John Lucas on Dickens criticism
There is a moment in William Morris's News From Nowhere when the narrator, who has been projected into a visionary Utopia of ideal democracy, suddenly recalls 'the sordid squabble, the dirty and miserable tragedy of the life I had left for a while'.
And at precisely that moment one of the Utopians informs him, 'I feel as if I could understand Dickens the better for having talked with [you]'. The merit of Dr Daleski's book—and one that distinguishes it from most of the recent studies on Dickens—is that it helps us to understand Dickens better because of its readiness to- acknowledge the great novelist's ability to confront the sordid squabble, the dirty and miserable tragedy of Victorian England. 'What Dickens does in the Pickwick Papers,' Dr Daleski says, 'is to discover his theme, the broad theme of social injustice, which it becomes his life's • - theme to develop in manifold ways.'
For Dr Daleski the really important development begins with Martin Chuzzlewit and culminates in Our Mutual Friend, and his book is largely occupied with pursuing the ways in which Dickens works out his chosen theme. In particular, he follows up the analogous patterns in plot, structure and imagery which he feels increasingly enable Dickens's novels to have about them a com- prehensiveness that makes them central judgments of the age. The pursuit, it has to be said, is by no means a lively one. And al- though one can justly admire the book's tenacity of purpose, there is no doubt that it has a doggedness about it, a determination to leave no analogue unturned, that makes it both wearying to read and too often tediously unoriginal, especially on the later work. There is also an oddly prosaic ap- proach about Dickens and the Art of An- alogy which will come as a surprise to any- one who has read The Forked Flame, Dr Daleski's fine and imaginative study of D. H. Lawrence. He makes unduly heavy weather of the death of Paul Dombey, for example, wheeling up I. A. Richards's criteria of sentimentality in order to fire away at weak- nesses which are surely insignificant com- pared with the total imaginative intensity of the scene. Paul's dying words, Dr Daleski says, 'lack all verisimilitude,' Which is rather like saying that Blake's chimney-sweep wouldn't actually have dreamed about angels. Thackeray was nearer the mark when, in a famous moment of envious ad-
miration (quoied by Philip Collins in his splendid new addition to the Critical Heri- tage series), he dashed his copy of Dombey and Son on to the table and exclaimed to Mark Lemon, 'There is no writing against such power as this—one has no chance!' And indeed, in what is the best chapter of his book, Dr Daleski himself makes handsome amends for his earlier literalmindedness by writing with alert and sympathetic tact about Great Expectations and Pip's search for love.
These pages make up for much that is flat about the earlier chapters, but they do not dispel the most serious doubt that one has about Dr Daleski's book. The fact is, that, for all his readiness to speak of Dick- ens's criticisms of Victorian England, Dr Daleski is extremely evasive about how these are established. Again and again, he speaks of the representativeness of characters in the novels, and repeatedly he refers to 'the society' that the novels present : the society, for instance, whose 'loss of a viable sense of value' provides the true theme for Martin Chuzzlewit, or which, in Dombey and Son, can be reduced to 'a sophisticated variety of bargain and sale,' or which, in Bleak House, 'condones Chancery and Tom-all- Alone's,' or whose required 'death and re- birth' is seen as the root of Dickens's concern in Our Mutual Friend. Yet Dickens and the Art of Analogy never, I think, frankly poses the question of how we can be confident that the society which Dickens presents does actually exist outside the pages of his novels, nor in what way the representativeness of his characters can be guaranteed (for that matter it is by no means always obvious whether Dr Daleski means to speak of a real or a fictional society, or whether he thinks Dickens means to—which may per- haps be why he refers to the 'theme' of social injustice, without bothering to indicate whe- ther he supposes Dickens was modelling theme on fact). It is, of course, an immensely tricky problem, but it has to be faced, if only
because—as Professor Collins's book makes strikingly clear—many of Dickens's con- temporary critics and readers weren't at all prepared to admit that he was saying any- thing either relevant to or piercingly truthful about their society. It is easy enough to dis- miss such critics as simply obtuse, or maintain that they thought attack was the best means of defending the indefensible; but to go beyond mere insistence on the representative nature of Dickens's art is a good deal more difficult.
Still, we have to go further, or be content to accept the pointlessly trivial 'subtleties of modern criticism,' about which Dr Daleski is properly scathing. Nobody who cares seriously about Dickens wants to discuss him in terms of solipsistic 'worlds' that evade any question about the truth of what he presents. And to be fair, Dr Daleski is far too intelligent and perceptive to wish to be identified with that sort of sterile acade- micism. It is therefore particularly good to have his praise of Edmund Wilson, which more than offsets the battering that Wilson's classic essay, 'Dickens : The Two Scrooges,' has recently undergone (Dr. Leavis's attack on it was presumably mounted because somebody, .other than Leavis himself, had to be found to carry the can for the crass dismissal of Dickens from the Great Tradi- tion). Even so, and allowing for the book's customary good sense, there is a failure of nerve, an unwillingness to ask or to face up to the really crucial questions, that bedevils Dickens and the Art of Analogy, and makes it a disappointment. Dr Daleski concludes his long essay on Our Mutual Friend by remarking that it is 'one of the most sub- versive' English novels of the nineteenth century. I happen to agree with him, but I wish he had made a rather better job of demonstrating why it is.
John Lucas is a Lecturer in English at the University of Nottingham:
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