Dickens's Fiction: Tapestries of Conscience (review)
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More than thirty-five years' experience in teaching Dickens to undergraduates has given Stanley Friedman a mastery of a novelist whose genius, in the end, like Matthew Arnold's Shakespeare, we can never explain. Professor Friedman is not solving mysteries. In his selection of eight of the major novels – Oliver Twist, Nicholas Nickleby, A Christmas Carol, David Copperfield, Bleak House, Hard Times, Great Expectations, and Our Mutual Friend – he examines devices of structure and rhetoric by which Dickens achieved his artistic effects and presents lucid readings of these familiar but critically challenging texts. The "special design" of his novels was to meet the demands of weekly or monthly serialization in periodicals or in separate monthly parts. This meant careful balancing of hosts of characters and intricate but always interrelated lines of plot into a single novel that would hold even the most impatient reader in suspense for months before it all came together. It is the measure of his creative genius that out of this whirling mass of characters and incidents there emerges, in Friedman's words, "a synthesis of many perspectives" (174).
Within each of the novels in this study, Friedman notes the weaving together of often disparate-seeming themes and characters. It is the old storyteller's art, enchanting the reader with his power to make the unbelievable believable: that long and deeply buried secrets of identity are discovered in the crowded streets of London, in the accidental meeting of strangers, in the sudden appearance of long-lost documents. Abused and abandoned orphans find identities and families. Oliver Twist finds a loving patron in a stranger he is being forced to rob. Starved and loveless Smike finds a father in the cold-blooded Ralph Nickleby and a valiant champion in Ralph's nephew Nicholas. Modest and plain Esther Summerson finds a penitent mother in the proud and beautiful Lady Dedlock. The prudent spinster Betsy Trotwood finds a long and well-lost husband. Pip uncovers the sordid background of his mysteriously acquired fortune. And the wealthy dustman Boffin and poor Jew Riah both find surrogate daughters. However uneven the weights that fate imposes on Dickens's characters, the scales always balance in the end.
The symmetry of plots and subplots, Friedman argues, is not based on repetition but on reiteration. Nicholas Nickleby "in many respects retells [End Page 417] the story presented in Oliver Twist ... in both books we find not only the motifs of neglected, abused children and guilty parents, but also the comforting figures of altruistic and benevolent parental surrogates who help to guide events to pleasing outcomes" (42–43). Bleak House not only reiterates themes of Oliver Twist (Esther's and Oliver's discovery of the dark secrets of their births), but both novels also indict powerful social institutions like the workhouse and the Court of Chancery. Evil characters are punished or reborn and redeemed, like Scrooge; the good are rewarded, and justice, if not even-handed, is always fair and balanced. Equally fair and balanced, Friedman's book is a useful contribution to Dickens studies.
Queens College, City University of New York
Vineta Colby is Professor Emerita, Queens College, City University of New York. Her special scholarly interests have been the nineteenth-century English novel, and nineteenth-century women novelists. Publications include several articles on nineteenth-century English women novelists and the following books: The Singular Anomaly: Nineteenth-Century English Women Novelists; Yesterday's Woman: English Domestic Novel; Vernon Lee: A Literary Biography.
