Dickens the Novelist

by F. R. Leavis

  1. R. Garis, The Dickens Theatre: A Reassessment of the Novels (Oxford, 1965).

  2. Ross H. Dabney, Love and Property in the Novels of Dickens (Chatto & Windus, 1967).

  3. I quote from letters printed in Lord Acton and his Times by David Mathew.

  4. When he was 24, not, as he alleged in 1896, before he was 20 – though his putting the influence of David Copperfield back in memory to his adolescence, the most formative period, is significant.

  5. Dickens was highly esteemed by the Russian intelligentsia and early translated, David Copperfield appearing in Russian translation in both ‘The Contemporary’ and ‘The Muscovite’ in 1851. Tolstoy refers to it first in his diary for 2 September 1852, where he wrote: ‘Read David Copperfield – a delight’, and in December 1853 wrote to his brother: ‘Buy me Dickens’s David Copperfield in English, and send me Sadler’s English Dictionary, which is among my books’ – I quote from an essay, ‘Tolstoy and Dickens’ in Family Views of Tolstoy, ed. Aylmer Maude, to which I was referred by Dr Theodore Redpath, on consulting him with respect to my interest in Dickens’s influence on Tolstoy. There N. Apostolov says that Dickens’s translations in Russian magazines ‘crowded out’ all other English and French writers, Dickens’s popularity in Russia being at its height in the 1840s and 1850s; Russian critics approved of Dostoevski’s imitating Dickens, for example. While Apostolov stresses a general debt of Tolstoy to Dickens, he does not specify anything more than Tolstoy’s finding congenial Dickens’s ‘humorous treatment of his themes’ and ‘the socio-ethical bearing of his novels’ generally. Dickens himself was soon made acquainted with this success in Russia; a Russian man of letters sent him a translation of Dombey into Russian ‘informing him that his works, which before had only been translated in the journals, and with certain omissions, had now been translated in their entire form by his correspondent’, ending: ‘For the last eleven years your name has enjoyed a wide celebrity in Russia … Your Dombey continues to inspire with enthusiasm the whole of the literary Russia.’ This seems to have been in 1849 (v. Forster, Book VI, § rv) but Dickens’s work was widely known in Russia by 1844. It was as well that Tolstoy struggled with David Copperfield in English, for Russian translators made free with Dickens’s text, and the translator of David Copperfield has been found guilty of many hundreds of ad libbings.

  6. R. F. Christian, the Tolstoy scholar and critic, has two generalizations of interest in this connexion. He writes of Tolstoy: ‘There is no doubt that he seized avidly at any confirmation of his ideas in other people’s work and even borrowed their examples’ and ‘A study of the drafts of Tolstoy’s novels confirms the suspicion that problems of structure and composition were often in the forefront of his thoughts’ (Tolstoy’s ‘War and Peace’: A Study, Oxford, 1962).

  7. H. House, The Dickens World, ignoring the surely essential and obvious fact that Dickens was a creative artist, treats his novels as accurate or inaccurate sources of facts, implying in Dickens ignorance or dishonesty in the latter case; in addition to this crass and dangerous approach to the works of Dickens he constantly insinuates misleading valuations or fatuous generalizations, e.g. that Pip’s history is ‘a snob’s progress’, that Dickens habitually and characteristically ‘flattered the public’s moral feelings’, and so on.

  8. ‘Why did he marry Lisa?’ asks R. F. Christian. ‘We are not told.’ Thus Mr Christian expresses a natural surprise at such an improbable marriage.

  9. Tolstoy has been greatly admired for his understanding of children and sympathetic insight in his novels into a child’s and boy’s modes of feeling, but has it been noticed how much these insights owed to Dickens’s in David Copperfield? Not only is his rendering of children’s feelings and behaviour Dickens’s, but scenes are of a similar kind. David’s lessons with his step-father seem to have made such an impression that they are reflected in both Tolstoy’s great novels – in Princess Mary’s misery at her mathematics lessons from her bullying father, and Serezha’s lessons and unhappy relations with his father Karenin (who like Miss Trotwood has the peculiarity of being unable, though apparently a hard, cold, character, to bear the sight of tears). Serezha instinctively hates Vronsky for coming between him and his mother even while Vronsky is not openly Anna’s lover, as David was hostile to Mr Murdstone before he knew he was courting his mother, feeling a threat to himself from the man touching his mother’s hand.

