Abstract
Dickens the Novelist (1970) has nearly 400 pages, of which Mrs Leavis has contributed over two-thirds. And even a glance at the detailed table of contents (Appendix B) makes the scope of her contribution strikingly clear. However, the jointly subscribed Preface reminds us that Leavis’s three chapters were the foundation of the book—the critique of Hard Times having first appeared in 1947, that of Dombey and Son in 1962, and that of Little Dorrit being substantially lecture material Leavis had used while Chichele Lecturer at Oxford in 1964. Evidently Mrs Leavis later wrote her four chapters and six appendices around these on an ad hoc basis (pp. xi–xii).
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Notes
George Ford disputes this, rebuking Leavis for hinting that this essay ‘single-handedly’ pioneered ‘a revival of interest in Dickens’—Nineteenth Century Fiction, XXVI (1971) 100. But Leavis only says that ‘this title and this essay have since been accepted as marking a new approach both to Dickens (and effecting a revolution in Dickens criticism) and to the art of the novel generally’ (Dickens the Novelist, p. xi). ‘Revival of interest’ is Ford’s interpolation.
Robert Garis, ‘Dickens Criticism’, Victorian Studies, VII (June 1964) 378–9.
Ibid., p. 378. And cf. Georg Lukács: ‘Today people repeatedly condemn any serious emphasis on the what [of art] as inartistic’—Writer and Critic, p. 19.
George H. Ford did this with particular efficiency in his review article for Nineteenth Century Fiction, XXVI (1971) 95–113, though even he overlooked Leavis’s commendatory review of Edmund Wilson’s The Wound and the Bow in Scrutiny, II (1942) 72–3, where Leavis referred to Wilson’s essay on Dickens as ‘intelligent and illuminating’. How can Leavis have forgotten that he wrote this? Most probably on rereading Dickens he found that Wilson had pursued his psychoanalytic reading of Dickens to the exclusion of the truth that ‘the novelist’s art is an art of using words’, as he phrased it in that review.
Scrutiny, VI (1938) 437.
In a review of Ruth Adam’s I’m Not Complaining, Scrutiny, VII (1938) 85.
‘Dostoevsky or Dickens?’ (review of William Faulkner, Light in August) Scrutiny, II (1933) 91–3.
‘The Critical Writings of George Santayana’, Scrutiny, IV (1935) 278–95; and ‘The Literary Life Respectable’, Scrutiny, IX (1940) 170–6. And see The Great Tradition, pp. 29–31.
George Santayana, ‘Dickens, 1921’, Soliloquies in England (1922); repr. in Selected Critical Writings of George Santayana, ed. Norman Henfrey (Cambridge, 1968), vol. I, pp. 189, 190 and 192. Compare, for instance, Mrs Leavis’s view that the portraits of Sir Leicester Dedlock and Dr Strong are ‘the painful guesses of the uninformed and half-educated writing for the uninformed and half-educated’—Fiction and the Reading Public, p. 157.
‘Charles Dickens’, Inside the Whale (1940); repr. in Stephen Wall (ed.), Charles Dickens (Harmondsworth, 1970) pp. 312–13.
Scrutiny, XI (1942) 73.
Robert Garis, The Dickens Theatre: A Reassessment of the Novels (1965) pp. 8, 24 and 39. This is only a Shandean—Joycean Dickens, we might infer.
Ibid., p. 53.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Robert Giddings, ‘The Dickens Forum’, Dickens Studies Newsletter, VI (June 1975) 47–55. Page references will appear parenthetically after the relevant quotations.
T. S. Eliot, ‘The Function of Criticism’, Selected Essays (1951) p. 25.
The essential character of Leavis’s criticism closely corresponds to ideals expressed by Leslie Fiedler in ‘Toward an Amateur Criticism’, Kenyon Review, XII (1950) 561–74, and by Douglas Bush in ‘The Humanist Critic’, ibid., XIII (1951) 81–92. Fiedler believes that ‘in intent, the good critic addresses the common reader, not the initiate’ because ‘the primary act of faith which makes criticism possible compels the critic under any circumstances to speak as if to men and not to specialists’ (XII, 563); ‘the act of evaluation remains … the vital center of criticism’ (p. 566); instead of ‘the sort of jargon most grossly typified in Kenneth Burke, a “treason of the clerks” become diction, anti-humane and autotelic in its implications’ (p. 571) the good critic uses ‘the language of conversation’, in ‘his own voice, idiosyncratic, personal’, and his vocabulary must be ‘humane’ (pp. 572–3).
As by George Watson in The Literary Critics: A Study of English Descriptive Criticism (Harmondsworth, 1973) p. 207.
Terry Eagleton, Marxism and Literary Criticism (1976) p. 20.
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© 1988 P.J.M. Robertson
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Robertson, P.J.M. (1988). The Leavises and Dickens. In: The Leavises on Fiction. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-09670-1_6
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