Dickens's Secular Gospel

Work, Gender, and Personality

Chris Louttit

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781135217501
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

The first full-length study on the subject of Dickens and work, this book reshapes our understanding of Dickens by challenging a critical oversimplification: that Dickens's attitude towards work reflects conventional expressions of Victorian earnestness of the sort attributed also to Thomas Carlyle, John Ruskin, and even more simplistically, Samuel Smiles. Instead, by analyzing a wide range of Dickens's fiction and journalism in the light of new biographical and historical research, Louttit shows that Dickens is not interested in work as an abstract, positive value, or even in cataloguing it in concrete detail. What he explores instead is the human dimension of work: how, in other words, work affects the lives of those engaged in it. His writing about work is, as a result, best viewed not merely as a quasi-religious Gospel of Work, nor as an objective sociological report, but rather as what Louttit terms a "secular gospel."

1 Work and the Shaping of Personality

SIGNIFICANT APPEARANCES

There are, according to George Newlin’s Everyone in Dickens, “a total of 3,592 name usages, and nearly that many named characters” in Dickens’s works of fiction. Of these 1,024 male and 137 female characters pursue an occupation or vocation.¹ Given that the number of those in work comes to just over 30% of Dickens’s characters, it might seem an overstatement to claim, as Humphry House does in his classic study The Dickens World, that “Nearly everybody in Dickens has a job” and that “there is a passionate interest in what people do for a living and how they make do.”² As House continues to note, however, what is most striking is the variety and detail of what Dickens’s people “do”:

The shopkeepers and land-ladies, who contribute so much to the atmosphere of close though honest business, have no monopoly of the working scene. Milliner, washerwoman, engineer, shipwright, glove-cleaner, barber, midwife, wet-nurse, waterman; actors, showmen, detectives, schoolmasters, are traced among the most surprising technical details.³

The range of occupations portrayed in his fiction makes Dickens stand out amongst Victorian novelists. George Eliot and Thomas Hardy, it is true, present the lives of provincial agricultural workers in some detail. In his novels Anthony Trollope effectively conveys the minutiae of professional and aristocratic life. None, however, match the breadth of occupations represented by Dickens.

As Humphry House and subsequent critics have noticed, moreover, in Dickens’s fiction work plays an important role in shaping the personalities of those who undertake it. In a recent study Andrew Sanders suggests that: “In many instances in Dickens’s fiction work defines character. It certainly determines circumstances, residence, clothes, and patterns of speech, all of them aspects of the delineation of character in which Dickens excels.”⁴ Sanders’s statement is especially true of a number of supporting characters in the novels of the late 1830s and 1840s. In Nicholas Nickleby (1838–39), for instance, Mr. Lillyvick is “a collector of water rates” whose occupation strongly influences his personal demeanor: “If ever a collector had borne himself like a collector, and assumed before all men a solemn and portentous dignity as if he had the world on his books and it was all two quarters in arrear, that collector was Mr Lillyvick” (NN, 645). Codlin and Short, the travelling Punch and Judy men from The Old Curiosity Shop (1840–41), also show such occupational markers:

One of them, the actual exhibitor no doubt, seemed to have unconsciously imbibed something of his hero’s [Punch] character. The other—that was he who took the money—had rather a careful and cautious look, which was perhaps inseparable from his occupation also. (OCS, 130)

More exhaustive yet is the portrayal of Bailey in Martin Chuzzlewit (1843–44), who is “a highly-condensed embodiment of all the sporting grooms in London” (MC, 401). The typical attributes of a groom filter into his garb, his actions, even the way he speaks. He wears, then, what might be called a “sporting” uniform: “A grass-green frock-coat … bound with gold, and a cockade” in his hat (MC, 401). And his habitual actions are inflected by a particular kind of horsiness; when asking a question, he includes “a straddling action of the white cords, a bend of the knees, and a striking forth of the top-boots,” for added emphasis, since it is “an easy, horse-fleshy, turfy sort of thing to do” (MC, 400). His conversation, predictably enough, tends towards “various sporting topics; especially on the comparative merits, as a general principle, of horses with white stockings, and horses without” (MC, 400–1). Even what might be described as his worldview is inflected by this “turfy” quality; he judges gentlemanliness by quantity and specific appearance of facial hair, observing of his “Governor” that “You can’t see his face for his whiskers, and can’t see his whiskers for the dye upon ’em,” lustily adding “That’s a gentleman, a’nt it?” (MC, 400). Bailey’s appearance and manner appear, then, to be entirely “from head to heel Newmarket” (MC, 407).⁵

These three examples from the early fiction provide a far from exhaustive survey of characters who, in various ways, embody their occupations. As Humphry House argues, however, there is a sense in which Dickens’s use of such occupational markers is repetitive and an aesthetic failure.⁶ The tendency does seem to represent a particular example of what many critics have seen as the shallowness of Dickens’s art, bewitched by surfaces but inferior in its exploration of any kind of depth. George Eliot famously claimed that:

