BOOKS
Harder than hard times
Paul Foot
DICKENS'S JOURNALISM: VOLUME I, SKETCHES BY BOZ AND OTHER EARLY PAPERS, 1833-1839 edited by Michael Slater Dent, 1...30, pp. 580 If journalism is 'reporting the news' as defined by our modern news editors, nothing could be less enticing than a huge volume of regurgitated journalism, especially when the volume is the first in a series of four. Experts on news desks every- where impatiently explain that news, to be news, must be bizarre, out of the ordinary, sensational, 'sexy'. The more news fits that definition, the less long it lasts. News reporting of that kind is essentially ephemeral, and is collected in volumes only to satisfy the vanity of authors or editors.
Charles Dickens had a different attitude to news. From early on in his unhappy youth, he was fascinated by the lives of the people around him, how they ate and drank, how they got from one place to another, how they worked, and above all how they played. He wanted to report the dramas which arose every day in every street from the clash of everyday charac- ters, their aspirations, greeds, fears and hypocrisies. He himself used the word `sketches' to describe his early reporting of the lower-middle-class London in which he grew up. The word has come on down over 160 years to denote a special kind of writ- ing, apart from and subordinate to real journalism, with which clever writers amuse clever readers in the sidelines. Charles Dickens was never in the sidelines. He was at the centre of real events. He brought his astonishing powers over language to awak- en his readers' appreciation and under- standing of themselves, their workmates and their neighbours — and they revelled in it.
All his life Dickens's majestic and intoxi- cating prose was reinforced by two rare qualities. The first was a sense of humour, which was as bitter and angry as it was funny. Most important people, he noticed, are absurd — mainly because they think they are important. The more they preen themselves in their self-importance, the more ridiculous they become. Dickens's work as a parliamentary reporter nourished in him a particular contempt for politicians who in his day belonged to two parties representing the rich and powerful, but pretending to represent everyone. His sharpest satire was reserved for lawyers, among whom he had also worked as a clerk. One of these early sketches takes us to Doctors Commons where we are intro- duced to a tewigged gentleman in red robes . . . straddling before the fire in the Centre of the Court in the attitude of the brazen Colossus'. What follows is Dickens at his bitterest best:
We shall never be able to claim any credit as a physiognomist again, for, after a careful
scrutiny of this gentleman's countenance, we had come to the conclusion that it bespoke nothing but conceit and silliness, when our friend with the silver staff whispered in our ear that he was no other than a doctor of civil law, and heaven knows what besides. So of course we were mistaken, and he must be a very talented man. He conceals it so well, though — perhaps with the merciful view of not astonishing ordinary people too much that you would suppose him to be one of the stupidest dogs alive.
The second quality was compassion for the dispossessed. What disgusted Dickens most about the law courts, for instance, was `a great deal of form, but no compassion'. His eye was always open to the desperate wretchedness in which so many Londoners unnecessarily suffered. He could describe the despair of such people as well as any- one — the portrait of the doomed woman in his essay on the pawnbroker's shop is almost too much to bear — but he prefers it when the poor refuse to accept their plight and start to argue back. In the same sketch, the woman's drunken husband is roundly abused by an equally poor woman in a magnificent flood of invective which brings the pawnbroker scurrying to the counter to stop the row in the only way he can: by chucking the bully out.
Fashionable Dickens scholars are `Lucky for me they're Veggies — they only eat vegetarians.' inclined to turn up their noses at Dickens's early journalism. It has, they tell us, none of the rounded brilliance of the great novels. In one sense they are right. Of course the novels are pulled along more easily by the engine of the narrative. But there is a lot to be said for the raw young journalist Dickens, unspoiled by fame or fortune or by a rather contrived plot. For a start there is in these early pieces none of the religion which got him later. His attack on the ecclesiastical courts (in which a man sentenced to two weeks' excommunication infuriates the court by begging them to excommunicate him for life, since he never goes to church anyway) would have been widely applauded even at the time. But in his glorious assault on the wealthy bigots who wanted to put a stop to all enjoyment on Sundays, he takes on the church at every level. In the high church, where the clergyman was 'celebrated at Eton for his hopeless stupidity', there is nothing but boredom and hypocrisy. In the 'small close chapel' you expect from Dickens something more sympathetic. But in the scene he describes, the form is different, but the content is very much the same. The evangelist preacher stretches his body half out of the pulpit, thrusts forward his arms with frantic gestures, and blasphemously calls upon the Deity to visit with eternal torments those who turn aside from the word, as interpreted and preached by — himself.
Perhaps for the same reason, there is much less in this early writing of Dickens's worst characteristic, his sentimentality. Again and again even in the greatest of his novels, his satirical scepticism deserts him while he wallows in a heroine's perfection or in a victim's honourable and decent for- bearance. As he got older and more respectable his sympathies with the poor, which never left him, seemed to take sec- ond place to his relief and admiration that they did not stir themselves to change the world which so ill-treated them. Even this early mid-1830s journalism tells us little of the bubbling pot of revolt which would boil over at the end of the decade. But it is more trenchant, tougher than the novels. Its author was closer to the grimness and the cheerfulness — of lower London life, and could report both more directly. I gobbled up these essays greedily, hardly believing at the end that they take up 550 pages. Their most extraordinary quality is their durability. The technology has changed hugely of course but the people, their relationships and their problems seem very much the same. Dickens's omnibus was not the sort you will find today in Clapham, but the average man on it is surely at this moment being irritated by a bore in very much the same way that Dick- ens described 160 years ago. For contem- porary political commentators there is even a story about public immunity certificates and their origins in the always strenuous efforts of the authorities to stop important information or documents reaching the public. In one of the most exciting pieces in the book, Dickens describes an election for beadle (an election much more genuinely representative than an election for Parlia- ment). Trouble was first whipped up by Captain Purdey, an old naval officer:
[He] boldly expressed his total want of confi- dence in the existing authorities and moved for a 'copy of the recipe by which the pau- pers' soup was prepared, together with any documents relating thereto'. This the over- seer steadily resisted; he fortified himself by precedent, appealed to the established usage, and declined to produce the papers, on the ground of the injury that would be done to the public service, if documents of a strictly private nature, passing between the master of the workhouse and the cook, were to be thus dragged to light on the motion of any indi- vidual member of the vestry.
Messrs Rifkind, Clarke, and Lilley could hardly improve on that.
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