The Mystery of Charles Dickens

by A. N. Wilson

  Privately, Dean Stanley would have perhaps empathized with the perception of G. K. Chesterton that ‘Even if we are not interested in Dickens as a great event in English literature, we must still be interested in him as a great event in English history… He did what no English statesman, perhaps, has really done; he called out the people. He was popular in a sense of which we moderns have not even a notion.’8 Stanley, after all, as well as being an aristocrat and a member of the Establishment, had known the terrors of English childhood, when his parents had sent him to the brutal world of Rugby School in 1829, thirteen years old, short of stature, frail, and clad, by his heedless innocent mother, in a blue coat with many buttons, grey trousers, adorned by a pink watch-ribbon. The boys immediately nicknamed him Nancy,9 and he was destined to be a character in a novel, Tom Brown’s Schooldays. Thomas Hughes did not even bother to change his name – little Arthur, who dares to kneel down to say his prayers before getting into his cold dormitory bed. The sheer misery of being a child, and its terror… No reader of Dickens, regardless of class, can miss this, nor can any reader respond to it in a purely ‘literary’ way.

  Gwen Watkins ended one of the best twentieth-century expositions of the mystery – Dickens in Search of Himself – with these words:

  John Carey [in The Violent Effigy] sees Dickens as ‘essentially a comic writer’, but it would be true to say that he is essentially a tragic writer, since in all but a few of his books he shows us what it feels like to be, or to have been, a child who can never find what it has never been given, its birthright of love. He has illuminated for us the sufferings of the empty heart, but it is from his own heart that the light streams.10

  Reading these words of Gwen Watkins, written in 1987, I am looking once again at my eight- or nine-year-old self, painfully thin, my bottom and back covered in the bruises and welts inflicted by a sadist teacher, sitting in a classroom with twenty or so other little boys. In retrospect, it is hard to believe that these children are sitting there in the 1960s. John F. Kennedy is president of the US, and the Beatles have told the world that ‘All You Need is Love’. But there we sit, indistinguishable, really, from Victorian, or at least Edwardian, children. The pictures on the wall – a print of General Gordon’s Last Stand, taken from George William Joy’s painting, which hangs in Leeds City Art Gallery, and a portrait of Lord Roberts dating from the time of the Boer War – can give us no indication that we are in fact living in a country whose Empire is all but dismantled. Mephy, the teacher who is in charge of the stationery cupboard, as well as the English master, has been round the class making sure that each ceramic ink-pot, the size of a small eggcup, has been filled with viscous blue ink, and that each child has in front of him the wooden pen-holder, fixed with a steel nib, with which we write our lessons. No ballpoint pens for us – and the felt-tipped pen had not been heard of.

  The idea of our all being at that school was not, in the minds of our mothers and fathers at least, to punish us for being born, though we could have been forgiven for thinking so. We were among the privileged few, the privately educated. We had been taken away from our families aged seven, and for the last few years had been living in what was in effect a concentration camp run by sexual perverts. There were, however, bright lights. The English lessons were among them, even though – unlike my elder brother, who doted on our teacher – I found Mephy, real name F. N. Sweet, sinister. He was not the teacher who molested us, but by this stage I distrusted all grown-ups, and the skill with which Mephy impersonated Fagin, in particular, also Wackford Squeers, was all too convincing. For the writing part of the lesson was over and we opened our books to excerpts from Oliver Twist and Nicholas Nickleby.

  He was called Mephy because, in the remote past – decades before any of us arrived at the school, or, indeed, on the earth – he had had red hair. Mephistopheles, the Red Devil. Mephy. Now he was shaven bald, and his nobbly old head was as pale as the white stubble that sprang from it. His craggy face was framed with tortoiseshell spectacles when he read aloud, or, more often, simply recited, for he knew some of the scenes by heart – Fagin teaching the urchins how to pick pockets, or Wackford Squeers teaching the Dotheboys pupils how to read and write. ‘We go upon the practical mode of teaching, Nickleby; the regular education system. C-l-ea-n, clean, verb active, to make bright, to scour. W-i-n-, win, d-e-r, der, winder, a casement. When a boy knows this out of a book, he goes and does it.’ [NN 8]

