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Essay
I
Dickens is one of those writers who are well worth stealing. Even the
burial of his body in Westminster Abbey was a species of theft, if you
come to think of it.
When Chesterton wrote his introductions to the Everyman Edition of
Dickens's works, it seemed quite natural to him to credit Dickens with
his own highly individual brand of medievalism, and more recently a
Marxist writer, Mr. T. A. Jackson, has made spirited efforts to turn
Dickens into a blood-thirsty revolutionary. The Marxist claims him as
'almost' a Marxist, the Catholic claims him as 'almost' a Catholic, and
both claim him as a champion of the proletariat (or 'the poor', as
Chesterton would have put it). On the other hand, Nadezhda Krupskaya, in
her little book on Lenin, relates that towards the end of his life Lenin
went to see a dramatized version of THE CRICKET ON THE HEARTH, and found
Dickens's 'middle-class sentimentality' so intolerable that he walked out
in the middle of a scene.
Taking 'middle-class' to mean what Krupskaya might be expected to mean by
it, this was probably a truer judgement than those of Chesterton and
Jackson. But it is worth noticing that the dislike of Dickens implied in
this remark is something unusual. Plenty of people have found him
unreadable, but very few seem to have felt any hostility towards the
general spirit of his work. Some years later Mr. Bechhofer Roberts
published a full-length attack on Dickens in the form of a novel (THIS
SIDE IDOLATRY), but it was a merely personal attack, concerned for the
most part with Dickens's treatment of his wife. It dealt with incidents
which not one in a thousand of Dickens's readers would ever hear about,
and which no more invalidates his work than the second-best bed
invalidates HAMLET. All that the book really demonstrated was that a
writer's literary personality has little or nothing to do with his
private character. It is quite possible that in private life Dickens was
just the kind of insensitive egoist that Mr. Bechhofer Roberts makes him
appear. But in his published work there is implied a personality quite
different from this, a personality which has won him far more friends
than enemies. It might well have been otherwise, for even if Dickens was
a bourgeois, he was certainly a subversive writer, a radical, one might
truthfully say a rebel. Everyone who has read widely in his work has felt
this. Gissing, for instance, the best of the writers on Dickens, was
anything but a radical himself, and he disapproved of this strain in
Dickens and wished it were not there, but it never occurred to him to
deny it. In OLIVER TWIST, HARD TIMES, BLEAK HOUSE, LITTLE DORRIT, Dickens
attacked English institutions with a ferocity that has never since been
approached. Yet he managed to do it without making himself hated, and,
more than this, the very people he attacked have swallowed him so
completely that he has become a national institution himself. In its
attitude towards Dickens the English public has always been a little like
the elephant which feels a blow with a walking-stick as a delightful
tickling. Before I was ten years old I was having Dickens ladled down my
throat by schoolmasters in whom even at that age I could see a strong
resemblance to Mr. Creakle, and one knows without needing to be told that
lawyers delight in Sergeant Buzfuz and that LITTLE DORRIT is a favourite
in the Home Office. Dickens seems to have succeeded in attacking
everybody and antagonizing nobody. Naturally this makes one wonder
whether after all there was something unreal in his attack upon society.
Where exactly does he stand, socially, morally, and politically? As
usual, one can define his position more easily if one starts by deciding
what he was NOT.
In the first place he was NOT, as Messrs. Chesterton and Jackson seem to
imply, a 'proletarian' writer. To begin with, he does not write about the
proletariat, in which he merely resembles the overwhelming majority of
novelists, past and present. If you look for the working classes in
fiction, and especially English fiction, all you find is a hole. This
statement needs qualifying, perhaps. For reasons that are easy enough to
see, the agricultural labourer (in England a proletarian) gets a fairly
good showing in fiction, and a great deal has been written about
criminals, derelicts and, more recently, the working-class
intelligentsia. But the ordinary town proletariat, the people who make
the wheels go round, have always been ignored by novelists. When they do
find their way between the covers of a book, it is nearly always as
objects of pity or as comic relief. The central action of Dickens's
stories almost invariably takes place in middle-class surroundings. If
one examines his novels in detail one finds that his real subject-matter
is the London commercial bourgeoisie and their hangers-on--lawyers,
clerks, tradesmen, innkeepers, small craftsmen, and servants. He has no
portrait of an agricultural worker, and only one (Stephen Blackpool in
HARD TIMES) of an industrial worker. The Plornishes in LITTLE DORRIT are
probably his best picture of a working-class family--the Peggottys, for
instance, hardly belong to the working class--but on the whole he is not
successful with this type of character. If you ask any ordinary reader
which of Dickens's proletarian characters he can remember, the three he
is almost certain to mention are Bill Sykes, Sam Weller, and Mrs. Gamp. A
burglar, a valet, and a drunken midwife--not exactly a representative
cross-section of the English working class.
