DICKENS AND LIFE

Press, Volume C, Issue 29656, 28 October 1961, Page 3

DICKENS AND LIFE

The Imagination of Charles Dickens. By A. O. J. Cockshut Collins. 187 pp. index.

So far Mr Cockshut’s books have dealt with various aspects of English life in the Victorian period. Trollope, the novelist, for instance, provided him with a subject of considerable scope. A survey of Trollope’s tales from “The Warden” in 1855 to “Dr Wortle’s School” in 1881 must pass in review types from many levels of society. “Anglican Attitudes,” Mr Cockshut’s second book, was certainly agreeable reading, although to some it seemed a trifle superficial. The title, which recalled Angus Wilson’s satirical novel, was perhaps an unfortunate choice. With the present work. “The Imagination of Charles Dickens,” the author returns to literary criticism. Inevitably this book will invite comparison with Humphrey House’s masterpiece, “The Dickens World;” but where Mr House was preoccupied by sociological considerations. Mr Cockshut writes as a critic concerned with the more general ideas that are ex. pended in the novels. His aim may be given in his own words. “Dickens’s development was very complex, of course. But I have stressed in particular the development of certain simple topics, prisons, crowds, justice, money and dirt, which seem to have been fundamental for him. It was not primarily a progress of ideas or opinions, but an ever deeper penetration into the majestic range of possible meaning contained in the simple ideas and images of his youth.” A little later Mr Cockshut shows how Dickens’s leaning towards fantasy was in a state of tension with this sense of facts and objects. The conclusion is that the novelist’s increasing response to the pressure of life and

his improved technique “gradually compressed and solidified the volatile essences of his early fantasy.” The light and airy "Pickwick Papers” was ’transformed into the weighty bulk of “Our Mutual Friend” or “Great Expectations,” so that his later books give the impression of having, been formed under pressure like geological strata.” The most arresting part of the book is the section in which the author discusses certain concepts implicit in the novels, to which sensitive readers quickly respond. Examples of such concepts are the juxtaposition of the crowd and the solitary, the sensation of confinement, which the present author characterises as "the expanding prison.” These are symbolic themes, and by his treatment of Dickens’s response to them, Mr Cockshut is able to show how a best seller whom many clever people despised has become “a real and acknowledged classic.”