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***
Chesterton was, among very many other things, a literary critic
of the sort that has become lamentably rarer as the business
of criticism has become increasingly a province claimed by
academic scholars. That is to say, he wrote about what he loved.
For the new Fourteenth Edition of Britannica (1929) he wrote
this biographical appreciation.
DICKENS, Charles John Huffam (1812-1870), certainly the most popular and
perhaps the greatest of the great English novelists, was born in Landport,
a division of Portsea; in a house in Mile End terrace, Commercial road.
The house can be identified and is in some sense a popular shrine
or memorial, enabling the sightseer to link up in one journey two
of the most romantic national names, associating Dickens with Portsea
and Nelson with Portsmouth. But beyond this symbolic and almost legendary
local interest, the actual address indicates little more than the drifting
and often decaying fortunes of the class and family from which he came.
It would be an exaggeration to compare it to Lant street, in the Borough,
of which, it will be remembered, "the inhabitants were migratory,
disappearing usually towards the verge of quarter-day." But there is the
note of something nomadic about the social world to which he belonged.
We talk of the solid middle class; he belonged, one might almost say,
to the liquid middle class; certainly to the insecure middle class.
His father, John Dickens, was a clerk in the Navy-Pay Office,
and all through life a man of wavering and unstable status,
partly by his misfortunes and partly by his fault. It is said that
Dickens sketched him in a lighter spirit as Micawber and in a sadder
and more realistic aspect as Dorrit. The contrast between the two men,
as well as the two moods, should be a warning against the weakness
of taking too literally the idea of Dickensian "originals."
The habit has done grave injustice to many people, such as Leigh Hunt;
and it may involve a grave injustice to John Dickens; and perhaps
an even greater injustice to Mrs. John Dickens, nee Elizabeth Barrow,
whom a similar rumour reports as the real Mrs. Nickleby. Some may
question, not without grief, whether there really could be a real
Mrs. Nickleby. But in any case there certainly could not be a man
who was both Dorrit and Micawber. The truth is that we shall
misunderstand from the beginning the nature of the Dickensian imagination,
if we suppose these things to be mechanical portraits in black
and white, taken by "the profeel machine," as Mr. Weller said.
It is the whole point of Dickens that he took hints from human beings;
and turned them, one may say, into superhuman beings. But it is true
that John Dickens was of the type that is often shifted from place
to place; and this is the chief significance of Charles Dickens's
connection with Portsea, or rather of his lack of connection with it.
He can only have been two years old when the household moved for a
short time to London and then for a longer time to Chatham. It was
perhaps lucky that the formative period of his first childhood was
also the most fortunate period of his not very fortunate family.
The dockyard of Chatham, the towers of Rochester, the gardens
and the great roads of Kent remained to him through life as the only
normal memory of a nursery and a native soil; his house in later
years looked down on the great road from Gads hill and the cathedral
tower rose again in his last vision, in the opium dream called
"Edwin Drood." Here he had leisure to learn a little from books,
who was so soon to learn only from life; first in the stricter sense
of school-books, from a Mr. Giles, a Baptist minister in Chatham;
and second, and probably with greater profit, from a random heap
of old novels that included much of the greatest English literature
and even more of the type of literature from which he could
learn most; Roderick Random and Robinson Crusoe and Tom Jones and
The Vicar of Wakefield.
He can hardly have been ten years old when the household was once
more upon the march. John Dickens had fallen heavily into debt;
he continued the tendency to change his private address;
and his next private address was the Debtors' Prison of
the Marshalsea. His wife, the mother of eight children of whom
Charles was the second, had to encamp desolately in Camden Town
and open a dingy sort of "educational establishment."
Meanwhile the unfortunate Charles was learning his lessons
at a very different sort of educational establishment.
After helping his mother in every sort of menial occupation,
he was thrown forth to earn his own living by tying
and labelling pots of blacking in a blacking warehouse at
Old Hungerford Stairs. The blacking was symbolical enough;
Dickens never doubted that this piece of his childhood was
the darkest period of his life; and he seems indeed to have been
in a mood to black himself all over, like the Othello of the
Crummles Company. Of his pessimistic period, of the heartrending
monotony and ignominy, he has given little more than a bitter
abbreviation in David Copperfield. But he was storing up much
more than bitterness; it is obvious that he had already developed
an almost uncanny vigilance and alertness of attention.
By the time his servitude came to an end, by his father falling
into a legacy as he had fallen into a jail (there was really a touch
of Micawber in the way in which things turned up and turned down
for him) the boy was no longer a normal boy, let alone a child.
He called his wandering parent "the Prodigal Father";
and there was something of the same fantastic family inversion
in the very existence of so watchful and critical a son.
We are struck at once with an almost malicious maturity of satire;
some of the best passages of the prison life of the Pickwicks
and the Dorrits occur in private letters about his own early life.
He had shared, of course, the improvement in the family condition;
which was represented in his case by a period of service as a
clerk to a Mr. Blackmore, a Grays Inn solicitor, and afterwards
in the equally successful, and much more congenial, occupation of
a newspaper reporter and ultimately a Parliamentary reporter.
