Dickens the Novelist

by F. R. Leavis

  But he did not receive it with unqualified assent; on the contrary, he said, ‘No, gentlemen, no; let them not misunderstand him.’

  And he proceeds to deliver his homily on the rare union of qualities needed by the man who shall be able to support existence and maintain his self-respect as a gentleman in the Marshalsea.

  Was his beloved brother Frederick that man? No. They saw him, even, as it was, crushed. Misfortune crushed him. He had not power of recoil enough, not elasticity enough, to be a long time in such a place, and yet preserve his self-respect and feel conscious that he was a gentleman. Frederick had not (if he might use the expression) Power enough to see in any little attentions and – and – Testimonials that he might under such circumstances receive, the goodness of human nature, the fine spirit animating the Collegians as a community, and at the same time no degradation to himself, and no depreciation of his claims as a gentleman. Gentlemen, God bless you!

  If the boldness of the stylization as seen in extracts might prompt one to recall that Dickens had much frequented Ben Jonson, one would never, reading currently through the whole page, think of finding a descriptive felicity in ‘Jonsonian’ for this art, which is so sensitively supple over so unlimited a human range. Indeed, reading through the whole chapter, one isn’t prompted to talk of stylization: the nature of Dickens’s marvellous freedom suggests too much, in the exquisite vital sensitiveness that we see the boldness to be, the analogy of Shakespeare, and there are in fact the strongest reasons for calling the art of the great Dickens Shakespearian. This is the emphasis one might very well resort to if called on to justify the observation that Dickens is not only a different kind of genius from James, but a genius of a greater kind. The creative life in him flows more freely and fully from the deep sources – the depth, the freedom and the fullness being the conditions of the Shakespearian suppleness.

  I refer in this comparative way to James because there is good reason for insisting that Dickens is certainly no less a master than James of the subtleties of the inner life – the inner drama of the individual life in its relations with others. The vivid external drama in the chapter under consideration (Book the First, chapter XIX) has its meaning in the inner drama, which is so largely a matter of the essentially inexplicit; or, rather, the inner drama is conveyed, with an inevitable felicity of supple shifts, in terms of the external. William Dorrit’s public demonstration of his heroically sustained role of Gentleman modulates into the domestic scene with his daughter.

  Her arm was on his shoulder, but she did not look into his face while he spoke. Bending her head, she looked another way.

  ‘I – hem! – can’t think, Amy, what has given Chivery offence. He is generally so – so very attentive and respectful. And to-night he was quite – quite short with me. Other people there too. Why, good Heaven! if I was to lose the support of Chivery and his brother officers, I might starve to death here.’ While he spoke, he was opening and shutting his hands like valves; so conscious all the time of that touch of shame that he shrunk before his own knowledge of his meaning.

  ‘I – ha! – I can’t think what it’s owing to. I am sure I can’t imagine what the cause of it is. There was a certain Jackson here once, a turnkey of the name of Jackson (I don’t think you remember him, my dear, you were very young) and – hem! – and he had a – brother and this – young brother paid his addresses to – at least, but did not go as far as to pay his addresses to – but admired – respectfully admired – the – not the daughter, the sister – of one of us; a rather distinguished Collegian; I may say, very much so. His name was Captain Martin; and he consulted me on the question whether it was necessary that his daughter – sister – should hazard offending the turnkey’s brother by being too – ha! – too plain with the other brother – Captain Martin was a gentleman and a man of honour, and I put it to him – first to give me his – his own opinion. Captain Martin (highly respected in the army) then unhesitatingly said, that it appeared to him that his – hem! – sister was not called upon to understand the young man too distinctly, and that she might lead him on – I am doubtful whether lead him on was Captain Martin’s exact expression: indeed I think he said tolerate him – on his father’s – I should say brother’s – account. I hardly know how I strayed into this story. I suppose it has been through being unable to account for Chivery; but as to the connection between the two, I don’t see –’

  His voice died away, as if she could not bear the pain of hearing him, and her hand crept to his lips. For a little while, there was a dead silence and stillness, and she remained with her arm round his neck, and her head bowed down upon his shoulder.

