In his hands both Rawdon and the Major would dwindle to
traditional
caricatures.
Orwell
The revolutionaries appear to him simply as
degraded savages — in fact, as lunatics. He broods over their frenzies with a curious
imaginative intensity. He describes them dancing the ‘Carmagnole’, for instance:
There could not be fewer than five hundred people, and they were dancing like five
thousand demons. . . They danced to the popular Revolution song, keeping a ferocious
time that was like a gnashing of teeth in unison. . . They advanced, retreated, struck at
one another’s hands, clutched at one another’s heads, spun round alone, caught one
another, and spun around in pairs, until many of them dropped. . . Suddenly they stopped
again, paused, struck out the time afresh, forming into lines the width of the public way,
and, with their heads low down and their hands high up, swooped screaming off. No fight
could have been half so terrible as this dance. It was so emphatically a fallen sport — a
something, once innocent, delivered over to all devilry.
He even credits some of these wretches with a taste for guillotining children. The passage
I have abridged above ought to be read in full. It and others like it show how deep was
Dickens’s horror of revolutionary hysteria. Notice, for instance that touch, ‘with their
heads low down and their hands high up’, etc. , and the evil vision it conveys. Madame
Defarge is a truly dreadful figure, certainly Dickens’s most successful attempt at a
MALIGNANT character. Defarge and others are simply ‘the new oppressors who have
risen in the destruction of the old’, the revolutionary courts are presided over by ‘the
lowest, cruellest and worst populace’, and so on and so forth. All the way through
Dickens insists upon the nightmare insecurity of a revolutionary period, and in this he
shows a great deal of prescience. ‘A law of the suspected, which struck away all security
for liberty or life, and delivered over any good and innocent person to any bad and guilty
one; prisons gorged with people who had committed no offence, and could obtain no
hearing’ — it would apply pretty accurately to several countries today.
The apologists of any revolution generally try to minimize its horrors; Dickens’s impulse
is to exaggerate them — and from a historical point of view he has certainly exaggerated.
Even the Reign of Terror was a much smaller thing than he makes it appear. Though he
quotes no figures, he gives the impression of a frenzied massacre lasting for years,
whereas in reality the whole of the Terror, so far as the number of deaths goes, was a joke
compared with one of Napoleon’s battles. But the bloody knives and the tumbrils rolling
to and fro create in his mind a special sinister vision which he has succeeded in passing
on to generations of readers. Thanks to Dickens, the very word ‘tumbril’ has a murderous
sound; one forgets that a tumbril is only a sort of fann-cart. To this day, to the average
Englishman, the French Revolution means no more than a pyramid of severed heads. It is
a strange thing that Dickens, much more in sympathy with the ideas of the Revolution
than most Englishmen of his time, should have played a part in creating this impression.
If you hate violence and don’t believe in politics, the only remedy remaining is education.
Perhaps society is past praying for, but there is always hope for the individual human
being, if you can catch him young enough. This belief partly accounts for Dickens’s
preoccupation with childhood.
No one, at any rate no English writer, has written better about childhood than Dickens. In
spite of all the knowledge that has accumulated since, in spite of the fact that children are
now comparatively sanely treated, no novelist has shown the same power of entering into
the child’s point of view. I must have been about nine years old when I first read DAVID
COPPERFIELD. The mental atmosphere of the opening chapters was so immediately
intelligible to me that I vaguely imagined they had been written BY A CHILD. And yet
when one re-reads the book as an adult and sees the Murdstones, for instance, dwindle
from gigantic figures of doom into semi-comic monsters, these passages lose nothing.
Dickens has been able to stand both inside and outside the child’s mind, in such a way
that the same scene can be wild burlesque or sinister reality, according to the age at
which one reads it. Look, for instance, at the scene in which David Copperfield is
unjustly suspected of eating the mutton chops; or the scene in which Pip, in GREAT
EXPECTATIONS, coming back from Miss Havisham’s house and finding himself
completely unable to describe what he has seen, takes refuge in a series of outrageous
lies — which, of course, are eagerly believed. All the isolation of childhood is there. And
how accurately he has recorded the mechanisms of the child’s mind, its visualizing
tendency, its sensitiveness to certain kinds of impression. Pip relates how in his
childhood his ideas about his dead parents were derived from their tombstones:
The shape of the letters on my father’s, gave me an odd idea that he was a square, stout,
dark man, with curly black hair. From the character and turn of the inscription, ‘ALSO
GEORGIANA, WIFE OF THE ABOVE’, I drew a childish conclusion that my mother
was freckled and sickly. To five little stone lozenges, each about a foot and a half long,
which were arranged in a neat row beside their grave, and were sacred to the memory of
five little brothers of mine. . . I am indebted for a belief I religiously entertained that they
had all been bom on their backs with their hands in their trouser-pockets, and had never
taken them out in this state of existence.
There is a similar passage in DAVID COPPERFIELD. After biting Mr. Murdstone’s
hand, David is sent away to school and obliged to wear on his back a placard saying,
‘Take care of him. He bites. ’ He looks at the door in the playground where the boys have
carved their names, and from the appearance of each name he seems to know in just what
tone of voice the boy will read out the placard:
There was one boy — a certain J. Steerforth — who cut his name very deep and very often,
who, I conceived, would read it in a rather strong voice, and afterwards pull my hair.
There was another boy, one Tommy Traddles, who I dreaded would make game of it, and
pretend to be dreadfully frightened of me. There was a third, George Demple, who I
fancied would sing it.
When I read this passage as a child, it seemed to me that those were exactly the pictures
that those particular names would call up. The reason, of course, is the sound-associations
of the words (Demple — ‘temple’; Traddles — probably ‘skedaddle’). But how many
people, before Dickens, had ever noticed such things? A sympathetic attitude towards
children was a much rarer thing in Dickens’s day than it is now. The early nineteenth
century was not a good time to be a child. In Dickens’s youth children were still being
‘solemnly tried at a criminal bar, where they were held up to be seen’, and it was not so
long since boys of thirteen had been hanged for petty theft. The doctrine of ‘breaking the
child’s spirit’ was in full vigour, and THE FAIRCHILD FAMILY was a standard book
for children till late into the century. This evil book is now issued in pretty-pretty
expurgated editions, but it is well worth reading in the original version. It gives one some
idea of the lengths to which child-discipline was sometimes carried. Mr. Fairchild, for
instance, when he catches his children quarrelling, first thrashes them, reciting Dr.
Watts’s ‘Let dogs delight to bark and bite’ between blows of the cane, and then takes
them to spend the afternoon beneath a gibbet where the rotting corpse of a murderer is
hanging. In the earlier part of the century scores of thousands of children, aged
sometimes as young as six, were literally worked to death in the mines or cotton mills,
and even at the fashionable public schools boys were flogged till they ran with blood for
a mistake in their Latin verses. One thing which Dickens seems to have recognized, and
which most of his contemporaries did not, is the sadistic sexual element in flogging. I
t hink this can be inferred from DAVID COPPERFIELD and NICHOLAS NICKLEBY.
But mental cruelty to a child infuriates him as much as physical, and though there is a fair
number of exceptions, his schoolmasters are generally scoundrels.
Except for the universities and the big public schools, every kind of education then
existing in England gets a mauling at Dickens’s hands. There is Doctor Blimber’s
Academy, where little boys are blown up with Greek until they burst, and the revolting
charity schools of the period, which produced specimens like Noah Claypole and Uriah
Heep, and Salem House, and Dotheboys Hall, and the disgraceful little dame-school kept
by Mr. Wopsle’s great-aunt. Some of what Dickens says remains true even today. Salem
House is the ancestor of the modern ‘prep school’, which still has a good deal of
resemblance to it; and as for Mr. Wopsle’s great-aunt, some old fraud of much the same
stamp is carrying on at this moment in nearly every small town in England. But, as usual,
Dickens’s criticism is neither creative nor destructive. He sees the idiocy of an
educational system founded on the Greek lexicon and the wax-ended cane; on the other
hand, he has no use for the new kind of school that is coming up in the fifties and sixties,
the ‘modem’ school, with its gritty insistence on ‘facts’. What, then, DOES he want? As
always, what he appears to want is a moralized version of the existing thing — the old type
of school, but with no caning, no bullying or underfeeding, and not quite so much Greek.
Doctor Strong’s school, to which David Copperfield goes after he escapes from
Murdstone & Grinby’s, is simply Salem House with the vices left out and a good deal of
‘old grey stones’ atmosphere thrown in:
Doctor Strong’s was an excellent school, as different from Mr. Creakle’s as good is from
evil. It was very gravely and decorously ordered, and on a sound system; with an appeal,
in everything, to the honour and good faith of the boys. . . which worked wonders. We all
felt that we had a part in the management of the place, and in sustaining its character and
dignity. Hence, we soon became warmly attached to it — I am sure I did for one, and I
never knew, in all my time, of any boy being otherwise — and learnt with a good will,
desiring to do it credit. We had noble games out of hours, and plenty of liberty; but even
then, as I remember, we were well spoken of in the town, and rarely did any disgrace, by
our appearance or manner, to the reputation of Doctor Strong and Doctor Strong’s boys.
In the woolly vagueness of this passage one can see Dickens’s utter lack of any
educational theory. He can imagine the MORAL atmosphere of a good school, but
nothing further. The boys ‘learnt with a good will’, but what did they learn? No doubt it
was Doctor Blimber’s curriculum, a little watered down. Considering the attitude to
society that is everywhere implied in Dickens’s novels, it comes as rather a shock to learn
that he sent his eldest son to Eton and sent all his children through the ordinary
educational mill. Gissing seems to think that he may have done this because he was
painfully conscious of being under-educated himself. Here perhaps Gissing is influenced
by his own love of classical learning. Dickens had had little or no formal education, but
he lost nothing by missing it, and on the whole he seems to have been aware of this. If he
was unable to imagine a better school than Doctor Strong’s, or, in real life, than Eton, it
was probably due to an intellectual deficiency rather different from the one Gissing
suggests.
It seems that in every attack Dickens makes upon society he is always pointing to a
change of spirit rather than a change of structure. It is hopeless to try and pin him down
to any definite remedy, still more to any political doctrine. His approach is always along
the moral plane, and his attitude is sufficiently summed up in that remark about Strong’s
school being as different from Creakle’s ‘as good is from evil’. Two things can be very
much alike and yet abysmally different. Heaven and Hell are in the same place. Useless
to change institutions without a ‘change of heart’ — that, essentially, is what he is always
saying.
If that were all, he might be no more than a cheer-up writer, a reactionary humbug. A
‘change of heart’ is in fact THE alibi of people who do not wish to endanger the
STATUS QUO. But Dickens is not a humbug, except in minor matters, and the strongest
single impression one carries away from his books is that of a hatred of tyranny. I said
earlier that Dickens is not IN THE ACCEPTED SENSE a revolutionary writer. But it is
not at all certain that a merely moral criticism of society may not be just as
‘revolutionary’ — and revolution, after all, means turning things upside down — as the
politico-economic criticism which is fashionable at this moment. Blake was not a
politician, but there is more understanding of the nature of capitalist society in a poem
like ‘I wander through each charted street’ than in three-quarters of Socialist literature.
Progress is not an illusion, it happens, but it is slow and invariably disappointing. There is
always a new tyrant waiting to take over from the old — generally not quite so bad, but
still a tyrant. Consequently two viewpoints are always tenable. The one, how can you
improve human nature until you have changed the system? The other, what is the use of
changing the system before you have improved human nature? They appeal to different
individuals, and they probably show a tendency to alternate in point of time. The moralist
and the revolutionary are constantly undermining one another. Marx exploded a hundred
tons of dynamite beneath the moralist position, and we are still living in the echo of that
tremendous crash. But already, somewhere or other, the sappers are at work and fresh
dynamite is being tamped in place to blow Marx at the moon. Then Marx, or somebody
like him, will come back with yet more dynamite, and so the process continues, to an end
we cannot yet foresee. The central problem — how to prevent power from being abused —
remains unsolved. Dickens, who had not the vision to see that private property is an
obstructive nuisance, had the vision to see that. ‘If men would behave decently the world
would be decent’ is not such a platitude as it sounds.
II
More completely than most writers, perhaps, Dickens can be explained in tenns of his
social origin, though actually his family history was not quite what one would infer from
his novels. His father was a clerk in government service, and through his mother’s family
he had connexions with both the Army and the Navy. But from the age of nine onwards
he was brought up in London in commercial surroundings, and generally in an
atmosphere of struggling poverty. Mentally he belongs to the small urban bourgeoisie,
and he happens to be an exceptionally fine specimen of this class, with all the ‘points’, as
it were, very highly developed. That is partly what makes him so interesting. If one wants
a modern equivalent, the nearest would be H. G. Wells, who has had a rather similar
history and who obviously owes something to Dickens as novelist. Arnold Bennett was
essentially of the same type, but, unlike the other two, he was a midlander, with an
industrial and noncomfonnist rather than commercial and Anglican background.
The great disadvantage, and advantage, of the small urban bourgeois is his limited
outlook. He sees the world as a middle-class world, and everything outside these limits is
either laughable or slightly wicked. On the one hand, he has no contact with industry or
the soil; on the other, no contact with the governing classes. Anyone who has studied
Wells’s novels in detail will have noticed that though he hates the aristocrat like poison,
he has no particular objection to the plutocrat, and no enthusiasm for the proletarian. His
most hated types, the people he believes to be responsible for all human ills, are kings,
landowners, priests, nationalists, soldiers, scholars and peasants. At first sight a list
beginning with kings and ending with peasants looks like a mere omnium gatherum, but
in reality all these people have a common factor. All of them are archaic types, people
who are governed by tradition and whose eyes are turned towards the past — the opposite,
therefore, of the rising bourgeois who has put his money on the future and sees the past
simply as a dead hand.
Actually, although Dickens lived in a period when the bourgeoisie was really a rising
class, he displays this characteristic less strongly than Wells. He is almost unconscious of
the future and has a rather sloppy love of the picturesque (the ‘quaint old church’, etc. ).
Nevertheless his list of most hated types is like enough to Wells’s for the similarity to be
striking. He is vaguely on the side of the working class — has a sort of generalized
sympathy with them because they are oppressed — but he does not in reality know much
about them; they come into his books chiefly as servants, and comic servants at that. At
the other end of the scale he loathes the aristocrat and — going one better than Wells in
this loathes the big bourgeois as well. His real sympathies are bounded by Mr. Pickwick
on the upper side and Mr. Barkis on the lower. But the term ‘aristocrat’, for the type
Dickens hates, is vague and needs defining.
Actually Dickens’s target is not so much the great aristocracy, who hardly enter into his
books, as their petty offshoots, the cadging dowagers who live up mews in Mayfair, and
the bureaucrats and professional soldiers. All through his books there are countess hostile
sketches of these people, and hardly any that are friendly. There are practically no
friendly pictures of the landowning class, for instance. One might make a doubtful
exception of Sir Leicester Dedlock; otherwise there is only Mr. Wardle (who is a stock
figure the ‘good old squire’) and Haredale in BARNABY RUDGE, who has Dickens’s
sympathy because he is a persecuted Catholic. There are no friendly pictures of soldiers
(i. e. officers), and none at all of naval men. As for his bureaucrats, judges and
magistrates, most of them would feel quite at home in the Circumlocution Office. The
only officials whom Dickens handles with any kind of friendliness are, significantly
enough, policemen.
Dickens’s attitude is easily intelligible to an Englishman, because it is part of the English
puritan tradition, which is not dead even at this day. The class Dickens belonged to, at
least by adoption, was growing suddenly rich after a couple of centuries of obscurity. It
had grown up mainly in the big towns, out of contact with agriculture, and politically
impotent; government, in its experience, was something which either interfered or
persecuted. Consequently it was a class with no tradition of public service and not much
tradition of usefulness. What now strikes us as remarkable about the new moneyed class
of the nineteenth century is their complete irresponsibility; they see everything in terms
of individual success, with hardly any consciousness that the community exists. On the
other hand, a Tite Barnacle, even when he was neglecting his duties, would have some
vague notion of what duties he was neglecting. Dickens’s attitude is never irresponsible,
still less does he take the money-grubbing Smilesian line; but at the back of his mind
there is usually a half-belief that the whole apparatus of government is unnecessary.
Parliament is simply Lord Coodle and Sir Thomas Doodle, the Empire is simply Major
Bagstock and his Indian servant, the Army is simply Colonel Chowser and Doctor
Slammer, the public services are simply Bumble and the Circumlocution Office — and so
on and so forth. What he does not see, or only intermittently sees, is that Coodle and
Doodle and all the other corpses left over from the eighteenth century ARE perfonning a
function which neither Pickwick nor Boffin would ever bother about.
And of course this narrowness of vision is in one way a great advantage to him, because
it is fatal for a caricaturist to see too much. From Dickens’s point of view ‘good’ society
is simply a collection of village idiots. What a crew! Lady Tippins! Mrs. Gowan! Lord
Verisopht! The Honourable Bob Stables! Mrs. Sparsit (whose husband was a Powler)!
The Tite Barnacles! Nupkins! It is practically a case-book in lunacy. But at the same time
his remoteness from the landowning-military-bureaucratic class incapacitates him for
full-length satire. He only succeeds with this class when he depicts them as mental
defectives. The accusation which used to be made against Dickens in his lifetime, that he
‘could not paint a gentleman’, was an absurdity, but it is true in this sense, that what he
says against the ‘gentleman’ class is seldom very damaging. Sir Mulberry Hawk, for
instance, is a wretched attempt at the wicked-baronet type. Harthouse in HARD TIMES
is better, but he would be only an ordinary achievement for Trollope or Thackeray.
Trollope’s thoughts hardly move outside the ‘gentleman’ class, but Thackeray has the
great advantage of having a foot in two moral camps. In some ways his outlook is very
similar to Dickens’s. Like Dickens, he identifies with the puritanical moneyed class
against the card-playing, debt-bilking aristocracy. The eighteenth century, as he sees it, is
sticking out into the nineteenth in the person of the wicked Lord Steyne. VANITY FAIR
is a full-length version of what Dickens did for a few chapters in LITTLE DORRIT. But
by origins and upbringing Thackeray happens to be somewhat nearer to the class he is
satirizing. Consequently he can produce such comparatively subtle types as, for instance,
Major Pendennis and Rawdon Crawley. Major Pendennis is a shallow old snob, and
Rawdon Crawley is a thick-headed ruffian who sees nothing wrong in living for years by
swindling tradesmen; but what Thackery realizes is that according to their tortuous code
they are neither of them bad men. Major Pendennis would not sign a dud cheque, for
instance; Rawdon certainly would, but on the other hand he would not desert a friend in a
tight corner. Both of them would behave well on the field of battle — a thing that would
not particularly appeal to Dickens. The result is that at the end one is left with a kind of
amused tolerance for Major Pendennis and with something approaching respect for
Rawdon; and yet one sees, better than any diatribe could make one, the utter rottenness of
that kind of cadging, toadying life on the fringes of smart society. Dickens would be quite
incapable of this.
In his hands both Rawdon and the Major would dwindle to traditional caricatures. And, on the whole, his attacks on ‘good’ society are rather perfunctory. The
aristocracy and the big bourgeoisie exist in his books chiefly as a kind of ‘noises off, a
haw-hawing chorus somewhere in the wings, like Podsnap’s dinner-parties. When he
produces a really subtle and damaging portrait, like John Dorrit or Harold Skimpole, it is
generally of some rather middling, unimportant person.
