March, 1953
IN THE EIGHTY-ODD years since his death, Charles Dickens has been summoned again and again from the tomb to face the verdict of history. The latest qualified expert to view the body and announce his findings is Edgar Johnson, a professor at City College, the author of an eleven-hundred-page biography that reads like the report of some officially constituted commission that hands in its verdict as follows: the deceased is cleared of the charge of sentimentality (finding: healthy emotion), chidden for his domestic conduct, and awarded a place among the world’s great authors, in recognition of his social vision.
Dickens hated officials, but his critics and biographers, almost inevitably, feel called upon to assume an official air when dealing with his “case.” Each critic clears his throat with a vast administrative harumph and scans the expectant courtroom before imparting his conclusions. Attorneys for the defense scribble while listening to the prosecution’s summation; on the bench a hanging judge peers over the bar to anathematize the quivering defendant; alienists and character witnesses succeed each other on the stand. Advocates of Dickens like Mr. Johnson have the anxious note of apologists, now glossing over and extenuating, now reprobating stoutly, lest they be charged with undue partiality. His assailants, on the other hand, present themselves as inquisitors, text in hand, eager to convict poor Dickens out of his own mouth of crimes of bad writing, crudity, unreality, unfriendliness to the proletariat, to business, to the Jews, to foreigners; “he could not paint a gentleman,” and it is “questionable” whether he regarded the poor as equals.
Here, as in most inquisitions, the metonymic principle is at work—the part is substituted for the whole, and a single “incriminating” utterance is produced in court to lay bare the man in his totality. This desire to criminate has singled Dickens out uniquely among great writers; Dostoevsky sometimes wrote badly; he was virulently anti-Semitic, anti-Polish, anti-Catholic; but nobody seeks to indict him for it. And Dickens’ defenders accept the criminative method when they produce a good Jew, Riah, to offset the bad Fagin, sympathetic aristocrats and proletarians to offset their opposite numbers; in their eagerness to give Dickens a clean bill of health, they are willing to strip him down to a few inoffensive platitudes.
Perhaps this zeal, however, merely testifies to the fact that Dickens is still alive—a burning issue. Certainly, the performance of Anthony West in The New Yorker recently suggests that it is a living man who is being collared and haled before justice. Reviewing Mr. Johnson’s biography becomes, for Mr. West, an occasion for a violent attack on Dickens—the most violent attack, to my knowledge, in all Dickens literature.
He was not a great writer, proclaims Mr. West, but a mere entertainer, an artist who sold his birthright for popular applause. Furthermore, he was a pious fraud and a hypocrite, a veritable Pecksniff. He was not really interested in industrial reforms, but jumped on the band wagon when he saw that Mrs. Gaskell and others were making a good thing of the cause. When he attacked social abuses, he was merely following in the wake of his audience, which was way ahead of him in its clamor for social change. Far from being a critic of imperialism, he was guilty of being an imperialist of the lesser-breeds-without-the-law order; his “real” feelings about this subject are embodied not in his novels but in a private letter to a philanthropic lady written at the time of the Indian Mutiny. “... the attack on heartless economic theory,” as embodied in Scrooge, was “a safety play that can be relied upon to ruffle nobody.” Another attack on heartless economic theory, Hard Times, is “dubious social criticism ... childish in its ignorance of what businessmen are like or were like as it is in its conception of industrial problems.
“Dickens’s imagination, in matters of finance, never got beyond petty cash. None of his rich men are really wealthy, and none of them are engaged in credible affairs. Hard Times is, however, wholehearted in its attack on two things—education and Parliament—that were the really effective instruments of social reform. ...”
