No More Learning

In any
case, in the typical Dickens novel, the DEUS EX MACHINA enters with a bag of gold in
the last chapter and the hero is absolved from further struggle. The feeling ‘This is what I
came into the world to do. Everything else is uninteresting. I will do this even if it means
starvation’, which turns men of differing temperaments into scientists, inventors, artists,
priests, explorers and revolutionaries — this motif is almost entirely absent from
Dickens’s books. He himself, as is well known, worked like a slave and believed in his
work as few novelists have ever done. But there seems to be no calling except novel-
writing (and perhaps acting) towards which he can imagine this kind of devotion. And,
after all, it is natural enough, considering his rather negative attitude towards society. In
the last resort there is nothing he admires except common decency. Science is
uninteresting and machinery is cruel and ugly (the heads of the elephants). Business is
only for ruffians like Bounderby. As for politics — leave that to the Tite Barnacles. Really
there is no objective except to marry the heroine, settle down, live solvently and be kind.
And you can do that much better in private life.



Here, perhaps, one gets a glimpse of Dickens’s secret imaginative background. What did
he think of as the most desirable way to live? When Martin Chuzzlewit had made it up
with his uncle, when Nicholas Nickleby had married money, when John Harman had
been enriched by Boffin what did they DO?

The answer evidently is that they did nothing. Nicholas Nickleby invested his wife’s
money with the Cheerybles and ‘became a rich and prosperous merchant’, but as he
immediately retired into Devonshire, we can assume that he did not work very hard. Mr.
and Mrs. Snodgrass ‘purchased and cultivated a small farm, more for occupation than
profit. ’ That is the spirit in which most of Dickens’s books end — a sort of radiant
idleness. Where he appears to disapprove of young men who do not work (Harthouse,
Harry Gowan, Richard Carstone, Wrayburn before his reformation) it is because they are
cynical and immoral or because they are a burden on somebody else; if you are ‘good’,
and also self-supporting, there is no reason why you should not spend fifty years in
simply drawing your dividends. Home life is always enough. And, after all, it was the
general assumption of his age. The ‘genteel sufficiency’, the ‘competence’, the
‘gentleman of independent means’ (or ‘in easy circumstances’) — the very phrases tell one
all about the strange, empty dream of the eighteenth-and nineteenth-century middle
bourgeoisie. It was a dream of COMPLETE IDLENESS. Charles Reade conveys its spirit
perfectly in the ending of HARD CASH. Alfred Hardie, hero of HARD CASH, is the
typical nineteenth-century novel-hero (public-school style), with gifts which Reade
describes as amounting to ‘genius’. He is an old Etonian and a scholar of Oxford, he
kn ows most of the Greek and Latin classics by heart, he can box with prizefighters and
win the Diamond Sculls at Henley. He goes through incredible adventures in which, of
course, he behaves with faultless heroism, and then, at the age of twenty-five, he inherits
a fortune, marries his Julia Dodd and settles down in the suburbs of Liverpool, in the
same house as his parents-in-law:

They all lived together at Albion Villa, thanks to Alfred. . . Oh, you happy little villa!
You were as like Paradise as any mortal dwelling can be. A day came, however, when
your walls could no longer hold all the happy inmates. Julia presented Alfred with a
lovely boy; enter two nurses and the villa showed symptoms of bursting. Two months
more, and Alfred and his wife overflowed into the next villa. It was but twenty yards off;
and there was a double reason for the migration. As often happens after a long separation,



Heaven bestowed on Captain and Mrs. Dodd another infant to play about their knees, etc.
etc. etc.

This is the type of the Victorian happy ending — a vision of a huge, loving family of three
or four generations, all crammed together in the same house and constantly multiplying,
like a bed of oysters. What is striking about it is the utterly soft, sheltered, effortless life
that it implies. It is not even a violent idleness, like Squire Western’s.

