Dickens, Ireland, and the Irish, Part I

Litvack, L. (2003). Dickens, Ireland, and the Irish, Part I. The Dickensian, 99(1), 34-59.

Published in: The Dickensian

Document Version: Version created as part of publication process; publisher's layout; not normally made publicly available

Queen's University Belfast - Research Portal: Link to publication record in Queen's University Belfast Research Portal

General rights Copyright for the publications made accessible via the Queen's University Belfast Research Portal is retained by the author(s) and / or other copyright owners and it is a condition of accessing these publications that users recognise and abide by the legal requirements associated with these rights.

Take down policy The Research Portal is Queen's institutional repository that provides access to Queen's research output. Every effort has been made to ensure that content in the Research Portal does not infringe any person's rights, or applicable UK laws. If you discover content in the Research Portal that you believe breaches copyright or violates any law, please contact [email protected].

Download date:06. Oct. 2021 TheSpring 2003 No. 459 Vol. 99 Part 1 ISSN 0012-2440

Dickensian DPublished by The Dickens Fellowship Subscriptions and Advertising THE DICKENSIAN is published three times a year, in Spring, Summer and Winter. Subscriptions must be paid in advance, and cover a year’s three issues. Standing orders are not accepted. Rates are as follows: United Kingdom individual subscribers £11.50 United Kingdom institutional subscribers £14.00 Overseas individual subscribers £12.50 Overseas institutional subscribers £16.00 Members of the Dickens Fellowship enjoy a privilege rate of £8.00. Overseas subscribers wishing to receive their copies by airmail must send an additional sum of £6.00. Payment in currencies other than Sterling should include an additional £1.00 to cover bank charges. Advertising rates: Full-page advertisement Ð £100.00; Half-page advertisement Ð £50.00. Enquiries concerning subscriptions and advertising should be sent to: Dr Tony Williams, The Dickens House, 48 Doughty Street, London WC1N 2LF. Email: [email protected]. Requests for bound volumes of THE DICKENSIAN should also be addressed to Dr Williams.

Copyright and Reproduction The moral and legal rights of the Authors whose works are contained in this publication have been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. No part of any work within this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the copyright owners.

Contributions and Editorial Correspondence Contributions and editorial correspondence should be sent to the Editor at: School of English, Rutherford College, University of Kent, Canterbury, Kent CT2 7NX. Fax: (01227) 827001. Email: [email protected]. Contributors wishing to have their articles returned should enclose an s.a.e. or international reply coupon.

Contributors are asked to observe the following house-style conventions in submitting material to THE DICKENSIAN: 2 copies of each submitted article or review; typescripts to be double-spaced; single quotation marks should be used, with double for quotations within quotations; the possessive ‘s’ is added to ‘Dickens’ (i.e. ‘Dickens’s’) and to similar proper names; dates should give Day followed by Month followed by Year (e.g. 7 February 1812); no full stop should follow abbreviations such as ‘Mr’ or ‘Dr’. The Dickensian Edited by MALCOLM ANDREWS Fellowship Notes & News: TONY WILLIAMS Picture Research: ANDREW XAVIER Published three times a year by the Dickens Fellowship, The Dickens House, 48 Doughty Street, London WC1N 2LF (See opposite for details concerning Subscriptions and Contributions) Spring 2003 No. 459 Vol. 99 Part 1 ISSN 0012-2440 CONTENTS Editorial 3 Notes on Contributors 4 Charles Dickens and Kate Field 5 CAROLYN J. MOSS The Contemporary Dutch Critical Reception of Dickens 11 OSCAR WELLENS Charles Dickens Ð Syndrome Spotter: 22 A Review of Some Morbid Observations JOHN COSNETT Nickleby’s Pilgrimage: Footnote to a Footnote 32 EDGAR ROSENBERG Dickens, Ireland and the Irish Ð Part I 34 LEON LITVACK Letters to the Editor 60 Book Reviews JEREMY TAMBLING on Lyn Pykett’s Critical Issues 62 LOUIS JAMES on Michael Slater’s biography of Douglas Jerrold 64 LEON LITVACK on Lilian Nayder’s Unequal Partners 66 ROGER CARDINAL on Dominic Rainsford’s68 history of ‘La Manche’ Radio Reviews ROBERT GIDDINGS on Scrooge Blues and Not So Tiny Tim 71 DONALD HAWES on the serialised Old Curiosity Shop 73 JEREMY CLARKE on Lend Me Your Ears 74 Fellowship Notes and News 77 When Found Fellowship Diary & Branch Lines ‘About the House’ & Friends of Dickens House A Gad’s Hill ‘Mystery’ Obituaries 1 Kate Field, author of Pen Photographs of Charles Dickens’s Readings as she appeared in 1868 when introduced to the ‘Great Charles’. (Photograph by Sarony). See article in this issue on ‘Charles Dickens and Kate Field’.

2 Editorial

The Fellowship is in process of reviewing its 100-year-old constitution. This has meant a reconsideration not only of its managerial structures and machinery, the relationship between branches and headquarters, and so on, but also of the principles underpinning its identity: what does the Fellowship stand for? The four stated aims in the constitution prioritise community, compassion, charity and commemorative preservation Ð all in the name of Charles Dickens. So, is corporate commitment to these aspirations what it takes to be a signed-up ‘Dickensian’? What exactly does ‘Dickensian’ now mean, either as noun or adjective? Dictionaries seldom give formal recognition to the noun ‘Dickensian’, although it appears regularly as an adjective, and in that form is notoriously a mesh of apparent contradictions. A trawl of modern dictionary definitions of the adjective produces the following examples (following on from the simple, neutral meaning of ‘after the style of Charles Dickens’): denoting poverty, distress, and exploitation as depicted in the novels… grotesquely comic, as in some of the characters of Dickens [Collins Concise Dictionary, 4th edn. 1999]… resembling the 19c English social life depicted in the novels of Charles Dickens…, especially the poor living and working conditions or the odd and often grotesque characters described [Chambers 21st Century Dictionary, updated edn. 1999]… resembling or suggestive of conditions described in Dickens’ novels, esp: (a) squalid and poverty- stricken (b) characterized by jollity and conviviality (c) grotesquely comic [Collins English Dictionary 1979: 3rd edn. updated 1994]… suggestive of the conviviality of Victorian amusements and customs… vividly delineated in character or incident [Longman Dictionary, 1984)

We might want to offer a few other meanings, just to complicate the picture a little more, such as ‘suggestive of picturesquely archaic and inefficient working practices or environment’. Readers might like to contribute further meanings? None of these dictionary entries, incidentally, includes that distinctive attribute enshrined for us in our constitution: …suggestive of Dickens’s ‘love of humanity’. When dictionaries admit the noun form, the definition of ‘a Dickensian’ is usually something like ‘an admirer of Dickens’, or ‘a student of Dickens’. Compare this with some analogies. A ‘Marxist’ is someone who abides by the doctrines of Karl Marx. A ‘Christian’ is someone whose life is governed by respect for (in the words of the Oxford English Dictionary) ‘the precepts and example of Christ’. To what extent does the Fellowship’s notion of being ‘a Dickensian’ imply ideological commitment to Dickens’s ‘precepts and example’? Is Dickens someone we would wish to ‘follow’? The Fellowship’s four stated aims imply that to be formally a ‘Dickensian’, in Fellowship

3 terms, does indeed involve some active allegiance to particular values beyond being simply an ‘admirer’ or ‘student’ of Dickens. Therein lies some of the difference between a ‘Fellowship’ and a literary ‘Society’. The particular Dickensian values we adopted a hundred years ago at the founding of the Fellowship are, of course, exclusively the benign ones associated with Dickens’s ‘precepts and example’: the charity, the compassion. Dickens’s political radicalism, for instance, would not be to the taste of every ‘Dickensian’; nor would his spasms of racism, his sexist prejudices, his making comic or dramatic capital out of deformity and eccentricity. Furthermore, the Dickens known to the Fellowship a century ago is not the same as the Dickens we know now. We have changed, culturally, and Dickens has changed: every few years scholars and biographers give the accumulated kaleidoscopic data of his life and works a good shake and watch ‘Charles Dickens’ resettle to a shape with slightly new configurations. Perhaps, as ‘Dickensians’, we compromise. Selectively and privately, as individuals, we are drawn to a man with many different, contentious and often contradictory qualities: publicly and formally, as an organisation, we devote ourselves to his unexceptionable ‘precepts and example’.

Notes on Contributors JOHN COSNETT is a retired physician-neurologist, previously Associate Professor at the University of Natal Medical School, Durban. He now lives in Northern Ireland. He has written on aspects of Tropical Neurology and Medical History. ROBERT GIDDINGS is Professor Emeritus, School of Media and Performing Arts, Bournemouth University. His Student Guide to Charles Dickens was published last year and he is co-author of The Classic Serial on Television and Radio. LEON LITVACK is Reader in Victorian Studies at the Queen’s University of Belfast. He is currently working on the authoritative Clarendon edition of Our Mutual Friend. His Complete Critical Guide to Charles Dickens (Routledge) will appear in late 2003. CAROLYN MOSS has edited Kate Field: Selected Letters and Kate Field’s Pen Photographs of Charles Dickens’s Readings. She has also co-authored (with Sidney P. Moss) Charles Dickens and His Chicago Relatives and The Charles Dickens-Thomas Powell Vendetta. EDGAR ROSENBERG is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Cornell University. He is a prolific Dickensian scholar and critic, the editor of the Norton Critical Edition of Great Expectations, and has most recently published on Thomas Mann and other twentieth-century German novelists. JEREMY TAMBLING is Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Hong Kong and has written widely on Dickens, most recently as editor of the Penguin David Copperfield and as author of Lost in the American City: Dickens, James and Kafka (2001). OSCAR WELLENS teaches English literature at the Free University of Brussels. His main area of research is British Romanticism, on which he has published numerous articles. He is currently writing a work on the Romantics’ impressions of the Continent. 4 Charles Dickens and Kate Field

CAROLYN J. MOSS

ATE FIELD’S RELATION TO DICKENS climaxed with the third edition of her book, Pen Photographs of Charles Dickens’s Readings KTaken from Life (London: Trübner; Boston: Osgood, 1871).1 But there is a prelude as well as a postlude to that climax, known, if known at all, only in scattered bits and pieces. On the very January evening in 1842 that Dickens arrived in the States and booked into Boston’s Tremont House, Kate Field’s father, Joseph Matthew Field, famed as journalist, newspaper owner, playwright, actor, and theatre manager, performed in Boz! A Masque Phrenologic, an entertainment he had written to amuse the twenty-nine- year-old genius. Very likely, Dickens, himself an actor, if still an amateur one, went backstage at the Tremont Theatre to express his gratitude to Field, gratitude he expressed again when Field sent him the manuscript of the playlet:

Mr Dickens [he said of himself] presents his compliments to Mr Field, and is extremely obliged to him for the MS he had the goodness to send last night. Though [if] Mr Dickens had not received any such mark of Mr Field’s courtesy and attention, he would still have felt it a pleasure and a duty to thank him for his most ingenious compliment, which afforded him very high gratification and entertainment.2

This note, dictated but not signed by Dickens, was written by George Washington Putnam, the young American whom Boz had hired as his travelling secretary within three days of his arrival in the States, and whose chief function was politely to refuse the myriad requests from strangers inviting Dickens to their homes, or pleading for a lock of his hair, or asking him to correct their manuscripts and find publishers for them. That this was not a mere bread-and-butter note is indicated by the fact that Dickens saved the manuscript of Boz!, which came to be lodged in the John Forster Collection after the Inimitable’s death. Dickens’s note was cherished by Kate Field: first, because from childhood she was a great reader and admirer of the author; secondly, because she revered her father to the point of modelling her career on him. Thus she became in time a freelance journalist, actress, playwright, newspaper owner, and, to go him one better, a lecturer, besides being involved in scores of significant cultural enterprises that won her, among other honours, the Palme Académique, the highest distinction the French Republic could bestow on an individual for service to literature and art. And thus in her latter years, to no one’s surprise, she became heralded as one of America’s foremost women.3

5 Two days after the Boz! event, Field and his famous actress wife, the beautiful Eliza Riddle Field, again performed for Dickens’s delectation at the Tremont Theatre Ð this time the first act of Nicholas Nickleby, the novel Field had dramatised three years earlier. Still later these selfsame actors performed Field’s Quozziana (Quozz being a play on Boz), a piece that mocked the well-meaning but overdone reception of Dickens that ‘America’s guest’ came to complain of so bitterly Ð the cheering crowds that dogged his steps, the incessant balls and dinners that courtesy obliged him to attend, the deputations of all kinds that he felt constrained to receive. It is intriguing to think that, on those occasions when Dickens went backstage to thank the Fields for their performances, he met, as seems likely enough, the actors’ then only child, the four-year-old Kate, who was to grow up ‘tall and beautiful, with magnificent hair and column-like throat.’4 (see Frontispiece) Intriguing because twenty-four years later Kate Field would go backstage at Tremont Temple (the magnificent auditorium built on the very site of the old burned-down Tremont Theatre) to be introduced to Dickens and to thank him for his performances. For she was much moved by Dickens’s readings Ð so much so that she devotedly attended his Boston and New York performances and as devotedly reported on them for the newspapers. On one occasion, which fell on New Year’s Eve 1867, Kate Field became possessed with the idea of presenting the great Charles, as she called him, with the offering of a bouquet.5 Despite freezing 18-degree weather and a buffeting northeaster, she went from flower-shop to flower-shop, but was turned down by all of them, as orders for New Year’s Day had overwhelmed the florists. At long last and after much pleading, she prevailed upon one poor shopkeeper to prepare the required bouquet. That errand accomplished, she had second thoughts and was tortured ‘by imagining that Mr Dickens might think me very impertinent’. At length, overcoming her scruples, she did up the basket of violets with red, white, and blue ribbons, to which she fastened a note ‘Wishing Mr Dickens “A Happy New Year” in America. “God bless him” every one’. When she entered the foyer of Steinway Hall that evening, she found George Dolby, Dickens’s bluff, bewhiskered tour manager, awaiting her to deliver a message from his Chief. ‘I asked him,’ Dolby explained, ‘whether he saw you in the audience, to which he replied, “See her? Yes, God bless her! She’s the best audience I ever had.”’ Taken aback but very pleased, Kate Field responded, ‘And I have something for Mr Dickens’, wherewith she presented her basket of violets. Before the Inimitable made his appearance, a stagehand placed the basket on Dickens’s reading desk. ‘Then’, in Kate Field’s words, ‘out came Mr Dickens, smiling profusely... as if to say “I hope Miss Field is pleased with my way of receiving her flowers.”’ Kate Field’s intuition proved correct, for a few days later she received a letter from Dickens, together with an engraved portrait of himself: 6 My dear Miss Kate Field, I entreat you to accept my most cordial thanks for your charming New Year’s present. If you could know what pleasure it yielded me you would be almost repaid even for your delicate and sympathetic kindness. But I must avow that nothing in the pretty basket of flowers was quite so interesting to me as a certain bright, fresh face I have seen at my Readings, which I am told you may see too when you look in the glass. With all good wishes Believe me, Always faithfully yours, Charles Dickens6

In February 1868 the first version of Pen Photographs was announced in newspaper advertisements as forthcoming Ð a 38-page pamphlet, as it turned out, that proved even more popular than her newspaper reports of Dickens’s performances. James R. Osgood of Ticknor & Fields (the sponsor of Dickens’s readings and the authorised American publisher of his works), who was escorting Dickens on his tour, wrote to Kate Field to tell her that Dickens had seen a notice of her book and proposed to have it reprinted by his London publisher, Chapman & Hall, if she would furnish advance sheets. ‘Amazed at Dickens’s proposal!’ Kate Field exclaimed in her diary.7 She wrote at once to Loring, her Boston publisher, to send Dickens page proofs. Loring, however, appears to have been dilatory, for some time later Osgood called at her hotel to report that the book, which had been published in the meantime, was smaller than Mr Dickens had supposed and that it might be too late to obtain British copyright. Naturally disappointed, Kate Field was nevertheless pleased that Dickens and the Boston papers praised the book so warmly, and she proceeded to enlarge it for a second edition.

Though Kate Field and Dickens admired each other, they never met face to face until 7 April, some three weeks before Dickens was to leave America. In the green-room of Tremont Temple, James T. Fields of Ticknor & Fields, together with his beautiful wife Annie, introduced her to the great Charles. Dickens said he was delighted to make her acquaintance. She replied that she owed him so heavy a debt that she never should be able to pay the interest. He in turn replied, ‘Then I will give you a receipt in full.’8 The next evening Dickens gave his last reading in Boston before concluding his tour in New York on 20 April. Kate Field had a florist send him another lovely basket of flowers, this time filled with pansies Ð in the language of flowers, the symbol for thoughts. On the card she wrote: A little western flower That’s for thoughts.9 7 Field’s allusion was to A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the point at which Oberon tells Puck that he had ‘mark’d... where the bolt of Cupid fell/... upon a little western flower,/ Before milk-white, now purple with love’s wound.’10 (In the final chapter of Pen Photographs, titled ‘Farewell’, she hoped that her pansies might ‘whisper in genial Boz’s ear the words, “Forget me not.”’) If Kate Field was taken with Dickens, the feeling was mutual. He had seen her among his Boston and New York audiences numerous times Ð indeed, he had seen her at some of the same programmes two and three times Ð and he was impressed by the devotedness, not to say loveliness, of his admirer. On 9 April she ordered ‘a beautiful laurel wreath’ to be sent to Dickens, laurel, of course, variously symbolising fame, honour, and victory. Whatever significance Dickens may have attached to the gift, he must have been pleased to receive it from, as he had said, the best audience he ever had.

Kate Field wrote her last missive to Dickens a week before he boarded the Russia, the steamship that would take him back to England:

Honored Sir: Ð In Boston, last week [after your reading], I had sufficient courage to tell you that I owed you so heavy a debt as to be unable to pay even the interest, and you were kind enough to say that you would give me a receipt for the whole amount. Will you think me presumptuous if I ask you to write this receipt beneath the accompanying engraving [sent to her by Dickens]. Without it, I shall be bankrupt; with it, I shall be more than ever, Gratefully, Kate Field.11

What Dickens wrote on the engraved portrait of himself is unknown, for the engraving, if extant, remains unlocated, though it hung in her chambers until her death. On 22 April, the very day that Dickens was to leave America, Kate Field was aboard a Hudson River ferry in New York Harbour on her way to catch a train at Jersey City that would take her to Washington, D.C. to cover President Andrew Johnson’s impeachment trial for the New York Tribune. By sheer coincidence, she chanced to see the Russia getting up steam while waiting for passengers and mail. Standing at the rail, remembering what she called her debt to Dickens, she bade the great Charles ‘Godspeed’.12

Dickens could hardly have left Kate Field’s thoughts for long, if only because, over a quarter of a century, she made the Immortal Memory her most popular and most frequently delivered lecture Ð or rather lectures, as she continually played the changes on her subject. Indeed, the last lecture she gave a few months before her death from pneumonia was ‘An Evening with Charles Dickens’.13 Through the good offices of Anthony Trollope, whose ‘most chosen friend’ was Kate Field,14 she received an 8 Advertisement for Kate Field’s Lectures on Dickens: in her weekly paper, Kate Field’s Washington (10 December 1890).

9 invitation from Charles Dickens fils, who had purchased the homestead at auction,15 so as to be able to discourse on ‘Dickens’s Home at Gad’s Hill’. She lectured on him in such American cities as Boston, New York, Washington, Chicago, St. Louis, Kansas City, and San Francisco, as well as towns bearing such names as Paw Paw, Weeping Water, and Lone Mound. She also lectured on Dickens in Alaska, England, and Hawaii, addressing all sorts of audiences, from the lowly and obscure to the rich and famous. While in London, searching for fresh material concerning her idol, she also visited Georgina Hogarth, who seemed always ready to reminisce about her famous brother-in-law. And when Gail Hamilton, a controversial American journalist, revived the charge that Dickens had maintained a ménage à trois, Kate Field defended Georgina, saying ‘she was one of the best of women... of whom that spitfire can know nothing’.16 Finally, in 1882, she dedicated her book on Charles Albert Fechter, the brilliant tragedian and the dear friend of her idol, ‘To the Memory of CHARLES DICKENS’.

1A reprint has recently appeared, with an introduction by Carolyn J. Moss, together with title pages of the three versions of Pen Photographs (Troy, New York: Whitston, 1998). 2MS, Kate Field Collection, Boston Public Library; published in Pilgrim Edition of The Letters of Charles Dickens, 3: 19-20. This edition is hereafter abbreviated to Letters. 3For a biographical essay on Kate Field, see Carolyn J. Moss, ed., Kate Field: Selected Letters (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1996), xvii-xxx. 4Frances Power Cobbe, Italics: Brief Notes on Politics, People, and Places in Italy (London: Trübner, 1864), 397. 5The episode, taken from Kate Field’s diary, is recorded by Lilian Whiting, Kate Field: A Record (Boston: Little, Brown, 1899), 173-75. Though Whiting frequently quoted from Kate Field’s diary, she destroyed it, probably because she considered it too revealing. 6To Miss Kate Field, 3/1/68: Letters XII, 1. 7Whiting, Kate Field, 178. 8Ibid., 181-82. 9Ibid., 182. 10Midsummer Night’s Dream, II.i.165-67. 11Kate Field: Selected Letters, 35. 12Whiting, 182. 13Whiting, 536. 14For a full account of Kate Field’s relation to the novelist, including his role in the publication of Pen Photographs, see Carolyn J. Moss, ‘Anthony Trollope and Kate Field: The Story of a Friendship’, in Sidney P. & Carolyn J. Moss, Dickens, Trollope, Jefferson (Albany, New York: Whitston, 2000), 31-53. 15Holograph letter (Ms KF 147), dated 30 June 1873, Boston Public Library, Dept. of Rare Books & Mss. Three other such notes from Dickens’s son to Kate Field are also in the KF Collection. 16For the entire story, see Carolyn J. Moss, ‘Gail Hamilton on Charles Dickens’s Alleged Ménage à Trois’, in Sidney P. and Carolyn J. Moss, American Episodes Involving Charles Dickens, (Troy, New York: Whitston, 1999) 152-60.

10 The Contemporary Dutch Critical Reception of Dickens

OSCAR WELLENS

N AN EARLIER ARTICLE I traced the inception of the first Dutch translations of Dickens’s works, and furnished an all-inclusive list of Ithese renditions.1 The present essay seeks to shed some light on the Dutch critical response to these publications. An account which attempts to investigate a field as large as this cannot be exhaustive, and must therefore, to be credible, limit its scope of coverage. What follows is a selection of what I have deemed the most salient comments on Dickens collected from the following well-known Dutch literary journals: Vaderlandsche Letteroefeningen (1761-1876), Recensent, ook der Recensenten (1805-64), Het Leeskabinet (1834-74), De Gids (1837- ), De Tijdspiegel (1844-1921), and De Tijd (1845-64).2 The Dutch reviewers were initially somewhat slow to respond to the arrival of Dickens on the literary scene in the Netherlands, perhaps because of the spate of novels in these years and because fiction was still looked at askance by professional criticism. Admittedly, as early as 1842 Vaderlandsche Letteroefeningen printed a translation of a letter by an anonymous American to Washington Irving entitled ‘A Visit to Charles Dickens’, which highlighted Dickens’s social commitment,3 but it was only in 1844 that this venerable journal chose to devote a review to Kersgechenk van Charles Dickens. Eene Geestesverschijning (1844).4 After a brief comment on the overriding importance attached by the English to Christmas, followed by a synopsis of the tale, the review5 praises Dickens for his ‘naturalness, wittiness, and often also sensibility.’6 Kersgeschenk is strongly recommended for its message of Christian charity. E. Potgieter, one of the first critics to have introduced Dickens to a Dutch audience, discusses the same work for De Gids.7 He lavishes praise on the story, in which, he feels, Dickens has suppressed ‘his appetite for effect’ and steered clear of ‘an accumulation of horrors’, which allegedly occur in Martin Chuzzlewit (1843-44). Potgieter, too, endorses the story’s moral design, but rather on humanitarian grounds. Like many contemporary readers, he discerns in Dickens’s narrative style parallels with that of Washington Irving’s Sketch Book (1819-20). The anonymous translator, Potgieter concludes, deserves approval because he has rendered the full text, while some of the earlier Dutch translators had felt the urge to abridge Dickens’s alleged verbosity Ð much to the detriment of his characteristic style. In a subsequent issue of 18448 Vaderlandsche Letteroefeningen approvingly advertises Uitstapje naar Noord-Amerika (American Notes) (1842),9 which roused a chorus of derision from some English critics because of Dickens’s superficial and partial coverage of American

11 society. Challenging this censure the Dutch reviewer argues that the author’s intention was not to offer ‘profound investigations’ but rather ‘some jottings for a general public’, couched in a ‘loose, easy, light, witty style,’ adding: Dickens is ‘a perceptive observer’ who ‘has the gift to set forth what he observes, simply and naturally.’ In 1846 the same journal prints a brief comment10 on Het krekeltje in de schoorsteen (The Cricket on the Hearth) (1846), which already appeared in an abridged version in Het Leeskabinet and De Tijd. The critic condemns the various abridgments and excisions, especially those made by ‘Boudewijn’ in De Tijd, arguing that not a single sentence should be excluded in the translation process, lest it detract from Dickens’s descriptive genius for ‘painting persons and characters.’ Before probing further into the Dutch reviews of Dickens’s work, we must dwell at some length on an interesting essay by Amédée Pichot, the well-known anglophile and French translator of Dickens. In this substantial contribution, translated into Dutch for De Tijd,11 Pichot clearly capitalises on the rising vogue for personal details about celebrities. The critic, who has enjoyed several tête-à-tête sessions with Dickens, sketches a flattering portrait of the author as an amiable host, and suggests a connection between his life and work. But he also ventures some perceptive critical remarks about the master’s output, and these, I believe, were voiced for the very first time in a Dutch periodical. ‘Dickens is noteworthy for the refinement with which he observes everything’, Pichot concedes, yet he analyses ‘more the material than the moral in man’ and because he ‘aims at effect he sometimes becomes artificial, either conceptually or stylistically’, and as a result winds up creating ‘caricatures’. Pichot further points to one huge flaw in the novels, notably a ‘lack of descriptive and dramatic unity’, attributable to the serialisation of Dickens’s works. Highlighting Dickens as a humorist and satirist in Pickwick and Nickleby, Pichot asserts that these are so intrinsically English, both in mentality and style, that foreign readers can hardly relish them. Although he approves of Dickens’s ethical concern for mankind, Pichot notes that he would ‘regret if the author would not firmly keep his fiction within the bounds of the genre. It is admissible to interweave the novel with philosophy and ethics, provided that philosophy and ethics do not tarnish the novel’s gloss.’ Here the reader is offered a refreshingly modern view on the novel in glaring contrast to the Dutch reviewers’ often preponderantly moralistic stance. In 1848 Recensent finally decided to join the ranks of the Dutch Dickens critics. Its contributor, assessing De strijd des levens (The Battle of Life) (1847),12 refers to ‘Mister Dickens’s rich ingenuity’ and admits that ‘The characters have been portrayed to the life’, but has nothing to say on the contents. In 1850 Mark Prager Lindo discusses De bezeten man (The Haunted Man) (1849) for De Gids.13 A great admirer and even imitator of Dickens, he praises the original as ‘a true and unrivalled Christmas carol’, which is bound to trigger real Christian feelings. The main portion of his review, however, focuses on Lion’s translation, which he finds 12 Title page to C. M. Mensing’s translation into Dutch of Pickwick Papers. Published by Hendrik Frijlinck 1840 (2nd impression 1841).

