Dickens and the City

Jeremy Tambling, Jeremy Tambling

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351944472
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism for Comparative Literature
• Index: Literature

Dickens's relationship to cities is part of his modernity and his enduring fascination. How he thought about, grasped and conceptualised the rapidly expanding and anonymous urban scene are all fascinating aspects of a critical debate which, starting virtually from Dickens's own time, has become more and more active and questioning of the significance of that new thing, the unknown and unknowable, city. Although Dickens was influenced by several European and American cities, the most significant city for Dickens was London, the city he knew as a boy in the 1820s and which developed in his lifetime to become the finance and imperial capital of the nineteenth-century. His sense of London as monumental and fashionable, modern and anachronistic, has generated a large number of writings and critical approaches: Marxist, sociological, psychoanalytic and deconstructive. Dickens looks at the city from several aspects: as a place bringing together poverty and riches; as the place of the new and of chance and coincidence, and of secret lives exposed by the special figure of the detective. Another crucial area of study is the relationship of the city to women, and women's place in the city, as well as the way Dickens's London matches up with other visual representations. This anthology of criticism surveys the field and is a major contribution to the study of cities, city culture, modernity and Dickens. It brings together key previously published articles and essays and features a comprehensive bibliography of work which scholars can continue to explore.

1

The Dickens World: A View from Todgers’s

Dorothy Van Ghent

THE course of things demonically possessed is to imitate the human, while the course of human possession is to imitate the inhuman. This transposition of attributes, producing a world like that of ballet, is the principle of relationship between things and people in the novels of Dickens. The masks, the stances, and the shock-tempo are comic. The style which they have for their perspective is the style of a world undergoing a gruesome spiritual transformation.

Things, like animal pets, have adopted the disposition and expression of their masters. The “tight-clenched” old bureau of a miser has a “bad and secret forehead.” But this argues a demonic life in things; and as it takes a demon to know a demon, they have maliciously felt out and imitated, in their relationships with each other and even with people, the secret of the human arrangement. A four-poster bed in an inn is a despotic monster that straddles over the whole room, “putting one of his arbitrary legs into the fireplace, and another into the doorway, and squeezing the wretched little washing-stand in quite a Divinely Righteous manner.” The animation of inanimate objects suggests both the quaint gaiety of a forbidden life and an aggressiveness that has got out of control. Even a meek little muffin has to be “confined with the utmost precaution under a strong iron cover,” and a hat, set on a mantelpiece, demands constant attention and the greatest quickness of eye and hand to catch it neatly as it tumbles off, but it is an ingenious demon and finally manages to fall into the slop-basin.

These continual broadsides of the pathetic fallacy might be considered as incidental embellishment if the description of people did not everywhere show a reciprocal metaphor. The animate is treated as if it were a thing. It is as if the life absorbed by things had been drained out of people who have become incapable of their humanity. Grandfather Smallweed, in Bleak House, has to be beaten up periodically like a cushion in order to be restored to the shape of a man. The ignominy is horrifying, suggesting unspeakable deterioration. Those who have engaged, as Grandfather Smallweed has, in the manipulation of their fellows as if they were things, themselves develop thing-attributes, like Podsnap, the capitalist, who has hairbrushes on his head instead of hair; while those who suffer the aggressiveness which is the dynamics of this economy are similarly transformed, like the convict Magwitch, mechanized by oppression and fear, who has a clockwork apparatus in his throat that clicks as if it were going to strike, or poor little Twemlow, whose hosts put leaves in him like a dining-table, extending or depressing him according to the size of the party.

The progressive keys of the transformation may be illustrated by those people who have wooden parts, Silas Wegg and Sarah Gamp’s famous husband offering the examples. The wooden leg of Mr. Gamp, “which in its constancy of walkin’ into wine vaults, and never comin’ out again ’till fetched by force, was quite as weak as flesh, if not weaker,” has taken over the man. More ominous is the deliberate choice of a lower order of being, when the man takes over or becomes his member. (Lady Scadgers, in Hard Times, is “an immensely fat old woman, with an inordinate appetite for butcher’s meat, and a mysterious leg which had now refused to get out of bed for fourteen years.” The lady is “thinged” into her own leg, which is clearly the repository of all that butcher’s meat.) In Silas Wegg, the humanity of the man with the wooden leg is so reduced to the quality of his appendage that he is expected to develop another leg of the same kind in about six months, if his development receive no untimely check. The inanimate member of the organism signifies spiritual necrosis, and Silas does in fact identify himself with his deceased member, which has been disposed of by the hospital porter to an articulator of bones. “Now, look here, what did you give for me?” he demands, and he bargains for his leg in a grotesque parody of the Resurrection of the Body. The man with the wooden leg, however harmless in appearance, is ominous of something out of nature; he is death-in-life. The comedy of this is comedy with immense stylistic tension.

