Complete Works of Wilkie Collins (2352 page)

The something “from above” never seems to be absent from Dickens, even at his worst. When the strain upon his invention became apparent, and he could only work freely in a more confined space than of old, it was still able to assert itself triumphantly; and his influence over his readers was continued by it to the last day of his life. Looking back over the series of his writings, the first reflection that rises to the mind of any thoughtful person, is one of thankfulness that the most popular of writers, who had carried into the lowest scenes and conditions an amount of observation, fun, and humour not approached by any of his contemporaries, should never have sullied that world-wide influence by a hint of impurity or a possibility of harm. Nor is there anything more surprising than the freshness and variety of character which those writings include, within the range of the not numerous types of character that were the limit of their author’s genius. For, this also appears, upon any review of them collectively, that the teeming life which is in them is that of the time in which his own life was passed; and that with the purpose of showing vividly its form and pressure, was joined the hope and design to leave it better than he found it. It has been objected that humanity receives from him no addition to its best types; that the burlesque humourist is always stronger in him than the reflective moralist; that the light thrown by his genius into out of the way corners of life never steadily shines in its higher beaten ways; and that beside his pictures of what man is or does, there is no attempt to show, by delineation of an exalted purpose or a great career, what man is able to be or to do. In the charge abstractedly there is truth; but the fair remark upon it is that whatever can be regarded as essential in the want implied by it will be found in other forms in his writings, that the perfect innocence of their laughter and tears has been itself a prodigious blessing, and that it is otherwise incident to so great a humourist to work after the fashion most natural to the genius of humour. What kind of work it has been in his case, the attempt is made in preceding pages to show; and on the whole it can be said with some certainty that the best ideals in this sense are obtained, not by presenting with added comeliness or grace the figures which life is ever eager to present as of its best, but by connecting the singularities and eccentricities, which ordinary life is apt to reject or overlook, with the appreciation that is deepest and the laws of insight that are most universal. It is thus that all things human are happily brought within human sympathy. It was at the heart of everything Dickens wrote. It was the secret of the hope he had that his books might help to make people better; and it so guarded them from evil, that there is scarcely a page of the thousands he has written which might not be put into the hands of a little child.
It made him the intimate of every English household, and a familiar friend wherever the language is spoken whose stores of harmless pleasure he has so largely increased.

“The loss of no single man during the present generation, if we except Abraham Lincoln alone,” said Mr. Horace Greeley, describing the profound and universal grief of America at his death, “has carried mourning into so many families, and been so unaffectedly lamented through all the ranks of society.” “The terrible news from England,” wrote Longfellow to me (Cambridge, Mass. 12th of June 1870), “fills us all with inexpressible sadness. Dickens was so full of life that it did not seem possible he could die, and yet he has gone before us, and we are sorrowing for him. . . . I never knew an author’s death cause such general mourning. It is no exaggeration to say that this whole country is stricken with grief . . .” Nor was evidence then wanting, that far beyond the limits of society on that vast continent the English writer’s influence had penetrated. Of this, very touching illustration was given in my first volume; and proof even more striking has since been afforded to me, that not merely in wild or rude communities, but in life the most savage and solitary, his genius had helped to while time away.

“Like all Americans who read,” writes an American gentleman, “and that takes in nearly all our people, I am an admirer and student of Dickens. . . . Its perusal” (that of my second volume) “has recalled an incident which may interest you. Twelve or thirteen years ago I crossed the Sierra Nevada mountains as a Government surveyor under a famous frontiersman and civil engineer — Colonel Lander. We were too early by a month, and became snow-bound just on the very summit. Under these circumstances it was necessary to abandon the wagons for a time, and drive the stock (mules) down the mountains to the valleys where there was pasturage and running water. This was a long and difficult task, occupying several days. On the second day, in a spot where we expected to find nothing more human than a grizzly bear or an elk, we found a little hut, built of pine boughs and a few rough boards clumsily hewn out of small trees with an axe. The hut was covered with snow many feet deep, excepting only the hole in the roof which served for a chimney, and a small pit-like place in front to permit egress. The occupant came forth to hail us and solicit whisky and tobacco. He was dressed in a suit made entirely of flour-sacks, and was curiously labelled on various parts of his person
Best Family Flour
.
Extra.
His head was covered by a wolf’s skin drawn from the brute’s head — with the ears standing erect in a fierce alert manner. He was a most extraordinary object, and told us he had not seen a human being in four months. He lived on bear and elk meat and flour laid in during his short summer. Emigrants in the season paid him a kind of ferry-toll. I asked him how he passed his time, and he went to a barrel and produced
Nicholas Nickleby
and
Pickwick
. I found he knew them almost by heart. He did not know, or seem to care, about the author; but he gloried in Sam Weller, despised Squeers, and would probably have taken the latter’s scalp with great skill and cheerfulness. For Mr. Winkle he had no feeling but contempt, and in fact regarded a fowling-piece as only a toy for a squaw. He had no Bible; and perhaps if he practised in his rude savage way all Dickens taught, he might less have felt the want even of that companion.”

CHAPTER XV.

AMERICA REVISITED: NOVEMBER AND DECEMBER 1867.

1867.

In Boston — Warmth of the Greeting — Old and New Friends — Changes since 1842 — Sale of Tickets in New York — First Boston Reading — Profits — Scene at First New York Sales — A Fire at the Hotel — Increase of New York City — Story of
Black Crook
— Local and General Politics — Railway Travelling — Police of New York — Again in Boston — More Fires — New York Newspapers generally — Cities chosen for Readings — The Webster Murder in 1849 — Again at New York — Illness — Mr. Fields’s Account of Dickens while in America — Miseries of American Travel.

