The boys
‘learnt
with a good will’, but what did they learn?
Orwell
Bounder by is a
bullying windbag and Gradgrind has been morally blinded, but if they were better men,
the system would work well enough that, all through, is the implication. And so far as
social criticism goes, one can never extract much more from Dickens than this, unless
one deliberately reads meanings into him. His whole ‘message’ is one that at first glance
looks like an enormous platitude: If men would behave decently the world would be
decent.
Naturally this calls for a few characters who are in positions of authority and who DO
behave decently. Hence that recurrent Dickens figure, the good rich man. This character
belongs especially to Dickens’s early optimistic period. He is usually a ‘merchant’ (we
are not necessarily told what merchandise he deals in), and he is always a superhumanly
kind-hearted old gentleman who ‘trots’ to and fro, raising his employees’ wages, patting
children on the head, getting debtors out of jail and in general, acting the fairy
godmother. Of course he is a pure dream figure, much further from real life than, say,
Squeers or Micawber. Even Dickens must have reflected occasionally that anyone who
was so anxious to give his money away would never have acquired it in the first place.
Mr. Pickwick, for instance, had ‘been in the city’, but it is difficult to imagine him
making a fortune there. Nevertheless this character runs like a connecting thread through
most of the earlier books. Pickwick, the Cheerybles, old Chuzzlewit, Scrooge — it is the
same figure over and over again, the good rich man, handing out guineas. Dickens does
however show signs of development here. In the books of the middle period the good rich
man fades out to some extent. There is no one who plays this part in A TALE OF TWO
CITIES, nor in GREAT EXPECTATIONS— GREAT EXPECTATIONS is, in fact,
definitely an attack on patronage — and in HARD TIMES it is only very doubtfully
played by Gradgrind after his refonnation. The character reappears in a rather different
form as Meagles in LITTLE DORRIT and John Jarndyce in BLEAK HOUSE — one
might perhaps add Betsy Trotwood in DAVID COPPERFIELD. But in these books the
good rich man has dwindled from a ‘merchant’ to a RENTIER. This is significant. A
RENTIER is part of the possessing class, he can and, almost without knowing it, does
make other people work for him, but he has very little direct power. Unlike Scrooge or
the Cheerybles, he cannot put everything right by raising everybody’s wages. The
seeming inference from the rather despondent books that Dickens wrote in the fifties is
that by that time he had grasped the helplessness of well-meaning individuals in a corrupt
society. Nevertheless in the last completed novel, OUR MUTUAL FRIEND (published
1 864-5), the good rich man comes back in full glory in the person of Boffin. Boffin is a
proletarian by origin and only rich by inheritance, but he is the usual DEUS EX
MACHINA, solving everybody’s problems by showering money in all directions. He
even ‘trots’, like the Cheerybles. In several ways OUR MUTUAL FRIEND is a return to
the earlier manner, and not an unsuccessful return either. Dickens’s thoughts seem to
have come full circle. Once again, individual kindliness is the remedy for everything.
One crying evil of his time that Dickens says very little about is child labour. There are
plenty of pictures of suffering children in his books, but usually they are suffering in
schools rather than in factories. The one detailed account of child labour that he gives is
the description in DAVID COPPERFIELD of little David washing bottles in Murdstone
& Grinby’s warehouse. This, of course, is autobiography. Dickens himself, at the age of
ten, had worked in Warren’s blacking factory in the Strand, very much as he describes it
here. It was a terribly bitter memory to him, partly because he felt the whole incident to
be discreditable to his parents, and he even concealed it from his wife till long after they
were married. Looking back on this period, he says in DAVID COPPERFIELD:
It is a matter of some surprise to me, even now, that I can have been so easily thrown
away at such an age. A child of excellent abilities and with strong powers of observation,
quick, eager, delicate, and soon hurt bodily or mentally, it seems wonderful to me that
nobody should have made any sign in my behalf. But none was made; and I became, at
ten years old, a little labouring hind in the service of Murdstone & Grinby.
And again, having described the rough boys among whom he worked:
No words can express the secret agony of my soul as I su nk into this companionship. . .
and felt my hopes of growing up to be a learned and distinguished man crushed in my
bosom.
Obviously it is not David Copperfield who is speaking, it is Dickens himself. He uses
almost the same words in the autobiography that he began and abandoned a few months
earlier. Of course Dickens is right in saying that a gifted child ought not to work ten
hours a day pasting labels on bottles, but what he does not say is that NO child ought to
be condemned to such a fate, and there is no reason for inferring that he thinks it. David
escapes from the warehouse, but Mick Walker and Mealy Potatoes and the others are still
there, and there is no sign that this troubles Dickens particularly. As usual, he displays no
consciousness that the STRUCTURE of society can be changed. He despises politics,
does not believe that any good can come out of Parliament — he had been a Parliamentary
shorthand writer, which was no doubt a disillusioning experience — and he is slightly
hostile to the most hopeful movement of his day, trade unionism. In HARD TIMES trade
unionism is represented as something not much better than a racket, something that
happens because employers are not sufficiently paternal. Stephen Blackpool’s refusal to
join the union is rather a virtue in Dickens’s eyes. Also, as Mr. Jackson has pointed out,
the apprentices’ association in BARNABY RUDGE, to which Sim Tappertit belongs, is
probably a hit at the illegal or barely legal unions of Dickens’s own day, with their secret
assemblies, passwords and so forth. Obviously he wants the workers to be decently
treated, but there is no sign that he wants them to take their destiny into their own hands,
least of all by open violence.
As it happens, Dickens deals with revolution in the narrower sense in two novels,
BARNABY RUDGE and A TALE OF TWO CITIES. In BARNABY RUDGE it is a
case of rioting rather than revolution. The Gordon Riots of 1780, though they had
religious bigotry as a pretext, seem to have been little more than a pointless outburst of
looting. Dickens’s attitude to this kind of thing is sufficiently indicated by the fact that his
first idea was to make the ringleaders of the riots three lunatics escaped from an asylum.
He was dissuaded from this, but the principal figure of the book is in fact a village idiot.
