SOURCE: Page, H. M. “‘A More Seditious Book Than Das Kapital’: Shaw on Little Dorrit.” Shaw Review 21, no. 3 (September 1977): 171-77.

[In the following essay, Page discusses George Bernard Shaw's appraisal of Little Dorrit as a masterpiece, which inspired a marked change in the novel's evaluation by scholars.]

In the last century, most critics were indifferent or hostile to Little Dorrit, which was often regarded even by Dickens' admirers as the worst of his works. In contrast, since 1950 many critics have thought it a masterpiece, perhaps Dickens' greatest novel. A pioneer of this change of attitude was Shaw, who, at intervals throughout his long career, continued to insist on the profundity of Dickens' art in Little Dorrit, its truthfulness to human character, and its value as a portrayal of and revolt against the corrupt political and social system of the modern world. Shaw's criticism was epigrammatic and fragmentary, expressed in private letters, public speeches reported with uncertain accuracy by others, short paragraphs in periodicals, and introductions to novels other than Little Dorrit. But it was nevertheless an important contribution to the twentieth-century revaluation of the later Dickens, and is of enduring critical interest.

Shaw is best known as a critic of the political and social aspects of Little Dorrit. His first recorded reference to these came as early as 1887, in a letter in which he mentions Lord Decimus and Mr. Casby as still-topical representations of a persisting social abuse, slum-landlordism.¹ That abuse was the major theme of his first play, Widowers' Houses, which pays tribute to Little Dorrit by showing signs of its influence.² However, when Shaw first published critical comments on Little Dorrit, he praised the novel not simply because it attacked particular abuses but because, like the other novels of Dickens' maturity, it revealed the essential sickness of the entire political and social system, and was therefore revolutionary. Shaw remained constant to this view of Little Dorrit, and expressed it always vigorously, though often summarily, on various occasions over a period of nearly forty years.

In 1908 Shaw declared in a speech that Little Dorrit was “… One of the greatest books ever written in the English language …,” adding that “… as soon as Englishmen realised that Little Dorrit was true there would be a revolution. …” He himself had become a “revolutionist” because he had read the novel as a small boy.³ In 1914, Shaw wrote in a published letter that “… if you put Little Dorrit and Our Mutual Friend into the hands of an experienced man of the world who is deeply interested in social questions and behind the scenes in politics, he is startled by the penetration and accuracy of the study of English politics and the picture of governing class life which he finds there. …”⁴ And in 1912, in answer to an enquiry from the editor of the Bookman as to which he thought Dickens' greatest novel, he replied, “… the tremendous series of exposures of our English civilization which began with Hard Times in 1854, and ended with Our Mutual Friend, throw his earlier works, entertaining as they are, into the shade. Little Dorrit is the work of a prophet—and no minor prophet: it is, in some respects, the climax of his work. …”⁵

As opinions such as these are now the common currency of criticism, it is easy to forget how extraordinary they were before the First World War. Little Dorrit had traditionally been regarded by nearly all English critics as more or less a failure. Matthew Arnold, for example, dismissed it as Philistine literature,⁶ and even Gissing, the critic who had done most to defend the novel against the consensus, had also found much to condemn.⁷ Against this background, Shaw's unqualified claim that the novel is one of the greatest books in the language was an innovation. Also new, and even more important, was Shaw's sense of the depth and comprehensiveness of Dickens' social and political concerns in Little Dorrit and the other later novels. Previous critics had seen no difference between Dickens' earlier and later works, assuming that he had continued to insert occasional and perhaps rather incongruous attacks on isolated social abuses into his books. So, for example, A. W. Ward, an admirer of Dickens and author of the English Men of Letters volume on the novelist, thought the Circumlocution Office chapters of Little Dorrit a well-deserved assault on contemporary English administration, but suggested that they were “out of place in a pathetic and humorous fiction. …”⁸ In contrast, Shaw insisted that the social and political elements in the later works were not incongruous diversions and conventional reformist satires on particular abuses, but were integral to novels which criticized English civilization so widely and deeply as to be revolutionary.

It seems likely that Shaw's unconventional opinions were not much regarded in the years around 1914. No other critics echo his views, although there was much interest in Dickens' radicalism.⁹ One admirer of Little Dorrit did record that he had been heartened by Shaw's praise of the novel.¹⁰ But another, noting that Shaw had “lavished praise upon it as one of the greatest books in the English language …” commented that it all seemed like “studied contrariety” on Shaw's part,¹¹ so testifying to Shaw's unfortunate reputation for “paradoxical high kicks” as the “Nation's Jester.”¹² Perhaps understatement would have been more persuasive, though Shaw may have judged correctly in thinking that resistance would best be overcome by vigorous emphasis. What is certain is that when he made his first detailed comments on Little Dorrit more than twenty years later in the very different and much more receptive atmosphere of the years preceding the Second World War, Shaw had not renounced the use of paradox, though on this occasion it is the Marxists who are teased. In 1937, in an introduction to Great Expectations, Shaw made that most memorable of critical comments on the novel, “Little Dorrit is a more seditious book than Das Kapital. …”¹³

Shaw does not attempt to justify this claim, or his other assertion that “All over Europe men and women are in prison for pamphlets and speeches which are to Little Dorrit as red pepper to dynamite. …” (p. xi) But he does explain why he considers Dickens a revolutionary writer, as contrasted with Thackeray and Trollope, who are essentially “bourgeois”:

… The difference between a revolutionist and what Marx called a bourgeois is that the bourgeois regards the existing social order as the permanent and natural order of human society, needing reforms now and then and here and there, but essentially good and sane and right and respectable and proper and everlasting. To the revolutionist it is transitory, mistaken, dishonest, unhappy, pathological: a social disease to be cured, not to be endured. …

(p. viii)

This definition as applied to Dickens presents an obvious difficulty—that, in Shaw's words, “… Marx knew he was a revolutionist while Dickens had not the faintest suspicion of that part of his calling … It never occurred to him to found a Red International, as Marx did, or even to join one out of the dozens of political reform societies that were about him. …” (pp. ix, xii)

Shaw has, of course, overlooked Dickens' membership in the Administrative Reform Association, the society set up after the revelations of administrative disaster in the Crimean War. But that involvement was an exception to Dickens' general rule, and it is certainly true that he did not found a Red International. Shaw's explanation of this omission by Dickens is that “… On the positive side he had nothing to say …” because “… Marxism and Darwinism came too late for him …” and “… he might have been a Comtist, but was not. …” (p. xiv) However, this does little to resolve the apparent paradox that an author capable of writing a book more seditious than Das Kapital should nevertheless have failed to draw the correct revolutionary conclusions from it.

Perhaps the explanation is that Shaw traps himself in an over-simple disjunction between the “bourgeois” and the “revolutionist.” He does not admit the possibility that society may be recognized as “… transitory, mistaken, dishonest, unhappy, pathological …” and yet inevitably so, because human defects are essentially irremediable, or not remediable by any obvious means, or only partly remediable for a few. And yet in some ways such a view may appear to suit the mood of Little Dorrit, whose ending with its limited and hard-won satisfactions for a few in an otherwise hostile and distasteful world, is more like a quiet celebration of individual survival than a call to the barricades. Indeed, Shaw's hyperbolic epigram may be true in a sense he did not intend. Little Dorrit may in fact be more seditious than Das Kapital because it combines a profound criticism of modern society with a gravely tragic acceptance of human destiny and a refusal to accept the remedies offered by the theorists of revolution. In that sense, the novel is as much a critique of Das Kapital as it is of capitalist civilization. But whether or not this is true, it is clear that Shaw's political views equip him well as a critic of the darker side of Little Dorrit, and there is no doubt that the seriousness and intensity of his account of its social and political elements is appropriate to the novel. At the least, Shaw deserves credit as a pioneer of a major tendency in the twentieth-century criticism of the later Dickens, and for confronting honestly the difficulties involved in any attempt to see Dickens as a revolutionary artist.

Shaw's interest in the political and social concerns of Little Dorrit is, however, only one element in his criticism. Perhaps even more important and certainly less well known, are his comments on Dickens' methods of characterization, and his contribution to the problematic area of biographical criticism. In a fascinating letter addressed to G. K. Chesterton, commenting on the latter's Charles Dickens (1906), Shaw anticipated Santayana's famous “realist” defence of Dickens' characterization, with an appropriate change of emphasis:

… In them [the later novels] Dickens recognizes that quite everyday men are as grotesque as Bunsby. Sparkler, one of the most extravagant of his gargoyles, is an untouched photograph almost. Wegg & Riderhood are sinister and terrifying because they are simply real, which Squeers & Sikes are not … Dickens doesnt care what he makes Wegg or Riderhood or Sparkler or Mr. F's aunt say, because he knows them & has got them, and knows what matters & what doesnt …¹⁴

