Charles Dickens. Sidney Dark

Чтение книги онлайн.

      He was home again in 1842, and in the months after his return he wrote his American Notes, any detailed description of which has been omitted from this book for want of space and because its " line " is almost exactly similar to that of Martin Chuzzlewit, the first number of which appeared in January 1843. Martin Chuzzlewit was a comparative failure, and the highest sale of any of the numbers was 23,000 as compared with the 50,000 numbers of Pickwick and the 60,000 of The Old Curiosity Shop; but since Dickens' death it has become the third most popular of all his novels, following Pickwick and David Copperfield. The Christmas Carol appeared a few days before the Christmas of this year, and was an immediate and tremendous success. A few months later Dickens went for a long holiday in Italy, not returning to England until June 1845, when he at once began working on his scheme for a daily newspaper — he was wedded to the idea of fathering periodicals — and the first number of The Daily News appeared under his editorship on the 21st of January 1846. The work was altogether too much for him, and he resigned the position a fortnight afterwards, ceasing to have any connection with the paper after four months, and starting for the Continent again to forget a mistake and to get back again into the vein for writing another novel. His stay in Lausanne and Geneva was followed by three months in Paris. In 1847 he lived a great deal at Brighton and Broadstairs, writing Dombey and Son. The Haunted Man was written in 1848, The Chimes having been completed in Italy three years before. Dickens spent much of 1849 and 1850 in Broadstairs and Bonchurch, Isle of Wight, with David Copperfield. He loathed Bonchurch, and it made him dull and ill. In one of his letters to Forster he says: " Naples is hot and dirty, New York feverish, Washington bilious, Genoa exciting, Paris rainy, but Bonchurch smashing. I am quite convinced that I should die here in a year."

      In 1850 he started Household Words. The original idea was fantastic and poetical — a weekly journal dominated by a certain Shadow, " a cheerful, useful, and always welcome Shadow," who should express his opinion of all manner of things week after week. But the practical Forster vetoed the Shadow, and Household Words with more conventional ambitions first appeared on the 30th of March. The assistant editor was W. G. Wills, and its first serial was written by Mrs. Gaskell.

      Dickens left the house in Devonshire Terrace in 1851. Whilst living there his fame had become worldwide, and he had gathered round him a small but desirable circle of genuine friends. Among them were the Macreadys, Mark Lemon, Tenniel, Milner Gibson, Lord Lovelace, John Delane, the Landseers, the Carlyles, Thackeray, Mrs. Gaskell, Douglas Jerrold, Tennyson, Tom Taylor, the Kembles, Frith, Mazzini, Sims Reeves, Mrs. Keeley, George Henry Lewes, and some others. At this time he was very busy as an amateur actor, playing in his own house and in halls in various parts of the country on behalf of the funds of the Guild of Literature or for some other worthy cause. There is no question that he had very great stage ability, used to the full years afterwards when he gave his public readings. In 1853 he went again to Switzerland and Italy. Although Dickens travelled on the Continent a great deal, as Mr. Chesterton suggests, he always remained entirely uncosmopolitan, and entirely an Englishman, and it is a highly suggestive and important fact that he should have written so thoroughly an English book as The Chimes in Genoa. Dickens had no vulgar racial prejudices. He had none of the detestable John Bull arrogance that has made the Englishman abroad so generally disliked. He simply lacked the faculty to perceive the essentials of any people but his own. He liked Italy and he loved the poor Frenchman, but like the hero of Sir William Gilbert's song he always remained an Englishman.

      Bleak House was begun in 1851 and finished at Boulogne in 1853. Hard Times was begun in 1853 and finished also at Boulogne in 1854. Dickens was very seriously overworking at this time editing Household Words, writing Bleak House and the quite unnecessary Child's History of England simultaneously. He was living in a turmoil, working to save his soul, trying to put out of his mind the family unhappiness which was beginning to be insupportable. He began Little Dorrit in 1855, and he finished the story during his stay in Paris in 1856 to 1857. In 1856 he was in Doncaster at the time of the St. Leger, and it is not without interest that this great anti-Puritanic Englishman should have found horse-racing entirely detestable. " I vow to God," he wrote, " that I can see nothing in it but cruelty, covetousness, calculation, insensibility, and low wickedness." In 1856 he bought the house at Gadshill, outside Chatham, which was his home during the rest of his life and where he eventually died.

      Dickens' marriage with Catherine Hogarth was never, I imagine, entirely satisfactory, and it eventually became impossible. He was a man who, because he was so English, was intensely domestic, earnestly yearning for all that home means to an Englishman. But he was a man who, because he was an artist to whom success and unbounded popularity had come when he was very young, was nervous, jumpy, sensitive, capricious, just the sort of man impossible as a husband to any woman who lacked the genius for loving and for understanding. John Forster bluntly regards Dickens' parting from his wife as a serious blot on his career. Mr. Chesterton, who is also nothing if not domestic, also rates him severely, and evidently regards the parting as largely his fault; but surely, with the very full knowledge that we have of Dickens and the partial and fairly definite knowledge that we have of Mrs. Dickens, their hopeless incompatibility is obvious, and it is evident that if they had gone on living together the man's life would have petered out in utter heart-break and premature sterility. Dickens wrote to Forster in 1856: