No More Learning

It is noticeable that Dickens
hardly writes of war, even to denounce it. With all his marvellous powers of description,
and of describing things he had never seen, he never describes a battle, unless one counts
the attack on the Bastille in A TALE OF TWO CITIES. Probably the subject would not
strike him as interesting, and in any case he would not regard a battlefield as a place
where anything worth settling could be settled. It is one up to the lower-middle-class,
puritan mentality.



Ill


Dickens had grown up near enough to poverty to be terrified of it, and in spite of his
generosity of mind, he is not free from the special prejudices of the shabby-genteel. It is
usual to claim him as a ‘popular’ writer, a champion of the ‘oppressed masses’. So he is,
so long as he thinks of them as oppressed; but there are two things that condition his
attitude. In the first place, he is a south-of-England man, and a Cockney at that, and
therefore out of touch with the bulk of the real oppressed masses, the industrial and
agricultural labourers. It is interesting to see how Chesterton, another Cockney, always
presents Dickens as the spokesman of ‘the poor’, without showing much awareness of
who ‘the poor’ really are. To Chesterton ‘the poor’ means small shopkeepers and
servants. Sam Weller, he says, ‘is the great symbol in English literature of the populace
peculiar to England’; and Sam Weller is a valet! The other point is that Dickens’s early
experiences have given him a horror of proletarian roughness. He shows this
unmistakably whenever he writes of the very poorest of the poor, the slum-dwellers. His
descriptions of the London slums are always full of undisguised repulsion:

The ways were foul and narrow; the shops and houses wretched; and people half naked,
drunken, slipshod and ugly. Alleys and archways, like so many cesspools, disgorged their
offences of smell, and dirt, and life, upon the straggling streets; and the whole quarter
reeked with crime, and filth, and misery, etc. etc.

There are many similar passages in Dickens. From them one gets the impression of whole
submerged populations whom he regards as being beyond the pale. In rather the same
way the modern doctrinaire Socialist contemptuously writes off a large block of the
population as Tumpenproletariat’.

Dickens also shows less understanding of criminals than one would expect of him.
Although he is well aware of the social and economic causes of crime, he often seems to
feel that when a man has once broken the law he has put himself outside human society.
There is a chapter at the end of DAVID COPPERFIELD in which David visits the prison
where Latimer and Uriah Heep are serving their sentences. Dickens actually seems to
regard the horrible ‘model’ prisons, against which Charles Reade delivered his
memorable attack in IT IS NEVER TOO LATE TO MEND, as too humane. He
complains that the food is too good! As soon as he comes up against crime or the worst



depths of poverty, he shows traces of the ‘I’ve always kept myself respectable’ habit of
mind. The attitude of Pip (obviously the attitude of Dickens himself) towards Magwitch
in GREAT EXPECTATIONS is extremely interesting. Pip is conscious all along of his
ingratitude towards Joe, but far less so of his ingratitude towards Magwitch. When he
discovers that the person who has loaded him with benefits for years is actually a
transported convict, he falls into frenzies of disgust. ‘The abhorrence in which I held the
man, the dread I had of him, the repugnance with which I shrank from him, could not
have been exceeded if he had been some terrible beast’, etc. etc. So far as one can
discover from the text, this is not because when Pip was a child he had been terrorized by
Magwitch in the churchyard; it is because Magwitch is a criminal and a convict. There is
an even more ‘kept-myself-respectable’ touch in the fact that Pip feels as a matter of
course that he cannot take Magwitch’ s money. The money is not the product of a crime, it
has been honestly acquired; but it is an ex-convict’s money and therefore ‘tainted’. There
is nothing psychologically false in this, either. Psychologically the latter part of GREAT
EXPECTATIONS is about the best thing Dickens ever did; throughout this part of the
book one feels ‘Yes, that is just how Pip would have behaved. ’ But the point is that in the
matter of Magwitch, Dickens identifies with Pip, and his attitude is at bottom snobbish.
The result is that Magwitch belongs to the same queer class of characters as Falstaff and,
probably, Don Quixote — characters who are more pathetic than the author intended.

When it is a question of the non-criminal poor, the ordinary, decent, labouring poor, there
is of course nothing contemptuous in Dickens’s attitude. He has the sincerest admiration
for people like the Peggottys and the Plomishes. But it is questionable whether he really
regards them as equals. It is of the greatest interest to read Chapter XI of DAVID
COPPERFIELD and side by side with it the autobiographical fragments (parts of this are
given in Forster’s LIFE), in which Dickens expresses his feelings about the blacking-
factory episode a great deal more strongly than in the novel. For more than twenty years
afterwards the memory was so painful to him that he would go out of his way to avoid
that part of the Strand. He says that to pass that way ‘made me cry, after my eldest child
could speak. ’ The text makes it quite clear that what hurt him most of all, then and in
retrospect, was the enforced contact with Tow’ associates:

No words can express the secret agony of my soul as I sunk into this companionship;
compared these everyday associates with those of my happier childhood. But I held some



station at the blacking warehouse too. . . I soon became at least as expeditious and as
skilful with my hands as either of the other boys. Though perfectly familiar with them,
my conduct and manners were different enough from theirs to place a space between us.
They, and the men, always spoke of me as ‘the young gentleman’. A certain man. . . used
to call me ‘Charles’ sometimes in speaking to me; but I think it was mostly when we
were very confidential. . . Poll Green uprose once, and rebelled against the ‘young-
gentleman’ usage; but Bob Fagin settled him speedily.

It was as well that there should be ‘a space between us’, you see. However much Dickens
may admire the working classes, he does not wish to resemble them. Given his origins,
and the time he lived in, it could hardly be otherwise. In the early nineteenth century class
animosities may have been no sharper than they are now, but the surface differences
between class and class were enormously greater. The ‘gentleman’ and the ‘common
man’ must have seemed like different species of animal. Dickens is quite genuinely on
the side of the poor against the rich, but it would be next door to impossible for him not
to think of a working-class exterior as a stigma. In one of Tolstoy’s fables the peasants of
a certain village judge every stranger who arrives from the state of his hands. If his palms
are hard from work, they let him in; if his palms are soft, out he goes. This would be
hardly intelligible to Dickens; all his heroes have soft hands. His younger heroes —
Nicholas Nickleby, Martin Chuzzlewit, Edward Chester, David Copperfield, John
Hannon — are usually of the type known as ‘walking gentlemen’. He likes a bourgeois
exterior and a bourgeois (not aristocratic) accent. One curious symptom of this is that he
will not allow anyone who is to play a heroic part to speak like a working man. A comic
hero like Sam Weller, or a merely pathetic figure like Stephen Blackpool, can speak with
a broad accent, but the JEUNE PREMIER always speaks the equivalent of B. B. C. This is
so, even when it involves absurdities. Little Pip, for instance, is brought up by people
speaking broad Essex, but talks upper-class English from his earliest childhood; actually
he would have talked the same dialect as Joe, or at least as Mrs. Gargery. So also with
Biddy Wopsle, Lizzie Hexam, Sissie Jupe, Oliver Twist — one ought perhaps to add Little
Dorrit. Even Rachel in HARD TIMES has barely a trace of Lancashire accent, an
impossibility in her case.

One thing that often gives the clue to a novelist’s real feelings on the class question is the
attitude he takes up when class collides with sex. This is a thing too painful to be lied



about, and consequently it is one of the points at which the Tm-not-a-snob’ pose tends to
break down.


One sees that at its most obvious where a class-distinction is also a colour-distinction.
And something resembling the colonial attitude (‘native’ women are fair game, white
women are sacrosanct) exists in a veiled form in all-white communities, causing bitter
resentment on both sides. When this issue arises, novelists often revert to crude class-
feelings which they might disclaim at other times. A good example of ‘class-conscious’
reaction is a rather forgotten novel, THE PEOPLE OF CLOPTON, by Andrew Barton.
The author’s moral code is quite clearly mixed up with class-hatred. He feels the
seduction of a poor girl by a rich man to be something atrocious, a kind of defilement,
something quite different from her seduction by a man in her own walk of life. Trollope
deals with this theme twice (THE THREE CLERKS and THE SMALL HOUSE AT
ALLINGTON) and, as one might expect, entirely from the upper-class angle. As he sees
it, an affair with a barmaid or a landlady’s daughter is simply an ‘entanglement’ to be
escaped from. Trollope’s moral standards are strict, and he does not allow the seduction
actually to happen, but the implication is always that a working-class girl’s feelings do
not greatly matter. In THE THREE CLERKS he even gives the typical class-reaction by
noting that the girl ‘smells’. Meredith (RHODA FLEMING) takes more the ‘class-
conscious’ viewpoint. Thackeray, as often, seems to hesitate. In PENDENNIS (Fanny
Bolton) his attitude is much the same as Trollope’s; in A SHABBY GENTEEL STORY
it is nearer to Meredith’s.

One could divine a great deal about Trollope’s social origin, or Meredith’s, or Barton’s,
merely from their handling of the class-sex theme. So one can with Dickens, but what
emerges, as usual, is that he is more inclined to identify himself with the middle class
than with the proletariat. The one incident that seems to contradict this is the tale of the
young peasant-girl in Doctor Manette’s manuscript in A TALE OF TWO CITIES. This,
however, is merely a costume-piece put in to explain the implacable hatred of Madame
Defarge, which Dickens does not pretend to approve of. In DAVID COPPERFIELD,
where he is dealing with a typical nineteenth-century seduction, the class-issue does not
seem to strike him as paramount. It is a law of Victorian novels that sexual misdeeds
must not go unpunished, and so Steerforth is drowned on Yarmouth sands, but neither
Dickens, nor old Peggotty, nor even Ham, seems to feel that Steerforth has added to his



offence by being the son of rich parents. The Steerforths are moved by class-motives, but
the Peggottys are not — not even in the scene between Mrs. Steerforth and old Peggotty; if
they were, of course, they would probably turn against David as well as against
Steerforth.

In OUR MUTUAL FRIEND Dickens treats the episode of Eugene Wrayburn and Lizzie
Hexam very realistically and with no appearance of class bias. According to the ‘Unhand
me, monster! ’ tradition, Lizzie ought either to ‘spurn’ Eugene or to be ruined by him and
throw herself off Waterloo Bridge: Eugene ought to be either a heartless betrayer or a
hero resolved upon defying society. Neither behaves in the least like this. Lizzie is
frightened by Eugene’s advances and actually runs away from him, but hardly pretends to
dislike them; Eugene is attracted by her, has too much decency to attempt seducing her
and dare not marry her because of his family. Finally they are married and no one is any
the worse, except Mrs. Twemlow, who will lose a few dinner engagements. It is all very
much as it might have happened in real life. But a ‘class-conscious’ novelist would have
given her to Bradley Headstone.

But when it is the other way about — when it is a case of a poor man aspiring to some
woman who is ‘above’ him Dickens instantly retreats into the middle-class attitude. He is
rather fond of the Victorian notion of a woman (woman with a capital W) being ‘above’ a
man. Pip feels that Estella is ‘above’ him, Esther Summerson is ‘above’ Guppy, Little
Dorrit is ‘above’ John Chivery, Lucy Manette is ‘above’ Sydney Carton. In some of these
the ‘above’-ness is merely moral, but in others it is social. There is a scarcely mistakable
class-reaction when David Copperfield discovers that Uriah Heep is plotting to marry
Agnes Wicklleld. The disgusting Uriah suddenly announces that he is in love with her:

‘Oh, Master Copperfield, with what a pure affection do I love the ground my Agnes
walks on. ’

I believe I had the delirious idea of seizing the red-hot poker out of the fire, and running
him through with it. It went from me with a shock, like a ball fired from a rifle: but the
image of Agnes, outraged by so much as a thought of this red-headed animal’s, remained
in my mind (when I looked at him, sitting all awry as if his mean soul griped his body)



and made me giddy. . . ‘I believe Agnes Wickfield to be as far above you (David says
later on), and as far removed from all your aspirations, as the moon herself. ’

Considering how Heep’s general lowness — his servile manners, dropped aitches and so
forth — has been rubbed in throughout the book, there is not much doubt about the nature
of Dickens’s feelings. Heep, of course, is playing a villainous part, but even villains have
sexual lives; it is the thought of the ‘pure’ Agnes in bed with a man who drops his aitches
that really revolts Dickens. But his usual tendency is to treat a man in love with a woman
who is ‘above’ him as a joke. It is one of the stock jokes of English literature, from
Malvolio onwards. Guppy in BLEAK HOUSE is an example, John Chivery is another,
and there is a rather ill-natured treatment of this theme in the ‘swarry’ in PICKWICK
PAPERS. Here Dickens describes the Bath footmen as living a kind of fantasy-life,
holding dinner-parties in imitation of their ‘betters’ and deluding themselves that their
young mistresses are in love with them. This evidently strikes him as very comic. So it is
in a way, though one might question whether it is not better for a footman even to have
delusions of this kind than simply to accept his status in the spirit of the catechism.

In his attitude towards servants Dickens is not ahead of his age. In the nineteenth century
the revolt against domestic service was just beginning, to the great annoyance of
everyone with over £500 a year. An enonnous number of the jokes in nineteenth-century
comic papers deals 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 a writer nowadays is so hopelessly isolated that the typical modern
novel 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 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, clothes, faces and,
above all, food. Everything is seen from the 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 ah 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 modem 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 enonnous 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 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
kn ows 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 noninterest 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 enonnous 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 Dickens’s first book was written. No modern man could
combine such 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 has been imitated, however, is simply a



tradition that Dickens himself 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.