Dickens the Novelist

by F. R. Leavis

  Prince Andrew held her hands, looked into her eyes, and did not find in his heart his former love for her. Something in him had suddenly changed; there was no longer the former poetic and mystic charm of longing, but there was pity for her womanly and childish weakness, fear in face of her devotion and trustfulness, and an oppressive yet joyful sense of the duty that now bound him to her for ever. The actual feeling, though it was not so bright and poetic as the former, was stronger and more serious.

  ‘Is it possible that I – the chit of a girl, as everybody called me.’ thought Natasha, ‘is it possible that I am now to be the wife, the equal of this strange, dear clever man, whom even my father respects? Can it be true? Can it be true that I can no longer play with life, that now I am grown up, that on me now lies a responsibility for every word and deed of mine?’

  And after this and its development we see Natasha pass through a succession of painful experiences (which include nursing Andrew to his death) and finding happiness in a marriage with Pierre, who has progressed to that marriage by his own self-discoveries which started with the disastrous mistake of letting himself be seduced into marrying a vicious society beauty. Pierre and Natasha’s happiness is shown to be founded on domestic tastes and mutual respect, so that Natasha is able to discard her girlish personality altogether without risking losing her husband’s love:

  Natasha did not follow that golden rule, advocated by clever folk, especially the French, which says that a girl … must be more careful of her appearance, and must fascinate her husband as much as she did before he became her husband. Natasha, on the contrary, at once abandoned all her witchery … She gave it up just because it was so powerfully seductive … She felt that the allurements instinct had taught her formerly to use would now be merely ridiculous in the eyes of her husband, to whom she had from the first given herself entirely – that is, with her whole soul, leaving no corner of it hidden from him. She felt that her unity with her husband was not maintained by the poetic feelings that had attracted him to her, but by something else – something indefinite, but as firm as the bond between her own body and soul. To fluff out her curls, put on fashionable dresses, and sing romantic songs, to fascinate her husband, would have seemed as strange to her as to adorn herself to attract herself.

  Dickens does not write and could not write such things, but we cannot but recognize that they are implied in his analyses of what was wrong with the society that formed David’s ideal for him and that formed Dora.

  At the same time, while Tolstoy was able to formulate and dramatize convincing positives of Dickens’s negatives, and successes to correct Dickens’s failures, we note that he is in Dickens’s debt for the idea of the good marriage. It may have struck some of Tolstoy’s other readers, as it has always done me, that the Victorian bourgeois ideal of marriage is unexpected, almost disconcertingly so, in its context in War and Peace and from the pen of a Russian aristocrat. The marriage of Nicholas Rostov with Princess Mary, the alternative happy marriage to Pierre’s and its complement, is a realistic version of David’s second marriage, and Nicholas Rostov’s feelings for his wife – also an angel-wife – are those of David for his Agnes.

  This is what had attracted Nicholas Rostov to Princess Mary originally:

  Nicholas was struck by the peculiar beauty he observed in her at this time. That pale, sad, refined face, that radiant look, those gentle graceful gestures, and especially that deep and tender sorrow expressed by all her features, agitated him and evoked his sympathy. In men Rostov hated to see an expression of lofty spirituality (that was why he did not like Prince Andrew) and he spoke of it contemptuously as philosophy and dreaminess, but in Princess Mary, just in that sorrow which revealed the depth of a whole spiritual world foreign to him, he felt an irresistible attraction. ‘She must be a wonderful woman! A real angel!’ he said to himself.

  Tolstoy’s society and Dickens’s are evidently similar in a need to localize in woman-as-wife the spiritual values which the man cannot afford to accept in his own life of manly aggressiveness and struggle – even though Tolstoy’s had a powerful aristocracy and court and only an insignificant bourgeoisie. Tolstoy as novelist incarnates the Victorian ideal of Woman, the Victorian ideal of marriage, and in his novels as in our own Victorian novels a culture based on the family, the countryside, the farm and the great house still counts for more than the city; there is no question as yet of the emancipation of woman either from domesticity or from male dominance. But Agnes is seen pictorially and her inside never examined, she has no life of her own like Princess Mary, in consequence Agnes’s spiritual attributes are little more than uplift. But even though this is not so with his Mary, Tolstoy does not, like Dickens, accept the idealisation as sound. He makes the point quite clearly that an average man like Nicholas Rostov sequestrated spirituality, which he knew he lacked but needed, as a right and desirable quality in Woman, feeling that these same qualities were in practice a weakness in a man because incompatible with his own duties as provider for a family:

