A Curious Grudgery
BELL, PEARL K.
Writers & Writing A CURIOUS GRUDGERY BY PEARL K. BELL The recently departed year could easily remain unlamented and uncelebrated for many reasons, but it did have one literary distinction: It...
...unlike Angus Wilson, though, his irascibility led him to a complex appreciation of Dickens' literary quality: "Dickens is obviously a writer whose parts are greater than his wholes...
...In all fairness to Wilson (himself a novelist though scarcely in Dickens' league), what could anyone possibly find to say at this late date about Dickens' generously documented, intensively investigated life and works that would be fresh, pertinent, and original...
...Wilson finds the single key to Dickens' adult personality and remarkable career in that purgatorial time in the rotting Thameside factory: Fear of returning to such poverty remained as real to the grown, successful author as a bad smell, and this terrible memory gave rise to his suicidally demanding regimen of work and travel...
...Not only did the deadlines for his serial installments loom and threaten throughout his writing life--this was equally true for many other 19th-century novelists--but he also undertook cruelly exhausting lecture and reading tours to meet his ballooning financial obligations...
...Once again we are told, in surprisingly pedestrian prose from a novelist, about Dickens' birth into a lower-middle-class family rich only in seedy gentility and the perennial disorder of incompetent social climbing...
...And the book hailed as the best of the centennial spate, first in England and then in the United States (where it appeared a few months ago), was Angus Wilson's The World of Charles Dickens (Viking, 302 pp., $12.95), a big, glossy, lavishly illustrated new exposition of Dickens and his times...
...It is no accident that one of Orwell's most frequently quoted political metaphors comes from his essay on Dickens, and it seems as urgently appropriate in 1971 as it was in 1939...
...Since Dostoevsky admired Dickens' work so deeply, Wilson time and again compares these two monuments of 19th-century literature, and inevitably Dickens suffers in the contrast: ". . . in the last analysis Dostoev-sky's world, though often more insane, more repulsive than Dickens', must be seen as more universal...
...In his own time Dickens was exposed to the powerful glare of spotlights that today are usually trained on movie stars and pop singers...
...But 100 years after Dickens' death, his books are read even more widely than they were in his lifetime...
...To an enormous and adulating public, his every move and word had the most compelling moral and personal importance...
...It is difficult otherwise to explain why he could be both read by working people (a thing that has happened to no other novelist of his stature) and buried in Westminster Abbey...
...in a sense, for all its madness, more mature...
...Since the British take their literary institutions with hard-working seriousness, they marked the anniversary by an inordinate flow of critical and biographical reassessments of the Inimitable...
...Dostoevsky continued to know extreme human misery on into his adult life...
...Writers & Writing A CURIOUS GRUDGERY BY PEARL K. BELL The recently departed year could easily remain unlamented and uncelebrated for many reasons, but it did have one literary distinction: It was the centenary of Charles Dickens' death, on June 9, 1870, at the perversely young age of 52...
...In almost 200 Victorian genre paintings, street scenes, photographs, and illustrations for the novels, we derive a far more vivid, immediate portrait of life in Dickens' time than is to be found in Angus Wilson's words...
...In addition, The World of Charles Dickens is full of crotchety complaints about modern Dickens critics and their "excessive symbol-seeking...
...It is unclear whether he is chiding Dickens for not having known extreme human misery in his adult human life--surely not altogether a matter of rational choice--or whether he finds Dickens inadequate because he remained obsessed with the one trauma of childhood...
...And he can be equally vague and inconclusive discussing Dickens' prophetic insight into the evils of Victorian industrial society--his adumbration of our own disordered world...
...although I agree that Dostoev-sky's world was more universal and mature, Wilson's reasons for this conclusion are woefully sloppy and illogically expressed...
...Aside from the formal chronological homage that custom decrees we pay a great writer on the centenary of his death or birth, I find little enlightenment or purpose in Wilson's rehash of the already legendary details...
