A History of English Literature

the marriage, but died within a few months, worn out by the unremitting
physical and moral strain of forty years.
The significance of 'Jane Eyre' can be suggested by calling it the last
striking expression of extravagant Romanticism, partly Byronic, but grafted
on the stern Bronte moral sense. One of its two main theses is the
assertion of the supreme authority of religious duty, but it vehemently
insists also on the right of the individual conscience to judge of duty for
itself, in spite of conventional opinion, and, difficult as this may be to
understand to-day, it was denounced at the time as irreligious. The
Romanticism appears further in the volcanic but sometimes melodramatic
power of the love story, where the heroine is a somewhat idealized double
of the authoress and where the imperfect portrayal of the hero reflects the
limitations of Miss Bronte's own experience.
Miss Bronte is the subject of one of the most delightfully sympathetic of
all biographies, written by Mrs. Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell. Mrs. Gaskell
was authoress also of many stories, long and short, of which the best known
is 'Cranford' (1853), a charming portrayal of the quaint life of a secluded
village.
CHARLES DICKENS. [Footnote: The life of Dickens by his friend John Forster
is another of the most famous English biographies.] The most popular of all
English novelists, Charles Dickens, was born in 1812, the son of an
unpractical and improvident government navy clerk whom, with questionable
taste, he later caricatured in 'David Copperfield' as Mr. Micawber. The
future novelist's schooling was slight and irregular, but as a boy he read
much fiction, especially seventeenth and eighteenth century authors, whose
influence is apparent in the picaresque lack of structure of his own works.
From childhood also he showed the passion for the drama and the theater
which resulted from the excitably dramatic quality of his own temperament
and which always continued to be the second moving force of his life. When
he was ten years old his father was imprisoned for debt (like Micawber, in
the Marshalsea prison), and he was put to work in the cellar of a London
shoe-blacking factory. On his proud and sensitive disposition this
humiliation, though it lasted only a few months, inflicted a wound which
never thoroughly healed; years after he was famous he would cross the
street to avoid the smell from an altogether different blacking factory,
with its reminder 'of what he once was.' To this experience, also, may
evidently be traced no small part of the intense sympathy with the
oppressed poor, especially with helpless children, which is so prominent in
his novels. Obliged from the age of fifteen to earn his own living, for the
most part, he was for a while a clerk in a London lawyer's office, where he
observed all sorts and conditions of people with characteristic keenness.
Still more valuable was his five or six years' experience in the very
congenial and very active work of a newspaper reporter, where his special
department was political affairs. This led up naturally to his permanent
work. The successful series of lively 'Sketches by Boz' dealing with people
and scenes about London was preliminary to 'The Pickwick Papers,' which
made the author famous at the age of twenty-four.
During the remaining thirty-three years of his life Dickens produced novels
at the rate of rather more than one in two years. He composed slowly and
carefully but did not revise greatly, and generally published by monthly
installments in periodicals which, latterly, he himself established and
edited. Next after 'The Pickwick Papers' came 'Oliver Twist,' and 'David
Copperfield' ten years later. Of the others, 'Martin Chuzzlewit,' 'Dombey
and Son,' 'Bleak House,' and 'A Tale of Two Cities,' are among the best.
For some years Dickens also published an annual Christmas story, of which