Are You Sentimental?
When considering in the autumn of 1844 the subject of his new Christmas book, Charles Dickens was “all eagerness to write a story about the length of that most delightful of all stories, The Vicar of Wakefield.” Goldsmith’s novel, Dickens believed, had “done more good in the world and instructed more kinds of people in virtue, than any other fiction ever written.”1 Actually, Dickens had declared himself an eponymous child of Goldsmith from the moment of his first appearance in print, taking as his pseudonym Boz, a humorous mispronunciation of the name of Dr. Primrose’s son, after whom Dickens had nicknamed his younger brother. The Vicar of Wakefield, which he knew even more intimately than he knew Fielding’s and Richardson’s novels, runs like a leitmotif through his fiction and, as did Joseph Andrews, Tom Jones, Roderick Random, Humphry Clinker, and Clarissa, influenced significantly his assumptions about human nature and the moral sentiments. Echoes of the Vicar sound from Pickwick to Crisparkle. Primrose is a constituent of all Dickens’ portraits of benevolence, as well as of the vision of the healthy, active pastor or shepherd of the flock of humanity. Primrose’s belief in the universal potential for moral reformation through an appeal to the moral sentiments underlies many of Dickens’ efforts to depict moral rebirth, such as that of Eugene Wrayburn in Our Mutual Friend. Like Goldsmith’s, Dickens’ conviction that novels are vehicles, among other things, for teaching virtue, and that the moral sentiments are the source of virtuous actions, pervades his fiction.
But Goldsmith’s influence is only one element in Dickens’ transformation of the doctrine of the moral sentiments, with its nonsectarian Christian values, into sentimentality. In the channels of transmission, Fielding and Richardson also play a major role, especially in Dickens’ commitment to creating ideal characters who are embodiments of the innate moral sentiments. Little Nell, Esther Summerson, and Little Dorrit, for example, are idealized representations in the mold of Sophia and Clarissa, embodiments of Dickens’ belief in the moral sentiments, part of his effort to depict absolute ideals in a mixed world. Fielding claimed that “the Vices to be found” in Joseph Andrews “are rather the accidental Consequences of some human Frailty or Foible, than causes habitually existing in the Mind.”2 Though Dickens’ sense of how deeply human flaws descend into the bedrock of “Mind” is more acute than Fielding’s, his depiction of pure or absolutely good minds or hearts bears witness to his belief that idealized representations of the moral sentiments are an essential function of fiction. Modern dissatisfaction with such characters as Little Nell, Esther Summerson, and Little Dorrit evaluates them against a standard derived from the very anti-idealistic tradition and its devaluation of human nature that Dickens energetically opposed. For example, Dickens’ depiction of the death of Little Nell, modeled on Richardson’s depiction of the protracted death of Clarissa, assumes that both author and audience will respond to their shared moral sentiments with a depth of feeling that will validate the artistry of the dramatization as a moral force for individual rebirth and for communal health. The suppression of the innate moral sentiments Dickens believed responsible for much of the corruption of Victorian culture, including the perversion of the free play of the imagination that he depicts in Hard Times.
The power of the moral sentiments is so great, Dickens implies, that their condemnation as “sentimentality,” in the pejorative modern sense, is a frightened defense against its demands. Indeed, the tears of sentimentality can dissolve the barrier that destructive individual and social pressures have erected to prevent the free expression of feeling. The Victorian “sentimentalists” believed that the alienating and dehumanizing pressures and structures of modern culture, all of them dry-eyed exponents of misery and suppression, are more and more separating human beings from their natural sentiments, and that the desire to repossess them is widespread even if dormant. The novelist’s purpose, among others, is to awaken that desire and to help it fulfill its needs. A formalist aesthetic, then, is meaningless to Dickens because it values structure more than feeling. Though Dickens’ aesthetic sense is reasonably well developed and his craftsmanship of the highest order, dramatizations such as the death of Little Nell must have seemed to him self-justifying, appealing to a higher tribunal than an aesthetic one.
The Romantic poet whom Dickens read closely and who most influenced him is Wordsworth. The “Lake Poet’s” fascination with sentiment made him a pervasive presence among the Victorians. The “thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears” frequently surfaced into tearful expression in a vast Victorian literature and ideology of feeling that embraced, on the one hand, Mrs. Felicia Hemans and the ever-popular sentimental annuals and, on the other, John Stuart Mill’s claim in his Autobiography (1873) that Wordsworth’s poetry of feeling provided therapy to cure emotional deadness. As the Victorian years progressed, Wordsworth became a good gray ghost, a warmly familiar patriarchal embodiment of the value of the sentiments. Wordsworth helped to legitimize sentimentality for the Victorians. As Matthew Arnold remarked in “Memorial Verses,” “he spoke, and loosed our heart in tears.”
For Dickens, Wordsworth’s glorification of the sentiments was sufficiently Christian to allay the possibility that a doctrine that advocated the primacy of the feelings might be thought of as potentially pagan. Excesses of the heart needed to be sharply distinguished from excesses of the body, Wordsworth needed to be distinguished from Swinburne, Christian liberalism from Romantic paganism. A safer poet for the Victorians than Byron, Keats, Shelley, or even Coleridge, Wordsworth’s regard for the healing nature of feeling had its origin in the same belief in the moral sentiments and in the same view of human nature that Dickens and many Victorians held. “Lucy Gray,” “Tintern Abbey,” and “Expostulation and Reply” advocate the moral sentiments, and the poet of The Prelude believes in a congruence between the mind of man and the mind of the universe which can be apprehended only through the feelings. The poet can see moral patterns in the external world of nature because those moral patterns exist within him, and the act of seeing is a leap of comprehension made by the feelings. Wordsworth particularly attracted the Victorians by his combination of modernity and conservatism, by his transformation of eighteenth-century benevolent and optimistic beliefs into what Keats calls the “holiness of the heart’s affections” and the moral nature of feeling into a language that expressed the nineteenth-century democratic ethos.
