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"Christ in the House of His Parents", "the lowest depths of what is mean, repulsive and
revolting", he was all the same able to become reconciled to Millais and the other Pre-
Raphaelites. Nor, I think, should we ignore the rethinking about Victorian painting now
going on, urging that the term be considered a less opprobrious one. Maclise in particular,
I think, increasingly demands reappraisal. Even so, I think it fair to say, particularly when
we consider what Dickens hung on his walls, that his tastes in painting were pretty much
identical to those of the newly rich middle classes whom he didn't hesitate to criticise.
When we turn to music, we find that his tastes were even less elevated. He had a
good ear, it is true, and could easily pick up a song. He enjoyed opera, and is said to have
enjoyed the virtuoso playing of the violinist, Joseph Joachim. But once again, the records
of his response to music show him, with characteristic momentary enthusiasm, over-praising
the merely worthy, calling Arthur Sullivan's music for "The Tempest" "a very great work",
for instance. Indeed, if once again we concentrate on what stimulated his writing, we are
prompted to suggest that his musical imagination never grew much beyond the state it
was in when, as a tiny boy, he used to sing comic songs with his sister Fanny at the
Mitre Inn in Chatham. The sentimental or comic song seems to have been at the heart of
the pleasure Dickens derived from music. There's some evidence that attempts were made
to teach him the piano and the violin, but the attempts were unsuccessful. The instrument
he did succeed in mastering was the accordian: not the complicated piano-accordian of
today, but a simple Victorian squeeze-box, with a maximum of twelve keys. And what did
he use it for? Well, he tells us what he used it for on the Britannia en route for America:
"You can't think with what feeling I play "Home Sweet Home" every night, or how
pleasantly sad it makes us What is "The Village Coquettes" but a sequence of comic
and sentimental songs?
Architecture is an art Dickens seems most to have admired in its absence. Writing
about Broadstairs in Our English Watering Place (1851), he declares, "We have a pier - a
queer old wooden pier, fortunately without the slightest pretensions to architecture, and
very picturesque in consequence". He seems to have had his knife into the architects. This
sort of phrasing crops up more than once. Describing Gad's Hill Place to Cerjat in 1858,
he says "My little place is a grave red brick house (time of George the First, I suppose),
which I have added to and stuck bits upon in all manner of ways, so that it is as pleasantly
irregular, and as violently opposed to all architectural ideas, as the most hopeful man could
possibly desire".
