The birthday festivities in Adam Bede buttress the quasi-feudal authority of Arthur's irascible grandfather, but the spirited participation by the entire countryside provides a greater sense of human fellowship than is likely in the ominously named alternative from which Dinah comes, the industrial town Stoniton. The strong liquor and sharp dealing at Weydon-Priors incite Henchard to an unpardonable act, but the fair itself is the afternoon's holiday following an assembly in the morning for the sale of horses and sheep; as in Far from the Madding Crowd , in which Oak seeks employment at a 'mop', or hiring fair, and Troy rides in the circus at a sheep fair, the occasion is an integral part of the rhythms of work and play within the seasonal activities of a rural area.
The entertainment in these novels, that is to say, is deployed to symbolize an older social fabric, which is giving way to new conditions less congenial to the vital communal spirit and depth of feeling found in the central characters. What these novelists do not give us, as Dickens does not, is an equally full depiction of the new types of entertainment which were emerging to cater to the changed conditions of modern, urban, industrial society.
Even when Victorian authors portray a large, anonymous, commercially based entertainment such as the circus, the qualities which they choose to single out in it are its old-fashioned romance as in the dashing Sergeant Troy's enactment of 'Turpin's Ride to York and the Death of Black Bess' or its humane idealism Sleary's pronouncement that 'People mutht be amuthed'. That the developing alternative tradition of entertainment could lend itself to being seen as a microcosm of modern life is clear enough from twentieth-century examples. Contraption, - that's the bizarre, proper slang,.
Eclectic word, for this portentous toy,. The flying machine, that gyrates stiffly, arms. A-kimbo, so to say, and baskets slung. From every elbow, skating in the air. Irreverent, we; but Tartars from Tibet. May deem Sir Hiram the Grandest Lama, deem. His volatile machinery best, and most. Magnific, rotary engine, meant. For penitence and prayer combined, whereby. Are spun about in space: Before the portal of that fane unique,.
Victorian temple of commercialism,. Our very own eighth wonder of the world,. They all pursue their purpose business-like. Victims, and not companions, of delight. Lawrence's Women in Love there is the architect Loerke, who is making 'a great frieze for a factory in Cologne': It was a representation of a fair, with peasants and artizans in an orgy of enjoyment, drunk and absurd in their modern dress, whirling ridiculously in roundabouts, gaping at shows, kissing and staggering and rolling in knots, swinging in swing-boats, and firing down shooting galleries, a frenzy of chaotic motion.
What is man doing, when he is at a fair like this? He is fulfilling the counterpart of labour - the machine works him, instead of he the machine. He enjoys the mechanical motion, in his own body. You have never worked for hunger, or you would know what god governs us. In these examples modern forms of entertainment are used as hateful images of what their authors saw as wrong in contemporary life; the anonymous, mechanical motion in both cases mirroring the essential quality of life in modern industrial society. More recently, Samuel Beckett in Waiting for Godot , John Osborne in The Entertainer and Trevor Griffiths in Comedians have each looked to the now declining traditions of the music-hall - of all Victorian forms of popular entertainment, the one which led most directly into the mass-entertainment industry - for images with which to assess their conviction of the failure of modern civilization.
But for me the most complex and haunting image of popular entertainment seen as a microcosm of modern society is to be found in Carol Reed's film of the Graham Greene story, The Third Man , in which the great wheel at the funfair in Vienna is used as the climactic meeting-place for Holley Martins and Harry Lime. At the same time - and herein lies the superiority of the image to those cited above - the wheel is also a perfect image of the release, the excitement and the fun of entertainment at its best: Holley, with his boy's crush on Harry, joins him briefly once again in an exhilarating adventure, high above the earth, and yet safe in the knowledge that it is, after all, only a ride in an amusement park - much as Harry conceives his own money-making schemes.
Third, the wheel, appearing in the narrative just at the moment before Harry, at the height of his success, is gunned down in a sewer, can hardly avoid carrying implications of the medieval trope of the Wheel of Fortune, which lifts Harry high above the rest of mankind, only to hurl him back down at last. In these complex ways, wholly integrated with one another and with the widest purposes of the film, the strategy of setting an episode of the plot in an amusement park releases symbolic meanings which brilliantly reflect Greene and Reed's vision of society.
