Joseph's Son

My Dear Children

I am very anxious that you should know something about the History of Jesus Christ. For everybody ought to know about Him. No one ever lived, who was so good, so kind, so gentle, and so sorry for all people who did wrong, or were in any way ill or miserable, as He was. And as He is now in Heaven, where we hope to go, and all to meet each other after we are dead, and there be happy always together, you never can think what a good place Heaven is, without knowing who He was and what He did.

Thus last week in 180 U. S. and Canadian newspapers began Charles Dickens' The Life of Our Lord, completed in 1849 for the private pleasure and instruction of his children. Its publication, after 85 years, was regarded by United Feature Syndicate as one of the big news scoops of the era. When, after two weeks, the 14,000-word story is completely published, the last jot of Charles Dickens' work will have been made public.

For the world rights to the manuscript, the London Daily Mail paid $210.000 to the widow and family of Sir Henry Fielding Dickens, last of the ten Dickenses to die. For an unnamed price, United Feature bought North & South American serial rights. Second publishing rights were to be sold to smaller papers up to May 15, when Simon & Schuster will issue The Life of Our Lord in book form.

Readers of the first installment were prepared by an editorial note for "inconsistencies in punctuation and spelling which appeared in the original manuscript, intended by Dickens only for the eyes of his children and not for the printer." What they were not prepared for was the anti-Fundamentalist credo in the second paragraph:

He was born a long time ago--nearly Two Thousand years ago--at a place called Bethlehem. His father and mother lived in a City called Nazareth, but they were forced, by business to travel to Bethlehem. His father's name was Joseph, and his mother's name was Mary.*

So great was the name of Dickens, however, that few churchmen took offense. "The time for the publication of The Life of Our Lord could not be more opportune," rejoiced General Secretary S. McCrea Cavert of the Federal Churches of Christ. "Many people," agreed Dean Luther Allan Weigle of the Yale Divinity School, "will read this because Charles Dickens wrote it and it will help to make many acquainted with the life of our Lord."

Five million members of Dickens clubs hoped The Life of Our Lord would start a Dickens revival. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer has already announced a film version of David Copperfield.

Charles John Huffam Dickens (1812-1870), second of eight children, was born in Portsea, England. His father. John Dickens (the original of Mr. Micawber in David Copper field) was at the time a clerk in the navy-pay office at Portsmouth. When Charles was two the family moved to London, where he had two years' schooling before Micawberish bankruptcy overtook his father, landed him in Marshalsea Prison for debt. Nine-year-old Charles had to leave school go to work in a blacking warehouse, tying, trimming, labeling blacking pots. Weekends he visited his parents in their comfortable prison quarters. When a legacy temporarily rescued the family fortunes Charles got another two years of school, and later a job in a solicitor's office. Ambitious, he learned shorthand, became at 19 Parliamentary reporter for a series of London newspapers --just as David Copperfeld did.

Dickens began to write sketches of London life, signed them with the pen-name 'Boz." The sketches were so popular that the proprietors of the Morning Chronicle regarded him with an increasingly kindly eye. One of them, who had three daughters, was glad to bestow his eldest, Catherine, on rising young Journalist Dickens. Publishers Chapman & Hall suggested Dickens write a series of humorous pieces about a club of Cockney sportsmen, to be illustrated by Artist Robert Seymour. After drawing seven pictures Seymour shot himself; Dickens got another'artist (Hablot K. Browne). With the publication of The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club (1837) Dickens' reputation was made. The book was translated into French and German. Winkle. Weller, jingle, Snodgrass became household words. London shops sold Pickwick chintzes, Pickwick cigars. Weller corduroys. Boz cabs jingled down the streets.

Author Dickens took to fame like a duck to water, working harder than ever. One popular success followed another from his ready pen--Oliver Twist, Nicholas Nickleby, The Old Curiosity Shop. No plodding cultivator of a thankless Muse, Dickens enjoyed not only the fruits of his work but the work itself. He described himself at work on Martin Chuz-zlewit: "In a bay-window in a one-pair sits, from nine o'clock to one. a gentleman with rather long hair and no neckcloth, who writes and grins, as if he thought he was very funny indeed. At one he disappears, presently emerges from a bathing-machine, and may be seen, a kind of salmon-colour porpoise, splashing about in the ocean. . . .''

On a first visit to the U. S. (1842) he was received everywhere with adulation. His subsequent American Notes wounded U. S. feelings but hardly dimmed his popularity. A year later he wrote his best-known story. A Christmas Carol, to help pay housekeeping debts. He founded and edited his own magazine. Household Words (afterwards All the Year Round), in which he serialized his novels, editorialized on subjects of the day.