That is the significance of Dickens’s urban background and his noninterest in the
blackguardly-sporting military side of life. His heroes, once they had come into money
and ‘settled down’, would not only do no work; they would not even ride, hunt, shoot,
fight duels, elope with actresses or lose money at the races. They would simply live at
home in feather-bed respectability, and preferably next door to a blood-relation living
exactly the same life:

The first act of Nicholas, when he became a rich and prosperous merchant, was to buy his
father’s old house. As time crept on, and there came gradually about him a group of
lovely children, it was altered and enlarged; but none of the old rooms were ever pulled
down, no old tree was ever rooted up, nothing with which there was any association of
bygone times was ever removed or changed.

Within a stone’s-throw was another retreat enlivened by children’s pleasant voices too;
and here was Kate. . . the same true, gentle creature, the same fond sister, the same in the
love of all about her, as in her girlish days.

It is the same incestuous atmosphere as in the passage quoted from Reade. And evidently
this is Dickens’s ideal ending. It is perfectly attained in NICHOLAS NICKLEBY,
MARTIN CHUZZLEWIT and PICKWICK, and it is approximated to in varying degrees
in almost all the others. The exceptions are HARD TIMES and GREAT
EXPECTATIONS — the latter actually has a ‘happy ending’, but it contradicts the general
tendency of the book, and it was put in at the request of Bulwer Lytton.

The ideal to be striven after, then, appears to be something like this: a hundred thousand
pounds, a quaint old house with plenty of ivy on it, a sweetly womanly wife, a horde of
children, and no work. Everything is safe, soft, peaceful and, above all, domestic. In the



moss-grown churchyard down the road are the graves of the loved ones who passed away
before the happy ending happened. The servants are comic and feudal, the children
prattle round your feet, the old friends sit at your fireside, talking of past days, there is the
endless succession of enonnous meals, the cold punch and sherry negus, the feather beds
and warming-pans, the Christmas parties with charades and blind man’s buff; but nothing
ever happens, except the yearly childbirth. The curious thing is that it is a genuinely
happy picture, or so Dickens is able to make it appear. The thought of that kind of
existence is satisfying to him. This alone would be enough to tell one that more than a
hundred years have passed since Dickens’s first book was written. No modern man could
combine such purposelessness with so much vitality.

V

By this time anyone who is a lover of Dickens, and who has read as far as this, will
probably be angry with me.

I have been discussing Dickens simply in terms of his ‘message’, and almost ignoring his
literary qualities. But every writer, especially every novelist, HAS a ‘message’, whether
he admits it or not, and the minutest details of his work are influenced by it. All art is
propaganda. Neither Dickens himself nor the majority of Victorian novelists would have
thought of denying this. On the other hand, not all propaganda is art. As I said earlier,
Dickens is one of those writers who are felt to be worth stealing. He has been stolen by
Marxists, by Catholics and, above all, by Conservatives. The question is, What is there to
steal? Why does anyone care about Dickens? Why do I care about Dickens?

That kind of question is never easy to answer. As a rule, an aesthetic preference is either
something inexplicable or it is so corrupted by non-aesthetic motives as to make one
wonder whether the whole of literary criticism is not a huge network of humbug. In
Dickens’s case the complicating factor is his familiarity. He happens to be one of those
‘great authors’ who are ladled down everyone’s throat in childhood. At the time this
causes rebellion and vomiting, but it may have different after-effects in later life. For
instance, nearly everyone feels a sneaking affection for the patriotic poems that he
learned by heart as a child, ‘Ye Mariners of England’, the ‘Charge of the Light Brigade’
and so forth. What one enjoys is not so much the poems themselves as the memories they
call up. And with Dickens the same forces of association are at work. Probably there are



copies of one or two of his books lying about in an actual majority of English homes.
Many children begin to know his characters by sight before they can even read, for on the
whole Dickens was lucky in his illustrators. A thing that is absorbed as early as that does
not come up against any critical judgement. And when one thinks of this, one thinks of all
that is bad and silly in Dickens — the cast-iron ‘plots’, the characters who don’t come off,
the longueurs, the paragraphs in blank verse, the awful pages of ‘pathos’. And then the
thought arises, when I say I like Dickens, do I simply mean that I like thinking about my
childhood? Is Dickens merely an institution?

