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NEWSPAPER PRESS FUND.--LONDON, MAY 20, 1865
[At the second annual dinner of the Institution, held at the
Freemasons' Tavern, on Saturday, the 20th May, 1865, the following
speech was delivered by the chairman, Mr. Charles Dickens, in
proposing the toast of the evening:]
Ladies and gentlemen,--When a young child is produced after dinner
to be shown to a circle of admiring relations and friends, it may
generally be observed that their conversation--I suppose in an
instinctive remembrance of the uncertainty of infant life--takes a
retrospective turn. As how much the child has grown since the last
dinner; what a remarkably fine child it is, to have been born only
two or three years ago, how much stronger it looks now than before
it had the measles, and so forth. When a young institution is
produced after dinner, there is not the same uncertainty or
delicacy as in the case of the child, and it may be confidently
predicted of it that if it deserve to live it will surely live, and
that if it deserve to die it will surely die. The proof of desert
in such a case as this must be mainly sought, I suppose, firstly,
in what the society means to do with its money; secondly, in the
extent to which it is supported by the class with whom it
originated, and for whose benefit it is designed; and, lastly, in
the power of its hold upon the public. I add this lastly, because
no such institution that ever I heard of ever yet dreamed of
existing apart from the public, or ever yet considered it a
degradation to accept the public support.
Now, what the Newspaper Press Fund proposes to do with its money is
to grant relief to members in want or distress, and to the widows,
families, parents, or other near relatives of deceased members in
right of a moderate provident annual subscription--commutable, I
observe, for a moderate provident life subscription--and its
members comprise the whole paid class of literary contributors to
the press of the United Kingdom, and every class of reporters. The
number of its members at this time last year was something below
100. At the present time it is somewhat above 170, not including
30 members of the press who are regular subscribers, but have not
as yet qualified as regular members. This number is steadily on
the increase, not only as regards the metropolitan press, but also
as regards the provincial throughout the country. I have observed
within these few days that many members of the press at Manchester
have lately at a meeting expressed a strong brotherly interest in
this Institution, and a great desire to extend its operations, and
to strengthen its hands, provided that something in the independent
nature of life assurance and the purchase of deferred annuities
could be introduced into its details, and always assuming that in
it the metropolis and the provinces stand on perfectly equal
ground. This appears to me to be a demand so very moderate, that I
can hardly have a doubt of a response on the part of the managers,
or of the beneficial and harmonious results. It only remains to
add, on this head of desert, the agreeable circumstance that out of
all the money collected in aid of the society during the last year
more than one-third came exclusively from the press.
Now, ladies and gentlemen, in regard to the last claim--the last
point of desert--the hold upon the public--I think I may say that
probably not one single individual in this great company has failed
to-day to see a newspaper, or has failed to-day to hear something
derived from a newspaper which was quite unknown to him or to her
yesterday. Of all those restless crowds that have this day
thronged the streets of this enormous city, the same may be said as
the general gigantic rule. It may be said almost equally, of the
brightest and the dullest, the largest and the least provincial
town in the empire; and this, observe, not only as to the active,
the industrious, and the healthy among the population, but also to
the bedridden, the idle, the blind, and the deaf and dumb. Now, if
the men who provide this all-pervading presence, this wonderful,
ubiquitous newspaper, with every description of intelligence on
every subject of human interest, collected with immense pains and
immense patience, often by the exercise of a laboriously-acquired
faculty united to a natural aptitude, much of the work done in the
night, at the sacrifice of rest and sleep, and (quite apart from
the mental strain) by the constant overtasking of the two most
delicate of the senses, sight and hearing--I say, if the men who,
through the newspapers, from day to day, or from night to night, or
from week to week, furnish the public with so much to remember,
have not a righteous claim to be remembered by the public in
return, then I declare before God I know no working class of the
community who have.
It would be absurd, it would be impertinent, in such an assembly as
this, if I were to attempt to expatiate upon the extraordinary
combination of remarkable qualities involved in the production of
any newspaper. But assuming the majority of this associated body
to be composed of reporters, because reporters, of one kind or
other, compose the majority of the literary staff of almost every
newspaper that is not a compilation, I would venture to remind you,
if I delicately may, in the august presence of members of
Parliament, how much we, the public, owe to the reporters if it
were only for their skill in the two great sciences of condensation
and rejection. Conceive what our sufferings, under an Imperial
Parliament, however popularly constituted, under however glorious a
constitution, would be if the reporters could not skip. Dr.
Johnson, in one of his violent assertions, declared that "the man
who was afraid of anything must be a scoundrel, sir." By no means
binding myself to this opinion--though admitting that the man who
is afraid of a newspaper will generally be found to be rather
something like it, I must still freely own that I should approach
my Parliamentary debate with infinite fear and trembling if it were
so unskilfully served up for my breakfast. Ever since the time
when the old man and his son took their donkey home, which were the
old Greek days, I believe, and probably ever since the time when
the donkey went into the ark--perhaps he did not like his
accommodation there--but certainly from that time downwards, he has
objected to go in any direction required of him--from the remotest
periods it has been found impossible to please everybody.
