the residuum he subsequently swallowed, exactly equals the number The Cornhill Magazine.

of compartments in a sleeping carriage on the Great Northern line.

In view of the centenary attempt to place the works of Charles Dickens on the stage at the Savoy, it is interesting to recall the hold the stage and its traffic had over Dickens during the most effective years of his life. The attempt to stage Dombey and Son, David Copperfield, Bleak House, Pickwick, Great Expectations, and The Old Curiosity Shop deserves more than passing attention, because the season may answer a contention of many admirers of the great novelist that there is much essentially dramatic in his work, which ought to appeal strongly to an audience across the footlights. Dickens has not yet succeeded on the modern stage. Perhaps the biggest success inspired by him in our day is The Only Way, a play which has done yeoman service for Mr. Martin Harvey, and is now entering upon another season in town, as successful as ever, in the centenary year. The Only Way is not, however, a direct dramatization; for the commerce of the stage, the book has been very freely handled. Attempts in the past to dramatize Dickens have nearly all failed to make permanent impression. In his life-and much to his annoyance-pirated versions of Dickens' works occupied the stage from time to time, and, since his death, several attempts have been made to popularize his novels for dramatic purposes. No lasting success has been achieved with any play founded on a Dickens novelwith the possible exception of The Only Way. The trial scene from Pickwick had a vogue, largely amongst amateurs, though I believe Toole revelled in Buzfuz. Irving played in Hunted Down, and also portrayed Jin

gle; a dramatized version of Bleak House was fairly popular, and for a long time held its own in the provinces. Any permanent vitality possessed for stage purposes by the creations of Dickens has been more successfully exploited by music-hall performers, who find impersonations of isolated characters have a popularity which never seems to wane.

That Dickens, with his sense of the drama of life and his love of the footlights, never essayed the rôle of dramatist with any amount of concentration is somewhat surprising. From early youth he fluttered round the stage; his friends were actors, and included Macready and Fechter. He found much relaxation in the theatre, and when, socially, he wanted the height of distraction, he turned to the organization of private theatricals.

"The fever of the footlights was always with him," says Mr. H. Fielding Dickens. Indeed, he was not without the usual desire of adolescence to adopt the profession of the sock and buskin as his main mission in life. In 1845 we find him confiding to the faithful Forster, "I have often thought that I should certainly have been as successful on the boards as I have been between them." In the communication which expresses this opinion so neatly, Dickens confesses to a desire to follow the stage as a career. This took active form at the age of twenty, at which time he was serving as a reporter. Indeed he went so far as to approach Bartley, then stage-manager at Covent Garden, in the hope that he would further his ambition. He told Bartley that, "I believed I had a strong per

ception of character and oddity and a natural power of reproducing in my own person what I observed in others." They were busy preparing The Hunchback at Covent Garden at that time, but not too busy to make an appointment for Dickens to reveal his talent before Charles Kemble and Bartley. Unfortunately for Dickens' aspirations as an actor-perhaps fortunately for the people who enjoy his novels-on the important day of the trial he was laid aside with a bad cold and inflammation of the face. The trial did not take place, but was postponed until the following season. In that brief period, Dickens succeeded as a reporter in the gallery of the House. His original work was attracting attention. He had plenty of money, and the idea of the stage as a profession left his mind and never returned to it. So the world, by losing an actor, retained a novelist who will leave his mark on our literature for centuries.

But though the idea of the stage as a profession left his mind, Dickens remained a fairly regular theatre-goer, and developed into quite a distinguished amateur actor. He pleads guilty, in his salad days, to visiting the theatres for the purpose of studying the best acting-Mathews apparently being his hero-and to attempting to reproduce what he saw. "I practised immensely (even such things as walking in and out and sitting down in a chair), often four, five, six hours a day, shut up in my room or walking about in the fields." In that period he memorized a great number of parts. Perhaps to these days of sedulous practice he owed the ability to cut such an admirable figure when he actually appeared in public as a distinguished amateur, and no doubt his observation of the conditions of the stage enabled him to touch the foibles of the profession so pointedly in the delightful Crummles episodes of Nicholas Nickleby. As an

amateur his two most noticed appearances were at Manchester and Liverpool, on July 26 and 28, 1847, when he appeared in A Good Night's Rest and Turning the Tables, and in Comfortable Lodgings, or Paris in 1750, the enterprise being organized by Dickens on behalf of Leigh Hunt, then in straitened circumstances.

While his interest in the drama never waned, his desire to exploit the stage as a setting for his work never took very positive shape. Like one of his own famous characters, he was always just about to begin. He flirted with the idea of providing theatrical fare, but never wedded the dramatist's profession. Forster, in a table showing his hero's literary work, credits Dickens with the authorship of The Strange Gentleman, a comic burletta adapted from one of the Sketches by Boz, and the libretto of a comic opera called The Village Coquettes, both written in 1836. Sala refers to both efforts very casually in his reminiscences, and it is apparent they did not set the theatrical Thames on fire. A last attempt at direct dramatization was the writing of a farce in 1839, which was completed to help Bartley, of Covent Garden. The play pleased not the million for the simple reason that the actors did not agree over it, and did not produce the farce. Dickens promptly turned it into a story, and it appeared as The Lamplighter.

From that period Dickens never seems to have attempted dramatization for the stage, beyond assisting in work of fugitive interest for private theatrical purposes. He must have been often tempted to do so, with a view of protecting his property, for his books were often assaulted by hack-dramatists, who made up bungling stage versions of his stories and produced them. Pickwick was extensively pirated in this way, and Forster records that Dickens, viewing a travesty of his Oliver

Twist at the Surrey Theatre, was so enraged that he lay on the floor of the box until the drop-scene fell. The author's venomous treatment of the adapter, present at the supper to Crummles, indicates a Dickens smarting under ill-treatment by a pirate named Stirling, and desiring to pillory the offender publicly.

In the end, however, Dickens did make prestige, popularity, and money on the stage, for the later years of his life were devoted to public readings. According to George Dolby, his manager for the later readings, between 1858 and 1879 Dickens gave 423 readings,

including the curtailed

American tour ending in 1868, for which he received something like £45,000. It is Dolby's verdict that, "handsome as these results were, and of course highly satisfactory to Mr. Dickens, they were purchased at the dear cost of the sacrifice of his health." Reading between the lines of the matter available relating to these public appearances, there is no doubt the stage, in the form of the lecture platform, did shorten the great writer's life. The incessant travelling, his anxiety to keep faith with the public even when ill-health had marked the novelist down, his ungrudging desire to give his audience dramatic malt for their financial meal, all preyed heav

The Outlook.

ily on his constitution when it demanded conservation. His work as a reader, judging from the estimates of his contemporaries, exhibited the longsuppressed histrionic abilities which Dickens had cultivated from his early youth.

The manner of the delivery proved as arresting as the matter, and the success of the readings was due to something more than the desire of an adoring public to view the master in his daily habit. His reading of the murder scene in Oliver Twist was so dramatic in its intensity that his audience were thrilled with the horror of it, and we are told "he worked himself up to a pitch of excitement which rendered him so utterly prostrate that when he went to his dressing-room (which he reached with difficulty) he was forced to lie on the sofa for some moments before he could gain strength to utter a word." One may catch a glimpse of what Dickens might have done on the stage by his success in the readings, and one may think and somewhat sadly of the persistency of his love for the actor's art, which sent him wandering about the world when he was nearing sixty, to fulfil the impulse of his early twenties towards the stage-a purpose which in its triumphant fulfilment brought about his too early dissolution.