  … this untiring mental effort, of which the aim was the children’s moral welfare, delighted him. If Nicholas could have analysed his feelings he would have discovered that his steady proud love for his wife was founded on wonder at her spirituality and at the lofty moral world almost beyond his reach – in which she had her being … Countess Mary’s soul always strove towards the infinite, the eternal, and the absolute, and therefore could never be at peace. A stern expression of secret lofty suffering, of a soul burdened by the body, appeared on her face. Nicholas glanced at her. ‘Oh God! What will become of us if she dies, as I always fear when her face is like that?’ he thought.

  It is because Tolstoy rejected the position of the man’s placing the responsibility for moral goodness on his wife that he ends his novel with the state of mind of ‘little Nicholas’, Prince Andrew’s son and Nicholas Rostov’s nephew. The boy turns away with dislike from his practically minded uncle and takes as his hero Pierre who was his dead father’s friend and whom he identifies in his dreams with his father, the two together being the inspiration for the boy’s idealism; he determines to do something glorious in life that they would approve of. For Pierre, we are shown, the source of values is not a Victorian idealization of Woman but for him it exists in the disinterested life of the spirit, shown in the artist’s, scientist’s and philosopher’s spheres of mind and vocation. And it is for this, we are told, that Natasha respects as well as loves him. Here Tolstoy has made it very clear that he sees a better alternative than Dickens’s idea for David Copperfield of a satisfactory ideal of marriage, where Agnes is described by her husband as ‘the source of every worthy aspiration I had ever had; the centre of myself, the circle of my life’, though Tolstoy’s ideal of married life is equally founded in the life of hearth and home. And yet we note also that Tolstoy in Natasha has provided a thoroughly Victorian conception of the right and proper relation of wife to husband, one that is neither aristocratic nor enlightened but decidedly bourgeois. Natasha cannot comprehend or share, is often irritated by and even jealous of, Pierre’s preoccupation with what is outside the scope of her wholly domestic life, yet she knows he must have this life in the outside world of the mind and spirit to make him the man she can look up to. [Kitty, Levin’s wife in Anna Karenina, is placed in exactly the same relation to her husband, showing that this was a part of Tolstoy’s beliefs that he saw no reason to abandon on second thoughts.] We may well feel that Tolstoy took over from Dickens everything in this respect and changed nothing in essentials. There is nothing in these fundamental attitudes about men and women’s relations in marriage that he has in common with Stendhal or Balzac, his other extra-Russian novelist influences.

  IV

  If part of Dickens’s theme in David Copperfield is an enquiry into the Victorian assumption that in a woman a loving heart is better than wisdom, another is an investigation into the other Romantic-Victorian belief, the value of innocence – that is, moral simplicity and ignorance of what
people are really like. It is David’s ‘innocence’ that makes him a victim of the idea of love that has been inculcated along with other idealisms. The romantic tradition has given him to understand that love at first sight is right and proper, and accordingly his relations with Dora are conducted entirely in the conventional idiom of romantic courtship which is seen as ridiculous, and this point made inescapable by Miss Mills’s soulful version of it, which brings out its essential absurdity by caricaturing it (not, as Cockshut asserts, to make David look sensible in comparison with Miss Mills – Dickens was not a thimble-rigger but an artist and he is not manipulating the reader here but directing him to what he himself feels to be the right position for seeing adolescent romantic passion justly). The dilemma of innocence is even more agonizing to Dickens than the question of affectionateness as an ultimate, since the idealization of innocence represented a menace to childhood; yet Innocence is what the heirs of the Romantic poets felt to be the true characteristic of the child. The child David’s innocent trustfulness is constantly being taken advantage of, the paradigm being when he is made at the very beginning to drink ‘Confusion to Brooks of Sheffield!’ (himself) by the heartless plotters against his mother and himself. A later episode, in chapter V, with the waiter at the inn, is more involved and more painful showing not only the manifold meanness of the waiter (whose idea of humour consists of jeering at the unprotected little boy whom he has cheated and duped by exploiting his innocence) but also the stupidity and hatefulness of a variety of adults who take part against the child automatically. Dickens’s comment, through the medium of grown-up David as he looks back at this episode in his moral history, brings out interestingly the dilemma I mean:

  If I had any doubt of him [the waiter], I suppose this half awakened it; but I am inclined to believe that with the simple confidence of a child, and the natural reliance of a child upon superior years (qualities I am very sorry any children should prematurely change for worldly wisdom), I had no serious mistrust of him on the whole, even then.

