[Rhubarb]

I have a huge problem with Dickens in that he's often seen as the voice of the working class in Victorian England. He wrote about awful conditions in ways that made people of higher incomes care about them, and was hugely popular in his time.

HOWEVER.

To my mind, he took on a big responsibility and failed to carry it. Or rather, people have attributed this responsibility to him when it was undeserved. He used his position to inform people of working-class conditions and issues of poverty rightly enough, but he did so in such a theatrical way as to seem unbelievable. His style is overly-sentimental and mellodramatic, and all his hero characters are pure-hearted, innocent little waifs, poor but honest old folks, and the benevolent rich. It's black and white. The only poor who are worth saving, it seems, are big-eyed darlings who couldn't have an impure thought if a nun disembowelled their family. Did I mention that all the villains are ugly trolls and all the heroes are sweet-faced angels (when they aren't comic relief)? Just a note.

Oliver Twist springs to mind here. Bill Sykes, Fagin, and Monks are the main jerks in this. One is a grasping 'low' type who masquerades as a gentleman, and two are dirt-poor... one is a filthy Jew! The elite rich are all so damn goodnatured and generous that it hurts the brain (Monks is technically family, but only distantly so, so it's okay) and Oliver himself, that poor mistreated angel who can't even abide the thought of stealing, is secretly of that family of good breeding as well. Nothing much like this had really made it before, so it was certainly effective, but hardly what I'd call realistic.

Things change slightly in Nicholas Nickleby. Dickens claimed to have written it to draw attention to the horror of boarding schools, which he certainly succeeded in doing. The 'breeding equals goodliness' theme was changed with the character of Sir Mulberry Hawk, the owner of a castle in Northern Wales, who is no less villainous because of his title (although the hero Nicholas is still a man of good breeding, brought down by circumstance). Dickens' dedication to exposing such mistreatment went a long way toward earning him his reputation. But Smike is so pathetic, and Sir Mulberry is so very evil, to the point where no one could possibly compare them with any living persons.

The maturity of Dickens' works evolved as his writing improved with experience. But his style always had something of the pantomime about it, and although it made him popular, to my mind he never quite reached the status he is attributed to have had.

The problem with such black and white thinking is that it doesn't apply well to real life. No good person has a bad thought (with occasional exceptions such as Tattycoram in Little Dorrit, who was a bit borderline and repented fully to her 'master and mistress' at the end), and no villain has a shred of compassion (except for those who are 'redeemed' like Scrooge). It makes few allowances for how poverty and circumstance can ruin a person, or how it's easy to be calm and have manners when you have everything in the world. There's no doubt that Dickens did a lot to draw attention to terrible conditions in the poor and working classes, but any further lessons he might have taught were nullified by his rigid portrayals of good and bad. No one could possibly look at themselves and think, 'I share attributes with the villains... perhaps I should rethink my views and actions toward those below me'. And any rich folks who wanted to think of themselves as those goodly people in the books would have been considerably put off, I think, by all the smelly little street arabs who insulted them, or the homeless people with broken teeth and filthy rags.

I thought this was as radical as the literature of the era got... I mean, Dickens wasn't that much of a 'voice of the working class' or a pioneer of those in poverty, but he was the only one actually drawing attention to this stuff, right?

Wrong. Perhaps I'm ignorant, but I'd never heard of Elizabeth Gaskall until a year or so ago. She was Dickens' protege, although apparently he had a few problems with her work. And oh my god, you can see why. No big-eyed innocent waifs in sight here. The title hero of Mary Barton is quite a good person, but definitely flawed. And John Barton is downright resentful... why wouldn't he be, when his job has been replaced by a machine, and his only son starves for want of nutrition, and all he can do is stand outside the butcher's store, staring at all the meat, knowing it would save his child and knowing he can have none. Eventually he's moved to murder, and I can't blame him at all.

An idea was now springing up among the operatives, that originated with the Chartists, but which came at last to be cherished as a darling child by many and many a one. They could not believe that government knew of their misery: they rather chose to think it possible that men could voluntarily assume the office of legislators for a nation who were ignorant of its real state; as who should make domestic rules for the pretty behaviour of children without caring to know that those children had been kept for days without food. Besides, the starving multitudes had heard, that the very existence of their distress had been denied in Parliament; and though they felt this strange and inexplicable, yet the idea that their misery had still to be revealed in all its depths, and that then some remedy would be found, soothed their aching hearts, and kept down their rising fury.

A little history lesson here - this disatisfaction brought about a mass petition, signed by workers, letting parlaiment know of their conditions. It was ignored completely.

There's a never-to-be-forgotten scene concerning the Davenports, a woman with a dying husband and starving family, all brought so low that they're forced to live in a flooded cellar, with raw sewerage swimming on the floor, her husband lying in the driest patch on a piece of sacking, wasted away to a skeleton while all she can do is cry and her children crawl around in the filth. You won't see that in Dickens. What you also won't see in Dickens is the sweet-natured and carefree rich, despite being quite nice people in many ways, also being the cause of most of the troubles of the poor, directly or indirectly.

