Charles Dickens (1812-1870)

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The 19th Century
Presentation 8 of 13

Charles Dickens (1812-1870)
The Greatest English Novelist and His Portrait of Man’s Life
Presented by Roger Weir
Tuesday, January 24, 1984

Transcript:

This series for those who have been coming I think has proved invigorating in the sense that the 19th century in this refreshed form looks in fact like the germinal field which it really is. We have progressively discovered that the great minds that we have singled out – and they are culled from a list that could easily be double or larger. I could have for instance chosen Baudelaire rather than Delacroix; I could have included Madame Blavatsky. There are many other authors who could have been treated. Stendhal instead of Balzac and so forth. But the authors, the figures, the writers, the thinkers, the philosophers, the artists that I've chosen, each share the basic concern which this series has sought to put before us. The concern was that in the 19th century that somehow man's matured mind, his faith in his reason, in his capacity to at last organize societies even empires on a powerful enough basis so that they could span the world in fact and intact, that man at that pinnacle of capacity should be able to organize his life in terms that most satisfy his material wants: his pursuit of happiness, his quest for the good life, his belief that at any cost the depths plumbed by the human spirit should be able to be dredged by his capacity to manifest his deepest thoughts into some material form, and that society by and large should profit. Civilization by and large should materialize his best capacities.

The belief was widespread. We have chosen examples largely from Germany and England and France. We will have Russia towards the end. We could just as well have extended it more generally across the face of– of Europe at this time. But in fact, with each thinker, with each artist, with each individual that we have come to, the depths reached have exceeded the capacity to translate what was discovered into the phenomenal world. That is to say the materialist basis, which was the origins of the confidence leading the individual forth were finally exceeded and the confidence evaporated and we were left increasingly with the proverbial hands full of dust. The questions that were raised were progressively of deeper scope so that the qualitative complications for man in the 19th century as it progressed from decade to decade increasingly seemed like a nightmare. There were individuals, and we are going to have one of them tonight, who initially seemed to have all of the capacities, all of the opportunities that human talent could confer upon one individual.

With Charles Dickens, he could have had half a dozen various careers. He was totally capable. He was a young man with such vivacity that he was often looked to as being the Victorian version of an Orpheus – someone who could simply by his wit and his talent charm the very vestigial powers of man into some lyrical glen of English countryside. And there one could make true the Victorian observation that they alone of all humanity had at last crawled ashore from the seas of evolution and had taken on a final permanent form of the mature human being. And yet as we will see tonight Dickens himself, in a short span of thrity years, exhausted the confidence, outpaced the talent which he had opened up issues which became more and more a stark absurdity for the end of the 19th century. And I will try and give you a brief selection from five of Dickens’s works to show you progressively the dematerialization of his confidence and the change of syntax in his writing from that of a witty young man intent on portraying comic characters who could transcend even social tragedies, to the kind of diction that one would run across perhaps at the beginning of an Ibsen play. And so Dickens in a way exceeds the childish estimation that he has received for the hundred years or so since his death. There has been a movement of course since the Second World War to take Dickens a little more seriously. And there was a poll taken, I am not sure whether it was the Modern Language Institute, but a poll taken recently in the 1970s and Dickens’s influence in English literature was second only to Shakespeare. So he has come into his own as a formative force.

When Dickens was born in 1809 he came from a family that was struggling to enter into the middle class on the lower reaches. He was born in Portsmouth but they moved when he was still in his infancy to Chatham. Chatham is on the Thames Estuary, to the east of London some distance, and later on when he would become successful financially, Dickens would buy Gads Hill and return to the roots of his happy childhood.

The father was unable to maintain his social and pecuniary ambitions and finally was put into a debtor's prison. The Dickens family with the children having to move to less and less substantial apartments until finally young Charles Dickens was put to work as a child in a factory, very much like a Dickens character – Oliver Twist for instance. Although David Copperfield is perhaps closer autobiographically to the actual conditions of the lad. When the father came out of debtors prison it was Dickens mother who wished to keep him working at the factory. And this realization of the lack of confidence in his mother in the naturally supposed protection of the female of the species of the mother of the family of the woman of the house produced some problems for Dickens later on with women, especially in view of his marriage to Catherine. But Dickens character was essentially that of an adventurer. He also could have been quite easily a consummate actor. He was even considering at the age of twenty of being a professional actor. And many actors who were quite famous in their day were lifelong friends of– of Dickens. But the– the young man was given schooling only up to the age of fifteen. He found himself in fact finally in a journalistic career. And this set the stage for Dickens swift emergence as an author.

In those days there were many publications in London quite a few more newspapers than there are today. And we'll see that Dickens found some of the best newspapers in the 19th century – The Daily News for instance was founded by Dickens. It was the belief by wealthy individuals that these publications made available avenues of social interchange; the social intercourse which was necessary for an urban metropolitan civilized society. London increasingly the hub of the British Empire. So that the eyes of the world were progressively upon London. Thus the movement of society in London took on the character of one vast ballroom under the crystalline chandeliers of excellent manners and deep complications having significance far and away beyond just the observable actions. Even the most mundane actions were seen to be significant to the whole world. Dickens will for instance have a character, a reprehensible female character wanly holding her hand up with her fan and making gestures so that she can appreciate the beauty of her hand. And this all comes from the mentality that she was on center stage for the world because she was the hostess in London society and of course everyone should be watching her.

Dickens, as a young journalist, having these sparkling eyes– they were always described by confreres as penetrating, lively, jovial, disposition all coming out through his eyes. The ability to discern in himself a number of talents. Dickens finally sat down using his journalistic prowess and wrote some short sketches of London life and without signing them, deposited them in a London mailbox addressed to a publication called Monthly Magazine which had been purchased recently by a retired Captain Holland who did not pay the authors but who gave young unknown writers perhaps even anonymous writers. In the case of the first Dickens submissions a chance to be published.

The wonderful biography of Dickens, in two volumes, by Edgar Johnson, published about thirty years ago, records the incident quite poignantly under the chapter, The Career Takes Shape. Johnson records,
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“ ‘With fear and trembling’ one twilight evening towards winter Dickens stealthily dropped this sketch ‘into a dark letter-box in a dark office up a dark court in Fleet Street.’ This was the office of the Monthly Magazine, subtitled ‘The British Registry of Literature, Science, and Belles Lettres.’ It was an old established periodical with a circulation of about six hundred, [and was published] by a bookseller named Andrew Robertson who had a shop at 84 Fetter Lane. Just that October had it been sold by Charles Tilt, its former owner, to a Captain Holland who had fought with Bolivar in South America and who was now editing the magazine to voice his own ardent liberalism.… On a December evening, [shortly thereafter] just before closing time, [Dickens] stepped into a bookshop on the Strand and asked for the new number of the Monthly Magazine.”

He held the issue close to him; he paid for it. What did it cost? Two and six I think. And nervously paging through, came upon the content list and there it was. “A Dinner at Poplar Walk.” He at last had his first taste of the glory of print. These are well-chosen words. The glory of print. Dickens’ personal energy, by dint of his personal capacity, had moved from in him to the external world and he was able, finally, to recognize a sense of triumph, glory as it is. He was in fact so overcome he was unable to read any further, his eyes misting not only with tears but with something more welling up in him. And, as Edgar Johnson records in here, he “took refuge in Westminster Hall” down the block and, “There for half an hour paced the stone floor under the dark rafters and [timeless] time-stained carvings.” Dickens wrote, and Johnson quotes him, “My eyes so dimmed with pride and joy, that they could not bear the street, and they were not fit to be seen.”

This taste of glory, this taste of– of triumph was the epitome of the self-made man in liberal London. We are somewhat able in the United States at this time, even in the 1980s, to appreciate the tremendous push of the self-made man, the self-educated man. In the London of this time the mythologies that were coming out were profoundly for that individual who took his own destiny in his hands and by dint of application and perseverance was able to make his way. For instance, one of the most reprinted books in the 19th century in London was The Lives of the Engineers by Samuel Smiles and the publication that came out later on Self-Help by Smiles. It went through something like a hundred and thirty-seven editions.

The whole notion of an individual man quite distinctly different from everyone else on his own, isolated as it were, through his own capacities to manipulate and maneuver his destiny through talent and perseverance to make a world of his own. This was the Olympia, this was the drawing vision. Dickens, at age twenty, found himself at last in the threshold of being able to do just this. He sent in several more anonymous contributions, which were printed, and finally sent in a contribution which he signed by the pen name of Boz. Now Boz comes through several different derivations from Moses. There had been someone in his family who had had a nickname of Moses and the child had mispronounced it as Boses. It had come down to Boz and Dickens chose the name Boz because it was a childlike transposition of– of Moses in a very secret– secret colloquial way. One of the great characters of his first work, Samuel Weller, spoke with this kind of childlike lisping. Dickens, Sketches by Boz was an immediate success. The sketches were pirated by several other publications and within weeks the young Charles Dickens was happily reporting to friends that he was being pirated all over town. People were reading him out loud and from having an audience of a supposed six hundred he was now in the thousands.

