Dickens the Novelist

by F. R. Leavis

  It is in consonance with these perceptions that Miss Trotwood was created, to play the complex and inevitably ridiculous part of Reason or systematic rationality; but she is not left as a Blakean idea, Dickens worked very hard on her, one sees, and she does not eventually figure as a concept for ridicule but as a very human case-history who is sympathetic because she can admit she has been misguided. This is seen in her ultimate distress at her share in Clara’s tragedy which makes her show her contrition by her very different attitude to Clara’s successor Dora, whom she not only tolerates but humours, forcing herself to show her exactly the same forbearance as she does Jip. Her uncompromising rationality in the first chapter is meant to be felt as inhuman because it is unfeeling. This is embodied in the grimness of her aspect, her ‘fell rigidity’ and her ‘stalking’ movements, her gruff voice, and the unforgettable image of her peering in at the window (this was chosen very rightly for the frontispiece to the novel) which terrifies poor Clara into hiding in a corner, only to be driven out by the clockwork movement of the eyes following her round the room, a metaphor implying an automaton (‘like the Saracen’s Head in a Dutch clock’, Dickens writes) – Reason, as the unnatural and life-threatening machine, horrible in its relentlessness. There is an essential humour in bringing her up at once against that basic mystery of Nature, childbirth, with its human suffering (against which she stops her ears with cotton-wool in an attempt – unsuccessful – to protect herself from feeling in sympathy) and unpredictability (her assurance of getting the girl baby her egotism demands is thwarted, to her indignation, which she vents on the doctor as a failure at his job). We are here invited to enjoy the spectacle of the defeat of rationality by Nature – we note however that even she cannot completely subdue her own humanity, for she can’t bear the sight of tears23 in spite of their being an illogical weakness: she softens to Clara when she cries, and immediately takes in the vagabond David when he breaks down in tears though she has started, characteristically, by ‘making a chop in the air with her knife’24 at him and declaring ‘“No boys here!”’ This is taken up to show, after her gradual humanizing, her complete yielding to natural sensibility when, on learning of David’s engagement to Agnes that she had long desired, ‘she immediately went into hysterics, for the first and only time’; she has previously been reconciled to Peggotty, her very opposite, and is last seen sharing with Peggotty the nurse’s role for David’s children and, having got the long-desired namesake, ‘spoiling’ her.

  When David is introduced into the Dover household he finds there the deranged Mr Dick, through whom Miss Betsey demonstrates her refusal to admit that final defeat of reason, madness: constantly ‘triumphant’ when she has elicited dubious proofs of his having sense (‘“That man mad!”’ etc.) Similarly she refuses to admit the fact of sexual attraction instead of accepting it as inevitable, employing maids ‘expressly to educate (them) in a renouncement of mankind, and who generally completed their abjuration by marrying the baker’, having herself consistently protested against the conditions of marriage by reverting to the status and mode of living of a spinster.25 We are made to wince at her harshness in relegating people into categories – Clara is always and from the first sight a Baby to her, and the most she can do in sympathy for her after her death is to prefix it with ‘poor’ or ‘poor dear’; Dora she classifies as something subhuman as ‘Little Blossom’. Yet she had recognized that reason alone is inadequate to live by; as she later admits rather pathetically to David: ‘“It was a gleam of light upon me, Trot, when I formed the resolution of being godmother to your sister Betsey Trotwood,”’ for her yearning for a human link was defeated: ‘“Where was this child’s sister, Betsey Trotwood? Not forthcoming. Don’t tell me!”’ It was after this, we learn, that she took Mr Dick into her care, as a substitute. The shortcomings of rationality in furnishing self-knowledge are beautifully implied in the dialogue with Mr Dick (where, as so often in David Copperfield, humour not merely reinforces serious insights but is a mode of presenting them effectively):

  ‘Ah! his sister, Betsey Trotwood, never would have run away.’ My aunt shook her head firmly, confident in the character and behaviour of the girl who never was born.

  ‘Oh! you think she wouldn’t have run away?’ said Mr Dick.

  His innocent question undermines for the reader in advance the assurance of her over-emphatic answer to the seeds of doubt thus sown in her own mind as well as ours.

