with the uppishness of servants. For years PUNCH ran a series of jokes
called 'Servant Gal-isms', all turning on the then astonishing fact that
a servant is a human being. Dickens is sometimes guilty of this kind of
thing himself. His books abound with the ordinary comic servants; they
are dishonest (GREAT EXPECTATIONS), incompetent (DAVID COPPERFIELD), turn
up their noses at good food (PICKWICK PAPERS), etc. etc.--all rather in
the spirit of the suburban housewife with one downtrodden cook-general.
But what is curious, in a nineteenth-century radical, is that when he
wants to draw a sympathetic picture of a servant, he creates what is
recognizably a feudal type. Sam Weller, Mark Tapley, Clara Peggotty are
all of them feudal figures. They belong to the genre of the 'old family
retainer'; they identify themselves with their master's family and are at
once doggishly faithful and completely familiar. No doubt Mark Tapley and
Sam Weller are derived to some extent from Smollett, and hence from
Cervantes; but it is interesting that Dickens should have been attracted
by such a type. Sam Weller's attitude is definitely medieval. He gets
himself arrested in order to follow Mr. Pickwick into the Fleet, and
afterwards refuses to get married because he feels that Mr. Pickwick
still needs his services. There is a characteristic scene between them:
'Vages or no vages, board or no board, lodgin' or no lodgin', Sam Veller,
as you took from the old inn in the Borough, sticks by you, come what
may...'
'My good fellow', said Mr. Pickwick, when Mr. Weller had sat down again,
rather abashed at his own enthusiasm, 'you are bound to consider the
young woman also.'
'I do consider the young 'ooman, sir', said Sam. 'I have considered the
young 'ooman. I've spoke to her. I've told her how I'm sitivated; she's
ready to vait till I'm ready, and I believe she vill. If she don't, she's
not the young 'ooman I take her for, and I give up with readiness.'
It is easy to imagine what the young woman would have said to this in
real life. But notice the feudal atmosphere. Sam Weller is ready as a
matter of course to sacrifice years of his life to his master, and he can
also sit down in his master's presence. A modern manservant would never
think of doing either. Dickens's views on the servant question do not get
much beyond wishing that master and servant would love one another.
Sloppy in OUR MUTUAL FRIEND, though a wretched failure as a character,
represents the same kind of loyalty as Sam Weller. Such loyalty, of
course, is natural, human, and likeable; but so was feudalism.
What Dickens seems to be doing, as usual, is to reach out for an
idealized version of the existing thing. He was writing at a time when
domestic service must have seemed a completely inevitable evil. There
were no labour-saving devices, and there was huge inequality of wealth.
It was an age of enormous families, pretentious meals and inconvenient
houses, when the slavey drudging fourteen hours a day in the basement
kitchen was something too normal to be noticed. And given the FACT of
servitude, the feudal relationship is the only tolerable one. Sam Weller
and Mark Tapley are dream figures, no less than the Cheerybles. If there
have got to be masters and servants, how much better that the master
should be Mr. Pickwick and the servant should be Sam Weller. Better
still, of course, if servants did not exist at all--but this Dickens is
probably unable to imagine. Without a high level of mechanical
development, human equality is not practically possible; Dickens goes to
show that it is not imaginable either.
IV
It is not merely a coincidence that Dickens never writes about
agriculture and writes endlessly about food. He was a Cockney, and London
is the centre of the earth in rather the same sense that the belly is the
centre of the body. It is a city of consumers, of people who are deeply
civilized but not primarily useful. A thing that strikes one when one
looks below the surface of Dickens's books is that, as nineteenth-century
novelists go, he is rather ignorant. He knows very little about the way
things really happen. At first sight this statement looks flatly untrue
and it needs some qualification.
Dickens had had vivid glimpses of 'low life'--life in a debtor's prison,
for example--and he was also a popular novelist and able to write about
ordinary people. So were all the characteristic English novelists of the
nineteenth century. They felt at home in the world they lived in, whereas
is a novel about a novelist. Even when Joyce, for instance, spends a
decade or so in patient efforts to make contact with the 'common man',
his 'common man' finally turns out to be a Jew, and a bit of a highbrow
at that. Dickens at least does not suffer from this kind of thing. He has
no difficulty in introducing the common motives, love, ambition, avarice,
vengeance and so forth. What he does not noticeably write about, however,
is work.
In Dickens's novels anything in the nature of work happens off-stage. The
only one of his heroes who has a plausible profession is David
Copperfield, who is first a shorthand writer and then a novelist, like
Dickens himself. With most of the others, the way they earn their living
is very much in the background. Pip, for instance, 'goes into business'
in Egypt; we are not told what business, and Pip's working life occupies
about half a page of the book. Clennam has been in some unspecified
business in China, and later goes into another barely specified business
with Doyce; Martin Chuzzlewit is an architect, but does not seem to get
much time for practising. In no case do their adventures spring directly
out of their work. Here the contrast between Dickens and, say, Trollope
is startling. And one reason for this is undoubtedly that Dickens knows
very little about the professions his characters are supposed to follow.
