Dickens the Novelist

by F. R. Leavis

  So here I am, in the middle way, having had twenty years – Twenty years largely wasted …

  – The resonance as of a religious concern with basic criteria and ultimate issues carried by this from its context in Four Quartets and from the opening of the Divina Commedia doesn’t make it inappropriate here – for the usual easy and confident denial of any profundity of thought to Dickens is absurd and shameful.

  The inquest into contemporary civilization that he undertook in Little Dorrit might equally be called a study of the criteria implicit in an evaluative study of life. What it commits him to is an enterprise of thought; thought that it is in our time of the greatest moment to get recognized, consciously and clearly, as thought – an affair (that is) of the thinking intelligence directed to a grasp of the real. Dickens’s capacity for effective thought about life is indistinguishable from his genius as a novelist. A great novelist is addicted to contemplating and pondering life with an intensity of interest that entails – that is – the thought that asks questions, seeks answers and defines. And (whatever that last verb might seem to imply) he doesn’t need to be told that he must take a firm hold on the truth that life, for a mind truly intent on the real, is life in the concrete; that life is concretely ‘there’ only in individual lives; and that individual lives can’t be aggregated, generalized or averaged.

  On the other hand, he knows that the serious and developed study of the individual life can’t but be a study of lives in relation, and of social conditions, conventions, pressures as they affect essential life. The really great novelist can’t but find himself making an evaluative inquiry into the civilization in which he finds himself – which he more and more finds himself in and of.

  I might have added a couple of sentences ago that he doesn’t need to be reminded – or to remind himself – that ‘life’ is a necessary word and that the impossibility of arriving at any abstract definition acceptable to him is far from being evidence of an unreality about what the word portends: it is the opposite.

  Dickens in the nature of his creative undertaking aims at communicating generally valid truths about what can’t be defined. I point here to the importance of getting it recognized that his genius as a novelist is a capacity for profound and subtle thought. His method, with all its subtleties and complexities, is a method of tackling what is in one aspect an intellectual problem: he tackles it, beyond any doubt, consciously and calculatingly.

  I have already noted how Clennam, returned after twenty years of exile, dejected and without momentum or aim, opens, out of a particular situation and the pressure of a personal history, the critique of Victorian civilization. The questioning, so largely for him a matter of self-interrogation that implicitly bears on the criteria for judgement and value – perception, starts in that reverse of theoretical way, but – or so – with great felicity. The answer implicit in Little Dorrit is given creatively by the book, and it is not one that could have been given by Clennam himself. Not only is it something that can’t be stated; the Clennam evoked for us is obviously not adequate to its depth and range and fullness, his deficiency being among the characteristics that qualify him for his part in the process by which the inclusive communication of the book is generated. Each of the other characters also plays a contributory part, inviting us to make notes on his or her distinctive ‘value’ in relation to the whole.

  Nevertheless, about Dickens’s art there is nothing of the rigidly or insistently schematic. We find ourselves bringing together for significant association characters as unlike, for instance, as Miss Wade, Henry Gowan, William Dorrit and Mrs Clennam, or seeing a rightness that is other than one of piquant or pleasing complementarity in the mutual attraction that manifests itself (a fact of the narrative) between Doyce, Clennam, Pancks and Cavalletto. And when we have got as far as that we are aware of already having made a note that Gowan (for instance) associates in significant relationship with characters who form a quite different grouping from that in which I have just placed him, so that, if in our diagrammatic notation we have been representing groupings by lines linking names, the lines run across one another in an untidy and undiagrammatic mess. The diagrammatic suggestion is soon transcended as the growing complexity of lines thickens; we arrive at telling ourselves explicitly what we have been implicitly realizing in immediate perception and response: ‘This, brought before us for pondering contemplation, is life – life as it manifests itself variously in this, that and the other focusing individual (the only way in which it can).’

  In the striking power with which the book achieves the effect I point to here Clennam plays an important part, one that entails the unique status he has among the characters. That he is very important doesn’t mean that he competes for inclusion among the ‘Dickens characters’, for he isn’t a character in that sense, though he decidedly exists for us – is felt (that is) as a real personal presence. He has in this respect a clear affinity with Pip of Great Expectations, who, though so centrally important in that book, is not described at all, or endowed with describable, or at any rate very distinctive, characteristics. What is required of Pip is that he shall be felt unquestionably to exist as a centre of sentience, an identity, and Dickens’s art ensures that he shall, for it ensures that the reader shall implicitly identify himself with Pip and be his sentience – while remaining, nevertheless, as the reader, another person (sufficiently another person in many cases, it seems, not to think of protesting when an authority calls Great Expectations ‘a snob’s progress’).

  Little Dorrit, the equally astonishing and very different masterpiece, is very differently organized; Clennam is not ‘I’ in it, and not the ubiquitous immediate consciousness that registers and presents. Yet he too is felt as a pervasive presence, or something approaching it. He has been very early, with a subtlety of purpose and touch Dickens isn’t as a rule credited with, established as that – established as the presence of what one may very well find oneself referring to as plain unassertive normality. And what that means is that we tend to be Clennam, as we obviously don’t William Dorrit, Mr Meagles, Daniel Doyce, Henry Gowan, Pancks – or any other character in the book. He is for us a person, the decently ordinary person among the dramatis personae (‘ordinary’ here not being used in a placing or pejorative way, but reassuringly), and he has at the same time a special status, unavowed but essential to his importance; it is implicit in his being, not a queer or unpleasant case, but the immediate focal presence of representative human sentience – ours (for ours, being our own, is that; it is the immediate concrete ‘presence of life’).

  Clennam’s consciousness of deprivation and disablement, avowed by him directly at the outset, in his exchange with Mr Meagles in chapter II,1 where the quarantine-freed travellers prepare to disperse, isn’t at all a contradiction that has to be reconciled with this special status, or with the suggestions of the word ‘normality’; without having suffered his childhood, we accept with ready sympathy the sense of the world represented by this earnest, intelligent and pre-eminently civilized man: we respect him as we respect ourselves. The way in which Clennam serves the effect that the intellectual-imaginative purpose of Little Dorrit requires has nothing of the diagrammatic or the logical about it; it works by imaginatively prompting suggestion, so that the reader sees and takes in immediate perception what logic, analysis and statement can’t convey. The effect is to make us realize explicitly why we are right to pick on Little Dorrit as a supreme illustration of the general truth about great creative writers, that their creative genius is a potency of thought. We tell ourselves that in presenting the large cast of diverse characters and the interplay between them Dickens is conducting a sustained, highly conscious and subtly methodical study of the human psyche; that he is concerned to arrive at and convey certain general validities of perception and judgement about life – enforcing implicitly in the process the truth that ‘life’ is a necessary word; that it is not a mere word, or a word that portends nothing more than an abstraction.

 
; It won’t, perhaps, be out of place to clinch this critical insistence with a comparative reference to Blake. Blake too was a creative writer whose genius was a penetrating insight into human nature and the human condition, and whose creativity was a potency of thought. The mythical works, with the complexities, ambiguities and shifting ‘symbolic’ values that defy the diagrammatizing interpreter, give us Blake’s method of grappling with the problem (‘lives’ and ‘life’) that Dickens tackles with the innovating resources of an inspired and marvellously original novelist in Little Dorrit.

  II

  We quite early find that we are engaged intimately and deeply in Clennam’s personal life. The book, in making the Clennam theme – the necessity-impelled battle with the challenging questions – a unifying one, gives us his éducation sentimentale. There is the shattering disillusion of Flora, the one redeeming memory (she had been) of his childhood:

  It is no proof of an inconstant mind, but exactly the opposite, when the idea will not bear close comparison with the reality, and the contrast is a fatal shock to it. Such was Clennam’s case. In his youth he had ardently loved this woman, and had heaped upon her all the locked-up wealth of his affection and imagination. That wealth had been, in his desert home, like Robinson Crusoe’s money; exchangeable with no one, lying idle in the dark to rust, until he poured it out for her. Ever since that memorable time, though he had, until the night of his arrival, as completely dismissed her from any association with his Present or Past as if she had been dead (which she might easily have been for anything he knew), he had kept the old fancy of the Past unchanged in its old sacred place. And now, after all, the last of the Patriarchs coolly walked into the parlour, saying in effect, ‘Be good enough to throw it down and dance upon it. This is Flora.’

  There is Pet Meagles, the charming girl with whom he, at forty (inevitably, as the just-quoted passage tells us), falls in love, but whom, we can see, as Dickens clearly sees and implicitly says, he oughtn’t (even though the parents favour him – even if Pet’s assent could be won) to be allowed to marry. And there is Little Dorrit, and, finally, marriage, with the fittingness, not to be dismissed as romantic or sentimental, that makes it something quite other than a conventional conclusion.

  In all this, which is done with delicacy and penetration, we can no doubt see some direct drawing on personal history; but Dickens himself, intimately presented as Clennam is, wasn’t at all like Clennam. Clennam’s past has left him discouraged in his vital spontaneity. The creative force of life in him has no confident authority; he, we can say with point, is not an artist. But in that set inquest into Victorian civilization which Little Dorrit enacts for us he is a focal agent – focal in respect of the implicit judgements and valuations and the criteria they represent. We have here, representatively manifest, the impersonalizing process of Dickens’s art: the way in which he has transmuted his personal experience into something that is not personal, but felt by us as reality and truth presented, for what with intrinsic authority they are, by impersonal intelligence. His essential social criticism doesn’t affect us as urged personally by the writer. It has the disinterestedness of spontaneous life, undetermined and undirected and uncontrolled by idea, will and self-insistent ego, the disinterestedness here being that which brings a perceived significance to full realization and completeness in art. The writer’s labour has been to present something that speaks for itself.

  That Dickens’s finest work has the impersonality of great art is something I have to insist on; the fact is at the centre of my theme. Consider the Marshalsea in Little Dorrit, and the kind of emphasis that marks Edmund Wilson’s discussion of its significance – Wilson being a critic who enjoys a very high prestige. He, in his well-known essay,2 makes the significance mainly a matter of the psychological traumata suffered by Dickens in childhood, and invites us to see Dickens ‘working the prison out of his system’ in the conceiving and writing of his œuvre. But this is to ignore the nature of Dickens’s development as an artist, and the greatness of his greatest book. And it is to misdirect the attention and to put obstacles in the way of perception and understanding. No one would wish to question that the Marshalsea was an intensely charged memory for Dickens, or that it was so by reason of the well-known facts of his personal history. But there is no need to know those facts in order to appreciate Little Dorrit; they have virtually no critical relevance, and if, as we read, we occupy ourselves with a quest for the evidence of traumata, we are disastrously misdirecting our attention.

  A colleague of mine some years ago hailed, as giving us the most promising kind of clue for future criticism, the discovery that Dickens was an ‘anal dandy’. I don’t expect to see anyone seriously attempting that approach, yet the ostensibly more respectable substitutes for an intelligent interest in the great novelist’s art are really no better.

  The significance of the Marshalsea is the significance we take in a disinterested response to the text; and, as we go on taking it, it expands and subtilizes–the profound irony of the novel expressing itself in that process. The prison is the world of ‘the mind-forged manacles’; it is Society with a big S, as well as the society we all have to live in; it is Mrs Clennam’s will and self-deception (figured also in her arthritic immobilization and her wheeled chair); it is Henry Gowan’s ego; it is Pancks’s ‘What business have I in the present world, except to stick to business? No business’; it is for the great Merdle the Chief Butler’s eye; it is life in our civilization as Clennam – as, more inclusively, the Dickens of Little Dorrit – registers it.

