Dickens the Novelist

by F. R. Leavis

  19. That there is delicacy of feeling forms a considerable part of Dickens’s reasons for any optimism being possible in the face of the litigating nature of man, since sympathy and imagination are the counter-agents. In our Kingsley Amis type civilization ‘delicacy’ has become a term of contempt with the intellectual guardians of our culture – I note a school of Anglo-American reviewers, for instance, who sneer at ‘delicacy’ as ‘a prototype Scrutiny word of praise’.

  20. e.g. in chapter XL, when Lady Dedlock awaits Mr Tulkinghorn’s arrival at Chesney Wold in an agony of apprehension and undecided how to deal with him. Volumnia, who pretends to be pining for him, says, ‘I had almost made up my mind that he was dead.’

  Everybody starts. For a gun is fired close by.

  ‘Good gracious, what’s that?’ cried Volumnia, with her little withered scream.

  ‘A rat’, says my Lady. ‘And they have shot him.’

  Enter Mr Tulkinghorn, followed by Mercuries with lamps and candles.’

  Perhaps the use of Hamlet and its dramatic irony is too blatant here, but it shows how Dickens’s imagination was working. The intention is to forecast the murder of Tulkinghorn who will later be shot, and to put the reader on a false trail of suspecting Lady Dedlock as the murderess, for which the Hamlet references were unnecessary. But that it is a dramatic technique and one used in the play within the play in Hamlet has brought in the imitation of and reference to the close of that with the call for lights, and the identification of the inquisitive solicitor with the rat in the arras, who was Polonius and, as Lady Dedlock is evidently thinking, was killed for his curiosity and meddling, as she at least wishes Tulkinghorn may be.

  21. ‘If in going over the parts you find the tendency to blank verse (I cannot help it, when I am very much in earnest) too strong, knock out a word’s brains here and there’ – Letters, Nov. 13th 1846.

  22. V. Appendix B: ‘Mayhew and Dickens’.

  23. Arnold Bennett, born and bred in the industrial Non-conformist Victorian society, constantly makes the situation described here the centre of his better novels and tales about his native Five Towns. In his most ambitious work, Clayhanger, the father, an uncultivated version of a Frederic Smith, is shown in impressive detail forcing his son, who wished to be an artist and architect, into the family works and economic dependence, thus turning him into an Arthur Clennam – frustrated, depressed and celibate till a marriage late in life.

  24. He is still useful as such in similar conditions of political and social disorder in our own age, witness Camus’s heroic doctor, the protagonist in La Peste, and Pasternak’s doctor-poet in Dr Zhivago, who endures and is martyred in the course of the Russian revolution.

  25. The suggestive surname is explained in the tribute paid Esther by Ada and Jarndyce: ‘They said that wherever Dame Durden went, there was sunshine and summer air.’

  26. Dr Thorne, though a Tory in his beliefs, is odious to Lady Arabella, Trollope says, because of ‘his subversive professional democratic tendencies’.

  4

  Hard Times: The World of Bentham

  HARD TIMES is not a difficult work; its intention and nature are pretty obvious. If, then, it is the masterpiece I take it for, why has it not had general recognition? To judge by the critical record, it has had none at all. If there exists anywhere an appreciation, or even an acclaiming reference, I have missed it. In the books and essays on Dickens, so far as I know them, it is passed over as a very minor thing; too slight and insignificant to distract us for more than a sentence or two from the works worth critical attention. Yet, if I am right, of all Dickens’s works it is the one that, having the distinctive strength that makes him a major artist, has it in so compact a way, and with a concentrated significance so immediately clear and penetrating, as, one would have thought, to preclude the reader’s failing to recognize that he had before him a completely serious, and, in its originality, a triumphantly successful, work of art.

  The answer to the question asked above seems to me to bear on the traditional approach to ‘the English novel’. For all the more sophisticated critical currency of the last decade or two, that approach (still prevails, at any rate in the appreciation of the Victorian novelists. The business of the novelist, you gather, is to ‘create a world’, and the mark of the master is external abundance – he gives you lots of ‘life’. The test of life in his characters (he must above all create ‘living’ characters) is that they go on living outside the book. Expectations as unexacting as these are not, when they encounter significance, grateful for it, and when it meets them in that insistent form where nothing is very engaging as ‘life’ unless its relevance is fully taken, miss it altogether. This is the only way in which I can account for the neglect suffered by Henry James’s The Europeans, which may be classed with Hard Times as a moral fable – though one might have supposed that James would enjoy the advantage of being approached with expectations of subtlety and closely calculated relevance. Fashion, however, has not recommended his earlier work, and this (whatever appreciation may be enjoyed by The Ambassadors) still suffers from the prevailing expectation of redundant1 and irrelevant ‘life’.

