Complete Works of Wilkie Collins (2303 page)

The first chapter of it was sent me only four days later (nearly half the entire part, so freely his fancy was now flowing and overflowing), with intimation for the artist: “The best subject for Browne will be at Mrs. Pipchin’s; and if he liked to do a quiet odd thing, Paul, Mrs. Pipchin, and the Cat, by the fire, would be very good for the story. I earnestly hope he will think it worth a little extra care. The second subject, in case he shouldn’t take a second from that same chapter, I will shortly describe as soon as I have it clearly (to-morrow or next day), and send it to
you
by post.” The result was not satisfactory; but as the artist more than redeemed it in the later course of the tale, and the present disappointment was mainly the incentive to that better success, the mention of the failure here will be excused for what it illustrates of Dickens himself. “I am really
distressed
by the illustration of Mrs. Pipchin and Paul. It is so frightfully and wildly wide of the mark. Good Heaven! in the commonest and most literal construction of the text, it is all wrong. She is described as an old lady, and Paul’s ‘miniature arm-chair’ is mentioned more than once. He ought to be sitting in a little arm-chair down in the corner of the fireplace, staring up at her. I can’t say what pain and vexation it is to be so utterly misrepresented. I would cheerfully have given a hundred pounds to have kept this illustration out of the book. He never could have got that idea of Mrs. Pipchin if he had attended to the text. Indeed I think he does better without the text; for then the notion is made easy to him in short description, and he can’t help taking it in.”

He felt the disappointment more keenly, because the conception of the grim old boarding-house keeper had taken back his thoughts to the miseries of his own child-life, and made her, as her prototype in verity was, a part of the terrible reality.
I had forgotten, until I again read this letter of the 4th of November 1846, that he thus early proposed to tell me that story of his boyish sufferings which a question from myself, of some months later date, so fully elicited. He was now hastening on with the close of his third number, to be ready for departure to Paris.

“. . . I hope to finish the number by next Tuesday or Wednesday. It is hard writing under these bird-of-passage circumstances, but I have no reason to complain, God knows, having come to no knot yet. . . . I hope you will like Mrs. Pipchin’s establishment. It is from the life, and I was there — I don’t suppose I was eight years old; but I remember it all as well, and certainly understood it as well, as I do now. We should be devilish sharp in what we do to children. I thought of that passage in my small life, at Geneva.
Shall I leave you my life in MS. when I die? There are some things in it that would touch you very much, and that might go on the same shelf with the first volume of Holcroft’s.
”

On the Monday week after that was written he left Lausanne for Paris, and my first letter to him there was to say that he had overwritten his number by three pages. “I have taken out about two pages and a half,” he wrote by return from the hotel Brighton, “and the rest I must ask you to take out with the assurance that you will satisfy me in whatever you do. The sale, prodigious indeed! I am very thankful.” Next day he wrote as to Walter. “I see it will be best as you advise, to give that idea up; and indeed I don’t feel it would be reasonable to carry it out now. I am far from sure it could be wholesomely done, after the interest he has acquired. But when I have disposed of Paul (poor boy!) I will consider the subject farther.” The subject was never resumed. He was at the opening of his admirable fourth part, when, on the 6th of December, he wrote from the Rue de Courcelles: “Here am I, writing letters, and delivering opinions, politico-economical and otherwise, as if there were no undone number, and no undone Dick! Well. Cosi va il mondo (God bless me! Italian! I beg your pardon) — and one must keep one’s spirits up, if possible, even under
Dombey
pressure. Paul, I shall slaughter at the end of number five. His school ought to be pretty good, but I haven’t been able to dash at it freely, yet. However, I have avoided unnecessary dialogue so far, to avoid overwriting; and all I
have
written is point.”

And so, in “point,” it went to the close; the rich humour of its picture of Doctor Blimber and his pupils alternating with the quaint pathos of its picture of little Paul; the first a good-natured exposure of the forcing-system and its fruits, as useful as the sterner revelation in
Nickleby
of the atrocities of Mr. Squeers, and the last even less attractive for the sweetness and sadness of its foreshadowing of a child’s death, than for those strange images of a vague, deep thoughtfulness, of a shrewd unconscious intellect, of mysterious small philosophies and questionings, by which the young old-fashioned little creature has a glamour thrown over him as he is passing away. It was wonderfully original, this treatment of the part that thus preceded the close of Paul’s little life; and of which the first conception, as I have shown, was an afterthought. It quite took the death itself out of the region of pathetic commonplaces, and gave to it the proper relation to the sorrow of the little sister that survives it. It is a fairy vision to a piece of actual suffering; a sorrow with heaven’s hues upon it, to a sorrow with all the bitterness of earth.

