Dickens the Novelist

by F. R. Leavis

  It seems to me that not to be sure of this is to have missed the creative arch-intuition in Dickens, the deep imperative preoccupation that organizes the immense range of evoked life, the wealth of diverse interest, into significance – for everything in the book is significant in terms of the whole. Dickens’s art in that brief exchange between Little Dorrit and Clennam is making the same affirmation it makes in the tête-à-tête between Louisa and her father about Bounderby’s proposal of marriage. The affirmation is of life, which – this is the insistence – doesn’t belong to the quantitative order, can’t be averaged, gives no hold for statistics and can’t be weighed against money. Little Dorrit is profoundly modest and not a person of intellectual force, and Clennam, she knows, is good, so she defers to him; but she has seen – for her feeling is perception – that to acquiesce in the suggestion that life can be weighed against money is a sin against life. Not crime, but sin; it is a word one has to use, even though Dickens (Cockshut’s judgement) knows nothing about sanctity, and is charged with shallowness, or philistinism, in matters of religion.

  ‘Life’, it may be commented, is a large word. Certainly it is a word we can’t do without and unquestionably an important one, and the importance is of a nature that makes it obviously futile to try to define abstractly, by way of achieving precision, the force or value it has as I have just used it. We feel the futility the more intensely in that, as we consider Dickens’s art in Little Dorrit, we see very potently at work a process that it seems proper to call definition by creative means. There are other important words, so closely associated – as, prompted by Little Dorrit, we find we have to invoke them – with ‘life’ that we judge them to be equally unsusceptible of what is ordinarily meant by definition; and these we unmistakably see getting a potent definition in the concrete. And as, with reassuring effect, we inquire into the justification of this last phrase, we recognize that what the prompted words in association portend gets its definition as the creative work builds up. Dickens’s essential ‘social criticism’, his inquest into Victorian civilization, is inseparable from this process. It is plain that neither the process (which is Dickens’s art) nor the significance has been, or can be, appreciated by critics, scholarly or otherwise, who can tell us – with forbearance and counter-concessions – that Dickens never grew up intellectually, and that there is no reason to suppose that he could have made much of Bentham.

  The points I have made about the nature and significance of Little Dorrit can be enforced by illustration abundantly and in many ways, as any responsive reader will easily exemplify; for the book has the aboundingness and the inexhaustible subtlety of the greatest art. My obvious next move is to record some of the notes that one finds oneself jotting down, as one reads, regarding the criteria implicit in Dickens’s critique of civilized England. When one has noted the set of indicative, or focal, words one is prompted to seize on, the words to which I have just referred, and made the essential commentary on them, one has at the same time done a lot to explain the force of calling Little Dorrit an ‘affirmation of life’. But to say that is to point to the difficulty; the words are focal, and the aboundingness, whatever Henry James might have thought, was not redundant. So I must make it plain at once that there can be no neat and systematic exposition, and avow that I find the directness of approach I may have seemed to promise out of place.

  I will start with some reflections on the character whose name gives the book its title. Little Dorrit, the heroine (if that is not too incongruous a word), has a large and very important part in the complex whole, and unmistakably represents human qualities on which Dickens sets a high value. Of her the first thing it seems natural to say is that she is good – which is not one of the ‘focal words’ in my own list. But if one says she is good it must be to add that she is utterly unlike Little Nell. I have found myself insisting on this obvious enough truth because, as I know from much arguing about Dickens, that people nowadays are apt to shy away from goodness as Little Dorrit evokes it, and, when challenged, to reply by associating her with Little Nell. They may have been shifted out of House’s kind of injustice, by which Dickens’s ‘social doctrine’ is reduced to a Cheeryble benevolence, but they still baulk at taking feminine goodness seriously.

