CHARLES DICKENS DICKENS the humorist is "by far the most popular author of recent times." Dickens the sentimentalist has become almost a memory. "All critics, and the vast majority of readers," says Henry J. Nickell, “are now agreed in regarding Dickens's pathos as immeasurably inferior to his humor, looking upon the former as coarse and unrefined, and ridiculously sentimental; yet at one time not only did thousands of ordinary readers cry over his pages, but such men as Jeffrey and Macready followed suit." The greatest of novel writers was born at Landport, England, in 1812. His father, who is portrayed as Mr. Micawber in David Copperfield, was a clerk in one of the Government offices, who essayed a rôle of gentility which his straitened circumstances did not warrant, and was eventually thrown into the debtors' prison, the "Marshalsea,” in London. Dickens received some desultory training in elementary schools at Chatham, when very young, and then became an office drudge. Afterwards he passed two years in an academy, which he quitted at fourteen to become a lawyer's clerk. His father had become a reporter for a morning paper in the metropolis, and the boy followed in his footsteps. At the age of twenty-two, Dickens began to write sketches for the Old Monthly Magazine, which were subsequently reprinted under the name of Sketches by Boz. These were followed by the Pickwick Papers, a series of racy compositions descriptive of a club of London cockneys. The latter were published monthly, and were illustrated by Seymour, an artist of some eminence. The popularity of these humorous delineations was so sudden and so great that the author soon rose to the editorship of a monthly magazine, Bentley's Miscellanies. In its pages he carried on, simultaneously with the later Pickwick Papers, a work of an entirely different character, the novel entitled Oliver Twist. Nicholas Nickleby immediately followed. In 1842 Mr. Dickens visited the United States, where he was cordially received. He published his impressions of the country in a book entitled American Notes, for General Circulation. So severe was this book in its criticisms of American society and life, that it largely alienated from him the high esteem in which he had been held by his American readers. Two years later appeared another unfriendly criticism on America, in a different form a satirical novel entitled Martin Chuzzlewit, which in England is accounted one of his best works, though highly offensive still to the majority of American readers. New novels now appeared in rapid succession. Dombey and Son and David Copperfield (both of which contain satirical pictures of education) are said to have marked the highest attainment of his genius. From this time his works became more sentimental, and less humorous. Bleak House and Hard Times (1853 and 1854) mark the transition in style. Then followed Little Dorrit, A Tale of Two Cities, Great Expectations, Our Mutual Friend, and The Mystery of Edwin Drood. The latter was unfinished at the time of the author's death, in 1870. In 1867-8 Mr. Dickens visited America a second time, was forgiven his American Notes and Martin Chuzzlewit, and reaped a fortune from the generous patronage which was given to his readings. Dickens wrote a Child's History of England, in a manner peculiarly its own, and was the author of many short stories and sketches. In person, Mr. Dickens is described as having been vain and egotistical. His domestic relations were destroyed by his "incompatibility of temper," and his wife separated from him. Yet he was generous and liberal in his advocacy of every good cause, fond of children, a real knight-errant in his championship of the oppressed and the unfortunate. The humor of Dickens has been of incalculable benefit to society. It set in motion the forces for reform in social life, in education, in law, and in government. It procured the abolition of many evils which pressed especially upon the young and the poor. In Nicholas Nickleby he satirizes the wretched and fraudulent Yorkshire schools, to which many illegitimate children were sent to be gotten rid of; in Dombey and Son he portrays the evils of the "cramming" process in schools of a higher class. In Hard Times he depicts a system of education in which the imagination is wholly uncultivated and despised. The latter book is of special benefit to the school world, and supports the best educational thought of to-day by the author's favorite form of argument the reductio ad absurdum. It would be more acceptable to modern taste had it been written in a tone of light humor. But the author was intensely in earnest, and chose to have his story contain the tragedy rather than the comedy of life. The Gradgrind system of education was utterly abhorrent to his nature; and the reader will appreciate the biting sarcasm of Mr. Gradgrind's remark to his young daughter, on devoting her to a loveless marriage with a sordid, heartless man of fifty years: "It has always been my object so to educate you, as that you might, while still in your early youth, be (if I may so express myself) almost any age." In that remarkable book, Letters to Dead Authors, Andrew Lang addresses the departed Dickens, expressing the liveliest appreciation of the great a novelist's humor, but deprecating his sentimental passages over which preceding generation shed unaffected tears. "Ah, sir,” says Lang, "how could you who knew so intimately, who remembered so strangely well the fancies, the dreams, the sufferings of childhood, how could you 'wallow naked in the pathetic,' and massacre holocausts of the innocents? "To draw tears over a child's deathbed, was it worthy of you? Was it the kind of work over which our hearts should melt? I confess that Little Nell might die a dozen times, and be welcomed by whole legions of angels, and I (like the bereaved fowl mentioned by Marjorie Fleming) would remain unmoved. 'She was more than usual calm,' wrote the astonishing child who diverted the leisure of Scott. Over your Little Nell and your Little Dombey, I remain more than usual calm; and probably so do thousands of your most sincere admirers. When an author sits deliberately down and says, 'Now, let us have a good cry,' he poisons the wells of sensibility, and chokes, at least in many breasts, the fountain of tears." . . . "How poor the world of fancy would be, how dispeopled of her dreams, if, in some ruin of the social system, the books of Dickens were lost; and if the Dodger, and Charley Bates, and Mr. Crinkle, and Miss Squeers, and Sam Weller, and Mrs. Gamp, and Dick Swiveller were to perish! We cannot think of our world without them; and, children of dreams as they are, they seem more essential than are the great statesmen, artists, soldiers, who have actually worn flesh and blood, ribbons and orders, gowns and uniforms." THE GRADGRIND SYSTEM OF EDUCATION (From Hard Times) I. THE ONE THING NEEDFUL "Now, what I want is Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else. You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts; nothing else will ever be of any service to them. This is the principle on which |