THE LETTERS OF CHARLES DICKENS

Press, Volume LXXIV, Issue 22515, 24 September 1938, Page 22

THE LETTERS OF CHARLES DICKENS

Art and Energy

[Abridged from an Address before the Christchurch branch of the Dickens Fellowship.]

[By J. H. E. SCHRODER.]

There are other respects in which a reader of the letters may find himself correcting old impressions. One of these has already appeared, indirectly. What I have been saying about Dickens’s absorbed and concentrated effort and his anxious care is itself enough to dispel the notion that he was a copious, fluent writer who needed only to let his pen run on. But something should be added. It is true that Dickens was copious, that his brain teemed, that he wrote a great deal in short time. Yes; but he sat very long hours when he was at work. He certainly did not write with the ease of Scott, for example, whose ability to drive straight ahead and drive fast was astonishing, or of Trollope,, who wrote by the clock. You may see specimen pages of Dickens’s manuscript in facsimile, in some editions of Forster’s biography: they are thickets of correction and revision. Dickens wrestled with his work. He hammered at it. He was not the impetuous, facile writer of common fancy. No conception of him is right which doesn’t take in the extremely deliberate, calculating craftsman, seeing, foreseeing, intent upon, the problems of a craftsman. Note what Dickens wrote to Miss Jolly, one of his favourite contributors to “All the Year Round.” 1 have no means of knowing whether you are patient in the pursuit of this art; but I am inclined to think that you are not. and that you do not discipline yourself enough. When one is impelled to write this or that, one has to consider: “How much of this will tell for what I mean? How much of it is my own wild emotion and superfluous energy—how much remains that is really belonging to this ideal character and these ideal circumstances. It is in the laborious struggle to make this distinction, and in the determination to try for it, that the road to the correction of faults lies. • (Perhaps I may remark, in support of the sincerity with which I write this, that I am an impatient and impulsive person myself, but that it has been for many years the constant effort of my life to practise at my desk what I preach to you.) Note what he says about “Our Mutual Friend”: Of the new book, I have' done the first two numbers, and am now beginning the third. It is a combination of drollery with romance which re?[uires a great deal of pains and a ect throwing away of points s that might be amplified. . i Impetuous, carefree writers don’t restrain and sacrifice like that. About the same book he says in another p|ace: “I have grown hard to satisfy and write very slowly.” 5 He wrote to his son Henry, from America, a letter of advice: Do everything at your best. It was but this last year that I set to and learned every word of my readings; and from 10 /years ago to last night, I have never read to an audience but 1 Have watched for an opportunity ot striking out something better somewhere. Look at such of my manuscripts as are in the library at Gad s, and think of the patient hours devoted year after year to single lines. Dickens as Religious Thinker , Again, I think it has been too sweepingly and lightly said, and top readily believed, that Dickens’s religion had only one doctrine—a general Christian charity and benevolence; and that his political theories could be , summarised quite adequately ; in the formula of plenty pudding for-everybody. It is true, of course, that the novels are a grand sermon *6n true charity; and Dickens is never so satirically bitter as against all the institutionalism, from Parliament to the parish poorhouse, ; which performed;' solemn, ?ailmig, official antics while people starved. Dickens’s passion for feeding up'the poor people in his books, as soon as he can m ana 6 e it, runs to extremes that shock the nutritional expert- But dismiss the idea that Dickens’s religious thinking wassimple'only because it was shallow or restricted; that his political thinking ' was * simple .because he never it to the great variety of practical issues ■ and had nothing precise to say about them. "Dismiss the idea that Dickens’s policy was only a sort of honest Wat Tylensm, aimed against crying evils-and flagrant abuses, one by one. Against the Yorkshire schools destroy them. Against the debtor’s prisonempty and close it. Against the Court of Chancery—blow it up.

