Dickenson

“ Presently he had alighted from his taxicab and was standing on the south side of Washington square with Dickenson, watching the house into which Dickenson said the girl had disappeared. As they stood there a man alighted from a limousine and walked rapidly across the sidewalk and up the stoop of the house. ”

“ White man great deal of money—read book—know all tat be good. We see—we see. I wait long—O here he come!
Enter Dickenson.
Well, friend, what say your massa to my massa?
DICKENSON.
⁠He has nothing to say to him at all. He is very angry with your massa.
SANCHO.
⁠Very angry! Ay, my massa be poor, and every body be angry wit him.—Your massa not angry, your massa very fond of him when he shake a te dice, and take all te money from him. Te tevil will shake him over te great fire for tat.—You tell him, he be in prison; he be cold; he be hungry? ”

“ Dickon's nerve sank into his shoes.
"A boar that I have slain, good father," he answered in a mumbling whimper, "and lack fire wherewith to roast it; and the raw flesh is ill food, and he can eat naught of it, and gets no warmth, and must die if I win not a fire."
At this the monk softened. He led Dickon into the outer porch, and gleaned the purport of his story. Only Dickon said nothing of the book or of the two men he had killed.
"Fire thou shalt have," the young monk said, more kindly, when Dickon's tale was finished. ”

“ The sources of Dickens's popularity in England were in truth multiplied many-fold in America. The hearty, cordial, and humane side of his genius had fascinated them quite as much; but there was also something beyond this. The cheerful temper that had given new beauty to the commonest forms of life, the abounding humor which had added largely to all innocent enjoyment, the honorable and in those days rare distinction of America which left no home in the Union inaccessible to such advantages, had made Dickens the object everywhere of grateful admiration, for the most part of personal affection. ”

“ Since Dickens’s time, however, we have had almost too much literary odour.
I do not agree with the purists who deny to Dickens the glory of a great writer of English prose. Dickens was an impressionist, perhaps the first and certainly the greatest of this school, and as such he was a master. Few equal and none surpass him in the rare vigour of scene, and portrait-painting. And it is significant to find him using the aroma of the place and also of the person to impart life and reality to his description. ”

“ Nor did I think it best, as the Great Head had suggested, to thrust myself and my curiosity upon Miss Dickens, the lives of distinguished descendants of distinguished people being too often made miserable by the Paul Prys of this earth. What mattered it, anyway, when the grime and soot and stain of the years are still to be seen both on the rounded nose of the old building in which her grandfather had corrected his proofs and on the measly row of houses on which Dickens looked and in one of which she herself—God bless her!—is to-day earning her living. ”

“ Never has captive released made a more eager or a better use of his recovered freedom. Before the summer had fairly set in Dickens had let his house, and was travelling with his family up the Rhine towards Switzerland. This was, I think, Dickens’s only passage through Germany, which in language and literature remained a terra incognita to him, while in various ways so well known to his friendly rivals, Lord Lytton and Thackeray. ”

“ Charles Dickens was a loyal champion of all boys, and underlying his pen pictures of them was an earnest desire to remedy evils which he had found existing in London and its suburbs. Poor Jo, who was always being "moved on," David Copperfield, whose early life was a picture of Dickens' own childhood, workhouse-reared Oliver, and the miserable wretches at Dotheboy Hall were no mere creations of an author's vivid imagination. ”

“ Two or three times a week, walking, black bag in hand, from Charing Cross Station to the office of All the Year Round in Wellington Street, came the good, the only Dickens! From that good genie the poor straggler from Fairyland got solid help and sympathy. Few can realise now what Dickens was then to London. His humour filled its literature like broad sunlight; the Gospel of Plum-pudding warmed every poor devil in Bohemia. ”

“ For more than a month from the time of this entry Dickens was carrying the triumph of his readings into other cities than Boston. There he had left a faithful champion in the person of Mrs. Fields, who wrote in her diary on January 26, 1868: “It is odd how prejudiced people have allowed themselves to become about Dickens. I seldom make a call where his name is introduced that I do not feel the injustice done to him personally, as if mankind resented the fact that he had excited more love than most men.” ”

“ Dickon was but a child in villany to him; Dickon was wilful and violent, but he was not base and false; Dickon might be a rebel, but he was never a traitor. Cast him out, Brown, cast him out; for the blood of my husband is upon him; and I will not dwell in the same tents with him. He cannot deny it; his face speaks it; his tale is not even like truth. Oh, my heart misgave me when he used so many vows and protestations last night that he would not have Pharold put in danger for the world. Truth is more simple ”

“ Dickens allows nothing to escape his attention and gives “one small corner of the white of one eye” to his household concerns, though he seems not to observe. [140] His daughter Mary has the governance of the servants, Miss Hogarth of the cellar and provisions. There is a system in everything with which he has to do. When he gives a reading, he is present in the hall at half-past six, although the reading does not begin until eight; for Dickens cannot go about as other people do, he must go when the people do not press upon him. ”

“ Naturally, Dickens puts more emphasis upon the contrast between his characters than upon the contrast within them. The internal inconsistencies and struggles, the slow processes of growth and change which are the delight of the psychological novelist do not especially interest him. He sees things black or white, not gray. The objects that attract him most, and on which he lavishes his art, do not belong to the average, but to the extraordinary. Dickens is not a commonplace merchant. ”

“ The rare versatility of an author who can transfer to paper his impressions of atmosphere as well in charcoal sketch as in charmingly told description has made this book an inspiration to the lover of Dickens and to the lover of London. The dusty old haunts of dusty old people, hid forever but for Dickens, are visited again and found little changed. Where modern things have crept in they are noticed with quick observation, keen humor, and that sympathy with the human which the author shares with the great Dickens himself. ”

