Free Charles Dickens by Jane Smiley

way. This mimics the European adventure of discovering and colonizing the New World. The adventure winds up bitterly, in the hands of Voltaire, when Candide returns, resolved henceforth to cultivate his own garden. The assumption of adventure literature is that domestic life is by nature already known, worth hardly a backward glance. In addition, the domesticated Cunegonde, originally Candide’s romantic inspiration, ends up as a drudge and a disappointment, hardly worth depicting.
    By Dickens’s time, in many ways as a result of Sir Walter Scott’s interest not only in the hero and his adventure, but also in the social and domestic circumstances of the hero’s world, domestic life becomes as interesting as the adventure; in Dickens’s work, domestic life becomes the goal of the journey, the prospective haven from the alienation and cruelty of homelessness. Dickens’s heroes and heroines take many journeys, but only the travels of the Pickwick Club are embarked upon willingly. Most often, the protagonist is ejected from his original home and forced out upon a quest to make another. Dickens’s social vision is formed by the recognition that in the world around him there are few bonds of social responsibility or generous humanity linking class to class or individual to individual, and that the government speaks and acts only for a small portion of the citizens, whereas the majority have no voice, no power, and no privileges. By contrast, small social groups, such as families, groups of friends, theater companies, and gangs of thieves, can mediate between the isolatedindividual and the vast social machine. But their mediation and companionableness can go either way, morally and spiritually, depending upon whether the members are motivated by love and kindness or by greed and selfishness. In all of Dickens’s early novels, at least one group represented the possibility of sociable safety and contentment—the Pickwickians, Mr. Brownlow’s household, Nicholas’s family and friends. In Martin Chuzzlewit, the selfish, greedy groups are dominant; Martin must find his way against a strong tide.
    Much of what Dickens was trying to get at in Martin Chuzzlewit was distilled in nearly perfect, supremely popular, and highly theatrical fashion in A Christmas Carol, which Dickens conceived of suddenly a few weeks after visiting the Field Lane School for Miss Coutts. He worked on it during October and November 1843, while the tenth and eleventh numbers of the longer novel were appearing; and in spite of his vow of the summer, A Christmas Carol was published by Chapman and Hall. He delivered the manuscript in early December, to be published for the Christmas trade. In an effort to avoid the sorts of contractual problems he had encountered with the low sales of his longer novel, he agreed with the publishers to publish on a commission basis—that is, he would design, edit, and produce the book (rather like book packaging today). Unfortunately, his desire to produce a beautiful artifact as well as a popular story meant that production costs were very high, and he realized, once again, only a small profit on what turned out to be a very large sale.
    A Christmas Carol, like Martin Chuzzlewit, concerns itself with the social ramifications of selfishness, but the charactersof young Martin and old Martin are combined in that of Ebenezer Scrooge, and his moral journey, which takes place in three acts in one night, has the force of revelation rather than the tedium of a lengthy trek by ox-drawn wagon. Some of the narrative had its origins in one of Dickens’s own vivid dreams, and surely the idea of using dreams as a structural device had its origins there as well. The thirty-one-year-old Dickens was evidently in a state of considerable psychological turmoil. He was beset by money worries and family obligations at the same time that Catherine was pregnant with a fifth child. He had found his experience