Secondly, in the ordinarily accepted sense of the word, Dickens is not a
'revolutionary' writer. But his position here needs some defining.
Whatever else Dickens may have been, he was not a hole-and-corner
soul-saver, the kind of well-meaning idiot who thinks that the world will
be perfect if you amend a few bylaws and abolish a few anomalies. It is
worth comparing him with Charles Reade, for instance. Reade was a much
better-informed man than Dickens, and in some ways more public-spirited.
He really hated the abuses he could understand, he showed them up in a
series of novels which for all their absurdity are extremely readable,
and he probably helped to alter public opinion on a few minor but
important points. But it was quite beyond him to grasp that, given the
existing form of society, certain evils CANNOT be remedied. Fasten upon
this or that minor abuse, expose it, drag it into the open, bring it
before a British jury, and all will be well that is how he sees it.
Dickens at any rate never imagined that you can cure pimples by cutting
them off. In every page of his work one can see a consciousness that
society is wrong somewhere at the root. It is when one asks 'Which root?'
that one begins to grasp his position.
The truth is that Dickens's criticism of society is almost exclusively
moral. Hence the utter lack of any constructive suggestion anywhere in
his work. He attacks the law, parliamentary government, the educational
system and so forth, without ever clearly suggesting what he would put in
their places. Of course it is not necessarily the business of a novelist,
or a satirist, to make constructive suggestions, but the point is that
Dickens's attitude is at bottom not even DEStructive. There is no clear
sign that he wants the existing order to be overthrown, or that he
believes it would make very much difference if it WERE overthrown. For in
reality his target is not so much society as 'human nature'. It would be
difficult to point anywhere in his books to a passage suggesting that the
economic system is wrong AS A SYSTEM. Nowhere, for instance, does he make
any attack on private enterprise or private property. Even in a book like
OUR MUTUAL FRIEND, which turns on the power of corpses to interfere with
living people by means of idiotic wills, it does not occur to him to
suggest that individuals ought not to have this irresponsible power. Of
course one can draw this inference for oneself, and one can draw it again
from the remarks about Bounderby's will at the end of HARD TIMES, and
indeed from the whole of Dickens's work one can infer the evil of
LAISSEZ-FAIRE capitalism; but Dickens makes no such inference himself. It
is said that Macaulay refused to review HARD TIMES because he disapproved
of its 'sullen Socialism'. Obviously Macaulay is here using the word
'Socialism' in the same sense in which, twenty years ago, a vegetarian
meal or a Cubist picture used to be referred to as 'Bolshevism'. There is
not a line in the book that can properly be called Socialistic; indeed,
its tendency if anything is pro-capitalist, because its whole moral is
that capitalists ought to be kind, not that workers ought to be
rebellious. Bounder by is a bullying windbag and Gradgrind has been
morally blinded, but if they were better men, the system would work well
enough that, all through, is the implication. And so far as social
criticism goes, one can never extract much more from Dickens than this,
unless one deliberately reads meanings into him. His whole 'message' is
one that at first glance looks like an enormous platitude: If men would
behave decently the world would be decent.
Naturally this calls for a few characters who are in positions of
authority and who DO behave decently. Hence that recurrent Dickens
figure, the good rich man. This character belongs especially to Dickens's
early optimistic period. He is usually a 'merchant' (we are not
necessarily told what merchandise he deals in), and he is always a
superhumanly kind-hearted old gentleman who 'trots' to and fro, raising
his employees' wages, patting children on the head, getting debtors out
of jail and in general, acting the fairy godmother. Of course he is a
pure dream figure, much further from real life than, say, Squeers or
Micawber. Even Dickens must have reflected occasionally that anyone who
was so anxious to give his money away would never have acquired it in the
first place. Mr. Pickwick, for instance, had 'been in the city', but it
is difficult to imagine him making a fortune there. Nevertheless this
character runs like a connecting thread through most of the earlier
books. Pickwick, the Cheerybles, old Chuzzlewit, Scrooge--it is the same
figure over and over again, the good rich man, handing out guineas.
