October 17, 1918 
LAND 6? WATER 
15 
Life and Letters ^ J. C Squire 
Dickens's Friends 
ONE of the fattest and fullest books of the year 
is Mr. J. W. T. Ley's The Dickens Circle, "just 
published (at a guinea) by Chapman & Hall. 
Mr. Ley has tabulated about a hundred of Charles 
Dickens's friends and, taking them individually 
or in groups, brought together from memoirs and letters 
a great pudding of information about his hero's relations 
with them. I have enjoyed the |30ok. It is about a writer 
who, to my taste, could be' less easily spared than all sub- 
sequent novelists put together. And it is the sort of book 
which demonstrates what interesting literary works may be 
produced by men who altogether lack the gift of writing. 
****** 
Mr. Ley resembles many compilers of literary memoirs, 
and most "students of Dickens" in that almost his sole 
literary gift is a mastery of the cliche. At the very outset, 
when one finds the sentence "If it be true that the proper 
study of mankind is Man, it is equally true that men most 
reveal themselves in their relations with men," one knows 
that all the other old sticks will parade across the scene. 
They do, and one greets each with a cheer. "My difficulty 
has been to decide what to omit," "Of the books I have con- 
sulted, I could not possibly give a complete list. Their 
name is Legion " : thus proceeds the preface. And the 
opening sentence of the book proper is : " There is no surer 
test of a man's character than to ask, " Who are his friends ? " 
Mr. Ley is the sort of devotee who continually refers to 
Dickens as "Boz" ; on the strength of that alone one could 
be certain that he would, when occasion arose, remark, 
" 'Tis true, and pity 'tis, 'tis true"; that he would say, 
" It must have been a red-letter day for tlje obscure young 
newspaper reporter on which he learned that his first book 
was to be illustrated by the great George Cruikshank," and 
that he would speak of death as the passage into the Great 
Beyond. And so he does. It is as well to make this clear 
lest in recommending this book to the leisured reader I be 
supposed to imply that its author is another Walter Pater. 
But though Mr. Ley is not an artist in words, it does not 
matter. His labour has been mostly research, and its pro- 
ducts are mainly quotations and anecdotes. He has col- 
lected them in such number that the publishers are justified 
in claiming that his is the most informative book of the 
kind since Forster's Life. 
It is not necessary to read the book straight through. 
If you do you may get tired of the Dickens Circle. Nobody 
could justly call it a Vicious Circle ; but a hundred accounts 
of the beginnings and developments of friendships taken in 
sequence are apt to seem a little monotonous. Besides, 
there is no chronological or other order which demands 
consecutive reading. As a book to "dip into," with or 
without a preliminary reference to the index, it is delightful. 
You get an immense number of extracts from Dickens's 
letters, many stories, many portraits of " Eminent Vic- 
torians," mostly of the not-quite-great kind, and an unsys- 
tematic but very illuminating picture of London in the 
'forties. You also get the charrriing oddments dear to that 
superficial antiquary who lives in most of us. For instance, 
Dickens, P'orster and Harrison Ainsworth used to go rides : 
On througli .Vcton's narrow High Street, with its quaint 
raised pavement and ancient red-tiled houses, past 
"Fordrush" Fielding's last well-loved home,, past 
Ealing's parks and long village green, round through orchard- 
bordered lanes to Chiswick, with its countless memories, 
and so by Shepherd's Bush to Wood Lane and the Scrubbs, 
home again. 
The thought of that sylvan ride on horseback now gives 
one a shudder. It is all new bricks and trams ; but^ then 
the Bush really was bushy, Wood Lane was a woody lane, 
and the Scrubbs no doubt covered with scrub. There is no 
mention of a meal in this passage. This is unusual. Dickens's 
contemporaries ate on the slightest provocation, and a new- 
novel was invariably celebrated by a tremendous and up- 
roarious tavern dinner. 
****** 
One is impressed again with the unparalleled hold that 
Dickens had upon his generation, a hold far wider and firmer 
than that of Walter Scott or of Pope, who commanded the 
cultured world of his day as Dickens never did, but whose 
influence was confined to that world, and was purely an 
influence on taste. Before he was thirty, Dickens was 
one of the most popular men in the English-speaking world, 
and years before that he had established friendships with 
many of the most famous men of the older generation. His 
numbers were waited for in the mining camps of Australia 
more eagerly than letters from home ; and he was qinly 
just over forty when a Lord Chief Justice paid him one of 
the greatest, though not one of the most decorous, com- 
pliments ever paid to an author. Dickens had been sum- 
moned to a jury, and the judge said : 
The name of the illustrious Charles Dickens has been called 
on the jury, but he has not answered. If his great Chancery 
suit had been still going on I certainly should have excused 
him, but as that is over he might have done us the honour 
of attending here that he might have seen how we went 
on at Common, Law. 
The whole of English-speaking manhood was, in a sense, 
his friend ; and he had as large a personal acquaintance 
with individuals as any other man could conceivably have 
had. 
****** 
Mr. Ley ropes them all in from Samuel Rogers to 
Carlyle, from Lytton to Augustus Egg, of whom he says : 
"In the novelist's home no one was more welcome than 
Egg." Macready, Longfellow, Thackeray, Browning, artists, 
actors, and politicians — they are all there. They met 
Dickens in an atmosphere of excessive geniality and, one js 
bound to add, of generous eating and drinking. To scores 
of them, and of scores of them, the emotional and open- 
hearted man wrote with an effusiveness that sometimes 
verges on gush. It is possibly significant that numerous 
though his friends were, they did not include many of the 
reticent type ; it is noticeable that the Tennyson chapter 
is very short and perhaps symbolical that the name of 
Matthew Arnold does not even appear in the index. The 
air of Dickens was a little warm for some. He longs to 
hold his friends in his arms ; he tells one that " I will fall 
on you with a swoop of love in Paris" ; he is very free with 
"Again and again, and again, my own true friend, God 
bless you," and "God bless you," and "God bless him," 
and "God bless her," are phrases even more common in 
his letters than in his works. ^ talHlllllM 
* * * * * * l»f 
He was Tiny Tim, with- some of the defects of that noble 
but rather wearying child ; all men Hked him for his generosity, 
humanity, wilhngness to work his hardest for others, cheer- 
fulness, and gallantry ; but they reacted variously to his, 
as some must have felt, almost too opulent benevolence, 
his almost too jolly joviality, his almost embarrassing affec- 
tionateness. Those who like to watch straws to see which 
way the wind is blowing may find a perfect straw in the 
nomenclature of Dickens's children. To name one's children 
after one's friends and the objects of one's reverence is a 
natural and excellent habit. But Dickens overdid it. He 
was not content to do the ordinary thing, and his children 
went through Hfe branded with names like Alfred Tennyson 
Dickens, Walter Savage Landor Dickens, Edward Bulwer 
Lytton Dickens, tokens at once of his sentimental promiscuity 
and of his intemperance of expression. It is odd — no, it is 
not odd — that with all this, all his communicativeness and 
sympathy and his multitude of friends, he leaves one never- 
theless with the impressions that the last intimacies of friend- 
ship he never experienced. He is the same to hundreds, 
very easily ready to catch fire if a sympathetic spark showed, 
eager to establish a contact of hearts with people at first 
meeting. But his friendships, I think, though they strength- 
ened with the accumulation of mutual mernories, did not 
greatly deepen. All that his friends were likely to know 
of Dickens they knew soon. That is to say, they none of 
them thoroughly knew him ; and I have the idea that he 
did not know himself. After reading the whole of Mr. Ley's 
long story of correspondences, collaborations, and conviviali- 
ties, after one has seen Dickens a thousand times as a minis- 
tering angel inspiring life-long gratitude, one still thinks of 
him not as this man's friend or as that man's friend, but 
as the friend of the human race. 