His father had taken up the trade; but his son was already making
a mark in it, as reporter to The True Sun, The Mirror of Parliament
and The Morning Chronicle. In all these aspects and attitudes,
at this time, he appears as alert, sharp-witted and detached;
recalling that sort of metallic brightness which an
observer at this period so often saw flash upon his face.
It is worthy of note, because certain healthy social emotions
which he always championed have somewhat falsified his personality
in the eyes of the prigs whom he loved to rap over the head.
He was a genuine champion of geniality; but he was not always genial;
certainly not only genial. One of his earliest sketches,
published not long after this time, was a defence of the Christian
festivity of Christmas against the Puritans and the Utilitarians;
it was called "Christmas Under Three Heads." All his
life he defended valiantly the pleasures of the poor;
and insisted that God had given ale and rum, as well as wine,
to make glad the heart of man. But all this has clouded his
character with fumes of mere conviviality and irresponsibility
which were very far from being really characteristic.
Even in youth, which is the period of irresponsibility,
Dickens appears in some ways as highly responsible.
He was in sharp reaction against the futility of his family;
he was both ambitious and industrious; and there were some who
even found him hard. In many moods he had as angry a dislike
of the Skimpoles as of the Gradgrinds.
Indeed he had come in more ways than one to the high turning-point
of his fortunes. His marriage and his first real literary
work can be dated at about the same time. He had already
begun to write sketches, chiefly in The Old Monthly Magazine,
which were in the broadest sense caricatures, of the common
objects of the street or the market-place. They were illustrated
by Cruikshank; and in these early stages of the story the
illustrator is often more important than the author. This was
notoriously true of his next and perhaps his greatest experiment;
but it is typical in any case of his time and his time of life.
The prose sketches were signed "Boz" and the signature had
become a recognized pseudonym when Messrs. Chapman and Hall,
the publishers, approached him with the suggestion of a larger scheme.
A well known humorous artist of that epoch, Seymour, was to
produce a series of plates illustrating the adventures,
or misadventures, of the Nimrod Club, a group of amateur sportsmen,
destined to dwindle and yet to grow infinitely greater in
the single figure of Mr. Nathaniel Winkle. Dickens consented
to write the letter-press, which was little more than a running
accompaniment like an ornamental border around the drawings;
and in that strange fashion, secondary, subordinate and even trivial,
first formed itself in the human fancy the epic and pantomime
of Pickwick (1837). Dickens persuaded the publishers to let
the Pickwick Club represent more varied interests or eccentricities,
retained Mr. Winkle to represent or misrepresent the original
notion of sport; and by that one stroke of independence cut
himself free from a stale fashion and started a new artistic
adventure and revolution. He gave as one of his reasons
the fact that he had no special knowledge of sports or games,
and proceeded to drive his argument home triumphantly by his
description of the cricket-match at Dingley Dell. And yet
that cricket-match alone might illustrate exactly the game which
Dickens so gloriously won; and why that wild and ill-instructed
batsman has had so many thousand runs and is not out.
What did a few mistakes in the description of cricket,
or even in the description of real life, matter in a man
who could invent that orator at the cricket-dinner, who
complimented the defeated eleven by saying, with the gesture
of Alexander, "If I were not Dumkins, I would be Luffey;
if I were not Podder, I would be Struggles"? Men do not read
that sort of thing to learn about cricket, or even about life,
but to find something more living than either. There had broken
through the entanglements of that trumpery bargain a force
of comic genius which swallowed up its own origin and excuses;
a wild animal big enough to eat all its direction labels.
People forgot about Seymour; forgot about sport; forgot about
the Nimrod Club; soon forgot about the Pickwick Club. They forgot
all that he forgot and followed whatever he followed;
much bigger and wilder game than any aimed at by the mere
gun of Mr. Winkle. The track of the story wandered;
the tone of the story changed; a servant whom Pickwick found
cleaning boots in an inn-yard took the centre of the stage
and towered even over Pickwick; Pickwick from being a pompous
buffoon became a generous and venerable old English gentleman;
and the world still followed that incredible transformation-scene
and wishes there were more of it to this day.
This was the emergence of Dickens into literature.
It had, of course, many secondary effects in life.
One was the first and almost the most bitter of his quarrels;
Seymour may be excused for having been annoyed at the relations
of artist and author being thus turned upside down in a whirlwind;
but Seymour was not therefore necessarily justified in saying,
as he did say and his widow long continued to say, that Dickens
had gained glory from another man's ideas. Nobody, we may
well imagine, believes that the oration of Sergeant Buzfuz
or the poem of Mrs. Leo Hunter, were Mr. Seymour's ideas.
Dickens had an inexhaustible torrent of such ideas;
and no man on earth could pretend to have provided them.
But it is true that in this quarrel, as in others, some found
a touch of sharpness and acid self-defence in Dickens;
and he was never without his enemies. His ideal was certainly
the leisure and geniality of Pickwick; but he was fighting rather
too hard for his own hand and had too much at stake and too
pressing a knowledge of poverty to be anything but practical.
