Charles Dickens

by W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM

1

CHARLES DICKENS, though small, was of a pleasing appearance. There is a portrait of him painted by Maclise when he was twentyseven, which is in the National Portrait Gallery in London. He is seated in a very grand chair at a writing table, with a small, elegant hand just resting on a manuscript. He is smartly dressed and wears a vast satin neckcloth. His brown hair is curled and falls luxuriantly down each side of his face well below the ears. His face is long and pale, his eyes fine; and the thoughtful expression he wears is such as an admiring public might expect of a successful young author.

His grandfather, William Dickens, began life as a footman, married a housemaid and eventually became steward at Crewe Hall, the seat of John Crewe, Member of Parliament for Chester. He had two sons, William and John, but the only one that concerns us is John, first because he was the father of England’s greatest novelist, and second, because he served as model for his son’s greatest creation, Mr. Micawber. William the elder died when John was born, and his widow stayed on at Crewe Hall for thirty-five years as housekeeper. She was then pensioned. The Crewes educated the two sons and got John a post in the Navy Pay Office, where he made friends with a fellow clerk whose sister, Elizabeth Barrow, he presently married. From the very beginning of his married life he appears to have been in financial trouble and he was always ready to borrow money from anyone who was unwise enough to lend it to him.

Charles, the second child of John and Elizabeth Dickens, was born in 1812 at Portsea, but two years later his father was transferred to London and three years after that to Chatham. There the boy was put to school and there he began to read. His father had a small collection of books, Tom Jones, The Vicar of Wakefield, Gil Bias, Don Quixote, Roderick Random and Peregrine Pickle; Charles read and reread them, and his own novels show how great an influence they had on him.

In 1822 John Dickens, who by this time had five children, was moved back to London, but Charles was left at Chatham to continue his schooling and did not rejoin his family for some months. They were then settled in Camden Town on the outskirts of the city in a house which he was later to describe as the home of the Micawbers. John Dickens, though earning a little more than three hundred pounds a year which would be equivalent today to something like five thousand dollars, was apparently in more than usually desperate straits and it would seem that there was not enough money to send little Charles to school again. To his disgust he was put to minding the children, cleaning the boots, brushing the clothes and doing the housework. But in the intervals he roamed about Camden Town, “a desolate place surrounded by fields and ditches” and the neighboring Somers Town and Kentish Town; and later, going further, he came to know Soho and Limehouse.

Debts were pressing, and Charles was sent to pawn everything on which a little cash could be raised; the books, the precious books which meant so much to him, were sold to a bookseller. Then James Lamert, a stepson of Mrs. Dickens’s sister, offered Charles a job at six or seven shillings a week in a blacking factory of which he was part owner. His parents thankfully accepted the offer; it reduced Charles to despair. It cut him to the quick that they should be so manifestly relieved to get him off their hands. He was twelve years old, quick, eager and intelligent, and he felt “a deep sense of abandonment.”

Shortly afterwards the long-awaited blow fell, John Dickens was arrested for debt and taken to the Marshalsea; and there his wife, after pawning the little that was left to pawn, joined him with her children. The Marshalsea and the Fleet were the two London prisons for debt. They were filthy, insanitary and crowded, for not only were they occupied by the prisoners, but by the families they might, if they chose, bring with them. Mrs. Dickens brought a little maid with her, who lived out, but came in daily to help with the children and prepare the family meals. John Dickens still had his salary of six pounds a week, but made no attempt to pay his debt, and it may be supposed that, content to be out of reach of his other creditors, he did not particularly care to be released.

The biographers have been puzzled by the fact that he continued in these circumstances to receive his wage. The only explanation appears to be that as government clerks were appointed by influence, such an accident as being imprisoned for debt was not considered so grave a matter as to call for so drastic a step as cutting off a salary. It may be also that it was paid by some other department than that which enjoyed the services of John Dickens and this department never discovered that he was not doing the work for which he was being paid.

2

AT the beginning of his father’s imprisonment Charles lodged in Camden Town; but since this was a long way from the blacking factory, which was at Hungerford Stairs, Charing Cross, he moved to Southwark and was then able to breakfast and sup with his family in the Marshalsea. The work was not hard; it consisted in washing the bottles, labeling them and tying them up. In the evenings he wandered about London, finding his way to strange and mysterious places about Thames-side and thus insensibly absorbed a sense of the romance of the great city which he never afterwards lost.

