The Place of Hard Times and Bleak House in English Literature
Bleak House and Hard Times among Dickens’s novels
Dickens wrote fourteen and a half novels, the half being the unfinished Mystery of Edwin Drood. He wrote eight before and four and a half after our two texts. The first novel was The Pickwick Papers (serialised 1836–1837). This began as a series of loosely connected anecdotes about Mr. Pickwick, but the stories were increasingly extended through several episodes. Dickens was leaning towards full-length narrative. At the same time, with Pickwick and the other club members, and the enormously popular Sam Weller, he was developing his brand of comical characterisation. Oliver Twist was serialised from 1837 to 1839, overlapping with Pickwick. The pathetic little hero, colourful band of boy-thieves, terrifying villains Fagin and Sykes, and sacrificial heroine Nancy, were all larger than life. Like Pickwick, this novel achieved instant popularity, and these two established Dickens’s reputation.
The next novel was the first of four that tell of a boy growing up. Nicholas Nickleby (1838–1839) is part of this group with Martin Chuzzlewit (1843–1844), David Copperfield (1849–1850) and Great Expectations (1860–1861). Some comparisons between these novels almost tell a story of their own. For example, Nicholas loves his Madeline, and their marriage completes the romantic theme. David Copperfield loves Dora, but she conveniently dies so the hero can discover a more fulfilling love with Agnes. In Great Expectations, Pip may be united with Estella after waiting another 11 years. So, in 1838, 1849 and 1860, Dickens expressed three different versions of romance, which make an interesting commentary on his own private life. Other similar ‘stories’ arise from a comparison of the hero’s eventual career with the dominant themes of these three narratives. See, for example, how Nicholas’s picaresque travels are loosely connected by the plots of the villainous Ralph, while Pip’s social climb explores a dark theme of snobbery, money, justice and class.
Also published before Bleak House were The Old Curiosity Shop (1840–1841) and Barnaby Rudge (February to November 1841), both of which appeared in weekly instalments, and Dombey and Son (1846–1848), which came out monthly. The death of little Nell in The Old Curiosity Shop, and of little Paul in Dombey and Son, gave rise to public displays of grief. These works demonstrated Dickens’s growing ability to work with numerous characters and multiple storylines. Dickens began The Old Curiosity Shop as a tale told by ‘Master Humphrey’ of Master Humphrey’s Clock, following the periodical’s plan of publishing stories within a loose frame. After the third chapter, however, Dickens decided to produce a full-length novel, and Master Humphrey is rather summarily made to disappear. By the time of Dombey and Son, Dickens planned on a far grander scale. Themes such as the grandfather’s gambling addiction, in The Old Curiosity Shop, give way to a major critique of finance, snobbery and misogyny, while the grotesque villain Quilp is succeeded by the plausible Carker, who hides his villainy beneath a smooth appearance.
Dombey and Son can thus be considered the first of another group of novels: a group evoking a panoramic picture of society, and developing bitter, critical themes concerning corrupt governance, hypocrisy, suffering and injustice. The next of this kind was to be Bleak House, the longest, and in many critics’ views, the best of its kind. Belonging to this group were also Hard Times (1854), Little Dorrit (1855–1857) and Our Mutual Friend (1864–1865).
Hard Times needs additional comment, for it was the only novel to be created, as it were, on the spot, and it was designed as a far shorter text than any of the others. So, Dickens’s attempt to show several strands of Coketown society from gentry to mill owners to workers, and finally circus performers, was always under constraint from the shorter format. Therefore, the idea that these novels present a ‘social panorama’ must be subject to a caveat in the case of Hard Times: Dickens intended a panorama of Coketown society, but did not succeed in this aim. Nonetheless, with its themes of industrial work and its bitter attack on Political Economy, Hard Times clearly belongs within our suggested group.
