This chapter challenges the assumption that Dickens belongs in some exclusive way to Anglo-Saxons by opening a window on to
the enormous quantity of European writing that unmistakably acknowledges him as its master. I start by querying another commonplace
– championed by no less authoritative a Dickensian than Philip Collins – that Dickens was profoundly English, with what George
Augusta Sala calls ‘a good-humoured contempt of foreigners’.
1 This is surely hard to square with such things as Dickens’s ceaseless activity in promoting various foreign national independence
struggles in Europe, or the trouble he took to become proficient in French and Italian. It seems particularly untrue of his
relations with Italy, which clearly go beyond intense political engagement on behalf of the movement for Italian unification,
the
Risorgimento. After an initial period of generalised revulsion, Dickens quickly began to practise a sharp distinction between disgust
at the deplorable social and political conditions of Italy and love of its people, not dissimilar to a later formula about
Britain itself: ‘My faith in the people governing is, on the whole, infinitesimal; my faith in The People governed is, on
the whole, illimitable.’
2 ‘Give me the smiling face of the attendant, man or woman; the courteous manner; the amiable desire to please and to be pleased;
the light-hearted, pleasant, simple air – so many jewels set in dirt – and I am theirs again to-morrow!’ he writes in Italy,
and later in London confesses a compulsion to ‘talk to all the Italian boys who go about the streets with Organs and white
mice, and give them mints of money per l’amore della bell’Italia’.
3 ‘Italy is an abiding dream with me … Visions of going back and living there, beset me at odd times and make me restless,’
he writes in 1863, and in 1866. ‘I feel for Italy almost as if I were an Italian born’ – surely not the views of a Little
Englander.
4Dickens’s enthusiasm for other cultures explains, in part, why he was held in so much reverence abroad in his own time and
thereafter. Despite his status as a national cultural institution, we commonly think
of Shakespeare’s genius as essentially ‘universal’ rather than peculiarly ‘English’, and, after Shakespeare, no English writer
has ever enjoyed such universal fame as Dickens. Collins asserts that what he calls the ‘parochial’ elements in Dickens posed
no great barrier to enjoyment of his work by readers of other nationalities, and quotes Leo Tolstoy’s praise of Dickens’s
characters as ‘the friends of all mankind: they are a bond between man in America and man in Petersburg’.
5 I believe that Dickens is the least parochial of Victorian novelists, most particularly because of his strong affinities
with Fyodor Dostoevsky, Nikolai Gogol and Honoré de Balzac, as studied in Donald Fanger’s now classic
Dostoevsky and Romantic Realism, but also because of his revered standing with more ‘classic’ realists such as Tolstoy, Benito Pérez Galdós, Alphonse Daudet
and Alexander Kielland, all of them unquestionably and avowedly indebted to him.
Comparative reading, or indeed ‘reverse reading’, a term developed by Loralee MacPike in her useful
Dostoevsky’s Dickens of
1981, offers fresh insights into Dickens’s writing. To take as an example an emphasis (still only slowly finding its feet in Dickens
studies) on sexual themes and innuendos in his writing, the study of nineteenth-century European novels that are in some sense
‘rewritings’ of particular Dickens novels can help provide sharper focus. In Dickens they may be only obliquely hinted at,
but as Wilkie Collins’s indignant marginal comments on Forster’s assertion of a chaste ‘purity’ in sexual matters in Dickens’s
work testify, they are indubitably
there.
6 Contemporary European writers like Daudet or Galdós were much less reticent about sex than Dickens, and the study of a text
like Dostoevsky’s
The Insulted and the Injured, consciously based on
The Old Curiosity Shop, can lead to thorough reappraisal of the degree to which ‘taboo’ subjects such as sadism, masochism and child prostitution
are present in Dickens’s novel.
