Significantly, one way Dickens takes to show how bad his villaiits are is to show how very unsentimental they are. Fagin, a lost soul by comparison with Nancy, furnishes proof of this with his remark: “The worst of these women is, that a very little thing serves to call up some tong-forgotten feeling; and the best of them is, that it never laste’ (XIX). Of what value is a long-forgotten feeling to a practical person? In the death cell all Oliver can think of is getting the condemned man to pray; all the condemned man can think of is getting Oliver to help him escape. So too the other villain is specifically damned as ”the unsentimental Mr. Sikes.” when Nancy declares that ”if it was you that was coming out to be hung, ... I’d walk round and round the place till I dropped, if the snow was on the ground and I hadn’t a shawl to cover me.” ”And what good would that do?” inquires he. (XVI). Fagin and Sikes are as tem peramentally incapable of appreciating Oliver and Nancy as they would be incapable of relishing large parts of a Dickens novel. It is only fair to say that they would dislike this author almost as much as he dislikes them, In one early page we get the difference: Oliver sheds tears at a thought, the thought of his mother dead ”of a broken heart”; Noah Claypole sheds tears at a blow: Older persons can be measured by whether they shed tears at all.
. The brief paragraph describing Rose Maylie’s first meeting with Oliver is crucial for giving us Dickens’s ideal woman:
The honest gentleman held the curtain in his hand and looked on for a minute or so in silence. Whilst he was watching the patient thus. the younger lady glided softly past and, seating hersetf in a chair by the bedside, gathered Oliver’s hair from his face. As she stooped over him, her tears fell upon his forehead. (xxx)
Our author is never more lovingly occupied than when picturing a fair, delicately constitutioned young heroine bending tearfully over a bedside. I say delicately constitutioned advisedly, for it is all the more moving if the nurse herself gets sick: Rose is in this as in other respects ideal, since after nursing Oliver she hovers on the threshold of death herself. In fact Dickens had intended her to die, but he could not bear to carry the plan through after he had himself lost Mary Hogarth (a better choice than Georgina for the original of Rose—the adjectives of Mary’s epitaph are applied to Rose when she is stricken, “young and good”—but is not this recurring type really a response to a longing rather than to a model?). A sufficiently sensitive patient will begin to entertain anxieties over the health of his faithful nurse: it is but a step from this to the projection of her as seriously in need of care herself. So, to cite the extreme case, Little Nell worries about her grandfather, and he worries about her, and the fears of both turn out, with excruciating gradualness, to be justified. In no other Victorian novelist does sickness loom so large. Trollope’s
Doctor Thorne
gives much less attention to sickness than Oliver
Twist.
The young Julia Newberry wrote in her diary that a novelist must remember to let his characters get sick once in a while; only with reluctance, if at all, would Dickens let his get well. The illnesses are lingering illnesses.
Not only are the novels full of young and sisterly nurses like Rose (“ ‘Not aunt,’ cried Oliver, throwing his arms about her neck: ‘I’ll never call her aunt—sister, my own dear sister!’ [Ll]) and older, motherly nurses like Mrs. Bedwin: they abound in bad nurses who are punished with comedy. Oliver’s mother is prey to such a one, the bibulous Mrs. Thingummy. And Mrs. Bedwin is succeeded at night at Oliver’s bedside by a fat old snorer, for the bad nurses are never young. On the other hand, doctors, from Mr. Losberne on (or from Bob Sawyer on), are always bluff, hearty fellows. (The predatory Dr. Jobling of
Martin Chuzzlewit
is not a practitioner but a consultant, a medical officer—an important and invidious distinction.) A hypochondriac could not show greater regard for the faculty.
Whatever the rather pathological touches of melodrama, such as the “fits” of Monks (XLVI) and the “foam” of Fagin (XLVII), that remind us of the author’s incorrigible love for the theater, there is no surpassing the inspired honesty of certain bits of dialogue—such as the exchange between Noah and his beast of burden, Charlotte, as the two rest on the road in sight of London. This is one of the places where Dickens is purely realistic—neither broadly comic nor unmistakably moral. At other times we feel vaguely that we are in the presence of a lesson; while wondering about the reverberation of the words, we do know that they ring true.
