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SCHOOLGIRLS, MONEY AND
REBELLION IN JAPAN

Japanese society in the 1990s and 2000s produced a range of complicated mate-
rial about sexualized schoolgirls, and few topics have caught the imagination of
Western observers so powerfully. While young Japanese girls had previously been
portrayed as demure and obedient, in training to become the obedient wife and
prudent mother, in recent years less than demure young women have become cen-
tral to urban mythology and the content of culture. The cultic fascination with the
figure of a deviant school girl, which has some of its earliest roots in the nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries, likewise re-emerged and proliferated in fascinating
and timely ways in the 1990s and 2000s.
Through exploring the history and politics underlying the cult of girls in con-
temporary Japanese media and culture, this book presents a striking picture of
contemporary Japanese society from the 1990s to the start of the 2010s. At its core
is an in-depth case study of the media delight and panic surrounding delinquent
prostitute schoolgirls. Sharon Kinsella traces this social panic back to male anxieties
relating to gender equality and female emancipation in Japan. In each chapter the
book reveals the conflicted, nostalgic, pornographic, and at times, distinctly racial-
ized manner in which largely male sentiments about this transformation of gender
relations have been expressed. The book simultaneously explores the stylistic and
flamboyant manner in which young women have reacted to the weight of an
obsessive and accusatory male media gaze.
Covering the often controversial subjects of compensated dating (enjo k sai),
the role of porn and lifestyle magazines, the historical sources and politicized social
meanings of the schoolgirl, and the racialization of fashionable girls, Schoolgirls,
Money and Rebellion in Japan will be invaluable to students and scholars of Japanese
culture and society, sociology, anthropology, gender, and women’s studies.

Sharon Kinsella is Lecturer in Japanese Studies at the University of Manchester, UK.

The Nissan Institute/Routledge Japanese Studies Series
Series Editors:
Roger Goodman, Nissan Professor of Modern Japanese Studies, University of Oxford,
Fellow, St Antony’s College

J.A.A. Stockwin, formerly Nissan Professor of Modern Japanese Studies and former
Director of the Nissan Institute of Japanese Studies, University of Oxford, Emeritus Fellow,
St Antony’s College

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Translated and with an introduction by
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Michael Howarth
Industrial Relations in Japan
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Norma Chalmers The reform of written Japanese
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William M. Tsutsui W. Dean Kinzley

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This page intentionally left blank
Schoolgirls, Money
and Rebellion in
Japan

Sharon Kinsella
First published 2014
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2014 Sharon Kinsella
The right of Sharon Kinsella to be identified as author of this work has
been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright,
Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or
utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now
known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in
any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing
from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or
registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation
without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Kinsella, Sharon, 1969-
Schoolgirls, money and rebellion in Japan / Sharon Kinsella.
pages cm. -- (The Nissan Institute/Routledge Japanese studies series)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Girls--Japan. 2. Schoolgirls--Japan. 3. Clothing and dress--Japan. 4.
Japan--Social life and customs--20th century. I. Title.
HQ777.K564 2013
305.230820952--dc23
2013016990

ISBN: 978-0-415-70410-6 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-0-415-70411-3 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-0-203-76231-8 (ebk)

Typeset in Bembo
by GreenGate Publishing Services, Tonbridge, Kent
CONTENTS

List of illustrations x
Series editor’s preface xii

1 Introduction: the age of the girl 1

2 Gathering and interpreting the statistical evidence 25

3 Compensated dating as a salaryman subculture 39

4 Kogyaru chic: dressing up as a delinquent girl 60

5 The surveillance of financial deviancy 88

6 Girls as a race 107

7 Ganguro, yamanba, and transracial style 130

8 Minstrelized girls 151

9 Schoolgirl revolt in male cultural imagination 167

10 Problems compensating women 188

European language bibliography 199

Japanese language bibliography 213
Newspaper and magazine articles 218
Filmography 226
Interviews 228
Index 231
Illustrations

1.1 Girls with up-to-the-minute caramel-colored hair and platform

boots (atsuzoku) posing in Shibuya in 2003 2
1.2 Graph depicting the rate of girls entering university
from 1970 to 2011 4
1.3 Graph illustrating the growth of irregular employment among
men and women from 1995 to 2012 5
1.4 Graph illustrating the changing trends for wages for male and
female full- and part-time employees from 1990 to 2011 6
1.5 Screen pixilation in news coverage 9
1.6 “I hope to do compensated dating …” declares a voicemail
message transcribed into telop on-screen subtitles in a teatime
television news report in 1998 10
1.7 Roving camera crews meeting schoolgirls in April 2004 11
1.8 The mountain of news media reportage of the key terms—
compensated dating, kogyaru, and ganguro—between 1995 and 2007 11
1.9 Fictional schoolgirl pimp Jonko, in the 1997 film Bounce Kogals!,
is scripted to say “It’s all the media’s fault” for encouraging the
deluded men who approach her in the streets for sex 14
1.10 Man-hating schoolgirl Yoko dawdling across a crossing gives
a van driver the finger in the film Love Exposure (2008) 16
1.11 A hardened schoolgirl fights off prying cameras in an eighties
pink eiga (porn movie), Lolita Vibe Torture that prophesises
news media attention to schoolgirls in the 1990s 17
3.1 Popteen cover, November 2002 issue 46
3.2 The race for sales between weeklies: Gendai, Shincho,
Post, and Bunshun 51
4.1 Tropical accessories and grimy skirts and blouses worn by
kogyaru girls in Kichijoji, summer 1998 67
4.2 An anthropologist’s drawing of the stylized koha “tough school”
postures of male gang members in the early 1980s 68
 Illustrations xi

4.3 Picking noses and unladylike squatting by kogyaru girls on the

street in Kichijoji, Tokyo, summer 1998 69
4.4 School tartan-clad members of Cawaii! editorial team at teatime
in November 1997 76
4.5 A spontaneous joke about photos by schoolgirls gathered at a
plaza near Kichijoji station in summer 1998 79
4.6 A public display of putting on make-up, at a plaza near
Kichijoji station in summer 1998 79
5.1 A full-page illustration of the history of compensated dating
shows a barefoot girl in school uniform walking on the shore
with cash in her hand 89
5.2 Hosts of the late-night show Hamasho visit a “soapland” and
find a girl in school uniform 91
5.3 Japanese Apricot 3 – a pink dream by Aoshima Chiho 102
6.1 The “Shibuya gyaru hierarchy” published in (Weekly)
Shukan Playboy 112
6.2 tsuka Eiji’s Native Ethnology of Girls (Sh jo minzokugaku) (1989) 117
6.3 Aida Makoto’s Azemichi (path between rice fields) (1991) 120
6.4 Aida Makoto’s Harakiri Joshik sei (Harakiri Schoolgirls) (1999) 121
7.1 A girl wearing braids outside McDonald’s in Shibuya in 1999 138
7.2 In “Talking with Girl Teacher,” Gyaru-sensei transmits her
worldly wisdom to an “18-year-old dry-cleaning shop assistant” 138
7.3 Television comedian Gori in drag as a gyaru 146
8.1 A d jinshi image of an infantilized girl with dumpy limbs in
bondage in a doggy chain 152
8.2 Theater poster showing a heavily caricatured Dan Emmet
prancing to banjo music (1844) 154
8.3 Miyadai Shinji posing as a kogyaru schoolgirl for a series of
cross-dressed portraits of famous male cultural figures first
serialized in the weekly magazine Sh kan H seki in 1987 157
8.4 An older man dressed as a fashionable kogyaru in a tartan
miniskirt attempts to make small talk with actual young
women in similar garb at the entrance to Yoyogi Park in 1997 159
8.5 A boy in love and in drag in Sono Sion’s Love Exposure
(Ai no Mukidashi, 2008) 160
8.6 Cover of the “Zip Coon” song sheet (1834) 163
8.7 A d jinshi of a gyaru schoolgirl titled Orange (Orenji, 2002) 164
9.1 Carefree girls take off their sailor tops and sing about their
customers in Throw out Your Books, Let’s Get into the Streets
(Sho o suteyo machi e dey , 1971) 178
10.1 A comparison of the number of news articles containing the
terms “comfort women” (ianfu) and “compensated dating”
(enjo k sai) in their titles, between 1991 and 2006 192
SERIES EDITOR’S PREFACE

