reference to it. The English, as he sees it, are invincible because of
their tremendous physical strength, due mainly to living on beef. Like
most Englishmen of his time, he has the curious illusion that the English
are larger than other people (Thackeray, as it happened, was larger than
most people), and therefore he is capable of writing passages like this:
I say to you that you are better than a Frenchman. I would lay even money
that you who are reading this are more than five feet seven in height,
and weigh eleven stone; while a Frenchman is five feet four and does not
weigh nine. The Frenchman has after his soup a dish of vegetables, where
you have one of meat. You are a different and superior animal--a
French-beating animal (the history of hundreds of years has shown you to
be so), etc. etc.
There are similar passages scattered all through Thackeray's works.
Dickens would never be guilty of anything of that kind. It would be an
exaggeration to say that he nowhere pokes fun at foreigners, and of
course like nearly all nineteenth-century Englishmen, he is untouched by
European culture. But never anywhere does he indulge in the typical
English boasting, the 'island race', 'bulldog breed', 'right little,
tight little island' style of talk. In the whole of A TALE OF TWO CITIES
there is not a line that could be taken as meaning, 'Look how these
wicked Frenchmen behave!' The only place where he seems to display a
normal hatred of foreigners is in the American chapters of MARTIN
CHUZZLEWIT. This, however, is simply the reaction of a generous mind
against cant. If Dickens were alive today he would make a trip to Soviet
Russia and come back to the book rather like Gide's RETOUR DE L'URSS. But
he is remarkably free from the idiocy of regarding nations as
individuals. He seldom even makes jokes turning on nationality. He does
not exploit the comic Irishman and the comic Welshman, for instance, and
not because he objects to stock characters and ready-made jokes, which
obviously he does not. It is perhaps more significant that he shows no
prejudice against Jews. It is true that he takes it for granted (OLIVER
TWIST and GREAT EXPECTATIONS) that a receiver of stolen goods will be a
Jew, which at the time was probably justified. But the 'Jew joke',
endemic in English literature until the rise of Hitler, does not appear
in his books, and in OUR MUTUAL FRIEND he makes a pious though not very
convincing attempt to stand up for the Jews.
Dickens's lack of vulgar nationalism is in part the mark of a real
largeness of mind, and in part results from his negative, rather
unhelpful political attitude. He is very much an Englishman but he is
hardly aware of it--certainly the thought of being an Englishman does
not thrill him. He has no imperialist feelings, no discernible views on
foreign politics, and is untouched by the military tradition.
Temperamentally he is much nearer to the small noncomformist tradesman
who looks down on the 'redcoats', and thinks that war is wicked--a
one-eyed view, but after all, war is wicked. It is noticeable that
Dickens hardly writes of war, even to denounce it. With all his
marvellous powers of description, and of describing things he had never
seen, he never describes a battle, unless one counts the attack on the
Bastille in A TALE OF TWO CITIES. Probably the subject would not strike
him as interesting, and in any case he would not regard a battlefield as
a place where anything worth settling could be settled. It is one up to
the lower-middle-class, puritan mentality.
III
Dickens had grown up near enough to poverty to be terrified of it, and in
spite of his generosity of mind, he is not free from the special
prejudices of the shabby-genteel. It is usual to claim him as a 'popular'
writer, a champion of the 'oppressed masses'. So he is, so long as he
thinks of them as oppressed; but there are two things that condition his
attitude. In the first place, he is a south-of-England man, and a Cockney
at that, and therefore out of touch with the bulk of the real oppressed
masses, the industrial and agricultural labourers. It is interesting to
see how Chesterton, another Cockney, always presents Dickens as the
spokesman of 'the poor', without showing much awareness of who 'the poor'
really are. To Chesterton 'the poor' means small shopkeepers and
servants. Sam Weller, he says, 'is the great symbol in English literature
of the populace peculiar to England'; and Sam Weller is a valet! The
other point is that Dickens's early experiences have given him a horror
of proletarian roughness. He shows this unmistakably whenever he writes
of the very poorest of the poor, the slum-dwellers. His descriptions of
the London slums are always full of undisguised repulsion:
The ways were foul and narrow; the shops and houses wretched; and people
half naked, drunken, slipshod and ugly. Alleys and archways, like so many
cesspools, disgorged their offences of smell, and dirt, and life, upon
the straggling streets; and the whole quarter reeked with crime, and
filth, and misery, etc. etc.
