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?

These choices have ramifications not just for individuals but, often, for the whole social order. On many levels, therefore, literature is asking: How should we live? What is the right life for man? And to ask such questions it must ask the further question: What is human nature, and what guideposts and constraints does it set for the kind of life we can choose? How do we realize to the fullest the potentialities for excellence and happiness with which nature endows us? Therefore (to make matters more richly complex), even while literature is mobilizing all our ways of knowing at once, it often is also taking two simultaneous perspectives, the personal and the social—and examining (at least implicitly) the ways in which the two realms intersect with and affect each other. Like a polyphonic musical work, many different voices interweave to create one larger harmony, transcending the sum of its parts.
Literature is a conversation across the ages about our experience and our nature, a conversation in which, while there isn’t unanimity, there is a surprising breadth of agreement. Literature amounts, in these matters, to the accumulated wisdom of the race, the sum of our reflections on our own existence. It begins (especially in novels like those I discuss here) with observation, with reporting, rendering the facts of our inner and outer reality with acuity sharpened by imagination. At its greatest, it goes on to show how these facts have coherence and, finally, meaning. As it dramatizes what actually happens to concrete individuals trying to shape their lives at the confluence of such a multiplicity of imperatives, it presents us with concrete and particular manifestations of universal truths. For as the greatest authors know, the universal has to be embodied in the particular—where, as it is enmeshed in the complexity and contradictoriness of real experience, it loses the clarity and lucidity that only abstractions can possess.
Well, you may object, if this is what literature’s insights amount to, then it is a realm of opinion, not knowledge. And in fact just such doubts were eating away at the confidence of literary critics, with growing force, over the years that I wrote Dickens and the Social Order. In the face of science, with its spectacular practical achievements and its unequivocal experimental truths, what claim had literature to a kind of truth? In what way could literature constitute knowledge? Wasn’t it just fantasy—interesting perhaps, but ultimately ephemeral and useless? And if anyone wanted to know about the world that literature supposedly elucidated, did we not have the “human sciences”—studies like sociology and psychology and anthropology, which brought the rigor and authority of science (or so their practitioners claimed, at least) to what literature handled in so amateur a fashion?
In the decades I happily spent in journalism after writing this book, I couldn’t help but develop an almost automatic skepticism about the claims of the human sciences, even sometimes about the claims of the harder sciences. How many “studies” and “reports,” with tables of data in small print appended, purported to reveal truths about welfare or policing or sex education but in fact revealed nothing but the initial prejudices of the “investigators”? My epiphany came when I interviewed the nation’s leading climatologists for a magazine article on acid rain and discovered mostly ideology, not knowledge. When I also learned years ago that academic paleontologists at that time couldn’t hope to get tenure if they questioned the theory that a giant meteor explosion had caused the extinction of the dinosaurs—thus providing a model of what a so-called “nuclear winter” would produce—my skepticism took on a certain wryness. And then came the “science” of global warming.
The social scientists have a mantra: “The plural of anecdote is not data.” I beg to differ. An accumulation of accurate stories about how the human world works, stories that provide an account wrapped in an interpretation, add up to knowledge, better knowledge than we can get elsewhere. Data are meaningless until we can articulate a story that makes sense out of them, after all, and literature makes sense out of the data of human experience.
Can anyone think that there is more understanding to be gained about the human heart from Freud than from Shakespeare—that the studies of Dora or the Wolf Man approach anywhere near to the profundity of understanding embodied in Macbeth or Lear, with their unflinching elucidation of man’s (and woman’s) capacity for evil? Can anyone think that the studies of Margaret Mead or Alfred Kinsey tell us anything nearly as true as Virgil or Ovid? Does the sociobiology of E. O. Wilson or Richard Dawkins tell us any more than we learn from Homer or Yeats?
What’s wanted is wisdom: the ability to see into the heart of things. Such knowledge has its practical use, no less than scientific knowledge, for if it doesn’t build computers or space shuttles, it builds civilizations. It defines what it means to be human, dramatizing the values and ideals, the web of culture, that differentiate us from the beasts.
Consider briefly four familiar examples. Start with Sophocles, since Oedipus Rex really does stand at the beginning of our tradition. Here is a work in which the author stacks the deck just as much as you can possibly stack it. A man commits two terrible crimes—universally terrible, not just bad by the standards of this or that society. But he didn’t know that he was committing them; he didn’t know that the man he killed was his father or the queen he married was his mother. Not knowing what he was doing, he certainly didn’t intend to commit these crimes. Furthermore, he was fated to do these terrible things, as oracles plainly stated at his birth. So with every kind of extenuating circumstance surrounding his actions, was he responsible?
Sophocles answers with a resounding Yes. What it means to be human, he shows us, is to take responsibility for one’s actions. In a world of uncertainty and chance, where so much is out of our control, this is the only way we can assert that we are moral creatures with free will, whose doings have meaning, rather than beings who are simply part of the mere flux and confusion of brute creation. This is a hard doctrine, but one that has undiminished resonance in an era when our search for extenuation and victimization diminishes rather than ennobles all it touches. And it is this acceptance of responsibility that makes Oedipus truly a tragic hero, with equal emphasis on both those words.
Sophocles dramatizes the most extreme possible consequences of acting without knowing, as all of us must do at least sometimes. But in Hamlet, Shakespeare complicates the issue further, showing that acting with knowledge can be no less problematic. After all, how do we know what we know? Is it knowledge? Our heads are filled with myths, old wives’ tales, beliefs, traditions, but are they really true? Is it true, for instance, that on Christmas Eve no “witch hath power to charm, / So hallow’d and so gracious is the time”? So they say; and even Horatio, who doesn’t like to believe anything “Without the sensible and true avouch / Of mine own eyes,” nevertheless concedes that “So have I heard and do in part believe it.” But which part? That there are witches, or that they operate under this restriction, or that the night is holy? And even if you go by the evidence of your own two eyes, well, he has just seen a ghost and comes away believing not only in ghosts but in the folk wisdom that ghosts have to vanish at dawn.
Still, we in the audience also have seen the ghost, and we know it’s only a play. But how much of what we see with our own eyes outside the theater is also fiction? As Hamlet shows us, people are playacting all the time—Polonius even counsels his son to make an art of it—so in our own lives the evidence of our senses isn’t infallible. Hamlet himself assumes a role, pretending to be mad, though at moments he isn’t sure if it’s an act or a reality, and he paradoxically adopts this falsehood in order to find out the truth. But Ophelia really does go mad, emphasizing the disquieting fact that the faculty of reason that we use to apprehend reality and make sense of it is also dangerously fallible. Not only that. As Hamlet famously warns, “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, / Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” Reason at its most perfect only comprehends a sliver of the stupendous reality that dwarfs us, though, as the prince later notes, we also have “prophetic souls” that intuit truths—if they are truths—by means reason can’t understand. But intuition is a feeling as much as a thought, and feelings have their own layers of complexity and untrustworthiness along with their power.
Yet in all this welter of uncertainty, we are required to act, if there is to be justice and order in our lives and in our world. No philosopher’s epistemology could have summed up the predicament as exquisitely as this.
Now flash forward to a dramatic world that seems like it belongs on another planet, the world of Mozart’s magical comic opera Cosi Fan Tutte—“They All Do It.” Its libretto, written by Lorenzo da Ponte, who also wrote the libretti to Don Giovanni and The Marriage of Figaro before ending up in New York as Columbia’s first professor of Italian, tells the wonderfully silly story of a bet two handsome young men make with their cynical older friend. Your two girlfriends, the older man says, whom you claim to be paragons of faithfulness, will not stay true to you if put to the test. Pretend to be called off to war, then come back disguised as noble Albanians, woo each other’s girls, and you’ll see.
Well, you know the result. But when the boys pretend to go off to war, the girls sing such a piercingly sweet lament of loss and farewell (for we are in a realm of literature plus) that you know their love is real, even though they later fall for the supposed Albanians and so prove—temporarily—unfaithful. And the opera’s point is that, yes, from the purely biological point of view, one good-looking boy is much like another. But from another point of view—the human perspective—the person we choose is unique and special and the only one for us. We are creatures of animal instinct; but as we marshal that indiscriminate instinct into an act of discriminating and binding choice, we transform the natural into the human and create a new realm of feeling and meaning in the process.
Così gets performed somewhere every year, and Jane Austen’s Emma, published a quarter century later, is just as perennial: Gwyneth Paltrow stars in a recent movie version, and Alicia Silverstone played the same character in a modern adaptation, Clueless. No wonder this story has lasted: its title character is adorable—irresistible despite her invincible self-satisfaction and self-delusion, perhaps excusable in one so very young and pretty and, as it happens, upscale. The story’s key event is an act of bad manners: Emma insults a family friend, Miss Bates, and wounds her feelings. True, Miss Bates is the kind of boring old maid whose endless chatter about trivialities makes you cringe when you see her coming, but she is a harmless and kindly person. True, too, Emma’s rudeness doesn’t approach what you can now hear on TV or social media every hour of the day; it is only a sarcastic crack about Miss Bates’s talkiness. But the man Emma loves calls her on the carpet for her behavior: she’s at the top of the social heap in her little town, he says, and if she treats Miss Bates with contempt, others will follow suit, causing injury to a poor and dependent but good-hearted person. Manners are not trivial, a matter of which fork to use; they are a department of morals, part of the code—that web of culture, again—by which we succeed in living in harmony with each other. Manners are another key part of the humanizing project, through which we convert eating into dining, sex into romance and courtship, and our everyday interactions into occasions for cooperation rather than conflict.
The four great but relatively neglected works I discuss in Dickens and the Social Order are very much part of this project. They add up to what for another writer would constitute a magnificent life’s work in itself, a tour de force that is like a university education in psychology, political theory, comparative political science, cultural anthropology, sociology, history, philosophy, and more—all transfigured and illuminated by the genius of the writer rightly said to be Inimitable, so that the reader can hardly believe that anything so full of pleasure can also be so full of wisdom. But reading these works, and thinking about them, will enlarge and deepen your understanding of our nature and what it is that makes us human.

One final point. By the time Dickens and the Social Order appeared in print, the era that confidently viewed literature in the way I have described was over; and the book, however kind the reviews that greeted it, seemed to belong to a past not only obsolete but malign. A newly emergent critical orthodoxy was taking a wrecking bar to literature. Critics no longer saw the literary enterprise as reliably trying to show us the truth of our condition and the possibilities it offers but instead as trying to hoodwink us into tolerating political and social oppression that we would instantly reject, could we but free our minds from the myths and mystifications with which authors, mere apologists of the established and the powerful, had beguiled us. The critic’s job now was not to dive down to the heart of the truth the author had grasped and explain to a new generation of readers how it applied to lived experience. He was to unmask the author’s imposture, to reveal how the author, unconscious himself of his actual motives and blind to the reality he purported to illuminate, really was a kind of lackey, devoid of the critic’s keen ability to see that the social relations, conventions, and beliefs that the author celebrates as humanizing and civilizing man in reality do exactly the opposite, constraining and diminishing him. To these critics, the truth of literature became its falsehood; the author, however great, became the gullible propagandist of one or another tyranny.

For all that, the literate public kept on reading literature, whose great works will still be there to instruct and inspire mankind long after the works of that angry, arrogant, and obtuse generation of critics have turned to dust.