G. K. Chesterton

“ It is a trick to make a heroine, in the act of accepting a lover, suddenly aureoled by a chance burst of sunshine, and then to call it romance. But it is quite as much of a trick to make her, in the act of accepting a lover, drop her umbrella, or trip over a hassock, and then call it the bold plain realism of life. If any one wishes to satisfy himself as to how excessively little this technical realism has to do, I do not say with profound reality, but even with casual truth to life, let him make a simple experiment offered to him{2} by the history of literature. ”

“ If Dickens’s optimism had merely been a matter of happy endings, reconciliations, and orange flowers, it would be a mere superficial art or craft. But it would not, as in the case discussed above, be in any way more superficial than the pessimism of the modern episode, or short story, which is an affair of bad endings, disillusionments, and arsenic. The truth about life is that joy and sorrow are mingled in an almost rhythmical alternation like day and night. ”

“ London, however, was again to be the home of John Dickens—the mighty metropolis which, with its phantasmagoria of life in its every aspect, its human comedies and tragedies, ever attracted the great writer, whose magic pen revelled in the delineation of them. It was in 1823 that the Dickens family took up their residence in Bayham Street, Camden Town—then the poorest part of the London suburbs. ”

“ Beyond our greatest happiness there lie dangers, and after our greatest dangers there remaineth a rest.
But the element in Dickens which we are forced to call by the foolish and unmanageable word optimism is a very much deeper and more real matter than any question of plot and conclusion. If Mr. Pickwick had been drowned when he fell through the ice; if Mr. Dick Swiveller had never recovered from the fever, these catastrophes might have been artistically inappropriate, but they would not have sufficed to make the stories sad. ”

“ This was the beginning of a sad and bitter experience in the life of Charles Dickens. Here he seemed to fall into a solitary condition, apart from all other boys of his own age, and, recalling the circumstances in after years, he observed to Forster: “As I thought, in the little back-garret in Bayham Street, of all I had lost in losing Chatham, what would I have given, if I had had anything to give, to have been sent back to any other school, to have been taught something anywhere?” ”

“ The worst optimism is that which, in making things comfortable, prevents them from becoming joyful; it bears the same relation to an essential and true optimism that the pleasure of sitting in an arm-chair bears to the pleasure of sitting on a galloping horse. It is the optimism which denies that burning hurts a martyr. ”

“ THE BIRTHPLACE OF DICKENS: No. 387, COMMERCIAL ROAD, LANDPORT, PORTSEA
(From “Rambles in Dickens-Land,” by R. Allbut. Reproduced by kind permission of Messrs. S. T. Freemantle & Co.)
We can never understand a writer of the old romantic school, even if he is as great and splendid as Dickens is great and splendid, until we realise this preliminary fact to which I have drawn attention. The fact that these merely technical changes are merely technical, and have nothing whatever to do with the force and truth behind. ”

“ Caricature is not merely an important form of art; it is a form of art which is often most useful for purposes of profound philosophy and powerful symbolism. The age of scepticism put caricature into ephemeral feuilletons ”

“ The creation of Sam Weller, therefore, was the turning-point in Dickens’s fortune, and so great became the popularity of the book that the name of “Pickwick” was bestowed by enterprising tradesmen upon their newest goods, while portraits of Dickens himself were in the ascendant. People of every degree, young and old, revelled in the pages of the “Pickwick Papers”—judges on the bench as well as boys in the street ”

“ More profoundly considered, it may be called the optimism which, in order to give a being more life, denies him his individual life; in order to give him more pleasure, denies him his especial pleasure. It offers the hunter repose, and the student pleasure, and the poet an explanation. Dickens, as I have said, sometimes fell into this. Nothing could be more atrocious, for instance, than his course of action in concluding “David Copperfield” with an account of the great Micawber at last finding wealth and success as a mayor in Australia. Micawber would never succeed; never ought to succeed ”

“ It offers instead, another joy or peace which is alien and nauseous; it offers grass to the dog and fire to the fishes. It is, indeed, in the same tradition as that cruel and detestable kindness to animals, which has been one of the disgraces of humanity: from the modern lady who pulls a fat dog on a chain through a crowded highway, back to the Roman Cæsar who fed his horse on wine, and made it a political magistrate. ”

“ She is supposed to be very weak and ineffectual, but she has about a hundred times more personal character than all Dickens’s waxwork heroines put together, the unendurable Agnes by no means excluded. It almost passes comprehension how a man who could conceive such a character should so insult it, as Dickens does, in making Dora recommend her husband’s second marriage with Agnes. ”

“ The whole of optimistic technique consists in the dodge of breaking off the story at dawn, and the whole of pessimistic technique in the art of breaking off the story at dusk. But wherever and whenever mere artists choose to consider the matter ended, the matter is never ended, and trouble and exultation go on in a design larger than any of ours, neither vanishing at all. ”

