"There appears to me to be something worrying about the way an extremely high valuation of Dickens's achievement is assumed as a matter of course: a long tradition of adverse criticism has not been answered so much as quietly silenced." ¹

It is easy to suggest a doubt, but I have a great doubt whether, sometimes, the rules of art are not too strictly observed, and whether it is quite well or agreeable that we should know beforehand, where this figure will be turning round, and where that figure will be lying down, and where there will be drapery in folds, and so forth. When I observe heads inferior to the subject, in pictures of merit, in Italian galleries, I do not attach that reproach to the Painter, for I have a suspicion that these great men, who were of necessity, very much in the hands of monks and priests, painted monks and priests a great deal too often. I frequently see, in pictures of real power, heads quite below the story and the painter: and I inevitably observe that those heads are of the Convent stamp, and have their counterparts among the Convent inmates of this hour; so, I have settled with myself that, in such cases, the lameness was not with the painter, but with the vanity and ignorance of certain of his employers, who would be apostles — on canvas, at all events.^2,3
                      Charles Dickens, "Pictures from Italy", Penguin Books, 1998, p. 146

It might be fair to assume that the above theory of art, as expressed by Dickens, applies not only to pictorial art, but across the board in all aspects of aesthetics, such as sculpture, music, writing and history.^4,5 Thus, in Dickens' view, a good person should appear to be good; a bad person should appear to be bad. This might explain why so many of Dickens' characters come out as caricatures. However, there are deeper problems: what of the bad person who in life actually appears to be a good person, or the good person who in life appears to be a bad person? Life is filled with ambiguity. What of characters that approach reality rather than caricatures, and have good parts and bad parts in their natures? Finally, let us consider the art theory of Thomas Eakins, for which he was criticized; the criticism amounting to the view that art must be beautiful, while Eakins' view was that art need not be beautiful, any more than life itself may be. Even more generally, who is to say what is beautiful and what is not? Thus we see that Dickens' view of literature is an extremely narrow one, even though it is one that was commonly held during and before the Victorian period.

"... The most important point of Bagehot's essay is that instead of attributing Dickens' wild improbabilities to a powerful imagination, he traces them beyond that to a lack of a proper education. The twisted anti-Johnsonian prose style of Dickens, his lack of 'sagacity' and good taste, his 'monstrous exaggerations,' his sentimental radicalism, are all, in Bagehot's view, the signs of a 'brooding irregular mind' which had regrettably not been subjected to the discipline of classical models and educated society." ⁶

In this context, we should bear in mind: "When faced with aspects of life that could not be thus distorted by imagination, Dickens' art fails. When for example he has to describe a good and virtuous girl like Agnes Wickfield, he gives us, as we have seen, an insipid angel, a wax doll.",⁷

Also, "... Old Dorrit, Pip, Bradley Headstone, show that Dickens was acquiring in his late years a new skill in the presentation of characters who change during the course of the novel. Usually, however, the static characters tend to crowd the developing characters off the stage.", ⁸

More: "Even when Dickens wishes to analyze the mixture of good and bad in the same individual, he has to represent the two coexistent elements to himself in a material, artificial way,...",⁹

However, yet more about the limitations of Dickens' education affecting Dickens' views of art: "One of the reasons for Lewes' distaste was that he had known the author of Pickwick in person from the outset of his career, and although their meetings appear to have been pleasant enough, Lewes never recovered from the shock of having peeped at the young Dickens' empty bookshelves. 'Thought is strangely absent from his works. I do not suppose a single thoughtful remark on life or character could be found throughout the twenty volumes. ... Compared with that of Fielding or Thackeray, his was merely an animal intelligence. ... He never was and never would have been a student.'",¹⁰

And: "... in an essay of 1895, [Professor George Santsbury]'s impatience with Dickensian exaggeration led to his treating the novels as minor works of humor. Dickens' 'unfortunate want of early education' had produced a rant which is 'disgusting'. Repetitions such as Panks and the 'tug' are examples of 'damnable iteration'.", ¹¹

Lastly: "Equally lively but less perceptive were the attacks which appeared during the 1920's and 1930's, such as Bechhofer Roberts' This Side Idolatry. In these the front has been narrowed. Instead of attacking Dickens' lack of realism in general, attention was concentrated upon the lack of realism in sex and in social criticism. In his valuable study, Freudianism and the Literary Mind, F. J. Hoffman has demonstrated why the generation which survived the 1914-1918 war was dissatisfied with Dickens' evasiveness in his treatment of sex.",¹²

"Though I believe, and shall try to show, that the attempt to see Dickens as a radical novelist profoundly critical of his society is mistaken,..."¹³

In fact, Dickens' writing is often contradictory, exaggerated (as in a caricature), even at odds with credibility. As an example, consider the following:

Considering the very, very limited views concerning injustice that concern Dickens, how is Dickens viewed today? In partial answer to this question, was Dickens truly aware and knowledgeable about English society? An analysis of chapter LX in David Copperfield is very revealing. Chapter LX is an example of "WUI" (Writing Under the Influence), meaning the influence of gross ignorance. Many people think Dickens to be very much the sociologist, but an examination of chapter LX reveals Dickens' shocking ignorance of London society. A detailed examination of chapter LX would take a lot of words as there are so many problems in this chapter, but one area will be examined in detail.

In chapter L, Rosa Dartle, a woman that thinks of herself as not only belonging to the privileged classes, but as one of its appointed defenders, full of hate towards Em'ly Peggotty (who Rosa blames for the death of James Steerforth), leaves the wealthy home in which she has almost imprisoned herself, and travels to ....where? The very slums of London, into a building where prostitutes and criminals, the abandoned and forgotten, the very poor are found (the poorest of poor are not here, those people have no homes at all, living under bridges for example). Now the question: is this not an example of extreme psychological dissonance? Rosa Dartle, almost an aristocrat in her distance and hatred of the lower classes, freely mingles among the prostitutes and criminals in a slum? How do writers other than Dickens view the privileged visiting such an environment?

In contrast, Jack London, writing not too many years later in "The People of the Abyss", feels that he will be viewed as a very foreign element among the poor unless he at least dresses to look like he belongs among the poor. Not Rosa Dartle. Perhaps she expects her wealth to protect her and that dressed in finery, she will not be noticed? With her lips enflamed, scar brilliantly shining, she will dazzle the poor that she so disdains?

Problems that challenge belief repeatedly appear in the Dickens oeuvre. "Thus, to accept Great Expectations without questioning Magwitch's ability to become some sort of Australian tycoon is, however seriously one thinks one is taking it, actually to read it on the level of a story book."..."For it should not take long to discover that, since a transported convict could only own property after he had served his time or been pardoned, the whole thing is quite impossible." ¹⁴

Contradictions are similarly discussed at length in "Hard Times". Thus contradictions, dissonances, etc., abound in the works of Dickens. ¹⁵ Dickens' simplifications, attempting to caricature a character's psychology or philosophy, were pointedly criticized by John Stuart Mill in a letter to Harriet Taylor:

... That creature Dickens, whose last story, Bleak House, I found accidentally at the London Library the other day and took home and read—much the worst of his things, and the only one of them I altogether dislike—has the vulgar impudence in this thing to ridicule rights of women. It is done in the very vulgarest way—just the style in which vulgar men used to ridicule 'learned ladies' as neglecting their children and household etc. ...¹⁶

Other critiques comparing Dickens and Thackeray have been made, focused upon an entirely different theory of art. In particular, the scholar David Masson¹⁷ bases his view of art on the distinction between the real as opposed to the ideal. The point being that "imaginative" writing that "distorts" reality isn't "real". Indeed, the distorted images (caricatures or 'grotesques') may grasp an "ideal" that is far more effective rhetorically. This is significant, given the view of novels held historically, even at the time when Dickens was writing.

"In Hugh Blair's Rhetoric (1783), widely known as an authoritative work even in the Victorian period, the novel is dismissed in three pages as a form of writing tending oftener 'to dissipation and idleness, than to any good purpose.' Blair apologizes for even introducing such an 'insignificant class of writings' into a serious discussion." ¹⁸

"The central point of Masson's comparison is based on the difference between 'real' and the 'ideal' in art. Recognizing that as applied to painting, the term 'ideal' refers to 'the more ambitious departments of landscape or figure painting,' Masson extends it to include any form of imaginative heightening or distortion, whether the subjects be from Mount Olympus or St. Giles. Hence Dickens is classified with Raphael and Reynolds rather than Hogarth. 'Thackeray is essentially an artist of the real school....all that he portrays—scenes as well as characters—is within the limits, and rigidly true to the features, of real existence. In this lies his particular merit...."¹⁹

"What differentiates Masson from most critics of the 1850's is that he was not so obsessed with the virtues of realism as to rule out Dickens' kind of art. Instead of insisting that realism is better, he indicates that it is different. In his view, both kinds are legitimate. Dickens, he says, has an 'essentially susceptible and poetic nature', and his style, while often exaggerated, reaches heights of which Thackeray is incapable. 'It is nonsense to say of his characters generally ... that they are life-like.' Instead they are 'transcendental renderings of certain hints furnished by nature.' In Masson's opinion, this is likewise the method of Homer, Shakespeare, and Cervantes. ¹⁹

It does not follow that Mr. Dickens' method is wrong. The characters of Shakespeare are not, in any common sense, life-like. They are not portraits of existing men and women; ... they are grand hyperbolic beings; ... they are humanity caught ... and kept permanent in its highest and extremest mood. ... Art is called Art, says Goethe, precisely because it is not Nature; and even such a department of art as the modern novel is entitled to the benefit of this maxim. ¹⁹