Dickens and the Idea of the Comic Novel

Author(s): Andrew Sanders

Source: The Yearbook of English Studies, Vol. 36, No. 2, Victorian Literature (2006), pp. 51-64
Published by: Modern Humanities Research Association
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 Dickens and the Idea of the Comic Novel
ANDREW SANDERS
Durham University

In the preface to his edition of Shakespeare of 1765 Samuel Johnson com

plained that Shakespeare's first editors, Heming and Condell, seemed not to
have distinguished between the genres of comedy, history, and tragedy 'by any
exact or definite ideas'. Johnson went on to describe what he saw as the vague
notion of comedy which was acceptable to Jacobean audiences: 'An action which
ended happily to the principal persons, however serious or distressful through
its intermediate incidents, constituted a comedy." Largely thanks to the ex
ample and the subsequent influence of Shakespeare's comedies over the span
of English literature this loose definition has taken on some intellectual weight.
Indeed, if we balance itwith the splendidly bland theory of fiction expressed by
Miss Prism in the second act of Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest,
it can be seen as having shaped a good number of moral, but not necessarily
exclusively 'comic', novels. For Prism, fiction simply 'means' that 'the good
ended happily, and the bad unhappily' (though Cecily Cardew nicely protests
that the theory 'seems very unfair').2
If we were to superadd Shakespeare's concern with the significance of love
and marriage to what Johnson describes as Heming and Condell's idea of
'comedy', we might safely arrive at a very loose definition of what is often
called 'romantic comedy'. This 'romantic comedy' is, of course, at odds with
the 'classical' idea of what constituted the comic. For Plato the comic spirit was
rooted in the representation of self-ignorance. In the Philebus he has Socrates
argue that 'those [. . .]who combine their delusion with weakness and incapacity
to be revenged on a scoffer you may truly call comic figures [. ...] In the strong,
ignorance of self is odious and repulsive [... .].Where it isweak, we see the proper
place and true character of the comic.'3 This notion is echoed by Aristotle, with
a new stress on social status, in his definition of the 'ludicrous':

Comedy is [. . .] an imitation of characters of a lower type-not, however, in the full

sense of the word, bad; for the Ludicrous ismerely a subdivision of the ugly. Itmay be
defined as a defect or ugliness which is not painful or destructive. Thus, for example,
the comic mask is ugly and distorted, but does not cause pain.4

Despite our lack of Aristotle's larger treatise on comedy, it has been assumed
that these Greek principles came to influence Roman comedy and, beyond the
1
Samuel Johnson, 'Preface to Shakespeare', repr. in Johnson on Shakespeare, ed. by Walter
Raleigh (London: Oxford University Press, 1908), p. 17.
2
This exchange was added by Wilde when he revised the manuscript of the play. See Oscar
Wilde's 'The Importance of Being Earnest': A Reconstructive Critical Edition of the Text of the First
Production, ed. by Joseph Donohue with Ruth Berggren, The Princess Grace Irish Library, 10
(Gerrard's Cross: Smythe, 1995), p. 206.
3
Trans by A. E. Taylor (1956) and quoted by D. J. Palmer in his Comedy: Developments in
Criticism. A Casebook (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1984), pp. 26-27.
4 The trans, by S. H. Butcher, in Palmer,
'Poetics' of Aristotle, quoted p. 27.

Yearbook of English Studies, 36.2 (2oo6), 5 I-64

CModern Humanities Research Association 2006

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 52 Dickens and the Idea of the Comic Novel

ancient world, the comic dramas and stories of medieval and Renaissance Eur
ope. The medieval comic tale seems to have retained many of the elements
outlined by Aristotle. Commenting generally on the traditions of comic story
telling, and on audience responses to comedy, which held sway until the late
eighteenth century, Derek Brewer has written:
No general study of humour was made in theMiddle Ages. It is an interesting question
whether such a quality, or entity, was even recognised. There was some discussion
of comedy and tragedy, usually of a learned and rather muddled kind, based on an
inadequate study of classical sources. Discussions of comedy rarely do more than,imply
humour [. . .] the kind of funniness enjoyed in the Renaissance was very similar to the
traditional and medieval forms. The humour of Don Quixote and Falstaff is essentially
medieval and they were enjoyed as straightforwardly absurd until the Romantic period.
Romanticism brought about amarked change in our attitude to the comic. Falstaff came
to be taken seriously, and Romanticism turned Don Quixote into a sad book.5

Brewer goes on to summarize Bakhtin's 'stimulating' theories of a holistic

medieval acceptance of the physical, excremental, degrading aspects of life as
'carnivalesque', but he concludes with a caveat:

In the end, pace Bakhtin, and accepting much of his holism, medieval humour, with
some exceptions, is conservative, hearty, and expressive of an ultimately 'official' point
of view. It is rarely subversive. This is even true of Chaucer and Shakespeare. The
supreme example is Falstaff. He is the very incarnation of the 'unofficial' culture [. ...]
He is a glorious fantasy-figure embodying our self-indulgent short-term physical desires
[. . .]But in the end he is repudiated, as for social satire he must be. Shakespeare and
Chaucer and almost all writers until the Romantics [. .] are in the end on the side of
the 'official' culture. (pp. xix-xx)

What we seem to have, therefore, as an inheritance from the classical period into
that of the neo-classicisists, is the variety of comedy that Ben Jonson succinctly
described as 'sporting' with 'human follies not with crimes', a moral comedy
which stands in a kind of complementary antithesis to high tragedy by exposing
misdemeanours and peccadilloes rather than exploring the consequences of
heroic hubris. The inherited idea of comedy, at least in its theatrical realization,
could therefore be as harsh, educative, moral, and disconcerting as tragedy,
but it required a more benign, and perhaps divinely graced, resolution. Such
resolutions in the Shakespearian tradition of 'romantic comedy' could be sealed
by marriage, celebrated in the mature comedies by communal assertions of
union (generally dance or music). It is with this open and various tradition of
thinking about comedy that we can begin to recognize where Dickens's fiction
stands in the European comic tradition and its distinctive English development.