Dickens told Forster that he was always losing sight of a man in his diversion by the mechanical play of some part of the man’s face, which “would acquire a sudden ludicrous life of its own.” His habit of seeing the parts of the body as separable and manipulable makes in his first writings for funny foolishness, as in the case of the tall lady, eating sandwiches, in Pickwick, who “forgot the arch—crash—knock—children look around—mother’s head off—sandwich in her hand—no mouth to put it in.” Where it is put to use most seriously and spectacularly, it is a technique of surgical division serving to characterize personality that has given itself over to deceit, thus dividing itself unnaturally into a manipulating and a manipulated part, a me-half and an it-half. General Scadder, the agent of the land-swindle in Martin Chuzzlewit, has one sightless eye that stands stock still: “With that side of his face he seemed to listen to what the other side was doing. Thus each profile had a distinct expression; and when the movable side was most in action, the rigid one was in its coldest state of watchfulness.” Pecksniff, warming his hands before the fire “as benevolently as if they were somebody else’s, not his,” has divided himself from his imagination of himself, and the image is one of mayhem and of a surgical graft. In Mr. Vholes, the lawyer in Bleak House, deceit is not even a personal matter, as it is with Pecksniff. Mr. Vholes is only a cog in the mechanics of Chancery, which has institutionalized the manipulation of living creatures as if they were not human but things. The norms of this hell enable Mr. Vholes to do more violent physical damage on himself than Pecksniff, a kind of damage of which only the mediaeval and twentieth-century imaginations have been thought capable. He “takes off his close black gloves as if he were skinning his hands, lifts off his tight hat as if he were scalping himself, and sits down at his desk.”

The more rugged criminals, among those who still move in respectable society, are radically cloven into two people, and it is but a question of point of view from the eccentric appearance of Mr. Flintwinch, in Little Dorrit, whose neck is so twisted that he looks as if he had hanged himself at one time, to the schizophrenia of the murderer Jonas Chuzzlewit, who, after his crime, is “not only fearful for himself but of himself,” and half expects when he returns home to find himself asleep in bed. The ultimate development of this imagery of division is total transformation of the me-half into the it-half, as in the spontaneous combustion of Krook. Krook, not even a hanger-on of the colossal deceit of Chancery, has established himself in a business which is a parody of Chancery; he lives off the refuse paper of the court, and at the time of his decease has just found a promising speculation in blackmail. Here personality has so developed its thing-constitution that it has become a purely chemical phenomenon, and the moment of Krook’s death is the moment when his chemicals (largely gin) have finally consummated their possession of him. The nastiness of the image is proportional to the horror of the idea. A defiling yellow liquor is the last of Krook, slowly dripping and creeping down the bricks.

Krook’s mortification is the savagely simple working out of the law of conversion of spirit into matter that operates in the Dickens world. In the case of Miss Havisham, in Great Expectations, the decayed wedding cake offers a supplementary image of the necrosis that is taking place in the human agent. Miss Havisham is guilty of aggression against life in using the two children, Pip and Estella, as inanimate instruments of revenge for her broken heart, and she has been changed retributively into a fungus. The cake on the banquet table acts by homeopathic magic, like a burning effigy or a doll stuck with pins: “when the ruin is complete,” she says, pointing to the cake but referring to herself, she will be laid out on the same table and her relatives will be invited to “feast on” her corpse. But this is not the only conversion. The “little quickened hearts” of the mice behind the panels have been quickened by what was Miss Havisham, carried off crumb by crumb. The principle of reciprocal changes bears on the characteristic lack of complex inner life on the part of Dickens’s people; it is inconceivable that the fungoid Miss Havisham or the spirituous Krook should have complex inner lives, in the moral sense. In the art of Dickens (distinguishing that moral dialectic that arises not solely from character but from total aesthetic occasion) there is a great deal of “inner life,” transposed to other forms than that of character; partially transposed in this scene, for instance, to the symbolic activity of the speckled-legged spiders with blotchy bodies and to the gropings and pausings of the black beetles on Miss Havisham’s hearth.