An image of entertainment, taken not from the old gregarious, communal tradition but from that of modern, commercial, impersonal leisure activity, serves as microcosm for the condition of man in modern civilization. What I have been attempting to suggest by means of these twentieth-century examples is that the new pattern of entertainment which began to emerge during the Industrial Revolution is as open to complex artistic treatment as was the older tradition which was.
This new pattern embodied new forms and new values, and it also bore more relation than the older model to the kind of social system which was developing in the nineteenth century and has continued to grow in the twentieth. Such images were unquestionably available to Dickens: As a professional entertainer himself, in his various capacities as author, editor and public reader, he struck hard bargains for his own financial rewards, and from occasional remarks he made - for example, about the appeal of pantomime and the thrill of dangerous entertainment see Chapter 6 below - it is clear that he recognized ways in which the new modes of popular entertainment directly reflected the society in which it existed.
Dickens chose to focus primarily on the declining tradition, and for the good reason that it represented for him values which he believed essential to humanity; but in thus limiting his range he offered what was more in the nature of an alternative to the society in which he lived than an integral part of it. Rooted in the past, this choice was for conservatism; for preservation rather than innovation.
Seen as an alternative, the choice was for radicalism; for replacement rather than integration. Either way the choice was pessimistic, made in the realization that the values he defended were not in accord with the prevailing attitudes of the age. That his presentation of entertainment in his fiction could nevertheless generate the marvellous gusto and comedy for which it is known and loved is testimony to his affection for the delights of entertainment; and that, despite its limitations, his artistic treatment of popular entertainment could generate such range, complexity and insight affirms the breadth of his vision and the excellence of his artistry.
For readers today, as in the past, Dickens remains the great entertainer, whose novels contain, among their riches, splendid depictions of popular entertainment. Every good actor plays direct to every good author, and every writer of fiction, though he may not adopt the dramatic form, writes in effect for the stage.
Charles Dickens, speech to the Royal. General Theatrical Fund, 29 March In the spring of , shortly before the first number of Nicholas Nickleby was issued, Dickens had his publishers, Chapman and Hall, circulate a public statement concerning his new work. The 'proclamation' denounced the 'dishonest dullards' who had turned his previous fiction to their own profit by 'wretched imitations', and served warning against further plagiarism.
From the earliest days of Pickwick 's fame an entire industry derivative of Dickens's creations had sprung up, marketing illustrations, plays, songs and endless varieties of merchandise, in addition to printed adaptations of the novels. The speed and persistence of this proliferation testify to Dickens's popular appeal: There were, for example, at least seven stage versions of Pickwick produced before Dickens finished writing the final number, and it was claimed that penny-issue plagiarisms of Pickwick and of The Old Curiosity Shop sold in the region of 50, copies weekly. Unprotected by adequate copyright laws, Dickens was justifiably exasperated, both by the reworking of his own material over which he had no control, and by the profits which accrued not to himself but to those who had stolen his ideas.
As Louis James has shown, the hacks seized upon Nickleby the moment the first number appeared, and one of them, calling himself 'Bos', impudently issued a counter-proclamation. But if Dickens's pronouncement had no influence on those who were cashing in on his popularity it did give a clear indication of his conception of the kind of attraction he hoped his own work would have.
In addition to attacking plagiarists, Dickens included a paragraph outlining his intentions in his forthcoming novel. In it he gave notice to the public. Nicholas Nickleby was to be, in a word, entertainment. By filling his book with humour and pathos, he hoped to arouse 'merriment' and sympathies', and he proposed to amuse his readers by constructing a fast-moving plot full of striking incidents and a multiplicity of boldly delineated characters.
This was a plan well tested by the novelists he admired most - Fielding, Smollett and Scott - and one in constant use in the popular theatre of his own day. It was also the basis of his own phenomenal success with Pickwick , and he had every reason to be sanguine that the formula would work again in Niekleby. As far as it goes, this statement of intention in the Nickleby proclamation is an accurate enough description of the novel which followed, but it is fascinating primarily for what Dickens does not say.