  10. Not, as Cockshut asserts (The Imagination of Charles Dickens, 1961) intending a sneer, that it shows he is an actor, but to make us aware that David’s consciousness is now outward-directed. All parents and teachers will recognize this feature of the now self-conscious schoolboy David as normal and typical.

  11. Dickens was perfectly well aware of the advances he made both as an artist and in educating a reading-public, as these two excerpts from letters show: ‘I hope David Copperfield will do for your correspondent. The world would not take another Pickwick from me now, but we can be cheerful and merry, I hope, notwithstanding, and with a little more purpose in us’ (to Costello, April 1849); ‘I am glad to say that there seems to be a bright unanimity about Copperfield. I am very much interested in it and pleased with myself. I have carefully planned out the story, for some time past, to the end, and am making out my purposes with great care. I should like to know what you see from that tower of yours. I have little doubt you see the real objects in the prospect’ (to the Rev. James White, July 1850).

  12. Too much has been made of the possible psychological implications of the fact that the novel’s hero and the novelist have the same initials in reverse and of Dickens’s being unaware of this or startled when Forster pointed it out to him. Dickens’s first two choices of name for the hero had been ‘David Mag’ and ‘Thomas Mag’, and it was the novel David Copperfield, not its hero, that Dickens called his ‘favourite child’.

  13. The most striking instance is that of his well-intentioned but revealingly stupid objection to the masterly ‘History of a Self-Tormentor’ chapter in Little Dorrit, which he thought should have been part of the narrative. Dickens used his better judgement, but the letter Dickens wrote justifying himself and expressing despair at not being understood is important to an appreciation of the difficulties under which he worked: ‘In Miss Wade I had an idea, which I thought a new one, of making the introduced story so fit into surroundings impossible of separation from the main story, as to make the blood of the book circulate through both. But I can only suppose, from what you say, that I have not exactly succeeded in this.’ This did not prevent Forster’s blandly confident assertion, in the Life, of the shortcomings, as he saw them, of Little Dorrit: ‘the want of coherence among the figures of the story, and of a central interest in the plan of it … some of the most deeply considered things that occur in it have really little to do with the tale itself. The surface-painting of both Miss Wade and Tattycoram, to take an instance, is anything but attractive, yet there is under it a rare force of likeness … and they must both have had, as well as Mr Gowan himself, a striking effect in the novel, if they had been made to contribute in a more essential way to its interest or development.’ He adds, with incredible fatuity: ‘The failure nevertheless had not been for want of care or study, as well as of his own design as of models by masters in his art’ [the classical and 18th century picaresque novelists, who all use the autobiography of a character inserted into the narrative for variety and other purposes, for instance; he thinks Dickens failed to emulate them in Miss Wade’s history] and he goes on to cite the letter from Dickens I have quoted above. We may also observe there his criterion of ‘attractive’ in operation, that of his age. This Dickens was courageous enough to ignore, and to stand by his own lights, as he implies in another letter of self-defence when he wrote: ‘Wrong or right, this was all design, and seemed to me to be in the fitness of things.’

  14. The plans for David Copperfield are given in Dickens at Work by John Butt and K. Tillotson (1957).

  15. In looking at Dickens’s ‘Plan
s’ I personally have been struck by the confirmation they give to my deduction – that Dickens was predominantly interested in thematic construction after the first batch of impromptu fiction-writing before Dombey – that I have made from studying the novels themselves. But Tillotson and Butt, ignoring this evidence of Dickens’s concern for construction in the Tolstoyan sense, discuss the Plans simply as evidence for the handling of the plots only, whereas we can see that the themes determined the plotting.

  16. This is only one of the innumerable occasions in David Copperfield where we should take heed of the statement in a letter Dickens wrote to G. H. Lewes: ‘The truth is, I am a very modest man, and if readers cannot detect the point of a passage without having their attention called to it by the writer, I would much rather they lost it and looked out for something else.’ ‘Readers have done just that. They have been so dazzled and so satisfied by the richness of the immediate effects that they have neglected the subtler shadings’. – thus Professor Harry Stone comments on this statement when reviewing the first volume of the new edition of Dickens’s letters in the quarterly of the University of Illinois Press.

