The Wizard of Boz:

G.K. Chesterton and Dickensian Humour

Elliot D. Engel

When plain folks such as you and I

See the sun sinking in the sky,
We think it is the setting sun:
But Mr. Gilbert Chesterton
Is not so easily misled;
He calmly stands upon his head,
And upside down obtains a new
And Chestertonian point of view.
Observing thus how from his nose
The sun creeps closer to his toes
He cries in wonder and delight
How fine the sunrise is tonight! i

Bishop Craig Stewart used these whimsical lines by Oliver

Herford to introduce G.K. Chesterton to admirers at a luncheon
in Chicago during Chesterton's second American visit in 1930.
The tone of Herford's poem can now serve to introduce an
important feature of the recent criticism of Chesterton's works,
for Chesterton was a man who could never be accused of taking
himself too seriously. His jaunty self-effacement encouraged and
still encourages critics to view him and his works with a twink-
ling, as well as a critical, eye.

Fortunately, Chesterton has failed to convince all readers

of his amateur status as author and critic. His observations on
his favourite novelist and kindred spirit—Charles Dickens—
remain as an essential contribution to Dickens studies. Most
critics rank Chesterton's Charles Dickens (1906) as one of his

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 The Chesterton Review

few masterpieces and allude to his extensive commentary on

Dickens found in his introductions, essays, articles, and speeches.
Lionel Trilling believed that in the realm of Dickens scholarship,
Chesterton was "a far greater critic than his present reputation
might suggest."2 Writing in the 1930's, T.S. Eliot acknowledged
that "there is no better critic of Dickens living than Mr. Chester-
ton. As a tribute to Chesterton's criticism of Dickens during
the Chesterton Centenary in 1974, Sylvere Monod's "Confessions
of an Unrepentant Chestertonian" examines both the short-
comings and strengths of Charles Dickens and clearly indicates
that the annoying paradoxes and verbalisms fade before the
genius of Chesterton's observations. Monod warns future Dick-
ensians of the consequences if they fail to read Chesterton on
Dickens:

I believe that we disregard Chesterton on Dickens at

our own peril; the worst peril of ignoring him lies in
the probability of our own laboriously rediscovering
through huge volumes of dry scholarship points that
Chesterton has lightly thrown off, as if without effort,
through the intuitions of genius, by simply formulat-
ing his individual reactions.4

More than one third of the ninety-two books Chesterton

wrote make at least some mention of Dickens,s not including
the myriad of his articles, introductions, and speeches devoted
entirely to Dickens; yet what critical comment there is on
Chesterton's views of Dickens is confined almost exclusively
to his Charles Dickens. At least, it appears that his future in
Dickens criticism is somewhat secure. For Chesterton brings to
Dickens an engaging quality few scholars possess. As Monod
comments: "Scholarship demands what Chesterton did not
possess: care and technical expertness. But it can hardly be
called in question that Chesterton possessed what scholarship—
fortunately for most of us—does not demand: genius.''^ Chester-
ton's individual observations on Dickens are irresistably brilliant
and quotable. There may be few scholars who care to attempt
analysis of Chesterton's overall work on Dickens, but there are
a great many who quote unsparingly from his works on Dickens

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The Wizard of Boz: G.K. Chesterton and Dickensian Humour

in an attempt to enliven their own dry studies. His name is

not likely to disappear from Dickens studies, therefore, though
it seems doomed to be forever sandwiched between the words
"as" and "observed."

Chesterton's name has been linked with that of Dickens in

two particular respects: the Christmas Dickens and the optimistic,
outrageously funny Dickens, the Dickens of "The Great Gusto,"
a phrase Chesterton coined to describe Dickens's unique approach
to life and to his writing. Critics most often quote Chesterton
on Dickens's early novels, especially his comments on Pickwick
Papers. It is Dickens's humour that drew Chesterton to the early
novels, and Chesterton responded to that humour throughout
his entire writing career. His own keen sense of the ludicrous
makes Chesterton an especially valuable critic of humour. Dur-
ing his thirty-five-year writing career, Chesterton published a
number of essays on humour in general and on the specific
humour of individual authors. The remainder of this essay will
first examine Chesterton's theories of humour and then discuss
how they apply to his writing on Dickens, including his lesser-
known essays on the novelist as well as the two book-length
studies, Charles Dickens and Appreciations and Criticisms of
the Works of Charles Dickens.
The easiest way to understand Chesterton's basic views on
humour is to examine his discontent with his own period's
sense of the comic, which he berated during his entire writing
career. Chesterton wages the battle against what he labels the
"cocktail humour" of the moderns, humour which is based on
the principle of exclusion, humour which claims to be so
sophisticated that only the chosen few are deemed worthy of
understanding it. Chesterton charges that this "sense of humour,
a weird and delicate sense of humour, is the new religion of
mankind. "7 Such an aristocracy of laughter is antithetical to
Chesterton's conception of laughter's broad appeal: "They have
introduced an almost insane individualism into that one form
of intercourse which is specially and uproariously communal.
They have made even levities into secrets. They have made
laughter lonelier than tears."s Since he believed that the healthi-

