We also have to acknowledge, with thanks, permission from MESSRS. SMITH, ELDER & CO., to introduce the various excerpts from Thackeray’s Works found in the following pages.
THE PUBLISHERS.
I.
Thackeray does not give the same opportunities for the identification of his scenes as Dickens. The elaboration with which the latter localizes his characters, and the descriptive minutiæ with which he makes their haunts no less memorable than themselves, are not to be found in the works of the author of Vanity Fair. No faculty was stronger in Dickens, or of more service to him, than his power of word-painting. He reproduces the objects by which the persons he describes are surrounded with a fidelity which would be tedious, if it were not relieved by the humor which humanizes bricks, and imparts a grotesque sort of sensibility to articles of furniture; and it is not easy to think of any of his leading characters without being reminded of the neighborhoods in which they played their parts.
Thackeray, on the contrary, is not topographical. The briefest mention of a street suffices with him, and it is the character, not the locality, which has permanence in the reader’s mind. Every feature of Becky Sharp is remembered with a vividness which disassociates her with fiction; but the situation of the little house in which the unfortunate Rawdon finally discovers her duplicity, in the famous scene with the Marquis of Steyne, escapes the memory. When the book is no longer fresh to him, the reader may recollect that after her marriage she went to live in Mayfair, and may picture to himself a small, fashionable dwelling in that aristocratic neighbourhood; but he cannot remember that the author places it in Curzon street, nor that the Sedleys lived in Russell Square, Philip in Old Parr street, and Colonel Newcome in Fitzroy Square.
We have one example in Thackeray of the grotesquely humorous descriptive power of which Dickens was a master. It hits at the absurd nomenclature of modern London suburbs, where every box of a house has some high-sounding name of the sort which ornaments the fiction of the “Chambermaid’s Companion,” and it describes the neighbourhood into which the Sedleys moved after their failure—“St. Adelaide Villa, Anna Maria Road, West, where the houses look like baby houses; where the people looking out of the first floor windows must infallibly, as you think, sit with their feet in the parlors below; where the shrubs in the little gardens in front bloom with a perennial display of little children’s pinafores, little red socks, caps, etc. (polyandria polygenia); whence you hear the sound of jingling spinets and women singing; and whither, of an evening, you see city clerks plodding wearily.”
The fanciful supposition that persons in the upper stories must have their legs on the lower floor is richly characteristic of the manner in which Dickens would have indicated the smallness of the houses. It is a touch of that kind of humour which distinguishes all the work of that author, and which was one of his most serviceable resources; it gives facial expression to inanimate objects, and, as we have said, it individualizes the haunts of his characters no less than the characters themselves. But it is so rare in Thackeray that the exhibition of it in this fragment strikes us, as the lurid style of the earlier writings of Lord Lytton would do if we were to find a passage from them interpolated among the confiding garrulities of Vanity Fair.
It was not that Thackeray lacked the power of observation in the direction of externals,—though he certainly did not possess it in the same degree as Dickens—nor that his characters were airy visions to him, requiring no other habitation than the chambers of his brain; they were indeed flesh and blood to him, and Miss Thackeray has told a friend of the writer’s, {5} how, in her walks with her father, he would point out the very houses in which they lived. The difference was principally one of method. Thackeray’s was the classic stage—a dais with a drapery of green baize, before the time of scenery. Dickens’s was the modern stage, with lime-lights, trap-doors, and elaborate “sets.”
II.
Though his other scenes are misty, no reader of Thackeray who engages in a search for the places which he describes is likely, however, to overlook the Charterhouse, the ancient foundation to which he refers again and again, dwelling on it with many fond reminiscences. It is the school in which he himself was educated, and he has associated three generations of his characters with it. Thomas Newcome received instruction here, also his son Clive, with Pendennis, Osborne, and Philip of the second generation, after whom came Rawdon Crawley’s little son and young George Osborne; and, finally, the dear old Colonel, when broken down and weary, joined the poor brethren who are pensioners of the institution, and within its monastic walls cried Adsum as he heard a voice summoning him to the everlasting peace. Occasionally it is called Slaughter-house, once or twice “Smiffle” (after the boys’ way of pronouncing Smithfield, where it is situated); but in Thackeray’s later works he generally speaks of it as Grayfriars or Whitefriars.
“It had been,” he says in Vanity Fair, “a Cistercian convent in old days when the Smith field, which is contiguous to it, was a tournament ground. Obstinate heretics used to be brought thither, convenient for burning hard by. Henry the Eighth seized upon the monastery and its possessions, and hanged and tortured some of the monks who would not accommodate themselves to the pace of his reform. Finally, a great merchant bought the house and land adjoining, in which, with the help of other wealthy endowments of land and money, he established a famous foundation hospital for old men and children. An extra school grew round the old, almost monastic foundation, which subsists still with its middle-age costume and usages; and all Christians pray that it may flourish.
