THERE have been two main grounds for dismissing Dickens altogether as a novelist – that is, from serious consideration as a novelist, as something other than a successful entertainer (at which no one disputes his eminence). One, which includes charges that take some such form as ‘Dickens was incapable of thought’, is represented by G. H. Lewes’s contemporary critical attack where he complained that with Dickens ‘sensations never pass into ideas’. The opposite charge is there in a recent relegation of Dickens: in denying that Dickens is more than a theatrical performer on the whole, Mr R. Garis (in The Dickens Theatre‚ 1965 – one of the few candid Dickens critiques of the modern phase and therefore most worth consideration) asserts, as a general truth, that:
We feel a gap between conception and performance, and sometimes we virtually ignore the performance, we almost wish it away, in our full concentration on Dickens’s idea. Much recent criticism adopts this attitude regularly.
and he sees ‘the over-emphatic and misleading excitement about Dickens’s symbolic structures not as a way of defending the success of the late novels but rather as a means of evading the issue: in Mr J. Hillis Miller’s book evasion of judgement is almost total, and Mr Trilling raises the issue only to condescend to it’. These last observations are perfectly true, and in defending Bleak House against both Lewes’s and Garis’s charges I do not wish to be taken as evading judgement of Dickens’s performance. On the contrary, I select Bleak House for close examination as a way of demonstrating both that Dickens was not satisfied with making fiction out of ‘sensations’ but had a well-grasped and deeply-felt argument, that he worked through fiction to make manifest his ideas, not as a set of ideas, but as a complex theme; and also that the ideas are not compulsive or simple-minded, nor inadequately presented as such, but are completely incarnated, dissolved into action and dialogue and feelings of representative forms of life that constitute a whole which is meaningful when (and only when) it is read with the necessary sensitiveness to the text and when the detail is related to the whole in ways implied in their context.
Some co-operation is demanded of the reader; some understanding too of what was imposed by the form of publication in parts and for a very diverse readership; and a certain amount of charity. We really should not, like Mr Garis, make an anthology of the weaker passages and points in the plots (passages which are mostly expendable) as if they were representative, on the principle, apparently, that the chain is only as strong as its weakest link (not a criterion that applies to any novel or many great fictions would be sunk). As an example of what can be achieved by doing just this, I would like to cite Mr Garis’s use of the exhortation delivered to Tattycoram by Mr Meagles at the end of Little Dorrit as they look down into the Marshalsea at Amy Dorrit passing below. Garis says:
This is worse than inept. We have no alternative but to take the sermon as the official moral of Tattycoram’s story, sponsored by the management … Yet the sermon is inappropriate in several ways. Since Tattycoram has already fully and convincingly described her conversion, Mr Meagles’s sermon about duty seems a work of pharisaical supererogation worthy of Mrs Pardiggle herself – it is hard to see how the generous Dickens could have been guilty of such tactlessness … Tattycoram’s promise to ‘count five-and-twenty thousand’ expresses well enough her pleasure in returning from Miss Wade’s imprisoning system to the world, and the vocabulary, of Mr Meagles; but it is also an unwelcome reminder of earlier doubts about Mr Meagles’s practicality. As a good audience we may have reluctantly obeyed the theatrical artist’s clear instructions to forget these doubts and to co-operate in this happy reconciliation scene, but with Mr Meagles’s sermon on duty Dickens has gone too far. We don’t want the sermon anyway…. Our sense that Dickens himself is sponsoring Mr Meagles’s sermon is confirmed also by the fact that Mr Meagles points to the heroine of the novel as an example of right behaviour.
There are several points to make here in reply. The outstanding one is that Dickens isn’t as simple a case as this writer assumes – he is very often less simple-minded than his critics, especially those outside the English tradition and in such a brutally crude one as the modern American. Even assuming that the ‘sermon’ is in relation to Dickens himself what Garis thinks it is, at the worst, it wouldn’t constitute an annulment of the whole of the novel that has gone before, or even affect the success of Dickens’s use of the Meagleses: Dickens has made a convincing demonstration (as Garis admits) of Tattycoram’s feelings and behaviour. What he implies is that Dickens has failed to do so (as regards convincing Mr Garis, that is) with respect to what the Meagleses are and represent, and this is simply a failure in him of the reading ability that I have posited as essential. To any able reader Dickens has surely made it plain that of the Meagleses he is both appreciative and yet radically and ultimately critical. The bulk of Dickens’s readers were affreux bourgeois, more or less Meagleses, and the tact with which Dickens offers the couple, their home and their daughter as the best specimens of their kind but with disqualifying limitations that cannot be ignored or forgiven, must be admired and respected. They have enough ‘warm feeling’ as parents to be hurt by the sight of the churchful of orphans and as ‘practical people’ (this term, which is stressed, means that they are doers as opposed to sentimentalists, but also constitutes as we are shown an essential limitation) they accordingly take an orphan girl into their home, by way of doing their share; they are even able to foresee that she might be jealous of Pet, but when they see this taking the form of bursts of rage they are unable to cope except by tactless exhortations. They are also demonstrated to be insular, thoroughly philistine, snobbish in an innocent but not harmless way, and to have done their truly beloved daughter harm by bringing her up to be a Pet. (The pet name is significant: Dickens had originally intended her to be known as ‘Baby’, but having already exhausted this idea in Copperfield made a characteristic development of his thinking on the same lines: Pet has been wronged by her parents because she has greater capabilities and could have been spared misery if she had not been made into a vehicle only for their love and for loving, at the mercy of the first determined suitor therefore – she has ‘chosen’ Gowan before Clennam appears and is distressed at not being able to return Clennam’s love.)
Dickens shows exactly how he values them by playing them off to their advantage against the worldling Mrs Gowan but showing Meagles at a loss and offensively patronizing in his attitude to the inventor Doyce. Dickens gives them their meed of praise for their loving Pet unselfishly enough to be able to realise that they had better resign her after marriage so that Gowan will not have a grievance to use against her. All this is done with consummate art and creative fertility: some of the scenes of painful comedy Jane Austen couldn’t have done better. And Dickens also leaves us in no doubt of the strength of his case against their kind: for instance, their simple moralizing habits which have been shown as driving Tattycoram to run away and which, when – the alternative represented by Miss Wade proving even more intolerable – she is driven to return, are still forced on her, thus showing that a Meagles can learn nothing. In exactly the same way Mr Meagles talked English very loudly to foreigners with the conviction that they must ultimately understand it. We are also shown him self-defeating in being always moved to say the wrong thing to Miss Wade because he can’t conceive that she is fundamentally not a nice well-meaning woman like his wife – a fatal absence of imagination. I simply can’t agree in the face of all this (and much more could be cited) that, as Mr Garis asserts, ‘Dickens’s grasp of the whole Meagles family and what they represent is always uncertain and often distinctly inept’ – that would be truer to say of Matthew Arnold’s ironic attacks on the Meagles class. Dickens saw that while their virtues were needed their limitations were dangerous and in some respects wholly disabling; he is tactful in making nearly all the criticism fall on the head of Mr Meagles, leaving ‘Mother’ to be a good soul totally lacking comprehension. Compare Jane Austen’s treatment and presentation of her equivalents, the Musgroves of Uppercross Hall in Persuasion, where there is a similar cultural gap between parents and children and a similar divided attitude on the part of the author to them all (I pick Jane Austen because Mr Garis takes her as a comparison by which to fault Dickens generally); we can’t help seeing that Dickens has an overwhelming advantage in inwardness, understanding, complexity and truly novelistic use of his couple.
Hence it is quite unjust to assume that Dickens ‘endorses’ simple-mindedly Mr Meagles’s sermon to Tattycoram, that we have been given ‘clear instructions to forget these doubts (‘about Mr Meagles’s practicality’) and to cooperate in this happy reconciliation scene’; there is no happy ending either to the novel as a whole or to Tattycoram’s share in it, any more than there is for Mr and Mrs Meagles and Pet, or anyone else in Little Dorrit except possibly Arthur Clennam. The ‘sermon’ is what Mr Meagles (not Dickens) would think appropriate, he would certainly utter it ‘gently’, and his approval of Amy would take the form (Dickens’s doesn’t) of praising her for ‘doing her duty’. ‘We don’t want the sermon anyway’, Mr Garis complains. Well, it depends who ‘we’ are! Not if ‘we’ are present-day readers; but Dickens’s readers were a different matter. With the strategy I have shown him habitually using from Copperfield onwards, Dickens wrote to be read in two ways. He saw that such a harmless sop to the Meagles section of his reading-public would give them the moral they could understand while allowing the rest of the novel’s meaning to sink in perhaps (I am not positing such a process of reasoning as deliberate, it would be instinctive in a man who worked as Dickens did, with such continuous experience as editor and novelist of the Victorian readership). At another level, that at which he wrote to satisfy himself, the ‘sermon’ is seen to be what I have described.
This may justly lead us to ask questions about the degree to which Dickens was a critic of Victorianism and the extent to which he may be said, as he grew older, to have come to terms with or even succumbed to, some Victorian attitudes, but not to write off Little Dorrit on that and similar grounds. The Meagleses were at the heart of a Victorian problem for Dickens and he shows himself impartial, sensitive and intelligent in presenting it. He knew only too well that his public even when not Meagleses probably mostly admired a Mr Meagles in all innocence, and that it would need critical tact to manœuvre them out of this position. At one level therefore there is the desired sermon on duty and a heroine who seems to endorse it; on another, for Mr Garis, if he could see it, a less attractive, extremely complex case of the blindness and mistakes human beings are prone to when they are nice ordinary John Bulls, and a much more sensitive and difficult and character-demanding role for the heroine than following the strait path of Duty. If Dickens could have afforded to write for Mr Garis’s ‘we’ – assuming it existed to any extent at all then – if Dickens had been able in the later half of his career to ignore the Meagleses even more than he did,1 literary history would have been very different; but social history would have had to be different first. George Eliot, writing Middlemarch a generation after, was able to profit by Dickens’s achievement in ultimately knitting together a large reading public at least willing if not eager to tackle a long novel demanding serious and sustained attention; without his work she could not have made a fortune by writing novels to please herself only.
The scenes with Tattycoram and the scenes where the Gowans and Meagleses and Arthur or any of them, meet, are all splendidly realized dramatically and in no respect can they be dismissed as theatrical. I can’t think of any novelist except perhaps Tolstoy who could have done as well here, certainly not Jane Austen, for there is a kind of imaginative sympathy Dickens had that she lacked. When we have been shown that Mr Meagles’s middle-class snobbery has made him finally agree to handing over his Pet to a Gowan, to be miserable for life, a spectacle neither he nor we are later spared, Dickens finishes with him in this way:
‘… but she’s very fond of him, and hides his faults, and thinks that no one sees them – and he certainly is well connected, and of a very good family!’
It was the only comfort he had in the loss of his daughter, and if he made the most of it, who could blame him?
Certainly not Dickens; but this is very far from being an endorsement.
The Dickens who wrote his excellent journalistic pieces and made admirable speeches appropriate to public functions or suitable speeches at public dinners, was not the Dickens who wrote the novels or those parts (the most) of them which make them works of art. When he created as a novelist – and it is significant that he said that he could not till he had ‘got up steam’ – it was to express a deeper level of self than the journalist, actor, social friend or even, on the whole, the letter-writer, drew upon. This should be axiomatic, and prevent the Holloways of Eng. Lit. from citing the non-novelist to ‘demolish’ triumphantly interpretations of the novels drawn from the text of the novels themselves by that method of intelligent and sensitive disciplined reading which literary criticism makes possible. This applies to other novels than Hard Times, and perhaps above all others to Bleak House, which has been so generally accepted as a characteristically muddled piece of indignation (an attack on the law’s delays) on the dubious evidence of Dickens’s remarks about his attitude to the laws of England elsewhere and his preface to the novel itself. This has led to arguments about whether the Lord Chancellor of the novel was Lord Lyndhurst and shakings of the head over the confusions of characters and events that could not be contemporaneous and a general belief that Dickens’s object in writing Bleak House was to get the Chancery Court reformed. Instead of an irrelevant, and indeed misleading, preface2 devoted to justifying the doing away with Krook by Spontaneous Combustion and the factual truth of the Jarndyce case, Dickens would have done better simply to have printed on the title-page: ‘These things are parables’. The nature of the theme, of his treatment of it, and the structure of the novel, would then have been made apparent.
But anyway the whole novel is set out so as to make this point inescapable for a sensitive reader. The nature of the fog that emanates from and is concentrated in the heart of London’s Chancery Court is indicated in the opening chapter by the fact that the ruined suitors (Miss Flite and the Man from Shropshire) are figures of fun to the lawyers’ clerks and merely nuisances to the lawyers and the judge, and by the description of the Jarndyce case itself:
Innumerable children have been born into the cause … whole families have inherited legendary hatreds with the suit … no man’s nature has been made better by it. In trickery, evasion, procrastination, spoilation, botheration, under false pretences of all sorts, there are influences that can never come to good … The receiver in the cause has acquired a goodly sum of money by it, but has acquired too a distrust of his own mother, and a contempt for his own kind … Shirking and sharking, in all their varieties, have been sown broadcast by the ill-fated cause; and even those who have contemplated its history from the outermost circle of such evil, have been insensibly tempted into a loose way of letting bad things alone to take their own bad course, and a loose belief that if the world go wrong, it was, in some off-hand manner, never meant to go right.
Thus, in the midst of the mud and at the heart of the fog,3 sits the Lord High Chancellor in his Court of Chancery.
Remembering that ‘jarndyce’ was the old-fashioned pronunciation of ‘jaundice’, we see that the Jarndyce Case is the case of man in the state of Victorian society. The kind of law that is the metaphor here is Equity (which can imprison for contempt of court) and is concerned with the concept of and search for true Justice; it is not the kind of law featured in Pickwick and Copperfield as imprisoning for debt and which is later to be used in Little Dorrit as the very type of absurdity in administering injustice; nor is it the symbol of the society represented by Newgate, that Dickens finally arrived at for Great Expectations, a society, criminal and criminal-making, that executed men. The bearing of Justice and Equity on religion, morals and ethics, and on social sanctions and institutions, is a matter explored by Dickens throughout Bleak House.
We are confirmed in our reading of the overtones in the first chapter by the more direct expositions of the theme that follow. It should be noted that the prose here (in the first chapter) is quite different from the rhetoric of indignation and satire that has appeared in earlier novels. This first chapter needs to be read in its entirety, when it will be seen as tightly controlled (not dependent on either Swift or Carlyle as so often previously) and characteristically witty in operation. Though behind Bleak House is that characterization of his age that Carlyle, in the ‘Present’ part of Past and Present,4 made available to the novelists of Early Victorian England and by which they so richly profited, yet this style owes nothing to Carlyle’s excited pulpit-pounding rhetoric, infectious as that was and particularly so for Dickens. (The contemporary parts of Past and Present seem to me to have been second only to Shakespeare in influencing Dickens.) What had seized Dickens’s imagination is Carlyle’s exposure of his culture as the laissez-faire. Devil-take-the-hindmost, cut-throat competitive society and the sense that they were part of it, willy-nilly: the novel is to demonstrate its heartlessness, its tragedies, its moral repulsiveness, its self-defeating wastefulness, its absurdities and contradictions, to enquire into the possibilities of goodness in such an environment, and whether anything in the nature of free-will is possible for those born into it.
Thus institutions and professions are necessarily examined. The second chapter undertakes to show that the world of high society was governed by the same laws – a self-defeating ritual of fashion – at its peak being the Dedlock family (to be in a deadlock is to be at a standstill). It contains the remarkable description of the ‘place’ in Lincolnshire, again unlike any earlier prose in Dickens’s novels, delicate, forceful, beautiful and moving and again telling its message in suggestive and inescapable overtones:
The waters are out in Lincolnshire. An arch of the bridge in the park has been sapped and sopped away. The adjacent low-lying ground, for half a mile in breadth, is a stagnant river, with melancholy islands in it, and a surface punctured all over, all day long, with falling rain. The weather, for many a day and night, has been so wet that the trees seem wet through, and the soft loppings and prunings of the woodman’s axe can make no crash or crackle as they fall. The deer, looking soaked, leave quagmires, where they pass. The shot of a rifle loses its sharpness in the moist air, and its smoke moves in a tardy little cloud towards the green rise, coppice-topped, that makes a background for the falling rain. The view from my Lady Dedlock’s own windows is alternately a lead-coloured view, and a view in Indian ink. The vases on the stone terrace in the foreground catch the rain all day; and the heavy drops fall, drip, drip, drip, upon the broad flagged pavement, called, from old time, the Ghost’s Walk, all night. On Sundays, the little church in the park is mouldy; and the oaken pulpit breaks out into a cold sweat; and there is a general smell and taste as of the ancient Dedlocks in their graves …
Boredom, depression, the absence of health, vitality and the colour of life, are irresistibly imparted here by the use of language. We note that the ‘shirking and sharking’ of the previous passage is not exceptional, but illustrates a vital and poetic use of language characteristic of Bleak House, as in the ‘sapped and sopped away’ here.
The plot, not altogether identical with the theme though not, as in Oliver Twist‚ Nicholas Nickleby and The Old Curiosity Shop, simply irrelevant to it and a nuisance, is launched in the second chapter. High Society being also In Chancery is in effect controlled by a legal mind too, Mr Tulkinghorn, who is a solicitor to the Court of Chancery as well as being Sir Leicester’s legal advisor. In fact, while the Dedlock class think they are autonomous, and employ and patronize him (‘“He is, of course, handsomely paid, and he associates almost on a footing of equality with the highest society” says Sir Leicester’, magnificently blind), Mr Tulkinghorn, an interesting case, manipulates his employers, manages all their affairs – which he alone understands – while despising them, and gets his real payment by feeding and exercising his desire for power. Accordingly he is one of the agents of destruction, destroying himself in the process. Lady Dedlock is, like nearly everyone in the novel, involved somehow in the Jarndyce case, and she involuntarily betrays an interest in the handwriting of the papers Tulkinghorn is showing them. As this is an impulsive movement alien to her usual manner Tulkinghorn, being what he is, naturally follows up this clue, thus unearthing Lady Dedlock’s guilty secret. The novel’s plot is simply a touching off of a chain of cause and effect that exposes a dead past, a classical form that Dickens had never hitherto used. His next major work, Little Dorrit, follows the same principle of classical tragedy, all the action having taken place before the novel starts and as before it is a piece of uncharacteristic behaviour, Mrs Clennam’s (of showing regard for the girl Little Dorrit), that causes her son Arthur to follow Little Dorrit’s trail and thus unearth a dead tragedy, his own origins (which are like Esther Summerson’s here) and his stepmother’s guilt. The plot of Little Dorrit therefore is only a variant on the plot of Bleak House, which, as they’re utterly different novels, shows that by now ‘plot’ was recognized by Dickens to be irrelevant and theme the decisive factor in giving a novel its character. Lady Dedlock’s ‘guilt’, unlike Mrs Clennam’s, is only guilt in the eyes of a morally misguided (jaundiced) society, it is implied, and this view is endorsed by the novelist, by Sir Leicester Dedlock who is a survival from a different age, and by the consensus of civilized opinion in the Chesney Wold drawing-room – also a doomed survival from an aristocratic society – when canvassed by Mr Tulkinghorn in chapter XL (‘Domestic’). Lady Dedlock’s sister Miss Barbary (= ‘barbarous’), the name she has adopted to hide her connexion with her fallen sister) is in the position of Mrs Clennam, of having deprived the ‘guilty’ mother of her child and deprived that child of a mother’s love and cherishing.
