The Artful Dickens: The Tricks and Ploys of the Great Novelist by John Mullan

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Artful Dickens: The Tricks and Ploys of the Great Novelist by John Mullan John Batchelor The Artful Dickens: The Tricks and Ploys of the Great Novelist. By John Mullan. London: Bloomsbury. 2020. ix+428 pp. £16.99. ISBN 978-1-4088-6683-2. The bibliography of major secondary works on Dickens is now huge. As with Shakespeare, where the bibliography is as extensive as the sea, the task of reading through enough secondary works on Dickens to arrive at a sound judgement of a new one is daunting. For my money the best work on Dickens begins with John Forster's indispensable Life in three volumes (London: Chapman and Hall, 1872–74), and has been followed by valuable critical studies from Humphrey House, F R. and Q. D. Leavis, John Butt and Kathleen Tillotson, John Carey, Vincent Newey, J. Hillis Miller, Harry Stone, and others. A cluster of biographical studies coincided with the second centenary of Dickens's birth, including especially those by Michael Slater (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), Claire Tomalin (London: Viking, 2011), and most intriguingly Robert Douglas-Fairhurst (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2011). There is no shortage of good books on Dickens. So do we need a book like this, which focuses sharply on Dickens's methods? The answer to that is: read it, and you will discover that we do indeed need it. This book by John Mullan is a careful, painstaking, and thoughtful unpicking of Dickens's narrative strategies, exploring in detail the different ways in which each of his modes—including the rhetorical, comical, moral, Gothic, and riotously farcical—contributes to the impact of his work. John Mullan is right to say that Dickens is an 'epicure of fear' (p. 319) and drowning, the terror of drowning and the effect of drowning on the human body. In David Copperfield, the emotionally charged death by drowning of Steerforth, David's friend and little Em'ly's seducer, stirs in David a deep homoerotic Liebestod for his flawed dead hero. Earlier in the same novel, drowning threatens the sexually awakened Em'ly in what Mullan rightly describes as an extraordinary passage in which Dickens violates all narrative conventions. David as narrator anticipates Em'ly's future as a fallen woman. The little girl runs along a 'jagged timber' and is in danger of falling into the sea. Looking forward into a future that only he as first-person narrator can know, David wonders whether 'if the life before her' (that is, her seduction by Steerforth) 'could have been revealed to me at a glance', he would not have done better to have allowed her to drown (p. 287). Drowned humans can also be pillaged, as they are by Gaffer Hexham in Our Mutual Friend, and drowning is a fit punishment for the sexually violent schoolmaster, Bradley Headstone, whose name recalls that of Murdstone, David Copperfield's brutal stepfather. These names evoke a chain of significance: a headstone marks a grave, while sex, shit (merde), and death link these two narratives. Much lighter and funnier meanings appear in Flora Finching's blushingly confused banter with her former suitor, Arthur Clennam, in Our Mutual Friend. [End Page 290] Mullan rightly finds this foolish character good-hearted and generous, and finally sympathetic. Flora Finching is based on a woman Dickens had once loved: 'In 1855 he had eagerly arranged a reunion with the former Maria Beadnell, whom he had unsuccessfully courted more than twenty years earlier.' He was disappointed to find her 'now in her mid-forties, stout and silly' (p. 153). Stout and silly though she may be, she is also good-hearted and generous-spirited, and as Flora she emerges as a 'rounded' figure in more than one sense. Although crazed, Flora is well worth listening to. She erupts into an unpunctuated monologue which has a central theme: 'The withered chaplet my dear,' said Flora, with great enjoyment, 'is then perished the column is crumbled and the pyramid is standing upside down upon its what's-his-name call it not giddiness call it not weakness call it not folly I must now retire into privacy and look upon the ashes...