Though as unfashionable now as it was when first expressed, this view may be correct; it certainly deserves pondering by anyone who sees Dickens' extreme characters as caricatures or “symbols.” More important still is Shaw's discussion of his reasons for thinking Little Dorrit “an enormous work,” and why Dickens is at his greatest after the “social awakening” which produced Hard Times:

… The change is partly the disillusion produced by the unveiling of capitalist civilization, but partly also Dickens's discovery of the gulf between himself as a man of genius & the public. That he did not realize this early is shewn by the fact that he found out his wife before he married her as much too small for the job, and yet plumbed the difference so inadequately that he married her thinking he could go through with it. When the situation became intolerable, he must have faced the fact that there was something more than “incompatibilities” between him and the average man & woman. Little Dorrit is written, like all the later books, frankly & somewhat sadly, de haut en bas. …

(p. 647)

This theory, though necessarily speculative, is at least plausible, and has the virtue of bringing together in a coherent explanation phenomena otherwise disparate—Dickens' failed marriage, with its crisis so near to the composition of Little Dorrit, the change in his later novels, especially in the comprehensiveness and depth of his social criticism, and the gap between Dickens and his readers so evident and marked in the misunderstanding and lack of sympathy shown by nearly all contemporary critics of Little Dorrit. It may also suggest an explanation for the weakest parts of the novel, the villain Blandois and the accompanying mysteries and excitements—they are intended to provide an appeal at the level of what Shaw calls the “average man,” and are perhaps an unsuccessful attempt to emulate Shakespeare's method of providing entertainment for all while usually not compromising the highest artistic standards.

More interesting still, however, is Shaw's discussion of the relation between Arthur Clennam and his creator:

… There is a curious contrast between Dickens's sentimental indiscretions concerning his marriage & his sorrows & quarrels, and his impenetrable reserve about himself as displayed in his published correspondence. He writes to his family about waiters, about hotels, about screeching tumblers of hot brandy and water, and about the seasick man in the next berth, but never one really intimate word, never a real confession of his soul. David Copperfield is a failure as an autobiography because when he comes to deal with the grown-up David, you find that he has not the slightest intention of telling you the truth—or indeed anything—about himself. Even the child David is more remarkable for the reserves than for the revelations: he falls back on fiction at every turn. Clennam and Pip are the real autobiographies. …

(pp. 646-647)

These remarkable insights are no doubt epigrammatic in form, and too summary to be acceptable as they stand, but they embody valuable truths in a striking manner, and they anticipate by a generation the biographical approach to Dickens of Edmund Wilson. No one, I suppose, is likely now to deny that Dickens' published correspondence does display an “impenetrable reserve about himself,” but we should remember that the hostile explanation of Dickens' reticence, prevalent in the nineteenth century and not unheard in the twentieth, was that he had no deeper self to reveal. Readers who believe an author's character shallow and superficial are not likely to notice deeper qualities in his writing. But Shaw recognized that the Dickens of the published letters was not the whole Dickens, and could see his more profound character expressed in his art. That insight is the foundation of Shaw's criticism, and is essential to any criticism of Dickens which aspires to deal successfully with the whole of his work. In comparison with that, it doesn't matter if Shaw does less than justice both to the element of self-revelation in David Copperfield and to Dickens' attempt to generalize an emotional predicament of his generation in that novel.¹⁵ Further more, Shaw's claim that “… Clennam and Pip are the real autobiographies …” is true in an important sense, though no doubt misleading in others. One could rightly object that Dickens himself had not been subjected to a Clennam upbringing, and that although his father was in some sense the original of William Dorrit, there is no character in Little Dorrit who plays a role like that of the young Charles Dickens. But that would be to miss the point. Shaw is concerned not with external biographical details, but with Dickens' inner life. The inner lives of Pip and Clennam, who both achieve a partial victory against overwhelming odds, have more in common than their external circumstances would readily suggest. And what Shaw's epigram does, very successfully, is to bring sharply to our attention the claim that Clennam, whose character is so unlike that of Charles Dickens, the vastly energetic, ebullient and successful public figure, nevertheless was in some sense representative of the novelist's inner life.

