G. K. Chesterton on Charles Dickens

Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874–1936)—the polymathic poet, philosopher, orator, journalist, superb stylist, and author of such classics as The Napoleon of Notting Hill, Orthodoxy, The Everlasting Man, and the sleuthy tales of the priestly Father Brown—is, like the subject he wrote on for Britannica, a giant of English literature and culture. We may know more about Charles Dickens today than Chesterton did—especially in light of the titillating Ellen Ternan revelations, about the middle-age Dickens’s affair with the teenage girl—but it hardly matters. For who could write better about the English giant than G.K.C. did? What we have here instead is a love letter to what really matters: the novels themselves and the volcanic genius that lay behind them. We reprint below the conclusion to Chesterton’s 8,500-word paean, highlighting what Chesterton saw as Dickens’s ultimate gift to the world. It was published in the inaugural printing of Britannica’s 14th Edition in 1929.

His [Dickens’s] life was destined to end in a whirlwind of an entirely new type of activity; which none the less never interrupted that creative work which was the in-dwelling excitement of all his days. He wrote one more complete novel, Our Mutual Friend (1864–65), and it is more complete than most. Indeed it is one of the best though not one of the most Dickensian of the Dickens novels. He then turned his restless talent to something in the nature of a detective story, more in the manner of his friend Wilkie Collins; the sort of story which begins by asking a question; in this case a question about the secret and the sequel of the fate of the hero, Edwin Drood. The question will never be answered; for it was cut short by the only thing that could be more dramatic than the death of the hero; the death of the author. Charles Dickens was dead.

He died very suddenly, dropping from his chair at the dinner-table, in the year 1870 at the comparatively early age of fifty-eight. A death so abrupt, and essentially so premature, could not but raise doubts about the wisdom of his impetuous industry and debates almost as varied as those round the secret of Edwin Drood. But without exaggerating any one of the elements that contributed to it, we may note that the very last phase of his life was a new phase; and was almost entirely filled with his new activity in giving public readings from his works. He had gone to America once more in the November of 1867, with this particular purpose; and his campaign of public speaking in this style was truly American in its scope and scale. If he had indeed been unjust to America as a writer, it is curious that he should have reached his final popularity and perhaps his final collapse, in a character so supremely American. Differences exist about how far he exaggerated the function or how far his biographer exaggerated the danger; but his own letters, ragged with insomnia and impatience, full of desperate fatigue and more desperate courage, are alone enough to show that he was playing a very dangerous game for a man approaching sixty. But it is certainly true, as is alleged on the other side, that this was nothing new in the general conduct of Dickens; that he had long ago begun burning the candle at both ends; and there have been few men, in the matter of natural endowments, with so great and glorious a candle to burn.

He was buried in the Poet’s Corner of Westminster Abbey; and new and vulgar as many critics had called his work, he was far more of a poet than many who were buried there as poets. He left a will commending his soul to God, and to the mercy of Jesus Christ, and leaving his works to the judgment of posterity; and in both respects the action was symbolic and will remain significant in history. Intellectually limited as he was by the rather cheap and cheery negations of an age of commercial rationalism, he had never been a bitter secularist or anti-clerical; he was at heart traditional and was drawn much more towards Anglican than Puritan Christianity; and his greatest work may yet prove to be the perpetuation of the joyful mystery of Christmas. On the other side, he has suffered and may suffer again the changes in the mere fashions of criticism; but his work was creative, it added something to life; and it is hard to believe that something so added will ever be entirely taken away. The defects of his work are glaring; they hardly need to be detected; they need the less to be emphasized because, unfortunately, he always emphasized them himself. It may be a fault, it is certainly a fact, that he enjoyed writing his worst work as much as his best.

The charge of exaggeration is itself exaggerated. It is also, which is much more important, merely repeated mechanically, without any consideration of its true meaning. Dickens did exaggerate; but his exaggeration was purely Dickensian. In this sense his very vulgarity had the quality of distinction. Mere overstatement, to say that a tall man is ten feet high, to say that a frosty morning froze Niagara; this is something relatively easy to do, though sometimes very cleverly done, especially by Americans. But the distinction of Dickens can be stated even in the common charge against him. He is said to have turned men into monsters of humour or horror, whereas the men were really commonplace and conventional persons in shops and offices. If any critic depreciates the Dickensian method as mere overstatement, the answer is obvious: let him take some of these commonplace people and overstate them. He will soon discover that he has not the vaguest notion of what to overstate. He will soon realise that it is not a simple matter of mere exaggeration, in the sense of mere extension. It is not a matter of making a man a little taller or a morning a little colder; the challenge to imagination is not whether he can exaggerate, but whether he can find anything worth exaggerating. Now the genius of Dickens consisted in seeing in somebody, whom others might call merely prosaic, the germ of a sort of prose poem. There was in this or that man’s attitude, or affectation, or habit of thought, something which only needed a touch of exaggeration to be a charming fantasy or a dramatic contradiction. The books of Dickens are in fact full of bores; of bores who do not bore us, merely because they did not bore him. We have all of us heard a hundred times the tiresome trick of public speakers, of asking themselves rhetorical questions which they do not want answered. Any of us might have heard a fat Dissenting minister doing it at a tea-party and thankfully forgotten all about him. But Dickens seized on the fallacy and turned it into a fantasy; into Mr. Chadband’s demands to know why he could not fly, or his wild and beautiful apologue about the elephant and the eel. We talk of the power of drawing people out; and that is the nearest parallel to the power of Dickens. He drew reels and reels of highly coloured caricature out of an ordinary person, as dazzlingly as a conjurer draws reels and reels of highly coloured paper out of an ordinary hat. But if anybody thinks the conjuring-trick is easy to perform, let him try it with the next ordinary person he sees. The exaggeration is always the logical extension of something that really exists; but genius appears, first in seeing that it exists, and second in seeing that it will bear to be thus exaggerated. That is something totally different from giving a man a long nose; it is the delicate surgical separation or extension of a living nerve. It is carrying a ludicrous train of thought further than the actual thinker carries it; but it requires a little thinking. It is making fools more gloriously foolish than they can be in this vale of tears; and it is not every fool who can do it.