What is surprising is that so few critics have mined this rich vein of material, especially since the field was so decisively
opened decades ago by George Ford and Ada Nisbet, in
Dickens and his Readers of
1955, and in Lionel Stevenson’s
Victorian Fiction: A Guide to Research of 1964. Ada Nisbet in particular deserves our attention here, because she perceived that an approach to Dickens through
European writers like Dostoevsky helps us to see the strongly ‘modern’ and ‘modernist’ features of his later fiction. She
quotes Hugh Walpole, remarking in 1929 that these late novels ‘have not been sufficiently studied in their strange and almost
uncanny relationship to certain aspects of the modern novel’. As Steven Marcus claimed in 1961, ‘true respect for Dickens
as an artist had to wait until the
work of Joyce, Proust, Faulkner, and Kafka made his techniques more familiar’.
7By and large, his European contemporaries were aware that Dickens’s writing was unorthodox, and looked forward to future challenges
to the gold standard of ‘classic realism’. In France, there is the testimony of the proto-modernist Charles Baudelaire, invoking
Dickens in the fragmentary ‘Puisque réalisme il y a’ of 1855, and distinguishing between the realism of Courbet, which he
criticises, and the divergent manner of Champfleury, to whom he ascribes a ‘Dickensian way of seeing … if things appear to
him in a somewhat fantastic light, it’s because his eye mystically contracts a little’, apparently seeing the novelist as
a poetic alchemist who transmutes base matter into spirit.
8In Germany there are similar voices starting with Otto Ludwig, who in the 1840s champions Dickens as the master of what he
calls
Poetischer Realismus, and calls on German writers to take him as their model. Next comes Friedrich Spielhagen (1829–1911), in his 1858 essay ‘Der
Humor’, admiring both W. M. Thackeray and Dickens but drawing a sharp contrast between the two. He writes that ‘Thackeray,
precisely because of addiction to photographic exactitude, remains anchored in prose, whereas Dickens, because he has the
courage to push ugliness to an extreme, creates truly poetic effects.’ Later, in 1883, he claims that Dickens possessed in
the highest degree the two great gifts necessary to an epic poet, that is to say, incredible powers of observation together
with ‘what of course finally makes him a poet: fantasy’.
9 The emphasis is the same in Wilhelm Dibelius’s important book
Charles Dickens (1916), according to which ‘the innermost essence of Dickens is the combination of sharp realism with mystical symbolism’,
and in Stefan Zweig’s
Drei Meister of 1920 (concerning Dickens, Balzac and Dostoevsky): ‘his great, unforgettable achievement is simply to discover the romantic
side of bourgeois life, the poetic quality of the prosaic’.
10Turning to Russia, it is Henry Gifford who best explains how Dickens struck so powerful a chord with great writers such as
Tolstoy and Dostoevsky: ‘It was the primitive, the poetic and myth-working element in his imagination that gained Dickens
an entry to Russian literature as if by an underground passage, so that he occupied it from the inside.’
11 The decisive breakthrough came with Irinarkh Vvedensky’s translation of
Dombey and Son, and the praise of the influential critic V. G. Belinsky, who did not live to read the novel’s conclusion, but who recorded
in December 1847 his admiration of Dickens’s great ability to combine realism with the fantastic: ‘This is something, abnormally,
miraculously
beautiful! I did not suspect that sharply, deeply realistic characters could be represented with such rich fantasy. This is
a revelation to me, not only in Dickens’s books, but in human nature as well.’
Vvedensky’s translations in fact had a significant part to play in the formation of such a conception of the novelist. An
associate of Nikolay Chernyshevsky – revolutionary, critic and philosopher – who ‘insisted that Dickens sought poetry in reality,
in the commonplace’, Vvedensky took great liberties with the originals in an attempt to reproduce for Russian readers the
wildness and strangeness of Dickens’s imagination. As a result Russian readers of Dickens were from the start unlikely to
bracket him with those realists who sought scientific neutrality by flattening their style; in a reaction against naturalism,
the satirist Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin declared that ‘he had grown to hate Zola and the Goncourts’ after reading Dickens
in Vvedensky’s translations.
12I conclude this very brief survey of critical reactions to Dickens in the nineteenth century with a glance at Spain. The key
figure here is another writer of stature, Benito Perez Galdós, who labelled Dickens his ‘maestro mas amado’. In 1868 he translated
The Pickwick Papers and wrote an essay on Dickens in
La Nacion, focussing on the modernist elements in Dickens, and underlining the preponderance of the ‘scriptible’ over the ‘lisible’.
