Dickensians will quickly discern that Waugh [in A Handful of Dust] caricatures Dickens outrageously and, in places, unfairly. But the joke, hilarious and effective, is definitely against Dickens. Waugh's reaction, like Aldous Huxley's, indicates that the response of modern satirical novelists to Dickens has been mixed. At other times an imitator of Dickens, Waugh puts the works of Boz in Mr. Todd's hut for a very satirical reason: he considers the Inimitable largely responsible for the breakdown of social restraints. This collapse, a consequence of the secularization of life, has resulted in the prevalence of savagery in the modern wasteland. To explicate the joke against Dickens from Waugh's perspective, one must discover why Mr. Todd reads Dickens instead of Conrad. (p. 171)

[The] real-life model for Mr. Todd is "stripped … of his religious ecstasy" and burdened instead with "a mania for the work of Charles Dickens." This enables A Handful of Dust to satirize the idea that one can make a substitute religion out of Dickens; one cannot believe in Boz, the novel argues, because modern reality does not obey humanistic Dickensian patterns….

Waugh transforms Dickens, the novel's primary scapegoat, into a satiric symbol. Discrepancies between life as he finds it in 1934 and as it appeared to him in Dickens' novels suggest to Waugh that Dickensian ethics no longer work. Nor were they powerful enough to forestall an unattractive modern world. Waugh compels the nineteenth-century novelist to represent the futility of Victorian humanism, the failure of its pernicious attempt to preserve the moral order by secularizing Christian values. One cannot make a religion out of the religion Waugh ascribes to Dickens: his pseudo-Christian humanism. Replacing religion with literature as the source of moral standards and an influence upon the actions of men—the humanist's favorite impulse—becomes one of the principal targets in Waugh's modern satirical novel. (p. 172)

With the Brazilian jungle, like the African in Conrad, a reliable index to the nature of things back home, the fruitlessness of Dickens' secularized Christianity becomes as universal as the disintegration of Kurtz's Western ideals.

One of the shrewdest methods of establishing the barbarousness of modern life is by constructing events that violate popular sequences in Dickens. This enters the elimination of Boz as a relevant moral guide, for Dickens' brand of humanism contributes significantly to the ongoing decline and fall of Western civilization. Where other Victorians confidently secularized Christianity and proclaimed a new dispensation, Dickens, according to Waugh, pretended the result would still be a recognizably unchanged Christian world. This position the modern satirist not only finds reprehensible but actually designates as enfeebled Christianity's last stand. (pp. 172-73)

Waugh attacks the reliance of liberal Victorians on the educative worth of good literature and Dickens' romantic sympathy for semi-illiterates. Todd's callous treatment of Tony shows that the increase of literacy in Victorian and modern times has not occasioned a broadening of moral responsibility to offset the decline in religious belief. Todd would be just as odious if he could read Dickens by himself. At the same time, illiteracy for Waugh is not an acceptable form of noble savagery….

Waugh stands up for literacy and civilization when they are threatened by foolish myths about their opposites, but cannot embrace the humanist's faith in them as replacements for traditional orthodoxy. (p. 174)

Todd represents the breakdown of civilized conduct that humanism was not puissant enough to prevent. Consequently, the half-breed has the literary tastes of a Victorian gentleman and the ethics of a jungle savage. Similarities between Tony's plight and the misery of social outcasts escape him. He overlooks resemblances between Tony's sentence and those being served by prisoners of legal proceedings. Reading Dickens to Todd forever becomes appreciably more futile than awaiting judgment from Chancery or standing trial in Kafka. (p. 175)

Chuzzlewit illustrates Dickens' modern fear that savagery and civilization, as Conrad later realized, are variations on a theme, different shades of darkness (Conrad) or of hypocrisy and selfishness (Dickens). But Dickens, Waugh insists, was unable to cajole the allegedly civilized world into behaving differently from men in their natural state. Consequently, parallels between Tony's plight in the jungle and the victimizations that drove him away from England persist not as proof of Dickens' prognostic powers but as a reminder of the failure of his humanism. (p. 176)

