A nose for a good story, 1841
A nose for a good story, 1841
What the Dickens is going on?
Two weeks ago, I related an interview between a rather awestruck American traveller, Charles Edwards Lester, and the newly famous Charles Dickens. Dickens came across as warm, gracious and modest, and delivered an inspiring monologue about his investigations of “the most wretched districts of the metropolis, studying the history of the human heart”.
It turns out that not everyone believed this encounter was accurately related.
Lester’s book in which the interview appeared, The Glory and Shame of England, was published in New York and London in November 1841. It was primarily a critique of British hypocrisy over child labour at home while espousing the abolition of slavery abroad, although it also celebrated Britain’s cultural heritage, including, of course, the work of literary figures including Dickens. It certainly caused a stir – only a year later, a textile merchant and writer called Peter Brown (ironically Scottish himself, and he emigrated to New York in 1837, and later to Canada) published a response, The Fame and Glory of England Vindicated. Brown, like Lester, was a keen supporter of the abolition of slavery, and was keen to point out social failings in America.
Another critique of Lester’s book had a rather different focus, however. In December 1841, the weekly newspaper The Examiner1 published an anonymous review of the book, and almost 80 per cent of the review is devoted to the interview with Dickens, despite that forming only a tiny portion of Lester’s two-volume work. “There is some truth in this book,” it begins, damning with faint praise. But a snarky tone very quickly appears:
The book contains an abundance of statements which have no better foundation than hearsay, imperfect and hasty observation, and deductions very illogically and unreasonably arrived at. But its chief property is an exquisite badness of taste, and a violation of the confidences of social life…
That last comment on “violation” appears to refer to Lester’s apparent imposition on the great novelist, and the reviewer does not hold back when he gets to his main theme:
When the American has in some degree recovered from the unbounded astonishment he may be supposed to have felt, on discovering the Englishman in circumstances so very extraordinary and portentous, he begins to ask a variety of questions… Accordingly he feels “at home at once,” and having in his eye twenty-seven mortal pages of publisher’s measure, begins his catechism…
Mr Lester proceeds to set down the subsequent conversation; as he says, word for word; but as it must be obvious to every reader, with the grossest mistakes, and a perfect disregard of sense and reason…
The reviewer – who is convinced “that Mr Lester speaks, and not Mr Dickens” – further snarks that Lester “launches into adulation so fulsome that it must absolutely sicken and disgust any man of the least delicacy or sensitiveness”.
And there’s plenty more to come, referring to Dickens’s alleged familiarity with the seedier parts of London:
Now Mr Dickens is generally supposed to have some dim perception of character, and by the time Mr Lester began to feel at home, probably began… to “twig” the kind of gentleman with whom he had to deal. But supposing that he abandoned himself to all that courtesy which it would be his desire to show to a stranger, and answered frankly and ingenuously to all his questions, can any one believe that a man who was capable of writing a letter, not to say a book, who had the most ordinary power of thought and the most limited range of intellect—would talk such intolerable nonsense as this? …
And in all the tirade about the scenes Mr Dickens has witnessed, and his familiar acquaintance with strange phases of life, can any man fail to recognise the maudlin speculations he has heard from elderly members of society a hundred times, as to the means by which a man so young can have gained such a vast quantity of knowledge of all kinds: more especially the naughty and “the low?”
Then the reviewer digs into greater detail. This is a passage from Lester’s account which I didn’t include last time:
The windows of his library look out upon a garden. I saw several rosy-cheeked children playing by a water fountain; and, as the little creatures cast occasional glances up to us while we were watching their sports from the window, I thought I saw in their large, clear, blue eyes, golden hair, and bewitching smile, the image of Charles Dickens. They were, in fact, young Bozzes!! I was greatly surprised, for I had never heard that there was such a lady as Mrs. Dickens.
This is somewhat poignant given that Dickens had married Catherine Hogarth four years earlier (and at the time of Lester’s visit they had three ‘young Bozzes’), although he was clearly in love with her younger sister Mary (who died 1837); and in 1858 their marriage would break down irretrievably.
Anyway, the reviewer responds:
Mr Dickens’s garden fronts the New road; and credible persons sitting on the tops of omnibuses and other tall carriages, have solemnly represented themselves as having seen into the domain. But after diligent inquiry, we can find no lady or gentleman who at any time or season has beheld a water-fountain at work in these premises: though several witnesses depose to a watering-pot; and a water-butt is admitted on all hands. This fairy fountain, therefore, is not a bad illustration of Mr Lester’s way of doing business: except that the water-butt or watering-pot is improved by the transformation; while Mr Dickens’s unassuming rill of sensible discourse, becomes a stagnant pool of mawkish milk and water.
Never having heard of such a lady as Mrs Dickens, Mr Lester must have been inexpressibly shocked when he saw “the young Bozzes” sporting round the water-fountain…
Last time I included just a fraction of Lester’s rather over-the-top praise for Dickens’s appearance (“I think Dickens incomparably the finest-looking man I ever saw”), omitting for example this stuff: “I should think his nose had once been almost determined to be Roman, but hesitated just long enough to settle into the classic Grecian outline.”
Our anonymous reviewer certainly isn’t going to let this slide:
And now as to these matters of eyes, nose, and hair… Mr Dickens’s Nose would appear to be rather a singular feature in his character. Its inconsistency in first inclining to Roman principles, and afterwards taking up with the Grecian, cannot be too strongly censured.
The writer feels Dickens has been “victimized”, and concludes:
… it is only necessary to have read Mr Dickens’s books in a proper spirit… to know that no man would feel such an entire disgust as he, at such foolish and fulsome things as these on which we have remarked.
All of this begs the question: who wrote the review?
We can’t know for sure, but there’s an obvious candidate. The review appeared in the ‘Literary Examiner’ section of The Examiner. And who was the literary editor of the paper at the time? One John Forster (1812–1876) – a close friend of Dickens, who in fact read each of the author’s novels while still in manuscript and was his official biographer. Forster wasn’t a saint – he was obviously jealous of Dickens’s later friendship with Wilkie Collins, for example, and ironically critics of his Life of Charles Dickens said it contained “too much of Forster and too little of Dickens”. But Forster was a devoted friend, and I suppose we can assume he knew pretty well whether Dickens had a water fountain in his garden and what his nose was like.
What to conclude? Was Lester faithful to his interviewee or was there too much journalistic licence?
To return briefly to the case for the defence:
In the 1866 edition of his book, i.e. 25 years later, Lester said he was pleased to see the interview “bear all the chief lineaments of truth”. An obituary for Lester (who died in 1890) praised his “noble traits of character” and “his broad and brilliant mind”. Another American, journalist John D. Sherwood, dropped in at Devonshire Terrace to interview Dickens in late 1841. He quoted Dickens saying similar things about his literary characters (and his wanderings around the dark corners of London): “I have never transferred any character or scene entire; but this I can aver, that there is scarcely a character or description, the nucleus and substantial body of which was not furnished from reality.”2 And a French interviewer in 1843 commented on Dickens’s “long, brown, rather untidy hair” and “bright, restless eyes” – but alas the nose goes undescribed.
You’ll have to make up your own mind about Lester’s accuracy. But the final word must rest with Dickens! Only days after the interview must have occurred, on 19 July 1840 he wrote a letter directly to Lester, who had clearly asked for a souvenir or two:3
As I have not the complete MS of Oliver [Twist]… I am enabled to send you a scrap,4 in compliance with your request; and have much pleasure in doing so.
Pray make my regards to your lady, and give her from me the other little packet inclosed. It is the first specimen of the kind I have parted with—except to a hair-dresser—and will most likely be the last, for if I were to be liberal in this respect, my next portrait would certainly be that of a perfectly bald gentleman.
Believe me Dear Sir Faithfully Yours,
CHARLES DICKENS
The Examiner (available in the British Newspaper Archive) was co-founded by Leigh Hunt, and Dickens was a frequent contributor.
Found in Dickens: Interviews and Recollections edited by Philip Collins – the book contains multiple descriptions of Dickens’s nose! And you can read more about the troubles of the authorial conk here.
The scrap survives to this day in the Berg Collection at New York Public Library.