So he came out of the woodwork. He in fact decided to sign a contract to collect the sketches for Boz to put into a publishable volume. He made some kind of an arrangement with a publisher for about two hundred pounds for doing a publication. And this publication was to appear in twenty monthly installments in a magazine and there would be a Sections of about twenty-five or thirty pages and these were to be collected at the end in a publication. This first serial was The Pickwick Papers and Dickens forced his enormous almost titanic energy into producing these monthly instalments and The Pickwick Papers. And as soon as they came out they were the talk of London. They were all the rage.

Now, The Pickwick Papers themselves are extraordinary. When we first began reading them in our time in our day and age were somewhat amiss to find where the great attraction is. And it's only after reading through several hundred pages that we come to see the lovability of the characters. There's a men's club with about thirteen or fourteen characters founded by and headed by a certain Mr. Pickwick who nicely plumply fills his breeches and waistcoat and in order to be heard at the club meeting stands on Windsor chairs and has his say. He is the picaresque character who carries the triumph of this men's club with its humorous conviviality safely through all the trials and tribulations of the episodes of life. One of the great episodes in The Pickwick Papers is when Mr. Pickwick is taken to court, and at his trial his landlady who has imagined that he has made overtures to marry her has in fact accepted all kinds of little favors. She has mended his socks. He has accepted food at her hand. There have been many conversations. He's been seen to pat the head of her little boy and say wouldn't you like to have a father? And all this is reported by various servants and passersby. And all this is brought out by two shyster lawyers, one of them named Fogg, of course.

In the trial it is apparent that this is a complete farce and as the trial comes to a conclusion Pickwick is fined seven hundred fifty pounds. He tells the opposing lawyers that they will never get a halfpenny from him and he leaves. They have a meeting of the club the next day and they decide that they're going to move to Bath, England. So, Chapter 34 sub-entitled, “In Which Mr. Pickwick Thinks He Had Better Go To Bath; and Goes Accordingly,” ran something like this for a page:

“ ‘Not one halfpenny,’ Mr. Pickwick said, firmly; ‘not one halfpenny.’ ‘Hooroar for the principle, as the money-lender said ven he vouldn't renew the bill,’ observed Mr. Weller, who was clearing away the breakfast things. ‘Sam,’ said Mr. Pickwick, ‘have the goodness to step down stairs.’ ‘Certainly, Sir,’ replied Mr. Weller; and acting on Mr. Pickwick's gentle hint, Sam retired.”

And then the discussion goes on that they are going to move to Bath. None of them have ever been there. So the next morning,

“The next was a very unpropitious morning for a journey – muggy, damp, and drizzly. The horses in the stages that were going out, had come through the city, and were smoking so, that the outside passengers were invisible.”

You see this is the mid 1830s. The Industrial Revolution is going on but the streets are filled with horse carriages. London's cold and miserable.

“The newspaper-sellers looked moist and smelled moldy; the wet ran off the hats of the orange-vendors as they thrust their heads in the coach windows, and diluted the insides in a refreshing manner…. and the men with the pocket-books made pocket-books of them. Watch-guards and toasting-forks were alike at a discount, and pencil-cases and sponge were a drug in the market.”

And so they climb in, take themselves to Bath and when they come to Bath – which is an old Roman resort, an old Chaucerian resort and now a London health spa – they find the following situation and kinds of people. They have moved from the London of absurd lawsuits and law courts and they've moved to the upper class resorts like Bath.

“At precisely twenty minutes before eight o’clock that night, Angelo Cyrus Bantam, Esquire, the Master of the Ceremonies, emerged from his chariot at the door of the Assembly Rooms in the same wig, the same teeth, the same eye-glass, the same watch and seals, the same rings, the same shirt-pin, and the same cane. The only observable alterations in his appearance, were, that he wore a brighter blue coat, with a white silk lining, black tights, black silk stockings, and pumps, and a white waistcoat, and was, if possible, just a thought more scented. Thus attired, the Master of Ceremonies, in strict discharge of the important duties of his all-important office, planted himself in the rooms to receive the company. Bath being full, the company, and the sixpences for tea, poured in, in shoals. In the ball-room, the long card-room, the octagonal card-room, the staircases, and the passages, the hum of many voices, and the sound of many feet were perfectly bewildering.”

And so on and on goes this portrayal of the ritual taking of the waters at Bath.

When the Pickwick Papers were finished, week by week Dickens had received more and more congratulations. The offers poured in and he finally signed a contract with a publisher, named Bentley, for two novels, as yet unwritten, as yet entitled on any subject Dickens wished to write, for four hundred pounds apiece. Dickens in conferring with friends decided that he would test his newfound mettle a little bit and he asked for five hundred a piece and Bentley gave it. Dickens now was well into it. As the English used to say, ‘he had the bit between his teeth.’

