The Times Great Victorian Lives. Ian Brunskill

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СКАЧАТЬ enjoyed an extensive sale. The following year Mr. Dickens undertook the production of a collection of stories in weekly numbers. The series was entitled Master Humphrey’s Clock, and it contained, among other tales, those since republished under the names of The Old Curiosity Shop – famous for its touching episode of ‘Little Nell,’ – and of Barnaby Rudge, which carries the reader back to the days of the Gordon Riots.

      The pen of Mr. Charles Dickens was henceforth almost incessantly at work. About the time of the publication of Master Humphrey’s Clock appeared his Memoirs of Joseph Grimaldi, the celebrated Clown, almost his only production which deals with the plain prose of facts, and with everyday life divested of all imagination. Though much interest attaches to the work, we shall not be suspected of any intention of depreciating the author’s reputation when we say that his imaginative powers rank far higher than his skill as a biographer. In fact, while Pickwick and Nickleby live, Grimaldi is forgotten. After completing Master Humphrey’s Clock Mr. Dickens visited America, where he was received with extraordinary honours. On his return, in 1842, he published the materials which he had collected in the United States under the title ‘American Notes for General Circulation.’ Many of its statements, however, were controverted by American pens in a book entitled Change for American Notes.

      In 1844 he published Martin Chuzzlewit in numbers, like Pickwick and Nicholas Nickleby, and in the summer of the same year visited Italy and Rome. An account of much that he saw and heard in this tour he gave afterwards to the world in the columns of the Daily News, of which he became the first editor. Its first number appeared on January 1, 1846; but after a few months Mr. Dickens withdrew from the editorship, and returned to his former line of humorous serial publications, varying, however, their monthly appearances with occasional stories of a more strictly imaginative cast, called ‘Christmas Books.’ Of these the first, A Christmas Carol, was published so far back as 1843; the second, the Chimes, appeared at Christmas, 1845; the third, the Cricket on the Hearth, followed in 1846; the fourth, the Battle of Life in 1847; and the fifth, the Haunted Man and the Ghost’s Bargain, in 1848.

      Besides these Mr. Dickens has published Dealings with the Firm of Dombey and Son, the History of David Copperfield, Bleak House, Little Dorrit, A Tale of Two Cities, Our Mutual Friend, the Uncommercial Traveller, Great Expectations, and last of all the Mystery of Edwin Drood, of which only three numbers have appeared. In 1850 Mr. Dickens projected a cheap weekly periodical which he called Household Words, and which was published by Messrs. Bradbury and Evans;but, difficulties having arisen between author and publisher, it was discontinued in 1859, and Mr. Dickens commenced in its stead its successor, All the Year Round, which he continued to conduct to the last.

      Mr. Dickens was one of the founders of the Guild of Literature, and was an ardent advocate of reforms in the administration of the Literary Fund. He was also an accomplished amateur performer, and often took part in private theatricals for charitable objects. Of late years he had frequently appeared before the public as a ‘reader’ of the most popular portions of his own works, of which he showed himself to be a most vivid and dramatic interpreter. He retired from this work only in March last, when his reputation stood at its highest. His renderings of his best creations, both humorous and pathetic, of his most stirring scenes and warmest pictures of life, will not readily be forgotten. Men and women, persons and places, we knew all before in the brilliant pages of his novels; but the characters lived with a new life, and the scenes took the shape of reality in the readings of the master. America had an opportunity of appreciating his powers in this direction on the second visit he paid to that country in 1868. That is all over now; but Mr. Dickens, in bidding his last audience farewell, consoled them with the promise that his retirement would be devoted all the more to his original and higher art. His words have scarcely had time to allow of their fulfilment in the way and in the degree in which, doubtless, he hoped to be able to fulfil them. It may be well here to place on record his parting speech on the occasion of his last reading at St. James’s-hall:-

      ‘Ladies and Gentlemen, – It would be worse than idle, it would he hypocritical and unfeeling, if I were to disguise that I close this episode in my life with feelings of very considerable pain. For some 15 years, in this hall and in many kindred places, I have had the honour of presenting my own cherished ideas before you for your recognition; and, in closely observing your reception of them, have enjoyed an amount of artistic delight and enjoyment which, perhaps, it is given to few men to know. In this task, and in every other I have ever undertaken as a faithful servant of the public, always imbued with a sense of duty to them, and always striving to do his best, I have been uniformly cheered by the readiest response, the most generous sympathy, and the most stimulating support. Nevertheless, I have thought it well at the full floodtide of your favour to retire upon those older associations between us which date from much further back than these, and henceforth to devote myself exclusively to the art that first brought us together. Ladies and gentlemen, in but two short weeks from this time I hope that you may enter, in your own homes, on a new series of readings at which my assistance will be indispensable, but from these garish lights I vanish now for evermore, with one heartfelt, grateful, respectful, and affectionate farewell.’

      While Pickwick charms us with its broad humour, it is in Nicholas Nickleby and Oliver Twist that the power of Charles Dickens’s pathos shows itself. In those two works he evinced a sympathy for the poor, the suffering, and the oppressed which took all hearts by storm. This power of sympathy it was, no doubt, which has made his name a household word in English homes. How many a phase of cruelty and wrong his pen exposed, and how often he stirred others to try at least to lessen the amount of evil and of suffering which must be ever abroad in the world, will never be fully known. There was always a lesson beneath his mirth.

      It only remains for us to add that he married in 1838 a daughter of the late Mr. George Hogarth, a musical writer of some eminence in his day, and a man of high literary attainments – who was formerly the friend and law agent of Sir Walter Scott, and well known in private life to Jeffrey Cockburn, and the other literary celebrities who adorned the society of Edinburgh some 40 or 50 years ago.

      The relatively scant information about Dickens’s early life which was available to the general public during the novelist’s lifetime seems to have been scrupulously edited by Dickens himself. This obituary therefore makes no mention of his father’s shameful financial embarrassments and confinement in the Marshalsea Prison, of Dickens’s fragmented education and, above all, of his acute misery when he was employed as a twelve-year-old drudge at Warren’s Blacking. These facts were not exposed until Dickens’s friend John Forster published them in the first volume of his Life of Charles Dickens in 1872. Detailed revelations about the break-up of the novelist’s marriage to Catherine Hogarth and his subsequent intense relationship with the young actress Ellen Ternan were not made until the second third of the twentieth century. Dickens had given his last Public Reading at St. James’s Hall in Piccadilly on 15 March 1870 to the largest audience ever assembled there. Hundreds more had been turned away at the doors. The hall was demolished in 1905.

       GENERAL ROBERT E. LEE

       American soldier: ‘one of the noblest soldiers who have ever drawn a sword in a cause which they believed just.’

      12 OCTOBER 1870

      EVEN AMID THE turmoil of the great European struggle the intelligence from America announcing that General Robert E. Lee is dead will be received with deep sorrow by many in this country, as well as by his followers and fellow-soldiers in America. It is but a few years since Robert Lee ranked among the great men of the present time. He was the able soldier of the Southern Confederacy, the bulwark of her northern frontier, the obstacle to the advance of the Federal armies and the leader who twice threatened by the capture of Washington to СКАЧАТЬ