In his otherwise perceptive and ground-breaking study The Triumph of Wit,6

Robert Bernard Martin seems disinclined to discuss Dickens's place in the
'comic' tradition evolved by the Romantics and the Victorians. In many ways
Martin expands on Brewer's suggestion that Romantic philosophical develop
ments shifted thinkingi about the nature and meaning of comedy and attitudes
5 2nd edn (Cambridge: and Brewer,
Medieval Comic Tales, ed. by Derek Brewer, Boydell 1996),
p. xiii.
6
Robert Bernard Martin, The Triumph of Wit: A Study of Victorian Comic Theory (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1974).

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 ANDREW SANDERS 53

towards the central characters of comic drama and fiction. Nevertheless, Mar
tin seems, at times, to accede to Leslie Stephen's antipathetic observation that
Dickens was more of a humorist than a truly comic writer. 'Humorists' among
Dickens's admirers, Stephen had asserted, loved Dickens for the quality that
offended true lovers of comedy: his ability to drop humour 'and become purely
and simply maudlin at a moment's notice'.7 That is as may be, but for both
Stephen and Martin the 'maudlin' appears to have no place in true and intel
lectually satisfying comedy. Earlier in his study, however, Martin had argued
that Victorian theorists of the comic were struggling in what he sees as a 'cleft
stick':
If comedy were backed by morality, and valuable for its educational potential, then it
finally appealed to scorn, arrogance and contempt. The alternative seemed equally bad.
If the major force of comedy were an intellectual one in which scorn was discarded
and laughter became its own end, then it was hard to see that it had any utility. In
neither case was it something that could be acceptable to those who were both kindly
and practical; few Victorians would have admitted lacking either of those qualities, any
more than they would have admitted to having no sense of humour. (p. 24)

What Martin's argument indirectly demonstrates, in the face of many of its own
premisses, is that early and mid-Victorian readers did not seem to have been
over-disturbed by this supposed theoretical, and ultimately moral, dilemma.
The Dickensian comedy that they readily appreciated was essentially mixed
and not pure, and its lapses into the 'maudlin' were integral to that popular
mixture. The phenomenal sales of Dickens's novels surely suggest that pre
Romantic ideas of what comic fiction was had retained their force and that few
readers were prepared to express anxieties about a clear distinction between
the 'comic' and the merely 'humorous'. Indeed, as Martin himself remarks,
'Humour had nearly total sway in the nineteenth century until the late i86os,
when we find the reviewers and critics becoming increasingly restive about
the state of comic writing' (p. 38). The fact that the period to which Martin
refers coincides with the climax of Dickens's writing career is not without
consequence. The more latter-day readers acquaint themselves with 'Victorian'
assumptions, prejudices, and tastes, the more the blanket term 'Victorian' seems
less and less helpful in defining the broad culture of the second two thirds of
the nineteenth century. It is not that Dickens is a misfit among early and
mid-Victorian writers, but that the intellectual snobberies and niceties of later
Victorian critics, such as the fastidious Leslie Stephen, should not necessarily
marginalize Dickens's comic genius or exclude him from his central place in
the English comic tradition.
Perhaps as a result of the critical acclaim accorded by earlier generations to
the nineteenth-century 'realist' novel, many commentators, and some readers,
are still wary of the comic tradition in fiction. Until the end of the twentieth
century, and the shifts in fictional fashion associated with magic realism and
postmodernism, there was certainly a critical awkwardness among students of
English literature in studying Pickwick Papers or Nicholas Nickleby in the same
context as Middlemarch or Portrait of a Lady. There seemed to be even less
7
Leslie Stephen, 'Humour', CornhillMagazine (March 1876), quoted by Martin, The Triumph
of Wit, p. 88.

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54 Dickens and the Idea of theComicNovel

inclination to view nineteenth-century comic fiction in relation to themedieval

and Renaissance precedents variously set by Chaucer, Rabelais, Shakespeare,
and Jonson. Comic fiction, whether it was by Fielding or Smollet, Dickens or
Thackeray, certainly had little or no place in the 'Great Tradition' defined by
F. R. Leavis in the late I940S (where the stress was laid firmly on the defining
contributions of George Eliot, James, Conrad, and, by extension, Lawrence).8
I do not wish, in this present context, to rehearse the shift in Dickens's critical
fortunes since the I940s, or to offer an account of the development of theoretical
criticism in the same period. Iwant instead to point to the ways in which certain
Victorian commentators simply assumed that the kind of comic fiction which
Dickens developed between i837 and i870 had grown out of an established
tradition and that this tradition was readily adaptable to respond to the cultural
demands of an industrial and urban society. What needs to be noticed is simply
that most literary critics of the time of Dickens and of his great comic rival,
Thackeray, failed to draw any real or effective distinction between novels that
we now might be inclined to categorize either as 'realist' or as 'comic'.
It was obvious to many contemporaries that, in their different ways, Dickens
and Thackeray dominated the literary scene in the i840s, I85os, and i86os.
Both were acknowledged to be 'humorists' and both were assumed to be writers
who, like Defoe and Smollett before them, concentrated on 'low-life' subjects.
In the i86os Dr Joseph Angus, who taught English language, literature, and
history at theUniversity of London, thus describes 'low-life' fiction to students
in his Handbook of English Literature:
'Low life' is an ambiguous expression; and does not depend on the worldly degree or
the physical condition of the characters delineated, but upon the quality of the emotions
which the characters are intended to excite; whether of sympathy for what is low, or of
sympathy for what is high. While, therefore, the distinction is accurate enough, when
'low life' is identified with the degrading, it is defective in actual usage; and especially
so, when the characters from low life show the qualities which 'make the whole world
kin', irradiated by touches of humour and of feeling.9

