LONDON: 1838. and Fielding: may measure his subject with the highest. We Le Sage. Gay, meet with a succession of swindlers and thieves in Gil Blas; we shake hands with highwaymen and house-breakers all round in the Beggars' Opera; we pack cards with La Ruse or pick pockets with Jonathan in Fielding's Mr. Wild the Great; we follow cruelty and vice from its least beginning to its grossest ends in the prints of Hogarth; but our morals stand none the looser for any of them. As the spirit of the Frenchman was pure enjoyment, the strength of the Englishmen lay in wisdom and satire. The low was set forth to pull down the false pretensions of the high. And though for the most part they differ in manner and design from Dickens in this tale, desiring less to discover the soul of goodness in things evil than to brand the stamp of evil on things apt to pass for good, their objects and reLikeness to sults are substantially the same. Familiar with the lowest kind of abasement of life, the knowledge is used, by both him and them, to teach what constitutes its essential elevation; and by the very coarseness and vulgarity of the materials employed, we measure the gentlemanliness and beauty of the work that is done. The quack in morality will always call such writing immoral, and the impostors will continue to complain of them. its treatment of imposture; but for the rest of the LONDON! 1838. ficial and the world it will still teach the invaluable lesson of The superwhat men ought to be from what they are. We true. cannot learn it more than enough. We cannot too often be told that as the pride and grandeur of mere external circumstance is the falsest of earthly things, so the truth of virtue in the heart is the most lovely and lasting; and from the pages of Oliver Twist this teaching is once again to be taken by all who will look for it. there. shadow of And now, while Oliver was running a great Again the career of popularity and success, the shadow of Barnaby Rudge. the tale of Barnaby Rudge which he was to write on similar terms, and to begin in the Miscellany when the other should have ended, began to darken everything around him. We had much discussion respecting it, and I had no small difficulty in restraining him from throwing up the agreement altogether; but the real hardship of his position, and the considerate construction to be placed on every effort made by him to escape from obligations incurred in ignorance of the sacrifices implied by them, will be best understood from his own frank and honest statement. On the 21st of January 1839, enclosing me the copy of a letter which he proposed to send to Mr. Bentley 1838. C. D. LONDON: the following morning, he thus wrote. "From "what I have already said to you, you will have "been led to expect that I entertained some such "intention. I know you will not endeavour to "dissuade me from sending it. Go it MUST. It "is no fiction to say that at present I cannot write "this tale. The immense profits which Oliver has "realized to its publisher and is still realizing; "the paltry, wretched, miserable sum it brought "to me (not equal to what is every day paid for "a novel that sells fifteen hundred copies at "most); the recollection of this, and the con"sciousness that I have still the slavery and "drudgery of another work on the same journey"man-terms; the consciousness that my books are "enriching everybody connected with them but "myself, and that I, with such a popularity as I "have acquired, am struggling in old toils, and An old story "wasting my energies in the very height and "freshness of my fame, and the best part of my "life, to fill the pockets of others, while for those "who are nearest and dearest to me I can realize "little more than a genteel subsistence: all this "puts me out of heart and spirits. And I can"not-cannot and will not-under such circum"stances that keep me down with an iron hand, "distress myself by beginning this tale until I have LONDON: 1838. C. D. to J. F. delay of "had time to breathe; and until the intervention "of the summer, and some cheerful days in the "country, shall have restored me to a more genial "and composed state of feeling. There-for six "months Barnaby Rudge stands over. And but Proposed "for you, it should stand over altogether. For I Barnaby, "do most solemnly declare that morally, before "God and man, I hold myself released from such "hard bargains as these, after I have done so "much for those who drove them. This net that "has been wound about me, so chafes me, so ex"asperates and irritates my mind, that to break "it at whatever cost-that I should care nothing "for-is my constant impulse. But I have not "yielded to it. I merely declare that I must have "a postponement very common in all literary "agreements; and for the time I have mentioned "-six months from the conclusion of Oliver in "the Miscellany-I wash my hands of any fresh "accumulation of labour, and resolve to proceed "as cheerfully as I can with that which already "presses upon me.”* Upon receiving this letter I gently reminded him that I had made objection at the time to the arrangement on the failure of which he empowered me to bring about the settlement it was now proposed to supersede. I cannot give his reply, as it would be unbecoming to repeat the warmth of its LONDON: 1838. Resignation necessary. of the Miscel lany. To describe what followed upon this is not It will suffice to state the results. Upon the appearance in the Miscellany, in the early months of 1839, of the last portion of Oliver Twist, its author, having been relieved altogether from his engagement to the magazine, handed over, in a familiar epistle from a parent to his child, the editorship to Mr. Ainsworth; and the Barnaby still subsisting agreement to write Barnaby Rudge Mr. Bentley. was, upon the overture of Mr. Bentley himself in June of the following year, 1840, also put an end to, on payment by Dickens, for the copyright of Oliver Twist and such printed stock as remained of the edition then on hand, of two thousand two hundred and fifty pounds. What was further incident to this transaction will be told hereafter; and a few words may meanwhile be taken, not given up by C. D. to J. F. expression to myself, but I preserve its first few lines to |