{"id":9217,"date":"2020-10-21T23:59:57","date_gmt":"2020-10-21T23:59:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/2020\/10\/21\/there-have-always-been-woke-students-the-problem-is-their-elders-2\/"},"modified":"2026-08-27T04:22:58","modified_gmt":"2026-08-27T04:22:58","slug":"greater-not-wiser","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/2020\/10\/21\/greater-not-wiser\/","title":{"rendered":"Greater\u2014not wiser"},"content":{"rendered":"

T<\/span>here was a time not so long ago in arts broadcasting when the Tiggerish presence of John Mullan was inescapable. He was the media-luvvie professor\u00a0du jour<\/i>\u00a0whose only rival in bumptiousness and ubiquity was Mary Beard. Of late he has been less visible\u2014a rare lockdown bonus?\u2014but no less busy on the evidence of this new book. Let me admit straightaway that Mullan in print is a different beast from his public persona. The only thing that stops me from acclaiming\u00a0The Artful Dickens<\/i>\u00a0a brilliant achievement is fear that its author will parlay it into an eight-part television series.<\/span><\/p>\n

For nearly 50 years the key critical work on Dickens has been John Carey\u2019s 1973 study\u00a0The Violent Effigy<\/i>. Mullan gives it a respectful nod, perhaps confident that his own book may supplant it for a new generation of readers. \u201cDickens is infinitely greater than his critics\u201d was the resonant first line of Carey\u2019s book. That may still be true, but Mullan\u2019s close readings and imaginative interpretations argue that Dickens isn\u2019t necessarily wiser. Nowhere is this more palpable than in the fearful treatment of sex. As Mullan writes, \u201cHis novels cannot face up to the truth of sexual desire and are distorted by the author\u2019s Victorian propriety\u201d. Dickens\u2019s suppression was hypocritical, given that he kept the actress Nelly Ternan as his mistress for 13 years, almost certainly visited prostitutes and tried to have his estranged wife Catherine confined to a lunatic asylum. It is also ironic: the funniest novelist in the English language denied to himself a vital comic subject.<\/span><\/p>\n

Fatal flaw aside, Mullan is more interested in his greatness, in the way his art was a form of sophisticated trickery. Dickens was an accomplished magician who thrilled in bamboozling audiences. One of his best tricks was to put the raw ingredients of a plum pudding into a hat and then pull a steaming-hot pudding out of it. Such ingenuity drove his writing. A whole chapter is devoted to \u201cSmelling\u201d and its effect on memory. When Scrooge in\u00a0A Christmas Caro<\/i>l returns to his childhood it is vivified by a sense of smell\u2014of a pastry cook\u2019s, a laundress\u2019s, a steam pudding \u201cout of the copper\u201d. Less agreeable is the frowsy odour Pecksniff detects from a corridor in\u00a0Martin Chuzzlewit<\/i>, a mixture of brandy, tobacco-smoke, beer and \u201cseveral damp umbrellas\u201d\u2014this last the inimitable Dickensian ingredient.<\/span><\/p>\n

He also loved mimicry, and in his youth was inspired by the \u201cmonopolylogues\u201d of impersonator Charles Mathews\u2014a prototype of \u201cthe man of many voices\u201d\u2014to try a dramatic career for himself, but the accident of a heavy cold thwarted his audition. The stage\u2019s loss was the novel\u2019s gain. His mimetic gift enabled him to invent individual voices, the earliest of them Sam Weller in\u00a0Pickwick Papers<\/i>\u00a0whose transposition of \u201cv\u201d and \u201cw\u201d would have been instantly recognisable to the working-class Cockney: \u201cVy, that\u2019s just the wery point\u201d. Mullan is astute on speech in Dickens as an unwitting revelation of the self. He traces the author\u2019s delight in pompous circumlocution to his father, John Dickens, whom he later magicked into the more benign Mr. Micawber. Verbosity may indicate pretension, or a concealment of moral failing, or simply a helpless social incontinence, as in Flora Finching from\u00a0Little Dorrit<\/i>: \u201c. . . there was a time dear Arthur that is to say decidedly not dear nor Arthur neither but you understand me when one bright idea gilded the what\u2019s-his-name horizon of et cetera . . . \u201d Do we not all know a Flora Finching?<\/span><\/p>\n

Mullan considers the architecture of the novels through Dickens\u2019s change of tenses, and his daring use of prolepsis\u2014a jumping forward of the narrative to warn the reader. This is good and useful, though it\u2019s not as absorbing as his investigation of dread (Dickens was \u201can epicure of fear\u201d) and the way he married horror and comedy tightly together. Perhaps the best chapter in the book is on Dickens\u2019s obsession with drowning. Given the number of drownings in his work it is notable how few biographers have asked whether Dickens could swim. Mullan thinks he learned to in his early thirties, but in his last completed novel\u00a0Our Mutual Friend<\/i>\u00a0the Thames is still a vortex of doom. It\u2019s not surprising to learn that when in Paris he always visited the morgue to inspect the drowned corpses there. \u201cDrowndead\u201d, as Peggotty says in\u00a0David Copperfield<\/i>. Mullan does a fantastic riff on the moment when Mr Dombey, hearing that his intended\u2019s child from a previous marriage drowned\u2014and will thus be no trouble to him\u2014raises his head. A silent reflex, with a chilling implication.<\/p>\n

The Artful Dickens<\/i>\u00a0teems with these fine squiggles of observation and insight. Like the best critics, Mullan not only elucidates the genius of his subject, he invites us to see it anew. Along with Claire Tomalin\u2019s 2011 biography it is the most enlivening book about Dickens in the last 30 years, and wery varmly recommended.<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

The Artful Dickens: The Tricks and\u00a0<\/b><\/span>Ploys of the Great Novelist
\n<\/b><\/span>By John Mullan
\n<\/i><\/span>Bloomsbury, pp448, \u00a316.99<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

John Mullan elucidates the genius of Charles Dickens<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":9498,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[652],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9217","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-books"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9217","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9217"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9217\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9228,"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9217\/revisions\/9228"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/9498"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9217"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9217"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9217"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}