For reading [The Dickens bicentenary]

AN OUTSIDER'S VIEW (02/07/2012) (From The Daily Tribune)

KEN FULLER

Today is the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Dickens, the foremost English novelist of the Victorian era. The acclaim greeting Dickens was — and still is — international in scope. Walk into any large bookstore in the Philippines, and Dickens will be there.

The author of Oliver Twist, David Copperfield, The Pickwick Papers and The Old Curiosity Shop is chiefly remembered for two achievements, the first of which was the creation of a range of unforgettable characters, some of which were taken from life.

“Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen nineteen six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery.” This was the memorable dictum of Mr. Micawber in David Copperfield, a character modeled on Dickens’s own father who, like Micawber, served a stretch in a debtors’ prison. Then there is the odious Uriah Heep, also from Copperfield, the hilarious Cockney nurse Sarah Gamp from Martin Chuzzlewit, Sam Weller (whose father was also modeled on the Dickens parent) from Pickwick, Fagin and the Artful Dodger from Oliver Twist, the much-loved Mr. Pickwick himself and many, many more.

It is just as well that Dickens possessed this gift for characterization, because his plotting was often wanting, and this doubtless arose from the way in which most of his novels were produced, being serialized in his two periodicals — first Household Words, then All the Year Round. Often, he worked himself to exhaustion, particularly when two serials overlapped, obliging him to work on both at once.

 His other achievement was to lay bare the monstrosity of social conditions in Victorian England, describing the squalid lives of the poor alongside the hypocrisy and pretension of their “betters.” Despite his reputation as a reformer, however, it is almost certainly the case that, rather than arising from any clear-sighted vision of a “new Jerusalem,” Dickens’s concern had its roots in his own experience. In the short story called “The Haunted Man,” the protagonist finds that if all memory of personal sorrow and regret is erased, compassion disappears also. In order to sympathize with the suffering of others, Dickens was saying, you must have suffered yourself.

This highly-debatable assertion appears to have been Dickens’s philosophy, derived from his own experience as a boy. His father’s inability to live within his means probably inflicted more misery on the son than on the man himself. While John Dickens was in Marshalsea debtors’ prison Charles, then aged 12, was sent to work in a riverside blacking factory, and this experience marked him for life. At a personal level, he felt betrayed by parents who, while putting him to work, provided his sister with a musical education. More than any other, it was probably this experience, fictionalized in Copperfield, which served as the basis for his sympathy for the poor.

It is more than possible that his sentimental idealization of the family derived not from any desire to hold up his own experience as a parent as an example (this, we will see, is plain), but from a sense of self-pity concerning his early life. Perhaps also his hurry to enter married life is explained by a desire to recreate something destroyed when he was twelve.

Charles Dickens was riven with contradictions. In her recent Charles Dickens: A Life (Penguin Viking, 2011), Clair Tomalin twice mentions his sympathy for the Chartists, the huge working-class movement for parliamentary reform, but most indications are that his sympathy lay with the poor as victims, not as an organized mass. Rather than the masses throwing off their oppressors, the latter should undergo a “Christian” reformation. He mercilessly satirized politicians and yet dined with Disraeli and Gladstone. He claimed to be a republican and probably was one, and yet his A Child’s History of England is almost exclusively an account of the lives of royalty. Even though he makes it abundantly clear that he considers most of these rulers to have been wastrels and villains, he concludes with “God save the queen!”

If Dickens showed little support for the poor when they organized on his own doorstep, he was even more opposed to revolts by peoples colonized by Britain, venting racist outbursts on the occasion of the Indian Mutiny and campaigning for Governor Eyre when more enlightened Britons called for him to be punished for his brutal suppression of the Morant Bay Rebellion in Jamaica.

In A Child’s History, Dickens expressed great admiration for Oliver Cromwell, and so perhaps the abstemious republican strongman (who, beset by his own contradictions, at one stage wished to be made king) was his ideal ruler. Within his own family, Dickens was indeed something of a Cromwell (although not a particularly abstemious one), ruling with a rod of iron. And despite his idealization of the family (one of the few collectives of which he approved) his own was a disappointment to him. He complained to his friend Angela Burdett Coutts (the richest woman in England, with whom Dickens ran a home for “fallen women”) that several of his 10 children were unwanted. In 1858, he not only cut free from his wife in order to pursue the actress Ellen Ternan but forbade his children to see their mother.

Several sons were dispatched to outposts in the British Empire. His youngest son Edward, just 16, sobbed as the train took him from the Dickens home in Kent on the first leg of his journey to Australia. Dickens later wrote to remind him that he had also been forced to “win my food” at a young age, expressing the hope that Edward would later consider “that you had a kind father.” What a tormented — and tormenting — man was Charles Dickens.

But many of Dickens’s own imperfections and contradictions were reflections of those within Victorian society, which in his writing he exposed to public scrutiny, and for this he should be celebrated.