Two years after he had settled down at his famed house. Gad's Hill, in Kent, and at the height of his career, Dickens separated from his wife, who had lived with him 23 years, borne him ten children. Only reason ever alleged: mutual incompatibility. In his heyday he took to the lecture platform, gave readings from his books to packed audiences. So moving was his delivery that once, at a reading of the murder scene from Oliver Twist, 20 women were carried out in a dead faint. A second lecture-tour to the U. S. (1867) was no less successful than the first, made even more money, but shattered Dickens' ailing health. Though he had accumulated $500.000 he kept on working. One June evening in 1870 he collapsed at the dinner table. When his sister-in-law urged him to leave the table, lie down, he said, "Yes. on the ground." They were his last words. Five days later he was buried in the Poet's Corner in Westminster Abbey.

Hero or Hypocrite? During the more triumphant parts of his lifetime, and for long after his death, Charles Dickens was generally regarded by the English-speaking race as one of its foremost heroes. Modern debunkers have called him a snob, a sentimentalist, a selfish egotist and a sloppy writer. Gilbert Keith Chesterton thinks Dickens had all his life the faults of the little boy who is kept up too late at night. But when the clouds of conflicting opinion have blown away Dickens emerges as a common man of genius. Never over his readers' heads, he expressed what they had often felt, in a funnier, sadder, tenderer way than they had ever found words for. Dickens was very much the Englishman of his day. To each of his sons, as they went off to Cambridge to get the gentleman's education their father had never had, he wrote a letter on the subject of religion: "You know you have never been hampered with religious forms of restraint and that with mere unmeaning forms I have no sympathy. But I most strongly and affectionately impress upon you the priceless value of the New Testament and the study of that book as the one unfailing guide in life. Deeply respecting it. and bowing down before the character of our Savior, as separated from the vain constructions and inventions of man, you cannot go very wrong and will always preserve at heart a true spirit of veneration and humility."

A Christian but a British Christian. Dickens venerated the New Testament but loved Christmas. At that season he liked to have his house overflowing with guests, to have charades and games in the evening, or a country dance with the servants joining in. He thought of Christmas as "a good time; a kind, forgiving, charitable, pleasant time. . . ."

Minor Prophet? Dickens' England was a country in which the Industrial Revolution was just getting under way. not without slime and soot. No observer of the contemporary scene could fail to notice the more noisome puddles, and Dickens soon made a name for himself as a crusader against social ills. To his critics' assertion that his indignation proceeded from no plan, that he had no social program, his defenders reply that his attacks did much of the spadework that made programs possible. In many a passage in his novels he pictured the desperate plight of the metropolitan poor, their crowded and filthy dwellings, the ignorance, disease and dirt that was complacently assumed to be their lot. Dickens pilloried child labor (David Copper field), venaliy-conducted charitable institutions (Oliver Twist), legal mummery (Bleak House). His account of the protracted suit of Jarndyce v. Jarndyce had a notable effect in speeding up British justice. Housing reform was the chief social interest of his last ten years. "The reforms of the people's habitations must precede all other reforms; without it all other reforms must fail. Neither religion nor education will make any way until a government shall have discharged its first obligation and secured to the people homes instead of polluted dens."

Dickens' program was decency. He never dreamed of launching a jeremiad against society as a whole. As a self-respecting member of a respectable community he considered it his duty to call attention to minor maladjustments, trust to public decency to right them. Time has not made obsolete all of Dickens' complaints but it has seen some of them answered. The open sewer that in his day meandered from Kensington Gardens into the Chelsea slums is there no longer; Dotheboys Hall is now an antique caricature; David Copperfields now toil in grammar schools instead of warehouses.

Major Writer? Dickens' stock, which took a severe slump toward the end of the igth Century and has never regained its oldtime high, is not considered to have found its proper level. A "classic," he is no longer widely read, except in abridgments, but his reputation as a No. 1 English writer is not therefore less secure. Dickens "did for the whole English-speaking race what Burns had done for Scotland--he gave it a new conceit of itself." An unliterary author, he wrote for his immediate audience, and much of what he wrote died with his readers. Says Oxford's late Thomas Seccombe: "Dickens had no artistic ideals worth speaking about. The sympathy of his readers was the one thing he cared about and ... he went straight for it through the avenue of the emotions." His novels are "enormous stockpots into which the author casts every kind of autobiographical experience, emotion, pleasantry, anecdote, adage or apophthegm. ... In spite of these defects, which are those of masters such as Rabelais, Hugo and Tolstoy, the work of Dickens is more and more instinctively felt to be true, original and ennobling. ,

*Radical in its day was Dickens' belief that Christ was conceived by Joseph and not God. Not until 14 years later appeared Kenan's celebrated Life of Jesus which also rejected the Immaculate Conception: ''His father, Joseph, and His mother, Mary, were people in humble circumstances living by their labor."

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