WHAT DICKENS KNEW 5of realities, excluding all control, all contradiction.” Following Taine, Lewes
finds the “glorious energy of imagination” a force coercive to its readers: “So
definite and insistent was the image, that even while knowing it was false we
could not help, for a moment, being affected, as it were, by his hallucination”
(60–61). This power, which Lewes purports to celebrate, is also depicted as a
delusion for “the mass of men” whose “minds are for the most part occupied
with sensations rather than ideas.” Like children who cherish a wooden horse
and call it real, this public, deaf to the truth-telling critics, loved Dickens for
his feelings, but the “world of thought and passion lay beyond his horizon”
(62–63).
Having mobilized most of the critical warhorses he had promised to tran-
scend, Lewes charges ahead with a long and predictable attack on Dickens’s
“incorrect” and “false” depictions of human character, with George Eliot
invisibly present as the standard of truth and correctness. Couched in the
authoritative language of the mental sciences, Lewes’s verdicts on Dickens’s
mind are nonetheless barely distinguishable from those of his contempo-
raries: “the writer presents almost a unique example of a mind of singular
force in which, so to speak, sensations never passed into ideas. Dickens sees
and feels, but the logic of feeling seems the only logic he can manage” (69).
Reading such accounts, one begins to wonder how Dickens managed to
write at all, let alone to organize a life of considerable complexity. Clearly
there was something about the concreteness of his intelligence and his disin-
clination to move rapidly from the particular to the general that disqualified
him from “thought.”
Once Freud’s ideas had permeated early twentieth-century culture, Dick-
ens’s kinds of knowledge became more plausible and interesting to his critics
and biographers. Current studies of nineteenth-century physiological psy-
chology bring Dickens into perspective as an early, if idiosyncratic, assimila-
tor of pre-Freudian ideas about the unconscious mind, placing him helpfully
within the intellectual context that he shared, after all, with George Henry
Lewes. In his own time, however, Dickens’s use of the uncanny and his ways
of externalizing interior conflict subjected him to a great deal of condescen-
sion from critics who saw him as an uneducated popular writer whose genius
for humor compensated for his failures to represent the inner lives of his
characters. Because they could not be pinned down analytically, or attributed
directly to a knowing narrative voice, Dickens’s forms of knowledge were
often attributed to the vagaries of a nonrational creative process from which
educated men and women found it necessary to distance themselves.
A conversation about what Dickens did know might begin with a look
at the special kinds of knowledge he cultivated and practiced. Dickens was