  Dickens also allows for the real usefulness of sharp unsentimental good sense, as in her enlightened treatment of Mr Dick, her understanding of what the Murdstones are, her upbringing of David, her immediate ‘placing’ of the Old Soldier and Mrs Crupp, – but undoubtedly another and important function is to show, in her devastating comments which do not allow for the feelings of others,26 and the unanswerable conclusions she draws in opposition to the facts of experience, that there is something to be said for the illogical, irrational, tender-hearted female accepted then as the norm. As is the mode of David Copperfield, she is offered, it seems, playfully and apparently for our entertainment, but this should not disguise the serious uses Dickens makes of her, and the importance of her contribution to the meaning of the novel, as one of its conflicting possibilities. We must surely recognize the inventiveness and spontaneous ingenuity with which Dickens brings this about. I must say that I used personally to resent his apparently unworthy tactic of saddling Miss Betsey with what I took to be a gratuitous trait of agressive mania – the donkeys whose intrusion on to the green which she claims to own, that she spends so much time in resenting, and her banging the donkey-boys’ heads against the wall, as rather too suggestive of the vulgar Victorian idea of a strong-minded woman, as though Dickens felt obliged to make a concession to vulgar prejudice. But on second thoughts one sees it is psychologically right: the aggressiveness belongs to her condition and the touch of mania against the opposite sex sees the donkey-drivers as suitable objects for her animus against mankind, just as she saw in the helpless and victimized child-man, Mr Dick, a suitable object for her protection and sympathy. Again we see Dickens combining the roles of entertainer and serious novelist.

  III

  At this point I will return to the comparison with Tolstoy. We have seen that Dickens has rooted the David-Dora marriage into the psychological as well as the sociological context of his age, as Tolstoy has not – what evidently struck Tolstoy in reading David Copperfield was mainly the fact of such a marriage and its bearings on a man’s happiness. So Tolstoy, unlike Dickens, leaves us rebellious against his fait accompli. Did Prince Andrew’s courtship give him no doubts about the wisdom of his choice of a wife, we ask, especially since he is not shown as having such need for childlike gaiety as David Copperfield had? And we note that nevertheless Dickens does show, with the greatest delicacy, that in David’s prolonged courtship he has misgivings in the many causes for uneasiness which he registers more or less consciously, particularly in the way Dora takes the news of his loss of Miss Trotwood’s fortune and her response to his consequent demands on her for support and co-operation. He does try to cope with her, but he is very young, and inexperienced, and as he cannot do without her his doubts have to be suppressed: we see that he can only allow himself to admit the truth about Dora in his dreams – Dickens’s intelligent interest in the underlying factors of consciousness make dreams and delirious states an important means of exploring experience in his novels. For instance, David dreams he is at ‘an imaginary party where the people were dancing the hours away, and I heard the music incessantly playing one tune, and saw Dora incessantly dancing one dance, without taking the least notice of me.’ And again, his waking self had bravely seen his future in this sanctioned form: ‘What I had to do, was, to take my woodman’s axe in my hand, and clear my own way through the forest of difficulty, by cutting down the trees until I came to Dora’ (the suggestion of a fairy-tale hero implies a consciousness of this activity’s being unrealistic in his very different circumstances, also that he sees
that his Dora belongs to a fairy-tale world). Yet when dozing over the fire this recurs in a hopeless recognition of the actuality as ‘thinking how I could best make my way with a guitar-case through the forest of difficulty, until I used to fancy my head was turning quite grey’.