As Pickwick was the foundation of his public life, his marriage
was naturally the foundation of his private life; and in this
also he has been an object of criticism as he was certainly
an object of sympathy. Very little good is done by making guesses
about a story of which the spiritual balance and proportion
were probably never known to more than three or four people.
It is sufficiently significant that those who were nearest
to it, and who survive to speak or rather to be silent,
agree in laying no very heavy blame upon anyone involved.
One of the principals of the Morning Chronicle, George Hogarth,
had been so much struck by the "Boz" sketches as to
insist on an improvement in the payment of the writer;
he introduced Dickens to his family and especially (we may say)
to his daughters, with all of whom the young journalist seems
to have been on very friendly and even affectionate terms.
One of them, Catherine, he married, and certainly married for love;
but not perhaps with the sort of love which gives a man a full
and serious realization of what he is doing. It is the pathos
of the story that in a sense the friendship outlasted the love;
for another sister, who understood him better, remained his friend
long after his marriage had become a prolonged misunderstanding.
All this, however, happened long afterwards; for the moment
his marriage may be taken as marking his step into security
and success; especially as he was probably stimulated and,
as it were, intoxicated, by a romance that brought him
into more refined social surroundings than his own.
From that moment he was launched as a popular writer and a power
in the world; and he never went back, until he died of popularity
thirty years afterwards.
It is notable that his next work was Oliver Twist (1838); which might
be meant for a contrast to Pickwick. If the first trick had succeeded,
nobody could accuse the conjurer of trying the same trick twice.
He was probably proud of proving his range; but he was certainly
courageous in testing his popularity. It is true that Oliver Twist
consists of a queer mixture of melodrama and realism; but both
the realism and the melodrama are deliberately dark and grim.
Nevertheless it is fortunate that with his second book he thus brought
into play what may be called his second talent. It is too common to
compare his humour with his pathos; for indeed there is no comparison.
But there really is a comparison between his humour and his horror;
and he really had a talent for a certain sort of horror, which is
exactly rendered by the popular phrase of supping on horrors.
For there is a sort of lurid conviviality that accompanies the panic;
as if the nightmare could accompany and not follow the heavy meal.
This suppressed vitality is due to his never for an instant losing
the love of life; the love of death, which is despair and pessimism,
was meaningless to him till he died. The sort of horror which afterwards
conceived the death of Krook is already found in Oliver Twist;
as in that intolerable repetition throbbing in the murderer's ears;
"will wash out mud-stains, blood-stains" and so on. For the rest,
the plot is preposterous and the flashes of fun excellent but few;
yet there is another aspect of the book which makes it important in
the story of Dickens. It is not only the first of his nightmare novels,
but also the first of his social tracts. Something of social
protest could be read between the lines of Pickwick in prison;
but the prison of Pickwick was very mild compared with the charitable
almshouse of Oliver. Dickens is witness, with Hood and Cobbett
and many others, that the workhouse was felt by all generous
people as something quite unnaturally new and hard and inhuman.
It is sometimes said that he killed Bumble; it would be easier
to say that, by making Bumble live, he created something by which it
will always be possible to kill bureaucracies.
Whether we call the transition from Pickwick to Oliver Twist
a change from comedy to tragedy, or merely a change
from farce to melodrama, it is notable that the next act
of Dickens is to mix the two in about equal proportions.
Having shown how much he can vary, he tries to show how well
he can combine. It is worth noting because it explains much
of the failure as well as the success of his art as a whole.
We may even say that, to the last, this sort of exhibition
of power remained his principal weakness. When the critics,
like those of The Quarterly, called him vulgar, it meant
nothing except that the critics themselves were snobbish.
There is nothing vulgar about drinking beer or describing
the drinking of beer, or enjoying the humours of really humorous
people who happen to black boots, like Sam Weller. But there
is something just a little vulgar about professing to be a
Universal Provider; a man who writes not only something that
he wants to write, but anything that anybody wants to read.
Anything in his work that can really be called failure is
very largely due to this appetite for universal success.
There is nothing wrong about the jester laughing at his own jokes;
indeed they must be very poor jokes if even he cannot laugh
at them. Dickens, in one of those endless private letters
which are almost more entertaining than his published novels,
describes himself as "a if he thought he was very funny indeed";
and so he was. But when he set out to prove that he was not
only very funny, but very pathetic, very tragic, very powerful,
he was not always enjoying the sense of power over his work,
he was enjoying the sense of power over his audience.
He was an admirable actor in private theatricals;
and sometimes, unfortunately, they were public theatricals.
And on this side of his character he had the proverbial itch
of Toole to act Hamlet. When he was rendering the humours
of the crowd, he was that rather rare thing, a real democrat.
But when he was trying to command the tears and thrills of the crowd,
he was something of a demagogue; that is, not one mingling
with the crowd, but one trying to dazzle and to drive it.
One of the ways in which he displayed this attribute,
if not of vulgarity at least of vanity, was in his habit,
from this time onwards, of running side by side in the same book
about five different stories in about five different styles.
