Chapter 1 of 13 · 3992 words · ~20 min read

Part 1

THE CHILDREN OF DICKENS

[Illustration:

_Copyright by Charles Scribner’s Sons_

DAVID COPPERFIELD AND PEGGOTTY BY THE PARLOUR FIRE]

THE CHILDREN OF DICKENS

SAMUEL McCHORD CROTHERS

ILLUSTRATED BY JESSIE WILLCOX SMITH

NEW YORK CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS MCMXXVI

Printed in the United States of America

CONTENTS

PAGE

I. LONDON ONCE UPON A TIME 1

II. DICKENS HIMSELF 9

III. PIP 17

PIP AT MR. PUMBLECHOOK’S 26

IV. DAVID COPPERFIELD 27

THE LITTLE BOY AND THE HUNGRY WAITER 36

V. WILKINS MICAWBER JUNIOR AND HIS PARENTS 43

VI. ON THE ROAD TO DOVER 59

VII. JOE THE FAT BOY 69

VIII. OLIVER TWIST 77

IX. THE JELLYBY CHILDREN 89

X. SISSY JUPE 101

XI. THE CHILD OF THE MARSHALSEA 109

XII. THE CRATCHITS 115

XIII. THE DOLL’S DRESSMAKER 123

XIV. LITTLE NELL 131

THE JOLLY SANDBOYS 135

MRS. JARLEY AND HER WAX-WORKS 139

XV. THE KENWIGSES 149

XVI. THE CHILD’S STORY 155

XVII. THE BOY AT TODGERS’S 163

XVIII. THE DOMBEY CHILDREN 171

HOW FLORENCE DOMBEY WAS LOST IN LONDON 176

PAUL DOMBEY AT BRIGHTON 187

XIX. JEMMY JACKMAN LIRRIPER’S STORY 193

XX. ON THE WAY TO GRETNA GREEN 203

XXI. OUR SCHOOL 209

XXII. ALICIA IN WONDERLAND 223

XXIII. THE INFANT PHENOMENON 241

XXIV. A CHRISTMAS TREE 249

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

David Copperfield and Peggotty by the Parlour Fire _Frontispiece_ FACING PAGE Pip and Joe Gargery 20

Little Em’ly 30

Oliver’s First Meeting with the Artful Dodger 80

Tiny Tim and Bob Cratchit on Christmas Day 118

Jenny Wren, the Little Doll’s Dressmaker 126

Little Nell and Her Grandfather at Mrs. Jarley’s 134

Mrs. Kenwigs and the Four Little Kenwigses 152

Paul Dombey and Florence on the Beach at Brighton 174

The Runaway Couple 206

The cover lining and title-page decoration designed by Euphame Mallison.

LONDON ONCE UPON A TIME

ONCE there was a city called Bagdad. I know just how it looked, and so do you. It was very mysterious. It was on a mysterious river called the Tigris. There were a great many little canals running in every direction through the city. The drinking water was brought to the houses in goatskins carried on the backs of men. These water-carriers often turned out to be very interesting persons. On the banks of the river were palm-trees, and under every palm-tree was a dervish or two. The streets of the city were narrow and winding, and dark people in flowing robes flitted about on secret errands that aroused suspicion. One could never tell what they were up to. There was Haroun Al Raschid prowling around with his grand vizier and his executioner. He was full of curiosity, and had a keen sense of justice. In Bagdad everything turned out in a most remarkable way. If you were looking for one mystery, you would find half a dozen.

I have recently read an article by a gentleman who has lived a number of years in Bagdad, and it appears that he has not seen any of the wonderful things that I am interested in. He says that the climate is very uncomfortable and that the thermometer often stands at 112 degrees at breakfast-time. That is very hot indeed. He says that many of the people now go about in Ford cars instead of riding on camels. When they want excitement they go to the movies. In short, according to his account, Bagdad must be getting to be very much like other places.

All this is disappointing, but as I am never likely to go to the modern Bagdad, anyway, it doesn’t matter so much to me. My Bagdad is in the _Arabian Nights_, and I can still go to it whenever I feel so inclined. When I open the book I find everything just as it was “once upon a time.”

It is the same with London. When I first crossed the Atlantic and visited the great city, I was a bit troubled because many parts of it looked so much like other places. I wanted it to be like the London I had read about. Of course this wasn’t fair to the people who live there, who can’t be expected to keep it just for travellers to look at.

