Fifty Orwell Essays

by George Orwell

with the uppishness of servants. For years PUNCH ran a series of jokes

  called 'Servant Gal-isms', all turning on the then astonishing fact that

  a servant is a human being. Dickens is sometimes guilty of this kind of

  thing himself. His books abound with the ordinary comic servants; they

  are dishonest (GREAT EXPECTATIONS), incompetent (DAVID COPPERFIELD), turn

  up their noses at good food (PICKWICK PAPERS), etc. etc.--all rather in

  the spirit of the suburban housewife with one downtrodden cook-general.

  But what is curious, in a nineteenth-century radical, is that when he

  wants to draw a sympathetic picture of a servant, he creates what is

  recognizably a feudal type. Sam Weller, Mark Tapley, Clara Peggotty are

  all of them feudal figures. They belong to the genre of the 'old family

  retainer'; they identify themselves with their master's family and are at

  once doggishly faithful and completely familiar. No doubt Mark Tapley and

  Sam Weller are derived to some extent from Smollett, and hence from

  Cervantes; but it is interesting that Dickens should have been attracted

  by such a type. Sam Weller's attitude is definitely medieval. He gets

  himself arrested in order to follow Mr. Pickwick into the Fleet, and

  afterwards refuses to get married because he feels that Mr. Pickwick

  still needs his services. There is a characteristic scene between them:

  'Vages or no vages, board or no board, lodgin' or no lodgin', Sam Veller,

  as you took from the old inn in the Borough, sticks by you, come what

  may...'

  'My good fellow', said Mr. Pickwick, when Mr. Weller had sat down again,

  rather abashed at his own enthusiasm, 'you are bound to consider the

  young woman also.'

  'I do consider the young 'ooman, sir', said Sam. 'I have considered the

  young 'ooman. I've spoke to her. I've told her how I'm sitivated; she's

  ready to vait till I'm ready, and I believe she vill. If she don't, she's

  not the young 'ooman I take her for, and I give up with readiness.'

  It is easy to imagine what the young woman would have said to this in

  real life. But notice the feudal atmosphere. Sam Weller is ready as a

  matter of course to sacrifice years of his life to his master, and he can

  also sit down in his master's presence. A modern manservant would never

  think of doing either. Dickens's views on the servant question do not get

  much beyond wishing that master and servant would love one another.

  Sloppy in OUR MUTUAL FRIEND, though a wretched failure as a character,

  represents the same kind of loyalty as Sam Weller. Such loyalty, of

  course, is natural, human, and likeable; but so was feudalism.

  What Dickens seems to be doing, as usual, is to reach out for an

  idealized version of the existing thing. He was writing at a time when

  domestic service must have seemed a completely inevitable evil. There

  were no labour-saving devices, and there was huge inequality of wealth.

  It was an age of enormous families, pretentious meals and inconvenient

  houses, when the slavey drudging fourteen hours a day in the basement

  kitchen was something too normal to be noticed. And given the FACT of

  servitude, the feudal relationship is the only tolerable one. Sam Weller

  and Mark Tapley are dream figures, no less than the Cheerybles. If there

  have got to be masters and servants, how much better that the master

  should be Mr. Pickwick and the servant should be Sam Weller. Better

  still, of course, if servants did not exist at all--but this Dickens is

  probably unable to imagine. Without a high level of mechanical

  development, human equality is not practically possible; Dickens goes to

  show that it is not imaginable either.

  IV

  It is not merely a coincidence that Dickens never writes about

  agriculture and writes endlessly about food. He was a Cockney, and London

  is the centre of the earth in rather the same sense that the belly is the

  centre of the body. It is a city of consumers, of people who are deeply

  civilized but not primarily useful. A thing that strikes one when one

  looks below the surface of Dickens's books is that, as nineteenth-century

  novelists go, he is rather ignorant. He knows very little about the way

  things really happen. At first sight this statement looks flatly untrue

  and it needs some qualification.

