The Decline of Innocence

...I think all of us, once we have accepted the higher standing of such later Dickens novels as Great Expectations and Bleak House, tend to find a favorite among the lesser works, and my own pleasure at Marcus' justification of Barnaby Rudge is not accidental...

...significantly, his book begins with a comment by Dostoevsky on Dickens, and this pairing-off suggests the spirit of Marcus' approach...

...While Marcus is also good on the great comedy of Martin Chuzzlewit as a kind of oblique threnody on the "end of innocence," with Pecksniff as a parody on the very ideal of pastoral innocence which Pickwick almost achieved, and just as good on Dombey and Son as a study of alienation in a changing Victorian society, he strikes me as best in the magnificent chapter "Sons and Fathers" (note again the hint of a resemblance to one of the great Russians) in which he brilliantly defends Barnaby Rudge as a novel whose qualities have never been adequately recognized...

...Marcus proceeds from an understanding of this fact to show the interplay in the novels, from Pickwick Papers to Dombey and Son, between Dickens's most intense personal drama—his relationship with a delinquent father—and the changing view of the external world that turned him from something very close to a conservative into one of the great radicals of his century...

...Altogether, this is a book from which the enthusiast will gain new reasons to pursue those researches whose peculiar diligence marks the Dickens cult...

...Oliver himself, as Marcus suggests, is "ideal and uncorrupted innocence," and his story is a kind of Christian parable, "conceived under substantial pressure of the Christian sentiments and language that were the received culture of Dickens' time...

...The less committed reader will gain pleasure from sound arguments brilliantly presented...

...Dingley Dell is replaced by an abstract vision of the terrifying and anonymous city, and Pickwick is replaced by Fagin, whom one might describe as an anti-father...

...He shows how these two great Dickensian thematic routes come together in a sweeping survey of the irreconcilable conflicts which center around various forms of power...

...The shadowy vision of this fascinating literary failure is repeatedly illuminated by the livid light of Quilp's villainy, which Marcus takes to mean the recognition on the part of Dickens that "the passion for purity becomes urgently felt only in proportion to the intensity of a passion for defiling it...

...It is for this reason that the outer landscape is always so much more intensely realized than the inner, or, to be more precise, that so much of the mental experience of his characters is externalized and comes to us as a reflection from the world through which they move...

...he also sees him, rightly, as a novelist in the European rather than the merely English tradition...

...That, of course, sounds very Dostoevskian, and one of the causes of Marcus' insights lies in his recognition of the bond between the great Russian and the great English novelist...

...So we go on, with the outer world steadily absorbing the shadows of Dickens's mind, and the central characters remaining in some sense pure—with the natural gentility of Nicholas Nickleby, for example, or the doomed goodness of Nell in The Old Curiosity Shop, which Marcus terms "a frustrated or failed idyll...

...It is hard to imagine a field in which the New Criticism would have borne a more meager crop, for Dickens is a writer who demands the many-sided critic, adept in history, sociology, psychology, for any full understanding of his works...

...Obscurely, he felt that the ills of men, if not entirely social in origin, must nevertheless be dispelled or endured within the framework of society...

...Dickens' imagination of his personal history," says Marcus, "is inseparable from his imagination of society," and, as he shows abundantly in this study of the early Dickens, both are inseparable from his art as a novelist...

...The Old Curiosity Shop, one of the least successful of Dickens' novels, is also one of the most significant in the chain of development, for it is here that Dickens is really inwardly confessing the failure of his faith in any earthly approximation to God's kingdom...

...The first stages are charted in Steven Marcus's Dickens from Pickwick to Dombey, one of the best critical studies ever written about the great novelist...

...since I first read it as a holiday task during one long Shropshire summer of boyhood...

...Particularly, as he proceeds from novel to novel, charting the pattern of mounting "restlessness" in Dickens's own emotional life, he shows how it is accompanied on the one hand by a growing desire to express resentment toward his father, and on the other by a growing pessimism about society...

...Moreover, Dickens only preserves the innocence of this vision by relegating to the interpolated tales that punctuate the papers some pretty lurid instances of human evil...

...Reviewed by GEORGE WOODCOCK Author, "The Paradox of Oscar Wilde," and a forthcoming history of the modern French novel From Dingley Dell to Bleak House was a long, painful and fascinating journey...

...In Oliver Twist the setting is no longer idyllic...

...He sees in Dickens a great deal of the psychological deviousness and ambiguity which are so obvious in Dostoevsky...

...In Barnaby Rudge Marcus sees a remarkable study not merely of various perversions of the father-son relationship —the "imagination of his personal history"—but also of the dilemma of authority and rebellion, which establishes the conditions under which violence breaks out—the "imagination of society...

...in the idyllic atmosphere of Dingley Dell, Pickwick appears as the all-benign father, though his benevolence seems to be maintained at a certain cost, since he is clearly in many ways undeveloped and even "infantile...

...In Pickwick Papers Marcus detects a "vision of the ideal possibilities of human relations in community...

...I have responded to this glimpse into "the heart of the affliction that goes by the name of modern civilization...

...It becomes, as Marcus shows, "a novel whose unremitting impulse is toward all that lies underground,' a novel about death in which "those who are not yet in their graves soon will be—they are merely the living dead," in which the heroine seeks refuge from life in "the primitive past," and finds only extinction...