boys' twopenny weeklies are of the deepest importance. Here is the stuff
that is read somewhere between the ages of twelve and eighteen by a very
large proportion, perhaps an actual majority, of English boys, including
many who will never read anything else except newspapers; and along with
it they are absorbing a set of beliefs which would be regarded as
hopelessly out of date in the Central Office of the Conservative Party.
All the better because it is done indirectly, there is being pumped into
them the conviction that the major problems of our time do not exist,
that there is nothing wrong with LAISSEZ-FAIRE capitalism, that
foreigners are un-important comics and that the British Empire is a sort
of charity-concern which will last for ever. Considering who owns these
papers, it is difficult to believe that this is un-intentional. Of the
twelve papers I have been discussing (i.e. twelve including the THRILLER
and DETECTIVE WEEKLY) seven are the property of the Amalgamated Press,
which is one of the biggest press-combines in the world and controls more
than a hundred different papers. The GEM and MAGNET, therefore, are
closely linked up with the DAILY TELEGRAPH and the FINANCIAL TIMES. This
in itself would be enough to rouse certain suspicions, even if it were
not obvious that the stories in the boys' weeklies are politically
vetted. So it appears that if you feel the need of a fantasy-life in
which you travel to Mars and fight lions bare-handed (and what boy
doesn't?), you can only have it by delivering yourself over, mentally, to
people like Lord Camrose. For there is no competition. Throughout the
whole of this run of papers the differences are negligible, and on this
level no others exist. This raises the question, why is there no such
thing as a left-wing boys' paper?
At first glance such an idea merely makes one slightly sick. It is so
horribly easy to imagine what a left-wing boys' paper would be like, if
it existed. I remember in 1920 or 1921 some optimistic person handing
round Communist tracts among a crowd of public-school boys. The tract I
received was of the question-and-answer kind:
Q. 'Can a Boy Communist be a Boy Scout, Comrade?'
A. 'No, Comrade.'
Q. 'Why, Comrade?'
A. 'Because, Comrade, a Boy Scout must salute the Union Jack, which is
the symbol of tyranny and oppression,' etc., etc.
Now suppose that at this moment somebody started a left-wing paper
deliberately aimed at boys of twelve or fourteen. I do not suggest that
the whole of its contents would be exactly like the tract I have quoted
above, but does anyone doubt that they would be SOMETHING like it?
Inevitably such a paper would either consist of dreary up-lift or it
would be under Communist influence and given over to adulation of Soviet
Russia; in either case no normal boy would ever look at it. Highbrow
literature apart, the whole of the existing left-wing Press, in so far as
it is at all vigorously 'left', is one long tract. The one Socialist
paper in England which could live a week on its merits AS A PAPER is the
DAILY HERALD: and how much Socialism is there in the DAILY HERALD? At
this moment, therefore, a paper with a 'left' slant and at the same time
likely to have an appeal to ordinary boys in their teens is something
almost beyond hoping for.
But it does not follow that it is impossible. There is no clear reason
why every adventure story should necessarily be mixed up with
snobbishness and gutter patriotism. For, after all, the stories in the
HOTSPUR and the MODERN BOY are not Conservative tracts; they are merely
adventure stories with a Conservative bias. It is fairly easy to imagine
the process being reversed. It is possible, for instance, to imagine a
paper as thrilling and lively as the HOTSPUR, but with subject-matter and
'ideology' a little more up to date. It is even possible (though this
raises other difficulties) to imagine a women's paper at the same
literary level as the ORACLE, dealing in approximately the same kind of
story, but taking rather more account of the realities of working-class
life. Such things have been done before, though not in England. In the
last years of the Spanish monarchy there was a large output in Spain of
left-wing novelettes, some of them evidently of anarchist origin.