  Dickens had had vivid glimpses of 'low life'--life in a debtor's prison,

  for example--and he was also a popular novelist and able to write about

  ordinary people. So were all the characteristic English novelists of the

  nineteenth century. They felt at home in the world they lived in, whereas

  a writer nowadays is so hopelessly isolated that the typical modern novel

  is a novel about a novelist. Even when Joyce, for instance, spends a

  decade or so in patient efforts to make contact with the 'common man',

  his 'common man' finally turns out to be a Jew, and a bit of a highbrow

  at that. Dickens at least does not suffer from this kind of thing. He has

  no difficulty in introducing the common motives, love, ambition, avarice,

  vengeance and so forth. What he does not noticeably write about, however,

  is work.

  In Dickens's novels anything in the nature of work happens off-stage. The

  only one of his heroes who has a plausible profession is David

  Copperfield, who is first a shorthand writer and then a novelist, like

  Dickens himself. With most of the others, the way they earn their living

  is very much in the background. Pip, for instance, 'goes into business'

  in Egypt; we are not told what business, and Pip's working life occupies

  about half a page of the book. Clennam has been in some unspecified

  business in China, and later goes into another barely specified business

  with Doyce; Martin Chuzzlewit is an architect, but does not seem to get

  much time for practising. In no case do their adventures spring directly

  out of their work. Here the contrast between Dickens and, say, Trollope

  is startling. And one reason for this is undoubtedly that Dickens knows

  very little about the professions his characters are supposed to follow.

  What exactly went on in Gradgrind's factories? How did Podsnap make his

  money? How did Merdle work his swindles? One knows that Dickens could

  never follow up the details of Parliamentary elections and Stock Exchange

  rackets as Trollope could. As soon as he has to deal with trade, finance,

  industry or politics he takes refuge in vagueness, or in satire. This is

  the case even with legal processes, about which actually he must have

  known a good deal. Compare any lawsuit in Dickens with the lawsuit in

  ORLEY FARM, for instance.

  And this partly accounts for the needless ramifications of Dickens's

  novels, the awful Victorian 'plot'. It is true that not all his novels

  are alike in this. A TALE OF TWO CITIES is a very good and fairly simple

  story, and so in its different ways is HARD TIMES; but these are just the

  two which are always rejected as 'not like Dickens'--and incidentally

  they were not published in monthly numbers. The two first-person

  novels are also good stories, apart from their subplots. But

  the typical Dickens novel, NICHOLAS NICKLEBY, OLIVER TWIST, MARTIN

&n
bsp; CHUZZLEWIT, OUR MUTUAL FRIEND, always exists round a framework of

  melodrama. The last thing anyone ever remembers about the books is their

  central story. On the other hand, I suppose no one has ever read them

  without carrying the memory of individual pages to the day of his death.

  Dickens sees human beings with the most intense vividness, but sees them

  always in private life, as 'characters', not as functional members of

  society; that is to say, he sees them statically. Consequently his

  greatest success is The PICKWICK PAPERS, which is not a story at all,

  merely a series of sketches; there is little attempt at development--the

  characters simply go on and on, behaving like idiots, in a kind of

  eternity. As soon as he tries to bring his characters into action, the

  melodrama begins. He cannot make the action revolve round their ordinary

  occupations; hence the crossword puzzle of coincidences, intrigues,

  murders, disguises, buried wills, long-lost brothers, etc. etc. In the

  end even people like Squeers and Micawber get sucked into the machinery.

