Life of Charles Dickens eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 214 pages of information about Life of Charles Dickens.

Life of Charles Dickens eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 214 pages of information about Life of Charles Dickens.

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

Copyrights
Project Gutenberg
Life of Charles Dickens from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.