I do not for a moment seek to conceal that I know this Institution
has been objected to. As an open fact challenging the freest
discussion and inquiry, and seeking no sort of shelter or favour
but what it can win, it has nothing, I apprehend, but itself, to
urge against objection. No institution conceived in perfect
honesty and good faith has a right to object to being questioned to
any extent, and any institution so based must be in the end the
better for it. Moreover, that this society has been questioned in
quarters deserving of the most respectful attention I take to be an
indisputable fact. Now, I for one have given that respectful
attention, and I have come out of the discussion to where you see
me. The whole circle of the arts is pervaded by institutions
between which and this I can descry no difference. The painters'
art has four or five such institutions. The musicians' art, so
generously and charmingly represented here, has likewise several
such institutions. In my own art there is one, concerning the
details of which my noble friend the president of the society and
myself have torn each other's hair to a considerable extent, and
which I would, if I could, assimilate more nearly to this. In the
dramatic art there are four, and I never yet heard of any objection
to their principle, except, indeed, in the cases of some famous
actors of large gains, who having through the whole period of their
successes positively refused to establish a right in them, became,
in their old age and decline, repentant suppliants for their
bounty. Is it urged against this particular Institution that it is
objectionable because a parliamentary reporter, for instance, might
report a subscribing M.P. in large, and a non-subscribing M.P. in
little? Apart from the sweeping nature of this charge, which, it
is to be observed, lays the unfortunate member and the unfortunate
reporter under pretty much the same suspicion--apart from this
consideration, I reply that it is notorious in all newspaper
offices that every such man is reported according to the position
he can gain in the public eye, and according to the force and
weight of what he has to say. And if there were ever to be among
the members of this society one so very foolish to his brethren,
and so very dishonourable to himself, as venally to abuse his
trust, I confidently ask those here, the best acquainted with
journalism, whether they believe it possible that any newspaper so
ill-conducted as to fail instantly to detect him could possibly
exist as a thriving enterprise for one single twelvemonth? No,
ladies and gentlemen, the blundering stupidity of such an offence
would have no chance against the acute sagacity of newspaper
editors. But I will go further, and submit to you that its
commission, if it be to be dreaded at all, is far more likely on
the part of some recreant camp-follower of a scattered, disunited,
and half-recognized profession, than when there is a public opinion
established in it, by the union of all classes of its members for
the common good: the tendency of which union must in the nature of
things be to raise the lower members of the press towards the
higher, and never to bring the higher members to the lower level.
I hope I may be allowed in the very few closing words that I feel a
desire to say in remembrance of some circumstances, rather special,
attending my present occupation of this chair, to give those words
something of a personal tone. I am not here advocating the case of
a mere ordinary client of whom I have little or no knowledge. I
hold a brief to-night for my brothers. I went into the gallery of
the House of Commons as a parliamentary reporter when I was a boy
not eighteen, and I left it--I can hardly believe the inexorable
truth--nigh thirty years ago. 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 a pelting
rain, that I remember two goodnatured colleagues, who chanced to be
at leisure, held a pocket-handkerchief over my notebook, 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 of 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 on miry by-roads, towards the small hours,
forty or fifty miles from London, in a wheelless 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.
Ladies and gentlemen, I mention these trivial things as an
assurance to you that I never have forgotten the fascination of
that old pursuit. The pleasure that I used to feel in the rapidity
and dexterity of its exercise has never faded out of my breast.
Whatever little cunning of hand or head I took to it, or acquired
in it, I have so retained as that I fully believe I could resume it
to-morrow, very little the worse from long disuse. To this present
year of my life, when I sit in this hall, or where not, hearing a
dull speech, the phenomenon does occur--I sometimes beguile the
tedium of the moment by mentally following the speaker in the old,
old way; and sometimes, if you can believe me, I even find my hand
going on the table-cloth, taking an imaginary note of it all.
Accept these little truths as a confirmation of what I know; as a
confirmation of my undying interest in this old calling. Accept
them as a proof that my feeling for the location of my youth is not
a sentiment taken up to-night to be thrown away to-morrow--but is a
faithful sympathy which is a part of myself. I verily believe--I
am sure--that if I had never quitted my old calling I should have
been foremost and zealous in the interests of this Institution,
believing it to be a sound, a wholesome, and a good one. Ladies
and gentlemen, I am to propose to you to drink "Prosperity to the
Newspaper Press Fund," with which toast I will connect, as to its
acknowledgment, a name that has shed new brilliancy on even the
foremost newspaper in the world--the illustrious name of Mr.
Russell.
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