Dickens the Novelist

by F. R. Leavis

  34. So is the comparable seduction of Hetty Sorrel by ‘the young squire’ in Adam Bede, but this does not prevent George Eliot from making it the centre of a really interesting moral inquiry (and providing a convincing Nemesis for the seducer) by centring the novel on the seducer’s conscience. Of course the seduction of a respectable lower-class girl by an upper-class symbol was a hallowed subject of the 19th-century theatre of the poor – the melodrama – long before David Copper field. A stock feature of this subject on the stage was the stand-up fight in which the girl’s dastardly seducer or would-be seducer was knocked out by the brother/father/suitor of her own class/husband. It is interesting to note a point in Dickens’s favour here as against George Eliot that while she compulsively reproduces in Adam Bede this embarrassing piece of drama, Dickens’s better judgment carefully arranged to avoid it in David Copperfield by sending Steerforth abroad out of Ham’s and Ham’s uncle’s way and not bringing him back alive.

  35. V. Times Lit. Sup., 30 April 1949 – K. J. Fielding.

  36. David and Steerforth, representing the innocently good and the selfishly vicious forms of young manhood of the age, combine to cover the possibilities here, and are in this respect identical, hence the importance of Rosa Dartle’s testimony, that she ‘descended into a doll’ for him – and hence we see why Dickens did not take the trouble to fill in Rosa and Steerforth’s joint past: all Dickens needed was to establish this fact from it.

  37. The assumption made by John Butt that Dickens cut it out only because he had over-written the Number, going with the claim that the passage was a success and its sacrifice a pity, ignores the fact that Dickens could have restored it when republishing in book form. Dickens might be given credit for good taste here, as in excising the reference to the song Rosa Dartle sings in chapter XXIX which was originally given as ‘The Last Rose of Summer’, where, as Butt admits, he had not over-written (v. John Butt, ‘David Copperfield: From Manuscripts to Print’, R.E.S., 1950).

  38. The novel shows David somewhat embarrassed at finding Mr Chillip and Mr Omer are admirers of his books – he seems uncomfortable at having to face the fact that his readership is made up of such as these, that is.

  39. Dickens went on noting his father’s Micawberisms in his letters until John Dickens’s death, having started to do so long before Micawber was conceived, Forster tells us.

  40. Not merely what Forster characterizes as his ‘rhetorical exuberance’. There is real wit in John Dickens’s snub to a Nonconformist asserting the superiority of Dissenters: ‘The Supreme Being must be an entirely different individual from what I have every reason to believe Him to be, if He would care in the least for the society of your relations.’

  41. Dickens himself, though always paying his way, and sharp with publishers for his rights, was extremely open-handed with the money he earned by incredibly hard toil, and paid out largely to settle the debts of his relatives and even in-laws. Georgina Hogarth wrote that ‘he had greatly suffered from almost every member of his own family. And most especially from his father … not only debts and difficulties, but most discreditable and dishonest dealing on the part of the father towards the son.’ Dickens could justly claim that no one cared less for money as money than he did.

  42. George Eliot in Middlemarch makes Dickens’s point in remarking that the Vincy household, with its whist-table, musical daughter and unrefined mother keeping open house, was an attraction because ‘The Vincys had the readiness to enjoy, the rejection of all anxiety, and the belief in life as a merry lot, which made a house exceptional in most county towns at that time, when Evangelicalism had cast a certain suspicion as of plague-infection over the few amusements which survived in the provinces.’ Correspondingly, Trollope’s soft spot for scamps, even gamblers (or especially gamblers) is to be explained by his resentment of the dull propriety, restraint and hypocrisy which he saw had closed in in his lifetime. Men like Burgo Fitzgerald and Mountjoy Scarborough – dashing, generous, loved by women, running through fortunes and living shamelessly on other people – are preferable, he feels, to the drearily virtuous Mr Pallisers and Barchester Close (Mr Palliser, with a lively young bride, regularly sits up over blue-books till the small hours so that neglect and boredom nearly drive his wife to elope with her old flame and cousin – another angle on such a marriage as Annie Strong’s). Similarly, Lady Dedlock is shown languishing in boredom, cherishing her secret past with her ne’er-do-well lover Captain Hawden in imagination. Hence Trollope’s mischievous delight in bringing back the Italianized Stanhope family to set Barchester and the County by the ears. In the same decade as David Copperfield, in The Warden (1855) he had taken the reader on a visit to Plumstead Rectory (chapter VIII) in order to ask why well-off people should deliberately make themselves now such a dismal environment: ‘considering the money that had been spent there, the eye and taste might have been better served; there was an air of heaviness about the rooms … it was not without ample consideration that those thick, dark, costly carpets were put down; those embossed but sombre papers hung up; those heavy curtains draped so as to half exclude the light of the sun … The apparent object had been to spend money without obtaining brilliancy or splendour … The silver forks were so heavy as to be disagreeable to the hand’, etc. Then follows a catalogue of the food and drink on the lavishly-supplied breakfast-table, overflowing oppressively on to the sideboard, ending: ‘And yet I have never found the rectory a pleasant house. The fact that men shall not live by bread alone seemed to be somewhat forgotten.’ That man cannot live by bread alone is the message equally of Mrs Gaskell, Dickens, Kingsley, Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot and Trollope, as much as of Ruskin, Carlyle and Matthew Arnold, and that message is communicated more persuasively and incontestably by the novelists, it seems to me.

