dividends. Home life is always enough. And, after all, it was the general
assumption of his age. The 'genteel sufficiency', the 'competence', the
'gentleman of independent means' (or 'in easy circumstances')--the very
phrases tell one all about the strange, empty dream of the eighteenth- and
nineteenth-century middle bourgeoisie. It was a dream of COMPLETE
IDLENESS. Charles Reade conveys its spirit perfectly in the ending of
HARD CASH. Alfred Hardie, hero of HARD CASH, is the typical
nineteenth-century novel-hero (public-school style), with gifts which
Reade describes as amounting to 'genius'. He is an old Etonian and a
scholar of Oxford, he knows most of the Greek and Latin classics by
heart, he can box with prizefighters and win the Diamond Sculls at
Henley. He goes through incredible adventures in which, of course, he
behaves with faultless heroism, and then, at the age of twenty-five, he
inherits a fortune, marries his Julia Dodd and settles down in the
suburbs of Liverpool, in the same house as his parents-in-law:
They all lived together at Albion Villa, thanks to Alfred...Oh, you
happy little villa! You were as like Paradise as any mortal dwelling can
be. A day came, however, when your walls could no longer hold all the
happy inmates. Julia presented Alfred with a lovely boy; enter two nurses
and the villa showed symptoms of bursting. Two months more, and Alfred
and his wife overflowed into the next villa. It was but twenty yards off;
and there was a double reason for the migration. As often happens after a
long separation, Heaven bestowed on Captain and Mrs. Dodd another infant
to play about their knees, etc. etc. etc.
This is the type of the Victorian happy ending--a vision of a huge,
loving family of three or four generations, all crammed together in the
same house and constantly multiplying, like a bed of oysters. What is
striking about it is the utterly soft, sheltered, effortless life that it
implies. It is not even a violent idleness, like Squire Western's.
That is the significance of Dickens's urban background and his
non interest in the blackguardly-sporting military side of life. His
heroes, once they had come into money and 'settled down', would not only
do no work; they would not even ride, hunt, shoot, fight duels, elope
with actresses or lose money at the races. They would simply live at home
in feather-bed respectability, and preferably next door to a
blood-relation living exactly the same life:
The first act of Nicholas, when he became a rich and prosperous merchant,
was to buy his father's old house. As time crept on, and there came
gradually about him a group of lovely children, it was altered and
enlarged; but none of the old rooms were ever pulled down, no old tree
was ever rooted up, nothing with which there was any association of
bygone times was ever removed or changed.
Within a stone's-throw was another retreat enlivened by children's
pleasant voices too; and here was Kate...the same true, gentle creature,
the same fond sister, the same in the love of all about her, as in her
girlish days.
It is the same incestuous atmosphere as in the passage quoted from Reade.
And evidently this is Dickens's ideal ending. It is perfectly attained in
NICHOLAS NICKLEBY, MARTIN CHUZZLEWIT and PICKWICK, and it is approximated
to in varying degrees in almost all the others. The exceptions are HARD
TIMES and GREAT EXPECTATIONS--the latter actually has a 'happy ending',
but it contradicts the general tendency of the book, and it was put in at
the request of Bulwer Lytton.
The ideal to be striven after, then, appears to be something like this: a
hundred thousand pounds, a quaint old house with plenty of ivy on it, a
sweetly womanly wife, a horde of children, and no work. Everything is
safe, soft, peaceful and, above all, domestic. In the moss-grown
churchyard down the road are the graves of the loved ones who passed away
before the happy ending happened. The servants are comic and feudal, the
children prattle round your feet, the old friends sit at your fireside,
talking of past days, there is the endless succession of enormous meals,
the cold punch and sherry negus, the feather beds and warming-pans, the
Christmas parties with charades and blind man's buff; but nothing ever
happens, except the yearly childbirth. The curious thing is that it is a
genuinely happy picture, or so Dickens is able to make it appear. The
thought of that kind of existence is satisfying to him. This alone would
be enough to tell one that more than a hundred years have passed since
purposelessness with so much vitality.