He sat about ready to produce a series of novels in serial. In fact at one time he had several serials going on at the same time. He was able through assiduous application of energy to write his daily and weekly quotas. Meeting these deadlines. In just this way he was able to produce finally a whole series of novels in the 1830s. He produced Oliver Twist of course at this time which was slightly autobiographical, and he was able to write Nicholas Nickleby as well as The Pickwick Papers. At this time they were all published and through– through the 1830s Dickens’s reputation soared. He was in demand in society. He was able to relinquish his journalistic job. He was in fact able, finally, in 1836 to take a wife. Catherine or Kate Dickens is a very interesting character difficult for us at this time to form an accurate estimate of but I think some of the correspondence between Dickens and herself is illustrious– illustrious of a fact, an observation.

Catherine did not share the literary taste that Dickens had. She was the sort of woman who looked to him to look to her. And when he did not she would lapse into baby talk. And with this kind of pouting hope to draw him back to her. Dickens, a month before they were married, had to reprimand her several times, in print, that she must understand that the projected house and the marriage and everything depended upon him being able to do his work. And that if this caused her consternation then she would just have to bear the inconvenience. She and Dickens were married for about twenty-two years. Dickens himself, fascinated with the triumph that he had, poured all of the money, all of the acclaim, all of the talent that he had into founding his family. In liberal 19th century London the pillar of respectability was the family. Your origins, where you had come from, what kind of people you were, the conditions which you made for your children passing respectability down to them. So that the well-run Victorian household was in itself the paradigm for the health of the individual. And what could a man produce but a great household, an estate, within which he was the king – the man is the king of his own house as the king is the head of the empire et cetera.

So that this paradigm became, for decades, the sine qua non of success and the chalice into which all of his energy was challenged– or channeled. But the challenge for him was the increasing perception on his part that the central bond of the household, the man and his wife in his case was problematic. But Dickens was young in the 1830s; he was experienced triumph after triumph; and in fact at the beginning of the 1840s he realized that his great capacity to read out loud convinced him to take on an extensive lecture tour which included the United States.

Now one of the reasons for coming to America at this time, the early 1840s, was to explore the possibility of international copyright. It was estimated by one researcher that 19th century British fiction brought in revenues in the middle of the 19th century of some twenty-seven million pounds. And this covered roughly a hundred and sixty thousand different publications that came out. The novel was having its heyday. It was becoming the secular family reading along with the sacred family reading the Bible. So that one would have a large family Bible, which Papa would read out of, front of the fireplace on Sundays. And the other days of the week novel reading would be had for the family. So that there was a correlation to this almost a religious ritual. Dickens found himself responsible as the major spokesman, the best selling novelist of his day, to maintain the integrity of this whole ecology of family unity. He became, therefore a self-appointed, and accepted the appointment the knight errant of family fiction. He would for instance when he came back from the United States he took it upon himself to produce A Christmas Carol in 1843. He came back in 1842. That's when American Notes was published and in 1843 he wrote A Christmas Carol specifically to be decent family reading at Christmas time. And thereafter, almost every year for the rest of his life except for one year – I think 1867 – he produced A Christmas Story, or a Christmas Poem so that Dickens, in his lifetime, was associated with Christmas; Christmas being the great family holiday in Victorian England. In fact, throughout the world that has the heritage of the British Empire, Christmas is a family time. What does one do when one has the family together? One reads the latest Dickens offering, or one does as we still do in our time, redo the tale of Scrooge.

When Christmas Carol came out the wonderful magazine illustrations almost all of Dickens works were illustrated by great caricaturists: George Cruikshank, Phiz, Daniels, and so forth. It says– it reads here,

“ ‘I have none to give,’ the Ghost replied. ‘It comes from other regions, Ebenezer Scrooge, and is conveyed by other ministers, to others.’… It was the habit of Scrooge, whenever he became thoughtful, to put his hands in his breeches pockets. Pondering on what the Ghost had said, he did so now, but without lifting up his eyes, or getting off his knees. ‘You must have been very slow about it, Jacob,’ Scrooge observed in his business-like manner, though with humility and deference. ‘Slow!’ the Ghost repeated. ‘Seven years dead,’ mused Scrooge. ‘And traveling all the time?’ ‘The whole time,’ said the Ghost. ‘No rest, no peace. Incessant torture of remorse.’ ‘You travel fast?’ said Scrooge. ‘On the wings of the wind,’ replied the Ghost. ‘You might have gotten over a great quantity of ground in seven years,’ said Scrooge. The Ghost, on hearing this, set up another cry, and clanked his chain so hideously in the dead silence of the night, that the Ward would have been justified in indicting it for a nuisance.”

