Charles Dickens and Music | Page 8

the custom of his time, and suggested the tune (if any) to which
they were to be sung. In addition to those that appear in the various
novels, there are others which
deserve mention here.
In 1841 he contributed three political squibs in verse to
the Examiner,
one being the 'Quack Doctor's Proclamation,' to the tune of 'A Cobbler
there was,' and another called
'The fine old English Gentleman.'
For the Daily News (of which he was the first editor) he
wrote 'The
British Lion, a new song but an old story,' which was to be sung to the
tune of the 'Great Sea Snake.' This was a very popular comic song of
the period, which described a
sea monster of wondrous size:

One morning from his head we bore
With every stitch of sail,
And
going at ten knots an hour
In six months came to his tail.
Three of the songs in the Pickwick Papers (referred to
elsewhere) are
original, while Blandois' song in _Little
Dorrit_, 'Who passes by this
road so late,' is a translation from the French. This was set to music by
R.S. Dalton.
In addition to these we find here and there impromptu lines which have
no connexion with any song. Perhaps the best known are those which
'my lady Bowley' quotes in The Chimes,
and which she had 'set to
music on the new system':
Oh let us love our occupations,
Bless the squire and his relations,

Live upon our daily rations,
And always know our proper stations.
The reference to the 'new system' is not quite obvious. Dickens may
have been thinking of the 'Wilhem' method of teaching
singing which
his friend Hullah introduced into England, or it may be a reference to
the Tonic Sol-fa system, which had already begun to make progress
when The Chimes was written in 1844.[7]
There are some well-known lines which owners of books were
fond
of writing on the fly-leaf in order that there might be no mistake as to
the name of the possessor. The general form was something like this:
John Wigglesworth is my name,
And England is my nation;

London is my dwelling-place,
And Christ is my salvation.
(See Choir, Jan., 1912, p. 5.) Dickens gives us at least
two variants of
this. In Edwin Drood, Durdles says of the Mayor of Cloisterham:
Mister Sapsea is his name,
England is his nation,
Cloisterham's his
dwelling-place,
Aukshneer's his occupation.
And Captain Cuttle thus describes himself, ascribing the
authorship

of the words to Job--but then literary accuracy
was not the Captain's
strong point:
Cap'en Cuttle is my name,
And England is my nation,
This here is
my dwelling-place,
And blessed be creation.
It is said that there appeared in the London Singer's Magazine for 1839
'The Teetotal Excursion, an original Comic Song by Boz, sung at the
London Concerts,' but it is not in my copy of this song-book, nor have I
ever seen it.
Dickens was always very careful in his choice of names and
titles,
and the evolution of some of the latter is very
interesting. One of the
many he conceived for the magazine
which was to succeed
Household Words_ was _Household Harmony, while another was
Home Music. Considering his dislike of
bells in general, it is rather
surprising that two other
suggestions were English Bells_ and
_Weekly Bells, but the final choice was All the Year Round. Only once
does he make use of a musician's name in his novels, and that is in
_Great Expectations_. Philip, otherwise known as Pip, the hero,
becomes friendly with Herbert Pocket. The latter objects to the name
Philip, 'it sounds like a moral boy out of a spelling-book,' and as Pip
had been a blacksmith and the two youngsters were 'harmonious,'
Pocket asks him:
'Would you mind Handel for a familiar name? There's
a charming
piece of music, by Handel, called the
"Harmonious Blacksmith."'
'I should like it very much.'
Dickens' only contribution to hymnology appeared in the _Daily
News_ February 14, 1846, with the title 'Hymn of the Wiltshire
Labourers.' It was written after reading a speech at one of the night
meetings of the wives of agricultural labourers in Wiltshire, held with
the object of petitioning for Free Trade. This is the first verse:
O God, who by Thy Prophet's hand
Did'st smite the rocky brake,


Whence water came at Thy command
Thy people's thirst to slake,

Strike, now, upon this granite wall,
Stern, obdurate, and high;
And
let some drop of pity fall
For us who starve and die!
We find the fondness for Italian names shown by vocalists and pianists
humorously parodied in such self-evident forms as
Jacksonini,
Signora Marra Boni, and Billsmethi. Banjo Bones is a self-evident nom
d'occasion, and the high-sounding name of Rinaldo di Velasco ill befits
the giant Pickleson (Dr. M.), who had a little head and less in it. As it
was essential that the Miss Crumptons of Minerva House should have
an Italian
master for their pupils, we find Signer Lobskini introduced,
while the modern rage for Russian musicians