The list of Dickens’s novels is completed by A Tale of Two Cities (1859), set in London and Paris during the French Revolution and the Terror; and the half-finished The Mystery of Edwin Drood. Notice that the intervals between publication of the novels increased throughout Dickens’s career: Pickwick and Oliver Twist overlapped; Nickleby and Oliver overlapped. Then, The Old Curiosity Shop ended and a week later Barnaby Rudge began. There were then gaps of a year or more, such as before Chuzzlewit, before Dombey and before Bleak House. Finally, in the 1860s, there were three blank years before Our Mutual Friend and five more blank years before Dickens began Edwin Drood. Explanations for these increasing gaps are not hard to find. Dickens quarrelled with publishers, suffered periods of exhaustion and attempted to live abroad; he also edited several journals and produced journalism, stories, and in particular his Christmas editions each year, following the national success of A Christmas Carol (1843).
One significant point should be noticed, however: Dickens spent only about two of his last ten years working as a novelist. He suffered with his swollen foot and other ailments, of course, and he spent five months in America. However, the change of occupation is still striking: Dickens became a professional reader and performer in his last decade, and this underlines the gratification Dickens garnered from his audience’s applause.
The first novels in English coalesced from various kinds of prose writing, towards the end of the seventeenth century. Stories of exploration, historical allegories such as Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia (1590), or sensational anecdotes such as Aphra Behn’s Orinooko (1688) were forerunners of the novel form. Fictions began to imitate documentary reporting, and the novel with its illusion of ‘realism’ was born. Many now think of Daniel Defoe (1659–1731), author of Robinson Crusoe, Moll Flanders and Roxana, as the first writer to synthesise various kinds of prose stories into a recognisable novel. During the eighteenth century, Samuel Richardson told the seduction stories of Pamela (1740) and Clarissa (1748), followed by The History of Sir Charles Grandison (1753). Henry Fielding parodied Richardson in Shamela (1741), and followed with his two great novels Joseph Andrews (1742) and Tom Jones (1749). Laurence Sterne published the nine volumes of The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman between 1759 and 1767, a novel full of digressions that meanders through the eponymous hero’s life (who is not born until Volume 3). Tristram Shandy’s peculiarities have made it the blueprint for modernist writers in the twentieth century. Both Fielding and Sterne developed a narrator who speaks directly to the reader as if talking. In Tom Jones, for example, Fielding introduces the novel as a feast, and the first chapter as a ‘bill of fare’ or menu, while in Tristram Shandy, the first-person narrator becomes a chatty and irritatingly digressive companion. These writers were favourite reading for Dickens, who named his sixth son after Henry Fielding.
In the final decades of the eighteenth century a sensational sub-genre of novels gained popularity. So-called ‘Gothic’ novels were generally set in medieval times, in castles or cloisters filled with intrigue, in Italy and other exotic locations, with imprisoned maidens, wicked noblemen, ghosts and pure-hearted heroes. Typical of the genre was Mrs. Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794). A more disturbing strand of the Gothic, emphasising perversion, is found in Matthew Lewis’s The Monk (1796). There was a blend of Gothic and realistic romance in the novels of Fanny Burney (e.g. Evelina, 1778). Jane Austen parodied the Gothic stereotype in Northanger Abbey (1818), while her other novels such as Pride and Prejudice (1813) and Emma (1815) gave a detailed account of a woman’s lot in one sector of society, the minor landed gentry.
Bleak House and Hard Times among their contemporaries
We will discuss two aims that may be attributed to those setting out to write a novel, and one controversy, concerning the author’s function. First, a novelist may aim to reflect reality: above all, the descriptions of events, settings and people should be believable. This aim was certainly important to Jane Austen, who compared herself to a painter of miniatures. She described a small sector of society and never attempted to record any class or milieu that was not her own. She never wrote a scene depicting men without a woman present because she did not know how they would behave. Dickens clearly adopted an adaptation of this method as a writer: he was ambitious to portray a social ‘panorama’, as we have noted. The difference is that Dickens did what Austen could not: if he wished to show a particular setting, Dickens went to look at it for himself. He was known to wander the streets of London at all hours, and we know that he visited Preston, during the strike, to see for himself before writing Hard Times.
