WORKS & COMMENTS OF CHARLES DICKENS
Pickwick Papers (1836-37);
Oliver Twist (1837-39); Nicholas
Nickleby (1838-39); The Old Curiosity Shop
(1840-4l);
Barnaby
Rudge (1841); Martin Chuzzlewit (1843-44);
Dombey and Son
(1846-48); David Copperfield (1849-50);
Bleak House (1852-
53); Hard Times (1854); Little Dorrit
(1855-57);
A Tale of Two
Cities (1859); Great Expectations (186~6I);
Our Mutual Friend
(1864-65); Edwin Drood (unfinished) (1870).
A man of phenomenal energy, Dickens combined his
literary career with a variety
of social and theatrical interests. Some of the social concerns are interestingly
documented in Philip Collins's two studies, Dickens and Crime (1962) and
Dickens and Education (1963), while the theatrical involvement embraced
writing, acting and producing for the stage, and culminated in the famous
public
readings from his own works. But a glance through the list of the novels
shows the
extent to which Dickens's life was dominated by the demands of authorship,
for
apart from the gaps between the last three items there is scarcely an unproductive
year. When one considers how each of the novels appeared in either weekly
or
monthly instalments, and that they were supplemented by short stories and
occasional journalism, as well as, from time to time, the duties of an
editor, it can
fairly be said that Dickens's literary activity over a period of more than
thirty years
was uninterrupted. (For reasons of space I have confined myself in this
study to the
novels alone. A full study of Dickens would, of course, pay proper attention
to the
other aspects of his literary career and in particular to the short stories,
some of
which throw interesting light on his development.)
The practice of serial publication, a publisher's device to facilitate
sales which
became an important factor in the development of nineteenth-century fiction,
had
consequences for Dickens's novels which it is difficult for the modern
reader
confronted by a set of eight-hundred page volumes to appreciate. Of the
novels
listed above, nine were originally published in illustrated monthly parts,
each
consisting of three or four chapters. Of the remaining six, one, Oliver
Twist,
appeared as a monthly serial in the magazine Bentley's Miscellany, while
the other
five, all of them rather shorter, were published in serial form in weekly
papers. The
effect of such a method of publication on the tone and content of the novels
concerned was considerable. In the first place the need to maintain interest
by the
deployment of an easily identifiable narrative was paramount. Much has
been made
of the complexity of Dickens's plots but fundamentally a Dickens novel
is based on
a sample narrative concept like Pickwick's journey, the lives of Oliver
Twist,
David Copperfield, or Pip, or the hidden secrets of Bleak House, Little
Dorrit or
Our Mutual Friend. On the other hand, with a basic story established, there
is
ample opportunity for the multiplicity of character and event for which
Dickens is
famous; the dual nature of the process is revealed clearly by Dickens's
device of
two separate narratives in Bleak House. The wealth of apparently extraneous
detail
that is a feature of the novels has sometimes led to the supposition that
Dickens
wrote without plan, but the information that he gave to Forster, together
with his
own notes for individual novels, shows very clearly the extent to which,
particularly
in his later novels, he formulated a basic narrative concept to which he
could keep
firm hold as his novel progressed.
Serial publication thus posed its own technical problems and to a large
extent
dictated their solution. It also had the effect of intensifying the relationship
between
the author and his audience to a degree that can perhaps be compared with
the oral
narrative poem or the Elizabethan stage. To some novelists, conscious of
what they
saw as more important obligations, the need to tailor their novels to popular
demand was a source of irritation: Mrs Gaskell, for example, had disagreements
with Dickens himself over the serialization of her industrial novel North
and South
in his magazine Household Words. More than technical issues were at stake,
however. In two vital areas audience-demand was a controlling factor over
the
content of Victorian fiction: the taboo on explicitness in the examination
of sexual
relationships, and the exploitation of sentiment, which in many ways can
be seen as
a substitute for a more realistic examination of human emotion.
It should be said straight away that very few major Victorian authors felt
these
aspects of public taste to be unduly crippling. As Kathleen Tillotson has
pointed
out, 'With very few exceptions, novelists were contented with such limitations
as
existed, and moved freely within them, or figure-skated along the edge'
(Novels of
the Eighteen-Forties, 1954, p. 64). Dickens, however, seems not merely
to have
accepted these conditions but to have positively endorsed them. Conscious
that his
instalments were read, as they appeared, at family gatherings, he ensured
that they
contained nothing that a Victorian family would blush to hear. Furthermore,
his
manipulation of pathos, evidenced not only by individual incidents like
the death of
Little Nell and Paul Dombey, but by the total concept of characters like
Esther
Summerson in Bleak House and Amy Dorrit, provides a feature of the novels
that
to a modern reader can require considerable explanatory apology.
Obviously the emphasis on the pathetic can be attributed to some extent
to popular
demand: it is well known that at the time of writing The Old Curiosity
Shop
Dickens received numerous letters on the fate of his heroine. What must
also be
stressed are the powerful elements of sentimentality and morbidity in Dickens's
own
character which enabled him to respond to this aspect of popular taste.
Little Nell
was the fictional parallel of Dickens's sister-in-law Mary Hogarth, over
whose early
death he had grieved inconsolably. She became more than a figure of fiction
to her
creator, however: approaching the climax of The Old Curiosity Shop Dickens
told
Forster, 'All night I have been pursued by the child; and this morning
I am
unrefreshed and miserable.' (Forster, op. cit., Bk II p. 7). To self-indulgence
in the
pathetic was added an impulse towards the violent and the macabre. Dickens's
readings from his own works show clearly the way in which he wished not
only to
gratify his own emotional needs in his fiction but also to witness its
effect on his
audience at first hand. Along with the comic scenes, he liked to include
in his
programmes the most affecting or disturbing passages from the novels -
the death
of Paul Dombey, the Bob Cratchit scenes from A Christmas Carol, the Smike
scenes from Nicholas Nickleby and, most dramatic of all, the murder of
Nancy
from Oliver Twist - and he measured his success by the degree of emotional
response that he could exact from an often weeping audience. In a revealing
letter
to his wife, describing a private reading, he wrote: 'If you had seen Macready
last
night, undisguisedly sobbing and crying on the sofa as I read, you would
have felt,
as I did, what a thing it is to have power.' (Quoted in E. Johnson, Charles
Dickens: His Tragedy and Triumph, 1953, p. 532.) The enjoyment of this
sense
of power over his audience gives us a clue to much that we find disturbing
in
Dickens's novels: more than any other novelist he needed not merely the
applause
of his audience but their submission. At the end of his career Dickens
wrote in the
last pages of Our Mutual Friend:
Even he, however, can hardly have been aware of the full implications of
the form
for the development of his art.