  43. Andersen’s Tales cover a very wide range of forms, in which the fairy-tale counts for less than the satire, the fable, the folk-tale, and the record of childhood experience through a child’s consciousness – it was this last that made Andersen’s work of most interest to Dickens, I conjecture from his rapture at, and confessed constant re-reading of, Andersen’s tale ‘The Old House’ which is wholly concerned with recapturing a child’s way of seeing and feeling his encounter with old age, and is very much in the style of the early chapters of Copperfield. Dickens’s own interest in what could be done by seeing life and society reflected in the eyes of childhood never ceased, and as late as 1868 he wrote Holiday Romance in four parts (two girls and two small boys serve as the authors) containing the delightful tales of ‘The Magic Fish-bone’ and of ‘Mrs Orange and Mrs Lemon’ which, like Andersen’s, have a serious aspect too.

  44. The details of Dickens’s actual contacts with Hans Andersen and his disillusion with him personally on sustaining an excessively long visit from Andersen in 1857, have been told by the authority on the subject, E. Bredsdorf in his ‘Hans Christian Andersen and Charles Dickens’. Dickens’s courtesy was such that Andersen never realized that he had been a bore and a burden to the Dickens family. Andersen was delighted with them all and noted – and this is really interesting – that Mrs Dickens seemed to him the original of Agnes (‘exactly like Agnes’) in David Copperfield, though the Dickens ménage was on the verge of breakdown at the time, unknown to him.

  45. v. my introductions and Notes to the Penguin English Library editions of Jane Eyre and Silas Marner and my essay on Wuthering Heights in Lectures in America (Chatto & Windus).

  46. David Copperfield is more realistic in fact, for David never forgives the Murdstones, or Creakle, or Uriah Heep or Littimer; his goodness of heart is shown by his praying, when his ordeal is over and he is safe under Miss Trotwood’s roof, ‘that I never might be houseless any more, and never might forget the houseless’.

  47. In the Penguin English Library edition of Jane Eyre.

  48. I might cite here two interesting examples from Our Mutual Friend. Bella Wilfer complains that she has been ‘left to him in a will, like a dozen of spoons with
everything cut and dried beforehand, like orange chips. Talk of orange flowers indeed!’ – where the metaphorical ‘cut and dried’, to express the unromantic nature of the matrimonial arrangement that willed her to John Harman, suggests ‘like orange chips’, and this brings up another reference to the fate prepared for her in the will, the orange flowers being traditionally worn by a bride, their sweetness and beauty symbolizing the accepted idea of a wedding as a love-match. What Dickens is interested in is the way the mind works, with its own logic; as again in the same novel, when old Lady Tippins, seeing the butler, a freezingly correct character, offer Lightwood a note and Lightwood being affected by her to be a lover of hers, she says to him; ‘Falser man than Don Juan; why don’t you take the note from the Commendatore?’ – moreover the note announces the death of the hero, John Harmon, making a dramatic point at the same time as suggesting that the Veneering’s dinner-table is a society of the damned. (Note also that Dickens is inward with Don Giovanni.) The mention of Mrs Sparsit’s Roman nose which is immediately followed by the reference to her ‘Coriolanian’ eyebrows, when she is taking up a preposterously Coriolanian attitude about the strike, is a witty and literary use of the suggestiveness of language such as is frequently made by Dickens. Flora Finching’s conversation is a dazzling and inexhaustibly entertaining demonstration of Dickens’s understanding of what speech is for us; his advantage over James Joyce is that this interest is never with him pedantic and so does not become self-stultifying. Examples from the early novels are Mrs Nickleby’s mental habits and conversation, Dick Swiveller’s and Mrs Gamp’s. Owing to the unique nature and infinite possibilities of the English language, there was of course an English tradition of such a literary interest, going back through Sheridan’s Mrs Malaprop, Swift and others to Shakespeare the great forerunner and exemplar. A spontaneous popular tradition of delight in exploiting the nature of the language, to which Dickens also had access like all other English children, is enshrined in our rich collection of nursery rhymes and the words of children’s games with their astonishing imaginative coinages and nonsense-fantasies.

