No More Learning

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. 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 hailstonn.
‘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 does 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 bedpust, and they give him a dozen, and they stuffed his mouth full of flowering
annuals to perwent 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 hanning 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 turns Magwitch into a sort of pantomime
wicked uncle, or, if one sees him through the child’s eyes, into an appalling monster.
Later in the book he is to be represented as neither, and his exaggerated gratitude, on
which the plot turns, is to be incredible because of just this speech. As usual, Dickens’s
imagination has overwhelmed him. The picturesque details were too good to be left out.
Even with characters who are more of a piece than Magwitch he is liable to be tripped up
by some seductive phrase. Mr. Murdstone, for instance, is in the habit of ending David
Copperfield’s lessons every morning with a dreadful sum in arithmetic. ‘If I go into a
cheesemonger’s shop, and buy four thousand double-Gloucester cheeses at fourpence
halfpenny each, present payment’, it always begins. Once again the typical Dickens
detail, the double-Gloucester cheeses. But it is far too human a touch for Murdstone; he
would have made it five thousand cashboxes. Every time this note is struck, the unity of
the novel suffers. Not that it matters very much, because Dickens is obviously a writer
whose parts are greater than his wholes. He is all fragments, all details — rotten
architecture, but wonderful gargoyles — and never better than when he is building up
some character who will later on be forced to act inconsistently.

Of course it is not usual to urge against Dickens that he makes his characters behave
inconsistently. Generally he is accused of doing just the opposite. His characters are
supposed to be mere ‘types’, each crudely representing some single trait and fitted with a
kind of label by which you recognize him. Dickens is ‘only a caricaturist’ — that is the
usual accusation, and it does him both more and less than justice. To begin with, he did
not think of himself as a caricaturist, and was constantly setting into action characters



who ought to have been purely static. S queers, Micawber, Miss Mowcher,* Wegg,
Skimpole, Pecksniff and many others are finally involved in ‘plots’ where they are out of
place and where they behave quite incredibly. They start off as magic-lantern slides and
they end by getting mixed up in a third-rate movie. Sometimes one can put one’s finger
on a single sentence in which the original illusion is destroyed. There is such a sentence
in DAVID COPPERFIELD. After the famous dinner-party (the one where the leg of
mutton was underdone), David is showing his guests out. He stops Traddles at the top of
the stairs:


* Dickens turned Miss Mowcher into a sort of heroine because the real woman whom he
had caricatured had read the earlier chapters and was bitterly hurt. He had previously meant
her to play a villainous part. But ANY action by such a character would seem incongruous.
(Author’s footnote)

‘Traddles’, said I, ‘Mr. Micawber don’t mean any harm, poor fellow: but if I were you I
wouldn’t lend him anything. ’

‘My dear Copperfield’, returned Traddles, smiling, ‘I haven’t got anything to lend. ’

‘You have got a name, you know,’ I said.

At the place where one reads it this remark jars a little though something of the kind was
inevitable sooner or later. The story is a fairly realistic one, and David is growing up;
ultimately he is bound to see Mr. Micawber for what he is, a cadging scoundrel.
Afterwards, of course, Dickens’s sentimentality overcomes him and Micawber is made to
turn over a new leaf. But from then on, the original Micawber is never quite recaptured,
in spite of desperate efforts. As a rule, the ‘plot’ in which Dickens’s characters get
entangled is not particularly credible, but at least it makes some pretence at reality,
whereas the world to which they belong is a never-never land, a kind of eternity. But just
here one sees that ‘only a caricaturist’ is not really a condemnation. The fact that Dickens
is always thought of as a caricaturist, although he was constantly trying to be something
else, is perhaps the surest mark of his genius. The monstrosities that he created are still
remembered as monstrosities, in spite of getting mixed up in would-be probable
melodramas. Their first impact is so vivid that nothing that comes afterwards effaces it.
As with the people one knew in childhood, one seems always to remember them in one




particular attitude, doing one particular thing. Mrs. Squeers is always ladling out
brimstone and treacle, Mrs. Gummidge is always weeping, Mrs. Gargery is always
banging her husband’s head against the wall, Mrs. Jellyby is always scribbling tracts
while her children fall into the area — and there they all are, fixed up for ever like little
twinkling miniatures painted on snuffbox lids, completely fantastic and incredible, and
yet somehow more solid and infinitely more memorable than the efforts of serious
novelists. Even by the standards of his time Dickens was an exceptionally artificial
writer. As Ruskin said, he ‘chose to work in a circle of stage fire. ’ His characters are even
more distorted and simplified than Smollett’s. But there are no rules in novel-writing, and
for any work of art there is only one test worth bothering about — survival. By this test
Dickens’s characters have succeeded, even if the people who remember them hardly
think of them as human beings. They are monsters, but at any rate they exist.