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est humour must appeal to the broadest possible audience,

Chesterton prophesies that the exclusive nature of modern
humour will ultimately exclude humour itself from man's
civilisation:

Once man sang together round a table in chorus; now

one man sings alone, for the absurd reason that he can
sing better. If scientific civilisation goes on (which is
most improbable) only one man will laugh, because he
can laugh better than the rest. 9

Chesterton's objections to this kind of exclusive humour

reveal the foundations of his own comic vision. He blames the
restricted appeal of modern humour primarily on its failure to
perceive that all fun must have an element of solemnity at its
root. Since he felt that the moderns of his time could not discern
the relevance and even the majesty which (according to Chester-
ton) unites all living things, they can no longer literally "make
fun" of any object, because "There must be something serious
that is respected, even in order that it may be satirised . . . . For
in a world where everything is ridiculous, nothing can be
ridiculed."Perhaps most fundamental to Chesterton's own
theory of humour is his objection that exclusive humour seems
to exclude the joker from the joke. To place oneself above or
outside a humourous situation is to deny the universally human
condition which humour always sustains: "Nothing has been
worse than the modern notion that a clever man can make a
joke without taking part in it; without sharing in the general
absurdity that such a situation creates."'^ For Chesterton, a
man must laugh at his own joke because he is his own joke.
To Chesterton, humility is the beginning of all humour: "Humour
is meant, in the literal sense, to make game of man; that is,
to dethrone him from his official dignity and hunt him like
game. It is meant to remind us human beings that we have
things about us as ungainly and ludicrous as the nose of the
elephant or the neck of the giraffe." 12 Thus, Chesterton's
criticism of humour upholds his broader literary, religious, and
political criticism as a statement of the dual nature of man,
the fundamental paradox that "Man is superior to all the things

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The Wizard of Boz: G.K. Chesterton and Dickensian Humour

around him and yet at their m e r c y . " H i s love of Cockney

humour was consistent with his belief that all humour should
be a humbling experience, and it was not surprising to him
that the poorest part of a nation could yield its richest veins
of humour:

There remains always this great boast, perhaps the

greatest boast that is possible to human nature. I mean
the great boast that the most unhappy part of our
population is also the most hilarious part. The poor can
forget that social problem which we (the moderately
rich) ought never to forget. Blessed are the poor; for
they alone have not the poor always with them. The
honest poor can sometimes forget poverty. The honest
rich can never forget it.i4

To turn to Chesterton's miscellaneous writings on the

humour of Dickens (in which grouping I include all works
except his Charles Dickens and his Appreciations and Criticisms)
is to discover the same concerns as were discussed in his general
essays on humour. It would be impossible to comment on or even
to identify all of Chesterton's writings on Dickens, for many
appear in the hundreds of articles he wrote which have never
been catalogued. Fortunately, a great number of Chesterton's
books are collections of essays, and at least fourteen of the
essays which deal chiefly with Dickens can be found in these
collections.

The majority of these articles resemble Chesterton's more

general discussions of humour in that he most often comments
on Dickens's popularity by contrasting the Victorians' reaction
to Dickens's humour with the twentieth century's. He blames
Dickens's fall from grace in the early twentieth century on the
lack of a critical understanding which could encompass Dickens's
comic vision. In "Disputes on Dickens," Chesterton argues that
modern critics are wrong in criticising Pickwick Papers for its
formlessness since they have forgotten that this type of humour-
ous writing has always depended on a rambling structure for
its comic atmosphere's And in "As Large as Life in Dickens,"

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Chesterton claims that modern thought automatically excludes

humourous writing from the status of important literature:

He was the last of the great comic writers; since

his time we have lost the power of realising the con-
nection between the words "great" and "comic." We
have forgotten that Aristophanes and Rabelais stand
with Aeschylus and Dante; that their folly was wiser
and more solid than our wisdom, and that their levity
has outlasted a hundred philosophies. 16

