The vogue for reimagining the nineteenth century, especially through its novels and novelists, depends on the continuing currency
of Dickens and his work, for without his celebrity, one suspects that a good percentage of the cultural capital that keeps
this ever-expanding enterprise afloat would rapidly depreciate. Sometimes Dickens seems to hover over the neo-Victorian like
an avuncular but reticent deity; at others, he is all too intrusive; transformed into a quasifictional character, he stalks
his virtual world and makes guest appearances in our own. Yet, as his contemporaries understood, ‘the Inimitable’ is one of
the hardest of all Victorian writers to replicate. The orchestration of the dissonant registers within Dickens’s fiction,
some more appealing to twenty-first-century tastes than others, acts, like the multiple fonts and the watermark in a banknote,
as a deterrent to full-scale literary imitation. And Dickens’s unassailable status today – the ubiquitous presence of his
work in multiple media – makes pastiche Dickens, as an end in itself, seem rather pointless when marketed alongside the readily
available real thing.
Even with these drawbacks the project has attracted very gifted novelists, for whom it has represented a formal challenge.
As a subgenre with considerable cultural ambitions, the neo-Victorian more generally came into its own in the 1970s with best-selling
novels such as John Fowles’s
The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969) feeding off and contributing to the development of the postmodern novel. In spite of the temptation to let pastiche
descend into parody, the neo-Victorian has been largely respectful of the nineteenth-century novel, which is, after all, its
raison d’être. True, the neo-Victorian most usually combines a critique of the less admirable Victorian values and practices – those attitudes,
institutions or social conditions commonly described as ‘Dickensian’ – but criticism is always underwritten by a complicated
nostalgia for the period and an unambiguous admiration for its writing. Sarah Waters’s
Fingersmith (2002), for example, borrows from both Dickens and Wilkie Collins in its
plot and its portrait of the London underclass, but its leading characters, including the mistress of the thieves’ den, Mrs
Sucksby, are all resourceful, complex female figures. Mrs Sucksby may remind us of the ironically named ‘Good Mrs Brown’ in
Dombey and Son (with a touch of Fagin), but she proves a much more sympathetic, if haunted, maternal figure than her evil Dickensian prototype.
One of
Fingersmith’s two heroines, Maud Lilly, is brought up by a vicious uncle who makes her copy out his collection of pornography – literature
evoking the underside of a world Dickens knew but could only hint at in his fiction. Combining elements from Dickens’s work
with such censored material underlines the way in which the neo-Dickensian rewrites the period and its literary forms. And
Maud Lilly not only survives, but in an ironic triumph over her uncle and men like him, uses her perverse training to become
a pornographer herself. The hint of lesbianism that serves to damn independent, angry women like Miss Wade in
Little Dorrit, is countered in
Fingersmith by the romantic reunion of the two female lovers, Maud Lilly and Susan Trinder. Waters’s light hand with pastiche, both in
dialogue and story, is her tribute to Dickens; at the same time her bold rewriting of nineteenth-century sexuality and gender
is a forceful response to his too schematic and overmoralised representation of women.
A more complicated example of the neo-Dickensian, Peter Ackroyd’s
Dickens (
1990) is often seen as crossing the border between biography and the novel, without quite becoming fully-fledged ‘biofiction’.
In a clever amalgam of the biographer’s meditative voice and Dickens’s own, Ackroyd seems at times to take on the discursive
identity of the man he is describing, and with it his authority. For Ackroyd, Dickens ‘had seen all the transitions of the
century. He had more than seen them; he had felt them, had experienced them, had declared them in his fictions.’
1 These repetitions expertly echo the lofty, meditative rhythms of Dickens’s authorial voice at its most rhetorical. Yet a
series of mini-chapters forming a kind of meta-commentary on Ackroyd’s project interrupts the chronological flow of
Dickens, and works to distinguish biographer from subject. The first of these asks, ‘But what if it were possible, after all, for
Charles Dickens to enter one of his own novels? To bow his head and cross the threshold, into the world he had created?’
