Do we really need to make such a fuss about Dickens?
'Dickensian' is an over-worked adjective because the author's life and work can be quarried in so many different ways. Dickens first sprang to prominence as a quick thinking and fast writing journalist, and the sketches he wrote as a correspondent at the law courts showed a keen grasp of the preening pomposity of public figures.
He was also an instinctive man of the theatre at a time when the playhouse was a major form of entertainment for the masses as well as the elite- in the provincial towns and cities as well as in London. And the novels are fondly remembered for those individual scenes of high drama, revelations of personality and twists of the plot which owe a lot to Dickens's playgoing habits: Sykes at bay on the rooftops for example and Pip's discovery of his benefactor.
'Dickensian' characters are drawn broadly and vigorously- and they fall into two camps: genial, life-affirming and generousor mean-spirited,scheming and vindictive. He wrote quickly and to order- with a fluency which encouraged a facile approach. So there was not much time for subtlety when it came to characterisation. Dickens was a commercial-minded, even materialistic, individual. He knew that he wrote for money, and he understood what the readers liked- vivid plots, quick thrills, and personalities both loathsome and lovable. These days he would be a script writer for Eastenders.
Although not born in London he quickly came to think of himself as a Londoner- so 'Dickensian' is a word bound up with the city's image of itself as a bustling, thrusting, get up and go, sharp-elbowed kind of place. But he is the creator of a national stereotype as well as a civic one. So 'Dickensian' means having a sense of humour and not taking ideas too seriously. The novels are sometimes affecting but often incorrigibly sentimental- the suggestion being that life's problems can be sorted out if we recognise that we are all in this together, and that we should row in the same boat having first of all ensured an outburst of niceness in order to transform the national condition. This tedious uplift can try a reader's patience.
Dickens's life showed the same kind of setimentality we observe in the novels. He cracked jokes, liked parties and cried easily. Like many sentimentalists he was also cruel. As a greater artist, Oscar Wilde, once wrote: '' A sentimentalist is a cynic on a bank holiday.' He married his wife on the way up and then abandoned her once he got there since she was fat and boring.
An expert on detecting hypocrisy in others Dickens was oblivious to his own performance in that department of life. Many artists are private monsters- and they get away with it since they do not preach. But a Dickens novel is often an extended sermon on the need to be good. He cottoned on- novelistically- to the fact that character and behaviour matter a lot in England. He exploited that trait commercially, but his nastiness as a family man exposes him to hypocrisy.
Many enjoy The Pickwick Papers, David Copperfield, and Great Expectations- though I suspect most people nowadays only know these works through film and tv dramatisations. He was a child-like person himself and so the portrayals of childhood are the most enchanting features of the oeuvre. But most of Dickens's other novels are verbose and dull. I would be amazed if more than a few dozen subjects of the present Queen struggled through, say, Barnaby Rudge in the last twelve months.
He wrote for the monthlies and quarterlies, and so his books mostly appeared initially in serialised form. That explains their sprawling nature. Those hundreds of thousands of words in a single Dickens novel have little aesthetic unity, and that is why they are remembered for their individual scenes rather than as an integrated whole. In death he soon became a great English 'character' but most of those who drone on about him- and there will be all too many of them in the bicentenary of his birth-confine themselves to a reading of, at most, five or six of the novels.
Posthumously, Dickens was taken up by the left-liberal English consenus of the 20th century. He was an entirely secular figureand therefore eminently suitable for that enrollment. And the fact that he was so relentlessly urban a figure was also a handy qualification for entry into that stage army. Despite the early impact of industralisation England from the 1840s to the 1860s (the decades of Dickens's mature self-expression) remained a mostly rural society. But he had no knowledge of the English countryside and was unsympathetic to its hierachies. The Dickens novels are a minority report on the national condition written by a cockney who looks at most of England from a stage coach or a railway carriage.
Being hypocritical about capitalism was surely the aspect of Dickens's character that most endeared him to the left. He negotiated his contracts extremely well, and then sermonised on the horrors of a materialistic society. And so 'Dickensian' also means malnutrition, illiteracy, and an early grave for the poor. This anti-capitalist parody of early and mid-victorian England was, until quite recently, a standard textbook view of the period. It is one of the many ways in which boring old Fabianism was able to limp on in the lecture theatres and school rooms of England
Poor Nick Gibb, the education minister, stumbles into this banality when he bewails the 'Dickensian' levels of illiteracy in our schools. Church schools in the nineteenth century did a better job of educating the poor than state schools have done in the past fifty years. By the 1890s the population of Britain had attained almost universal literacy and numeracy. A hundred and twenty years later- one in six of all eleven year olds are described in public sector weasel-speak as 'not fluent readers' . They are in fact illiterate. The real England of Dickens's day would have done more to liberate them, but an acknowledgement of that fact would not be at all 'Dickensian.'