In "Dickens Again" (Uses of Adversity, 226-232) Chesterton

explores why the twentieth-century critics of Dickens cannot be
expected to produce inspired criticism of Dickens's humour.
Believing that the amateur Dickensian is a more qualified judge
than the university professor, he charges that the very act of
reading Dickens's novels for professional reasons is itself un-
Dickensian:

While reading Dickens may make a man Dickensian,

studying Dickens makes him quite the reverse . . . .
Those who study [him] are a most valuable class of
the community, and they do good service to Dickens in
their own way. But their type and temperament are
not, in the nature of things, likely to be full of the
festive magic of their master. 17

In 1924 he wrote a now obscure but illuminating essay for

John Drinkwater and Sir William Orpen's The Outline of Liter-
ature and Art, a contribution titled "Dickens and Thackeray,"
which is actually two individual portraits rather than the com-
parative study which the title suggests. In the Dickens section,
Chesterton notes that Dickens's greatest achievement in humour
was not so much an original contribution to comedy as a genre
as a revitalisation (or rather vitalisation) of stock comic char-
acters and situations. Dickens in Chesterton's view was not a
Chaucer, opening up a new epoch in comedy; he was a humour-
ist whose genius allowed him to tower above the inferior writers
who served as his models. The stale and vulgar types he employed
were dead weight until "his own poetic fancy made the stale

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The Wizard of Boz: G.K. Chesterton and Dickensian Humour

things startling and the vulgar things artistic. We talk of

imitation of great models; but good literature is sometimes
based on bad literature, and great men sometimes model
themselves on small ones." Speaking of the uninspired ease
with which ordinary humourists often make fun of tragic
characters and conditions, Chesterton points out that the real
triumph of Dickens is that "he made comic characters comic."'0

It was in his essay on Dickens written in 1932 for Hugh and

H.J. Massingham's volume. The Great Victorians, that Chesterton
first used the phrase "Great Gusto." He did not intend the
term to apply exclusively to Dickens's robust humour, for he
defined it as "something wholehearted and precipitate about
the mirth and the anger of that age when there were mobs
and no ballot boxes."'9 This essay connects Dickens to the
Cockney humour tradition which Chesterton had commented on
in his "Cockney's and Their Jokes" essay in 1908.20 Seeing
Dickens as the poor man striking out against the rich with
humour as his weapon, Chesterton demonstrates what few
modern critics have, an understanding of the lower classes'
craving for laughter as "its substitute for religion, for property,
and sometimes even for food."2i

The "Great Gusto" essay differs from Chesterton's other

essays on Dickens in its willingness to mention the techniques
of Dickens as a humourist and in its eloquent demonstration of
humour's centrality to Dickens the man and artist. Like many
critics, Chesterton notes that Dickens carries on the English
tradition of "the coarse and comic novels of Smollett and Field-
ing," but Chesterton emphasises that Dickens, through conscious
and inventive technique, refined that inheritance to the point
that "his work is still comic but no longer coarse."22 He is one
of the earliest critics to recognise the highly technical artistry
of Dickensian humour, describing it as "for the moment on one
note, and making the most of one notion; like poetry, it leaves
us amazed at what can be made out of one notion."23 Above
all, this important essay convinces a reader that humour was
not Dickens's only popular gift, but it was his greatest and the

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 The Chesterton Review

one that gave him his deepest understanding of human tragedy

and the human potential to cope with it. With today's increased
interest in Dickens as a realist, symbolist, Marxist, and every
other "-ist" except humourist, Chesterton's words are particularly
welcome:

This is the real comparison between Dickens the humour-

ist and Dickens the sentimentalist, the sociologist, the
realist, the reformer and all the many aspects that have
been unfavourably or favourably compared with it. Not
that his social criticism was bad, not even that his
sentimentalism was always necessarily bad; but that
his humour was the elder brother, the more hardy, more
mature, more expert, and experienced; more genuine
and more national and historic. 24

Although Chesterton wrote about Dickens during his entire

literary career, his Charles Dickens remains today, as it was
during Chesterton's Hfetime, by far his most popular and most im-
portant work on the novelist. Maisie Ward records that Kate
Perugini, Dickens's second oldest daughter, read the book when it
first appeared in 1906 and wrote Chesterton "two letters of im-
mense enthusiasm about the book, saying it was the best thing
written about her father since Forster's biography."25 And on
the other side of the Atlantic, theatre critic, WilHam Archer,
discussing Chesterton with President Theodore Roosevelt, re-
ported that the President spoke "with special appreciation" of
G.K.C.'s Charles Dickens.^^ Contemporary reviews of the book
and more recent assessments have been almost unanimously favour-
able, although most reviewers have pointed out that the book is
hardly the "critical study" its title proclaims in the 1913 edition,
but rather, in the words of Alexander WooUcott, "a hymn of
praise, a song of gratitude for such gifts as Charles Dickens and
the privilege of being alive."27 Even Percy F . Picnell's disparaging
review of the first edition of the book in The Dial had to concede
begrudgingly that "it was the very last book one would ever
go to sleep over."28

