Dickens the Novelist

by F. R. Leavis

  15. Book the Second, chapter XXXIII.

  16. We note how the intense vividness of that is generated in the temperature-paradox.

  17. I have discussed the force of this phrase of Lawrence’s in the note at the end of D. H. Lawrence: Novelist, and in the essay on Anna Karenina in Anna Karenina and Other Essays.

  18. That we have a positive Dickensian affirmation here is beyond doubt. It is an insistence on that ‘upright’ human posture, with its entailed hazards, which Marvell treats of in ‘A Dialogue between the Soul and Body’. No one realizing how essential to the Dickensian critique the emphasis is could endorse Cockshut’s reflections on the significance of the Marshalsea:

  The first description (chapter VI) of the Marshalsea is curiously nostalgic; and we soon find the place possesses an attraction for its inmates. It is a place of rest, of kindness, of gentle and harmless deceits.

  When Mrs Dorrit is giving birth there, the charwoman says, ‘The flies trouble you, don’t they dear? But p’r’aps they’ll take your mind off it, and do you good. What between the buryin’ ground, the grocer’s, the waggon-stables, and the paunch trade, the Marshalsea flies gets very large. P’r’aps they’re sent as a consolation, if only we know’d it.’ The religious sensibility revealed here may not be of a very high order, but the humanity and kindness are genuine. In the same scene the beery, disreputable doctor says: ‘We are quiet here; we don’t get badgered here; there’s no knocker here, sir, to be hammered at by creditors and bring a man’s heart to his mouth. Nobody comes here to ask if a man’s at home, and say he’ll stand on the door till he is. Nobody writes threatening letters about money to this place. It’s freedom, sir, it’s freedom.’

  Actually, what Dickens’s evocation registers is not attraction, but recoil – intense and ‘placing’. It is an evocation of final human defeat as a subsidence into a callous living deadness of abject acquiescence. If we are to talk of ‘religious sensibility’, then what we have is Dickens’s vision of the Marshalsea as Hell: ‘Abandon hope all ye who enter here’.

  19. Book the First, chapter XXV.

  20. Book the First, chapter XIII.

  21. Book the First, chapter XXXII. Also: ‘He had suddenly checked himself. Where he got all the additional black prongs from, that now flew up all over his head, like the myriads of points that break out in the large change of a great firework, was a mystery.’

  22. When, in The Princess Casamassima, we consider Mr Vetch (who, though once a gentleman, is reduced to earning his living as a fiddler in a low theatre) along with Millicent Henning in comparison with Frederick Dorrit and Fanny, it becomes hardly questionable, and not the more so for the differences, that memories of Little Dorrit were the promptings to James’s characters. His dependence on Dickens is more general than that, and may fairly be called parasitic. Thus the prison, the child protagonist whose young life is intimately associated with it, and the seamstress in the squalid area of London, are plainly vague memories of Little Dorrit, used in The Princess Casamassima for atmosphere unconvincingly, since James had no corresponding first-hand knowledge. It is significant that he expressed a high admiration for Dickens’s Fanny.

  23. Here, at a lower social level, is Plornish on William Dorrit:

  ‘“Ah! there’s manners! There’s polish! There’s a gentleman to have run to seed in the Marshalsea jail! Why, perhaps you are not aware”, said Plornish, lowering his voice, and speaking with a perverse admiration of what he ought to have pitied or despised, “not aware that Miss Dorrit and her sister dursn’t let him know that they work for a living. No!” said Plornish, looking with a ridiculous triumph first at his wife, and then round all the room. “Dursn’t let him know it, they dursn’t!”’

  It’s in place to remember Rugg’s concern that Clennam should have more respect for himself and his legal representative, and shift to the King’s Bench.

  24. He has Mrs General’s corroboration:

  ‘I took the liberty’, said Mr Dorrit again, with the magnificent placidity of one who was above correction, ‘to solicit the favour of a little private conversation with you, because I feel rather worried respecting my – ha – my younger daughter. You will have observed a great difference of temperament, madam, between my two daughters?’

