A Little History of Literature (18 page)

Readers in the nineteenth century reacted, by and large, rather differently from us. They did not feel any obligation to hold back their emotions. We like to think we are made of sterner stuff, or that we are more sophisticated readers of literature. Hence Oscar Wilde's much recycled wisecrack, ‘One would need a heart of stone not to laugh at the death of Little Nell’. Perhaps we chuckle at the funnier scenes in Dickens's fiction (describing Mr Micawber's perennial struggle with the debt collector, for example); our eyes may moisten a little at the sadder scenes (the long-lingering death of Paul Dombey, for example); but we generally keep a tight control on our emotions. It makes us more objective and rational in our literary judgements. Does it make us better readers? Arguably not.

We are not Victorians, but there are five good arguments why modern readers should also see that Dickens is the greatest ever novelist.

First is that Dickens was, over the course of his long writing career, uniquely inventive. While still in his early twenties, he had a huge success with his first novel,
The Pickwick Papers
. Like all his novels, it first appeared in instalments; monthly episodes started appearing in April 1836 under the title
The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club
. Lesser writers would have written a string of novels along the same Pickwickian lines, but Dickens, the most restless of writers, immediately moved on to a very different kind of novel with
Oliver Twist
(1837–38). This is a dark, angry and politically-engaged work, quite different from the comic adventures of Mr Samuel Pickwick. Its anger is directed as much
towards the British government as the British reading public. This tale of a workhouse boy turned pickpocket turned burglar, is the first of his ‘social problem’ novels in which he attacked abuses of the day. In the fiction that followed, Dickens carved out other new kinds of novel. The first detective in English fiction, for instance, is found in
Bleak House
, and with him the detective novel was born.

Dickens pioneered the ‘autobiographical novel’, in which the novelist takes himself as subject, with
David Copperfield
(1849–50) and
Great Expectations
(1860–61). We learn more about Dickens the man in those two novels than we do from any of the eighty-or-so biographies that have been written about him.

As he moved from novel to novel we can see him perfecting his work technically, particularly in his mastery over plot. The serialist's motto (as Dickens's fellow novelist Wilkie Collins put it) was: ‘Make 'em laugh. Make 'em cry. Make 'em
wait
.’ By the middle of his career, when he was taking immense pains over the construction of his novels, Dickens had become a master of suspense. He knew exactly how to keep the reader waiting, eagerly purchasing the next weekly or monthly issue to find out what happened next. In a late novel, such as
Little Dorrit
(1855–57), Dickens ‘plays’ the reader expertly, and we enjoy being played with. Dock-workers in the New York harbour, we are told, yelled out to the ship bringing early copies of
The Old Curiosity Shop
, ‘Is she [Little Nell] dead?’

Dickens's fiction moves through many authorial moods over the years, generally becoming less comic, something about which his contemporaries complained – they wanted more Pickwick jollities. But as his fiction darkened, Dickens became increasingly fascinated by the power of symbolism, and his work became more ‘poetic’ in that respect. In the late novel
Our Mutual Friend
(1864–65), for example, the River Thames is the dominant symbol. (All the later novels have one.) It baptises London with its incoming tide and carries away the city's filth (implying its sin) with the outgoing tide. The hero of the novel is drowned and ‘reborn’ (with a different identity) in the river. This poetic dimension in the late novels enriches Dickens's texts but, more importantly, it opened ways for other novelists to follow and explore. Like all the great writers of
literature, Dickens did not just write great fiction, he made great fiction, by other hands, possible.

A second reason for Dickens's greatness is that he was the first novelist not merely to make children the heroes and heroines of his fiction (as in
Oliver Twist
) but also to make his reader appreciate how vulnerable and easily bruised the child is, and how unlike an adult's is the child's-eye view of the world. When he was still a young man, anticipating that his would not be a long life (it wasn't), he chose his close friend John Forster to be his biographer. To Forster Dickens entrusted a few sheets of paper describing what he called ‘the secret agony of my soul’. These described Dickens's own acute sufferings as a child. His father, an admiralty clerk, could never manage money and ended up in the Marshalsea, a debtors' prison. This was the setting of
Little Dorrit
, a location familiar to Dickens as an eleven-year-old boy. While his father languished behind bars, he was put to work sticking labels on jars of boot-blacking in a rat-infested factory on the Thames, for just six shillings a week. It was brutal but, more than anything, it was the shame that scorched him. The scars never healed. The cleverest of boys, Dickens never got the education his cleverness deserved. His schooling was grossly disturbed and it finished when he was fifteen. That shame too was a burden. He was routinely dismissed as ‘low’ and ‘vulgar’ by contemporaries, even in his obituary in
The Times
. Underlying Dickens's central concern with children is the belief that they are not merely little adults but have something that all adults should aspire to repossess. Dickens (who wrote a
Life of Christ
for his own children) was a firm believer in Jesus's dictum, ‘Except ye become as children ye shall not enter the kingdom of heaven’.