Charles Dickens is one of Chesterton's earliest works,

published in the fifth year of a writing career which would

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The Wizard of Boz: G.K. Chesterton and Dickensian Humour

extend for over a third of a century (1900-1936). But turning

to this early work after the discussion of his later and more
scattered essays on Dickens presents no problems of continuity.
Chesterton was not an author whose beliefs developed in any
chronological progression. The main difference between the
"early" and "late" Chesterton is merely the difference between
a wildly paradoxical essayist and a more restrained, though still
wholly exuberant, critic. His style might have matured, but his
beliefs remained constant. Charles Dickens, however, goes be-
yond the single concern with Dickens's humour and remains
invaluable for its remarkable insights into Dickens the man and
Dickens the author. It was Chesterton who first played truant
from the various schools of literary criticism of his day and
declared that "Dickens did not strictly make a literature; he
made a mythology,"^^ a realm in which his characters could
"live statically, in a perpetual summer of being themselves"
(64). He found it easier to describe the Dickensian philosophy
in vivid metaphor than in the vague metaphysics of more sober
critics: "The spirit he at bottom celebrates is that of two
friends drinking wine together and talking through the night.
But for him they are two deathless friends talking through an
endless night and pouring wine from an inexhaustible bottle" (66).

Chesterton's comments on Dickens's humour as a medium

for characterisation are especially sound. He was fond of acknow-
ledging a related question which all Dickensians must answer
at least once for themselves and countless times for others: did
Dickens exaggerate? The question was Chesterton's golden apple
and like Atalanta he would always turn aside from the issue
at hand to stoop in response to it. His defenses of Dickensian
exaggeration or "caricature" always advocate the reality behind
the distortion: "Dickens exaggerated when he had found a real
truth to exaggerate . . . . In one sense truth alone can be
exaggerated; nothing else can stand the strain" (134). The ex-
aggeration is not unreal because Dickens "exaggerated as per-
sonalities are exaggerated by their own friends and enemies . . . .
In cataloguing the facts of life, the author must not omit that
one massive fact, illusion" (140-141). Chesterton obviously reveled

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in the humourous creations which emerged from such exaggera-

tions, and yet was not as uncritical as J.B. Priestley, who admired
such characters as individuals in their own right. Chesterton was
more interested in defining the creative function of the humour
in such Dickensian figures:

Dickens had to be ridiculous in order to be true. His

characters that begin solemn end futile; his characters
that begin frivolous end solemn in the best sense . . . .
Dickens had to make a character humourous before he
could make it human . . . . Of the things he tried to
make unsmilingly and grandly we can all make game
to our heart's content. But when he has laughed at a
thing it is sacred forever. (136-137)

Chesterton's most important commentary on Dickens's

humour in Charles Dickens foreshadows the numerous later
essays where he indicates the broad nature of Dickens's comic
genius by contrasting it with the limited scope of modern
humourists. In one sense such a contrast reveals that Dickens's
humour was the greater because it alone could allow all men—
the sophisticated and the unsophisticated—to share in the laugh-
ter: "All men can laugh at broad humour, even the subtle
humourists. Even the modern flaneur who can smile at a
particular combination of green and yellow would laugh at Mr.
Lammle's request for Mr. Fledgeby's nose. In a word, the com-
mon things are common—even to the uncommon people" (80).
In a different sense, Chesterton believed that the contrast dis-
plays Dickens's uncanny ability to lodge his humour deep
within the character's own psyche as opposed to the modern
and supposedly more sophisticated humourists who seldom trans-
cend the more superficial verbal level: "The humble characters
of Dickens do not amuse each other with epigrams; they amuse
each other with themselves. The present that each man brings
in hand is his own incredible personality" (182).

