The Best of All Impossible Worlds
G. K. Chesterton, Charles Dickens (1906)
G. K. Chesterton (1874–1936) wrote a number of short books about writers. He needed the money. But his work on Dickens was a labour of love. Dickens unlocked the whole world for Chesterton in a way he has done for countless others. Chesterton’s Charles Dickens is a letter of thanks written to a rescuer.
My copy was lying on the shelves of a second-hand bookshop in Harden, a small town on the railway in the Central West of New South Wales. My father worked on a farm there during World War II but this book long precedes him. It is a colonial edition printed in 1907. On the flyleaf, Henry Swan has indicated that he took possession of the book on 26 September 1907. A few pages further on, he has included a sticker celebrating the centenary of Dickens’ birth, in 1912.
Swan liked this book and I suspect I would have liked Swan. At the end, he has written the precise date on which he finished each reading. The first of those was 27 September 1907, the day after he bought it. He read it twice more the following year and once in 1909. Then he writes: ‘once at least in 1910. I think more.’ He read it in April 1911 and June 1915, ‘and some time which I have not noted between 1911 and 1915’. So Swan read the book at least eight times before 1915 was out. I feel a kind of intimacy with Swan as a result of these dates. Intimacy always happens in detail. I know what a fellow fan of a particular book was doing on a certain day more than a century ago.
This edition includes a full catalogue of all the books Methuen is willing to send out to the colonies, including many school textbooks. After these mundane pages (which Chesterton would have cheerfully enjoyed) Swan has pencilled a list of the pages of the text that have meant most to him and finally concluded, ‘The chapter (XI) on optimism is a great chapter.’ I couldn’t agree more. Swan has relished Chesterton’s famous conclusion to that chapter: ‘It is the best of all impossible worlds.’ He has written in the margins at different points in it, ‘Oh, I say!’ and ‘That is profound’ and ‘Here is more perception of history than in a dozen books on demonology.’
As he begins the essay, Chesterton writes about fashionable cynicism:
The fierce poet of the Middle Ages wrote, ‘Abandon hope all ye who enter here,’ over the gates of the lower world. The emancipated poets of to-day have written it over the gates of the world. But if we are to understand the story which follows, we must erase that apocalyptic writing, if only for an hour…Dream for one mad moment that the grass is green…deny that deadly knowledge that you think you know…give up the very jewel of your pride; abandon hopelessness, all ye who enter here.
Next to the phrase about the ‘emancipated poets of to-day’, Henry Swan has written ‘Yes, the dogs.’ I love a reader who talks back to books. Even better when one barks back.
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Two of the more heartfelt literary essays of the twentieth century are about Dickens. The other one was published in 1939 by George Orwell, the pen name of Eric Blair (1903–50). Any reader of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) will soon discover the ways in which Orwell, like Chesterton, dreads the diminishment of language. In some respects, the novel dramatises the theories that Orwell outlined in his masterly essay ‘Politics and the English Language’ (1946). Orwell says that ‘one ought to recognise that the present political chaos is connected with the decay of language’ and that people desperate for good sense get ‘a lump of verbal refuse’: ‘the slovenliness of our language makes it easier to have foolish thoughts.’
In Nineteen Eighty-Four, an entire language, Newspeak, is created to control thought. If you look up a half-decent thesaurus, you will find scores of words that could mean ‘good’, each with a slightly different shade of meaning or each appropriate in a different context. The same applies to the word ‘bad’. In the world of Big Brother, these will all be reduced to ‘good’, ‘plus good’ or ‘double plus good’. The opposite will be ‘ungood’. As one party enthusiast says, ‘The destruction of words is a beautiful thing.’ Language, for Orwell, is under threat and he prepares to defend it behind walls of solid common sense and plain speaking. Faced with the same challenge, Chesterton wants to leave language exposed to every absurdity that the world can hurl at it.
It’s a pity that Orwell simply didn’t seem to ‘get’ Chesterton, but nor did he understand either Tolstoy (see Chapter 26) or King Lear. Anything inherently comic eluded him, most of all Dickens. To Orwell, Dickens is an angel from the other side, ‘a man who lives through his eyes and ears rather than through his hands and muscles’. He professes a grudging admiration for Dickens, especially for his depictions of childhood, but criticises him for a lack of concrete thinking, an inability to propose detailed social reform and a lack of rapport with the economic lives of the working classes, believing ‘individual kindliness is the remedy for everything.’
Chesterton’s shimmering essay about Dickens was written before Orwell’s but seems to respond to most of what Orwell wrote. Chesterton said of Dickens that ‘If he learnt to whitewash the universe, it was in a blacking factory that he learnt it.’ Chesterton believed laughter reaches within and ‘Exaggeration is the definition of art.’ He suggests Dickens was ‘always most accurate when he was most fantastic’ and that he was ‘ridiculous in order…to be true’:
The chief fountain in Dickens of what I have called cheerfulness, and some prefer to call optimism, is something deeper than a verbal philosophy. It is…an incomparable hunger and pleasure for the vitality and the variety, for the infinite eccentricity of existence.
Much as I love Orwell, I am firmly on the side of Chesterton when it comes to this. Dickens has been one of the liberators of my life. The first time I laughed aloud with a book in my hands was as a sixteen-year-old who had stumbled into The Pickwick Papers when he should have been playing sport before school; I still haven’t fully found my way out of Dickens.