...Where Angus Wilson's book undertakes to honor and acclaim, and in the end seems, in a curious grudgery, to do neither, George Orwell's much briefer evaluation begins with a characteristic expression of distaste and ends in a gift of love...
...More curious still are the gratuitous pejorations he tucks into his praise even of those novels, like Great Expectations, that he considers truly great...
...Now, this passage is typical of the raggedy, fundamentally unconsidered quality of many of Wilson's critical statements about Dickens...
...Neither Wilson's praise of Dickens nor his blame ever seems to come out quite right...
...Like all educated Englishmen, who had Dickens crammed down their throats in boyhood, Orwell had his share of cranky resentment toward him...
...He is all fragments, all details--rotten architecture, but wonderful gargoyles--and never better than when he is building up some character who will later on be forced to act inconsistently...
...Primarily he complains of a lack of unity and consistency of characterization, but he evades any close examination of these shortcomings in the larger context of Dickens' eccentric genius...
...of a nineteenth-century liberal, a free intelligence, a type hated with equal hatred by all the smelly little orthodoxies which are now contending for our souls...
...The secret of Dickens' enduring fascination is to be found not in Wilson's gaudy and expensive book, but rather in an essay George Orwell wrote more than 30 years ago...
...Yet if the world of Dickens were truly no more than the cornucopian realism of that Victorian Norman Rockwell, William Frith (whose paintings of Derby Day, of a children's birthday party in a Victorian parlor, and of Ramsgate Sands in summer, heavy with overdressed trippers, are beautifully reproduced), his novels would be as little read today as the closet dramas of Shelley and Byron...
...perhaps he wishes to avoid charges of Dickensolatry...
...In his own age and ours he has been popular chiefly because he was able to express in a comic, simplified and therefore memorable form the native decency of the common man...
...These seem two different points one might make about a writer, not two parts of one idea...
...When he and his wife separated after 22 years of marriage, seven sons and two daughters, Dickens felt called upon to write a front-page article in his magazine, Household Words, that would explain, though scarcely justify, this shocking action to his incredulous and disapproving readers...
...Italics mine...
...Dickens voiced a code which was and on the whole still is believed in, even by people who violate it...
...yet Wilson mentions few of these critics by name, and manages, incredibly, to misspell Steven Marcus' when he does...
...Nearly everyone, whatever his actual conduct may be, responds emotionally to the idea of human brotherhood...
...P.K.B...
...Near the end of the essay, Orwell finally shakes off his irritation with Dickens' monstrosities and limitations, in celebration of his blazing and imperishable humanity, "his native generosity of mind, which acts as a kind of anchor and nearly always keeps him where he belongs...
...for Dickens it was a single traumatic experience of childhood...
...about the traumatic months of dehumanizing work in the blacking factory, when Dickens was 12 and his pound-foolish father had been sentenced to the Marshalsea debtors' prison...
...about the sadistic boarding schools that became such magnificently monstrous material for Nicholas Nickleby and David Copperfield...
...Dickens, Orwell wrote, had "the face of a man who is generously angry...
...Sad to say, the profuse illustration of The World of Charles Dickens is more interesting than the text...
...There is no critical exploration in this volume approaching Marcus' brilliant description in Dickens: From Pickwick to Dombey of the divided sensibility revealed in Dombey and Son...
...Indeed, we have always known almost more about Dickens than anyone should want to know about a novelist's existence, partly because he transliterated his life into his fiction with a tantalizing blend of fact and fantasy that scholars have been scrutinizing and querying for decades...
...We have known all this for years, though, and Wilson does not offer enough new material or insight to justify the retelling...
...and although by the time he was 48, in Great Expectations, he at last exorcised those months [in the factory], it left him no time to explore what had made Dickens the man and the great artist, for he had been too occupied in understanding how Dickens the boy could have suffered so suddenly and so hard...
...Scarcely a week went by in the London Times Literary Supplement without an article, a review, or at least the passing mention of some new study about the great man...
Vol. 54 • January 1971 • No. 2