It pleased the actor in him to show his versatility and his ease
in turning from one to the other. He did not realize clearly
enough that in some of the parts he was a first-rate actor
and in some a second-rate and in some a fifth-rate actor.
He did not remind himself that though he turned to each topic
with equal ease, he did not turn to each with equal effect.
But, whatever the disadvantages of the universal ambition,
it definitely dates from the period of his next book.
Pickwick has a prevailing tint of gaiety and Oliver Twist of gravity,
not to say grimness; but with Nicholas Nickleby (1839) we have
the new method, which is like a pattern of bright and dark stripes.
The melodrama is if possible even more melodramatic than in
Oliver Twist; but what there is of it is equally black and scowling.
But the comedy or farce has already displayed the rapid ripening
of his real genius in letters. There is no better company in all
literature than the strolling company of Mr. Vincent Crummles;
though it is to be hoped that in any convivial meeting of it,
Miss Snevellicci will remember to invite her incomparable papa.
Mr. Mantalini also is one of the great gifts of Dickens
to the enduring happiness of humanity. For the rest, it is
very difficult to take the serious part of the story seriously.
There is precious little difference between the rant
and claptrap of the Crummles plays, which Dickens makes
fun of, and the rant and claptrap of Ralph Nickleby
and Mulberry Hawke which Dickens gravely narrates to us.
All that, however, was of little consequence either immediate
or permanent. Dickens was not proving that he could write
smooth and probable narratives, which many people could do.
He was proving that he could create Mantalini and Snevellicci,
which nobody could do.
Nevertheless, this pretence of providing for all tastes,
which produced the serio-comic novel, is also the explanation
of the next stage of his career. There runs or recurs throughout
his whole life a certain ambition to preside over a more or less
complex or many-sided publication; a large framework for many pictures;
a system of tales within tales like the Arabian Nights or the tales
of the Tabard. It is the ambition that he afterwards gratified
by becoming the editor of two magazines, Household Words and All
the Year Round. But there is here something of a shadow of
the original meaning of the word magazine, in the sense of a shop;
and another hint of that excessive desire to keep a shop that
sells everything. He had been for a time editor of something
of the sort in Bentley's Miscellany, but the final form taken
by this mild and genial megalomania (if we may so describe it)
was the plan which Dickens formed immediately after the success
of Nicholas Nickleby. The serial scheme was to be called,
"Master Humphrey's Clock," and was to consist of different stories told
by a group of friends. With the idea of making them the more friendly
he turned some of them into old friends; reintroducing Mr. Pickwick
and the two Wellers, though these characters were hardly at
their best, the author's mind being already on other things.
One of these things was a historical novel, perhaps conceived more
in the romantic manner of Scott than the prosaic manner of Smollett,
which Dickens generally followed. It was called Barnaby Rudge
(1840) and the most interesting part of it perhaps is the business
of the Gordon Riots; and the mob that has a madman for its
mascot and penny-dreadful prentice for its comic relief.
But there is also a plot as complicated as, though rather clearer than,
that of Oliver Twist; a plot that intensely interested the detective
mind of Poe. Barnaby Rudge, however, is not so directly Dickensian
as the romance that preceded or the romance that followed it.
The second story, somewhat insecurely wedged into the framework
of Master Humphrey's Clock, was The Old Curiosity Shop (1841), as the
opening and some of the references in the story still vaguely attest.
The public reception of this story very sharply illustrates
what has been said about the double character of his success.
On the one side was his true success as a craftsman carving
figures of a certain type, generally gargoyles and grotesques.
On the other side was his inferior success as a jack-of-all-trades
tending only too much to be a cheapjack. As a matter
of fact, The Old Curiosity Shop contains some of the most
attractive and imaginative humour in all his humorous work;
there is nothing better anywhere than Mr. Swiveller's imitation
of the brigand or Mr. Brass's funeral oration over the dwarf.
But in general gossip and association, everything else in the story
is swallowed up in the lachrymose subject of Little Nell. There can
be no doubt that this unfortunate female had a most unfortunate
effect on Dickens's whole conception of his literary function.
He was flattered because silly people wrote him letters imploring
him not to let Little Nell die; and forgot how many sensible people
there were, only hoping that the Marchioness would live for ever.
Little Nell was better dead, but she was an unconscionable
long time dying; and we cannot altogether acquit Dickens of
keeping her lingering in agony as an exhibition of his power.
It tended to fix him in that unfortunate attitude, of something
between a showman and a magician, which explains almost all the real
mistakes of his life.
About this time a very determining event interrupted his purely
literary development, his first visit to America. It was destined
to have, apart from any other results, a direct effect upon
his next book, which was Martin Chuzzlewit (1844). There were,
of course, many purely practical and personal elements in
the criticism which he directed against the western democracy.
An unjust copyright law, or one which he at any rate thought
very unjust, had enabled Americans to pirate his most popular works;
and it would seem that the people he met were, in their breezy way,
but little inclined to apologize for the anomaly. But it would be
very unjust to Dickens to deny that his sense and sensibility were
alike irritated by some real divisions in the international relation.