There are many similar passages in Dickens. From them one gets the
impression of whole submerged populations whom he regards as being beyond
the pale. In rather the same way the modern doctrinaire Socialist
contemptuously writes off a large block of the population as
'lumpenproletariat'.
Dickens also shows less understanding of criminals than one would expect
of him. Although he is well aware of the social and economic causes of
crime, he often seems to feel that when a man has once broken the law he
has put himself outside human society. There is a chapter at the end of
DAVID COPPERFIELD in which David visits the prison where Latimer and
Uriah Heep are serving their sentences. Dickens actually seems to regard
the horrible 'model' prisons, against which Charles Reade delivered his
memorable attack in IT IS NEVER TOO LATE TO MEND, as too humane. He
complains that the food is too good! As soon as he comes up against crime
or the worst depths of poverty, he shows traces of the 'I've always kept
myself respectable' habit of mind. The attitude of Pip (obviously the
attitude of Dickens himself) towards Magwitch in GREAT EXPECTATIONS is
extremely interesting. Pip is conscious all along of his ingratitude
towards Joe, but far less so of his ingratitude towards Magwitch. When he
discovers that the person who has loaded him with benefits for years is
actually a transported convict, he falls into frenzies of disgust. 'The
abhorrence in which I held the man, the dread I had of him, the
repugnance with which I shrank from him, could not have been exceeded if
he had been some terrible beast', etc. etc. So far as one can discover
from the text, this is not because when Pip was a child he had been
terrorized by Magwitch in the churchyard; it is because Magwitch is a
criminal and a convict. There is an even more 'kept-myself-respectable'
touch in the fact that Pip feels as a matter of course that he cannot
take Magwitch's money. The money is not the product of a
crime, it has
been honestly acquired; but it is an ex-convict's money and therefore
'tainted'. There is nothing psychologically false in this, either.
Psychologically the latter part of GREAT EXPECTATIONS is about the best
thing Dickens ever did; throughout this part of the book one feels 'Yes,
that is just how Pip would have behaved.' But the point is that in the
matter of Magwitch, Dickens identifies with Pip, and his attitude is at
bottom snobbish. The result is that Magwitch belongs to the same queer
class of characters as Falstaff and, probably, Don Quixote--characters
who are more pathetic than the author intended.
When it is a question of the non-criminal poor, the ordinary, decent,
labouring poor, there is of course nothing contemptuous in Dickens's
attitude. He has the sincerest admiration for people like the Peggottys
and the Plornishes. But it is questionable whether he really regards them
as equals. It is of the greatest interest to read Chapter XI of DAVID
COPPERFIELD and side by side with it the autobiographical fragments
(parts of this are given in Forster's LIFE), in which Dickens expresses
his feelings about the blacking-factory episode a great deal more
strongly than in the novel. For more than twenty years afterwards the
memory was so painful to him that he would go out of his way to avoid
that part of the Strand. He says that to pass that way 'made me cry,
after my eldest child could speak.' The text makes it quite clear that
what hurt him most of all, then and in retrospect, was the enforced
contact with 'low' associates:
No words can express the secret agony of my soul as I sunk into this
companionship; compared these everyday associates with those of my
happier childhood. But I held some station at the blacking warehouse
too...I soon became at least as expeditious and as skilful with my hands
as either of the other boys. Though perfectly familiar with them, my
conduct and manners were different enough from theirs to place a space
between us. They, and the men, always spoke of me as 'the young
gentleman'. A certain man...used to call me 'Charles' sometimes in
speaking to me; but I think it was mostly when we were very
confidential...Poll Green uprose once, and rebelled against the
'young-gentleman' usage; but Bob Fagin settled him speedily.
