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18th October 1983 Dickens and Shakespeare: stooping to examine a pebble A week ago I picked up The Old Curiosity Shop intending to browse in it for half an hour; I finished the last chapter half an hour ago. Like stepping into a labyrinth, I had to work my way right through it to find my way out again, and now that I’m out of it, I have to think back over all the paths down which it led me. Extraordinary the polarization of good and evil in the tale. “In the Destroyer’s steps there spring up bright creations that defy his power, and his dark path becomes a way of light to Heaven.” That, in essence, is the moral of the story, drummed home over the last chapters by the respective deaths and burials of Nell and Quilp. The final moral, if only one could believe it – and if only one could turn a blind eye to the twaddle that Dickens lets flow from his pen in his attempt to persuade his readers to the same belief. But they are already converts of course, which makes the horribleness of Nell’s beautiful death all the more horrible. But we all know the good women of Dickens’ novels are sugar-plum angels and the bad men vaudeville villains, we expect that. We also expect his plots to be massive, sprawling and labyrinthine, held together by threads, skeins, nets of coincidence whose obtrusive presence would tax the patience of the most credulous reader. We anticipate all this and wipe it off the slate in advance. The morals of the time, the economics of serial writing etc. etc. What is interesting in Dickens is not the grand design and not the general moral but the particular observation and the concentrated meditation. Dickens is the master of the paragraph. What Lord Bobby said to the Marquess of Mizzler, for instance, is completely unimportant yet utterly fascinating – and that is how Dickens presents it. It’s as if this little detail were a pebble that one lights upon on one’s way through the labyrinth. It’s only a pebble of no particular importance, not part of the structure of the labyrinth, just there along with many other pebbles – but once one has stooped to pick it up and examine it, one finds that it is utterly remarkable and quite fascinating, and the whole of the labyrinth, every corridor, is strewn with these pebbles, individual and in clusters, with here and there a genuine boulder blocking one’s way so that, try as one might, one cannot even walk down the corridors in a straight line, still less cut through the entire structure so as to reach one’s known destination more quickly.Dickens is like Shakespeare in this. One of Shakespeare’s most notable characteristics is his habit of stopping suddenly in mid-track wherever the fancy takes him to pick up a pebble and turn it in his hand. All his characters do it, from kings to fools to common sentries standing guard. There is something extraordinarily free about this because the breaking off of the advancing action does not happen in the face of conventions (whatever later critics were to say): it just happens. There is something untrammelled about Shakespeare – and about Dickens too, despite the latter’s leaping headlong into the straitjacket of conventional morality whenever he sees a chance for a bit of moralizing. One reads Dickens for the freedom with which he writes about everything that hasn’t strictly to do with the problem of good and evil. Dick Swiveller’s delirium, for instance, or Kit’s family at the play, or the landlord’s stew at the Jolly Sandboys. Interesting the way Little Nell and Barbara are depicted in the illustrations. I have an edition with 75 illustrations by Cattermole and Phiz, and the quality of the illustrations varies enormously, as do the features of the main characters as they appear in the different illustrations. The tendency however is quite clear. Little Nell is depicted with a high forehead, rounded cheek and weak chin. In certain pictures she looks pretty, though always innocently so; in others, these features in combination make her look monstrous. By contrast, Barbara, who appears naturally more rarely, is a good deal prettier and is even allowed a well-turned foot. See, for instance, ‘Farewell to the Travellers’ and ‘At Rest’ for the contrast at its most striking. It is as if all suspicion of sexuality had completely to be ironed out of Nell. Nell kisses her grandfather, whilst Barbara is allowed to kiss Kit.
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