A Free Intelligence Contending Against Smelly Little Orthodoxies
Orwell on Dickens... and on Orwell
There is always something intriguing in seeing one literary great comment on another. The uncertainty about what to expect—humble admiration and respectful acknowledgement of a debt? a no-holds-barred, bare-knuckle prize fight?—provokes curiosity, anticipation, even a kind of gossipy titillation (“did you hear what he said about her?”).
It was with this kind of anticipation that I recently approached George Orwell’s long essay on “Charles Dickens.” Such a piece presents challenges if one is less well-read than its author and thus ill-equipped to assess his interpretations and judgements. This was certainly my situation in this case; I’ve read various works by Dickens over the years, but by no means all of them (no Pickwick, no Nicholas Nickleby, David Copperfield only in an abridged version, even—an embarrassing confession—no Tale of Two Cities). And some of what I have read was many years ago. So when Orwell rattles off comments on a string of Dickensian characters, with their familiar-unfamiliar, classically Dickensian names, I more or less have to take his word for it.
Another challenge is even more interesting: when we read an essay like Orwell’s on Dickens, who is the real object of our attention? Orwell or Dickens? The answer, of course, is both, but it is not always easy to know, at any given moment, about whom we are learning. When Orwell issues a judgement on Dickens, does it tell us more about Dickens or about Orwell? The challenge is all the greater in the case of an author like Orwell, who manages to be both deeply opinionated and also firmly committed to offering a fair assessment of his subject.
“Charles Dickens” raises these questions in an acute way. The first thing to say about it is that it is a superb essay. Learned, judgemental, self-assured, occasionally brilliant—Orwell manages to convey his love of Dickens’s novels at the same time that he criticizes his political vision. He embeds his own social criticism within an interpretation of Dickens. The essay displays a dual tendency that is very characteristic of Orwell but hard to describe (and even harder to imitate): on the one hand, a remarkable confidence in his own pronouncements about which way the world is tending; on the other, a willingness to second-guess himself when intellectual honesty requires it.
Orwell opens his essay by puzzling over a seeming oddity of Dickens’s reputation. Dickens is a reformer, a social critic, a defender of the underdog and oppressed—he “attacked English institutions with a ferocity that has never since been approached.” Yet he did so without ever, it seems, really giving offense or making his middle-class readers feel that their position in society was genuinely threatened. Hence his immense and continued popularity: “In its attitude towards Dickens the English public has always been a little like the elephant which feels a blow with a walking-stick as a delightful tickling.”
Orwell thus portrays Dickens as an ineffectual social critic, one who does not really have any understanding of the political and economic transformations that would be necessary in order to implement the reforms he appears to desire. He is not a “proletarian” writer, nor in any real sense a “revolutionary” writer. Orwell, of course, wishes that he were, and he describes Dicken’s political obtuseness with a kind of bemused exasperation. If only Dickens had possessed Orwell’s own insight into the shortcomings of British capitalism!:
[Dickens] attacks the law, parliamentary government, the educational system and so forth, without ever clearly suggesting what he would put in their places. Of course it is not necessarily the business of a novelist, or a satirist, to make constructive suggestions, but the point is that Dickens’s attitude is at bottom not even destructive. There is no clear sign that he wants the existing order to be overthrown, or that he believes it would make any difference if it were overthrown…. It would be difficult to point anywhere in his books to a passage suggesting that the economic system is wrong as a system.
Here is one of those points where we sense that the essay is as much about Orwell as it is about Dickens. For Orwell, of course, is certain that the economic system is wrong as a system. Only on that assumption is the flaw he detects in Dickens truly a flaw.
From Orwell’s perspective, Dickens’s criticisms of English society are not properly political or economic criticisms at all; they are, rather, mere “moral” criticisms. “The truth is that Dickens’s criticism of society is almost exclusively moral…. [I]n reality his target is not so much society as ‘human nature’.” And if fundamental political transformation, revolutionary transformation, is necessary, then “exclusively moral” criticism is inadequate. (The scare quotes that Orwell puts around “human nature,” as if it were not really a thing, are telling.) As a consequence, the great Dickens might appear simply irrelevant to any practically constructive (or, as we have seen, even practically destructive!) consideration of social problems. “His whole ‘message’ is one that at first glance looks like an enormous platitude: If men would behave decently the world would be decent.”
That this is not an entirely unjustified observation is clear if we think of what is surely Dicken’s best-known novel, the one practically everyone has read, heard, or seen at least once: A Christmas Carol. It is set against the backdrop of urban poverty. Scrooge’s own clerk Bob Cratchit can hardly support his family; for those even worse off, there are Scrooge’s cherished prisons and workhouses. It would be nice, of course (thinks the reader), if the poor could escape these institutions. But the only real alternative appears to be charity, and the obstacle to improvement is the miserliness of nasty old Scrooge. Until the end of the book, when suddenly the problem appears solved because… Scrooge has a change of heart. If only men would behave decently, the world would be decent.
Orwell extends his critique by asking what Dickens’s ideal appears to be. It is comfortably middle-class, utterly bourgois idyll: relative prosperity, a good meal, a warm fire, freedom from harsh or servile labor, a large and affectionate family, familiar surroundings, secure traditions. It is, in particular, a private, domestic idyll. Here is his description—Orwell does this sort of thing very well:
The ideal to be striven after, then, appears to be something like this: a hundred thousand pounds, a quaint old house with plenty of ivy on it, a sweetly womanly wife, a horde of children, and no work. Everything is safe, soft, peaceful and, above all, domestic. In the moss-grown churchyard down the road are the graves of the loved ones who passed away before the happy ending happened. The servants are comic and feudal, the children prattle round your feet, the old friends sit at your fireside, talking of past days, there is the endless succession of enormous meals, the cold punch and sherry negus, the feather beds and warming-pans, the Christmas parties with charades and blind man’s buff; but nothing ever happens, except the yearly childbirth.
It is impossible to read that and not think: yes, Orwell is on to something. That is Dickens. The shaft hits home.
But then comes the comment that makes one realize, again, that all of this is as much about Orwell as about Dickens: “No modern man could combine such purposelessness with so much vitality.” It’s a great line, and not quite wrong. But Orwell is awfully confident that he knows what “modern man” is and is not like. And also that we will read Dickens against the same backdrop of assumptions about this as he does.
I myself don’t, as it happens. I think that the “merely moral” critique is both fundamental and true. But the remarkable thing is that Orwell too is willing to concede its force and at least partial validity, despite his commitment to revolutionary socialism. It is typical of Orwell, and a mark of his intellectual honesty, that he is constantly catching himself, not backtracking exactly—he doesn’t retract his commitments—but interrogating himself, asking what there is to be said on the other side of things. Dickens, he affirms, is no mere “cheer-up writer” or “reactionary humbug.” To be sure,
a ‘change of heart’ is in fact the alibi of people who do not wish to endanger the status quo. But Dickens is not a humbug, except in minor matters, and the strongest single impression one carries away from his books is that of a hatred of tyranny. I said earlier that Dickens is not in the accepted sense a revolutionary writer. But it is not at all certain that a merely moral criticism of society may not be just as ‘revolutionary’—and revolutionary, after all, means turning things upside down—as the politico-economic criticism which is fashionable at this moment.
Fashionable, of course, among people like Orwell. In other words, he’s saying: it’s just possible—not likely, but at least possible—that I might be wrong.
Indeed, the essay’s final page praises Dickens and suggests that at a deep level Orwell even feels a kind of spiritual kinship with him. “All through the Christian ages, and especially since the French Revolution,” he writes, “the western world has been haunted by the idea of freedom and equality; it is only an idea, but it has penetrated to all ranks of society.” In spite of the mounting injustice all around us, Orwell says, we still believe in “the idea of human brotherhood.” And Dickens is among that idea’s most powerful spokesmen.
Whenever he reads a “strongly individual” author, writes Orwell, he always pictures a face behind the words. In Dickens’s case, the face “is laughing, with a touch of anger in his laughter, but no triumph, no malignity.” And then comes the critical gesture of spiritual kinship, in a long final sentence that again makes us ask whether Orwell is writing about Dickens or about himself:
It is the face of a man who is always fighting against something, but who fights in the open and is not frightened, the face of a man who is generously angry—in other words, of a nineteenth-century liberal, a free intelligence, a type hated with equal hatred by all the smelly little orthodoxies which are now contending for our souls.
A generously angry, free intelligence—that is not simply how Orwell sees Dickens, it is also how he sees himself, or at least how he hopes to be seen. It is the face he hopes we readers will see behind his own words when we picture their author. And it reveals why Orwell remains so valuable today. Our political debates contain plenty of anger, but rarely anger combined with generosity. And we have our share of smelly little orthodoxies. But the nineteenth-century liberal’s free intelligence—that is in all too short supply.
Thanks for reading, and I’ll see you next time for another installment From My Bookshelf.
Excellent take on a fascinating essay. BTW, Orwell was in the habit of trying to figure out and visualize the "ideal" writers had in mind when he was analyzing them - see for instance his essays on George Gissing or WB Yeats, or "Lear, Tolstoy and the Fool." Sometimes he seems closer to the mark than others, but it's an interesting approach.
Fascinating essay! I had no idea Orwell wrote about Dickins.