The third chapter is another complete change, the first instalment of Esther Summerson’s autobiography, taking her in one superb, unbroken sweep from her first memories to her introduction at the age of twenty into the court of Chancery and into Chancery London – it is in ‘a London particular’, as Mr Guppy classifies the fog for her, that she arrives. The procedure being over, Esther and the wards in Chancery confer:
‘And where do we go next?’
None of them knows: ‘We looked at one another, half laughing at our being like the. children in the wood’ – the Babes in the Wood of course wandered about lost until they died of it. Miss Flite, to show them where they are likely to end, appears on this cue – ‘“It’s a good omen for youth, and hope, and beauty”,’ she says, ‘“when they find themselves in this place, and don’t know what’s to come of it … I was a ward myself. I was not mad at that time,” curtseying low, and smiling between every little sentence. “I had youth and hope. I believe, beauty. It matters very little now. Neither of the three served, or saved me … I expect a judgment. On the Day of Judgement … Pray accept my blessing.”’ We note again the Shakespearean use of language – the ‘served, or saved’. It is surely evident how we are to take this. We are being told something about the human condition, and in a Shakespearean mode, as we find when this section is completed by chapter V. Miss Flite is a much more painful Ophelia, wholly conceived in terms of her environment in time and place – for instance, she has the lower-middle-class clinging to gentility, as we are shown when our three representatives of youth, hope and beauty5 (Esther, Richard and Ada), like the Three Kings of mediaeval wall-paintings encountering Death in their path when riding out in the pride of life, go out to explore London (‘A Morning Adventure’) and meet Miss Flite again, with her ‘mincing’ manner: she takes them to her room and they realize why she looks ‘pinched’: there are no coals or ashes in her grate, no spare clothing in her room and no food, and she says:
‘I am sorry I cannot offer chocolate. I expect a judgement shortly, and shall then place my establishment on a superior footing. At present, I don’t mind confessing to the wards in Jarndyce (in strict confidence), that I sometimes find it difficult to keep up a genteel appearance. I have felt the cold here. I have felt something sharper than cold. It matters very little. Pray excuse the introduction of such mean topics.’
The pathos of gentility in such circumstances, which represents a truly heroic clinging to self-respect and as such an achievement of the human spirit that Dickens has no desire to ridicule, is extraordinarily touching, and comes from the imaginative centre of a true novelist. But it is only one element in the tragedy Miss Flite incarnates. There are her birds, with their significant names, by which we are told something more painful still about the human condition in a Chancery world and with a deadly irony:
‘I began to keep the little creatures,’ she said, ‘with an object that the wards will readily comprehend. With the intention of restoring them to liberty. When my judgement should be given. Ye-es! They die in prison, though. Their lives, poor silly things, are so short in comparison with Chancery proceedings, that, one by one, the whole collection has died, over and over again. I doubt, do you know, whether one of these, though they are all young, will live to be free! Ve-ry mortifying, is it not?’
This is spine-chilling. Yet Miss Flite’s peculiar tone, idiom and speech-habits are never forgotten. The Shakespearean poetic – for if this is prose it is prose which serves the purposes of poetry – continues throughout the chapter. Miss Flite explains that she ‘“can’t allow them to sing much for (you’ll think this curious) I find my mind confused by the idea that they are singing, while I am following the argument in Court. And my mind requires to be so very clear, you know!”’ This is self-explanatory (though not allegorical but having a more subtle suggestiveness of another level of meaning). More sinister aspects of the Chancery society are then introduced to us:
‘I cannot admit the air freely,’ said the little old lady; the room was close, and would have been the better for it; ‘because the cat you saw downstairs – called Lady Jane – is greedy for their lives. She crouches on the parapet outside for hours and hours. I have discovered’ whispering mysteriously, ‘that her natural cruelty is sharpened by a jealous fear of their regaining their liberty. She is sly and full of malice. I half believe that she is no cat, but the wolf of the old saying. It is so very difficult to keep her from the door.’
The last touch of horror is added when Krook himself (nicknamed the Lord Chancellor and his rag-and-bone shop the Court of Chancery) adds:
‘When my noble and learned brother gives his judgement they’re to be let go free,’ winking at us again. ‘And then,’ he added, whispering and grinning, ‘if that ever was to happen – which it won’t – the birds that have never been caged would kill ’em.’
This casts a meaningful light back on Richard’s ‘cheerful’ voice just previously saying to Ada: ‘So, cousin, we are never to get out of Chancery!’ when they found themselves by accident back at their meeting-place of the day before. Krook’s pleasure (‘grinning’) at the idea that the wild birds would kill the caged ones if they ever got out, proves that this is true of the human species too: this seems to rule out any hope in Nature or human nature – Dickens was not at all inclined to take comfort in the belief that savagery may have something to teach civilization, he had no weakness for man in a state of nature. His hope for mankind is intimated in the novel, and is his faith in the human spirit which can show such other traits pitifully struggling for survival in those as battered by existence as Miss Flite, Jenny and Liz, and Jo of Tom-all-Alone’s who though he don’t know nothink can feel gratitude and so is ‘not quite in outer darkness’. We may reflect that Miss Flite’s name doesn’t merely suggest madness (‘flighty’) but is related to the ‘flight’-of birds.6 Flying is after all what characterizes birds, and the bird is an ancient symbol for the soul. The devoted enemy of the birds, the cat of the twin Lord Chancellor, is of course the Law, and we are confirmed in, or reminded of, this identification when we get to Mr Vholes who, when preying on Richard, ‘glances at the official cat who is patiently watching a mouse’s hole’ with his (Vholes’s) ‘hungry eyes’ – ‘official’ is good!
The purpose of these experiences of Chancery London is that the three young novices shall ponder them. They are all orphans, and Esther something more forlorn, illegitimate; so they are appropriate material for Dickens to choose for exposing to the mercies of life in his time (succeeding Oliver Twist, Paul Dombey, David Copperfield but – no longer children). An important part of these new experiences has been Krook’s account of the sufferings in Chancery and the consequent suicide of Tom Jarndyce, Ada and Richard’s grandfather, to which, says Esther, ‘“We listened with horror … to hearts so fresh and untried, it was a shock to come into the inheritance of a protracted misery”’ – to realize, in short, the human lot. The cousins’ summing up in this dialogue is central to the theme of the novel:
‘Quite an adventure for a morning in London!’ said Richard, with a sigh. ‘Ah, cousin, cousin, it’s a weary word, this Chancery!’
‘It is to me, and has been ever since I can remember,’ returned Ada. ‘I am grieved that I should be the enemy – as I suppose I am – of a great number of relations and others; and they should be my enemies – as I suppose they are; and that we should all be ruining one another, without knowing how or why, and be in constant doubt and discord all our lives. It seems very strange, as there must be right somewhere, that an honest judge in real earnest has not been able to find out through all these years where it is.’
‘Ah, cousin!’ said Richard. ‘Strange, indeed! all this wasteful wanton chess-playing is very strange. To see that composed Court yesterday jogging on so serenely, and to think of the wretchedness of the pieces on the board gave me the headache and the heartache both together. My head ached with wondering how it happened, if men were neither fools nor rascals; and my heart ached to think they could possibly be either. But … at all events, Chancery will work none of its bad influences on us.’
It is not therefore the Law as such, but the laws of human nature and the society that man’s nature has produced as the expression of our impulses, that constitute what John Jarndyce calls ‘the family misfortune’. What rightly distresses Ada is the realization that merely by being born they are enemies in the struggle for existence – which the laissez-faire society of course did nothing to mitigate; hence the stress laid on the fact that the wide variety of people concerned in the Jarndyce case have been born into it willy-nilly, and, like Miss Flite’s symbolic birds, ‘die in prison’. When Richard dies on learning that the Jarndyce case has collapsed because the costs have absorbed the whole estate (this is Equity!) Miss Flite, ‘weeping’, ‘gives her birds their liberty’. The point presumably is that she has given up expecting a Judgment in her favour – the occasion on which she had intended to release the birds – realizing now that she will have to wait for that till the Day of Judgment (which she has hitherto confused, being mad, with the court judgment) because there is no justice obtainable in this world.
The idea of Justice in this higher than legal sense of Equity is seen in Bleak House as the overwhelming desire of all men who are not base and which transcends all other considerations – Miss Flite has been driven mad by it and Gridley is killed by his frantic determination to have justice in this world, instead of resigning himself to suffering injustice but practising charity like the wiser John Jarndyce. Gridley’s demands for justice had led to his being imprisoned for contempt of court. He seems ‘a mad bull’ to the ordinary man and to the lawyers a joke, but he is presented in heroic terms by Dickens: he is given a dying testament which sounds like that of the heroes of Pilgrim’s Progress because he would not accept that injustice is the law of the land and has worn himself out in fighting the inertia that maintains injustice:
‘But you know I made a good fight for it, you know I stood up with my single hand against them all, you know I told them the ‘truth to the last, and told them what they were, and what they had done to me.’
He had explained earlier:
‘It is only by resenting them, and by revenging them in my mind, and by angrily demanding the justice I never get, that I am able to keep my wits together … If I did restrain myself, I should have become imbecile.’
This is akin to the later statement by Daniel Doyce explaining why he does not give up the invention he can’t get the government to take up:
‘It’s not put into a man’s head to be buried. It’s put into his head to be made useful. You hold your life on the condition that to the last you shall struggle hard for it. Every man holds a discovery on the same terms.’
Dickens was also an angry man in the face of the system, and while he recognizes, by way of Gridley’s case, that his anger and heat may be looked askance at, he knows that like Gridley it keeps him from being an ‘imbecile’ in the sense that a Skimpole or a Conversation Kenge is one, and that to struggle hard to defend your knowledge of what is valuable is not the litigating spirit but its opposite, the defence of values. Richard goes on repeating that ‘there must be truth and justice somewhere’‚ but his mistake is in expecting to find it in the company of lawyers, who instigate litigation. Nevertheless, Richard also is a kind of tragic hero, for Dickens is saying that it is only by keeping alive the belief in justice that we can be fully human (that there is ‘such a thing as principle’). Hence Miss Flite’s anguished cry: ‘“There’s a cruel attraction in the place. You can’t leave it. And you must expect.”’ Man lives in the ‘expectation’ of justice and his desire for it has created the law, but human nature being what it is, this has in practice produced (typically) lawyers with their (inevitable) vested interests and Wiglomeration, represented by the Lord High Chancellor ‘in the midst of the mud and at the heart of the fog’.
The conception of England in Dombey and Son as mercantile London and Commercial Man, or of Utility England and Economic Man in Hard Times, is altogether less sinister than Dickens’s vision of the Bleak House that man the litigating animal has built himself and must live in (‘Bleak House has an exposed sound’). For litigating is shown to be the primary instinct, leading us, as Ada saw, to ‘our all ruining one another without knowing how or why’ since everyone’s interests place him in enmity to everyone else, even though we are all relations. Thus it will be seen that practically everyone in the novel (down to the wretched inhabitants of Tom-all-Alone’s – which is in Chancery and can’t be knocked down and rebuilt because of the Jarndyce Case) is in some way involved in it through no fault of his own, apart from the lawyers who are involved in it willingly because they make their living by keeping the system going and so are more completely of it than anyone else. But an important point in Dickens’s parable is that those who are not involved willy-nilly in the Jarndyce case are gratuitously involved in litigation, either literal or metaphorical, of their own making.
Hence ‘The Boythorn and Dedlock Wars’ – two neighbours, Mr Boythorn and Sir Leicester Dedlock, each of whom has ample means to live happily at peace with mankind, are engaged in private litigation over a trifling piece of land that neither wants, on principle since it is a right of way; that is, merely as an expression of their instinct of antagonism. And not only will neither yield to reason nor allow arbitration, both are determined to fight it out regardless of expense and the fact that they are as neighbours habitually put to social embarrassment and to un-Christian encounters in Church. In chapter XVIII Esther describes in detail Mr Boythorn’s delectable home (‘formerly the Parsonage-house’) and Paradisal garden alongside which is, we are told, ‘the terrible piece of ground in dispute where Mr Boythorn maintained a sentry’, also a fierce bulldog, man-traps and spring-guns; he threatens trespassers with personal chastisement and legal prosecution. (What in the last novel was invented to endow Miss Trotwood with an amusing eccentricity has, by a characteristic development of Dickens’s process of working out ideas, become part of a serious and central argument.)
Mr Boythorn, though chivalrous, high-minded and personally gentle, is given to a ferocious mode of talking. This appears when he first comes on the scene as not inappropriate in expressing his detestation of Chancery, yet
‘But how do you and your neighbour get on about the disputed right of way?’ said Mr Jarndyce. ‘You are not free from the toils of the law yourself.’
‘The fellow has brought actions against me for trespass, and I have brought actions against him for trespass’ returned Mr Boythorn. ‘By Heavens! …’
Each of the antagonists, with all his virtues, prides himself on his strength of character, a form of egotism which Dickens identifies in the course of the novel as the mainspring of the litigating impulse. Thus we see that litigation is the essential characteristic of fallen mankind (the legal system is as old established as England itself, says Conversation Kenge), the form that Original Sin may be said to take in the condition of mankind described by Malthus and later to be elaborated and extended by Darwin as the struggle for existence.
Richard has concluded that they are like pieces on a chess-board, helpless and moved about in ‘wretchedness’, though, he says, that would be understandable only if men were either fools or rascals and he cannot bear to believe that they are either. But this is in his generous and hopeful youth – he is straight from school when the novel opens; his own history is to show how of his own free will (Dickens believes we have some measure of free will and therefore moral responsibility) he is involved in Chancery toils – degraded to its nature, thinking in accordance with its perverted logic, allowing its system which denies disinterestedness in any man to determine his conduct (‘Don’t you see he is an interested party? … I must maintain my rights’, he says of John Jarndyce) and to alter ‘all the colours of his mind’ – merely as the inevitable process of growing older and going out into the world. Esther recognizes the change in him by asking sadly: ‘Are division and animosity your natural terms, Richard?’ when he has explained that in the days when he was friendly with John Jarndyce ‘we were not on natural terms’. He becomes one of Miss Flite’s birds that (‘poor silly things’) die in prison. Even Esther is involved: she observes that Krook’s cat ‘looked so wickedly at me, as if I were a blood-relation of the birds upstairs’ – she is indeed, for Nemo the law-writer who lodges upstairs is one of them and her unknown father.7 The plot is almost identifiable with the theme in Bleak House, though it is not till Great Expectations that we see Dickens has made an elaborate plot become the complete and wholly necessary exemplification of a theme.
There are other gratuitous warfares going on in the novel beside the Boythorn–Dedlock affair. Marriage is seen as one form of it as often as not: worthy Mr Snagsby’s prosperous life is made almost intolerable by a suspicious domineering wife (whom he tries to placate, and to persuade into her proper role, by calling her ‘my little woman’), while in the lower orders the men (‘our masters’, the brick-makers’ wives call them) brutalize their wives. At the bottom of society is Jo who expects to be, and is, ‘chivvied’ by everyone. The Smallweed family all hate each other even more than they hate everyone else. Charley and Guster, servants, are victimized by their employers (unlike Dedlock menials) until Charley is rescued by Mr Jarndyce. Lady Dedlock and her sister have been separated by pride; little Esther’s childhood has been made wretched by moral prejudice (‘Morality, Heavenly link!’ as W. S. Gilbert wrote ironically of the spirit of the age); the snobbery of Pedigree makes old Mrs Woodcourt try to stop her son’s love-match with Esther; Mr Tulkinghorn hates women, and all the philanthropists are at loggerheads. The refusal to sentimentalize is a distinctive feature of Bleak House and most remarkably so in an area where Dickens has hitherto been most liable to this weakness: Mrs Blinder of Bell Yard, interviewed by Mr Jarndyce enquiring after Neckett’s orphans, admits that the other lodgers and neighbours (poor but socially sensitive) objected to him, on the grounds that ‘“It is not a genteel calling”’, so that when he died his children didn’t get as kind treatment as they otherwise might have had. ‘“Similarly with Charlotte. Some people won’t employ her because she was a follerer’s child; some people that do employ her cast it at her; some make a merit of having her to work for them, with that and all her drawbacks upon her, and perhaps pay her less and put upon her more.”’ Here is human nature not merely as the struggle for existence has formed it but with an added meanness and where the poor and uneducated show the same odious traits as the genteel. (This social unit of Mrs Blinder’s Bell Yard, which appears only once, is the prototype of Mrs Plornish’s Bleeding Heart Yard, with its fatal hankering after the genteel, and which plays an important part in Little Dorrit, another instance of Dickens’s creative habit of rethinking some casual or minor invention and making it significant in a later context.)
This is how we are inducted into the theme and mode of what I find the most impressive and rewarding of all Dickens’s novels, the most various and consistently lively in style of writing and composition. Bleak House has very little indeed to be written off as below the level of the bulk of it or incompatible with the best of it. What seems to me most remarkable of all, the greatest tribute to Dickens’s creative powers – something more than fertility can account for – is that the Tolstoyan David Copperfield should in a couple of years be succeeded by the Dostoievskian Bleak House. But it was the success of David Copperfield in a new mode that, after the initial drop in sales, made Dickens able to take another and yet higher flight with confidence; it had given him status as well as greater financial reward, and he carried his public upward with him each time. Thus he wrote to a friend: ‘It (Bleak House) is an enormous success; all the prestige of Copperfield [which is very great] falling upon it, and raising its circulation above all my other books. I am very much interested, having just written No. IV – and look forward to good things whereof the foundations are built.’
