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time he was there, by wearing, not their conventional black satin waistcoat of an evening,
but velvet waistcoats in vivid green and brilliant crimson. A young lady at a party thrown
for Dickens in Cincinnati thought him foppish, was particularly offended by his black
waistcoat embroidered with coloured flowers, and thought he wore too much jewelry. He
may well have looked very elegant, of course, but in this field too Dickens displays his
capacity for surprising us.
By now you may well be asking yourselves, "What is this man doing in charge of
the Dickens House, if he finds Dickens's tastes so very out of tune with his own"? Certainly
I find myself wishing from time to time that Dickens liked more of the things I like and
disliked more of the things I dislike. But am I alone in this feeling? I think not. I think
it a fairly common feeling among Dickens's readers today: both those who think of them
selves as cultivated and those who don't.
But let me say now that I don't let it worry me.
Why not?
Well, first of all let us consider things that may be said in mitigation of Dickens's
tastes.
In the first place, his was not an age in which the canons of taste were clear and
universally accepted. It was not a classic age with agreed sets of rules, agreed decorum
in the various arts. Indeed, when we are speaking of this particular field, we may profitably
say that Dickens lived at the very beginning of the modern age. There was an information
explosion and a technology explosion. People knew too much and learned too many new
tricks. They couldn't handle it all. The arts, and especially the practical arts like
architecture and public. Now we are used to all the information and to the rapid changes
in technology, and we do perhaps a bit better. But not very much better, surely. Though
I think we can now see that many Victorian buildings, for instance, are splendid pieces
of architecture (thanks to John Betjeman and others) we must surely agree that during
the Victorian age an astonishing proportion of the buildings put up were ugly. But can
we pride ourselves on doing much better, when we look around our cities today? Let us
frankly say, then, that it was a lot easier for Pope and Dr Johnson, and even Keats and
Byron, to see what was fine and what was worthless than it was for Dickens, and that
it's somewhat easier for us. Let's not ask of Dickens more than may be expected.
And while we're avoiding that error let us consider Dickens's education. Perhaps
the most fruitful period of formal education he had was at William Giles's school in
Chatham, when he was nine and ten. While that is an age at which many instinctive tastes
can be formed, it is not an age at which judgment may be taught. Then came the
educationally wasted and emotionally traumatic months of Camden Town, Gower Street,
the blacking factory and the Marshalsea, to be followed by two and a half years at
Wellington House Academy, a school often unkindly described I think, but clearly much
less treasured in Dickens's memory than William Giles's. By the time he was fifteen and a
quarter, Dickens was at work. He lacked the schooling necessary to make a connoisseur
