Fagin in his cell; George Cruikshank

ONE OF MY favorite works of literary criticism is G.K. Chesterton’s book on Charles Dickens. I recommended it to a reader and in return received this excellent essay. 

Greg Jinkerson writes:

I took you up on the advice to read Chesterton’s Charles Dickens, the Last of the Great Men. What an inspiration. It became obvious after one chapter that I would need to read all of Dickens. There is nothing quite like the experience of having Chesterton point you to the wonders of other writers and areas of thought. His encomium to Dickens is exemplary in this regard. It is almost a hagiography of Dickens; or perhaps I should say a theology of the world Dickens created. It cannot be fairly categorized as literary criticism, not only because Chesterton’s verdict is almost entirely positive. Yes, Chesterton is a fan, and I wish that our modern critics would feel the importance of liking a book before attempting to assess it critically. But Chesterton’s study also transcends mere categories like literary criticism because, unlike our modern critics, Chesterton feels no need to pretend that his appreciation of Dickens is disinterested. This is not to say that the book is merely fawning in its presentation. On the contrary, what Chesterton set out to do in this book was not simply to defend and praise the novels of Dickens. The deeper aim was to throw light upon the objective reality of individual greatness itself, and to point out that at the time of publication (1906), this notion was already disappearing rapidly from the mind of the English.

In the first chapter Chesterton addresses a question which was evidently a fashionable one in his day, “Why have we no great men today? Why have we no great men like Thackeray, or Carlyle, or Dickens?” He answers the question by way of introducing the thesis of the book. “Do not let us dismiss this expression, because it appears loose or arbitrary. ‘Great’ does mean something, and the test of its actuality is to be found by noting how instinctively and decisively we do apply it to some men and not to others; above all how instinctively and decisively we do apply it to four or five men in the Victorian era, of whom Dickens was not the least. The term is found to fit a definite thing. Whatever the word ‘great’ means, Dickens was what it means. Even the fastidious and unhappy who cannot read his books without a continuous critical exasperation, would use the word of him without stopping to think. They feel that Dickens is a great writer even if he is not a good writer. He is treated as a classic; that is, as a king who many now be deserted, but who cannot now be dethroned. The atmosphere of this word clings to him; and the curious thing is that we cannot get it to cling to any of the men of our own generation…[Dickens’ generation] was a world that expected everything of everybody. It was a world that encouraged anybody to be anything. And in England and literature its living expression was Dickens.”

Chesterton argues that the disappearance of Victorian greatness is mirrored by the disappearance of Christian hope, a virtue that suffused English culture in the early 19th century and was given its voice in Dickens’ novels. There was in Dickens’ characters an exuberant and irrepressible whirlwind of thoughtfulness and activity, traits whose absence from 20th-century literature (and 20th-century civilization) Chesterton lamented poignantly. “The children of [Dickens’] fancy are spoilt children. They shake the house like heavy and shouting schoolboys; they smash the story to pieces like so much furniture. When we moderns write stories our characters are better controlled. But, alas! our characters are rather easier to control. We are in no danger from the gigantic gambols of creatures like Mantalini or Micawber…When we experience the ungovernable sense of life which goes along with the old Dickens sense of liberty, we experience the best of the revolution. We are filled with the first of all democratic doctrines, that all men are interesting; Dickens tried to make some of his people appear dull people, but he could not keep them dull. He could not make a monotonous man. The bores in his books are brighter than the wits in other books.”

‘Ungovernable sense of life.’ ‘All men are interesting.’ ‘Gigantic gambols.’ How beautifully Chesterton captures Dickens’ mode, the mode of life as it is truly lived. Dickens’ characters lived as if life were intrinsically good and valuable, as if existence were irreducibly adventurous. And we feel, while reading about them, that their instincts are truer and nobler than our own, that the cynicism which pervades all popular presentations of modern life is false and noxious. Chesterton states that the declining popularity of Dickens in the early 20th century can only be explained in terms the modern conflation between realism and pessimism, as if Dickens’ literary expressions of joy were not only distastefully outmoded, but also untrue to life. He says, “Dickens overstrains and overstates a mood our period does not understand. The truth he exaggerates is exactly this old Revolution sense of infinite opportunity and boisterous brotherhood. And we resent his undue sense of it, because we ourselves have not even a due sense of it.” The modern religion is a dogma of doubt, and when the high priests of our religion run up against the wild and untamable joy of Dickens they dismiss it as fake and sentimental. Our modern unease with Dickens’ rambunctious vision of peasant happiness snatches away the mask of our liberalism: it cannot be true, we insist, that poor people are happy the way that Dickens depicts them, for if they are happy in that way, then human fulfillment must lie somewhere other than what can be furnished by godless materialism.

When you recommended the book, I became very curious about what Chesterton would make of Dickens’ politics, and he does touch on that subject with a great deal of insight. The main point he makes is that the question of Dickens’ politics is basically irrelevant to any understanding of Dickens’ life and work. According to Chesterton, Dickens was blissfully and admirably apolitical. Oh how I reveled to read that judgment, and how it made me yearn for more such men, men who, as Chesterton puts it, “perceive that any theory that tries to run the living State entirely on one force and motive [is] probably nonsense.” He says that Dickens was neither a Socialist, nor a Radical, nor a Utilitarian, nor an Individualist. Instead he was a champion of common sense, and the wisdom of his world view comes across inescapably in the reading of the novels themselves. “[Dickens],” says Chesterton, “was simply a man of very clear, airy judgment on things that did not inflame his private temper…Whenever the Liberal philosophy had embedded in it something hard and heavy and lifeless, by an instinct he dropped it out. He was too romantic, perhaps, but he would have to do only with real things. He may have cared too much about Liberty. But he cared noting about ‘Laissez faire.’” How desperate we are today for men who ‘care too much about Liberty’ and care nothing about ‘laissez faire.’ More men who are immune to ideology and and open to optimism. Perhaps what made Dickens the last of the great men was his happy indifference to political nonsense.

I am nearly through now with the Pickwick Papers and it is all that Chesterton led me to expect. Once again, thank you for your advice, I am looking forward to a lifetime of enthralling reading.

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