LETTERS BY CHARLES DICKENS.

Akaroa Mail and Banks Peninsula Advertiser, Volume 4, Issue 380, 12 March 1880, Page 2

LETTERS BY CHARLES DICKENS.

The letters of Charles Dickens have been published by Messrs Chapman and Hall in \ two volumes, edited by -Miss Georgina Hogarth, the sister-in-law of the novelist, and Miss Maggie Dickens, his eldest daughter. The correspondence extends from 1833 to 1870, and forms a valuable supplement to Mr Forster's life of Dickens. The popularity of the name of Dickens may be judged from one fact: the announcement of the publication was enough to sell the first edition; and before the book was. out, Messrs Chapman and Hall were obliged to go to press with a second edition. The great librarian, Mr Mudie, took 1500 copies "to begin with," one of the huge ledgers having been nearly filled a week previous with requests for the correspondence. A few specimens of the letters may be given. In 1842 Mr Dickens visited America, and formed by no means a favourable opinion of the country. In a letter to Macready he says :—

lam disappointed. This is not the republic I came to see ; this is not the republic of my imagination. I infinitely prefer a liberal monarchy—even with its sickening, accompaniments of court circulars—to such a Government as this. The more I think of its youth and strength, the poorer and more trilling in a thousand aspects it appears in my eyes. . In everything of which it has made a boast—excepting its education of-the : people-and its care for poor children—it. sinks immeasurably below the level I 1 had it placed upon ; and England, even England, bad and faulty as the old land is, and miserable as millions of her people are, rises in comparison. ; v ,

In 1844 he was in Italy, and A'jsited Venice. After all the descriptions' that have been given of Venice, the following, in a letter to Jerrold, is well worth quotation.— i :

I have never in my life been so struck by any place as bj' Venice- It is the wonder of the world. Dreamy, beautiful, inconsistent, impossible, wicked shaddowy old place. I entered it by night, and the sensation of that night, and the bright morning that followed is a part of me for the rest of my existence. And, oh God! the cells below the water underneath the Bridge of Sighs; the nook where the monk came at midnight t'» confess the political offender; the bench where he was strangled ; the deadly little vault in which they tied him in a sack, and the stealthy crouching little door through which they hurried him into a boat, and bore him away to sink him where no fisherman dare cast' his net —all shown by torches that blink and wink, as if they were ashamed to look upon the gloomy theatre of sad horrors ; past and gone as they are, these things stir a man's blood, like a great wrong or passion of the instant. And with these in their minds, and with a museum there, having a chamber full of such frightful instruments of torture as the devil in a brain fever could scarcely invent, there are hundreds of parrots, who will declaim to you in speech and print, by the together, on the degeneracy of the times in which a railroad is building across the wator at Venice ; instead of going down on their knees, the drivellers, and thanking heaven that they live in a time when iron makes roads, instead of prison bars and engines for driving screws into the skulls of innocent men.

On a cold day in February, Dickens, his wife, and some friends-i-a party of six —ascended Mount Vesuvius. They had six saddlehorses, an armed soldier for a guard, and 22 guides, the latter being rendered necessary by the extreme severity of the weather. The precipitous part of the mountain was cohered with" deep snow, the surface being glazed .with one smooth sheet of ice from the top oi the cone to the bottom. The party started at four o'clock in the afternoon so as to reach the summit during moonlight. The latter part of the ascent was very difficult" — ,

At every step everybody fell, now into a hot chink, now into a bed of ashes, now over a mass of cindered iron : and the confusion in the darkness (for the smoke obscured the moon in this part), and the quarrelling and shouting and roaring of the guides, and the waiting every now and then for somebody who was not to be found, and was supposed to have stumbled into, some pit or other, made such a scene Of it I can give you no idea of. My ladies were how on foot, of course ; but we dragged them on as well as .we could (they were thorough game and did not make the least complaint) until we got to the foot of the topmost hill; Here we all stopped ; but the'head, guide, an English gentleman, of the name of Lβ Gros—who has been here many years, and; has been up the mountain a hundred times—and your humble servant, resolved (like jackasses) to climb that hill to the brink, and look down into the crater itself. You may form some notion of what is going on inside it, when I tell you it is a hundred feet higher than it was six weeks ago. The sensation of struggling up it, choked with the fire and smoke, and feeling -at every* step as if the crust of ground between one's feet and the gulf of fire would crumble in and swallow one up (which is the real danger), I shall remember for some little time, I think. • But wo did it. Wo looked down intu the flaming bowels of the mountain and came back again, alight in half-a-dozen places, and burnt from head to foot. You never saw such devils. And I never saw anything so.awful and terrible.

