It was not long after the flood in Florence it seems to me, as I write, that I might almost leave out the two last words! that I saw Dickens for the first time. One morning in Casa Berti my mother was most agreeably surprised by a card brought in to her with “Mr. and Mrs. Charles Dickens” on it. We had been among his heartiest admirers from the early days of Pickwick. I don’t think we had happened to see the Sketches by Boz. But my uncle Milton used to come to Hadley full of “the last Pickwick,” and swearing that each number out-Pickwicked Pickwick. And it was with the greatest curiosity and interest that we saw the creator of all this enjoyment enter in the flesh.

We were at first disappointed, and disposed to imagine there must be some mistake! No! that is not the man who wrote Pickwick! What we saw was a dandified, pretty-boy-looking sort of figure, singularly young looking, I thought, with a slight flavour of the whipper-snapper genus of humanity.

Here is Carlyle’s description of his appearance at about that period of his life, quoted from Froude’s History of Carlyle’s Life in London:

“He is a fine little fellow Boz I think. Clear blue, intelligent eyes, eyebrows that he arches amazingly, large, protrusive, rather loose mouth, a face of most extreme mobility, which he shuttles about eyebrows, eyes, mouth and all in a very singular manner when speaking. Surmount this with a loose coil of common-coloured hair, and set it on a small compact figure, very small, and dressed a la D’Orsay rather than well this is Pickwick. For the rest, a quiet, shrewd-looking little fellow, who seems to guess pretty well what he is and what others are.”

One may perhaps venture to suppose that had the second of these guesses been less accurate, the description might have been a less kindly one.

But there are two errors to be noted in this sketch, graphic as it is. Firstly, Dickens’s eyes were not blue, but of a very distinct and brilliant hazel the colour traditionally assigned to Shakspeare’s eyes. Secondly, Dickens, although truly of a slight, compact figure, was not a very small man. I do not think he was below the average middle height. I speak from my remembrance of him at a later day, when I had become intimate with him; but curiously enough, I find on looking back into my memory, that if I had been asked to describe him, as I first saw him, I too should have said that he was very small. Carlyle’s words refer to Dickens’s youth soon after he had published Pickwick; and no doubt at this period he had a look of delicacy, almost of effeminacy, if one may accept Maclise’s well-known portrait as a truthful record, which might give those who saw him the impression of his being smaller and more fragile in build than was the fact. In later life he lost this D’Orsay look completely, and was bronzed and reddened by wind and weather like a seaman.

In fact, when I saw him subsequently in London, I think I should have passed him in the street without recognising him. I never saw a man so changed.

Any attempt to draw a complete pen-and-ink portrait of Dickens has been rendered for evermore superfluous, if it were not presumptuous, by the masterly and exhaustive life of him by John Forster. But one may be allowed to record one’s own impressions, and any small incident or anecdote which memory holds, on the grounds set forth by the great writer himself, who says in the introduction to the American Notes (first printed in the biography) “Very many works having just the same scope and range have been already published. But I think that these two volumes stand in need of no apology on that account. The interest of such productions, if they have any, lies in the varying impressions made by the same novel things on different minds, and not in new discoveries or extraordinary adventures.”

At Florence Dickens made a pilgrimage to Landor’s villa, the owner being then absent in England, and gathered a leaf of ivy from Fiesole to carry back to the veteran poet, as narrated by Mr. Forster. Dickens is as accurate as a topographer in his description of the villa, as looked down on from Fiesole. How often ah, how often! have I looked down from that same dwarf wall over the matchless view where Florence shows the wealth of villas that Ariosto declares made it equivalent to two Romes!

Dickens was only thirty-three when I first saw him, being just two years my junior. I have said what he appeared to me then. As I knew him afterwards, and to the end of his days, he was a strikingly manly man, not only in appearance but in bearing. The lustrous brilliancy of his eyes was very striking. And I do not think that I have ever seen it noticed, that those wonderful eyes which saw so much and so keenly, were appreciably, though to a very slight degree, near-sighted eyes. Very few persons, even among those who knew him well, were aware of this, for Dickens never used a glass. But he continually exercised his vision by looking at distant objects, and making them out as well as he could without any artificial assistance. It was an instance of that force of will in him, which compelled a naturally somewhat delicate frame to comport itself like that of an athlete. Mr. Forster somewhere says of him, “Dickens’s habits were robust, but his health was not.” This is entirely true as far as my observation extends.