There were other reasons for the injustice in the particular case of Dickens. Though his characters often were caricatures, they were not such wild caricatures as was supposed by those who had never met such characters. And the critics had never met the characters; because the critics did not live in the common life of the English people; and Dickens did. England was a much more amusing and horrible place than it appeared to the sort of man who wrote reviews in The Quarterly; and, in spite of all scientific progress or social reform, it is still. The poverty and anarchy of Dickens’s early life had stuffed his memory with strange things and people never to be discovered in Tennysonian country houses or even Thackerayan drawing-rooms. Poverty makes strange bedfellows, the same sort of bedfellows whom Mr. Pickwick fought for the recovery of his nightcap. In the vivid phrase, he did indeed live in Queer street and was acquainted with very queer fish. And it is something of an irony that his tragedy was the justification of his farce. He not only learnt in suffering what he taught in song, but what he rendered, so to speak, in a comic song.

It is also true, however, that he caught many of these queer fish because he liked fishing in such troubled waters. A good example of this combination of opportunity and eccentricity is to be found in his affection for travelling showmen and vagabond entertainments of all sorts, especially those that exhibited giants and dwarfs and such monstrosities. Some might see in this truth a sort of travesty of all his travesties. It would be easy to suggest a psychological theory, by which all his art tended to the antics of the abnormal; it would also be entirely false. It would be much truer to say that Dickens created so many wild and fantastic caricatures because he was himself commonplace. He never identifies himself with anything abnormal, in the more modern manner. In his travelling show, the Giant always falls far short of being a Superman. And though he was tempted only too easily to an obvious pathos, there was never anything particularly pathetic about his dwarfs. His fun is more robust; and even, in that sense, more callous. The truth is that Dickens’s attitude to the abnormal has been misunderstood owing to the modern misunderstanding of the idea of the normal. He was in many ways a wild satirist, but still a satirist; and satire is founded on sanity. He had his real Cockney limitations. But his moderation was not a limitation but a liberty; for it allowed him to hit out in all directions. It was precisely because he had an ordinary and sensible view of life that he could measure the full madness both of Gradgrind’s greed or Micawber’s improvidence. It was because he was what we call commonplace that Dombey appeared to him so stiff or Jellaby so slovenly. In a later generation a real person often assumed such an unreal pose and lost the power of merely laughing at it; as, for example, when Oscar Wilde said seriously all that Skimpole had said absurdly. The Victorian commonsense was not a complete commonsense; and Dickens did suffer from having a narrower culture than Swift or Rabelais. But he did not suffer from being sensible; it was even more from his sense than his sensibility, it was from a sort of inspired irritation and impatience of good sense, that he was able to give us so radiant a fairyland of fools.

His literary work produced of course much more than a literary effect. He was the last great poet, in the true sense of maker, who made something for the people and was in the highest sense popular. He still gives his name, not to a literary clique, but to a league or fellowship numbering thousands all over the world. In this connection it is often noted that he achieved many things even considered as a practical political and social reformer. He let light into dark corners, like the dens of dirt and brutality often called schools, especially in Yorkshire; he probably had much to do with making the professional nurse a duller but more reliable person than Mrs. Gamp; it is likely enough that his vivid descriptions, assisted by the whole trend of the time, hastened the extinction of ordinary imprisonment for debt and clarified much of the original chaos of Chancery. But precisely because this has often been said, it will be well not to say it too often. It has the effect of making his satire appear much more superficial and utilitarian than it really was; for the great satirist is concerned with things not so easily destroyed. We do more honour to Dickens in noting the evils he did not destroy than those he did. The eager worship of a man merely wealthy, however dull and trivial, which appears in the affair of Merdle, has by no means disappeared from our own more recent affairs. The pompous old Barnacle and the agreeable young Barnacle are still almost as much alive as in Dickens’s day. The sweeping away of a genuine gentry, in the person of Mr. Twemlow, on the tide of a new plutocracy, represented by Mr. Veneering, has gone much further than in Dickens’s day. But this makes Dickens’s satire the more rather than the less valuable to posterity. The other mood, which pictures all such abuses as things of the past, tends not to reform but only too much to repose; and to the perpetuation of a rather snobbish and paltry version of the Dickensian tradition. In that spirit we may hear to this day a Stiltstalking telling the House of Commons that Stiltstalkings have perished before the march of progress; or in the law courts a Buzfuz quoting Buzfuz and jeering at himself as an instinct monster.

The future of the fame of Dickens is no part of the Dickens record and a very dubious part of the Dickens criticism. Some have suggested that his glory will fade as new fashions succeed those he satirized; others have said, at least equally reasonably, that the difference itself fades when all the fashions have grown old; and that Aristophanes and Cervantes have outlived their descendants as well as their contemporaries. But there can be no question of the importance of Dickens as a human event in history; a sort of conflagration and transfiguration in the very heart of what is called the conventional Victorian era; a naked flame of mere natural genius, breaking out in a man without culture, without tradition, without help from historic religions or philosophies or from the great foreign schools; and revealing a light that never was on sea or land, if only in the long fantastic shadows that it threw from common things.