A Sample of Critical Views
The scope of this chapter
The literature on Dickens is vast: for the postgraduate student there are bibliographies such as R. C. Churchill’s A Bibliography of Dickensian Criticism 1836–1975 (1975), which can be supplemented from updates in the periodical Dickens Quarterly. Our sole aim here is to summarise a few critical views, chosen simply because they differ from each other, in order to stimulate debate. We begin with Dickens’s contemporaries. Then we report some critics of Dickens from between then and now. Finally, we summarise the views of four recent critics. This chapter is intended to encourage you to develop your own ideas with confidence, and to read the critics critically.
Dickens’s contemporaries
Dickens’s novels have always inspired extreme admiration and extreme dislike in more or less equal quantities. Some readers have found themselves admiring and hating Dickens at the same time. When Bleak House came out, for example, Mrs. Oliphant1 was offended by the portrait of Chadband, because he was ‘a detestable Mr Chadband, an oft-repeated libel upon the preachers of the poor. This is a very vulgar and common piece of slander, quite unworthy of a true artist’. Despite ‘acknowledging to the full how excellently this [Lady Dedlock] portion of Bleak House is accomplished’, she felt ‘obliged to say that we think Esther a failure, and, when she has only herself to talk about, are glad to be done with the complaisant history’. Several others disliked Esther’s self-deprecating narrative. George Brimley remarked cattily, ‘it is impossible to doubt the simplicity of her [Esther’s] nature, because she never omits to assert it’.2 Even John Forster, Dickens’s friend and biographer, found Esther ‘A difficult exercise, full of hazard in any case, not worth success and certainly not successful’3, while Charlotte Brontë expressed another divided opinion: ‘I liked the Chancery sections, but when it passes into the autobiographical form … it seems to me too often weak and twaddling.’4
George Eliot voiced more serious criticisms of these novels. Writing in The Westminster Review in July 1856,5 she was among several who questioned Dickens’s characterisations. While some reviewers felt that ‘As a delineator of persons, … [Dickens] stands second only to Shakespeare’6 George Eliot agreed that he is ‘gifted with the utmost power in rendering the external traits of our town population,’ but added, ‘and if he could give us their psychological character – their conceptions of life and their emotions’ he would be a great writer. However, Dickens, she observed, ‘scarcely ever passes from the humorous and external to the emotional and tragic, without becoming as transcendent in his unreality as he was a moment before in his artistic truthfulness’. Another reviewer describes this as ‘the habit of seizing peculiarities and presenting them instead of characters’.7 This is a serious charge, as Eliot explains, because ‘His frequently false psychology, his preternaturally virtuous poor children and artisans … [have the effect of] encouraging the miserable fallacy that high morality and refined sentiment can grow out of harsh social relations, ignorance, and want; or that the working classes are in a condition to enter at once into a millennial state of altruism, wherein everyone is caring for everyone else, and no one for himself’. This is an early attempt to express the oddity and yet realism of Dickens’s characters, a preoccupation that persists in Dickens criticism to the present day.
Eliot was also critical of Dickens’s attacks on institutions. These were pernicious because ‘Mr Dickens’s government looks pretty at a distance, but we can tell him how his ideal would look if it were realised. It would result in the purest despotism’. George Eliot believed that the law must be cautious, slow and carefully regulated: Dickens’s ideal of ‘justice freed from the shackles of law’ would lead to abuses of arbitrary power. Lord Denman was critical of Dickens’s attack on Chancery, because the court was already reformed: ‘now the reformers appear to have gained their end … now first Mr. Dickens takes an active part in promoting Chancery reform’.
It is clear from these comments that Bleak House received a mixed press at the time: Dickens’s contemporaries aired doubts that are still debated today. One of these was Esther’s irritating humility, another was a sceptical reaction to Dickens’s characters, and finally there were objections to the attack on Chancery both because it was too late, and more seriously because it would liberate despotism. At the same time, there were reviews expressing admiration and delight at the style, the characterisation and Dickens’s warm-hearted earnestness in the cause of the downtrodden, among whom many selected Jo as a compellingly sympathetic case.
The reception of Hard Times was equally controversial and contradictory. John Forster who, we have remarked, was Dickens’s friend and biographer, made a valiant attempt to defend the novel. One criticism was that the attack on ‘fact’ was exaggeration because facts are helpful, and society cannot be governed without them. Forster acknowledges that there are those who ‘accuse Mr Dickens of attacking this good movement and the other, or of opposing the search after statistical and other information by which only real light can be thrown on social questions’.8 He answers them by referring to Household Words, which is ‘a great magazine of facts’ and edited by Dickens. Apparently, Dickens knows that ‘facts and figures’ will not be forgotten ‘by the world’ so ‘he leaves them, when he speaks as a novelist, to take care of themselves’.
Forster meets the objection that Hard Times merely argues, like a fable, that to train any man ‘properly’ we must ‘cultivate his fancy, and allow proper scope to his affections’, by asserting that the enforcement of this moral is ‘not argumentative, because no thesis can be argued in a novel’. Both of these arguments are fallacious: you cannot soothe the angry reader by saying that he will find what is missing from the novel if he looks somewhere else; and it is manifestly untrue to say that ‘no thesis can be argued in a novel’, let alone in the same breath as ‘To enforce this truth has been the object of the story of Hard Times’, which, surely, contradicts. So, Forster’s defence of Hard Times is a failure. We could defend the novel much more easily by arguing that the anti-fact passages are satirical exaggeration and successful, and that the book is constructed as a kind of fable, does argue its thesis and is none the worse for that. Forster’s reasoning, however, doesn’t work.
Thomas Babington Macaulay found Hard Times indigestible. It contained, he felt, ‘one excessively touching, heart-breaking passage, and the rest sullen socialism’. The ‘touching’ passage is the scene between Rachael and Stephen as he lies dying, but Macaulay continues: ‘The evils which he attacks he caricatures grossly, and with little humour.’9 This last is the criticism Forster fails to counter. A more even-handed complaint about exaggeration was advanced by John Ruskin, who begins by stating that Hard Times is ‘in several respects, the greatest’ of Dickens’s novels, and that ‘Dickens’s caricature, though often gross, is never mistaken’.10 However, Ruskin requires of Dickens, ‘when he takes up a subject of high national importance, such as that which he handled in Hard Times, that he would use severer and more accurate analysis’. Ruskin feels that the serious social and economic theme is diminished because, for example, Bounderby is ‘a dramatic monster, instead of a characteristic example of a worldly master’, and Stephen is ‘a dramatic perfection, instead of a characteristic example of an honest workman’. This is a shame, for Dickens ‘is entirely right in his main drift and purpose in every book he has written; and all of them, but especially Hard Times, should be studied with close and earnest care by persons interested in social questions’.
Karl Marx appreciated Dickens’s provision of ‘an accurate picture of the affected, ignorant and tyrannical bourgeoisie’,11 and Friedrich Engels agreed, suggesting that Dickens, together with George Sand and Eugène Sue, ‘had brought about almost a social revolution in continental literature’ by dethroning the kings and princes and elevating the poor, the ‘despised class,’ to a suitable subject for literature.12 Such enthusiasm tells us that Dickens’s reformist campaigning was appreciated. However, the exaggeration of his characters that was regretted by Ruskin, was castigated by Anthony Trollope in his lampoon of Dickens as ‘Mr. Popular Sentiment’, whose ‘good poor people are so very good; his hard rich people so very hard; and the genuinely honest so very honest’.13 Trollope did write in a more moderate tone elsewhere. He made a virtue of Dickens’s popularity, and of the way characters such as Mrs. Gamp, Sam Weller, Inspector Bucket and, of course, Bounderby, have become part of English culture, as have characters from Shakespeare. How can we criticise an author who has been so successful, and who is so loved by the mass of his readers? Trollope asks, writing in St. Paul’s Magazine, ‘It is fatuous to condemn that as deficient in art which has been so full of art as to captivate all men.’
Mrs. Oliphant starts a new strand in Hard Times criticism when she complains that the novel lacks the beauties she finds in Dickens’s other works. Instead, she finds in Hard Times ‘The petulant theory of a man in a world of his own making, where he has no fear of being contradicted.’ The suggestion is that Hard Times lacks the range and variety of the longer novels, and that it is an argument rather than a story, with no room for the comic entertainment to be found in Nicholas Nickleby or The Pickwick Papers. Therefore it is unpleasant to read. This is a complaint that has been taken up by later critics as well.
Between then and now
Dickens died in 1870. From then until now, almost every literary figure – author or critic – has aired an opinion of him. As you would expect, the fans and haters are both well represented. Oscar Wilde is said to have commented that ‘You would need to have a heart of stone to read the death of Little Nell without dissolving into tears – of laughter,’ while G. K. Chesterton said ‘It is not the death of Little Nell but the life of Little Nell that I object to’14; and Henry James, rather superciliously called Dickens ‘the greatest of superficial novelists’15.
George Bernard Shaw saw Bleak House as the first novel Dickens produced after he discovered the hollowness of the great middle-class pretence:
… the discovery of the rottenness of the Court of Chancery was an important instalment of the exposure of the great middle class sham begun in Dombey and Son.16
Shaw argued the socialist nostrum that property is theft and the property holder a parasite, so the ‘rights’ Richard Carstone hopes to inherit for himself are really ‘wrongs’ for everybody else because they maintain the ‘spoliation of the industrious by the idle’. Shaw therefore complains that all John Jarndyce’s advice to Richard is advanced only to save him from disappointment, not for the much better reason that he has a ‘moral obligation to earn his own livelihood by his own exertions’. Dickens also suffers from another limitation which commonly follows when somebody has realised that the promise of the middle-class is sham: ‘a renewed tenderness towards the upper class’ which motivates the ‘elaborate portrait of Sir Leicester Dedlock, who, arrogant numbskull as he is, has nothing of Pecksniff or Dombey about him’. Dickens’s developing insights into his society and its classes, and his increasing perceptions, meant that ‘by this time [when writing Bleak House] the deeper and deeper feeling which marked Dickens’s advance as a writer had become almost continuous in his books’. Shaw sees an end to the Dickensian tendency to grotesque caricatures and careless laughter. If Mr. Vholes had appeared in an earlier novel such as Nicholas Nickleby, he would ‘certainly have ended in a horse pond’, and while Guppy and Jobling are ‘not very mercifully dealt with’, they are ‘taken quite seriously for all that’.
In his introduction to Hard Times,17 Shaw begins by suggesting a slightly different theory of Dickens’s development, saying that ‘the first half of the XIX century considered itself the greatest of all the centuries. The second discovered that it was the wickedest of all the centuries’. He likens the changed viewpoint to a religious conversion: ‘ … in it [Hard Times] we see Dickens with his eyes newly open and his conscience newly stricken by the discovery of the real state of England’. Shaw contrasts Bleak House, in which Dickens is still engaged in piecemeal campaigns focussing on ‘mere symptoms … individual delinquencies, local plague-spots’, with Hard Times, in which ‘Coketown is the whole place; and its rich manufacturers are proud of its dirt’. Shaw believes this to be the start of the later Dickens, where ‘the occasional indignation’ found in the early novels ‘has spread and deepened into a passionate revolt against the whole industrial order of the modern world’. Therefore, while earlier novels were written to entertain us, ‘Hard Times was written to make you uncomfortable; and it will make you uncomfortable’, but it will ‘leave a deeper scar on you, than any two of its forerunners’.
Having thus cried up Hard Times as a powerful critique, Shaw turns his fire on what he calls ‘one real failure in the book’, which is the depiction of the trade union meeting and the activist Slackbridge, who
… is a mere figment of the middle class imagination. No such man would be listened to by a meeting of English factory hands … even at their worst, trade union organisers are not a bit like Slackbridge.
Further, there was a chairman at the meeting, who made no attempt to preserve the usual order of a public discussion, but allowed Slackbridge to take over. We remember the effective chairman in ‘On Strike’, and wonder why it is so different in Hard Times.
This ‘failure’ of the book is compounded because Dickens ‘expressly says … that the workers were wrong to organise themselves in trade unions’: Stephen Blackpool’s statement that it is ‘they as is put ower me, and ower aw the rest of us’ shows that Dickens believed it was the responsibility of the upper class to find a solution to the ills of industry. Shaw, then, believes that Hard Times is a passionate attack upon a whole society that is not merely incidentally, but structurally wrong. At the same time he recognises that Dickens does not understand industry, and offers only a rather feudal answer to its problems.
G. K. Chesterton18 distinguishes the novels that came before Bleak House as picaresque: their heroes travel from place to place, so that the plots of those stories are rather ‘rambling’. Bleak House is different: it is ‘no longer a string of incidents; it is a cycle of incidents. It returns upon itself; it has a recurrent melody and poetic justice’ because ‘the whole story comes back to Bleak House’. Developing his point, Chesterton praises the beginning of the novel, which gives us ‘the feeling that the author sees the conclusion and the whole. The beginning is alpha and omega … He means that all the characters and all the events shall be read through the smoky colours of that sinister and unnatural vapour’. In fact, Bleak House has ‘artistic unity’ because characters such as Miss Flite and Krook are symbolic of Chancery; Chancery is responsible for the death of Jo: ‘almost everything is calculated to assert and reassert the savage morality of Dickens’s protest … The fog of the first chapter never lifts’.
Two further features of Bleak House impress Chesterton. First, he regards the characterisation of Richard Carstone as a triumph of psychological realism, and as the only example of true tragedy in Dickens. Second, he finds the figure of Caddy Jellyby an admirable piece of work:
Every touch in her is true, from her first bewildering outbursts of hating people because she likes them, down to the sudden quietude and good sense which announces that she has slipped into her natural place as a woman … Miss Caddy Jellyby is by far the greatest, the most human, and the most really dignified of all the heroines of Dickens.
Chesterton does have criticisms, however. He finds the early scenes with Skimpole delightful, but complains that by the end of the book Dickens has involved his character in ‘mere low villainy’; and he comments that it is one of Dickens’s weaknesses, that his characters become ‘coarser and clumsier’ when they take part in ‘the practical events of a story’. Other than Skimpole, and with the exception of Chadband and Turveydrop, Chesterton opines that the characters are more ‘delicately’ and ‘faintly’ drawn than in earlier novels.
Hard Times, Chesterton tells us, is ‘the highest and hardest’ of those ‘angles of [Dickens’s] absolute opinion’ that ‘stood up out of the confusion of his general kindness, just as sharp and splintered peaks stand up’ from a forest. In this novel, more than anywhere else, we meet the ‘sternness’ of Dickens. We meet the ‘expression of a righteous indignation which cannot condescend to humour’, so that when we take Dickens’s hand in Hard Times, it is startlingly cold, and we realise that we have ‘touched his gauntlet of steel’. However, we cannot assess Hard Times without discussing the politics of its time. Chesterton felt that politics had been ‘getting into a hopeless tangle’ for a hundred years. He traces the origin of Dickens’s English liberalism to the American and French Revolutions, but suggests that the English forgot two of the three central pillars of revolution: ‘if they had more and more liberty it did not matter whether they had any equality or any fraternity’. Herbert Spencer, Bentham and Mill all lost their direction, while Dickens kept his head: in Hard Times ‘he specially champions equality. In all his books he champions fraternity’:
In an England gone mad about a minor theory he reasserted the original idea – the idea that no one in the State must be too weak to influence the State.
Chesterton finishes by re-emphasising that Hard Times is different from the other novels: it is ‘bitter’, ‘hard’ and ‘harsh’. Previous satirical characters such as Nupkins, or Bumble, are treated to ‘half affectionate derision’ and ‘his very abuse was benignant’, whereas Gradgrind and Bounderby are described with ‘a degree of grimness and sombre hatred’ that is very different. Hard Times is ‘perhaps the only place where Dickens, in defending happiness, for a moment forgets to be happy’.
