Trying to Save Piggy Sneed (39 page)

1. Why I Like Charles Dickens; Why Some People Don't

Great Expectations
is the first novel I read that made me wish I had written it; it is the novel that made me want to be a novelist — specifically, to move a reader as I was moved then. I believe that
Great Expectations
has the most wonderful and most perfectly worked-out plot for a novel in the English language; at the same time, it never deviates from its intention to move you to laughter and to tears. But there is more than one thing about this novel that some people don't like — and there is one thing in particular that they don't like about Dickens in general. Here is the thing highest on the list that they don't like: the intention of a novel by Charles Dickens is to move you emotionally, not intellectually; and it is by emotional means that Dickens intends to influence you socially. Dickens is not an analyst; his writing is not analytical — although it can be didactic. His genius is descriptive; he can describe a thing so vividly — and so influentially — that no one can look at that thing in the same way again.

You cannot encounter the prisons in Dickens's novels and ever again feel completely self-righteous about prisoners being where they belong; you cannot encounter a lawyer of Mr. Jaggers's terrifying ambiguity and ever again put yourself willingly in a lawyer's hands—Jaggers, although only a minor character in
Great Expectations
, may be our literature's greatest indictment of living by abstract rules. Dickens has even provided me with a lasting vision of a critic; he is Bentley Drummle, “the next heir but one to a baronetcy,” and “so sulky a fellow that he even took up a book as if its writer had done him an injury.”

Although his personal experiences with social evil had been brief and youthful, they never ceased to haunt Dickens — the humiliation of his father in the debtors' prison at Marshalsea; his own three months' labor (at age 11) in a blacking warehouse at Hungerford Stairs, pasting labels on bottles; and because of his father's money problems, the family's several moves — especially, when Charles was nine, to meaner accommodations in Chatham, and shortly thereafter, away from the Chatham of his childhood. “I thought that life was sloppier than I expected to find it,” he wrote. Yet his imagination was never impoverished; in
David Copperfield
, he wrote (remembering his life as a reader in his attic room at St. Mary's Place, Chatham), “I have been Tom Jones (a child's Tom Jones, a harmless creature).” He had been Don Quixote, too — and all the even less likely heroes of the Victorian fairy tales of his time. As Harry Stone has written: “It is hard to know which came first, Dickens's interest in fairy tales or his conditioning by them.” Dickens's fine biographer, Edgar Johnson, describes the sources of the author's imagination similarly, claiming further that Dickens had devised “a new literary form, a kind of fairy tale that is at once humorous, heroic, and realistic.”

The Chatham of Dickens's childhood is sharply recalled in
Great Expectations
— in the churchyard graves he could see from his attic room, and in the black convict hulk, “like a wicked Noah's ark,” which he saw looming offshore on the boating trips he took up the Medway to the Thames; that is where he saw his first convicts, too. So much of the landscape of
Great Expectations
is Chatham's landscape: the foggy marshes, the river mist; and his real-life model for the Blue Boar was there in nearby Rochester, and Uncle Pumblechook's house was there — and Satis House, where Miss Havisham lives. On walks with his father, from Gravesend to Rochester, they would pause in Kent and view the mansion atop a two-mile slope called Gad's Hill; his father told him that if he was very hardworking, he might get to live there one day. Given his family's Chatham circumstances, this must have been hard for young Charles to believe, but he did get to live there one day — for the last 12 years of his life; he wrote
Great Expectations
there, and he died there. For readers who find Dickens's imagination farfetched, they should look at his life.

His was an imagination fueled by personal un-happiness and the zeal of a social reformer. Like many successful people, he made good use of disappointments — responding to them with energy, with near-frenzied activity, rather than needing to recover from them. At 15, he left school; at 17, he was a law reporter; at 19, a parliamentary reporter. At 20, he was a witness to the unemployment, starvation, and cholera of the winter of 1831-32, and his first literary success, at 21, was made gloomy by the heartbreak of his first love. She was a banker's daughter, whose family shunned Dickens; years later, she returned to him in her embarrassing maturity — she was plump and tiresome, then, and he shunned her. But when he first met her, her rejection made him work all the harder; Dickens never moped.

