Opinion Pip & pop

Dickens’s novels have come down to us as classics,and this often prompts us to think of them as unified wholes: carefully planned,written and rewritten until Dickens got the exact novel that he wanted. In fact Dickens,whose father spent time in a debtor’s prison,was much more concerned with ways of maximising his earnings from the consistent popularity that his writing enjoyed ever since he introduced the incredibly funny,lower-class Londoner,Sam Weller,midway through his first complete book,The Pickwick Papers. One way in which Dickens and his publishers cut through the dominance of lending libraries and the big,three-decker novels that they circulated was serial publication. They released a new novel by Dickens,serially,in 20,equal monthly instalments and in this way ensured that a single novel would sustain several rounds of demand,first for the monthly numbers and then for subsequent reprints of the whole novel.

The extraordinarily powerful after-life that serialisation enjoyed in subsequent forms of print entertainment and also in the numerous radio and television shows of our times points to the dynamic relationship that Dickens’s mode of working has always enjoyed with a whole range of extra-literary forms and media. The building blocks of Dickens’s own novels did not come from what we recognise as the more literary forms of novel-writing that preceded him. They came from radical journalistic satire of William Hone and William Cobbett,the political cartooning of George Cruikshank,and the impressions of London in the prints of William Hogarth and in the melodramas that Dickens avidly watched.

This is why the aristocratic state dignitary or the petty parish official who inhabits a Dickensian novel has none of the psychological complexity that we would associate with a similar character in a novel by Stendhal or Balzac. Instead,Tite Barnacle,chief bureaucrat at the Circumlocution Office struts across the pages of Little Dorrit like a moving political cartoon. Rather than bemoaning the absence of inner life in Dickens’s characterisation,it would be much more useful to consider how he brought the expressive energies of political cartooning to bear on the novel. From this point of view,the pompous Tite Barnacle who “wound and wound folds of white cravat around his neck,as he wound and wound folds of tape and paper round the neck of the country” could be said to follow the political cartoon in attempting to mobilise an angry,mocking audience against a bureaucracy adept at blocking every project with a newer version of “How Not To Do It”.

Again,Dickens swerved away from the network of middle-class interiors in which the canonical 19th century novel is embedded. Instead,he learned from the popular prints of Hogarth and the stage melodramas how to unfold his plots across the dramatic social disparities of London. In the process,London acquired an unparalleled density in his work. He mobilised elements of the metropolis — its parasitic legal and administrative systems,its slums and street urchins,its nightscapes,its often fraudulent ways of money-making — to produce the surprises,the violence and the humour that would link his work to the more contemporary forms of mass entertainment.

To be sure,Dickens’s sheer virtuosity as a writer has kept his novels in constant circulation,but remarkably,he has had greater influence on filmmakers than on subsequent generations of novelists. It’s not just that his books have been repeatedly adapted. More important is that several filmmakers have written on the extraordinary influence that some of Dickens’s novelistic methods have had on cinema. Sergei Eisenstein,for example,showed how much American director D.W. Griffith drew on Oliver Twist in his use of the montage mode to generate suspense. And Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator demonstrates how Dickens’s walking cartoons would flourish if equipped with the expressive resources of cinema.

On Dickens’s 200th birthday,then,it would perhaps be appropriate to celebrate not the eternal value of great literature,but the traffic of expressive energies across disparate genres and media,and especially literature’s capacity to draw from and transfer these energies to genres usually thought of as merely popular.

The writer is professor of English,University of Delhi. His book ‘London,Radical Expression and the Making of the Dickensian Aesthetic’ (Ohio State University Press) will be published in June
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