Read Ebook: Chroniques de J. Froissart tome 10/13 by Froissart Jean

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LIST OF SONGS, &c., MENTIONED BY DICKENS 135

INDEX OF MUSICAL INSTRUMENTS 164

INDEX OF CHARACTERS 165

GENERAL INDEX 169

LIST OF MUSIC TITLES, &c., FOUNDED ON DICKENS' CHARACTERS 172

LIST OF WORKS REFERRED TO

CHARLES DICKENS AND MUSIC

DICKENS AS A MUSICIAN

The attempts to instil the elements of music into Charles Dickens when he was a small boy do not appear to have been attended with success. Mr. Kitton tells us that he learnt the piano during his school days, but his master gave him up in despair. Mr. Bowden, an old schoolfellow of the novelist's when he was at Wellington House Academy, in Hampstead Road, says that music used to be taught there, and that Dickens received lessons on the violin, but he made no progress, and soon relinquished it. It was not until many years after that he made his third and last attempt to become an instrumentalist. During his first transatlantic voyage he wrote to Forster telling him that he had bought an accordion.

The steward lent me one on the passage out, and I regaled the ladies' cabin with my performances. You can't think with what feelings I play 'Home, Sweet Home' every night, or how pleasantly sad it makes us.

On the voyage back he gives the following description of the musical talents of his fellow passengers:

One played the accordion, another the violin, and another the key bugle: the combined effect of which instruments, when they all played different tunes, in different parts of the ship, at the same time, and within hearing of each other, as they sometimes did , was sublimely hideous.

He does not tell us whether he was one of the performers on these occasions.

The knives and forks form a pleasing accompaniment to Auber's music, and Auber's music would form a pleasing accompaniment to the dinner, if you could hear anything besides the cymbals.

Dickens was acquainted with Jenny Lind, and he gives the following amusing story in a letter to Douglas Jerrold, dated Paris, February 14, 1847:

It was Dickens' habit wherever he went on his Continental travels to avail himself of any opportunity of visiting the opera; and his criticisms, though brief, are always to the point. He tells us this interesting fact about Carrara:

There is a beautiful little theatre there, built of marble, and they had it illuminated that night in my honour. There was really a very fair opera, but it is curious that the chorus has been always, time out of mind, made up of labourers in the quarries, who don't know a note of music, and sing entirely by ear.

But much as he loved music, Dickens could never bear the least sound or noise while he was studying or writing, and he ever waged a fierce war against church bells and itinerant musicians. Even when in Scotland his troubles did not cease, for he writes about 'a most infernal piper practising under the window for a competition of pipers which is to come off shortly.' Elsewhere he says that he found Dover 'too bandy' for him , while in a letter to Forster he complains bitterly of the vagrant musicians at Broadstairs, where he 'cannot write half an hour without the most excruciating organs, fiddles, bells, or glee singers.' The barrel-organ, which he somewhere calls an 'Italian box of music,' was one source of annoyance, but bells were his special aversion. 'If you know anybody at St. Paul's,' he wrote to Forster, 'I wish you'd send round and ask them not to ring the bell so. I can hardly hear my own ideas as they come into my head, and say what they mean.' His bell experiences at Genoa are referred to elsewhere .

How marvellously observant he was is manifest in the numerous references in his letters and works to the music he heard in the streets and squares of London and other places. Here is a description of Golden Square, London, W. :

Two or three violins and a wind instrument from the Opera band reside within its precincts. Its boarding-houses are musical, and the notes of pianos and harps float in the evening time round the head of the mournful statue, the guardian genius of the little wilderness of shrubs, in the centre of the square.... Sounds of gruff voices practising vocal music invade the evening's silence, and the fumes of choice tobacco scent the air. There, snuff and cigars and German pipes and flutes, and violins and violoncellos, divide the supremacy between them. It is the region of song and smoke. Street bands are on their mettle in Golden Square, and itinerant glee singers quaver involuntarily as they raise their voices within its boundaries.

We have another picture in the description of Dombey's house, where--

the summer sun was never on the street but in the morning, about breakfast-time.... It was soon gone again, to return no more that day, and the bands of music and the straggling Punch's shows going after it left it a prey to the most dismal of organs and white mice.