  Ideally, Victorian adults were to be thought of as parents, natural protectors, and trustfully accepted as guides; and even if the actuality often failed to match the theory, children were still to be taught that it is true, even though this left them to be exploited, hurt and morally bewildered.30 Yet at some point or other in growing up they must learn the probability of the theory’s being humbug and in fact dangerous to trust in. The whole question therefore hinged on how ‘prematurely’ is to be interpreted. David would not be so attractive as a child if he had not had this simple confidence in his seniors and at this stage we can only remark, ‘The more shame to them for abusing it!’ (This is particularly painful in the journey to Dover.) But by the time he gets to Mr Creakle’s and accepts Steerforth, against a good deal of evidence, as a noble character and the father-figure he needs as protector, we should find David lacking in acumen if Dickens had not shown that public opinion at the school supported David’s supposition (except for Mr Mell and Traddles – but both were without status); and he is still a little boy, at this stage. There is certainly a deliberate and delicate demonstration here as to the difficulty of an innocent’s arriving at a true judgement in the face of public opinion, and David’s moral bewilderment and unhappiness about the Mell episode, and the impossibility for him of understanding it, is finally conveyed to us as well as, which makes it more painful, the delicacy and decency of Mr Mell in trying to assure David that he doesn’t blame him. But the same pattern is repeated when David is introduced into the Steerforth home by his friend (to feed Mrs Steerforth’s maternal egoism): Miss Dartle with her ironic questions and sinister intimations is putting him into a position to draw the right conclusions about Steerforth, but David is again fortified by Mrs Steerforth’s unshakeable belief in her son and by what he believes to be Steerforth’s affection for him (which is really only Steerforth’s self-indulgent habit of patronage, and which contains a hateful element of contempt). David thus unsuspectingly introduces a seducer into the virtuous Noah’s Ark on the Yarmouth beach, launching Little Em’ly into misery and disgrace. I think we are now undoubtedly meant to feel impatient with David over his failure to ‘change his simple confidence for worldly wisdom’, for it would now clearly not be ‘premature’ but timely. We surely feel at this stage that David is no longer simply very young but very young for his age,31 that he is in danger of growing up to be what Miss Trotwood had described his mother as being, in summing up her disastrous second marriage: ‘a most unworldly, most unfortunate baby’. We often enough have reason to echo his aunt’s ‘Blind! blind! blind!’ and are clearly meant to.32 We are also meant to reflect that his sheltered life and idealistic education at Dr Strong’s have put him in blinkers, for the period when his life was not sheltered, at the warehouse, occurred too early to do more for him than make him wretched and did not last long enough to turn him into an Artful Dodger. Here, in a variety of scenes and situations deliberately created for the purpose, Dickens must be recognized as consciously, persistently and with great subtlety, intimating a radical criticism of the theory of the Victorian moral code with its Romantic heritage. Dickens is no more than anyone else able to decide what is the right point of balance between being a grown-up Baby and a hardened young Artful Dodger (or in this case, a Steerforth with his sophistication derived from the ‘Varsity world instead of from the gutter), but Dickens certainly feels that while the good young man is handicapped by his innocence, it is better to be a David than a James Steerforth, the proof being that Steerforth at moments felt it too. One indication we are given of Dickens’s personal bias is that he likes to show that the intuitions of the innocent mind are a safer guide where feelings are concerned than worldly wisdom: the solicitor’s suspicions of Annie prove to be unjust and Dr Strong’s guileless trust in her justified; Jack Maldon’s attitude of sneering at the delightful simplicity of the old Doctor is not only ugly in its ingratitude but stupid, since it prevents him from understanding his cousin Annie’s feelings, and we register here the truth of Dickens’s argument that it is better to be even ridiculously unworldly than base, since moral stupidity (as George Eliot called it) defeats itself. (The parallel playing off of Mr Micawber against Littimer as an argument in favour of a spontaneity that ignores some virtues as against hypocritical respectability, is a different matter and has to be established in the novel dramatically.)

