Joseph Brodsky on reality

It's either nonsense or a nuisance.

Spurious Quotation # 9

The aim of criticism should be to send the reader hurrying back to the original text with a new curiosity and a greater insight. It should stimulate the reader to form his own judgments of texts, either in opposition to or in agreement with the critic. Above all, it should attempt to explicate, not obfuscate.
Pierre Macherey

"The Old Curiosity Shop" Charles Dickens

Along with Hard Times, this is my least favourite of Dickens's novels, and for many of the same reasons, namely an imbalance between the end and the means.

The end, or purpose, of art, its deeper meaning, may be thought of in philosophical terms: to show us how to live a virtuous life, to be a good person, to treat our fellow creatures better, to lead to improvements in society, to better our understanding of ourselves and the nature of our humanity, our relationship to our mortality and our consciousness, to assist in the mediation of reality, and so on. The means is the materials and craft of the art form combined with the skill and temperament of the artist: what the Greeks called techne.
Every fictional work is a balancing act between the subterranean end and the surface means. In really great art, the means exemplify and even enact the end: the intellectual and imaginative work done by the reader in order to uncover the end (the deeper meaning) by unpicking the clues left in the discourse is itself the purpose of the novel. It's the process of discovery which leads to greater understanding.
In allegory and parable, the end rises to the surface and becomes more obvious. An allegory or a parable shows its meaning. In the novel, or in poetry, the end becomes submerged and the means to that end becomes the focus. A novel or a poem, in contrast to an allegory or parable, reveals its meaning by hiding it and making the reader work it out for him or her self; meaning is created by the reader and writer in concert. In parable and allegory, meaning is given. Allegories and parables are a restriction on imaginative freedom because they contain absolutely no ambiguity, novels and poems a creation of freedom.
The greater the submersion of the end, the more interesting the discourse, and more often than not, the better the quality of the writing. It's when the end becomes obvious, as in parable and allegory, that the writing deteriorates. For this reason, all allegories and parables, like other people's dreams, are inherently boring, because they are simply too easy and too confined. Both Hard Times and The Old Curiosity Shop are the most allegorical of Dickens's novels. In these two books, his writing is at its weakest because his purpose is more obvious.

Like The Pilgrim's Progress (another boring allegory), this book features a quest through a wilderness, meetings with highly allegorical figures ending in the redemption of death. However, whereas the Progress features a solitary male traveller in the prime of life, Dickens splits this figure into two: two sexes, two ages, so as to bring to life the themes of gender and intergenerational relations, and also to increase pathos in the figures of the child, and the elder, two helpless states at the extremes of life.

Although Dickens was generally overtly hostile to organised religion in his fiction, regarding it as little more than a hypocritical system, the novel is permeated with a remnant protestant ethic stemming from its allegorical roots:
With the brightness and joy of morning, came the renewal of yesterday’s labours, the revival of its pleasant thoughts, the restoration of its energies, cheerfulness and hope. The worked gaily in ordering and arranging their houses until noon, and then went to visit the clergyman.

