Critical Insights: Dickens, Charles

The Paris Review Perspective

by Elizabeth Gumport

In his biography of Charles Dickens, G. K. Chesterton called the author “a great event in English history.” Images attach themselves to events: the French Revolution is the guillotine; George Washington is a cherry tree. Dickens is an uneaten wedding cake, tablefuls of chanting orphans, Scrooge in his nightcap. The English-speaking world is so steeped in Dickens that anybody who does not claim to be on intimate terms with Dickens counts him, at least, as an acquaintance.

The reality, however, is nothing like the event. One expects a diorama but finds moving parts instead. To read Dickens is to encounter, as Chesterton put it, “the first of all democratic doctrines, that all men are interesting.” His small men loom large and his dull men cannot help but entertain, but above all they are men, round and whole. “A wonderful fact to reflect upon,” Dickens writes in A Tale of Two Cities, “that every human creature is constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every other.” Wonder is the fundamentally Dickensian attitude, the source of the democratic generosity observed by Chesterton. In Dickens’s respect for the mystery of individuality, and in the great array of individuals his novels contain, one finds a kind of moral imperative. We cannot know others, Dickens suggests, but we can empathize, and through empathy we know them to be like ourselves, capable of pain and therefore deserving protection from it. If death is, as Dickens continues, “the inexorable consolidation and perpetuation of the secret that was always in that individuality,” so is fiction, for in honoring the unknowable wholeness of the minds of others, Dickens makes them a little less unknown.

Reading Dickens, one is convinced: the world looks just like he says it looks. George Orwell, who rightly stated that nobody wrote so well about childhood as Dickens, confessed that when he first read David Copperfield he believed its early chapters to have been written by a child, so accurately did they evoke the sensitivity and terror of youth. For Dickens, whose own early years were unhappy ones, childhood imprisons children. Whether his subject is, as in Hard Times, the harassed students of Coketown who are instructed “Go and be somethingological already,” or the likes of Our Mutual Friend’s Georgiana Podsnap, cosseted into hysteria by the unceasing inanity of her parents, Dickens captures the helplessness of childhood, and the child’s frightening discovery that his destiny is controlled by the whims of distracted, and often lunatic, adults.

Unable to act, children remain free to think. Dispatched to Pumblechook’s shop, Great Expectations’ Pip discovers “a singular affinity between seeds and corduroys. Mr. Pumblechook wore corduroys, and so did his shopman; and somehow, there was a general air and flavor about the corduroys, so much in the nature of seeds, and a general air and flavor about the seeds, so much in the nature of corduroys, that I hardly knew which was which.” These associations seem arbitrary at first; in the child’s contained world, each thing relates to the next simply by virtue of proximity.

Yet Pip is correct: there is a connection between seeds and corduroys, at least in the dream logic of childhood. Children, as powerless as we all are in nightmares, must build a private system to explain the inexplicable images that swoop down upon them. Just as one enters a dark room and intuits the presence of another person without being able to see him, one reads Dickens and perceives, in flashes, the happy, hidden unity of the world.

This fullness of vision is why Dickens’s writing transcends realism. “His art is like life,” Chesterton wrote, “because, like life, it cares for nothing outside itself, and goes on its way rejoicing.…Art indeed copies life in not copying life, for life copies nothing. Dickens’s art is like life because, like life, it is irresponsible, because, like life, it is incredible.” His novels are not representations of the world but worlds unto themselves.

When David Copperfield —a mostly autobiographical portrait of Dickens himself, the differences between author and character as subtle as the reversal of the first letters in their first and last names —reads as a child, he imagines the Murdstones as the villains in his stories and he as their heroes; fiction and fact, entwined so early, can never be untangled. Recalling his youth, Copperfield pictures himself in bed on a summer evening, “reading as if for life.” Reading is for life, Dickens suggests, for words and stories give shape to our minds. More than describe us to ourselves, they make us who we are. Dickens does not simply depict the world in words: his words invent the world.

Source

Copyright © 2011 by Elizabeth Gumport.

Works Cited

1 

Chesterton, G. K. The Collected Works of G. K. Chesterton. Vol. 15, Chesterton on Dickens. Fort Collins, CO: Ignatius Press, 1990.

2 

Orwell, George. Dickens, Dali, and Others. New York: Mariner Books, 1970.

Citation Types

Type
Format
MLA 9th
Gumport, Elizabeth. "The Paris Review Perspective." Critical Insights: Dickens, Charles, edited by Eugene Goodheart, Salem Press, 2010. Salem Online, online.salempress.com/articleDetails.do?articleName=CIDickens_710251003.
APA 7th
Gumport, E. (2010). The Paris Review Perspective. In E. Goodheart (Ed.), Critical Insights: Dickens, Charles. Salem Press. online.salempress.com.
CMOS 17th
Gumport, Elizabeth. "The Paris Review Perspective." Edited by Eugene Goodheart. Critical Insights: Dickens, Charles. Hackensack: Salem Press, 2010. Accessed September 15, 2025. online.salempress.com.