Against the poorhouse—burn it with indignant .fires. Dickens had more than a sword and a torch in his hands and energising charity in his heart. He had ideas in his head, worthy of his generous emotions and his reforming spirit. lam not going to illustrate this elaborately. A piece from one letter will do for the question of Dickens’s religious views: The position of the writers of “Essays and Reviews” is that certain parts of the Old Testament have done their intended function in the education of the world as it was; but that mankind, like the individual man, is designed by the Almighty to have an infancy and a maturity, and that as it advances, the machinery of its education must advance too. For example: insomuch as ever since there was a sun and there was vapour, there must have been a rainbow under certain conditions, so surely it would be better now to recognise that fact. Similarly, Joshua might command the sun to stand still, under the impression that it moved round the earth; but he could not possibly have inverted the relations of the earth and the sun, whatever his impressions were. Again, it is contended that the science of geology is quite as much a revelation to man, as books of am-

mense age and of (at the best) doubtful origin, and that your consideration of the latter must reasonably be influenced by the former. As I understand the importance of timely suggestions such as these, it is, that the Church should not gradually shock and lose the more thoughtful and.logical of human minds; but should be so gently and considerately yielding as to retain them, and through them hundreds and thousands. This seems to me, as I understand the temper and the tendency of the time, whether for good or evil, to be a very wise and necessary position. And as I understand the danger, it is not chargeable on those who take this ground, but on those who in reply call names and argue nothing. What these bishops and suchlike say about revelation, in assuming it to be finished and done with, i can’t in the least understand. Nothing is discovered without God’s intention and assistance, and I suppose every new knowledge of His works that is conceded to man to be distinctly a revelation by which men are to guide themselves. Lastly, in the mere matter of religious doctrine and dogmas, these men (Protestants —protestors— successors of the men who protested against human judgment beihg set aside) talk and write as if they were all settled by the direct act of Heaven; not as If they had been, as we know they were, a matter of temporary accommodation and adjustment among disputing mortals as fallible as you or I. ’ , This is forceful, lucid, and true. The man who wrote that was not one whose religious thinking can be packed in a formula and patronised as if it were that of an amiable but undeveloped mind. Political Ideas Again, you will remember that in the middle years of last century, the political clap-trap of the day Was the liberation of the people through the franchise and—this is the claptrap— certainty that every possible good rhust follow automatically from the dropping of votes into the ballot-box. Dickens was about 80 years ahead of his time impenetrating the fallacy of this new millennial device—as a device that was to work like magic. Dickens could only see it as an instrument that required the right effort and will to use it; and he could not see, among leaders or people, the effort, the will, the min'd that were to use it well: As to the suffrage, I have lost hope , even in the ballot. We appear to me to have proved the failure of representative institutions without an educated and advanced people to support them. What with teaching people to “keep in their stations,” what with bringing up the soul and the body of the land to be a good child, or to go to the beer shop, to go a-poaching and go to the devil; what with having no such thing as a middle class (for though we are perpetually bragging of it as our safety, it is nothing but a poor fringe on the mantle of the upper); what with flunkeyism, toadyism, letting the most contemptible lords come in for all manner of places, reading the Court Circular for the New Testament, I do reluctantly believe that the English people are consenting parties to the miserable imbecility into which we are fallen, and never will help themselves out of it. We are anxious to-day about the future of democracy. Our anxiety would, have been less, had the problems of democracy been identified and faced sooner, as Dickens identified, and faced them. I have thought, lately, when I have read of certain officious and • interfering movements to round up rthe factory hand, the office boy, the

