In the know

Tension between knowing and not knowing propels Charles Dickens’s fiction. There are characters who have a sound knowledge of the worst of human nature and use this to their advantage. These are the baddies. Murdstone, Fagin, Ralph Nickleby, Sikes and Quilp are good examples. The characters who do not possess the requisite knowledge of the ways of the world are extremely vulnerable to the manipulations and schemes of the first group: Nicholas (father and son) and Kate Nickleby, David Copperfield and Pip as young men, Joe Willet and Mr Wickfield are obvious cases; they have to walk through flames in order to earn the knowledge needed to live a safe and satisfactory life. Some don’t make it. As Newman Noggs writes to Nicholas at the start of his ill-fated journey to Dotheboys Hall: “I know the world. Your father did not, or he would not have done me a kindness when there was no hope of return. You do not, or you would not be bound on such a journey”. Not knowing enough of the world leads to bad scrapes, financial ruin and/or actual death, in the case of Nickleby senior.

In the second group are also the children – Oliver Twist, David Copperfield, little Paul Dombey, Wackford Squeers’s boys – and it is these innocents for whom Dickens demonstrates the greatest compassion in his writing. A third group can be made up of characters who also lack worldly knowledge, but who pretend or falsely believe that they possess it. These are the fools who are used for comedic effect, and they contribute to the vulnerability of the innocent. Mrs Nickleby is a good example, but also Mr Bumble, Lillyvick Kenwigs, Noah Claypole and, of course, the Pickwickians. There is another vulnerable group of characters who are childlike and retain a dangerous innocence: Smike, Barnaby Rudge, Clara Copperfield. And we mustn’t forget the women who have knowledge, but who are trapped by their sex or through having made a critical error, such as Nancy, Florence Dombey, Betsey Trotwood, Estella, Miss Havisham and Rose Maylie.

This attempt to categorize Dickens’s characters probably results in unforgivable oversimplification and is quite a, well, Victorian thing to do. It doesn’t work for all characters. Where, for example, are we to place Simon Tappertit, Edith Granger or Gabriel Varden? Wilkins Micawber, drawn from Dickens’s own father, is closest to H. E. Bates’s Pop Larkin. And what is to be done with the villain Uriah Heep, whom Dickens forces us to feel somehow guilty about, and who, along with Anthony Powell’s Kenneth Widmerpool, has to be one of literature’s most shockingly grotesque characters?

But this tension between knowing and not knowing, or at the very least not knowing enough, is important, as so much of Dickens’s life and work revolved around it. In his fiction and his journalism he aimed to give his readers knowledge of things he believed were worth knowing so that they might look further themselves. He dedicated A Child’s History of England (1851) to his children, “whom I hope it may help, by-and-by, to read with interest larger and better books on the same subject”, and his essays published in All the Year Round under the title “The Uncommercial Traveller”, have something of a paternal tone about them as well.

It all comes back to those world-weary children, Ignorance and Want, hidden under the spirit’s cloak in A Christmas Carol. J. H. Alexander is the editor of The Uncommercial Traveller, the first critical edition of these thirty-seven pieces from All the Year Round, in the new Oxford Edition of Charles Dickens; he explains that All the Year Round, the successor to Household Words, was meant to move away from the political in favour of more fiction. But while Dickens had practical reasons for starting what he often called “The Uncommercial” (largely to do with William Makepeace Thackeray’s popular “Roundabout Papers” in his Cornhill Magazine), it can also be said that Dickens found it impossible not to moralize and do something to combat Ignorance and Want.

“The Great Tasmania’s Cargo” (April 21, 1860) gives a clear indication of Dickens’s purpose. In it he travels to the Liverpool workhouse to witness the state of 140 discharged soldiers recently returned from India. He begins this piece, as he does all of the pieces, with curiosity. “I was curious to note what our discharged soldiers looked like, when they were done with”, he writes, and he quickly shares his horror at the sight of these men, who by all accounts had behaved with “unblemished fidelity and bravery”. Such worthiness was a requirement of Victorian pity:

O the sunken eyes that turned to me as I walked between the rows of beds, or – worse still – that glazedly looked at the white ceiling, and saw nothing and cared for nothing! Here, lay the skeleton of a man, so lightly covered with a thin unwholesome skin, that not a bone in the anatomy was clothed, and I could clasp the arm above the elbow, in my finger and thumb. Here, lay a man with black scurvy eating his legs away, his gums gone, and his teeth all gaunt and bare … The awful thinness of the fallen cheeks, the awful brightness of the deep-set eyes, the lips of lead, the hands of ivory, the recumbent human images lying in the shadow of death with a kind of solemn twilight on them, like the sixty who had died aboard the ship and were lying at the bottom of the sea.

Dickens the traveller is a cynic, feigning surprise at injustices he encounters, placing a hand on the reader’s shoulder and steering him towards another hospital bed and another interview. “I travel for the great house of Human Interest Brothers”, he explains in the introduction to the series, “His General Line of Business” (January 28, 1860). He also sought to push his readers’ buttons until they felt compelled to act, or at least speak out, for the common good.

“I find it very difficult”, he says, “to indicate what a shocking sight I saw in them [the discharged soldiers], without frightening the reader from the perusal of these lives and defeating my object of making it known.” And here’s the key. Dickens’s object in these pieces, as in so much of his writing, was to make things known, through entertainment, of course, but always confronting his readers with uncomfortable truths about any assumed knowledge they may hold dear. A reader should enjoy the caricatures, but also secretly fear finding elements of himself in Mr Bumble or any of the Kenwigs and their company.

Dickens highlights the absurdities inherent in all institutions, and in these pieces, painstakingly analysed by Alexander, he tears them down one by one: empire, “on which the sun never sets and the light of reason never rises” (“The Great Tasmania’s Cargo”); British civilization, or “the public savagery of neglected children in the streets of its capital city” (“On an Amateur Beat”); education, “Take the square of five, multiply it by fifteen, divide it by three, deduct eight from it, add four dozen to it, give me the result in pence, and tell me how many eggs I could get for it at three farthings a piece” (“The Short-Timers”). Victorian ideas on charity and morality are also critiqued: “how often have I heard the unfortunate working man lectured, as if he were a little charity-child, humid as to his nasal development, strictly literal as to his Catechism, and called by Providence to walk all his days in a station of life represented on festive occasions by a mug of warm milk-and-water and a bun!” (“The Boiled Beef of New England”). London fashions are not spared either: “probably there are not more second hand clothes sold in London than in Paris, and yet the mass of the London population have a second-hand look which is not to be detected on the mass of the Parisian population” (“The Boiled Beef of New England”). Even the gulf between sanity and madness is narrowed: “are not the sane and the insane equal at night as the sane lie dreaming? Are not all of us outside this hospital, who dream, more or less in the condition of those inside it, every night of our lives? Are we not nightly persuaded, as they daily are, that we associate preposterously with kings and queens, emperors and empresses, and notabilities of all sorts?” (“Night Walks”).

In “A Plea for Total Abstinence”, Dickens describes a teetotal procession, but shifts the emphasis to the poor overloaded horses on which the company rode. In this tongue-in-cheek piece, the last in the series (Alexander helpfully highlights the significant time lapse between the final pieces and the earliest), Dickens decides to engage in “a little fair trying of Tee-Totalism by its own tests”. The result being that, while many in the parade did not misuse their horses by overloading them, “Tee-Total mathematics demonstrate that the less includes the greater; that the guilty include the innocent, the blind the seeing, the deaf the hearing, the dumb the speaking, the drunken the sober”. His conclusion is to call for “Total Abstinence from Horseflesh through the whole length and breadth of the scale”. If there was a way to play the role of devil’s advocate, Dickens could always find it.