But the most valuable and original contribution which

Chesterton makes to the criticism of Dickensian humour can be
stated more specificially. Chesterton is, to my knowledge, the

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The Wizard of Boz: G,K, ChesteHon and Dickensian Humour

only critic to comprehend the notion of Dickens's humour as

a liberating force in literature. He does not mean liberation in
the sense of a "rescue" or "deliverance," although Chesterton
certainly knew how the English lower classes treasured the
humour of Dickens's early novels as an imaginative escape from
their mundane surroundings. He means liberation not as a
freedom from something but as freedom for something, freedom
for every man to be equal in hilarity. Chesterton's celebration
of Dickens the humourist is close to his celebration of Dickens
the democrat: "Dickens was destined to show with inspired
symbolism all the immense virtues of the democracy. He was
to show them as the most humourous part of our civilisation,
which they certainly are" (52), Contemporary and modern
reviewers have singled out Chesterton's opening chapter in
Charles Dickens on "The Dickens Period" as the most valuable
section of the book because of its brilliant recapturing of the
reforming spirit of the early Victorians. These reviewers point
out that Chesterton saw Dickens as the harbinger of this humane
encouragement which expected everything of everybody, but
they do not discern that Chesterton saw Dickens's humour as
the finest representation of his alliance with the democratic
spirit. Chesterton believed that Dickens viewed democracy "as
consisting of free men, but yet of funny men" (212) and, there-
fore, that "the real gospel of Dickens" was simply "the inex-
haustible opportunities offered by the liberty and variety of
msin'' (187), And with this definition of liberating humour,
Chesterton makes his final connection between Dickens's humour
and pathos, a connection based on their function as the two
great levelers:

There are two rooted spiritual realities out of which

grow all kinds of democratic conceptions or sentiments
of human equality . . . . This is a spiritual certainty,
that all men are tragic. And this, again, is an equally
sublime spiritual certainty, that all men are comic. No
special or private sorrow can be so dreadful as the fact
of having to die. And no freak or deformity can be so
funny as the mere fact of having two legs. Every man
is important if he loses his life; and every man is funny
if he loses his hat and has to run after it, (175)

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Chesterton's later criticism of the exclusive nature of modern

"cocktail humour" can be traced directly to this conception of
humour's democratic essence in Charles Dickens.

Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles

Dickens^^ has been ignored by most critics because they con-
sider it little more than a gathering of Chesterton's random
thoughts on Dickens's individual novels. Typically, Chesterton's
own words have been an important factor in convincing critics
that these collected pieces (introductions which he wrote for
the Everyman reissue of Dickens's works) have little worth.
It was Chesterton who remarked in Charles Dickens that "Dick-
ens's work is not to be reckoned in novels at all" since they
are "simply lengths cut from the flowing and mixed substance
called Dickens—a substance of which any given length will be
certain to contain a given proportion of brilliant and of bad
stuff" (60). With Chesterton himself advancing this theory, it
is not surprising that there would be no great interest in a
volume which indeed appears to "reckon" Dickens in novels
after all. And even less attractive to modern Dickensians is
the justification for Appreciations and Criticisms which Chester-
ton gives in the introduction, where he defines the purpose of
the volume as an "attempt to exhibit Dickens in the growing
and changing lights of our time" (xvii). The propensity for linking
Dickens with his own turn-of-the-century political and social
concerns has tended to alienate modern readers of this work of
Chesterton and dates it in a way which his earlier Charles
Dickens was not.

But the essays in Appreciations and Criticisms do serve the

imporant purpose in looking at the novels separately from
Dickens's life. Charles Dickens did not bring Dickens's individual
works into any kind of clear focus, for they were usually
treated as of secondary importance to the events occurring in
Dickens's life; only Pickwick Papers draws a chapter of its own
in the book. The other chapter divisions apply either to Dick-
ens's life (such as "The Youth of Dickens" or "The Time of
Transition") or to a general quality of all the novels ("The

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The Wizard of Boz: G,K, Chesterton and Dickensian Humour

Great Dickens Characters," "On the Alleged Optimism of

Dickens"). Willoughby Matchett pointed out in his review of
Appreciations and Criticisms in The Dickensian that Chester-
ton's Charles Dickens "was in the nature of a trumpet blast,
bringing startled heads to windows," whereas the volume under
review is a collection of short essays in which Chesterton has
"dealt out one to each novel in turn, as if he were playing a
sort of card game. For the essays are not so much on the
novels as they are pinned on the novels; yet the ideas they em-
body find a certain basis in the individual stories."3i Thus, in
Appreciations and Criticisms Chesterton's discussion of Bleak
House might be motivated by his ideas concerning the maturity
of Dickens's later works in general, but he explores the problem
by using the evidence he finds in Bleak House alone. A sense
of the novels' individual qualities emerged which had not been
demonstrated in Charles Dickens. Garry Wills is surely correct
when he asserts in Chesterton: Man and Mask that Apprecia-
tions and Criticisms is "more disjunct" than Charles Dickens
"but it is not inferior to it. The introductions do not simply
repeat and expand comments in the first book. Their method
is different, more technical."^^

