Charles Dickens. Sidney Dark

Чтение книги онлайн.

      Soon after he went to the blacking factory the whole family moved into the Marshalsea, and Dickens was sent to lodge in Little College Street, Camden Town, with " a reduced old lady," the original of Mrs. Pipkin in Dombey and Son. His father paid his lodging, but otherwise he was left entirely on his own resources — " no advice, no counsel, no encouragement, no consolation, no support from anyone that I can call to mind, so help me God! " And the boy was just ten. It is wonderful indeed that he should have grown into the supreme laughter-maker of the after years; and yet, perhaps, as I shall try to show, it was not so wonderful, for miracles do happen and miracles always happen according to natural law — a fact of importance of which both scientists and theologians often appear strangely ignorant.

      A legacy of some hundred pounds was left to the elder Dickens. He took his release from the Marshalsea, and soon afterwards he quarrelled with his blacking-manufacturer relative, and Charles was happily discharged. He was sent to a school in the Hampstead Road called the Wellington House Academy, and there he stayed until he was fourteen. Some of the characteristics of the school were used afterwards in the description of Salem House in David Copperfield. On leaving school his father obtained for him an engagement in the office of Mr. Edward Blackmore, a solicitor in Gray's Inn, and there he acquired that intimate knowledge of the futility and chicanery of the law which he was to use with such splendid effect in The Pickwick Papers, Bleak House, and Great Expectations.

      John Dickens — he was a man of ability and at times of resource — had become a parliamentary reporter on the staff of The Morning Herald, and his son decided to learn shorthand as the first step in his real career. He worked almost viciously. " Whatever I have tried to do in life," he once said, " I have tried with all my heart to do well." To teach oneself shorthand from a text-book is not an easy task. " The changes that were rung upon dots which in such a position meant such a thing, and in such another position something else entirely different; the wonderful vagaries that were played by circles; the unaccountable consequences that resulted from mastlike flies' legs; the tremendous effects of a curve in the wrong place, not only troubled my waking hours, but reappeared before me in my sleep."

      He worked as a shorthand writer for two years in an office in Doctors' Commons, and when he was nineteen he entered the House of Commons gallery as one of the representatives of a paper called The True Sun. It is one of the characteristics of Charles Dickens' career that despite the hardships of his youth, and his almost entire lack of influential friends, success came to him quickly and easily. He had a story published in The Old Monthly Magazine when he was twenty-one. He had constant newspaper work from the time he was nineteen, and this work gave him all kinds of useful knowledge and experience. He does not appear to have had any trouble in getting his writings accepted and published, and in February 1835 the signature " Boz " — the nickname of one of his brothers — first appeared in The Monthly Magazine, and his career as a novelist may be said to have begun.

      In the latter part of this book I have dealt with each of his novels in their order, and here it is only necessary briefly to summarise the facts of their publication. In 1836 he collected the Sketches by Boz, and sold the copyright for £150, and on the 31st of March of the same year Messrs. Chapman & Hall began the publication in shilling numbers of The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club. The same year saw the end of his career as a parliamentary reporter and the production at the St. James's Theatre of a farce of his called Strange Gentlemen and an opera Village Coquettes, for which he wrote the dialogue and the words of the songs.

      Charles Dickens married Miss Catherine Hogarth in the Pickwick year, and he must have been an extremely attractive and impressive-looking young man. Forster when he first saw him was struck by " the quickness, keenness, and practical power, the eager, restless, energetic outlook on each several feature that seemed to tell so little of a student or writer of books and so much of a man of action." Mrs. Carlyle said of his face " that it was as if made of steel," and Leigh Hunt wrote, " It has the life and soul in it of fifty human beings."

      No man could possibly have anticipated the enormous popularity achieved by Dickens by his very first book, and unfortunately for him, before that popularity was assured he had entered into agreements which overloaded him with work. While the early numbers of Pickwick were appearing, and before Sam Weller had been created, Dickens had agreed with Mr. Bentley to edit a monthly magazine and to write three stories, on terms good enough for a beginner, but altogether inadequate for the author of Pickwick. In the latter part of 1836 he was writing at the same time the first half of Oliver Twist and the last half of Pickwick. In the years 1837 and 1838 he edited a life of the famous clown Grimaldi, finished Oliver Twist, and began Nicholas Nickleby, which kept him busy almost to the end of 1839.

      He had lived since his marriage in Doughty Street, and although he was still only twenty-seven years old he had become a prominent figure in a literary and artistic society which included Thackeray, Macready, Talfourd, Maclise, Landseer, and Douglas Jerrold. In 1840 he began the publication of Master Humphrey's Clock, the idea of which was a weekly three-penny publication based on the Tatler and Spectator, only far more popular, and in which one of his stories should appear in regular instalments. This story was The Old Curiosity Shop, and its success was even greater than that of Pickwick. Quite early in his writing life Dickens began his frequent visits to Broadstairs, and in 1840 he moved from Doughty Street to Devonshire Terrace. This year was the year of Barnaby Rudge, which he had begun during the progress of Oliver Twist, but had put aside for some months.

      In January 1842, Dickens made his first visit to America. I have dealt at some length with his impressions in the chapter on Martin Chuzzlewit. It is very difficult, I think, to label him with any political tag, but he was certainly essentially and emphatically an anti-Tory, and he was without question prepared to like America and the Americans. And despite the fact that he detested some of the individuals he met when he landed, particularly " one man in very dirty gaiters and with very protruding upper teeth, who said to all comers after him, ' So you've been СКАЧАТЬ