Selected Short Fiction (3 page)

The demonic aura of Fagin in
Oliver Twist
and the fairy-tale illusions of Pip in
Great Expectations
are only two of the extra-natural metaphors and motifs which proliferate in all of Dickens's work. With the exception of the
Christmas Books,
however, he had little opportunity to focus on such features save in a few short pieces like those included here. The narrator of ‘A Christmas Tree' noted that ghost stories are particularly appropriate ‘round the Christmas fire'; ‘The Story of the Goblins who stole a Sexton‘, at the height of the Christmas celebration at Dingley Dell in the very centre of
Pickwick Papers,
emerges fromjust such a setting. Like the
Christmas Books
which it anticipates, this story of Gabriel Grub's metamorphosis from hate to love of mankind, achieved through supernatural means, is a form of fairy tale;
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as in the
Christmas Books,
the potential terror of the supernatural agents is intentionally undercut by Dickens's humour. ‘The Baron of Grogzwig', from the sixth chapter of
Nickolas Nicklehy,
follows a similar pattern, although here, perhaps prophetically in view of Dickens's own later domestic difficulties, the note of humour seems slightly strained. In ‘To Be Read at Dusk' and the more skilful and mature ‘Signalman', on the contrary, the chilling sensation on a reader's spine is all important; events move imperceptibly and disturbingly from the ordinary to the extraordinary world. ‘A Confession Found in a Prison in the Time of Charles the Second', written by Dickens for his abortive
Master Humphrey's Clock,
introduces no supernatural agents. Nevertheless, as in some of the sensational tales in
Pickwick Papers,
its grimly implausible details seem designed to evoke the sensation of the ‘uncanny' which Freud derives from ‘a conflict of judgement whether things which have been “surmounted” and are regarded as incredible are not, after all, possible'.
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Of all of Dickens's short fiction, such tales of terror come closest to the genre which Poe made famous; indeed in a review of an American edition of
Master Humphrey's Clock,
Poe described ‘A Confession Found in a Prison in the Time of Charles the Second' as ‘a paper of remarkable power'
(Graham's Magazine,
May 1841). The common denominator of these five tales is a temporary, in Dickens's terminology ‘fanciful‘, flight from the ordinary, humdrum events of life. Admittedly, ‘The Story of the Goblins who stole a Sexton' and, to an even greater degree, ‘The Baron of Grogzwig' are inferior to
A Christmas Carol,
and, of the three designedly terrifying tales, perhaps only ‘The Signalman' ranks with the masterpieces in this vein by writers such as Poe, LeFanu, and Lovecraft. Viewed as individual compositions, the significance of these tales by Dickens may be easily overlooked. Viewed as a group, as recurring exercises in an obviously escapist vein which Dickens particularly valued, and as concentrated manifestations of strains which run throughout his novels, they should not be casually dismissed.

Fancies prompted by Christmas trees, or other suitable stimuli, are by no means confined to ‘Winter Stories', and a large number of Dickens's best short pieces, like ‘A Christmas Tree' itself, simply capture a perceptive first-person observer's responses to and thoughts about his own immediate situation. Like the eighteenth-century descriptive essays from which they stem, these writings sometimes seem to be neither fiction nor non-fiction; Steele himself felt it necessary to note in the
Tatler
(no. 172) his ‘libertine manner of writing by way of essay'. No editor could exclude such pieces, some of which are brilliantly imaginative; that would be the kind of Podsnappish gesture which Dickens himself would have ridiculed. Extended descriptions in Dickens's novels such as that of the fog at the beginning of
Bleak House
are fantastically heightened versions of the literal settings which lie behind them, and the same transforming power flowed readily into Dickens's sketches. Mario Praz has suggested that for Dickens ‘the road which presented itself most naturally ... was that of the essay on things observed', although, in Praz's words, the kind of observation which such pieces contain is far from simply factual -‘I said “things observed”: but things observed through a peculiar distorting lens, fantastically distorted ... Dickens's world is akin to that of Doré, of Hugo, of Breughel, and of the gargoyles on Gothic cathedrals.'
ⁱ
More recently, J. Hillis Miller has argued that any reading of the seemingly journalistic reportings in
Sketches by Boz
inevitably hovers between the view of them as figurative and the view of them as realistic representation:

What had seemed ‘realistic' comes to be seen as figurative, and the radically fictive quality of the
Sketches
as a whole comes into the open. Back and forth between these two interpretations the reader oscillates. Neither takes precedence over the other, but the meaning of the text is generated by the mirage of alternation between them.
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In essence, the
Sketches
are not an imitation but an interpretation of the familiar world. These
Sketches
and the even more sophisticated versions which Dickens contributed later to
Household Words
and
All the Year Round
offer an incomparable laboratory in which to explore the boundaries of fiction, and the best products of Dickens's own experiments in this laboratory are too valuable to ignore. The selections included here under the heading ‘Impressionistic Sketches' are fictive in the sense that their primary purpose is not an objective description of particular scenes but a recreation of these scenes through the eyes of an observant and thoughtful bystander. Like Monet's paintings of Rouen cathedral, they take their nature from the particular moment and particular mood in which they have been seen.

In the extracts from
Sketches by Boz,
for example, we see everyday events and people as this bystander sees them; we perceive their entertaining and striking qualities only as they have already been perceived. It is no accident that we occasionally spot this figure in the actual process of creating pictures. In ‘Seven Dials', he pauses to put together the elements of a grim ‘still life':

Brokers' shops, which would seem to have been established by humane individuals, as refuges for destitute bugs, interspersed with announcements of day-schools, penny theatres, petition-writers, mangles, and music for balls or routs, complete the ‘still life' of the subject; and dirty men, filthy women, squalid children, fluttering shuttlecocks, noisy battledores, reeking pipes, bad fruit, more than doubtful oysters, attenuated cats, depressed dogs, and anatomical fowls, are its cheerful accompaniments.

