In The Great Tradition, published in 1948, F. R. Leavis seemed
to rate the work of Charles Dickens - with the exception of Hard
Times - as lacking the seriousness and formal control of the true
masters of English fiction.
By 1970, when Dickens the Novelist was published on the first
centenary of the writer's death, Leavis and his lifelong
collaborator Q. D. (Queenie) Leavis, had changed their minds. 'Our
purpose', they wrote, 'is to enforce as unanswerably as possible
the conviction that Dickens was one of the greatest of creative
writers . . .'
In seven typically robust and uncompromising chapters, the
Leavises grapple with the evaluation of a writer who was then still
open to dismissal as a mere entertainer, a caricaturist not worthy
of discussion in the same breath as Henry James. Q. D. Leavis
shows, for example, how deeply influential David Copperfield was on
the work of Tolstoy, and explores the symbolic richness of the
nightmare world of Bleak House. F. R. Leavis reprints his famous
essay on Hard Times, with its moral critique of utilitarianism, and
reveals the imaginative influence of Blake on Little Dorrit. Q. D.
Leavis contributes a pathbreaking chapter on the importance of
Dickens's illustrators to the effect of his work.
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