Peter Hitchens doesn't understand Charles Dickens

as the mail-coachman said to the snowstorm, ven it overtook him

Peter Hitchens is unhappy about the BBC’s new adaptation of Great Expectations because of the use of swear words and the fact that Miss Havisham smokes opium. Such impure adaptations, Hitchens worries, will spread to us having to watch David Copperfield fight zombies or Betsy Trotwood “live off the income of her slave estates.” It might be “modish” to include zombies, but Hitchens knows very well that plenty of people did live off the income of slave estates at one time. Just as he knows that opium use was so widespread in the nineteenth century, Dickens himself took the drug as a painkiller.

The idea Dickens was “far too clever to fall for” such “crudities” as having Miss Havisham smoke opium is distempered puritan nonsense disguised as historicism. In Bleak House one of the characters dies of an opium overdose. In Our Mutual Friend, Veneering speculates on drugs. In Little Dorrit it is left open to interpretation that Arthur Clennam’s family makes their money trading drugs: it seems unlikely that Clennam would be ashamed of selling tea. Following Orwell, we might think Dickens simply wasn’t interested in whatever it was the Clennams did. But Dickens’ son travelled to China and he wrote several journalistic articles about opium, as well as using it himself. Ignorance is a difficult claim to make here.

Imported from the empire, opium was everywhere in nineteenth century London. You could buy it in barber shops. Dickens was one of the people who brought the dangers of opium dens to public attention. If Hitchens thinks the BBC is modish he should read the opening of Edwin Drood, a startling modern description of being drugged. It might be beyond the pale of Great Expectations for Miss Havisham to smoke opium, but it’s hardly anathema to Dickens’ times or his writing. Hitchens’ objections are less based in the history of the 1850s and 1860s, than in the 1950s and 1960s of his own youth. As Sam Weller said, “if I do see your drift, it’s my ‘pinion that you’re a-comin’ it a great deal too strong, as the mail-coachman said to the snowstorm, ven it overtook him.”

The opium overdose in Bleak House.

As for Pumblechook being a masochist, that is an imposition on the text, an affront to it as well, but look at this description from Chapter IV:

Uncle Pumblechook, a large hard-breathing middle-aged slow man, with a mouth like a fish, dull staring eyes, and sandy hair standing upright on his head, so that he looked as if he had just been all but choked, and had that moment come to

I read in John Mullan’s utterly splendid book The Artful Dickens that Dickens inserted the words “all but” in the phrase as if he had been all but choked at the proof stage. This is incredibly unlikely to imply masochism, I agree, but it’s not like the adaptation is getting the idea out of nowhere. Pumblechook is one of many Dickensian characters who seem to be revived from near death—-remember the general in Martin Chuzzlewit who “came up stiff and without a bend in him like a dead Clown”—and whose physical descriptions are given what you might describe as masochistic detail.

Hitchens thinks Dickens “described the English people and their character as nobody else ever has.” But the genius of Dickens’ characters is that they are not real. He took eccentric aspects of the British character and magnified them. Does Hitchens really think women like Miss Havisham—opium or otherwise—realistically describe the English people? If he has met anyone truly like Mrs Gamp or Uriah Heep, or any of the meek and characterless young women who Dickens writes as if they were made of perfumed tissue paper, I’ll eat my hat and swallow the buckle whole. Dickens holds up a carnival mirror to the British character. 

Making Dickens lurid is hardly against the spirit of his work. Once described as writing “in a circle of stage fire”, Dickens was a great melodrama novelist, perfectly happy to exaggerate. All adaptations follow that spirit including David Lean. Hitchens wants to preserve his idea of Dickens. But his version is no more authentic than it is to make Pip swear or turn Mr Pumblechook into a masochist. All adaptations are reductive and based in the morals of their own time. If there’s no room in your view of Dickens for drugs, you aren’t really open to the whole of his genius.  “I want to make your skin crawl,” says the Fat Boy in Pickwick. It seems the BBC has managed that.

As Hitchens says, Dickens’ world is gone. Even after the war, you might have been able to find grandmothers who remembered having Dickens read to them. But that is over now. Hitchens thinks millions still know his characters. I doubt it. Not from reading the books. Ask people to name half a dozen of his characters and they cannot. His characters are no longer on cigarette cards. We don’t know him as a nation the way we once did. Dickens died out long before BBC adaptations came along. 

Adaptations are never satisfactory as accurate renditions of books. Once you take away Dickens’ prose, your fidelity is ragged and limp. We must learn to live with this. It does the great authors of the past no harm. Instead, we must read and write about the originals. I am part of a Dickens Chronological Reading Club, a fine effort organised by an American blogger Rachel M. In the cause of preserving the spirit of Dickens’ work, rather than writing TV criticism Peter Hitchens should join the bloggers.