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C.C. Barfoot
SWIVELLING WITH DICKENS AS ROMANTIC AND ANTIROMANTIC*)
There are at least two traditions in the English novel (and certainly more). The traditions
I am about to describe are not pure, since they touch at various points and not all the
examples within these two categories are alike. Perhaps it would be better to consider
them as diverging fictional targets, opposed poles to which different novels are moving
but rarely actually reach. And sometimes, curiously enough, a single novel may in various
sections be seen to be moving in opposite directions. To simplify grossly then, one tradition,
one pole, of the English novel is that of a realistic comedy of manners: derived from the
stage perhaps in such plays as Congreve's The Way of the World and other Restoration
plays and their later eighteenth-century bourgeois and sentimental derivations. The novelists
one would want to associate with this tradition would be Jane Austen, of course, George
Eliot (in some aspects of her work), Thackeray and Trollope in some respects, Henry James
as an inheritor of Jane Austen and George Eliot, and, in the twentieth century, E.M. Forster
and Angus Wilson, perhaps. The other tradition, or pole, is a Gothic Romantic one (in
dramatic terms to be seen, perhaps, as being derived from certain features of Shakespearian
and Jacobean tragedy): in this case aspects of the original Gothic novel as invented and
developed by Horace Walpole The Castle of Otranto, 1764), Ann Radcliffe The Mysteries
of Udolpho1794), M.G. Lewis The Monk, 1796) and C.R. Maturin (Melmoth the Wanderer,
1820) are to be found incorporated and developed in the novels of the Brontes (Wuthering
Heights, 1847, Jane Eyre, 1847, and Villette, 1853), and such later novelists as Thomas
Hardy and D.H. Lawrence (even a contemporary novelist like Iris Murdoch displays the
influence of a Gothic strain in her novels, and it is a dominant streak in most fantasy
writing, including Science Fiction).
This is terribly simplified, of course. Where are Defoe, Richardson, Fielding, Sterne,
Smollett in these traditions? -- which must be a particularly pertinent question since
Dickens, certainly, was much influenced by at least two of these eighteenth-century
novelists. However, to pursue these simplifications a little further, before beginning to
consider where exactly Dickens stands in regard to them, one might summarize the effect
of these polarizations in the following way.
The realistic tradition of the comedy of manners is essentially anti-Romantic, laugh
ing at Romantic illusions and scorning the sins of egotism and the crimes of acquisition and
aggrandizement that Romanticism (Romance and Romantic fantasy) prompts, promotes and
encourages (note the early history of the words "romance" and "romantic" in the OED,
with the implications of foolishness and delusion). As an early progenitor of one aspect
Te verschijnen in de Dutch Quarterly Review in de loop van 1989.
