DICKENS AND THE CRITICS
SIR,—Mr. Peter Fison opens a review in your last week's issue by telling your readers that 'Dr Leavis, of course, doesn't like Dickens.' What information Mr. Fison is relying on I can't guess. Or perhaps (and the 'of course' may imply it) he relies on his unaided intuition. In any case, as some of your readers (1 think) could tell him, his trust is mis- placed. If he inquires around, or even reads what I have written, he will find that for a number of years one of my major preoccupations, in writing and speech, has been 'the challenge of Dickens'— the challenge he presents to criticism to define the ways in which he is one of the greatest of creative writers.
I will say here, what I have found myself saying in discussion, that (if one can imagine oneself faced with such a choice) I would without hesitation surrender the whole ceuvre of Flaubert for Dombey and Son or Little Dorrit. This, however, may con- firm Mr. Fison's view of me (and he can tell him- self that he has Dame Edith Sitwell with him) as a comic character. I will nevertheless add that to lay the kind of emphasis Mr. Fison does upon The Old Curiosity Shop seems to me a' poor tribute to Dickens's genius, and that to talk of 'folk tradition' by way of 'appreciating' the business of Little Nell and her grandfather advances neither the recognition of that genius nor the usefulness of 'folk' as a critical term.
Dickens, in learning how to become a novelist and developing out of a journalist and a popular entertainer into a great artist, became more and more conscious of himself as such. Like all great artists a great technical inventor, he created a highly subtle, penetrating and sophisticated art—an art that made him an incalculably potent influence in the work of his greatest successors.
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