Schoolgirls, Money and Rebellion in Japan

Sharon Kinsella

Few topics have caught the imagination of Western observers of Japan in recent
years as powerfully as the apparent growth in delinquent and materialistic behavior
of young Japanese women. Young Japanese girls have previously been portrayed
as demure and obedient, in training to become the perfect wife and mother that
the society needs to support the development of the Japanese economy. Less than
demure and obedient young women have been collectively identified as gyaru in
the Japanese media and they have become central to a great deal of urban mythol-
ogy and creative production over the past three decades. The behavior of teenage
Japanese girls in the 1990s which most fired the Western imagination was the
practice known as enjo k sai (generally translated as “compensated dating”), which
came to define an older man dating a schoolgirl to whom he paid money, goods or
the price of a meal, in exchange for companionship or sexual favors.
Sharon Kinsella unravels the social and imaginative roots of the media focus
on apparently disorderly girls and subjects the entire topic of enjo k sai to rigor-
ous sociological analysis. Looking at compensated dating allows her to conduct a
broader investigation of late twentieth-century girl culture and street style in Japan,
which, she argues, counteracts, often humorously, the (male) media construction of
supposedly greedy and unruly young ladies. Compensated dating, Kinsella argues,
became a media panic because it linked the circulation of young girls to the circula-
tion of money. Such moral panics, of course, are far from uncommon in Japan and
indeed have a predictable trajectory as Kinsella, along with other colleagues, have
argued in another book also published in the Nissan Institute/Routledge Japanese
Studies Series, A Sociology of Japanese Youth (Goodman et al., 2012).
Kinsella identifies some of the key figures in the public debates about enjo k sai
and how they not only created, but actually championed, the highly sexualized
imagery of the joshi k sei, or schoolgirl, as a stand-in for their own desires for a cer-
tain kind of political radicalism. One of the key themes of the book is the fact that
 Series editor's preface xiii

the girls themselves were not passive in the face of this media construction. She
describes a fascinating feedback loop between the media—the porn industry, as
well as mass magazines and television shows aimed alternately at middle-aged men
and high-school-aged girls—and teenage girls themselves who adopted parodies of
the challenging fashion and attitudes of the image promoted by that media. Perhaps
most fascinating is Kinsella’s analysis of the racialization of kogyaru (fashionable
schoolgirls) including their appropriation of attributes that would identify them
(in their ganguro and yamamba form) as racially other: dark skin, white eyeshadow,
thick wavy hair in a variety of hues.
There will be a wide readership for this book, including those interested in
all aspects of contemporary Japanese society and popular culture, as well as those
interested more generally in women’s and gender studies, and race and ethnic stud-
ies beyond Japan. We are delighted to be able to publish it in the Nissan Institute/
Routledge Japanese Studies Series which has been designed to explore all aspects of
Japanese society through the rigorous application of theoretical and methodologi-
cal skills from social science and humanities disciplines. As this addition to the series
demonstrates, even the most apparently sensationalist topics, when subject to such
analysis, can tell us a great deal about the development of contemporary Japan.

Roger Goodman
Arthur Stockwin
April 2013
This page intentionally left blank
1
INTRODUCTION
The age of the girl

An intense and diverse lode of cultural and journalistic material has been produced
about girls in contemporary Japan, escalating in volume particularly from the 1980s
to 2010s. This book analyses this cult of girls and takes as its core case study social
panic and media delight about delinquent schoolgirls in the second half of the
1990s. The prolific outpouring of girl material reflected the convoluted and tricky
male reaction to further realms believed to be lost to gender equality and female
emancipation. These were under-employment and the loss of privileges and secu-
rity in the workplace, which have been bound up with the restructuring of the
postwar Japanese labor system in a period of extended recession extending from
the early 1990s. Accompanying the erosion of wages and onset of labor insecurity
(Ishida and Slater, 2010) were losses of expected service, care, and reproduction in
the home through the consequential unraveling of the established and dependent
bolster of under-paid part-time female labor and dedicated housewifery. The con-
flicted, nostalgic, pornographic, and at times, racialized manner in which largely
male sentiments about this transformation have been expressed, and the flamboy-
ant and stylistic manner in which young women have reacted to the weight of an
obsessive and accusatory male media gaze in the 1990s and 2000s, are the substance
of this book. See teenage female expression in Figure 1.1.
Pornographic by means of tortuous metaphors (“loose socks” or “loose sex”?)
and greased with juvenile smut, material about girls has rarely excluded a dosage
of visceral titillation. This is not to say that the staging of girls’ bodies in culture
is commensurate simply with the servicing of personal and compensatory “por-
notopias” (Marcus, 1966). Though hunched, perhaps, behind the voyeurism and
insistent vulgarity of girls staged in the various lacunae of male subculture, the
ghost of sexual starvation does not provide an explanation for the convoluted nar-
ratives, sarcastic jokes, elaborate physical appearances, and peculiar metamorphoses
of animated girls from the late 1980s through to the present, nor does it explain the
2 Introduction: the age of the girl

FIGURE 1.1 Girls with up-to-the-minute caramel-colored hair and platform boots
(atsuzoku) posing in Shibuya in 2003
Source: photograph by Sharon Kinsella.

intricate code of meanings underlying the news-reportage on sexually and finan-

cially independent high-school girls in the mid to late 1990s.
The popularity of both official (cute and sanitized) and underground (porno-
graphic, iconoclastic, and anti-bourgeois) images and narratives about Japanese
schoolgirls, imported and reinvented overseas, suggests that the type of multivalent,
ambivalent, and avenging postures projected onto girls in Japan—and the under-
lying structures of feeling operating behind those projections—have a resonance
in other societies that are experiencing different versions of the same disintegrat-
ing social totality (Tiqqun, 2012) and disordering of labor, family, reproduction,
and gender but that are less able or willing to evolve explicit cultural tropes and
local journalism through which to give form to and disseminate these sentiments.
Japan in the 1990s and 2000s became the source of a range of complicated mate-
rial about sexualized schoolgirls and girls with power, which was broadly cathartic
to male viewers and in specific cases hostile to women, but whose precise import
and insider ironies could remain obscure, foreign, and conveniently lost in transla-
tion. Cute sh jo (girl) and sexy schoolgirl (joshi k sei) figures have been celebrated
as wonderfully, incomprehensibly Japanese and kooky. But the fascination with
animated and licentious Japanese schoolgirls in the US and Europe perhaps hints
at depths of hidden longing, nostalgia, and resentment of women, that are not
otherwise easily discerned in the public sphere in North American and European
culture. Hints about the domesticated but unfinished business of difficult gender
relations in post-industrial Western states can be gleaned through observing the
selective importation of girl iconography from Japan.
 Introduction: the age of the girl 3

Female advancement
Visions of female advancement, whether real or merely anticipated, have permeated
culture and public debate in Japan over the past two decades. Journalism has played
upon anxious thoughts about the critical retraction of unpaid and underpaid female
labor—servicing, reproductive, caring, and sexual—resulting in a generalized “care
deficit” (Allison, 2009: 13). The retraction of unrewarded female contributions
appeared to be having a corrosive impact on the strength of the family, the labor
force, the population, and national morale. Female advancement appeared from
across national borders, too, in the form of the multi-state campaign for the finan-
cial compensation of former comfort women of Imperial Japan that ran through
the 1990s and 2000s. Government-sponsored social research published in numer-
ous white papers showed over and again that women in Japan were not marrying as
much ( hashi, 1993; Yamada, 1996; Kitamura and Abe, 2007; Tokuhiro, 2009),
not having as many children (Ueno, 1998; Schoppa, 2006), and that they were
applying to proper four-year universities (Fujimura-Faneselow, 1995; Edwards and
Pasquale, 2003) instead of women’s two-year colleges. The divorce rate rose most
conspicuously between 1990 and 2005 (from 1.28 to 2.10 per 1,000 of the popula-
tion). The age of first marriage has also climbed steadily from the early-seventies
reaching 28.8 by 2010. The rate of marriage and national birth rates having already
declined gradually between the mid-postwar turning point of 1973 and 1990, then
dropped again between 2000 and 2010. The national birth rate reached its lowest
point on record in 2005 after a five-year slump (at 1.25 live births per 1,000) and
marriage rates reached the lowest levels on record of 5.5 per 1,000 in 2010 after
two decades of steep decline in the rate of marriage.1 The proportions of young
women choosing not to marry or not to have children—which are closely con-
comitant in this society (Hertog, 2009: 1–4)—have risen in the 1990s and 2000s
as the proportion of unmarried men and women (mikonsha) of parenting age has
risen without pause. In 1980, 11.42 percent of 35-year-olds were unmarried; in
2010, this had risen to 32.04 percent. Almost half (47.2 percent) of all those adults
aged 30 years and under were unmarried, in 2010. In 2010, 28 percent of Japanese
women and over 38 percent of Japanese men aged between 25 and 49 years old
were unmarried and, unlike their counterparts in Europe, only rarely cohabiting
with partners or children (Kokusei ch sa, 1980, 2010).
Observe the increases in the rate of young women pursuing university educa-
tion in Figure 1.2. In 1970, 6.5 percent, and by 1989, 14.7 percent of women
were going to university. This figure rose rapidly in the 1990s, almost doubling to
33.8 percent by 2002 and tripling by 2011, when entering university was achieved
by 45.8 percent of all young women. The numbers entering graduate school also
rose, from 3 percent in 1989 to 6.3 percent by 2000 and 7.1 percent in 2004, and
then creeping to a peak of 7.5 percent in 2008. At the same time, the number of
women attending a two-year junior college to receive ladylike skills (McVeigh,
1996) slipped by one-third, from 22.1 percent in 1989 to 10.4 percent in 2011.2
Ironically, young women in the 1990s and 2000s began to attain the university
4 Introduction: the age of the girl

Percentage entering higher education 50

45 Junior college
University
40 Graduate school
35

30
25
20

15
10
5

0
‘70 ‘73 ‘76 ‘79 ‘82 ‘85 ‘88 ‘91 ‘94 ‘97 ‘00 ‘03 ‘06 ‘09

Year

FIGURE 1.2 Graph depicting the rate of girls entering university from 1970 to 2011
Source: Fujin Hakusho (~1999), Josei R d Hakusho (2000–2002), Danjo Ky d Sankaku Hakusho
(2001–2011).

education required to compete directly with young men for what was a simulta-
neously shrinking number of secure graduate jobs as full-time company recruits.
With and without degrees, however, women were struggling to find employment
and to stay in the workforce despite the pressure of low wages linked to part-
time and non-permanent employee status and the largely maintained exclusion of
women from managerial track positions with corresponding higher salaries. The
proportion of women in pure employment (excluding work in family businesses
and housewifery) has steadily risen from 26.9 percent in 1975 to 37.9 percent in
1995, and to 40.8 percent in 2010. The White Paper on Gender Equality (Danj
Ky d Sankaku Hakusho) introduced in 1998 attempted to monitor a transition
in Japanese gender relations, and can be considered symptomatic of government
goals to channel the “active participation of women” into the “revitalization of
economy and society” (Danj Ky d Sankaku Hakusho, 2010: 10). At ministerial
levels, capturing the energy and skills of young women has been viewed as critical
to the healing and cohesion of a more flexible society that could weather the reces-
sion and economic restructuring.

Lack of male advancement and economic recession

The effects of the collapse of the financial bubble of the 1980s at the end of that
decade began to shake through the economy and society in the early 1990s, and
crystallized in full-blown economic recession, rising unemployment and a freeze
on hiring new recruits from universities from 1995. The “employment ice age”
(koy hy gaki), extending from 1995 into the 2000s, forced previously securely
 Introduction: the age of the girl 5

employed cohorts of male high-school and college graduates into a permanent

cycle of irregular (hiseiki), part time (paato), temporary (arubaito), and contract
(haken) work, strung between bouts of unemployment, giving rise to contempo-
rary social problems, from youth poverty, unmarried adults cohabiting with parents
(“parasite singles”), the working poor, and reports of widespread stress, heavy
workloads, and minimized workplace training for those gaining full-time employ-
ment (Genda, 2006, Suzuki et al., 2010). Critical academic analysts estimated that
the rate of unemployment in 1995 was as high as 8.9 percent (Kishi, 1995: 290),
though it increased most sharply from 1997 onwards, affecting younger men and
school-leavers not attending college disproportionately. From another perspective,
the male labor force participation rate fell to an all-time postwar low of 63.3 per-
cent in 1998 (K sei r d hakusho, 1999). While the proportion of men channeled
into irregular employment increased steadily in the 1990s, reaching 14.8 percent
by 2002, women fully absorbed a greater part of the growing demand for cheap
and flexible irregular employment—50.7 percent of all female employment was
“irregular” by 2002. (See the movement of men and women into the irregular
employment pool in Figure 1.3.) Interestingly, through the 1990s and 2000s the
wages of part-time and irregular male employees began to drop behind those of
both full-time male employees and those of the small but emerging cohort of full-
time and permanent female employees, whose wages steadily rose through this
period and tracked those of their full-time male colleagues. By the 2000s the wages
of part-time male employees were closer to those of their female counterparts than

60
Women
Percentage in irregular employment

Men and women

50
Men

40

30

20

10

0
‘95 ‘96 ‘97 ‘98 ‘99 ‘00 ‘01 ‘02 ‘03 ‘04 ‘05 ‘06 ‘07 ‘08 ‘09 ‘10 ‘11 ‘12

Year

FIGURE 1.3 Graph illustrating the growth of irregular employment among men and
women from 1995 to 2012
Source: Josei R d Hakush 2004:82; figures continued in Hataraku Josei no Jitsuj Heisei 23/2012,
sourced online at: http://www.mhlw.go.jp/bunya/koyoukintou/josei-jitsuj /dl/11b.pdf.
6 Introduction: the age of the girl

those of other men: gender-based wage inequalities systematized within the twen-
tieth century labor market had been partially redistributed and de-gendered within
the ballooning pool of irregular employees (Genda, 2006; Ishida and Slater, 2010).
Thought provoking shifts in wage levels can be examined in detail in Figure 1.4.
Rising unemployment and poverty linked to irregular employment impacted on
the potential of younger generations to “envision a stable life-course” (Suzuki
et al., 2010: 513) and generated “widespread anxiety” and a potentially exagger-
ated sensitivity to unequal developments: “Emblematic of this vague, amorphous
uneasiness is the concern over widening economic disparities” (Genda, 2006: 2).