In the chapters dealing with the riots Dickens shows a most profound horror of mob
violence. He delights in describing scenes in which the ‘dregs’ of the population behave
with atrocious bestiality. These chapters are of great psychological interest, because they
show how deeply he had brooded on this subject. The things he describes can only have
come out of his imagination, for no riots on anything like the same scale had happened in
his lifetime. Here is one of his descriptions, for instance:
If Bedlam gates had been flung open wide, there would not have issued forth such
maniacs as the frenzy of that night had made. There were men there who danced and
trampled on the beds of flowers as though they trod down human enemies, and wrenched
them from their stalks, like savages who twisted human necks. There were men who cast
their lighted torches in the air, and suffered them to fall upon their heads and faces,
blistering the skin with deep unseemly burns. There were men who rushed up to the lire,
and paddled in it with their hands as if in water; and others who were restrained by force
from plunging in, to gratify their deadly longing. On the skull of one drunken lad — not
twenty, by his looks — who lay upon the ground with a bottle to his mouth, the lead from
the roof came streaming down in a shower of liquid lire, white hot, melting his head like
wax. . . But of all the howling throng not one learnt mercy from, or sickened at, these
sights; nor was the fierce, besotted, senseless rage of one man glutted.
You might almost think you were reading a description of ‘Red’ Spain by a partisan of
General Franco. One ought, of course, to remember that when Dickens was writing, the
London ‘mob’ still existed. (Nowadays there is no mob, only a flock. ) Low wages and the
growth and shift of population had brought into existence a huge, dangerous slum-
proletariat, and until the early middle of the nineteenth century there was hardly such a
thing as a police force. When the brickbats began to fly there was nothing between
shuttering your windows and ordering the troops to open fire. In A TALE OF TWO
CITIES he is dealing with a revolution which was really about something, and Dickens’s
attitude is different, but not entirely different. As a matter of fact, A TALE OF TWO
CITIES is a book which tends to leave a false impression behind, especially after a lapse
of time.
The one thing that everyone who has read A TALE OF TWO CITIES remembers is the
Reign of Terror. The whole book is dominated by the guillotine — tumbrils thundering to
and fro, bloody knives, heads bouncing into the basket, and sinister old women knitting
as they watch. Actually these scenes only occupy a few chapters, but they are written
with terrible intensity, and the rest of the book is rather slow going. But A TALE OF
TWO CITIES is not a companion volume to THE SCARLET PIMPERNEL. Dickens
sees clearly enough that the French Revolution was bound to happen and that many of the
people who were executed deserved what they got. If, he says, you behave as the French
aristocracy had behaved, vengeance will follow. He repeats this over and over again. We
are constantly being reminded that while ‘my lord’ is lolling in bed, with four liveried
footmen serving his chocolate and the peasants starving outside, somewhere in the forest
a tree is growing which will presently be sawn into planks for the platform of the
guillotine, etc. , etc. , etc. The inevitability of the Terror, given its causes, is insisted upon
in the clearest terms:
It was too much the way. . . to talk of this terrible Revolution as if it were the only
harvest ever known under the skies that had not been sown — as if nothing had ever been
done, or omitted to be done, that had led to it — as if observers of the wretched millions in
France, and of the misused and perverted resources that should have made them
prosperous, had not seen it inevitably coming, years before, and had not in plain terms
recorded what they saw.
And again:
All the devouring and insatiate monsters imagined since imagination could record itself,
are fused in the one realization, Guillotine. And yet there is not in France, with its rich
variety of soil and climate, a blade, a leaf, a root, a spring, a peppercorn, which will grow
to maturity under conditions more certain than those that have produced this horror.
Crush humanity out of shape once more, under similar hammers, and it will twist itself
into the same tortured forms.
In other words, the French aristocracy had dug their own graves. But there is no
perception here of what is now called historic necessity. Dickens sees that the results are
inevitable, given the causes, but he thinks that the causes might have been avoided. The
Revolution is something that happens because centuries of oppression have made the
French peasantry sub-human. If the wicked nobleman could somehow have turned over a
new leaf, like Scrooge, there would have been no Revolution, no JACQUERIE, no
guillotine — and so much the better. This is the opposite of the ‘revolutionary’ attitude.
From the ‘revolutionary’ point of view the class-struggle is the main source of progress,
and therefore the nobleman who robs the peasant and goads him to revolt is playing a
necessary part, just as much as the Jacobin who guillotines the nobleman. Dickens never
writes anywhere a line that can be interpreted as meaning this. Revolution as he sees it is
merely a monster that is begotten by tyranny and always ends by devouring its own
instruments. In Sydney Carton’s vision at the foot of the guillotine, he foresees Defarge
and the other leading spirits of the Terror all perishing under the same knife — which, in
fact, was approximately what happened.
And Dickens is very sure that revolution is a monster. That is why everyone remembers
the revolutionary scenes in A TALE OF TWO CITIES; they have the quality of
nightmare, and it is Dickens’s own nightmare. Again and again he insists upon the
meaningless horrors of revolution — the mass-butcheries, the injustice, the ever-present
terror of spies, the frightful blood-lust of the mob. The descriptions of the Paris mob — the
description, for instance, of the crowd of murderers struggling round the grindstone to
sharpen their weapons before butchering the prisoners in the September massacres —
outdo anything in BARNABY RUDGE. The revolutionaries appear to him simply as
degraded savages — in fact, as lunatics. He broods over their frenzies with a curious
imaginative intensity. He describes them dancing the ‘Carmagnole’, for instance:
There could not be fewer than five hundred people, and they were dancing like five
thousand demons. . . They danced to the popular Revolution song, keeping a ferocious
time that was like a gnashing of teeth in unison. . . They advanced, retreated, struck at
one another’s hands, clutched at one another’s heads, spun round alone, caught one
another, and spun around in pairs, until many of them dropped. . . Suddenly they stopped
again, paused, struck out the time afresh, forming into lines the width of the public way,
and, with their heads low down and their hands high up, swooped screaming off. No fight
could have been half so terrible as this dance. It was so emphatically a fallen sport — a
something, once innocent, delivered over to all devilry.
He even credits some of these wretches with a taste for guillotining children. The passage
I have abridged above ought to be read in full. It and others like it show how deep was
Dickens’s horror of revolutionary hysteria. Notice, for instance that touch, ‘with their
heads low down and their hands high up’, etc. , and the evil vision it conveys. Madame
Defarge is a truly dreadful figure, certainly Dickens’s most successful attempt at a
MALIGNANT character. Defarge and others are simply ‘the new oppressors who have
risen in the destruction of the old’, the revolutionary courts are presided over by ‘the
lowest, cruellest and worst populace’, and so on and so forth. All the way through
Dickens insists upon the nightmare insecurity of a revolutionary period, and in this he
shows a great deal of prescience. ‘A law of the suspected, which struck away all security
for liberty or life, and delivered over any good and innocent person to any bad and guilty
one; prisons gorged with people who had committed no offence, and could obtain no
hearing’ — it would apply pretty accurately to several countries today.
The apologists of any revolution generally try to minimize its horrors; Dickens’s impulse
is to exaggerate them — and from a historical point of view he has certainly exaggerated.
