The Imagination of Charles Dickens (RLE Dickens)

Routledge Library Editions: Charles Dickens Volume 3

A. O. J. Cockshut

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135027698
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Collections
• Index: Literature

This book describes Charles Dickens as an ordinary man who by being perfectly tuned to the public taste developed into a master of his art. The clue to this paradox lies, in the author's opinion, in Dickens' obsession with such topics as money, crowds and prisons which touch the life of everyone. From the deep fears of his childhood they became the main food for his imagination. As his creative mind worried over them, so his art developed. This process provided the driving force behind his work, and is at the root of his greatness as an artist.

1
Introductory

In the last twenty-five years, Dickens has advanced from the “classics” shelf in the preparatory school library to the position of a real and acknowledged classic. The process by which the best-seller whom many clever people despise achieves classic status would repay attention from sociologists. But for my purpose, two questions are raised: How did a man with such a coarse mind become a master of his art? and, How was it possible, in the nineteenth century, to be a best-seller and a true classic at the same time?

The artistic handicaps inherent in his mind certainly seem at first sight formidable enough. He was not a man who could be deeply influenced by literature. It seems likely that, to the end of his days, he never came to understand himself or his own motives very well. He lacked the disinterested curiosity, and the detachment which are indispensable for profound spiritual or intellectual development. He never attained any deep understanding of history, art or politics. His general critical comments are, without exception, jejune and superficial, and show that he never progressed very far beyond his simple boyish enthusiasm for Fielding and Smollett. His prefaces reveal a literal mind, and a determination to prove that his strangest imaginative flights are only sober reporting.

An examination of the text of his works shows that some of the qualities in which he is reputed to be strong are largely fortuitous or even non-existent. Thus, Dickens, more perhaps than anyone else, is regarded as the founder of our modern version of Rousseauist innocence. When people talk about the fundamental decency of the working class, they are often influenced by Dickens. This is odd, for two reasons. First, owing to the uncomfortable pseudo-gentility of his family, and his early bitter experience of being treated in the blacking factory as a member of the working class, Dickens was very class-conscious. It is significant that all his heroes (except in Hard Times, which provides exceptions to several fair generalisations) speak the King’s English, even when it is impossible to understand how they can have learnt it. But such is his melodramatic power, and the sympathy he excites for outcasts like Smike, who are helped and patronised by his gentlemanly heroes, that many people actually think that he wrote mainly about the working class.

But there is another and more fundamental reason for surprise that this myth of proletarian innocence finds an important source in Dickens. It is really the darkness of their surroundings, and the hypnotic power of their enemies that make his threatened innocents so influential. If you stop a man in the street and ask him to name a Dickens character, he may mention a purely comic figure, but it is just as likely that he will name a threatened innocent like Oliver Twist. But no one would have remembered Smike if it had not been for Squeers, and no one would have remembered Oliver if it had not been for Fagin. Moral goodness in Dickens exists largely by contrast. The goodness of those who are not isolated or threatened, like the Cheeryble brothers, is frequently absurd, or at the least, even in his mature vein, pale and faintly embarrassing like that of John Jarndyce and Esther.

Dickens failed here because he had absolutely no conception of sanctity. A writer has spoken recently of the “religious inanity of our greatest novelist.” If the compliment is scarcely too high, the blame, too, is scarcely too severe. Dickens’s religion, a kind of loose, moralistic Anglicanism-cum-unitarianism, was perfectly sincere. But as the above confused definition will indicate, it lacked consistency. Worse still, it was cut off from the spiritual and intellectual treasures of the Christian tradition. When he was really thinking, he unconsciously assumed that religion was irrelevant; and it seems likely, too, that emotional and indeed sentimental though its expression often was, it did not operate at a level where it could mingle with his deepest and most persistent feelings.