A Handful of Dust, like Chuzzlewit, is carefully built around a central idea: Waugh's contention that alternatives to genuine Christianity (i.e., Catholicism) do not perform well in the modern world. Anglican church services dutifully attended at Hetton, Dickensian humanism that leaves Todd unmoved, and religio-aesthetic debacles such as the Gothic Revival discredit one another not simply by association but by their common failure to fill man's religious needs. (p. 177)

Critics have generally realized that humanism, in Waugh's opinion, is helpless to combat modern savagery but wrongly assume that Tony is the humanist. Clearly, Dickens symbolizes the shortcomings of this philosophy, while Tony, with his futile interest in things medieval, personifies everything Waugh had to say about Anglicanism. Neither a fervent but inchoate humanism nor a barren, mechanical Anglicanism, Waugh maintains, enables a man to defend himself against the rapacity of his species.

Waugh also observed that A Handful of Dust "dealt entirely with behavior," an enlightening disclosure, for it is a surprisingly philosophical book about untenable attitudes toward life. In coming full circle, the novel takes Tony from the pointless rituals kept up at Hetton to the even less satisfying pseudo-religious ritual of daily readings from Dickens. In addition to its circularity, a cynical comment on the direction of the secular world, the novel achieves satirical symmetry. It criticizes unacceptable behavior by bringing Tony, who is form without feeling at Hetton, to Mr. Todd, who is feeling without form in Brazil….

Tony's Anglicanism symbolizes for Waugh the mindless perpetuation of empty forms. (p. 180)

Since Tony merely progresses from one kind of senseless ritual to another, Waugh repeats his favorite satiric proposition about modern life. It not only parodies the by-gone Christian world, but also seems ludicrously circular. Instead of meaningful cycles, such as the rotation of the seasons, one now finds in the modern wasteland circular motions that parody them: the round of Tendril's inappropriate sermons, Tony's pointless routines, and the daily readings at Mr. Todd's. The fanatical Dickensian appreciates the parodic cycles that circularity can bring, the sense of repeated movement without spiritual goals. (p. 181)

Todd is the man who likes Dickens, yet he and Tony seem to be rehearsing a Conrad novel. The madman reads Dickens (not Conrad) so Waugh can underline differences between the humanist perspective and the insane modern world of perverted intentions that the failure to preserve restraints has allegedly produced. Tony peruses Boz but relives Heart of Darkness. Waugh imports Conrad's grasp of the absurdity of life to undercut the humanist position. In turn, he permits this position to render Conrad demoralizingly negative.

An adroit parodist, Waugh also has it in for modern novelists who come to terms with the preposterousness of the secular life process. His joke against Dickens makes possible an equally serious jest at the expense of Conrad. At first Waugh presents Dickens and Conrad as contrapuntal opposites, then subtly unveils mutually incriminating similarities. He contends that the apparently nihilistic reaction to the secular world in moderns like Conrad is deceptive. It is inferior to the unworkable Victorian stance that preceded it, a stance which Waugh finds that Conrad cannot quite forsake.

Conrad's skeptical opinion of human nature, world events, and humanitarian endeavor often anticipates Waugh's own. In Chapters Five and Six, Waugh places the absurdist outlook, which he shares to a point, alongside Dickens' humanism. The resulting contrast is between two untenable secular philosophies of life. The sentimental side of the Victorian novelist symbolizes the recent past. But a stoical streak in Conrad, Waugh adds, is as unrealistic and perhaps as sentimental as humanism. Nihilism pure and simple would be an automatic dead end. To suggest that a kind of saving awareness paradoxically proceeds from it is even worse. Waugh charges that Marlow's heroic recognition of life's perversity ought not to assume the merits of a final wisdom. Experiences Marlow assimilates seem, at first glance, hopelessly pessimistic, but actually constitute a liberating acceptance of life and human nature that is foreign to Waugh and the uncompromising honesty of the modern satirical novel.

A Handful of Dust is closer to Heart of Darkness than the similarity in the initials of both titles suggests. London resembles Brazil as thoroughly as it reminds Marlow of the Congo. Waugh parodies the notion that Marlow, like Chuzzlewit, can go to hell and come back. This trip did not convince Waugh when a humanist made it and seems no more persuasive when attempted by a more cynical traveller. Hell for Waugh is a factual possibility, not a metaphorical ploy. As did Dickens, Conrad devises secular equivalents for events heretofore considered sacred, such as pilgrimage, martyrdom, death, and resurrection. These facsimiles are always consciously semi-parodic in Conrad, yet often prove curiously effective. (pp. 181-82)

Tony remains an inarticulate, Prufrockian failure, nobody's spokesman. His hell is Dantesque, a punishment both permanent and anti-heroic. Marlow's underworld, as it parodies the classical variety, remains similar enough to it to make his ordeal there maturing. Classical heroes descend into hell to find someone who knows the truth. For Marlow, Kurtz amply fulfills this role.

