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primary one is the humour with which Dickens describes reality. Dickens is the
funniest writer in the World:
"with more types of humour than anyone else, from the most obvious burlesque, via
all gradations from the comicality of characters, situations, manners, speech, parody,
cruel and friendly banter, to finally the subtleness of laughing through your tears.
The 'funniest writer in the world' is definitely not an exaggeration. The second
characteristic of Dickens is what Hobsbawm calls his 'cinematographic vision'.
When reading him it is as if you are watching a film. The third extraordinary
characteristic of Dickens is that he shows you the world as you saw it when you
were a child. Dyson says about Our Mutual Friend, 'Some characters seem to have
come straight Out of my childhood'. 1 think that anyone who reads Dickens would
be able to say that.(21)"
Of course, 't Hart was not the first to notice this, but the emphasis he lays on the
childish reality is well worth noting. Dickens had and maintained the vie of a child
in all his best work, up to and including Edwin Drood, and because we have all been
children, that viewpoint is very familiar. It is particularly evident in descriptions of
details of appearance or behaviour that only a child's eye would notice. One of the
best examples in my opinion is little Pip's imaginings of how his parents looked
when he studies their tombstones and those of his five infant brothers:
"The shape of the letters on my father's, gave me an odd idea that he was a square,
stout, dark man, with curly black hair. From the character and turn of the inscription,
'Also Georgiana Wife of the Above', 1 drew a childish conclusion that my mother
was freckled and sickly. To five littie stone lozenges, each about a foot and a half
long, which were arranged in a neat row beside their grave, and were sacred to the
memory of five little brothers of me, I am indebted for a belief 1 religiously
entertained that they had all been bom on their backs with their hands in their
trousers-pockets, and had never taken them out in this state of existence. (22)"
For't Hart, these three characteristics make Dickens someone who has no equal. He
has 'the ability to create unforgettable people who are more alive to you than
anybody in a novel by any other author'. They are real not only in the writer's
imagination, but also in that of the reader.
Conclusion
When we review the criticisms of Dutch writers, the words real and realistic turn out
to be key words. Within the course of a century, they have changed their meaning
radically. What contemporaries of Dickens such as Busken Huet considered to be
realistic and 'real' we might now consider to be idealistic, unreal, even false. The
moral battle between Good and Evil, regarded by them as 'real', we might regard as
either kitsch (23) or as a battle that takes place in the soul and not in flesh and blood,
in short, as an idealistic problem. On the other hand, what we now value as realistic
in Dickens was considered by Busken Huet as either vulgar or a product of the
imagination, that is, as not real but artificial, like the blue sky painted on a backdrop
for a play. Leading on from this, one should also be aware of the sentimentality of
