Cheadle 2017

Cheadle, Brian. "David Copperfield and Pendennis: Answering Back." Dickens Quarterly 34:1 (March 2017): 14-26. Web.

• • David Copperfield (Dickens, 1850)
  • Pendennis (Thackeray, 1850)

• 15 ...Thackeray, who associated the social conscience novel with sham sentiments, would continue to sneer pointedly, with Dickens the social reformer in mind, at those with a sense of "a Great Social Evil to Discover and Remedy" (The Book of Snobs 12).
• 16: Crucially, Pen's mentor George Warrington voices Thackeray's own edgy sense that writing for money is not really proper for a gentleman, declaring, "I don't want it to be said that George Warrington writes for bread."
• debate about literary pensions (Dickens was involved in various schemes for this, Thackeray would have nothing to do with them) in the interim of Th's illness after the number containing the ch (32) in which he satirizes such funds
  • this started with the Morning Chronicle on 3 Jan 1850 writing against pensions, which was taken up by Forster in the Examiner in the "Encouragement of Lit by the State" (cf. Douglas-Fairhurst 2011)
• 17 The broader context of this whole controversy is that England was by the 1850s and 60s fast moving from being a society based on rank towards a more fluid and volatile society based on class. By midcentury the traditional notion of a gentleman as one who did not have to work because he had an independence, or unearned income, had become untenable.
• 19 [Thackeray in the 12 Jan Morning Chronicle, letter to the ed] "Men of letters had best silently assume that they are as good as any other gentlemen; nor raise piteous controversies."
• Argument at last: "The whole ongoing spat would be relatively inconsequential and of interest only for hte sociology of the literary profession were it not for the impact it had, midstream, on both Pendennis and David Copperfield."
• Change btwn Ch 35 and 36, which starts, "A literary man has often to work for his bread against time" - acknowledging the unsentimental, unsatirical reality of the hack's life
• In essence, Th was quarrelling with himself and reflecting his own vacillations
• 20: He was embarrassed by large ideas such as the dignity of the novel, and the heroism of bourgeois life with which the former notion became so entangled in David Copperfield: his Pen was not a hero but in human meanness a "man and a brother." Thackeray's real forte was for puncturing humbug with an acerbic thrust. Nonetheless, there was a great deal of humbug in his own pompous gentility.
• 21: Robert Douglas-Fairhurst's biography of Dickens's young years has emphasized that it was by no means inevitable that Dickens himself would become a novelist. Dickens comparably left the question of David's career open for a long time.
• Ch. 23 of Copperfield, "I Choose a Profession," was being worked on while Pendennis was suspended
• "Never to put one hand to anything, on which I could throw my whole self; and never to affect depreciation of my work" (ch. 42) - "...[this] makes the realization that it is a reaction to Th's attitudes irresistible."
• Dickens's novel will reveal the shallowness of Thackeray's cynical disenchantment and quietly affirm the seriousness of the literary profession in so doing.
• 22 In an odd way though, Thackeray's thrusts go a long way towards explaining a feature of DC that many find surprising - the skimpiness of its attention to the details of a writer's life.
• 23 the successful rhetorical strategy of claiming his relationship to his readers to be one of personal friendship "masked the realities of the impersonal, economic process of production, payment and reception in the competitive and newly expanded market in which D 'earned his bread'."
• 24 Thackeray for his part had no illusions about economic realites, and he addresses them brazenly in Pendennis.
• If the skeptical Thackeray was very much a product of the Regency, then Dickens was equally a prime example of what Steven Marcus called "the dominant character type" of the Victorian middle-class in whom self-reliance and self-discipline served "the higher purpose of self-improvement," a notion which was at the heart of the bourgeois claim to a "high spirituality." But as Marcus went on to argue, "Self-discipline was regularly put into the service of personal aggrandizement, and the claims to high spirituality were a permutated and incompletely sublimated form of materialism."
  • Look up: Marcus, "Conceptions of the Self in an Age of Progress." Almond et al., eds, Progress and its Discontents. Berkeley: U of CA P, 1982.
• 25 The central fault-line in the Victorian conception of the self which Marcus so clearly defined was something which did not bear pressing; and this was precisely what Th's skepticism about earning one's bread by literary toil threatened to do.