In April, 1824, Mrs. William Dickens, the Crewes’ old housekeeper, died and left her small savings to her two sons. John Dickens’s debt was paid (by his brother) and he regained his freedom. He settled his family once more in Camden Town and went back to work at the Navy Pay Office. Charles continued to wash bottles at the factory for a while, but then owing to something John Dickens wrote to James Lamert, he was fired. He went home “with a relief so great that it was like oppression,” he wrote many years later: his mother tried to smooth things down so that Charles should retain his job and the six shillings a week of his wages, which she doubtless needed; and for this he never forgave her. “I never afterwards forgot, I never shall forget, I never can forget that my mother was warm for my being sent back,” he added. John Dickens would not hear of it and sent his son to school.

It is difficult to make out how long the boy spent at the blacking factory: he went there early in February, 1824, and was back with his family by June, so that at the outside he cannot have been at the factory more than four months. It made, however, a deep impression on him and he looked upon the experience as so humiliating that he could not bear to speak of it.

We are so used to hearing eminent politicians and captains of industry boast of having in their youth washed dishes or sold newspapers that it is hard for us to understand why Charles Dickens should have worked himself up into looking upon it as a great injury that his parents had done him when they sent him to the blacking factory and a secret so shameful that it must be concealed. At Camden Town he was put to sweep and scrub and mind the children; he was sent to pawn articles to buy food for dinner; and like any other boy he must have played in the streets with boys of the same sort as himself. It is hard to see why he should have found it such a degradation to consort with the other boys who were working in the blacking factory. My own surmise is that he did not suffer as much as in after years, when he was famous and respectable, a social as well as a public figure, he persuaded himself he had. He lived at a time when to be a gentleman was to be one of God’s chosen creatures.

Charles remained at school till he was fifteen, when he went to work as an errand boy in a lawyer’s office; he was there for a few weeks, after which his father managed to get him engaged as a clerk in another lawyer’s office at fifteen shillings a week. In his spare time he learned shorthand, and in eighteen months was sufficiently competent to set up as a reporter in the Consistory Court of Doctors’ Commons. By the time he was twenty he had qualified as a parliamentary reporter, and joined the staff of a paper to report the speeches made in the House of Commons. He gained the reputation of being “the fastest and most accurate man in the Gallery.”

Meanwhile he had fallen in love with Maria Beadnell, the daughter of a bank manager; she was a flirtatious young person, and she seems to have given him a good deal of encouragement. She was flattered and amused to have a lover, but Charles was penniless and she never can have intended to marry him. When after two years the affair came to an end, and in true romantic fashion they returned one another’s presents, Charles thought his heart would break. When, after he had written David Copperfield, in which she appeared as Dora, a woman friend asked him whether he had really loved her “so very, very, very much,” he answered that there was “no woman in the world and few men who could realise how much.” They did not meet again till many years later when Maria Beadnell, long a married woman, dined with the celebrated Mr. Dickens and his wife: she was fat, commonplace and stupid. She served then as the model for Flora Finching in Little Dorr it.

At the age of twenty-two Charles Dickens was earning five guineas a week. In order to be near his newspaper office he took lodgings in one of the dingy streets off the Strand, but finding them unsatisfactory he rented unfurnished rooms in Furnival’s Inn. But before he could furnish them his father was again arrested for debt, and he had to provide money for his keep at the sponging-house. Charles took cheap lodgings for the family, and camped out with his brother Frederick, whom he took charge of, in the “three-pair-back” at Furnival’s Inn without curtains or crockery.

When he had been working for a year or so in the Gallery of the House of Commons, Dickens began to write a scries of sketches of London life; the first were published in the Monthly Magazine and later ones in the Morning Chronicle; he was paid nothing for them, but they attracted wide attention. There was a vogue at the time for anecdotal novels of a humorous character, which were issued in monthly parts at a shilling with comic illustrations, and distinguished writers were engaged by the publishers to provide the letterpress. They were the remote ancestors of the funnies of our day, and had the same prodigious popularity.