Aldous Huxley19 records a less sympathetic view of Dickens, suggesting that the creator of so many ‘old infants’ – examples are the Cheeryble brothers, Tim Linkwater – ‘and so many other gruesome old Peter Pans, was obviously a little abnormal in his emotional reactions. There was something rather wrong with a man who could take this lachrymose and tremulous pleasure in adult infantility’.
Huxley believes, then, that there is an emotional peculiarity in Dickens that he insists is ‘pathological’. He then continues in an even more damaging vein, this time turning his attention towards an element in Dickens’s works that has often been criticised: those passages often traduced as sentimental melodrama. Huxley’s contention is that ‘whenever in his writing he [Dickens] becomes emotional, he ceases instantly to use his intelligence’. This shutting down of his brain, according to Huxley, comes as a function of Dickens’s desire to ‘overflow’ as his ‘overflowing’ heart ‘drowns his head and dims his eyes’. When ‘Mentally drowned and blinded by the sticky overflowings of his heart, Dickens was incapable, when moved, of recreating, in terms of art, the reality which had moved him.’
Virginia Woolf explains her reaction to Dickens in an essay she calls ‘Phases of Fiction’,20 and she introduces the ‘romantic’ by turning from Scott, Stevenson and Mrs. Radcliffe to Dickens, whereupon, ‘We enter at once into the spirit of exaggeration.’ By this, she means that the characters have ‘eccentricity and vigour’, they are larger than life, and are repetitive in their words and actions: ‘This perpetual repetition has, of course, an enormous power to drive these characters home, to stabilize them [Mrs. Jellyby, Mr. Vholes, Mr. Turveydrop]; all serve as stationary points in the flow and confusion of the narrative.’ Their exaggerated appearance shows Dickens’s eye for character: ‘an eye gluttonous, restless, insatiable, creating more than it can use’. Woolf clearly believes that Dickens’s characters represent something excessive, and describes her impression of Bleak House: ‘Human faces, scowling, grinning, malignant, benevolent, are projected at us from every corner. Everything is unmitigated and extreme’ (quotations are from pages 11 to 12).
This is not all, however, for in Woolf’s view there is one more natural character who threatens to distract us from the gargantuan world inhabited by the rest. This is Inspector Bucket, whose ‘character is no longer fixed and part of the design; it is in itself of interest. Its movements and changes compel us to watch it’. The detective is a mistake in the novel’s structure because Dickens has:
sharpened our curiosity and made us dissatisfied with the limitations and even with the exuberance of his genius. The scene becomes too elastic, too voluminous, too cloud-like in its contours. The very abundance of it tires us, as well as the impossibility of holding it all together. We are always straying down bypaths and into alleys where we lose our way and cannot remember where we were going.
(VW, 13)
Dickens felt indignant at the injustices of society, but ‘he lacked sensitiveness privately, so that his attempts at intimacy failed’. His characters ‘do not inter-lock’ and are often out of touch with each other. Often, ‘when they talk to each other they are vapid in the extreme or sentimental beyond belief’. Since he created Bucket, Woolf argues, Dickens has inadvertently given us a taste for something more ‘in proportion to the figure of a normal man’, so that we now want ‘this intensification, this reduction’ – something that Dickens cannot provide. According to Woolf, we will find this elusive quality in Jane Austen.
We can now come to George Orwell, whose essay ‘Charles Dickens’ was published in 1940.21 Orwell sets himself the task of defining the kind of novelist Dickens was, and notes that there is an ‘utter lack of any constructive suggestion anywhere in his work. He attacks the law, parliamentary government, the educational system and so forth, without ever clearly suggesting what he would put in their places’. This is because Dickens’s criticisms of society are all ‘moral’ and not political. He does not want to change the system, nor does he believe that it would be better if changed. Instead, ‘His whole “message” is one that at first glance looks like an enormous platitude: If men would behave decently the world would be decent.’ Orwell then argues that this is not a platitude, but, on the contrary, a valuable message. It is for this reason, for example, that there is a series of good, rich men in Dickens’s novels: John Jarndyce and Gradgrind after his conversion, being two examples.
Orwell spends some time pointing out that Dickens has no revolutionary agenda. So, for example, he does not complain about child labour. Instead, he complains that a delicate nature like that of Copperfield (Dickens himself, of course) should have to ‘sink’ into the company of the ‘rough boys’ with whom he worked. The revolutionary mobs in Barnaby Rudge and A Tale of Two Cities are described as subhuman lunatics, not forward-looking democrats, and the trade union in Hard Times is ‘not much better than a racket, something that happens because employers are not sufficiently paternal’. Finally, when it comes to education, Dickens attacks almost every type of school then in existence. Orwell remarks, ‘It seems that in every attack Dickens makes upon society he is always pointing to a change of spirit rather than a change of structure. It is hopeless to try and pin him down to any definite remedy, still more to any political doctrine. His approach is always along the moral plane.’ This is what Orwell means by a ‘moral’ revolutionary, one who focuses on human nature because there is no point in changing society if human nature remains in its present wicked and foolish state. So Dickens’s attitude is ‘not such a platitude as it sounds’.
Orwell then turns to Dickens’s lower-middle-class origin, which imposes some limitations on his outlook – particularly underpinning the idea that most of the institutions of government, whether Parliament or the Circumlocution Office, are unnecessary and do no useful work. His origin also gives him some advantages, however: together with his lack of interest in world affairs, he lacks the English habit of despising foreigners. So, he never describes a battle: ‘in any case he would not regard a battlefield as a place where anything worth settling could be settled’ and Orwell comments that ‘It is one up to the lower-middle-class, puritan mentality.’ There are many examples of descriptions that convey a feeling of repulsion and contempt for the poorest classes and slum dwellers, and some disgust and fear of sinking into poverty.
Turning to Dickens’s style, Orwell notices what he calls the Dickens ‘touch’, by which he means that everything is piled up, ‘detail on detail, embroidery on embroidery’, so the novel ultimately gives a ‘rococo’ impression. Sometimes, such embroidery leads Dickens astray and his elaborations strike a false note. This does not matter, as ‘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.’ To explain this last remark, Orwell acknowledges that ‘Generally he is accused of doing just the opposite. His characters are supposed to be mere ‘types’, each crudely representing some single trait.’ On the contrary, Orwell sees characters who ought to have been purely static, such as Micawber, Squeers, Wegg and Skimpole, ‘finally involved in “plots” where they are out of place and where they behave quite incredibly’. This, in Orwell’s opinion, is because Dickens was a caricaturist, but thought he was not, and so he was constantly putting static characters into action.
Orwell’s conclusion emphasises Dickens’s sense of outrage and his championing of the underdog as special qualities even in the absence of any social agenda. When imagining Dickens, what Orwell sees ‘is the face of a man who is always fighting against something, but who fights in the open and is not frightened, the face of a man who is generously angry – in other words, of a nineteenth-century liberal, a free intelligence, a type hated with equal hatred by all the smelly little orthodoxies which are now contending for our souls’.
In 1948 the influential critic F. R. Leavis published his study The Great Tradition, declaring that there are four ‘great’ novelists in English: Jane Austen, George Eliot, Joseph Conrad and Henry James. The novelists before Austen were leading up to her, and the three since Austen, favoured by his approval, were continuing in her ‘tradition’. This ‘great’ tradition seems to mean that everything about the ‘great’ novel has one purpose: ‘the end is a total significance of a profoundly serious kind’.22 Leavis finds most Dickens’s novels lacking in this, for although Dickens was ‘a great genius … permanently among the classics’, nevertheless, ‘The adult mind doesn’t as a rule find in Dickens a challenge to an unusual and sustained seriousness.’ We note the Leavisite idea of ‘sustained seriousness’ again. He finds such a quality in only one work – Hard Times – which he praises. Hard Times has ‘a perfection that is one with the sustained and complete seriousness for which among his productions it is unique’. This is partly because it is much shorter than Dickens’s other novels, and consequently ‘leaves no room for the usual repetitive overdoing and loose inclusiveness’ found in his works. More generously, Leavis supposes also that Dickens was not tempted to expand in his usual manner, because ‘he was too urgently possessed by his themes; the themes were too rich, too tightly knit in their variety and too commanding’.