When I think of London as it was once upon a time, that is the time when Charles Dickens lived in it. This London was as wonderful as Bagdad, though in different ways. If you want to know what it was like, you must go to the Dickens books. Dickens was the only one who ever saw London in that way. When you ask whether it was the real London, you have to take his word for it. It was real to him and he had the power to make it real to us. That is what we call genius.

The London the Dickens people lived in was a big city, so big that one easily got lost in it. The railroads were just coming in, but they didn’t get into the stories. There were no telephones or electric lights or automobiles or radios. People came in from the green country on gay stage-coaches with prodigious tooting of horns and cracking of whips. They stopped at inns, where a great deal of eating and drinking was going on. But when they left the inns to explore the town, they plunged into a maze of the queerest streets imaginable. The streets ran in every direction except in the direction one wanted to go. Many of them were mere alleys, but they were always crowded. One soon got down to the river, where there were old warehouses that leaned over the water but never actually fell in. There were old and shabby houses, and the people were made to match them. That is what made them so interesting and exciting. Yet, though there were so many people on the streets that you didn’t know, it was curious to be all the time running across people you did know, or who knew you. If you were trying to hide, you were sure to be found out. On the other hand, you could get lost with no difficulty at all.

One of the most interesting parts of the city to prowl around in was down by the water-front. The River Thames flowed through London just as mysteriously as the River Tigris flowed by Bagdad; and it was the scene of many adventures. To be sure, there were no palm-trees and no dervishes. But there were great ships coming from countries as far away as Arabia and the Spice Islands. On the banks of the river were great warehouses, with musty, mouldy cellars and strange garrets, and with all kinds of foreign smells. Back from the river were streets where people lived who could afford to live nowhere else. Some of them were dwarfed, with gnarled faces, as if they had not had sunlight enough when they were growing up. Some of these people were as bad as they looked, but many of them were much better. When you had time to become acquainted with them, you couldn’t help but like them. Each person had some little trick of manner which made it easy to recognize him. They had a way of doing the same thing over again, just as people have in real life. This made them amusing even when we could not approve of them.

Most of the people we meet live in lodgings--which is a very interesting way to live in England. You hire a room and the landlady will go out and buy the food for you and serve it in your room. This gives opportunity for a good deal of conversation. It’s all very snug and cosy if you have money to pay for what you order. If you haven’t, this leads to more conversation. Many of the Dickens people didn’t have a very regular income and were not sure where the next meal was coming from. Having a good dinner was quite an event to them, and they made the most of it. It is wonderful the enjoyment they got out of eating and drinking. And how they liked to talk on such happy occasions! They were living in a hand-to-mouth way, but they didn’t seem to mind it as much as people in the world outside of the Dickens books do. They took it all as an adventure.

Down in the city were the offices of the bankers and rich merchants, where clerks sat on high stools and did their accounts under the eyes of elderly gentlemen whom they didn’t like. In the suburbs there were trim little houses where people lived who were beginning to be more prosperous.

One doesn’t see much of the great places. Though there were palaces in London, the people whom Dickens was interested in didn’t live in them, though they admired them very much and were proud of them in a way. For they were every-day Englishmen who lived in the days of good Queen Victoria.

The great thing about London as Dickens saw it, and as we see it through his eyes, was that it was queer. The houses were queer, and the streets were queer, and the people were queer. Each one went about his business without caring a rap for what other people thought about him. If they acted in a particular way, it was because they were made that way. And yet they were friendly--most of them. And those that weren’t were such villains and hypocrites that we dislike them heartily. We always know just what to think about them, and so we don’t waste any sympathy on them. When the characters appear, we know at once which ones are to be looked upon with suspicion and which are to be trusted. You get to know the people in Dickens’s London because he is so anxious to make you see them as plainly as he does. If you don’t see them at first, he keeps on telling about them till you can’t help yourself.

Now if I were to tell you that I saw a child with a face like a rosy apple, you would probably forget all about it in a minute or so. But Dickens goes at the business of description more thoroughly. He says:

“Miss Tox escorted a plump rosy-cheeked, apple-faced young woman, with an infant in her arms, and a younger woman not so plump but apple-faced also, who led a plump and apple-faced child in each hand, another plump and apple-faced boy who walked by himself, and finally a plump and apple-faced man who carried another plump and apple-faced boy, whom he stood down on the floor and admonished in a husky whisper to ketch hold of his brother Johnny.”

