Page:Notes and Queries - Series 11 - Volume 5.djvu/562

 462

NOTES AND QUERIES. [iis.v. JINK is, 1912.

however, had a lifelong grievance against him from the time when ' Pickwick ' ap- peared with the character of Stiggins. Further offence was given by the character of Chadband in ' Bleak House,' followed by Melchisedech Howler in ' Dombey and Son,' besides other evidences of Dickens's dis- taste for Dissenters. This caused much indignation among a large body of Non- conformists so much so that in many households the works of Dickens were not allowed, while some advertisers would not insert their announcements in his works. This feeling was not shared by all. My father for one, staunch Baptist as he was, always read Dickens with delight, month by month as fast as the parts were pub- lished. He regarded the characters objected to as merely attacks on religious humbugs, and such the author has shown was his intention. At the same time it is evident that Dickens had no intimate knowledge of Dissenters, or he would have been aware that by far the larger number of the ministers were as cultivated and learned as those of the Established Church, while those who had not this cultivation led saintly lives and influenced their people for good.

Among the papers representing the Dis- senters, The Nonconformist carefully re- frained from saying anything that could be construed into approval or otherwise ; but The Freeman, now The Baptist Times, the organ of the Baptists, made a bold attack on the 17th of June, and referred to " his deliberate and grossly unjust misrepresen- tation of Dissent." It quoted from the Preface in the later editions of ' Pickwick,' in which Dickens explains

" that there is a difference between religion and the cant of religion, piety and the pretence of piety, a humble reverence for the great truths of Scrip- ture and an audacious and offensive obtrusion of its letter and not its spirit in the commonest dissensions and meanest affairs of life,"

and states " that it is always the latter, and never the former, which he satirizes." Of this The Freeman remarks :

" It would be well if this were absolutely true. No more eligible subject can be imagined for the lash of the satirist than the various forms of religious hypocrisy. If Mr. Dickens had confined himself to an exposure of these hateful and mischievous false- hoods, we, at least, should have no fault to find, but why does he invariably identify them with Dissent? How is it that his canting, snivelling, red- nosed hypocrites invariably hail from Ebenezer Chapel? Take the earlier of his libels on Dissent the well-known Stiggins, and consider the effect which such a portraiture must have been intended to produce on the minds of readers previously un- acquainted with Dissenters."

One cannot but regret that some sugges- tion was not made to Dickens with respect to this. He seems to have formed a pre- judice, and to have followed it up without any adequate reason ; and in his anxiety to- attack hypocrisy he thus gave offence to many who would otherwise gladly have helped him in his work for the good of all for in most of the reforms in which he was interested the Dissenters were among the hardest workers.

Although forty-two years have passed since the death of Dickens, the position he then occupied in the world of letters has not only been maintained, but has become even higher. The sale of his writings through those forty-two years has been, and still continues to be, enormous, and there is hardly a publisher, either here or in Amer ica who has not issued some work, associated, with his name.

A few people thought at the time of his death that the praise bestowed on him was extravagant, yet the press on the occasion of the centenary of his birth has been fully a& enthusiastic, and there has been hardly a writer of note who has not taken advantage of the celebration to render tribute. Mr. Clement Shorter in The Sphere of the 10th of February well describes the literature- relating to Dickens as " almost Napoleonic in its magnitude." Mr. Arthur Waugh in The Daily Chronicle of the 7th of February states in a couple of brief sentences why this celebration differs from all others r "It is a celebration prompted by glowing and almost passionate personal devotion .... The Centenary tribute to Charles Dickens is a tribute of love."

The celebration was, however, shorn of some of its festivities on account of the death of Alfred Tennyson Dickens, which occurred suddenly in the Hotel Astor, New York, on the 2nd of January. He visited England last year after forty-five years' absence in Australia, and during his stajr here he was much with Mr. B. W. Matz r who wrote the obituary notice of him which appeared (with a portrait) in The Dickensian for February.

Yet what did take place at the Centenary was in full accord with the spirit of Dickens. The Daily Telegraph opened a fund to secure a better provision for five of the daughters of his eldest son, and a dinner was given to poor children in Lambeth. It is also interesting to note that in this Centenary year on the 4th of this month a White Paper was issued dealing with the