Dickens the Novelist

by F. R. Leavis

  This makes my point, that cannot too strongly be insisted on, that Dickens was writing about real life in the sense that ‘real’ means essential experience, what Charlotte Brontë called ‘the unseen seat of life and the sentient target of death’, ‘what the blood rushes through’. Dickens above all in Copperfield gives proof of his understanding that Love as a reality, not a Victorian convention, did inevitably exist; and that it could not be ignored, suppressed or channelled into the decorous forms the age conventionally considered acceptable, without peril to the psyche, thus fulfilling the challenge, not in Charlotte Brontë’s opinion met by Jane Austen or Fielding, to understand ‘the heart of her race’.

  Miss Mowcher is disappointing. The specimen of her in action (chapter XXII) is superb in its suggestions and undertones of a depravity shared with Steerforth from which David the Daisy is excluded, in which his being an amusement to both meanwhile, and still more an additional source of secret amusement to Steerforth since he is using David to mislead Miss Mowcher about which of them is after Emily, plays its part. But Dickens had made too free with the recognizable characteristics of a real woman in endowing Miss Mowcher with a suitable physical deformity; to avoid threatened trouble from the indignant original he had to turn Mowcher suddenly into a ‘good’ character, thus depriving her of further usefulness in any serious sense. A less forgivable thing, is to have kept the reader on edge throughout most of the novel by intimations that Annie is going to elope with, or will be found to have been seduced by, her cousin Jack Maldon, merely as a means of retaining the readership, the Strong marriage being evidently so unsuitable that an expectation of Annie’s ‘fall’ is plausible. It was evidently very difficult for Dickens, with so disparate a reading-public, to manage to hold it – or believe he could – without some such interest (hence his care to know the sales of each number – and David Copperfield’s were disappointing compared with Dombey’s at first). Tolstoy could write for an audience of peers, that is, for himself. But Dickens was already in David Copperfield discovering tactics for saying what he meant or felt indirectly or beneath a surface less likely to arouse hostility in a readership of Meagleses, Podsnaps, Chillips and Agneses.38 A successful piece of such delicacy is represented by the scenes in chapter XVI, reported by the schoolboy David who, as was inevitable, could not interpret them. The appearance is that Annie is distraught and faints either merely at the departure of her cousin (loss of her old playmate) or because she is in love with him; the deduction, made not by David but the reader, that Maldon may have already become her lover, is supported by the loss David reports of one of the cherry-coloured ribbons from her white gown (the symbolism is stressed) which her mother officiously makes public, and which the artist has confirmed by showing her afterwards at the Doctor’s feet with a face full of remorse and shame and her dress, only described by David as ‘disordered from the loss of the bow’, open, showing her breasts. The reality, which we can deduce when the éclaircissement comes, is that Jack Maldon had snatched the bow when making his dishonourable intentions clear to his cousin, obviously in a physical assault, that though resisted by her filled her with horror and humiliation. What could only have been melodramatic if enacted straight, and would then have struck a note of violence out of keeping with the tone of the novel, is successfully left to the reader’s imagination, and leaves him with no way of coming to any certainty of interpretation for a good while. The credit side of this drama is that subsequently the painful nature of Annie’s awareness of her false position, an innocence agonizingly unable to defend itself (against her mother’s use of her, her cousin’s ill intention and the insulting conclusions of Mr Wickfield) adds very notably to the points made elsewhere in the novel about the vulnerability of Victorian youth.

