Chapter VI: Last Years (1)

[1858-1870.]

The last twelve years of Dickens's life were busy years, like the others; but his activity was no longer merely the expression of exuberant force, and long before the collapse came he had been repeatedly warned of the risks he continued to defy. When, however, he first entered upon those public readings, by persisting in which he indisputably hastened his end, neither he nor his friends took into account the fear of bodily ill-effects resulting from his exertions. Their misgivings had other grounds. Of course, had there been any pressure of pecuniary difficulty or need upon Dickens when he began, or when on successive occasions he resumed, his public readings, there would be nothing further to be said. But I see no suggestion of any such pressure. "My worldly circumstances," he wrote before he had finally made up his mind to read in America, "are very good. I don't want money. All my possessions are free and in the best order. Still," he added, "at fifty-five or fifty-six, the likelihood of making a very great addition to one's capital in half a year is an immense consideration." Moreover, with all his love of doing as he chose, and his sense of the value of such freedom to him as a writer, he was a man of simple though liberal habits of life, with no taste for the gorgeous or capricious extravagances of a Balzac or a Dumas, nor can he have been at a loss how to make due provision for those whom in the course of nature he would leave behind him. Love of money for its own sake, or for that of the futilities it can purchase, was altogether foreign to his nature. At the same time, the rapid making of large sums has potent attractions for most men; and these attractions are perhaps strongest for those who engage in the pursuit for the sake of the race as well as of the prize. Dickens's readings were virtually something new; their success was not only all his own, but unique and unprecedented--what nobody but himself ever had achieved or ever could have achieved. Yet the determining motive--if I read his nature rightly--was, after all, of another kind. "Two souls dwelt in his breast;" and when their aspirations united in one appeal it was irresistible. The author who craved for the visible signs of a sympathy responding to that which he felt for his multitudes of readers, and the actor who longed to impersonate creations already beings of flesh and blood to himself, were both astir in him, and in both capacities he felt himself drawn into the very publicity deprecated by his friends. He liked, as one who knew him thoroughly said to me, to be face to face with his public; and against this liking, which he had already indulged as fully as he could without passing the boundaries between private and professional life, arguments were in vain. It has been declared sheer pedantry to speak of such boundaries; and to suggest that there is anything degrading in paid readings such as those of Dickens would, on the face of it, be absurd. On the other hand, the author who, on or off the stage, becomes the interpreter of his writings to large audiences, more especially if he does his best to stereotype his interpretation by constantly repeating it, limits his own prerogative of being many things to many men; and where the author of a work, more particularly of a work of fiction, adjusts it to circumstances differing from those of its production, he allows the requirements of the lesser art to prejudice the claims of the greater.

Dickens cannot have been blind to these considerations; but to others his eyes were never opened. He found much that was inspiriting in his success as a reader, and this not only in the large sums he gained, or even in the "roaring sea of response," to use his own fine metaphor, of which he had become accustomed to "stand upon the beach." His truest sentiment as an author was touched to the quick; and he was, as he says himself, "brought very near to what he had sometimes dreamed might be his fame," when, at York, a lady, whose face he had never seen, stopped him in the street, and said to him, "Mr. Dickens, will you let me touch the hand that has filled my house with many friends?" or when, at Belfast, he was almost overwhelmed with entreaties "to shake hands, Misther Dickens, and God bless you, sir; not ounly for the light you've been in mee house, sir--and God love your face!--this many a year." On the other hand--and this, perhaps, a nature like his would not be the quickest to perceive--there was something vulgarising in the constant striving after immediate success in the shape of large audiences, loud applause, and satisfactory receipts. The conditions of the actor's art cannot forego these stimulants; and this is precisely his disadvantage in comparison with artists who are able to possess themselves in quiet. To me, at least, it is painful to find Dickens jubilantly recording how at Dublin "eleven bank-notes were thrust into the pay-box--Arthur saw them--at one time for eleven stalls;" how at Edinburgh "neither Grisi, nor Jenny Lind, nor anything, nor anybody, seems to make the least effect on the draw of the readings;" while, every allowance being made, there is something almost ludicrous in the double assertion, that "the most delicate audience I had ever seen in any provincial place is Canterbury; but the audience with the greatest sense of humour certainly is Dover." What subjects for parody Dickens would have found in these innocent ecstasies if uttered by any other man! Undoubtedly, this enthusiasm was closely connected with the very thoroughness with which he entered into the work of his readings. "You have no idea," he tells Forster, in 1867, "how I have worked at them. Finding it necessary, as their reputation widened, that they should be better than at first, _I have learnt them all_, so as to have no mechanical drawback in looking after the words. I have tested all the serious passion in them by everything I know; made the humorous points much more humorous; corrected my utterance of certain words; cultivated a self-possession not to be disturbed; and made myself master of the situation." "From ten years ago to last night," he writes to his son from Baltimore in 1868, "I have never read to an audience but I have watched for an opportunity of striking out something better somewhere." The freshness with which he returned night after night and season after season to the sphere of his previous successes, was itself a genuine actor's gift. "So real," he declares, "are my fictions to myself, that, after hundreds of nights, I come with a feeling of perfect freshness to that little red table, and laugh and cry with my hearers as if I had never stood there before."