If the more startling aspects of Dickens's fiction can be traced to traits
in his own
temperament it must be recorded that his comedy also has its origins in
the man
himself. Much has been written of his comic technique, but his letters
reveal very
clearly that the source of his comedy was not a conscious technique, in
the literary
sense, but a combination of vision and expression that was habitual to
him. Writing,
for example, of the domestic upheaval caused by some house alterations
which he
had set in progress he builds up a scene and an atmosphere in much the
same way
as he does in the novels:
In a similar letter, describing the same events, Catherine, his wife, is
'all over paint'
and seems to think it is somehow being immensely useful to get into that
condition'.
Here we have not only the elaboration of detail in the accumulation of
comic
disaster that we know so well from the novels, but also that spontaneous
interrelationship of perception and articulation that is the hallmark of
Dickens's
mode of comic expression. The sentence about his wife, for example,
inconsequential though it is, could not have been rendered in any other
way and it is
typical of countless such observations that appear in the novels, giving
to their
comedy its inimitable flavour. Character and incident proliferate in Dickens
so
naturally because they are the product of an imagination that was never
still, and of
an impulse towards the dramatic evidenced not only by his theatrical activities
but
by the details of his day-to-day existence. Dickens would never have understood
a
theory of fiction based on the detachment of the author; the novels, as
they stand,
are the expression of the man who wrote them.
The origins of Dickens's literary career can be traced to his early employment
as a
journalist. This work took him first to the Law Courts, including the Court
of
Chancery, and then to Parliament, and his contempt for these institutions,
evinced
most powerfully in Bleak House but reappearing consistently throughout
his work,
is based on the first-hand knowledge of them that he gained at the outset
of his
career. From reporting he moved on to descriptive journalism of a more
imaginative kind and from 1834 to 1835 he wrote a series of sketches which
appeared first in the Monthly Magazine and then in the Evening Chronicle.
Some
of these, together with some additional sketches written for the occasion,
were
collected and published in two illustrated volumes under the title Sketches
by Boz
in February 1836. Forster remarks that 'The Sketches were more talked about
than the first two or three numbers of Pickwick' (op. cit., Bk I p. 5),
and certainly
they were well received at the time. Their appearance in the Evening Chronicle
had
already attracted the attention of the publishers Edward Chapman and William
Hall
who invited Dickens to write a series of similar pieces to accompany a
set of
illustrations that they intended to bring out on sporting themes. From
the start the
text became more important than the illustrations and The Posthumous Papers
of
the Pickwick Club was born. The work appeared in monthly numbers, running
from April 1836 to November in the following year.
Initially the venture seemed to be a failure. The opening numbers sold
only four
hundred copies and were dismissed by such reviewers as noticed them, but
with
the fourth number sales began to improve and Pickwick Papers suddenly became
a triumph, selling 40,000 copies at the height of its success. Readers
of Mrs
Gaskell's Cranford will remember how Captain Brown was run over by a railway
train while engrossed in the latest number of Pickwick Papers; his enthusiasm
was
paralleled with less disastrous consequences throughout the country and
at all levels
of literate society. Once it had caught on, the book was not just another
literary
success but a phenomenon and its boisterous and inconsequential spirit
came to
represent - and indeed to misrepresent its author for generations to come.
The form that Pickwick Papers took was not original. R. S. Surtees had
already
established himself as a humorous celebrant of sporting life and the sketches
which
he wrote for The New Sporting Magazine, and which were later re-published
as
Jorrocks' Jaunts and Jollities (1838), were the direct source of Dickens's
material, most notably of the trial of Bardell vs Pickwick. There was indeed
a
vogue for this kind of comic realism on familiar topics which had probably
attracted
the publishers in the first place. But Dickens brought to the form not
simply a wish
to emulate a successful predecessor but also a comic imagination nurtured
on the
classics of the picaresque novel. In David Copperfield Dickens tells us
that his
hero had 'a little room upstairs. . . . From that blessed little room,
Roderick
Random, Peregrine Pickle, Humphry Clinker, Tom Jones, The Vicar of
Wakefield, Don Quixote, Gil Blas and Robinson Crusoe came out, a glorious
host, to keep me company' (Forster, op. cit., Bk I p. 1). Pickwick Papers
is in
direct line of descent from such a tradition, with Mr Pickwick and Sam
Weller as
anglicized Quixote and Sancho Panza, journeying in the last days of the
stage-coach through pre-industrial England. The story, based on the unpredictable
adventures of a journey, exploited so successfully by Fielding and Smollett,
was
rendered obsolete by the coming of the railways, and it is worth remarking
that
Pickwick Papers, the first novel of the greatest urban novelist, was also,
in a very
real sense, the last major novel of the pre-railway age.
The narrative devices of Pickwick Papers, its loosely- connected sequence
of
events, its interpolated stories and its mildly mock-heroic set-pieces,
are techniques
that Dickens had learnt from his eighteenth-century predecessors; from
them also
he inherited the comic amplitude and boisterous humour that is typical
of much of
the book. Pickwick drinks himself to sleep in Mr Wardle's wheelbarrow and
is
deposited as a vagabond in the village pound, there to be pelted with rubbish;
when
Mr Winkle goes shooting, Mr Tupman 'saved the lives of innumerable small
birds
by receiving a portion of the charge in his left arm.' Pickwick himself
comments on
the source of much of the comedy:
Such scenes, however, are always more decorously comic than their counterparts
in Fielding and Smollett, and the predominant tone of Pickwick Papers is
one of
benevolence and well-being. Good food, so often a source of comfort in
Dickens,
is never so effective in resolving disaster as it is in his first novel.
The interpolated
stories, in which can be seen hints of the violence that was sometimes
to
predominate in the later novels, are too crude to affect the basic atmosphere
more
than marginally and even the social realism of the Eatanswill election
is presented in
such a way that its less pleasant aspects are tempered by the overall sense
of
inconsequence.
