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I just finished ‘Dombey and Son’ by Charles Dickens; and at the same time finished George Orwell’s masterly essay about the author. Having read Dickens before I was aware of his caricatures and propensity for Manichaeism in his overly crude characters. But Orwell touched on Dickens’s other main failing: his inability to criticise the system that reined in his Victorian period, i.e. unregulated capitalism and its imperial concomitant. Dickens verily has odious capitalists, and sometimes the demons see the error of their way and ameliorate their more malevolent sides. But the implicit supposition is that if these people could only be a bit nicer (in this case Mr. Dombey, of Dombey and Son, an imperialist speculative trading house), everything would be just dandy, and we could all live happily on top of this class-divided, imperial society.
Orwell’s criticisms being on point and apposite doesn’t detract from Dickens magnificent command over the English language, and his ability to render scenes so clearly and with such metaphorical and imaginative pungency as to be pretty much unrivalled. Strange similes bring incongruous scenes and ideas together and some stick in the memory. Some banal and demotic events become epic occurrences in the hands of Dickens libertine imagination. Check out this description of a walk into London:

She often looked with compassion, at such a time, upon the stragglers who came wandering into London, by the great high-way hard, and who, footsore and weary, and gazing fearfully at the huge town before them, as if foreboding that their misery there would be but as a drop of water in the sea, or as a grain of sea-sand on the shore, went shrinking on, cowering before the angry weather, and looking as if the very elements rejected them. Day after day, such travellers crept past, but always, as she thought, in one direction – always towards the tow. Swallowed up in one phase or other of its immensity, towards which they seemed impelled by a desperate fascination, they never returned. Food for the hospitals, the churchyards, the prisons, the river, fever, madness, vice, and death – they passed on to the monster, roaring in the distance, and were lost.

This post is tagged charles dickens, george orwell