Dickens's first public readings were given at Birmingham, during the Christmas week of 1853-'54, in support of the new Midland Institute; but a record--for the authenticity of which I cannot vouch--remains, that with true theatrical instinct he, before the Christmas in question, gave a trial reading of the _Christmas Carol_ to a smaller public audience at Peterborough. He had since been repeatedly found willing to read for benevolent purposes; and the very fact that it had become necessary to decline some of these frequent invitations had again suggested the possibility--which had occurred to him eleven years before--of meeting the demand in a different way. Yet it may, after all, be doubted whether the idea of undertaking an entire series of paid public readings would have been carried out, had it not been for the general restlessness which had seized upon Dickens early in 1858, when, moreover, he had no special task either of labour or of leisure to absorb him, and when he craved for excitement more than ever. To go home--in this springtime of 1858--was not to find there the peace of contentment. "I must do _something_," he wrote in March to his faithful counsellor, "or I shall wear my heart away. I can see no better thing to do that is half so hopeful in itself, or half so well suited to my restless state."

So by April the die was cast, and on the 29th of that month he had entered into his new relation with the public. One of the strongest and most genuine impulses of his nature had victoriously asserted itself, and according to his wont he addressed himself to his task with a relentless vigour which flinched from no exertion. He began with a brief series at St. Martin's Hall, and then, his invaluable friend Arthur Smith continuing to act as his manager, he contrived to cram not less than eighty-seven readings into three months and a half of travelling in the "provinces," including Scotland and Ireland. A few winter readings in London, and a short supplementary course in the country during October, 1859, completed this first series. Already, in 1858, we find him, in a letter from Ireland, complaining of the "tremendous strain," and declaring, "I seem to be always either in a railway carriage, or reading, or going to bed. I get so knocked up, whenever I have a minute to remember it, that then I go to bed as a matter of course." But the enthusiasm which everywhere welcomed him--I can testify to the thrill of excitement produced by his visit to Cambridge, in October, 1859--repaid him for his fatigues. Scotland thawed to him, and with Dublin--where his success was extraordinary--he was so smitten as to think it at first sight "pretty nigh as big as Paris." In return, the Boots at Morrison's expressed the general feeling in a patriotic point of view: "'Whaat sart of a hoose, sur?' he asked me. 'Capital.' 'The Lard be praised, for the 'onor o' Dooblin.'"

The books, or portions of books, to which he confined himself during this first series of readings were few in number. They comprised the _Carol_ and the _Chimes_, and two stories from earlier Christmas numbers of _Household Words_--may the exclamation of the soft-hearted chambermaid at the Holly Tree Inn, "It's a shame to part 'em!" never vanish from my memory!--together with the episodic readings of the _Trial_ in _Pickwick_, _Mrs. Gamp_, and _Paul Dombey_. Of these the _Pickwick_, which I heard more than once, is still vividly present to me. The only drawback to the complete enjoyment of it was the lurking fear that there had been some tampering with the text, not to be condoned even in its author. But in the way of assumption Charles Mathews the elder himself could have accomplished no more Protean effort. The lack-lustre eye of Mr. Justice Stareleigh, the forensic hitch of Mr. Serjeant Buzfuz, and the hopeless impotence of Mr. Nathaniel Winkle were alike incomparable. And if the success of the impersonation of Mr. Samuel Weller was less complete--although Dickens had formerly acted the character on an amateur stage--the reason probably was that, by reason of his endless store of ancient and modern instances, Sam had himself become a quasi-mythical being, whom it was almost painful to find reproduced in flesh and blood.

I have not hesitated to treat these readings by Dickens as if they had been the performances of an actor; and the description would apply even more strongly to his later readings, in which he seemed to make his points in a more accentuated fashion than before. "His readings," says Mr. C. Kent, in an interesting little book about them, "were, in the fullest meaning of the words, singularly ingenious and highly-elaborated histrionic performances." As such they had been prepared with a care such as few actors bestow upon their parts, and--for the book was prepared not less than the reading--not all authors bestow upon their plays. Now, the art of reading, even in the case of dramatic works, has its own laws, which even the most brilliant readers cannot neglect except at their peril. A proper pitch has to be found, in the first instance, before the exceptional passages can be, as it were, marked off from it; and the absence of this ground-tone sometimes interfered with the total effect of a reading by Dickens. On the other hand, the exceptional passages were, if not uniformly, at least generally excellent; nor am I at all disposed to agree with Forster in preferring, as a rule, the humorous to the pathetic. At the same time, there was noticeable in these readings a certain hardness which competent critics likewise discerned in Dickens's acting, and which could not, at least in the former case, be regarded as an ordinary characteristic of dilettanteism. The truth is that he isolated his parts too sharply--a frequent fault of English acting, and one more detrimental to the total effect of a reading than even to that of an acted play.

No sooner had the heaviest stress of the first series of readings ceased than Dickens was once more at work upon a new fiction. The more immediate purpose was to insure a prosperous launch to the journal which, in the spring of 1859, took the place of _Household Words_. A dispute, painful in its origin, but ending in an amicable issue, had resulted in the purchase of that journal by Dickens; but already a little earlier he had--as he was entitled to do--begun the new venture of _All the Year Round_, with which _Household Words_ was afterwards incorporated. The first number, published on April 30, contained the earliest instalment of _A Tale of Two Cities_, which was completed by November 20 following.

