Charles Dickens - Social Reformer. William Walter Crotch
Bumble's indignation would be laughed at even by a Board of Guardians, and the white-waist-coated gentleman would have been regarded as an eccentric. To-day nearly everybody likes, if they do not love, children. To-day the man who grudges them a service is looked at askance. To-day we all feel the happier when we see children happy and that is the supreme triumph of the genius of Charles Dickens.
Someone (I think it must have been Mr. G. K. Chesterton) says somewhere that, from the frequency with which Dickens attempted the portrait, he must have known in the dark days of his own upbringing some child, prematurely grave and careworn, putting out its little strength against the world and charged with tasks far beyond its powers. It has always seemed to me that that child was Dickens himself — Dickens taking round the circulars of his mother's school, bargaining with the pawnbrokers for the small sum on the remnant of the house, and helping to eke out for his family his miserable earnings of six shillings a week, until at length " nothing remained but a few bits of furniture, mother and children encamping in the two parlours of the empty house; the boy's own little bed (with the brass coalscuttle, a roasting jack, and a birdcage ' to make a lot of it ') went for a song — ' so I heard mentioned, and I wondered what song and thought what a dismal song it must have been to sing.' " Perhaps it is for this very reason that this particular portrait of childhood never proves quite so convincing, so arresting and vibrant as the blither pictures of his boys and girls, laughing at the troubles that seem to overwhelm them. After all, such sadness and depression was but a part of Dickens's great nature, which refused, not only to be soured, but even permanently saddened by the grey and dreadful morning of his days — a morning that did not rob him of his spirits, his gaiety, his quick eye for contrast and his immense appreciation of the colour side of life. So, perhaps, it comes about that Dickens succeeds more with these presentations of children who show us these qualities also, rather than with those who are so crushed that it is difficult for us to remember that there is anything of childhood about them — more with " the Marchioness " than with Little Nell, more with " The Artful Dodger " than with Oliver Twist. Both appeal with the pathos of those who are overmatched and cruelly weighted down, but somehow then* appeal becomes irresistible when allied with the freshness, the good spirits, the abandon of youth, rather than when it is borne with the resignation of premature old age. If Kipling's drummer boys of the Fore and Aft had crept back with the discreet and wary steps of veterans, there would have been no story to write about them. It is when they strike up the British Grenadiers and swagger along as oblivious of their own danger as though in the barrack yard, that they capture our hearts. And singular to say, Dickens's own grown-up characters seem to find this potency of youthful fearlessness, for it is just to these wayward irresponsible types of true childhood that even the very worst of them succumb. I say the worst, excluding deliberately those of his characters whom we feel instinctively are fundamentally bad — Rudge the outcast, Jonas with blood upon his hands, Jasper the brooding murderer — these are men from whom one realizes children would shrink as they in their turn would from childhood. But others there are, distinctly to be classified as bad, between whom and the children of his creation, strange bonds of unspoken sympathy and understanding grow up naturally and without any formal expression, but are yet binding upon both parties — unto death. There is a striking, as it always seemed to me, a wonderful illustration of this in Martin Chuzzlewit. It occurs during that last awful journey of Montague Tigg, from which he knows that Jonas does not mean that he should return alive, the journey on which he will not enter without that " monkey of a boy," whom Mr. Jonas — it is midnight when they set out — tries to send to bed. Alas poor little Bailey who has " climbed into the rumble is thrown out of the carriage in an accident sheer over a five-barred gate."
" ' When I said to-night that I wish I had never started on this journey,' cried his master, ' I knew it was an ill-fated one. Look at this boy! '
" ' Is that all,' growled Jonas. ' If you call that a sign of it '
" ' Why, what should I call it a sign of? ' asked Montague hurriedly. ' What do you mean? '
" ' I mean,' said Jonas, stooping down over the body, ' that I never heard you were his father or had any particular reason to care much about him.' "
Then, later, when the surgeon " gives it for his opinion that Mr. Bailey's mortal course is run ":
" ' I would rather have lost,' he said, ' a thousand pounds than lost the boy just now. But I'll return home alone. I am resolved upon that. Chuzzlewit shall go forward first and I will follow in my own time. I'll have no more of this,' he added, wiping his damp forehead, ' twenty-four hours of this would turn my hair grey.' "
" For some unexpressed reason," says Dickens, " he attached a strange value to the company and presence of this mere child." There is surely something infinitely pathetic in this dilemma of poor Tigg, scoundrel as he was. The one human creature on whose devotion he could count was " this mere child." The men he had dined and wined in the flat in Pall Mall, who had toasted him as their friend, who had battened on him, as men do on a popular and successful swindler, whom he had helped with small favours or encouraged with liberal promises — he would have laughed at the thought of relying upon these. But not so upon the little street boy, the child-drudge of Todger's boarding-house! There is something supremely wonderful in the idea of this superlative scoundrel, who trusted no one of necessity, realizing that so long as this child was with him he had protection against the evil presence of Jonas.
As for the boy, he trusted, even reverenced, the dashing Montague, on whose dog-cart perhaps the proudest moments of his life had been passed, prouder even than when " divesting himself of his neckcloth he sat down in the easy shaving-chair of Mr. Poll Sweedlepipe " and requested to be shaved.
" ' The barber stood aghast . . . there was no resisting his manner. The evidence of sight and touch became as nothing. His chin was as smooth as a new-laid egg or a scraped Dutch cheese; but Poll Sweedlepipe wouldn't have ventured to deny, on affidavit, that he had the beard of a Jewish Rabbi.
" ' Go with the grain. Poll, all round please,' said Mr. Bailey screwing up his face for the reception of the lather. ' You may do what you like with the bits of whiskers. I don't care for 'em.'
" The neat little barber stood gazing at him with the brush and soap dish in his hand, stirring them round and round in a ludicrous uncertainty, as if he were disabled by some fascination from beginning. At last he made a dash at Mr. Bailey's cheek. Then he stopped again, as if the ghost of a beard had suddenly receded from his touch, but receiving mild encouragement from Mr. Bailey, in the form of an adjuration to ' go in and win ' he lathered him bountifully. Mr. Bailey smiled through the suds and with satisfaction.
" ' Gently over the stones, Poll. Go a tip-toe over the pimples! ' "
It was this beardless infant that Tigg trusted for protection and who looked up to Tigg, villain as he was, with the same worship that Quilp's boy, Tom Scott, bestowed upon the dwarf between him and whom there existed a strange kind of mutual liking how born or bred, or nourished upon blows and threats on one side and retorts and defiance on the other, is not to the purpose! Quilp, certainly, would suffer nobody to contradict him but the boy, and the boy would assuredly not have submitted to be so knocked about by anybody but Quilp when he had the power to run away any time he choose.
" ' Now,' said Quilp, passing into the wooden country house, ' you mind the wharf. Stand upon your head again, and I'll cut one of your feet off.'
" The boy made no answer, but directly Quilp had shut himself in, stood on his head before the door, then walked on his hands to the back and stood on his head there, and then to the opposite side and repeated the performance. There were indeed, four sides to the country house, but he avoided that one where the window was, deeming it probable that Quilp would be looking out of it."
It was from the bottom of this wharf that Quilp stepped into the river, which carried him miles down and laid him, a torn mass, on a marshy bank there to be discovered days later, when poor Tom Scott sheds the only tears wept over his master and wants to fight the jury for returning a verdict of Felo de se.
These two men, need we say, are presented to us as bad, but not in the sense that Jonas or that Rudge is. There is an old-fashioned saying, that has dropped into desuetude,