His innate melodramatic tendency, though, as I shall try to show, an advantage to him in many ways, was no help here. It left him very imperfectly aware that good and evil exist together in the same person, and therefore unaware also of the difficulty of living up to one’s own standards. The Cheeryble brothers are unconvincing largely because they never seem to have known an impulse to be ungenerous. In reading Dickens, it is apt to seem rather easy to be good, or as good as Dickens expects you to be. Hence, at his worst, he tends to encourage pharasaism. He was, on the technical side, profoundly conservative; and melodramatic conventions appealed to him for their solid, traditional strength. They appealed also to his engrained love of violence. He was able to become a great artist without ever ceasing to be crudely melodramatic. (Think, for instance, in two of his best books, of the Dedlock mystery, and Boffin’s salvation from the clutches of miserdom.) In this, and especially in the way he was fascinated all his life by the subject of murder, he can fairly be compared with a master who no doubt surpassed him, but who nevertheless learnt much from him—Dostoevsky. In the conservative nature of his technical originality, he can be called Shakespearian. At all times it was both his strength and weakness that he immersed himself completely in his work. A letter of 7th January 1841 to Forster about Little Nell was typical of his lifelong attitude to his creations. “It casts the most horrible shadow upon me, and it is as much as I can do to keep moving at all. I tremble to approach the place a great deal more than Kit.… I have refused several invitations for this week and next, determining to go nowhere till I had done.” Even at his worst, Dickens cannot be dull. He hypnotised the reader because he hypnotised himself.

II

It does not seem useful to inquire here into possible biographical sources of his favourite images. It would be easy, though perhaps mistaken, to link some of them to experiences of his early years. Thus both the prison and the money obsession could be explained by the fact that his father was imprisoned for debt. But what matters for the evaluation of his novels is that he already had an obsession with these things at the start of his career in Pickwick Papers, and that he had it still in Our Mutual Friend. So it is that his work, as much as anyone’s should be seen as a continuous whole. There are some irregularities in the pattern, naturally, to remind us that we are dealing with an unpredictable human being. There are moments in David Copperfield, for instance, when he seems to revert to an earlier style. But taken as a whole, the development is extraordinarily continuous. The stock of ideas and images hardly varies; the profundity of their meaning and the skill of their arrangement develop prodigiously. The lack of spiritual and intellectual development is excused by the wonderful development in imagination and technique.

His intense awareness of physical objects was necessary to him as a symbolist; and it was necessary in other ways too. For in constant tension with his sense of facts and objects was his bias towards fantasy. Sometimes fantasy was too strong, I give in the chapter on prisons my reasons for thinking that this is so in the case of Pickwick Papers. But even in this book fantasy was not completely out of control. The fantasies of Dickens, like those of Mrs. Gamp, were very earthy—and, despite some failures, the tension between fantasy and obsessive sensibility to detail was very fruitful.

One might say that his abiding and ever-increasing sense of the pressure of life, and his advancing technical skill gradually compressed and solidified the volatile essences of his early fantasy. The light and airy Pickwick Papers was transformed into the weighty bulk of Our Mutual Friend or Great Expectations. So his later books give the impression of having been formed under pressure like geological strata. This disciplining, and partial elimination of his sparkling fantasy was necessary for achievement of his best works; but it was not all gain. The greatest casualty in the process was his humour.

2
Humour, Positive and Negative

The humour of Dickens is his best-loved contribution to our life; and perhaps his most influential, for most English humorous writing since his time unconsciously imitates him. So it is hard to realise how far he lies outside the various humorous traditions of earlier times. His best humorous writing is only very mildly satirical. When he became deeply satirical, his humour declined, as we shall see. Chaucer, Ben Jonson, the Augustan satirists and the eighteenth-century novelists, all required for their humorous effects an accepted moral system and the idea of a society as an organic body in which functions varied. Now Dickens ultimately showed that he, too, could work from this basis; but in his most characteristic early comic writings, his moral sense and his vision of corporate society were in abeyance.

He is faintly linked with Augustan satire by his use of mock-heroics. But very faintly, because he uses it so crudely as to make any detailed comparison with Pope absurd, and even Fielding easily surpasses him. A comparison with Shakespeare is slightly more rewarding, but even in the passages where Shakespeare’s humour comes nearest to Dickensian extravagance, in the mechanicals of A Mid-summer Night’s Dream, there is an awareness of class and society.

