Dickensian Characters

The final talk was given by Mr. Barbier, Chairman of AlphaOmega Holdings, Ltd., near Exeter. Boys entered their farm at 16 or 17 years on paying a deposit of £1,000. The training took nine years including National Service, and if the student was successful at the end of this time he kept all the stock excess he had reared on a 250 acre farm, together with the refunded £1,000.

This term's programme was a great success and the programme for next term, which was discussed by the Advisory Committee, seems to be full of promise. It includes the first of a number of visits to a farm throughout the year so as to follow the development of particular crops.

C.B.M.G.

A re-reading of Dickens' Hard Times this term as a set-book inevitably leads one back to a consideration of his characterisation. Dickens is a remarkable writer in many ways but the trouble really starts with his characters : it is these that have invaded the novel and overrun everyday life, so that any person with a distinctive quirk or gimmick is liable to be called "Dickensian". It is this genius for individualisation that makes his characters immediately recognisable and memorable. Moreover it was vital to his success as a serial writer : his readers had to pick up the threads and feel at home with the characters as soon as every monthly instalment appeared.

Dickens' art was essentially mnemonic : he wrote to be remembered. On the tiniest scale he seems to write in slogans"Barkis is willing", for example. Even the most casual persons, such as the rescuers in the above novel, are distinguished. In all its forms, this art depends upon imperishable tags and mannerisms associated with individuals : Mr. Micawber is forever waiting for something to turn up and Uriah Heep's hands are forever clammy. Even when "type" characters proliferate as with the Squeers family, though all are marked with a strong idiosyncrasy, all are yet different. And at some point, what has seemed a useful trick turns into a high virtue : the memorable turns into the legendary.

Dickens usually presents a person more or less fully formed by a combination of professional, physical and environmental details—a sort of chemical compound with a precise flavour that identifies it. This is often achieved by physical suggestion as in this description of Mrs. Gamp : "She was neatly but not gaudily attired; in the weeds she had worn when Mr. Pecksniff had the pleasure of making her acquaintance; and was perhaps the turning of a scale more snu ffy."

This method of characterisation distinguishes him sharply from, say, Jane Austen or George Eliot. He shows little conception of the flux of human relationships whereby an Elizabeth Bennet or a Dorothea Brooke develop under our very eyes. His skill lies rather in producing idiosyncratic and separate persons and objects, which have a life and motion of their own but invariably stand against each other in fixed and still relations. Hence his world is lonely, lonely and gregarious : he is most at home in a garret or in a crowd.

Dickens' focus, then, is upon society itself in its aggregate parts, the swarming metropolis of the mid-nineteenth century. And the central idea of his mature novels is that of predatory man in this society, a category which includes predatory-evil characters (Quilp, Mr. Pecksniff) and predatory-benevolent creatures (Mrs. Squeers, Mrs. General). Quilp in The Old Curiosity Shop is the predatory figure par excellence : the uneasy feeling that he gives us is not due to anything profoundly evil in his nature (all he does is to pop up and make faces) but that, seen through a child's eyes, a sense of mysterious evil is evoked. It is a matter of perspective. David Lean caught it perfectly in his film of Great Expectations when Pip is terrified by the towering figure of the convict in the graveyard scene. To a child such figures are larger than life in a real sense. "Oliver Twist peering fearfully from the folds of the Beadle's cloak", that is Dickens' imaginative viewpoint; and "Oliver asking for more" puts in a nutshell the feeling that he is Fagin's prey. Indeed, my own view is that Dickens' unique contribution to literature is that in the persons of his shark characters, both great and small, he presents us with a sense of evil and corruption in society as seen through the ingenuous eyes of a child; and that at the same time he applies to this child-vision the moral judgment of an adult.

Now the greatest of these shark characters are Mr. Pecksniff and Mrs. Gamp in Martin Chuzzlewit. These two combine the above predatory traits with a world of comic fantasy : in fact they live almost entirely by the faculty of make-believe. Pecksniff begins by combating the disbelief of others in his pretensions, but he does not rise to his full stature until he has rooted out all trace of it even in himself, until the impregnability of his private world of self-esteem and hypocrisy is as consistent as Mrs. Gamp's devotion to the mythical Mrs. Harris. We meet this invincible screen first at the family gathering of the Chuzzlewits : " Pecksniff,' said Anthony, who had been watching the whole party with peculiar keenness from the first, 'don't you be a hypocrite.' `A what, my good sir?' demanded Mr. Pecksniff. 'A hypocrite.' `Charity, my dear,' said Mr. Pecksniff, 'when I take my chamber candlestick tonight, remind me to be more than usually particular in praying for Mr. Anthony Chuzzlewit, who has done me an injustice.' "