Dickens at Garsington

What follows is a preliminary section of a project with the provisional title “Dickens among the Modernists,” which aims to investigate how in the period surrounding the First World War Dickens came to be revalued and reinvented by a number of important Modernist writers and critics. I begin in an Anglophone context but will later go on to explore my topic in a broader perspective that will include a number of major European writers who responded acutely to Dickens’s work, Kafka and Strindberg among them.

In the present phase of the work I shall take as the epicenter of this rediscovery in Britain the group of pacifists and war dissenters who gathered at Garsington Manor in Oxfordshire at the home of Lady Ottoline Morrell (Fig. 2) and her husband Philip, the Liberal M. P. for Burnley, between 1910 and 1918 (Fig. 1). The first thing to say is that a remarkable number of the war opponents gathered there were also Dickens enthusiasts. I shall treat here as a link man the most prominent pacifist of them all, Bertrand Russell (Fig. 3), who embarked on a long term affair with Lady Ottoline in 1911, and who can therefore be thought of as at the very heart of Garsington society.

Garsington, like the friends who surrounded Vanessa Bell and her sister, Virginia Woolf, in Bloomsbury – and there are indeed many overlaps between the two groups – was about talk, endless discussion of every conceivable subject. It is inconceivable that Dickens was not among the subjects that surfaced from time to time, especially since even a partial list of Garsington protagonists is bound to include writers and philosophers who made distinctive, usually positive pronouncements about the novelist at around this time. I am thinking of Russell and Lady Ottoline themselves, Russell’s friend and disciple Ludwig Wittgenstein (very much a presence in spirit at Garsington if not in the flesh), T. S. Eliot, whom Russell had met at Harvard, George Santayana, another ex-Harvard man whom he knew initially through his brother Francis, Virginia Woolf, Siegfried Sassoon, Kathleen Mansfield, and, last but not least, John Middleton Murry.

Part of the aim of this essay is to try to catch echoes of that talk as it concerned Dickens, not necessarily at Garsington itself – our first two locations are the Villa I Tatti in Fiesole near Florence in Italy and Trinity College, Cambridge – but involving figures directly or indirectly associated with its society. I hope to substantiate in some degree Murry’s assertion in his August 1922 essay “Dickens,” written in response to Santayana’s famous essay that had appeared in The Dial the previous November, that “in the last few years, let us say since 1914, there has been a marked revival of interest and admiration for Dickens among the younger generation” (Murry 31). As many Dickensians will know, the writer had fallen on relatively hard times around the turn of the century as a result of a two-pronged attack, from aesthetes and naturalists alike. The former tended to regard Dickens as an inadequate artist, the latter as an inadequate realist. Besides, to many it appeared that his work had been thoroughly superseded by the powerful tragicomic novels and stories of Dostoevsky, which in England, in translations by Constance Garnett, gave rise to something of a cult, especially among the Bloomsbury group, as attested by Duncan Grant’s 1909 “Crime and Punishment,” depicting Marjory Strachey in agony or ecstasy after she has just put down the book. So much so, in fact, that Edmund Wilson would later claim, in his famous “Two Scrooges” essay, that “the Bloomsbury that talked about Dostoevsky ignored Dostoevsky’s master, Dickens” (1).

In what follows I shall want to modify this judgement about Dickens’s standing in relation to acknowledged Modernist literary masters – even among members of the Bloomsberry group itself. There is the testimony of Ottoline Morrell, writing in 1929, but covering the period after 1906 in which she entertained in her house in Bedford Square, who asks rhetorically “who can say that they stand alone without having derived some ideas […] that scattered the seed into their imagination...