Dickens and the Imagined Child

Peter Merchant, Catherine Waters

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317151203
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism for Comparative Literature
• Index: Literature

The figure of the child and the imaginative and emotional capacities associated with children have always been sites of lively contestation for readers and critics of Dickens. In Dickens and the Imagined Child, leading scholars explore the function of the child and childhood within Dickens's imagination and reflect on the cultural resonance of his engagement with this topic. Part I of the collection examines the Dickensian child as both characteristic type and particular example, proposing a typology of the Dickensian child that is followed by discussions of specific children in Oliver Twist, Dombey and Son, and Bleak House. Part II focuses on the relationship between childhood and memory, by examining the various ways in which the child's-eye view was reabsorbed into Dickens's mature sensibility. The essays in Part III focus upon reading and writing as particularly significant aspects of childhood experience; from Dickens's childhood reading of tales of adventure, they move to discussion of the child readers in his novels and finally to a consideration of his own early writings alongside those that his children contributed to the Gad's Hill Gazette. The collection therefore builds a picture of the remembered experiences of childhood being realised anew, both by Dickens and through his inspiring example, in the imaginative creations that they came to inform. While the protagonist of David Copperfield-that 'favourite child' among Dickens's novels-comes to think of his childhood self as something which he 'left behind upon the road of life', for Dickens himself, leafing continually through his own back pages, there can be no putting away of childish things.

Chapter 1
Introduction

Peter Merchant and Catherine Waters

When William Makepeace Thackeray looked at George Cruikshank’s Phrenological Illustrations (1826), his critical conjectures themselves took on the certainty of phrenological measurement: “The artist has at the back of his own skull, we are certain, a huge bump of philoprogenitiveness.”¹ When Thackeray then looked at the early novels of Charles Dickens, that certainty grew to the point where the adjective “huge” was no longer big enough: “As for this man’s love of children, that amiable organ at the back of his honest head must be perfectly monstrous.”² More recent readers of Dickens may hesitate to draw Thackeray’s conclusion from the evidence Thackeray saw, but they are nevertheless compelled to account for that evidence somehow. In studies of the fiction and journalism of Dickens, therefore, the figure of the child and the topic of childhood have always loomed large—and have sometimes even appeared to assume “monstrous” proportions. As Mark Spilka noted in his seminal essay of 1984, Dickens broke new ground in situating the child as “the affective center of fiction”³—an innovation shown in the imaginative power of his portrayals of childhood in figures like Oliver Twist, Little Nell or David Copperfield. His ability to switch from seeing childhood from one perspective to seeing it from another is evidenced in the contrasting views expressed by the diners who gather around the Gargery Christmas dinner table in chapter 4 of Great Expectations, for while Mr Hubble declares that children are “Naterally wicious,”⁴ Joe’s tender regard for the orphaned child is comically manifested by his mutely spooning gravy onto the young Pip’s plate. But as one of Dickens’s grown-up children, Joe himself attests to the complexity that characterizes Dickens’s treatment of the concept of childhood.

The novels’ abiding interest in the figure of the orphan is no doubt connected with Dickens’s recollections of his own childhood—particularly that most burning of boyhood memories, and the one to which since the original disclosure to Forster all biographers’ roads have led back, the period spent working in Warren’s Blacking Factory. To J. Hillis Miller, this is the centre from which “a thousand paths radiate”⁵; to John Carey, it is an episode that “Dickens goes on writing … in novel after novel,” and “an image to which his imagination constantly returns.”⁶ The Dickens revealed by Forster, though “famous and caressed and happy,” would in his dreams “often … wander desolately back to that time of [his] life.”⁷ Much though he might wish to “move on” (as Rosemarie Bodenheimer in this volume shows him to have committed his child characters to doing), Dickens finds that in this respect he cannot. Continually haunted by ghosts from thirty or forty years before, he was never able to forget the lessons which he obliges Scrooge to learn: lessons about bringing the younger self that absorbed experience then into vital relation with the present self that remembers it now; lessons about keeping the child alive within the man.