The number had been finished, he had made his visit to London, and was again in the Rue de Courcelles, when on Christmas day he sent me its hearty old wishes, and a letter of Jeffrey’s on his new story of which the first and second part had reached him. “Many merry Christmases, many happy new years, unbroken friendship, great accumulation of cheerful recollections, affection on earth, and Heaven at last! . . . Is it not a strange example of the hazard of writing in parts, that a man like Jeffrey should form his notion of Dombey and Miss Tox on three months’ knowledge? I have asked him the same question, and advised him to keep his eye on both of them as time rolls on.
I do not at heart, however, lay much real stress on his opinion, though one is naturally proud of awakening such sincere interest in the breast of an old man who has so long worn the blue and yellow. . . . He certainly did some service in his old criticisms, especially to Crabbe. And though I don’t think so highly of Crabbe as I once did (feeling a dreary want of fancy in his poems), I think he deserved the pains-taking and conscientious tracking with which Jeffrey followed him”. . . . Six days later he described himself sitting down to the performance of one of his greatest achievements, his number five, “most abominably dull and stupid. I have only written a slip, but I hope to get to work in strong earnest to-morrow. It occurred to me on special reflection, that the first chapter should be with Paul and Florence, and that it should leave a pleasant impression of the little fellow being happy, before the reader is called upon to see him die. I mean to have a genteel breaking-up at Doctor Blimber’s therefore, for the Midsummer vacation; and to show him in a little quiet light (now dawning through the chinks of my mind), which I hope will create an agreeable impression.” Then, two days later: “. . . I am working very slowly. You will see in the first two or three lines of the enclosed first subject, with what idea I am ploughing along. It is difficult; but a new way of doing it, it strikes me, and likely to be pretty.”

And then, after three days more, came something of a damper to his spirits, as he thus toiled along. He saw public allusion made to a review that had appeared in the
Times
of his Christmas book, and it momentarily touched what he too truly called his morbid susceptibility to exasperation. “I see that the ‘good old Times’ are again at issue with the inimitable B. Another touch of a blunt razor on B.’s nervous system. — Friday morning. Inimitable very mouldy and dull. Hardly able to work. Dreamed of
Timeses
all night. Disposed to go to New Zealand and start a magazine.” But soon he sprang up, as usual, more erect for the moment’s pressure; and after not many days I heard that the number was as good as done. His letter was very brief, and told me that he had worked so hard the day before (Tuesday, the 12th of January), and so incessantly, night as well as morning, that he had breakfasted and lain in bed till midday. “I hope I have been very successful.” There was but one small chapter more to write, in which he and his little friend were to part company for ever; and the greater part of the night of the day on which it was written, Thursday the 14th, he was wandering desolate and sad about the streets of Paris. I arrived there the following morning on my visit; and as I alighted from the malle-poste, a little before eight o’clock, found him waiting for me at the gate of the post-office bureau.

I left him on the 2nd of February with his writing-table in readiness for number six; but on the 4th, enclosing me subjects for illustration, he told me he was “not under weigh yet. Can’t begin.” Then, on the 7th, his birthday, he wrote to warn me he should be late. “Could not begin before Thursday last, and find it very difficult indeed to fall into the new vein of the story. I see no hope of finishing before the 16th at the earliest, in which case the steam will have to be put on for this short month. But it can’t be helped. Perhaps I shall get a rush of inspiration. . . . I will send the chapters as I write them, and you must not wait, of course, for me to read the end in type. To transfer to Florence, instantly, all the previous interest, is what I am aiming at. For that, all sorts of other points must be thrown aside in this number. . . . We are going to dine again at the Embassy to-day — with a very ill will on my part. All well. I hope when I write next I shall report myself in better cue. . . . I have had a tremendous outpouring from Jeffrey about the last part, which he thinks the best thing past, present, or to come.”
Three more days and I had the MS. of the completed chapter, nearly half the number (in which as printed it stands second, the small middle chapter having been transposed to its place). “I have taken the most prodigious pains with it; the difficulty, immediately after Paul’s death, being very great. May you like it! My head aches over it now (I write at one o’clock in the morning), and I am strange to it. . . . I think I shall manage Dombey’s second wife (introduced by the Major), and the beginning of that business in his present state of mind, very naturally and well. . . . Paul’s death has amazed Paris. All sorts of people are open-mouthed with admiration. . . . When I have done, I’ll write you
such
a letter! Don’t cut me short in your letters just now, because I’m working hard. . . .
I
’ll make up. . . . Snow — snow — snow — a foot thick.” The day after this, came the brief chapter which was printed as the first; and then, on the 16th, which he had fixed as his limit for completion, the close reached me; but I had meanwhile sent him out so much of the proof as convinced him that he had underwritten his number by at least two pages, and determined him to come to London. The incident has been told which soon after closed his residence abroad, and what remained of his story was written in England.