13 lamentable. This is no matter for surprise, for Lindo was an educated Englishman by birth who had settled in the Netherlands. He frequently aired his frustration about the inadequacy of Dutch renditions of Dickens, not least in an 1845 article contributed to Fraser’s Magazine. In the early 1850s De Tijd again publishes an interpretative article entitled ‘Charles Dickens Considered as a Novelist’, which develops some striking critical observations.14 Its well-informed author opens his piece with the contention that in England Dickens is ‘the most popular writer, but also the most national’, adding: ‘Rarely have the peculiarities of a nation been so characteristically expressed in a novelist’. Because this critic believes that though Dickens is extremely popular Ð ‘Everyone had read Dickens’ Ð few have reflected on him, he decides to proffer some remarks on the novelist from which I distil the following. Like many contemporary English critics, he finds Dickens’s first sketches ‘his best productions’ because they reveal his ‘great talent’, viz. ‘the description of soulless life’ which he is at times able to animate. He typifies furthermore Pickwick as ‘a vivid and vigorous portrayal of the English people’ depicting as no other work an English quality, that is, ‘geniality’. The serial appearance of Dickens’s works has hardly undermined Pickwick as ‘an art-form’. For what is offered here is not ‘a connected story’, but ‘some popular scenes’ which remain intertwined through the presence of a protagonist. In this piece the Dutch public is for the first time confronted with parallels between Dickens and Shakespeare, such as the genius for creating memorable characters Ð a trait previously spotted by the English reviewers. Another Shakespearean hallmark perceived by the Dutch critic is Dickens’s satire of puritan hypocrisy. On the other hand, the Dutchman criticises Dickens’s urge to ‘affect the tear-glands’, a propensity which tends to turn many characters into ‘caricatures’. Concluding his piece, he categorises Dickens as a chiefly popular writer, dear to the English because he confronts them with their idiosyncratic nature. The Dutch David Copperfield (1850) elicits critical reactions from Vaderlandsche Letteroefeningen15 as well as from Het Leeskabinet, which from 1853 was to remain a regular commentator on Dickens’s performances. The contributor to the former periodical rejoices at the Dutch translation of a work by Dickens, ‘this productive writer, so full of genius and truth’, and praises David Copperfield for its ‘truth and simplicity’ as well as for its ‘fine feeling’ and ‘naturalness’. In line with many colleagues, he is convinced that the novel is shot through with autobiographical material. Selecting some anecdotes from the novel for special praise, he dwells on the character of Agnes, whom he extols as ‘the woman par excellence, soft, prepossessing, intelligent, without presumption, in one word, lovely and amiable’. Although this critique admittedly does not excel in perceptiveness, it yet has the merit of sending the reader straight to the book. Het Leeskabinet prints a 20-page essay,16 which besides casting valuable light on the overall reception of Dickens in Holland at the time, helps us gain some insight into the critical response to the course the novel was then taking. In the opening 14 pages of his article, the committed reviewer rejects the novel as a fictitious account, that is, as the product of the imagination, instead voicing a strong plea on behalf of a story enacted ‘in reality in and around’ the reader and in which ‘human life’ or also ‘the family’ and ‘daily life’ are central. ‘Give us reality, it alone, it alone’, he cries out. Clearly, this man profiles himself as an outspoken adherent of narrow literary realism which, introduced into Dutch literature in the 1830s, was mockingly labelled by Potgieter as ‘the craze for copying daily life’. This fresh development of the novel flourishes especially among English writers, the critic asserts, of whom Dickens is ‘the head’ and even ‘the father’, whose ‘unique talent’ he sets out to analyse. By selecting extracts from various novels, he tries to illustrate that Dickens’s inspiration is guided by ‘real life’ and that his characters are therefore recognisable to every reader. Despite his ‘incorrigible humour’ the tenor of his stories is ‘serious’, for Dickens ‘wants you to be a better person’, he ‘wakes up the better person in you’ and his underlying conception of life is ‘Evangelical’. Once more Dickens is here classed as a preeminently edifying author with Christian principles who as ‘a very severe moralist’ pillories social abuses. These principles find particular application in David Copperfield, which this critic, in keeping with many contemporaries, regards as Dickens’s ‘masterpiece’ and finds imbued ‘with much of his own personality’. The novel’s ‘individuality’ is, however, surpassed by ‘something universal’, for every reader can mirror himself in Copperfield’s’ chequered career. After these general remarks this critic offers a rather detailed synopsis of the novel along with a full description of the prominent characters. In 1855 C. I. Schüller passes judgment on Slechte Tijden (Hard Times) (1854) for Recensent.17 In his opening he hints at the initial low approval of Dickens in Holland, which he largely attributes to the ‘insipidity’ and ‘silliness’ which the Dutch reader discovered in Dickens’s first works, thereby misguided by Seymour’s illustrations which he mistook for caricatures. But, Schüller writes, the Dutch publication of David Copperfield put Dickens firmly on the road to fame in Holland, adding that Slechte Tijden was ‘written with the purpose of raising reflections and applications’ on social and political issues. The novel is therefore not ‘a mere cursory pastime’ but requires an ‘earnest reading’. In the course of 1855 Het Leeskabinet prints no less than three substantial articles on Dickens. A review of Slechte Tijden18 eulogises its social dimension and Dickens’s mastery of ‘deep feeling, a subtle knowledge of human nature, biting jest and incomparable humour’. Further, the journal features an interesting contribution19 on Dickens’s acting talents, in which the critic L. Kalish reports favourably on the author’s performance in Bulwer’s Not so bad as we seem (1851) and in his own and Mark Lemon’s farce Mr. Nightingale’s Diary (1851), rounding off his account with some lucubrations on Dickens’s literary gifts. Kalish is of the opinion that Dickens ‘can easily be assessed’ because his ‘flaws and virtues come all too clearly to the fore’. He has ‘a 15 rich lively imagination’, but ‘he lets it run riot’. About the characters he says that they are ‘rather weakly’ portrayed and ‘do not act according to an inner organic necessity, but according to an outer mechanism’. In addition, Dickens possesses ‘only a limited range of thoughts’ which are ‘rarely original or new’. The popularity that Dickens enjoys ‘even in the most remote corners of Europe’ he attributes to ‘a great gift of invention’, to ‘the talent to record the volatile phenomena of life’ and to his ‘humour’. But his astonishing success is chiefly determined by ‘an open heart of love of humanity’. In Kruseman’s new and ‘cheap’ edition of Dickens’s works Leonard Fairfax reviews Nelly (The Old Curiosity Shop) (1855) for Het Leeskabinet.20 His account, although extensive, is no more than a report of his intensely personal response to the novel; critical remarks are missing; instead substantial extracts from the novel are quoted which, showered as they are with compliments, must spur the reader to purchase Nelly as soon as possible. In 1856 the same periodical focuses on David Copperfield.21 Unhesitatingly its critic declares that Dickens can be identified with Copperfield and that therefore he relates his own life-story. After a sketch of each character and its role in the story he advances the view that David Copperfield reveals all Dickens’s narrative skills such as ‘his extraordinary gift of representing graphically what he relates, his descriptions and character portrayals, his exposition of causes and principles which govern the actions without ever deliberately describing them, the vivid and animated presentation of every scene’, etc. Despite Dickens’s claim in the Preface to Little Dorrit (1855-57) that he had never before had so many readers, this novel was unfavourably received by the bulk of English critics. The Dutch reviewers did not altogether reject Kleine Dora (1857), but found much to criticise. Vaderlandsche Letteroefeningen22 raises the following objections: the character of Clennam is burdened by too many ‘improbabilities’; the absence of ‘unity’ in the plot stems from the many characters, several of whom are ‘shrouded in a mysterious veil’ and who do not forward the plot. ‘C. P.’ of Het Leeskabinet23 admits that each announcement of new work by Dickens raises high expectations that are generally met, but Kleine Dora ‘is very below anything we ever read by Dickens’ and ‘its reading was occasionally really boring’ because of the numerous ‘dull characters’ and ‘a crowd of incidents’ that hardly relate to the novel’s plot, which as a result is ‘confused and unclear’. As to the characters, Dickens has degraded them to ‘ridiculous caricatures, worse, to caricatures extremely tedious’. In the same year Het Leeskabinet24 comments on Kruseman’s edition of Het verlaten huis (Bleak House) (1857-58), in the original of which some English critics had detected the first signs of Dickens’s literary decline. Despite warm words for the author as an advocate of common people as well as admiration for ‘the many natural descriptions and character delineations which are eminently successful’, the Dutch critic 16 has much to censure. Finding it difficult to mark the protagonist, he concludes that the novel has ‘not been properly elaborated’, but confusingly acquaints the reader with ‘a series of characters who come near each other, but fail to form a unity’. In contrast to this negative verdict, De Tijdspiegel25 warmly welcomes Het verlaten huis for its ‘democratic dispositions’, acclaiming it as a novel that instils charity. Therefore its author must be endowed with ‘something noble, exalted, Christian, divine’. A fine instance of contemporary Dickens idolatry is found in the conclusion: ‘Who has loved so much as Dickens loves humanity, will be much forgiven’.26 Whereas the critical reception of A Tale of Two Cities (1859) reached rock bottom in England, its Dutch counterpart In Londen en Parijs (1860) boasted considerable attention from Dutch reviewers. Vaderlandsche Letteroefeningen27 gives it high praise. Dickens has presented the scenes of the French Revolution ‘in his usual, that is, masterly manner’; he betrays ‘a master’s hand’ and an ‘inexhaustible genius’; there is ‘much beauty’ to be found in this novel; the author is thanked for ‘the delight Ð the true rapturous delight’ he has offered the reader. The verdict of Recensent28 on In Londen en Parijs does not deviate from the above jubilant observations. The novel is ‘a masterpiece’, ‘a jewel of the first size’ which ‘cannot be dispensed with in any reading company’. The reader becomes acquainted with ‘again interesting characters, excellently drawn’. In short, In Londen en Parijs is felt to be ‘one of Dickens’s best novels’.29 Het Leeskabinet strikes a less favourable note. Its critic misses ‘the fulness and rounding, the precision of outlines, the accuracy of drawing’ which he so much valued in Dickens’s earlier work. Then, too, he deplores that this story is no longer ‘drawn from real life’, as a result of which the reader can no longer identify with the characters. Stylistically, too, he has much to find fault with. Whereas formerly he had much admiration for Dickens’s ‘simplicity and naturalness’, he now finds his style ‘overloaded’ with ‘sphinx-like statements, strained oppositions, loose expressions and more generally effect-hunting’. The contributor to De Tijdspiegel30 develops the same negative line of thought. In a brief sketch of Dickens’s reception in Holland, he declares that the author’s fame peaked extraordinarily with David Copperfield and afterwards foundered dramatically, a consequence of ‘forcedness, effect-hunting, obscurity that must cover up a lack of depth, mannerism of style, laboured constructions’. These blemishes he discovers ‘in a large measure’ in In Londen en Parijs. Moreover, Dickens has distorted the historical background to the story and not ‘evoked the popular spirit at the time of the French Revolution’ and therefore this work has ‘little value’ as a ‘historical contribution’. It cannot be given pride of place, the more so as the various characters embody classes which cannot subsist as individuals. Such characterisation ‘gives to the novel something unreal, fantastic that is unpleasant for the reader’. De Tijdspiegel,31 as far as I know, was the only Dutch journal to 17 notice Groote verwachtingen (Great Expectations) (1862). After years of disappointment among English critics about an alleged extinction of Dickens’s literary talent, Great Expectations (1861) could again command their admiration. Although shouts of applause are wanting, the response of De Tijdspiegel is positive. Its reviewer assures his reader that he will not be wholly disappointed in his expectations. Dickens has worded his tale ‘in singular manner’; ‘there are such whimsical characters, such odd almost impossible situations; there is such a succession of delicate and burlesque scenes that one cannot stop reading and that it is impossible to guess the outcome’. Focusing on Jufvrouw Lirriper en hare commensalen (Mrs. Lirriper’s Lodgings) (1864), the critic of Vaderlandsche Letteroefenngen32 answers in the negative to the question whether Dickens’s continuous flow of Christmas stories preserves ‘the touch of freshness’ and continues ‘to excite the curiosity’, concluding that they are ‘not worthy of Dickens’s genius’. ‘L.’ of Het Leeskabinet33 thinks differently about this collection. Once more it betrays, he writes, the author’s ‘wonderful talent’ which maintains ‘a unity in these various tales’; the volume is therefore not ‘a string of individual pearls’, but ‘a fine tissue stitched through with precious stone, the one more beautiful than the other’. Again we hear the same encomium about ‘the ardour and warmth’ of some characters who ‘have something touching and always move us’. In this chronological survey we have come to Onze wederzijdsche vriend (Our Mutual Friend) (1866), the last novel by Dickens to be translated into Dutch. In England Our Mutual Friend (1865) was received with mixed feelings with the balance still inclining to complimentary criticism. Vaderlandsche Letteroefeningen34 chose to join the praisers. By way of introduction the critic ‘v. O.’ volunteers some general observations on Dickens’s most striking literary gifts i.e. ‘an inexhaustible fertility of invention’, ‘an always fresh presentation’ and ‘funny witticisms’; he finds Dickensian fiction ‘more English that almost any other English novel’, which does not, however, prevent it from being enjoyable to a foreign reader. He has little to say on Onze wederzijdsche vriend except that it is ‘a very entertaining, but extremely intricate history’. ‘C. P.’ of Het Leeskabinet35 opens his review of the same novel with the following significant confession: ‘We have always loved Dickens, and we will also do so, despite his faults’. This critic shares the oft- voiced view that Dickens’s first works are ‘masterpieces’ and that after David Copperfield he never reached the same level. Onze wederzijdsche vriend has ‘great flaws’ including the introduction of ‘very trivial characters’ who rapidly ‘bore’ the reader. On the other hand, he feels Dickens at his best in the delineation of individuals such as Bella Wilfer, who ‘deserves our highest admiration’. ‘C. P.’ ends his account by strongly recommending the work to ‘all the friends of Dickens’. Finally, the reviewer of the same work in De Tijdspiegel36 emerges as one of the most fervent admirers of Dickens, calling him ‘one of the greatest of 18 novelists’, who outside of England ‘is perhaps nowhere else more appreciated than in the Netherlands’, where ‘he has been our favourite writer for thirty years’. He labels Onze wederzijdsche vriend as ‘a splendid work’ that surpasses David Copperfield. This new novel epitomises Dickens’s ‘excellent qualities’ such as a ‘severe morality’, respect for religion with aversion to ostentation’, ‘warm love for the fellow being’, ‘a singular style’, ‘original language’, ‘humour’, etc. The last reviews of the Dutch Dickens translations in the period concerned are devoted to Station Mugby (1867); they occur in Het Leeskabinet and Vaderlandsche Letteroefeningen. After a brief history of Dickens’s Christmas tales, ‘N. T.’ of the former journal37 admits that in Station Mugby he has discovered ‘the old Dickens’, and briefly reviews various scenes of the work, concluding: ‘One must be a Dickens to make such a happy choice of real life and to represent common people and things so wittily’. Again we hear of Dickens’s ‘fine sensibility, vivid power of imagination, and ingenuity’. Before attempting to draw a conclusion from this survey, I want to skim through a thoughtful contribution Ð not a review Ð entitled ‘Charles Dickens, the Author for the Homely Fireplace’, contributed by P. H. Hugenholtz to Vaderlandsche Letteroefeningen in 1866.38 His principal motive for writing this essay was, it seems, a response to H. Taine’s notorious Histoire de la littérature anglaise (1863-64), from which he cites passages relating to Dickens. The nucleus of Hugenholtz’s argument is to demonstrate that Dickens is an admirable provider of homely fiction. First Hugenholz surveys Dickens’s life, highlighting his sudden emergence and triumphant success as a writer, styling him foremost as ‘a painter par excellence’ who in all his descriptions brings ‘action and life’ and ‘personifies inanimate objects’. To illustrate this skill Hugenholz quotes substantial passages from various novels. Dickens is, in addition, raised to the status of ‘a master in painting details’. Unlike Taine, who rejects this stylistic device, Hugenholz considers it admissible because ‘with Dickens each detail matters’ as it typifies his characters. As a comical writer Dickens reminds him of Shakespeare and Schiller, especially in Pickwick with ‘its funny oppositions and confusing situations’. However, ‘immoderate use’ of this genuine comical talent often leads ‘to the painting of caricatures, so exaggerated that often no human being is recognisable in them’. Then, too, Dickens’s ‘high seriousness’, ‘profound feeling’, ‘warm love of mankind’ and ‘zest for life’ turn Pickwick into ideal reading matter for all the members of a family. Although Hugenholz admires Dickens’s social criticism as well as his satirical treatment of hypocrisy, he is less happy with Dickens’s ‘one-sided devotion to the naivety of nature’, which drives him ‘to underestimate the blessings of civilization and to reject the wonderful fruits of science’. Dickens’s concern to chastise social abuses ranks him as a writer of ‘tendency-novels’, which raises reservations. For Dickens’s support of social reforms detrimentally affects ‘the artistic value of his novels’ as ‘a character’s development recedes into the background and the course of actions is stemmed by serving subsidiary 19 objects’. Finally, Hugenholz typifies Dickens as a ‘Moralist... in the noblest sense of the word, not a dry moraliser, but a kindly guide, an experienced leader on the road of moral life’. This view is meant to refute Taine’s criticism of the English preoccupation with good morals in literary work. By contrast, Hugenholz argues that this underlying stance in English literature, and in Dickens’s work in particular, deserves applause. In this respect he refers to Shakespeare, who condemns and punishes ‘every vice, every impure passion’. Clearly, like his predecessors Dickens supposedly embraces ‘the supremacy of moral life, the right to a conscience, the inviolability of religious sentiment’. However, Hugenholz is forced to admit with Taine that Dickens’s narrow vision of life Ð he is merely ‘a genre-painter, a draughtsman of types’ Ð has not lifted him on to ‘the highest stage’ as an artist. Hugenholz concludes that Dickens ‘is one of the favourite authors of our nation’ and that his works ‘are constantly read and devoured by our people’. It remains to extract from these reviews and commentaries the most salient pronouncements as well as to determine the overall Dutch critical attitude to Dickens. This is not easy, for the reactions, as we have seen, were numerous, and, as might be expected, not unanimous. Yet some observations recur with a significant frequency, which suggest some degree of consensus. To begin with, Dickens was, despite an initial doubtful start, quickly tagged as an author with a charismatic talent, who never failed to captivate the audience. This intimate bond between the author and his readers largely accounts for the fact that these reviews invariably hint at the alleged amiability of Dickens’s personality, which some critics insisted was reflected in his work, an attitude which of course disarmed impartial criticism. We also frequently encounter the view, always with a nod of approval, that Dickens’s tales, despite their humorous undertone, pursue some portentous designs, including the promotion of conventional morality and social reform. About the literary qualities proper of Dickens’s output the assessments differ widely, although his mastery in this matter is rarely questioned. Occasionally we hear some grumbling about structural flaws in some novels, but this aspect is never treated in depth. The characterisation is praised for its ‘naturalness’ but as these critics become increasingly acquainted with later work, the disparaging label ‘caricature’ occurs. On the other hand, they unanimously praise Dickens’s powerful descriptive talent which at its best seems to infuse inanimate reality with life. As might be expected, many of the critical concepts spring from standard contemporary literary values. For instance, the critics’ insistence that literature has primarily an instructional purpose relies on Neoclassical prescriptions. Then, too, their critical terminology is characterised by imagery derived from the art of painting: Dickens ‘paints... a portrait’ ‘in sharply drawn and finely finished strokes’ and more generally he possesses ‘a talent to paint’. As is well-known, this conception of literature, a commonplace in nineteenth-century criticism, is a relict of the Neoclassical doctrine that relied on Horace’s statement ‘Ut pictura poesis’ (Ad Pisiones, 361). Similarly, these critics inherited the pragmatic Neoclassical concern for 20 the impact exerted by Dickens’s works on his audience. As to these Dutch critics’ overall estimate of Dickens, it is hardly too much to say that in these years, despite some fluctuations in their verdicts, he commanded their unflagging attention. Until the publication of David Copperfield, which was regarded as his masterpiece, their admiration showed an upward trend, giving way to disappointment with works such as Het verlaten huis, Kleine Dora, and In Londen en Parijs, although even here they had to concede that the master’s hand had left its traces. But nowhere are these men tempted to boos of derision, which could occasionally be heard from their English counterparts. Some of the more perceptive critics, who assessed Dickens’s complete oeuvre, claimed that he never excelled Pickwick, a view shared by many contemporary readers and reviewers. Strikingly, not one Dutch commentator compares Dickens with other contemporary literary heavyweights such as Thackeray and Eliot, whose works were also readily available in a Dutch translation. It should be noted in passing that in these commentaries hardly any observation is offered on Dickens’s imagery and symbolism. We have seen that at Dickens’s Dutch début some critics classified him at once as a more than typical English author who therefore appealed to the taste of his own countrymen. These pages have, I believe, amply demonstrated that in the Netherlands too, Dickens could count on an uncommonly warm reception.

I would like to thank my friend and colleague Prof. Dr. J. P. Van Noppen for reading this essay in its first draft and for offering valuable suggestions.

1See ‘The Earliest Dutch Translations of Dickens (1837-1870): An All-inclusive List’, The Dickensian, 93 (1997), 126-32. 2As a rule these journals carried anonymous reviews; signed or initialled articles will be specified. 3ii, 403-8. 4For the original English titles of all the Dutch translations the reader is referred to my article mentioned in n. 1. 5i, 473-4. 6This and the following translations from the Dutch are my own. 71844, i, 744-6. 8i, 711-15. 231858, i, 79-85. 9ii, 711-15. 241858, i, 202-5251858, ii, 123-5. 10i, 750-1. 26A paraphrase of Luke, 7:47. 111847, v, 65-75. 271861, iii, 64-7. 12i, 83. 281862, 526-35. 13i, 351-3. 291861, i, 110-14. 141851, iii, 389-95. 301861, i, 60-4. 151851, i, 416-18. 311862, ii, 52-6. 161852, iv, 1-20. 321864, iii, 332-3. 171855, vol. 48, 537-39. 331866, i, 93-4. 181855, i, 63-5. 341866, ii, 283-5. 191855, iv, 110-17 351866, i, 62-4. 201855, iv, 230-9. 361866, ii, 87-9. 21iv, 211-14. 371867-8, ii, 134-66. 221858, i, 29-34. 381866, ii, 317-36. 21 Charles Dickens Ð Syndrome-Spotter: A Review of Some Morbid Observations

JOHN COSNETT

FEATURE OF CHARLES DICKENS’S NOVELS which fascinates physicians is his ability to provide realistic accounts of illnesses Aand disabilities which affect his characters, with their predominant signs, and sometimes symptoms, accurately portrayed. So vivid and true are these descriptions that it is possible to make retrospective diagnoses in many cases. This facility is all the more remarkable when one considers two attributes of the author. Firstly, he had no formal medical training or experience though some such knowledge might have rubbed off from his acquaintance with doctor friends or medical students. Secondly, many of the clinical pictures and syndromes which he described had not, at the time of his authorship, been formally reported in the medical literature. Indeed, many of his more esoteric descriptions antedated formal medical description by one hundred years or more. Medical diagnosis consists largely of Pattern Recognition. A large proportion of medical training consists of learning patterns of disease and their basis in physiology and pathology. The diagnostic process consists mostly of forming a ‘differential diagnosis’ which includes cataloguing those conditions which might be suspected of being present. Proceeding further, one tries to confirm the diagnosis by searching for more clinical signs, and employing laboratory tests and imaging techniques which will exclude some conditions listed in the differential diagnosis, and, hopefully, leave one final diagnosis confirmed. In the absence of medical training, the observer, however keen, can only describe what he sees and hears. He does not know what further signs or symptoms to search for. Diagnosis is somewhat akin to shopping: the process is much easier and effective if one knows what is available, and where items can be found. Without such knowledge it is remarkable how often Dickens contrived to produce pictures of clinical situations and syndromes which are recognisable and accurate today. The question arises: To what can this exceptional ability be attributed? That Dickens had unique powers of observation and description is obvious. Dickens applied these powers to many facets of the human condition, and to their environment. Through his narrative he conveyed, meticulously and precisely, the clinical picture that he perceived, without the embroidery which is often used by authors to dramatise (and perhaps blur) medical situations. While he sometimes portrayed common clinical conditions, he had a knack of selecting those which, though genuine and perhaps rare, tended to be bizarre, and thus able to attract the attention of readers, both lay and medical. Other

22 authors whose fictional characters have morbid disorders often describe these in a ‘woolly’ fashion, or they construct miscellanies of signs and symptoms which lack veracity in the perception of the medical reader. This ability to recognise and accurately describe those real, though bizarre, conditions which he encountered may have been engendered by his experience as a newspaper and court reporter. This employment taught Dickens to focus on the newsworthy, though not usually at the expense of veracity. While his powers of observation are now axiomatic, what is not widely known is that these extended to recognised syndromes, and that analysis of many of his descriptions has earned publicity in formal medical literature.

Ill-Defined Maladies A number of Dickens’s prominent characters suffered from severe, ill- defined, often febrile, illnesses from which most recovered. These include Rose Maylie, Oliver Twist, young Martin Chuzzlewit, Mark Tapley, Richard Carstone and Smike. In that era such conditions were common and often fatal. The list of causes includes Tuberculosis, Typhoid and Typhus fevers, malaria and pneumonia. To the lay observer who was not equipped to distinguish these by physical examination or diagnostic laboratory tests these diseases must have appeared rather similar. Some characters had such relatively ill-defined illnesses, without specific features, but sometimes a single facet in Dickens’s narrative offers a clue to the likely diagnosis in a relatively indistinct malady. For example, Little Nell’s fatal condition had no distinguishing features but there is a single indication, in her history, regarding the nature of her illness. That is the episode, in the latter part of their long journey, when she walked ‘with difficulty’ on account of ‘the pains that racked her joints... of no common severity, and every exertion increased them’.1 Shortly afterwards she collapsed and suffered intermittent setbacks until her death. The severe joint pains in a young person would stigmatise this as rheumatic fever, subsequently complicated by rheumatic carditis, which caused her premature death. It is thus also possible that a similar explanation would pertain to the sudden death of Mary Hogarth, on whom the character of Little Nell is said to be based. Cardiac complications of rheumatic fever were among the more common causes of death among adolescents in the days before penicillin. The case of Maggy is another example of past medical history providing a crucial clue to diagnosis. ‘When Maggy was 10 years old she had a bad fever... and she had never grown any older ever since’.2 The fact of cognitive defect, eyes that were ‘very little affected by light’, and ‘having one tolerably serviceable eye’2 would indicate neurological disorder, and the likely cause would be a post-encephalitic syndrome. Complications of encephalitis at the age of 10 years would explain her chronic adult condition. In the case of Rose Maylie the clue to the nature of her ‘high and dangerous fever’ and delirium came from the detail in Dr Losberne’s 23 prognostications. The ‘deep sleep, from which she would waken, either to recovery and life, or to bid them farewell, and die’3 was characteristic of the crisis in lobar (pneumococcal) pneumonia. This is rarely witnessed today with the successful and early resolution of the condition by antibiotics. The Chancery prisoner in Pickwick Papers was said to have been ‘consumptive’ in addition to his cognitive and sensory deficits.4 This term was, however, applied to many chronic wasting diseases as well as tuberculosis. It is very likely that the chronic ‘dread disease’ which Dickens describes as affecting Smike, causing his ‘mortal part to waste and wither away’5, was tuberculosis, possibly in a disseminated form. Dickens’s account is well-nigh pathognomonic for tuberculosis in that era. Some diseases warrant no debate: Martin Chuzzlewit and Mark Tapley suffered from malaria, contracted in America ‘where fatal maladies... came forth at night, in misty shapes... creeping out upon the water’.6 Dickens wrote this some 50 years before Sir Patrick Manson and Sir Ronald Ross demonstrated the role of swamp-living mosquitoes in the transmission of malaria.

Modification of Syndromes A syndrome is defined as ‘a group of signs and symptoms that collectively indicate or characterise a disease, psychological disorder, or other abnormal condition’.7 It happens occasionally that a clinical syndrome which Dickens attaches to a character is accurate in most respects but includes some features which tend to contradict or exclude the obvious diagnosis. For example, in the case of Jenny Wren, the dolls’ dressmaker, the clinical features are manifestly those of the foetal- alcohol syndrome. Strong circumstantial support for this diagnosis comes from the history of her family. It was reported of Jenny that ‘This poor ailing creature has come to be what she is, surrounded by drunken people from her cradle...’.8 Her father and her grandfather were alcoholics. Her mother had died, presumably from a cause related to alcohol. It is thus likely that her late mother had been intemperate during her pregnancy with Jenny. But the medical reader who considers this diagnosis will immediately have reservations when he reads of Jenny’s bright intellect, and of the ‘remarkable dexterity of her nimble fingers’.8 These features would tend to exclude the diagnosis of the foetal-alcohol syndrome. There are several possible explanations for this diagnostic paradox. One is that the subject of Dickens’s description had acquired the syndrome in an incomplete form Ð a somewhat unlikely occurrence in one whose other features are those of a relatively advanced form of the syndrome. The more likely explanation is that Dickens tailored the syndrome to suit his story. It is likely that he combined the features of two children of his acquaintance. One was a bright, nimble-fingered girl who did dolls’ dressmaking. The other was a child afflicted with the foetal-alcohol syndrome, together with impaired intellect, unusual face, deformed hands, and ‘queer legs’.8 But it would not have suited the narrative to have all these features in his dolls’ dressmaker. So the features were, perhaps, moulded to suit the needs of the story. Even outside the clinical 24 setting the creation of composite portraits in behaviour and mannerisms of various models was not uncommon among Dickens’s characters. In some cases Dickens uses the passage of time to allow manipulation of an otherwise chronic and incurable disability. Both Mrs Clennam and Mrs Crewler were manifestly paraplegic, having lost the use of their legs. Mrs Clennam had been paralysed for ‘a dozen years’.9 Yet at the end of the story she was able to rise from her sofa and hurry to the Marshalsea prison. Such dramatic recovery from paraplegia might be construed to indicate original hysterical paralysis, but even an hysteric would, after twelve years of assumed disability and immobilisation, have disuse atrophy and joint limitation. The conclusion must be that this was manipulation of disease to satisfy the requirements of the story. The method of publication, as a serial story in monthly parts, over 18 months, would probably contribute to this manipulation. When the bedridden Mrs Clennam was first introduced the author had probably not yet conceived the precise end of the story which required her to walk through the streets of London. A further factor which might handicap an author in producing entirely true pictures of a subject is the need for ‘political correctness’ and for concealment of the model’s true identity. Dickens encountered such problems when he introduced the characters of Harold Skimpole, and Miss Mowcher, who was manifestly an achondroplastic dwarf. In the latter example he was obliged to make modifications in his text to defuse an embarrassing and possibly litigious situation. Dickens was constrained to change his portrayal of Miss Mowcher’s temperament, though her achondroplasia was immutable. He was not, however, swayed to polish the character of Harold Skimpole even though Leigh Hunt and his family recognised the image, and complained of the resemblance. Doctors who describe new syndromes, or add examples to previously known syndromes, have the advantage of medical training which prompts them to search for more features in a subject along lines dictated by the disciplines of anatomy, physiology and pathology. Such a search often yields confirmation of a suspected diagnosis. In the absence of such training, the author who is creating a character can only describe what he observes in some subject in his circle, and then, perhaps, add features drawn from his own imagination. Otherwise he might graft on features of another subject’s abnormality or character. In both these instances the imaginary, or grafted features, may destroy the veracity of the syndrome described. Among Dickens’s characters such manipulation occurred but rarely.

Abstruse Syndromes Surveying Dickens’s pathological characters, one feels that he was fascinated by the more bizarre and unusual presentations, just as present- day students tend to remember the odd rarities rather than the commonplace in Medicine. His penchant for noticing neurological and motor abnormalities indicates a particular interest in this facet of medicine. Pancks had Tourette’s syndrome, Flintwinch had focal 25 dystonia, Jenny Wren’s father had alcoholic cerebellar degeneration, and Feenix had cerebellar ataxia. Sloppy, the ‘very long boy’ of which there was ‘too much longwise and too little broadwise’,10 was probably a case of Marfan’s syndrome. Uriah Heep was a case of palmar hyperhidrosis. The old tailor in Martin Chuzzlewit who had progressively bandy legs ‘between which you might wheel a large barrow’ must have had Paget’s disease of bone.11 This condition was first described by Sir James Paget in 1877, thirty-three years after Dickens wrote this vignette. Several characters had strokes, which were as common then as they are now. Even in his description of strokes Dickens draws attention to some of the more unusual features such as Mrs Skewton’s dysphasia and dysgraphia, and the jargon aphasia of Sir Leicester Dedlock and Anthony Chuzzlewit. Similarly pertinent observations were recorded in the case of old Chuffey. This was an old man who, following an acute episode twenty years previously, spoke little, showed perseveration when ‘he never left off casting up’ with his figures, had difficulty swallowing (‘always chokes himself when it ain’t broth;... verified the statement relative to his choking propensities... the mutton being tough’) and had a ‘wall-eyed expression’.12 This combination of signs and symptoms would offer sufficient basis for a tentative diagnosis of pseudo-bulbar paralysis due to strokes. It is in his descriptions of these cases of stroke that Dickens best shows his unique powers of observation which would do credit to present-day students of medicine. Morphological abnormalities are also prominent. The best known of these is Joe, the fat boy. Although he has earned a syndrome of his own, inappropriately called the Pickwickian syndrome, the precise pathological nature of Joe’s disorder is still debatable. A diagnosis of a diencephalic syndrome is, perhaps, more appropriate than the ‘cardiorespiratory syndrome of extreme obesity’. Modern imaging techniques would be necessary to settle the issue! Miss Mowcher was a classical example of an achondroplastic dwarf, though the initial impression of her indelicacy in behaviour is not a feature of this condition. While most of these descriptions have features which give some clue to the nature of the disease there are some in which the diagnosis remains uncertain, though one might offer a differential diagnosis. Paul Dombey is such an example. He was a case of failure to thrive with ultimate progressive weakness. In the differential diagnosis one must consider congenital heart disease, coeliac disease, cystic fibrosis, or some form of muscular dystrophy. The latter is probably the most likely. This penchant for describing what is clinically abstruse, even bizarre, raises certain questions. In several cases the characters concerned seem to have no solid contribution to the plot of the story. One wonders whether some characters, with their morbidity, were introduced merely to add interest, or to illustrate that such strange abnormalities had been observed. As doctors sometimes aim to be first to describe a syndrome so Dickens might have felt some pride in his clinical observations, some of which were, indeed, unique. Among Dickens’s characters, it is 26 noteworthy that those who had bizarre or abstruse syndromes (Pancks, Flintwinch, Feenix, Joe, Cleaver) were usually not major characters. This tends to indicate that such bizarre disorders were introduced in order to demonstrate their recognition rather than for the characters to play major parts in the plots.

Dickensian Syndromes and the Specialist Medical Literature Dickens was not, of course, writing with a medical readership in mind. That doctors have analysed and debated his clinical reports is a tribute to his descriptions, in that his characters have been able to attract medical attention, and to provoke analysis. Lay reviewers have usually concluded that some of his characters have illnesses which, they presume, remain undiagnosed. But literary reviewers are probably not aware of the numerous articles which have appeared in specialised medical journals, analysing the clinical features of certain characters, and debating their diagnoses. Table 1 lists some of these publications which have appeared in medical journals in recent years. Besides the published articles, there are some conditions which Dickens described which still await analysis in the medical literature. In addition to the bizarre syndromes, Dickens also portrayed commonplace conditions which, though the descriptions are precise and accurate, do not provoke much discussion and debate, because they are medically straightforward. A good example of such a situation is the case of Major Bagstock. In his case Dickens described many classical features of chronic obstructive airways disease with emphysema. But let it not be thought that doctors have always agreed in their interpretation of Dickens’s accounts of medical abnormalities. Even when they have a living, breathing, patient before them in a clinical situation, doctors frequently disagree about diagnosis. Modern technology often helps to settle diagnostic arguments but when doctors have disagreed about the diagnoses of Dickens’s characters there is no such resolution of debates. Examples of such continued disagreement occur in the cases of Tiny Tim Cratchit and the fat boy, Joe.

Epidemiology In some respects, Dickens’s accounts of medical conditions have scientific value. This stems from the possibility of deducing some epidemiological conclusions from them. For example, his writings give support to the observation that alcoholism, and its complications, were rife at the time of his writing. Infant mortality was high. Strokes and ‘consumption’ were common. Observations, or the lack of them, might also have negative epidemiological value. For example, Dickens’s works seem to contain no accurate description of a case of Parkinson’s disease, a condition which is now very common, and which has signs so characteristic that they could hardly be missed. They are also of a nature that would have attracted Dickens’s attention, because of his apparent fascination with disorders of motion. The obvious conclusion is that Parkinson’s disease was much less prevalent at the time of Dickens’s 27 writing than it is today. This might be due to the fact that it is essentially a disease of the aged. The average age of death in 1850 was only 45 years. James Parkinson published his Essay on the Shaking Palsy in 1817. So this condition was not unknown in Dickens’s time, though it was less commonly seen because people rarely lived long enough to develop the disease. The observer who attempts description and interpretation of clinical conditions without medical training brings to mind the parable of the three blind men who stumble across an elephant. One blind man feels a leg, another feels the trunk, and the third feels an ear. Each reaches a completely different conclusion in attempting identification of his discovery. This illustrates the fallacies in perception which might be associated with ignorance and lack of opportunity for full examination. Some knowledge of what is to be expected is, however, not always advantageous. A feeling of what should be seen might generate illusions, rather than perception of the true picture. The interpretation of one’s sensations, and the recognition of objects depend on what the mind is prepared for. Medical training therefore prepares the mind to recognise clinical syndromes. Dickens had neither the training in observation, nor the knowledge that such syndromes existed, at the time he was writing. His contribution is that of pure observation, uncomplicated by perceptive aberrations. Indeed, had he studied the medical literature of the time he would not have found reference to many of the syndromes which he described. Formal description of some only appeared in print a century or more later. In his oration on Dickensian Diagnoses, published in the British Medical Journal, Sir Russell Brain said that Dickens ‘... recorded what he saw, and what the patient told him, so that he often gives us accounts which would do credit to a trained physician’.13 Had Dickens chosen a medical career he may have achieved eminence in a different arena, probably in the field of neurology.

1The Old Curiosity Shop, Penguin Classics (London 1985) Ch. 45, p. 423. 2Little Dorrit, Penguin English Library (Harmondsworth 1967) Book the First, Ch. 9, p. 142-143. 3Oliver Twist, Penguin Classics (London 1985) Ch. 33, pp. 294-300. 4The Pickwick Papers, Collins’ Clear Type Press (London & Glasgow) Ch. XLIV, p. 637. 5Nicholas Nickleby, Everyman’s Library No. 238; J. M. Dent & Sons (London 1907) Ch. XLIX, pp. 647-648. 6Martin Chuzzlewit, Collins (London & Glasgow 1953) Ch. 23, p. 369. 7Reader’s Digest Universal Dictionary, (London 1987) p. 1535. 8Our Mutual Friend, Penguin English Library (Harmondsworth 1971) Book the Second, Ch. 1, pp. 271-277. 9Little Dorrit, Penguin English Library (Harmondsworth 1967) Ch. 3, p. 73. 10Our Mutual Friend, Penguin English Library (Harmondsworth 1971) Book the First, Ch. 16, pp. 245-249. 11Martin Chuzzlewit, Collins (London & Glasgow 1953) Ch. 43, p. 627. 12Ibid. Ch. 11, pp. 185-187.

28 13Brain, R.: Dickensian Diagnoses: Brit. Med. J. 1955; 2; pp. 1553-1556.

TABLE 1 CONDITIONS NOTED AND ANALYSED IN THE MEDICAL LITERATURE

MEDICAL CONDITION CHARACTER NOVEL &c LITERATURE REFERENCE Post-concussional state Wrayburn OMF Brain, R.: Brit. Med. J. 1955; 2; 1553-1556

Post-traumatic aphasia Mrs Gargery GE Ibid.

Stroke, Hemiplegia, Mrs Skewton D&S Ibid. Agraphia

Stroke Sir L. Dedlock BH Ibid.

?Cerebral arteriosclerosis Mr Dorrit LD Ibid. ?Uraemia, stroke

Serial strokes John Willet BR Ibid.

Epilepsy ?secondary A. Chuzzlewit MC Ibid.

Paraplegia ?hysterical Mrs Crewler DC Ibid.

Hysterical paraplegia Mrs Clennam LD Ibid.

Cerebellar ataxia Cousin Feenix D&S Ibid.

Senile dementia ?strokes Chuffey MC Ibid.

Senile dementia Mrs Smallweed BH Ibid.

Chronic hypomania Man over fence NN Ibid.

?Multiple personality Dr Manette TTC Ibid.

Learning difficulty Barnaby BR Ibid.

Post-encephalitic syndrome Maggy LD Ibid. ?Argyll-Robertson pupil

Emphysema, airways obstrn. Bagstock D&S Ibid.

?Schizophrenia Mr F’s aunt LD Ibid.

Paraplegia: ?motor neurone G’pa Smallweed BH Ibid. disease

Dyslexia, Spontaneous Krook BH Jacoby; Lancet; 1992; combustion 340; 1521-1522

Renal tubular acidosis, Tiny Tim CC Lewis, D. W.; Am J Dis type 1 (diagnosis debated) Ch; 1992; 146; 1403-1407

Tuberculosis of spine Tiny Tim CC Callahan C.; Dickensian, Winter 1993 29 Pickwickian syndrome: Joe PP Burwell et al: Amer J. Cardiorespiratory syndrome Med. 1956; 21: 811-818 of extreme obesity. ?Diencephalic syndrome (diagnosis debated)

Miss Havisham syndrome Miss Havisham GE Critchley M., The Divine Banquet of the Brain, 1979; Raven Press p. 136-140

Tourette syndrome Pancks LD Cosnett: J. Neurol. N Neurosurg. Psy. 1991; 54; 184

Torticollis: focal dystonia Flintwinch LD Ibid.

SLEEP AND ITS DISORDERS: Insomnia Pickwick PP Cosnett, Sleep, 1992; Edith Granger D&S 15(3) 264-267 Florence D. D&S Ibid. Carker D&S Ibid. Pecksniff MC Ibid. Dickens UT Ibid.

Parasomnias Dickens UT Ibid. Miggs BR Ibid. Copperfield DC Ibid. Barnaby BR Ibid.

Restless legs Waiter DC Ibid.

Sleep paralysis Oliver OT Ibid.

Nightmares Walter Gay D&S Ibid. Copperfield DC Ibid. Florence D. D&S Ibid. Chester BR Ibid.

Automatisms Capt. Cuttle D&S Ibid. Perch D&S Ibid.

Hypersomnia Joe PP Ibid. W. Dorrit LD Ibid. Hugh, ostler BR Ibid.

Sleep apnoea John Willet BR Ibid. Coffee-stall UT Ibid. holder

30 EPILEPSY: VARIOUS TYPES Guster BH Cosnett, Epilepsia, 1994 35(4); 903-905 Monks OT Ibid. Headstone OMF Ibid. Spenlow DC Ibid. A. Chuzzlewit MC Ibid.

CONSEQUENCES OF ALCOHOLISM Binge drinking Sydney Carton TTC Cosnett, Addiction, 1999; 94(12), 1891- 1892

Alcoholism Wickfield DC Ibid.

Alcoholic cerebellar Cleaver OMF Ibid. degeneration

Delirium tremens Dying clown PP Ibid. Arthur Havisham GE Ibid.

Foetal Alcohol syndrome Jenny Wren OMF Ibid.

KEY: PP = Pickwick Papers OT = Oliver Twist NN = Nicholas Nickleby OCS = Old Curiosity Shop BR = Barnaby Rudge MC = Martin Chuzzlewit CC = Christmas Carol D&S = Dombey and Son DC = David Copperfield BH = Bleak House LD = Little Dorrit TTC = Tale of Two Cities UT = Uncommercial Traveller GE = Great Expectations OMF = Our Mutual Friend

31 Nickleby’s Pilgrimage: Footnote to a Footnote

EDGAR ROSENBERG

HE NOTE WHICH FOLLOWS links two fairly recent, nearly concurrent consummations, one delightful, the other very sad: the completion Tof the Pilgrim Letters and the death of Kathleen Tillotson. At our first luncheon, some time in 1974, Tillotson mentioned the frustrating difficulty of annotating the Letters, of scaring up clues to obscure historical references, a lot of them minutiae which didn’t so much as get into the European press Ð a mutiny among the Peruvian miners, say. As long as we talked footnotes, I exhumed an unidentified item of mortality in Pilgrim I who had lain dormant for almost a decade. The pertinent letter is dated ‘[?October 1833]’: Dickens’s accepting an invitation to dinner extended by one Miss Urquhart, pace the editors an amateur actress, presumably the sister of the slightly more visible Jack Urquhart, himself a participant in CD’s theatricals. The note displays CD’s characteristic mix of urbanity, a certain imperious hic jubeo, and the kind of kidding that suggests the nicest chumminess between the correspondents (‘It will afford me the greatest pleasure [should nothing occur to prevent me, which I have no idea of] to have the honor of dining with you on Friday at Five precisely.’) And, following the customary ‘Believe me, My dear Miss Urquhart / Yours most sincerely’ the weird signature, ‘Charles. I.B.L.K.Y.N. Dickens.’ The editors annotate the middle term ‘A mystery Ð but perhaps something to do with the theatricals’ (I, 31, n. 5). I called this to Tillotson’s notice, scribbled on the back of our bill two words IBLKYN NYKLBI and sent the scrap sailing across the table, allowing ‘theatricals’, all right. My sleight of hand brought on such a wonderful smile in the austere editor (‘Extraordinary! Why yes of course!’) that if I had known how to blush, I should have blushed like one of Dickens’s Grown-Up Children. As a matter of fact, the solution to the onomastic mystery happens to raise a larger and more intriguing puzzle: why it took Dickens more than five years to breathe life into NYKLBI. To judge from the preliminary homework in Yorkshire in late January and early February ’39 and the publication of the first monthly number on 31 March, our hero couldn’t have gotten himself into the manuscript any earlier than February, more likely March, ’39. Somehow, between autumn ’33 and early spring ’39, N. (or I.) was left snoring in limbo. Of course, the interim between the acting out of Nicholas Nickleby and its first motion five years earlier tells us nothing about the projected plot of the novel (such as it is), apart from

32 its anticipating the histrionic businesses; all it suggests is that in the beginning was the name. So much for IBLKYN’s pilgrimage and, had Dickens peeped into the future, the germ that engendered the physical, mental, and emotional ailments which afflict all these cripples Ð Smike, his monstrous begettor, Mrs Nickleby and her vegetable lover. Before her death, the great textualist (to whom this note is meant to be the smallest of tributes) might have tackled the problem of IBLYKIN’s temps perdu, but I forgot to bring up the subject; and if she couldn’t have solved it, chances are that nobody could.

33 Dickens, Ireland and the Irish1 Part I

LEON LITVACK

N IRELAND Dickens was clearly a popular and renowned figure. In a letter to his sister-in-law Georgina Hogarth he recalls how on a Ireading tour of the country he was approached by an admirer in the streets of Dublin, who shook his hand, saying ‘Do me the honour to shake hands, Misther Dickens and God bless you sir; not only for the light you’ve been to me this night, but for the light you’ve been in mee house sir (and God love your face!) this many a year!’2 The fact that Dickens chooses to render an approximation of a Dublin accent is interesting, for it not only points to his attention to the qualities and inflections of local speech; it is also indicative of his more general attitude towards Ireland and the Irish, which was a fusion of objectified pronouncements and informed observation. Evidence of Dickens’s approach appears in a number of areas in his life and work, including his fascination with the theatre; his interest in Irish poetry and balladry; his familiarity with Irish politics Ð particularly with Daniel O’Connell and the Repeal Movement, and later with Fenianism; his observations on the Irish in America and in London; his appreciation of his own popularity on the other island, verified personally on three reading tours; and the friendships he enjoyed with specific figures, including the Irish lawyer Percy Fitzgerald and the Cork painter Daniel Maclise. Dickens’s theatrical interests ensured that he was familiar with the tradition of the stage Irishman. In a letter to George Henry Lewes in April 1848 Ð a time when he was involved in amateur theatricals to raise funds for preserving Shakespeare’s house at Stratford Ð Dickens wrote: ‘I can’t find a suitable farce with an Irishman in it’.3 By June, however, he had done so: he had selected Dion Boucicault’s Used Up, a play first performed in 1844, which praised the simple life, and expressed nostalgia for rural values.4 Dickens played the part of the bored hero, Sir Charles Coldstream, and never took on the role of the stage Irishman, though in 1858, while in Dublin, he wrote in jovial mood to his sister-in- law to say, ‘I have become a wonderful Irishman Ð must play an Irish part some day’. Indeed in the same letter Dickens includes a dialogue with a young boy, which embodies a theatricality that informs the wish he expresses:

INIMITABLE. Holloa old chap. YOUNG IRELAND. Hal-loo! INIMITABLE (in his delightful way). What a nice old fellow you are. I am very fond of little boys. YOUNG IRELAND. Air yer? Ye’r right.

34 INIMITABLE. What do you learn, old fellow? YOUNG IRELAND (very intent on Inimitable, and always childish except in his brogue). I lairn wureds of three sillibils, and wureds of two sillibils, and wureds of one sillibil. INIMITABLE (gaily). Get out, you humbug! You learn only words of one syllable. YOUNG IRELAND (laughs heartily). You may say that it is mostly wureds of one sillibil. INIMITABLE. Can you write? YOUNG IRELAND. Not yet. Things comes by deegrays. INIMITABLE. Can you cipher? YOUNG IRELAND (very quickly). Wha’at’s that? INIMITABLE. Can you make figures? YOUNG IRELAND. I can make a nought, which is not asy, being roond. INIMITABLE. I say, old boy, wasn’t it you I saw on Sunday morning in the hall, in a soldier’s cap? You know Ð in a soldier’s cap? YOUNG IRELAND (cogitating deeply). Was it a very good cap? INIMITABLE. Yes. YOUNG IRELAND. Did it fit unkommon? INIMITABLE. Yes. YOUNG IRELAND. Dat was me!5

The exchange, complete with stage directions, is meant to recall a dramatic performance, and contributes to a large body of evidence concerning Dickens’s remarkable attentiveness to the pronunciation of Irish English. He emphasises such distinctive features as the fronted vowel in ‘Air’; the lowered vowels in ‘deegrays’ and ‘asy’; the lengthened vowel in ‘Wha’at’s; defrication of the target ‘th’ in ‘Dat’; vowel insertion (epenthesis) in ‘wureds’ Ð thus explaining his comment about learning words of one syllable; and, in a line Dickens himself speaks, the Irish English construction ‘Wasn’t it you I saw’ (rather than ‘Didn’t I see you’).6 This level of perception, characteristic of Dickens, goes well beyond what a casual English observer of Irish speech might appreciate or Ð and this is far more challenging Ð render in written form. Dickens knew the work of prominent Irish balladeers and poets, particularly Thomas Moore (Fig. 1, 1779-1852), whom he first met through Richard Bentley in 1838,7 and to whose work he alludes in his fiction. Moore, who was born a Catholic, was from an early age an Irish patriot, with a ‘thorough and ardent passion for poor Ireland’s liberties, and a deep and cordial hatred of those who were then lording over and trampling her down’.8 These sentiments were strengthened after his entry into Trinity College Dublin in 1795, where he acquired a reputation as a political speaker, and became a close friend of Robert Emmet (1778- 1803), who was later executed for treason.9 The amatory and convivial poetry that Moore was writing at the time suited the taste of fashionable London society, to which he was introduced in 1799.10 His songs were in great request, and his performances enlivened many soirées,11 thus reinforcing the sale of his poetry.

