Dickens the Novelist

by F. R. Leavis

  We see his pride as in essence a stultifying self-contradiction; his egotism, in its inhumanity, as inimical to life and inevitably self-defeating. The profundity of the effect of Dickens’s treatment of the theme depends upon the force and adequacy with which he makes present to us the opposite of the pride and the egotism – that which they outrage and frustrate and blight. The focus of the presentation of ‘life’ as the positive invoked in the irony is of course Polly Toodle the wet-nurse. The scene in which Polly is engaged gives us the truly great Dickens, the clairvoyant artist wholly commanded by a profound theme – a Dickens profoundly serious, that is, as well as genially creative: indeed, all that has to do with Polly or what is associated with her is strong.

  ‘Still,’ resumed Miss Tox, ‘she naturally must be interested in her young charge, and must consider it a privilege to see a little cherub so closely connected with the superior classes gradually unfolding itself from day to day at one common fountain. Is it not so, Louisa?’

  The irony is that Mr Dombey’s inner being, his egotism, vehemently repudiates the community, though his child’s survival, which this egotism demands with the same passionate will, depends on it. He doesn’t see why Polly must be interested in her young charge; he desires her to be no more interested than a tea-pot would be. Strong in his wealth, he is confident that this desideratum can be virtually achieved; money will do it. Money will induce her to forgo, for as long as the son and heir of wealth may need her, any ‘interest’ she may have in her own children, and money will ensure that when no longer needed, she will not, yielding to the ‘natural’ temptation (the nature of the lower orders being that in question), use as an exploitable advantage the having inevitably been something other than a tea-pot.

  ‘Oh, of course,’ said Mr Dombey. ‘I desire to make it a question of wages altogether. Now, Richards, if you nurse my bereaved child, I wish you to remember this always. You will receive a liberal stipend in return for the discharge of certain duties, in the performance of which I desire you to see as little of your family as possible. When these duties cease to be required and rendered, and the stipend ceases to be paid, there is an end of all relations between us. Do you understand me?’

  Mrs Toodle seemed doubtful about it; and as to Toodle himself, he had evidently no doubt whatever, that he was all abroad.

  ‘You have children of your own,’ said Mr Dombey. ‘It is not at all in this bargain that you need become attached to my child, or that my child need become attached to you. I don’t expect or desire anything of the kind. Quite the reverse. When you go away from here, you will have concluded what is a mere matter of bargain and sale, hiring and letting; and you will stay away. The child will cease to remember you; and you will cease, if you please, to remember the child.’

  Mrs Toodle, with a little more colour in her cheeks than she had had before, said, ‘she hoped she knew her place.’

  ‘I hope you do, Richards,’ said Mr Dombey.

  This, with a change of proper names, might have come from Hard Times, a book eight years or so in the future when (1846–7) Dickens was writing Dombey and Son. As yet, however, Coketown and the industrial world had not made their impact on him; it was under the aspect that would strike an observer for whom the centre was London – Thackeray’s London – that he knew the hard and hateful ethos with which both books deal. The stress falls on the reinforced spirit of class, with its cold, brutal and extreme repudiation of what Lawrence calls ‘blood-togetherness’. ‘Oh! Exclusion itself!’ says Miss Tox, recommending Mrs Pipchin’s establishment to Mr Dombey. His second marriage allies him with the aristocracy. But the particular spirit of class he represents depends without disguise on the new money-power, and openly identifies its power with that. His is not industrial England, but it is an England whose prevailing ethos is that of Hard Times. Dickens, indeed, explicitly associates Dombey with the utilitarian orthodoxy and its formulations. ‘Some philosophers’, he remarks, discussing the nature of Dombey’s devotion to his son, and intimating plainly enough that we are to see this representative of the City (‘“A pecuniary Duke of York, my love, and nothing short of it!” said Miss Tox’) as representative of the spiritual world expressing itself in the ‘hard’ philosophy, ‘tell us that selfishness is at the root of our best loves and affections.’1 And Dombey himself, reproving the act of generosity that entangled Solomon Gills, does so with the distinctive orthodox sanctimony.