  Tolstoy’s very rationality and his consistently logical use of language seem to put him at a disadvantage compared to Dickens in such a complex matter. Thus Andrew’s guilt is for having deserted his wife and been dead to her appeals for affection, but that does not prevent his forming a satisfactory attachment later to Natasha, who though undisciplined, spoilt and girlish is shown to be capable of maturing through her love for him. Andrew’s penitence after his experience of suffering (virtually death) on the battlefield, had no basis in genuine feeling for Lisa, it is only a new consciousness of the moral claims of others instead of the hard superiority, the egoism, of his father. Yet Tolstoy in giving his own version of Dickens’s theme in War and Peace does take it to a more satisfactory issue. We all feel – though the Victorian public didn’t for the most part – that the schematic marriage to Agnes, theoretically the right wife, is hollow and unconvincing, that all the reality is in David’s feelings for Dora. Of course Dickens had no experience of a satisfactory marriage and his sister-in-law Georgina, who carried out so successfully the housekeeping and child-rearing functions in his home, did not arouse feelings of love or romantic tenderness in him: this kind of woman seems to have evoked in him only gratitude plus some irritation (he wished she would marry though he knew he could hardly spare her). Agnes is only a willed concession to the Victorian ideal – seen always as the angel on the hearth, in the light from a stained glass window, ‘pointing upward’, or with her ‘patient smile’. Moreover, she has been established as in essence a sister-figure to David, and there is an unpleasant suggestion in the Sister-and-wife combination corresponding to the ‘O my father and my husband’ of the Strongs’ marriage, neither of which Dickens at bottom found appealing, we can see, for he can’t make them either attractive or plausible.

  But what about Dickens’s other models for a happy marriage – are they any more satisfactory? He has tried hard with the Traddleses, and with some success. Sophie, ‘the dearest girl in the world’, is a convincing presence; for one thing, she isn’t envisaged as forever static with a holy smile on her face like Agnes, and she has the playfulness and vivacity that for Dickens was the essential feminine allure without having also Dora’s or Clara’s folly and selfishness. But she also is essentially schematic, and too much of her consists of turning Dora upside down without sacrificing Dora’s desirable qualities. Sophie, says Traddles, ‘is quite as much a mother to her mother, as she is to the other nine [sisters]’; she is older than Traddles and used to narrow means, so altogether she can take the burden of marriage to a struggling professional man and train herself to be a helpmeet. Dora can only hold the pens for her overworked husband in, as usual, a make-believe of wifely duty (actually this makes her a hindrance to David’s writing but he acquiesces in the fiction, having enough imagination to realize, Dickens shows, that she needs to believe that the marriage is thus put on a more equal footing – David was not a Prince Andrew). But Sophie really uses the pens herself to serve Traddles as the necessary copying-clerk he can’t afford, and disciplines herself to write a stiff masculine law-hand. Yet Sophie is also a source of unfailing gaiety and youthful feelings – to establish this we are shown her romping with ‘the girls’ in Traddles’s legal chambers, singing innumerable children’s songs from memory, and so forth; so she is satisfactory on every score. Yet is the Traddles marriage any more than a daydream? We can’t help noting that their private life is that of grown-up children, and the novel ends with further illustrations of this fact though Traddles has somehow, very improbably, developed legal maturity to the degree required for becoming a Judge.27 There is a similar absence of realism in the Micawber marriage, where, though the attachment of husband and wife to each other is in itself convincing enough, yet in Mrs Micawber’s theme-song, that she will never desert Mr Micawber, and in his, about the comfort of mutual confidence, Dickens seems to be using the couple as a means of making fun of the clichés of the Victorian marriage theory,28 and almost to make it impossible to take seriously the mutual explanations of the Strongs in chapter XLV, which the Micawbers unconsciously burlesque subsequently in their comic scene in chapter LII.

