In his recent review of A.N. Wilson’s new book, The Mystery of Charles Dickens (New York Times, Nov. 8, 2020), writer Robert Gottlieb leads off by calling Dickens “England’s greatest novelist.” This generated two letters to the editor in the Book Review section taking issue with Dickens’s right to that title – both suggested George Eliot as far more deserving (and I agree, fully worthy). Malcolm of Cambridge, MA sniffed that Dickens characters are “not real, complex people.” Sarah of Williamsburg, VA more gently suggested that Eliot was superior in “her insight into people’s inner lives.”
I don’t intend to weigh in on who was “England’s greatest novelist.” It’s not a contest, for pete’s sake. But as a decades-long lover of Dickens’s writing, I feel called to defend his people, and object to Cambridge Malcolm’s dismissive statement. Of course, I could simply point out that after all, most people in novels are not “real.” It’s just that Dickens’s people display their humanity in a different way: they selectively demonstrate in full color traits deeply engrained in human beings. The author plays with the ways they model their characteristics as they blend, flare, wax and wane, and we cannot fail to recognize them in “real” people around us and ourselves.
Perhaps no one is as completely smarmy, deceitful and cruel as David Copperfield’s nemesis Uriah Heep – but we’ve probably all worked with someone who connives, flatters, manipulates, and cheats his way up. David’s friend Mr. Micawber impulsively runs up his 19th-century credit cards, only to shed genuine tears of remorse and misery when the bill comes due… I know people who have been there. And when you’ve been brutally dumped by someone you loved desperately, didn’t you feel (for a while) that your future was to be eternal mourning in a darkened room a la Miss Havisham?
They are saved from being pure caricatures by bearing their own complexities and perplexities. The callow, bumbling law clerk Guppy in Bleak House finds he can step up and do the right thing when called upon through genuine respect and affection. Many readers have found the diffuse and silly Flora Finching a cruel portrait of an old girlfriend of Dickens – but the hilariously garrulous Flora is actually one of the kindest, most generous-hearted people in Little Dorrit. Dickens plays his characters off against one another: the vile and violent boarding school of Dotheboys Hall in Nicholas Nickleby is run by the dreadful Mr. and Mrs. Squeers (who make sure to tell the servant not to give their pony any corn). They are set off against the generous, shrewd, warm-hearted, theatrical Crummles couple, who extol the virtues of their pony and give him extra corn. And yet… for all the contrast, they are both extremely happy, loving marriages – husband and wife openly love and admire their spouses and their respectively horrid and talented (well, Mother and Father Crummles think they are!) offspring. And then there’s my favorite man in all of Dickens: Newman Noggs, a shabby, beaten-down, alcoholic nobody, who for all his “comic” ineptness manages to carry his innate dignity, generosity, and stalwart friendship forward into courage.
** ADDENDUM 01/17/2021: I just read James Wood’s intelligent, perspicacious collection of essays Serious Noticing: Selected Essays 1997-2019. In the essay called “Hysterical Realism,” he takes Dickens to task at some length for his “flat,” “histrionic,” “theatrical” characters of “glittering liveliness,” and holds him responsible for contemporary writers who fall back on the same tricks because they are unwilling or unable to create characters who are fully human. Just as I was getting rather seriously annoyed with him, he says this: “Yet in Dickens there is always an immediate access to strong feelings, which tears the puppetry of his people, breaks their casings, and lets us enter them. Mr. Micawber may be a caricature, a simple, univocal essence, but he feels, and he makes us feel. One recalls that very passionate and simple sentence, in which David Copperfield tells us: ‘Mr. Micawber was waiting for me within the gate, and we went up to his room, and cried very much.’ It is difficult to find a single moment like that in all the many thousands of pages of the big, ambitious, contemporary books.” Thank you, Mr. Wood. You are forgiven.**
And as for “real”? On a trip to London some years ago (largely driven by the opportunity to see the 7-hour stage adaptation of Nicholas Nickleby), we did the usual sightseeing of Westminster Abbey, Buckingham Palace, Kensington Gardens, and the Imperial War Museum. But we also went in search of Lincoln’s Inn Fields, and discovered the warren of offices with the occupants’ names painted outside the door – and half-expected to find Herbert Pocket’s lodgings. It was lovely to stumble on Hanging Sword Alley where Jerry Cruncher shouted at his wife for “floppin’ again!” And of course, a visit to Dickens’s home was pure pleasure. Even in Paris, we figured out where La Force prison was to pay our respects to that great, heartbreaking hero of melodrama, Sydney Carton in A Tale of Two Cities.
We don’t go to Dickens for psychological scrutiny and nuance. We go to watch humanity parade in all its brightest plumage of ridiculousness and wretchedness, greed and gallantry, to inspire recognition, insight, sympathy, and, perhaps, love. That’s real and complex enough for me.
Let me leave you with Dickens’s description of the bombastic Josiah Bounderby in Hard Times: “He was a rich man: banker, merchant, manufacturer, and what not. A big, loud man, with a stare, and a metallic laugh. A man made out of a coarse material, which seemed to have been stretched to make so much of him. A man with a great puffed head and forehead, swelled veins in his temples, and such a strained skin to his face that it seemed to hold his eyes open, and lift his eyebrows up. A man with a pervading appearance on him of being inflated like a balloon, and ready to start. A man who could never sufficiently vaunt himself a self-made man…. A man who was the Bully of humility…. A year or two younger than his eminently practical friend, Mr. Bounderby looked older; his seven or eight and forty might have had the seven or eight added to it again, without surprising anybody. He had not much hair. One might have fancied he had talked it off; and that what was left, all standing up in disorder, was in that condition from being constantly blown about by his windy boastfulness.” Tell me we couldn’t identify that man in 2020… in fact, I believe we have.