“Of this famous house some of the greatest noblemen, prelates and dignitaries in England, are governors; and as the boys are very comfortably lodged, fed and educated, and subsequently inducted to good scholarships at the University, and livings in the Church, many little gentlemen are devoted to the ecclesiastical profession from their tenderest years, and there is considerable emulation to procure nominations for the foundation. It was originally intended for the sons of poor and deserving clerics and laics; but many of the noble governors of the institution, with an enlarged and rather capricious benevolence, selected all sorts of objects for their bounty. To get an education for nothing, and a livelihood and profession assured, was so excellent a scheme, that some of the richest people did not disdain it; and not only the great men’s relations, but great men themselves, sent their sons to profit by the chance. Right reverend prelates sent their own kinsmen as the sons of their clergy, while on the other hand some great noblemen did not disdain to patronize the children of their confidential servants, so that a lad entering this establishment had every variety of youthful society wherewith to mingle.”
As a rule, however, the boys, belong to the upper classes, and an education obtained at Charterhouse is scarcely less of a social distinction than the much coveted and costly preparation of Eton, Harrow, or Winchester. The history of the school is full of brilliant names, and among its scholars have been Joseph Addison, Richard Steele, Isaac Barrow, General Havelock, Sir William Blackstone, Lord Chief Justice Ellenborough, Lord Liverpool, John Wesley and George Grote.
It is possible that one may know London intimately, and yet be ignorant of the situation of the Charterhouse. Smithfield is out of the way of the main lines of traffic: it is a squalid neighbourhood, north of Ludgate Hill, and it retains its ancient characteristics more than almost all other parts of the great city,—which has been so modernized that Cheapside looks like a slice of Broadway, and once shabby Fleet Street is showing all sorts of ornamental fronts. It has in it many solemn brick houses of a blackish purple, with glowing roofs of red tiles; smaller buildings of an earlier period, with high peaked gables and overlapping second stories; sequestred alleys, and courts bearing queer names, and many curious little shops.
One of the most direct approaches to it is through the Old Bailey from Ludgate Hill. On this route we pass the austere granite of Newgate Prison and also Pye Corner, where as the sign-board of a public house tells us, the great fire of 1666 ended, after burning from the 2nd to the 10th of September; we also pass Cock Lane, famous for its ghost, and the quaintest of old London churches, St. Bartholomew the Great, which is hemmed in and partly extinguished by the surrounding houses, that hide all but its smoked and patched tower, and a few square feet of grass, which is justifiably discouraged in its want of sunshine and space; thence our path is by the extensive buildings of St. Bartholomew’s Hospital, about which there is a morbid activity in the flow of officials and visitors, most of the latter being slatternly and anxious-looking women, with babies and baskets on their arms, and from the Hospital we cross the street, and so through the new cattle market, which fills the space once occupied by the pens, and covers the spot whence the souls of many martyrs have passed in flame from the stake to heaven.
III.
The buildings form an irregular cluster spread over a prodigal area, and isolated by a wall of brick and stone which many London fogs and long days of yellow weather have reduced to the dismalest of colors. None of them are lofty; some of them are of granite, and others of brick, upon which age has cast a smoky mantle. They are separated by wide courts and winding passages; and when I was there in the Easter vacation these open spaces were vacant, and the brisk twittering of the sparrows was the only sound that came from them. The quiet seemed all the greater, inasmuch as all around the walls is a busy neighbourhood, full of traffic and voices. The courts are for the most part paved with small cobblestones, and are cleanly swept; but some of them are grassy—grassy in the dingy and feeble way of London vegetation. These buildings look as sad as they are old; to the juvenile imagination the high walls and the severe architecture must be sharply distressing, and many a boy has felt his heart sink with misgiving as, for the first time, he has been driven through the old gate-way, to be placed as a scholar on Thomas Sutton’s {15} famous foundation.
At this old gate-way, one day, I saw a very feeble old gentleman, strangely dressed in a scarlet waistcoat and bright blue trowsers, a brass-buttoned coat, and a high silk hat. He was very small and very weak, moving slowly with the help of a stick, and coughing painfully behind his pocket handkerchief. To my question as to the admission of strangers, he said, quaveringly: “If you are a patron, you may see the buildings, but you had better ask the janitor; there he is. I,” he added, with some hesitation, “I am one of the poor brethren.”
