Part 1 — CHAPTER IV—THE METHODS OF DICKENS

HALF-WAY IN DICKENS

Dickens has left us one-half of his last story. It was to be completed in twelve parts, and six parts were published. We can only infer and guess at the way in which the author would have completed it. Would he have brought many new characters on the stage, or are we to believe that the main characters are already there, and that it is through the revealing of their secrets that the end is to be reached? To give a positive reply is impossible, and yet we may learn something of Dickens’s methods by studying his complete books. Supposing we had only one-half of each book in our possession, might we expect that the complete story would introduce us to many fresh characters? I give the results of some investigations from the later novels.

THE LENGTH OF DICKENS’S NOVELS

Edwin Drood, as we have it, runs in round numbers to about 100,000 words. When completed it would have been 200,000 words. This would have made it slightly longer than Great Expectations, which may be estimated at 160,000 words. A Tale of Two Cities runs to 143,000 words. Edwin Drood, while slightly longer than this, would have been very much shorter than the larger works of Dickens. David Copperfield has about 306,000 words; Bleak House, 308,000, and Our Mutual Friend, 297,000. All these are practically the same length. Barnaby Rudge has about 264,000 words.

‘BLEAK HOUSE’

I begin with Bleak House, which is one of the latest and most elaborate of Dickens’s stories. In the first half the characters arrive in crowds. I make out in the first chapter ten or eleven. The second chapter brings My Lady Dedlock, Sir Leicester Dedlock, Mr. Tulkinghorn, and others. The third brings Esther Summerson and John Jarndyce, besides half a dozen more. The fourth brings us the Jellybys, with Mr. Guppy, and others. Krook and Nemo are the fresh arrivals in chapter v.; Mr. Harold Skim-pole arrives in chapter vi., with the Coavinses. In chapter vii. I make out six arrivals at least. Chapter viii. gives us the Pardiggles, Mr. Gusher, the brickmaker, and family, and Jenny, his wife. In chapter ix. Mr. Lawrence Boythorn arrives alone; chapter x. gives us the Snagsbys, their predecessor, Peffer, the two prentices, and Guster, the servant. Miss Flite comes with chapter xi., and along with her appear the young surgeon, the beadle, Mrs. Perkins, Mrs. Anastasia Piper, and a few more. Chapter xii. brings Mlle. Hortense, maid to Lady Dedlock, Lord Boodle and his retinue, the Right Hon. William Buffy, M.P., and his retinue. In Chapter xiii. we have Mr. Bayham Badger, Mrs. Badger, and the former husbands of Mrs. Badger are recalled. Chapter xiv. brings Mr. Turveydrop and his son, also Allan Woodcourt, the young surgeon, and we have mentioned the ‘old lady with a censorious countenance,’ and the late Mrs. Turveydrop. In chapter xv. we have Mrs. Blinder and the Neckett family; chapter xvii., Mrs. Woodcourt, mother of Allan; chapter xix., Mr. and Mrs. Chadband; chapter xx., Young Smallweed and Jobling, alias Weevle; in chapter xxi., the Grandfather and Grandmother Smallweed, Judith Smallweed, Mr. George, trooper (Uncle George, chapter vii.), and Phil Squod of the Shooting Gallery. The great Mr. Bucket appears in chapter xxii. Captain Hawdon is in chapter xxvi. In chapter xxvii. we have the Bagnet family of five. In chapter xxviii. there comes Volumnia Dedlock; Miss Wisk in chapter xxx., and Liz in chapter xxxi.

