SEAL PEOPLE IN NOVELS.

Globe, Volume XXIII, Issue 2221, 8 April 1881, Page 3

SEAL PEOPLE IN NOVELS.

[London " Globe."]

Diokens' books are crowded -with personal adaptations, none, or very few of whioh would ever have been recognised but for the j vanity or the umbrage of the principals them- ■ ■elves. His method was to take some atrik- 1 ingly singular trait of oharacter, some phenomenon in human nature, and surround it with qualities totally different from those i found in the original, and thus he preserved the reality without exposing his model. We are not told whether the elder Diokens described himself in Mioawber, but it is certain that nobody else did, and how many of the admirers of Walter Savage Landor would have recognised the poet in the "Boythorn" of " Bleak House ? " When Diokens was engaged on "Dombey and Son" on the Continent, he J direoted Mr Hablot Browne, the artißt, to post himself on a oertain spot in the oity where he would meet with a gentleman of the type of physiognomy whioh he wished Dombey, senior, to take, yet (alarmed though he poseibly might have been had he known the design) it is not to be supposed that thiß veritable prototype would have considered himself |Dombey merely beoause the lineaments of the two bore a marked resemblanoe. On the other hand, there is a tendenoy no less remarkable in persons who in goneral character most resemble them to consider certain types of the human family.. afl V or / trayed in fiction, monstrosities, and impossibilities. In one of his prefaces, the author of " Nioholas Nickleby says, " Mrs Nickleby sitting bodily before me once asked whether I really believed there ever was suoh a woman." John Forster, the biographer, who is grave over the complications whioh grew out of his friend's caricatures, was himself the model of Kenny Meadows's portrait of Master; Froth, and is said to have been the original of Fuabus in Lady Lytton-Bulwer's " Ohovoly." Charlotte Bronte got into some difficulties with regard to her too life-like local portraits in n Shirley." Mrs G-askell says of her West Yorkshire sketohes in this book: —"People recognised themsolves or were reoognised by others, in her graphio descriptions of their personal appearance and modes of action and turnß of thought, though they were placed in new positions and figured away in scenes far different to those in whioh their actual life had been passed. ... The three curates were real living men, haunting Haworth and the neighbouring districts, and so obtuse in perception that, after the first burst of anger at having their ways and habit* ohromoled was over, they rather enjoyed the joke of calling each other by the names she had given them. "Mrs Pryor" waa well known to jmd/ who loved the original dearly. The

wholo family of Yorkes were, I am assured, almost daguerreotypes." As neithor portraiture is of an uncomplimentary nature, it may be added that the poet " Kulmat" io Mr Joseph Hatton's " Clytio" finds his double in Mr Joaquin Miller, and the Laird of " Mucleod of Dare" is ft well-known, prosperous, and genial resident of Oban.