Like Bleak House, this novel also employs a kind of double narrative, one that is not so clearly signalled. One story is that of Nell and her grandfather’s quest and their adventures, and the other is the story of Kit and the plot against him. It’s in the Nell story that Dickens’s writing is at its weakest, as in the paragraph quoted above.
That this story is allegorical is signalled in many ways: the writing in these sections resonates with suggestions and echoes of the Book of Common Prayer, and of the King James version of the Bible. The only two occasions in her life where Nell receives paid employment, and therefore some measure of independence, require her to show: in Mrs Jarley’s waxworks, and in the church of her death scene. In allegory, naming takes on a profound importance: consider Everyman in the medieval morality plays, and the names in the Progress. The Old Curiosity Shop is filled with key characters who are only given generic names (the schoolmaster, the bachelor, the single gentleman, the small servant), who refuse to give their names to other characters and to us (the single gentleman), who receive new names from other characters (The Marchioness, Sopphronia Sphynx, Sophy Wackles on the occasion of her marriage) or who have several names (Richard/Dick Swiveller, Kit/Christopher, Sarah/Sally Brass).
And yet, strangely, it’s not exactly clear what the allegory is. Of course there is the usual Dickensian stuff about being good to each other, and there is also the suggestion of a carpe diem idea in the (Hamlet-like) scene with the sexton and his chum. Perhaps the strongest suggestion of a purpose for the allegory is this: There is nothing, no, nothing innocent or good that dies and is forgotten. Let us hold to that faith or none. An infant, a prattling child dying in its cradle will live again in the better thoughts of those who loved it, and play its part, through them, in the redeeming actions of the world. I think that Dickens’s power of clear thought was blurred by his grief at the death of Mary Hogarth, his wife’s sister, who died shortly before the writing of The Old Curiosity Shop. It’s as if his purpose was simply to hold on to Mary’s image and to make it immortal through the image of little Nell. Perhaps he also thought that if people were really moved by the death of little Nell, they would become better people, and that in this way, through Nell, Mary would continue to play her part in the redeeming action of the world. People were moved, in their thousands, and Dickens received many letters from his fans imploring him to undo what he had done.
The death of little Nell is one of the most controversial scenes in Victorian literature, and, strangely enough, it is one of the most powerful scenes in the book, despite Oscar Wilde’s remark that one would have to have a heart of stone not to laugh at it (that’s just Oscar being Oscar; the Naughty Nineties scoffing at the idealism of the Hungry Forties). The scene doesn’t describe the death at all, but focuses on the grandfather, who has become a depersonalised spectre of grief with limbs huddled together, head bowed down, arms crossed upon the breast, and fingers tightly clenched, it rocked to and fro upon its seat without a moment’s pause, accompanying the action with a mournful sound…. When we see Nell she is, shockingly, already dead, and her death is related at third hand, like the murders in Greek tragedy.

The other story is the story of Kit and the plot against him, involving characters such as Sampson Brass, Dick Swiveller and the deeply repulsive Quilp. While Nell and her grandfather wander through unnamed allegorical spaces, Kit’s story takes place firmly in recognisable locations: London Bridge, Bevis Marks and Finchley. It’s in the London scenes, as one would expect, that the writing is as rich and strange as anything in Dickens’s career. London is alive and teeming, and the river in particular has a real presence, as it was to do later in Our Mutual Friend:
The day, in the highest and brightest quarters of the town, was damp, dark, cold, and gloomy. In that low and marshy spot, the fog filled every nook and corner with a thick dense cloud. Every object was obscured at one or two yards distance. The warning lights and fires upon the river were powerless beneath this pall, and but for a raw and piercing chilliness in the air, and now and then the cry of some bewildered boatman as he rested on his oars and tried to make out where he was, the river itself might have been miles away. The mist, though sluggish and slow to move, was of a keenly searching kind. No muffling up in furs and broadcloth kept it out. It seemed to penetrate into the very bones of the shrinking wayfarers and to rack them with cold and pains. Everything was wet and clammy to the touch.
There are the scenes of hilarity and good fellowship that are characteristic of Dickens’s work of this period, but the writing is also taking on gloomier colours. In the death of Quilp especially, the writing takes on the magnificent oppressive darkness of Dickens’s later works:
And there it lay [Quilp’s corpse], alone. The sky was red with flame, and the water that bore it here had been tinged with the sullen light as it flowed along. The place the deserted carcase had left so recently, a living man, was now a blazing ruin. There was something of the glare upon its face. The hair, stirred by the damp breeze, played in a kind of mockery of death – such a mockery as the dead man himself would have reveled in when alive – about its head, and its dress fluttered idly in the night wind.
(Conrad learnt much from Dickens: And this too has been one of the dark places of the earth). This description is marvelously complemented by Phiz’s superb illustration with its obscene phallic suggestiveness.

Notwithstanding the unevenness of the writing over these parallel narratives, the novel is full of great stuff. There are some bizarre images, many of them involving simulacra. Nell and the old man meet with fake people: puppets, dancing dogs and waxworks. Quilp, in his hatred for Kit, installs in his room an old ship’s figurehead which bears a resemblance to Kit, and attacks it viciously with the poker: the huge immobile statue towers over the vicious, repulsive dwarf and bears his attacks with a mute and indifferent gaze. Quilp himself, is also a kind of human simulacra. Like Punch, he pops out unexpectedly from doors and windows and dark passages when he is least expected, and has the awful ability to drink boiling brandy, neat, without blinking, and smoke incessantly all through the night, like a dismounted nightmare.