  She says nothing, turns no dark eyes upon him, but merely by continuing to be what unselfconsciously she is, brings him to a halt and an unwilling self-realization – self-realization, though tainted and fleeting. It is utterly convincing; by the close acquaintance we have been given with her, she exists for us in a way that makes it so.

  … he began his meal. They did not, as yet, look at one another. By little and little he began; laying down his knife and fork with a noise, takings things up sharply, biting at his bread as if he were offended with it, and in other similar ways showing that he was out of sorts. At length he pushed his plate from him, and spoke aloud. With the strangest inconsistency.

  ‘What does it matter whether I eat or starve? What does it matter whether such a blighted life as mine comes to an end, now, next week, or next year? What am I worth to anyone? A poor prisoner, fed on alms and broken victuals; a squalid and disgraced wretch!’

  ‘Father, father!’

  Where shall we find an art like this? It is astonishingly original, the art of a great poet who is essentially a novelist. We can see that without a familiarity with the theatre of the time Dickens couldn’t have given William Dorrit, the Gentleman, that speech at the prison lodge, but we feel nothing infelicitously theatrical about it. And in noting that the convention Dickens actually uses is that of reported oratory we perceive at the same time what a manifestation of triumphant tact his use of it is. It makes what might otherwise have seemed too challengingly exaggerated in its absurdity, too stagey (for William Dorrit is essentially an actor here, playing the role he has cast himself for in the play, the histrionic unreality he has made of his life in the Marshalsea), wholly acceptable. Dickens in fact improvises, in a way characteristic of his art, his own convention, and does so with a perfect rightness. Our response as to a painfully disturbing actuality of life retains its full power; we don’t lose our embarrassed and apprehensive sense of the emotional and moral crisis – the poignant affair of John Chivery immediately present to us in the background.

  The domestic sequel, the intimate scene between father and daughter, issues with a complete naturalness out of all that has gone before, and it is horrible and tragic. The father (Father of the Marshalsea) is committed to his role with an alcoholic’s irredeemableness; he can’t face life apart from it. But, without support from her, which in this matter it is impossible for her to give – a fact that there’s no saving him from having to admit to himself, he can’t sustain it. The fostered unrealities collapse; for a terrible moment of humiliation he can’t help seeing things as they are – what his daughter is, what he himself is, and what are their relations.

  How is it possible not to recognize in the deviser of such an art, an art serving with such boldness, penetration and delicacy such an insight into the human soul, one of the very greatest of those dramatic poets whose genius has gone into the novel? The particular human situation presented in the chapter is of course central to Little Dorrit, and it appears recurrently in closely analogous forms, such recurrence with variation being necessarily entailed in the undertaking and the designed total effect. For another major instance, a comparable scene in which the painful comedy of the heroically preserved gentleman-status has for upshot a collapse into something like abject self-recognition, one can point to that which ensues on the Father’s encountering old Nandy (�
��one of my pensioners’) being escorted into the Marshalsea on Little Dorrit’s arm (Book the First, chapter XXXI). The irony of the Chivery episode has a further development when Mr Dorrit, no longer the Father of the Marshalsea but impeccably and opulently a gentleman on tour, and rejoicing in Fanny’s marriage to Edmund Sparkler, a step-son of the great Merdle, torments poor Amy with the insistent and confident admonition that it is now her turn, her duty, to make an equally good marriage.

  ‘Amy,’ he resumed; ‘your dear sister, our Fanny, has contracted – ha hum – a marriage, eminently calculated to extend the basis of our – ha – connection, and to – hum – consolidate our social relations. My love, I trust that the time is not far distant when some – ha – eligible partner may be found for you.’

  ‘Oh no! Let me stay with you. I beg and pray that I may stay with you! I want nothing but to stay and take care of you!’

  She said it like one in sudden alarm.

  ‘Nay, Amy, Amy, Amy,’ said Mr Dorrit. ‘This is weak and foolish, weak and foolish. You have a – ha – responsibility imposed on you by your position. It is to develop that position, and be – hum – worthy of that position. As to taking care of me; I can – ha – take care of myself. Or,’ he added after a moment, ‘if I should need to be taken care of, I – hum – can, with the – ha – blessing of Providence, be taken care of. I – ha – hum – I cannot, my dear child, think of engrossing, and – ha – as it were, sacrificing you.’

  Reinstated in wealth and position, the Dorrit family in Italy not only don’t need the practical and material services so long taken for granted; they can afford – as they desire – never to be reminded of the real: they are securely in and of Society, which is personified for us in Mrs General – form, surface and emptiness; Papa, potatoes, prunes and prisms. Mrs General (who may be counted on not to decline Mr Dorrit’s imminent proposal) is a companion figure to Mr Gradgrind; they represent complementary ‘social’ ways of emptying the reality out of life – to note which is to recall the significance of Mr James Harthouse’s part in Hard Times.

  But for Little Dorrit there is no challenge she can offer to meet dramatically with the counter-challenge: that kind of demonstration is not what life has cast her for. Deprived of her raison d’être, slighted, disciplined and neglected, she finds the beautiful and squalid world around her unreal in its strangeness, and looks back to the real reality left behind in the Marshalsea – a reality created among those familiar unrealities by love, spontaneity and habitual service of life:

  the more surprising the scenes, the more they resembled the unreality of her own inner life as she went through its vacant places all day long. The gorges of the Simplon, its enormous depths and thundering waterfalls, the wonderful road, the points of danger where a loose wheel or a faltering horse would have been disastrous, the descent into Italy, the opening of that beautiful land, as the rugged mountain-chasm widened and let them out from a gloomy and dark imprisonment – all a dream – only the old mean Marshalsea a reality. Nay, even the old mean Marshalsea was shaken to its foundations when she imagined it without her father. She could scarcely believe that the prisoners were still lingering in the close yard, that the mean rooms were still every one tenanted, and that the turnkey still stood in the Lodge letting people in and out, all just as she well knew it to be. With a remembrance of her father’s old life hanging about her like the burden of a sorrowful tune, Little Dorrit would wake from a dream of her birthplace into a whole day’s dream. The painted room in which she awoke, often a humbled state-chamber in a dilapidated palace, would begin it; with its wild red autumnal vineleaves overhanging the glass, its orange-trees on the cracked white terrace outside the window, a group of monks and peasants in the little street below, misery and magnificence wrestling with each other upon every rood of ground in the prospect, no matter how widely diversified, and misery throwing magnificence with the strength of fate … Then breakfast in another painted chamber, damp-stained and of desolate proportions; and then the departure, which, to her timidity and sense of not being grand enough for her place in the ceremonies, was always an uneasy thing.

  V

  Dickens, as in the chapter from which that comes (Book the Second, chapter III), can evoke scene and setting through long passages on successive pages, while relying with an easy confidence on a sustained attention from the reader – an attention as inevitably given as if what was being presented were a gripping narrative of events. For this evocative power that Dickens so abundantly commands is a different thing from what we admire, perhaps, in Ruskinian poetic prose (and Dickens, employing it, shows himself in an obvious way a greater poet than any of the Victorian formal poets). It is not merely that the effects in which it manifests itself present so vitally nervous a diversity; in considering this livingness we can’t but observe that it belongs to an art that doesn’t go in for set descriptions – products of a talent that we can think of as something additional to the gift that makes Dickens a great novelist. Dickens’s evocations are always a novelist’s; they are doing the novelist’s essential work.

  In the chapter I have been quoting from they give us in poignant immediacy – give us as an experienced or suffered state – the peculiar loneliness and hunger of Little Dorrit’s situation; and the insistence, or free-flowing abundance (never felt as longueur), is necessary to the effect, so important an element in the total communicated significance of the novel. The family proceed towards Venice:

  So they would be driven madly through the narrow unsavoury streets, and jerked out at the town gate. Among the day’s unrealities would be, roads where the bright red vines were looped and garlanded together on trees for many miles; woods of olives; white villages and towns on hill-sides, lovely without, but frightful with their dirt and poverty within; crosses by the way; deep blue lakes with fairy islands and clustering boats with awnings of bright colours and sails of beautiful form; vast piles of buildings mouldering to dust; hanging-gardens where the weeds had grown so strong that their stems, like wedges driven home, had split the arch and rent the wall; stone-terraced lanes, with the lizards running into and out of every chink; beggars of all sorts everywhere: pitiful, picturesque, hungry, merry children-beggars and aged beggars. Often at posting-houses, and other halting-places, these miserable creatures would appear the only realities of the day …

  In the evocation of Venice we get the obsessive sense that troubles the poor girl settling into a nostalgic hopelessness of enchantment:

  In this crowning unreality, where all the streets were paved with water, and where the death-like stillness of the days and nights was broken by no sound but the softened ringing of church-bells, the rippling of the current, and the cry of the gondoliers turning the corners of the flowing streets, Little Dorrit, quite lost by her task being done, sat alone to muse.

  To the potency of this mode of the Dickensian genius George Eliot and Henry James after her, pay a tribute the more telling because unconscious (James at a remove, for he clearly derives through her). I am thinking of the passage in chapter 20 of Middlemarch that evokes, in terms of the effect on her of Rome, the state of fevered despair to which marriage with Casaubon has so soon brought Dorothea, and the unmistakably related passage in The Portrait of a Lady that gives us the disillusioned Isabel. To be sure of the derivative relation to Dickens one has only to recall Little Dorrit looking round at the grandeur and strangeness and squalor of the immemorial city. I will quote two sentences.

  The family has moved on to Rome:

  Through a repetition of the former Italian scenes, growing more dirty and more haggard as they went on, and bringing them to where the very air was diseased, they passed to their destination. A fine residence had been taken for them on the Corso, and there they took up their abode, in a city where everything seemed to be trying to stand still for ever on the ruins of something else – except the water, which, following eternal laws, tumbled and rolled from its glorious multitude of fountains. (Part the Second, chapter VII.)
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  The peculiar poetic genius comes out here with cogent felicity in what, for a close, follows the ‘except’, evoking as ‘eternal laws’ the spontaneity and power of life – triumphant gloriously even in the eternal city; no, not triumphant as they ought to be (for the metaphorical potency of that close is complex). This, we say (perceiving as we say it that the Dickensian vitality of the whole passage is involved) is essential Dickens: neither George Eliot nor James is a great poet in this sense – the sense in which we find the description felicitous and potent when we acclaim this kind of effect as intensely characteristic of the writer’s genius. For George Eliot, of course, as for us, the whole preceding evocation of Little Dorrit’s state of malign enchantment makes its power felt in what we take as her response to Rome. Hence the profound impression associated in particular with Rome that George Eliot recalls unwittingly in her derivative passage.

  But the nature of the distinctive genius as represented by the kind of poetic life I have called attention to is not fully recognized if we don’t, in considering the passage last quoted, note the tone, manner and burden of the paragraph into which, illustrating one manifestation of what I have called Dickens’s flexibility, it leads (the flexibility being something that has for its accompaniment pregnancy – manifestations, these, of the author’s wholeness and profundity of possession by his human theme). What follows immediately is this:

  Here, it seemed to Little Dorrit that a change came over the Marshalsea spirit of their society, and that Prunes and Prisms got the upper hand. Everybody was walking about St Peter’s and the Vatican on somebody else’s cork legs, and straining every visible object through somebody else’s sieve. Nobody said what anything was, but everybody said what Mrs General, Mr Eustace, or somebody else said it was. The whole body of travellers seemed to be a collection of voluntary human sacrifices, bound hand and foot, and delivered over to Mr Eustace and his attendants to have the entrails of their intellects arranged according to the taste of that sacred priesthood. Through the rugged remains of temples and tombs and palaces and senate halls and theatres and amphitheatres of ancient days, hosts of tongue-tied and blindfolded moderns were carefully feeling their way, incessantly repeating Prunes and Prisms, in the endeavour to set their lips according to the received form. Mrs General was in her pure element. Nobody had an opinion. There was a formation of surface going on around her on an amazing scale, and it had not a flaw of courage or honest free speech in it.