Frequent allusions and references to Wordsworth and his poetry in Dickens’ letters and conversations testify to his familiarity with Wordsworth’s “genius” from the beginning of the novelist’s career. During the years he was at work on Oliver Twist, Nicholas Nickleby, and Old Curiosity Shop, Dickens owned the six-volume 1836 edition of Wordsworth’s Poems, which was among the first set of books he purchased. When he dined with Wordsworth’s son in 1839, he thought him “decidedly lumpish. Copyrights need be hereditary,” he remarked, unwittingly anticipating his relationship with his own children, “for genius isn’t.”3 He had no doubt about Wordsworth’s genius, and he found in Wordsworth’s poetry a model for and a confirmation of his own beliefs about human nature, the moral sentiments, and the role of the sentiments in literature. Dickens did not read the Wordsworth of The Prelude, who saw within external nature the potential for dark passions as well as for bright benevolence, and by and large he kept clear of Wordsworth’s emphasis on the healing powers of landscape, though he had no particular argument with the view Wordsworth popularized of the rural world as a healthy antidote to urban ugliness and corruption. The pastoral landscapes of Old Curiosity Shop are one element in Dickens’ dramatization of the traditional opposition between the country and the city, derived partly from eighteenth-century fiction and partly from Wordsworth.
Dickens was not attracted by Wordsworth’s emphasis on the healing powers of nature because he believed that the crucial conflicts of modern culture, between the natural and the unnatural, between innate goodness and a hostile environment, take place within the city’s walls, and that therefore the cure must come from within the self and be enacted within the urban environment. Nature is at best a refuge in which to hide and even to die, as do Little Nell and Betty Higden. But Dickens’ reading of Wordsworth did help direct his attention to the sentiments as the source of moral feeling. He commented a half year before he began writing Old Curiosity Shop that “We Are Seven” is “one of the most striking examples” of Wordsworth’s “genius,” and the “simple Child” of the poem contributed to his portrait of Little Nell. The poem was still in his mind in 1842 when in a lighthearted reference he revealed how profound a part of his consciousness it had become. In Old Curiosity Shop, Dickens insists, as do Rïchardson in Clarissa and Wordsworth in “We Are Seven,” that the faith of the feeling heart whose sentiments are moral can embrace dying as an ideal against which to measure the limitations of life and criticize those who prefer a corrupt life to an idealized death.4 Echoing a poem by Wordsworth that he had read closely, Dickens asserted that “there are thoughts, you know, that lie too deep for words.”5 The purposeful misquotation manifests Dickens’ awareness of the limitations of language in expressing feeling. But in Old Curiosity Shop and elsewhere, Dickens strove for a dramatic rendition of the sentiments (Wordsworth’s “thoughts”) that would bring to the visible surface that which often seems too deeply buried for effective expression.
Unlike Matthew Arnold, Dickens believed “sentiment” representable, a prominent if not the major constituent of his art. As a novelist, he did not feel bound by the restrictions of realistic characterization. On the contrary, he assumed that the moral ideal can represent the reality of the moral sentiments which “realism” tends to deny. The language of the moral sentiments can express that which the other vocabularies available to it at best only hint at and at worst disavow. Though Dickens misquotes the final line of Wordsworth’s “Ode: Intimations of Immortality on Recollections from Early Childhood” by substituting “words” for “tears,” Dickens’ actual practice restores the “tears.” In Old Curiosity Shop, he affirms the Victorian belief that a wet face is not an embarrassment. Tears are an effective expression and communication of moral feeling.
Some of Dickens’ contemporaries recognized the similarities between Dickens and Wordsworth, particularly influences and conjunctions of the sort that occur in “We Are Seven” and Old Curiosity Shop. Richard Henry Horne in The New Spirit of the Age (1844) favorably compared the accidental passages of blank verse in Old Curiosity Shop with “the best passages in Wordsworth, and thus, meeting on the common ground of a deeply truthful sentiment, the two most unlike men in the literature of the country are brought into the closest approximation.”6 Dickens’ contemporaries thought his blank verse passages effective heightening of the language of sentiment, since “sentiment” itself belonged to the ideal expression of innate human nature. That nature, under constant attack from changing perspectives in modern culture, needed as much reinforcement as possible. Wordsworth and Dickens, in Horne’s view, shared the common ground of “a deeply truthful sentiment” that was even more important than other similarities, including their shared concern with the child and with the influence of childhood on the formation of the adult.
Dickens had less interest than Wordsworth in analyzing the patterns of feeling and more in dramatizing the situations that produced them. Naturally, Dickens tends to be more melodramatic than Wordsworth, who finds his drama in meditation rather than in action. The underlying belief in the importance of feeling defined as moral sentiment and the impossibility of excessive feeling, however, is similar. Dickens constantly dramatizes heightened feeling arising from crises of action, and elaborate set scenes, reminiscent of Clarissa’s extended death, are less frequent in Dickens’ fiction than the notoriety of a few such instances, such as Little Nell’s death, would suggest. When Wordsworth creates dramatizations of action, as in the death of Lucy Gray and the poverty of Alice Fell, he also effectively dramatizes heightened feelings. And the narrative thrust of Wordsworth’s art in general, particularly within the ballad and the pastoral, is quite strong. But his art generally demands abstraction, not individuation, the search for and the dramatization of meditative patterns, for making sense out of sense data. Dickens prefers to dramatize the sense data and sensations in extremis—birth, death, marriage, separation, violence, communal rituals—individual, immediate responses to the passages of life. As selective as Wordsworth in what he chooses to see, Dickens desires to create the illusion that what he sees is more objectively real and less mediated through self-consciousness. The nature of his art demands a wider, more tactile canvas than Wordsworth’s, whose subject is his own moral sentiments. The novelist’s art is more indirect, the patterns of plot preceding the patterns of feeling. But Dickens and his novelistic contemporaries believed that the novel could be as effective an embodiment and communicator of the moral sentiments as poetry.