Unfortunately at the time when they were appearing I did not see their
social significance, and I lost the collection of them that I had, but no
doubt copies would still be procurable. In get-up and style of story they
were very similar to the English fourpenny novelette, except that their
inspiration was 'left'. If, for instance, a story described police
pursuing anarchists through the mountains, it would be from the point of
view of the anarchist and not of the police. An example nearer to hand is
the Soviet film CHAPAIEV, which has been shown a number of times in
London. Technically, by the standards of the time when it was made,
CHAPAIEV is a first-rate film, but mentally, in spite of the unfamiliar
Russian background, it is not so very remote from Hollywood. The one
thing that lifts it out of the ordinary is the remarkable performance by
the actor who takes the part of the White officer (the fat one)--a
performance which looks very like an inspired piece of gagging. Otherwise
the atmosphere is familiar. All the usual paraphernalia is there--heroic
fight against odds, escape at the last moment, shots of galloping horses,
love interest, comic relief. The film is in fact a fairly ordinary one,
except that its tendency is 'left'. In a Hollywood film of the Russian
Civil War the Whites would probably be angels and the Reds demons. In the
Russian version the Reds are angels and the Whites demons. That is also a
lie, but, taking the long view, it is a less pernicious lie than the
other.
Here several difficult problems present themselves. Their general nature
is obvious enough, and I do not want to discuss them. I am merely
pointing to the fact that, in England, popular imaginative literature is
a field that left-wing thought has never begun to enter. ALL fiction from
the novels in the mushroom libraries downwards is censored in the
interests of the ruling class. And boys' fiction above all, the
blood-and-thunder stuff which nearly every boy devours at some time or
other, is sodden in the worst illusions of 1910. The fact is only
unimportant if one believes that what is read in childhood leaves no
impression behind. Lord Camrose and his colleagues evidently believe
nothing of the kind, and, after all, Lord Camrose ought to know.
CHARLES DICKENS (1940)
I
Dickens is one of those writers who are well worth stealing. Even the
burial of his body in Westminster Abbey was a species of theft, if you
come to think of it.
When Chesterton wrote his introductions to the Everyman Edition of
Dickens's works, it seemed quite natural to him to credit Dickens with
his own highly individual brand of medievalism, and more recently a
Marxist writer, Mr. T. A. Jackson, has made spirited efforts to turn
<
br /> Dickens into a blood-thirsty revolutionary. The Marxist claims him as
'almost' a Marxist, the Catholic claims him as 'almost' a Catholic, and
both claim him as a champion of the proletariat (or 'the poor', as
Chesterton would have put it). On the other hand, Nadezhda Krupskaya, in
her little book on Lenin, relates that towards the end of his life Lenin
went to see a dramatized version of THE CRICKET ON THE HEARTH, and found
Dickens's 'middle-class sentimentality' so intolerable that he walked out
in the middle of a scene.
Taking 'middle-class' to mean what Krupskaya might be expected to mean by
it, this was probably a truer judgement than those of Chesterton and
Jackson. But it is worth noticing that the dislike of Dickens implied in
this remark is something unusual. Plenty of people have found him
unreadable, but very few seem to have felt any hostility towards the
general spirit of his work. Some years later Mr. Bechhofer Roberts
published a full-length attack on Dickens in the form of a novel (THIS
SIDE IDOLATRY), but it was a merely personal attack, concerned for the
most part with Dickens's treatment of his wife. It dealt with incidents
which not one in a thousand of Dickens's readers would ever hear about,
and which no more invalidates his work than the second-best bed
invalidates HAMLET. All that the book really demonstrated was that a
writer's literary personality has little or nothing to do with his
private character. It is quite possible that in private life Dickens was
just the kind of insensitive egoist that Mr. Bechhofer Roberts makes him
appear. But in his published work there is implied a personality quite
different from this, a personality which has won him far more friends
than enemies. It might well have been otherwise, for even if Dickens was
a bourgeois, he was certainly a subversive writer, a radical, one might
truthfully say a rebel. Everyone who has read widely in his work has felt
this. Gissing, for instance, the best of the writers on Dickens, was
anything but a radical himself, and he disapproved of this strain in
Dickens and wished it were not there, but it never occurred to him to
deny it. In OLIVER TWIST, HARD TIMES, BLEAK HOUSE, LITTLE DORRIT, Dickens
attacked English institutions with a ferocity that has never since been
approached. Yet he managed to do it without making himself hated, and,
more than this, the very people he attacked have swallowed him so
completely that he has become a national institution himself. In its
attitude towards Dickens the English public has always been a little like
the elephant which feels a blow with a walking-stick as a delightful
tickling. Before I was ten years old I was having Dickens ladled down my
throat by schoolmasters in whom even at that age I could see a strong
resemblance to Mr. Creakle, and one knows without needing to be told that
lawyers delight in Sergeant Buzfuz and that LITTLE DORRIT is a favourite
in the Home Office. Dickens seems to have succeeded in attacking
everybody and antagonizing nobody. Naturally this makes one wonder
whether after all there was something unreal in his attack upon society.
