Fifty Orwell Essays

by George Orwell

turns Magwitch into a sort of pantomime wicked uncle, or, if one sees him

  through the child's eyes, into an appalling monster. Later in the book he

  is to be represented as neither, and his exaggerated gratitude, on which

  the plot turns, is to be incredible because of just this speech. As

  usual, Dickens's imagination has overwhelmed him. The picturesque details

  were too good to be left out. Even with characters who are more of a

  piece than Magwitch he is liable to be tripped up by some seductive

  phrase. Mr. Murdstone, for instance, is in the habit of ending David

  Copperfield's lessons every morning with a dreadful sum in arithmetic.

  'If I go into a cheesemonger's shop, and buy four thousand

  double-Gloucester cheeses at fourpence halfpenny each, present payment',

  it always begins. Once again the typical Dickens detail, the

  double-Gloucester cheeses. But it is far too human a touch for Murdstone;

  he would have made it five thousand cashboxes. Every time this note is

  struck, the unity of the novel suffers. Not that it matters very much,

  because Dickens is obviously a writer whose parts are greater than his

  wholes. He is all fragments, all details--rotten architecture, but

  wonderful gargoyles--and never better than when he is building up some

  character who will later on be forced to act inconsistently.

  Of course it is not usual to urge against Dickens that he makes his

  characters behave inconsistently. Generally he is accused of doing just

  the opposite. His characters are supposed to be mere 'types', each

  crudely representing some single trait and fitted with a kind of label by

  which you recognize him. Dickens is 'only a caricaturist'--that is the

  usual accusation, and it does him both more and less than justice. To

  begin with, he did not think of himself as a caricaturist, and was

  constantly setting into action characters who ought to have been purely

  static. Squeers, Micawber, Miss Mowcher,[Note, below] Wegg, Skimpole,

  Pecksniff and many others are finally involved in 'plots' where they are

  out of place and where they behave quite incredibly. They start off as

  magic-lantern slides and they end by getting mixed up in a third-rate

  movie. Sometimes one can put one's finger on a single sentence in which

  the original illusion is destroyed. There is such a sentence in DAVID

  COPPERFIELD. After the famous dinner-party (the one where the leg of

  mutton was underdone), David is showing his guests out. He stops Traddles

  at the top of the stairs:

  [Note: Dickens turned Miss Mowcher into a sort of heroine because the

  real woman whom he had caricatured had read the earlier chapters and

  was bitterly hurt. He had previously meant her to play a villainous part.

  But ANY action by such a character would seem incongruous. (Author's

  footnote)]

  'Traddles', said I, 'Mr. Micawber don't mean any harm, poor fellow: but

  if I were you I wouldn't lend him anything.'

  'My dear Copperfield', returned Traddles, smiling, 'I haven't got

  anything to lend.'

  'You have got a name, you know,' I said.

  At the place where one reads it this remark jars a little though

  something of the kind was inevitable sooner or later. The story is a

  fairly realistic one, and David is growing up; ultimately he is bound to

  see Mr. Micawber for what he is, a cadging scoundrel. Afterwards, of

  course, Dickens's sentimentality overcomes him and Micawber is made to

  turn over a new leaf. But from then on, the original Micawber is never

  quite recaptured, in spite of desperate efforts. As a rule, the 'plot' in

  which Dickens's characters get entangled is not particularly credible,

  but at least it makes some pretence at reality, whereas the world to

  which they belong is a never-never land, a kind of eternity. But just

  here one sees that 'only a caricaturist' is not really a condemnation.

  The fact that Dickens is always thought of as a caricaturist, although he

  was constantly trying to be something else, is perhaps the surest mark of

  his genius. The monstrosities that he created are still remembered as

  monstrosities, in spite of getting mixed up in would-be probable

  melodramas. Their first impact is so vivid that nothing that comes

  afterwards effaces it. As with the people one knew in childhood, one

  seems always to remember them in one particular attitude, doing one

  particular thing. Mrs. Squeers is always ladling out brimstone and

  treacle, Mrs. Gummidge is always weeping, Mrs. Gargery is always banging

  her husband's head against the wall, Mrs. Jellyby is always scribbling

  tracts while her children fall into the area--and there they all are,

  fixed up for ever like little twinkling miniatures painted on snuffbox

  lids, completely fantastic and incredible, and yet somehow more solid and

  infinitely more memorable than the efforts of serious novelists. Even by

  the standards of his time Dickens was an exceptionally artificial writer.

