SUMMER BOOKS-1 Dickens and the demon toy box
ELIZABETH BOWEN
At a first glance, the format of The World of Charles Dickens (Seeker and Warburg 80s), could be misleading. The handsomely glossy jacket is slightly whimsical, the shape of the book could mean looking rather than read- ing. and who knows what the title might not portend—yet another centenary book about Dickens's England, now vanished, alas? You would be wrong. The author is Angus Wilson —who, in a brief preface, forecasts what he is to carry out. The reason for and the aim of his undertaking are made clear. 'The world we have inherited,' he declares, 'is the imag- inative world of Charles Dickens . .. It is as a guide to exploring the Dickens imagi- native system—both the various novels which are its planets and the whole marvellous group as it revolves around him—that this account of his life has been written.'
Nothing contributory to the life can, by this reckoning, be quite left out, though to include all would be a large order. Extrovert, Dickens was no man for an ivory tower. The Victorian universe, around him, acted upon him at every turn. The action was two-way, reciprocal : if Victorianism to an extent made Dickens, he to no less an extent was to make it—feeding its longings, stoking its deep- down fires, wakening its vision. endowing it with an image of itself. Would he have thriven in another climate, another epoch?—he is unimaginable in any but his own. Those con- ventions which cramped and taboos which restricted him, may they not by their very repressiveness have accounted for the ex- plosive, maniacal nature of his genius when and where it broke out? He was one with his age in its ghoulish tastes, morgues, maniacs, murderers, as in its sentimental ones. He had a fellow-addiction to the grotesque.
All romantic art roots, palpably, in a myth- ology: individual to the artist, generally infantile. What, Mr Wilson invites us to ask, was Dickens's, and whence came it? Mr Wilson's answer, Dickens himself corrobor- ates in a childhood memoir. All began, apparently when, very early on—how early? —Charles had a dire experience with a Christ-. mas tree, or rather, its denizens. (That year, toy-designers seem to have overreached themselves.) The gifts were as follows: first. the Tumbler, who, hands in his pockets, would not lie down but persisted in rolling about till he twitched still. Next, a purporting snuff- box. out of which sprang a 'demoniacal' black-robed Counsellor with a red cloth mouth. Thirdly, a cardboard Man, with Jointed limbs, whom, having hung on a wall. one animated by pulling a string—'when he got his legs round his neck (as he often did)' Dickens recalled, 'he was ghastly, and not a creature to be alone with'. Final abomination, The Mask. 'When did that dreadful Mask first look at me? . , . 0! 1 know it's coming! 0! the Mask!'
Did those four, in an inexhaustible series of mutations, as the art went on, as each novel bred a new host of characters, reign over the Dickens world of pity and terror? Mr Wilson thinks, yes, vet:), possibly : 'Memory is selec- tive and so it is not surprising that these child- hood toys which Dickens recalls when he is nearing forty should have so close a link with some of the adult obsessions-in his books'.
Other obsessions had a more concrete cause : tjae collapse of the physical security of childhood. Nothing worse could have hap- pened: Mr Dickens pere went off to prison for debt, his son into a blacking factory to work. There, not so much the dreariness of his task as the degrading company in which he had to perform it (Charles's first contact, and as time was to show a far from unfruitful one, with the underworld) was to set up a longlasting sense of contamination. He had been brought up to the tightrope-walking genteelism of that most precarious of classes, the lower-middle—the class whose fantasy- consolations, heroic feints and dread of engulfment he was to immortalise. Mammoth success was needed to get him back again into equilibrium : it did. But loathing of chaos, exaltation of 'order' and fanatical impatience with fecklessness remained. Ultimately. his charity grew stronger, his heart wiser. After the wretched death of a younger brother, the once bright and delightful Fred. he writes to Forster : 'It was a wasted life, but God forbid that one should be hard upon it, or upon any- thing in this world that is not deliberately and coldly wrong'.
Habitually, with the splendid prodigality of genius. Dickens exaggerated everything. Des- pite being as honest as the day, for a great part of the time he was acting up : many of his letters are hysterical. One may wonder, therefore, whether the proportion he gives some memories may not here or there be out of the true. Did the rebuff he got from Maria Beadnell really maim him (as he asserts) for years? Something, as Mr Wilson points out, arrested his development with regard to women—in his novels they are, as we know, of an insipidity; villainesses being a trifle better.
He never portrays a feminine character in depth; but then, does he portray any charac- ter in depth, when one comes to think? What matter? His creatures, comic or tragic, are afloat in the rhetoric, staged by the super- humanity of the vision which was to make him the prose Shakespeare. In his life were two women who taught him little : Kate, the wife he left after twenty-two years and a flock of children; Mary, the maiden sister-in-law who died in his arms. From Ellen Ternan,
Simon Paap, the celebrated Dutch dwar from .`The World of Charles Dickens'. that other eighteen-year-old, an agonising education came too late. Not too late alto- gether: in the novels of the Ternan epoch (his last) understanding of passion exists. and deepens.
Mr Wilson anatomises the novels splen- didly, one by one—relating each, as promised, both to others in the 'imaginative system' and to the being, and growth. of the central man. As a novelist's work on a novelist. The World of Charles Dickens could not be bettered. Praise must go. too, to his choice of the illus- trations—which do illustrate. Gorgeous or curious in themselves, great Victorian con- versation-pieces (in colour) combine with black-and-white portraits and frightening drawings to cover the whole scenic range of the stories : they are pointers, also, to the social extremes on which Dickens dwelt. As a thing of beauty. this is a book to possess. As writing, it is a mine of intelligence.
A. E. Dyson. author of The Inimitable Dickens (Macmillan 70s). is Senior Lecturer in English at the University of East Anglia, and a Dickens expert. -His handling of (roughly) the same theme as Angus Wilson's is a shade more didactic, and less suggestive: here or there, he inclines to issue a statement where one would prefer to think, or judge, for oneself. However, he need not scare off the non-student reader, for his manner is friendly. his points are interesting, and his inexhaust- ible subject cannot but fascinate. There could be a book of this kind which is one too many, but Mr Dyson's, definitely, is not.
The London of Charles Dickens (12s), an engaging sort of a guide-book (compiled by whom?) has a foreword by great-grand- daughter Monica Dickens. and is published by London Transport, in association with the Dickens Fellowship—I imagine, to cater for the centenary year. The format is pretty, and pocket-size, and the lay-out pleasing. Extant buildings, sites of those vanished and public monuments which have a Dickens connection are listed, alphabetically, with 'How to get there' (by public transport) as an invaluable addition.
Previous page
