BOOKS.

BARNABY RUDGE.*

WHILE wondering within ourselves how best to review, from an old reader's latest standpoint, this reproduction of a well-

remembered classic—at once with due deference to the estab- lished fame of the book and its author on the one hand, and our frank and positive impressions on the other—we learned from the preface a curious story of Mr. James Payn's, bow a schoolmaster of his acquaintance, instructing his pupils about the Gordon Riots, discovered to his horror that not one of them knew anything about Barnaby Budge. Casting about in pity of their ignorance, he proposed to give them in the next half an examination-paper on the book, which they were to study meanwhile as a congenial holiday task. When the time and the papers came, it turned out that even in that pleasant form they would have none of it. Hardly any entered for the examination at all, and only one was up to any mark in it whatever. The boys as a body frankly acknowledged that they couldn't read the book at all, finding it too tough an undertaking altogether. How different from the old Pick- wick examinations of the Calverley days, on which we have

commented more than once, when the subject was universal in its attractions. and unrivalled in its scholarship. " Tempora mutanter—boys at instanter in illis." There must have been some utter want of the literary elements here.

It is true that the comments of a daily paper upon the

Payn incident may be accepted as in a degree quite correct. The boys resented historic learning fixed upon them in this powder- in-jam form. They knew that what was really demanded of them was an acquaintance with the history of the Gordon Riots, and Barnaby meant nothing else to them. With minds thus historically warped, they had no eye for the humours of Miss Miggs and Simmun, or heart for the fascinations of Dolly Varden. We wonder, however, if there might be a further reason. The present writer, an old Dickens- lover if there was one, as delighted as ever with the jocosities of Pickwick, and as convinced a believer in David Copperfield or Nicholas Nickleby, found himself in much perplexity of spirit over his once-loved Barnaby Badge. It is—in one word—so intensely and theatrically melodramatic, that the essential humours are lost and obscured. The most complete of humourists, Dickens cannot gain full play for his faculties in the trammels of a historic novel. Nothing, of course, more exactly suited Thackeray,—to recur once more to the old analogy between the two most opposite of rivals. Now Higgs and Simmun in vain try to shake themselves free of Victorian surroundings :-

" Oh no, you're not, mim, indeed you're not,' said Miggs. I repeal to master : master knows you're not, mim. The hair, and motion of the shay, will do you good, mim, and you must not give way, you must not raly. She must keep up, musn't she, Sir, for all our sakes ? I was telling her that just now. She must remember us even if she forgets herself.' Oh,' cried Miggs. turning on the tears again, previous to quitting the room in great emotion, I never see such a blessed one as she is for the forgiveness of her spirit, I never, never, never did. No more did master neither ; no, nor no one—never.' " There we have as characteristic a piece of Miggs as any of the numbers which describe that maiden throughout the book ; but we venture to doubt if language more thoroughly con- temporary was ever put into the mouth of Mrs. Gamp herself. It is idealised in its way, of course, as all Dickens's humours are, and wants the photographic pitilessness of Mr. Anstey's prose and Mr. Milliken's verse; but it is true to Nature in its kind, though that kind has little in common with the times and manners of the period of Lord George Gordon. So, too,

with Simon Tappertit. "There are strings in the human heart that had better not be vibrated. That's what's the matter." The melodramatic young men who belong of right

to the stage, and were always such favourites with Dickens, talk always in this self-same tone.

None the less, many of the old familiar scenes of the

• ban.oby hvdye : a i•e riot of the lira .8,, t.on. With the lilostrathms and an Introduction, Biogrxt bleat t nd Fib tog, spinet/1. By CharlesDickens the . Younger. London; Macmillan and Co. 1b9g.