  49. In the Note to my edition of Jane Eyre in the Penguin English Library.

  3

  Bleak House: A Chancery World

  THERE have been two main grounds for dismissing Dickens altogether as a novelist – that is, from serious consideration as a novelist, as something other than a successful entertainer (at which no one disputes his eminence). One, which includes charges that take some such form as ‘Dickens was incapable of thought’, is represented by G. H. Lewes’s contemporary critical attack where he complained that with Dickens ‘sensations never pass into ideas’. The opposite charge is there in a recent relegation of Dickens: in denying that Dickens is more than a theatrical performer on the whole, Mr R. Garis (in The Dickens Theatre‚ 1965 – one of the few candid Dickens critiques of the modern phase and therefore most worth consideration) asserts, as a general truth, that:

  We feel a gap between conception and performance, and sometimes we virtually ignore the performance, we almost wish it away, in our full concentration on Dickens’s idea. Much recent criticism adopts this attitude regularly.

  and he sees ‘the over-emphatic and misleading excitement about Dickens’s symbolic structures not as a way of defending the success of the late novels but rather as a means of evading the issue: in Mr J. Hillis Miller’s book evasion of judgement is almost total, and Mr Trilling raises the issue only to condescend to it’. These last observations are perfectly true, and in defending Bleak House against both Lewes’s and Garis’s charges I do not wish to be taken as evading judgement of Dickens’s performance. On the contrary, I select Bleak House for close examination as a way of demonstrating both that Dickens was not satisfied with making fiction out of ‘sensations’ but had a well-grasped and deeply-felt argument, that he worked through fiction to make manifest his ideas, not as a set of ideas, but as a complex theme; and also that the ideas are not compulsive or simple-minded, nor inadequately presented as such, but are completely incarnated, dissolved into action and dialogue and feelings of representative forms of life that constitute a whole which is meaningful when (and only when) it is read with the necessary sensitiveness to the text and when the detail is related to the whole in ways implied in their context.

  Some co-operation is demanded of the reader; some understanding too of what was imposed by the form of publication in parts and for a very diverse readership; and a certain amount of charity. We really should not, like Mr Garis, make an anthology of the weaker passages and points in the plots (passages which are mostly expendable) as if they were representative, on the principle, apparently, that the chain is only as strong as its weakest link (not a criterion that applies to any novel or many great fictions would be sunk). As an example of what can be achieved by doing just this, I would like to cite Mr Garis’s use of the exhortation delivered to Tattycoram by Mr Meagles at the end of Little Dorrit as they look down into the Marshalsea at Amy Dorrit passing below. Garis says:

  This is worse than inept. We have no alternative but to take the sermon as the official moral of Tattycoram’s story, sponsored by the management … Yet the sermon is inappropriate in several ways. Since Tattycoram has already fully and convincingly described her conversion, Mr Meagles’s sermon about duty seems a work of pharisaical supererogation worthy of Mrs Pardiggle herself – it is hard to see how the generous Dickens could have been guilty of such tactlessness … Tattycoram’s promise to ‘count five-and-twenty thousand’ expresses well enough her pleasure in returning from Miss Wade’s imprisoning system to the world, and the vocabulary, of Mr Meagles; but it is also an unwelcome reminder of earlier doubts about Mr Meagles’s practicality. As a good audience we may have reluctantly obeyed the theatrical artist’s clear instructions to forget these doubts and to co-operate in this happy reconciliation scene, but with Mr Meagles’s sermon on duty Dickens has gone too far. We don’t want the sermon anyway…. Our sense that Dickens himself is sponsoring Mr Meagles’s sermon is confirmed also by the fact that Mr Meagles points to the heroine of the novel as an example of right behaviour.