What exactly went on in Gradgrind's factories? How did Podsnap make his
money? How did Merdle work his swindles? One knows that Dickens could
never follow up the details of Parliamentary elections and Stock Exchange
rackets as Trollope could. As soon as he has to deal with trade, finance,
industry or politics he takes refuge in vagueness, or in satire. This is
the case even with legal processes, about which actually he must have
known a good deal. Compare any lawsuit in Dickens with the lawsuit in
ORLEY FARM, for instance.
And this partly accounts for the needless ramifications of Dickens's
novels, the awful Victorian 'plot'. It is true that not all his novels
are alike in this. A TALE OF TWO CITIES is a very good and fairly simple
story, and so in its different ways is HARD TIMES; but these are just the
two which are always rejected as 'not like Dickens'--and incidentally
they were not published in monthly numbers. The two first-person
novels are also good stories, apart from their subplots. But
the typical Dickens novel, NICHOLAS NICKLEBY, OLIVER TWIST, MARTIN
&n
bsp; CHUZZLEWIT, OUR MUTUAL FRIEND, always exists round a framework of
melodrama. The last thing anyone ever remembers about the books is their
central story. On the other hand, I suppose no one has ever read them
without carrying the memory of individual pages to the day of his death.
Dickens sees human beings with the most intense vividness, but sees them
always in private life, as 'characters', not as functional members of
society; that is to say, he sees them statically. Consequently his
greatest success is The PICKWICK PAPERS, which is not a story at all,
merely a series of sketches; there is little attempt at development--the
characters simply go on and on, behaving like idiots, in a kind of
eternity. As soon as he tries to bring his characters into action, the
melodrama begins. He cannot make the action revolve round their ordinary
occupations; hence the crossword puzzle of coincidences, intrigues,
murders, disguises, buried wills, long-lost brothers, etc. etc. In the
end even people like Squeers and Micawber get sucked into the machinery.
Of course it would be absurd to say that Dickens is a vague or merely
melodramatic writer. Much that he wrote is extremely factual, and in the
power of evoking visual images he has probably never been equalled. When
Dickens has once described something you see it for the rest of your
life. But in a way the concreteness of his vision is a sign of what he is
missing. For, after all, that is what the merely casual onlooker always
sees--the outward appearance, the non-functional, the surfaces of
things. No one who is really involved in the landscape ever sees the
landscape. Wonderfully as he can describe an APPEARANCE, Dickens does not
often describe a process. The vivid pictures that he succeeds in leaving
in one's memory are nearly always the pictures of things seen in leisure
moments, in the coffee-rooms of country inns or through the windows of a
stage-coach; the kind of things he notices are inn-signs, brass
door-knockers, painted jugs, the interiors of shops and private houses,
consumer-angle. When he writes about Cokestown he manages to evoke, in
just a few paragraphs, the atmosphere of a Lancashire town as a slightly
disgusted southern visitor would see it. 'It had a black canal in it, and
a river that ran purple with evil-smelling dye, and vast piles of
buildings full of windows where there was a rattling and a trembling all
day long, where the piston of the steam-engine worked monotonously up and
down, like the head of an elephant in a state of melancholy madness.'
That is as near as Dickens ever gets to the machinery of the mills. An
engineer or a cotton-broker would see it differently; but then neither of
them would be capable of that impressionistic touch about the heads of
the elephants.
In a rather different sense his attitude to life is extremely unphysical.
He is a man who lives through his eyes and ears rather than through his
hands and muscles. Actually his habits were not so sedentary as this
seems to imply. In spite of rather poor health and physique, he was
active to the point of restlessness; throughout his life he was a
remarkable walker, and he could at any rate carpenter well enough to put
up stage scenery. But he was not one of those people who feel a need to
use their hands. It is difficult to imagine him digging at a
cabbage-patch, for instance. He gives no evidence of knowing anything
about agriculture, and obviously knows nothing about any kind of game or
sport. He has no interest in pugilism, for instance. Considering the age
in which he was writing, it is astonishing how little physical brutality
there is in Dickens's novels. Martin Chuzzlewit and Mark Tapley, for
instance, behave with the most remarkable mildness towards the Americans
who are constantly menacing them with revolvers and bowie-knives. The
average English or American novelist would have had them handing out
socks on the jaw and exchanging pistol-shots in all directions. Dickens
is too decent for that; he sees the stupidity of violence, and he also
belongs to a cautious urban class which does not deal in socks on the
jaw, even in theory. And his attitude towards sport is mixed up with
social feelings. In England, for mainly geographical reasons, sport,
especially field-sports, and snobbery are inextricably mingled. English
Socialists are often flatly incredulous when told that Lenin, for
instance, was devoted to shooting. In their eyes, shooting, hunting,
etc., are simply snobbish observances of the landed gentry; they forget
that these things might appear differently in a huge virgin country like
Russia. From Dickens's point of view almost any kind of sport is at best
a subject for satire. Consequently one side of nineteenth-century
life--the boxing, racing, cock-fighting, badger-digging, poaching,
rat-catching side of life, so wonderfully embalmed in Leech's
illustrations to Surtees--is outside his scope.