We have one great novelist who is gifted with the utmost power of rendering the external traits of our town population; and if he could give us their psychological character—their conceptions of life, and their emotions—with the same truth as their idiom and manners, his books would be the greatest contribution Art has ever made to the awakening of social sympathies.⁷

After her remarks several critics of the novel, including Henry James and E. M. Forster, have had similar reservations about the apparent superficiality of Dickens’s fiction, especially its rendering of character.⁸ Approaching Dickens’s writings from an ideological as well as an aesthetic angle, Raymond Williams has also been critical of Dickens’s handling of characters defined only by their occupations, claiming that Toodles and Cuttle from Dombey and Son (1846–48) are “subjected” by Dickens “who defines their whole reality in the jargon of their job.”⁹

Such reservations about Dickens’s fictional techniques are perhaps inevitable if we view them through either a high realist or Marxist lens. What House, Williams and other critics neglect in making these judgments about Dickens, however, are specifically Victorian conceptions of how the inner personality of an individual is conveyed to others. As Richard Sennett explains, in the early nineteenth century it was believed that:

One really knew about a person by understanding him at the most concrete level—which consisted of details of clothes, speech, and behavior. In the clothes and speech of Balzac’s Paris, appearances were therefore no longer at a distance from self, but rather clues to private feeling; conversely, ‘the self’ no longer transcended its appearances in the world. This was the basic condition of personality.¹⁰

This belief in the central importance of external appearance in revealing the mysteries of the self expresses itself in several ways in the cultural life of the earlier part of the Victorian period. Emerging sciences like physiognomy, which Lucy Hartley calls “a means of describing character through expression,”¹¹ and anthropology—whether in the East End of London or the tropics—aimed to discover the essence of things through external characteristics.¹² As Mary Cowling has convincingly shown, such assumptions also influenced the work of visual artists and literary men.¹³

The focus of Cowling’s The Artist as Anthropologist is the Victorian painter William Powell Frith. In defending her subject against his detractors she reinforces the necessity of viewing Frith’s work in relation to current social attitudes. Cowling argues that:

Accused as he sometimes is of painting externals only, it is easy to forget the significance with which his age invested them; easy to forget, too, the novelty which the urban crowd still offered, in its size, its variety, and in the striking contrasts which arose from its chance composition.¹⁴

In many ways this insight is pertinent in further understanding the influences at work on the presentation of characters defined by their jobs in Dickens’s fiction. It hardly needs to be said that Dickens is one of the pre-eminent urban novelists, and just as fascinated by the “novelty” and “variety” of the urban crowd as Frith. Less obviously, his work can also be viewed as an important contribution to the rich visual and verbal tradition of categorizing individual city dwellers as particular “types,” partly as a means of dealing with the rich and perplexing heterogeneity of urban life. This form of representation can be traced as far back as the Cries of London, “a rich iconographic tradition depicting city characters of many stripes” in many media, from broadsides to illustrated books.¹⁵ In the nineteenth century it finds expression in an interesting range of sources, and is generally influenced by emerging scientific and classificatory impulses. Mary Cowling points out, by way of context for her discussion of Frith, that “A whole literary genre developed in response to [physiognomical and anthropological] activity in the 1840s,” and “a whole series of artists and writers were … attracted to [the] rich variety” of characters on the urban scene.¹⁶ In the subsequent decade, Tim Barringer suggests that both the text and illustrations for Henry Mayhew’s social survey London Labour and the London Poor (1850–62) and Ford Madox Brown’s masterpiece Work (1852–65) are “indebted” to the “traditional prints of the Cries of London.”¹⁷ Both certainly claim to create a taxonomy of workers. As Barringer points out, “The organising principle of Mayhew’s London Labour was categorisation by occupation … he was concerned with types rather than individuals.”¹⁸ Madox Brown himself, “undoubtedly influenced by Henry Mayhew’s research practices” according to Barringer, admitted that in Work “My object … in all cases, is to delineate types and not individuals.”¹⁹

We do not know for certain that Dickens ever read London Labour and the London Poor, or that he ever saw Work.²⁰ It seems highly likely, however, that he was familiar with the conventions of the 1840s “literary genre” described by Cowling in her study. Dickens of course made an excursion into the genre himself with Sketches by Boz, and pieces such as “Thoughts about People” are wry, Dickensian versions of this kind of writing on urban types.²¹ Described as “sketches of types representing various trades and callings” by Michael Slater, this largely-forgotten genre was “much favoured by the Romantic essayists, especially Leigh Hunt, and one with an ancient lineage going back all the way via La Bruyère and Sir Thomas Overbury to Theophrastus.”²² As has been effectively demonstrated by Grahame Smith, Dickens had an excellent knowledge of the eighteenth-century and Romantic essay form.²³ According to Smith “the influence of the eighteenth century in forming him as journalist, editor and essay writer is undeniable.”²⁴ There is firm evidence too that he was familiar with Leigh Hunt’s prose writings; John Drew tells us that, as well as having read widely in the essay form, a collected edition of Hunt’s works was “holiday reading” for Dickens in 1839.²⁵

