Dickens the Novelist

by F. R. Leavis

  The dreary magnificence of the state rooms, seen imperfectly by the doubtful light admitted through closed shutters, would have answered well enough for an enchanted abode. Such as the tarnished paws of gilded lions, stealthily put out from beneath their wrappers; the marble lineaments of busts on pedestals, fearfully revealing themselves through veils; the clocks that never told the time, or, if wound up by any chance, told it wrong, and struck unearthly numbers, which are not upon the dial; the accidental tinklings among the pendant lustres, more startling than alarm-bells; the softened sounds and laggard air that made their way among these objects, and a phantom crowd of others, shrouded and hooded, and made spectral of shape. But, besides, there was the great staircase, where the lord of the place so rarely set his foot, and by which his little child had gone up to Heaven.

  The evocations of the Dombey house – evocations of varied dramatic mood and tone – are very impressive in their characteristic Dickensian power: the Hogarthian passages sort well with other kinds that are also in their different ways strong. See, for instance, in chapter IX the account of the second-hand shop ending:

  Of motionless clocks that never stirred a finger, and seemed as incapable of being successfully wound up, as the pecuniary affairs of their former owners, there was always great choice in Mr Brogley’s shop; and various looking-glasses, accidentally placed at compound interest of reflection and refraction, presented to the eye an eternal perspective of bankruptcy and ruin.

  Mr Brogley himself was a moist-eyed, pink-complexioned, crisp-haired man, of a bulky figure and an easy temper – for that class of Caius Marius who sits upon the ruins of other people’s Carthages, can keep up his spirits well enough.

  Everywhere, in description and narrative and dramatic presentation and speech, we have exemplified that vitality of language which invites us to enforce from Dickens the truth of the proposition that in the Victorian age the poetic strength of the English language goes into the novel, and that the great novelists are the successors of Shakespeare. In fact, it is hard not to see a significance in the habitual way (the habit is very marked in Dombey and Son) in which Dickens quotes from Shakespeare and alludes to him – in the familiarity with Shakespeare he assumes in the reader and in the evidence he gives of the active presence of Shakespeare in his own creative mind. That he developed an art so different from anything he could have learnt from Smollett or Fielding – or Ben Jonson, in whom he was also interested, or the theatre of his own time – was of course a manifestation of his genius; but that his genius was fostered on the side of its characteristic strength by the potent fact of Shakespeare, not only in his own life, but in the life of the English people for whom he wrote (a fact making itself felt at the level of popular entertainment), is very much a point to be made. When it was that Shakespeare ceased to be a popular institution I do not know; he was certainly that in Dickens’s formative period. Looking at the characteristics of form and method of the novel as Dickens was aspiring to create it in Dombey and Son, we can see that the influence of the sentimental and melodramatic theatre was not the only dramatic influence that counted, or the most profound.

  One cannot, then, rest happily on the formula that Dickens’s genius was that of a great popular entertainer: the account is not unequivocal enough. Exalting the ‘great French novelists’ in general, and Balzac in particular, over ‘their fellows here,’ a well-known Sunday-paper critic not very long ago wrote:

  George Eliot, deeply influenced by the French, was the first English writer, I believe, to think of fiction as a major art … Thackeray, Dickens and Trollope, like their eighteenth-century predecessors, were satisfied to offer entertainment, often weighted with moralizing.

  It is an ignorant and unintelligent parti pris, the Francophil convention of ‘Bloomsbury’, that comes out, amusingly, in that ‘deeply influenced by the French’. But what immediately concerns us is the bracketing of Dickens with Thackeray and Trollope – an absurdity that Dombey and Son is enough to dispose of. Dickens was in the fullest sense a great national artist. His genius responded with inexhaustible vitality to the new, the unprecedented conditions of a rapidly developing civilization. In catering for the tastes and needs of a nation-wide public he found congenial employment for his powers – he found what his powers were and he found the inspiration he himself needed. His art was wonderfully original, and no great writer was ever more remote from being troubled or limited or guided by scruples that could in any sense be called academic. Yet, as we have seen, Dickens’s uninhibited freedom of practice as a great popular artist did not prevent him from having his essential creative relations with the classical past of English literature and English art. And if we are to say that he saw himself as a popular entertainer, it must not be with any suggestion that he did not think of himself, and with justice, as having, qua artist, a penetrating insight into contemporary civilization, its ethos, its realities and its drives, that it concerned him to impart. And if we are to talk of fiction as a ‘major art’, then, faced with explaining what we mean and how the ‘art’ established its right to be considered in that way, we have to recognize that Dickens had a very important – a major – part in the history. He may, in the habit and conditions of his work, have been very unlike Flaubert, but he nevertheless thought of himself with the conscious pride of responsibility as an artist, and with a developing earnestness pondered the claims of his art. His œuvre, in fact, presents the critic of ‘fiction as a major art’ with a central, delicate and testing challenge.

