OTHER DICKENS
117
ceptibility. Encountering a young woman whom circumstances have
forced into genteel prostitution and who yet enjoys the love and
respect of her brother and even humbly respects herself, he re–
marks that this is " a romance so astonishing and yet so intelligible
as I never had the boldness to think of." It is: sexual vice is not
generally compatible with respect and love in the world of his
novels. Yet Dickens's personal story as it appears in his letters must
often seem to us a romance that he never thought of as a writer.
It is a romance in which, for example, a duke can be really noble
and a woman with a past be completely charming. It is a romance,
too,
in
which the poor and oppressed can arouse his unqualified
ire, even when they are acting out of the very exigencies of their
condition. This the unfortunate baker's man learns when he urin–
ates, or whatever, on Dickens's gate, is threatened with the Police
Act by the great humanitarian himself, and can only demand to
know, as Dickens reports, "what I should do 'if I was
him.'''
It
is
a romance, finally, in which the rhythms of existence itself are
largely indifferent to moral impulses. Here Time is the great force
for change and no one is hustled to his destiny by any patrol wagon
of a plot. People--his friends-merely alter with the years, for
better and worse, as people seem to do in what we call "life" and
in the kind of novels Dickens didn't write.
The differences are, however, far from absolute. Especially at
moments of great emotional stress is the novelist firmly re-united
with the letter-writer. The impulse of melodrama bursts out in him,
as in the fierce accusations and final judgments he brings to the
affair of his separation from his wife. On the other hand, his ex–
travagantly idealizing tendency makes an unmitigated heroine of
Mary Hogarth, his dead sister-in-law, as it does of the Little Neils
and Esther Summersons of his novels.
The readers of Dickens's letters breathe not only an intriguing
moral air but an exhilarating air of vast public acclaim. As between
Dickens and his public, the acclaim is intensely heady, richly earn–
ed, cheerfully given, cheerfully accepted. Originating with the
success of
The Pickwick Papers,
his fame is sustained by his con–
tinued performance .as a novelist and by his other brilliant activi-