  There was something truly thrilling/horrific about the way in which Mephy, with enormous strides, paced about the room pretending to be Fagin, while also making his left hand enact that of the Artful Dodger, snatching handkerchiefs from the pocket of his capacious oatmeal tweed coat. Mephy’s voice was croaky, and rather harsh. He was not a kind teacher, and we were ruled as fiercely in his lessons as in all the others. Indeed, for he must have known the true character of our headmaster and his appalling wife and daughter, he seemed entirely to endorse the regime. My father believed Mephy was a jailbird, attributing his pallor to the fact that he had been behind bars, but while he might have been in prison (one assumes for the usual reasons in those days – but perhaps he had been a ‘conshie’), his cheeks had had decades of the fresh air of Great Malvern to get a little bloom into them and they remained ashen-white.

  Yet without those lessons, and that introduction to Dickens, my spirit would have gone under. We were not given the whole of Oliver Twist or Nicholas Nickleby to read, but little school editions, composed of a few chapters. Dickens brought me redemption at that time, in part because his books, what tiny fragments of them I had experienced, were compulsive reading. Apart from these little Dickensian extract-books, I found reading distasteful. The school forbade us to read any book that was not in the school library, and the only fiction on offer there was either by G. A. Henty or by Captain W. E. Johns (With Kitchener in the Sudan or Biggles). I have remained counter-suggestible to this day and scarcely ever manage to finish books that have been recommended to me. Henty and Biggles were unreadable. One of the many occasions when I was thrashed, by a headmaster who was visibly masturbating, usually inside his trousers, but not always inside, as he did it – an activity that was mysterious to me: what on earth was he doing? – was for reading a book that I had brought back to school in my suitcase, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. The distaste, and horror, one felt while these punishments went on was exacerbated by the knowledge that those of us who had proved attractive to the headmaster – and we were wise enough to know that these gratuitous canings were in their repellent way a form of special treatment, reserved for favourites – would have to endure persecution from the man’s wife and daughter. The tortures they dreamed up – discovering your least-favourite dish, making you eat it until you vomited, and then making you eat the vomit; locking you in a cage and, after a few hours, assembling an audience of the other boys to wait until you wet yourself – were far worse, really, than the antics of the paedophile headmaster. He, presumably, was out of control, unlike the womenfolk of his household: the wife – who was the daughter of the headmaster of Harrow, a rather beautiful woman in a gipsy kind of way – was hideously in control of herself and of everyone else, while the daughter, a plump, plain girl, would have enjoyed life could she have gone back a few decades and crossed the Continent to gain employment as a concentration-camp guard.

  Only later, when time mercifully moved on and I went to a school for older children, where no such horrors were experienced, did I devote my evenings to reading the novels in their entirety and, indeed, I think I read the whole of Dickens then, with the exception of Pickwick – a book for which I was not ready. Only much later in life, in my forties, did I discover it, now one of my very favourites. I can still remember my astonishment when another teenaged boy, seeing me absorbed in one of the novels, expressed the view that they were not ‘realistic’. Up to that point, this idea had not occurred to me. Nearly all the grown-ups in my family, and among the teaching staff, appeared to me like Dickensian ‘characters’,
repeating their leitmotifs and showing no inclination to escape self-parody. Having passed into a more pretentious phase of readership, in which I supposed that Dickens’s way of depicting human character was too crude to be able to arrive at the truth, I discovered, as already mentioned, the judgement of Elizabeth Bowen/Iseult in Eva Trout and came to my senses again. Had I known it, I would have echoed George Santayana: ‘When people say that Dickens exaggerates, it seems to me that they can have no eyes and no ears. They probably only have notions of what things and people are; they accept them conventionally at their diplomatic value.’11

  My adolescence took place twenty and more years after the ending of the Second World War, but the BBC in those days still occasionally broadcast on British radio extracts from the programmes that had been popular years before we were born. Round the Horne. The Navy Lark. The Glums. ITMA. ‘It’s bein’ so cheerful, that keeps me goin’, ‘Can I do yer now, Sir?’ and the gales of audience laughter. Those who exploded with mirth were living on minimal rations, hearing almost every month the news that their young menfolk were dying in the most terrible battles all over the world, while they themselves made their way to poorly paid work through the rubble and ruin of bombed-out cities, and their way home in the evening through blacked out-streets. ‘The great thing abaht the Blitz is – it takes yer mind off the war.’ (A storm of merriment, as they contemplated, or rather did not contemplate, the destruction of their houses, possessions and loved ones.)

