Dickens never
writes anywhere a line that can be interpreted as meaning this.
writes anywhere a line that can be interpreted as meaning this.
Orwell
Highbrow literature apart, the whole of
the existing left-wing Press, in so far as it is at all vigorously ‘left’, is one long tract. The
one Socialist paper in England which could live a week on its merits AS A PAPER is the
DAILY HERALD: and how much Socialism is there in the DAILY HERALD? At this
moment, therefore, a paper with a ‘left’ slant and at the same time likely to have an
appeal to ordinary boys in their teens is something almost beyond hoping for.
But it does not follow that it is impossible. There is no clear reason why every adventure
story should necessarily be mixed up with snobbishness and gutter patriotism. For, after
all, the stories in the HOTSPUR and the MODERN BOY are not Conservative tracts;
they are merely adventure stories with a Conservative bias. It is fairly easy to imagine the
process being reversed. It is possible, for instance, to imagine a paper as thrilling and
lively as the HOTSPUR, but with subject-matter and ‘ideology’ a little more up to date. It
is even possible (though this raises other difficulties) to imagine a women’s paper at the
same literary level as the ORACLE, dealing in approximately the same kind of story, but
taking rather more account of the realities of working-class life. Such things have been
done before, though not in England. In the last years of the Spanish monarchy there was a
large output in Spain of left-wing novelettes, some of them evidently of anarchist origin.
Unfortunately at the time when they were appearing I did not see their social
significance, and I lost the collection of them that I had, but no doubt copies would still
be procurable. In get-up and style of story they were very similar to the English
fourpcnny novelette, except that their inspiration was ‘left’. If, for instance, a story
described police pursuing anarchists through the mountains, it would be from the point of
view of the anarchist and not of the police. An example nearer to hand is the Soviet film
CHAPAIEV, which has been shown a number of times in London. Technically, by the
standards of the time when it was made, CHAPAIEV is a first-rate film, but mentally, in
spite of the unfamiliar Russian background, it is not so very remote from Hollywood. The
one thing that lifts it out of the ordinary is the remarkable perfonnance by the actor who
takes the part of the White officer (the fat one) — a performance which looks very like an
inspired piece of gagging. Otherwise the atmosphere is familiar. All the usual
paraphernalia is there — heroic fight against odds, escape at the last moment, shots of
galloping horses, love interest, comic relief. The film is in fact a fairly ordinary one,
except that its tendency is ‘left’. In a Hollywood film of the Russian Civil War the
Whites would probably be angels and the Reds demons. In the Russian version the Reds
are angels and the Whites demons. That is also a lie, but, taking the long view, it is a less
pernicious lie than the other.
Here several difficult problems present themselves. Their general nature is obvious
enough, and I do not want to discuss them. I am merely pointing to the fact that, in
England, popular imaginative literature is a field that left-wing thought has never begun
to enter. ALL fiction from the novels in the mushroom libraries downwards is censored
in the interests of the ruling class. And boys’ fiction above all, the blood-and-thunder
stuff which nearly every boy devours at some time or other, is sodden in the worst
illusions of 1910. The fact is only unimportant if one believes that what is read in
childhood leaves no impression behind. Lord Camrose and his colleagues evidently
believe nothing of the kind, and, after all, Lord Camrose ought to know.
CHARLES DICKENS (1940)
I
Dickens is one of those writers who are well worth stealing. Even the burial of his body
in Westminster Abbey was a species of theft, if you come to think of it.
When Chesterton wrote his introductions to the Everyman Edition of Dickens’s works, it
seemed quite natural to him to credit Dickens with his own highly individual brand of
medievalism, and more recently a Marxist writer, Mr. T. A. Jackson, has made spirited
efforts to turn Dickens into a blood-thirsty revolutionary. The Marxist claims him as
‘almost’ a Marxist, the Catholic claims him as ‘almost’ a Catholic, and both claim him as
a champion of the proletariat (or ‘the poor’, as Chesterton would have put it). On the
other hand, Nadezhda Krupskaya, in her little book on Lenin, relates that towards the end
of his life Lenin went to see a dramatized version of THE CRICKET ON THE HEARTH,
and found Dickens’s ‘middle-class sentimentality’ so intolerable that he walked out in the
middle of a scene.
