Selected Short Fiction (2 page)

His next novel,
Dombey and Son
(1846-8), was more wholly serious and more carefully planned than his early work. In
David Copperfield
(1849-50), he explored his own childhood and youth, thinly disguised. In the 1850s he increased his already intense interest in public affairs. He founded
Household Words,
a weekly magazine which combined entertainment with social purpose; it was succeeded in 1859 by
All the Year Round,
which sold as many as 300,000 copies.
Bleak House
(1852-3) and
Hard Times
(1854) have strong social themes, and
Little Dorrit
(1855-7) continues Dickens's bitter public denunciation of the whole framework of government and administration which had mismanaged the Crimean War.

In 1858 he separated from his wife. Although Kate, a shadowy, slow person, had given him ten children, she had never suited his exuberant temperament very well. He befriended a young actress, Ellen Ternan, who may have become his mistress. He was now living mainly in Kent, at Gad's Hill, near his boyhood home of Chatham.
A Tale of Two Cities
(1859),
Great Expectations
(1860- 61), and
Our Mutual Friend
(1864-5) completed his life's main work of fourteen major novels. By the mid 1860s his health was failing, partly under the strain of his successful but exhausting public readings from his own work, which had begun in 1858. An immensely profitable but physically shattering series of readings in America (1867-8) speeded his decline, and he collapsed during a ‘farewell' series in England. His last novel,
Edwin Drood
(1870), was never completed; he suffered a stroke after a full day's work at Gad's Hill on 8 June 1870 and died the following day. Lamentation was demonstrative and universal, and he was buried in the Poets' Comer of Westminster Abbey.

Dickens's extreme energy was not exhausted by his unique success as a novelist. His weekly journalism made heavy demands on his time after 1850, and he constantly turned to the stage, first in many amateur theatricals, given privately or for charity, where he produced and took leading roles with great brilliance, and, later, in his public readings. His concern with social reform in his novels and journalism was matched by an active personal interest in several charitable projects.

Furthermore, as Lionel Trilling puts it, ‘the mere record of his conviviality is exhausting'. His typical relaxation was a long walk at great speed, and he was dedicated to any and every sort of game or jollification. In the early days of his success, observers were sometimes displeased by his flamboyant dress and a hint of vulgarity in his manners, but he had powerful, magnetizing eyes and overwhelming charm. Beneath his high spirits, friends could detect a permanent emotional insecurity and restlessness, which flavours the tragi-comic world of his novels.

Two biographies stand out among many: John Forster's
Life
(1872-4, many times reprinted); and Edgar Johnson's
Charles Dickens, His Tragedy and Triumph
(London: Gollancz, 1953), which embodies material neglected or suppressed by Forster. Readers interested in Dickens's methods as a novelist will be enlightened by John Butt's and Kathleen Tillotson's
Dickens at Work
(London: Methuen, 1957). There are innumerable specialized studies of his work, life and views. A magazine exclusively devoted to the subject,
The Dickensian,
is published three times a year by the Dickens Fellowship.

LIKE an unfamiliar side dish ignored by diners intent on sirloin steak, Dickens's short fiction, apart from his
Christmas Books,
has often been overlooked.
^a
Those who do turn their attention to it frequently find it baffling. Many of the assorted stories and sketches which Dickens produced throughout his career defy conventional categorization and now lie buried in remote corners of his collected works. The preternatural occurrences in tales like ‘The Signalman', the impressionistic fusion of sensations in sketches like ‘The Calais Night-Mail', and remarkable monologues like those in
Mrs Lirriper's Lodgings
and
Mrs Lirriper's Legacy
are seldom remembered in discussions of similar, although often less striking, elements in Dickens's novels. With the single exception of
A Christmas
Carol, the samples of Dickens's seemingly minor work which the modern reader most often encounters - the pieces collected in
Sketches by Boz
and the tales introduced into
Pickwick Papers -
are amongst his earliest compositions, and inevitably reflect the occasionally unsteady hand of the developing artist. Consequently, faced with the infinite variety of Dickens's better known writings from
Pickwick Papers
to
The Mystery of Edwin Drood,
few people have explored these unfamiliar pieces in any depth. Sylvère Monod's passing comment that his shorter stories ... however intrinsically interesting, seemed to me to belong to another literary genre [than his novels] and to deserve a separate study'
^b
is a rare tribute to the value of Dickens's short fiction in its own right. Nevertheless, this material is sometimes very lively, and evidently occupied an important place in Dickens's thoughts.