On the other hand, and arguably in conflict with such ‘realism’, the novelist may aim to arouse the reader’s emotions: pity, fear, grief, elation, shock and laughter are the responses a novelist may seek to inspire. Dickens found the elements of such a project ready to hand: Gothic features and melodramatic settings and events were designed to evoke an emotional public response. Definitions of melodrama all include terms such as ‘sentimental’, ‘extravagant’ and ‘sensational’. The plot is ‘improbable’ and more important than characters who are limited to ‘the noble hero, the long-suffering heroine, and the hard-hearted villain’ who experience ‘exaggerated emotions’. These terms such as ‘improbable’, ‘exaggerated’, ‘sentimental’ and ‘extravagant’, reveal how a writer attracted by melodrama was in conflict with ‘realism’. Dickens learned, early in his career, how to inspire the fear of Bill Sykes, pity for little Oliver, both shock and grief at Nancy’s fate, and anger at the evils of the Poor Law. These effects succeeded in arousing emotion, but at the same time marked a compromise with ‘realism’. Nobody would deny that Oliver is extraordinarily sweet and good; that Fagin and his lair are painted in lurid colours; or that either he or Sykes is a ‘hard-hearted villain’ in the direct tradition of melodrama and the Gothic. ‘Improbable’? ‘Sentimental’? These terms describe the compromise Dickens reached between the demands of melodramatic sentiment and those of realism.
Gothic novels continued to be written during Dickens’s life. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) came out when Dickens was only six, but Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights and her sister Charlotte’s Jane Eyre (both 1847) were both published while Dickens was writing Dombey and Son. The Brontë sisters each told of improbable events, such as the two dead lovers haunting the moors in Wuthering Heights, or the madwoman imprisoned in Rochester’s attic, in Jane Eyre. Perhaps the pursuit of Lady Dedlock through a blizzard, and the madness of Miss Havisham, are Dickensian instances of similarly ‘extravagant’ conceptions.
An astute comment on melodrama comes from the film director Sidney Lumet, who observed that ‘In a well-written drama, the story comes out of the characters. The characters in a well-written melodrama come out of the story.’ With the remarkable exception of Pip in Great Expectations, many Dickens characters fail to develop. They react to events, but hardly ever change. For example, in Bleak House, Esther meets her mother. This is an emotional scene, and it leads her to visit Mr. Guppy. But, does Esther change? It is very much the same Esther who visits Mr. Guppy, as the Esther who went for a walk and met her mother.
Esther provides a further instance: the love interest with Allan Woodcourt is beset with difficulties, and the two are united only at the end. This is as it should be in a courtship novel. In Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, Lizzie rejects Darcy’s first proposal, just as Esther rejects Allan. However, the two rejections are completely different. Lizzie and Darcy are in the toils of a psychological tangle. Lizzie stokes her anger against him, frightened of being attracted to him, and she boosts her misunderstanding of Darcy and Wickham, while Darcy is still over-confident, depending on his wealth to win Lizzie, rather than his personal qualities. Their troubles, then, are those of character and relationship, and both of them have to develop – have to grow up, change – before they can be united. What is the trouble that interrupts Esther and Allan’s romance? There is no psychological or emotional difficulty at all. In other words, the delayed courtship has nothing to do with character. It is purely a matter of plot: Esther is already betrothed to Mr. Jarndyce. Other impediments to their courtship are also matters of plot, not character. Allan has a ridiculous and prejudiced mother; Allan has to go on a long voyage; Allan is ‘not rich’.
In this respect Hard Times is something of an exception: we have seen in Chapter 2 that both Louisa and Mr. Gradgrind change significantly as a result of their experiences. Mr. Harthouse provokes Louisa to realise things about herself that she had previously suppressed. Louisa’s reflections on the mistakes of her upbringing cause a radical re-evaluation of his philosophy in Mr. Gradgrind, and with his altered beliefs come an altered personality and manners.
