English Literature For Boys And Girls by H.E. Marshall

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Then began for Charles the most miserable time of his life. The
poor, sickly little chap was set to work in a blacking factory.
His work was to cover the pots of paste-blacking, tie them down
neatly and paste on the labels. Along with two or three others
boys he worked all day long for six or seven shillings a week.
Oh, how the little boy hated it! He felt degraded and ashamed.
He felt that he was forgotten and neglected by every one, and
that never never more would he be able to read books and play
pretending games, or do anything that he loved. All week he
worked hard, ill clad and only half fed, and Sunday he spent with
this father at the prison. It was a miserable, sordid, and
pitiful beginning to life.

How long this unhappy time lasted we do not know. Dickens
himself could not remember. He seldom spoke of this time, but he
never forgot the misery of it. Long afterwards in one of his
books called David Copperfield, when he tells of the unhappy
childhood of his hero, it is of his own he speaks.

But presently John Dickens got out of prison, Charles left the
blacking factory, and once more went to school. And although in
after years he could never bear to think of these miserable days,
at the time his spirits were not crushed, and at school he was
known as a bright and jolly boy. He was always ready for any
mischief, and took delight in getting up theatricals.

At fifteen Dickens left school and went into a lawyer's office,
but he knew that he had learned very little at school, and now
set himself to learn more. He went to the British Museum
Reading-room, and studied there, and he also with a great deal of
labor taught himself shorthand.

He worked hard, determined to get on, and at nineteen he found
himself in the Gallery of the House of Commons as reporter for a
daily paper. Since the days when Samuel Johnson reported
speeches without having heard them things had changed. People
were no longer content with such make-believe reporting, and
Dickens proved himself one of the smartest reporters there had
ever been. He not only reported the speeches, but told of
everything that took place in the House. He had such a keen eye
for seeing, and such a vivid way of describing what he saw, that
he was able to make people realize the scenes inside the House as
none had done before.

Besides reporting in the Houses of Parliament Dickens dashed
about the country in post-chaises gathering news for his paper,
writing by flickering candle-light while his carriage rushed
along, at what seemed then the tremendous speed of fifteen miles
an hour. For those were not the days of railways and motors, and
traveling was much slower than it is now.

But even while Dickens was leading this hurried, busy life he
found time to write other things besides newspaper reports, and
little tales and sketches began to appear signed by Boz. Boz was
a pet name for Dickens's youngest brother. His real name was
Augustus, but he had been nicknamed Moses after Moses in the
Vicar of Wakefield. Pronounced through the nose it became Boses
and then Boz. That is the history of the name under which
Dickens at first wrote and won his earliest fame.

The sketches by Boz were well received, but real fame came to
Dickens with the Pickwick Papers which he now began to write.
This story came out in monthly parts. The first few numbers were
not very successful, only about four hundred copies being sold,
but by the fifteenth number London was ringing with the fame of
it, and forty thousand copies were quickly sold. "Judges on the
bench and boys in the street, gravity and folly, the young and
the old"* all alike read it and laughed over it. Dickens above
everything is a humorist, and one of the chief features in his
humor is caricature, that is exaggerating and distorting one
feature or habit or characteristic of a man out of all likeness
to nature. This often makes very good fun, but it takes away
from the truth and realness of his characters. And yet no story-
teller perhaps is remembered so little for his stories and so
much for his characters. In Pickwick there is hardly any story,
the papers ramble on in unconnected incidents. No one could tell
the story of Pickwick for there is really none to tell; it is a
series of scenes which hang together anyhow. "Pickwick cannot be
classed as a novel," it has been said; "it is merely a great
book."**

*Forster.
**Gissing.

So in spite of the fact that they are all caricatures it is the
persons of the Pickwick club that we remember and not their
doings. Like Jonson long before him, Dickens sees every man in
his humor. By his genius he enables us to see these humors too,
though at times one quality in a man is shown so strongly that we
fail to see any other in him, and so a caricature is produced.

Dickens himself was full of fun and jollity. His was a florid
personality. He loved light and color, and sunshine. He almost
covered his walls with looking-glasses and crowded his garden
with blazing geraniums. He loved movement and life, overflowed
with it himself and poured it into his creations, making them
live in spite of rather than because of their absurdities.

Winkle, one of the Pickwickians, is a mild and foolish boaster,
who pretends that he can do things he cannot. He pretends to be
able to shoot and succeeds only in hitting one of his friends.
He pretends to skate, and this is how he succeeds:--

"'Now,' said Wardle, after a substantial lunch had been done
ample just to, 'what say you to an hour on the ice? We shall
have plenty of time.'

