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INTRODUCTION. xxv |
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have been driving a pair of them. I know it all now. The apparent impossibility of getting each into its place, coupled with that craving for streets, so thoroughly put me off the track, that up to Wednesday or Thursday last, I really contemplated at times the total abandonment of the Christmas book this year and the limitation of my labours to Dombey and Son."
The "craving for streets" which had troubled Charles Dickens even in Genoa, where he " had two miles of streets at least, lighted at night to walk about in ; and a great theatre to repair to, every night," became in the quiet outskirts of the little Swiss town, a very serious trouble. Streets he wanted, and numbers of figures. As he described it, it seemed as if they supplied something to his brain which it could not bear, when busy, to lose, and as if he could not get rid of the spectres of his imagination unless he could lose them in crowds. Their absence, he declared, made the toil of writing immense.
With these two difficulties in the way the Battle of Life had a hard struggle for its very existence, and although, after the letter I have quoted above, the despondent fit passed off for a time, and a good beginning was made, the lapse of a week brought all the trouble back again. On the 26 th of September a letter was written to Mr. Forster which announced the possibility of there being, after all, no Christmas book, and which described the writer as being " sick, giddy, and capriciously despondent," and it really seemed as if the double work would prove absolutely impossible. But a short visit to Geneva brought about a considerable improvement in Charles Dickens's health, and consequently in his views about his work, and he went at the Christmas book with a determination to get it finished in time.
The task was a hard one, the difficulty of working out the story in such narrow limits being especially trying—" I was thoroughly wretched at having to use the idea for so short a story," Charles Dickens wrote afterwards to Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton—but it was accomplished by the middle of October. How great the effort had been may be judged by Charles Dickens's description of himself at about this time. " I really do not know what the story is worth," he wrote in the letter which enclosed the last slips. " I am so |
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