IT seems well to state clearly and briefly in front of this book what we offer to do in it. We have not undertaken a general survey of Dickens, believing that all such enterprises are merely academic, and unprofitable critically. Our purpose is to enforce as unanswerably as possible the conviction that Dickens was one of the greatest of creative writers; that with the intelligence inherent in creative genius, he developed a fully conscious devotion to his art, becoming as a popular and fecund, but yet profound, serious and wonderfully resourceful practising novelist, a master of it; and that, as such, he demands a critical attention he has not had. We should like to make it impossible for any academic authority to feel that, in ‘doing’ assorted ‘Dickens characters’ with histrionic gusto he pays the recognized appropriate tribute to the creative gift, or for any intellectual – academic, journalist or both – to tell us with the familiar easy assurance that Dickens of course was a genius, but that his line was entertainment, so that an account of his art that implies marked intellectual powers – a capacity, for example, to read and understand Bentham – is obviously absurd. We wish to make it impossible for such critics to assert, or assume, that any character from the novels of Dickens’s maturity might have equally appeared in any other of the novels than the one in which it in fact functions as an inseparable part of the whole. And we have thought it essential to register specific protests against the trend of American criticism of Dickens, from Edmund Wilson onwards, as being in general wrong-headed, ill-informed in ways we have demonstrated, and essentially ignorant and misdirecting.
In this connection we should perhaps explain our preference for Forster’s Life of Dickens as a source over modern, more ‘correct’ biographies, whether British or, still less acceptable, American. The fact is that Forster, whatever his sins of omission, suppression, or alteration of some letters or documents to give himself greater importance in relation to Dickens in the eyes of his world, does give the only convincing representation of Dickens as the creator of the novels for those capable of reading them with critical perception and disinterestedness – witness the quotations from Forster’s Life in our Epigraphs. And Forster, with his intimate personal knowledge of his friend (a friendship which survived storms), gives us the sense, as no other biographer does or now can, of being in the same room as Dickens, and even, more important, of being really inward with Dickens’s personality and character, and without being concerned to make out a case by ‘interpreting’ his subject. The ineptness of scholars as literary critics is a notorious fact. Essential ignorance can consort with a great deal of scholarly industry in assembling irrelevant data, and misrepresentation with interpreting that so-called ‘factual matter’, owing to a more or less unconscious bias, and with insinuating, through critical stupidity, false assumptions about the subject’s art, character, personality and history: the subject often becoming a victim. In these respects the older biographers are much the safest, and even, surprisingly, the most useful still, for they shared and understood the age of which they wrote. They are also less pretentious as critics, have no modern psychological jargon, and were more really knowledgeable in presenting their subjects, as well as more truly respectful and essentially more inward with them. George Eliot’s widower thus contrives to provide an intimate, indispensable and unsurpassed portrait of, and understanding of the inner life of, Miss Evans and G. H. Lewes’s consort, without Mary Anne-or Marian-ing her in an ineffectual attempt to achieve familiarity, such as we have met in recent biographies from which after all no such appreciation or clear portrait is obtainable. Thus for instance Professor Edgar Johnson’s biography of Dickens cannot claim to have superseded or even to rival Forster’s, or Professor Gordon Haight’s to be as illuminating a guide to George Eliot the novelist as John Cross’s, while the biographical notices and memoirs of anyone who knew D. H. Lawrence and wrote of him without malice are undoubtedly to be preferred to Professor Harry T. Moore’s. The untenable position of those academics and journalists who are determined to explain away Dickens’s creative œuvre as the uncontrolled product of childhood obsessions or experiences, or of a psychological abnormality, or of a consistent lifelong exhibition of manias, is examined in a Note below.
The method we decided on was to take the six great novels as lending themselves peculiarly to the purpose when considered in relation to the development of Dickens’s powers, and to discuss them each in terms of intrinsic interest but in chronological order and in reference to each other. The book was conceived as a book: the fact that a chapter is devoted to each of these novels doesn’t reduce it to a collection of essays. The purpose is everywhere there as the informing spirit, determining approach and presentation, and the chronological order belongs to the sustained argument.