Where exactly does he stand, socially, morally, and politically? As
usual, one can define his position more easily if one starts by deciding
what he was NOT.
In the first place he was NOT, as Messrs. Chesterton and Jackson seem to
imply, a 'proletarian' writer. To begin with, he does not write about the
proletariat, in which he merely resembles the overwhelming majority of
novelists, past and present. If you look for the working classes in
fiction, and especially English fiction, all you find is a hole. This
statement needs qualifying, perhaps. For reasons that are easy enough to
see, the agricultural labourer (in England a proletarian) gets a fairly
good showing in fiction, and a great deal has been written about
criminals, derelicts and, more recently, the working-class
intelligentsia. But the ordinary town proletariat, the people who make
the wheels go round, have always been ignored by novelists. When they do
find their way between the covers of a book, it is nearly always as
objects of pity or as comic relief. The central action of Dickens's
stories almost invariably takes place in middle-class surroundings. If
one examines his novels in detail one finds that his real subject-matter
is the London commercial bourgeoisie and their hangers-on--lawyers,
clerks, tradesmen, innkeepers, small craftsmen, and servants. He has no
portrait of an agricultural worker, and only one (Stephen Blackpool in
HARD TIMES) of an industrial worker. The Plornishes in LITTLE DORRIT are
probably his best picture of a working-class family--the Peggottys, for
instance, hardly belong to the working class--but on the whole he is not
successful with this type of character. If you ask any ordinary reader
which of Dickens's proletarian characters he can remember, the three he
is almost certain to mention are Bill Sykes, Sam Weller, and Mrs. Gamp. A
burglar, a valet, and a drunken midwife--not exactly a representative
cross-section of the English working class.
Secondly, in the ordinarily accepted sense of the word, Dickens is not a
'revolutionary' writer. But his position here needs some defining.
Whatever else Dickens may have been, he was not a hole-and-corner
soul-saver, the kind of well-meaning idiot who thinks that the world will
be perfect if you amend a few bylaws and abolish a few anomalies. It is
worth comparing him with Charles Reade, for instance. Reade was a much
better-informed man than Dickens, and in some ways more public-spirited.
He really hated the abuses he could understand, he showed them up in a
series of novels which for all their absurdity are extremely readable,
and he probably helped to alter public opinion on a few minor but
important points. But it was quite beyond him to grasp that, given the
existing form of society, certain evils CANNOT be remedied. Fasten upon
this or that minor abuse, expose it, drag it into the open, bring it
before a British jury, and all will be well that is how he sees it.
Dickens at any rate never imagined that you can cure pimples by cutting
them off. In every page of his work one can see a consciousness that
society is wrong somewhere at the root. It is when one asks 'Which root?'
that one begins to grasp his position.
The truth is that Dickens's criticism of society is almost exclusively
moral. Hence the utter lack of any constructive suggestion anywhere in
his work. He attacks the law, parliamentary government, the educational
system and so forth, without ever clearly suggesting what he would put in
their places. Of course it is not necessarily the business of a novelist,
or a satirist, to make constructive suggestions, but the point is that
Dickens's attitude is at bottom not even destructive. There is no clear
sign that he wants the existing order to be overthrown, or that he
believes it would make very much difference if it WERE overthrown. For in
reality his target is not so much society as 'human nature'. It would be
economic system is wrong AS A SYSTEM. Nowhere, for instance, does he make
any attack on private enterprise or private property. Even in a book like
OUR MUTUAL FRIEND, which turns on the power of corpses to interfere with
living people by means of idiotic wills, it does not occur to him to
suggest that individuals ought not to have this irresponsible power. Of
course one can draw this inference for oneself, and one can draw it again
from the remarks about Bounderby's will at the end of HARD TIMES, and
indeed from the whole of Dickens's work one can infer the evil of
LAISSEZ-FAIRE capitalism; but Dickens makes no such inference himself. It
is said that Macaulay refused to review HARD TIMES because he disapproved
of its 'sullen Socialism'. Obviously Macaulay is here using the word
'Socialism' in the same sense in which, twenty years ago, a vegetarian
meal or a Cubist picture used to be referred to as 'Bolshevism'. There is
not a line in the book that can properly be called Socialistic; indeed,
its tendency if anything is pro-capitalist, because its whole moral is
that capitalists ought to be kind, not that workers ought to be
rebellious. Bounder by is a bullying windbag and Gradgrind has been
morally blinded, but if they were better men, the system would work well
enough that, all through, is the implication. And so far as social
criticism goes, one can never extract much more from Dickens than this,
unless one deliberately reads meanings into him. His whole 'message' is
one that at first glance looks like an enormous platitude: If men would
behave decently the world would be decent.
Naturally this calls for a few characters who are in positions of
authority and who DO behave decently. Hence that recurrent Dickens
figure, the good rich man. This character belongs especially to Dickens's
early optimistic period. He is usually a 'merchant' (we are not
necessarily told what merchandise he deals in), and he is always a
superhumanly kind-hearted old gentleman who 'trots' to and fro, raising
his employees' wages, patting children on the head, getting debtors out
of jail and in general, acting the fairy godmother. Of course he is a
pure dream figure, much further from real life than, say, Squeers or
Micawber. Even Dickens must have reflected occasionally that anyone who
was so anxious to give his money away would never have acquired it in the
first place. Mr. Pickwick, for instance, had 'been in the city', but it
is difficult to imagine him making a fortune there. Nevertheless this
character runs like a connecting thread through most of the earlier
books. Pickwick, the Cheerybles, old Chuzzlewit, Scrooge--it is the same
figure over and over again, the good rich man, handing out guineas.
Dickens does however show signs of development here. In the books of the
middle period the good rich man fades out to some extent. There is no one
who plays this part in A TALE OF TWO CITIES, nor in GREAT
EXPECTATIONS--GREAT EXPECTATIONS is, in fact, definitely an attack on
patronage--and in HARD TIMES it is only very doubtfully played by
Gradgrind after his reformation. The character reappears in a rather
different form as Meagles in LITTLE DORRIT and John Jarndyce in BLEAK
HOUSE--one might perhaps add Betsy Trotwood in DAVID COPPERFIELD. But in
these books the good rich man has dwindled from a 'merchant' to a
RENTIER. This is significant. A RENTIER is part of the possessing class,
he can and, almost without knowing it, does make other people work for
him, but he has very little direct power. Unlike Scrooge or the
Cheerybles, he cannot put everything right by raising everybody's wages.
The seeming inference from the rather despondent books that Dickens
wrote in the fifties is that by that time he had grasped the
helplessness of well-meaning individuals in a corrupt society.
Nevertheless in the last completed novel, OUR MUTUAL FRIEND (published
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