posted on 16 Apr 2025

Charles Dickens by George Orwell

I have at last been in a situation to do something I have promised myself I would do for decades. Over the years I have told myself that I would reread Orwell’s great essay, Charles Dickens (written in 1939, first published in 1940 in the collection Inside the Whale), but would do so at a point when I was actively immersed in reading Dickens. Well, having read Great Expectations a matter of a few weeks ago, and having just finished rereading Bleak House, I thought now was the perfect time.

And what a wonderful essay it is – and not necessarily because it is about Dickens: because while everyone almost always refers to it as Orwell’s ‘famous essay about Dickens’, what makes it so extraordinary is that at a conservative count it touches on at least a score of writers in addition to Dickens while making a consistent, central argument regarding the importance of the radical tradition in English literature from its roots in the early eighteenth century through to the great Victorian realist novelists of the nineteenth century. 

It is also marvellous for what it tells us about a certain kind of early-twentieth century education – Orwell’s utter confidence with the Western and European literary canons, particularly of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the reach and accuracy and absolute sure-footedness of his cultural references (as easily and as swiftly deployed as if every book mentioned was open at his elbow, but I think this was often far from the case), and a sense of shape and recall that seem to defy the possible.

So what does Orwell tell us about Bleak House? I ought at least to try and say, as this was my primary reason for reading the essay. Well, I think even Orwell acknowledges that Dickens was often a writer whose ‘parts were greater than his wholes’. He also admits that it demonstrates Dickens’s shortcomings – his tendency to embroider, to add rococo flourishes until all is virtually obscured by flourish; and the problems associated with part-publishing – at least part-publishing in the way Dickens engaged in it. For while it may seem inconceivable now, in the Victorian period writers would often embark on a year’s worth of publishing, often longer, with only a broad outline of each chapter, composing and publishing their work in instalments in real-time. Driven by rising levels of literacy, a burgeoning leisure class with an insatiable appetite for print, and technological advances in printing, binding, publishing and distribution, this is how much of what we now regard as the literary classics were first published. And generally it was a method that Dickens was highly adept at. He found the business model a lucrative one and as long as the weekly instalments offered generous space – ‘elbow-room’ – he was happy. What he couldn’t stand were weekly parts that constrained him, as he felt those for Hard Times had done. They had been too short to pack enough interest into, he had said. (Orwell observing drily: ‘In other words, he had to stick more closely to the story.’)

I don’t think Bleak House is amongst Dickens’s greatest work because the plot doesn’t really stand up to scrutiny or even necessarily engage one’s interest consistently, and the metaphorical richness of the novel (Chancery and the law) doesn’t seem as well integrated as that of, say, Our Mutual Friend (dust and waste and the profit that can be extracted from their collection). But like much of Dickens, it is made up of imperishable moments. Orwell, not just right, but acutely right, says: ‘The thing that cannot be imitated is his fertility of invention, which is invention not so much of characters, still less of ‘situations’, as of turns of phrase and concrete details. The outstanding, unmistakable mark of Dickens’s writing is the unnecessary detail,’ and this, he concludes, will often contain a phrase ‘that is as individual as a fingerprint’. 

One of the episodes I most relished in Bleak House is the pursuit of Lady Dedlock by Esther Summerson and Inspector Bucket (‘Inspector Bucket of The Detective’) – by horse coach through blizzards of snow and sleet and twisting runnels of melt-water into the countryside surrounding London. You read this (and truly, there really is far too much of it, but it’s riveting) knowing that you are reading the voice of experience and that Dickens himself made similar coach journeys. His remarks in passing that dry hay is found to line the floor of the carriage and to insulate the ankles of those fortunate to be travelling inside tell you that this is what he observed – or perhaps as a youth longed for himself on numerous occasions. (Orwell tellingly notes that ‘Dickens nowhere describes a railway journey with anything like the enthusiasm he shows in describing journeys by stage-coach. In nearly all of his books one has a curious feeling that one is living in the first quarter of the nineteenth century,’ rather than, as was the case for much of the time that Dickens was writing, the height of the Victorian steam era.)

And while I think about it, what a marvellous late introduction the character of Inspector Bucket is! Shrewd, insightful and humane, apparently plodding but indefatigable, almost colourless (perhaps today we might even describe him as affectless), he is the unstoppable investigating machine, as implacable in the pursuit of justice as he is his commitment to the simple pleasures offered by hearth, home and Mrs Bucket, and an occasional warming glass or two of brown India sherry – he is surely the ur-police detective from whom all others are descended.

So, to try and return to Orwell’s essay for a moment, it is certainly one of his finest and amongst his most enjoyable. Yes, it is literary criticism of a kind, I suppose, but it is much more than that. It is a feat of recollection – of reclamation and recognition – of a certain English heritage of radicalism and truth-telling and broad-mindedness written on the very cusp of that heritage perhaps being swept away forever by world war. I’ll let Orwell complete his train of thought in his own graceful and apparently effortless way:

‘When one reads any strongly individual piece of writing, one has the impression of seeing a face somewhere behind the page. It is not necessarily the actual face of the writer. […] Well, in the case of Dickens I see a face that is not quite the face of Dickens’s photographs, though it resembles it. It is the face of a man of about forty, with a small beard and a high colour. He is laughing, with a touch of anger in his laughter, but no triumph, no malignity. It is the face of a man who is always fighting against something, but who fights in the open and is not frightened, the face of a man who is generously angry – in other words, of a nineteenth-century liberal, a free intelligence, a type hated with equal hatred by all the smelly little orthodoxies which are now contending for our souls.’

It is said that this essay was conceived when war was just months away and Orwell was in a state of political despair. I think it is at least plausible that at the time of writing he may well have thought it could be his final testament. How brightly – how courageously – it still shines.

Alun Severn

April 2025

 

 

George Orwell elsewhere on Letterpress:

 

There are numerous Orwell-related articles on Letterpress and all the links can be found in this digest.