In the last year of his life Dickens ended a public speech with the declaration: ‘My faith in the people governing, is, on the whole, infinitesimal; my faith in The People governed, is, on the whole, illimitable.’ He was a life-long radical. According to Forster, it was Dickens’s childhood experiences which instilled ‘the hatred of oppression, the revolt against abuse of power, and the war with injustice under every form’. Dickens would unfailingly take the side of the poor and the underdog. ‘Certainly a subversive writer,’ as George Orwell put it, ‘Dickens attacked English institutions with a ferocity that has never since been approached.’ His vision darkened with age, but although his focus changed, the radicalism never left him.
Arranging all his Boz sketches to best advantage for their reissue in 1837, Dickens chose to start with a sequence ‘From Our Parish’—Parish meaning local government and its administration. Here are the opening sentences:
How much is conveyed in those two short words—‘The Parish’! And with how many tales of distress and misery, or broken fortune and ruined hope, too often of unrelieved wretchedness and successful knavery, are they associated!
The persona Dickens constructs as the curtain goes up on his career is Boz the friend of the poor, their champion against unfeeling and untrustworthy authority. A year later Oliver Twist, subtitled The Parish Boy’s Progress, took the fight to one state institution in particular: the workhouses where the state warehoused—and abused—the orphaned, the poor, the elderly and infirm, breaking up families in the process.
For his next novel, Nicholas Nickleby, Dickens picked another visible manifestation of cruelty to children: the private schools in Yorkshire. ‘I have kept down the strong truth’, Dickens told a friend after his research trip for Nicholas Nickleby, ‘and thrown as much comicality over it as I could, rather than disgust and weary the reader with its fouler aspects.’ These schools, which advertised ‘no holidays’, were dumping grounds for inconvenient children far away from friends and family. In Dickens’s hands, Dotheboys Hall is a freezing lair of beatings and starvation, presided over by the ogre Wackford Squeers. He can boast a convincing pedagogic veneer:
‘We go upon the practical mode of teaching, Nickleby; the regular education system. C-l-e-a-n, clean, verb active, to make bright, to scour. W-i-n, win, d-e-r, der, winder, a casement. When this boy knows this out of the book, he goes and does it.’
(chapter 8)
But while his sadism may seem pantomime—‘“I never thrashed a boy in a hackney-coach before,” said Mr Squeers, when he stopped to rest. “There’s inconveniency in it, but the novelty gives it a sort of relish too!”’ (chapter 38)—Dickens makes his hero as angry as he wants his readers to be, when he defies Squeers for beating the helpless Smike. ‘Nicholas sprang upon him, wrested the weapon from his hand, and, pinning him by the throat, beat the ruffian till he roared for mercy.’ But then high-minded justice, in typical Dickensian about-turn, yields to knockabout as Squeers’s daughter Fanny joins in, ‘and after launching a shower of inkstands at the usher’s head, beat Nicholas to her heart’s content, animating herself at every blow with the recollection of his having refused her proffered love’ (chapter 13).
Dickens had republican views, as his Child’s History of England makes abundantly obvious with its superfluity of bad kings and queens—a Horrible History with Alfred the Great as a rare honourable exception. When republican America failed to live up to his expectations he makes Martin Chuzzlewit’s visit there a comic catastrophe. But his Preface to the novel suggests that his vision is now opening out, his ‘main object’ being ‘to show how Selfishness propagates itself; and to what a grim giant it may grow, from small beginnings’. The story he wrote between instalments of Martin Chuzzlewit marked him forever as torch-bearer for the poor. ‘“This boy is Ignorance”’ declaims the Ghost of Christmas Present. ‘“This girl is Want. Beware them both, and all of their degree, but most of all beware this boy, for on his brow I see that written which is Doom, unless the writing be erased”’ (stave III). A Christmas Carol pits this stark prediction against the optimistic hope that the writing of Doom—a fitting metaphor for a crusading novelist—can be erased by the writing of reform. Here and in his next Christmas book, The Chimes, ‘he was bent’, according to Forster, ‘on striking a blow for the poor’. And as he got into the stride of his public persona he enjoyed landing what he called sledge-hammer blows on behalf of the cause of the moment. To do so, he could choose from a variety of media.
