When he was already well established as the most prosperous and famous novelist of his day — not just in England — Charles Dickens was to be found stalking the streets of London at dead of night, witnessing for himself the atrocious conditions under which labored the wretched of the earth.
“There lay, in an old egg-box, which the mother had begged from a shop, a feeble, wasted, wan, sick child. With his little wasted face, and his little hot worn hands folded over his breast, and his little bright attentive eyes, I can see him now, as I have seen him for several years, looking steadily at us. There he lay in his little frail box, which was not at all a bad emblem of the little body from which he was slowly parting — there he lay quite quiet, quite patient, saying never a word. He seldom cried, the mother said, he seldom complained. He lay there, seeming to wonder what it was all about. God knows, I thought, as I stood looking at him, he had his reasons for wondering — and why, in the name of a gracious God, such things should be.”
His anger thus fueled, Dickens turned it into incandescent words — hundreds and hundreds of pages of journalism, speeches up and down the country, and, of course, the great novels of his maturity, “Bleak House,” “Hard Times,” “Little Dorrit” — in which he puts Britain at its industrial zenith in the dock, prosecuting with savage ferocity those whom he held responsible for the iniquities he had witnessed. His compassion had never been in doubt from the very first — from the early sketches he wrote under the name of Boz to “The Pickwick Papers” and “Oliver Twist” — but to this was added a kind of volcanic rage, which made him more than ever publicly identified with the disadvantaged.
With “The Christmas Carol” and its explicit attacks on the disparity between those who have and those who do not, he had given the conscience of the age a powerful jolt, but that was just a beginning. From his early 40s until his death some 15 years later, he never ceased to engage with the howling injustice he saw all around him. This is not in itself, of course, enough to make a great novelist. But when this sort of active, practical, radical determination to reform the system under which he lived is allied to a genius for storytelling and an incomparable imagination in the creation or character, you have a pretty potent combination.
There is nothing distant or cool about Dickens, nothing formal or academic. His structures are big and unwieldy. He seems to be making it up as he goes along, which, of course, is exactly what he did, writing in episodes, sometimes knocking off three or four at a time for weekly or monthly publications, as he pursued his active, not to say frantic, other life — corresponding, speechifying, editing (weekly journals and even, for a time, a crusading daily newspaper), partying, breeding (10 children by the time he was 40), performing conjuring tricks with nonchalant ease (the fruit of much serious rehearsal).
Need to communicate
The thing that pulses through his work like an electric current is his almost carnal need to communicate with his readers. His relationship with them far exceeds in intensity any other relationship in his life: those with his children (devoted but formal), his wife (initially affectionate, ultimately disgusted), his friends (passionate but erratic), or even his hidden mistress Ellen Ternan, 30 years his junior. (We can only conjecture at the nature of his feelings for Ternan, though it is safe to say that an element of play-acting — he adopted the persona of “Mr. Tringham” to throw the curious off the trail — must have formed a large part of them.)
His relationship with his public was something quite different, altogether more real. Simply put, he needed their love in order to exist. Like a lover, he responded instantly to their moods and to their wants; they, for their part, expected him to speak for them, to express their joys and their miseries, to create for them their monsters and their comic heroes. In almost shamanic fashion, he was possessed by their spirit, the great popular Carnival spirit.
His playful, metamorphosing language — distorting, personifying, now engorging, now withering, transforming a city into a single breathing organism or an individual into a swarming mass of grotesque features — is the vernacular mode at its most extended and its most exuberant. He embodies appetite, glories in extremes. This is where he can most be compared to Shakespeare, his immediate superior in the pantheon of English literature — in this and in his matchless creation of character. Only in the matter of sex is he oddly reticent, almost blank. In every other area, his inventiveness is almost surreal, which is why adaptations of his books, attempting to treat him as a social realist, or a psychological realist, are so rarely successful. The screen and even the stage have a confining effect on the psychedelic fantasies of Dickens’ pen.
In true Carnival spirit, Dickens’ work is a performance, generous and unstinting, for his audience of readers. We never forget that it is he that is doing it, and doing it for us. And, on cue, we laugh, we cry, we moan, we applaud.
The performer
Dickens is the writer as actor. In life, of course, he acted whenever he had the opportunity, finally, triumphantly, taking to the boards with great tours of England and America in which he “read” his own work. In fact, his readings were memorized and meticulously rehearsed and performed with a degree of histrionic energy that even drew the stunned admiration of the theatrical profession. His audiences (who also knew his books by heart and who were more or less chanting the words in unison with him) were in ecstasy; they thronged to him in their thousands and the performances became cathartic experiences, both comic and tragic, on a grand scale. They were unprecedented events, only to be compared today in their emotional fervor to rock concerts. But they were implicit in the novels themselves — the literal performance was the logical extension of the literary one.
Dickens wrote fiercely and pertinently about the abuses of his day, which are not, alas, so different from the abuses of ours. He attacked imbalances in income, indifference to mental suffering, the venality of lawyers, the heartlessness of capitalists, the death of the soul and the rape of the child.
But it is not for this alone that we read him now — not even for the great generous heart, or for the unique literary voice. It is for his huge populist energy that we love him and need him, for his assertion of the glorious vitality of human life and the united diversity of society, for his denial of uniformity and his exploration of the unbounded manifestations of man and woman, both peccable and sublime. Dickens, the hero of his own age, reaches out to a tradition and a culture which long precedes it, which even ante-dates the Elizabethan period, and asserts, for our own age in which the twin horrors of globalization and fundamentalism — both tending towards the standardization of human experience — threaten to overwhelm us, the glorious, contradictory and insuppressible bounteousness of the human experience.
The best of times for Dickens
‘Tis the season for adaptations of Dickens’ work.
Here are a few:
– “The Mystery of Charles Dickens”: Chicago Shakespeare Theater.
– “A Christmas Carol”: Goodman Theatre, Drury Lane Oakbrook in Oakbrook Terrace, Centerlight Theatre in Northbrook, Wheaton Drama Inc. in Wheaton, Writers’ Theatre Chicago in Glencoe.
– “Mrs. Scrooge”: Wood Street Theatre Co. in Palatine.
