Thomas Seccombe

“ But the success of Castle Howard now caused him to entertain the rash project of building a theatre in the Haymarket, from his own design, for the acting of his own plays. The joyous courage with which, having persuaded thirty people in the fashionable world to aid him in finding the money, and Congreve to aid him in finding the plays, he began to build in perfect unconsciousness of the danger before him, is the only passage in his life which may be called pathetic, save of course his struggle with the “wicked woman of Marlborough.” ”

“ Pungent observation allied to a vigorous prose, emancipated to a rare degree from provincialism or archaism, were perhaps the first of Smollett's qualifications as a novelist. Such coherence as his novels have owes more to accidental accumulation than to constructive design. The wealth of amusing incident, the rapidly moving crowd of amusing and eccentric figures, atones for a good many defects. Smollett's peculiar coarseness and ferocity were gradually eliminated from English fiction, but from Tom Jones right down to Great Expectations his work was regularly ransacked for humour. ”

“ There is a touch of genius, too, in the naïf and imperturbable good nature and persistency (“Sir, I will not be baited with ’what’ and ‘why.’ ‘Why is a cow’s tail long?’ ‘Why is a fox’s tail bushy?’ ”) , and even in the abnegation of all personal dignity, with which Boswell pursued his hero. As he himself said of Goldsmith, “He had sagacity enough to cultivate assiduously the acquaintance of Johnson, and his faculties were gradually enlarged.” Character, the vital principle of the individual, is the ignis fatuus of the mechanical biographer. ”

“ His unique force in literature he was to owe to no supreme artistic or intellectual quality, but almost entirely to his inordinate gift of observation, his sympathy with the humble, his power over the emotions and his incomparable endowment of unalloyed human fun. To contemporaries he was not so much a man as an institution, at the very mention of whose name faces were puckered with grins or wreathed in smiles. ”

“ The fusion is necessarily very incomplete and the hotch-potch is bound to fall to pieces with time. Dickens’s plots, it must be admitted, are strangely unintelligible, the repetitions and stylistic decorations of his work exceed all bounds, the form is unmanageable and insignificant. The diffuseness of the English novel, in short, and its extravagant didacticism cannot fail to be most prejudicial to its perpetuation. In these circumstances there is very little fiction that will stand concentration and condensation so well as that of Dickens. ”

“ But it must be remembered that not only Vanbrugh’s plays but his own were to be acted there, and that, although Congreve was a man of great sagacity, no man, not even he who pretended to set his gentility above his genius, is sagacious when confronted by the surpassing excellence of his own poems and plays. ”

“ If he makes a tour in any part of the British Isles, he writes a full description of all he sees, of everything that happens, and writes it with such gusto, such mirth, such strokes of fine picturing, as appear in no other private letters ever given to the public. ”

“ The difficulty of dramatic description can only be realized, as Jowett well pointed out, by those who have attempted it, and it is not until we compare Boswell’s reports with those of less skilful hearers that we can appreciate the skill with which the essence of a conversation is extracted, and the whole scene indicated by a few telling touches. The result is that Johnson, not, it is true, in the early days of his poverty, total idleness and the pride of literature, but in the fulness of fame and competence of fortune from 1763 to 1784, is better known to us than any other man in history. ”

“ Voluminous as his work is, it is never dull. While making self-depreciation a fine art, and perpetually laughing in his sleeve at the literary bias and the literary foible, he fulfilled with exceptional conscience the literary duty of never writing below his best. ”

“ But all these resources combined proved unequal to his powers as an original observer of popular types, until he reinforced himself by autobiographic reminiscence, as in David Copperfield and Great Expectations, the two great books remaining to his later career.
After these two masterpieces and the three wonderful books with which he made his début, we are inclined to rank Chuzzlewit. Nothing in Dickens is more admirably seen and presented than Todgers’s, a bit of London particular cut out with a knife. ”