Chesterton's introductions to the early works (Sketches by

Boz, Pickwick Papers, Nicholas Nickleby and The Old Curiosity
Shop) demonstrate that this more technical inclination of
Appreciations and Criticisms leads to a more technical analysis of
Dickens's humour and therefore provides insights of a nature not
indicated in the earlier book. For example, Chesterton felt that
he should use his introduction to Sketches by Boz to familiarise
modern readers with the "palpable and unsophisticated fun" of
this earliest work, since he feared that modern education "has
given to our people a queer and inadequate sort of refinement,
one which prevents them from enjoying the raw jests of the
Sketches of Boz** (xiV'Xv)Jn providing this type of introduction
to Dickens's early humour, Chesterton pays attention to Dick-
ens's unique skills which converted the hackneyed into the
hilarious:

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 The Chesterton Review

The incidents are upon the plain lines of the stock

comedy of the day: sharpers who entrap, simpletons,
spinsters who angle for husbands, youths who try to
look Byronic and only look foolish. Yet there is some-
thing in these stories which there is not in the ordinary
stock comedies of that day: an indefinable flavour of
emphasis and richness, a hint as of infinity of fun . . . .
It is in a certain quality of deep enjoyment in the writer
as well as the reader, as if the few words written had
been dipped in dark nonsense and were, as it were,
reeking with derision. (8)

Chesterton also attempts to educate his readers by showing

the maturity of Dickens's comedy. In Charles Dickens, Chester-
ton had argued for the dignity of humour by comparing it to
tragedy; in Appreciations and Criticisms he compares it to the
classic ode: "A true poet writes about the spring being beautiful
because (after a thousand springs) the spring really is beautiful.
In the same way, the true humourist writes about a man sitting
down on his hat, because the act of sitting down on one's hat
(however often and however admirably performed) is extremely
funny. We must not dismiss a new poet because his poem is
called 'To a Skylark'; nor must we dismiss a new humourist
because his new farce is called 'My Mother-In-Law'" f i i X For
Chesterton, Dickens's humour evokes the majesty of Carlyle's
"inverse sublimity," the quality of exalting into man's conscious-
ness that which is below him, as sublimity draws down into man's
consciousness that which is above him. Dickens's humour thrives
"in passing the borderland, in breaking through the floor of
sense and falling into some starry abyss of nonsense far below
our ordinary human life" (210). This discussion of the expansive
nature of Dickens's humour echoes the remarks in Charles
Dickens on Dickens's liberating humour, and here again Chester-
ton mentions the elastic nature of comedy: "Laughter is a thing
that can be let go; laughter has in it a quality of liberty . . . .
Humour is expansive; it bursts outwards; the fact is attested by
the common expression, 'holding one's sides'"C2^).

Surprisingly, the most vivid remark on Dickens's humour

in Appreciations and Criticisms is found in Chesterton's intro-

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The Wizard of Boz: G.K. Chesterton and Dickensian Humour

duction to Pictures from Italy. Chesterton is one of the very few

critics to include this minor work in his discussions of Dickens
and the only one ever to emphasise the humour in it. Yet
Chesterton's point in considering the humour here is the fact
that Dickens's sense of the ridiculous erupts in all of his works
and the best of it is often accidental and seemingly unrelated
or even antithetical to the major scene Dickens is creating at
the time. Chesterton recounts Dickens's description of the Italian
Marionette Theatre where he sees a performance of the death
of Napoleon on St. Helena and describes in detail the deathbed
scene which included Napoleon's doctor standing near the patient.
What impresses Chesterton the most about the description is the
small Dickensian detail gently tucked into the narrative describ-
ing the doctor puppet as hung on wires too short and, therefore,
delivering "medical opinions in the air." Chesterton's glorifi-
cation of this particular example of Dickens's unfailing comic
spirit emphasises both the genius and the preeminence of all
Dickensian humour:

In all his writings, from his most reasoned and sus-

tained novel to his maddest private note it is always
this obstreperous instinct for farce which stands out
as his in the highest sense. His wisdom is at the best
talent, his foolishness is genius. Just that exuberant
levity which we associate with a moment we associate
in his case with immortality. It is said of certain old
masonry that the mortar was so hard that it has sur-
vived the stones. So if Dickens could revisit the thing
he built, he would be surprised to see all the work he
thought solid and responsible wasted almost utterly
away, but the shortest frivolities and the most momen-
tary jokes remaining like colossal rocks for ever. (89)

George Ford has summed up Chesterton's position today

as a critic of Dickens by saying that he "continues to hover in
the background whenever Dickens's novels are being discussed."^^
Such a ghostly presence may not seem an enviable role but,
considering the modern penchant for sober critical analysis, it
is a compliment to Chesterton's erratic genius that modem
critics of Dickens have even allowed him hovering privileges.

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 The Chesterton Review

Yet W.H. Auden discerned the one ultimate triumph of Chester-

ton's brand of criticism over the critics of this age. Dividing
modern literary critics into two groups—the documentors and
the cryptologists—Auden invokes a plague on both houses: the
documentor "publishes every unearthable fact about an author's
life, from his love-letters to his dinner invitations and laundry
bills, on the assumption that any fact, however trivial, about
the man may throw light upon his writings"; the cryptologist,
on the other hand, "approaches his work as if it were an anony-
mous and immensely difficult text, written in a private language
which the ordinary reader cannot hope to understand until it
is deciphered for him by experts." Both types would "dismiss
Chesterton's literary criticism as out-of-date, inaccurate and
superficial" Auden argues, but "if one were to ask any living
novelist or poet which kind of critic he would personally prefer
to write about his work, I have no doubt as to the answer."3-*

The fact is that Chesterton gave a much more exacting and

critical commentary on Dickens's work than most recent scholars
realise. Chesterton's remarks on Dickens's humour alone, an
extremely hazardous territory for any critic, refute the charges
of superficiality which plague his reputation. His consistent
praise in Charles Dickens and in the miscellaneous essays ana-
lysing the liberating, anti-exclusive nature of Dickens's humour
give a foundation and guiding principle for all his general com-
ments on Dickens's comedy and the mainstay of his daring
assertion that Dickens was the most democratic author of the
Victorian period. His essay on the "Great Gusto" and his Ap-
preciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens
complement his earlier Charles Dickens by revealing the more
technical side of his criticism, an understanding of both the craft
behind Dickensian comedy and the broader function of humour
in the total effect of the early novels. Chesterton celebrates
Dickens's humour as the unequivocally dominent feature of his
artistic genius, claiming that "humour was his medium; his only
way of approaching emotion.''^^ And he fought to destroy the
misconception of his age that humour could never be the vehicle
for profound thought. Chesterton wanted to educate those who

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The Wizard of Boz: G,K. Chesterton and Dickensian Humour

mistakenly believe that "funny" is the opposite of "serious":

"Funny is the opposite of not funny and of nothing else . . . .
Whether a man chooses to tell the truth in long sentences or
in short jokes is a problem analogous to whether he chooses to
tell the truth in French or German."63 Just as Dickens had
made humour in the novel respectable for the Victorians,
Chesterton attempted to make humour in Dickens respectable
for the Edwardians.

With the critical emphasis on the the later novels that

followed the publication of Edmund Wilson's "Dickens: The
Two Scrooges" in 1940, Chesterton's importance as a critic of
Dickens has continued to decline. Admittedly the decline can
be justified in one sense. If modern critics expect Chesterton to
compete with them in their analyses of the gnarled fibers of
Little Dorrit or Our Mutual Friend, they predictably have no
adversary. This is not to admit that Chesterton made no critically
perceptive observations on the later novels. His comment that
Great Expectations "is a study in human weakness and the slow
human surrender"^^ characterises the novel as well as any
recent study of the novel, and there are scattered comments
on the other novels equally memorable. But it was the early
novels and their profusion of humour that challenged the genius
and critical perception of Chesterton to their farthest stretch.
Chesterton never was unintelligent in his response to the later
works of Dickens, but above all he was the wizard of Boz. He
has been the only critic of Dickens to gain renown for his pro-
found delight in the one-syllable Dickens, the "Boz" who wrote
the Sketches and whose comic spirit burst into genius in The
Pickwick Papers. G.K.C. remains the morning star among critics
of Dickens, the guiding light who first illuminated the fact that
there can be no true understanding of the dark Dickens unless
one recognises that within the man who wrote Little Dorrit
and Our Mutual Friend surged the exuberant spirit which
created Pickwick and Horatio Sparkins.

