The Naked Heart by Peter Gay

Author:Peter Gay
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

5. Dickens

Charles Dickens, the representative writer for the century, deserves a chapter of his own. For he was more agile in crossing boundaries than any other of its novelists: entertainer and moralist, buffoon and tragedian in one. When he died in June 1870, at the age of fifty-eight, the whole world went into mourning—or so it appeared to his bereft contemporaries.† Naturally, at home expressions of sorrow were all the more heartfelt. Luke Fildes, who had illustrated Dickens’s last, unfinished novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, famously captured the sense of loss in picturing Dickens’s empty armchair and writing desk surrounded by his favorite creations: Mr. Pecksniff, Sam Weller and Mr. Pickwick, Oliver Twist asking for more, and others in that inimitable crew. Her Majesty Queen Victoria sent an affecting telegram of condolence, and crowds filed past Dickens’s open grave for days. His wish for a quiet country burial ignored, he was entombed at Westminster Abbey as became a national treasure.

This unprecedented outpouring of sorrow for a novelist speaks to Dickens’s range. He seemed to have something for every reader everywhere. Few makers of fiction had ventured into so many neighborhoods, from London slums to pretentious mansions, cathedral towns to industrial cities, opium dens to fishing villages. His cast of characters embraced pimps and prostitutes, merchants active and retired, old rich and newly rich, heiresses and charity boys, beautiful young women from diverse social ranks, servants, scavengers, lawyers, idlers, clerks, nurses, sailors, taxidermists, bureaucrats, executioners, evangelical divines, uncharitable philanthropists, confidence men, schoolteachers, labor leaders, innkeepers, and a host of lesser folk, spear carriers in his teeming operatic dramas. A Dickens novel gives the busy impression of a rococo palace: leaving not an inch of his fictive canvas undecorated, he would endow a waiter, a domestic servant, even a fly, destined for a fleeting appearance, with memorable individuality. Some exacting critics denied him the depths of understanding granted only a handful of novelists. In 1865, reviewing the last novel Dickens completed, Our Mutual Friend, Henry James called him, a little cruelly, “the greatest of superficial novelists.”1 But even if he was deficient in psychological acuity—we shall return to the question—Dickens met the needs of his vast reading publics by making himself available to each on its own level.

The conviction that Dickens was the universal storyteller of the Victorian century, delighting all ages and all tastes, from peers to lowly clerks and beyond them to the common people, emerged early.2 No doubt, the monthly installments of his novels cut an imposing swath: the Pickwick Papers, which made him famous, gathered more and more purchasers as successive numbers poured out, until they totaled some 40,000. By 1870, more than a million copies of that quixotic comedy had been sold. Yet the core of his most faithful support was occupied by the proper middle classes. As the perceptive Mrs. Oliphant, herself a prolific and popular novelist, observed in 1855: notwithstanding Dickens’s eloquent sympathies for the poor, he was “perhaps more distinctly than any other

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