Volume 32 (2003)
Embracing the New Spirit of the Age: Dickens and the Evolution of The Old
Curiosity Shop
PAUL SCHLICKE
As The Old Curiosity Shop evolved out of Master Humphrey’s
Clock, Dickens engaged with a number of concerns in his life, his art,
and his times. The image of an innocent child in threatening circumstances took
powerful hold of his imagination. Quilp personifies that threat, but it is the
pathological addiction of Nell’s grandfather to gambling which undoes
her, and the countryside to which they flee offers no escape. In his development
of Swiveller from a Regency gent into a responsible Victorian hero Dickens found
a positive way to link the imaginative responsiveness of a city-dweller with
moral responsibility.
Narrating History in Scott and Dickens
H.M. DALESKI
This essay sets out to compare how Scott and Dickens, writing as novelists,
approach historic material that is an essential part of their narratives. A
common ground for the comparison is provided by their descriptions of historic
riots that involve the storming of prisons, that of the Tolbooth during the
Porteuos Riots in The Heart of Midlothian, and of Newgate during the
Gordon Riots in Barnaby Rudge. The critical criterion for the comparison,
following a dictum of Joseph Conrad, is the degree to which the novelists succeed
in making us visualize the events they describe. The analysis suggests that
Scott works much more like an historian than does Dickens. Scott sticks close
to his sources and is careful not to deviate from them. Dickens vouches for
the authenticity of his descriptions of the riots, but gives his imagination
free rein in his evocation of them and the way he integrates this material in
the narrative as whole.
"They lost the whole": Telling Historical (Un)Truth
in Barnaby Rudge
GEORGE SCOTT CHRISTIAN
Critics have long struggled over the status of Barnaby Rudge, both
in the Dickens canon and as historical fiction. The novel, however, defies easy
categorization, partly because Barnaby Rudge is a comic expression
of history’s essential unnarratability. In the novel Dickens rejects the
possibility of either a complete apprehension of the historical field or a comprehensive
knowledge of it. This rejection is expressed in the voice of Grip, who proves
either unwilling or unable to narrate the “tale” of the Gordon Riots.
Grip’s narrative demonstrates that prescriptive narratives, such as “history,”
cannot transcend epistemological limitations on individual perceptions and understanding;
instead, in order to teach us anything at all, it must be limited to a sympathetic
exchange between individuals. Dickens imagines “truth telling” as
a comic process of breaking down the illusory coherence of all historical narratives—particularly
those of the novel’s master manipulators, who seek to commandeer history
to serve their personal desires. In short, Grip’s tale teaches us to “lose
the whole” in order to gain it, to avoid being co-opted and controlled
by narratives that promise social and moral improvement, but deliver only recurrent
private and public violence and oppression.
Of Jews and Ships and Mob Attacks, Of Catholics and Kings: The
Curious Career of Lord George Gordon
JEFFREY L. SPEAR
Though it was the largest civil disturbance since Monmouth’s Rebellion,
the Gordon Riots constitute a neglected chapter of English history, one most
often invoked as background to Barnaby Rudge. This essay looks around
Dickens’s novel and the tradition it helped establish to the riots themselves
and the circumstances around Gordon’s conversion to Judaism. It then returns
to the novel to suggest that the discrepancy between the political issues of
Gordon’s time and those ascribed to him and the rioters in historical
fiction adumbrates a radical political novel that Dickens had neither the will
nor what Pierre Bourdieu calls the cultural “space possibilities”
to write.
"What the Waves Were Always Saying"
: Submerging Masculinity in Dombey in Son
CLAIRE SENIOR
It is surely fair to say that Dombey and Son’s almost constant
references to water gradually “submerge” the masculine realm represented
by the novel’s title character. Dickens’s construction and subsequent
deconstruction of femininity, however, is far more problematic. While Florence’s
female sentimentality is continually viewed as dangerous by her father, it is
she who extends the life of her beloved brother, and she who is able to attain
emotional fulfillment through the community of the Wooden Midshipman, and, ultimately,
marriage to Walter Gay. Dombey’s second marriage to Edith Granger, a woman
who is unable to express this sort of feminine feeling, brings him no such happiness,
but the idealized domesticity of the Midshipman is portrayed in a decidedly
uneven fashion, a microcosm of Dickens’s apparent inability to decide
whether to praise or condemn the aquatic dissolution of the male. In the end,
while Dickens provides the expected ending, there is no real resolution of these
issues.
