Dickens: His Work and His World
By Michael Rosen and Robert Ingpen
Walker Books 2005
95 pages
REVIEW BY ALEX MILLER
According to Peter Ackroyd, Karl Marx once said to Frederick Engels that Charles Dickens had "issued to the world more political and social truths than have been uttered by all the professional politicians, publicists and moralists put together". Since then, Dickens has had more mixed reviews from the left. According to Nadezha Krupskaya, Lenin once walked out of a dramatised version of Dickens' The Cricket on the Hearth because he found its "middle-class sentimentality" unbearable. In this large-format book, lavishly illustrated by Australian artist Robert Ingpen, Michael Rosen introduces Dickens in a way that suggests that Marx's assessment of Dickens was much more accurate than Lenin's.
Rosen, a well-known author of books for children and a regular contributor to the left-wing press in England, writes in a way that is child-friendly but without a hint of being patronising. Dickens' life and work is introduced in the context of the massive political, economic and social convulsions taking place in 19th century Britain, including the recent American and French revolutions, the revolt of the Chartists and the ongoing industrial revolution. According to Rosen, Dickens' work cannot be understood in abstraction from this context: "He saw how much the working people around him loved reading ... and so, for most of his life, his own stories appeared as serials, week by week or month by month, in popular magazines. We call him a novelist and put him in the same group as people who write a book and publish it to be read by a relatively small number of educated men and women, yet really he was part of the world of magazines and chapbooks. Because his stories were so good, they did become books and it was Dickens more than any other writer who turned books into things that anyone who knew how to read felt happy to read. Books were no longer just for people cleverer or richer than you."
As well as a brief account of Dickens' life and a chapter on the London of the novels, there is a chapter in which Rosen takes us through some of the early episodes of Great Expectations, thought by many to be Dickens' greatest work, and the book that first got me hooked on Dickens at the age of eight.
Although writing for children, Rosen has some subtle and striking observations about the book and the questions that it raises: What does it mean to be ashamed of your background? How does perception of social status affect the development of human character? Do you have to make someone else a beggar to become rich?
In a well-known essay on Dickens, George Orwell claimed, "You cannot hold a conversation with a Dickens character ... It is because Dickens' characters have no mental life. They say perfectly the thing they have to say, but they cannot be conceived as talking about anything else. They never learn, never speculate."
In a masterly discussion of Pip's first meeting with the cold and beautiful Estella and the mysterious and eccentric Miss Havisham, Rosen shows how Dickens combines the voice of the infant Pip with that of his adult self to explore what Malcolm X would later call "internalising the voice of the oppressor". Rosen thus captures a dimension of Dickens' work that Orwell simply missed: "This double-voiced storytelling helps Dickens make us think about something which we all do every day: we look back at things that have happened to us, relive them in our minds and wonder what they meant. Should I or shouldn't I have behaved like that? Why did that person treat me like that? Dickens can be described as a moral writer, because he makes us wonder about the rights and wrongs of the way people behave; he's also a psychological writer, because he shows us how people do their thinking."
Rosen and Ingpen have produced an excellent book that will hold the attention of adult devotees of Dickens as well as spark the interest of younger readers.
From Green Left Weekly, April 5, 2006.
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