Most of the writers about Dickens, and especially his personal friends, bear testimony both to his vocal power and his love of songs and singing. As a small boy we read of him and his sister Fanny standing on a table singing songs, and acting them as they sang. One of his favourite recitations was Dr. Watts' 'The voice of the sluggard,' which he used to give with great effect. The memory of these words lingered long in his mind, and both Captain Cuttle and Mr. Pecksniff quote them with excellent appropriateness.

From a humorous account of a concert on board ship we gather that Dickens possessed a tenor voice. Writing to his daughter from Boston in 1867, he says:

When at home he was fond of having music in the evening. His daughter tells us that on one occasion a member of his family was singing a song while he was apparently deep in his book, when he suddenly got up and saying 'You don't make enough of that word,' he sat down by the piano and showed how it should be sung.

On another occasion his criticism was more pointed.

Here too were ballads on the old ballad paper and in the old confusion of types, with an old man in a cocked hat, and an armchair, for the illustration to Will Watch the bold smuggler, and the Friar of Orders Grey, represented by a little girl in a hoop, with a ship in the distance. All these as of yore, when they were infinite delights to me.

On one of his explorations he met a landsman who told him about the running down of an emigrant ship, and how he heard a sound coming over the sea 'like a great sorrowful flute or Aeolian harp.' He makes another and very humorous reference to this instrument in a letter to Landor, in which he calls to mind

that steady snore of yours, which I once heard piercing the door of your bedroom ... reverberating along the bell-wire in the hall, so getting outside into the street, playing Aeolian harps among the area railings, and going down the New Road like the blast of a trumpet.

a little tinkling box of music that stops at 'come' in the melody of the Buffalo Gals, and can't play 'out to-night,' and a white mouse, are the only amusements left at Broadstairs.

'Buffalo Gals' was a very popular song 'Sung with great applause by the Original Female American Serenaders.' The first verse will explain the above allusion:

As I went lum'rin' down de street, down de street, A 'ansom gal I chanc'd to meet, oh, she was fair to view. Buffalo gals, can't ye come out to-night, come out to-night, come out to-night; Buffalo gals, can't ye come out to-night, and dance by the light of the moon.

We find some interesting musical references and memories in the novelist's letters. Writing to Wilkie Collins in reference to his proposed sea voyage, he quotes Campbell's lines from 'Ye Mariners of England':

As I sweep Through the deep When the stormy winds do blow.

There are other references to this song in the novels. I have pointed out elsewhere that the last line also belongs to a seventeenth-century song.

Writing to Mark Lemon he gives an amusing parody of

Lesbia hath a beaming eye,

beginning

Lemon is a little hipped.

In a letter to Maclise he says:

My foot is in the house, My bath is on the sea, And before I take a souse, Here's a single note to thee.

These lines are a reminiscence of Byron's ode to Tom Moore, written from Venice on July 10, 1817:

My boat is on the shore, And my bark is on the sea, But before I go, Tom Moore, Here's a double health to thee!

The words were set to music by Bishop. This first verse had a special attraction for Dickens, and he gives us two or three variations of it, including a very apt one from Dick Swiveller .

Henry F. Chorley, the musical critic, was an intimate friend of Dickens. On one occasion he went to hear Chorley lecture on 'The National Music of the World,' and subsequently wrote him a very friendly letter criticizing his delivery, but speaking in high terms of the way he treated his subject.

In one of his letters he makes special reference to the singing of the Hutchinson family. Writing to the Countess of Blessington, he says:

I must have some talk with you about these American singers. They must never go back to their own country without your having heard them sing Hood's 'Bridge of Sighs.'

Amongst the distinguished visitors at Gad's Hill was Joachim, who was always a welcome guest, and of whom Dickens once said 'he is a noble fellow.' His daughter writes in reference to this visit:

His only remaining suggestion is that Miss Rainforth will want another song when the piece is in rehearsal--'a bravura--something in "The soldier tired" way.'

Dickens wrote a few songs and ballads, and in most cases he fell in with the custom of his time, and suggested the tune to which they were to be sung. In addition to those that appear in the various novels, there are others which deserve mention here.

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