Much of the poetic literature of sentiment of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century is neglected today, usually for sound aesthetic reasons, and the pressed hearts and flowers of Victorian keepsake books and annuals have been pressed into oblivion as well. With Wordsworth, the question of sentimentality rarely arises. With Dickens, it frequently does, partly because the sentimental poet in the Romantic tradition usually is granted the virtue of sincerity sufficient to his claims of feeling, whereas the nineteenth-century sentimental novelist, forced into a quasi-realistic straitjacket by the modern reader’s expectations, often has his sincerity questioned. The modern allegation of sentimentality against the Victorians in general politely expresses a widespread feeling that Dickens and his contemporary writers were insincere. The novelist of sentiment is particularly reprehensible, for any novelist aware of his genre and in control of his craft should know that the assumptions about reality upon which the novel as a genre is based allow no place for an idealistic depiction of human nature. Such a depiction must be either insincere or in bad taste.
The charge of bad taste can be readily dismissed as irrelevant. “Taste” is a historical given, a standard derived from education, social position, and class structure. The standards that determine “taste” change as time passes. And what in art may be in good taste to one subgroup within our culture may be distasteful to another. Questions of taste ought best be suspended in the discussion of art, except in those instances of bad taste that are calculated by the artist to make a point. Bad taste is a matter of class rather than of aesthetics. Bad taste tends to be spontaneous, something one cannot help. Insincerity is purposeful, the manipulation of aesthetic materials for some self-serving, usually commercial, end. Henry Hal-lam in 1847 responded to the death of Dickens’ Paul Dombey by remarking, “I am so hardened as to be unable to look on it in any light but pure business,” suggesting that Dickens had manipulated the dramatic situation, eliciting from his readers feelings that he himself did not have in order to appeal to a debased popular taste for the purpose of selling more books.7 R. H. Hutton in 1862 commented about both Old Curiosity Shop and Dombey and Son that Dickens “spoons and stirs the subject of grief and death.”8 Like many Victorians who, from their superior class position, looked down on Dickens as a literary Bounderby, Hallam undoubtedly believed that Dickens frequently wrote in bad taste, spontaneously and unwittingly. That, however, for Hallam, was secondary and morally unimportant. Hallam, who felt certain that Dickens was consciously insincere, was probably more scrupulous than many of his contemporaries in distinguishing between bad taste and insincerity, and Victorian practice in general reveals the widespread assumption that one need not bother about such fine distinctions.
In his depiction of the deaths of Little Nell and Paul Dombey, Dickens dramatizes his belief in the innate moral sentiments and in sentimentality as morally instructive. “Yet nothing teacheth like death,” one of Dickens’ predecessors, whose works he owned, preached. William Dodd’s widely read Reflections on Death (1763) is representative of hundreds of similar volumes whose depiction and evaluation of death the Victorians read. Dickens would have agreed with Dodd that
it is too commonly found, that a familiarity with death, and a frequent recurrency of funerals, graces, and church-yards, serve to harden rather than humanize the mind, and deaden rather than excite those becoming reflections which such objects seem calculated to produce. Hence the physician enters, without the least emotion, the gloomy chambers of expiring life; the undertaker handles, without concern, the clay-cold limbs; and the sexton whistles unappalled, while the spade casts forth from the earth the mingled bones and dust of his fellow creatures.9
In Oliver Twist, Dickens contrasts the easy familiarity and insensitivity toward death of Noah Claypool with Oliver’s alertness to the inherent moral lessons in the coffin and the tomb. Nicholas Nickleby, Barnaby Rudge, and Martin Chuzzlewit also contain effective dramatizations of the moral significance of death, vivid embodiments of the Victorian concern with the potential devitalization of that powerful teacher of moral lessons and Christian virtues. To Dickens and his contemporaries, strong emotional response to death seemed more desirable than the all-too-common callousness, the kind of hardening of the feelings, that Dodd warns against. In a scene in Reflections on Death, which may have directly influenced Dickens’ depiction of the death of Little Nell, Dodd dramatizes the death of a paragon of Christian virtue, a young mother who on her deathbed consoles her own parents, claiming that she is “wholly resigned” to God’s will.
“I am on the brink of eternity, and now see clearly the importance of it—Remember, oh remember, that every thing in time is insignificant to the awful concerns of—” Eternity, she would have said; but her breath failed; she fainted a second time; and when all our labours to recover her, seemed just effectual, and she appeared returning to life, a deep sob alarmed us—and the lovely body was left untenanted by its immortal inhabitant! NOW SHE IS NUMBER’D AMONG THE CHILDREN OF GOD, AND HER LOT IS AMONG THE SAINTS.10
For her mourners, Nell provides a similar example of the lesson that death is a reminder to the living to allow their innate moral sentiments to flourish. To linger with expressive sentiment over the deathbeds or the graves of the departing or departed is to stand, even if prematurely, at the portals of paradise, being reminded that death is not only the mother of beauty but also that the moral sentiments that death evokes are the fountainhead of our feelings about the soul and about eternity. Dickens lingers for some time over Nell’s deathbed, partly to affirm his commitment to Dodd’s “important truth: The abuse of life proceeds from the forgetfulness of death.” “Oh thank God, all who see it,” Dickens writes of Paul Dombey’s death, “for that older fashion yet, of Immortality! And look upon us, angels of young children, with Regards not quite estranged, when the swift river bears us to the ocean” (DS, chap. 16). Though some modern readers may be uncomfortable with the emotional intensity and the rhetoric with which Dickens describes such dyings, and may elevate discomfort and misunderstanding into an accusation of insincerity, Dickens is attempting purposely to arouse his readers’ innate moral sentiments, reminding them that the more emotionally sensitive they are to death the more morally attentive they will be to the values of life. In the early stages of his career, Dickens felt optimistic that such dramatizations would stir the world’s conscience as well as its fears. The suppressed and the exploited would benefit. He believed that fictional presentations of the deaths of children had extraordinary corrective potential. Such deaths appealed powerfully to the moral sentiments both because they seem against “nature” and “human nature” and because children are more vulnerable than adults. Intensely aware of children dead and dying, Dickens and many of his contemporaries thought it impossible to be excessively feeling or “sentimental” in any pejorative way about such losses. Attempts to curb the expression of such feeling denied human nature and human need.