Of course we may well doubt this assertion. How can we know that Clennam and Pip are Dickens' “real autobiographies?” Is it safe to claim more than that Dickens can empathize with the characters as much as his art requires? And even if we did know that Clennam represented Dickens' inner life, would it assist our understanding of Little Dorrit? The contest of Shaw's remarks suggests an answer to these questions. He is vigorously though politely controverting Chesterton's views. Chesterton had argued that although Dickens improved “as an artist” in his later works, he did not always improve “as a creator,” and that Little Dorrit was “not a good novel” because it was untypical of its author, the product of a passing moment of depression in which Dickens' “. … old hilarious and sentimental mood seems for a moment dimmed. …”¹⁶

In particular, Chesterton thought that Arthur Clennam, being “… very much older than Mr. Pickwick …”, was merely part of the “fugitive grey cloud” of Little Dorrit, and therefore uncharacteristic of Dickens' work (p. 230). In contrast, Shaw insists that Dickens is at his best after Hard Times, that Little Dorrit is an “enormous work,” and that Clennam and Pip are truly representative of their creator because they derive from Dickens' deeper self. No doubt Shaw's formulation of this insight in biographical terms is speculative and questionable. But the essence of his argument, that Clennam and Pip are not peripheral and untypical figures in the Dickens world, but are characteristic elements in Dickens' greatest work, is much harder to dispute. Indeed, in recent years it has hardly been disputed at all, but that should not blind us to Shaw's originality in radically changing critical perspectives on Dickens. Nor should his habitual exaggeration and over-emphasis detract from the valuable insights which pervade his important and varied work as a pioneer of the twentieth-century revaluation of Little Dorrit and the later Dickens.

Notes

1. 8 June, to W. T. Stead, the crusading journalist, in Collected Letters, 1874-1897, ed. Dan H. Laurence (London, 1965), p. 173

2. See Robert E. Rockman, “Dickens and Shaw: Another Parallel,” Show Bulletin, 2 (January 1957), 8-10

3. “Charles Dickens and Little Dorrit,” Dickensian, 4 (1908), 323.

4. “On Dickens,” Dickensian, 10 (1914), 150. cf. the Preface, written in 1910, to The Shewing-Up of Blanco Posnet (London, 1913), in which Shaw stated that Little Dorrit “… remains the most accurate and penetrating study of the genteel littleness of our class governments in the English language. …” (p. 298)

5. “Charles Dickens. Some Personal Recollections and Opinions,” Bookman, 41 (1912), 247. Cf. Shaw's Preface, written in 1911 and published in 1913, to the Waverley edition of Hard Times (London, undated), in which he argues that Dickens' masterpieces are Bleak House, Hard Times, Little Dorrit and Our Mutual Friend “… for their mercilessly faithful and penetrating exposures of English social, industrial and political life. …” (p. x)

6. v Preface to Essays in Criticism (London, 1865), pp. xiii-xiv.

7. v Charles Dickens, A Critical Survey (London, 1898), pp. 86, 96, 99, 159.

8. Dickens (London, 1882), p. 137.

9. See, for example, E. W. Pugh's Dickens: The Apostle of the People (London, 1908), and W. W. Crotch's Charles Dickens, Social Reformer (London, 1913), in which Dickens is treated in the traditional way, as a reformer, not a revolutionary.

10. See W. Matchett, “The Neglected Book,” Dickensian, 6 (1910), 98.

11. W. Kent, “Little Dorrit and the Edinburgh Review,” Dickensian, 15 (1919), 64.

12. Spectator, 19 April 1913, p. 643, commenting on the founding of the New Statesman, under the editorship of Shaw and Sidney Webb.

13. Printed in Edinburgh for the Members of the Limited Editions Club (p. xi). Republished, with some minor changes, by Hamish Hamilton in London, 1947.

14. 6 September 1906, in Collected Letters, 1898-1910, ed. Dan H. Laurence (London, 1972), p. 647. Shaw expresses similar views in his 1937 Introduction to Great Expectations, in which he describes Mr. F's Aunt as “… a first-rate clinical study of senile deficiency in a shrewd old woman …,” and praises her and Pancks and Casby as “… authentic …,” with the reservation that Dickens' humor runs away with him when such characters collide (p. vi).

15. I accept Q. D. Leavis' argument in ch. 2 of F. R. and Q. D. Leavis, Dickens the Novelist (London, 1970).

16. Charles Dickens (London, 1906), pp. 81, 229-230, 233.