Charles in Charge
查爾斯.狄更斯：贏得生前身后名

By Radhika Jones 譯/ 辛獻云

In 1812, the year Charles Dickens was born, there were 66 novels published in Britain. People had been writing novels for a century, but nobody aspired to do it professionally. Many works of fiction appeared anonymously, with attributions like "By a Lady." The steam-powered printing press was still in its infancy; the literacy rate in England was under 50%. And novels, for the most part, were looked upon as silly, immoral, toxic or just plain bad.

In 1870, when Dickens died, the world mourned him as its first literary celebrity: a career writer and publisher, famous and beloved, who had led an explosion in both the publication of novels and their readership and whose characters were held up as moral touchstones. Today Dickens’ greatness is unchallenged. Evicting him from the pantheon of English literature would make about as much sense as the Louvre selling off the Mona Lisa.

How did Dickens get to the top? For all the sentiment readers attach to stories, literature is a numbers game, and the test of time is exceedingly difficult to pass. Some 60,000 novels were published in the Victorian era, from 1837 to 1901; today a casual reader might be able to name a half-dozen of them. It's partly that Dickens was a stylistic genius, whose writing attracted audiences highbrow and low. It's partly that his career rode a wave of social, political and scientific progress. But it's also that he rewrote the culture of literature and put himself at the center. No one will ever know what mix of talent, ambition, energy and luck made Dickens such a singular writer. But as his bicentenary arrives, it is possible to understand how he made himself a lasting one.

Posthumous Papers

Dickens got into novel writing by accident. As a young man, he longed to be an actor and trained to be a reporter. He dashed off fictional stories from time to time. In 1836 he accepted a magazine commission to write a series of comic sketches, at 14 a month, to accompany a set of illustrations of sporting life. The result, The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club, was a sensation. It established Dickens as a peerless ventriloquist, able to channel the voices of both swells and servants, and as a gifted writer of serials, which became the standard method of publication in an era when books were expensive but cheap periodicals thrived. Most important in terms of his legacy, The Pickwick Papers established him as a financially viable artist, bestriding the gap between creativity and commerce. From Pickwick to his deathbed, he wrote for an audience, and he wrote for money—two forces that before his time had had little to do with art.

《匹克威克外傳》英文版封面

《匹克威克外傳》英文版中的插圖

Dickens’ commitment to his audience also struck a contradictory balance: he cultivated a mass readership by creating a sense of personal intimacy. Readers felt he was speaking directly to them, and often he did. He channeled his thespian ambitions into live dramatic readings; his bloodcurdling performance of the brutal killing of Nancy in Oliver Twist caused fainting spells among audience members. "He invented that form of publicity," says Nicholas Dames, a Victorian scholar and chair of the English department at Columbia University. "He invented merchandising. All those things that we associate with publishing culture—he was essentially the first." And Dickens knew it. He called himself the Inimitable, a nickname that stuck.

As his audience grew, Dickens took great care to keep his populist touch. Midway through the writing and publication of David Copperfeld, he received a letter from an acquaintance objecting to a minor character, Miss Mowcher, who is implicated in a scheme involving the seduction of David's childhood friend Little Em’ly. Like the letter writer, Miss Mowcher happened to be a dwarf. Dickens responded that all his characters were composites and he hadn't meant to suggest that deformity of size might signify deformity of soul. But when Miss Mowcher reappears in the novel, he backpedals and clears her of any wrongdoing. It's an awkward, implausible scene, but Dickens cared more about appeasing his wounded reader. He felt responsible to her, and to all his readers, and they adored him in return.

As immediate as the response was to his work, Dickens knew that his writing was only as powerful as his ability to control it. Authors possessed limited copyright protection in England at the time his career began and virtually none abroad. American magazines pirated his work outright. Dickens fought successfully for stronger terms of copyright in England and for international agreements to prevent unauthorized translations and theft. He even advocated for an authors’ union. As the editor of two weeklies, he was cultivating new talent and he wanted writers to profit from their work, during and after their lifetime.

He also began to think posthumously in his fiction. His early novels were rooted in problems specific to his time: the Poor Law of 1834 (Oliver Twist), the abusive schools in Yorkshire (Nicholas Nickleby). As he matured, his criticism became more oblique. He invented grand, allegorical evils: the Circumlocution Office in Little Dorrit, the parasitic court case of Jarndyce & Jarndyce in Bleak House—giant grinders of corruption and inefficiency that mangled all who entered them. When people read Oliver Twist, they knew whom to blame and what to fix. With Dickens’ later novels, says Dames, "You can't identify who the bad guy is anymore. Everything seems so systemic."

狄更斯在寫作

Critics found these novels dreary and diffuse. Henry James, reviewing Our Mutual Friend for the Nation in 1865, wrote, "For the last 10 years it has seemed to us that Mr. Dickens has been unmistakably forcing himself. Bleak House was forced; Little Dorrit was labored; the present work is dug out as with a spade and pickaxe." But Dickens wasn't writing for the critics. His deft touch with comedy and pathos kept his loyal readers happy, and he had a new readership in mind: posterity.

His final bit of legacy building involved the appointment of his close friend John Forster as his biographer. When Forster's Life of Charles Dickens appeared, two years after the great writer's death, it included a tale that Dickens had been too ashamed to tell all but a handful of people: that as a child he had been sent for a time to work in a blacking factory while his father was in debtor's prison. Readers were stunned. They already knew the details but from the young David Copperfeld, who speaks of being "thrown away" at age 10 by his cruel stepfather to labor in a warehouse. They knew that Amy Dorrit was born in the debtor's prison to which her father was consigned. They knew that Pip, the hero of Great Expectations, carries a lifelong burden of shame about his low origins. Until Forster's biography, they didn't know where all this shame came from. It was Dickens’ last plot twist—the revelation that at his characters’ most vulnerable moments, their creator was speaking from experience. It surprised his readers and kept him alive in their minds.

狄更斯在朗誦自己的作品

Immortal and Inimitable

The Dickens bicentenary coincides with another leap in literary culture: the rise of electronic text. The debate about e-books still focuses on the merits of page vs. screen. But the far more profound effect will be in disrupting the numbers game of literature—the game that began with the Victorian fiction boom, which began with Dickens.

E-books are changing the idea of being in print. Publishing was designed as a Darwinian process in which authors compete to be printed and then thousands of books go the way of the passenger pigeon. Digital flies, self-publishing and print-on-demand technologies raise the possibility that this natural selection will be warped. The traditional definition of going out of print means that the content is no longer accessible. The digital version lives in perpetuity. In some ways, that's a good thing but it exacerbates the problem of quantity.

The flood of books in the 19th century elicited two powerful institutional responses: the rise of prize culture and the rise of literature as a field of study. The message was that the masses needed help figuring out what to read, and the cultural elite was going to provide it. The Nobel Prize was first awarded in 1901, the Pulitzer in 1917. About the same time, the study of English literature became a mainstream field, and a canon of approved literary texts began to take shape.

A century later, the curatorial influence of these institutions has been eroded by the same food that brought them into existence. The English canon, which came under pressure for being largely populated by dead white males, has been expanded and modernized. Prizes have metastasized. As James English writes, the ratio of awards to new titles of fiction, poetry and drama has risen tenfold since the 1920s. At the same time, the culture of reviews and criticism has fragmented. Anyone with a smart phone can review a new novel, or an old one.

If Dickens had been around for the first Nobel, he wouldn't have won it. His style drew scorn from critics for much of the early 20th century, when complicated, even inhospitable writing came into fashion. (One of the tenets of modernism was that if it wasn't difficult, it wasn't art.) But regular people kept reading him. And around midcentury he was rescued by, among others, George Orwell, who latched onto him as a social critic. It was his dark, dreary novels that did the trick. They were presciently modern, it turned out. Dickens, so quintessentially of his time, was also ahead of it.

Once, an educated person could read pretty much everything important, because there weren't as many books and an educated person by definition possessed the money to buy books and the leisure to read them. The same publishing machine that helped spread literacy in the 19th century made it impossible for all the readers to read anywhere near all the books. Now the idea is laughable.

So the Dickens bicentenary is a celebration of his immortality, but it's also a celebration of consensus, a sigh of relief. The verdict on Dickens is sound. He's been questioned and cross-examined and voted in. The exponential accumulation of fiction combined with the widening of its circle of stewards—prize givers and professors, yes, but also recommendation engines and top 10 lists—may make that kind of consensus difficult for future readers. They'11 have more writers to choose from, more tastemakers to choose them and infinite piles of books in the cloud. The advantage will go to those novelists who don't just reflect the culture but also transform it. Will the readers of the future find their 21st century Dickens on the Pulitzer roster or the best-seller list or FanFiction.net? This much is clear: on Feb. 7, 2112, they'11 be wishing the original Inimitable a very happy 300th birthday.