A second historian of English Literature, William Spalding, Professor of Logic,

Rhetoric, and Metaphysics at the University of St Andrews, had noted in I853
that both Dickens and Thackeray had used the novel to 'illustrate [. . .] the
questions which agitate society most powerfully'. Spalding then proceeded to
draw a distinction between the two novelists:

Thackeray has given to his pictures of society and character all that they could re
ceive from extraordinary skill of mental analysis, great acuteness of observation, and
formidable strength and fineness of sarcastic irony [... .]Dickens has done much more
than all which Thackeray has left unattempted. While his painting of character is inimi
tably vigorous and natural, his stories are always interesting, and would be more so if
they were less encumbered by minute details: and his power of exciting emotion ranges,
with equal success, from horror (sometimes too intense) tomelting pathos, and thence
to a breadth of humour which degenerates into caricature [. . ] nowhere is he more

8
F. R. Leavis, The Great Tradition: George Eliot, James and Conrad (London: Chatto and
Windus, 1948).
9 The Tract
Joseph Angus, The Handbook of English Literature (London: Religious Society,
[1860s]), p. 619.

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 ANDREW SANDERS 55

at ease, nowhere more sharply observant or more warmly sympathetic, than in scenes
whose meanness might have disgusted, or whose moral foulness might have appalled.'0

Implicit in what both Angus and Spalding are observing is that Dickens and
Thackeray render the unpalatable acceptable through humour. Laughter tem
pers accounts of social andmoral depravity and the essentially comic resolution
offered by both writers holds out hope of a reform both in society as a whole
and in the individual. Both writers are seen as working with material of great
contemporary significance, but within the traditional framework of the comic
novel. As Ben Jonson would have recognized, both are showing 'an image of
the times' as they sport with human follies.
To some commentators, however, Dickens's art was to be preferred to Thack
eray's because itwas both more sympathetic and more benign. Samuel Phillips,
for example, offered readers of The Times in June i 85 i a detailed and often per
ceptive analysis of the distinction between Dickens's David Copperfield and
Thackeray's Pendennis:

Compare the tone of the two books, and one will be found, as a whole, light-hearted
and hopeful, the other dolorous and depressing. Both books are comic inmuch of their
expression, for both writers are humorists, but the humour of one ismore gloomy then
that of the other, as if from a shadow fallen upon a life.While in David Copperfield
the tragedy is consummated in a single chapter, in Pendennis it is spread over the whole
surface of the story. In the former case aman is slain; in the latter case human aspirations
and complacencies are demolished. Rising from the perusal of Mr. Dickens's work, you
forget there is evil in the world, and remember only the good .The distinction drawn
between the bad and the good is a broad one. Rising from Mr. Thackeray's, you are
doubtful of yourself and of humanity at large, for nobody is very bad or very good,
and everybody seems pretty well contented [. . .]Mr. Dickens touches a higher key: his
villains, Heep and Littimer, stand out as villains; his women [. . .] hold an eminence
which women may and do reach in this world, and which mere purity and love do not
suffice to attain."I

Thackeray disconcerts, whereas Dickens reassures and, more significantly reaf

firms.What Phillips believed Dickens had achieved in David Copperfield is
almost precisely what Samuel Johnson had seen as typifying Jacobean com
edy ('an action which ended happily to the principal persons, however serious
or distressful through its intermediate incidents'). Such definitions, like Miss
Prism's, are valid for all the stark simplification they appear to offer. The extent
of Dickens's debt to the comic achievement of his literary forebears should
scarcely surprise us, but what many of his contemporaries felt was that he had
discovered a new resource in his exploration of the potential of comedy.
Dickens's claims to rival, or emulate, Shakespeare's literary achievement
were regularly maintained by his Victorian admirers. In I857 the writer of an
unsigned review of Little Dorrit in The Leader, having asserted that Dickens
was 'the most dramatic of the novelists', went on to exnlain:
10
William Spalding, The History of English Literature: With an Outline of the Origin and Growth
of the English Language. Illustrated by Extracts. For the Use of Schools and of Private Students
(Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1853), p. 400.
11
Samuel Phillips, 'David Copperfield and Pendennis', The Times, 11 June 1852, p. 8; repr. as
'Dickens and Thackeray', in Essays from 'The Times', new edn, 2 vols (London: Murray, 1871), 11,
336-37.

