Dickens the Novelist

by F. R. Leavis

  Hence it is quite unjust to assume that Dickens ‘endorses’ simple-mindedly Mr Meagles’s sermon to Tattycoram, that we have been given ‘clear instructions to forget these doubts (‘about Mr Meagles’s practicality’) and to cooperate in this happy reconciliation scene’; there is no happy ending either to the novel as a whole or to Tattycoram’s share in it, any more than there is for Mr and Mrs Meagles and Pet, or anyone else in Little Dorrit except possibly Arthur Clennam. The ‘sermon’ is what Mr Meagles (not Dickens) would think appropriate, he would certainly utter it ‘gently’, and his approval of Amy would take the form (Dickens’s doesn’t) of praising her for ‘doing her duty’. ‘We don’t want the sermon anyway’, Mr Garis complains. Well, it depends who ‘we’ are! Not if ‘we’ are present-day readers; but Dickens’s readers were a different matter. With the strategy I have shown him habitually using from Copperfield onwards, Dickens wrote to be read in two ways. He saw that such a harmless sop to the Meagles section of his reading-public would give them the moral they could understand while allowing the rest of the novel’s meaning to sink in perhaps (I am not positing such a process of reasoning as deliberate, it would be instinctive in a man who worked as Dickens did, with such continuous experience as editor and novelist of the Victorian readership). At another level, that at which he wrote to satisfy himself, the ‘sermon’ is seen to be what I have described.

  This may justly lead us to ask questions about the degree to which Dickens was a critic of Victorianism and the extent to which he may be said, as he grew older, to have come to terms with or even succumbed to, some Victorian attitudes, but not to write off Little Dorrit on that and similar grounds. The Meagleses were at the heart of a Victorian problem for Dickens and he shows himself impartial, sensitive and intelligent in presenting it. He knew only too well that his public even when not Meagleses probably mostly admired a Mr Meagles in all innocence, and that it would need critical tact to manœuvre them out of this position. At one level therefore there is the desired sermon on duty and a heroine who seems to endorse it; on another, for Mr Garis, if he could see it, a less attractive, extremely complex case of the blindness and mistakes human beings are prone to when they are nice ordinary John Bulls, and a much more sensitive and difficult and character-demanding role for the heroine than following the strait path of Duty. If Dickens could have afforded to write for Mr Garis’s ‘we’ – assuming it existed to any extent at all then – if Dickens had been able in the later half of his career to ignore the Meagleses even more than he did,1 literary history would have been very different; but social history would have had to be different first. George Eliot, writing Middlemarch a generation after, was able to profit by Dickens’s achievement in ultimately knitting together a large reading public at least willing if not eager to tackle a long novel demanding serious and sustained attention; without his work she could not have made a fortune by writing novels to please herself only.

  The scenes with Tattycoram and the scenes where the Gowans and Meagleses and Arthur or any of them, meet, are all splendidly realized dramatically and in no respect can they be dismissed as theatrical. I can’t think of any novelist except perhaps Tolstoy who could have done as well here, certainly not Jane Austen, for there is a kind of imaginative sympathy Dickens had that she lacked. When we have been shown that Mr Meagles’s middle-class snobbery has made him finally agree to handing over his Pet to a Gowan, to be miserable for life, a spectacle neither he nor we are later spared, Dickens finishes with him in this way:

  ‘… but she’s very fond of him, and hides his faults, and thinks that no one sees them – and he certainly is well connected, and of a very good family!’

  It was the only comfort he had in the loss of his daughter, and if he made the most of it, who could blame him?

  Certainly not Dickens; but this is very far from being an endorsement.

  1

  The Theme

  The Dickens who wrote his excellent journalistic pieces and made admirable speeches appropriate to public functions or suitable speeches at public dinners, was not the Dickens who wrote the novels or those parts (the most) of them which make them works of art. When he created as a novelist – and it is significant that he said that he could not till he had ‘got up steam’ – it was to express a deeper level of self than the journalist, actor, social friend or even, on the whole, the letter-writer, drew upon. This should be axiomatic, and prevent the Holloways of Eng. Lit. from citing the non-novelist to ‘demolish’ triumphantly interpretations of the novels drawn from the text of the novels themselves by that method of intelligent and sensitive disciplined reading which literary criticism makes possible. This applies to other novels than Hard Times, and perhaps above all others to Bleak House, which has been so generally accepted as a characteristically muddled piece of indignation (an attack on the law’s delays) on the dubious evidence of Dickens’s remarks about his attitude to the laws of England elsewhere and his preface to the novel itself. This has led to arguments about whether the Lord Chancellor of the novel was Lord Lyndhurst and shakings of the head over the confusions of characters and events that could not be contemporaneous and a general belief that Dickens’s object in writing Bleak House was to get the Chancery Court reformed. Instead of an irrelevant, and indeed misleading, preface2 devoted to justifying the doing away with Krook by Spontaneous Combustion and the factual truth of the Jarndyce case, Dickens would have done better simply to have printed on the title-page: ‘These things are parables’. The nature of the theme, of his treatment of it, and the structure of the novel, would then have been made apparent.

