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Charles Dicken’s Inner Child 21

Charles Dickens’s Inner written at the same time Dickens was writing the to the next in the 1840s. Admittedly, he had a
last ten parts of Pickwick. Each section of Oliver qualified beef with those Yankee publishers who
Child Twist ran to about eight thousand words, and wouldn’t part with royalties, but this hardly

each section of Pickwick ran to about that or a licences what he wrote in private to his friend
bit more, so Dickens was writing ninety pages a the actor William Macready about America’s
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month of these novels, while also working on being “a low, coarse and mean nation” that was
other essays, articles, speeches, and plays. “driven by a herd of rascals Pah! I never knew
Charming, is it not—seductive even— Evidence is that he would write the dark, ironic what it was to feel disgust and contempt, ’till I
the manner in which that somewhat chapters of Oliver Twist first, then the light, travelled in America.” The Dickens mean streak
overpunctuated Victorian sentence suddenly comic chapters of Pickwick. is quite something when you strike it.
gives way and yields a deposit of “freshness, and So it’s all right to confuse Podsnap and This renders it all the more impressive
gentleness, and capacity of being pleased.” It is Pecksniff, or to ask whether the incident of the when he tries to make restitution. For instance,
all there to emphasize the one central and polar mutton chops in the fireplace is at Mrs. he was obviously very impressed when a
and critical point that Dickens wishes to enjoin Todgers’s establishment or Mrs. Jellyby’s, and prominent Jewish lady, Mrs. Eliza Davis, wrote
on us all: whatever you do—hang on to your whether the missing baby belongs to either or him an anguished letter after the 1838
childhood! He was true to this in his fashion, both of them, or to Mrs. Gamp—a character publication of Oliver Twist. She was obviously
both in ways that delight me and in ways that do over whom Dickens quite lost control. The same terribly upset about the character of Fagin and
not. He loved the idea of a birthday celebration, goes for the settings: the Circumlocution Office was not even quite willing to concede that some
being lavish about it, reminding people that they and the High Court of Chancery—indeed the Jews had been involved in the stolen-goods
were once unborn and are now launched. This is whole vast apparatus of the Jarndyce-and- racket. At any rate, Dickens went into the matter
bighearted, and we might all do a bit more of it. Jarndyce lawsuit—are all part of the same and convinced himself that he’d been part of an
It would help me to forgive, perhaps just a little, narrative. Cut into it at any point and you have injustice. He thereupon did three things: He
the man who helped generate the Hallmark taken a simultaneous tranche out of Sydney softened the description of Fagin in later
birthday industry and who, with some of his less Carton and the “infant phenomenon.” That versions of the book. When he himself took part
imposing and more moistly sentimental prose Dickens should have had the nerve to call in public “readings” from the story, he
scenes in A Christmas Carol, took the Greatest himself, simply, “the Inimitable” may seem downplayed the “Jewish” characteristics of the
Birthday Ever Told and helped make it into the conceited. All right then, so it was. villain. And he then created a whole new
near Ramadan of protracted obligatory We can’t hope to “read” all of Dickens character to order. In Our Mutual Friend, we
celebration now darkening our Decembers. by the light of this single candle of access to encounter a Jewish moneylender named Mr.
But imagine the power that Dickens had. boyhood. He showed his biographer John Riah, who is friendly and helpful to Lizzie
By a few brilliant strokes of the pen, he revived Forster a section from the autobiography he Hexam and Jenny Wren. I admit that I find this
and restored a popular festival and made it into never completed that said quite a lot about his personage almost too altruistic to be true, but it
a sort of social solidarity: a common defense apprenticeship to the grime and shame of the says something for Dickens, surely, that he
against the Gradgrinds and the Bounderbys and blacking factory so that Forster could write would take someone who had the same
the men who had been responsible for the about “the attraction of repulsion” as the spring occupation as the infamous Shylock, but none of
misery of the Hungry Forties. For the first time, of David Copperfield, and indeed of everything Shylock’s vices, and insert him at the heart of
the downtrodden English people were able to he wrote. This leaves a nice little area of business, at a time when vulgar prejudice was
see a celebrity, a man of wealth and fame, who darkness in which we can speculate about the easy to stir up. The story isn’t as well known as
was on their side. We have verbatim reports— motives of the lad as he maneuvers for his it ought to be.