The editors of the two-volume Oxford edition of Nicholas Nickleby – Elizabeth James and Joel J. Brattin with, again, Alexander – want to supply readers with all the available knowledge about thework. And indeed these excellent scholarly editions offer all the information one could possibly want, from maps to carefully analysed proof corrections, with illustrations, thought-provoking essays and comprehensive explanatory notes. These volumes are now the definitive texts of these works, taking account of previous editions such as The Uncommercial Traveller edited by Daniel Tyler (2015) and Paul Schlicke’s edition of Nicholas Nickleby (1990) – both Oxford World’s Classics editions – and Michael Slater’s Penguin edition of Nicholas Nickleby (1978). The accompanying material for the Oxford Nicholas Nickleby is contained in a separate volume, which makes for cumbersome railway reading, as the novel and appendix (in the first volume) come to a hefty 857 pages. It is worth it, however, to have access to the depth of information about this novel and the excellent glossary, from which, as discussed earlier this year in the TLS (May 3, 2024), there is much fun to be had in both editions. Missing out on the word Zooks (“an exclamation of surprise”) would be a great shame.

For Dickens knowledge mattered a great deal. And combating Ignorance and his sister Want was seen as fundamental to retaining our humanity. His most impassioned writing was reserved for describing the effects of these two sins on children. In A Christmas Carol they are described as “Yellow, meagre, ragged, scowling, wolfish; but prostrate, too, in their humility. Where graceful youth should have filled their features out, and touched them with its freshest tints, a stale and shrivelled hand, like that of age, had pinched, and twisted them, and pulled them into shreds”. In Nicholas Nickleby (first published 1838–9), the inmates at Dotheboys Hall are described similarly:

Pale and haggard faces, lank and bony figures, children with the countenances of old men, deformities with irons upon their limbs, boys of stunted growth, and others whose long meagre legs would hardly bear their stooping bodies, all crowded on the view together; there were the bleared eye, the hare-lip, the crooked foot, and every ugliness or distortion that told of unnatural aversion conceived by parents for their offspring, or of young lives which, from the earliest dawn of infancy, had been one horrible endurance of cruelty and neglect. There were little faces which should have been handsome, darkened with the scowl of sullen dogged suffering; there was childhood with the light of its eye quenched, its beauty gone, and its helplessness alone remaining; there were vicious-faced boys brooding, with leaden eyes, like malefactors in a jail; and there were young creatures on whom the sins of their frail parents had descended, weeping even for the mercenary nurses they had known, and lonesome even in their loneliness.

This is Dickens at his best. Some might want to call it a typical Dickensian pity party – a world in which Tiny Tims tug at our heartstrings while we drink from the punch bowl of class-conscious guilt. But what he absolutely refused to do was to let his readers get away with being mindlessly naive or unaware of hard truths. And the destruction of childhood’s precious innocence, “the light of its eye quenched”, is the crime Dickens can be said to have railed against the most. His own childhood was blighted by his abandonment at the age of twelve, when he was taken out of school and sent to work in Warren’s Blacking Factory. Like the investigative journalist he was, the adult Dickens can be seen wandering along “the streets of a city where every stone seemed to call to me, as I walked along, ‘Turn this way, man, and see what waits to be done!’”. Called to action by what he sees and feels, Dickens asks us to do the same. As he explains in “A Small Star in the East”, “Any one who will reverse that route, may retrace my steps”.

The problem with these critical editions is the price. At £190 for each, they are out of reach for most academics and postgraduates, who are the target readership. The expectation must be that university libraries will pay these prices, and this comes with all sorts of access implications (although the ebook is for sale at £102.91). The other title published in this series, Sketches by Boz (2020) is currently on the OUP website for £222.50. These new Oxford editions are the successors to the Clarendon Dickens, which began publishing critical editions in the 1960s. The 1993 Clarendon edition of Great Expectations is currently on the website for £385, though second-hand copies can be found. The scholarship in these editions is without fault, but the cost should make us grateful for the Broadview Press critical editions of some of Dickens’s novels, which, though not as extensive as the OUP editions, are still authoritative, clearly informative and (this is no small thing) affordably priced.

Ana Alicia Garza writes about the Victorians and Dickens for The Year’s Work in English Studies

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