  But anyway the whole novel is set out so as to make this point inescapable for a sensitive reader. The nature of the fog that emanates from and is concentrated in the heart of London’s Chancery Court is indicated in the opening chapter by the fact that the ruined suitors (Miss Flite and the Man from Shropshire) are figures of fun to the lawyers’ clerks and merely nuisances to the lawyers and the judge, and by the description of the Jarndyce case itself:

  Innumerable children have been born into the cause … whole families have inherited legendary hatreds with the suit … no man’s nature has been made better by it. In trickery, evasion, procrastination, spoilation, botheration, under false pretences of all sorts, there are influences that can never come to good … The receiver in the cause has acquired a goodly sum of money by it, but has acquired too a distrust of his own mother, and a contempt for his own kind … Shirking and sharking, in all their varieties, have been sown broadcast by the ill-fated cause; and even those who have contemplated its history from the outermost circle of such evil, have been insensibly tempted into a loose way of letting bad things alone to take their own bad course, and a loose belief that if the world go wrong, it was, in some off-hand manner, never meant to go right.

  Thus, in the midst of the mud and at the heart of the fog,3 sits the Lord High Chancellor in his Court of Chancery.

  Remembering that ‘jarndyce’ was the old-fashioned pronunciation of ‘jaundice’, we see that the Jarndyce Case is the case of man in the state of Victorian society. The kind of law that is the metaphor here is Equity (which can imprison for contempt of court) and is concerned with the concept of and search for true Justice; it is not the kind of law featured in Pickwick and Copperfield as imprisoning for debt and which is later to be used in Little Dorrit as the very type of absurdity in administering injustice; nor is it the symbol of the society represented by Newgate, that Dickens finally arrived at for Great Expectations, a society, criminal and criminal-making, that executed men. The bearing of Justice and Equity on religion, morals and ethics, and on social sanctions and institutions, is a matter explored by Dickens throughout Bleak House.

  We are confirmed in our reading of the overtones in the first chapter by the more direct expositions of the theme that follow. It should be noted that the prose here (in the first chapter) is quite different from the rhetoric of indignation and satire that has appeared in earlier novels. This firs
t chapter needs to be read in its entirety, when it will be seen as tightly controlled (not dependent on either Swift or Carlyle as so often previously) and characteristically witty in operation. Though behind Bleak House is that characterization of his age that Carlyle, in the ‘Present’ part of Past and Present,4 made available to the novelists of Early Victorian England and by which they so richly profited, yet this style owes nothing to Carlyle’s excited pulpit-pounding rhetoric, infectious as that was and particularly so for Dickens. (The contemporary parts of Past and Present seem to me to have been second only to Shakespeare in influencing Dickens.) What had seized Dickens’s imagination is Carlyle’s exposure of his culture as the laissez-faire. Devil-take-the-hindmost, cut-throat competitive society and the sense that they were part of it, willy-nilly: the novel is to demonstrate its heartlessness, its tragedies, its moral repulsiveness, its self-defeating wastefulness, its absurdities and contradictions, to enquire into the possibilities of goodness in such an environment, and whether anything in the nature of free-will is possible for those born into it.

  Thus institutions and professions are necessarily examined. The second chapter undertakes to show that the world of high society was governed by the same laws – a self-defeating ritual of fashion – at its peak being the Dedlock family (to be in a deadlock is to be at a standstill). It contains the remarkable description of the ‘place’ in Lincolnshire, again unlike any earlier prose in Dickens’s novels, delicate, forceful, beautiful and moving and again telling its message in suggestive and inescapable overtones:

  The waters are out in Lincolnshire. An arch of the bridge in the park has been sapped and sopped away. The adjacent low-lying ground, for half a mile in breadth, is a stagnant river, with melancholy islands in it, and a surface punctured all over, all day long, with falling rain. The weather, for many a day and night, has been so wet that the trees seem wet through, and the soft loppings and prunings of the woodman’s axe can make no crash or crackle as they fall. The deer, looking soaked, leave quagmires, where they pass. The shot of a rifle loses its sharpness in the moist air, and its smoke moves in a tardy little cloud towards the green rise, coppice-topped, that makes a background for the falling rain. The view from my Lady Dedlock’s own windows is alternately a lead-coloured view, and a view in Indian ink. The vases on the stone terrace in the foreground catch the rain all day; and the heavy drops fall, drip, drip, drip, upon the broad flagged pavement, called, from old time, the Ghost’s Walk, all night. On Sundays, the little church in the park is mouldy; and the oaken pulpit breaks out into a cold sweat; and there is a general smell and taste as of the ancient Dedlocks in their graves …

  Boredom, depression, the absence of health, vitality and the colour of life, are irresistibly imparted here by the use of language. We note that the ‘shirking and sharking’ of the previous passage is not exceptional, but illustrates a vital and poetic use of language characteristic of Bleak House, as in the ‘sapped and sopped away’ here.

