The Dickens Circle: A Narrative of the Novelist's Friendships
By , New York: : E. P. Dutton & Company. 1919. 12mo, xvi+363 pp. Illustrations. $10.00.
WITH dignity and sage consideration Mr. Ley has reclaimed and recombined old facts about Charles Dickens, added new information, and expressed sound judgments of personalities and incidents such as to supplement, and in some cases to qualify or correct, Forster’s Life. Many a volume of Victorian biography and autobiography he has sifted for its grain of Dickensian gold. He has drawn from the whole range of sources: I he Life; the various reminiscences and collections of letters; the accumulated material of the Dickensian; the files of Household Words, All the Year Round, and the Examiner; and personal interviews with the sons and daughters of Dickens’s friends. It is a not unimpressive commentary on the circumference — so to speak — of the Dickens circle, that the book might easily, for its illustrations, be mistaken at first glance for a rather full portrait-album of Victorian artists and men of letters.
But, delightful as the generous illustration of Mr. Ley s book is, and clear and valuable as are his arrangement of facts and his display of new tid-bits lor Dickensians, it is scarcely surprising that a continuous reading of so full a treatment this of the Dickens circle should have a slightly vertiginous effect. Seventy-seven chapters, treating each in brief chronological routine the. inception, development, and end of the relations between Dickens and some literary or artistic man, woman, or group, arc hardly to be read ‘right slap off,’any more than ‘The Decline and Fall-Off the Rooshan Empire' was, by Mr. Wegg. One overcome by the rhythmic formula. Over and over, Dickens makes a friend at a dinner, in the Shakespeare Club, or through his professional work; meets him on various occasions, corresponds with him, performs in amateur theatricals with him, or goes on a trip with him; presents him with a book, works him into a novel, quarrels with him makes up, names a son after him, and attends his funeral. The result is almost a grotesque Dickens, meeting all comers and disposing of them by varying applications of the ineluctable formula.
Such an impression is, however, grossly unjust (if for no other reason than that Dickens had not sons enough for the christenings to go round). He was far from a champion at a social Donnybrook; and, when separately read, such chapters as those on Ainsworth, Macready, Browning, ‘Phiz,’Landor, Jeffrey, and Wilkie Collins stand out each as a distinct and easily memorable contribution to the lore of the Dickensian world. The chapters on Thackeray and Forster are, particularly, of most illuminating quality. And not since James T. Fields published Yesterdays with Authors have Dickens’s relations with America been more fairly and more gratifyingly treated than in the chapters on his American friends. Even the kaleidoscopic confusion of continuous reading cannot distract attention from the clear-cut veracity and accurate analysis that mark these separate presentations of Dickens’s friendships.
It is only to theeternal honor of Charles Dickens that there were so many, and to the credit of Mr. Ley that he has so completely and so succinctly canvassed the whole list. If the irreverent regard these labors as unconsidered trifles snapped up by a too ardent trader in literary scraps, let them but consider the fundamental importance of the subject, and bless the Boswellian exactitude of such an Autolyeus. T. L. H.