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56 Dickens and the Idea of the Comic Novel

We do not exaggerate when we say that his genius possesses some points of resemblance
to that of Shakespeare-something of the very thing which, more than anything else,
makes Shakespeare the greatest of dramatic poets. It is not merely that Dickens is himself
a poet, and in nothing so much as in his exquisite sensitiveness to those fine threads of
analogy which connect the animate with the inanimate world, so that the still life of his
scenes is constantly made to reflect the dominant emotion of the characters, in amanner
which may appear extravagant tomatter-of-fact minds, but which iswonderfully true
to all who have ever felt emotion-it is not merely that many of his characters have
in them such a strong and self-existent vitality that they have already become part of
our actual experience, and remain there like remembrances of our own life-it is not
merely that Dickens has added phrases to the language, which are to be found in almost
any column of a newspaper that you may take up to read haphazard-it is not simply
on these accounts that Dickens shows some affinity with Shakespeare, but much more
on account of that feeling of universal sympathy with human nature which breathes
through his pages like some 'broad and general' atmosphere.

This complex, clausal second sentence manages to refer to no specific book,

chapter, character, or phrase, yet it seeks to persuade us of the validity of its
argument by suggesting that we read Dickens emotionally. Dickens appeals to
our feelings and the emotional response he requires of his readers opens up to
wider, 'Shakespearian' kinship to the 'universal sympathy with human nature'.
The writer is not, of course, referring exclusively to comedy or to the 'comic
spirit', but he is suggesting that Dickens's appeal to the heart rather than to the
head allows us to see the world as informed by harmony and universal values,
much as a certain, refined kind of comedy asserts. He concludes this section of
his argument by insisting that the nature of Dickens's art often eludes those
who approach it by an exclusively intellectual route, and appeals, literally above
the heads of fastidious critics, to the general reader:

Certain University-bred reviewers, whose shrivelled souls cannot understand the fresh,
spontaneous efflorescence of genius, and who will accept no gold that does not come to
them impressed with the college stamp, may affect to despise the large regard of Dickens;
but the world will recognise its great ones whether or not they wear the uniform of cap
and gown.'2

Dickens's Shakespearian qualities could therefore be seen as implicit in the

broad 'sympathetic' nature of his art rather than in specific explorations of
philosophical, theological, or moral issues. Like Shakespeare, he deals with
'natural' emotions, not with mental contrivances and theories.
Dickens's comedy was therefore accepted by many of his original readers as
expressive of a benign world-view in which human nature was interwoven with
the nature of Nature itself. Human benevolence could be observed in his novels
as an instrument of the will of God and as part of a larger pattern of creation.
Thus his vision seemed to his most determined admirers to be much more than
simply that of awit or a humorist; itwas truly and effectively both comic and af
firmative. This nineteenth-century awareness that Dickens's novels suggested
that there was an ultimate tidiness, meaning, and harmony in the world allowed
some critics to see him as a profoundly religious writer exploring a temporal
12
The Leader, 27 June 1857, pp. 616-17; quoted by Philip Collins, review of Little Dorrit, in
Dickens: The Critical Heritage, ed. by Philip Collins (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1971),
pp. 362-63.

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 ANDREW SANDERS 57

'divine comedy'. This was certainly Dostoevsky's view (the hero of The Idiot,
for example, recognizesMr Pickwick as a type of the 'absolutebeauty' embodied
in Christ). Even the writer of the I857 review of Little Dorrit insisted that 'a
more deeply religious writer is not to be found' and suggested that the nature of
Dickens's undogmatic faith could be found in his fictional account of 'all those
elements of religion which rise eternally from the natural emotions of love and
reverence'.'3Beyond, or perhaps below, this elevated 'divine' comedy, Dickens's
fiction fundamentally expounds, explores, and exploits three further traditional
types of comedy. In his early novels in particular he adapts the classical and
medieval mode which seeks to expose hypocrisy, to laugh at self-delusion, and
generally to sportwith human follies. Secondly, throughout his fiction, though
with varying degrees of moral insistence, Dickens maintained a 'comic' moral
order in which the good were rewarded and the bad punished. Thirdly, perhaps
prompted by the Shakespearian model, most of Dickens's novels contain a
love story and end with marriage as an assertion of the conjunction of natural
and human harmony. The validity of these assertions needs now to be tested
with reference to two contrasting novels, Oliver Twist of I837-39 and Great
Expectations of i86o-6i.

In a lecture given in the year of Dickens's death (I870), Anthony Trollope

somewhat eccentrically insisted that 'the book which we call a novel contains,
we may say, always a love story [. . .] [novels] not only contain love stories, but
they are written for the sake of the love stories'.'4 One wonders how Trollope
managed to square this assertion with a reading of Robinson Crusoe, let alone
of Oliver Twist. We know, however, that Trollope (who had little real relish
for Dickens's fiction compared to Thackeray's) considered that Dickens had
endowed his early central characters with 'unnatural virtue' and that 'so good
a boy as Oliver' bore no real resemblance to real life.'5 By this standard he
possibly meant that Oliver Twist stood beyond the pale of standard fiction.
Nevertheless, although Dickens's novel relegates the troubled Rose Fleming
and Harry Maylie romance to a relatively secondary position in terms of the
plot, Oliver Twist emphatically does contain a love story. As the strands of the
novel's plot work themselves out, and as Oliver's happy destiny triumphs over
the forces that have heretofore tended to enforce his absences from felicity, it
is in the happy home of the Maylies that his story concludes. The sentiments
expressed in the concluding chapter (53) are saccharine, but the assertions of
contentment, private fulfilment, and domestic order must be allowed to have
their moral force given what has gone before:

Before three months had passed, Rose Fleming and Harry Maylie were married, in the
village church which was henceforth to be the scene of the young clergyman's labours;
on the same day they entered into possession of their new and happy home.
Mrs. Maylie took up her abode with her son and daughter-in-law, to enjoy, during the
tranquil remainder of her days, the greatest felicity that age and worth can know-the
13
Quoted ibid., p. 363.
14 as a Rational in Four
Anthony Trollope, 'English Prose Fiction Amusement' (1870), repr.
Lectures, ed. by Morris L. Parrish (London: Constable, 1938), p. 108.
15
Anthony Trollope, Thackeray (London: Macmillan, 1879), p. 26.

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58 Dickens and the Idea of the Comic Novel

contemplation of the happiness of those on whom the warmest affections and tenderest
cares of awell- spent life, have been unceasingly bestowed [. . .]
Mr. Brownlow adopted Oliver as his own son. Removing with him and the old
housekeeper towithin amile of the parsonage-house, where his dear friends resided, he
gratified the only remaining wish of Oliver's warm and earnest heart, and thus linked
together a little society, whose condition approached as nearly to one of perfect happiness
as can ever be known in this changing world.

This happy 'little society' is perhaps intended to stand in contrast to the deci
dedly unhappy broader society that has accepted the New Poor Law and turned
a blind eye to the London slums that foster Fagin and his gang. Nevertheless, a
good deal of speculation has taken place as to why Dickens sought to suppress
the last plate that his illustrator, George Cruikshank, provided for the novel.
The original plate ('Rose Maylie and Oliver') showed Oliver at the Maylies'
fireside, with old Mrs. Maylie seated contentedly to the right and a portrait of
Oliver's lost mother hanging to the left of the chimneypiece. It was replaced
in later issues of the three-volume edition with a far less obviously domestic
illustration of Oliver and Rose visiting the church chancel that contained a
memorial to that same lost mother. Both have a claim, however, to be appro
priate to Dickens's 'comic' scheme. The 'fireside' plate emphasizes Oliver's
triumph and his acceptance into the kind of bourgeois security that had so long
eluded the 'parish boy'. The second picks up on the novel's last paragraph:

Within the altar of the old village church there stands awhite marble tablet, which bears
as yet but one word,-'Agnes!' There is no coffin in that tomb; and may it be many,
many years before another name is placed above it. But if the spirits of the Dead ever
come back to earth to visit spots hallowed by the love-the love beyond the grave-of
those whom they knew in life, I do believe that the shade of that poor girl often hovers
about that solemn nook-ay, though it is a church, and she was weak and erring.

This last paragraph recalls the novel's opening scene (in which Oliver's 'weak
and erring' mother dies giving birth to her child in the workhouse). The un
folding story has justified this dead mother and revealed the true circumstances
of Oliver's conception and birth. Oliver has his temporal reward. His mother,
it is implied, has her heavenly one because all is 'hallowed by the love-the
love beyond the grave'. Her spirit, if it ever chooses to visit earth, does not
appear to be a restless one. Thus, however we read the ending of Oliver Twist,
the implications are that divine justice has brought about a happy and proper
resolution to the wayward progress of the parish boy who is its central charac
ter. Like the hero of that other great 'Progress' in English literature, Bunyan's
Christian, Oliver has escaped the City of Destruction. Unlike Christian, Oliver
has found an earthly bliss, but it is one that is presented as a prelude to an
ultimate celestial reward after a well-spent and virtuous life (after 'many, many
years' we presume that it will be Oliver's name that will be added to the tablet
and inscribed in the book of life).
The happy ending of Oliver Twist, with its pattern of rewards and punish
ments, is in line with a long tradition of storytelling. Dickens grants the Maylies
a happy marriage and a happy home, and Oliver, with his future progress pre
sumably ensured by Mr Brownlow, shares in that achievement. The love story
that Trollope insisted was integral to all novels reaches a kind of fulfilment

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 ANDREW SANDERS 59

and in so doing it is conjoined to themore complex and demanding story of

Oliver's post-workhouse progress. It is obvious to all readers of the last chap
ter of Oliver Twist, however, thatDickens has also experimented with another
kind of traditional comedy inwhich the bad are required either to end unhap
pily or to have their folly exposed. The archly hypocritical Mr Bumble has his
come-uppance inmarriage with Mrs Corney, before the couple find themselves
paupers in the very workhouse 'inwhich they had once lorded it over others'.
Monks leaves for America, where he squanders his money, is imprisoned for
'fraud and knavery' and dies in prison. Charley Bates, extraordinarily enough,
is said to have repented of his former life, retired to the purer life of the coun
tryside, and has ended up 'themerriest young grazier inNorthamptonshire'.
Only Noah Claypole eludes 'justice' (having received a free pardon from the
Crown) and works as an informer, assisted in his new calling by the equally
wayward Charlotte.
Earlier in the novel Dickens had allotted far greater punishments to his
two major villains, Sikes and Fagin. Sikes, pursued by a vengeful mob to a
rooftop at Jacob's Island, loops a rope over his head in order to lower himself
down. He then yells as he sees 'the eyes' again, staggers, loses his balance, and
chokes convulsively as the noose closes round his neck. His dog, 'which had
lain concealed' on the rooftop, springs after him, falls, and dashes its brains out
on a stone. Thus a kind a 'poetic', but none the less public, justice is achieved.
The account of Fagin's end ismore drawn out. Found guilty and condemned
to death, Fagin conspicuously fails to take in the relationship of his crimes to
their due punishment. Alone in his cell inNewgate he sporadically meditates
as night draws on:

After a while, he began to remember a few disjointed fragments of what the judge had
said: though it had seemed to him, at the time, that he could not hear a word. These
gradually fell into their proper places, and by degrees suggested more: so that in a little
time he had the whole, almost as itwas delivered. To be hanged by the neck, till he was
dead-that was the end. To be hanged by the neck till he was dead. As it came on very
dark, he began to think of all the men he had known who had died upon the scaffold;
some of them through his means. They rose up, in such quick succession, that he could
hardly count them. He had seen some of them die,-and had joked too, because they
died with prayers upon their lips. With what a rattling noise the drop went down; and
how suddenly they changed, from strong and vigorous men to dangling heaps of clothes!
(Chapter 52)

Dickens seems to be implying that Fagin will die in despair, only half-com
prehending what is happening and without recourse to prayer (he has already
turned away the 'venerable men of his own persuasion' who had come into
Newgate to pray beside him). Thus unrelieved by hope, human or divine, and
seemingly devoid of repentance, Fagin will die horribly and justice will be seen
to be done in the street outside the prison. Fagin is Dickens's most satanic
villain and his destiny seems hellish. Haunted by the ghosts of his victims, he
is instructed in despair just as Shakespeare's Richard III had been on the night
before Bosworth.
The deaths of Fagin and Sikes scarcely strike us as 'comic' resolution, but
they are vital to Dickens's moral scheme in Oliver Twist. Dickens's benign

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 6o Dickens and the Idea of the Comic Novel

vision has not deserted him, but in the novel he had determined to deal directly
with crimes, rather than simply to sport with follies. In the cases of both men,
one extra-judicial, the other judicial, justice has to be seen to be done (there are
no ironies here about 'Presidents of the Immortals' finishing their sport with
either criminal). Dickens, like Chaucer and Shakespeare before him, remains
non-subversively on the side of the 'official' culture and the law takes its course
divinely and humanly. Oliver Twist uses various comic devices (irony, satire,
comic archness, comic exposure, etc.) and it can be as cruel in the situations it
presents as Brewer implies that medieval and Renaissance comedy are, but it
remains essentially comedy for all its determination to dwell darkly on poverty
and crime.
A reading of Great Expectations presents us with a radically different kind of
comic fiction, one which may strike many readers as distinctly un-comic in its
progress and resolution. It is still emphatically Dickensian, and it is, in its way
a love story (albeit an unhappy one). In the early stages of the planning and
composition of the novel Dickens himself certainly seems to have dwelt on the
idea that his new story was both humorous and essentially comic in design. He
told John Forster in mid-September i86o that he had hit on 'a very fine, new
and grotesque idea'.'6 A month later Dickens expanded on this notion of the
'grotesque':
[... .] you will find the hero to be a boy-child, like David [Copperfield]. You will not
have to complain of the want of humour as in The Tale of Two Cities. I have made
the opening, I hope, in its general effect exceedingly droll. I have put the child and a
good-natured foolish man, in relations that seem tome very funny. Of course I have got
in the pivot on which the story will turn too-and which indeed, as you will remember,
was the grotesque tragi-comic conception that first encouraged me.'7

As Forster explained to readers of his biography of Dickens, the pivotal 'gro

tesque tragi-comic conception' was the relationship between Magwitch and
Pip, but the 'droll' and 'funny' opening effects (the humour of which may elude
some readers) are clearly the other crucial relationship of the story: that between
Joe Gargery and Pip.
Dickens's second letter to Forster also provides us with one further vital
piece of information about his 'conception' of Great Expectations. 'To be quite
sure I had fallen into no unconscious repetitions', he told Forster, 'I read David
Copperfield again the other day'. He then added a revealing further clause,
admitting that he was 'affected by it to a degree you would hardly believe' (ibid.).
What Dickens was indicating here was that Forster might uniquely understand
why he was so affected by rereading the novel he described elsewhere as his
'favourite child'. Forster was perhaps the only other person who knew the
secret of the boy Dickens's 'agony of the soul' and who therefore was able to
recognize the extent to which the novelist had touched on his own story inDavid
Copperfield. Very few early readers of David Copperfield could have suspected
that the sorrows of young David mirrored those of young Dickens, but equally
few would have chosen to read David Copperfield as an obsessively gloomy work
16
Letter to John Forster, [mid-September i860], in The Pilgrim Edition of the Letters of Charles
Dickens, ed. by Graham Storey, 12 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965-2002), ix (1997), 310.
17
Ibid, [early October i860], p. 325.