One very striking thing about Dickens, especially considering the time he lived in, is his
lack of vulgar nationalism. All peoples who have reached the point of becoming nations
tend to despise foreigners, but there is not much doubt that the English-speaking races are
the worst offenders. One can see this from the fact that as soon as they become fully
aware of any foreign race they invent an insulting nickname for it. Wop, Dago, Froggy,
Squarehead, Kike, Sheeny, Nigger, Wog, Chink, Greaser, Yellowbelly — these are merely
a selection. Any time before 1870 the list would have been shorter, because the map of
the world was different from what it is now, and there were only three or four foreign
races that had fully entered into the English consciousness. But towards these, and
especially towards France, the nearest and best-hated nation, the English attitude of
patronage was so intolerable that English ‘arrogance’ and ‘xenophobia’ are still a legend.
And of course they are not a completely untrue legend even now. Till very recently
nearly all English children were brought up to despise the southern European races, and
history as taught in schools was mainly a list of battles won by England. But one has got
to read, say, the QUARTERLY REVIEW of the thirties to know what boasting really is.
Those were the days when the English built up their legend of themselves as ‘sturdy
islanders’ and ‘stubborn hearts of oak’ and when it was accepted as a kind of scientific
fact that one Englishman was the equal of three foreigners. All through nineteenth-
century novels and comic papers there runs the traditional figure of the ‘Froggy’ — a
small ridiculous man with a tiny beard and a pointed top-hat, always jabbering and
gesticulating, vain, frivolous and fond of boasting of his martial exploits, but generally
taking to flight when real danger appears. Over against him was John Bull, the ‘sturdy
English yeoman’, or (a more public-school version) the ‘strong, silent Englishman’ of
Charles Kingsley, Tom Hughes and others.
Thackeray, for instance, has this outlook very strongly, though there are moments when
he sees through it and laughs at it. The one historical fact that is firmly fixed in his mind
is that the English won the battle of Waterloo. One never reads far in his books without
coming upon some reference to it. The English, as he sees it, are invincible because of
their tremendous physical strength, due mainly to living on beef. Like most Englishmen
of his time, he has the curious illusion that the English are larger than other people
(Thackeray, as it happened, was larger than most people), and therefore he is capable of
writing passages like this:
I say to you that you are better than a Frenchman. I would lay even money that you who
are reading this are more than five feet seven in height, and weigh eleven stone; while a
Frenchman is five feet four and does not weigh nine. The Frenchman has after his soup a
dish of vegetables, where you have one of meat. You are a different and superior
animal — a French-beating animal (the history of hundreds of years has shown you to be
so), etc. etc.
There are similar passages scattered all through Thackeray’s works. Dickens would never
be guilty of anything of that kind. It would be an exaggeration to say that he nowhere
pokes fun at foreigners, and of course like nearly all nineteenth-century Englishmen, he is
untouched by European culture. But never anywhere does he indulge in the typical
English boasting, the ‘island race’, ‘bulldog breed’, ‘right little, tight little island’ style of
talk. In the whole of A TALE OF TWO CITIES there is not a line that could be taken as
meaning, ‘Look how these wicked Frenchmen behave! ’ The only place where he seems
to display a normal hatred of foreigners is in the American chapters of MARTIN
CHUZZLEWIT. This, however, is simply the reaction of a generous mind against cant. If
Dickens were alive today he would make a trip to Soviet Russia and come back to the
book rather like Gide’s RETOUR DE L’URSS. But he is remarkably free from the idiocy
of regarding nations as individuals. He seldom even makes jokes turning on nationality.
He does not exploit the comic Irishman and the comic Welshman, for instance, and not
because he objects to stock characters and ready-made jokes, which obviously he does
not. It is perhaps more significant that he shows no prejudice against Jews. It is true that
he takes it for granted (OLIVER TWIST and GREAT EXPECTATIONS) that a receiver
of stolen goods will be a Jew, which at the time was probably justified. But the ‘Jew
joke’, endemic in English literature until the rise of Hitler, does not appear in his books,
and in OUR MUTUAL FRIEND he makes a pious though not very convincing attempt to
stand up for the Jews.
Dickens’s lack of vulgar nationalism is in part the mark of a real largeness of mind, and
in part results from his negative, rather unhelpful political attitude. He is very much an
Englishman but he is hardly aware of it — certainly the thought of being an Englishman
does not thrill him. He has no imperialist feelings, no discernible views on foreign
politics, and is untouched by the military tradition. Temperamentally he is much nearer to
the small noncomformist tradesman who looks down on the ‘redcoats’, and thinks that
war is wicked — a one-eyed view, but after all, war is wicked. It is noticeable that Dickens
hardly writes of war, even to denounce it. With all his marvellous powers of description,
and of describing things he had never seen, he never describes a battle, unless one counts
the attack on the Bastille in A TALE OF TWO CITIES. Probably the subject would not
strike him as interesting, and in any case he would not regard a battlefield as a place
where anything worth settling could be settled. It is one up to the lower-middle-class,
puritan mentality.
Ill
Dickens had grown up near enough to poverty to be terrified of it, and in spite of his
generosity of mind, he is not free from the special prejudices of the shabby-genteel. It is
usual to claim him as a ‘popular’ writer, a champion of the ‘oppressed masses’. So he is,
so long as he thinks of them as oppressed; but there are two things that condition his
attitude. In the first place, he is a south-of-England man, and a Cockney at that, and
therefore out of touch with the bulk of the real oppressed masses, the industrial and
agricultural labourers. It is interesting to see how Chesterton, another Cockney, always
presents Dickens as the spokesman of ‘the poor’, without showing much awareness of
who ‘the poor’ really are. To Chesterton ‘the poor’ means small shopkeepers and
servants. Sam Weller, he says, ‘is the great symbol in English literature of the populace
peculiar to England’; and Sam Weller is a valet! The other point is that Dickens’s early
experiences have given him a horror of proletarian roughness. He shows this
unmistakably whenever he writes of the very poorest of the poor, the slum-dwellers. His
descriptions of the London slums are always full of undisguised repulsion:
The ways were foul and narrow; the shops and houses wretched; and people half naked,
drunken, slipshod and ugly. Alleys and archways, like so many cesspools, disgorged their
offences of smell, and dirt, and life, upon the straggling streets; and the whole quarter
reeked with crime, and filth, and misery, etc. etc.
There are many similar passages in Dickens. From them one gets the impression of whole
submerged populations whom he regards as being beyond the pale. In rather the same
way the modern doctrinaire Socialist contemptuously writes off a large block of the
population as Tumpenproletariat’.
Dickens also shows less understanding of criminals than one would expect of him.
Although he is well aware of the social and economic causes of crime, he often seems to
feel that when a man has once broken the law he has put himself outside human society.
There is a chapter at the end of DAVID COPPERFIELD in which David visits the prison
where Latimer and Uriah Heep are serving their sentences. Dickens actually seems to
regard the horrible ‘model’ prisons, against which Charles Reade delivered his
memorable attack in IT IS NEVER TOO LATE TO MEND, as too humane. He
complains that the food is too good! As soon as he comes up against crime or the worst
depths of poverty, he shows traces of the ‘I’ve always kept myself respectable’ habit of
mind. The attitude of Pip (obviously the attitude of Dickens himself) towards Magwitch
in GREAT EXPECTATIONS is extremely interesting. Pip is conscious all along of his
ingratitude towards Joe, but far less so of his ingratitude towards Magwitch. When he
discovers that the person who has loaded him with benefits for years is actually a
transported convict, he falls into frenzies of disgust. ‘The abhorrence in which I held the
man, the dread I had of him, the repugnance with which I shrank from him, could not
have been exceeded if he had been some terrible beast’, etc. etc. So far as one can
discover from the text, this is not because when Pip was a child he had been terrorized by
Magwitch in the churchyard; it is because Magwitch is a criminal and a convict. There is
an even more ‘kept-myself-respectable’ touch in the fact that Pip feels as a matter of
course that he cannot take Magwitch’ s money. The money is not the product of a crime, it
has been honestly acquired; but it is an ex-convict’s money and therefore ‘tainted’. There
is nothing psychologically false in this, either. Psychologically the latter part of GREAT
EXPECTATIONS is about the best thing Dickens ever did; throughout this part of the
book one feels ‘Yes, that is just how Pip would have behaved. ’ But the point is that in the
matter of Magwitch, Dickens identifies with Pip, and his attitude is at bottom snobbish.
The result is that Magwitch belongs to the same queer class of characters as Falstaff and,
probably, Don Quixote — characters who are more pathetic than the author intended.
When it is a question of the non-criminal poor, the ordinary, decent, labouring poor, there
is of course nothing contemptuous in Dickens’s attitude. He has the sincerest admiration
for people like the Peggottys and the Plomishes. But it is questionable whether he really
regards them as equals. It is of the greatest interest to read Chapter XI of DAVID
COPPERFIELD and side by side with it the autobiographical fragments (parts of this are
given in Forster’s LIFE), in which Dickens expresses his feelings about the blacking-
factory episode a great deal more strongly than in the novel. For more than twenty years
afterwards the memory was so painful to him that he would go out of his way to avoid
that part of the Strand. He says that to pass that way ‘made me cry, after my eldest child
could speak. ’ The text makes it quite clear that what hurt him most of all, then and in
retrospect, was the enforced contact with Tow’ associates:
No words can express the secret agony of my soul as I sunk into this companionship;
compared these everyday associates with those of my happier childhood. But I held some
station at the blacking warehouse too. . . I soon became at least as expeditious and as
skilful with my hands as either of the other boys. Though perfectly familiar with them,
my conduct and manners were different enough from theirs to place a space between us.
They, and the men, always spoke of me as ‘the young gentleman’. A certain man. . . used
to call me ‘Charles’ sometimes in speaking to me; but I think it was mostly when we
were very confidential. . . Poll Green uprose once, and rebelled against the ‘young-
gentleman’ usage; but Bob Fagin settled him speedily.
