The One and Only

Like Mozart, Charles Dickens is one of those artists whose prolific excellence defies belief, seems somehow an artifact of an earlier age when men and women had fewer conveniences and more energy, less formal education but greater literacy, shorter lives but, perhaps, longer days. His 20 novels seem to build a world at least as complex and fascinating as the world around us, and he wasn’t behindhand either with stories, essays, letters, journals, children, affairs of the heart, friendships, travels and walking tours, performances, parties and the vicissitudes of life. Anyone, like this reader, who already feels astonished and privileged to live after Dickens and thus to freely partake of the marvelous banquet that is his work, will feel no less so after perusing this new Penguin collection of his journalism.

Most lovers of English literature know that Dickens edited several magazines and that he wrote for them too, but college courses and publishers have generally focused on the novels. The editing seems like his day job--a dimly recognizable activity he must have done sometime--but in fact Dickens was a dedicated and ambitious editor who launched four magazines. “Household Words” and “All the Year Round” were successful, and Dickens was deeply involved in every aspect of their production for most of the years he was also writing novels. Indeed, his editorial opinions permeated all the pieces in both magazines. The contrast between a passage from one piece, written by Henry Morley and quoted in David Pascoe’s introduction, and Dickens’ revision of it, as it appeared in “Household Words,” shows not only Dickens’ lively taste, but also his indefatigable energy and his amazing fluency. And then he wrote a long, instructive editorial letter to Morley, which, Pascoe says, Morley was not happy to receive.

Dickens’ own essays and articles slant the light into his remarkable sensibility somewhat differently than the novels do, even though, as many have pointed out, certain characters and scenes that later appeared in the novels were given dry runs in the articles. His voice, for one thing, is unabashedly personal. His great friend and correspondent, John Forster, recalled that when Dickens was casting about for a title for “Household Words,” along with “Mankind” and “Everything,” he thought of “Charles Dickens,” a weekly journal designed for the instruction and entertainment of all classes of readers, “Conducted by Himself.” Surely Dickens, a great wit, saw the humor in these possible titles. But the reader may also see Dickens’ grand ambition as well as his own recognition of the capaciousness of his imagination.

The 72 pieces collected here must inevitably vary in their appeal to individual readers. As a writer and a citizen, Dickens wore many hats; the categories Pascoe has chosen emphasize that Dickens was a social critic, a political gadfly, a passionate traveler, a connoisseur of oddities and a deeply reflective observer of his own psychology. Whether the subject is lying awake at night, crowds gathering to witness a death in Paris, an industrial strike or governmental incompetence--all are unmistakably Dickensian, that is, all develop through the seemingly effortless accumulation of detail, all portray a complex and seething mix of the human, the mechanical and the natural, all exhibit quick but fluid changes of mood and tone, and in all, the author’s sympathies are readily apparent. Indeed, in his letter to Morley, Dickens expounded his views on the necessity for fancy, imagination, “some little grace or other” in the telling of any tale or the reporting of any incident. Of course, the outstanding hallmark of Dickens’ style is his mastery of the use of figurative language--objects, processes and people are continuously likened to other objects, processes and people, in order to get at their underlying sense. This was both a natural habit of mind for Dickens and a conscious technique for resisting what he saw as the growing mechanization and depersonalization of the world around him. The effect is to give both intense life and intense subjectivity to every scene. For me, these pieces are not so much to be read as to be delighted in, scarfed up. Favorite passages in each give way as in music to subsequent favorite passages and finally to a feeling that Dickens’ abundance defies criticism, interpretation and even selection.

But I laugh. I laugh when he describes taking a boat to Calais: “A stout wooden wedge driven in at my right temple and out at my left, a floating deposit of lukewarm oil in my throat, and a compression of the bridge of my nose in a blunt pair of pincers, these are the personal sensation by which I know we are off, and by which I shall continue to know it until I am on the soil of France. My symptoms have scarcely established themselves comfortably, when two or three skating shadows that have been trying to walk or stand, get flung together, and other two or three shadows in tarpaulin slide with them into corners and cover them up. Then the south foreland lights begin to hiccup at us in a way that bodes no good.” (From “The Calais Night Mail.”)

But I see. I see clearly that “at intervals all day, a frightened hare has shot across this whitened turf; or the distant clatter of a herd of deer trampling the hard frost, has, for the minute, crushed the silence too. Their watchful eyes beneath the fern may be shining now, if we could see them, like the icy dewdrops on the leaves, but they are still, and all is still. And so, the lights growing larger, and the trees falling back before us, and closing up again behind us, as if to forbid retreat, we come to the house.” (From “A Christmas Tree.”)

And I hear. “Mr. Cheerful [the bookmaker], he said, had gone out on ‘tickler bizniz’ at ten o’clock in the morning and wouldn’t be back until late at night. Mrs. Cheerful was gone out of town for her health, till the winter. Would Mr. Cheerful be back tomorrow? cried the crowd. ‘He won’t be here tomorrow,’ said the miraculous boy. ‘ ‘Coz it’s Sunday, and he always goes to church, a’ Sunday.’ At this, even the losers laughed. ‘Will he be here a’ Monday, then?’ asked a desperate young green-grocer. ‘A’ Monday?’ said the Miracle, reflecting. ‘No, I don’t think he’ll be here a’ Monday, coz he’s going to a sale a’ Monday.’ ” (From “Betting Shops.”)

I also get the point. “The power of Nobody is becoming so enormous in England, and he alone is responsible for so many proceedings, both in the way of commission and omission; he has so much to answer for, and is so constantly called to account; that a few remarks upon him may not be ill-timed.

“The hand which this surprising person had in the late war is amazing to consider. It was he who left the tents behind, who left the baggage behind, who chose the worst possible ground for encampments, who provided no means of transport, who killed the horses, who paralysed the commissariat, who knew nothing of the business he professed to know and monopolized, who decimated the English army. It was Nobody who gave out the famous unroast coffee, it was Nobody who made the hospitals more horrible than language can describe, it was Nobody who occasioned all the dire confusion of Balaklava harbor, it was even Nobody who ordered the fatal Balaklava cavalry charge. The non-relief of Kars was the work of Nobody, and Nobody has justly and severely suffering for that infamous transaction.” (From Nobody, Somebody, and Everybody.”)

These selected pieces are taken from the 20 years of Dickens’ life that also saw the writing of all the great and massive novels after “David Copperfield,” though only one essay appeared after 1863. In June of 1865, Dickens and his traveling companions were passengers upon a train that crashed and went over a bridge into the River Beult, killing and injuring numerous others but leaving Dickens and his companions unharmed. It may have seemed to the author that the forces of mechanization and depersonalization had finally overwhelmed his capacity for observing and resisting them, because though he continued writing novels, he stopped writing journalistic pieces almost entirely, and those he did write had none of the verve of the earlier ones. While he escaped physically unharmed, he began, according to Pascoe, to be reluctant to write as he always had, about what he had seen. He died five years later on the anniversary of the crash.

Those of us who, unconsciously, perhaps, think of Charles Dickens as more a phenomenon than a man may take special delight in his “Selected Journalism,” for on every page his sense of himself as a particular man in a particular place and time is apparent in every sentence, and yet that ineffable other thing is there as well, that abiding inexhaustibility, that transcendent mastery of all the richnesses of the English language.