The fourth chapter, that on Hard Times, originally appeared in Scrutiny as inaugurating this approach to Dickens, and more generally to the Novel, as early as Spring 1947, being the initial essay in a series the title of which, ‘The Novel as Dramatic Poem’, conveyed the idea of the enterprise. Received at the time with ridicule, this title and this essay have since been accepted as marking a new approach both to Dickens (and effecting a revolution in Dickens criticism) and to the art of the novel generally. It was reprinted as something in the nature of an appendix to The Great Tradition, where its inclusion testified to the convinced and emphatic recognition of Dickens’s status. The inclusion was strongly urged by the other of the collaborating pair; both in fact realized that the complete omission of Dickens from the book would be ridiculous, and if its inclusion looked odd, it was meant as an avowal at any rate of default in respect of Dickens and of a deferred commitment to making the default good. The critical significance of the slowness to recognize Dickens’s pre-eminence among English novelists – he may be seen surely as the Shakespeare of the novel – is touched on explicitly in the beginning of the first chapter (on Dombey and Son), and is implicitly developed in the book as a whole.
The critique of Dombey and Son, originally written as introducing the book for its inclusion (which was cancelled later by the publishers on financial grounds) in a series of English classics, was published only in an American quarterly (The Sewanee Review, 1962) – still with the limitations entailed by the original conditions of writing. In Chapter I there is the completer treatment of Dombey conceived in relation to the stated plan and purpose of our book. Some changes of the same kind will be found in Chapter 4.
No notes of the kinds exemplified above are called for by the four chapters initialled ‘Q.D.L.’. These were all written ad hoc as constituent parts of the book when it had been conceived as something to be undertaken forthwith, and worked at in an intensive and sustained way until completed. The last of the four – it concludes the book – is a study of Dickens’s use of illustrations as accessories of his art in conveying his meaning to his readers; it has an immediate relevance to the central critical themes of this book. And since it was in the earlier part of his creative career that Dickens first habitually asserted a positive and authoritative interest in the illustrating of his text, the chapter, it seems to us, adds to the direct discussion of the major work an appropriate recall of the earlier work out of which the great novelist emerged. It stresses moreover the importance for Dickens of having such a live tradition of illustration and a public which understood it – of being able to assume this and develop it for the purposes of his art; while showing that the death of the tradition, owing to the characteristic and fundamental change in the later Victorian ethos, meant a serious narrowing of taste which pointed to a corresponding impoverishment of art, poetry and literature generally, so that Dickens’s death marked the end of his era.
As for the mode of collaboration, the collaborators have in their respective chapters – as will no doubt be noted – been guided by the spontaneities of the personal judgement and the personal habit of approach, and also by the experience they both have of the most profitable method of criticizing Dickens derived from many years’ individual teaching of university students. The authors here started by knowing that they were in essential agreement about Dickens and about the kind of book needed. The differences of idiosyncrasy, it seemed to them, could only be an advantage in the execution of the collaboratively conceived project, and the upshot, they judge, answers reasonably to their idea of what was required and what they are prepared to stand by. To repeat the insistence, it asks to be read as a book, and not as a collection of essays.
There is a note to be added under the head of ‘acknowledgments’. As Chichele Lecturer at Oxford in 1964, the writer of Chapter 5 discussed Little Dorrit together with – in a minor way – Hard Times – under the title: ‘Dickens, Art and Social Criticism’. The different emphasis entailed by the present undertaking necessitated for Chapter 5, not only an extended, but a re-thought treatment of Little Dorrit. Nevertheless, the given collaborator is very conscious that the attention he devoted to that great novel in preparing the Chichele Lectures has told decisively in the critical discussion offered here, and he would like to express the gratitude he feels to All Souls’ College for the opportunity and intellectual stimulus the appointment as Chichele Lecturer gave him. Parts of Chapter 2, on the relation between Dickens and Tolstoy, and with regard to the two levels at which Dickens may be read, were delivered as lectures by the other collaborator at the universities of Bristol and Aberdeen.