  Though it is easily seen that Mr Micawber has really no place in the plot or in the action (he is perfunctorily worked in first as David’s landlord and then Traddles’s, and sent to Canterbury to be employed most improbably by Heep, still more improbably made the agent of Heep’s downfall), the fact that everyone remembers him as a leading feature of the novel is proof of his importance in it: we all feel that somehow he is a major contributor to the meaning of the book. Whenever he is present, even in prison or miserably in debt in mean lodgings, there is life, joy, and a defiance of the rules of Victorian good citizenship. When, as in the little party in David’s rooms at Mrs Crupp’s, he is for once deflated, it is not by his real troubles but by the ethos surrounding the ‘respectable’ Littimer who makes everyone uncomfortable by his high standards of behaviour and ultimately turns out, ironically, to be a villainous hypocrite, thus making plain the kind of meaning Dickens had in mind. We know that once David’s boyhood got mixed up temporarily with Dickens’s, through the warehouse phase of it, Mr Micawber had to be there, for Micawber is Dickens’s tribute to the life-style of his father: no doubt Dickens was aware that he had inherited some of the Micawber qualities himself and was grateful for it. [Another set of John Dickens’s characteristics contributed a good deal later to William Dorrit, and Dickens took another – a disenchanted – look at even some of the Micawber features in his next novel, in Mr Skimpole.] But Dickens created Micawber to register the reasons for his affection for his father rather than his grievances, which time had softened in his memory as Dickens, as he wrote, grew to value increasingly his father’s disposition and to appreciate, as a comic artist himself, John Dickens’s high-handed treatment of reality.39 It is therefore irrelevant to complain, as an undergraduate pupil of mine did, that Dickens ought to have shown realistically the misery of a family with such an improvident father and husband, as Dostoievsky does with the Marmaladov household. Dickens was not writing Crime and Punishment or a tract or even a naturalistic novel. The significance of Micawber is his Micawberism – he represents an essential truth of experience and one that a creative artist in such a society as mid-19th century England needed to point to and maintain. Had Dickens made Micawber a writer or artist he would not only have been completely plausible but even recognizable as an archetype: Joyce, for instance, had the swagger, the shameless assurance in drawing on the resources of others, and the eternal impecuniosity, as well as the gift for language,40 and Oliver Goldsmith was another of the Micawber tribe. Contempt for the morrow, faith in the future and enjoyment of the present are essential attributes of the creative mind.

  By an association we can easily make out, Mr Micawber bears witness to a pre-Victorian enjoyment of living that Dickens indignantly saw being destroyed by the Murdstones and Littimers. (No one hates Micawber, not even his creditors,41 as in fact no one seems to have objected to being bled by James Joyce, and everyone but Boswell loved Goldsmith.) Most of the responsible Victorian novelists (not just the irresponsible like Wilkie Collins), who had of course been formed before the Victorian ethos was established, testify in their novels to their sense of what had been lost in human enjoyment by the advent of ‘respectability’, Evangelical domination, a stifling conventionality, and tastes imposed by a purse-proud and Philistine middle-class; but none does it so tellingly as Dickens.42 Micawber is so successful that I can’t help believing that he is ultimately responsible for the presence in Anna Karenina of Anna’s brother Steve, a more reprehensible Micawber to whom everything is forgiven, even by the serious and high-minded Levin, because he increased everyone’s enjoyment of life and was lovable. Would Steve have borne such improbable witness to the triumph of the debonaire in the face of morality if Tolstoy had not absorbed David Copperfield into his being? Tolstoy had comprehended and assented to Dickens’s meaning, so that while we always await the Nemesis we expect Steve to receive at the moral novelist’s hand, it never occurs: though Steve doesn’t, like the Micawber family, actually figure in a pantomime transformation scene at the end, he is last seen successful in winning over the new head of his office by a gift, like Mr Micawber’s, for making something like punch, and still floating buoyantly over his financial and family difficulties. It is interesting that the gloomy,
conscience-ridden Levin thirsts for his society and sides with him in sympathy against poor Dolly, Steve’s virtuous and victimized wife, like Mrs Micawber too in being the mother of too many children and always in debt. Just as Tolstoy appreciated a Steve, Dickens registered enjoyment from an Artful Dodger, who though led off to prison at the end of Oliver Twist is quite unsubdued, still impudently talking down the magistrate as he swaggers out of the court.

