these readings was enormous from every point of view. Mr Forster mentions that he remitted from America £10,000 odd as the result of 34 readings.
That Dickens should so long have abstained from appearing as a public reader of his own works, and standing face to face with his audience to enjoy the delight of their effect, notwithstanding his strong desire to do so, is a significant fact. It gives a sort of measure of two things,—the force of his craving for sympathy and applause, and the extent of his patience under conventional prejudices. It was from deference to these prejudices that he abstained; and it required an almost fierce, effort on his part to dismiss those prejudices as "humbug," and "the proprieties of old women." His attitude towards society, in the narrow sense of the word, was always peculiar. To understand it, we must bear in mind the circumstances of his youth. He seems never to have quite lost a lurking fear that those circumstances exposed him to contempt. He was much too proud and great-hearted a man to give in to such a fear; but it clung to him, and was always demanding a certain struggle to keep it down. Slight as the struggle was, the traces of it are perceptible in his work. We have an evidence of it in the common saying that he never succeeded in painting "a gentleman." That is not to be got over by calling for a definition of the word; it is a popular expression of a fact, the fact that nearly all the personages in his novels occupying a position in life to which that word would have been applied in his own time are painted in unfavourable colours. Perhaps the course of his stories did not call upon him to paint more favourable specimens of that class; still the fact remains that in Dickens's attitude towards society there was something of the defensive, even of the aggressive. He faced towards society with a certain air of defiance, with the consciousness of a vast popular multitude behind him, to which he could appeal if they refused him what was his due. He never claimed more than, his due, and it was never refused to him. It is perhaps for this reason that the traces of his spirit of revolt against society are so slight as to be more matter of inference than of observation. It is more correct to say that he never tried to paint "a gentleman," than that he did not succeed. The question can hardly be raised without giving it undue importance, an importance which Dickens himself would have been the first to make light of; for, though he had his full share of the little vanities inseparable from humanity, he was a great man in temper as well as in genius, and littlenesses were of the accidents and not of the essence of his nature.
Dickens's want of perfect sympathy with the cultured society of his time incapacitated him for that kind of novel which answers to comedy in dramatic composition, although it left him free for work of a greater and more enduring kind. What may be called the comedy novel, the novel of Thackeray in Dickens's generation, is much less sure of enduring fame, because the sentiments on which it rests, being the product of a particular knot of circumstances, are more fugitive, and pass sooner into the province of the historian. The novels of Dickens will live longer because they take hold of the permanent and universal sentiments of the race,—sentiments which pervade all classes, and which no culture can ever eradicate. His fun may be too boisterous for the refined tastes of his own time, or, for the matter of that, of posterity; his pathos may appear maudlin; but they carried everything before them when they first burst upon our literature, because, however much exaggerated, they were exaggerations of what our race feels in its inner heart; and unless culture in the future works a miracle, and carries its changes beneath the surface, we may be certain that Dickens will keep his hold.
If Dickens had been asked why his novels were likely to live, he would probably have answered that it was because he put more work into them than any of his contemporaries. He was fond of insisting that genius meant attention. The definition may be accepted with a qualification. No man can become a genius by resolving to attend; but if he attends very much in some one direction by natural impulse, then he may be said to have a genius, whatever may be his field of work. No genius is of much avail for great literary productions without attention. Dickens could never have gathered together his amazing variety of characters and abundance of incidents without attention. M. Taine, in his criticism of Dickens, dwells much upon the boundless wealth of his imagination; Dickens himself would have expressed the same fact by speaking of the persistence and closeness of his attention. It comes to the same thing in the end, whichever way we express it; but there is no doubt that Dickens's own expression is more descriptive of his actual method of work. M. Taine rather gives us the notion that Dickens sat down and trusted to the inexhaustible fertility of his imagination; whereas, ready and active as his imagination ever was, he accumulated materials for it with the industry of a pre-Raphaelite painter. The charm, the inimitable secret, lay, of course, in the transmuting process through which dry facts passed in his imagination; but he laboured earnestly, exercised the most painstaking attention, not merely in bringing his facts together, but in setting them, with all their superadded value, for his special purposes. Dickens would have been a humorist though he had never written a line; he could never have helped attending to the humorous side of whatever met his eye; but without the attention on which he prided himself as the secret of his power, he could never have established himself securely as one of the greatest humorists in literature.
Our Mutual Friend was published in 1864 and 1865. After an interval of five years, during which he contributed to three Christmas numbers of All the Year Round, and wrote A Holiday Romance and George Silverman's Explanation for an American publisher, the first number of The Mystery of Edwin Drood was issued in April 1870. He did not live to complete the novel. For some years severe pains in the left hand and foot had given warning that he was overtaxing his system, but the warning was not fully understood till too late. He was suddenly overcome by a stupor, caused by effusion on the brain, on the evening of the 8th of June, and ceased to breathe on the following day. In his will he had desired that he should be buried in "an inexpensive, unostentatious, and strictly private manner, without any public announcement of the time or place of his burial." These conditions were observed; but his executors did not consider them inconsistent with his receiving the honour of interment in Westminster Abbey, where he was buried on the 14th of June 1870.
His death took place at Gadshill Place, a house near the main road between Rochester and Gravesend, which he had bought in 1856, and which had been his home since 1859. Here he worked, and walked, and saw his friends, and was loved and almost worshipped by his poorer neighbours for miles around. His previous residences in London had been Furnival's Inn, where fame found him a young man writing sketches for the Chronicle; 48 Doughty Street, after his marriage and first flood of success; Devonshire Terrace, from 1839 to 1851; Tavistock House, from 1851 to 1859. These residences were varied by his numerous excursions to provincial towns, to the Continent, to America. But "perhaps there was never a man who changed places so much and habits so little. He was always methodical and regular, and passed his life from day to day, divided for the most part between working