The Marxizing and other ideologically-slanted interpretations of Dickens’s achievement were comparatively harmless and are now a dead letter, but the echoes and elaborations of Edmund Wilson’s theory of Dickens’s art – as being the volcanic explosions of a manic-depressive – are still with us on the air, in print and in lectures being given in this centenary year to academic audiences and learned societies. Alternative accounts are that Dickens’s art is evidently the product of ‘an anal dandy’, that it is based on and conditioned by childhood terrors and fantasies from nurse’s story-telling, or by the brief spell the boy Dickens endured in the blacking-factory. The favourite method is to amalgamate these and others with the assumption that the art can be explained away in the light of such miscellaneous and quite unconnected data (or alleged data) as: the uninhibited capers of Dickens’s youth; the outbreaks common to men of letters against exploitation by their publishers and the touchiness and irritability almost inevitable in literary genius; the trials of an unsatisfactory marriage and the wholly conjectural torments of a possibly unsatisfactory liaison; the physical exhaustion of an overworked, much-tried and over-convivial editor and journalist who, in the manner of his day and profession, kept himself going ultimately with stimulants, undermining his health; the nervous shock and physical damage due to a railway accident late in life, while writing Our Mutual Friend (during which accident, however, he behaved with admirable self-control); and finally the greatly exaggerated accounts and implausible explanations of his dramatic readings from his novels at the end of his life. No discouraging scepticism has, as far as one knows, been incurred by these amateur psychologists of our academic scene; but no trained psychologist seems to have condoned, much less supported, any of these assumptions and theories. Besides the evident fact that such self-indulgent vapourings give no satisfaction to anyone but their perpetrators (for they shepherd us away from the texts and can only misdirect for the approach to Dickens’s creative achievement), they reveal in their authors a refusal, or an inability, to read the novels as literature: for the complex sensibility, in general so marvellously controlled and directed objectively into a unique form in each of the novels of Dickens’s maturity, gives the lie to such crude and cheap attempts to dispose of the created entities.
The theories are also a travesty of the facts that we know of Dickens’s personality and behaviour. What a weight of academic capital has been made of that innocent hornpipe danced by the young man outside that window! – Quilp-like comparisons have even been made on the strength of that and similar lively capers and pranks in the young manhood of poor Charles – bearing witness only to the innocence of these academic minds as to normal youth and also as to the manners, running naturally to high jinks, of that phase of English social life Dickens was reared in, of the tone and habits of which he inevitably partook. Dickens’s was a pre-Victorian England of course, with the uninhibited licences of the Regency lower-middle-class, plus a temporary plunge by him into the raffish underworld (as Mr Micawber’s son) which extended into the society of the debtor’s prison, and the streets in which old Mr Weller boasted that he had provided his son with an essential education when (like Dickens) Sam was ‘wery young’. If Dickens was in these respects abnormal, so was practically everyone else in his youth. Cruikshank, a much older man than Dickens and a favourite companion, was a great deal more ‘eccentric’, wildly unconventional (that is, by later Victorian standards, which were prim) and more startling in his antics than Dickens was ever known to be, while a gentleman like Thackeray could waggle his legs out of his carriage window in triumph as he drove past without arousing adverse comment. The habitual buffoonery, amounting to licence, of another gentleman who was also a cleric and nearly a bishop, Sydney Smith, was welcomed in the highest society as well as the most intellectual of the day. Practical jokes of the most unrefined kind and even savagery, histrionics and travesty for fun, hoaxes or ‘flams’, uninhibited punning and broad jests, excessive tippling, as well as a now unknown degree of sentimental susceptibility, were characteristic of the age Dickens was formed in. But what was characteristic of him is surely that he grew or raised himself out of its influences instead of being their victim – the change from the author of Pickwick to the author of Dombey is as decisive as impressive.
