Dickens' Moral Disgust

"Charles will shake his head and admonish the dog for its carelessness, saying such things as ‘You are the most naughty of creatures.’"

Nowadays one can never really be sure if someone has read an author’s work or not. If all you want is cultural capital, you could pretty accurately — and more succinctly — explain the plot and themes of any classic work by simply watching its film adaptation; perhaps even making some conjecture as to the author’s prose style.

Equally, you might read an online literary essay in which a particular point of interest in the author’s work is condensed into a manageable fifteen-hundred words, short enough for you to regurgitate at dinner parties.

One thing you can be certain of, however, is that if anyone holds Charles Dickens to be the author of “hearth and home” they have almost certainly never read him directly. That most adaptable and sentimental of his works, A Christmas Carol, has undoubtedly coloured the entire televisual oeuvre of Charles Dickens film adaptations, and consequently the public idea of the man himself.

A Christmas Carol is indeed sentimental, as is The Old Curiosity Shop, and while smatterings of sentimentality exist across Dickens’ work, it is by no means his defining feature. Dickens was first and foremost a moralist, as well as an inheritor of the satirical tradition of the preceding century.

If we accept Henry Fielding as its originator, the modern English novel was born from the desire to mercilessly ridicule the sentimental: Fielding’s novella Shamela and its sequel Joseph Andrews were intended to satirise the sentimentality of Samuel Richardson’s epistolary Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded and are the founding works of the medium. In his introduction to the latter, Fielding introduces this novel form of writing, which he terms a comic romance, thus:

Now, a comic romance is a comic epic poem in prose; differing from comedy, as the serious epic from tragedy: its action being more extended and comprehensive; containing a much larger circle of incidents, and introducing a greater variety of characters. It differs from the serious romance in its fable and action, in this; that as in the one these are grave and solemn, so in the other they are light and ridiculous: it differs in its characters by introducing persons of inferior rank, and consequently, of inferior manners, whereas the grave romance sets the highest before us: lastly, in its sentiments and diction; by preserving the ludicrous instead of the sublime.

As apt a description as any other for the novels of Dickens, and in particular his early works, where the confluence of characters — some grave, some ludicrous — form the basis for the comic tension which so readily delights us. This is also the formula, for Fielding as well as for Dickens, for moral instruction. Dickens’ protagonists are frequently “straight men,” basically decent figures who move through a world of personified vice.¹ It is true that Dickens’ villains are idiosyncratic rather than particular. That is to say that they are more satires of universal evils than of contemporary individuals or institutions.² But this generality of satire is not to Dickens’ discredit; his refusal to attend exclusively to the maladies of his time accounts in part for his longevity as a diagnostician of social ills, and his moral outrage is no less palpable for it.

In fact, we sometimes feel Dickens’ moral disgust a little too keenly. Any reader looking for concrete examples of his most violent satire should read Martin Chuzzlewit and his American Notes. Both works concern America, for which he reserved a particular hatred:

So vile a press as the American press never existed outside this country. It is the engine by which the American vulgarity feeds itself... It has its own standard of right and wrong, of honour and dishonour, of truth and falsehood, and is a thousand times more abominable than any tyranny or despotism of which the most corrupt European system ever dreamed.”

It is in these works that one most feels — too sharply, perhaps — the strength of Dickens’ moral outrage. The extent to which moral disgust was necessary for the production of his works has always been accepted.

That it was, in fact, the entire creative motor of his works, we could have hardly imagined. That is, were it not for a series of revealing letters written by his wife, Catherine Thompson Hogarth, which were discovered just last year.

This corpus of letters, discovered, collected and compiled by Doctor Lyndon Shobley of the University of Bournemouth, have shed an unprecedented light on Dickens’ appetite for disgust. This “attraction to repulsion”³, seems to have manifested itself in his personal life, too, and in a more literal sense than previously imagined. Dickens was known to be a lifelong insomniac. Among other things⁴ he would take frequent nocturnal walks in order to cure himself. What was little known before the release of these letters, however, is how this insomnia and the need to walk the streets of London at night were actually occasioned by what Dickens experienced as an insufficiency of moral disgust. That is to say that he was unable to sleep without first feeling a keen sense of repulsion. His wife Catherine writes on one occasion:

At around ten o’clock last night, not half-an-hour after going to bed, Charles entered that agitated state which I now recognise all too readily. He got out of bed, beat the pillow, shook the bed sheets, and repeated this all twenty times before returning to bed even more saucer-eyed than before. This occasioned a night walk from which he was not to return for some two hours, and during which time he intended to be, as he put it, “awash in the filth”.⁵

On her husband’s return Catherine describes his disgust as he recounts what he has witnessed:

He returned home, again in a state of agitation, but distinct from that in which I had seen him, tinged as it was with a curious satisfaction of having witnessed some moral decay. He informed me that he had been approached by two separate women in Haymarket, solicitous of his custom, and that he had only loosed them with very much insistence. In passing through Covent Garden he happened upon three more women of this rank who continued to solicit him during a half hour, and that when he had managed to reach St Giles he was barely with enough moral strength in him to deny the advances of the seven young women who there approached him.⁶

She writes later:

Charles is often unable to sleep unless sufficiently roused in his moral disgust by being accosted by and rejecting as many as fifteen lost women. [emphasis mine]⁷

We know from Dickens’ own letters that the day following his nocturnal excursion described in the first excerpt of his wife’s letters that he wrote feverishly the following day, completing in a single sitting the December instalment of Oliver Twist (chapters 18-19) of that year.

In other letters we are given more surprising details of Dickens’ domestic life, and the extent to which he needed to excite a feeling of moral disgust in order to sleep:

Often before retiring to bed he will crush some mustard seeds to a fine powder and mix them in water before administering it to one of the dogs. The animal will accept it placidly and then, after heaving and making some noise, regurgitate it onto the rug, during which Charles will shake his head and admonish the dog for its carelessness, saying such things as ‘You are the most naughty of creatures’. After this he will sleep for some six or seven hours without stirring, and will write in a continual stream in the morning.⁸

What are we to make of this? It is difficult to read these acts without feeling some temptation to judge the man behind them. We may think Dickens a hypocrite for exciting his own moral disgust so deliberately, only to retaliate against it. But it is perhaps only from this constant moral tension, this oscillation between attraction and repelling, that the great works of moral literature are born. Without vice the satirist has no reason to exist; and it is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick.

1. This, of course, demonstrates his other main influence of the picaresque which he was largely exposed to through the works of the now largely-forgotten Tobias Smollett.

2. Although they are often inspired by them. The sanctimonious Seth Pecksniff in Martin Chuzzlewit, for example, is reportedly based on philanthropist Samuel Carter Hall. This is however just a personal reference for Dickens, rather than the subject of his satire. We are given no indication in the novel that our hatred should be directed at anything but the fictional character and the general sin of hypocrisy.

3. Noted particularly in the early villains of Dickens’ work who have often been marked by some physical deformity or ugliness. Daniel Quilp in The Old Curiosity Shop, for example, is a dwarf, while Fagin conforms to the most typical antisemitic physicality of the Jew.

4. Such as turning his bed so that his head pointed North.

5. Thompson Hogarth, Catherine. (1837, November 5). The letters of Catherine Thompson Hogarth, Wife to Charles Dickens (Vol. 1). Shobley, L. (Bournemouth University Press, 2025)

6. Ibid

7. Ibid, (1838, February 24)

8. Ibid, (1838, April 1)