story form reading as agreeable as of old to the lover of Dickens's work. The cold comedy of Sir John Chester comes back to us, as the most finished portrait and most

attractive reading in the volume. But the figures of Maypole Hugh, and of Dennis, of Gashford, and of Lord George, and above all, perhaps, of Barnaby himself, are melodramatic to the last degree; while the mingling of jest and earnest in the most savage parts of the story, which Dickens, of course, could not resist, jar somehow with his own avowed pur- pose in writing the book. Here is Gashford's description to Lord George of his latest " subscribers :"—" On Friday night the widow's mites dropped in. Forty scavengers, three- and-fourpence. An aged pew-opener of St. Martin's parish, sixpence. A bell-ringer of the established church, sixpence. A Protestant infant, newly born, one halfpenny. The United Link Boys, three shillings, one bad. The Anti-Popish prisoners in Newgate, five-and-fourpence. A friend in Bedlam, half-a-crown. Dennis the hangman, one shilling." That is more like a Punch view of the Gordon story than that of a grave chronicler, and as history is always repeating itself in one form or another, might be presented as a parody on a subscription recently presented to a Surrey incumbent who has distinguished himself by turning Dissenter in con- sequence of the Popish practices now rising up amongst us. But it has not much in common with the terrible scenes so graphically and pictorially set forth in the chapters which describe the rising of the mob. The purpose on which Dickens was set, he describes himself in his early preface as that of a lover of religious toleration, though no sympathiser with the Romiah church. and desirous to teach anew the lesson of indelible disgrace which may be learned under the colour of a " religious cry." In this way he worked up details to his purpose, especially bringing in the horrible frequency of capital punishment as the moral for his tale. But the result, we say again, is a very curious instance of the undue proportion assumed under these conditions by the melo- dramatic aide of Dickens's well-known method, which tallies curiously, just as in his mind his love of the stage was always uppermost, with the stage-methods of the day, which led to alternate comic and serious scenes in an order almost their own. No wonder that Dickens, sufferer as he was from theatrical plagiarists, enjoyed seeing his own puppets in stage-form, notwithstanding much that has been said to the contrary. According to his son, be was delighted, among other things, by the acting of the Miss Fortescue of the day as Barnaby Rudge. In our own later time, we have a memory of an extraordinary Miss Miggs in the popular American actress, Mrs. John Wood.

The interest attending this reproduction of the first 'edition attaches especially, of coarse, to the reappearance of the old illustrations, to the history of the book as told by the editor, and to Dickens's reface as now reproduced. In those days the pictures formed a great part of the attraction of the serial, and have certainly made themselves part of our original memories. But we do not like them in their present form. They seem to us to exaggerate the very melodramatic effects which we have found in the story itself, and to make the narrative more than ever like a play rather than a lifelike picture. The illustration of the party at the `Maypole' (on page 5 of the story), of the No-Popery Dance by Hugh and Dennis at the Boot,' and of Mr. Haredale on his armed watch in the solitary house, are instances of this which may be cited. The latter figure is especially Adelphic in its suggestion and effect. A very stagey Barna.by, too, is the pictured boy who gives his name to the story, while in her portraits Miggs is really too forbidding. Nevertheless, to the student these illustrations are quaint enough studies of the taste of the time, which ran so essentially to caricature rather than, as at the present day, to realism. It is difficult to say whether Charles Dickens puzzles the caricaturist or the realist most. For in truth he was, before all things, Charles Dickens, with nobody like or second in his way.

The story of the negotiations between Dickens and his pub- lishers, narrated by his son in the Introduction, gives an extraordinary idea of his incredible industry. Under agree- ment with Bentley, he became editor of his magazine in August, 1836, undertaking at the same time to furnish it with a serial story (Oliver Twist), and further, to write him two other stories by an early date. The pay for the third was to be £500, and an additional £50 on the sale reaching three thousand,—certainly, no very large price for a highly popular writer. Dickens, however, had undertaken more than even his appetite for work could do, and it taxes one's under- standing to imagine how the most inventive of minds could