There were things in the American culture, or lack of culture,
which he could not be expected to understand but which he might
reasonably be expected to dislike. His English law-abiding
liberalism would in any case have been startled by a certain streak
of ferocity and persecution that there really is in the Americans;
just as he might have recoiled from the same fierceness in
the Irish or the Italians. But in the Americans it was also
connected with something crude and incomplete in the society,
and was not softened by tradition or romance. He was also both
annoyed and amused at the American habit of uttering solemn
idealistic soliloquies and of using rhetoric very rhetorically.
But all these impressions are important chiefly as they changed
the course of his next important narrative; and illustrated
a certain condition or defect of his whole narrative method.
All these early books of Dickens, from Pickwick onward, appeared,
it must always be remembered, serially and in separate parts.
They were anticipated eagerly like bulletins; and they were often
written up to time almost as hastily as newspaper reports.
One effect of this method was that it encouraged the novelist
in a sort of opportunism and something of a hand to mouth
habit of work. And a character that always belonged,
in varying degrees, to his novels is first and most sharply
illustrated in Martin Chuzzlewit. The earlier numbers,
though they contained the two superb caricatures called
Pecksniff and Mrs. Gamp, had not for some reason been so popular
as the caricatures called Pickwick and Miss Squeers. Dickens was
already beginning to show something of that feverish fatigue
which was the natural reaction of his fervid industry.
He feared that the public was bored with the book; he became
perhaps subconsciously a little bored with it himself.
He conceived the bold idea of breaking the story in the middle
and putting in a purple patch woven from his wild memories of
the Yankees. It was completely successful, in the comedy sense;
but it is worth noting that Dickens did something curiously
Dickensian in thus suddenly sending Martin Chuzzlewit across
the sea to America. It is not easy to imagine Thackeray suddenly
hurling Pendennis from Mayfair into the middle of Australia;
or George Eliot dislodging Felix Holt and flinging him as far
as the North Pole. The difference was partly the result of
the Dickensian temper and partly of the method of publication.
But it will be well to remember it: for there is more
than one example of what looks like a positive change
of plan in the Dickens stories, made more possible by this
early habit of not producing the work of art as a whole.
Some have suggested that the degeneration of Boffin was originally
meant to be real, and his rather clumsy plot an afterthought:
and the same idea has figured in the reconstructions of Edwin Drood.
At this point there is a break in the life of Dickens,
in more ways than one. It is represented by his decision
to live abroad for a time, chiefly on grounds of economy;
the last lingering results of the relative failure of
Martin Chuzzlewit. He took a villa in the neighbourhood of Genoa
in 1844; and he and his family, already a fairly large one,
settled down there with a certain air of finality that deserved
for a time the name of exile. But it is curious to note that
the literary work done there has something of the character
of an interlude, and indeed of a rather incongruous interlude.
For it was in that Italian landscape that he concentrated on
a study so very domestic, insular and even cockney as The Chimes
(1845); and industriously continued the series of short
Christmas stories which had recently begun in the very London
fog of A Christmas Carol (1843). Whatever be the merits
or demerits of the Christmas Carol, it really is a carol;
in the sense of being short and direct and having the same
chorus throughout. The same is true in another way of The Chimes;
and of most things that occupied him in his Italian home.
He had not settled down to another long and important book;
and it soon became apparent that he had not settled down at all.
He returned to London, the landscape which for him was really
the most romantic and even historic; and did something
so ominously typical of the place and time as almost to seem
like tempting Providence. He became the first editor of
the Daily News, a paper started to maintain those Liberal,
if not Radical opinions of which he always shared the confident
outlook and the humane simplicity. He did not long remain
attached to the editorial chair or even to the metropolis,
for this was the most restless period in all his restless life.
He immediately went back to Lausanne and immediately wanted
to go back to London. It seems probable that this break in his
social life corresponded to a break in his artistic life:
which was in a sense just about to begin all over again and begin
at the other end. He did indeed write one more full-size novel
of the earlier type, Dombey and Son (1846-48); but it has
very much the character of the winding up of an old business,
like the winding up of the Dombey firm at the end of it.
It is comic as the earlier books were comic, and no praise can
be higher; it is conventional as the earlier plots were conventional,
and never really pretended to be anything else; it contains a dying
child upon the pattern of Little Nell; it contains a very amusing
major much improved from the pattern of Mr. Dowler. But underneath
all this easy repetition of the old dexterity and the old
clumsiness the mind of the conjurer is already elsewhere.
Dombey and Son was more successful in a business sense than
Martin Chuzzlewit; though really less successful in many others.
Dickens settled again in England in a more prosperous style;
sent his son to Eton and, what was more sensational, took a rest.
It was after a long holiday at Broadstairs, in easier circumstances
more favourable to imaginative growth and a general change
of view, that there appeared in 1849 an entirely new novel
in an entirely new style.
There is all the difference between the life and adventures of
David Copperfield and the life and adventures of Nicholas Nickleby,
that there is between the life of Charles Dickens and the life
of Amadis of Gaul. The latter is a good or bad romance; the former
is a romantic biography, only the more realistic for being romantic.