Dickens’s novels, then, can be said to exist in the conflict between ‘realism’, and using melodrama to arouse the reader’s emotions to a sensational pitch. The novels waver between these two dynamic forces. Their best moments achieve an equilibrium, when the melodramatic can take on an aura of naturalness, or (less often) when the natural in character can drive the story. They are at their most suspect when improbable plot devices control the narrative. In Our Mutual Friend, for example, John Harmon’s identity – even kept secret from his wife on some excuse about testing her loyalty1 – is never sufficiently justified. Similarly, in Bleak House, Mr. Jarndyce’s gift of Esther to Allan, with a surprise house thrown in, is an equally unjustifiable device.
One matter of controversy concerned the presence or absence of the author. An author writing in their own voice would break the fragile illusion of reality. On the other hand, there was a long tradition of authors who regularly obtruded an author’s personality into their novels – not least, Fielding and Sterne. William Makepeace Thackeray was a successful contemporary of Dickens, whose most famous novel, Vanity Fair (1847–1848), gives a running commentary on the characters, their faults, and society’s shortcomings, from the cynical critic who is the author. As we know, Dickens is often present in his novels, frequently telling us what to think and feel, and we have commented that this sustains an impression that, in reading the novel, we are attending a theatrical performance: what we have called the ‘dramatic’ flavour of our two texts. Thackeray incorporated himself into his novels in a different fashion. The persona he cultivated was of a friendly old buffer, a bit of a cynic but chatty: in other words, another fictional character. Dickens, by contrast, does not present an ironic personality. The author’s character in Dickens is without fault. He has recourse to rhetoric when it is called for, but when he urges us to think and feel like him, he is sincere. Other voices, such as Detective Bucket’s or Harold Skimpole’s, may be ironic, but the nearest thing to irony in Dickens’s voice is generally a bitter sarcasm, as when he exclaims, ‘Dead, your Majesty’, on Jo’s passing (BH, 677).
This question of the author’s persona is a perennial challenge. Dickens’s close collaborator, Wilkie Collins (1824–1889), developed a method whereby the story is told by several narrators who are also characters, each telling the part of the tale they witnessed. He used this method for his crime thrillers The Woman in White (1859) and The Moonstone (1868). George Eliot2 wrote passages of moral discussion, taking up points relevant to the narrative, but without obtruding an authorial persona. Thomas Hardy,3 on the other hand, maintained an objective distance, as if reporting from external observation, creating a pitiless realism he seemed to ascribe to fate itself.
Of other novelists who were more or less Dickens’s contemporaries and were also successful, we will mention four. First, the dominant literary figure, Sir Walter Scott, died when Dickens was 20. His historical adventure stories such as Waverley (1814), Rob Roy (1817) or Ivanhoe (1819), must have appealed to his young follower. Second, Anthony Trollope (1815–1882) was a direct contemporary, who established himself with the ‘Barsetshire’ series of novels, the first of which, The Warden, was published in 1855. The Warden contains an attack on Dickens as ‘Mr. Popular Sentiment’, a novelist whose exaggerations have reformed everything in sight, and whose poor characters are impossibly angelic. Trollope produced over 40 novels, many of which revealed – as did those of Thackeray – a somewhat jaundiced view of human nature, but at the same time a lively sense of humour.
Our third mention goes to Mrs. Elizabeth Gaskell, who wrote of the industrial north, based on her experience as the wife of an Unitarian minister in Manchester. North and South (1854) is of particular interest, as Dickens’s sudden decision to produce Hard Times preempted Mrs Gaskell’s novel. She was annoyed, clearly feeling that Dickens was competing against her by getting his work in first. North and South is arguably a more sophisticated exploration of society in the industrial north than Hard Times. Furthermore, the differences between north and south are explored through character, in the manner Sidney Lumet prescribes for a ‘well-written drama’, rather than by means of melodrama.
