5 - Dickens and Mainstream Academic Criticism (1960–1969)

Summary

IN SURVEYING THE STATUS of Dickens studies in 1961, Steven Marcus suggested that Edmund Wilson's claim made twenty years earlier that Dickens was the greatest dramatic writer in England since Shakespeare “could be advanced today without much fear of anyone's turning a hair” (278). Despite the occasional carping attack on Dickens's technical merits, by the 1960s he was accorded primacy of place among Victorian novelists both as an artist and a chronicler of society. Scholarship celebrating the many aspects of his creative genius appeared regularly. To supplement this original work, George Ford and Lauriat Lane's The Dickens Critics (1961) provided for the first time in a single volume a selection of essays representing the most influential criticism on Dickens published to date. The two scholars boasted excellent credentials for such work; Ford had published Dickens and His Readers in 1955, and Lane's “Dickens' Archetypal Jew” had appeared in PMLA just three years before The Dickens Critics was issued. Unfortunately, space limitations and some copyright problems prevented Ford and Lane from making the volume truly first-rate; for example, Wilson's “The Two Scrooges” is omitted, and many other commentaries are excerpted. Nevertheless, there was now one book to which interested scholars might turn to learn what Masson, Fitzjames Stephen, Ruskin, Lewes, James, Chesterton, Shaw, Santayana, Orwell and others had to say about Dickens. They could sample the work of Jack Lindsay, Morton Zabel, Edgar Johnson, and J. Hillis Miller. Lane's lengthy introduction provides a guide through the maze of Dickensian criticism, offering sound judgments about both the insights of critics and their motives.