Faculty of Foreign Languages ;

English Department
Master 1 : English Literature/ Realism

“Grotesque but not impossible”: Dickens’s Novels and mid-Victorian Realism

Dickens obviously aspired to submit to the rules of mid-Victorian realism, as his public
statements and prefaces testify, but his imagination seems to have been somewhat uneasy
with these conventions which it constantly sought to get round without actually
transgressing. The tensions between the novelist’s public statements and the nature of his
imagination resulted in a number of paradoxes which partly derived from Dickens’s acute
awareness of the shortcomings of mid-Victorian realism. This awareness and the tensions
which it imposed upon his writing led him to give his own interpretation of realism.
The Paradoxes:
 The unrealistic stereotypes in his characters
 The ambivalent attitude towards the romanticism, idealization or sensationalism of
the Romantic novels
He says: ... to draw a knot of such associates in crime as really did exist; to paint them
in all their deformity, in all their wretchedness, in all the squalid misery of their lives;
to show them as they really were, for ever skulking uneasily through the dirtiest
paths of life, with the great black ghastly gallows closing up their prospect, turn them
where they might.
Yet, he resorts to sensationalist techniques to paint his criminals: melodramatic dialogues,
extremely violent scenes, and gruesome details, in order to meet the demands of his
readers.
 Too perfect characters: Dickens depicted many characters rather too perfect to be
realistic, and consequently more in keeping with Bulwer Lytton’s theory that art was
not aimed at imitating but at exalting nature, than with the canons of realism.
 The problem of authenticity: while Dickens was intent on dealing with social
problems, and resorted to newspapers and archives in his prefaces, he was often
tempted by improbable incidents.
 The accumulation of details tha t spoil the Realistic effect, in the description of
setting, or characters…
Dickens and the self-contradictions of mid-Victorian realism
 The Victorian readership: mid-Victorian realism mirrored the world of the Middle
class, with certain rules of decency:
Dicken’s preface to Oliver Twist: “No less consulting my own taste, than the manners of
the age, I endeavoured, while I painted it [the unattractive and repulsive truth] in all its
fallen and degraded aspects, to banish from the lips of the lowest characters I
introduced, any expression that could by possibility offend (...). In the case of the girl, in
particular, I kept this intention constantly in view.”

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Faculty of Foreign Languages ;
English Department
Master 1 : English Literature/ Realism
These restrictions might cover language, details(ugly, gruesome), and even characters;
yet, Dickens from time to time, ventured towards these limits and risked to offend his
readers’ taste, through the resort to humour, metaphorical language and some other
forms of symbolism to by-pass the repression of the middle class taste.
1. Dickens’s interpretation of mid-Victorian realism: “grotesque and wild but not
impossible” used by Dickens in the Preface of The Old Curiosity Shop
 Reality and imagination: “Thus, although the Victorians often associated the new
realist movement with the ideas of copy, transcript, photograph, and daguerreotype,
Dickens did not adhere to the definition of realism as a mechanical reproduction of
reality, although he did associate his writing with photography. Indeed, walking in the
pit country in Durham during his first reading tour in 1858, he noted in a letter to a
friend how, as he worked his way north, he made “a little fanciful photograph” in his
mind of the area, thinking he could use it one day in his magazine Household Words.
In this same letter he compared his mind to a “sort of capitally prepared and highly
sensitive plate” which received impressions (Letters 8. 669). This may at first seem
contradictory with Dickens’s rejection of novel writing as the mechanical
reproduction of reality, but his use of the expression “fanciful photograph”, which
implies a combination of reality and imagination, qualifies his equation of writing and
photography. Moreover this photographic process is situated at an early stage of the
writing process.”
 “the lyricism of memory”: the novelist seemed to need to describe London more as
he remembered it than as it actually was at the time when he was writing.
 “fantastic fidelity”: The underlying idea is that fantasy and imagination, even in their
wildest forms are not necessarily opposed to reality but are often part and parcel of
it, and that this unity is perceptible to any mind devoid of prejudices. This theory is
developed in an article entitled “The Spirit of Fiction” (1867) published in Household
Words:
“Greater differences still exist between the common observer and the writer of
genius. The former accuses the latter of intentional exaggeration, substitution,
addition, and has never been able in society to see the startling phenomena which he
condemns in the romance as melodramatic and unnatural. The reason is that such an
individual has never developed the sense for the seeing such things.”

“Dickens certainly was less easy with the limits of realism than most of his
contemporaries…”