Finally, Edward Bulwer Lytton, some nine years Dickens’s senior, was a friend he admired. He was a prolific writer, best known now as the author of The Last Days of Pompeii (1834) and for having coined some phrases that have entered the language, such as ‘the great unwashed’ and ‘the almighty dollar’. Bulwer Lytton’s novels told of ghosts, mysteries of sinister crime, romance, historical adventure and even science fiction. He was the friend who advised Dickens to give Great Expectations a happy ending. There is a Bulwer Lytton Fiction Contest, won by the worst opening sentence for a novel, in imitation of Lytton’s:
It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents – except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness.
(Edward Bulwer Lytton, Paul Clifford, 1830)
We have included Bulwer Lytton in our group of four, to show that Dickens could have poor judgement. Bulwer Lytton was popular in his time, but is hardly ever read in the present day.
Some features of the novel after Dickens
Any systematic survey of the novel since Dickens would be a huge undertaking: our aim here is merely to start some lines of thought that may prove fruitful.
We have referred to Dickens’s ambition to present an overview of society. Thackeray’s Vanity Fair held a similar ambition, the title referring to a society founded on ‘vanity’. This bears comparison with Bleak House’s ‘In Fashion’ chapter (BH, 17–23). However, the idea that the novel format could portray life on a grand canvas, found several subsequent practitioners. The society of an English provincial town, describing several different social levels and occupations, is painted in detail in George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871–1872), just two years after the appearance of Tolstoy’s huge historical epic War and Peace (1869). In Britain, John Galsworthy’s The Forsyte Saga (1906–1921), a series of novels tracing a single family through generations, and Arnold Bennett’s novels about the ‘five towns’ – the English potteries – display a similar panoramic ambition. In France, Honoré de Balzac (1799–1850) planned to write novels depicting all levels of society, calling his project La Comédie Humaine (from 1832). Subsequently, Émile Zola (1840–1902) conceived of his saga of two families, Les Rougon-Macquart, as a series of 20 novels. This ‘panoramic’ strand in the development of the novel marks how prose fiction took over some functions from epic poetry. War and Peace, for example, can be compared with the grand scope of Homer’s Iliad, while the crowded populations of Dickens’s works or Balzac’s and Zola’s projects, are reminiscent of Dante’s Divine Comedy (1308–1321), William Langland’s ‘fair field full of folk’ in Piers the Plowman (1370–1390), or John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678). All such collections of people from varied walks of life show a residue of the earlier works’ moral themes: the crowd taken together suggests a satisfying range of different sins and virtues.
Of course ‘social realism’ was never a practical project. No novel, however huge, could embrace the chaos of actual life. A novelist can only impose his own idea of shape, upon nature’s raw material. So we come to the death of Krook by spontaneous combustion, in Bleak House. We commented that this is an extraordinary event; that Dickens goes to considerable lengths to make it convincing; and we called the event a form of ‘magic realism’. We will mention two later examples of ‘magic realism’ to show how this feature developed with an increasing interest in psychology and symbolism.
First, in Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbevilles, the heroine spends a winter working in the fields: ‘ … strange birds from behind the North Pole began to arrive silently on the upland of Flintcomb-Ash; gaunt spectral creatures with tragical eyes – eyes which had witnessed scenes of cataclysmal horror in inaccessible polar regions of a magnitude such as no human being had ever conceived’. There is, of course, no such place as ‘behind the North Pole’, nor are there ‘cataclysmal’ scenes beyond human imagination in ‘inaccessible’ regions. As Hardy continues, we realise that these birds are a strange manifestation of suffering against the background of a hostile fate, their ‘tragical eyes’ emblematic of the hopelessness of Tess’s heart. These ‘magical’ birds are just as impossible as Krook’s conflagration. Many critics see Krook’s death as symbolic of an end to Chancery, brought about by its own corruption. In this view, then, Dickens and Hardy are seen to use ‘magic realism’ for similar purposes.