  I need say no more by way of defining the moral fable than that in it the intention is peculiarly insistent, so that the representative significance of everything in the fable – character, episode, and so on – is immediately apparent as we read. Intention might seem to be insistent enough in the opening of Hard Times, in that scene in Mr Gradgrind’s school. But then, intention is in some well-known places in Dickens’s work – and this has been generally thought of as a Dickensian characteristic – notably insistent without its being taken up in any inclusive significance that informs and organizes a coherent whole; and, for lack of any expectation of an organized whole, it has no doubt been supposed that in Hard Times the satiric irony of the first two chapters is merely, in the large and genial Dickensian way, thrown together with melodrama, pathos and humour – and that we are given these ingredients more abundantly and exuberantly elsewhere. Actually, the Dickensian vitality is there in its varied characteristic modes, which should – surely – here be the more immediately and perceptively responded to as the agents of a felt compelling significance because they are free of anything that might be seen as redundance: the creative exuberance is controlled by a profound inspiration that informs, directs and limits.

  The inspiration is what is given in the grim clinch of the title, Hard Times. Ordinarily what are recognized as Dickens’s judgements about the world he lives in (‘Dickens’s social criticism’) are casual and incidental – a matter of including among the ingredients of a book some indignant treatment of a particular abuse. But in Hard Times he is unmistakably possessed by a comprehensive vision, one in which the inhumanities of Victorian civilization are seen as fostered and sanctioned by a hard philosophy, the aggressive formulation of an inhumane spirit. The philosophy is represented by Thomas Gradgrind, Esquire, Member of Parliament for Coketown, who has brought up his children on the lines of the experiment recorded by John Stuart Mill as carried out on himself. What Gradgrind stands for is, though repellent, nevertheless respectable; his Utilitarianism is a theory sincerely held and there is intellectual disinterestedness in its application. But Gradgrind marries his eldest daughter to Josiah Bounderby, ‘banker, merchant, manufacturer’, about whom there is no disinterestedness whatever, and nothing to be respected. Bounderby is Victorian ‘rugged individualism’ in its grossest and most intransigent form. Concerned with nothing but self-assertion and power and material success, he has no interest in ideals or ideas – except the idea of being the completely self-made man (since, for all his brag, he is not that in fact). Dickens here makes a just observation about the affinities and practical tendency of Utilitarianism, as, in his presentment of the Gradgrind home and the Gradgrind elementary school, he does about the Utilitarian spirit in Victorian education.

  All this is obvious enough. But Dickens’s art, while remaining that of the great po
pular entertainer, has in Hard Times, as he renders his full critical vision, a stamina, a flexibility combined with consistency, and a depth that he seems to have had little credit for. Take that opening scene in the school-room:

  ‘Girl number twenty,’ said Mr Gradgrind, squarely pointing with his square forefinger, ‘I don’t know that girl. Who is that girl?’

  ‘Sissy Jupe, sir,’ explained number twenty, blushing, standing up, and curtsying.

  ‘Sissy is not a name,’ said Mr Gradgrind. ‘Don’t call yourself Sissy. Call yourself Cecilia.’

  ‘It’s father as call me Sissy, sir,’ returned the young girl in a trembling voice, and with another curtsy.

  ‘Then he has no business to do it,’ said Mr Gradgrind. ‘Tell him he mustn’t. Cecilia Jupe. Let me see. What is your father?’

  ‘He belongs to the horse-riding, if you please, sir.’

  Mr Gradgrind frowned, and waved off the objectionable calling with his hand.

  ‘We don’t want to know anything about that here. You mustn’t tell us about that here. Your father breaks horses, don’t he?’

  ‘If you please, sir, when they can get any to break, they do break horses in the ring, sir.’

  ‘You mustn’t tell us about the ring here. Very well, then. Describe your father as a horse-breaker. He doctors sick horses, I dare say?’

  ‘Oh, yes, sir!’

  ‘Very well, then. He is a veterinary surgeon, a farrier, and horse-breaker. Give me your definition of a horse.’

