Fro' first to last, a muddle!
William Scammell
THE PILGRIM EDITION OF THE LETTERS OF CHARLES DICKENS, VOLUME VII, 1853-1855 edited by Graham Storey, Kathleen Tillotson and Angus Easson OUP, £85, pp. 975 trike up the band, call down Mr Han- del, send for Magistrate Fielding. Here comes the Inimitable at the high tide of his powers polishing off the second half of Bleak House, writing Hard Times and the start of Little Dorrit, completing A Child's History of England, philanthropising inces- santly with Angela Burdett-Coutts and her home for the reclamation of fallen young women, amateur play-acting (to a profes- sional standard), giving readings to vast audiences in aid of Mechanics' Institutes, presiding at innumerable dinners and meetings, reforming the Royal Literary Fund, running (and writing much of) Household Words (People don't plunge into Churches and play the Organs, without knowing the notes, or having the ghost of an ear. Yet fifty people a day will rush into manuscript.. . who have no earthly qualifi- cations. . .'), overseeing his son Charley's education, escaping to Italy and Switzer- land and France, where he walks his boots off (If I couldn't walk fast and far, I should just explode and perish'), setting up a one- man Opposition to blundering ministers during the Crimean War, while commis- sioning and despatching a special Drying Machine for Miss Nightingale out at the Scutari hospital, scrutinising a daily flood of requests and in his spare time dashing off these thousand pages of letters to the great, the good, the necessary, the tire- some, the busybodies, the headhunters and George Lewes, who was so far sunk in 5C1 Peter Meinke entific rationalism as to raise both eye-
brows, in print, over Mr ICrook's exit from this mortal vale in a flash of spontaneous literary combustion.
Once Dickens's imagination is on the move it is no more stoppable than an avalanche. 'What if ghosts be one of the terrors of the gaols?' he had written earlier, and in the space of a few sentences he has the entire prison population wracked with supernatural terrors. James I's faith in witches, on the other hand, is airily dis- missed as superstition. So is the Victorian fad for Spiritualism and other forms of clairvoyance. On the other hand again, 'I am rather strong on Voyages and Canni- balism'. Long before Ripley cashed in on human credulity, it was an article of faith with him that fact is infinitely stranger than fiction, or rather indissoluble from it.
One of the many pleasures to be got from this book is watching the multitudes and contradictions within our hero jostle for elbow-room. His implacable philan- thropy, for example, went hand in hand with a piety and self-righteousness worthy of his worst fictional hypocrites, as some of the unfortunate girls at Miss Coutts's soon discovered. His undoubted radicalism and Sympathy for the working class =They are born at the oar, and they live and die at it. Good God, what would we have of them!' — stops well short of ever rocking the boat. His love of literature, and detestation of cant, never stays his hand from blue- pencilling anything in Household Words that might remotely upset John Bull and the family audience. The Swiftian indigna-
tion sometimes inflates into gaseous rhetoric, or dies splitting its sides. His immense kindness and high spirits are locked into a monstrous ego which demands that everyone and everything con- form to his expectations of them, especially poor Charley and his mother Catherine, who is directed at several points what to think, what to feel, and what to write.
Ideologues of various persuasions will find enough evidence here to hang him by his own bootstraps. The thing for cultural materialists to bear in mind, though — as with other sacred monsters such as Tolstoy, Lawrence, even Larkin — is that the guilty party willingly incriminated himself, and in so doing lit up the human condition. Labelling such phrases 'essentialist', hence verboten, and sneering at 'wisdom' as a metaphysical construct that won't bear the light of day, is simply to deny the evidence of the senses, and that of millions of read- ers. Those who would rather read Profes- sor Eagleton than encounter Mr Bumble will perhaps form a suitable first colony on Mars.
'Cannot Cain and Abel confer, instead of killing each other?' Dickens asks plaintively at one point. These hugely entertaining letters (plus, it must be said, a large admix- ture of orts and scraps) take us deep into the Old Testament of the life that lay behind the New one of his novels. There are hints and rumbles of the forthcoming separation from his wife Cone happiness I have missed. . . one friend and companion I have never made. . .'). There is the comi-
tragic episode of a reunion with his old love Maria Beadnell, which ends with the wistful dreamer beating a hasty retreat. There are endless frolics, verbal and other- wise, with old friends and his new business partner Wills. There is a moving descrip- tion of the 'stern condition' on which he holds his 'inventive capacity', namely that 'it must master my whole life', and an instinctive distaste for the biographers hov- ering round Charlotte Bronte's grave:
I have a particular objection to that kind of interest in a great mind, which prompts a vis- itor to take 'a good look' at the mortal habili- ments in which it is arranged, and afterwards to catalogue them, like an auctioneer. I have no sympathy whatever with the staring curiosity that it gratifies.
What he would have thought of this lat- est volume in the Pilgrim edition is all too predictable, but it is the price he pays for his greatness. The editorial apparatus, whose vastness constitutes a book in itself, set in Lilliputian type, lives up to expecta- tions, but neither it nor the Introduction are beyond criticism. Well-known allusions and quotations are sometimes glossed, sometimes not (e.g. Milton's 'blaze of noon', p. 195), on no obvious plan. Obscu- rities are passed over in silence. One foot- note interpreting a comic Dickens image (p. 549) gets it pedantically wrong. The Introduction highlights major themes but fails to provide a sketch of Dickens's family and intimates as they stood in 1853, which would have been useful to non-specialists. Format and margins are less generous than
would have been stipulated by any Ameri- can university press. Six appendices bring up the rear, including 140 pages of letters (1820-1852) newly discovered.
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