Boz Will Be Boz

By Christopher Porterfield

THE WORLD OF CHARLES DICKENS by Angus Wilson. 302 pages. Viking Press. $12.95.

When Fyodor Dostoevsky was sentenced to four years in a Siberian labor camp, he requested only one kind of reading matter: books by Dickens. In mid-19th century New York, ships arriving with the latest installment of Dickens' The Old Curiosity Shop were met by anxious cries from the dock: "Is Little Nell dead?"

For a writer, such fame was unprecedented then, and has been unimaginable since. Not just fame, either, but ardor and devotion. In The World of Charles Dickens, English Novelist Angus Wilson suggests that Dickens, publishing most of his works in serial form, achieved the same intimate, regular contact with his audience as Scheherazade in his childhood favorite, The Arabian Nights. Dickens kept telling another tale. Jokes and fantasies, social and political critiques, plummy visions of Christmas swept from his pen. He even wrote a front-page article in his own magazine, Household Words, to explain and justify the breaking up of his staunchly Victorian marriage after 22 years.

Debtors' Prison. His contemporaries may well have felt they knew everything important about him. In fact, it was precisely the important things that they did not know. They did not know about the rat-ridden London warehouse that sagged over the Thames and was called Warren's Blacking Factory. At age twelve, Dickens was yanked from school and put to work there while his father and the rest of the family went into debtors' prison. So traumatic was his sense of shock and abandonment that although the experience lasted no more than five months, as a grown man he still would burst into tears whenever he found himself back in the neighborhood.

It is hardly news to Dickens specialists today that the blacking-factory episode, as Wilson puts it, "provided nearly a lifetime's impetus toward artistic creation." Wilson's scrutiny of the fierce personal drive that transformed an anonymous, victimized lad into the inimitable Boz opens the way to a shrewd, wide-ranging analysis of Dickens' life and work. The result is the best all-round book on the subject for the general reader in years. Absorbing, gracefully written, freshly thought out, it is, in addition, that rare hybrid, a coffee-table book with both brains and beauty. The glossy pages are strewn with well-selected (though skimpily captioned) illustrations that vividly reflect the squalor and especially the sentiment of 19th century England.

To Wilson, Dickens' determination to write sprang from a fear of sinking back into oblivion and poverty. His disenchantment with his parents primed him for his eventual satire of the feckless, posturing stratum of society that they epitomized. Father, an expansive but hopelessly improvident clerk, was to balloon into fiction as Mr. Micawber. Mother, with her snobbish faith in "connections" (one of whom was the manager of the blacking factory), would become not only Mrs. Micawber but later Mrs. Nickleby. "Peculiarly unfair" treatment for mother, Wilson concludes, but there was a special reason for that, too.

Dickens' feeling of being let down by his mother was the first of several jolts to his self-indulgent idealization of women. At 21 he tried to place a girl named Maria Beadnell in the role of an angelic object of worship. She ended by jilting him. Later he cast his wife--the bland, slightly perplexed daughter of one of his former editors--as the traditional loyal helpmeet. She seems to have ended by boring him. The result was that in his fiction he was never able to display a fully rounded view of women. Even his most memorable females--Esther Summerson in Bleak House, or Mrs. Gamp in Martin Chuzzlewit--are little more than ingenious cutouts, painted in brilliant hues of pathos and humor.

The forlorn, ill-fed Dickens who lodged alone during the blacking-factory days was the original of all the young innocents set wandering in his books--the Oliver Twists and David Copperfields and Pips. Through them, his evocations of childhood and the child's point of view are still unmatched for sympathy and immediacy, as well as for their perceptive mixture of terror and delight.

Submerged Society. The teeming streets of London helped lend shape to Dickens' lifelong, horrified fascination with the submerged of Victorian society--the poor, the grotesque, especially the criminal. A long line of murderers stalk through Dickens' novels, from Bill Sikes in Oliver Twist to John Jasper in Edwin Drood. Among other things, they embody his belief in an irredeemable evil in human nature--a belief that tends to be forgotten because of the hilarity Dickens spread through even his darkest passages.

There is no Bozolatry in Wilson's book, even though it is part of the official commemoration of the centenary of Dickens' death. A centenary can be a fete worse than death. But at best it provides a good occasion to settle accounts, not just with Dickens but with his critics and interpreters. The past century has piled up a long bill of critical complaints that he was sentimental, arch and melodramatic; that he would never do what he could merely overdo. In recent decades, on the other hand, critics have rescued him from his earlier reputation as a hearthside moralist and improvising Toby-jug showman. Readers are now ready to acknowledge with Wilson that Dickens "leaps the century and speaks to our fears, our violence, our trust in the absurd, more than any other English Victorian writer." It no longer seems so far from the chancery court in Bleak House to Kafka's trial of Joseph K.

Nowhere does Dickens seem more modern than in his treatment of London. He prowled its streets at night so much during his lifetime that he found it hard to write without the inspiration of his "magic lantern," as he called the city. When he pulled the reader along, says Wilson, he brought the first "cinematic mobility" to the English novel: long tracking shots, like Oliver Twist's escapades in grimy alleys, where the scenes flash by like some satanic carnival; wide panoramas, like the scene in the brickyard in Dombey and Son, where the city lies on the horizon like a vast, destructive machine; dreamlike overhead views, like the dawn in Little Dorrit, where the news of Financier Merdle's suicide spreads through the town like poison through an organism.

Dickens was the first poet of the modern industrial city: he saw it not only as a milieu but as a destiny. The characters he propelled through it were both its living parts and the fuel it consumed. Their hugeness, their stylization, their compulsive verbalizing are all in part a response to the pressures the city exerts on them. This, as Critic V.S. Pritchett has pointed out, is the kinship that urbanized modern readers have with them: a dependence on the "private, mythmaking faculty" by which people dramatize their existence in a mass society. It is a kinship with Dickens as well. In the 1970s more than ever, the feeling he once voiced in a letter seems hauntingly familiar: "I don't seem able to get rid of my spectres unless I can lose them in crowds."

Christopher Porterfield

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