Taking ‘middle-class’ to mean what Krupskaya might be expected to mean by it, this was
probably a truer judgement than those of Chesterton and Jackson. But it is worth noticing
that the dislike of Dickens implied in this remark is something unusual. Plenty of people
have found him unreadable, but very few seem to have felt any hostility towards the
general spirit of his work. Some years later Mr. Bechhofer Roberts published a full-
length attack on Dickens in the form of a novel (THIS SIDE IDOLATRY), but it was a
merely personal attack, concerned for the most part with Dickens’s treatment of his wife.
It dealt with incidents which not one in a thousand of Dickens’s readers would ever hear
about, and which no more invalidates his work than the second-best bed invalidates
HAMLET. All that the book really demonstrated was that a writer’s literary personality
has little or nothing to do with his private character. It is quite possible that in private life
Dickens was just the kind of insensitive egoist that Mr. Bechhofer Roberts makes him
appear. But in his published work there is implied a personality quite different from this,
a personality which has won him far more friends than enemies. It might well have been
otherwise, for even if Dickens was a bourgeois, he was certainly a subversive writer, a
radical, one might truthfully say a rebel. Everyone who has read widely in his work has
felt this. Gissing, for instance, the best of the writers on Dickens, was anything but a
radical himself, and he disapproved of this strain in Dickens and wished it were not there,
but it never occurred to him to deny it. In OLIVER TWIST, HARD TIMES, BLEAK
HOUSE, LITTLE DORRIT, Dickens attacked English institutions with a ferocity that has
never since been approached. Yet he managed to do it without making himself hated,
and, more than this, the very people he attacked have swallowed him so completely that
he has become a national institution himself. In its attitude towards Dickens the English
public has always been a little like the elephant which feels a blow with a walking-stick
as a delightful tickling. Before I was ten years old I was having Dickens ladled down my
throat by schoolmasters in whom even at that age I could see a strong resemblance to Mr.
Creakle, and one knows without needing to be told that lawyers delight in Sergeant
Buzfuz and that LITTLE DORRIT is a favourite in the Home Office. Dickens seems to
have succeeded in attacking everybody and antagonizing nobody. Naturally this makes
one wonder whether after all there was something unreal in his attack upon society.
Where exactly does he stand, socially, morally, and politically? As usual, one can define
his position more easily if one starts by deciding what he was NOT.
In the first place he was NOT, as Messrs. Chesterton and Jackson seem to imply, a
‘proletarian’ writer. To begin with, he does not write about the proletariat, in which he
merely resembles the overwhelming majority of novelists, past and present. If you look
for the working classes in fiction, and especially English fiction, all you find is a hole.
This statement needs qualifying, perhaps. For reasons that are easy enough to see, the
agricultural labourer (in England a proletarian) gets a fairly good showing in fiction, and
a great deal has been written about criminals, derelicts and, more recently, the working-
class intelligentsia. But the ordinary town proletariat, the people who make the wheels go
round, have always been ignored by novelists. When they do find their way between the
covers of a book, it is nearly always as objects of pity or as comic relief. The central
action of Dickens’s stories almost invariably takes place in middle-class surroundings. If
one examines his novels in detail one finds that his real subject-matter is the London
commercial bourgeoisie and their hangers-on — lawyers, clerks, tradesmen, innkeepers,
small craftsmen, and servants. He has no portrait of an agricultural worker, and only one
(Stephen Blackpool in HARD TIMES) of an industrial worker. The Plomishes in
LITTLE DORRIT are probably his best picture of a working-class family — the
Peggottys, for instance, hardly belong to the working class — but on the whole he is not
successful with this type of character. If you ask any ordinary reader which of Dickens’s
proletarian characters he can remember, the three he is almost certain to mention are Bill
Sykes, Sam Weller, and Mrs. Gamp. A burglar, a valet, and a drunken midwife — not
exactly a representative cross-section of the English working class.
Secondly, in the ordinarily accepted sense of the word, Dickens is not a ‘revolutionary’
writer. But his position here needs some defining.
Whatever else Dickens may have been, he was not a hole-and-comer soul-saver, the kind
of well-meaning idiot who thinks that the world will be perfect if you amend a few
bylaws and abolish a few anomalies. It is worth comparing him with Charles Reade, for
instance. Reade was a much better-informed man than Dickens, and in some ways more
public-spirited. He really hated the abuses he could understand, he showed them up in a
series of novels which for all their absurdity are extremely readable, and he probably
helped to alter public opinion on a few minor but important points. But it was quite
beyond him to grasp that, given the existing form of society, certain evils CANNOT be
remedied. Fasten upon this or that minor abuse, expose it, drag it into the open, bring it
before a British jury, and all will be well that is how he sees it. Dickens at any rate never
imagined that you can cure pimples by cutting them off. In every page of his work one
can see a consciousness that society is wrong somewhere at the root. It is when one asks
‘Which root? ’ that one begins to grasp his position.
The truth is that Dickens’s criticism of society is almost exclusively moral. Hence the
utter lack of any constructive suggestion anywhere in his work. He attacks the law,
parliamentary government, the educational system and so forth, without ever clearly
suggesting what he would put in their places. Of course it is not necessarily the business
of a novelist, or a satirist, to make constructive suggestions, but the point is that
Dickens’s attitude is at bottom not even DEStructive. There is no clear sign that he wants
the existing order to be overthrown, or that he believes it would make very much
difference if it WERE overthrown. For in reality his target is not so much society as
‘human nature’. It would be difficult to point anywhere in his books to a passage
suggesting that the economic system is wrong AS A SYSTEM. Nowhere, for instance,
does he make any attack on private enterprise or private property. Even in a book like
OUR MUTUAL FRIEND, which turns on the power of corpses to interfere with living
people by means of idiotic wills, it does not occur to him to suggest that individuals
ought not to have this irresponsible power. Of course one can draw this inference for
oneself, and one can draw it again from the remarks about Bounderby’s will at the end of
HARD TIMES, and indeed from the whole of Dickens’s work one can infer the evil of
LAISSEZ-FAIRE capitalism; but Dickens makes no such inference himself. It is said that
Macaulay refused to review HARD TIMES because he disapproved of its ‘sullen
Socialism’. Obviously Macaulay is here using the word ‘Socialism’ in the same sense in
which, twenty years ago, a vegetarian meal or a Cubist picture used to be referred to as
‘Bolshevism’. There is not a line in the book that can properly be called Socialistic;
indeed, its tendency if anything is pro-capitalist, because its whole moral is that
capitalists ought to be kind, not that workers ought to be rebellious. 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.
the existing left-wing Press, in so far as it is at all vigorously ‘left’, is one long tract. The
one Socialist paper in England which could live a week on its merits AS A PAPER is the
DAILY HERALD: and how much Socialism is there in the DAILY HERALD? At this
moment, therefore, a paper with a ‘left’ slant and at the same time likely to have an
appeal to ordinary boys in their teens is something almost beyond hoping for.
But it does not follow that it is impossible. There is no clear reason why every adventure
story should necessarily be mixed up with snobbishness and gutter patriotism. For, after
all, the stories in the HOTSPUR and the MODERN BOY are not Conservative tracts;
they are merely adventure stories with a Conservative bias. It is fairly easy to imagine the
process being reversed. It is possible, for instance, to imagine a paper as thrilling and
lively as the HOTSPUR, but with subject-matter and ‘ideology’ a little more up to date. It
is even possible (though this raises other difficulties) to imagine a women’s paper at the
same literary level as the ORACLE, dealing in approximately the same kind of story, but
taking rather more account of the realities of working-class life. Such things have been
done before, though not in England. In the last years of the Spanish monarchy there was a
large output in Spain of left-wing novelettes, some of them evidently of anarchist origin.
Unfortunately at the time when they were appearing I did not see their social
significance, and I lost the collection of them that I had, but no doubt copies would still
be procurable. In get-up and style of story they were very similar to the English
fourpcnny novelette, except that their inspiration was ‘left’. If, for instance, a story
described police pursuing anarchists through the mountains, it would be from the point of
view of the anarchist and not of the police. An example nearer to hand is the Soviet film
CHAPAIEV, which has been shown a number of times in London. Technically, by the
standards of the time when it was made, CHAPAIEV is a first-rate film, but mentally, in
spite of the unfamiliar Russian background, it is not so very remote from Hollywood. The
one thing that lifts it out of the ordinary is the remarkable perfonnance by the actor who
takes the part of the White officer (the fat one) — a performance which looks very like an
inspired piece of gagging. Otherwise the atmosphere is familiar. All the usual
paraphernalia is there — heroic fight against odds, escape at the last moment, shots of
galloping horses, love interest, comic relief. The film is in fact a fairly ordinary one,
except that its tendency is ‘left’. In a Hollywood film of the Russian Civil War the
Whites would probably be angels and the Reds demons. In the Russian version the Reds
are angels and the Whites demons. That is also a lie, but, taking the long view, it is a less
pernicious lie than the other.
