But imagine the power that Dickens had. By a few brilliant strokes of the pen, he revived and restored a popular festival and made it into a sort of social solidarity: a common defense against the Gradgrinds and the Bounderbys and the men who had been responsible for the misery of the Hungry Forties. For the first time, the downtrodden English people were able to see a celebrity, a man of wealth and fame, who was on their side. We have verbatim reports—sometimes in letters from the author himself—of the speeches he made to enthusiastic crowds in halls across the nation, just as we have the author’s cue cards for the electrifying evenings in 1869 when he staged the murder of Nancy by Bill Sikes, so it’s clear that Dickens had the sort of demagogic power that could have been dangerous in other hands. It’s also quite clear that he can’t have modeled a villain like Sikes, or a heroine like Nell, on his own character. No, he was drawing on much wider and deeper sources of potency. The main one was the sheer stubborn existence of so many people whom the system had disregarded. Begin thinking about it and you start to whisper a list to yourself: the pathetic Jo, the crossing sweeper; Smike; Mr. Micawber; Amy Dorrit; Mr. Dick—all of them with pain to feel and a life to lead, and many of them kept going (like poor Dick Swiveller) only by a certain unique sense of humor and the absurd. Dickens was able to mine this huge resource of London life, becoming its conductor and chronicler like nobody since Shakespeare himself, and always remembering, as he noted in the last stages of The Old Curiosity Shop, to “keep the child in view.”
And here’s my birthday or anniversary present to you. You can forget that sense of guilt you have. The one about being not quite sure which character is from which book. None of us really knows, and there is no shame in it. Probably Dickens himself wasn’t certain much of the time. As Jane Smiley notices in Charles Dickens:
The first ten parts of Oliver Twist were written at the same time Dickens was writing the last ten parts of Pickwick. Each section of Oliver Twist ran to about eight thousand words, and each section of Pickwick ran to about that or a bit more, so Dickens was writing ninety pages a month of these novels, while also working on other essays, articles, speeches, and plays. Evidence is that he would write the dark, ironic chapters of Oliver Twist first, then the light, comic chapters of Pickwick.
So it’s all right to confuse Podsnap and Pecksniff, or to ask whether the incident of the mutton chops in the fireplace is at Mrs. Todgers’s establishment or Mrs. Jellyby’s, and whether the missing baby belongs to either or both of them, or to Mrs. Gamp—a character over whom Dickens quite lost control. The same goes for the settings: the Circumlocution Office and the High Court of Chancery—indeed the whole vast apparatus of the Jarndyce-and-Jarndyce lawsuit—are all part of the same narrative. Cut into it at any point and you have taken a simultaneous tranche out of Sydney Carton and the “infant phenomenon.” That Dickens should have had the nerve to call himself, simply, “the Inimitable” may seem conceited. All right then, so it was.
We can’t hope to “read” all of Dickens by the light of this single candle of access to boyhood. He showed his biographer John Forster a section from the autobiography he never completed that said quite a lot about his apprenticeship to the grime and shame of the blacking factory so that Forster could write about “the attraction of repulsion” as the spring of David Copperfield, and indeed of everything he wrote. This leaves a nice little area of darkness in which we can speculate about the motives of the lad as he maneuvers for his liberty. On the other hand, we don’t have so much guidance on which to rely when it comes to the pallid, worried, wraithlike little girl who slips disturbingly through so much of Dickens’s fiction, taking here the shape of Little Dorrit, and of Florence Dombey with her brother, and then the infant Agnes and—above all—Little Nell. It seems impossible that no such rapidly evaporating diminutive female haunted Dickens’s own life at some stage. Possibly he simply and shrewdly “knew” that Victorian guilt about the endangerment of such creatures was a continuous “draw” (“Is Nell dead?” they say the New York crowds cried out as the dreaded installment of The Old Curiosity Shop was freighted to the waiting wharf), but we have to draw our own conclusions from scanty evidence.
