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David Parker
DICKENS'S TASTE
On 25 November 1842 Dickens wrote to John Forster about a play the latter had sent him.
It had thrown him, said Dickens, "into a perfect passion of sorrow".
To say that there is anything in its subject save what is lovely,
true, deeply affecting, full of the best emotion, the most earnest
feeling, and the most true and tender source of interest, is to say
that there is no light in the sun, and no heat in blood. It is full of
genius, natural and great thoughts, profound and yet simple and
beautiful in its vigour.
What can he be speaking of? One of Shakespeare's last plays that had somehow
escaped his notice? No such thing. It is Browning's A Blot in the Scutcheona now unread
play and certainly an unperformed one, about a young woman who grants her lover intimacy
before he has asked for her hand, and thus brings disaster on herself and all about her.
Dickens loved it. He goes on:
I know nothing that is so affecting, nothing in any book I
have ever read, as Mildred's recurrence to that 'I was so young - I
had no mother'. I know no love like it, no passion like it, no moul
ding of a splendid thing after its conception, like it. And I swear it
is a tragedy that MUST be played.
Now let us admit from the start that nothing is easier, with all the advantages of
hindsight, than scoffing at quirks in the taste of former generations, and let that admission
stand as a silent qualification to everything I say. Even so, resisting the old sweeping
accusations that Dickens was a philistine, resisting charges about his vulgarity and
decadence, it is still true to say that revelations about what he liked and didn't like are
capable of surprising us - or me at any rate. And his tastes in the drama are a case in
point.
His admiration for the Browning play is in fact one of the less surprising examples
among those I might have chosen. He loved Shakespeare, it is true, but that aside, his
theatrical instincts seemed to have drawn him chiefly towards farce and melodrama. The
sensational final scene of The Frozen Deepwhich so upset Maria Ternan and everyone
else, and which Dickens clearly felt to have provided one of the great dramatic experiences
of his life, is full of lines like, "Saved, saved for you! I may rest now - I may sleep at
last - the task is done, the struggle is over". That is one of the lines in fact spoken by
the character Dickens played.
If the vitality of his writing is anything to go by, Dickens seems to have enjoyed
dramatic performances he knew to be bad, or at least tinselly, very nearly as much as
those he thought were good. He enjoyed visiting the circus while he was in Broadstairs.
One company, he told Forster in 1845, put on a dramatization of Byron:
I went to a circus at Ramsgate on Saturday night, where
"Mazeppa" was played in three long acts without an H in it; as if for