In his influential biography of Goldsmith, John Forster quotes a passage from Boswell’s Life of Johnson, the point of which Dickens, even more so because of his commitment to the moral sentiments, had well in mind.
Boswell: “I have often blamed myself, sir, for not feeling for others as sensibly as many say they do.” Johnson: “Sir, don’t be duped by them anymore. You will find these very feeling people are not very ready to do you good. They pay you by feeling.”11
The insincere expression of feeling and its exploitation for self-serving ends Dickens usually depicts as corrupt, a “paying” with counterfeit coin. For example, Edith Grainger’s mother, “Cleopatra” Skewton, insincerely advocates the moral sentiments and the natural goodness of the feelings in an effort to expedite the selling of her daughter to the unnatural, unfeeling Mr. Dombey.
“—about these cold conventionalities of manner that are observed in little things? Why are we not more natural? Dear me! With all those yearnings, and gushings, and impulsive throbbings that we have implanted in our souls, and which are so very charming, why are we not more natural?” Mr. Dombey said it was very true, very true. (DS, chap. 21)
Keenly aware of the danger of being duped by insincerity, Dickens gives some priority to communicating to his readers where he stands on such a matter. The widespread corruption of the sentiments and hardening of the feelings are destructive among other reasons because the hypocritical appeal to falsified feeling cannot always be distinguished from the expression of genuine feeling. Those who tarnish spiritual gold by manipulating feeling to obtain material gold Dickens satirizes and condemns. Johnson’s reminder to Boswell that those who have moral sentiments demonstrate them in deed, a sounder currency than words, strikes forcefully at the heart of the danger, as the Victorians saw it, of disengaging moral feeling from moral performance. The pejorative use of the word “sentimentality” sometimes means just that: the degree of moral action is small in relation to the amount of expressed moral feeling, as if an implied promise to create consonance between feeling and action has not been fulfilled. The meditative poet, like Wordsworth, need only persuade that his feelings are sincere, appropriate in broad human terms to his means and his ends. The Victorian novelist, like Dickens, must always respond to the expectations of the novel as a genre and of his readers that expressions of feeling will be aligned with the settings and actions to which his narrators’ and his characters’ feelings relate. In a discussion of Arnold’s poetry, Arthur Hugh Clough expressed the belief of many Victorians that fiction is superior to lyric and even dramatic poetry because it forces the artist always to relate feelings to performance.12 Arnold himself confessed dissatisfaction with his early poetry precisely because it separated feeling from action, lacking the catharsis that only patterns of action can provide. Tennyson, in “Locksley Hall” and in Maud, compels the meditating, intensely “feeling” persona into social action, the theme in Arnold’s “Rugby Chapel” of the marching band that leads us “on to the City of God.”
To keep as narrow as possible the potential gap between moral feelings and moral acts has been, naturally, a longstanding concern in Western culture, frequently expressed in religion, philosophy, and literature, part of the traditional attempt to define human nature in moral terms. “Repentance, Prayer, and Charity” have been the sacred call within the Judaeo-Christian tradition for more than two thousand years. Like many of his contemporaries, Dickens believed that whereas previously such lack of consonance between feelings and actions could be isolated as rare examples, Victorian society manifested a reversal of the traditional ratio, both in individual and social terms. Now those rare instances of consonance between feelings and actions stood out as isolated instances. That frightening reality became for the first time the subject of the community’s literature.
Numbness of feeling constantly confronts Keats and other Romantics as the inescapable result of the sensitive poet living in a world hostile to the imagination. The meditative odes of the Romantic tradition embody the poet’s lyric dramatization of the pain and frustration arising from his awareness of the gap between his desire to express imaginatively the moral power of his feelings and his inability to do so. Such poems are psychodramas in which the poet is both victim and self-victimizer, and the highest aim of the performance is liberation from the closed circle of pain. Still, the performance is the artistic representation of the inner life, the representation of sensibility rather than moral sentiments, except in the case of Wordsworth, who emphasizes the consonance between moral feelings and moral acts, keeping the performance close to expressions of the moral pulse beat in the eighteenth-century sense, the “little, nameless, unremembered acts of kindness and of love,” the growth and expression of the moral sentiments. Like many Victorians, Dickens takes Wordsworth as his moral and aesthetic mentor in his emphasis on the lack of consonance or separation between feelings and moral acts rather than between feelings and aesthetic or imaginative acts.
Though for Dickens the most important acts occur within the individual and private sphere, the origin of the gap between moral feeling and moral action is social. Like Carlyle, Thackeray, Tennyson, Browning, and George Eliot, Dickens focuses on the struggle of the private self to come to terms with the needs and the limitations of the private self. But the theater in which the conflict takes place is the public one. Dickens conceives of the external world as materially real (hardly something that we “half create” and “half perceive”) and solidly there, independent of the mind of the artist. In that world, the gap between individual perception and external reality is minimal, at least in potential. There is no reason inherent in the substance of the world and in our process of perceiving it why we cannot see what is there, though some of Dickens’ characters find it self-serving to see only what they want to. For Dickens, unlike most of the Romantics, the epistemological problem is minimal. The lack of consonance between feelings and acts is a moral and social problem more than it is and before it is a personal one.