In trying to attract readers for a work not yet published - indeed, a work largely yet to be written - Dickens omits any suggestion of polemical intention. The social satire upon the Yorkshire schools, which constitutes the first and most famous section of the novel, is quaintly alluded to here as 'wander[ing] into fresh fields and pastures new'; and the moral imperatives which drive the plot and propel hero and villain to their respective fates receive no mention at all.
Yet Dickens had gone to Yorkshire two months earlier for the specific purpose of gathering material which would give his novel an urgent sense of purpose. From its very inception Nickleby was, like Oliver Twist , a novel of crusading resolve. It was hardly simple entertainment. The proclamation was not disingenuous, however; despite the horror and outrage directed at Dotheboys Hall, the portrait of Squeers and his household manifests the ebullience of Dickens's power to amuse.
From the moment Squeers enters the novel in Chapter 4, Dickens's writing rises above bitter satire to rejoice in the transcendent lunacy of comic invention. There is more delight than indignation in the glimpse of Squeers inspecting the diluted milk of his hapless charges and crying, '"Here's richness!
The reality of iniquity at Dotheboys Hall is emphatic, but simultaneously Dickens turns it into a fantasy peopled by outlandish ogres. Entertainment and moral conviction work together as comedy lifts the villainy into a sphere of ethical certainties, in which we can laugh heartily at the wickedness because we know it will be defeated. As in the melodrama which dominated the stage at the time, in Nickleby real problems are resolved in ideal solutions.
Dickens's desire to make his fiction amusing was not a contradiction to the seriousness of his purpose; as we saw in the previous chapter, he was far from thinking entertainment a trivial matter, and to the end of his career it was an essential ingredient of his art. After devoting most of this preface to comment on the factual basis of Squeers and of the Cheeryble brothers, he concluded by expressing to his readers the hope that he had 'contributed to their amusement'.
I have been stressing Dickens's announced intentions to make Nickleby entertaining because he himself did so, and because the wish to entertain motivates all his fiction. Moreover, this aim was a crucial factor in determining the sort of art he was later to create in the full maturity of his genius. Starting out as an entertainer himself, he gravitated naturally to the subject of popular entertainment when. His earliest works, Sketches by Boz , Pickwick , Memoirs of Grimaldi , Nickleby and The Old Curiosity Shop all included entertainment as a major component of his subject-matter; readers of these volumes recognized that he was covering familiar territory, not only in the rambling tale of high jinks, which he inherited from the works of Combe, Surtees and Hook, but also in the scenes from the entertainment world, which formed a staple aspect of Pierce Egan's popularity.
Dickens was soon eager to dissociate his name from Egan's, and when he was writing Nickleby he asked Frederick Yates 'not to compare Nicholas to Tom and Jerry' in advertising the stage adaptation of the novel. His desire to entertain never left him, but the function of entertainment in his fiction became more complex, and sometimes problematic, as his artistry matured. At first, in Sketches by Boz and in The Pickwick Papers , Dickens drew upon entertainment largely for its own sake, as a ready source of amusement; its presence took on new implications when, in Nicholas Nickleby , he tried to combine the cheerful delights of those earlier works with the social criticism of Oliver Twist ; and in The Old Curiosity Shop he faced squarely the values which entertainment contained for his own art.
Where entertainment was beguiling diversion in his earliest fiction, the buoyant vitality of Crummles lay athwart the official conclusions of Nickleby. But in The Old Curiosity Shop , after surveying the lot of the itinerant showmen along Nell's route to death and exorcizing the perversities of the Punch-and-Judy figure of Quilp, Dickens affirmed the life-enhancing possibilities of entertainment by making it the focus for the creative fancy of the novel's ultimate hero, Dick Swiveller. With The Old Curiosity Shop imagination supplanted entertainment to become the key source of value for Dickens, and the exploration of its necessity was to be a concern in all his later fiction.
That his assessment in this novel satisfied his own creative needs is evident in the striking fact that the amusements which bulked so large in his work up to that point virtually disappear from his next five novels. Thereafter, in the novels which follow, the occasional street per-. The panoramic nature of Dickens's vision ensured that random entertainers and entertainments would inevitably appear as part of the cityscape of his novels, but it was not until he determined in to centre Hard Times on the pernicious effects of the denial of imagination that he once again found it appropriate to include entertainers on a large scale.