For instance, and from a deep boiling layer of anxiety and rage that goes well beyond anything Dostoyevsky might or might not have been told about, we have the Dickens who wrote to his best female friend, Angela Burdett-Coutts, in 1857, telling her of his yearnings to “exterminate” the Indian rebels against British rule. We have the Dickens who joined his friends Thomas Carlyle and John Ruskin against Charles Darwin, T. H. Huxley, J. S. Mill, and the other Victorian humanitarians, to support Governor Eyre of Jamaica in his war of torture and execution and reprisal against the rebels of that country. We have—this is in some ways the most depressing of all—Dickens’s surreptitious hatred for Americans, even as he was making his way from one scene of their immense hospitality to the next in the 1840s. Admittedly, he had a qualified beef with those Yankee publishers who wouldn’t part with royalties, but this hardly licenses what he wrote in private to his friend the actor William Macready about America’s being “a low, coarse and mean nation” that was “driven by a herd of rascals . . . Pah! I never knew what it was to feel disgust and contempt, ’till I travelled in America.” The Dickens mean streak is quite something when you strike it.
This renders it all the more impressive when he tries to make restitution. For instance, he was obviously very impressed when a prominent Jewish lady, Mrs. Eliza Davis, wrote him an anguished letter after the 1838 publication of Oliver Twist. She was obviously terribly upset about the character of Fagin and was not even quite willing to concede that some Jews had been involved in the stolen-goods racket. At any rate, Dickens went into the matter and convinced himself that he’d been part of an injustice. He thereupon did three things: he softened the description of Fagin in later versions of the book. When he himself took part in public “readings” from the story, he downplayed the “Jewish” characteristics of the villain. And he then created a whole new character to order. In Our Mutual Friend, we encounter a Jewish moneylender named Mr. Riah, who is friendly and helpful to Lizzie Hexam and Jenny Wren. I admit that I find this personage almost too altruistic to be true, but it says something for Dickens, surely, that he would take someone who had the same occupation as the infamous Shylock, but none of Shylock’s vices, and insert him at the heart of business, at a time when vulgar prejudice was easy to stir up. The story isn’t as well known as it ought to be.
The next instance of the victory of the large spirit comes from his second visit to the United States, in 1867. Dickens did his very best to clean up after himself, once again accepting lavish hospitality, but this time not taking revenge for it in a nasty, boring novel named Martin Chuzzlewit or a cruel and hastily written travelogue named American Notes for General Circulation, in which the not-too-clever pun suggests that American currency is bankrupt. Having successfully miscalculated the exchange rate, Dickens publicly offered to include a speech of praise for the USA in reprints of his two books about the country—and actually kept the promise even after the wild applause had died away and he had gone back home to England. Possibly he would not be an American hero if he had not performed this now forgotten act. But then, the “attraction-repulsion” principle, of which he spoke so readily, seems to have meant that he could sometimes let himself be “claimed” by those—from his neglected children to the mobs that he so feared—who loved him in spite of himself.
(Vanity Fair, February 2012)
* * *
I. Publisher’s note: Subsequent to the publication of this essay, the Dickens–Dostoyevsky meeting was proved to be a hoax. See Times Literary Supplement, “When Dickens Met Dostoevsky,” April 10, 2013.
G. K. Chesterton: The Reactionary
Review of The Everyman Chesterton edited by Ian Ker; and G. K. Chesterton: A Biography by Ian Ker
PROFESSOR KER’S SPIRITED and double-barreled attempt at a rehabilitation of his cherished subj
ect is enjoyable in its own right, and takes in such matters as G. K Chesterton’s dialectical genius for paradox, the authority of the Father Brown stories in the detective genre, and the salience of Charles Dickens in the English canonical one. But for him to show that his hero was the protagonist of a superior form of English democratic virtue, Ker would have to meet me where we are at agreement: on the high quality of Chesterton’s poems. It’s at exactly this sublime point, though, that he comes undone.