In Balzac, environment is literally natural; in Dickens, environment is literally unnatural. Mme. Vauquer’s pension or Old Grandet’s house in Saumur, as physical constructions, partake eminently of the harshness and constriction of the forms of life which they help to render intelligible, but there is never any doubt as to their natural limitations; formally they correspond to the human nature for which they provide the scene, and they set physical and in time spiritual bounds to the human development within them; but in no sense do they actively intrude upon the human. Their symbolic value lies in their natural rigidity. They are that beyond which the soul cannot go. In Dickens, environment constantly exceeds its material limitations. Its mode of existence is altered by the human purposes and deeds it circumscribes, and its animation is antagonistic; it fearfully intrudes upon the soul.

The room occupied by Jonas Chuzzlewit at the time of the murder is charged with the tensions of a straining life—but not Jonas’s life.

The room in which he had shut himself up was on the ground-floor, at the back of the house. It was lighted by a dirty skylight, and had a door in the wall, opening into a narrow, covered passage or blind alley. … It was a blotched, stained, mouldering room, like a vault; and there were water-pipes running through it, which, at unexpected times in the night, when other things were quiet, clicked and gurgled suddenly, as if they were choking.

It is not only that the water-pipes serve to interpret Jonas’s fears—as if they had tattle-tale tongues—but they appear to have been released, by the act which dehumanizes Jonas, into a busy life of their own. What is shocking is not their relevance to the murder but their irrelevance to it. On a larger scale, the same transposition of attributes has taken place in Coketown, in Hard Times, whose fortifications are more alive than the race they shelter. The Coketown “hands” have been approximately reduced to those members for which they are named,—or, Dickens says, they are “like the lower creatures of the seashore, only hands and stomachs,”—while the two-way law has also had the effect of converting their material environment into passion, complicated, lunatic, and uncontrollable: Coketown is a labyrinth of “narrow courts upon courts and close streets upon streets, which had come into existence piecemeal, every piece in a violent hurry for some one man’s purpose, and the whole an unnatural family, shouldering, and trampling, and pressing one another to death.”

The description of Coketown is strongly felt because it represents an objective evil favored by industrialism; the image of a deformed, totem-like life in its chimneys and chimney-pots—“which, for want of air to make a draught, were built in an immense variety of stunted and crooked shapes, as though every house put out a sign of the kind of people who might be expected to be born in it”—has an hallucinatory vividness; but more hallucinatory is the relatively innocent prospect from the roof of Todgers’s boarding-house, in Martin Chuzzlewit, a description which bears a curious resemblance to passages in M. Sartre’s La Nausée and other writings, where non-human existences rage with an indiscriminate life of their own.

The revolving chimney-pots on one great stack of buildings seemed to be turning gravely to each other every now and then, and whispering the result of their separate observation of what was going on below. Others, of a crook-backed shape, appeared to be maliciously holding themselves askew, that they might shut the prospect out and baffle Todgers’s. The man who was mending a pen at an upper window over the way, became of paramount importance in the scene, and made a blank in it, ridiculously disproportionate in its extent, when he retired. The gambols of a piece of cloth upon the dyer’s pole had far more interest for the moment than all the changing motion of the crowd. Yet even while the looker-on felt angry with himself for this, and wondered how it was, the tumult swelled into a roar; the hosts of objects seemed to thicken and expand a hundredfold; and after gazing round him, quite scared, he turned into Todgers’s again, much more rapidly than he came out; and ten to one he told M. Todgers afterwards that if he hadn’t done so, he would certainly have come into the street by the shortest cut; that is to say, head-foremost.

Much of the description is turned upon the conservative “seemed to be” and “as if,” and the pathetic fallacy provides a familiar bourgeois security, but the technique changes in the middle, betrayed by a discomfort which the “as if’s” are no longer able to conceal. The prospect from Todgers’s is one in which categorical determinations of the relative significance of objects—as of the chimney-pots, the blank upper window, or the dyer’s cloth—have broken down, and the observer on Todgers’s roof is seized with suicidal nausea at the momentary vision of a world in which significance has been replaced by naked and aggressive existence.

It has so often been said that Dickens’s point of view is that of the undernourished child roving London streets at night, that one hesitates to say it again, although with no reference to biography. The point of view is hallucinated and often fearful, as the insecure and ill-fed child’s might be. It is not childish. The grotesque transpositions are a coherent imagination of a reality that has lost coherence, comic because they form a pattern integrating the disintegrated and lying athwart the reality that has not got itself imagined. Everything has to be mentioned—like the “strange solitary pumps” found near Todgers’s, “hiding themselves in blind alleys, and keeping company with fire ladders”—for, assuming that there is coherence in a world visibly disintegrated into things, one way to find it is to mention everything. Hence the indefatigable attention to detail. No thing must be lost, as it is doubtless essential to the mysterious organization of the system. The system itself is assumed to be a nervous one, and for this reason Dickens’s language has its almost inexhaustible vitality and vivacity, inasmuch as its predications about persons or objects tend to be statements of metabolic conversion of one into the other.