Most of Leavis’s remaining remarks concern Gradgrind and Bounderby, and the theme of Utilitarianism which he finds to be successful, satisfyingly countered by the opposition of Sleary’s Horse-Riding. Finally, Leavis turns to his ‘great’ novelists and acknowledges that there is clear evidence of Dickensian influence in some of George Eliot’s ‘less felicitous characterization’, in Henry James’s Princess Casamassima and in D. H. Lawrence’s The Lost Girl. Despite approving of Hard Times, Leavis allows his concept of ‘seriousness’ the last word, for even if the works of these other writers evince ‘a clear relation to the Dickensian’, they are nonetheless ‘incomparably more mature, and belong to a total serious significance’.
Philip Larkin wanted to say something about ‘the whole Dickens method’.23 What he said shows a sharp insight: ‘it strikes me as being less ebullient, creative, vital, than hectic, nervy, panic-stricken’. He pursues this idea further, suggesting that Dickens had a desperate rather than abundant imagination: ‘This jerking of your attention, with queer names, queer characters, aggressive rhythms, piling on adjectives – seems to me to betray basic insecurity in his relation with the reader.’ Larkin’s remark comes from a private letter. However, he does seem to identify an aspect of Dickens we mentioned in Chapter 8: his need for reassurance, the brittle lack of confidence that could look like arrogance and his increasing need for shared emotion, for applause from the audience at his readings.
Recent critics
We now summarise a portion of the arguments put forward recently by four professional critics. We make no claim that these four are representative – that would be an impossible aim. They have been chosen only because they are different. Reading their arguments should encourage you to develop your ideas – whether similar to theirs or very different – with the confidence that your responses can be equally valid. We summarise not merely their conclusions, but also their arguments, so you can judge their reasoning as well as their opinions.
The first in our sample is Dickens’s Villains: Melodrama, Character, Popular Culture, by Juliet John.24 She begins by explaining what led her to write this study: ‘Many notable critics have dismissed Dickens’s villains as “melodramatic” or “stagey”, while at the same time praising Dickens’s complex understanding of deviant psychology’ (JJ, 1). John’s book was ‘born’ in response to this ‘false logic’. Critics have approached Dickens from within the tradition of intellectual elitism, but such an approach is not appropriate. John, on the contrary, believes that Dickens had a purpose:
Dickens’s writings attempt to collapse the artificial opposition between ‘high’ and ‘popular’ culture … The privileging of the mind above emotion underpins, for Dickens, the misguided intellectual elitism which, far from improving the lot of the workers, compounds their cultural alienation.
(JJ, 3)
Melodrama avoids ‘interiority’ and concentrates on ‘ostension’; and Dickens uses ‘melodramatic aesthetics … as a point of ideological principle – the principle of cultural inclusivity’. Critics have brought inappropriate assumptions to Dickens, from the elitism of the Romantic tradition instead of approaching him with the popular culture conceptions appropriate to melodrama. So they read Dickens ‘in terms of cultural assumptions to which he was opposed’ (JJ, 16).
Villains originated in allegory in a Christian context, so they are types, not psychological individuals. This would seem to make them ideal for melodrama. However, John argues that in any work, the villains are definable as such ‘because of the threat they pose to the value system’ of the genre. So, villains in melodrama threaten the dominant melodramatic aesthetic. This means that they are often the most intelligent characters in the story, ‘threatening its general elevation of emotion over intellect’ (JJ, 11); they are individualists, and they may be role-players, dandies, intellectuals or Romantics. So, villains can often sabotage ‘the attempt dramatically to marginalise the psyche’ which was at the heart of ‘Dickens’s populist, anti-intellectual project’ (JJ, 11). Having explained her reasons for not including Quilp or Pecksniff in her survey of villains (they belong in carnival rather than melodrama), and having taken into account the objection that novel reading is essentially a private and interiorised activity (Dickens’s ‘theatrical’ novels work against this tendency), John concludes her introduction by saying:
Dickens’s novels in fact present a self-consciously idealized and problematized version of reality in which, most importantly, the mind is marginalised.
(JJ, 20)
George Henry Lewes commented on Dickensian characters’ ‘brainlessness’, but since then critics have been ‘slow to investigate the political purposes informing Dickens’s externalized aesthetics’ (JJ, 20).
In her chapter, ‘Dickens and Dandyism’, John quotes the passage on ‘Dandyism’, from Chapter 12 of Bleak House (see BH, 172–173), noting that Dickens has a broad concept of Dandyism: he applies the term to any fashion that is unjustifiable, so there can be a Dandyism of religion, for example, as well as Dandies who wear the latest clothes. She then turns to a discussion of Skimpole, who ‘personifies the artistic and moral issues surrounding the elevation of beauty over ethics in Bleak House’ (JJ, 157). There is a philosophy implicit in the broader concept of Dandyism that Dickens calls the ‘more mischievous’ kind, which is that expressed by Skimpole, who elevates art over life. He therefore has no emotional connection with others. While the fashionable Lady Dedlock is ‘distorted by the effort of repressing passion … Harold Skimpole is portrayed as free from such struggles. This apparent absence of interior struggle functions as a sign of his monstrosity’ (JJ, 159).
With art elevated above life, what happens is that the brain takes the place of the heart, and John brings forward examples of Skimpole’s words and actions from Bleak House to show that his philosophy is irresponsible, ignores the human in favour of art, and is potentially fascist (see, for example, Skimpole’s remarks about slaves, BH, 273). Skimpole speaks of himself in the third person, and we can conceive this habit either as that of an actor being separate from his role, or as an aesthete’s ‘view of himself as a work of art’ (JJ, 161). To bring this discussion of Skimpole as a representative of Dandyism back to the main thesis of her book, John points out that it was his intellectualism, his dogma that placed the intellectual and elitist culture above the needs of others, that led Dickens to develop this Dandy as villainous:
In his use of the intellect to advocate the elevation of art over life, or the divorce of art from its social consequences, Skimpole personifies the kind of art that was anathema to Dickens. He is significant because of his aesthetic philosophy, an ethos which Baudelaire, Wilde, and, before them, Dickens realized was dangerous.
(JJ, 161)
Skimpole’s character helps in ‘demonstrating the link between aestheticism and immorality’ (JJ, 162) which John suggests contributes to Dickens’s hostility to the demands of ‘high’ or elitist culture.
In Bleak House, Dickens investigates what, in Thomas Carlyle’s 1836 novel Sartor Resartus,25 are called the ‘Dandiacal’ and ‘Drudge’ sectors of society. When Skimpole evicts Jo, this is symbolic of ‘the division of England into the privileged and the neglected, or ‘the dandies and the drudges’, and is ironic also as Skimpole has no more money than Jo: it is his ‘cultural capital’ that gives him access to ‘elite circles’ (JJ, 166). Bleak House constantly juxtaposes slums and dire poverty against wealth and ease, and there is little communication between these two worlds. Dickens makes clear that the Dandies:
… are not mysterious, anomalous monsters; rather, they are monstrous products of their time. The implication of Dickens’s critique of a polarized, unequal society is obviously to reinforce the desirability of the idea of cultural inclusivity to which dandyism is an affront … And just as Victorian dandies were products of their social environment, Dickens’s dandies can never be divorced from their novelistic environment.
(JJ, 167)
Writing in 2012, Valerie Purton26 identifies her critical project as a close fellow of Juliet John’s. Both of these critics seek a ‘fuller, fairer reading of Dickens’ (VP, 160): John on account of melodrama, and Purton from examining the sentimental tradition. John, she says, argues that Dickens avoided ‘interiority’ by adopting a ‘theatrical aesthetic’ in service of his ‘anti-intellectualism’. Purton goes on to define her own direction: ‘This chimes in with the argument of the present work that Dickens uses the sentimentalist tradition to disable thinking in his readers, in order to prompt in them the healthy overflow of tears.’ Purton is not convinced that Dickens was always anti-elitist. However, ‘what is public and populist (sentimentalism or melodrama) needs to be recognised as having a cultural, if not an aesthetic, value equal to
that of the individual and private (the Romantic)’ (all from VP,156).