Even the Reign of Terror was a much smaller thing than he makes it appear. Though he
quotes no figures, he gives the impression of a frenzied massacre lasting for years,
whereas in reality the whole of the Terror, so far as the number of deaths goes, was a joke
compared with one of Napoleon’s battles. But the bloody knives and the tumbrils rolling
to and fro create in his mind a special sinister vision which he has succeeded in passing
on to generations of readers. Thanks to Dickens, the very word ‘tumbril’ has a murderous
sound; one forgets that a tumbril is only a sort of fann-cart. To this day, to the average
Englishman, the French Revolution means no more than a pyramid of severed heads. It is
a strange thing that Dickens, much more in sympathy with the ideas of the Revolution
than most Englishmen of his time, should have played a part in creating this impression.
If you hate violence and don’t believe in politics, the only remedy remaining is education.
Perhaps society is past praying for, but there is always hope for the individual human
being, if you can catch him young enough. This belief partly accounts for Dickens’s
preoccupation with childhood.
No one, at any rate no English writer, has written better about childhood than Dickens. In
spite of all the knowledge that has accumulated since, in spite of the fact that children are
now comparatively sanely treated, no novelist has shown the same power of entering into
the child’s point of view. I must have been about nine years old when I first read DAVID
COPPERFIELD. The mental atmosphere of the opening chapters was so immediately
intelligible to me that I vaguely imagined they had been written BY A CHILD. And yet
when one re-reads the book as an adult and sees the Murdstones, for instance, dwindle
from gigantic figures of doom into semi-comic monsters, these passages lose nothing.
Dickens has been able to stand both inside and outside the child’s mind, in such a way
that the same scene can be wild burlesque or sinister reality, according to the age at
which one reads it. Look, for instance, at the scene in which David Copperfield is
unjustly suspected of eating the mutton chops; or the scene in which Pip, in GREAT
EXPECTATIONS, coming back from Miss Havisham’s house and finding himself
completely unable to describe what he has seen, takes refuge in a series of outrageous
lies — which, of course, are eagerly believed. All the isolation of childhood is there. And
how accurately he has recorded the mechanisms of the child’s mind, its visualizing
tendency, its sensitiveness to certain kinds of impression. Pip relates how in his
childhood his ideas about his dead parents were derived from their tombstones:
The shape of the letters on my father’s, gave me an odd idea that he was a square, stout,
dark man, with curly black hair. From the character and turn of the inscription, ‘ALSO
GEORGIANA, WIFE OF THE ABOVE’, I drew a childish conclusion that my mother
was freckled and sickly. To five little stone lozenges, each about a foot and a half long,
which were arranged in a neat row beside their grave, and were sacred to the memory of
five little brothers of mine. . . I am indebted for a belief I religiously entertained that they
had all been bom on their backs with their hands in their trouser-pockets, and had never
taken them out in this state of existence.
There is a similar passage in DAVID COPPERFIELD. After biting Mr. Murdstone’s
hand, David is sent away to school and obliged to wear on his back a placard saying,
‘Take care of him. He bites. ’ He looks at the door in the playground where the boys have
carved their names, and from the appearance of each name he seems to know in just what
tone of voice the boy will read out the placard:
There was one boy — a certain J. Steerforth — who cut his name very deep and very often,
who, I conceived, would read it in a rather strong voice, and afterwards pull my hair.
There was another boy, one Tommy Traddles, who I dreaded would make game of it, and
pretend to be dreadfully frightened of me. There was a third, George Demple, who I
fancied would sing it.
When I read this passage as a child, it seemed to me that those were exactly the pictures
that those particular names would call up. The reason, of course, is the sound-associations
of the words (Demple — ‘temple’; Traddles — probably ‘skedaddle’). But how many
people, before Dickens, had ever noticed such things? A sympathetic attitude towards
children was a much rarer thing in Dickens’s day than it is now. The early nineteenth
century was not a good time to be a child. In Dickens’s youth children were still being
‘solemnly tried at a criminal bar, where they were held up to be seen’, and it was not so
long since boys of thirteen had been hanged for petty theft. The doctrine of ‘breaking the
child’s spirit’ was in full vigour, and THE FAIRCHILD FAMILY was a standard book
for children till late into the century. This evil book is now issued in pretty-pretty
expurgated editions, but it is well worth reading in the original version. It gives one some
idea of the lengths to which child-discipline was sometimes carried. Mr. Fairchild, for
instance, when he catches his children quarrelling, first thrashes them, reciting Dr.
Watts’s ‘Let dogs delight to bark and bite’ between blows of the cane, and then takes
them to spend the afternoon beneath a gibbet where the rotting corpse of a murderer is
hanging. In the earlier part of the century scores of thousands of children, aged
sometimes as young as six, were literally worked to death in the mines or cotton mills,
and even at the fashionable public schools boys were flogged till they ran with blood for
a mistake in their Latin verses. One thing which Dickens seems to have recognized, and
which most of his contemporaries did not, is the sadistic sexual element in flogging. I
t hink this can be inferred from DAVID COPPERFIELD and NICHOLAS NICKLEBY.
But mental cruelty to a child infuriates him as much as physical, and though there is a fair
number of exceptions, his schoolmasters are generally scoundrels.
Except for the universities and the big public schools, every kind of education then
existing in England gets a mauling at Dickens’s hands. There is Doctor Blimber’s
Academy, where little boys are blown up with Greek until they burst, and the revolting
charity schools of the period, which produced specimens like Noah Claypole and Uriah
Heep, and Salem House, and Dotheboys Hall, and the disgraceful little dame-school kept
by Mr. Wopsle’s great-aunt. Some of what Dickens says remains true even today. Salem
House is the ancestor of the modern ‘prep school’, which still has a good deal of
resemblance to it; and as for Mr. Wopsle’s great-aunt, some old fraud of much the same
stamp is carrying on at this moment in nearly every small town in England. But, as usual,
Dickens’s criticism is neither creative nor destructive. He sees the idiocy of an
educational system founded on the Greek lexicon and the wax-ended cane; on the other
hand, he has no use for the new kind of school that is coming up in the fifties and sixties,
the ‘modem’ school, with its gritty insistence on ‘facts’. What, then, DOES he want? As
always, what he appears to want is a moralized version of the existing thing — the old type
of school, but with no caning, no bullying or underfeeding, and not quite so much Greek.
Doctor Strong’s school, to which David Copperfield goes after he escapes from
Murdstone & Grinby’s, is simply Salem House with the vices left out and a good deal of
‘old grey stones’ atmosphere thrown in:
Doctor Strong’s was an excellent school, as different from Mr. Creakle’s as good is from
evil. It was very gravely and decorously ordered, and on a sound system; with an appeal,
in everything, to the honour and good faith of the boys. . . which worked wonders. We all
felt that we had a part in the management of the place, and in sustaining its character and
dignity. Hence, we soon became warmly attached to it — I am sure I did for one, and I
never knew, in all my time, of any boy being otherwise — and learnt with a good will,
desiring to do it credit. We had noble games out of hours, and plenty of liberty; but even
then, as I remember, we were well spoken of in the town, and rarely did any disgrace, by
our appearance or manner, to the reputation of Doctor Strong and Doctor Strong’s boys.
In the woolly vagueness of this passage one can see Dickens’s utter lack of any
educational theory. He can imagine the MORAL atmosphere of a good school, but
nothing further.
The boys ‘learnt with a good will’, but what did they learn? No doubt it
was Doctor Blimber’s curriculum, a little watered down. Considering the attitude to
society that is everywhere implied in Dickens’s novels, it comes as rather a shock to learn
that he sent his eldest son to Eton and sent all his children through the ordinary
educational mill. Gissing seems to think that he may have done this because he was
painfully conscious of being under-educated himself. Here perhaps Gissing is influenced
by his own love of classical learning. Dickens had had little or no formal education, but
he lost nothing by missing it, and on the whole he seems to have been aware of this. If he
was unable to imagine a better school than Doctor Strong’s, or, in real life, than Eton, it
was probably due to an intellectual deficiency rather different from the one Gissing
suggests.
It seems that in every attack Dickens makes upon society he is always pointing to a
change of spirit rather than a change of structure. It is hopeless to try and pin him down
to any definite remedy, still more to any political doctrine. His approach is always along
the moral plane, and his attitude is sufficiently summed up in that remark about Strong’s
school being as different from Creakle’s ‘as good is from evil’. Two things can be very
much alike and yet abysmally different. Heaven and Hell are in the same place. Useless
to change institutions without a ‘change of heart’ — that, essentially, is what he is always
saying.
If that were all, he might be no more than a cheer-up writer, a reactionary humbug. A
‘change of heart’ is in fact THE alibi of people who do not wish to endanger the
STATUS QUO. But Dickens is not a humbug, except in minor matters, and the strongest
single impression one carries away from his books is that of a hatred of tyranny. I said
earlier that Dickens is not IN THE ACCEPTED SENSE a revolutionary writer. But it is
not at all certain that a merely moral criticism of society may not be just as
‘revolutionary’ — and revolution, after all, means turning things upside down — as the
politico-economic criticism which is fashionable at this moment. Blake was not a
politician, but there is more understanding of the nature of capitalist society in a poem
like ‘I wander through each charted street’ than in three-quarters of Socialist literature.
Progress is not an illusion, it happens, but it is slow and invariably disappointing. There is
always a new tyrant waiting to take over from the old — generally not quite so bad, but
still a tyrant. Consequently two viewpoints are always tenable. The one, how can you
improve human nature until you have changed the system? The other, what is the use of
changing the system before you have improved human nature? They appeal to different
individuals, and they probably show a tendency to alternate in point of time. The moralist
and the revolutionary are constantly undermining one another. Marx exploded a hundred
tons of dynamite beneath the moralist position, and we are still living in the echo of that
tremendous crash. But already, somewhere or other, the sappers are at work and fresh
dynamite is being tamped in place to blow Marx at the moon. Then Marx, or somebody
like him, will come back with yet more dynamite, and so the process continues, to an end
we cannot yet foresee. The central problem — how to prevent power from being abused —
remains unsolved. Dickens, who had not the vision to see that private property is an
obstructive nuisance, had the vision to see that. ‘If men would behave decently the world
would be decent’ is not such a platitude as it sounds.
II
More completely than most writers, perhaps, Dickens can be explained in tenns of his
social origin, though actually his family history was not quite what one would infer from
his novels. His father was a clerk in government service, and through his mother’s family
he had connexions with both the Army and the Navy. But from the age of nine onwards
he was brought up in London in commercial surroundings, and generally in an
atmosphere of struggling poverty. Mentally he belongs to the small urban bourgeoisie,
and he happens to be an exceptionally fine specimen of this class, with all the ‘points’, as
it were, very highly developed. That is partly what makes him so interesting. If one wants
a modern equivalent, the nearest would be H. G. Wells, who has had a rather similar
history and who obviously owes something to Dickens as novelist. Arnold Bennett was
essentially of the same type, but, unlike the other two, he was a midlander, with an
industrial and noncomfonnist rather than commercial and Anglican background.
The great disadvantage, and advantage, of the small urban bourgeois is his limited
outlook. He sees the world as a middle-class world, and everything outside these limits is
either laughable or slightly wicked. On the one hand, he has no contact with industry or
the soil; on the other, no contact with the governing classes. Anyone who has studied
Wells’s novels in detail will have noticed that though he hates the aristocrat like poison,
he has no particular objection to the plutocrat, and no enthusiasm for the proletarian. His
most hated types, the people he believes to be responsible for all human ills, are kings,
landowners, priests, nationalists, soldiers, scholars and peasants. At first sight a list
beginning with kings and ending with peasants looks like a mere omnium gatherum, but
in reality all these people have a common factor. All of them are archaic types, people
who are governed by tradition and whose eyes are turned towards the past — the opposite,
therefore, of the rising bourgeois who has put his money on the future and sees the past
simply as a dead hand.
Actually, although Dickens lived in a period when the bourgeoisie was really a rising
class, he displays this characteristic less strongly than Wells. He is almost unconscious of
the future and has a rather sloppy love of the picturesque (the ‘quaint old church’, etc. ).
Nevertheless his list of most hated types is like enough to Wells’s for the similarity to be
striking. He is vaguely on the side of the working class — has a sort of generalized
sympathy with them because they are oppressed — but he does not in reality know much
about them; they come into his books chiefly as servants, and comic servants at that. At
the other end of the scale he loathes the aristocrat and — going one better than Wells in
this loathes the big bourgeois as well. His real sympathies are bounded by Mr. Pickwick
on the upper side and Mr. Barkis on the lower. But the term ‘aristocrat’, for the type
Dickens hates, is vague and needs defining.
Actually Dickens’s target is not so much the great aristocracy, who hardly enter into his
books, as their petty offshoots, the cadging dowagers who live up mews in Mayfair, and
the bureaucrats and professional soldiers. All through his books there are countess hostile
sketches of these people, and hardly any that are friendly. There are practically no
friendly pictures of the landowning class, for instance. One might make a doubtful
exception of Sir Leicester Dedlock; otherwise there is only Mr. Wardle (who is a stock
figure the ‘good old squire’) and Haredale in BARNABY RUDGE, who has Dickens’s
sympathy because he is a persecuted Catholic. 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.
bullying windbag and Gradgrind has been morally blinded, but if they were better men,
the system would work well enough that, all through, is the implication. And so far as
social criticism goes, one can never extract much more from Dickens than this, unless
one deliberately reads meanings into him. His whole ‘message’ is one that at first glance
looks like an enormous platitude: If men would behave decently the world would be
decent.
Naturally this calls for a few characters who are in positions of authority and who DO
behave decently. Hence that recurrent Dickens figure, the good rich man. This character
belongs especially to Dickens’s early optimistic period. He is usually a ‘merchant’ (we
are not necessarily told what merchandise he deals in), and he is always a superhumanly
kind-hearted old gentleman who ‘trots’ to and fro, raising his employees’ wages, patting
children on the head, getting debtors out of jail and in general, acting the fairy
godmother. Of course he is a pure dream figure, much further from real life than, say,
Squeers or Micawber. Even Dickens must have reflected occasionally that anyone who
was so anxious to give his money away would never have acquired it in the first place.
Mr. Pickwick, for instance, had ‘been in the city’, but it is difficult to imagine him
making a fortune there. Nevertheless this character runs like a connecting thread through
most of the earlier books. Pickwick, the Cheerybles, old Chuzzlewit, Scrooge — it is the
same figure over and over again, the good rich man, handing out guineas. Dickens does
however show signs of development here. In the books of the middle period the good rich
man fades out to some extent. There is no one who plays this part in A TALE OF TWO
CITIES, nor in GREAT EXPECTATIONS— GREAT EXPECTATIONS is, in fact,
definitely an attack on patronage — and in HARD TIMES it is only very doubtfully
played by Gradgrind after his refonnation. The character reappears in a rather different
form as Meagles in LITTLE DORRIT and John Jarndyce in BLEAK HOUSE — one
might perhaps add Betsy Trotwood in DAVID COPPERFIELD. But in these books the
good rich man has dwindled from a ‘merchant’ to a RENTIER. This is significant. A
RENTIER is part of the possessing class, he can and, almost without knowing it, does
make other people work for him, but he has very little direct power. Unlike Scrooge or
the Cheerybles, he cannot put everything right by raising everybody’s wages. The
seeming inference from the rather despondent books that Dickens wrote in the fifties is
that by that time he had grasped the helplessness of well-meaning individuals in a corrupt
society. Nevertheless in the last completed novel, OUR MUTUAL FRIEND (published
1 864-5), the good rich man comes back in full glory in the person of Boffin. Boffin is a
proletarian by origin and only rich by inheritance, but he is the usual DEUS EX
MACHINA, solving everybody’s problems by showering money in all directions. He
even ‘trots’, like the Cheerybles. In several ways OUR MUTUAL FRIEND is a return to
the earlier manner, and not an unsuccessful return either. Dickens’s thoughts seem to
have come full circle. Once again, individual kindliness is the remedy for everything.
One crying evil of his time that Dickens says very little about is child labour. There are
plenty of pictures of suffering children in his books, but usually they are suffering in
schools rather than in factories. The one detailed account of child labour that he gives is
the description in DAVID COPPERFIELD of little David washing bottles in Murdstone
& Grinby’s warehouse. This, of course, is autobiography. Dickens himself, at the age of
ten, had worked in Warren’s blacking factory in the Strand, very much as he describes it
here. It was a terribly bitter memory to him, partly because he felt the whole incident to
be discreditable to his parents, and he even concealed it from his wife till long after they
were married. Looking back on this period, he says in DAVID COPPERFIELD:
It is a matter of some surprise to me, even now, that I can have been so easily thrown
away at such an age. A child of excellent abilities and with strong powers of observation,
quick, eager, delicate, and soon hurt bodily or mentally, it seems wonderful to me that
nobody should have made any sign in my behalf. But none was made; and I became, at
ten years old, a little labouring hind in the service of Murdstone & Grinby.
And again, having described the rough boys among whom he worked:
No words can express the secret agony of my soul as I su nk into this companionship. . .
and felt my hopes of growing up to be a learned and distinguished man crushed in my
bosom.
Obviously it is not David Copperfield who is speaking, it is Dickens himself. He uses
almost the same words in the autobiography that he began and abandoned a few months
earlier. Of course Dickens is right in saying that a gifted child ought not to work ten
hours a day pasting labels on bottles, but what he does not say is that NO child ought to
be condemned to such a fate, and there is no reason for inferring that he thinks it. David
escapes from the warehouse, but Mick Walker and Mealy Potatoes and the others are still
there, and there is no sign that this troubles Dickens particularly. As usual, he displays no
consciousness that the STRUCTURE of society can be changed. He despises politics,
does not believe that any good can come out of Parliament — he had been a Parliamentary
shorthand writer, which was no doubt a disillusioning experience — and he is slightly
hostile to the most hopeful movement of his day, trade unionism. In HARD TIMES trade
unionism is represented as something not much better than a racket, something that
happens because employers are not sufficiently paternal. Stephen Blackpool’s refusal to
join the union is rather a virtue in Dickens’s eyes. Also, as Mr. Jackson has pointed out,
the apprentices’ association in BARNABY RUDGE, to which Sim Tappertit belongs, is
probably a hit at the illegal or barely legal unions of Dickens’s own day, with their secret
assemblies, passwords and so forth. Obviously he wants the workers to be decently
treated, but there is no sign that he wants them to take their destiny into their own hands,
least of all by open violence.
As it happens, Dickens deals with revolution in the narrower sense in two novels,
BARNABY RUDGE and A TALE OF TWO CITIES. In BARNABY RUDGE it is a
case of rioting rather than revolution. The Gordon Riots of 1780, though they had
religious bigotry as a pretext, seem to have been little more than a pointless outburst of
looting. Dickens’s attitude to this kind of thing is sufficiently indicated by the fact that his
first idea was to make the ringleaders of the riots three lunatics escaped from an asylum.
He was dissuaded from this, but the principal figure of the book is in fact a village idiot.
In the chapters dealing with the riots Dickens shows a most profound horror of mob
violence. He delights in describing scenes in which the ‘dregs’ of the population behave
with atrocious bestiality. These chapters are of great psychological interest, because they
show how deeply he had brooded on this subject. The things he describes can only have
come out of his imagination, for no riots on anything like the same scale had happened in
his lifetime. Here is one of his descriptions, for instance:
If Bedlam gates had been flung open wide, there would not have issued forth such
maniacs as the frenzy of that night had made. There were men there who danced and
trampled on the beds of flowers as though they trod down human enemies, and wrenched
them from their stalks, like savages who twisted human necks. There were men who cast
their lighted torches in the air, and suffered them to fall upon their heads and faces,
blistering the skin with deep unseemly burns. There were men who rushed up to the lire,
and paddled in it with their hands as if in water; and others who were restrained by force
from plunging in, to gratify their deadly longing. On the skull of one drunken lad — not
twenty, by his looks — who lay upon the ground with a bottle to his mouth, the lead from
the roof came streaming down in a shower of liquid lire, white hot, melting his head like
wax. . . But of all the howling throng not one learnt mercy from, or sickened at, these
sights; nor was the fierce, besotted, senseless rage of one man glutted.
