Author: Valerie Purton

Publisher:

Published: 1973

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13:

This thesis is an exploration of Dickens' style in one early and one late novel. I have restricted it because of space to a consideration of Nicholas Nickleby and Our Mutual Friend , with only passing references to other novels, but I hope that, within its limited scope, it may shed some light on Dickens' general development from the early to the late novels. I believe that the oscillations of critical taste, from the vogue for the early novels at the beginning of this century to the vogue for the later ones begun by Edmund Wilson, mislead us about the nature of Dickens' achievement. I -. attempt to refute the statement by A.O.J. Cockshut, in his chapter on Edwin Drood in Dickens and the Twentieth Century : "The distinction I make between the early and the late novels is in no way original; ... In books like Pickwick Papers and Nicholas Nickleby we have a spirited, macabre and humorous development of the tradition of English melodrama. Grotesque fantasy of plot and character .... But in Little Dorrit , Great Expectations and Our Mutual Friend , we have symbolic comment on society ... On the whole there is little mingling of the two methods." Such a polarisa tion of Dickens' achievement leads to the undervaluing of Nicholas Nickleby and to the misinterpretation of Our Mutual Friend . In chapters on character, plot and the influence of melodrama I attempt to show the essential continuity of the two works and, in the final chapter, to explain where I think the real difference lies: in the development of Dickens' language, in the growth from the similes of Nicholas Nickleby to the metaphors of Our Mutual Friend . It is this development which has led to the artificial critical division between the early theatrical Dickens and the latet prose poet-and it is these two characters whom I try to reconcile.