Of the general charm of his manner I despair of giving any idea to those who have not seen or known him. This was a charm by no means dependent on his genius. He might have been the great writer he was and yet not have warmed the social atmosphere wherever he appeared with that summer glow which seemed to attend him. His laugh was brimful of enjoyment. There was a peculiar humorous protest in it when recounting or hearing anything specially absurd, as who should say “’Pon my soul this is too ridiculous! This passes all bounds!” and bursting out afresh as though the sense of the ridiculous overwhelmed him like a tide, which carried all hearers away with it, and which I well remember. His enthusiasm was boundless. It entered into everything he said or did. It belonged doubtless to that amazing fertility and wealth of ideas and feeling that distinguished his genius.

No one having any knowledge of the profession of literature can read Dickens’s private letters and not stand amazed at the unbounded affluence of imagery, sentiment, humour, and keen observation which he poured out in them. There was no stint, no reservation for trade purposes. So with his conversation every thought, every fancy, every feeling was expressed with the utmost vivacity and intensity, but a vivacity and intensity compatible with the most singular delicacy and nicety of touch when delicacy and nicety of touch were needed.

What were called the exaggerations of his writing were due, I have no doubt, to the extraordinary luminosity of his imagination. He saw and rendered such an individuality as Mr. Pecksniff’s or Mrs. Nickleby’s for instance, something after the same fashion as a solar microscope renders any object observed through it. The world in general beholds its Pecksniffs and its Mrs. Nicklebys through a different medium. And at any rate Dickens got at the quintessence of his creatures, and enables us all, in our various measures, to perceive it too. The proof of this is that we are constantly not only quoting the sayings and doings of his immortal characters, but are recognising other sayings and doings as what they would have said or done.

But it is impossible for one who knew him as I did to confine what he remembers of him either to traits of outward appearance or to appreciations of his genius. I must say a few, a very few words of what Dickens appeared to me as a man. I think that an epithet, which, much and senselessly as it has been misapplied and degraded, is yet, when rightly used, perhaps the grandest that can be applied to a human being, was especially applicable to him. He was a hearty man, a large-hearted man that is to say. He was perhaps the largest-hearted man I ever knew. I think he made a nearer approach to obeying the divine precept, “Love thy neighbour as thyself,” than one man in a hundred thousand. His benevolence, his active, energising desire for good to all God’s creatures, and restless anxiety to be in some way active for the achieving of it, were unceasing and busy in his heart ever and always.

But he had a sufficient capacity for a virtue, which, I think, seems to be moribund among us the virtue of moral indignation. Men and their actions were not all much of a muchness to him. There was none of the indifferentism of that pseudo-philosophic moderation, which, when a scoundrel or a scoundrelly action is on the tapis, hints that there is much to be said on both sides. Dickens hated a mean action or a mean sentiment as one hates something that is physically loathsome to the sight and touch. And he could be angry, as those with whom he had been angry did not very readily forget.

And there was one other aspect of his moral nature, of which I am reminded by an observation which Mr. Forster records as having been made by Mrs. Carlyle. “Light and motion flashed from every part of it [his face]. It was as if made of steel.” The first part of the phrase is true and graphic enough, but the image offered by the last words appears to me a singularly infelicitous one. There was nothing of the hardness or of the (moral) sharpness of steel about the expression of Dickens’s face and features. Kindling mirth and genial fun were the expressions which those who casually met him in society were habituated to find there, but those who knew him well knew also well that a tenderness, gentle and sympathetic as that of a woman, was a mood that his surely never “steely” face could express exquisitely, and did express frequently.

I used to see him very frequently in his latter years. I generally came to London in the summer, and one of the first things on my list was a visit to 20, Wellington Street. Then would follow sundry other visits and meetings to Tavistock House, to Gadshill, at Verey’s in Regent Street, a place he much patronised, &c., &c. I remember one day meeting Chauncy Hare Townsend at Tavistock House and thinking him a very singular and not particularly agreeable man. Edwin Landseer I remember dined there the same day. But he had been a friend of my mother’s, and was my acquaintance of long long years before.

Of course we had much and frequent talk about Italy, and I may say that our ideas and opinions, and especially feelings on that subject, were always, I think, in unison. Our agreement respecting English social and political matters was less perfect. But I think that it would have become more nearly so had his life been prolonged as mine has been. And the approximation would, if I am not much mistaken, have been brought about by a movement of mind on his part, which already I think those who knew him best will agree with me in thinking had commenced. We differed on many points of politics. But there is one department of English social life one with which I am probably more intimately acquainted than with any other, and which has always been to me one of much interest our public school system, respecting which our agreement was complete. And I cannot refrain from quoting. The opinion which he expresses is as true as if he had, like me, an eight years’ experience of the system he is speaking of. And the passage, which I am about to give, is very remarkable as an instance of the singular acumen, insight, and power of sympathy which enabled him to form so accurately correct an opinion on a matter of which he might be supposed to know nothing.

