WHAT DICKENS KNEW 3for biographers and critics to know Dickens better than he knew himself.
During his lifetime he was recognized and loved as the comic genius of the
early novels, which retained their nostalgic flavor for many Victorian read-
ers. As his novels grew sadder and his social views more bitter, he retained
his popularity but laid himself open to serious critiques that often focused
on the “narrowness” of his mind, or on his ignorance of matters he took up
as social causes. The word genius stuck to him, but many educated reviewers
were intent on circumscribing its limits in the strongest terms. For Walter
Bagehot, writing in the National Review of October 1858, Dickens’s genius
was “essentially irregular and unsymmetrical” because he was “utterly defi-
cient in the faculty of reasoning.” Such a genius was a “bizarrerie... rendered
more remarkable by the inordinate measure of his special excellences” (Col-
lins 1971, 391–93). Those excellences reside in his capacity for observing and
rendering details of city streets and peculiarities of character in isolated scenes
and fragments, rather than in the envisioned wholes that Bagehot defines as
essential to high art. A regular education would not have helped Dickens’s
case, Bagehot ventures, because he possessed “an irregular and anomalous
genius, whose excellences consist in the aggravation of some special faculty”
(400).
Bagehot was not alone in depicting Dickens’s genius as a kind of nervous
disease. The French critic Hippolyte Taine had already published his famous
view of Dickens in the Revue des deux Mondes of 1 February 1856, cast in
hyperbolic sentences that competed with Dickens’s own: “The difference
between a madman and a man of genius is not very great.... The imagina-
tion of Dickens is like that of monomaniacs. To plunge oneself into an idea,
to be absorbed by it, to see nothing else, to repeat it under a hundred forms, to
enlarge it, to carry it, thus enlarged, to the eye of the spectator, to dazzle and
overwhelm him with it, to stamp it upon him so firmly and deeply that he
can never again tear it from his memory—these are the great features of this
imagination and this style.” Taine captures something here that is missing in
the measured rectitude of English reviewers like Bagehot or James Fitzjames
Stephen, who held forth regularly on Dickens’s ignorance. But Taine is ulti-
mately unforgiving: “These eccentricities are in the style of sickness rather
than health” (Taine 124–25).
It is not difficult to see why Dickens, who worked without apology for
emotional effect, might stimulate such responses. The Victorian habit of
judging writers by comparisons with others also contributed to the nega-
tive turn in contemporary reviews of his work. When Thackeray appeared
on the scene in 1847, the originality and humor that had amazed Dickens’s
early readers was set up against Thackeray’s more restrained social worldliness;