1812年，查爾斯·狄更斯誕生，那一年，英國有66部小說出版。其時人們寫小說已有一百年的歷史，但從沒有人想到過把它當做一個職業。許多小說作品都沒有署名，只是標明“一位女士著”等等。當時，以蒸汽為動力的印刷業尚處于“嬰兒期”，而英國能讀書、會寫字的人還不到50%。大部分小說都被認為是愚蠢、傷風敗俗、毒害民眾或者干脆就是差勁的。

1870年，狄更斯去世，世人把他當做第一位文學名人來哀悼：一位職業作家和出版商，聲名遠播，受人愛戴。他使小說的出版數量和讀者人數都有了爆炸式增長，他所創造的人物也被當做是道德的試金石。即使在今天，狄更斯的偉大地位依然無人能夠挑戰。如果英國文學的神圣殿堂里少了他，那就好比是盧浮宮賣掉了蒙娜·麗莎的畫像一樣。

狄更斯是如何達到如此登峰造極的地位的呢？不管讀者對小說寄予多少情感，文學說到底就像數字游戲，又極難通過時間的考驗。在維多利亞時代，從1837到1901年，大約有六萬部小說得以出版；今天，一個普通讀者大概只能說出其中的五六部。而狄更斯之所以能夠經久不衰，部分原因在于他是位風格大師，其作品既有陽春白雪，也有下里巴人，能吸引各種品味的讀者。還有一部分原因是他的職業生涯正趕上社會、政治和科學進步的浪潮。但除此以外，還有一個原因，那就是他改寫了文學文化，并將自己置于文學文化的中心。誰都無法說清是什么樣的才華、抱負、能量和運氣使得狄更斯成為如此獨樹一幟的作家。但值其兩百周年誕辰之際（編注：英文原文刊發于2012年1月），也許我們能弄清楚一件事：狄更斯本人是如何做到讓自己經久不衰的。

《匹克威克外傳》及其他創作

狄更斯從事小說創作純屬偶然。年輕的時候，他渴望成為一位演員，而他所受的教育則要他成為一名記者。他時常也會隨意寫上幾篇短篇小說。1836年，他接受一家雜志的委托，寫一個喜劇短篇系列，每月14篇，與一套體育生活插圖配套刊登。《匹克威克外傳》就這樣誕生了，引起了巨大的轟動。它確立了狄更斯舉世無雙的模仿大師的地位，不管是上流社會的頭面人物，還是地位卑下的傭人，他都能惟妙惟肖地模仿其說話的語氣。它同時也確立了狄更斯在系列作品方面天才作家的地位：那時書籍的價格昂貴，但價格低廉的期刊卻很受歡迎，于是期刊連載便成了出版作品的標準做法。更為重要的是，《匹克威克外傳》確立了他在經濟上能夠獨立的藝術家地位，同時這部作品也在文學創作和商業盈利之間架起了一座橋梁。從創作《匹克威克外傳》開始到離世之日，狄更斯一直都在為讀者創作，同時也在為金錢創作——在他之前，這兩者和藝術幾乎沒有任何關系。

狄更斯對讀者的忠誠也使原本對立的雙方之間產生了一種平衡：他在作品中創造出一種氛圍，讓讀者覺得自己與他有著親密的個人關系，借此他培養了一個龐大的讀者群。讀者們覺得他是在直接和他們對話，他也的確經常這樣做。他將自己做一名演員的夢想轉化為對作品充滿激情的現場朗讀。在讀到《霧都孤兒》中南茜被殘忍地殺害那一幕時，他那令人毛骨悚然的表演引起觀眾的陣陣暈厥。“是他發明了那種宣傳形式，”哥倫比亞大學英語系主任、專門研究維多利亞時期英國文學的學者尼古拉斯·達姆斯指出，“他發明了營銷策略。和出版文化能夠扯上關系的所有那些東西基本上都是他首創的。”狄更斯本人也知道這一點。他稱自己為“不可模仿者”，這個綽號后來一直保留了下來。

