Dickens and Parochialism

There is an unfortunate strand in English letters of placid acceptance of a kind of status quo. There is a  number of  great writers (of whom Dickens is one) and every conceivable aspect of their works is comfortably (and not very questioningly) celebrated. The TLS of April 11 2014 contained a fine example of such complacency.

Two pages are devoted to a review of the two-volume collection of essays, The Reception of Charles Dickens in Europe. This book, we are told, offers “much for English-speakers to learn through dialogues with their European colleagues”. But it is clear throughout the review that what is meant is less “dialogue” than sermon – that Dickens should be enlightening the European reader, and the European reader is expected to respond with unquestioning admiration. The book, for example

offers a number of engaging facts about Dickens’s European legacy. For instance, no single novel by Dickens has ever been translated into Icelandic, but he is still, asserts Astradur Eysteinsson, an important figure in the development of the Icelandic novel … In excessive contrast to the apparent Icelandic neglect, more than 1,000 editions of Dickens were published in Russia between 1838 and 1960.

Perhaps the population of Iceland is so tiny that there was no business case for translating Dickens? Perhaps the level of English was (and is) so high in Iceland that Icelanders read him in the original English? It seems a very bland comment to make by the reviewer.  If Dickens was “neglected”, how can he have been an important figure?  It would be more valuable to explore if the number of editions is indicative of a novelist’s worth.

More fundamental, the review seems to accept without question some of Dickens’s most dubious national stereotypes. Despite Dickens spending “lengthy spells” in France and his French apparently becoming fluent, and despite the way that Dickens’s work “frequently undercut British pretensions to global mastery”,  there is not a hint that his novel A Tale of Two Cities is guilty of the worst stereotyping of France and the French.  Indeed, the reviewer blithely states “while we might imagine that A Tale of Two Cities would be popular in France”, an astonishing statement given the novel’s slanted and one-sided depiction of the French. In Dickens’s novel, the only good Frenchmen and women are those who have spent some time in England. Dickens’s view of the Revolution seems to be wholly in agreement with that of Thomas Carlyle, in his reactionary The French Revolution. Perhaps that is the reason why for the French “it never was to become one of their favourite novels, even after Mrs Thatcher gave it as a state gift to Francois Mitterand [sic] in 1989 as a state gift.”

Did Mrs Thatcher ever read A Tale of Two Cities? If she had, she would never have given it to the French president. Is it not supremely ironic that a not very cultured English head of state gives an insulting depiction of the French to the French head of state, and the reviewer seems to be surprised the book is not more popular. Is would appear perhaps to this reviewer that any work by Dickens, however insulting to the recipient, should be beneficial to them. Such a supine attitude to things cultural (that they are always somehow “good”, if the author has a sufficiently high status) is the parochialism I referred to. For this reviewer, Dickens is de facto a great writer, and the Europeans should be engaged in appreciating him (even if they have inexplicably failed to translate him with sufficient enthusiasm.