fiction. In The Real Life of Mary Ann Evans: George Eliot, Her Letters and Fiction (1994) and Knowing Dickens (2007), she fashioned a form of biographical criticism that juxtaposes a writer's letters with published works, as mutually illuminating forms of writing. After retirement, she published in various areas, most recently Samuel Beckett in the OUP series My Reading (2022).
Philip Davis was, until his retirement, Director of the Centre for Research into Reading, Literature and Society (CRILS) at the University of Liverpool, with strong interests in reading and inner being, with particular relation to emotion, memory, auto/biography, and fictional realism. His work on Victorian writing includes Memory and Writing, The Victorians volume in the Oxford English Literary History series, Why Victorian Literature Still Matters, and The Transferred Life of George Eliot. He is an editor of two OUP series: The Literary Agenda and My Reading.
They applied the "Page 99 Test" to their new book, In Dialogue with Dickens: The Mind of the Heart, and reported the following:
Page 99 occurs in our chapter about Dickens’s novel Little Dorrit. Devoted to her father, Amy Dorrit has to resist Mr. Dorrit's attempt to manipulate her into marrying the jailor’s son, to ease his own plight in the debtor’s prison.Learn more about In Dialogue with Dickens at the Oxford University Press website.
RB (Rosemarie Bodenheimer) writes:This most excruciating scene between Dorrit father and daughter happens with no witness but the reader. The father can read his daughter’s silent refusal perfectly well, and his half-acknowledged shame takes shape in a performance of abject self-pity that’s even more emotionally manipulative than his pressure to accept John Chivery. Amy has no choice but to soothe him down at just the moment when he has most violated her heart. The terrible intimacy of that scene has no predecessor in Dombey and Son or, so far as I recall, anywhere else in Dickens.To this PD (Philip Davis) replies:And it comes after she has said, at last: ‘O, father, how can you! O dear, dear father, how can you, can you, do it!’ But she said it to herself, not to his dear, dear face. It is with that father-like something that Dickens could have seen more brazenly in All’s Well That Ends Well: ‘Is it possible he should know what he is, and be that he is?’ (4.1.45).RB then goes on to speak of a different but related scene, when Little Dorrit visits Arthur Clennam, her would-be protector, in his lodgings. Suddenly, as he quietly and considerately looks at her, she has a strange thought:‘She thought what a good father he would be. How, with some such look, he would counsel and cherish his daughter’ (Book 1, Chapter 14).Page 99 begins mid-sentence with the word ‘silent’ and ends mid-sentence with ‘overwhelmingly’ (we’ve cheated just a little by adding the follow-on words). That’s a fair measure of the Dickens effect we discuss in this book when, through Dickens, the reader infers what is not actually said: then the internal emotional effect bursts out overwhelmingly. So page 99 very well indicates what we call the Dickens ‘wince’ – of sensitive, hidden pain often brought about by love itself.
It’s another extraordinary moment of truth-telling that reveals her real understanding of Mr Dorrit’s failure. Arthur would counsel not with words, but with a look, she imagines: just the opposite of her situation at home, where, she perfectly well knows, she’s talked at but unseen.
Then, telling Arthur that she has lied to her family about going to a party that night:She feared that he was blaming her in his mind, for so devising to contrive for them, think for them, and watch over them, without their knowledge or gratitude; perhaps even with their reproaches for supposed neglect. But what was really in his mind was the weak figure with its strong purpose, the thin worn shoes, the insufficient dress, and the pretence of recreation and enjoyment.At this point it’s no longer quite clear whose mind we’re in. Amy’s exaggerated guilt at lying to her family takes form as imagined criticism from Arthur, as if he were her projected conscience. Though the point of view shifts mid-paragraph, Arthur too could be charged with devising to contrive for her, think for her, and watch over her. All of this sensitively intertwined consciousness makes it overwhelmingly important to Amy that Arthur not put her mind in turmoil by thinking badly of her father. If he were to do that, she would have to cut off her connection with him.
Further, this page does what we often do: move quickly like Dickens himself from one scene to another, one point of view to a contrasting other one. We get more of what Little Dorrit does not want to think about her father when she projects upon Arthur Clennam the idea of the ideal father her own parent so badly fails to be.
Thirdly, the psychological structure becomes very complicated in this triangulated emotional relationship: Little Dorrit—Arthur Clennam—Father Dorrit. We love Dickens’s psychological sensitivity and subtlety of form – a sense of relationships so different from the stereotype-idea of Dickens as a popular serial writer of often crude and simple sentimentality.
On the other hand:
We quote plentifully because we want our reader to read Dickens with us, as part of the dialogue; but often we also show how intricately Dickens works by showing the quick changes he made in the manuscript. Page 99 doesn’t reveal that. In fact the manuscript shows Dickens made ‘She feared he was blaming her in his mind’ into a terrible new paragraph only in after-thought, and that ‘feared’ was the stark word he came to only after some heavily erased earlier formulations.
So, marks: 3 out of 4, 75%
Our book — subtitled ‘The Mind of the Heart’ — is concerned throughout with emotion and the thinking that goes on within it, often vulnerable and painful. It registers Dickens’s mobility in the complex to-and-fro between his human beings. And we try to capture some of that to-and-fro in our own dialogue, standing in place of traditional single-author monographs.
--Marshal Zeringue
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