Dickensian Laughter: Essays on Dickens and Humour

208 Pages·2013·1.55 MB·English

by  Malcolm Andrews

Dickensian Laughter
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Dickensian Laughter
Essays on Dickens and Humour
MALCOLM ANDREWS
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© Malcolm Andrews 2013
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First Edition published in 2013
Impression: 1
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ISBN 978–0–19–965159–7
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For LIONEL WEST, my grandfather,
and his daughter
JOAN, my mother:
in loving memory
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Preface and Acknowledgements
In his autobiographical Father and Son (1907) the poet and critic
Edmund Gosse records how, as a mid-Victorian child, he became
‘gloriously enslaved’ to P ickwick Papers : ‘My shouts of laughter at the
richer passages were almost scandalous, and led to my being
reproved for disturbing my Father while engaged, in an upper room,
in the study of God’s Word’. He felt himself to be in the company
of a gentleman so extremely funny that he ‘began to laugh before
he began to speak’. Father and Son was written in the Edwardian
period, and Gosse pondered the possibility that he might be the last
of the generations ‘who accepted Mr. Pickwick with unquestioning
and hysterical abandonment’. But he wasn’t. He would have been
reassured to hear the experience of at least one child of the next
generation, John Middleton Murry, who in turn had been reassured
to read in Father and Son that his own particular affl iction was shared.
Up to that point, Murry records in P encillings (1923), ‘I was per-
suaded that the behaviour Mr Pickwick induced in me at the age of
eight and nine was a clear proof of a peculiar madness’. Helpless
laughter seemed to him to have a pathological signifi cance:
Even at that age I was half-ashamed of it. I used to begin to laugh before
I had opened the book […]. And I have never been able to read more
than a few pages since then, because the helpless feeling of unquench-
able Achaean laughter takes hold of me. I dare not let go my sanity;
I am afraid of a second childhood.
That is how Pickwick affected generations of readers. A contempor-
ary of Middleton Murray, Lionel West, used to return home from
his offi ce in an accounting fi rm, have supper with the family, retire
to put on his slippers, light his pipe, settle in his armchair in the
family living-room, and open his P ickwick. As he chuckled, pipe still
clenched in his teeth, the incendiary Pickwick effect jiggled tobacco
ash from the bowl down onto the pages. His daughter used to watch
this slightly alarming routine, and years later often told the story to
her children, still somewhat in awe of the power of Pickwick . Lionel’s
daughter was my mother. This book is dedicated to both of them.
viii Preface and Acknowledgements
‘The qualities for which every body reads and admires him [Dickens]
are his humour and wit’, wrote one reviewer of Dickens’s work at
the start of his career, in 1837. After Dickens’s death in 1870, his
friend and biographer John Forster concluded his assessment of his
subject: ‘His leading quality was Humour’. Dickens was seen as the
greatest English humorist since Shakespeare. And yet you might not
know it from the vast accumulation of books and articles on Dickens
over the last half century. As Philip Collins remarked in 1971, in
introducing an anthology of contemporary reviews of Dickens, The
Critical Heritage : ‘from how many discussions of Dickens in the learned
journals would one ever guess that (as Dickens himself thought)
humour was his leading quality, his highest faculty?’ Over forty
years later has the situation changed much?
Perhaps we think Forster was wrong in identifying humour as
Dickens’s leading quality? Perhaps we think we now see more clearly
than he could that it was the serious Dickens, the darker Dickens,
where the real genius of the man showed itself? Or perhaps in order
to take Dickens seriously attention always needs to be turned away
from the comedy, from the farce, the irony and the facetiousness
which were part of his identity? Whatever the verdict, there is rela-
tively little in the way of sustained critical attention to Dickens’s
humour. There have been distinguished exceptions, of course, nota-
bly James Kincaid’s D ickens and the Rhetoric of Laughter (1970) and John
Carey’s chapter on ‘Dickens’ Humour’ in The Violent Effi gy (1973). But
search the indexes in any of the recent proliferating ‘companions’,
‘guides’ etc. to Dickens for ‘humour’, ‘comedy’ or ‘laughter’ and you
would be hard put to fi nd much. This gap is evident also in much of
the modern popular conception of Dickens. Classical Comics brought
out a glossy and handsome ‘Graphic’ version of A Christmas Carol in
2008. At the end of the book the editors added some historical and
biographical information, including this ‘Dickens Fact’; ‘ “D ickensian”
= denoting poverty, distress, and exploitation, as depicted in the
novels of Charles Dickens’. Who would have thought that D ickens,
more than any other Victorian novelist, was famous for making
people laugh, loud and long?
There is of course, and always has been, wider recognition of
Dickens the humorist than the record of published criticism sug-
gests. The shortage of critical studies may be due to intellectual
Preface and Acknowledgements ix
market forces, as suggested above, but may also owe something to
another kind of problem. One hears quite often that humour is very
hard to write about in any intensively analytical way (trying to
defi ne humour is one of the defi nitions of humour, according to the
cartoonist Saul Steinberg). Even professional comedians can be
silenced when asked about, for instance, their gift of comic timing.
The popular view is that under the anatomist’s knife the vital essence
of humour seeps away, elusive as ever, leaving a pile of mangled
remains. ‘Analysing humour is like dissecting a frog’, according to a
remark attributed to E. B. White, the American essayist: ‘few people
are interested, and the frog dies of it’. (Mrs Leo Hunter’s batrachian
sympathies might be called into play here). The reader of this book
will have to judge whether or not this particular analytical endeavour
has been worthwhile; and also whether or not I have inadvertently
killed off Dickens’s humour.
How does Dickens make us laugh?—that is what interests me
here in this sequence of essays. How can words on a page fi re off
into the reader’s consciousness and jolt him or her into a smile, a
giggle, or a hearty laugh? The book’s method of composition has
been essentially reactive. By and large I have picked out extracts
from Dickens’s novels, stories, journalism and letters that make me
laugh, and then explored (not necessarily discovered) how he has
done it. That route, rather than through any prefabricated theoreti-
cal framework, is how I have preferred to approach the topic; at the
same time, this reactive exploration has found useful navigational
impetus from some of the stimulating laughter theorists of the last
two centuries. At all events, if the analysis is not to the reader’s taste,
then the book can bid fair to be a tempting anthology of hilarious
passages from a master humorist. My hope all along has been to
make the reader laugh and also refl ect on his or her laughter.
I must here acknowledge the help and encouragement from many
people known and unknown. In the latter category I include and
thank the two anonymous readers for Oxford University Press who
commented most constructively on some draft essays. My wife
Kristin has been unfailingly good-humoured and encouraging
throughout this book’s sometimes taxing gestation and writing.
Andrea Samson of Stanford University and Sophie Scott of Univer-
sity College, London, have both been generous with information