CHAPTER II

DICKENS AND THACKERAY

THE character of early Victorian fiction was determined, not so much by any of the writers who have just been passed in review, as by two greater men who were slightly posterior in date to most of them. The true successors to Scott, not in the sense that they imitated him, or were very close akin to him in their work, but in the sense that they became after him the leaders and chiefs of prose-fiction, were Dickens and Thackeray.

A moment's comparison between them and Scott reveals the nature of the change which was passing over the novel. It may be summed up in a word: there is less romance, and there is more realism. Dickens and Thackeray, even when they write historical novels, have "no use for the Middle Ages'." The scenes of Barnaby Rudge and A Tale of Two Cities, Dickens's two experiments in this sort, are laid just a little way behind his own time; while Thackeray's Esmond is a careful transcript, not at all in the romantic vein, of life, manners and literary style of that period which has least of all in common with the Middle Ages. In so far as romanticism survives, it survives with a difference. Even the streets of London are often treated romantically by Dickens. "He sought," says his most sympathetic critic, George Gissing, "for wonders amid the dreary life of common streets." But from Ivanhoe to the romance of the slums

1 Beers's History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century, 396. 2 Charles Dickens, 30.

is a far cry indeed. The change is in the last degree significant, and not the less so although many elements of romance still survived.

Charles Dickens (1812-1870), the son of a clerk in the Navy pay-office, concerns us principally in respect of his early life ; for after his fame was established nothing happened to him which produced any noteworthy effect on his literary work. But the history of his boyhood and youth is well worth noticing; because it was then that he acquired the experience and accumulated the materials which afterwards formed the staple of his books. The authoritative life of Dickens was written by his friend John Forster (1812-1876), a good biographer and a great editor, during whose tenure of office The Examiner won, and deserved, an influence rarely equalled in the history of journalism. In literature Forster's tastes ran to history; but to him the essence of history was biography, and so his principal works are a series of lives,-Lives of Eminent Statesmen (18371839), Life of Goldsmith (1848), Life of Landor (1869), Life of Dickens (1872-1874), and the unfinished Life of Swift (1875). Forster is always careful and sound, and his narrative is often very interesting. In the cases of Landor and Dickens he can never be superseded; for he had direct personal knowledge which no one else can ever acquire, and he had access to materials now destroyed or dispersed. But he had not that power of penetrating character which is the special gift of the great biographer, and he never makes his subjects live, as Carlyle does, and Lockhart, and Boswell. His Life of Dickens therefore is an interesting, but hardly a great, book. It tells much about Dickens; but for a comprehension of the man it must be supplemented by a study of his works.

Not the least important deduction which may be drawn from Forster's biography is that the picture Dickens drew of himself and his early life in David Copperfield is substantially accurate. He himself was the miserable little drudge depicted in the novel. He himself went through the wretched experience of the blacking warehouse, and his school was the streets of London. The mysterious 'deeds' which led up to the imprisonment of Micawber

in the Marshalsea were actually executed by John Dickens, and they resulted in his imprisonment. Charles Dickens could never refer to this period of his life without bitterness. The pen which wrote David Copperfield was often dipped in his own blood; and if he violated the law of filial piety in the picture there drawn of his parents and his home, the sufferings he endured in the process may be set against the sin. Assuredly few sons have had more just ground of complaint on the score of an uncared-for childhood and neglected education.

After a time a legacy lifted the family out of its most pressing difficulties; and in 1824 Dickens was sent to a school which had been selected rather for its 'gentility' than for educational efficiency. He remained there for two years or rather more, and at fifteen he entered a lawyer's office, in which however he stayed only about a year and a half. He then became a reporter, first on the staff of The True Sun, and afterwards for other papers. As a reporter he acquired great skill. He was determined to succeed, he had untiring industry, and he toiled at stenography until he became, to use his own words, "the best and most rapid reporter ever known." This result was doubtless due to that quality which struck all observers of Dickens in later years-his almost preternatural energy. This quality produced in many a curious illusion. They imagined him to be phenomenally healthy and strong in reality, his "habits were robust, but his health was not." His tireless activity was a matter rather of the spirit than of the body.

