Early in 2020, as society shut down, I retreated behind closed doors with Charles Dickens, who kept me company and cheered me up throughout the pandemic. Carried along by narratives that Dickens thought of as speedy locomotives and warmed by a combustible imagination that he compared to an industrial forge, I soon felt no need for tame timed circuits of the local park, and I even stopped fretting about the imminent end of the world. But although Dickens saved from me one disease, he infected me with another: escaping Covid-19, I contracted an incurable monomania instead.
Emerging after the last lockdown, I buttonholed any friend who would listen and began to claim that Dickens contained the whole of literature. His novels made everyone else’s seem puny. Larger even than the newly metropolitan London he described, their scale is planetary: looking down from on high in A Tale of Two Cities, he ponders “the feeble shining of this earth of ours” and marvels at the “greatnesses and littlenesses” crammed on to it. Those swarming creatures are not exclusively human. At a country estate in Bleak House, Dickens overhears “motions of fancy” in the barnyard, where stabled horses conspire to corrupt a pony, a dim-witted mastiff dozing in the sun is puzzled by the moving shadows, and a turkey frets about the coming of Christmas. Inanimate objects also qualify as characters, and Sketches by Boz floats a theory about the physiognomy of brass door-knockers, which mould themselves into portraits of the house-owners.
Dickens’s achievements as a novelist were, for me, just the beginning. He was also a poet, whose metaphors make prosaic objects strange: seen by him, umbrellas become bony skeletons or impertinent phallic symbols or tropical foliage or whatever else he pleases. And in addition he was a dramatist, who not only invented characters but brought them to life at his public readings, when he astonished his audiences by transforming himself into sickly little Paul from Dombey and Son or the gin-sodden nurse Mrs Gamp from Martin Chuzzlewit. In a violently self-contradictory double act, he played both the streetwalker Nancy and her brutish pimp Bill Sikes when he acted out the murder scene from Oliver Twist. Shakespeare, Dickens noted, had two simultaneous careers as “author and stage-player”: why shouldn’t he be equally versatile?
Protesting too much, Dickens said that he trailed “a few millions of leagues behind” Shakespeare. The truth is that he was fiercely competitive and regarded Shakespeare as his only rival. He knew the plays inside out and was always casually quoting them, yet what he borrowed he customarily altered or edged into unfamiliar contexts, making the words his own. In need of a name for a new periodical, he remembered Othello telling Desdemona “the story of my life, / From year to year”; he therefore called the magazine All the Year Round and adapted the quotation on the title page to read “The story of our lives, from year to year”. Othello’s digest of military triumphs glorifies only himself, but Dickens rebukes this conceit and transcends Shakespeare as well, opening the phrase out into a democratic statement of his editorial mission. Journalism is a synonym for daily life, and he intended to produce a communal diary.
Jibes from some disrespectful characters in his novels help Dickens to narrow that gap of a few million leagues. David Copperfield’s child-bride Dora, for instance, thinks Shakespeare “a terrible fellow” and grimaces when David reads the plays to her to improve her mind; a hack charged with plagiarism in Nicholas Nickleby points out that Shakespeare also purloined his plots and grudgingly adds “very well he adapted too – considering”. At a time when Shakespeare had been deified – Coleridge likened his “omnipresent creativeness” to the biological bounty of God – such potshots were almost blasphemous, and that, I think, is what Dickens intended.
In Martin Chuzzlewit a viscount who goes to the theatre to ogle the women on stage grumbles that Shakespeare’s heroines have “no legs at all”. Although the fatuous fellow would be better off watching the can-can at the Folies Bergère, his bizarre critique makes sense: Shakespeare’s scripts endow his characters with minds and voices, but otherwise they are bodiless, needing actors to supply them with faces and physiques. Dickens made up for that by anatomising his quirky people from top to toe, making sure that each of them is unrepeatably idiosyncratic. Often they have prosthetic limbs, glass eyes and detachable heads; many of them appear to be fabricated from wood, wax, flannel or rubber, not just flesh and blood. Rather than describing men and women like those who already exist, Dickens manufactured a whole new species, which is why he often alludes to the myth of Prometheus, who roughly sculpted the first human beings from the mud of a river bed and enlivened them with fire stolen from the hearth of Zeus.
