KATHRYN HUGHES LITERATURE
The Artful Dickens John Mullan Bloomsbury £16.99
What is it about Charles Dickens that makes him so good? In t his brilliantly sharp book, John Mullan delves into all the ways in which the Great Boz grabs our attention on page one of his novels and refuses to let go until we are deposited a thousand pages later, having been totally immersed in his parallel world.
The fact that we’ve all heard of Mr Micawber, Bill Sikes and Miss Havisham isn’t a happy accident. Nor is the way that we still describe a dingy city scene as ‘Dickensian’ or call someone a ‘Scrooge’ if they won’t get into the Christmas spirit. All of it – the vivid scene- setting, the eccentric characters, the ridiculous names – is testimony to what Mullan describes as Dickens’s ‘artfulness’.
Take the opening page of Bleak House. Published in 1853, it is a searing indictment of the Victorian legal system, a labyrinthine maze of courts and cases that serves no one apart from the solicitors and barristers who get rich on others’ misery. Many novelists might have begun with an opening scene of the Lord Chancellor snug inside Lincoln’s Inn Hall while the driving rain outside turns the muddy pavements into sludge.
But who would be bold enough to introduce a dinosaur into the mix? Yet that is exactly what Dickens does, comparing the slime of the filthy London streets to a primeval world in which we wouldn’t be surprised to ‘meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill’.
Mullan is a professor of English literature, which means that he has a forensic eye for how Dickens produces his spellbinding effects. He’s very good, for instance, on the way the novelist uses smell to describe character. Mr Jaggers, the thuggish lawyer in Great Expectations, has brutal-looking hands that nonetheless leave a strong whiff of perfumed soap. In this single detail, the reader begins to get a sense of the dirty work that Jaggers does among criminals or those accused of unspeakable crimes. His compulsive handwashing is a nervous habit he has developed to appease his own guilty conscience.
From here Mullan deftly shows how Dickens’s brilliant sensory perceptions were forged in his own past. As a 12-year-old he had famously been put to work in Warren’s blacking factory by his impoverished father, a shameful incident that was still causing him pain years later. Even as a literary superstar he felt compelled to cross the road when he got to Warren’s in The Strand ‘to avoid a certain smell… which reminded me of what I once was’.
This vastly entertaining book gives the sense that Mullan is a man with a mission. He is particularly offended by the way in which highbrow literary types from Henry James to Iris Murdoch continually rolled their eyes at the mention of Charles Dickens while clearly knowing – and enjoying – his work inside out.
Far from being a popular entertainer who happened on a winning formula by some lucky fluke, Mullan makes us see that Charles Dickens was one of the most artful, which is to say skilled, writers the world has ever seen.