Palgrave Advances in Charles Dickens Studies

"I’ve chosen a collection of essays because it gives you lots of different ways into Dickens. It includes some of the best critics who are writing at the moment: the editors, John Bowen and Robert Patten are both excellent. These are some of the best Dickens critics collected in one volume. You also get all these different aspects, like “Psychoanalyzing Dickens” by Carolyn Dever. If you were going to read one critical book, this would be a good one to have. Some critical stuff can weigh you down a bit, but this one is written very accessibly. Each person writes very clearly. They are also excited by Dickens — and that comes across really well. Particularly, for instance, some aspects that had maybe got a bit muted, like the visual that we were talking about earlier. I think Rosemarie Bodenheimer is an absolutely terrific critic of Charles Dickens. Her chapter is, “Dickens and the Writing of a Life.” She talks about the energy of Dickens and uses the letters as a lens to look at the novels. She’s done a whole book on that and she does it quite briefly here, but she writes about him really intelligently. She looks back through past critics. Some of the best ones were actually novelists themselves. George Gissing, the novelist, wrote terribly well about Dickens and so did GK Chesterton. They really get him, and I think she does as well. Because he was quite extraordinary. It was Peter Ackroyd who wrote about “the essential strangeness of the man” and I think a lot of these critics get into that in different ways. He really is a novelist like no other, and, in a way, you need lots of critics to give you different angles on that and, in this book, they do. A lot of people have criticised Dickens, because he can’t do interior, he can’t do psychology. Yes, he is not George Eliot, but he does it from the outside in. So he gives you people’s tics, their way of behaving. We talk about body language quite happily now, but Victorians didn’t. We understand how to read somebody from the outside. That’s a great gift that he has given to us, if you like. Malcolm Andrews talks about that really well. So you can read a character by what they are wearing, how they speak, the little tics of behaviour. Other novelists pay tribute to Dickens for doing that. We’ve had a whole thing of going into people’s heads, George Elio t gave us people’s inside, as did Henry James —at great length—the minute turns of thought. Dickens didn’t do that. Maybe now we can see it again, but of course his length is against him. If you were to give someone an 800-page novel, they would flinch. Yes, the idea of journeying, being episodic. I actually think he had a much tighter hold on the plot than that. Sometimes the plots are a bit ridiculous— these wills that suddenly turn up, somebody’s third grandchild has inherited—but I think he wants to show that there is a plan to the world. Maybe it goes back to religion, but there is a shape and a meaning. Dickens , I suppose, went out of fashion because he says, ‘No, we are all connected. In Bleak House he famously says, ‘What can be the connection between all these people in London?’ And he shows there is a connection, a moral connection. In that book, the connection is partly through disease. We can affect each other that way so we are connected in a very real way. The character at the bottom of society can infect the character at the top of society, and our actions do have consequences. The word ‘picaresque’ suggests something that goes on and on like a soap opera. His books have been compared to soap operas. Which, in a way, is great. They do have that melodramatic aspect, it’s a popular form. But they also have shape and a universe and a meaning. Everything belongs, everything fits together."