In dealing with
fiction as such, I shall have occasion to say wherein Dickens is weaker
and stronger than that England of the eighteenth century: here it is
sufficient to say that he represents the return of Cobbett in this vital
sense; that he is proud of being the ordinary man. No one can understand
the thousand caricatures by Dickens who does not understand that he is
comparing them all with his own common sense. Dickens, in the bulk,
liked the things that Cobbett had liked; what is perhaps more to the
point, he hated the things that Cobbett had hated; the Tudors, the
lawyers, the leisurely oppression of the poor. Cobbett's fine fighting
journalism had been what is nowadays called "personal," that is, it
supposed human beings to be human. But Cobbett was also personal in the
less satisfactory sense; he could only multiply monsters who were
exaggerations of his enemies or exaggerations of himself. Dickens was
personal in a more godlike sense; he could multiply persons. He could
create all the farce and tragedy of his age over again, with creatures
unborn to sin and creatures unborn to suffer.
Pages:
56
57
58
59
60
61
62
63
64
65
66
67
68
69
70
71
72
73
74
75
76
77
78
79
80