It is the intention of this and the following chapter to narrate the incidents of the visit to America in Dickens’s own language, and in that only. They will consist almost exclusively of extracts from his letters written home, to members of his family and to myself.

On the night of Tuesday the 19th of November he arrived at Boston, where he took up his residence at the Parker House hotel; and his first letter (21st) stated that the tickets for the first four Readings, all to that time issued, had been sold immediately on their becoming saleable. “An immense train of people waited in the freezing street for twelve hours, and passed into the office in their turns, as at a French theatre. The receipts already taken for these nights exceed our calculation by more than £250.” Up to the last moment, he had not been able to clear off wholly a shade of misgiving that some of the old grudges might make themselves felt; but from the instant of his setting foot in Boston not a vestige of such fear remained. The greeting was to the full as extraordinary as that of twenty-five years before, and was given now, as then, to the man who had made himself the most popular writer in the country. His novels and tales were crowding the shelves of all the dealers in books in all the cities of the Union. In every house, in every car, on every steamboat, in every theatre of America, the characters, the fancies, the phraseology of Dickens were become familiar beyond those of any other writer of books. “Even in England,” said one of the New York journals, “Dickens is less known than here; and of the millions here who treasure every word he has written, there are tens of thousands who would make a large sacrifice to see and hear the man who has made happy so many hours. Whatever sensitiveness there once was to adverse or sneering criticism, the lapse of a quarter of a century, and the profound significance of a great war, have modified or removed.” The point was more pithily, and as truly, put by Mr. Horace Greeley in the
Tribune
. “The fame as a novelist which Mr. Dickens had already created in America, and which, at the best, has never yielded him anything particularly munificent or substantial, is become his capital stock in the present enterprise.”

The first Reading was appointed for the second of December, and in the interval he saw some old friends and made some new ones.
Boston he was fond of comparing to Edinburgh as Edinburgh was in the days when several dear friends of his own still lived there. Twenty-five years had changed much in the American city; some genial faces were gone, and on ground which he had left a swamp he found now the most princely streets; but there was no abatement of the old warmth of kindness, and, with every attention and consideration shown to him, there was no intrusion. He was not at first completely conscious of the change in this respect, or of the prodigious increase in the size of Boston. But the latter grew upon him from day to day, and then there was impressed along with it a contrast to which it was difficult to reconcile himself. Nothing enchanted him so much as what he again saw of the delightful domestic life of Cambridge, simple, self-respectful, cordial, and affectionate; and it seemed impossible to believe that within half an hour’s distance of it should be found what might at any time be witnessed in such hotels as that which he was staying at: crowds of swaggerers, loafers, bar-loungers, and dram-drinkers, that seemed to be making up, from day to day, not the least important-part of the human life of the city. But no great mercantile resort in the States, such as Boston had now become, could be without that drawback; and fortunate should we account any place to be, though even so plague-afflicted, that has yet so near it the healthier influence of the other life which our older world has wellnigh lost altogether.

“The city has increased prodigiously in twenty-five years,” he wrote to his daughter Mary. “It has grown more mercantile. It is like Leeds mixed with Preston, and flavoured with New Brighton. Only, instead of smoke and fog, there is an exquisitely bright light air.” “Cambridge is exactly as I left it,” he wrote to me. “Boston more mercantile, and much larger. The hotel I formerly stayed at, and thought a very big one, is now regarded as a very small affair. I do not yet notice — but a day, you know, is not a long time for observation! — any marked change in character or habits. In this immense hotel I live very high up, and have a hot and cold bath in my bed room, with other comforts not in existence in my former day. The cost of living is enormous.” “Two of the staff are at New York,” he wrote to his sister-in-law on the 25th of November, “where we are at our wits’ end how to keep tickets out of the hands of speculators. We have communications from all parts of the country, but we take no offer whatever. The young under-graduates of Cambridge have made a representation to Longfellow that they are 500 strong and cannot get one ticket. I don’t know what is to be done, but I suppose I must read there, somehow. We are all in the clouds until I shall have broken ground in New York.” The sale of tickets, there, had begun two days before the first reading in Boston. “At the New York barriers,” he wrote to his daughter on the first of December, “where the tickets were on sale and the people ranged as at the Paris theatres, speculators went up and down offering twenty dollars for any body’s place. The money was in no case accepted. But one man sold two tickets for the second, third, and fourth nights; his payment in exchange being one ticket for the first night, fifty dollars (about £7 10
s.
), and a ‘brandy-cocktail.’“

On Monday the second of December he read for the first time in Boston, his subjects being the
Carol
and the
Trial from Pickwick;
and his reception, from an audience than which perhaps none more remarkable could have been brought together, went beyond all expectations formed. “It is really impossible,” he wrote to me next morning, “to exaggerate the magnificence of the reception or the effect of the reading. The whole city will talk of nothing else and hear of nothing else to-day. Every ticket for those announced here, and in New York, is sold. All are sold at the highest price, for which in our calculation we made no allowance; and it is impossible to keep out speculators who immediately sell at a premium. At the decreased rate of money even, we had above £450 English in the house last night; and the New York hall holds 500 people more. Everything looks brilliant beyond the most sanguine hopes, and I was quite as cool last night as though I were reading at Chatham.” The next night he read again; and also on Thursday and Friday; on Wednesday he had rested; and on Saturday he travelled to New York.