The Mystery of Charles Dickens by A.N. Wilson

Author:A.N. Wilson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2020-06-11T00:00:00+00:00

The horrors of the gibbet and the crime which brought the wretched murderers to it faded in my mind before the atrocious bearing, looks and language of the assembled spectators. When I came upon the scene at midnight, the shrillness of the cries and howls that were raised from time to time, denoting that they came from a concourse of boys and girls already assembled in the best places made my blood run cold.32

There is excitement pulsating through his denunciation. As a little boy, Dickens had loved it when his godfather Christopher Huffam walked with him through the streets of London at night. He had especially loved the crime-ridden area of Seven Dials – ‘Good Heaven! What wild visions of prodigies of wickedness, want, and beggary arose in my mind out of that place!’33

He deplored official leniency to ruffians, and felt that police and magistrates were devoted to the ‘preserving of them as if they were Partridges’. [‘The Ruffian’, UT 30] Nor did Dickens believe that wicked people could be reformed or made better. There are good people and bad people, in Dickens’s world, as in his novels. The repentance of the sinner, of which the Bible speaks, or the heart-searching inner reform of heedless or bad people, such as we meet in the pages of the great Russian novels, does not play much role in Dickens’s fiction, with two big exceptions – the repentance of Scrooge, and the attempt made by Magwitch to put ‘good’ use to his fortune. No surprise then that, as far as he was concerned, criminals should not be rehabilitated. They should simply be punished.

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