Addendum - bear in mind that I haven't read all of Dickens' books, and might have missed something really wonderful and poignant that he did. Feel free to correct me if this is the case.

I also apologise for the constant flitting between past and present tense.

This post has been edited by Rhubarb: 27 April 2005 - 06:08 PM

[J m HofMarN]

Rhubarb- Thank you, thank you thank you. Both for your views on Dickens, which I disagree with, and for bringing a fabulous literary debate to the forums which I hope will be the first of many.

Now, on to the battle. Yes, Dickens didn't really write about things with teh gritty realism that he could have, but if you read Victorian writing gritty realism was not something being looked for. I frankly adore his pretentious nature.

Dickens, as we all well know, was still very much a child when he wrote many of his books, and so he sees the world in a much different way than people today or in our time. He experienced work houses and boarding schools and all of that, and he was seperated from his family. He wrote about his own trials and tribulations and what he would like to happen to him for a very long time. In the early books (boy loses family, boy finds family in unlikely and clever way, yay everyone lives happily ever after) it is evident that he is writing almost entirely from his own basis and his own desires.

However, read A Tale of Two Cities and Bleak House. These were written later in his life when he had matured as a writer. Tale is a classic. Now we see the abused child become an abused old man who finds his family. We also see the familiar element of plot twists and connections. However, Dr. Darnet is not Dickens' persona, Carton is. Carton is the usual lost child character, and we see Dickens' desire to prove himself to his loved ones come out full force in the end of the novel.

It is NOT the typical Dickens. He shifted things about and came out with a masterpiece that has endured for over a century.

Bleak House contains the usual carefree rich people, but a lot more. There is, naturally, a wide eyes young boy in the novel, but much like Tale, this boy (SPOILER SPOILER!)

dies. His death is accompanied by an open and flagrant address to everyone from the queen to parliament that yes, boys like this die every day in the streets. And in the climax of the novel, Lady Dedlock, the heroines long lost mother, up and dies as well. This is not the typical Dickens either. Dickens is ruthlessly slamming the skewed moral system of England by showing how it murders Lady Dedlock, and at the same time assailing the treatment of the poor by showing the way that the streetsweeping boy dies.

(no more spoilers, all clear)

Bleak House contains a lot more death and a lot less adventure and black and white stuff than his earlier work. And it is delightfully satirical and unpredictable. However let it be said that I still enjoy his early work as well.

Also, look at the other literature of the time. Even a dissident like Oscar Wilde only wrote about, as he put it, "the clever people" We had H Rider Haggard (who deserves a far better reputation and following than he has) and all the other adventure novel authors writing fantasy in Africa, and we had the literary novelists writing about rich people. Dickens is the only popular author who wrote about the poor or even acknowledged their existence.

Not only does Dickens deserve his reputation, he deserves more. I state once again that Dickens aught to be hailed as the greatest English writer, and held above Shakespeare.

[Rhubarb]

Ahaha, I knew you wouldn't be able to stay out of this one.

I agree with some points, disagree with others. I'll respond in full later on. In the meantime, what are your views on Our Mutual Friend?

And you're right in assuming that I haven't read Bleak House; every time I tried, it made me cry (although judging from your synopsis, I fail to see how it differs too much from Dickens' previous works). If I'm being honest, the biggest problem I have with CD is that he wrote his books in serials - paid by the chapter. You could club someone to death with Tale of Two Cities. Not catered toward short attention spans. Or trees.

[J m HofMarN]

Bleak house has no less than 20 chapters that could easily be burned and noone would notice. It needed an editor badly. Bleak house has some excellent parts though and once you get through all the nonsensical character indroductions it really is a grand story. I havn't actually read Our Mutual Friend yet. Is it good? Bleak House, well it does end happily, but trust me it's not typical Dickens. It's his most literary novel in my opiniom.

[Rhubarb]

Bleak House, well it does end happily

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Of course it does.

It didn't need an editor so much as it needed to be released in a single volume. As I said, he got paid by the chapter as he released them on a monthly (or whenever) basis, so the more chapters he squeezed in there, the longer he could milk his cash cow.

Our Mutual Friend is not unlike Bleak House, I would assume, in that you could do away with a lot of it and it would make little to no difference. I didn't actually finish it, although I tried twice, because reading it longer than a couple of days straight caused my brain to seize up (literally). But it was his second-to-last novel, I think, so I was wondering what the quality was like. It had some interesting bits. I just couldn't stomach the pages and pages of prattle.

I'm tempted to start a Jane Austen thread, but I have mixed opinions on her and I fear it would hamper my ability to rant.

[J m HofMarN]

Bleak house was a terrible terrible book for being too long. Now that you mention the fact he did it in serials I can forgive the man. I've never read Jane Austen, I dislike that kind of literature really. Austen, Woolfe, Thackeray and others serious literary Victorians just seem to be too... too something.

[Rhubarb]

I quite like Woolfe. Her stuff is very poetic... I can't really explain why on technical merits, but it moved me. There's a lot of emotion in there. And she sounds like I might have liked her. Which is more than I can say for Jane Austen.