In the year 1836, which the commencement of the Pickwick Papers has made memorable in the history of English literature, Dickens was already in the full tide of authorship. In February, 1837, the second number of Bentley’s Miscellany, a new monthly magazine which he had undertaken to edit, contained the opening chapters of his story of Oliver Twist. Shortly before this, in September and December, 1836, he had essayed two of the least ambitious branches of dramatic authorship. The acting of Harley, an admirable dry comedian, gave some vitality to The Strange Gentleman, a “comic burletta,” or farce, in two acts, founded upon the tale in the Sketches called The Great Winglebury Duel. It ran for seventy nights at Drury Lane, and, in its author’s opinion, was “the best thing Harley did.” But the adaptation has no special feature distinguishing it from the original, unless it be the effective bustle of the opening. The Village Coquettes, an operetta represented at the St. James’s Theatre, with music by Hullah, was an equally unpretending effort. In this piece Harley took one part, that of “a very small farmer with a very large circle of intimate friends,” and John Parry made his début on the London stage in another. To quote any of the songs in this operetta would be very unfair to Dickens.2 He was not at all depressed by the unfavourable criticisms which were passed upon his libretto, and against which he had to set the round declaration of Braham, that there had been “no such music since the days of Shiel, and no such piece since The Duenna.” As time went on, however, he became anything but proud of his juvenile productions as a dramatist, and strongly objected to their revival. His third and last attempt of this kind, a farce called The Lamplighter, which he wrote for Covent Garden in 1838, was never acted, having been withdrawn by Macready’s wish; and in 1841 Dickens converted it into a story printed among the Picnic Papers, a collection generously edited by him for the benefit of the widow and children of a publisher towards whom he had little cause for personal gratitude. His friendship for Macready kept alive in him for some time the desire to write a comedy worthy of so distinguished an actor; and, according to his wont, he had even chosen beforehand for the piece a name which he was not to forget—No Thoroughfare. But the genius of the age, an influence which is often stronger than personal wishes or inclinations, diverted him from dramatic composition. He would have been equally unwilling to see mentioned among his literary works the Life of Grimaldi, which he merely edited, and which must be numbered among forgotten memorials of forgotten greatness.
To the earlier part of 1838 belong one or two other publications, which their author never cared to reprint. The first of these, however, a short pamphlet entitled Sunday under Three Heads, is not without a certain biographical interest. This little book was written with immediate reference to a bill “for the better observance of the Sabbath,” which the House of Commons had recently thrown out by a small majority; and its special purpose was the advocacy of Sunday excursions, and harmless Sunday amusements, in lieu of the alternate gloom and drunkenness distinguishing what Dickens called a London Sunday as it is. His own love of fresh air and brightness intensified his hatred of a formalism which shuts its ears to argument. In the powerful picture of a Sunday evening in London, “gloomy, close, and stale,” which he afterwards drew in Little Dorrit, he almost seems to hold Sabbatarianism and the weather responsible for one another. When he afterwards saw a Parisian Sunday, he thought it “not comfortable,” so that, like others who hate bigotry, he may perhaps have come to recognise the difficulty of arranging an English Sunday as it might be made. On the other hand, he may have remembered his youthful fancy of the good clergyman encouraging a game of cricket after church, when thirty years later, writing from Edinburgh, he playfully pictured the counterpart of Sunday as Sabbath bills would have it: describing how “the usual preparations are making for the band in the open air in the afternoon, and the usual pretty children (selected for that purpose) are at this moment hanging garlands round the Scott monument preparatory to the innocent Sunday dance round that edifice with which the diversions invariably close.” The Sketches of Young Gentlemen, published in the same year, are little if at all in advance of the earlier Sketches by Boz, and were evidently written to order. He finished them in precisely a fortnight, and noted in his diary that “one hundred and twenty-five pounds for such a book, without any name to it, is pretty well.” The Sketches of Young Couples, which followed as late as 1840, have the advantage of a facetious introduction, suggested by her Majesty’s own announcement of her approaching marriage. But the life has long gone out of these pleasantries, as it has from others of the same cast, in which many a mirthful spirit, forced to coin its mirth into money, has ere now spent itself.
It was the better fortune of Dickens to be able almost from the first to keep nearly all his writings on a level with his powers. He never made a bolder step forwards than when, in the very midst of the production of Pickwick, he began his first long continuous story, the Adventures of Oliver Twist. Those who have looked at the MS. of this famous novel will remember the vigour of the handwriting, and how few, in comparison with his later MSS., are the additions and obliterations which it exhibits. But here and there the writing shows traces of excitement; for the author’s heart was in his work, and much of it, contrary to his later habit, was written at night. No doubt he was upheld in the labour of authorship by something besides ambition and consciousness of strength. Oliver Twist was certainly written with a purpose, and with one that was afterwards avowed. The author intended to put before his readers—“so long as their speech did not offend the ear”—a picture of “dregs of life,” hitherto, as he believed, never exhibited by any novelist in their loathsome reality. Yet the old masters of fiction, Fielding in particular, as well as the old master of the brush whom Dickens cites (Hogarth), had not shrunk from the path which their disciple now essayed. Dickens, however, was naturally thinking of his own generation, which had already relished Paul Clifford, and which was not to be debarred from exciting itself over Jack Sheppard, begun before Oliver Twist had been completed, and in the self-same magazine. Dickens’s purpose was an honest and a praiseworthy one. But the most powerful and at the same time the most lovable element in his genius suggested the silver lining to the cloud. To that unfailing power of sympathy which was the mainspring of both his most affecting and his most humorous touches, we owe the redeeming features in his company of criminals; not only the devotion and the heroism of Nancy, but the irresistible vivacity of the Artful Dodger, and the good-humour of Charley Bates, which moved Talfourd to “plead as earnestly in mitigation of judgment” against him as ever he had done “at the bar for any client he most respected.” Other parts of the story were less carefully tempered. Mr. Fang, the police-magistrate, appears to have been a rather hasty portrait of a living original; and the whole picture of Bumble and Bumbledom was certainly a caricature of the working of the new Poor-law, confounding the question of its merits and demerits with that of its occasional maladministration. On the other hand, a vein of truest pathos runs through the whole of poor Nancy’s story, and adds to the effect of a marvellously powerful catastrophe. From Nancy’s interview with Rose at London Bridge to the closing scenes—the flight of Sikes, his death at Jacob’s Island, and the end of the Jew—the action has an intensity rare in the literature of the terrible. By the side of this genuine tragic force, which perhaps it would be easiest to parallel from some of the “low” domestic tragedy of the Elizabethans, the author’s comic humour burst forth upon the world in a variety of entirely new types: Bumble and his partner; Noah Claypole, complete in himself, but full of promise for Uriah Heep; and the Jew, with all the pupils and supporters of his establishment of technical education. Undeniably the story of Oliver Twist also contains much that is artificial and stilted, with much that is weak and (the author of Endymion is to be thanked for the word) “gushy.” Thus, all the Maylie scenes, down to the last in which Oliver discreetly “glides” away from the lovers, are barely endurable. But, whatever its shortcomings, Oliver Twist remains an almost unique example of a young author’s brilliant success in an enterprise of complete novelty and extreme difficulty. Some of its situations continue to exercise their power even over readers already familiarly acquainted with them; and