In particular, there was a sensation of cabbage; as if all the greens that had ever been boiled there, were evergreens, and flourished in immortal strength. The parlour was wainscoted, and communicated to strangers a magnetic and instinctive consciousness of rats and mice. The staircase was very gloomy and very broad, with balustrades so thick and heavy that they would have served for a bridge. In a sombre corner of the first landing, stood a gruff old giant of a clock, with a preposterous coronet of three brass balls on his head; whom few had ever seen — none ever looked in the face — and who seemed to continue his heavy tick for no other reason than to warn heedless people from running into him accidentally. It had not been papered or painted, hadn’t Todgers’s, within the memory of man. It was very black, begrimed, and mouldy. And, at the top of the staircase, was an old, disjointed, rickety, ill-favoured skylight, patched and mended in all kinds of ways, which looked distrustfully down at everything that passed below, and covered Todgers’s up as if it were a sort of human cucumber-frame, and only people of a peculiar growth were reared there.
All the familiar Dickensian tropes are pressed into service here. Comic exaggeration, the swaggering simile (“balustrades …[that] would have served for a bridge”), personification, the conversational aside (“It had not been papered or painted, hadn’t Todgers’s”), the piling on of adjectives and then, finally, the startling transmogrifying image — of Todgers’s as a human cucumber-frame — that leaps from the page and delivers us Todgers’s in a manner so fresh, so audacious, that any sense that this was merely another run-of-the-mill tumbledown dwelling, of the sort that has been described in literature countless times before, is entirely banished from our minds.
There are also other, more covert, talents at work in passages like this: to do with punctuation and rhythm and sentence cadence. This is hard to analyse, and it may even be an instinctive gift, but Dickens, it seems to me, has a superb sense of timing, of when to throw in a short sentence—“It was very black, begrimed, and mouldy”—amongst longer ones; of when to allow the parenthetical clauses to build and mount; of when to introduce repetition (“The staircase was very gloomy and very broad”); and so on. This ability to orchestrate the pace of these bravura passages in no small manner contributes to their success. The way a paragraph like this is structured acts as a kind of invisible matrix upon which the ideas and images may confidently rest; and Dickens shows himself as deftly accomplished with these more recherché technical gifts, as with the principal ones of story, character and language, allowing them discreetly to distribute and enhance the various forces of the words he employs. One may admire the splendid ambition of the architect but one should never forget the less ostentatious labours of the engineer. Dickens, as we have seen, was a formidable exponent of both professions.
There are many passages of similar brilliance in Martin Chuzzlewit, as there are in all of Dickens’s novels, but Chuzzlewit, to my mind, is amongst the most amply provided. Furthermore, it is not simply a matter of sparkling and pyrotechnical description. Chuzzlewit, it is worth reiterating, is Dickens’s funniest novel, and it is the ever present, and effervescent, sense of comedy, alongside the virtuoso wordplay and image-mongering, that makes paragraphs like the one quoted above so memorably effective.
If, in some notional parlour game, I were asked to select the most sustained passage of comic writing in English literature, to choose a tour de force that one could confidently present as an exemplar of the comic form, then I think I would offer up as my choice the penultimate chapter of Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop, where Salter, the hapless news editor, follows William Boot to Boot Magna, the family home, and tries to persuade him to rejoin the staff of the Daily Beast. Every time I read these pages I laugh again and exult at Waugh’s impeccable comic sense. Comparisons are invidious, and the comic styles are so different in any case, but I now believe that the pre-eminence of the penultimate chapter of Scoop is seriously challenged, if not overthrown, by chapters eight and nine of Martin Chuzzlewit, pages which deal with the Pecksniff family’s trip to London, their arrival at Todgers’s, their visit to Miss Pinch and concluding with the Sunday dinner given in the Pecksniffs’ honour by the gentlemen lodgers. Waugh’s style is all to do with restraint, the humour is implicit, everything is merely presented — shown — and it is the reader who, automatically, fleshes out the context and significance, and supplies the humour and absurdity. Waugh sets the charges, if you like, and the reader detonates them. In Dickens the reverse is true — Dickens tells as well as shows — and it is a remarkable tribute to the potent verve and dynamism of his style (and perhaps to the fact that, at root, senses of humour barely change) that, a century and a half on, these forty pages or so of Martin Chuzzlewit provide such fecund and inventive writing as well as such rich and apparently timeless comedy. They are, in my opinion, unmatched in all his other novels.
But Dickens, as has been frequently observed, can all too easily make his critics appear clever. This may be a weakness apparent in a certain type of talent or genius — not so long ago Mozart was mocked for his “horrible little tunes”—a type that is generous and lavish, open and unguarded, the very opposite of the costive or over-intellectual artist. Dickens takes great risks (he was, it should always be remembered, writing for a huge popular audience) and he leaves hostages to fortune in every chapter. It is not difficult to deplore a ghastly passage like this, apostrophizing on the attraction between John Westlock and Ruth Pinch:
Merrily the tiny fountain played, and merrily the dimples sparkled on its sunny face. John Westlock hurried after her. Softly the whispering water broke and fell; and roguishly the dimples twinkled as he stole upon her footsteps.
Oh, foolish, panting timid little heart, why did she feign to be unconscious of his coming! Why wish herself so far away, yet be so flutteringly happy there!
Can this be the same man who can write, with the laconic quietism of a Kurt Vonnegut, of a child’s death: “Smart citizens grow rich, and friendless victims smart and die, and are forgotten. That is all”? The answer is “yes” and there is a complexity of reasons required to explain why this can be. Briefly, it is a combination, I would suggest, of autre temps, autres moeurs, and various impulses existing in the Dickens psyche. And there is no doubt that raw sentiment, in serious literature, is today almost wholly discredited and démodé to such an extent that we are embarrassed when we come across it in an artist we admire and revere. It is instructive to compare the contemporary responses to another comic genius — Charlie Chaplin (with whom, in the life and the work, there are many parallels) — who, forty years after Dickens’s death, also won enormous popular acclaim with a similar blend of comedy and unadulterated sentiment. In Chaplin’s case modern audiences feel happier analysing the complex architectonics of a pratfall or elaborate gag than responding to the two-fisted hauling on their heartstrings that many a Chaplin film indulges in. But Dickens is the greater artist (and, of course, his art form infinitely more rich and complex) and his genius, unlike Chaplin’s, more easily survives the excesses of an overloaded heart.