Girl cult in the media

From the 1980s to the 2010s both mass media and underground culture mirrored
government policy-making, in the sense that it too was dominated by the vision
of ranks of able, heroic, and energetic young women. In the expanding spheres

75
Hourly wages as a percentage of full-time

70

65
male employees

60

55

50

45

40
‘90 ‘92 ‘94 ‘96 ‘98 ‘00 ‘02 ‘04 ‘06 ‘08 ‘10
Year

Hourly wages of female employees as a percentage of male

full-time hourly wages
Hourly wages of part-time male employees as a percentage of
full-time male employees
Hourly wages of part-time female employees as a percentage of
full-time male employees

FIGURE 1.4 Graph illustrating the changing trends for wages for male and female full-
and part-time employees from 1990 to 2011
Source: basic Survey on Wage Structure, Heisei 24, MLHW.
 Introduction: the age of the girl 7

of communications, advertizing, television, and new digital visual media, the exu-
berant faces and voices of robotic little girls bouncing with energy became the
messengers, voices, and actors. The single most widely broadcast animation and
lyrics at the start of the 1990s were “pi-hyara, pi-hyara,” the lusty nonsense chorus
of a ditty sung by the willful and eccentric animated girl character “Chibi Maruko
Chan” (Little Miss Chubby Cheeks; Yamane, 1993: 12). Cultural critic Sait
Tamaki goes on to estimate that about 80 percent of the most popular animations
produced in Japan in the 1990s featured some version of the beautiful fighting girl
(bish jo senshi) character at its core (Sait , 1998: 8).The image of an alert and intelli-
gent schoolgirl with short, cropped hair avidly reading the news, which featured in
an Asahi Shinbun poster advertisement in 2003, was symptomatic of the widespread
anticipation of an informed teenage female initiative, that was widely presumed
to be imminent in this period. In fact, smart young women in business suits or
school uniform were the recurrent characters of adverts for broadsheet newspapers
throughout the late 1990s and 2000s. The slogan of this advertisement was “Read,
Think, Gain Power: Power Paper Asahi Shinbun” (Yomu, kangaeru, chikara ni
naru: Power Paper, Asahi Shinbun). Commenting on teenage girls’ consumption
and cultural activity over the preceding decade, the director of social research
at the highly regarded Hakuhodo Institute (HILL) suggested that in the midst of
the long Japanese economic recession, schoolgirls had displayed an “unanticipated
vitality” that ought not be criminalized but channeled instead—commercially, that
is—for its energizing and healing (“iyasu”) potential (Sekizawa Hidehiko inter-
view, 24 October 2002). Through the recent historical period in which the male
cult of girlhood has peaked, girl material has moved between different media sec-
tors through specific channels, becoming associated with both more (film, art,
literature, photography) and less (comics, animation, internet, games, pornogra-
phy) educated readers.