II

The changes are still wrought out of the broad common intuition of the connections between moral and physical phenomena, often using the ancient image of the bacillus-like physical reality of the evil spirit. The moral atmosphere of the Merdle swindle, in Little Dorrit, is treated in terms of a malignant physical infection, that, disseminated in the air they breathe, lays hold on people in the soundest health. On the other hand, the physical plague that arises out of the slum district of Tom All Alone’s, in Bleak House, and that creeps to the houses of the great, is itself a moral plague, the conditions for it having been created by moral acquiescence. Its ambiguity is enforced by the conversion of the slum-dwellers into vermin parasites—“a crowd of foul existence that crawls in and out of gaps in walls and boards; and coils itself to sleep, in maggot numbers, where the rain drips in; and comes and goes, fetching and carrying fever, and sowing … evil in its every footprint.” The Transformation of spiritual into physical being is reversed by an imagery of inferno, which translates the physical fact as a spiritual one: “the crowd … hovers round the three visitors, like a dream of horrible faces, and fades away up alleys and into ruins, and behind walls; and with occasional cries and shrill whistles of warning, thenceforth flits about them until they leave the place.” This is Hell, and however verifiable on earth, is “unnatural” in nature. It is representative of Dickens’s method, which is a scrupulous rendering of nature gone wrong in all its parts.

Imperceptibly, by changes that are themselves psychologically valid, the atoms of the physical world have been impregnated with moral aptitude, so that it is not inconsistent that at the crisis of plot, a giant beam should loosen itself and fall on the head of the villain. Stephen Blackpool, returning home and thinking of the drunken wife whom he will find there in her filth and madness, has “an unwholesome sense of growing larger, of being placed in some new and diseased relation towards the objects among which he passed, of seeing the iris round every misty light turn red….” Gaffer Hexam, coming from the river where he has been at his usual business of trolling for corpses, is shunned by the other river-men when they suspect him of improving his occupation by manufacture of the commodity on which he lives, and he says fiercely as he looks around, now over this shoulder, now over that, “Have we got a pest in the house? Is there summ’at deadly sticking to my clothes? What’s let loose upon us? Who loosed it?” Pip, standing waiting for Estella in the neighborhood of Newgate, and beginning dimly to be aware of his implication in the guilt for which that establishment stands, has the same sensation of a deadly dust clinging to him and tries to beat it out of his clothes. Still not without psychological validity is the minute change from the subjective atmosphere of guilt, or the apprehension of evil, which seems to be reflected in the physical world, to its actualization in the behavior of physical things, as in those mysterious rustlings and tremblings which frighten Affery in Little Dorrit, “as if a step had shaken the floor, or even as if she had been touched by some awful hand,” which are the real warnings of dissolution in the worm-eaten old house and of its final providential collapse on Blandois, when he is alone in it in the purity of his evil. Considered in this way, Dickens’s use of physical coincidence in his plots is consistent with his imagination of a thoroughly nervous universe, whose ganglia spread through things and people alike, so that moral contagion, from its breeding center in the human, transforms also the non-human and gives it the aptitude of the diabolic.