  The plot, not altogether identical with the theme though not, as in Oliver Twist‚ Nicholas Nickleby and The Old Curiosity Shop, simply irrelevant to it and a nuisance, is launched in the second chapter. High Society being also In Chancery is in effect controlled by a legal mind too, Mr Tulkinghorn, who is a solicitor to the Court of Chancery as well as being Sir Leicester’s legal advisor. In fact, while the Dedlock class think they are autonomous, and employ and patronize him (‘“He is, of course, handsomely paid, and he associates almost on a footing of equality with the highest society” says Sir Leicester’, magnificently blind), Mr Tulkinghorn, an interesting case, manipulates his employers, manages all their affairs – which he alone understands – while despising them, and gets his real payment by feeding and exercising his desire for power. Accordingly he is one of the agents of destruction, destroying himself in the process. Lady Dedlock is, like nearly everyone in the novel, involved somehow in the Jarndyce case, and she involuntarily betrays an interest in the handwriting of the papers Tulkinghorn is showing them. As this is an impulsive movement alien to her usual manner Tulkinghorn, being what he is, naturally follows up this clue, thus unearthing Lady Dedlock’s guilty secret. The novel’s plot is simply a touching off of a chain of cause and effect that exposes a dead past, a classical form that Dickens had never hitherto used. His next major work, Little Dorrit, follows the same principle of classical tragedy, all the action having taken place before the novel starts and as before it is a piece of uncharacteristic behaviour, Mrs Clennam’s (of showing regard for the girl Little Dorrit), that causes her son Arthur to follow Little Dorrit’s trail and thus unearth a dead tragedy, his own origins (which are like Esther Summerson’s here) and his stepmother’s guilt. The plot of Little Dorrit therefore is only a variant on the plot of Bleak House, which, as they’re utterly different novels, shows that by now ‘plot’ was recognized by Dickens to be irrelevant and theme the decisive factor in giving a novel its character. Lady Dedlock’s ‘guilt’, unlike Mrs Clennam’s, is only guilt in the eyes of a morally misguided (jaundiced) society, it is implied, and this view is endorsed by the novelist, by Sir Leicester Dedlock who is a survival from a different age, and by the consensus of civilized opinion in the Chesney Wold drawing-room – also a doomed survival from an aristocratic society – when canvassed by Mr Tulkinghorn in chapter XL (‘Domestic’). Lady Dedlock’s sister Miss Barbary (= ‘barbarous’), the name she has adopted to hide her connexion with her fallen sister) is in the position of Mrs Clennam, of having deprived the ‘guilty’ mother of her child and deprived that child of a mother’s love and cherishing.

  The third chapter is another complete change, the first instalment of Esther Summerson’s autobiography, taking her in one superb, unbroken sweep from her first memories to her introduction at the age of twenty into the court of Chancery and into Chancery London – it is in ‘a London particular’, as Mr Guppy classifies the fog for her, that she arrives. The procedure being over, Esther and the wards in Chancery confer:

  ‘And where do we go next?’

  None of them knows: ‘We looked at one another, half laughing at our being like the. children in the wood’ – the Babes in the Wood of course wandered about lost until they died of it. Miss Flite, to show them where they are likely to end, appears on this cue – ‘“It’s a good omen for youth, and hope, and beauty”,’ she says, ‘“when they find themselves in this place, and don’t know what’s to come of it … I was a ward myself. I was not mad at that time,” curtseying low, and smiling between every little sentence. “I had youth and hope. I believe, beauty. It matters very little now. Neither of the three served, or saved me … I expect a judgment. On the Day of Judgement … Pray accept my blessing.”’ We note again the Shakespearean use of language – the ‘served, or saved’. It is surely evident how we are to take this. We are being told something about the human condition, and in a Shakespearean mode, as we find when this section is completed by chapter V. Miss Flite is a much more painful Ophelia, wholly conceived in terms of her environment in time and place – for instance, she has the lower-middle-class clinging to gentility, as we are shown when our three representatives of youth, hope and beauty5 (Esther, Richard and Ada), like the Three Kings of mediaeval wall-paintings encountering Death in their path when riding out in the pride of life, go out to explore London (‘A Morning Adventure’) and meet Miss Flite again, with her ‘mincing’ manner: she takes them to her room and they realize why she looks ‘pinched’: there are no coals or ashes in her grate, no spare clothing in her room and no food, and she says:

  ‘I am sorry I cannot offer chocolate. I expect a judgement shortly, and shall then place my establishment on a superior footing. At present, I don’t mind confessing to the wards in Jarndyce (in strict confidence), that I sometimes find it difficult to keep up a genteel appearance. I have felt the cold here. I have felt something sharper than cold. It matters very little. Pray excuse the introduction of such mean topics.’

  The pathos of gentility in such circumstan
ces, which represents a truly heroic clinging to self-respect and as such an achievement of the human spirit that Dickens has no desire to ridicule, is extraordinarily touching, and comes from the imaginative centre of a true novelist. But it is only one element in the tragedy Miss Flite incarnates. There are her birds, with their significant names, by which we are told something more painful still about the human condition in a Chancery world and with a deadly irony: