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Dickens Modern Judgements Modern Judgements DICKENS MODERN JUDGEMENTS General Editor: P. N. FURBANK Dickens A. E. Dyson Henry James Tony Tanner Milton Alan Rudrum Walter Scott D. D. Devlin Shelley R. B. W oodings Swift A. Norman Jeffares IN PREPARATION Matthew Arnold P. A. W. Collins Freud F. Cioffi Marvell M. Wilding 0' Casey Ronald Ayling Pasternak Donald Davie and Angela Livingstone Pope Graham Martin Racine R. C. Knight Dickens MODERN JUDGEMENTS edited by A. E. DYSON Macmillan Education Selection and editorial matter © A. E. Dyson 1968 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1St edition 1968 MACMILLAN & CO LTD Little Essex Street London WC2 and also at Bombay Calcutta and Madras Macmillan South Africa (Publishers) Pty Ltd Johannesburg The Macmillan Company ofAustralia Pty Ltd Melbourne The Macmillan Company of Canada Ltd Toronto ISBN 978-0-333-07297-4 ISBN 978-1-349-15261-2 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-15261-2 Contents PAGE Acknowledgements 6 General Editor's Preface 7 Introduction 9 Chronology of Dickens's Works 28 ANGUS WILSON Charles Dickens: A Haunting 30 c. B. cox In Defence of Dickens 40 GRAHAM GREENE The Young Dickens 52 A. E. DYSON The Old Curiosity Shop: Innocence and the 59 Grotesque STEVEN MARCUS Barnaby Rudge: Sons and Fathers 82 J. HILLIS MILLER Martin Chuzzlewit u8 KATHLEEN TILLOTSON Dombey and Son 158 MARK SPILKA David Copperfield as Psychological Fiction 186 MONROE ENGEL Bleak House 197 W. J. HARVEY Bleak House 204 HUMPHRY HOUSE Hard Times 214 LIONEL TRILLING Little Dorrit 221 JOHN GROSS A Tale of Two Cities 233 DOROTHY VAN GHENT Great Expectations 244 ROBERT MORSE Our Mutual Friend 25 8 JAMES WRIGHT The Mystery ofEdwin Drood 270 EDGAR JOHNSON Epilogue 278 Select Bibliography 281 Notes on Contributors 282 Index 284 Acknowledgements Angus Wilson, 'Charles Dickens: A Haunting', from Critical Quarterly, II,2 (1960); Professor C. B. Cox, 'In Defence of Dickens', from Essays and Studies, 1958; 'The Young Dickens', from The Lost Childhood and Other Essays (Eyre & Spottiswoode Ltd, Viking Press Inc.; © Graham Greene 1951); A. E. Dyson, 'The Old Curiosity Shop: Innocence and the Grotesque'; 'Sons and Fathers', from Dickens: From pichllick to Dombey {Chatto & Windus Ltd, Basic Books Inc.; © Steven Marcus 1965);J. Hillis Miller, 'Martin Chuzzlewit', from Charles Dickens: The World of His Novels (Harvard University Press; © the President and the Fellows of Harvard College 1958); Kathleen Tillotson, 'Dombey and Son', from Novels of the Eighteen Forties (The Clarendon Press); Mark Spilka, 'David Copperfield as Psychological Fiction', from Dickens and Kafka (Indiana University Press); 'Bleak House', from The Maturity of Dickens (Harvard University Press; © Monroe Engel); W. J. Harvey, 'Freedom and Causality', from Character and the Novel (Chatto & Windus Ltd, Cornell University Press); Humphry House, 'Hard Times', from The Dickens World (Oxford University Press); Lionel Trilling's introduction to Little Dorril, from The Opposing Self (Oxford University Press); John Gross, 'A Tale of Two Cities', from Dickens and the Twentieth Cen­ tury (Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd, University of Toronto Press); Dorothy Van Ghent, 'On Great Expectations', from The English Novel, Form and Function (Holt, Rinehart and Winston Inc.); Robert Morse, 'Our Mutual Friend', from Partisan Review (Mar 1949), vol. XVI, no. 3; James Wright, 'Afterword to The Mystery ofEdwin Drood'; the Epilogue from Charles Dickens: His Tragedy and Triumph (Professor Edgar John­ son and Victor Gollancz Ltd). General Editor's Preface LITERARY criticism has only recently come of age as an academic discipline, and the intellectual activity that, a hundred years ago, went into theological discussion, now fmds its most natural outlet in the critical essay. Amid a good deal that is dull or silly or pretentious, every year now produces a crop of critical essays which are brilliant and profound not only as contributions to the understanding of a particular author, but as statements of an original way of looking at literature and the world. Hence it often seems that the most useful undertaking for an academic publisher might be, not so much to commission new books of literary criticism or scholarship, as to make the best of what exists easily available. This at least is the purpose of the present series of anthologies, each of which is devoted to a single major writer. The guiding principle of selection is to assemble the best modern criticism - broadly speaking, that of the last twenty or thirty years­ and to include historic and classic essays, however famous, only when they are still influential and represent the best statements of their particular point of view. It will, however, be one of the functions of each editor's Introduction to sketch in the earlier history of criticism in regard to the author concerned. Each volume will attempt to strike a