In Bleak House, we find Dickens developing Goldsmithian characters in Esther, Jarndyce and, most of all, in Harold Skimpole. Purton compares the bailiff scenes between Bleak House and Goldsmith’s The Good-Natured Man, in which Dickens acted in 1847. In Skimpole, Dickens ‘showed himself capable not only of Goldsmith’s undermining of hypocrisy, but of a true satirist’s ferocity’ (VP, 59). Skimpole is the ‘false sentimentalist’ in the scene with Coavins, while the whole action is refracted through the ‘sentimental heroine’ narration by Esther: ‘In both scenes, hypocrisy is certainly attacked but sentimental values, through Esther’s and Honeywood’s charity, are finally reinforced’ (VP, 61). This shows that, by the time of Bleak House, Dickens has developed a ‘sentimentalist rhetoric’ complex enough to attack the hypocrisies of his day, and Purton suggests that this is an inheritance from Goldsmith’s play.
Bleak House has a ‘sentimental heroine’ as one of its narrators. However, both narratives explore ‘the web of connections which make up English society and which is the novel’s real focus of attention’. When Esther constructs Ada as the ‘sentimental heroine’ with obvious reference to her childhood companion, her beloved doll, this is astute psychology on Dickens’s part: ‘a characterisation rather than an uncritical presentation of the sentimental vision’ (VP, 140). As we examine Bleak House, we find that there is a wide-ranging critique of sentimental values. ‘Self-denial’ is exemplified by Esther, and found to be of limited value, while a healthy selfishness leads to the happy ending. Benevolence is also found wanting in the character of Jarndyce, due to his mistaken support of Skimpole, his inability to deal with Chancery, and his general passivity: ‘the Good-Natured Man is not adequate in the world of this novel’. Richard Carstone is the frank and honest young hero, but ‘frankness, openness, generosity are not enough’. Woodcourt comes out on top, but he ‘hardly qualifies as the sentimental hero’. Purton therefore argues that the happy ending is not so much an ‘endorsement’ of sentimentalism, as a ‘demystification’ (all from VP, 141), where various versions of the sentimental have been found wanting.
Skimpole is the sentimental hypocrite, the Joseph Surface27 of Bleak House. His selfishness is
… textually exposed in the juxtaposition of his cruelty to Jo and his singing of a blatantly sentimental ballad about a peasant boy, a song, he says, which “always made him cry”. Thus Dickens critiques the sentimental tears he elsewhere works so successfully to elicit. It is a powerfully self-reflexive even deconstructive moment, part of the complexity of Dickens’s sentimentalist strategy in this novel.
(VP, 141)
Purton then turns to Jo’s death, because it is ‘the key moment … in which the resources of sentimentalism are exploited to the full’. Jo’s double is Skimpole, the false child set against the real but denied child. The labouring cart metaphor shows ‘Dickens’s dazzling linguistic shifts between the physical and the metaphorical’. Whether we are religious or not,
Jo is in death literally given, by Woodcourt, the empowerment of words, allowed for the first time to share the linguistic inheritance of the rest of society. The security of the sentimental tradition, steeped as it is in drama and theatricality, is the enabling factor in that terrifying ending, as the expected sentimental narrator … turns to snarl at the audience … “Dead, your majesty … etc.”.
(VP, 142)
Purton finds Hard Times a less successful novel. Dickens had used the hard/soft opposition, a sentimentalist structure, with Dombey and Florence in Dombey and Son, and attempted the same thing with Gradgrind and Sissy. ‘The novel’s focus is weakened, however, by the accompanying industrial plot of the confrontation’ between Bounderby and Stephen. That plot is an ‘artistic failure’, and virtually all of the characters and relationships in Hard Times are, according to Purton, wrong. Bounderby is from the ‘sentimental hypocrite’ plot, but Stephen and Rachael are from the ‘sentimental selfishness’ plot, so the two sides do not work together. The pairing of Gradgrind and Sissy is diluted by the presence of Louisa, which ‘weakens the sentimental catharsis’ (all from VP, 143).
There is discussion of Herbert Spencer’s Principles of Psychology which insists on the necessity of merging the cognitive (head) and affective (heart), and it is suggested that Dickens’s writing is at its greatest when he combines what an early critic, H. P. Sucksmith, called the ‘rhetoric of sympathy’ with ‘the rhetoric of irony’. Sucksmith thought that this healthy combination of intellect and emotion was the project and success of Hard Times. Purton disagrees: ‘but Hard Times as a reading experience is a dramatisation of a desperate opposition, not a co-operation, ending with the triumph of Sissy’s world-view over Gradgrind’s’. Another feature of Hard Times that distinguishes it from the sentimental tradition is that ‘it ends, untypically, with failure – the failure of Louisa to achieve full womanhood’ (VP, 144).
Valerie Purton appends a concluding chapter, which commentates the sentimental tradition, suggests that the twentieth century was not a congenial time for it, but that there may be the beginnings of a resurgence of the sentimental now that the twenty-first century is under way, because there are signs ‘that, in the twenty-first century, the physical and the spiritual are once more being linked’ (VP, 158). Sentimental tears ‘are not to be dismissed as unintelligent simply because they do not involve the intellect: perhaps when we cry in a crowd or when reading Dickens we are losing our identity but experiencing the ecstasy of being purely, merely, irrationally, human’ (VP, 159). To lose one’s self in an emotion shared with the crowd is a sentimental phenomenon Purton seems to recommend. Many, on the contrary, will find unthinking mob emotion a disturbing and potentially frightening idea.
In Juliet John and Valerie Purton, we have sampled two critics who are most concerned with the type or genre to which Dickens’s writing belongs, and who are both – whether on behalf of melodrama or the sentimental – constructing their ‘fuller, fairer’ readings within the contentious area of the novels’ aesthetics. We now turn to a different approach. Our third critic in this section, Pam Morris,28 considers Bleak House in the context of the social and political background, beginning with the effect she ascribes to the events of 1848:
The cluster of threatening events in 1848 – cholera, revolutions in Europe, and Chartism at home – and their seemingly miraculous dispersal without dire consequences gave rise, in England at the turn of the decade, to a hegemonic discourse upon the ways of Divine Providence. It was a discourse characterised by congratulatory complacency. Great Britain, it seemed evident, was under a special dispensation.
(PM, 81)
Morris explains this ‘discourse’ in greater detail, drawing on material from Methodist Magazine, the Christian Observer, and other evidence from the time showing a belief that God was on Britain’s side. To quarrel with the establishment status quo of wealth and influence, the ‘“eternal settlement”, was to quarrel with the will of God’ (PM, 82). Since God organised everything, this conviction of divinely ordained goodness extended to prosperity also: if you were prosperous, you could assume that this was a reward for your goodness. The poor, who were not ‘materially able to exhibit ‘godly’ signs’, were ‘interpellated into a damning system of meaning’ (PM, 83), in which their misfortunes were interpreted as being their wickedness: ‘Righteous art Thou O Lord, and just art Thy judgments,’ wrote the Methodist Magazine, commenting on the death of a drunken man in a house fire, presumably because he was a sinful victim of God’s righteous justice. However, ‘Despite the surface complacency engendered by this discourse on Providential settlement, there were points of fracture and contradiction which became the focus of nagging social anxiety’ (PM, 84). By the time Dickens came to write Bleak House, there was increasing anxiety about the fabric of society, which was seen to be threatened: ‘The interconnected malaise of poverty, prostitution, disease, illegitimacy, and juvenile crime was undoubtedly the ‘Tough Subject’ of the early 1850s’ (PM, 85).
