Censored Kisses in Dickens by Orlando Bartro
A reviewer in 1836 remarked of a bestseller in his time that it contained “some few instances of profanity; and some jokes, incidents, and allusions, which could hardly be read by a modest woman.”
What novel was the reviewer attacking?
The Pickwick Papers, of course! That was the surprise bestseller by twenty-three-year-old Charles Dickens.
I suppose the reviewer meant by “profanity” the occasional use of the word damn, and by “immodesty,” the sweet kiss at the end of a paired, man-and-woman folding of an ever smaller square of a blanket.
I strongly suspect that this review changed the trajectory of Dickens’ fiction. After that review, he self-censored himself for the rest of his career.
Thus, kisses afterward are suppressed and are nowhere so numerous as in the Pickwick Papers, which seems downright salacious, despite its innocence, compared to his other fat and boisterous (but often kiss-less) books.
Before reading this contemporaneous review of The Pickwick Papers, I had thought that Dickens shared the moralistic rigidity of his time, by excluding kisses when transforming the reality of his London into his fantastical shapes of it; but now, I think he was only lacking in courage, such as the courage of a Flaubert who went to prison for the adultery theme of Madame Bovary.
Or maybe he accepted what his society told him not to write about, but the result is fewer kisses in his fiction than ought to be there.
* Orlando Bartro is the author of Toward Two Words, a comical & surreal novel about a man who finds yet another woman he never knew, usually available at Amazon for $4.91.