Chapter V

I shall endeavour to appraise with you, by and by, the true worth of this amazing popularity. For the moment I merely ask you to consider the fact and the further fact that Dickens took it with the seriousness it deserved and endeavoured more and more to make himself adequate to it. He had--as how could he help having?--an enormous consciousness of the power he wielded: a consciousness which in action too often displayed itself as an irritable conscientiousness. For instance, _Pickwick_ is a landmark in our literature: its originality can no more be disputed than the originality (say) of the _Divina Commedia_. “I thought of Pickwick”--is his classical phrase. He thought of Pickwick--and Pickwick was. But just because the ill-fated illustrator, Seymour--who shot himself before the great novel had found its stride--was acclaimed by some as its inventor, Dickens must needs charge into the lists with the hottest, angriest, most superfluous, denials. Even so, later on, when he finds it intolerable to go on living with his wife, the world is, somehow or other, made acquainted with this distressing domestic affair as though by a papal encyclical. Or, even so, when he chooses (in _Bleak House_) to destroy an alcoholised old man by “spontaneous combustion”--quite unnecessarily--a solemn preface has to be written to explain that such an end is scientifically possible. This same conscientiousness made him (and here our young novelist of to-day will start to blaspheme) extremely scrupulous about scandalising his public--I use the term in its literal sense of laying a stumbling-block, a cause of offence. For example, while engaged upon _Dombey and Son_, he has an idea (and a very good idea too, though he abandoned it) that instead of keeping young Walter the unspoilt boyish lover that he is, he will portray the lad as gradually yielding to moral declension, through hope deferred--a theme which, as you will remember, he afterwards handled in _Bleak House_: and he seriously writes thus about it to his friend Forster:

About the boy, who appears in the last chapter of the first
number--I think it would be a good thing to disappoint all the
expectations that chapter seems to raise of his happy connection
with the story and the heroine, and to show him gradually and
naturally trailing away, from that love of adventure and boyish
light-heartedness, into negligence, idleness, dissipation,
dishonesty and ruin. To show, in short, that common, every day,
miserable declension of which we know so much in our ordinary life:
to exhibit something of the philosophy of it, in great temptations
and an easy nature; and to show how the good turns into the bad, by
degrees. If I kept some notion of Florence always at the bottom of
it, _I think it might be made very powerful and very useful. What
do you think? Do you think it may be done without making people
angry?_

George Gissing--in a critical study of Dickens which cries out for reprinting--imagines a young writer of the ’nineties (as we may imagine a young writer of to-day) coming on that and crying out upon it.

What! a great writer, with a great idea, to stay his hand until he
has made grave enquiry whether Messrs. Mudie’s subscribers will
approve it or not! The mere suggestion is infuriating.... Look
at Flaubert, for example. Can you imagine _him_ in such a sorry
plight? Why, nothing would have pleased him better than to know
he was outraging public sentiment! In fact, it is only when one
_does_ so that one’s work has a chance of being good.

All which, adds Gissing, may be true enough in relation to the speaker. As regards Dickens, it is irrelevant. And Gissing speaks the simple truth; “that he owed it to his hundreds of thousands of readers to teach them a new habit of judgment Dickens did not see or begin to see.” But that it lay upon him to deal with his public scrupulously he felt in the very marrow of his bones. Let me give you two instances:

When editing _Household Words_ he receives from a raw contributor a MS. impossible as sent, in which he detects merit. “I have had a story,” he writes to Forster, “to hack and hew into some form this morning, which has taken me four hours of close attention.” “Four hours of Dickens’ time,” comments Gissing, “in the year 1856, devoted to such a matter as this!--where any ordinary editor, or rather his assistant, would have contented himself with a few blottings and insertions, sure that ‘the great big stupid heart of the public,’ as Thackeray called it, would be no better pleased, toil how one might.”

For my second instance. The next year, 1857, was Mutiny Year, and closed upon an England raging mad over the story of Cawnpore. Dickens and Wilkie Collins, on a tour together in the north of England, had contrived a Christmas Number for _Household Words_, announced and entitled _The Perils of Certain English Prisoners, and their Treasures in Women, Children, Silver and Jewels_. The public expected a red-hot account of the Nana Sahib, the treacherous embarkation, the awful voyage down the Ganges. It was all there, to the man’s hand, with illimitable applause for his mere inviting. But it might inflame--and, inflaming, hurt--the nation’s temper, and therefore he would have none of it: he, Dickens, the great literary Commoner; lord over millions of English and to them, and to right influence on them, bounden. Therefore the public got something more profitable than it craved for: it got a romantic story empty of racial or propagandist hatred; a simple narrative of peril and adventure on a river in South America.