"'Capital!' said Mr. Benjamin Allen.

"'Prime!' ejaculated Mr. Bob Sawyer.

"'You skate of course, Winkle?' said Wardle.

"'Ye-yes; oh, yes,' replied Mr. Winkle. 'I--I am rather out of
practice.'

"'Oh, do skate, Mr. Winkle,' said Arabella. 'I like to see it so
much.'

"'Oh, it is so graceful,' said another young lady. A third young
lady said it was elegant, and a fourth expressed her opinion that
it was 'swanlike.'

"'I should be very happy, I'm sure,' said Mr. Winkle, reddening,
'but I have no skates.'

"This objection was at once overruled. Trundle had a couple of
pair, and the fat boy announced that there were half-a-dozen
more, downstairs: whereat Mr. Winkle expressed exquisite
delight, and looked exquisitely uncomfortable.

"Old Wardle led the way to a pretty large sheet of ice, and the
fat boy and Mr. Weller, having shovelled and swept away the snow
which had fallen on it during the night, Mr. Bob Sawyer adjusted
his skates with a dexterity which to Mr. Winkle was perfectly
marvellous, and described circles with his left leg, and cut
figures of eight, and inscribed upon the ice, without once
stopping for breath, a great many other pleasant and astonishing
devices, to the excessive satisfaction of Mr. Pickwick, Mr.
Tupman, and the ladies: which reached a pitch of positive
enthusiasm, when old Wardle and Benjamin Allen, assisted by the
aforesaid Bob Sawyer, performed some mystic evolutions, which
they called a reel.

"All this time Mr. Winkle, with his face and hands blue with the
cold, had been forcing gimlet into the soles of his boots, and
putting his skates on, with the points behind, and getting the
straps into a very complicated and entangled state, with the
assistance of Mr. Snodgrass, who knew rather less about skates
than a Hindoo. At length, however, with the assistance of Mr.
Weller, the unfortunate skates were firmly screwed and buckled
on, and Mr. Winkle was raised to his feet.

"'Now, then, Sir,' said Sam, in an encouraging tone; 'off with
you, and shoe 'em how to do it.'

"'Stop, Sam, stop!' said Mr. Winkle, trembling violently and
clutching hold of Sam's arms with the grasp of a drowning man.
'How slippery it is, Sam!'

"'Not a uncommon thing upon ice, Sir,' replied Mr. Weller. 'Hold
up, Sir!'

"This last observation of Mr. Weller's bore reference to a
demonstration Mr. Winkle made at the instant, of a frantic desire
to throw his feet in the air, and dash the back of his head on
the ice.

"'These--these--are very awkward skates; ain't they, Sam?'
inquired Mr. Winkle, staggering.

"'I'm afeerd there's an orkard gen'l'm'n in 'em, Sir,' replied
Sam.

"'Now, Winkle,' cried Mr. Pickwick, quite unconscious that here
was anything the matter. 'Come, the ladies are all anxiety.'

"'Yes, yes,' replied Mr. Winkle, with a ghastly smile. 'I'm
coming.'

"'Just a-goin' to begin,' said Sam, endeavouring to disengage
himself. 'Now, Sir, start off!'

"'Stop an instant, Sam,' gasped Mr. Winkle, clinging most
affectionately to Mr. Weller. 'I find I've got a couple of coats
at home, that I don't want, Sam. You may have them, Sam.'

"'Thank'ee, Sir,' replied Mr. Weller.

"'Never mind touching your hat, Sam,' said Mr. Winkle, hastily.
'You needn't take your hand away to do that. I meant to have
given you five shillings this morning for a Christmas-box, Sam.
I'll give it you this afternoon, Sam.'

"'You're wery good, Sir,' replied Mr. Weller.

"'Just hold me at first, Sam; will you?' said Mr. Winkle.
'There--that's right. I shall soon get in the way of it, Sam.
Not too fast, Sam; not too fast.'

"Mr. Winkle, stooping forward with his body half doubled up, was
being assisted over the ice by Mr. Weller, in a very singular and
un-swanlike manner, when Mr. Pickwick most innocently shouted
from the opposite bank,--

"'Sam!'

"'Sir?' said Mr. Weller.

"'Here, I want you.'

"'Let go, Sir,' said Sam. 'Don't you hear the governor a-
callin'? Let go, Sir.'

