{"id":234,"date":"2013-04-16T22:26:24","date_gmt":"2013-04-16T21:26:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/neilsinyard.britishtelevisiondrama.org.uk\/?p=234"},"modified":"2024-10-17T07:14:32","modified_gmt":"2024-10-17T06:14:32","slug":"chaplin-and-dickens-some-reflections-on-the-influence-of-charles-dickens-on-the-cinematic-artistry-of-charlie-chaplin","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/neilsinyard.britishtelevisiondrama.org.uk\/?p=234","title":{"rendered":"Chaplin and Dickens: some reflections on the influence of Charles Dickens on the cinematic artistry of Charlie Chaplin"},"content":{"rendered":"

by NEIL SINYARD<\/p>\n

\"Sinyard_TheKid_2\"
\nCharlie Chaplin\u2019s autobiography was one of the publishing sensations of the decade when it appeared in 1964. He had been encouraged to write it by Graham Greene and some of the story was already well known; yet critics were taken aback by the quality of the writing and particularly by the painful and powerful evocation of his childhood, which made such an impression that just the childhood section of the book was later published as a separate work in its own right. Alistair Cooke spoke for many when he noted what he called \u2018an eerie similarity between the first sixty pages of Chaplin\u2019s Autobiography<\/em> and Oliver Twist<\/em>.\u2019 And he went on: \u2018As a reincarnation of everything spry and inquisitive and Cockney shrewd and invincibly alive and cunning, Chaplin was the young Dickens in the flesh\u2019.1<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n

\"Sinyard_Dickens\"
\nChaplin as the reincarnation of Dickens is an interesting thought. There is no doubt in my mind that Dickens was the most pronounced artistic influence on Chaplin\u2019s career. He had discovered Dickens before he could even read and even the origins of his showbiz career owed a lot to Dickens. Growing up in London, Chaplin had seen the actor Bransby Williams imitating Dickens characters like Uriah Heep, Bill Sykes and the old man in The Old Curiosity Shop<\/em> and it had ignited a love of the theatre and a fascination with literature. \u2018I wanted to know what was this immured mystery that lay hidden in books,\u2019 he wrote, \u2018these sepia Dickens characters that moved in such a strange Cruickshankian world. Although I could hardly read, I eventually bought a copy of Oliver Twist<\/em>.\u20192<\/a><\/sup> He was so enthralled with these Dickens characters that he began imitating Bransby Williams imitating them; and it was then that he was discovered and invited to make his stage debut. What is particularly intriguing about this is that Dickens as a boy used to console himself in the same way by impersonating favourite characters from novels he had read (particularly those of Fielding) and that his early ambition was a career on stage. To the end of his life he was a frustrated actor, liking nothing better than giving public readings of his description of the murder of Nancy in Oliver Twist<\/em> and then enquiring politely how many women in the audience had fainted.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\"Sinyard_Limelight\"
\nIn my view, Chaplin was to the 20th century what Dickens was to the 19th: both centuries unthinkable without them; both men comic\/poetic dramatists of quite unparalleled popularity who used satire, caricature and suspense to assault injustice. They were both artistic giants in their respective fields, but fascinatingly, giants in remarkably similar ways and for remarkably similar reasons. The parallels between their lives and personalities as well as their work are quite uncanny:<\/p>\n

Physically they were quite similar: both small and wiry.<\/p>\n

Temperamentally they were very alike: as a close friend of Chaplin\u2019s, Thomas Burke remarked, they were both \u2018querulous, self-centred, moody insecure men who, with all their success, remained vaguely dissatisfied with life.\u20193<\/a><\/sup> In both cases, this dissatisfaction lay rooted in a traumatic childhood never entirely exorcised but which permeated every aspect of their life and art. \u2018Even now,\u2019 said Dickens in his later years, \u2018famous and caressed and happy, I forget in my dreams that I have a dear wife and children; even that I am a man; and wander desolately back to that time of my life\u2019.4<\/a><\/sup> Chaplin too: \u2018I\u2019ve known humiliation,\u2019 he said, \u2018and humiliation is a thing you never forget. Poverty- the degradation and helplessness of it! I can\u2019t feel myself any different, at heart, from the unhappy and defeated men, the failures.\u20195<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n

