The Scriptures of Charles Dickens

Novels of Ideology, Novels of the Self

Vincent Newey

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781351882224
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism for Comparative Literature
• Index: Literature

This study focuses on Dickens's response to questions of identity, conduct, and social organization that emerged in an era of major cultural unsettlement and change, not least with the decline of religious certainty and the rise of materialism. An analysis of A Christmas Carol as a paradigm of his concerns and strategies in these fields is followed by close readings of novels from different stages of his career, Oliver Twist, David Copperfield, Great Expectations and Our Mutual Friend. These, and other works by Dickens, are seen to reflect ideologies currently at work in his society but also, more importantly, to participate in the construction of needful value systems and codes for regulating behaviour. Liberal humanism and middle-class hegemony feature largely in this process of culture formation, where Dickens played a crucial role in formulating and promulgating such salient guiding principles as those of sympathy, marriage and the family, economic responsibility, and hierarchy within and between groups. His treatment of the self is on one level driven by this project in shaping and stabilizing attitudes among a confederacy of readers, in that it offers positive models of development, of how to function and fit in; yet on another, especially in his sustained imaginative preoccupation with the figure of the outsider or misfit, this is one pre-eminent area where his writing transcends purposes of enculturation and paradoxically challenges its own ideological positions. His female characters in particular, as well as more obviously his anti-heroes, criminals, and other dissidents, are shown to question and subvert the moulds in which they are formally cast. The novels are confirmed not only as great creative achievements, an aspect this book consistently salutes, nor simply as a primary site of the evolving Victorian dispensation and revolution of ideas, but as a territory that predicts, engages, and illuminates our own complex modernity. Reference is made throughout the volume to other contemporary writings, including sociological, philosophic, and medical discourse, to recent cognate theory, and to traditions, like that of Puritan spiritual autobiography, which Dickens adapted to new ends.

CHAPTER ONE

Introduction

There appeared in 1880 a book by William Hurrell Mallock with the intriguing title of Is Life Worth Living? This is not a treatise on suicide, but it is about a demise. Its concern, like that of much contemporary discourse, is with the waning of religious faith and the consequences for existence. Mallock identifies a widespread ‘crisis’, at the centre of which lie a ‘negation of the supernatural’ and a concomitant ‘intense self-consciousness … on the part of man as to his own prospects and his own position’. The ‘old spontaneity of action’, rooted in the ideals of rewards in heaven and obedience to divine law, has given way to the cultivation of this-worldly knowledge and success, ‘natural happiness’, under the aegis of the ‘positive school’ of scientific thought and progress.¹ This is a restrained version of Carlyle’s strident lament for the ‘Everlasting No’ of a universe become ‘dead, immeasurable Steam-engine’, a ‘machine … go[ing] by the wheel-and-pinion “motives”, self-interests, checks’.² It is also a theme at the heart of Dickens’s writing. The present study is, broadly speaking, an account of how this author reflects and responds to the unsettlement and stress of his era – his involvement in the question of, as Barry Qualls puts it, ‘the way man might live adequately in a world whose only certainty was flux’.³ ‘Adequately’, which Qualls emphasizes, is an important word: there is no magical or complete solution to the challenge.

In targeting the causes of nineteenth-century angst Mallock’s aim comes to rest on the deconstructive influence of philosophic ‘positivism’, which had its principal source in Ludwig Feuerbach’s Essence of Christianity, published in 1841 and translated by George Eliot in 1854, where belief in the Divine is construed as the adolescent phase of humankind’s development and Christian doctrines are interpreted fundamentally as projections of our own aspirations or wants, and where, above all, the orthodox credo of ‘God is love’ is displaced with the humanist principle of ‘Love is god’.⁴ For Mallock, the spiritual losses of deconversion far outstripped any gains in benevolent sentiment or material welfare. Dickens, we shall find, has mixed feelings in such areas, and certainly to a large extent runs with the ‘Religion of Humanity’ that Is Life Worth Living? anathematizes. There is, however, a more immediately obvious and clear-cut difference between the two writers. Mallock addresses the problem of restoring stability and the quality of life amidst change and failing metaphysical assumptions by advocating a mass return to the Catholic Church, which he views as an organism capable of infinite adaptation and, in its emphasis on ritual and dogma, of supplying a refuge from self-consciousness itself. As is suggested by R.H. Hutton’s incredulous arraignment of this call in an otherwise enthusiastic review,⁵ the proposal seems just as improbable in its early context as it does now, in spite of John Henry Newman and the Oxford Movement. Dickens, on the other hand, is Protestant and in tune with the future, in that he centres the quest for order and value in individuals rather than in any overarching institution.

