At the beginning of the twentieth century Dickens did not enjoy a high reputation among literary critics (this state continued
until the 1930s). After Dickens’s death there had been a noticeable tendency to regard him merely as a jovial novelist for
the half-educated. In this climate George Gissing raised a supportive voice (1898).
1 However, as Gissing was a novelist working in the age of realism, he valued Dickens where the latter approximated this literary
ideal. G. K. Chesterton (1906) felt it was a misguided defence. He praised Dickens’s exaggeration and glorified the fecundity
of his comic imagination. In his opinion, ‘the units of Dickens, the primary elements, are not the stories, but the characters
who affect the stories – or, more often still, the characters who do not affect the stories’.
2 Five years later, Chesterton gathered his introductions for the Everyman’s Library editions of Dickens in one volume (1911),
in which we have his extended views on individual works – ‘
Bleak House is not certainly Dickens’s best book; but perhaps it is his best novel’ – and more of his sharp observations, such as: ‘[Dickens]
did not dislike this or that argument for oppression; he disliked oppression. He disliked a certain look on the face of a
man when he looks down on another man.’
3The last remark is approvingly quoted by George Orwell (1940) in his discussion of Dickens as a rebel. In the thirties some
critics saw Dickens as a revolutionary, proletarian writer (most notably, the biased but perceptive T. A. Jackson),
4 but Orwell did not agree. He pointed out that ‘Dickens’s criticism of society is almost exclusively moral’, and that he ‘sees
the world as a middle-class world, and everything outside these limits is either laughable or slightly wicked’. Like Chesterton,
Orwell thought the novel form was at odds with Dickens’s genius: ‘Significantly Dickens’s most successful books (not his
best books) are
The Pickwick Papers, which is not a novel, and
Hard Times and
A Tale of Two Cities, which are not funny’; ‘Dickens is obviously a writer whose parts are greater than his wholes. He is all fragments, all details
– rotten architecture, but wonderful
gargoyles – and never better than when he is building up some character who will later on be forced to act inconsistently.’
5Meanwhile, Edmund Wilson (1941) was developing his own theory of Dickens as a rebel. On the premise that his father’s imprisonment
and the drudgery in the Blacking factory ‘produced in Charles Dickens a trauma from which he suffered all his life’, Wilson
argued: ‘For the man of spirit whose childhood has been crushed by the cruelty of organized society, one of two attitudes
is natural: that of the criminal or that of the rebel.’ According to Wilson, while the theme of the criminal is prominent
in early novels, in the middle period the identification with the rebel becomes predominant, which is seen in the increasing
severity of his social criticism. In the very last novel, ‘the Dickens who had been cut off from society has discarded the
theme of the rebel and is carrying the theme of the criminal, which has haunted him all his life, to its logical development
in his fiction’. Despite his claim that Dickens was driven by an ‘unstable’ dualism, Wilson very much foregrounds the rebellious
side of the novelist. This view, as it turned out, was so influential that the jolly Christmas Dickens was virtually eclipsed.
Wilson also made a significant contribution to Dickens studies by conducting the first substantial analysis of his symbolism,
particularly that of the prison in
Little Dorrit.
6Humphry House’s was the first book-length study of Dickens written by an academic (1941). His purpose was to show ‘the connexion
between what Dickens wrote and the times in which he wrote it’, and his examination of the novelist’s views on economy, religion
and politics remains in many ways unsurpassed. House demonstrates that Dickens’s social criticism (which was inconsistent)
lay in attacking abuses that were already matters of the past – the novelist was following, rather than leading, public opinion
– and that due to the ‘continued habit of drawing on his own past’, Dickens ‘tended to push back his stories back in time’,
thereby often producing anachronisms. House’s interest led him to become the first critic to pay serious attention to Dickens’s
social journalism.
7In his ambitious and influential attempt at establishing the canon of English fiction (1948), F. R. Leavis observed that Dickens
was merely a ‘great entertainer’, and since ‘[t]he adult mind doesn’t as a rule find in Dickens a challenge to an unusual
and sustained seriousness’, he deemed the novelist unworthy of inclusion in his ‘great tradition’. However, in the appendix,
he made an exception for
Hard Times, conceding that in this novel Dickens ‘is for once possessed by a comprehensive vision’; the ‘confutation of Utilitarianism
by life’.
8Dorothy van Ghent (1950) focussed on the way Dickens treats living beings as if they were things, and things as if they were
alive. This reciprocity is ‘wrought out of the broad common intuition of the connections between moral and physical phenomena’.