  Undeniably, though David Copperfield’s true end, at David’s vision in chapter LXII of the miracle his life had been, is perfect and logical, there is a twofold transformation scene tacked on, two scenes that are not, like the glimpses of the Traddles’ married life, necessary to the scheme of the novel. But together they serve splendidly the purpose of the closing satiric comedy of classical tradition. The bad are shown imprisoned in a hell of solitary confinement under Mr Creakle’s supervision – ironically, while as a headmaster he was a sadistic bully to little boys, as a magistrate and theorist on the punishment of criminals he is a bullying idealist. This is truly comic and yet not so improbable a combination as some critics seem to think. The good, who have been unsuccessful is this unjust world, are reported to have been transported to a comic paradise of success and happiness in the Antipodes. I don’t think this Classical ending is an argument for not taking seriously the serious parts of this novel or for relegating it as a whole to the category of fairy-tale, as is increasingly the tendency in Dickens criticism. ‘Everyone has noticed, I suppose, how close David Copperfield is to the traditional fairy story. Much of it is a daydream, where pieces of gigantic good or evil fortune happen without cause or consequence, where each incident seems detached from every other’, etc. (The Imagination of Charles Dickens, A. O. J. Cockshut, 1961); ‘In David Copperfield, Aunt Betsey Trotwood is clearly the good fairy godmother, and Uriah Heep the wicked genie’ (Edgar Johnson in Dickens Criticism: A Symposium, 1962) etc. By relegating some of the characters to fairy-tale types and failing to see that the novel has a theme, by alleging that the incidents in David Copperfield are ‘detached’ and are ‘without cause or consequence’, Cockshut – a biassed as well as a singularly impercipient reader – tries to deprive this novel of any claim to be taken seriously. [He also says that the book’s worst aspect is that it is a ‘fake autobiography’; if we could wipe out our perhaps unfortunate knowledge of Dickens’s life there would be fewer stumbling-blocks for critics.]

  That David Copperfield can be, in any respect, described in outline as what is vulgarly called a fairy-tale is surely due to the fact that the story of Dickens’s life by 1850 did actually correspond to the idea of a fairy-tale rather than to an everyday success-story where rags to riches is achieved by climbing the industrial or commercial ladder; David’s life in this respect paralleled Dickens’s. So did Hans Andersen’s, and it is highly suggestive that these two men so greatly admired each other’s work, as also that Hans Andersen invented an art form of the fairy-tale to express his poignantly tragic and satiric insights.43 Both had gone from childhood misery to comfort and fame, as the Ugly Duckling who became a swan, solely through the fairy-tale gift of genius, and both had shameful memories in connexion with family and childhood.44 Dickens’s account of how he was saved, unlike and yet like Oliver Twist, from falling into the abyss of crime that seemed inevitably the fate of an unprotected child in London, is stamped with his wonder and thankfulness knowing as he did that it was not his own efforts but Providence alone that saved him. No wonder he believed that for all its dangers innocence had a considerable survival value. He wrote: ‘I know that, but for the mercy of God, I might have been, for any care that was taken of me, a little robber or a little vagabond … I prayed when I went to bed to be lifted out of the humiliation and neglect in which I was … I do not write resentfully or angrily: for I know how all these things have worked together to make me what I am … The deep remembrance of the sense I had of being utterly neglected and hopeless … cannot be written. My whole nature was so penetrated with the grief and humiliation of such considerations, that even now, famous and caressed and happy, I often forget in my dreams that I have a dear wife and children; even that I am a man; and wander desolately back to that time of my life’ [Forster, Bk. I, §5 II]. This deeply-felt sense of the miracle that his life represented to him is the source of the passage that, I have suggested, really and very appropriately ends the novel, when having won Agnes David looks back in mind over ‘Long miles of road’, ‘and toiling on, I saw a ragged way-worn boy forsaken and neglected …’ – a passage not by any means sentimental but a sincere expression of the wonder Dickens felt at his own position, though he was strictly a self-made man, made by hard work, by ‘toiling on’. We might also reflect that ‘fairy-tales’ of this type are really folk-tales, embodying the folk’s experience of the truths of existence in allegoric forms. Dickens is not alone in his age with Hans Andersen. The folk-tale and fairy-story were very generally brought into the use of the novelist’s art, owing to the new life felt to rest in these forms once attention had been called to them as something else than diversions for children, by the translation early in the 19th century first of the collections of the Brothers Grimm and later of Hans Andersen’s tales. In Silas Marner, Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre,45 as much as, or more than, in the moralistic use of the fairy-tale for children that Victorian writers tried their hands at (such as The Water Babies), elements of the fairy-tale were used for wholly serious purposes. They showed a basic indebtedness to the fairy-tale, but this does not entail escapism, only a recognition of a new vehicle for the novelist of 19th-century society. One of Hans Andersen’s best tales, ‘The Shadow’, works entirely by using traditional motifs of folk-and fairy-tale but is nonetheless a deeply serious and valid criticism of contemporary life, with a tragic end; the truths it enforces are a matter of experience.