Dickens obviously belongs for Galdós with the Impressionists, for he describes him as ‘a great colourist who produces his
effects with indeterminate masses of colour, of light and shade, without permitting you to see clearly each object in particular
or to delineate every feature separately’.
13 But his contemporary Marcelino Mendez y Pelayo, attempting in 1897 to compare Dickens and Galdós, goes further still in ascribing
to both of them ‘dreamlike qualities, in the wealth of detail seen as through a microscope … in the depiction of exceptional
states of consciousness, madness, sleepwalkers, seers and strange types of all sorts’.
14Let us now turn to a few of the numerous remarkable European appropriations of Dickens’s work in the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries. Alas for reasons of space we must leave out the rewritings of
David Copperfield by Tolstoy in
Childhood, Boyhood, Youth and by Daudet in
Le Petit Chose. I will concentrate on one novel,
Dombey and Son, and chiefly on two of its key scenes – Paul Dombey quizzing his father about money, and Paul on his deathbed. This is because
I take the Brechtian concept
die Fabel to be relevant to Dickens, partly because of the vivid theatricality that characterises his novels, but more essentially
because of the importance in his writing of what Elizabeth Wright calls ‘invented happenings invented and shaped in response
to ideas’.
15 Cardinal Dickensian scenes
of such intense vividness acquire the status of myth and figure prominently in European reactions to his work. I have in mind
Oliver Twist asking for more, David Copperfield biting his stepfather, Nell on her deathbed, as well as the scenes examined
here. All of them concern children, for Dickens’s delineations of children were universally admired by Europeans. There is
Ivan Turgenev, modestly ruing his incapacity to compete in depicting children in his own marvellous short story ‘Bezhin Meadow’,
or Stefan Zweig, aptly giving Dickens global rather than parochial status when he writes of Dickens’s children that ‘he transcends
the limitations of being English, or even of being human, in this Dickens is great and incomparable without qualification’.
16We may give the German writer Otto Ludwig the honour of being the first writer inspired by the unforgettable scene where Paul
poses questions like ‘what is money? … what can it do? … why didn’t money save me my Mama?’ (
Dombey and Son, ch. 8). Not long after 1847, he began a story whose ironic title
Es hat noch keinen Begriff [
She Doesn’t Understand Yet] immediately expresses an obvious debt to this scene. The child who supposedly ‘doesn’t understand yet’ is called Liesle,
and she asks embarrassing questions in repetitive cadences that clearly echo those of Paul Dombey: ‘“What is the correct thing
to do here, Cousin Annemarth?” “We must do what is right.” “And what then is right?”’ Ludwig also copies what he calls Dickens’s
Gebärdenspiel or play of gestures. Paul rubbing his hand on his chair, or looking into the fire, or Dombey adjusting his neckerchief: such
clearly expressive gestures in Dickens find their equivalent in Annemarth’s body language, as she declares her unwillingness
or inability to communicate with the child by wrapping her hands in her apron and sitting with her chin on her knees.
17 There are echoes of the same scene in D. H. Lawrence’s ‘The Rocking-Horse Winner’, in the anxious questions of another child
named Paul, also destined to die at a tragically early age: ‘Is luck money, mother?’
18The novel
Gift [
Poison] of 1883 by Kielland, who James Brown describes as the ‘Norwegian Dickens’, combines a similar exchange with the famous episode
of Paul Dombey’s death. In this version the question-and-answer structure of the ‘What is money?’ conversation is grafted
on to the deathbed scene to produce a savagely ironic
dialogue des sourds between a distraught mother beseeching and questioning her son in Norwegian and the dying boy answering her in Doctor Blimber’s
Latin. The precocious student responds to his mother’s increasingly urgent pleas that he recognise her with a series of complex
Latin declensions, dying with the words: ‘
Mensa rotunda’.
19But in my view the two finest rewritings of
Dombey and Son are by the great Spanish realist novelist Galdós. In the first of these,
Miau, the major focus is on the child, Luis, orphaned like Paul Dombey, ‘shortish, timid and pale … looked like eight though he
might have been ten’.