According to Percy Fitzgerald, one of his young associates, Dickens ‘always seemed to hanker after the short story'.
^c
As Dickens learned relatively early, however, his public did not share this inclination.
Master Humphrey's Clock,
a journal, like Gold-smith's
Bee,
containing a miscellaneous assortment of short pieces, suffered a marked drop in sales, so he transformed one tale into a full-length novel
(The Old Curiosity Shop)
and thereafter confined his writing to novels, except on special occasions. The most special of such occasions was Christmas, which presented Dickens with the opportunity to indulge once again in literature like the fairy tales he had enjoyed in childhood. His close friend and biographer John Forster observed about Dickens's
Christmas Books:
‘No one was more intensely fond than Dickens of old nursery tales, and he had a secret delight in feeling that he was here only giving them a higher form.' Moreover, the five
Christmas Books
which Dickens produced in the 1840s were by no means his only outlet for short fiction. In 1850, he inaugurated
Household Words,
a weekly periodical succeeded in 1859 by
All the Year Round,
which he edited until his death in 1870; they provided him with an excuse not only for additional Christmas pieces but also for less seasonal subjects, like the workings of memory and the manifestations of the macabre, which emerge in many of his novels in less concentrated form. In some cases, as Harry Stone has perceptively argued, they gave him a chance to experiment with techniques of rendering the operation of the mind - at times verging upon stream-of-consciousness narration - which he felt his readers would not accept in novels.
^d
Lack of inhibition is often dangerous, and some of Dickens's short creations might be gladly wished away, but others show a literary master brilliantly indulging in the very essence of his art.

The sketch entitled ‘A Christmas Tree', for example, explicitly reveals this sense of liberation. Above all, as the narrator declares, Christmas is the time for an imaginative vacation:

And I do come home at Christmas. We all do, or we all should. We all come home, or ought to come home, for a short holiday - the longer, the better - from the great boarding-school, where we are for ever working at our arithmetical slates, to take, and give a rest. As to going a visiting, where can we not go, if we will; where have we not been, when we would; starting our fancy from our Christmas Tree!

 

The ‘fancy' which starts ‘from our Christmas Tree' flies rapidly ‘Away into the winter prospect' and into the realm of ‘Winter Stories - Ghost Stories, or more shame for us - round the Christmas fire'. It flows in and out of narrative
personae.
The unspecified first-person singular speaker of the initial portion of the sketch becomes a nervous observer of ghosts: ‘We are a middle-aged nobleman, and we make a generous supper with our host and hostess and their guests'; ‘we always travel with pistols'; ‘we are dead now'. The symbolic homecoming ‘from the great boarding-school, where we are for ever working at our arithmetical slates' follows a fusion of recollections of toys and tales ‘upon the branches of the Christmas Tree of our own young Christmas days', and the supernatural ‘going a visiting' ultimately fades into seasonal emotion with an allusion to the birth in Bethlehem for which the holiday is named: ‘In every cheerful image and suggestion that the season brings, may the bright star that rested above the poor roof, be the star of all the Christian world!' The motivation, the ingredients, the vitality, and the difficulties of Dickens's short fiction are here in embryo.

