Dickens the Novelist

by F. R. Leavis

  That the whole Yarmouth affair is a moralistic exercise is given away finally by the artificial use of dialect. We have only to observe – to feel – the living nature of the dialect that plays its essential part in Adam Bede, Wuthering Heights or The Heart of Midlothian, for instance, to see that Dickens’s use of East Anglian coastal speech is self-conscious, and irritating in its patronizing exhibition of the quaintness of the humble – a matter of vocabulary and grammar only, with none of the vitality of Sam Weller’s, Mr Guppy’s or the Kenwigs’ Cockney or Mrs Gamp’s vernacular that Dickens has successfully made an expression of character. We do not need to know that Dickens in fact got Suffolk dialect up from a book, Suffolk Words and Phrases.35 The series of framed interiors in which Daniel and Ham Peggotty are posed make them as artificial as Victorian academy pictures; this is especially notable in the scene when Ham tells David of his noble feelings towards Emily after her return, David instructing us in the right admiring response. Rebelliously we ask, if Ham was so admirable why couldn’t he insist on marrying Emily on her return home and emigrating with her, instead of only forgiving her like a Christian? – one mistake of a very young girl with Emily’s excuses can’t be supposed to entail ruin for life in the eyes of any right-minded person! Dickens knew this was so, for he helped Miss Coutts in her rescue-work, which equipped fallen women to go to Australia to start afresh and marry there, as Martha indeed is allowed to. But Emily, who has not been a prostitute like Martha, is not allowed to forgive herself for her one false step, but must hang her head in guilt eternally. Mr Peggotty is brought home from the colony in order to assure us, in nauseating detail, that Emily has been polluted once for all:

  ‘She might have married well a mort of times, “but, uncle” she says to me, “that’s gone for ever.” Cheerful along with me; retired when others is by; fond of going any distance fur to teach a child, or fur to tend a sick person, or fur to do some kindness tow’rds a young girl’s wedding (and she’s done a many, but has never seen one); patient; sowt out by all that has any trouble. That’s Em’ly!’

  One would like to be able to believe that Dickens here is satirizing the unco’ guid by holding up in caricature the doom of the fallen woman, and there does seem to me at bottom a trace of such a state of mind. Yet it seems inescapable that he was apparently endorsing the prejudices of his reading-public at this point, for though so humane a man could not at heart endorse such an attitude, and we know that in fact he did not, he is scarcely challenging it effectively. Here writing at two levels at once has muddled the message.

  But the artist – the truthteller, the psychological realist – is visible without any possibility of denial or conjecture in another aspect of the Emily episode – in the morbidity Dickens shows as powering the intense affection Daniel Peggotty has for his niece – another critical comment on what could pass as ‘affection’ and thus as admirable – though that might be acceptable to the Victorian reader as the touching devotion of one who stood in the relation of adopted father to Little Em’ly. But while Mr Peggotty seems at first sight to offer the pattern of disinterested devotion to the winning child he had fostered, what emerges is a horribly possessive love that is expressed characteristically in heat, violence and fantasies, impressing us as maniacal. And Dickens doesn’t attempt to disguise this; on the contrary, it is hammered home. Mr Peggotty had no objection to his niece’s marrying her cousin Ham, whom she doesn’t love as much as her uncle and who, while not being a rival in her affections, will keep her in the family; but her elopement with Steerforth, even though marriage is what she intended, makes him aware of what he cannot face, that she loves Steerforth enough to leave home and uncle for him. Daniel Peggotty is shown driven by uncontrollable passion through Europe on foot to search for Emily, though without any clue as to her whereabouts, determined to find Emily and bring her home, ignoring the very relevant fact that she had preferred to give up that home in order to share Steerforth’s life because she can do without her uncle. The Victorian reader understood that he was acting in the interests of Morality in rescuing Emily from a life of shame, but Dickens’s attention is elsewhere, on putting into Daniel Peggotty’s mouth words of a truly astonishing import:

  ‘I’m a-going to seek my niece through the wureld. I’m a-going to find my poor niece in her shame and bring her back…. I’m a-going to seek her, fur and wide…. I began to think within my own self “What shall I do when I see her?” I never doubted her. On’y let her see my face – on’y let her heer my voice – on’y let my stanning afore her bring to her thoughts the home she had fled away from, and the child she had been – and if she had growed to be a royal lady, she’d have fell down at my feet, I know’d it well! Many a time in my sleep had I heerd her cry out, “Uncle!” and seen her fall like death afore me. Many a time in my sleep had I raised her up and whispered to her “Em’ly, my dear, I am come fur to bring forgiveness, and to take you home!” He was nowt to me now, Em’ly was all. I bought a country dress to put upon her; and I know’d that, once found, she would walk beside me over them stony roads, go wheer I would, and never, never, leave me more.’

