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PARTISAN REVIEW
posts to guide us to more rational and moral behavior, or are they
the creations of a sensibility that reveled in the haunts of Dr. Grod–
deck's "it"? The "caricature" may be simply the intensification or
distortion of dream, but from the point of view of
unity,
if Dickens'
people are caricatures they are invoked at an almost identical level
of caricature, and once slapped on the back by his masterly hand
they rise and breathe the same vigorous air.
Although these characters seem so often to emerge from folk
tale and dream, they are not all nightmarish. Sleep has its pleasant
apparitions. And among the legendary types we fleetingly detect
underlying the personages of Dickens there are many Cinderellas,
Jack the Giant Killers, Dick Whittingtons, Fairy Godmothers, and
Pucks, as well as the Ogres and Robber Bridegrooms. (Who could
Mr. and Mrs. Smallweed be, by the way, other than Punch and
Judy?) But these lay or archetypal figures do not often oppress us
with familiarity; they are so richly clothed in borrowed garments
of actuality that the smooth, ancient timbers of their limbs rarely
peep through. No, it must not be supposed that Dickens' under–
ground London is cut off entirely from its counterpart. The million
sights and sounds of outer life drift downward in a kind of sediment,
and, as certain jelly-like organisms gather the debris of the sea bot–
tom about them to form a shell, so Dickens' characters crust them–
selves in these fragments of actuality.
Dickens notoriously used the names and peculiarities of many
persons encountered in his own life, as well as the names and fea–
tures of buildings and places. He kept the sharpest lookout for traits
and manners, for little absurd, grotesque, or pathetic ways. Daily
he crammed
his
memory with
this
loot, and when the time came for
the creation of a new tavern, character, or street, he had only to
agitate these thousand bits of observation, and administer, as from
a salt shaker, the proper seasoning for person or place. In similar
fashion he distributes the deeper traits of pride, hypocrisy, cheerful–
ness, fidelity, greed, and the like-as well as the general attributes of
youth, beauty, intelligence, etc., together with hundreds of occupa–
tions such as fishing, body snatching, the law. His salt shaker holds
them
all.
How else, beyond plot and uniformity of caricature, does
Dickens integrate his novels?
One soon becomes aware that each book arises from a single
