Professor Borges - A Course on English Literature

however, that the Bible contains great visions of the present.) The Victorian era was characterized by a great reserve regarding anything related to the sensual or the sexual. And yet Sir Richard Burton translated the Arabic book
The Perfumed Garden
, and he put his whole soul into that work. 1 (It is also around this time, in 1855, that Walt Whitman writes his
Leaves of Grass
.) It is the height of the British Empire. Yet, in spite of all this, several writers wrote and acted without any partisanship:Chesterton, Stevenson, etcetera. The Victorian era was a time of debates and discussion. It did not have a markedly Protestant tendency; there is, for example, a strong movement, born in Oxford, that leans toward Catholicism. So the meeting of all these contrasting elements makes it difficult to define; but still it exists. All these elements are united by a common but changing atmosphere lasting seventy-odd years.
    It is within this framework that we find CharlesDickens. He is born in 1812 and dies in 1870. He is a man who comes from the lower middle classes. His father was a clerk and was in debtors’ prison many times. Dickens was an engaged writer who devoted a large part of his life’s work to fighting for reform, yet we cannot say that Dickens achieved his goal. And this perhaps explains why the reformer aspect of Dickens has been so lost to us. He also lived with the fear that a creditor would send him to debtors’ prison, and he advocated for the reform of schools, prisons, labor systems. But if a reform fails, the reformer’s work seems to have less value. If it is successful, it no longer seems relevant. For example, the idea that an individual must live his own life, which now seems like a cliché, was at one time a revolutionary idea. This can be seen in Ibsen’s
A Doll’s House
.
    Now, the problem with socially engaged literature is that it is never completely accepted. In the case of Dickens, the social part of his work is obvious. He was a revolutionary. He had a very difficult childhood, and to find out about it, we must read
DavidCopperfield
, where he also portrays his own father. Dickens [Senior] is a man who lives on the verge of ruin, a lifelong debtor with extravagant optimism about the future. Dickens’s mother was a good woman, but her behavior was rather confused and excessive. Dickens had to work in a factory when he was a child. Then he was a journalist and a stenographer. He recorded the debates of the House of Commons, but much more realistically than Johnson—we’ve already seen how
he
did it.
    Dickens lived in London. In his book
A Tale of Two Cities
, based on the French Revolution, we see that he really could not write a tale of two cities. He was a resident of just one city: London.
    He began in journalism and came to the novel from there. And he remained faithful to the style he developed, throughout his life. His novels were published in installments, in serial form, and his work resonated so much that his readers followed the destinies of his characters as if they were real. For example, one time he received hundreds of letters asking him not to let the protagonist of a novel die.
    Now, Dickens was not very interested in plot but rather in character, in his characters’ personalities. The plot is almost a mere mechanical means through which the action advances. There is no real development in his characters. It is the environment, the events, that change them, as is the case in reality. 2 The characters Dickens creates live in the perpetual rapture of being themselves. He often distinguishes them through dialects; for some he employs a special dialect. This can be seen in the original English.
    But Dickens suffers from an excess of sentimentalism. He does not remain outside his work when he writes. He identifies with each and every character. His first book that achieved a large readership was
The Posthumous Papers of thePickwick Club
, published in installments. 3 At first they suggested he use certain illustrations, and Dickens adjusted the text to fit them. And as he kept writing the book, he kept imagining new characters, becoming intimate with them. His characters soon began taking on a life of their own. This is what happens with Mr. Pickwick, who takes on a singular relevance and is a gentleman with a solid character, and the same thing happens with the other characters. The servant sees certain ridiculous things about his master, but he is very fond of him.
    Dickens