Morris then turns to Bleak House itself. Her thesis is that the novel ‘is centrally concerned with the ideological subjection of subjects and positions itself dialogically in the midst of the conflicts articulated within Providential discourse’. The divided narrative between the omniscient third-person voice, and the restricted view of Esther, contributes to the enacting of such a dialogue, where the all-knowing external narrator is a ‘parodic representation of a Providential viewpoint’ (both from PM, 86). As the reader connects the pieces of meaning, it becomes clear that all the evils that happen are due to human, not providential, causation.
Law is represented in the text as at the centre of this proliferating system of misreading, subsuming all other structures of mystification. This is wholly appropriate, since law is the ultimate foundation and guarantor of the existing providential dispensation of property, privilege, and power … In Bleak House, the imposition of a sense of guilt and illegitimacy – in the widest sense of having no right to exist – is unveiled as the mechanism of submission, constructing subjects who ‘willingly’ subject themselves to subjection.
(PM, 87)
Morris looks at the way Mr. Snagsby becomes entangled in the plotting and power games of Tulkinghorn and Bucket, and comments on how he becomes mystified and confused, and convinced of his own guilt. It is so with the other victimised characters: ‘All are marked by a sense of powerlessness, fatalism, and guilt’ (PM, 90).
Turning to consider Esther and her narrative, Morris points out how her origins are paired with Jo’s, even before these two are connected by disease. Esther, like the other victims, does not know how or why she is stigmatised with guilt. However, she becomes ‘more than willing to pay the price of admission into social community’ (PM, 92) and resolves to ‘try as hard as ever I could, to repair the fault I had been born with’ (BH, 27). Esther’s narrative is compared to ‘confessional’ writing that was much indulged by young women writing in the Methodist Magazine at that date. Several critics have noticed the inner boastfulness of Esther’s humility, and Morris is another: like the autobiographical writers in Methodist Magazine, Esther’s narrative discourse:
… exploits the licence offered by the confessional form to covertly catalogue moral virtue while proclaiming humility. Her retrospectively organised personal history culminating in the happy domestic ending, constructs a causal moral plot in which her original virtue is recognised and rewarded at last, and Esther assigned her proper place at the very centre of that little adoring company of the elect at Bleak House.
(PM, 93)
Submission, self-denial and industry are the ‘admission price of social acceptance and love’. So, Esther, having obeyed her godmother’s strictures, eventually achieves her reward. However, we cannot read only Esther’s narrative in Bleak House, for it is set against the external, third-person narrative, which provides a more cynical and ironic set of social connections which work against any ‘providential’ complacency conveyed by Esther. Morris now discusses Jo, almost as if he is Esther’s alter ego: ‘Unlike Esther, though, there is no fairy-tale element of transformation in Jo’s story … The representation of Jo, read in conjunction with the characterisation of Esther, unveils the means by which such inexplicable submissiveness in the poor was maintained’ (PM, 95). The slum where he lives is described with allusions to the infernal, but it is a hell made by human agency (in fact, Chancery). The name ‘all-Alone’ emphasises Jo’s illegitimate condition, and his ‘loss of all social connection’. Furthermore, his illiteracy cuts him off, as ‘None of its [society’s] structuring systems of signs conveys any meaning or offers any position to him at all’ (both from PM, 96). Jo is sustained by the compassion of other orphans: Guster pats him on the shoulder; Charley Neckett cares for him, followed by Esther, and finally he is in the care of Phil Squod.
As Jo becomes connected to other people, he begins to show some subjectivity, a dawning consciousness of himself. However, like the child Esther, this is ‘self-perception founded upon such an extreme of difference that inevitably with it there comes a sense of lack and shame’ (PM, 97). Morris points out that the very poor can only read their distance from all objects of desire, as a measure of their unworth. Jo’s conception of his own history is in the form of self-blame, and he therefore seeks ‘to justify his existence by reparation’:
Having discovered at last the power of signifying systems, Jo is eager to pay the admission fee for a place within social discourse. Like Esther he is ready and willing to confess. He commissions Mr. Snagsby to ‘write out, wery large so that anyone could see it anywheres, as that I was wery truly hearty sorry that I done it’. The chapter is entitled ‘Jo’s Will’, and this is his bequest. It is the only thing society does not begrudge the poor: a willed and willing moral guilt.
(PM, 98)
Morris more or less sums up her analysis in her final sentence, supporting her contention that in Bleak House Dickens has provided a critique of society’s means of controlling the disconnected, the victims and the poor. This critique analyses society’s means of maintaining the status quo to the benefit of the controlling class: Jo ‘catches its [society’s] most pernicious infection. It is the infection of shame, imposed with the inequality of class, and ensuring the willing subjection of the poor in perpetuity’ (PM, 98).
Our fourth and final critic in this section, Stephen J. Spector,29 begins by asking why Stephen Blackpool and Rachael, the Coketown workers in Hard Times, are so boring and represent such a failure on Dickens’s part, as characterisations of the working class. Spector quotes George Eliot and George Bernard Shaw, but these comments still beg the question: why did Dickens feel confident that he could bring to life a class about which he knew nothing? In answer, Spector writes: ‘In this essay I will argue that Dickens’s confidence, and ultimately his failure, rests upon his implicit faith in the power of language, and more specifically upon epistemological assumptions embedded in the rhetoric of realism’ (SS, 230).
A realistic text is one that ‘intends to tell the truth’, and whether praising the accuracy of Hard Times or criticising its portrayal of a northern industrial society, readers typically assess it as convincing or otherwise. In other words, it is treated as a ‘realistic’ text. Rhetorical analysis has identified metonymy as the basic trope in realism: ‘Broadly speaking, metonymy is a figure in which one entity is identified by another with which it is contiguous; to cite the standard example, a king is called the crown because he wears one … To identify an invisible quality – character – by a visible exterior is realism’s fundamental metonymy’ (SS, 231). Dickens and other realistic writers have made the assumption that metonymy can also work the other way: you can discover the character by observing the exterior. So, Dickens embarked on Hard Times in the confidence that he could observe and therefore realistically characterise industrial workers.
Near to the beginning of Hard Times comes the ‘Keynote’ description of Coketown, which is a powerful and successful passage because Dickens transforms the scene through the use of figurative language, introducing the metaphors of serpents, mad melancholy elephants, and the red and black ‘painted face of a savage’ within the context that the town is a transformation of nature, with its clay turned to brick, its purple river and its black canal. In this passage the people are no more than parts in the working, machine-like town. Like the streets, they are ‘equally like one another’ and their behaviour is ‘same … same … same … same’. Spector comments:
This reading, which imagines industrialisation as a cataclysm for the workers, promises to be a disaster for the novelist subscribing to Victorian ideas about character; without differentiation and individuation the Dickensian novel cannot exist. Thus Hard Times must ultimately repudiate its keynote.
(SS, 233)
Stephen, Rachael, Slackbridge and the Hands are not, of course, ‘equally like one another’, so the keynote fails and this infects other aspects of the novel. Louisa realises that she is totally ignorant of the workers, about half way through the novel. In the second half, the workers disappear, except for the brief scene of Stephen’s death.
Spector then brings in the article ‘On Strike’, which Dickens wrote for Household Words just after he began writing Hard Times, and which gives an account of his visit to Preston in January 1854, to observe the long-running strike there. When he answers his fellow passenger, who he calls ‘Mr. Snapper’, for his rigid opinions about the strike, Dickens the reporter uses heavily qualifying language so that his answer conveys deep uncertainty. Dickens’s statement, ‘in all its calculated classiness, inaugurates a distance between Dickens and the workers that will not be easily overcome’ (SS, 234). Sure enough, when he spends time in Preston, the emphasis is on Dickens’s expectations of the working people. After such a long-running dispute, he expects to find an angry and dangerous mob, and he is surprised at the restrained and courteous behaviour he witnesses. He repeatedly expresses relief that he is treated so politely by the strikers and other workers.