It was as well that there should be ‘a space between us’, you see. However much Dickens
may admire the working classes, he does not wish to resemble them. Given his origins,
and the time he lived in, it could hardly be otherwise. In the early nineteenth century class
animosities may have been no sharper than they are now, but the surface differences
between class and class were enormously greater. The ‘gentleman’ and the ‘common
man’ must have seemed like different species of animal. Dickens is quite genuinely on
the side of the poor against the rich, but it would be next door to impossible for him not
to think of a working-class exterior as a stigma. In one of Tolstoy’s fables the peasants of
a certain village judge every stranger who arrives from the state of his hands. If his palms
are hard from work, they let him in; if his palms are soft, out he goes. This would be
hardly intelligible to Dickens; all his heroes have soft hands. His younger heroes —
Nicholas Nickleby, Martin Chuzzlewit, Edward Chester, David Copperfield, John
Hannon — are usually of the type known as ‘walking gentlemen’. He likes a bourgeois
exterior and a bourgeois (not aristocratic) accent. One curious symptom of this is that he
will not allow anyone who is to play a heroic part to speak like a working man. A comic
hero like Sam Weller, or a merely pathetic figure like Stephen Blackpool, can speak with
a broad accent, but the JEUNE PREMIER always speaks the equivalent of B. B. C. This is
so, even when it involves absurdities. Little Pip, for instance, is brought up by people
speaking broad Essex, but talks upper-class English from his earliest childhood; actually
he would have talked the same dialect as Joe, or at least as Mrs. Gargery. So also with
Biddy Wopsle, Lizzie Hexam, Sissie Jupe, Oliver Twist — one ought perhaps to add Little
Dorrit. Even Rachel in HARD TIMES has barely a trace of Lancashire accent, an
impossibility in her case.
One thing that often gives the clue to a novelist’s real feelings on the class question is the
attitude he takes up when class collides with sex. This is a thing too painful to be lied
about, and consequently it is one of the points at which the Tm-not-a-snob’ pose tends to
break down.
One sees that at its most obvious where a class-distinction is also a colour-distinction.
And something resembling the colonial attitude (‘native’ women are fair game, white
women are sacrosanct) exists in a veiled form in all-white communities, causing bitter
resentment on both sides. When this issue arises, novelists often revert to crude class-
feelings which they might disclaim at other times. A good example of ‘class-conscious’
reaction is a rather forgotten novel, THE PEOPLE OF CLOPTON, by Andrew Barton.
The author’s moral code is quite clearly mixed up with class-hatred. He feels the
seduction of a poor girl by a rich man to be something atrocious, a kind of defilement,
something quite different from her seduction by a man in her own walk of life. Trollope
deals with this theme twice (THE THREE CLERKS and THE SMALL HOUSE AT
ALLINGTON) and, as one might expect, entirely from the upper-class angle. As he sees
it, an affair with a barmaid or a landlady’s daughter is simply an ‘entanglement’ to be
escaped from. Trollope’s moral standards are strict, and he does not allow the seduction
actually to happen, but the implication is always that a working-class girl’s feelings do
not greatly matter. In THE THREE CLERKS he even gives the typical class-reaction by
noting that the girl ‘smells’. Meredith (RHODA FLEMING) takes more the ‘class-
conscious’ viewpoint. Thackeray, as often, seems to hesitate. In PENDENNIS (Fanny
Bolton) his attitude is much the same as Trollope’s; in A SHABBY GENTEEL STORY
it is nearer to Meredith’s.
One could divine a great deal about Trollope’s social origin, or Meredith’s, or Barton’s,
merely from their handling of the class-sex theme. So one can with Dickens, but what
emerges, as usual, is that he is more inclined to identify himself with the middle class
than with the proletariat. The one incident that seems to contradict this is the tale of the
young peasant-girl in Doctor Manette’s manuscript in A TALE OF TWO CITIES. This,
however, is merely a costume-piece put in to explain the implacable hatred of Madame
Defarge, which Dickens does not pretend to approve of. In DAVID COPPERFIELD,
where he is dealing with a typical nineteenth-century seduction, the class-issue does not
seem to strike him as paramount. It is a law of Victorian novels that sexual misdeeds
must not go unpunished, and so Steerforth is drowned on Yarmouth sands, but neither
Dickens, nor old Peggotty, nor even Ham, seems to feel that Steerforth has added to his
offence by being the son of rich parents. The Steerforths are moved by class-motives, but
the Peggottys are not — not even in the scene between Mrs. Steerforth and old Peggotty; if
they were, of course, they would probably turn against David as well as against
Steerforth.
In OUR MUTUAL FRIEND Dickens treats the episode of Eugene Wrayburn and Lizzie
Hexam very realistically and with no appearance of class bias. According to the ‘Unhand
me, monster! ’ tradition, Lizzie ought either to ‘spurn’ Eugene or to be ruined by him and
throw herself off Waterloo Bridge: Eugene ought to be either a heartless betrayer or a
hero resolved upon defying society. Neither behaves in the least like this. Lizzie is
frightened by Eugene’s advances and actually runs away from him, but hardly pretends to
dislike them; Eugene is attracted by her, has too much decency to attempt seducing her
and dare not marry her because of his family. Finally they are married and no one is any
the worse, except Mrs. Twemlow, who will lose a few dinner engagements. It is all very
much as it might have happened in real life. But a ‘class-conscious’ novelist would have
given her to Bradley Headstone.
But when it is the other way about — when it is a case of a poor man aspiring to some
woman who is ‘above’ him Dickens instantly retreats into the middle-class attitude. He is
rather fond of the Victorian notion of a woman (woman with a capital W) being ‘above’ a
man. Pip feels that Estella is ‘above’ him, Esther Summerson is ‘above’ Guppy, Little
Dorrit is ‘above’ John Chivery, Lucy Manette is ‘above’ Sydney Carton. In some of these
the ‘above’-ness is merely moral, but in others it is social. There is a scarcely mistakable
class-reaction when David Copperfield discovers that Uriah Heep is plotting to marry
Agnes Wicklleld. The disgusting Uriah suddenly announces that he is in love with her:
‘Oh, Master Copperfield, with what a pure affection do I love the ground my Agnes
walks on. ’
I believe I had the delirious idea of seizing the red-hot poker out of the fire, and running
him through with it. It went from me with a shock, like a ball fired from a rifle: but the
image of Agnes, outraged by so much as a thought of this red-headed animal’s, remained
in my mind (when I looked at him, sitting all awry as if his mean soul griped his body)
and made me giddy. . . ‘I believe Agnes Wickfield to be as far above you (David says
later on), and as far removed from all your aspirations, as the moon herself. ’
Considering how Heep’s general lowness — his servile manners, dropped aitches and so
forth — has been rubbed in throughout the book, there is not much doubt about the nature
of Dickens’s feelings. Heep, of course, is playing a villainous part, but even villains have
sexual lives; it is the thought of the ‘pure’ Agnes in bed with a man who drops his aitches
that really revolts Dickens. But his usual tendency is to treat a man in love with a woman
who is ‘above’ him as a joke. It is one of the stock jokes of English literature, from
Malvolio onwards. Guppy in BLEAK HOUSE is an example, John Chivery is another,
and there is a rather ill-natured treatment of this theme in the ‘swarry’ in PICKWICK
PAPERS. Here Dickens describes the Bath footmen as living a kind of fantasy-life,
holding dinner-parties in imitation of their ‘betters’ and deluding themselves that their
young mistresses are in love with them. This evidently strikes him as very comic. So it is
in a way, though one might question whether it is not better for a footman even to have
delusions of this kind than simply to accept his status in the spirit of the catechism.
In his attitude towards servants Dickens is not ahead of his age. In the nineteenth century
the revolt against domestic service was just beginning, to the great annoyance of
everyone with over £500 a year. An enonnous number of the jokes in nineteenth-century
comic papers deals with the uppishness of servants. For years PUNCH ran a series of
jokes called ‘Servant Gal-isms’, all turning on the then astonishing fact that a servant is a
human being. Dickens is sometimes guilty of this kind of thing himself. His books
abound with the ordinary comic servants; they are dishonest (GREAT
EXPECTATIONS), incompetent (DAVID COPPERFIELD), turn up their noses at good
food (PICKWICK PAPERS), etc. etc. — all rather in the spirit of the suburban housewife
with one downtrodden cook-general. But what is curious, in a nineteenth-century radical,
is that when he wants to draw a sympathetic picture of a servant, he creates what is
recognizably a feudal type. Sam Weller, Mark Tapley, Clara Peggotty are all of them
feudal figures. They belong to the genre of the ‘old family retainer’; they identify
themselves with their master’s family and are at once doggishly faithful and completely
familiar. No doubt Mark Tapley and Sam Weller are derived to some extent from
Smollett, and hence from Cervantes; but it is interesting that Dickens should have been
attracted by such a type. Sam Weller’s attitude is definitely medieval. He gets himself
arrested in order to follow Mr. Pickwick into the Fleet, and afterwards refuses to get
married because he feels that Mr. Pickwick still needs his services. There is a
characteristic scene between them:
‘Vages or no vages, board or no board, lodgin’ or no lodgin’, Sam Veller, as you took
from the old inn in the Borough, sticks by you, come what may. . . ’
‘My good fellow’, said Mr. Pickwick, when Mr. Weller had sat down again, rather
abashed at his own enthusiasm, ‘you are bound to consider the young woman also. ’
‘I do consider the young ‘ooman, sir’, said Sam. ‘I have considered the young ‘ooman.