  When towards the end Clennam finds himself literally imprisoned in the Marshalsea and lapses into accidie, we have no need to ponder symbolic values: the focused charge has its immediate effect. The Blakean indeterminateness of what the Marshalsea ‘stands for’ is a condition, in fact, of the major part the ‘symbol’ plays in the whole wonderfully close organic unity. In the shifting metaphorical suggestiveness there is a unifying constant; it is the implicitly evoked contrasting opposite – opposite of what the stale and squalid prison, closed in upon by the city ‘where the charter’d Thames does flow’, evokes directly. When we say that for Dickens, and for us, it is ego-free love, creative spontaneity, Little Dorrit’s bouquet, Flora Casby, the erupting Pancks, Doyce, Cavalletto and Dickens himself, we don’t unsay ‘unifying constant’. And to say that the book, the created whole, justifies this last sentence seems a good way of pointing to the nature of Dickens’s triumphant success.

  The problem (‘social problem’) with which Dickens’s book challenges us in the Marshalsea isn’t of a kind to which discussions of Dickens’s part (or the absence of it) in the abolition of imprisonment for debt has any relevance. That isn’t to say that Dickens didn’t in his innermost being cry out against the very idea of imprisonment for debt. The book does that. The fact that imprisonment for debt had been abolished before he wrote Little Dorrit only serves to make the spirit of his use of the Marshalsea the more unambiguous. All his early readers would know of the not distant actuality, and no one would for a moment suppose him ignorant of the abolition.3 There has been no excuse at any time for any reader not to realize the nature and take the force of this ‘social criticism’ as the book makes it. They are those exemplified in the passage (Book the First, chapter XXXV) in which Little Dorrit, her father’s release being imminent, makes her protest against the conditions of it – though obviously her essential protest comes to more than that:

  ‘Mr Clennam, will he pay all his debts before he leaves here?’

  ‘No doubt. All.’

  ‘All the debts for which he has been imprisoned here, all my life, and longer?’

  ‘No doubt.’

  There was something of uncertainty and remonstrance in her look; something that was not all satisfaction. He wondered to detect it, and said:

  ‘You are glad that he should do so?’

  ‘Are you?’

  ‘Am I? Most heartily glad.’

  ‘Then I know I ought to be.�
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  ‘And are you not?’

  ‘It seems to me hard,’ said Little Dorrit, ‘that he should have lost so many years and suffered so much, and at last pay all the debts as well. It seems to me hard that he should pay in life and money both.’

  ‘My dear child –,’ Clennam was beginning.

  ‘Yes, I know I am wrong,’ she pleaded timidly, ‘don’t think any the worse of me; it has grown up with me here.’

  The prison, which could spoil so many things, had tainted Little Dorrit’s mind no more than this. Engendered, as the confusion was, in compassion for the poor prisoner, her father: it was the first speck Clennam had ever seen, it was the last speck Clennam ever saw, of the prison atmosphere upon her.

  The speck, of course, is upon Clennam. I say ‘of course’, but I know from questions and discussion – and there is the (to me) astonishing commentary in A. O. J. Cockshut’s book4 on ‘this slight taint of irresponsibility’ (‘It is beyond her imagination that the creditor also might have suffered hardship through unpaid debts’) – I know that the irony can be missed. Yet who, on reflection, can conceive Dickens to have meant any but that judgement which is conveyed by Little Dorrit? Besides the cruelty, the offence against life, of imprisonment for debt (and it was society that had entailed indebtedness on the essentially innocent William Dorrit), there is the stultifying irrationality: the debtor in prison is debarred from setting about earning the means of repayment. The imprisoning him represents starkly the most indefensible idea of retribution. And life against money! – it is the blasphemous iniquity of that, legally and righteously enforced, that Little Dorrit can’t swallow: who can suppose that it’s the money she cares about? Her protest is against the whole code, and the unspeakable her father has suffered. The taint is what clings to Clennam, clings still from his upbringing; the taint of the Calvinistic commercial ethos (prison), and it manifests itself in his taking her as he does, and reproving her with that firm forbearing look. If we take Dickens’s irony, we don’t assume that look or that tone; we leave them to Clennam, and it’s not for Little Dorrit that we make allowances.