Edmund Wilson - The Wound and the Bow

To the Students of English 354,

University of Chicago, Summer, 1939

OF all the great English writers, Charles Dickens has received in his own country the scantiest serious attention from either biographers, scholars, or critics. He has become for the English middle class so much one of the articles of their creeda familiar joke, a favourite dish, a Christmas ritualthat it is difficult for British pundits to see in him the great artist and social critic that he was. Dickens had no university education, and the literary men from Oxford and Cambridge, who have lately been sifting fastidiously so much of the English heritage, have rather snubbingly let him alone. The Bloomsbury that talked about Dostoevsky ignored Dostoevskys master, Dickens. What happens when the London of Lytton Strachey does take Dickens up is shown in Hugh Kingsmills book, The Sentimental Journey, in which the man who was called by Taine the master of all hearts is made into one of those Victorian scarecrows with ludicrous Freudian flawsso infantile, pretentious, and hypocritical as to deserve only a perfunctory sneer.

Since Forsters elaborate memoir, which even in the supplemented edition of Ley has never been a real biography, no authoritative book about Dickens has been published. Some of the main facts about his life have till recently been kept from the public, and now that they have finally come out they have usually been presented either by doddering Dickens-fanciers or through the medium of garrulous memoirs. Mr. Ralph Straus and Mr. T. A. Jackson have recently published studies of Dickensthe one from the psychological, the other from the Marxist, point of viewwhich attempt a more searching treatment; but though they contain some valuable insights, neither is really first-rate, for neither handles surely enough or carries to fundamental findings the line which it undertakes. The typical Dickens expert is an old duffer who, as Mr. Straus has said, is primarily interesting in proving that Mr. Pickwick stopped at a certain inn and slept in a certain bed.

As for criticism, there has been in English one admirable critic of Dickens, George Gissing, whose prefaces and whose book on Dickens not only are the best thing on Dickens in English but stand out as one of the few really first-rate pieces of literary criticism produced by an Englishman of the end of the century. For the rest, you have mainly G. K. Chesterton, who turned out in his books on Dickens some of the best work of which he was capable and who said some excellent things, but whose writing here as elsewhere is always melting away into that peculiar pseudo-poetic booziness which verbalizes with large conceptions and ignores the most obtrusive actualities. Chesterton celebrated the jolly Dickens; and Bernard Shaw offset this picture by praising the later and gloomier Dickens and insisting on his own debt to the author of Little Dorrit at a time when it was taken for granted that he must derive from such foreigners as Ibsen and Nietzsche.

Chesterton asserted that time would show that Dickens was not merely one of the Victorians, but incomparably the greatest English writer of his time; and Shaw coupled his name with that of Shakespeare. It is the conviction of the present writer that both these judgments were justified. Dickensthough he cannot of course pretend to the rank where Shakespeare has few companionswas nevertheless the greatest dramatic writer that the English had had since Shakespeare, and he created the largest and most varied world. It is the purpose of this essay to show that we may find in Dickens work to-day a complexity and a depth to which even Gissing and Shaw have hardly, it seems to me, done justicean intellectual and artistic interest which makes Dickens loom very large in the whole perspective of the literature of the West.

The father of Charles Dickens father was head butler in the house of John Crewe (later Lord Crewe) of Crewe Hall, Member of Parliament for Chester; and the mother of his father was a servant in the house of The Marquess of Blandford in Grosvenor Square, who was Lord Chamberlain to the Household of George III. This grandmother, after her marriage, became housekeeper at Crewe Hall, and it is assumed that it was through the patronage of her employer that her son John Dickens was given a clerkship in the Navy Pay Office.

John Dickens began at 70 a year and was in time increased to 350. But he had always had the tastes of a gentleman. He was an amiable fellow, with an elegant manner and a flowery vein of talk, who liked to entertain his friends and who could not help creating the impression of a way of life beyond his means. He was always in trouble over bills.

When Charles, who had been born (7th February, 1812) at Portsmouth and had spent most of his childhood out of London at Portsmouth, Portsea and Chatham, who had had a chance to go to the theatre and to read the Arabian Nights and the eighteenth-century novelists, and had been taught by a tutor from Oxford, came up to London at the age of nine to join his parents, who had been obliged to return there, he was terribly shocked to find them, as a consequence of his fathers debts, now living in a little back garret in one of the poorest streets of Camden Town. On 20th February, 1824, when Charles was twelve, John Dickens was arrested for debt and taken to the Marshalsea Prison, announcing, as he left the house: The sun has set upon me for ever! At home the food began to run low; and they had to pawn the household belongings till all but two rooms were bare. Charles even had to carry his books, one by one, to the pawnshop. It was presently decided that the boy should go to work at six shillings a week for a cousin who manufactured blacking; and through six months, in a rickety old house by the river, full of dirt and infested with rats, he pasted labels on blacking bottles, in the company of riverside boys who called him the little gentleman. He wanted terribly to go on with his schooling, and couldnt grasp what had happened to him. The whole of the rest of the family moved into the Marshalsea with his father; and Charles, who had a lodging near them, went to the jail after work every evening and ate breakfast with them every morning. He was so ashamed of the situation that he would never allow his companion at the blacking warehouse, whose name was Bob Fagin, to go with him to the door of the prison, but would take leave of him and walk up the steps of a strange house and pretend to be going in. He had had a kind of nervous fits in his earlier childhood, and now these began to recur. One day at work he was seized with such an acute spasm that he had to lie down on some straw on the floor, and the boys who worked with him spent half the day applying blacking bottles of hot water to his side.