I’ve spoke to her. I’ve told her how I’m sitivated; she’s ready to vait till I’m ready, and I
believe she vill. If she don’t, she’s not the young ‘ooman I take her for, and I give up with
readiness. ’
It is easy to imagine what the young woman would have said to this in real life. But
notice the feudal atmosphere. Sam Weller is ready as a matter of course to sacrifice years
of his life to his master, and he can also sit down in his master’s presence.
degraded savages — in fact, as lunatics. He broods over their frenzies with a curious
imaginative intensity. He describes them dancing the ‘Carmagnole’, for instance:
There could not be fewer than five hundred people, and they were dancing like five
thousand demons. . . They danced to the popular Revolution song, keeping a ferocious
time that was like a gnashing of teeth in unison. . . They advanced, retreated, struck at
one another’s hands, clutched at one another’s heads, spun round alone, caught one
another, and spun around in pairs, until many of them dropped. . . Suddenly they stopped
again, paused, struck out the time afresh, forming into lines the width of the public way,
and, with their heads low down and their hands high up, swooped screaming off. No fight
could have been half so terrible as this dance. It was so emphatically a fallen sport — a
something, once innocent, delivered over to all devilry.
He even credits some of these wretches with a taste for guillotining children. The passage
I have abridged above ought to be read in full. It and others like it show how deep was
Dickens’s horror of revolutionary hysteria. Notice, for instance that touch, ‘with their
heads low down and their hands high up’, etc. , and the evil vision it conveys. Madame
Defarge is a truly dreadful figure, certainly Dickens’s most successful attempt at a
MALIGNANT character. Defarge and others are simply ‘the new oppressors who have
risen in the destruction of the old’, the revolutionary courts are presided over by ‘the
lowest, cruellest and worst populace’, and so on and so forth. All the way through
Dickens insists upon the nightmare insecurity of a revolutionary period, and in this he
shows a great deal of prescience. ‘A law of the suspected, which struck away all security
for liberty or life, and delivered over any good and innocent person to any bad and guilty
one; prisons gorged with people who had committed no offence, and could obtain no
hearing’ — it would apply pretty accurately to several countries today.
The apologists of any revolution generally try to minimize its horrors; Dickens’s impulse
is to exaggerate them — and from a historical point of view he has certainly exaggerated.
Even the Reign of Terror was a much smaller thing than he makes it appear. Though he
quotes no figures, he gives the impression of a frenzied massacre lasting for years,
whereas in reality the whole of the Terror, so far as the number of deaths goes, was a joke
compared with one of Napoleon’s battles. But the bloody knives and the tumbrils rolling
to and fro create in his mind a special sinister vision which he has succeeded in passing
on to generations of readers. Thanks to Dickens, the very word ‘tumbril’ has a murderous
sound; one forgets that a tumbril is only a sort of fann-cart. To this day, to the average
Englishman, the French Revolution means no more than a pyramid of severed heads. It is
a strange thing that Dickens, much more in sympathy with the ideas of the Revolution
than most Englishmen of his time, should have played a part in creating this impression.
If you hate violence and don’t believe in politics, the only remedy remaining is education.
Perhaps society is past praying for, but there is always hope for the individual human
being, if you can catch him young enough. This belief partly accounts for Dickens’s
preoccupation with childhood.
No one, at any rate no English writer, has written better about childhood than Dickens. In
spite of all the knowledge that has accumulated since, in spite of the fact that children are
now comparatively sanely treated, no novelist has shown the same power of entering into
the child’s point of view. I must have been about nine years old when I first read DAVID
COPPERFIELD. The mental atmosphere of the opening chapters was so immediately
intelligible to me that I vaguely imagined they had been written BY A CHILD. And yet
when one re-reads the book as an adult and sees the Murdstones, for instance, dwindle
from gigantic figures of doom into semi-comic monsters, these passages lose nothing.
Dickens has been able to stand both inside and outside the child’s mind, in such a way
that the same scene can be wild burlesque or sinister reality, according to the age at
which one reads it. Look, for instance, at the scene in which David Copperfield is
unjustly suspected of eating the mutton chops; or the scene in which Pip, in GREAT
EXPECTATIONS, coming back from Miss Havisham’s house and finding himself
completely unable to describe what he has seen, takes refuge in a series of outrageous
lies — which, of course, are eagerly believed. All the isolation of childhood is there. And
how accurately he has recorded the mechanisms of the child’s mind, its visualizing
tendency, its sensitiveness to certain kinds of impression. Pip relates how in his
childhood his ideas about his dead parents were derived from their tombstones:
The shape of the letters on my father’s, gave me an odd idea that he was a square, stout,
dark man, with curly black hair. From the character and turn of the inscription, ‘ALSO
GEORGIANA, WIFE OF THE ABOVE’, I drew a childish conclusion that my mother
was freckled and sickly. To five little stone lozenges, each about a foot and a half long,
which were arranged in a neat row beside their grave, and were sacred to the memory of
five little brothers of mine. . . I am indebted for a belief I religiously entertained that they
had all been bom on their backs with their hands in their trouser-pockets, and had never
taken them out in this state of existence.
There is a similar passage in DAVID COPPERFIELD. After biting Mr. Murdstone’s
hand, David is sent away to school and obliged to wear on his back a placard saying,
‘Take care of him. He bites. ’ He looks at the door in the playground where the boys have
carved their names, and from the appearance of each name he seems to know in just what
tone of voice the boy will read out the placard:
There was one boy — a certain J. Steerforth — who cut his name very deep and very often,
who, I conceived, would read it in a rather strong voice, and afterwards pull my hair.
There was another boy, one Tommy Traddles, who I dreaded would make game of it, and
pretend to be dreadfully frightened of me. There was a third, George Demple, who I
fancied would sing it.
When I read this passage as a child, it seemed to me that those were exactly the pictures
that those particular names would call up. The reason, of course, is the sound-associations
of the words (Demple — ‘temple’; Traddles — probably ‘skedaddle’). But how many
people, before Dickens, had ever noticed such things? A sympathetic attitude towards
children was a much rarer thing in Dickens’s day than it is now. The early nineteenth
century was not a good time to be a child. In Dickens’s youth children were still being
‘solemnly tried at a criminal bar, where they were held up to be seen’, and it was not so
long since boys of thirteen had been hanged for petty theft. The doctrine of ‘breaking the
child’s spirit’ was in full vigour, and THE FAIRCHILD FAMILY was a standard book
for children till late into the century. This evil book is now issued in pretty-pretty
expurgated editions, but it is well worth reading in the original version. It gives one some
idea of the lengths to which child-discipline was sometimes carried. Mr. Fairchild, for
instance, when he catches his children quarrelling, first thrashes them, reciting Dr.
Watts’s ‘Let dogs delight to bark and bite’ between blows of the cane, and then takes
them to spend the afternoon beneath a gibbet where the rotting corpse of a murderer is
hanging. In the earlier part of the century scores of thousands of children, aged
sometimes as young as six, were literally worked to death in the mines or cotton mills,
and even at the fashionable public schools boys were flogged till they ran with blood for
a mistake in their Latin verses. One thing which Dickens seems to have recognized, and
which most of his contemporaries did not, is the sadistic sexual element in flogging. I
t hink this can be inferred from DAVID COPPERFIELD and NICHOLAS NICKLEBY.
But mental cruelty to a child infuriates him as much as physical, and though there is a fair
number of exceptions, his schoolmasters are generally scoundrels.
Except for the universities and the big public schools, every kind of education then
existing in England gets a mauling at Dickens’s hands. There is Doctor Blimber’s
Academy, where little boys are blown up with Greek until they burst, and the revolting
charity schools of the period, which produced specimens like Noah Claypole and Uriah
Heep, and Salem House, and Dotheboys Hall, and the disgraceful little dame-school kept
by Mr. Wopsle’s great-aunt. Some of what Dickens says remains true even today. Salem
House is the ancestor of the modern ‘prep school’, which still has a good deal of
resemblance to it; and as for Mr. Wopsle’s great-aunt, some old fraud of much the same
stamp is carrying on at this moment in nearly every small town in England. But, as usual,
Dickens’s criticism is neither creative nor destructive. He sees the idiocy of an
educational system founded on the Greek lexicon and the wax-ended cane; on the other
hand, he has no use for the new kind of school that is coming up in the fifties and sixties,
the ‘modem’ school, with its gritty insistence on ‘facts’. What, then, DOES he want? As
always, what he appears to want is a moralized version of the existing thing — the old type
of school, but with no caning, no bullying or underfeeding, and not quite so much Greek.
Doctor Strong’s school, to which David Copperfield goes after he escapes from
Murdstone & Grinby’s, is simply Salem House with the vices left out and a good deal of
‘old grey stones’ atmosphere thrown in:
Doctor Strong’s was an excellent school, as different from Mr. Creakle’s as good is from
evil. It was very gravely and decorously ordered, and on a sound system; with an appeal,
in everything, to the honour and good faith of the boys. . . which worked wonders. We all
felt that we had a part in the management of the place, and in sustaining its character and
dignity. Hence, we soon became warmly attached to it — I am sure I did for one, and I
never knew, in all my time, of any boy being otherwise — and learnt with a good will,
desiring to do it credit. We had noble games out of hours, and plenty of liberty; but even
then, as I remember, we were well spoken of in the town, and rarely did any disgrace, by
our appearance or manner, to the reputation of Doctor Strong and Doctor Strong’s boys.
In the woolly vagueness of this passage one can see Dickens’s utter lack of any
educational theory. He can imagine the MORAL atmosphere of a good school, but
nothing further. The boys ‘learnt with a good will’, but what did they learn? No doubt it
was Doctor Blimber’s curriculum, a little watered down. Considering the attitude to
society that is everywhere implied in Dickens’s novels, it comes as rather a shock to learn
that he sent his eldest son to Eton and sent all his children through the ordinary
educational mill. Gissing seems to think that he may have done this because he was
painfully conscious of being under-educated himself. Here perhaps Gissing is influenced
by his own love of classical learning. Dickens had had little or no formal education, but
he lost nothing by missing it, and on the whole he seems to have been aware of this. If he
was unable to imagine a better school than Doctor Strong’s, or, in real life, than Eton, it
was probably due to an intellectual deficiency rather different from the one Gissing
suggests.
