Chapter IX

But even this apologia--sufficient as I think it--does not cover the whole defence. We have picked up a habit of consenting with critics who tell us that Dickens’ prose is careless and therefore not worth studying. Believe me, you are mistaken if you believe these critics. Dickens sometimes wrote execrably: far oftener he penned at a stretch page upon page of comment and conversation that brilliantly effect their purpose and are, _therefore_, good writing. You will allow, I dare say, his expertness in glorifying the loquacity that comes of a well-meaning heart and a rambling head. Recall, for example--casually chosen out of hundreds--Mrs. Chivery on her son John, nursing his love-lornness amid the washing in the back-yard: and remark the _idiom_ of it:

“It’s the only change he takes,” said Mrs. Chivery, shaking her
head afresh. “He won’t go out, even to the back-yard, when there’s
no linen: but when there’s linen to keep the neighbours’ eyes off,
he’ll sit there, hours. Hours he will. Says he feels as if it
was groves.... Our John has everyone’s good word and everyone’s
good wish. He played with her as a child when in that yard she
played. He has known her ever since. He went out upon the Sunday
afternoon when in this very parlour he had dined, and met her,
with appointment or without appointment which I do not pretend to
say. He made his offer to her. Her brother and sister is high in
their views and against Our John. ‘No, John, I cannot have you, I
cannot have any husband, it is not my intentions ever to become a
wife, it is my intentions to be always a sacrifice, farewell. Find
another worthy of you and forget me!’ This is the way in which she
is doomed to be a constant slave, to them that are not worthy that
a constant slave unto them she should be. This is the way in which
Our John has come to find no pleasure but in taking cold among the
linen....”

Is _that_ not prose? Of course it is prose _for its purpose_: and, strictly for her purpose--strictly, mind you for their purpose--Mrs. Chivery’s parallelisms of speech will match those of the prophet Jeremiah at his literary best. “Ah,” say you, “but Dickens is dealing out humorous reported speech. Can he write prose of his own?” Well, yes, and yes most certainly. If you will search and study his passages of deliberate writing you will scarcely miss to see how he derives in turn of phrase as in intonation from the great eighteenth-century novelists and translators whose works, if you remember, were the small child’s library in the beautiful fourth chapter of _David Copperfield_:

My father had left a small collection of books in a little room
upstairs ... which nobody else in our house ever troubled. From
that blessed little room, Roderick Random, Peregrine Pickle,
Humphrey Clinker, Tom Jones, the Vicar of Wakefield, Don Quixote,
Gil Blas, and Robinson Crusoe came out, a glorious host, to keep me
company....

The whole passage, if you will turn to it, you will recognise as delicate English prose. But it is also a faithful, if translated, record. From this line of English writers, the more you study him, the more clearly you will recognise Dickens as standing in the direct descent of a pupil. He brings something of his own, of course, to infuse it, as genius will: and that something is usually a hint of pathos which the eighteenth-century man avoided. But (this touch of pathos excepted) you will find little, say, to distinguish Fielding’s sketch of Squire Allworthy on his morning stroll from this sketch, which I take casually from _The Old Curiosity Shop_, of an aged woman punctually visiting the grave of her husband who had died in his prime of twenty-three:

“Yes, I was his wife. Death doesn’t change no more than life, my
dear.”... And now that five-and-fifty years were gone, she spoke of
the dead man as if he had been her son or grandson, with a kind of
pity for his youth growing out of her own old age, and an exalting
of his strength and manly beauty, as compared with her own weakness
and decay; and yet she spoke of him as her husband too, and
thinking of herself in connection with him, as she used to be and
not as she was now, talked of their meeting in another world, as
if he were dead but yesterday, and she, separated from her former
self, were thinking of the happiness of that comely girl who seemed
to have died with him.