Logos: A Journal of Catholic Thought and Culture

Charles Dickens is probably Chesterton's greatest work—the work in which more than in any other he expressed his own self and his philosophy of life—and the book that explains most clearly and fully his Catholicism—his Roman Catholicism—and the sense in which he is a Catholic writer in his most creative works. . . . The book is built on the paradox that outwardly Dickens was as far from Catholicism as any Englishman can be. Chesterton emphasizes this fact. When in Italy, Dickens never really left England, or rather, "Dickensland": "the great foreign things which lie in wait for us in the south of Europe" such as the Catholic Church, he never "really [End Page 171] felt." Paradoxically again, Chesterton could not really regret it, as Dickens "could only have understood them by ceasing to be the inspired cockney that he was"!¹ In one of his Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens (1911), Chesterton remarks that "[w]hen he found a thing in Europe which he did not understand, such as the Roman Catholic Church, he simply called it an old-world superstition, and sat looking at it like a moonlit ruin." Because Dickens had, in spite of this, what Chesterton conceived of as a naturally Catholic spirit, he could not bring himself to condemn that innocent ignorance which enabled Dickens, for example, to criticize "the backwardness and idleness of Catholics who would not build a Birmingham in Italy," while seemingly "quite unconscious of the obvious truth, that the backwardness of Catholics was simply the refusal of Bob Cratchit to enter the house of Gradgrind" (292).

Chesterton's own primary—religious—experience, that wonder at the unexpectedness of the ordinary world, is for him the outstanding feature of Dickens's novels. But whereas the scene of the childhood experiences was also London, it was a very different city from the comfortable middle-class world of Chesterton's happy childhood. One might have thought that the environment of Dickens's miserable childhood could hardly have evoked wonder, let alone gratitude. Nevertheless it was during the nightmare of "drudging" at the blacking factory that the young Dickens "drifted over half London" and discovered those streets that "[f]or him ever afterwards . . . were mortally romantic; they were dipped in the purple dyes of youth and its tragedy," and yet "rich with irrevocable sunsets." As Chesterton explains in one of the great passages in Charles Dickens:

He did not go in for "observation," a priggish habit; he did not look at Charing Cross to improve his mind or count the lamp-posts in Holborn to practise his arithmetic. But unconsciously he made all these places the scenes of the monstrous drama in his miserable little soul. He walked in darkness under the [End Page 172] lamps of Holborn, and was crucified at Charing Cross. So for him ever afterwards these places had the beauty that only belongs to battlefields. For our memory never fixes the facts which we have merely observed. The only way to remember a place for ever is to live in the place for an hour; and the only way to live in the place for an hour is to forget the place for an hour. The undying scenes we can all see if we shut our eyes are not the scenes that we have stared at under the direction of guide-books; the scenes we see are the scenes at which we did not look at all—the scenes in which we walked when we were thinking about something else—about a sin, or a love-affair, or some childish sorrow. We can see the background now because we did not see it then. So Dickens did not stamp these places on his mind; he stamped his mind on these places.

The dramatic quality of this kind of writing does not support the common supposition that Chesterton's paradoxes are merely clever rhetorical devices to highlight his admittedly acute powers of insight and observation. Here, rather, the inescapable truth of the apparently contradictory only adds to the sense of a perfectly lucid nightmare which one...