It seems that in every attack Dickens makes upon society he is always pointing to a
change of spirit rather than a change of structure. It is hopeless to try and pin him down
to any definite remedy, still more to any political doctrine. His approach is always along
the moral plane, and his attitude is sufficiently summed up in that remark about Strong’s
school being as different from Creakle’s ‘as good is from evil’. Two things can be very
much alike and yet abysmally different. Heaven and Hell are in the same place. Useless
to change institutions without a ‘change of heart’ — that, essentially, is what he is always
saying.
If that were all, he might be no more than a cheer-up writer, a reactionary humbug. A
‘change of heart’ is in fact THE alibi of people who do not wish to endanger the
STATUS QUO. But Dickens is not a humbug, except in minor matters, and the strongest
single impression one carries away from his books is that of a hatred of tyranny. I said
earlier that Dickens is not IN THE ACCEPTED SENSE a revolutionary writer. But it is
not at all certain that a merely moral criticism of society may not be just as
‘revolutionary’ — and revolution, after all, means turning things upside down — as the
politico-economic criticism which is fashionable at this moment. Blake was not a
politician, but there is more understanding of the nature of capitalist society in a poem
like ‘I wander through each charted street’ than in three-quarters of Socialist literature.
Progress is not an illusion, it happens, but it is slow and invariably disappointing. There is
always a new tyrant waiting to take over from the old — generally not quite so bad, but
still a tyrant. Consequently two viewpoints are always tenable. The one, how can you
improve human nature until you have changed the system? The other, what is the use of
changing the system before you have improved human nature? They appeal to different
individuals, and they probably show a tendency to alternate in point of time. The moralist
and the revolutionary are constantly undermining one another. Marx exploded a hundred
tons of dynamite beneath the moralist position, and we are still living in the echo of that
tremendous crash. But already, somewhere or other, the sappers are at work and fresh
dynamite is being tamped in place to blow Marx at the moon. Then Marx, or somebody
like him, will come back with yet more dynamite, and so the process continues, to an end
we cannot yet foresee. The central problem — how to prevent power from being abused —
remains unsolved. Dickens, who had not the vision to see that private property is an
obstructive nuisance, had the vision to see that. ‘If men would behave decently the world
would be decent’ is not such a platitude as it sounds.
II
More completely than most writers, perhaps, Dickens can be explained in tenns of his
social origin, though actually his family history was not quite what one would infer from
his novels. His father was a clerk in government service, and through his mother’s family
he had connexions with both the Army and the Navy. But from the age of nine onwards
he was brought up in London in commercial surroundings, and generally in an
atmosphere of struggling poverty. Mentally he belongs to the small urban bourgeoisie,
and he happens to be an exceptionally fine specimen of this class, with all the ‘points’, as
it were, very highly developed. That is partly what makes him so interesting. If one wants
a modern equivalent, the nearest would be H. G. Wells, who has had a rather similar
history and who obviously owes something to Dickens as novelist. Arnold Bennett was
essentially of the same type, but, unlike the other two, he was a midlander, with an
industrial and noncomfonnist rather than commercial and Anglican background.
The great disadvantage, and advantage, of the small urban bourgeois is his limited
outlook. He sees the world as a middle-class world, and everything outside these limits is
either laughable or slightly wicked. On the one hand, he has no contact with industry or
the soil; on the other, no contact with the governing classes. Anyone who has studied
Wells’s novels in detail will have noticed that though he hates the aristocrat like poison,
he has no particular objection to the plutocrat, and no enthusiasm for the proletarian. His
most hated types, the people he believes to be responsible for all human ills, are kings,
landowners, priests, nationalists, soldiers, scholars and peasants. At first sight a list
beginning with kings and ending with peasants looks like a mere omnium gatherum, but
in reality all these people have a common factor. All of them are archaic types, people
who are governed by tradition and whose eyes are turned towards the past — the opposite,
therefore, of the rising bourgeois who has put his money on the future and sees the past
simply as a dead hand.
Actually, although Dickens lived in a period when the bourgeoisie was really a rising
class, he displays this characteristic less strongly than Wells. He is almost unconscious of
the future and has a rather sloppy love of the picturesque (the ‘quaint old church’, etc. ).
Nevertheless his list of most hated types is like enough to Wells’s for the similarity to be
striking. He is vaguely on the side of the working class — has a sort of generalized
sympathy with them because they are oppressed — but he does not in reality know much
about them; they come into his books chiefly as servants, and comic servants at that. At
the other end of the scale he loathes the aristocrat and — going one better than Wells in
this loathes the big bourgeois as well. His real sympathies are bounded by Mr. Pickwick
on the upper side and Mr. Barkis on the lower. But the term ‘aristocrat’, for the type
Dickens hates, is vague and needs defining.
Actually Dickens’s target is not so much the great aristocracy, who hardly enter into his
books, as their petty offshoots, the cadging dowagers who live up mews in Mayfair, and
the bureaucrats and professional soldiers. All through his books there are countess hostile
sketches of these people, and hardly any that are friendly. There are practically no
friendly pictures of the landowning class, for instance. One might make a doubtful
exception of Sir Leicester Dedlock; otherwise there is only Mr. Wardle (who is a stock
figure the ‘good old squire’) and Haredale in BARNABY RUDGE, who has Dickens’s
sympathy because he is a persecuted Catholic. There are no friendly pictures of soldiers
(i. e. officers), and none at all of naval men. As for his bureaucrats, judges and
magistrates, most of them would feel quite at home in the Circumlocution Office. The
only officials whom Dickens handles with any kind of friendliness are, significantly
enough, policemen.
Dickens’s attitude is easily intelligible to an Englishman, because it is part of the English
puritan tradition, which is not dead even at this day. The class Dickens belonged to, at
least by adoption, was growing suddenly rich after a couple of centuries of obscurity. It
had grown up mainly in the big towns, out of contact with agriculture, and politically
impotent; government, in its experience, was something which either interfered or
persecuted. Consequently it was a class with no tradition of public service and not much
tradition of usefulness. What now strikes us as remarkable about the new moneyed class
of the nineteenth century is their complete irresponsibility; they see everything in terms
of individual success, with hardly any consciousness that the community exists. On the
other hand, a Tite Barnacle, even when he was neglecting his duties, would have some
vague notion of what duties he was neglecting. Dickens’s attitude is never irresponsible,
still less does he take the money-grubbing Smilesian line; but at the back of his mind
there is usually a half-belief that the whole apparatus of government is unnecessary.
Parliament is simply Lord Coodle and Sir Thomas Doodle, the Empire is simply Major
Bagstock and his Indian servant, the Army is simply Colonel Chowser and Doctor
Slammer, the public services are simply Bumble and the Circumlocution Office — and so
on and so forth. What he does not see, or only intermittently sees, is that Coodle and
Doodle and all the other corpses left over from the eighteenth century ARE perfonning a
function which neither Pickwick nor Boffin would ever bother about.
And of course this narrowness of vision is in one way a great advantage to him, because
it is fatal for a caricaturist to see too much. From Dickens’s point of view ‘good’ society
is simply a collection of village idiots. What a crew! Lady Tippins! Mrs. Gowan! Lord
Verisopht! The Honourable Bob Stables! Mrs. Sparsit (whose husband was a Powler)!
The Tite Barnacles! Nupkins! It is practically a case-book in lunacy. But at the same time
his remoteness from the landowning-military-bureaucratic class incapacitates him for
full-length satire. He only succeeds with this class when he depicts them as mental
defectives. The accusation which used to be made against Dickens in his lifetime, that he
‘could not paint a gentleman’, was an absurdity, but it is true in this sense, that what he
says against the ‘gentleman’ class is seldom very damaging. Sir Mulberry Hawk, for
instance, is a wretched attempt at the wicked-baronet type. Harthouse in HARD TIMES
is better, but he would be only an ordinary achievement for Trollope or Thackeray.
Trollope’s thoughts hardly move outside the ‘gentleman’ class, but Thackeray has the
great advantage of having a foot in two moral camps. In some ways his outlook is very
similar to Dickens’s. Like Dickens, he identifies with the puritanical moneyed class
against the card-playing, debt-bilking aristocracy. The eighteenth century, as he sees it, is
sticking out into the nineteenth in the person of the wicked Lord Steyne. VANITY FAIR
is a full-length version of what Dickens did for a few chapters in LITTLE DORRIT. But
by origins and upbringing Thackeray happens to be somewhat nearer to the class he is
satirizing. Consequently he can produce such comparatively subtle types as, for instance,
Major Pendennis and Rawdon Crawley. Major Pendennis is a shallow old snob, and
Rawdon Crawley is a thick-headed ruffian who sees nothing wrong in living for years by
swindling tradesmen; but what Thackery realizes is that according to their tortuous code
they are neither of them bad men. Major Pendennis would not sign a dud cheque, for
instance; Rawdon certainly would, but on the other hand he would not desert a friend in a
tight corner. Both of them would behave well on the field of battle — a thing that would
not particularly appeal to Dickens. The result is that at the end one is left with a kind of
amused tolerance for Major Pendennis and with something approaching respect for
Rawdon; and yet one sees, better than any diatribe could make one, the utter rottenness of
that kind of cadging, toadying life on the fringes of smart society. Dickens would be quite
incapable of this.
In his hands both Rawdon and the Major would dwindle to traditional caricatures. And, on the whole, his attacks on ‘good’ society are rather perfunctory. The
aristocracy and the big bourgeoisie exist in his books chiefly as a kind of ‘noises off, a
haw-hawing chorus somewhere in the wings, like Podsnap’s dinner-parties. When he
produces a really subtle and damaging portrait, like John Dorrit or Harold Skimpole, it is
generally of some rather middling, unimportant person.