In his obituary, T. S. Eliot alluded to GKC’s capacity for “first-rate journalistic balladry,” and this high praise I think almost insufficient, because it understates his magic faculty of being unforgettable. Selecting from “one of his handful of good serious poems,” Ker makes important use of “Lepanto,” the verses of which Chesterton employed to mark off a certain English Protestant memory from a Roman Catholic one. Inspired by GKC’s friend Father John O’Connor, the poem shows how the great 1571 battle of the papacy against the Ottoman Porte was, and is, a minor Rorschach blot for a discrepant national memory.
Aiming off an early line (“The cold queen of England is looking in the glass”) as a kind of establishing shot, Chesterton presses on to conscript all the images of sullen northern Protestant indifference in the face of the sultan’s mobilization:
St. Michael’s on his Mountain in the sea-roads of the north
(Don John of Austria is girt and going forth.)
Where the grey seas glitter and the sharp tides shift
And the sea-folk labour and the red sails lift.
He shakes his lance of iron and he claps his wings of stone;
The noise is gone through Normandy; the noise is gone alone;
The North is full of tangled things and texts and aching eyes,
And dead is all the innocence of anger and surprise,
And Christian killeth Christian in a narrow dusty room,
And Christian dreadeth Christ that hath a newer face of doom,
And Christian hateth Mary that God kissed in Galilee,—
But Don John of Austria is riding to the sea.
In one rather gallant stave, then, the finer aspects of Christendom detach themselves from the frigid dogmas of the Reformation, and re-proclaim the magnificence of the Crusades. In a separate but intimately related poem, “The Secret People” (the historic refrain of which is “Smile at us, pay us, pass us; but do not quite forget / For we are the people of England, that never have spoken yet”), Chesterton summarizes the woes and dispossessions of his fellow-countrymen in this way:
Our patch of glory ended; we never heard guns again.
But the squire seemed stuck in the saddle; he was foolish, as if in pain.
He leaned on a staggering lawyer, he clutched a cringing Jew,
He was stricken; it may be, after all, he was stricken at Waterloo.
Or perhaps the shades of the shaven men, whose spoil is in his house,
Come back in shining shapes at last to spoil his last carouse:
We only know the last sad squires ride slowly towards the sea,
And a new people takes the land and still it is not we.
Thus, and in a few small phrases, Chesterton hopelessly undermines his own project of defending England against the secular pallor of Protestantist greed. Instead, by making it seem as if they were to be condemned for their neutrality and abstention at Lepanto, he confines his chosen people inside the enclave that had been fashioned for them by some rather strict Catholic intellectuals: intellectuals who were later to get themselves on the wrong side of Europe’s most important quarrel by being shady on the question of fascism. (Professor Ker somewhat confidingly, if not devastatingly from his own viewpoint, adds that this poem “could hardly have been more Catholic in its view of English history.”) One might also note that Chesterton wrote his jaw-dropping line about the “cringing Jew” at a time when England was becoming preoccupied by the so-called Marconi case, involving the “scandal” of Jewish commerce in politics, and thus helped to cement the idea that there was a connection between the two. At any rate, I don’t think even the best of the poetic quotations can redeem Chestertonianism from the reactionary implications of the prosaic ones: they put one too much in mind of another critique of his work by T. S. Eliot. Reviewing him on Robert Louis Stevenson in 1927, Eliot found him suffering “under a misunderstanding that we are not likely to labor under,” “attacking misconceptions which we had not heard of and in which we are not interested,” and putting forth “a style exasperating to the last point of endurance.”
Chesterton’s overbuilt reputation for paradox was founded on his Paradox of Conservatism, which was to the effect that if you want to be a conservative, you had better not be too much of one. He gave us this, which he deemed to be a distillation of Cardinal John Henry Newman’s “theory of development”:
All conservatism is based upon the idea that if you leave things alone you leave them as they are.