  17. Life obligingly provided Dickens with a perfect piece of symbolism when, on taking his wife to call on his old flame, he was able to observe in the hall the original Jip, dead and stuffed.

  18. Dickens preserved this feature through all the changes his titles for this novel passed through – ‘Thomas Mag the Younger’, ‘David Mag the Younger’, ‘David Copperfield the Younger’, ‘David Copperfield, Junior’ etc.

  19. Wuthering Heights is another example of this interest, v. my essay in Lectures in America (F. R. & Q.D. Leavis).

  20. That Dickens intended us to make this reflection is shown by Miss Trotwood’s making this very point when she asks Mr Murdstone if Clara had made no settlement upon her boy when she remarried, and it then appears that David’s father was equally guilty in having left his young wife ‘the what’s-its-name Rookery without any rooks in it’ unconditionally. To underline this point, there is a Biblical picture on Miss Trotwood’s drawing-room wall in this scene, called ‘Jacob’s Garment’.

  21. Dickens’s notes for the chapter ‘Our Housekeeping’ contain this one, underlined as important: ‘Carry through incapacity of Dora – but affectionate.’

  22. Forster’s Life is a mine of interesting documentation here. The incredible number of letters dashed off to his friends with which Dickens, as it were compulsively, filled the chinks of his editorial duties and novel-writing and social activities, is explicable only as the result of this need – they overflow with high-spirited fun and nonsense that it seemed he must share with someone. He was a wonderful conjuror, a giver of outstanding children’s parties, and brought all his children into his theatrical activities in the home, as part of this need. His insight into the necessity of play-activities and imaginative fostering for the child’s psychic health is generally recognized, since it is explicit in most if not all of his novels; but this is part only of his general theory, as a creative artist, of the adult’s need also for love and art, which is basic to Hard Times, and in David Copperfield produced this characteristic inquiry into the nature of happiness in marriage.

  23. I have always thought that Tolstoy was struck with the psychological insight shown in this trait and that the result was his Karenin, who is afraid of feeling and can’t bear the sight of tears, but once develops a fully human self owing to the appeal of the helpless neglected baby his wife has borne that is not his. His realization thereby that Anna’s adultery is something he is involved in, and thence that if it were not for the moral conventions of his society they could find a modus vivendi which would not turn her out of her home with the loss to him of the baby is his first tentative effort towards a moral rebirth. It is thwarted, unlike Miss Trotwood’s, and he dries up.

  24. Dickens cannot be said to have meant this as a symbolic threat of murder or castration at a conscious level, but it is undoubtedly the right gesture to express the attitude Miss Trotwood has taken up, just as the Doll’s Dressmaker charateristically makes two pricks in the air with her needle when angered, symbolically blinding those she dislikes. To use – or invent – characteristic gestures for his personae is one of the means a novelist has to convince the reader of his insight, of course, and Dickens is peculiarly gifted in being able to uncover such authentic expressions of a unique inner life.

  25. Her humanization towards the end of the novel is shown by her acceptance of woman’s fate – ‘aiding and abetting’ her last maid’s marrying a tavern-keeper and ‘crowning the marriage-ceremony with her presence’, as well as in spoiling her god-daughter when she gets one. The half-way stage is marked by her declaring to David her refusal to try to help him improve Dora’s character: ‘I want our pet to like me, and be as gay as a butterfly.’ Dora is now ‘our’ pet, in effect an acceptance of the idea.

  26. A contrast in the same novel to Miss Trotwood’s fallacious use of logic is provided by Miss Dartle’s brilliantly witty use of logic to expose the fallacies of the Steerforth assumptions, based on class contempt for the lower orders, when in reply to James Steerforth’s conventional dismissal of their right to consideration as not being sensitive like ‘us’, she retorts: ‘Really! Well, I don’t know, now, when I have been better pleased than to hear that. It’s so consoling! It’s such a delight to know that, when they suffer, they don’t feel!’

