depends on revealing how the pursuit of truth often indulges various kinds of fantasy. In characters like Micawber or Mr. Dick in
It is tempting to read Dickens's work (as I have largely done) as one long novel-partly because the plots seem to matter less than such things as his evocations of atmosphere and his handling of character. Still, it is important to note at least a few landmarks in his development as a novelist, for the outlines of his career help chart a number of cul-403- tural changes from the 1840s through the 1860s. In the later novels, for instance, there is a new sense of social restraint. The lower-middle-class figures of Dickens's youth, rooted more in the uninhibited license of the Regency than in Victorian behavioral norms, yield to a general sense of social conformity that makes eccentrics stand out. In the late novels, too, it is the middle class that carries itself in more self-important ways, and the lower class that is demonstrably less assured. London, opened up by the police and by the surveillance of observers like Dickens himself, seems less mysterious, less enchanting. The mid-Victorian reaction against sentimentality (which culminated later in Oscar Wilde's famous put-down of Dickens: 'A man would have to have a heart of stone to read the death of Little Nell without laughing') is reflected in his own abandonment of deathbed scenes after
While Dickens is most famous, of course, as a novelist, it is important to remember that he had another significant career as an editor. He maintained a vigorous, inflexible control over nearly all the details of his weekly magazines, monitoring and often rewriting the work of his many contributors. His involvement in these periodicals, over the course of twenty years, was unceasing, and he was able to use them as a strong platform from which to address social problems. His generosity as an editor helped launch the careers of a number of younger writers, including Elizabeth Gaskell, Wilkie Collins, and George Meredith. In many ways, Dickens was also a key figure in the professionalization of literature during the nineteenth century. He was extremely skillful at -404- exploring new methods of printing and advertising, and he was a central figure in the campaign for copyright laws, both domestic and international. Most important, through the social and political stature of his work, he endowed the writer with a new kind of public visibility and dignity. His only work to represent the figure of the writer-David Copperfield-relies heavily on notions of writerly disinterest, and on the inspirational, nonworkmanlike conditions of writerly labor to help support this newly professionalized image. Mary Poovey has shown as well that it was by «individualizing» the figure of the writer that Dickens helped resolve an entrenched Victorian ambivalence about whether the writer was a genius or an entrepreneur-for Dickens, the professional writer as creative individualist is necessarily both at once.It would be as difficult to map out Dickens's complex influences on later writers as it is to explain his extraordinarily wide popularity, and for much the same reasons. The traces of Dickens's direct literary influence extend in appropriately multiple ways, from Russian novelists like Gogol, Tolstoy, and Dostoevsky through Joyce and Kafka, and they include a significant impact on the modernist theater of Ibsen and Shaw. Perhaps the most succinct summary of his influence is the formula applied by an obituary in the Daily News, which pronounced him 'the one writer everybody read and everybody liked.' While the past century has certainly qualified and complicated that simple impression, giving us a more variegated palate for the complex elixir of values, interests, and ideologies that Dickens brewed, it has done nothing to change the sense that Dickens is one Victorian writer everyone thinks it important to know well.
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Thackeray and the Ideology of the Gentleman
THE novels of William Makepeace Thackeray (1811–1863) typically feature a sudden loss of fortune, usually a bankruptcy brought about by the failure of a speculative enterprise, and they also exemplify a special interest in-even obsession with-the figure of the gentleman. These are not unrelated narrative motifs. In Thackeray, as in the larger social discourse in which his work participates, the construction of the modern English gentleman served in large part as a response to Britain's shift from a landed to a credit economy with its attendant uncertainties and fluctuations. Although the gentleman was defined and redefined in different ways throughout the course of the century, nineteenth-century discourse on the gentleman always positioned him as a counter to the anonymous and volatile power of money. At the same time, it harnessed for the gentleman that very power by broadening the category to include the new classes created by the explosion of the commercial sphere since the eighteenth century.
Nineteenth-century writers like Thackeray built on the notion of the gentleman developed in the eighteenth century, when the requirement of 'gentle birth' and landed property was first placed in serious question. In periodicals like the Tatler and the Spectator, early essayists like Joseph Addison and Richard Steele, while not severing the link to land and to rank, loosened it considerably. They began to treat as autonomous the ethical component of the gentleman (the code of duty and disinterest), which was originally rooted in the ownership of property and which sig -407- naled a commitment to the general rather than particular good. Like their eighteenth- century predecessors, the Victorians privileged an ethical model of the gentleman, but theirs tended to generalize private rather than public virtues. In the complicated political and economic matrix of an industrial society, the whole question of public virtue (knowledge of the general good) had become much more problematic, and Victorian definitions generally displaced the issue by valorizing what could be called relational virtues. The Victorian