“In July,” says Mr. Forster, writing of the year 1858-9, “he took earnest part in the opening efforts on behalf of the Royal Dramatic College, which he supplemented later by a speech for the establishment of schools for actors’ children, in which he took occasion to declare his belief that there were no institutions in England so socially liberal as its public schools, and that there was nowhere in the country so complete an absence of servility to mere rank, position, and riches. ‘A boy there’” (Mr. Forster here quotes Dickens’s own words) “’is always what his abilities and personal qualities make him. We may differ about the curriculum and other matters, but of the frank, free, manly, independent spirit preserved in our public schools I apprehend there can be no kind of question.’”

I have in my possession a great number of letters from Dickens, some of which might probably have been published in the valuable collection of his letters published by his sister-in-law and eldest daughter had they been get-at-able at the time when they might have been available for that publication. But I was at Rome, and the letters were safely stowed away in England in such sort that it would have needed a journey to London to get at them.

I was for several years a frequent contributor to Household Words, my contributions for the most part consisting of what I considered tit-bits from the byways of Italian history, which the persevering plough of my reading turned up from time to time.

In one case I remember the article was sent “to order,” I was dining with him after I had just had all the remaining hairs on my head made to stand on end by the perusal of the officially published Manual for Confessors, as approved by superior authority for the diocèses of Tuscany. I was full of the subject, and made, I fancy, the hairs of some who sat at table with me stand on end also. Dickens said, with nailing forefinger levelled at me, “Give us that for Household Words. Give it us just as you have now been telling it to us” which I accordingly did. Whether the publication of that article was in anywise connected with the fact that when I wished to purchase a second copy of that most extraordinary work I was told that it was out of print, and not to be had, I do not know. Of course it was kept as continually in print as the Latin Grammar, for the constant use of the class for whom it was provided, and who most assuredly could not have found their way safely through the wonderful intricacies of the Confessional without it. And equally, of course, the publishers of so largely-circulated a work did not succeed in preventing me from obtaining a second copy of it.

Many of the letters addressed to me by Dickens concerned more or less my contributions to his periodical, and many more are not of a nature to interest the public even though they came from him. But I may give a few extracts from three or four of them.

Here is a passage from a letter dated 3rd December, 1861, which my vanity will not let me suppress.

“Yes; the Christmas number was intended as a conveyance of all friendly greetings in season and out of season. As to its lesson, you need it almost as little as any man I know; for all your study and seclusion conduce to the general good, and disseminate truths that men cannot too earnestly take to heart. Yes, a capital story that of ’The Two Seaborn Babbies,’ and wonderfully droll, I think. I may say so without blushing, for it is not by me. It was done by Wilkie Collins.”

Here is another short note, not a little gratifying to me personally, but not without interest of a larger kind to the reader:

“Tuesday, 15th November, 1859.

“MY DEAR TROLLOPE, I write this hasty word, just as the post leaves, to ask you this question, which this moment occurs to me.

“Montalembert, in his suppressed treatise, asks, ’What wrong has Pope Pius the Ninth done?’ Don’t you think you can very pointedly answer that question in these pages? If you cannot, nobody in Europe can. Very faithfully yours always,

“CHARLES DICKENS”

Some, some few, may remember the interest excited by the treatise to which the above letter refers. No doubt I could, and doubtless did, though I forget all about it, answer the question propounded by the celebrated French writer. But there was little hope of my doing it as “pointedly” as my correspondent would have done it himself. The answer, which might well have consisted of a succinct statement of all the difficulties of the position with which Italy was then struggling, had to confine itself to the limits of an article in All The Year Round, and needed in truth to be pointed. I have observed that, in all our many conversations on Italian matters, Dickens’s views and opinions coincided with my own, without, I think, any point of divergence. Very specially was this the case as regards all that concerned the Vatican and the doings of the Curia. How well I remember his arched eyebrows and laughing eyes when I told him of Garibaldi’s proposal that all priests should be summarily executed! I think it modified his ideas of the possible utility of Garibaldi as a politician.

Then comes an invitation to “my Falstaff house at Gadshill.”

Here is a letter of the 17th February, 1866, which I will give in extenso, bribed again by the very flattering words in which the writer speaks of our friendship:

“MY DEAR TROLLOPE, I am heartily glad to hear from you. It was such a disagreeable surprise to find that you had left London” [I had been called away at an hour’s notice] “on the occasion of your last visit without my having seen you, that I have never since got it out of my mind. I felt as if it were my fault (though I don’t know how that can have been), and as if I had somehow been traitorous to the earnest and affectionate regard with which you have inspired me.

