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From, David Daiches, A Critical History of English Literature, v. 4: The Romantics to the present day, ch. 26
Page 7
Oliver Twist (published serially, 1837-39) is the first of Dickens' novels to concentrate on specific social ills, but, as always with Dickens, the force of the indictment falls most heavily on the individuals who administer the attacked institution rather than on the institution as such. Oliver Twist, bandied between workhouse on the one hand, and benevolent protection on the other, with a third sinister alternative of forcible adoption into one of the criminal gangs of London, exists not so much to be saved as to illustrate the different kinds of environment into which innocence may fall. The book is full of nightmare symbols of loss, isolation, and incarceration. It is also a portrait gallery (done in Dickens' best style) together with a series of vividly etched pictures of physical locations and single incidents; it contains some great and memorable scenes, but the humanitarian feeling that informs the novel is not sufficient to give it adequate form: Oliver's salvation remains accidental, and comes only when (and because) Dickens has exhausted his ammunition. Much of what was said of Nicholas Nickleby could be said of The Old Curiosity Shop (1840-41), powerful and brilliant though many of its episodes are: the death of Little Nell, which reduced to tears the populations of England and America, has become the standard example of Dickensian sentimentality, a sentimentality which expressed itself in an inflated, embarrassing style which it is difficult to believe could ever have caused intelligent readers anything but acute discomfort. Barnaby Rudge (1841) is a more controlled work, and a stranger one: in it Dickens first displays to the full his ability to discipline melodrama into a somber if not quite a tragic pattern and to relate individual eccentrics to a general atmosphere in which they seem somehow inevitable. But it was with Martin Chuzzlewit (1843-44) that Dickens first showed his real stature as a novelist, though, paradoxically enough, on its first appearance in the usual monthly parts there was a sharp drop in subscribers. It was still picaresque in structure, and was begun, like so many of Dickens' novels, without any clear idea of where he was going. The full title is even more facetious than the long titles he gave to Pickwickand Nicholas Nickleby: "The Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit, His Relatives, Friends, and Enemies. Comprising All His Wiles and His Ways, With an Historical Record of What he Did, and What He didn't; Showing, moreover, Who Inherited the Family Plate, Who came in For the Silver Spoons, and Who for the Wooden Ladles." The central theme revolves around Pecksniff, the superb hypocrite who never admits the truth of his own intentions even to himself, and the novel is a grimly ironical study of the effects of greed on character, and of the possibilities of self-knowledge as well as of real knowledge of others.