Spurring my hobby-horse to a gallop, I took to saying that Dickens was better than Shakespeare – at once more uproariously funny and more violently scary, more freakish and fantastical, an originator who created his own universe and had every right to nickname himself “The Inimitable”. But this went too far, and my most tolerant friends blinked in disbelief or froze in disapproval. Shakespeare, I gathered, is sacrosanct – but why? The reasons for his supremacy have as much to do with national self-esteem as with literary merit. “Triumph, my Britain,” crowed Ben Jonson in a poem that ordered “all scenes of Europe” to bow down before the country in which Shakespeare deigned to be born. Such patriotic puffery still continues: in the Amazon listing for a book about him that Boris Johnson has so far neglected to write, Shakespeare is called “the true British icon”. Is he the last remnant of the country’s vanished sense of global supremacy?
The dying John of Gaunt in Richard II rhapsodises about “this dear, dear land”, which he calls a “precious stone set in a silver sea”. Dickens briefly glances at “the one great garden of the whole cultivated island” during harvest in The Mystery of Edwin Drood, but his map of England is murkier, spotted with towns called Dullborough, Mudfog and Eatanswill. He detested jingoistic hype, and when surveying London in its pall of rheumy fog in Bleak House he demolishes an imperial slogan. “[B]etter for the national glory,” he says, “even that the sun should sometimes set upon the British dominions than that it should ever rise upon so vile a wonder” as the city’s slums. “Dickensian” is a term of censure, still applied to insanitary social conditions or grimly oppressive institutions that he would have denounced. While Shakespeare is enshrined as a hallowed icon, Dickens, like Banksy or the disembodied hand at Belshazzar’s feast, writes blackly prophetic graffiti on the wall.
Shakespeare’s Gaunt goes on to grieve that England, rather than conquering the world, now “makes a shameful conquest of itself”. Dickens derives an anarchic comedy from the same collapse. When David Copperfield gets a job as a parliamentary reporter, he practises shorthand at home, scribbling as his family and friends improvise abusive political debates. Dotty Mr Dick, a deputy for his namesake Dickens, forgets that the rowdy repartee is a game, and feels personally responsible for “the annihilation of the British constitution, and the ruin of the country”. That might have been the covert ambition of Dickens himself. He raged against the chilly complacency of the ruling class, and goaded the elements to join his rhetorical vendetta. In Bleak House, Sir Leicester Dedlock’s seasick qualms while crossing the English Channel rehearse a political uprising: Dickens calls the turbulent waters “the Radical of Nature”, and reports that they provoke a nauseous “revolution” in the old fogey’s aristocratic stomach.
No such authorial commentary can be expected from Shakespeare, who owes his bardic status to the fact that we know so little about his life and nothing at all about his political convictions. Dickens envied this anonymity, adding that he “tremble[d] every day lest something should come out” about Shakespeare. It was a typically waspish comment: he would surely have relished any tittle-tattle that humanised “the sweet swan of Avon”, as Jonson called him. Like Hamlet, Shakespeare is a connoisseur of ambiguities and uncertainties, which makes him see all sides of every question. Before the Brexit referendum, a column in the Times hailed him as a patron of the leave campaign, pointing out that he rallied us to cheer Henry V’s victory over the effete French at Agincourt. Replying in the Guardian, Chris Bryant enrolled Shakespeare as a remainer for the rather feeble reason that his plays are often set abroad. Shakespeare might have dramatised the debate, as he does when Brutus and Antony wrangle in the marketplace in Julius Caesar, but without exercising a casting vote.
Dickens, on the contrary, was always partisan, and in the novels he uses his privileged position as a narrator to address or accuse the nation. When smallpox kills the pathetic street sweeper Jo in Bleak House, he blames the monarchy, the legislature and the church for the boy’s sad end. “Dead, your Majesty,” Dickens announces. “Dead, my lords and gentlemen. Dead, right reverends and wrong reverends of every order.” As he saw it, kings were pampered wastrels squabbling over a crown which he compared to “a stewpan without a handle”; likewise all politicians were gasbags and all clerics sanctimonious hypocrites, while the antiquated rites at St James’s Palace, Westminster and the Inns of Court resembled what he thought of as African mumbo-jumbo. We are a long way from Shakespeare’s “sceptred isle”.