  For the other couple Dickens has worked hard to produce as a model is a very surprising one indeed, almost shockingly perverse, and calls for some investigation. Their symbolic name of Strong suggests that it has Dickens’s full endorsement – but at what level? Annie, we learn, was only 17 when she was persuaded into marriage with the learned classical scholar and headmaster aged 60 who had been her father’s old friend and her own teacher from childhood, and whom she has continued to think of as a father-figure. He provides all the wisdom while she contributes girlish gaiety, singing, and relaxation for him; she is always seen symbolically kneeling at his feet, first buttoning up his gaiters and later in reverence towards him, or else contentedly but uncomprehendingly listening to him reading from his projected dictionary. In spite of Dickens’s efforts in making the Doctor chivalrous and kind-hearted, it has an inescapable grisly likeness to that later marriage of the kind, Dorothea Casaubon’s, and Dickens throws in, perhaps involuntarily, some features that support this view (e.g. the marriage is childless, the Doctor’s life’s work is represented as rather ridiculous pedantry and unreal, not being even remotely possible of completion in his lifetime, and so on). Worse still, the marriage has to us inevitably a really unpleasant morbid aspect which Dickens seems to reveal in spite of his conscious intentions, as in Annie’s ‘O my father and my husband’ speeches and attitudes – isn’t there something very wrong in her contentedness with this situation? we ask. Dr Strong, ‘the old scholar’, needs youth and gaiety and tenderness, too, – in Dickens’s eyes they are, as we saw, indispensable to a man’s happiness; but we can’t be satisfied seeing the price Annie has to pay that he may enjoy them, and note with disapproval Dickens’s determination to believe that Annie is really fulfilled in such a marriage.29 Here I think we must not impute dishonesty to Dickens but recognize the Balaam prophetic vein at work that is a part of every true artist’s endowment and that must surface at the right time. In fact, the Strongs are so presented that they posit these doubts inevitably. The technique here is that which characterizes David Copperfield – not ambiguity but a novel that can be read at two levels, a popular one (humorous, sentimental and moralistic) and that of art, complex, serious, poignant, subtly suggestive, though devious in presentation and its argument subterranean.

  As a pendant to Dickens’s attempt to cover the matrimonial possibilities in his age, he gives us Miss Trotwood who, having made an unhappy choice and finding herself deceived in her husband’s character, follows the voice of Reason in separating herself from her husband and quite logically reverting to spinster status. But a rational solution to the problem of an unhappy marriage, a legal separation, can’t make happiness. She is shown living a rigidly monotonous existence in which her tending of Mr Dick is (till David enters her life) her substitute for husband and child and the natural instincts for intimate human relations – she has to vindicate her own judgement against society’s. But by giving her a thoroughly bad man for a husband Dickens has spoilt his argument, for it was necessary to show that it was her inflexibility in the face of the process of readjustment and mutual concession that marriage demands, that caused the breakdown of her marriage. I imagine this was his original intention, since it fits the part Miss Trotwood enacts in the schematic novel, but that getting fond of Miss Trotwood as a person, as the novel progressed, he could not bring himself to treat her afterwards with the impartiality required. Otherwise we might have had a parallel to the Murdstone marriage with the sexes reversed, which would have completed the schematic argument.

  We must admit therefore that Dickens in David Copperfield is not
able to provide an adequate answer to the question of Victorian man’s happiness that he set out to tackle. He has, however, shown us very fully, delicately and seriously what is involved in that question, and has refused to simplify the issues. We may recollect that Chekhov defended Anna Karenina against critics by saying that we must not demand that a novelist solves our problems for us; that all we are entitled to require of him is that he should state the problems correctly. This Dickens has certainly done, to the best of his ability, in David Copperfield, and we need not, I suggest, think less of his novel if we compare it with the comparable art of Tolstoy’s work that he inspired. However we must note that Tolstoy was in fact able to take further steps towards suggesting helpful answers to the problems Dickens first raised and that Tolstoy in his turn undertook to dramatize in his first large-scale novel. Dickens makes David, after the long enchanted courtship, during which, through no fault of his own, he has failed to make of Dora anything but a pet, feel alarm once the marriage has taken place and he must live with her in the everyday world. Dickens shows him, in one masterly phrase, realizing that the courtship has turned into a prison sentence: they have now, David reflects, ‘no one to please but one another – one another to please for life’. And their married life continues to the end unchanged, in the chapters called ‘Our Housekeeping’ and ‘Domestic’, which explore the marriage between the lines, as it were, as a hopeless dilemma, while maintaining a sufficient appearance, in its humorous tone, of being the stock joke about a young couple’s housekeeping troubles and little quarrels, that Dickens’s reading public would not find disturbing. Tolstoy was able to show through his Natasha the growth into maturity of the delightful girlish creature who has revived in the despondent Prince Andrew a desire for life and happiness. Unlike his dead child-wife Lisa, Natasha is potentially a woman. In the proposal scene we learn that both of the lovers realise that they are now responsible for each other: