Dickens

BBC Radio 3, 31 May 1970²²

I was struck on reading Dickens for the first time by his pessimism, his sense of the inexorable process of history which drags human beings to their destinies, in spite of any action which they may take on their own behalf. I’ve often thought about the similarity between him and Darwin, about the strange parallel between the theory of natural selection and Dickens’s great images of destruction in which only a few people survive, except that in Dickens’s case it’s not necessarily the fittest who survive. You get a feeling that the public Dickens would like to think that virtue is rewarded and that right prevails; and if one were to trace out the elementary lines of the plot, one would imagine that Dickens was an elementary moralist. But the events finally are so enormous that the individuals do become dwarfed, and you feel that underneath Dickens is secretly – perhaps unconsciously to himself – acknowledging the violent and destructive indifference of both nature and history.

It would be facile to say that he was simply a pessimist. It’s just that underneath that jocular exterior, underneath that love of human foible, there is something much more secret, something much more passionate and peculiar and mad than people are publicly willing to acknowledge in him. Because to see Dickens as a purveyor of darkness would be to take him out of the area of BBC serials, the area of Christmas cards and of the jolly plum-pudding and Toby-jug world which makes him so popular. The Victorians had a very complex sense of depression and the part which depression played in the Victorian literary imagination has been underestimated. They were very torn between their sense of seriousness and duty and moral responsibility on the one hand, and their romantic sense of the imaginative power and virtue which were resident in the child on the other. This presumably was why they were so outraged by the Darwinian suggestion that we had descended from the apes: the apes are a sort of hairy children, and the idea that these frivolous coconut-throwing monsters should be our ancestors appalled them, since to be a heavily-suited, responsible, industrial creature making the wealth of England must have appeared to the Victorians to be the prize achievement. To have to acknowledge within themselves either the ape or the child, and to see in some cases that there was value in such an acknowledgment and value in such an ancestry, produced a sense of conflict which may have been one of the origins of this melancholy and despair which run through Victorian literature, particularly among the men.

It’s clear when you read Dickens that to be a child at that period was a wretched business. Yet even in the most depressed of all the Dickensian childhoods – in Copperfield’s, for example – there is a sense of some mysterious imaginative power which is going to be extinguished by the passage through the blacking factory into adult life. I will always remember, for instance, the minute perception that the child has in Copperfield of Peggotty’s fingers or thumbs being like nutmeg graters: that sudden, almost hallucinatory vividness with which the child sees a tiny detail of the adult world.23 One feels that as Copperfield grows up and becomes expedient he loses this minute sense of the visual world. What is so interesting about Dickens is that he himself came out intact from his passage through the blacking factory, in the sense that his visual imagination was still monstrously overdeveloped. Perhaps this is what being a successful artist is: it’s being able to survive the process of growing up and to drag a certain element of that primeval vision of childhood with you.

I often wonder how important fear and repression and darkness and unexpectedness and gloom are to the creative imagination. One hesitates, for example, to take children to frightening films or plays and I don’t just mean violent plays where they’re going to see sadism: I’m thinking simply of gloomy or pessimistic plays. One always thinks that children shouldn’t be exposed to this sort of thing, that they should have a bright, pleasant, interesting and creative childhood. But looking back on experiences which frightened me a great deal when I was a child, I can say quite clearly that they are, in fact, very important elements of what elements of imagination I now have in adult life. That the experience of fear, as long as it’s not overwhelming and damaging and really mutilating, is an absolutely essential part of the imagination. One of the things which I feel about modern life – and in a sense I share this feeling with Malcolm Muggeridge – is that there’s now an orthodoxy which insists that happiness is so much to be desired that every single institution, every single occasion, every single incident of our lives, should be bent in order to achieve this for ourselves and for our offspring. There is a feeling today that death perhaps is a postponable accident and that the doctors will have it licked before long, that we can transplant organs ad infinitum if not ad nauseam, and that human life can survive and human happiness be perpetuated for ever; a feeling that there are no glooms, no dark areas and no inexplicable patches. Now, in removing all these things we have gone some way to removing perhaps the essential features of the creative imagination which in fact rests ultimately on the sense of dread, the sense of mystery, the sense of the uncanny.

One gets a feeling, with Dickens, of one of those town-hall clocks in Nuremberg which display a series of very simplified, very grotesque allegorical figures who come racketing past us as the chimes occur, but who nevertheless seem somehow to project and summarize the human condition in a very effective way. The interaction of all these strange, monstrous, embossed, warty creatures who run through a Dickens novel is like a medieval allegory. The characters have vast hook-noses and monstrous gleaming blue eyes and very gaudy clothes, but in their total collaboration they communicate something essential about human life.

Dickens’s sexuality often took the form, as it did with a lot of Victorians, of a sort of paedophilia. A tiny, chubby, rounded knee, seen through the childish petticoat, attracts the child molester in Dickens; and the only female characters in Dickens who seem to have any sort of sexual glow about them are in fact these young, discontented, sad, downtrodden girls – Little Dorrit and Little Nell, of course. It’s like a Pre-Raphaelite innocence. The Victorians would have thought of this as the illustration of all that was sweet and just; after all, the child in Victorian iconography occurs again and again as the very symbol of innocence and of affection and of moral spotlessness. Therefore it’s a very crafty manoeuvre of the imagination to desire the very thing which in fact is a representation of the denial of desire. The little angels that hover over the Victorian tombs, the child’s hands that come in Victorian séances bearing flowers, the whole underworld of sentimental literature dealing with the death of children, and the little angels that come back – all show the place that the child played in the Victorian imagination as a representative of virtue. Perhaps it was because of this that they came to stand also as a paradigm of sexual desirability. In this way, Dickens is the victim of his times.

One of the interesting things is to ask why it’s possible for someone like George Eliot to have written so intelligently about sexual relationships, thereby contrasting herself with Dickens, who seems so incapable of dealing with this subject. I wonder sometimes whether it isn’t to do with the position of women; whether it isn’t precisely because the woman was so functionless in public life that it was much easier for her to acknowledge these deeper streams of feeling and to deal with them honestly: she would not jeopardize her reputation by doing this. George Eliot had the advantage of being a true intellectual who finds every detail of human life a matter for discussion and examination. Dickens is not like this. There’s a sense of the lapsed Methodist about him. Also, Dickens was a man, determined to make his way in the world and be a public success. And for a person of this sort it would have been very difficult to write with honesty about sexual affairs.

Dickens’s sense of the destructive effects of the city is one of his most significant achievements. There’s a marvellous description of the devouring ferocity of the city seen from afar in Dombey, when he looks towards it from some brick-filled desert about five miles outside London. Dickens describes the character going on towards this awful machine, which was going to engulf him and turn him into one of a number of impersonal particles jostling with each other in a giant process.24 In this sense he’s the creator of one of the most potent metaphors of human society that I know of.

I think, too, of that wonderful description of the morning after the suicide of Merdle in Dorrit: of the rumour spreading through the great city and of the sense that everyone – no matter who – in London is somehow going to be brought crashing to their ruin by the ruin of this single man. Dickens has an extraordinary capacity for building these doom-laden metaphors in conjunction with a whole series of subsidiary images. It’s not just the giant Merdle collapse: it’s also the minor metaphor of the dark house which gives way beneath the weight of its own brooding evil.²⁵ It’s similar in some ways to the death by spontaneous combustion of Mr Krook in Bleak House. After Krook dies, the young lawyers upstairs become aware of the catastrophe in an extremely peculiar and surrealistic way: by the fact that grease starts to run down the window panes and a sort of greasy smoke starts to fill the room.²⁶ This is a completely impossible circumstance but Dickens is using it with such power and such control that he’s somehow capable of making us believe that it has reality – which is the ultimate mastery of the imagination.