Complete Works of Wilkie Collins (2338 page)

“I am dining early, before reading, and write literally with my mouth full. But I have just hit upon a name that I think really an admirable one — especially with the quotation
before
it, in the place where our present
H. W.
quotation stands.

“‘The story of our lives, from year to year.’ —
Shakespeare.
”
“All the Year Round.
“A weekly journal conducted by Charles Dickens.”

With the same resolution and energy other things necessary to the adventure were as promptly done. “I have taken the new office,” he wrote from Tavistock House on the 21st of February; “have got workmen in; have ordered the paper; settled with the printer; and am getting an immense system of advertising ready. Blow to be struck on the 12th of March. . . . Meantime I cannot please myself with the opening of my story” (the
Tale of Two Cities
, which
All the Year Round
was to start with), “and cannot in the least settle at it or take to it. . . . I wish you would come and look at what I flatter myself is a rather ingenious account to which I have turned the Stanfield scenery here.” He had placed the
Lighthouse
scene in a single frame; had divided the scene of the
Frozen Deep
into two subjects, a British man-of-war and an Arctic sea, which he had also framed; and the school-room that had been the theatre was now hung with sea-pieces by a great painter of the sea. To believe them to have been but the amusement of a few mornings was difficult indeed. Seen from the due distance there was nothing wanting to the most masterly and elabourate art.

The first number of
All the Year Round
appeared on the 30th of April, and the result of the first quarter’s accounts of the sale will tell everything that needs to be said of a success that went on without intermission to the close. “A word before I go back to Gadshill,” he wrote from Tavistock House in July, “which I know you will be glad to receive. So well has
All the Year Round
gone that it was yesterday able to repay me, with five per cent. interest, all the money I advanced for its establishment (paper, print &c. all paid, down to the last number), and yet to leave a good £500 balance at the banker’s!” Beside the opening of his
Tale of Two Cities
its first number had contained another piece of his writing, the “Poor Man and his Beer;” as to which an interesting note has been sent me. The Rev. T. B. Lawes, of Rothamsted, St. Alban’s, had been associated upon a sanitary commission with Mr. Henry Austin, Dickens’s brother-in-law and counsellor in regard to all such matters in his own houses, or in the houses of the poor; and this connection led to Dickens’s knowledge of a club that Mr. Lawes had established at Rothamsted, which he became eager to recommend as an example to other country neighbourhoods. The club had been set on foot
to enable the agricultural labourers of the parish to have their beer and pipes independent of the public-house; and the description of it, says Mr. Lawes, “was the occupation of a drive between this place (Rothamsted) and London, 25 miles, Mr. Dickens refusing the offer of a bed, and saying that he could arrange his ideas on the journey. In the course of our conversation I mentioned that the labourers were very jealous of the small tradesmen, blacksmiths and others, holding allotment-gardens; but that the latter did so indirectly by paying higher rents to the labourers for a share. This circumstance is not forgotten in the verses on the Blacksmith in the same number, composed by Mr. Dickens and repeated to me while he was walking about, and which close the mention of his gains with allusion to

“A share (concealed) in the poor man’s field,
Which adds to the poor man’s store.”

The periodical thus established was in all respects, save one, so exactly the counterpart of what it replaced, that a mention of this point of difference is the only description of it called for. Besides his own three-volume stories of
The Tale of Two Cities
and
Great Expectations
, Dickens admitted into it other stories of the same length by writers of character and name, of which the authorship was avowed. It published tales of varied merit and success by Mr. Edmund Yates, Mr. Percy Fitzgerald, and Mr. Charles Lever. Mr. Wilkie Collins contributed to it his
Woman in White
,
No Name
, and
Moonstone
, the first of which had a pre-eminent success; Mr. Reade his
Hard Cash;
and Lord Lytton his
Strange Story
. Conferring about the latter Dickens passed a week at Knebworth, accompanied by his daughter and sister-in-law, in the summer of 1861, as soon as he had closed
Great Expectations;
and there met Mr. Arthur Helps, with whom and Lord Orford he visited the so-called “Hermit” near Stevenage, whom he described as Mr. Mopes in
Tom Tiddler’s Ground
. With his great brother-artist he thoroughly enjoyed himself, as he invariably did; and reported him as “in better health and spirits than I have seen him in, in all these years, — a little weird occasionally regarding magic and spirits, but always fair and frank under opposition. He was brilliantly talkative, anecdotical, and droll; looked young and well; laughed heartily; and enjoyed with great zest some games we played. In his artist-character and talk, he was full of interest and matter, saying the subtlest and finest things — but that he never fails in. I enjoyed myself immensely, as we all did.”

In
All the Year Round
, as in its predecessor, the tales for Christmas were of course continued, but with a surprisingly increased popularity; and Dickens never had such sale for any of his writings as for his Christmas pieces in the later periodical. It had reached, before he died, to nearly three hundred thousand. The first was called the
Haunted House
, and had a small mention of a true occurrence in his boyhood which is not included in the bitter record on a former page. “I was taken home, and there was debt at home as well as death, and we had a sale there. My own little bed was so superciliously looked upon by a power unknown to me hazily called The Trade, that a brass coal-scuttle, a roasting jack, and a bird cage were obliged to be put into it to make a lot of it, and then it went for a song. So I heard mentioned, and I wondered what song, and thought what a dismal song it must have been to sing!” The other subjects will have mention in another chapter.

His tales were not his only important work in
All the Year Round
. The detached papers written by him there had a character and completeness derived from their plan, and from the personal tone, as well as frequent individual confessions, by which their interest is enhanced, and which will always make them specially attractive. Their title expressed a personal liking. Of all the societies, charitable or self-assisting, which his tact and eloquence in the “chair” so often helped, none had interested him by the character of its service to its members, and the perfection of its management, so much as that of the Commercial Travellers. His, admiration of their schools introduced him to one who then acted as their treasurer, and whom, of all the men he had known, I think he rated highest for the union of business qualities in an incomparable measure to a nature comprehensive enough to deal with masses of men, however differing in creed or opinion, humanely and justly. He never afterwards wanted support for any good work that he did not think first of Mr. George Moore,
and appeal was never made to him in vain. “Integrity, enterprise, public spirit, and benevolence,” he told the Commercial Travellers on one occasion, “had their synonym in Mr. Moore’s name;” and it was another form of the same liking when he took to himself the character and title of a Traveller
Un
commercial. “I am both a town traveller and a country traveller, and am always on the road. Figuratively speaking, I travel for the great house of Human-interest Brothers, and have rather a large connection in the fancy goods way. Literally speaking, I am always wandering here and there from my rooms in Covent-garden, London: now about the city streets; now about the country by-roads: seeing many little things, and some great things, which, because they interest me, I think may interest others.” In a few words that was the plan and drift of the papers which he began in 1860, and continued to write from time to time until the last autumn of his life.

Many of them, such as “Travelling Abroad,” “City Churches,” “Dullborough,” “Nurses’ Stories,” and “Birthday Celebrations,” have supplied traits, chiefly of his younger days, to portions of this memoir; and parts of his later life receive illustration from others, such as “Tramps,” “Night Walks,” “Shy Neighbourhoods,” “The Italian Prisoner,” and “Chatham Dockyard.” Indeed hardly any is without its personal interest or illustration. One may learn from them, among other things, what kind of treatment he resorted to for the disorder of sleeplessness from which he had often suffered amid his late anxieties. Experimenting upon it in bed, he found to be too slow and doubtful a process for him; but he very soon defeated his enemy by the brisker treatment, of getting up directly after lying down, going out, and coming home tired at sunrise. “My last special feat was turning out of bed at two, after a hard day pedestrian and otherwise, and walking thirty miles into the country to breakfast.” One description he did not give in his paper, but I recollect his saying that he had seldom seen anything so striking as the way in which the wonders of an equinoctial dawn (it was the 15th of October 1857) presented themselves during that walk. He had never before happened to see night so completely at odds with morning, “which was which.” Another experience of his night ramblings used to be given in vivid sketches of the restlessness of a great city, and the manner in which
it
also tumbles and tosses before it can get to sleep. Nor should anyone curious about his habits and ways omit to accompany him with his Tramps into Gadshill lanes; or to follow him into his Shy Neighbourhoods of the Hackney-road, Waterloo-road, Spitalfields, or Bethnal-green. For delightful observation both of country and town, for the wit that finds analogies between remote and familiar things, and for humorous personal sketches and experience, these are perfect of their kind.