When I see the happy apple-faced family together, it makes an impression on me. It’s the same with the descriptions of the scenery or the weather. I might say that the London fog is very disagreeable, and you would answer that you had always heard so. But Dickens takes you out into the fog and you see it and feel it and taste it:

“Fog everywhere. Fog up the river where it flows among the green meadows. Fog down the river where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping and the waterside pollutions of a great and dirty city. Fog in the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights. Fog creeping into the cabooses of collier brigs, fog lying out on the yards and hovering in the rigging of great ships; fog in the eyes and throats of ancient Greenwich pensioners wheezing by the firesides in their wards; fog in the stem and bowl of the afternoon pipe of the wrathful skipper down in the close cabin.”

By this time you get the London fog into your own throat and feel what it was like in November, when “the raw afternoon is rawest and the dense fog is densest and the muddiest streets are muddiest.” When you feel all this, Dickens is ready to go on with his story.

DICKENS HIMSELF

I ONCE sat with several thousand people on one summer evening to watch an historical pageant at Warwick in England. Back of us were the walls of the great Norman castle, around us were the old trees that had been there for centuries, and through the trees we could see the little River Avon. Then the townspeople acted out for us the romantic scenes that had taken place on that very spot. First we saw the Druids building their altars; then the Romans came; and after them the Saxons. After a while we saw Norman knights riding under the greenwood trees. Warwick the king-maker rode up to his castle. Then there was a stir on the river, and we saw Queen Elizabeth in her barge. When she had been received in state, the officers of the neighboring towns were presented to her. Among them was Mr. Shakespeare from Stratford, who brought with him his young son, William. Then came Cromwell’s soldiers and the men who have made history since Queen Elizabeth’s day.

It was all very picturesque, and we felt that we were really watching the events that had taken place on that spot through the centuries of English history. But when the Druids and the Saxons and the Normans and the great personages of every degree had passed out of our sight, there was only one person left. It was the little boy from Stratford. He stood there all alone, thinking it all over. Then he walked away.

Now the thing that made the most impression upon us was this boy who had the gift of seeing all we saw and more in his imagination. For, after all, the great thing about the River Avon is that this boy once played upon its banks. And the pleasant Warwickshire country has for its chief charm the fact that William Shakespeare knew it and loved it.

Now and then a person is born who has the gift not only of seeing things more clearly than we do, but of making us see them more vividly than we could without his help. Such a person we call a genius. He gives us the use of his mind. When such a person writes a book, it is as if he had created an interesting country and filled it with all sorts of things for our amusement. He invites us to visit him and make ourselves at home. And the best of it is that we are not invited for a particular day. The invitation is open to us for a lifetime. Whenever we feel inclined, we may visit Shakespeare’s country and meet all the Shakespearian people and listen to their talk. And the more often we go on such visits, the more enjoyment we find.

Now it is the same with Dickens. To be sure, his hospitality is not on so grand a scale as Shakespeare’s. He does not show us kings, or knights in armor, or vast parks and lordly castles. But he opens to us a world of imagination that is his own. It is filled with common people, but they are uncommonly amusing. We see not only what they are doing, but also what they think they are doing, which is often absurdly different. We see their “tricks and their manners” as they cannot possibly see them. That is where we have the advantage of them. Some of them strut about as if they owned the earth, while some that wear poor clothes and endure hard knocks turn out to be the real heroes. Dickens is not like some writers who pride themselves on not telling what they think of their characters. He has his likes and his dislikes, and he doesn’t care who knows it. He hates a bully, whether he is a man or boy, and he loves the people who knock the bully down. That is because he suffered so much from bullies when he was a boy.

When he was twelve years old, his father lost his money and was thrown into a debtors’ prison. It was a queer way they had then of treating a person who couldn’t pay his debts. They shut him up where he couldn’t earn anything. Charles had to visit pawn-shops to try to borrow money for the family. Then he was put to work in a big, gloomy establishment where they made blacking for shoes. His work was to sit all day on a bench pasting labels on the boxes. Then he would have to find ways of keeping alive on a few pennies he got each day.

But though he had a very hard time for a year or two, he spent his time greatly to his own and our advantage. Before he was thirteen, he had accumulated a great deal of experience. He had kept his eyes open and had seen a side of life that most people never see at all.

