ministers and appreciated the social inspi
ration of this preacher-without-a-Bible.
But, as was frequently pointed out by the
English critics, his composition and artistic
force suffered as a result of his works'
serial production. They also regretted the
lack of psychological development of his
characters, the melodrama and the exagge
ration of both the good and bad personali
ties. And the very fact of the general
public's appreciation of him made Dickens
suspect in the eyes of the increasingly
elitist critics. As far as they were concer
ned, Dickens's popularity with the public
would not count in his favour, although
this was perhaps less so than with other
popular authors such as Sue and Dumas.
When at the end of the 1870s Emile Zola
became the subject of literary debate in the
Netherlands, his merciless passion for the
truth was contrasted with the fairytale
narratives of Dickens. This resulted in the
younger generation, in particular, relega
ting Dickens to the nursery. As artists
everywhere began turning away from the
general public, and as the public conse
quentially began to ignore the avant-garde,
Dickens lost his place in the front rank.
Nevertheless, the last quarter of the nine
teenth century saw the appearance of
large, handsome editions of Dickens's
collected works aimed at the general pu
blic. I have argued elsewhere2 that the
widespread system of commercial lending
libraries, in combination with book prices
beyond the general public's means, had
precluded the need for reprints for many
years. Now, however, publishers began to
see money in reprints in large quantities
and for low prices, to be sold in
installments, thus making reliable public
favourites affordable even to those of
slender means. After all, the translation
costs had already been paid. The illustrati
ons consisted mainly of cheap, badly-made
woodcuts of the original prints. The first
Dutch editions of Dickens contained only a
small number of Phiz and Cruickshank
copies. The publishers of these early editi
ons apologised, complaining that the high
costs involved in copying the plates would
have pushed the price of the books up
even further.
According to research, in Germany, after
the initial huge enthusiasm, a more mea
sured reaction set in, and eventually, by
the end of the 1840s, Dickens had sunk
into oblivion.3 This happened in the Ne
therlands too, albeit at a later date. The
renaissance in Dutch literature known as
the 'Eighties Movement' signalled the end
for Dickens. An individualist like the critic
and novelist Lodewijk van Deyssel might
continue to read Dickens's work with
pleasure until a ripe old age, but he could
not call it literature.4 One of the youngest
of the new generation, Frans Coenen,
wrote an extensive study entitled 'Charles
Dickens and the Romantic Movement',
which was published in 1911 in De Gids -
the same magazine in which Potgieter had
formerly published his early Dickens
translations, and in which, thirty years
after Dickens's first appearance, the young
Zimmerman had reviewed the writer's
oeuvre up to and including 'Hard Times'.
Coenen concluded that in his view 'Dic
kens stood at the centre of an already
vague past'. His study was one of the most
comprehensive and probing ever written
about Dickens in the Netherlands, conside
ring the purely academic attention which
he later received in the handful of acade
mic theses, such as Wierstra's thesis about
the influence of Smollet on Dickens, and
Bogaerts' thesis on 'Chesterton and the
Victorian Age'.
But let us start by discussing Coenen, the
author of a number of pessimistic natura
listic novels and novellas. Coenen explai
ned Dickens's great success by pointing to
the extensive agreement in thought and
emotion between the writer and his Victo-
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