“ He looked upon himself in later years as a man of Kent, and his capital abode as that in Ordnance Terrace, or 18 St Mary’s Place, Chatham, amid surroundings classified in Mr Pickwick’s notes as “appearing” to be soldiers, sailors, Jews, chalk, shrimps, officers and dockyard men. He fell into a family the general tendency of which was to go down in the world, during one of its easier periods (John Dickens was now fifth clerk on £250 a year) , and he always regarded himself as belonging by right to a comfortable, genteel, lower middle-class stratum of society. ”

“ As regards formal excellence it is plain that Dickens labours under the double disadvantage of writing in the least disciplined of all literary genres in the most lawless literary milieu of the modern world, that of Victorian England. ”

“ Dickens had no artistic ideals worth speaking about. The sympathy of his readers was the one thing he cared about and, like Cobbett, he went straight for it through the avenue of the emotions. In personality, intensity and range of creative genius he can hardly be said to have any modern rival. ”

“ Thus was commenced The Old Curiosity Shop, which was continued with slight interruptions, and followed by Barnaby Rudge. For the first time we find Dickens obsessed by a highly complicated plot. The tonality achieved in The Old Curiosity Shop surpassed anything he had attempted in this difficult vein, while the rich humour of Dick Swiveller and the Marchioness, and the vivid portraiture of the wandering Bohemians, attain the very highest level of Dickensian drollery ”

“ Hence the adjectives corrosive and splenetic so often applied to a nature essentially both generous and tender. After Fielding, Smollett counts as the greatest purveyor of comic prose-epic of contemporary life to his generation, if not to his century. Scott and Dickens regarded him as fully Fielding's equal. Hazlitt and Thackeray thought otherwise. Equally rationalist and pagan with Fielding, Smollett is more of a pedagogue and less of the instinctive scholar and wit than his predecessor. ”

“ Trunnion's grotesque ride to church reappears in John Gilpin; the misanthrope, practising satire under cover of feigned deafness, reappears in the Mungo Malagrowther of Scott, who frankly admits further debts to Smollett in the preface to the Legend of Montrose. The "garrison" unquestionably suggested the "castle" of Tristram Shandy and the "fortress" of Mr Wemmick. Indeed it is no exaggeration to say that the tideway of subsequent fiction is strewn on every hand with the disjecta membra of Smollett's happy phrases and farcical inventions. ”

“ It is probably impossible to depict the schoolboy in his natural state and in a realistic manner; it is extremely difficult to portray him at all in such a way as to interest the adult. Yet this last has certainly been achieved twice in English literature—by Dickens in Nicholas Nickleby, and by Hughes in Tom Brown. In both cases interest is concentrated upon the master, in the first a demon, in the second a demigod. Tom Brown did a great deal to fix the English concept of what a public school should be. ”

“ It should also help us to make the necessary allowances for the man. Dickens, even the Dickens of legend that we know, is far from perfect. The Dickens of reality to which Time may furnish a nearer approximation is far less perfect. But when we consider the corroding influence of adulation, and the intoxication of unbridled success, we cannot but wonder at the relatively high level of moderation and self-control that Dickens almost invariably observed. ”

“ During a trial that lasted over one hundred days the claimant exhibited an ignorance, a cunning and a bulldog tenacity in brazening out the discrepancies and absurdities of his depositions, which have probably never been surpassed in the history of crime. Over one hundred persons swore to the claimant’s identity, the majority of them—and they were drawn from every class—being evidently sincere in their belief in his cause. ”

“ It is here that his true genius lies, even more than in his talent for conviviality and fun, which makes an early copy of an early Lever (with Phiz’s illustrations) seem literally to exhale an atmosphere of past and present entertainment. It is here that he is a true romancist, not for boys only, but also for men.
Lever’s lack of artistry and of sympathy with the deeper traits of the Irish character have been stumbling-blocks to his reputation among the critics. ”

“ Nothing therefore, in the whole range of Dickens surpassed the early chapters of Great Expectations in perfection of technique or in mastery of all the resources of the novelist’s art. To have created Abel Magwitch alone is to be a god indeed, says Mr Swinburne, among the creators of deathless men. Pumblechook is actually better and droller and truer to imaginative life than Pecksniff ”

“ Yet thorough as the scheme was from the outset, and admirable as was the devotedness of the biographer, Boswell was far too volatile a man to confine himself to any one ambition in life that was not consistent with a large amount of present fame and notoriety. ”

“ Suddenly in the Fleet Prison a deeper note is struck. The medley of human relationships, the loneliness, the mystery and sadness of human destinies are fathomed. The tragedy of human life is revealed to us amid its most farcical elements. ”

“ For these reasons among others our interest in Dickens’s novels as integers has diminished and is diminishing. But, on the other hand, our interest and pride in him as a man and as a representative author of his age and nation has been steadily augmented and is still mounting. ”

“ But Smollett owed less to these models than to his studies in Cervantes, Swift, Defoe and above all Le Sage. His hero, who gives his first novel its capital name, Roderick Random, recounts like Gil Bias a life of varied adventure in the company of a servant, in which he enters the service of a physician and meets with old schoolfellows, thieves, notes of the bank of engraving, prison, semi-starvation and in the end an unexpected fortune. The author draws on his adventures on the English highway and in the cockpit of a king's ship. ”

“ The theatre was opened to the public with an Italian opera, which was followed by three of Molière’s comedies, and these by the Confederacy, Vanbrugh’s masterpiece on the whole, though perhaps its finest scenes are not equal to the finest scenes in The Relapse.
Vanbrugh at last withdrew from the disastrous speculation; Congreve had already withdrawn. But a man to whom Fortune had been so kind as she had been to Vanbrugh could hardly be depressed by any of her passing frowns. Queen Anne at once sent him abroad on an important state errand, and afterwards he was commissioned to build Blenheim. ”

“ The baronetcy and estates passed in 1862 to Roger’s younger brother, Sir Alfred Joseph Doughty-Tichborne, who died in 1866. The only person unconvinced of Roger’s death was his mother the dowager Lady Tichborne, from whom every tramp-sailor found a welcome at Tichborne Park. She advertised largely and injudiciously for the wanderer, and in November 1865 she learnt, through an agency in Sydney, that a man “answering to the description of her son” had been found in the guise of a small butcher at Wagga Wagga, in Queensland. ”

“ In Barnaby Rudge he was manifestly affected by the influence of Scott, whose achievements he always regarded with a touching veneration. The plot, again, is of the utmost complexity, and Edgar Allan Poe (who predicted the conclusion) must be one of the few persons who ever really mastered it. But few of Dickens’s books are written in a more admirable style. ”

“ Before November 1837 had ended, Charles Dickens entered on an engagement to write a successor to Pickwick on similar lines of publication. Oliver Twist was then in mid-career; a Life of Grimaldi and Barnaby Rudge were already covenanted for. Dickens forged ahead with the new tale of Nicholas Nickleby and was justified by the results, for its sale far surpassed even that of Pickwick. As a conception it is one of his weakest. An unmistakably 18th-century character pervades it. ”

“ The work of Dickens was a prize for which publishers naturally contended both before and after his death. The first collective edition of his works was begun in April 1847, and their number is now very great. The most complete is still that of Messrs Chapman & Hall, the original publishers of Pickwick; others of special interest are the Harrap edition, originally edited by F. G. Kitton; Macmillan’s edition with original illustrations and introduction by Charles Dickens the younger; and the edition in the World’s Classics with introductions by G. K. Chesterton. ”

“ Falstaff is alone in the literature of the world; but if ever there came a later Falstaff, Monsoon was the man. As for Baby Blake, is she not an Irish Di Vernon? The critics may praise Lever’s thoughtful and careful later novels as they will, but Charles O’Malley will always be the pattern of a military romance. ”

“ A useful abridgment was carried out in 1903 by the novelist George Gissing. Gissing also wrote Charles Dickens: A Critical Study (1898) , which ranks with G. K. Chesterton’s Charles Dickens (1906) as a commentary inspired by deep insight and adorned by great literary talent upon the genius of the master-novelist. The names of other lives, sketches, articles and estimates of Dickens and his works would occupy a large volume in the mere enumeration. See R. H. Shepherd, The Bibliography of Dickens (1880) ; James Cooke’s Bibliography of the Writings of Charles Dickens (1879) ”