  What stylization of life – the typicality of Dickens’s experience in his age – Dickens makes in David Copperfield as a whole is not the fairy-tale but the myth. In the beginning of Dickens’s art, in Oliver Twist – whose hero is in many respects the prototype of David but is left at the point where David is being reared by his great-aunt – we have the essentials of a myth existing semi-consciously in Dickens’s mind, where was secreted, as we have seen, the truths he had learnt of experience in his own boyhood about the human family and society. The bastard orphan Oliver is cruelly used by circumstances in being born fatherless and unprotected by the adults in his world who should stand in a parental relation to him, and by society which has relegated him, rightfully a gentleman by birth and entitled to a fortune by his father’s will, to pauperhood and set him to degrading work in low company. Thrown on his own in London, he is set to work at underworld activities he cannot understand, and is in the greatest danger of being turned into a criminal and so lost forever to the upper world; but providentially he finds himself cast up on the threshold of relations who give him a fresh start under a new name, putting him in possession of respectability, education and love, the gifts he desires most. Yet two symbols of the horrors that had nearly engulfed him lurk outside his window and on the threshold of his consciousness – his elder brother, a heartless reprobate, and Fagin, an inexplicable monster of social and moral evil, who are working against him together. But now sustained by new hopes and moral courage, he is able to brace himself against them and so maintain his moral freedom and social respectability. The wholly impossible interview between Oliver and Fagin in the death-cell is to prove Oliver’s moral emancipation and show that his goodness of heart (e.g. in his being able to forgive Fagin and be sorry for him) has survived his ordeals.46 There is nothing of the fairy-tale in Oliver Twist and no one accuses Dickens of escapism in framing it. Perhaps the episode that most convincingly symbolizes the anguish of the child’s helplessness and horror is Oliver’s experience when he finds that, though he has been rescued, as he thinks, by kind middle-class Mr Brownlow, this cannot protect him: he is trapped by Nancy the prostitute, who passes herself off as his
sister on the crowd of good citizens Oliver appeals to to save him, and forces him back with the aid of Bill Sikes (feminine guile plus brute force and savagery) into Fagin’s underground establishment for turning children into social and moral outcasts.

  David’s history is more realistic, less nakedly symbolic that is, than Oliver’s; for instance, he is not passive and left by coincidence on the doorstep of his only though unknown relatives, but takes the initiative of running away from his dangers and making his own way to his great-aunt though penniless. Oliver’s experience of the unfeeling hostility and treachery in ordinary people and of evil lurking to drag him down are repeated in the adventures David has on the road: the young man to whom he has confided his trunk steals it and robs him of his money, then threatens him to his terror with the police so that, paradoxically, David has to run away from justice instead of getting redress from it. He then has to pawn his waistcoat as he is penniless, but the pawnbroker cheats him, and this is repeated in a nightmare variation with another pawnbroker, who is a drunken madman in addition. He registers the ‘vicious looks’ of the tramps, who stone him when he runs away from them, and he is attacked and robbed by a tinker who is on the way to murdering his woman companion (another Bill Sikes and Nancy) and who asserts the underworld’s anti-morality: