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From, David Daiches, A Critical History of English Literature, v. 4: The Romantics to the present day, ch. 26
Page 10
In Hard Times (1854) Dickens, always keenly aware of the social situation around him, turned his attention to the morality of the utilitarian industrialist and its affect on the possibilities of human happiness. This novel is more of a simple fable than anything else that the mature Dickens wrote, and the names of the characters (Gradgrind, M'Choakumchild, Bounderby) sound like a comic Bunyan; but the force of the novel comes from its juxtaposition of apparent and real knowledge, of the mechanical and the imaginative, and the moments of supreme irony-as when Cissy Jupe is forced to admit ignorance of what a horse is because she cannot define it in strict dictionary terms though she has lived and worked with horses all her life-are much more than exercises in the grim or the bizarre or the self-contradictory, but revelations of the tragic inadequacy of rational schematizations to cope with the realities of human understanding and imaginative awareness. In Little Dorrit (1855-57), Great Expectations (1860-61), and Our Mutual Friend (1864-65), Dickens achieves that almost careless maturity that Shakespeare achieved in his lust plays; yet these novels are far from flawless, and the last of them especially has at least the normal quota of sentimentalities and frigidities. Little Dorrit presents with somber power, paradoxes of fate and fortune while incidentally carrying the share of social propaganda (about prison conditions) which is an element in nearly all of the novels. Great Expectations explores, with more subtlety and more control than Dickens anywhere else displays, aspects of the relation between gentility and morality, and though it has its melodramatic moments (the Miss Haversham theme), there is no other of his novels where the characters and incidents are so perfectly subdued to the central moral vision. From the opening scene with Pip and the escaped convict-surely one of the most brilliant openings in English fiction-through the ambitions, expectations, and frustrations of the hero, the ironic vision never falters: Pip seeks to become a gentleman and to wash from his mouth forever the flavor of his early life, especially the encounter with the convict, while in fact it is the convict who has left him the money with which to pursue his genteel ambitions, for-supreme irony-the convict, too, conceives that there is no higher reward than the achievement of gentility. The great anagnorisis, the recognition by Pip of the convict as the true author of his fortunes, shows Dickens at the very height of his genius, and if the final working out of the action seems too full of complicated coincidences, this is no great matter, for the real story has by now been told and we are content with whatever ingenuities of explanation the author presents to us.
