Dickens and Hamlet

Abstract

‘If any one of Shakespeare’s plays was known by an individual during the Victorian era that play was Hamlet. ‘1 Valerie L. Gager’s claim about the popularity of Hamlet is perhaps difficult to substantiate, but there is no doubt that, of all Shakespeare’s plays, Hamlet was the play to which Dickens most often alluded.² At first sight Dickens’s interest in Hamlet may seem surprising. Dickens, or Mr Popular Sentiment as Trollope infamously called him, was accused of vulgarity and intellectual deficiency from his own day onwards. G. H. Lewes perhaps put the charges most bluntly, maintaining that there was not ‘a single thoughtful remark’ in the whole Dickens canon, and that Dickens ‘never was and never would have been a student’.³ Hamlet, on the other hand, became synonymous with the tortured, alienated intellectual at the play’s centre — a man superbly endowed with intelligent thoughts, but a little short on action. During the nineteenth century, when so many artists and thinkers felt themselves to be, in Isobel Armstrong’s term, ‘secondary’, Hamlet metamorphosed from a flawed Prince to the archetypal hero as artist and thinker.⁴ Dickens’s fascination with Hamlet, however, was not born of this hero-worship.