We have now reached the end of the first half, and the arrivals after that are few and unimportant. In chapter xxxii. no new character is brought on the stage, though there is talk about the noted siren, who assists at the Harmonic Meetings, and is announced as Miss M. Melvilleson, though she has been married a year and a half. In chapter xxxiii. it is mentioned that the ‘Sols Arms,’ a well-conducted tavern, is licensed to a highly respectable landlord, Mr. J. G. Bogsby. After that we have no new character till chapter xxxvii., where we are introduced to Mr. W. Grubble, the landlord of that very clean little tavern, ‘The Dedlock Arms.’ Vholes is introduced by Skimpole as the man who gives him something and called it commission. Mr. Vholes has the privilege of supporting an aged father in the Vale of Taunton, and has a red eruption here and there upon his face. He has three daughters—Emma, Jane, and Caroline—and cannot afford to be selfish. In chapter xxxviii. we meet Mrs. Guppy, ‘an old lady in a large cap, with rather a red nose, and rather an unsteady eye, but smiling all over.’ Then in chapter xl. there are the cousins of Sir Leicester Dedlock. In chapter xliii. Mrs. Skimpole and the Skimpole family are introduced, and in chapter liii. Mrs. Bucket. It will be observed that some of these can scarcely be called new characters, and that not one is of any real importance, that is, so far as Bleak House is concerned. Dickens in the middle of his story had practically put every actor upon the stage. The story was to be developed by the characters to whom the reader had been introduced. I have calculated that in the first half there are about one hundred and six characters of greater or less importance. In the second half there are, on the most generous computation, only sixteen, and not one of them plays a vital part in the development of the tale.

‘OUR MUTUAL FRIEND’

I take next Our Mutual Friend, and with this I must deal more briefly. Our Mutual Friend is remarkable for the profusion of characters in the first half. In the second chapter there are sixteen at least, including Mr. and Mrs. Veneering, Mr. and Mrs. Podsnap, Mortimer Lightfoot, Eugene Wrayburn, and John Harmon. The Wilfers come in chapter iv.; in chapter v. Silas Wegg and the Boffins, and almost every chapter adds to the company till we get to the middle. After that there is an abrupt cessation. There are not more than half a dozen new characters named in the second part, and all of them are wholly insignificant, the Deputy Lock, Gruff and Glum, the Greenwich pensioner, the Archbishop of Greenwich, a waiter, Mrs. Sprodgkin, the exacting member of the fold, and the contractor of 500,000 power. In Our Mutual Friend every character of any significance has been introduced when the first half ends. The few stragglers who come later have practically no effect on the story.

‘LITTLE DORRIT’

In Little Dorrit we have the old profuseness of characters; in the first half nearly one hundred, and in the second half there are practically no new characters at all. Mr. Tinkler, the valet to Mr. Dorrit, and Mr. Eustace, the classical tourist, can hardly be counted. In chapter xxi., ‘The History of a Self-Tormentor,’ we have Charlotte Dawes, the false friend, who vanishes instantly, and counts for nothing. Thus, I think, we may say, taking the three long books of Dickens’s later period, that in each it was his manner to introduce no new characters of the least import in the second half of his books. But it may be worth while to glance at his practice in the shorter tales, A Tale of Two Cities and Great Expectations.

‘A TALE OF TWO CITIES’

In the second half of this fine book there are practically no new characters that I can trace. The epithet can hardly be applied to the President of the trial at the Conciergerie.

‘GREAT EXPECTATIONS’

It is now agreed that one of Dickens’s most perfect books is Great Expectations. It is known also that Dickens complied with a suggestion of Lord Lytton’s, which modified the plot—not seriously nor disagreeably. Here again in the second part we have very few fresh characters. We have the Colonel in Newgate introduced to Mr. Wemmick, but he is ‘sure to be assassinated on Monday.’ Let us not forget Miss Skiffins, a good sort of fellow, with a high regard both for Wemmick and the Aged. There is the retrospective Provis, but the characters introduced belong to the past. Finally, in chapter xlvi., we have a pleasant glimpse of the Barley family and of Mrs. Whymple, the best of housewives, and the motherly friend of Clara and Herbert. It is she who fosters and regulates with equal kindness and discretion their mutual love. ‘It was understood that nothing of a tender nature could possibly be confided to Old Barley, by reason of his being totally unequal to the consideration of any subject more psychological than Gout, Rum, and Purser’s Stores.’

These are all the books of which I have made a close personal examination. I believe that the general result will be the same in all save two or three exceptional works, such as Barnaby Rudge. Whether he consciously acted on the principle that no new characters should be introduced after half the story was told, it is impossible to say. It seems certain, however, that he acted upon it.

