14
"Dickens's novels are not really reading matter for adults. There are no deep
psychological observations in them; they show no more than ordinary insight into
human nature; the motives behind our actions are not exposed by the expert hand of
an anatomist. There are no great characters in the books either; no depictions of men
or women that readers can hold up against themselves."
Dickens sees only the externals, is enthralled by the exceptional and the excessive
and thus creates stagy individuals, with a tic instead of a character. Busken Huet was
not the only Dutch critic with this opinion. In two anonymous reviews of Great
Expectations, the 'eccentric' characters are condemned and the story written off as a
fable. The main character, Pip, is uninteresting and one reviewer even ended with
the words: 'the great expectations are great malversations'(6). Which writers were
praised for their true-to-life depictions of characters then? People like Charlotte
Yonge and Mrs Henry Wood, who wrote what are now considered to be indigestible
novels of manners. The moral and idealistic description of good or bad heroes and
heroines was what was unanimously felt to be 'realistic'. The joy or sorrow of a
mother is described 'completely true to nature', the depiction of the characters in
Yonge's The Two Guardians is 'outstanding': 'This is what people are like, with
their faults and their virtues'.
What modem readers notice is a complete reversal of this valuation. The further
Dickens lies behind us, the more true to life, realistic and recognisable we find his
characters. A hundred years after Busken Huet, Godfried Bomans wrote:
'all the characters live, they have not been thought up by a resourceful brain, they
have been fashioned by a creator, in three dimensions, so that we can walk around
them and observe them from all sides' (7)1 Even Maarten 't Hart, no fan of
Bomans's observations, commented on the many repetitions and exaggerations in
Dickens's works: 'People really do misunderstand each other as much as they do in
novels by Dickens. They really do carry on such long monologues while always
using the same turns of phrase and expressions. Every day you meet a real Mrs
Nickleby and each week you read articles by the Mrs Jellyby's (8)'
This reversal of appreciation is not something that happened suddenly, it has grown
slowly. Nor is it an exclusively Dutch phenomenon. At the time of Dickens's death
the search for 'truth' in his works was a search for moral truth and consequently the
'real' characters in his novels had to be moral characters. As Busken Huet put it,
they had to 'be royal souls who played an elevated role in the battle of life'. This
sentence is typical the battle of life is not a battle purely for survival but a moral
battle, and that battle was seen as realistic. However, that elevated, aristocratic tone
is completely missing in Dickens according to Busken Huet. On the one hand, his
few aristocrats are either imbeciles like cousin Feenix and Lord Frederick Verisopht,
or scoundrels like Sir Mulberry Hawk, Chester and the Marquis St Evrémonde. On
the other hand, the elevated role in the moral battle is played by simple folk, like
Mark Tapley, Little Dorrit, Walter Gay, Agnes Wickfield. In our modern eyes, they
are not Dickens's most successful creations. Because they did not come from the
'elevated' world, Dickens was considered to be 'plebeian'. Busken Huet described
Dickens as a 'popular preacher' indeed he said that he was uncivilised. This is
evident when he compares Dickens's separation (the separation again, Busken Huet
was obsessed by it) with that of the aristocrat Byron: 'As passionate, even bloody as
