Dickens the Novelist

by F. R. Leavis

  To this kind of calculation Dickens commits himself without uneasiness or any sense of offending against the artist in him. That artist, in fact, needs, feels he ought to need and to have, and actually has, a sense of solidarity with the nation-wide public for which he writes – we have here a condition or essential aspect of his peculiar creative greatness. To observe which truth, of course, is not to abstain from noting the attendant disadvantages. We see the disadvantages in Dombey in Dickens’s failure to maintain, and in his offences against – his worst departures and inconsistencies amount to that – the strength of the opening. The spectacle of the great writer at his greatest disturbing, and then deserting, the creative drive for the sake of an uninspired and unnecessary Christmas production may well strike us as ominous. And, actually, when he does, having incurred fatigue to the point of illness, take up Dombey again, calculations and inspirations that do not belong with the opening strength turn out to have established their claim to a major part in the development.

  We may recall some admonitory modulations into an art that is disconcertingly Victorian in the pathos of the dying Paul and of the neglected Florence’s goodness and beauty. But Dickens’s rendering of Paul’s fate and the cruel irony of the father’s pride mustn’t be dismissed with such a reference: nowhere is the poet-novelist’s genius more apparent than there. The irony of the child’s immolation is the irony of the father’s pride, a pride that, of its nature, detroys life in painfully thwarting itself. And that pride (money-pride) is the theme so potently realized by Dickens in the strong half of the book, Dombey himself being the victim of the society that formed him and of which he is the honoured representative.

  Life, of course, in the pages dealing with Paul’s education, is above all – is focally and insistently – the child, the emergent sentience and awareness, and these pages give us childhood with the unique Dickensian vividness, delicacy and truth. And we are made to recognize that this power of recall is not something apart in Dickens: that it is beneath, or implicit in, the penetration and strength of his response in general to human life – the immediacy and insight with which he renders it. He has not forgotten; in achieving the rare maturity his genius represents he has lost nothing. The genius is an intense concern for the real, and Dickens, when under its command, isn’t tempted to sentimentalize. The acuteness with which we are made to feel Paul’s ache of deprivation, his hunger for love, depends on that and our utter conviction of it.

  ‘Little people should be tired at night, for then they sleep well.’

  ‘Oh, it’s not at night, papa,’ returned the child, ‘it’s in the day; and I lie down in Florence’s lap, and she sings to me. At night I dream about such cu-ri-ous things!’

  And he went on warming his hands again, and thinking about them, like an old man or a young goblin. Mr Dombey was so astonished, and so uncomfortable, and so perfectly at a loss how to pursue the conversation, that he could only sit looking at his son by the light of the fire, with his hand resting on his back, as if he were detained there by some magnetic attraction. Once he advanced his other hand, and turned the contemplative face towards his own for a moment. But it sought the fire again as soon as he released it; and remained, addressed towards the flickering blaze, until the nurse appeared, to summon him to bed.

  ‘I want Florence to come with me,’ said Paul.

  ‘Won’t you come with your poor nurse, Wickam, Master Paul?’ inquired the attendant, with great pathos.

  ‘No, I won’t,’ replied Paul, composing himself in his armchair again, like the master of the house.

  Invoking a blessing upon his innocence, Mrs Wickam withdrew, and presently Florence appeared in her stead. The child immediately started up with sudden readiness and animation, and raised towards his father in bidding him goodnight, a countenance so much brighter, so much younger, and so much more childlike altogether, that Mr Dombey, while he felt greatly reassured by the change, was quite amazed at it.

  After they had left the room altogether, he thought he heard a soft voice singing; and remembering that Paul had said his sister sung to him, he had the curiosity to open the door and listen, and look after them. She was toiling up the great, wide, vacant staircase, with him in her arms; she singing all the way, Paul sometimes crooning out a feeble accompaniment. Mr Dombey looked after them until they reached the top of the staircase – not without halting to rest by the way – and passed out of his sight; and then he still stood gazing upwards, until the dull rays of the moon, glimmering in a melancholy manner through the skylight, sent him back to his own room.