  Of course, to suggest taking Little Nell seriously would be absurd: there’s nothing there. She doesn’t derive from any perception of the real; she’s a contrived unreality, the function of which is to facilitate in the reader a gross and virtuous self-indulgence. But the Little Dorrit we know, if we read and see and respond, emerges for us out of the situation and the routine of daily life that produced her – I mean, conditioned just that manifestation of what she spontaneously was, in the living individuality that started its unfolding when she was born in the Marshalsea. Her genius is to be always beyond question genuine – real. She is indefectibly real, and the test of reality for the others. That is a proposition to which the dramatic poem gives the clearest meaning. The characteristic manifests itself in her power to be, for her father and brother and sister, the never-failing providence, the vital core of sincerity, the conscience, the courage of moral percipience, the saving realism, that preserves for them the necessary bare minimum of the real beneath the fantastic play of snobberies, pretences and self-deceptions that constitutes genteel life in the Marshalsea. It is done, not merely told us, with inexhaustible fullness, diversity and power.

  Little Dorrit is unquestionable ‘there’ for us. Dickens’s creativity in achieving this is a matter of appealing to our experience. We recognize in her a profoundly important human possibility – one that has a normative bearing. There seems to me point in recalling here the parallel provided by James in his Maisie. I think of James because, having once suggested, with good reason, that the prompting to that masterpiece, What Maisie Knew, had been a memory of little David Copperfield’s situation in the Micawber household,5 it has struck me that Little Dorrit, a child and the family’s unfaltering stay, had certainly no less a part in the prompting. Incorruptibly innocent and sincere, what does she know – really know? To know would be to recognize and to judge: she judges and doesn’t judge. She understands enough to be infallible in response.

  I mean with these three last sentences merely to justify my ‘parallel’: to think of elaborating a comparison between the two works would be absurd. James’s intention, perfectly executed, is, in the characteristic Jamesian way, strictly and narrowly limited, and his book is really a nouvelle. That the unrecognized memory could play so essential a part in the imaginative conception (my suggestion is a convinced one) can be seen as an implicit tribute to Dickens on James’s part, the recall of which is immediately very much in place. He translated the Little Dorrit situation, the poignant human truth and the irony of which had clearly made a deep impression on him, into terms of a social world (or, rather, stratum) he had observed closely – and with revulsion. In saying that James’s intention in his nouvelle is severely limiting (I put it this way now), I don’t mean merely that there are many more things in Dickens’s book than the ‘Little Dorrit situation’ that James responded to creatively. My point is (and in making it I challenge the Jamesian critical attitude towards Dickens) that that situation as Dickens presents it involves the whole of the book he called Little Dorrit, and can be appreciated for what it is only by those who are open to the force of that truth. James’s assured critical bent is that of the decidedly less great artist. – My concern is not to depreciate James, but to vindicate the genius of Dickens.

  Immediately it is with the inquiry into ‘criteria’ and ‘values’ as it centres upon Little Dorrit herself. The affinity between her and Maisie is that they both so obviously prompt the characterizing notes, ‘ego-free love’, ‘disinterestedness’ and ‘innocence’. There is no compelling reason why the admirer of What Maisie Knew should feel that such notes ought to be developed further; he wouldn’t, in the nature of the case, be engaged in the kind of inquiry I have avowed as my own concern – an inquiry into
the criteria implicit in a critique of a civilization. It is only as involved – through all kinds of personal relations, contacts and implicit cross-references – in that civilization that Little Dorrit exists to be studied as a focus of significance, and she is a very important one.

  Dickens’s abundance, range and intense freedom are the conditions, not only of an inexhaustibly subtle relatedness,6 but of depth. I will pick up at this point the side-references I have thrown out to Blake. It has long seemed to me that there is the closest essential affinity between Dickens and the author of ‘London’. It was in relation to the question of ‘criteria’ and ‘values’ that the affinity was borne in on me: I found that in reading Dickens I was jotting down the same words and phrases as those prompted by Blake. As for the nature of the affinity, I will quote what I have written elsewhere.7

  But, of course it will be asked: what influence can Blake, who was far from being a current author in his time and didn’t come in with the Romantic poets, be supposed to have had? A study of the evidence may some day be written showing that Blake, his poetry and his thought were well enough known to make him an ‘influence’ of certainly not less importance on the literature of the Victorian age than Wordsworth; for Little Dorrit, where the characteristics that make one think of Blake belong to the essential organic structure of the dramatic poem, is a much greater creative work than any in which Wordsworth may be seen as counting in a major way, and it is representative of the art that puts Dickens among the very greatest creative writers.