So Dickens, associated with the family, associated with Christmas, had gone to the United States on his Great Reading Tour, not only to meet the American authors but to assure them that they had their stake in international copyright. The American publishers took great umbrage at this kind of interference. One of the major complaints on their part was that if there was international copyright, the American publishers could not alter the publications to suit an American audience. This was just the sort of thing that Crusader Dickens said, “That's exactly right. You cannot tamper with these works of art. You cannot just change them and edit them according to your own whims.’ Longfellow, Prescott, Emerson, a number of great American authors were absolutely entranced by Dickens. His vivacity as an individual; the quality of his literature which he could lift off the page with his great acting ability; the poignancy of his liberal political outlook; the insistence that family literature had a definite unifying place in civilization which was equated with the empire at that time which was equated with the English speaking world; and that everyone should pay homage to this idea of integrity.

Throughout the 1840s Dickens would grow in stature. Almost everything he did brought in incredible sums of money. He was able finally to move to very luxurious habitations. In 1844 he took his family for six months to Italy and in Genoa they lived in a palace. Photographs of the rooms there show 30 foot ceilings and marble columns and huge vast vistas of marble with just a few antique chairs and room upon room. Dickens had come a long way from the days when his father was in a debtors’ prison.

In the center of this was a nagging suspicion that the core of the apple was rotten, that something was wrong. And Dickens, as the 1840s went by, became more and more susceptible to periods of overwhelming depression. He would write to friends that when quiet moments would come to him he involuntarily would sink into the most primeval depths of gloom for no apparent reason. Everything on the surface seemed the best that it could possibly be. And this of course is exactly what one looks to in terms of modern psychoanalytic practice. The surface was so picture perfect. The responsibility was so enormous. He had a commitment to his readers. Someone observed in a study that Dickens’s most faithful marriage was between himself and his readers. The capacity for Dickens to assume the mantle of kingship over the world of literature. He was compared in his time to Shakespeare – the Shakespeare of the novel. The man who brought the drama of human character in all of its vicissitudes showing the eventual triumph of good into the living rooms and drawing rooms of all civilized persons found in his own house an incapacity to effectively share this vision with his wife.

The estrangement of Kate and Charles grew. It would not issue into a separation until the late 1850s, but already in the late 1840s we begin to find a little bit of a change in Dickens. In order to take stock of himself, in order to use his art to unify, Dickens turned to an autobiographical novel which used up all the notes that he had taken for a life of himself when he wrote David Copperfield, 1850, 1851. Listen to the tone of the beginning of David Copperfield and how markedly different it is from the tone from Pickwick Papers which we had just a few minutes ago. It’s entitled, The Personal History and Experience of David Copperfield the Younger.

“Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show. To begin my life with the beginning of my life, I record that I was born (as I have been informed and believe) on a Friday, at twelve o’clock at night. It was remarked that the clock began to strike, and I began to cry, simultaneously.”

This synchronicity – the midnight chimes, and the birth of the lad – the first striking image in David Copperfield that Dickens is reaching out away from the banter of The Pickwick Papers to something larger something more inclusive. And in fact David Copperfield is one of the world's great novels. The portrayal of character in David Copperfield so transcends that of Pickwick Papers that we can easily imagine Dickens being quite confident that he had achieved his aim with the writing and the publication of David Copperfield.

With this under his belt Dickens now entered into a phase of trying his hand at starting all kinds of publications. He wanted to make liberal, middle class, family London ring with the pleasures of intellectual debate with the pleasures of great literary revival and almost single handedly began to invest enormous sums of money in most of the publications which did not last. He founded the Daily News as I have said and many other publications at this time. But it seemed to him as if somehow there were other aspects to life which had not been properly attended to. And Dickens, being the kind of man he was, having leaned on his literature, having gone back to his public, and his most capacious mode of integration he brought himself back in a series of poignant novels, Bleak House, Great Expectations, and one which I will quote from in just a minute or so called Little Dorrit which I think is one of Dickens greatest works. But he had set this up by writing a book called Dombey and Son. And in Dombey and Son this is how the beginning occurs. Now compare this to what we just had with David Copperfield, where the first person in a synchronistic mode was the narration.

“Dombey and Son.”

“Chapter I. Dombey and Son.”

“Dombey sat in the corner of the darkened room in the great arm-chair by the bedside, and Son lay tucked up warm in a little basket bedstead, carefully disposed on a low settee immediately in front of the fire and close to it, as if his constitution were analogous to that of a muffin, and it was essential to toast him brown while he was very new. Dombey was about eight-and-forty years of age. Son about eight and forty minutes.”

Sallying forth again, in Dombey and Son the complications, much more extensive. The integration as a novel much more intense. Whereas David Copperfield is a great Autobiographical tour de force, Dombey and Son is an attempt of a novelist who's largely been called an entertainer to bring his work into focus in such a powerful structural way that he is able to disclose through this microscope intensity a deeper inner core of motivation beyond the personal.