sometimes in letters from the author himself—of liberty. On the other hand, we don’t have so The next instance of the victory of the
the speeches he made to enthusiastic crowds in much guidance on which to rely when it comes large spirit comes from his second visit to the
halls across the nation, just as we have the to the pallid, worried, wraithlike little girl who United States, in 1867. Dickens did his very best
author’s cue cards for the electrifying evenings slips disturbingly through so much of Dickens’s to clean up after himself, once again accepting
in 1869 when he staged the murder of Nancy by fiction, taking here the shape of Little Dorrit, lavish hospitality, but this time not taking
Bill Sikes, so it’s clear that Dickens had the sort and of Florence Dombey with her brother, and revenge for it in a nasty, boring novel named
of demagogic power that could have been then the infant Agnes and—above all—Little Martin Chuzzlewit or a cruel and hastily written
dangerous in other hands. It’s also quite clear Nell. It seems impossible that no such rapidly travelogue named “American Notes” (For
that he can’t have modeled a villain like Sikes, evaporating diminutive female haunted General Circulation), in which the not-too-
or a heroine like Nell, on his own character. No, Dickens’s own life at some stage. Possibly he clever pun suggests that American currency is
he was drawing on much wider and deeper simply and shrewdly “knew” that Victorian guilt bankrupt. Having successfully miscalculated the
sources of potency. The main one was the sheer about the endangerment of such creatures was a exchange rate, Dickens publicly offered to
stubborn existence of so many people whom the continuous “draw” (“Is Nell dead?” they say the include a speech of praise for the U.S.A. in
system had disregarded. Begin thinking about it New York crowds cried out as the dreaded reprints of his two books about the country—
and you start to whisper a list to yourself: the installment of The Old Curiosity Shop was and actually kept the promise even after the wild
pathetic Jo, the crossing sweeper; Smike; Mr. freighted to the waiting wharf), but we have to applause had died away and he had gone back
Micawber; Amy Dorrit; Mr. Dick—all of them draw our own conclusions from scanty home to England. Possibly he would not be an
with pain to feel and a life to lead, and many of evidence. American hero if he had not performed this now
them kept going (like poor Dick Swiveller) only For instance, and from a deep boiling forgotten act. But then, the “attraction-
by a certain unique sense of humor and the layer of anxiety and rage that goes well beyond repulsion” principle, of which he spoke so
absurd. Dickens was able to mine this huge anything Dostoyevsky might or might not have readily, seems to have meant that he could
resource of London life, becoming its conductor been told about, we have the Dickens who wrote sometimes let himself be “claimed” by those—
and chronicler like nobody since Shakespeare to his best female friend, Angela Burdett-Coutts, from his neglected children to the mobs that he
himself, and always remembering, as he noted in in 1857, telling her of his yearnings to so feared—who loved him in spite of himself.[]
the last stages of The Old Curiosity Shop, to “exterminate” the Indian rebels against British
“keep the child in view.” rule. We have the Dickens who joined his
And here’s my birthday or anniversary friends Thomas Carlyle and Ruskin against
pres ent to you. You can forget that sense of guilt Darwin, T. H. Huxley, J. S. Mill, and the other
you have. The one about being not quite sure Victorian humanitarians, to support Governor
which character is from which book. None of us Eyre of Jamaica in his war of torture and
really knows, and there is no shame in it. execution and reprisal against the rebels of that
Probably Dickens himself wasn’t certain much country. We have—this is in some ways the
of the time. As Jane Smiley notices in Charles most depressing of all—Dickens’s surreptitious
Dickens: hatred for Americans, even as he was making his
The first ten parts of Oliver Twist were way from one scene of their immense hospitality