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the one was, the other was calculating and bourgeois'. Professor Michael Slater once
told me that for a long time the aristocracy considered Dickens 'plebeian', and
vulgar, no fit reading matter for aristocratic young girls (9)
Romantic reality
In the beginning of the twentieth century this so-called moral reality had gradually
disappeared as a result of changed social circumstances: the declining importance of
the aristocracy, the shock of the First World War, and of course the influence of the
ideas of Freud, who showed that there is hardly any difference between someone's
tic and his character. With the rise of psychology, the descriptions by Dickens of the
numerous characters became much better appreciated. Dickens came to be
considered as a good judge of human character and his characters were increasingly
often linked to 'real' life. In his book 'Charles Dickens en de romantiek' (1911),
Frans Coenen (10) says that the most important point is 'the reality or humanity of
the characters in Dickens's novels, their possibilities or impossibilities and, related
to this, Dickens's knowledge of human nature and psychological insights' (11).
Coenen saw in Dickens (and, by the way, in all the Victorians) an ability 'to lead
two lives alongside each other, one daily life in reality and one in the imagination.'
Both lives were considered to be 'real'. Dickens's contemporaries also regarded the
life of the imagination as 'real' because romantic fiction was placed alongside and
opposed to the hard reality of everyday life, so that readers would be able to come to
terms with that existence: it could comfort them, allow them to forget, and, in short,
lift the reader Out of that daily life. The moral virtues of characters such as Agnes
Wickfield and Walter Gay were not convincing any more as 'real' virtues. But were
the more everyday characters the Pecksniffs, Podsnaps, Skimpoles, Uriah Heeps
and hundreds of others considered more realistic in Coenen's day? No, says
Coenen, they were abstractions, not living beings. If Dickens 's characters are
sympathetic, then they are personified virtues, if they are unsympathetic, they are
caricatures, human posturings. The main characters often remain as stiff as dolls,
they are not the ones who develop in the course of the story. The plot is always
simple: virtue must be rewarded, vice punished. Coenen admired the inimitable way
in which Dickens had drawn his characters. Dickens's reality: he says, is not a moral
reality but a romantic reality, in other words, the reality of his imaginative eye, or, in
Heine's words, a depiction of reality that is not natur-treu but gemiits-treu. (12)'
Psychological reality
The tendency to psychoanalyse, present in embryonic form in Coenen's writings,
reaches its apex in an article by Simon Vestdijk (13) from 1952, entitled 'Dickens
als psycholoog' I IDickens as a psychologist (14). Vestdijk sees a new reality in
Dickens's works. He calls it the psychological reality that shines through the
theatrical, schematic and sometimes bombastic descriptions. Dickens is a genius in
that respect. According to Vestdijk, not nearly enough attention is paid to that
psychological reality: 'It would be hard to find a more colourful collection of
psychopaths, eccentrics, stray madmen, schizophrenics, imbeciles and hysterics than
in his novels the 'healthy' domestic novels of our forefathers!' The Victorian