In ‘On Strike’, Dickens is astonished by a contrast between ‘the deliberate collected manner of these men proceeding about their business, and the clash and hurry of the engines among which their lives are passed’. Spector points out why he is so surprised:
What he knows comes from a ‘reading’ of the new industrial scene that is based on the familiar assumption of realism, that men must be like their environment: the workers should be like the most striking and visible aspect of their lives, the machines. Thus the expectation that the workers will be a violent, unthinking mob is based explicitly on their contiguity with the violent, unthinking machines.
(SS, 236)
Throughout his career, beginning when he wrote Sketches by Boz and created characters out of external bits and pieces, minutely observed, Dickens had relied on metonymy for characterisation. Now, suddenly, ‘The premise that ‘to look’ or ‘to see’ is ‘to know’ does not stand up, and as a consequence the figure loses its reliability’ (SS, 237).
Of course there are numerous metonymies of character: we need only think of Gradgrind’s squareness (forefinger, wall-like forehead and square house), the appearance of Slackbridge that reveals his malignance, or the filth of Mrs. Blackpool. However, when Dickens came to reprise his keynote, at the start of Chapter 11, it is noticeable that the description of Stephen and his fellows at their looms contrasts them ‘quiet, watchful, and steady’ against the ‘crashing, smashing, tearing’ machines. Dickens even apostrophises the reader with a piece of meditation: put any work of God (the working men) next to any work of man (the machines), and the work of God will come out with dignity from the comparison. As for the workers, Dickens admits that ‘there is an unfathomable mystery in the meanest of them, for ever’. Spector seemingly credits Dickens with having sensed the failure of metonymy to guide him towards a realistic characterisation of the working class. Nonetheless, ‘Dickens’s intention in Hard Times is to move beyond a surface reading of the workers and to reveal them in their particular, complex reality’ (SS, 238). That he fails in this endeavour should not lead us to undervalue his awareness of the ‘gap’ between himself and his subject.
‘Mystery’ and ‘muddle’, figures of illegibility, are repeatedly invoked in Hard Times, as is the maze or labyrinth, at the same time as the Coketown ‘Hands’ are described as unknowable, an instance of correspondence between the workers and their environment. In this there is a form of metonymy, but Spector points out that it is ‘a metonymy that signals its own limitations’ (SS, 239).
Next, Spector initiates a comparison between Hard Times and Engels’s The Condition of the Working Class. Returning to Dickens’s workers ‘all equally like one another’, a metonymic figure which equates machine-like work with an automaton worker, he sees Engels going even further. In Engels’s description, workers all belong to one of two kinds. Either their repetitive, automatic labour reduces them to a sub-human level where they live like animals, or, their obstinate rebellion against such labour turns them aggressive and angry. When Engels observed the miners’ strike of 1844, he was – like Dickens ten years later – astonished at the rational self-control of the striking miners. So far from their behaviour reflecting the subhuman filth and violence of their place of work, on the contrary, their behaviour was that of ‘moderation, rationality, self-control’ – all middle-class virtues Engels hardly thought to witness during such a bitter dispute. Engels’s reactions, like those of Dickens, show a crude reliance on metonymy as a means of decoding observation, of ‘seeing’ to know. However, Dickens differs in that, implicitly, he recognises his mistake:
The lifelessness of Dickens’s industrial workers in Hard Times … paradoxically may be taken as a sign of his humaneness. Instead of allowing them to develop into savages or grotesque robots, he lets them fade into the colourless anonymity of moral personifications while quietly relinquishing the project of presenting the truth about them. He permits his initial expectation that the new industrial world would be peopled by a mob of interchangeable, mass-produced characters to be shown a delusion, revealing in the process that he had been mistaken in assuming a necessary connection between Coketown and its inhabitants. Because it dramatises its own futility, Hard Times displays an unusual intellectual and moral honesty.
(SS, 244)
This shows how Spector, who is clearly of the opinion that the industrial theme of Hard Times, and the characters of both Stephen and Rachael, all fail, manages to find an unexpected positive quality – honesty in failure – with which to credit Dickens.
Further varieties
Dickens has been regularly attacked by his detractors, accused of being melodramatic and sentimental. Our first two critics, Juliet John and Valerie Purton, defend Dickens by agreeing with his attackers, but at the same time arguing that melodrama and sentimentality belong to respectable aesthetic traditions. Yes, Dickens is melodramatic; or, yes, he is sentimental, but these are strengths, not grounds for lowering our estimate of his contribution to the canon of English Literature. John goes further, and introduces us to a Dickens who campaigned against intellectualism on the grounds of cultural inclusion: he was a champion of popular culture. Purton goes further still in her final chapter, suggesting that a bright new era of mass sentimentality may be about to dawn.
Our third critic, Pam Morris, takes an entirely different approach. She takes the ‘Providential discourse’ of the mid-nineteenth century – the conviction that God and Providence favoured the English – as her starting point. With convincing reference to Bleak House, Morris analyses the means society employs to maintain the status quo and to oppress the disconnected poor, as these are demonstrated through characters such as Mr. Snagsby and Jo the crossing sweeper. This analysis reveals a thorough social theme in Bleak House, but raises the very interesting question: does the novel demonstrate the means of social control because it innocently describes the society of its time? Or, does Dickens consciously critique society’s oppressive techniques?
Finally, we met Stephen J. Spector, whose starting point is completely different again. As he develops his argument, his interest in the social structure – this time related to Hard Times and the industrial north – might suggest he is on a similar tack to Pam Morris. He begins, however, with the rhetorical figure: metonymy; and it is from this feature of Dickens’s language, generalised into a metonymic habit of mind, that Spector’s argument stems. Spector brings other contemporary documents into his analysis, citing Engels’s description of the working class, and Dickens’s own report of his visit to Preston, ‘On Strike’. Spector believes Dickens was conscious of his failure to describe the workers, and sees the author acknowledging his own limitation. So, our four critics approach Dickens from different starting points, and, except for Pam Morris, who leaves open the question of Dickens’s intentions, all seem obliged to deal with adverse criticisms of the novelist.
You will quickly find more varieties of approach: each new critic you read will introduce another angle. Barbara Hardy, in her Dickens and Creativity,30 builds a part of her argument by considering various narrators in Dickens’s novels, one of whom is Esther Summerson. She describes the contrasting narrators of Bleak House, suggesting that the Godlike overview of the one, and the first-person subjectivity of the other, represent two extremes of narrative voice. Then, the omniscient narrator’s ‘social indignation is Dickens’s but the narrator’s lack of gender, history and personal identity anticipate T. S. Eliot’s ideal of impersonality just as the bifocal narrative anticipates Joyce’ (Hardy, op. cit., p. 54). Later in her study Hardy focuses on what she calls ‘crises of imagination’ and analyses two deathbed scenes, that of Jo from Bleak House, and that of Mrs. Gradgrind from Hard Times. She finds that in both of these scenes ‘Dickens is open to the charge of softening deathbed distress and idealising the capacity for deathbed vision, but the scene of Mrs. Gradgrind’s dying and seeing, like Jo’s, is unsentimental because its psychology is so profound, coherent and particular’ (Hardy, op. cit., pp.105–106). We have read elsewhere (George Eliot) that Dickens’s characters have no psychology, and (Valerie Purton) that Jo’s death is the paradigm of sentimentality. Hardy is on a different tack, and she follows these investigations by looking at what she calls ‘Creative conversations’, among which she analyses Louisa’s two crucial dialogues with her father, and Sissy Jupe’s victory over the verbal ironist James Harthouse.31
Another completely different approach is taken by Hilary M. Schor in her Dickens and the Daughter of the House.32 The title of this book should immediately remind us that Esther’s life is largely shaped by her being the daughter of Lady Dedlock, while Louisa Gradgrind is ruinously damaged by being the daughter of her father’s ‘house’. However, Schor takes as her starting point the memoir written by Mrs. Kate Perugini – Dickens’s eldest daughter – after her father’s death. In this memoir Mrs. Perugini regrets that she did not show loyalty to her mother, but on the contrary she abandoned her, following her father’s wishes. Schor reads Perugini’s text sceptically, seeing it as a ‘story’ from the daughter of a novelist. She then goes on to consider various kinds of ‘property’ and ‘inheritance’ both in comparison to what these daughters (Esther and Louisa) inherit, whether it be emotional, psychological, or in the form of a story or a text (Lady Dedlock’s document that Esther must burn, for example; Louisa’s lack of stories); and in comparison to the laws and conventions regarding female inheritance, and the position of daughters, at the time when these novels were written:
Within the story Esther is telling, the story figured psychically as the story of the dead mother and the dead child, there is a different story of inheritance: one we can follow only through the fragments, torn documents, the story of resemblance written on the wandering ‘face’ of the female plot. Where it leads is not only a different version of Bleak House, but a different version of property altogether: the daughter’s quest for her maternal legacy.