Waugh's point is that negation, no matter how sincere, cannot be more fruitful than unfounded affirmation. One cannot make a substitute religion out of Conradian negativity any more successfully than Victorians created one from a more sanguine Dickens. A relentless modern satirical novelist, Waugh denies readers the consolations negative epiphanies like Marlow's supposedly bring. The nature of things in Waugh's continually declining world remains distressingly profane, hence irredeemable. A Handful of Dust is more than a critique of Victorianism. According to Waugh, Conrad and the Edwardians do not surpass Dickens and the Victorians because they are still looking for humanistic ways to feel religious about life, as if art, utilizing religious metaphors, might restore value to a purely secular existence. (pp. 182-83)

Chuzzlewit enters the American jungle, Marlow penetrates the Congo, Tony travels into the wilds of Brazil—three journeys into the self to discover the nature of things. The first two pilgrims find something within their secular selves to depend on. Waugh employs the third to parody them both. (p. 183)

As Waugh's paradigm, Tony personifies the incurable hollowness Conrad sensed in modern secular man but immediately obscured. Kurtz is not hollow if he finally perceives his own hollowness and utters the perception. Provoked by Conrad, who cannot decide if evil is energy or emptiness, Waugh concludes that it is primarily unrestrained energy (dynamic or Dionysian); it thrives because its traditional opposition, the static or conservative forces (Apollonian), have forfeited living beliefs. They have become vacant and energyless, hollow pushovers like Tony is, first for Brenda, then for Mr. Todd. (pp. 183-84)

Making an absurdist like Conrad seem absurd is more difficult and less amusing, however, than making the sentimental humanism in Dickens appear ridiculous. Waugh's affinities with Conrad occlude the differences between them. Hence the usefulness of Dickens as a satiric symbol for a persistently disastrous humanism of which Waugh makes Conrad's predatory world the sorry outcome and Conrad himself a willing perpetuator. (p. 185)

In A Handful of Dust Waugh unmasks Conrad as a fainter humanist than Dickens. Conrad's weaker faith in the recuperative powers of the human spirit, his shrunken confidence in man's capacity for changes of heart, stands to Dickens' humanism as Teddy's project relates to Tony's ambition. The slide downward from formal Christianity to Dickens to Conrad is reflected in the deterioration from Tony's grandfather to Tony to Teddy. A Handful of Dust contains Waugh's cleverest variation on his recurrent satiric image for life: normally pointless and circular, the life process is rendered as a downward spiral, an idea combining purposelessness with unstoppable descent. (pp. 186-87)

A Handful of Dust is best seen as a religio-philosophical satiric novel. It mounts a full-fledged attack on the secularized life process of the modern world. Beneath the artful narrative and superb comic incidents, one detects an unfolding argument that a novelist of ideas would envy. A complete set of Dickens turns up in a mud hut on the Amazon for reasons that have little to do with the Inimitable's universal appeal. Waugh connects Dickens with Conrad and satirizes both as instances of that recurring aberration which relies on the innermost humanity of man and accepts as irrevocable a secularized world. Waugh emphasizes selected aspects of Dickens that admirers of the profoundly sombre, often tragic author of Bleak House, Little Dorrit, and Our Mutual Friend will find difficult to digest, even if they see the darker Dickens as a victim of the failure of his own humanistic vision. As for Conrad, Waugh's censure of him and the kind of modernity he represents as the latest phase in a process at least as old as Dickens is persuasive…. (p. 187)

Jerome Meckier, "Why the Man Who Liked Dickens Reads Dickens Instead of Conrad: Waugh's 'A Handful of Dust'," in Novel: A Forum on Fiction (copyright © Novel Corp., 1980), Vol. 13, No. 2, Winter, 1980, pp. 171-87.