  Money-pride and money-faith, egotism, the closed heart, class as ‘exclusion’ – these in Dombey and Son are aspects of the same theme. It is presented with subtlety as well as force. To the life the Dombey ‘pride’ repels, represses, insults and sacrifices – the generous life that, acting as foil to it, shows up its mean and lethal inhumanity for what it is – Dickens has given a figuring presence that is more inevitable in its representative authority than the Horse-riding of Hard Times. As the natural motherly woman, Polly Toodle is perfectly done. But she does not stand alone; she has her special context in the Toodle family and the Toodle milieu. Mr Toodle is in his way as remarkable a triumph as Polly. Brought by Miss Tox and Mrs Chick with the family on the exhibitionary visit that is to reassure Mr Dombey, he plays his characteristic and significant part in the interrogatory:

  ‘You have a son, I believe?’ said Mr Dombey.

  ‘Four on ’em, Sir. Four hims and a her. All alive!’

  ‘Why, it’s as much as you can afford to keep them!’ said Mr Dombey.

  ‘I couldn’t hardly afford but one thing in the world less, Sir.’

  ‘What is that?’

  ‘To lose ’em, Sir.’

  The irony of that repeated ‘afford’, the repetition bringing to one sharp focus the opposed habits of valuation, the opposed kinds of ‘success’ in life, is pregnant. In the context Toodle’s reply carries no suggestion of pertness. He is naïve, mannerless and unaggressively direct – simple humanity (in a double sense of the noun). That, after the ironically foreshadowed death of Paul, is his role in the scene (chapter XX) at the railway terminus where, standing by his engine, he accosts Mr Dombey:

  During the bustle of preparation at the railway Mr Dombey and the Major walked up and down the platform side by side … Neither of the two observed that in the course of these walks, they attracted the attention of a working man who was standing near the engine, and who touched his hat every time they passed; for Mr Dombey habitually looked over the vulgar herd, not at them; and the Major was looking, at the time, into the core of one of his stories. At length, however, this man stepped before them as they turned round, and pulling his hat off, and keeping it off, ducked his head to Mr Dombey.

  ‘Beg your pardon, Sir,’ said the man, ‘but I hope you’re a doin’ pretty well, Sir.’

  He was dressed in a canvas suit abundantly besmeared with coal-dust and oil, and had cinders in his whiskers, and a smell of half-slaked ashes all over him. He was not a bad-looking fellow, nor even what could be fairly called a dirty-looking fellow, in spite of this; and, in short, he was Mr Toodle, professionally clothed.

  ‘I shall have the honour of stokin’ of you down, Sir,’ said Mr Toodle. ‘Beg your pardon, Sir. I hope you find yourself a coming round?’

  Mr Dombey looked at him, in return for this tone of interest, as if a man like that would make his very eyesight dirty.

  ‘’Scuse the liberty, Sir,’ said Toodle, seeing he was not clearly remembered, ‘but my wife Polly, as was called Richards in your family –’

  A change in Mr Dombey’s face, which seemed to express recollection of him, and so it did, but it expressed in a much stronger degree an angry sense of humiliation, stopped Mr Toodle short.

  ‘Your wife wants money, I suppose,’ said Mr Dombey, putting his hand in his pocket, and speaking (but that he always did) haughtily.

  ‘No thank’ee, Sir,’ returned Toodle, ‘I can’t say she does. I don’t.’

  Mr Dombey was stopped short now in his turn: and awkwardly: with his hand in his pocket.

  �
��No, Sir,’ said Toodle, turning his oilskin cap round and round; ‘we’re a doin’ pretty well, Sir; we haven’t no cause to complain in the worldly way, Sir. We’ve had four more since then, Sir, but we rubs on.’

  The whole passage is consummate in its ironic trenchancy and its natural truth. Dombey’s imputation of the money-motive recoils on himself. The stoker, in the simple decency of his human feeling, registers nothing to resent – sees no insult; it hasn’t occurred to him that, in such a situation, there could be any intention to snub. His mention of ‘my wife Polly as was called Richards in your family’ reminds us of the will expressed in that substitution: the will to preclude as far as possible any but the barest functional relation between the stoker’s wife and the infant of class (‘Exclusion’). While ‘Richards’ is functioning as she is paid to do, her human ties shall (for the due monetary consideration) have ceased to exist; when, once more Polly Toodle, she goes back to her children, ‘Richards’ the nurse will have ceased to exist, and with her any possibility of human relations there may have been a danger of her establishing. The name reminds Dombey too, reminding him at the same time of the humiliating way in which, when little Paul was dying, that will had had to confess its defeat. But the truly horrifying aspect of the concentrated irony is that this humiliation of outraged pride should so predominate in Dombey’s present pang of bereavement. To be reminded that the stoker ‘foster-father’ has a redundancy of children who live – that is bitter enough; but the climax of bitterness is when Dombey espies the crape on the stoker’s cap, and realizes that it is worn for the dead Dombey heir. How dare he, the stoker, presume to flaunt his sympathy; how dare he make this implicit and insufferable claim to a common humanity?

  The painful imaginative impact, which is shockingly real, brings to a new sharp focus our recognition of the truth that this pride is of its very nature an enemy to life. We renew our sense of the central irony that it should have been this confident spirit that killed Paul Dombey himself. For essentially it did, having with righteous deliberateness taken the risk Polly’s crime was unforgivable; she had yielded to her human feelings and gone to see her children. Therefore, although the proven perfect nurse for the motherless Paul, she must go:

  ‘Ah, Richards!’ said Mrs Chick, with a sigh. ‘It would have been more satisfactory to those who wish to think well of their fellow-creatures, and much more becoming in you, if you had shown some proper feeling, in time, for the little child that is now going to be prematurely deprived of its natural nourishment.’

  The pride represented by the child and the child’s vital interests being weighed against each other, there could be no question which was to be sacrificed. So Paul lost ‘his second mother – his first, so far as he knew – by a stroke as sudden as that natural affliction which had darkened the beginning of his life’ (and that the ‘natural affliction’ was the work of the same ethos is a reflection we make without further prompting).

  The criminal expedition to Staggs’s Gardens (chapter VI) that led to Polly’s dismissal is a good instance of what occurs a great deal in Dombey and Son: the characteristically Dickensian (as it must strike the reader) that has a strength not characteristically Dickensian till Dombey and Son makes it so. Polly and Susan Nipper, with Florence and Paul, visiting the humble, populous and happy home of the Toodle family – it is a highly Dickensian occasion, and it is done with all the vivacity, force and humour of Dickens’s genius. But the force goes with economy; there is no overdoing. The Toodle family and milieu, as we have noted, stand for that which is repressed and denied by the Dombey code: human kindness, natural human feeling, thriving human life. But there is nothing that seems to us sentimental or as the least inclined to be soft or too facile: it all affects us as real.

  Dickens for his positives and foil has not, as in Hard Times, gone outside the common actualities of every day. The Toodles are, we don’t question, just a working-class family belonging to the workaday Victorian world. The conditions that enabled Dickens to use them with a convinced sense of realism in the way he does are given, in very large part at any rate, in his account of the ‘great earthquake’ that has rent the Camden Town through which the little party finds its way to Staggs’s Gardens. The description of the driving-through of the railway that was to have Euston for its terminus is in its vigour, Vividness and clear authenticity a magnificent document of the early Victorian age. It reminds us of those drawings, paintings and engravings in which the artists of that time record their sense of the Titanism and romantic sublimity of the works of man. In a like spirit Dickens is profoundly impressed by the energy and the promise:

  In short, the yet unfinished and unopened Railroad was in progress, and, from the very core of all this dire disorder trailed smoothly away, upon its mighty course of civilization and improvement.

  With much to justify him in the actualities he contemplates, he sees the railway as the triumphant manifestation of beneficent energy. And, characteristically, the beneficence that he acclaims manifests itself in terms of immediate human betterment. It is figured directly and representatively in Toodle himself – Toodle and his family. ‘Where have you worked all your life?’ Mr Dombey asks him at that first interview.

  – ‘Mostly underground, Sir, till I got married. I come to the level then. I’m a going on one of these here railroads when they comes into full play.’

  The prosperity and happiness of the Toodle family are associated with the ‘coming into full play’ of the railways – and seen as a representative accompaniment. When Dickens comes to write Hard Times, which is to register a disturbing contact with industrial England, he will not be able to use the working-classes in that way as a foil to Gradgrind, or to associate the Titanism of contemporary civilization with any beneficent action on humble life.

  As I have noted, the ‘hard’ ethos celebrated in Hard Times figures explicitly enough in Dombey and Son. Where Education is in question we have it in the episode of the Charitable Grinders and Mr Dombey’s act of charitable generosity.

  ‘The number of her son, I believe,’ said Mr Dombey, turning to his sister, and speaking of the child as if he were a family coach, ‘is one hundred and forty-seven.’

  It is remarkable that an art so strong, a moral insight and a grasp of realities so sure, should be associated as they are in Dombey and Son with things so different. The association is in many ways close and embarrassing, though the essential distinctions are easy to make – they make themselves. The impressive, the truly great, art I have been considering forms part of an elaborately plotted novel written – and written with conviction – for the Victorian market. With conviction: Dickens, it is plain, would have told us that the book had a long-pondered unifying theme and was conceived as a whole. He would have told us this in good faith: there is evidence enough of that. If, however, we are to do justice to what impresses us most in Dombey and Son we have to judge that the book is not a whole conceived in any unified or unifying imagination – and that it is certainly not, in its specious totality, the work of that genius which compels our homage in the strong parts. The creative afflatus goes in other, characteristic and large parts of the book with a moral élan that favours neither moral perception nor a grasp of the real.

  I speak of ‘creative afflatus’ advisedly. We pass our adverse judgment, but we can’t help perceiving – for all the evidence we have of the anxious calculating eye he kept upon the public and the sales-returns – that here too Dickens writes with the conviction, the triumphant conscious power, of the inspired artist. In fact, to arrive at a full recognition of the nature of his greatness, it is necessary to recognize how far, as a creative force, he was from being either a Romantic genius or a Flaubert. If we look through the chapters of Forster’s Life covering the period during which (to take the instance under consideration) Dombey was written, that truth comes home to us. As, in the summer and autumn of 1846, he wrote the first two numbers, he felt that he was doing something superlatively good. Yet, after agonies of worry
and hesitation, he laid the new and prospering work aside in order not to miss producing the annual Christmas tale this year, The Battle of Life.

  It was not a rival creative compulsion, though it was a characteristic scruple of the actual great creative force Dickens was, that took him from Dombey. Simply, the Christmas tale had become an institution, and to defeat the expectation of the public, he felt, would be to damage his status. But the ‘simply’ must not be taken to suggest that this last clause portends an altogether simple state of mind (as we read Forster it is easy enough to understand, but less easy to analyse). There was certainly profit-and-loss calculation – Dickens was never a less than eager moneymaker – but equally what we must call a sense of duty entered in. Was it not his status – his genius — to be the public entertainer? The public entertainer had as such his obligations to the public. Of closely related significance (records of such exchanges forming a constantly recurring element in the Life) are the anxious discussions with Forster as to whether the public will stand this contemplated development of the now-appearing story, or whether it wouldn’t respond more favourably to this, which could very well be contrived.