Dickens the Novelist

by F. R. Leavis

  Dickens

  THE NOVELIST

  F. R. LEAVIS AND Q. D. LEAVIS

  We dedicate this book to each other as proof, along with Scrutiny (of which for twenty-one years we sustained the main burden and the responsibility), of forty years and more of daily collaboration in living, university teaching, discussion of literature and the social and cultural context from which literature is born, and above all, devotion to the fostering of that true respect for creative writing, creative minds and, English literature being in question, the English tradition, without which literary criticism can have no validity and no life.

  ‘I suppose so remarkable an author as Dickens hardly ever lived who carried so little of authorship into ordinary social intercourse … Though Dickens bore outwardly so little of the impress of his writings, they formed the whole of that inner life which essentially constituted the man.’

  FORSTER, Life of Dickens

  ‘“It always struck me they missed my little point with a perfection exactly as admirable when they patted me on the back as when they kicked me in the shins. By my little point I mean – what shall I call it? – the particular thing I’ve written my books most for. Isn’t there for every writer a particular thing of that sort, the thing that most makes him apply himself, the thing without the effort to achieve which he wouldn’t write at all, the very passion of his passion, the part of the business in which, for him, the flame of art burns most intensely? … The order, the form, the texture of my books will perhaps some day constitute for the initiated a complete representation of it. So it’s naturally the thing for the critic to look for.”’

  HENRY JAMES, The Figure in the Carpet

  ‘I have said that Dickens felt criticism, of whatever kind, with too sharp a relish for the indifference he assumed to it; but the secret was that he believed himself to be entitled to a higher tribute than he was always in the habit of receiving.’

  FORSTER, Life of Dickens

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraphs

  Preface and Note

  CHAPTER ONE

  The First Major Novel: Dombey and Son – F.R.L.

  Appendix: Dickens and Smollett – Q.D.L.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Dickens and Tolstoy: The Case for a Serious View of David Copperfield – Q.D.L.

  Appendix A: Dora ‘from a woman’s point of view’

  Appendix B: Oliver Twist, Jane Eyre and David Copperfield

  Appendix C: Dickens’s Exposure Scenes

  CHAPTER THREE

  Bleak House: A Chancery World – Q.D.L.

  Appendix A: The Symbolic Function of the Doctor in Victorian Novels

  Appendix B: Mayhew and Dickens

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Hard Times: The World of Bentham – F.R.L.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Dickens and Blake: Little Dorrit – F.R.L.

  CHAPTER SIX

  How we must read Great Expectations – Q.D.L.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  The Dickens Illustrations: Their Function – Q.D.L.

  About the Authors

  Copyright

  Preface

  IT seems well to state clearly and briefly in front of this book what we offer to do in it. We have not undertaken a general survey of Dickens, believing that all such enterprises are merely academic, and unprofitable critically. Our purpose is to enforce as unanswerably as possible the conviction that Dickens was one of the greatest of creative writers; that with the intelligence inherent in creative genius, he developed a fully conscious devotion to his art, becoming as a popular and fecund, but yet profound, serious and wonderfully resourceful practising novelist, a master of it; and that, as such, he demands a critical attention he has not had. We should like to make it impossible for any academic authority to feel that, in ‘doing’ assorted ‘Dickens characters’ with histrionic gusto he pays the recognized appropriate tribute to the creative gift, or for any intellectual – academic, journalist or both – to tell us with the familiar easy assurance that Dickens of course was a genius, but that his line was entertainment, so that an account of his art that implies marked intellectual powers – a capacity, for example, to read and understand Bentham – is obviously absurd. We wish to make it impossible for such critics to assert, or assume, that any character from the novels of Dickens’s maturity might have equally appeared in any other of the novels than the one in which it in fact functions as an inseparable part of the whole. And we have thought it essential to register specific protests against the trend of American criticism of Dickens, from Edmund Wilson onwards, as being in general wrong-headed, ill-informed in ways we have demonstrated, and essentially ignorant and misdirecting.

  In this connection we should perhaps explain our preference for Forster’s Life of Dickens as a source over modern, more ‘correct’ biographies, whether British or, still less acceptable, American. The fact is that Forster, whatever his sins of omission, suppression, or alteration of some letters or documents to give himself greater importance in relation to Dickens in the eyes of his world, does give the only convincing representation of Dickens as the creator of the novels for those capable of reading them with critical perception and disinterestedness – witness the quotations from Forster’s Life in our Epigraphs. And Forster, with his intimate personal knowledge of his friend (a friendship which survived storms), gives us the sense, as no other biographer does or now can, of being in the same room as Dickens, and even, more important, of being really inward with Dickens’s personality and character, and without being concerned to make out a case by ‘interpreting’ his subject. The ineptness of scholars as literary critics is a notorious fact. Essential ignorance can consort with a great deal of scholarly industry in assembling irrelevant data, and misrepresentation with interpreting that so-called ‘factual matter’, owing to a more or less unconscious bias, and with insinuating, through critical stupidity, false assumptions about the subject’s art, character, personality and history: the subject often becoming a victim. In these respects the older biographers are much the safest, and even, surprisingly, the most useful still, for they shared and understood the age of which they wrote. They are also less pretentious as critics, have no modern psychological jargon, and were more really knowledgeable in presenting their subjects, as well as more truly respectful and essentially more inward with them. George Eliot’s widower thus contrives to provide an intimate, indispensable and unsurpassed portrait of, and understanding of the inner life of, Miss Evans and G. H. Lewes’s consort, without Mary Anne-or Marian-ing her in an ineffectual attempt to achieve familiarity, such as we have met in recent biographies from which after all no such appreciation or clear portrait is obtainable. Thus for instance Professor Edgar Johnson’s biography of Dickens cannot claim to have superseded or even to rival Forster’s, or Professor Gordon Haight’s to be as illuminating a guide to George Eliot the novelist as John Cross’s, while the biographical notices and memoirs of anyone who knew D. H. Lawrence and wrote of him without malice are undoubtedly to be preferred to Professor Harry T. Moore’s. The untenable position of those academics and journalists who are determined to explain away Dickens’s creative œuvre as the uncontrolled product of childhood obsessions or experiences, or of a psychological abnormality, or of a consistent lifelong exhibition of manias, is examined in a Note below.

  The method we decided on was to take the six great novels as lending themselves peculiarly to the purpose when considered in relation to the development of Dickens’s powers, and to discuss them each in terms of intrinsic interest but in chronological order and in reference to each other. The book was conceived as a book: the fact that a chapter is devoted to each of these novel
s doesn’t reduce it to a collection of essays. The purpose is everywhere there as the informing spirit, determining approach and presentation, and the chronological order belongs to the sustained argument.

  The fourth chapter, that on Hard Times, originally appeared in Scrutiny as inaugurating this approach to Dickens, and more generally to the Novel, as early as Spring 1947, being the initial essay in a series the title of which, ‘The Novel as Dramatic Poem’, conveyed the idea of the enterprise. Received at the time with ridicule, this title and this essay have since been accepted as marking a new approach both to Dickens (and effecting a revolution in Dickens criticism) and to the art of the novel generally. It was reprinted as something in the nature of an appendix to The Great Tradition, where its inclusion testified to the convinced and emphatic recognition of Dickens’s status. The inclusion was strongly urged by the other of the collaborating pair; both in fact realized that the complete omission of Dickens from the book would be ridiculous, and if its inclusion looked odd, it was meant as an avowal at any rate of default in respect of Dickens and of a deferred commitment to making the default good. The critical significance of the slowness to recognize Dickens’s pre-eminence among English novelists – he may be seen surely as the Shakespeare of the novel – is touched on explicitly in the beginning of the first chapter (on Dombey and Son), and is implicitly developed in the book as a whole.

  The critique of Dombey and Son, originally written as introducing the book for its inclusion (which was cancelled later by the publishers on financial grounds) in a series of English classics, was published only in an American quarterly (The Sewanee Review, 1962) – still with the limitations entailed by the original conditions of writing. In Chapter I there is the completer treatment of Dombey conceived in relation to the stated plan and purpose of our book. Some changes of the same kind will be found in Chapter 4.

  No notes of the kinds exemplified above are called for by the four chapters initialled ‘Q.D.L.’. These were all written ad hoc as constituent parts of the book when it had been conceived as something to be undertaken forthwith, and worked at in an intensive and sustained way until completed. The last of the four – it concludes the book – is a study of Dickens’s use of illustrations as accessories of his art in conveying his meaning to his readers; it has an immediate relevance to the central critical themes of this book. And since it was in the earlier part of his creative career that Dickens first habitually asserted a positive and authoritative interest in the illustrating of his text, the chapter, it seems to us, adds to the direct discussion of the major work an appropriate recall of the earlier work out of which the great novelist emerged. It stresses moreover the importance for Dickens of having such a live tradition of illustration and a public which understood it – of being able to assume this and develop it for the purposes of his art; while showing that the death of the tradition, owing to the characteristic and fundamental change in the later Victorian ethos, meant a serious narrowing of taste which pointed to a corresponding impoverishment of art, poetry and literature generally, so that Dickens’s death marked the end of his era.