Dickens's style of description is down-to-earth but purposefully distorted. The speaker's vision is rooted in the noise, dirt, and odour of a London slum, but, as he gazes, the scene becomes more than a verbal photograph of urban decay. As in Dickens's mature treatments of London and its inhabitants, human beings are reduced to the level of things, while non-human things assume lives of their own.
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‘Squalid children' fall into the same category as ‘fluttering shuttlecocks'; ‘dirty men' exist on the same level as ‘reeking pipes'. Insects become as ‘destitute' as the neighbourhood which they infest and seek refuge in secondhand stores. ‘More than doubtful' oysters may not only give pause to a prospective purchaser but also wonder themselves how they came to be in such a place. ‘Anatomical fowls' appear ready to give up their existence and lay themselves out to be dissected. Dickens's intention in this passage is largely playful - perhaps too playful, as his heavy-handed use of the word ‘cheerful' suggests-and the picture thus created is an elementary illustration of the letting ‘loose' at times of ‘mere description' about which Forster complained. In later sketches such as ‘The Calais Night-Mail', this imaginative heightening through verbal play becomes strikingly more polished.

Throughout these pieces, the point of view of the thoughtful observer is used. Sometimes, as in ‘The Election for Beadle' from
Sketches by Boz,
his tone bears traces of condescension; more often, especially in later pieces, it is wryly sympathetic and nostalgic. In
Sketches by Boz
(the title of a collection of short writings first published between 1833 and 1836) the
persona
of Boz appears fortuitous, and a reader is given relatively little information about this personage himself. Nonetheless, Dickens evidently found the stance of the idly speculative bystander congenial. He returned to it in the 1850s when his editorship of
Household Words
gave him an opportunity for further pieces in this vein, and the unspecified narrator of sketches from
Household Words
like ‘Lying Awake‘, ‘Our School', and ‘A Flight' is unmistakably an older and more experienced Boz. Still later, in the figure of the Uncommercial Traveller in
All the Year Round,
Dickens initiated another series of sketches narrated by an even more polished version of this now familiar voice: ‘Figuratively speaking, I travel for the great house of Human Interest Brothers, and have rather a large connection in the fancy goods way. Literally speaking, I am always wandering here and there...' This wandering, observant narrator, of course, bears a close affinity to Dickens himself who was an energetic explorer of familiar and unfamiliar sights. Many of these ‘Impressionistic Sketches' contain fragments of autobiography; some of them, such as ‘Dullborough Town' and ‘Nurse's Stories' are often used as sources of information about Dickens's happy years in Chatham before his family moved to London, where financial improvidence brought his father temporarily to a debtor's prison, forced Dickens at the age of twelve to work for a few indelibly unhappy months in a blacking warehouse, and terminated for ever his childhood sense of security and freedom from care. However, there are obvious hazards in uncritically reading such pieces as mere confessions - Dickens came to Chatham at the age of five while the Uncommercial Traveller describes Dullborough Town as the location of ‘scenes among which my earliest days were passed' — and available evidence indicates that Dickens manipulated material from his own life to strengthen the voice of his narrator.

The piece entitled ‘Our School' illustrates this point. Just as Elia's apparent recollections in ‘Christ's Hospital Five-and-Thirty Years Ago' fuse Lamb's own memories with those of his friend Coleridge, so the picture in ‘Our School' is not a completely accurate representation of its author's past. Forster observes that much of ‘Our School' is modelled upon Dickens's own experience at Wellington House Academy, but he also remarks that Dickens did not attain the academic distinctions which the narrator of this sketch attributes to himself. In addition, the narrator contrasts ‘Our School' with his earlier ‘Preparatory Day-School‘, talks about friends who boarded at ‘Our School', avoids any mention of his own living arrangements, and thus suggests that he too was a boarder, although Dickens explained to Forster that he had been a day student at Wellington House Academy. These subtle differences between Dickens's own experience and the experience which he portrays appear to show that his intention was to depict a thoughtful personality remembering a typical experience. The background of the piece is that of a normal, perfectly adjusted schoolboy; there is no suggestion that this schoolboy, like Dickens himself, might recently have escaped from a psychologically harrowing occupation or that his father, just out of prison, could barely afford his education. Part of this contrast undoubtedly stems from Dickens's lifelong reluctance to discuss his early misery in the blacking warehouse, but, two years earlier, he had fictionalized that very episode in
David Copperfield.
The reason behind his portrayal of such a natural childhood in this sketch seems to be literary strategy more than personal compulsion. The narrator's nostalgia is that of any adult remembering happy days, and he includes details of his bygone academic achievements and his apparent lack of family complications to make the sketch more convincing.

Thus Dickens's goal in such pieces is not accurate documentation but the achievement of particular effects, and, like ‘A Christmas Tree', some of the resulting sketches openly declare their freedom from the confines of literality. Boz begins ‘A Visit to Newgate' with the assurance ‘that we do not intend to fatigue the reader with any statistical accounts of the prison', and, in ‘City of London Churches', the Uncommercial Traveller specifically disavows any antiquarian concern with facts for their own sake:

Again and again in these pieces, the first-person speaker speculates upon places and their inhabitants - discerning amusement in unpromising material, transforming commonplace events into something notable and strange.

As the title of one piece, ‘Meditations in Monmouth-Street', suggests, the narrator sometimes allows us to follow the progress of his thinking and occasionally captures the very moment when this thinking bursts the confines of actuality: