Volume 4, Number 3 · March 11, 1965
Dickens, Our Contemporary
By Christopher Ricks
Dickens: From Pickwick to Dombey
by Steven Marcus
Basic Books, 389 pp., $5.95
In this penetrating book on the first half of Dickens's career, Steven Marcus has an acute summing-up of Mr. Dombey's relationship to his son, that child whose only destiny in life was to become part of the great firm of Dombey and Son. 'Dombey's obsession with Paul's future obliterates all regard for Paul's present.' Exactly the same may be said of most critics of early Dickens. With the same condescending blend of solicitude and thoughtlessness, they become so obsessed with Dickens's future (the weighty and profound works of his maturity) as to obliterate all regard for his present (the vigorous comic sanity from Pickwick Papers to Martin Chuzzlewit). One excellence of Mr. Marcus's book lies in his avoiding this mistake. He shares the current opinion that Dickens's late novels are indisputably his greatest, but he manages to combine an intuitive sureness about the lines of Dickens's development with a confident sense of what each novel achieves in and for itself. As he says, it is only our knowledge of what was to come that gives us any right to use so presumptuous a term as 'apprenticeship' for the novels that precede Dombey and Son. To be able to disentangle achievement and promise, and to give due and vivid praise to each, argues unusual gifts as a critic. In fact there is a sense in which the point about Dickens is true too of Mr. Marcus. His book gets better and better as it progresses—not because Dickens's novels become more 'congenial' to him (all of Dickens is congenial), but because they come closer and closer to his own central concern as a critic: that fateful and unforgettable place where three roads meet—myth, self, and society. It is only the sheer excellence of his last two chapters (on Dickens's inner turmoil from 1844 to 1848, and on Dombey and Son) that gives one the right to think of the earlier chapters as a sort of apprenticeship. This is the first of two projected volumes, and there can be little doubt that the second will stand to this one as Little Dorrit stands to Dombey and Son.
Review, 2377 words
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