  Since those terrible times, for reasons too obvious to expound, the Western world has realized that none of this will quite ‘do’. That generation who came home from the wars, to all the countries of the world, and ‘never talked about it’ were, we can now suspect, suffering from PTSD. As, presumably, have all the soldiers and sailors the world has ever known. Those who torment children – which, by modern standards, includes the high proportion of those who have ever taught them since the beginning of time (if by ‘torment’ you mean impose corporal punishment) – are made the objects of public hatred, suspended from their posts. Their victims are offered therapy. Many of those who suffered sexual and physical abuse as children are very often afflicted for life, so those of us who did so are encouraged to think that this is true of us all.

  It is certainly not part of my task in this book to pronounce upon whether any of this is a good thing or a bad thing. This book, however, is about a man who was able to draw forth tears and laughter from readers and audiences to a prodigious degree. His work has passages of lyricism, descriptive force, comedy and pathos that have no parallels in the English language. It has been the surely rather obvious contention of this book that this all sprang from the inner, hidden fount of Dickens’s own suffering, and the reason he meant so much to his contemporaries – and survives, meaning so much to us – is that we respond to him differently. We respond to him because he has been there before us, though nothing or almost nothing gives a hint of this, unless it is the twinkle that Henry Fielding Dickens saw in his father’s eye during that last Christmas.

  Certainly when I look at my own childhood, which had moments of abject terror and hopelessness, I realize that Dickens not only helped me through those moments – walled up, aged seven to thirteen, in an establishment that made the existence of the pupils at Dotheboys seem actually enviable – but also helped me in my horror-stricken recollection of those times. He performed, as Gwen Watkins says, the function of the tragedian, if that is to provide katharsis through fear and pity. Yet John Carey was surely right to say that Dickens did so, not by writing tragedy, but by writing comedy. I survived my own childhood traumas by realizing that my tormentors were not only figures of pure horror, but also that they were as comic as Wackford Squeers, as grotesque as Fagin, though as cruel as Mr Murdstone.

  Katharsis through tears, but not through tears alone: that was what Dickens offered – offers – me, and millions upon millions of readers. That is why of all the nineteenth-century English writers, in prose or rhyme, he has remained the most popular. The streets of Mumbai and Lagos, the banlieue of Paris and Brussels, the housing estates of wrecked Britain and the Badlands of American cities are still scenes where terror and violence are the daily experience of the child. And every week, somewhere around the world, a prelate, a youth leader, an esteemed teacher, now advanced in years, is brought into the dock and made to answer for what he ‘did’ to children, all those years ago.

  Philip Larkin, to judge from his letters, read Dickens pretty frequently, throughout his life, despite his misgivings.

  Better the Dickens you know than the Dickens you don’t know – on the whole I enjoyed [Great Expectations]. But I should like to say something about this ‘irrepressible vitality’, this ‘throwing a handful of characters on the fire when it burns low’, in fact the whole Dickens method – it strikes me as being less ebullient, creative, vital, than hectic, nervy, panic-stricken. If he were a person I should say ‘you don’t have to entertain me, you know. I’m quite happy sitting here.’ This jerking of your attention, with queer names, queer characters, aggressive rhythms, piling on adjectives – seems to me to betray basic insecurity in his relation with the reader. How serenely Trollope, for instance, compares. I say in all seriousness that, say what you like about Dickens as an entertainer, he cannot be considered a real writer at all; not a real novelist. His is the garish, gaslit, melodramatic barn (writing that phrase makes me wonder if I’m right!) where the yokels gape: outside is the calm, measureless world, where the characters of Eliot, Trollope, Austen, Hardy (most of them) and Lawrence (some of them) have their being. However, I much enjoyed G. E. & may try another soon.12

  Any intelligent reader can see immediately what Larkin is saying here, they can recognize the phenomenon he is describing, though – as a matter of personal preference – we might prefer every second spent in the garish, gaslit barn with the Enchanter to the ‘serene’ grown-ups who were Larkin’s preferred reading. And the Larkinian judgement is what we should expect from one who, with his other friends in what came to be known as ‘The Movement’, eschewed mythology, legend, ‘style’, the ‘difficult’; who professed to prefer jazz to Beethoven. (Perhaps really did. How could anyone?)

