Charles Dickens and Music | Page 6

him to take the
second in 'All's
Well' and likewise in 'There's not in the wide world'[2]
(your parent taking the first), than from anything
previously known of
me on these shores.... We also sang (with a Chicago lady, and a
strong-minded woman from
I don't know where) 'Auld Lang Syne,'
with a tender
melancholy expressive of having all four been united

from our cradles. The more dismal we were, the more
delighted the
company were. Once (when we paddled i'
the burn) the captain took a
little cruise round the
compass on his own account, touching at the
Canadian
Boat Song,[3] and taking in supplies at Jubilate, 'Seas
between us braid ha' roared,' and roared like ourselves.
J.T. Field, in his Yesterdays with Authors, says: 'To hear him sing an
old-time stage song, such as he used to enjoy in his youth at a cheap
London theatre ... was to become acquainted with one of the most
delightful and original companions in
the world.'
When at home he was fond of having music in the evening. His
daughter tells us that on one occasion a member of his family was
singing a song while he was apparently deep in his book, when he
suddenly got up and saying 'You don't make enough of that word,' he
sat down by the piano and showed how it should be sung.
On another occasion his criticism was more pointed.

One night a gentleman visitor insisted on singing
'By the sad sea
waves,' which he did vilely, and he
wound up his performance by a
most unexpected and
misplaced embellishment, or 'turn.' Dickens
found the
whole ordeal very trying, but managed to preserve a

decorous silence till this sound fell on his ear, when
his neighbour
said to him, 'Whatever did he mean by
that extraneous effort of
melody?' 'Oh,' said Dickens,
'that's quite in accordance with rule.
When things
are at their worst they always take a turn.'
Forster relates that while he was at work on the _Old Curiosity Shop_
he used to discover specimens of old ballads in his
country walks
between Broadstairs and Ramsgate, which so
aroused his interest that
when he returned to town towards
the end of 1840 he thoroughly
explored the ballad literature of Seven Dials,[4] and would occasionally
sing not a few of these wonderful discoveries with an effect that
justified
his reputation for comic singing in his childhood. We get a
glimpse of his investigations in Out of the Season, where he tells us
about that 'wonderful mystery, the music-shop,' with its assortment of
polkas with coloured frontispieces, and also the book-shop, with its
'Little Warblers and Fairburn's Comic Songsters.'
Here too were ballads on the old ballad paper and
in the old
confusion of types, with an old man in a
cocked hat, and an armchair,
for the illustration
to Will Watch the bold smuggler, and the Friar of

Orders Grey, represented by a little girl in a hoop,
with a ship in
the distance. All these as of yore,
when they were infinite delights to
me.
On one of his explorations he met a landsman who told him
about the
running down of an emigrant ship, and how he heard a sound coming
over the sea 'like a great sorrowful flute or Aeolian harp.' He makes
another and very humorous reference to this instrument in a letter to
Landor, in which he calls to mind
that steady snore of yours, which I once heard piercing the door of your

bedroom ... reverberating along the
bell-wire in the hall, so getting
outside into the
street, playing Aeolian harps among the area railings,

and going down the New Road like the blast of a trumpet.
The deserted watering-place referred to in Out of the Season is
Broadstairs, and he gives us a further insight into its
musical
resources in a letter to Miss Power written on July 2, 1847, in which he
says that
a little tinkling box of music that stops at 'come'
in the melody of the
Buffalo Gals, and can't play 'out
to-night,' and a white mouse, are the
only amusements
left at Broadstairs.
'Buffalo Gals' was a very popular song 'Sung with great
applause by
the Original Female American Serenaders.' (c. 1845.) The first verse
will explain the above allusion:
As I went lum'rin' down de street, down de street,
A 'ansom gal I
chanc'd to meet, oh, she was fair to view. Buffalo gals, can't ye come
out to-night, come out to-night,
come out to-night;
Buffalo gals, can't ye come out to-night, and dance
by the
light of the moon.
We find some interesting musical references and memories in the
novelist's letters. Writing to Wilkie Collins in reference to his proposed
sea voyage, he quotes Campbell's lines from 'Ye Mariners of England':
As I sweep
Through the deep
When the stormy winds do blow.
There are other references to this song in the novels. I have pointed out
elsewhere that the last line also belongs to a
seventeenth-century
song.
Writing to Mark Lemon (June,