The novel contains fascinating glimpses of two exotic or marginal types: the Victorian female entrepreneur, and the homosexual.
Mrs Jarley is one of the rare female business people in Victorian fiction. The text tells us approvingly that she has inventive genius. Illiterate, she has all the skills of the modern business person; she is adept at marketing, logistics and managing her staff; she diversifies her products to meet local market needs: These audiences were of a very superior description, including a great many young ladies' boarding-schools, whose favour Mrs Jarley had been at pains to conciliate, by altering the face and costume of Mr Grimaldi as clown to represent Mr Lindley Marray as he appeared when engaged in the composition of his English Grammar ; uses marketing and advertising skills to create demand by employing Mr Smugs to produce copy which is judiciously distibuted around the town; negotiates like a master negotiator; socializes like a business person: What line are you in?; and knows how to utilize the skills of her key employees. She is a truly independent woman (if a bit alcoholic…) and is also one of the most sympathetic characters Nell and Gramps encounter on their pilgrimage.
The other marginal type is the homosexual, rarely and fleetingly glimpsed in Dickens. Sally Brass, like Marian Halcombe in Collins's The Woman in White, is pointedly described as masculine. She relates to the world as a man in the same way as the world relates to her as a man: he had gradually accustomed himself to talk to her like a man ... but Miss Brass looked upon it quite as a matter of course, and has most of her femininity stripped away from her by the narrative. All suggestions that the small servant is the illegitimate child of her and Quilp were carefully expunged by Dickens from the manuscript before publication, probably in an attempt to forestall a scandal by reducing the risk of offending the more ‘sensitive’ (conservative) among his audience with the mention of illegitimacy. However, the result is to place Sally Brass firmly at the lesbian end of the sexual spectrum, at least for this reader. Another situation which sets my critical gaydar pinging, is the priest and his bachelor friend in the unnamed town where Nell and Gramps finally end up. The bachelor, described as an ‘early friend from his youth' (one imagines them as sensitive types at Oxford…), named by the villagers 'the bachelor' perhaps because he was an unmarried, unencumbered gentleman cohabits with his (current?) life partner, and is obsessively interested in interior design and local history. How many other gay couples in Dickens’s time might have buried themselves away in the country to lead this kind of life, possibly tactfully described by the villagers as ‘two gentleman sharing’?

Spurious Quotation #8

Whosoever that believeth and liveth in me is obviously a total moron.
St John the Divine

"The way we live now" Anthony Trollop

A book written by a master craftsman, but a mediocre artist. The plot is well handled, with a large cast of memorable characters. Trollope uses the same tricks as Dickens to help us remember these characters: giving them a tick which is repeated with each new appearance of the character. However, whereas Dickens reserves these ticks for minor characters, Trollope bizarrely uses them for the main characters of the story: Marie Melmotte’s “Cut me to pieces” is irrelevant: we don’t need to be helpd to remember who she is: she is one of the main characters in the book!

Where Trollope fails as an artist is in the sense of pattern, and in the sense of the relationships of the details to the whole. We are treated to pages of dialogue, which, while not wooden exactly, serve no real artistic purpose: they tell us nothing new about the characters, elaborate no theme, enact no philosophy, add no sense of beauty to the book. It is verisimilitude taken too far, and is ultimately, like life itself, rather boring. The book’s length is due to padding, the ending a disaster of misjudged pacing: a whole chapter is given to each of the main characters in which their stories are predictably rounded off with unnecessary length: and then the thing simply stops on the word …himself.
Trollope’s use of letters to tell the story, judged by the critics as a neat device for revealing character, is actually a trick to disguise the fact that Trollope is incapable of both psychological judgment and of describing it in free indirect discourse.
The discourse is totally empty of symbolism, of metaphor, of simile even. Trollope’ s London is strangely empty: the servants faceless, the middle classes and workers absent, the topology of the streets unseen. Such views as the narrator gives us are banal in their ordinariness. Where is the satire? I think I smiled once while reading this book, certainly I didn’t laugh out loud.

It’s as if Trollope was only conscious of one thing while he wrote this book: his daily word count. He has not stood back from it to see the whole, the pattern. He has not been swept away by the power of his own discoursive gift.

No wonder Trollope is the favorite writer of politicians: he lacks imagination.

If you were to take a man of moderate parts and make him Prime Minister out of hand, he might probably do as well as other prime ministers, the greatness of the work elevating the man to its own level.

Spurious Quotation #7

Mistah Kurtz - he me.
Chinua Achebe

Spurious Quotation #6

Of course, the most successful cults are the ones which manage to convince their adherents that they are not in fact cults.
Rudolf Steiner

"Martin Chuzzlewit" Charles Dickens

In the way that Plato’s dialogues each examine a particular virtue, Dickens's novels each revolve around a specific vice. Dombey and Son examines pride, Bleak House examines greed, Barnaby Rudge examines religious fanaticism, Martin Chuzzlewit examines hypocrisy.
The main vehicle for this is of course Mr Pecksniff, who, in spite of the comedy surrounding his scenes, is one of the vilest characters Dickens created. On occasions where he is being most duplicitous, his language reaches for the most sublime (ridiculous) in a marvelous parody of high-flown Carlylese:
“Behold the wonders of the firmament, Mrs Lupin,! How glorious is the scene! When I look up at those shining orbs, I think that each of them is winking to the other to take notice of the vanity of men’s pursuits. My fellow men, you are much mistaken; my wormy relatives, you are much deceived! …Oh do not strive and struggle to enrich yourselves, or to get the better of each other, my friends, but look up there with me.” …“Look up there with me”, repeated Mr. Pecksniff, stretching out his hand, “with me, an humble individual who is also an Insect like yourselves…”
How one longs to punch him in the face! However, Dickens knows that the best reaction to such bullshit is the snigger, and Pecksniff always makes us laugh, especially when he gets drunk at Todgers, one of the most hilarious moments in this most hilarious (and darkest) of novels. The other weapon Dickens uses against him is sarcasm, and the opening chapter of the novel is one extended sarcastic rant against the pretensions of good breeding.

The duplicity of Pecksniff is contrasted against the innocent honesty of Tom Pinch, who is one of Dickens’ most likable characters, and another example of the holy fool who takes his place among Dickens’s gallery of holy fools. The one note of weakness in this novel is the apostrophizing voice the narrator takes on when commenting on the goodness of Tom Pinch: Tom! Tom! The man in all this world most confident in his sagacity and shrewdness; the man in all this world most proud of his distrust of other men, and having the most to show in gold and silver as the gains belonging to his creed, Every man for himself, and God for us all… Dickens seems to be unaware that he is in danger of sounding as ridiculous as Pecksniff in these moments. Perhaps he was not sure that Tom’s actions and behavior alone would do the job for him in getting the reader to love him. The malign influence of Carlyle again…

In Dickens’s world view, a philosopher is a dirty thing (cf this from Oliver Twist: Although Oliver had been brought up by philosophers, he was not theoretically acquainted with the beautiful maxim that self preservation is the first law of nature.
And this from The Old Curiosity Shop: Mr Codlin talked very slowly and ate very greedily, as is not uncommon with philosophers and misanthropes.) Philosophy symbolizes a callous disregard for the reality of human suffering. This was partly due to his distaste for abstract systems in general, and Utilitarian thought in particular, whose social philosophy underpinned the main legal and social framework of his time. It must also surely be partly due to his ignorance of classical and continental philosophy, which more often looks at the problem of how to live a good life and how to define goodness on an individual level, a project that preoccupies Dickens in his own way in this novel and throughout his career.
In a sense this novel is an extended meditation on the Socratic question of what it means to be a good man, with goodness measured in terms of honesty, and evil measured in terms of the disconnect between one’s actions and one’s words. Mr Pecksniff, the narrative voice tells us sarcastically, is a moral man. The characters fall into place along a spectrum of morality, with Pecksniff at the evil end: the arch hypocrite with the biggest gap between words and actions, and Tom Pinch at the other: the man incapable of duplicity. Mark Tapler is also at this end. At the centre of the spectrum is the double figure of Martin Chuzzlewit: the old and the young. Old Martin is duplicitous, but ultimately working for a good end. Young Martin is not duplicitous but very selfish. These characters change, as does the character of Merry Pecksniff. Jonas Chuzzlewit is not on the spectrum as he is the thoroughly evil man and doesn’t disguise the fact. The main characters may each be thought of as embodying a philosophical type: Mark Tapler the Stoic, Pecksniff the Cynic, Old Martin the Machiavellian Pragmatist, Tom Pinch the Virtuous Man, Jonas Chuzzlewit the Vile Man.

It’s fitting, then, that Martin junior takes off to America, the Republic of Bullshit itself. Dickens’s description of America in the novel is ironic to the point of sarcasm, and alarmingly prescient. He loves to make fun of the mad names Americans give themselves: Mr LaFayette Kettle, Mr Jefferson Brick, Mr Hannibal Chollop, (perhaps Condeleeza Rice is really a Dickensian character…) and sends up the disconnect between the discourse of liberty, freedom and independence on the one hand (President Bush: “This war is about peace”…), and on the other the thuggish behavior of a place where the right to carry a gun and bully others with it is guaranteed by the constitution. There’s an awful lot of spitting, a superabundance of military titles, a lot of rather unwashed people and not much civilization. Plus ca change, it would seem….

Susan Sontag on the importance of literature

One of the resources we have for helping us to make sense of our lives, and make choices, and propose and accept standards for ourselves, is our experience of singular authoritative voices, not our own, which make up that great body of work that educates the heart and the feelings and teaches us to be in the world, that embodies and defends the glories of language (that is, expands the basic instrument of consciousness): namely, literature.

Dickens on the difficulty of saying goodbye

Why is it that we can better bear to part in spirit than in body, and while we have the fortitude to act farewell have not the nerve to say it?
On the eve of long voyages or an absence of many years, friends who are tenderly attached will separate with the usual look, the usual pressure of the hand, planning one final interview for the morrow, while each well knows that it is but a poor feint to save the pain of uttering that one word, and that the meeting will never be.Should possibilities be worse to bear than certainties? We do not shun our dying friends; the not having distinctly taken leave of one among them, whom we left in kindness and affection, will often embitter the whole remainder of a life.

Fragment 123

Notes on Dickens 2

Dickens's use of language reflects an exterior view of character. In most of Dickens we are outside the characters looking on and understanding them from their actions and their speech, as described by an omniscient narrator who goes everywhere and who knows everything. Dickens’s stories are usually told in the third person singular, past or present simple. There are a number of significant exceptions to this.

In his first published work the fantastic Sketches by Boz the narrative voice is 1st person plural, the Royal We; Reader and Writer united from the start.

The first three chapters of The Old Curiosity Shop are in the 1st person, but then the narrator - an old man who runs into Nell one dark night on the streets of London - bows out for the convenience of the narrative. It’s as if the naïve writer realizes that a 1st person narrative will limit his perspective, and that using the 3rd person will enable him to float around London. It’s amazing to see Dickens doing this on the hoof, in the third weekly installment of a project.

David Copperfield and Great Expectations are also told in the first person.

David Copperfield is the story of a boy from the middle classes who is plunged into personal poverty. The story is essentially his struggle to put himself back, about his re-entry into the middle classes as a young man (similar to Dickens’s own life story). Six months before he started writing it, the death from TB of his favourite older sister, Fanny, closely followed by the death of her mentally handicapped son, Dickens’s nephew, forced the writer to look in detail at his hitherto perhaps rather too successfully repressed childhood experiences. The 1st person narrative closely describes many of the experiences from Dickens’s own early life, and one has the sense that writing it is dealing with it.

Great Expectations, on the other hand, is the story of a working class boy who is suddenly and inexplicably elevated into the middle classes by inheriting a mysterious fortune from the Australian convict Magwitch. The story is essentially about his struggle to deal with his guilt at his elevation, to find his working class roots and return to himself.
The narrative trajectories of these two novels mirror each other, and they are both consciousness driven novels, which by necessity of their 1st person narratives explore the themes of memory and experience.

The two narratives of Bleak House – one 3rd person present simple, one 1st person past simple are the means by which the novel examines the relationship between the private and the public spheres: interiority but not at the cost of omniscience.

Emir Kusturica on the English –after the censor’s request to remove a scene of a cat mauling a pigeon.

I just don't get it. The pigeon was already dead, we found it in the road. And no other censor has objected. What is the problem with you English? You killed millions of Indians and Africans, and yet you go nuts about the circumstances of the death of a single Serbian pigeon. I am touched you hold the lives of Serbian birds so dear, but you are crazy. I will never understand how your minds work.