  But I am not intending to commit myself to the belief that Dickens had read Blake. What is plain beyond question is that he was familiar with Wordsworth and with Romantic poetry in general, and that his interest and responsiveness were those of an originating genius who was equipped by nature to be himself a great poet. Further, a man of wonderfully quick intelligence, he mixed with the élite that shared the finest culture of the age and, when first frequented by him, was like himself pre-Victorian. One can say that his genius, entailing a completeness of interest in human life (Dickens was not ‘a solemn and unsexual man’), cities and civilization that it was Wordsworth’s genius not to have, spontaneously took those promptings of the complex romantic heritage which confirmed his response to early Victorian England; confirmed the intuitions and affirmations that, present organically in the structure and significance of Hard Times and Little Dorrit, make one think of Blake.

  I have in mind, of course, the way in which the irrelevance of the Benthamite calculus is exposed; the insistence that life is spontaneous and creative, so that the appeal to self-interest as the essential motive is life-defeating; the vindication, in terms of childhood, of spontaneity, disinterestedness, love and wonder; and the significant place given to Art – a place entailing a conception of Art that is pure Blake.

  In Hard Times, with its comparative simplicity as a damning critique of the hard ethos and the life-oppressing civilization, the identity of the affirmatives, or evoked and related manifestations of life and health and human normality, by which he condemns, with those of Blake is clear. Little Dorrit is immensely more complex, and offers something like a comprehensive report on Victorian England – what is life, what are the possibilities of life, in this society and civilization, and what could life, in a better society, be? To elicit the convinced assent to the proposition that here too the underlying structure of value-affirmations (implicit, spontaneous, inevitable) upon which the form and significance depend is Blakean, is not so easy. But the structure is there; for the book has organic form and essential economy; it is all significant.

  – The entailed immediate emphasis for me is that, if one’s commentary is to be effective in the required way, one will be conscious of facing a challenge to one’s tactical skill. And, with ‘disinterestedness’, ‘ego-free love’ and Little Dorrit in mind, I think that my best move is to adduce Blake’s distinction between the ‘identity’ and the ‘selfhood’. ‘Identity’ is the word with which he insists, in the face of the ethos of ‘Locke and Newton’, that what matters is life, that only in the individual is life ‘there’, and that the individual is unique. With the distinction he insists also that the individual is a centre of responsibility towards something that is not him- (or her-)self. The distinction points to a basic truth – and not the less because there are perhaps difficulties in the way of seeing the distinction as absolute; a truth that is made to manifest itself concretely, its force brought home to us, by the great novelist’s art. In fact I know of no better way of developing an account of Blake’s thought than by turning, as I do now, to Little Dorrit, my theme being the thought – the insight and intelligence – of Dickens.

  III

  What Little Dorrit herself is as a person is established for us, i.e. ‘created’, by the dramatic interplay with others in which the narrative presents her; the significance we see in her is developed by a complex implicit play of contrasts and affinities that involves all the characters in the cast. Her great opposite is Mrs Clennam, the righteously unforgiving, who in the dénouement asks her forgiveness. Immediately after the confrontation with the blackmailing Rigaud,8 and its sequel, the nightmare passage through the streets to the Marshalsea, we are told of the proud tormented woman, as she waits for Little Dorrit to come to her:9 ‘She stood at the window, bewildered, looking down into the prison out of her own different prison, when a soft word or two of surprise made her start, and Little Dorrit stood before her’. Little Dorrit, it comes to her, is the offered – the sought – opening of escape, and she takes it. The prison out of which she looks is the selfhood: Urizen, one has found oneself calling it – as one had found oneself calling the other too. Having achieved, in appeal and confession, a measure of release from her solitary confinement, she rushes with Little Dorrit out of the Marshalsea, and arrives at the grim and stale old house just as it splits and crumbles in dust and thunder before their eyes and subsides into rubble.

