To announce the publication of the Kindle Edition of Dickens and the Social Order, I’m posting this preview. I hope it will whet your interest.

PREFACE TO THE ELECTRONIC EDITION

Aristotle perhaps didn’t go far enough when he said that tragedy was more philosophic than history, concentrating as it does on what might be rather than merely on what had been. He might have gone on to say that tragedy—or, more broadly, literature—is more philosophic even than philosophy. It is, after all, a form of knowledge that draws on all our ways of knowing, rather than on ratiocination alone. And it is a more intense, as well as a broader, form of knowledge, since, unlike philosophy, it isn’t constantly taking its own pulse, or checking its instruments, anxiously asking itself how it can know this or that. As Dickens would say, it just goes and knows it.
When I began to write Dickens and the Social Order over four decades ago, the belief that literature was a repository of knowledge—and important knowledge—was usual enough for critics to take it for granted. At the very least, everybody understood that literature was a treasure trove of documentary knowledge. We could learn about how others lived—the Greeks, the men of the Middle Ages, our own contemporaries: how they judged one another, what they considered good manners, how they fell in love, what their family life was like, how they structured their society, when they dined, how they grew up and took their place in the world of adults.
But that was only the beginning. Literature also teaches us more about psychology than the psychologists can. The inner life—and its relation to the outer appearance, from which it is often (and proverbially) very different—is literature’s special subject. It is a particularly complex subject, with its interweaving of motives and impulses, as appetites grapple with ideals, as consciousness both registers and distorts external reality, as natural promptings intersect with social ambitions, and the universal in our nature takes on the garb of a particular age.
Here literature’s weakness—that, unlike philosophy, it is unsystematic—becomes its great strength. It draws on all our ways of knowing at once: not just the analysis of the outer world, but introspection and intuition as well. We can understand what is going on in the hearts of others because we know what stirs our own hearts, and what could stir them. When a writer imagines his characters’ inner drama, his description rings true to us because we have felt similar impulses or imagined analogous situations, and, further, can identify sympathetically with something beyond our ken. We grasp intuitively the complex internal mix: the simultaneous interplay of feelings, thoughts, beliefs, and hopes, of conscious and subliminal impulses—as pity combines with social anxiety, say, or eros or vanity or sudden insight to impel a character to behave as he behaves. Literature is the great school of motivation: it teaches us how, out of the complex welter of impulses churning within us, we make the choices that define us and forge our fate.
And it dramatizes for us the consequences of those choices. Do they lead to happiness or misery, decency or not—and for whom? What does the high-handedness of Agamemnon and the anger of Achilles produce? What dire offense from am’rous causes springs? What results from the choices of Emma Bovary and Anna Karenina? What happens to the soul of a man who kills a “useless” old pawnbroker—or, at the urging of his wife, the king of Scotland? Continue reading →