  As Ruskin said, he 'chose to work in a circle of stage fire.' His

  characters are even more distorted and simplified than Smollett's. But

  there are no rules in novel-writing, and for any work of art there is

  only one test worth bothering about--survival. By this test Dickens's

  characters have succeeded, even if the people who remember them hardly

  think of them as human beings. They are monsters, but at any rate they

  exist.

  But all the same there is a disadvantage in writing about monsters. It

  amounts to this, that it is only certain moods that Dickens can speak to.

  There are large areas of the human mind that he never touches. There is

  no poetic feeling anywhere in his books, and no genuine tragedy, and even

  sexual love is almost outside his scope. Actually his books are not so

  sexless as they are sometimes declared to be, and considering the time in

  which he was writing, he is reasonably frank. But there is not a trace in

  him of the feeling that one finds in MANON LESCAUT, SALAMMB�, CARMEN,

  WUTHERING HEIGHTS. According to Aldous Huxley, D.H. Lawrence once said

  that Balzac was 'a gigantic dwarf', and in a sense the same is true of

  Dickens. There are whole worlds which he either knows nothing about or

  does not wish to mention. Except in a rather roundabout way, one cannot

  learn very much from Dickens. And to say this is to think almost

  immediately of the great Russian novelists of the nineteenth century. Why

  is it that Tolstoy's grasp seems to be so much larger than

  Dickens's--why is it that he seems able to tell you so much more ABOUT

  YOURSELF? It is not that he is more gifted, or even, in the last

  analysis, more intelligent. It is because he is writing about people who

  are growing. His characters are struggling to make their souls, whereas

  Dickens's are already finished and perfect. In my own mind Dickens's

  people are present far more often and far more vividly than Tolstoy's,

  but always in a single unchangeable attitude, like pictures or pieces of

  furniture. You cannot hold an imaginary conversation with a Dickens

  character as you can with, say, Peter Bezoukhov. And this is not merely

  because of Tolstoy's greater seriousness, for there are also comic

/>   characters that you can imagine yourself talking to--Bloom, for

  instance, or Pecuchet, or even Wells's Mr. Polly. It is because

  Dickens's characters have no mental life. They say perfectly the thing

  that they have to say, but they cannot be conceived as talking about

  anything else. They never learn, never speculate. Perhaps the most

  meditative of his characters is Paul Dombey, and his thoughts are mush.

  Does this mean that Tolstoy's novels are 'better' than Dickens's? The

  truth is that it is absurd to make such comparisons in terms of 'better'

  and 'worse'. If I were forced to compare Tolstoy with Dickens, I should

  say that Tolstoy's appeal will probably be wider in the long run,

  because Dickens is scarcely intelligible outside the English-speaking

  culture; on the other hand, Dickens is able to reach simple people,

  which Tolstoy is not. Tolstoy's characters can cross a frontier, Dickens

  can be portrayed on a cigarette-card. But one is no more obliged to

  choose between them than between a sausage and a rose. Their purposes

  barely intersect.

  VI

  If Dickens had been merely a comic writer, the chances are that no one

  would now remember his name. Or at best a few of his books would survive

  in rather the same way as books like FRANK FAIRLEIGH, MR. VERDANT GREEN

  and MRS. CAUDLE'S CURTAIN LECTURES, as a sort of hangover of the

  Victorian atmosphere, a pleasant little whiff of oysters and brown stout.

  Who has not felt sometimes that it was 'a pity' that Dickens ever

  deserted the vein of PICKWICK for things like LITTLE DORRIT and HARD

  TIMES? What people always demand of a popular novelist is that he shall

  write the same book over and over again, forgetting that a man who would

  write the same book twice could not even write it once. Any writer who is

  not utterly lifeless moves upon a kind of parabola, and the downward

  curve is implied in the upper one. Joyce has to start with the frigid

  competence of DUBLINERS and end with the dream-language of FINNEGAN'S

  WAKE, but ULYSSES and PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST are part of the trajectory.

