3 - Dickens among the Moderns (1915–1940)

Summary

WHEN THE CONFLICT THAT WOULD COME to be known for a time as The Great War broke out, Britain mobilized all its resources to defeat the Germans and their allies. Dickens became a tool to boost morale among those who stayed behind while young men went off to the trenches in France and Belgium. While it may seem strange to students of literature in the twenty-first century to see fiction employed for such overtly jingoist purposes, the idea did not seem at all unusual in 1914. Some sense of how Dickens was used as propaganda can be gleaned from J. W. T. Ley's 1915 Dickensian article, “Dickens and Our Allies.” Ley's tone is more akin to patriotic rhetoric than literary criticism: “The Editor has asked me to write something about Dickens and his association with or references to the peoples who are fighting with us in this great war of Freedom” (286). His was no small task, given that among Britain's allies were the Russians, against whom Britain had fought in the Crimean War, and the French and Italians, peoples long distrusted by Englishmen. Ley begins by pointing out that Dickens was “impatient” with England's “insularity,” and recognized his country's faults and failings (285), the worst of which was an unmerited chauvinism. Ley waxes passionately about Dickens's great humanitarianism, assuring readers he was “a man of too broad sympathies not to know that the foreigner is a human being like the Englishman” (286).