Dickens does however show signs of development here. In the books of the
middle period the good rich man fades out to some extent. There is no one
who plays this part in A TALE OF TWO CITIES, nor in GREAT EXPECTATIONS--
GREAT EXPECTATIONS is, in fact, definitely an attack on patronage--and
in HARD TIMES it is only very doubtfully played by Gradgrind after his
reformation. The character reappears in a rather different form as
Meagles in LITTLE DORRIT and John Jarndyce in BLEAK HOUSE--one might
perhaps add Betsy Trotwood in DAVID COPPERFIELD. But in these books the
good rich man has dwindled from a 'merchant' to a RENTIER. This is
significant. A RENTIER is part of the possessing class, he can and,
almost without knowing it, does make other people work for him, but he
has very little direct power. Unlike Scrooge or the Cheerybles, he cannot
put everything right by raising everybody's wages. The seeming inference
from the rather despondent books that Dickens wrote in the fifties is
that by that time he had grasped the helplessness of well-meaning
individuals in a corrupt society. Nevertheless in the last completed
novel, OUR MUTUAL FRIEND (published 1864-5), the good rich man comes back
in full glory in the person of Boffin. Boffin is a proletarian by origin
and only rich by inheritance, but he is the usual DEUS EX MACHINA,
solving everybody's problems by showering money in all directions. He
even 'trots', like the Cheerybles. In several ways OUR MUTUAL FRIEND is a
return to the earlier manner, and not an unsuccessful return either.
Dickens's thoughts seem to have come full circle. Once again, individual
kindliness is the remedy for everything.
One crying evil of his time that Dickens says very little about is child
labour. There are plenty of pictures of suffering children in his books,
but usually they are suffering in schools rather than in factories. The
one detailed account of child labour that he gives is the description in
DAVID COPPERFIELD of little David washing bottles in Murdstone & Grinby's
warehouse. This, of course, is autobiography. Dickens himself, at the age
of ten, had worked in Warren's blacking factory in the Strand, very much
as he describes it here. It was a terribly bitter memory to him, partly
because he felt the whole incident to be discreditable to his parents,
and he even concealed it from his wife till long after they were married.
Looking back on this period, he says in DAVID COPPERFIELD:
It is a matter of some surprise to me, even now, that I can have been so
easily thrown away at such an age. A child of excellent abilities and
with strong powers of observation, quick, eager, delicate, and soon hurt
bodily or mentally, it seems wonderful to me that nobody should have made
any sign in my behalf. But none was made; and I became, at ten years old,
a little labouring hind in the service of Murdstone & Grinby.
And again, having described the rough boys among whom he worked:
No words can express the secret agony of my soul as I sunk into this
companionship. . . and felt my hopes of growing up to be a learned and
distinguished man crushed in my bosom.
Obviously it is not David Copperfield who is speaking, it is Dickens
himself. He uses almost the same words in the autobiography that he began
and abandoned a few months earlier. Of course Dickens is right in saying
that a gifted child ought not to work ten hours a day pasting labels on
bottles, but what he does not say is that NO child ought to be condemned
to such a fate, and there is no reason for inferring that he thinks it.
David escapes from the warehouse, but Mick Walker and Mealy Potatoes and
the others are still there, and there is no sign that this troubles
Dickens particularly. As usual, he displays no consciousness that the
STRUCTURE of society can be changed. He despises politics, does not
believe that any good can come out of Parliament--he had been a
Parliamentary shorthand writer, which was no doubt a disillusioning
experience--and he is slightly hostile to the most hopeful movement of
his day, trade unionism. In HARD TIMES trade unionism is represented as
something not much better than a racket, something that happens because
employers are not sufficiently paternal. Stephen Blackpool's refusal to
join the union is rather a virtue in Dickens's eyes. Also, as Mr. Jackson
has pointed out, the apprentices' association in BARNABY RUDGE, to which
Sim Tappertit belongs, is probably a hit at the illegal or barely legal
unions of Dickens's own day, with their secret assemblies, passwords and
so forth. Obviously he wants the workers to be decently treated, but
there is no sign that he wants them to take their destiny into their own
hands, least of all by open violence.
