Copperfield Text / Essays & Tools / Dickens Resources / Forum / Creative Writing | Donate
|
|
Copperfield Text / Essays & Tools / Dickens Resources / Forum / Creative Writing | Donate |
From, David Daiches, A Critical History of English Literature, v. 4: The Romantics to the present day, ch. 26
Page 8
For the first time Dickens has taken a moral situation rather than a group of picturesque characters and incidents as his starting point, and though his episodic technique, and the fact that he was feeling his way toward the plot as he wrote the book, led him to digress frequently and to introduce many scenes and characters who have no direct or even indirect relation to this theme, nevertheless the theme does remain central and the power of the novel derives from the pitiless humor with which Dickens pursues his investigation of the hypocrisies, pretensions, corruptions, and distortions to which men are liable if they gear their ambitions wholly to the material aspects of a civilization in which prestige derives from monetary wealth or in some other ways surrender their personalities to an idol. There are moments of rich comedy in the book-such as the scene where Mr. Pecksniff becomes drunk in Mrs. Todger's boarding house-but they derive from permutations and combina tions of the factors out of which the moral meaning of the book is constructed-the relation between gentility and morality, between virtue and its appearance, between (in Yeatsian terms) a man's mask and his true self. Even the scenes in America, which Dickens put in on a sudden decision in the hope of increasing sales, and which have often been criticized as an excrescence, are related to this central concern, and the relation between appearance and reality, between moral pretensions and actual behavior, between true worth and public esteem, constitute the motivating force of the American incidents. Again, however, the positive moral base is flimsy and sentimental. Tom Pinch represents innocence, virtue, fidelity, in such a way as to make these virtues appear both unbelievable and fatuous, and though his relation with Pecksniff plays a significant part in the book by showing how vice can use virtue with virtue's innocent consent, his pastoral affection for his sister Ruth, done with that idealized eroticism with which Dickens describes equally fraternal and sexual love, is wholly unacceptable. Nevertheless, in spite of these and other faults, and in spite of (or perhaps because of) the fact that Dickens produced a different book from that which he apparently set out to write, Martin Chuzzlewit represents an important stage in Dickens' career in that it shows him taking a central moral situation as the focal point of the novel. This links him more clearly to the other Victorian novelists-Thackeray on the one hand and George Eliot on the other-than anything he had yet written could have done. In learning how to discipline his genius for caricature, comedy, and irony to a moral vision Dickens took his place among the Victorians as essentially one of them. Yet he never lost his individuality; his feeling for melodrama, for the outre, his sometimes irresponsible histrionic sense, and his unique and unquenchable vitalitythese remained with him always to give the characteristic Dickensian flavor to all his work.
