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and it is folly to seek a connoisseur's judgement in him. That should not be what we turn
to Dickens for.
Some readers and some critics, far from seeking to apologize for Dickens's tastes,
make a virtue out of a necessity and rejoice in the fact that he was "the common man writ
large". They praise him for documenting in his novels cockney enjoyment of his own
cockney tastes, for the humanity of the thing. Fair enough! That's at least enjoying what
we find in Dickens, and not a case of complaining about what we don't find. Better,
certainly, than finding excuses.
But is it the best we can do, in Dickens's defence, and is finding excuses really so
necessary? Are his tastes really things just to be explained away or made the best of?
My own answer, you will be astonished to hear, is no. I don't like a lot of things he liked,
and I like a lot of things he didn't like, but even so I recognize that the likes and dislikes
of so thoroughly an organized and dedicated genius are not things that can be separated
from his works which, for all their imperfections, are incomparable in their magic and
their power.
How, then, can the odd tastes and the great works be brought together and
encompassed in one vision? I should like to start the process by considering the nature
of Dickens's imagination. I don't think many will protest if I assert that Dickens had an
imagination that was essentially an active rather than a contemplative one. In this he
was characteristically Victorian. He would have approved, I think, of Matthew Arnold's
turning away from poetry to polemic prose and to active affairs (the school inspectorate
in his case). Dickens never weaned himself away from journalism. Throughout his career
he participated in successful and unsuccessful journalistic projects, seeking always not
just to depict the world around him but to change it too. And he was quite happy to think
of his novels as part of the same process. Not for Dickens, then, the aesthetic object,
the hurly-burly of the world calmed into stillness as a harmonious unity for serene
contemplation. Art for Dickens was doing, was change, was process, was narrative. A very
proper attitude for a novelist, one might remark in passing.
This by itself explains many of the peculiarities of his taste. Most of the things
he liked had what we might term narrative resonance. They declared themselves to be
part of a story, or indeed amounted to one; they spoke of history, organic growth,
character. When I was talking of Dickens's taste in painting I said he liked the Victorian
portraitists and genre painters. One reason why such painters were so popular, surely at
the expense of painters who in hindsight we find much more interesting, is that they
satisfied the Victorian appetite for narrative that Dickens shared or indeed epitomized.
Anyone who has ever bored or been bored by holiday photographs can understand the
narrative significance of portraits. And Dickens tended to use them in much the same way
as we do. I'm thinking of Maclise's group portrait of his children that he and Kate took
to America with them. Or he would enjoy something that was both a portrait and had
additional narrative interest added - such as the picture of Georgina Hogarth, again by