Here several difficult problems present themselves. Their general nature is obvious
enough, and I do not want to discuss them. I am merely pointing to the fact that, in
England, popular imaginative literature is a field that left-wing thought has never begun
to enter. ALL fiction from the novels in the mushroom libraries downwards is censored
in the interests of the ruling class. And boys’ fiction above all, the blood-and-thunder
stuff which nearly every boy devours at some time or other, is sodden in the worst
illusions of 1910. The fact is only unimportant if one believes that what is read in
childhood leaves no impression behind. Lord Camrose and his colleagues evidently
believe nothing of the kind, and, after all, Lord Camrose ought to know.
CHARLES DICKENS (1940)
I
Dickens is one of those writers who are well worth stealing. Even the burial of his body
in Westminster Abbey was a species of theft, if you come to think of it.
When Chesterton wrote his introductions to the Everyman Edition of Dickens’s works, it
seemed quite natural to him to credit Dickens with his own highly individual brand of
medievalism, and more recently a Marxist writer, Mr. T. A. Jackson, has made spirited
efforts to turn Dickens into a blood-thirsty revolutionary. The Marxist claims him as
‘almost’ a Marxist, the Catholic claims him as ‘almost’ a Catholic, and both claim him as
a champion of the proletariat (or ‘the poor’, as Chesterton would have put it). On the
other hand, Nadezhda Krupskaya, in her little book on Lenin, relates that towards the end
of his life Lenin went to see a dramatized version of THE CRICKET ON THE HEARTH,
and found Dickens’s ‘middle-class sentimentality’ so intolerable that he walked out in the
middle of a scene.
Taking ‘middle-class’ to mean what Krupskaya might be expected to mean by it, this was
probably a truer judgement than those of Chesterton and Jackson. But it is worth noticing
that the dislike of Dickens implied in this remark is something unusual. Plenty of people
have found him unreadable, but very few seem to have felt any hostility towards the
general spirit of his work. Some years later Mr. Bechhofer Roberts published a full-
length attack on Dickens in the form of a novel (THIS SIDE IDOLATRY), but it was a
merely personal attack, concerned for the most part with Dickens’s treatment of his wife.
It dealt with incidents which not one in a thousand of Dickens’s readers would ever hear
about, and which no more invalidates his work than the second-best bed invalidates
HAMLET. All that the book really demonstrated was that a writer’s literary personality
has little or nothing to do with his private character. It is quite possible that in private life
Dickens was just the kind of insensitive egoist that Mr. Bechhofer Roberts makes him
appear. But in his published work there is implied a personality quite different from this,
a personality which has won him far more friends than enemies. It might well have been
otherwise, for even if Dickens was a bourgeois, he was certainly a subversive writer, a
radical, one might truthfully say a rebel. Everyone who has read widely in his work has
felt this. Gissing, for instance, the best of the writers on Dickens, was anything but a
radical himself, and he disapproved of this strain in Dickens and wished it were not there,
but it never occurred to him to deny it. In OLIVER TWIST, HARD TIMES, BLEAK
HOUSE, LITTLE DORRIT, Dickens attacked English institutions with a ferocity that has
never since been approached. Yet he managed to do it without making himself hated,
and, more than this, the very people he attacked have swallowed him so completely that
he has become a national institution himself. In its attitude towards Dickens the English
public has always been a little like the elephant which feels a blow with a walking-stick
as a delightful tickling. Before I was ten years old I was having Dickens ladled down my
throat by schoolmasters in whom even at that age I could see a strong resemblance to Mr.
Creakle, and one knows without needing to be told that lawyers delight in Sergeant
Buzfuz and that LITTLE DORRIT is a favourite in the Home Office. Dickens seems to
have succeeded in attacking everybody and antagonizing nobody. Naturally this makes
one wonder whether after all there was something unreal in his attack upon society.
Where exactly does he stand, socially, morally, and politically? As usual, one can define
his position more easily if one starts by deciding what he was NOT.
