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a wager. Ewen, and edds, and orrors, and ands, were as plentiful as
blackberries; but the letter H was neither whispered in Ewen, nor
muttered in Ell, nor permitted to dwell in any form on the confines
of the sawdust.
Two years later he enjoyed just as absurd an example of pure spectacle:
Some wild beasts (in cages) have come down here, and involved
us in a whirl of dissipation. A young lady in complete armour - at
least, in something that shines very much, and is exeedingly scaley-
goes into the den of ferocious lions, tigers, leopards, etc., and
pretends to go to sleep upon the principal lion, upon which a rustic
keeper, who speaks through his nose, exclaims, "Behold the abazid
power of woobad!" and we all applaud tumultuously.
Perhaps it is unfair to suggest deficiences in Dickens's taste in the drama, living
as he did during what must be the worst of all periods of English drama, when presumably
almost no one knew how things needed to be. Still, much the same state of affairs prevailed
when Wilde and Shaw began to transform the drama fifty years later. We can at least
say that, despite his enthusiasm, Dickens lacked the perspicacity to change the theatre of
his day.
When we turn to less literary arts, we again often encounter in Dickens's taste a
ready acceptance of the choices of his day and class. A connoisseur alert to lasting merit
in painting, during the period of Dickens's prosperity, could have been buying Constables
and Turners. When CD Jr sold his father's engravings in 1878, we find among them just
one Turner. And what were Dickens's tastes in painting? Daniel Maclise, Clarkson Stanfield,
Augustus Egg, Frank Stone, Sir David Wilkie, Edwin Landseer, Charles Leslie, E.M. Ward
and so on. Dickens's own friends and acquaintances, by and large, but doubtless so because
Dickens found them kindred spirits. And for us, their works tend to symbolize what we
mean when we speak of Victorian painting: not the great figures from a former age, like
Turner, nor those that anticipated the next, like Whistler, nor rebels like the Pre-Raphaeli-
tes, but the portraitists and genre painters who made it their business to document the
sentiments of the middle classes. Dickens's response to some of the great monuments of
western art is recorded in the ironically named Pictures from Italy. This is what he has
to say about Parma Cathedral:
This Cathedral is odorous with the rotting of Correggio's
frescoes in the Cupola. Heaven knows how beautiful they may have
been at one time. Connoisseurs fall into raptures with them now; but
such a labyrinth of arms and legs: such heaps of foreshortened limbs,
entangled and involved and jumbled together: no operative surgeon,
gone mad, could imagine in his wildest delirium.
The situation is perhaps less simple than all this suggests. Dickens did have moments
of doubt. After seeing the Paris exposition of 1855, he wrote of his English painter friends,
"It is of no use disguising the fact that what we know is wanting in the men is wanting
in their works There is a horrid respectability about most of the best of them - a
little, finite, systematic routine in them, strangely expressive of the state of England
herself." If he was able to lapse into that respectability himself, and to see in Millais's