One day a partner in the firm of Chapman and Hall called upon Dickens to ask him to write a narrative about a club of amateur sportsmen to serve as a vehicle for the illustrations of a wellknown artist. He offered fourteen pounds a month and additional payment on sales. Dickens protested that he knew nothing about sport and did not think he could write to order, but “the emolument was too tempting to resist.” I need hardly say that the result was The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club: never can a masterpiece have been written under such conditions. The first five numbers had no great success, but with the introduction of Sam Weller the circulation leapt up. By the time the book appeared Charles Dickens, being then twenty-five, was famous. Though the critics made their reservations, his reputation was made.

3

A COUPLE of days before the appearance of the first number of The Pickwick Papers, in 1836, Charles Dickens married Kate, the eldest daughter of George Hogarth, a colleague on the paper for which he was then working. George Hogarth was the father of six sons and eight daughters. The daughters were small, plump, fresh-colored and blue-eyed. Kate was the eldest and the only one of marriageable age. That seems to have been the reason why he married her rather than one of the others. After a short honeymoon they settled down in Furnival’s Inn and invited Kate’s pretty sister, Mary Hogarth, a girl of sixteen, to live with them.

Charles became attached to her and when Kate found herself with child and so could not go about with him, she was his constant companion.

He had accepted a contract to write another novel, Oliver Twist, and started it while he was still at work on The Pickwick Papers. This also was to appear in monthly numbers and he devoted a fortnight to one and a fortnight to the other. Most novelists are so absorbed in the characters which are at the moment engaging their attention that, by no effort of will, they thrust back into their unconscious what other literary ideas they have had in mind; and that Dickens should have been able to switch, apparently with ease, from one story to another is an extraordinary feat.

Kate’s baby was born, and as she might be expected to have several more a move was made from Furnival’s Inn to a house in Doughty Street. Mary grew every day more lovely and more delightful. One May evening Dickens took Kate and Mary to a play; they enjoyed themselves and came home in high spirits. Mary was suddenly taken ill. A doctor was sent for. In a few hours she was dead. Dickens took the ring from her finger and put it on his own. He wore it till his death. He was prostrated with grief. Not very long after he wrote in his diary: “If she were with us now, the same winning, happy, amiable companion, sympathising with all my thoughts and feelings more than anyone I know ever did or will, I think I should have nothing to wish for but a continuance of such happiness. But she is gone, and pray God I may one day, through His mercy, rejoin her.” He arranged to be buried by her side. The shock resulted in Kate’s having a miscarriage, and when she was well enough, Charles took her for a short trip abroad so that they might both recover their spirits.

The life of a literary man who has achieved success is not as a rule interesting. It follows a uniform pattern. His profession obliges him to devote a certain number of hours a day to his work, and he discovers a routine to suit him. He is brought in contact with the celebrated people of the day, literary, artistic and polite. He is taken up by great ladies. He goes to parties and gives parties. He travels. He makes public appearances. This, broadly, was the pattern of Dickens’s life. He enjoyed a success such as has been the fortune of few authors to experience.

Oddly enough, though he had an immense power of observation and in course of time came to be on familiar terms with persons in the higher ranks of society, he never succeeded in his novels in making such characters as he created in those walks of life quite credible. Nor are his parsons and doctors ever so lifelike as the lawyers and lawyers’ clerks whom he had known when he worked in an office and as a reporter at Doctors’ Commons, or as the underprivileged among whom his boyhood was spent.

He was a hard worker and for several years started to write a new book long before he was finished with the old one. He wrote to please and kept his eye on the public reaction to the monthly numbers in which most of his novels appeared, and it is interesting to learn that he had no intention of sending Martin Chuzzlewit to America till the declining sales showed that the numbers were not as attractive as usual. He was not the sort of author who looks upon popularity as something to be ashamed of. The labor his great production entailed did not exhaust Dickens’s energy. He edited and wrote for three weekly magazines. He thought nothing of walking twenty miles a day, he rode, he danced and played the fool with gusto, he did conjuring tricks to amuse his children, he acted in amateur theatricals; he attended banquets where his speeches were an event, he delivered lectures; he was lavishly entertained and entertained lavishly.

As soon as circumstances permitted, the Dickenses moved into a new house in a more fashionable neighborhood and ordered from firms of repute complete suites for the reception rooms and bedrooms. Thick pile carpets were laid on the floors, and festooned curtains were made for the windows. They engaged a good cook, three other maids and a manservant. They set up a carriage. They gave dinner parties to which noble and distinguished persons came.