The world of Pickwick Papers, however, is not simply the world of Dingley
Dell
and Eatanswill, neither is its total effect as disjointed as its loosely-constructed
technique would perhaps imply. The novel is given shape both by a subtle
development in the character of Pickwick himself and by the way in which
its
thematic concerns, most notably in the sequence of events involving Pickwick
and
the law, have the common element of an attack on inhumanity and selfishness.
The
affair with Mrs Bardell begins as a typically Pickwickian episode, but
as Pickwick
becomes more deeply involved with the legal process, described as an instrument
for 'the torture and torment of his majesty's liege subjects' and 'the
comfort and
emolument' of its practitioners, there is an increasingly serious edge
to the comedy.
Ultimately, in the Fleet prison, Pickwick is brought face to face with
misery and the
effect is not compromised in any way. When the 'Chancery prisoner' dies
of
consumption, a note is introduced into the novel that its readers have
been
prepared for over a series of scenes but which its earliest numbers hardly
anticipated. In his solicitor's office Pickwick reflects that 'When a man
bleeds
inwardly it is a dangerous thing for himself; but when he laughs inwardly,
it bodes
no good to other people' (ch. 31); the thought has an intensity that indicates
the
development of Pickwick himself from a myopic comic butt to a figure of
wisdom
and sensitivity. He himself may not be aware of the development, which
was
perhaps to some extent subconscious on the part of his creator, but it
is consistent
with a gradual process of unification that is apparent in Pickwick Papers
as a
whole. If we still remember the novel primarily in terms of its superb
range of comic
incident and character we cannot re-read it and remain unaffected by its
social
concern and above all by its ultimate affirmation of the pre-eminence of
human
charity.
Such concerns, of course, are the preoccupations of the novels that followed
Pickwick Papers, Oliver Twist and Nicholas Nickleby, both of which take
as
their central situation the plight of children in the face of institutional
cruelty.
Undoubtedly Dickens's success with Pickwick Papers had given him the
confidence to put his own interests at the centre of his fiction, and in
practical terms
the financial security which it had brought him made it possible to experiment
with
themes of his own choosing. The change surprised some of the readers of
Pickwick Papers who, seeing in Oliver Twist simply another example of the
'Newgate Novel', objected to its preoccupation with low life. Such reservations
were a minority judgment however, and, after all, both Oliver Twist and
Nicholas
Nickleby continue to show the imaginative fertility that had brought about
Dickens's
early triumph.
Of the two novels Oliver Twist is the most consistently effective as an
attack on
social injustice. Far more successfully than Nicholas Nickleby, it creates
within its
comedy the element of evil by which its child-hero is threatened, and the
malignancy is rendered more complex by the way in which it is embodied
not only
in the dramatically criminal figures of Fagin and Bill Sikes but also in
the
representatives of established authority like the Board of Guardians and
the police
magistrate Mr Fang. Here Dickens emphasizes for the first time a quality
that was
to become a theme of his later work:the innocent are caught between the
Scylla of
crime and the Charybdis of legalized repression. 'Mrs Sowerberry, the undertaker's
wife, who had a good deal of taste in the undertaking way', emphasizes
the point;
the repressive mentality has invaded the family hearth. Compared with this
enveloping atmosphere of inhumanity, the cruelties of Nicholas Nickleby,
for all
their vividness, seem parochial; Dotheboys Hall exists not at the centre
of the novel
but at its perimeter, and once it has been destroyed the novel is given
over to issues
of romance and to a series of comic portraits which, splendid in themselves,
tend to
dissipate its thematic interest. Despite the death of Smike, Wackford Squeers
is
more a figure of fun than the embodiment of inhumanity that Dickens intended,
while the wicked Uncle Ralph and the decadent Sir Mulberry Hawk are scarcely
more substantial than those intolerable manifestations of goodness, the
Cheeryble
twins.
Dickens's next two novels, The Old Curiosity Shop and Barnaby Rudge, can
also
usefully be considered as a pair in that they appeared in quick succession
in a
periodical of his own devising, Master Humphrey's Clock. Furthermore, as
distinct from the other early novels, they involved a more hectic process
of
composition, appearing in weekly instead of monthly instalments. The very
factor
which was responsible for The Old Curiosity Shop's compulsive effect on
Dickens's contemporaries, his treatment of the life and death of the heroine
Little
Nell, has led to its notoriety with succeeding generations. Edward FitzGerald
copied out all the parts of the book which involved Little Nell herself:
modern
opinion would go to the opposite extreme and delete them, leaving an interesting
range of incidental characters and some social commentary on industrial
England of
considerable force. In fact, The Old Curiosity Shop deserves more generous
consideration than this. Professor K. J. Fielding has commented effectively
on its
resemblance to allegory (Charles Dickens, 1958, pp 52-4), and, like other
Dickens children, Little Nell herself assumes symbolic significance when
set against
the avarice of her persecutors, Quilp and Sampson Brass. Barnaby Rudge
is a
novel of a different kind. Based on the Gordon riots, it is in many ways
a more
stimulating novel on the theme of revolution than the more famous - and
more
sentimental - A Tale of Two Cities. For Dickens, the revolutionary, like
the
criminal, was a figure of compelling interest; while the behaviour of such
characters
might be rendered explicable, even sympathetic, by the circumstances in
which they
found themselves, ultimately they figured as expressions of evil far beyond
the
powers of rational analysis.
In the five years from 1836 to 1841 Dickens had thus produced five long
novels,
all of them, to a greater or lesser degree, bestsellers. Unknown seven
years earlier,
in 1842 he visited America as a literary celebrity. The visit began auspiciously
enough, hut despite his appreciation of the lavish hospitality of his hosts
Dickens
could not resist the opportunity to refer repeatedly in his public pronouncements
to
the vexed issue of international copyright, and in particular to the pirating
of English
works by American publishers. While undoubtedly in the right, as ever he
lacked
discretion, and the result was a series of attacks on him in American newspapers
for which he, in return, exacted revenge, at first mildly in his American
Notes,
published in 1842, and then more vehemently in the American sections of
his next
novel, Martin Chuzzlewit.
Martin Chuzzlewit, to Dickens's alarm, met with a very lukewarm reception.
