Charles Dickens and other Victorians

by Arthur Quiller-Couch

“Yes, I know I am wrong,” she pleaded timidly. “Don’t think any worse of me; it has all grown up with me here.”

The prison, which could spoil so many things, had tainted Little Dorrit’s mind no more than this. Engendered as the confusion was, in compassion for the poor prisoner, her father, it was the first speck Clennam had ever seen, it was the last speck Clennam ever saw, of the prison atmosphere upon her.

Now I call that, Gentlemen, the true novelist’s stroke; rightly divined, so suddenly noted that we, who had not expected it, consent at once with a “Yes, yes—of course it happened so.”

V

But what I wish you to grasp is—in a man who could play strokes like that by the score and conjure up out of his vasty deeps anything from Dick Swiveller to Uncle Pumblechook, from the Marchioness to Mrs. Joe Gargery—the silliness of diffidence which drove him again and again to mere copying “from the life.” The superstition was idle, even when it did no harm. Having, in Oliver Twist, to describe a harsh and insolent Magistrate, Dickens (who could invent a Mr. Nupkins at will) took pains to be introduced to the Hatton Garden Police Court over which a certain Mr. Laing presided. He took these pains scrupulously, through an official channel (as they say), with the double result that we get Mr. Fang in the novel and that the Home Secretary very soon found it convenient to remove Mr. Laing from the Bench—and this, maybe, was all for the good—but you see how our author has already mixed up his conception of Charles Dickens as an author with that of Charles Dickens as a popular institution.

We will suppose that this Mr. Laing got his deserts. None the less Dickens was hitting him on a pitch where he had no standing and could not hit back. And I would warn you of this, Gentlemen—that if, trained here, you go forth to do battle with wrongdoing, one of two methods is equally fair, and no other. Either you must persuade men generally that such and such a principle should govern their actions, or, if you have to take a particular wrongdoer by the throat, you should in the first place be absolutely sure of your facts, and, in the second, take him preferably on his own ground: so that his defeat will be righteous and plain to all, and he can excuse nothing on your advantage of position.

I have diverged into advising you as artists in public life: but the advice is not irrelevant, for it echoes that which, repeatedly given to Dickens by his best friends, he repeatedly ignored, yet never without detriment to his art and not seldom with irritating personal consequences. You all know how he came to grief over his caricatures of Landor and Leigh Hunt in Bleak House. Laurence Boythorne was merely a cheap superficial, not ill-natured, portrait. Landor, who never condescended to notice it, might well have shrugged his tall shoulders and said, “Is this the friend who visited Fiesole for my sake, and sent me home the only gift I demanded—an ivy-leaf from my old Villa there ... and is this what he knows of me, or even what I seemed to him?” (The ivy-leaf was found wrapped away among Landor’s papers, twenty years later.) But nothing—least of all its verisimilitude—can excuse the outrage perpetrated upon Leigh Hunt in the mask of Harold Skimpole: for, as Forster observes, to this character in the plot itself of Bleak House is assigned a part which no fascinating foibles or gaieties of speech could redeem from contempt. Hunt, who (with all his faults) never lacked generosity, had been among the first to hail and help Dickens, was (as often happens) the last to recognise himself for the intended victim: but when some kind friend drew his attention to the calculated wound, it went deep. Dickens apologised in a letter which did its best, but could, in the nature of things, amount to no more than kindly evasiveness. He was guilty, and he knew it. Hunt had been wounded in the house of his friend. It was all very well, or ill, for Dickens to plead (as he did) that in Micawber and Mrs. Nickleby he had played a like trick on his own father and mother. The first and most obvious answer to that is, “Well, if you did, you ought to have known better”—the second, “And, anyhow, why should that make it any the more agreeable to me?” But Mrs. Nickleby and Mr. Micawber (as we saw) are kindly, even lovable characters. Harold Skimpole is at once abject and mischievous: and as Forster very justly remarks:

The kindly or unkindly impression makes all the difference where liberties are taken with a friend; and even this entirely favourable condition will not excuse the practice to many, where near relatives are concerned.

But Landor and Leigh Hunt, you may say, were literary men of their hands, well able to defend themselves. Well, then, take down your David Copperfield and compare the Miss Mowcher of Chapter XXII with the Miss Mowcher of Chapter XXXII. You will see at once that something very queer has happened; that the Miss Mowcher of the earlier chapter, obviously meant to be an odious little go-between in the Steerforth plot, has changed into a decent little creature at once pathetic and purposeless. Why? The answer is that the deformed original, recognising her portrait, had in the interim addressed to Dickens a poignant letter of remonstrance. Dickens, writing the story in monthly numbers, apologised and hastily readjusted his plot.

These things work out to this—that in dealing with Dickens we have to lay our account—as in dealing with Shakespeare we have to lay our account—with a genius capable of vast surprises but at any point liable to bolt out of self-control. I have no theories at all of what a genius should be, or of how it ought to behave. Let us take what the gods give and be thankful: and with Dickens as with Shakespeare—both of whom write execrably at times and at times above admiration—we have to accept this inequality as a condition of our arriving at the very best. Even if we allow that a stricter schooling would have spoilt both, and is indeed the bane of originality: still let us keep our heads and tell ourselves that a great part of Oliver Twist is execrable stuff and no less, as the talk of Speed in The Two Gentlemen of Verona or of Lucio in Measure for Measure is execrable stuff and no less. By all means let us keep in mind that these flagrancies are human and, if you will, a necessary part of any Shakespeare, of any Dickens. But let us be quite clear in judging them as counterweights, and tell ourselves that a Virgil or a Dante—yes, or a Cervantes—would never need to ask such forgiveness from us.