The Stourbridge Observer, Cradley Heath, Halesowen & District Chronicle.
Stourbridge, West Midlands, England, 1870-06-18 00:00:00

THE LATE MR. CHARLES DICKENS.
tont a Portsmouth, Nebruary 7th, 1812.
Dlttt at his residence, Giuni-hlll House, Rochester, June 9th.
1870.—Aged 68 years.

The Times, in a leader, pays the following tribute to
the memory of Mr. Dickens, whose eloquent pen was
always rebuking vice and satiriging follies; and there
is not a home in which the English language is spoken,
but will have received the mournful intelligence of his
death, with the most heart•felt regret
Oct whom young and old, wherever the English langusge
Is spikes, have been accustomed to regard ae • personal
friend is suddenly taken away from among us. Charles
Dickens is no more. The lose of such a mall Is an ev. lit
which makes ordinary t xpressions of regret seem cold anti
conventional. It will be felt by millions .te nothing less than
a personal nereevement. Statesmen, men or edence, philan-
thropist., the acknowledged benefactors of their race edge t
pass away, and yet not leave the void which will be caused
by the death of Dickens. They may have earned the esteem
of mankind ; their days may have been paused in power,
honour, anti prosperity; they may have been surrounded by
troops of friends ; hut, however pre-eminent in station,
ability, or public services, they will not have been, like
our great anti genial novelist, the letimate of every house-
hold. Indeed, such a position is attained today. by one
man in an age. It needs an extraordinary combination of
intellectual and moral qualities to gain the hearts of the
public, as Dickens hae gained them. Extraordinary and
very original genius must be united with good sense, con-
sunitnete skill, a well-balanced mind, and the proofs of a
noble and affectionate disposition before the world will con•
sent to enthrone a elan as their unassallahle anti enduring
favourite. This is the position which Mr. D:ckens has occu-
pied with the lieglish and alto with the American public
for the third of a century. It we compare his reputation
with that of the number of eminent men and women
who have been his contemporaries, we have irresistible
evidence of his surnaming merits. Ills is a depart-
ment of literature in which ability In our time has
been abundant to overflowing. As the genius of the
Elizabethan age turned to the drama, so that of the
reign of Victoria seeks expression In the novel. There Is no
more extraordinary phenomenon than the number, the
variety, and the generally high excellence of the werks of
fiction in our own day. Their inspirations are as many as
the phases of thought and social life. They treat not only
of love anti marriage, but of things political and ecclesiasti-
cal, of social yearnings and sceptical disquietudes ; they give
us revelations from the empyrean of fashion and from the
abysses of crime. Their authors have their admirers, their
party, their public, but not the public of Dickens. It has
been his pecultar fortune to appeal to that which is common
to all sorts and conditions of men, to excite the interest of
the young and the uninstructed, without shocking the more
refined taste of a higher aegis and a more mature age. Thus
the news of his death will hardly meet the eye of an educated
man or woman who has not read hts works and who has led
been accustomed to think of him with admiration and
friendly regard.
To the survivors, at least, there is something terrible In
sudden death, and when we hear that Dickens is gone we
cannot but recall how Thackeray died before him, also In the
vigour of age, and apparently in the Nines. of health.
Dickens has lived longer than his great rival, for he was bons
only a year after, and he has survived him several year.. But
he hae been cat cif while still in what may be called middle
age. Ile was horn in Februery, 1812, and has consequently
uot long attained his 58th year. As men live and work now,
this is an age which would give the hope of many years of
successful exertion, to be succeeded by a period of honoured
reeose. But we have this consolation, that the life of
Dickens has been long enough to allow full scope for his
genius, and to enable him not only to earn, but to enjoy his I
fame. In this respect his career has been extraordinary. De
was one whose marvellous powers were developed early, and
he attained the highest eminence in the firat years of his
literary career. It is certainly a wonderful phenomenon
that a book the Platen*, the pages of which over-
flew with huniour, and are marked in every smi-
te))ee with the keenest observation of men and
thirgs, should have beet) prodnced by a young man of 2i.
