The Facts of Fiction by Norman Collins

Author:Norman Collins
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: THE FACTS OF FICTION
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2011-11-27T05:00:00+00:00

Charles Dickens

To pass from Walter Scott to Charles Dickens is to pass from the real founder of the trade of fiction to the first journeyman of genius of modern times.

Praise of Charles Dickens passed saturation point a generation ago. Most of what has been said since has simply and inevitably sunk to the bottom, till the whole bottle of Dickens criticism needs shaking before using. And to find something to say about Dickens that is at once new enough to be interesting, and true enough to be worth being interested in, has exhausted more critics, perhaps, than the criticism of any other writer in the language, save Shakespeare.

It would be easy enough to shock people into curiosity by redrawing Dickens’s portraits to show him as a specious and spiteful cynic (who after all is usually only a sentimentalist that has been rather badly snubbed) enjoying the sight of the cracks in the universe. Or to explain him in terms of social sadism, and call up the Smikes and the Little Nells, and the Olivers and the Davids as witnesses for the Crown.

But some subtler method will have to be found if we are to lead readers up the garden. Even though it is only a bouquet that is to be presented at the end of the path.

Strangely enough the true secret of Dickens’s genius, to say nothing of his popularity, is to be found, not in any piece of remarkably profound criticism, but in a piece of sheer critical folly.

I refer to the remark commonly made by those who do not like Dickens, that he was writing down to the public. Such a remark would have astonished Charles Dickens. The wild irony of the little ten-year-old boy sticking labels on pots of blacking and solemnly patronising the great English nation would have delighted Dickens. For, as David Copperfield shows, young Charles Dickens, the baby on the treadmill, was a figure that remained in his imagination throughout his life. And Dickens, the golden, successful author, would take periodical dives out of prosperity back into poverty to look at life again through the eyes of fatigue and failure.

That memory of worse things, indeed, is about half the secret of his huge and human sympathy.

But to defend anyone against the charge of “writing down ” is difficult. In the first place, it is not a charge at all; it is a kind of grudging compliment. It implies a consciousness of the supreme importance of one’s words, together with complete unscrupulousness about the use of them. The Parables are examples of the same kind of thing: heavenly truths designed for the consumption of earthly blockheads.

But Dickens did not speak from a point of isolation. When he emerged, he emerged among the blockheads. Dickens was the product, not of an act of God, but of an Act of Education. There was nothing airy about him: he was of the earth, earthy. He was quite simply and satisfactorily a member of the great British public.

Dickens has

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