  There are several points to make here in reply. The outstanding one is that Dickens isn’t as simple a case as this writer assumes – he is very often less simple-minded than his critics, especially those outside the English tradition and in such a brutally crude one as the modern American. Even assuming that the ‘sermon’ is in relation to Dickens himself what Garis thinks it is, at the worst, it wouldn’t constitute an annulment of the whole of the novel that has gone before, or even affect the success of Dickens’s use of the Meagleses: Dickens has made a convincing demonstration (as Garis admits) of Tattycoram’s feelings and behaviour. What he implies is that Dickens has failed to do so (as regards convincing Mr Garis, that is) with respect to what the Meagleses are and represent, and this is simply a failure in him of the reading ability that I have posited as essential. To any able reader Dickens has surely made it plain that of the Meagleses he is both appreciative and yet radically and ultimately critical. The bulk of Dickens’s readers were affreux bourgeois, more or less Meagleses, and the tact with which Dickens offers the couple, their home and their daughter as the best specimens of their kind but with disqualifying limitations that cannot be ignored or forgiven, must be admired and respected. They have enough ‘warm feeling’ as parents to be hurt by the sight of the churchful of orphans and as ‘practical people’ (this term, which is stressed, means that they are doers as opposed to sentimentalists, but also constitutes as we are shown an essential limitation) they accordingly take an orphan girl into their home, by way of doing their share; they are even able to foresee that she might be jealous of Pet, but when they see this taking the form of bursts of rage they are unable to cope except by tactless exhortations. They are also demonstrated to be insular, thoroughly philistine, snobbish in an innocent but not harmless way, and to have done their truly beloved daughter harm by bringing her up to be a Pet. (The pet name is
significant: Dickens had originally intended her to be known as ‘Baby’, but having already exhausted this idea in Copperfield made a characteristic development of his thinking on the same lines: Pet has been wronged by her parents because she has greater capabilities and could have been spared misery if she had not been made into a vehicle only for their love and for loving, at the mercy of the first determined suitor therefore – she has ‘chosen’ Gowan before Clennam appears and is distressed at not being able to return Clennam’s love.)

  Dickens shows exactly how he values them by playing them off to their advantage against the worldling Mrs Gowan but showing Meagles at a loss and offensively patronizing in his attitude to the inventor Doyce. Dickens gives them their meed of praise for their loving Pet unselfishly enough to be able to realise that they had better resign her after marriage so that Gowan will not have a grievance to use against her. All this is done with consummate art and creative fertility: some of the scenes of painful comedy Jane Austen couldn’t have done better. And Dickens also leaves us in no doubt of the strength of his case against their kind: for instance, their simple moralizing habits which have been shown as driving Tattycoram to run away and which, when – the alternative represented by Miss Wade proving even more intolerable – she is driven to return, are still forced on her, thus showing that a Meagles can learn nothing. In exactly the same way Mr Meagles talked English very loudly to foreigners with the conviction that they must ultimately understand it. We are also shown him self-defeating in being always moved to say the wrong thing to Miss Wade because he can’t conceive that she is fundamentally not a nice well-meaning woman like his wife – a fatal absence of imagination. I simply can’t agree in the face of all this (and much more could be cited) that, as Mr Garis asserts, ‘Dickens’s grasp of the whole Meagles family and what they represent is always uncertain and often distinctly inept’ – that would be truer to say of Matthew Arnold’s ironic attacks on the Meagles class. Dickens saw that while their virtues were needed their limitations were dangerous and in some respects wholly disabling; he is tactful in making nearly all the criticism fall on the head of Mr Meagles, leaving ‘Mother’ to be a good soul totally lacking comprehension. Compare Jane Austen’s treatment and presentation of her equivalents, the Musgroves of Uppercross Hall in Persuasion, where there is a similar cultural gap between parents and children and a similar divided attitude on the part of the author to them all (I pick Jane Austen because Mr Garis takes her as a comparison by which to fault Dickens generally); we can’t help seeing that Dickens has an overwhelming advantage in inwardness, understanding, complexity and truly novelistic use of his couple.