For romance is a very real part of life and perhaps the most
real part of youth. Dickens had turned the telescope round
or was looking through the other end of it; looking perhaps
into a mirror, looking in any case out of a new window.
It was life as he saw it, which was somewhat fantastically;
but it was his own life as he knew it, and even as he had lived it.
In other words, it is fanciful but it is not fictitious;
because not merely invented in the manner of fiction.
In Pickwick or Nickleby he had in a sense breathed fresh imaginative
life into stock characters, but they were still stage characters;
in the new style he may be extravagant, but he is not stagey.
That vague glow of exaggeration and glamour which lies over all
the opening chapters of David Copperfield, which dilates some figures
and distorts others, is the genuine sentimentalism and suppressed
passion of youth; it is no longer a convention or tradition
of caricature. There are men like Steerforth and girls like Dora;
they are not as boys see them; but boys do see them so.
This passionate autobiography, though it stiffens into greater
conventionality at the real period of passion, is really,
in the dismally battered phrase, a human document. But something
of the new spirit, more subtle and sympathetic but perhaps less
purely creative, belongs to all the books written after this date.
The next of the novels in point of time was Bleak House (1853), a
satire chiefly directed against Chancery and the law's delay,
but containing some brilliant satire on other things, as on
the philanthropic fool whose eyes are in the ends of the earth.
But the description of the feverish idleness of Rick has the new
note of one for whom a well-meaning young man is no longer merely
a "first walking gentleman." After a still more severe phase
in Hard Times (1854) (historically important as the revolt of a
Radical against the economic individualism which was originally
identified with Radicalism) he continued the same tendency
in Little Dorrit (1857), the tone of which is perhaps as sad
as anything illustrated by Dickensian humours can be; broke off
into an equally serious and more sensational experiment in historical
romance in The Tale of Two Cities (1859), largely an effect
of the influence of Carlyle; and finally reached what was perhaps
the height of his new artistic method in a purely artistic sense.
He never wrote anything better, considered as literature,
than the first chapters of Great Expectations (1861). But there is,
after all, something about Dickens that prevents the critic from
being ever quite content with criticizing his work as literature.
Something larger seems involved, which is not literature, but life;
and yet the very opposite of a mere recorded way of living.
And he who remembers Pickwick and Pecksniff, creatures like Puck
or Pan, may sometimes wonder whether the work had not most life
when it was least lifelike.
The stretch of stories following on David Copperfield,
from 1850 onwards, fall into the framework of another of Dickens's
editorial schemes; and this time a much more successful one.
He began to edit Household Words, in which some, though not
all of his later tales appeared; and continued to do so until
he exchanged it in 1859 for another and similar periodical
called All the Year Round. Just as we find him about this
time induced at last to settle down finally in a comparatively
comfortable editorial chair, so we find him at last settled
more comfortably in a domicile that could really be called
a home, when, returning at last to his beloved Rochester district
on the great road of Kent, he set up his house at Gads hill.
It is sad to realize that this material domestic settlement had
followed on a moral unsettlement; and the separation of Dickens
and his wife, by agreement (of which the little that needs
saying has already been said) had already taken place in 1856.
But indeed, even apart from that tragedy, it is typical
of Dickens that his repose could never be taken as final.
His life was destined to end in a whirlwind of an entirely new type
of activity; which none the less never interrupted that creative
work which was the indwelling excitement of all his days.
He wrote one more complete novel, Our Mutual Friend (1864-65), and
it is more complete than most. Indeed it is one of the best
though not one of the most Dickensian of the Dickens novels.
He then turned his restless talent to something in the nature of a
detective story, more in the manner of his friend Wilkie Collins;
the sort of story which begins by asking a question; in this
case a question about the secret and the sequel of the fate
of the hero, Edwin Drood. The question will never be answered;
for it was cut short by the only thing that could be more
dramatic than the death of the hero; the death of the author.
Charles Dickens was dead.
He died very suddenly, dropping from his chair at the dinner-table,
in the year 1870 at the comparatively early age of fifty-eight. A
death so abrupt, and essentially so premature, could not but raise
doubts about the wisdom of his impetuous industry and debates almost
as varied as those round the secret of Edwin Drood. But without
exaggerating any one of the elements that contributed to it,
we may note that the very last phase of his life was a new phase;
and was almost entirely filled with his new activity in giving
public readings from his works. He had gone to America once
more in the November of 1867, with this particular purpose;
and his campaign of public speaking in this style was truly
American in its scope and scale. If he had indeed been unjust
to America as a writer, it is curious that he should have
reached his final popularity and perhaps his final collapse,
in a character so supremely American. Differences exist
about how far he exaggerated the function or how far his
biographer exaggerated the danger; but his own letters,
ragged with insomnia and impatience, full of desperate fatigue
and more desperate courage, are alone enough to show that he was
playing a very dangerous game for a man approaching sixty.
But it is certainly true, as is alleged on the other side,
that this was nothing new in the general conduct of Dickens;
that he had long ago begun burning the candle at both ends;
and there have been few men, in the matter of natural endowments,
with so great and glorious a candle to burn.
He was buried in the Poet's Corner of Westminster Abbey;
and new and vulgar as many critics had called his work, he was far
more of a poet than many who were buried there as poets. He left
a will commending his soul to God, and to the mercy of Jesus Christ,
and leaving his works to the judgment of posterity; and in both respects
the action was symbolic and will remain significant in history.
Intellectually limited as he was by the rather cheap and cheery
negations of an age of commercial rationalism, he had never been
a bitter secularist or anti-clerical; he was at heart traditional
and was drawn much more towards Anglican than Puritan Christianity;
and his greatest work may yet prove to be the perpetuation of
the joyful mystery of Christmas. On the other side, he has suffered
and may suffer again the changes in the mere fashions of criticism;
but his work was creative, it added something to life; and it is hard
to believe that something so added will ever be entirely taken away.
The defects of his work are glaring; they hardly need to be detected;
they need the less to be emphasized because, unfortunately, he always
emphasized them himself. It may be a fault, it is certainly a fact,
that he enjoyed writing his worst work as much as his best.
The charge of exaggeration is itself exaggerated. It is also,
which is much more important, merely repeated mechanically,
without any consideration of its true meaning. Dickens did exaggerate;
but his exaggeration was purely Dickensian. In this sense his
very vulgarity had the quality of distinction. Mere overstatement,
to say that a tall man is ten feet high, to say that a frosty morning
froze Niagara; this is something relatively easy to do, though sometimes
very cleverly done, especially by Americans. But the distinction
of Dickens can be stated even in the common charge against him.
He is said to have turned men into monsters of humour or horror,
whereas the men were really commonplace and conventional persons
in shops and offices. If any critic depreciates the Dickensian
method as mere overstatement, the answer is obvious:
let him take some of these commonplace people and overstate them.
He will soon discover that he has not the vaguest notion of what
to overstate. He will soon realise that it is not a simple
matter of mere exaggeration, in the sense of mere extension.
It is not a matter of making a man a little taller or a morning
a little colder; the challenge to imagination is not whether
he can exaggerate, but whether he can find anything worth exaggerating.
Now the genius of Dickens consisted in seeing in somebody, whom others
might call merely prosaic, the germ of a sort of prose poem.
There was in this or that man's attitude, or affectation, or habit
of thought, something which only needed a touch of exaggeration
to be a charming fantasy or a dramatic contradiction. The books
of Dickens are in fact full of bores; of bores who do not bore us,
merely because they did not bore him. We have all of us heard
a hundred times the tiresome trick of public speakers, of asking
themselves rhetorical questions which they do not want answered.
Any of us might have heard a fat Dissenting minister doing
it at a tea-party and thankfully forgotten all about him.
But Dickens seized on the fallacy and turned it into a fantasy;
into Mr. Chadband's demands to know why he could not fly,
or his wild and beautiful apologue about the elephant and the eel.
We talk of the power of drawing people out; and that is the nearest
parallel to the power of Dickens. He drew reels and reels of highly
coloured caricature out of an ordinary person, as dazzlingly as a conjurer
draws reels and reels of highly coloured paper out of an ordinary hat.
But if anybody thinks the conjuring-trick is easy to perform,
let him try it with the next ordinary person he sees.
The exaggeration is always the logical extension of something that
really exists; but genius appears, first in seeing that it exists,
and second in seeing that it will bear to be thus exaggerated.
That is something totally different from giving a man a long nose;
it is the delicate surgical separation or extension of a living nerve.
It is carrying a ludicrous train of thought further than the
actual thinker carries it; but it requires a little thinking.
It is making fools more gloriously foolish than they can be in this
vale of tears; and it is not every fool who can do it.
There were other reasons for the injustice in the particular
case of Dickens. Though his characters often were caricatures,
they were not such wild caricatures as was supposed by those
who had never met such characters. And the critics had
never met the characters; because the critics did not live
in the common life of the English people; and Dickens did.
England was a much more amusing and horrible place than it appeared
to the sort of man who wrote reviews in The Quarterly; and, in spite
of all scientific progress or social reform, it is still.
The poverty and anarchy of Dickens's early life had stuffed
his memory with strange things and people never to be discovered
in Tennysonian country houses or even Thackerayan drawing-rooms.
Poverty makes strange bedfellows, the same sort of bedfellows
whom Mr. Pickwick fought for the recovery of his nightcap.
In the vivid phrase, he did indeed live in Queer street
and was acquainted with very queer fish. And it is something
of an irony that his tragedy was the justification of his farce.
He not only learnt in suffering what he taught in song,
but what he rendered, so to speak, in a comic song.
It is also true, however, that he caught many of these queer
fish because he liked fishing in such troubled waters.
A good example of this combination of opportunity and eccentricity
is to be found in his affection for travelling showmen and vagabond
entertainments of all sorts, especially those that exhibited
giants and dwarfs and such monstrosities. Some might see in this
truth a sort of travesty of all his travesties. It would be easy
to suggest a psychological theory, by which all his art tended
to the antics of the abnormal; it would also be entirely false.
It would be much truer to say that Dickens created so many wild
and fantastic caricatures because he was himself commonplace.
