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VOICES OF THE PAST IN DICKENS AND OTHERS tHERBERT HOWARTH What matters most in a writer is the new, personal voice he brings to his art, representing a new way of seeing and feeling the world. But he hears, and uses, and blends in, other voices: voices of contemporaries he admires, voices of the past that have excited him and pervaded his blood. The nineteenth-century writers often did instinctively what Eliot later prescribed in 'Tradition and the Individual Talent.' This essay will consider how Dickens, that most distinctive and unmistakable personality, calls in two or three traditional voices, including a very familiar voice; will contrast the orchestration of the same voice in the work of his nineteenth-century rivals; and will briefly enquire whether the voices of the mid-nineteenth century can be heard in the writers of the twentieth century. Criticism has long acknowledged the formative effect of Dickens' early Chatham encounter with the eighteenth-century novelists. There is a passage in Forster's Life which indicates another early experience which helped to determine Dickens' sense of the arts. At the 'tenderest age' he was taken to the theatre, where his young heart leapt with terror as the wicked king Richard, struggling for his life against the virtuous Richmond, backed up and bumped against the box in which he was; and subsequent visits to the same sanctuary, as he tells us, revealed to him many wondrous secrets, 'of which not the least terrific were, that the witches in Macbeth bore an awful resemblance to the thanes and other proper inhabitants of Scotland; and that the good king Duncan couldn't rest in his grave, but was constantly coming out of it, and calling himself somebody else.' Much later, in the course of that career in which he managed to do everything , be everything, and see everything, Dickens became a tllOrough Shakespearean, acquainted with works less popular than Richard III and Macbeth: saw Macready's Coriolanus as well as his Lear restored; probably saw All's Well and The Winter's Tale; himself played Shallow in The Merry Wives. But when he called on Shakespeare's help in his novels, his mind ran back to the earliest experiences. Volume XLI, Number 2. Winter 1972 152 HERBERT HOWARTH The shadow of Richard Crookback lies across The Old Curiosity Shop. Quilp is conceived in Richard's image. Richard was born with teeth, which plainly signified That I should snarl and bite and play the dog, and he could gnaw a crust at two hours old. Quilp is fanged; threatens his wife 'I'll bite you'; eats his eggs, shell and all; eats prawns, heads and tails and all; and baits the chained dog - 'Why don't you come and bite me - why don't you come and tear me to pieces, you coward?' said Quilp, hissing and worrying the animal till he was nearly mad ... Richard was the restless, urgent contriver, who twice pressed his hireling 'Shall we hear from thee ... ere we sleep?' Quilp, like Richard, robs his wife of sleep and can easily dispense with it himself, and when he instructs Brass to get rid of Kit and presses him 'Shall it be done?' his voice is Richard's and 'It shall, sir,' says Sampson with alacrity. Richard was the living paradox of ugliness and lechety thriving together. Quilp is the amalgam of ugliness and dynamic lust. Richard offered himself as a 'jolly, thriving wooer'; Quilp, lashing his wife with his tongue, leaves her to be 'a jolly bachelor.' The word 'jolly' proves the connection between the two characters. One of the nrst triumphs of Shakespeare's art as he acquired skill in winning the general audience was his blending of comedy with the diabolism of Richard: he endowed Richard with a comic energy, a vivacity, that held, and has continued to hold, the audience, who willynilly share his delight in the effrontery that carries all before it, and this although they clench their fists and long for the moment when he will be resisted. Dickens infuses the same vivacity into Quilp. Quilp knows the 'sport' of villainy. 'Here's sport,' he cries, as he screams and rolls about...

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