In the hundreds of public speeches he gave throughout his career he could carry the banner in person. His journalism and letters to the national press denounced abuses such as child labour down the coal-mines, cholera-ridden baby farms, and public hangings, in tones ranging from scathing satire to outraged civic indignation. The founding of Household Words in 1850 gave him a regular platform, as some of the titles he contemplated for it suggest: The Lever, The Forge, The Crucible, The Anvil of Time. Throughout the 1850s his magazine addressed important and controversial issues: factory conditions, slum housing, public health and hygiene, women’s employment, education, emigration, crime and prison discipline, government bureaucracy and administration.
The workhouse bugbear persisted in both journalism and fiction. Old Nandy in Little Dorrit is immured ‘in a grove of two score and nineteen more old men, every one of whom smells of all the others’ (book I, chapter 31). So terrified is the old washerwoman Betty Higden in Our Mutual Friend of being ‘brick[ed] up in the Unions’ (the workhouse) that she flees her home, ‘trudging through the streets, away from paralysis and pauperism’ towards freedom and death (book II, chapter 14). ‘Worn-out old people of low estate’, comments Dickens high on his satirical horse, ‘have a trick of reasoning as indifferently as they live, and doubtless would appreciate our Poor Law more philosophically on an income of ten thousand a year’ (book III, chapter 9). The voice of protester on behalf of the people suited him. He liked feeling embattled. ‘I have fought the fight across the Atlantic with the utmost energy I could command’, he wrote to the English publisher Thomas Longman about international copyright in 1842; ‘have never been turned aside by any consideration for an instant; am fresher for the fray than ever; will battle it to the death, and die game to the last.’
As Britain and her empire swelled in size and confidence, Dickens’s own belief in it diminished. For him the best of times were becoming the worst of times, Victorian high noon was dusk verging on midnight. Not that he was anti-progress. As Ruskin aptly said, ‘Dickens was a pure modernist—a leader of the steam-whistle party par excellence.’ The titles he chose for fake book-jackets adorning his study door at Gad’s Hill succinctly express his attitude to the past: The Wisdom of Our Ancestors in seven volumes: 1 Ignorance, 2 Superstition, 3 The Block, 4 The Stake, 5 The Rack, 6 Dirt, 7 Disease. Articles in Household Words toured readers round modern factories and communication centres such as the General Post Office. But by the 1850s, rather than highlighting an issue like the workhouse or a vice like selfishness, Dickens was organizing his novels around his critique of the dehumanizing structures, ideologies, and bureaucracies of 19th-century Britain.
Dickens began work on Bleak House in 1851—the year of the Great Exhibition, showcase to the world for the wonders of industrial Britain. Dickens was less sure of the wonders of his nation. Bleak House was the first of a run of three novels (Hard Times and Little Dorrit followed) to tackle Britain’s ruling institutions and attitudes. His primary target in Bleak House is the legal system, exemplified by the incomprehensible and interminable Jarndyce lawsuit. ‘The little plaintiff or defendant,’ the narrator tells us in the opening chapter,
who was promised a new rocking-horse when Jarndyce and Jarndyce should be settled, has grown up, possessed himself of a real horse, and trotted away into the other world.
(chapter 1)
Those effortless transitions between horses real, rocking, and incorporeal, and between ‘this world and the next’: what precipitous dimensions they open up. The whole first chapter dazzles with its giddying shifts of scale expanding and contracting, converging and radiating, from the real fog of London to the ‘foggy glory’ of the Chancellor’s wig and out to the ‘blighted land in every shire’. All involved in the legal system are doomed. The ‘ruined suitor, who periodically appears from Shropshire’ and tries to address the Chancellor directly, face-to-face, has become a figure of fun. ‘“There again!” said Mr Gridley, with no diminution of his rage. “The system! I am told on all hands, it’s the system. I mustn’t look to individuals. It’s the system”’ (chapter 1).
