Dickens Centennial Essays

244 Pages·1971·98.313 MB·English

by  Ada Nisbet (ed.), Blake Nevius (ed.), Denis Donoghue, K.J. Fielding, George H. Ford, Barbara Hardy, J. Hillis Miller, Ian Milner, Sylvère Monod, Michael Slater, Harry Stone

Dickens Centennial Essays
EDITED BY
ADA NISBET BLAKE NEVIUS
AND
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS
Berkeley Los Angeles London
1971
University of California Press
Berkeley and Los Angeles, California
University of California Press, Ltd:
Lon<J,on, England
Copyright© 1971 by The Regents of the University of California
lSBN:0-520-01874-5
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 77-142047
Printed in the United States of America
Preface
"Charles Dickens died at 6:10 a.m. on June 9, 1870, and was
buried privately in Poet's Corner, Westminster Abbey, in the
early morning of June 14. In his will he enjoined his friends to
erect no monument in his honour, and directed his name and
dates only to be inscribed in plain English letters on his tomb,
adding this proud provision:-'! rest my claim to the remem
brance of my country upon my printed works.'" So begins the
brief London Times notice in 1920 on the occasion of the fiftieth
anniversary of Dickens's death. As is well known, the 1920s were
the nadir of that remembrance-at least among those Samuel
Butler invariably referred to as "the superior people," those
blasted twenty years later by Edmund Wilson as they had never
ceased to be blasted by those strange-bedfellow critics Shaw and
Chesterton. Of course Dickens was still being read by inferior
people, among whom young men were known to have broken off
their engagemen~ to girls who misquoted him.
. The notice in the Times says all the right things on such an oc
casion, but carefully avoids anything like unseemly panegyric
while it zigs from mild praise of Dickens's artlessness to reserva
tions about his "epileptic" history, and zags from comment on
faults which "are colossal as those of giants mostly are" to pa
tronizing regrets at his aiming "at national success" which led to
his being read "with the sand-blindness thafmade 'Lady Audley's
Secret' and 'East Lynne' so garishly popular." After all this facing
both ways, the anonymous leader-writer nods across the channel
where, it seems, admiration for Dickens was not epileptic and
quotes Anatole France that "everybody in France" reads Dickens
even though "in England it is the fashion to neglect the best Eng
lish author." A more favorable notice in the Athenaeum, one of
the few jou·mals that took any notice of the event at all, after ob
serving that "Dickens has for many years been in disrepute among
the highbrows," praises him as a colossus who "created a world
and peopled it," a point emphasized by Chesterton in his "Dickens
[ V ]
1886J9
Preface
Vl
50 Years After" in the Observer. Chesterton goes on to remon
strate against those who berate Dickens for not creating a "real"
world and writes, "The trouble is not that his world is not like
our world; it is that our world is a great deal too like his world.
If we differ at all, so to speak, it is by being the same, only more
so."
The story of the shift in the critical estimate of Charles Dickens
in the past fifty years is as melodramatic, irrational, and comic as
any of the author's inventions; one has only to read the many
books and articles that have been published in the 1960s and
compare them with the generally feeble "defenses" of Dickens
published in the 1920s to realize that the mid-twentieth-century
rebirth of Dickens is as much a phenomenon as his leap to fame
with the publication of Pickwick. Although the midwives of this
rebirth have been the critics led, significantly, by the anti-academic
Edmund Wilson, those of us engaged in university teaching know
that it is the students who are making it impossible for us to re
peat the old cliches. It is they who are reading Dickens with such
close attention that we have been forced to blow the dust off our
old volumes and our old views.
Chesterton was right. The twentieth century is more like
Dickens's world than the nineteenth; it is just that his ear was so
close to the Victorian heart that he heard its beat and diagnosed
its "illth" (as Ruskin called it) in its early stages. He heard its
death rattle in the chaos, exploitation, indifference, and inhu
manity that -were engulfing mankind like the mists over Chesney
Wold. It was a world that could not be encompassed in a well
made "mimetic" novel that followed familiar patterns and rules,
any more than Shakespeare could encompass his world within the
narrow limits of the three unities. And so Dickens, like Shake
speare, broke the rules. His "baggy monsters" recorded not what
Saul Bellow has called "the penny psychology of private worlds,"
but the undisciplined complexity of worlds within worlds- and
he invented a language and a polyphonic technique that brought
visual and oral and poetic elements together in a rich thematic
montage that left his readers fc:1scinated but often nonplussed as
to its more oblique and profound meaning.
But the university students of the sixties are not nonplussed.
Dickens is on their wave length, speaks their language, sits in the
same room with them. They share, as did Blake before him, his
Preface
Vll
distrust of Reason weaving its satanic web of spiritual destruction,
as they share his distrust of the Establishment. Unlike their great
grandfathers whose uptightness about class and sex and respectabil
ity made them ill at ease with Dickens's sentimentality and comic
vulgarity, these young readers are at home with both, recognizing
them as evidences of Dickens's understanding of human needs and
responses at their deepest level, in the face of otherwise unbearable
pain. If Dickens's social philosophy is naive, so is theirs, and like
him they question all systems whether proposed by politicians or
academic theorists. What they admire most in Dickens is his rec
ognition of such monstrous evils as man's (in the singular or plural
sense) use of another man or woman or child for his own selfish
ends and the brilliant subtlety of the dramatic, poetic, and lin
guistic techniques he assembles to carry such awareness into the