35 Fig. 1. Thomas Moore in his Study at Sloperton College (English School; artist unknown). The setting for this panel painting is the poet’s home in Wiltshire, where he had lived since 1817. He is depicted as a man of culture, at home in both the literary and musical worlds. A harp (an instrument often associated with Moore) sits on the floor on the left, in front of the piano. By kind permission of the National Gallery of Ireland. Moore’s success was also fostered by the patronage of Francis Rawdon-Hastings, Earl of Moira,12 who secured for him the offer of the Irish Poet Laureateship Ð an honour which was declined, partly on account of Moore’s Irish patriotism. His passion for his country’s culture is perhaps most evident in his Irish Melodies (Fig. 2), which he conceived during 1806-7. He was approached by two music publishers, William and James Power, to write words for arrangements by Sir John Stevenson from characteristic Irish folk-tunes;13 Moore’s splendid performances were sufficient justification to recommend the songs to fashionable society. The Melodies, published in ten ‘Numbers’ between 1808 and 1834, were congenial; but Moore also hoped that they would have a softening effect on the English, whom he considered harsh, scornful, or indifferent, and would, as he said, ‘catch the eye of some of our patriotic politicians’.14 Moore earned a great deal from the work: James Power paid him £500 a year for the publication of new numbers of the Irish Melodies, and for its companion volume, National Airs (1818- 27).15 These, along with such works as Lalla Rookh (1817), established him as a leading poet of his time. Moore’s reputation in Ireland was pre-eminent. Though he had no liking for vociferous nationalists like Daniel O’Connell, he was keenly aware of the oppressive atmosphere occasioned by the 1800 Act of 36 Fig. 2. Daniel Maclise, frontispiece to Moore’s Irish Melodies (London: Longman, Brown, Green and Longmans, 1845). This collage features a host of images traditionally associated with Ireland and with music (including harps, shamrocks, uillean pipes, fairies, keening women, and men singing in a tavern). A likeness of Moore on a medallion forms the centre of the illustration. In the lower right a bugler calls soldiers to arms, as he points towards an occurrence in the distance (an echo, perhaps, of the rousing calls to the people of Ireland which feature throughout the Irish Melodies). The theme of music is pervasive Ð even in the union of a couple above Moore’s image (the man attempts awkwardly to play the fiddle as he kisses his beloved).

37 Union. Several works attest to this position: the Memoires of Captain Rock (1824), a fierce indictment of the misgovernment of Ireland, the publication of which established Moore as a leading Irish patriot;16 The Life and Death of Lord Edward Fitzgerald (1831), a respectful treatment of one of the leaders of the 1798 rebellion; Travels of an Irish Gentleman in Search of Religion (1833), which, though it served as a defence of the ancient national faith, was, by Moore’s own admission, ‘deeply political’ in its ‘bearings on the popular case of Ireland’;17 and his History of Ireland (1835-46), which illustrated the impressive cultural achievements of the Irish people before their subjugation by what was perceived as an unjust régime. Given this evidence of Moore’s Irish sympathies it is interesting to examine what use Dickens made of his work. In ‘The Boarding House’ from Sketches by Boz, Mr Calton exclaims, ‘Tom Moore is my poet’18 Ð a sentiment that is then echoed by several other characters. The words might also apply to Dickens himself, at least in the context of his deep familiarity with Moore’s songs. He owned a set of the twelve-volume Paris edition of the poet’s works,19 and knew the Irish Melodies well enough to exchange verse-letters based on them with Mark Lemon.20 There are over thirty allusions to Moore’s songs in Dickens’s novels and sketches; they have been identified by Donal O’Sullivan, who notes that Moore ‘held a special place in Dickens’s affections’.21 They appear in Sketches by Boz, Nicholas Nickleby, Martin Chuzzlewit, David Copperfield, Bleak House, Little Dorrit, Great Expectations, The Uncommercial Traveller, Our Mutual Friend, and The Mystery of Edwin Drood; by far, however, the greatest number occur in The Old Curiosity Shop, and are mostly recalled by Dick Swiveller, either as quotation or parodic variation. Titles from Irish Melodies include ‘When first I met thee’,22 ‘I saw thy form in youthful prime’ (OCS, p. 271), ‘Oh! blame not the bard’ (OCS, p. 346; Fig. 3), ‘Go where Glory waits thee’ (OCS, p. 530; Fig. 4),23 ‘Drink of this cup’ (OCS, p. 562), and ‘When he, who adores thee’ (OCS, p. 345). From National Airs Dickens includes ‘’Tis when the cup is smiling before us’ (OCS, p. 530); he also recalls ‘Mary, I believed thee true’ from Moore’s Juvenile Poems (OCS, p. 117), ‘Holy be the pilgrim’s sleep’ (OCS, p. 596), and from Lalla Rookh the quatrains concerning ‘The Fire-Worshippers’, beginning ‘Oh! Ever thus, from childhood’s hour’ (OCS, p. 513). Despite the overt nationalist sentiments of some of these, Dickens recalls them as touchstones of popular culture, fit to be recited by the Perpetual Grand Master of the ‘Glorious Apollers’ Ð a convivial glee club which Dick tells Quilp about in chapter 13 (OCS, p. 159). J. W. T. Ley comments on Swiveller’s extensive knowledge of songs, explaining that it is an indication of his mental expansiveness and ‘flow of soul’ (important to his role as an adaptable ‘pivot’ in the novel, capable of change and growth).24 Dick also functions as an evocation of sentiment, which is readily apparent in his quotations from Moore, as well as his recollections of other songs, including the seventeenth-century melody ‘Begone! Dull Care’, Thomas Haynes Bayly’s ‘We met Ð ’twas in a crowd’, and the tune Dick plays on the flute, ‘Away with Melancholy’ 38 Fig. 3. Daniel Maclise, illustrated version of ‘Oh, blame not the bard’, Moore’s Irish Melodies, p. 45. This melody treats the dual themes of patriotism and song, and emphasises the fact that the bard (now departed) might have sung of victory in battle, had the circumstances been different. It is recalled in chapter 35 of The Old Curiosity Shop, when Dick Swiveller asks the name of the Single Gentleman (the Grandfather’s brother, who turns out to be Master Humphrey), in case anyone should call. When the anonymous character says ‘Nobody ever calls on me’, Dick exclaims ‘If any mistake should arise from not having the name, don’t say it was my fault, Sir... Oh blame not the bard’.

39 Fig. 4. Daniel Maclise, illustrated version of ‘Go where Glory waits thee’, Moore’s Irish Melodies, p. 1. The Germanic influences on Maclise’s art can clearly be seen in this image. The melody concerns a warrior who takes leave of his beloved before going to battle; he is asked to remember her in various circumstances. It is recalled in Martin Chuzzlewit, chapter 11, and in chapter 58 of The Old Curiosity Shop, when Dick, on learning from the Marchioness that ‘the Baron Sampsono Brasso and his fair sister’ are at the play, inquires of the diminutive servant, ‘Do they often go where glory waits ’em and leave you here?’

40 (OCS, pp. 100, 350, 533). It would seem, then, that Dickens’s passion for Moore was for the writer and songster who was the favourite in the convivial clubs and fashionable English society of the novelist’s youth, rather than the one whose poetry and prose works served as vehicles for Irish romantic nationalism. There is, however, a greater attention to the Irish Ð and particularly to their political aspirations Ð evident in Dickens’s pronouncements on the United States. In chapter 6 of American Notes, where Dickens describes New York, he espies ‘two labourers in holiday clothes, of whom one carries in his hand a crumpled scrap of paper from which he tries to spell out a hard name, while the other looks for it on all the doors and windows’. He continues:

Irishmen both! You might know them, if they were masked, by their long-tailed blue coats and bright buttons, and their drab trousers, which they wear like men well used to working dresses, who are easy in no others. It would be hard to keep your model republics going, without the countrymen and the countrywomen of those two labourers. For who else would dig, and delve, and drudge, and do domestic work, and make canals and roads, and execute great lines of Internal Improvement! Irishmen both, and sorely puzzled too, to find out what they seek. Let us go down, and help them, for the love of home, and that spirit of liberty which admits of honest service to honest men, and honest work for honest bread, no matter what it be.25

The passage is perceptive, because it reflects predominant patterns of Irish emigration to America before the Great Famine began in 1845.26 Also, here Dickens characterises them as honest labourers, thus clearly discriminating between them and those unnamed figures he describes in Sketches by Boz, including the Irishman who ‘comes home drunk every other night, and attacks everybody’,27 or the ‘knot of Irish labourers’ who have been ‘alternately shaking hands with, and threatening the life of each other’.28 In chapter 11 of his travelogue (Fig. 5) he describes a journey from Pittsburgh to Cincinnati on a steamboat:

Further down still, sits a man who is going some miles beyond their place of destination to “improve” a newly-discovered copper mine. He carries the village Ð that is to be Ð with him: a few frame cottages, and an apparatus for smelting the copper. He carries its people too. They are partly American and partly Irish, and herd together on the lower deck; where they amused themselves last evening till the night was pretty far advanced, by alternately firing off pistols and singing hymns.29

The singing of hymns is a telling detail, because it points to a certain type of religiosity,30 which is also evident in a temperance parade in Cincinnati in which the Irish were prominent:

41 Fig. 5. Marcus Stone, ‘Emigrants’, illustration for American Notes, chapter 11 (‘From Pittsburg [sic] to Cincinnati in a Western Steamboat’). In 1862 Stone was commissioned to supply supplementary scenes for the Library Edition of this travel book, as well as for Pictures from Italy, A Child’s History of England; in the same year he was asked by Dickens to illustrate the volume publication of Great Expectations. There happened to be a great Temperance Convention held here on the day after our arrival: and as the order of march brought the procession under the windows of the hotel in which we lodged, when they started in the morning, I had a good opportunity of seeing it. It comprised several thousand men; the members of various “Washington Auxiliary Temperance Societies”; and was marshalled by officers on horseback, who cantered briskly up and down the line, with scarves and ribbons of bright colours fluttering out behind them gaily. There were bands of music too, and banners out of number: and it was a fresh, holiday-looking concourse altogether. I was particularly pleased to see the Irishmen, who formed a distinct society among themselves, and mustered very strong with

42 their green scarves; carrying their national Harp and their Portrait of Father Matthew, high above the people’s heads. They looked as jolly and good-humoured as ever; and, working (here) the hardest for their living and doing any kind of sturdy labour that came in their way, were the most independent fellows there, I thought.31

This genial description might indicate that Dickens was particularly interested in depicting the Irish in America as honest and sober labourers, making a fresh start in the new Republic. In contrast, however, he viewed with disgust the poor Irish immigrants, whose settlement, complete with sod huts, he espies en route to the Shaker village:

At one point, as we ascended a steep hill... we came upon an Irish colony. With means at hand of building decent cabins, it was wonderful to see how clumsy, rough, and wretched, its hovels were. The best were poor protection from the weather, the worst let in the wind and rain through wide breaches in the roofs of sodden grass, and in the walls of mud; some had neither door nor window; some had nearly fallen down, and were imperfectly propped up by stakes and poles; all were ruinous and filthy. Hideously ugly old women and very buxom young ones, pigs, dogs, men, children, babies, pots, kettles, dung-hills, vile refuse, rank straw, and standing water, all wallowing together in an inseparable heap, composed the furniture of every dark and dirty hut.32

Dickens’s ability to offer contrasting presentations in the same work points to the difficulty for scholars in pinpointing any unified attitude on the part of the novelist towards Ireland and the Irish. Whereas the presentation of the Irish in American Notes reveals Dickens’s biases as a journalist and travel-writer, the treatment in Martin Chuzzlewit provides evidence of his skill as a satirist. In chapter 21, Martin and Mark attend the meeting of the Watertoast Association of United Sympathisers, whose secretary, in reading the minutes, enlightens Martin concerning the group’s allegiances:

He then learned that the Watertoast Association sympathized with a certain Public Man in Ireland, who held a contest upon certain points with England; and that they did so, because they didn’t love England at all Ð not by any means because they loved Ireland much; being indeed horribly jealous and distrustful of its people always, and only tolerating them because of their working hard, which made them very useful; labour being held in greater indignity in the simple republic than in any other country upon earth.33

The man in question is the Irish ‘Liberator’, Daniel O’Connell (Fig. 6, 1775-1847), who campaigned for Catholic emancipation and the repeal of the 1800 Act of Union, and, interestingly, expressed his pleasure with American Notes and with The Old Curiosity Shop.34 The episode in 43 Fig. 6. David Wilkie, Daniel O’Connell (1836-38). By kind permission of the Royal Bank of Scotland. Wilkie exercised a profound influence on the work of Daniel Maclise, who, in August 1841, involved Dickens in a campaign for a monument in Wilkie’s memory.

44 Chuzzlewit was inspired by a series of articles in the Times in June and July 1843, which satirised the anti-English meetings held by Americans in favour of Home Rule.35 Dickens, writing the Watertoast episode shortly after the appearance of these pieces, takes a similar stance; however, in tracing the Association’s dissolution to General Cyrus Choke’s discovery of O’Connell’s opposition to slavery, Dickens was able to evoke his own emancipatory sentiments.36 The novelist was sensitive to the strong feelings aroused by O’Connell at public meetings. In 1836, when he was working for the Morning Chronicle, the then radically minded37 Dickens was sent to report on the Irish MP’s famous Ipswich speech, made as part of his ‘Justice for Ireland’ campaign. He wrote to Catherine on 27 May:

It is now half past one, and huge mobs are assembled to greet O’Connell who is every moment expected. From the appearance of the crowd, and the height of party feeling here, I rather expect a Row.38

A more animated (though less authoritative) instance of Dickens’s admiration is recorded by William Carleton, who quotes several sources which recall that during the passage of the Irish Coercion Bill through the House of Commons, a speech by O’Connell had such an effect on Dickens (who was reporting the debate for the Morning Chronicle) that he was forced to lay down his pencil, because he was so moved by the orator’s account of a widow seeking her only son among the peasants killed by soldiers in a tithe riot, and another of a young girl shot down while leading her blind grandfather along a country lane.39 While the provenance of this anecdote cannot be unquestionably established, the degree to which Dickens appreciated O’Connell’s ability to excite pathos is evident in comments made to his American friends James and Annie Fields in 1868, when he compared O’Connell to the reformer John Bright: ‘[O’Connell] had a fine brogue which he cultivated and a magnificent eye. He had written a speech on the wrongs of Ireland, and, though he repeated it many, many times during the three months when I followed him about the country, I never heard him give it twice the same, nor ever without himself being deeply moved’.40 O’Connell’s reaction to Dickens’s work in the early 1840s has become the stuff of legend. He supposedly threw his copy of The Old Curiosity Shop out of a train window in a fit of indignation.41 Of greater import is Dickens’s reaction to the Liberator’s trial, in which the latter was accused of sedition, fined £2000, and was supposed to be imprisoned for one year. Dickens alluded to the case in the leader he wrote for the Morning Chronicle in March 1844; it opened thus:

The present Government, having shown itself to be particularly clever in its management of Indictments for Conspiracy [that is, the trial of O’Connell], cannot do better, we think (keeping in its administrative eye the pacification of some of its most influential and most unruly 45 13 (1848). This grimly effective image depicts the Illustrated London News onlookers are convincingly presented. , ’ Ejectment of Irish Tenantry ‘ brutal bailiff evicting the pleading tenant, along with his weeping wife and children; soldiers unfeeling Fig. 7.

46 supporters), than indict the whole manufacturing interest of the country for a conspiracy against the agricultural interest.

The article was largely an ironic assault on the entrenched opponents to the repeal of the Corn Laws; yet it contains several references to injustices and absurdities in evidence at O’Connell’s trial, including the challenge of the defence lawyers to a duel by Thomas Barry Smith (the Attorney General for Ireland). The leader concluded with the observation that ‘An indictment against the whole manufacturing interest need not be longer, surely, than the indictment in the case of the Crown against O’Connell and others’.42 Later in the year the case was brought to appeal before the Law Lords; after deliberation the two sides were evenly divided, leaving Lord Denman with the deciding vote. He used it to reverse the decision, and O’Connell was released from Richmond Bridewell in September 1844, after serving three months. In a letter to Forster, written from Italy, Dickens expressed delight with Denman, saying ‘I am glad to think I have always liked him so well’. His opinion of the newly released O’Connell, however, was rather less adulatory: in the same letter he spoke of the Liberator being ‘beleaguered by vanity’, making speeches about the justice system that were ‘fretty’, ‘boastful’, and ‘frothy’.43 Dickens is not known to have commented on O’Connell again until 1868, in the exchange with the Fieldses quoted above. He did not express a view on the Liberator’s death in 1847, and never found sympathy with the Irish nationalist cause, which fell into the hands of the radical Young Ireland group in O’Connell’s final years. For one so interested in the workings of Parliament and the issues of reform and social change in these islands, it would seem on first glance extraordinary that Dickens never once expressed an opinion on the Great Irish Famine, which caused the death of one million people, and the emigration of another million, between the years 1845 and 1851.44 It is important to remember, however, that the reportage in England of the Famine generally accorded with prevailing imperial rhetoric. Leslie Williams discusses the coverage in the Illustrated London News Ð a journal which has, for many scholars, served as a treasure-trove of Victorian illustrations (Figs. 7, 8):

In a deeper reading of the text and graphic material, there appears a very strong recurrent theme of the otherness of the Irish. Even while reporting current events on the neighbouring island, most of the writers and illustrators view the Irish experience by contrast with the happy homes and fair fields recorded more often in illustrations of the English countryside. The editorial viewpoint regarding the Irish is comparable to the proto-anthropological view of the imperial or colonial reportage in the paper. The Irish experience is seen by the ILN as foreign and is reported in that context. The effect of distancing, of course, reduces involvement or any sense of political or social responsibility. Whatever passed for social contract in London 47 or England was not expected to be applied to the colonies, nor to the sister island. While the ILN is at first sympathetic and positive towards the Irish, the very tragedy of the famine and emigration makes their experience “other”.45

Fig. 8. ‘Bridget O’Donnell and her Children’, Illustrated London News 15 (1849). This pathetic group is one of the few illustrations in the London journal to show signs of emaciation and desperation. Prior to the food crisis, O’Donnell’s husband was a tenant holding a small parcel of land; late in 1849, however, the family was evicted for non-payment of rent, and Bridget, ill with fever, was left homeless.

This rationale helps to explain the novelist’s silence. Comments on the Famine did, however, appear in Household Words, in an article by Harriet Martineau published in November 1852; ‘The Irish Union’ championed the workhouses established in Ireland in 1838- 41, and stressed their benefit to the population in the wake of the Famine.46 Dickens certainly knew of the piece; yet he comments only on ‘rampant Irish nonsense (and worse) about the Saxon’47 Ð that is, the more violent anti-English elements of the Catholic Defence Association Ð rather than on the effects of Famine. Dickens’s feelings about the Association (never mentioned in the article) are made clear in a letter to Angela Burdett Coutts:

The Government will do with those Irish Ruffians, exactly what it did with Puseyism Ð interfere, feebly, when the mischief is done. I feel 48 quite certain that but for the laisser-aller dealing with the Candlestick and Confessional matters, we never should have got to this pass Ð for the Pope was made, through that medium, to believe that there was a tendency towards him in England which does not exist Ð and presumed upon it Ð and went too far to retract. Now, a War between the Roman Catholic Religion Ð that curse upon the world Ð and Freedom, is inevitable.48

The anti-Catholic bias clearly evident here also characterises Dickens’s own pronouncements about the Irish in Household Words. In ‘A Crisis in the Affairs of Mr John Bull’ Dickens adopts a piteous-contemptuous posture in his characterisation of ‘Miss Eringobragh’ (the sister of John Bull), ‘grovelling on the ground with her head in the ashes’; he continues: ‘This unfortunate lady had been, for a length of time, in a horrible condition of mind and body, and presented a most lamentable spectacle of disease, dirt, rags, superstition and degradation’. The ferociously partisan piece was prompted by the restoration of the Roman Catholic hierarchy, and centres on how recent political and ecclesiastical developments might affect life in England. The pitiful state of Miss Eringobragh (whom Dickens deals with rather cursorily) has been aggravated, he writes, because of inexorable Catholic influence; the conclusion he draws is that ‘wherever you see a condition at all resembling hers, you will find, on inquiry, that the sufferer has allowed herself to be dealt with by the Bulls of Rome’.49 Dickens seems to give Ireland up as a lost cause; what concerns him more is the influence of a newly strengthened Catholicism Ð and indeed Tractarianism Ð on John Bull’s island. As Malcolm Andrews notes, while Dickens’s relationship to his country is a ‘continually changing one’, he wrote very little that was not to do with England and the English, and he usually considered ‘barbarism’ and ‘Catholicism’ to be synonymous.50 These observations, combined with Dickens’s own pronouncements about Ireland’s prospects, serve to indicate that his concern with English matters far outweighed his consideration of Irish ones. The subject of the Irish in Britain (the destination of many who emigrated in the wake of the Famine) was a far more fertile field for Dickens’s imagination. His intimate knowledge of London ensured that the Irish Ð who formed nearly five per cent of the capital’s population in 1851 Ð frequently found their way into his work.51 They are often stereotyped to enhance the general atmosphere Dickens wishes to create: they appear, for example, as prisoners in Newgate, ‘indifferent’ to the presence of visitors;52 occupants of Saffron Hill public houses, ‘wrangling with might and main’;53 servants to the likes of Harold Skimpole;54 and as the mass of urban poor, whose ‘miserable affairs’ are observed by the Uncommercial Traveller.55 The greatest number are, however, found in ‘On Duty with Inspector Field’, an account in Household Words of a nocturnal visit by a forensic observer to the St Giles rookery, the East End, and the Mint lodging-houses in the Borough, in the company of Charles Frederick Field (Fig. 9), who 49 became chief of the Detective department of Scotland Yard in 1846, and retired in 1852, with a testimonial to which Dickens contributed £300. Michael Slater points out that Field may have first acted as Dickens’s guide as early as 1839 when, together with John Forster, Daniel Maclise, and the actor James R. Anderson, the novelist made a nocturnal tour of St Giles Ð the district which excited in him, according to Forster a ‘profound attraction of repulsion’.56 In this article he presents a tramps’ lodging-house, featuring various Irish occupants:

Fig. 9. Inspector Charles Field; by kind permission of Dickens House, London. He joined the New Police in 1829, and first worked in Holborn Division, which included the notorious slum area of St Giles. He was made an inspector in 1833, and became Chief of the Detective Department in 1846. On his retirement in 1852 he opened a private detective agency. Field contributed to Dickens’s conception, in Bleak House, of Inspector Bucket, who, interestingly, demonstrates his familiarity with Moore’s Irish Melodies on three occasions: chapters 49, 57, and 59 (see Charles Dickens, Bleak House, ed. Nicola Bradbury [Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1996], pp. 763, 874, 907).

Ten, twenty, thirty Ð who can count them! Men, women, children, for the most part naked, heaped upon the floor like maggots in a cheese! Ho! In that dark corner yonder! Does anybody lie there? Me sir, Irish me, a widder, with six children. And yonder? Me sir, Irish me, with me wife and eight poor babes. And to the left there? Me sir, Irish me, along with two more Irish boys as is me friends. And to the right there? Me sir and the Murphy fam’ly, numbering five blessed souls. And what’s this, coiling, now, about my foot? Another Irish me, pitifully in want of shaving, whom I have awakened from sleep Ð and across my other foot lies his wife Ð and by the shoes of Inspector 50 Field lie their three eldest Ð and their three youngest are at present squeezed between the open door and the wall. And why is there no one on that little mat before the sullen fire? Because O’Donovan, with his wife and daughter, is not come in from selling Lucifers! Nor on the bit of sacking in the nearest corner? Bad luck! Because that Irish family is late to-night, a-cadging in the streets!57

From the way he recounts the incident, it seems that Dickens never doubted his prerogative to break in and wake up the trampers as they took their poor rest; clearly he uses the presence of the police to justify this intrusive surveillance. Indeed it would be interesting to discover whether such thoughts ever occurred to the readers of Household Words. Nevertheless, the tone he adopts should be clearly distinguished from the apocalyptic pronouncements of Thomas Carlyle in Chartism (1839), where the Scotsman notes that ‘The uncivilised Irishman, not by his strength, but by the opposite of strength, drives out the Saxon native, takes possession in his room. There abides he, in his squalor and unreason, in his falsity and drunken violence, as the ready-made nucleus of degradation and disorder’.58 While Dickens’s art depended on his readers’ immediately recognising the various types which constituted the social fabric of his time, he did not simply juxtapose ‘apes’ and ‘angels’, and avoided marking out the Irish in particular as creatures of vice.59 He was, rather, reflecting the conspicuousness of the Irish in a specific London district,60 and was describing the social reality for the tramping class, which was not the realm of the social outcast, but rather of the working people who followed itinerant callings and trades; these lodging-houses were the night-time havens for hawkers and travelling labourers who could afford the penny- or twopenny-a-night beds. The mingling of the sexes and the crowded, impromptu conditions in which the inmates ate and slept were deemed by reformers to be immoral and unsanitary; yet those in lodging- houses were, in fact, better off than those who either slept rough or resorted to the metropolitan casual wards and night refuges, where accommodation was free. Because the period of residence was variable, there was a high turnover rate; thus Dickens’s appellation ‘Irish me’ underscores the anonymity of the inhabitants. The visitations by the police, with their bull’s-eye lanterns, were frequent; indeed in exploring the more notorious tramps’ havens in London, such as the labyrinthine Adelphi Arches off the Strand, ‘no sane person’, one account stated, would have entered ‘without an armed escort’.61 Bearing these circumstances in mind, it appears that in this article Dickens is not evoking an anti-Irish bias, or objectifying them because of any innate antipathy; he is, rather, doing what he had attempted earlier, in presenting the sod huts in American Notes, that is, to draw on the English reading public’s perception of the foreignness of the Irish experience, particularly in emphasising that his party is ‘stricken back by the pestilential breath’ issuing from within.62 It was a distancing technique, which, if Leslie Williams’s assessment is correct, reduced or obviated the 51 need for an informal political or social response, while encouraging the employment of stereotype by the reader to sketch in the scene depicted. The complexity of Dickens’s disposition towards the Irish is best observed by juxtaposing these literary and journalistic pronouncements with the respect and admiration he demonstrated for Ireland and its people during his three reading tours of the island, in August-September 1858, March 1867, and January 1869.63 During his first sojourn (in the company of his manager Arthur Smith) he read in Dublin, Cork, Limerick, and Belfast, and was ‘greatly surprised’ that imagined stereotypes were not confirmed. Dublin, he noted, had ‘far fewer spirit shops’ than other ‘great cities’ and was ‘very much larger’ than he had supposed it to be.64 Some of the places he visited reminded him of Paris and Naples.65 Newspaper reports of the time confirm that audiences were enraptured by his renditions. The Freeman’s Journal summarised Irish public opinion of Dickens thus:

We are very glad to find that so large a number of our fellow citizens assembled on this occasion to give Mr Dickens a hearty Irish welcome on his first visit to this country.... There are a great many writers for whose brilliant works and admirable genius we may have the most intense appreciation Ð as Macauley [sic], Carlyle, Thackeray, or Tennison [sic], but no one of these seems to have acquired such a hold upon the affections of the reading public as Mr Dickens can proudly boast of.... But mingled with this natural curiosity to see a man so distinguished, we believe there was a strong desire on the part of the audience to express by their presence on this occasion the respect, the reverence, and the affection which they feel towards a great public teacher whose lessons have ever inculcated the divine principles of kindness, charity, and love.66

Though Dickens spent more time in Dublin than he did elsewhere (largely because of the profitability of readings there),67 it is interesting to consider his observations on other parts of the island, where the inhabitants revelled in the presence of the most famous author of the day. Forster believes that he liked Belfast ‘as much as Dublin in another way’; he continued, interspersing his narrative with extracts from Dickens’s correspondence:

“A fine place with a rough people; everything looking prosperous... every cottage looking as if it had been whitewashed the day before; and many with charming gardens, prettily kept with bright flowers.” The success, too, was quite as great. “Enormous audiences. We turn away half the town. I think them a better audience on the whole than Dublin; and personal affection is somewhat overwhelming...”. He had never seen men “go in to cry so undisguisedly”, as they did at the Belfast Dombey reading; “and as to the Boots and Mrs. Gamp it was just one roar with me and them. For they made me laugh so, that sometimes I could not compose my face to go on”.68 52 He also took a long walk to Carrickfergus (ten miles from the city), and purchased, with the help of his friend Francis Finlay, a ‘trim, sparkling, slap-up Irish jaunting car’, which he later used to convey guests from Higham Station to Gad’s Hill.69 His visit to Cork (where he read on 30 and 31 August) included a trip to Blarney Castle, where he kissed the famous stone; he did not, however, think the audience for the Carol as good as those in Dublin or Belfast.70 Of Limerick he said ‘there is not much to be done’; he remarked on the town’s peculiarity in a letter to W. H. Wills:

This is the oddest place Ð of which nobody in any other part of Ireland seems to know anything. Nobody could answer a single question we asked about it.... Arthur [Smith] says that when he opened the doors last night, there was a rush of Ð three Ducks! We expect a Pig to-night. We had only £40; but they seemed to think that, amazing! If the two nights bring £100, it will be as much as we expected. I am bound to say that they are an admirable audience. As hearty and demonstrative as it is possible to be. It is a very odd place in its lower-order aspects, and I am very glad we came Ð though we could have made heaps of money by going to Dublin instead.