"With a violent effort Mr. Weller disengaged himself from the
grasp of the agonised Pickwickian; and, in so doing, administered
a considerable impetus to the unhappy Mr. Winkle. With an
accuracy which no degree of dexterity or practice could have
insured, that unfortunate gentleman bore swiftly down into the
centre of the reel, at the very moment when Mr. Bob Sawyer was
performing a flourish of unparalleled beauty. Mr. Winkle struck
wildly against him, and with a loud crash they both fell heavily
down.

"Mr. Pickwick ran to the spot. Bob Sawyer had risen to his feet,
but Mr. Winkle was far too wise to do anything of the kind, in
skates. He was seated on the ice, making spasmodic efforts to
smile, but anguish was depicted on every lineament of his
countenance.

"'Are you hurt?' inquired Mr. Benjamin Allen, with great anxiety.

"'Not much,' said Mr. Winkle, rubbing his back very hard.

"'I wish you'd let me bleed you,' said Mr. Benjamin, with great
eagerness.

"'No, thank you,' replied Mr. Winkle hurriedly.

"'What do you think, Mr. Pickwick?' enquired Bob Sawyer.

"Mr. Pickwick was excited and indignant. He beckoned to Mr.
Weller, and said in a stern voice, 'Take his skates off.'

"'No; but really I had scarcely begun,' remonstrated Mr. Winkle.

"'Take his skates off,' repeated Mr. Pickwick firmly.

"The command was not to be resisted. Mr. Winkle allowed Sam to
obey it, in silence.

"'Lift him up,' said Mr. Pickwick. Sam assisted him to rise.

"Mr. Pickwick retired a few paces apart from the bystanders; and
beckoning his friend to approach, fixed a searching look upon
him, and uttering in a low, but distinct and emphatic tone, these
remarkable words,--

"'You're a humbug, Sir.'

"'A what!' said Mr. Winkle starting.

"'A humbug, Sir. I will speak plainer, if you wish it. An
impostor, Sir.'

"With these words Mr. Pickwick turned slowly on his heel, and
rejoined his friends."

There is much life and fun and jollity and some vulgarity in
Pickwick. There is a good deal of eating and far too much
drinking. But when the fun is rather rough, we must remember
that Dickens wrote of the England of seventy years ago and more,
when life was rougher than it is now, and when people did not see
that drinking was the sordid sin we know it to be now.

To many people Pickwick remains Dickens's best book. "The glory
of Charles Dickens," it has been said, "will always be in his
Pickwick, his first, his best, his inimitable triumph."*

*Fred Harrison.

Just when Dickens began to write Pickwick he married, and soon we
find him comfortably settled in a London house, while the other
great writers of his day gathered round him as his friends.

Although not born in London, Dickens was a true Londoner, and
when his work was done he loved nothing better than to roam the
streets. He was a great walker, and thought nothing of going
twenty or thirty miles a day, for though he was small and slight
he had quite recovered from his childish sickliness and was full
of wiry energy. The crowded streets of London were his books.
As he wandered through them his clear blue eyes took note of
everything, and when he was far away, among the lovely sights of
Italy or Switzerland, he was homesick for the grimy streets and
hurrying crowds of London.

After Pickwick many other stories followed; in them Dickens
showed his power not only of making people laugh, but of making
them cry. For the source of laughter and the source of tears are
not very far apart. There is scarcely another writer whose
pathetic scenes are so famous as those of Dickens.

In life there is a great deal that is sad, and one of the things
which touched Dickens most deeply was the misery of children.
The children of to-day are happy in knowing nothing of the
miseries of childhood as it was in the days when Dickens wrote.
In those days tiny children had to work ten or twelve hours a day
in factories, many schools were places of terror and misery, and
few people cared. But Dickens saw and cared and wrote about
these things. And now they are of a bygone day. So children may
remember Dickens with thankful hearts. He is one of their great
champions.

Dickens loved children and they loved him, for he had a most
winning way with them and he understood their little joys and
sorrows. "There are so many people," says his daughter writing
about her father, "There are so many people good, kind, and
affectionate, but who can not remember that they once were
children themselves, and looked out upon the world with a child's
eyes only." This Dickens did always remember, and it made him a
tender and delightful father to whom his children looked up with
something of adoration. "Ever since I can remember anything,"
says his daughter, "I remember him as the good genius of the
house, or as its happy, bright and funny genius." As Thackeray
had a special handwriting for each daughter, Dickens had a
special voice for each child, so that without being named each
knew when he or she was spoken to. He sang funny songs to them
and told funny stories, did conjuring tricks and got up
theatricals, shared their fun and comforted their sorrows. And
this same power of understanding which made him enter into the
joys and sorrows of his children, made him enter into the joys
and sorrows of the big world around him. So that the people of
that big world loved him as a friend, and adored him as a hero.