Clearly, the experience of his being sent to work briefly at Warren’s Blacking at the age of 12 forms a crucial vehicle for Dickens’s social criticism. Child poverty and lack of education are targeted most memorably perhaps in the savage figures of “Ignorance” and “Want,” disclosed from underneath the skirts of the Ghost of Christmas Present as a dire warning to Scrooge regarding the social consequences of such neglect. But Dickens was equally concerned to nurture and preserve the capacities of fancy and imagination that he associated with childhood, as the essays by Carolyn Oulton, Jonathan Buckmaster, Laura Peters and Wu Di in this volume amply demonstrate. In Hard Times, the childish wonderings that come into the Gradgrind home with Sissy from the circus prove vital antidotes to the endless stream of facts which it is the fate of the children—“little pitchers” as they are—to have poured into their heads. The overwhelming onrush of “stutterings” (which are all the sense that the infant tongue can manage to make of “statistics”) would otherwise carry all before it.⁸

Sissy remains capable of limitless compassion, however, precisely because calculation is something into which she has never entered. Her example suggests that there is a kind of holy idiocy for which Dickens is prepared to make some of his child figures stand: those children who exhibit G.K. Chesterton’s “sacred bewilderment,”⁹ or the “divine intoxication” of Georges Bataille.¹⁰ The next step, carrying this into adulthood, may of course be a step too far. The wish that wonder might never cease comes up against a world determined to deny that wish. Consequently, long before being treated in Jude the Obscure, “the contrast between the ideal life a man wished to lead, & the squalid real life he was fated to lead”¹¹ is writ very large indeed in the child characters of Dickens’s novels. In Our Mutual Friend it is written on the face of Jenny Wren, a face “at once so young and so old,”¹² and inscribed in the liminal space that the novel has her inhabit, somewhere between “the kingdom of childhood” and “the rational world of calculation” as Bataille (9–10) defines those two opposing realms. Although Jenny is set down by Dickens in a neighbourhood which is “anything but” flowery, she fancifully repatriates herself to an enchanted region where the lame can cast off their crutch-sticks and where all of her imagined children are her own redeeming opposites: “not chilled, anxious, ragged, or beaten,” and “never in pain” (239).

Metaphorically, the hope of that same miracle—the lame beginning to walk—hangs over another of the characters whom, before they have quite ceased to be children, Dickens deposits in the anteroom of adolescence: Kit Nubbles in The Old Curiosity Shop. Chapter 3 of this novel chronicles his halting attempts to form his letters, under the supervision of Little Nell. According to Alexander Pope, “True Ease in Writing comes from Art, not Chance, / As those move easiest who have learn’d to dance”;¹³ but Kit, of course, will never be the most nimble or graceful of movers. The scene is captured on canvas in the painting, Kit’s Writing Lesson, which Robert Braithwaite Martineau exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1852 and which forms the cover illustration for the present collection. Martineau paints a picture of the child both as learning and as learnt from; for beside Kit stands Nell to guide him, just as Florence Dombey assists Paul (in a passage which Wu Di’s chapter discusses) and just as Biddy in Great Expectations leads Pip through the mysteries of the alphabet. Nell is sewing as she oversees Kit’s learning; but really this is a reversal of Tennyson’s “Man for the sword and for the needle she,” because there is no rapier wit in Kit, and he wields the pen very clumsily indeed. In the intensity of his unavailing concentration he depends absolutely upon the superior knowledge of “his instructress.”¹⁴

Beneath that knowledge, however, Nell herself displays in an acute form the vulnerability of the child; she is no better “fitted … for struggles with the world” (32) than her pet linnet in his hanging cage. If the birdcage that Martineau has pointedly included in the painting focuses the tension between childhood as affording a safe haven and childhood as spelling limitation, the apples which sit in front of Kit and Nell—his partly eaten, but hers as yet untouched—indicate what an equivocal Eden they both inhabit, and how fragile and fleeting a thing is the innocence of the child. The serpent Quilp has slithered from the room for now but is nowhere near to being scotched or killed as yet. Just as the Eden of Martin Chuzzlewit is the despair of those who invest in it, so the much-vaunted Eden of childhood might seem a terrestrial Paradise, but equally may turn into a graveyard of youthful hopes and dreams.