From other remarks it is clear that Dickens’s dominant concern was with profits; at times his audience was reduced, in his estimation, to so many pounds and shillings: when he wrote to his daughter about Victoria Hall (his Belfast venue), he noted; ‘The room will not hold more than from eighty to ninety pounds.’71 He delights in the fact that, as he tells Wills, he ‘made, last week, clear profit, £340; and have made, in the month of August, a profit of One Thousand Guineas!’72 The evidence concerning the first Irish reading tour indicates that though Dickens appreciated some aspects of the locations and people he encountered, the ways in which he thought about them did not point to an especial interest in Ð or estrangement from Ð Ireland and the Irish.

Part II will follow in the next issue

1This article is developed from ideas originally presented in the Oxford Reader’s Companion to Dickens, ed. Paul Schlicke (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1999), pp. 297-8; permission has been granted by OUP to reproduce portions of the argument. I am grateful for opportunities to speak on this topic at the Dickens Society Boston conference in November 1999, and at Dickens Fellowship gatherings in October 2000 and July 2001. I am also grateful to Michael Slater, John Drew, Paul Schlicke, Graham Storey, Patrick McCarthy, James Murphy, and Nial Osborough, for useful discussions on various points, both general and specific. 2Letters of Charles Dickens, The Pilgrim Edition, 8, ed. Graham Storey and Kathleen Tillotson (Oxford: Clarendon, 1995), p. 643 (hereafter ‘Pilgrim Letters’); dated 29 August 1858. 3Pilgrim Letters 5, p. 282; dated 16 April 1848. The letter continues: ‘I have no doubt you are a good countryman, however; and in the enclosed farce (excellent for our purpose) there is [a] very excellent and telling part of Emery’s Ð Andrew’. The play to which Dickens refers was Love, Law, and Physic; the countryman (which Lewes agreed to play)

53 was one of the best-known parts of the actor John Emery (1777-1822). 4See Pilgrim Letters 5, p. 354; to Mark Lemon, dated 30 June 1848. 5Pilgrim Letters 8, pp. 637-9; dated 25 August 1858. The Pilgrim editors have chosen to reproduce the text from The Letters of Charles Dickens, edited by his Sister-in-law [Georgina Hogarth] and his Eldest Daughter [Mamie Dickens], vol. 2 (London: Chapman & Hall, 1880), where Dickens’s title is given as ‘Inimitable’. The exchange is also, however, reproduced in John Forster’s Life of Charles Dickens (ed. J. W. T. Ley, London: Cecil Palmer, 1928, p. 663), where Dickens is referred to as ‘Old England’, which, the Pilgrim editors note, is ‘probably what CD wrote’. The juxtaposition is potentially significant in political terms: ‘Young Ireland’ is also, of course, the term used for the group led by Thomas Davis which agitated for Irish independence; for further information see Charles Gavan Duffy, Young Ireland: A Fragment of Irish History (London: Cassell, Petter, Galpin & Co., 1880). 6I am grateful to my colleagues Joan Rahilly and Paul Simpson for their assistance in performing this linguistic analysis. The encounter described in the opening paragraph of this article shows a similarly high degree of perception: the dentalisation of |t| in the proximity of |r| (‘Misther’); dipthongisation (‘ounly’); demonstrative articles (‘this night’, ‘this many’); as well as the idiomatic straight translation from Irish of ‘but for the light you’ve been in mee house sir (and God love your face!)’. 7See Pilgrim Letters 1, p. 460. Bentley gave a dinner in November 1838, which was attended by Moore, Dickens, Harrison Ainsworth, and others whom the Irish poet described in his diary as ‘all the very haut ton of the literature of the day’ (Memoirs, Journal and Correspondence of Thomas Moore, ed. Lord John Russell [London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1853-6], 7, p. 244; entry for 21 November 1838). Moore adds that he refused to sing on this occasion, ‘saying, rather unluckily, that I should feel as doing something unnatural to sing to a party of men’ (p. 245). 8Memoirs, Journal and Correspondence of Thomas Moore 1, p. 21. I am grateful to Geoffrey Carnall, who has written the entry on Moore for the new Dictionary of National Biography, for his insight into the poet’s nationalist sentiments, and for some of the details that follow. 9Emmet in fact discouraged Moore from involving himself in the conspiracies that led to the 1798 rebellion. 10Moore was enrolled in the Middle Temple, with a view to a legal career. 11According to William Jerdan, Moore’s face was ‘sparkling with intelligence and pleasure, whilst Beauty crowded enamoured around him and hung with infectious enthusiasm upon every note’ (The Autobiography of William Jerdan: with His Literary, Political and Social Reminiscences and Correspondence during the Last Fifty Years [London: A. Hall, Virtue & Co., 1852], 4, p. 91). 12Moira persuaded his friend the Prince of Wales to be the dedicatee of Moore’s Odes of Anacreon, Translated into English Verse, published in 1800. 13Most of these airs were drawn from Edward Bunting’s General Collection of Ancient Irish Music of 1796 and 1809 Ð a pioneering work in Irish folklore studies; the songs were collected at a meeting of itinerant Irish harpers in Belfast on 12 July 1792. 14The Letters of Thomas Moore, ed. Wilfred S. Dowden, vol. 1: 1793-1818 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1964), p. 128; to Lady Donegal, dated 29 April 1808. 15National Airs had arrangements by John Stevenson and Henry Bishop. Most of them are said to be derived from the folk music of various countries; thus ‘Oft in the stilly night’ is termed a ‘Scotch air’. There is a strong probability, however, that the majority were written by Bishop or Stevenson, with some contributions from Moore, who composed some of the music for pieces in the collection identified as ‘Miscellaneous Songs’. 16Moore’s work served as the inspiration for Daniel Maclise’s painting The Installation of Captain Rock (1834). For a detailed consideration see Luke Gibbons, ‘Between Captain Rock and a Hard Place: Art and Agrarian Insurgency’, Ideology and Ireland in the Nineteenth Century, ed. Tadhg Foley and Sean Ryder (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 1998), pp. 23-44. 17Letters of Thomas Moore 2, p. 787; to Cornelius Lyne, dated 26 September 1834. 18Charles Dickens, Sketches by Boz, in The Dent Uniform Edition of Dickens’ Journalism, Volume 1: Sketches by Boz and Other Early Papers 1833-39, ed. Michael

54 Slater (London: J. M. Dent, 1993), p. 281. 19The Poetical Works of Thomas Moore, 12 vols. (Paris: A. & W. Galignani, 1823-7). The volumes are included in the inventory of the contents of 1 Devonshire Terrace, completed on 27 May 1844 before Dickens’s departure for Italy, and reproduced in volume 4 of the Pilgrim Letters (see p. 712); they also appear in the catalogue of the library at Gad’s Hill (Catalogue of the Library of Charles Dickens from Gadshill, ed. J. H. Stonehouse [London: Piccadilly Fountain Press, 1935], p. 82). For further information on Dickens’s book purchases see Leon Litvack, ‘What Books Did Dickens Buy and Read? Evidence from the Book Accounts with His Publishers’, The Dickensian 94.2 (1998), pp. 85-130. 20See Pilgrim Letters 5, pp. 467, 496; Dickens begins the first of these letters ‘My Dear Tom Moore Ð (I mean Lemon Ð but the verses have confused me Ð)’. 21Donal O’Sullivan, ‘Charles Dickens and Tom Moore’, Studies 37 (1948), p. 169. The article is reprinted by Jim Cooke in his Charles Dickens’s Ireland: An Anthology (Dublin: Woodfield Press, 1999), pp. 60-77; see Leon Litvack’s review in The Dickensian 96.2 (2000), pp. 163-4. 22Charles Dickens, The Old Curiosity Shop, ed. Angus Easson (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985), p. 237 (hereafter ‘OCS’); subsequent references will appear in the text. 23Dickens also recalls this song in a letter; see Pilgrim Letters, vol. 4, p. 540, letter of 22 April 1846, to H. P. Smith. 24J. W. T. Ley, ‘Songs that Dick Swiveller Knew’, The Dickensian 27 (1931), p. 205. On the importance of this character to the novel see Gabriel Pearson, ‘The Old Curiosity Shop’, Dickens and the Twentieth Century, ed. John Gross & Gabriel Pearson (Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1962), pp. 77-90; see also Garrett Stewart, Dickens and the Trials of Imagination (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1974), pp. 89-113. 25Charles Dickens, American Notes, ed. F. S. Schwarzbach (Everyman Dickens, London: J. M. Dent, 1997), p. 91. 26David Fitzpatrick calculates that one million Irish emigrants crossed the Atlantic between 1815 and 1845 (‘Emigration 1801-1870’, A New History of Ireland, 5, ed. W. E. Vaughan [Oxford: Clarendon, 1989], p. 565). He also notes that the majority of Irish emigrants to New York in the period 1830-45 were classed as ‘labourers’, a designation which included industrial and construction workers, as well as carpenters and other artisans (p. 575). 27Charles Dickens, ‘Seven Dials’, Sketches by Boz, pp. 74-5. 28Charles Dickens, ‘Gin Shops’, Sketches by Boz, p. 184. An extensive (though still incomplete) list of the named and unnamed Irish characters in Dickens’s work may be found in George Newlin’s Everyone in Dickens (Westport, Conn: Greenwood Press, 1995), pp. 316, 441-2. 29American Notes, p. 165. 30On the singing of hymns by Irish emigrants see Leon Litvack, ‘The psychology of song; the theology of hymn: songs and hymns of the Irish migration’ Religion and Identity, The Irish World-Wide: History, Heritage, Identity, 5, ed. Patrick O’Sullivan (Leicester: Leicester UP, 1996), pp. 70-89. 31American Notes, p. 169. The ‘Father Mathew’ to whom Dickens refers was Theobald Mathew (1790-1856), the much loved Catholic cleric who embarked on a temperance campaign in Ireland in 1838, and achieved remarkable success. Known as the ‘Temperance Apostle’, he mounted similar campaigns in London in 1843, and in the United States from 1849-51. Mathew (after whom many American temperance societies were named) gave evidence before the Select Committee on Colonisation from Ireland in 1847. 32American Notes, p. 217 33Charles Dickens, Martin Chuzzlewit, ed. Margaret Cardwell (Oxford World’s Classics, Oxford UP, 1991), pp. 310-11 34See O’Connell’s letter to the Dublin Pilot, 24 March 1843, reprinted in W. J. Fitzpatrick, ed., Correspondence of Daniel O’Connell (London: John Murray, 1888), vol. 2, pp. 296-7. 35See Lowell L. Blaidsell, ‘The Origins of the Satire in the Watertoast Episode of Martin Chuzzlewit’, The Dickensian 77 (1981), pp. 92-101, and K. J. Fielding, ‘Martin Chuzzlewit and “The Liberator”’, Notes & Queries 198 (1953), pp. 254-6. 55 36On O’Connell’s petitions to the Americans in the 1840s on abolition and on repeal of the Act of Union see Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White (New York: Routledge, 1995), pp. 6-31. 37Andrew Sanders, Dickens and the Spirit of the Age (Oxford: Clarendon, 1999), p. 52. Sanders demonstrates how in the 1830s Dickens’s ‘radical hopes for the continued reform of the constitution and for the further evolution of representative government’ were ‘consistently confounded by his experience of vested interest in action (and inaction)’. 38Pilgrim Letters 1, p. 152; dated 27 May 1836. Fred Kaplan records that Dickens and Thomas Beard attended two dinners given for O’Connell in Liverpool and Birmingham in January 1836 (Dickens: A Biography [London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1988], p. 61). 39See W. J. Carlton, ‘Dickens Reports O’Connell: A Legend Examined’, The Dickensian 65 (1969), pp. 95-9. His sources are Justin McCarthy’s The Epoch of Reform 1830-1850 (London, 1882), and two works by Michael MacDonagh, The Life of Daniel O’Connell (London: Cassell & Co., 1903), and The Reporters’ Gallery (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1913). The incident is also recalled by Ley, in a note to his edition of Forster’s Life of Charles Dickens (p. 66) 40Quoted in Carlton, ‘Dickens Reports O’Connell’, p. 99; Carlton gives as his source Harper’s Monthly Magazine 145 (June 1922), p. 114. Dickens’s comparison is interesting: Bright, who served as President of the Board of Trade in Gladstone’s first ministry (1868- 74) pushed for the disestablishment of the Church of Ireland and for the Land Act of 1870; he did not, however, support Irish Home Rule. See also James T. Fields, Yesterdays with Authors (Boston: J. R. Osgood and Company, 1872), George Curry, Dickens and Annie Fields (San Marino: Huntington Library, 1988), and ‘His Closest American Friends: James and Annie Fields’, in Dickens: Interviews and Recollections, ed. Philip Collins (London: Macmillan, 1981), pp. 320-1. Dickens was also asked to stand for Parliament alongside Bright; see Pilgrim Letters 12, p. 181. 41Edgar Johnson, for example, records that O’Connell, reading the book in a railway carriage, ‘burst into tears when he read the death of Nell, groaned “He should not have killed her”, and despairingly threw the volume out of the train window’ (Charles Dickens: His tragedy and Triumph [New York: Simon and Schuster, 1952] p. 304). Fitzpatrick provides a more sober account: O’Connell, he says, was reading The Old Curiosity Shop ‘excitedly’, but on reading of the death of Nell he ‘flung away’ the book in a fit of indignation, declaring that ‘never again’ would he read a line that Dickens wrote, because the novelist ‘had not sufficient talent to maintain Nell’s adventures with interest to the end and bring them to a happy issue, so he killed her to get rid of the difficulty’ (Correspondence of Daniel O’Connell 2, pp. 112-3). 42‘The Agricultural Interest’, Dickens’ Journalism, Volume 2: ‘The Amusements of the People’ and Other Papers: Reports, Essays and Reviews 1834-51, ed. Michael Slater (London: J. M. Dent, 1996), pp. 64-7. Dickens visited the site of O’Connell’s trial when he travelled to Dublin in 1858; see Pilgrim Letters 8, p. 635, dated 23 August 1858, to Mamie Dickens. 43See Pilgrim Letters, vol. 4, pp. 193-4; dated ?15-16 September 1844. 44The reason for this tragedy was the failure of the staple crop, the potato, in three seasons out of four, beginning in 1845. Because over three million Irish people were totally dependent on the potato as their sole source of sustenance, famine ensued, the horrors multiplying with each successive failure. Recent assessments of the Famine include Christine Kinealy, This Great Calamity: The Irish Famine 1845-52 (Dublin: Gill & Macmillan, 1994); Peter Gray, Famine, Land and Politics: British Government and Irish Society, 1843-50 (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1998); Donal Kerr, A ‘Nation of Beggars’? Priests, People and Politics in Famine Ireland, 1846-1852 (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1994); Chris Morash and Richard Hayes, eds., Fearful Realities: New Perspectives on the Famine (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1996); John Killen, ed., The Famine Decade: Contemporary Accounts, 1841-51 (Belfast: Blackstaff, 1995); and Noel Kissane, The Irish Famine: A Documentary History (Dublin: National Library of Ireland, 1995). 45See Leslie Williams, ‘Irish Identity and the Illustrated London News, 1846-51: Famine to Depopulation’ Representing Ireland: Gender, Class, Nationality, ed. Susan Shaw Sailer (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1997), p. 91. On the journal’s Famine illustrations in particular see Margaret Crawford, ‘The Great Irish Famine 1845-9: Image

56 Versus Reality’. Ireland: Art into History, ed. Brian P. Kennedy and Raymond Gillespie (Dublin: Town House, 1994), pp. 75-88. 46[Harriet Martineau], ‘The Irish Union’, Household Words 6 (6 November 1852), pp. 169-75 (hereafter ‘HW’). There were other contributions to the journal on Irish subjects: William Allingham’s ‘The Irish “Stationers”’ (HW 2 [5 October 1850], pp. 29-33), ‘Irish Ballad Singers and Irish Street Ballads’ (HW 4 [10 January 1852] p. 361) and ‘Saint Patrick’ (HW 13 [5 April 1856], pp. 279-83); Harriet Martineau’s ‘Triumphant Carriages’ (HW 6 [23 October 1852], pp. 121-5); Sidney Smith’s ‘The Spade in Ireland’ (HW 3 [26 April 1851], pp. 114-5); G. A. Sala’s ‘The Length of Quays’ (HW 7 [20 August 1853], pp. 582-6) and ‘An Irish Stew’ (HW 7 [27 August 1853], pp. 617-20); and William Moy Thomas’s ‘The Last Howley of Killowen’ (HW 9 [15 July 1854], p. 513-9). For authorship of Household Words articles see Anne Lohrli, Household Words:... Table of Contents, List of Contributors and their Contributions (Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1973). Dickens commented on several of these in his correspondence. On ‘Irish Ballad Singers and Irish Street Ballads’ see Pilgrim Letters 6, p. 778 (to Wills, dated 13 October 1852); on Smith’s ‘The Spade in Ireland’ see Pilgrim Letters 6, p. 432 (to Lady Grey, dated 16 July 1851); on Sala’s ‘An Irish Stew’ see Pilgrim Letters 7, p. 130 (to Wills, dated 12 August 1853). 47Pilgrim Letters 6, p. 795; to Angela Burdett Coutts, dated 3 November 1852. 48See Pilgrim Letters 6, p. 466; to Angela Burdett Coutts, dated 22 August 1851. The impetus for the letter was a meeting in Armagh on 19 August 1851 of the newly formed Catholic Defence Association, whose aim was the repeal of the Ecclesiastical Title Assumption Act (passed on 1 August), which forbade the use of diocesan titles by the new Catholic bishops in Britain as a whole. 49[Charles Dickens], ‘A Crisis in the Affairs of Mr John Bull’, HW 2 (23 November 1850), p. 195. The article is reprinted, with helpful commentary, in Slater’s Dickens‘ Journalism, Volume 2, pp. 297-305. 50Malcolm Andrews, Dickens on England and the English (Hassocks: Harvester, 1979), pp. xix, xv. For an incensed response to Dickens’s anti-Catholicism see the review of Pictures from Italy in the Dublin Review 21 (Sept. 1846). 51For information on the Irish in Victorian Britain see Lyon Hollen Lees, Exiles of Erin: Irish Migrants in Victorian London (Manchester: Manchester UP, 1979); Roger Swift and Sheridan Gilley, eds., The Irish in the Victorian City (London: Croom Helm, 1985), and The Irish in Britain 1815-1939 (London: Pinter 1989); Graham Davis, The Irish in Britain 1815-1914 (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1991); and Donald MacRaild, Irish Migrants in Modern Britain, 1750-1922 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999). 52Charles Dickens, ‘A Visit to Newgate’, Sketches by Boz, p. 204. 53Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist, ed. Kathleen Tillotson (Oxford World’s Classics, Oxford: Oxford UP, 1982), p. 49. 54Charles Dickens, Bleak House, ed. Nicola Bradbury (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1996), p. 930. 55Charles Dickens, ‘A Small Star in the East’, The Uncommercial Traveller (Illustrated Library Edition, London: Chapman and Hall, 1875), p. 598. Dickens provides a vivid portrait of a woman who has suffered from working in the dust-laden, poisonous atmosphere of a white-lead factory; she is described by her companion thus: ‘Sure ’tis the lead-mills, wher the women gets took on at eighteen-pence a day, sur, when they makes application early enough, them gets lead-poisoned later, and some, but not many, niver; and ’tis all according to the constitooshun, sur, and some constitooshuns is strong, and some is weak; and it hurts her dreadful; and that’s what it is, and niver no more, and niver no less, sur’. It is important to note that the vast majority of the Irish in Britain were not reliant on either poor relief or charity for their subsistence, except, perhaps, during the worst Famine years. 56Life of Charles Dickens, p. 11. For Slater’s comments see Dickens’ Journalism, Volume 2, p. 356. St Giles was, according to Samuel, one of London’s ancient haunts of the travelling fraternities (Raphael Samuel, ‘Comers and Goers’, The Victorian City: Images and Realities, ed. H. J. Dyos and Michael Wolff [London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973], 1, p. 126). 57‘On Duty with Inspector Field’, HW 3 (14 June 1851), pp. 266-7; the article is reprinted in Dickens’ Journalism, Volume 2, pp. 359-69. For Field’s proximity to Inspector

57 Bucket see Philip Collins, Dickens and Crime (London: Macmillan, 1962), pp. 206-11. 58Thomas Carlyle, Chartism (London: James Fraser, 1840), pp. 27-8. For Carlyle’s comments on the repeal of Act of Union (‘We’ll joost cut every one of yer thraits first’) and on Thomas Moore (‘puir little Tammy Moore’), both discussed at dinner parties given by John Forster, see Percy Fitzgerald, Memories of Charles Dickens, with an Account of ‘Household Words’ and ‘All the Year Round’ and the Contributors Thereto (Bristol: J. W. Arrowsmith, 1913), pp. 95, 97. 59See L. Perry Curtis, Jr., Apes and Angels: The Irishman in Victorian Caricature (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1971) and Sheridan Gilley, ‘English Attitudes to the Irish in England, 1780-1900’, Immigrants and Minorities in British Society (London: Allen and Unwin, 1978), p. 88. David Fitzpatrick treats the available evidence for Irish distinctiveness, and makes clear that there was no universal stereotype of the Irish immigrant; see ‘“A peculiar tramping people”: the Irish in Britain, 1801-70’, A New History of Ireland 5, p. 623. Dickens was not, however, immune from stereotypical identification; for example, he commented on an Irish girl at Urania Cottage, ‘shewing a very national incapability of getting on with anybody on any subject’ (Pilgrim Letters 6, p. 513; dated 9 October 1851, to Angela Burdett Coutts). 60Fitzpatrick notes that Irish conspicuousness in Britain was a result of their concentration in particular areas of a handful of cities; he cites such examples as Liverpool’s Irishtown, London’s rookery of St Giles, and Manchester’s Little Ireland (‘“A peculiar tramping people”’, p. 634). He adds, however, that the ‘Irish quarters’ were seldom exclusively Irish. 61See Samuel, pp. 126-9; he explains that in winter, when employment was more scarce, labourers gravitated towards towns and cities, often remaining in the lodging-houses for extended periods. This great influx occurred in October, after hop-picking or ‘hopping’ Ð an occupation for which, one journal noted, the Irish poor developed a ‘positive mania’ (‘The Irish in England’, Dublin Review [1856], p. 508). 62‘On Duty with Inspector Field’, p. 266. 63Dickens had considered travelling to Ireland on two previous occasions: he told Forster in July 1839 that he intended going ‘either to Ireland or to America and to write from thence a series of papers descriptive of the places and people I see’ (Pilgrim Letters 1, p. 564; dated 14 July 1839); in May 1852 he was invited by the Cork attorney John William Bourke to come to Ireland with members of the Guild of Literature and Art, to mount amateur theatricals at the time of the National Exhibition of the Arts, Manufacturers, and Materials (see Pilgrim Letters 6, pp. 668-9, 693; letters dated 8 May and 11 June 1852). Neither plan was executed, though Dickens did seriously consider Bourke’s invitation to Cork. 64Pilgrim Letters 8, pp. 633, 634; letters to Angela Burdett Coutts and Mamie Dickens, both dated 23 August 1858. It is interesting to note that before departing for Liverpool on 18 August 1858 Dickens, recovering from a cold, ‘sang half the Irish Melodies’ to himself to test his voice (Pilgrim Letters 8, p. 628; to Georgina Hogarth). By chance Dickens’s arrival in Ireland coincided with that of Cardinal Wiseman. 65Forster, Life of Charles Dickens, p. 662. 66‘Mr Charles Dickens’, Freeman’s Journal, 24 August 1858. Newspaper reports of the Irish reading tours were collected by Jack Shaw, in his ‘Dickens and Ireland’, The Dickensian 5 (1905), pp. 33-8. Shaw’s account was extensively used (though never acknowledged) by Cooke in his Charles Dickens’s Ireland, pp. 3-20. 67When Dickens wrote to his daughter about Victoria Hall (his Belfast venue), he noted ‘The room will not hold more than from eighty to ninety pounds’ (Pilgrim Letters 8, p. 641; dated 18 August 1858). 68Forster, Life of Charles Dickens, p. 664. The extracts are reprinted in Pilgrim Letters 8, pp. 642-3. Percy Fitzgerald recalls that Dickens described the citizens of Belfast as ‘curious people’ who ‘all seemed Scotch, but quite in a state of transition’ (Memories of Charles Dickens, pp. 7-8). 69Pilgrim Letters 8, p. 644; to Georgina Hogarth, dated 29 August 1858. Again Dickens drew a continental comparison, calling the ‘gay and bright’ jaunting car ‘Wonderfully Neapolitan’. See also his letter to Finlay confirming the order, in Pilgrim Letters 8, pp. 645-6. Fitzgerald describes Dickens’s coming to collect him in this vehicle

58 (Memories of Charles Dickens, p. 25). 70See Pilgrim Letters 8, p. 646; to Francis Findlay, dated 2 September 1858. 71Pilgrim Letters 8, p. 641; dated 18 August 1858. 72Pilgrim Letters 8, p. 647; to W. H. Wills, dated 2 September 1858.

