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vait till I'm ready, and I believe she vill. If she don't, she's not the young 'ooman I
take her for, and I give her up vith readiness."
It is easy to imagine what the young woman would have said to this in real life. But
notice the feudal atmosphere. Sam Weller is ready as a matter of course to sacrifice years of life to
his master, and he can also sit down in his master's presence. A modern manservant would never think
of doing either. Dickens's views on the servant question do not get much beyond wishing that master
and servant would love one another. Sloppy in Our Mutual Friend, though a wretched failure as a
character, represents the same kind of loyalty as Sam Weller. Such loyalty, of course, is natural,
human and likeable; but so was feudalism.
What Dickens seems to be doing, as usual, is to reach out for an idealised version of the
existing thing. He was writing at a time when domestic service must have seemed a completely
inevitable evil. There were no labour-saving devices, and there was huge inequality of wealth. It was
an age of enormous families, pretentious meals and inconvenient houses, when the slavey drudging
fourteen hours a day in the basement kitchen was something too normal to be noticed. And given the
fact of servitude, the feudal relationship is the only tolerable one. Sam Weller and Mark Tapley are
dream figures, no less than the Cheerybles. If there have got to be masters and servants, how much
better that the master should be Mr. Pickwick and the servant should be Sam Weller. Better still, of
course, if servants did not exist at all—but this Dickens is probably unable to imagine. Without a high
level of mechanical development, human equality is not practically possible; Dickens goes to show
that it is not imaginable either.
4
It is not merely a coincidence that Dickens never writes about agriculture and writes endlessly about
food. He was a Cockney, and London is the centre of the earth in rather the same sense that the belly
is the centre of the body. It is a city of consumers, of people who are deeply civilised but not
primarily useful. A thing that strikes one when one looks below the surface of Dickens books is that,
as nineteenth-century novelists go, he is rather ignorant. He knows very little about the way things
really happen. At first sight this statement looks flatly untrue, and it needs some qualification.
Dickens had had vivid glimpses of "low life"—life in a debtor's prison, for example—
and he was also a popular novelist and able to write about ordinary people. So were all the
characteristic English novelists of the nineteenth century. They felt at home in the world they lived in,
whereas a writer nowadays is so hopelessly isolated that the typical modern novel is a novel about a
novelist. Even when Joyce, for instance, spends a decade or so in patient efforts to make contact with
the "common man," his "common man" finally turns out to be a Jew, and a bit of a highbrow at that.
Dickens at least does not suffer from this kind of thing. He has no difficulty in introducing the common
motives, love, ambition, avarice, vengeance and so forth. What he does not noticeably write about,
however, is work.
In Dickens's novels anything in the nature of work happens off-stage. The only one of his
heroes who has a plausible profession is David Copperfield, who is first a shorthand writer and then