Of the works I have chosen for detailed discussion, two, David Copperfield and Great Expectations, are first-person narratives that recall, the second often very precisely, the autobiographies of Puritan tradition, with their stories of guilt and renovation, inner maturation, the search through memory for self-knowledge and unity of being. In A Christmas Carol the erstwhile conversion process and strategies of meditation are powerfully dramatized and adjusted to latter-day settings and needs. The theme persists in Our Mutual Friend in the narratives of John Harmon’s discovery of identity and the inward enlightenment of Bella Wilfer and Eugene Wrayburn. Characters in Dickens can bridge epochs, tracking, more or less firmly, the paths of John Bunyan and his pilgrims but having no Celestial City in view and in themselves confirming the investiture of what Philip Rieff, considering in the twentieth century the long march of secularization that he sees as first breaking the surface of history in the period of the French Revolution, has called modern ‘psychological man’, in whom ‘the new centre, which can be held even as communities disintegrate, is the self’, existing where ‘there is no longer an effective sense of communion, driving the individual out of himself’, having to manage his own ‘well-being’ and ‘personal capacity’.⁶ Or, we should add, failing to manage that ‘well-being’. It is important to note from the outset the dark side of the picture. The internal landscape can be as blighted as the outer. For every one who, like Scrooge or David, gets a better life, there is one who, like Pip, can only hang on desperately, and one who, like Bradley Headstone, goes under. In the arena of selving there are some wins, some draws, and some defeats.

Yet, that Dickens is a chronicler of existential struggle against a background of dissolution does not of course mean that he has no care for the relationship between self and society, or no interest in the latter’s re-formation. His characters do not simply express a solitary condition, they function, selectively, as models of how to conduct oneself and one’s interaction with others, and how not to. Scrooge is a concentrated case in point. His transcending of egotism for a sense of community at the levels of personal relations, the family, the local group, and the larger stage constitutes a paradigm of good practice. As we shall see, this is one of the places where we are most strongly conscious of Dickens forging a Feuerbachian position, upvaluing the species-awareness and recognition of the interdependence of ‘I’ and ‘Thou’ that arise from an anthropological creed. The novel, Carlyle proclaimed, should bring ‘doctrine’, ‘reproof’, ‘edification’, ‘healing’, ‘guidance’.⁷ Dickens provides all these, and does so in a variety of ways of which the use of character-as-example is but one salient method. Another is what may be termed experiential reader engagement. This happens when we are invited to play out scenes in the theatre of the mind, in keeping with the imperative towards imaginative involvement issued by Dickens in an intended epigraph to one of his novels, ‘Your homes the scene, yourselves the actors, here!’.⁸ Scrooge’s getting of wisdom, his recall to outgoing vision, has a counterpart in those occasions where we are prompted to take a renewed interest in people, especially the vulnerable and the overbearing. We shall encounter several great set pieces in this vein: Bumble, of all men, driven to shed a tear for Oliver; Steerforth’s ruthless baiting of the defenceless Mr Mell; Magwitch succoured in open court by Pip, who has trod the same path as Scrooge, from selfishness to charity.

This is Dickensian epiphany: not a leaping of the spirit in the presence of the Divine or, as characteristically for the Romantics, of Nature, but a becoming of healthy emotional and moral instincts in anthropocentric contexts. It is part and parcel of ‘the Word made Novel’ in Dickens and his contemporaries, or, better perhaps, of ‘the Novel made Word’; an aspect, that is, of their embrace of a long tradition of teaching whose operation and ends are memorably signalled in the ‘Scola Cordis’ of the Emblems of Francis Quarles – ‘Peruse this little Book; and thou wilt see / What thy heart is, and what it ought to be’.⁹ Put another way, we are here, as Matthew Arnold and the Leavises famously did in their generations, witnessing to literature as the provider of a new canon, a substitute bible, a secular scripture informed by and disseminating – to quote from T.R. Wright’s investigation of the interface of Theology and Literature – ‘an alternative set of liberal-humanist values’.¹⁰ The ‘liberal humanism’ of Dickens’s novels comprises major elements of their still-continuing relevance and appeal; but the phrase also signals a historic reorientation of cultural authority, and brings us, now, to the matter of ideology.

That the novelist had serious mass influence was a fact fully recognized in Dickens’s time. A piece in the Westminster Review, ‘Novels with a Purpose’, which appeared in 1864, the year Our Mutual Friend was begun, presses the point unreservedly:

The novelist is now our most influential writer. If he be a man of genius his power over the community he addresses is far beyond that of any author. Macaulay’s influence over the average English mind was narrow compared with that of Dickens; even Carlyle’s was not on the whole so great as that of Thackeray…. The influence of the novelist is beginning, too, to be publicly acknowledged of late much more frankly than was once the fashion. For a long time his power over society, except as a mere teller of stories and provider of easy pastime, was ignored or disputed. It was, indeed, something like the power of women in politics; an influence almost all-pervading, almost irresistible, but silent, secret, and not to be openly acknowledged.¹¹

There is, of course, an ideology at work in this very statement, where the ‘masculine’ is assumed to be open, public, respectable, while the ‘feminine’ acts covertly, in close ways that are somehow dangerous, perhaps disreputable, and cannot be brought into the light. The implication of the passage is that the novel has come of age, achieved a position of legitimate, manly sway mentionable in the same breath as that of the Victorian sages – which is to say that the genre is being claimed for the patriarchal establishment. In fact, Dickens’s novels have never ceased to operate surreptitiously, as well as frankly, in influencing the reader. At the extreme, they are divided against themselves and call into question conventions which on the surface they uphold. Gender stereotyping itself is one of the fields in which this most forcibly happens. For the moment, however, it is enough to be reminded that his texts are, whatever else, conduits for the inculcation and reinforcement of particular attitudes and beliefs and utilize both direct and indirect strategies to this end.

A small but telling instance occurs within the well-known satire on ‘Podsnappery’ in Chapter 11 of Book 1 of Our Mutual Friend. Podsnap is a caricature of the nationalistic, self-made, upward-climbing, puritanical man of business – of ‘British Philistinism’.¹² At one of his dinner parties, he patronizes an ‘unfortunately-born foreigner’, correcting his guest’s punctuation – ‘Our English adverbs do Not terminate in Mong and We Pronounce the “ch” as if there were a “t” before it. We say Ritch’ – and bringing the pompous dose of education to a climax with an encomium on ‘the Englishman’: ‘there is in the Englishman a combination of qualities, a modesty, an independence, a responsibility, a repose, combined with an absence of everything calculated to call a blush into the cheek of a young person.’ The joke is on Podsnap not only because of his overblown prudishness (which, we learn elsewhere, he applies with so much zeal as to turn his own daughter into a nervous wreck) but because of the manifest gap between his own character and the traits he has idealized. Dickens’s explicit purpose lies in deprecating the myopic self-regard and monocultural barbarism with which Podsnap almost explodes. Implicitly, however, he is trailing an ideology of his own, which, though not jingoistic, is certainly about bringing and holding the nation together. Qualities are qualities whether Podsnap possesses them or not, and those he lists – ‘modesty’, ‘independence’, ‘responsibility’, ‘repose’ – are among the conspicuous virtues of John Harmon, one of the two heroes of the novel, who is balanced and quietly efficient, never brash though well-to-do and good at business, kindly towards friends and the needy, the perfect family man – Harmon[ious] within and spreading Harmon[y] without. He is a paragon of the English middle class, in whom the common sense and reasonable values of liberal humanism are allied to an instinct for practical success and standing.

Dickens thus reflects and puts in place, for immediate want of a better phrase, a bourgeois ideology. This is not a matter of simply presenting a given outlook or suite of ideas, however, but of participating in their construction. Andrew Blake rounds off his study of the intersections between developing Victorian ideologies and Victorian novels by stating that the latter were concerned with

the reproduction of society: with the integration of the new wealthy, new powerful, and new respectable groups into the already existing ruling class structure, and the modification of that culture to include within it many new ideological elements associated with those groups…. The novel was an arena of public information, of public debate, and of ‘interpellation’, helping by its concerns to form society by helping to form individuals as members of that society.¹³

This is helpfully put in respect of Dickens, though he is not one of the authors Blake considers. To ‘interpellation’ I shall come in a moment. Of easier note...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Illustrations
• The Nineteenth Century Series General Editors’ Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 A Christmas Carol: Snatched?
• 3 Oliver Twist: Hegemony and the Transgressive Imagination
• 4 David Copperfield: Selving and Social Modelling
• 5 Great Expectations: Pip Pirrip’s Gospel for Modern Man
• 6 Our Mutual Friend: Retrospective and Reform
• Bibliography
• Index