Sleary's circus is a colourful representation of a major form of nineteenth-century popular entertainment, as Crummles's strolling players had been sixteen years earlier, but by this point in his career Dickens had so substantially developed the art of his fiction that the later entertainers take on symbolic weight as trustees of imaginative vitality to an extent quite beyond the possibilities of his earlier work.
Sleary is thus finally less important as an entertainer than as a thematic figure within the structure of the novel; Crummles, lacking so coherent a function, owes his vitality far more to what he is than to what he represents. If we look to Dickens's later fiction for the highest sophistication of his artistry, it is to his earlier works that we must turn to discover how his concern with popular entertainment contributed to his development into the greatest English novelist.
Before turning to Nickleby we should remind ourselves just how central entertainment was to his first imaginative publications. Dickens's first published volume, Sketches by Boz , contains a high proportion of material devoted to entertainments, recreations and amusements, and the avowed aim throughout the work is to discover scenes which will provoke interest and delight. Composed initially as occasional pieces for magazines and newspapers, the sketches have the imaginative young journalist's characteristic lively observation and colourful detail, and from the outset Dickens thought of them as more than ephemeral diversion.
His letters of the time reveal the commitment he invested in these essays, and years later he still recalled the 'fear and trembling' with which he dropped his 'first effusion' into the letterbox at the office of the Monthly Magazine. As a whole Sketches by Boz is dedicated to the proposition that amusement is to be found abundantly in everyday life. He shows the comical misadventures of personages who aspire to become entertainers themselves 'Private Theatres', 'The Mistaken Milliner', 'Mrs Joseph Porter' , and casts cheerful ridicule upon misanthropes who grumble against amusement 'Mr Minns and His Cousin', 'The Bloomsbury Christening'.
Above all, his narrative voice celebrates the enjoyment to be found simply by keeping one's eyes open to the world about. Repeatedly throughout the sketches he draws attention to the fascination of the commonplace: And lest his interest appear merely frivolous Dickens leavened the volume with a few sketches which examined scenes decidedly not entertaining. These were tales of degradation, abandonment and death, and Dickens's letters show that he set great store by them.
Two, 'A Visit to Newgate' and 'The Black Veil', were composed specifically for the first collected edition, and a third, 'The Drunkard's Death', was written with 'great pains' for the second series, to appear in the final position in the sequence, 'to finish the Volume with eclat '.
Dickens thought that amusement depended upon a disposition to respond positively to the wide variety of. Hogarth that visiting the prisons had supplied him with 'lots of anecdotes. They [a group of adolescent prisoners] were evidently quite gratified at being thought worth the trouble of looking at; their idea appeared to be, that we had come to see Newgate as a grand affair, and that they were an indispensable part of the show; and every boy as he 'fell in' to the line, actually seemed as pleased and important as if he had done something excessively meritorious in getting there at all.
We never looked upon a more disagreeable sight, because we never saw fourteen such hopeless creatures of neglect, before. Like the majority of the sketches, the dark essays were based on observation and inspired by 'curiosity' SB , pp. The mood of amusement in Sketches by Boz is controlled by the principle that the fascination of everyday scenes has only to be recognized to be enjoyed.
Pleasure is thus dependent on the disposition of the beholder; whether he be participant, spectator or entertainer himself, a person's enjoyment arises from his own readiness to respond to the abundance and variety of stimuli available. From this perspective, nothing is more ridiculous and self-defeating than wilful taciturnity, and no characters in the stories are made to look more absurd than Augustus Minns and Nicodemus Dumps, whose steadfast refusals to countenance gaiety lead to their discomfort and our amusement.
Conversely, the truest delight is to be gained by looking about in a spirit of cheerful speculation. Nowhere is this more evident than in 'Meditations on Monmouth Street', in which imagination magically transforms a somnolent scene, as Dickens conjures up a fanciful pantomime of living characters while staring at second-hand clothing hung up for sale. The source of interest was, he believed, inherent in the scenes themselves; as he said in the preface to the first series, Sketches by Boz consisted of 'little pictures of life and manners as they really are'. Certainly much of the appeal of the sketches resides in this evocation of reality; again and again Dickens's first readers praised his writing for the vividness and accuracy with which he animated familiar sights.