In the first place he was NOT, as Messrs. Chesterton and Jackson seem to imply, a
‘proletarian’ writer. To begin with, he does not write about the proletariat, in which he
merely resembles the overwhelming majority of novelists, past and present. If you look
for the working classes in fiction, and especially English fiction, all you find is a hole.
This statement needs qualifying, perhaps. For reasons that are easy enough to see, the
agricultural labourer (in England a proletarian) gets a fairly good showing in fiction, and
a great deal has been written about criminals, derelicts and, more recently, the working-
class intelligentsia. But the ordinary town proletariat, the people who make the wheels go
round, have always been ignored by novelists. When they do find their way between the
covers of a book, it is nearly always as objects of pity or as comic relief. The central
action of Dickens’s stories almost invariably takes place in middle-class surroundings. If
one examines his novels in detail one finds that his real subject-matter is the London
commercial bourgeoisie and their hangers-on — lawyers, clerks, tradesmen, innkeepers,
small craftsmen, and servants. He has no portrait of an agricultural worker, and only one
(Stephen Blackpool in HARD TIMES) of an industrial worker. The Plomishes in
LITTLE DORRIT are probably his best picture of a working-class family — the
Peggottys, for instance, hardly belong to the working class — but on the whole he is not
successful with this type of character. If you ask any ordinary reader which of Dickens’s
proletarian characters he can remember, the three he is almost certain to mention are Bill
Sykes, Sam Weller, and Mrs. Gamp. A burglar, a valet, and a drunken midwife — not
exactly a representative cross-section of the English working class.
Secondly, in the ordinarily accepted sense of the word, Dickens is not a ‘revolutionary’
writer. But his position here needs some defining.
Whatever else Dickens may have been, he was not a hole-and-comer soul-saver, the kind
of well-meaning idiot who thinks that the world will be perfect if you amend a few
bylaws and abolish a few anomalies. It is worth comparing him with Charles Reade, for
instance. Reade was a much better-informed man than Dickens, and in some ways more
public-spirited. He really hated the abuses he could understand, he showed them up in a
series of novels which for all their absurdity are extremely readable, and he probably
helped to alter public opinion on a few minor but important points. But it was quite
beyond him to grasp that, given the existing form of society, certain evils CANNOT be
remedied. Fasten upon this or that minor abuse, expose it, drag it into the open, bring it
before a British jury, and all will be well that is how he sees it. Dickens at any rate never
imagined that you can cure pimples by cutting them off. In every page of his work one
can see a consciousness that society is wrong somewhere at the root. It is when one asks
‘Which root? ’ that one begins to grasp his position.
The truth is that Dickens’s criticism of society is almost exclusively moral. Hence the
utter lack of any constructive suggestion anywhere in his work. He attacks the law,
parliamentary government, the educational system and so forth, without ever clearly
suggesting what he would put in their places. Of course it is not necessarily the business
of a novelist, or a satirist, to make constructive suggestions, but the point is that
Dickens’s attitude is at bottom not even DEStructive. There is no clear sign that he wants
the existing order to be overthrown, or that he believes it would make very much
difference if it WERE overthrown. For in reality his target is not so much society as
‘human nature’. It would be difficult to point anywhere in his books to a passage
suggesting that the economic system is wrong AS A SYSTEM. Nowhere, for instance,
does he make any attack on private enterprise or private property. Even in a book like
OUR MUTUAL FRIEND, which turns on the power of corpses to interfere with living
people by means of idiotic wills, it does not occur to him to suggest that individuals
ought not to have this irresponsible power. Of course one can draw this inference for
oneself, and one can draw it again from the remarks about Bounderby’s will at the end of
HARD TIMES, and indeed from the whole of Dickens’s work one can infer the evil of
LAISSEZ-FAIRE capitalism; but Dickens makes no such inference himself. It is said that
Macaulay refused to review HARD TIMES because he disapproved of its ‘sullen
Socialism’. Obviously Macaulay is here using the word ‘Socialism’ in the same sense in
which, twenty years ago, a vegetarian meal or a Cubist picture used to be referred to as
‘Bolshevism’. There is not a line in the book that can properly be called Socialistic;
indeed, its tendency if anything is pro-capitalist, because its whole moral is that
capitalists ought to be kind, not that workers ought to be rebellious. 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.
