ROSEMARY LIBRARY The Speeches of CHARLES DICKENS Other titles in preparation THE NEW REPUBLIC by W. H. MALLOCK With an introduction by SIR JOHN SQUIRE KRIEGSPIEL by F. H. GROOME With an introduction by HENRY WILLIAMSON THE SCHOOL FOR FATHERS by T. GWYNNE With an introduction by ALICE WABRENDER SKETCHES OF WILD SPORTS AND NATURAL HISTORY OF THE HIGHLANDS by CHARLES ST. JOHN With an introduction by D. R. JARDINE L.E ROSEMARY LIBRARY Edited by Sir John Squire The Speeches of CHARLES DICKENS, WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY BERNARD DARWIN, Edited and Prefaced by R. H. Shepherd MICHAEL JOSEPH LTD. 14 Henrietta Street, London, Set and printed in Great Britain by William Brendon at the Mayflower Press,, Plymouth, in Baskerville type, eleven point, on a toned antique-wove paper made by John Dickinson, and bound by James Burn in Swithin Crash Canvas. CONTENTS The fifty-six Speeches comprised in this volume were delivered at the following places and dates : PAGE EDINBURGH June 25, 1841 55 UNITED STATES Jan. 1842 61 BOSTON Feb. 7, 1842 HARTFORD Feb. 7, 1842 69 NEW YORK Feb. 18, 1842 74 MANCHESTER Oct. 5, 1843 80 LIVERPOOL Feb. 26, 1844 88 BIRMINGHAM Feb. 28, 1844 94 LONDON April 6, 1846 1 02 LEEDS Dec. i, 1847 107 GLASGOW Dec. 28, 1847 114 LONDON March /, /<9j/ 122 LONDON April 14, 1851 127 LONDON May 70, 1851 132 LONDON June p, 1851 136 LONDON June 14, 1852 139 BIRMINGHAM Jan. 6, 1853 H3 LONDON April 30, 1853 152 LONDON May 7, 1853 154 BIRMINGHAM Dec. 30, 1853 I 56 LONDON Dec. 30, 1854 1 60 DRURY LANE June 27, 7555 1 68 5 Contents PAGE SHEFFIELD Dec. 22, 1855 179 LONDON March 12, 1856 181 LONDON Nov. 5, 1857 186 LONDON Feb. 9, 1858 193 EDINBURGH March 26, 1858 201 LONDON March 29, 1858 203 LONDON April 29, 1858 2O6 LONDON May i, 1858 208 LONDON May 8, 1858 20g LONDON July 21, 1858 214 MANCHESTER Dec. 3, 1858 217 COVENTRY Dec. 4, 1858 227 LONDON March 29, 1862 230 LONDON May 20, 1862 233 LONDON May n, 1864 237 LONDON May g, 1865 243 LONDON May 20, 1865 249 KNEBWORTH July 29, 1865 257 LONDON Feb. 14, 1866 259 LONDON March 28, 1866 266 LONDON May 7, 1866 269 LONDON June 5, 1867 272 LONDON Sept. 17, 1867 278 LONDON Nov. 2, 1867 280 BOSTON April 8, 1868 284 NEW YORK April 18, 1868 286 NEW YORK April 20, 1868 292 LIVERPOOL April 10, 1869 294 SYDENHAM Aug. 30, 1869 299 BIRMINGHAM Sept. 27, 1869 304 BIRMINGHAM Jan. 6, 1870 317 LONDON March 75, 1870 321 LONDON April 5, 1870 324 LONDON May 2, 1870 330 Introduction by BERNARD DARWIN DICKENS DIED SOME SIXTY-SIX YEARS AGO AND THERE ARE now but few people alive who heard him read from his own books. They tell us, as do the contemporary accounts and as indeed he suggested in his own letters, that the effect produced on his audience was extraordinary, that he made them laugh or cry at will and that during the scene of Nancy's murder women were carried out of the hall in rows, fainting and motionless. Only one dissentient voice has ever been raised, that ofthe American gentleman who declared that Dickens had no more notion of Sam Weller than a cow had of pleating shirts. With him some of us, who like to cherish undisturbed our own of our feel a secret pictures favourites, may sympathy ; but we cannot deny that he was the exception to prove the rule of an universal and frantic admiration and delight. Therefore we entirely believe what we are told, but we cannot really understand. We have not sufficient imagination to conceive the flashing vitality of the reader himself, which carried all those thousands of listeners off their feet. We have to take it largely on trust. The same remark must apply in some degree toDickens's speeches which we know were rapturously received. Speeches are meant to be consumed hot-and-hot as David 7 8 Introduction Gopperfield and the Micawbers consumed the devilled mutton off the gridiron in Buckingham Street. There must be something of cold lifelessness when they are merely read, and this must be particularly true of Dickens, who impressed everybody as being aboundingly, almost " tempestuously full of life. You know," said Mr. Pickwick " to Serjeant Snubbin, how much depends on effect." Dickens knew it too and he had not only the sincerity and the fervour but the histrionic skill to produce it. Some of his words, which seem to us to-day almost commonplace, may from the light of his eye, the mobility of his features and his intensely dramatic nature