Charles Dickens: the World of His Novels J

CHARLES DICKENS: THE WORLD OF HIS NOVELS J. HILLIS MILLER HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS 1958 Publication of this book has been aided by a grant from the Ford Foundation © 1958 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College Distributed in Great Britain by Oxford University Press, London Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 58-10402 Printed in the United States of America TO GEORGES POULET -- vii -- INTRODUCTION He made out of Victorian England a complete world, with a life and vigour and idiom of its own, quite unlike any other world there has ever been. (Humphry House, _The Dickens World_) IN recent years a good many important studies of Dickens have appeared.*1* These have approached Dickens from the most diverse points of view, though there has been generally an implicit agreement with Edmund Wilson's belief that "we may find in Dickens' work today a complexity and a depth to which even Gissing and Shaw have hardly . done justice - an intellectual and artistic interest which makes Dickens loom very large in the whole perspective of the literature of the West."*2* While recognizing the measure of justice in the traditional charges against Dickens' novels (that they are melodramatic, falsely pathetic, didactic, repetitive, and so on), various critics and scholars have attempted to assess what is authentic in his fiction. One can distinguish several different modes of approach in these recent studies, though there is of course a good deal of overlapping. There are biographical studies, culminating in Edgar Johnson's probably definitive book. These biographies have put our knowledge of the facts of Dickens' life and their relation to his work on solid ground. Other scholars have explored the relation of Dickens' work to the political, moral, and social realities of the Victorian age, while still others have examined Dickens' overt opinions about art, politics, or morality, and have shown us how Dickens was a much more deliberate and calculating writer than we had thought. The latter scholars have most often found their evidence in Dickens' letters and prefaces, and in the nonfictional pieces he wrote or ----------------------------------- *1* A selected bibliography win be found at the end of this book. *2* Edmund Wilson, "Dickens: The Two scrooges," _Eight Essays_ (New York, 1954, pp. 11-91), p. 13. -- viii -- accepted for the periodicals he edited. Similar studies have shown the relation of Dickens' opinions and practice as a novelist to Victorian theories and practice generally, or have studied the history of the criticism of Dickens' novels. More in the direction of literary criticism have been investigations of the relation between Dickens' life and his fiction. The best such study is the brilliant essay by Edmund Wilson, though might also include an introduction to _Little Dorrit_ by Lionel Trilling, and the biographies by Jack Lindsay and Edgar Johnson. But Trilling's essay is really one of the best examples of a kind of study closer to my own approach: the discussion of Dickens' novels as autonomous works of art. Such criticism has frequently used one form or another of the method of analysis associated with the "new criticism." Trilling's essay, however like most such studies, is limited to the discussion of a single novel. All these recent investigations are taken for granted here . and without them my own study could never have been undertaken. However, I have attempted to do something slightly different from any of them: to assess the specific quality of Dickens' imagination in the totality of his work, to identify what persists throughout all the swarming multiplicity of his novels as a view of the world which is unique and the same, and to trace the development of this vision of things from one novel to another throughout the chronological span of his career. Though it is true to say that a work of literature is rooted in its age, in the life of its author, and in his conscious theories about art and morality, and though, in the other direction, any single novel by Dickens can legitimately be viewed as independent of all these factors and as standing on its own as a self-contained entity, there is still another way of looking at Dickens' work, a way which to some degree reconciles the dichotomy between these extreme approaches. This way reverses the usual causal sequence between the psychology of an author and his work. It sees a work of literature not as the mere symptom or product of a preëxistent psychological condition but as the very means by which a writer apprehends and, in some measure, creates himself. The given conditions of a writer's life, -- ix -- including his psychological nature as well as the culture he lives in, are merely the obstacles or materials which he transforms and vanquishes by turning them into novels or poems, that is, by giving them a different meaning from the one they had in themselves. The attitude I have here taken, then, also reverses the usual relation between the spirit of the age and a work of literature. Rather than seeing the former as wholly the cause of the latter, so that the work becomes a symptom of the age and altogether determined by it, this approach remembers the other side of the truth and sees Dickens' own creative vision as in part determining the "Victorian spirit" itself. This study presupposes that each sentence or paragraph of a novel, whether it is presented from the point of view of the narrator or of some imagined character, defines a certain relationship between an imagining mind and its objects. A passage of interior monologue or of reminiscence, passages describing characters in action, or portraying an imaginary scene, will reveal unsuspected similarities if each is taken as the definition of a certain relation between mind and world. Juxtaposed, these apparently distinct elements can clarify one another and be brought to reveal their profound harmony. Taken all together, all the unit passages form the imaginative universe of the writer. Through the analysis of all the passages, as they reveal the persistence of certain obsessions, problems, and attitudes, .the critic can hope to glimpse the original unity of a creative mind. For all the works of a single writer form a unity, a unity in which a thousand paths radiate from the same center. At the heart of a writer's successive works, revealed in glimpses through each event and image, is an impalpable organizing form, constantly presiding over the choice of words. This form, if we can discover it, will be a better clue than any biographical data to the writer's intimate relation to the material world, to other human beings, and to himself. For a novel is not simply an external structure of meaning, an objective narrative which we can understand from the outside. It is also the expression of the unique personality and vital spirit of its author. It is the embodiment in words of a certain very special way of experiencing the world. The pervasive stylistic traits of a writer, his -- x -- recurrent words and images, his special cadence and tone, are as personal to him as his face or his way of walking. His style is his own way of living in the world given a verbal form. So in literature every landscape is an interior landscape, just as each imaginary man or woman is also a figure in the writer's own private world of perception or memory, longing or fear. A poem or novel is indeed the world refashioned into conformity with the inner structure of the writer's spirit, but at the same time it is that spirit given, through words, a form and substance taken from the shared solidity of the exterior world. It is in this sense that the words of the work are themselves the primary datum, a self-sufficient reality beyond which the critic need not go. For in literature what is hidden and without visible form is made visible and communicable to others. The chapters presented here have as their goal the exploration of the imaginative universe of Dickens, and the revelation of that presiding unity hidden at the center, but present everywhere within his novels and partially revealed there in the embodied disguises of particular characters, actions, interiors landscapes, and cityscapes. The imaginative universe of a great writer is an infinite domain, and an infinite number of critical paths might traverse it profitably. The view from certain roads however, is more complete and less distorted, and I have chosen what seems to me a salient approach to Dickens, the theme of the search for a true and viable identity. Wishing to respect the unity and fullness of particular novels and yet to remain within some bounds of length, I have chosen to explore in detail six novels spanning Dickens' career: _Pickwick Papers_, _Oliver Twist_, _Martin Chuzzlewit_, _Bleak House_, _Great Expectations_, and _Our Mutual Friend_. Each of these novels represents an important segment of the curve of Dickens' temporal development, and all of them together include much of Dickens' most important work. However, I do not mean to imply that these six novels are far more important or excellent than the others. To bridge the gaps between the detailed studies I have interspersed much briefer discussions of all the other novels. These concentrate on the special contribution of the omitted novels to the development of Dickens' creative vision. -- xi -- Where I have multiplied quotations expressing the same attitude or idea it has been to show, through the juxtaposition of passages from widely separated points in a novel, the pervasive presence of a certain organizing form.

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