“I have my eye upon a piece of Kentish road, bordered on either side by a wood, and having on one hand, between the road-dust and the trees, a skirting patch of grass. Wild flowers grow in abundance on this spot, and it lies high and airy, with a distant river stealing steadily away to the ocean, like a man’s life. To gain the mile-stone here, which the moss, primroses, violets, blue-bells, and wild roses, would soon render illegible but for peering travellers pushing them aside with their sticks, you must come up a steep hill, come which way you may. So, all the tramps with carts or caravans — the Gipsy-tramp, the Show-tramp, the Cheap Jack — find it impossible to resist the temptations of the place; and all turn the horse loose when they come to it, and boil the pot. Bless the place, I love the ashes of the vagabond fires that have scorched its grass!” It was there he found Dr. Marigold, and Chops the Dwarf, and the White-haired Lady with the pink eyes eating meat-pie with the Giant. So, too, in his Shy Neighbourhoods, when he relates his experiences of the bad company that birds are fond of, and of the effect upon domestic fowls of living in low districts, his method of handling the subject has all the charm of a discovery. “That anything born of an egg and invested with wings should have got to the pass that it hops contentedly down a ladder into a cellar, and calls
that
going home, is a circumstance so amazing as to leave one nothing more in this connexion to wonder at.” One of his illustrations is a reduced Bantam family in the Hackney-road deriving their sole enjoyment from crowding together in a pawnbroker’s side-entry; but seeming as if only newly come down in the world, and always in a feeble flutter of fear that they may be found out. He contrasts them with others. “I know a low fellow, originally of a good family from Dorking, who takes his whole establishment of wives, in single file, in at the door of the Jug Department of a disorderly tavern near the Haymarket, manœuvres them among the company’s legs, emerges with them at the Bottle Entrance, and so passes his life: seldom, in the season, going to bed before two in the morning. . . . But, the family I am best acquainted with, reside in the densest part of Bethnal-green. Their abstraction from the objects among which they live, or rather their conviction that those objects have all come into existence in express subservience to fowls, has so enchanted me, that I have made them the subject of many journeys at divers hours. After careful observation of the two lords and the ten ladies of whom this family consists, I have come to the conclusion that their opinions are represented by the leading lord and leading lady: the latter, as I judge, an aged personage, afflicted with a paucity of feather and visibility of quill that gives her the appearance of a bundle of office pens. When a railway goods-van that would crush an elephant comes round the corner, tearing over these fowls, they emerge unharmed from under the horses, perfectly satisfied that the whole rush was a passing property in the air, which may have left something to eat behind it. They look upon old shoes, wrecks of kettles and saucepans, and fragments of bonnets, as a kind of meteoric discharge, for fowls to peck at. . . . Gaslight comes quite as natural to them as any other light; and I have more than a suspicion that, in the minds of the two lords, the early public-house at the corner has superseded the sun. They always begin to crow when the public-house shutters begin to be taken down, and they salute the Potboy, the instant he appears to perform that duty, as if he were Phœbes in person.” For the truth of the personal adventure in the same essay, which he tells in proof of a propensity to bad company in more refined members of the feathered race, I am myself in a position to vouch. Walking by a dirty court in Spitalfields one day, the quick little busy intelligence of a goldfinch, drawing water for himself in his cage, so attracted him that he bought the bird, which had other accomplishments; but not one of them would the little creature show off in his new abode in Doughty-street, and he drew no water but by stealth or under the cloak of night. “After an interval of futile and at length hopeless expectation, the merchant who had educated him was appealed to. The merchant was a bow-legged character, with a flat and cushiony nose, like the last new strawberry. He wore a fur cap, and shorts, and was of the velveteen race, velveteeny. He sent word that he would ‘look round.’ He looked round, appeared in the doorway of the room, and slightly cocked up his evil eye at the goldfinch. Instantly a raging thirst beset that bird; and when it was appeased, he still drew several unnecessary buckets of water, leaping about his perch and sharpening his bill with irrepressible satisfaction.”