2 Ackroyd imagines Dickens encountering ‘the simpleton Maggie’ and ‘Little Dorrit’ in their long night without shelter as they
walk towards the Marshalsea, where, he explains to them, his own father has been incarcerated like William Dorrit.
3 This scene serves both to dramatise Dickens’s imaginative dependence on his own childhood, the constant refrain of Ackroyd’s
Dickens, and to distinguish
memory transmuted into fiction from the ‘outer world’. The second of these vignettes parodies the unequal relationship between
admiring biographer and great writer. Ackroyd imagines himself as a nervous young acolyte, out of breath as he tries to question
and keep step with an impatient Dickens, also young but already grandiose, striding down Kingsland Road. These little fantasy
interludes admit the reader into a kind of a cartooned reverie – the biographer’s secret theatre of abjection. They also allow
Ackroyd to show off the range of his own authorial skills, reminding us that he is himself an accomplished historical novelist
in command of a number of voices and styles. The neo-Dickensian (and the neo-Victorian too) has a rivalrous element built
into it, and nowhere is this better revealed than in
Dickens.
Dickens’s life and work have become prime targets for interpretation and adaptation, but lately strong criticism of either
has been relatively rare. His career has become celebrated as an example of the self-regulating mechanisms of Victorian society:
as poor boy made good, both insider and outsider, victim and critic of Victorian social ills and class hierarchies, he is
generally thought to speak for Britain and its cultural values at their best. It is this somewhat too complacent association
of Dickens with the cultural and social values of the metropolitan centre of Britain that has inspired writers from the southern
periphery of its former empire to try their hand at neo-Dickensian fiction. Great Expectations, in which Australia figures less as a place than as an emblem of punishment, provides the occasion for two celebrated examples
of the neo-Dickensian, by antipodean writers. Australian-born Peter Carey’s Jack Maggs (1997) and New Zealander Lloyd Jones’s Mister Pip (2006) focus on different aspects of the tale: Jack Maggs, set in 1837, at the beginning of the Victorian period and at a key moment of Dickens’s career, invents an alternative history
for Dickens’s Magwitch. Maggs, the rough, tormented hero of Carey’s novel, is a man whose ‘story’ is stolen and rewritten
by an ambitious young author, Tobias Oates, a wickedly hostile portrait of the young Dickens. Jack Maggs attacks the sentimentalised version of Victorian England, a version for which Dickens, as the fictional Oates, is held partly
responsible, but which implicitly includes the airbrushed image of Dickens himself, as conveyed then and now in the popular
imagination.
By contrast, Magwitch is a minor figure in Lloyd Jones’s novel set in the early 1990s on the war-torn South Pacific island
of Bougainville. Its protagonist and narrator is a young island girl, Matilda, on the verge of adolescence. She and the other
village children are read a version of
Great Expectations by the elderly and eccentric Mr Watts, a white Dickens fan
who lives with his mad wife Grace in the remote village she had left years before for a mainland education. Pip’s star-crossed
story and his moral education fascinate the village children, and are a relief from their daily anxieties, but their too literal
identification with this fictional figure puts the whole village at risk.
Great Expectations functions in
Mister Pip as a kind of parable and cautionary tale for the traumatic transformations and inevitable losses of traditional societies
– here the cultures of the non-white poor – in a violent, globalised world. In Jones, as in Carey, Dickens plays a key role
in the diffusion of culture and history from the European centre to the colonial and post-colonial world. In both novels,
if in very different ways, he poses both a threat to as well as an opportunity for the emergent voices of subaltern subjects
– the exiled English underclass of his own time, the victims of neo-imperialist greed in ours. The creative and critical uses
of the neo-Dickensian in these two novels exemplifies the literary possibilities of the genre.
Carey, like Waters after him, has a felicitous way with pastiche. The opening pages set the scene in 1837, as Maggs returns
to London: the ‘unearthly flare and glare’ of the gaslight, installed during his sojourn in Australia; ‘sausages illuminated,
fish and ice gleaming, chemists shops aglow like caves’.