WILKIE COLLINS ‘AHEAD OF ALL THE FIELD’

Dickens was no great reader, and it is plain by what he did not say, as well as by what he did say, that he did not on the whole admire ardently the work of his contemporaries. But he made a special exception in the case of Wilkie Collins, with whom he collaborated on more than one occasion, as in the story No Thoroughfare. He published in his own magazine some of Collins’s best detective stories, including The Woman in White, No Name, and The Moonstone. Of these stories Dickens put first No Name. The Moonstone he criticised in one of his letters to Wills. At first he thought it in many respects ‘much better than anything he has done,’ but afterwards he wrote, 26th July 1868: ‘I quite agree with you about The Moonstone. The construction is wearisome beyond endurance, and there is a vein of obstinate conceit in it that makes enemies of readers.’ [90]

In September 1862 he wrote in enthusiastic terms of admiration about No Name. This I take to be a very weighty and significant letter, as will appear in the sequel:

I have gone through the second volume [No Name] at a sitting, and I find it wonderfully fine. It goes on with an ever-rising power and force in it that fills me with admiration. It is as far before and beyond The Woman in White as that was beyond the wretched common level of fiction-writing. There are some touches in the Captain which no one but a born (and cultivated) writer could get near—could draw within hail of. And the originality of Mrs. Wragge, without compromise of her probability, involves a really great achievement. But they are all admirable; Mr. Noel Vanstone and the housekeeper, both in their way as meritorious as the rest; Magdalen wrought out with truth, energy, sentiment, and passion, of the very first water.

I cannot tell you with what a strange dash of pride as well as pleasure I read the great results of your hard work. Because, as you know, I was certain from the Basil days that you were the Writer who would come ahead of all the Field—being the only one who combined invention and power, both humorous and pathetic, with that invincible determination to work, and that profound conviction that nothing of worth is to be done without work, of which triflers and feigners have no conception. [91]

Mr. Swinburne in his study of Wilkie Collins writes:

It is apparently the general opinion—an opinion which seems to me incontestable—that no third book of their author’s can be ranked as equal with The Woman in White and The Moonstone: two works of not more indisputable than incomparable ability. No Name is an only less excellent example of as curious and original a talent. [92a]

This was not the opinion of Dickens.

‘A BACKWARD LIGHT’

On 6th October 1859 Dickens replied to a suggestion by Collins on the working out of A Tale of Two Cities. The italics are mine:

I do not positively say that the point you put might not have been done in your manner; but I have a very strong conviction that it would have been overdone in that manner—too elaborately trapped, baited, and prepared—in the main anticipated, and its interest wasted. This is quite apart from the peculiarity of the Doctor’s [Dr. Manette—A Tale of Two Cities] character, as affected by his imprisonment; which of itself would, to my thinking, render it quite out of the question to put the reader inside of him before the proper time, in respect of matters that were dim to himself through being, in a diseased way, morbidly shunned by him. I think the business of art is to lay all that ground carefully, not with the care that conceals itself—to show, by a backward light, what everything has been working to,—but only to suggest, until the fulfilment comes. These are the ways of Providence, of which ways all art is but a little imitation. [92b]

EDGAR ALLAN POE AND DICKENS: A MYSTIFICATION

Could Dickens keep his secrets well? In other words, could he prevent his readers from fathoming a mystery till the proper moment of the dénouement? An important help to the answering of this question will be found in the essay on Charles Dickens by Edgar Allan Poe, who was a critic of extraordinary penetration. If any one could detect a secret it was he. But he was also much given to mystification, and it is not wise to accept anything he says without verifying it. The essay on Dickens turns largely on Barnaby Rudge, and, to the best of my belief, it has not been strictly examined.

POE’S CLAIM

Poe says:

We are not prepared to say, so positively as we could wish, whether by the public at large, the whole mystery of the murder committed by Rudge, with the identity of the Maypole ruffian with Rudge himself, was fathomed at any period previous to the period intended, or, if so, whether at a period so early as materially to interfere with the interest designed; but we are forced, through sheer modesty, to suppose this the case; since, by ourselves individually, the secret was distinctly understood immediately upon the perusal of the story of Solomon Daisy, which occurs at the seventh page of this volume of three hundred and twenty-three. In the number of the Philadelphia Saturday Evening Post for 1st May 1841 (the tale having then only begun), will be found a prospective notice of some length, in which we make use of the following words:

‘That Barnaby is the son of the murderer may not appear evident to our readers—but we will explain. The person murdered is Mr. Reuben Haredale. He was found assassinated in his bed-chamber. His steward (Mr. Rudge, senior) and his gardener (name not mentioned) are missing. At first both are suspected. “Some months afterward”—here we use the words of the story—“the steward’s body, scarcely to be recognised but by his clothes and the watch and ring he wore, was found at the bottom of a piece of water in the grounds, with a deep gash in the breast, where he had been stabbed by a knife. He was only partly dressed; and all the people agreed that he had been sitting up reading in his own room, where there were many traces of blood, and was suddenly fallen upon and killed, before his master.”