\"Sinyard_ModernTimes_6\"
\nPerhaps because of their similarly traumatic childhoods (Dickens haunted by family debts, the threat of prison and his period in the blacking factory, Chaplin buffeted between workhouse and orphanage because of an absent father and a mentally unstable mother) they are made precociously aware of life\u2019s misfortunes, and, in response to this, they are similarly drawn to images of innocence in their work and lives, an innocence that they themselves have missed. One thinks of Dickens, in his work, with those child-women heroines, like Dora in his most autobiographical novel, David Copperfield<\/em>, or Little Dorrit, who seems to stay little, however old she gets, and, in his life, his association with Ellen Ternan when he\u2019s 45 and she\u2019s 18 which leads to his separation from his wife. Chaplin too, with his four marriages to teenage brides, culminating in his marriage to Oona O\u2019Neill (daughter of the great playwright Eugene O\u2019Neill), when he\u2019s 54 and she\u2019s 18, a marriage that actually turned out to be an extremely happy one. Their attitudes to women and their depiction of heroines seem to be a mixture of adoration and misogyny, deriving from mother figures whom they loved but by whom they also felt in some way betrayed. For example, in Dickens\u2019s case, when all the debts had been repaid and the family reunited, his mother had suggested that perhaps young Charles could remain at the blacking factory which he so hated rather than find some schooling; it is said that Dickens never quite forgave her for that. Similarly, Chaplin\u2019s love for his mother was always mixed with a frustration and anger at her mental illness, an anguish that she\u2019d not been able to protect him from a premature awareness of the harshness of the world (his father had abandoned the family when Charlie was seven).<\/p>\n

Similarly their popularity was quite unprecedented and it\u2019s interesting that when Chaplin\u2019s popularity was being discussed in the 1920s and 30s, Dickens was often invoked as a comparison. I always loved the story concerning Dickens\u2019 popularity which extended to a situation where, when British ships were coming into New York harbour, they were receiving frantic signals from the shore saying \u2018How is little Nell?\u2019 When Chaplin visited London in February,1931 for the premiere of City Lights<\/em>, The Times<\/em> wrote: \u2018Dickens knew something of popular enthusiasm, but could he have beheld the press of people gathered…in honour of Mr Chaplin, he might have rubbed his eyes in astonishment.\u20196<\/a><\/sup> It is said that, during one visit to London, Chaplin received 73,000 fan letters from the capital alone. His popularity was such that it became something of a psychopathological phenomenon, notably on an occasion on 12 November 1916 when Chaplin was allegedly spotted in 800 places at the same time.<\/p>\n

Their popularity cut across cultures, countries and class, and it might have delayed proper critical recognition of their stature, for in both cases their artistic reputations plummeted for a while after their deaths. Henry James thought Dickens superficial as later did F.R. Leavis (though he changed his mind in time for the centenary of Dickens\u2019s death): and George Henry Lewes was moved to observe that there probably never was a writer of so vast a popularity whose genius was so little appreciated by the critics. Still if the critics had their reservations about Dickens, they weren\u2019t shared by his peers and fellow novelists, such as Thackeray, Joyce, Conrad, Kafka and Dostoyevsky, who said that what kept him sane during his exile in Siberia was reading Pickwick Papers<\/em> and David Copperfield<\/em>. Similarly, if the critics really went for Chaplin after his death, calling his films old-fashioned, technically unadventurous and woefully sentimental, their reservations weren\u2019t shared by his peers and successors, such as Buster Keaton, Jean Renoir, Woody Allen, Francois Truffaut, Jean-luc Godard, and Federico Fellini, for whom Chaplin was \u2018the Adam from we\u2019re all descended\u2019. There was a nice comment from Sean French when he heard Barry Norman claim that Chaplin was over-rated: \u2018I felt as if a molehill had said that Mount Everest\u2019s reputation for height was undeserved.\u2019 <\/p>\n