隨著讀者數量的增長，狄更斯特別注重保留自己的平民主義特色。在《大衛·科波菲爾》的創作和出版進行到一半的時候，他收到了一位熟人的來信，信中對小說里一個次要人物——莫切爾小姐——表達了反對意見。在小說中，莫切爾小姐設下圈套，涉嫌參與了引誘大衛的兒時玩伴小艾米莉的陰謀。巧合的是，和這位寫信者一樣，莫切爾小姐也是個侏儒。狄更斯解釋說他筆下的所有人物都是各種性格的復合體，他本人并無意暗示身體上的缺陷就代表著靈魂的缺陷。但是，當莫切爾小姐再次在小說中露面時，狄更斯就改主意了，抹去了她做的所有壞事。這一變化有點別扭和不合常理，但狄更斯更看重撫慰讀者受傷的心靈。他覺得自己要對她負責，對所有讀者負責，而讀者給他的回報則是對他的崇拜。

狄更斯對其作品的反應是迅速的，他知道，只有他保持對作品的控制能力，他的作品才會有生命力。在他創作生涯剛剛開始時，作者在英國國內只擁有有限的版權保護，而在海外則幾乎沒有任何保護。美國雜志就公然盜版他的作品。狄更斯成功地在英國國內爭取到了更為強勢的版權條款，在國際上也簽定了相關協定，以阻止未經授權的翻譯和剽竊。他甚至呼吁成立一個作家聯盟。作為兩個周刊的總編，他一直在扶植新的人才，致力于讓作者從自己的作品中獲利，不管是生前還是身后。

在小說中，狄更斯也開始思考身后事了。他早期的小說都植根于他所在那個時代所特有的問題，比如1834年頒布的《濟貧法》（《霧都孤兒》）、約克郡虐待兒童的學校（《少爺返鄉》）等。隨著他日漸成熟，他的批判也變得愈加隱晦。他開創了用諷喻的手法描寫巨大社會弊端的先河，比如《小杜麗》中的“兜圈子辦公室”，還有《荒涼山莊》中在英國法庭上演的寄生蟲式的“詹狄士狀告詹狄士”訴訟案——這些龐大的由腐敗和低效構成的“粉碎機”足以令每一個闖入者粉身碎骨。人們在閱讀《霧都孤兒》時，能夠知道責任在誰，問題在哪兒。但在讀狄更斯后期的小說時，就像達姆斯說的那樣，“你再也無法看出誰是壞蛋了。一切都似乎自成體系。”

《荒涼世界》英文版封面

批評家覺得這些小說沉悶枯燥、冗長散漫。亨利·詹姆斯在1865年為《國家》雜志撰寫《我們共同的朋友》的書評時指出，“在我們看來，過去的十年時間里，狄更斯先生一直在強迫自己寫作，這一點是顯而易見的。《荒涼山莊》是硬逼出來的；《小杜麗》寫得非常吃力；而《我們共同的朋友》簡直是用鐵鍬和鎬硬挖出來的。”但狄更斯并不為批評家而創作。他對喜劇和感傷作品駕輕就熟，深得忠實讀者的歡心。而且，他開始考慮一個新的讀者群：子孫后代。

《霧都孤兒》英文版封面

狄更斯為自己身后留名做的最后一件事是委任他的密友約翰·福斯特作為自己的傳記作家。在這位偉大的作家去世兩年之后，福斯特撰寫的《查爾斯·狄更斯的一生》面世了。書中講述了一件事，這件事狄更斯一直羞于示人，僅僅告訴了身邊少數人：小時候，父親因欠債入獄的那段時間里，他曾一度被送到鞋油廠打工。這件事讓讀者們深感震驚。他們早就知道童年打工的細節，但那是少年大衛·科波菲爾的情況——大衛曾說過自己在十歲時被冷酷無情的繼父“扔”在一家貨棧打工。他們也知道艾米·杜麗出生在關押欠債者的牢房里，那是她父親被關押的地方。他們還知道《遠大前程》中的主人公皮普為自己出身低賤而感到羞辱，終生背負著這個沉重的負擔。但直到福斯特的傳記出版，他們才知道這些恥辱的根源。這是狄更斯安排的最后的情節轉折，現在終于真相大白：在那些書中人物內心最為脆弱的時刻，原來是他們的創造者在講述自己的親身經歷。這讓他的讀者感到意外，卻也使他永遠活在他們心中。