Social historians and literary-critical historians once knew such facts of life. G. M. Young in his Victorian England: Portrait of an Age rightly stresses the characteristic ‘exuberance’ of the earlier Victorians, as when audiences even at Bowood sobbed at Tom Moore’s songs, ‘when Ministers sometimes wept at the Table; when the sight of an infant school could reduce a civil servant to a passion of tears … an age of flashing eyes and curling lips’, and concludes that ‘out of the horse-play of sentimental Cockneys [came] Dickens’. Dickens moreover had worked in a law-office, and the society of Dick Swivellers (are Dick’s capers to be taken as pathological?) can only have encouraged the normal adolescent histrionic tendencies which Dickens exploited for humorous purposes – a conditioning to which purposes was inevitable at first. Such deliberate playfulness and exaggerated whimsicality has been solemnly taken for morbidity, as in the case of his prolonged dama of frustrated passion for the young Queen and jealousy of Prince Albert, though well understood for what it was by Forster who mentions that it was a joint jape with two friends, of Dickens’s. Professor Oliver Elton in his Survey of English Literature (1830– 80) had made similar points to G. M. Young’s in citing the (inevitable) literary influences of this period on Dickens as a young novelist and a man of his time. He mentions as typical Theodore Hook, ‘farce-maker, journalist, essayist, novelist, punster, practical jester, impromptu rhymester, and Bohemian’ whose characters were a source of early characterization for Dickens, and that Hook actually relates in his novels some of his own outrageous ‘flams’, adding that while Hook and Surtees and others of that kind were ‘not exactly literature’, they were ‘the cause of literature in others’, for instance, Dickens. Yes, indeed, and deductions therefore from the contents and tone of the early batch of Dickens’s novels must be checked by such considerations (a precaution ignored by Edmund Wilson) – for how, as a hard-driven young aspiring writer could Dickens fail to be of his ambience, draw on his predecessors, and satisfy such a public’s tastes? ‘Even allowing for the change of taste, there is a vulgar callousness about most of them that is not amusing. The cheaper jokes of Sydney Smith, the sarcasms of Macaulay, the horse-play in Marryat’s novels, the manners of old Lady Holland, the illustrations of Cruikshank and Douglas Jerrold’s merry and vulgar work – all belong, if we will, to a more robust age (pre-Victorian at first)’ says Elton, writing in 1920 as a later Victorian gentleman. Such data show us the matrix in which Dickens was originally shaped as a writer and a person, and no suppositious tracing to childhood impressions is needed to find the source for Dickens’s use at first of grotesque, savage and violent activities and personalities in his fictions, for they were the commonplaces of Grub Street and High Society alike. (One might as well allege a death-wish in the writer for the frequent deaths of children, babies and wives, but of course these were factual in the first half of the 19th century.) What distinguishes Dickens is that he could make of a Quilp a study in sadistic malice, showing his critical detachment from the inheritance of his literary and social environment, and his own better informed insights, the insights of a genius and one fortunately informed also, through his literary tastes, with better influences from a finer past of English literature – his two greatest assets. We should not however under-rate the range of possible or permitted feeling in this uninhibited society, for along with the ribald jests, the noisy waggishness and the appearance even of Mr Punch, in Sydney Smith there was, as in others of his world, not only brilliant wit but the unexpected capacity for a sensibility of another order: Fanny Price in Mansfield Park was ‘one of his (Smith’s) prime favourites’.
