IT IS WIDELY AGREED that the account of Dickens which Edmund Wilson gave in The Wound and the Bow (1941) has had remarkable success with academic readers. It is hardly too much to say that we think of Dickens very largely in Wilson's terms. Santayana's Dickens in Soliloquies in England is an engaging figure, the novelist as man's best friend: we are to admire Dickens's vast sympathetic participation in the daily life of mankind; but it now seems a picture from a gone time. It would be foolish to disengage ourselves entirely from Santayana's Dickens or from Henry James's Dickens in the Autobiography (the great actuality of the current imagination), but these figures do not speak to us, it appears, with particular authority. The Wound and the Bow presents Dickens as a victim, a man of obsession, and for that very reason as a poet, an artist of modern fears and divisions. We are to think of his fiction in association with the novels of Dostoevsky and Kafka. We do not hope to find him in our Christmas stocking; it is no longer common to speak of his novels in association with good cheer. The first effect of this interpretation is that Dickens is no longer received in the first instance as a voluble presence, a large arrival (in James's phrase), an entertainer, or a comedian; he is of the modern dispensation now, a tragic hero. If this means that he is taken seriously as a major artist, companion of Shakespeare, George Eliot, James, Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy, perhaps it makes a happy conclusion. But it is hard to avoid the impression that there is still something askew in our sense of Dickens's art. We seem to have run from one extreme position to another. If an instance is required, there is our failure with the comedy. We do not know what to make of it, now that we have moved the center of our interest away from the famous comic scenes. We cannot relate the [383]