  The emotional situation presented here has a complexity that positively disclaims anything like a sentimental purpose. Paul himself isn’t the ideally sympathique child-victim. He is a victim, right enough, but that doesn’t make certain of the characterizing traits the less disconcerting. It isn’t Wickam (not yet in the room) or Mrs Pipchin and Mrs Blimber who here see Paul as ‘like an old man or a young goblin’, but we ourselves and (for we take the suggestion) Dombey. Of course, those traits are very largely the products of the substitute for love that Dombey, with the devoted cooperation of his friends and allies, makes the formative spirit of the child’s upbringing. But in this passage itself we have the intimation that the child is the son of his father:

  ‘No, I won’t,’ replied Paul, composing himself in his armchair again, like the master of the house.

  The irony for Dombey is that he has to see this admirably decisive firmness of the worthy successor, the born master, exerted in a characteristic demonstration of the love for Florence that he hates but daren’t obstruct. That it belongs to a world wholly alien to him, from which he is excluded, and in which the Dombey criteria of success have no meaning, is brought cruelly home to him when, opening the door, he looks and listens as Florence carries her brother up to bed. Something more than utterly disinterested love and absolute trust is involved in the evocative power (it suggests Lawrence) of that last paragraph of the passage I have quoted. As Florence toils (and toils happily) up the staircase, ‘singing all the way’, Paul croons an accompaniment, ‘his head lying on her shoulder, one of his arms thrown negligently round her neck’. The ‘old man’, the goblin ‘slyness’, and the enfant terrible disconcertingness have disappeared, and been replaced by the relaxed and absorbed spontaneity of childhood.

  The spontaneity is the flowing of life, emotional and imaginative. But Dombey’s confident scheme has no place for spontaneity – for life that finds by living its own nature and need. ‘There is nothing of chance or doubt before my son,’ he tells Mrs Pipchin: ‘His way in life was clear and prepared, and marked out before he existed.’ She on her part reassures him about the undesirable attachment to Florence: ‘the studies he would have to master would very soon prove a sufficient alienation.’ Mrs Pipchin (the ‘child-queller’) in her self-enclosure is inertly malign, but it’s not apprehension she awakens in Paul:

  He was not fond of her; he was not afraid of her; but in those old, old moods of his, she seemed to have a grotesque attraction for him. There he would sit, looking at her, and warming his hands, and looking at her, until he sometimes quite confounded Mrs Pipchin, Ogress as she was. Once she asked him, when they were alone, what he was thinking about.

  ‘You,’ said Paul, without the least reserve.

  ‘And what are you thinking about me?’ asked Mrs Pipchin.

  ‘I’m thinking how old you must be,’ said Paul.

  ‘You mustn’t say such things as that, young gentleman,’ returned the other. ‘That’ll never do.’

  ‘Why not?’ asked Paul.

  ‘Because it’s not polite,’ said Mrs Pipchin snappishly.

  ‘Not polite?’ said Paul.

  ‘No.’

  ‘It’s not polite,’ said Paul innocently, ‘to eat all the mutton-chops and toast, Wickam says.’

  There is no suggestion of archness about the ‘innocently’ here; Paul, ‘quaint’ though he may be, is innocent; the enfant terrible element in him is
the child’s fresh, ‘unsocial’, directness of vision and judgement – frank because ‘frank’ is a word he hasn’t learnt the use of.

  ‘Berry’s very fond of you, ain’t she?’ Paul once asked Mrs Pipchin when they were sitting by the fire with the cat.

  ‘Yes,’ said Mrs Pipchin.

  ‘Why?’asked Paul.

  ‘Why!’ returned the disconcerted old lady. ‘How can you ask such things, Sir! why are you fond of your sister Florence?’

  ‘Because she’s very good,’ said Paul. ‘There is nobody like Florence.’

  ‘Well!’ retorted Mrs Pipchin shortly, ‘and there’s nobody like me, I suppose.’

  ‘Ain’t there really though?’ asked Paul, leaning forward in his chair, and looking at her very hard.

  ‘No,’ said the old lady.

  ‘I’m glad of that,’ observed Paul, rubbing his hands thoughtfully. ‘That’s a very good thing.’

  Mrs Pipchin didn’t dare to ask him why, lest she should receive some perfectly annihilating answer.

  The quality and nature of Mrs Pipchin’s apprehensiveness have been made manifest to us; it is the correlative of ‘innocence’. For of Dickens’s ‘annihilating’, too, we note that it isn’t to be taken as cliché-colloquial. Paul, and not the less because he couldn’t have expressed the judgements analytically, sees that, while she neither is loved nor wants to be (an oddity that makes her an object of fascinated contemplation to him), she relies with utter confidence on devoted services that imply love. The full conscious perception is not one she could have lived with (what she wants is unqualified selfish comfort), and when she is forced by Paul’s unsocial innocence (which is ‘not polite’) to share it, she feels her own supreme reality (guaranteed as it is by an habitual sense of social corroboration) suddenly menaced with destruction.

  The enfant terrible disconcertingness derives from Paul’s own aching need – the deprivation that has conditioned his rapid ‘quaint’ development, and engendered the ‘old man’ or ‘goblin’ in him, his precocity. That comes out plainly in the scene (chapter VIII) which begins: ‘Papa! what’s money?’

  The abrupt question had such immediate reference to the subject of Mr Dombey’s thoughts, that Mr Dombey was quite disconcerted.

  ‘What is money, Paul?’ he answered. ‘Money?’

  ‘Yes,’ said the child, laying his hands upon the elbows of his little chair, and turning the old face up towards Mr Dombey’s: ‘what is money?’

  Mr Dombey was in a difficulty. He would have liked to give him some explanation involving the terms circulating medium, currency, depreciation of currency, paper, bullion, rates of exchange, value of precious metals in the market, and so forth: but looking down at the little chair, and seeing what a long way down it was, he answered: ‘Gold, and silver, and copper. Guineas, shillings, half-pence. You know what they are?’

  ‘Oh yes, I know what they are,’ said Paul. ‘I don’t mean that, papa. I mean what’s money after all?’

  ‘What is money after all!’ said Mr Dombey, backing his chair a little, that he might the better gaze in sheer amazement at the presumptuous atom that propounded such an inquiry.

  ‘I mean, papa, what can it do?’ returned Paul, folding his arms (they were hardly long enough to fold), and looking at the fire, and up at him, and at the fire, and up at him again.

  Mr Dombey drew his chair back to its former place, and patted him on the head. ‘You’ll know better by and by, my man,’ he said. ‘Money, Paul, can do anything.’ He took hold of the little hand, and beat it softly against one of his own, as he said so.

  But Paul got his hand free as soon as he could; and rubbing it gently as if his wit were in the palm, and he were sharpening it – and looking at the fire again, as though the fire had been his adviser and prompter – repeated, after a short pause:

  ‘Anything, papa?’

  ‘Yes. Anything – almost,’ said Mr Dombey.

  ‘Anything means everything, don’t it, papa?’ asked his son: not observing, or possibly not understanding, the qualification.

  ‘It includes it: yes,’ said Mr Dombey.

  ‘Why didn’t money save my mama?’ returned the child. ‘It isn’t cruel, is it?’

  ‘Cruel!’ said Mr Dombey, settling his neckcloth, and seeming to resent the idea. ‘No. A good thing can’t be cruel.’

  ‘If it’s a good thing, and can do anything,’ said the little fellow, thoughtfully, as he looked back at the fire, ‘I wonder why it didn’t save me my mama.’

  He didn’t ask the question of his father this time. Perhaps he had seen, with a child’s quickness, that it had already made his father uncomfortable.

  The child’s directness, we see, has for Dombey the same effect as for Mrs Pipchin; it makes him feel that the reality in which he has invested his life is threatened with annihilation. But Dombey has a resource that Mrs Pipchin hasn’t; he can propose to wean Paul from his childishly destructive irrationality by means that he is peculiarly in a position to exploit. Seizing on the opportunity offered by Solomon Gills’s misfortune and Walter Gay’s appeal, he tries to awaken and foster in Paul a pride that shall exploit his development into full Dombey adulthood.

  ‘If you had money, now,’ said Mr Dombey; ‘as much money as young Gay has talked about; what would you do?’

  ‘Give it to his old uncle,’ returned Paul.

  ‘Lend it to his old uncle, eh?’ retorted Mr Dombey. ‘Well! When you are old enough, you know, you will share my money, and we shall use it together.’

  ‘Dombey and Son,’ interrupted Paul, who had been tutored early in the phrase.

  ‘Dombey and Son,’ repeated his father. ‘Would you like to be Dombey and Son, now, and lend this money to young Gay’s uncle?’

  ‘Oh! if you please, papal’ said Paul: ‘and so would Florence.’

  ‘Girls,’ said Mr Dombey, ‘have nothing to do with Dombey and Son. Would you like it?’

  ‘Yes, papa, yes!’

  ‘Then you shall do it,’ returned his father. ‘And you see, Paul,’ he added, dropping his voice, ‘how powerful money is, and how anxious people are to get it. Young Gay comes all this way to beg for money, and you, who are so grand and great, having got it, are going to let him have it, as a great favour and obligation.’

  The potentiality is there in the child, as his immediate response shows:

  Paul turned up the old face for a moment, in which there was a sharp understanding of the reference conveyed in these words: but it was a young and childish face immediately afterwards when he slipped down from his father’s knee, and ran to tell Florence not to cry any more, for he was going to let young Gay have the money.

  ‘Young Gay’ is Florence’s ‘Walter’, and Dombey, a little later, has the satisfaction, for all the ‘uneasy glances’ he bestows on the sister thus distinguished by the Son, of watching Paul ‘walk about the room with the new-born dignity of letting young Gay have the money’.

  Poignantly felt privation remains, of course, the determining condition in Paul. It is behind what I have been referring to as the enfant terrible in him. The phrase, in fact, is too glib, with a glibness that slights the delicacy and penetration of Dickens’s insight. We can’t help realizing that in the acutely affecting scene of Paul’s introduction to the Blimber academy, when he makes his reply to the Doctor – the reply that is so heart-piercing in its brevity and finality. Blimber, unlike Mrs Pipchin, isn’t malign; he is merely stupid, with the confident collective stupidity of the world to which he belongs:

  ‘Ha!’ said the Doctor, leaning back in his chair with his hand in his breast. ‘Now I see my little friend. [Paul has been lifted on to the table.] How do you do, my little friend?’

  The clock in the hall wouldn’t subscribe to this alteration in the form of words, but continued to repeat ‘how, is, my, lit, tle, friend? how, is, my, lit, tle, friend?’

  ‘Very well, I thank you, Sir,’ returned Paul, answering the clock quite as much as the Doctor.

  �
�Ha!’ said Doctor Blimber. ‘Shall we make a man of you?’

  ‘Do you hear, Paul?’ asked Mr Dombey. Paul being silent.

  Paul’s intuitive recognition that this is a frighteningly inhuman world, one bent, in its blind mechanical cheerfulness,2 on annihilating him, is conveyed in that ‘answering the clock quite as much as the Doctor’. There is no sang-froid in the characteristic directness of his reply, when it comes:

  ‘Shall we make a man of him?’ repeated the Doctor.

  ‘I had rather be a child,’ replied Paul.

  The poignancy of this has its dreadful piercingness because we know so well that Paul is doomed: no adult present will be pierced, and the righteous personnel of the academy, unlike Mrs Pipchin, can’t be disconcerted by the menace of being made to see itself.

  ‘Indeed!’ said the Doctor, ‘Why?’

  The child sat on the table looking at him, with a curious expression of suppressed emotion in his face, and beating one hand proudly on his knee as if he had the rising tears beneath it, and crushed them. But his other hand strayed a little way the while, a little farther – farther from his yet – until it lighted on the neck of Florence. ‘This is why,’ it seemed to say, and then the steady look was broken up and gone; the working lip was loosened, and the tears came streaming forth.

  ‘Mrs Pipchin,’ said the father, in a querulous manner, ‘I am really very sorry to see this.’

  ‘Come away from him, do, Miss Dombey,’ quoth the matron.3

  The exploitation of childish tears plays no part in the heart-rending pathos of Paul’s life and death as Dickens evokes it. The other occasion on which Paul expresses with as intense and overt a directness the extremity of his case – the starvation and the ache – is when he asks Florence, ‘where’s India, where that boy’s friends live?’