‘Now, be it observed, it is not the author himself who asserts that the steward’s body was found; he has put the words in the mouth of one of his characters. His design is to make it appear, in the dénouement, that the steward, Rudge, first murdered the gardener, then went to his master’s chamber, murdered him, was interrupted by his (Rudge’s) wife, whom he seized and held by the wrist, to prevent her giving the alarm—that he then, after possessing himself of the booty desired, returned to the gardener’s room, exchanged clothes with him, put upon the corpse his own watch and ring, and secreted it where it was afterwards discovered at so late a period that the features could not be identified.’

This is the prediction we have to examine. In the first place, was such an article published in the Philadelphia Saturday Evening Post for 1st May 1841? Mr. J. H. Ingram, the chief authority on Poe in this country, very kindly informs me that this review has never been reprinted in any edition of Poe’s works. Should it not be searched out and reprinted in full? I should like to see the context of Poe’s extract, and I should like still more to be sure that the article appeared as he says it did. Mr. Ingram has no doubt that the article appeared as stated by Poe. Mr. J. H. Whitty of Richmond, Va., kindly informs me that all the early files of the Post are inaccessible.

In the second place, Poe affirms that the article appeared in the Philadelphia paper for 1st May 1841, and that the tale was only then begun. As for that, Barnaby Rudge was first published as a volume in 1841, after having run as a serial in the pages of Master Humphrey’s Clock from 13th February 1841 to 27th November 1841. I have failed to find the precise date of its first appearance in America. No doubt it appeared in serial form, and the first instalments on which Poe bases his assertions should have been printed in America considerably earlier than 1st May. But the assertion which chiefly demands scrutiny is very definitely made by Poe. He says: The secret was distinctly understood immediately upon the perusal of the story of Solomon Daisy.’ The italics are mine.

THE STORY OF SOLOMON DAISY

We turn to the story of Solomon Daisy ‘as told in the Maypole at any time for four and twenty years.’ It is very simple and matter-of-fact. It tells how Mr. Reuben Haredale, of The Warren, a widower with one child, left the place when his lady died. He went up to London, where he stopped some months, but, finding that place as lonely as The Warren, he suddenly came back with his little girl, bringing with him besides, that day, only two women servants, and his steward and a gardener. The rest stayed behind in London, and were to follow next day. That night, an old gentleman who lived at Chigwell Row, and had long been poorly, died, and an order came to Solomon at half after twelve o’clock at night to go and toll the passing bell. Solomon relates to a thrilled audience how he went out in a windy, rainy, very dark night; how he entered the church, trimmed the candle, thought of old tales about dead people rising and sitting at the head of their own graves, fancying that he saw the old gentleman who was just dead, wrapping his shroud round him, and shivering as if he felt it cold. At length he started up and took the bell rope in his hands. At that minute there rang—not that bell, for he had scarcely touched the rope—but another! It was only for an instant, and even then the wind carried the sound away, but he heard it. He listened for a long time, but it rang no more. He then tolled his own bell and ran home to bed as fast as he could touch the ground. Next morning came the news that Mr. Reuben Haredale was found murdered in his bed-chamber, and in his hand was a piece of the cord attached to an alarm bell outside, which hung in his room, and had been cut asunder, no doubt by the murderer when he seized it. ‘That was the bell I heard.’ He further relates how the steward and the gardener were both missing, both suspected, but never found. The body of Mr. Rudge, the steward—scarcely to be recognised by his clothes and the watch and the ring he wore—was found months afterwards at the bottom of a piece of water in the grounds with a deep gash in the breast where he had been stabbed by a knife. Every one knew now that the gardener must be the murderer, and Solomon Daisy predicted that he would be heard of. That is the whole story as told by Solomon Daisy, and Poe affirms that he perceived from this story: (1) That the steward Rudge first murdered the gardener; (2) that he then went to his master’s chamber and murdered him; (3) that he was interrupted by Rudge’s wife, whom he seized and held by the wrist to prevent her giving the alarm; (4) that he possessed himself of the booty, returned to the gardener’s room, exchanged clothes with him, put upon the corpse his own watch and ring, and secreted it where it was afterwards discovered at so late a period that the features could not be identified.