  It is this genius, which cannot stop at the moralistic and sentimental but which burrows down below the superficial to find an underlying psychological veracity, that is characteristic of Dickens’s development as a novelist. We may ask, How does Dickens know these truths? The awful conviction, the terrifying possessive passion Daniel Peggotty’s words reveal, could hardly have been expected to pass even with unsophisticated readers as natural feelings creditable to a worthy uncle. Dickens’s interest in morbid states and the strange self-deceptions of human nature, shown here in the compulsive fantasying, can never before have been so nakedly displayed. And Daniel Peggotty’s dream is actually realized – the artist has caught the spirit of the episode in the illustration called, like the chapter, ‘Mr Peggotty’s dream comes true’ – and after this Daniel Peggotty tells David of the aftermath: ‘“All night long we have been together, Em’ly and me. All night long, her arms has been about my neck; and her head has laid heer; and we knows full well, as we can put our trust in one another ever more.”’

  There is no need to say: Perhaps Dickens did not see the purport of all this, for there is not merely the remarkable consistency to point to, but in the same novel he has deliberately embarked on, though not in the end done more than outline, another morbid father-love, in Mr Wickfield’s substitution of his daughter Agnes for the beloved wife who died soon after Agnes’s birth. ‘“My love for my dear child,”’ said Mr Wickfield to David, at the end, ‘“was a diseased love, but my mind was all unhealthy then.”’ The fear that his Agnes would tire of him or leave him drove him to drink and professional ruin: this, like Mr Peggotty’s relation to Emily and Miss Dartle’s to Steerforth and Uriah Heep’s lust to possess Agnes against her will (not only in order to keep her father in his power, for he has trapped the father in order to be able to blackmail Agnes into marrying him) are some of the more sombre undercurrents in the novel that has been described by Mr Edmund Wilson as Dickens’s ‘holiday’. The scene where Uriah Heep, compensating himself for compulsory ’umbleness in his youth, parades his power over Mr Wickfield, who is degraded into his puppet, is more unpleasant than his plots against Agnes, which the reader doesn’t mind as much as David does because Agnes is too good to be true.

  The submerged drama of Steerforth and Rosa Dartle is more interesting and we may well complain that Dickens has not given it more prominence and fuller attention. Its positive phase is already over when we first see them together, when we learn that there had been some kind of love relation between them that had been so stormy that he had flung a hammer at her, ruining her looks for life and her prospects of marriage – the sinister implications are recognizable in spite of the devious symbolism imposed on a Victorian novelist. [We meet a comparable instance in Middlemarch in the superb prolonged and involved metaphor composed to register Dorothea’s moral shock at encountering on her honeymoon the un
imagined spectacle of the concrete history of Rome and its alien civilizations, a projection of her shock at finding out what marriage is, and marriage to a Casaubon.]

  Early on we hear the ambiguous statement Steerforth makes in reply to ‘Daisy’s’ innocent question about his relation to the alarming Miss Dartle:

  ‘And I have no doubt she loves you like a brother?’ said I.

  ‘Humph!’ retorted Steerforth. looking at the fire. ‘Some brothers are not loved over much; and some love –.’

  We must finish the sentence for ourselves, but even the implications of ‘looking at the fire’ move us in the right direction. Rosa’s version to David later is that Steerforth’s interest in her proved to be of a kind she could not tolerate: ‘“I descended into a doll”’ for him, she says, and therefore broke with him without herself ceasing to love him resentfully. The refusal to be his ‘doll’ puts her in opposion to the Clara–Dora–Emily ‘wax doll’ notion of the role of woman in love that the David Copperfields and Steerforths equally look for or impose on women,36 but Dickens didn’t develop this interesting idea. Rosa Dartle is not, except in connection with Emily, melodramatic like Edith Dombey and shows an immense advance on such a characterization. Rosa’s personality and behaviour are exceptionally interesting in a Victorian novel. The total situation between them surfaces in the remarkable scene detailed in chapter XXIX, where we are shown Steerforth with cruel perversity (‘with a curious smile’ is all that David notices) placating and charming her against her will in order to subdue her. He seduces her into playing the harp she had long laid aside and singing him a love-song to its accompaniment:

  She stood beside it for some little while, in a curious way, going through the motion of playing it with her right hand, but not sounding it. At length she sat down and drew it to her with one sudden action, and played and sang.

  I don’t know what it was, in her touch or voice, that made that song the most unearthly I have ever heard in my life, or can imagine. There was something fearful in the reality of it. It was as if it had never been written, or set to music, but sprung out of the passion within her; which found imperfect utterance in the low sounds of her voice, and crouched again when all was still. I was dumb when she leaned beside the harp again, playing it, but not sounding it, with her right hand.

  Steerforth makes a laughing gesture of affection by way of thanking her, ‘And she had struck him, and thrown him off with the fury of a wild cat’.

  Realizing he is only playing with her and that she has again ‘descended into a doll’ for him in spite of her will not to, she strikes him (such a violent action, in a drawing-room, and from a lady, would be excessively shocking to the reader of the day). The painfulness of the scene is enhanced by being conveyed to us through the medium of the blind and stupidly innocent David who thinks that Rosa is ‘jaundiced and perverse’ for struggling – as he notes she does – against Steerforth’s ‘delightful art’ and ‘delightful nature’.

