Dickens the Novelist

by F. R. Leavis

  What could I do but … tell her how I doted on her, after that!

  ‘I am sure I am very affectionate,’ said Dora; ‘you oughtn’t to be cruel to me, Doady?’

  We now see, by its association in the previous line with ‘doted’, the point of her inventing ‘Doady’ as her pet name for him, which he has innocently explained as ‘a corruption of David’. It is her way of forcing him into sustaining the character of a doting lover towards her. There is a great deal of this kind of suggestive word-play in the novel, less obvious than the self-evident ‘Murdstone’ implying a stony-hearted murderer (‘their gloom and their austerity destroyed her’). But of course it is not only the associations revealed by words, but the similar underground currents that determine our actions, that the novelist traces for us and shows as decisive.48 I have always admired the train of psychological events that bring Steerforth back so fatally into David’s life. After his sheltered youth at Canterbury, Miss Trotwood sends him out to see the world in order ‘to have a reliance upon yourself and act for yourself’, she tells him, little knowing the tragic irony this contains. What more appropriate than that he should, as soon as he gets to London, go to the theatre to see Shakespeare (Julius Caesar) and feel it to be a romantic experience?

  To have all those noble Romans alive before me, and walking in and out for my entertainment, instead of being the stern taskmasters they had been at school, was a most novel and delightful effect. But the mingled reality and mystery of the whole show, the influence upon me of the poetry, the light, the music, the company, the smooth stupendous changes of glittering and brilliant scenery, were so dazzling and opened up such illimitable regions of delight, that when I came out into the rainy street, at twelve o’clock at night, I felt as if I had come from the clouds, where I had been leading a romantic life for ages, to a bawling, splashing, link-lighted, umbrella-struggling, hackney-coach-jostling, pattern-clinking, muddy, miserable world.

  I had emerged by another door, and stood in the street for a little while, as if I really were a stranger upon earth; but the unceremonious pushing and hustling that I received, soon recalled me to myself, and put me in the road back to the hotel; whither I went, revolving the glorious vision all the way … I was so filled with the play, and with the past – for it was in a manner, like a shining transparency, through which I saw my earlier life moving along – that I don’t know when the figure of a handsome, well-formed young man, dressed with a tasteful easy negligence which I have reason to remember very well, became a real presence to me … In going towards the door, I passed the person who had come in, and saw him plainly. He did not know me, but I knew him in a moment.

  At another time I might have wanted the confidence or the decision to speak to him, and might have lost him. But, in the then condition of my mind, where the play was still running high, his former protection of me appeared so deserving of my gratitude, and my old love for him overflowed my breast so freshly and spontaneously, that I went up to him at once, with a fast-beating heart, and said:

  ‘Steerforth! won’t you speak to me?’

  This is as remarkably imagined as it is utterly convincing. To David, Steerforth was a heroic character in his unhappy schooldays, someone larger and nobler than life, seeming to belong with the historical Classical characters in the Shakespeare play by which he has just been so aroused – without the stimulus of which he would have been too timid to claim acquaintance with his former patron. The play is then used for another purpose: David is dashed by Steerforth’s expression of contempt for the performance which has so enchanted David, for by now Steerforth is at Oxford with the appropriate arrogant sophistication. In accordance with this he nicknames David ‘Daisy’, and uses him.

  Dickens, I suggest, had a far better idea of how speech occurs and of the laws of association which direct thought than either George Eliot or Tolstoy, whose novels for the most part, though they are masterly in their understanding of behaviour, show over-rationalization in representing speech (though they never, admittedly, suffer from the attraction of the melodrama of the popular English stage which Dickens so often yields to before Bleak House, and which is seen forcing his conception of Martha into its mode of rhetorical utterance). Dickens is therefore particularly good at rendering the speech-habits of the illiterate and of the half-educated, and this is not a matter of masquerading himself and thus producing fat acting roles, as is alleged by one modern school of Dickens criticism; Dickens shows a sensitive and intelligent insight into the mysterious nature of speech as one expression of the unique idiom of each of us.

