Life of Charles Dickens | Page 9

remedy the
defects in the literary part of his education. But the best powers of his

mind were directed to "Gurney's system of shorthand." And in time he
had his reward. He earned and justified the reputation of being one of
the best reporters of his day.
I shall not quote the autobiographical passages in "David Copperfield"
which bear on the difficulties of stenography. The book is in
everybody's hands. But I cannot forego the pleasure of brightening my
pages with Dickens' own description of his experiences as a reporter, a
description contained in one of those charming felicitous speeches of
his which are almost as unique in kind as his novels. Speaking in May,
1865, as chairman of a public dinner on behalf of the Newspaper Press
Fund, he said: "I have pursued the calling of a reporter under
circumstances of which many of my brethren at home in England here,
many of my modern successors, can form no adequate conception. I
have often transcribed for the printer, from my shorthand notes,
important public speeches, in which the strictest accuracy was required,
and a mistake in which would have been, to a young man, severely
compromising, writing on the palm of my hand, by the light of a dark
lantern, in a post-chaise and four, galloping through a wild country, and
through the dead of the night, at the then surprising rate of fifteen miles
an hour. The very last time I was at Exeter, I strolled into the
castle-yard there to identify, for the amusement of a friend, the spot on
which I once took, as we used to call it, an election speech of my noble
friend Lord Russell, in the midst of a lively fight maintained by all the
vagabonds in that division of the county, and under such pelting rain,
that I remember two good-natured colleagues, who chanced to be at
leisure, held a pocket-handkerchief over my note-book, after the
manner of a State canopy in an ecclesiastical procession. I have worn
my knees by writing on them on the old back row of the old gallery in
the old House of Commons; and I have worn my feet by standing to
write in a preposterous pen in the old House of Lords, where we used to
be huddled together like so many sheep, kept in waiting, say, until the
woolsack might want re-stuffing. Returning home from excited
political meetings in the country to the waiting press in London, I do
verily believe I have been upset in almost every description of vehicle
known in this country. I have been, in my time, belated in miry
by-roads, towards the small hours, forty or fifty miles from London, in

a wheel-less carriage, with exhausted horses, and drunken postboys,
and have got back in time for publication, to be received with
never-forgotten compliments by the late Mr. Black, coming in the
broadest of Scotch from the broadest of hearts I ever knew."
What shall I add to this? That the papers on which he was engaged as a
reporter, were The True Sun, The Mirror of Parliament, and _The
Morning Chronicle_; that long afterwards, little more than two years
before his death, when addressing the journalists of New York, he gave
public expression to his "grateful remembrance of a calling that was
once his own," and declared, "to the wholesome training of severe
newspaper work, when I was a very young man, I constantly refer my
first success;" that his income as a reporter appears latterly to have been
some five guineas a week, of course in addition to expenses and general
breakages and damages; that there is independent testimony to his
exceptional quickness in reporting and transcribing, and to his
intelligence in condensing; that to an observer so keen and apt, the
experiences of his business journeys in those more picturesque and
eventful ante-railway days must have been invaluable; and, finally, that
his connection with journalism lasted far into 1836, and so did not
cease till some months after "Pickwick" had begun to add to the world's
store of merriment and laughter.
But I have not really reached "Pickwick" yet, nor anything like it. That
master-work was not also a first work. With all Dickens' genius, he had
to go through some apprenticeship in the writer's art before coming
upon the public as the most popular novelist of his time. Let us go back
for a little to the twilight before the full sunrise, nay, to the earliest
streak upon the greyness of night, to his first original published
composition. Dickens himself, and in his preface to "Pickwick" too, has
told us somewhat about that first paper of his; how it was "dropped
stealthily one evening at twilight, with fear and trembling, into a dark
letter-box, in a