One very striking thing about Dickens, especially considering the time he lived in, is his
lack of vulgar nationalism. All peoples who have reached the point of becoming nations
tend to despise foreigners, but there is not much doubt that the English-speaking races are
the worst offenders. One can see this from the fact that as soon as they become fully
aware of any foreign race they invent an insulting nickname for it. Wop, Dago, Froggy,
Squarehead, Kike, Sheeny, Nigger, Wog, Chink, Greaser, Yellowbelly — these are merely
a selection. Any time before 1870 the list would have been shorter, because the map of
the world was different from what it is now, and there were only three or four foreign
races that had fully entered into the English consciousness. But towards these, and
especially towards France, the nearest and best-hated nation, the English attitude of
patronage was so intolerable that English ‘arrogance’ and ‘xenophobia’ are still a legend.
And of course they are not a completely untrue legend even now. Till very recently
nearly all English children were brought up to despise the southern European races, and
history as taught in schools was mainly a list of battles won by England. But one has got
to read, say, the QUARTERLY REVIEW of the thirties to know what boasting really is.
Those were the days when the English built up their legend of themselves as ‘sturdy
islanders’ and ‘stubborn hearts of oak’ and when it was accepted as a kind of scientific
fact that one Englishman was the equal of three foreigners. All through nineteenth-
century novels and comic papers there runs the traditional figure of the ‘Froggy’ — a
small ridiculous man with a tiny beard and a pointed top-hat, always jabbering and
gesticulating, vain, frivolous and fond of boasting of his martial exploits, but generally
taking to flight when real danger appears. Over against him was John Bull, the ‘sturdy
English yeoman’, or (a more public-school version) the ‘strong, silent Englishman’ of
Charles Kingsley, Tom Hughes and others.
Thackeray, for instance, has this outlook very strongly, though there are moments when
he sees through it and laughs at it. The one historical fact that is firmly fixed in his mind
is that the English won the battle of Waterloo. One never reads far in his books without
coming upon some reference to it. The English, as he sees it, are invincible because of
their tremendous physical strength, due mainly to living on beef. Like most Englishmen
of his time, he has the curious illusion that the English are larger than other people
(Thackeray, as it happened, was larger than most people), and therefore he is capable of
writing passages like this:
I say to you that you are better than a Frenchman. I would lay even money that you who
are reading this are more than five feet seven in height, and weigh eleven stone; while a
Frenchman is five feet four and does not weigh nine. The Frenchman has after his soup a
dish of vegetables, where you have one of meat. You are a different and superior
animal — a French-beating animal (the history of hundreds of years has shown you to be
so), etc. etc.
There are similar passages scattered all through Thackeray’s works. Dickens would never
be guilty of anything of that kind. It would be an exaggeration to say that he nowhere
pokes fun at foreigners, and of course like nearly all nineteenth-century Englishmen, he is
untouched by European culture. But never anywhere does he indulge in the typical
English boasting, the ‘island race’, ‘bulldog breed’, ‘right little, tight little island’ style of
talk. In the whole of A TALE OF TWO CITIES there is not a line that could be taken as
meaning, ‘Look how these wicked Frenchmen behave! ’ The only place where he seems
to display a normal hatred of foreigners is in the American chapters of MARTIN
CHUZZLEWIT. This, however, is simply the reaction of a generous mind against cant. If
Dickens were alive today he would make a trip to Soviet Russia and come back to the
book rather like Gide’s RETOUR DE L’URSS. But he is remarkably free from the idiocy
of regarding nations as individuals. He seldom even makes jokes turning on nationality.
He does not exploit the comic Irishman and the comic Welshman, for instance, and not
because he objects to stock characters and ready-made jokes, which obviously he does
not. It is perhaps more significant that he shows no prejudice against Jews. It is true that
he takes it for granted (OLIVER TWIST and GREAT EXPECTATIONS) that a receiver
of stolen goods will be a Jew, which at the time was probably justified. But the ‘Jew
joke’, endemic in English literature until the rise of Hitler, does not appear in his books,
and in OUR MUTUAL FRIEND he makes a pious though not very convincing attempt to
stand up for the Jews.
Dickens’s lack of vulgar nationalism is in part the mark of a real largeness of mind, and
in part results from his negative, rather unhelpful political attitude. He is very much an
Englishman but he is hardly aware of it — certainly the thought of being an Englishman
does not thrill him. He has no imperialist feelings, no discernible views on foreign
politics, and is untouched by the military tradition. Temperamentally he is much nearer to
the small noncomformist tradesman who looks down on the ‘redcoats’, and thinks that
war is wicked — a one-eyed view, but after all, war is wicked. It is noticeable that Dickens
hardly writes of war, even to denounce it. With all his marvellous powers of description,
and of describing things he had never seen, he never describes a battle, unless one counts
the attack on the Bastille in A TALE OF TWO CITIES. Probably the subject would not
strike him as interesting, and in any case he would not regard a battlefield as a place
where anything worth settling could be settled. It is one up to the lower-middle-class,
puritan mentality.
Ill
Dickens had grown up near enough to poverty to be terrified of it, and in spite of his
generosity of mind, he is not free from the special prejudices of the shabby-genteel. It is
usual to claim him as a ‘popular’ writer, a champion of the ‘oppressed masses’. So he is,
so long as he thinks of them as oppressed; but there are two things that condition his
attitude. In the first place, he is a south-of-England man, and a Cockney at that, and
therefore out of touch with the bulk of the real oppressed masses, the industrial and
agricultural labourers. It is interesting to see how Chesterton, another Cockney, always
presents Dickens as the spokesman of ‘the poor’, without showing much awareness of
who ‘the poor’ really are. To Chesterton ‘the poor’ means small shopkeepers and
servants. Sam Weller, he says, ‘is the great symbol in English literature of the populace
peculiar to England’; and Sam Weller is a valet! The other point is that Dickens’s early
experiences have given him a horror of proletarian roughness. He shows this
unmistakably whenever he writes of the very poorest of the poor, the slum-dwellers. His
descriptions of the London slums are always full of undisguised repulsion:
The ways were foul and narrow; the shops and houses wretched; and people half naked,
drunken, slipshod and ugly. Alleys and archways, like so many cesspools, disgorged their
offences of smell, and dirt, and life, upon the straggling streets; and the whole quarter
reeked with crime, and filth, and misery, etc. etc.
There are many similar passages in Dickens. From them one gets the impression of whole
submerged populations whom he regards as being beyond the pale. In rather the same
way the modern doctrinaire Socialist contemptuously writes off a large block of the
population as Tumpenproletariat’.
Dickens also shows less understanding of criminals than one would expect of him.
Although he is well aware of the social and economic causes of crime, he often seems to
feel that when a man has once broken the law he has put himself outside human society.
There is a chapter at the end of DAVID COPPERFIELD in which David visits the prison
where Latimer and Uriah Heep are serving their sentences. Dickens actually seems to
regard the horrible ‘model’ prisons, against which Charles Reade delivered his
memorable attack in IT IS NEVER TOO LATE TO MEND, as too humane. He
complains that the food is too good! As soon as he comes up against crime or the worst
depths of poverty, he shows traces of the ‘I’ve always kept myself respectable’ habit of
mind. The attitude of Pip (obviously the attitude of Dickens himself) towards Magwitch
in GREAT EXPECTATIONS is extremely interesting. Pip is conscious all along of his
ingratitude towards Joe, but far less so of his ingratitude towards Magwitch. When he
discovers that the person who has loaded him with benefits for years is actually a
transported convict, he falls into frenzies of disgust. ‘The abhorrence in which I held the
man, the dread I had of him, the repugnance with which I shrank from him, could not
have been exceeded if he had been some terrible beast’, etc. etc. So far as one can
discover from the text, this is not because when Pip was a child he had been terrorized by
Magwitch in the churchyard; it is because Magwitch is a criminal and a convict. There is
an even more ‘kept-myself-respectable’ touch in the fact that Pip feels as a matter of
course that he cannot take Magwitch’ s money. The money is not the product of a crime, it
has been honestly acquired; but it is an ex-convict’s money and therefore ‘tainted’. There
is nothing psychologically false in this, either. Psychologically the latter part of GREAT
EXPECTATIONS is about the best thing Dickens ever did; throughout this part of the
book one feels ‘Yes, that is just how Pip would have behaved. ’ But the point is that in the
matter of Magwitch, Dickens identifies with Pip, and his attitude is at bottom snobbish.
The result is that Magwitch belongs to the same queer class of characters as Falstaff and,
probably, Don Quixote — characters who are more pathetic than the author intended.
When it is a question of the non-criminal poor, the ordinary, decent, labouring poor, there
is of course nothing contemptuous in Dickens’s attitude. He has the sincerest admiration
for people like the Peggottys and the Plomishes. But it is questionable whether he really
regards them as equals. It is of the greatest interest to read Chapter XI of DAVID
COPPERFIELD and side by side with it the autobiographical fragments (parts of this are
given in Forster’s LIFE), in which Dickens expresses his feelings about the blacking-
factory episode a great deal more strongly than in the novel. For more than twenty years
afterwards the memory was so painful to him that he would go out of his way to avoid
that part of the Strand. He says that to pass that way ‘made me cry, after my eldest child
could speak. ’ The text makes it quite clear that what hurt him most of all, then and in
retrospect, was the enforced contact with Tow’ associates:
No words can express the secret agony of my soul as I sunk into this companionship;
compared these everyday associates with those of my happier childhood. But I held some
station at the blacking warehouse too. . . I soon became at least as expeditious and as
skilful with my hands as either of the other boys. Though perfectly familiar with them,
my conduct and manners were different enough from theirs to place a space between us.
They, and the men, always spoke of me as ‘the young gentleman’. A certain man. . . used
to call me ‘Charles’ sometimes in speaking to me; but I think it was mostly when we
were very confidential. . . Poll Green uprose once, and rebelled against the ‘young-
gentleman’ usage; but Bob Fagin settled him speedily.
