ABSTRACT
This presentation of London as a deterministic hell is, of course, precisely what makes Gissing a very different kind of novelist from Dickens. Environment totally prescribes the individual. The difference can be very clearly seen in a passage in Gissing’s book on Dickens in which he discusses Uriah Heep:
With regard to this slimy personage, we note at once that he is a victim of circumstances, the outcome of a bad education and of a society affected with disease. His like abounded at the time. … He cannot respect himself; his training has made the thing impossible; and all men are his enemies. When he is detected in criminal proceedings we are hard upon him, very hard. Dickens cannot relent to this victim of all that is worst in the society he criticises. Had Uriah stopped short of crime, something might have been said for him, but the fellow is fatally logical. Logic of that kind we cannot hear of for a moment; in our own logic of the police-court and the assizes we will take remarkably good care that there is no flaw.
What is so fascinating about this passage is the emphasis that Gissing lays on the victimisation of Heep. The connection between Heep’s background and his personality is a causal rather than, what I would have thought more obvious, a complementary one. I think that Gissing is offering Heep a good deal more sympathy here than he ought. Dickens hates his personality, Gissing only sees it as the logical product of his upbringing. Moreover, Gissing almost seems to recognise some kind of disagreement with Dickens by mentioning the police court. Dickens’ logic, like the logic of the law, is the logic of moral responsibility, and praise or blame is precisely what Gissing, in the completeness of his pessimism, is unable to exercise. Neither Bob Hewett nor Scawthorne is bad, or at least there is no point in calling them bad. Only an essentially 244optimistic view of human nature can enable a personal judgement as harsh as Dickens’ judgement of Uriah Heep.