balance between general essays and ones on specialised aspects, or particular works, of the writer in question. And though in many instances the bulk of the articles will come from British and American sources, certain of the volumes will draw heavily on material in other European languages - most of it being translated for the first time. P. N. FURBANK Introduction 1 EVERYTHING in this volume, with one exception, has been written since 1949; much of it dates from 1959. During this period, Dickens's reputation has been not established, but recognised. No-one pretends any longer that he is unread, or that his readers are too lower middle class to count. From the tone of bemused patronage in which intellec­ tuals would mention him in the earlier part of this century, we have passed to more fruitful bemusement at the range and complexity of his work. Students settle down to him with lively expectations of symbolism. Our modern anxieties, enigmas and literary experiments are seen foreshadowed in his work. But the idea that 'nobody' reads Dickens was so prevalent only a few years ago that it seems a logical place to start from. His reputation during his lifetime is not in question: 'Whether our great-grandchildren do or do not read Mr Dickens', George Stott wrote in 1869, 'they will all have to recognise that their great-grandfathers certainly did.' The demand for his work, said Trollope in St Paul's Magazine in 1870, exceeds that 'for the work of any other writer in our language'. With Dickens's death in 1870, sales showed no falling off. During the twelve years following, over four million copies were sold. I By 1891 the sales were four times greater than they had been in 1869; about 330,000 copies were sold each year. Between 1900 and 1920 there were thirteen complete editions, and innumerable versions of individual works. By 1944 no less than sixty different editions of A Tale of Two Cities had been published in Great Britain alone. In 1948 the Everyman Library reported that the book with the highest annual sale was David Copperfield. At the same time Dickens was read and discussed in I For these, and many other facts, I am indebted to George H. Ford's Dickens and his Readers: Aspects if Nove/-criticism since J 836 - a bighly readable account, published in 1955, and now available in paperback. 10 INTRODUCTION most parts of Europe, Asia and America. In France and Germany he has been particularly admired (though in Germany with some loss of interest since the First World War). Among other European countries favourable to his reputation, Spain, Italy, Holland and Denmark stand out. He was always a great favourite in Russia, under the Tsars and under the Soviets. Most other communist countries find him con­ genial, including China, where, it seems, he even accords with the Thought of Mao Tse-Tung. For serious critical discussion and atten­ tion, the U.S.A. has long led the world. No other English writer, except Shakespeare, has been so widely and enthusiastically read. It is against facts such as these that one has to test the mystical con­ viction of certain intellectuals twenty or thirty years ago that 'nobody' read Dickens. Their view rested on the authority of a tradition which was started in his lifetime - notably by G. H. Lewes, James Fitzjames Stephen and Walter Bagehot - and which passed, by way of Leslie Stephen's tepid account in the Dictionary of National Biography and the faint praise of Saints bury, into the hostility of Leslie Stephen's daughter, Virginia Woolf, and the Bloomsbury Group. I can remember being told myself in the early 1940S that nobody read Dickens, and feeling sorry - though I should have remembered that a set of his works sponsored by a popular newspaper in the 1930S had found its way into my own horne, and presumably into a great many more. Even as a boy, I half realised that 'nobody' in this context had a special meaning, and should be taken more as a rebuke than a fact. Yet, even on this enlightened showing, it ran into difficulties; could 'nob<ildy,' even in the grandest circles, include Gissing and Morris, Swinburne and Hopkins? - an amazing spectrum of admirers in themselves. Indeed, was Henry James nobody? After his famous youthful attack on Our Mutual Friend he had corne round, after all, to writing of Dickens in French Poets and Novelists (1884): In intensity of imaginative power, the power of evoking visible objects and figures, seeing them themselves with the force of hallucination and making others see them all but just as vividly, they [Dickens and Balzac] were almost equal. Here there is little to choose between them; they have no rivals but each other and Shakespeare. Kipling enjoyed Dickens, and so did Bennett; Conrad thought him the first among English novelists, confessing that he had read Bleak House 'innumerable times', and found 'the very weaknesses more INTRODUCTION II precious to me than the strengths of other men's work'.
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