CHAPTER VIII

DICKENS

By the year 1850, in England, the so-called Novel of realism had conquered.  Scott in an earlier generation had by his wonderful gift made the romance fashionable.  But, as we said, it was the romance with a difference:  the romance with its feet firmly planted on mother-earth, not ballooning in cloudland; the romance depicting men and women of the past but yet men and women, not creatures existing only in the fancy of the romance-maker.  In short, Scott, romancer though he was, helped modern realism along, because he handled his material more truthfully than it had been handled before.  And his great contemporary, Jane Austen, with her strict adherence to the present and to her own locale, threw all her influence in the same direction, justifying Mr. Howell’s assertion that she leads all English novelists in that same truthful handling.

Moreover, that occult but imperative thing, the spirit of the Time, was on the side of Realism:  and all bend to its dictation.  Then, in the mid-century, Dickens and Thackeray, with George Eliot a little later on their heels, and Trollope too, came to give a deeper set to the current which was to flow in similar channels for the remainder of the period.  In brief, this is the story, whatever modifications of the main current are to be noted:  the work of Bulwer and Disraeli, of Reade, Kingsley and Collins.

A decade before Thackeray got a general hearing Dickens had fame and mighty influence.  It was in the eighteen thirties that the self-made son of an impecunious navy clerk, who did not live in vain since he sat for a portrait of Micawber and the father of the Marshalsea, turned from journalism to that higher reporting which means the fiction of manners and humors.  All the gods had prepared him for his destiny.  Sympathy he had for the poor, the oppressed, the physically and morally unfit, for he had suffered in his own person, or in his imagination, for them all.  His gift of observation had been sharpened in the grim school of necessity:  he had learned to write by writing under the pressure of newspaper needs.  And he had in his blood, while still hardly more than a lad, a feeling for idiomatic English which, so far as it was not a boon straight from heaven, had been fostered when the very young Charles had battened, as we saw, upon the eighteenth century worthies.

It is now generally acknowledged that Dickens is not a temporary phenomenon in Victorian letters, but a very solid major fact in the native literature, too large a creative force to be circumscribed by a generation.  Looked back upon across the gap of time, he looms up all the more impressively because the years have removed the clutter about the base of the statue.  The temporary loss of critical regard (a loss affecting his hold on the general reading public little, if any) has given way to an almost violent critical reaction