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LONDON, FEBRUARY 14, 1866
[On this occasion Mr. Dickens officiated as Chairman at the annual
dinner of the Dramatic, Equestrian, and Musical Fund, at Willis's
Rooms, where he made the following speech:]
Ladies, before I couple you with the gentlemen, which will be at
least proper to the inscription over my head (St. Valentine's day)-
-before I do so, allow me, on behalf of my grateful sex here
represented, to thank you for the great pleasure and interest with
which your gracious presence at these festivals never fails to
inspire us. There is no English custom which is so manifestly a
relic of savage life as that custom which usually excludes you from
participation in similar gatherings. And although the crime
carries its own heavy punishment along with it, in respect that it
divests a public dinner of its most beautiful ornament and of its
most fascinating charm, still the offence is none the less to be
severely reprehended on every possible occasion, as outraging
equally nature and art. I believe that as little is known of the
saint whose name is written here as can well be known of any saint
or sinner. We, your loyal servants, are deeply thankful to him for
having somehow gained possession of one day in the year--for
having, as no doubt he has, arranged the almanac for 1866--
expressly to delight us with the enchanting fiction that we have
some tender proprietorship in you which we should scarcely dare to
claim on a less auspicious occasion. Ladies, the utmost devotion
sanctioned by the saint we beg to lay at your feet, and any little
innocent privileges to which we may be entitled by the same
authority we beg respectfully but firmly to claim at your hands.
Now, ladies and gentlemen, you need no ghost to inform you that I
am going to propose "Prosperity to the Dramatic, Musical, and
Equestrian Sick Fund Association," and, further, that I should be
going to ask you actively to promote that prosperity by liberally
contributing to its funds, if that task were not reserved for a
much more persuasive speaker. But I rest the strong claim of the
society for its useful existence and its truly charitable functions
on a very few words, though, as well as I can recollect, upon
something like six grounds. First, it relieves the sick; secondly,
it buries the dead; thirdly, it enables the poor members of the
profession to journey to accept new engagements whenever they find
themselves stranded in some remote, inhospitable place, or when,
from other circumstances, they find themselves perfectly crippled
as to locomotion for want of money; fourthly, it often finds such
engagements for them by acting as their honest, disinterested
agent; fifthly, it is its principle to act humanely upon the
instant, and never, as is too often the case within my experience,
to beat about the bush till the bush is withered and dead; lastly,
the society is not in the least degree exclusive, but takes under
its comprehensive care the whole range of the theatre and the
concert-room, from the manager in his room of state, or in his
caravan, or at the drum-head--down to the theatrical housekeeper,
who is usually to be found amongst the cobwebs and the flies, or
down to the hall porter, who passes his life in a thorough draught-
-and, to the best of my observation, in perpetually interrupted
endeavours to eat something with a knife and fork out of a basin,
by a dusty fire, in that extraordinary little gritty room, upon
which the sun never shines, and on the portals of which are
inscribed the magic words, "stage-door."
Now, ladies and gentlemen, this society administers its benefits
sometimes by way of loan; sometimes by way of gift; sometimes by
way of assurance at very low premiums; sometimes to members,
oftener to non-members; always expressly, remember, through the
hands of a secretary or committee well acquainted with the wants of
the applicants, and thoroughly versed, if not by hard experience at
least by sympathy, in the calamities and uncertainties incidental
to the general calling. One must know something of the general
calling to know what those afflictions are. A lady who had been
upon the stage from her earliest childhood till she was a blooming
woman, and who came from a long line of provincial actors and
actresses, once said to me when she was happily married; when she
was rich, beloved, courted; when she was mistress of a fine house--
once said to me at the head of her own table, surrounded by
distinguished guests of every degree, "Oh, but I have never
forgotten the hard time when I was on the stage, and when my baby
brother died, and when my poor mother and I brought the little baby
from Ireland to England, and acted three nights in England, as we
had acted three nights in Ireland, with the pretty creature lying
upon the only bed in our lodging before we got the money to pay for
its funeral."
Ladies and gentlemen, such things are, every day, to this hour;
but, happily, at this day and in this hour this association has
arisen to be the timely friend of such great distress.
