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Chapter 1, Introduction of the author's Dickens and the Rhetoric of Laughter, which Clarendon Press published in 1971. It has been included in the Victorian Web with the kind permission of the author and of the Clarendon Press, which retains copyright.
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n the midst of the dark-Dickens revolution, Fred W. Boege wrote, "Dickens is still read for his fun, but he is being read more and more for the profound, brooding sense of evil in life that informs his work and causes his name to be coupled constantly with Dostoevsky's" (p. 187) Surely one need not make this choice or this distinction. Edmund Wilson and G. K. Chesterton, so remote from each other in many ways, still saw the same writer, and both saw further that his fun was very serious and his seriousness often funny. Wilson noted "a trace of the hysterical" (p. 14) in Dickens's humour, and Chesterton more pointedly complained that "the frivolous characters of Dickens are taken much too frivolously" (p. 57).
I want to examine the part laughter plays in our response to both early and late novels and to demonstrate not so much how serious Pickwick is and how funny Little Dorrit is as how our laughter is used in both cases to cement our involvement in the novel's themes and concerns. Instead of approaching the novels through imagery, structure, or theme, this is an attempt to approach them through humour, one of Dickens's most certain rhetorical tools, and through the resulting laughter, one of the most complex and intimate responses a reader can make. Laughter implies, among other things, a very solid agreement with a certain value system, and Dickens is masterful in using that agreement for subtle thematic and aesthetic purposes. He can use it to reinforce the feeling of freedom and the opposition to order and bureaucratic sterility in The Pickwick Papers, to undercut the apparent bourgeois comfort of Oliver Twist and force us into at least temporary [1/2] sympathetic alignment with the world of Fagin and Sikes, to make effective the pathos of The Old Curiosity Shop, to define more emphatically the structural principle of contrasts in Barnaby Rudge, to urge us into agreement with an extremely sophisticated and worldly value system in Martin Chuzzlewit, to create an ambiguous response to the narrator in David Copperfield, to attack the very bases of comedy in Little Dorrit, and to reassert a final and limited comic view in Our Mutual Friend. Every time we laugh at Sam Weller's witty attacks on the law, we are moving a step further from our usual position of commercial safety; laughter at Sim Tappertit implicates us in his final crippling; laughter at Mr. Micawber forces us to take a position on the crucial thematic issues of imagination -- irresponsibility -- freedom as opposed to fact -- prudence -- imprisonment. I should say at the outset that Dickens's variety in this regard is all but overwhelming, but his success seems to me so complete as to necessitate some examination of the details.
I shall, then, examine the several novels I have mentioned -- The Pickwick Papers, Oliver Twist, The Old Curiosity Shop, Barnaby Rudge, Martin Chuzzlewit, David Copperfield, Little Dorrit, and Our Mutual Friend -- in terms of their appeals to laughter, not primarily to judge the success or failure of those appeals or to examine Dickens's techniques as a humorist, but to understand the individual novels better by more sharply defining our reaction to them. More specifically, I wish to show how Dickens controls our response to his humour and integrates that response into the entire novel. The primary emphasis, however, will be literary, not psychological. Our sensitivity to humour will be used, much as our sensitivity to patterns of imagery has often been used, in order to articulate more clearly and thereby understand more completely our experience with the novels. With Dickens, the reader's laughter is important evidence for the critic and becomes a valuable tool for literary criticism.
Chesterton, G. K. Apprecations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens. London, 1911.
Wilson, Edmund. The Wound and the Bow. New York, 1947.
Last modified: 1 May 2001