He had what Edgar Johnson calls a “boundless confidence in the power of the will.” One of his earliest reviews (by his future father-in-law; imagine that!) was absolutely right about the talents of the young author. “A close observer of character and manners,” George Hogarth wrote about the 24-year-old Dickens, “with a strong sense of the ridiculous and a graphic faculty of placing in the most whimsical and amusing lights the follies and absurdities of human nature. He has the power, too, of producing tears as well as laughter. His pictures of the vices and wretchedness which abound in this vast city are sufficient to strike the heart of the most careless and insensitive reader.”

Indeed, Dickens's young star so outshone that of Robert Seymour, the
Pickwick Papers
's first illustrator, that Seymour blew his brains out with a muzzle-loader. By 1837 Dickens was already famous for Mr. Pickwick. He was only 25. He even took command of his hapless parents; having twice bailed his father out of debtors' prison, Dickens moved his parents forcibly from London to Exeter — an attempt to prevent his feckless father from running up an unpayable tab in his famous son's name.

Dickens's watchdog behavior regarding the social ills of his time could best be described, politically, as reform liberalism; yet he was not to be pinned down. His stance for the abolition of the death penalty, for example, was based on his belief that the death penalty did nothing to deter crime — not out of sentiment for any malefactor. For Dickens, “the major evil” — as Johnson describes it — “was the psychological effect of the horrible drama of hanging before a brutalized and gloating mob.” He was tireless in his support of reform homes for women, and of countless services and charities for the poor; by the time of
Dombey and Son
(1846-48), he had a firmly developed ethic regarding the human greed evident in the world of competitive business— and a strongly expressed moral outrage at the indifference shown to the welfare of the downtrodden; he had begun to see, past
Oliver Twist
(1837-39), that vice and cruelty were not randomly bestowed on individuals at birth but were the creations of society. And well before the time of
Bleak House
(1852-53), he had tenacious hold of the knowledge that “it is better to suffer a great wrong than to have recourse to the much greater wrong of the law.”

He was 30 when he had his first fling at editing “a great liberal newspaper,” dedicated to the “Principles of Progress and Improvement, of Education, Civil and Religious Liberty, and Equal Legislation”; he lasted only 17 days. With
Household Words
, he did much better; the magazine was as successful as many of his novels, full of what he called “social wonders, good and evil.” Among the first to admire the writing of George Eliot, he was also among the first to guess her sex. “I have observed what seem to me to be such womanly touches,” he wrote to her, “that the assurance on the title-page is insufficient to satisfy me, even now. If they originated with no woman, I believe that no man ever before had the art of making himself, mentally, so like a woman, since the world began.” Of course, she was charmed — and she confessed to him.

He was so industrious that (despite his generosity) even the work of his own friends failed to impress him. “There is a horrid respectability about the most of the best of them,” he wrote,” — a little, finite, systematic routine in them, strangely expressive to me of the state of England herself.” Yet he was ever the champion of the unchampioned — as in Mr. Sleary's heartfelt and lisped plea for the circus artists in
Hard Times.
“Don't be croth with uth poor vagabondth. People must be amuthed. They can't be alwayth a learning, nor yet can they be alwayth a working, they ain't made for it. You
mutht
have uth, Thquire. Do the withe thing and the kind thing, too, and make the betht of uth; not the wortht!” It is this quality in Dickens that has been blessed by Irving Howe, who writes that “in [his] strongest novels, entertainer and moralist come to seem shadows of one another — finally two voices out of the same mouth.”

Dickens's gift is how spontaneously he can render a situation both sympathetic and hilarious — and charged with his fierce indignation, with what Johnson calls his “furious exposure of social evils.” Yet Dickens's greatest risk taking, as a writer, has little to do with his social morality. What he is most unafraid of is sentimentality — of anger, of passion, of emotionally and psychologically revealing himself; he is not self-protective; he is never careful. In the present, postmodernist praise of the
craft
of writing — of the subtle, of the exquisite — we may have refined the very heart out of the novel. Dickens would have had more fun with today's literary elitists and minimalists than he had with Mr. Pumblechook and Mrs. Jellyby. He was the king of the novel in the same century that produced the models of the form.

Dickens wrote great comedy — high and low — and he wrote great melodrama. At the conclusion of the first stage of Pip's expectations, Dickens writes: “Heaven knows we need never be ashamed of our tears, for they are rain upon the blinding dust of earth, overlying our hard hearts.” But we
are
ashamed of our tears. We live at a time when critical taste tells us that to be softhearted is akin to doltishness; we're so influenced by the junk on television that even in reacting against it we overreact — we conclude that
any
attempt to move an audience to laughter or to tears is shameless, is either sitcom or soap opera or both.

Edgar Johnson is correct in observing that “though much has been said about Victorian restraint, emotionally it is we who are restrained, not they. Large bodies of modern readers, especially those called ‘sophisticated,' distrust any uncurbed yielding to emotion. Above all when the emotion is noble, heroic, or tender, they wince in skeptical suspicion or distaste. A heartfelt expression of sentiment seems to them exaggerated, hypocritical, or embarrassing.” And Johnson offers a reason for this. “There are explanations, of course, for our peculiar fear of sentiment as sentimental. With the enormous growth of popular fiction, vulgar imitators have cheapened the methods they learned from great writers and coarsened their delineation of emotion. Dickens's very powers marked him out as a model for such emulation.”

To the modern reader, too often when a writer risks being sentimental the writer is already guilty. But as a writer it is cowardly to so fear sentimentality that one avoids it altogether. It is typical — and forgivable— among student writers to avoid being mush-minded by simply refusing to write about people, or by refusing to subject characters to emotional extremes. Dickens took sentimental risks with abandon. “His weapons were those of caricature and burlesque,” Johnson writes, “of melodrama and unrestrained sentiment.”

And here's another wonderful thing about him: his writing is never vain — I mean that he never sought to be original. He never pretended to be an explorer, discovering neglected evils. Nor was he so vain as to imagine that his love or his use of the language was particularly special; he could write very prettily when he wanted to but he never had so little to say that he thought the object of writing was pretty language; he did not care about being original in that way either. The broadest novelists never cared for that kind of original language — Dickens, Hardy, Tolstoy, Hawthorne, Melville … their so-called style is every style; they use all styles. To such novelists, originality with language is mere fashion; it will pass. The larger, plainer things — the things they are preoccupied with, their obsessions — these will last: the story, the characters, the laughter and the tears.

Yet writers who are considered masters of style have also marveled at Dickens's technical brilliance, while recognizing it as instinctual — as nothing anyone ever learned, or could be taught. G. K. Chesterton's
Charles Dickens: A Critical Study
is both an appreciative and a precise view of Dickens's techniques; Chesterton also offers a marvelous defense of Dickens's characters. “Though his characters often were caricatures, they were not such caricatures as was supposed by those who had never met such characters,” Chesterton writes. “And the critics had never met the characters; because the critics did not live the common life of the English people; and Dickens did. England was a much more amusing and horrible place than it appeared to the sort of man who wrote reviews.”

It is worth noting that both Johnson and Chesterton stress Dickens's fondness for the
common;
Dickens's critics stress his eccentricity. “There can be no question of the importance of Dickens as a human event in history,” Chesterton writes, “… a naked flame of mere genius, breaking out in a man without culture, without tradition, without help from historic religions and philosophies or from the great foreign schools; and revealing a light that never was on sea or land, if only the long fantastic shadows that it threw from common things.”

Vladimir Nabokov has pointed out that Dickens didn't write every sentence as if his reputation depended on it. “When Dickens has some information to impart to his reader through conversation or meditation, the imagery is generally not conspicuous,” Nabokov writes. Dickens knew how to keep a reader reading; he trusted his descriptive powers — as much as he trusted his ability to make his readers feel emotionally connected to his characters. Very simply, narrative momentum and emotional interest in the characters are what make a novel more compellingly readable on page 300 than it is on page 30. “The bursts of vivid imagery are spaced” is how Nabokov puts it.