V
By this time anyone who is a lover of Dickens, and who has read as far as
this, will probably be angry with me.
I have been discussing Dickens simply in terms of his 'message', and
almost ignoring his literary qualities. But every writer, especially
every novelist, HAS a 'message', whether he admits it or not, and the
minutest details of his work are influenced by it. All art is propaganda.
Neither Dickens himself nor the majority of Victorian novelists would
have thought of denying this. On the other hand, not all propaganda is
art. As I said earlier, Dickens is one of those writers who are felt to
be worth stealing. He has been stolen by Marxists, by Catholics and,
above all, by Conservatives. The question is, What is there to steal? Why
does anyone care about Dickens? Why do I care about Dickens?
That kind of question is never easy to answer. As a rule, an aesthetic
preference is either something inexplicable or it is so corrupted by
non-aesthetic motives as to make one wonder whether the whole of literary
criticism is not a huge network of humbug. In Dickens's case the
complicating factor is his familiarity. He happens to be one of those
'great authors' who are ladled down everyone's throat in childhood. At
the time this causes rebellion and vomiting, but it may have different
after-effects in later life. For instance, nearly everyone feels a
sneaking affection for the patriotic poems that he learned by heart as a
child, 'Ye Mariners of England', the 'Charge of the Light Brigade' and so
forth. What one enjoys is not so much the poems themselves as the
memories they call up. And with Dickens the same forces of association
are at work. Probably there are copies of one or two of his books lying
about in an actual majority of English homes. Many children begin to know
his characters by sight before they can even read, for on the whole
Dickens was lucky in his illustrators. A thing that is absorbed as early
as that does not come up against any critical judgement. And when one
thinks of this, one thinks of all that is bad and silly in Dickens--the
cast-iron 'plots', the characters who don't come off, the longueurs, the
paragraphs in blank verse, the awful pages of 'pathos'. And then the
thought arises, when I say I like Dickens, do I simply mean that I like
thinking about my childhood? Is Dickens merely an institution?
If so, he
is an institution that there is no getting away from. How often
one really thinks about any writer, even a writer one cares for, is a
difficult thing to decide; but I should doubt whether anyone who has
actually read Dickens can go a week without remembering him in one
context or another. Whether you approve of him or not, he is THERE, like
the Nelson Column. At any moment some scene or character, which may come
from some book you cannot even remember the name of, is liable to drop
into your mind. Micawber's letters! Winkle in the witness-box! Mrs. Gamp!
Mrs. Wititterly and Sir Tumley Snuffim! Todgers's! (George Gissing said
that when he passed the Monument it was never of the Fire of London that
he thought, always of Todgers's.) Mrs. Leo Hunter! Squeers! Silas Wegg
and the Decline and Fall-off of the Russian Empire! Miss Mills and the
Desert of Sahara! Wopsle acting Hamlet! Mrs. Jellyby! Mantalini, Jerry
Cruncher, Barkis, Pumblechook, Tracy Tupman, Skimpole, Joe Gargery,
Pecksniff--and so it goes on and on. It is not so much a series of
books, it is more like a world. And not a purely comic world either, for
part of what one remembers in Dickens is his Victorian morbidness and
necrophilia and the blood-and-thunder scenes--the death of Sykes,
Krook's spontaneous combustion, Fagin in the condemned cell, the women
knitting round the guillotine. To a surprising extent all this has
entered even into the minds of people who do not care about it. A
music-hall comedian can (or at any rate could quite recently) go on the
stage and impersonate Micawber or Mrs. Gamp with a fair certainty of
being understood, although not one in twenty of the audience had ever
read a book of Dickens's right through. Even people who affect to despise
him quote him unconsciously.
Dickens is a writer who can be imitated, up to a certain point. In
genuinely popular literature--for instance, the Elephant and Castle
version of SWEENY TODD--he has been plagiarized quite shamelessly. What
took from earlier novelists and developed, the cult of 'character', i.e.
eccentricity. The thing that cannot be imitated is his fertility of
invention, which is invention not so much of characters, still less of
'situations', as of turns of phrase and concrete details. The
outstanding, unmistakable mark of Dickens's writing is the UNNECESSARY
DETAIL. Here is an example of what I mean. The story given below is not
particularly funny, but there is one phrase in it that is as individual
as a fingerprint. Mr. Jack Hopkins, at Bob Sawyer's party, is telling the
story of the child who swallowed its sister's necklace:
Next day, child swallowed two beads; the day after that, he treated
himself to three, and so on, till in a week's time he had got through the
necklace--five-and-twenty beads in all. The sister, who was an
industrious girl and seldom treated herself to a bit of finery, cried her
eyes out at the loss of the necklace; looked high and low for it; but I
needn't say, didn't find it. A few days afterwards, the family were at
dinner--baked shoulder of mutton and potatoes under it--the child, who
wasn't hungry, was playing about the room, when suddenly there was the
devil of a noise, like a small hailstorm. 'Don't do that, my boy', says
the father. 'I ain't a-doin' nothing', said the child. 'Well, don't do it
again', said the father. There was a short silence, and then the noise
began again, worse than ever. 'If you don't mind what I say, my boy',
said the father, 'you'll find yourself in bed, in something less than a
pig's whisper.' He gave the child a shake to make him obedient, and such
a rattling ensued as nobody ever heard before. 'Why dam' me, it's IN the
child', said the father; 'he's got the croup in the wrong place!' 'No, I
haven't, father', said the child, beginning to cry, 'it's the necklace; I
swallowed it, father.' The father caught the child up, and ran with him
to the hospital, the beads in the boy's stomach rattling all the way with
the jolting; and the people looking up in the air, and down in the
cellars, to see where the unusual sound came from. 'He's in the hospital
now', said Jack Hopkins, 'and he makes such a devil of a noise when he
walks about, that they're obliged to muffle him in a watchman's coat, for
fear he should wake the patients.'
As a whole, this story might come out of any nineteenth-century comic
paper. But the unmistakable Dickens touch, the thing that nobody else
would have thought of, is the baked shoulder of mutton and potatoes under
it. How does this advance the story? The answer is that it doesn't. It is
something totally unnecessary, a florid little squiggle on the edge of
the page; only, it is by just these squiggles that the special Dickens
atmosphere is created. The other thing one would notice here is that
Dickens's way of telling a story takes a long time. An interesting
example, too long to quote, is Sam Weller's story of the obstinate
patient in Chapter XLIV of THE PICKWICK PAPERS. As it happens, we have a
standard of comparison here, because Dickens is plagiarizing, consciously
or unconsciously. The story is also told by some ancient Greek writer. I
cannot now find the passage, but I read it years ago as a boy at school,
and it runs more or less like this:
A certain Thracian, renowned for his obstinacy, was warned by his
physician that if he drank a flagon of wine it would kill him. The
Thracian thereupon drank the flagon of wine and immediately jumped off
the house-top and perished. 'For', said he, 'in this way I shall prove
that the wine did not kill me.'
As the Greek tells it, that is the whole story--about six lines. As Sam
Weller tells it, it takes round about a thousand words. Long before
getting to the point we have been told all about the patient's clothes,
his meals, his manners, even the newspapers he reads, and about the
peculiar construction of the doctor's carriage, which conceals the fact
that the coachman's trousers do not match his coat. Then there is the
dialogue between the doctor and the patient. ''Crumpets is wholesome,
sir,' said the patient. 'Crumpets is NOT wholesome, sir,' says the
doctor, wery fierce,' etc., etc. In the end the original story had been
buried under the details. And in all of Dickens's most characteristic
passages it is the same. His imagination overwhelms everything, like a
kind of weed. Squeers stands up to address his boys, and immediately we
are hearing about Bolder's father who was two pounds ten short, and
Mobbs's stepmother who took to her bed on hearing that Mobbs wouldn't eat
fat and hoped Mr. Squeers would flog him into a happier state of mind.
Mrs. Leo Hunter writes a poem, 'Expiring Frog'; two full stanzas are
given. Boffin takes a fancy to pose as a miser, and instantly we are down
among the squalid biographies of eighteenth-century misers, with names
like Vulture Hopkins and the Rev. Blewberry Jones, and chapter headings
like 'The Story of the Mutton Pies' and 'The Treasures of a Dunghill'.
Mrs. Harris, who d
oes not even exist, has more detail piled on to her
than any three characters in an ordinary novel. Merely in the middle of a
sentence we learn, for instance, that her infant nephew has been seen in
a bottle at Greenwich Fair, along with the pink-eyed lady, the Prussian
dwarf and the living skeleton. Joe Gargery describes how the robbers
broke into the house of Pumblechook, the corn and seed merchant--'and
they took his till, and they took his cashbox, and they drinked his wine,
and they partook of his wittles, and they slapped his face, and they
pulled his nose, and they tied him up to his bedpost, and they give him a
dozen, and they stuffed his mouth full of flowering annuals to prevent
his crying out.' Once again the unmistakable Dickens touch, the flowering
annuals; but any other novelist would only have mentioned about half of
these outrages. Everything is piled up and up, detail on detail,
embroidery on embroidery. It is futile to object that this kind of thing
is rococo--one might as well make the same objection to a wedding-cake.
Either you like it or you do not like it. Other nineteenth-century
writers, Surtees, Barham, Thackeray, even Marryat, have something of
Dickens's profuse, overflowing quality, but none of them on anything like
the same scale. The appeal of all these writers now depends partly on
period-flavour and though Marryat is still officially a 'boy's writer'
and Surtees has a sort of legendary fame among hunting men, it is
probable that they are read mostly by bookish people.
Significantly, Dickens's most successful books (not his BEST books) are
THE PICKWICK PAPERS, which is not a novel, and HARD TIMES and A TALE OF
TWO CITIES, which are not funny. As a novelist his natural fertility
greatly hampers him, because the burlesque which he is never able to
resist, is constantly breaking into what ought to be serious situations.
There is a good example of this in the opening chapter of GREAT
EXPECTATIONS. The escaped convict, Magwitch, has just captured the
six-year-old Pip in the churchyard. The scene starts terrifyingly enough,
from Pip's point of view. The convict, smothered in mud and with his
chain trailing from his leg, suddenly starts up among the tombs, grabs
the child, turns him upside down and robs his pockets. Then he begins
terrorizing him into bringing foal and a file:
He held me by the arms in an upright position on the top of the stone,
and went on in these fearful terms:
'You bring me, tomorrow morning early, that file and them wittles. You
bring the lot to me, at that old Battery over yonder. You do it and you
never dare to say a word or dare to make a sign concerning your having
seen such a person as me, or any person sumever, and you shall be let to
live. You fail, or you go from my words in any partickler, no matter how
small it is, and your heart and liver shall be tore out, roasted and ate.
Now, I ain't alone, as you may think I am. There's a young man hid with
me, in comparison with which young man I am a Angel. That young man hears
the words I speak. That young man has a secret way pecooliar to himself,
of getting at a boy, and at his heart, and at his liver. It is in wain
for a boy to attempt to hide himself from that young man. A boy may lock
his doors, may be warm in bed, may tuck himself up, may draw the clothes
over his head, may think himself comfortable and safe, but that young man
will softly creep his way to him and tear him open. I am keeping that
young man from harming you at the present moment, but with great
difficulty. I find it wery hard to hold that young man off of your
inside. Now, what do you say?'
Here Dickens has simply yielded to temptation. To begin with, no starving
and hunted man would speak in the least like that. Moreover, although the
speech shows a remarkable knowledge of the way in which a child's mind
works, its actual words are quite out of tune with what is to follow. It