Virginia Woolf's review of The Thackeray Country by Lewis Melville
and The Dickens Country by F. G. Kitton was first published in the TLS
of March 10, 1905
These two books belong to what is called the “Pilgrimage” series, and before
undertaking the journey it is worth considering in what spirit we do so. We
are either pilgrims from sentiment, who find something stimulating to the
imagination in the fact that Thackeray rang this very door bell or that
Dickens shaved behind that identical window, or we are scientific in our
pilgrimage and visit the country where a great novelist lived in order to
see to what extent he was influenced by his surroundings. Both motives are
often combined and can be legitimately satisfied; as, for instance, in the
case of Scott or the Brontës, George Meredith or Thomas Hardy. Each of these
novelists may be said to possess a spiritual sovereignty which no one else
can dispute. They have made the country theirs because they have so
interpreted it as to have given it an ineffaceable shape in our minds, so
that we know certain parts of Scotland, of Yorkshire, of Surrey, and of
Dorset as intimately as we know the men and women who have their dwelling
there. Novelists who are thus sensitive to the inspiration of the land are
alone able to describe the natives who are in some sense the creatures of
the land. Scott’s men and women are Scotch ; Miss Brontë loves her moors so
well that she can draw as no one else can the curious type of human being
that they produce ;. . and so we may say not only that novelists own a
country, but that all who dwell in it are their subjects. It seems a little
incongruous to talk of the Thackeray “country” or the Dickens “country” in
this sense; for the word calls up a vision of woods and fields, and you may
read through a great number of these masters’ works without finding any
reason to believe that the whole world is not paved with cobble stones. Both
Thackeray and Dickens were Londoners; the country itself comes very seldom
into their books, and the country man or woman—the characteristic product of
the country—hardly at all. But to say that a man is a Londoner implies only
that he is not one of the far more definite class of countrymen; it does not
stamp him as belonging to any recognized type.
In the case of Thackeray any such definition is more than usually absurd; he
was, as Mr. Melville remarks, a cosmopolitan; with London for a basis he
travelled everywhere; and it follows that the characters in his books are
equally citizens of the world . “Man and not scenery,” says Mr. Melville,
“was what he strove to portray”; and it is because he took so vast and
various a subject that the only possible scene for a pilgrim in Thackeray’s
footsteps is the great world of London. And even in London, the scene of
“Vanity Fair,” of “Pendennis,” of “The Newcomes,” it is not easy to decide
upon the exact shrine at which we are to offer incense. Thackeray did not
consider the feelings of these devout worshippers, and left many of his
localities vague. Whole districts rather than individual streets and houses
seem to be his; and though we are told that he knew exactly where Becky and
Colonel Newcome and Pendennis lived, the photographs of the authentic houses
somehow leave one’s imagination cold. To imprison these immortals between
brick walls strikes one as an unnecessary act of violence; they have always
tenanted their own houses in our brains, and we refuse to let them go
elsewhere. But there can be no such risk in following Thackeray himself from
one house to another; and we may perhaps find that it adds to our knowledge
of him and of his books to see where he lived when he was writing them and
what surroundings met his eye. But here again we must select. Charterhouse
and the Temple, Jermyn-street, and Young-street, Kensington, are the genuine
Thackeray country, which seems to echo not only his presence but his spirit;
these are the places that he has interpreted as well as pictured. But it
needs either a boundless imagination or a mind that holds sacred the boots
and umbrellas of the great to follow Thackeray with unflagging interest in
his journeyings to Ireland, to America, and to all parts of the Continent;
and at No. 36, Onslow-square, Brompton, the most devoted pilgrim might find
it difficult to bend the knee.
We do less violence to the truth, if in our love of classification we describe
Dickens as a cockney. We might draw a very distinct line round London—even
round certain districts of London—if we wished to circumscribe his kingdom.
It is true that the late Mr. Kitton, who brought what we must consider a
superfluous zeal and a too minute knowledge to the task, begins his book
with two or three pictures of Portsmouth and Chatham. We are asked to
imagine the child Dickens as he looked at the stars from the upper window of
No. 18, St. Mary’s-place, and we are assured that he enjoyed many a ramble
with his sister and nurse in the fields near Chatham. The imagination
oppressed with these details has to bear an altogether insupportable load
before it has followed Dickens to his last resting place. Mr. Melville was
wise enough to ignore the “hundred and one places of minor importance” in
writing of Thackeray and select only those that seemed to him of primary
interest—from which the reader will probably make a further selection. But
Mr. Kitton, whose mind was a unique storehouse of facts about Dickens, lets
us have the full benefit of his curiously minute scholarship. He knows not
only every house where Dickens lived, but every lodging that he took for a
month or two in the summer; he tells us how Dickens seemed to prefer “houses
having semi-circular frontages” and describes the inns where Dickens lodged
and the mugs from which he is said to have drunk and the “stiff wooden
chair” in which he sat. A pilgrimage, if one followed this guide, would be a
very serious undertaking; and we doubt whether the pilgrim at the end would
know very much more about Dickens and his writings than he did at the
beginning. The most vivid and valuable part of the book is that which
describes the various dwelling places of Dickens as a young man before he
was famous and could afford a “frightfully first-class family mansion,” as
he calls it. It was while he lived in these dreary and dingy back streets in
Camden-town and the neighbourhood of the Debtors’ Prison that Dickens
absorbed the view of life which he was afterwards to reproduce so
brilliantly. These early experiences, indeed, read like the first sketch for
David Copperfield. No one probably has ever known his London so intimately
as Dickens did, or has painted the life of the streets with such first-hand
knowledge. He was not really happy when he was alone. He made one or two
conscientious expeditions into the country in search of local colour, but
when it had yielded the words he wanted he had no further use for it. He
spent his summer holidays at various seaside resorts, and in London he lived
in a variety of houses which leave no single impression upon the mind.
Indeed, the book is such an accumulation of detail that it is, after all,
from his own writings that one must draw one’s impression of the Dickens
country.
And perhaps, when everything is said, this is always bound to be the case. A
writer’s country is a territory within his own brain; and we run the risk of
disillusionment if we try to turn such phantom cities into tangible brick
and mortar. We know our way there without signposts or policemen, and we can
greet the passers by without need of introduction. No city indeed is so real
as this that we make for ourselves and people to our liking; and to insist
that it has any counterpart in the cities of the earth is to rob it of half
its charm. In the same way too the great dead come to each of us in their
own guise, and their image is more palpable and enduring than any shapes of
flesh and blood. Of all books therefore the books that try to impress upon
the mind the fact that great men were once alive because they lived in this
house or in that are those that seem to have least reason for their being,
for Thackeray and Dickens, having done with earthly houses, live most
certainly in our brains. If the thing must be done, however, we could not
wish it better done than it is by Mr. Melville. Mr. Kitton, from the reasons
we have given, seems to us to fail, and to injure the master whom he would
honour. Both books are full of excellent pictures, to one of which only we
wish to take exception. Surely Mr. Melville could have found some happier
portrait of Thackeray than the etching in dry point by G. Barnett Smith
which forms the frontispiece of his book and which gives a singularly
inadequate likeness of the grand and familiar head?