He never identifies himself with anything abnormal,
in the more modern manner. In his travelling show, the Giant
always falls far short of being a Superman. And though
he was tempted only too easily to an obvious pathos, there was
never anything particularly pathetic about his dwarfs.
His fun is more robust; and even, in that sense, more callous.
The truth is that Dickens's attitude to the abnormal has
been misunderstood owing to the modern misunderstanding of
the idea of the normal. He was in many ways a wild satirist,
but still a satirist; and satire is founded on sanity.
He has his real Cockney limitations. But his moderation was
not a limitation but a liberty; for it allowed him to hit out
in all directions. It was precisely because he had an ordinary
and sensible view of life that he could measure the full
madness both of Gradgrind's greed or Micawber's improvidence.
It was because he was what we call commonplace that Dombey
appeared to him so stiff or Jellaby so slovenly. In a later
generation a real person often assumed such an unreal pose
and lost the power of merely laughing at it; as, for example,
when Oscar Wilde said seriously all that Skimpole had said absurdly.
The Victorian commonsense was not a complete commonsense;
and Dickens did suffer from having a narrower culture than
Swift or Rabelais. But he did not suffer from being sensible;
it was even more from his sense than his sensibility, it was
from a sort of inspired irritation and impatience of good sense,
that he was able to give us so radiant a fairyland of fools.
His literary work produced of course much more than a literary effect.
He was the last great poet, in the true sense of maker, who made
something for the people and was in the highest sense popular.
He still gives his name, not to a literary clique, but to a
league or fellowship numbering thousands all over the world.
In this connection it is often noted that he achieved many things
even considered as a practical political and social reformer.
He let light into dark corners, like the dens of dirt and brutality
often called schools, especially in Yorkshire; he probably had
much to do with making the professional nurse a duller but more
reliable person than Mrs. Gamp; it is likely enough that his
vivid descriptions, assisted by the whole trend of the time,
hastened the extinction of ordinary imprisonment for debt and clarified
much of the original chaos of Chancery. But precisely because this
has often been said, it will be well not to say it too often.
It has the effect of making his satire appear much more
superficial and utilitarian than it really was; for the great
satirist is concerned with things not so easily destroyed.
We do more honour to Dickens in noting the evils he did not destroy
than those he did. The eager worship of a man merely wealthy,
however dull and trivial, which appears in the affair of Merdle,
has by no means disappeared from our own more recent affairs.
The pompous old Barnacle and the agreeable young Barnacle
are still almost as much alive as in Dickens's day.
The sweeping away of a genuine gentry, in the person of Mr. Twemlow,
on the tide of a new plutocracy, represented by Mr. Veneering,
has gone much further than in Dickens's day. But this makes Dickens's
satire the more rather than the less valuable to posterity.
The other mood, which pictures all such abuses as things of the past,
tends not to reform but only too much to repose; and to the perpetuation
of a rather snobbish and paltry version of the Dickensian tradition.
In that spirit we may hear to this day a Stiltstalkings telling
the House of Commons that Stiltstalkings have perished before
the march of progress; or in the law courts a Buzfuz quoting
Buzfuz and jeering at himself as an extinct monster.
The future of the fame of Dickens is no part of the Dickens
record and a very dubious part of the Dickens criticism.
Some have suggested that his glory will fade as new fashions
succeed those he satirized; others have said, at least
equally reasonably, that the difference itself fades when all
the fashions have grown old; and that Aristophanes and Cervantes
have outlived their descendants as well as their contemporaries.
But there can be no question of the importance of Dickens as a human
event in history; a sort of conflagration and transfiguration
in the very heart of what is called the conventional Victorian era;
a naked flame of mere natural genius, breaking out in a man
without culture, without tradition, without help from historic
religions or philosophies or from the great foreign schools;
and revealing a light that never was on sea or land, if only
in the long fantastic shadows that it threw from common things.
(G. K. C.)
Bibliography. W.Bagehot, Charles Dickens, Preface to Cheap Edition of Works
of Dickens (1857-58); J. Forster, Life of Charles Dickens, 3 vols.
(1872-74), new ed., 2 vols. (1927); Mary Dickens, Letters of Charles Dickens
(1898); G. K. Chesterton, Charles Dickens (1906), Appreciations and
Criticisms of the Work of Charles Dickens (1911); S. J. A. Fitz-Gerald,
Dickens and the Drama (1910); W. G. Wilkins, Charles Dickens in America
(1911); E. P. Whipple, Charles Dickens, 2 vols. (1912); A. C. Swinburne,
Charles Dickens (new ed., 1913); W. Dexter, The London of Dickens (1923);
The Kent of Dickens (1924); The England of Dickens (1925); Dickens (1927);
J. B. van Amerongen, The Actor in Dickens (1926); G. R. Gissing, Dickens, a
critical study (1926); W. J. Carlton, Charles Dickens, Shorthand Writer
(1926); P. Delattre, Dickens et la France (1927); see also G. E. B.
Saintsbury, Dickens, Chap. X., Vol. XIII., Cambs. Hist. Mod. Lit.
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