As one early reviewer put it, 'His excellence appears to lie in describing just what. Modern commentators have insisted upon the artifice with which this impression of reality is created: Virgil Grillo, comparing Dickens to other sketch-writers of the s, argues that Sketches by Boz is distinctive in the 'rhetorical relationship' which Dickens establishes with the reader in order to distil the 'essence' of a scene; Edward Costigan, persuasively demonstrating how conventions of contemporary theatre influence the shape of the sketches, proposes that Dickens offers 'a shared delight in the illusions that are part of reality'.
As a consequence of these attitudes it follows that in Sketches by Boz entertainment is seen as an integral part of everyday life. It offers an extension of the fascination found in more mundane activity, differing only in that it caters specifically to amusement, whereas the pleasure derived elsewhere is generally incidental to the purported rationale of buying, selling, or getting from one place to another. Observing people going to the circus, theatre or fair, and the people who do the entertaining in those places, Dickens finds bustle, noise and absurdity, just as in more workaday situations.
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What he does not see to any significant extent is entertainment divorced from or in conflict with the social patterns he presents. Far from being compartmentalized into snatched moments, remote from the mainstream of daily existence, entertainment in Sketches by Boz releases in concentrated form the spectacle inherent virtually everywhere. As in Sunday under Three Heads written and published during the months between the appearance of the first and second series of Sketches and in his later work, Sketches shows that Dickens is well aware that for most people, most of the time, leisure activity can take place only on the one day in the week free from work, or on a rare special outing: Likewise, he knows that many sources of entertainment are in a state of decay or actively threatened by hostile forces: Vauxhall Gardens has opened its gates by day in an attempt to recoup losses by extending its hours; May Day dancing is disappearing; and he himself has neglected to visit Greenwich Fair for years.
But the emphasis falls elsewhere: Sunday tea-gardens are seen in relation to the daily pleasures of tending one's. Indeed, as John Butt and Kathleen Tillotson have shown, Dickens pointedly toned down overtly 'political' defence of recreation when he revised the sketches for volume publication. Ready availability of amusement and the disposition to seek it out reappear in The Pickwick Papers , which Dickens began to write on 18 February , just ten days after Sketches by Boz , first series, was published. In contrast to the collections of separate sketches, Pickwick is organized as a continuous story, but the episodic nature of the adventures - to say nothing of the interpolated tales - ensures that it has the random variety of entertainment which characterizes the previous work.
In the opening pages Mr Pickwick 's intention of 'extending his travels and consequently enlarging his sphere of observation' is announced PP , 1 , and the search for amusing novelty is at once established as the motive force behind the book's forward progress. In Chapter 2, Mr Pickwick and his companions set off for Rochester, and before they finally retire they have wandered to Bury St Edmunds, Ipswich, Bath, Bristol and Birmingham, with frequent intermediate stops along the way. To be sure, with the introduction of Sam Weller and the ensuing complications with Mrs Bardell, a more coherent, developing action emerges, and the dynamic interrelation of Mr Pickwick and Sam takes over as the centre of interest, but to the very end new scenes and new characters continue to appear, and the sheer abundance of spirited activity constitutes much of Pickwick 's attraction.
As every student of Dickens knows, the book originated in a proposal from the artist Robert Seymour to draw a series of Cockney sporting scenes, which were to be accompanied by letterpress. It was a format of tested popularity, devised to promote amusement by portraying the misadventures of unskilled sportsmen in a spirit of broad ridicule and boisterous comedy. The publishers Chapman and Hall agreed to take on the project and approached Dickens to supply the text. Before the scheme even included Dickens, that is, the decision had already been reached that both the subject-matter and the purpose of the projected work would be popular entertainment.
Nevertheless, Dickens continued to fill the work with amusing adventures, and he publicly reaffirmed the purpose of providing his readers with entertainment. At the conclusion of the tenth number December he inserted an announcement in which he referred to himself as 'Mr Pickwick 's Stage-Manager' and likened his position as author to that of the great showman John Richardson, thanking his audience for their favour and promising to 'keep perpetually going on beginning again, until the end of the fair'.