You might almost think you were reading a description of ‘Red’ Spain by a partisan of
General Franco. One ought, of course, to remember that when Dickens was writing, the
London ‘mob’ still existed. (Nowadays there is no mob, only a flock. ) Low wages and the
growth and shift of population had brought into existence a huge, dangerous slum-
proletariat, and until the early middle of the nineteenth century there was hardly such a
thing as a police force. When the brickbats began to fly there was nothing between
shuttering your windows and ordering the troops to open fire. In A TALE OF TWO
CITIES he is dealing with a revolution which was really about something, and Dickens’s
attitude is different, but not entirely different. As a matter of fact, A TALE OF TWO
CITIES is a book which tends to leave a false impression behind, especially after a lapse
of time.
The one thing that everyone who has read A TALE OF TWO CITIES remembers is the
Reign of Terror. The whole book is dominated by the guillotine — tumbrils thundering to
and fro, bloody knives, heads bouncing into the basket, and sinister old women knitting
as they watch. Actually these scenes only occupy a few chapters, but they are written
with terrible intensity, and the rest of the book is rather slow going. But A TALE OF
TWO CITIES is not a companion volume to THE SCARLET PIMPERNEL. Dickens
sees clearly enough that the French Revolution was bound to happen and that many of the
people who were executed deserved what they got. If, he says, you behave as the French
aristocracy had behaved, vengeance will follow. He repeats this over and over again. We
are constantly being reminded that while ‘my lord’ is lolling in bed, with four liveried
footmen serving his chocolate and the peasants starving outside, somewhere in the forest
a tree is growing which will presently be sawn into planks for the platform of the
guillotine, etc. , etc. , etc. The inevitability of the Terror, given its causes, is insisted upon
in the clearest terms:
It was too much the way. . . to talk of this terrible Revolution as if it were the only
harvest ever known under the skies that had not been sown — as if nothing had ever been
done, or omitted to be done, that had led to it — as if observers of the wretched millions in
France, and of the misused and perverted resources that should have made them
prosperous, had not seen it inevitably coming, years before, and had not in plain terms
recorded what they saw.
And again:
All the devouring and insatiate monsters imagined since imagination could record itself,
are fused in the one realization, Guillotine. And yet there is not in France, with its rich
variety of soil and climate, a blade, a leaf, a root, a spring, a peppercorn, which will grow
to maturity under conditions more certain than those that have produced this horror.
Crush humanity out of shape once more, under similar hammers, and it will twist itself
into the same tortured forms.
In other words, the French aristocracy had dug their own graves. But there is no
perception here of what is now called historic necessity. Dickens sees that the results are
inevitable, given the causes, but he thinks that the causes might have been avoided. The
Revolution is something that happens because centuries of oppression have made the
French peasantry sub-human. If the wicked nobleman could somehow have turned over a
new leaf, like Scrooge, there would have been no Revolution, no JACQUERIE, no
guillotine — and so much the better. This is the opposite of the ‘revolutionary’ attitude.
From the ‘revolutionary’ point of view the class-struggle is the main source of progress,
and therefore the nobleman who robs the peasant and goads him to revolt is playing a
necessary part, just as much as the Jacobin who guillotines the nobleman. Dickens never
writes anywhere a line that can be interpreted as meaning this. Revolution as he sees it is
merely a monster that is begotten by tyranny and always ends by devouring its own
instruments. In Sydney Carton’s vision at the foot of the guillotine, he foresees Defarge
and the other leading spirits of the Terror all perishing under the same knife — which, in
fact, was approximately what happened.
And Dickens is very sure that revolution is a monster. That is why everyone remembers
the revolutionary scenes in A TALE OF TWO CITIES; they have the quality of
nightmare, and it is Dickens’s own nightmare. Again and again he insists upon the
meaningless horrors of revolution — the mass-butcheries, the injustice, the ever-present
terror of spies, the frightful blood-lust of the mob. The descriptions of the Paris mob — the
description, for instance, of the crowd of murderers struggling round the grindstone to
sharpen their weapons before butchering the prisoners in the September massacres —
outdo anything in BARNABY RUDGE. The revolutionaries appear to him simply as
degraded savages — in fact, as lunatics. He broods over their frenzies with a curious
imaginative intensity. He describes them dancing the ‘Carmagnole’, for instance:
There could not be fewer than five hundred people, and they were dancing like five
thousand demons. . . They danced to the popular Revolution song, keeping a ferocious
time that was like a gnashing of teeth in unison. . . They advanced, retreated, struck at
one another’s hands, clutched at one another’s heads, spun round alone, caught one
another, and spun around in pairs, until many of them dropped. . . Suddenly they stopped
again, paused, struck out the time afresh, forming into lines the width of the public way,
and, with their heads low down and their hands high up, swooped screaming off. No fight
could have been half so terrible as this dance. It was so emphatically a fallen sport — a
something, once innocent, delivered over to all devilry.
He even credits some of these wretches with a taste for guillotining children. The passage
I have abridged above ought to be read in full. It and others like it show how deep was
Dickens’s horror of revolutionary hysteria. Notice, for instance that touch, ‘with their
heads low down and their hands high up’, etc. , and the evil vision it conveys. Madame
Defarge is a truly dreadful figure, certainly Dickens’s most successful attempt at a
MALIGNANT character. Defarge and others are simply ‘the new oppressors who have
risen in the destruction of the old’, the revolutionary courts are presided over by ‘the
lowest, cruellest and worst populace’, and so on and so forth. All the way through
Dickens insists upon the nightmare insecurity of a revolutionary period, and in this he
shows a great deal of prescience. ‘A law of the suspected, which struck away all security
for liberty or life, and delivered over any good and innocent person to any bad and guilty
one; prisons gorged with people who had committed no offence, and could obtain no
hearing’ — it would apply pretty accurately to several countries today.
The apologists of any revolution generally try to minimize its horrors; Dickens’s impulse
is to exaggerate them — and from a historical point of view he has certainly exaggerated.