Inspector Bucket versus Tom-all-Alone’s: Bleak House,
Literary Theory, and the Condition-of-England in the 1850s
SIMON JOYCE
It has recently seemed something of a litmus test for new schools of literary
theory to demonstrate themselves through a close reading of Bleak House.
Taking up the challenge to examine the novel through the lens of cultural studies,
this essay seeks first to locate the novel in historical context. Written less
than a decade after the appearance of a small unit of London detectives, the
text reflects early anxieties about the efficiency and impartiality of these
public servants, although Dickens’s own journalistic writings tended to
exaggerate the abilities of officers like the real-life inspector Field. Where
New Historicist criticism in particular has tended to take such claims at face
value, early readers of Bleak House were confused by Inspector Bucket,
and identified instead with the crossing sweeper, Jo. Reed in relation to the
“condition-of-England” novels by Gaskell and others, and Dickens’s
own interest in welfare and sanitary reform, Jo shows the weakness of contemporary
projects of social amelioration, including those that operated through the agency
of the new police. In that sense, Bucket’s insistence that Jo simply “move
on” from place to place illustrates a larger political failure to develop
reform strategies for the urban poor.
Editorial Interventions: Hard Times’s Industrial
Imperative
JULIE M. DUGGER
Critics have often noted that Charles Dicken’s Hard Times fails
to suggest specific solutions to the social problems it describes. This refusal,
however, should be interpreted not as a failure, but rather as a reflection
of the changes wrought by industrialism in the world of London publishing, and
particular the new roles emerging for editors as a result of those changes.
This essay locates Hard Times in the contexts of Stephan Blackpool’s
resemblance to Thomas Carlyle’s “Editor” in Past and Present
and of recent criticism on Dickens’s work as an editor and as an author
in the other genres, claiming that the manufacturing world portrayed in Hard
Times was modeled on the publishing world which produced that novel, and
correspondingly that both Stephan and the novel itself pursue a figuratively
“editorial” model of activism within those worlds. That is, their
actions invoke a concept of reform in which the agents of social transformation
pursue their ends as participants in a collaboratively- and institutionally-structured
community, rather than as autonomously-inspired individuals. Focusing on the
figure of the editor underlying Hard Times thus allows us to seek out
in the literary field the same kinds of collaborative endeavors which critics
have admired in reform movements in the industrial field, as well as to reexamine
our expectations about how literature itself should participate in such reform
movements.
Little Dorrit and Providence
MARK KNIGHT
Many commentators have observed that when Dickens began to write Little
Dorrit, he intended to write a story in which no one was willing to accept
responsibility for his or her actions. Although the original title for the book,
Nobody’s Fault, was subsequently abandoned, the initial theme
remained of central importance. As a result, the reader is encouraged to consider
the issue of human responsibility in the course of a debate between free will
and determinism, a debate which, as I argue, is located within a theological
framework. The novel may include a variety of secular parallels and alternatives
to this framework, but ultimately, it insists on exploring the issue of human
responsibility via the theological concept of providence. The second half of
the article examines three providential models that are present in Little
Dorrit: determinism, deism, and agent causation. While the first two models
are found wanting, the third, embodied in the character of Pancks, is shown
to provide a successful conception of providence in which an agent, who is neither
entirely determined not completely autonomous, is capable of asserting his individuality
amid a world in which various determinants exert a powerful influence.
Help Wanting: The Exhaustion of a Dickensian Ideal
DANIEL SIEGEL
Though he has come to personify the greatest ambitions of Victorian philanthropy,
Dickens, at the height of his career, abandoned the very image of charity he
had so fiercely advocated throughout his early works. Initially, elaborates
an ideal of “personal charity” as one that can inspire extreme acts
of social recognition and class conciliation. This ideal becomes most profound
in the novels of his middle period, in which personal encounters between rich
and poor expose prior histories of abuse and neglect, and, through such exposures,
provide an avenue for restitution and recovery. Yet, beginning in Little
Dorrit, a charity based on personal relation loses its power to reconcile;
intimacy itself becomes a tool whereby the poor and disaffected are better manipulated.