This story holds a unique place amongst the fictions of its author. Perhaps the most striking difference between it and his other novels may seem to lie in the all but entire absence from it of any humour or attempt at humour; for neither the brutalities of that "honest tradesman," Jerry, nor the laconisms of Miss Pross, can well be called by that name. Not that his sources of humour were drying up, even though, about this time, he contributed to an American journal a short "romance of the real world," _Hunted Down_, from which the same relief is again conspicuously absent. For the humour of Dickens was to assert itself with unmistakable force in his next longer fiction, and was even before that, in some of his occasional papers, to give delightful proofs of its continued vigour. In the case of the _Tale of Two Cities_, he had a new and distinct design in his mind which did not, indeed, exclude humour, but with which a liberal indulgence in it must have seriously interfered. "I set myself," he writes, "the little task of writing a picturesque story, rising in every chapter with characters true to nature, but whom the story itself should express more than they should express themselves by dialogue. I mean, in other words, that I fancied a story of incident might be written, in place of the bestiality that is written under that pretence, pounding the characters out in its own mortar, and beating their own interests out of them." He therefore renounced his more usual method in favour of one probably less congenial to him. Yet, in his own opinion at least, he succeeded so well in the undertaking, that when the story was near its end he could venture to express a hope that it was "the best story he had written." So much praise will hardly be given to this novel even by admirers of the French art of telling a story succinctly, or by those who can never resist a rather hysterical treatment of the French Revolution.

In my own opinion _A Tale of Two Cities_ is a skilfully though not perfectly constructed novel, which needed but little substantial alteration in order to be converted into a not less effective stage-play. And with such a design Dickens actually sent the proof-sheets of the book to his friend Regnier, in the fearful hope that he might approve of the project of its dramatisation for a French theatre. Cleverly or clumsily adapted, the tale of the Revolution and its sanguinary vengeance was unlikely to commend itself to the Imperial censorship; but an English version was, I believe, afterwards very fairly successful on the boards of the Adelphi, where Madame Celeste was certainly in her right place as Madame Defarge, an excellent character for a melodrama, though rather wearisome as she lies in wait through half a novel.

The construction of this story is, as I have said, skilful but not perfect. Dickens himself successfully defended his use of accident in bringing about the death of Madame Defarge. The real objection to the conduct of this episode, however, lies in the inadequacy of the contrivance for leaving Miss Pross behind in Paris. Too much is also, I think, made to turn upon the three words "and their descendants"--non-essential in the original connexion--by which Dr. Manette's written denunciation becomes fatal to those he loves. Still, the general edifice of the plot is solid; its interest is, notwithstanding the crowded background, concentrated with much skill upon a small group of personages; and Carton's self-sacrifice, admirably prepared from the very first, produces a legitimate tragic effect. At the same time the novelist's art vindicates its own claims. Not only does this story contain several narrative episodes of remarkable power--such as the flight from Paris at the close, and the touching little incident of the seamstress, told in Dickens's sweetest pathetic manner--but it is likewise enriched by some descriptive pictures of unusual excellence: for instance, the sketch of Dover in the good old smuggling times, and the mezzo-tint of the stormy evening in Soho. Doubtless the increased mannerism of the style is disturbing, and this not only in the high-strung French scenes. As to the historical element in this novel, Dickens modestly avowed his wish that he might by his story have been able "to add something to the popular and picturesque means of understanding that terrible time, though no one can hope to add anything to Mr. Carlyle's wonderful book." But if Dickens desired to depict the noble of the _ancien regime_, either according to Carlyle or according to intrinsic probability, he should not have offered, in his Marquis, a type historically questionable, and unnatural besides. The description of the Saint Antoine, before and during the bursting of the storm, has in it more of truthfulness, or of the semblance of truthfulness; and Dickens's perception of the physiognomy of the French workman is, I think, remarkably accurate. Altogether, the book is an extraordinary _tour de force_, which Dickens never repeated.

The opening of a new story by Dickens gave the necessary _impetus_ to his new journal at its earliest stage; nor was the ground thus gained ever lost. Mr. W. H. Wills stood by his chief's side as of old, taking, more especially in later years, no small share of responsibility upon him. The prospectus of _All the Year Round_ had not in vain promised an identity of principle in its conduct with that of its predecessor; in energy and spirit it showed no falling off; and, though not in all respects, the personality of Dickens made itself felt as distinctly as ever. Besides the _Tale of Two Cities_ he contributed to it his story of _Great Expectations_. Amongst his contributors Mr. Wilkie Collins took away the breath of multitudes of readers; Mr. Charles Reade disported himself amongst the facts which gave stamina to his fiction; and Lord Lytton made a daring voyage into a mysterious country. Thither Dickens followed him, for once, in his _Four Stories_, not otherwise noteworthy, and written in a manner already difficult to discriminate from that of Mr. Wilkie Collins. For the rest, the advice with which Dickens aided Lord Lytton's progress in his _Strange Story_ was neither more ready nor more painstaking than that which he bestowed upon his younger contributors, to more than one of whom he generously gave the opportunity of publishing in his journal a long work of fiction. Some of these younger writers were at this period amongst his most frequent guests and associates; for nothing more naturally commended itself to him than the encouragement of the younger generation.