If ‘The one great principle of the English law is, to make business for itself’ (chapter 39), other institutions are equally culpable. Religion, in the shape of the clergyman Mr Chadband, is self-regarding, greedy, and greasy. ‘A large yellow man with a fat smile and a general appearance of having a good deal of train oil in his system’, he spouts ‘abominable nonsense’ (chapter 19). Philanthropy, as embodied in Mrs Jellyby, is looking the wrong way, towards Africa instead of the inner city. The aristocracy, exemplified by Sir Leicester Dedlock, is ‘intensely prejudiced, perfectly unreasonable’ (chapter 2). As George Bernard Shaw commented in his 1937 Foreword to Great Expectations, ‘Trollope and Thackeray could see Chesney Wold [where the Dedlocks live]; but Dickens could see through it.’ And that central institution of care and protection, the family itself, proves woefully inadequate. Everywhere in the book are abandoned, neglected, and exploited children, and some appalling parenting. The legal system, it becomes clear, is metonymic, synecdoche for something rotten in the state, the rottenness of the state itself. This is the prosperous nation which cannot educate its children, cannot look after its poor, cannot keep its cities clean, and cannot bury its dead properly.
In this vexed world there are no simple solutions. Quietism, staying as aloof as possible, is the path chosen by John Jarndyce as he provides succour to the defenceless. But his scope is limited, and his unworldliness lays him open to being duped, for instance by the calculatingly irresponsible ‘“I am a mere child”’ Harold Skimpole. It is, surprisingly, the cottagey haven Mr Jarndyce establishes outside London to protect his young wards, which is called Bleak House, and where Esther becomes infected with the smallpox coming out of the London slum. So it turns out that there is no good place in this novel which is un-bleak.
The form of the novel re-enforces the sense of disequilibrium, with its two modes of narration fitting uneasily together. One is the omniscient third-person narrator using the historic present. The other is the past tense and first person of Esther Summerson contributing ‘my portion of these pages’ (chapter 3). Her portion could have taken the form of letter or journal; her words suggest that she is collaborating with someone, but with whom? The novel is an experiment in destabilization, constructing a multiplicity of viewpoints, not one of which is privileged. Its final paragraph finishes mid-sentence in uncertainty, as Esther wonders ‘—even supposing—.’ So right to its end this mammoth novel will not settle down; it resists closure, and throws open the ‘system’ of the novel.
Further contributing to the unease is the anxiety about literacy brooding throughout. What is it like not to be able to read or write? An illustration of Jo the illiterate crossing-sweeper occupies the titlepage of the first single-volume edition of the novel, slumped outside the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts. He is at the bottom of society, and in an extraordinary passage the narrator thinks himself into Jo’s subject position:
To see people read, and to see people write, and to see the postmen deliver letters, and not to have the least idea of all that language—to be, to every scrap of it, stone blind and dumb! … what does it all mean, and if it means anything to anybody, how comes it that it means nothing to me?
(chapter 16)
And there is so much of ‘all that unaccountable reading and writing’ needed to keep London going, ‘the great tee-totum … set up for its daily spin and whirl’. Indeed, far too much of it, over-literacy possibly as bad as illiteracy.
Writing is the default position of many characters, much to their disadvantage. People are always at it, characters dwindle into its constituent elements. ‘“I am only pen and ink to her”’ sobs the exasperated Caddy Jellyby (chapter 14), enforced amanuensis for her mother’s philanthropic mania. Others, like Richard Carstone and the lawyer Tulkinghorn, are in danger of drying up and turning into paper; paper is in danger of turning into litter: in Mrs Jellyby’s cluttered cupboards, in mad Miss Flite’s reticule, in Krook’s filthy rag-and-bone shop, in the law courts. Dickens himself at this time seems to have been feeling the need to be more present to his readers. Household Words, founded in the year before he started Bleak House, was his attempt to speak directly to a larger audience. He was on the verge of a new career as a reader of his novels; never was he more in demand as a public speaker. Face-to-face is what he values, and the novel mounts an offensive against writing, in writing—all 900 pages of it.
