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From, David Daiches, A Critical History of English Literature, v. 4: The Romantics to the present day, ch. 26
Page 12
There was an element of the ingenious mystery writer in Dickens, which developed as a result of the example of Wilkie Collins; his last novel, unfinished, was The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870), a highpowered thriller which still keeps critics guessing. And in A Tale of Two Cities (1859) he wrote an intense historical novel centered on the French Revolution. Both these works, though they display many of the characteristic Dickens strengths, were bypaths for him. Journalist, caricaturist, satirist from the beginning, he soon learned to subsume these gifts in a rendering of aspects of the social situation in terms of human foibles and weaknesses, the demands made by social conventions, and the relation between the social and economic fabric of society and the strengths and vulnerabilities of individuals. His vitality was enormous; be crowded his canvases with many more figures than the pattern of his story demanded out of sheer relish for the vagaries of human nature. If the weakness of his philosophical equipment prevented him from indicating any satisfactory moral base from which to contemplate the ultimate issues of human life, and thus led him into sentimentality and melodrama in order to cover up, as it were, this lack; if he was continually producing squibs and sketches and stories (such as "A Christmas Carol") where he pleased his contemporary readers by laying this kind of thing on with a trowel; and if his solution to social problems went no further than suggesting that people simply stopped behaving cruelly-let us remember that be did awaken the Victorian conscience on a great variety of subjects, from debtors' prisons to private schools, and that as a novelist he possessed a combination of gifts unknown among English novelists before or since. He had that joy in the varieties of human character that Chaucer and Shakespeare had, and to a degree shared by none but those; he had both a richness of pure comic invention and an extraordinary gift for irony and caricature; he had a pressing sense of the moral and social problems of his day and the genius to illuminate them through the presentation of character in action; and always and invariably he entertained. If Tennyson was the great prophet of the Victorian middle classes, Dickens was the great entertainer. Like Tennyson, be met his audience halfway; he accepted their preconceptions, cashed in on their emotional potentialities. Yet in doing so he exposed their shams and conventions and hypocrisies with almost frightening violence. The norm of his art remained bourgeois sentimental melodrama, but he transcended its limitations through the power and versatility of his genius.