  It is not then Dickens who is sometimes Tolstoyan but Tolstoy who is in origin Dickensian. As we have seen, brilliantly and feelingly as Tolstoy can present the facts of Andrew Bolkonski married to a Lisa, it remains a mere episode, however moving, whereas to Dickens his view of such a marriage is that it must be considered in a wider context altogether and with the assumption that it can be explained, accounted for, and therefore understood. The assumption made by so many recent critics that Dickens is concerned to excuse David, or that we can accuse David, or even thereby accuse Dickens, is to miss the achievement of the novel completely; it goes along with the fallacy of identifying Dickens with David, Dora with either his wife or his first sweetheart or both, of denying Dickens impersonality and wisdom as a novelist in this case. George Eliot made Mr Casaubon in quite a Copperfield way feel bewilderment and indignation at finding himself unhappy when married, for in choosing a beautiful young lady for a wife he had only done what his society sanctioned or even enjoined on a man, he knew. David might have argued the same, for this is Dickens’s point. David could not help being a child of his age, of his age’s best intentions indeed; and even more Nature’s victim of the archetypal situation in being his mother’s son. Steerforth is provided to show another fatherless son formed by a loving mother who differs from David in not being innocent and sensitive nor having had, what saved David, the discipline of having had to make his own way in the world – a part of the Victorian theory of life that Dickens thoroughly assented to, and which did not come within Tolstoy’s knowledge.

  I hope I have at any rate made out a case for Tolstoy’s high opinion of David Copperfield and thereby of Dickens, and in doing so shown that the relation between them is not that of pigmy to giant or precursor to supercessor or entertainer to artist, but that they are two similar geniuses of the art of the novel of whom the earlier has the additional prestige of being the great original. And I have also, I hope, shown that there were grounds for Dickens’s feeling of injury that Forster indicates at the end of his Life by writing that Dickens ‘believed himself to be entitled to a higher tribute than he was always in the habit of receiving’. One thinks immediately of Henry James’s parable of ‘The Figure in the Carpet’.

  APPENDIX A

  Dora ‘from a woman’s point of view’

  Dickens has been scolded by critics for ‘not seeing David’s first marriage from the woman’s (Dora’s) point of view’, but, instead, solving David’s problem by the easy expedient of removing her by death and, even worse, exonerating David from guilt for it by representing her as willing to die in order not to be a burden. ‘It is better as it is’, she says, which is indeed more realistic and less selfish than anything that could have been expected from Dora – which are not however the grounds on which Dickens is blamed for her death-bed admissions. Tolstoy, who also frees the husband by the death of the wife, does seem to have a moral advantage in showing his Prince Andrew harrowed by a sense of guilt towards Lisa, but this is surely because Andrew had been as a husband singularly lacking in forbearance, imagination and tenderness, of which David cannot be accused. In view of all this it is interesting that we have the woman’s point of view on the same situation and that it rather surprisingly turns out to be essentially identical with Dickens’s, though the possibility of nowadays ending an unsuitable marriage by divorce has made it unnecessary for the wife to die in the flesh; yet she too volunteers to die i
n effect, to free her husband. In The Tortoise and the Hare (1954) an able woman novelist, Miss Elizabeth Jenkins, shows a romantic, incompetent and self-centred young wife, an acknowledged beauty and charmer, who is thoroughly in love with her much older husband and who has moreover a schoolboy son. She is oriented towards the arts, poetry and sentiment instead of turning outwards to play a part in the social life her barrister-husband now needs, for his earlier sympathy with his wife’s tastes, values and temperament (attractions for which he had originally fallen in love with her) has been replaced by desire for worldly success, money and what it will buy, and the gratifications of social life. A neighbour, neither young nor beautiful, who can provide these things, supersedes the increasingly unsatisfactory wife, Imogen, who gradually comes to realize this and that her inadequacies are irritating to her husband, that she is no longer a solace for and relief to his professional grind, that she can no longer charm him. She has always been out of sympathy with their boy, who prefers the other woman as a mother.

  Recognizing all this, though still loving her husband, she feels obliged to yield her place to the neighbour, the Tortoise of the title, who corresponds to Agnes in being the woman the husband now realizes is the wife he needs and loves. Imogen doesn’t die but she suffers extinction as far as husband, home and child are concerned, and that voluntarily. This is in spite of the novelist’s sympathy with the heroine and refusal to endorse the domineering but adored husband. Imogen is last seen in a London flat (she is a country-lover) pining away on her own, though, unlike Dora, able to conceive turning herself into a useful woman: the novel ends with Imogen wiping away her tears as ‘She looked about the uncared-for room. ‘“I must improve,” she said half aloud. “There is a very great deal to be done.”’

