New Judgments

New Zealand Listener, Volume 12, Issue 312, 15 June 1945, Page 13

New Judgments

TATION 3YA broadcast recently a "New Judgment" on Dickens, delivered by J. B. Priestley. I found it neither new nor very thoroughly developed; it was the not very startling information that much of Dickens’ work is social criticism, an attack on the less lovable Victor‘an characteristics, and that

his later novels, supposedly weaker, were in reality less exuberant and more social. This is all very well; but surely the point about Dickens’ social criticism, at its best, is that it is a great deal more. Mr. Pecksniff, for instance, remarking that it is well that others should be less fortunate than we are, "Otherwise what would become of our sense of gratitude," is clearly a type of the eternal damnation of Pure Individualism. But what a poor creature would he be if he was nothing more than a type; we must allow Dickens a pure distinterested love of making his gargoyles genuine flesh and blood and his jndividuals at least individuals. Similarly his working-class characters are far more than profetariansand he knew a great deal about the pro-letariat-they are men; which is why Dickens, and even Mr. Priestley his disciple, in such a work as "Daylight on Saturday," have one great advantage over the more self-consciously proletarian writers; they do not approach the’ reader with the words: "Dr. Livingstone, I presume?"