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it's the other way around. We know nothing about the internal spiritual life of
Pickwick or Micawber; we are free to form our own opinion. But their outward
appearance: their hats, jackets, walking sticks and the littie tics that accompany them
through life, we are not permitted to form our own opinions about those. Corning
from a world in which everything changes and merges, the reader wanders into a
small, unchanging cosmos, inhabited by creations whose only reason for existing is
this they always remain themselves." (18)
Thus Bomans comes to a completely different judgement, in agreement with
Chesterton in viewing Dickens as a writer not of literary fiction but of mythology.
Dickens's reality is a mythical reality.
Social reality
Opposed to this view is that of the writer Theun de Vries. (19)' In 1950 he translated
A Tale of Two Cities, accompanied by a foreword. As a convinced communist at
that time (he wrote an Ode to Stalin) he was primarily interested in the social
conflict in the novel. This conflict is described as an emotional problem on the part
of the writer and not as the class warfare it actually is, according to De Vries:
"Dickens, like many democrats from the 19th century, had an abhorrence of anything
with a whiff of class warfare; even the concept 'class' only appears very summarily
in his view of society. He experienced the social contradictions and their resulting
conflicts mainly in his emotional life, as endearing and pitiful,encouraging the rich
to concern themselves with the lot of the poor."
According to De Vries, the double portrait of the Defarges, man and wife, is the
most successful. They are true plebeian types, particularly the 'consistent terrorist
Madame Defarge, who is depicted with a mixture of admiration and horror." He goes
on to say 'In such figures Dickens's own battle of conscience is expressed for
with this author, every moment of life, even political and social ones, passes through
the heart and the mind before it is given a place in the work of art.'
De Vries discerns three phases in Dickens's work, each with its own reality. After
the spontaneous creative urge of the Pickwick Papers comes the grimmer reality of
Dombey and Son, and then finally the dark reality of the final period, to which A
Tale of Two Cities belongs. Dickens experienced a gradual awareness of the fact
that sick and suffering society would not be helped by charity and love of one's
fellow man. That awareness, according to De Vries, turned Dickens into a tormented
man, who quite rightly wrote in the foreword to A Tale of Two Cities that he had
made everything that is experienced and suffered in the book so real that he himself
experienced and suffered it. In this sense, according to De Vries, 'Dickens, who in
the second half of his life lived an elegant and carefree life and left his children two
hundred thousand pounds, reveals himself in his true colours, those of a citizen who
is worried and plagued by his bad conscience'. More contemporary with our own
day is Maarten't Hart (20), whose analysis is much closer to that of Bomans than he
would actually like to admit. In his shrewd 1979 article, he lists three characteristics
that make Dickens so special. All three have something to do with realism. The