  Of course it would be absurd to say that Dickens is a vague or merely

  melodramatic writer. Much that he wrote is extremely factual, and in the

  power of evoking visual images he has probably never been equalled. When

  Dickens has once described something you see it for the rest of your

  life. But in a way the concreteness of his vision is a sign of what he is

  missing. For, after all, that is what the merely casual onlooker always

  sees--the outward appearance, the non-functional, the surfaces of

  things. No one who is really involved in the landscape ever sees the

  landscape. Wonderfully as he can describe an APPEARANCE, Dickens does not

  often describe a process. The vivid pictures that he succeeds in leaving

  in one's memory are nearly always the pictures of things seen in leisure

  moments, in the coffee-rooms of country inns or through the windows of a

  stage-coach; the kind of things he notices are inn-signs, brass

  door-knockers, painted jugs, the interiors of shops and private houses,

  clothes, faces and, above all, food. Everything is seen from the

  consumer-angle. When he writes about Cokestown he manages to evoke, in

  just a few paragraphs, the atmosphere of a Lancashire town as a slightly

  disgusted southern visitor would see it. 'It had a black canal in it, and

  a river that ran purple with evil-smelling dye, and vast piles of

  buildings full of windows where there was a rattling and a trembling all

  day long, where the piston of the steam-engine worked monotonously up and

  down, like the head of an elephant in a state of melancholy madness.'

  That is as near as Dickens ever gets to the machinery of the mills. An

  engineer or a cotton-broker would see it differently; but then neither of

  them would be capable of that impressionistic touch about the heads of

  the elephants.

  In a rather different sense his attitude to life is extremely unphysical.

  He is a man who lives through his eyes and ears rather than through his

  hands and muscles. Actually his habits were not so sedentary as this

  seems to imply. In spite of rather poor health and physique, he was

  active to the point of restlessness; throughout his life he was a

  remarkable walker, and he could at any rate carpenter well enough to put

  up stage scenery. But he was not one of those people who feel a need to

  use their hands. It is difficult to imagine him digging at a

  cabbage-patch, for instance. He gives no evidence of knowing anything

  about agriculture, and obviously knows nothing about any kind of game or

  sport. He has no interest in pugilism, for instance. Considering the age

  in which he was writing, it is astonishing how little physical brutality

  there is in Dickens's novels. Martin Chuzzlewit and Mark Tapley, for

  instance, behave with the most remarkable mildness towards the Americans

  who are constantly menacing them with revolvers and bowie-knives. The

  average English or American novelist would have had them handing out

  socks on the jaw and exchanging pistol-shots in all directions. Dickens

  is too decent for that; he sees the stupidity of violence, and he also

  belongs to a cautious urban class which does not deal in socks on the

  jaw, even in theory. And his attitude towards sport is mixed up with

  social feelings. In England, for mainly geographical reasons, sport,

  especially field-sports, and snobbery are inextricably mingled. English

  Socialists are often flatly incredulous when told that Lenin, for

  instance, was devoted to shooting. In their eyes, shooting, hunting,

  etc., are simply snobbish observances of the landed gentry; they forget

  that these things might appear differently in a huge virgin country like

  Russia. From Dickens's point of view almost any kind of sport is at best

  a subject for satire. Consequently one side of nineteenth-century

  life--the boxing, racing, cock-fighting, badger-digging, poaching,

  rat-catching side of life, so wonderfully embalmed in Leech's

  illustrations to Surtees--is outside his scope.

  What is more striking, in a seemingly 'progressive' radical, is that he

  is not mechanically minded. He shows no interest either in the details of

  machinery or in the things machinery can do. As Gissing remarks, Dickens

  nowhere describes a railway journey with anything like the enthusiasm he

  shows in describing journeys by stage-coach. In nearly all of his books

  one has a curious feeling that one is living in the first quarter of the

  nineteenth century, and in fact, he does tend to return to this period.

  LITTLE DORRIT, written in the middle fifties, deals with the late

  twenties; GREAT EXPECTATIONS (1861) is not dated, but evidently deals

  with the twenties and thirties. Several of the inventions and discoveries

  which have made the modern world possible (the electric telegraph, the

  breech-loading gun, India-rubber, coal gas, wood-pulp paper) first

  appeared in Dickens's lifetime, but he scarcely notes them in his books.

  Nothing is queerer than the vagueness with which he speaks of Doyce's

  'invention' in LITTLE DORRIT. It is represented as something extremely

  ingenious and revolutionary, 'of great importance to his country and his

  fellow-creatures', and it is also an important minor link in the book;

  yet we are never told what the 'invention' is! On the other hand, Doyce's

  physical appearance is hit off with the typical Dickens touch; he has a

  peculiar way of moving his thumb, a way characteristic of engineers.