  Mrs Clennam too sank to the ground; from that hour she never recovered the ability ‘to lift a finger or speak a word’; ‘reclined in her wheeled chair … she lived and died a statue’. The mechanism of will, idea and ego had stopped; but, after the years during which the spontaneous upflow had been jealously and righteously excluded, there was nothing that could take over; only a sad ghost of identity for a while remained, wholly impotent. She couldn’t now, in the manner of those days of Urizenic domination, drive her wheeled chair with a thrust of her foot from one place to another in her enclosing room.10

  The selfhood encloses; it insulates; the closure against the creative flow from below is at the same time a closure against surrounding lives and life. In Mrs Clennam and Miss Wade and Henry Gowan the identity has become the selfhood: the thing is achieved. The word ‘responsibility’ I used gives some clue to the way in which this happens – some clue to the nature and significance of the process. ‘Disinterestedness’, and ‘ego-free love’ are easily said; but the responsibility in question hasn’t – the effect of the whole complex work is to bring that out – its complete representation, its full comprehensive paradigm, in Little Dorrit, whose goodness is innocence. The presence of Daniel Doyce, who is both short and sharp about Henry Gowan, makes that plain. Doyces are rare, but what Doyce represents in so unqualified a way can’t be dispensed with. One learns, however, to expect, in general, varying degrees of qualification; the life-thwarting potentialities in the psyche being uneliminable and insidious. Doyce’s indefeasible ‘responsibility towards something other than himself’ entails, to be effective, his being strongly conscious of it. Such a consciousness can hardly not entail a sense of one’s identity’s being important; one’s identity is oneself, and, as the habit of this last word in free use intimates, the shift to a dominating sense of one’s unique and unshared selfhood as the important thing is insidiously easy.

  Mrs Clennam’s Calvinistic religion enables her to transmute the service of her will – of her possessiveness, pride, jealousy, vengefulness and life-hatred – into the serv
ice of God, and this gives a poised, judicially stern and quasi-rational authority to her ruthless dominance:11 Urizen reigns. The essential nature of her disease is brought out by the simpler case of Miss Wade. Miss Wade has no need of disguised self-justification, and no need of God. In her, ‘identity’ is ‘selfhood’, completely, simply and without misgiving; as if, in fact, she were God, a jealous and vengeful one, and blameless. She had no Little Dorrit on whom to appease a suppressed need of tenderness and an unavowed qualm of conscience. Her righteousness is wholly a sense of being wronged (i.e. sinned against). And she has been wronged, how irremediably, the state expressed with mechanical invariableness in her behaviour manifests; she has been wronged by Victorian civilization, being a victim of the Victorian attitude towards illegitimacy12 – the attitude as experienced by the sex which was the more exposed to its cruellest consequences: she needs to be wronged in order to keep up the intensity of her resentment, the passion which for her is life.

  To us the whole process presents itself as a hysterical mechanism – a mechanism which in fact is madness, and this is what she describes in the curriculum vitae she hands to Clennam13 in order to convince him of the hopelessness of his quest. Her need to be wronged is a need to dominate – to be uniquely real, unconditioned and absolute; and driven by it she destroys, she herself being the victim who can’t escape. She doesn’t rescue Tattycoram in order to make her happy; she doesn’t want to make herself happy – essentially she is destructive. This it didn’t take Tattycoram long to discover – or, rather, she had felt the lethal fascination at the first contact, and knew at once that the fascination was fear: restored to Twickenham, she confesses that.