  APPENDIX

  Dickens and Smollett

  Dickens was an enthusiastic reader of Smollett in his boyhood6 and paid tribute to him not only explicitly, as in making Roderick Random, Peregrine Pickle and Humphrey Clinker the imaginative sustenance of David Copperfield in his boyhood – along with such authentic immortals as Don Quixote, Tom Jones, the Vicar of Wakefield and Robinson Crusoe – but, as has been frequently pointed out, by including, in his earlier novels at least, a line of cruder comic characters in the Smollett image of such, with their external humours and coarse knockabout. However, after Pickwick Papers such obtrusive borrowings can be seen to have been transmuted into the Dickensian art: they have an inherent psychological interest in themselves (like Dennis the hangman in Barnaby Rudge) and are absorbed into the totality of the novel in which they occur, and this seems not as yet recognized by literary criticism, though it should be part of the larger tribute paid to Dickens which he himself felt owing to him and deplored his never receiving. Even in an early novel like The Old Curiosity Shop, Dick Swiveller and Codlin and Short, for instance, are very different from similar types in Smollett and not merely in having been made acceptable to a more refined age. It is in the first great Dickens novel, Dombey, that what Dickens made of his Smollett originals may be most profitably studied. In Captain Cuttle, ‘a very salt-looking man indeed’, with ‘a hook instead of a hand’, a nose all over knobs like his stick, a farcical hard glazed hat and ‘such a very large Coarse shirt-collar, that it looked like a small sail’, we have a character visibly close to Smollett’s rough sea-dogs, a character who would not have been there at all but for the Smollett originals, who has the customary eccentricities of speech and manners of such Smollett types and who gets involved in the customary comic humours (with the vixen Mrs MacStinger, the still more Smollettian Captain Bunsby, the artful Rob the Grinder, etc.). But Captain Cuttle is not sentimentalized in order to make such a type tolerable to a Victorian reading public which would not have borne Smollett’s brutal humour, though the Captain’s having been endowed with qualities of feeling such as chivalry and some delicacy, as well as with a vein of shrewdness that may seem incompatible with such worldly simplicity as he manifests habitually, may make him dubiously plausible. We are obliged by the quality of Dickens’s art in Dombey (and there are three chapters before the Captain appears) to reflect that human nature is more complex even in the apparently simplest and least cultivated of us, than is recognized in Fielding’s and Smollett�
�s novels, and that Dickens is the superior of his predecessors if only in asserting this and consistently providing for it. Moreover, Captain Cuttle is not a mere grotesque who could be as well in one novel as another, a peripheral figure of fun or a cog in the plotting as in a picaresque novel, but falls within the stylization of the whole theme of the unique work of art in which he plays an essential part.

  For example, he is the necessary complement to Sol Gills for the nurturing of Walter Gay, in contrast to Mr Dombey’s, Mrs Pipchin’s and the Blimbers’ of little Paul: even more an orphan than Paul, and in addition poor, Walter is shown to receive from his foster-parents the love and imaginative food for lack of which the rich man’s son pines and dies; and that Captain Cuttle is a sailor with, it is shown, the reverence for the mysteries of life ingrained in him by the experiences of seafaring, associates him with Old Glubb in the meaning of the book, as well as with the nautical instrument-maker Sol Gills, these standing in contrast to Dombey himself, Carker, Major Bagstock, the Blimbers and the other land-sharks preying on little Paul and Florence, who ignore the sea and its voices. Another aspect in which Captain Cuttle relates to the whole meaning of the book is in his faith in the amount of capital represented by his silver teaspoons, sugar-tongs and watch, not by any means merely the occasion for a trivial kind of humour. His belief in the value of these objects, his ‘property’, is either ridiculous or touching, as you care to take it, and Dickens allows for both reactions, making it plain that he sees Cuttle’s belief is preposterous to Mr Dombey and likely to be found absurd by the sophisticated reader; yet Dickens thus intimates to us that, to the hard-working pilot and skipper, such a pitiful accumulation, plus an annuity of a hundred pounds a year, is the reward for a life of honest service to the Dombey society (Dombey makes his money by trading overseas). It is also a proof that the Captain’s life has been passed among those to whom his little heap of silver objects and the contents of his tin canister of savings represents wealth, so that his confidence in its impressiveness when he goes with Walter to negotiate a loan for Sol Gills in chapter X is natural. And we are perforce touched by the Captain’s willingness to give his all, his annuity as well as his pathetic little heap of property laid out on the table before us, to save his friend from bankruptcy, when we are shown in contrast Mr Dombey’s mean prudence in correcting Paul’s instinctive ‘give it to his old uncle’ to ‘lend it to his old uncle’ – mean, seeing that ‘he’ is Walter who has done the whole Dombey family a service in rescuing Florence and that the required sum is nothing to Mr Dombey. As part of the theme of the novel Dickens is showing that the poor man can put forth such flowers of the spirit as generosity and a delicacy of feeling not known to the successful merchant, a delicacy which is not the product of education or contacts with social superiors. We meet this again in Hard Times in the contrast between the horse-riding people and the Gradgrind-Bounderby class in their attitudes to Sissy’s loss of her father. Captain Cuttle is thus seen to be a necessary element in the novel, casting an ironic light on that Victorian idea of Property as a value and its acquisition an end in itself which is later to be satirized both by Dickens in Wemmick’s assertion of everyone’s obligation to acquire Portable Property and by Tennyson’s insight into the effects of this assumption (that it superseded all real human values) in his brilliant poem ‘The Northern Farmer, New Style’. Without going into the subject exhaustively, we can see in the case of Captain Cuttle that a Smollett type of character has been by Dicken’s profounder genius turned to uses inconceivable to Smollett.

  Q.D.L.

  1. Regarding the egotism of Dombey’s devotion to his son, Dickens has already recorded this observation:

  ‘For all his starched, impenetrable dignity and composure, he wiped blinding tears from his eyes as he did so; and often said, with an emotion for which he would not, for the world, have had a witness, “Poor little fellow!”

  ‘It may have been characteristic of Mr Dombey’s pride, that he pitied himself through the child. Not poor me. Not poor widower, confiding by constraint in the wife of an ignorant hind who has been working “mostly underground” all his life, and yet at whose door Death never knocked, and at whose table four sons daily sit – but poor little fellow!’

  2. ‘As to Mr Feeder B.A., Doctor Blimber’s assistant, he was a kind of human barrel-organ …’

  3. ‘“Never mind,” said the Doctor, blandly nodding his head, to keep Mrs Pipchin back. “Ne-ver mind; we shall substitute new cares and new impressions, Mr Dombey, very shortly. You would still wish my little friend to acquire –?”’

  4. See here (the attitude summed up in: ‘You are not to wonder’).

  5. ‘It was not that Miss Blimber meant to be too hard upon him, or that Doctor Blimber meant to bear too heavily on the young gentleman. Cornelia merely held the faith in which she had been bred; and the Doctor, in some partial confusion of his ideas, regarded the young gentlemen as if they were all Doctors, and were born grown up. Comforted by the applause of the young gentlemen’s nearest relations, and urged on by their blind vanity …’

  6. ‘Supposing one wrote an essay on Fielding, for instance, and another on Smollett, and another on Sterne, recalling how one read them as a child (no one read them younger than I, I think) and how one gradually grew up into a different knowledge of them, and so forth – would it not be interesting to many people?’ – Letter, quoted by Forster, 5 September 1847.