Through the dissolution of the Meagles household and the anti-philanthropic
thrust of Amy Dorrit’s eventual ascendancy, Dickens dismantles the ideal
of personal charity, insisting that even the exertions of the most earnest benefactors
are finally performed in the interests of their own security.
Sucking the Empire Dry: Colonial Critique in The Mystery
of Edwin Drood
MIRIAM O'KANE MARA
Many critics have considered Charles Dickens's attitudes about imperialism to
be unified throughout his career. Citing his fiction and letters, they find
ethnocentrism and intolerance for colonial subjects. While this perspective
on the colonies was indeed present, it may be qualified by investigating Dickens's
later work, in particular The Mystery of Edwin Drood. Dickens's unfinished
novel moves away from his previous colonial position and instead criticizes
colonialism by juxtaposing British domestic consumption with the effect of empire.
By examining the character in the novel and their consumption of colonial commodities,
including opium, I argue that Dickens's last novel subtly critiques such consumption.
The critique suggests, then, that the appetites of the British themselves, rather
than some taint or infection from the colonies, adulterates the colonial system
and, in turn, England itself.
"Proud possession to the English nation":
Victorian Philanthropy and Samuel Johnson's Goddaughter
JUDE V. NIXON
From April 1855 to May 1856, Carlyle, Dickens, and Forster sponsored a benevolence
on behalf of two Deptford spinsters, Ann Elizabeth and Frances Meliora Lucia
Lowe, daughters to Mauritius Lowe, R.A., friend to Samuel Johnson. Knowledge
of the Lowes Memorial remains scant, much of it veiled in hitherto unpublished
letters. And the little that we can glean from the Dickens letters does not
provide an altogether lucid picture. A more comprehensible portrait of this
charitable venture will come with the release of volumes 29 to 31 of The
Collected Letters of Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle. Dickens's involvement
is hardly surprising, considering his centrality to domestic charities and generosity
to destitute individuals. The plan appealed to the Lord Palmerston, whose inability
to deliver a Civil List Pension prompted a public appeal in The Times.
Approximately £300 was raised, reflecting some curious observations on
which Victorians gave and how much. The Memorial reveals a complex set of ideas
about Victorian philanthropy, demonstrating, among other things, the way Victorians
rallied to support an exclusive pair whose ties to Samuel Johnson demanded national
attention, urgency, and munificence. Additionally, the Lowes Memorial expands
our understanding of Victorian charities—their goals, scope, and politics;
the identity of their sponsors and donors; the interaction between sponsors
and beneficiaries; and the ways monies were raised and dispersed.
The Widowhood of Catherine Dickens
LILLIAN NAYDER
This essay examines the cultural and legal significance of widowhood for Victorian
women as well as the particular experience of widowhood for Catherine Dickens.
It considers the effects of Charles Dickens’s death on the wife from whom
he separated in 1958, correcting the tendency of Dickens critics and biographers
to engage in what Catherine Dickens's friend, the novelist Annie Thomas, termed
"the suttee business." Despite the commonly held assumption that her
life effectually ended with that of her husbands in 1870, if not with their
separation twelve years before, Catherine Dickens played a variety of meaningful
roles in the nine years between her husband's death and her own, a period in
which she enjoyed her improved status as Dickens’s widow, strengthened
her ties to a number of her children, and sought to move from the margins of
her family to its center.
Impounding the Future: Some Uses of the Present Tense in Dickens
and Collins
SUSAN LYNN BECKWITH and JOHN R. REED
Both Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins make interesting use of present-tense
narration in their fiction. Collins imbeds a present-tense text within the main
narrative of The Woman in White, and Dickens alternates between present-
and past-tense narration in The Mystery of Edwin Drood. Collins exploits
the immediacy act of the present tense in the conventional mode of the diary,
but Dickens more experimentally uses a nondiegetic present-and-past-tense narrator.