nerve system of his readers-being tuned into such techniques
through the experimental films they admire and the poetry and
music they listen to. The modem students' response is instan
taneous to the things Dickens is saying about his-and their
"hedgehog and porcupine" world: his attacks on the cash nexus,
on man's passion for possession of things and people, on the shock
ing immensity of the gulf between rich and poor, on corruption at
high levels and low, on the social hypocrites and the self-swindlers,
and the Damoclean monster hanging over all-the bloodless and
fleshless Machin-e. Who, reading the following passages from
Dickens's letters, would not think they were written last week?
The absorption ... in the war is to me, a melancholy thing. Every other
subject of popular solicitude and sympathy goes down before it. I fear
I clearly see that for years to come domestic reforms are shaken to the
root; every miserable red-tapist flourishes war over the head of every
protester against his humbug. [On the Crimean War]
Look at the exhausted treasury, the paralyzed government, the uncouth
representatives of a free people; the desperate contests between the
North and the South; the iron curb and brazen muzzle fastened upon
every man who speaks his mind. [On the United States in 1842]
Or these from Our Mutual Friend, his last and angriest completed
novel?
For when we have got things to the pass that with an enormous treasure
at disposal to relieve the poor, the best of the poor detest our mercies,
hide their heads from us, and shame us by starving to death in the
Preface
Vlll
midst of us, it is a pass impossible of prosperity, impossible of contin
uance.
It was a foggy day in London, and the fog was heavy and dark. Animate
London, with smarting eyes and irritated lungs, was blinking, wheezing,
and choking; inanimate London was a sooty spectre, divided in pur
pose between being visible and invisible and so being wholly neither.
"I must decline to pursue this painful discussion. It is not pleasant to
my feelings. It is repugnant to my feelings. I have said that I do not
admit these things. I have also said that if they do occur (not that I
admit it), the fault lies with the sufferers themselves. It is not for me"
Mr. Podsnap pointed "me" forcibly, as adding by implication though
it may be all very well for you-"it is not for me to impugn the work
ings of providence. I know better than that, I trust."
"Relevance" is a much-abused word these days, but it is the only
word relevant here, as we listen to Dickens's megalosaurus slouch
ing through the mud and mists toward a twentieth-century Beth
lehem. Dickens was right to rest his claim to remembrance of his
printed works. It may be that those works will speak less per
tinently (let us hope so) to his bicentenary readers in 2070, but
it is impossible to believe that they can ever again be as mis
understood and underestimated--even by intellectuals- as they
were in 1920.
Professor Miller's paper was delivered in part at a Dickens
NOTE:
Cruikshank Seminar held at the William Andrews Clark Memorial
Library, University of California, Los Angeles, on May 9, 1970, and
published in full by the William Andrews Clark Library which has
generously given permission for its inclusion in this volume. The
other eight essays appeared originally in the special Dickens issue of
Nineteenth-Century Fiction.
ADA NISBET
Notes
on Contributors
DENIS DONOGHUE is Professor of Modern English and American Literature,
University College, Dublin, and the author of The Third Voice, Connoisseurs
of Class, The Ordinary Universe, and Jonathan Swift.
J.
K. FIELDING is Saintsbury Professor of English Literature, University of Edin
burgh, author of Charles Dickens (Writers and Their Work), Charles Dickens:
A Critical Introduction, and editor of The Speeches of Charles Dickens. ANNE
SMITH, of the University of Edinburgh, is working on the social novel.
GEORGE H. FoRD is Professor of English and chairman of the department, Uni
versity of Rochester, Rochester, N.Y., author of Keats and the Victorians, Dick
ens and His Readers: Aspects of Novel Criticism since 1836, and a study of D.
H. Lawrence's novels, Double Measure, and editor (with Lauriat Lane, Jr.) of
The Dickens Critics.
BARBARA HARDY is Professor of English Language and Literature, Birkbeck Col
lege, University of London, and author of The Novels of George Eliot: A Study
in Form, The Appropriate Form: an Essay on the Novel, Dickens: the Later
Novels (Writers and Their Work), and The Moral Art of Dickens.
J.
HILLIS MILLER is Professor of English, Johns Hopkins University, and author
0£ Charles Dickens: The World of His Novels, The Disappearance of God:
Five Nineteenth Century Writers, Poets of Reality, The Form of Victorian
Fiction, and Thomas Hardy: Distance and Desire.
lAr'i MILNER is Associate Professor of English Literature, Charles University,
Prague, and author of The Structure of Values in George Eliot.
SYLVERE MoNoD is Professor of English Contemporary Literature and Civiliza
tion at the Sorbonne, and author of Dickens romancier (tr. Dickens the Novel
ist), Charles Dickens, and editor of the Dickens Centenary Number of Etudes
anglaises.
MICHAEL SLATER is Lecturer, English Language and Literature, Birkbeck Col
lege, University of London, and editor of The Dickensian (London), Dickens
and Fame 1870-1970, and Dickens 1970.
HARRY STONE is Professor of English, San Fernando Valley State College, and
editor of Charles Dickens' Uncollected Writings from "Household Words"
(1830-1859).
"
Contents
The English Dickens and Dom bey and Son
by Denis Donoghue 1
Hard Times and the Factory Controversy:
Dickens vs. Harriet Martineau
J.
by K. Fielding and Anne Smith 22
Dickens and the Voices of Time
by George H. Ford 46
Dickens and the Passions
by Barbara Hardy 67
The Fiction of Realism: Sketches by Boz,
Oliver Twist, and Cruikshank's Illustrations
by J. Hillis Miller 85
The Dickens Drama: Mr. Dombey
by Ian Milner 155
Dickens's Attitudes in A Tale of Two Cities
by Sylvere Monod 166
Carlyle and Jerrold into Dickens: A Study of
The Chimes
by Michael Slater 184
Dickens Rediscovered: Some Lost Writings
Retrieved
by Harry Stone 205
Index 227
C