《小杜麗》英文版封面

永恒與獨創

狄更斯誕辰兩百周年恰逢文學界的又一飛躍：電子文本的興起。人們關于電子書的爭論依然圍繞著紙質書與電子屏幕的孰優孰劣。但電子書更為深刻的影響是它會干擾文學領域的“數字”游戲。這種游戲始于維多利亞時代小說的興盛時期，以狄更斯為先導。

電子書改變了人們關于出版的概念。出版是一個優勝劣汰的過程，作者們相互競爭，搶奪出版機會，然后成千上萬的書像已經滅絕的旅鴿一樣消失不再了。數字文檔、自我出版以及按需印刷等技術極有可能使這種自然淘汰過程發生改變。傳統的絕版概念意味著書的內容已不可獲得。而數字版本的圖書則會永遠存在。從某種意義上說，這是好事，但它卻使量的統計更加困難。

19世紀海量書籍的出版催生了兩種影響力深遠的新生事物：一是獎勵文化的興起，二是文學作為一種研究領域的興起。它們傳達給我們的是以下信息：民眾需要幫助以確定閱讀什么，而文化精英可以提供這種幫助。于是，諾貝爾獎于1901年首次頒發，普利策獎于1917年首次頒發。幾乎與此同時，英國文學研究成為主流研究領域，而公認的經典文學作品的名單也開始形成。

一個世紀以后，這些新生事物作為評議者的影響力已經受到侵蝕，而侵蝕它們的正是過去催生它們的海量書籍。由于主要被逝世的白人男作家所占據，英國經典文學的名單從一誕生就伴隨著壓力，如今這一名單的范圍已經擴大并且已被現代化。而各種獎勵已經像癌細胞一樣擴散。正如詹姆斯·英格利士所指出的那樣，自20世紀20年代以來，頒發給小說、詩歌和戲劇新作的獎勵比例上升了十倍。與此同時，評論與批評文化已變得支離破碎。任何一個拿著智能手機的人都能夠對新篇舊作發表評論。

在首屆諾貝爾獎頒獎時，即使狄更斯還活著，他也無緣獲得。在20世紀初期的大部分時間里，評論者對狄更斯的寫作風格都嗤之以鼻，當時流行的是那種錯綜復雜甚至不近人情的作品。（現代主義的原則之一：不晦澀就不是藝術。）但還是有一些忠實讀者一直在閱讀他的作品。直到20世紀中葉，狄更斯才被一些人從“冷宮”中拯救出來，其中一個拯救者就是喬治·奧威爾，他十分欣賞狄更斯作為社會批評家的成就。這其中發揮奇效的正是狄更斯那些隱晦、沉悶的小說。人們發現，這些作品竟然如此超前地具有現代主義風格。狄更斯是他所在時代的典型代表，但同時也超越了那個時代。

曾經，一個受過教育的人差不多可以讀到所有重要的書籍，一是因為當時書籍不多，再者是因為受過教育的人當然有錢去買書，也有閑暇去讀書。然而，19世紀時曾大力普及文化知識的同一臺出版機器，現在卻不可能讓任何讀者哪怕是接近讀完所有的書籍。讀遍天下書的想法如今只能淪為笑柄。

因此，狄更斯誕辰兩百周年紀念既是慶祝他的不朽地位，也是慶祝人們終于達成一致意見，可以松口氣了。人們對狄更斯的看法，經歷了質疑、反復盤問乃至最后投票表決，最終得出了合情合理的裁定。在將來，要為讀者作出一個類似的裁定將變得更加困難，因為小說數量在呈指數級增長，而且評判者的圈子也變得越來越大——有頒獎機構和大學教授，還有網站的推薦引擎和十大優秀圖書排行榜等等。他們需要從更多的作家中進行篩選，需要有更多的仲裁者來進行仲裁，還有一堆堆高聳入云的圖書需要評判。那些不僅反映文化而且改變文化的作家無疑將占據優勢。那么，在普利策獲獎者名單上，在暢銷書排行榜上，或者在同人小說網站上，未來的讀者能否找到他們21世紀的狄更斯呢？有一點是顯而易見的：2112年2月7日，他們將會向這位富有創意的“不可模仿者”道一聲：“三百歲生日快樂！”