What is bewildering in this violence is first of all the fact that it seems to issue from an almost insensate ignorance of Dickens’ writing and life—is it education that Dickens is attacking in Hard Times or “education”? Compare the dates of Mrs. Gaskell’s Mary Barton (1848) and The Old Curiosity Shop (1841), where Dickens first assailed the factory system—who was following whom? “Petty cash”—Mr. Merdle’s transactions? Dombey not wealthy, or Jarndyce of Bleak House or Mr. Boffin, the golden dustman? And if Dickens was cut off “from easy intercourse with his intellectual equals all through his life” and surrounded himself “with an entourage of second-raters,” is this meant to be a judgment on Thackeray, the Carlyles, Mrs. Gaskell, Lord John Russell, George Eliot and George Henry Lewes, Tennyson, Landor, Mazzini, Lamartine, and Victor Hugo—Dickens’ friends and intimates? If Dickens was following in the wake of his audience, how did that audience make its views felt? Not in legislation, certainly, which lagged far behind Dickens. Was it Parliament or Dickens that was the really effective instrument of social reform?
It has been argued that Dickens the social reformer and pamphleteer swamped Dickens the artist. Edward Sackville-West put this case at its strongest when he declared that Dickens’ bathos was required to awaken pity in the hardened Victorian heart. But if this was a sin, it was a generous sin, as most of Dickens’ critics have conceded. Mr. West is the first, so far as I know, to pretend that Dickens’ art was a calculated untruth aimed to swell the volume of sales.
Yet a child (to take Dickens’ own favorite touchstone of truth and purity of response) has only to read a single chapter of Oliver Twist, say, to perceive that here is both a heated critic of society and a ready sentimentalist. We do not need a biographer to tell us that Dickens wrote his “affecting” passages with tears in his eyes; that is precisely what makes us wish to turn our own dry eyes away from the moist spectacle of the author. George Eliot also underwent a hysterical transformation as she wrote her climactic pages, the very pages we cannot read today without mortification for that gaunt, moralistic dame.
And the highbrow reader of the era was attuned to these vibrations. Daniel O’Connell, the Irish political leader, was so affected by the death of Little Nell that he burst into sobs and threw the book out the window of the railway carriage he was traveling in, groaning, “He should not have killed her.” Walter Savage Landor, Macready the actor, Carlyle, and Jeffrey the critic were all overcome by the chapter; in Jeffrey’s case, a visitor, perceiving his condition, feared she was intruding on a real bereavement. I do not agree with Mr. Johnson that this was healthy emotion; rather it has the eerie quality of a mass phenomenon, like the possession of the nuns of Loudun.
In any case, it was genuine enough, of its kind. The excessive suggestibility of the Victorians probably had something to do with “alienation,” with the transformations being wrought in man and countryside by the process of mechanization. Already, in the eighteenth century, in the early stages of the Industrial Revolution, there appeared that taste for prodigies, for the august and the sublime, that the Victorians brought to fulfillment in their passion for mountain-climbing, for gorges and precipices, for the abysmal vertigo of crime and innocence, horror and bathos. Feeling, shrinking before the industrial vistas, sought to accommodate itself to the new scale of things by developing its own kinetics. Popular authors like Dickens and George Eliot differed from the ordinary public in that they possessed an internal self-starter of emotion.
Yet if Dickens was the prosperous owner of such a gadget or patent, he was also, of all his contemporaries, the man who looked upon the new mechanized human being with the greatest sense of fear and astonishment. For this is what many of his famous “characters” are: wind-up toys, large or small, that move in jerks and starts, whose machinery whirs toilsomely before they begin to speak. How a man can become a monster or a mechanical marvel is the question that preoccupies Dickens throughout the whole of his work. And these mechanical marvels he shows us are not travesties of men invented by a satirical author; they are appallingly true to life. Mr. Dorrit, Pecksniff, Uriah Heep—these are the travesties man has made of himself.
Leaving aside the heroes and heroines, Dickens’ world is divided into two kingdoms: the kingdom of metal, which is dominated by the hunchback Quilp, that malignant Vulcan, armored and carapaced, who eats hard-boiled eggshells and prawns with their heads and tails on and cools his brazen throat by drinking boiling grog straight from the saucepan; and the kingdom of vegetables, presided over by Mr. Dick, Mr. Wemmick, and the Aged P.
