Dickens followed The Old Curiosity Shop with Barnaby Rudge (1841), also published weekly in Master Humphrey's Clock . Set in the time of the Gordon Riots of 1780, this represents Dickens's first attempt to write an historical novel. While the riots themselves were inflamed by anti-Catholic sentiment, Dickens suggests throughout the novel that they are actually an outburst of social protest. Dickens is appalled by the mob violence he brilliantly depicts in the brutal riots, but he expresses deep sympathy for the oppressed who are driven to such lengths by an indifferent and unresponsive system.
Dickens himself was becoming increasingly impatient with England's political economy, which he perceives as insensitive to the needs of the people, and is indignant with the social conditions he sees around him. While he does not advocate a violent outburst from those who are the victims of this oppression, the explosive energy of the riot scenes in Barnaby offers a vision of what is possible if the needs of the people are not addressed.
Visited America
Upon completing Barnaby Rudge Dickens visited America where he was absolutely lionized. However, after several attacks on him for his insistent speaking out in favor of international copyright laws and after further acquaintance with American ill breeding and overly familiar intrusion on his and Catherine's privacy, Dickens became disenchanted with his own vision of America as a land of freedom that was fulfilling a democratic ideal. In American Notes (1842) he expresses his reservations about America, much to the chagrin of his American audience.
With The Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit , Dickens returned to monthly numbers publishing in twenty installments from January, 1843, to July, 1844. Martin Chuzzlewit is organized around the theme of selfishness, and marks an advance in Dickens's development as a novelist. However, sales dropped off to twenty thousand; in an effort to increase sales, Dickens sends Martin to America where Martin discovers the boorish behavior Dickens had only gently portrayed in American Notes .
But if Dickens is scathing in hvis portrayal of America in Chuzzlewit , he is een fiercer in exposing greed, selfishness, hypocrisy, and corruption in his homeland. He is able to sustain this satiric exposure with his comic genius, creating here characters who have achieved a reality beyond their pages. Sairey Gamp is no less real for us than Mrs. Harris is for her, and Pecksniff's name has entered the language as descriptive of hypocritical benevolence.
Experiencing the angst
Dickens was himself experiencing a similar sense of vague dissatisfaction at this time and may have wondered if his wife were not partly responsible. Whether she was or whether Dickens was experiencing the angst that every major Victorian thinker suffered from we cannot know. David's problem is settled by Dora's early death and David's recognition that Agnes has loved him all along and that on a level he was not aware of he had loved her too. They marry, have a lovely family, and share a fulfilled existence.
The novel ends with David's apostrophe to his true wife: "Oh Agnes, Oh my soul, so may thy face be by me when I close my life indeed; so may I, when the shadows which I now dismiss, still find thee near me, pointing upward!" In his Preface to the novel, Dickens talks about "dismissing some portion of himself into the shadowy world" as he finishes David Copperfield. Both Dickens and David equate the world of vision with the world of actuality--one is as impermanent as the other. For David, Agnes is pointing to a world he hopes lasts beyond the worlds of shadow.
In 1842, Dickens had written to Forster in response to the overwhelming triumph of his welcome in Boston: "I feel, in the best aspects of this welcome, something of the presence and influence of that spirit which directs my life, and through a heavy sorrow has pointed upward with unchanging finger for more than four years past." He is referring, of course, to Mary Hogarth.
Dickens' idealized vision of beauty
In the novel, David is able to realize his ideal vision, actually to possess the beauty that is his inspiration and end as artist. Mary Hogarth becomes, for Dickens, an idealized vision of beauty that cannot be possessed, but she serves "as a presence and influence of that spirit that directs" Dickens's life. Whether that ideal can be attained beyond this realm is not the issue. The ideal has allowed David to become the hero of his life, not by possessing the ideal but by acting on its inspiration.
David the artist becomes artist as the result of realizing his imaginative vision, of creating art. In the act of creating art he possesses the vision.If this society is to be redeemed, Dickens insists, it will be through the values represented by Esther Summerson. Jo's broom cannot sweep away the mud of Tom-all-Alone's, but the clarity and warmth of Esther's sympathetic love may be capable, if it becomes contagious, of illuminating this world and dissipating the fog. Esther and Allan Woodcourt, the physician who attends Jo at his death, marry, and we believe that their family can contain,
in miniature, the order and love that must be transmitted to the larger society if it is to be saved. But Dickens is not sure, at this point, if what Esther and Allan represent can withstand the evils of London: they set up household in a country cottage, provided by the benevolent John Jarndyce, Esther's guardian.