All this cost money, but he had other expenses besides: his father continued to be a drain on him. Among things he did to embarrass his celebrated son was to borrow money on the strength of his success and sell his autographs and pages of his manuscripts. Dickens came to the conclusion that he would have no peace till he got the old man and the rest of the family, all of whom he supported, out of London; so, much to their disgust, he took a house for them at Alphington, near Exeter, and settled them there. It was partly to meet his heavy expenses that he founded the first of his magazines, Master Humphrey’s Clock, and to give it a good send-off he published The Old Curiosity Shop in it. Its success was immense. Crowds gathered on the quay at New York shouting to an incoming ship: “Is Little Nell dead?”

4

IN 1812, Mr. and Mrs. Dickens, leaving their four children in the care of Georgina Hogarth, Kate’s sister, went to America. Charles Dickens was lionized as no author has ever been before or since. But the trip was not a complete success. A hundred years ago the people of the United States, though ready enough to disparage things European, were exceedingly sensitive of any criticism of themselves. A hundred years ago the press of the United States was ruthless in its invasion of the privacy of any hapless person who was “news.” A hundred years ago in the United States the publicity-minded looked upon the distinguished foreigner as a Godgiven opportunity and called him “up stage” when he showed a disinclination to be treated like a monkey in a zoo. A hundred years ago the United States was a land where speech was free so long as it did not offend the susceptibilities or affect the interests of other people, and where everyone was entitled to his own opinions so long as they agreed with those of everyone else. Of all this Charles Dickens was ignorant, and he made bad blunders.

The absence of an International Copyright not only deprived English authors of any profit in the United States from the sale of their books but also greatly hurt American authors, for the booksellers very naturally preferred to publish books by English authors which they could get for nothing rather than books by American authors for which they would have to pay. But it was certainly tactless of Charles Dickens to introduce the subject in the speeches he made at the banquets given for him on his arrival. The reaction was violent and the newspapers described him as “no gentleman, but a mercenary scoundrel.” Though he was mobbed by admirers, and at Philadelphia shook hands for two hours with the crowd who wanted to meet the great man; though souvenir hunters tore bits of fur out of his new fur coat, his personal success was not complete: it is true that most people were charmed by his youth, good looks and gaiety, but a good many found his appearance effeminate, his dress, his rings and diamond pins vulgar, and his manner lacking in refinement.

The Dickenses returned to England after four eventful but exhausting months. The children had grown attached to their aunt Georgina and the tired travelers asked her to make her home with them. She was sixteen, the age of Mary when she went to live at Furnival’s Inn, and so like her that from a distance she might have been taken for her.

Dickens had been poor too long not to like to live in style when he was able to, with the consequence that about this time he found himself very uncomfortably in debt. He decided to let his house and go to Italy to economize. He spent a year there, chiefly at Genoa, and did a good deal of sightseeing in the peninsula; but he was too insular, too ill-read, for the experience to have any spiritual effect on him. He remained the typical tourist.

On the other hand he formed a friendship with a Mrs. de la Rue, the wife of a Swiss banker, who was living at Genoa. She suffered, it appeared, from delusions, and Dickens, who had taken an interest in hypnotism, was convinced that by means of this he could rid her of them. The pair met every day, sometimes twice a day, so that he could pursue the treatment. It caused Kate a great deal of unhappiness. On their excursions the de la Rues went everywhere with the Dickenses, and such was the efficacy of Charles’s ministrations that Mrs. de la Rue was restored to health; but Kate was thankful when they went back to England.

She was placid and of a melancholic disposition. She was not adaptable and liked neither the journeys Charles took her on, nor the parties she went to with him nor the parties in which she acted as hostess. She was colorless, and rather stupid it would appear, and it is likely enough that the great and important people who were eager to enjoy the celebrated author’s company found it a nuisance to have to put up with his dull wife. Meanwhile Georgy was there to take the place that Mary once occupied. In course of time Dickens came to depend more and more on her. They took long walks together and he discussed his literary plans with her. She acted as his amanuensis. Kate, besides four miscarriages, had seven sons and three daughters. During her pregnancies Georgy accompanied Dickens on the jaunts he was fond of taking, went to parties with him and often presided at his table in Kate’s place. One would have expected Kate to resent the situation; she does not seem to have done so.

