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Point of View in Dickens

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Fred W. Boege
Fred W. Boege*
Affiliation:
Queens College Flushing, N. Y.
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Extract

It does not seem that Dickens' use of point of view has attracted much attention. The general limits of the subject have been fixed, but what lies between them has seldom been considered. Those limits are pretty-well determined by his dates. Like most other predecessors of George Eliot, Dickens is pre-eminently an objective novelist: hardly to be surpassed in the external treatment of his characters, but quite inadequate when he deals with their inner lives. George Eliot herself has stated this view as well as anyone.

We have one great novelist who is gifted with the utmost power of rendering the external traits of our town population; and if he could give us their psychological character—their conceptions of life, and their emotions—with the same truth as their idiom and manners, his books would be the greatest contribution Art has ever made to the awakening of social sympathies. But… he scarcely ever passes from the humorous and external to the emotional and tragic, without becoming as transcendent in his unreality as he was a moment before in his artistic truthfulness.

Essays (Edinburgh—London: Blackwood, 1885), p. 194 (from the essay “Natural History of German Life”).

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 65 , Issue 2 , March 1950 , pp. 90 - 105
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1950

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References

2 See the references in the article by Warrington Winters, “Dickens and the Psychology of Dreams”, PMLA, LXIII (1948), 984–1006. Winters cites one or two minority opinions, but his own study, together with Edmund Wilson's essay on Dickens in The Wound and the Bow, offers the best evidence that the introspective elements in Dickens are worthy of more attention than they have received.

3 The Twentieth Century Novel (New York, 1932), p. 4.

4 The Man Charles Dickens (Boston—New York, 1929), pp. 20–21.

5 Aspects of the Novel (New York, 1927), pp. 119–120.

6 Letters (Bloomsbury: Nonesuch Press, 1938), ii, 624.

7 Ibid., i, 770–771.

8 Life of Charles Dickens, bk. vi, ch. vi.

9 Ernest Boll, “The Plotting of Our Mutual Friend”, MP, XLII (1944–45), 96–122.

10 Life, bk. vII, ch. i.

11 Charles Dickens (London, 1913), p. 35.

12 See chs. xvii-xvIII and xxxvi-xxxvIII, where things come to us through Esther's eyes quite differently than in the omniscient context: e.g., the conception of Hortense, Lady Dedlock's maid.

13 “The Story of the Goblins who stole a Sexton”, Pickwick Papers, ch. xxix; “The Baron of Grogzwig”, Nicholas Nickleby, ch. vi.

14 Legouis and Cazamian, A History of English Literature (New York, 1931), p. 71.

15 G. M. Trevelyan, History of England (London, 1926), p. 130.

16 Aspects of the Novel, pp. 119–120.

17 A Tale of Two Cities, bk. II, ch. xi.

18 Hard Times, bk. i, chs. iii-iv, xv.

19 Edwin Drood, ch. xi.

20 Nicholas Nickleby, ch. LVII.

21 Martin Chuzzlewit, ch. xxxi.

22 Cf. chs. xxiii and XL, Barnaby Rudge, with the introspective passages in chs. xv, xxiv, XXVIII, and xxix.

23 A Tale of Two Cities, bk. i, ch. iii.

24 American Notes, ch. vii.

26 See, e.g., bk. I, chs. ii, x; bk. ii, ch. xvi.

26 Bleak Bouse, chs. x, xxii, xxv.

27 Nicholas Nickleby, chs. vii-ix, xii-xiii.

28 Dombey and Son, ch. xxv.

29 Martin Chuzzlewit, chs. xxxi, xxxvi, and the first part of xxxvii.

30 Our Mutual Friend, bk. iii, ch. v.

31 Our Mutual Friend, bk. iv, ch. x.

32 The Wound and the Bow, pp. 15–17.

33 Scenes, xxv, “A visit to Newgate” (the penultimate paragraph of this chapter offers an interesting parallel to Bierce's “An occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge”); Oliver Twist, ch. XLVIII; Martin Chuzzlewit, chs. XLVII, LI.

34 Oliver Twist, ch. m; Nicholas Nickleby, ch. LXII; Dombey and Son, chs. xiv, xvi.

35 Our Mutual Friend, bk. iii, ch. viii.

36 Life of Charles Dickens, bk. vii, ch. i.