Charles Dickens and other Victorians

by Arthur Quiller-Couch

My father had left a small collection of books in a little room upstairs ... which nobody else in our house ever troubled. From that blessed little room, Roderick Random, Peregrine Pickle, Humphrey Clinker, Tom Jones, the Vicar of Wakefield, Don Quixote, Gil Blas, and Robinson Crusoe came out, a glorious host, to keep me company....

The whole passage, if you will turn to it, you will recognise as delicate English prose. But it is also a faithful, if translated, record. From this line of English writers, the more you study him, the more clearly you will recognise Dickens as standing in the direct descent of a pupil. He brings something of his own, of course, to infuse it, as genius will: and that something is usually a hint of pathos which the eighteenth-century man avoided. But (this touch of pathos excepted) you will find little, say, to distinguish Fielding’s sketch of Squire Allworthy on his morning stroll from this sketch, which I take casually from The Old Curiosity Shop, of an aged woman punctually visiting the grave of her husband who had died in his prime of twenty-three:

“Yes, I was his wife. Death doesn’t change no more than life, my dear.”... And now that five-and-fifty years were gone, she spoke of the dead man as if he had been her son or grandson, with a kind of pity for his youth growing out of her own old age, and an exalting of his strength and manly beauty, as compared with her own weakness and decay; and yet she spoke of him as her husband too, and thinking of herself in connection with him, as she used to be and not as she was now, talked of their meeting in another world, as if he were dead but yesterday, and she, separated from her former self, were thinking of the happiness of that comely girl who seemed to have died with him.

X

No, we can none of us afford to despise Dickens’ prose. This passage comes from one of his earliest books: if you would learn how he (ever a learner) learned to consolidate his style, study that neglected work of his, The Uncommercial Traveller—study such essays as that on “Wapping Workhouse” or that on “The City Churchyards”—study them with Thackeray’s Roundabout Papers—and tell me if these two great Victorian novelists, after shaking the dust of an Esmond or a David Copperfield off their palms, cannot, as a parergon, match your Augustans—your Steele or your Addison—on their own ground. Few recognise it, this pair being otherwise so great: but it is so.

And because you will probably disbelieve me at first going-off, I shall add the testimony of one you will be apter to trust—that of George Gissing. I have spoken of one chapter in David Copperfield, to commend it.

But, says Gissing:

In the story of David Copperfield’s journey on the Dover road we have as good a piece of narrative prose as can be found in English. Equally good, in another way, are those passages of rapid retrospect in which David tells us of his later boyhood, a concentration of memory perfumed with the sweetest humour. It is not an easy thing to relate, with perfect proportion of detail, with interest that never for a moment drops, the course of a year or two of wholly uneventful marriage: but read the chapter entitled Our Domestic Life and try to award adequate praise to the great artist who composed it. One can readily suggest how the chapter could have been spoiled; ever so little undue satire, ever so little excess of sentiment; but who can point to a line in which it might be bettered? It is perfect writing: one can say no more and no less.

XI

I am glad, Gentlemen, on the verge of concluding these talks about Dickens, to quote this from Gissing—a genuine genius, himself an author of what Dr. Johnson would have described as “inspissated gloom.” There is, I daresay, some heaven of recognition in which all true artists meet; and at any rate it pleases one to think that the author of The New Grub Street should, in this sublunary sphere, have been comforted on his way (it would even seem, entranced) by such children of joy as Sam Weller and Mr. Toots. And I, at any rate, who admired Gissing in life, like to think of him who found this world so hard, now, by virtue of his love for Dickens, reconciled to look down on it from that other sphere, with tolerant laughter—upon this queer individual England, at least. For Providence has made and kept this nation a comfortable nation, even to this day: and if you take its raciest literature from Chaucer down, you may assure yourselves that much of its glorious merit rests on the “triple pillar” of common-sense, religious morality and hearty laughter. I for my part hold that we shall help a great deal to restore our commonwealth by seeking back to that last “Godlike function” and re-learning it. To promote that laughter, with good sense and good morality, was ever Dickens’ way, as to kill wherever he could what he once called “this custom of putting the natural demand for amusement out of sight, as some untidy housekeepers put dust, and pretending that it was swept away.” And I think of Dickens as a great Englishman not least in this, that he was a man of his hands, with a great laugh scattering humbug to make place for mirth and goodwill; “a clean hearth and [to adapt Mrs. Battle] the spirit of the game.”