As it happens, Dickens deals with revolution in the narrower sense in two
novels, BARNABY RUDGE and A TALE OF TWO CITIES. In BARNABY RUDGE it is a
case of rioting rather than revolution. The Gordon Riots of 1780, though
they had religious bigotry as a pretext, seem to have been little more
than a pointless outburst of looting. Dickens's attitude to this kind of
thing is sufficiently indicated by the fact that his first idea was to
make the ringleaders of the riots three lunatics escaped from an asylum.
He was dissuaded from this, but the principal figure of the book is in
fact a village idiot. In the chapters dealing with the riots Dickens
shows a most profound horror of mob violence. He delights in describing
scenes in which the 'dregs' of the population behave with atrocious
bestiality. These chapters are of great psychological interest, because
they show how deeply he had brooded on this subject. The things he
describes can only have come out of his imagination, for no riots on
anything like the same scale had happened in his lifetime. Here is one of
his descriptions, for instance:
If Bedlam gates had been flung open wide, there would not have issued
forth such maniacs as the frenzy of that night had made. There were men
there who danced and trampled on the beds of flowers as though they trod
down human enemies, and wrenched them from their stalks, like savages who
twisted human necks. There were men who cast their lighted torches in the
air, and suffered them to fall upon their heads and faces, blistering the
skin with deep unseemly burns. There were men who rushed up to the fire,
and paddled in it with their hands as if in water; and others who were
restrained by force from plunging in, to gratify their deadly longing. On
the skull of one drunken lad--not twenty, by his looks--who lay upon
the ground with a bottle to his mouth, the lead from the roof came
streaming down in a shower of liquid fire, white hot, melting his head
like wax. . . But of all the howling throng not one learnt mercy from, or
sickened at, these sights; nor was the fierce, besotted, senseless rage
of one man glutted.
You might almost think you were reading a description of 'Red' Spain by a
partisan of General Franco. One ought, of course, to remember that when
Dickens was writing, the London 'mob' still existed. (Nowadays there is
no mob, only a flock.) Low wages and the growth and shift of population
had brought into existence a huge, dangerous slum-proletariat, and until
the early middle of the nineteenth century there was hardly such a thing
as a police force. When the brickbats began to fly there was nothing
between shuttering your windows and ordering the troops to open fire. In
A TALE OF TWO CITIES he is dealing with a revolution which was really
about something, and Dickens's attitude is different, but not entirely
different. As a matter of fact, A TALE OF TWO CITIES is a book which
tends to leave a false impression behind, especially after a lapse of
time.
The one thing that everyone who has read A TALE OF TWO CITIES remembers
is the Reign of Terror. The whole book is dominated by the guillotine--
tumbrils thundering to and fro, bloody knives, heads bouncing into the
basket, and sinister old women knitting as they watch. Actually these
scenes only occupy a few chapters, but they are written with terrible
intensity, and the rest of the book is rather slow going. But A TALE OF
TWO CITIES is not a companion volume to THE SCARLET PIMPERNEL. Dickens
sees clearly enough that the French Revolution was bound to happen and
that many of the people who were executed deserved what they got. If, he
says, you behave as the French aristocracy had behaved, vengeance will
follow. He repeats this over and over again. We are constantly being
reminded that while 'my lord' is lolling in bed, with four liveried
footmen serving his chocolate and the peasants starving outside,
somewhere in the forest a tree is growing which will presently be sawn
into planks for the platform of the guillotine, etc., etc., etc. The
inevitability of the Terror, given its causes, is insisted upon in the
clearest terms:
It was too much the way. . . to talk of this terrible Revolution as if it
were the only harvest ever known under the skies that had not been sown--
as if nothing had ever been done, or omitted to be done, that had led to
it--as if observers of the wretched millions in France, and of the
misused and perverted resources that should have made them prosperous,
had not seen it inevitably coming, years before, and had not in plain
terms recorded what they saw.
And again:
All the devouring and insatiate monsters imagined since imagination could
record itself, are fused in the one realization, Guillotine. And yet
there is not in France, with its rich variety of soil and climate, a
blade, a leaf, a root, a spring, a peppercorn, which will grow to
maturity under conditions more certain than those that have produced this
horror. Crush humanity out of shape once more, under similar hammers, and
it will twist itself into the same tortured forms.
