Dickens the Novelist

by F. R. Leavis

  Such characters are means of pursuing an argument and yet thanks to Dickens’s art don’t in general strike us as schematic. Even less so do the more complex characters who embody, like David Copperfield and Pip, the basic problems of living in their society. However amusing or merely entertaining at times, or partially irrelevant, it may at first sight appear, such an enquiry is conducted by Dickens responsibly, with his eye always on an object of ultimate importance. Thus it is not surprising that Dickens re-read David Copperfield when undertaking a comparable novel, Great Expectations. But David was not a true alternative to Pip except that while David achieves happiness and fulfilment by coming to terms with and accepting his society, Pip ceases to be wretched and saves himself from shipwreck by freeing himself from participation in that society. The very close alternative to Pip’s is the subject of a late short story which though subsequent to Great Expectations I propose to examine first because it shows indisputably how Dickens’s mind operated in creating, and for what purpose.

  George Silverman’s Explanation, though written rapidly for an American magazine (published in 1868 and therefore one of Dickens’s last undertakings in fiction) is one of his best written and most accomplished, as well as one of his most significant works, but it is because it is so thoroughly representative, and so undisguisedly so, that I cite it here. It is laid out in three sections, corresponding to the phases of the protagonist’s development, each having its own locale, a method that is easily apparent in Great Expectations2 and only less obviously the essential structure of David Copperfield. Dickens has tried perhaps too realistically at the start to show the difficulty the narrator has in bringing himself to rehearse his sufferings, but there is absolutely nothing, not a sentence, in this tale, once it is launched, which is not required for the demonstration of a child whose conditioning is similar to Pip’s but whose reactions to it were almost the opposite. George writes his history not as Pip does, with detachment, and not as an apologia, for he is bewildered and is trying to explain how he came to be where and what he is, to find out what went wrong.

  ‘My infant home’, he eventually begins, ‘was a cellar in Preston.’ In wretched poverty and deprived of all affection, light and warmth, he was constantly accused by his bad-tempered mother (a Mrs Joe Gargery in character, always frowning), whenever he was hungry, cold or frightened of the dark, of being ‘a worldly little devil’ – the sense in which ‘worldly’ affected him suggests that it is expected to be understood in a sectarian or Evangelical context. His parents die frighteningly in the cellar of fever and he is brought to the surface by the authorities, knowing nothing except what it feels to be cold and hungry and ashamed of being ‘worldly’ – that is, with a sense of guilt, which of course he can’t help since worldliness seems to him to mean ‘yearning for enough of anything (except misery)’, yet for which sin his mother used to beat him. He cannot therefore regret his parents but is told by his rescuers that this too is horrible worldliness. The police teach him the virtues of cleanliness and order, and feed him well, and he is then taken in charge by an unctuous sectarian tradesman, Brother Hawkyard, who undertakes to educate George as a good deed. As George is probably still infectious he sends the boy to lodge at a farmhouse in the country to recuperate, first charging him not to tell about the fever or he’ll get turned out. George knows that he was at this time a mere animal, ‘sordid, afraid, unadmiring’ – the choice of words is striking; he thought that the shadows on the hills from clouds were frowns, like his mother’s, at him, the guilty one, as he comes to the farmhouse built up against an imposing ruined Jacobean mansion.

  Here begins the second phase of his moral life. The powerful impression made now by the countryside and the deserted great house on the boy’s sensibilities, that is, by art and nature together, their morally poetic action upon him, is finely conveyed; Wordsworth himself never described more convincingly the moral influence of natural surroundings and of the works of man’s imagination. George ends, recalling them:

  I have written that the sky stared sorrowfully at me. Therein I have anticipated the answer. I knew that all these things looked sorrowfully at me; that they seemed to sigh or whisper, not without pity for me, ‘Alas! poor worldly little devil!’ … How not to be this worldly little devil? How not to have a repugnance towards myself as I had towards the rats? I hid in a corner of one of the smaller chambers, frightened at myself, and crying (it was the first time I had ever cried for any cause not purely physical) and I tried to think about it. One of the farm-ploughs came into my range of view just then; and it seemed to help me as it went on with its two horses up and down the field so peacefully.

  This bears fruit. A girl of his own age in the farmer’s family attracts him as Estella does Pip, but because Sylvia is kind as well as pretty. It occurs to George that if he is infectious and she caught the fever from him she would die like his parents, therefore he must keep away from her. He can do this only by avoiding meals and hiding from her; he is even pleased that this means he has to live on ‘broken fare’ because ‘so much the less worldly and less devilish the deed’, and pleased also to see from afar that Sylvia looks healthy still thanks to his sacrifices. This unselfish action was, he knows, ‘the humanizing of myself’ and softened his thoughts of father and mother. Thus begins a sense of achievement and self-respect founded in self-sacrifice which is even heightened because he must not explain to the kindly farmer and Sylvia why he is unsocial and ungracious. This makes him ‘timidly silent under misconstruction’. All this becomes the unalterable pattern of George’s existence.

  After a start he earns his own education, forcing himself to stomach the odious patronage of Brother Hawkyard and his sect and resolutely suppressing a suspicion, which in fact becomes a certainty, that Hawkyard has embezzled George’s inheritance from his grandfather and is quieting his conscience by paying a very little of it out for George’s support. Determined not to be worldly, George, quite unnecessarily, and of his own volition gives the man a document vindicating him, renouncing his inheritance for ever rather than appear to be ungrateful, for ‘without him, how should I ever have seen the sky look sorrowfully down upon that wretched boy at Hoghton Towers?’ he says, confessing to ‘an inexpressible, perhaps a morbid, dread of ever being sordid or worldly. It was in these ways that my nature came to shape itself to such a mould.’ He wins his way to Cambridge, and thus becomes a scholar and a Fellow, takes Holy Orders and is soon a university coach of some repute. Again he shows how this ‘mould’ has made him automatically yielding of his rights: his scrupulous unworldliness obliges him to return ‘immediately’ on request from the grasping mother of an idle pupil, half the fees, because the young aristocrat doesn’t take a degree in spite of George’s work. The mother, Lady Fareway, thus finds that George’s fear of being thought mercenary can be exploited, and by forcing on him a poor living on her estate gains, as well as a clergyman, a secretary for herself and a tutor for her talented daughter, for nothing. George however refuses to attribute mean motives to her and is content in fulfilling his own standards of conduct and with the joy of instructing an eager pupil, Adelina Fareway.