Both writers seek to create anxiety about the future in their readers while
still implying a providential design at work in human affairs. Both Collins
and Dickens use present-tense narration for enhancing suspense and increasing
narrative authority through the withholding of information about the future,
but Dickens is more inventive, using a single narrator who moves between history
and discourse and employing a shifting focalization that includes the narrator.
Wilkie Collins's Villainous Miss Gwilt, Criminality, and the
Unspeakable Truth
MARIA K. BACHMAN and DON RICHARD COX
The foreword to Wilkie Collins's novel Armadale warns that the book may offend
some readers because it is a book "daring enough to speak the truth"
Collins, however, does not mention specifically just how the book "oversteps,
in more than on direction," the limits of what he labels the "Clap-trap
morality" of the day. Critics who have focused only on the crimes of the
novel's villain, the outrageous Miss Gwilt, have overlooked the book's undeniable
emphasis on sexuality, specifically the homoerotic bond that exists between
the novel’s two protagonists, Allan Armadale and Ozias Midwinter. Collins
repeatedly hints at the irrepressible passion between the two, a passion they
can acknowledge privately, but not publicly. Indeed, given the attitude towards
sodomy that was present in nineteenth-century England (it was a capital crime
until 1861), it is clear that the frequent hysterical fits of Midwinter reflect
his own homosexual panic as he contemplates the criminality of the love that
"dare not speak its name." Lydia Gwilt, who appears on the scene as
this relationship is nearing a climax, represents an unspeakable pathology of
male homosocial desire, the signification of the criminal. The Armadale/Gwilt/Midwinter
triangle that ensues reveals the love shared by the men as she attempts to come
between them and inherit a fortune by marrying Midwinter and murdering Armadale.
Miss Gwilt finally decides to kill herself instead, because she understands
that the love the two men share will continue unabated. At the novel's conclusion
Armadale marries the asexual Neelie Milroy, but he also vows that he will never
part from Midwinter, thus preserving homosexuality as an option which Collins
depicts, but refuses to judge.
Charles Lutwidge Dodgson's Infatuation with the Weaker and More
Aesthetic Sex Reexamined
HUGUES LEBAILLY
Again and again, the Reverend C.L. Dogson, better known under his pen name of
Lewis Carroll, is described in the media as a more or less active child lover,
whose single lifelong source of pleasure would have been the company of prepubescent
girls. If his most famous extant photographs indeed depict little girls in various
attires, an objective examination of his unabridged diaries and published letters
demonstrates that, far from deliberately dropping his young friends when they
reached puberty, he was very intent on stretching his acquaintance with them
as long and as far as they were willing, and as Mrs. Grundy would allow him.
The actual ages of the recipients of his so-called letters to child-friends,
and his repeated marks of satisfaction at being able to go around with older
girls and women as he himself grew older, as well as massive evidence for his
fascination with the adult naked female body, have all been overlooked by most
of his biographers so far. In this day and age when pedophilia is widely condemned
as an abominable crime, it is important the image of one of the greatest Victorian
writers be cleared of such outrageous and ungrounded suspicions.
A Secret Garden of Repressed Desires Frances Hodgson Burnett’s
That Lass O’Lowries
JEANETTE ROBERTS SHUMAKER
Frances Hodgson Burnett’s That Lass O’Lowries (1877),
set in Lancashire’s mining district, extends traits associated with bourgeois
femininity to “good” women of the lower and upper classes, concealing
the depth of class conflicts. Burnett’s strapping, working-class heroine,
Joan Lowrie, transforms into a domestic angel through her repressed affection
for the bourgeois hero, Fergus Derrick. By the end of Lass, the values of the
working class and the upper class have been abandoned to the enable Joan to
promote the values of the middle class who served as Burnett’s primary
audience. However, through characterizing Joan as possessing not only the virtues
of the middle class femininity but physical strength as well, Burnett revises
the standards of bourgeois femininity to some extent. Burnett’s revision
has implications for class and race relations, because it indirectly supports
eugenics. Whereas Burnett glorifies a superb female specimen through Joan, eugenicists
would later foster persecution of the supposedly unfit.