  2

  Dickens and Tolstoy: The Case for a Serious View of David Copperfield

  I

  DAVID COPPERFIELD is a long novel, uneven in quality and more complicated than it may seem; snap judgements on it are certain to be not merely inadequate but falsifying. Therefore there seems to me an interesting point which must be raised before anyone can begin to discuss it at all: What novel is it? For evidently, for Tolstoy it was a very different novel from what it was for its English contemporaneous admirers or equally from what (quite other) it is for its latter-day denigrators – I note that in the opinion of the more recent trans-Atlantic thesis-writers (there is always a smart Dickens book in vogue with the academics and literary journalists, and those favoured at the moment seem to be Garis1 and Dabney2) the valuation of David Copperfield should be low indeed. The view of it held from the moment of its publication in 1850 and till modern Dickens criticism ousted that, was shown in its being bracketed invariably in esteem with Pickwick Papers, the pair being accepted as the high-water mark of Dickens’s achievement (with The Christmas Carol often thrown in) – David Copperfield was ‘second only to Pickwick in immediate and lasting popularity’, wrote Forster, Dickens’s biographer and business confidant. This was the valuation not only of the average uncritical intellectual men of the age, who thus made it clear that they saw Dickens only as a writer to relax with. ‘I was told by Lord Morley’, wrote Harold Laski in his Introduction to Mill’s Autobiography, ‘that few people enjoyed more, or read more often, Pickwick Papers and David Copperfield’ than – John Stuart Mill. Lord Acton, I note, wrote in 1880 in a letter: ‘It is beginning at the wrong end to read David Copperfield first, but he [Dickens] is worth anything to busy men, because his fun is so hearty and so easy, and he rouses the emotions by such direct and simple methods. I am ashamed to think how much more often I return to Dickens than to George Eliot.’ Perhaps comment is unnecessary, but my deduction that he thought Dickens, at what Acton took to be his best, could serve only for the relaxation of serious citizens, and rather shamingly at that, is borne out by another statement in his letters: ‘Dickens is far below Thackeray in his characters’, and it appears that he didn’t think much of Thackeray either.3

  Quite logically, from this reading of and valuation of Copperfield, Forster saw Dickens’s subsequent novels as a steady falling-off, increasingly less amusing and more ‘unpleasant’ (for instance, he complains that Skimpole is a very disagreeable successor to Micawber), while the only drawback to Copperfield’s perfection he finds is the insertion of the unnecessarily ‘unpl
easant’ Rosa Dartle. An acceptance of this reading of Copperfield is implied in Henry James’s low opinion of Dickens generally, as in this comment in his non-fictional book English Hours: ‘You go on liking David Copperfield – I don’t say you go on reading it, which is a very different matter – because it is Dickens.’ Supporting this view of Dickens we have James’s statement in his essay on Turgeniev in 1884 expressing surprise that ‘Turgeniev should have rated Dickens so high’ and explaining that it must have been ‘merely that Dickens diverted him, as well he might’.

  Tolstoy on the contrary did go on reading it, having singled out David Copperfield from his first encountering the Russian translation4 and then grappling with it in English with the aid of a dictionary in order to do it justice.5 We know from numerous independent sources of Tolstoy’s conversation throughout his long life, as well as from his own written tributes, that David Copperfield was a serious and indeed fundamental influence on his work as a novelist. In 1905 he told Makovitsky: ‘How good Dickens is! I should have liked to write about him.’ Though he seems never to have done so directly, I think by examining his novels we can see what he would have written about Dickens if he had been able, from the use he makes of Dickens and the understanding of Dickens’s themes and intentions that he shows in War and Peace and Anna Karenina. Recalling in conversation with friends in 1905 the influence Dickens had on him when he began writing he said that it was second only to Stendhal’s; but in general he placed Dickens above all other novelists and Copperfield above all his other novels: his family quoted him as saying: ‘If you sift the world’s prose literature, Dickens will remain; sift Dickens, David Copperfield will remain.’ He also said: ‘Dickens was a genius such as is met with but once in a century’ and ‘on me he had a great influence’. Between this admiration for Dickens in his youth and his old age there are also similar references to his frequenting Dickens’s novels – e.g. in 1886: ‘Dickens interests me more and more’, and he used to read Dickens to his visitors. While to us it may on reflection seem surprising that a young Russian aristocrat with a wild youth and an army officer’s experiences, living as a privileged member of an archaic society which had an autocrat at one end of the social scale and serfs at the other, accustomed to only a monastic form of Christianity and generally being as remote as a European can be imagined from industrialized Victorian England – that such a member of such a society should be so excited and stimulated by the wholly alien fictions of a self-made member of a Protestant English lower-middle-class – yet it is only because of an overall likeness to Dickens’s of Tolstoy’s two great novels that we do not register as improbable this surely remarkable state of affairs. Would Tolstoy’s novels have been as they are and what they are but for their author’s having encountered the translation of David Copperfield at the formative phase of his writing life? Even Tolstoy’s autobiography Childhood, Boyhood and Youth has been found by Russian critics to contain ‘evident traces of David Copperfield’ in ‘the characteristics of conduct and even the grouping of characters and the selection of facts’. It was in fact this novel that Tolstoy again and again specified as for him the most important work of the greatest of novelists. And not only as a novel: when in 1896 he drew up a list of the books which had made a strong impression on him in his youth, in the highest category he placed Copperfield (along with Rousseau and the Gospel of St Matthew); at the age of 80 he told his doctor that the English book he thought the highest of was David Copperfield.