5

THE years passed. In 1857 Charles Dickens, the most popular author in England, with a reputation besides as a social reformer, living, as very much appealed to his theatrical instincts, in the public eye, being then forty-five years of age, with children already grown up, fell in love with an actress. He was fond of acting and had on more than one occasion given amateur performances of one play or another for charitable purposes. He was asked at this time to give some performances in Manchester of a play, The Frozen Deep, which Wilkie Collins had written with his help, and which Dickens had performed with great success before the Queen, the Prince Consort and the King of the Belgians. He had grown a beard to play the part of a selfsacrificing arctic explorer, a part which he vastly enjoyed and played with such pathos that there was not a dry eye in the house. But when he agreed to repeat the play at Manchester, since he did not think his daughters, who had taken the girls’ parts before, would be heard in a big theater he decided that their parts should be acted by professionals.

A young woman called Ellen Ternan was engaged for one of them. He had seen her some months before in a play called Atalanta, and going to her dressing room before she went on the stage, found her in tears because she had to show so much leg. He was charmed with her modesty. Ellen Ternan was eighteen. She was small, fair and blue-eyed. The rehearsals took place in Dickens’s house and he directed. He was flattered by Ellen’s adoring attitude and by her pathetic anxiety to please him. Before the rehearsals were over he was desperately in love with her. He gave her a bracelet, which by mistake was delivered to his wife, and she naturally made him a scene; but Charles seems to have adopted the attitude of injured innocence which a husband in such an awkward junction finds it most convenient to adopt. The play was produced and his performance electrified the audience.

Kate had not given him all he had expected of her and now he grew more and more intolerant of her shortcomings: “she is amiable and complying,” he wrote, “but nothing on earth would make her understand me.” He began to think she had never suited him. He told John Forster, his biographer, that “the gist is that it is a mistake to marry too young and that the years are not making things easier.” He had developed, but she had remained what she was at the beginning.

Dickens was quite convinced that he had nothing to reproach himself with. There is something of Pecksniff in the way he assured himself that he had been a good father and had done everything possible for his children. Though he was none too pleased at having to provide for so many, for which he seems to have thought Kate alone was to blame, he liked them well enough when they were small; but as they grew up he lost interest in them and at a suitable age packed most of the boys off to remote parts of the world. During this time he was moody, restless and out of temper with everyone but Georgy.

At last he came to the conclusion that he could not live with Kate any longer, but his position with the public was such that he was fearful of the scandal that an open break might cause. His anxiety is comprehensible. He had been for years the moving advocate of hearth and home, and had done more than anyone to make Christmas the symbolic festival to celebrate the domestic virtues and the beauty of a united and happy family life. Various suggestions were made. Finally a complete separation was decided on. Kate was installed in a little house on the edge of Camden Town with an income of six hundred pounds a year. A little later Dickens’s eldest son, Charley, was sent to live with her.

The arrangement is surprising. One cannot but wonder why Kate allowed herself to be driven from her own house and why she consented to leave her children behind. The only explanation of her submissiveness is that suggested by Dickens’s mysterious allusion to a mental disorder “which caused his wife to think that she would be better away.” This has been thought, though I do not know on what grounds, to be a discreet reference to the fact that Kate drank.

Dickens was too celebrated for his private affairs not to give rise to gossip. Many of his friends thought he had behaved badly and so excited his bitter hostility. Scandalous rumors were spread abroad concerning Georgy. The gossip attained such proportions that Dickens felt himself called upon to give the public his own version of the separation. In a letter published in the New York Tribune and later in English papers he wrote of Georgy: “Upon my soul and honour there is not on earth a more virtuous and spotless creature.”

By this, of course, he meant to deny that he had had sexual relations with her. It is very probably true. Perhaps Georgy loved him; she was jealous enough of Kate to cut out all sentences in praise of her when, after Charles’s death, she edited a selection of his letters; but the attitude church and state had adopted towards marriage with a deceased wife’s sister had given any connection of the sort an incestuous aspect, and it may never even have entered Georgy’s head that there could be more between herself and the man in whose house she had lived for fifteen years than the fond affection a sister might legitimately feel for her brother by blood. Moreover, Charles was passionately enamored of Ellen Ternan. Perhaps it was enough for Georgy to be in the confidence of so celebrated a man and to have established a complete ascendency over him. The strangest thing about the whole affair is that she welcomed Ellen Ternan to Gad’s Hill, whose mistress she now became, and made a friend of her.