  Said Mrs General in response, crossing her gloved hands (she was never without gloves, and they never creased and always fitted) ‘There is a great difference.’

  ‘May I ask to be favoured with your view of it?’ said Mr Dorrit, with a deference not incompatible with majestic severity.

  ‘Fanny’ returned Mrs General, ‘has force of character and self-reliance, Amy, none.’ Book the Second, chapter V.

  25. ‘“I have been expecting him”, said Mrs Plornish, “this half-an-hour, at any minute of time. Walk in, sir.”

  ‘Arthur entered the rather dark and close parlour (though it was lofty too), and sat down in the chair she placed for him.

  ‘“Not to deceive you, sir, I notice it,” said Mrs Plornish, “and I take it kind of you.”

  ‘He was at a loss to understand what she meant: and by expressing as much in his looks, elicited her explanation.

  ‘“It ain’t many that comes into a poor place, that deems it worth their while to move their hats,” said Mrs Plornish. “But people think more of it than people think.”’ Part the First, chapter XII.

  26. What Flora and Pancks have in common is that each vindicates dramatically an essential human realness that is independent of good breeding, and that, in both, what might seem calculated to make them uncongenial to Clennam only lends emphasis to the approving constatation that the reader in due course arrives at – sharing with Clennam himself.

  27. See here.

  28. See, e.g., The Theology of William Blake, J. G. Davies.

  29. See The Image of Childhood: The Individual and Society – A Study of the Theme in English Literature. Peter Coveney. Peregrine Books.

  6

  How we must read Great Expectations

  IT must have been very much easier to read Great Expectations adequately – that is, with a sympathetic and intelligent comprehension of the spirit in which it was written and of what it was actually about – in Dickens’s own day, or in any time up to the present, than it evidently is now. For not only has Dickens’s society gone for ever, and with it many (though not all) of the difficulties and problems of a young man living in that age, but the young reader in ours is further handicapped by crass misdirections from contemporary Dickens specialists. Even ignoring the bright-idea merchants who are with us in all specialisms in literary studies nowadays, there are the blind-bat school of Dickens critics who make pseudo-logical objections to what they represent, often inaccurately or quite unjustifiably, as Dickens’s ideas, and who have no real knowledge of the constitution and actuality of Dickens’s society – in addition, too often no intuitive feeling for the implications of our language as Dickens used it, no sensitiveness to his tone of voice and to his overtones, no understanding of the conventions in which he wrote, and whose obstinate literal-mindedness and absence of all imaginative insight leave one in despair.1 Then there are the critics who reduce this novel to a matter of fairy godmothers and princesses, to fairy-tale dimensions and remoteness from any actuality, or to some other-world of folk-tale elements and primitive symbolism. It is true that Pip likens Miss Havisham to a fairy godmother when he thinks she has become his patron, but she has in fact almost no part in the chain of cause and effect that binds him to his convict benefactor. And when he thinks of Estella as the Sleeping Beauty whom he will awaken with a kiss and thus bring life back to Satis House, this is to heighten for Pip the basic irony, as Pip is later to discover, of her being the very opposite of a princess in actuality and of the fact that she was never destined for him, as also that Satis House cannot be revivified but is revisited by Pip and Estella, when they do come together ultimately, as a site cleared for rebuilding. The adjuncts of the fairy-tale are employed (or rather deployed) as a mode
of thought natural to a romantic country boy, but they are not the terms in which Dickens himself worked or thought here, and he dissociates himself from Pip throughout the novel, very skilfully, though the method is subtle and easy to overlook, since the narrative is autobiographical.

