of a literate popular audience. After Pickwick's success, all of his later novels were published first either in monthly numbers, in monthly periodicals, or in Dickens's own weeklies. One effect of this form of publication was to intertwine the twists and turns of his plots with the -395- rhythms of his readers' lives over a period of eighteen months, which did much to promote a sense of 'living with' his characters. Another was to give him time to sample his reader's responses and to revise his plans accordingly. Thus, when sales of Martin Chuzzlewit flagged, Martin was packed off to America to spice up the plot; and responses to Dickens's short-lived weekly, Master Humphrey's Clock, spurred him to use it as the vehicle to launch The Old Curiosity Shop. Ironically, these effects of intimacy were achieved by making the actual conditions of publication more factorylike, more pressured by deadlines, more susceptible to standardization, and more immediately commodifiable.
As a reformer, too, Dickens was always reactive, no matter how much he may have presented himself as a social maverick. He never took up a reform issue unlikely to capture popular consensus. As Humphry House put it: 'Detached now from his time he may seem more original and adventurous than he was; for then he was only giving wider publicity in 'inimitable' form to a number of social facts and social abuses which had already been recognized if not explored before him… [He] caught exactly the tone which clarified and reinforced the public's sense of right and wrong, and flattered its moral feelings.' In this way, his works are an invaluable expression of Victorian ethical priorities.
These various kinds of responsiveness guaranteed that there would be a good many issues upon which Dickens's vision crossed social boundaries, and indeed had a unifying appeal. One of these is his special role as the chronicler of the Victorian city. No one knew London better, and Dickens's extraordinary powers of observation made him a writer who, as Walter Bagehot put it, 'describes London like a special correspondent for posterity.' Reflecting widely shared Victorian misgivings about the benefits of industrial progress, there is often an apocalyptic note in Dickens's description of urban life, a tendency to use images of urban decay as signs for general moral chaos. His metaphors for the urban landscape-fog, mud, dirt, pestilence-suggest a systematic, animated evil, as if the city's growth had taken on a destructive, allconsuming life of its own. At the same time, Dickens codified in specific terms many of the pressing problems of the Victorian city: the depopulation of the ancient urban core; overcrowding in slum areas; the destruction of open spaces; the problem of the fringe areas of London (described in Our Mutual Friend as a 'suburban Sahara'); the sense of individual loss of control over conditions (even for wealthy individuals -396- like the Merdles in
Dickens's representation of the city does waver somewhat in its moral shadings. The city is most often represented as a place from which to escape, and in novels like Our Mutual Friend it is explicitly represented as a prison. In
Dickens also seems to have struck a complex but common chord in his transformation of religious ideas into a secularized vision. He often used religious allusions to reinforce notions of transcendence or liberation-as in the kind of pilgrim's progress undergone by Nell and her grandfather in The Old Curiosity Shop, or in the rhetoric of his sentimental deathbed scenes. Religious orthodoxies underlie persistent Dickensian themes, such as the deception of riches and the evils of selfishness. His ending marriages, too, should be understood not simply as a conventional endorsement of domestic complacency, but as images of transcendent bliss-which is why they always invoke metaphors of changelessness and the stoppage of time. Despite his vicious satires of evangelicalism-Chadband in
In more purely aesthetic terms, the motley nature of Dickens's literary influences gives some indication of the mixed pleasures of his writing. He was deeply indebted to popular novelists of the early nineteenth century, especially Pierce Egan and Theodore Hook. His education in the popular theater was extremely thorough (he claimed to have gone to the theater every night for two to three years running in the early 1830s), and he drew on popular melodramas for his stagy plots and his more conventionalized character types. But Dickens also drew on eighteenth-century «classics» he read in his childhood-on Smollett, Fielding, Goldsmith, and Defoe-as well as on Cervantes and Scott. His descriptive tendencies owe something to the essays of Leigh Hunt. He knew Shakespeare exceptionally well, and Shakespearean influences show up in many ways-in his use of thematically cross-fertilizing subplots, for instance, or in many of his plot paradigms (King Lear in The Old Curiosity Shop andDombey and Son;Hamlet in
One of the more idiosyncratic hallmarks of the Dickens aesthetic is his striking power of description. He is especially good at evoking moral atmosphere through his description of physical details-closely observed things often seem to grow sentient with specific moral tendencies. Other formal aspects of his work that have inspired admiration include the inexhaustible comic creativeness of the novels and their vigorous narrative drive. His inventive prose style, as well as his ear for dialogue, prompted F. R. Leavis to claim that there was 'surely no greater master of English except Shakespeare.' Yet Dickens's greatest strength -398- as a novelist lies in his dexterity with character. His literary fame began with the publication of Sketches by Boz, a collection of journalistic pieces notable for their extraordinary range and perceptiveness of characterization. His first works are designed to showcase his genius for character sketching-The Pickwick Papers includes over 350 characters. It is not until Oliver Twist that these seminal skills with characterization and description are coupled with his enduring tendencies toward sentiment, melodrama, and social crusading.
Despite his skill at characterization, Dickens has been routinely disparaged as a psychologist. This long- standing critical disdain results, however, from a failure to appreciate the kind of psychological analysis Dickens offers-a failure that is just beginning to be rectified. If one thinks of psychology as the depiction of an organic, complexly textured, and unified personality, then obviously Dickens is no Henry James. By contrast, his depiction of particular characters is always reductive, and always also the product of a deliberate effort to distort and exaggerate. Dickens is often said to have seen people the way a child sees grownups, focusing on what seems peculiar, arbitrary, unintelligible, comic, or terrifying. What is crucial about Dickens's interest in psychology, however, is his perception of the performative nature of the psyche. Dickens demonstrates the ways in which interiority is always staged, never fully organic and 'inward.' He counters the antitheatrical prejudices of the Victorian age, and its exaltation of sincerity, by presenting psychic states as a series of disjunctive, performative, and socially conditioned roles.
Of all English novelists, Dickens was no doubt most closely tied to the stage. He acted in scores of private and amateur theatricals, in addition to his histrionic public readings, and he wrote a number of minor plays, in some of which he performed himself. While Dickens's strong interest in theater carries over in numerous ways to his fiction, none is as important as his conception of the psyche as a kind of theater. Dickens always conceives