  Now this is not melodrama, nor, though it is distinctly enacted, is it at all theatrical. It is memorable because it has the stamp of comprehended truth, like Rosa’s habit of undermining people by ironical questioning which allows her, a dependant, the relief of expressing her contempt for them indirectly. This and the other passages of arms between Steerforth and Rosa cannot be dismissed or relegated as theatrical and rhetorical: if such scenes, thus written, had appeared in a tale by D. H. Lawrence, who would have failed to recognize them as in the genuine mode and style of Lawrence, and as exhibiting his characteristic insight into the relations between a man and a woman in such a case? It is Dickens who is the pioneer here – himself accompanied in such insights and their uses by Charlotte and Emily Brontë – and it is he who is to be seen in so much of Dombey and Copperfield taking the novel in conception and idiom out of melodrama and the language of stage rhetoric, just as in these two novels he takes the novel constructively out of the two inherited traditions of composing it (the picaresque and the sentimental moralistic), takes it in fact into the realm of psychological truth in depth that was demanded by Charlotte Brontë in a letter to her publisher, where she rejects the novel of Jane Austen, saying:

  The passions are perfectly unknown to her; she rejects even a speaking acquaintance with that stormy sisterhood … What sees keenly, speaks aptly, moves flexibly, it suits her to study; but what throbs fast and full, though hidden, what the blood rushes through, what is the unseen seat of life and the sentient target of death – this Miss Austen ignores. She no more, with her mind’s eye, beholds the heart of her race, than each man, with bodily vision, sees the heart in his heaving breast.

  As this was written in 1850, and David Copperfield was published in parts from 1849–50, she is recognizing a change in the conception of the novelist’s function and the possibilities of the novel that had already taken place and been actualized by Dickens as well as by herself and her sister in writing Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights.

  Steerforth himself though not sufficiently explored is potentially more interesting than any other specimen of his class in Dickens until we get to Eugene in Our Mutual Friend. Steerforth’s momentary regrets for not having David’s clear conscience and his awareness that if David understood him he would lose David’s admiring affection, feelings which are yet not sufficient to prevent him indulging his passing fancy for a little Em’ly, – and his sense of guilt about ruining Rosa Dartle’s looks and her chances of marriage, seem to require the fuller treatment that Tolstoy gives to his similar types, such as Anatole Kuragin and Dolokhov. But Taine’s complaint, that in the seduction of Emily we are shown only the consequences and not the passion, is hardly relevant, since Steerforth’s feelings, such as they are in this respect, are of no interest, while Emily’s can be deduced and to enlarge on them would be to expose her folly and lose our sympathy for her (as George Eliot does for her seduced maiden by showing us the inside of Hetty Sorrel’s feather head). As it is, we get the benefit of sharing David’s shock on learning of the elopement. The scene in chapter XXIX showing Steerforth’s irresistible effect on Miss Dartle, being set immediately preceding the elopement with little Em’ly (and, as we then reflect, the imminent triumph over the one woman being the stimulus and prompting for Steerforth’s ‘curious’ impulse to prove he retains his seductive powers over a previous victim too), this makes any demonstration by Dickens of Steerforth’s similar effect on the altogether inferior Little Em’ly quite unnecessary. Dickens had actually cut out of his proofs a piece he had originally written to show Steerforth beguiling Mrs Gummidge into cheerfulness in spite of herself, but this was inevitably a poor thing and Dickens showed his judgement in excising it.37

  Thus from such strikingly forceful and absolutely original episodes in Copperfield alone as I have been examining here, and those comparable in the case of Dombey (such as Mr Carker’s sinister relations with Edith Dombey, as well as wholly other aspects of the originality there which are given critical exposition in the essay devoted to Dombey above), we can see that to Dickens it was the meanings of his mature novels which were important to him and the reason for his undertakings. The force of the language and the originality of conception and execution of such parts (in characterization, action and technique) prove that they were infinitely more the concern of the creative writer than the parts of these novels emanating from his concern (genuine though it was) for social welfare and ordinary morality. And Copperfield in addition discovers and explores psychological truths which are to bear fruit in Little Dorrit and Great Expectations. We have Agnes as victimized daughter shown mothering her consciously disgraced father who is morally dependent on her, and mutely aware that reproach or criticism would make her services in sustaining him useless – the first sketch for the function of the Little Dorrit who in the masterly scene in Book the First, chapter XIX is shown as not merely the embodiment of Christian virtue but as comprehending instinctively the psychological truth behind its conception, in the silent delicacy and forbearance which she b
rings to bear on the painful situation her father places her in, making it possible, while defending her own integrity, for him to hold up his head and survive in the only role open to him (‘Father of the Marshalsea’). This is what we understand by the term ‘Tolstoyan’, while the episodes of Daniel Peggotty in his relation with his niece, and Steerforth’s with Rosa Dartle, make the transference from the ‘Tolstoyan’ core of Copperfield to the Dostoievskian Bleak House comprehensible, just as the history of Paul and Florence Dombey’s childhood, though embedded in Hogarthian satiric scenes as to the adult world, took us out of the Hogarthian mode into the Tolstoyan conception of the whole novel Copperfield.