  As for the mode of collaboration, the collaborators have in their respective chapters – as will no doubt be noted – been guided by the spontaneities of the personal judgement and the personal habit of approach, and also by the experience they both have of the most profitable method of criticizing Dickens derived from many years’ individual teaching of university students. The authors here started by knowing that they were in essential agreement about Dickens and about the kind of book needed. The differences of idiosyncrasy, it seemed to them, could only be an advantage in the execution of the collaboratively conceived project, and the upshot, they judge, answers reasonably to their idea of what was required and what they are prepared to stand by. To repeat the insistence, it asks to be read as a book, and not as a collection of essays.

  There is a note to be added under the head of ‘acknowledgments’. As Chichele Lecturer at Oxford in 1964, the writer of Chapter 5 discussed Little Dorrit together with – in a minor way – Hard Times – under the title: ‘Dickens, Art and Social Criticism’. The different emphasis entailed by the present undertaking necessitated for Chapter 5, not only an extended, but a re-thought treatment of Little Dorrit. Nevertheless, the given collaborator is very conscious that the attention he devoted to that great novel in preparing the Chichele Lectures has told decisively in the critical discussion offered here, and he would like to express the gratitude he feels to All Souls’ College for the opportunity and intellectual stimulus the appointment as Chichele Lecturer gave him. Parts of Chapter 2, on the relation between Dickens and Tolstoy, and with regard to the two levels at which Dickens may be read, were delivered as lectures by the other collaborator at the universities of Bristol and Aberdeen.

  F.R.L. Q.D.L.

  NOTE

  The Marxizing and other ideologically-slanted interpretations of Dickens’s achievement were comparatively harmless and are now a dead letter, but the echoes and elaborations of Edmund Wilson’s theory of Dickens’s art – as being the volcanic explosions of a manic-depressive – are still with us on the air, in print and in lectures being given in this centenary year to academic audiences and learned societies. Alternative accounts are that Dickens’s art is evidently the product of ‘an anal dandy’, that it is based on and conditioned by childhood terrors and fantasies from nurse’s story-telling, or by the brief spell the boy Dickens endured in the blacking-factory. The favourite method is to amalgamate these and others with the assumption that the art can be explained away in the light of such miscellaneous and quite unconnected data (or alleged data) as: the uninhibited capers of Dickens’s youth; the outbreaks common to men of letters against exploitation by their publishers and the touchiness and irritability almost inevitable in literary genius; the trials of an unsatisfactory marriage and the wholly conjectural torments of a possibly unsatisfactory liaison; the physical exhaustion of an overworked, much-tried and over-convivial editor and journalist who, in the manner of his day and profession, kept himself going ultimately with stimulants, undermining his health; the nervous shock and physical damage due to a railway accident late in life, while writing Our Mutual Friend (during which accident, however, he behaved with admirable self-control); and finally the greatly exaggerated accounts and implausible explanations of his dramatic readings from his novels at the end of his life. No discouraging scepticism has, as far as one knows, been incurred by these amateur psychologists of our academic scene; but no trained psychologist seems to have condoned, much less supported, any of these assumptions and theories. Besides the evident fact that such self-indulgent vapourings give no satisfaction to anyone but their perpetrators (for they shepherd us away from the texts and can only misdirect for the approach to Dickens’s creative achievement), they reveal in their authors a refusal, or an inability, to read the novels as literature: for the complex sensibility, in general so marvellously controlled and directed objectively into a unique form in each of the novels of Dickens’s maturity, gives the lie to such crude and cheap attempts to dispose of the created entities.

