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Dickens which we might now consider to be false feeling. The poet Bloem (24)
expresses surprise at this in the foreword to his translation of The Cricket on the
Hearth:
"Dickens made great mistakes. That is something he has in commonwith many other
great writers, but few of them make such obvious mistakes, that are so emphasized.
These mistakes were naturally products of his time: insufferable sentimentality,
obnoxious bourgeois respectability, but nevertheless, it remains at least a partial
mystery why Dickens failed to resist the tendency to commit them. Not only that, he
seems to have indulged himself in them; even the greatest admiration cannot
mitigate this. But it's a sign of his great talent that the admiration survives despite
this criticism that would annihilate a lesser writer. Let us not forget that Dickens,
despite often ruining his most moving scenes by outbursts of false sentiment, has no
less often described events in so sober and poignant a way that even the best realist
cannot surpass him. Just think of Sir Leicester Dedlock, the rigid English aristocrat,
whose heart only succumbs to the great love for his wife after he is recovering from
a stroke, staring out of the window of his castle at the snow and waiting for her to
come back. (25)"
1 think the answer to Bloem's partial mystery is simply the fact that what we might
now feel to be offensive respectability was then regarded as realistic, and what we
might now judge as false sentiment was proper and 'real' feeling then. We certainly
make a distinction between Betsey Trotwood, who is flesh and blood, and Agnes
Wickfield who is not, but 1 think that for contemporaries they were equally 'real'.
As Bloem correctly remarks, the errors that we now perceive in Dickens's works
were a product of Dickens's time; the degree to which that time was so insufferably
sentimental is a question which we cannot deal with now. Coenen's and Bomans's
(26) response was that the superfluous expression of the inner life fulfilled a social
function in that hard time of emerging industrialisation. Sentimentality was
supposed to compensate for the insensitivity and cruelty of daily life in the
nineteenth century.Thus in the Netherlands at least every critic saw his own reality
in Dickens: Busken Huet saw an ideal and moral reality somewhat lacking in
Dickens and a theatrical reality that he had too much of. Frans Coenen speaks of
romantic reality, by which he means a flood of feelings and imagination which can
compensate for the hardships of everyday life (27). Vestdijk discussed the
psychological reality, Theun de Vries the social reality, Bomans the mythical reality
and 't Hart, inter alia, the realism of a child's-eye view. If we had examined more
writers, the reality count in Dickens would have increased. So is one writer right and
the others wrong? No, because all these 'realities' appear in Dickens, to greater or
lesser degrees and they happen often simultaneously. That is the root of his talent
and the secret of his success. That's also what Bloem says in his foreword. Even
with something so banal as the description of a cricket on a hearth, where the
piercing chirps resound through the house, we feel something different, something
grander:
"Of course this greater, wider background is only evident in Dickens in flashes. But
it has the potential to be there all the time, just as someone in a closed inner room
