The Artist as Sob Sister

CHARLES DICKENS' BEST STORIES (669 pp.)--Edited by Morton Dauwen Zabel --Hanover House ($4.95).

A reader may pay for an author's talent and get only his company. Charles Dickens is good company, but this collection of short stories, articles, sketches and short novels displays few of his virtues and almost all of his melodramatic devices. It is chockablock with phantoms, haunts, ominous coincidences, infants lowered into tiny graves to ascend as tiny angels, would-be suicides snatched back at the dark river's edge, pregnant maidens abandoned by heartless cads. This is the Dickens who wrung out Victorian soap opera's dampest hour, and posted "cry now" signs at every chapter break.

Handkerchiefs Ready. A typical sob-coaxer is entitled Doctor Marigold. No doctor. Marigold is actually an itinerant peddler hawking his household wares from the footboard of his cart. His termagant wife cruelly beats their little daughter. During one of his spiels to the assembled yokelry, the wan and feverish tot dies in his arms. Turning on his wife, Marigold cries "Oh woman, woman, you'll never catch my little Sophy by her hair again, for she has flown away from you!" A paragraph later, Mrs. Marigold commits suicide (the river route). Handkerchiefs must be kept at the ready, for Marigold adopts a deaf-mute girl who is being cuffed and starved by a bestial circus master.

As the girl grows older, to Marigold's dismay she acquires a wooer. But in sign language the tearful girl rebuffs her suitor, telling him that she must repay the love and kindness of her surrogate father by being his companion and comforter. Tears in his own eyes, old Marigold proclaims the lovers man and wife with his blessing. Five years go by, when a tiny hand turns the doorknob of the cart door, followed by dark eyes and curly locks. "Grandfather," says the little girl. "She can speak!" cries Marigold, as "the happy and yet pitying tears fell rolling down [his] face."

Mere Mannerisms. Half a dozen variations on this theme help to dispel any notion of Dickens as irrepressibly comic. Other "best stories" of Editor Zabel's choosing include second-rate ghost thrillers and third-rate detective stories. At novel length, Dickens could create memorable caricatures, e.g., Mr. Micawber, Uriah Heep, Madame Defarge. In the short stories, his characters are mere mannerisms. In the novels, Mr. Pickwick and Sam Weller produce idiosyncratic dialogue; in the short stories there is only an endless chatty din.

The best section of the book consists of a dozen of the Boz sketches, where Dickens roves through the gin shops, the courts, the dawn-lit and night-curtained alleys of London with the gusto of a tourist and the unsentimental eye of a bobby covering his beat. But the rest of Charles Dickens' Best Stories is no match for the memory of Lionel Barrymore playing Scrooge.

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