It is not often the fault of the sufferers that they fall into
these straits. Struggling artists must necessarily change from
place to place, and thus it frequently happens that they become, as
it were, strangers in every place, and very slight circumstances--a
passing illness, the sickness of the husband, wife, or child, a
serious town, an anathematising expounder of the gospel of
gentleness and forbearance--any one of these causes may often in a
few hours wreck them upon a rock in the barren ocean; and then,
happily, this society, with the swift alacrity of the life-boat,
dashes to the rescue, and takes them off. Looking just now over
the last report issued by this society, and confining my scrutiny
to the head of illness alone, I find that in one year, I think, 672
days of sickness had been assuaged by its means. In nine years,
which then formed the term of its existence, as many as 5,500 and
odd. Well, I thought when I saw 5,500 and odd days of sickness,
this is a very serious sum, but add the nights! Add the nights--
those long, dreary hours in the twenty-four when the shadow of
death is darkest, when despondency is strongest, and when hope is
weakest, before you gauge the good that is done by this
institution, and before you gauge the good that really will be done
by every shilling that you bestow here to-night. Add, more than
all, that the improvidence, the recklessness of the general
multitude of poor members of this profession, I should say is a
cruel, conventional fable. Add that there is no class of society
the members of which so well help themselves, or so well help each
other. Not in the whole grand chapters of Westminster Abbey and
York Minster, not in the whole quadrangle of the Royal Exchange,
not in the whole list of members of the Stock Exchange, not in the
Inns of Court, not in the College of Physicians, not in the College
of Surgeons, can there possibly be found more remarkable instances
of uncomplaining poverty, of cheerful, constant self-denial, of the
generous remembrance of the claims of kindred and professional
brotherhood, than will certainly be found in the dingiest and
dirtiest concert room, in the least lucid theatre--even in the
raggedest tent circus that was ever stained by weather.
I have been twitted in print before now with rather flattering
actors when I address them as one of their trustees at their
General Fund dinner. Believe me, I flatter nobody, unless it be
sometimes myself; but, in such a company as the present, I always
feel it my manful duty to bear my testimony to this fact--first,
because it is opposed to a stupid, unfeeling libel; secondly,
because my doing so may afford some slight encouragement to the
persons who are unjustly depreciated; and lastly, and most of all,
because I know it is the truth.
Now, ladies and gentlemen, it is time we should what we
professionally call "ring down" on these remarks. If you, such
members of the general public as are here, will only think the
great theatrical curtain has really fallen and been taken up again
for the night on that dull, dark vault which many of us know so
well; if you will only think of the theatre or other place of
entertainment as empty; if you will only think of the "float," or
other gas-fittings, as extinguished; if you will only think of the
people who have beguiled you of an evening's care, whose little
vanities and almost childish foibles are engendered in their
competing face to face with you for your favour--surely it may be
said their feelings are partly of your making, while their virtues
are all their own. If you will only do this, and follow them out
of that sham place into the real world, where it rains real rain,
snows real snow, and blows real wind; where people sustain
themselves by real money, which is much harder to get, much harder
to make, and very much harder to give away than the pieces of
tobacco-pipe in property bags--if you will only do this, and do it
in a really kind, considerate spirit, this society, then certain of
the result of the night's proceedings, can ask no more. I beg to
propose to you to drink "Prosperity to the Dramatic, Equestrian,
and Musical Sick Fund Association."
[Mr. Dickens, in proposing the next toast, said:-]
Gentlemen: as I addressed myself to the ladies last time, so I
address you this time, and I give you the delightful assurance that
it is positively my last appearance but one on the present
occasion. A certain Mr. Pepys, who was Secretary for the Admiralty
in the days of Charles II., who kept a diary well in shorthand,
which he supposed no one could read, and which consequently remains
to this day the most honest diary known to print--Mr. Pepys had two
special and very strong likings, the ladies and the theatres. But
Mr. Pepys, whenever he committed any slight act of remissness, or
any little peccadillo which was utterly and wholly untheatrical,
used to comfort his conscience by recording a vow that he would
abstain from the theatres for a certain time. In the first part of
Mr. Pepys' character I have no doubt we fully agree with him; in
the second I have no doubt we do not.
I learn this experience of Mr. Pepys from remembrance of a passage
in his diary that I was reading the other night, from which it
appears that he was not only curious in plays, but curious in
sermons; and that one night when he happened to be walking past St.
Dunstan's Church, he turned, went in, and heard what he calls "a
very edifying discourse;" during the delivery of which discourse,
he notes in his diary--"I stood by a pretty young maid, whom I did
attempt to take by the hand." But he adds--"She would not; and I
did perceive that she had pins in her pocket with which to prick me
if I should touch her again--and was glad that I spied her design."
Afterwards, about the close of the same edifying discourse, Mr.
Pepys found himself near another pretty, fair young maid, who would
seem upon the whole to have had no pins, and to have been more
impressible.
Now, the moral of this story which I wish to suggest to you is,
that we have been this evening in St. James's much more timid than
Mr. Pepys was in St. Dunstan's, and that we have conducted
ourselves very much better. As a slight recompense to us for our
highly meritorious conduct, and as a little relief to our over-
charged hearts, I beg to propose that we devote this bumper to
invoking a blessing on the ladies. It is the privilege of this
society annually to hear a lady speak for her own sex. Who so
competent to do this as Mrs. Stirling? Surely one who has so
gracefully and captivatingly, with such an exquisite mixture of
art, and fancy, and fidelity, represented her own sex in
innumerable charities, under an infinite variety of phases, cannot
fail to represent them well in her own character, especially when
it is, amidst her many triumphs, the most agreeable of all. I beg
to propose to you "The Ladies," and I will couple with that toast
the name of Mrs. Stirling.
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