Another obvious fact, likely to be obscured by our great familiarity with Dickens’s humour, is that he tends to ignore the traditional comic subject. Smollett is an example of a comic writer of moderate talents only whose humour derives mainly from the fact that a few subjects are funny in themselves. Writing of adultery, fisticuffs or dung the author need contribute very little. The basic humorous brutality of the race will do most of his work for him. The relation between the sexes, in particular, normally the chief field of comic invention, is almost completely ignored by Dickens when not in a serious vein. When he does attempt to portray comic husband-hunting and nagging wives, he usually fails through mixing fantasy and seriousness in impossible proportions. We can never be quite happy about laughing at Mercy and Charity Pecksniff.

Nor does Dickens often resort to the traditional humour of situation—people going into the wrong bedroom, listeners hearing frank comments on themselves, mistaken identity and the like. The encounter of Parson Adams with Parson Trulliber in Joseph Andrews is a good example of this tradition of the theatre neatly acclimatised in the novel. Dickens ignores such devices.

Some of Dickens’s least successful humour, it is true, harps on the subject of drink, which was just developing into a stock comic subject in his time, and has remained one ever since. This development, which only slightly concerns us here, would be worth investigating. It would seem that, in a time of mounting literary solemnity about sex, and of the rise of total abstention as a moral ideal, drink partly took the place of sex, to supply the indispensable comic mystery of forbidden fruit.

But with one or two minor reservations like these, we can say that the humour of Dickens was truly creative and original. It is derived largely from idiosyncrasies of language, showing forth impossible eccentricity. It lacks the morality, the good sense, the analysis of the typical follies and inconsistencies of human nature, which is the main strength of comic tradition. Instead it reveals new abysses of absurdity, fantastic and yet hypnotically real to the reader, in characters who fall outside normal canons of judgment. If I risk inventing the terms positive and negative humour, to distinguish the two kinds, it is, of course without any suggestion that the positive type is superior. On these terms, Jonson’s humour would be called negative, because his characters were seen to be failing to meet a standard of religion, morality and good sense, and to be absurd because of their failure. Dickens’s is, usually, positive, because his great comic creations, Crummies, Mrs. Gamp, Mr. Micawber, present forms of absurdity not to be found in human nature, and therefore hardly amenable to moral categories. It is this “positive” quality that makes the humour of Dickens so difficult to analyse, and so easy to enjoy. Negative humour, in the hands of a master like Ben Jonson, makes for the greatest moral profundity and the greatest artistic unity. But positive humour is perhaps the purest, the most memorable—in fact, the funniest form. It can be traced back to a few passages in Shakespeare, a few speeches of the Fool in Lear and of Autolycus and Bottom. But after Dickens, and excepting his imitators, who are mostly inferior, we have only the Victorian nonsense writers and P. G. Wodehouse. Splendid as these are, they do not prevent Dickens from reigning supreme.

II

Particular attention should be paid to the private languages of his characters. And here a comparison with Scott may be helpful. Take the brilliant comic (and serious) passage in Old Mortality where the time-serving son, Cuddie saves his fanatical mother, Mause Headrigg from the Stuart soldiery by means of a verbal confusion between the covenant of works and the covenant of grace. Here is a fine, complex example of what I have called negative humour. The context is rich. The whole Reformation controversy about faith and works, Calvinism, Arminianism and Pelagianism lurk behind the passage. The humour lies partly in the ignorance of the soldiers, who cannot see the immense theological gulf between the two covenants, partly in the crafty, worldly use of theological learning by Cuddie, and partly in the sublime, naive truthfulness of Mause, who curses the covenant of works with the deepest sincerity, unaware that she is being guided by her son into a skilful deception. Theology is here truly alive; words like “covenant” recapture the primitive terror and force felt by those who first used them. At the same time the Scottish dialect of the characters is central to the traditions of the people. It is a heightened form of a common, public language. The passage is very funny, but it is potentially tragic, too. Martyrdom is very near, and Mause would not shrink if it came.

