Artful Interview: Dickens at 200

This month – February 8 specifically – beloved novelist and writer Charles Dickens would have celebrated his 200th birthday – if he had not, you know, died back in 1870.  In honor of that distinction, I’m republishing an interview about Old Boz that I conducted with Boston College English Professor Judith Wilt back in 2007.   Judith joined the teaching staff at BC in 1978 and specializes in 19th and 20th century British and Victorian literature. She’s an unabashed admirer of Mr. Dickens.

Artful Hatter: Dickens allegedly burned most of his important letters and correspondence when he was nearing the end of his writing career. What do we really know about the life of the creator of Scrooge and David Copperfield?

Judith Wilt: Whoa! That would have been a conflagration indeed, for this obsessed writer of private and public documents! Dickens did, in one of his periodic attempts to resist his past, burn baskets and baskets of correspondence in the late summer of 1860, mostly letters from others and copies of his own, but the Dickens letters we do have run to twelve volumes in the most recent Oxford UP edition.

Even more important, we have from Dickens’ friend and first biographer John Forster an account of the ‘autobiographical fragment’ Dickens himself wrote about his early years as a neglected and abandoned (by his own lights anyway) child, those months put to work in a London blacking factory while his father was in debtor’s prison, when he feared that he would be sunk forever in menial and unimaginative work – an experience which haunted him with images of his own futility, solitariness and inadequacy even at the height of his success, and which he put directly into “David Copperfield” (1850).

We have a long defensive letter he wrote and showed to friends about the reasons for the breakdown of his marriage to Catherine Hogarth, and a follow-up statement about his formal separation from her that he actually insisted on publishing in the “Times”; and from others’ letters and diaries and from hints in his letters, we know he maintained a clandestine and probably erotic, if not necessarily adulterous, correspondence with the actress Ellen Ternan for some years after that separation.

Artful Hatter: Is Dickens still an important author today? If so, why?

Judith Wilt: I’d certainly take his books with me to a desert island; they’re so filled with life at the extremes of joy and despair, so vividly pictorial, so rhetorically unique and memorable. Then too, the Victorians are unmistakably our contemporaries in the attempt to access the human consequences of everything we think of as “modern” – individualism, industrialism, urbanism, science, and so on. And more even than Charlotte Bronte and George Eliot, Dickens wrote into his characterizations those communications of mind and body, those strange and intimate connections between behavior and thought, which Freud later codified as the beginnings of the science of psychology.

Artful Hatter: What are the biggest misconceptions about Dickens?

Judith Wilt: Two, I think: one emotional and one literary. In the early decades of his career what impressed readers was the vitality, comedy, and consoling durability of Dickens’s people and his attitude towards life, and lots of people still think of his work as some sort of “Christmas Carol,” coming round to “cheer” every year. But there’s a darker Dickens right from the start, a haunted consciousness, and in his later novels he explored with great acuity the sorts of human and social obsessions and mistakes which we can diagnose but can’t seem to cure.

Then too, people understand him as a “popular” writer, one who wrote for money by the inch in the magazines and serializations of his first publishing years, one who addressed, and to some degree created, the “mass market.” True enough, but he was also a man of gigantic ambition and that includes artistic ambition – what may seem at first glance the proverbial “loose baggy monster” of swollen narrative in his 800 pagers actually turns out to be unified around images and themes and paced according to both suspense and thought in ways which we associate, on a different scale, with Browning, and which certainly caught the eye and influenced the likes of Henry James and T. S. Eliot.

Artful Hatter: In your opinion, what are Dickens’s three greatest works and why?

Judith Wilt: “Bleak House” (1853): it has the best balance of private and public concerns in the story of a lost little girl and of a national system of government, medicine and law which fails its people. It’s a narrative tour de force through its creation of two written “speaking” voices – an epic sardonic kind of investigative journalist looking over the whole picture and the lost little girl turned hyper-orderly woman; and it’s got at least two scenes which make me tear up even when I’m reading it in the classroom.

“Our Mutual Friend” (1865): it’s a treasure trove of strange and wonderful character (Mr. Venus, articulator of bones and melancholy artiste!), beautifully turned images (a dull old business house in the gloomy metropolis reflects “a sobbing gaslight in the counting-house window and a burglarious stream of fog creeping in the keyhole”), and a heartbreaking competition for one of the heroines between a languidly handsome dandy and an obsessed upwardly mobile young teacher.

“A Tale of Two Cities” (1859): we know the story in advance, both the male doubles who desire the heroine and the causes and consequences of the French Revolution, and yet this warhorse of a historical novel is still supreme for compulsive pace and quaint Dickensian touches.

Artful Hatter: Which three Dickens characters are your favorites and what do you find most compelling about them?

Judith Wilt: Oh, hard to keep to three. Well then…. Estella in “Great Expectations” (1861): a frightening example of a story Dickens often tells – a parent (figure) who wishes to reconstruct a malleable child into a weapon against the word, in this case, the masculine world which betrayed Miss Havisham is to have its heart eaten out, over and over, by the “femme fatale” she creates Estella to be. The process is so far advanced by the time Estella becomes conscious of this that she can do nothing but warn the innocent men, or try to destroy her guilty self in a car-crash of a marriage to a brute.

Sidney Carton in “A Tale of Two Cities”: “it is a far, far better thing I do than I have ever done”… a cliché of a character, and yet Dickens draws us powerfully, and anxiously, into the story of a man of talent and intelligence whose “will” is, for reasons we can only guess at, somehow broken by the conditions of modern professional life, so that he is mysteriously unable to comment cynically on the passing show: he can only take an action when it is for someone else. A male version, in some ways, of Estella’s problem.

And finally, Harold Skimpole of “Bleak House,” the comic figure of a minor artist blithely assuming that the universe, and more specifically his long-suffering friends, will support him. A half conscious Dickensian critique of his own art – and yet, Skimpole makes us all sit up and take notice as he argues that we active and virtuous people would be nowhere without someone of his disabilities and inadequacies to be the object of our charity and our competence. A character worthy of G. B. Shaw.