The vegetable kingdom is more amiable; its inhabitants have lapsed into nature and present themselves as botanical curiosities—harmless on the whole, except for an occasional flycatcher plant. But they too have lost their humanity, which stirs in them only as a rum memory. They have obdurately become things, like the men of brass and iron, and they differ from the latter principally in that they do not treat other men as things but are content to soliloquize mystifyingly, in their own patch of ground. This obduracy is typical of all true Dickens creations: a true Dickens character never listens to the protests of reality; he inflexibly orates. In short, he has officialized himself, like Mr. Dorrit, the Father of the Marshalsea, receiving his testimonials; or Mr. Bounderby, who has invented his own authorized biography; or Mrs. Gamp, who has invented her own reference, the imaginary Mrs. Harris. All these people live in shatterproof hierarchical structures.
The thingification of man, to use Kant’s term, is Dickens’ inexhaustible subject and the source of his power and fascination. To treat another man as a thing, you must first become a very large thing yourself—an impervious thing. This was Dickens’ discovery about character, and he remains the only writer (outside of Gogol, whom in many ways he resembles) to have this dreadful insight, not as an abstract theorem but as a concrete apprehension of a process, like the processes of manufacturing that were being developed with such rapidity in his day. “There’s a young man hid with me, in comparison with which young man I am a Angel,” says the convict Magwitch, impressively, to frighten the boy Pip in the churchyard. This passage has been criticized on the ground that Magwitch, realistically, would not look upon himself as a horrid apparition. But this casual self-knowledge, precisely, is what transfixes not only the boy Pip but the reader: the man Magwitch—how is it possible?—sees what he has become and uses himself as a bogy to terrify a child in a graveyard; and the fact of the frank perception prepares for Magwitch’s redemption, the change of heart on which Dickens places so many hopes. Otherwise, the accents are those of Marlowe’s Mephistophilis: “Why this is hell, nor am I out of it.”
When Dickens tries to create virtue or manliness, he often fails (though he is very good at a kind of boyish manliness—Nicholas Nickleby, Martin Chuzzlewit, David Copperfield—with a blush still on its cheek). And yet this quality is not absent from his work, for it is present in wonderful abundance in the author himself. This was a man—again and again one is halted in the midst of a page to make this wondering observation, as though Dickens himself, and not his characters, were the marvel.
The author does not mean to display his manliness, as he displays, say, the virtue of Little Dorrit or Nell; it takes the reader unawares. He did not mean to display it in his life, but time and again the reader of any Dickens biography is halted by the blaze of energy, the bravery, the spontaneous anger, the magnanimity, the quick assumption of responsibility.
Can it be that this is what is amiss? Are today’s critics and biographers sincerely disturbed to find a man entombed in the Westminster Abbey grave? A man entombed in the novel—the last place, apparently, they would expect to find one today? Is this why even the best of Dickens’ recent critics approach him in such a gingerly fashion, as if they feared to be held accountable for any slip of the pen concerning him?
In a certain sense, of course, they are right to take these precautions, to keep their distance from Dickens and display him as a specimen that has come under official notice. Mr. West’s outburst in The New Yorker is evidence that there exists a profound hostility to Dickens that may break out anywhere without warning, though not, as one might think, in highbrow circles, where the charge “mere entertainer” might have some appropriateness, but in commercial journalism: Orville Prescott in the New York Times promptly echoed Mr. West’s judgment, and Time magazine found a citation from Lenin to prove that Dickens was not “a social revolutionary.” Like the mysterious utterances of Mr. F.’s aunt, this animus of Mr. West’s spouts up from arcane caverns that perhaps underlie the whole of modern “humanistic” culture.
A book review of Charles Dickens: His Tragedy and Triumph, by Edgar Johnson.