By the time the book was finished he was taking his achievement more elegantly, invoking the precedent of 'some of the greatest novelists in the English language' to defend its variety of incidents, but even then he continued to claim entertainment as his guiding purpose: The amusements in Pickwick are almost wholly participatory and convivial in nature, and underpin the book's gaiety.
As in Sketches by Boz , formally constituted entertainment merges with a prevailing atmosphere of pleasure, and active engagement in pastimes predominates over passive spectating. Early in the book, for example, Mr Pickwick and his friends go to watch a display of military exercises, only to find themselves absurdly caught up in a bayonet charge, and leisurely admiration of the grand review quickly gives way to the broad farce of Mr Pickwick chasing his hat. Again, when the Pickwick ians go with Mr Wardle to see the cricket match between AlI-Muggleton and Dingley Dell, they spend as much time eating, drinking and talking as they do observing the game, and it is an integral part of the occasion when the players from both sides gather with the spectators after the contest at the Blue Lion Inn for a banquet, complete with toasts, speeches, carousing, and cheerful camaraderie.
Dickens presents the cricket less as a sporting engagement than as a communal ritual, in which traditional forms of gregarious interaction serve to affirm bonds of human fellowship. Mr Pickwick is not an anonymous spectator, impersonally witnessing the skills of professional players, but an active participant who shares fully in the sociable nature of the event.
The emphasis is similar in two shooting episodes. These scenes, closer than any others in the book to Seymour's original intention, depict the laugh. Mr Pickwick does not carry a gun - indeed, on the second expedition he is conveyed by Sam in a wheelbarrow - but he enjoys the recreation as fully as the others, cuts as ridiculous a figure, and enters as heartily into the spirit of the activity. Throughout their travels Mr Pickwick and his friends seek out the convivial pleasures for which English inns had been justly famous for centuries; they attend balls, parties and jovial gatherings wherever they go, and when other sources of amusement momentarily flag they engage strangers in conversation and story-telling.
All of these shared delights lend support to the popular image of Dickens which links his name so intimately with the festive spirit of Christmas, for the good-natured Christmas celebrations at Dingley Dell epitomize the fun of this novel. Participation is the key to enjoyment in Pickwick , and reciprocally professional entertainment, in the figure of Mr Jingle, steps out of its magically enclosed world into the lives of the characters.
For this strolling player all the world truly is a stage, and he exploits his skills as an actor for any audience sufficiently gullible to be taken in by the roles he plays. From his first entrance Jingle's existence is histrionic posturing: He upstages Dr Slammer and Mr Tupman in courtship, has a flair for the strong curtain-line, and when challenged strikes attitudes which freeze a scene into comic tableau. His loquacious staccato is a perpetually diverting stage patter, derived, as Earle Davis has shown, from the one-man 'At Home' performances of Charles Matthew's the elder, which Dickens went to see 'whenever he played' for three or four years; Jingle himself gives the clue to his origins when he tells Dr Slammer that he is not to be found 'at home'.
Jingle never actually appears in a theatre at all in the course of the novel, and his talent for duplicity hardly requires professional qualifications. Like subsequent rascals in Dickens's fiction, he relies on native wit to outface any situation; there is a positive vitality in the gleeful impudence with which he cuts in on Dr Slammer, and the gulls he deceives are either so spoony Mr Tupman or self-important the Nupkinses that they richly deserve comic deflation.
But because his unscrupulousness conflicts with Mr Pickwick 's principled selflessness Dickens chastens the stroller in the end and consigns him to the Fleet Prison. This turnabout gives Dickens the opportunity to demonstrate once again the sunny benevolence of Mr Pickwick , who forgives Jingle and Job and finances their emigration to Demerara, but the punishment strikes a discordant note very. It contrasts sharply with the final appearance of the book's other principal deceivers, Dodson and Fogg, who exit basking in complacent unrepentance, cheerfully noting down the particulars of Mr Pickwick 's denunciation of them in evidence for future legal chicanery.
