Complete Works of Wilkie Collins (2270 page)

The passage about James Lamert, beginning at the thirteenth line of p. , now stands: “His chief ally and encourager in these displays was a youth of some ability, much older than himself, named James Lamert, stepson to his mother’s sister and therefore a sort of cousin, who was his great patron and friend in his childish days. Mary, the eldest daughter of Charles Barrow, himself a lieutenant in the navy, had for her first husband a commander in the navy called Allen; on whose death by drowning at Rio Janeiro she had joined her sister, the navy-pay clerk’s wife, at Chatham; in which place she subsequently took for her second husband Doctor Lamert, an army surgeon, whose son James, even after he had been sent to Sandhurst for his education, continued still to visit Chatham from time to time. He had a turn for private theatricals; and as his father’s quarters were in the ordnance-hospital there, a great rambling place otherwise at that time almost uninhabited, he had plenty of room in which to get up his entertainments.” Two other corrections were consequent on this change. At the 21st line of page , for “the elder cousin” read “the cousin by marriage;” and at the 31st line of p. , “cousin by his mother’s side” should be “cousin by his aunt’s marriage.”

At the 15th line of the st page, “his bachelor-uncle, fellow-clerk,” &c. should be “the uncle who was at this time fellow-clerk,” &c. At the 11th line of page , “Charles-court” should be “Clare-court.” The allusion to one of his favourite localities at the 23d line of page
 
should stand thus: “a little public-house by the water-side called the Fox-under-the-hill, approached by an underground passage which we once missed in looking for it together.”

The passage at p. , having reference to an early friend who had been with him, as I supposed, at his first school, should run thus: “In this however I have since discovered my own mistake: the truth being that it was this gentleman’s connection, not with the Wellington-academy, but with a school kept by Mr. Dawson in Hunter-street, Brunswick-square, where the brothers of Dickens were subsequently placed, which led to their early knowledge of each other. I fancy that they were together also, for a short time, at Mr. Molloy’s in New-square, Lincoln’s-inn; but, whether or not this was so, Dickens certainly had not quitted school many months before his father had made sufficient interest with an attorney of Gray’s-inn, Mr. Edward Blackmore, to obtain him regular employment in his office.” There is subsequent allusion to the same gentleman (at p. ) as his “school-companion at Mr. Dawson’s in Henrietta-street,” which ought to stand as “having known him when himself a law-clerk in Lincoln’s-inn.”

At p.
 
I had stated that Mr. John Dickens reported for the
Morning Chronicle;
and at p.
 
that Mr. Thomas Beard reported for the
Morning Herald;
whereas Mr. Dickens, though in the gallery for other papers, did not report for the
Chronicle
, and Mr. Beard did report for that journal; and where (at p. ) Dickens was spoken of as associated with Mr. Beard in a reporting party which represented respectively the
Chronicle
and
Herald
, the passage ought simply to have described him as “connected with a reporting party, being Lord John Russell’s Devonshire contest above-named, and his associate chief being Mr. Beard, entrusted with command for the
Chronicle
in this particular express.”

At p.
 
I had made a mistake about his “first published piece of writing,” in too hastily assuming that he had himself forgotten what the particular piece was. It struck an intelligent and kind correspondent as very unlikely that Dickens should have fallen into error on such a point; and, making personal search for himself (as I ought to have done), discovered that what I supposed to be another piece was merely the same under another title. The description of his first printed sketch should therefore be “(Mr. Minns and his Cousin, as he afterwards entitled it, but which appeared in the magazine as A Dinner at Poplar Walk).” There is another mistake at p. , of “bandy-legged” instead of “bulky-legged” and, at p. , of “fresh fields” for “fresh woods.”

Those several corrections were made in the Tenth Edition. To the Eleventh these words were prefixed (under date of the 23rd of January, 1872): “Since the above mentioned edition went to press, a published letter has rendered necessary a brief additional note to the remarks made at pp. -.” The remark occurs in my notice of the silly story of Mr. Cruikshank having originated
Oliver Twist
, and, with the note referred to, now stands in the form subjoined. “Whether all Sir Benjamin’s laurels however should fall to the person by whom the tale is told,* or whether any part belongs to the authority alleged for it, is unfortunately not quite clear. There would hardly have been a doubt, if the fable had been confined to the other side of the Atlantic; but it has been reproduced and widely circulated on this side also; and the distinguished artist whom it calumniates by attributing the invention to him has been left undefended from its slander. Dickens’s letter spares me the necessity of characterizing, by the only word which would have been applicable to it, a tale of such incredible and monstrous absurdity as that one of the masterpieces of its author’s genius had been merely an illustration of etchings by Mr. Cruikshank!” Note to the words “person by whom the tale is told:” “*This question has been partly solved, since my last edition, by Mr. Cruikshank’s announcement in the
Times
, that, though Dr. Mackenzie had ‘confused some circumstances with respect to Mr. Dickens looking over some drawings and sketches,’ the substance of his information as to who it was that originated
Oliver Twist
, and all its characters, had been derived from Mr. Cruikshank himself. The worst part of the foregoing fable, therefore, has not Dr. Mackenzie for its author; and Mr. Cruikshank is to be congratulated on the prudence of his rigid silence respecting it as long as Mr. Dickens lived.”

In the Twelfth Edition I mentioned, in the note at p. , a little work of which all notice had been previously omitted; and the close of that note now runs: “He had before written for them, without his name,
Sunday under Three Heads;
and he added subsequently a volume of
Young Couples
.” At p. , “parish abuses” is corrected in the same edition to “parish practices;” and at p. , “in his later works” to “in his latest works.”

I have received letters from several obliging correspondents, among them three or four who were scholars at the Wellington-house Academy before or after Dickens’s time, and one who attended the school with him; but such remark as they suggest will more properly accompany my third and closing volume.

Palace Gate House, Kensington,
29th of October, 1872.

THE LIFE

OF

CHARLES DICKENS.

CHAPTER I.

AMERICAN NOTES.

1842.

Return from America — Longfellow in England — Thirty Years Ago — At Broadstairs — Preparing
Notes
— Fancy for the Opening of
Chuzzlewit
— Reading Tennyson — Theatricals at Margate — A New Protégé — Proposed Dedication — Sea-bathing and Authorship — Emigrants in Canada — Coming to the End — Rejected Motto for
Notes
— Return to London — Cheerless Visit — The Mingled Yarn — Scene at a Funeral — The Suppressed Introductory Chapter to the
Notes
, now first printed — Jeffrey’s Opinion of the
Notes
— Dickens’s Experience of America in 1868.

The reality did not fall short of the anticipation of home. His return was the occasion of unbounded enjoyment; and what he had planned before sailing as the way we should meet, received literal fulfilment. By the sound of his cheery voice I first knew that he was come; and from my house we went together to Maclise, also “without a moment’s warning.” A Greenwich dinner in which several friends (Talfourd, Milnes, Procter, Maclise, Stanfield, Marryat, Barham, Hood, and Cruikshank among them) took part, and other immediate greetings, followed; but the most special celebration was reserved for autumn, when, by way of challenge to what he had seen while abroad, a home-journey was arranged with Stanfield, Maclise, and myself for his companions, into such of the most striking scenes of a picturesque English county as the majority of us might not before have visited: Cornwall being ultimately chosen.

Before our departure he was occupied by his preparation of the
American Notes;
and to the same interval belongs the arrival in London of Mr. Longfellow, who became his guest, and (for both of us I am privileged to add) our attached friend. Longfellow’s name was not then the pleasant and familiar word it has since been in England; but he had already written several of his most felicitous pieces, and he possessed all the qualities of delightful companionship, the culture and the charm, which have no higher type or example than the accomplished and genial American. He reminded me, when lately again in England, of two experiences out of many we had enjoyed together this quarter of a century before. One of them was a day at Rochester, when, met by one of those prohibitions which are the wonder of visitors and the shame of Englishmen, we overleapt gates and barriers, and, setting at defiance repeated threats of all the terrors of law coarsely expressed to us by the custodian of the place, explored minutely the castle ruins. The other was a night among those portions of the population which outrage law and defy its terrors all the days of their lives, the tramps and thieves of London; when, under guidance and protection of the most trusted officers of the two great metropolitan prisons afforded to us by Mr. Chesterton and Lieut. Tracey, we went over the worst haunts of the most dangerous classes. Nor will it be unworthy of remark, in proof that attention is not drawn vainly to such scenes, that, upon Dickens going over them a dozen years later when he wrote a paper about them for his
Household Words
, he found important changes effected whereby these human dens, if not less dangerous, were become certainly more decent. On the night of our earlier visit, Maclise, who accompanied us, was struck with such sickness on entering the first of the Mint lodging-houses in the borough, that he had to remain, for the time we were in them, under guardianship of the police outside. Longfellow returned home by the Great Western from Bristol on the 21st of October, enjoying as he passed through Bath the hospitality of Landor; and at the end of the following week we started on our Cornish travel.

But what before this had occupied Dickens in the writing way must now be told. Not long after his reappearance amongst us, his house being still in the occupation of Sir John Wilson, he went to Broadstairs, taking with him the letters from which I have quoted so largely to help him in preparing his
American Notes;
and one of his first announcements to me (18th of July) shows not only this labour in progress, but the story he was under engagement to begin in November working in his mind. “The subjects at the beginning of the book are of that kind that I can’t
dash
at them, and now and then they fret me in consequence. When I come to Washington, I am all right. The solitary prison at Philadelphia is a good subject, though; I forgot that for the moment. Have you seen the Boston chapter yet? . . . I have never been in Cornwall either. A mine certainly; and a letter for that purpose shall be got from Southwood Smith. I have some notion of opening the new book in the lantern of a lighthouse!” A letter a couple of months later (16th of Sept.) recurs to that proposed opening of his story which after all he laid aside; and shows how rapidly he was getting his
American Notes
into shape. “At the Isle of Thanet races yesterday I saw — oh! who shall say what an immense amount of character in the way of inconceivable villainy and blackguardism! I even got some new wrinkles in the way of showmen, conjurors, pea-and-thimblers, and trampers generally. I think of opening my new book on the coast of Cornwall, in some terribly dreary iron-bound spot. I hope to have finished the American book before the end of next month; and we will then together fly down into that desolate region.” Our friends having Academy engagements to detain them, we had to delay a little; and I meanwhile turn back to his letters to observe his progress with his
Notes
, and other employments or enjoyments of the interval. They require no illustration that they will not themselves supply: but I may remark that the then collected
Poems
of Tennyson had become very favourite reading with him; and that while in America Mr. Mitchell the comedian had given him a small white shaggy terrier, who bore at first the imposing name of Timber Doodle, and became a great domestic pet and companion.

“I have been reading” (7th of August) “Tennyson all this morning on the seashore. Among other trifling effects, the waters have dried up as they did of old, and shown me all the mermen and mermaids, at the bottom of the ocean; together with millions of queer creatures, half-fish and half-fungus, looking down into all manner of coral caves and seaweed conservatories; and staring in with their great dull eyes at every open nook and loop-hole. Who else, too, could conjure up such a close to the extraordinary and as Landor would say ‘most wonderful’ series of pictures in the ‘dream of fair women,’ as —