Even the Reign of Terror was a much smaller thing than he makes it appear. Though he
quotes no figures, he gives the impression of a frenzied massacre lasting for years,
whereas in reality the whole of the Terror, so far as the number of deaths goes, was a joke
compared with one of Napoleon’s battles. But the bloody knives and the tumbrils rolling
to and fro create in his mind a special sinister vision which he has succeeded in passing
on to generations of readers. Thanks to Dickens, the very word ‘tumbril’ has a murderous
sound; one forgets that a tumbril is only a sort of fann-cart. To this day, to the average
Englishman, the French Revolution means no more than a pyramid of severed heads. It is
a strange thing that Dickens, much more in sympathy with the ideas of the Revolution
than most Englishmen of his time, should have played a part in creating this impression.
If you hate violence and don’t believe in politics, the only remedy remaining is education.
Perhaps society is past praying for, but there is always hope for the individual human
being, if you can catch him young enough. This belief partly accounts for Dickens’s
preoccupation with childhood.
No one, at any rate no English writer, has written better about childhood than Dickens. In
spite of all the knowledge that has accumulated since, in spite of the fact that children are
now comparatively sanely treated, no novelist has shown the same power of entering into
the child’s point of view. I must have been about nine years old when I first read DAVID
COPPERFIELD. The mental atmosphere of the opening chapters was so immediately
intelligible to me that I vaguely imagined they had been written BY A CHILD. And yet
when one re-reads the book as an adult and sees the Murdstones, for instance, dwindle
from gigantic figures of doom into semi-comic monsters, these passages lose nothing.
Dickens has been able to stand both inside and outside the child’s mind, in such a way
that the same scene can be wild burlesque or sinister reality, according to the age at
which one reads it. Look, for instance, at the scene in which David Copperfield is
unjustly suspected of eating the mutton chops; or the scene in which Pip, in GREAT
EXPECTATIONS, coming back from Miss Havisham’s house and finding himself
completely unable to describe what he has seen, takes refuge in a series of outrageous
lies — which, of course, are eagerly believed. All the isolation of childhood is there. And
how accurately he has recorded the mechanisms of the child’s mind, its visualizing
tendency, its sensitiveness to certain kinds of impression. Pip relates how in his
childhood his ideas about his dead parents were derived from their tombstones:
The shape of the letters on my father’s, gave me an odd idea that he was a square, stout,
dark man, with curly black hair. From the character and turn of the inscription, ‘ALSO
GEORGIANA, WIFE OF THE ABOVE’, I drew a childish conclusion that my mother
was freckled and sickly. To five little stone lozenges, each about a foot and a half long,
which were arranged in a neat row beside their grave, and were sacred to the memory of
five little brothers of mine. . . I am indebted for a belief I religiously entertained that they
had all been bom on their backs with their hands in their trouser-pockets, and had never
taken them out in this state of existence.
There is a similar passage in DAVID COPPERFIELD. After biting Mr. Murdstone’s
hand, David is sent away to school and obliged to wear on his back a placard saying,
‘Take care of him. He bites. ’ He looks at the door in the playground where the boys have
carved their names, and from the appearance of each name he seems to know in just what
tone of voice the boy will read out the placard:
There was one boy — a certain J. Steerforth — who cut his name very deep and very often,
who, I conceived, would read it in a rather strong voice, and afterwards pull my hair.
There was another boy, one Tommy Traddles, who I dreaded would make game of it, and
pretend to be dreadfully frightened of me. There was a third, George Demple, who I
fancied would sing it.
When I read this passage as a child, it seemed to me that those were exactly the pictures
that those particular names would call up. The reason, of course, is the sound-associations
of the words (Demple — ‘temple’; Traddles — probably ‘skedaddle’). But how many
people, before Dickens, had ever noticed such things? A sympathetic attitude towards
children was a much rarer thing in Dickens’s day than it is now. The early nineteenth
century was not a good time to be a child. In Dickens’s youth children were still being
‘solemnly tried at a criminal bar, where they were held up to be seen’, and it was not so
long since boys of thirteen had been hanged for petty theft. The doctrine of ‘breaking the
child’s spirit’ was in full vigour, and THE FAIRCHILD FAMILY was a standard book
for children till late into the century. This evil book is now issued in pretty-pretty
expurgated editions, but it is well worth reading in the original version. It gives one some
idea of the lengths to which child-discipline was sometimes carried. Mr. Fairchild, for
instance, when he catches his children quarrelling, first thrashes them, reciting Dr.
Watts’s ‘Let dogs delight to bark and bite’ between blows of the cane, and then takes
them to spend the afternoon beneath a gibbet where the rotting corpse of a murderer is
hanging. In the earlier part of the century scores of thousands of children, aged
sometimes as young as six, were literally worked to death in the mines or cotton mills,
and even at the fashionable public schools boys were flogged till they ran with blood for
a mistake in their Latin verses. One thing which Dickens seems to have recognized, and
which most of his contemporaries did not, is the sadistic sexual element in flogging. I
t hink this can be inferred from DAVID COPPERFIELD and NICHOLAS NICKLEBY.
But mental cruelty to a child infuriates him as much as physical, and though there is a fair
number of exceptions, his schoolmasters are generally scoundrels.
Except for the universities and the big public schools, every kind of education then
existing in England gets a mauling at Dickens’s hands. There is Doctor Blimber’s
Academy, where little boys are blown up with Greek until they burst, and the revolting
charity schools of the period, which produced specimens like Noah Claypole and Uriah
Heep, and Salem House, and Dotheboys Hall, and the disgraceful little dame-school kept
by Mr. Wopsle’s great-aunt. Some of what Dickens says remains true even today. Salem
House is the ancestor of the modern ‘prep school’, which still has a good deal of
resemblance to it; and as for Mr. Wopsle’s great-aunt, some old fraud of much the same
stamp is carrying on at this moment in nearly every small town in England. But, as usual,
Dickens’s criticism is neither creative nor destructive. He sees the idiocy of an
educational system founded on the Greek lexicon and the wax-ended cane; on the other
hand, he has no use for the new kind of school that is coming up in the fifties and sixties,
the ‘modem’ school, with its gritty insistence on ‘facts’. What, then, DOES he want? As
always, what he appears to want is a moralized version of the existing thing — the old type
of school, but with no caning, no bullying or underfeeding, and not quite so much Greek.