59 Letters to the Editor

Dear Sir, The Rev Tony Lucas, in his sermon to mark your centenary year, claimed that you would be ‘hard put to find’ any literary society that could lay claim to a hundred years of continuous existence. If he would take a short walk from the Dickens House to King’s Cross Station, take a train to Leeds, then another to Keighley, walk across to the new bus station and catch one of the every-twenty-minutes buses to Haworth, he can visit a one-time Parsonage, now the Brontë Parsonage Museum, owned by a literary society that has been in continuous existence for one hundred and ten years. We wear our seniority lightly, however, and will give any Dickensian who makes him or herself known a hearty welcome.

Yours faithfully Robert Barnard (Chairman: The Brontë Society)

Dear Editor, Maria Bachman is clearly right to point out, in her fascinating article ‘“Up the River”: Another Mystery in The Mystery of Edwin Drood’ (The Dickensian, no. 458, winter 2002), that the ethos of Fildes’s illustration ‘Up the River’ does not correspond with Dickens’s description of the outing as a happy one. Grewgious and Rosa certainly look far less contented in the drawing than the text credits them with being. I am not convinced, however, that this is because of what Tartar might be saying to them. I think in fact that it is not Fildes’s illustration but Dickens’s text that needs a bit of explaining. We might reasonably expect Grewgious and Rosa to be somewhat tense and subdued on a boating trip since it would surely bring back to both of them the memory of the sad occasion when Rosa’s mother drowned. True, we are not told specifically in chapter 9 of Edwin Drood that ‘the fatal accident’ happened in connection with a boat; but it was a drowning ‘at a party of pleasure’, so I think it is a reasonable assumption that a boat was involved. It also happened at a similar time of year to the excursion ‘up the river’. So it is likely that Rosa and Grewgious, despite their readiness to go on the outing with Tartar, would at least begin it in the frame of mind which the illustrator has captured. Dickens, however, was at pains to emphasise the happiness of the trip, so presumably they gradually relaxed into contentment Ð though not, according to the illustration, until they had passed Putney Bridge. But why did Dickens so much stress the happiness of the occasion and omit all reference to any other emotion? Was the delicious afternoon on the Thames designed to be some kind of healing recapitulation of the

60 earlier experience of tragedy, a replacement of its sorrows by new hope and promise? Did Dickens, at least initially, intend this river trip to remind us of Rosa’s mother’s fate? Ð and, if, as Maria Bachman suggests, there was indeed some preliminary discussion between Dickens and Fildes which touched on the idea for an illustration of the trip, did Dickens at that stage suggest a sombre ethos for it? Did he later change his mind, and make it a wholly happy occasion, to avoid suggesting any link with Rosa’s mother’s death? If so, was this not because it was very important and he did not want its significance to become obvious too soon? Did he therefore go for a less prominent reminder of it by slipping in the brief mention of it in the course of the reunion of Crisparkle and Tartar, and leaving it at that? And, if any of this is anywhere near the truth, what was the fuller significance that this past tragedy was to have?

Yours sincerely Mike Kidger

61 Book Reviews

LYN PYKETT, Charles Dickens: Critical Issues. London: Palgrave, 2002, pp. ix + 206. ISBN 0-333-72802-5 (hardback) 0-333-72803-3 (paperback). £16.50.

Lyn Pykett’s study of Dickens does not so much float her ideas of what critical issues she wants to address in thinking of Dickens now, as give her sense of what critical issues others have engaged with. The absence of the first makes the book helpful for students, who will get a wide sense of what there is going, but it also makes for an impossible assignment: she proposes going right the way through all Dickens’s books, and by the end she has succeeded, though with one or two omissions, notably the short stories. No ‘George Silverman’, for instance. But just as she is obviously interested in the publishing details of the books Ð and this, though predictably inserted into the beginning of each chapter of each book, could have been developed, as giving her own ‘take’ on Dickens Ð she does have room for the journalism: her comments on Household Words are useful, like her work on The Uncommercial Traveller, and there it is noteworthy that she cites no other critic, she just says what she thinks. The book proposes to go through Dickens in terms of decades; this would have been worthwhile (we remember Kathleen Tillotson’s Novels of the Eighteen-Forties) and innovative, but strangely, nothing much happens with the idea. The opening of A Tale of Two Cities is quoted, but, even so, disappointingly vaguely, as we are told it ‘could stand as an epigraph for any of the novels discussed in this chapter [1858 to the end], or indeed for virtually all of Dickens’s novels from Dombey and Son onwards’ (165). It rather takes away from the specificity implied in looking at decades in the author’s development, and it raises the question, why start with Dombey and Son, which as a beginning seems arbitrary indeed. But then these decadal moments, which turn out to mean 1835-41, and 1842-8 (which, logically, should have Dombey and Son in the middle), then going back to 1846-50 (so starting again with Dombey), 1850-7 and then after 1858 to 1870, look as if they are more simply related to Dickens’s biography than to a history of the times. They offer some interesting contributions to the account of Dickens’s

62 life, though Lyn Pykett plays down Ellen Ternan and also has not much to say about Forster, surely a key critic to help us think through critical issues about Dickens. But it may be said that there is not much sense of the specificity of the different decades in Victorian social and political history. The analysis is often sharp and is always worth consulting, even if Lyn Pykett’s preferred mode of critique is to go through different critical views without adding in her own opinions: she is a trifle inclined to compile lists of viewpoints, as with assessments of Quilp (66), or on Oliver Twist’s innocence (48-49), or with Nell (62-63). On p. 129, she gives a list of views of what kind of novel Bleak House is, and it leaves the impression that she rather thinks the novel is the sum of these different critical positions, or that she does not care to arbitrate between different views. This may be unfair; for there is also the sense that she is not too impressed with Foucault-influenced readings, but has more time for those based on Derrida; that she has more time still for readings that find the woman in the text and that focus on the family and on domesticity. Her comments on the women in Little Dorrit (152-4) (though for a list-collector, surprisingly omitting Flora Finching) are interesting, and typical of many pages in the book. But she has little interest in violence, and the absence of passion is also marked in both the book’s treatment of Dickens, and the analysis of what it finds in Dickens. Nor is there much interest in comedy, despite a few token references to Bakhtin. It is a marker of what is problematic in discussing the whole of Dickens in a couple of hundred pages, especially when there seems also a need to show that she is au courant with every position that has been taken up in Dickens criticism. It means too that she is overly indulgent to critical positions that have derived out of more original work done elsewhere. The appropriations on pp. 28-30 of Walter Benjamin and his work on the flâneur (the idler or dawdler in the market-place) in nineteenth-century Paris (from Benjamin’s Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Age of High Capitalism [London: Verso 1973]) seem routine. Dickens is made the flâneur, but the appropriation also misses (as is standard in commentaries using Benjamin) the point that Benjamin thinks that the conditions of capitalism rule out the existence of the free flâneur, who cannot recognise that his position is as much commodified as the commodities to which he affects to be superior. Nor do I agree that the presentation of Smithfield in Oliver Twist is of the city as spectacle (47), since that implies, surely, the work of Guy Debord on the ‘society of the spectacle’. But the city in neither Sketches by Boz nor Oliver Twist is so commodified that it can be a spectacle to its inhabitants; there seems to be an historical simplification at work. Questions arise over one or two other critiques, where Lyn Pykett speaks in her own voice. Does Jaggers’s ‘obsessive’ handwashing ‘signal his desire to cleanse the taint of, thus dissociate himself from, his criminal clients’? (168). Surely it is a matter of speculation why Jaggers washes his hands, and open to several readings, of which another might be his cynicism (like Pilate). On p. 183, in relation to Edwin Drood, there are interesting comments on bachelors, 63 a little too much à la Eve Sedgwick on homophobia and the homoerotic for my liking. The analysis may well be right, but, as with Sedgwick’s Between Men, the theory of men being linked by homosocial desire is too much applied from the outside on to the text. The theory comes first, the text later. Bachelors are, after all, a feature of all Dickens’s writings from Sketches by Boz onwards, not just part of his later work, and a chance to develop a theme is missed. (The last section discusses masculinity: the theme is valid, but what does Pykett mean in finding Eugene initially ‘improperly masculinised’ (178)?). In conclusion, that there are so few disagreements, and fewer surprises, about a book on Dickens is probably a measure of how the arguments have been slightly dulled, and have been allowed to cancel each other out.

University of Hong Kong JEREMY TAMBLING

MICHAEL SLATER, Douglas Jerrold 1803-1857. Duckworth, 2002, pp xii + 340. ISBN 0-7156-2824-0. £25.00.

‘I am on such intimate terms with your writing’, wrote Dickens, before first meeting Douglas Jerrold in 1836, ‘that I almost feel an apology is unnecessary when I say I intend calling on you tomorrow...’. Jerrold, a brisk, diminutive figure, with intense blue eyes and a tossing mane of grey-brown hair, already an established playwright and journalist, struck up an immediate friendship with the younger Dickens, who had just become editor of Bentley’s Miscellany. By the eighteen-forties Jerrold and Dickens, with Thackeray, were being celebrated as a ‘supreme triad of comic and satirical writing’. In 1849 Charlotte Brontë cited Jerrold, Thackeray, Tennyson and Sir John Herschel as the ‘men [who] sway the public mind’. When Jerrold unexpectedly died in 1857, Dickens organised a series of commemorative performances to benefit Jerrold’s dependents, with such success that the proceeds still fund a Bursary for disadvantaged scholars at Christ Church, Oxford. Then Jerrold’s reputation faded. In 1918 Jerrold’s grandson Walter Jerrold attempted to re-establish it with his biography, Douglas Jerrold, Dramatist and Wit. But this was overshadowed by a general reaction against the Victorian period (Lytton Strachey’s iconoclastic Eminent Victorians appeared the same year). We have had to wait for Professor Michael Slater’s timely study to put Jerrold’s life and work in perspective. In an age instinct with drama, Jerrold was born (1803) into the theatre. His father ran the struggling Dover Company of strolling actors, which in 1806/7 moved from rural Cranbrook to the seething narrow streets of Sheerness, a dockyard town, where, by one report, every other house was a tavern and every third one a brothel. Aged ten, Jerrold entered Nelson’s navy as a Volunteer on the man-of-war, the Namur, with prospects of becoming a midshipman. He had the good fortune to 64 start under the paternal eye of Captain Charles Austen, brother of Jane, and to share a berth with Clarkson Stanfield, the future marine artist and scene painter. Together they staged onboard amateur theatricals, and nearly twenty years later Stanfield was to create the sets for Jerrold’s stage hit The Rent Day at Covent Garden. But Jerrold saw enough brutality to make him a lifelong campaigner against the military, the death penalty, and formal authority, and after two years he left the navy. His family had fallen on hard times, and Douglas was thrown as a boy into a struggle for existence in the turbulent world of Regency London, first as a printer’s apprentice, then as literary hack and aspiring playwright. Jerrold’s industry was extraordinary. In twenty years he wrote over sixty plays. At least three of them Ð Black-Eyed Susan (1829), Martha Willis (1831) and The Rent Day (1841) Ð pioneered English popular theatre in a field dominated by French melodramas. But playwriting was wretchedly paid: Jerrold received only sixty pounds for the phenomenally successful Susan, and then, when consigned to a debtors’ prison for a friend’s default, was refused help by Elliston, the theatre manager who was profiting hugely from it. Journalistic hackwork was paid little better. But Jerrold was becoming noticed, and making friends in the journalistic world. A turning point came in 1841 when Jerrold co- founded Punch, and his spiky satire helped ensure its success through its radical beginnings. The fearsome Mrs Caudle of the celebrated Curtain Lectures first harangued her hapless spouse in its columns. Jerrold also edited The Illuminated Magazine in 1843, later launched two magazines of his own, and in 1850 took on the mass circulation Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper. Professor Slater gives us splendid value. We get a meticulously researched account both of Jerrold’s life, and of the theatrical and journalistic world in which he lived. We see Jerrold the Radical-Liberal satirist and earnest campaigner for social issues, and the private persona, entertaining boisterously at his Putney home, animated in private theatricals, and entertaining with a flow of often barbed witticisms at Punch dinners. (The Chartist Thomas Cooper was one night startled to see an inebriated Jerrold bundled into a cab by Punch colleagues, with a home address label round his neck.) As a writer, Jerrold was also complex. From his childhood in the Dover Company he imbibed a strong vernacular style that in a play like Black-Eyed Susan can still be effective. He could draw vividly on his past, and, in a story like ‘The Manager’s Pig’, create a minor comic masterpiece. But, with even less formal education than Dickens, Jerrold the autodidact turned ambitiously to literary models like Jeremy Taylor, Thomas Browne, Shakespeare, Congreve and Rabelais. He typically loaded both his conversations and plays with clever conceits and similes, although true wit requires a detachment Jerrold signally lacked, and few of his surviving apophthegms sparkle today. His earnestness caught the mood of the period, but makes a social protest like The History of St James and St Giles (1841) two-dimensional today: where Jerrold raged at his age, 65 Dickens, with imagination and inspired reportage, transcended it. Nevertheless Jerrold and Dickens shared strongly-held Radical- Liberal views (protesting against the sufferings of the poor, hostile to working class militancy), only falling out over Dickens’s support of capital punishment. Both delighted in acting. When Jerrold joined Dickens’s Amateur Theatrical company on its visit to Manchester, Dickens imagined Mrs Gamp spotting Jerrold, and squawking with rage to see him surrounded by female admirers, ‘getting encouragement of the pretty delooded creeturs, as never know’d that sweet saint, Mrs C[audle], as I did...’. They admired each other’s writing and shared a common imaginative world. Professor Slater notes that Dickens’s Ghost of Christmas Present in his glorious plenitude resembles Jerrold’s Hermit of Bellyfulle in The Chronicles of Clovernook, serialised four months earlier. In Dombey, Dickens, rekindling Florence’s feelings for the long- lost Walter Gay, turned to the scene in Jerrold’s Susan in which Susan hears a tragic account of William’s death at sea, only to find him behind her. But this is much more than a study of Jerrold and his influence. Jerrold was, declared The Atlantic Monthly Review, ‘to a singular degree, a representative of his age... Jerrold and the century help explain each other...’. By so comprehensively ‘explaining’ Jerrold, Professor Slater has significantly clarified the early Victorian period as a whole, and puts us all in his debt. LOUIS JAMES

LILLIAN NAYDER, Unequal Partners: Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, and Victorian Authorship, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002, pp. xiv+221. ISBN 0-8014-3925-6 $35.00

In 1953 a debate emerged in The Dickensian, between Robert Ashley and Kenneth Fielding, concerning the literary collaborations between Wilkie Collins and Dickens, and the influence which Collins might Ð or might not Ð have exercised on Dickens’s art. While an element of partisanship is evident in these early critiques, later ones, by, for example, Sue Lonoff and Jerome Meckier, use a range of evidence to demonstrate the mutual indebtedness between the two novelists, and consider the psychological and artistic benefits that Dickens derived from Collins. Lillian Nayder’s study treads similar ground, but highlights the ‘inequities’ built into the working relationship at Household Words and All the Year Round Ð a situation that both writers, she claims, recognised, and that Collins increasingly came to resist. The opening chapter treats the relationship in the context of the Victorian publishing industry, emphasising such issues as class, labour relations, literary aspects of the market economy, perceptions of public taste, and gender politics, in order to demonstrate the degree to which Dickens controlled his ‘product’. Though Nayder may be correct in 66 identifying the tensions and restrictions which Collins felt in his role as Dickens’s subordinate, the evidence presented for this claim occasionally overstates the case. For instance, she assesses Dickens’s treatment of female contributors, such as Elizabeth Gaskell and Dinah Mulock, noting that he discredited their desire for autonomy by imposing revisions on their work; in this way, Nayder holds, Dickens treated women’s authorship as ‘illegitimate’. At several points, Nayder incorrectly assumes that Dickens’s comments on incompetent writers apply largely or wholly to women; more particularly, she fails to recognise the admiration that Dickens clearly felt for Gaskell’s work, and the genuine warmth that characterised their relationship. The gender politics argument is finally employed to assert that Collins was subject to some of the same terms imposed on female contributors to Household Words. In assessing ‘The Wreck of the Golden Mary’, Nayder emphasises Dickens’s treatment of class conflict. Noting that the inspiration for the multi-authored tale stems in part from reports of so-called ‘Blue-Jacket Agitation’ (labour unrest in the British merchant fleet), she highlights Dickens’s strategies for obscuring these difficulties, and links the issue to his contract negotiations with Collins. Interestingly, Nayder argues that the underlying threat to Ravender’s authority emanates from Rarx (who, she claims, is an implicitly anti-Semitic depiction) and from the feminised unruly labour force on the ship. She asserts that by commissioning Collins to undertake the narrative of the faithful Steadiman (who gains his own command after the wreck), Dickens was encouraging his new staff member to ‘define himself against unruly women and Jews’, and thus consider himself a ‘manager of labor’ rather than a ‘hired hand’. Here again, in discussing how Dickens imaginatively resolves labour disputes, Nayder’s projection seems a trifle forced. Nayder then offers a more absorbing Ð and better substantiated Ð consideration of the variants of The Frozen Deep, to reveal Collins’s extended interest in the theme of mutiny. Through a careful scrutiny of Collins’s initial 1856 draft, Dickens’s revised performance version of 1857, and Collins’s two further revisions of 1866 and 1874, Nayder effectively demonstrates that Dickens’s revisions were designed to remove signs of class strife. Of particular note is her insight into the genesis and development of the Scottish housekeeper, Nurse Esther: whereas Dickens envisaged her as a ‘devouring mother’ and barbarous Highlander, Collins conceived of her as a visionary, who sees more than the ‘civilised’ English characters who disparage her. Nayder rightly perceives greater division between Dickens and Collins over The Frozen Deep than over any other collaborative work. Further divisions are highlighted in the author’s analysis of ‘The Lazy Tour of Two Idle Apprentices’, ‘The Perils of Certain English Prisoners’, and ‘No Thoroughfare’. In ‘The Lazy Tour’, Nayder observes, the roles of staff writer and literary conductor are elided in a ‘wishful representation’, which attempts to obscure English class divisions by turning industry into idleness and work into play; she demonstrates how Collins is nevertheless able to communicate social anxieties in his 67 interpolated tale, which undermines the ‘social idyll’ of the frame narrative. Nayder then effectively demonstrates how in ‘The Perils’ Collins acknowledges social inequities obscured by Dickens: he allies the English privates and sailors with those who are subjected to colonial rule. In discussing ‘No Thoroughfare’, the final collaboration between Dickens and Collins, Nayder focuses on its treatment of male partnership and legitimacy, to emphasise how, by 1867, Dickens and Collins were writing at cross-purposes Ð a situation most clearly revealed, she notes, in the stage adaptation which Collins undertook while Dickens was in the United States. In the drama Collins transforms Obenreizer (conceived by Dickens as a ‘savage’ ‘animalistic’ figure), into a tragic hero. This alteration, Nayder argues, anticipates Collins’s treatment of the three Brahmins in The Moonstone. The author uses her final chapter to compare Collins’s sensation novel with The Mystery of Edwin Drood, to reveal how the unfinished novel can be understood in the context of Dickens’s decision to end collaboration: Drood serves, Nayder believes, as an attempt to reclaim control over race relations and empire, particularly as Collins developed it in The Moonstone. She demonstrates how Dickens acknowledges the ‘crimes of the empire’ by his presentation of the Landlesses (‘who recall the Hindus of The Moonstone’), while shifting the burden of criminality from West to East; by contrast, Nayder posits that Collins firmly implicates the East India Company and its profiteering from the sale of opium. When trying to unravel the complex web of relations between Dickens and Collins, it is clear that inequities surface. Some of these were unavoidable, in the context of a working relationship in which the older novelist assumed a high degree of risk in commissioning contributors to provide copy for literary journals of which he was proprietor and leading light. In using the language of labour relations, gender politics, and empire, combined with thorough textual research, to assess the terms of this occasionally strained relationship, Nayder has added significantly to our understanding of one of the most important literary collaborations of the nineteenth century.

The Queen’s University of Belfast LEON LITVACK

DOMINIC RAINSFORD, Literature, Identity and the English Channel. Narrow Seas Expanded, Palgrave, 2002, pp. viii + 191. ISBN 0-333- 77389-6. £45.00.

This slim yet spirited contribution to the study of literary topography takes as its subject that body of water known to the Romans as Mare Britannicum, subsequently dubbed ‘the narrow seas’ and nowadays identified Ð depending on which side of the water one owes allegiance to Ð as either the English Channel or La Manche. This cold, grey and often 68 turbulent stretch of sea has, across history, been construed in many different ways, now seen as beguiling and inspiring, now as treacherous and malefic; in political terms, it has been saluted as the link between two great nations, but there is no gainsaying that it is also what divides them. On the assumption that the Channel is no neutral setting, but ‘a charged locality with a powerful history’, Dominic Rainsford offers a survey of Anglo-French responses, drawing on literature and popular culture from the two centuries or so since the French Revolution. His entertaining conspectus ranges from the novels of Dickens and Victor Hugo to the short stories of Julian Barnes and the travelogues of Paul Theroux, and examines Channel-poems by the likes of Gautier, Verlaine, Swinburne and Matthew Arnold, generally demonstrating that the selfsame salty hiatus can nourish a myriad of emotional and aesthetic options. Such background history as Rainsford finds space for eschews the larger narrative of, say, Napoleon’s invasion-plans or the Normandy landings, and instead privileges novelties like the first balloon and airplane overflights, or the recent controversial Eurotunnel link. Engaging lowbrow digressions treat of the popular association of Beachy Head with suicide, or invoke Vera Lynn’s poignant wartime hit ‘The White Cliffs of Dover’. All these lofty and mundane elements combine in what the author calls ‘a dialogue between the concrete and the imaginary’ and stimulate critical attention to both topography and the cultural reflexes and idiosyncrasies of national identity. Thus intimations of British insecurity in the 1790s mark the coastal poetry of Charlotte Smith, whose proto-Romantic Elegiac Sonnets frequently find in ‘the dim cold sea’ a metaphor for political crisis. Among French responses, Chateaubriand’s vision of the storm-lashed rocks of his native Brittany underpins a high-flown discourse upon transience and vanitas; in Hugo’s epic fiction Les Travailleurs de la Mer, metaphysical impulses continually spurt through the graphic descriptions of the Channel Islands, where the writer spent years in exile; while the historian Jules Michelet, in his prose meditation La Mer, gazes out from a Normandy cliff-top upon the inexorable mirror of human conflict. Charles Dickens must be deemed one of the most dedicated of trans- Manche travellers, for Rainsford calculates that he made at least thirty return trips to France between 1837 and 1868. Though little exploited in the novels (curiously, Dickens simply elides Miss Manette’s exposure to the waves at the outset of A Tale of Two Cities), these journeys frequently crop up in his correspondence and journalism. ‘The Calais Night Mail’ elaborates on the classic motif of sea-sickness, while seeming to hint at popular misgivings about France dating back to the days of the Terror. ‘A Flight’ recounts a twelve-hour journey from London to Paris, sharply contrasting the surliness of the sea with the generous welcome of the French capital. For all that Dickens inclines to harp on the discomforts and disorientations of the crossing, his vaguely francophobic grumbling evaporates in the sheer bliss of arrival. ‘All in all, the process of getting to France is lavishly traumatic for Dickens, but being there is perfectly comfortable’, Rainsford concludes, an 69 observation matching the irrational wariness of many British Channel- hoppers to this day.

University of Kent at Canterbury ROGER CARDINAL

70 Radio Reviews

Scrooge Blues and Not So Tiny Tim, by Nicholas McInerny: BBC Radio 4, December 2002.

Dickens’s fiction has always lent itself to dramatic treatment, and recently there has been a craze for singling out a character and providing new adventures for him. John Sullivan attempted, with admittedly so-so results, to resuscitate Micawber for television last year in some brand- new adventures, starring hard-working David Jason. BBC Radio 4 offered two seasonal dramas last December Ð Scrooge Blues and Not So Tiny Tim Ð drawing on characters from the immortal Christmas Carol, by prolific radio dramatist, Nicholas McInerny. In effect, these were two short morality plays that deployed characters from A Christmas Carol. The characters constituted the strongest link with Charles Dickens, for although quite satisfying seasonal radio dramas with uplifting themes, effective dialogue and splendid sound effects, they lacked the vitality and indeed the electrical comicality of their great original. In Scrooge Blues we find the reformed Ebenezer (David Hargreaves) a year after the night of his ghostly life-changing visitors, seemingly happily married to Mary (Gillian Goodman). He sits by the fire, roasting chestnuts, swilling mulled wine and waiting for his Christmas guests to arrive for a celebration. This was a comic touch, as Ð on the face of it Ð the guests turn out to be his old pals Christmas Past (Christopher Ashley), Christmas Present (Sean Connelly) and Christmas Yet To Come (a non-speaking role). Jollifications ensue, with a fiddler twiddling as they all dance a roundelay. Scrooge has indeed become the best employer in all of London, with a reputation for charitable works. But things are not all they seem. Mary is plotting a surprise. She deliberately plied the old man with booze and raised his excitement to a pitch. She mutters to Bob Cratchit, waiting in the wings, that Ebenezer is now ready for plucking. Bob comes on the scene with Tiny Tim. In just twelve months Tim has improved beyond all imagining. He has thrown his crutch away and now nips about with just a cane. And he can dance! He joins in. Scrooge is delirious with excitement to see the living proof of his benevolence. But Tim overdoes it and passes out. Scrooge is stricken with anxiety. The

71 moment is ripe and Bob Cratchit produces a pair of letters for Scrooge to peruse. It is bad news. The firm is bust; the only way out is to sign it all over to Bob Cratchit. Ebenezer has been stitched up, but drink and jollity have done their stuff and he can’t see it. A scratchy signature is scrawled. The deed is done. As Scrooge, brooding on his ill luck, does his best to console himself, Mary pays off the actors who assumed the roles of the visiting spirits. There’s a brief moment of comedy as they complain they have been paid less than they had agreed. Mary will stand no nonsense. The money changes hands and that’s that. Not So Tiny Tim takes place fifteen years later. Tim (Ian Pepperell) now heads a very thriving company and is poised to become the most powerful businessman in London. Mary, Scrooge’s ex, turns up, now a drunken woman of the streets. Her purpose seems to be to remind Tim of where he’s come from and then check his pride and arrogance. He seems impervious. The drama came alive at this point in one of the best scenes in these plays. Tim’s intentions gradually become clear Ð he’s going to stop the payments to the charities for crippled children. Mary is horrified at his callousness. Tim is adamant, ruthless and unmoved. The atmosphere changes when Tim is on his own again. Dragging chains signal the unexpected and frightful prospects of a ghostly visitor. The ghost of Scrooge has returned from the grave, dragging his memory chain with him, to warn Tiny Tim of the consequences of his money- grasping way of life. The basic ideas of the two dramas were sound enough and I had expected much from them. But in the event I was disappointed. There might well be several justifications to take Dickens’s characters and work them up in a new context. A master of pastiche could make a good entertainment of it. With good story lines, crackling dialogue and effective production Scrooge Blues and Not So Tiny Tim could have been really entertaining radio drama. A skilled dramatist might use the material to point up a modern parallel or relevance in the modern world (as for example in Brecht’s Schweyk im Zweiten Weltkrieg). But Dickens’s story needs neither rewriting nor modernising to make its point. A modern stereo radio production that pulled out all the stops, played up the melodrama, rascally comicality and spookiness of Dickens’s source material might have brought this off, but the direction by Peter Leslie Wild was routinely adequate. The big trick in A Christmas Carol is that it’s melodramatic and comic at the same time, often in the same breath. Nothing is funnier than the way Scrooge relishes his own wickedness and warms his rascally old heart with it all. This tale is central in understanding Dickens’s genius. It is no accident that it featured so strongly in his reading tours. Slight it may be, but the prose is charged with unique electricity: as he wrote in a letter dated 2 January 1844, he ‘wept and laughed, and wept again, and excited himself in a most extraordinary manner in the composition; and thinking whereof he walked about the black streets of London fifteen and twenty miles a night when all sober folks had gone to bed’. Little of that vitality here, I’m 72 afraid. The fact is, like a true classic, A Christmas Carol needs no updating. Like a myth it always means what it says. It makes its statement and speaks to us across the years. We only have to learn to listen.

