Dickens, Comedy and "Bisociation"

"The qualities for which every body reads and admires him [Dickens] are his humour and wit"1 wrote one reviewer of Dickens's work at the start of his career, in 1837. After Dickens's death in 1870, John Försters verdict on the writings was simple: "His leading quality was Humour." A century later, Philip Collins compiled an anthology of contemporary reviews of Dickens, The Critical Heritage (1971), and remarked in his Introduction: "from how many discussions of Dickens in the learned journals would one ever guess that (as Dickens himself thought) humour was his leading quality, his highest faculty [. . .]?" (19).

Now, forty years later, and in the wake of several hundred more books and articles on Dickens, are we any nearer to recognizing Försters estimate, and to engaging with it in any serious critical endeavor? To judge by more modern work specifically devoted to Dickens's humor, the answer to the question is no: beyond one or two book-length studies - James Kincaid's Dickens and the Rhetoric of Laughter (1971) being the outstanding one - a chapter or two in a critical monograph - for instance John Carey's excellent essay on "Dickens' Humour" in The Violent Effigy (1973) - and a handful of articles, the Dickens critical industry seems to have shied away from any intensive examination of this aspect of his art. Kincaid and Carey were writing in the 1970s. One of the finest, maybe the best, of those who have assessed and analyzed Dickens's comic powers was G. K. Chesterton, whose Criticisms and Appreciations of the Works of Charles Dickens was published exactly a century ago, in 1911. As we focus on Dickens and the New Millennium, let me take a couple of prominent recent collections of essays that aim to take the measure of Dickens for our age. Palgrav e Advances in Charles Dickens Studies (Palgrave, 2006, c. 270 pages of text), offered in its index just a couple of pages on "satire," four pages under "humor," and five under "comedy." Blackwell s Companion to Charles Dickens (Blackwell, 2008, c. 480 pages of text), had no Index entries for "comedy" and "satire," and just three page- references for "humor." The student-scholar market at which these compilations are aimed has evidently little appetite...