Coincidence is the violent connection of the unconnected; but there is no discontinuity in the Dickens world, either between persons and things, or between the private and the public act. What connection can there be, Dickens asks, between proud Lady Dedlock and Jo the outlaw with the broom: “What connection can there have been between many people in the innumerable histories of this world, who, from opposite sides of great gulfs, have, nevertheless, been very curiously brought together!” What brings Lady Dedlock and Jo together, from opposite sides of great gulfs, is the bond between the public guilt for Jo and the private guilt of Lady Dedlock for her daughter, these two offering to each other—as usual in Dickens—the model of parental irresponsibility, and the models coalescing when the woman who has denied her child, and the diseased boy to whom society has been an unnatural father, are laid side by side in the same churchyard to be consumed by the same worms, physical nature asserting the organicity which moral nature had revoked. What brings the convict Magwitch across “great gulfs” to the boy Pip is again a profoundly implicit compact of guilt, as binding as the convict’s leg-iron which is its recurrent symbol, and again the model is that of parental irresponsibility—although the terms shift subtly here, and it is sometimes Magwitch, the criminal foster-father, who is the abused child, and Pip, the corrupted child, who bears the social guilt for Magwitch. The multiplying likenesses in the street as Magwitch draws nearer, coming over the sea, the mysterious warnings of his approach on the night of his reappearance, are moral projections as real as the storm outside the windows and as the crouched form of the vicious Orlick on the dark stairs. The conception of what brings people together—the total change in the texture of experience that follows upon the...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Series Preface
• Introduction
• 1 ‘The Dickens World: A View from Todgers’s’, The Sewanee Review, 58, pp. 419–38
• 2 ‘Dickens: Realism, Subjunctive and Indicative’, in Dostoevsky and Romantic Realism: A Study of Dostoevsky in Relation to Balzac, Dickens and Gogol, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, pp. 65–100
• 3 ‘Dickens’s Slum Satire in Bleak House’, The Modern Language Review, 60, pp. 340–51
• 4 ‘The Strategy and Theme of Urban Observation in Bleak House’, Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900, 9, pp. 659–76
• 5 ‘Introduction to Dombey and Son’, in Peter Fairclough (ed.), Dombey and Son, Harmondsworth: Penguin, pp. 11–34
• 6 ‘The City and the River: Dickens’s Symbolic Landscape’ in Jean-Claude Amalric (ed.), Studies in the Later Dickens, Montpellier: Université Paul Valéry, pp. 111–26
• 7 ‘Dickens and London’, in Harold J. Dyos and Michael Wolff (eds), The Victorian City: Ideas in the Air, 2 vols, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, pp. 537–57
• 8 ‘Little Dorrit in Italy’, Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 29, pp. 393–411
• 9 ‘City Life and the Novel: Hugo, Ainsworth, Dickens’, Comparative Literature, 30, pp. 157–71
• 10 ‘Dickens the Flâneur’, The Dickensian, 77, pp. 71–87
• 11 ‘Bleak House and Victorian Art and Illustration: Charles Dickens’s Visual Narrative Style’, The Journal of Narrative Technique, 13, pp. 31–46
• 12 ‘Dickens, Ruskin and the City: Parallels or Influence?’, The Dickensian, 82, pp. 66–81
• 13 ‘Dickens’s Sublime Artifact’, Browning Institute Studies, 14, pp. 71–95
• 14 ‘The Grotesque and Urban Chaos in Bleak House’, Dickens Studies Annual, 21, pp. 97–112
• 15 ‘London, Dickens, and the Theatre of Homelessness’, in Debra N. Mancoff and D.J. Trela (eds), Victorian Urban Society: Essays on the Nineteenth-Century City and Its Contexts, New York: Garland Publishing, pp. 74–88
• 16 ‘Dickens, ‘Household Words’, and the Paris Boulevards (Parts One and Two)’, Dickens Quarterly, 14, pp. 154–64 and pp. 199–212
• 17 ‘Dickensian Architextures or, the City and the Ineffable’, in Writing London: The Trace of the Urban Text from Blake to Dickens, New York: Macmillan, pp. 141–79 and pp. 229–35
• 18 ‘The Uncommercial Traveller and the Later Dickens’, Dickens Quarterly, 16, pp. 256–61
• 19 ‘Bleak House, Vanity Fair, and the Making of an Urban Aesthetic’, Nineteenth-Century Literature, 54, pp. 480–502
• 20 ‘City Spaces: Martin Chuzzlewit’, in Lost in the American City: Dickens, James and Kafka, New York: Palgrave, pp. 49–75 and pp. 205–10
• 21 ‘“Turn Again, Dick Whittington!“: Dickens, Wordsworth, and the Boundaries of the City’, Victorian Literature and Culture, 32, pp. 407–19
• 22 ‘Touring the Metropolis: The Shifting Subjects of Dickens’s London Sketches’, The Yearbook of English Studies, 34, pp. 155–70
• 23 ‘An Italian Dream and a Castle in the Air: The Significance of Venice in Little Dorrit’, The Dickensian, 103, pp. 157–65
• 24 ‘Hogarth, Egan, Dickens and the Making of an Urban Aesthetic’, Representations, 103, pp. 84–106
• 25 ‘A More Expansive Reach: The Geography of the Thames in Our Mutual Friend’, in Cleansing the City: Sanitary Geographies in Victorian London, Athens: Ohio University Press, pp. 86–114 and pp. 190–92
• 26 ‘Dickens: Intimations of Apocalypse’, in Imagined Cities: Urban Experience and the Language of the Novel, New Haven: Yale University Press, pp. 63–81
• Name Index