While Martineau faithfully represents Kit’s ungainliness at his task—“he tucked up his sleeves and squared his elbows and put his face close to the copybook and squinted horribly at the lines” (33)—and the religious stained glass images and lantern slides in the background of the shop capture the novel’s saintly image of Nell, what is missing from the painting is the laughter, the “fresh burst of merriment” that Dickens describes breaking from the two children “at every fresh mistake” (33) on Kit’s part. The discrepancy is instructive in reminding us of the range of keynotes sounded by Dickens in his representation of childhood. While the imagined child may be laden with affect, bound up for some readers with Dickens’s reputation as “Mr Popular Sentiment,”¹⁵ more humorous examples also recur in the fiction and journalism of children who are absurdly damaged or “stuck” in some way, as Rosemarie Bodenheimer puts it in the first essay of this collection. One thinks of Mr Toots, whose brains have comically “blown” too soon under the forcing regime of Dr Blimber in Dombey and Son, or Georgiana Podsnap, who is described on the occasion of her eighteenth birthday in Our Mutual Friend as

but an undersized damsel, with high shoulders, low spirits, chilled elbows, and a rasped surface of nose, who seemed to take occasional frosty peeps out of childhood into womanhood, and to shrink back again, overcome by her mother’s head-dress and her father from head to foot—crushed by the mere dead-weight of Podsnappery. (129)

Georgiana is characterized by the awkwardness of youthful limbs that have not yet settled into their adult proportions. Her sporadic “peeps out” of childhood into womanhood are comically described as she is “solemnly tooled through the Park by the side of her mother in a great tall custard-coloured phaeton” and “show[s] above the apron of that vehicle like a dejected young person sitting up in bed to take a startled look at things in general, and very strongly desiring to get her head under the counterpane again” (130). Poised precariously between childhood innocence and adult knowledge, Georgiana is left vulnerable to the wiles of the Lammles, husband and wife, who try to make money by marrying her off to the callow Fledgeby. While spared this fate, she departs the novel still a “credulous little creature,” “with her poor little red eyes and weak chin peering over the great apron of the custard-coloured phaeton, as if she had been ordered to expiate some childish misdemeanour by going to bed in the daylight, and were peeping over the counterpane in a miserable flutter of repentance and low spirits” (648).

Dickens’s multifaceted response to childhood no doubt owes much to the diversity of opinion circulating about the topic in his own day. A particularly salient opposition was sensed between the Evangelical emphasis on original sin and what Peter Coveney in Poor Monkey (1957) and then in The Image of Childhood (1967) has seen as the reinvention of childhood, towards the end of the eighteenth century, as an ideal state. On the one hand, the belief that children come into the world “trailing clouds of glory” (as Wordsworth expressed it in his “Immortality” Ode) was cherished by many; upon our young hearts is stamped an “image of Eden,” says one of Nicholas Nickleby’s travelling companions, that then “chafes and rubs in our rough struggles with the world, and soon wears away.”¹⁶ This belief also had its “mockers,” however—to Hardy’s Tess, “as to not a few millions of others, there was ghastly satire in the poet’s lines”¹⁷—and its opponents often insisted that the rubbing and chafing (and the Tickling, indeed) would be what saved the child, not what ruined him or her. “It was universally admitted that to spare the rod was to spoil the child,” notes Samuel Butler’s narrator.¹⁸ Far from being naturally predisposed to virtue, children, on this view, can only attain anything approaching decency if they are continually and strenuously disciplined into it. Dickens reflects and symbolically resolves this contradiction, Angus Wilson suggests, when in Great Expectations he creates “an allegory of a child, Pip, whose good impulses are personified in Joe and whose bad impulses are acted out by Orlick.”¹⁹

To follow the giddying fluctuations of Pip’s moral capacities, Dickens creates a continual fluctuation in the novel’s retrospective first-person narrative, which has no sooner given us Pip the perceiving subject than it gives us Pip the obje...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• Notes on Contributors
• Foreword by Malcolm Andrews
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• PART I THE DICKENSIAN CHILD
• PART II CHILDHOOD AND MEMORY
• PART III CHILDREN, READING AND WRITING
• Index