  The thing that drove Dickens forward into a form of art for which he was

  not really suited, and at the same time caused us to remember him, was

  simply the fact that he was a moralist, the consciousness of 'having

  something to say'. He is always preaching a sermon, and that is the final

  secret of his inventiveness. For you can only create if you can CARE.

  Types like Squeers and Micawber could not have been produced by a hack

  writer looking for something to be funny about. A joke worth laughing at

  always has an idea behind it, and usually a subversive idea. Dickens is

  able to go on being funny because he is in revolt against authority, and

  authority is always there to be laughed at. There is always room for one

  more custard pie.

  His radicalism is of the vaguest kind, and yet one always knows that it

  is there. That is the difference between being a moralist and a

  politician. He has no constructive suggestions, not even a clear grasp of

  the nature of the society he is attacking, only an emotional perception

  that something is wrong, all he can finally say is, 'Behave decently',

  which, as I suggested earlier, is not necessarily so shallow as it

  sounds. Most revolutionaries are potential Tories, because they imagine

  that everything can be put right by altering the SHAPE of society; once

  that change is effected, as it sometimes is, they see no need for any

  other. Dickens has not this kind of mental coarseness. The vagueness of

  his discontent is the mark of its permanence. What he is out against is

  not this or that institution, but, as Chesterton put it, 'an expression

  on the human face.' Roughly speaking, his morality is the Christian

  morality, but in spite of his Anglican upbringing he was essentially a

  Bible-Christian, as he took care to make plain when writing his will. In

  any case he cannot properly be described as a religious man. He

  'believed', undoubtedly, but religion in the devotional sense does not

  seem to have entered much into his thoughts [Note, below]. Where he is

  Christian is in his quasi-instinctive siding with the oppressed against

  the oppressors. As a matter of course he is on the side of the underdog,

  always and everywhere. To carry this to its logical conclusion one has

  got to change sides when the underdog becomes an upper-dog, and in fact

  Dickens does tend to do so. He loathes the Catholic Church, for instance,

  but as soon as the Catholics are persecuted (BARNABY RUDGE) he is on

  their side. He loathes the aristocratic class even more, but as soon as

  they are really overthrown (the revolutionary chapters in A TALE OF TWO

  CITIES) his sympathies swing round. Whenever he departs from this

  emotional attitude he goes astray. A well-known example is at the ending

  of DAVID COPPERFIELD, in which everyone who reads it feels that something

  has gone wrong. What is wrong is that the closing chapters are pervaded,

  faintly but not noticeably, by the cult of success. It is the gospel

  according to Smiles, instead of the gospel according to Dickens. The

  attractive, out-at-elbow characters are got rid of, Micawber makes a

  fortune, Heep gets into prison--both of these events are flagrantly

  impossible--and even Dora is killed off to make way for Agnes. If you

  like, you can read Dora as Dickens's wife and Agnes as his sister-in-law,

  but the essential point is that Dickens has 'turned respectable' and done

  violence to his own nature. Perhaps that is why Agnes is the most

  disagreeable of his heroines, the real legless angel of Victorian

  romance, almost as bad as Thackeray's Laura.

  [Note: From a letter to his youngest son (in 1868): 'You will remember that

  you have never at home been harassed about religious observances, or mere

  formalities. I have always been anxious not to weary my children with

  such things, before they are old enough to form opinions respecting them.

  You will therefore understand the better that I now most solemnly impress

  upon you the truth and beauty of the Christian Religion, as it came from

  Christ Himself, and the impossibility of your going far wrong if you

  humbly but heartily respect it...Never abandon the wholesome practice of

  saying your own private prayers, night and morning. I have never

  abandoned it myself, and I know the comfort of it.' (Author's footnote)]

  No grown-up person can read Dickens without feeling his limitations, and

  yet there does remain his native generosity of mind, which acts as a kind

  of anchor and nearly always keeps him where he belongs. It is probably

  the central secret of his popularity. A good-tempered antinomianism

  rather of Dickens's type is one of the marks of Western popular culture.

