Charles Dickens and the Great Theatre of the World. Simon Callow
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stronger in the contrast. Some men, like bats or owls, have better eyes for the darkness than for the light. We, who have no such optical powers, are better pleased to take our last parting look at the visionary companions of many solitary hours, when the brief sunshine of the world is blazing full upon them.
Night came very suddenly. Dickens’s readers needed to fasten their safety belts: it proved to be a bumpy trip. He was intent on deromanticizing the criminal world of which he had such vivid first-hand experience. The all-important thing for Dickens in writing the book was that IT IS TRUE, as he wrote (his capitals) in the Preface. He was describing ‘the very scum and refuse of the land’, determined to show that there was nothing glamorous about a criminal life: ‘What charms has it for the young and ill-disposed, what allurements for the most jolter-headed of juveniles? Here are no canterings on moonlit heaths, no merry-makings in the snuggest of all possible caverns.’ This was the life of the urban underbelly: ‘the cold, wet, shelterless midnight streets of London; the foul and frowzy dens, where vice is closely packed and lacks the room to turn; the haunts of hunger and disease, the shabby rags that scarcely hold together.’ He had been perilously close to immersion in that underworld. Oliver’s experience was for Dickens an all-too-probable vision of the horror that his own life might have sunk into. ‘But for the mercy of God, I might easily have been, for any care that was taken of me, a little robber or a little vagabond.’ He put all his understanding of the danger of the world into his lowlife characters, explicitly identifying them in his Preface: ‘Sikes is a thief, and Fagin a receiver of stolen goods; the boys are pickpockets, and the girl is a prostitute.’ The blunt use of the last word stopped Dickens’s readers dead in their tracks – no wonder Lord Melbourne tried to dissuade the young Queen Victoria (who ascended the throne the year the book started to appear) from reading a book about ‘Workhouses and Coffinmakers and pickpockets … I don’t like that low debasing style.’
Meanwhile, even as he was exposing the brutality both of so-called charity and of organized child crime in Twist to the astounded fascination of the nation, he determined to expose the iniquities of the Yorkshire boarding schools. He had been deeply moved by stories he had read of children abandoned to the untender mercies of these primitive educationalists, so he and Phiz travelled to the North under pseudonyms – how Dickens must have loved that masquerade – and did hair-raising field research. The following month, the first instalment of Nicholas Nickleby appeared, fuelled by the furious energy of Dickens’s rage at what he had seen; it was read by an astonishing 50,000 readers, and confirmed Dickens as the most compelling literary voice of his time. But the novel did not confine itself to social criticism; like Pickwick, its form was loose enough to embrace many aspects of British life on which Dickens wished to comment. En route, for no particular reason, he takes a sizeable detour into the world of the theatre, an astonished Nicholas finding himself recruited into a company of moth-eaten thespians under the titanic leadership of Vincent Crummles (a fate that would have been something of a dream come true for Dickens himself). These sections of the book are Dickens’s love letter to the profession, and it is entirely fitting that the novel, when it appeared in hard covers, was dedicated to Macready, a very different actor indeed from Mr Crummles.
It is worth stopping for a moment to consider what the theatre meant to Dickens, since it occupied such a central role in his imagination. Nicholas finds a kindness, a warmth and an inclusiveness in the theatre that contrasts favourably with almost every other stratum of society he encounters. It has room for dwarves and giants and women with beards, for those with one tiny skill and for the preternaturally gifted. It is, as he rightly calls it, ‘a little world’, but his stress is on the noun, not the adjective: he sees the theatre as an entire world, consistent within itself. Every transaction within its boundaries, on or off stage, is somehow theatrical (even the pony’s mother was ‘in the business’): it is life lived as a series of plays-within-plays. Nicholas finds it irresistibly charming, the whole gaudy enterprise essentially affirmative. ‘Are they very theatrical people here?’ he asks Crummles of the folk of Portsmouth. ‘Far from it,’ reports Crummles, moodily. ‘I pity them,’ says Mrs Crummles. ‘So do I,’ Nicholas concurs, ‘if they have no relish for theatrical entertainment, properly conducted.’
As an actor, Nicholas responds vividly, as Dickens did, to the heroic act of performance, to rising above your situation, getting on stage and giving it your all, which was essentially, of course, Dickens’s own approach to life. It is generous and dangerous and not like normal life. The artificiality of the theatrical environment makes it, paradoxically, more real: it is actually happening before your eyes, people are making it happen for you. The moment of performance, the coming together of the elements, the power of impersonation, are all practical mysteries that heighten experience and charge life with an electrical current of excitement. To enter a theatre for a performance is to be inducted into a magical space, to be ushered into the sacred arena of the imagination. ‘Is this a theatre?’ doubts Smike one morning when Nicholas slips him onto the stage where Crummles and co. will be playing that night. ‘I thought it was a blaze of light and finery,’ to which Nicholas gives the superb reply, revealing the measure of Dickens’s understanding of the essential nature of the theatre: ‘Why, so it is … but not by day, Smike, not by day.’ Dickens is not so stage-struck, though, as to be unaware of the practical realities of the business, drily noting the ‘remarkable fact in theatrical history, but one long since established beyond dispute, that it is a hopeless endeavour to attract people to a theatre unless they can be first brought to believe that they will never get into it.’
His view of the stage is not unsatirical, but his affection for its denizens and their activities is deep. Crummles’s theatre, bordering as it does on vaudeville, and with more than a nod in the direction of the end of the pier, is not exactly, as Paul Schlicke remarks, the Royal Shakespeare Company, but it is – like most theatre companies – a broad church, able to encompass not only the tumblers, the dancers, and Miss Ninetta Crummles, the Infant Phenomenon herself, but also the ‘First Tragedy Man’ who, when he played Othello, ‘used to black himself all over’. Vincent Crummles is rather in awe of this pioneering Method actor: ‘that’s feeling a part and going into it as if you meant it. It isn’t usual – more’s the pity,’ he adds, mournfully echoing the general view, frequently expressed in the novel’s theatre sections, of the sad decline of the English stage. Everyone in Crummles’s group is a readily identifiable theatre type and has his or her counterpart in any modern company. Perhaps the most startling portrait is that of Folair, who dances the part of The Savage. Dickens paints him unmistakably as a bitchy theatre queen, spreading poison wherever he goes; the spirit of Folair, alas, lives still. The theatre is, as has perhaps been too often observed, a family, and all families, as Dickens more than most had cause to know, have their problem children (and problem parents). But a feeling of family was central to the Eden from which he had once been exiled, and for a return of which he ardently hoped, and the theatre supplied it.
Beyond his sense of the theatre-as-world was his sense of the world-as-theatre, of the charivari, the endless parade, each man in his time playing many parts, absurd, grotesque, battered, damaged, ridiculous, briefly glorious. It is a carnival view of life, in which we are all, like members of a theatre company, dependent on each other, all limbs of one body, all human, and therefore all flawed, all beautiful. There are, too, as part of this more or less medieval view of the great theatre of the world, devils and angels, playing havoc with the endless parade, creating a pressing and permanent tension between Nicholas Nickleby’s carnival spirit and its morbid sentimentality, a tension highly characteristic of the nascent Victorian era in which it was written, and one which was central to Dickens himself; he never quite resolved it to the end. But for the most part the book is a kind of corybantic frieze of all-too-human mankind, its characters parading unforgettably past us, insinuating themselves permanently into our imaginations, populating our mental landscapes. Its spirit seems to hark back, past Shakespeare to Chaucer, enabling Dickens to embody something quintessentially and irrepressibly English.
Nickleby was of course, adapted for the stage, too, long before the final instalment was written, notably by the prolific William Moncrieff. Dickens struck back in the later pages of the novel itself, speaking of ‘a literary gentleman who had dramatised in his time 247 novels as fast as they had come out – some of them faster than they had come out’. Taking this as a personal taunt, Moncrieff (still before