‘Coincidence’, she declared, ‘is the violent connection of the unconnected; but there is no discontinuity in the Dickens world,
either between persons and things, or between the private and the public act’; it is ‘a thoroughly nervous universe, whose
ganglia spread through things and people alike’. Its central expression is the view from Todgers’s, ‘with its baffling labyrinths,
its animated chimneys, its illicit bacillary invasions, its hints of a cancerous organization’ – ‘a world in which significance
has been replaced by naked and aggressive existence’.
9J. Hillis Miller (1958), too, conceived the ‘world’ of Dickens. He postulates that Dickens’s novels form a unified totality:
‘Within this whole a single problem, the search for viable identity, is stated and restated with increasing approximation
to the hidden center, Dickens’ deepest apprehension of the nature of the world and of the human condition within it.’ In his
view, the characters’ drama becomes the author’s own, and their experiences reflect his exploratory search and personal development.
Miller traces ‘a movement from dependence on the child–parent relation as an escape from isolation to a dependence on the
more adult solution of romantic love’ in the early to middle period. Later novels show society as evil and explore the difficulties
arising from love, until
Our Mutual Friend shows in Bella and Rokesmith ‘an attitude which recognizes that value radiates not from any thing or power outside the human,
but outward from the human spirit itself’.
10Robert Garis (
1965), aiming to ‘restore something like the popular understanding of Dickens’, argues that we should not judge him by the same
standards we use when reading George Eliot or Henry James. He makes a distinction between theatrical and non-theatrical art:
the latter is the mode adopted by Eliot/James, in which the focal point is the character’s inner life; Dickens employs the
former mode, in which ‘the centre of our attention … is the artificer himself’. It was, he argues, ‘an essential part of [Dickens’s]
genius that kept him, as a rule, so strangely innocent of the spiritual exercise which we think of as natural to the serious
dramatic artist’.
11 (Barbara Hardy, though sympathising with Garis, still reads Dickens as a moral novelist, who has his ‘peculiar crudity, a
crudity that is both essential to him and valuable in literary experiment’.
12)
Since New Critics, in their concentration on the words on the page, tended to exclude history from their consideration, Philip
Collins
brought out his books on Dickens in relation to crime (1962) and education (1963) in order to redress the balance, the former
being largely an attempt to modify the image of the novelist that had been built up since Wilson; ‘a Dickens increasingly
clear-sighted in his radical opposition to the structure and ideology of his society’.
13 Collins also offers interesting testimony regarding Dickens’s critical reception: ‘it was not until around 1960 that an admiration
for Dickens altogether ceased to have a taint of endearing eccentricity in literary and academic circles’.
14Reaction to New Criticism can also be detected in Steven Marcus’s study (1965) of the first half of Dickens’s career, a synthetic
effort from the critical, biographical and socio-historical perspectives. The master theme he discerns is the father–son relationship;
the theme of careless or cruel fathers and neglected children, deriving from the novelist’s childhood experiences. In his
view, while in the early novels heroes are passive and the main impulse is ‘a deliverance from society’, the novels of the
middle period (from
Barnaby Rudge through
David Copperfield) ‘contain an attempt to achieve an accommodation within society’. By the time of
Dombey and Son, Dickens was divided between the life of aggressive will and change on one hand, and the life without will, the life of simplicity
and affectionate feeling, on the other. Marcus submits that ‘part of Dickens’s genius was to see that society itself suffered
from similar contradictions’.
15Alexander Welsh (1971) examined Dickens’s thinking about death. Dickens, he argues, associates death with the city (the City
of Destruction), but the Christian alternative (the Heavenly City) is not directly present in his novels; instead, Dickens
locates one’s immortality in the memory of the people who survive one. Welsh’s ‘search for a religious centre in Dickens’
leads him to the hearth, where the heroine stands against death (that she often plays the role of wife, sister and daughter
all in one embodies the ‘timelessness of the female principle’).
16 The literary value of the heroines as characters, however, does not concern Welsh. It is extensively dealt with by Michael
Slater, who argues that in the period from
Dombey to
Little Dorrit the novelist’s imagination was deeply engaged with women, creating passionate, intelligent figures – Betsey Trotwood being
‘the finest flowering’.
17F. R. Leavis (1970), now regarding Dickens as a serious novelist worthy of ample treatment, pronounces that ‘
Little Dorrit confronts the technologico-Benthamite world with a conception of man and society to which it is utterly blank’, and places
him in the company of Blake and
Lawrence; ‘the vindicator[s] of the spirit – that is, of life’. Q. D. Leavis, for her part, provocatively argues that in
David Copperfield Dickens tries to create, not his autobiographical reflection, but ‘a typical male history in that age’;
Great Expectations is not a snob’s progress; sometimes (for example, where Mr Peggotty’s love for Little Em’ly is concerned) Dickens ‘wrote
to be read in two ways’ – on one level he offered ‘a harmless sop to the Meagles section of his reading public’, on the other
he undermined their smug morality.