  (Sissy Jupe thrown into the greatest alarm by this demand.)

  ‘Girl number twenty unable to define a horse!’ said Mr Gradgrind, for the benefit of all the little pitchers. ‘Girl number twenty possessed of no facts in reference to one of the commonest animals! Some boy’s definition of a horse. Bitzer, yours.’

  . . . . .

  ‘Quadruped. Graminivorous. Forty teeth, namely twenty-four grinders, four eye-teeth, and twelve incisive. Sheds coat in the spring; in marshy countries, sheds hoofs too. Hoofs hard, but requiring to be shod with iron. Age known by marks in mouth.’ Thus (and much more) Bitzer.

  Lawrence himself, protesting against harmful tendencies in education, never made the point more tellingly. Sissy has been brought up among horses, and among people whose livelihood depends upon understanding horses, but ‘we don’t want to know anything about that here’. Such knowledge isn’t real knowledge. Bitzer, the model pupil, on the button’s being pressed, promptly vomits up the genuine article, ‘Quadruped. Graminivorous’, etc.; and ‘Now, girl number twenty, you know what a horse is.’ The irony, pungent enough locally, is richly developed in the subsequent action. Bitzer’s aptness has its evaluative comment in his career. Sissy’s incapacity to acquire this kind of ‘fact’ or formula, her inaptness for education, is manifested to us, on the other hand, as part and parcel of her sovereign and indefeasible humanity: it is the virtue that makes it impossible for her to understand, or acquiesce in, an ethos for which she is ‘girl number twenty’, or to think of any other human being as a unit for arithmetic.

  This kind of ironic method might seem to commit the author to very limited kinds of effect. In Hard Times, however, it associates quite congruously, such is the flexibility of Dickens’s art, with very different methods; it cooperates in a truly dramatic and profoundly poetic whole. Sissy Jupe, who might be taken here for a merely conventional persona, has already, as a matter of fact, been established in a potently symbolic role: she is part of the poetically-creative operation of Dickens’s genius in Hard Times. Here is a passage I omitted from the middle of the excerpt quoted above:

  The square finger, moving here and there, lighted suddenly on Bitzer, perhaps because he chanced to sit in the same ray of sunlight which, darting in at one of the bare windows of the intensely white-washed room, irradiated Sissy. For the boys and girls sat on the face of an inclined plane in two compact bodies, divided up the centre by a narrow interval; and Sissy, being at the corner of a row on the sunny side, came in for the beginning of a sunbeam, of which Bitzer, being at the corner of a row on the other side, a few rows in advance, caught the end. But, whereas the girl was so dark-eyed and dark-haired that she seemed to receive a deeper and more lustrous colour from the sun when it shone upon her, the boy was so light-eyed and light-haired that the self-same rays appeared to draw out of him what little colour he ever possessed. His cold eyes would hardly have been eyes, but for the short ends of lashes which, by bringing them into immediate contrast with something paler than themselves, expressed their form. His short-cropped hair might have been a mere continuation of the sandy freckles on his forehead and face. His skin was so unwholesomely deficient in the natural tinge, that he looked as though, if he were cut, he would bleed white.

  There is no need to insist on the force – representative of Dickens’s art in general in Hard Times – with which the moral and spiritual differences are rendered here in terms of sensation, so that the symbolic intention emerges out of metaphor and the vivid evocation of the concrete. What may, perhaps, be emphasized is that Sissy stands for vitality as well as goodness – they are seen, in fact, as one; she is generous, impulsive life, finding self-fulfilment in self-forgetfulness – all that is the antithesis of calculating self-interest. There is an essentially Laurentian suggestion about the way in which ‘the dark-eyed and dark-haired’ girl, contrasting with Bitzer, seemed to receive a ‘deeper and more lustrous colour from the sun’, so opposing the life that is lived freely and richly from the deep instinctive and emotional springs to the thin-blooded, quasi-mechanical product of Gradgrindery.

  Sissy’s symbolic significance is bound up with that of Sleary’s Horse-riding where human kindness is very insistently associated with vitality.

