The Columbia History of the British Novel

and exclusion, domestic love and social security, that the Victorian novel, and the second half of Wuthering Heights, had to tell.

Barry V. Qualls

Selected Bibliography

Armstrong Nancy. Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987.

Bersani Leo. A Future for Astyanax: Character and Desire in the Novel. New York: Columbia University Press, 1984.

Bodenheimer Rosemarie. The Politics of Story in Victorian Social Fiction. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1988.

Boone Joseph Allen. Tradition Counter Tradition: Love and the Form of Fiction. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987.

David Deirdre. Intellectual Women and Victorian Patriarchy: Harriet Martineau, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, George Eliot. Itahca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1987.

Eagleton Terry. Myth of Power: A Marxist Study of the Brontës. London: Macmillan, 1975.

Gilbert Sandra M., and Susan Gubar. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1979.

Hardy Barbara. Forms of Feeling in Victorian Fiction. London: Peter Owen, 1985.

Kaplan Cora. Sea Changes: Culture and Feminism. London: Verso, 1986.

Poovey Mary. Uneven Developments: The Ideological Work of Gender in Mid- Victorian England. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988.

Showalter Elaine. A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Brontë to Lessing. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1977.

Spivak Gayatri. 'Three Women's Texts and a Critique of Imperialism.' Critical Inquiry 12 (Autumn 1985): 243 -61.

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Dickens

NO other English novelist has ever been as popular as Charles Dickens, and it is impossible to grasp Dickens's place in cultural history without appreciating the extraordinary dimensions of that popularity. Sales of his first novel, The Pickwick Papers, took off like a rocket, igniting a kind of national Pickwick mania. Merchants flooded London with all kinds of «Pickwickian» paraphernalia, and hacks turned out numerous pirated imitations, 'sequels,' and theatrical adaptations (seven of these were staged even before the serialized issues of the novel had all been published). Nothing like the Pickwick phenomenon had ever happened before, in England or anywhere else, and it thrust Dickens into a national limelight that blazed fiercely, without interruption, over the rest of his career. His third novel, Nicholas Nickleby, sold fifty thousand copies on the first day of publication alone; The Old Curiosity Shop sold over a hundred thousand installments a week; and his journal All the Year Round had a circulation at one point of three hundred thousand. These figures (which do not include plagiarisms and imitations) suggest a complete command of the national literary attention-nearly as extensive in America as it was in England. Crowds used to gather on the New York and Boston piers to buy his serials the instant they arrived from England, and while awaiting the climactic chapters of The Old Curiosity Shop, they shouted up to the sailors, 'Is Little Nell dead?' What is particularly remarkable is that Dickens managed to sustain this feverish level of celebrity for nearly thirty-five years. During the last twelve years of his life, he conducted -381- a series of electrifying public readings in England, Scotland, Ireland, America, and Paris (over four hundred of them, all to packed houses) that became a ritual of mass adulation, the culmination of a love affair with his public that Kathleen Tillotson and John Butt have called, not unkindly, 'by far the most interesting love-affair of his life.'

Towering monumentally over the landscape of nineteenth-century fiction-'the Shakespeare of the novel,' he was titled by the Cambridge critics F. R. and Q. D. Leavis-Dickens acquired his stature through his unique ability to cut across the social boundaries of his readership. In 1916, writing his own account of Dickens's oeuvre, the literary historian George Saintsbury claimed that 'it is probably safe to say (here making no exception at all and giving him no companions) that no author in our literary history has been both admired and enjoyed for such different reasons; by such different tastes and intellects; by whole classes of readers unlike each other.' Certainly, no writer's work has appealed to so wide an audience while also enjoying the favor of serious criticism. Saintsbury concluded that there is a heterogeneous quality in Dickens's work that allows readers to overlook aspects of it that are not to their taste, and to cherish those that are. Dickens's achievement is the result not of 'a Shakespearean universality,' but of the 'diversity of [his] appeal,' a quality of 'mixed genius… [that] requires a corresponding variety of analysis to understand itself, its causes and its manifestations.' Even today, Dickens seems amenable to highly particularized schools of critical reading that are often in conflict with each other-which may be one reason why his central place in the literary canon has survived vicissitudes of recent criticism that have been far less kind to writers such as Thackeray, Trollope, or Meredith. Although critics sometimes rhapsodize about the universal humanist values Dickens is said to embody, his wonderfully broad acclaim depends on distinct intellectual, ideological, and aesthetic compounds that enable him to address the values of very different readerly constituencies at the same time as he suppresses whatever conflicts might arise between them. It may well be that the boldness of his work's heterogeneity, its capacious eclecticism, is what has inspired in many people the sense that Dickensis the Victorian period.

Following Saintsbury's suggestion to apply 'a variety of analysis' to account for Dickens's «mixed» appeal, one could do worse than to begin with his populism, and with the fundamental ambiguities of class affiliation it actually entails. The biographical sources for Dickens's pop-382- ulism are well known, though they have sometimes been viewed Simplistically as the key to his entire vision. Dickens's childhood was haunted by severe bouts with poverty-the most legendary of these occurring when his father, a clerk in the naval pay office, was incarcerated in the Marshalsea prison for debt, while twelve-year-old Charles was taken out of school and sent to work in a blacking warehouse (events that are fictionalized in David Copperfield and Little Dorrit). Because of his father's gregariousness, his childhood also included a convivial acquaintance with all and sundry from the lower-middle and working classes. This social apprenticeship surely did fuel Dickens's lifelong fellow feeling with the humble and the downtrodden, and it led to his constant appeals for sympathetic understanding of the poor, which he molded around New Testament pieties. His annual Christmas stories, a tradition begun in 1843 with 'A Christmas Carol,' express these Christian principles of forgiveness, generosity, and brotherly love most directly. While Dickens did not, as some have claimed, «invent» the modern rituals of Christmas, he did much to promote the emerging Victorian sense of Christmas as a great festival of social goodwill, and to identify himself with it. On the most superficial level, the novels feature an incessant conflict between good and evil, the latter associated primarily with the lack of feeling-and also the stupidity-that follow from refusals of human brotherhood. Coupling the virtues of charity to the power of moral intelligence, Dickens was able to articulate a populism that combined an exuberant faith in the best potentials of humankind with an acute and unflinching recognition of its worst.

There is much evidence that Dickens was acknowledged among the lower classes as a friend of the poor man. His pioneering methods of cheap serial publication had something to do with his access to a lowerclass readership. His affirmative incorporation into the novels of lowerclass culture, especially of popular entertainments- the circus, the pantomime, the Punch and Judy show-was an additional factor. Dickens always associates these popular entertainments with the communal values of spontaneity, selflessness, and fellow feeling. Their affinity with «traditional» as opposed to modern patterns of social relationship is conveyed through the strangely dated entertainment figures he often celebrates-the itinerant puppetmasters and strolling actors that are so prominent in the early novels. More important, though, the perception of Dickens as the champion of the poor derived from his active support for lower-class political causes. While not avowedly partisan, Dickens -383- was a consistent