(Schor, op. cit., p. 112)
It is clear from such an extract that Schor is ready to interpret both intellectually and metaphorically, drawing together threads of her ideas and weaving them into a complex reading of the text. So in the above sample, she cites the ‘story’ of dead mother and daughter, which refers to the fact that both Esther and Lady Dedlock were told that the other died in childbirth. In her chapter called ‘The Social Inheritance of Adultery’, Schor discusses Edith Dombey and Louisa Gradgrind, and ends by imagining Louisa who ‘sits silent and alone by the cold hearth fire … unable herself to wander, to adulterate, to rejoin the plots of marriage and childbirth’ (Schor, op. cit., p. 83). Schor presents some startling insights in her commentaries: but we must be careful. Louisa sits by the fire, yes (HT, 273); but the fire is lit. Where Schor’s ‘cold’ hearth comes from, I do not know.
Alexander Welsh33 takes our two novels together because ‘the two are the first of six completed novels of Dickens’s later career, the period most celebrated by academic critics’ (Welsh, op. cit., xiii). In coining the title Dickens Redressed, Welsh’s idea is that Esther is a sort of ‘cross-dressed’ David Copperfield; and that Dickens ‘redressed his protagonist’s childhood, compensated for it, restored the abandoned self to love and success in life’ (ibid., xiv). Dickens’s novels are typically of ‘egocentric design’ because every detail is mediated through the ‘desires and fears and satisfactions’ of the protagonist. Esther’s narrative increasingly subdues, but does not silence, the other narrator, whose main function is to satirise: and, ‘The very premise of his satire is the interconnection of the human inhabitants of London, great and small’ (ibid., xv).
Welsh sees Hard Times as ‘redressing’ Bleak House. Here there is no central ego. The most sympathetic character is again a woman, Louisa, but is seen from the outside. The language sometimes ‘grates’, as if Dickens were ‘too impatient’ (Welsh, xvi), and the careful counterpoint of the Bleak House narrators is no more. Perhaps Dickens took on ‘a more intractable social question than any he had approached thus far’ (ibid., xvi), in the conflicts of the new industrial order. Meanwhile, Welsh thinks it possible that Bounderby is a satirical self-portrait, and is inclined ‘to think of the novel itself as a kind of circus’ and to see Hard Times as constantly tipping towards ‘clowning’. For example, names such as M’Choakumchild are comedy, and the schoolroom scene is more ridiculous than horrific. In these ways, Welsh distinguishes these two novels as Dickens ‘redressing’ his novelist’s art. David Copperfield was finished in 1850, and Dickens lost his father at the beginning of 1851. In the context of these events both professional and personal, Bleak House and Hard Times mark the start of the later period, and a ‘redressing’.
Having summarised four recent critics, we have now mentioned three more. The one truth that is apparent from all of them is that there is an unlimited supply of different approaches to the study of Dickens’s novels. You can set out from any angle of approach. You can follow any number of different interests, whether you are most fascinated by genre, structure or technique: by language and style, by social commentary, by character and psychology, or by the cultural and social context. Each and any of a multitude of angles can yield exciting insights, and may open the reader’s eyes to new views of the text. It is hoped that this chapter, although quite unable to present anything in the nature of a survey, will have stimulated independent thought, suggested a variety of approaches, and encouraged you to pursue your own angles and your own interests with confidence.
1 Mrs Margaret Oliphant (1828–1897), Scottish novelist and historical writer.
2 From ‘Dickens’s Bleak House’, The Spectator, 24 September 1853, p. 925.
3 Forster, John, The Life of Charles Dickens, 3 vols., (London 1872, 1873, 1874), page 610.
4 In a letter to George Smith, 11 March 1852, in The Letters of Charlotte Brontë Volume III: 1852–1855, Ed. Margaret Smith, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 2004.
5 From ‘The Natural History of German Life’, lxvi, p. 55.
6 Riggs, C. F., ‘Bleak House’, Puttnam’s Monthly Magazine, NY, November 1853, p. 558.
7 Brimley, George, The Spectator, London, 24 September 1853, p. 923.
8 Forster, John, from an unsigned review, The Examiner, 9 September 1854, pp. 568–9.
9 Macaulay, Thomas Babington, The Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay, Ed. Trevelyan, G. O. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1961, p. 614.
10 From The Works of John Ruskin, Ed. Cook E. T. & Wedderburn, Alexander, George Allen, London & NY, 1903–1912, Vol. 17 p. 31.
11 Writing in the New York Tribune, 1 August, 1854.
12 Engels, Friedrich, in New Moral World, 1844.
13 Trollope, Anthony, The Warden, 1855, from Chapter 15.
14 In his Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens, London & NY: Dent & Dutton, 1911.
15 From his review of Our Mutual Friend, in The Nation (New York), 21 December 1865.
16 Shaw, George Bernard, Shaw on Dickens, Eds. Laurence, Dan H. & Quinn, Martin, Frederick Ungar, NY, 1985. Quotations are from pp. 20–21.
17 Shaw, op. cit. Quotations on Hard Times are from pp. 27–35.
18 Chesterton, G. K., Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens, London & NY: Dent & Dutton, 1911. All quotations are taken from Chapter 15 (‘Bleak House’) and Chapter 17 (‘Hard Times’).
19 From Vulgarity in Literature: Digressions from a Theme, London: Chatto & Windus, 1930.
20 In Granite and Rainbow: Essays, NY: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1958, pp. 93–148.
21 From Inside the Whale and Other Essays, London: Gollancz, 1940.
22 Leavis, F. R., The Great Tradition, London & NY: Faber and Faber, 1948, p. 19. All quotations are from pages 19 to 21.
23 Philip Larkin: Letters to Monica, Ed. Thwaite, Anthony, Faber & Faber, London, 2011.
24 John, Juliet, Dickens’s Villains: Melodrama, Character, Popular Culture, Oxford & NY: Oxford University Press, 2001. Page numbers will appear in brackets preceded by JJ, thus: (JJ, 15).
25 John presumably refers to Sartor Resartus as Dickens is known to have read and admired it.
26 Purton, Valerie, Dickens and the Sentimental Tradition: Fielding, Richardson, Sterne, Goldsmith, Sheridan, Lamb, London & NY: Anthem Press, 2012. Page numbers will appear in brackets preceded by VP, thus, (VP, 15).
27 Joseph Surface is the hypocrite who professes ‘sentiments’ to cover his selfish ends, in Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s play The School for Scandal (1777).
28 Morris, Pam, Dickens’s Class Consciousness: A Marginal View, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1991. This summary draws upon Chapter 4: ‘Bleak House: Alienated Readers’, pages 81 to 98. Page numbers will appear in brackets preceded by PM thus, (PM, 15).
29 Spector, Stephen J, ‘Monsters of Metonymy: Hard Times and Knowing the Working Class’, in Modern Critical Views: Charles Dickens, Ed. Bloom, Harold, Chelsea House Publishers, NY and Philadelphia, 1987, pp. 229–244.
30 London & NY: Continuum Literary Studies, 2008.
31 Hardy, op. cit., Chapter 10: ‘Creative Conversation in Hard Times, Great Expectations and Our Mutual Friend’, pp. 127–132.
32 Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.
33 Dickens Redressed: The Art of Bleak House and Hard Times, New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 2000.