What is more striking, in a seemingly 'progressive' radical, is that he
is not mechanically minded. He shows no interest either in the details of
machinery or in the things machinery can do. As Gissing remarks, Dickens
nowhere describes a railway journey with anything like the enthusiasm he
shows in describing journeys by stage-coach. In nearly all of his books
one has a curious feeling that one is living in the first quarter of the
nineteenth century, and in fact, he does tend to return to this period.
LITTLE DORRIT, written in the middle fifties, deals with the late
twenties; GREAT EXPECTATIONS (1861) is not dated, but evidently deals
with the twenties and thirties. Several of the inventions and discoveries
which have made the modern world possible (the electric telegraph, the
breech-loading gun, India-rubber, coal gas, wood-pulp paper) first
appeared in Dickens's lifetime, but he scarcely notes them in his books.
Nothing is queerer than the vagueness with which he speaks of Doyce's
'invention' in LITTLE DORRIT. It is represented as something extremely
ingenious and revolutionary, 'of great importance to his country and his
fellow-creatures', and it is also an important minor link in the book;
yet we are never told what the 'invention' is! On the other hand, Doyce's
physical appearance is hit off with the typical Dickens touch; he has a
peculiar way of moving his thumb, a way characteristic of engineers.
After that, Doyce is firmly anchored in one's memory; but, as usual,
Dickens has done it by fastening on something external.
There are people (Tennyson is an example) who lack the mechanical faculty
but can see the social possibilities of machinery. Dickens has not this
stamp of mind. He shows very little consciousness of the future. When he
speaks of human progress it is usually in terms of MORAL progress--men
growing better; probably he would never admit that men are only as good
as their technical development allows them to be. At this point the gap
between Dickens and his modern analogue, H.G. Wells, is at its widest.
Wells wears the future
round his neck like a mill-stone, but Dickens's
unscientific cast of mind is just as damaging in a different way. What it
does is to make any POSITIVE attitude more difficult for him. He is
hostile to the feudal, agricultural past and not in real touch with the
industrial present. Well, then, all that remains is the future (meaning
Science, 'progress', and so forth), which hardly enters into his
thoughts. Therefore, while attacking everything in sight, he has no
definable standard of comparison. As I have pointed out already, he
attacks the current educational system with perfect justice, and yet,
after all, he has no remedy to offer except kindlier schoolmasters. Why
did he not indicate what a school MIGHT have been? Why did he not have
his own sons educated according to some plan of his own, instead of
sending them to public schools to be stuffed with Greek? Because he
lacked that kind of imagination. He has an infallible moral sense, but
very little intellectual curiosity. And here one comes upon something
which really is an enormous deficiency in Dickens, something, that really
does make the nineteenth century seem remote from us--that he has no
idea of work.
With the doubtful exception of David Copperfield (merely Dickens
himself), one cannot point to a single one of his central characters who
is primarily interested in his job. His heroes work in order to make a
living and to marry the heroine, not because they feel a passionate
interest in one particular subject. Martin Chuzzlewit, for instance, is
not burning with zeal to be an architect; he might just as well be a
doctor or a barrister. In any case, in the typical Dickens novel, the
DEUS EX MACHINA enters with a bag of gold in the last chapter and the
hero is absolved from further struggle. The feeling 'This is what I came
into the world to do. Everything else is uninteresting. I will do this
even if it means starvation', which turns men of differing temperaments
into scientists, inventors, artists, priests, explorers and
revolutionaries--this motif is almost entirely absent from Dickens's
books. He himself, as is well known, worked like a slave and believed in
his work as few novelists have ever done. But there seems to be no
calling except novel-writing (and perhaps acting) towards which he can
imagine this kind of devotion. And, after all, it is natural enough,
considering his rather negative attitude towards society. In the last
resort there is nothing he admires except common decency. Science is
uninteresting and machinery is cruel and ugly (the heads of the
elephants). Business is only for ruffians like Bounderby. As for
politics--leave that to the Tite Barnacles. Really there is no objective
except to marry the heroine, settle down, live solvently and be kind.
And you can do that much better in private life.
Here, perhaps, one gets a glimpse of Dickens's secret imaginative
background. What did he think of as the most desirable way to live? When
Martin Chuzzlewit had made it up with his uncle, when Nicholas Nickleby
had married money, when John Harman had been enriched by Boffin what did
they DO?
The answer evidently is that they did nothing. Nicholas Nickleby invested
his wife's money with the Cheerybles and 'became a rich and prosperous
merchant', but as he immediately retired into Devonshire, we can assume
that he did not work very hard. Mr. and Mrs. Snodgrass 'purchased and
cultivated a small farm, more for occupation than profit.' That is the
spirit in which most of Dickens's books end--a sort of radiant idleness.
Where he appears to disapprove of young men who do not work (Harthouse,
Harry Gowan, Richard Carstone, Wrayburn before his reformation) it is
because they are cynical and immoral or because they are a burden on
somebody else; if you are 'good', and also self-supporting, there is no
reason why you should not spend fifty years in simply drawing your