4 Maggs, like Magwitch, has come to find the young gentleman whose social mobility he has funded – his ‘son’, as he fondly
thinks of him. But the elusive Mr Phipps is an entirely undeserving foster-child – his posh education has made him an idle,
shallow and corrupt fellow who has callously conned his too trusting benefactor with dutifully filial letters, and has fled
his house in order to avoid meeting him. Maggs, orphaned and raised as a thief by the abortionist Mary Britten, finds England
an even harsher place than in his Georgian childhood, a society riddled with class antagonisms and pretensions. The scandalous
freedom of fiction allows Carey to speculate on some of most murky and compromised aspects of Dickens’s life – for example,
his deep affection for his wife’s young sister, Mary Hogarth, who died suddenly in his house in 1837. In Carey’s story, Oates
has been having a full-blown affair with his wife’s sister, renamed ‘Lizzie’, who becomes pregnant with his child and dies
as a result of abortificants administered by Oates and his wife. Carey’s portrait of Oates highlights the young Dickens’s
social and financial insecurities – a great writer in embryo, but a manipulative, weak and desperate young man. Yet for all
its cynicism,
Jack Maggs’s depiction of Oates is not exclusively an attack on the idealisation of Dickens as a great author, but one instance of Carey’s
argument across his fiction that novelists, however great, are never ‘nice’. By nature and profession they are
voyeurs and exploiters of their subjects – the real thieves, not of material goods, but of other people’s lives. Oates’s celebrated
sketches, Maggs tells him bitterly, ‘steal’ the voices of the poor, turning urban street figures into saleable print for the
amusement of readers. Carey’s sympathy is reserved for the unvirtuous poor of his own invention, for his rough hero, for Sofrina,
Maggs’s childhood sweetheart, hanged for theft, and for the servant girl Mercy (named after a servant in Dickens’s parents’
household) who befriends and eventually marries the convict.
Jack Maggs is a tour de force that revels in the paradox of neo-Victorian critique: its inevitable dependence on and celebration of
its source. Carey’s use of Dickens’s interest in mesmerism, to which he was introduced through John Elliotson in January 1838,
is a case in point. Maggs suffers from an exquisitely painful tic-douloureux, which Oates attempts to treat by putting him
in a mesmeric trance, giving the author illicit access to Maggs’s criminal history, which he will use in his fiction. (Dickens
was afflicted with a similar facial neuralgia when he was writing
Great Expectations.) The elusive, terrifying ‘phantom’ in human form that torments Maggs when in his hypnotic state is a detail drawn from Dickens’s
own mesmeric experiments in the 1840s, experiments that suggest his need for control and power.
5 The ‘phantom’ – who needs to be banished if Maggs is to be cured – is identified towards the end of the novel with the ungrateful
Henry Phipps. He becomes the retributive psychic embodiment of Maggs’s misplaced benevolence towards the once kind child he
had ruined rather than rescued. Cleverly borrowing and reshaping Dickens’s types and his social lens,
Jack Maggs offers a bleak vision of Britain unredeemed by sentimental caricature or moralised repentance and punishment. Yet in an admiring
nod to the affective structure of the Victorian novel, and in line with
Jack Maggs’s own reparatory intent – to rescue Magwitch from the symbolic fictional deaths to which Oates and Dickens would consign
him – Carey supplies a defiantly happy ending, Victorian style, for Maggs and Mercy. Together they escape back to Australia,
which they help to build and learn to love, becoming not only wealthy but wholly respectable and respected citizens. Ever
even-handed, Carey allows the novel’s various villains to live and thrive also. Oates goes on to become a distinguished author,
who in his late work offers his fictional
Jack Maggs to a rapturous public.
In
Mister Pip, Lloyd Jones tries out a different strategy of ‘writing back’ to the heart of Empire, one which highlights the pleasures
and dangers of reading Dickens today. Avoiding period pastiche, Jones sets his novel in the midst of a very real if ‘forgotten’
modern war, exemplary of the bitter,
complex legacies of colonialism. Bougainville, a mineral-rich island off the coast of Papua New Guinea, was under Australian
administration after the First World War, but became an unwilling part of the new state after Papua New Guinea gained independence
in 1975. An indigenous independence movement arose and fought the Australian-backed PNG forces, resulting in the deaths of
many islanders. When
Mr Pip opens, Bougainville was enduring the early years of an eight-year blockade of the island while the civil war continued. Fourteen-year-old
Matilda lives in a remote village with her devoutly Christian mother, her father having left them a few years before for a
job on the mainland. Matilda’s mother and Watts are at war for Matilda’s soul. The mother, who lives her life according to
her ‘pigeon’ Bible, sees
Great Expectations as potentially blasphemous and Matilda’s imaginative attachment to it another victory for a white culture that has robbed
her of her husband. Their ideological clash is overtaken when the villagers are caught in the crossfire of the war. ‘Mister
Pip’ has become such a concrete presence in the children’s minds that reference to him inadvertently leads the ignorant government
soldiers to believe that he is an insurgent being hidden by the villagers. In an horrific climax, Matilda’s mother makes common
cause with Watts, who has, ironically, taken on the identity of ‘Mr Pip’ in an attempt to protect the village. Watts and Matilda’s
mother are hacked to death with machetes and thrown to the pigs. Matilda escapes by sea to join her father in Australia, go
to university and eventually to England to do postgraduate research on Dickens’s orphans, a project she eventually abandons
to write her own story – the novel we have just read. Earlier, in her Australian secondary school, she has discovered the
‘unpleasant truth’ that Watts had bowdlerised
Great Expectations for his young audience, leaving out characters and simplifying the language. In search of Watts’s own back story, Matilda
visits his home town, Wellington, New Zealand, where, she finds a long-discarded white wife, who, like Watts, had worked as
a clerk for the Standards Association – a nice Dickensian touch. Like Dickens, Watts turns out to have had a passion for amateur
theatricals, and Matilda begins to wonder whether his supposed love of Dickens was just another of his roles. Neither the
great author nor his colonial fan retain their mythical or heroic status for Matilda, who comes to read Dickens’s oeuvre and
life with a critic’s eye. Once in Britain, in the British Library she muses upon the contradiction between Dickens’s concern
for the Victorian poor and his treatment of his own children – sent abroad to the colonies to thrive or die. In order to emphasise
her isolation and discomfort in England, Lloyd Jones makes Matilda a more exotic and
alien figure than she would be in real life. Through her jaundiced eyes, multicultural England is a nation the worse for wear:
a London of ‘filthy steps lined with beggars and gypsy kids’ and melancholy seaside towns where ‘turbanned Indians’ look uncomprehendingly
at a black female foreigner.
6 At the Dickens exhibit at Eastgate House, Matilda ‘encountered Miss Havisham in her white wedding gown. She was stuck behind
glass, her back turned to us sightseers. There for all eternity. I wished she could turn, just for half an instant, to find
a black woman staring at her.’
7 Yet this antagonistic wish is countered by the empathetic experience of reading. What Matilda retains from her complicated,
traumatic encounter with
Great Expectations is the ‘act of magic’ that allowed her to ‘slip under the skin of another … even when that skin is white and belongs to a
boy in Dickens’ England’.
8 Matilda, however, refuses to be stuck, either with Dickens, who has become, in a sophisticated rather than naive slippage,
merged with his unreliable colonial mediator, Mr Watts in his crumpled white suit, or with the trauma of her own history.
Mindful of Pip’s pained confession that ‘
it is a miserable thing to be ashamed of home’, she aims to do what he could not, and return with the cultural capital she has acquired to her embattled island.
9Both of these inventive, affecting neo-Dickensian fictions inevitably return the modern reader to Great Expectations, a novel that never disappoints, but each of them asks the reader to reflect on the power relations of writing and reading
that reach across centuries and continents. Enduring tributes to Dickens’s imagination and his literary skills, they are a
reminder that these relations, like the conventions of the novel, are a part, not above or outside, of the history of Empire
and its aftermath. The critical encounter between that past and the present is what makes the neo-Victorian and the neo-Dickensian
a living and lively literary form.