Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles DickensChesterton, G. K. (Gilbert Keith)
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Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens
Chesterton, G. K. (Gilbert Keith)
Dickens, Charles, 1812-1870 -- Criticism and interpretation
Another case might be taken as testing the greater seriousness of this
tale. The passages about Mrs. Jellyby and her philanthropic schemes show
Dickens at his best in his old and more familiar satiric manner. But in
the midst of the Jellyby pandemonium, which is in itself described with
the same _abandon_ and irrelevance as the boarding-house of Mrs. Todgers
or the travelling theatre of Mr. Crummles, the elder Dickens introduced
another piece of pure truth and even tenderness. I mean the account of
Caddy Jellyby. If Carstone is a truly masculine study of how a man goes
wrong, Caddy is a perfectly feminine study of how a girl goes right.
Nowhere else perhaps in fiction, and certainly nowhere else in Dickens,
is the mere female paradox so well epitomised, the unjust use of words
covering so much capacity for a justice of ultimate estimate; the
seeming irresponsibility in language concealing such a fixed and
pitiless sense of responsibility about things; the air of being always
at daggers-drawn with her own kindred, yet the confession of incurable
kinship implied in pride and shame; and, above all, that thirst for
order and beauty as for something physical; that strange female power of
hating ugliness and waste as good men can only hate sin and bad men
virtue. Every touch in her is true, from her first bewildering outbursts
of hating people because she likes them, down to the sudden quietude and
good sense which announces that she has slipped into her natural place
as a woman. Miss Clare is a figure-head, Miss Summerson in some ways a
failure; but Miss Caddy Jellyby is by far the greatest, the most human,
and the most really dignified of all the heroines of Dickens.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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