Bournemouth University ROBERT GIDDINGS

The Old Curiosity Shop: Adapted by Mike Walker. BBC Radio 4, December 2002 Ð January 2003.

The Old Curiosity Shop was broadcast on Radio 4 in a dramatised version by Mike Walker in twenty-five fifteen-minute instalments between 23 December 2002 and 25 January 2003. The producer was Jeremy Mortimer. The radio version of Nicholas Nickleby (1999), which Walker adapted with Georgia Pritchett, and which had the same producer, was broadcast in a similar format Ð thirty fifteen-minute instalments. He claimed that this format ‘reflects the way Dickens wrote [The Old Curiosity Shop]. Listeners will experience the story in a similar way to how the original audience would have’. This is a justifiable claim in that the first readers pursued the story through forty instalments in Master Humphrey’s Clock (though Forster thought this an uncomfortable experience). The total of over six hours on the radio meant that most of the characters and incidents could be included in some form or other. But there were pointless changes to names: Nubbles became Nubbins, Fred Trent became Frank, Short became Harris (admittedly, his real name Ð but ‘Codlin’s the friend, not Short’ is the catchphrase) and the landlord of The Valiant Soldier was knowingly renamed Jerry Cruncher instead of Jem Groves. Needless concessions were made to conform to today’s usages and customs: the pupils at the village school became students, farthings and crowns disappeared, Kit swore once or twice. Quilp’s main motive, often repeated, appeared to be his sexual obsession with Nell, whom he saw and heard in a vision just before he died. On the other hand, there seemed occasionally to be a reluctance to use emotional and meditative passages, which I suppose had been construed as sentimental. The reflections on time and mortality when Nell and her Grandfather reach the village haven were omitted. Oscar Wilde’s smart verdict is unfortunately still remembered and Nell’s death was unobtrusively described. Alex Jennings, who was a kindly and convincing narrator, could have sympathetically recited the words of Dickens’s elegy: ‘No sleep so beautiful and calm, so free from trace of pain, so fair to look upon’. Nothing too upsetting was allowed: Quilp’s death was toned down (as I’ve already implied), and the Brasses’ harsh fate, mockingly relished by Dickens, was replaced by a suggestion that they continued to thrive (Sampson as a lawyer still Ð and Sally as a soldier or sailor). All the same, it was an engaging production, with plenty of spirited 73 scenes, including the Single Gentleman’s entertaining Dick Swiveller in his room, Mrs Jarley’s waxworks, and the visit to Astley’s. And despite my doubtless old-fashioned wish for more pathos and moralising, there were tender conversations and encounters involving Nell and her Grandfather, Kit, and the Marchioness. The adaptation was almost as populous as the novel, with some cherishable performances from the large cast. Quilp must be a marvellous role for an over-the-top actor Ð why didn’t Dickens and Irving include him in their repertoires? I remember bravura performances by Trevor Peacock (Nell’s grandfather in the current production) on TV over twenty years ago and Tom Courtenay on the radio in 1996. Phil Daniels was just as forceful in the present production, making joyously malevolent appearances in scene after scene, displaying the ‘primordial energy’ that Chesterton saw as his essential characteristic. Jane Anderson, in the Radio Times, thought it ‘the performance of his career to date in one of the best radio dramas [she had] heard’. From the rest of the splendid cast, I’ll first choose two of great experience and one who has just left drama school: Julia McKenzie as an exuberant Mrs Jarley, Clive Swift as a benevolent and resourceful Single Gentleman, and Emily Chennery (the newcomer) as a sweet and caring Nell. Then in addition to those three, I must mention Anna Massey, who was wonderfully forbidding in the cameo role of Miss Monflathers. The music by Melanie Pappenheim and Anne Wood evoked moods varying from excitement to melancholy, conjuring up the passions and delights of this enjoyable dramatisation of a novel that Peter Ackroyd aptly calls ‘so strange and wonderful an achievement’.

DONALD HAWES

Lend Me Your Ears, presented by Fiona Shaw: BBC Radio 4, in 5 weekly parts: February-March 2003.

Lend Me Your Ears brought us ‘the sound of Dickens’s London’ through a series of programmes which attempted to cock an ear towards the discordant noises of the Victorian city Ð an impressionistic, eavesdropping earful of what the man himself might have tuned into on one of his long walks. Each programme took a theme. We were treated to the sound of the streets, the workplace, the home, the River Thames and a night out on the town. Experts from English Heritage and the Museum of London provided a commentary. Despite extensive non-aural digressions (the usual Victorian soundbites about ‘railway time’, mudlarking boys and the amount of dung in the streets) there was much here to stimulate the imagination. Whose mind’s ear could resist the thought of a herd of cattle lowing and snorting their way down the Caledonian Road to the meat market in Smithfield? Or the extraordinary noise of a butcher’s cleaver 74 and marrowbone orchestra (pay them to play or pay them to leave Ð either way they win)? There was silence too Ð or something close to it. We visited Scrooge’s office, where there were not even enough coals in the grate to settle and rustle against each other as the fire burned low. Just the steady thin scratching of quill on paper, broken only by the quiet tap of a shutting inkwell lid. Other workplaces would have raised a din we can only guess at. At Pontifex and Wood, a famous coppersmith’s off Fleet Street, passers-by would have been treated to the day-long racket of dozens of men beating out copper sheets into vessels of all shapes and sizes. The major banks would have had large machines counting money, rattling and clanking as they sorted the coinage. Class factors, of course, would have affected any Victorian’s experience of noise and noises, both out on the town and in the home. Performers in the numerous unlicensed theatres staging melodramas and musical entertainments had to fight to be heard above rowdy audiences intent on amusing themselves, as Mr Wopsle found to his cost. Singing styles were designed to project the voice and fill large auditoriums without the aid of microphones. Servants at home would have shielded many middle-class families from the sound, as well as the sight, of all that domestic work Ð the rasp of the scrubbing brush, the hiss of the iron and so on. Perhaps a rumbling from the cellar might let on that the coalman had been. But those living in crowded tenements such as Tom-All-Alone’s would have been wrapped in sound; noise would have pressed upon them like a London fog. Fiona Shaw reminded us how much privacy is a matter of not simply what you can and cannot see, but also what you can and cannot hear. Increasingly, museum curators, exhibition designers and history teachers are encouraging us to bring all our senses to bear upon the study of the past. Our imagination thrives on detail; here, in these programmes, was a chance to go back to the past Ð and back to Dickens’s novels Ð with newly opened ears.

Education Officer JEREMY CLARKE Medway Council

75 76 Fellowship Notes and News Edited by Tony Williams

When Found

Recalling Doughty Allan Clack reminds us that Patrick Hamilton’s Street 1930s novel, 20,000 Streets Beneath the Sky, contains many Dickensian references, and one of the main characters lives in Doughty Street. The proximity of the Dickens House Museum is alluded to several times. Hamilton wrote novels about the seedier and poorer side of 1930s London and is mainly remembered for his book Hangover Square and two successful stage plays, Rope and Gaslight, both of which have been made into films. His description of Doughty Street as a run-down, neglected area in the 1930s is a far cry from the upmarket business premises in the street now, with individual properties selling for over a million pounds. A visit to the Museum at 48 Doughty Street, especially if one hasn’t been there for some time, will also offer a good opportunity to explore the surrounding area.

*****

Krook again! Joanne Eysell alerts us to an item in The Medical Post (Canada) for 28 January 2003, on Spontaneous Human Combustion. A previous piece appeared there in 1997. Michelle Phillips, a freelance writer from Halifax, discusses Countess Bandi, and the article is accompanied by the illustration from Bleak House with Guppy and Weevle discovering Krook’s remains (‘The Appointed Time’). A new twist has been given to the possible causes: first, women bathed in camphorated spirits, which is postulated as the reason why so many women were victims; second, the practice of ingesting gunpowder in teas and tonics ‘could have contributed to the occurrences of combustion, as well as explain the timeline of the phenomenon.’ As Dickens told Lewes: ‘Draw your own conclusions and hug the theory closely.’ Allan Sutcliffe provides another slant on the topic with an extract from the ‘Questions and Answers’ column of The Sunday Telegraph for

77 9 March 2003, where the columnist Robert Matthews explains the so- called ‘wick effect’, whereby the victim’s clothes catch alight and act like a candle-wick, heating the body to temperatures at which body fat melts and giving the fire a source of fuel for long periods. A 1999 test of this theory by American arson investigator John de Haan used a pig carcass to show that the wick effect could generate temperatures of 1,400¡F.

*****

Staplehurst Our thanks to Margaret Cameron from Great Revisited Missenden, Buckinghamshire, for providing a family connection to Dickens’s involvement in the Staplehurst railway accident of June 1865. She provides a copy of an article by B. K. Field in the Strand Magazine for July 1906, and points to a family member, Mrs Amelia Alexander Lloyd Rayner, who was one of the passengers killed in the accident.

*****

Dickens Memento On page 260 of the Winter 2002 issue of this journal, we featured an item about a bas-relief image of Dickens owned by Mrs F. M. Barber of Stratford-upon-Avon, and formerly in the possession of T. W. Hill. There have been several responses from readers who have their own copies of this image. Allan Sutcliffe has one bought from Portobello Market in London about four years ago, and Gary Jones also owns one. Mrs Barber would still be interested in further information which comes to light.

*****

Anticipating Michael Eaton is keeping us well informed about George Silverman the progress of his forthcoming radio adaptation of George Silverman’s Explanation, which has Paul Scofield narrating and a cast including Gemma Jones and David Warner. It is due for broadcast on the afternoon of 1 May on BBC Radio 4, and will be well worth listening to.

*****

Continuing the Headquarters member Marian Bythell has sent Christmas Spirit us a cutting from the Chester Chronicle mentioning the fourth successive year of a Dickensian Christmas fair at Tilston village hall, in the heart of Cheshire.

*****

78 Stranger than Joanne Eysell sent us this item, passed to her by Fiction? a friend who is a neurologist. About twenty years ago there was a bank that went under in Cologne. The responsible manager was indicted on charges of fraud, but was acquitted when a neurologist diagnosed the man as suffering from ‘Pickwick Syndrome’: he had slept through meetings.

*****

Sam Weller and a The novelist John Galsworthy writing home Ship’s Concert during a long voyage in 1893 described a concert on board his ship one evening. Eighteen items were on the programme of songs and other turns, ‘including the Bosun on a penny whistle and a recitation of Sam Weller’s Valentine by one of the stewards’ (H. V. Marrot, The Life and Letters of John Galsworthy, 1935, p. 87). Thanks to Dr Keith Carabine for contributing this item.

*****

Dickens in the Thanks to Judy Zavos, from Sydney, for the Palm of one’s following item: ‘When we were riding the local Hand busses in downtown Los Angeles, I noticed a youngish hispanic guy deeply absorbed in what appeared to be the palm of his hand. I edged nearer to take a peek, and found it was a palm pilot [a type of hand-held TV screen]...upon which, and the object of his total absorption all the way out to near the airport, was the text of Great Expectations!

79 Dickens Fellowship Diary

Activities arranged by Headquarters and Branches for the period from May to August 2003 are given below. Further information is available from the appropriate Secretary. Visitors are advised to check, since some dates may be subject to change. Branch Secretaries are encouraged to send details of activities for September to December 2003 for publication in the Summer issue of The Dickensian to Dr Tony Williams, c/o 48 Doughty Street, London WC1N 2LX, or by e-mail ([email protected]) as soon as possible, and no later than 1 June 2003. May 3 Friends of Tba Dickens, New York 3 Monterey Jumble Sale 3 Nottingham David Copperfield, chapters 59-64: John Cox 3 Christchurch ‘Women in David Copperfield’s Life’: Beryl Evans 7 Southend AGM, and readings from Great Expectations 8 Portsmouth Visit to Milestones Museum, Basingstoke 8 Bristol ‘Coketown Revisited’: Sally Ledger 11 Headquarters Commemoration Service at St George the Martyr, Borough High Street, followed by lunch at the George Inn 12 Christchurch Pickwick Celebration 12 Canterbury ‘Dickens’s Theatre’: Tony Williams 15 Rochester ‘A Great Friendship Ð Dickens and Douglas Jerrold’: Michael Slater 15 Birmingham ‘Dickens Biography’: Donald Cooper 17 Nottingham AGM and Raffle 21 Toronto AGM 26 Monterey A Tale of Two Cities, Book the Third, chapters 8-15 27 Southwold Outing to Great Yarmouth 27 York Outing to Military Museum, York

July 7 Friends of Tba Dickens, New York 7 Christchurch ‘Humour and Comic Characters in David Copperfield’: Pearl Marshall 8 Portsmouth Garden Party at St Mary’s, Portsea, the Vicarage Garden 8 Chicago Francis Jeffrey Dickens’s Tombstone Dedication (video) 9 Headquarters Wreath-laying at Westminster Abbey 9 Canterbury ‘Dickens on Italy and America’: Hilary Fraser 80 10 Portsmouth Bleak House and Bring and Buy Sale 11 Birmingham AGM and Bring and Buy sale 12 Bristol AGM followed by Performing Animals 14 Broadstairs Dickens Festival (to 22nd) 14 Greater Martin Chuzzlewit, Part IV Los Angeles 19 Rochester Social Evening at Gad’s Hill Place 20 Gad’s Hill ‘The Ghost in the Looking-Glass’: Lee Ault 21 Haarlem Outing to Enkhuizen 21 Christchurch Mid-Winter Wassail 24 York Mr C. Connaughton and his one-man Dickensian Show 30 Headquarters Visit to the Forster Collection

July 5 Christchurch ‘Heroes and Villains in David Copperfield’: Esmé Richards and Lydia Moore 12 Headquarters ‘Dickens and Camden’: walk led by Sue Gane 19 Christchurch Newsletter Meeting 24 97th International Dickens Fellowship Conference, in Bristol (to 29th) ‘Dickens: An Author in an Age of Change’

August 2 Christchurch ‘Child-Rearing Practices in David Copperfield’: Elaine and Bob Oakley 16 Headquarters ‘Quilp’s Neighbourhood’: walk led by Tony Williams

Branch Lines

Branch Secretaries are encouraged to send in copies of their newsletters, and other information about branch activities, so that items of interest can be published here, and the network of news throughout the Fellowship may be maintained. Items for the Summer 2003 issue should reach the Joint Secretaries as soon as possible, and no later than 1 June 2003. We have received details of centenary celebrations from branches in Portsmouth and in Nottingham, and advance notice of celebrations planned in Rochester and Liverpool. We are sure that other branches will not mind standing aside for this issue, to enable us to present these important events in some detail.

Portsmouth. Eileen Norris and Tony Pointer have sent us the following report on the activities held over the Birthday weekend.

81 There is a tradition in Portsmouth that, on the anniversary of Dickens’s birth, a laurel wreath is hung on the front door of the Birthplace Museum. On the morning of 7 February 2003 a group of children from the nearby Charles Dickens Junior School stood waiting with the wreath, outside the little house. This was to be a very special occasion for them: they were to be met by Henry Dickens Hawksley, great-great grandson of Charles Dickens and current President of The Dickens Fellowship Ð and they were to be televised. Whilst the adults present drank a toast to the Immortal Memory, the children were entertained with one of Dickens’s stories. Throughout the day, on the hour, members of the Portsmouth branches read to more than two hundred and fifty visitors. A display had been mounted in Portsmouth Central Library, presenting the history of the Birthplace branch. Surviving through two world wars, in which so much of the city was destroyed by bombing, the branch has been fortunate, thanks to the work of former branch secretaries and City librarians, in retaining so much press cutting and other material held in the City Archives. The Library is the usual meeting place of the branch and it was there that a special meeting was held on Saturday afternoon, 8 February. Two talks were presented at the meeting. The first, ‘Why Dickens Matters’, was given by Dr Tony Williams, who spoke of Dickens’s skills in observation, his imagination, his satire, his passionate sense of injustice. He illustrated Dickens’s mastery of language with the description of the railway journey in Dombey and Son, something of a tour de force, much appreciated by the audience. Henry Dickens Hawksley continued his substantial involvement in the Portsmouth celebrations by giving an illustrated talk on ‘Dickens from a Family Point of View’, including a fascinating film of the Golden Wedding of Sir Henry Fielding and Lady Dickens, dating from 1926. Part of the fun was identifying members of the Dickens family well-known to the audience, including a young Cedric! Both Mr Hawksley and Dr Williams had appeared on Radio Solent that morning, in an interview with Peter White, which had ranged over many aspects of Dickens’s continuing appeal. Dickens the writer, Dickens the man Ð and Dickens the performer. Sponsored by the Portsmouth University branch and Portsmouth Grammar School, Patrick Garland, the producer of The Mystery of Charles Dickens, the one-man show starring Simon Callow and scripted by Peter Ackroyd, gave a talk in John Pound’s Church on Saturday evening, called ‘On the Road with Charles Dickens’. As well as giving insights into the international tour of this production, Mr Garland also led us along Dickens’s own road as a creative artist, identifying all the ways in which he was above all a man of the theatre who knew how to develop and maintain a special relationship with his audience. It was a hugely entertaining evening, much enjoyed by the large audience. The local festivities concluded on Tuesday 11 February with a Centenary Birthday Tea at the City Museum, exactly one hundred years after the foundation of the branch. The guest of honour was Mike Gilson, 82 Editor of The Portsmouth News. He quoted Chesterton in pointing out that Dickens was ‘not like our ordinary demagogues and journalists. He did not write what people wanted. Dickens wanted what the people wanted.’ It was, he said, a good description for an ideal newspaper editor. Eileen Norris, as Chairman of the branch, paid tribute to loyal members of the past, and to the support received from the City throughout the past century. The centenary had been a very special and enjoyable time for the Fellowship. On the following day, a party of 49 pupils and 6 teachers from the Charles Dickens Junior School (mentioned in the opening paragraph of this item), was taken by two members of the Fellowship on a visit to the Charles Dickens Primary School in Southwark, London. The Portsmouth school is sited one hundred yards from the Birthplace, and the Southwark school is in Lant Street, where the young Dickens was placed in lodgings when his family were in the Marshalsea Prison. The visit started in the footsteps of Dickens from London Bridge and Nancy’s Steps, Southwark Cathedral, Borough Market, Clink Prison, the balconied George Inn, White Hart Yard, the site of the Marshalsea Ð where six London bobbies insisted on having their photograph taken with the party Ð and a guided visit to Little Dorrit’s Church. The party was hosted for lunch by the Southwark school. Elizabeth Owens, the Portsmouth-born Headmistress, had arranged a presentation by her pupils who had, like the Portsmouth children, been studying Dickens and the Victorians. Each class at Southwark has the name of a Dickens character Ð Barnaby, Micawber, Peggotty, and so on. Grace was preceded by a rousing chorus of ‘Food, Glorious Food’, and Miss Miller, the Portsmouth Headmistress and a former London teacher, thanked their hosts, announcing that, later in the year, the visit would, in short, be reciprocated. In the afternoon there was a visit to Shakespeare’s Globe and its Exhibition by pupils from both schools, and the coach then returned home, with much credit to both schools having been shown by the young participants. The exchange had been sponsored by Portsmouth City Council as the result of initiatives by Mrs Susan Healey and other Fellowship members in working with pupils in dramatic, Dickens-based, activities over three years. Both schools are now looking forward to regular co-operation. Many thanks to both Portsmouth branches for providing such an interesting account of their programme.

Nottingham. The branch launced its centenary celebrations last November with a talk by Mr Pat Stokes on ‘Celebrations of Dickens’s Life and Works’, and the following month with a special Christmas dinner. Several new members have joined the branch in this special centenary year, though it has also been a matter of great sadness that four members have not survived to be able to share in the celebrations: Val and Helen Jones, Beth Fender, and that great worldwide Fellowship stalwart, Arthur Castledine, all of whom died during 2002. 83 It was at the birthday dinner in February that the branch celebrated fully and in earnest. The menu for the event listed the officers of 1903 alongside the current ones, and showed the subscription rates then (one shilling) and now (seven pounds). There was much local press publicity, including an item from John Cox drawing attention to the remarkable longevity of the organisation ‘in these days of short attention spans and soundbites’. He raised the ever-intriguing question ‘why is Dickens still so popular today?’ The branch received letters of congratulation from Buckingham Palace and Nottingham City Council. The toast to ‘The Immortal Memory’ was given by Michael Eaton, who proved to be a great success. His regular column in the Nottingham Evening Post described his participation in the event as ‘something really monumental’ in the honour it conferred. His article took readers through Dickens’s associations with the city and with the Mechanics’ Institute, where the branch holds its meetings (though not in the building Dickens knew). He described Dickens’s experiences as an actor, the difficulties faced by his group of amateur performers in obtaining a licence from the Nottingham magistrates in 1852, and the opposition the performance drew from a local preacher. Dickens and his colleagues persevered, nevertheless, and raised one hundred and ninety pounds for the Guild of Literature and Art. The owner of the (then) George the Fourth Hotel, was so pleased to have had Dickens as a guest that he never cashed the cheque for thirty-six pounds, seventeen shillings, which Dickens left in payment for his stay there, but had it framed and on display until it was, sadly, stolen some years ago. It is extremely appropriate that the branch is reading David Copperfield, Dickens’s ‘favourite child’, in this special year. We are most grateful to Kathy Powis for sending us details of the celebrations.

Liverpool has alerted local media and the branch is looking forward to seeing its one hundreth birthday advertised and celebrated in good style. They plan to meet at Burton Manor for coffee, lunch, afternoon tea and birthday cake, along with talks and musical entertainment.

Rochester has prepared a very full programme for its centenary year and is also playing an enhanced role in the city’s Dickens Festival, an event in which the branch is always very prominently featured. We shall report in more detail on the events later but readers will be delighted to know about Gerald Dickens’s performance in the Theatre Royal in Star Hill, Rochester, the theatre where his great-great grandfather was introduced to stage entertainment, thereby creating a lifelong passion for the activity. Making this family connection in the branch’s centenary year is a matter of great pride, both for the branch and for the performer. Other planned events will include an exhibition narrating the history of the branch, and an accompanying leaflet ready, it is hoped, in time for the branch’s birthday on 26 May. More to come!

84 Fellowship Notes and News

Bulwer’s Bicentennial Birthday Celebration The Knebworth House Education and Preservation Trust and the Lytton family are opening Bulwer Lytton’s home, Knebworth House in Hertfordshire, for a two-day conference to mark his 200th birthday. In the beautiful surroundings of this gothic fantasy home that he loved, scholars and enthusiasts from around the world will present a full programme of performances, readings and discussions of the author’s life and works. The main events will take place on 22 and 23 May, and will be preceded on Tuesday and Wednesday, 20 and 21 May, by Schools’ Events and performances of The Lady Of Lyons. For more information, please contact Christine Smith on 01438 810931, or visit the website at www.knebworthhouse.com

Launch of New Guides Dickens Fellowship Headquarters member, Sue Gane, has introduced three new guides via her website www.dickens-and-london.com. Two new walk guides explore Dickens’s associations in the inner suburb of Camden Town and the outer suburb of Richmond. Most Dickensians know that, aged 10, Dickens fell into neglect when his family moved from Chatham to Bayham Street, Camden Town. The walk around Victorian Camden Town shows how he returned to the area in David Copperfield and Dombey and Son. It also visits Gloucester Terrace, where Catherine lived after Dickens separated from her, and the fascinating churchyard of St Pancras old church, which features in A Tale of Two Cities. The walk around aristocratic Richmond starts at historic Richmond Green where Esther lodged in Great Expectations. At the end of the walk the route takes a ferry to Twickenham that features in Little Dorrit and passes the home of Mr and Mrs Meagles. In between it takes in the Star and Garter home on the top of Richmond Hill, where Dickens celebrated his wedding anniversary each year, Richmond Park and the delightful village of Petersham, where Dickens and Catherine spent holidays early in their marriage. The third guide, available in electronic form only, expands on the guide to David Copperfield’s London, which is still available from the website as a free offer for those up to speed with the Internet and Adobe Acrobat. The new guide to David Copperfield shows the house in Broadstairs Dickens used for the home of Miss Betsey Trotwood, Agnes’s home (alleged) in Canterbury and many other key places Dickens used in his novel. The guide summarises the story, largely in pictures, bringing out the similarities between Dora and David’s young mother and between upwardly-mobile, hard-working David and the equally energetic villain Uriah Heep.

Fellowship Lapel Badges The official Fellowship lapel badge, a red geranium (Dickens’s favourite

85 flower) can be purchased for one pound. Please send a stamped, addressed envelope for orders of fewer than five badges. There are also good quality cufflinks with the same motif for sale at five pounds per pair. Please send orders to Allan Clack, Dickens Fellowship, Dickens House, 48 Doughty Street, London WC1N 2LX.

Can You Help? The Trustees of The Dickens House Museum (48 Doughty Street, London) are seeking to appoint a Clerk to the Trustees, to assist with the management of the Trustees’ meetings and to maintain records. This is a voluntary position, and out-of-pocket expenses will, of course, be paid. There are four Trustees’ meetings during the year, held in January, April, July and September/October. Meetings take place in the afternoon or evening and typically last for two/two and a half hours. Evening meetings usually begin at 5.45 pm. There may, from time to time, be additional Special Meetings called to discuss particular single issues. The Clerk would be required to take minutes at meetings, and confer with the Chairman (or other officer appointed for the purpose) over the accuracy of the minutes before circulating them to members of the Board of Trustees. The Clerk will also be expected to gather appropriate papers and reports from Trustees for circulation to all members of the Board in advance of each meeting, with an Agenda. The Clerk will be required to ensure that records are maintained in good order, with full documentation, ready for access and consultation as required. If you feel you could spare some time to help with this very important task, or know someone who could (they do not have to be a member of the Fellowship), or would like to know more about the position, please contact the Secretary to the Trustees, Dickens House Museum, 48 Doughty Street, London WC1N 2LX.