“The lady’s verses are accepted by the editorial potentate, and shall presently appear.” [I am ashamed to say that I totally forget who the lady was.]

“I am not quite well, and am being touched up (or down) by the doctors. Whether the irritation of mind I had to endure pending the discussions of a preposterous clerical body called a Convocation, and whether the weakened hopefulness of mankind which such a dash of the middle ages in the colour and pattern of 1866 engenders, may have anything to do with it, I don’t know.

“What a happy man you must be in having a new house to work at. When it is quite complete, and the roc’s egg hung up, I suppose you will get rid of it bodily and turn to at another.” [Absit omen! At this very moment, while I transcribe this letter, I am turning to at another.]

“Daily News correspondent” [as I then for a short time was], “Novel, and Hospitality! Enough to do indeed! Perhaps the day might be advantageously made longer for such work or say life.” [Ah! if the small matters rehearsed had been all, I could more contentedly have put up with the allowance of four-and-twenty hours.] “And yet I don’t know. Like enough we should all do less if we had time to do more in.

“Layard was with us for a couple of days a little while ago, and brought the last report of you, and of your daughter, who seems to have made a great impression on him. I wish he had had the keepership of the National Gallery, for I don’t think his Government will hold together through many weeks.

“I wonder whether you thought as highly of Gibson’s art as the lady did who wrote the verses. I must say that I did not, and that I thought it of a mechanical sort, with no great amount of imagination in it. It seemed to me as if he ‘didn’t find me’ in that, as the servants say, but only provided me with carved marble, and expected me to furnish myself with as much idea as I could afford.

“Very faithfully yours,

“CHARLES DICKENS.”

I do not remember the verses, though I feel confident that the lady who sent them through me must have been a very charming person. As to Gibson, no criticism could be sounder. I had a considerable liking for Gibson as a man, and admiration for his character, but as regards his ideal productions I think Dickens hits the right nail on the head.

In another letter of the same year, 25th July, after a page of remarks on editorial matters, he writes:

“If Italy could but achieve some brilliant success in arms! That she does not, causes, I think, some disappointment here, and makes her sluggish friends more sluggish, and her open enemies more powerful. I fear too that the Italian ministry have lost an excellent opportunity of repairing the national credit in London city, and have borrowed money in France for the poor consideration of lower interest, which” [sic, but I suspect which must be a slip of the pen for than] “they could have got in England, greatly to the re-establishment of a reputation for public good faith. As to Louis Napoleon, his position in the whole matter is to me like his position in Europe at all times, simply disheartening and astounding. Between Prussia and Austria there is, in my mind (but for Italy), not a pin to choose. If each could smash the other I should be, as to those two Powers, perfectly satisfied. But I feel for Italy almost as if I were an Italian born. So here you have in brief my confession of faith.

“Mr. Home” [as he by that time called himself, when he was staying in my house his name was Hume], “after trying to come out as an actor, first at Fechter’s (where I had the honour of stopping him short), and then at the St. James’s Theatre under Miss Herbert (where he was twice announced, and each time very mysteriously disappeared from the bills), was announced at the little theatre in Dean Street, Soho, as a ‘great attraction for one night only,’ to play last Monday. An appropriately dirty little rag of a bill, fluttering in the window of an obscure dairy behind the Strand, gave me this intelligence last Saturday. It is like enough that even that striking business did not come off, for I believe the public to have found out the scoundrel; in which lively and sustaining hope this leaves me at present.

“Ever faithfully yours,

“CHARLES DICKENS.”

Here is a letter which, as may be easily imagined, I value much. It was written on the 2nd of November, 1866, and reached me at Brest. It was written to congratulate me on my second marriage, and among the great number which I received on that occasion is one of the most warm-hearted:

“MY DEAR TROLLOPE, I should have written immediately to congratulate you on your then approaching marriage, and to assure you of my most cordial and affectionate interest in all that nearly concerns you, had I known how best to address you.

“No friend that you have can be more truly attached to you than I am. I congratulate you with all my heart, and believe that your marriage will stand high upon the list of happy ones. As to your wife’s winning a high reputation out of your house if you care for that; it is not much as an addition to the delights of love and peace and a suitable companion for life I have not the least doubt of her power to make herself famous.

“I little thought what an important master of the ceremonies I was when I first gave your present wife an introduction to your mother. Bear me in your mind then as the unconscious instrument of your having given your best affection to a worthy object, and I shall be the best paid master of the ceremonies since Nash drove his coach and six through the streets of Bath.

