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iver that ran purple with evil-smelling dye, and vast piles of buildings full of windows where there
was a rattling and a trembling all day long, and where the piston of the steam-engine worked
monotonously up and down, like the head of an elephant in a state of melancholy madness." That is as
near as Dickens ever gets to the machinery of the mills. An engineer or a cotton-broker would see it
differently, but then neither of them would be capable of that impressionistic touch about the heads of
the elephants.
In a rather different sense his attitude to life is extremely unphysical. He is a man who
lives through his eyes and ears rather than through his hands and muscles. Actually his habits were not
so sedentary as this seems to imply. In spite of rather poor health and physique, he was active to the
point of restlessness; throughout his life he was a remarkable walker, and he could at any rate
carpenter well enough to put up stage scenery. But he was not one of those people who feel a need to
use their hands. It is difficult to imagine him digging at a cabbage-patch, for instance. He gives no
evidence of knowing anything about agriculture, and obviously knows nothing about any kind of game
or sport. He has no interest in pugilism, for instance. Considering the age in which he was writing, it
is astonishing how little physical brutality there is in Dickens's novels. Martin Chuzzlewit and Mark
Tapley, for instance, behave with the most remarkable mildness towards the Americans who are
constantly menacing them with revolvers and bowie-knives. The average English or American
novelist would have had them handing out socks on the jaw and exchanging pistol-shots in all
directions. Dickens is too decent for that; he sees the stupidity of violence, and also he belongs to a
cautious urban class which does not deal in socks on the jaw, even in theory. And his attitude towards
sport is mixed up with social feelings. In England, for mainly geographical reasons, sport, especially
fieldsports, and snobbery are inextricably mingled. English Socialists are often flatly incredulous
when told that Lenin, for instance, was devoted to shooting. In their eyes shooting, hunting, etc., are
simply snobbish observances of the landed gentry; they forget that these things might appear
differently in a huge virgin country like Russia. From Dickens's point of view almost any kind of sport
is at best a subject for satire. Consequently one side of nineteenth-century life—the boxing, racing,
cockfighting, badger-digging, poaching, rat-catching side of life, so wonderfully embalmed in Leech's
illustrations to Surtees—is outside his scope.
What is more striking, in a seemingly "progressive" radical, is that he is not
mechanically minded. He shows no interest either in the details of machinery or in the things
machinery can do. As Gissing remarks, Dickens nowhere describes a railway journey with anything
like the enthusiasm he shows in describing journeys by stage-coach. In nearly all of his books one has
a curious feeling that one is living in the first quarter of the nineteenth century, and in fact, he does
tend to return to this period. Little Dorrit, written in the middle 'fifties, deals with the late 'twenties;
Great Expectations (1861) is not dated, but evidently deals with the 'twenties and 'thirties. Several of
the inventions and discoveries which have made the modern world possible (the electric telegraph,
the breech-loading gun, india-rubber, coal gas, wood-pulp paper) first appeared in Dickens's lifetime,
but he scarcely notes them in his books. Nothing is queerer than the vagueness with which he speaks
of Doyce's "invention" in Little Dorrit. It is represented as something extremely ingenious and
revolutionary, "of great importance to his country and his fellow-creatures," and it is also an
important minor link in the book; yet we are never told what the "invention" is! On the other hand,
Doyce's physical appearance is hit off with the typical Dickens touch; he has a peculiar way of
moving his thumb, a way characteristic of engineers. After that, Doyce is firmly anchored in one's