  One sees it in folk-stories and comic songs, in dream-figures like Mickey

  Mouse and Pop-eye the Sailor (both of them variants of Jack the

  Giant-killer), in the history of working-class Socialism, in the popular

  protests (always ineffective but not always a sham) against imperialism,

  in the impulse that makes a jury award excessive damages when a rich

  man's car runs over a poor man; it
is the feeling that one is always on

  the wrong side of the underdog, on the side of the weak against the

  strong. In one sense it is a feeling that is fifty years out of date. The

  common man is still living in the mental world of Dickens, but nearly

  every modern intellectual has gone over to some or other form of

  totalitarianism. From the Marxist or Fascist point of view, nearly all

  that Dickens stands for can be written off as 'bourgeois morality'. But

  in moral outlook no one could be more 'bourgeois' than the English

  working classes. The ordinary people in the Western countries have never

  entered, mentally, into the world of 'realism' and power-politics. They

  may do so before long, in which case Dickens will be as out of date as

  the cab-horse. But in his own age and ours he has been popular chiefly

  because he was able to express in a comic, simplified and therefore

  memorable form the native decency of the common man. And it is important

  that from this point of view people of very different types can be

  described as 'common'. In a country like England, in spite of its

  class-structure, there does exist a certain cultural unity. All through

  the Christian ages, and especially since the French Revolution, the

  Western world has been haunted by the idea of freedom and equality; it is

  only an IDEA, but it has penetrated to all ranks of society. The most

  atrocious injustices, cruelties, lies, snobberies exist everywhere, but

  there are not many people who can regard these things with the same

  indifference as, say, a Roman slave-owner. Even the millionaire suffers

  from a vague sense of guilt, like a dog eating a stolen leg of mutton.

  Nearly everyone, whatever his actual conduct may be, responds emotionally

  to the idea of human brotherhood. Dickens voiced a code which was and on

  the whole still is believed in, even by people who violate it. It is

  difficult otherwise to explain why he could be both read by working

  people (a thing that has happened to no other novelist of his stature)

  and buried in Westminster Abbey.

  When one reads any strongly individual piece of writing, one has the

  impression of seeing a face somewhere behind the page. It is not

  necessarily the actual face of the writer. I feel this very strongly with

  Swift, with Defoe, with Fielding, Stendhal, Thackeray, Flaubert, though

  in several cases I do not know what these people looked like and do not

  want to know. What one sees is the face that the writer OUGHT to have.

  Well, in the case of Dickens I see a face that is not quite the face of

  Dickens's photographs, though it resembles it. It is the face of a man of

  about forty, with a small beard and a high colour. He is laughing, with a

  touch of anger in his laughter, but no triumph, no malignity. It is the

  face of a man who is always fighting against something, but who fights in

  the open and is not frightened, the face of a man who is GENEROUSLY

  ANGRY--in other words, of a nineteenth-century liberal, a free

  intelligence, a type hated with equal hatred by all the smelly little

  orthodoxies which are now contending for our souls.

  CHARLES READE (1940)

  Since Charles Reade's books are published in cheap editions one can

  assume that he still has his following, but it is unusual to meet anyone

  who has voluntarily read him. In most people his name seems to evoke, at

  most, a vague memory of 'doing' THE CLOISTER AND THE HEARTH as a school

  holiday task. It is his bad luck to be remembered by this particular

  book, rather as Mark Twain, thanks to the films, is chiefly remembered by

  A CONNECTICUT YANKEE IN KING ARTHUR'S COURT. Reade wrote several dull

  books, and THE CLOISTER AND THE HEARTH is one of them. But he also wrote

  three novels which I personally would back to outlive the entire works of

  Meredith and George Eliot, besides some brilliant long-short stories such

  as A JACK OF ALL TRADES and THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A THIEF.

  What is the attraction of Reade? At bottom it is the same charm as one