Resistance to female ambition

Within male-oriented subculture and journalism, however, ambivalence about the
liveliness of women (“onna wa genki”), who were felt to be fully applying themselves
neither to corporate needs nor duties in the home but who had instead disposable
income and leisure to hand, were distilled into the evolving stereotype of the selfish
and assertive gyaru (Miller, 1998, 2000b; Kinsella, 1995: 243–249; Bardsley, 2005;
Miyake, 2001). Caricatures resonant of pantomime and popular scenarios involv-
ing young office ladies (OL), gyaru, and later kogyaru (junior or teenage gyaru) and
high-school girls, occupying a central position in news and entertainment, expressed
discomfort with young female ambition. Public shaming of young women perceived
to be ambitious and insufficiently obedient and demure was partly concealed, having
its more hostile and derogatory face in commercial magazines, comics, and anima-
tions produced specifically for male audiences, which converged at their lower levels
with even more exclusively male reportage linked to the sex-services (f zoku) under-
world and otaku (manga and anime fan) subculture and online communications.
from journalists; we learn it from inspectors, we learn it from doctors,
we learn it even from shame-stricken schoolmasters and repentant
sweaters; but we never learn it from the children; we never learn it
from the victims. It would seem as if a living creature had to be
taught, like an art of culture, the art of crying out when it is hurt. It
would seem as if patience were the natural thing; it would seem as if
impatience were an accomplishment like whist. However this may
be, it is wholly certain that Dickens might have drudged and died
drudging, and buried the unborn Pickwick, but for an external
accident.
He was, as has been said, in the habit of visiting his father at the
Marshalsea every week. The talks between the two must have been
a comedy, at once more cruel and more delicate than Dickens ever
described. Meredith might picture the comparison between the child
whose troubles were so childish, but who felt them like a damned
spirit, and the middle-aged man whose trouble was final ruin, and
who felt it no more than a baby. Once, it would appear, the boy broke
down altogether—perhaps under the unbearable buoyancy of his
oratorical papa—and implored to be freed from the factory—implored
it, I fear, with a precocious and almost horrible eloquence. The old
optimist was astounded—too much astounded to do anything in
particular. Whether the incident had really anything to do with what
followed cannot be decided, but ostensibly it had not. Ostensibly the
cause of Charles’s ultimate liberation was a quarrel between his
father and Lamert, the head of the factory. Dickens the elder (who
had at last left the Marshalsea) could no doubt conduct a quarrel
with the magnificence of Micawber; the result of this talent, at any
rate, was to leave Mr. Lamert in a towering rage. He had a stormy
interview with Charles, in which he tried to be good-tempered to the
boy, but could hardly master his tongue about the boy’s father.
Finally he told him he must go, and with every observance the little
creature was solemnly expelled from hell.
His mother, with a touch of strange harshness, was for patching
up the quarrel and sending him back. Perhaps, with the fierce
feminine responsibility, she felt that the first necessity was to keep
the family out of debt. But old John Dickens put his foot down here—
put his foot down with that ringing but very rare decision with which
(once in ten years, and often on some trivial matter) the weakest
man will overwhelm the strongest woman. The boy was miserable;
the boy was clever; the boy should go to school. The boy went to
school; he went to the Wellington House Academy, Mornington
Place. It was an odd experience for any one to go from the world to a
school, instead of going from school to the world. Dickens, we may
say, had his boyhood after his youth. He had seen life at its coarsest
before he began his training for it, and knew the worst words in the
English language probably before the best. This odd chronology, it
will be remembered, he retained in his semi-autobiographical
account of the adventures of David Copperfield, who went into the
business of Murdstone and Grinby’s before he went to the school
kept by Dr. Strong. David Copperfield, also, went to be carefully
prepared for a world that he had seen already. Outside David
Copperfield, the records of Dickens at this time reduce themselves to
a few glimpses provided by accidental companions of his
schooldays, and little can be deduced from them about his
personality beyond a general impression of sharpness and, perhaps,
of bravado, of bright eyes and bright speeches. Probably the young
creature was recuperating himself for his misfortunes, was making
the most of his liberty, was flapping the wings of that wild spirit that
had just not been broken. We hear of things that sound suddenly
juvenile after his maturer troubles, of a secret language sounding like
mere gibberish, and of a small theatre, with paint and red fire, such
as that which Stevenson loved. It was not an accident that Dickens
and Stevenson loved it. It is a stage unsuited for psychological
realism; the cardboard characters cannot analyze each other with
any effect. But it is a stage almost divinely suited for making
surroundings, for making that situation and background which belong
peculiarly to romance. A toy theatre, in fact, is the opposite of private
theatricals. In the latter you can do anything with the people if you do
not ask much from the scenery; in the former you can do anything in
scenery if you do not ask much from the people. In a toy theatre you
could hardly manage a modern dialogue on marriage, but the Day of
Judgment would be quite easy.
 After leaving school, Dickens found employment as a clerk to Mr.
Blackmore, a solicitor, as one of those inconspicuous under-clerks
whom he afterwards turned to many grotesque uses. Here, no doubt,
he met Lowten and Swiveller, Chuckster and Wobbler, in so far as
such sacred creatures ever had embodiments on this lower earth.
But it is typical of him that he had no fancy at all to remain a
solicitor’s clerk. The resolution to rise which had glowed in him even
as a dawdling boy, when he gazed at Gad’s-hill, which had been
darkened but not quite destroyed by his fall into the factory routine,
which had been released again by his return to normal boyhood and
the boundaries of school, was not likely to content itself now with the
copying out of agreements. He set to work, without any advice or
help, to learn to be a reporter. He worked all day at law, and then all
night at shorthand. It is an art which can only be effected by time,
and he had to effect it by overtime. But learning the thing under
every disadvantage, without a teacher, without the possibility of
concentration or complete mental force, without ordinary human
sleep, he made himself one of the most rapid reporters then alive.
There is a curious contrast between the casualness of the mental
training to which his parents and others subjected him and the
savage seriousness of the training to which he subjected himself.
Somebody once asked old John Dickens where his son Charles was
educated. “Well, really,” said the great creature, in his spacious way,
“he may be said—ah—to have educated himself.” He might indeed.
This practical intensity of Dickens is worth our dwelling on,
because it illustrates an elementary antithesis in his character, or
what appears as an antithesis in our modern popular psychology.
We are always talking about strong men against weak men; but
Dickens was not only both a weak man and a strong man, he was a
very weak man and also a very strong man. He was everything that
we currently call a weak man; he was a man hung on wires; he was
a man who might at any moment cry like a child; he was so sensitive
to criticism that one may say that he lacked a skin; he was so
nervous that he allowed great tragedies in his life to arise only out of
nerves. But in the matter where all ordinary strong men are
miserably weak—in the matter of concentrated toil and clear purpose
and unconquerable worldly courage—he was like a straight sword.
Mrs. Carlyle, who in her human epithets often hit the right nail so that
it rang, said of him once, “He has a face made of steel.” This was
probably felt in a flash when she saw, in some social crowd, the
clear, eager face of Dickens cutting through those near him like a
knife. Any people who had met him from year to year would each
year have found a man weakly troubled about his worldly decline;
and each year they would have found him higher up in the world. His
was a character very hard for any man of slow and placable
temperament to understand; he was the character whom anybody
can hurt and nobody can kill.
When he began to report in the House of Commons he was still
only nineteen. His father, who had been released from his prison a
short time before Charles had been released from his, had also
become, among many other things, a reporter. But old John Dickens
could enjoy doing anything without any particular aspiration after
doing it well. But Charles was of a very different temper. He was, as I
have said, consumed with an enduring and almost angry thirst to
excel. He learnt shorthand with a dark self-devotion as if it were a
sacred hieroglyph. Of this self-instruction, as of everything else, he
has left humorous and illuminating phrases. He describes how, after
he had learnt the whole exact alphabet, “there then appeared a
procession of new horrors, called arbitrary characters—the most
despotic characters I have ever known; who insisted, for instance,
that a thing like the beginning of a cobweb meant ‘expectation,’ and
that a pen-and-ink skyrocket stood for ‘disadvantageous.’” He
concludes, “It was almost heartbreaking.” But it is significant that
somebody else, a colleague of his, concluded, “There never was
such a shorthand writer.”
Dickens succeeded in becoming a shorthand writer; succeeded
in becoming a reporter; succeeded ultimately in becoming a highly
effective journalist. He was appointed as a reporter of the speeches
in Parliament, first by The True Sun, then by The Mirror of
Parliament, and last by The Morning Chronicle. He reported the
speeches very well, and if we must analyze his internal opinions,
much better than they deserved. For it must be remembered that this
lad went into the reporter’s gallery full of the triumphant Radicalism
which was then the rising tide of the world. He was, it must be
confessed, very little overpowered by the dignity of the Mother of
Parliaments: he regarded the House of Commons much as he
regarded the House of Lords, as a sort of venerable joke. It was,
perhaps, while he watched, pale with weariness from the reporter’s
gallery, that there sank into him a thing that never left him, his
unfathomable contempt for the British Constitution. Then perhaps he
heard from the Government benches the immortal apologies of the
Circumlocution Office. “Then would the noble lord or right
honourable gentleman, in whose department it was to defend the
Circumlocution Office, put an orange in his pocket, and make a
regular field-day of the occasion. Then would he come down to that
house with a slap upon the table and meet the honourable
gentleman foot to foot. Then would he be there to tell that
honourable gentleman that the Circumlocution Office was not only
blameless in this matter, but was commendable in this matter, was
extollable to the skies in this matter. Then would he be there to tell
that honourable gentleman that although the Circumlocution Office
was invariably right, and wholly right, it never was so right as in this
matter. Then would he be there to tell the honourable gentleman that
it would have been more to his honour, more to his credit, more to
his good taste, more to his good sense, more to half the dictionary of
common-places if he had left the Circumlocution Office alone and
never approached this matter. Then would he keep one eye upon a
coach or crammer from the Circumlocution Office below the bar, and
smash the honourable gentleman with the Circumlocution Office
account of this matter. And although one of two things always
happened; namely, either that the Circumlocution Office had nothing
to say, and said it, or that it had something to say of which the noble
lord or right honourable gentleman blundered one half and forgot the
other; the Circumlocution Office was always voted immaculate by an
accommodating majority.” We are now generally told that Dickens
has destroyed these abuses, and that this is no longer a true picture
of public life. Such, at any rate, is the Circumlocution Office account
of this matter. But Dickens as a good Radical would, I fancy, much
prefer that we should continue his battle than that we should
celebrate his triumph; especially when it has not come. England is
still ruled by the great Barnacle family. Parliament is still ruled by the
great Barnacle trinity—the solemn old Barnacle, who knew that the
Circumlocution Office was a protection, the sprightly young Barnacle
who knew that it was a fraud, and the bewildered young Barnacle
who knew nothing about it. From these three types our Cabinets are
still exclusively recruited. People talk of the tyrannies and anomalies
which Dickens denounced as things of the past like the Star
Chamber. They believe that the days of the old stupid optimism and
the old brutal indifference are gone for ever. In truth, this very belief
is only the continuance of the old stupid optimism and the old brutal
indifference. We believe in a free England and a pure England,
because we still believe in the Circumlocution Office account of this
matter. Undoubtedly our serenity is wide-spread. We believe that
England is really reformed, we believe that England is really
democratic, we believe that English politics are free from corruption.
But this general satisfaction of ours does not show that Dickens has
beaten the Barnacles. It only shows that the Barnacles have beaten
Dickens.
It cannot be too often said, then, that we must read into young
Dickens and his works this old Radical tone towards institutions.
That tone was a sort of happy impatience. And when Dickens had to
listen for hours to the speech of the noble lord in defence of the
Circumlocution Office, when, that is, he had to listen to what he
regarded as the last vaporings of a vanishing oligarchy, the
impatience rather predominated over the happiness. His incurably
restless nature found more pleasure in the wandering side of
journalism. He went about wildly in post-chaises to report political
meetings for the Morning Chronicle. “And what gentlemen they were
to serve,” he exclaimed, “in such things at the old Morning Chronicle.
Great or small it did not matter. I have had to charge for half a dozen
breakdowns in half a dozen times as many miles. I have had to
charge for the damage of a great-coat from the drippings of a blazing
wax candle, in writing through the smallest hours of the night in a
swift flying carriage and pair.” And again, “I have often transcribed for
the printer from my shorthand notes important public speeches in
which the strictest accuracy was required, and a mistake in which
would have been to a young man severely compromising, writing on
the palm of my hand, by the light of a dark lantern, in a post-chaise
and four, galloping through a wild country and through the dead of
the night, at the then surprising rate of fifteen miles an hour.” The
whole of Dickens’s life goes with the throb of that nocturnal gallop.
All its real wildness shot through with an imaginative wickedness he
afterwards uttered in the drive of Jonas Chuzzlewit through the
storm.
All this time, and indeed from a time of which no measure can be
taken, the creative part of his mind had been in a stir or even a fever.
While still a small boy he had written for his own amusement some
sketches of queer people he had met; notably, one of his uncle’s
barber, whose principal hobby was pointing out what Napoleon ought
to have done in the matter of military tactics. He had a note-book full
of such sketches. He had sketches not only of persons, but of places
which were to him almost more personal than persons. In the
December of 1833 he published one of these fragments in the Old
Monthly Magazine. This was followed by nine others in the same
paper, and when the paper (which was a romantically Radical
venture, run by a veteran soldier of Bolivar) itself collapsed, Dickens
continued the series in the Evening Chronicle, an off-shoot of the
morning paper of the same name. These were the pieces afterwards
published and known as the “Sketches by Boz”; and with them
Dickens enters literature. He also enters many other things about
this time; he enters manhood, and among other things marriage. A
friend of his on the Chronicle, George Hogarth, had several
daughters. With all of them Dickens appears to have been on terms
of great affection. This sketch is wholly literary, and I do not feel it
necessary to do more than touch upon such incidents as his
marriage, just as I shall do no more than touch upon the tragedy that
ultimately overtook it. But it may be suggested here that the final
misfortunes were in some degree due to the circumstances
attending the original action. A very young man fighting his way, and
excessively poor, with no memories for years past that were not
monotonous and mean, and with his strongest and most personal
memories quite ignominious and unendurable, was suddenly thrown
into the society of a whole family of girls. I think it does not overstate
his weakness, and I think it partly constitutes his excuse, to say that
he fell in love with all of them. As sometimes happens in the
undeveloped youth, an abstract femininity simply intoxicated him.
And again, I think we shall not be mistakenly accused of harshness if
we put the point in this way; that by a kind of accident he got hold of
the wrong sister. In what came afterwards he was enormously to
blame. But I do not think that his was a case of cold division from a
woman whom he had once seriously and singly loved. He had been
bewildered in a burning haze, I will not say even of first love, but of
first flirtations. His wife’s sisters stimulated him before he fell in love
with his wife; and they continued to stimulate him long after he had
quarrelled with her for ever. This view is strikingly supported by all
the details of his attitude towards all the other members of the
sacred house of Hogarth. One of the sisters remained, of course, his
dearest friend till death. Another who had died, he worshipped as a
saint, and he always asked to be buried in her grave. He was
married on April 2, 1836. Forster remarks that a few days before the
announcement of their marriage in the Times, the same paper
contained another announcement that on the 31st would be
published the first number of a work called “The Posthumous Papers
of the Pickwick Club.” It is the beginning of his career.
The “Sketches,” apart from splendid splashes of humour here
and there, are not manifestations of the man of genius. We might
almost say that this book is one of the few books by Dickens which
would not, standing alone, have made his fame. And yet standing
alone it did make his fame. His contemporaries could see a new
spirit in it, where we, familiar with the larger fruits of that spirit, can
only see a continuation of the prosaic and almost wooden wit of the
comic books of that day. But in any case we should hardly look in the
man’s first book for the fulness of his contribution to letters. Youth is
almost everything else, but it is hardly ever original. We read of
young men bursting on the old world with a new message. But youth
in actual experience is the period of imitation and even obedience.
Subjectively its emotions may be furious and headlong; but its only
external outcome is a furious imitation and a headlong obedience.
As we grow older we learn the special thing we have to do. As a man
goes on towards the grave he discovers gradually a philosophy he
can really call fresh, a style he can really call his own, and as he
becomes an older man he becomes a newer writer. Ibsen, in his
youth, wrote almost classic plays about vikings; it was in his old age
that he began to break windows and throw fireworks. The only fault,
it was said, of Browning’s first poems was that they had “too much
beauty of imagery, and too little wealth of thought.” The only fault,
that is, of Browning’s first poems, was that they were not Browning’s.
In one way, however, the “Sketches by Boz” do stand out very
symbolically in the life of Dickens. They constitute in a manner the
dedication of him to his especial task; the sympathetic and yet
exaggerated painting of the poorer middle-class. He was to make
men feel that this dull middle-class was actually a kind of elf-land.
But here, again, the work is rude and undeveloped; and this is
shown in the fact that it is a great deal more exaggerative than it is
sympathetic. We are not, of course, concerned with the kind of
people who say that they wish that Dickens was more refined. If
those people are ever refined it will be by fire. But there is in this
earliest work, an element which almost vanished in the later ones, an
element which is typical of the middle-classes in England, and which
is in a more real sense to be called vulgar. I mean that in these little
farces there is a trace, in the author as well as in the characters, of
that petty sense of social precedence, that hub-hub of little unheard-
of oligarchies, which is the only serious sin of the bourgeoisie of
Britain. It may seem pragmatical, for example, to instance such a
rowdy farce as the story of Horatio Sparkins, which tells how a tuft-
hunting family entertained a rhetorical youth thinking he was a lord,
and found he was a draper’s assistant. No doubt they were very
snobbish in thinking that a lord must be eloquent; but we cannot help
feeling that Dickens is almost equally snobbish in feeling it so very
funny that a draper’s assistant should be eloquent. A free man, one
would think, would despise the family quite as much if Horatio had
been a peer. Here, and here only, there is just a touch of the
vulgarity, of the only vulgarity of the world out of which Dickens
came. For the only element of lowness that there really is in our
populace is exactly that they are full of superiorities and very
conscious of class. Shades, imperceptible to the eyes of others, but
as hard and haughty as a Brahmin caste, separate one kind of
charwoman from another kind of charwoman. Dickens was destined
to show with inspired symbolism all the immense virtues of the
democracy. He was to show them as the most humorous part of our
civilization; which they certainly are. He was to show them as the
most promptly and practically compassionate part of our civilization;
which they certainly are. The democracy has a hundred exuberant
good qualities; the democracy has only one outstanding sin—it is not
democratic.
 CHAPTER IV
“THE PICKWICK PAPERS”

Round the birth of “Pickwick” broke one of those literary quarrels

that were too common in the life of Dickens. Such quarrels indeed
generally arose from some definite mistake or misdemeanour on the
part of somebody else; but they were also made possible by an
indefinite touchiness and susceptibility in Dickens himself. He was so
sensitive on points of personal authorship and responsibility that
even his sacred sense of humour deserted him. He turned people
into mortal enemies whom he might have turned very easily into
immortal jokes. It was not that he was lawless: in a sense it was that
he was too legal; but he did not understand the principle of de
minimis non curat lex. Anybody could draw him; any fool could make
a fool of him. Any obscure madman who chose to say that he had
written the whole of “Martin Chuzzlewit”; any penny-a-liner who
chose to say that Dickens wore no shirt collar could call forth the
most passionate and public denials as of a man pleading “not guilty”
to witchcraft or high treason. Hence the letters of Dickens are filled
with a certain singular type of quarrels and complaints, quarrels and
complaints in which one cannot say that he was on the wrong side,
but merely that even in being on the right side he was in the wrong
place. He was not only a generous man, he was even a just man; to
have made against anybody a charge or claim which was unfair
would have been insupportable to him. His weakness was that he
found the unfair claim or charge, however small, equally
insupportable when brought against himself. No one can say of him
that he was often wrong; we can only say of him as of many
pugnacious people, that he was too often right.
 The incidents attending the inauguration of the “Pickwick
Papers” are not, perhaps, a perfect example of this trait, because
Dickens was here a hand-to-mouth journalist, and the blow might
possibly have been more disabling than those struck at him in his
days of triumph. But all through those days of triumph, and to the
day of his death, Dickens took this old tea-cup tempest with the most
terrible gravity, drew up declarations, called witnesses, preserved
pulverizing documents, and handed on to his children the forgotten
folly as if it had been a Highland feud. Yet the unjust claim made on
him was so much more ridiculous even than it was unjust, that it
seems strange that he should have remembered it for a month
except for his amusement. The facts are simple and familiar to most
people. The publishers—Chapman & Hall—wished to produce some
kind of serial with comic illustrations by a popular caricaturist named
Seymour. This artist was chiefly famous for his rendering of the
farcical side of sport, and to suit this specialty it was very vaguely
suggested to Dickens by the publishers that he should write about a
Nimrod Club, or some such thing, a club of amateur sportsmen,
foredoomed to perpetual ignominies. Dickens objected in substance
upon two very sensible grounds—first, that sporting sketches were
stale; and second, that he knew nothing about sport. He changed the
idea to that of a general club for travel and investigation, the
Pickwick Club, and only retained one fated sportsman, Mr. Winkle,
the melancholy remnant of the Nimrod Club that never was. The first
seven pictures appeared with the signature of Seymour and the
letterpress of Dickens, and in them Winkle and his woes were fairly,
but not extraordinarily prominent. Before the eighth picture appeared
Seymour had blown his brains out. After a brief interval of the
employment of a man named Buss, Dickens obtained the assistance
of Hoblot K. Brown whom we all call “Phiz,” and may almost, in a
certain sense, be said to have gone into partnership with him. They
were as suited to each other and to the common creation of a unique
thing as Gilbert and Sullivan. No other illustrator ever created the
true Dickens characters with the precise and correct quantum of
exaggeration. No other illustrator ever breathed the true Dickens
atmosphere, in which clerks are clerks and yet at the same time
elves.
 To the tame mind the above affair does not seem to offer
anything very promising in the way of a row. But Seymour’s widow
managed to evolve out of it the proposition that somehow or other
her husband had written “Pickwick,” or, at least, had been
responsible for the genius and success of it. It does not appear that
she had anything at all resembling a reason for this opinion except
the unquestionable fact that the publishers had started with the idea
of employing Seymour. This was quite true, and Dickens (who over
and above his honesty was far too quarrelsome a man not to try to
keep in the right, and who showed a sort of fierce carefulness in
telling the truth in such cases) never denied it or attempted to
conceal it. It was quite true, that at the beginning, instead of
Seymour being employed to illustrate Dickens, Dickens may be said
to have been employed to illustrate Seymour. But that Seymour
invented anything in the letter-press large or small, that he invented
either the outline of Mr. Pickwick’s character or the number of Mr.
Pickwick’s cabman, that he invented either the story, or so much as a
semi-colon in the story was not only never proved, but was never
very lucidly alleged. Dickens fills his letters with all that there is to be
said against Mrs. Seymour’s idea; it is not very clear whether there
was ever anything definitely said for it.
Upon the mere superficial fact and law of the affair, Dickens
ought to have been superior to this silly business. But in a much
deeper and a much more real sense he ought to have been superior
to it. It did not really touch him or his greatness at all, even as an
abstract allegation. If Seymour had started the story, had provided
Dickens with his puppets, Tupman or Jingle, Dickens would have still
have been Dickens and Seymour only Seymour. As a matter of fact,
it happened to be a contemptible lie, but it would have been an
equally contemptible truth. For the fact is that the greatness of
Dickens and especially the greatness of Pickwick is not of a kind that
could be affected by somebody else suggesting the first idea. It
could not be affected by somebody else writing the first chapter. If it
could be shown that another man had suggested to Hawthorne (let
us say) the primary conception of the “Scarlet Letter,” Hawthorne
who worked it out would still be an exquisite workman; but he would
be by so much less a creator. But in a case like Pickwick there is a
simple test. If Seymour gave Dickens the main idea of Pickwick,
what was it? There is no primary conception of Pickwick for any one
to suggest. Dickens not only did not get the general plan from
Seymour, he did not get it at all. In Pickwick, and, indeed, in Dickens,
generally it is in the details that the author is creative, it is in the
details that he is vast. The power of the book lies in the perpetual
torrent of ingenious and inventive treatment; the theme (at least at
the beginning) simply does not exist. The idea of Tupman, the fat
lady-killer, is in itself quite dreary and vulgar; it is the detailed
Tupman, as he is developed, who is unexpectedly amusing. The
idea of Winkle, the clumsy sportsman, is in itself quite stale; it is as
he goes on repeating himself that he becomes original. We hear of
men whose imagination can touch with magic the dull facts of our
life, but Dickens’s yet more indomitable fancy could touch with magic
even our dull fiction. Before we are halfway through the book the
stock characters of dead and damned farces astonish us like
splendid strangers.
Seymour’s claim, then, viewed symbolically was even a
compliment. It was true in spirit that Dickens obtained (or might have
obtained) the start of Pickwick from somebody else, from anybody
else. For he had a more gigantic energy than the energy of the
intense artist, the energy which is prepared to write something. He
had the energy which is prepared to write anything. He could have
finished any man’s tale. He could have breathed a mad life into any
man’s characters. If it had been true that Seymour had planned out
Pickwick, if Seymour had fixed the chapters and named and
numbered the characters, his slave would have shown even in these
shackles such a freedom as would have shaken the world. If Dickens
had been forced to make his incidents out of a chapter in a child’s
reading-book, or the names in a scrap of newspaper, he would have
turned them in ten pages into creatures of his own. Seymour, as I
say, was in a manner right in spirit. Dickens would at this time get his
materials from anywhere, in the sense that he cared little what
materials they were. He would not have stolen; but if he had stolen
he would never have imitated. The power which he proceeded at
once to exhibit was the one power in letters which literally cannot be
imitated, the primary inexhaustible creative energy, the enormous
prodigality of genius which no one but another genius could parody.
To claim to have originated an idea of Dickens is like claiming to
have contributed a glass of water to Niagara. Wherever this stream
or that stream started the colossal cataract of absurdity went roaring
night and day. The volume of his invention overwhelmed all doubt of
his inventiveness; Dickens was evidently a great man; unless he was
a thousand men.
The actual circumstances of the writing and publishing of
“Pickwick” show that while Seymour’s specific claim was absurd,
Dickens’s indignant exactitude about every jot and tittle of authorship
was also inappropriate and misleading. “The Pickwick Papers,” when
all is said and done, did emerge out of a haze of suggestions and
proposals in which more than one person was involved. The
publishers failed to base the story on a Nimrod Club, but they
succeeded in basing it on a club. Seymour, by virtue of his
idiosyncrasy, if he did not create, brought about the creation of Mr.
Winkle. Seymour sketched Mr. Pickwick as a tall, thin man. Mr.
Chapman (apparently without any word from Dickens) boldly turned
him into a short, fat man. Chapman took the type from a corpulent
old dandy named Foster, who wore tights and gaiters and lived at
Richmond. In this sense were we affected by this idle aspect of the
thing we might call Chapman the real originator of “Pickwick.” But as
I have suggested, originating “Pickwick” is not the point. It was quite
easy to originate “Pickwick.” The difficulty was to write it.
However such things may be, there can be no question of the
result of this chaos. In “The Pickwick Papers” Dickens sprang
suddenly from a comparatively low level to a very high one. To the
level of “Sketches by Boz” he never afterwards descended. To the
level of “The Pickwick Papers” it is doubtful if he ever afterwards
rose. “Pickwick,” indeed, is not a good novel; but it is not a bad
novel, for it is not a novel at all. In one sense, indeed, it is something
nobler than a novel, for no novel with a plot and a proper termination
could emit that sense of everlasting youth—a sense as of the gods
gone wandering in England. This is not a novel, for all novels have
an end; and “Pickwick,” properly speaking, has no end—he is equal
unto the angels. The point at which, as a fact, we find the printed
matter terminates is not an end in any artistic sense of the word.
Even as a boy I believed there were some more pages that were
torn out of my copy, and I am looking for them still. The book might
have been cut short anywhere else. It might have been cut short
after Mr. Pickwick was released by Mr. Nupkins, or after Mr. Pickwick
was fished out of the water, or at a hundred other places. And we
should still have known that this was not really the story’s end. We
should have known that Mr. Pickwick was still having the same high
adventures on the same high roads. As it happens, the book ends
after Mr. Pickwick has taken a house in the neighbourhood of
Dulwich. But we know he did not stop there. We know he broke out,
that he took again the road of the high adventures; we know that if
we take it ourselves in any acre of England, we may come suddenly
upon him in a lane.
But this relation of “Pickwick” to the strict form of fiction demands
a further word, which should indeed be said in any case before the
consideration of any or all of the Dickens tales. Dickens’s work is not
to be reckoned in novels at all. Dickens’s work is to be reckoned
always by characters, sometimes by groups, oftener by episodes,
but never by novels. You cannot discuss whether “Nicholas Nickleby”
is a good novel, or whether “Our Mutual Friend” is a bad novel.
Strictly, there is no such novel as “Nicholas Nickleby.” There is no
such novel as “Our Mutual Friend.” They are simply lengths cut from
the flowing and mixed substance called Dickens—a substance of
which any given length will be certain to contain a given proportion of
brilliant and of bad stuff. You can say, according to your opinions,
“the Crummles part is perfect,” or “the Boffins are a mistake,” just as
a man watching a river go by him could count here a floating flower,
and there a streak of scum. But you cannot artistically divide the
output into books. The best of his work can be found in the worst of
his works. “The Tale of Two Cities” is a good novel; “Little Dorrit” is
not a good novel. But the description of “The Circumlocution Office”
in “Little Dorrit” is quite as good as the description of “Tellson’s Bank”
in “The Tale of Two Cities.” “The Old Curiosity Shop” is not so good
as “David Copperfield,” but Swiveller is quite as good as Micawber.
Nor is there any reason why these superb creatures, as a general
rule, should be in one novel any more than another. There is no
reason why Sam Weller, in the course of his wanderings, should not
wander into “Nicholas Nickleby.” There is no reason why Major
Bagstock, in his brisk way, should not walk straight out of “Dombey
and Son” and straight into “Martin Chuzzlewit.” To this generalization
some modification should be added. “Pickwick” stands by itself, and
has even a sort of unity in not pretending to unity. “David
Copperfield,” in a less degree, stands by itself, as being the only
book in which Dickens wrote of himself; and “The Tale of Two Cities”
stands by itself as being the only book in which Dickens slightly
altered himself. But as a whole, this should be firmly grasped, that
the units of Dickens, the primary elements, are not the stories, but
the characters who affect the stories—or, more often still, the
characters who do not affect the stories.
This is a plain matter; but, unless it be stated and felt, Dickens
may be greatly misunderstood and greatly underrated. For not only
is his whole machinery directed to facilitating the self-display of
certain characters, but something more deep and more unmodern
still is also true of him. It is also true that all the moving machinery
exists only to display entirely static character. Things in the Dickens
story shift and change only in order to give us glimpses of great
characters that do not change at all. If we had a sequel of Pickwick
ten years afterwards, Pickwick would be exactly the same age. We
know he would not have fallen into that strange and beautiful second
childhood which soothed and simplified the end of Colonel
Newcome. Newcome, throughout the book, is in an atmosphere of
time: Pickwick, throughout the book, is not. This will probably be
taken by most modern people as praise of Thackeray and dispraise
of Dickens. But this only shows how few modern people understand
Dickens. It also shows how few understand the faiths and the fables
of mankind. The matter can only be roughly stated in one way.
Dickens did not strictly make a literature; he made a mythology.
For a few years our corner of Western Europe has had a fancy
for this thing we call fiction; that is, for writing down our own lives or
similar lives in order to look at them. But though we call it fiction, it
differs from older literatures chiefly in being less fictitious. It imitates
not only life, but the limitations of life; it not only reproduces life, it
reproduces death. But outside us, in every other country, in every
other age, there has been going on from the beginning a more
fictitious kind of fiction. I mean the kind now called folklore, the
literature of the people. Our modern novels, which deal with men as
they are, are chiefly produced by a small and educated section of the
society. But this other literature deals with men greater than they are
—with demi-gods and heroes; and that is far too important a matter
to be trusted to the educated classes. The fashioning of these
portents is a popular trade, like ploughing or bricklaying; the men
who made hedges, the men who made ditches, were the men who
made deities. Men could not elect their kings, but they could elect
their gods. So we find ourselves faced with a fundamental contrast
between what is called fiction and what is called folklore. The one
exhibits an abnormal degree of dexterity operating within our daily
limitations; the other exhibits quite normal desires extended beyond
those limitations. Fiction means the common things as seen by the
uncommon people. Fairy tales mean the uncommon things as seen
by the common people.
As our world advances through history towards its present
epoch, it becomes more specialist, less democratic, and folklore
turns gradually into fiction. But it is only slowly that the old elfin fire
fades into the light of common realism. For ages after our characters
have dressed up in the clothes of mortals they betray the blood of
the gods. Even our phraseology is full of relics of this. When a
modern novel is devoted to the bewilderments of a weak young clerk
who cannot decide which woman he wants to marry, or which new
religion he believes in, we still give this knock-kneed cad the name of
“the hero”—the name which is the crown of Achilles. The popular
preference for a story with “a happy ending” is not, or at least was
not, a mere sweet-stuff optimism; it is the remains of the old idea of
the triumph of the dragon-slayer, the ultimate apotheosis of the man
beloved of heaven.
But there is another and more intangible trace of this fading
supernaturalism—a trace very vivid to the reader, but very elusive to
the critic. It is a certain air of endlessness in the episodes, even in
the shortest episodes—a sense that, although we leave them, they
still go on. Our modern attraction to short stories is not an accident of
form; it is the sign of a real sense of fleetingness and fragility; it
means that existence is only an impression, and, perhaps, only an
illusion. A short story of to-day has the air of a dream; it has the
irrevocable beauty of a falsehood; we get a glimpse of grey streets of
London or red plains of India, as in an opium vision; we see people,
—arresting people, with fiery and appealing faces. But when the
story is ended, the people are ended. We have no instinct of
anything ultimate and enduring behind the episodes. The moderns,
in a word, describe life in short stories because they are possessed
with the sentiment that life itself is an uncommonly short story, and
perhaps not a true one. But in this elder literature, even in the comic
literature (indeed, especially in the comic literature), the reverse is
true. The characters are felt to be fixed things of which we have
fleeting glimpses; that is, they are felt to be divine. Uncle Toby is
talking for ever, as the elves are dancing for ever. We feel that
whenever we hammer on the house of Falstaff, Falstaff will be at
home. We feel it as a Pagan would feel that, if a cry broke the
silence after ages of unbelief, Apollo would still be listening in his
temple. These writers may tell short stories, but we feel they are only
parts of a long story. And herein lies the peculiar significance, the
peculiar sacredness even, of penny dreadfuls and the common
printed matter made for our errand-boys. Here in dim and desperate
forms, under the ban of our base culture, stormed at by silly
magistrates, sneered at by silly schoolmasters,—here is the old
popular literature still popular; here is the unmistakable
voluminousness, the thousand and one tales of Dick Deadshot, like
the thousand and one tales of Robin Hood. Here is the splendid and
static boy, the boy who remains a boy through a thousand volumes
and a thousand years. Here in mean alleys and dim shops,
shadowed and shamed by the police, mankind is still driving its dark
trade in heroes. And elsewhere, and in all other ages, in braver
fashion, under cleaner skies the same eternal tale-telling goes on,
and the whole mortal world is a factory of immortals.
Dickens was a mythologist rather than a novelist; he was the last
of the mythologists, and perhaps the greatest. He did not always
manage to make his characters men, but he always managed, at the
least, to make them gods. They are creatures like Punch or Father
Christmas. They live statically, in a perpetual summer of being
themselves. It was not the aim of Dickens to show the effect of time
and circumstance upon a character; it was not even his aim to show
the effect of a character on time and circumstance. It is worth
remark, in passing, that whenever he tried to describe change in a
character, he made a mess of it, as in the repentance of Dombey or
the apparent deterioration of Boffin. It was his aim to show character
hung in a kind of happy void, in a world apart from time—yes, and
essentially apart from circumstance, though the phrase may seem
odd in connection with the godlike horse-play of “Pickwick.” But all
the Pickwickian events, wild as they often are, were only designed to
display the greater wildness of souls, or sometimes merely to bring
the reader within touch, so to speak, of that wildness. The author
would have fired Mr. Pickwick out of a cannon to get him to Wardle’s
by Christmas; he would have taken the roof off to drop him into Bob
Sawyer’s party. But once put Pickwick at Wardle’s, with his punch
and a group of gorgeous personalities, and nothing will move him
from his chair. Once he is at Sawyer’s party, he forgets how he got
there; he forgets Mrs. Bardell and all his story. For the story was but
an incantation to call up a god, and the god (Mr. Jack Hopkins) is
present in divine power. Once the great characters are face to face,
the ladder by which they climbed is forgotten and falls down, the
structure of the story drops to pieces, the plot is abandoned, the
other characters deserted at every kind of crisis; the whole crowded
thoroughfare of the tale is blocked by two or three talkers, who take
their immortal ease as if they were already in Paradise. For they do
not exist for the story; the story exists for them; and they know it.
To every man alive, one must hope, it has in some manner
happened that he has talked with his more fascinating friends round
a table on some night when all the numerous personalities unfolded
themselves like great tropical flowers. All fell into their parts as in
some delightful impromptu play. Every man was more himself than
he had ever been in this vale of tears. Every man was a beautiful
caricature of himself. The man who has known such nights will
understand the exaggerations of “Pickwick.” The man who has not
known such nights will not enjoy “Pickwick” nor (I imagine) heaven.