exact truth. The exact truth must be
there; but the merit or art in the
narrator, is the manner of stating the
truth. As to which thing in literature, it
always seems to me that there is a
world to be done. And in these times,
when the tendency is to be frightfully
literal and catalogue-like - to make the
thing, in short, a sort of sum in
reduction that any miserable creature
can do in that way - I have an idea
(really founded on the love of what I
profess), that the very holding of
popular literature through a kind of
popular dark age, may depend on such
fanciful treatment,24)
Dickens is here giving expression to a
central axiom of his artistic creed, namely
his belief in the essential value to human
life of vital imagination, which it is a
primary function of art to nourish.
Imagination, or "fancy", as Dickens more
frequently called it, was for him a
responsiveness to things outside the self, a
curiosity, wonder, and delight in the
plenitude of existence, a willingness to
contemplate ordinary reality from new and
suprising perspectives. Fancy, in his view,
offered a relief from the tedium of mundane
existence and encouraged social harmony
through its power of awakening bonds of
fellow-feeling.
And fancy, Dickens believed, was precisely
the human faculty that the theatre appealed
to. As he said in a speech in 1857,
I hold it to be more than ever essential
to the character of a great people, that
the imagination, with all its innumerable
graces and charities, should be tenderly
nourished; and foremost among the means
of training it must always stand the
stage, with its wonderful pictures of
passion, with its magnificent illusions, and
with its glorious literature,25)
The characteristics of the theatre of the age
clarify the nature of this stimulus to the
imagination. The theatre as Dickens knew it
was not representational in the sense of
creating an illusion of reality; its value was
not the verification of a "slice of life".
Rather, theatre was performance, pushing
against the boundaries of known reality,
revealing undreamt-of possibilities, shedding
new light on ordinary existence, and thereby
enlarging experience. So too Dickens in his
novels, purposely dwelling on the romantic
side of familiar things, created an art which
expanded readers' perception through its
appeal to their imagination. Mr Bounderby,
the pompous blowhard of Hard Times, stands
as the antithesis of such activity.
Fabricating an utterly fallacious image of
himself for his own personal aggrandizement,
Bounderby rejects the "exact truth" which
must form the core of fanciful treatment.
His invention is not fancy, but deceit; not
role-playing for the delight of others, but
misrepresentation at the expense of everyone
around him. it is the very reverse of the
theatrical values embodied by the artistes of
Sleary's circus.
For Dickens, the relation between theatre
and life was a fascinating mirror image.
Such, at least, was the claim he made in his
early essay "The Pantomime of Life", in
