by F. R. Leavis
Reality, courage, disinterestedness, truth, spontaneity, creativeness – and, summing them, life: these words, further charged with definitive value, make the appropriate marginal comment. Little Dorrit, whose desolate sense of the unreality is what we have been sharing, is the focal presence of what they stand for. But she is beaten. For her – a profound irony – the real is what, at her father’s liberation, she left behind in the Marshalsea. The point implicitly made (the book makes it in many ways) is that reality is a collaborative creation: Little Dorrit, in ‘chartered’, mean and gloomy London, had found collaboration in the responsive human needs of her father and his other children, and in the human good-nature of the turnkeys, the Collegians and Flora – even of Mrs Clennam. But in Italy she is wholly denied it; her love for her father is reduced to expressing itself in docility to Mrs General, the arch-unreality. He, on the other hand (for Dickens’s irony is pregnant) has not left the Marshalsea behind; in this genteel world of collusive unreality the old familiar Marshalsea is the concealed reality – a menacing fact, ever-present in apprehension and suspicion.
Reality for him is what has to be feared. The Marshalsea he now, as a courier-respected gentleman, inhabits in Italy (and, when he goes there, in London) is the collusive unreality of the genteel world. It too is a collaborative creation. The novel gives us a richly diverse view of the creating and maintaining. Here again we have the subtlety of Dickens’s insight into the human psyche. Little Dorrit, like anyone else, needs collaboration in creating the reality she can grasp – more comprehensively, the reality she can implicitly believe herself to be, and that which she can feel with assurance she lives in. Her father too, as he exemplifies – with effects of both comedy and pathos – every day, can’t get on without collaboration: without it he couldn’t have maintained the unreality he inhabited as a gentleman in the Marshalsea (the prison that also protected – as he recognized in declining the turnkey’s offer to let him step outside into the street for a glimpse of the world.) It was a system of countenanced empty pretensions. But so is that in which he proudly takes his place when he is liberated into Society; the ‘real’ unreality is equally unreal, and, in his own way, equally a prison. It is unreal in a way symbolized by the authority of Mrs General, who is concerned for nothing but a conventionally approved kind of surface. Members, by observing a given code, are enabled to feel that their claims to be genteel, correct and of the ‘right people’ are recognized by the others who observe the code and are recognized; the recognition – a matter of externals (or ‘surface’) – is everything. The system of authoritative conventions that makes this Society possible is itself a perverse product of creative collaboration, collaborative creativity being so essentially in and of the human psyche that it must, one way or another, have play.
A Henry Gowan, whose social distinction is a matter of being recognized as most unquestionably one of the socially distinguished – one of the born and guaranteed élite, can rely on the system to give him his status and support him in it, in spite of the quasi-Bohemian habit he affects and his deliberately disconcerting articulateness (he doesn’t, of course, threaten anything that matters much to Mrs General or the Chief Butler).
Here we have the aspect of the system that particularly prompts the use of the word ‘snobbery’ – a word the implications of which are brought out when we say, as we might have done, that we can’t do clinical justice to Tattycoram without giving full weight to the benevolent British obtuseness of Mr Meagles, the retired banker, who is, as Dickens is not, a Philistine, placed as such by Dickens, and a snob as well.
No one has surpassed Dickens in the treatment of Victorian snobbery – indeed, has anyone approached him? He is clear-sighted about the social realities it portends; he sees that the successful banker’s amiable weakness represents a major political fact, and may be said to give us the effective condition of the continued unchallenged power of the Barnacles – whose Circumlocution Office, even if we don’t accept it as exhaustively representative of the way the country was administered, conveys so unanswerably what we know to have been a large measure of the essential truth. The Gowans are a branch of the Barnacle clan, so Mr Meagles, though he would have saved his daughter from Henry Gowan if he could, gets immense satisfaction from the wedding.23 The irony of the situation is developed in the comedy – painful, but still comedy, marvellous in its perfection – of the various dialogues in which Mrs Gowan imposes on Clennam, the Meagleses and the world her version of the marriage, which makes Henry the victim of designing bourgeois climbers, Pet’s good looks being the bait.
