No More Learning

There are no friendly pictures of soldiers



(i. e. officers), and none at all of naval men. As for his bureaucrats, judges and
magistrates, most of them would feel quite at home in the Circumlocution Office. The
only officials whom Dickens handles with any kind of friendliness are, significantly
enough, policemen.

Dickens’s attitude is easily intelligible to an Englishman, because it is part of the English
puritan tradition, which is not dead even at this day. The class Dickens belonged to, at
least by adoption, was growing suddenly rich after a couple of centuries of obscurity. It
had grown up mainly in the big towns, out of contact with agriculture, and politically
impotent; government, in its experience, was something which either interfered or
persecuted. Consequently it was a class with no tradition of public service and not much
tradition of usefulness. What now strikes us as remarkable about the new moneyed class
of the nineteenth century is their complete irresponsibility; they see everything in terms
of individual success, with hardly any consciousness that the community exists. On the
other hand, a Tite Barnacle, even when he was neglecting his duties, would have some
vague notion of what duties he was neglecting. Dickens’s attitude is never irresponsible,
still less does he take the money-grubbing Smilesian line; but at the back of his mind
there is usually a half-belief that the whole apparatus of government is unnecessary.
Parliament is simply Lord Coodle and Sir Thomas Doodle, the Empire is simply Major
Bagstock and his Indian servant, the Army is simply Colonel Chowser and Doctor
Slammer, the public services are simply Bumble and the Circumlocution Office — and so
on and so forth. What he does not see, or only intermittently sees, is that Coodle and
Doodle and all the other corpses left over from the eighteenth century ARE perfonning a
function which neither Pickwick nor Boffin would ever bother about.

And of course this narrowness of vision is in one way a great advantage to him, because
it is fatal for a caricaturist to see too much. From Dickens’s point of view ‘good’ society
is simply a collection of village idiots. What a crew! Lady Tippins! Mrs. Gowan! Lord
Verisopht! The Honourable Bob Stables! Mrs. Sparsit (whose husband was a Powler)!
The Tite Barnacles! Nupkins! It is practically a case-book in lunacy. But at the same time
his remoteness from the landowning-military-bureaucratic class incapacitates him for
full-length satire. He only succeeds with this class when he depicts them as mental
defectives. The accusation which used to be made against Dickens in his lifetime, that he
‘could not paint a gentleman’, was an absurdity, but it is true in this sense, that what he



says against the ‘gentleman’ class is seldom very damaging. Sir Mulberry Hawk, for
instance, is a wretched attempt at the wicked-baronet type. Harthouse in HARD TIMES
is better, but he would be only an ordinary achievement for Trollope or Thackeray.
Trollope’s thoughts hardly move outside the ‘gentleman’ class, but Thackeray has the
great advantage of having a foot in two moral camps. In some ways his outlook is very
similar to Dickens’s. Like Dickens, he identifies with the puritanical moneyed class
against the card-playing, debt-bilking aristocracy. The eighteenth century, as he sees it, is
sticking out into the nineteenth in the person of the wicked Lord Steyne. VANITY FAIR
is a full-length version of what Dickens did for a few chapters in LITTLE DORRIT. But
by origins and upbringing Thackeray happens to be somewhat nearer to the class he is
satirizing. Consequently he can produce such comparatively subtle types as, for instance,
Major Pendennis and Rawdon Crawley. Major Pendennis is a shallow old snob, and
Rawdon Crawley is a thick-headed ruffian who sees nothing wrong in living for years by
swindling tradesmen; but what Thackery realizes is that according to their tortuous code
they are neither of them bad men. Major Pendennis would not sign a dud cheque, for
instance; Rawdon certainly would, but on the other hand he would not desert a friend in a
tight corner. Both of them would behave well on the field of battle — a thing that would
not particularly appeal to Dickens. The result is that at the end one is left with a kind of
amused tolerance for Major Pendennis and with something approaching respect for
Rawdon; and yet one sees, better than any diatribe could make one, the utter rottenness of
that kind of cadging, toadying life on the fringes of smart society. Dickens would be quite
incapable of this. In his hands both Rawdon and the Major would dwindle to traditional
caricatures. And, on the whole, his attacks on ‘good’ society are rather perfunctory. The
aristocracy and the big bourgeoisie exist in his books chiefly as a kind of ‘noises off, a
haw-hawing chorus somewhere in the wings, like Podsnap’s dinner-parties. When he
produces a really subtle and damaging portrait, like John Dorrit or Harold Skimpole, it is
generally of some rather middling, unimportant person.

One very striking thing about Dickens, especially considering the time he lived in, is his
lack of vulgar nationalism. All peoples who have reached the point of becoming nations
tend to despise foreigners, but there is not much doubt that the English-speaking races are
the worst offenders. One can see this from the fact that as soon as they become fully
aware of any foreign race they invent an insulting nickname for it. Wop, Dago, Froggy,
Squarehead, Kike, Sheeny, Nigger, Wog, Chink, Greaser, Yellowbelly — these are merely



a selection. Any time before 1870 the list would have been shorter, because the map of
the world was different from what it is now, and there were only three or four foreign
races that had fully entered into the English consciousness. But towards these, and
especially towards France, the nearest and best-hated nation, the English attitude of
patronage was so intolerable that English ‘arrogance’ and ‘xenophobia’ are still a legend.
And of course they are not a completely untrue legend even now. Till very recently
nearly all English children were brought up to despise the southern European races, and
history as taught in schools was mainly a list of battles won by England. But one has got
to read, say, the QUARTERLY REVIEW of the thirties to know what boasting really is.
Those were the days when the English built up their legend of themselves as ‘sturdy
islanders’ and ‘stubborn hearts of oak’ and when it was accepted as a kind of scientific
fact that one Englishman was the equal of three foreigners. All through nineteenth-
century novels and comic papers there runs the traditional figure of the ‘Froggy’ — a
small ridiculous man with a tiny beard and a pointed top-hat, always jabbering and
gesticulating, vain, frivolous and fond of boasting of his martial exploits, but generally
taking to flight when real danger appears. Over against him was John Bull, the ‘sturdy
English yeoman’, or (a more public-school version) the ‘strong, silent Englishman’ of
Charles Kingsley, Tom Hughes and others.

Thackeray, for instance, has this outlook very strongly, though there are moments when
he sees through it and laughs at it. The one historical fact that is firmly fixed in his mind
is that the English won the battle of Waterloo. One never reads far in his books without
coming upon some reference to it. The English, as he sees it, are invincible because of
their tremendous physical strength, due mainly to living on beef. Like most Englishmen
of his time, he has the curious illusion that the English are larger than other people
(Thackeray, as it happened, was larger than most people), and therefore he is capable of
writing passages like this:

I say to you that you are better than a Frenchman. I would lay even money that you who
are reading this are more than five feet seven in height, and weigh eleven stone; while a
Frenchman is five feet four and does not weigh nine. The Frenchman has after his soup a
dish of vegetables, where you have one of meat. You are a different and superior
animal — a French-beating animal (the history of hundreds of years has shown you to be
so), etc. etc.



There are similar passages scattered all through Thackeray’s works. Dickens would never
be guilty of anything of that kind. It would be an exaggeration to say that he nowhere
pokes fun at foreigners, and of course like nearly all nineteenth-century Englishmen, he is
untouched by European culture. But never anywhere does he indulge in the typical
English boasting, the ‘island race’, ‘bulldog breed’, ‘right little, tight little island’ style of
talk. In the whole of A TALE OF TWO CITIES there is not a line that could be taken as
meaning, ‘Look how these wicked Frenchmen behave! ’ The only place where he seems
to display a normal hatred of foreigners is in the American chapters of MARTIN
CHUZZLEWIT. This, however, is simply the reaction of a generous mind against cant. If
Dickens were alive today he would make a trip to Soviet Russia and come back to the
book rather like Gide’s RETOUR DE L’URSS. But he is remarkably free from the idiocy
of regarding nations as individuals. He seldom even makes jokes turning on nationality.
He does not exploit the comic Irishman and the comic Welshman, for instance, and not
because he objects to stock characters and ready-made jokes, which obviously he does
not. It is perhaps more significant that he shows no prejudice against Jews. It is true that
he takes it for granted (OLIVER TWIST and GREAT EXPECTATIONS) that a receiver
of stolen goods will be a Jew, which at the time was probably justified. But the ‘Jew
joke’, endemic in English literature until the rise of Hitler, does not appear in his books,
and in OUR MUTUAL FRIEND he makes a pious though not very convincing attempt to
stand up for the Jews.

Dickens’s lack of vulgar nationalism is in part the mark of a real largeness of mind, and
in part results from his negative, rather unhelpful political attitude. He is very much an
Englishman but he is hardly aware of it — certainly the thought of being an Englishman
does not thrill him. He has no imperialist feelings, no discernible views on foreign
politics, and is untouched by the military tradition. Temperamentally he is much nearer to
the small noncomformist tradesman who looks down on the ‘redcoats’, and thinks that
war is wicked — a one-eyed view, but after all, war is wicked. 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.