To pay close attention to specific examples of such “occupational sketches” by Hunt, Douglas Jerrold and other writers in the 1840s demonstrates Dickens’s indebtedness to them in creating characters like Lilyvick, Short, Codlin, and Bailey. Thus, in sketches by Hunt such as “The Maidservant,” “The Waiter,” and “The Butcher,” the subjects are given the predictable features of recognizable types. His “Maidservant” has among her belongings: “an odd volume of Pamela, and perhaps a sixpenny play, such as George Barnwell or Mrs Behn’s Oroonoko.”²⁶ His “Butcher” too is expectedly hearty: “The beef mingles kindly with his animal nature. He goes fat with the best of it, perhaps with inhaling its very essence.”²⁷ In another collection of occupational sketches to which Hunt contributed, edited by Douglas Jerrold and entitled Heads of the People (1840–1), the woodcuts by Kenny Meadows in fact preceded the accompanying essays.²⁸ These are distinctive illustrations; it is unsurprising that Henry Vizitelly said that Meadows had a “quaint way of looking at things.”²⁹ The written pieces may not quite match up to the quirkiness of the engravings. They nevertheless include what Michael Slater calls some “highly effective vignettes of common scenes,”³⁰ in which, for many of the characters portrayed, what they do turns into what they are. Like the rather smug-looking figure in the illustration which accompanies the sketch, we read that “from being continually consulted and appealed to [the solicitor] attains a certain look of self-satisfaction [and] a perfect reliance on his own acumen.”³¹ In the case of the portrait of the capitalist a piece of occupational detail is extended almost to the point of ridiculousness in a description of his eye:

it is not piercing and restless, like the lawyer’s; it is not stolid and staring, like the parson’s; it is not veiled and blinking, like the soldier’s; but it is a good clear, bright eye—nine times out of ten, grey, or greyish blue—clear and firm, but mild and quick.³²

This comically reinforces the point that it was commonly understood that such fine distinctions could be made between professional types. In another essay comprising a law clerk’s account of a colleague, the character’s faithfulness to the job is so strong that it influences the kind of literary entertainment that he favors to the exclusion of all else, thus “he had never read any book but a law book since he had left off studying Vyse on Spelling; and if he read a newspaper, it was that interesting portion headed Nisi Prius.”³³

In assessing the portrayal of characters such as Lillyvick and Bailey, then, it is important to keep these conceptual, visual, and literary contexts in mind. Seen in this light they become novelistic versions of the caricatures drawn by Kenny Meadows for Heads of the People, and a response to the sometimes puzzling variety of types from the urban crowd rather than what E. M. Forster would label “flat” characters.³⁴ At the same time this is to let Dickens off too easily, especially since his sophisticated handling of the relationship between work and personality moves beyond this context, especially in the latter part of his career. Mary Cowling is right about the “significance … invested” in “externals” in the Victorian period, and several studies, including Lucy Hartley’s, have shown convincingly how much was invested in sciences like physiognomy whose aim was to reveal how a person’s appearance signified their inner personality. Yet this is surely only part of the picture. Appearances were not everything, and not always to be trusted. For one thing, the nineteenth century saw the development of the kind of psychological realism first seen in the fiction of writers like Samuel Richardson and Jane Austen in the acute and sophisticated novels of George Eliot, Henry James, and others. There was also a persistent fascination, and perhaps anxiety, with what remained hidden, and with secrets and disguise, both in the wider culture and in novels by Dickens and in sensation novels by the likes of Wilkie Collins and Mary Elizabeth Braddon.³⁵ Dickens sits on the cusp of both ways of viewing the world.

“TRADES … AND THE WAY THEY SET THEIR MARKS ON MEN”

Henry Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor has already been used in this chapter as an example of a systematic taxonomy of urban workers. As critics such as Gertrude Himmelfarb and Anne Humpherys have pointed out in different ways, however, appro...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Abbreviations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Dickens, Work, and the Victorians
• 1 Work and the Shaping of Personality
• 2 Gendering the Laboring Body
• 3 Dickens and the Professions
• 4 Dickens and Domestic Management
• 5 Dickens’s Idle Men
• Epilogue: Occupation, Disguise, and Personality in Dickens’s Late Novels
• Notes
• Select Bibliography