Doctor Strong’s school, to which David Copperfield goes after he escapes from
Murdstone & Grinby’s, is simply Salem House with the vices left out and a good deal of
‘old grey stones’ atmosphere thrown in:
Doctor Strong’s was an excellent school, as different from Mr. Creakle’s as good is from
evil. It was very gravely and decorously ordered, and on a sound system; with an appeal,
in everything, to the honour and good faith of the boys. . . which worked wonders. We all
felt that we had a part in the management of the place, and in sustaining its character and
dignity. Hence, we soon became warmly attached to it — I am sure I did for one, and I
never knew, in all my time, of any boy being otherwise — and learnt with a good will,
desiring to do it credit. We had noble games out of hours, and plenty of liberty; but even
then, as I remember, we were well spoken of in the town, and rarely did any disgrace, by
our appearance or manner, to the reputation of Doctor Strong and Doctor Strong’s boys.
In the woolly vagueness of this passage one can see Dickens’s utter lack of any
educational theory. He can imagine the MORAL atmosphere of a good school, but
nothing further.
The boys ‘learnt with a good will’, but what did they learn? No doubt it
was Doctor Blimber’s curriculum, a little watered down. Considering the attitude to
society that is everywhere implied in Dickens’s novels, it comes as rather a shock to learn
that he sent his eldest son to Eton and sent all his children through the ordinary
educational mill. Gissing seems to think that he may have done this because he was
painfully conscious of being under-educated himself. Here perhaps Gissing is influenced
by his own love of classical learning. Dickens had had little or no formal education, but
he lost nothing by missing it, and on the whole he seems to have been aware of this. If he
was unable to imagine a better school than Doctor Strong’s, or, in real life, than Eton, it
was probably due to an intellectual deficiency rather different from the one Gissing
suggests.
It seems that in every attack Dickens makes upon society he is always pointing to a
change of spirit rather than a change of structure. It is hopeless to try and pin him down
to any definite remedy, still more to any political doctrine. His approach is always along
the moral plane, and his attitude is sufficiently summed up in that remark about Strong’s
school being as different from Creakle’s ‘as good is from evil’. Two things can be very
much alike and yet abysmally different. Heaven and Hell are in the same place. Useless
to change institutions without a ‘change of heart’ — that, essentially, is what he is always
saying.
If that were all, he might be no more than a cheer-up writer, a reactionary humbug. A
‘change of heart’ is in fact THE alibi of people who do not wish to endanger the
STATUS QUO. But Dickens is not a humbug, except in minor matters, and the strongest
single impression one carries away from his books is that of a hatred of tyranny. I said
earlier that Dickens is not IN THE ACCEPTED SENSE a revolutionary writer. But it is
not at all certain that a merely moral criticism of society may not be just as
‘revolutionary’ — and revolution, after all, means turning things upside down — as the
politico-economic criticism which is fashionable at this moment. Blake was not a
politician, but there is more understanding of the nature of capitalist society in a poem
like ‘I wander through each charted street’ than in three-quarters of Socialist literature.
Progress is not an illusion, it happens, but it is slow and invariably disappointing. There is
always a new tyrant waiting to take over from the old — generally not quite so bad, but
still a tyrant. Consequently two viewpoints are always tenable. The one, how can you
improve human nature until you have changed the system? The other, what is the use of
changing the system before you have improved human nature? They appeal to different
individuals, and they probably show a tendency to alternate in point of time. The moralist
and the revolutionary are constantly undermining one another. Marx exploded a hundred
tons of dynamite beneath the moralist position, and we are still living in the echo of that
tremendous crash. But already, somewhere or other, the sappers are at work and fresh
dynamite is being tamped in place to blow Marx at the moon. Then Marx, or somebody
like him, will come back with yet more dynamite, and so the process continues, to an end
we cannot yet foresee. The central problem — how to prevent power from being abused —
remains unsolved. Dickens, who had not the vision to see that private property is an
obstructive nuisance, had the vision to see that. ‘If men would behave decently the world
would be decent’ is not such a platitude as it sounds.
II
More completely than most writers, perhaps, Dickens can be explained in tenns of his
social origin, though actually his family history was not quite what one would infer from
his novels. His father was a clerk in government service, and through his mother’s family
he had connexions with both the Army and the Navy. But from the age of nine onwards
he was brought up in London in commercial surroundings, and generally in an
atmosphere of struggling poverty. Mentally he belongs to the small urban bourgeoisie,
and he happens to be an exceptionally fine specimen of this class, with all the ‘points’, as
it were, very highly developed. That is partly what makes him so interesting. If one wants
a modern equivalent, the nearest would be H. G. Wells, who has had a rather similar
history and who obviously owes something to Dickens as novelist. Arnold Bennett was
essentially of the same type, but, unlike the other two, he was a midlander, with an
industrial and noncomfonnist rather than commercial and Anglican background.
The great disadvantage, and advantage, of the small urban bourgeois is his limited
outlook. He sees the world as a middle-class world, and everything outside these limits is
either laughable or slightly wicked. On the one hand, he has no contact with industry or
the soil; on the other, no contact with the governing classes. Anyone who has studied
Wells’s novels in detail will have noticed that though he hates the aristocrat like poison,
he has no particular objection to the plutocrat, and no enthusiasm for the proletarian. His
most hated types, the people he believes to be responsible for all human ills, are kings,
landowners, priests, nationalists, soldiers, scholars and peasants. At first sight a list
beginning with kings and ending with peasants looks like a mere omnium gatherum, but
in reality all these people have a common factor. All of them are archaic types, people
who are governed by tradition and whose eyes are turned towards the past — the opposite,
therefore, of the rising bourgeois who has put his money on the future and sees the past
simply as a dead hand.
Actually, although Dickens lived in a period when the bourgeoisie was really a rising
class, he displays this characteristic less strongly than Wells. He is almost unconscious of
the future and has a rather sloppy love of the picturesque (the ‘quaint old church’, etc. ).
Nevertheless his list of most hated types is like enough to Wells’s for the similarity to be
striking. He is vaguely on the side of the working class — has a sort of generalized
sympathy with them because they are oppressed — but he does not in reality know much
about them; they come into his books chiefly as servants, and comic servants at that. At
the other end of the scale he loathes the aristocrat and — going one better than Wells in
this loathes the big bourgeois as well. His real sympathies are bounded by Mr. Pickwick
on the upper side and Mr. Barkis on the lower. But the term ‘aristocrat’, for the type
Dickens hates, is vague and needs defining.
Actually Dickens’s target is not so much the great aristocracy, who hardly enter into his
books, as their petty offshoots, the cadging dowagers who live up mews in Mayfair, and
the bureaucrats and professional soldiers. All through his books there are countess hostile
sketches of these people, and hardly any that are friendly. There are practically no
friendly pictures of the landowning class, for instance. One might make a doubtful
exception of Sir Leicester Dedlock; otherwise there is only Mr. Wardle (who is a stock
figure the ‘good old squire’) and Haredale in BARNABY RUDGE, who has Dickens’s
sympathy because he is a persecuted Catholic. 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.