Under the name of Charles Tringham, Dickens took a house for Ellen at Peckham, and not so long ago visitors, going to see it, were shown the tree under which Mr. Tringham, an author, had liked to sit. Here she lived till his death and here she bore him a son. It was not difficult to get from Gad’s Hill to Peckham, and Dickens would spend two, and sometimes three, nights with Ellen. On one occasion they went to Paris together.

At about the time of the separation Dickens began to give readings of his works. He traveled all over the British Isles and again went to America; with his histrionic gift he was able to make them very effective, and his success was spectacular. But the effort he put into them and the constant journeys entailed wore him out, and people began to notice that though still in the forties he looked an old man. But these readings were not his only activity: during the twelve years between his separation and his death he wrote three long novels and conducted an immensely successful magazine called All the Year Round. It is not surprising that his health failed. He was warned by his doctors that he must take care of himself, but, infatuated as he was by the applause he received from the public, he insisted on making a final tour. He was taken so ill in the middle of it that he had to abandon it. He went back to Gad’s Hill and sat down to writ e The Mystery of Edwin Drood. But to make up to his managers for the readings he had had to cut short, he arranged to give twelve more in London. This was in January, 1870. One day in June, Georgy, with whom he was living alone, noticed at dinner that he looked very ill. “Come and lie down,” she said. “Yes, on the ground,” he answered. They were the last words he spoke. He slid from her arm and fell upon the floor.

Georgy sent for his two daughters, who were in London, and next day one of them, Katey, was dispatched by the resourceful and competent woman to break the news to his wife. Katey returned to Gad’s Hill with Ellen Ternan. He died next day, June 9, 1870, and was buried in Westminster Abbey.

6

IN THIS sketch of Dickens’s life I have said nothing of his persistent and efficacious interest in social reform and of his passionate championship of the poor and oppressed. I have confined myself, as far as I could, to his private life, since it seemed to me that to know something of this must give a greater interest to the book I am inviting the reader to read. David Copperfield is in great part autobiographical; but Dickens was writing a novel, not an autobiography, and though he drew much of his material from his own life he made such use of it as suited his purpose. For the rest he fell back on his fertile imagination. Mr. Micawber was drawn after his own father, Dora after his first love, Maria Beadnell, and Agnes partly from his idealized memories of Mary Hogarth and partly from her sister Georgy. David Copperfield at the age of ten was put to work by his wicked stepfather, as Charles Dickens was by his father, and suffered in the same way from the “degradation” of having to mix with boys of his own age whom he did not consider his social equals.

David Copperfield tells his story himself. This is a device that novelists have often used. It has its advantages and disadvantages. One advantage is that it forces the author to keep to the thread of his narrative; he can only tell you what he has himself seen, heard or done. It served Dickens well since his plots were apt to be complicated and confused, and the reader’s interest was sometimes diverted to characters and incidents that had no bearing on the course of the narration. In David Copperfield there is only one major digression, and that is the account of Dr. Strong’s relations with his wife, her mother and his wife’s cousin: it does not concern David and is in itself tedious. The device has the other advantage of lending verisimilitude to the story and enlisting your sympathy with the narrator.

A disadvantage of the device is that the narrator, who is also the hero, cannot without immodesty tell you that he is handsome and attractive; he is apt to seem vainglorious when he relates his doughty deeds and stupid when he fails to see, what is obvious to the reader, that the heroine loves him. A greater disadvantage, and one that no authors of this sort of novel have been able entirely to surmount, is that the hero-narrator, the central character, is likely to appear pallid in comparison with the persons he comes in contact with. I have asked myself why this should be, and the only explanation I can suggest is that the author, since the hero is himself, sees him from the inside, subjectively, and telling what he sees, gives him the confusions, the weaknesses, the indecisions he feels in himself; whereas he sees the other characters from the outside, objectively, through his imagination; and if he is an author with Dickens’s peculiar gifts, he sees them with a dramatic intensity, with an unfailing sense of fun, with a keen eye for their oddity, and so makes them stand out with a vividness which overshadows his portrait of himself.