If so, he is an institution that there is no getting away from. How often one really thinks
about any writer, even a writer one cares for, is a difficult thing to decide; but I should
doubt whether anyone who has actually read Dickens can go a week without
remembering him in one context or another. Whether you approve of him or not, he is
THERE, like the Nelson Column. At any moment some scene or character, which may
come from some book you cannot even remember the name of, is liable to drop into your
mind. Micawber’s letters! Winkle in the witness-box! Mrs. Gamp! Mrs. Wititterly and Sir
Tumley Snuffim! Todgers’s! (George Gissing said that when he passed the Monument it
was never of the Fire of London that he thought, always of Todgers’s. ) Mrs. Leo Hunter!
Squeers! Silas Wegg and the Decline and Fall-off of the Russian Empire! Miss Mills and
the Desert of Sahara! Wopsle acting Hamlet! Mrs. Jellyby! Mantalini, Jerry Cruncher,
Barkis, Pumblechook, Tracy Tupman, Skimpole, Joe Gargery, Pecksniff — and so it goes
on and on. It is not so much a series of books, it is more like a world. And not a purely
comic world either, for part of what one remembers in Dickens is his Victorian
morbidness and necrophilia and the blood-and-thunder scenes — the death of Sykes,
Krook’s spontaneous combustion, Fagin in the condemned cell, the women knitting
round the guillotine. To a surprising extent all this has entered even into the minds of
people who do not care about it. A music-hall comedian can (or at any rate could quite
recently) go on the stage and impersonate Micawber or Mrs. Gamp with a fair certainty
of being understood, although not one in twenty of the audience had ever read a book of
Dickens’s right through. Even people who affect to despise him quote him unconsciously.

Dickens is a writer who can be imitated, up to a certain point. In genuinely popular
literature — for instance, the Elephant and Castle version of SWEENY TODD — he has
been plagiarized quite shamelessly. What has been imitated, however, is simply a



tradition that Dickens himself took from earlier novelists and developed, the cult of
‘character’, i. e. eccentricity. The thing that cannot be imitated is his fertility of invention,
which is invention not so much of characters, still less of ‘situations’, as of turns of
phrase and concrete details. The outstanding, unmistakable mark of Dickens’s writing is
the UNNECESSARY DETAIL. Here is an example of what I mean. The story given
below is not particularly funny, but there is one phrase in it that is as individual as a
fingerprint. Mr. Jack Hopkins, at Bob Sawyer’s party, is telling the story of the child who
swallowed its sister’s necklace:

Next day, child swallowed two beads; the day after that, he treated himself to three, and
so on, till in a week’s time he had got through the necklace — five-and-twenty beads in
all. The sister, who was an industrious girl and seldom treated herself to a bit of finery,
cried her eyes out at the loss of the necklace; looked high and low for it; but I needn’t
say, didn’t find it. A few days afterwards, the family were at dinner — baked shoulder of
mutton and potatoes under it — the child, who wasn’t hungry, was playing about the room,
when suddenly there was the devil of a noise, like a small hailstonn. ‘Don’t do that, my
boy’, says the father. ‘I ain’t a-doin’ nothing’, said the child. ‘Well, don’t do it again’,
said the father. There was a short silence, and then the noise began again, worse than
ever. ‘If you don’t mind what I say, my boy’, said the father, ‘you’ll find yourself in bed,
in something less than a pig’s whisper. ’ He gave the child a shake to make him obedient,
and such a rattling ensued as nobody ever heard before. ‘Why dam’ me, it’s IN the child’,
said the father; ‘he’s got the croup in the wrong place! ’ ‘No, I haven’t, father’, said the
child, beginning to cry, ‘it’s the necklace; I swallowed it, father. ’ The father caught the
child up, and ran with him to the hospital, the beads in the boy’s stomach rattling all the
way with the jolting; and the people looking up in the air, and down in the cellars, to see
where the unusual sound came from. ‘He’s in the hospital now’, said Jack Hopkins, ‘and
he makes such a devil of a noise when he walks about, that they’re obliged to muffle him
in a watchman’s coat, for fear he should wake the patients. ’

As a whole, this story might come out of any nineteenth-century comic paper. But the
unmistakable Dickens touch, the thing that nobody else would have thought of, is the
baked shoulder of mutton and potatoes under it. How does this advance the story? The
answer is that it doesn’t. It is something totally unnecessary, a florid little squiggle on the
edge of the page; only, it is by just these squiggles that the special Dickens atmosphere is



created. The other thing one would notice here is that Dickens’s way of telling a story
takes a long time. An interesting example, too long to quote, is Sam Weller’s story of the
obstinate patient in Chapter XLIV of THE PICKWICK PAPERS. As it happens, we have
a standard of comparison here, because Dickens is plagiarizing, consciously or
unconsciously. The story is also told by some ancient Greek writer. I cannot now find the
passage, but I read it years ago as a boy at school, and it runs more or less like this:

A certain Thracian, renowned for his obstinacy, was warned by his physician that if he
drank a flagon of wine it would kill him. The Thracian thereupon drank the flagon of
wine and immediately jumped off the house-top and perished. ‘For’, said he, ‘in this way
I shall prove that the wine did not kill me. ’

As the Greek tells it, that is the whole story — about six lines. As Sam Weller tells it, it
takes round about a thousand words. Long before getting to the point we have been told
all about the patient’s clothes, his meals, his manners, even the newspapers he reads, and
about the peculiar construction of the doctor’s carriage, which conceals the fact that the
coachman’s trousers do not match his coat. Then there is the dialogue between the doctor
and the patient. “Crumpets is wholesome, sir,’ said the patient. ‘Crumpets is NOT
wholesome, sir,’ says the doctor, wery fierce,’ etc. , etc. In the end the original story had
been buried under the details. And in all of Dickens’s most characteristic passages it is
the same. His imagination overwhelms everything, like a kind of weed. Squeers stands up
to address his boys, and immediately we are hearing about Bolder’s father who was two
pounds ten short, and Mobbs’s stepmother who took to her bed on hearing that Mobbs
wouldn’t eat fat and hoped Mr. Squeers would flog him into a happier state of mind. Mrs.
Leo Hunter writes a poem, ‘Expiring Frog’; two full stanzas are given. Boffin takes a
fancy to pose as a miser, and instantly we are down among the squalid biographies of
eighteenth-century misers, with names like Vulture Hopkins and the Rev. Blewberry
Jones, and chapter headings like ‘The Story of the Mutton Pies’ and ‘The Treasures of a
Dunghill’. Mrs. Harris, who does not even exist, has more detail piled on to her than any
three characters in an ordinary novel. Merely in the middle of a sentence we learn, for
instance, that her infant nephew has been seen in a bottle at Greenwich Fair, along with
the pink-eyed lady, the Prussian dwarf and the living skeleton. Joe Gargery describes
how the robbers broke into the house of Pumblechook, the corn and seed merchant — ‘and
they took his till, and they took his cashbox, and they drinked his wine, and they partook



of his wittles, and they slapped his face, and they pulled his nose, and they tied him up to
his bedpust, and they give him a dozen, and they stuffed his mouth full of flowering
annuals to perwent his crying out. ’ Once again the unmistakable Dickens touch, the
flowering annuals; but any other novelist would only have mentioned about half of these
outrages. Everything is piled up and up, detail on detail, embroidery on embroidery. It is
futile to object that this kind of thing is rococo — one might as well make the same
objection to a wedding-cake. Either you like it or you do not like it. Other nineteenth-
century writers, Surtees, Barham, Thackeray, even Marryat, have something of Dickens’s
profuse, overflowing quality, but none of them on anything like the same scale. The
appeal of all these writers now depends partly on period-flavour and though Marryat is
still officially a ‘boy’s writer’ and Surtees has a sort of legendary fame among hunting
men, it is probable that they are read mostly by bookish people.

Significantly, Dickens’s most successful books (not his BEST books) are THE
PICKWICK PAPERS, which is not a novel, and HARD TIMES and A TALE OF TWO
CITIES, which are not funny. As a novelist his natural fertility greatly hampers him,
because the burlesque which he is never able to resist, is constantly breaking into what
ought to be serious situations. There is a good example of this in the opening chapter of
GREAT EXPECTATIONS. The escaped convict, Magwitch, has just captured the six-
year-old Pip in the churchyard. The scene starts terrifyingly enough, from Pip’s point of
view. The convict, smothered in mud and with his chain trailing from his leg, suddenly
starts up among the tombs, grabs the child, turns him upside down and robs his pockets.
Then he begins terrorizing him into bringing foal and a file:

He held me by the arms in an upright position on the top of the stone, and went on in
these fearful terms:

‘You bring me, tomorrow morning early, that file and them wittles. You bring the lot to
me, at that old Battery over yonder. You do it and you never dare to say a word or dare to
make a sign concerning your having seen such a person as me, or any person sumever,
and you shall be let to live. You fail, or you go from my words in any partickler, no
matter how small it is, and your heart and liver shall be tore out, roasted and ate. Now, I
ain’t alone, as you may think I am. There’s a young man hid with me, in comparison with
which young man I am a Angel. That young man hears the words I speak. That young



man has a secret way pecooliar to himself, of getting at a boy, and at his heart, and at his
liver. It is in wain for a boy to attempt to hide himself from that young man. A boy may
lock his doors, may be warm in bed, may tuck himself up, may draw the clothes over his
head, may think himself comfortable and safe, but that young man will softly creep his
way to him and tear him open. I am keeping that young man from hanning you at the
present moment, but with great difficulty. I find it wery hard to hold that young man off
of your inside. Now, what do you say? ’

Here Dickens has simply yielded to temptation. To begin with, no starving and hunted
man would speak in the least like that.
Moreover, although the speech shows a
remarkable knowledge of the way in which a child’s mind works, its actual words are
quite out of tune with what is to follow. It turns Magwitch into a sort of pantomime
wicked uncle, or, if one sees him through the child’s eyes, into an appalling monster.
Later in the book he is to be represented as neither, and his exaggerated gratitude, on
which the plot turns, is to be incredible because of just this speech. As usual, Dickens’s
imagination has overwhelmed him. The picturesque details were too good to be left out.
Even with characters who are more of a piece than Magwitch he is liable to be tripped up
by some seductive phrase. Mr. Murdstone, for instance, is in the habit of ending David
Copperfield’s lessons every morning with a dreadful sum in arithmetic. ‘If I go into a
cheesemonger’s shop, and buy four thousand double-Gloucester cheeses at fourpence
halfpenny each, present payment’, it always begins. Once again the typical Dickens
detail, the double-Gloucester cheeses. But it is far too human a touch for Murdstone; he
would have made it five thousand cashboxes. Every time this note is struck, the unity of
the novel suffers. Not that it matters very much, because Dickens is obviously a writer
whose parts are greater than his wholes. He is all fragments, all details — rotten
architecture, but wonderful gargoyles — and never better than when he is building up
some character who will later on be forced to act inconsistently.

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



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


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

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

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

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

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




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

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



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

VI

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



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

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



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


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

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

No grown-up person can read Dickens without feeling his limitations, and yet there does
remain his native generosity of mind, which acts as a kind of anchor and nearly always
keeps him where he belongs. It is probably the central secret of his popularity. A good-
tempered antinomianism rather of Dickens’s type is one of the marks of Western popular
culture. One sees it in folk-stories and comic songs, in dream-figures like Mickey Mouse
and Pop-eye the Sailor (both of them variants of Jack the Giant-killer), in the history of
working-class Socialism, in the popular protests (always ineffective but not always a
sham) against imperialism, in the impulse that makes a jury award excessive damages
when a rich man’s car runs over a poor man; it is the feeling that one is always on the
wrong side of the underdog, on the side of the weak against the strong. In one sense it is a
feeling that is fifty years out of date. The common man is still living in the mental world
of Dickens, but nearly every modern intellectual has gone over to some or other form of
totalitarianism. From the Marxist or Fascist point of view, nearly all that Dickens stands
for can be written off as ‘bourgeois morality’. But in moral outlook no one could be more
‘bourgeois’ than the English working classes. The ordinary people in the Western
countries have never entered, mentally, into the world of ‘realism’ and power-politics.
They may do so before long, in which case Dickens will be as out of date as the cab-
horse. But in his own age and ours he has been popular chiefly because he was able to
express in a comic, simplified and therefore memorable form the native decency of the
common man. And it is important that from this point of view people of very different
types can be described as ‘common’. In a country like England, in spite of its class-