“ CHARLES DICKENS
From a photo by Walter Dexter
THE CORN EXCHANGE, ROCHESTER HIGH STREET
Showing the “Moon-faced” Clock
CONSIDERED merely as literary fashions, romanticism and realism are both tricks, and tricks alone. The only advantage lies with romanticism, which is a little less artificial and technical than realism. For the great majority of people here and now do naturally write romanticism, as we see it in a love-letter, or a diary, or a quarrel, and nobody on earth naturally writes realism as we see it in a description by Flaubert. ”

“ It may seem at first sight a paradox to say that the special fault of optimism is a lack of faith in God: but so it is. There are some whom we should not seek to make comfortable: their appeasement is in more awful hands. There are conflicts, the reconciliation of which lies beyond the powers not only of human effort but of human rational conception. One of them is the{12} reconciliation between good and evil themselves in the scheme of nature; another is the reconciliation of Dora and Agnes. ”

“ The Bookman makes appeal to every one who is interested in current literature. It is not a dry-as-dust magazine for specialists. Every line and every picture it contains is of peculiar interest to the great and ever increasing public that delights in books. ”

“ Gad’s Hill Place was the novelist’s last residence, where he wrote “The Uncommercial Traveller,” “Great Expectations,” “Our Mutual Friend,” and “The Mystery of Edwin Drood.”
On this house Dickens had fixed his choice in his boyish days. It had always held a prominent place amid the recollections connected with his childhood. Forster wrote of Dickens that “upon first seeing it as he came from Chatham with his father, and looking up at it with admiration, he had been promised that he might live in it himself, or some such house, when he came to be a man, if he would only work hard enough.” ”

“ Squeers with the master of any particular school by his words, “Mr. Squeers is the representative of a class and not of an individual.” “‘The fact is it ain’t a Hall,’ observed Squeers, drily.... ‘We call it a hall up in London because it sounds better, but they don’t know it by that name in these parts. A man may call his house an island if he likes; there’s no Act of Parliament against that, I believe.’ ... The school was a long cold-looking house, one storey high, with a few straggling outbuildings behind and a barn and stable adjoining.”
Dickens’s Favourite Raven
see page 15 ”

“ It is but a sentiment after all, this idea of money,{9} and a poor man who is also a poet, like Micawber, may find a short end to it. To make such a man, after a million mental triumphs over material circumstances, become the mere pauper and dependent of material success, is something more than an artistic blunder: it is a moral lapse ”

“ What cheerful intellectuality is about the man’s eyes, and a large forehead! The mouth is too large and full, too eager and active, perhaps; the smile is very sweet and generous.”
Charles Dickens reading “The Chimes” to his friends at 58, Lincoln’s Inn Fields, Monday, the 2nd of Dec., 1844
see page 10
A portrait, reproduced from an engraving by C. H. Jeens after the original sketch by Daniel Maclise, R. A., which is now in the South Kensington Museum. ”

“ After a short residence in Bayham Street, the family removed their belongings to Gower Street North (the identical house was demolished a few years ago) , and an effort was made to bring grist to the mill by an attempt on the part of Mrs. Dickens to start a school for young ladies; but the venture proved abortive, notwithstanding the fact that Charles did his utmost to aid the project by leaving “at a great many doors, a great many circulars,” calling attention to the advantages of the establishment. ”

“ Chesterton’s many novel points of view to the earnest consideration of our readers. ‘The Defendant’ is a book that will be read with both pleasure and profit.”—Aberdeen Journal.
“His style is limpid and lucid.”—Sunday Sun.
“He is always on the side of the high-spirited, the Quixotic, and the things of the mind.”—Daily Chronicle.
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“Mr. Chesterton is one of the most brilliant of the younger journalists.”—Observer.
“At once marked by originality of thought and distinction of style.”—Sunday Times.
“G. K. Chesterton is a master of paradox.”—Dundee Advertiser. ”

“ Horace N. Pym, the editor of “Caroline Fox’s Journal.” Of this portrait Mr. F. G, Kitton writes in “Charles Dickens by Pen and Pencil”: “The artist has admirably succeeded in rendering with marvellous skill the fire and beauty of the eyes—the sensitiveness and mobility of the mouth.”
Charles Dickens in 1839. From the picture by Daniel Maclise, R.A.
see page 7
This painting was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1840, and is now in the National Portrait Gallery. ”

“ The birthplace in Landport—still existing is an unpretentious tenement of two storeys, surmounted by a dormer window, and fronted by a small railed-in garden. John Dickens, the father of Charles, had filled a clerical{20}
From a photo by Fradelle & Young
CHARLES DICKENS AT WORK
{21}
position in the Navy Pay Office, Somerset House, whence he was transferred to a similar post at Portsea. About four years after the birth of Charles (the second child) , the Dickens family removed to Chatham, residing there until the boy was eleven years old. ”