  But now the final and fatal repetition of this pattern of self-blame, self-sacrifice and over-compensation for his guilty cellar-self takes place inevitably. Adelina Fareway the pupil is everything that could make George happy. He falls in love with her and he even sees that she unconsciously loves her very congenial young tutor. Adelina is almost of age and will then possess her own fortune, and is of a ‘daring, generous character’: George could be rich and happy, and he is already a gentleman (there is no question of social distinctions between them to complicate the purely moral-psychological conditions). But ‘No. Worldliness should not enter here at any cost’ – and George again over-compensates. He is not satisfied with forbidding himself to win Adelina, he must complete the sacrifice by putting her into another man’s hands. He now has a likely pupil studying with him in his vicarage whom he deliberately throws into Adeli
na’s company, resolutely encouraging an attachment between them, for it is enough, George felt, that ‘though poor, Mr Granville had never lived in a cellar in Preston’ – this does not raise a class issue, the different poverty that disqualifies George in his own eyes is a matter of his past guilt of moral savagery and has nothing to do with snob values either. George heroically marries the lovers himself in secret, ‘and I was at peace’.3 He has undertaken to break the news to Adelina’s ambitious mother; he is prepared that she should be angry but not that she would accuse him, to his horror, of being a ‘worldly wretch’, of having been in a conspiracy with Mr Granville to gain Adelina’s fortune and take a percentage for himself. George is of course incapable of justifying himself or defending his interests, as always, and resigns everything, losing his living and his reputation owing to Lady Fareway’s malignity. Though little over thirty, he is now white-haired and broken-hearted. ‘If I have unwittingly done any wrong with a righteous motive, that is some penalty to pay’, he says, and ‘I almost suspect I was a repulsive object’ – since having sacrificed everything he has still incurred the charge of being ‘a worldly little devil’. He lies broken-hearted in the churchyard to write his ‘explanation’, though to him it explains nothing. Though George is a clergyman, religion doesn’t enter into the tale any more than Class. Dickens has kept the question of irrational guilt incurred in childhood and its part in the development of the life of feeling and its influence on character and conduct entirely clear of such extraneous matters, though it is relevant and appropriate that George should become a clergyman as part of his programme. The uselessness of a high ideal of conduct that is simply automatic because it is founded on fear and guilt and does not allow a reasoned response to each situation as it arises, is the point of this case-history, where George’s intentionally noble behaviour, originally right in the case of the fever-infection and Sylvia because spontaneously evolved, is wrong in the later contexts, not noble but inappropriate, merely compulsive and therefore self-defeating. The relevance of George’s case to Pip’s helps to make clear the purpose of that earlier spiritual adventure, Great Expectations. Pip was by definition ‘morally timid and very sensitive’ too, owing to his early conditioning by his unjust and ill-tempered sister, who demanded gratitude for bringing the child up ‘by hand’ when that hand was so hard upon him that he could feel only resentment. But Pip does not end as George does broken and bewildered and still saddled with the original guilt from which he had tried so sedulously to escape – for Lady Fareway was, as George suspects, right in accusing him: in making Adelina’s marriage he had done it for his own profit, his ‘percentage’ being the self-approval he gained from it. George ends, in spite of his life-long and resolute efforts to become of good repute, back where he started, repulsive to himself. (The logic that shaped George’s history and the compassionate insight with which it is interpreted, show that, whatever may be deduced from the obsession Dickens revealed in the sixties about his ‘readings’, his powers as a creative artist were unaffected as late as 1868 anyway.) The elements which Great Expectations and George Silverman’s Explanation have in common (such as Sylvia and Estella, Hoghton Towers and Satis House, the guilt-inducing mother and mother-surrogate, the striving of both boys towards peace of mind via intellectual cultivation and usefulness, among others) are not reworked from Great Expectations because the writer was worn out and running out of resources, but because he was pursuing what I have shown to be his regular creative method. Having succeeded with Pip, Dickens posits an alternative case: suppose Pip hadn’t had the qualities which made him able to free himself from his early conditioning and its burden of guilt and shame? (The shame is absent from George’s case.) Reversing Dickens’s progress, we can discover from George’s history what was crucial to Pip’s case, what made the book not a case-history but the history of a successful progress towards spiritual freedom. Pip, we are shown, though this seems not at all noticed, is fully human in having impulses flowing freely in different directions, and it is by ordering these according to a code he acquires by trial and error and self-examination of an open kind – the process is laid before us – that at the crisis of his life, which occurs half-way through the novel, he is able to master his immediate reactions and control them, substituting a ‘better’ mode of feeling and action, not of course by forcing them on himself as a duty, but by understanding himself and his needs more fully so that his new self is produced of free choice, a choice that is seen to be steadily prepared for, unconscious of it though Pip has been, by undercurrents of feeling since his first association with ‘his’ convict.