  What is required is to be able to substantiate the conviction one has from reading the novel that it is a great novel, seriously engaged in discussing, by exemplifying, profound and basic realities of human experience. Even those who sense that this novel is meaningful are not in general successful in offering a convincing and adequate account of its meanings. It is the reverse of a Victorian reader who now reads Great Expectations, at once too sophisticated and yet too humanly ignorant: anyone who is now engaged in reading English Literature with undergraduates even in England must feel (unless of the same generation) that he has to introduce delicately complex perceptions and a social civilization of which that literature is the flower, to a brutally callous generation as to sensibility, students who except in rare cases have lost contact with the traditional culture that could and did produce both the self-educated genius Dickens and a public to read and support him. To have an easily available cynicism but no reverence for life’s serious issues, no aim in living otherwise than to satisfy basic instincts, is a particular disqualification for appreciating what Great Expectations has to offer.

  The difficulty we are faced with is to find an approach, a way in, which cannot be waived away as sentimental or faulted as far-fetched. I propose to start with an irrefutable pointer to the essential nature of Dickens’s dealing with men and women, which incidentally has the merit of exposing a notorious English academic contention that Dickens was primarily an irresponsible concoctor of acting parts, as though his novels were merely material for the public readings of his very last phase. In an interesting book, Some Reflections on Genius, published in 1960, Lord Brain reprinted a paper called Dickensian Diagnoses he had once given to a medical association that is of very considerable interest to the reader of Dickens and more relevant to an insight into Dickens’s work than that of many of the well-known Dickens ‘authorities’. As it is too long to quote from adequately, I select a few sentences which will give the gist of his conclusions, based on ample reference to the novels, the conclusions of an authority in his field:

  What is surprising is that Dickens should have given such detailed and accurate descriptions of the disorders from which his characters suffered. He was not content with vague diagnoses like brain fever, which figure in the works of some of his contemporaries, and even those who wrote later. Dickens looked on disease with the observing eye of the expert clinician, and he recorded what he saw, and what the patient told him, so that he often gives us accounts which would do credit to a trained physician … Dickens’s psychiatric studies are as comprehensive and as varied as his observations on organic diseases…. Perhaps the most remarkable example of Dickens’s psychiatric insight is the case of Dr Manette in A Tale of Two Cities. It is remarkable for the accuracy of his account of a case of multiple personality and loss of memory, because it is the most comprehensive of his studies of psychological abnormality, and because it includes an anticipation of psychotherapy … At a time when medicine itself was only just beginning to recognize the importance of physical signs, the characters in the world of Dickens’s imagination are so real that they have recognizable diseases of body and mind, described with the accuracy and insight of a great clinical observer.

  Thus we have the best authority for endorsing our own perception that Dickens was neither interested in people as an actor-manager, for their theatrical possibilities, nor was he, as Edmund Wilson and others have asserted, under the compulsions of a psychological disorder he could neither understand nor control – as if he were like Kafka, able only to describe and project in fictions his own neuroses. But interesting as Russell Brain’s observations on Dickens’s gifts as a clinical observer are, they are only a pointer to a more important fact, that Dickens was much more than this or than an amateur psychologist fictionizing his own observations. It is not merely an interest in case-histories that is shown in Dickens’s intuitive apprehension of the relation between the inner and the outer life that is manifested by gesture, mannerisms, speech-habits, facial expressions, gait, physical characteristics and such that he documents so accurately in his novels (the idea now sedulously propaganded that Dickens’s characters make merely theatrical gestures and facial signs is demonstrably false). He proceeds always from such intelligent observations and sensitive insights as Russell Brain admiringly records, to an ordered and systematic inquiry into what light may be thrown by such insights on the subjects that are the province of the great novelist. Dickens is always to be seen asking questions as to the why of human conduct – What is their motivation? Why are people what they are (heredity or nurture)? Why do people in similar circumstances and under the same pressures behave differently? Is there such a thing as freewill, admitting the force of heredity, conditioning by the social and psychological forces of infancy and adolescence, and the constrictions of emotional and moral habits? What explanation is there for apparently pointless, or perverse, or even self-stultifying action? How do murderers feel and behave after breaking the most powerful human taboos in doing to death friend, kinsman, mistress? What are madness and associated states of temporary aberration or derangement due to drugs, fever and delirium, suicidal states? Dickens explores all these and many related questions by the means proper to the novelist, of course, and not by writing essays in his fictions as novelists have frequently done. But his approach to such questions and topics is neither emotional nor theatrical: it is so systematic as to be almost academic. Hence his interest in human life after the callow Pickwick Papers is not just in people as such (whatever the Chestertonians may allege) but includes them in the examination of questions that we now tend to consider the province of the psychologist and sociologist – though in happier days it was otherwise and Dickens, like Shakespeare and Tolstoy, shows the advantage of the artist’s insight which is not reductive nor generalizing and abstract, but always sympathetically human. Dickens sees people as at once the products and symptoms of their society and the producers of it. Similarly he shows his interest in ethical matters by exploring the behaviour of characters, chosen for the purpose, in such a way as to undercut theory and extend our views by presenting situations in a new light, disturbing our preconceptions and prejudices. Where judgement on behaviour is in question Dickens puts before the reader facts that must be taken into consideration before forming such judgement, facts that would otherwise have lain outside our perceptions even.

  Of course the method is not evident as such except in such a tale as I am about to point to. The procedure, though it must have been pondered at some level, appears generally to be spontaneous, the ideas completely dissolved into novelistic material of action, dialogue and characterization. But one way in which we can see that Dickens evidently did do some deliberate thinking is by recognizing that he habitually examined alternatives – people he posits who in the same situation have responded to it in opposite ways and so become different persons with, alternatively, tragic or relatively happy outcomes. Thus the girl-child who learns she is illegitimate in Dickens’s society, which held that the child inherited a stigma from the guilty mother, could respond either by acceptance and docility or by aggression and resentment: in the one case is produced Esther Summer-son in Bleak House and in the other Miss Wade in Little Dorrit, who is so much alienated from everyone that she has no need of a Christian name and has to write out her case-history for her own relief, as her justification. Being able to communicate in no other way, she hands it to some-one to read whom she senses is sympathetic because a fellow-sufferer from life, Arthur Clennam. Dora, who adopts and exploits the role of pet provided by her habitat, has an alternative in Pet Meagles who outgrows that character but finds it has fatally circumscribed her possibilities of happiness. These cannot be chance occurrences since a great deal of D
ickens’s characterization is seen to have been formed or used in such a way. Another instance of his rationale is the characterization of Pancks in Little Dorrit and Wemmick in Great Expectations. Pancks is presented as a human machine (a steam-tug), humorously, but the humour is entirely controlled by Dickens as a means of developing for us this character’s functional uses. When he argues with Arthur, in their Socratic dialogue, which ends with Pancks’s definition of ‘The Whole Duty of Man in a commercial society’, cornering Arthur with his final query: ‘What else?’, Pancks is being subtly ironic, acting Devil’s Advocate in order to ridicule the Victorian theory, which as a human steam-boat he has to exemplify in his working life. But in fact, no one can be a mere machine: while in his working life, as the grasping hand of Casby the Patriarch, his business is to rack-rent the inhabitants of Bleeding Heart Yard, he compensates in his own time by looking for people to give money to, for those who are missing heirs. Thus he is able to release the Dorrits from prison and set them up with wealth (paying the expenses of the inquiry out of his own pocket); eventually Nature, whom Dickens evidently thinks can’t be trifled with, drives him to rebel outright against his ‘proprietor’. Dickens’s grounds for optimism, legitimate because psychologically sound, are dramatized thus by embodying them in the history of Mr Pancks and enacting it before our eyes, with humour, irony, drama, pathos, wit and a final scene of fantasy revenge. Wemmick is a similar but distinct case of the completely split man, so much so that Pip feels Wemmick is actually twins who replace each other according to circumstances, one who earns his living in the Office and the other who had to invent the Castle to make a healthy life possible – healthy physically, morally and spiritually.