Chatting about Boz

Lots of us did unusual things in lockdown. Two retired professors of English, one each side of the Atlantic, discussed their current projects online. Professors of English do that sort of thing all the time, of course, but perhaps doing fewer other things made the experience more intense. Anyhow, Rosemarie Bodenheimer and Philip Davis clicked, and resolved to write a book that would incorporate the kind of pleasure and profit they had found in the process. Oxford University Press gave them a contract; but they had started writing already, and they finished a year early. They have never met in real life. What they wanted to preserve from the lockdown was “a form of excited interruption”: “when the reader picked up the thought of the writer, stopped it, felt and received its impact, and then gave it back again with added personal weight and a renewed sense of its living value”.

For a second the word “self-indulgent” might drift into a reader’s head; but In Dialogue with Dickens turns out to be disarmingly delightful. So much contemporary literary criticism seems written in a spirit of grim determination: this book is overflowing with enthusiasm, curiosity and love.

The problem Bodenheimer and Davis set themselves is one with which generations of puzzled scholars have grappled: how Dickens contrives to be a great writer. Attacks on him tend to be perfectly fair: yes, he is sentimental, prejudiced and melodramatic; yes, his characters each sing one note. Yet the emotional force of his fiction is unequalled. So how does he do it?

Bodenheimer and Davis try to get at the mystery of how Dickens himself felt and thought, what he thought about his novels and his own life. They toss away the convention that academic critics should talk about the persona of the narrator, not about the voice of the author. Transgressively, they analyse what he says in the narrative voice as indirectly revealing his personal feelings about his family, his identity and life itself. One tool that comes to hand is digital imagery of Dickens’s untidy, much-revised manuscripts. It is mainly Davis who pulls into the discussion of these erasures, and what can be deduced from them; written at speed, which gives an impression of the creative process quite different even from the most conscientious scholarly edition.

This book deals in turn with Dombey and Son, David Copperfield, Little Dorrit and Bleak House. Its authors mostly applaud what one another says, and eagerly take up each other’s ideas – as they put it, their “back-and-forth collaborative dialogue amplifies for us the excited pleasure of thinking as a creatively messy process”. When they come to Little Dorrit, though, there is a change. Davis puts more of his emotions and his philosophy of life on the page, and finds himself appalled by the novel, still shaken after years of reading, still made angry and unhappy by its cruelty. Bodenheimer is less disturbed.

They focus throughout on the experience of being in the middle of reading the novels, of being under their spell. Scenes, sentences and words (they are especially keen on pronouns) are scrutinized with wonderful effectiveness. Their focus on the manuscripts gives us a Dickens who is a “sudden and delicate improviser”. They also see him restlessly exploring fictional strategies – in the four novels each narration is quite different, and Bleak House is the most daring formal experiment of all. Unlike David Copperfield, who looks back on his past from an adult point of view, Esther Summerson is marooned somehow in a present where she knows neither what is going to happen nor much of what has happened in her own past. Her co-narrator knows about her, but she knows nothing of him. Bodenheimer and Davis convincingly argue that the novel’s frequent changes of perspective are fundamental to its structure and its themes.

In Dialogue with Dickens is an exhilarating book. It shows how good readers read, and the way they make literature part of their lives. If one wanted a book to persuade a young person that academic criticism can be inspiring, this work by two veterans would be a good choice. Putting it down, somewhat shaken, made this reader wonder if “this deliberately untidy experiment” will have imitators. Perhaps, like Neil MacGregor’s A History of the World in 100 Objects, it will be seized on as a way of escape from irksome academic convention. Will we soon be saying, “Oh no, not another literary critical book in dialogue form”?

Charlotte Mitchell is Honorary Senior Lecturer in English Literature at University College London

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