But though longer imaginative works played at least as conspicuous a part in the new journal as they had in the old, the conductor likewise continued to make manifest his intention that the lesser contributions should not be treated by readers or by writers as harmless necessary "padding." For this purpose it was requisite not only that the choice of subjects should be made with the utmost care, but also that the master's hand should itself be occasionally visible. Dickens's occasional contributions had been few and unimportant, till in a happy hour he began a series of papers, including many of the pleasantest, as well as of the mellowest, amongst the lighter productions of his pen. As usual, he had taken care to find for this series a name which of itself went far to make its fortune.

"I am both a town and a country traveller, and am always on the road.
Figuratively speaking, I travel for the great house of Human Interest
Brothers, and have rather a large connexion in the fancy goods way.
Literally speaking, I am always wandering here and there from my rooms
in Covent Garden, London--now about the city streets, now about the
country by-roads, seeing many little things, and some great things,
which, because they interest me, I think may interest others."

The whole collection of these _Uncommercial Traveller_ papers, together with the _Uncommercial Samples_ which succeeded them after Dickens's return from America, and which begin with a graphic account of his homeward voyage _Aboard Ship_, where the voice of conscience spoke in the motion of the screw, amounts to thirty-seven articles, and spreads over a period of nine years. They are necessarily of varying merit, but amongst them are some which deserve a permanent place in our lighter literature. Such are the description of the church-yards on a quiet evening in _The City of the Absent_, the grotesque picture of loneliness in _Chambers_--a favourite theme with Dickens--and the admirable papers on _Shy Neighbourhoods_ and on _Tramps_. Others have a biographical interest, though delightfully objective in treatment; yet others are mere fugitive pieces; but there are few without some of the most attractive qualities of Dickens's easiest style.

Dickens contributed other occasional papers to his journal, some of which may be forgotten without injury to his fame. Amongst these may be reckoned the rather dreary _George Silverman's Explanation_ (1868), in which there is nothing characteristic but a vivid picture of a set of ranters, led by a clique of scoundrels; on the other hand, there will always be admirers of the pretty _Holiday Romance_, published nearly simultaneously in America and England, a nosegay of tales told by children, the only fault of which is that, as with other children's nosegays, there is perhaps a little too much of it. I have no room for helping to rescue from partial oblivion an old friend, whose portrait has not, I think, found a home amongst his master's collected sketches. Pincher's counterfeit has gone astray, like _Pincher_ himself. Meanwhile, the special institution of the Christmas number flourished in connexion with _All the Year Round_ down to the year 1867, as it had during the last five years of _Household Words_. It consisted, with the exception of the very last number, of a series of short stories, in a framework of the editor's own devising. To the authors of the stories, of which he invariably himself wrote one or more, he left the utmost liberty, at times stipulating for nothing but that tone of cheerful philanthropy which he had domesticated in his journal. In the Christmas numbers, which gradually attained to such a popularity that of one of the last something like a quarter of a million copies were sold, Dickens himself shone most conspicuously in the introductory sections; and some of these are to be reckoned amongst his very best descriptive character-sketches. Already in _Household Words_ Christmas numbers the introductory sketch of the _Seven Poor Travellers_ from Watt's Charity at supper in the Rochester hostelry, and the excellent description of a winter journey and sojourn at the _Holly Tree Inn_, with an excursus on inns in general, had become widely popular. The _All the Year Round_ numbers, however, largely augmented this success. After _Tom Tiddler's Ground_, with the adventures of Miss Kitty Kimmeens, a pretty little morality in miniature, teaching the same lesson as the vagaries of Mr. Mopes the hermit, came _Somebody's Luggage_, with its exhaustive disquisition on waiters; and then the memorable chirpings of _Mrs. Lirriper_, in both _Lodgings_ and _Legacy_, admirable in the delicacy of their pathos, and including an inimitable picture of London lodging-house life. Then followed the _Prescriptions_ of _Dr. Marigold_, the eloquent and sarcastic but tender-hearted Cheap Jack; and _Mugby Junction_, which gave words to the cry of a whole nation of hungry and thirsty travellers. In the tales and sketches contributed by him to the Christmas numbers, in addition to these introductions, he at times gave the rein to his love for the fanciful and the grotesque, which there was here no reason to keep under. On the whole, written, as in a sense these compositions were, to order, nothing is more astonishing in them than his continued freshness, against which his mannerism is here of vanishing importance; and, inasmuch as after issuing a last Christmas number of a different kind, Dickens abandoned the custom when it had reached the height of popular favour, and when manifold imitations had offered him the homage of their flattery, he may be said to have withdrawn from this campaign in his literary life with banners flying.

In the year 1859 Dickens's readings had been comparatively few; and they had ceased altogether in the following year, when the _Uncommercial Traveller_ began his wanderings. The winter from 1859 to 1860 was his last winter at Tavistock House; and, with the exception of his rooms in Wellington Street, he had now no settled residence but Gad's Hill Place. He sought its pleasant retreat about the beginning of June, after the new experience of an attack of rheumatism had made him recognise "the necessity of country training all through the summer." Yet such was the recuperative power, or the indomitable self-confidence, of his nature, that after he had in these summer months contributed some of the most delightful _Uncommercial Traveller_ papers to his journal, we find him already in August "prowling about, meditating a new book."

It is refreshing to think of Dickens in this pleasant interval of country life, before he had rushed once more into the excitement of his labours as a public reader. We may picture him to ourselves, accompanied by his dogs, striding along the country roads and lanes, exploring the haunts of the country tramps, "a piece of Kentish road," for instance, "bordered on either side by a wood, and having on one hand, between the road-dust and the trees, a skirting patch of grass. Wild flowers grow in abundance on this spot, and it lies high and airy, with a distant river stealing steadily away to the ocean like a man's life. To gain the mile-stone here, which the moss, primroses, violets, bluebells, and wild roses would soon render illegible but for peering travellers pushing them aside with their sticks, you must come up a steep hill, come which way you may." At the foot of that hill, I fancy, lay Dullborough town half asleep in the summer afternoon; and the river in the distance was that which bounded the horizon of a little boy's vision "whose father's family name was Pirrip, and whose Christian name was Philip, but whose infant tongue could make of both names nothing longer or more explicit than Pip."

The story of Pip's adventures, the novel of _Great Expectations_, was thought over in these Kentish perambulations between Thames and Medway along the road which runs, apparently with the intention of running out to sea, from Higham towards the marshes; in the lonely church-yard of Cooling village by the thirteen little stone-lozenges, of which Pip counted only five, now nearly buried in their turn by the rank grass; and in quiet saunters through the familiar streets of Rochester, past the "queer" Townhall; and through the "Vines" past the fine old Restoration House, called in the book (by the name of an altogether different edifice) Satis House. And the climax of the narrative was elaborated on a unique steamboat excursion from London to the mouth of the Thames, broken by a night at the "Ship and Lobster," an old riverside inn called "The Ship" in the story. No wonder that Dickens's descriptive genius should become refreshed by these studies of his subject, and that thus _Great Expectations_ should have indisputably become one of the most picturesque of his books. But it is something very much more at the same time. The _Tale of Two Cities_ had as a story strongly seized upon the attention of the reader. But in the earlier chapters of _Great Expectations_ every one felt that Dickens was himself again. Since the Yarmouth scenes in _David Copperfield_ he had written nothing in which description married itself to sentiment so humorously and so tenderly. Uncouth, and slow, and straightforward, and gentle of heart, like Mr. Peggotty, Joe Gargery is as new a conception as he is a genuinely true one; nor is it easy to know under what aspect to relish him most--whether disconsolate in his Sunday clothes, "like some extraordinary bird, standing, as he did, speechless, with his tuft of feathers ruffled, and his mouth open as if he wanted a worm," or at home by his own fireside, winking at his little comrade, and, when caught in the act by his wife, "drawing the back of his hand across his nose with his usual conciliatory air on such occasions." Nor since _David Copperfield_ had Dickens again shown such an insight as he showed here into the world of a child's mind. "To be quite sure," he wrote to Forster, "I had fallen into no unconscious repetitions, I read _David Copperfield_ again the other day, and was affected by it to a degree you would hardly believe." His fears were unnecessary; for with all its charm the history of Pip lacks the personal element which insures our sympathy to the earlier story and to its hero. In delicacy of feeling, however, as well as in humour of description, nothing in Dickens surpasses the earlier chapters of _Great Expectations_; and equally excellent is the narrative of Pip's disloyalty of heart toward his early friends, down to his departure from the forge, a picture of pitiable selfishness almost Rousseau-like in its fidelity to poor human nature; down to his comic humiliation, when in the pride of his new position and his new clothes, before "that unlimited miscreant, Trabb's boy." The later and especially the concluding portions of this novel contain much that is equal in power to its opening; but it must be allowed that, before many chapters have ended, a false tone finds its way into the story. The whole history of Miss Havisham, and the crew of relations round the unfortunate creature, is strained and unnatural, and Estella's hardness is as repulsive as that of Edith Dombey herself. Mr. Jaggers and his house-keeper, and even Mr. Wemmick, have an element of artificiality in them, whilst about the Pocket family there is little, if anything at all, that is real. The story, however, seems to recover itself as the main thread in its deftly-woven texture is brought forward again: when on a dark, gusty night, ominous of coming trouble, the catastrophe of Pip's expectations announces itself in the return from abroad of his unknown benefactor, the convict whom he had as a child fed on the marshes. The remainder of the narrative is successful in conveying to the reader the sense of sickening anxiety which fills the hero; the interest is skilfully sustained by the introduction of a very strong situation--Pip's narrow escape out of the clutches of "Old Orlick" in the lime-kiln on the marshes; and the climax is reached in the admirably-executed narrative of the convict's attempt, with the aid of Pip, to escape by the river. The actual winding-up of _Great Expectations_ is not altogether satisfactory; but on the whole the book must be ranked among the very best of Dickens's later novels, as combining, with the closer construction and intenser narrative force common to several of these, not a little of the delightfully genial humour of his earlier works.