Dickens did all he could to excite the reader’s sympathy for his hero, and indeed on the celebrated journey to Dover when he ran away to seek the protection of his aunt Betsey Trotwood, an admirable character, he loads his dice somewhat extravagantly. One cannot be but surprised that the little boy should have been such a ninny as to let everyone he came across rob and cheat him. After all, he had been in the factory for some months and had wandered about London early and late, he had lived with the Micawbers and pawned their bits and pieces for them, and had visited them at the Marshalsea; one would have thought that if he were the bright boy he is described to be, even at that tender age he would have acquired some knowledge of the world and enough sharpness to fend for himself.

But throughout, David Copperfield shows himself sadly incompetent. He continues to allow himself to be robbed and cheated. He never seems able to cope with a difficulty. His weakness with Dora, his lack of common sense in dealing with the ordinary problems of domestic life, are really almost more than one can bear; and he is so obtuse that he does not guess that Agnes is in love with him. I cannot persuade myself that in the end he became the successful novelist we are told he did. If he wrote novels, I suspect they were more like the novels of Mrs. Henry Wood than the novels of Charles Dickens. It is strange that his creator should have given him none of his own drive, vitality and exuberance. David was slim and good-looking; and he had charm, or he would not have attracted the affection of almost everyone he came across; he was honest, kindly and conscientious; but he was surely a bit of a fool. He remains the least interesting person in the book.

But that doesn’t matter: it is filled with characters of the most astonishing variety, vividness and originality. They are not realistic and yet they abound with life. There never were such people as the Micawbers, Peggotty and Barkis, Traddles, Betsey Trotwood and Mr. Dick, Uriah Heap and his mother. They are fantastic inventions of Dickens’s exultant imagination, but they have so much vigor, they are so consistent, they are presented with so much verisimilitude and with so much conviction, that you believe in them. They are extravagant, but not unreal, and when you have once come to know them you can never quite forget them.

The most remarkable of them is, of course, Mr. Micawber. He never fails you. Dickens has been blamed, to my mind unjustly, for making him end up as a respectable magistrate in Australia, and some critics have thought that he should have remained reckless and improvident to the last page. Australia was a sparsely settled country; Mr. Micawber was a man of fine presence, of some education and of grandiloquent address. I do not see why in that environment and with those advantages he should not have attained an official position. I am less willing to believe that he would have been ingenious enough and secret enough to discover the villainy of Uriah Heap.

Dickens never hesitated to make use of coincidence when it suited his story, and was not bothered by the necessity the modern novelist is under to make events not only likely, but so far as possible, inevitable. Readers then accepted the grossest improbabilities without turning a hair, and such was Dickens’s intensity, so great his narrative skill, one is prepared to accept them to this day. David Copperfield abounds in coincidences. Since I do not want to spoil the reader’s enjoyment by divulging anything of the plot, I will only hint at the most outrageous of them all. When Steerforth returns to England and his ship is wrecked on the sands of Yarmouth, who should have gone there just then to see some friends but David? Dickens was quite skillful enough to have avoided this shocking improbability if he had wanted to. He didn’t, because it gave him the opportunity for a striking scene.

Though David Copperfield has fewer of the melodramatic incidents that Dickens was in the habit of using in his novels, it must be admitted that certain of the characters smack of what used to be called transpontine melodrama. Uriah Heap, for instance; but for all that he is a powerful, horrifying figure admirably portrayed; a lesser creation, Steerforth’s servant, has a mysterious, sinister quality which sends cold shivers down one’s back. The most baffling character of this type is to my mind Rosa Dartle. She has generally been looked upon as a failure. I have a notion that Dickens meant to make greater use of her in his story than he did, and I suspect (without any evidence) that if he did not do so it was because he feared to offend his public. I have asked myself whether Steerforth had not been her lover and whether her hatred of him was not mingled with a hungry, jealous love. I cannot see what else could have caused her to treat Little Em’ly (a stagey figure who, to my mind, only got what she asked for) with such callous brutality.

Dickens wrote: “Of all my books I like this the best; like many fond parents I have my favourite child and his name is David Copperfield.” An author is not always a good judge of his own work, but in this case Dickens’s judgment was sound. Matthew Arnold and Ruskin considered it his best novel and I think we may agree with them. If we do, we shall be in pretty good company.