  Pip’s business in telling his history is to explain and chart for us what he calls in chapter VI ‘my inner self’ – it will be noted that with his outside we have no concern and the only person we get any kind of description of Pip from is Herbert on one occasion, from whom we then hear that Pip was ‘a boy whom nature and circumstances made so romantic’,4 confirming for us a deduction we ought to have made. The sense in which Great Expectations is a novel at all is certainly not to be arrived at by applying to it the ordinary conventions and assumptions derived from Victorian novels in general. The succession of events are as carefully chosen, and almost as exclusively, as those in George Silverman’s Explanation for a similar purpose, and just as in that there is in Great Expectations no love interest in the usual sense, no love scenes, and a refusal to be limited to the everyday ‘reality’ of commonsense experience. But whereas George’s is only a case-history, and explicitly a morbid one, Pip’s is so fully human as to be representative in its age. Dickens’s preoccupations in Great Expectations are with the fundamental realities of his society and focus on two questions: how was it that a sense of guilt was implanted in every child, and with what consequences? And what part does Class play in the development of such a member of that society? The novelist is concerned with the effects of these two sanctions, guilt and shame, and it is an inseparable feature of this concern that he constantly insinuates the question: what is ‘real’ in such a context? for Pip is continually in doubt and perplexity as to whether the real life is that social one with its rules of right and wrong, into which he was born, or the life of the imagination that grows out of natural feeling, into which he was inducted from the opening chapter, his first distinct memory. Of course it is in the working out and presentation of these inquiries that the value of the novel lies, in the minute particularities of the individual life which are yet so skilfully invented as to carry overtones of allegory and to be exemplary. The pertinacity and concentration of Dickens’s mind on his theme has made the two questions, in which the third is implied, so interwoven as to be inseparable eventually, and his Shakespearean genius as a creator has produced the wonderful plot which is not only exciting to read and faultless in execution but strikingly classical in its peripeteia. Every detail of the plot, moreover, expresses some aspect, some further aspect, of the theme, and one that is necessary for its full apprehension by the reader. A remarkable feature of the novel is the complexity of the irony which informs the plot from beginning to end (the rewritten end which is demonstrably superior to the one first intended and which perfectly completes the intention and meaning of the novel) – an irony which inheres in the title; yet the novel is affirmative and constructive, not, like other novels shot through with irony (e.g. Huckleberry Finn, The Confidence Man, Le Rouge et le Noir), pessimistic or nihilistic.

  And whereas Dickens’s difficulties, ever since they first appeared in Oliver Twist, in reconciling the reader’s demands for realism with his own need, for his creative intentions, of a non-rational symbolism of situation and action, a freer form of dealing with experience than his inheritance from the eighteenth-century novelists provided, he has at last, in Great Expectations, managed to reconcile realism and symbolism so that in this novel we move without protest, or uneasiness even, from the ‘real’ world of everyday experience into the non-rational life of the guilty conscience or spiritual experience, outside tim
e and place and with its own logic: somehow we are inhibited from applying the rules of common sense to it even where we hardly recognize that it is symbolic action and can not possibly be plausible real life. The novel is also remarkable for having no wide divergences of prose style either, as even Bleak House has; almost the only rhetoric is the passage where Pip tries to explain to Estella his feelings for her, where the effect of weak egotism is required and deliberately obtained through rhetorical language. There is a consistent sobriety of language without losing idiomatic identity for the characters, who range widely nevertheless, as from Jaggers to Joe, from Wemmick to Herbert, from Miss Havisham to Mrs Joe, and this personal idiom is even what distinguishes Magwitch from Orlick. While Dickens works here, as in George Silverman’s Explanation, with the minimum in word, setting and characterization, he does not sacrifice in Great Expectations scope, range, richness or imaginative complexity. This is the Dickens novel the mature and exigent are now likely to reread most often and to find more and more in each time, perhaps because it seems to have more relevance outside its own age than any other of Dickens’s creative work.

  Dickens, as I’ve argued, from Dombey onwards worked schematically by translating ideas into characters and their relations to each other, and by choosing or arranging illustrative settings for this, and he proceeded commonly by picking up an idea he had thrown out marginally before and developing it thoughtfully in a more suitable context. Thus the exemplary situation of the illegitimate child Esther who is made to feel ‘guilty yet innocent’ (by the mere fact of her birth)5 is thoroughly explored in Pip’s comparable situation which, unlike Esther’s, is not static, an initial fact only, but cumulative; while in the same novel Richard Carstone had been shown as the tragic victim of illusory expectations, ‘great’ indeed, sacrificing a real happiness and hopeful work for a delusion which falsifies all reality, the realization of which kills him. From these previous disjointed ideas Dickens now deduces a coherent and compelling analysis of what was fundamentally amiss with his society. In the world of Esther and Richard it was seen as a litigating society where base competitiveness and greed and desire for power over others ruined the innocent; now it is seen as a society that first makes and then executes criminals, with a quite arbitrary conception of justice, a society in which all are therefore guilty inescapably – there are no innocent, only those more or less aware of guilt, ranging from the blindly self-righteous to the repentantly self-accusing.