Already, before _Great Expectations_ was completely published, Dickens had given a few readings at the St. James's Hall, and by the end of October in the same year, 1861, he was once more engaged in a full course of country readings. They occupied him till the following January, only ten days being left for his Christmas number, and a brief holiday for Christmas itself; so close was the adjustment of time and work by this favourite of fortune. The death of his faithful Arthur Smith befell most untowardly before the country readings were begun, but their success was unbroken, from Scotland to South Devon. The long-contemplated extract from _Copperfield_ had at last been added to the list--a self-sacrifice _coram publico_, hallowed by success--and another from _Nicholas Nickleby_, which "went in the wildest manner." He was, however, nearly worn out with fatigue before these winter readings were over, and was glad to snatch a moment of repose before a short spring course in town began. Scarcely was this finished, when he was coquetting in his mind with an offer from Australia, and had already proposed to himself to throw in, as a piece of work by the way, a series of papers to be called _The Uncommercial Traveller Upside Down_. Meanwhile, a few readings for a charitable purpose in Paris, and a short summer course at St. James's Hall, completed this second series in the year 1863.

Whatever passing thoughts overwork by day or sleeplessness at night may have occasionally brought with them, Dickens himself would have been strangely surprised, as no doubt would have been the great body of a public to which he was by this time about the best known man in England, had he been warned that weakness and weariness were not to be avoided even by a nature endowed with faculties so splendid and with an energy so conquering as his. He seemed to stand erect in the strength of his matured powers, equal as of old to any task which he set himself, and exulting, though with less buoyancy of spirit than of old, in the wreaths which continued to strew his path. Yet already the ranks of his contemporaries were growing thinner, while close to himself death was taking away members of the generation before, and of that after, his own. Amongst them was his mother--of whom his biography and his works have little to say or to suggest--and his second son. Happy events, too, had in the due course of things contracted the family circle at Gad's Hill. Of his intimates, he lost, in 1863, Augustus Egg; and in 1864 John Leech, to whose genius he had himself formerly rendered eloquent homage.

A still older associate, the great painter Stanfield, survived till 1867. "No one of your father's friends," Dickens then wrote to Stanfield's son, "can ever have loved him more dearly than I always did, or can have better known the worth of his noble character." Yet another friend, who, however, so far as I can gather, had not at any time belonged to Dickens's most familiar circle, had died on Christmas Eve, 1863--Thackeray, whom it had for some time become customary to compare or contrast with him as his natural rival. Yet in point of fact, save for the tenderness which, as with all humourists of the highest order, was an important element in their writings, and save for the influences of time and country to which they were both subject, there are hardly two other amongst our great humourists who have less in common. Their unlikeness shows itself, among other things, in the use made by Thackeray of suggestions which it is difficult to believe he did not in the first instance owe to Dickens. Who would venture to call Captain Costigan a plagiarism from Mr. Snevellici, or to affect that Wenham and Wagg were copied from Pyke and Pluck, or that Major Pendennis--whose pardon one feels inclined to beg for the juxtaposition--was founded upon Major Bagstock, or the Old Campaigner in the _Newcomes_ on the Old Soldier in _Copperfield_? But that suggestions were in these and perhaps in a few other instances derived from Dickens by Thackeray for some of his most masterly characters, it would, I think, be idle to deny. In any case, the style of these two great writers differed as profoundly as their way of looking at men and things. Yet neither of them lacked a thorough appreciation of the other's genius; and it is pleasant to remember that, after paying in _Pendennis_ a tribute to the purity of Dickens's books, Thackeray in a public lecture referred to his supposed rival in a way which elicited from the latter the warmest of acknowledgments. It cannot be said that the memorial words which, after Thackeray's death, Dickens was prevailed upon to contribute to the _Cornhill Magazine_ did more than justice to the great writer whom England had just lost; but it is well that the kindly and unstinting tribute of admiration should remain on record, to contradict any supposition that a disagreement which had some years previously disturbed the harmony of their intercourse, and of which the world had, according to its wont, made the most, had really estranged two generous minds from one another. The effort which on this occasion Dickens made is in itself a proof of his kindly feeling towards Thackeray. Of Talfourd and Landor and Stanfield he could write readily after their deaths, but he frankly told Mr. Wilkie Collins that, "had he felt he could," he would most gladly have excused himself from writing the "couple of pages" about Thackeray.

Dickens, it should be remembered, was at no time a man of many friends. The mere dalliance of friendship was foreign to one who worked so indefatigably in his hours of recreation as well as of labour; and fellowship in work of one kind or another seems to have been, in later years at all events, the surest support to his intimacy. Yet he was most easily drawn, not only to those who could help him, but to those whom he could help in congenial pursuits and undertakings. Such was, no doubt, the origin of his friendship in these later years with an accomplished French actor on the English boards, whom, in a rather barren period of our theatrical history, Dickens may have been justified in describing as "far beyond any one on our stage," and who certainly was an "admirable artist." In 1864 Mr. Fechter had taken the Lyceum, the management of which he was to identify with a more elegant kind of melodrama than that long domesticated lower down the Strand; and Dickens was delighted to bestow on him counsel frankly sought and frankly given. As an author, too, he directly associated himself with the art of his friend.[11] For I may mention here by anticipation that the last of the _All the Year Round_ Christmas numbers, the continuous story of _No Thoroughfare_, was written by Dickens and Mr. Wilkie Collins in 1867, with a direct eye to its subsequent adaptation to the stage, for which it actually was fitted by Mr. Wilkie Collins in the following year. The place of its production, the Adelphi, suited the broad effects and the rather conventional comic humour of the story and piece. From America, Dickens watched the preparation of the piece with unflagging interest; and his innate and irrepressible genius for stage-management reveals itself in the following passage from a letter written by him to an American friend soon after his return to England: "_No Thoroughfare_ is very shortly coming out in Paris, where it is now in active rehearsal. It is still playing here, but without Fechter, who has been very ill. He and Wilkie raised so many pieces of stage-effect here, that, unless I am quite satisfied with the report, I shall go over and try my stage-managerial hand at the Vaudeville Theatre. I particularly want the drugging and attempted robbery in the bedroom-scene at the Swiss Inn to be done to the sound of a water-fall rising and falling with the wind. Although in the very opening of that scene they speak of the water-fall, and listen to it, nobody thought of its mysterious music. I could make it, with a good stage-carpenter, in an hour."