As to the recent fashion for attributing as characteristic of Dickens’s art deforming terrors and fixations set up by nursery tales of horror, folk-tales and fairy-tales imparted in his childhood, it is surely decisive that he never, in any novel, to my knowledge, shows a child suffering from such an heritage but, on the contrary, stresses that children essentially need the old folk-lore and fairy-tales and the magic cycle of the Arabian Nights, as part of their full imaginative development. That he should write up for purposes of journalism, with obvious playfulness and pleasure in blood-curdling reminiscence, tales of horror and popular nursery bogies of the time (such as Susan Nipper harmlessly uses to chasten little Miss Floy) is quite beside the point. Dickens the journalist was a lightly assumed personality very often, and we can surely gather from his style and tone how seriously to take him on such occasions. What his letters show, besides the same histrionic attitudes and high spirits, is the confident and devoted writer for whom his profession was the main consideration in his life. Dickens’s consistent courtesy, generosity and unstinted helpfulness to his contributors as an editor, and his high standard of conscientious professionalism throughout his writing life and in spite of his later physical and other handicaps, suggest that he had exceptional self-control and was as far as possible from being dependent on moods or uncontrollable drives in any direction, and this is borne out by the experience of many who knew him in his maturity. It is also borne out, as we argue in discussing the later fiction, by the evidence from the creative work itself, that he was not a psychically sick man or anything like a ‘case’. This is the only deduction possible to the literary critic.
The arguments drawn from Dickens’s passion at the end of his life for giving dramatic readings from his novels is a more interesting and not so simple a question as is implied in the claim that Dickens thus killed himself and that his satisfaction in the readings was the morbid one of sending his audience into fainting fits. In common with other literary artists, such as Henry James and T. S. Eliot for example, who launched deliberately into play-writing for the purpose, Dickens obviously, as his hold on life began to fail, felt the need, overpoweringly in his case as in theirs, for a visible instead of an invisible audience, to prove that the public were still responsive to his powers as an artist; the only difference in Dickens’s case was that, with his early and never-satisfied impulse to become a professional actor, he made himself his own vehicle for the purpose, taxing his exhausted physical strength and giving at times (the accounts vary widely) performances in poor taste with over-acting, and subsequently expressing excitement at the audiences’ violently responsive reactions. We should however remember such reports of an opposite kind as Annie Thackeray’s (Lady Ritchie) of ‘the last London reading from David Copperfield’ to which she was taken by her friend Kate Dickens:
It was for all the rest of my life that I heard his voice … The slight figure stood alone quietly facing the long rows of people. He seemed to be holding the great audience in some mysterious way from the empty stage. Quite immediately the story began; Copperfield and Steerforth, Yarmouth and the fishermen, and then the rising storm, all were there before us. It was not acting, it was not music, nor harmony of sound and colour, and yet I still have an impression of all these things as I think of that occasion.
Intimate with the Dickens household from childhood, her testimony to Dickens’s personality is valuable since she knew everyone in art and literature in her time, and she writes of Dickens as always impressing her by ‘that curious life-giving power of his’ which he exercised on others ‘quietly’, adding: ‘I know not what to call that power by which he inspired everyone with spirit and interest.’ Dickens is not a case for the simple-minded or the amateur psychologist to exercise himself upon; what a crazy structure even academic ‘Dickens specialists’ have reared on selected, confidently interpreted, miscellaneous or incompatible, so-called facts! One notes that a distinguished specialist like Russell Brain, in the book cited in Chapter 6 below, Some Reflections on Genius, though he recognizes in Swift a well-known and unfortunate type of case, whose disabilities in life and, consequent constricted and damaged creativeness he understands and can account for, he has no such impression of Dickens but only, in the essay devoted to him, admiration for his exceptional range of intuitive powers and his objective interest in life. It would be wiser to bear in mind Jung’s caution:
The creative aspect of life which finds its clearest expression in art baffles all attempts at rational formulation. Any reaction to stimulus may be causally explained; but the creative act, which is the absolute antithesis of mere reaction, will for ever elude the human understanding. It can only be described in its manifestations; it can be obscurely sensed but never wholly grasped.
Q.D.L.