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From International Socialism (1st series), No.64, Mid-November 1973, pp.??.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
A Reader’s Guide to Charles Dickens
Philip Hobsbaum
Thames and Hudson, £1.
‘IT IS REMARKABLE with how little notice, good, bad or indifferent, a man may live and die in London,’ wrote Dickens in 1836 as a very young man. This remained one of the guiding Dickensian themes, one of the leading ideas which holds together some of the most profound, beautiful and powerful writing in our language.
Dickens early realised that the tendency of modern life was to alienate human beings, to make us lonely, isolated, anonymous: to make us feel without identity or purpose in the crowded, pushing, busy industrial-commercial complex we have to ‘live’ in. It runs right through his work: Little Dorrit was originally to have been called Nobody’s Fault.
‘The story of nobody,’ he wrote, ‘is the story of the rank and file of the earth. They bear their share of the battle ... they fall; they leave no name but in the mass ...’
Dickens created and exploited the powerful image of the child figure, the symbol of man lost in a society totally indifferent to him.
In the 100 years since his death in 1870, Dickens’ reputation has gone up and down, or rather down and then up: at one time undisputedly the greatest novelist writing (’there has been nothing like it since Shakespeare’ wrote the formidable Lord Jeffrey of The Old Curiosity Shop) but within 30 years we find the young Henry James asserting that Dickens had been forcing himself for years, Bleak House and Little Dorrit showed the strain, but Our Mutual Friend was ‘dug out as with a spade and pickaxe.’ Despite Middleton Murry’s prediction in the 1920s that Dickens was returning to favour, his reputation sunk to an all time low between the wars.
T.A. Jackson (Charles Dickens – The Progress of a Radical, 1937) and Edmund Wilson (Dickens – The Two Scrooges, 1939) attempted to show Dickens’ work was to be taken seriously but they seemed voices crying in the wilderness. It was not really until the centenary in 1970 that it was quite respectable to acknowledge Dickens, and allow him to rub shoulders with Jane Austen, George Eliot, Henry James, Joseph Conrad and D.H. Lawrence.
This new book by Philip Hobsbaum is very welcome as it shows why Dickens deserved the immense reputation he is just beginning to get. It shows him as the great poet and mythologist of industrial-commercial society, a thinker and observer who predates both Marx and Max Weber.
Some of the best of recent work on Dickens has tended to deal in limited specialist areas (Dickens and education/crime/law etc.) but the great merit of this new book is that in an incredibly short space it unites both the expertise of the historian and the skill of the critic. Here we have analytic discussion of Dickens’ novels and stories with an examination of his symbolism, political and social ideas and the conditions in which he wrote and published.
Philip Hobsbaum, without the special pleading of Edmund Wilson or T.A. Jackson, shows that one great theme unites Dickens’ work, the sense of the individual’s struggle to remain human and alive in the midst of an overwhelming society – complex, oppressive, estranging – which threatens to isolate and dehumanise him. This book, is indispensable for anyone who wishes to read our greatest novelist properly. It is priced within the reach of us workers. Boz would have liked that.
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Last updated on 13.2.2008