_Great Expectations_ had been finished in 1860, and already in the latter part of 1861, the year which comprised the main portion of his second series of readings, he had been thinking of a new story. He had even found a title--the unlucky title which he afterwards adopted--but in 1862 the tempting Australian invitation had been a serious obstacle in his way. "I can force myself to go aboard a ship, and I can force myself to do at that reading-desk what I have done a hundred times; but whether, with all this unsettled, fluctuating distress in my mind, I could force an original book out of it is another question." Nor was it the "unsettled, fluctuating distress" which made it a serious effort for him to attempt another longer fiction. Dickens shared with most writers the experience that both the inventive power and the elasticity of memory decline with advancing years. Already since the time when he was thinking of writing _Little Dorrit_ it had become his habit to enter in a book kept for the purpose memoranda for possible future use, hints for subjects of stories,[12] scenes, situations, and characters; thoughts and fancies of all kinds; titles for possible books. Of these _Somebody's Luggage_, _Our Mutual Friend_, and _No Thoroughfare_--the last an old fancy revived--came to honourable use; as did many names, both Christian and surnames, and combinations of both. Thus, Bradley Headstone's _praenomen_ was derived directly from the lists of the Education Department, and the Lammles and the Stiltstalkings, with Mr. Merdle and the Dorrits, existed as names before the characters were fitted to them. All this, though no doubt in part attributable to the playful readiness of an observation never to be caught asleep, points in the direction of a desire to be securely provided with an armoury of which, in earlier days, he would have taken slight thought.

Gradually--indeed, so far as I know, more gradually than in the case of any other of his stories--he had built up the tale for which he had determined on the title of _Our Mutual Friend_, and slowly, and without his old self-confidence, he had, in the latter part of 1863, set to work upon it. "I want to prepare it for the spring, but I am determined not to begin to publish with less than four numbers done. I see my opening perfectly, with the one main line on which the story is to turn, and if I don't strike while the iron (meaning myself) is hot, I shall drift off again, and have to go through all this uneasiness once more." For, unfortunately, he had resolved on returning to the old twenty-number measure for his new story. Begun with an effort, _Our Mutual Friend_--the publication of which extended from May, 1864, to November, 1865--was completed under difficulties, and difficulties of a kind hitherto unknown to Dickens. In February, 1865, as an immediate consequence, perhaps, of exposure at a time when depression of spirits rendered him less able than usual to bear it, he had a severe attack of illness, of which Forster says that it "put a broad mark between his past life and what remained to him of the future." From this time forward he felt a lameness in his left foot, which continued to trouble him at intervals during the remainder of his life, and which finally communicated itself to the left hand. A comparison of times, however, convinced Forster that the real origin of this ailment was to be sought in general causes.

In 1865, as the year wore on, and the pressure of the novel still continued, he felt that he was "working himself into a damaged state," and was near to that which has greater terrors for natures like his than for more placid temperaments--breaking down. So, in May, he went first to the sea-side and then to France. On his return (it was the 9th of June, the date of his death five years afterwards) he was in the railway train which met with a fearful accident at Staplehurst, in Kent. His carriage was the only passenger-carriage in the train which, when the bridge gave way, was not thrown over into the stream. He was able to escape out of the window, to make his way in again for his brandy-flask and the MS. of a number of _Our Mutual Friend_ which he had left behind him, to clamber down the brickwork of the bridge for water, to do what he could towards rescuing his unfortunate fellow-travellers, and to aid the wounded and the dying. "I have," he wrote, in describing the scene, "a--I don't know what to call it: constitutional, I suppose--presence of mind, and was not in the least fluttered at the time.... But in writing these scanty words of recollection I feel the shake, and am obliged to stop." Nineteen months afterwards, when on a hurried reading tour in the North, he complains to Miss Hogarth of the effect of the railway shaking which since the Staplehurst accident "tells more and more." It is clear how serious a shock the accident had caused. He never, Miss Hogarth thinks, quite recovered it. Yet it might have acted less disastrously upon a system not already nervously weakened. As evidence of the decline of Dickens's nervous power, I hardly know whether it is safe to refer to the gradual change in his handwriting, which in his last years is a melancholy study.