It was as well that there should be ‘a space between us’, you see. However much Dickens
may admire the working classes, he does not wish to resemble them. Given his origins,
and the time he lived in, it could hardly be otherwise. In the early nineteenth century class
animosities may have been no sharper than they are now, but the surface differences
between class and class were enormously greater. The ‘gentleman’ and the ‘common
man’ must have seemed like different species of animal. Dickens is quite genuinely on
the side of the poor against the rich, but it would be next door to impossible for him not
to think of a working-class exterior as a stigma. In one of Tolstoy’s fables the peasants of
a certain village judge every stranger who arrives from the state of his hands. If his palms
are hard from work, they let him in; if his palms are soft, out he goes. This would be
hardly intelligible to Dickens; all his heroes have soft hands. His younger heroes —
Nicholas Nickleby, Martin Chuzzlewit, Edward Chester, David Copperfield, John
Hannon — are usually of the type known as ‘walking gentlemen’. He likes a bourgeois
exterior and a bourgeois (not aristocratic) accent. One curious symptom of this is that he
will not allow anyone who is to play a heroic part to speak like a working man. A comic
hero like Sam Weller, or a merely pathetic figure like Stephen Blackpool, can speak with
a broad accent, but the JEUNE PREMIER always speaks the equivalent of B. B. C. This is
so, even when it involves absurdities. Little Pip, for instance, is brought up by people
speaking broad Essex, but talks upper-class English from his earliest childhood; actually
he would have talked the same dialect as Joe, or at least as Mrs. Gargery. So also with
Biddy Wopsle, Lizzie Hexam, Sissie Jupe, Oliver Twist — one ought perhaps to add Little
Dorrit. Even Rachel in HARD TIMES has barely a trace of Lancashire accent, an
impossibility in her case.
One thing that often gives the clue to a novelist’s real feelings on the class question is the
attitude he takes up when class collides with sex. This is a thing too painful to be lied
about, and consequently it is one of the points at which the Tm-not-a-snob’ pose tends to
break down.
One sees that at its most obvious where a class-distinction is also a colour-distinction.
And something resembling the colonial attitude (‘native’ women are fair game, white
women are sacrosanct) exists in a veiled form in all-white communities, causing bitter
resentment on both sides. When this issue arises, novelists often revert to crude class-
feelings which they might disclaim at other times. A good example of ‘class-conscious’
reaction is a rather forgotten novel, THE PEOPLE OF CLOPTON, by Andrew Barton.
The author’s moral code is quite clearly mixed up with class-hatred. He feels the
seduction of a poor girl by a rich man to be something atrocious, a kind of defilement,
something quite different from her seduction by a man in her own walk of life. Trollope
deals with this theme twice (THE THREE CLERKS and THE SMALL HOUSE AT
ALLINGTON) and, as one might expect, entirely from the upper-class angle. As he sees
it, an affair with a barmaid or a landlady’s daughter is simply an ‘entanglement’ to be
escaped from. Trollope’s moral standards are strict, and he does not allow the seduction
actually to happen, but the implication is always that a working-class girl’s feelings do
not greatly matter. In THE THREE CLERKS he even gives the typical class-reaction by
noting that the girl ‘smells’. Meredith (RHODA FLEMING) takes more the ‘class-
conscious’ viewpoint. Thackeray, as often, seems to hesitate. In PENDENNIS (Fanny
Bolton) his attitude is much the same as Trollope’s; in A SHABBY GENTEEL STORY
it is nearer to Meredith’s.
One could divine a great deal about Trollope’s social origin, or Meredith’s, or Barton’s,
merely from their handling of the class-sex theme. So one can with Dickens, but what
emerges, as usual, is that he is more inclined to identify himself with the middle class
than with the proletariat. The one incident that seems to contradict this is the tale of the
young peasant-girl in Doctor Manette’s manuscript in A TALE OF TWO CITIES. This,
however, is merely a costume-piece put in to explain the implacable hatred of Madame
Defarge, which Dickens does not pretend to approve of. In DAVID COPPERFIELD,
where he is dealing with a typical nineteenth-century seduction, the class-issue does not
seem to strike him as paramount. It is a law of Victorian novels that sexual misdeeds
must not go unpunished, and so Steerforth is drowned on Yarmouth sands, but neither
Dickens, nor old Peggotty, nor even Ham, seems to feel that Steerforth has added to his
offence by being the son of rich parents. The Steerforths are moved by class-motives, but
the Peggottys are not — not even in the scene between Mrs. Steerforth and old Peggotty; if
they were, of course, they would probably turn against David as well as against
Steerforth.
In OUR MUTUAL FRIEND Dickens treats the episode of Eugene Wrayburn and Lizzie
Hexam very realistically and with no appearance of class bias. According to the ‘Unhand
me, monster! ’ tradition, Lizzie ought either to ‘spurn’ Eugene or to be ruined by him and
throw herself off Waterloo Bridge: Eugene ought to be either a heartless betrayer or a
hero resolved upon defying society. Neither behaves in the least like this. Lizzie is
frightened by Eugene’s advances and actually runs away from him, but hardly pretends to
dislike them; Eugene is attracted by her, has too much decency to attempt seducing her
and dare not marry her because of his family. Finally they are married and no one is any
the worse, except Mrs. Twemlow, who will lose a few dinner engagements. It is all very
much as it might have happened in real life. But a ‘class-conscious’ novelist would have
given her to Bradley Headstone.
But when it is the other way about — when it is a case of a poor man aspiring to some
woman who is ‘above’ him Dickens instantly retreats into the middle-class attitude. He is
rather fond of the Victorian notion of a woman (woman with a capital W) being ‘above’ a
man. Pip feels that Estella is ‘above’ him, Esther Summerson is ‘above’ Guppy, Little
Dorrit is ‘above’ John Chivery, Lucy Manette is ‘above’ Sydney Carton. In some of these
the ‘above’-ness is merely moral, but in others it is social. There is a scarcely mistakable
class-reaction when David Copperfield discovers that Uriah Heep is plotting to marry
Agnes Wicklleld. The disgusting Uriah suddenly announces that he is in love with her:
‘Oh, Master Copperfield, with what a pure affection do I love the ground my Agnes
walks on. ’
I believe I had the delirious idea of seizing the red-hot poker out of the fire, and running
him through with it. It went from me with a shock, like a ball fired from a rifle: but the
image of Agnes, outraged by so much as a thought of this red-headed animal’s, remained
in my mind (when I looked at him, sitting all awry as if his mean soul griped his body)
and made me giddy. . . ‘I believe Agnes Wickfield to be as far above you (David says
later on), and as far removed from all your aspirations, as the moon herself. ’
Considering how Heep’s general lowness — his servile manners, dropped aitches and so
forth — has been rubbed in throughout the book, there is not much doubt about the nature
of Dickens’s feelings. Heep, of course, is playing a villainous part, but even villains have
sexual lives; it is the thought of the ‘pure’ Agnes in bed with a man who drops his aitches
that really revolts Dickens. But his usual tendency is to treat a man in love with a woman
who is ‘above’ him as a joke. It is one of the stock jokes of English literature, from
Malvolio onwards. Guppy in BLEAK HOUSE is an example, John Chivery is another,
and there is a rather ill-natured treatment of this theme in the ‘swarry’ in PICKWICK
PAPERS. Here Dickens describes the Bath footmen as living a kind of fantasy-life,
holding dinner-parties in imitation of their ‘betters’ and deluding themselves that their
young mistresses are in love with them. This evidently strikes him as very comic. So it is
in a way, though one might question whether it is not better for a footman even to have
delusions of this kind than simply to accept his status in the spirit of the catechism.
In his attitude towards servants Dickens is not ahead of his age. In the nineteenth century
the revolt against domestic service was just beginning, to the great annoyance of
everyone with over £500 a year. An enonnous number of the jokes in nineteenth-century
comic papers deals with the uppishness of servants. For years PUNCH ran a series of
jokes called ‘Servant Gal-isms’, all turning on the then astonishing fact that a servant is a
human being. Dickens is sometimes guilty of this kind of thing himself. His books
abound with the ordinary comic servants; they are dishonest (GREAT
EXPECTATIONS), incompetent (DAVID COPPERFIELD), turn up their noses at good
food (PICKWICK PAPERS), etc. etc. — all rather in the spirit of the suburban housewife
with one downtrodden cook-general. But what is curious, in a nineteenth-century radical,
is that when he wants to draw a sympathetic picture of a servant, he creates what is
recognizably a feudal type. Sam Weller, Mark Tapley, Clara Peggotty are all of them
feudal figures. They belong to the genre of the ‘old family retainer’; they identify
themselves with their master’s family and are at once doggishly faithful and completely
familiar. No doubt Mark Tapley and Sam Weller are derived to some extent from
Smollett, and hence from Cervantes; but it is interesting that Dickens should have been
attracted by such a type. Sam Weller’s attitude is definitely medieval. He gets himself
arrested in order to follow Mr. Pickwick into the Fleet, and afterwards refuses to get
married because he feels that Mr. Pickwick still needs his services. There is a
characteristic scene between them:
‘Vages or no vages, board or no board, lodgin’ or no lodgin’, Sam Veller, as you took
from the old inn in the Borough, sticks by you, come what may. . . ’
‘My good fellow’, said Mr. Pickwick, when Mr. Weller had sat down again, rather
abashed at his own enthusiasm, ‘you are bound to consider the young woman also. ’
‘I do consider the young ‘ooman, sir’, said Sam. ‘I have considered the young ‘ooman.
I’ve spoke to her. I’ve told her how I’m sitivated; she’s ready to vait till I’m ready, and I
believe she vill. If she don’t, she’s not the young ‘ooman I take her for, and I give up with
readiness. ’
It is easy to imagine what the young woman would have said to this in real life. But
notice the feudal atmosphere. Sam Weller is ready as a matter of course to sacrifice years
of his life to his master, and he can also sit down in his master’s presence.