To transcend the novel’s ‘writtenness’ Dickens draws on the rhetorical flourish of the speaking voice: the prophecy of the avenging slum-dwellers in Tom-all-alone’s—‘not an atom of Tom’s slime … but shall work its retribution through every order of society’—and the scalding apostrophe of the elegy for Jo which disrupts plot and form to exhort us directly: ‘Dead, your Majesty. Dead, my lords and gentlemen. Dead, Right Reverends and Wrong Reverends of every order. Dead, men and women, born with Heavenly compassion in your hearts. And dying thus around us, every day’ (chapter 47).
Hard Times, Dickens’s next and shortest novel, moves the battle on. It is dedicated to his friend and mentor, Thomas Carlyle, who had analysed the nation’s ills in ‘Signs of the Times’ (1829): ‘Men are grown mechanical in head and in heart, as well as in hand.’ Or, as Dickens ascribes it to his representative of utilitarianism in his novel:
It was a fundamental principle of the Gradgrind philosophy that everything was to be paid for. Nobody was ever on any account to give anybody anything, or render anybody help without purchase. Gratitude was to be abolished, and the virtues springing from it were not to be. Every inch of the existence of mankind, from birth to death, was to be a bargain across a counter. And if we didn’t get to Heaven that way, it was not a politico-economical place, and we had no business there.
(book III, chapter 8)
The Hard Times parable proposes a stark opposition between this world and the next, between economic man and the Christian values and beliefs which Dickens consistently upheld throughout his life.
Moving outside London for once, he goes north, mapping his attack on utilitarian philosophy onto the landscape of the industrialized workforce. For this new environment new words are needed. The Coketown people are ‘workful’; the shrubberies in the suburban gardens are ‘besmoked’. ‘The Key-Note’ chapter makes the point:
Fact, fact, fact, everywhere in the material aspect of the town; fact, fact, fact, everywhere in the immaterial … everything was fact between the lying-in hospital and the cemetery, and what you couldn’t state in figures, or show to be purchaseable in the cheapest market and saleable in the dearest, was not, and never should be, world without end, Amen.
(book I, chapter 5)
Set within this frame of ‘world without end’, the language of materialism becomes a blasphemous liturgy. The stakes could not be higher.
At the heart of Hard Times is the issue of education. ‘“Go and be somethingological directly”’, Mrs Gradgrind tells her children (book I, chapter 4). ‘“Now, what I want is, Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life”’ are the first words of the book and central to Mr Gradgrind’s ‘system’ as he calls it later, when ruing its consequences for his children. ‘“I have meant to do right”’, he says, with a commentary from Dickens to ensure that we do not make him the villain of the piece.
He said it earnestly, and to do him justice he had. In gauging fathomless deeps with his little mean excise-rod, and in staggering over the universe with his rusty stiff-legged compasses, he had meant to do great things. Within the limits of his short tether he had tumbled about, annihilating the flowers of existence with greater singleness of purpose than many of the blatant personages whose company he kept.
(book III, chapter 1)
Although Mr Gradgrind sees the error of his ways Dickens has no faith in the Parliament where Gradgrind sits as an MP doing any good—the ‘cinderheap’, the ‘national dustyard’ as he calls it. Rather, it is Dickens’s prose which comes to the rescue. The novel is, appropriately, suffused with ‘fanciful imagination’, Dickens’s prime weapon in his assault on the dead hand of utilitarian thinking. His imagery casts the chimneys and steam engines of Coketown into interminable serpents and melancholy mad elephants. Violence simmers beneath the sullen surfaces of the Gradgrind children. Tom wants to ‘“put a thousand barrels of gunpowder”’ under all the Facts and Figures ‘“and blow them all up together!”’ (book I, chapter 8); Louisa watches for the fire which ‘bursts out’ of the factory chimneys at night (book I, chapter 15).
Throughout the book Dickens switches between smoke-blackened Coketown and the eternal perspectives of the ‘laws of Creation’, between the tethered goat Gradgrind and the universe he staggers over with his compasses, between ‘the utmost cunning of algebra’ and ‘the last trumpet ever to be sounded [which] shall blow even algebra to wreck’ (book I, chapter 15). The voice of the prophet is heard again, reinforcing the book’s Biblical language and cadences with warnings to us to heed the needs of working people or ‘Reality will take a wolfish turn, and make an end of you!’ (book II, chapter 6).
Dickens’s initial idea for his next novel was, according to Forster, of ‘a leading man for a story who should bring about all the mischief in it, lay it all on Providence, and say at every fresh calamity, “nobody was to blame”’; the title was to be Nobody’s Fault. But Dickens soon had more topical targets in his sights, and many to cast at fault—in fact a whole system. ‘I have relieved my indignant soul with a scarifier,’ he told his friend Wilkie Collins while planning Little Dorrit in 1855. The book’s tenth chapter, ‘Containing the Whole Science of Government’, goes for the jugular in its first paragraph:
The Circumlocution Office was (as everybody knows without being told) the most important Department under government. No public business of any kind could possibly be done at any time, without the acquiescence of the Circumlocution Office. Its finger was in the largest public pie, and in the smallest public tart. It was equally impossible to do the plainest right and to undo the plainest wrong, without the express authority of the Circumlocution Office. If another Gunpowder Plot had been discovered half an hour before the lighting of the match, nobody would have been justified in saving the parliament until there had been half a score of boards, half a bushel of minutes, several sacks of official memoranda, and a family-vault-full of ungrammatical correspondence, on the part of the Circumlocution Office.
Circumlocution: the paragraph lands us where we started, mimicking the circularity of the system. Its great watchword is ‘how not to do it’, meaning how to do nothing about anything, so that in an appropriately swollen and higgledy-piggledy list:
Mechanicians, natural philosophers, soldiers, sailors, petitioners, memorialists, people with grievances, people who wanted to prevent grievances, people who wanted to redress grievances, jobbing people, jobbed people, people who couldn’t get rewarded for merit, and people who couldn’t get punished for demerit, were all indiscriminately tucked up under the foolscap paper of the Circumlocution Office.
Dickens’s diatribe against civil-service bureaucracy was timely: an enquiry into the conduct of the Crimean War was revealing gross administrative incompetence. For the only time in his life he joined a political movement, the Administrative Reform Association.
As Dickens tells it, the Circumlocution Office is in the hands of one family, the Tite Barnacles. In his quest to help the bankrupt Mr Dorrit, Arthur Clennam is cheerfully given masses of forms to fill in—‘“You can have a dozen, if you like”’—but no hope of success. Barnacles can be likeable, even while understanding ‘the Department to be a politico-diplomatic hocus pocus piece of machinery’ (book I, chapter 10). Lifting his gaze from the miles of ‘red tape’ which could ‘stretch, in graceful festoons, from Hyde Park corner to the General Post Office’ (book II, chapter 8), Dickens indicts the whole ‘Barnacle tribe’, the governing class and all its hangers on, clinging on across the empire. ‘The paternal Gowan’, for example (father of the charlatan artist Henry—Dickens detests artists who are not serious about their work),
originally attached to a legation abroad, had been pensioned off as a Commissioner of nothing particular somewhere or other, and had died at his post with his drawn salary in his hand, nobly defending it to the last extremity.
(book I, chapter 18)
Henry’s mother has been given lodgings in Hampton Court Palace, along with ‘several other old ladies of both sexes’, where she entertains tribe members such as Lord Lancaster Stiltstalking, the ‘noble Refrigerator’ who
had iced several European courts in his time, and had done it with such complete success that the very name of Englishman yet struck cold to the stomachs of foreigners who had the distinguished honor of remembering him, at a distance of a quarter of a century.