Nadhim Zahawi once baselessly bragged that Shakespeare “in his soul and actions was a natural Tory”, and Dickens’s contempt for the state and its ceremonial masquerades has not deterred Conservatives from trying to co-opt him as another true-blue icon. In 2012 Jeremy Hunt, as culture secretary in David Cameron’s government, marked Dickens’s bicentenary by distributing copies of his novels to the cabinet. Presumably the books went unread, which saved Hunt’s cronies from having to confront acid-etched replicas of themselves. Cameron, who nonchalantly whistled on his way back into Downing Street after resigning, was as slickly aloof as David Copperfield’s false friend Steerforth. George Osborne, Cameron’s chancellor, resembled the parliamentarian Bowley in the Christmas story The Chimes, who replaces our supposed maker with a financial potentate when he refers to “a matter of deep moment between a man and his – and his banker”. Theresa May, then in censorious mode as home secretary, had an emasculating role-model in Miss Murdstone from David Copperfield, a “metallic lady” who keeps her purse “in a very jail of a bag which hung upon her arm by a heavy chain, and shut up like a bite”.
That description reveals how dangerous Dickens is: he could make monsters of the people he described, and he was both elated and alarmed by the sorcery he practised. On one of his night walks through London, he paused outside an asylum in Southwark and reflected on the internees. How different were they from those of us who pass for sane, since in our dreams we all behave like lunatics? Writing about this reverie, he defers to Shakespeare as “the great master who knew everything”, then immediately enunciates something that his rival didn’t know. Macbeth, tormented by insomnia, “called Sleep the death of each day’s life”, which prompts Dickens to ask why he “did not call Dreams the insanity of each day’s sanity”.
The alternative line is a triumph of oneupmanship: Shakespeare’s solemn truism is obliterated by a flash of Freudian insight which at the same time neatly defines the hallucinatory vividness of certain traumatic episodes in Dickens’s own novels – Affery in Little Dorrit watching her husband Flintwinch batter a duplicate of himself with a candle snuffer, or Quilp, the malign dwarf in The Old Curiosity Shop, terrorising his wife like “a dismounted nightmare”. These are waking dreams, unbelievable but terrifyingly real despite their surrealism, creepier than the histrionic antics of Hamlet when he pretends to be deranged or Lear crazily cavorting on the heath.
One Shakespearean motto lodged in Dickens’s mind, almost as an irritant. This was Prospero’s boast in The Tempest about his “so potent art”, by which he means the magic that whips up storms and even resurrects the dead. Dickens was also a magician, who performed conjuring tricks at parties and thought of his poetic metaphors as verbal spells; he frequently quoted Prospero’s phrase, as if quietly asking whose art was the more potent. At the end of the play, Shakespeare’s magus wearily discards his book of charms and resigns himself to impotent mortality: he cannot match the creative energy of Dickens, who said that when writing he often felt that his head was about to explode “like a fired shell”.
Dickens never gave up his ambition to overtake Shakespeare, and in real estate he managed to do so. As a child on rural rambles with his father he admired a house at Gad’s Hill outside Rochester; eventually he bought the property, which is where he died. It appealed because of its Shakespearean associations: Falstaff in Henry IV robs some travellers there, then runs off in a foolish panic when accosted by Prince Hal. In his hall Dickens hung a heraldic scroll which announced that “This house, Gad’s Hill Place, stands on the summit of Shakespeare’s Gadshill, ever memorable for its association in his noble fancy with Sir John Falstaff”. The inscription courteously ennobles Shakespeare, although the episode exposes Falstaff at his most ignoble; a reverential sonnet by Matthew Arnold placed Shakespeare on “the loftiest hill”, but Dickens reminded visitors that this particular summit belonged to him.
Even so, there is no need for a squabble about prior rights to the Kentish Parnassus. Moderating my more fervent claims, I’d suggest a compromise: Shakespeare might perhaps move over a little and allow Dickens to share the throne.
Peter Conrad’s Dickens the Enchanter: Inside the Explosive Imagination of the Great Storyteller is published by Bloomsbury Continuum (£22). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
