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is illustrated at the end of Great Expectations when Pip returns to the forge after eleven
years:
There, smoking his pipe in the old place by the kitchen
firelight, as hale and as strong as ever, though a little grey, sat Joe;
and there, fenced into the corner with Joe's leg, and sitting on my
own little stool looking at the fire, was - I again!
"My own little stool": that exemplifies, I think, what Dickens really enjoyed in
furniture: pieces full of memory. Perhaps the things that show this most clearly in his
own life are the nicknacks he insisted be on his desk, such as the famous china monkey.
Not only did he feel uneasy without them; he could scarcely write without them. The things
around him needed to speak to Dickens, not of their elegance particularly, but of their
place in the story of his life.
Having discovered this theme of narrative resonance, we do not need to look too
far for an explanation of Dickens's dandyism. The dandy, as such, is constantly making
statements about himself and his relation to society. In personal adornment, he makes
different choices from the rest of us, and from the differences we are to infer things
about him and things about ourselves. The dandy, as such, is telling us the story of his
life and ours.
Narrative resonance, then, is the explanation of Dickens's favouring the queer,
the quaint, the old and the odd - for favouring in his fiction, moreover, a background of
things that require just those epithets. This explains much about his tastes. It doesn't
justify them, however. Nor indeed does it explain everything. Admiring it as a narrative
vignette or as an expression of character doesn't really justify getting more pleasure out
of "Home Sweet Home" than out more ambitious and satisfying musical pieces. There's no
accounting for taste, of course, but lovers of "Home Sweet Home" can't complain if people
don't commend them for their musical discrimination. Moreover, I've not yet offered any
explanation of Dickens's odd tastes in the drama. It doesn't make much sense to talk about
narrative resonance there. What drama is without it?
It's with the business of theatrical performance, then, that I propose to start, in
my attempt to suggest to you a kind of justification of Dickens's tastes. A kind of justifica
tion, I say, because I don't think we can go all the way and make ourselves admire every
thing that he liked. Dickens was human - all too human sometimes - and as such imper
fect. Not everything he liked can be justified. He would probably have been a happier
and better man if some of his tastes had been different. Yet for all that, he had the
amazing capacity of genius to capitalize on its own deficiencies. He took the tastes that
chance and a skimped education had formed in him, wrought upon them with his
imagination, not without some cost to his personal life, I think, and transformed them,
by and large, into formidable resources.