For
Dickens, with his emotional need for the support of his audience, this
was
particularly distressing, all the more so since he thought the book 'in
a hundred
points immeasurably the best of my stories.' It has been cogently argued
that its
comparative failure was due not so much to its own weakness as to the limitations
of its predecessor, American Notes; whatever the reason, it caused its
author
intolerable anxiety.
Martin Chuzzlewit's lack of contemporary success is particularly surprising
when
one considers that in some ways it re- invokes the spirit of Pickwick Papers.
There is, of course, no Mr Pickwick, but Mark Tapley, the pot-boy who becomes
the hero's inseparable man-servant, is in the vein of Sam Weller, and the
recourse
to the familiar aspects of the coaching-inn and the feast are reminiscent
of Dickens's
first success. Martin Chuzzlewit, however, was written to a definitely
preconceived thematic plan. It has a story devised to demonstrate the eventual
triumph of goodness, and the characters also were intended to emphasize
the
novel's thematic concerns. According to Forster, 'the notion of taking
Pecksniff for
a type of character was really the origin of the book; the design being
to show,
more or less by every person introduced, the number and variety of humours
that
have their root in selfishness' (op. cit., Bk III p. 8). Martin Chuzzlewit
is thus both
a return to the spirit of Pickwick Papers and, in technique, a development
from it.
In that it can perhaps be seen as the culmination of Dickens's early novels
it is
worth considering in some detail.
Certainly Forster's emphasis on character is borne out by the book itself
Its plot is
an amalgam of the improbable and the sentimental, but for what Forster
referred to
as 'the exuberance of comic invention' its characters are unequalled elsewhere
in
Dickens. Pecksniff the hypocritical architect whose moral enunciation -
"'Charity,
my dear . . . when I take my chamber-candlestick tonight, remind me to
be more
than usually particular in praying for Mr Anthony Chuzzlewit, who has done
me an
injustice"' (ch. 4) - is superbly parodied by his own drunken declamation
at
Todgers's boarding-house. Mrs Gamp, the bibulous sick-nurse and layer-out
of the
dead who regards her clients in the former function in terms of their potential
for the
latter, and Mrs Harris, a creature not only of Dickens's imagination but
Mrs
Gamp's as well, are only the more prominent members of the cast of a comedy
as
expansive as any that Dickens wrote. The inventiveness of the comedy in
fact
defeats Dickens's moralistic intentions: in a world in which the eventual
happiness of
the good is scarcely in doubt Pecksniff himself becomes a self-sustaining
figure of
delight.
Martin Chuzzlewit is not only memorable for its comedy, however. In its
variety
of scene it achieves considerable atmospheric complexity and in its London
scenes
in particular it suggests that sense of the density of urban experience
that was to
become the hallmark of the later novels. When Pecksniff brings his daughters,
Mercy and Charity, up to town he brings them to an exciting new world.
And when Mercy Pecksniff is inveigled into marriage with Jonas Chuzzlewit,
who
during the course of the novel becomes wifebeater, murderer and suicide,
the threat
becomes reality. If London is the site of Mrs Todgers's boarding-house,
it is also
the site of the dwelling-place of Jonas, incarcerated with his aged father
and the
senile and terrified servant, Chuffey. While the outcome of Martin Chuzzlewit
confirms its benevolent ethos, Dickens extracts from the sub-plot of Jonas's
career
a disturbing atmosphere of the macabre. Martin Chuzzlewit has its imperfections
-
amongst them the extended American journey of its hero which Dickens introduced
unashamedly in an attempt to stimulate sales, and which, though a sustained
tour-or-force, can never overcome its digressive effect - but they are
the faults of
an imagination on the rampage. Dickens may have set out with an end in
view, but
he found, as he wrote the novel, that, as Forster records, 'it seized him'
for itself...
he wept over it, and laughed, and wept again, and excited himself to an
extraordinary degree... and walked thinking of it fifteen and twenty miles
about the
black streets of London, many and many a night after all sober folks had
gone to
bed' (Bk W p. 4) Such self-absorption was indeed not uncommon to Dickens,
but
it did not always achieve such fortunate results as it did in this case.
From this point
his novels were to achieve an often overpowering symbolic and thematic
intensity,
but they did so to some extent at the cost of the unrestrained comic invention
that
proliferates in the earlier novels, and to such potent effect in the best
scenes of
Martin Chuzzlewit.
In the novels discussed so far the techniques, both of the fiction itself
and the social
criticism embodied within it, are relatively straightforward. The institutions
which
Dickens attacks, the workhouses in Oliver Twist or the Yorkshire schools
in
Nicholas Nickleby, are easily recognizable, and once the abuse has been
overcome, the way is open to a happy conclusion. Dickens's conception of
character in these novels is similarly uncomplicated: hence the optimism
which they
imply, which in itself is made more acceptable by the way in which they
are
distanced in time from the late 1830s and early 1840s when they were written.
The
stagecoach world of Pickwick Papers, Nicholas Nickleby and Martin
Chuzzlewit is fundamentally stable and comforting, and it is only parenthetically
that the violence of the changes implicit in the industrialization of society
breaks in -
as with the London sections of Oliver Twist or, more specifically, Little
Nell's
journey through the Midlands in The Old Curiosity Shop. In Dombey and Son,
however, and in most of the novels which follow it, Dickens locates his
action, at
least in spirit, in the immediately contemporary world, most emphatically
perhaps in
Dombey and Son itself, with its constant reference to the railway, a symbol
of
social change of perhaps uncontrollable potential, but also in novels like
Bleak
House, with its descriptions of the squalor of living conditions in the
overcrowded
city, Little Dorrit, like Dombey and Son, emphasizing the destructive
interrelationship of economic and moral attitudes, and finally, Our Mutual
Friend,
where the forces of business speculation are seen at work on the raw material
of
rotting corpses, dunghills - and marriage. As Humphry House has pointed
out, the
specific abuses attacked in these novels are often things of the past -
most
obviously so in the case of the Marshalsea prison in Little Dorrit and
the physical
settings are sometimes a mixture of the contemporary and the recollected
past, but
the institutions are important not in themselves but as metaphors for a
repressive
social psychology, in itself the consequence of a predominantly selfish
economic
ethos, that in its pressure on the helpless individual is identifiably
Victorian. The
opening of Little Dorrit gives the date of the action as the eighteen-twenties,
but
when Arthur Clennam, its hero, returns to his inheritance the description
of the city
that greets him in no way evokes the sense of the past:
The resemblance, of course, is far from coincidental: both Blake and Dickens
have'
at the heart of their work a sense of the threat to the human spirit from
the forces of
repression, and they locate that threat symbolically in the rapidly developing
urban
and industrial world around them. The London of Little Dorrit though, however
specific the dating of the novel, is the London of the tangible present,
just as it is in
the other later novels (even, in a very special way, in A Tale of Two Cities).