18Duality, indeed, is at the centre of John Carey’s study (1973) – for him, the most important aspect of Dickens is his ability
to see things from two opposing points of view (as instanced in his fascination with violence and order) – but unlike most
critics, he pays no attention to Dickens’s moral concerns and social criticism, stressing his comic genius instead: ‘We could
scrap all the solemn parts of his novels without impairing his status as a writer. But we could not remove Mrs Gamp or Pecksniff
or Bounderby without maiming him irreparably.’ Again, contrary to the majority of critics since Wilson, Carey dismisses Dickens’s
symbolism, because his ‘sharp-edged’ imagination ‘fills his novels with objects that vividly loom – locks, graveyards, cages
– intensely themselves, not signs for something else’.
19 Garrett Stewart (1974) also explores, in a highly idiosyncratic but stimulating manner, Dickens’s imagination as it manifests
itself in his style and his characters, chiefly those sharing their creator’s power of fancy, from Sam Weller (‘the most complete
hero’) through Dick Swiveller to Jenny Wren, whom he calls – borrowing from Jane Austen – ‘imaginists’.
20The last three decades of the century might be called the age of theory, and the signs of the times were palpably felt in
Dickens criticism. Hillis Miller, now under the influence of Jacques Derrida, thinks there is nothing outside language, and
he brings that philosophy to bear upon his reading of
Bleak House (1971). This novel, in his view, ‘is a document about the interpretation of documents’, and its ultimate villain is not the
Court of Chancery or corrupt Victorian society, but ‘the act of interpretation itself, the naming which assimilates the particular
into a system, giving it a definition and a value incorporating it into a whole’. Esther seeing herself as part of a flaming
necklace offers ‘a fit emblem for the violence exercised over the individual by language and other social institutions’.
21If Hillis Miller sees man as trapped in the system of language, D. A. Miller (
1988), drawing on Michel Foucault, sees man as being under the dominance of power. For him, the nineteenth-century novel is a
disciplinary discourse, policing the subjectivities of its readers. His reading of
Bleak House is an attempt to illustrate the complex operations of this social control. For example, the novel shifts focus from the Jarndyce
suit to the Tulkinghorn murder case because the Court of Chancery, ‘to make itself tolerable, produces a desire for the detective
story’, something that can be interpreted and brought to termination. In his view, ‘despite or by means of its superficially
hostile attitude toward bureaucracy, a novel like
Bleak House [with its own extraordinary length and complexity] is profoundly concerned to train us … in the sensibility for inhabiting
the new bureaucratic, administrative structures’.
22Indeed, in the political turn the recent criticism has clearly taken, Foucault’s thinking about power and discourse has been
most influential. Catherine Gallagher (1985), concerned with the ways in which Victorian social-problem fiction was permeated
by various discourses on industrialisation circulating at that time (she examines a range of texts including parliamentary
Bluebooks, journalism, manuals on labour relations and domestic felicity, stories in working-class magazines), argues that
Hard Times, with its ending where the novel seems to retreat from social considerations into the purely private sphere, exposes a dilemma
inherent in the contemporary discourse based upon the ‘society is a family’ metaphor.
23 Mary Poovey (1993) looks at
Our Mutual Friend in relation to ‘a series of legislative measures that culminated in the establishment of limited liability’ between 1844
and 1862 and the ensuing speculation mania, probing the implications of the same ‘structure of wishful projection’ underlying
financial investment and men’s assignment of virtue to female nature.
24In a pivotal text in gender studies, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (1985) considers Dickens’s last two novels as his contribution
to the political naturalisation of homophobia about men. Central to her analysis of
Our Mutual Friend, ‘
the English novel that everyone knows is about anality’, is the triangle involving Lizzie, Eugene and Bradley, whose only mode
of grappling for power is ‘sphincter domination’. In
Edwin Drood, Dickens recasts this triangle with Rosa, Jasper and Edwin; here ‘the denied erotics of male rivalry are discussed more sentiently’
and the socially crucial signifying function is performed by race instead of class, as in the previous novel. Neither of the
female characters, Sedgwick notes, is a real object of love; each of them is merely used ‘as a counter in an intimate struggle
of male will’.
25Thus, in the twentieth century Dickens invited a wide variety of critical responses. And he continues to do so. Currently
scholars tend to examine
the novelist in relation to such issues as gender, sexuality, empire, race, visual culture, politics, economics and science.
The ‘Dickens industry’, led notably by Rosemarie Bodenheimer (2007) and Sally Ledger (
2007), is thriving, indeed.
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