(book I, chapter 26)
Dickens invariably directs his fire against those who wield power badly, be they petty officials, cruel judges, or the aristocracy, though in his own personal dealings with the latter he could be obsequious. Now the class system comes into focus as the cause of the country’s ills. Little Dorrit is, according to George Bernard Shaw, ‘a more seditious book than Das Kapital’. The theme rumbles through the novel and surfaces in satirical parallels, such as William Dorrit, imprisoned for debt in the Marshalsea and massaging his self-esteem by patronizing the workhouse resident Old Nandy:
Mr. Dorrit was in the habit of receiving this old man, as if the old man held of him in vassalage under some feudal tenure. He made little treats and teas for him, as if he came in with his homage from some outlying district where the tenantry were in a primitive state.
(book I, chapter 31)
William Dorrit is in prison; and this is the novel’s dark and controlling image for a society enchained by class and ideology. At last the Marshalsea can find its place in Dickens’s fiction, to embody the mental, social, and spiritual structures which Dickens shows to be so constricting. From the educational philosophy of the governess Mrs General, whose ‘ways of forming a mind—to cram all articles of difficulty into cupboards, lock them up, and say they had no existence’ (book II, chapter 2), to the fierce Old Testament religion of Arthur’s mother, with her bible ‘bound like her own construction of it in the hardest, barest, and straitest boards, with one dinted ornament on the cover like the drag of a chain, and a wrathful sprinkling of red upon the edges of the leaves’ (book I, chapter 3): this is a book full of things and people locked and shut up.
So far, so bleak. But relief is at hand. Dickens’s rage against the system can be violent: prisons are burnt down in Barnaby Rudge and flung open in A Tale of Two Cities. In Bleak House the illiterate Krook is nicknamed the Lord Chancellor. His crazy shop is a parody Chancery and his death by spontaneous combustion the author’s vengeful desire to put a bomb under the whole Chancery system. But such explosions are rare. Dickens was not one to advocate anarchy. He looks rather to the antidotes and respites afforded by safe spaces and interludes of carnival. Where he likes to be best is in the family circle round the fireside. When ‘all the Cratchit family drew round the hearth, in what Bob Cratchit called a circle, meaning half a one’ (stave III), Dickens installed himself there too. Think of yourselves as ‘a group of friends, listening to a tale told by a winter fire’, he urged the audience at his public reading of A Christmas Carol in 1858. ‘No man’, wrote his daughter Mamie, ‘was so inclined naturally to derive his happiness from home affairs. He was full of the kind of interest in a house which is commonly confined to women.’ His own houses often feature in his letters, with precise directions for home improvements including designs for shower curtains.
Home, rather than pastoral Eden or heavenly city, is the great good place for Dickens, its locations many and various. It can be in a thieves’ den like Fagin’s, in shops like the Wooden Midshipman in Dombey and Son, or legal chambers like Mr Grewgious’s in Edwin Drood. Characters who can create havens, however temporary, are celebrated. An improvised trim interior is best (Dickens was a demon for tidiness, as his children knew only too well), diminutive and tight against the world outside. Mrs Jarley’s caravan in The Old Curiosity Shop, offers Little Nell a harbour where she eats well and sleeps late (chapter 26). Mr Peggotty’s boat on the beach at Yarmouth charms young David Copperfield instantly. ‘After tea, when the door was shut and all was made snug (the nights being cold and misty now), it seemed to me the most delicious retreat that the imagination of man could conceive’ (chapter 3). Even a prison can have its safe spots, such as the Marshalsea Snuggery’s ‘social evening club’ in Little Dorrit (book I, chapter 8).
not a shabby, dingy, dusty cart, but a smart little house upon wheels, with white dimity curtains festooning the windows, and window-shutters of green picked out with panels of a staring red, in which happily-contrasted colours the whole concern shone brilliant,
The shibboleths of home do not escape mockery. In Our Mutual Friend, Bella Wilfer takes on ‘The Complete British Family Housewife’ from which she is learning to cook, retorting ‘“Oh you ridiculous old thing, what do you mean by that? You must have been drinking!”’ (book IV, chapter 5). It can be a place of secrets, mystery, and suffering. But home is always to be aspired to, longed for. The shut-out child is a powerful Dickens figure. The rejected Florence Dombey is, as her father recognizes belatedly, ‘the spirit of his home’ (chapter 35).
These refuges, though, are susceptible to contamination and destruction. From inside Mrs Jarley’s caravan, Nell glimpses Quilp pursuing her and dreams fearfully of him. Mr Peggotty’s boat is blown down by the storm at the end of the book. On being deceived by his servant in Dombey and Son, Captain Cuttle laments the ‘treachery’ in the parlour ‘which was a kind of sacred place’ (chapter 39). And while Dickens is second to none in his worship at the familial hearth, few of his families are happy, and many are dysfunctional. He prefers the improvised to the biological sort. Old Sol Gills and Captain Cuttle are surrogate parents for Florence Dombey. Mr Peggotty brings together children and widows left orphaned and bereft by the sea. Mr Jarndyce opens his home to illegitimate Esther Summerson and the wards in Chancery, children adrift in the legal system.
Homes, families—and entertainment. If there is a prison in almost every novel, there is also a theatre. An avid theatre-goer and zealous manager of his own amateur company, Dickens dispatches even his demurest heroines, Agnes Wickfield and Esther Summerson, to enjoy themselves at the theatre. The youthful Nicholas Nickleby excels as actor/dramatist in a novel thronged with characters acting on and off stage. All forms of popular culture had attractions for Dickens, and melodrama in particular. It is also what many have deplored in his work. Ruskin, who considered Hard Times a great book, nevertheless criticized Dickens for writing in a ‘circle of stage fire’. But for Dickens, all ‘The Amusements of the People’, as he called them in two Household Words essays, were to be valued. Puppet shows, Punch and Judy, and waxworks had the added charm of playing across the boundaries of animate and inanimate. Running counter to the mechanization of thought, word, and deed in Hard Times is Sleary’s circus and horse-riding. Dickens admires both what they do—‘“People must be amuthed, Thquire, thomehow”’, the lisping ‘never sober and never drunk’ Mr Sleary tells Mr Gradgrind—and how they do it. The circus people possess ‘a remarkable gentleness … and an untiring readiness to help and pity one another’ (book I, chapter 6).
For all his admiration—perhaps because of it—Dickens is equally drawn to the underside of carnival. In The Old Curiosity Shop he shows us the Punch and Judy puppets being mended, ‘all slack and drooping in a dark box’, and the commerce at its heart. Mr Vuffin the giant-keeper expounds his economic ‘policy’:
‘What becomes of the old giants?’ said Short, turning to him again after a little reflection.
‘They’re usually kept in carawans to wait upon the dwarfs,’ said Mr Vuffin.
‘The maintaining of ’em must come expensive, when they can’t be shown, eh?’ remarked Short, eyeing him doubtfully.
‘It’s better that, than letting ’em go upon the parish or about the streets,’ said Mr Vuffin. ‘Once make a giant common and giants will never draw again. Look at wooden legs. If there was only one man with a wooden leg what a property he’d be!’
‘So he would!’ observed the landlord and Short both together. ‘That’s very true.’
‘Instead of which,’ pursued Mr Vuffin, ‘if you was to advertise Shakespeare played entirely by wooden legs, it’s my belief you wouldn’t draw a sixpence.’
(chapter 19)
Celebrating the individual and the eccentric, Dickensian carnival can take many shapes and forms. The stout elderly gent in Dickens’s first novel arrives as a force of nature—indeed, the force of nature:
That punctual servant of all work, the sun, had just risen … when Mr. Samuel Pickwick burst like another sun from his slumbers, threw open his chamber window, and looked out upon the world beneath.
The princes of this world are the enjoyers of life. Easy enough for men of leisure like Pickwick, gallivanting round the country with his chums; more special is the starving young servant in The Old Curiosity Shop who forages for scraps after her employers have gone to bed. She salvages ‘“pieces of orange peel to put into cold water and make believe it was wine … If you make believe very much, it’s quite nice,” said the small servant; “but if you don’t, you know, it seems as if it would bear a little more seasoning, certainly”’ (chapter 64).
Dickens’s child characters are blessed with a Wordsworthian access to the life of the imagination, and that spirit which prompts them to pose fundamental questions. ‘“What is money?”’ asks little Paul Dombey (chapter 8). If it ‘“can do anything”’ as his father claims, why could it not keep his mother alive? David Copperfield admires those who retain the child’s ‘faculty’ in later years, and so does his creator. The nurturing of this force of the imagination was the avowed mission of his new journal in 1850:
No mere utilitarian spirit, no iron binding of the mind to grim realities, will give a harsh tone to our Household Words. In the bosoms of the young and old, of the well-to-do and of the poor, we would tenderly cherish that light of Fancy which is inherent in the human breast.
Hence Dickens’s lifelong preoccupation with non-rational states of mind, with madness, with dreams, hallucinations, and semi-conscious states. He took a keen interest in mesmerism; in Italy he successfully hypnotized a fellow hotel guest suffering from nervous disorder (he had to stop when Catherine objected to his visiting a lady’s bedroom at midnight). A ‘night-fancy’ prompts him to ‘wander by Bethlehem Hospital’, the lunatic asylum, for his 1860 ‘Night Walks’ essay, as he meditates on the porous boundaries and definitions of sanity.
Are not the sane and the insane equal at night as the sane lie a dreaming? Are not all of us outside this hospital, who dream, more or less in the condition of those inside it, every night of our lives? Are we not nightly persuaded, as they daily are, that we associate preposterously with kings and queens, emperors and empresses, and notabilities of all sorts? Do we not nightly jumble events and personages, and times and places, as these do daily?
His books abound with characters who are irrational, excitable, obsessed, compulsive, deluded. He takes pleasure in creating the malign demented Mrs F’s Aunt in Little Dorrit, who terrifies Arthur Clennam with her ferocious pronouncements—‘“Give him a meal of chaff”’ (book II, chapter 9)—as well as the benignly ‘childish’ Mr Dick, whose advice is treasured by Betsey Trotwood. ‘“What shall I do with him?”’ she asks when her little nephew David Copperfield turns up ragged and filthy, having run away from his miserable employment in Murdstone and Grinby’s rat-infested warehouse (chapter 13). Mr Dick’s practical ‘“I should wash him!”’ has the inevitable consequence of Miss Trotwood’s taking David in and, ultimately, adopting him.
Above all, Dickens relishes the fabricators and visionaries, those who can afford to be lavish with language if with nothing else. Old Mrs Gamp in Martin Chuzzlewit—when she appears ‘a peculiar fragrance was borne upon the breeze, as if a passing fairy had hiccupped, and had previously been to a wine vaults’ (chapter 25)—has an inventive idiolect appropriate to her work as midwife and layer-out of corpses. She likes to remember children ‘“playing at berryins down in the shop, and follerin’ the order-book to its long home in the iron safe”’, and is, like Dickens, a creator of character.
A fearful mystery surrounded this lady of the name of Harris, whom no one in the circle of Mrs. Gamp’s acquaintance had ever seen; neither did any human being know her place of residence, though Mrs. Gamp appeared on her own showing to be in constant communication with her. There were conflicting rumours on the subject; but the prevalent opinion was that she was a phantom of Mrs. Gamp’s brain—as Messrs. Doe and Roe are fictions of the law—created for the express purpose of holding visionary dialogues with her on all manner of subjects, and invariably winding up with a compliment to the excellence of her nature.
(chapter 25)
Dickens’s own ‘visionary dialogues’, his extravagant conceits and metaphysical yokings together of the totally disparate, his wilful category confusions of animate and inanimate, his extended and jumbled lists, and his exuberant wordplay: for him it is ultimately the carnival of language itself which will defy the ‘grim realities’ and the ‘iron binding of the mind’ he saw all around him.