metaphors, symbols and fables of good and evil, of sympathy and cunning. One
indicator of this is the symbolic suggestiveness of the opening set-pieces, such as
‘The floods were out in Lincolnshire’ or Chapter 1, ‘In Chancery’:
London. Michaelmas Term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s
Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets as if the waters
had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to
meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up
Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle
with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snowflakes – gone into mourning, one
might imagine, for the death of the sun. Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses,
scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers. Foot passengers, jostling one another’s
umbrellas in a general infection of ill temper, and losing their foot-hold at street-
corners ....
Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog
down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping and the waterside
pollutions of a great (and dirty) city. Fog on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish
heights. Fog creeping into the cabooses of collier-brigs; fog lying out on the yards and
hovering in the rigging of great ships; fog drooping on the gunwales of barges and small
boats. Fog in the eyes and throats of ancient Greenwich pensioners ....Our Mutual Friend
The late novels can start separate subjects in successive chapters, as does Our Mutual
Fr iend:the recovery of a body from the Thames; the Veneerings’ dinner party; Silas
Wegg with his wooden leg. The themes do not always hold together, but Dickens’s
parts are better than other writers’ wholes. There is Mr Podsnap, for instance, who
‘consider ed other countries ... a mistake, and of their manners and customs would
co nclusively observe, “Not English!” ’, clearing them away with ‘a peculiar flourish of
his right arm’. He instructs a visiting Frenchman in English pronunciation:
‘We call it Horse,’ said Mr Podsnap, with forbearance. ‘In England, Angleterre, England.
We Aspirate the “H,” and We Say “Horse.” Only our Lower Classes Say “Orse!” ’
‘Pardon,’ said the foreign gentleman; ‘I am alwiz wrong!’
‘Our Language,’ said Mr Podsnap, with a gracious consciousness of being always
right, ‘is Difficult. Ours is a Copious Language, and Trying to Strangers. I will not Pursue
my Question.’
That could be early Dickens. This is late Dickens:
A certain institution in Mr. Podsnap’s mind which he called ‘the young person’ may be
co nsidered to have been embodied in Miss Podsnap, his daughter. It was an inconvenient
and exacting institution, as requiring everything in the universe to be filed down and
fitted to it. The question about everything was, would it bring a blush into the cheek of
the young person?The last sentence is immortal and Victorian. The first sentence has the more abstract
wit of the later novels, with no loss of acrobatic mock-grandiloquence.
The clearest of Dickens’s books is Hard Times, a satire upon the hard-hearted
regimes governing industrial life in a northern Coketown. It is a fable lacking the
specificity and nightmare of Dickens’s London. The critic Leavis agreed with its
analysis and relished the bite of its caricatures: industrialism in Bounderby, utilitar-
ianism in Gradgrind. Yet its love story has a weak pitifulness which lets energy leak
from the novel.294 10 · FICTION