As the years went on Dickens wrote more and more books. He
started a magazine too, first called Household Words and later
All the Year Round. In this, some of his own works came out as
well as the works of other writers. It added greatly to his
popularity and not a little to his wealth. And as he became rich
and famous, his boyish dream came true. He bought the house of
Gad's Hill which had seemed so splendid and so far off in his
childish eyes, and went to live there with his big family of
growing boys and girls.

It was about this time, too, that Dickens found a new way of
entertaining the world. He not only wrote books but he himself
read them to great audiences. All his life Dickens had loved
acting. Indeed he very nearly became an actor before he found
out his great powers of writing. He many times took part in
private theatricals, one of his favorite parts, you will like to
know, being Captain Bobadil, in Jonson's Every Man in his Humor.
And now all the actor in him delighted in the reading of his own
works, so although many of his friends were very much against
these readings, he went on with them. And wherever he read in
England, Scotland, Ireland, and America, crowds flocked to hear
him. Dickens swayed his audiences at will. He made them laugh,
and cry, and whether they cried they cheered and applauded him.
It was a triumph and an evidence of his power in which Dickens
delighted and which he could not forego, although his friends
thought it was beneath his dignity as an author.

But the strain and excitement were too much. These readings
broke down Dickens's health and wore him out. He was at last
forced to give them up, but it was already too late. A few
months later he died suddenly one evening in June 1870 in his
house at Gad's Hill. He was buried in Westminster, and although
the funeral was very quiet and simple as he himself had wished,
for two days after a constant stream of mourners came to place
flowers upon his grave.

I have not given you a list of Dicken's books because they are to
be found in nearly every household. You will soon be able to
read them and learn to know the characters whose names have
become household words.

Dickens was the novelist of the poor, the shabby genteel, and the
lower middle class. It has been said many times that in all his
novels he never drew for us a single gentleman, and that is very
nearly true. But we need little regret that, for he has left us
a rich array of characters we might never otherwise have known,
such as perhaps no other man could have pictured for us.

BOOKS TO READ

Stories from Dickens, by J. W. M'Spadden. The Children's
Dickens.

Chapter LXXXV TENNYSON--THE POET OF FRIENDSHIP

KEATS had lain beneath the Roman violets six years, and Shelley
somewhat less than five, when a little volume of poems was
published in England. It was called Poems by two Brothers. No
one took any notice of it, and yet in it was the first little
twitter of one of our sweetest singing birds. For the two
brothers were Alfred and Charles Tennyson, boys then of sixteen
and seventeen. It is of Alfred that I mean to tell you in this
last chapter. You have heard of him already in one of the
chapters on the Arthur story, and also you have heard of him as a
friend of Carlyle. And now I will tell you a little more about
him.

Alfred Tennyson was born in 1809 in the Lincolnshire village of
Somersby. His father was the rector there, and had, besides
Alfred, eleven other children. And here about the Rectory
garden, orchard and fields, the Tennyson children played at
knights and warriors. Beyond the field flowed a brook--

"That loves
To purl o'er matted cress and ribbed sand,
Or dimple in the dark of rushy coves,
Drawing into his narrow earthen urn,
In every elbow and turn,
The filter'd tribute of the rough woodland."*

*Ode to Memory.

Of the garden and the fields and of the brook especially, Alfred
kept a memory all through his long life. But at seven he was
sent to live with his grandmother and go to school at Louth,
about ten miles away. "How I did hate that school!" he said,
long afterwards, so we may suppose the years he spent there were
not altogether happy. But when he was eleven he went home again
to be taught by his father, until he went to Cambridge.

At home, Alfred read a great deal, especially poetry. He wrote,
too, romances like Sir Walter Scott's, full of battles, epics in
the manner of Pope, plays, and blank verse. He wrote so much
that his father said, "If Alfred die, one of our greatest poets
will have gone." And besides writing poems, Alfred, who was one
of the big children, used to tell stories to the little ones,--
stories these of knights and ladies, giants and dragons and all
manner of wonderful things. So the years passed, and one day the
two boys, Charles and Alfred, resolved to print their poems, and
took them to a bookseller in Louth. He gave them 20 pounds for
the manuscript, but more than half was paid in books out of the
shop. So the grand beginning was made. But the little book caused
no stir in the great world. No one knew that a poet had broken
silence.