Fragment 903

The Wasteland is an act of literary vandalism. In it, Eliot’s answer to his predecessors was to take his influences and to desecrate them, in the same way that graffiti desecrates a fresco. In this lies his originality; it is his revenge on their inescapable influence. And to a certain extent he disguised his rancour with what Durrell called “a cool chloroform pad” of elegance. His obscurity alienates all but the hierophant, and leaves the rest of us murmuring admiration at the smoothness of the surface.

Inadvertent Obscenity #3

There was no resisting this: the two young men turned their faces to the window, and 'went off' like a couple of bottles of ginger beer.

Charles Dickens The Boarding House

"Sketches by Boz" Charles Dickens

George Eliot’s main objection to Dickens, apart from (what she perceived as) his vulgarity and melodrama, was his lack of interiority. In this she is both right and wrong. Dickens’s whole gift is his exteriority. He can sum up in a sentence a whole character that would take Eliot three chapters to describe. However, where she is wrong is in considering that this is a weakness. Eliot surprisingly makes two cardinal critical errors here, not only in judging a work of art, but in judging it in terms other than those provided by itself.

Eliot and Dickens stand at two polar extremes of literature: exteriority and interiority, both of which are based on different conceptions of character. For Eliot, character is the mind communing with itself, its impression of the world and reflections on it. It is the mind of someone raised in the country, in the relative isolation of family members, in the company of books. Locke.

Dickens, on the other hand, has a completely different conception of character. Character is what is revealed in our relations with other people and in our actions. It’s something we observe in others and which others observe in us. It is urban, the individual reacting to the constant stimulation of the other, the mind of someone who has forgotten what it is like to be alone, of someone constantly living in very close proximity to strangers, where privacy is a luxury. Marx.

In the Sketches, Dickens announces himself as this kind of writer; he announces his conception of character by providing sketches of London ‘everyday life and everyday people’, giving us just as much of them as is necessary for us to recognize ourselves. Here are the Lord Mayor and a crony enjoying dinner, for example: The Lord Mayor threw himself back in his chair in a state of frantic delight at his own joke; every vein in Mr. Hobbler’s countenance was swollen with laughter, partly at the Lord Mayor’s facetiousness, but more at his own…

Dickens doesn’t aim for interiority. He doesn’t do it not because he can’t, but because it’s not his thing. He is an observer, a sketcher, a cartoonist. This is not to denigrate his gift, but to recognize it for what it is. It’s a purity of line that expresses everything in one swift movement with utter confidence and economy. It’s not chiaroscuro.

Historical hindsight has made it difficult to appreciate the radical impact of the book. We need an imaginative leap to appreciate the sheer novelty of Dickens’s voice, a voice inextricably linked to the new phenomenon of the megalopolis.
Reading the sketches now we appreciate them for the glimpses of the great Victorian city they afford us, nostalgic, vanished and all but forgotten. For Dickens’s readers, however, this was not nostalgia, but a description of life in the massive metropolis as they knew it: immediate and new. Foreign visitors to London were always overwhelmed by its vastness, by its teeming crowds. The inhabitants of this vast anthill must have also felt the same way from time to time. It was all so new, and growing daily with fresh arrivals from the country flocking in for work. Never before in literature had this urban scene been described. Until now, the urban character had not been visible to himself in the literature of vicarage gardens, unmarried daughters in cottages, rakes and libertines of the aristocracy, castaways and adventurers. Here for the first time was the urban environment as it was experienced: anonymous, teeming with characters, disorientating. Frequently, the life of the street actually invades the text: There is a hackney coach stand under the very window at which we are writing…. …cotton handkerchiefs unlike any, one ever saw before, with the exception of those on the backs of the three young ladies without bonnets who passed us just now.

In the Sketches, ‘Boz’ holds up a mirror to the everyday urban experience and allows the inhabitants of the city to see themselves as they negotiate the spaces and objects of the urban environment.
Here is his advice on how to get into the newfangled cabs:
The getting into a cab is a pretty and graceful process, which when well performed, is essentially melodramatic.(…) one bound and you are on the first step; turn your body lightly round to the right and you are on the second; bend gracefully beneath the reins working round to the left at the same time, and you are in the cab. There is no difficulty in finding a seat, the apron knocks you comfortably into it at once and off you go.Those reins, you see, how they must have puzzled people at first. And now how to get out:
We have studied the subject a great deal and we think the best way is to throw yourself out, and trust to chance for alighting on your feet.
How they must have laughed at the newness of it, at the recognition of themselves.

The newness of this urban voice also includes Dickens’s enthusiastic embracing of new forms of production: the urban mass-produced newspaper and of course the illustrations by Cruikshank. This was a genuinely popular art form that the urban masses hungered for as a novelty at first, and then as an established cultural phenomenon.

I think also early Victorian people experienced the anonymity of the city crowds as a kind of liberation in which new forms of character could be tried out. So often in Dickens there is the feeling that characters are performatory. The gesture, the turn of speech, the idiosyncrasy of dress reveal a conception of character shared by Dickens and his readers: Look at me: I exist in the eyes of others, in the eyes of fleeting strangers. In the country town or village it’s not possible to reinvent oneself as every one knows you. In the new city, however, no-one knows you and new things can be tried out. Dickens is full of characters who are on the make: Guppy, Miss Miggs, Heep, Mr Moddle, Bailey, and they are all intensely performative.

In the Sketches the voice is fresh, jaunty, witty, sympathetic and unmarred as yet by the corrupting influence of Carlyle, who came to exercise such a malign influence over Dickens’s prose towards the middle of his career.

Dickens writing to Forster on the occasion of Forster's brother's death

You have a Brother left. One bound to you by ties as strong as ever Nature forged. By ties never to be broken, weakened, changed in any way...

Fragment 803

Notes on Dickens 1

Dickens was constantly innovative, and consciously pushing his art to the limits, running businesses, editing journals, organizing theatricals and siring a string of children on his exhausted wife, the Dynamo of the Victorian age.

This energy is reflected in his prose which buzzes and fizzes with life. Hazlitt would surely have applied his term ‘gusto’ to Dickens’s prose had he lived long enough. There is always the feeling in reading Dickens that he is not quite in control. In his early work especially, he appears to be a naive writer, carried away by the energy of his voice and imagination, struggling to keep up, running after the horses, quill and notebook at the ready, coat tails flying. His prose is always on the verge.
Dickens lives in the realm of the superlative: the best of times, the worst of times, Mr Boythorn in Bleak House, whose superlatives seemed to go off like blank cannons and hurt nothing, John Westlock lifting Ruth Pinch over an obstruction in the street the lightest, easiest, neatest thing. So much in Dickens is the kindest in the world, the most true nature ever to be beheld, the most virtuous or vilest, and at those moments where he most wants to pack an emotional punch, he reaches for the superlative. At the same time, a superlative denies an alternative: once the best has been reached, where can we go from here? The danger of such an approach is that it can entrench an ideology. On the other hand, Dickens himself seems to be aware of this, as sometimes the writing simply stops, simply gives up, as words become inadequate to describe the intensity of his vision, the pace of his thoughts: which no one can imagine who has not witnessed it, and of which any description would convey a very faint idea. Or this: Why should we attempt to describe that of which no description can convey an adequate idea? Or this: A degree of spirit which is quite indescribable.

His characters are also infected with the same energy and gusto. They often do the unexpected and make you gasp with delighted astonishment. I’m quite sure that Mrs. Gamp was as surprising to her creator as she is to us: The severely ironical character of this reply was strengthened by a very slow nod, and a still slower drawing down of the corners of Mrs. Gamp’s mouth. She added with extreme stateliness of manner, after indulging in a short doze: “ But I’m a keeping of you gentlemen, and time is precious.”
So many of the minor characters in Dickens are of course completely bonkers mad or mentally handicapped, a madness equally matched by the spirited incredulity of the narrator. Paul saw the weak-eyed young man who had that morning given such offence to Mrs. Pipchin, suddenly seize a very large drumstick, and fly at a gong that was hanging up, as if he had gone mad or wanted vengeance. Instead of receiving warning, however, or being instantly taken into custody, the young man left off unchecked, after having made a dreadful noise. Then Cornelia Blimber said dinner would be ready in a quarter of an hour. This is pure Camphill.