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Monday, March 18, 2013

Whom does Dickens like?

At first look, I thought I could generalize and say that Dickens doesn't like people in groups or classes but he does (sometimes) like individuals. That is, his sympathetic characters (and his villains) are almost unique and apart from their class. But when he confronts or conveys people in groups, especially in crowds, or when he paints with a broader brush - groups of people at a meeting or a party or a streetcorner or an office - he's uneasy and satirical. We see almost a classic example of this in Great Expectations when Pip's office mate brings Pip home and Pip, seeing him outside of the public sphere, sees an entirely different and much more sympathetic character. But all that is simplistic: of course individuals are more vivid in fiction, for better or worse, than figures in a crowd or in a class. Which led me to think about: Whom does Dickens like? In A Tale of Two Cities I'm beginning to get a sense of whom he doesn't like: worst of all is the French nobility (the Marquis) whom he despises and depicts as despicable; but he's not that much more sympathetic to the French revolutionaries. Yes, taking on the nobility is a just social cause, but Dickens stops just short of portraying the crowd around Defarge's (?) wine shop as cold-blooded thugs - notably, his wife, coolly knitting shrouds and waiting for heads to tumble. Though D is slightly sympathetic to crowds in Paris, he's much less so to crowds in London - where we see a throng overtake a funeral procession, for example. Crowds are dangerous and unruly. He doesn't like lawyers, and he doesn't seem to like the rough working-class families, at least as portrayed in Tale by Cruncher (maybe too much of a generalization). Whom does he like: first, the rising business and merchant class of London - e.g., the kindly Doctor Manette (and his daughter) and the self-effacing banker Lorry. Second: what about the British nobility? How and why do they get off so easy? Is the King of England that much better than the King and Queen of France? (Americans wouldn't have thought so ca 1780.) Dickens's vitriol and satire has free reign in Tale, and few are left unscathed. Those who try to change the world are treated not much better than the exploiters and the crooks.  It's a misanthropic novel.

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