The One, Other, and Only Dickens by Garrett Stewart (review)

In Edward Lear’s “Mr. and Mrs. Discobbolos,” the happy couple begin making their home on top of a high wall, only for the latter to exclaim: “Oh! W! X! Y! Z! | It has just come into my head – | Suppose we should happen to fall! ! ! ! ! | Darling Mr. Discobbolos.” Lear’s nonsense, remote as it may seem from the matter at hand, epitomizes something of the thrust of Garrett Stewart’s latest book. As the exclamatory “Oh!” is transformed retrospectively into the letter O – a shift prompted by the following letters (“W! X! Y! Z!”) – there is a slippage between the individual graphemes with which written language is built and the expressive potential of the human voice; we hear, almost simultaneously, the letter and the word. This, in a way, is how Stewart proposes to come to terms with Dickens’s style in The One, Other, and Only Dickens.

Dickens has been the subject of one other of Stewart’s books (Dickens and the Trials of Imagination, 1975), but in other ways his distinctive body of criticism on narrative fiction has always been energized by confrontations with Dickens’s prose. At heart, this is an attempt to find new ways of coming to terms with Dickens’s style – what Graham Greene famously termed Dickens’s “secret prose” (to the unpacking of which phrase Stewart devotes the second chapter). Stewart’s methodology for transcribing the punning musicality of Dickens’s prose is one that he has made his own from his earliest books: a granular approach that slows down the reading time and traces the way individual words and letters shift and recur through certain passages. In Stewart’s hands, letters and syllables take on something of the quality of notes in a musical scale.

The main argument of the book, though, is that two of the most important influences on Dickens’s writerly sensibility are shorthand and Shakespeare (an alliterative pairing that no doubt played pleasingly on Stewart’s ear). In tracing the ripples of these two influences through the grain of Dickens’s prose, Stewart contends that another aspect of Dickens’s linguistic psyche comes into view. Or we might rather say an Other aspect, for this “Other Dickens” is the main subject of the book. Its close (very close) readings set out to discover for Stewart’s readers a kind of shadow Dickens, cloaked in the verbal and phonetic filigree of Dickens’s linguistic exuberance. This Other Dickens is best thought of, suggests Stewart, as a version of Dickens’s “phonetic unconscious” (xvi), a kind of linguistic id that is both created and revealed by the grain and texture of Dickens’s language. He might be thought of as an anarchic counterbalance, at the micro level, to a sentimentality and domestic coziness that more readily appears at the level of Dickens’s plots. This idea of the One Dickens and the Other Dickens therefore gives Stewart a kind of shorthand for expressing a tension between the “microplots” of sound and syllable and the broader narrative structure – an argument that will be familiar to readers of Stewart’s Novel Violence: Towards a Narratography of Fiction (2009). Dickens’s readers, though, have long discerned the importance of tension, contradiction and paradox to his writing – think, for instance, of Wilson’s “The Two Scrooges” – and so it isn’t altogether clear that Stewart’s psychoanalytic-trinitarian approach to Dickens (One, Other, and Only) affords him a kind of heuristic purchase that wasn’t already available.

The occasion or reason for the book – as Stewart himself admits – is a “considered inkling” (108) regarding the roots of Dickens’s inimitable style. The hunch is that Dickens’s early learning of stenographic shorthand in his brief career as a court reporter shaped the timbre and dynamics of his prose. The system Dickens used (Thomas Gurney’s Brachygraphy) omitted vowels, and registered consonants with a system of lines and curves, from which Stewart draws three conclusions: first...