Having established his theme in the first five chapters and begun to show its working out, Dickens then logically proceeds to enquire whether it is possible to opt out of the system or in any other way to vanquish it. How can we preserve ourselves from its corrupting influences? It is pretty obvious that Dickens didn’t think that organized religion in his time offered much help and is anxious to show why (useless I’m afraid for Mr Cockshut to scold him for not being an Anglo-Catholic). Miss Barbary was a devout church-goer of the Evangelical type, sternly puritanical and cruelly misguided (Dickens clearly held) in attributing hereditary guilt to a child, in which she was representative – there are plenty of other such religious characters in Victorian fiction, and the Rev. Mr Brocklehurst in Jane Eyre was identified with his real-life original by many readers. Mr Chadband represents the inner light and Chapel culture,8 Mrs Pardiggle High Anglicanism and the class superiority that went with it; the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, like Mrs Jellyby, can see nothing nearer than Africa, and Allan Woodcourt’s well-meant attempt at instructing Jo on his death-bed to repeat as a talisman a prayer Jo can’t possibly understand is not sentimental but ironical in effect and, I think, in intention, since it is followed by the indignant and generous outburst with which Dickens ends the chapter (XLVII). The village church can’t reconcile Mr Boythorn and Sir Leicester who are at war all the week. Dickens, a gospel Christian rather like Tolstoy, as witness his will, looked upon religious institutions as separating men and as hostile to the spirit of Christianity.9
Mr Jarndyce who has himself successfully opted out from the Jarndyce case, steadfastly practising a generous disinterestedness, has tried various idealisms to circumvent the system for others. One attempt had been to put his money to the use of the philanthropists, but he has learnt the hopelessness of that – they are only fostering their own egos, however they lay out the money. He has been more successful in using his money to save Esther and to make a home for her and the other orphans, his cousins Richard and Ada: but he cannot for all his good heart and wisdom save either of these last from misery and blight. We are not told where the money comes from, that enables him to stand au-dessus-de la mêlée; this would be a weakness in the novel if it were not shown that his money has not availed except in Esther’s case.
Like Conrad, Dickens does believe in the discipline of a profession that demands disinterested service (the opposite of the profession of the law). Mr George and the Bagnets are admirable if simple-minded people formed by army discipline. But the detective, Mr Bucket, who hunts out the truth of things, is nevertheless in the service of a bad system, which he cannot afford to question or think about. Though shrewd, kindly and all-knowing, he is also morally simple-minded, as witness his concern for the dying Gridley whom he has come to arrest and whom he can only try to help by offering as consolation encouragement to go on braving the law; thus Dickens shows very neatly and with some humour (of the wry kind that characterizes Bleak House) that the good feelings Mr Bucket exercises whenever possible are merely paradoxical in his position and are constantly being disconcerted by the nature of the material he has to work in. Faced with the hopelessness of the system he is helpless, as we see in the dialogue arranged for this purpose with the brickmaker’s wife in Tom-all-Alone’s who thinks her baby would be better dead:
‘Why, you ain’t such an unnatural woman, I hope,’ returns Bucket, sternly, ‘as to wish your own child dead?’
‘God knows you are right, master,’ she returns. ‘I am not.’
‘Then don’t talk in that wrong manner,’ says Mr Bucket, mollified again. ‘Why do you do it?’
She explains that the sight of the children round her and their inevitable fate is the cause:
‘Think of the children that your business lays with often and often, and that you see grow up!’
‘Well, well,’ says Mr Bucket, ‘you train him respectable, and he’ll be a comfort to you, and look after you in your old age, you know.’
The irony of offering this prescription to anyone living in such conditions and such a world needs (and gets from Dickens here) no comment.10 Mr Bucket’s ‘Well, well!’ is an admission of the uselessness of his simple morality in the face of the undeniable facts that the woman has forced him to recognize for once, of which he never voluntarily accepts the implications. Mr Bucket with his domestic felicity, his fondness for children (when respectable) and the strict separation of his everyday good-heartedness from his bloodhound professionalism, is the precursor of the concept of the Split Man that Dickens is feeling his way towards with Mr Bucket. It is to be deliberately launched with Pancks in Little Dorrit, and elaborated as Wemmick in Great Expectations (nothing to do with Jekyll-and-Hyde morally dual man, whom Dickens originated in Edwin Drood’s uncle, the cathedral choirmaster and haunter of opium-dens).
The medical profession, which it may be remembered came well out of the first chapter of Dombey and Son, is here put forward by Dickens as the type of disinterested service to humanity that is needed11 to counteract the Chancery fog. Allan Woodcourt therefore, who is shown as full of humanitarian classless feeling in his treatment of the brickmakers’ wives, Miss Flite and Jo, and at Nemo’s death-bed possessed of a humanity conspicuously lacking in Mr Tulkinghorn and Krook who are there too, as well as lacking in the beadle, coroner and others at the inquest, is even shown as one to whom heroism comes natural in a shipwreck. His sense of vocation and persistence in it against poverty are held up (explicitly by Mrs Bayham Badger) as a contrast to Richard’s lack of such necessary qualities. It is therefore proper that the novel should end with Allan’s appointment as a public health doctor – medical service in the public interest and not for private gain – and should marry Esther who exemplifies (and convincingly incarnates) selfless love and fully human sympathy. This is the limited hope for a future that may bring the defeat of the litigating spirit which has its roots in the claims of egotism, Dickens has shown – Esther’s marriage offsets the defeat of Ada’s. There is something more on the credit side and more of optimism in the marriage of Esther and Allan Woodcourt even though still in a (new) Bleak House than in Little Dorrit’s marriage with Arthur Clennam of the firm of Doyce, Clennam and Pancks in Bleeding Heart Yard; though Arthur and his wife are blessed in each other, they have no hope of making any impact on their world of ‘the arrogant, the froward and the vain’ who will continue to make ‘their usual uproar’. Bleak House is fortunate in coming mid-way in Dickens’s development before his scene darkens and thins.
Woodcourt is not the only representative of medicine, the healing art, in the novel. There is also the surgeon for whom he works, Mr Bayham Badger, whom we may take as a ludicrous figure because of his subservience to the innocent vanity of his wife; but we should be wrong, for even she can serve as mouthpiece for some serious considerations. Dickens thus continues the technique he practised so successfully in David Copperfield of appearing to write merely to divert the reader while really pursuing a serious end. Thus Mrs Badger notices Richard’s lack of the sense of vocation for medicine because, as her husband points out, ‘“her mind has had the rare advantage of being formed by two such very distinguished public men as Captain Swosser and Professor Dingo”’, her two previous husbands. She is therefore able to point to the Captain’s maxim, ‘that if you only have to swab a plank, you should swab it as if Davy Jones were after you’ (a maxim which, Mr Badger says, applies to all professions) and to Professor Dingo’s reply when accused of disfiguring buildings with his geological hammer, ‘that he knew of no building save the Temple of Science’. No doubt Dickens felt that literature as he himself practised it was like the navy, science and medicine in requiring to be pursued in the spirit of these maxims, which he undoubtedly personally endorsed, and that all are citadels of disinterested service to humanity12 in their different ways. He sees them as combating the claims of the assertive ego that has produced the litigating or competitive society. ‘Public men’ in this sense are the very opposite of public women like Mrs Pardiggle, Mrs Jellyby and the betrothed of Mr Quale.
Associated with the idea of doctor, scientist and naval officer is the idea of the gentleman, to which Dickens devotes a good deal of systematic attention in Bleak House, clearing the ground for Great Expectations where the idea is shown to have fallen on evil days and to be, as in the Marshalsea in Little Dorrit, a source of corruption. Dickens created the figure of Sir Leicester Dedlock deliberately to embody the qualities he believed, as a Radical, objectionable, but at a deeper level, and in spite of himself, what as an artist he could not help feeling to be valuable. Sir Leicester therefore inevitably exhibits Dickens’s ambivalence, which is conveniently visible in the initial introduction of him in chapter II:
Sir Leicester Dedlock is only a baronet, but there is no mightier baronet than he. His family is as old as the hills, and infinitely more respectable. He has a general opinion that the world might get on without hills, but would be done up without Dedlocks. He would on the whole admit Nature to be a good idea (a little low, perhaps, when not enclosed with a park-fence), but an idea dependent for its execution on your great county families. He is a gentleman of strict conscience, disdainful of all littleness and meanness, and ready, on the shortest notice, to die any death you may please to mention rather than give occasion for the least impeachment of his integrity. He is an honourable, obstinate, truthful, high-spirited, intensely prejudiced, perfectly unreasonable man.
Sir Leicester Dedlock is seen as ridiculous as regards his false idea of his importance and that of his class in a world that has no longer any use for an aristocracy as such – we see in due course that he has been quietly superseded, without his being able to recognize it, by Mr Rouncewell, the mill-owner and banker and inventor of industrial machinery, in every sphere but ‘the world of fashion’;13 the parable is wittily completed by making Rouncewell the son of Sir Leicester’s housekeeper (who is not proud of him but apologetic). Sir Leicester is also obsessively undemocratic and doesn’t even think much of Nature when natural, preferring it to be landscaped in a gentleman’s park when, of course, it is fenced off from the public. Here
Dickens’s tone and style noticeably change slightly. The confident humour expressed in the robust alliteration and slang (‘done up without Dedlocks’) gives way to a more sensitive and complex sentence which ends seriously, and we see in the various accounts in the novel of Chesney Wold that Dickens was aesthetically very sensible of the man-made beauty of the estates of the ‘great county families’, to which his own powerful feeling for order and the beauty of utility must have made him partial. And we are therefore not surprised that Dickens shows he is weakening in the attitude he has taken up so blithely at first to the great landowner, whom it was evidently his intention at the outset to treat as something in a museum in a glass case, or a waxwork figure to be pointed at, and characterized as extinct. But now, with ‘a gentleman of strict conscience, disdainful of all littleness and meanness’ the figure comes alive and must be respected. Dickens, the artist now, is veracious and generous in admitting that the gentleman ideally stood for values that the industrial England of Mr Rouncewell (who is allowed his own business virtues of punctuality and keeping his word, which are not however the same thing as ‘integrity’ and ‘strict conscience’) can’t afford, and that the law-courts and lawyers are shown simply to despise. Nevertheless, Dickens recollects that an aristocrat is committed to a code of honour which in the modern world is a ridiculously inappropriate way of settling disputes: he is touchy and fights duels, therefore he is not the ideal enemy of the litigating society. (We are presently told that her part in the Jarndyce case ‘was the only property my Lady brought him’ and far from objecting, he approves of the institution of the Court of Chancery, holding that to listen to complaints about the system ‘would be to encourage some persons in the lower classes to rise up somewhere like Wat Tyler’.) The chivalrous Mr Boythorn expresses his willingness to decide his right to the disputed land by single combat with Sir Leicester ‘with any weapon known to mankind in any age or country’.
Thus it is demonstrated that the gentleman is an anachronism, though Dickens stresses the delicacy of feeling and chivalry to women shown by both Sir Leicester and Mr Boythorn which is foreign to a Rouncewell. In the alternately arranged adjectives in the last sentence of this introductory description of Sir Leicester we see the Dickens scales oscillating and ending by registering rejection: a gentleman has his virtues – a pity we can’t any longer afford them – but his drawbacks render him impossible. An aristocrat is ultimately one who won’t compromise (‘perfectly unreasonable man’) and can’t therefore be fitted into the world of middle-class enterprise and institutions. This is recognized perhaps by the consistent and intentionally irritating use of ‘my Lady’ in naming Lady Dedlock throughout the novel, an address demanding subservience.
Yet Dickens, as regards Sir Leicester, carries on this debate, and in the same open-minded manner: Sir Leicester and his set are retrograde politically, we are shown, and want to run the country in the interest of their own class and by personal influence. Pocket boroughs having been abolished, they bribe the electorate (Sir Leicester’s embarrassment when Volumnia innocently elicits this fact is revealing) – yet Mr Rouncewell’s candidate gets into Parliament largely through Mr Rouncewell’s influence and speeches. Chesney Wold and the country-house way of life, alleged to be insufferably boring, is Lady Dedlock’s punishment for having married a man twenty years older than herself when she had previously had a lover, the father of her child, who still filled her thoughts, we gather. Yet Chesney Wold is beautifully ordered with contented servants and retainers and seems comparatively idyllic when measured against all the other places in the novel – even Mr Jarndyce’s home has the brickmakers’ country slum at its doors. We have only to accompany Jane Austen on the trip to Sotherton (in Mansfield Park) to get the real feel of a way of living that is a dead conventionality with its empty pride and an air that suffocates with boredom. Jane Austen of course knew a great deal more of country houses and the old aristocracy than Dickens, but in over-formal Mansfield Park and its owner the pompous, kindly Sir Thomas Bertram, we get something like that blend of the insufferable and the invaluable that Dickens incarnates almost in spite of himself in Chesney Wold and Sir Leicester Dedlock; and for the same reason. (Probably Dickens had read Jane Austen by now – he hadn’t, we know, at the time he wrote Nicholas Nickleby – and he may have got inspiration there. If not, it is interesting that he had made an identical analysis.) Dickens is aware of this complexity enough to try to investigate it, and finds it fascinating; this occasions some of his loveliest and most unusual prose descriptions where, in an effort to express adequately what he feels, his imagination is fired to a poetic intensity by the beauty, dignity, decorum and continuity that the great house represented.14 The earlier Dickens novels show in several ways the prevailing influence on Dickens of the 18th century of Hogarth, Swift, Gay and Smollett; in David Copperfield and Bleak House these are seen to have lost their ascendancy and more sophisticated influences are felt to be present – Shakespeare, Jane Austen, Disraeli, and incontestably here, also, it seems to me, Pope – the Pope of the Moral Epistles, and particularly of Epistle IV, ‘On the use of Riches’. (We know Dickens read and admired Pope.)
Though the second chapter is given up to the Dedlocks and a verbal view of Chesney Wold in the rain, it is not till chapter VII that we get there, the family being still absent. Dickens’s first criticism is that there is a want of imagination in the Dedlock class, that there is not ‘any superabundant life of imagination on the spot’ and that Sir Leicester even when present ‘would not do much for it in that particular’ – this is very interesting since it is also Jane Austen’s implicit criticism of the life at Mansfield and Sotherton. Dickens goes on to enquire into the possibility of a superior life of the imagination in the domestic animals, poultry and wild life, entering into their possible feelings and suggesting that they are no more limited than the people who tend them and work on the estate, a feudal entity, whose thinking is done for them by their master. The house itself is really the housekeeper’s, who shows visitors over it, treasures the family traditions, and lives solely in her devotion to the idea of the Dedlock family (she is never ridiculed):
She sits in her room (in a side passage on the ground floor, with an arched window commanding a smooth quadrangle, adorned at regular intervals with smooth round blocks of stone, as if the trees were going to play at bowls with the stones), and the whole house reposes on her mind. She can open it on occasion, and be busy and fluttered; but it is shut up now, and lies on the breadth of Mrs Rouncewell’s iron-bound bosom, in a majestic sleep.
This is a surprising kind of writing of which there is a great deal in Bleak House, and recognizable as characterizing the novel, yet it is hard to describe its unique effect, poetic, non-rational without being whimsical, alive with humour without being arch or playful, suggestive of metaphorical implications, and with moving overtones. Mrs Rouncewell’s limitations are not avoided: she sees everything, as in duty bound, through Dedlock eyes; her discomfort at having produced a son who, as a mechanical genius, is felt to be inimical by Sir Leicester and banished to ‘the iron country farther north’, and who, having become a rich iron-master, holds anti-Dedlock political views, is communicated with wit and a light touch. The presence of Sir Leicester at Chesney Wold brings out his virtues: an excellent master, though proud and lofty in his ideas he is more than courteous and always shakes hands with Mrs Rouncewell as a mark of his genuine attachment to her, a personal relation that Dickens shows later is impossible between the self-made mill-owner and his ‘hands’. (Later we learn Sir Leicester feels a personal bond with George, her younger son, too.) Dickens, however, grudges crediting the Dedlock class with having created or supported a real civilization and shows Sir Leicester in his study as habitually contemplating the backs of his books (Dickens had the library of Timon’s villa in mind, I imagine).
One of the most telling points in favour of the Dedlocks is scored in one of the best scenes of social comedy in the novel (chapter XXVIII) when the iron-master, his own housekeeper’s son, beards Sir Leicester in his own drawing-room, over the question of removing Lady Dedlock’s maid Rosa for a quick course in higher education to fit her for becoming Mr Rouncewell’s daughter-in-law. Mr Rouncewell, it then appears, though self-educated, and his wife likewise, is proud of having risen socially and expected his children to rise by marriage higher still (in the new fluid society which Dickens in general backs against the caste system); he explains that these are the usual ambitions and feelings of the new class to which he belongs. Dickens does not actually comment on this – he is not one to make even a hero say, as George Eliot’s Felix Holt does, that a man owes something to the class he was born into and should help it to rise too if he is lucky himself – but there is an unspoken reflection; Dickens certainly leaves the impression that a society represented by a Mr Rouncewell’s ideals is open to serious criticism. And this is borne out by the great scene, a set piece, in chapter XL, when Mr Tulkinghorn tells the story designed to let Lady Dedlock know that he has found out her secrets. The alleged ‘fellow-townsman’ of Mr Rouncewell’s (who is described as being in the position Mr Rouncewell would be in if he had known of Lady Dedlock’s past) takes the girl, his daughter, who is a great lady’s protégée, away ‘as if from reproach and disgrace’ when the discovery is made: like Little Em’ly Lady Dedlock would be considered a source of contamination to young girls by the Rouncewell class. But Mr Tulkinghorn’s insolent fiction is more than a notification to Lady Dedlock, it serves to sound the company’s moral reaction, which turns out to be wholly opposed to the automatic response based on the bourgeois theory that women can be divided into the pure and the fallen. Volumnia refuses to entertain the possibility of such a history at all, Sir Leicester ‘generally refers back in his mind to Wat Tyler’ (thus forecasting his indignant reaction when Mr Bucket tells him that the late Mr Tulkinghorn had entertained suspicions of Lady Dedlock), while ‘The majority incline to the debilitated cousin’s sentiment, which is in few words – “No business – Rouncewell’s fernal townsman.”’ As so often, the throwaway line disguises, without detracting from, the intended seriousness of the content, and is here made more effective by the contempt conveyed by the languid cousin’s drawl. Thus we see that Dickens saw in the Great House class an alternative moral code to the cruel blanket morality of Victorian public opinion, made by the new dominant middle-class; the upper class were capable of personal judgement and would stand by their own, refusing to allow the bourgeoisie to apply their rules to its members. We are invited to admire the moral courage and independence shown here explicitly when (in chapter LIV and subsequently) Sir Leicester does behave accordingly when the scandal about his wife reaches him and she, mistakenly, takes flight. Ironically, this was unnecessary, we learn. When the disclosure of her ‘guilty’ past is made to him, he declares unequivocally that he has nothing to forgive and thinks no less of his wife than before (as she did not belong to his class by birth she could not know this, but took her line from her religious sister who had cast her off for her ‘sin’). Dickens ends the chapter of the disclosure by three paragraphs of plain, unrhetorical prose which enter with the most delicate imaginative insight into the feelings of the unhappy elderly gentleman who has suffered a series of shocks to all he believed in and felt most deeply, and is succumbing to a stroke and paralysis from it. He sees his privacy and family pride exposed to vulgar scandal, but he feels only for his wife as the sufferer, since he is capable of real, personal, unselfish feeling:
It is she who, at the core of all the constrained formalities and conventionalities of his life, has been a stock of living tenderness and love, susceptible as nothing else is of being struck with the agony he feels. He sees her, almost to the exclusion of himself; and cannot bear to look upon her cast down from the high place she graces so well.
And even to the point of his sinking down on the ground, oblivious of his sufferings, he can yet pronounce her name with something like distinctness in the midst of those intrusive sounds, and in a tone of mourning and compassion rather than reproach.
It is in keeping with this use of Chesney Wold that the penultimate chapter of the book is given up to an elegy on the passing of the great house in the Victorian Age, which Dickens sees as the victory of the iron-master over the gentry (‘the great old Dedlock family is breaking up’) – a lament for the human loss this means:
The greater part of the house is shut up, and it is a show-house no longer … Closed in by night with broad screens, and illuminated only in that part, the light of the drawing-room seems gradually contracting and dwindling until it shall be no more … Thus Chesney Wold. With so much of itself abandoned to darkness and vacancy … with no family to come and go, no visitors to be the souls of pale, cold shapes of rooms, no stir of life about it; – passion and pride, even to the stranger’s eye, have died away from the place in Lincolnshire, and yielded it to dull repose.
It is Dickens the artist, the poet, who mourns the loss of ‘passion and pride’, which only can be nourished by such a cultural context,15 and who sees that ‘dull repose’ is the death of the spirit which the light of the drawing-room had formerly kept alive. A parallel tribute to this is that George Rouncewell rejects his brother’s offer of a post in his works, preferring personal service to Sir Leicester who needs him and whom he also needs. Sir Leicester, who started as a butt, ends in pathos and dignity and is like Gridley in representing that moral courage which in our Chancery world is heroism. However, he is still at war with Boythorn – ‘the quarrel goes on to the satisfaction of both’ to the last, reaffirming Dickens’s original point that the idea of the gentleman cannot lead us out of Chancery, perhaps led us in.
But, Dickens has asked himself, there is yet another professional man, the artist. What does the practice of the arts imply? Skimpole, unnecessary to the plot but essential to the theme, was created as a means of testing the popular idea of the practitioner of the arts (any of them – he composes a little, paints and draws, sings and plays, writes verse and is a man of sensibility, also a gifted talker). After the theme has been systematically advanced in the first five chapters, Dickens takes the three children of this world away from Chancery London into the country, through what seems to be idyllic countryside and to a paradise of a home (chapter VI, ‘Quite at Home’). There is however a serpent in this paradise. As soon as they are installed the theme is taken up again with the worthy John Jarndyce’s opening: ‘“There’s no one here but the finest creature upon earth – a child.”’
‘I don’t mean literally a child,’ pursued Mr Jarndyce; ‘not a child in years. He is grown up – he is at least as old as I am – but in simplicity, and freshness, and enthusiasm, and a fine guileless inaptitude for all worldly affairs, he is a perfect child.’
We all felt that he must be very interesting.
The formulation is ironic. What has hitherto been for Dickens an uncritically accepted Romantic image of childhood is now exposed to criticism (as I noted its being uneasily reconsidered in the form of David Copperfield’s dangerous innocence) – the criticism being intimated through the ‘innocent’ enthusiasm of Mr Jarndyce. It is thus suggested that the idea of a grown-up child – an adult who has never matured – is the reverse of valuable.
‘He is a musical man; an Amateur, but might have been a Professional. He is an Artist, too; an Amateur, but might have been a Professional. He is a man of attainments and of captivating manners …’
Dickens is particular to specify at the outset that Skimpole is essentially a dilettante – no professional musician or artist could be a Skimpole; Dickens of course was, and prided himself on being, thoroughly professional in all his undertakings. And by now Dickens, the author of Dombey and Copperfield, had ceased to find satisfaction solely in his ‘inimitable’ powers as entertainer, humourist and so forth, realizing that his self-respect depended on his being an Artist, his status that of serious novelist with a responsibility to his art (‘the art that he holds in trust’ as his own noble formulation ran when in his obituary notice on Thackeray he rebuked him for irresponsibility). How, he must now have been asking himself, how to justify the profession of writing novels in this Bleak House, a world bursting with sin and sorrow, where men are in Chancery? While Dickens is not ready with an answer, he is clear about what he is not: as a novelist he is not a Skimpole, who is an Amateur, a dilettante, and something even worse. Skimpole, essentially an entertainer in private life, is also an actor and nothing else; singing for his supper, always acting a part, he has no real self; a parasite, he has no sense of responsibility either as an artist, a husband or parent. Skimpole is not of course, as used to be claimed, Leigh Hunt, except in the conveniently happy temperament which Dickens borrowed and the appropriate appearance (which had to be toned down by the artist to avoid trouble). Except in his claims to be childlike Skimpole is a recognizable later Victorian type, an aesthete, who systematically substitutes aesthetic reactions for human ones. Henry James’s Gabriel Nash (in The Tragic Muse) might be Skimpole’s brother, and he like Skimpole is something of an Oscar Wilde without the vice. Skimpole already uses the paradox as a means of explaining the principles he follows in his practices.
What is truly remarkable about the conception of Skimpole is not merely that Dickens predicted the aesthetic movement through him – the signs were there already to be read by an acute observer of the literary and social scene – but that Dickens who, we are so frequently assured by Dickens specialists, had no powers of thought, should have gone straight to the centre of the Skimpole case and exposed its philosophical basis – not as such but by the novelist’s true art of dramatizing it. Skimpole’s style of amusing, playful fantasy which refuses to be serious and therefore cannot be easily reprehended since only a prig would be hostile to such a butterfly, is maintained throughout, as in his opening apologia, which even flutters from idea to idea in a butterfly movement:
‘I covet nothing,’ said Mr Skimpole in the same light way. ‘Possession is nothing to me. Here is my friend Jarndyce’s excellent house. I feel obliged to him for possessing it. I can sketch it and alter it. I can set it to music. When I am here, I have sufficient possession of it, and have neither trouble, cost, nor responsibility.’
This subjectivism seems harmless and delightful, but on it Skimpole erects a technique of flattery: he is necessary to society as an exponent of beauty, he argues, and therefore those practical worldly people who can’t of course feel exquisitely like himself are indebted to him and are in the enviable position of owing him a living:
‘I envy you your power of doing what you do … I almost feel as if you ought to be grateful to me, for giving you the opportunity of enjoying the luxury of generosity. I know you like it. For anything I can tell, I may have come into the world expressly for the purpose of increasing your stock of happiness,’ etc.
Esther, the truly sensitive recording consciousness of the book, notes that ‘Of all his playful speeches (playful, yet always fully meaning what they expressed) none seemed to be more to the taste of Mr Jarndyce than this … We were all enchanted.’ Skimpole is more plausible as an object for Jarndyce to lay out his money on than the philanthropists. Esther soon realizes that Jarndyce blinds himself to the ugly truth about Skimpole because he needs to believe that it is possible to beat the system, that Skimpole has successfully opted out of it. ‘I thought I could understand,’ writes Esther, ‘how such a nature as my guardian’s, experienced in the world, and forced to contemplate the miserable evasions and contentions of the family misfortune, found an immense relief in Mr Skimpole’s avowal of his weaknesses and display of guileless candour’, ‘to find one perfectly undesigning and candid man … could not fail to give him pleasure.’ Keeping to his principles, on his first meeting with the young people Skimpole fleeces them; taken with them to Bell Yard to see the desolate orphan children, Skimpole’s ‘usual gay strain’ grates on us as outrageously inappropriate to the occasion (chapter XV.) This has been brought about partly by Esther’s natural sympathy for the heroically self-reliant little creatures and partly by bringing in Gridley who in spite of his own genuine and deeply-felt grievances against life has shown active helpfulness to the children. All Skimpole can produce is an affectation of sympathy, a display of egotism:
‘He said … he had been a benefactor to Coavinses; that he had actually been enabling Coavinses to bring up these charming children in this agreeable way developing these social virtues! Insomuch that his heart had just now swelled, and the tears had come into his eyes, when he had looked round the room, and thought, ‘I was the great patron of Coavinses, and his little comforts were my work!’
We are therefore ready on Skimpole’s next appearance for a complete exposure of his theory of life, his philosophy and his apologia. This is managed wholly dramatically in chapter XVIII by taking them all down to the Chesney Wold neighbourhood and bringing Skimpole up against his opposite, Boythorn, a man of convictions that he is always ready to put into practice energetically, and whose excessive energies are always channelled into violent expressions of principle, a man proud of the fact that he is always in deadly earnest. As Skimpole points out, this is liable to make him disagreeable, and for Skimpole it is axiomatic that ‘everybody’s business in the social system is to be agreeable. It’s a system of harmony, in short.’ To which Boythorn makes the very relevant objection: ‘“Is there such a thing as principle, Mr Harold Skimpole?”’. Skimpole’s reply is that he doesn’t know what such a thing is.
Dickens has been a good deal accused by academic and literary Skimpoles of being characteristically (that is, self-indulgently) angry, but it seems not to have been noticed that in comparing the angry men Gridley and Boythorn with Skimpole in the setting of their Chancery world he has defended himself adequately, by showing the contemptible nature of the man who plays for safety and comfort. Skimpole ends this protracted argument with Boythorn by a full and candid statement of the aesthetic and solipsistic position which he systematically adopts. He has candour here, in not shrinking from the conclusions that will strike the average man as morally objectionable:
‘Enterprise and effort,’ he would say to us (on his back), are delightful to me. I believe I am truly cosmopolitan. I have the deepest sympathy with them. I lie in a shady place like this, and think of the adventurous spirits going to the North Pole, of penetrating to the heart of the Torrid Zone, with admiration. Mercenary creatures ask, ‘What is the use of a man’s going to the North Pole! What good does it do?’ I can’t say; but, for anything I can say, he may go for the purpose – though he don’t know it – of employing my thoughts as I lie here. Take an extreme case. Take the case of the Slaves on the American plantations. I daresay they are worked hard, I dare say they don’t altogether like it, I dare say theirs is an unpleasant experience on the whole; but they people the landscape for me, they give it a poetry for me, and perhaps that is one of the pleasanter objects of their existence. I am very sensible of it, if it be, and I shouldn’t wonder if it were!’
This is surely as brilliant an intellectual exercise for the purpose as a novel could show, something we are more accustomed to thinking of as Peacock’s forte. The explanation exposes itself. Other people don’t exist for Skimpole in their own right, and yet he demands their services since he can’t, being a social parasite, exist without them. Skimpole’s claim to preferential treatment is that as an artist he has sensibility, and he needs to feed it, we see, but at the cost of excluding human considerations (the Southern slave issue was then very much in the public eye as well as the ground for taking it as ‘an extreme case’ which Skimpole agrees he is willing to face as the test of his position). He is therefore committed by his theory of non-involvement, in order to live agreeably, either to the most callous heartlessness, as to such issues as the slavery question, taking a purely picturesque view of them, or to an equally vicious self-indulgent sentimentality, as we see the next time he is brought on the scene (in chapter XXXI). There Jo, with the fever on him, is brought home by Esther and Charley to be helped; Skimpole with his basic selfishness instantly objects to Jo’s being brought in to infect them all: ‘“He’s not safe, you know.”’ Skimpole has in fact had a training in medicine16 but couldn’t be bothered to practise: he is an anti-doctor (we must remember the symbolic part played by the medical man in this novel), refusing to operate the medical code of obligation to the sick. He advises turning Jo out – after all, other people don’t really exist for him – and subsequently assists Mr Bucket in surreptitiously putting Jo out into the night.17 When Esther returns from seeing Jo looked after she finds Skimpole ‘playing snatches of pathetic airs, and sometimes singing to them with great expression and feeling. When we rejoined him in the drawing-room he said he would give us a little ballad, which had come into his head, “apropos of our young friend”; and he sang one about a Peasant boy,
“Thrown on the wide world, doom’d to wander and roam, Bereft of his parents, bereft of a home”,
– quite exquisitely. It was a song that always made him cry, he told us.’ It would hardly be possible to give a better illustration of sentimentality.
We see him adapting his form of candour to flattering Sir Leicester Dedlock:
Sir Leicester seemed to approve of this sentiment highly. ‘An artist, sir?’
‘No,’ returned Mr Skimpole. ‘A perfectly idle man. A mere amateur.’
Sir Leicester seemed to approve of this even more.
Here we have a fresh budding-off of Dickens’s thinking, which is going to throw up Henry Gowan in a later novel. Like Taine, in his Notes sur l’Angleterre, Dickens had noted that in England, unlike France, artists had no accepted social position based on recognition of their value to the community. In a utilitarian, puritanical society they were looked at askance for various reasons and Dickens was sensitive to status. The essential sign of a gentleman in the vulgar mind was that he didn’t work for a living, and in rejecting the title of artist in favour of being an amateur, Skimpole is showing that he is a gentleman, to Sir Leicester’s approval; Dickens notes this against both of them. In due course one sign of Mr Dorrit’s contemptible snobbery is that he has doubts about letting the apparently Bohemian Henry Gowan paint his portrait until he is assured Gowan is not really an artist but a gentleman of good family. Dickens has taken the case further with Gowan who is seen as the enemy of all disinterestedness and hating the real thing, the artist. Skimpole has talent and abilities but never finishes anything – having no real belief in the value of what he is doing or any sense of serving something outside himself. Skimpole, his charm gradually dispelled for us, fades out of the novel leaving a bad taste behind him (exactly like Henry James’s Gabriel Nash, who is played off in The Tragic Muse against the man who has a real vocation as painter). Skimpole’s epitaph is given to Esther by the experienced Bucket: ‘“Whenever a person proclaims to you ‘In worldly matters I’m a child’, you consider that that person is only a-crying off from being held accountable, and that you’ve got that person’s number, and it’s Number One.”’ Skimpole then is in one aspect Dickens’s reconsidering in the context of social responsibility the habits of Micawber (though Micawber of course is not offered as an artist); in another, he is one stage in Dickens’s attempt to prove himself something other than an entertainer, a demonstration that the writer is not less concerned than others for his fellow-slaves but more, not irresponsible and self-indulgent but peculiarly responsible in his understanding of ‘the family misfortune’. Dickens is saying that the artist must be ‘held accountable’ in life and art, that these two are inseparable; sensibility and taste can’t exist in a void; indifference to one’s fellows means paying the penalty as an artist of sterility; refusal to make a stand on principle is to commit an artist to parasitism; to have no concern for justice is to be condemned to triviality. Dickens shows himself now ready to assent to Lawrence’s ‘I write for the race’, and writing Dombey and Son, David Copperfield and Bleak House were his path to it.
There is another feature of the Skimpole conception that is important: his assumption of the character of the child. He is thus, with his mock-innocence, a pseudo-child, yet in so far as he is a child at all, the only one in the novel. This is a significant departure for Dickens, to whom the image of the child has hitherto been a necessary conception and the child’s sensibility that records criticism of the adult world a necessary technical mode. Here half the novel is Esther’s autobiographical narrative and yet Esther grows up early in her first chapter, indeed she can hardly be said ever to have had much childhood at all, and the same applies to such other children as figure in the novel: Charley, Tom and little Emma are prematurely forced to be little adults, responsible, stoical and sobered by extreme hardship, just as Esther had been cheated out of happy trusting childhood by the knowledge forced on her that she had no right to exist and was unloved. The wholly characteristic children of the Chancery world are the Smallweeds who were ‘little old men and women’ from birth because the family ‘strengthened itself in its practical character’ and therefore ‘discarded all amusements, discountenanced all story-books, fairytales, fictions and fables, and banished all levities whatsoever. Hence the gratifying fact, that it has had no little child born to it, and that the complete little men and women whom it has produced have been observed to bear a likeness to old monkeys with something depressing on their minds. … Judy never owned a doll, never played at any game’, etc. They are thus the idea of the child in a utilitarian society – that society which indeed ‘strengthened itself in its practical character’ – that Dickens next projected into the central theme of a novel as the Gradgrind children and Bitzer in Hard Times, who were disasters because likewise robbed of their natural inheritance of imaginative literature, play, fun and make-believe, all of which Dickens rightly saw to be essential to a healthy childhood. The Smallweeds, justly so named, are brought up to unenlightened self-interest only, and figure as puppets in a Punch-and-Judy show kind of entertainment, as awful warnings on the margin of the novel. That Dickens had already the whole of the anti-Utilitarian case crystallizing in his mind ready for Hard Times is shown by the development of the Smallweed characteristics in the Bitzer direction too:
‘Been along with your friend again, Bart?’
Small nods.
‘Dining at his expense, Bart?’
Small nods again.
‘That’s right. Live at his expense as much as you can, and take warning by his foolish example. That’s the use of such a friend. The only use you can put him to,’ says the venerable sage.
Esther however is fully human and framed to be a very carefully complete study of what a sensitive child is made into in such circumstances as are posited for her. Her aunt is a very moderate version of a Murdstone; Esther understood her to be ‘a good, good woman’ and that it was Esther’s own fault that she was illegitimate. On her aunt’s death she feels obliged to bury her doll, her only friend, with tears – in a grave in the garden; it is left to us to deduce, since Esther doesn’t understand her action herself, that she was showing herself obedient to the rule laid down for her of ‘submission, self-denial, diligent work’. Esther, like Little Dorrit the child with the stigma of prison birth, accepts her lot without complaint or self-pity and is even excessively docile, though Esther nonetheless suffers from the ‘wound’ she knew she had received in childhood, ‘the fault I had been born with (of which I confessedly felt guilty and yet innocent)’ – the child’s confusion between what it is told it should feel, and what it feels instinctively, could hardly be better put. She undertakes to atone by being useful and trying to win love. Thus is explained her constantly noting down compliments paid her and marks of affection shown her, which are to her necessary proofs that she has won the right to be alive. Yet, ignoring the care and the wonderful imaginative insight it has taken to build up and maintain Esther’s case, criticism habitually complains of her for showing the traits that are proof of Dickens’s indignant and compassionate understanding of an aspect of the life of his time that only a great novelist could demonstrate. Esther can hardly believe people when they tell her how useful, pretty and lovable she is and writes it all down to be able to. Esther has never been Pet or Baby to anyone and even in Mr Jarndyce’s circle her excessive maturity is recognized by nicknames like ‘Dame Durden’ and ‘Little Old Woman’.
Esther has an interesting psychological consistency, and is the more remarkable for being Dickens’s first successful attempt at creating a girl from the inside – Florence Dombey is convincing only in childhood and Agnes never at any time. Esther is even a young lady too, so that to have established her through autobiography is a real triumph for such a thoroughly masculine writer. We know more about Esther than any other young woman in Dickens’s novels and she has more reality than any except Bella Wilfer (before Bella’s marriage). Esther is always true to her own peculiarities but they are not mannerisms; her individual sensibility is shown in her unusual sensitiveness to her surroundings anywhere and her quite personal descriptions of natural scenery. Chapter III, Esther’s first, is as a chapter one of the very best Dickens ever wrote in a mode not committed to satire (as the remarkable first chapter of Dombey is). Her submissiveness makes her blame herself whenever as a child she is unsuccessful in winning the affection she craves, but she never criticizes the others, so that her submissiveness becomes painful to us, as it was meant to. The psychology of an illegitimate child of her time can never have been caught with greater fidelity.18 She is intelligent through the intensity of her sensibility but, unlike Pip, not morally timid or weak. On the contrary, she demands respect by her strength of character and resourcefulness, which comes out in all her contacts with Mr Guppy, in her sympathy with Miss Flite, Caddy, Jenny, Jo and any other unfortunates she meets, and in her very natural self-compensation in instinctively mothering younger girls like Charley, Caddy and Ada. It is in keeping too that she doesn’t allow herself to entertain the idea that Allan Woodcourt is attracted by herself or that she is entitled to love and marry him, and that she should persuade herself it is her duty to refuse him in order to marry her guardian out of gratitude – this looks like Dickens reconsidering the idea of the Strong marriage and admitting his mistake there, for Jarndyce himself sees such a marriage would be wrong and resigns Esther to a more appropriate husband. Esther has forced herself to burn the treasured posy Woodcourt had left for her exactly as she had buried the beloved doll in her younger phase. (One is constantly surprised by Dickens’s persistence in ‘filling in’ Esther when he has so much else on his hands in this demanding novel.) What is even more remarkable is Dickens’s imaginative insight into her reactions to exceptional situations, as when, her looks having been ruined by the smallpox, she cannot bear to meet Ada in case she sees signs in Ada’s face of being shocked or repelled; after steeling herself to the meeting she hides behind the door at the last minute. When she learns from her mother the secret of her birth her second reaction – the first having been to reassure and comfort her mother – is to relapse into the feelings of her childhood and wish she had never been born. While it is Dickens who had treasured the anecdote of the village girl who, though literate, follows her illiterate bridegroom in making a cross instead of signing the marriage register, in order not to ‘shame him’, it is appropriate that the novelist should give it to Esther to tell and comfort herself with because it represents the delicacy of feeling19 which she desires to find in others at this point, to support her in her distress, against her fear of being shamed by those she loves. All this and much more in Esther’s history is proof that Dickens had the true creative artist’s power of feeling himself into and sustaining a character who is as far as possible from being himself. But there is even more striking testimony, in demonstrating that Dickens also understood that such a nature under such strains must develop signs of psychic stress, and though Esther is not driven to the borders of mania like Miss Wade, Dickens gives remarkably convincing glimpses of her difficulties. When Esther has learnt that Lady Dedlock is her mother:
Knowing that my mere existence as a living creature was an unforeseen danger in her way, I could not always conquer that terror of myself which had seized me when I first knew the secret. At no time did I dare to utter her name. I felt as if I did not even dare to hear it. If the conversation anywhere, when I was present, took that direction, as it sometimes naturally did, I tried not to hear it – I mentally counted, repeated something that I knew, or went out of the room. I am conscious, now, that I often did these things when there can have been no danger of her being spoken of; but I did them in the dread I had of hearing anything that might lead to her betrayal through me.
Again, Dickens’s understanding of the relation between dreams and the hidden truths of experience is shown in Esther’s noting, without being able to say why, that she always dreamt of the period of her life when she lived with her aunt, and in her delirious dreams during her fever:
Everything else seemed to have retired into a remote distance, where there was little or no separation between the various stages of my life which had really been divided by years. In falling ill, I seemed to have crossed a dark lake, and to have left all my experiences, mingled together by the great distance, on the healthy shore…. While I was vey ill, the way in which these divisions of time became confused with one another, distressed my mind exceedingly. At once a child, an elder girl, and the little woman I had been so happy as, I was not only oppressed by cares and difficulties adapted to each station, but by the great perplexity of endlessly trying to reconcile them … I laboured up colossal staircases, ever striving to reach the top, and ever turned, as I have seen a worm in a garden path, by some obstruction, and labouring again … that worse time when, strung together somewhere in great black space, there was a flaming necklace, or ring, or starry circle of some kind, of which I was one of the beads! And when my only prayer was to be taken off from the rest, and when it was such an inexplicable agony and misery to be a part of the dreadful thing.
This last dream is the one that is representative of the theme of the novel, a nightmare version of what Ada and Richard had debated at the beginning of the novel when they had been inducted into the Chancery world where there is no freewill except in moral decisions. Esther can pray ‘to be taken off’ and not to be a ‘part of the dreadful thing’ but it is only by her love and sympathy that she can get off. We are in Bleak House well on the way to the prison world of Little Dorrit where each is locked into his own appointed or self-made cell, and to the still worse state of Pip in Great Expectations who, wholly passive, has not even moral choice until his world falls into ruins around him and he sees that he is tied hand and foot to the Newgate society by a contract he never knowingly entered into. Esther’s sensibility is unique in Dickens’s novels not only in being essentially feminine but in being different from the sensitiveness shown by other unhappy Dickens children, even Little Dorrit, who is a working-girl and not a lady and whose experience is limited to the society of the poor, and her possibilities of action very circumscribed. And Esther is mature, not innocent with David Copperfield’s disabilities, her early experiences having given her a precocious understanding of the painfulness of life and the cruelty of circumstance which enables her to understand John Jarndyce’s kind of innocent goodness and appreciate it and yet see that it was as to Skimpole self-indulgent and that Skimpoles need firm treatment (which she can and does provide). Yet she has womanly tact and, like the Ibsen of The Wild Duck, she sees that in some circumstances it is better to let well alone, in accordance with which she hopes that Caddy and Prince will never see through Mr Turveydrop but go on believing in him happily since they will have to put up with him anyway. Esther is not sentimentalized and as a good angel is altogether more acceptable than Agnes, showing an advance on that part of the previous novel. For Dickens is also prepared to show us Esther’s limitations – her shrinking from criticism of mothers (psychologically this is right, from her), as in her attempt to stop Caddy from judging her mother to have failed in her duty – Dickens is clearly on Caddy’s side here – and her own effort to deny her dislike of Mrs Woodcourt who is anxious her son should not be recognized by Esther as a suitor.
It is necessary to insist on the success Esther represents for the novelist since she is so important to the novel as the registering consciousness and has been consistently underrated by critics; it is she through whom we apprehend the truth about Mr Vholes who is thus brought into the mode of the book as not merely a legal shark, like Conversation Kenge and Guppy, but a thematic presence. We might not rejoice in Esther’s society ourselves but she is impressive as a similar character, Fanny Price, is in Mansfield Park (another link with that novel, and there is something incipiently Victorian about both Fanny herself and Jane Austen’s attitude to her). Through Esther, as through Fanny, we get a just apprehension of the other performers in her world.
*
Esther is not the only case-history in Bleak House, since it seems that Dickens had the intention of showing that such a society warps its products (we are on the way to the disappearance of the Romantic image of childhood and its replacement by the sociologically realistic child produced by our Bleak House, the Doll’s Dressmaker). Mr Tulkinghorn is another masterly study in abnormality, though completely a human being – Dickens has outgrown the stage of throwing up inexplicable monsters like Fagin, Quilp, Squeers and Pecksniff. Yet Tulkinghorn, though all of a piece and thoroughly accounted for, is commonly seen as a mystery or an engine of melodrama. Actually, the only extraordinary thing about him is the contrast between his public self and his private self, that inner self which drives him; and while his innocuous public self makes him seem negligible to his employers, the revelation of his private self is terrifying to those who like Lady Dedlock stand in his way or arouse his antipathies. He lives only in his sense of power, hating Lady Dedlock for having more influence with her husband than himself, and all women for their role in life and that irrational nature of theirs which he can’t control. He has of necessity to suppress both his pleasure in dominating and his distaste for women, when with his employers, but relieves himself when it is safe to exhibit these passions openly as in bullying and torturing poor innocent George (because he has dared to withhold his specimen of Captain Hawdon’s handwriting – this chapter is called ‘The Turn of the Screw’ and George describes Mr Tulkinghorn as ‘a slow-torturing kind of man’), and torturing Lady Dedlock with his knowledge of her past and his threats of exposing her to her husband (though this is a bluff which she should have known he would never dare to bring off since his position depended on keeping the secrets of the aristocracy – ‘as it were, the steward of the legal mysteries, the butler of the legal cellar, of the Dedlocks’). He cheats and coarsely abuses the French maid to the point of goading her into murdering him – if she hadn’t, someone else eventually would have done, as Dickens intimates by showing the fateful Roman on the ceiling pointing eternally to Tulkinghorn’s predestined end. It is only Dickens (before Dostoievsky) who would comprehend that such a case as Mr Tulkinghorn invites murder. Content to move in the world in rusty black and never conversing, he rests on his sense of power and if possible exercises it discreetly even there, as when he enjoys telling Sir Leicester that Rouncewell has beaten him in the election, and in letting Lady Dedlock know in public that he has discovered her past, with the hint: ‘I leave you to imagine, Sir Leicester, the husband’s grief.’
There are other family lawyers or lawyer-surrogates in Victorian novels who have some of Mr Tulkinghorn’s traits in a milder form – one thinks of, among others, Mr Forrester the agent of Trollope’s Duke of Omnium, Mathew Jermyn the family lawyer of the Transomes in Felix Holt, with his own knowledge of the lady’s guilty past, and Disraeli’s Baptist Hatton, in Sybil – all secretive men of power who manage their clients’ affairs to their own satisfaction – but none has the dreadful consistency and desire to torture of Dickens’s creation here. Dickens’s characters such as Bounderby and Tulkinghorn impinge uniquely on the reader because they represent an essence, containing the essential truth about some aspect of their society without being diluted by all the inessentials that make the characters of other novelists more acceptably ‘lifelike’. Thus Mrs Gaskell’s mill-owner Mr Thornton in North and South (co-eval with Hard Times) though first presented as rebarbative is carefully composed of both good qualities and obnoxious views about his ‘hands’ and the manufacturing ethos; eventually he is shown reclaimed by the heroine and circumstances, and fit for her to marry. He has in fact all the attitudes and principles and most of the traits of the bad Victorian mill-owner out of which Dickens has composed his Bounderby, but Mr Thornton’s significant characteristics have been so diluted and so counter-balanced by better qualities, to achieve authorial fairness, that their real viciousness can hardly be apprehended. Dickens, by selecting the essence of the type, his unique characteristics, and then activating the character so formed in a context which brings out their significance with a startling degree of vividness, lit up by sardonic humour, achieves a more important kind of success as art and criticism of life. (From instances in Francis Place’s Life it seems there were far more brutal masters even than Bounderby in the earlier period.)
Turn to Mr Vholes and one realizes the inclusiveness of the mode of Bleak House, which is followed by a triumph of exclusive art in Hard Times, for Vholes represents a feat of creative brilliance in complexity, and in neither of the conventions that determine Esther and Tulkinghorn; he is not limited by psychological consistency or uniform presentation. He starts by being little more than a rhetorical conception to expose the true nature of the new Victorian middle-class ideal, respectability (in chapter XXXIX ‘Attorney and Client’), but just previously, in Esther’s first encounter with him, we get an intimation of his meaning in the general purpose of the novel:
Dressed in black, black-gloved, and buttoned to the chin, there was nothing so remarkable in him as a lifeless manner, and a slow fixed way he had of looking at Richard … and now I observed that he was further remarkable for an inward manner of speaking … I never shall forget those two seated side by side in the lantern’s light; Richard, all flush and fire and laughter, with the reins in his hand; Mr Vholes, quite still, black-gloved and buttoned up, looking at him as if he were looking at his prey and charming it. I have before me the whole picture of the warm dark night, the summer lightning, the dusty track of road closed in by hedgerows and high trees, the gaunt pale horse with his ears pricked up, and the driving away at speed to Jarndyce and Jarndyce.
Vholes has entangled Richard in the Jarndyce case and is to assist at his ruin; he is now come to take him back to London to watch the action in court. We hardly need the evocation of Death’s pale horse to identify the nature of the black figure with his lifelessness and inward manner of speaking and gaze riveted on his prey, to identify who is driving with Richard and to where.
In the second appearance, which is in the third-person narrative, we first get an account of Vholes’s chambers in Symond’s Inn, remarkably like the allegorical description of Barnard’s Inn later in Great Expectations only here sinister and not humorous in tone. All the imagery associated with Vholes is sinister – e.g. his blue bags of legal documents are ‘hastily stuffed, out of all regularity of form, as the larger sorts of serpents are in their first gorged state’; he is identified with ‘the official cat’; he looks at Richard ‘never winking his hungry eyes’. Thus we come to Vholes himself. The name describes a rodent who undermines river-banks, the vole, but this was also used throughout the Victorian Age in a well-known term meaning ‘to win all the tricks’ in such card-games as écarté and other gambling-games of skill, and it would be quite like the Dickens of Bleak House to intend such a pun. We may compare Sir Leicester Dedlock’s attributing anything democratic that comes to his notice to an outbreak of Wat Tylerism and his Wat Tylerish adversary the ‘new man’ Mr Rouncewell having named his son Watt (after the inventor who launched the industrial age with steam power); this is a pun that Dickens undoubtedly intended, and I have noted others already.
Thus prepared, we approach Vholes as a representative figure in his age:
Mr Vholes is a very respectable man. He has not a large business, but he is a very respectable man. He is allowed by the greater attorneys who have made good fortunes, or are making them, to be a most respectable man. He never misses a chance in his practice; which is a mark of respectability. He never takes any pleasure; which is another mark of respectability. He is reserved and serious; which is another mark of respectability. His digestion is impaired, which is highly respectable. And he is making hay of the grass which is flesh, for his three daughters. And his father is dependent on him in the Vale of Taunton.
Mr Vholes is cited by the forces of reaction, on account of his respectability, as reason for blocking all attempts at reform of the English law:
… Take a few more steps in this direction, say they, and what is to become of Vholes’s father? Is he to perish? And of Vholes’s daughters? Are they to be shirt-makers or governesses? As though, Mr Vholes and his relations being minor cannibal chiefs, and it being proposed to abolish cannibalism, indignant champions were to put the case thus: Make man-eating unlawful, and you starve the Vholeses!
Evidently Dickens had a Shakespearean model in mind here, as so often in Bleak House,20 in this case the ironic technique of Mark Antony in his funeral oration on Caesar, the shifting implications of ‘honourable man’ being paralleled by the gradual undermining of the concept of ‘respectable man’. Thus we learn successively that a respectable man is expected to have a large business, that a reliable testimony to respectability is that of attorneys who have made large fortunes out of the law ‘or are making them’ – we know how, having sat in on Chancery procedure for over half the novel – and now (coming into the open) that a mark of respectability is to be unscrupulous. This, Dickens was telling his readers, is what your ideal of respectability is worth! Then we get another glimpse of respectability as conceived by a society that is in Chancery: ‘He never takes any pleasure’ – to do so would be a waste of time and a reprehensible desire to enjoy oneself (hits at the Evangelical and the business outlooks, which are seen to converge here). The sense of how ridiculous all this is has for the moment replaced Dickens’s indignation and contempt and the author of Pickwick emerges to pillory the notion that to enjoy food and conviviality should be now held to be reprehensible. The joking parody of piety follows in the finale: ‘And he is making hay of the grass which is flesh, for his three daughters.’ The last thrust and its repetitions in the following paragraphs of the rhetoric are like the irony of Matthew Arnold in Culture and Anarchy and have a similar target – Puritanism and middle-class morality in the Victorian Age. The argument about the nature of English institutions in general is developed with wit as well as high spirits from the fact that Mr Vholes is too respectable to be sacrificed – ‘As though, Mr Vholes and his relations being minor cannibal chiefs, and it being proposed to abolish cannibalism, indignant champions were to put the case thus: Make man-eating unlawful, and you starve the Vholeses!’ In fact, the Vholeses do live by man-eating and the joke reminds us of the actuality.
So that we then see Mr Vholes in his personally sinister aspect again:
Mr Vholes, quiet and unmoved, as a man of so much respectability ought to be, takes off his close black gloves as if he were skinning his hands, lifts off his tight black hat as if he were scalping himself, and sits down at his desk … and proceeds in his buttoned-up half-audible voice, as if there were an unclean spirit in him that will neither come out nor speak out.
– where the sinister implications of their being nothing under the gloves but a skeletal hand and nothing under the hat but a skull is capped by the concluding suggestion that this corpse is animated by an evil spirit. Urging Richard then to put his trust in Vholes’s zeal for his cause, he says: ‘“This desk is your rock, sir!” Mr Vholes gives it a rap, and it sounds as hollow as a coffin.’
The final impression of Vholes comes from Esther and has therefore her peculiar perceptiveness:
I happened to turn my eyes towards the house, and I saw a long thin shadow going in which looked like Mr Vholes … Mr Vholes who had looked at me while speaking, here emerged into the silence he could hardly be said to have broken, so stifled was his tone … gauntly stalked to the fire, and warmed his funeral gloves. … Mr Vholes put his dead glove, which scarcely seemed to have any hand in it, on my fingers, and took his long thin shadow away. I thought of it on the outside of the coach, passing over all the sunny landscape between us and London, chilling the seed in the ground as it glided along.
Thus Vholes, by the sensitive Esther, is perceived to be nothing but his shadow – a shadow without a man – an ‘it’, no hand in the glove, no voice to break the silence; we don’t need to speculate what Esther feels the shadow is of as she imagines it, in that blood-curdling image, ‘chilling the seed in the ground’ wherever it passed between Jarndyce’s Bleak House and that other Bleak House made by Chancery. The macabre effect of Mr Vholes is free from any touch of the theatrical or the melodramatic in its creation in simple and unrhetorical words; he weaves in and out of the other characters’ lives, fixing on Richard as his prey whom no one – wife or friend – can save, intimating that life in the Chancery world is a Dance of Death. In any novel before Copperfield Dickens would have presented Vholes in a Hogarthian satiric mode, but there is nothing of the eighteenth-century satiric or of Hogarth’s moral commentary on his age in these images.
Bleak House thus has an extraordinary imaginative richness which is not just a matter of length or of showing a complete social world from the pinnacle of fashion to the London slum and from the High Court of Chancery to Chesney Wold. Its greatness lies in its genuine complexity, variety that is fully controlled in the interest of a deeply-felt theme without thereby being impoverished as Our Mutual Friend may be felt to have been. And yet the path Dickens followed from Dombey to Hard Times and Little Dorrit passes, as I’ve shown, through David Copperfield and Bleak House necessarily, and without these two experiments he would not have got there. There is a more profound and sober understanding in Bleak House than in any previous Dickens novel of the nature of living and the interaction of members of a society, though I can’t agree that the chain of cause and effect that brings Lady Dedlock to her death in the clothes of the brickmaker’s wife at the threshold of the paupers’ burial-ground is convincing: it is, however, felt to be right in the context of the novel, which is perhaps sufficient – reason may baulk at it afterwards but the whole mode of the novel undercuts a merely rational reading. Is it made sufficiently clear that Lady Dedlock is being punished not for a ‘guilty’ past but for being the pinnacle of an irresponsible society? I think so, for no one in the novel except the contemptible characters or the unco’ guid has anything but compassion towards her and Captain Hawdon, and her relation with him is shown as the only real life she had had. Two genuine lovers were doomed to misery and disgrace, a tragedy forecasting Ada and Richard’s. Quite unambiguous and a more subtle moral point is that Esther has to lose her looks for her charity and humanity in taking in Jo and nursing Charley – good intentions are irrelevant if one is part of a society based on injustice and irresponsibility, making the point that society is one and indivisible as regards infectious diseases at least. Carlyle had pointed this out by delaring in Past and Present that in the laissez-faire state there was one sole link between high and low: typhus fever. Kingsley two years earlier in Alton Locke had found a novelistic form for Carlyle’s idea by showing in his terrible account of the tailors’ sweatshops how typhus and other diseases due to the disgusting conditions in which the tailors worked and lived were transmitted to the well-to-do via the clothes made for them there, and no doubt Dickens adapted this for his own purpose in Bleak House. It is impossible to read nineteenth-century novels in bulk without coming to the conclusion, I find, that the Victorian novelists read and used each other’s work quite as freely as Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatists did theirs. This was more or less recognized, the Early Victorian novelists being inevitably the main source of ideas and techniques. Thus Dickens wrote resignedly in a letter in 1852 about Uncle Tom’s Cabin: ‘She (I mean Mrs Stowe) is a leetle unscrupulous in the appropriatin’ way. I seem to see a writer with whom I am very intimate (and whom nobody can possibly admire more than myself) peeping very often through the thinness of the paper. Further I descry the ghost of Mary Barton, and the very palpable mirage of a scene in The Children of the Mist; but in spite of this, I consider the book a fine one.’ We may also remember Thackeray’s feeling – of satisfaction, not resentment – that he thought Dickens with David Copperfield had improved by turning to domestic life and the history of a young man’s difficulties and progress, by taking a leaf out of his book (Pendennis, 1848–1850). I have argued in my introductory essay to Miss Marjoribanks by Mrs Oliphant (Chatto & Windus) that George Eliot was indebted to it for the new tone and attitude to her heroine of Middlemarch, while Mrs Oliphant had herself evidently arrived at the idea of her ‘Chronicles of Carlingford’ series, of which Miss Marjoribanks formed part, by the success in the previous decade that novelists had had with Cranford, Barchester and Milby (the scene of the last of George Eliot’s ‘Scenes from Clerical Life’). The complicated inter-relatedness of Oliver Twist, Jane Eyre and David Copperfield I have already illustrated. A great deal of the Victorian novelists’ achievement is due to such cross-fertilization, illustrated still more by Henry James’s debt to them for themes, characters, settings, ideas, symbols and imagery – above all those of Dickens and George Eliot.
I would like to illustrate what I meant by saying that there is a new Dickens mode in Bleak House over and above the numerous points of growth that I have pointed to in David Copperfield which are seen developed here. There is this extraordinary combination of the painfully serious that tends towards the macabre even, which yet consorts with a high-spirited, witty and sometimes humorous apprehension of life without discordance, and runs to a finer awareness of the quality of personality and human relations – I think of Dickens’s writing of the trooper George: ‘from his superfluity of life and strength seeming to shed down temporary vigour upon’ the dying Jo, or of the Bleak House of the poor’s existence in the country as seen in this bird’s eye view:
On the waste, where the brick-kilns are burning with a pale blue flare; where the straw-roofs of the wretched huts in which the bricks are made, are being scattered to the wind; where the clay and water are hard frozen, and the mill in which the gaunt blind horse goes round all day, look like an instrument of torture …
and which yet exist without incongruity in the same novel as this grimly funny account of a Victorian funeral (Mr Tulkinghorn’s), recording a ridiculous ritual of the age; too high-spirited for a Hogarth or a Gillray satire, it is characteristically Dickensian in tone:
… strictly speaking, there are only three other human followers, but the amount of inconsolable carriages is immense. The peerage contributes more four-wheeled affliction than has ever been seen in that neighbourhood. Such is the assemblage of armorial bearings on coach panels, that the Heralds’ College might be supposed to have lost its father and mother at a blow. The Duke of Foodle sends a splendid pile of dust and ashes, with silver wheel-boxes, patent axles, all the last improvements, and three bereaved worms, six feet high, holding on behind, in a bunch of woe. All the state coachmen in London seem plunged into mourning; and if that dead old man of the rusty garb …
The absurdity of the parade of mourning without any real mourners is not only a macabre joke, it is presented as another instance of the Chancery way of life. Thus Dickens is also able to let us savour the humours relevant to Sir Leicester – who ‘repeats in a killing voice: “The young man of the name of Guppy?”’ or (a hit at a Victorian characteristic) is ‘not so much shocked by the fact, as the fact of the fact being mentioned’, those brought out by the colloquies between Sir Leicester and Mr Bucket with his new classless familiarity which is without deference but is willing to humour: ‘If there’s a blow to be inflicted on you, you naturally think of your family. You ask yourself, how would all them ancestors of yours, away to Julius Caesar – not to go beyond him at the present – have borne that blow?’ and the debilitated cousin’s ‘Haven’t a doubt – zample – far better hang wrong fler than no fler.’ The presentation of Mrs Pardiggle is of the same order, with her voice that impressed Esther’s fancy ‘as if it had a sort of spectacles on too’, who ‘pulled out a good book as if it were a constable’s staff, and took the whole family into custody’ but who is still less of a joke, for it is clear that it is she and her kind who erected the ‘iron barrier’ which Esther was ‘painfully sensible’ existed ‘between us and those people’ (the brick-makers whose homes Mrs Pardiggle is shown invading).
Mr Guppy has only to be compared to Dickens’s earlier examples of the Cockney-clerk model, such as Dick Swiveller, to see that he is at least as entertaining but also a great deal more than a joke: he is further illustration of the theme of the novel, and the amusing and the serious aspects of him are quite inseparable, from his first introducing himself into Chesney Wold (when it is not open to the public) in that idiom Dickens handles so expertly: ‘Us London lawyers don’t often get an out’, and his forcing himself on Lady Dedlock to prise her secrets out of her to assist him in marrying Esther, in order to advance himself in the world, throughout his proposals and retractions of his proposal to Esther in his characteristic mixture of legal jargon and romantic clichés. Dickens is a master of the use of the clichés of Romanticism (and unlike Mark Twain he sees that they represent something more than an absurdity). The Romantic and its idiom had indeed fallen on evil days and into vulgar minds by mid-Victorian times. Mostly a blend of the tricks and sentimentality of Byron at his worst, Tom Moore and Victorian drawing-room ballads, the language of feeling and sentiment is used to amuse by Dickens with a full appreciation of its ludicrous inappropriateness to his Dick Swivellers, Young John Chiveries, Mr Moddles and so forth of lowish life, and to sentimental young ladies like Julia Mills. But in William Guppy’s use it sharpens a satire: the sentimental idiom and professions never for a moment prevent Mr Guppy from putting his business interests first. The lifelessness and artificiality of this jargon bring out the remoteness of such sentiments from anything Guppy really feels and is actuated by; the fact of such a meaningless idiom being in use to express alleged feeling is proof that such a society has no real feelings to express of this kind, but that it has a desire to lay claim to a language of the heart, because it is somehow aware that self-interest is not enough, an unconscious recognition of a fact on which Dickens’s optimism is based. Only a Bitzer, constructed by the novelist for the purpose of showing the impossibility of a human machine actuated solely by self-interest, can exist without the idealism and feelings that make us human, and Mr Guppy is far from being a Bitzer. The human complexity is registered in his ‘going with one leg and staying with the other’ when he is torn between what his decent instincts tell him is mean behaviour to Esther and what his self-interest tells him is expedient, when in spite of his ‘witness-box face’ he can’t help showing he is ashamed, and is therefore a pitiable human being; his discomfort is heightened when he discovers that Esther has in fact come to let him off, making a scene essentially humorous but not simply comic. Setting off the absurdity of his sentimental idiom is the fact that his genuine affection for his very trying mother is always expressed in restrained exasperation – the Guppys are a great advance on the Heep mother and son. Thus though Mr Guppy is an agent of Chancery and so trained that sharp practice is second nature to him (he is the precursor of Mr Jaggers in carrying over to private life the habit of cross-examination as a form of conversation) he has another nature too, the first nature of all human beings (Dickens thinks), if only it were given a chance. A pathetic example of this need for an idealism, the consciousness that something is needed outside Chancery practice to make life worth living, is shown in Guppy’s and his friends’ passion for connoisseuring fashionable British Beauty and covering their walls with the Galaxy Gallery collection of engravings of it; even the Bitzer-like Bart Smallweed has his ideal and models himself on Guppy, in spite of his grandfather’s admonitions.
But the best way of illustrating the variety of Bleak House and its progress towards a finer art is by juxtaposing the old and the new prose techniques which exist in it side by side, as here:
Into a beastly scrap of ground which a Turk would reject as a savage abomination, and a Caffre would shudder at, they bring our dear brother here departed, to receive Christian burial.
With houses looking on, on every side, save where a reeking little tunnel of a court gives access to the iron gate – with every villainy of life in action close on death, and every poisonous element of death in action close on life – here, they lower our dear brother down a foot or two: here, sow him in corruption, to be raised in corruption: an avenging ghost at many a sick bedside: a shameful testimony to future ages, how civilization and barbarism walked this boastful island together.
Come night, come darkness, for you cannot come too soon, or stay too long, by such a place as this! Come straggling lights into the windows of the ugly houses; and you who do iniquity therein, do it at least with this dread scene shut out! Come, flame of gas, burning so sullenly above the iron gate, on which the poisoned air deposits its witch-ointment slimy to the touch! It is well that you should call to every passer-by, ‘Look here!’
‘He was put there,’ says Jo, holding to the bars and looking in.
‘Where? O, what a scene of horrors!’
‘There!’ says Jo, pointing. ‘Over yinder. Among them piles of bones, and close to that there kitchen winder! They put him wery nigh the top. They was obliged to stamp upon it to git it in. I could unkiver it for you with my broom, if the gate was open. That’s why they locks it, I s’pose,’ giving it a shake. ‘It’s always locked. Look at the rat!’ cries Jo, excited. ‘Hi! Look! There he goes! Into the ground.’
The servant sinks into a corner – into a corner of that hideous archway, with its deadly stains contaminating her dress; and putting out her two hands, and passionately telling him to keep away from her, for he is loathsome to her, so remains for some moments. Jo stands staring, and is still staring when she recovers herself.
‘Is this place of abomination, consecrated ground?’
‘I don’t know nothink of consequential ground,’ says Jo, still staring.
‘Is it blessed?’
‘WHICH?’ says Jo, in the last degree amazed.
‘Is it blessed?’
‘I’m blest if I know,’ says Jo, staring more than ever; ‘but I shouldn’t think it warn’t. Blest?’ repeats Jo, something troubled in his mind. ‘It an’t done it much good if it is. Blest? I should think it was t’othered myself. But I don’t know nothink!’
It will be seen at once that the dialogue between the disguised Lady Dedlock and Jo at the gate of the public burial-ground for paupers makes the laboured irony of the previous description of the funeral unnecessary, since the dialogue effects, by purely novelistic means without intrusive authorial comment, what the rhetorical passage tries to do, but does it much more effectively and economically (besides avoiding an adverse reaction from any who may object to being preached at – though it is true that the Victorians were avid listeners to and purchasers of sermons). Dickens in the course of writing this novel must have come to realize that it is more satisfactory for the novelist to act out rather than to tell, however long he may have held this view in theory, as we know he did. As we can see from the second of my extracts, Dickens could perfectly well dissolve what he wanted to communicate into dialogue and action without any ‘telling’, but he seems unable to trust to that alone, or else, as in the first of my extracts, he cannot control altogether his indignation at some monstrous feature of the life of his time. We may hazard that the reason for the form the first extract takes is the unfortunate influence of Carlyle’s excitable prose on him (as can be seen even more clearly in Tale of Two Cities, where the inspiration is Carlyle’s History of the French Revolution and the only interest the novel has is Dickens’s case-history of Dr Manette); Carlyle’s ideas irresistibly led to Dickens’s employing his tricks of prose rhetoric too. The sad thing is that Dickens without Carlyle, free to create from his own powerful and much more sensitive and lively imagination, is so much better a writer. There is nothing so telling in the earlier passage as the horror achieved by the casual statement: ‘They was obliged to stamp on it to git it in. I could unkiver it for you with my broom, if the gate was open.’ It is Jo’s taking such things for granted – the rat is the only feature of the case that interests him, but not even the rat is shocking to him – that make the horrors really sickening, and this is finally intensified by our realization that the impact of the situation is not only on us but on Lady Dedlock, who is bound to the dead man – ‘it’ – by her former passionate love and by having borne his child, and has proved her abiding concern for him by having had Jo show her all the places connected with his last days, of which this burial-ground is the climax. We note the sense of its all happening in our presence by its being written in the present tense and by Jo’s ‘giving it (the gate) a shake’, and his staring at her unable to understand why she is upset at what is, for him, an everyday matter of course. Even the dreadful irony secured in the first extract by deploying the phrases from the Christian burial-service and showing that they here have a literal truth, is surpassed by the irony in the dialogue that questions its being consecrated ground. The characteristic use in this novel of the Dickensian pun that I have noted is here seen in the play on ‘blessed’: ‘Is it blessed?’ ‘I’m blest if I know’ which underlines Jo’s unblessed state and takes us without a jolt into the bitter humour of ‘It an’t done it much good if it is. Blest? I should think it t’othered myself.’ There is no need for Dickens here to accuse his readers explicitly of tolerating a society which throws the bodies of the poor into such a mockery of consecrated ground and has no more sense of responsibility than to bury corpses under kitchen windows, and we have here intimated the additional irony of a so-called Christian country allowing the children of the poor to be brought up in Jo’s condition of spiritual darkness.
The interest of the first extract is the way it moves in and out of automatic writing, tending towards blank verse21 (Dickens’s greatest weakness and always associated with his vague reaching for what Shakespeare would have done in his place). Thus we get:
Come night, come darkness, for you cannot come too soon
Or stay too long, by such a place as this! …
And you who do iniquity therein,
Do it at least with this dread scene shut out!
Come flame of gas …
and at this point Dickens ceases to write blank verse but instead becomes Shakespearean in a real sense because the gas-jet recalls him to an actual scene where he must have remembered it ‘burning so sullenly’ because of the ‘poisoned air’, and that the metal of the gate felt slimy from the horrible deposits – fumes from the decaying bodies and therefore ‘witch-ointment’ since it was with human grease and extracts from corpses that witches made their ointments. And he sees that the arresting light is a signal to every passerby to stop and witness this outrage, thus calling ‘Look here!.’ The real poetry in Dickens’s prose is always in some detail of a concrete experience which has lodged in and therefore touched off his imagination.
And Bleak House is full of this poetry. Braque said that the quality he valued above all else in art was what he called ‘poésie’, a mysterious quality which an artist achieves ‘when he transcends his talent and exceeds himself’ and which each artist ‘can discover for himself only through his intuitions’. It is in Bleak House, as in Dombey and Son, that we see Dickens taking a great leap forward and consistently transcending his talent, to use Braque’s fine phrase. In Bleak House we are constantly being surprised by signs of this. Krook is described like someone in a Wordsworth poem: ‘His throat, chin and eyebrows were so frosted with white hairs, so gnarled with veins and puckered skin, that he looked from his breast upwards like some old root in a fall of snow.’ Esther watches Charley from Bell Yard run back to her work ‘and melt into the city’s strife and sound, like a dewdrop in an ocean’. One could make an anthology. But I would dwell most on the extraordinary feat of showing with such variety and imaginative power Skimpole’s attitudes to everything and every one as wholly aesthetic, without being monotonous or predictable. I have already quoted him on the orphans (on both Jo and ‘the little Coavinses’) and on his logical refusal to feel he should feel gratitude. Dickens doesn’t take the easy line of making Skimpole stupid or gross – no, he is surprisingly intelligent, if to be merely quick, clever, observant and witty is; it’s only feeling that he lacks, though feeling for the Arts and Nature is his stock-in-trade (what he would call sensibility). Of his opposite and adversary Boythorn, the man of principles: ‘“Nature forgot to shade him off a little, I think?” observed Mr Skimpole. “A little too boisterous, like the sea? A little too vehement – like a bull, who has made up his mind to consider every colour scarlet? But I grant a sledge-hammering sort of merit in him!”’ And on the angry Man from Shropshire:
He said, Well, it was really very pleasant to see how things lazily adapted themselves to purposes. Here was this Mr Gridley, a man of robust will, and surprising energy – intellectually speaking, a sort of inharmonious blacksmith – and he could easily imagine that there Gridley was, years ago, wandering about in life for something to expend his superfluous combativeness upon – a sort of Young Love among the thorns – when the Court of Chancery came in his way, and accommodated him with the exact thing he wanted. There they were, matched, ever afterwards! Otherwise he might have been a great general, blowing up all sorts of towns, or he might have been a great politician, dealing in all sorts of parliamentary rhetoric; but, as it was, he and the Court of Chancery had fallen upon each other in the pleasantest way, and nobody was much the worse, and Gridley was, so to speak, from that hour provided for.
On Jo:
‘It seems to me that it would be wiser, as well as in a certain kind of way more respectable, if he showed some misdirected energy that got him into prison. There would be more of an adventurous spirit in it, and consequently more of a certain sort of poetry. I don’t see why our young friend, in his degree, should not seek to invest himself with such poetry as is open to him … and I don’t know but what I should be more interested in our young friend, as an illustration of such a case, than merely as a poor vagabond – which anyone can be.’
What Dickens succeeds in demonstrating is the inhumanity of the aesthetic attitude to life, though Skimpole is allowed all the playfulness, paradoxes and fancifulness that disguise this. Skimpole’s callousness and dialectic are more remarkable than the looking-glass logic of Mr and Mrs Micawber, even. For diverting as Skimpole is, Dickens makes us recognize each time that Skimpole lacks something – that the aesthete’s selfishness is more than the ordinary self-centred man’s, it is a systematic refusal to be involved as a human being, except sentimentally which commits him to nothing and is therefore self-indulgent. Skimpole is really one of Dickens’s monsters and quite the finest – what is Pecksniff’s hypocrisy or Quilp’s malice in comparison, for they are coarse and repetitive whereas Skimpole has inexhaustible resources of sophistry? He is the link between Disraeli’s dandies and the fin-de-siècle aesthetes, and I have often wondered whether Oscar Wilde plagiarized him.
Clough, one of the most intelligent contemporary critics of Victorianism, reviewing ‘Recent English Poetry’, which included Arnold’s first two volumes, complained that whereas such poetry might be claimed to have ‘great literary value’ it was merely academic so that poetry had ceased to matter as a force in the life of his time. Why, he asked, did people prefer Bleak House, as they plainly did, he said: ‘Is it, that to be widely popular, to gain the ear of multitudes, to shake the hearts of men, poetry should deal more than at present it usually does, with general wants, ordinary feelings, the obvious rather than the rare facts of human nature?’ The novelist, Clough argues, deals now with ‘the actual, palpable things with which our everday life is concerned’ and to emulate the novelist poetry ‘must be in all points tempted as we are; exclude nothing, least of all guilt and distress, from its wide fraternization’. ‘The modern novel’, he says, giving as examples Bleak House and Vanity Fair, ‘is preferred to the modern poem, because we do here feel an attempt to include these phenomena which, if we forget on Sunday, we must remember on Monday … The novelist does try to build us a real house to live in; and this common builder, with no notion of orders, is more to our purpose than the student of ancient art who proposes to lodge us under an Ionic portico.’ ‘The true and lawful haunts of the poetic powers’, he says, are ‘no more upon Pindus or Parnassus’ but ‘in the blank and desolate streets, and upon the solitary bridges of the midnight city, where Guilt is, and wild Temptation, and the dire compulsion of what has once been done … there walks the discrowned Apollo, with unstrung lyre.’
That it is Bleak House and Dickens that Clough has in mind is clear from the last sentence. Clough shows himself, like Dickens, refusing to be a Skimpole in his refusal to accept the role of Romantic poet in the new conditions of man’s life in his age and in insisting that the poet, as the novelist has chosen to do, must live in the everyday world and not only ‘include these phenomena’ but see his function as bringing order into it and meaning. And it is very much to Clough’s credit, ‘himself a poet’ and the friend of Mathew Arnold, that he was able to see that the true and best Victorian poetry was written by the novelist, that is, that the novel had in his time superseded the poem as the vehicle of art-speech. In this review Clough was also strongly rebutting Arnold’s Classical-don’s prescription for modern poetry, as described in Arnold’s preface to his Poems of 1853; Arnold himself never realized that the predominance of the novelist was now a fact, and smugly assigned Little Dorrit (and by implication all of Dickens) to the Temple of Philistia.
It has been my object to show that Bleak House disproves both Lewes’s complaint, that ‘Dickens’s sensations never pass into ideas’ and a modern reaction against those Dickens appreciators who have confined themselves to pointing out that Dickens worked through ideas and symbols, a reaction seen in Mr Garis’s charge that Dickens’s ideas are executed in clumsy melodrama or are crudely theatrical performances either mainly or fatally. While the mature Dickens, from Dombey onwards that is, investigates and constates the life of his time through an intelligent apprehension of its social, moral and psychological nature, it is strictly as a novelist, not a philosopher, not a didactic moralist; nor as a mere performer (entertainer even) – to be which implies some degree of deception. Nor, though Dickens’s best novels are schematic, a novelist of the kind academics like to discuss diagrammatically; the systematic world of Thomas Mann’s novels, for instance, is peopled by characters who have minimal characterization of expression, gesture, mode of feeling and apprehension, who talk and argue but hardly ever act, boring shadows – compared to these Dickens’s characters enjoy a rich life of idiom and emotion though still, as in Mann’s novels, each plays a part in a complex whole and stands in relation to a total theme. Moreover each mature Dickens novel is a unique whole and it is an error to suppose – as is sometimes alleged – that any character from one of those could have appeared in a different novel from the one in which it functions – for one thing, the stylization differs, and each novel has its own timbre. No one well read in the non-fictional as well as the fictional literature of the early and mid-nineteenth century can question the truth of Dickens’s understanding of the nature of the age he lived in, particularly in its tendency to produce children and adults of an exceptional kind and in the extraordinary psychological traits, due to its special pressures, they present. Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor (published in 1851 with a final volume in 1862) confirms many of Dickens’s insights,22 but a more interesting kind of confirmation is to be found in the biographies of the later nineteenth century, the lives of the children of those formed by the earlier Dickens phase; these confirm the remarkable insight into the deeper truths of life that Dickens, like Lawrence, saw as the material of the novelist.
Through the various children such as Esther Summerson Dickens was working towards Arthur Clennam who really includes the earlier ones (he would even have married a Dora if both their parents had not intervened – and his realization that if he had been able to fulfil his youthful romantic dream he would have made a great mistake which the apparent cruelty of the parents had prevented, shows that Dickens no longer sees parents as simply the cause of their children’s frustrations). Arthur’s childhood is shown only retrospectively since it is on the adult thus produced, and his problems as an adult, that the mature novelist focuses now – we have seen that this was true of Esther too. Arthur had been ham-strung by his parents’ marital hostility, by the pressures of his (step-) mother’s Calvinism and by her not unrelated self-righteousness in forcing him against his inclinations into the family business of money-dealing – when he, now a man of forty, nerves himself after his father’s death to tell her he wishes to leave the firm she solemnly curses him. Having been treated always as a child naturally prone to evil who must be kept in the right path, he has no will-power, no capacity for happiness, and no belief in himself. That this combination and his circumstances were widely representative of the deep-seated ills of Dickens’s culture is of course why Arthur Clennam was chosen as the hero of the novel. There are Little Dorrits in Mayhew and such, their actuality is easily proved, but for Arthur Clennams we have better sources than social historians.
For instance, Matthew Smith the well-known painter showed a comparable case-history (one among many such). He was born in industrial Yorkshire in 1879 – I take the facts from the Biographical Note supplied by his friends to the volume of reproductions, published by Allen & Unwin. ‘His childhood and boyhood’, it tells us, were dominated by the personality of his father, who was a man of great force of character and hard-headed business vision. A strict Nonconformist, who went to chapel twice every Sunday and also taught in Sunday School, Frederic Smith was a cultured example of the successful industrialist of his day, but ‘he had no sympathy with Matthew’s growing awareness of his vocation as a painter. Frederic Smith ruled his family, as he ruled his business, absolutely … Matthew was haunted as a boy and as a youth by the fear of his father’s displeasure.’ Taken from school and put into the family works in Manchester, Matthew was ‘a complete failure’ and his health suffered seriously, yet his father would not consider letting him become an artist because the proper way of life was to be a business man and the arts, besides being a leisure activity rightly, were in the case of painting dubiously moral since the nudity of models was involved. The father’s significance is that he was widely representative, and so was the psychological strain on his family. Matthew was twenty-one before he could make his wishes known effectively: ‘Such was his frustration and despair that at last he nerved himself to stand up to his father, choosing the solemn occasion of Sunday tea. The family sat silent, heads bowed, while Matthew and his father fought it out.’ In the end, Matthew won (by threatening to leave home) and was allowed to attend the Manchester School of Art, ‘but applied design, not painting, was to be his main subject, and his father gave instructions that his son was on no account to be allowed near any class-room where women were posing in a state of undress.’ The combination Dickens had diagnosed, and represents in Mrs Clennam as typical, are all represented here (except for her sexual jealousy as a wronged wife – her marriage was never consummated since Arthur’s mother, a professional singer, had been her husband’s choice until his uncle forced him into a loveless marriage). Frederic Smith exhibits the self-righteousness, the inflexible prejudices of Nonconformity, the Puritan acquisitiveness and materialism, fear of pleasure and of the sensuous (Mrs Clennam’s ‘those accursed snares of Satan, the arts’), the belief in the absolute right of the parent to decide the lives of the children, even when adult, the painful effects of the domineering over the whole family, and the control of economic power to secure this23 – though Matthew was allowed for the next four years to attend art school and afterwards one in London even, ‘he had little or no pocket-money and was kept strictly under his father’s control’.
The inevitable consequences were to turn him into an Arthur Clennam, as Dickens had foreseen: his health troubles developed into breakdowns, he had no self-confidence even when he at last got abroad to Brittany which enchanted him (his father, when the doctor sent him abroad for his health, stipulated he should not go to wicked Paris; this was in his thirtieth year). It is surprising that he was able to marry at thirty-three, two years before his father’s death which at last gave him financial freedom though never freedom from the despair, and ‘nervous and emotional strains’, from which he continued to suffer even when, at forty-four, he found the voluptuous model who enabled him to produce his characteristic nudes and vivid sensual paintings of flowers and fruit, paintings flooded with rich colour and painted with the vigour of a young man. Though he was now free as an artist he never overcame the sense of isolation and self-distrust caused by his family history, and he could never settle into family life.
The difficulty of being an artist of any kind in such a culture is manifest, and perhaps Dickens’s increasing appreciation of his father owed a good deal to the son’s realization that he had been spared the respectable middle-class upbringing and conventional schooling of the time which were, as he shows in many of his novels he believed them to be, the enemy of the creative spirit. The tension in the family of Matthew Smith I’ve cited is feelingly presented by Dickens in the remembered childhood of chapter III of Little Dorrit, called ‘Home’ to make the point clear, and in Mrs Clennam’s account in her apologia at the end of the novel of her own life and her reasons for her persecution of the Dorrits (she had caused their rotting away in a long imprisonment for debt by withholding a legacy due to Frederick Dorrit, a patron of the arts – if the fact is not very plausible the motivation is and essential to Dickens’s case, and we can now see that it was symbolically right). Yet Dickens was himself spared these psychological conditions of Victorian family life, and to create them so successfully, having diagnosed and comprehended their causes, represents a very considerable feat. One understands why Dickens filled his own children’s lives with acting, jokes, dancing, singing, parties, travel, seaside spells, and all kinds of happy nonsense (Edmund Wilson of course finds a sinister explanation for such things), and why he liked to describe scenes of joviality as well as to show the horrors of such family life as that of the Clennams, the Wilfers, the Snagsbys, the Gradgrinds and the Murdstone, among others such as Esther’s childhood home.
Victorian novelists of the unoriginating kind go on using the doctor as physician in his traditional aspect of either wise family friend or humorously as a self-important old humbug, but in either case his chief asset is the bedside manner – as it inevitably was, of course, before medical science had been developed on modern lines. Encouraging the patient and his family to pin their faith on him and Nature’s healing power was probably most of what the doctor could do without harm, outside elementary surgery. Just as a science of nursing and hospital management resulted from the Crimean War so the necessity for sanitary reforms and public health services resulted in England from the epidemics produced by crowded cities and the new industrial slums, and from the advent of cholera. The doctor had thus to be thought of as filling quite a new role, a modern figure concerned not for private practice among the well-to-do but for public health and the scientific advancement of medicine, a figure as disinterested as the cleric and visibly more important in the new social conditions. Thus he became an evident symbol and available as such to the novelist as a central character instead of a stock background-filler.24
Dickens in Bleak House (1852) is early in the field in using the doctor in this way. I have pointed out Allan Woodcourt’s part in the novel’s theme, Dickens’s use of the surgeon who cites naval officer and academic scientist to state his professional theory, and that the aesthete is there represented as a renegade doctor – all interesting ideas for that date, and particularly in that the grounds for optimism of the novel consist in the marriage of the doctor, now become a public health official, to Esther Summerson25 – love and charity wedded to disinterested service and scientific knowledge. But it is Kingsley, generally in the lead as to ideas, however wildly and patchily he developed them in his novels, who in Two Years Ago (1857) produced the doctor as hero and as the genuinely modern figure required for the role – ‘two years ago’ being when the cholera epidemic hit England. Tom Thurnall, son of a doctor and with a vocation for medical practice as well as a generally scientific bent, has also a strong social conscience, though tough-minded and a rolling stone. Wrecked on the Cornish coast, he stays on in the fishing village mainly in order to see it through the cholera which he knows is on the way. He fights disease in the same spirit as earlier heroes fought sin and the pursuit of science is his religion, he being a sceptic as regards Christianity. Rather surprisingly he cuts a better figure than the good young High Church curate who is simply ineffective in spite of his idealism and good-will, having antagonized the fishermen as a gentleman and, they believe, a crypto-Papist, while the widely-experienced doctor is shown tactfully managing them, and the reactionary, the vicious and the foolish, fighting vested interests, winning respect all round and completely indifferent to class considerations, as well as physically courageous. Kingsley has put much more into him than Dickens has into Allan Woodcourt, and the great speech Tom is given to explain to the curate his obsessive sense of vocation is really convincing:
‘I do it because I like it. It’s a sort of sporting with your true doctor. He blazes away at a disease where he sees one, as he would at a bear or a lion; the very sight of it excites his organ of destructiveness. Don’t you understand me? You hate sin, you know. Well, I hate disease. Moral evil is your devil, and physical evil is mine. I hate it, little or big; I hate to see a fellow sick; I hate to see a child rickety and pale; I hate to see a speck of dirt in the street; I hate to see a woman’s gown torn; I hate to see her stockings down at heel; I hate to see anything wasted, anything awry, anything going wrong; I hate to see water-power wasted, manure wasted, land wasted, muscle wasted, pluck wasted, brains wasted; I hate neglect, incapacity, idleness, ignorance, and all the disease and misery which spring out of that. There’s my devil; and I can’t help, for the life of me, going right at his throat, wheresoever I meet him!’
Kingsley’s novel, like its predecessor Bleak House, is deliberately schematic and the doctor is in the centre of a system of representative characters – an aristocratic landlord and an objectionable squire; the curate for whom the villagers have no use till the cholera epidemic shows his moral stamina and he finds his function; a Romantic poet who ‘had been apprenticed to Tom’s father but had run away from medicine to literature’, and comes to a bad end generally as, like Skimpole, an aesthete, one who ‘had also (and prided himself too, on having) all Goethe’s dislike of anything terrible or horrible, of sickness, disease, wounds, death, anything which jarred with that “beautiful” which was his idol’; and a contrasting character who is the true artist. A painter who, seeing that the invention of photography is a science that must have sooner or later an impact on art, he has given up painting when the novel starts in order to experiment with the camera for a spell to find out what it can do as well as or better than the painter and what it can’t do, so that he can rethink the question of the function of the artist in a new scientific age – whereas the Romantic poet had rejected Tom’s suggestion that the poets ought to ‘take to the microscope’ and write poems about the new realities thus made manifest. The heroine is a Methodistical Cornish girl called Grace who thus symbolically provides Tom with the faith he has rejected hitherto since he ultimately marries her, as his only salvation, after a long resistance, for she is a village girl, though beautiful, saintly and gifted – this shows a characteristic collapse into hysterical emotionalism that seems the only way Kingsley could bring a novel to an end.
We can see that George Eliot, in supplying Dr Lydgate with a central role in Middlemarch in 1872, was therefore not particularly original, except in putting him back into an earlier age of unscientific medicine in the English provincial scene (as we see from Trollope whose Barsetshire doctors are of the thoroughly old-fashioned type, even his hero Dr Thorne of the novel of that name of a year later than Two Years Ago). But Mrs Oliphant, like George Eliot a thoroughly up-to-date intellectual, had published in 1865 her best novel, Miss Marjoribanks, where a leading figure, the heroine’s father, is a Scotch doctor who is hard, sardonic of tongue and outlook, and takes a wholly scientific view of people; his life is centred on the scientific advancement of medicine and he is shown as having considerable contempt for the drawing-room where his daughter reigns, slipping away to his study to write up his cases for The Lancet. Like Lydgate too he is very conscious of being of good family. I have argued in my introduction to the Zodiac edition of Miss Marjoribanks (Chatto & Windus, 1969) that George Eliot probably took from this novel the tone of her original attitude to her heroine in Middlemarch and that the presence of Dr Lydgate there owes much to the scientific-oriented doctor who dominates Carlingford in the earlier novel. Possibly also to the whole tradition going back to Bleak House, which had provided the form of a social microcosm which George Eliot uses in Middlemarch, except that she replaces London by a provincial town in the Midlands and that instead of Chesney Wold we have two contrasted estates and landlords, one the good old Tory landlord (Sir James Chettam who is her Sir Leicester Dedlock, and even shows himself willing to fight a duel) and the other as a source of humour, a bad landlord, Mr Brooke, who has Radical views though not to the extent of doing his duty by his tenants. The idea of putting a modern scientific medical man into such an unpromising context had already been suggested by Kingsley, as I’ve shown. Lydgate, who in Bleak House or Two Years Ago would have been allowed to marry the symbolically fitting character Dorothea Brooke, and so fulfilled and provided with a field of action suited to his qualities and talents, touches her life only ideally, so to speak, and comes to grief partly through defeat by the reactionary elements in the town but mainly through marrying the wrong woman who deflects him from public service to private practice among the rich to satisfy her social ambitions; he dies in the bitterness of self-contempt, and his widow then marries a physician of the old school who can provide her with a carriage. It is thus George Eliot the ‘meliorist’, as she considered herself (neither an optimist nor a pessimist) who follows the comparatively hopeful uses of the new doctor-figure by a thoroughly defeatist one.
Another reason for the usefulness of the doctor as a symbol for Victorian novelists was that he was necessarily outside class,26 privileged to tell the truth to the upper classes and handle them impartially, frequently having to be let into secrets not even revealed to the family lawyer. Dickens in Little Dorrit makes a very marked distinction between Physician, who is straightforward, self-respecting and immune to the snobbery and Mammon-worship practised by all around him, and representatives of the other professions such as Bar and Bishop. Trollope’s Dr Thorne is habitually shown snubbing ladies of noble birth who try unsuccessfully to put him down, and maintaining a position of moral superiority to the aristocracy and the new rich alike; Dr Lydgate, Dr Marjoribanks and Dr Tom Thurnall are of the same pattern – all happily born gentlemen, but despising the drawing-room and its values and refusing to bow the neck to Mammon (except for Lydgate’s defeat by his wife eventually.) But ‘Physician’ in Little Dorrit, named generically like a character in a morality-play – which the scenes in the Merdles’ house would seem to suggest – is much loftier in conception than any of these actual physicians. ‘Where he was, something real was’: he causes everyone, even Mrs Merdle, to speak the truth to him, he is shown practising charity and, imperturbable, looking on the just and the unjust alike, ‘his equality of compassion no more disturbed than the Divine Master’s of all healing was’. In fact, he is the truly wise man as well as truly good. Thus for Dickens the physician in essence is virtually sanctified, but as we have seen, by the time Dickens was ending Little Dorrit, where Physician appears in the late chapters, (snubbing ‘Bishop’ incidentally), the character had been evolving in this direction. Henry James merely follows on the Dickens of Little Dorrit in this, as so often, when in The Wings of the Dove he makes his physician, Sir Luke Strett, all-knowing and apostolic.
Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor was published in three volumes in 1851 and followed by a fourth in 1862. While confirmation for Dickens’s material accounts of the nature and sufferings of the lives of poor and submerged classes of Londoners, and country boys and girls attracted to London, are provided by Mayhew, the main interest for readers of Dickens’s novels is that he incidentally furnishes collateral evidence about the effects on children of having to support themselves and younger brother and sisters, which bear out what in Dickens’s novels might be disbelieved otherwise. Dickens, in his constant patrolling of the streets of London – his ‘magic lantern’ – for exercise and inspiration, and in his considerable charities, had plenty of opportunities of making his own observations, but Mayhew, being factual, escapes the possible charge of romanticizing or sentimentalizing his evidence, though evidently he must in the cases of his underworld characters have frequently bowdlerized what he was told for publication.
As to the truth to life of Charley and her family in Bleak House, Amy Dorrit in Little Dorrit and Jenny Wren in Our Mutual Friend, Mayhew in some of his characters, such as the Orphan Flower Girl and the Water Cress Girl, gives confirmation of the unchildlike nature, the respectability maintained under the most unlikely circumstances, the fortitude, and the touching depth of affection and unselfishness of such children, as well as their (and many old people too) having Betty Higden’s pride in not taking charity and in escaping the workhouse (or ‘Union’).
He tells of ‘The little watercress girl, who, although only eight years of age, had entirely lost all childish ways, and was, indeed, in thoughts and manner, a woman. There was something cruelly pathetic in hearing this infant, so young that her features had scarcely formed themselves, talking of the bitterest struggles of her life, with the calm earnestness of one who had endured them all. I did not know how to talk with her … Her little face, pale and thin with privation, was wrinkled where the dimples ought to have been, and she would sigh frequently.’ She had already been a twelvemonth in the streets selling cresses and before that had taken care of a young baby with real pleasure. When she got home she scrubbed the floor ‘“and put the room to rights … All my money I earns I puts in a club and draws out to buy clothes with. It’s better than spending it in sweet-stuff, for them as has a living to earn. Besides it’s like a child to care for sugar-sticks, and not like one who’s got a living and vittals to earn. I ain’t a child but I’m past eight, I am.”’ etc.
The orphan flower-girl supported her younger sister and brother with what help they could give, sharing one room with a married couple, the woman (their landlady) giving the children friendly services like Mrs Blinder. The eldest, now fifteen, told Mayhew: ‘“Mother died seven years ago last Guy Faux day. I’ve got myself, and my brother and sister, a bit o’ bread ever since, and never had any help but from the neighbours. I never troubled the parish. … We can all read. I put myself and I put my brother and sister to a Roman Catholic school – and to Ragged schools. My brother can write, and I pray to God that he’ll do well with it,”’ etc.
Hence we can trust Dickens in his presentation of such characteristics – to us of the Welfare State Society unbelievable – as he attributes to his Dolls’ Dressmaker and to young sister-mothers like Lizzie Hexam, Little Dorrit and Charley, while we may note that their impressive qualities, as well as their sufferings and sacrifices and stunted physique, were brought into being and operation by that social system which Dickens criticizes so radically. Self-help, one of its by-products, is after all the best kind of help. (Dickens’s findings on what the Welfare State ethos has done in altering the character, mentality and outlook of the English working-class – that is, on the Trade Union state of mind thus engendered – would also have been worth having.) From his observation of the London streets alone Dickens must clearly have been struck by the difference between the premature gravity, the precocity and the excessive responsibilities of the children of the poor, in contrast to what he saw to be the arrested development, particularly of the girls, of the petted children of the well-off, so much so as to make this a recurrent and ultimately a leading idea in his novels.
Mayhew also frees Dickens from charges of sentimentalizing the poor, for he documents Dickens’s belief that it was the poor who showed sympathy and charity for the destitute, that aged husbands and wives in extreme poverty and illness could show themselves, in Mayhew’s own words, ‘heroic’ in their devoted attachment and loyalty to each other, and he illustrates the touching affection of the shockingly poor in their human relations, as well as the liveliness of language in idiom and capabilities of self-expression in the illiterate and ignorant of all ages then. His interviews with what he called ‘the humbler classes’ in their homes and in the streets of London furnish evidence of the actuality of Artful Dodgers and Noah Claypoles, Fagins, Orlicks and Magwitches, Martha Endells, Betty Higdens, Lizzie Hexams and Little Dorrits. We have his evidence of the truth of Dickens’s observation of the clinging to respectability, or the still more astonishing yearning for it, in those almost or quite at the bottom of the social and moral ladder, as a Victorian characteristic. What we might dismiss as the improbable fantasy-dreams related by Jenny Wren are realized in the case of the Crippled Street Bird-Seller (‘I’ve never seemed to myself to be a cripple in my dreams. Well, I can’t explain how, but I feel as if my limbs was all free like – so beautiful’ etc.)
Dickens of course was quite capable of doing his own Mayhewing, and from his letters, and articles in periodicals, as well as his early (pre-Mayhew) novels, can be seen to have done so.
1. Dickens wrote to Wills in 1858: ‘I particularly wish you to look well to Wilkie’s article … and not to leave anything in it that may be sweeping and unnecessarily offensive to the middle class. He always has a tendency to overdo that.’ Note the ‘unnecessarily’ and the ‘overdo’ which show the presence of integrity with the desire not to alienate, in Dickens’s attitude to the question I have been discussing. Wilkie Collins was aggressively Bohemian in his habits and enjoyed sniping at the virtuous, which Dickens had more sense than to encourage.
2. Dickens is not the only novelist whose prefaces are liable to mislead. Henry James often seems, by the time he came to write a Preface, to have forgotten why he wrote the novel (this is particularly evident in the preface to The Awkward Age). Dickens did in fact disapprove of prefaces on principle: ‘a book should speak for and explain itself’, he wrote.
3. The association of legal processes with fog is already present in Pickwick Papers where the rascally lawyers are called ‘Dodson and Fogg’ and are denounced eventually by their victim Mr Pickwick as ‘mean, rascally, pettifogging robbers’. ‘It is all summed up in that’, he repeats.
4. Though Past and Present was not published till 1843, the gist of the ‘Present’ section appeared in 1840, as ‘Chartism’.
5. Miss Flite’s reiterated ‘youth, hope and beauty’ is echoed by Mr George in describing his abiding devotion to his officer Captain Hawdon, who, he says, ‘had been young, hopeful and handsome in the days gone by’ and ‘went to ruin’ like Miss Flite and Richard; and, it is implied, this is the fate of mankind in general ‘in Chancery’. In the novel’s present Captain Hawdon is the wretched, degraded, Nemo, the law-writer, who kills himself with opium and is thrust into a pauper’s mass grave, having become nobody. The elegiac note that characterizes Bleak House is sounded at the announcement of Richard and Ada’s engagement: ‘So young, so beautiful, so full of hope and promise, they went lightly on through the sunlight, as their own happy thoughts might then be traversing the years to come, and making them all years of brightness. So they passed away into the shadow, and were gone.’
6. Dickens constantly uses the symbol of the caged bird, and in such a Blakean context that one would be inclined to believe that he must have been acquainted with Blake’s lyrics. Particularly ‘The Schoolboy’ in Songs of Experience, which is so close to the Blimber section of Dombey and Son – which has a Blake-like lyric in prose as a separate ending to the novel, summarizing the theme: the new generation of Dombey children are wandering ‘free and stirring’ on the beach. Blake’s enquiry: ‘How can the bird that is born for joy sit in the cage and sing?’ is repeated in the history of little Paul who is described pining in his room at Dr Blimber’s as ‘breasting the window of his solitary cage when birds flew by, as if he would have emulated them, and soared away’ – probably the first form in which the idea of Miss Flite’s birds was conceived by Dickens. However, I notice one even earlier, when the wretched boys, released by Squeers’s imprisonment, escape from Dotheboys Hall, some young children who have no homes to go to are in even worse plight at being loose, ‘frightened by the solitude’ (cage birds indeed!) of whom ‘One had a dead bird in a little cage; he had wandered nearly twenty miles, and when his poor favourite died, lost courage, and lay down beside him.’ More explicitly, when the grown-up David Copperfield passes Salem House, his old school: ‘I would have given all I had, for lawful permission to get down and thrash him (the headmaster), and let all the boys out like so many caged sparrows.’ Esther, after the break-up of the only home she has known, goes off to school in a stage-coach with her bird-cage at her feet, having buried her doll as a sign that her childhood is ended. Arthur Clennam’s mother was ‘The singing-bird kept in a cage.’
7. Dickens has dispensed with the diabolical; all evil in Bleak House is in certain human instincts that his form of society sanctions and institutionalizes. The Devil is an unnecessary concept. Krook remarks to Mr Tulkinghorn of Nemo: ‘They say he has sold himself to the enemy; but you and I know better – he don’t buy.’
8. Those who would write off Mr Chadband as a slanderous fiction and his idiom as too grossly nonsensical even for a caricature, must remember that Leonard Woolf, disgusted with the verbiage of Middleton Murry’s spiritual utterances in The Adelphi, once mixed sentences or phrases of Chadband’s with passages from Murry’s unctuous prose and defied the reader (successfully) to distinguish the two. Moreover, research has shown that Chadband’s is only a slight caricature of the customary idiom of purveyors of improving and spiritual ideas at that date.
9. Dickens’s Will as printed by Forster in an appendix to the Life ends:
‘I rest my claims to the remembrance of my country upon my published works, and to my friends upon their experience of me in addition thereto. I commit my soul to the mercy of God through our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, and I exhort my dear children humbly to try to guide themselves by the teaching of the New Testament in its broad spirit, and to put no faith in any man’s narrow construction of its letter here or there.’
Dickens himself was considered as a valuable unifying Christian influence through his novels, by many of his contemporaries, since he operated a highest common factor of Christian attitudes and implied values without activating the aggressive forces that resided in the different practices of worship.
10. If we remember the comparable dialogue in The Old Curiosity Shop between the magistrate and the two mothers, one of them of a deaf-and-dumb boy, which is conducted in rhetorical stage terms and is merely an unconnected episode dropped into the novel arbitrarily and inserted as something overheard by accident, but not comprehended by, Little Nell, and then forgotten, we can see both how much more of an artist Dickens now is and also how he trusts the reader – or how far he can now afford to ignore the limitations as readers of much of his public. Dickens in 1860 wrote to Wilkie Collins: ‘You know that I always contest your disposition to give an audience credit for nothing, which necessarily involves the forcing of points on their attention’.
11. For the Victorian novelists’ use of the idea of the doctor and medical science v. Appendix A.
12. Dickens approves as a class of soldiers, sailors, and doctors, who are all protectors, whereas he sees lawyers, most schoolmasters and officers of the then local government (especially beadles) and of Victorian religion (especially self-appointed chapel ministers) as preying on society or the psyche. In Bleak House we note Esther, the sensitive and enquiring consciousness, speculating that Richard’s having been eight years at Winchester and spending them largely in making Latin verses as an end in itself and learning nothing much besides, may be responsible for his unsatisfactoriness – because ‘having never had much chance of finding out what he was fit for’ – ‘I wondered whether Latin verses often ended in this.’ Dickens however took pains to follow Dr Blimber’s cramming academy by the favourable picture of a Dr Strong’s and in Our Mutual Friend pays tribute to the function of the parish clergyman and his wife. Dickens has a well-thought-out selective criticism of his society and does not use his remarkable powers of ridicule and satire irresponsibly – perhaps the true sign of great art. It would in any other age than ours be unnecessary to point this out, but in the world of Kingsley Amis – he is a portent, since reviewers in serious quarters and academic critics are visibly unwilling or afraid to make adverse judgements on his productions – this is not axiomatic. It is worth pointing out here, as throwing into relief Dickens’s achievement, that all that now constitutes what Coleridge described as the clerisy, our only bastions against barbarism, are the consistent and systematic objects of Amis’s animus: in turn his fictions have taken as targets for denigration the university lecturer, the librarian, the man of letters, the serious novelist, the grammar-schoolmaster, the learned societies, the social worker; I used to remark that he would in time get to the parson, and I gather from the reviews that his last novel does. Dickens, besides making the careful discriminations that I’ve noted, also took care to dissociate himself from two kinds of writers – the amateur and aesthete (Skimpole) and the man occupying Amis’s position – Henry Gowan.
13. Disraeli in Coningsby (1844) provided Dickens, I feel sure, with the situation represented by Sir Leicester and the ironmaster with his private bank, in his similar antagonists the superb elderly Marquess of Monmouth and the wealthy Lancashire manufacturer Mr Millbank. Though they have no personal confrontation Millbank wins an election for his candidate against the Marquess’s similarly, by his energy and speeches, also sets up his family in an estate neighbouring the Marquess’s. Millbank has similar ambitions to Rouncewell’s for his children: his ‘opinions were of a very democratic bent’ so he ‘sent his son to Eton, though he disapproved of the system of education pursued there, to show that he had as much right to do so as any duke in the land. He had, however, brought up his only boy with a due prejudice against every sentiment or institution of an aristocratic character.’ Disraeli presents Millbank with the same mixture of respect and a little amusement as Dickens does Rouncewell, but his attitude to Monmouth is much more one of firm rejection than Dickens’s to Sir Leicester Dedlock, for Disraeli while appreciating the grand style and the high development of individuality that the old aristocracy achieved, understood that its basis was amoral and heartlessly selfish, and this he exhibits with wit, subtlety and controlled disgust, in a quite Stendhalian way. Disraeli in this novel also as Dickens does, attacks ‘the idolatry of Respectability’, and there is a gentleman who feels the east wind when made morally uncomfortable, like John Jarndyce. Basic to Coningsby even more than to Bleak House is the idea of playing off the still-wealthy and proud landowner who has lost his political power with the passing of pocket-boroughs, against the new-rich manufacturer-banker, equally class-conscious and proud of a superiority of achievement which determines him to usurp the privileges of the effete aristocracy, their battle-ground being inevitably the elections for Parliament.
14. It is noticeable that Dickens makes up for this inconsistency by stressing the defects of the Dedlock caste – satirizing poor harmless Volumnia, the dandy cousins, the Coodle and Doodle factions, and by providing a comic caricature of the gentleman in his great days (George IV’s) in old Mr Turveydrop, the bogus representative of Deportment who throws a satiric light on the genuine Grand Style of Sir Leicester himself.
15. Dickens’s view of the nature and function of an aristocracy is here remarkably like Yeats’s, who saw the great house as the creation and home of proud, passionate, violent men who thereby nourished the arts and inspired artists to creativity.
16. This is very neat: Skimpole is tied into the thematic structure of the novel as a renegade doctor. Cf. Kingsley’s Romantic poetaster in Two Years Ago who deserted his medical apprenticeship for poetry and comes to a bad end, discussed in Appendix A.
17. If this is thought too much to believe of even a Skimpole, we may remember Wilde shows in The Picture of Dorian Gray that the aesthete does not, quite logically, shrink even from murder if his comfort demands it.
18. About ten years ago one of our most responsible newspapers printed an article enquiring about illegitimacy in these post-Victorian times when no one believes in Miss Barbary’s religious horror of it, and published an interesting correspondence that ensued from many wishing to give their own experience. This bore out surprisingly Dickens’s insights. One started: ‘I am illegitimate, and have been in social work for 20 years, so I have had ample opportunity to study the problem. I have noticed one point above all: whatever their background or experience, illegitimates seem to feel the need to apologize for their existence…’
19. That there is delicacy of feeling forms a considerable part of Dickens’s reasons for any optimism being possible in the face of the litigating nature of man, since sympathy and imagination are the counter-agents. In our Kingsley Amis type civilization ‘delicacy’ has become a term of contempt with the intellectual guardians of our culture – I note a school of Anglo-American reviewers, for instance, who sneer at ‘delicacy’ as ‘a prototype Scrutiny word of praise’.
20. e.g. in chapter XL, when Lady Dedlock awaits Mr Tulkinghorn’s arrival at Chesney Wold in an agony of apprehension and undecided how to deal with him. Volumnia, who pretends to be pining for him, says, ‘I had almost made up my mind that he was dead.’
Everybody starts. For a gun is fired close by.
‘Good gracious, what’s that?’ cried Volumnia, with her little withered scream.
‘A rat’, says my Lady. ‘And they have shot him.’
Enter Mr Tulkinghorn, followed by Mercuries with lamps and candles.’
Perhaps the use of Hamlet and its dramatic irony is too blatant here, but it shows how Dickens’s imagination was working. The intention is to forecast the murder of Tulkinghorn who will later be shot, and to put the reader on a false trail of suspecting Lady Dedlock as the murderess, for which the Hamlet references were unnecessary. But that it is a dramatic technique and one used in the play within the play in Hamlet has brought in the imitation of and reference to the close of that with the call for lights, and the identification of the inquisitive solicitor with the rat in the arras, who was Polonius and, as Lady Dedlock is evidently thinking, was killed for his curiosity and meddling, as she at least wishes Tulkinghorn may be.
21. ‘If in going over the parts you find the tendency to blank verse (I cannot help it, when I am very much in earnest) too strong, knock out a word’s brains here and there’ – Letters, Nov. 13th 1846.
22. V. Appendix B: ‘Mayhew and Dickens’.
23. Arnold Bennett, born and bred in the industrial Non-conformist Victorian society, constantly makes the situation described here the centre of his better novels and tales about his native Five Towns. In his most ambitious work, Clayhanger, the father, an uncultivated version of a Frederic Smith, is shown in impressive detail forcing his son, who wished to be an artist and architect, into the family works and economic dependence, thus turning him into an Arthur Clennam – frustrated, depressed and celibate till a marriage late in life.
24. He is still useful as such in similar conditions of political and social disorder in our own age, witness Camus’s heroic doctor, the protagonist in La Peste, and Pasternak’s doctor-poet in Dr Zhivago, who endures and is martyred in the course of the Russian revolution.
25. The suggestive surname is explained in the tribute paid Esther by Ada and Jarndyce: ‘They said that wherever Dame Durden went, there was sunshine and summer air.’
26. Dr Thorne, though a Tory in his beliefs, is odious to Lady Arabella, Trollope says, because of ‘his subversive professional democratic tendencies’.