  The novelists Larkin lists – certainly those who were more or less Dickens’s contemporaries – are the sorts of writer who take us on a journey, either by telling us a story, or by speaking of a world outside ourselves, or – as in the case of Tolstoy – suggesting the spiritual or intellectual journey of the protagonists. At its most basic, this type of narrative keeps us turning the pages by making us wonder what will happen next. Trollope, however thin the gruel he served up, was the absolute master of making us know what would happen next. It is like the pappy experience of being addicted to a TV soap and, when a writer has the skill to the advanced degree it was possessed by Anthony Trollope, it is not to be sneezed at.

  Dickens did not aim for this effect, any more than he was trying to depict, as Larkin seems to think (probably rightly; George Eliot, Trollope and co. were trying), the realistic nineteenth-century world, if by that is meant the middle- and upper-class world of hunts, castles, dinners, parliaments and cathedrals.

  There is, of course, another category of writer altogether, and that is the stylist, the inventor of their own world. They include the creators of fantasy such as Hesse or Bulgakov, or those who are so linguistically acrobatic that we abide in their world – Nabokov, Firbank – even though it is not, obviously at any rate, trying to tell us anything about the world outside ‘the barn’.

  One easily sees why a leading light in ‘The Movement’ – everyday language, a blokeish suspicion of foreign culture or special effects – would fight shy of much of this sort of thing unless it came clearly labelled. (Larkin’s friend Kingsley Amis, for example, was a keen aficionado of science fiction.) I would put into this category – of authors whom we read not because they provide us with a mirror on the world, but because they create a theatrical show, a firework display, a mannered, perfec
tly formed ‘world’ inhabiting its own stylistic universe – figures as diverse as P. G. Wodehouse, Raymond Chandler or, among the poets, Wallace Stevens, and – in spite of Larkin finding her to inhabit the ‘calm measureless world’ – Jane Austen, for I’d submit that we read her more because of her ‘voice’ than because she depicts the ‘world’, still less the ‘world which is the world of all of us’.

  If forced to say that Dickens was one or the other sort of writer – this mannered second sort who creates, by language or other effect, their own world, and the others, who take us on a journey through what purports to be the real world – we should surely place Dickens with the mannerists, with the stylists. He sure as heck isn’t a realist – is he? ‘His is the garish, gaslit, melodramatic barn (writing that phrase makes me wonder if I’m right!) where the yokels gape.’

  This book has been written by a gaping yokel who now feels the need to explain what happens when we become absorbed in a Dickens novel, or find ourselves at large in ‘the Dickens world’.

  To answer Philip Larkin, I am going back to that open grave in Westminster Abbey, where the crowds filed past. Walking there, I recollect my own friendship with the poet. When we attended John Betjeman’s memorial service in the Abbey together, Larkin told me that he expected it would not be long before he, too, had a service there in his honour. It was his way of saying he was dying, which he was, but my first thought was – ‘You must be joking.’ His gloomy bachelor poems, about stubbing out cigarettes in lonely rented rooms, or playing jazz records in his mother’s front parlour in Leicester, were accomplished with a technical skill that was awe-inspiring, but… the Abbey? How wrong I was, as, a couple of years later, I stood there with thousands of other people, to whom Philip Larkin’s poetry – of loss and loneliness, of unbelief, of social fear, of being ‘fucked up’ by their parents, and of not being able to sustain satisfactory relationships, however hard you try ‘talking in bed’; above all, his poems that confront the ignominy of old age and the finality of death – all spoke to a post-religious generation in the most direct way possible.