In other words, the French aristocracy had dug their own graves. But
there is no perception here of what is now called historic necessity.
Dickens sees that the results are inevitable, given the causes, but he
thinks that the causes might have been avoided. The Revolution is
something that happens because centuries of oppression have made the
French peasantry sub-human. If the wicked nobleman could somehow have
turned over a new leaf, like Scrooge, there would have been no
Revolution, no JACQUERIE, no guillotine--and so much the better. This is
the opposite of the 'revolutionary' attitude. From the 'revolutionary'
point of view the class-struggle is the main source of progress, and
therefore the nobleman who robs the peasant and goads him to revolt is
playing a necessary part, just as much as the Jacobin who guillotines the
nobleman. Dickens never writes anywhere a line that can be interpreted as
meaning this. Revolution as he sees it is merely a monster that is
begotten by tyranny and always ends by devouring its own instruments. In
Sydney Carton's vision at the foot of the guillotine, he foresees Defarge
and the other leading spirits of the Terror all perishing under the same
knife--which, in fact, was approximately what happened.
And Dickens is very sure that revolution is a monster. That is why
everyone remembers the revolutionary scenes in A TALE OF TWO CITIES; they
have the quality of nightmare, and it is Dickens's own nightmare. Again
and again he insists upon the meaningless horrors of revolution--the
mass-butcheries, the injustice, the ever-present terror of spies, the
frightful blood-lust of the mob. The descriptions of the Paris mob--the
description, for instance, of the crowd of murderers struggling round the
grindstone to sharpen their weapons before butchering the prisoners in
the September massacres--outdo anything in BARNABY RUDGE. The
revolutionaries appear to him simply as degraded savages--in fact, as
lunatics. He broods over their frenzies with a curious imaginative
intensity. He describes them dancing the 'Carmagnole', for instance:
There could not be fewer than five hundred people, and they were dancing
like five thousand demons. . . They danced to the popular Revolution song,
keeping a ferocious time that was like a gnashing of teeth in unison. . .
They advanced, retreated, struck at one another's hands, clutched at one
another's heads, spun round alone, caught one another, and spun around in
pairs, until many of them dropped. . . Suddenly they stopped again, paused,
struck out the time afresh, forming into lines the width of the public
way, and, with their heads low down and their hands high up, swooped
screaming off. No fight could have been half so terrible as this dance.
It was so emphatically a fallen sport--a something, once innocent,
delivered over to all devilry.
He even credits some of these wretches with a taste for guillotining
children. The passage I have abridged above ought to be read in full. It
and others like it show how deep was Dickens's horror of revolutionary
hysteria. Notice, for instance that touch, 'with their heads low down and
their hands high up', etc., and the evil vision it conveys. Madame
Defarge is a truly dreadful figure, certainly Dickens's most successful
attempt at a MALIGNANT character. Defarge and others are simply 'the new
oppressors who have risen in the destruction of the old', the
revolutionary courts are presided over by 'the lowest, cruellest and
worst populace', and so on and so forth. All the way through Dickens
insists upon the nightmare insecurity of a revolutionary period, and in
this he shows a great deal of prescience. 'A law of the suspected, which
struck away all security for liberty or life, and delivered over any good
and innocent person to any bad and guilty one; prisons gorged with people
who had committed no offence, and could obtain no hearing'--it would
apply pretty accurately to several countries today.
The apologists of any revolution generally try to minimize its horrors;
Dickens's impulse is to exaggerate them--and from a historical point of
view he has certainly exaggerated. Even the Reign of Terror was a much
smaller thing than he makes it appear. Though he quotes no figures, he
gives the impression of a frenzied massacre lasting for years, whereas in
reality the whole of the Terror, so far as the number of deaths goes, was
a joke compared with one of Napoleon's battles. But the bloody knives and
the tumbrils rolling to and fro create in his mind a special sinister
vision which he has succeeded in passing on to generations of readers.
Thanks to Dickens, the very word 'tumbril' has a murderous sound; one
forgets that a tumbril is only a sort of farm-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 born 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 think 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 'modern' 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
terms 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 noncomformist 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
performing 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.
III
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
'lumpenproletariat'.
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 Plornishes. 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 'low' 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 Harmon--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 'I'm-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
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