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 ANDREW SANDERS 6i

of fiction. It is perhaps the last supremely optimistic of Dickens's novels, and

its successor, Bleak House, distinctly dissipates that former mood of optimism.
Dickens was clearly determined not to repeat himself in Great Expectations,
his second purely first-person narrative in which a boy grows to manhood.
What the novelist appears to be indicating to Foster in his letters is that Great
Expectations was to be both like and unlike David Copperfield. It was to be like it
in that itwould take the form of an autobiography and that the narrators of both
books would possess a certain naivety and a propensity to misunderstand and
misinterpret the circumstances inwhich they find themselves. Both narrators
were to go through a learning process akin towhat Goethe had seen as Lehrjahre.
Pip was to be unlike David in that he was of a much lower social class, that
he would lay himself more open to manipulation by others, and that his love
would prove to be painfully unrequited. Suffering would figure prominently in
both narratives, but the key to their difference would be how the hero of each
would deal with and/or master his unfolding destiny. What I wish to suggest
here is that critics have tended to dwell more on the differences between the two
novels than on their kinship.Where David Copperfield is generally assumed to
be 'sunny', Great Expectations is taken to be 'gloomy'. Indeed infinitely more
stress seems to have been laid on the 'tragic' in Great Expectations than on what
Dickens himself styled his 'grotesque tragi-comic conception'.
Pip is certainly a far less resilient, and far more melancholy, character than
David. Stanley Friedman, who has recognized the extent to which Dickens
refers to Hamlet in Great Expectations, may also have given readers a clue as to
how Hamlet's states of mind find echoes in Pip's.'8 Dickens's narrator certainly
frequently gives himself over to expressions of self-doubt, guilty conscience,
nostalgia, and regret, but he never quite approaches Hamlet's rigorous self
analysis. Take, for example the opening of Book ii, Chapter IS:

As I had grown accustomed tomy expectations, I had insensibly begun to notice their ef
fect upon myself and those around me. Their influence on my own character, I disguised
from my recognition as much as possible, but I knew very well that itwas not all good.
I lived in a state of chronic uneasiness respecting my behaviour to Joe. My conscience
was not by any means comfortable about Biddy. When I woke up in the night-like
Camilla-I used to think, with a weariness on my spirits, that I should have been
happier and better if I had never seen Miss Havisham's face, and had risen tomanhood
content to be partners with Joe in the honest old forge. Many a time of an evening, when
I sat alone looking at the fire, I thought, after all there was no fire like the forge fire and
the kitchen fire at home.
Yet Estella was so inseparable from all my restlessness and disquiet of mind, that I
really fell into confusion as to the limits of my own part in its production. That is to
say, supposing I had had no expectations, and yet had had Estella to think of, I could
not make out tomy satisfaction that I should have done much better.

It might be apposite at this stage to recall Plato's suggestion that in the strong
'ignorance of self is odious and repulsive. When it is in the weak, we see the
proper place and true character of the comic.' Pip has neither the status nor
the responsibilities of the Prince of Denmark. Perhaps too, Dickens intends us
to see Pip as essentially unheroic and therefore tragic-comic in his responses.
Certainly his circumstances in the novel, and even his own narrative, reveal
18
Stanley Friedman, 'Echoes o?Hamlet in Great Expectations', Hamlet Studies, g (1987), 86-89.

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62 Dickens and the Idea of the Comic Novel

him to be both deluded and wilfully self-deluded. Pip is often simply inept
as well as passive. He accedes to Miss Havisham's and, by extension, Estella's
manipulation of him. Despite his later sense of revulsion from the idea, he
also opens himself up toMagwitch's social and financial control. Readers may
be disinclined to recognize this combination of delusion and manipulation as
'comic' but perhaps that is, in part, what Dickens requires us to do.
Pip's lack of 'heroism' also distinguishes him from David Copperfield. As I
have argued elsewhere, the questioning opening statement of David's narrative
('Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that
station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show') is answered by
the evolving representation of David's life by David himself.'9 David can be
seen as a 'hero' in terms of Carlyle's definition of the new phenomenon of
the heroic 'man of letters' in his On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in
History (i 840). David must also be allowed to emerge as the man who masters
his destiny and proves himself by learning the disciplines of the heart. Pip never
exhibits such a determined mastery over his fate. David distinguishes himself as
a writer, we are told. Pip ends up without his 'great' expectations, working first
as a clerk at and then as a partner in Clarriker and Co., the shipping insurance
firm inwhich he had helped establish Herbert Pocket.20 This shift in 'heroic'
emphasis between David Copperfield and Great Expectations is as significant as
the radical differences in tone, style, plot, and comic resolution between Oliver
Twist and Great Expectations. As I have suggested, themoral world of Oliver
Twist is polarized by extremes of vice and virtue. Oliver is preternaturally and
instinctively good; Fagin appears to be irredeemably bad. If we are less aware of
such extremes inDavid Copperfield, we still allow for the punishment of villains
(Heep, Littimer, and, perhaps, Steerforth) and the justification of the virtuous
(the Micawbers, Traddles, Betsey) and the 'heroic' (David). The world of Great
Expectations ismuch more morally murky and indeterminate. What villains
there are (Orlick and Compeyson) are distinctly shadowy and relatively ill
defined characters, but the 'good' characters are rarely unequivocally virtuous
(though Joe, Biddy, and Herbert are obvious exceptions). Magwitch, a criminal
in the eyes of the law, and a man who appears to have done vast social and
psychological damage to his 'gentleman', is committed to a Heavenly Judge
by Pip at the end of Book iii, Chapter I7, with a reference to the parable of
the Pharisee and the publican ('O Lord, be merciful to him, a sinner'). Pip
himself seems so often compromised by his 'expectations', so often 'ignorant of
himself', that we sense not only the degree to which teller and tale reflect one
another but also the vital significance of Dickens's idea of the 'tragi-comic' as
determining the nature of the tale.
Such considerations lead us directly into the issue of the revised ending to
the novel. The new, more ambiguously optimistic, conclusion was suggested
by Dickens's friend and fellow novelist, Edward Bulwer Lytton and on 23 June
19 to David
See my introduction Copperfield, World's Classics Edition (Oxford: Oxford Univer
sity Press, 1997), pp. xiii-xvi.
20
We should not, of course, think of Dickens as disparaging clerks. Although he was the son
of a humble enough official in the naval pay office, Dickens seems to have been content with his
own son's choice of career. See Andrew Sanders, Dickens and the Spirit of the Age (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1999), pp. 146-50.

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 ANDREW SANDERS 63

i86i the novelist announced the change toWilkie Collins and proclaimed that
he thought it was 'for the better'.2' John Forster would later disagree ('The
first ending [. . .] seems to be more consistent with the drift, aswell as natural
working out, of the tale') and to demonstrate his point he reprinted the original
conclusion as a footnote to his biography.22 There is no space here to rehearse
the disquiet this revision continues to provoke among readers and critics of
Great Expectations, but it isworth quoting the opinions of one astute, if deeply
prejudiced, critic, George Bernard Shaw:
Unfortunately, what Bulwer wanted was what is called a happy ending, presenting Pip
and Estella as reunited lovers who were going to marry and live happily ever after;
and Dickens, though he could not bring himself to be quite so explicit in sentimental
falsehood did, at the end of the very last line, allow himself to say that there was 'no
shadow of parting' between them. If Pip had said 'Since that parting I have been able
to think of her without the old unhappiness; but I have never tried to see her again, and
I know I never shall' he would have been left with at least the prospect of a bearable
life. But the notion that he could ever have been happy with Estella: indeed that anyone
could ever have been happy with Estella is positively unpleasant. I can remember when
the Cowden Clarks ventured to hint a doubt whether Benedick and Beatrice had a very
delightful union to look forward to; but that it did not greatly matter, as Beatrice and
Benedick have none of the reality of Pip and Estella. Shakespear [sic] could afford to trifle
with Much Ado About Nothing, which is avowedly a potboiler; but Great Expectations
is a different matter. Dickens put nearly all his thought into it. It is too serious a book
to be a trivially happy one. Its beginning is unhappy; its middle is unhappy, and the
conventionally happy ending is an outrage on it. 3

The outrage here is perhaps the gratuitous insult toMuch Ado aboutNothing,
but Shaw also manages to be wrong about Great Expectations on two counts: he
misquotes the last sentence, and he wilfully (perhaps) misreads the beginning
of the novel as 'unhappy'. As we have seen, Dickens himself found the opening
'droll' and 'very funny'. Dickens told Forster that he considered that 'the story
will be more acceptable through the alteration' but he clearly had some difficulty
with the phrasing of this new, much longer conclusion. He would explain to
Bulwer that his tendency, when he began to 'unwind the thread', had been 'to
labour and get out of proportion'.24 Dickens took Pip back to the ruined garden
of Satis House and to an encounter with Estella. At the very end Pip hopes that
the two will remain friends and Estella adds that they will 'continue friends
apart'. The last paragraph is Pip's:
I took her hand inmine, and we went out of the ruined place; and, as the morning mists
had risen long ago when I first left the forge, so, the evening mists were rising now, and
in all the broad expanse of tranquil light they showed to me, I saw the shadow of no
parting from her.

This iswhat most readers now accept as Dickens's last word, but the manuscript
21
The Pilgrim Edition of the Letters of Charles Dickens, ix, 428.
22
John Forster, The Life of Charles Dickens, ed. by J. W T. Ley (London: Palmer, 1928),
PP-737-38.
23
Foreword to Great Expectations (1937), repr. in Shaw on Dickens, ed. by Dan H. Laurence
and Martin Quinn (New York: Ungar, 1985), p. 56.
24
For a full discussion of the revisions see Great Expectations, ed. by Margaret Cardwell, The
Clarendon Dickens (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), pp. xli-xliii.

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64 Dickens and the Idea of the Comic Novel

shows that he originally wrote 'the shadow of no parting from her but one'.
To complicate matters further, he revised the phrase in the i 862 edition to 'no
shadow of another parting from her'. These are all different nuances, of course,
but they do indicate a real uncertainty which may be more than simply trying
to find a proper rhythm for the sentence.
What seems to me most important about Dickens's revision of the end of
Great Expectations is that he so readily gave way to Bulwer's pressure for a
change. He was not generally so open to interference, however well intentioned
or well informed it was. Dickens must have felt an unease with what he had
first written and readily accepted that a change was both 'for the better' and
would prove 'more acceptable' to his readers. I want to suggest that neither
ending should necessarily be seen as destructive of the 'comedy' of the novel
as a whole. The original ending would have left Pip barren (both emotionally
and in the sense that the young Pip, who is with him when he meets Estella in
Piccadilly, is not his own child). It would emphasize that his love is still painfully
unrequited, but also that, without his 'expectations', the disillusioned Pip has
survived alone and, in a sense, prospered. This 'disillusioning', as much as his
survival, would be in tune with the ancient spirit of comedy. The second ending
opens up glimmers of hope amid the 'broad expanse of tranquil light', and the
rising mists signal some potential, or at least some new beginning. Many critics
have noted the echoes of the end of Milton's Paradise Lost as this new Adam
and Eve leave the ruined garden. What readers must consider iswhether or not
Pip is indulging in yet another illusion and whether or not the hope he holds
out could ever be buttressed by reality. Either way, this does not strike me as
specifically 'tragic' or undermining of the kind of broadly 'comic' readings I
have explored in this essay. The mood is precisely what Dickens seems to have
aspired to throughout the tale: an expression of the tragi-comic. The title of
his novel-Great Expectations-should always be seen as a consistently ironic
commentary on its action, and irony is far more commonly associated with
comedy than it is with tragedy.

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