Having finished Bleak House, I am re-reading Edmund Wison's essay on Dickens in The Wound and the Bow. It is called "Dickens: The Two Scrooges." After relating the story of his father's incarceration in Marshalsea Prison and Charles's employment for six months, when he was 12, in a blacking warehouse, Wilson writes at the beginning of the long essay's third section:
For the man of spirit whose childhood has been crushed by the cruelty of organized society, one of two attitudes is natural: that of the criminal or that of the rebel. Charles Dickens, in imagination, was to play the roles of both, and to continue up to his death to put into them all that was most passionate in his feeling.
I know that my eyes have passed over these words before and am surprised now to think they made no impression on me. Wilson seems exactly right but his Dickens, the brooding and subversive survivor of a childhood wound, is not the kindly lover of Christmas many think they know. When Wilson tries to place Dickens in some kind of literary context the author whose name recurs is no Englishman. It's Dostoevski.
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