All these circumstances should be taken into account in judging of Dickens's last completed novel. The author would not have been himself had he, when once fairly engaged upon his work, failed to feel something of his old self-confidence. Nor was this feeling, which he frankly confessed to Mr. Wilkie Collins, altogether unwarranted. _Our Mutual Friend_[13] is, like the rest of Dickens's later writings, carefully and skilfully put together as a story. No exception is to be taken to it on the ground that the identity on which much of the plot hinges is long foreseen by the reader; for this, as Dickens told his critics in his postscript, had been part of his design, and was, in fact, considering the general nature of the story, almost indispensable. The defect rather lies in the absence of that element of uncertainty which is needed in order to sustain the interest. The story is, no doubt, ingeniously enough constructed, but admiration of an ingenious construction is insufficient to occupy the mind of a reader through an inevitable disentanglement. Moreover, some of the machinery, though cleverly contrived, cannot be said to work easily. Thus, the _ruse_ of the excellent Boffin in playing the part of a skinflint might pass as a momentary device, but its inherent improbability, together with the likelihood of its leading to an untoward result, makes its protraction undeniably tedious. It is not, however, in my opinion at least, in the matter of construction that _Our Mutual Friend_ presents a painful contrast with earlier works produced, like it, "on a large canvas." The conduct of the story as a whole is fully vigorous enough to enchain the attention; and in portions of it the hand of the master displays its unique power. He is at his best in the whole of the water-side scenes, both where "The Six Jolly Fellowship Porters" (identified by zealous discoverers with a tavern called "The Two Brewers") lies like an oasis in the midst of a desert of ill-favoured tidal deposits, and where Rogue Riderhood has his lair at the lock higher up the river. A marvellous union of observation and imagination was needed for the picturing of a world in which this amphibious monster has his being; and never did Dickens's inexhaustible knowledge of the physiognomy of the Thames and its banks stand him in better stead than in these powerful episodes. It is unfortunate, though in accordance with the common fate of heroes and heroines, that Lizzie Hexham should, from the outset, have to discard the colouring of her surroundings, and to talk the conventional dialect as well as express the conventional sentiments of the heroic world. Only at the height of the action she ceases to be commonplace, and becomes entitled to be remembered amongst the true heroines of fiction. A more unusual figure, of the half-pathetic, half-grotesque kind for which Dickens had a peculiar liking, is Lizzie's friend, the doll's dressmaker, into whom he has certainly infused an element of genuine sentiment; her protector, Riah, on the contrary, is a mere stage-saint, though by this character Dickens appears to have actually hoped to redeem the aspersions he was supposed to have cast upon the Jews, as if Riah could have redeemed Fagin, any more than Sheva redeemed Shylock.

But in this book whole episodes and parts of the plot through which the mystery of John Harmon winds its length along are ill-adapted for giving pleasure to any reader. The whole Boffin, Wegg, and Venus business--if the term may pass--is extremely wearisome; the character of Mr. Venus, in particular, seems altogether unconnected or unarticulated with the general plot, on which, indeed, it is but an accidental excrescence. In the Wilfer family there are the outlines of some figures of genuine humour, but the outlines only; nor is Bella raised into the sphere of the charming out of that of the pert and skittish. A more ambitious attempt, and a more noteworthy failure, was the endeavour to give to the main plot of this novel such a satiric foil as the Circumlocution Office had furnished to the chief action of _Little Dorrit_, in a caricature of society at large, its surface varnish and its internal rottenness. The Barnacles, and those who deemed it their duty to rally round the Barnacles, had, we saw, felt themselves hard hit; but what sphere or section of society could feel itself specially caricatured in the Veneerings, or in their associates--the odious Lady Tippins, the impossibly brutal Podsnap, Fascination Fledgeby, and the Lammles, a couple which suggests nothing but antimony and the Chamber of Horrors? Caricature such as this, representing no society that has ever in any part of the world pretended to be "good," corresponds to the wild rhetoric of the superfluous Betty Higden episode against the "gospel according to Podsnappery;" but it is, in truth, satire from which both wit and humour have gone out. An angry, often almost spasmodic, mannerism has to supply their place. Amongst the personages moving in "society" are two which, as playing serious parts in the progress of the plot, the author is necessarily obliged to seek to endow with the flesh and blood of real human beings. Yet it is precisely in these--the friends Eugene and Mortimer--that, in the earlier part of the novel at all events, the constraint of the author's style seems least relieved; the dialogues between these two Templars have an unnaturalness about them as intolerable as euphuism or the effeminacies of the Augustan age. It is true that, when the story reaches its tragic height, the character of Eugene is borne along with it, and his affectations are forgotten. But in previous parts of the book, where he poses as a wit, and is evidently meant for a gentleman, he fails to make good his claims to either character. Even the skilfully contrived contrast between the rivals Eugene Wrayburn and the school-master, Bradley Headstone--through whom and through whose pupil, Dickens, by-the-way, dealt another blow against a system of mental training founded upon facts alone--fails to bring out the conception of Eugene which the author manifestly had in his mind. Lastly, the old way of reconciling dissonances--a marriage which "society" calls a _mesalliance_--has rarely furnished a lamer ending than here; and, had the unwritten laws of English popular fiction permitted, a tragic close would have better accorded with the sombre hue of the most powerful portions of this curiously unequal romance.