The Creators: A History of Heroes of the Imagination

by DANIEL J. BOORSTIN

  That celebrity came upon him like a whirlwind at the age of twenty-five. It is still not easy to explain. Dickens’s first notable publication, in February 1836, was Sketches by Boz, a collection of his pieces from magazines and newspapers, under the appropriate subtitle “Illustrative of Everyday Life and Everyday People.” The book was widely and favorably reviewed, and the author, likened by critics to Washington Irving or Victor Hugo, was praised for his “power of producing tears as well as laughter.” But when the first number of the scheduled monthly installments of Pickwick Papers appeared later that year, it was received without enthusiasm. The publisher Chapman and Hall had printed only 400 copies of the first installment. Hoping to increase the sale in the provinces, they sent out 1,500 copies of the next four numbers “on sale or return.” Of these an average of 1,450 copies were returned. After the first number had appeared, the popular caricaturist Robert Seymour, who was illustrating the series, became despondent over young Dickens’s wholesale revision of Seymour’s original plan. At Dickens’s demand that he redo an illustration, Seymour committed suicide.

  With these unhappy events, the publisher Chapman and Hall could easily have dropped the project. But the enthusiastic Dickens persuaded them to find another illustrator whom he would choose and supervise. Luckily, as it proved, the celebrated George Cruikshank was not available, and they found the sketches submitted by the eager young William Makepeace Thackeray (1811–1863) quite unsuitable. Instead they gave the commission to the precocious but relatively unknown Hablot Knight Browne (1815–1882), who would become famous as “Phiz,” the illustrator of novels by Dickens and others. By the end of July 1836, when Sam Weller had appeared in the Pickwick Papers, the sales exploded to forty thousand copies for each number. Dickens wrote his publisher, “Pickwick Triumphant!”

  The popularity of Pickwick was a literary phenomenon without precedent—in the youth of the author, in the suddenness and durability of the acclaim—and has found few successors. “Here was a series of sketches,” Dickens’s intimate friend and biographer John Forster observed in amazement, “without the pretence to such interest as attends a well-constructed story; put forth in a form apparently ephemeral as its purpose; having none that seemed higher than to exhibit some studies of cockney manners with help from a comic artist; and after four or five parts had appeared, without newspaper notice or puffing … it sprang into a popularity that each part carried higher and higher, until people at this time talked of nothing else, tradesmen recommended their goods by using its name, and its sale, outstripping that of all the most famous books of the century, had reached an almost fabulous number.” Carlyle reported a clergyman who heard a deathly-ill parishioner exclaim, “Well, thank God, Pickwick will be out in ten days anyway!”

  Forster likened Dickens’s popularity to the slavery of men of letters in ancient times. “He had unwittingly sold himself into a quasi-bondage, and had to purchase his liberty at a heavy cost, after considerable suffering.” But Dickens’s bondage, like Balzac’s, was self-created. He remained in the thick of things, editing magazines, organizing good causes, reporting for newspapers, while he wrote his novels piecemeal. Like Pickwick, his next novel, Nicholas Nickleby (1838–39), was written in twenty monthly parts. Then The Old Curiosity Shop (1849–41) and Barnaby Rudge (1841) were written in shorter weekly installments. Novel writing for Dickens was the closest thing to journalism because it was periodical writing. This was a commitment not only to the publisher, for whom the work was contracted, but to the public, whose expectant response could suggest or even dictate the direction of the story. Nearly all Dickens’s novels were written in this way.

  With the “serial novel” Dickens was innovating. While nowadays the normal form for a novel is a single volume, it was not so in Dickens’s day. In the eighteenth century a novel might come to five volumes. Later, in the times of Jane Austen (1775–1817) and Sir Walter Scott (1771–1832), three volumes had become standard. When the price was half a guinea (10s. 6d.) a volume, most people could not afford to buy the book. But each installment of the Pickwick Papers published by Chapman and Hall was only thirty-two pages of print. In green paper covers, with two illustrations and some pages of advertisement, three or four chapters were offered to readers on the last day of the month for one shilling.

  Unlike Balzac, Dickens was a daytime writer. In his early years he wrote fluently, sometimes for the whole day, and made few revisions. But by midcareer he was normally writing only from nine until two. His erasures and interlineations and revisions increased. The serial calendar normally controlled the pace of his writing. Each number had to reach a point of rest, yet keep the reader breathless for the next number. The serial novelist, needing to keep only one jump ahead of his readers, could not follow Trollope’s prescription that “an artist should keep in his hand the power of fitting the beginning of his work to the end.” When Dickens published the first number of a novel, he rarely had more than four or five numbers written. And when he reached the middle he might still be only one number ahead. Committed by contract to write more than one serial at a time, Dickens was often under pressure. For example, he was writing numbers of Oliver Twist before he had completed the Pickwick series, and was already writing the opening numbers of Nicholas Nickleby before he had ended Oliver Twist.

  The progress of a serial novel would inevitably reflect the personal misfortunes of the novelist. When Mary Hogarth, Dickens’s sister-in-law, to whom he was deeply devoted, died on May 7, 1837, and sent him into a depression, the result was that there were no June numbers of either Pickwick or Oliver Twist. And when Dickens died on June 9, 1870, he had already written enough of Edwin Drood to provide serial publication of three posthumous numbers.

  The periodical way of writing also tied the author and the content of the novel intimately to the daily life of his time. Dickens himself explained in his original Preface to Nicholas Nickleby (1839), “Other writers submit their sentiments to their readers, with the reserve and circumspection of him who has had time to prepare for a public appearance.… But the periodical essayist commits to his readers the feelings of the day, in the language which those feelings have prompted.” The reader who was impatient to spend his shilling for the latest green-covered chapters at the end of every month had been conjured up by the serial novelist. Here was a wider, more instantaneous audience, “more delicately responsive” to the author. And the author too could be continuously and instantly responsive to the audience. Just as Shakespeare could take the measure of his audience by the box-office receipts at the Globe or the heard response of spectators to individual scenes, so Dickens could do the same with each part of a novel. Dickens described the price paid by the serial novelist as “periodical paragraph disease.”

  Loving his audiences, Dickens responded promptly to their signals. Martin Chuzzlewit (1843–44) Dickens himself called “in a hundred points immeasurably the best” he had yet written. But in its first four serial numbers it did not sell well—only some 20,000 for each number compared with the 50,000 for Pickwick and Nicholas Nickleby, and 100,000 for The Old Curiosity Shop. Dickens conferred with his publishers Chapman and Hall and his intimate John Forster on what could be done. Forster suggested that the public had become so accustomed to weekly installments of his more recent novels that they did not like to wait a whole month for the next installment of Chuzzlewit.

  Instead of making Chuzzlewit a weekly serial, Dickens found another way to heighten interest. He would have Chuzzlewit “go to America.” And so he announced at the end of the fifth number. A sound commercial reason was that only the year before, in 1842, Dickens’s American Notes had been a roaring popular success in England. America, Dickens said, had failed to live up to “the republic of my imagination.” In the United States he had been lionized by readers, and formed warm personal friendships with Longfellow and others, but he was vilified by the press. Slavery in America, which Dickens loudly opposed, they said was none of his business. His plea for an American copy
right law to protect authors from pirating they called purely mercenary, a motive that Americans found suspect in foreigners. In 1843, he believed, British readers would eagerly buy anything that Dickens had to say about America, especially if it was unfavorable. His American mail continued to bring scurrilous letters and contemptuous articles. “I have a strong spice of the Devil in me,” he explained, “and when I am assailed, as I think falsely or unjustly, my red hot anger carries me through it bravely.” He would use the next numbers of Chuzzlewit, still unwritten, to embroider the most offensive points of his American Notes and get even with his American assailants. But English readers were only mildly pleased, and increased their purchase of the next numbers of Chuzzlewit by a scant three thousand. The predictable American reaction was explosive. “Martin has made them all stark raving mad across the water,” Dickens reported to Forster with glee. Carlyle also seemed pleased to note that “All Yankee-Doodle-dum” had exploded “like one universal soda bottle.” In the long run Dickens’s instinct for the public taste was confirmed. In the next century, Martin Chuzzlewit would rival Pickwick, Oliver Twist, David Copperfield, and A Christmas Carol in popularity.

  Dickens, while a man of enthusiasm and compassion, unlike Balzac, was not a man of passion. Emphatically a democrat, he remained a special kind of Victorian populist. “My faith in the people governing,” he summed up in 1869, “is, on the whole, infinitesimal; my faith in the People governed is, on the whole, illimitable.” Experience as a Parliamentary reporter had not increased his confidence in representative assemblies. He had suffered the House of Commons “like a man,” and in the House of Lords “yielded to no weakness but slumber.” He boasted having seen many elections without “ever having been impelled (no matter which party won) to damage my hat by throwing it up in the air in triumph.” What he saw of the Congress in Washington did nothing to change his views. Never had he “been moved to tears of joyful pride at the sight of any legislative body.”

  Still, he never lost faith in the power of “the People,” through legislation, to push reform. He spoke, wrote, and contributed time and money for every major reform movement during his lifetime. He opposed capital punishment and promoted laws for the reform of prisons, for the improvement and diffusion of education, for better hospitals and improved urban sanitation, for safer factories and shorter working hours, for humane treatment of orphans, the insane, the deaf, and the blind, for widows, and debtors. He sometimes sounded like an anarchist, the enemy of all institutions, but he spent himself for legal reforms with the conviction of a committed socialist.

  Dickens’s friends admired his good nature and especially his ability to “laugh at the majesty of his own absurdities.” As George Bernard Shaw observed, the England of Thackeray and Trollope is long gone, “But Dickens’s England, the England of Barnacle and Stiltstalking and Hamlet’s aunt, invaded and overwhelmed by Merdle and Veneering and Fledgeby, with Mr. Gradgrind theorizing and Mr. Bounderby bullying in the provinces, is revealing itself in every day’s news, as the real England we live in.” The comic in Dickens, his feeling for the theater and the music hall, prevented him from becoming a solemn preacher. His dramatic sense cast the world’s ills, its triumphs and tragedies, in story form, and his polemics were effective precisely because they were not arguments.

  One of the mysteries of Dickens’s prodigious achievement is how he secured the raw materials for stories that covered the whole of English working-class and middle-class life. He made the most of every moment of his limited experience, such as the few months of his father’s imprisonment in Marshalsea. He did live on the Continent for months at a time, but this was mainly to write, not to gather material. Still he managed to squeeze those experiences too, finding the clue for The Chimes in his hapless time in Genoa. Before he was twenty-five he had briefly shared the hungry life of London’s destitute working-class children, had felt the miseries of sadistic school discipline, had witnessed the foibles of the legal profession and the absurdities of law courts, had endured the rhetoric of both houses of Parliament, had followed the London theater, and had a short energetic career as a newsman.

  While Balzac sought his fortune in harebrained projects for pineapple plantations or Sardinian silver mines, Dickens experimented only with ways to reach people with the word. The most strenuous of these experiments was the Daily News (1846), which he helped found to promote his programs of reform, and to dispute the primacy of the powerful Times (circulation about twenty-five thousand). His paper settled into a meager circulation of about four thousand and Dickens remained editor for only seventeen issues. More successful was his aptly titled Household Words (1850–59), a weekly miscellany, selling for twopence, which aimed to be “as amusing as possible, but all distinctly and boldly going to what … ought to be the spirit of the people and the time.” Every problem of the day, from illiteracy to sewage disposal and inhuman jails became a target in its pages. The first number sold one hundred thousand copies and it flourished for nearly a decade (1850–59). All the Year Round (1859–88), its successor, was still more successful. Each number offered a serial by a famous author, advertised in advance, beginning with the opening installment of A Tale of Two Cities.

  In 1858, when Dickens had first thought of a novel about the French Revolution, he sought research advice from his friend Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881), whose French Revolution (1837) had been widely acclaimed. From the London Library, Carlyle, who had been one of its founders, sent Dickens two cartloads of books. In other ways, too, this was a hard time for Dickens, whose troubled marriage of two decades was finally coming apart. Seeking a title for his revolutionary novel, he first thought of One of These Days. “What do you think of this name for my story—Buried Alive?” he asked Forster, “Does it seem too grim? Or The Thread of Gold? Or The Doctor of Beauvais?” At the last minute he came up with a better idea, along with a more effective way to reach his expectant public:

  I have got exactly the name for the story that is wanted, exactly what will fit the opening to a T. A Tale of Two Cities. Also … I have struck out a rather original and bold idea. That is, at the end of each month to publish the monthly part in the green cover, with two illustrations at the old shilling. This will give All the Year Round always the interest and precedence of a fresh weekly portion during the month; and will give me my old standing with my old public, and the advantage (very necessary in this story) of having numbers of people who read it in no smaller portions than a monthly part.

  Again Dickens had shrewdly judged his public. Within ten years each number of All the Year Round was selling three hundred thousand copies.

  Whenever Dickens discovered a public enthusiasm, he responded. His first long Christmas story, A Christmas Carol (1843), proved a spectacular success, selling six thousand copies on the day of publication. Even the jaundiced Lord Jeffrey (1773–1850) congratulated him for having “done more good by this little publication, fostered more kind feelings, and prompted more positive acts of beneficence, than can be traced to all the pulpits and confessionals in Christendom since Christmas 1842.” Thackeray proclaimed it “a national benefit, and to every man or woman who reads it a personal kindness.” Naturally, Dickens decided to make it the first of an annual Christmas serial. He followed it with The Chimes, The Cricket on the Hearth, The Battle of Life, and The Haunted Man—all profitable, but none quite up to the first number. Few of Dickens’s other writings had involved him so personally as A Christmas Carol. He had “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 many a night when all other folks had gone to bed.”

  Had he thought of it he too might have called the body of his novels The Human Comedy. But Dickens was not one for abstractions. He thought not of “humanity” but of “the People.” They were the scene that he surveyed, and his novels ran the gamut of popular concerns. In the midst of writing the serials of Bleak House
, his tale of the absurdities of the Court of Chancery, he went to Birmingham to plead the cause of public education. In what might have been his own literary manifesto he attacked “the coxcombical idea of writing down to the popular intelligence.” “From the shame of the purchased dedication, from the scurrilous and dirty work of Grub Street, from the dependent seat on sufferance at My Lord Duke’s table today, and from the sponging-house or Marshalsea tomorrow … the people have set literature free.”

  For Dickens, freeing literature meant freeing the author from servility to patrons or fellow literati in order to champion popular causes. He was not always successful, as when, hoping to redeem his son Charles from the perils of Torydom, he wrote his Child’s History of England. But the sufferings of the destitute children of London, the schemes of pettifogging lawyers, the frustrated hopes of hardworking clerks, the criminals of passion and greed, all these he surveyed in David Copperfield, A Christmas Carol, Oliver Twist, Nicholas Nickleby, Bleak House, Hard Times, Little Dorrit, and The Old Curiosity Shop. Their legacy was not a philosophy of life but a cast of unforgettable characters: Mr. Micawber, Scrooge, Fagin, Little Nell, and countless others. Bagehot properly described him as “a special correspondent for posterity.”