The Columbia History of the British Novel

spokesman for the 'common man,' and was particularly concerned with the damage public institutions did to the poor. Oliver Twist, for example, begins with an attack on the workhouse and the New Poor Law of 1834, and it ends with a general outburst of indignation that slums like the fictional Jacob's Island have been allowed to fester. Dickens's social crusading extended outside the bounds of fiction, for he had other political instruments at his disposal: he was a popular public speaker, a pamphleteer, the founder and editor of the liberal Daily News, and the editor (for twenty years) of a widely read weekly-first Household Words, and then its successor, All the Year Round. Altogether, he was an effective spokesman for various causes: the legalization of Sunday amusements (which were the primary refuge of the working class from a workweek of exhausting labor), factory reform, improved education, sanitation, administrative reform, and other campaigns primarily intended to meliorate lower-class conditions. In the novels, his reformist attacks were usually directed less at specific institutions than at unimaginative and unfeeling bureaucracy in general, but his more pointed fictional satires often bore fruit on both small and large scales. The tyrannical Mr. Fang from Oliver Twist, who was modeled on a notoriously brutish magistrate named Laing, resulted in the man's removal from office, for example. More significantly, the satires on philanthropy in Bleak House were instrumental in bringing about a more systematic organization of Victorian charities (even if this organization entailed new problems of its own).

Dickens's appeal to the lower orders also owes something to the 'popular style' of his narrative persona, which adopts attitudes and postures familiar to readers from lower social strata. His prevailing facetiousness of tone, his comically exaggerated types, his uninhibited punning, his cheerful satire, his mixture of farce and seriousness, and, most of all, his deep-seated and unrelenting grudge against snobbishness of any kind-all express a persona looking upward at the social scale, knowingly and defiantly, yet with its good humor, self-confidence, and unembittered vitality preserved intact. With its air of precocious cleverness, Dickens's tone has the impudence and the broad ironies one might find in a street urchin. His attack on snobbishness is virulent enough to have given offense to quite a few middle-class readers-like Saintsbury, who faulted Dickens for having started 'that curious topsyturvyfied snobbishness-that 'cult of the lower classes'-which has become a more and more fashionable religion'; or like Q. D. Leavis, — 384- who dismissed Dickens's attempts to satirize his more refined characters as 'the painful guesses of the uninformed and half-educated writing for the uninformed and half-educated.'

Dickens's popular affinities certainly did lead to some unfortunate indulgences in lower-class prejudices and philistinism. In Barnaby Rudge, for example, Lord Gordon, who was responsible for the Gordon riots against Catholics of 1780, is portrayed leniently as a well-meaning incompetent (Dickens was fervently antipapist, as well as casually anti-Semitic). Dickens's easy populism also led to occasional offenses against good taste-as in his sketch of Miss Mowcher in David Copperfield, which was modeled on a poor female dwarf who recognized her fictional portrait and complained bitterly to Dickens. It is his seemingly unself-critical indulgence of popular attitudes (in addition, of course, to the narrative conventions he borrows from popular art) that has led to most of the disparagement Dickens has suffered. Trollope parodied him, in The Warden, as 'Mr. Popular Sentiment,' and F. R. Leavis initially excluded him from the 'Great Tradition' because he was too much a 'popular entertainer,' and 'not completely serious.' Surprise at Dickens's own personal «vulgarity» also was not uncommon. Richard Henry Dana wrote: 'You admire him, & there is a fascination about him which keeps your eyes on him, yet you cannot get over the impression that he is a low bred man… Take the genius out of his face & there are a thousand young London shop-keepers… who look exactly like him.' Edward Fitzgerald thought him a 'Cockney Snob.' Even his good friend John Forster never ceased to feel that Dickens's public readings were beneath the dignity of a literary man.

Yet while Dickens's style-both personal and narrational-seemed to represent the humble man to himself flatteringly, it also domesticated the underdog sensibility in ways that Dickens's middle-class readers found congenial. The innocence and the disarming joviality of Dickens's devilry, coupled with a Christian sentimentalism very much in tune with evangelical tastes, had a particular charm for middle-class readers. In characters like Sam Weller from The Pickwick Papers, the process of domestication was already apparent: Weller, a Victorian Sancho Panza, manages to sublimate the acuteness of the street philosopher into a kind of wise deference and loyalty toward his master, Mr. Pickwick, whose inoffensive aloofness marks him as the idealistic but democratic gentleman. This kind of appreciative distancing of popular life, which (to put it most cynically) allowed Dickens's «slumming» - 385- middle-class readers to sample harmlessly what they conceived to be the uninhibited energies of the lower orders, results in the large psychological gap Dickens created between his middle-class protagonists and the more colorful, unrepressed minor characters who surround (and support) them. In their very blandness, Dickens's protagonists embody the moral authority of middle-class seriousness, reserve, and self-control, which anchors and controls the lower-class carnival backdrop meant to animate their moral progress.

The ambivalence of Dickens's populism is wonderfully complex, and not reducible simply to middle-class patronage. It is important to recognize, however, that his populism owes much to the tremendous optimism about reform that was in vogue among the newly enfranchised middle classes in the 1830s, at the formative stages of his career. As Humphry House has pointed out, Dickens's career 'coincided almost exactly with the rule of the Ten- Pound Householders'-that is, with the period between the Reform Bills of 1832 and 1867. As a young parliamentary stenographer, Dickens copied down the first Reform Bill debates in 1831, and for the next few years he covered numerous important political speeches as a journalist. His reformist attitudes might be taken as a sentimentalized version of 1830s middle-class radicalism-Fitzjames Stephen once referred to him as the 'representative man' of the reform period. In this sense, Dickens's outspokenness about social justice was largely expressive of middle-class idealism, though in his case it was pitched in a more-than-usually empathetic key. As a reviewer for the Economist pointed out in response to his Christmas story 'The Chimes': 'One of the most remarkable circumstances of the day is the passion… which prevails to improve the condition of the working classes… Under the influence of this passion, all the so-called light writers, who catch their inspiration from the prevailing events, have turned political philosophers, perhaps without knowing it… Mr. Dickens shares this national feeling.' What is most important about Dickens's middle-class representativeness is that the gloomy pessimism setting into his social vision in the early 1850s reflects the class disillusionment of the disappointed thirties reformers. In this pessimism, too, the later Dickens was representative of the class within which he had established himself, rather than simply the brooding, wizened popular sage that he is often taken to have been.

But Dickens's middle-class identifications actually run counter to his populism in serious if largely suppressed ways. Some features of his -386- vision of the popular crowd, for example, served middle-class desires to repress class conflict by reimaging mass society in reassuring terms. Dickens's seminal conception of the diverse and heterogeneous English crowd-that is, his creative reservoir of character sketching that has led many to speak sentimentally of 'the Dickens world'-represents the full flowering of a middle-class rhetorical strategy for defusing the political significance of mass society. This rhetorical tradition depends on a particular anthology of crowd imagery that can be found originally in the cheap popular journals of the 1820s-the Penny Magazine, the Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, the Hive. These journals systematically portray the mob in terms of its friendly individualism, breaking up the frightening images of nebulous mass society that haunt late-eighteenth- century writing into a rich array of individuated types. It is because of this tradition of writing that Gissing could complain, with a nostalgia that was only partially accurate, that the latenineteenth-century masses had become more homogeneous than they were in Dickens's day. Dickens's work, which adapts the earlier writers' crowd imagery to a much wider audience, carries out an individualizing approach to mass society in various ways: by using proper names that summarize a character's predictable tendencies, by depicting individuals as singularly purposive, and by creating a kind of social taxonomy for placing strange eccentrics in comprehensible niches. Dickens's comic background characters are all monads-obsessives who seem uninterested in intercourse with other selves-and one effect of this gallery of eccentric types is to make the social crowd seem comforting, even friendly, in its willingness to yield up the quaintly insular identities of its atomized members.

This strategy of representing the crowd as a menagerie of eccentric types provided mass readers with a sense of the colorful, baroque plenitude of collective life. It sublimated political conflicts into a kind of mythologized pantheon of wackiness. But for the middle-class reader, more inclined to identify with the observer, this approach to the crowd had slightly different effects. It produced the sense that a «human» rationale could be discovered by the patient observer in what appeared to be the dehumanized surfaces of mass society. The implicit tone of 'the Dickens world' is that of a complacent middle-class utopianism, in which a certain benign voyeurism seems to transcend class conflict and to produce a sense of national togetherness. This tendency to decollectivize the identity of the working classes corresponded, among -387- other things, to Dickens's antipathy to extending any kind of political power to the lower class as a body. In Hard Times, he came out very strongly against unionization, and the