successfully carry on three stories at once, besides the work of editing. Various compromises were accordingly effected in his arrangements, under which it should be added that Pick- wick was proceeding for Chapman and Hall at the same time as was Oliver Twist for Bentley. Dickens's standing mentor, John Forster, certainly had reason for doubting Dickens's wisdom. It is simply bewildering to read—and till now we had no adeq nate notion of the involution of Dickens's earlier work—that he had undertaken to finish Barnaby for Bentley by November, 1838, when in November, 1837, he agreed with Chapman to begin, and did begin, Nicholas Nickleby in April, 1838, to be finished in October, 1839, while Oliver Twist was to be ready for publication in three-volume form by October, 1838. That " something like a hideous nightmare " was the result on the novelist's mind is not much to be wondered at, and he gave it up at last, though it is wonderful to find that in February, 1838, he had found a " short interval " to edit and arrange Grimaldi's memoirs for Bentley. "Beyond Scott himself " he finally pronounced his labours, and some sort of a beginning was all he could make on Barnaby towards the end of that year. After all, it seems absurd enough to pick small holes in such a work produced under such conditions ! "I cannot write this tale at present," was Dickens's conclusion in January, 1839 ; and one feels a pang of the old regret in reading, in his letter to Forster of that date, the over-true old tale of the " immense profits Oliver was realising to his publisher," and the " paltry, wretched, miserable sum " (not equal to what is every day paid for a novel that sells fifteen hundred copies at most), which was all he had himself derived from it. Struggling in old toils with all his popularity, wasting his freshest energies and the best part of his life to fill the pockets of others, and realise but a " genteel sub- sistence" for his own nearest and dearest—out of heart and spirits under the iron hand—this is Dickens's version of the old and much be-preached text : these are his own phrases. Yet this is the author of all authors who was supposed to be the spoiled child of Fame and Fortune. It is very sad to us,— that is all that can be said. May Mr. Meredith's presidency of the Society of Authors be the beginning of better things. For the rest of the story—how the Miscellany was given up and Barnaby indefinitely adjourned, and £2,250 paid to Bentley for the copyright and stock-in-hand of Oliver—we must refer our readers to the introduction itself, satisfied if it throws new lights for them on the history of the Gordon Riots. Subject to fresh " undertakings "—" to be deducted " from sums yet to be earned—with " liens " on property and what not, the necessary money to pay off Publisher Bentley was advanced by Publisher Chapman. This pen-and-ink slavery is a long and a recurring tale. What can one feel but thanks for the compensations with which such a kingdom of imagination as Dickens's must have been provided him.

With the book Barnaby, which, after all, was only announced as on the eve of appearance in January, 1841, came the author's preface, which shows us the happier Dickens again. We have quoted from it already his purpose when he wrote the story, in which no one who reads it is likely to have for- gotten " Grip," the raven. Here, a little shortened, is Dickens's account of "the two great originals," of whom he was a com- pound. The first was presented to him when in the " bloom of youth," having good gifts, " which he improved by study and attention in a most exemplary manner. He slept in a stable—generally on horseback—and so terrified a Newfound- land dog by his preternatural sagacity, that he has been known, by the mere superiority of his genius, to walk off unmolested with the dog's dinner, from before his face. He was rapidly rising in acquirements and virtues, when, in an evil hour, his stable was newly painted. He observed the workmen closely, saw that they were careful of the paint, and immediately burned to possess it. On their going to dinner, he ate up all they had left behind, consisting of a pound or two of white lead ; and this youthful indiscretion terminated in death."

How the second, older and more gifted, began by ad- ministering to the effects of his predecessor, by disinterring all the cheese and halfpence he had buried in the garden, a work of immense labour and research ; how he then set him- self to acquiring stable language till he could drive imaginal y

horses all day ; and only failed to show himself at his best because Dickens had no drunken man handy to produce for him,.which his former master said would bring him out very strong ; how he respected nobody but the cook, and that from an attachment of the same order as the policeman's ; and how one day he was encountered in the middle of the street, showing off all his accomplishments to a large crowd, and refused to be brought home till he had defended himself behind a pump, and was overpowered by numbers,—these are the principal data of his amusing biography. Quite on the Sam Weller prin- ciple is the brief account of his end, for he, too, was taken ill after three years, and died before the kitchen fire. "He new- pointed the greater part of the garden wall by digging out the mortar, broke countless squares of glass by scraping away the putty all round the frames, and tore up and swallowed in splinters the greater part of a wooden staircase of six steps and a landing." There is gratification in learning that it is not all genius that fails of financial appreciation. The rather dilapidated stuffed remains of this remarkable bird were bought in a glass case by the London Stereoscopic Company at the sale at Christie's for no less a sum than £126.