Mere morality is quite alien to their integrity, as it had seemed with Jingle. Furthermore, the sight of Jingle ill and penitent, humbled in his wrongdoing, suggests a 'real' person beneath the poses, quite contrary to the impression created by his previous activities, in which performance was all. This raises unsettling questions about the morality of acting, by implying that role-playing is not gesture but imposture.
These are doubts which recur in acute form in Nickleby when Dickens sends Crummles, like Jingle, off to the New World without even, in the latter novel, the excuse that it is an act of justice. On the other hand, the expulsion of Jingle is consistent with the happy idealism of Pickwick , in which pastimes are seen as the vehicle for human affection. Genuine entertainment, in this view, brooks no self-seeking or mercenary considerations; it arises out of shared pleasures and contentments, and must reject anyone who cynically plays upon man's need for amusement. Dickens stated in his preface to the original edition that it was his hope that Pickwick would be an inducement for the reader 'to think better of his fellow men and to look upon the brighter and more kindly side of human nature', and this is the lesson Jingle learns in the Fleet.
Dickens's vision of entertainment in this book is decidedly old-fashioned; it looks back to an imaginary model of social harmony, in which the commingling of people of different age, sex and rank is fostered by leisure activity. As we saw in Chapter 1, Dickens cherished this model of pre-industrial traditions for the concord it represented, and here, in combination with the amiable innocence of Mr Pickwick and supported by the evocation of the rapidly disappearing exhilaration of coaching days, popular entertainment is celebrated as a vital and readily accessible tonic for the human spirit.
Its joys were never to be so secure again. Dickens's second novel, begun when he was barely halfway through the writing of Pickwick , was conceived in an altogether different spirit. Entertainers are decidedly thin on the ground in the squalid workhouse, and in the criminal underworld the 'indifferent'. Oliver finds scant amusement in his young life until, perversely, the warmth of Fagin's den provides him with his first real companionship, and the Jew's impersonation for his pupils of an old gentleman fearful of thieves moves Oliver to tears of laughter.
Innocent enjoyment, found in such lavish abundance in Sketches by Boz and The Pickwick Papers , is here restricted to the isolated havens of Mr Brownlow and the Maylies, and the utter polarity of the polite and criminal worlds has led Graham Greene to describe Dickens's vision in Oliver Twist as Manichaean. Nevertheless, he is instinctively prepared to draw upon the conventions of popular entertainment and to exploit them for his own purposes in the book.
In particular, as readers have long recognized, his intimate familiarity with the theatre of his day infuses his art at every level. The boldly contrasting scenes, exciting action, larger-than-life characters, and stylized speech and gesture are the very stuff of early nineteenth-century melodrama, and Dickens points directly to this influence when he invokes the precedent of theatrical usage in his famous image of streaky bacon, to defend the abrupt transitions of Oliver Twist.
It is the custom on the stage: He goes on to urge that this is an aspect of the 'mimic life of the theatre', and his readiness to see popular forms as a mirror of the real world says much about the roots of his artistry. Striving ambitiously to create a work of urgent social import and high moral purpose, he turns to the amusements of the people for a vigorous, direct and accessible vehicle. Dickens's inspiration comes not from the elite culture of philosophical abstraction, classical education, and aesthetic theory, but from the living tradition of tavern song, pulpit oration, newspaper rhetoric, chapbook sensation, and circus, street and stage performance.
He is the great artist who draws his sustenance from popular entertainment. Because he was prepared to draw on these sources for the form of Oliver Twist , it is the more striking that he neglected them as. Sketches by Boz and Pickwick both began as journalism; they were written to provide appealing diversion, and the inclusion of scenes of entertainment was entirely appropriate to this purpose. That they became something more was testimony to Dickens's talents as a writer, but their limited aim did not, he must have felt, give scope for him to work at full stretch.
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Oliver Twist was to be different, and one mark of Dickens's more ambitious plans for this novel was what it did not include. At the beginning of his career as a novelist, I am suggesting, there was a division in his mind between seriousness in fiction and the imprudence of entertainment. Comedy, of course, was another matter, as was the right to seek amusement. As we have already seen, this caused a minor ambiguity in Pickwick when he tried to fit Jingle into that book's moral framework; Dickens avoided such difficulty in Oliver Twist by the simple expedient of leaving entertainment scenes out.
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