A second example is psychological: the murder of Jill Banford by Henry, in D. H. Lawrence’s novella The Fox. Henry fells a tree, and wills it to fall upon and kill Jill Banford, which it does. Lawrence writes that ‘In his heart he had decided her death. A terrible still force seemed in him, and a power that was just his. If he turned even a hair’s breadth in the wrong direction, he would lose the power.’ Henry’s will, the axe-blows, the tree and Jill Banford standing in its way, all make a single magical power, as described by Lawrence, which accomplishes her death. Another novelist from the twentieth century who frequently flirts with or uses magic realism, is William Golding. See, for example, the murder of Piggy in Lord of the Flies (1954), or many other examples in works such as The Spire (1964) or The Inheritors (1955).
Bleak House and Hard Times declare themselves, in their opening pages, as political novels. For a novel to be so overtly part of a campaign was comparatively new. Novels had attacked social mores before: Jane Austen, for example, provides a full critique of the marriage-market in her segment of society; and Richardson’s Clarissa is critical of a family’s power over a single daughter. The open campaigning oratory of Dickens, however, was something new. Anthony Trollope, satirising Dickens as ‘Mr. Popular Sentiment’, noted the new role the novel had taken on. Reforms used to come slowly, after deliberation; now things move faster: ‘monthly novels convince, when learned quartos fail to do so. If the world is to be set right, the work will be done by shilling numbers’. Trollope continues: ‘Of all such reformers Mr. Sentiment is the most powerful. It is incredible the number of evil practices he has put down: it is to be feared he will soon lack subjects … .’4 There have been few followers of this tradition. All published novels are, of course, acts of political consequence, but the vast majority of authors since Dickens’s day have been more circumspect in their methods for promoting a political agenda, preferring not to thunder in the author’s own outraged voice, as we have found to be Dickens’s habit.
Serial publication was a phenomenon of the times, and a brief word about this practice is appropriate here. Readers of Austen’s Northanger Abbey know that novels were reputedly immoral: young women in particular were encouraged to read sermons, because novels engendered silly romantic daydreams, thus undermining a girl’s virtue. This view was itself often ridiculed, but was still widespread in the more pompously ‘respectable’ sectors of society. So, the novel was thought to be vulgar, and not really part of ‘literature’. At the same time, rates of literacy increased rapidly throughout the nineteenth century – and the literate percentage grew particularly during Dickens’s working life.
We remember that funding for schools for poor children was voted in 1833 when Dickens was 21, while the first bill to make education compulsory was passed in the year of his death. The publishing industry adapted to the new situation and developed the serial system of ‘shilling numbers’. This suited the pockets of the newly literate, who found a complete volume more difficult to afford than 20 cheap ‘numbers’ spread over more than a year;5 and it provided novels with excellent publicity, as thousands of readers waited for the next issue discussing the characters and future events. Serial publication still provoked strong public reactions in 1891, when there was shock at the seduction in Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbevilles, or, in 1894–1895, with the shocking unmarried cohabitation of Jude and Sue in Jude the Obscure. Dickens was probably more successful than any other writer at developing his reputation into a personality cult. Serial publication and the new mass readership help to explain how Dickens’s readings attracted such large audiences, as well as explaining why his novels exploit melodrama and sentimentality so unerringly. Dickens’s critics would say serial publication explains why his novels are so vulgar. We can theorize that Dickens’s novels are merely fulfilling the prophecy of those pompous ‘respectable’ people who always disapproved.
