4 KNOWING DICKENS
when George Eliot emerged in the late 1850s, Dickens’s treatment of charac-
ter was measured against her intellectual habits of moral analysis. “The pas-
sions are a sealed book to Mr. Dickens,” wrote George Stott in 1869; Dickens
was “no psychologist; and without psychology, success in the higher walks of
idealization is unattainable” (Collins 1971, 496–97). R. H. Hutton, writing
just days after Dickens’s death, was more generous in his attempt to capture
the secret “of a genius so rich to overflowing in the creation of English types
of humour.” As he put it, “the great intellectual mystery of Dickens’s fertile
genius was his power of reduplicating a single humourous conception of
character into an elaborate structure of strictly analogous conceptions.” The
power of multiplying a single effect did not mean, of course, that Dickens
was “a realist as regards human nature” (Collins 1971, 519–22). It is notable
that few of the reviewers who created the image of Dickens as the genius of
English humor were inclined to consider the kind of intelligence on which
humor depends.
The publication of the first volume of John Forster’s Life of Charles Dick-
ens late in 1871 prompted George Henry Lewes to enter the fray of Dickens
criticism. Abandoning the enthusiasm with which he had initially greeted
Dickens’s arrival on the literary scene, Lewes reacted to Forster’s representa-
tions of his friend by rolling Taine, Bagehot, and Hutton into a ball of
Lewesian argument and hurling it toward posterity in defiance of Forster.
“Dickens in Relation to Criticism” begins mildly enough, as though it
were intended to defend Dickens against the accumulation of critical con-
tempt that had formed around him in his later years. In language redolent
of George Eliot, Lewes writes about the pain of writers whose genius
goes unappreciated, noting that Dickens critics “insisted on his defects as if
these outweighed all positive qualities; and spoke of him with condescend-
ing patronage, or with sneering irritation... How are we to reconcile this
immense popularity with this critical contempt?” The very reviewers who
scorned Dickens in print cherished him in private, he asserts; for a moment it
seems that Dickens and George Eliot have merged as figures of sympathetic
identification for Lewes (Ford and Lane 57).
Once at work on his definition of his subject’s genius, however, Lewes is
ruthless. He adopts Taine’s view of Dickens’s “imperial” imagination, sub-
stituting the term “hallucination” for Taine’s “monomania” (59). Arguing
in a scientific vein about the mental processes that feed the hallucinations
of the insane and their belief in the reality of their visions, he distinguishes
Dickens—in whom “I have never observed any trace of the insane tempera-
ment”—only to collapse the distinction: “To him also revived images have
the vividness of sensations; to him also created images have the coercive force