structure, there does exist a certain cultural unity. All through the Christian ages, and
especially since the French Revolution, the Western world has been haunted by the idea
of freedom and equality; it is only an IDEA, but it has penetrated to all ranks of society.
The most atrocious injustices, cruelties, lies, snobberies exist everywhere, but there are
not many people who can regard these things with the same indifference as, say, a Roman
slave-owner. Even the millionaire suffers from a vague sense of guilt, like a dog eating a
stolen leg of mutton. Nearly everyone, whatever his actual conduct may be, responds
emotionally to the idea of human brotherhood. Dickens voiced a code which was and on
the whole still is believed in, even by people who violate it. It is difficult otherwise to
explain why he could be both read by working people (a thing that has happened to no
other novelist of his stature) and buried in Westminster Abbey.

When one reads any strongly individual piece of writing, one has the impression of
seeing a face somewhere behind the page. It is not necessarily the actual face of the
writer. I feel this very strongly with Swift, with Defoe, with Fielding, Stendhal,
Thackeray, Flaubert, though in several cases I do not know what these people looked like
and do not want to know. What one sees is the face that the writer OUGHT to have. Well,
in the case of Dickens I see a face that is not quite the face of Dickens’s photographs,
though it resembles it. It is the face of a man of about forty, with a small beard and a high
colour. He is laughing, with a touch of anger in his laughter, but no triumph, no
malignity. It is the face of a man who is always fighting against something, but who
fights in the open and is not frightened, the face of a man who is GENEROUSLY
ANGRY — in other words, of a nineteenth-century liberal, a free intelligence, a type
hated with equal hatred by all the smelly little orthodoxies which are now contending for
our souls.


CHARLES READE (1940)

Since Charles Reade’s books are published in cheap editions one can assume that he still
has his following, but it is unusual to meet anyone who has voluntarily read him. In most
people his name seems to evoke, at most, a vague memory of ‘doing’ THE CLOISTER
AND THE HEARTH as a school holiday task. It is his bad luck to be remembered by this
particular book, rather as Mark Twain, thanks to the films, is chiefly remembered by A



CONNECTICUT YANKEE IN KING ARTHUR’S COURT. Reade wrote several dull
books, and THE CLOISTER AND THE HEARTH is one of them. But he also wrote
three novels which I personally would back to outlive the entire works of Meredith and
George Eliot, besides some brilliant long-short stories such as A JACK OF ALL
TRADES and THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A THIEF.

What is the attraction of Reade? At bottom it is the same charm as one finds in R. Austin
Freeman’s detective stories or Lieutenant-Commander Gould’s collections of
curiosities — the charm of useless knowledge. Reade was a man of what one might call
penny-encyclopaedic learning. He possessed vast stocks of disconnected information
which a lively narrative gift allowed him to cram into books which would at any rate pass
as novels. If you have the sort of mind that takes a pleasure in dates, lists, catalogues,
concrete details, descriptions of processes, junk-shop windows and back numbers of the
EXCHANGE AND MART, the sort of mind that likes knowing exactly how a medieval
catapult worked or just what objects a prison cell of the eighteen-forties contained, then
you can hardly help enjoying Reade. He himself, of course, did not see his work in quite
this light. He prided himself on his accuracy and compiled his books largely from
newspaper cuttings, but the strange facts which he collected were subsidiary to what he
would have regarded as his ‘purpose’. For he was a social reformer in a fragmentary way,
and made vigorous attacks on such diverse evils as blood-letting, the treadmill, private
asylums, clerical celibacy and tight-lacing.