Headquarters Birthday Dinner Friday 7 February 2003 saw a convivial gathering of forty-six members of Headquarters and their guests assembled together at the National Liberal Club in London to celebrate the 191st anniversary of Charles Dickens’s birth. Allan Clack, as Chairman of Council, presided, and we were delighted to have the company of the President-Elect, Dr Paul Schlicke, and the Chairman of the Trustees of the (recently-rechristened) Charles Dickens Museum, Anthony Burton, as guests of honour. Anthony Burton, proposing the Immortal Memory toast, explored some of the ways in which the concept of ‘memory’ was important. He referred to administrators, particularly museum administrators like Henry Cole who had been such a force in creating the Victoria and Albert Museum, as people who are often forgotten because they are concerned with creating conditions in which they will be eventually superseded. Creative figures are more readily remembered, and in the establishment of the museum in Doughty Street, the Dickens Fellowship had created a museum Dickens himself might well have enjoyed, especially if the future shows the museum heeding Dickens’s own great injunction to 86 ‘Brighten it!’ Mr Burton continued in proposing the toast to the Fellowship, to express the Dickens House Trust’s admiration for the Fellowship as a remarkable body, notable for its inclusive quality. It would, he said, be impossible to imagine a Charles Dickens Museum without a Dickens Fellowship actively working alongside, both supporting and enhancing the memory of the writer they both find exciting. Dr Schlicke, responding, identified the Fellowship as probably the biggest literary fan club in the world, and reminded us that the Fellowship had recently celebrated one hundred years of existence, the Museum over seventy-five years, and The Dickensian almost a century. He drew attention to the special advantages we have in the direct and enthusiastic involvement of members of the Dickens family in our activities. All those present enjoyed the evening, and expressed their thanks to Peter Duggan for organising it, leaving, in the words of one of the apt quotations Peter selected for the menu card, hoping ‘may we meet as on the present occasion on many future occasions.’

Rochester Dickensian Christmas This two-day event, held on the first weekend each December, was on 7 and 8 December 2002. Members of Rochester Branch, which is celebrating its Centenary, were prominent in the costumed parades on both days, carrying a large banner embellished with Dickens’s geranium motif. The weather was cold and windy, which explained the ‘Full Houses’ at all the free indoor entertainments. These included readings in the Dickens Centre by Rochester members Sylvia Blundell, Freda Man, Diana Stewart and Thelma Grove on ‘Celebrating Christmas’, arranged by Derek Mortimer. We enjoyed welcoming, among other listeners, Florian Schweizer, Assistant Curator of the Dickens House Museum. Other popular presentations in the Dickens Centre included dramatic readings by Colin Greenslade, ‘An Audience with Queen Victoria’ by Anne Carter, and Jean Haynes’s ‘Christmas Pie’, an unusual selection of seasonal readings and song. The local Medway News published a Dickensian Christmas Souvenir Edition, featuring an ‘Exclusive’ headlined, ‘Miser’s Ghostly Lesson’, which was A Christmas Carol reported as a news item, concluding, ‘Mr Cratchit was unavailable for comment as The Medway News went to press’. In view of our visitors’ surprising readiness during the weekend to stand covered in snow from the artificial snow machines, I think Dickens would have shared my amusement at reading that the ‘Winter Wonderland’ spectacular outdoor skating rink in the Castle Gardens, planned to be open until 12 January, closed early because the real frost and snow in Rochester at New Year made it too cold to continue! Thelma Grove

87 Greetings From Gad’s Dickens’s former home will be open for tours, cream teas and self- conducted garden tours on the first Sunday of each month from 2-5 pm. The house will also open at the same time on the Sundays of Bank Holiday weekends and on Saturdays and Sundays during the Rochester Dickens Festivals. We are always happy to arrange group visits in school holidays, and already have a number of bookings for the season. The dates for the Cedric Dickens Evenings, tickets £9 including refreshments, are 20 June, 19 September and 19 December. Season tickets are available, cost £30, and season ticket holders will be admitted to the First Sunday openings at a reduced cost of £1. The restoration projects for this year are the imitation books in the study door, and the walled garden, and your support will be greatly appreciated in helping us to preserve Dickens’s ‘Little Kentish Freehold’. I look forward to welcoming old and new friends to an enjoyable evening of food, fellowship and fun! Thelma Grove

1851-3 and all that... Dickens’s Child’s History of England was serialised in thirty-nine parts in Household Words between January 1851 and December 1853, also appearing in three volumes in 1852, 1853 and 1854. Whilst it has never attracted the same degree of attention as his fiction and journalism (though some Fellowship branches have, in recent years, selected it as a work for study), it repays examination for what it reveals to us about Dickens’s attitudes to the history of his country, and those aspects of it which he thinks will appeal to a nursery audience. It will soon find itself prominently presented as the subject of the next exhibition to be mounted at the Dickens House Museum, 48 Doughty Street, London, under the enticing title Gore of Yore! Dickens’s history book for children is much more than a record of kings, queens, dynasties and royal marriages. It is also liberally interspersed with plenty of insults and bloodshed and details of torture and other cruelties, seen as belonging to the past, as opposed to the progressive present. Andrew Sanders, in his volume on Dickens in the Oxford World’s Classics new Authors in Context series (2003), reminds us that Dickens’s preference in this book for ‘anecdotalism (rather than) analysis’ and his’ penchant for snap judgements’ underlines the book’s purpose as ‘a child’s history: didactic, forthright, vivid, and entertaining.’ The forthcoming exhibition, with its strong emphasis on appeal for a younger audience, will certainly aim to carry out these purposes. It will be great fun to see, and to read the book.

88 About The House and Notes on ‘The Friends of Dickens House’

‘“Write that down” the King said to the jury, and the jury eagerly wrote down all three dates on their slates, and then added them up, and reduced the answer to shillings and pence.’ Lewis Carroll: from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, published 1865.

Three Dates Not quite so inappropriate a quotation as it may seem at first sight, for there are, indeed, three dates which should be noted by all those interested in the Dickens House and its Collections Ð and, of course, in its continuing future success in attracting even more visitors. Anthony Burton, the new Chairman of Trustees, is instituting a series of themed ‘Saturday Afternoons at the Dickens House’, when different aspects of the Museum and its Collections will be examined and explored. These afternoons should, we hope, entice more people into the House Ð not only first-time visitors, who will be curious to discover what the House has to offer, but also ‘returnees’ and dedicated aficionados interested in finding out, in depth, more about the exhibits which they have previously viewed perhaps more superficially. These sessions will, of course, be publicised both within the House and to the general public. The dates are: Saturday, 17 May 2003 Saturday, 12 July Saturday, 18 October Times will be announced later.

The Friends of Dickens House Ð a new involvement It is intended that the Friends of Dickens House should play an important part in these Saturday afternoon sessions: volunteer Friends will support this initiative by being a friendly presence at the House on the three dates listed above and acting as guides in the same way that volunteers do, say, at National Trust properties. To assist them in this venture, each immediately previous Friday evening will be a special Friends’ event, with light refreshments and a talk on his or her specialist subject by the instigator of each particular theme. Thus, on Friday, 16 May, Michael Slater will introduce the Friends to the Leslie Staples’ Collection (which will be the themed event at the House on the following day, Saturday, 17 May).

89 On Friday, 11 July, our Curator, Andrew Xavier, will introduce us to the splendours of our Dickens portraits; and on 17 October, Anthony Burton will talk to us about the topography of nineteenth- century London, illustrated by some of the Museum’s magnificent collection of prints and photographs. You don’t have to be a fully paid-up Friend to attend the Friday evening sessions Ð all are welcome Ð old Friends, new friends, would-be friends or the merely curious; nor does attendance at the Friday evening talks mean that you are then compelled to attend the House the next day to act as a volunteer. We hope, rather, that a number of people may see this as an imaginative and enjoyable way of supporting the House, as ‘Friendly’ hosts to its visitors in this new enterprise.

And a Fourth Date for all Friends Ð and future friends Before the three occasions listed above, there is another, especially important date to remember Ð and this one’s not so far away. On Thursday, 10 April, at 7.00 p.m., at the House, there is to be a special evening event for all past, present and future Friends, when the Chairman of Trustees will speak to us on the intentionally open-ended subject of ‘The Dickens House Ð the Way Ahead’. There’ll be refreshments and a glass of wine and the opportunity for discussion about future plans both for the House and for the role that the Friends can play in this. Once again, you don’t have to be a member of the Friends to attend what we expect to be a lively and thoroughly enjoyable evening... And you don’t have to be a Member of the Dickens Fellowship to be a Friend, so maybe you can introduce a friend to the House? We hope that a large number of people will come to find out more about the House Ð and about the Friends. JEAN CARROLL

90 Gad’s Hill Place: A Mystery Solved

The following article was published in Donald Insall Associates News for Spring 2002, and will provide much interest for readers. We are most grateful to Jonathan Carey, the article’s author, and Donald Insall Associates, for allowing us to reproduce it here.

Although Charles Dickens fell in love with Gad’s Hill as a boy whilst walking from Rochester with his father, only in 1856, at the age of 44 did he have both the capital and the opportunity to buy this, the only house he ever owned. He spent much time extending and improving it, eventually dying there on 9th June 1870. Understandably, the House is now Listed Grade I. In 2000 the present owners, Gad’s Hill School, asked us to examine the creaking and loose floor of the main hall which had long been covered in carpet. We were delighted to discover an oak marquetry floor, laid in a field of square panels set within a simple, yet unusual inlaid border. Sadly, this 19th-century joinery, which was laid on to 18th- century floor joists, proved to be in poor condition. Many of the panels had dropped or were loose and uneven. After lifting and examining sample panels, it became clear that the only effective method of repair was to dis-assemble the entire floor for careful overhaul in a joinery workshop, before re-laying it on a new substrate. The School knew nothing of the history of the hall floor, for the archive contained no information on its date or origin. Such floors were not made until after 1842 when a Charles Steinitz of Vienna set up a factory in south-east London which continued in business until the Second World War. If the floor had been purchased by Dickens and laid during his lifetime, why did he not refer to it in correspondence? His other building works and their disruptive effects are mentioned frequently; often the contractors’ names are recorded. Wheldon Flooring Ltd. of Lincolnshire, a specialist company who have carried out work for us on similar floors, including at Windsor Castle, were appointed as contractors. Most helpfully, they found some documentary material on ‘Charles Steinitz and Company’ which also traded as ‘The London Parquetry Works’. In 1861 the Company moved to Camberwell Hall, formerly the Georgian Assembly Rooms at 45 Grove Lane, Camberwell. Following Steinitz’s death, his partner’s son changed the name to ‘Jefferiss (Camberwell) Ltd.’ and in their 1930s catalogue we found a drawing of the marquetry pattern used in the hall at Gad’s Hill. Then in Blanche’s ‘Ye Parish of Camberwell’, published two years after Dickens’s death, a footnote concerning Camberwell Hall was discovered stating that: ‘...some of the parquetry, manufactured here, may be seen at Gad’s Hill, the residence of the late Mr. Charles Dickens’. It also reveals that between 1833 and 1836, in Sketches By Boz, Dickens set a short story at Camberwell Hall, so he may have known

91 Steinitz from the very beginning of his marquetry business. After receiving grant offers from Gravesham Council and the Wolfson Foundation, the School was able to proceed. Weldon lifted the floor during the half term holiday in Autumn 2001 and laid it out in their workshops to allow us to make a closer assessment of its condition and to specify repairs. Given the now almost certain association with Dickens, we and our Clients were anxious to keep replacements and changes in appearance to a minimum. When the backs of the panels were cleaned of dust, two printed delivery labels from the London Parquetry Works were discovered addressed (by hand) to ‘Chas Dickens Esqr, Gad’s Hill, Higham, per North Kent Raily’. The job number is given as 286 but, sadly, Steinitz’s order books do not survive and the labels are undated. A third delivery label indicates that the order went as ‘17 Packages of Wood, 2 Benches, 2 Boxes’. The floor must have been fitted at Gad’s Hill by Steinitz’s employees, for the last four items listed were workmen’s tools and equipment and all three labels state ‘It is particularly requested that no Package may be opened except by Workmen from the London Parquetry Works’. Wheldon re-laid the floor during the last week of December. Perhaps Dickens would be amused that two antipodean craftsmen and an English architect celebrated New Year’s Eve together over a cup of tea on his newly repaired floor. JONATHAN CAREY

92 Obituaries

Jules Kosky We were saddened to hear of the death of Jules Kosky, early in 2003. Born in Holywell Lane, Shoreditch, in May 1922, Jules was a former member of the Fellowship and will be well known to many members through his book Mutual Friends, on the relationship between Dickens and Great Ormond Street Hospital for Sick Children. We have been fortunate, through the kindness of his nephew Keith Langford, to be allowed to see an unpublished piece he wrote called A Sketch of My Life, in which he recalls that Bleak House was the first Dickens novel he read, and that it sparked an interest which was later to develop into his work for the Hospital.

Eric Osborne The former organist at Little Dorrit’s Church (St George the Martyr, Borough High Street, London) and great friend of the Fellowship, Eric Osborne, died on 10 November 2002. Eric had been suffering from cancer for some time, and was thought to have been responding well to treatment, but his condition deteriorated quickly towards the end. Many members have listened with great pleasure to his musical contributions to the annual Commemoration Service at St George’s, in particular his spirited rendition of ‘The Harmonious Blacksmith’ which has often brought the service to a close.

Ernest Gurd A loyal member of the Portsmouth Birthplace branch for many years, Ernest Gurd died peacefully in his sleep early in December 2002 as a result of cancer from which we all thought he was recovering. He was a familiar figure at annual conferences, most recently attending those in Connecticut (1998), York (1999), and Rochester (2000).

Jack Prescott Born in 1925, Jack Prescott, a long serving member of the Christchurch branch, died on 15 December 2002 following a heart attack. He had been an extremely active member for 49 years, taking part in all aspects of branch activities, and was a serving committee member at the time of his death, a position he had held for 31 years, as well as being President of the branch from 1987-9. He took great pleasure in the life membership conferred on him in 1992. Dickens was one of the passions in Jack’s life. He had vast knowledge of plot and character, and enjoyed giving readings and taking part in sketches. Members will miss his courtesy and gentlemanly ways, his firmness of belief and his tolerance of other viewpoints.

Martha Rosso It was with an enormous sense of shock that Dickensians throughout the world have tried to come to terms with the sudden death of Martha Rosso, peacefully in her sleep on Saturday 8 March 2003, at the age of 81. Tributes and messages of condolence have been arriving from all around the world, all testifying to the immense influence Martha has had on everyone with whom she came into contact.

93 Pat Vinci writes from Philadelphia:

Dickensians all over the world were shocked and saddened to read of the sudden death of Martha Rosso on the 8 March 2003. A longtime member of the Philadelphia Branch, Martha joined the small, somewhat exclusive group of Dickensians in the Fall of 1967, when it was required that one submit at least two references to apply for membership. Martha began making waves immediately when, unsatisfied with the small attendance at the monthly meetings, she advertised the group’s existence in the newspaper. By the time I joined Ð just three years later Ð the monthly meeting room was packed with people, with over a hundred attending the annual Birthday Luncheons! A modest, passive person on the surface, Martha was a firecracker beneath it! She was a doer and a go-getter who had a knack for making things happen. It wasn’t long after becoming a member that Martha’s name became known in International Dickens circles. A self-taught writer, she entered and won The Dickensian’s Deeper Owen Essay Contest in 1973 and travelled to England to accept her award. She was warmly received there and was invited to place the wreath on Dickens’s grave in Westminster Abbey on the anniversary of his death. Two years later, Martha won the distinguished essay award once more! Life was never the same for this Homemaker/Secretary. Martha had enjoyed her trip to England so much that she invited her branch to come along with her on the next one. She personally organised a group tour to England, in 1977, which was so successful that she was asked to do it again in 1984. She worked tirelessly, with no compensation except for the obvious pleasure it gave her to foster the relations of Philadelphia Dickensians with members of Fellowship branches in Britain. She had begun doing this by personally directing a successful North American Conference for America’s Bicentennial in Philadelphia in 1976, with several visiting Dickensians from England also in attendance. In 1987, Martha took over as Editor of the Philadelphia branch’s monthly Buzfuz Bulletin. She added a whole new flavour to the newsletter with her intimate, informative accounts of the monthly meetings and presentations. Her newsletters were praised for their creative writing and insight. About two years ago, she resigned as Editor after eleven years of service, but continued to contribute her expertise to the production of the newsletter up until the time of her death. Martha Rosso will be held in loving remembrance by all of us for her many contributions to this fellowship of Dickens lovers, and for her great knowledge of, and endless fascination with, the inimitable writings of Charles Dickens.

94 Jesper Wetterberg The Dickens Fellowship lost one of its Conference stalwarts when Swedish member, Jesper Wetterberg, died in early December, 2002. A Doctor of Literature in Sweden, Jesper had a perfect command of English, a rich caring voice, a handsome commanding figure, and a delightful personality. As well as being a capable scholar himself, who will be sadly missed by his students, Jesper was a gentleman at all times, quietly demonstrating his courtesy at every opportunity. He possessed a fine brain, being able to engage in scholarly discussion, yet with a sense of humour to match. He was deeply regarded in his home town of Lund where he spent his whole life, and the full church for his funeral service was a testimony to the esteem in which he was held. Patricia, his wife, sometimes attended Conference with Jesper. To her we send our love and sympathy. E. G. P.

95 THE DICKENS FELLOWSHIP (Founded 6 October, 1902) Headquarters: The Dickens House, 48 Doughty Street, London WC1N 2LX Joint Honorary General Secretaries: Mrs Thelma Grove and Dr Tony Williams Honorary Treasurer: To be appointed LIST OF BRANCHES WITH CONTACT ADDRESSES UNITED KINGDOM INDIA BEXHILL-ON-SEA (No 186 Ð 1990), Miss Jacqueline POONA (No 191 Ð 1993), Prof V. M. Madge, Maneesha, Bastian, 56 Sedlescombe Road South, St. Leonards- 1165 Subhash-nagar, Poona Ð 411002 on-Sea, East Sussex TN38 0TJ. Tel 01424 439554 JAPAN BIRMINGHAM (No 19 Ð 1904), Mrs Doreen Ward, 41 JAPAN (No 157 Ð 1970), Prof Takao Saijo, English Claverdon Drive, Great Barr, Birmingham B43 5HR. Department, Konan University, 8-9-1 Okamoto, Tel 0121 357 6593 Higashinadaku, Kobe, 658-8501, Japan. Tel 078-431- BRISTOL AND CLIFTON (No 124 Ð 1902), Mr Lionel 4341 Reeves, 10 St. Helena Road, Westbury Park, Bristol THE NETHERLANDS BS6 7NR. Tel 0117 973 8388 HAARLEM (No 142 Ð 1956), Mr Pieter de Groot, BROADSTAIRS (No 130 Ð 1937), Mrs Jean Aylward, 52 Kanaaldyk 81, 1454 AC Watergang, Holland King Edward Avenue, Broadstairs, Kent CT10 1PH. Tel 01843 869129 NEW ZEALAND CHRISTCHURCH (No 117 Ð 1931), Mrs Esmé Richards, CANTERBURY (No 196 Ð 1996). Mr John Ingram, 1C 39 Hartley Avenue, Christchurch, New Zealand 8005 Westgate Court Avenue, Canterbury, Kent CT2 8DN. Tel 01227 472589 UNITED STATES OF AMERICA EASTBOURNE (No 75 Ð 1919), Mrs P. Gyton, ‘St GREATER BOSTON (No 193 Ð 1995), Mrs Claire F. Andrews’, Marine Terrace, Pevensey Bay, East Fitzgerald, 18 Richdale Avenue, Somerville, Sussex BN24 6EQ. Tel 01323 761610 Massachusetts 02145. Tel. 617-776-8880 LIVERPOOL (No 5 Ð 1903), Mrs Pat Dugdale, 13 BUFFALO (No 164 Ð 1978), Dr Thomas W. Fitzsimons, Sherwood Road, Great Crosby, Liverpool L23 7UE. 521 Stolle Road, Elma, NY 14059 Tel 0151 924 8309 CHICAGO (No 33 Ð 1905), Carol Larson, 2787 NORTH EAST ENGLAND (No 198 Ð 2002), Mr Herbert Greenbridge Court, Schaumburg, Illinois 60194. Tel Savory, 51 Grange Estate, Kibblesworth, Gateshead, 847 884 7188 Tyne and Wear NE11 0TG. Tel 0191 4104074 CLEVELAND (No 177 Ð 1984), Kathy L. Broz, 3402 NOTTINGHAM (No 9 Ð 1903), Mrs. Kathy Powis, 4 Clarendon Road, Cleveland Heights, Ohio 44118. Tel Buttery Gardens, off Distillery Street, Ruddington, 216-932-1403 Nottingham NG11 6HP. Tel 0115 9845375 CONNECTICUT (No 194 Ð 1995), Mrs Sonya F. Googins, PORTSMOUTH (No 137 Ð 1903), Mrs. D. Cawkwell, 5 74 Forest Lane, Glastonbury, Connecticut 06033. Tel Wardens Close, Manor Road, Hayling Island, Hants 860-6334237 PO11 0QY DENTON (No 182 Ð 1988), Prof J. Don Vann, 811 West PORTSMOUTH UNIVERSITY (No 192 Ð 1994), Mr Oak, Denton, Texas 76201. Tel 940-387-3241 David Francis, Frewen Library, University of GREATER LOS ANGELES (No 178 Ð 1984), Dr Jack Portsmouth, Ravelin Park, Portsmouth, Hampshire and Mrs Anna Kerr, 10540, Wiley Burke Avenue, PO1 2UP. Tel 023 928 43243 Downey, California 90241. Tel 562-927 4023 ROCHESTER (No 13 Ð 1903), Mrs Sylvia Blundell, 43 MADISON (No 103 Ð 1927), Miss Maureen Gerarden, Beech Avenue, Sidcup DA15 8IH 1630 Monroe Street, Apt E, Madison, WI 53711 SHEFFIELD (No 23 Ð 1904), Mrs Joan R. Norton, MARINETTE (No 108 Ð 1929), Mrs Alice M. Whitford, Channing Hall, 45 Surrey Street, Sheffield S1 2LG. 2735 Hall Avenue, Marinette, Wisconsin 54143. Tel Tel 0114 272 5329 715-735 3305 SOUTHEND AND DISTRICT (No 54 Ð 1910), Mr MONTEREY PENINSULA (No 189 Ð 1992), Miss Beth Dennis A. Franklin, 8 Deepdale, Thundersley, Essex Penney, PO Box 604, Pacific Grove, California SS7 3AX. Tel 01268 792847 93950. Tel 831-372 7625 SOUTHWOLD (No 184 Ð 1989), Mrs Miriam Bennett, 7 NEW YORK CITY (No 29 Ð 1905), Rose Roberts, 6th Loftus Avenue, Reydon, Southwold, Suffolk IP18 Floor, 415 East 52nd Street, New York, New York 6PX. Tel 01502 722483 10022. Tel 212-371 9306 YORK (No 158 Ð 1974), Mrs Janet Parker, 65 Almsford THE FRIENDS OF DICKENS, NEW YORK (No 197 Ð Drive, Acomb, York YO2 5NR. Tel 01904 791616 1998), James Armstrong, 357 West 45th Street, Apt 1 RE, New York 10036 ARGENTINA PALO ALTO (No 159 Ð 1975) Ð Sue Anderson, 2921 BUENOS AIRES (No 147 Ð 1961), Sra Susana Casado Waverly Street, Palo Alto, CA 94306 Elia, Tagle 2572-7¡ D (1425) Buenos Aires, PHILADELPHIA (No 41 Ð 1907) Ð Mary Jane Mallonee, Argentina. Tel/Fax (5411) 4802-3385 115 Center Court, Wilmington, DE 19810. Tel 302 475 0748 AUSTRALIA PITTSBURGH (No 97 Ð 1925), Mrs Ruth E. Cunningham, ADELAIDE (No 127 Ð 1936), Mrs Rose-Marie Morrison, 116 Oak Avenue, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania 15235- Unit 2, 2 Vivian Street, Henley Beach 5022, South 4348. Tel 412-371-2826 Australia Tel 088 356 7117 PURCHASE (No 180 Ð 1985), Elizabeth Hall, Make Peace MELBOURNE (No 24 Ð 1904), Mrs L. Elisabeth Neales, Hill - Box 4, Waccabuc, New York 10597. Tel 914- 45 White Avenue, East Kew, Victoria 3102. Tel 03- 763-8480 98592460 RALEIGH (No 171 Ð 1982), Dr Elliot Engel, PO Box 99008, Raleigh, North Carolina 27624. Tel 919-676- CANADA 9909 TORONTO (No 32 Ð 1905), Ms Henrietta Johnson, 1118- SAN FRANCISCO (No 190 Ð 1992), Mr Stanley Hutter, 111 Davisville Avenue, Toronto, Ontario, Canada 823 Valle Vista Avenue, Vallejo, CA 94590, USA M45 1G5 WORCESTER (No 119 Ð 1932), Theresa Davitt, 123 VICTORIA (No 113 Ð 1931), Betty Goodwin, 306-948 Paine Street, Worcester, Massachusetts 01605. Tel Esquimalt Road, Victoria BC, V9A 6V3 508-757-4966 AFFILIATED SOCIETY FRANCE PICKWICK’S EUROPEAN CLUB Krystyna Pacula and BOULOGNE (No 165 Ð 1978), Mme Madeleine Petit, Anna Stanisweska, Gimnazjum nr. 1, ul. 3 Avenue Belle Isle, 62360 St Leonard, Pont-de- Bernardynska 1, 32-700 Bochnia, POLAND Briques, Boulogne. Tel 21-911892

96

If you have a collection of books by or about Charles Dickens that you wish to sell, please contact Brian Lake at Jarndyce Antiquarian Booksellers, the specialists in 19th-century literature.

* THE DICKENS CATALOGUE IS AVAILABLE FROM JARNDYCE

1,842 items, including: first and early editions, biography and criticism, illustrations and portraits, letters and ephemera.

To receive a copy, please contact Janet Nassau at Jarndyce.

*

46, Great Russell Street, (opp. British Museum), Bloomsbury, London WC1B 3PA Telephone: 020 7631 4220; Fax: 020 7631 1882 email: [email protected]

Typeset and printed by The Weald Press, St. Leonards-on-Sea. Tel (01424) 854424