  The way in which the Horse-riding takes on its significance illustrates felicitously the poetic-dramatic nature of Dickens’s art. From the utilitarian schoolroom Mr Gradgrind walks towards his utilitarian abode, Stone Lodge, which, as Dickens evokes it, brings home to us concretely the model régime that for the little Gradgrinds (among whom are Malthus and Adam Smith) is an inescapable prison. But before he gets there he passes the back of a circus booth, and is pulled up by the sight of two palpable offenders. Looking more closely, ‘what did he behold but his own metallurgical Louisa peeping through a hole in a deal board, and his own mathematical Thomas abasing himself on the ground to catch but a hoof of the graceful equestrian Tyrolean flower act!’ The chapter is called ‘A Loophole’, and Thomas ‘gave himself up to be taken home like a machine’.

  Representing human spontaneity, the circus-athletes represent at the same time highly-developed skill and deftness of kinds that bring poise, pride and confident ease – they are always buoyant, and, ballet-dancer-like, in training:

  There were two or three handsome young women among them, with two or three husbands, and their two or three mothers, and their eight or nine children, who did the fairy business when required. The father of one of the families was in the habit of balancing the father of another of the families on the top of a great pole; the father of the third family often made a pyramid of both those fathers, with Master Kidderminster for the apex, and himself for the base; all the fathers could dance upon rolling casks, stand upon bottles, catch knives and balls, twirl hand-basins, ride upon anything, jump over everything, and stick at nothing. All the mothers could (and did) dance upon the slack wire and the tight-rope, and perform rapid acts on bare-backed steeds; none of them were at all particular in respect of showing their legs; and one of them, alone in a Greek chariot, drove six-in-hand into every town they came to. They all assumed to be mighty rakish and knowing, they were not very tidy in their private dresses, they were not at all orderly in their domestic arrangements, and the combined literature of the whole company would have produced but a poor letter on any subject. Yet there was a remarkable gentleness and childishness about these people, a special inaptitude for any kind of sharp practice, and an untiring readiness to help and pity one another, deserving of
ten of as much respect, and always of as much generous construction, as the every-day virtues of any class of people in the world.

  Their skills have no value for the Utilitarian calculus, but they express vital human impulse, and they minister to vital human needs. The Horse-riding, frowned upon as frivolous and wasteful by Gradgrind and malignantly scorned by Bounderby, brings the machine-hands of Coketown (the spirit-quenching hideousness of which is hauntingly evoked) what they are starved of. It brings to them, not merely amusement, but art, and the spectacle of triumphant activity that, seeming to contain its end within itself, is, in its easy mastery, joyously self-justified. In investing a travelling circus with this kind of symbolic value Dickens expresses a profounder reaction to industrialism than might have been expected of him. It is not only pleasure and relaxation the Coketowners stand in need of; he feels the dreadful degradation of life that would remain even if they were to be given a forty-hour week, comfort, security and fun. We recall a characteristic passage from D. H. Lawrence.

  The car ploughed uphill through the long squalid straggle of Tevershall, the blackened brick dwellings, the black slate roofs, glistening their sharp edges, the mud black with coal-dust, the pavements wet and black. It was as if dismalness had soaked through and through everything. The utter negation of natural beauty, the utter negation of the gladness of life, the utter absence of the instinct for shapely beauty which every bird and beast has, the utter death of the human intuitive faculty was appalling. The stacks of soap in the grocers’ shops, the rhubarb and lemons in the greengrocers’! the awful hats in the milliners all went by ugly, ugly, ugly, followed by the plaster and gilt horror of the cinema with its wet picture announcements, ‘A Woman’s Love’, and the new big Primitive chapel, primitive enough in its stark brick and big panes of greenish and raspberry glass in the windows. The Wesleyan chapel, higher up, was of blackened brick and stood behind iron railings and blackened shrubs. The Congregational chapel, which thought itself superior, was built of rusticated sandstone and had a steeple, but not a very high one. Just beyond were the new school buildings, expensive pink brick, and gravelled playground inside iron railings, all very imposing, and mixing the suggestion of a chapel and a prison. Standard Five girls were having a singing lesson, just finishing the la-me-do-la exercises and beginning a ‘sweet children’s song’. Anything more unlike song, spontaneous song, would be impossible to imagine: a strange bawling yell followed the outlines of a tune. It was not like animals: animals mean something when they yell. It was like nothing on earth, and it was called singing. Connie sat and listened with her heart in her boots, as Field was filling petrol. What could possibly become of such a people, a people in whom the living intuitive faculty was dead as nails, and only queer mechanical yells and uncanny will-power remained?’