When I think of Dickens and of his way of finding out obscure people, and making them interesting, I remember the advice I once read in a newspaper as to how to find a collar-button. When a collar-button rolls off the dressing-table, it seems to have an uncanny way of rolling out of sight. The gentleman who is in need of it feels himself greatly aggrieved over the collar-button’s easy way of getting lost. Now the newspaper man said that the reason the man doesn’t see the collar-button is that he stands too high above it. If he will forget all about his dignity and lie down on the floor, he can’t help but see what he is looking for. In order to see it he must get down to the level where the collar-button is. There he will see it shining like a little mountain of gold.

I think that explains why Dickens sees so much more in his characters than other persons would who did not have his advantages. He does not look down on his characters. He meets them on their own level, because he has been there. And so he makes us see them.

He learned very early that, no matter where a person is, he is always the centre of his little world. He always has something that he is afraid of and always has something that he hopes for. And he learned to sympathize not only with the big hopes and fears but with the little hopes and fears. They are the things which wise people often overlook, but they are really very important, for there are so many of them.

Dickens did not write children’s stories, that is, stories about children who stayed as children. Of course there are children in his novels just as there are in the London streets--plenty of them. But they are all mixed up with the older people. And then they are all the time growing up just as they do in real life. You get acquainted with a small boy in one chapter; and the next time you meet him he is at boarding-school, and before the end of the book he is out walking with children of his own.

This is the reason why it would not be worth while to try to tell the stories of the children in the novels of Dickens. The moment you got to the most exciting part of the story you would find that they weren’t children at all. They are quite grown up. The fact is that Dickens was not very much of a story-teller. We do not read him for the plot, which is often hard to follow. He gives us scenes, one after another, each one really complete in itself.

When we sit down by the fire on a winter evening, some one says: “What shall we read? We haven’t time to read a book through--only a chapter.” Now the chances are that we choose a chapter from Dickens. And it’s very likely that we will choose some scene which we all are most familiar with.

We come into an inn. The coach has just arrived, and there is a cheerful bustle. We hear the blowing of the horns and the cracking of the whips, and if Mr. Weller happens to be driver, or if Mr. Pickwick and his friends happen to be on board, we are sure that we will be left in a state of great good humor.

Or we drop into a shabby little house, and climb the stairs till we come to a room where some of our friends are having a little dinner. They are making speeches to one another, and acting in a most extraordinary manner. It’s their way of having a good time, and we are glad that they can enjoy themselves over so little.

We hear people quarrelling and crying and laughing, and we are curious to know what it is all about. The best of it is that Dickens always tells us. If a man is a villain, we see it at once; and if he is a good-hearted person, we give him credit for it. We do not have to read the book through to get the flavor of it. We go at once to the scenes that please us best.

The scenes that are selected for this book are those in which children appear, and we want to see them as Dickens did.

PIP

III

PIP

AS I have said, almost all the Dickens people lived in London or went up to it sometimes. But all were not born there, and many of them, as children, lived in little villages. When they got to be seventeen or eighteen, they went to the great city to seek their fortunes.

There was Pip. I don’t care so much for him after he grew up. When he got to London he became very much like other folks. I like him best when he was a small boy in the country.

His name was Philip Pirrip. This was hard to pronounce, and puckered up the lips like “Peter Piper picked a peck of peppers.” The best he could make of it was Pip, and so everybody called him that for short.

His father and mother had died, and he was brought up by his older sister, who had married Joe Gargery, the blacksmith. She was twenty years older than Pip and had forgotten how she felt when she was his age. This made trouble for them both.

Pip had a hard time with Mrs. Gargery, and so had Joe, and so they became great chums. Joe was a big man, and his arms were strong, as all blacksmiths’ are, but he had never learned to read and write, though he knew some of the letters of the alphabet and was very proud over that.

The house where the Gargerys lived was in the marsh country near a river. One could look out on a dark flat country with little ditches running through it in every direction. It was a place where one could easily get lost, and where robbers could hide. There was a prison ship down near the mouth of the river, and now and then some of the prisoners would escape and get into the marsh. Pip met two of them once and had an exciting adventure. Down by the river there was a battery, and Pip used to go down with Joe Gargery sometimes and sit on the old cannon, while Joe would tell what fine things they would do if Mrs. Joe would let them. But she never did let them do what they wanted to do if she could prevent it.

[Illustration:

_Copyright by Charles Scribner’s Sons_

PIP AND JOE GARGERY]