As if to underline the colossal difference between Mause and Mrs. Gamp, there is one similarity. Mrs. Gamp also speaks in the language of religious consolation. Here are a few of her strange religious phrases, chosen almost at random:

This Pilgiams Projiss of a mortal wale.

Playing at berryin’ down in the shop, and follerm’ the order book to its long home in the iron safe.

Rich folk may ride on camels, but it isn’t so easy for ‘em to see out of a needle’s eye.

Lambs would not forgive, nor worms forget.

The families I’ve had… would take a week to chrisen in Saint Polge’s fontin.

The relation of the multitude of remarks of this kind to the religious rhetoric from which they derive is complicated. Mrs, Gamp is not a hypocrite, like Pecksniff; she is not making fun of the religious sentiments of others, or trying to compose a witty parody. It is rather that a tradition of religious sensibility has plunged right down into the unconscious memory of the race, and has risen once again to the surface, filtered through this strange personality, deprived of its order and logic, a recreated, original Gampian language. Part of its strange power is due to the religious tradition behind it; but the satirical element we would expect is absent. There is no criticism of religious doctrines, or of Mrs. Gamp for perverting them (as there would be in Scott). In the end, derivative though it is, the language stands on its own, and we enjoy it for its own sake. The vast context present in Old Mortality dwindles to nothing. Mrs. Gamp’s language is detached; it is like a volcanic island. Powerful subterranean forces may have formed it, but we forget them when we see the island’s own individual beauty. In the same metaphor, Scott’s humour could be compared to a perfectly produced picture of all the geological strata that went to produce the final result.

This is particularly odd when we think of Mrs. Gamp’s social position. As a midwife and a nurse she is the cause of terrible sufferings. With a slight change in the point of view, the story could become charged with moral indignation. Florence Nightingale, one might say, spent her life in displacing and defeating Mrs. Gamp. But all this, undeniable though it is, seems curiously irrelevant to the actual literary quality of the woman. Her voice stills all questionings and puts all general values out of account. In part, this effect is achieved by the deliberate breaking down of logical categories. For instance, she says, “A pleasant evening, though warm, which we must expect when cowcumbers is three for twopence.” It is natural to Mrs. Gamp, and in reading about her, it becomes curiously natural to us, to make the weather depend on prices, instead of the other way about.

At the same time, phrases like, “Gamp is my name, and Gamp my nater,” though literally meaningless, have a strong tendency to turn her into a timeless myth instead of a human being. And so we find a very interesting combination of obvious and subtle humour in a phrase like the following: “I’m glad to see a parapidge in case of fire, and lots of roofs and chimney pots to walk upon.” The obvious humour lies in the absurdity of a fat, gin-sodden old woman moving like an acrobat over the roofs of London. But the subtlety lies in the fact that by this time we have come to accept Mrs. Gamp as a praeternatural reality, freed from mortality and from the limitations of time and space. The idea of her being threatened by fire is therefore absurd. In her mythic capacity, we feel, she would not need parapidges; she would take the wings of the morning, and fly into the uttermost parts of the sea.

And so it is that the joke has an extra depth, like the jokes of Justice Shallow; an achievement which few have equalled.

III

Also in Martin Chuzzlewit, we have Pecksniff, a curious transitional comic type, who will help us to understand why the positive Dickensian humour was soon to be muted, and finally disappeared altogether. Pecksniff, unlike Mrs. Gamp, is essential to the book’s central action. He is conceived mainly as a typical representative of a moral vice, hypocrisy. To this extent, he clearly belongs to what I have called the negative comic tradition. For a time he maintains this character very well.

“You will excuse Thomas Pinch’s want of ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• PREFACE
• 1 Introductory
• 2 Humour, Positive and Negative
• 3 The Expanding Prison
• 4 Reform and Indignation
• 5 Crowds and Justice
• 6 Fruitful Failures
• 7 Dombey and Son
• 8 David Copperfield
• 9 Bleak House
• 10 Hard Times—Dickens’s Masterpiece?
• 11 Little Dorrit
• 12 Great Expectations
• 13 Our Mutual Friend
• 14 Conclusion
• DATES OF RELEVANT WORKS
• INDEX