have roused a storm of feeling difficult now to imagine. Even in reading his books we cannot feel that red-hot indigna- tion at abuses which he awakened among his own and of his referred to contemporaries ; many speeches questions which were at the time burning ones and to-day scarcely smoulder. Yet when all is said those speeches are enormously well worth reprinting and enormously well worth reading, as by-products of his genius. One or two of them are still quoted, such as his few words of farewell after his last public reading, his appeal on behalf of the Children's Hospital and his account at a newspaper dinner of his as a early adventures in post-chaises reporter ; but the others are for the most part much less well known than they deserve to be. They have perhaps suffered, as I think his letters have done, from his immense and over- shadowing fame as a novelist. Those letters are among the most racy, spirited and altogether delightful in the little of English language ; they contain pieces description as as in his books have made the good any ; they might Introduction 9 reputation of a lesser man. Yet we constantly meet people who are on terms of affectionate intimacy with the novels and have not read the letters. The speeches, though many of them are essentially more ephemeral than letters, may well have met with a similar injustice. In these speeches taken as a whole we find Dickens in his serious mood, and that mood does not appeal to us as it did to those of his own time. We do not, as they criticize did, swallow him whole ; we and we skip. We adore those whom Mr. Chesterton called his great creatures, but we do not mind how soon he kills little Nell. Dickens, as it seems to many of us, was least pathetic when he deliberately took his coat off to the job. The death of Mrs. Weller, which he took, so to speak, in his is a conscious effort over the stride, perfect ; he made death ofJo the crossing-sweep, and the only result on us is a writhing discomfort. Thus it is also with Dickens's intense sympathy with the poor. He tried dreadfully in " " Hard Times over the sufferings of the virtuous work- man, Stephen Blackpool, and he appears to us to have made a mess of it. Joe Gargery on the other hand is a spontaneous and effortless creation of genius. So now and again in these speeches we find Dickens palpably taking off his coat and we are not moved perhaps as he meant us to be and as his hearers doubtless were ; but if we read fairly and not peevishly we must, I think, be impressed by the wonderful ardour and genuineness of the man, by his furious hatred of misery and the indiffer- ence to misery, by his passion of pleasure in good deeds and kind thoughts. He was, to use words of his own, "so warm-hearted, so nobly in earnest." He may say at Athenaeums and Mechanics' Institutes that the rank is io Introduction but the guinea's stamp and that kind hearts are more than coronets, but the words do not seem flat and stale in his he declaims so mouth ; them with flaming a belief. Dickens as a man must be taken as a whole and the speeches do bring home to us this essential aspect of his character. As a writer we are to-day, as I have suggested, par- ticularly disinclined to take him as a whole. We want to be real stuff everything what we deem the ; we grow captious and pernickety about any passage which does " " not pass that test. We say that A Tale of Two Cities " is a very fine book but not the genuine stunning." We make an exception in favour ofJerry Cruncher, but in a general way we resent the author having tried an experi- ment. I must admit, with no overwhelming shame, that I incline to this school of thought myself, and that I have most enjoyed the speeches which remind me of beloved things in the books. There is, for instance, the speech on behalf of the Theatrical Fund, in which he falls " to enumerating the different members of the cast. He may be the captain who courts the young lady, whose uncle unaccountably persists in dressing himself in a costume some hundred years older than his time or he may be the young lady's brother in white gloves and inexpressibles, whose duty in the family appears to be to listen to the female members of it whenever they sing and to shake hands with everybody between the verses," and so on, reeling off the rest of the cast with an irresistible is touch enjoyment of his own fun.