\"Sinyard_ModernTimes_2a\"
\n\"Sinyard_ModernTimes_2b\"
\nThere are couple of extracts from Chaplin\u2019s movies that I now wish to examine for what I see as their Dickensian characteristics. The first is an extract from Chaplin\u2019s 1936 film, Modern Times<\/em>, and the Dickens comparison I have in mind is his novel, Hard Times<\/em>. It was published in 1851 and is one of his most terse, polemical works, particularly its savage critique of a Utilitarian approach to education, which prioritises Fact over Imagination and which sees children as potential economic units rather than as individuals whose innate creativity also needs to be nurtured and encouraged. (This might strike you as rather topical.) But another great theme of the novel is Industrialisation and the relation of men and women to machines and how this industrial drive, unless harnessed to some kind of humanity, could result in the depersonalisation\/mechanisation of the individual. The industrial town in Hard Times<\/em> is appropriately called Coketown, as if it is smothering and suffocating its inhabitants; and there is a great passage in the novel (the opening of Chapter X1 entitled \u2018No Way Out\u2019) about the industrial workplace and the relation of man to the machine, written in a style that wonderfully parodies the educational system he is also attacking: it\u2019s satirically statistical:<\/p>\n

\"Sinyard_ModernTimes_1\"<\/p>\n

So many hundred hands in this Mill; so many hundred horse Steam Power. It is known, to the force of a single pound weight, what the engine will do; but not all the calculators of the National Debt can tell me the capacity for good or evil, for love or hatred, for patriotism or discontent, for the decomposition of virtue into vice, or the reverse, at any single moment in the soul of one of these, its quiet servants, with the composed faces and the regulated actions. There is no mystery in it; there is an unfathomable mystery in the meanest of them, for ever.- <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\"Sinyard_ModernTimes_3\"
\nI think that\u2019s one of the great passages in Dickens. He\u2019s not idealising humanity (he\u2019s careful to balance \u2018good\u2019 OR \u2018evil\u2019, \u2018love\u2019 OR \u2018hatred\u2019 etc.) but he\u2019s still recognising and cherishing the rich complexity of humanity, even in – perhaps especially in – what he calls the \u2018soul… of its quiet servants\u2019. He goes on: \u2018There is no mystery in it [i.e. the engine, the machine]; there is a mystery in the meanest of them, for ever.\u2019 I\u2019m sure Chaplin would have responded to that. When his silent features were re-released during the sound era and he added a commentary, he would refer to the Tramp as \u2018The Little Fellow\u2019- and was heavily attacked for his so-called \u2018condescension\u2019- but what he was thinking of, I believe, in that phrase was precisely the equivalent of Dickens\u2019s \u2018the meanest of them\u2019, those people who are up against it, whom society marginalizes and whom governments sometimes do not even acknowledge as a statistic, but in whom (both Dickens and Chaplin would insist) there is still a mystery and depth that deserve recognition. The Tramp is the kind of figure Society would ignore or even disdain, but, as James Agee asserted in his classic essay on silent film comedy, \u2018Comedy\u2019s Greatest Era\u2019, the Tramp character in Chaplin\u2019s hands was \u2018as centrally representative of humanity, and as many-sided and mysterious as Hamlet\u2019.7<\/a><\/sup> In Modern Times<\/em>, the Tramp is an assembly-line worker who is being driven progressively mad by the repetitive routine of his job. In an early sequence in the film, an inventor has visited the plant with his revolutionary contraption: an automatic feeding-machine that will eliminate the lunch-hour (and hence accelerate production and maximise worker efficiency) by feeding the worker whilst he continues to work at his job. The manager is impressed but insists that the machine be tried out on one of the workers. Inevitably the Tramp is chosen for the demonstration, and chaos ensues, with the contraption attacking the man before self-destructing.
\n