  Here Dickens is early in the field examining Victorian values and assumptions. Clough began his dramatic poem ‘Dipsychus’ the year after David Copperfield, and in a prose Epilogue to his poem makes his fictional uncle complain that the younger generation have been made dangerously high-minded by Dr Arnold’s schooling: ‘as for my own nephews’, says the worldly old gentleman who had grown up in a pre-Victorian England, ‘they seem to me a sort of hobbadi-hoy cherub, too big to be innocent and too simple for anything else’, adding that at ‘about the age of 18 or 19’ the poet himself was ‘a great goose’. Clough therefore must have felt that this was so and that it was not an advantage. This is Dickens’s point too, though he himself certainly didn’t suffer like Clough from this Victorian disability.33 Trollope, another writer formed before Victorian idealism was current orthodoxy, sensed likewise that something had gone wrong, though his contribution was confined to showing the dangers of innocence and the sheltered life to young ladies. In one of his novels (Mr Scarborough’s Family), he tells us that his heroine ‘attempted to live by grand rules’ – ‘Nor did she know it’, and he goes on to make the interesting general point that reproduces Dickens’s earlier inquiry in David Copperfield:

  Unselfishness may become want of character; generosity essentially unjust; confidence may be weakness, and purity insipid.

  He actually devoted a whole, though short, novel (Sir Harry Hotspur of Humblethwaite) to dramatizing this insight, showing a family tragically ruined and their only child, a daughter, literally killed by these Victorian idealisms, the disaster entirely due to her insistence on putting into practice t
he Christian and sentimental beliefs she had been taught as proper for a young lady and which she would have known to be impracticable if she had not been kept in such innocence of the nature of things. The idea is interesting, but Trollope was not the novelist to do it justice. His heroine is without individuality and makes no imaginative impact as Rosa Dartle, for instance, does, while Trollope’s pedestrian style and no-nonsense mode of operation as a novelist deprive the subject of that sensitive notation and appropriately original presentation which it requires. We cannot but feel the advantage Dickens had in not being addicted to that logical-discursive use of language, and rational treatment of a theme, that characterizes the novels of Trollope, Thackeray, Mrs Gaskell and all other Victorian writers of fiction not of the first order. In this Dickens stands apart with Charlotte and Emily Brontë and George Eliot.

  I have shown in the development of the theme of David’s typical relation to his mother and its effect on his emotional life, in the function of Miss Trotwood, in the delicate intimations of parallels between father and son, and in the whole elaborate structure of meanings expressed through such techniques, that in David Copperfield Dickens has triumphantly arrived at mastery of a new, his own, art of the novel. Of course, as Tolstoy said, Dickens was liable to be (in patches) ‘a sentimental and loquacious writer’, and (as is not the case with Middlemarch or Tolstoy’s novels), areas, (insignificant generally) of many of his novels have to be written off. As David Copperfield is early in his progress, which started in Dombey, from willy-nilly entertainer to a free artist, we must admit that some of its parts exist on different levels of seriousness. Dickens was perfectly sincere when he told Miss Coutts that he wanted to make people more humane about prostitutes and ‘fallen women’ by his presentation of Martha and Emily, but Martha is, like the similar character in Dombey, Good Mrs Brown’s daughter, a figure drastically edited for the purpose from the originals he knew and had helped in real life. Emily is another matter. Just as Tolstoy made the conditions of Anna’s marriage to Karenin so demanding of sympathy that her ‘fall’ seems a matter for compassion, or even more positive support, so Emily is framed as orphan, childishly innocent, very young in fact, over-sheltered and indulged by her family in the boat, and moreover given to understand by Steerforth that he will ‘make her a lady’ and he, so to speak, vouched for as to character by being David’s old friend and hero; and in addition there is her intolerable position of being about to marry her dull cousin Ham, having yielded to pressure to engage herself to him to please her uncle. All these points are piled up to amount to a demand for a verdict of Not Guilty, even from strict Victorian moralists, presumably. In consonance with this, the blame is firmly laid at Mrs Steerforth’s door, David accompanying the outraged father-uncle to Highgate who is to shame the seducer’s mother with his simple working-man’s nobility of soul and expose the false values of the upper classes. The theatrical demonstrations of Rosa Dartle against Emily are to show the cruelty of conventional morality even further, since – a nice touch – Miss Dartle is personally jealous of her as a successful rival, suggesting a class as well as a personal jealousy since the whole Steerforth-Emily episode is treated by Dickens as a class matter.34