Charles Dickens and other Victorians

by Arthur Quiller-Couch

III

But I fear we have a great deal more to empty out of this world of his.

To begin with, we must jettison religion; or at any rate all religion that gets near to definition by words in a Credo. Religious formulae I think we may say that he hated; and equally that he had little use for ministers of religion. I can recall but one sympathetic portrait of an Anglican parson—the Reverend Septimus Crisparkle, Minor Canon of Cloisterham—and that in his last book, and with scarcely a shadow of a quality impinged upon it by his vocation, by Holy Orders: Crisparkle, Minor Canon and muscular Christian, well visualised, is a good fellow just as Tartar in the same story is a good fellow: nothing more. George Eliot and Charlotte Brontë, who disliked ecclesiastics, have to give them understanding, even sympathy, in some degree. Dickens merely neglects them. Unaccredited missionaries of the Gospel are humbugs all, in Dickens; uneducated Pharisees, Stiggins’s, Chadbands; devourers of widows’ (and widowers’) houses; spongers on the kindness and credulity of poor folk just a little more ignorant than they, while far more innocent. As for sacred edifices—cathedrals, churches—Dickens uses them as picturesque, romantic, mouldy, just as suits his convenience—a last harbourage for Little Nell or an object with a steeple suggesting to Mr. Wemmick—“Hullo! here’s a church!... let’s get married!” If Dickens ever conceives of a church as a tabernacle of any faith, I have yet to find the passage.

You must remember that, while Dickens wrote, Tractarian Movements, Unitarian Movements, Positivist Movements—Wiseman’s claim, Newman’s secession, the Gorham judgment, Bishop Colenso’s heresies—Darwin’s hypothesis, Huxley’s agnostic rejection of doctrine, and so on—that all these were agitating men’s thoughts as with a succession of shocks of earthquake. But all these passed Dickens by, as little observed as felt by him: simply disregarded.

IV

Of political thought, again, his world is almost as empty. He was, in his way, an early-Victorian Radical. When he saw a legal or political hardship which hurt or depressed the poor, conventions injurious to the Commonwealth—the Poor Laws, Debtors’ Prisons, the Court of Chancery, the Patent (or Circumlocution) Office and so forth, with the people who batten on such conventions, taking them for granted as immutable—Dickens struck hard and often effectively. But he struck at what he saw under his own eyes. Beyond this immediate indignation he had no reasoned principles of political or social reform. I have to hand, at this moment, no evidence to confirm a guess which I will nevertheless hazard, that he hated Jeremy Bentham and all his works. Certainly the professional, bullying, committee-working philanthropists—Mrs. Jellaby and Mr. Honeythunder, whose successors pullulate in this age—were the very devil to him. His simple formula ever was—in an age when Parliament carried a strong tradition of respect—“Yes, my Lords and Gentlemen, look on this waif, this corpse, this broken life. Lost, broken, dead, my Lords and Gentlemen, and all through your acquiescence, your misfeasance, your neglect!” To the immediate reader his message ran simply, “Take into your heart God’s most excellent gift of Charity: by which I mean let Charity begin at home, in that kingdom of God which is within you, let it operate in your own daily work; let it but extend to your own neighbours who need your help; and so—and only so—will the city of God be established on earth.”

V

I perceive, Gentlemen, that in my hurry I have let slip a great part of the secret, and so will add but this in hasty summary, catching up, before retreat, my cloak of advocatus diaboli:

(1) In the first place, Dickens’ world was not a world of ideas at all, but a city “full of folk.” Compared with the world as Carlyle saw it, or Clough, or Martineau, or Newman, or Arnold, it is void of ideas, if not entirely unintellectual.

(2) Moreover, and secondly, it is a vivid hurrying world; but the characters in it—until you come to Pip, say, in Great Expectations—are all quite curiously static; and, as the exception proves the rule, I am not afraid to back this assertion against Martin Chuzzlewit, for example, in which young Martin is, of set purpose, to be converted out of the family selfishness. Things happen to Mr. Pecksniff, to Little Nell, to Mr. Micawber, to Mr. Dombey, to Bradley Headstone and Eugene Wraybourne, to Sally Brass and her brother: but, as the rule, these things do not happen within them, as such things happen in the soul of any protagonist in a novel by Tolstoy or Dostoievsky, or as they are intended and traced as happening (say) in Romola. Dombey’s conversion is a mere stage-trick; and, for Micawber’s apotheosis as a prosperous colonist, let him believe it who will.