  The theories are also a travesty of the facts that we know of Dickens’s personality and behaviour. What a weight of academic capital has been made of that innocent hornpipe danced by the young man outside that window! – Quilp-like comparisons have even been made on the strength of that and similar lively capers and pranks in the young manhood of poor Charles – bearing witness only to the innocence of these academic minds as to normal youth and also as to the manners, running naturally to high jinks, of that phase of English social life Dickens was reared in, of the tone and habits of which he inevitably partook. Dickens’s was a pre-Victorian England of course, with the uninhibited licences of the Regency lower-middle-class, plus a temporary plunge by him into the raffish underworld (as Mr Micawber’s son) which extended into the society of the debtor’s prison, and the streets in which old Mr Weller boasted that he had provided his son with an esse
ntial education when (like Dickens) Sam was ‘wery young’. If Dickens was in these respects abnormal, so was practically everyone else in his youth. Cruikshank, a much older man than Dickens and a favourite companion, was a great deal more ‘eccentric’, wildly unconventional (that is, by later Victorian standards, which were prim) and more startling in his antics than Dickens was ever known to be, while a gentleman like Thackeray could waggle his legs out of his carriage window in triumph as he drove past without arousing adverse comment. The habitual buffoonery, amounting to licence, of another gentleman who was also a cleric and nearly a bishop, Sydney Smith, was welcomed in the highest society as well as the most intellectual of the day. Practical jokes of the most unrefined kind and even savagery, histrionics and travesty for fun, hoaxes or ‘flams’, uninhibited punning and broad jests, excessive tippling, as well as a now unknown degree of sentimental susceptibility, were characteristic of the age Dickens was formed in. But what was characteristic of him is surely that he grew or raised himself out of its influences instead of being their victim – the change from the author of Pickwick to the author of Dombey is as decisive as impressive.

  Social historians and literary-critical historians once knew such facts of life. G. M. Young in his Victorian England: Portrait of an Age rightly stresses the characteristic ‘exuberance’ of the earlier Victorians, as when audiences even at Bowood sobbed at Tom Moore’s songs, ‘when Ministers sometimes wept at the Table; when the sight of an infant school could reduce a civil servant to a passion of tears … an age of flashing eyes and curling lips’, and concludes that ‘out of the horse-play of sentimental Cockneys [came] Dickens’. Dickens moreover had worked in a law-office, and the society of Dick Swivellers (are Dick’s capers to be taken as pathological?) can only have encouraged the normal adolescent histrionic tendencies which Dickens exploited for humorous purposes – a conditioning to which purposes was inevitable at first. Such deliberate playfulness and exaggerated whimsicality has been solemnly taken for morbidity, as in the case of his prolonged dama of frustrated passion for the young Queen and jealousy of Prince Albert, though well understood for what it was by Forster who mentions that it was a joint jape with two friends, of Dickens’s. Professor Oliver Elton in his Survey of English Literature (1830– 80) had made similar points to G. M. Young’s in citing the (inevitable) literary influences of this period on Dickens as a young novelist and a man of his time. He mentions as typical Theodore Hook, ‘farce-maker, journalist, essayist, novelist, punster, practical jester, impromptu rhymester, and Bohemian’ whose characters were a source of early characterization for Dickens, and that Hook actually relates in his novels some of his own outrageous ‘flams’, adding that while Hook and Surtees and others of that kind were ‘not exactly literature’, they were ‘the cause of literature in others’, for instance, Dickens. Yes, indeed, and deductions therefore from the contents and tone of the early batch of Dickens’s novels must be checked by such considerations (a precaution ignored by Edmund Wilson) – for how, as a hard-driven young aspiring writer could Dickens fail to be of his ambience, draw on his predecessors, and satisfy such a public’s tastes? ‘Even allowing for the change of taste, there is a vulgar callousness about most of them that is not amusing. The cheaper jokes of Sydney Smith, the sarcasms of Macaulay, the horse-play in Marryat’s novels, the manners of old Lady Holland, the illustrations of Cruikshank and Douglas Jerrold’s merry and vulgar work – all belong, if we will, to a more robust age (pre-Victorian at first)’ says Elton, writing in 1920 as a later Victorian gentleman. Such data show us the matrix in which Dickens was originally shaped as a writer and a person, and no suppositious tracing to childhood impressions is needed to find the source for Dickens’s use at first of grotesque, savage and violent activities and personalities in his fictions, for they were the commonplaces of Grub Street and High Society alike. (One might as well allege a death-wish in the writer for the frequent deaths of children, babies and wives, but of course these were factual in the first half of the 19th century.) What distinguishes Dickens is that he could make of a Quilp a study in sadistic malice, showing his critical detachment from the inheritance of his literary and social environment, and his own better informed insights, the insights of a genius and one fortunately informed also, through his literary tastes, with better influences from a finer past of English literature – his two greatest assets. We should not however under-rate the range of possible or permitted feeling in this uninhibited society, for along with the ribald jests, the noisy waggishness and the appearance even of Mr Punch, in Sydney Smith there was, as in others of his world, not only brilliant wit but the unexpected capacity for a sensibility of another order: Fanny Price in Mansfield Park was ‘one of his (Smith’s) prime favourites’.