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From, David Daiches, A Critical History of English Literature, v. 4: The Romantics to the present day, ch. 26
Page 9
Dombey and Son. (1846--48) joins richness of character and incident to unity of moral purpose with a new maturity, illustrating the drawing together by Dickens of his various gifts. By "moral purpose" is not, of course, meant a single didactic theme, but concentration on some central moral situation, often deriving (in Dickens) from the author's awareness of the tension between private affection and the apparent demands of a commercial civilization. In David Copperfield (1849-50), autobiography has been subdued into art with remarkable skill. The richness, flexibility, and strength of this novel give it a special place among Dickens' work. Here self-pity is sublimated into ironic observation, and as the novel follows the fortunes of its hero from idyllic infancy through the powerfully drawn Murdstone period to his aunt Trotwood's protection and thence on to manhood and love with their consequences in emotion and action, the sense of life, individual and social, operating with all its complexity and inevitability on the hero and his friends, emerges persuasively. There are the inevitable Dickens sentimentalities-the fate of Little Em'ly, David's relationship with Dora-but they pale beside the strength and vitality of the whole. There is the clash of different ways of life; different strata of society each with its own ideals of gentility and worth come into conflict with each other, and in the process Dickens explores once again the relationship between convention and reality, between public and private standards. Bleak House (1852-53) shows the same kinds of strength as the two previous novels, together with an ingenuity of plot contrivance and some touches of pure melodrama; but again it is the power of the individual scenes, the skillfully produced atmosphere, the concentration on the tragic irony of human ambitions and professions through the sheer accumulation of evidence, as it were, that make the novel. Dickens' endings are often slick and unconvincing, though ingenious, and show a contrivance of happy endings for favored characters on a quite different level of probability from that which gives life to the novel as a whole; but we accept this kind of convention because it is superimposed lightly on the essential novel and does not seem really to affect It.