Chapter 26 called, “Shadows of the Past and Future.” Listen to the kind of dialogue now that Dickens puts into the mouth of the people where we're now coming to a dialogue that has a clipped kind of a syntax, a resonance of a tougher mind.

“ ‘Your most obedient. Sir,’ said the Major. ‘Damme, Sir, a friend of my friend Dombey’s, is a friend of mine, and I'm glad to see you!’ ‘I am infinitely obliged, Carker,’ [replied] Mr. Dombey, ‘to Major Bagstock for his company and conversation. Major Bagstock has rendered me great service, Carker.’ Mr. Carker the Manager, hat in hand, just arrived at Leamington, and just introduced to the Major, showed the Major his whole double range of teeth, and trusted [that] he might take the liberty of thanking him with all his heart for having affected so great an improvement in Mr. Dombey’s looks and spirits. ‘By Gad, Sir,’ said the Major, in reply, ‘there are no thanks due to me for it's a give and take affair. A great creature like our friend Dombey, Sir,’ said the Major, lowering his voice, but not lowering it so much as to render it inaudible to that gentleman, ‘cannot help improving and exalting his friends. He strengthens and invigorates a man, Sir, does Dombey in his moral nature.’ Mr. Carker snapped at the expression. In his moral nature. Exactly. The very words he had been on the point of suggesting.”

The complications go on. I was going to give you a whole precis of this chapter as an indication but I'll just give you this and then go on. A portrait of a woman.

“ ‘What insupportable creature is this, coming in! said Mrs. Skewton. ‘I cannot bear it. Go away, whoever you are!’ ‘You have not the heart to banish J. B., Ma'am’ said the Major, halting midway, to remonstrate, with his cane over his shoulder. ‘Oh it is you, is it? On second thoughts, you may enter,’ observed Cleopatra. The Major entered accordingly, and advanced to the sofa pressed her charming hand to his lips. ‘Sit down,’ said Cleopatra, listlessly waving her fan, ‘a long way off. Don't come too near me, for I'm frightfully faint and sensitive this morning, and you smell of the Sun. You are absolutely tropical.’ ‘By George, Ma'am,’ said the Major, ‘the time has been when Joseph Bagstock has been grilled and blistered by the Sun; the time was, when he was forced, Ma'am, into such full blow, by high hothouse heat in the West Indies, that he was known as the Flower. A man never heard of Bagstock, Ma'am, in those days; he heard of the Flower – the Flower of Ours. The Flower may have faded, more or less, Ma'am,’ observed the Major, dropping into a much nearer chair than had been indicated by his cruel Divinity, ‘but it is a tough plant yet, and constant as the evergreen.’ ”

“Here the Major, under cover of the dark room, shut up one eye, rolled his head like a Harlequin, and, in his great self-satisfaction, perhaps went nearer to the confines of apoplexy than he had ever gone before. ‘Where is Mrs. Granger?’ inquired Cleopatra of her page. Withers believed that she was in her own room. ‘Very well,’ said Mrs. Skewton. ‘Go away, and shut the door. I am engaged.’ As Withers disappeared, Mrs. Skewton turned her head languidly towards the Major, without otherwise moving, and asked him how his friend was.”

And the conversation goes on, and Mrs. Skewton calls in Edith. Notice the quick way that Dickens is able to portray these upper class English people who have come a long way from the adventurousness of Pickwick, from the personal poignancy and warmth of David Copperfield to this portrait of Edith as she comes in the room.

“ ‘Hush!’ said Cleopatra, suddenly, ‘Edith!’ The loving mother can scarcely be described as resuming her insipid and affected air when she made this exclamation; for she had never cast it off; nor was it likely that she ever would or could, in any other place than in the grave. But hurriedly dismissing whatever shadow of earnestness, or faint confession of a purpose, laudable or wicked, that her face, or voice, or manner, had, for the moment, betrayed, she lounged upon the couch, her most insipid and most languid self again, as Edith entered the room. Edith, so beautiful and stately, but so cold and repelling. Who, slightly acknowledging the presence of Major Bagstock, and directing a keen glance at her mother, drew back the curtain from a window, and sat down there, looking out. ‘My dearest Edith,’ said Mrs. Skewton, ‘where on earth have you been? I have wanted you, my love, most sadly.’ ‘You said you were engaged, and I stayed away,’ she answered, without turning her head. ‘It was cruel to Old Joe, Ma'am,’ said the Major in his gallantry. ‘It was very cruel, I know,’ she said, still looking out – and she said with such calm disdain, that the Major was discomfited, and could think of nothing in reply.”