“ It is probable, again, that the theory of Dickens the caricaturist has been pushed much too far; that a great deal that seems strange, uncouth, impossible to us, is faithful representation enough—only the society that Dickens knew has passed away and the fashion of it, and we, who may be well-instructed as to the social life of Athens 400 B.C, or of mediæval Paris in the fourteenth century, are so ignorant of the petite bourgeoisie of eighty years ago in England that its manners and customs seem to us the odd inventions of a whimsical and fantastic writer. ”

“ You must think me insane, I fancy, to say such a thing, and I must confess that you might guess every mortal and immortal thing under the sun, but you would never guess how this most frightful occurrence took place.
“Those who have read Charles Dickens’s ‘Life,’ by Mr. Forster, will know that he is the ‘great man’ who had lived at Tavistock House for twelve [ten] years. People from all parts of the world have come to look at the house Charles Dickens lived in, and see the interior of the house, a request which I have frequently complied with.” ”

“ Even German professors, I suppose, have the will to live. But Dickens had exactly what German professors have not: he had the power to live. And indeed it is most valuable to have these early specimens of the Dickens work if only because they are specimens of his spirit apart from his matured intelligence. It is well to be able to realise that contact with the Dickens world is almost like a physical contact; it is like stepping suddenly into the hot smells of a greenhouse, or into the bleak smell of the sea. ”

“ They are necessarily of varying merit, but amongst them are some which deserve a permanent place in our lighter literature. Such are the description of the church-yards on a quiet evening in The City of the Absent, the grotesque picture of loneliness in Chambers—a favourite theme with Dickens—and the admirable papers on Shy Neighbourhoods and on Tramps. Others have a biographical interest, though delightfully objective in treatment; yet others are mere fugitive pieces; but there are few without some of the most attractive qualities of Dickens’s easiest style. ”

“ Nor are signs entirely wanting that, as the years went by, the mind of Dickens himself was haunted by some such suspicion. A quarter of a century later, he visited the United States a second time; and speaking at a public dinner given in his honour by the journalists of New York, he took occasion to comment on the enormous strides which the country had made in the interval, and then said, "Nor am I, believe me, so arrogant as to suppose that in five and twenty years there have been no changes in me, and that I had nothing to learn, and no extreme impressions to correct when I was here first." ”

“ Dinmont, the Border farmer, and Pleydell, the Edinburgh advocate, and Meg Merrilies, the gipsy. The book's life is in its flesh and blood, not in its plot. And the same is true of Dickens' novels. He crowds them so full of human creatures, each with its own individuality and character, that we have no care for more than just as much story as may serve to show them struggling, joying, sorrowing, loving. ”

“ To have stirred this pure and natural humanity, this force of sympathy, in such countless millions is a great triumph. Men and women to-day do not want any criticism of Charles Dickens, any talk about him at all. They enjoy him as he is: they examine one another in his books: they gossip on by the hour about his innumerable characters, his never-to-be-forgotten waggeries and fancies.
No account of early Victorian literature can omit the name of Charles Dickens from the famous writers of the time. ”

“ Meanwhile, a few readings for a charitable purpose in Paris, and a short summer course at St. James’s Hall, completed this second series in the year 1863.
Whatever passing thoughts overwork by day or sleeplessness at night may have occasionally brought with them, Dickens himself would have been strangely surprised, as no doubt would have been the great body of a public to which he was by this time about the best known man in England, had he been warned that weakness and weariness were not to be avoided even by a nature endowed with faculties so splendid and with an energy so conquering as his. ”

“ What the Lake District is to Wordsworthians, Melrose to lovers of Scott, and Ayr to Burns, Rochester and its neighbourhood is to Dickens enthusiasts throughout the English-speaking world.
The very subtlety of the spell in the former cases holds aloof many an average mortal who grasps at once the home thrusts, the lightly veiled satire, the poor human foibles, fads, and weaknesses in the characters of Dickens. The ordinary soul, in whom the "meanest flower that grows" produces no tears, may possibly be conscious of a lump in his throat as he reads of the death of Jo or Little Nell. ”

“ During one of these walks, he fell in with a man driving a cart loaded with manure, and had a long chat with him, the sort of thing he frequently did (said our informant) in order to become acquainted with the brogue and feelings of the working people. When Dickens went on his way, one of the man's fellow-labourers said to him, "Do you know that that was Charles Dickens who spoke to you?" ”

“ At the close of a letter addressed by Dickens to his friend John Forster, but not to be found in the English editions of the Life, the writer adds to his praises of the biography of Goldsmith these memorable words: “I desire no better for my fame, when my personal dustiness shall be past the control of my love of order, than such a biographer and such a critic.” Dickens was a man of few close friendships—“his breast,” he said, “would not hold many people”—but, of these friendships, that with Forster was one of the earliest, as it was one of the most enduring. ”

“ On September 12, 1857, Dickens announced that he and his companion were on their way to Doncaster, en route for London. Breaking the journey at Lancaster, they stopped at another delightful hostelry, the King’s Arms in Market Street. “We are in a very remarkable old house here,” wrote Dickens to his sister-in-law, “with genuine old rooms and an uncommonly quaint staircase. I have a state bedroom, with two enormous red four-posters in it, each 150 as big as Charley’s room at Gad’s Hill.” ”

“ When we consider Dickens's life and work, in comparison with that of the two great poets we have been studying, the contrast is startling. While Tennyson and Browning were being educated for the life of literature, and shielded most tenderly from the hardships of the world, Dickens, a poor, obscure, and suffering child, was helping to support a shiftless family by pasting labels on blacking bottles, sleeping under a counter like a homeless cat, and once a week timidly approaching the big prison where his father was confined for debt. ”