One of the devices from the theory of moral sentiments that Dickens draws on is the man of Benevolence, who, in his idealized form, such as the Cheeryble brothers in Nicholas Nickleby and Mr. Brownlow in Oliver Twist, matches his innate moral sentiments with moral acts.13 The Benevolent man is an epitome of moral sentiment. As a concept, Benevolence is a secularized development of Pauline Charity, the third value in the apostolic trinity, which eighteenth-century latitudinarian religion and moral philosophy promoted as a humanistic substitute. One of the many attempts to have Christian values without Christian dogma, it is an ethical concept rather than a religious imperative, an attempt by eighteenth-and nineteenth-century humanism to liberate itself from theology.
Dickens’ reading of eighteenth-century literature and his pervasive latitudinarian sympathies attracted him to Benevolence as a device for depicting models of an idealized consonance between moral feeling and moral action. Though Dickens finds comic material in the problems that the Benevolent man meets with in an imperfect world, particularly in Pickwick Papers, the Benevolent man exists, among other reasons, to show how much better we and our world can be. As an idealization of such consonance, the Benevolent man does disappear from Dickens’ fiction, at least in his easily recognized form, by the late 1840s, partly because the Benevolent man provides assistance to a type of character whom Dickens came to believe must self-reliantly struggle to determine his own fate, partly because the Benevolent man has a priori the means to manifest his Benevolence, whereas Dickens became concerned with exploring the questionable sources of such wealth. In addition, Benevolence is always embodied in a male figure of the kind who, for biographical reasons, particularly his relationship with his own father, Dickens became anxious and doubtful about. There are no idealized Benevolent men in Dickens’ fiction after John Jarndyce in Bleak House, and Jarndyce is substantially different from the Cheeryble brothers. Later characters, such as Wemmick, Boffin, and Sleary, possess moral sentiments and charitable hearts but not a commitment to Benevolence as a social program or as a personal philosophy. The vision that compelled Dickens to create Abel Magwitch, the convict in Great Expectations, made it impossible for him to explore the problem of innate moral sentiment in complex characters within the limitations of the concepts and categories of Benevolence. Among other things, it became clear to Dickens that Benevolence oversimplified the social context and the possibilities of widespread remediation to the extent that it damaged the chances of other approaches. Under the guise of private charity, it had become a self-serving substitute for public responsibility. Still, Dickens’ initial attraction to Benevolence, to the good father as an informal social institution, served him well in his early fiction.
Neither the Oxford English Dictionary nor any other authority has done better than Nicodemus Boffin in defining sentimentality, particularly the broad implications the word had for Dickens and many of his contemporaries. In Our Mutual Friend, Sophronia and Alfred Lammle, who have swindled one another into an unprofitable marriage, attempt to deceive and swindle for profit Georgiana Podsnap and the Boffins, but they are unmasked by Boffin.
“Mr. and Mrs. Boffin,” said Mrs. Lammle …“there are not many people, I think, who under the circumstances, would have been so considerate and sparing as you have been to me just now. Do you care to be thanked?”
“Thanks are always worth having,” said Mrs. Boffin, in her ready good nature.
“Sophronia,” asked her husband, mockingly, “are you sentimental?”
“Well, well, my good sir,” Mr. Boffin interposed, “it’s a very good thing to think well of another person, and it’s a very good thing to be thought well of by another person. Mrs. Lammle will be none the worse for it, if she is.” (OMF, Book IV, chap. 2)
To be sentimental, Mr. Boffin proposes, is a very good thing, for the desire to be thought well of by others and to think well of others is a manifestation of the moral sentiments. Boffin apparently posits a Humean standard of motivation in such matters, based upon an irreducible value with which there is no point arguing since it is not a rational matter. In The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Adam Smith cogently expresses Boffin’s underlying assumption: “Man naturally desires, not only to be loved, but to be lovely; or to be that thing which is the natural and proper object of love.… He dreads, not only blame, but blame-worthiness.”14 This innate dread is existential, a self-correcting aspect of the moral sentiments that provides the spur to the moral sentiments when they are laggard. Sophronia’s dread of being thought less well of, being thought worthy of blame by Georgiana, her husband mockingly refers to as being “sentimental.” But Sophronia’s sentimentality is the sign of her possession of healthy, functioning moral sentiments.
Adam Smith makes no uncertain claim that “Nature, when she formed man for society, endowed him with an original desire to please, and an original aversion to offend his brethren.… She rendered their approbation most flattering and most agreeable to him for its own sake; and their disapprobation most mortifying and most offensive.”15 The eighteenth-century moral philosophers believed that Society is a reflection of Nature and that Society and human nature mutually contain and reinforce the moral values of Nature. The Romantic idea that the moral sentiments can be cultivated best in solitude would have been as unacceptable to the moral philosophers as it was to the Victorians. Without society, Smith asserted, man has “no mirror which can present” the moral sentiments to his view. “Bring him into society, and he is immediately provided with the mirror which he wanted before.”16 But the mirror of society in Dickens’ world, like the mirror over the Veneerings’ sideboard in Our Mutual Friend, does not reflect the moral sentiments nearly as clearly as do the less obscured, cleaner mirrors of eighteenth-century moral philosophy. In Dickens’ fiction, the mirror of enlargement has become the mirror of grotesque distortion. And the once clear glass has been made partly opaque by a film of Victorian dirt and doubt. It can no longer provide an accurate reflection of the moral sentiments inherent in Nature and in human nature.
Like numbers of his contemporaries, Dickens was attracted by the possibility of substituting moral paradigms in literature for those once provided by the mirror of society. But that venture had high risks, particularly for a novelist trying to reach a wide public. Dickens’ public demanded that his novels provide it with a substantial degree of confirmation of widely accepted values. The considerable extent to which Dickens purposely did not provide his audience with conventional assurances while still keeping their loyalty is one of the measures of his genius. Unlike his friend Wilkie Collins, whose Woman in White exceeded in popularity any of Dickens’ novels, the older writer imposed moral paradigms on his fiction, challenging his public to discover a corrective mirror of itself. Dickens throughout is basically non-mimetic. His main interest is not in accurately representing society but in creating a social world within his fiction that accurately embodies the moral paradigms that he believes are innate within human nature, society, and all things that are Natural. Often such a non-mimetic artist depends on mythic constructs or invents them, as Blake does. Dickens, tied to the things of this visible world, was aware of running another risk, the risk of substituting a personal vision for mimesis and unnaturally amplifying the voice of the artist beyond seemliness and natural sound. For the substitution of a literary mirror for a social mirror compounds the potential blasphemy and hybris by substituting a secular text for what had once been the mission reserved for scripture.
In Our Mutual Friend, the Boffins function as a mirror of the moral sentiments into which other characters can look and against which they can measure themselves. Without education or social position, the Boffins glow with natural good spirits, the spontaneous expression of their innate moral sentiments. Boffin assumes, despite his experiences with greed and viciousness, that his own moral sentiments are similar to other people’s, and that most people do feel good when they know that others think well of them and when they think well of others. “It’s a very good thing,” Boffin states flatly, for the individual and for society, a claim placed beyond any train of reasoning. This is not a matter for disputation; it precedes cognition; the intellect is irrelevant. We need not and we cannot explain in rational terms why people feel good in engaging in such transactions with the self and with other people. Like the moral philosophers, Boffin believes that the moral sentiments are pre-rationally there. “The approbation,” Hume writes, “which then ensues, cannot be the work of the judgment, but of the heart; and is not a speculative proposition or affirmation, but an active feeling of sentiment.”17
Sophronia’s tears are the outward expression of her moral sentiments, a visible sign that she has not moved so far away from her human nature that she cannot return to her natural sentiments when called. No wonder, then, that Dickens and many of his contemporaries are not opposed to tears. “My behaviour before my fellow passengers was weak in the extreme,” Dickens proudly wrote to Wilkie Collins, for, while reading one of Collins’ stories on a railway journey, “I cried as much as you could possibly desire.”18 Tears themselves are often the visible sign of rediscovering or returning to our first natures, our best human natures, our moral sentiments. Sometimes they are testimony to our never having been separated from our “natural” selves.
Sophronia’s return to her moral sentiments is brief, a visit with what might have been rather than with what is. Under the pressure of her husband’s expectations, she quickly masters her “sentimental” response, a lifetime of conditioning having made her adept at manipulating and suppressing innate moral feeling. “She walked to the window, flinching under his angry stare, and turned round quite coldly.” She reminds Alfred that they are to flee abroad to escape their debts. “There is no fear of my taking any sentiment with me. I should soon be eased of it, if I did. But it will be all left behind. It is all left behind.” Sentiment, she recognizes, is an intolerable obstacle to Alfred’s profession and their union. Sophronia still can feel its power; Alfred Lammle has so suppressed or destroyed his moral sentiments that for all intents and purposes, as far as Sophronia can tell, he has never had any. Sophronia’s expression of her moral sentiments in her final meeting with Georgiana may be taken either as an anomaly never to be repeated or a demonstration that, no matter how battered or suppressed, those sentiments will always surface in appropriate circumstances. Sophronia, then, joins that category of fictional Victorian women who exist to demonstrate that the moral sentiments can never be eradicated, and that women, for better and for worse, find it more difficult than men to suppress their innate natures. Since the moral sentiments remain a vital part of Sophronia’s nature, they have the potential to become active again. Dickens concludes the chapter by expelling both the Lammles from the Victorian community in a wry parody of the first couple expelled from paradise. “She passed out and he followed her.… They went down the long street. They walked arm in arm.… In turning the street corner they might have turned out of this world.”
Like many of his contemporaries, Dickens desired to affirm the community as the touchstone from which the moral sentiments can be evoked and against which human performance can find its proper measure of approbation and disapprobation. But the task was a difficult, almost an impossible one. The Victorian community from which the Lammles have been expelled often appears to the sharp eye to be an inadequate, even an unnatural, representation of Nature and human nature. And the artist must either bend under the pressure of social values or, as increasingly became the case, stiffen and rebel. Ironically, the Lammles turned the same street corner of exile that was to become the point of exit, whether literally or metaphorically, for many artists for whom society had become unnatural. For the moral philosophers, society embodied the perfection of the creation. In Dickens’ fiction, neither society nor the creation is unequivocally good, and the Lammles represent a deficiency or perversion of the moral sentiments for which society bears considerable responsibility. At its worst, society embodies and perpetuates the age-old train of unnaturalness. At its best, it provides a dark mirror in which we may be able to glimpse a few points of light.
Though Dickens approaches the inner life and human nature through the external and the visible, he is essentially a psychological portraitist who uses the moral sentiments as a gauge to measure the essence of his characters. The road of appearance leads to the palace of essence. Pickwick, Oliver, Little Nell, Dolly Varden, Nicholas, Ruth Pinch, Fanny Dombey, Esther Summerson, and Little Dorrit, for example, exemplify human nature defined fully in terms of the moral sentiments. They inhabit the palace of idealization. Whatever weaknesses they may have and however inhospitable to their virtues the imperfect world may be, they need only trust in their innate moral sentiments to act wisely and well. Unlike Pip and Bella Wilfer, for example, they already possess what experience cannot teach or provide. Dickens’ concern here is with the dramatization of idealized moral sentiments rather than with a depiction of the mixed nature of human nature.
His belief in the moral sentiments, in the feelings as innately good, inevitably forced Dickens to attempt to create a working definition of human nature. It was clear to him that human nature not only contained more than the moral sentiments, but also that aspects of what seemed to be innate human nature were in conflict with one another. And if the question, What is the mechanism of the distribution of the elements of human nature within individuals? came first, then immediately afterward came the question, Who or what is the source of those innate qualities that in aggregate we call human nature? Dickens’ wide range of character types dramatizes the problem. Esther Summerson, Sissy Jupe, and Little Dorrit are from birth representations of fully realized moral sentiment. They are models that others, like Arthur Clennam, Louisa Gradgrind, and Sidney Carton, may use as inspiration for their own moral rejuvenation, for the awakening of their latent moral sentiments. But characters like Jingle, Monk, Ralph Nickleby, Quilp, Carker, Heep, Orlick, and Silas Wegg have moral sentiments to such a negligible degree that they challenge the assumption that moral sentiment is an innate human quality, a basic constituent of human nature. Dickens partly confutes that challenge by creating some characters, particularly Mrs. Clennam, Sidney Carton, and Miss Havisham, who also seem initially to be without innate moral sentiments but who demonstrate in crisis that they do have them. There are, though, few such characters in Dickens’ fiction, and in the case of Miss Havisham the petrifaction of her moral sentiments is the effect of some cause. In contrast, Little Nell’s and Little Dorrit’s fullness of virtue and Quilp’s and Heep’s moral vacuousness seem not to be the effect of some cause at all. They are a priori givens.
But who is the giver? And why given in those proportions? And to what degree are such “givens” of human nature influenced by the environment? Dickens’ attempt to answer these questions in narrative takes its force from his repugnance at what seems to him to be “unnatural.” His most explicit rhetoric on the topos, in Dombey and Son (chap. 47), derives from widespread eighteenth- and nineteenth-century discussions of Nature in which natural and unnatural are the key oppositions. The line of discussion reaches from Pope’s Essay on Man (1744) to John Stuart Mill’s posthumously published “On Religion” (1874). Unlike Mill, Dickens had no talent for or interest in semantic analysis. He could not define Nature, the natural, and the unnatural in other than experiential terms. Like his eighteenth-century predecessors, he assumed that the universe has “eternal laws” which govern the visible and invisible totality called “Nature.” With the loosest of theological implications, Nature is the creation of God. Affronts to the “eternal laws … of Nature,” Dickens believed, make Nature outraged, for Nature is the repository and expression of normative positive values. All manipulations or distortions of Nature, as “God designed it,” result in unnaturalness. All manipulations and distortions of human nature, as “God designed it,” result in unnaturalness. Dickens’ phrase, assigning responsibility to the deity, is a generic one, representing his disinterest in pursuing the ultimate source beyond a conventional formula. And he is not always consistent in his references to the determining power behind Nature. But he implies that he has no difficulty distinguishing the natural from the unnatural in human performance. To that process of discrimination, central to Dickens’ art as a novelist, philosophical and theological analysis is irrelevant.
Dickens generally depicts the world of physical nature in traditional Romantic opposition to the artificial creations of humankind. Little Nell flees from London as from a center of darkness into a rural paradise. But the countryside is Edenic because of the absence of certain evils, not because of the presence of Edenic forms. Since it provides Nell the security in which to express her natural goodness, it is paradise enough. Betty Higden, in Our Mutual Friend, flees the fallen city so that she may die peacefully in natural surroundings. Lizzie Hexam, seeking refuge from her painful relationship with Eugene Wrayburn, joins a fraternal community of workers in the countryside. Such versions of Dickensian pastoral are imbued with vague religious overtones, for the god who has created the “eternal laws of … Nature” can be more readily communicated with when his stars are clearly visible, one of which shows Stephen Blackpool, in Hard Times, “where to find the God of the poor.” But in Dickens’ fiction, that God or any other God at best puts in a shadowy appearance in the world of physical nature and often is hardly there at all. At times that world of nature only mirrors the qualities of the character who moves in it. Montague Tigg turns the woodlands into a nightmare with his murderous mind. Rogue Riderhood and Bradley Headstone transform the bucolic valley of the Thames into a landscape of mutual doom.
Since Dickens is concerned with physical nature mainly as a vehicle for dramatizing human nature, he implies no general overview of “the nature of nature” in his novels. He never claims that the physical world is inherently good. Unlike Arnold, he believes neither that nature is remorselessly indifferent to human concerns nor that “Man must begin … where Nature ends.”19 Landscape is not a book in which to read theology or mysticism or the answers to ethical questions. Though, as in the opening passage of Little Dorrit, it is sometimes depicted in animated, even anthropomorphic terms, this is an imagistic device to establish that the life of landscape comes from the life of the human mind and the functioning of human nature. Even the magnificent description in Little Dorrit of the crossing of the Alps confines Alpine grandeur within the dimensions of human psychology. No supernatural light ever transforms Alpine peaks or English valleys.
Dickens’ subject, like Fielding’s, is human nature. In its idealized representation, in characters like Little Nell and Little Dorrit, human nature is synonymous with the moral sentiments. Dickens grants such characters, by virtue of the fullness of their moral sentiments, the intuitive power to recognize the moral sentiments in other people and to discriminate effectively between the “natural” and the “unnatural.” But it is only the authorial narrator who can speculate on the larger issues involved. “Was Mr. Dombey’s master-vice,” writes Dickens,
that ruled him so inexorably, an unnatural characteristic? It might be worth while sometimes, to inquire what Nature is, and how men work to change her, and whether, in the enforced distortions so produced, it is not natural to be unnatural? (DS, chap. 47)
In the dramatic passages that follow, Dickens claims that social misery is an unnatural creation for which man, not Nature, is responsible. The universe is not inherently structured so as to make unnaturalness inevitable. The human beings malformed by social exploitation are not inherently sinful. For what we inherit is the culmination of “a long train of nameless sins against the natural affections and repulsions of mankind.” An “unnatural humanity” has so distorted its own human “Nature” that it creates such unnaturalness and self-servingly argues that it is natural. But that unnatural condition need not last, and
not the less bright and blest would that day of regeneration be for rousing some who have never looked out upon the world of human life around them, to a knowledge of their own relation to it, and for making them acquainted with a perversion of nature in their own contracted sympathies and estimates; as great, and yet as natural in its development when once begun, as the lowest degradation known. (DS, chap. 47)
But once having had the natural “sympathies” narrowed and the moral sentiments constricted, few ever expand them. Like nerve cells, they are difficult to regenerate. And “no such day ever dawned on Mr. Dombey, or his wife; and the course of each was taken.”
Dickens, of course, creates a large community of unhappy children and miserable adults. Many of them have had their moral sentiments or “sympathies” narrowed by social brutality, the exploitation and perversion of human nature that he associates with the industrial revolution and class structure. The degree to which the moral sentiments have been deadened varies from instance to instance, and characters like Nancy, the prostitute in Oliver Twist, and Jo, the crossing-sweep in Bleak House, keep their moral sentiments sufficiently alive so that they capture not only our sympathy but also our admiration. Oliver, Nicholas, and Little Dorrit have such strength of moral sentiment, among other advantages, that social “unnaturalness,” no matter how seemingly powerful, cannot affect their heart’s core and make them into less than idealized embodiments of the moral sentiments. But a great many characters in Dickens’ novels are neither embodiments of the residual power nor idealized representations of the moral sentiments. Though the moral sentiments apparently are a universal given of human nature, some characters reveal that theirs have been diminished or deadened into invisibility. Others have maintained their moral sentiments at a sufficient level of latency so as to be able to resurrect them and themselves—characters such as Scrooge, Martin Chuzzlewit, Sidney Carton, Louisa Gradgrind, Arthur Clennam, and Bella Wilfer.
Do Dickens’ villains have moral sentiments? The logic inherent in his notion of Nature and human nature demands that we conclude that they do. But such an optimistic characterology provides a vision of universal redemption in potentia that the experience of reading Dickens’ depictions of his villains denies. If we assume that characters like Quilp, Squeers, Carker, Orlick, and Riderhood are themselves the victims of environmental distortion rather than being inherently deficient in moral sentiments, then indeed Dickens’ view of the source of such immoral performances strains credibility. Smike and Jo, victims of extreme social brutality, nevertheless retain sympathy and moral sentiment, whereas Quilp and Carker, who have had easier lives, show no trace of such feelings. Dickens’ villains, like his idealized models, seem to have been born into the perfection of their extremes. As adults, they are without redeeming moral value. Is it, then, that individuals have been treated differently from the beginning, from conception—that we have not all begun, in Dickens’ world, from the same starting point? Have we each been given at birth a distinctive, unchanging amount of moral sentiment? Or is moral sentiment to be thought of as a potential for moral response rather than as a measurable substance? Dickens’ characters are so different from one another in the degree of moral sentiment they possess that environmental influence alone cannot reasonably account for the differences.
The logic of innate moral sentiments, from Shaftesbury to Dickens, implies that Carker and Quilp have begun the race from the same starting gate and with the same handicap as Amy Dorrit and Little Nell. But much in Dickens’ presentation of his villains and in common sense denies this. His villains seem always to have been and always to be unredeemable. It is one of their great attractions. It is also a complicating, enriching element in his fiction, a drama of the elect and the damned, the chosen and the forsaken, being played out on the same stage on which there is also being performed an optimistic human comedy about the triumph of the moral sentiments. That Dickens permits the possibility that there are people who do not possess moral sentiment at all is, however, a darker element in his vision of the human condition than his conviction that environmental corruption creates unnaturalness.
The environmental explanation had great appeal for Dickens. As the area of potential corrigibility, it deserved and got much attention. Within limits, it worked effectively, permitting Dickens and his contemporaries to believe that the basic human situation could be substantially improved through social reform. But Dickens also recognized that environmental pressure accounted for only a limited number—the middle range, shall we say—of instances of human unnaturalness. Like many of his contemporaries outside the evangelical world, he feared that the population of those seemingly without the moral sentiments at all was large and growing. At times it does seem that Dickens hoped that the elimination of environmental abuses would allow more light to shine on the obscure, fuller range of problems. Then, perhaps, we would see that what appear to be unchangeable, innate givens of human nature are not so at all but are also the products of social conditioning, that we indeed all have equal potential at birth for having and expressing moral sentiments. The Quilps and Heeps and murderous Riderhoods of our culture then will be seen not to have to have been. It is not a hope, though, that Dickens maintained or sustained in his fiction as a whole or even throughout any one novel.
In general, Dickens chooses to operate as if, since the dark elements cannot be resolved, the bright counterpoint needs constantly to be affirmed. He is hardly alone among Victorian writers in this regard. But he stands in the modern retrospect as the Victorian writer most energetic in demonstrating, even in his later novels, that human nature contains innate moral sentiments whose expression is the heart of moral feeling and the pulse beat of the novel as a literary form. He is never ambivalent about dramatizing the moral sentiments: the more sentimental in that sense the better. And he is never dubious, even when environmental deformation is at its ugliest, about the eventual triumph of the moral sentiments for the individual. Every Dickens novel has one or more characters whose innate goodness cannot be perverted or destroyed by hostile forces. Even Great Expectations presents Joe Gargery as an epitome of untutored and innate moral sentiment whom Pip eventually learns to accept as a model superior to all the alternatives he has tried throughout his pilgrimage. Carlyle, with a rather different definition of human nature, always found invigorating what he thought of as Dickens’ moral “cheerfulness,” as if the sheer energy and moral bravura of his belief in the moral sentiments was itself a fiction so admirable that it transcended the limitations of fiction. Dickens’ fiction was in fact a rear-guard action that Carlyle could sympathize with without ever believing in, an attempt to express the hope that moral deadness and social dehumanization are not inevitable.