  After that, Doyce is firmly anchored in one's memory; but, as usual,

  Dickens has done it by fastening on something external.

  There are people (Tennyson is an example) who lack the mechanical faculty

  but can see the social possibilities of machinery. Dickens has not this

  stamp of mind. He shows very little consciousness of the future. When he

  speaks of human progress it is usually in terms of MORAL progress--men

  growing better; probably he would never admit that men are only as good

  as their technical development allows them to be. At this point the gap

  between Dickens and his modern analogue, H.G. Wells, is at its widest.

  Wells wears the future
round his neck like a mill-stone, but Dickens's

  unscientific cast of mind is just as damaging in a different way. What it

  does is to make any POSITIVE attitude more difficult for him. He is

  hostile to the feudal, agricultural past and not in real touch with the

  industrial present. Well, then, all that remains is the future (meaning

  Science, 'progress', and so forth), which hardly enters into his

  thoughts. Therefore, while attacking everything in sight, he has no

  definable standard of comparison. As I have pointed out already, he

  attacks the current educational system with perfect justice, and yet,

  after all, he has no remedy to offer except kindlier schoolmasters. Why

  did he not indicate what a school MIGHT have been? Why did he not have

  his own sons educated according to some plan of his own, instead of

  sending them to public schools to be stuffed with Greek? Because he

  lacked that kind of imagination. He has an infallible moral sense, but

  very little intellectual curiosity. And here one comes upon something

  which really is an enormous deficiency in Dickens, something, that really

  does make the nineteenth century seem remote from us--that he has no

  idea of work.

  With the doubtful exception of David Copperfield (merely Dickens

  himself), one cannot point to a single one of his central characters who

  is primarily interested in his job. His heroes work in order to make a

  living and to marry the heroine, not because they feel a passionate

  interest in one particular subject. Martin Chuzzlewit, for instance, is

  not burning with zeal to be an architect; he might just as well be a

  doctor or a barrister. In any case, in the typical Dickens novel, the

  DEUS EX MACHINA enters with a bag of gold in the last chapter and the

  hero is absolved from further struggle. The feeling 'This is what I came

  into the world to do. Everything else is uninteresting. I will do this

  even if it means starvation', which turns men of differing temperaments

  into scientists, inventors, artists, priests, explorers and

  revolutionaries--this motif is almost entirely absent from Dickens's

  books. He himself, as is well known, worked like a slave and believed in

  his work as few novelists have ever done. But there seems to be no

  calling except novel-writing (and perhaps acting) towards which he can

  imagine this kind of devotion. And, after all, it is natural enough,

  considering his rather negative attitude towards society. In the last

  resort there is nothing he admires except common decency. Science is

  uninteresting and machinery is cruel and ugly (the heads of the

  elephants). Business is only for ruffians like Bounderby. As for

  politics--leave that to the Tite Barnacles. Really there is no objective

  except to marry the heroine, settle down, live solvently and be kind.

  And you can do that much better in private life.

  Here, perhaps, one gets a glimpse of Dickens's secret imaginative

  background. What did he think of as the most desirable way to live? When

  Martin Chuzzlewit had made it up with his uncle, when Nicholas Nickleby

  had married money, when John Harman had been enriched by Boffin what did

  they DO?

  The answer evidently is that they did nothing. Nicholas Nickleby invested

  his wife's money with the Cheerybles and 'became a rich and prosperous

  merchant', but as he immediately retired into Devonshire, we can assume

  that he did not work very hard. Mr. and Mrs. Snodgrass 'purchased and

  cultivated a small farm, more for occupation than profit.' That is the

  spirit in which most of Dickens's books end--a sort of radiant idleness.

  Where he appears to disapprove of young men who do not work (Harthouse,

  Harry Gowan, Richard Carstone, Wrayburn before his reformation) it is

  because they are cynical and immoral or because they are a burden on

  somebody else; if you are 'good', and also self-supporting, there is no

  reason why you should not spend fifty years in simply drawing your