From
the time of Dombey and Son Dickens becomes, in the fullest sense, a Victorian
novelist.
In the space available here it is scarcely possible to discuss each of
the later novels
in detail and it must be emphasized that generalizations about them must
be
qualified, not only by the way in which Dickens presents different aspects
of his
analysis of society in the novels already mentioned, but also by the diversifying
effect of the other novels of this later period, most notably David Copperfield
and
Great Expectations with their strongly autobiographical overtones, and
Hard
Times and A Tale of Two Cities with their concentration on specific issues.
The
generalization that I have outlined in the preceding paragraph, however,
will, I
hope, serve as a context within which discussion of individual novels can
take
place. For the purposes of this essay I intend to concentrate in some detail
on
Dombey and Son before going on to suggest resemblances and qualifications
that
may arise from the novels which followed it.
Just as Martin Chuzzlewit was written with a preconceived moral end in
view, so
Dombey and Son was intended to convey a similar message. Forster records
that
Dickens told him that the intention in the case of Dombey and Son was 'to
do with
Pride what its predecessor had done with Selfishness' and he goes on to
quote a
long letter from Dickens outlining the proposed plot in some detail:'This
is what
cooks call "the stock of the soup". All kinds of things will be added to
it of course.'
Dickens's letter emphasizes the central issue of Dombey's pride, expressed
in his
preoccupation with his son, Paul, and the consequent alienation, on Paul's
death,
from his daughter, Florence, leading up to 'the decay and downfall of the
house,
and the bankruptcy of Dombey, and all' the rest of it' (Forster, Bk VI
p. 2) It
makes no mention of Dombey's second marriage, and thus of the way in which
the
climax of the novel is intensified by Edith Dombey's desertion of her husband,
but
the novel as it stands is a remarkably consistent development of Dickens's
original
idea. In particular, his conception of Dombey's character is far more complex
than
anything he had attempted so far and the relationship of every aspect of
the novel
to the psychology of its central character is consistently and convincingly
handled.
What Dickens's communications with Forster do not stress so emphatically
is the
way in which Dombey's ruling passion is conceived specifically in economic
terms.
This is implied, of course, in the ambiguity of the novel's title: 'Dombey
and Son' is
both a paternal relationship and a commercial concern, and Dombey's tragedy
is
the result of his inability to distinguish between the two. The point is
underlined in
the opening chapter of the novel in contrast with that of Martin Chuzzlewit,
perhaps the most effective that Dickens ever wrote:
'
The first part of the novel is devoted to the stultifying effect of Dombey's
inability to
see the world except in terms of his own commercial pride: the Dombey children,
Paul and Florence, are isolated in a world which denies their natural impulses
and
affections. Paul, doomed with a precocious world-weariness almost before
the
novel has begun, dies, and 'Dombey and Son is a Daughter after all'.
The pathetic death of Paul Dombey, more intensely rendered in its way than
that of
Little Nell, is a reminder that Dickens's new control over his material
does not
involve any change in his basic fictional techniques. In the confrontation
between
authority and the child Dickens presents the conflict in much the same
way as in the
earlier novels, exploiting, for example, the combination of comedy and
pathos
familiar from Oliver Twist. For his education Paul is sent first to Mrs
Pipchin, who
runs 'an infantine Boarding-House of a very select description' with all
the selfish
asperity common to Dickensian widows, and then to Dr Blimber's boarding
school.
The comic juxtaposition of uncomprehending adult and unsophisticated child
is
reminiscent of Oliver's asking for more, but in Dombey and Son scenes like
this
are integrated into the presentation of Paul Dombey's childhood in a way
which
qualifies their comedy and emphasizes, by contrast, the completely enveloping
nature of the ethos that destroys him.
Dombey's obsession with the power of money lies at the heart of the novel
and its
repressive consequences are emphasized not only in terms of plot but by
the way in
which character and location are organized towards a total symbolic effect.
It is a
common Dickensian technique to identify characters by the life- style of
their
establishments and he employs it perhaps more purposefully in Dombey and
Son
than in any other of his novels. The business house of Dombey, where fortunes
are
made and life is destroyed, is contrasted with Sol Gills's shop, where
business fails
and humanity flourishes; the suffocating institutions presided over by
Mrs Pipchin
and Dr Blimber can be set against Staggs's Gardens, the home of Paul Dombey's
first nurse, and Mrs MacStinger's lodging-house, where if children run
wild they at
least run naturally. Minor characters, like Miss Tox, Major Bagstock and
John and
Harriet Carker, are all presented in the homes which they have made for
themselves and which express their personalities so precisely. At the centre
of the
novel Dombey's own house, with its cheerless rooms and staircases, is no
home at
all: from its windows Florence looks across the street to where she sees
a very
different household, with a very different head.
For all its considerable qualities of plot it is through effects and contrasts
such as
these that Dombey and Son makes its most telling effect. At the climax
of the novel
we are again brought back to the Dombey mansion.
Alone, the ruined Dombey wanders its corridors at night. He contemplates
suicide
and is melodramatically saved by the daughter he had spurned, but far more
instrumental in the assertion of Dombey's downfall than the events is their
setting..
The great empty house, which has seen the birth and death of Paul, Florence's
solitary growth to womanhood and the hollow triumph of Dombey's remarriage,
is
an expression of nemesis far more potent than the events of his career
can possibly
be.
Running parallel with Dombey's career is that of his unloved daughter:
as he moves
obdurately towards disaster, she leads a life of emotional starvation from
which she
is ultimately rescued by her marriage to Dombey's clerk, Walter Gay. Here
again
the atmospheric contrasts are as important as the narrative events; against
the
sterility of Florence's environment is set the vitality of the influences
which surround
Walter Gay. It is worth emphasizing, however, that, just as Dickens's firm
hold on
the character of Dombey at the centre of the novel gives it coherence and
power,
so the character of Florence is handled with a sensitivity that gives particular
force
to her part in the novel. Unlike Esther Summerson in Bleak House and Amy
Dorrit,
Florence Dombey draws from the reader a sympathy consistent with the facts
of
her situation, largely perhaps because the importance of her role is not
specifically
emphasized but develops as a consequence of the novel's central theme.