The next year Charles and Alfred went to Cambridge. Alfred soon
made many friends among the clever young men of his day, chief
among them being Arthur Hallam, whose father was a famous
historian.

At college Tennyson won the chancellor's prize for a poem on
Timbuctoo, and the following year he published a second little
volume of poems. This, though kindly received by some great
writers, made hardly more stir than the little volume by "Two
Brothers."

Tennyson did not take a degree at Cambridge, for, owing to his
father's failing health, he was called home. He left college,
perhaps with no very keen regret, for his heart was not in
sympathy with the teaching. In his undergraduate days he wrote
some scathing lines about it. You "teach us nothing," he said,
"feeding not the heart." But he did remember with tenderness
that Cambridge had been the spot where his first and warmest
friendship had been formed.

Soon after Alfred left college, his father died very suddenly.
Although the father was now gone the Tennysons did not need to
leave their home, for the new rector did not want the house. So
life in the Rectory went quietly on; friends came and went, the
dearest friend of all, Arthur Hallam, came often, for he loved
the poet's young sister, and one day they were to be married. It
was a peaceful happy time--

"And all we met was fair and good,
And all was good that Time could bring,
And all the secret of the Spring,
Moved in the chambers of the blood."

Long days were spent reading poetry and talking of many things--

"Or in the all-golden afternoon
A guest, or happy sister, sung,
Or here she brought the harp and flung
A ballad to the brightening moon.

"Nor less it pleased the livelier moods,
Beyond the bounding hill to stray,
And break the live long summer day
With banquet in the distant woods."

And amid this pleasant country life the poet worked on, and
presently another little book of poems appeared. Still fame did
not come, and one severe and blundering review kept Tennyson, it
is said, from publishing anything more for ten years.

But now there fell upon him what was perhaps the darkest sorrow
of his life. Arthur Hallam, who was traveling on the Continent,
died suddenly at Vienna. When the news came to Tennyson that his
friend was gone--

"That in Vienna's fatal walls
God's finger touch'd him, and he slept,"

for a time joy seemed blotted out of life, and only that he might
help to comfort his sister did he wish to live, for--

"That remorseless iron hour
Made cypress of her orange flower,
Despair of Hope."

As an outcome of this grief we have one of Tennyson's finest
poems, In Memoriam. It is an elegy which we place beside Lycidas
and Adonais. But In Memoriam strikes yet a sadder note. For in
Lycidas and Adonais Milton and Shelley mourned kindred souls
rather than dear loved friends. To Tennyson, Arthur Hallam was
"The brother of my love"--

"Dear as the mother to the son
More than my brothers are to me."

In Memoriam is a group of poems rather than one long poem--

"Short swallow-flights of song, that dip
Their wings in tears, and skim away."

It is written in a meter which Tennyson believed he had invented,
but which Ben Jonson and others had used before him. Two hundred
years before Jonson had written a little elegy beginning--

"Though Beautie be the Marke of praise,
And yours of whom I sing be such
As not the world can praise too much,
Yet is't your vertue now I raise."

Here again we see that our literature of to-day is no new born
thing, but rooted in the past. Jonson's poem, however, is a mere
trifle, Tennyson's one of the great things of our literature.
The first notes of In Memoriam were written when sorrow was
fresh, but it was not till seventeen years later that it was
given to the world. It is perhaps the most perfect monument ever
raised to friendship. For in mourning his own loss Tennyson
mourned the loss of all the world. "'I' is not always the author
speaking of himself, but the voice of the human race speaking
thro' him," he says.

After the prologue, the poem tells of the first bitter hopeless
grief, of how friends try to comfort the mourners.

"One writes, that 'Other friends remain,'
That 'Loss is common to the race'--
And common is the common-place,
And vacant chaff well meant for grain.

"That loss if common would not make
My own less bitter, rather more:
Too common! Never morning wore
To evening, but some heart did break."

And yet even now he can say--

"I hold it true, whate'er befall;
I feel it, when I sorrow most;
'Tis better to have loved and lost
Than never to have loved at all."

And so the months glide by, and the first Christmas comes, "The
time draws near the birth of Christ," the bells ring--