The House of Cobwebs | Page 5

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England, Dickens as humorist, Dickens as leader of men, above all,
Dickens as friend of the poor, the outcast, the pale little sempstress and
the downtrodden Smike.
[Footnote 5: Isabel Clarendon. By George Gissing. In two volumes,
1886 (Chapman and Hall). In reviewing this work the Academy
expressed astonishment at the mature style of the writer--of whom it
admitted it had not yet come across the name.]
In the summer of 1870, Gissing remembered with a pious fidelity of
detail the famous drawing of the 'Empty Chair' being framed and hung
up 'in the school-room, at home'[6] (Wakefield).
[Footnote 6: Of Gissing's early impressions, the best connected account,

I think, is to be gleaned from the concluding chapters of _The
Whirlpool_; but this may be reinforced (and to some extent corrected,
or, here and there cancelled) by passages in Burn in Exile (vol. i.) and
in Ryecroft. The material there supplied is confirmatory in the best
sense of the detail contributed by Mr. Wells to the cancelled preface of
Veranilda, touching the 'schoolboy, obsessed by a consuming passion
for learning, at the Quaker's boarding-school at Alderley. He had come
thither from Wakefield at the age of thirteen--after the death of his
father, who was, in a double sense, the cardinal formative influence in
his life. The tones of his father's voice, his father's gestures, never
departed from him; when he read aloud, particularly if it was poetry he
read, his father returned in him. He could draw in those days with great
skill and vigour--it will seem significant to many that he was
particularly fascinated by Hogarth's work, and that he copied and
imitated it; and his father's well-stocked library, and his father's
encouragement, had quickened his imagination and given it its
enduring bias for literary activity.' Like Defoe, Smollett, Sterne,
Borrow, Dickens, Eliot, 'G.C.' is, half involuntarily, almost
unconsciously autobiographic.]
'Not without awe did I see the picture of the room which was now
tenantless: I remember too, a curiosity which led me to look closely at
the writing-table and the objects upon it, at the comfortable
round-backed chair, at the book-shelves behind. I began to ask myself
how books were written and how the men lived who wrote them. It is
my last glimpse of childhood. Six months later there was an empty
chair in my own home, and the tenor of my life was broken.
'Seven years after this I found myself amid the streets of London and
had to find the means of keeping myself alive. What I chiefly thought
of was that now at length I could go hither or thither in London's
immensity seeking for the places which had been made known to me
by Dickens.
'One day in the city I found myself at the entrance to Bevis Marks! I
had just been making an application in reply to some advertisement--of
course, fruitlessly; but what was that disappointment compared with the
discovery of Bevis Marks! Here dwelt Mr. Brass and Sally and the
Marchioness. Up and down the little street, this side and that, I went
gazing and dreaming. No press of busy folk disturbed me; the place

was quiet; it looked no doubt much the same as when Dickens knew it.
I am not sure that I had any dinner that day; but, if not, I daresay I did
not mind it very much.'
The broad flood under Thames bridges spoke to him in the very tones
of 'the master.' He breathed Guppy's London particular, the wind was
the black easter that pierced the diaphragm of Scrooge's clerk.
'We bookish people have our connotations for the life we do not live. In
time I came to see London with my own eyes, but how much better
when I saw it with those of Dickens!'
Tired and discouraged, badly nourished, badly housed--working under
conditions little favourable to play of the fancy or intentness of the
mind--then was the time, Gissing found, to take down Forster and
read--read about Charles Dickens.
'Merely as the narrative of a wonderfully active, zealous, and successful
life, this book scarce has its equal; almost any reader must find it
exhilarating; but to me it yielded such special sustenance as in those
days I could not have found elsewhere, and lacking which I should,
perhaps, have failed by the way. I am not referring to Dickens's swift
triumph, to his resounding fame and high prosperity; these things are
cheery to read about, especially when shown in a light so human, with
the accompaniment of so much geniality and mirth. No; the pages
which invigorated me are those where we see Dickens at work, alone at
his writing-table, absorbed in the task of the story-teller. Constantly he
makes known to Forster how his story is getting on, speaks in detail of