20 His mother is dead, and he lives with his maternal grandparents, his grandfather, desperately seeking an administrative post
in government, the central adult male in his life. He falls ill of course, like Paul, and suffers from convulsions in which
he hallucinates tragicomic question-and-answer sessions with God, a handsome old man with a long white beard who chides him
for poor performance in class: ‘Why did you imagine that France is bounded on the north by the Danube, and that the Po passes
through Pau? What a lot of nonsense! Do you think that’s what I made the world for, to have you … turning it upside down every
few minutes … How can you expect me to find your grandfather a post if you don’t do your lessons?’ (60–1).
The child, then, comes to feel it is his fault the grandfather cannot find a job. It looks as if the Dombey paradigm deployed in Kielland’s Gift or Lawrence’s ‘The Rocking-Horse Winner’ will be played out yet again, that the novel will end with the death of another
child victim. In a brilliant ironic reversal, however, the patriarchal father God here takes as his pharmakos the grandfather rather than the grandson. The instrument of this sacrifice is, however, Luis himself, when he tells the grandfather
that God sees no hope for him: ‘last night he told me that they won’t give you a post, and that this is a very wicked world,
and that there’s nothing more for you here and the sooner you go to heaven the better’ (265). The grandfather draws the necessary
consequence – God has been saying the same to him, he says – and commits suicide.
In the second text, Galdós concentrates on Dombey the father, reincarnated as the moneylender and property owner Torquemada,
whose name points to the Spanish Inquisition as another matrix of the text, for this is to be an ironic morality tale about
a biter bitten: ‘I’m going to recount how the inhuman man who consumed so many human lives in flames went to the stake himself.’
21 Prior to the inevitable calamity engulfing him and his son, Torquemada takes a sadistic pleasure in ‘roasting’ his victims
in the manner of Quilp. He loses his wife, as does Dombey, and must bring up a son and daughter alone, the former, as in Dickens,
the absolute apple of his father’s eye.
The son Valentinito in this book is presented deliberately without internal focalisation as a colourless cypher, a mathematical
prodigy to equal the child hero of Aldous Huxley’s ‘Young Archimedes’, another of the
seemingly endless series of texts modelled on
Dombey and Son. He shares ‘all that was strange, and old, and thoughtful’ (
Dombey and Son, ch. 12) in Paul Dombey’s character: ‘The boy’s seriousness astounded all the friends of the household, and some even said
he was like an old man.’ The telling phrase for him is ‘el monstruo de la edad presente’ – the ‘phenomenon’ or ‘monster’ of
the present age. His father imagines for him a fantasy future reminiscent of the ingenuity of the mathematician Joseph Fourier
or the caricatures of J. J. Grandville: ‘What an engineer Valentín would be if he lived! He’d invent trains that ran from
here to Peking in five minutes, balloons to sail through the sky and boats to travel underwater, and other things never before
seen or even dreamed of.’
22But, of course, the intertextual paradigm decrees that one day he shall fall sick in school and be carried home by a teacher.
Doctor Quevedo diagnoses meningitis, and warns the father that his son may die: Torquemada is now well and truly at the stake.
In scenes full of wild and savage ironic humour, he attempts to persuade the Almighty to spare his son by abandoning his pitiless
cruelty towards those who cannot pay. His new-found charity, however, encounters, first incredulity, and then vehement rejection
from those to whom it is offered. Torquemada’s attempt at bargaining with God fails, his son dies, and after the expensive
show of grief he puts on at the funeral he resumes the sadistic torture of his victims in full earnest, declaring in the final
words of the story: ‘If I ever show mercy again, damn it, I hope they hang me for it!’
23 Even more markedly than in Kielland, the story of Paul Dombey’s sacrificial death is rewritten here with a ferocious bitterness
that envisages no prospect of paternal reform.
To conclude, we may say that many great European writers learnt imaginative daring from Dickens, recognising, like George
Bernard Shaw, his genius for ‘knowing how to be unerringly true and serious whilst entertaining your reader with every freak
… that imagination and humour can conceive at their freest and wildest’.
24 Indeed, there may still be truth in G. K. Chesterton’s paradoxical reformulation of the comparison between Thackeray and
Dickens: ‘Thackeray has become classical; but Dickens has done more: he has remained modern.’
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