After the light but clever Sketches by Bog. Dickens began
Pickwick in 1836, and finished Bin the course of the succeed-
ing sear. We are inclined to think that this, the first con-
siderable work of the author, in his masterpiece ; but, what-
ever may he the world's decision on this point, it can hardly
be doubted that the prize must be given coons of the group
of fictions which he produced within the first ten or twelve
years of hie literary life. Nicholas Nickleby teems with wit,
and the characters, with one or two exceptions, are lifelike
in the extreme. Oliver Twiet everybody knows ; Martin
Chanlewit is excelleut, and the American portions are not
only the most amusing satire that has been published in the
present age, but fill us with wonder that the peculiarities of
th. light, manner, and diction of • people should be so surely
seized and so inimitably expressed by a young writer who had
been only • few months in the country.
In this marvellous precocity of genius Dickens formed a
contrast to some of those with whom a comparison naturally
suggest* itself. Scott was St year. old before he published
his first great poem, the Lay of the Last Minatrel, and it wits
nearly ten years afterwards, In 1814, that he made his experi-
ment as • novelist with Waverley. So, too, Thackeray,
though known for some time in the field of literature, made
his first great success with Vanity Fair, when no longer •
' young man. Of Deckens It may be raid, also, that his early
' Leeks show no signs of juvenility. When young in years he
showed the mental balance of an experienced writer. And
yet what freshnees anti vigour there was in those wonderful
i serials which, about the time the present Queen came to the
• throne, changed the popular literature of the day When
that young unknown author appeared on the field he was
at once bailed as the sew chief of ',pular fiction. It le along
i time ago, but our older readers will remember the excite-
[ meet caused by the Pickwick Papers, the shilling numbers
of Bee carried everything Mere them. They were
read here by tens of thoueande, though the reading public
, thirty years ego was not what it la now; and they
were reprinted in every possible form in America. In fact,
half the newspapers in the States transferred them to their
columns bodily the day after their arrival. This popularity
they fully deserved. They are among the few books of the
kind that one can return to again and again; or having
ensued at any parts can read straight on, carried forward by
' a mese of real enjoyment. The best characters Stand out In
. real flesh and blood, awl in this respect are superior to those
of Thackeray, which, though excellently designed, show too
Much the art of an able sketcher from artificial types. For
this marten, Thackeray, though he has always maintained
his hold on the London world in which his personages figure,
, has never come near to Dickens in popularity with the great
' mass of the peon The characters of Dickens have been
. accepted by all men's discernmebt ae the true reflection of
, human nature; not merely of manners or costume. &mem
is to everybody the low tyranhical scheolroaeter Bumble the
representative of parochial pomposity Mrs. (tamp is the
, type of her vulgar hard-hearted sisterhood. Perhaps a more
signal proof of the genius of Dickens lathe manner in which
his sty le and dictien have penetrated into the ordinary
literature of the country. So much hue become naturalised
and is used quite unconeeiously that it is only by rereading
those earlier works which most impressed his contemporaries
, that 000 becomes aware how great has been their influence.
we cannot cdeclude these remarks without paying a tri-
I bute to the moral influence of the writings of which we have
epoken. Mr. Dickens was a man of an eminently Shelly
, nature, and fall of sympathy for all anuhd hint. This,
' without being paraded, makes itself manifest in his works,
and we have no doubt whatever that notch of the active
, benevolence of the present day, the interest in humble
persons and humble things, and the desire to seek out and
I relieve every form of misery is tine to the innuence of his
, works. We feel that we have lost one of the foremost Eng-
lishmen of the age. There are clever writers enough, but no
use who will take the place, literary antisocial, that belonged
t to y im. It was but the other day that at the Iteyal Academy
Banquet he made the best speech of the evening, in mater,
' Isliguage, and manner. His powers as an actor are well
khos n, though, of late years, they have heen only exhibited
in the narrow field of public realities. Ile was made to be
, popular, and, even irrespective of ha liter try genius, was an
able and rerong-minded man, who would have succeeded In
. almost any profeeiden to which he devoted himself. We can
but condole with the public on hie sudden aud premature
lots.