2 - The Birth of the Dickens Industry and the Reaction against Victorianism (1870–1914)

Summary

WHEN DICKENS DIED in 1870, there was a rush to publish memorial tributes. Among the first to appear was one by George Augustus Sala, who had worked with Dickens on Household Words and All The Year Round and been considered one of his protégés. Sala originally published a testimonial to his mentor in the Daily Telegraph, then expanded his narrative fourfold for publication under the title Charles Dickens later in 1870. Writing more a celebratory funeral oration than critical analysis, Sala claims Dickens was “as original as he who imagined Achilles' wrath, as he who conjured up Falstaff's salt humors, and who painted Satan in awful blackness” (7). Such favorable comparisons to Homer, Shakespeare, and Milton might have been expected from someone who owed his career to Dickens's sponsorship, but they are also typical of the ways Victorian critics tended to judge a writer's merits. Sala praises Dickens for discovering what the people of his age wanted, and then giving it to them — humor without grossness — and for being a model citizen. Typical of Victorian biographers, Sala focuses on the novelist's public accomplishments while saying of his private life, “it behooves me not at this time to speak” (94). Certainly Sala knew something of Dickens's mid-life crises, but as a good Victorian, he preferred not to expose the clay feet of his idol.

A much longer biography appeared in the same year. Robert Shelton MacKenzie's Life of Charles Dickens (1870) is more comprehensive than Sala's and contains considerably more commentary on the novels.