What the Dickens?

Charles Dickens was born 212 years ago yesterday, and even an insignificant anniversary of a comparably significant cultural figure would be on every front page in France.

In England, however, it largely went ignored. In fact, I espied only one reference to it, and even that was on Facebook. This is what I’d like to talk about, but first a few remarks about our arguably greatest novelist.

In fact, my personal, limited and very inadequate experience suggests that Dickens wrote the greatest half-novels in English literature. Usually, they were the first halves, where the writer’s eagle-eyed social observations, mordant view of human nature and coruscating humour came to the fore.

After that, he tended to sink into gooey sentimentality and rather trite melodrama, thereby losing me as a reader. Then again, I have similar problems with Dickens’s contemporary, Dostoyevsky. I suppose the 19^th century zeitgeist was largely to blame, but giants are supposed to stand tall enough to look down on temporal maelstroms down below.

A propos of nothing, Dickens got a bad turn from Russian translators. When I was little, a 30-volume collection was published in Russia. In fact, it was overpublished, which is why those black-and-green volumes adorned every bookshelf I can recall.

That’s how most people used them, as an aspect of interior decoration. Reading those novels was the lot of the very few, and to a large extent that was the translators’ fault.

There are two basic schools of translation, which in Russia were called ‘literalist’ and ‘adequate’. The former preached verbatim rendering of the text, the latter believed that the translator’s task is for the work to achieve the same effect in the target language as it did in the original one. If that meant deviating from the letter of the text here and there, then so be it. The cost of doing business.

Now literal translation isn’t without merit when it comes to scholarly essays, though even there one must respect the idiosyncrasies of the target tongue. However, when it comes to literature produced by great stylists and satirists like Dickens, literalism is lethal. The translations of his novels into Russian prove that.

The hacks who undertook the task did a good job preserving everything I find objectionable in Dickens, such as his soppy sentimentality and propensity for cheap melodrama. At the same time, they killed stone-dead everything that makes him a writer of genius.

Yet the quotation I saw on social media today had nothing to do with Dickens’s novels. Instead it was his comment on the ongoing Civil War in America: “The Northern onslaught upon slavery is no more than a piece of specious humbug designed to conceal a desire for economic control of the Southern states.”

If I referred to Dickens’s day job as writing great half-novels, then this is a great half-thought. Dickens saw through the Northern ploy of selling its aggression on the South as a noble effort to liberate enslaved human beings. That indeed was humbug, to use Dickens’s favourite word.

He correctly identified the reason for the war as having little to do with slavery as such, and having much to do with the North’s desire to bring the South to heel. But the control the North sought wasn’t so much economic as political.

True enough, the eleven Southern states seceded largely because the federal government had put obstacles in the way of spreading slavery into the newly acquired territories. However, Lincoln and his colleagues explicitly stated on numerous occasions that they had no quarrel with slavery in the original Southern states.

Their bellicose reaction to the secession was caused not by slavery but by their in-built imperative to retain and expand the power of the central government. “If that would preserve the Union, I’d agree not to liberate a single slave,” Lincoln once said. Note also that his Gettysburg Address includes not a single anti-slavery word – and in fact Lincoln dreaded the possibility that he himself might be portrayed as an abolitionist.

That war was produced by what I see as the key political clash of modernity, one between localism and centralism. This terminology is, I think, more elucidating, in politics at any rate, than the Marxist dichotomy of capitalism and socialism. Both can be seen as merely subsets of the overarching conflict.

The greatest political crimes of modernity have been committed by the centralisers. It mattered little whether they described themselves as socialists (national or international), fascists, republicans or democrats.

Abraham Lincoln, for example, closed down 300 pro-Southern newspapers (and had their presses smashed), suppressed the writ of habeas corpus and, according to the Commissary General of Prisoners, had 13,535 Northern citizens arrested for political crimes from February 1862 to April 1865.

Comparing his record with that of Mussolini, who only managed 1,624 political convictions in 20 years and yet is universally and justly reviled, one begins to see modern hagiography in a different light.

So Dickens only got his assessment half-right, but he still did better than many other commentators, both at the time and now. Tolstoy, for example, a greater novelist than Dickens, had none of his perspicacity. What the Russian wrote on Lincoln has to be described as bilge, and even that would be charitable:

“Of all the great national heroes and statesmen of history Lincoln is the only real giant. Alexander, Frederick the Great, Caesar, Napoleon, Gladstone and even Washington stand in greatness of character, in depth of feeling and in a certain moral power far behind Lincoln. Lincoln was a man of whom a nation has a right to be proud; he was a Christ in miniature, a saint of humanity, whose name will live thousands of years in the legends of future generations. We are still too near to his greatness, and so can hardly appreciate his divine power; but after a few centuries more our posterity will find him considerably bigger than we do. His genius is still too strong and too powerful for the common understanding, just as the sun is too hot when its light beams directly on us.”

Quite. I get it. Lincoln was Jesus Christ come again.

So let’s wish a happy anniversary to Charles Dickens. In addition to his artistic achievements, he was a counterweight to the likes of Tolstoy, and we should be for ever grateful.