I shall not farther dwell upon it in any detail. It extended over the whole of the year; and the interest and passion of it, when to himself both became centred in Florence and in Edith Dombey, took stronger hold of him, and more powerfully affected him, than had been the case in any of his previous writings, I think, excepting only the close of the
Old Curiosity Shop
. Jeffrey compared Florence to little Nell, but the differences from the outset are very marked, and it is rather in what disunites or separates them that we seem to find the purpose aimed at. If the one, amid much strange and grotesque violence surrounding her, expresses the innocent, unconsciousness of childhood to such rough ways of the world, passing unscathed as Una to her home beyond it, the other is this character in action and resistance, a brave young resolute heart that will
not
be crushed, and neither sinks nor yields, but from earth’s roughest trials works out her own redemption even here. Of Edith from the first Jeffrey judged more rightly; and, when the story was nearly half done, expressed his opinion about her, and about the book itself, in language that pleased Dickens for the special reason that at the time this part of the book had seemed to many to have fallen greatly short of the splendour of its opening. Jeffrey said however quite truly, claiming to be heard with authority as his “Critic-laureate,” that of all his writings it was perhaps the most finished in diction, and that it equalled the best in the delicacy and fineness of its touches, “while it rises to higher and deeper passions, not resting, like most of the former, in sweet thoughtfulness, and thrilling and attractive tenderness, but boldly wielding all the lofty and terrible elements of tragedy, and bringing before us the appalling struggles of a proud, scornful, and repentant spirit.” Not that she was exactly this. Edith’s worst qualities are but the perversion of what should have been her best. A false education in her, and a tyrant passion in her husband, make them other than Nature meant; and both show how life may run its evil course against the higher dispensations.

As the catastrophe came in view, a nice point in the management of her character and destiny arose. I quote from a letter of the 19th of November, when he was busy with his fourteenth part. “Of course she hates Carker in the most deadly degree. I have not elabourated that, now, because (as I was explaining to Browne the other day) I have relied on it very much for the effect of her death. But I have no question that what you suggest will be an improvement. The strongest place to put it in, would be the close of the chapter immediately before this last one. I want to make the two first chapters as light as I can, but I will try to do it, solemnly, in that place.” Then came the effect of this fourteenth number on Jeffrey; raising the question of whether the end might not come by other means than her death, and bringing with it a more bitter humiliation for her destroyer. While engaged on the fifteenth (21st December) Dickens thus wrote to me: “I am thoroughly delighted that you like what I sent. I enclose designs. Shadow-plate, poor. But I think Mr. Dombey admirable. One of the prettiest things in the book ought to be at the end of the chapter I am writing now. But in Florence’s marriage, and in her subsequent return to her father, I see a brilliant opportunity. . . . Note from Jeffrey this morning, who won’t believe (positively refuses) that Edith is Carker’s mistress. What do you think of a kind of inverted Maid’s Tragedy, and a tremendous scene of her undeceiving Carker, and giving him to know that she never meant that?” So it was done; and when he sent me the chapter in which Edith says adieu to Florence, I had nothing but praise and pleasure to express. “I need not say,” he wrote in reply, “I can’t, how delighted and overjoyed I am by what you say and feel of it. I propose to show Dombey
twice
more; and in the end, leave him exactly as you describe.” The end came; and, at the last moment when correction was possible, this note arrived. “I suddenly remember that I have forgotten Diogenes. Will you put him in the last little chapter? After the word ‘favourite’ in reference to Miss Tox, you can add, ‘except with Diogenes, who is growing old and wilful.’ Or, on the last page of all, after ‘and with them two children: boy and girl’ (I quote from memory), you might say ‘and an old dog is generally in their company,’ or to that effect. Just what you think best.”