This is not
to suggest that Dickens deliberately adopted a more naturalistic approach
in
Dombey and Son, which as much as any other Dickens novel, has its high
points of
melodrama, comedy and pathos. What can be said is that these effects are
skilfully
controlled towards a unified expression of its central concerns in a way
which was
new to Dickens, and which was to open up new possibilities for the development
of his art. (For a fuller discussion of points mentioned here and of many
others see
Kathleen Tillotson's excellent chapter on this novel in her Novels of the
Eighteen-Forties.)
While working on Dombey and Son Dickens had confessed to the need he felt
to
control some aspects of his imagination.
The admission is an interesting testimony to the way in which Dickens regarded
his
creative impulse, and in David Copperfield he seems to have been able to
relax
the restraint which he had imposed upon its predecessor. David Copperfield's
traditional popularity has always depended to some extent on the 'preposterous
sense of the ridiculous' manifested in characters like Micawber and Betsy
Trotwood, while the extent of Dickens's 'enjoyment' in the novel is communicated
by the particular quality of its reflective tone.
The beautifully realized sense of place, achieved again later in the descriptions
of
the marsh country in Great Expectations, is typical of the best of David
Copperfield; nostalgia is far too crude a term to define its evocative
sensitivity. The
attention paid to the other major novels of Dickens's later period by modern
critics
has led to some neglect of what was once regarded as the representative
Dickens
novel and it is a neglect that amounts to self-deprivation. But when this
is said, it
has to be admitted that there is much that is unsatisfactory in David Copperfield.
In his Introduction to the Everyman edition, written in 1907, Chesterton
commented that 'although this is the best of all Dickens's books, it constantly
disappoints the critical and intelligent reader.' So much the worse for
him, one is
tempted to respond, but Chesterton defines the more worrying aspects of
David
Copperfield when he discusses the novel's conclusion: 'I do not like the
notion of
David Copperfield sitting down comfortably to his tea-table with Agnes,
having
got rid of all the inconvenient or distressing characters of the story
by sending them
to Australia.' Dickens was not above getting rid of his more inconvenient
or
distressing children by sending them to Australia in real life, but the
fictional
experience is somehow less excusable. The combination of fiction and selective
autobiography makes David Copperfield a disturbingly self-centred book:
its hero
is embarrassingly prone to a tendency to self-pity and wishful thinking
which he
never really outgrows and which is hardly improved by the smugness with
which he
regards himself at the conclusion of the novel.
The unity which Dickens had had to create in Dombey and Son is embodied
in
David Copperfield in its first-person narrative but, in spite of the special
circumstances surrounding it, it has important factors in common with.
the other
later novels. Like Florence Dombey, David Copperfield suffers a loveless
childhood, emphasized in this case by the physical and psychological violence
of his
stepfather's oppression. In a variety of ways, most obviously in the story
of Little
Em'ly, this is a Dickensian Song of Experience:the novel has no clearer
message
than its demonstration of the fragility of childhood innocence. Coupled
with this is
the sense of isolation, amounting on occasions to desolation, which surrounds
David himself as the people to whom he commits himself in his search for
security -
Steerforth, Dora, even, though through no fault of his own, Peggotty -
prove
fallible. Given such a demonstration of the instability of existence, how
can the
marriage to Agnes seem other than a sham? Marriage, in fact, is to seem
increasingly a mockery as a means of conclusion in the later novels:what
in Martin
Chuzzlewit is an acceptable convention of comedy becomes in Little Dorrit,
Great Expectations and Our Mutual Friend almost a matter for apology.
David Copperfield, for all its variety of character and situation, is,
of course, a
deeply introspective novel. In the two great novels of the eighteen-fifties
which
followed it, Bleak House and Little Dorrit, Dickens turned, more completely
than
ever before, to an analysis of society. These two novels have attracted
so much
attention in recent years that it would serve little purpose to attempt
a
comprehensive account of them here, even were it possible, and instead
I intend
only to refer to specific issues arising from them: in the case of Bleak
House the
unusual narrative method that Dickens adopted, and its implications for
the view of
society presented in the novel, and in the case of Little Dorrit the organization
of
the novel towards the expression of an unrelenting social pessimism. (On
Bleak
House see in particular M. D. Zabel's essay in The Dickens Critics, ed.
Ford and
Lane. Edgar Johnson's chapter on Little Dorrit in his Charles Dickens is
one of
his finest and should be consulted.)
Dickens began work on Bleak House at the end of 1851, a year which has
often
been taken to mark a turning-point in Victorian social history. The Great
Exhibition
of that year affirmed a commercial and nationalistic pride that could hardly
have
been predicted from the social unease of the eighteen-thirties and forties:
the fifties
were the first decade of Victorian self-confidence. The limitations of
such an
over-simplification have been expertly demonstrated by Professor Asa Briggs
(Victorian People, ch. 2), and Dickens himself no admirer of the Exhibition,
was in
fact probably more concerned with a speech which he made in the same year
on
behalf of the Metropolitan Sanitary Association, during the course of which
he
proclaimed.
In Bleak House Esther Summerson catches smallpox from the crossing-sweeper,
Jo; her aristocratic mother dies at the gate of the poison-infested burying-ground
close by Tom All-Alone's. The all- embracing nature of social evil in Bleak
House
is thus made explicit through a symbolism born of Dickens's immediate social
concerns. Richard Carstone, the doomed ward of the Court of Chancery, says
of
that court's operations.
The comment applies not just to Chancery itself but by extension to the
social
system of which it is presented as the representative institution in the
novel.
To emphasize the extent of his social preoccupations in Bleak House Dickens
deliberately contrived a dual-narrative in which the life-story of his
heroine, Esther
Summerson, related as a first-person narrative, is interwoven with an extensive
range of imaginative social documentation provided by the author himself.
The
effect is a subtle one - the novel gains stability from the progressive
unravelling of
Esther's story, while leaving Dickens free to expatiate on various examples
of social
abuse in the manner of his earlier picaresque method. The evils which he
attacks,
ranging from slum-dwelling to misguided philanthropy and including every
form of
exploitation, are indeed related to the main plot, but the fact that the
novel is
deliberately compartmentalized in this way allows Dickens to extend his
social
criticism without limitation.
There is, however, a further effect of the narrative method that is vital
to an
understanding of Bleak House. If Dickens supplies his analysis in what
might
loosely be called the picaresque section of the novel, his remedy is contained
in the
'linear' narrative of Esther's life-story, and in particular in its account
of her
relationship with Jarndyce, the father-figure of the novel, who knows the
ways of
Chancery and constantly asserts the futility of opposition. Jarndyce's
method of
alleviation is a simple one springing from his inexhaustible bank-account,
and, in
fact, all that Dickens can offer against the realistic depredations of
the social system
is charity of improbably mythic proportions. The inadequacy of such a solution
is
best demonstrated by the way in which Jarndyce, a descendant of the Cheerybles
of Nicholas NicklebyOliver Twist, is presented as a figure of semi-divine
potential. At the climax of Bleak House, when he has made Esther a present
of not
only her home but also her husband, she describes her reaction.
The unrealistic nature of Jarndyce's role in Bleak House, far from providing
an
answer to the social evil documented in the novel, is, in fact, an expression
of
pessimism about the prospects of social change as intense as any expressed
by the
social analysis itself; in that Esther's narrative is ostensibly optimistic,
the
dual-narrative method can be seen as enabling Dickens to put forward a
solution to
the problems outlined in the novel which he could scarcely have endorsed
in
rational terms.
The pessimism implicit in Bleak House finds overt expression in Little
Dorrit,
written some five years later. Here Dickens reverts to the world of Dombey
and
Son in that the novel is given a specifically commercial setting: the inter-relationship
between financial preoccupations and selfishness is emphasized not only
by the
thwarted life of the hero Arthur Clennam, a Paul Dombey who managed to
survive,
but also, in parody, through the social pretensions of William Dorrit,
the Father of
the Marshalsea, existing in fantasy when he is imprisoned and in fact after
his
release. The theme is given a fuller social perspective by the career of
the financier,
Merdle, surrounded by pillars of the establishment until he is exposed
as 'the
greatest Forger and the greatest Thief that ever cheated the gallows' (Bk
II, ch.
25). The structure of Little Dorrit is a simple one compared with the ingenuity
of
Bleak House; the real issue is not, as Dickens himself was forced to enquire
in a
memorandum, how the Clennams are related to the Dorrits, but how the course
of
their lives demonstrates the hopelessness of existence in the prison-world
that the
novel portrays. The prison-symbolism of Little Dorrit has received ample
comment: one need only remark here on the way in which the actual prisons
of the
novel and life itself as it is portrayed there become interchangeable.
Dorrit released
is Dorrit enchained: Clennam imprisoned is Clennam liberated, at. least
temporarily,
from the pressures of the outside world. Little Dorrit ends with the marriage
of
Clennam to the heroine, Amy Dorrit, but the sense of release that this
convention
had given in the earlier novels is never attempted. The marriage takes
place in an
atmosphere devoid of festivity and the concluding sentence of the novel
describes
how, after it.
Little Dorrit has its 'good' characters - Amy herself, the Meagleses, Doyce
the
engineer, and in their own way, the rent-collector Panks and Flora Finching,
nursing her senile aunt - but they are all cast in a minor key and their
capacity for
happiness seems constantly overshadowed by the predominant atmosphere of
defeat that the novel suggests. Here the representative institution is
the
Circumlocution Office, a government department devoted to the frustration
of the
individual; in Little Dorrit Dickens seems to abandon the idea that the
individual
can assert himself with any hope of success against the pressures of society.
The other novels of the eighteen-fifties, Hard Times and A Tale of Two
Cities,
were both written in weekly instalments for Dickens's own periodicals,
Household
Words and All the Year Round. Of the novels written in this way only Great
Expectations really achieves the stature of the major novels although,
since its
championship by F. R. Leavis in The Great Tradition, Hard Times has come
to
occupy a special place in Dickens studies. Written soon after the completion
of
Bleak House and after a visit by Dickens to the industrial North, it is,
in fact, far
more successful as an attack on Utilitarianism than as a discussion of
specifically
industrial issues. The economy of its form has certain advantages in this
respect;
Hard Times makes its point about its chosen target lucidly and forcefully,
and
certainly Humphry House's assertion that it is 'a sport and an anomaly'
(The
Dickens World, 1941, p. 34) gives a misleading impression. These qualities,
however, cannot disguise the fact that its characterization is often unsubtle
and its
irony often laboured. Amplitude is fundamental to Dickens's art, and the
restrictions
imposed upon him by the comparative brevity of Hard Times are not always
successfully overcome.
A Tale of Two Cities is more of an anomaly than Hard Times, and some critics
have related its singular emotional tone to aspects of Dickens's private
life, and
particularly to his involvement with the young actress, Ellen Ternan. It
is probably
more to the point to see this novel as an expression of the subconscious
fear of
revolutionary violence which Dickens had revealed earlier in Barnaby Rudge
and
which he shared with so many of his contemporaries. In the Preface Dickens
refers
to 'the philosophy of Mr Carlyle's wonderful book'. Carlyle's French Revolution
had been published in 1837, at a time when it was easy to see the significance
of its
theme for contemporary England, but A Tale of Two Cities, appearing more
than
twenty years later, is an interesting reminder that anxiety on the subject
of
revolution was not confined to the first half of the century. The 'two
cities' of the
title are, of course, London and Paris, and if the opening chapters express
a
modernist's contempt for the London of an earlier age, it is not implausible
to relate
Dickens's account of the fall of the French aristocracy, with its hallmark
of
gratuitous indifference, to his comments on society in his other late novels.
but it is never consistently developed. Inspired by Carlyle, A Tale of
Two Cities
matches Carlyle in its rhetoric and in the vagueness with which its social
and
emotional themes are explored. For the complexity of tone and analysis
that
characterizes Dickens's other work of the period are substituted shrillness
and a
pervasive sentimentality epitomized by Sidney Carton's famous last words.