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 The Chesterton Review

1 Maisie W a r d quotes the poem in her Gilbert Keith Chesterton (New

York, 1944), p. 586.
2 Lionel T r i l l i n g , A Gathering of Fugitives (Boston, 1956), p. 411.
3 T . S . Eliot, "Wilkie Collins and Dickens," Selected Essays, 1917 -1932
(New York, 1932), p. 374.
* Sylvere Monod, "Confessions of an Unrepentant Chestertonian,"
Dickens Studies Annual, I I I , 227.
5 Thirty-three of Chesterton's ninety books mention Dickens. See
Joseph W . Sprug's An Index to G.K. Chesterton (Washington, D . C . , 1966)
for complete listing.
6 Sylvere Monod, "1900 -1920: T h e Age of Chesterton," The Dickensian,
66 (Centenary Number, 1970), 113.
7 G . K . Chesterton, The Napoleon of Notting Hill (New York, 1909),
p. 52.
8 G . K . Chesterton, "Demagogues and Mystagogues," All Things Con-
sidered (London, 1908), p. 239.
» G . K . Chesterton, "On Mr. McCabe and a Divine Frivolity," Heretics
(New York, 1909), p. 229.
1» G . K . Chesterton, "On the Comic Spirit," Generally Speaking (New
York, 1929), pp. 205-206.
11 G . K . Chesterton, "The F l a t F r e a k , " Alarms and Discursions (New
York, 1911), p. 233.
12 G . K . Chesterton, Alarms and Discursions, pp. 232-233.
13 G . K . Chesterton, "Cockneys and T h e i r Jokes," All Things Considered,
p. 13.
14 Ibid., p. 12.
15 G . K . Chesterton, The Spice of Life and Other Essays, ed. Dorothy
Collins (Beaconsfield, 1964), pp. 79-84.
16 Ibid., p. 77.
17 G . K . Chesterton, "Dickens Again," Uses of Diversity (London, 1920),
p. 152.
18 G . K . Chesterton, "Dickens and Thackeray," The Outline of Liter^ature
and Art, ed. John D r i n k w a t e r and Sir W i l l i a m Orpen (New York, 1924),
I I I , 804 and 807.
19 G . K . Chesterton, "Dickens," The Great Victorians, ed. H u g h and H . J .
Massingham (London, 1932), pp. 54-55. T h i s essay is reprinted in A Hand-
ful of Authors (London and New York, 1953).
20 G . K . Chesterton, All Things Considered, pp. 9-20.
21 G . K . Chesterton, "Dickens," The Great Victorians, p. 49.
22 Ibid., p. 45.
23 Ibid., p. 52.
24 Ibid., p. 49.
25 Maisie W a r d , Gilbert Keith Chesterton (London, 1944), p. 158. I n
one of the letters K a t e Perugini did inform Chesterton that his r e m a r k
concerning Dickens's "falling in love with the wrong sister" was totally
unfounded.
26 Dudley B a r k e r , G.K. Chesterton: A Biography (London, 1973), p. 164.
27 Woollcott made the r e m a r k in his introduction to Charles Dickens:
The Last of the Great Men (New York, 1942), p. ix.
28 Percy F . Picnell, "A B i z a r r e Book on Dickens," The Dial, 41 (Novem-

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The Wizard of Boz: G.K. Chesterton and Dickensian Humour

ber 1, 1906), 274. Shaw wrote a long letter to Chesterton immediately

after finishing Charles Dickens. H e offered no direct praise but wanted
to correct "a fantastic and colossal howler" Chesterton made when he
mentioned that Dickens wanted to publish an explanation of his separa-
tion f r o m Catherine in Punch. Shaw's letter is reprinted in Ward's bio-
graphy of Chesterton (pp. 156-158) and comprises the entire article on
"Shaw on Dickens" in The Dickensian, 69 (January, 1973), 44-45.
29 G . K . Chesterton, Charles Dickens (London, 1975), p. 61.
30 G . K . Chesterton, Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of
Charles Dickens (London, 1911). E l e v e n of the introductions were originally
written in 1907, five in 1908, four in 1909, and two in 1910. A l l page numbers
which follow refer to this volume of Appreciations and Criticisms.
31 Willoughby Matchett, "Mr. Chesterton's New Book on Dickens,"
The Dickensian, 7 (April, 1911), 89.
32 G a r r y Wills, Chesterton: Man and Mask (New York, 1961), p. 71.
33 George F o r d , Dickens and his Readers (Princeton, 1955), p. 241.
34 W . H . Auden, G.K. Chesterton: A Selection from his Non-Fictional
Prose (London, 1970), p. 238.
35 G . K . Chesterton, Charles Dickens, p. 178.
36 G . K . Chesterton, Heretics, pp. 220-221.
37 G . K . Chesterton, Appreciations and Criticisms, p. 197.

229