My own favourite has always been FOUL PLAY, which as it happens is not an attack on
anything in particular. Like most nineteenth-century novels FOUL PLAY is too
complicated to be summarized, but its central story is that of a young clergyman, Robert
Penfold, who is unjustly convicted of forgery, is transported to Australia, absconds in
disguise, and is wrecked on a desert island together with the heroine. Here, of course,
Reade is in his element. Of all men who ever lived, he was the best fitted to write a
desert-island story. Some desert-island stories, of course, are worse than others, but none
is altogether bad when it sticks to the actual concrete details of the struggle to keep alive.
A list of the objects in a shipwrecked man’s possession is probably the surest winner in
fiction, surer even than a trial scene. Nearly thirty years after reading the book I can still
remember more or less exactly what things the three heroes of Ballantyne’s CORAL
ISLAND possessed between them. (A telescope, six yards of whipcord, a penknife, a



brass ring and a piece of hoop iron. ) Even a dismal book like ROBINSON CRUSOE, so
unreadable as a whole that few people even know that the second part exists, becomes
interesting when it describes Crusoe’s efforts to make a table, glaze earthenware and
grow a patch of wheat. Reade, however, was an expert on desert islands, or at any rate he
was very well up in the geography textbooks of the time. Moreover he was the kind of
man who would have been at home on a desert island himself. He would never, like
Crusoe, have been stumped by such an easy problem as that of leavening bread and,
unlike Ballantyne, he knew that civilized men cannot make fire by rubbing sticks
together.

The hero of FOUL PLAY, like most of Reade’s heroes, is a kind of supennan. He is hero,
saint, scholar, gentleman, athlete, pugilist, navigator, physiologist, botanist, blacksmith
and carpenter all rolled into one, the sort of compendium of all the talents that Reade
honestly imagined to be the normal product of an English university. Needless to say, it is
only a month or two before this wonderful clergyman has got the desert island running
like a West End hotel. Even before reaching the island, when the last survivors of the
wrecked ship are dying of thirst in an open boat, he has shown his ingenuity by
constructing a distilling apparatus with ajar, a hot- water bottle and a piece of tubing. But
his best stroke of all is the way in which he contrives to leave the island. He himself, with
a price on his head, would be glad enough to remain, but the heroine, Helen Rollestone,
who has no idea that he is a convict, is naturally anxious to escape. She asks Robert to
turn his ‘great mind’ to this problem. The first difficulty, of course, is to discover exactly
where the island is. Luckily, however, Helen is still wearing her watch, which is still
keeping Sydney time. By fixing a stick in the ground and watching its shadow Robert
notes the exact moment of noon, after which it is a simple matter to work out the
longitude — for naturally a man of his calibre would know the longitude of Sydney. It is
equally natural that he can detennine the latitude within a degree or two by the nature of
the vegetation. But the next difficulty is to send a message to the outside world. After
some thought Robert writes a series of messages on pieces of parchment made from
seals’ bladders, with ink obtained from cochineal insects. He has noticed that migrant
birds often use the island as a stopping-place, and he fixes on ducks as the likeliest
messengers, because every duck is liable to be shot sooner or later. By a stratagem often
used in India he captures a number of ducks, ties a message to each of their legs and lets
them go. Finally, of course, one of the ducks takes refuge on a ship, and the couple are



rescued, but even then the story is barely half finished. There follow enonnous
ramifications, plots and counterplots, intrigues, triumphs and disasters, ending with the
vindication of Robert, and wedding bells.

In any of Reade’s three best books, FOUL PLAY, HARD CASH and IT IS NEVER TOO
LATE TO MEND, it is not fair to say that the sole interest is in the technical detail. His
power of descriptive writing, especially of describing violent action, is also very striking,
and on a serial-story level he is a wonderful contriver of plots. Simply as a novelist it is
impossible to take him seriously, because he has no sense whatever of character or of
probability, but he himself had the advantage of believing in even the absurdest details of
his own stories. He wrote of life as he saw it, and many Victorians saw it in the same
way: that is, as a series of tremendous melodramas, with virtue triumphant every time.