Dickens however was conscious of talents for which the profession of a reporter afforded no outlet. He judged himself, quite correctly as he subsequently proved, to possess a gift for the stage, and began to train himself to be an actor. Fortunately he was diverted from his purpose, and instead started to use his pen not merely to report the words of others but to write his own thoughts. For this end he had acquired an education better than he knew in the blacking warehouse and in the streets; he had been storing his mind unconsciously with excellent literary material; and the success of his first venture fixed the whole course of his life. He has himself described how tremulously he dropped

his first article into the letter-box of The Monthly Magazine, and how eagerly he watched for its appearance. It was printed in December, 1833, under the title of A Dinner at Poplar Walk; in the Sketches by Boz, of which it was the germ, it is now known as Mr Minns and his Cousin.

For some time Dickens still continued to act as a reporter. On the staff of the Morning Chronicle he was at once reporter and contributor. But the success of the Sketches by Boz (1836) and the inception in the same year of the scheme of The Pickwick Papers made him by profession an author. The design of the publishers, as is well known, was to publish a series of plates of amusing sporting scenes by a popular caricaturist named Seymour, and to accompany the plates with a sort of running commentary of letter-press. Two other names besides that of Dickens are associated with the story of Pickwick. The plan, such as it was, came from Robert Smith Surtees (18031864), and the man who was first asked by the publishers to supply the letter-press was not Dickens, but Charles Whitehead (1804-1862).

In

Surtees, who afterwards won some fame as a writer of sporting novels, was at this time just at the beginning of his career. 1831 he started the New Sporting Magazine, which he edited for about five years. It was in this periodical that his creation, John Jorrocks, the hero of Jorrocks's Jaunts (1838), first appeared. Though the humour of this character seems to the reader of the present day not very bright or refined, its success tempted others to pay Surtees the homage of imitation. Even so severe a critic as Lockhart was sufficiently pleased to suggest that Surtees should write a work of fiction on a more regular plan. The result was Handley Cross (1843) and the rest of the series of sporting stories which still keep the name of Surtees alive. His works, however, are more worthy of remembrance for the sake of Leech's illustrations, than for their literary merit.

The other writer, Charles Whitehead, stands on a different plane. His reputation, after rising to a respectable height, underwent eclipse, to be revived again by the industry and research of a writer of the present day, Mr Mackenzie Bell, whose critical

biography, A forgotten Genius: Charles Whitehead, recalled him to memory. Unfortunately, most of those whom Mr Bell's volume induced to study Whitehead regarded him, in virtue of The Solitary (1831), as a poet; and this has told against his fame, for though The Solitary shows a real, it does not show a great, poetic gift. Whitehead's true talent lay in prose-fiction; and it was so high that, but for his failing of intemperance, he would probably have taken rank among the best novelists of the time after the two great leaders. Whitehead's most ambitious works are Richard Savage (1842) and the historical romance, The Earl of Essex (1843). His masterpieces are the former and a short story full of tragic power, The Confession of James Wilson. Richard Savage is a story in which Whitehead follows closely the life of the real Savage, the friend of Johnson. The interest, especially in the earlier part, is remarkably well sustained. The conception of the character of Savage himself is masterly, and several of the figures, both real and imaginary, by whom he is surrounded, are very well portrayed.

Richard Savage was unwritten when the design was formed of what in the hands of Dickens became Pickwick; but Whitehead was well known as the author of The Solitary; and he had just published the Lives and Exploits of English Highwaymen, Pirates and Robbers (1834) and The Autobiography of Jack Ketch (1834)— items in that literature of crime which was popular in those days. Among the articles in Fraser's Magazine doubtfully attributed to Thackeray is a review of the former work, which, if it was really by Thackeray, establishes a literary connexion between Whitehead and the great rival of Dickens. At this time then, Whitehead being known as an active man of letters, the publishers asked him to write the sketches which were to accompany Seymour's plates. He declined, because he was afraid he could not work with rapidity enough to supply month by month the necessary "copy"; but at the same time he recommended his friend Dickens as a man who had the necessary faculty for rapid work.

Dickens accepted the commission; Seymour died by suicide after the issue of the first number; and the letter-press proved so rich and racy, and the characters conceived in the brain of