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F. W.
DUPEE
less, distinctions between art and action, artist and man, artist and
non-artist scarcely exist. His whole personal history works against
them. His vocation for literature follows naturally, though by no
means inevitably, from his youthful occupation as a reporter. He
continues to identify that vocation with a regular trade or profes–
sion, and he labors to enhance its dignity in a society that is far
from generous in granting dignity to the unestablished, whether
persons or classes. The society's cruel exclusiveness is hateful to
him; yet he strives to establish himself and his fellow writers in it
on their own terms.
In all this Dickens's passion for justice is inflamed by an un–
dying sense of outrage which had its beginnings in the now famous
ordeal of his boyhood. The distress of the twelve-year-old boy who
saw his father suddenly imprisoned for debt and was himself made to
drudge long hours in the unaccustomed squalor of a shoe-blacking
plant lives on in the mature Dickens, although he confides these
facts to John Forster alone. Indeed the events of his twelfth year
seem to have constituted one of those family crises that cast their
shadow back over the family's past and forward over its future.
For young Dickens it was a crisis of the affections as well as a crisis
in the Dickenses' social history. A nestling suddenly thrust from the
nest, he never quite forgave his mother for her seeming indifference
to his sufferings in the blacking plant. Grown up and married, he
tends to visit his suspicions and resentments on his own wife, who,
aided no doubt by her intrinsic faults, is finally made to reenact the
essentials of the mother's failure. At the same time he has fears for
the social well-being of the family. His paternal grandparents were
domestic servants; and although his father, John Dickens, succeed–
ed in extricating himself from that class-he was first a government
employee, then a journalist of sorts- he was given to improvidence
as to a sort of fate. There was reason to guess that he was morally
unequal to his improved position, remaining in a state of partial
dependency; and John Dickens's genial fecklessness turned into an
ungenial, even criminal parasitism in two of Charles Dickens's
brothers. Hence Dickens's tremendous will to power, to success in
the world, to respectability; and hence his affinity with another