But you do not. If you leave a thing alone you leave it to a torrent of change. If you leave a white post alone it will soon be a black post. If you particularly want it to be white you must be always painting it again; that is, you must be always having a revolution. Briefly, if you want the old white post you must have a new white post.
(One wishes, as on other occasions, that he had not reserved his recommendation of brevity until the last. The old buzzard could be a master of prolixity.)
So there was GKC’s enduring problem. Instead of occupying massive portions of the landscape (“there came a sound like that of Mr G. K. Chesterton falling onto a sheet of tin”) for his meditative verses and polemics, he was compelled to be active so that his fellow reactionaries could be involved in something worth calling a movement. For an instance of the operations of paradox in practice, incidentally, we may examine the founding of the only movement that ever bore the name he gave it: that of “Distributism.” This scheme for a more equitable sharing of existing property took form in late 1926, the year of class convulsion that saw the defeat of the General Strike and the mobilization and demobilization of millions of British workers. The initial founders of the Distributist League could fit into one hall in the Strand, and could not at once decide upon a unifying name. An early suggestion was “The Cow and Acres,” which sounded to GKC rather too much like a pub. Another was “The League of the Little People,” which with its air of plaintive populism also retained the aura of a fairy glen. It was later generally agreed that the only genuine disagreement concerned the question of whether a true Distributist should also be a Roman Catholic.
GKC himself took heart from the launch of this frail bark, despising the niceties of theory and nomenclature because in his own mind an essential point had already been established. Disputes about machinery and capital were to be put on one side. The English people had already been shorn of their property rights before the advent of industrial capital. This is a clear reference to the lines, in “The Secret People,” about the “men of the new religion, with their Bibles in their boots,” who had “eaten the abbey’s fruits.” The Protestant revolution, in other words, had been an act of theft and not an action of redistribution. To Chesterton’s bucolic conservatism, and his view that a certain kind of revolution was necessary to keep the counterrevolution in action, was to be added a working alliance with Roman Catholic conservatism. In the late 1920s and early 1930s, this was actually an unpromising initiative, as Chesterton failed to note when he traveled to Rome and saw Mussolini and formed the verdict that while fascism could be criticized as hypocritical to the point of flagrance, the same could surely be said of liberal democracy. This shows the moth-eaten fringe of absurdity that always hung around his political reflections, as it did his vastly draped and histrionic form.
Let us try some of his other paradoxes and see how they hold up. The first one states that those who affirm that they conduct themselves by “the spirit of Christianity” rather than its outward dogmas do in fact keep “some of the words and terminology, words like
Peace and Righteousness and Love; but they make these words stand for an atmosphere utterly alien to Christendom; they keep the letter and lose the spirit.” It would be just about as useful to say that GKC could reinfuse the higher concepts of faith by restoring them to upper and lower case: we are all fully familiar with the religious practitioner who can’t or doesn’t live up to the merits of his creed. There’s nothing innately paradoxical in that. Any solution, however, is a bit like the Golden Rule: the creed is only as morally strong as the person who happens to be uttering it. If Chesterton ever managed the feat of preserving the letter and the spirit, or knew anyone who had, or anyone who could temporarily separate letter and spirit, he would have done well to inform us. (Professor Ker, sadly, describes the above effort as “one of [Chesterton’s] most brilliant paradoxes.”)
Had he been tempted down to cases, GKC might have extracted more profit from his mischievous idea that the book of Job portrayed god as “paradoxically” atheist, but this, when compared with other and mightier speculations on that text, was a trifle thin. His American tour yielded a small handful of what one might call minor ironies or contradictions (he began ostentatiously to call himself “a democrat” and “an equal”), while on the larger point, he missed a critical chance. It was unfortunate, Chesterton asserted, that although America had “a great political idea . . . it had a small religious idea.” This came out as follows:
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