But all the same there is a disadvantage in writing about monsters. It amounts to this, that
it is only certain moods that Dickens can speak to. There are large areas of the human
mind that he never touches. There is no poetic feeling anywhere in his books, and no
genuine tragedy, and even sexual love is almost outside his scope. Actually his books are
not so sexless as they are sometimes declared to be, and considering the time in which he
was writing, he is reasonably fra nk . But there is not a trace in him of the feeling that one
finds in MANON LESCAUT, SALAMMBO, CARMEN, WUTHERING HEIGHTS.
According to Aldous Huxley, D. H. Lawrence once said that Balzac was ‘a gigantic
dwarf, and in a sense the same is true of Dickens. There are whole worlds which he
either knows nothing about or does not wish to mention. Except in a rather roundabout
way, one cannot learn very much from Dickens. And to say this is to think almost
immediately of the great Russian novelists of the nineteenth century. Why is it that
Tolstoy’s grasp seems to be so much larger than Dickens’s — why is it that he seems able
to tell you so much more ABOUT YOURSELF? It is not that he is more gifted, or even,
in the last analysis, more intelligent. It is because he is writing about people who are
growing. His characters are struggling to make their souls, whereas Dickens’s are already
finished and perfect. In my own mind Dickens’s people are present far more often and far
more, vividly than Tolstoy’s, but always in a single unchangeable attitude, like pictures
or pieces of furniture. You cannot hold an imaginary conversation with a Dickens
character as you can with, say, Peter Bezoukhov. And this is not merely because of
Tolstoy’s greater seriousness, for there are also comic characters that you can imagine



yourself talking to — Bloom, for instance, or Pecuchet, or even Wells’s Mr. Polly. It is
because Dickens’s characters have no mental life. They say perfectly the thing that they
have to say, but they cannot be conceived as talking about anything else. They never
learn, never speculate. Perhaps the most meditative of his characters is Paul Dombey, and
his thoughts are mush. Does this mean that Tolstoy’s novels are ‘better’ than Dickens’s?
The truth is that it is absurd to make such comparisons in terms of ‘better’ and ‘worse’. If
I were forced to compare Tolstoy with Dickens, I should say that Tolstoy’s appeal will
probably be wider in the long run, because Dickens is scarcely intelligible outside the
English-speaking culture; on the other hand, Dickens is able to reach simple people,
which Tolstoy is not. Tolstoy’s characters can cross a frontier, Dickens can be portrayed
on a cigarette-card. But one is no more obliged to choose between them than between a
sausage and a rose. Their purposes barely intersect.

VI

If Dickens had been merely a comic writer, the chances are that no one would now
remember his name. Or at best a few of his books would survive in rather the same way
as books like FRANK FAIRLEIGH, MR. VERDANT GREEN and MRS. CAUDLE’S
CURTAIN LECTURES, as a sort of hangover of the Victorian atmosphere, a pleasant
little whiff of oysters and brown stout. Who has not felt sometimes that it was ‘a pity’
that Dickens ever deserted the vein of PICKWICK for things like LITTLE DORRIT and
HARD TIMES? What people always demand of a popular novelist is that he shall write
the same book over and over again, forgetting that a man who would write the same book
twice could not even write it once. Any writer who is not utterly lifeless moves upon a
kind of parabola, and the downward curve is implied in the upper one. Joyce has to start
with the frigid competence of DUBLINERS and end with the dream-language of
FINNEGAN’S WAKE, but ULYSSES and PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST are part of the
trajectory. The thing that drove Dickens forward into a form of art for which he was not
really suited, and at the same time caused us to remember him, was simply the fact that
he was a moralist, the consciousness of ‘having something to say’. He is always
preaching a sermon, and that is the final secret of his inventiveness. For you can only
create if you can CARE. Types like Squeers and Micawber could not have been produced
by a hack writer looking for something to be funny about. A joke worth laughing at
always has an idea behind it, and usually a subversive idea. Dickens is able to go on



being funny because he is in revolt against authority, and authority is always there to be
laughed at. There is always room for one more custard pie.

His radicalism is of the vaguest kind, and yet one always knows that it is there. That is
the difference between being a moralist and a politician. He has no constructive
suggestions, not even a clear grasp of the nature of the society he is attacking, only an
emotional perception that something is wrong, all he can finally say is, ‘Behave
decently’, which, as I suggested earlier, is not necessarily so shallow as it sounds. Most
revolutionaries are potential Tories, because they imagine that everything can be put right
by altering the SHAPE of society; once that change is effected, as it sometimes is, they
see no need for any other. Dickens has not this kind of mental coarseness. The vagueness
of his discontent is the mark of its permanence. What he is out against is not this or that
institution, but, as Chesterton put it, ‘an expression on the human face. ’ Roughly
speaking, his morality is the Christian morality, but in spite of his Anglican upbringing he
was essentially a Bible-Christian, as he took care to make plain when writing his will. In
any case he cannot properly be described as a religious man. He ‘believed’, undoubtedly,
but religion in the devotional sense does not seem to have entered much into his
thoughts. * Where he is Christian is in his quasi-instinctive siding with the oppressed
against the oppressors. As a matter of course he is on the side of the underdog, always
and everywhere. To carry this to its logical conclusion one has got to change sides when
the underdog becomes an upperdog, and in fact Dickens does tend to do so. He loathes
the Catholic Church, for instance, but as soon as the Catholics are persecuted
(BARNABY RUDGE) he is on their side. He loathes the aristocratic class even more, but
as soon as they are really overthrown (the revolutionary chapters in A TALE OF TWO
CITIES) his sympathies swing round. Whenever he departs from this emotional attitude
he goes astray. A well-known example is at the ending of DAVID COPPERFIELD, in
which everyone who reads it feels that something has gone wrong. What is wrong is that
the closing chapters are pervaded, faintly but not noticeably, by the cult of success. It is
the gospel according to Smiles, instead of the gospel according to Dickens. The
attractive, out-at-elbow characters are got rid of, Micawber makes a fortune, Heep gets
into prison — both of these events are flagrantly impossible — and even Dora is killed off
to make way for Agnes. If you like, you can read Dora as Dickens’s wife and Agnes as
his sister-in-law, but the essential point is that Dickens has ‘turned respectable’ and done
violence to his own nature. Perhaps that is why Agnes is the most disagreeable of his



heroines, the real legless angel of Victorian romance, almost as bad as Thackeray’s
Laura.


* From a letter to his youngest son (in 1868): ‘You will remember that you have never at
home been harassed about religious observances, or mere formalities. I have always been
anxious not to weary my children with such things, before they are old enough to form
opinions respecting them. Y ou will therefore understand the better that I now most solemnly
impress upon you the truth and beauty of the Christian Religion, as it came from Christ
Flimself, and the impossibility of your going far wrong if you humbly but heartily respect it.

. . Never abandon the wholesome practice of saying your own private prayers, night and
morning. I have never abandoned it myself, and I know the comfort of it. ’ (Author’s
footnote)

No grown-up person can read Dickens without feeling his limitations, and yet there does
remain his native generosity of mind, which acts as a kind of anchor and nearly always
keeps him where he belongs. It is probably the central secret of his popularity. A good-
tempered antinomianism rather of Dickens’s type is one of the marks of Western popular
culture. One sees it in folk-stories and comic songs, in dream-figures like Mickey Mouse
and Pop-eye the Sailor (both of them variants of Jack the Giant-killer), in the history of
working-class Socialism, in the popular protests (always ineffective but not always a
sham) against imperialism, in the impulse that makes a jury award excessive damages
when a rich man’s car runs over a poor man; it is the feeling that one is always on the
wrong side of the underdog, on the side of the weak against the strong. In one sense it is a
feeling that is fifty years out of date.