shop girl, and the apprentice and to organise and employ their leisure for them ... I have thought that Dickens was wiser, because he showed, in his reforming zeal, nothing of the snob or bully: The English are, so far as I know, the hardest-working people on which the sun shines. Be content if, in their wretched intervals of pleasure, they read for amusement and do no worse. They are born at the oar, they live and die at it. Good God, what would we have of them! “Parrots of Reaction” For the rest, it is enough to suggest that, if you read what Dickens says in his letters about the parrots of reaction—birds still in full feather and voice to-day—about education, public executions, capital punishment, or prison reform, you will shake your head oyer the opinion that there was nothing in Dickens s social and political ideology—blessed word! —but a good slice of pudding for all. I shall quote one more letter, in which Dickens bangs a nail on the head. He knew that prison reform was dragging impossible shackles without poor-law reform; that reform of the prison system must rest on social reform. Somebody had submitted an article to “Household Words”; Dickens wrote to Wills about it: It is exactly because the great bulk of offences in a great number of places are committed by professed thieves, that it will not do to have pet-prison-ing advocated without grave remonstrance and great care. That class of prisoner is not to be reformed. We must begin at the beginning and prevent, by stringent correction and supervision of wicked parents, that class of prisoner from being regularly supplied as if he were a human necessity. Do they teach trades in workhouses and try to fit their people (the worst part of them) for society? Come with me to Tothill Fields, Bridewell, and I will show you what a workhousegirl is. Or look to -my “Walk in a Workhouse” (in “H.W. ) and to the

glance at the youths I saw in one place, positively kept like wolves. Mr thinks prisons could be made nearly self-supporting. Have you any idea of the difficulty that is found in disposing of prison-work, or does he think that the treadmills didn’t grfoid th§ air because the State or . the Magistracy objected to the competition of prison-labour with free-labour, but because the work could not be got? I never can have any kind of prison-, discipline disquisition in “H.W.” that does not start with the first great principle I have laid down, and that does not protest against prisons being considered per se. Whatever chance is given to a man in a prison must be given to a man in a refuge for distress. This is a man who knows what hp is talking about—a practical sociologist. The Inimitable I have reached the end of this ramble. But let me look back for one moment, to point out something that we have passed and seen in glimpses, without my drawing your particular notice to it. These letters have made you laugh, here and there. I-am only going to tell you that the Dickens in them is, over and over again, the rich., comic, fantastic Dickens of the novels, making his friends laugh—Wilkie Collins, Mark Lemon, -Jerrold, Macready, Felton, Forster, all the rest—making them laugh, and leaving the same laughter for us. I don’t think I should trouble to say to you, “Read Dickeps’s letters for their wealth of information about him,” if I could not also say, “Much better: read Dickens’s letters 'for the wealth of entertainment in them” —the sort .of entertainment in which Dickens is unrivalled. Nobody else gets so much fun out of life as Dickens. Nobody else has ever put more fun into it; and the letters are full of it. Dickens made a great friend, on his first American tour, of Professor Felton. It seems that they must have feasted often and notably upon oysters, for oysters keep on popping up in Dickens’s letters to him. As for example, here; he says he has been, and is, extremely busy; therefore. “I indite a monstrously short and wildly uninteresting epistle to the American Dando.’’ : —And off ne goes: , But perhaps you don’t know who Dando was. He was an oyster-eater, my dear Felton. He used to go into oyster shops, without a farthing of money, and stand at the counter eating natives, until the man who opened 1 them grew pale, cast down the knife, staggered backwards, struck his white forehead with his open hand, and cried, “You are Dando!!!” He has been known to eat twenty dozen at one sitting, and would have eaten forty if the truth had not flashed upon the shopkeeper. For these offences he was constantly committed to the House of Correction. During kfs last imprisonment he was taken ill, got worse and worse, and at last began knocking violent double knocks ,at Death’s door; The doctor stood beside the bed, with his fingers on the pulse. “He is going,” says the doctor, “I see it in his eye. There is only one thing that would keep life in him for another, hour, and that is—oysters.” They were immediately brought. Dando swallowed eight, and feebly took a ninth. He held it in his mouth and looked round the bed strangely. “Not a bad one, is it?” says the doctor. The patient shook his head, rubbed his trembling hand upon his stomach, bolted the oyster, and fell back—dead. They buried him in a prison-yard and paved his grave with oyster-shells. That’s our delightful, irresistible Dickens—“ The Inimitable," indeed! (Concluded.).. * .