The
pessimistic turn taken by Dickens's novels from Dombey and Son onwards
could
scarcely have passed unnoticed by contemporary reviewers. In a long review
of
Little Dorrit, for example, in Blackwood's Magazine entitled 'Remonstrance
with
Dickens', the writer lamented what he regarded as a distortion of Dickens's
natural
propensities.
The review concludes by begging Dickens not to go on 'building streets
of Bleak
Houses, and creating crowds of Little Dorrits'. Pleas for a return to the
spirit of
the earlier novels were often a way of expressing disapproval of what were
felt to
be dangerously radical social attitudes: Lord Macaulay's famous comment
that
Hard Times was 'sullen socialism' was not an isolated example. There were
other
causes for anxiety amongst Dickens's admirers. Aware of his unhappiness
in his
marriage, which came to a climax with his separation from his wife in 1858,
and his
removal to his new house at Gad's Hill near Rochester, his friend, Angela
Burdett-Coutts, was afraid that his domestic difficulties had affected
his writing.
Certainly Little Dorrit, in particular, of the later novels seems in many
ways to
suggest an impasse: the constant atmosphere of failure surrounding its
middle-aged
hero has psychological as well as social implications.
Settled at Gad's Hill, however, Dickens seems to have found new resources
of
creative energy. His last completed novels, Great Expectations and Our
Mutual
Friend, together with the unfinished Edwin Drood, are certainly no more
optimistic
than the novels which preceded them - Our Mutual Friend especially, suggests
a
society more positively predatory than anything in Bleak House or Little
Dorrit -
but they are marked by new reserves of that fictive inventiveness which
is
characteristic of Dickens at his greatest, reinforced now by an increasing
fascination
with the macabre themes of crime and death.
Great Expectations was Dickens's second 'autobiographical' novel -
'autobiographical' in the very general sense that it presents in a first-person
narrative
the career, and more importantly the psychological development, of its
hero. As in
David Copperfield, Dickens makes skilful use of the narrator's recollected
sense
of place. From the opening chapter we are presented through the eyes of
the child,
Pip, with an evocative picture of the marsh country amongst which he grew
up, and
to which he is to return, at moments of emotional crisis, throughout the
course of
the novel.
This kind of atmospheric precision achieves symbolic force and recurs,
for
example, in Pip's references to the great furnace at the forge where he
works with
the blacksmith Joe Gargery, and in the descriptions of the decayed sterility
of Satis
House, the mansion of his supposed benefactress, Miss Havisham.
The theme of Great Expectations is that of false pride and again, as in
Dombey
and Son, it is given a specifically monetary perspective:Pip's ambitions
to be a
gentleman, based on the belief that he is the chosen protégé
of Miss Havisham, are
shattered when he learns that his sponsor is the convict Magwitch. But
Great
Expectations is, in fact, equivocal about money-values and its real strength
lies in
the quality of its psychological penetration, revealed not only in its
account of Pip's
reactions to his situation, but also in features like the mysterious split
personality of
the criminal lawyer Jaggers and the self-imposed death-in-life of Miss
Havisham,
the consequence of her having been jilted many years before. Related to,
and
indeed reinforcing, these psychological concerns is a fascination with
crime,
emphasized by the role of Magwitch and his involvement in the lives of
both Pip
and the unattainable heroine, Estella. In his notes for the novel Dickens
wrote:
Magwitch tried, found guilty, & left for
DEATH
(Butt and Tillotson, op. cit., p. 30)
and at the climax of the novel he includes a highly dramatized account
of the death
sentence passed on Magwitch at his trial. Preoccupations which had revealed
themselves in the early part of Dickens's career, in episodes like Fagin's
last night
alive, the suicide of Ralph Nickleby and the murder in Martin Chuzzlewit,
thus
recur in these final novels.
Violence and the mentality of the criminal are even more intensely represented
in
Our Mutual Friend and Edwin Drood and in the latter, with the prominence
given
to the character of Jasper Drood, choirmaster, opium addict and presumably
murderer, Dickens would seem to have intended to concentrate specifically
on
these issues. Dickens had published Wilkie Collins's The Moonstone in All
the
Year Round in 1868 and this may have induced him to write his own detective
story, although Edwin Drood is a work of potentially far greater power
than
Collins's novel. Speculation on the subject of Dickens's unfinished novel,
however,
while fascinating, is not always productive, and I therefore intend to
conclude this
survey of Dickens's work with a discussion of Our Mutual Friend his last,
and
arguably his greatest, completed novel.
Our Mutual Friend has had a chequered critical career. Its opening numbers
were
not altogether well received and Dickens endured considerable anxiety about
its
progress. The young Henry James attacked it violently for its lack of discipline
and
'humanity'.
and of the early critics only Shaw seems to have anticipated such modern
views as
those of Edmund Wilson and Edgar Johnson, who rank it with Dickens's greatest
achievements rather than considering it as evidence of decline.
The first thing that has to be said about Our Mutual Friend is that it
is a novel in
which Dickens, in a way curiously comparable to Henry James himself in
his last
novels, takes his fictional techniques to the point of self-parody. The
convoluted
plot, involving its central character in not two, but three, separate identities,
all
involving disguise, outdoes anything its author had contrived before; we
are asked
to accept concealed evidence, simulated behaviour and hidden secrets as
part of
the day-to-day processes of existence. The characterization offers a range
of
grotesques like the one-legged Silas Wegg, hired to read the
'Decline-and-Fall-Off-The-Rooshan-Empire' to the equally improbable Golden
Dustman Noddy Boffin, Mr Venus, taxidermist and dealer in 'human warious',
and
Jenny Wren, the deformed dolls' dressmaker, whose love for the good Lizzie
Hexam alternates with sadistic fantasies about the fate of her enemies.
Our Mutual
Friend seems at times like a vast and somewhat decaying baroque structure,
threatening at any moment to collapse.
The effect of this exaggeration of technique, like that of James's prose
in The
Ambassadors, is one of challenge to the reader, and it is a challenge which,
if
accepted, intensifies the thematic concerns of the novel. These, crudely,
are
two-fold and combine the preoccupations which I have outlined in the earlier
novels - social constriction, based on obsession with money, and psychological
stress, particularly of a violent kind.
Our Mutual Friend is set very firmly in the present: 'In these times of
ours, though
concerning the. exact year there is no need to be precise' (Bk I, ch. I).
The history
of the Harmon inheritance, which consists of a series of dust-heaps containing