Pecksniff and Mrs Gamp, Betsy Prig and “Mrs Harris” have passed into the national language and life. The coach journey, the windy autumn night, the stealthy trail of Jonas, the undertone of tragedy in the Charity and Mercy and Chuffey episodes suggest a blending of imaginative vision and physical penetration hardly seen elsewhere. Two things are specially notable about this novel—the exceptional care taken over it (as shown by the interlineations in the MS.) and the caprice or nonchalance of the purchasing public, its sales being far lower than those of any of its monthly predecessors.
At the close of 1843, to pay outstanding debts of his now lavish housekeeping, he wrote that pioneer of Christmas numbers, that national benefit as Thackeray called it, A Christmas Carol. It failed to realize his pecuniary anticipations, and Dickens resolved upon a drastic policy of retrenchment and reform. He would save expense by living abroad and would punish his publishers by withdrawing his custom from them, at least for a time. Like everything else upon which he ever determined, this resolution was carried out with the greatest possible precision and despatch. In June 1844 he set out for Marseilles with his now rapidly increasing family (the journey cost him £200). In a villa on the outskirts of Genoa he wrote The Chimes, which, during a brief excursion to London before Christmas, he read to a select circle of friends (the germ of his subsequent lecture-audiences), including Forster, Carlyle, Stanfield, Dyce, Maclise and Jerrold. He was again in London in 1845, enjoying his favourite diversion of private theatricals; and in January 1846 he experimented briefly as the editor of a London morning paper—the Daily News. By early spring he was back at Lausanne, writing his customary vivid letters to his friends, craving as usual for London streets, commencing Dombey and Son, and walking his fourteen miles daily. The success of Dombey and Son completely rehabilitated the master’s finances, enabled him to return to England, send his son to Eton and to begin to save money. Artistically it is less satisfactory; it contains some of Dickens’s prime curios, such as Cuttle, Bunsby, Toots, Blimber, Pipchin, Mrs MacStinger and young Biler; it contains also that masterpiece of sentimentality which trembles upon the borderland of the sublime and the ridiculous, the death of Paul Dombey (“that sweet Paul,” as Jeffrey, the “critic laureate,” called him), and some grievous and unquestionable blemishes. As a narrative, moreover, it tails off into a highly complicated and exacting plot. It was followed by a long rest at Broadstairs before Dickens returned to the native home of his genius, and early in 1849 “began to prepare for David Copperfield.”
“Of all my books,” Dickens wrote, “I like this the best; like many fond parents I have my favourite child, and his name is David Copperfield.” In some respects it stands to Dickens in something of the same relation in which the contemporary Pendennis stands to Thackeray. As in that book, too, the earlier portions are the best. They gained in intensity by the autobiographical form into which they are thrown; as Thackeray observed, there was no writing against such power. The tragedy of Emily and the character of Rosa Dartle are stagey and unreal; Uriah Heep is bad art; Agnes, again, is far less convincing as a consolation than Dickens would have us believe; but these are more than compensated by the wonderful realization of early boyhood in the book, by the picture of Mr Creakle’s school, the Peggottys, the inimitable Mr Micawber, Betsy Trotwood and that monument of selfish misery, Mrs Gummidge.
At the end of March 1850 commenced the new twopenny weekly called Household Words, which Dickens planned to form a direct means of communication between himself and his readers, and as a means of collecting around him and encouraging the talents of the younger generation. No one was better qualified than he for this work, whether we consider his complete freedom from literary jealousy or his magical gift of inspiring young authors. Following the somewhat dreary and incoherent Bleak House of 1852, Hard Times (1854)—an anti-Manchester School tract, which Ruskin regarded as Dickens’s best work—was the first long story written for Household Words. About this time Dickens made his final home at Gad’s Hill, near Rochester, and put the finishing touch to another long novel published upon the old plan, Little Dorrit (1855–1857). In spite of the exquisite comedy of the master of the Marshalsea and the final tragedy of the central figure, Little Dorrit is sadly deficient in the old vitality, the humour is often a mock reality, and the repetition of comic catch-words and overstrung similes and metaphors is such as to affect the reader with nervous irritation. The plot and characters ruin each other in this amorphous production. The The Tale of Two Cities, commenced in All the Year Round (the successor of Household Words) in 1859, is much better: the main characters are powerful, the story genuinely tragic, and the atmosphere lurid; but enormous labour was everywhere expended upon the construction of stylistic ornament.
The Tale of Two Cities was followed by two finer efforts at atmospheric delineation, the best things he ever did of this kind: Great Expectations (1861), over which there broods the mournful impression of the foggy marshes of the Lower Thames; and Our Mutual Friend (1864–1865), in which the ooze and mud and slime of Rotherhithe, its boatmen and loafers, are made to pervade the whole book with cumulative effect. The general effect produced by the stories is, however, very different. In the first case, the foreground was supplied by autobiographical material of the most vivid interest, and the lucidity of the creative impulse impelled him to write upon this occasion with the old simplicity, though with an added power. 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; Joe Gargery is worthy to have been praised and loved at once by Fielding and by Sterne: Mr Jaggers and his clients, Mr Wemmick and his parent and his bride, are such figures as Shakespeare, when dropping out of poetry, might have created, if his lot had been cast in a later century. “Can as much be said,” Mr Swinburne boldly asks, “for the creatures of any other man or god?”
In November 1867 Dickens made a second expedition to America, leaving all the writing that he was ever to complete behind him. He was to make a round sum of money, enough to free him from all embarrassments, by a long series of exhausting readings, commencing at the Tremont Temple, Boston, on the 2nd of December. The strain of Dickens’s ordinary life was so tense and so continuous that it is, perhaps, rash to assume that he broke down eventually under this particular stress; for other reasons, however, his persistence in these readings, subsequent to his return, was strongly deprecated by his literary friends, led by the arbitrary and relentless Forster. It is a long testimony to Dickens’s self-restraint, even in his most capricious and despotic moments, that he never broke the cord of obligation which bound him to his literary mentor, though sparring matches between them were latterly of frequent occurrence. His farewell reading was given on the 15th of March 1870, at St James’s Hall. He then vanished from “those garish lights,” as he called them, “for evermore.” Of the three brief months that remained to him, his last book, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, was the chief occupation. It hardly promised to become a masterpiece (Longfellow’s opinion) as did Thackeray’s Denis Duval, but contained much fine descriptive technique, grouped round a scene of which Dickens had an unrivalled sympathetic knowledge.
In March and April 1870 Dickens, as was his wont, was mixing in the best society; he dined with the prince at Lord Houghton’s and was twice at court, once at a long deferred private interview with the queen, who had given him a presentation copy of her Leaves from a Journal of our Life in the Highlands with the inscription “From one of the humblest of authors to one of the greatest”; and who now begged him on his persistent refusal of any other title to accept the nominal distinction of a privy councillor. He took for four months the Milner Gibsons’ house at 5 Hyde Park Place, opposite the Marble Arch, where he gave a brilliant reception on the 7th of April. His last public appearance was made at the Royal Academy banquet early in May.