It was as well that there should be 'a space between us', you see.
However much Dickens may admire the working classes, he does not wish to
resemble them. Given his origins, and the time he lived in, it could
hardly be otherwise. In the early nineteenth century class animosities
may have been no sharper than they are now, but the surface differences
between class and class were enormously greater. The 'gentleman' and the
'common man' must have seemed like different species of animal. Dickens
is quite genuinely on the side of the poor against the rich, but it would
be next door to impossible for him not to think of a working-class
exterior as a stigma. In one of Tolstoy's fables the peasants of a
certain village judge every stranger who arrives from the state of his
hands. If his palms are hard from work, they let him in; if his palms are
soft, out he goes. This would be hardly intelligible to Dickens; all his
heroes have soft hands. His younger heroes--Nicholas Nickleby, Martin
Chuzzlewit, Edward Chester, David Copperfield, John Harmon--are usually
of the type known as 'walking gentlemen'. He likes a bourgeois exterior
and a bourgeois (not aristocratic) accent. One curious symptom of this is
that he will not allow anyone who is to play a heroic part to speak like
a working man. A comic hero like Sam Weller, or a merely pathetic figure
like Stephen Blackpool, can speak with a broad accent, but the JEUNE
PREMIER always speaks the equivalent of B.B.C. This is so, even when it
involves absurdities. Little Pip, for instance, is brought up by people
speaking broad Essex, but talks upper-class English from his earliest
childhood; actually he would have talked the same dialect as Joe, or at
least as Mrs. Gargery. So also with Biddy Wopsle, Lizzie Hexam, Sissie
Jupe, Oliver Twist--one ought perhaps to add Little Dorrit. Even Rachel
in HARD TIMES has barely a trace of Lancashire accent, an impossibility
in her case.
One thing that often gives the clue to a novelist's real feelings on the
class question is the attitude he takes up when class collides with sex.
This is a thing too painful to be lied about, and consequently it is one
of the points at which the 'I'm-not-a-snob' pose tends to break down.
One sees that at its most obvious where a class-distinction is also a
colour-distinction. And something resembling the colonial attitude
('native' women are fair game, white women are sacrosanct) exists in a
veiled form in all-white communities, causing bitter resentment on both
sides. When this issue arises, novelists often revert to crude
class-feelings which they might disclaim at other times. A good example
of 'class-conscious' reaction is a rather forgotten novel, THE PEOPLE OF
CLOPTON, by Andrew Barton. The author's moral code is quite clearly mixed
up with class-hatred. He feels the seduction of a poor girl by a rich man
to be something atrocious, a kind of defilement, something quite
different from her seduction by a man in her own walk of life. Trollope
deals with this theme twice (THE THREE CLERKS and THE SMALL HOUSE AT
ALLINGTON) and, as one might expect, entirely from the upper-class angle.
As he sees it, an affair with a barmaid or a landlady's daughter is
simply an 'entanglement' to be escaped from. Trollope's moral standards
are strict, and he does not allow the seduction actually to happen, but
the implication is always that a working-class girl's feelings do not
greatly matter. In THE THREE CLERKS he even gives the typical
class-reaction by noting that the girl 'smells'. Meredith (RHODA FLEMING)
takes more the 'class-conscious' viewpoint. Thackeray, as often, seems to
hesitate. In PENDENNIS (Fanny Bolton) his attitude is much the same as
Trollope's; in A SHABBY GENTEEL STORY it is nearer to Meredith's.
One could divine a great deal about Trollope's social origin, or
Meredith's, or Barton's, merely from their handling of the class-sex
theme. So one can with Dickens, but what emerges, as usual, is that he is
more inclined to identify himself with the middle class than with the
proletariat. The one incident that seems to contradict this is the tale
of the young peasant-girl in Doctor Manette's manuscript in A TALE OF TWO
CITIES. This, however, is merely a costume-piece put in to explain the
implacable hatred of Madame Defarge, which Dickens does not pretend to
approve of. In DAVID COPPERFIELD, where he is dealing with a typical
nineteenth-century seduction, the class-issue does not seem to strike him
as paramount. It is a law of Victorian novels that sexual misdeeds must
not go unpunished, and so Steerforth is drowned on Yarmouth sands, but
neither Dickens, nor old Peggotty, nor even Ham, seems to feel that
Steerforth has added to his offence by being the son of rich par
ents. The
Steerforths are moved by class-motives, but the Peggottys are not--not
even in the scene between Mrs. Steerforth and old Peggotty; if they were,
of course, they would probably turn against David as well as against
Steerforth.
In OUR MUTUAL FRIEND Dickens treats the episode of Eugene Wrayburn and
Lizzie Hexam very realistically and with no appearance of class bias.
According to the 'Unhand me, monster!' tradition, Lizzie ought either to
'spurn' Eugene or to be ruined by him and throw herself off Waterloo
Bridge: Eugene ought to be either a heartless betrayer or a hero resolved
upon defying society. Neither behaves in the least like this. Lizzie is
frightened by Eugene's advances and actually runs away from him, but
hardly pretends to dislike them; Eugene is attracted by her, has too much
decency to attempt seducing her and dare not marry her because of his
family. Finally they are married and no one is any the worse, except Mrs.
Twemlow, who will lose a few dinner engagements. It is all very much as
it might have happened in real life. But a 'class-conscious' novelist
would have given her to Bradley Headstone.
But when it is the other way about--when it is a case of a poor man
aspiring to some woman who is 'above' him Dickens instantly retreats into
the middle-class attitude. He is rather fond of the Victorian notion of a
woman (woman with a capital W) being 'above' a man. Pip feels that
Estella is 'above' him, Esther Summerson is 'above' Guppy, Little Dorrit
is 'above' John Chivery, Lucy Manette is 'above' Sydney Carton. In some
of these the 'above'-ness is merely moral, but in others it is social.
There is a scarcely mistakable class-reaction when David Copperfield
discovers that Uriah Heep is plotting to marry Agnes Wickfield. The
disgusting Uriah suddenly announces that he is in love with her:
'Oh, Master Copperfield, with what a pure affection do I love the ground
my Agnes walks on.'
I believe I had the delirious idea of seizing the red-hot poker out of
the fire, and running him through with it. It went from me with a shock,
like a ball fired from a rifle: but the image of Agnes, outraged by so
much as a thought of this red-headed animal's, remained in my mind (when
I looked at him, sitting all awry as if his mean soul griped his body)
and made me giddy...'I believe Agnes Wickfield to be as far above
you (David says later on), and as far removed from all your aspirations,
as the moon herself.'
Considering how Heep's general lowness--his servile manners, dropped
aitches and so forth--has been rubbed in throughout the book, there is
not much doubt about the nature of Dickens's feelings. Heep, of course,
is playing a villainous part, but even villains have sexual lives; it is
the thought of the 'pure' Agnes in bed with a man who drops his aitches
that really revolts Dickens. But his usual tendency is to treat a man in
love with a woman who is 'above' him as a joke. It is one of the stock
jokes of English literature, from Malvolio onwards. Guppy in BLEAK HOUSE
is an example, John Chivery is another, and there is a rather ill-natured
treatment of this theme in the 'swarry' in PICKWICK PAPERS. Here Dickens
describes the Bath footmen as living a kind of fantasy-life, holding
dinner-parties in imitation of their 'betters' and deluding themselves
that their young mistresses are in love with them. This evidently strikes
him as very comic. So it is in a way, though one might question whether
it is not better for a footman even to have delusions of this kind than
simply to accept his status in the spirit of the catechism.
In his attitude towards servants Dickens is not ahead of his age. In the
nineteenth century the revolt against domestic service was just
beginning, to the great annoyance of everyone with over ?500 a year. An
enormous number of the jokes in nineteenth-century comic papers deals