In 18G8 Dickens was again in America, and we have liis opinions of Boston and New England, written in that year :— Although, he says, there is a conventional familiarity in the use of one's name in tho newspapers, as "Dickens, " " Charlie," *• and what not, Ido not in the least see that familiarity in the writers themselves. An inscrutable tone obtains in journalism which a stranger cannot understand. If I say in common courtesy to one of them, whom Dolby introduces, ' I am much obliged to you for your interest in me,' or so forth, he eeems quite shocked, and has a bearing of perfect modesty and propriety. I am rather inclined to think that they suppose their printed tone to be the public's love of smartness, but it is immensely difficult to make out. All I can as yet make out is, that my perfect freedom from bondage, and at any moment to go on or leave off, or otherwise do as I like, is the * only safe position to occupy. Again, there are two apparently irreconcilable contrasts here. Down below in this hotel every night are the bar loungers, dram drinkers, m drunkards, swaggers, loafers, that _ one might find in a Boucicault play. Within half an hour is Cambridge, and a delightful domestic life —simple, eelf-respectful, cordial, and affectionate —is seen irJ an admirable aspect. All New England is prknative and puritanical. All about and around it is a puddle of mixed humane mud, with not much quality in it. Perhaps I may in time sift out some tolerably intelligible whole, but I certainly have not done bo yet. It is a good sign, may be, that it all eeems immensely more difficult to understand than it was when I was here Before. In answer to a gentleman who had charged him with unnecessary abuse of the clergy, Dickens wrote : — Sir,—Permit me to say, in reply to your letter, that you do not understand the intention (I daresay the fault is mine) of that passage in the " Pickwick Papers" which has given you offence. The design *» of " The Shepherd," and other, and every other allusion to him, is to show how eacred things are degraded, vulgarised, and rendered abturd, when persons who are utterly incompetent to teach the com- *■ monest things take upon themselves to expound such mysteries, and how in making mere cant phrases of divine words these persons miss the spirit in which they had their origin, I have seen a great deal of this sort of -thing in many parts of England, and I never knew it lead to charity or good deeds. "Whether the great Creator of the world and the creature of his hands, moulded in his own imnge, be quite so opposite in character as you believe is a question which it would profit ua little to *" discuss. I like the frankness and candour of your letter, and thank you for it. Thot every man. who seeks Heaven must be born again in good thoughts of his Maker <• I sincerely believe. That it is expedient for every hound to say so in a certain snuffling form of words to which he • - attaches no good meaning, Ido not believe. 1 take it there ia no difference -" between us. Pickens was very fond of cliildern. — The following incident occurred during Ids stay at Baltimore in 1868 :— There is a child of the Barney Williarns's in this house—a little —to whom I * presented a black doll when I was here * '" Jast.' I have seen her eye at tho key hole since I began writing this, and I think she and the doll are outside still. " When M you sent it up to me by the coloured boy," she said after receiving it (coloured boy is the term for black waiter), " I gave such a 'cream that ma came running in and 'creamed too, 'cos she fort I'd hurt myself. But I 'creamed a 'cream of joy." She had a friend to play with her that day, and brought the friend with her, to my inGnite confusion. A friend all stockings, and much too tall, who eat on the sofa very far back, with her stockings sticking stiffly out in front of her, and glared at me, and •» never spoke a word. Dolby found us confronted in a sort of fascination, like serpent and bird. Almost minultaneously with the pub- * lication of the letters comes the announcement of the death of the widow of the novelist, who expired at her residence in London. Mrs Dickens was the daughter of Mr George Hogarth, a London journalist and writer on musical matters, with whom Dickens was brought into intimate relations during his first experiences as a reporter on the Morning Chronicle, and the marriage took place at the end of 1835, just when the novelist, fresh from the success of the " Sketches by Boz," was beginning to feel the strength of his own powers, and had begun the immortal *' Pickwick Papers." The ynion was for many years a happy one, but differences subse- * quemly arose which, it is well known, led to a*separation about eleven years before Mr Dickens's death.