The key word in this context is ‘fancy' - the vague but vital quality which triumphs over utilitarian practicality in Dickens's novel
Hard Times.
The term appears repeatedly in his writing, not as a clearly defined critical concept as in Wordsworth and Coleridge but rather as an infallible panacea for a debilitating overdose of fact. Fancy, for Dickens, was roughly synonymous with imagination. However, the meanings which he attached to this protean word range, among a host of others, from temporarily escaping the workaday world to softening it with feeling, or transforming it into something strange and new through the power of a contemplative, creative eye. As Dickens himself willingly acknowledged, fancy is fundamental to his concept of literature, and it appears in one or more of these senses in his work of any length. As he explained in one of his rare defences of his art:

Significantly, this credo is quoted in Forster's
Life of Charles Dickens
in the context of what the discerning but staid biographer called Dickens's tendency to ‘let himself loose' in passages of ‘mere description' and in shorter and thus to Forster less important works. Dickens himself seems to have valued his short fiction precisely because it gave opportunities to express fancy in concentration.

Not all of the results, at least to modem palates, are felicitous. A few of Dickens's short pieces contain an even higher proportion of pathos than his description of the demise of the unfortunate Little Nell. In other short pieces, however, Dickens's penetration of the secrets of the human psyche far surpasses anything in his longer work.

The creative exuberance which led him to experiment so freely and so diversely poses special problems for an editor; the pieces included here by no means exhaust the subject of Dickens's short fiction. If a reader's appetite should become sufficiently whetted to evoke Oliver Twist's anxious question, he can rest contented that there is certainly ‘more'. I have limited my choice to three general types so that readers may readily examine Dickens's recurring concerns and relate these concerns to elements in his novels. Nonetheless, this selection demonstrates in varying ways the essential characteristics of all Dickens's writing - his unsurpassed gift of comedy, his deepening awareness of human tragedy, and his belief, often emphasized in pieces associated with Christmas, in the value of human compassion.

Just as compassionate and non-compassionate impulses sometimes defy rational description, so Dickens's short fiction often resists ordinary labels. Edgar Allan Poe's celebrated dictum that in a well-constructed tale ‘there should be no word written, of which the tendency, direct or indirect, is not to the one pre-established design' (
Graham's Magazine,
May 1842) is seldom an adequate explanation of these brief excursions of a novelist whose ‘outstanding, unmistakable mark‘, according to George Orwell, ‘is the
unnecessary detail'.
^e
In many cases, as ‘A Christmas Tree' demonstrates, even the seemingly simple distinction between realistic reporting and fanciful creation becomes an extremely complex issue. Consequently, I have used the term ‘short fiction' rather than ‘short story' with its connotations, many derived from Poe, of rigidly plotted tightness and compression.

The headings - ‘Tales of the Supernatural', ‘Impressionistic Sketches', and ‘Dramatic Monologues' - of the three categories are arbitrary ones, chosen solely to facilitate discussion. The categories themselves are likewise arbitrary and imprecise, but provide a useful perspective on an astonishingly variable scene.

The ‘Tales of the Supernatural', which form the first category, openly encourage astonishment. For Dickens, as for numerous other writers in the Gothic tradition, tales could legitimately transcend the limits of ordinary physical reality. As an individual, Dickens had little patience with spiritualists or ‘rappers' like his one-time friend William Howitt,
^f
but, as a writer and an editor, he spared no pains upon occasion to produce the right involuntary shiver. Forster noted that ‘Among his good things should not be omitted his telling of a ghost story‘, and Dickens himself exclaimed in a letter in 1851 to Mrs Gaskell, a contributor to
Household Words
and
All the Year Round
whom he admired for her talented writing of similar tales: ‘Ghost-stories, illustrating particular states of mind and processes of the imagination, are common-property, always think - except in the manner of relating them, and O whc can rob some people of
that
!' Dickens's literary admiration in this realm of the ordinarily inexplicable was not confined to the subject of ghosts. When the noted illustrator and fanatic teetotaller George Cruikshank altered the story of ‘Hop o' My Thumb' to show the evils of inebriation, Dickens exploded in outrage. ‘Fairy-tales', he declared in an article called ‘Frauds on the Fairies', are ‘nurseries of fancy' and ‘In a utilitarian age, of all other times, it is a matter of grave importance that Fairy tales should be respected' (
Househola Words,
1 October 1853). In view of the importance of such preternatural tales in Dickens's thinking, his own experiments warrant particular attention.