Charles Dickens and Music | Page 4

--
S.B.T.

Sunday under Three Heads 1836 --
Sketches of Young People 1840 --

Sketches of Young Gentlemen 1838 --
Tale of Two Cities, A 1859 --
Uncommercial Traveller_ 1860-9 _U.T.

CHARLES DICKENS AND MUSIC
CHAPTER I
DICKENS AS A MUSICIAN
The attempts to instil the elements of music into Charles
Dickens
when he was a small boy do not appear to have been
attended with
success. Mr. Kitton tells us that he learnt the piano during his school
days, but his master gave him up in despair. Mr. Bowden, an old
schoolfellow of the novelist's when he was at Wellington House
Academy, in Hampstead Road, says that music used to be taught there,
and that Dickens received lessons on the violin, but he made no
progress, and soon relinquished it. It was not until many years after that
he made his third and last attempt to become an instrumentalist. During

his
first transatlantic voyage he wrote to Forster telling him
that he
had bought an accordion.
The steward lent me one on the passage out, and I
regaled the ladies'
cabin with my performances. You
can't think with what feelings I
play 'Home, Sweet Home' every night, or how pleasantly sad it makes
us.
On the voyage back he gives the following description of the musical
talents of his fellow passengers:
One played the accordion, another the violin, and
another (who
usually began at six o'clock a.m.) the key bugle: the combined effect of
which instruments, when
they all played different tunes, in different
parts
of the ship, at the same time, and within hearing of
each other,
as they sometimes did (everybody being
intensely satisfied with his
own performance), was
sublimely hideous.
He does not tell us whether he was one of the performers on these
occasions.
But although he failed as an instrumentalist he took
delight in hearing
music, and was always an appreciative yet critical listener to what was
good and tuneful. His favourite composers were Mendelssohn--whose
Lieder he was specially fond of[1]--Chopin, and Mozart. He heard
Gounod's Faust
whilst he was in Paris, and confesses to having been
quite
overcome with the beauty of the music. 'I couldn't bear it,' he
says, in one of his letters, 'and gave in completely. The composer must
be a very remarkable man indeed.' At the same time he became
acquainted with Offenbach's music, and heard _Orphée aux enfers_.
This was in February, 1863. Here also he made the acquaintance of
Auber, 'a stolid little elderly man, rather petulant in manner.' He told
Dickens that he had lived for a time at 'Stock Noonton' (Stoke
Newington) in order to study English, but he had forgotten it all. In the
description of a dinner in the Sketches we read that

The knives and forks form a pleasing accompaniment to
Auber's
music, and Auber's music would form a pleasing
accompaniment to
the dinner, if you could hear anything besides the cymbals.
He met Meyerbeer on one occasion at Lord John Russell's. The
musician congratulated him on his outspoken language on Sunday
observance, a subject in which Dickens was deeply interested, and on
which he advocated his views at length in the papers entitled Sunday
under Three Heads.
Dickens was acquainted with Jenny Lind, and he gives the
following
amusing story in a letter to Douglas Jerrold, dated Paris, February 14,
1847:
I am somehow reminded of a good story I heard the
other night from
a man who was a witness of it and
an actor in it. At a certain German
town last autumn
there was a tremendous furore about Jenny Lind,
who,
after driving the whole place mad, left it, on her
travels, early
one morning. The moment her carriage
was outside the gates, a party
of rampant students who
had escorted it rushed back to the inn,
demanded to be
shown to her bedroom, swept like a whirlwind
upstairs
into the room indicated to them, tore up the sheets,
and
wore them in strips as decorations. An hour or two
afterwards a bald
old gentleman of amiable appearance,
an Englishman, who was
staying in the hotel, came to
breakfast at the _table d'hôte_, and was
observed to be much disturbed in his mind, and to show great terror

whenever a student came near him. At last he said, in
a low voice, to
some people who were near him at the
table, 'You are English
gentlemen, I observe. Most
extraordinary people, these Germans.
Students,
as a body, raving mad, gentlemen!' 'Oh, no,' said

somebody else: 'excitable, but very good fellows,
and very sensible.'
'By God, sir!' returned the old
gentleman, still more disturbed, 'then
there's something political in