Who Can Escape Grandfather?

CHARLES DICKENS AND EARLY VICTORIAN ENGLAND (308 pp.)--R. J. Cruikshank--Chanticleer ($4.50).

It may be legal to call a man a Victorian, but it is always safer to say it with a smile. No word in the language is so pointed a synonym for pious smugness and stuffy taste. Victoria became Queen in 1837, died in 1901. During the course of her long reign the British Empire reached the peak of its prestige and power; for much of it the English working classes lived at a level close to brutishness. It was a time of tremendous literary output when many of the great English novels were written, but in 1844 one-third of all English bridegrooms and nearly half of the brides were unable to write their names in the marriage register. A proper lady dared not sew on a button on Sunday, but Queen Victoria, assured by an evangelical lady in waiting that once in paradise she could converse with David, King of Israel, coldly replied: "King David is not a person I would wish to meet."

Robin Cruikshank, liberal editor of London's News Chronicle, is plainly fascinated by the Victorians and isn't afraid to speak up for them. In Charles Dickens and Early Victorian England he frankly admits their most irritating faults: "Above all, they lack charm . . . They were, on the whole, Philistines, they were, in the mass, barbarians. They could be brutally insensitive to women, children, servants and artists . . . They left their descendants some damnable inheritances . . ." But Author Cruikshank wouldn't dream of disowning his Victorian background: "Who, in the end, can escape his father and grandfather?"

Author Cruikshank's title is a casual misnomer for a readable, informed but casually thrown together book. Its promise is interesting and original: to use the novels of Charles Dickens as a reference ground Dickens' for contemporaries, Cruikshank's especially comments on the great novelist's collection of lower-middle-class men aspiring to the solid comforts and well-heeled righteousness of middle-class men.

It turns out a medley of disconnected chapters on the Victorian mind and man ners that gets farther & farther away from Dickens and his world and finally distances him altogether.

What it does on the way, with the help of illustrations that often speak more directly than the text, is to catalogue the extremes of greed and generosity, piety and hypocrisy, good humor and smugness that were the bench marks of an epoch.

The Bishop of London might go over railway statistics hoping to prove that the Almighty decreed more crashes for Sunday travelers. Proper people might be certain that "Time was money; amuse ments were sinful." But Author Cruikshank, taking the long view of history, is also aware that in two world wars the "piled-up riches[of the Victorians] were prodigally spent . . . that the grand children might live at all."

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