  27. Scott, who like Dickens was greatly interested in the psychology of the legal profession besides being a lawyer himself, showed in Guy Mannering an eminent lawyer enjoying himself in an atmosphere of high jinks, but in the sanctioned smoking-room tradition of masculine relaxation, which is very different from Traddles’s childlike diversions.

  28. Dickens had previously made a joke about this in Nickleby, via John Browdie.

  29. A better treatment of the unequal marriage had already appeared in The Cricket on the Heath (1845) where the gay young wife is thought by her sober and older husband to have a lover; after some saddened self-reproach he decides to separate from his wife without allowing blame to attach to her since he ought not to have tied a young girl to middle age. He finds however, in the general dénouement, that his wife truly loves and honours him and enjoys the disparity as an excuse for a game of make-believe. Dickens can carry this off with a light hand in a Christmas fairy-story, and the couple’s having a baby and a convincingly realistic working-man’s home makes the marriage more acceptable.

  30. Cf. Oliver Twist: the real horror at the corruption of innocence there is epitomized in Fagin, whom Oliver thinks a kind old gentleman fond of children, but who is really turning them into thieves, criminals and prostitutes; he teaches Oliver a game which Oliver later realizes is picking pockets, thus using the child’s natural instinct for play to ruin him.

  31. David himself feels at this time that he was ‘aware, indeed, of being younger than I could have wished’ – and Phiz, deliberately instructed thereto no doubt, makes this excessive immaturity inescapable visually, by stressing David’s extremely unformed and innocent appearance; v. e.g. Phiz’s picture of his introduction to Dora, and the illustration entitled: ‘Mr Micawber Delivers Some Valedictory Remarks’. In the picture ‘The Friendly Waiter and I’ David’s smallness and innocence are even exaggerated, and the waiter’s grossness made appropriately evident. The illustration entitled ‘I make the acquaintance of Miss Mowcher’, quite the best in the novel, brings out most intelligently all aspects of Dickens’s theme as to the disabilities of innocence in a corrupt world. David’s and Steerforth’s contrasted faces deserve studying under a magnifying glass for subtlety of expression. On the wall among other suitable pictures we see one showing Mephistopheles looking on at the meeting of Faust and Marguerite, and another of Gulliver as a smirking and subservient manikin amusing the hideous society of Brobdignag, David’s role here in relation to Steerforth and Miss Mowcher.

  32. In this light, there is no ground for Cockshut’s objection that Steerforth
’s obvious failings ‘make David’s hero-worship seem much less touching than it is supposed to be’. It is only Mrs Steerforth who thinks it touching, and Agnes’s disregarded warning against Steerforth is one further proof that Dickens meant us to be exasperated with David’s simple-minded credulity, and to realize that his need for affection and for an object to lavish affection and hero-worship on (accounted for by his history), are dangerous. At the beginning of chapter XXXII David explains that even when he has been disillusioned about Steerforth he could not have reproached him if brought face to face and still cherishes the old relation with him.

  33. Dickens was a great deal more knowing at this age. The hint we are given of the difference David felt between himself, who had shared the life of the disreputable Micawbers, and the boys from unsullied homes, when he first went to Dr Strong’s school, is one of the more deeply-felt insights in the novel (chapter XVI) – e.g. ‘How would it affect them, who were innocent of London life and the London streets,’ he wondered, ‘to discover how knowing I was (and was ashamed to be) in some of the meanest phases of both?’ David’s remembrance of things past was buried by his rebirth as Miss Trotwood’s Trotwood and his re-education in the honour system of Dr Strong’s school; this was not the case of Charles Dickens – at 15 he was a clerk in a lawyer’s office, acquiring the cynical view of the law and lawyers evident in his writings from Pickwick Papers onwards, where he sponsored Sam Weller’s knowingness against Mr Pickwick’s greenness. Pickwick’s innocence is considered lovable but shown to be dangerous. Characteristically, Dickens goes deeper into the subject by showing the ridiculous innocence in some respects of ‘knowing’ characters such as old Tony Weller and his circle, when obliged to go outside their own purlieu – that is, that to be sharp is not to be wise. Mark Twain uses the same technique with Huckleberry Finn to make the same point.