“I don’t belong to them. I don’t know them. Help! help!” cried Oliver, struggling in the man’s powerful grasp.
“Help!” repeated the man. “Yes; I’ll help you, you young rascal! What books are these? You’ve been stealing ‘em, have you? Give ’em here.” With these words, the man tore the volumes from his grasp and struck him on the head.
“That’s right!” cried a looker-on from a garret window. “That’s the only way of bringing him to his senses!”
“To be sure!” cried a sleepy-faced carpenter, casting an approving look at the garret window.
“It‘II do him good!” said the two women.
“And he shall have it, too!” rejoined the man, administering another blow and seizing Oliver by the collar. “Come on, you young villain! Here, Bull‘s-eye, mind him, boy! Mind him!” (XV)
We may decide that the point of this mingling of the spectators’ voices with that of Sikes is to illustrate the ease with which ill will becomes unanimous. All snarl, the dog last. It is a scene technically and morally similar to that of Faithful’s quick conviction in
The Pilgrim‘s, Progre.ss.
The jury there was unanimous too.
Mr. Blind-man, the foreman, said, “I see clearly that this man is a heretic.”
Then said Mr. No-good, “Away with such a fellow from the earth.”
“Ay,” said Mr. Malice, “for I hate the very looks of him.”
Then said Mr. Love-lust, “I could never endure him.”
“Nor I,” said Mr. Live-loose, “for he would always be condemning my way.”
“Hang him, hang him,” said Mr. Heady.
“A sorry scrub,” said Mr. High-mind.
And so on through the twelve. This was Vanity Fair, which in the person of the more respectable part of the state looked down on the sorry scrub Oliver at board meetings early in Dickens’s story; now Bunyan’s successor is demonstrating the still more despairing truth that “a low neighborhood”—Blake’s “London”—is not the place to turn up easily a human heart either; that even the poor do not love the poor.
Dickens is Bunyan’s successor on more than one count, including the names. For again and again his names tell almost as plain a tale as Bunyan’s. There is, for example, Mr. Grimwig: his grimness is something he puts on only—we may as well learn this the easy way, since that does not preclude our learning it the hard way, too, the more complicated, novelist’s way. It is wrong to deny Bunyan any subtlety of characterization merely because he tells us in advance what sort of person he is going to portray. The greatest storytellers can afford to lay some cards on the table because their supply is not limited. If the commentators oversimplify Dickens, he gave them false encouragement by oversimplifying himself. He gives us a handle to grasp (who can forget, given the handle “Pecksniff,” that here is a hypocrite and a prude?), or a man nerism to hang on to, but these aids to memory must not regularly be mistaken for the whole conception.
When the scene shifts to the comic, Mr. Bumble is the featured player, throwing a portly shadow over such minors as the risible Bates, the Dodger (Artful to the end), and the valiant “boy” Brittles (who with Mr. Giles and the tinker and the other excited servants has the same function as Dogberry, Verges, and the Watch in
Much Ado About Nothing).
Mr. Bumble does not become downright funny until he woos and weds Mrs. Corney, but there are early signs that his villainy, though used, will be mitigated: on one occasion he appears to be not completely unmoved by Oliver’s tears, and in general he blusters more than he beats. In his brass buttons and plush knee breeches he has the pride of office of a rooster: his very hat is cocked. But this Chanticleer is undone by Pertelote in a wooing scene—and later in domestic scenes—that compare with the best of Pickwick. The scene before marriage is crystallized in one parenthesis, when the beadle makes so bold as to mention to “you” who “have been a married woman, ma‘am” the brazen arrival at the overseer’s door of a beggar “with hardly a rag upon his back”: “(here Mrs. Corney looked at the floor).” To find the like of this, one has to go back to Restoration comedy. In Wycherley’s
The Country Wife,
Lady Fidget, who, it goes without saying, is about to be flagrantly unfaithful to her husband, demurs when he happens to begin a sentence with the words, “To tell you the naked truth—”: “Fy, Sir Jasper! do not use that word naked.” Where Wycherley is stylizing, Dickens is breathing the breath of life.
We associate coincidence with the drama, too. The smallness and the tension of the stage call for fateful meetings between characters who in the wide world ought never to run into each other. So there has been strident objection to the turn of plot whereby the book-lover whom Oliver is accused of pickpocketing is the one person in London who has at home, where the convalescent orphan can dreamily contemplate it, a picture of that boy’s mother. As if that were not enough, the second time he is required to assist in a robbery he breaks into the house where his own aunt is living.
The reader’s own experience of “coincidences” (what used to be called providence) will of course vary not only from individual to individual but from city to city and time to time. The chances of two persons happening to meet in London today are mathematically smaller than they were in 1837. But this is hardly a promising line of argument. It would be better to draw the skeptic up short with the irrefutable suggestion that his experience, not Dickens‘s-story, is at fault. The author’s life exhibited some astonishing coincidences. Is it for nothing that London has been called “the city of encounters”? The hero of Wilkie Collins’
The Moonstone
says drily to a skeptical steward whose life had been too sheltered: “Nothing in this world, Betteredge, is probable unless it appeals to our own trumpery experience; and we only believe in a romance when we see it in a newspaper.” What about the use made of Oliver by Sikes and Crackit in the burglary of the Maylies? Those who require newspapers to assist their belief can be satisfied here, as in many another case:
The New York Times
of October 2, 1951, carried this headline on the front page: “Boy, 6, Tool of Two Older Lads, Held as Jersey Skylight Burglar.” Or, if we are antiquarians, we can turn to the
Gentleman’s Magazine
of March 25, 1765, where the latest news was, “that a man who kept a public house near Fleet-Market had a club of boys, whom he instructed in picking pockets, and other iniquitous practices; beginning first with teaching them to pick a handkerchief out of his own pocket, and next his watch.... ”
But resort to documentation is, admittedly, trumpery, to answer a trumpery criticism. It argues neither for nor against the total impression that
Oliver Twist,
amidst all the accouter ments of a novel, has the primitive appeal of a fairy tale; it forms one of those basic stories that are not forgotten because they were partly familiar before they were read, being the stuff of young dreams and fears.
—EDWARD LE COMTE
Columbia University
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY
WORKS BY CHARLES DICKENS
Sketches by Boz,
1836, 1839 Sketches and Stories
The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club,
1837 Novel
Oliver Twist; or, the Parish Boy’s Progress,
1838 Novel
The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby,
1839 Novel
The Old Curiosity Shop,
1841 Novel
Barnaby Rudge,
1841 Novel
American Notes: For General Circulation,
1842 Travel Book
Christmas Carol:
in Prose, 1843 Christmas Book
The Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit,
1844 Novel
The Chimes,
1844 Christmas Book
The Cricket on the Hearth,
1845 Christmas Book
Pictures from Italy,
1846 Travel Book
The-Battle of Life: A Love Story,
1846 Christmas Book
Dealings with the Firm of Dombey. and Son,
1848 Novel
The Haunted Man and the Ghost’s Bargain,
1848 Christmas Book
The Personal History of David Copperfield,
1850 Novel
A Child’s History of England,
1852, 1853, 1854 History
Bleak House,
1853 Novel
Hard Times: For These Times,
1854 Novel
Little Dorrit,
1857 Novel
The Lazy Tour of Two Idle Apprentices
(with Wilkie Collins), 1857 Travel Book
Reprinted Pieces,
1858 Collection of Magazine Articles
A Tale of Two Cities,
1859 Novel
Great Expectations,
1861 Novel
The Uncommercial Traveler,
1861, 1868 Collection of Magazine Articles
Our Mutual Friend,
1865 Novel
“George Silverman’s Explanation,” 1868 Story
The Mystery of Edwin Drood
(unfinished), 1870 Novel
BIOGRAPHY AND CRITICISM
Ackroyd, Peter.
Dickens.
New York and London: HarperCol lins, 1990.
Andrews, Malcolm.
Dickens and the Grown-up Child.
London: Macmillan, 1994.
Bloom, Harold, ed.
Charles Dickens’s
Bleak House. Modem Critical Interpretations. New York: Chelsea House, 1987.
Butt, John, and Kathleen Tillotson.
Dickens at Work.
Fairlawn, NJ: Essential Books, 1958.
Chesterton, G. K.
Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens.
New York: Dutton, 1911.