These things exhibit a consummate art that is very characteristic of Dickens’s genius. In the rendering of manners at the social level at which they are the essential art of living, to be practised with the assurance only a conscious state of initiation can give, Dickens is certainly not a lesser master than Henry James. The dialogue, along with the rest of the notation, in the scenes of ‘highly civilized’ intercourse I have referred to is perfect (and it comes from the creator of Flora Finching). In those scenes, of course, Mrs Gowan is the assured practitioner – the exploiter – of ‘civilization’, and Clennam and Meagles are the practised upon; the genius of the greater novelist comes out in the way the comedy is made painful for us by the quite uncomic significances that our deep sympathies respond to: we protest, in fact – the human issues are too important for us to be anything but partisan.
Fanny, in accepting the brainless Edmund Sparkler, does so as belonging with accomplished and single-minded assurance to that ‘civilization’, having, on the Dorrit re-emergence into Society, achieved her unquestioned position with exemplary completeness. Her ability to do so was achieved in the Marshalsea: it is the product of her upbringing, and her father can see in her the reward and vindication of his resolute stand for ‘self-respect’.24 The subtle perfection with which Dickens does her is seen in the way in which, enjoying the comedy of her unfailing success in holding her own socially, we never forget that she is the pupil of the Marshalsea and the sister of Little Dorrit, so that her value even in these scenes is felt as more than satiric. She provides, in fact, ‘one more illustration of what, associating it with pregnancy and depth, I have called flexibility, meaning the ease with which his art moves between different tones and modes. We can’t but regard her with a marked lack of sympathy, our applause being only for her spirit and skill in the heartless comedy of manners in which she triumphs; but at the same time she belongs as essentially to the sombre theme of the Marshalsea, the long drama of human disaster with its disturbing and monitory significance, as Little Dorrit and the rest of the family do.
And this is the moment to note a preoccupation of Dickens’s that has its part in the normative impulsion and the essential positive nisus, without which his inquest into civilization in England would be something other than the great creative work it is. The ‘civilization’ with which Fanny, the reverse of disabled by her Marshalsea education, triumphantly identifies herself is that in terms of which Henry Gowan, so unambiguously ‘more than an artist’, is beyond question a gentleman. But the word ‘gentleman’ as used consciously by Dickens in pursuit of his artist’s purpose of exploration and definition has a number of different values, the relations between which clearly seem to him a matter of great interest. Ferdinand, the pleasant young Barnacle, is a kinsman of Henry Gowan’s and a member of the same privileged class. In applying the word to him, however, we find ourselves, at the prompting of Dickens’s art, doing it in this way: ‘Ferdinand is charming, genuinely kind, and, in short, a gentleman.’ At the Circumlocution Office, where the Barnacles in general make no attempt to disguise their lack of any decent human consideration, and show not the least concern for manners, Ferdinand, with urbane friendliness, tries to dissuade Clennam from the futility of pursuing his inquiries.
This kind of thing, it will be commented, merely exemplifies the role that Ferdinand, who identifies himself happily with the system that maintains him, plays in it; plays
in that whole complex organism of pretence, pretension, privilege, parasitic class-interest and ‘civilization’ – the whole social malady – that Dickens is exposing. And certainly Ferdinand’s charm, in Dickens’s sense of it as in Clennam’s, is a matter for exasperation and diagnostic comment: we remember as characteristic the part played by Ferdinand on the occasion of the Merdle dinner in finally bringing together for a tête-à-tête – the end for which the dinner was arranged – Lord Decimus and the great Merdle (Book the Second, chapter XII). Ferdinand has charm, urbanity and tact, and here Dickens shows them functioning. Before the culminating achievement – this we remember too – they have been shown functioning in the same spirit, but to an effect that eliminates all possibility of amusement or complaisance in the reader.
‘Pray,’ asked Lord Decimus, casting his eyes around the table, ‘what is this story I have heard of a gentleman long confined in a debtor’s prison, proving to be of a wealthy family, and having come into the inheritance of a large sum of money? I have met with a variety of allusions to it. Do you know anything of it, Ferdinand?’
‘I only know this much,’ said Ferdinand, ‘that he has given the Department with which I have the honour to be associated’; this sparkling young Barnacle threw off the phrase sportively, as who should say, we know all about these forms of speech, but we must keep it up, we must keep the game alive; ‘no end of trouble, and has put us into innumerable fixes.’
And he gives an account of the characteristic ritual of incompetence, incuria and obstruction, protracted in complete indifference to any decent human consideration, and holding up the discharge of the Dorrit debt and Mr Dorrit’s release from prison for months, that makes ‘charm’ and ‘urbanity’, for the reader, exceedingly unpleasant words.
‘It was a triumph of public business,’ said this handsome young Barnacle, laughing heartily. ‘You never saw such a lot of forms in your life.’
He exhibits himself, in short, as the voice of the Barnacle caste, and utterly devoid of imaginative sympathy.
We mustn’t, however, simplify. The visit that Clennam in the Marshalsea receives from Ferdinand doesn’t come altogether under this account. The elegant gentleman riding up and dismounting is immediately recognized as unmistakably a gentleman at the Lodge and by the prisoners. But ‘gentleman’ shifts its value when, defining the effect on us of the scene in Clennam’s room, we say that it shows Ferdinand as charming, genuinely kind, and in short ‘a gentleman’. The effect itself isn’t a simple one. He makes the ‘confession of his faith as the head of the rising Barnacles who were born of woman’ – ‘A little humbug and a groove, and everything goes on admirably, if you leave it alone’ (a faith ‘to be followed under a variety of watchwords which they utterly repudiated and disbelieved’), and ‘Nothing could be more agreeable than his frank and courteous bearing, or adapted with a more gentlemanly instinct to the circumstances of his visit.’
It is a faith, or ‘civilized’ philosophy, that no one to whom the questions about life and civilization preoccupying Dickens matter can have failed to meet with and to hate. And that Dickens expresses here the strong feeling with which the ‘social criticism’ he conveys in the Barnacles and Gowans and their Merdle is charged is quite clear. Yet we remind ourselves – or are not allowed to forget – that Ferdinand’s visit is kind. And the favourable element in our response, an essentially evaluative one, is confirmed and enforced by the contrast with the immediately succeeding visitor, Blandois, who proclaims himself with characteristic gratuitousness ‘a gentleman from the beginning and a gentleman to the end’. The contrast prompts us with the implicit judgement that Ferdinand has not only external good breeding, but, associated with it, something that distinguishes him radically from Henry Gowan, the gentlemanly ‘friend’ of the blackguard to whom, in calling him a blackguard, we deny the name of gentleman in any sense. If anyone should comment that the element of genuineness in Ferdinand merely adds to his plausibility, qualifying him to represent an essential constituent of the Barnacle system, and serving to make the noxious ethos of the Circumlocution Office seem amiable, Dickens’s art prompts us with a reply: it won’t do simply to see Ferdinand as linked back with Lord Decimus and the Gowans, ignoring the significance of his being drawn, as he unmistakably is, towards Clennam, to whom he goes out of his way to be kind. The significance lies in the implicit recognition on the part of so limited a representative of good breeding that Clennam himself is a gentleman – Clennam in whom good breeding, apparent in his bearing and manners, expresses and engages (as even Ferdinand in his way perceives) something deep within that repudiates the Barnacle philosophy.
I am insisting, then, that ‘gentleman’ means something important here, and that Dickens – his art is witness – values very highly certain social and cultural achievements it portends. No one more unequivocally than he has placed snobbery and the stupidities and cruelties of class-pride (‘exclusiveness’), but he has the reverse of contempt for civilization manifested as manners – manners that in their refined form come under ‘politeness’; he knows that they may be, in what they entail or engage, more than a mere matter of external social grace or aplomb – Mrs General’s ‘form’ and ‘surface’. He simplifies no questions and doesn’t suggest that there can be any simple answers, and the ways in which he uses the word ‘gentleman’ in Little Dorrit, the range of his related uses (on one occasion, where in our period remoteness we a little flinch, he tells us that John Chivery showed the feelings of a gentleman), would repay study. By way of enforcing this suggestion, I will remark that in the world of (say) Kingsley Amis no one is a gentleman; the idea, whether as represented by Henry Gowan, Ferdinand, Clennam or John Chivery, is unknown – and the word has no use.
Before I proceed to justify the observation that Dickens clearly means us to judge Clennam a gentleman par excellence, I will slip in a point raised by the mention of Ferdinand. He belongs to the Circumlocution Office. Whether or not the Circumlocution Office conveys an altogether fair criticism of Government and bureaucracy at the time of the Crimean War doesn’t matter. Life always has to be defended, vindicated and asserted against Government, bureaucracy and organization – against society in that sense. The defence and assertion are above all the business of the artist, which is never what those who think that the ‘responsibility of the writer’ is something he can be instructed in suppose.
I have observed that Ferdinand’s taking to Clennam is a recognition that Clennam, though so demonstratively not of the ruling caste, but an offence to it, is a gentleman: in doing so Ferdinand, for all his unquestioning identity with the odious world of privilege and snobbery to which he belongs, implicitly recognizes that the ‘civilization’ of manners seems somehow to entail, at any rate for him, something more than Henry Gowan’s assured superiority and easy social competence do for Henry Gowan. Dickens knew, in bringing in such an episode, what significances constituted its point, and I won’t offer to develop them further in general terms. Ferdinand likes what we and Daniel Doyce like in Clennam, in whom the external ‘civilization’ that qualifies him to be dealt with as a gentleman by Mrs Gowan expresses and engages (to his disadvantage in dealing with her, a given kind of lady) sensitiveness, modesty and sympathetic tact.25 That is, it expresses and engages the qualities that enable him to be the intimate and wholly acceptable friend to Doyce that, with all his bourgeois geniality and good-nature, the obtuse and patronizing Meagles can’t be.
These are the qualities that, when it comes to coping with Flora, put Clennam at the disadvantage that has those decidedly comic aspects – as, for example, when, having contrived that she should be shown round the dark old Clennam house so familiar to them in childhood, she makes the escorting Arthur clasp her with his arm beneath her shawl. The whole comedy of Flora tends too much to be thought of as a self-justifying spontaneity of the Dickensian genius – a kind of creative largesse. It is comedy, and of a lively kind; but it doesn’t follow that the comedy hasn’t its part to play in a tota
l significance. I have already pointed to ways in which Flora tells in the essential communication of the book. And it can now be observed with some force that a corrective emphasis is conveyed by the piquant contrast she presents with Clennam. Flora is decidedly not a lady in the sense that Clennam is a gentleman; but her exuberantly ungenteel characteristics don’t blind us – the contrary – to her robust and warm good-nature and the uninhibited completeness with which she has the courage of it. In fact, in her superbly innocent spontaneity she is the great anti-snob; she is qualified to be that as Clennam obviously isn’t.26 And her creative vitality brings home to us the way in which Clennam’s virtues, necessary as they are, don’t represent all that is necessary – I mean, in relation to the criteria of Dickens’s evaluative inquiry, which was initiated in the opening of Little Dorrit by the presentation of the repatriated Clennam’s own predicament; criteria that are sought, elicited, and brought to conscious recognition (that is, determined) in the course of the inquiry itself.
VI
I have referred to the way in which in the sufficiently dramatic poetry of Flora’s discourses we feel the presence of Dickens the creative genius himself. We know it to be impossible that any utterance of Clennam’s should affect us in that way. This certainty, however, doesn’t entail the conclusion that Dickens the poet, the incomparable Victorian master of poetic expression, is therefore debarred from having any direct part in the processes that make Clennam present to us. Consider the following – Blandois, belonging as he does to the melodramatic side of Little Dorrit, has melted into thin air, and the problem for Dickens (it might indeed have presented itself to him as one) is to make us feel in immediacy that the prolonged and unexplained disappearance does profoundly trouble Clennam, so that he is obsessed by it: