Readings of Dickens
MATHEWSON, RUTH
READINGS OF DICKENS BY RUTH MATHEWSON "You charm me, Mortimer, with your reading of my weaknesses. (By the by, that very word, Reading, in its critical use, always charms me. An actress's Reading...
...Sloppy's virtuosity may well have been inspired by Dickens' own public readings, in which he "did" the voices of Scrooge and Mrs...
...And old Betty Higden loves to hear young Sloppy read the newspaper, because "he do the police in different voices...
...The whore, who exists only in Dolby's imagination, is more real to us than his daughter, and Busch's Dolby is far more interesting than the self-effacing author of Dickens as I Knew Him...
...Here, Kate Dickens addresses her plaints to a daughter who died in infancy...
...He develops with considerable suppleness, it seems to me, a theory of "realist form...
...Of my family, I shall not speak," he says repeatedly, but he reveals at the end that his household in Hertfordshire is dispersed-his wife dead, his son George in Paris, his daughter Barbara far away in America...
...We do not need Freud to catch the erotic undertones of these and many other coincidences in The Mutual Friend...
...Of late, "if one answer has been favored over another," Romano writes, "it has been that Dickens winked his creations into being...
...would see anyone, say...
...An actress's Reading of a chambermaid, a singer's Reading of a song, a marine painter's Reading of the sea, the kettledrum's Reading of an instrumental passage, are phrases ever youthful and delightful...
...Mark Twain called him "a gladsome gorilla...
...Dickens' "claustrophobic unrest" made it impossible for him to content himself with what has so often been ascribed to him: the smooth transformation of the real world into an imaginary one of his own...
...It is the mysterious Dolby-the most original creation in the novel-who holds more of our interest...
...Although Dickens is vividly drawn as husband, father, lover, and friend in these scenes, he is throughout the familiar artist who is both hunter and hunted, murderer and victim...
...Those who read The Inimi-table's works, often aloud, in households where literacy was a recent acquisition, could encounter in Our Mutual Friend others engaged in the same kind of activity...
...We do not know when "he began to fall on evil days," as an acquaintance reported, but it is certain that he turned to drink...
...You couldn't show me a piece of English print," Wegg boasts, "that 1 wouldn't be equal to collaring and throwing...
...We' do not think of him as a realist...
...Boffin, the Golden Dustman, pays Silas Wegg, "a literary man," to read to him...
...I booked his halls and blacked his boots...
...That is where, in 1899, Busch's Dolby, suffering from consumption, begins to write his memoirs, this time including what was left out of Dickens as I Knew Him...
...Busch has a fondness for narrative gimmicks...
...Nonetheless, it may be possible to convey some of its suggestiveness through paraphrase and quotation...
...No organizing principle is safe from the formlessness and sprawl of reality, which always outdistances "the forms provided by the chasing mind...
...There are hundreds of Will Cases (as they are called) far more remarkable than that fancied in this book...
...Still, many of the early doubts about Dickens' world were concerned with social, political and psychological accuracy-or, at any rate, probability...
...Thus, in Charles Dickens' Our Mutual Friend, Eugene Wrayburn evades an awkward question by playing with a cliche of the 1860s (and one that passes current now, if we entertain the structuralist fancy that the chambermaid, the song and the sea are "texts" to be decoded...
...Yet he was capable and conscientious...
...Scenes in literature, Romano points out, that are closed, or framed, or limited to surface-the party that begins War and Peace, the mirror that reflects the Veneerings and their guests in Our Mutual Friend-are always being violated, interrupted, opened to the outside world...
...This is not indebted to Formalism, which "cannot give an adequate account of...
...Romano's essay is well written, eclectic in its sources and rich in illustration...
...While such inventiveness may at first be pleasurable, it tends to become wearying, a mere contrivance...
...Gamp, Paul Dombey, Little Nell and a throng of his other creations...
...We are permitted to guess at his secret life by tracing his unconscious associations as he imagines the other characters...
...His recollections of the American tour show him to be much more sensitive, more egotistical, more aware of the love-hate, attraction-repulsion in his relationship with Dickens than his hero-worshipping reminiscence revealed, at least on the surface...
...Romano eschews both Ian Watt's emphasis on life-likeness and literal reality and Northrop Frye's stress on "creation for its own sake...
...A far-fetched notion, of course, but it recalls what Kipling and Chesterton predicted when Dickens' reputation declined: that he would become more "modern" as time went on...
...her father was a Hertfordshire clergyman, a homosexual who permitted her to be sold into prostitution by his lover...
...Yet even without this acknowledgement we would recognize a common reading of their mutual friend: Dickens' realism lies in his deep awareness that form resists reality...
...She came from the world of "the other Victorians...
...He'made me what I am...
...I was his page...
...He minded nothing...
...Any summary risks reduction of its complexities and would scant the book's true achievement: a fresh reading of the novels...
...In the splendid biography, Charles Dickens, His Tragedy and Triumph, Edgar Johngentleman...
...It is of course a platitude that literature is livelier than life...
...and to the actress Ellen Ternan, Dickens' mistress, the first-person readings of their own stories, as he imagines they would tell them...
...Romano thanks Busch for advising him on his study...
...Dickens, or any novelist whose affinities with realism are significant"-even though the old New Critics' discussion of "coherence" and "correspondence" have benefitted our understanding of Dickens...
...These are dramatic, frequently moving, but somewhat strained and overcomplicated...
...Wrayburn's observation is characteristically casual, yet it is not "by the by" in a novel that treats so variously the very idea of reading...
...Dolby assigns to a prostitute named Barbara (whom he invents, or "dreams...
...And in the Preface to Martin Chuzzlewit: "I sometimes ask myself whether it is always the writer who colors highly, or whether it is now and then the reader whose eye for color is a little dull...
...Dickens, whom he referred to as "The Chief," admired and trusted him, finding him "as tender as a woman and as watchful as a doctor" in ministering to his failing health...
...We recall that the whore Dolby invents is also named Barbara...
...But, he argues, Dickens was always writing "the novel of reality...
...or do anything...
...One therefore turns to John Romano's Dickens and Reality (Columbia, 187 pp., $12.50) with considerable interest in this young critic's approach the perennial question of Dickens' faithfulness to reality...
...He is reading them aloud to an Indian orderly, Moon, in exchange for gin or rum...
...At the same time, Dickens himself often protested his fidelity to fact...
...to Kate, Dickens' discarded wife...
...Her mother was dead...
...In 1872, G. H. Lewes, the first English critic to use the word "realism," drew up seven charges against Dickens, four of them on this score...
...His novel Manual Labor is told by the miscarried son of a couple who later, fortunately, take over the account of their marriage...
...He died impoverished, in 1900, at London's Fulham Infirmary...
...To take but two celebrated instances: Mr...
...In the postscript to Our Mutual Friend he noted "an odd disposition in this country to dispute as improbable in fiction what are the commonest experiences in fact...
...Dickens' death, hastened by the terrible strain of the readings, "closed the brightest chapter of my life," Dolby wrote...
Vol. 61 • May 1978 • No. 11
