A Tale of Two Cities and Great Expectations (Penguin) - Charles Dickens [438]
Whipple’s Atlantic Monthly appraisal finds the two strains “harmonised” in Great Expectations: “Everybody must have discerned in the action of his mind two diverging tendencies, which, in this novel, are harmonised. He possesses a singularly wide, clear, and minute power of acute observation, both of things and of persons; but his observation, keen and true to actualities as it independently is, is not a dominant faculty, and is opposed or controlled by the strong tendency of his disposition to pathetic or humorous idealisation [. . .].” The most humorous idealization, most reviews agreed, was the character of Wemmick. Though the Saturday Review criticized Miss Havisham as “one of Mr. Dickens’s regular pieces of melodramatic exaggeration,” like other critics, it found in Wemmick “the great creation of the book, and his marriage as the funniest incident.” Other reviews, such as that in the Dublin University Review, estimated Joe Gargery the most “natural” and sympathetic portrayal, and somewhat grudgingly admitted that Great Expectations “contains a good many striking passages, a few racy and one or two masterly portraits, a story for the most part cleverly sustained and wrought out to no lame or disjointed issues” and a plot that has “a kind of artistic unity and clear purpose.” The Times review, by E. S. Dallas (17 Oct. 1861) ranked Great Expectations, if not among Dickens’s best novels, (in an odd choice of adjective given the novel’s dark tone and muted ending), his “happiest”: “There is that flowing humour in it which disarms criticism, and which is all the more enjoyable because it defies criticism.” Certainly, Dickens’s wide readership and enduring popularity has defied those early negative reviews and validated the insight of his most sympathetic critics.
What Is “Dickensian”?
Depending on the context, the adjective “Dickensian” is sometimes used to refer to the Victorian era, or even more vaguely, to an old-timey past that was more warmhearted and communitarian than our own times. In a derogatory sense, it may imply a description that is either overly sentimental or extravagantly expressed. In social-critical terms, “Dickensian” sometimes indicates the abject condition of some group, as in the phrase “Dickensian poverty,” which relates to the critique of the living and working conditions of the poor that is a prominent part of Dickens’s novels. But “Dickensian” most often refers to his characteristic style: an acute perception exaggerated to comic effect. This effect often included giving life to inanimate objects and the reverse, mechanizing the animate. Dickens routinely employed this style in describing his characters’ physical appearance, especially his one-dimensional, minor characters, though he sometimes extended its use to houses and other objects, and to bureaucratic systems, such as the Circumlocution Office in Little Dorrit. Critics point out that a Dickensian character’s odd or eccentric behavior refers to a deeper lack in their nature; this, added to the fact that these characters are rarely depicted as transforming in any psychological detail, makes them, in narrative terms, “flat.” Examples abound in every Dickens novel: in Bleak House, Miss Flite, the crazy old woman who befriends Esther Summerson and is never absent from the court carrying her bag of nonsensical documents, while awaiting a favorable judgment of her case; the villainous Marquis of Evremonde, in A Tale of Two Cities, who has a face like a “fine mask . . . of a transparent paleness; every feature in it clearly defined; one set expression on it”—an expression of cruelty. (Appropriately, the château belonging to the Marquis has a similarly “stony” aspect.) The lawyer, Jaggers, in Great Expectations, has “bushy black eyebrows that wouldn’t lie down but stood up bristling,” and Pip always