Together with the phenomenon of the serialised novel and mass literacy we should also say a word about the mores of Victorian Domesticity. Despite his hilarious satires of ‘respectable’ humbugs (such as Chadband in Bleak House, for example, and the Veneerings and their dinner-guests in Our Mutual Friend), Dickens played to mid-Victorian prurience and avoided mentioning physical love. Dora Spenlow in David Copperfield is a typical Dickens heroine, described as a dazzling halo of spoilt prettiness, but not as a girl. Meanwhile, ‘fallen’ women such as Emily and Martha, are tearfully evoked, and Dora dies following a miscarriage. However, all is implication of moral horror and gushing sympathy, with a sideswipe at the perfidy of men, but there is no explicit reference to the physical. Dickens also had recourse to coyness, using the Victorian’s favourite linguistic device, euphemism. So for example, Bella’s and John’s embraces in Our Mutual Friend are euphemised as her ‘disappearing act’ within his arms.
D. H. Lawrence remarked that the nineteenth century was ‘the century of the dirty little secret’,6 complaining that the Victorians’ suppression of the subject of sex made theirs the most dishonest century in British history. Lawrence believed that the twentieth century still lived under an intolerable leftover of prudish denial about sex. Lawrence’s views seem to apply to Dickens, and we have considered the issues involved when studying the angelic Rachael and Ada in Chapter 3. However, it would be wrong to accept Lawrence’s assessment as a general truth about nineteenth-century novels. Readers of George Eliot’s Adam Bede, with its characterisation of Hetty Sorrel, or of Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbevilles and its heroine’s seduction, or of her courtship at Talbothays, will realise that sensuality and physical passion are powerfully depicted in those texts. Becky Sharp’s adulteries in Vanity Fair are clearly implied, and although Thackeray does hold back in submission to ‘respectable’ mores, he was never as prurient as Dickens.
Several of the issues we have discussed in this chapter can coalesce to build the impression of Dickens as that unusual creature, the popular artist. In the present day there are still ‘literary’ novels, and the various popular genres: crime thrillers, adventure stories, romance, espionage and so on. There are quality practitioners in all these fields, but Dickens remains preeminent in combining mass popularity, with a sustained reputation as an important writer. Who else occupies such a position? Richardson and Defoe, perhaps, but their ‘popularity’ does not compare with the Victorian mass readership either in numbers, or in social range. In order to find an artist whose works are still admired, and who reached the ordinary people of England as well as the literate minority, we probably have to go back to Shakespeare, back to a time when the stage entertained both Queen and commoner.
This is a relevant point to make. The history of English Literature is bedevilled by the social dichotomies of Britain’s class-ridden society. For most of the centuries concerned, literature was written by and for the educated and privileged few. Even a nonconformist commoner such as Daniel Defoe had to seek and accept patronage from political sponsors. In the present day a snobbism about ‘art’ remains strong. What, for example, does the popular press say about the annual Turner Prize? In the first three decades of the twentieth century, modernist ‘artists’ wrote for each other: T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922), for example, was like a puzzle of references to classical myth and previous literature, only understandable by those as cultured as Eliot himself. Virginia Woolf and James Joyce experimented with ‘stream of consciousness’ writing, also puzzling because the reader was expected to follow the character’s subconscious associations. So, there remains a divide between writing for ‘art’ and popular writing. This divide was energetically challenged in the 1950s and 1960s by novelists Alan Sillitoe (Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, 1958) and John Braine (Room at the Top, 1957), and playwrights such as John Osborne (Look Back in Anger, 1956), a group who became known as ‘the angry young men’, and whose works appealed both to the general population and the literati. Very few works are now able to bridge this divide.
1 Compare this treatment of Bella with the final scene of Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew. Both are uncomfortable pictures of a demand for absolute female submission.
2 Works include Adam Bede (1859), The Mill on the Floss (1860) and Middlemarch (1871–1872).
3 Works include Tess of the D’Urbevilles (1891) and Jude the Obscure (1895).
4 Trollope, Anthony, The Warden, 1855, Chapter 15.
5 For much the same reason the system of ‘Hire Purchase’ or ‘the Never-Never’, for various purchases, became widespread following the Second World War.
6 Lawrence, D. H., ‘A Study of Thomas Hardy’, in D. H. Lawrence, Selected Literary Criticism, Ed. Beal, Anthony, London, 1956, pp. 185–194.