Americans have borrowed these flowers of speech from England, and have invaded her territory. Was it because he could find no poverty at home worthy of his strenuous pen, that Mr. Jack London crossed the sea to write up the streets of Whitechapel and Spitalfields, already so abundantly exploited by English authors? Was there anything _he_ could add to the dark pictures of Mr. Gissing, or to the more convincing studies of Mr. Arthur Morrison, who has lit up the gloom with a grim humor, not very mirthful, but acutely and unimpeachably human? Mr. Gissing's poor have money for nothing but beer (it would be a bold writer who denied his starvelings beer); but Mr. Morrison sees his way occasionally to bacon, and tea, and tinned beef, and even, at rare intervals, to a pompous funeral, provided that the money for mutes can be saved from the sick man's diet. He is the legitimate successor of Dickens, and Dickens knew his field from experience rather than from observation. The lighthouse-keeper sees the storm, but the cabin boy feels it.
In the annals of poverty there are few pages more poignant than the one which describes the sick child, Charles Dickens, taken home from work by a kind-hearted lad, and his shame lest this boy should learn that 'home' for him meant the debtors' prison. In vain he tried to get rid of his conductor, Bob Fagin by name, protesting that he was well enough to walk alone. Bob knew he was not, and stuck to his side. Together they pushed along until little Charles was fainting with weakness and fatigue. Then in desperation he pretended that he lived in a decent house near Southwark bridge, and darted up the steps with a joyous air of being at last in haven, only to creep down again when Bob's back was turned, and drag his slow steps to the Marshalsea.
Out of this dismal and precocious experience sprang two results,--a passionate resolve _not_ to be what circumstances were conspiring to make him, and an insight into the uncalculating habits which deepen and soften poverty. Dickens--once free of institutions--wrote of the poor, even of the London poor, with amazing geniality; but it cannot be denied that his infallible recipe for brightening up the scene is the timely introduction of a pot of porter, or a pitcher of steaming flip. If we try to think of him writing in a prohibition state, we shall realize that he owed as much to beer and punch as ever Horace did to wine. Imagination fails to grasp either of them in the rôle of a water-drinker. The poor of Dickens are a sturdy lot, but they are jovial only in their cups. His wholesome hatred of institutions would have been intensified could he have lived to hear the Camberwell Board of Guardians decide--at the instigation, alas! of a woman member--that the single mug of beer which for years had solaced the inmates of Camberwell Workhouse on Christmas Day, should hereafter be abolished as an immoral indulgence. The generous ghost of Dickens must have groaned in Heaven over that melancholy and mean reform.