WHERE POE FAILED

Poe admits that his preconceived ideas were not entirely correct:

The gardener was murdered, not before, but after his master; and that Rudge’s wife seized him by the wrist, instead of his seizing her, has so much the air of a mistake on the part of Mr. Dickens that we can scarcely speak of our own version as erroneous. The grasp of a murderer’s bloody hand on the wrist of a woman enceinte would have been more likely to produce the effect described (and this every one will allow) than the grasp of the hand of the woman upon the wrist of the assassin. We may, therefore, say of our supposition, as Talleyrand said of some cockney’s bad French—que s’il ne soit pas Français assurément donc il le doit être—that if we did not rightly prophesy, yet, at least, our prophecy should have been right.

I have no hesitation in saying that this is largely a piece of pure mystification, another Tale of the Grotesque and Arabesque. It is conceivable that Poe guesses from Solomon Daisy’s story that the steward Rudge murdered the gardener and his master. It follows that the steward changed clothes with the murdered gardener, put upon the corpse his own watch and ring, and secreted it where it was afterwards discovered at so late a period that the features could not be identified. But that Poe should have guessed immediately after reading Solomon Daisy’s story that he seized and held by the wrist his wife to prevent her giving the alarm is beyond belief. ‘By the wrist’ are the three significant words, and they prove that Poe must have had before him when writing the parts of the novel up to and including chapter V. For it is in the fifth chapter that the first mention is made of the smear of blood on Barnaby’s wrist. We read there:

They who knew the Maypole story, and could remember what the widow was, before her husband’s and his master’s murder, understood it well. They recollected how the change had come, and could call to mind that when her son was born, upon the very day the deed was known, he bore upon his wrist what seemed a smear of blood but half washed out.

Near the beginning of chapter lxii., where Rudge is making his confession in prison, he says of his wife:

Did I see her fall upon the ground; and, when I stooped to raise her, did she thrust me back with a force that cast me off as if I had been a child, staining the hand with which she clasped my wrist? Is that fancy?

To claim that the seizing of the wrist could have been deduced from Solomon Daisy’s story by itself is to affirm an impossibility.

And so vanishes the main value of the prediction. If Poe wrote that article in the Saturday Evening Post, he wrote it after having read the fifth chapter of Dickens’s novel.

WHERE POE SUCCEEDED

It may be asked whether Poe discovered anything from his reading of the first pages. The only thing which he may have guessed is the thing which it was comparatively easy to guess. He may have conjectured that the mysterious stranger at the Maypole was Rudge Redux. When this surmise had been lodged in his mind the other deductions follow as a matter of course from later chapters, as the tale unfolds itself. Even if Poe identified the stranger at the Maypole with the murderer it was no great feat, for the murderer is closely disguised, from which any intelligent reader would infer that he has a motive for fearing detection in an old haunt. He is shabbily dressed; he is very curious about the people and events at The Warren; he is suspected as a criminal of some kind by the cronies; he strikes Joe as he leaves. On the road he threatens Varden with murder. This shows us that we have before us a fugitive criminal. He is presented to us with all the marks of a villain in hiding. It may be noted that from Solomon Daisy’s story the inference is that only one of two men committed the murder of Reuben Haredale, the gardener or Rudge. There has also been a difficulty in identifying the remains. This leaves Poe no special credit. There is considerable keenness in his conjecture that the treatment of the Gordon Riots was an afterthought of Dickens. Poe says:

The title of the book, the elaborate and pointed manner of the commencement, the impressive description of The Warren, and especially of Mrs. Rudge, go far to show that Mr. Dickens has really deceived himself—that the soul of the plot, as originally conceived, was the murder of Haredale, with the subsequent discovery of the murderer in Rudge—but that this idea was afterwards abandoned, or, rather, suffered to be merged in that of the Popish riots. The result has been most unfavourable. That which, of itself, would have proved highly effective, has been rendered nearly null by its situation. In the multitudinous outrage and horror of the Rebellion, the one atrocity is utterly whelmed and extinguished.

