Dickens, Chesterton & Christmas

G. K. Chesterton wrote a series of brilliant introductions to Dickens' books, including his Christmas books, which are well worth reading at this time of year. You can find the relevant introductions here and here.

As you might guess, they are eminently quotable, so I have had to restrict myself to just a few of Chesterton's comments here. 

What he appreciates is that "Dickens devoted his genius in a somewhat special sense to the description of happiness. No other literary man of his eminence has made this central human aim so specially his subject matter." 

Which is why he was so attracted to Christmas, almost despite himself: "All Dickens's books," he writes,  "are Christmas books."

So what is so special about Christmas?

"Everything is so arranged that the whole household may feel, if possible, as a household does when a child is actually being born in it. The thing is a vigil and a vigil with a definite limit. People sit up at night until they hear the bells ring. Or they try to sleep at night in order to see their presents the next morning. Everywhere there is a limitation, a restraint; at one moment the door is shut, at the moment after it is opened. The hour has come or it has not come; the parcels are undone or they are not undone; there is no evolution of Christmas presents."

And why does the season matter?

"All comfort must be based on discomfort. Man chooses when he wishes to be most joyful the very moment when the whole material universe is most sad."

As he wrote about Dickens: "He may almost be said to have only written a brilliant introduction to another man's book."

More Dickens. More Chesterton.

The fact that Chesterton is so quotable means that he has not always been taken as seriously as he should have been. Here are a couple more of his comments from his wonderful book about Dickens:

"Dickens had all his life the faults of the little boy who is kept up too late at night. The boy in such a case exhibits a psychological paradox; he is a little too irritable because he is a little too happy."

"[Certain Moderns] permit any writer to emphasise doubts ... for doubts are their religion, but they permit no man to emphasise dogmas. If a man be the mildest Christian, they smell 'cant'; but he can be a raving windmill of pessimism and they call it 'temperament'."

Charles Dickens, G.K. Chesterton and Catholicism

In his preface to Barnaby Rudge, Dickens wrote: "However imperfectly those disturbances [the 1780 No Popery riots] are set forth in the following pages, they are impartially painted by one who has no sympathy with the Romish Church, though he acknowledges as most men do, some esteemed friends among the followers of its creed."


An obvious question for any Catholic English teacher, therefore, is which side of Dickens won out: the 19th Century Protestant who had "no sympathy with the Romish Church" or the sympathetic friend who was perfectly capable of seeing Catholics as people like any others? I'll come back to Barnaby Rudge in a later post but for now I'd like to look at what G.K. Chesterton had to say on the matter. 


In one of his books, he commented that, "When [Dickens] found a thing in Europe which he did not understand, such as the Roman Catholic Church, he simply called it an old-world superstition, and sat looking at it like a moonlit ruin."


More damningly still, in his introduction to Barnaby Rudge he argued that, "Undoubtedly [Dickens] knew no history; and he may or may not have been conscious of the fact. But the consciousness did not prevent him from writing a History of England. Nor did it prevent him from interlarding all or any of his works with tales of the pictorial past, such as the tale of the broken swords in Master Humphrey's Clock, or the indefensibly delightful nightmare of the lady in the stage-coach, which helps to soften the amiable end of Pickwick. Neither, worst of all, did it prevent him from dogmatising anywhere and everywhere about the past, of which he knew nothing; it did not prevent him from telling the bells to tell Trotty Veck that the Middle Ages were a failure, nor from solemnly declaring that the best thing that the mediæval monks ever did was to create the mean and snobbish quietude of a modern cathedral city. No, it was not historical reverence that held him back from dealing with the remote past; but rather something much better -- a living interest in the living century in which he was born. He would have thought himself quite intellectually capable of writing a novel about the Council of Trent or the First Crusade. He would have thought himself quite equal to analysing the psychology of Abelard or giving a bright, satiric sketch of St. Augustine. It must frankly be confessed that it was not a sense of his own unworthiness that held him back; I fear it was rather a sense of St. Augustine's unworthiness."


In other words, Chesterton was not blind to Dickens' self-confessed anti-Catholic prejudices but that did not stop him writing, in what Ian Ker calls "probably [his] greatest work", an appreciation of Dickens as a novelist which has been scarcely equalled since.


One of Chesterton's great strengths was that he was able to see Dickens' novels in their broad historical context. In one of those marvellous, free-flowing passages of his, he argued that "for a few years our corner of Western Europe has had a fancy for this thing we call fiction; that is, for writing down our own lives or similar lives in order to look at them. But though we call it fiction, it differs from older literatures chiefly in being less fictitious." 


According to Chesterton, Dickens stood outside this tradition because he retained a link with the literature that came before the Realist revolution: "Dickens was a mythologist rather than a novelist; he was the last of the mythologists, and perhaps the greatest." 


Dickens stood in a line of descent, through Shakespeare, with Chaucer and other great Catholic writers and so, Chesterton argued, whatever his own personal prejudices, his art drew upon all that was best in the pre-Reformation world: "He could only see all that was bad in mediaevalism. But he fought for all that was good in it."


As we approach the bicentenary of Dickens' birth next year, we do not need to be overly concerned by Dickens' lack of "sympathy with the Romish Church". As GKC puts it in his final paragraph: "The hour of absinthe is over. We shall not be much further troubled with the little artists who found Dickens too sane for their sorrows and too clean for their delights. But we have a long way to travel before we get back to what Dickens meant, and the passage is along a rambling English road, a twisting road such as Mr Pickwick travelled. But this at least is part of what he meant: that comradeship and serious joy are not interludes in comradeship and joy, which through God shall endure for ever. The inn does not point to the road; the road points to the inn. And all roads point at last to an ultimate inn, where we shall meet Dickens and all his characters; and when we drink again it shall be from the great flagons in the tavern at the end of the world."


Or if that's not punchy enough, we could look at the sign that hangs at the entrance to all Dickens' novels, according to Chesterton, the sign that could equally well hang at the entrance to Chesterton's own book: "Abandon hopelessness, all ye who enter here."