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Romanticism has to be qualified by our realization of the anti-Romantic critique that his
work dramatizes and constructs.
But one also has to add that Dickens's attitude is entirely ambivalent. He is above
all the poet of the city. Romantic poetry as a whole, and at its greatest, celebrates the
natural world; and Nature is something that Dickens is never quite sure about. In theory
he is in favour of it, but in practice, when he actually starts to describe it, with rare
exceptions it sounds faked, stage backcloths only, which will be snatched away at any
moment and even when dropped are wobbling all the time. Dickens in the city is different.
He loves it and loathes it, the dark, the dreck, the dirt, the waste, the seediness, the
disintegrating habitations of modern Babylon; and this vision can be carried over successfully
to views of the countryside when it extends no further than the estuary and the marshes
(as in the opening of Great Expectations).
Consider the openings of Bleak House:
LONDON. Michaelmas Term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor
sitting in Lincoln's Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much
mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the
face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a
Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard
up Holborn-hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a
soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snow-
flakes - gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of
the sun. Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better;
splashed to their very blinkers. Foot passengers, jostling one another's
umbrellas, in a general infection of ill-temper, and losing their foot
hold at street-corners, where tens of thousands of other foot-
passengers have been slipping and sliding since the day broke (if this
day ever broke), adding new deposits to the crust upon crust of mud,
sticking at those points tenaciously to the pavement, and accumulating
at compound interest.
Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green
aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the
tiers of shipping, and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty)
city. Fog on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights. Fog
creeping into the cabooses of collier-brigs; fog lying out on the yards,
and hovering in the rigging of great ships; fog drooping on the
gunwales of barges and small boats. Fog in the eyes and throats of
ancient Greenwich pensioners, wheezing by the firesides of their wards;
fog in the stem and bowl of the afternoon pipe of the wrathful skipper,
down in his close cabin; fog cruelly pinching the toes and fingers of
his shivering little 'prentice boy on deck. Chance people on the bridges
peeping over the parapets into a nether sky of fog, with fog all round
them, as if they were up in a balloon, and hanging in the misty clouds.
Gas looming through the fog in divers places in the streets,
much as the sun may, from the spongy fields, be seen to loom by
husbandman and ploughboy. Most of the shops lighted two hours before
their time -as the gas seems to know, for it has a haggard and
unwilling look.
or Our Mutual Friend:
In these times of ours, though concerning the exact year there
is no need to be precise, a boat of dirty and disreputable appearance,
with two figures in it, floated on the Thames, between Southwark