But facts, as Poe admits, are against this supposition. Dickens says in his Preface:

If the object an author has had, in writing a book, cannot be discovered from its perusal, the probability is that it is either very deep or very shallow. Hoping that mine may lie somewhere between these two extremes, I shall say very little about it, and that only in reference to one point. No account of the Gordon Riots having been to my knowledge introduced into any work of fiction, and the subject presenting very extraordinary and remarkable features, I was led to project this tale.

This is final. It appears from Forster’s biography that Dickens desired to expose the brutalising character of laws which led to the incessant execution of men and women comparatively innocent. It is clear also that Dickens made a special study of the contemporary newspapers and annual registers. But Forster admits that the form ultimately taken by Barnaby Rudge had been comprised only partially within its first design, and he admits also that the interest with which the tale begins has ceased to be its interest before the close. ‘What has chiefly taken the reader’s fancy at the outset almost wholly disappears in the power and passion with which, in the later chapters, great riots are described. So admirable is this description, however, that it would be hard to have to surrender it even for a more perfect structure of fable.’ To this I may add that the letters to the artist Cattermole on the illustrations to Barnaby Rudge are very valuable for the fullness and precision of their detail.

DICKENS’S WAY

That it is legitimate to draw inferences from the hints given by Dickens I should be the last to deny. His purpose was to provide hints which, when contemplated with what he called a backward glance, should appear luminous at the end of the story. Their meaning at the time might be more or less obscure, but when from the end of the book one could look back upon its course even to the beginning, he would see that the artist had a purpose all through, and that he was steadily preparing his reader for the dénouement. Of this I give a striking proof, on which, so far as I am aware, little stress has been laid. [104] The Edinburgh Review of July 1857 contains an article, ‘The License of Modern Novelists,’ in which the critic deals with Little Dorrit, and denounces his charges against the administrative system of England. Among other things, the reviewer says: ‘Even the catastrophe in Little Dorrit is evidently borrowed from the recent fall of houses in Tottenham Court Road, which happens to have appeared in the newspapers at a convenient period.’ Dickens, for the first and only time in his life, so far as I know, publicly replied to a reviewer. He wrote an article in Household Words of 1st August 1857, entitled ‘Curious Misprint in the Edinburgh Review,’ in which he turned upon his critic fiercely and sharply. He quotes the sentence about the catastrophe in Little Dorrit, and goes on to say:

Thus, the Reviewer. The Novelist begs to ask him whether there is no License in his writing those words, and stating that assumption as a truth, when any man accustomed to the critical examination of a book cannot fail, attentively turning over the pages of Little Dorrit, to observe that that catastrophe is carefully prepared for from the very first presentation of the old house in the story; that when Rigaud, the man who is crushed by the fall of the house, first enters it (hundreds of pages before the end) he is beset by a mysterious fear and shuddering; that the rotten and crazy state of the house is laboriously kept before the reader, whenever the house is shown; that the way to the demolition of the man and the house together is paved all through the book with a painful minuteness and reiterated care of preparation, the necessity of which (in order that the thread may be kept in the reader’s mind through nearly two years) is one of the adverse incidents of the serial form of publication? It may be nothing to the question that Mr. Dickens now publicly declares, on his word of honour, that that catastrophe was written, was engraved on steel, was printed, had passed through the hands of compositors, readers for the press, and pressmen, and was in type and in proof in the Printing House of Messrs. Bradbury and Evans before the accident in Tottenham Court Road occurred. But, it is much to the question that an honourable reviewer might have easily traced this out in the internal evidence of the book itself, before he stated, for a fact, what is utterly and entirely, in every particular and respect, untrue.

The blows are dealt with a will, and it should be noted that Dickens is more irritated at the stupidity of the reviewer in failing to see the way in which he contrived the catastrophe than at his mistake in the fact. It is to be noted also that Dickens considered that his serial form of publication compelled him to be almost too minute, copious, and constant in keeping the thread in the mind of a reader whose attention had to be maintained for nearly two years.