In fact, Dickens's early life was a heroic feat of self-education and self-improvement. He got work as an office clerk, learned shorthand, and was taken on as a journalist reporting on House of Commons debates. He was to become a mirror of his changing age – the third reason we consider him a great writer. No novelist has been more sensitive to his own times than Dickens. Historically his was a period of explosive growth in London. The city was
doubling in population every ten years, creating both huge leaps forward and huge municipal crises. Thirteen of Dickens's fourteen major novels are set or largely set in London. The one that isn't –
Hard Times
(1854) – is a story of strike and strife in the area around Manchester (‘the workshop of the world’, as it was called). Dickens had his finger firmly on the pulse of England. He realised the huge change that the railway network would bring as it spread across the country in the 1840s, replacing the old (and, for Dickens, romantic) stagecoach.
Dombey and Son
(1848) deals centrally with the horribly disruptive yet wonderfully interconnected new world that the railway brought with it.

Our fourth point. It was not simply the fact that Dickens's fiction
reflected
social change. He was the first novelist to appreciate that fiction itself could
change
the world. It could enlighten, it could expose, it could advocate. A rather surprising example of Dickens the reformer can be found in the preface to
Martin Chuzzlewit
, where he says that in all his fiction he has tried to show the need to ‘improve public sanitation’. It seems an odd thing to say to readers about to embark on a novel like, say,
Bleak House
. But look for a moment at the famous opening to that novel:

In a word, ‘filth’ everywhere. (That ‘mud’ in the street is largely horse droppings and human waste.) So much filth in the air that it has blocked out the sun. And filth's inevitable companion is sickness. There is disease everywhere in the novel – it kills poor little Jo the child street-sweeper, and disfigures the heroine. The
first instalments of
Bleak House
appeared in 1852. Six years later, the engineer Joseph Bazalgette began construction of the sewer system under the London streets. That ‘mud’ would disappear. It's not far-fetched to say that Dickens, although he never dug a spade into the London soil, or lifted a flagstone, or soldered a metal pipe, helped in the great Victorian sanitary reform. We still read
Bleak House
. Every London bookstore will have copies on sale. And city dwellers still walk – most of them wholly unconsciously – over the same sewer system that our Victorian predecessors laid under our feet.

Lastly, and most importantly, one of the things that gives Dickens's novels their everlasting appeal is his honest belief in the essential goodness of people. Us, that is. There are villains (it would be hard to mount a defence for murderous Bill Sikes in
Oliver Twist
) but in general Dickens has huge faith in humanity – he always felt that people were good at heart. This faith in human goodness is the central feature in his most famous work,
A Christmas Carol
(1843). Ebenezer Scrooge is a hard-hearted skinflint who simply does not care if poor people die in the street outside his door. Are there no workhouses, he asks? But even Scrooge, when his heart is touched, can become a benevolent person – a second father to crippled Tiny Tim and a generous employer of Tim's father, Bob Cratchit. This ‘change of heart’ is an all-important moment in most of Dickens's narratives. And – if you'd asked him and he'd felt able to give a straightforward answer – Dickens would probably have said that the aim of all his writing, both his fiction and his journalism, was to change or, at least, ‘soften’ hearts. More than most writers, he succeeds. Even today.

Charles Dickens would have been the first to admit that he was not, in every respect, a perfect man. Although most of his novels end with happy marriage, he himself was not the best of husbands or fathers. After his wife of twenty years had borne him ten children he got rid of her and took up with someone twenty years his junior, who suited him better. Even by Victorian standards Dickens was a man who was occasionally wrongheaded in his social views, attitudes and prejudices. But this wrongheadedness is more than
outweighed by his wholly admirable beliefs in progress and the human race's ability to make a better world – if their ‘hearts’ are in it. Our world is what it is, a better place than what it was, thanks, in part, to Charles Dickens. That, ultimately, is why his novels are great. ‘Quite so’, as the Inimitable would say (probably grumpily, if you had ever dared to think otherwise).

CHAPTER
19

Life in Literature

T
HE
B
RONTËS

The lives of the Brontë sisters – Charlotte (1816–55), Emily (1818–48) and Anne (1820–49) – could themselves serve as the plot of a sensational novel. They were the daughters of a remarkable self-made man, born Patrick Prunty, one of ten children of a dirt-poor Irish farmer. By dint of native cleverness, work and a lot of good luck, Patrick got himself to Cambridge University. On graduation he was ordained into the Church of England and prudently changed his name to Brontë, one of the titles of Lord Nelson. Not everyone liked the Irish at the time – there were regular uprisings and bloodshed. The Revd Brontë married well, and in 1820 got himself a living (as religious postings were called) in Yorkshire, on the Pennine Moors not far from Keighley, a mill town producing textiles. The family lived with wild nature on one side, the Industrial Revolution on the other.

The ‘living’ was misnamed. The handsome parsonage at Haworth was a place of death. Patrick's wife, worn out by six pregnancies, died in her mid-thirties, when Anne was a baby. The two eldest daughters died in childhood. Of the three sisters who survived, none
reached forty – Charlotte lived longest, to just short of her thirty-ninth birthday. The son, and great hope of the family, Branwell, went to the bad, took to drink and drugs, and died, raving, aged thirty-one. All the children either died, or were fatally weakened, by ‘consumption’ (as tuberculosis was called at the time). Ironically their father, poor man, outlived them all. Was it for this he had dragged himself up by his bootstraps?

Had the Brontë family been as healthy, happy, prosperous and long-lived as that other famous parson's daughter, Jane Austen (who was forty-one when she died), how different would their unwritten fiction have been, in that unlived decade? Very. That, at least, would seem undeniable. They were all of them developing as artists at phenomenal speed, almost up to the last moments of their short lives.