  Another woman’s point of view of a similar marriage is George Eliot’s of Lydgate’s. Rosamund Vincy is not loving, even in the sense that Dora may be said to be, but is like her in being extravagant, vain, unreasonable and a selfish egoist – all this being shown us through the unsympathetic woman novelist’s eyes. Though George Eliot makes Rosamund kill her husband, instead of freeing him by dying herself – which is shown as being the least likely step she would ever take – this is because the woman novelist feels that Lydgate should be punished for his mistake in accepting a drawing-room ornament as a wife. Dorothea, the Agnes of Middlemarch, makes a parallel mistake to Lydgate’s in her first choice of a partner but George Eliot finds her pardonable and arranges for her to be set free by death and find happiness in another mate.

  Yet another woman’s attitude to the David–Dora situation is to be found in Jane Eyre, and that really is surprising. St John Rivers, who has decided to go to India as a missionary, also loves a Rosamond, a gay, frivolous, ‘child-like’ beauty who lets him see she is anxious to marry him, and is moreover an heiress. But the poor clergyman is an intellectual, a scholar and has a religious vocation; on all these grounds he sees that the undoubted sensuous and worldly happiness he would gain by letting his taste for a Rosamond conquer him would be followed by self-disgust and repentance. He refrains, and goes off to convert the heathen. But Charlotte Brontë makes Jane Eyre thoroughly scold her cousin for his perversity in rejecting a normal happy marriage. It has always seemed to me probable that George Eliot, who was greatly impressed by Jane Eyre (and Villette), arrived at the Lydgate-Rosamund marriage out of interest in what would have happened if a man with a vocation for a profession did thoughtlessly take the course rejected by the clear-sighted St John Rivers.

  APPENDIX B

  Oliver Twist, Jane Eyre and David Copperfield

  Though the underlying myth, the orphan’s tale, in David Copperfield is, as I have said, comparable with that of Oliver Twist‚ there is one great difference which must strike everyone. Oliver is almost entirely an object used for satiric diatribe against the Poor Laws (old and new) and the society that produced them, against a society that tolerated the underworld of Fagin and Bill Sikes and did nothing to protect children against being exploited by them as thieves and prostitutes, against a society which let justice be administered by a Mr Fang, and which ascribed to an illegitimate child inherited guilt; Oliver hardly exists as more than an innocent anonymous consciousness to register suffering and bewilderment engendered by these conditions. But David is recognizably a ‘real’ child and boy, with specific sufferings, in a realistic and not merely symbolic ambience; we have the impression of being taken into his confidence, that we understand his unique and not merely predictable feelings. It is true that Dickens produced little Paul Dombey in between Oliver and David, not to mention Little Nell and Smike, but Paul, like the rest of these until David, is also an object to look at from outside except for our less wholly external view of his desolation at being parted from Florence and entered into Dr Blimber’s forcing-house. It seems more to the point that Jane Eyre had intervened. Whatever it turns out that Dickens may or may not have said in his surviving letters about Currer Bell’s first novel, which rivalled Vanity Fair in the reception it received from both reviewers and reading-public, he, like everyone else in the literary world, must have read it with the kind of respect we know was accorded it by novelists as different as George Eliot, Thackeray and Lockhart. Dickens no doubt unconsciously noted its relevance to his own use of the child as recording consciousness and critic of adult attitudes.