“ ‘Major Bagstock, my darling Edith,’ drawled her mother, ‘who is generally the most useless and disagreeable creature in the world: as you know–’ ‘It is surely not worth while, Mama,’ said Edith, looking round, ‘to observe these forms of speech. We are quite alone. We know each other.’ The quiet scorn that sat upon her handsome face – a scorn that evidently lighted on herself, no less than them – was so intense and deep, that her mother's simper, for the instant, though of a hearty constitution, drooped before it. ‘My darling girl,’ she began again. ‘Not woman yet?’ said Edith, with a smile. ‘How very odd you are to-day, my dear! Pray let me say, my love, that Major Bagstock has brought the kindest of notes from Mr. Dombey, proposing that we should breakfast with him to-morrow, and ride to Warwick and Kenilworth. Will you go, Edith?’ ‘Will I go!’ she repeated, turning very red, and breathing quickly as she looked round at her mother. ‘I knew you would, my own,’ observed the latter, carelessly. ‘It is, as you say, quite a form to ask. Here is Mr. Dombey's letter, Edith. ‘Thank you. I have no desire to read it,’ was her answer.”

The family reading, which was a sacred task to Dickens, had produced an increasing skew away from the adventures of Pickwick, from the warmth of David Copperfield, even from the artistic wranglings in Oliver Twist. In Dombey and Son, we begin to find Dickens settling in producing for the family reading, a juncture of what was bothering him personally. What he could see was wrong with the society at large and these two great concerns were meeting and taking apart the comfortable homey literature which he was supposed to be so famous for producing. And in fact, after Dombey and Son most of Dickens’ novels are misread intentionally when even today high school seniors are given Bleak House or college freshmen are given Great Expectations they are encouraged to read in terms of the jovial English novelist Dickens. What a wonderful style he has; what great comedy he has. And we should not presume that Dickens is a novelist of ideas. But in fact the ideas become more and more poignant and the idea of personally is the unsettled dis-ease that Dickens has about the nature of human beings and the fact that this is reflected quite accurately in a society that is increasingly shallow, increasingly manipulated by conventions, which themselves are thirdhand misrepresentations of any true sense of social order. That there in fact is no polarity between the individual and society, but that one has exactly the kinds of conditions that are called forth by the kind of individuals who actually exist. And the shallowness of the latter has produced the vacuousness of the former. And that in this rude spiral man has achieved the crawl ashore from the seas of change in evolution and is becoming – Dickens tried not to think of it – fossilized in this vacuity, frozen in this comfortable shallowness, no longer to be challenged by a nature which he couldn't control. No longer to be driven by expectations which he could not fathom and that he would be cast ashore like so much coral, petrified in its nothingness. And this was a horrific vision that began to dawn on Charles Dickens in the 1860s.

He began to suffer from headaches. His depressive states no longer occurred in isolation but coalesced and became long months of anxiety. He couldn't find a place to sit and write. He began to devote himself more and more to the kinds of brooding that when he was younger would have led him to undertake social reforms. He had brought in many wealthy people into setting up orphanages and care houses. Mrs. Coutts for instance was one of his great companions in setting up a home for unfortunate young women. But this energy no longer flowed out. It had in its deepest response taken the form of– of writing a tighter integrated novel to bring to his readers the– the poignancy of the moments, the portrayal of characters caught in this web. But in the 1860s, increasingly, it was difficult for Dickens to address himself to this.

Little Dorrit is a classic. Little Dorrit is not read in the high schools or universities but you read Little Dorrit. Little Dorrit in two rather large volumes. The first is called poverty. The second is called riches. But there is a truthfulness in the poverty. There is at least a challenge for man internally and externally in poverty. There is a sudden chilling vacuousness in the riches both inside and out. And in Little Dorrit, Dickens comes very very close to the kinds of quandaries that, would say, be portrayed by Ibsen and Strindberg not much later. Here's how Little Dorrit begins – compare this now with David Copperfield and Dombey and Son.

“Thirty years ago, Marseille lay burning in the sun, one day. A blazing sun upon a fierce August day was no greater rarity in southern France then, than at any other time, before or since. Everything in Marseille, and about Marseilles, had stared at the fervid sky, and been stared at in return, until a staring habit had become universal there. Strangers were stared out of countenance by staring white houses, staring white walls, staring white streets, staring tracts of arid road, staring hills from which verdure was burnt away. The only things to be seen not fixedly staring and glaring were the vines drooping under their load of grapes. These did occasionally wink a little, as the hot air barely moved their faint leaves.”

You'd have thought this is Albert Camus writing in 1946. This is Charles Dickens writing in the 1860s. Something had set in hard on the man and he'd had enough genius to see it. And he was discovering, reluctantly, that he had enough genius to portray it. And so the family literature took another dive deeper into the kind of depths that Dickens had never once in his heyday as a young novelist ever supposed he would have had to take.

Chapter ten of Little Dorrit is called “Containing the whole Science of Government.” It starts:

“The Circumlocution Office was (as everybody knows without being told) the most important Department under Government.” – the Circumlocution Office – “...No public business of any kind could possibly be done at any time, without the acquiescence of the Circumlocution Office.” – It's like Kafka – “Its finger was in the largest public pie, and in the smallest public tart. It was equally impossible to do the plainest right and to undo the plainest wrong without the express authority of the Circumlocution Office. If another Gunpowder Plot had been discovered half an hour before the lighting of the match, nobody would have been justified in saving the parliament until there had been half a score of boards, half a bushel of minutes, several sacks of official memoranda, and a family-vault full of ungrammatical correspondence, on the part of the Circumlocution Office.”

It's getting there– getting there. I’m skipping over. The title of the chapter is on the, “Containing the whole Science of Government” – just two more short paragraphs. The whole chapter is like this. This is in music called pianissimo. Dickens is a very great writer, and he not only had the bit between his teeth, he had a vision of what had happened to himself as a prime candidate of the number one subject of the British Empire. He didn't know what to do about it. And there wasn't anything about it he liked at all.

“...How not to do it. It is true that the royal speech at the close of such session, virtually said, My lords and gentlemen, you have through several laborious months been considering with great loyalty and patriotism, How not to do it, and you have found out; and with the blessing of Providence upon the harvest (natural, not political), I now dismiss you. All this is true, but the Circumlocution Office went beyond it.”

“Because the Circumlocution Office went on mechanically, every day, keeping this wonderful, all-sufficient wheel of statesmanship, How not to do it, in motion. Because the Circumlocution Office was down upon any ill-advised public servant who was going to do it, or who appeared to be by any surprising accident in remote danger of doing it, with a minute, and a memorandum, and a letter of instructions, that extinguished him. It was this spirit of national efficiency in the Circumlocution Office that had gradually led to its having something to do with everything. Mechanicians, natural philosophers, soldiers, sailors, petitioners, memorialists, people with grievances, people who wanted to prevent grievances, people who wanted to redress grievances, jobbing people, jobbed people, people who couldn't get rewarded for merit, and people who couldn't get punished for demerit, were all indiscriminately tucked up under the foolscap paper of the Circumlocution Office.”

Foolscap is large folio-sized sheets. In Elizabethan times they used a watermark of a jester with a cap and that's why they call it foolscap; large sheets. We call it legal size in this country, but in Victorian England it was large sheets that could be shook out in front of you and many things could be enumerated to you without having to shift the page.

Dickens once he had begun this way, once he had seen his capacity, once he had seen the quandary, began to almost resent the fact that he could write. He tried not to write because his great talent in expressing exactly what was wrong pulled him closer and closer to the brink of having to realize the full implications. Beyond Little Dorrit is Our Mutual Friend. I won't even read to you from it. I just don't have the time. And beyond Our Mutual Friend, which will really do it if you read it. It begins with a little girl and her father rowing a boat down the Thames, and they're selling a body that's in it. Beyond that it's the very end of his life. Dickens suffering very greatly even though he was in his late 50s almost continuously now filled with anxiety got to by the pressures began writing his last work The Mystery of Edwin Drood and The Mystery of Edwin Drood was left unfinished at his death. It is a real tour de force. I'm sorry I don't have a copy. My copy was taken from me and I was unable to find another one.

But The Murder of Edwin Drood shows Dickens finally grappling with what he had come to understand was the condition of man in truth that we are murdering ourselves through an inanity which we think is civilization. That we have come to an impasse having left behind our capacities for redoing our lives because we have plugged ourselves in totally to the society and have given our all to that creation so that we no longer move individually but only in consonance with the patterns already set up and that the patterns already set up are readymade through the ingenuity of thousands of years condensed together into an intensified sophisticated machine to dehydrate man, permanently, ultimately, and completely.

Dickens died in 1870. One wonders where could you go from there? Well there was one great last hope. There was an attempt by the poet laureate of the British Empire to reach back into the fabled mythic origins of the British race and of the royal situation and by bringing back the great Arthurian mythos to restimulate the growth of the psyche in the British Empire. And Alfred Lord Tennyson, in writing The Idols of the King, thought that this was the one great hope left for man – to reach back into his original sacred Grail like triumphal psyche and pull those energies back before it was too late before he no longer was able to remember that he even could do such a thing. And we'll see next week how Tennyson handled that situation.