CHARLES DICKENS

WHATEVER the minor merits or defects in the character of Dickens, two great features stand out clearly — his kindliness and his courage. To the whole human race he reached a hand of cheer and comfort. Children loved him. It was this great heart of his that caused Thackeray's children to ask their father why he did not write books like Mr. Dickens's, and grown persons to cry, at mention of his name, "God bless him!" His unfailing good spirits through the last years of illness close fittingly a story of sweetness and courage. Once in a speech, in which he spoke of the actor's having "sometimes to come from scenes of sickness, of suffering, ay, even of death itself, to play his part," he added that "all of us, in our spheres, have as often to do violence to our feelings, and to hide our hearts in fighting this great battle of life, and in discharging our duties and responsibilities." Frequently in ill-health, married to an uncongenial wife, during his boyhood subjected to ignominious labor, Dickens had as much cause as the average man to be sad; yet, outwardly, and generally in his family, he was cheerful. Perhaps the very struggle which he had to make saved him, taught him the larger optimism. Certainly a great deal was due to his natural mirthfulness, his inexhaustible humor. Still, as has often been observed, mirth is by no means cheerfulness, and humor is played about by pathos. Dickens's cheerfulness was won hardly and could never have been won but for his courage.

These chief characteristics of Dickens are, as every one knows, shadowed forth in his books with everchanging, never-ending pathos and humor. Whatever purpose they had, to reform this prison or that charity school, or to give thousands wholesome amusement, or to ridicule the " Circumlocution Office," they have accomplished the greater purpose of preaching the chief trait of their author. In nearly all his books, behind the gloomy pictures of oppression and poverty, behind the loud humor and buffoonery, is his gentleness, his genial mirth, his simple faith in mankind. Every one has laughed and wept over his books; no writer of the nineteenth century, perhaps of any century, has so given his heart to English-reading people.

There are of course certain other traits very obvious in Dickens. He was feverishly ambitious, often for mere worldly fame. He had a pride that sometimes was almost akin to vanity. In little things he was unreasonably irritable. Further, still, though he had a fine sense of honor and courtesy, he had, it must be granted, a certain bluntness of artistic sensibility—a cheap love of melodramatic effect; in the man, as in his books, there is too frequently a suggestión of overdone pathos, of humor that borders on caricature, of theatrical show. Personally, he was always overdressed. Many have sought to account for this lack of taste by Dickens's lack of fine breeding, by his extremely humble origin. It would be indeed remarkable if the son of a Mr. Micawber for such a man was Dickens's father developed the austere taste of an Arnold or a Newman; Dickens was nurtured literally in the streets of London, not in an academic grove. Yet in his actions and his manners he was in no sense vulgar. The humble-origin argument,

one begins to suspect, is too convenient a way, after explaining a not very sensitive taste, of bringing against Dickens wholly unfair accusations. The facts of his life acquit him of commonness. Indeed, as one considers them and keeps that humble origin in mind the while, one comes more and more to have faith in the "natural goodness of man." For below and above all, and through all, predominate the man's kindliness and courage, his great human heart.

Charles Dickens, the son of John Dickens and Elizabeth Barrow, was born in Portsea on February 12,1812. His father, to posterity Mr. Wilkins Micawber, lived in grandiloquent poverty. A clerkship in the navy pay office clearly did not support his large family, and after a few years, during which he moved to Chatham and London, he found himself arrested for debt and well settled in the Marshalsea prison. Poor Mrs. Micawber - that is, Mrs. Dickens-had set up her " Boarding Establishment for Young Ladies;"" but I never found," says Dickens, "that any young lady had ever been to school there; or that any young lady ever came, or professed to come; or that the least preparation was ever made to receive any young lady. The only visitors I ever saw or heard of were creditors. They used to come at all hours, and some of them were quite ferocious." Mrs. Dickens had therefore to abandon the school and join her husband in the Marshalsea, where one can fancy his saying, "for the first time in many revolving years, the overwhelming pressure of pecuniary liabilities was not proclaimed from day to day, by importunate voices declining to vacate the passage."

Charles, aged eleven, was put in a shoe-blacking factory, with the task, on a salary of six shillings a week,

of pasting labels on bottles a position he considered degrading and one to which he never referred with pleasure. During these years of child-labor he subsisted for the most part on bread, milk, cheese, and stale

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try, sometimes on nothing at all; occasionally there was a spree on pudding or à la mode beef. In his own words he was a "queer small boy" and he was a sickly boy; how much he suffered can be understood only by those who know the pathetic story of little David Copperfield.

In 1824 John Dickens, released from prison, took his family to the house of a woman who figures as "Mrs. Pipchin" in Dombey and Son, quarreled with Lamert, his son's employer, and determined, as if by commendable though tardy inspiration, actually to send the boy to school. Charles was forthwith put at Wellington House Academy, the head master of which, Mr. Jones, is said to have been "a most ignorant fellow, and a mere tyrant."

The boy's schooling, however, was a brief and, technically, a poor one. In three years it was all over, such as it was, for at fifteen he entered the office of a solicitor, where he stayed till November, 1828. Then, his father having become a reporter, the son decided to follow the same calling. In his boyhood, nevertheless, he did receive a very valuable education—that which made Oliver Twist, Nicholas Nickleby, practically all his novels, possible. He was not merely familiar with the London streets, as was Macaulay; he was of them. What he wrote down in David Copperfield was not what he had observed, but what he had lived. The squalor, the pathos, the humor, had entered into his soul. There was at least one lesson, in the great school

of the world, which Dickens had learned better than any one else, as he was soon abundantly to show.

At his trade of reporter the young boy of the streets worked with zeal. He learned shorthand; he reported for The True Sun, The Mirror of Parliament, and The Morning Chronicle, and was soon considered one of the quickest reporters in London. Years later he told graphically of his experiences. "I have often transcribed for the printer," he said, "from my shorthand notes, important public speeches, in which the strictest accuracy was required, and a mistake in which would have been, to a young man, severely compromising, writing on the palm of my hand, by the light of a dark lantern, in a post-chaise and four, galloping through a wild country, and through the dead of the night, at the then surprising rate of fifteen miles an hour. . . . Returning home from excited political meetings in the country to the waiting press in London, I do verily believe I have been upset in almost every description of vehicle known in this country. I have been, in my time, belated in miry by-roads, towards the small hours, forty or fifty miles from London, in a wheelless carriage, with exhausted horses, and drunken post-boys, and have got back in time for publication, to be received with never-forgotten compliments by the late Mr. Black, coming in the broadest of Scotch from the broadest of hearts I ever knew."

Like young David Copperfield, Dickens had his Dora, in 1829, when he was a lad of seventeen. In 1855 he thus wrote of his feeling to Forster: "I don't quite apprehend what you mean by my overrating the strength of the feeling of five-and-twenty years ago. If you mean of my own feeling, and will only think what the desper