  I have elsewhere49 shown that the outlines of the orphan’s myth as created by Dickens in Oliver Twist are repeated in Jane Eyre, and that, while we have no other evidence for Charlotte Brontë’s having read Dickens’s first serious novel, it seems very probable that it would have got to Keighley, where the Brontë sisters used the lending library, in the nine years between the appearance of Oliver and the conception of Jane. But Charlotte Brontë invested that myth with a very different detail and ethos, and it is this detail which we find distinguishing the myth of David Copperfield from the form it had taken originally in Oliver Twist. Jane represents an immense advance on Oliver, Little Nell, Smike, or even Paul and Florence Dombey, being neither a typical nor idealized nor sentimentalized child and never used as a stalking-horse. She develops by the laws of her own being and in accordance with the pressures brought to bear on her, as David Copperfield does later (the first of Dickens’s children so to do); she has a child’s literal-mindedness, a child’s logic, a child’s pathetic cunning in self-protection and a child’s intuitions about the adults who arbitrate her fate; she is always passionate, violent and fierce if oppressed intolerably, and above all resentful of injustice and craving to be loved; she has a child’s terrors, as when, alone in the night after recovering from the ‘fit’ in the Red Room, she reports ‘ear, eye and mind were alike strained by dread: such dread as children only can feel’. We recognize most of these characteristics in the child David, and later in the child Pip too, though in none of Dickens’s earlier children. Jane’s virtual step-mother Mrs Reed, with ‘her stony eye, opaque to tenderness’, whose cruelty and injustice torture Jane, is clearly related to David’s step-father and Miss Murdstone. When Jane goes to Mr Brocklehurst’s boarding-school she finds she is saddled with the character of being a vicious child thanks to Mrs Reed, as David arriving at Mr Creakle’s finds Mr Murdstone has arranged for him to be. There David’s innocent and excellent friend Traddles is habitually discriminated against and punished unfairly by Mr Creakle, as Jane’s admirable school-friend Helen Burns had been by the sadistic teacher Miss Scatcherd. Under intolerable pressure later in life Jane runs away, losing her luggage and money at the outset, to wander penniless, starving and having to sleep on the ground in all weathers, rebuffed agonizingly by all she meets whose assistance she asks, until she collapses at the threshold of relatives who take her in out of charity and wash, tend and feed her, whereupon she is reborn as it were under a new name (Jane Elliott) and starts a new existence in family life. The same events in every detail take place in David’s life, who similarly becomes Trotwood Copperfield. It seems hard to reject the conclusion that Dav
id Copperfield inherits from Jane Eyre in these respects.

  It might be mentioned here that Jane Eyre, like her creator, had the customary class feelings of her age, which Dickens has in ours been accused of snobbery for showing to exist in David Copperfield (e.g. for making David habitually called ‘Master David’ by Barkis the carrier and the fisherfolk of Yarmouth, and ‘Master Copperfield’ by Uriah Heep). No one accuses Charlotte Brontë of snobbery or social insecurity, so I will merely remark that Jane always reports herself as being called ‘Miss Jane’ by Bessie the nurse, by Abbott the lady’s-maid and by the apothecary, while she is still in the nursery (and a resented poor relation there at that), and that when she leaves Lowood School to go into a situation, as it was called, Bessie is called in (now a matron) solely to testify for us that ‘Miss Jane’ is ‘quite a lady’. This is the ethos in which David Copperfield was reared in rural Suffolk, and those critics who complain of Dickens for registering it correctly are simply showing their ignorance of the facts of social life in the England of the 19th century (and some of the twentieth), before the attitudes engendered by the democratic theory of equality had made an appearance. In her autobiography Lark Rise to Candleford (1943) Flora Thompson, writing of her childhood in an Oxfordshire village from the cottager’s angle, records as phenomenal the coming of a new type of Vicar when she grew up, who made it known that his children were to be called by their plain Christian names ‘at a time when other quality children were “Master” or “Miss” in their cradles’. The term ‘quality’ implies that deference to class distinctions was not servility but something subtler and not inherently undesirable. Those of us well read in writers of reminiscences of pre-1914 days will have noticed how frequently these illustrate this consciously or unconsciously– that manners and right attitudes for the ‘quality’ were instilled into them as children by the family servants and people on the estates, and a code of behaviour to be lived up to made plain; privilege implied responsibility. Cockshut ridiculing Dickens for class consciousness says that everyone in the novel’ is a little too conscious that David is a gentleman and confers honour by paying a visit’, but the same holds true of all comparable Victorian novels. George Eliot, a safe guide, amusingly illustrates these traditional attitudes in showing that Mrs Poyser, combatative by nature and equal when goaded to telling off her own landlord the Squire, was yet respectful to the gentry in general and felt honoured by their notice and visits. Class distinction in the form of deference to ladies and gentlemen and their children was on the whole a tribute to birth, education and breeding (not recognized by mere income, smart clothes or pretensions unsupported by manners, which villagers were quite prepared to criticize). Comparable with this is the deference shown to craftsmen by villagers in the days when every village had resident craftsmen: traditionally accorded the honourable title of ‘Master’ in recognition of their superior abilities, no servility being involved. Mrs Gaskell in her novel North and South (exactly contemporary with Hard Times) takes great care to show that her heroine, Margaret Hale a parson’s daughter from Hampshire, was accustomed to having her visits to the cottagers received with pleasure, and gets a shock on moving to Manchester to find a new, Industrial Age, proletariat, without manners and aggressively egalitarian, hostile equally to mill-owners and to educated professional people, who having no standards except ‘brass’ despise the Hales for being poor and therefore having no right to gentility. Whether this implies real progress or only Progress depends on one’s definition of civilization.