AT LEAST IN ONE KEY RESPECT, DICKENS’S self-presentation was as contemporary readers would have wanted. Victorian readers were not really sure that a novelist’s profile was improved by exhibiting Victorian kinds of seriousness. Even though Dickens was labelled by Trollope as a radical, even though he might have seemed Utilitarian enough in showing the ‘captain of industry’ Mr Rouncewell facing up to the ancestrally privileged Sir Leicester Dedlock, even though he did at least as much as most other Victorian novelists to raise awareness of the condition of women, and even though he fiercely satirised several other aspects of the Victorian scheme of things, his moral and social criteria were not entirely stable. Well attuned to the ideological, cultural, and linguistic heterogeneity of the society in which he was working, he could opportunistically switch from one type of writer persona to another, and proposed correspondingly differing reader personae as well. Sometimes such variations could have struck readers as they moved from one novel to another. Although the sociocultural identity of the ‘new man’ Mr Bounderby in Hard Times is similar to that of the admirable Mr Rouncewell in Bleak House, readers were urged to enjoy Dickens’s ridicule of Bounderby, for reasons that would have been partly endorsed by Sir Leicester Dedlock. Then again, in just a single novel the various characters or caricatures could represent a whole range of contrasting viewpoints, few of which finally emerged as some sort of ‘truth’, but many of which readers were bound to try on for size. In Dombey and Son, both Dickens and his readers are positioned to judge Captain Cuttle’s simplicity by the standards of a genteel sophistication worthy of Mrs Skewton, while at the same time there is also an assessment to be made of Mrs Skewton’s artificiality against the benchmark of a ‘Wordsworthian’ naturalness such as Captain Cuttle’s.1¹ In short, the novels of Dickens, while pinpointing aspects of the world around him with unparalleled sharpness and engagement, showed relatively little zeal for an utter transformation of human life and society along some sustained spiritual or ethical trajectory. His work gave rise to plenty of discussion, but he did not pretend to be a Victorian sage – a Ruskin or a Carlyle.

中文翻译：

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发现狄更斯是认真的

狄金斯的自我陈述至少是一键完成，就像当代读者所希望的那样。维多利亚时代的读者并不确定通过展示维多利亚时代的严肃性来改善小说家的形象。即使狄更斯被特罗洛普（Trollope）标记为激进分子，即使他可能表现出足够的功利主义，也能表现出朗德韦尔（Rouncewell）先生面对着祖先特权莱斯特·德洛克爵士（Sir Leicester Dedlock）的“工业上尉”，尽管他至少做得最多。维多利亚时代的小说家提高了对妇女状况的认识，尽管他激烈地讽刺了维多利亚时代的计划中的其他几个方面，但他的道德和社会标准并不完全稳定。对他所工作的社会在意识形态，文化和语言上的异质性非常满意，他可以机会主义地从一种作家角色转换为另一种作家角色，并提出相应的不同读者角色。有时，当他们从一本小说转移到另一本小说时，这种变化可能会吸引读者。尽管Bounderby先生的“新人”的社会文化特征在艰难时期类似于《荒凉之屋》中令人钦佩的Rouncewell先生的经历，敦促读者欣赏狄更斯对Bounderby的嘲笑，原因是莱斯特·戴德洛克爵士部分赞同。再说一次，在一部小说中，各种角色或讽刺漫画就代表了一系列截然不同的观点，其中很少有最终成为某种“真相”，但其中有许多读者必定会试着去尝试。在唐贝和儿子，狄更斯和他的读者都可以通过值得Skewton太太精致的标准来判断Cuttle船长的简单性，与此同时，还要评估Skewton太太的人为性与“华兹华斯时代”的基准自然如船长Cuttle's.1 ¹总之，狄更斯的小说，同时查明他周围具有无可比拟的清晰度和参与世界的各个方面，表现出相对小的热情，为人类生活和社会的彻底改造以及一些持续的精神或道德轨迹。他的作品引起了很多讨论，但他并没有假装自己是维多利亚时代的圣人–罗斯金（Ruskin）或凯雷（Carlyle）。