“Faithfully yours,

“CHARLES DICKENS.”

Among a heap of others I find a note of invitation written on the 9th of July, 1867, in which he says: “My ‘readings’ secretary, whom I am despatching to America at the end of this week, will dine with me at Verey’s in Regent Street at six exact to be wished God-speed. There will only be besides, Wills, Wilkie Collins, and Mr. Arthur Chappell. Will you come? No dress. Evening left quite free.”

I went, and the God-speed party was a very pleasant one. But I liked best to have him, as I frequently had, all to myself. I suppose I am not, as Johnson said, a “clubbable” man. At all events I highly appreciate what the Irishman called a tatur-tatur dinner, whether the gender in the case be masculine or feminine; and I incline to give my adherence to the philosophy of the axiom that declares “two to be company, and three none.” But then I am very deaf, and that has doubtless much to do with it.

On the 10th of September, 1868, Dickens writes:

“The madness and general political bestiality of the General Elections will come off in the appropriate Guy Fawkes days. It was proposed to me, under very flattering circumstances indeed, to come in as the third member for Birmingham; I replied in what is now my stereotyped phrase, ’that no consideration on earth would induce me to become a candidate for the representation of any place in the House of Commons.’ Indeed it is a dismal sight, is that arena altogether. Its irrationality and dishonesty are quite shocking.” [What would he have said now!] “How disheartening it is, that in affairs spiritual or temporal mankind will not begin at the beginning, but will begin with assumptions. Could one believe without actual experience of the fact, that it would be assumed by hundreds of thousands of pestilent boobies, pandered to by politicians, that the Established Church in Ireland has stood between the kingdom and Popery, when as a crying grievance it has been Popery’s trump-card!

“I have now growled out my growl, and feel better.

“With kind regards, my dear Trollope,

“Faithfully yours,

“CHARLES DICKENS.”

In the December of that year came another growl, as follows:

“KENNEDY’S HOTEL, EDINBURGH.

“MY DEAR TROLLOPE, I am reading here, and had your letter forwarded to me this morning. The MS. accompanying it was stopped at All The Year Round office (in compliance with general instructions referring to any MS. from you) and was sent straight to the printer.

“Oh dear no! Nobody supposes for a moment that the English Church will follow the Irish Establishment. In the whole great universe of shammery and flummery there is no such idea floating. Everybody knows that the Church of England as an endowed establishment is doomed, and would be, even if its hand were not perpetually hacking at its own throat; but as was observed of an old lady in gloves in one of my Christmas books, ‘Let us be polite or die!’

“Anthony’s ambition” [in becoming a candidate for Beverley] “is inscrutable to me. Still, it is the ambition of many men; and the honester the man who entertains it, the better for the rest of us, I suppose.

“Ever, my dear Trollope,

“Most cordially yours,

“CHARLES DICKENS.”

Here is another “growl,” provoked by a species of charlatan, which he, to whom all charlatans were odious, especially abominated the pietistic charlatan:

“Oh, we have such a specimen here! a man who discourses extemporaneously, positively without the power of constructing one grammatical sentence; but who is (ungrammatically) deep in Heaven’s confidence on the abstrusest points, and discloses some of his private information with an idiotic complacency insupportable to behold.

“We are going to have a bad winter in England too probably. What with Ireland, and what with the last new Government device of getting in the taxes before they are due, and what with vagrants, and what with fever, the prospect is gloomy.”

The last letter I ever received from him is dated the 10th of November, 1869. It is a long letter, but I will give only one passage from it, which has, alas! a peculiarly sad and touching significance when read with the remembrance of the catastrophe then hurrying on, which was to put an end to all projects and purposes. I had been suggesting a walking excursion across the Alps. He writes:

“Walk across the Alps? Lord bless you, I am ‘going’ to take up my alpenstock and cross all the passes. And, I am ‘going’ to Italy. I am also ‘going’ up the Nile to the second cataract; and I am ‘going’ to Jerusalem, and to India, and likewise to Australia. My only dimness of perception in this wise is, that I don’t know when. If I did but know when, I should be so wonderfully clear about it all! At present I can’t see even so much as the Simplon in consequence of certain farewell readings and a certain new book (just begun) interposing their dwarfish shadow. But whenever (if ever) I change ‘going’ into ‘coming,’ I shall come to see you.

“With kind regards, ever, my dear Trollope,

“Your affectionate friend,

“CHARLES DICKENS.”

And those were the last words I ever had from him!