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A Brief History of Western Culture – Michael Peverett |
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A Brief History of Western Culture
By Michael Peverett
Charles Dickens (1812-1870)
The Old Curiosity Shop (1840-41)
A Child's History of England (1851-53)
Charles Dickens (Una Pope-Hennessy, 1945)
Forster, Johnson, Kaplan... the Lives of Dickens aren’t inspiring, and this is surely something to do with the man himself. No-one who read a biography of Dickens without knowing his books (impossible supposition) would suspect him of having written anything worthwhile. He emerges as frivolous, dandyish, conventional, an energetic businessman; on the whole, unamiable. His friends are not astounding (just think of Scott’s...) - he scarcely reads, is a philistine in art, drifts rather helplessly through married life and divorce, takes his notions from Carlyle of all people, is driven by motives it is hard to understand, constantly takes on too much, muddles through, lets people down. His unastounding friends patronize him even when they are overwhelmed by him, and we see their point of view. If Scott tends to underrate his own significance, he at least sees his art in recognizable terms. Dickens airily alludes to himself as “the Inimitable”, and that seems to be that. The features of his work that he openly discusses are trivia - he hopes to have “a great effect” with little Paul, or The Chimes... That’s something like the way you suppose Desmond Wheatley or Frederick Forsyth would put it.
Presumably all this is an essential aspect
of (one can hardly call it an insight into) the unusual kind of greatness we
encounter in Bleak House, Little Dorrit... in all his novels to
some extent, for even the worst of them (let’s say, Tale of Two Cities)
has a uniqueness, a fire about it that becomes apparent when we try to place it
in the same universe as other books. Dickens, more than any other writer,
permitted his imagination to cut loose from his own conscious life and
opinions. Who else could do so? No-one who was not so naïve, so unintrospective, so
ill-educated, so insensitive, so buoyed up by early success that he never had
time to anxiously plan for.
And perhaps
this peculiar situation does give some clue to why, though his greatness
exceeds any other English novelist, it is not entirely happy. What I mean is
that, although Little Dorrit is our greatest novel and Bleak House
the most stupendous imaginative creation that is a novel, we always assert
Dickens’ claim with a dissatisfied sense of paradox - his failures and
limitations are peculiarly gross, he doesn’t happily supersede his competitors
in every way (thus we have come to think of Shakespeare), or even in most ways.
Just in a few ways, but in those, beyond argument.
And
still, in those few are infinities. In all that line of big books our chief
sense is of prodigal wealth - of how little we are wearied by repetition or
perfunctory narrative. When, as occasionally in Hardy or Kipling or Conrad, we
catch someone trying out a Dickensian sentence, we are embarrassed by their
lack of confidence - into this sea of creation they will never plunge. I
thought how unlike Mr Pickwick is to his author - and then I realized that all
Dickens’ characters are quite unlike the Dickens of the biography - he seems
never to have met himself. I suppose he never kept a journal - I can’t imagine
its voice.
I think
I have read all his novels at least twice - most of them three times, and some
four or more. Even so, when I touch one of them, or pass the “Collected” in a
corridor of Marston House, I’m impressed with a sense of the powerful energies
contained within. They certainly are not “inexhaustible”, and I doubtless absorbed
the essential image on first or second reading, but I know I’ll go back
sometimes. London is spoiled for me because I still see it as Dickens’ London
with flyovers - which means, I suppose, that I don’t see it very accurately -
or perhaps “London” is a bagatelle, a will o’ the wisp, a Boojum (I have
forgotten the word I want) that only exists in literature; there’s nothing but
this kerbstone, this pigeon, this bus-lane... my sense that This is London
- all the connotations and the “atmospheree” - are created by art alone - mostly
by Dickens.
[This was written in 2001. I decided a long
time ago not to chase around my Brief History trying to keep it all in
line with what I currently believe; the variety is more entertaining. In this
case what changed my idea of Dickens’ life and friends was the brief and
powerful “In Memoriam : W. M. Thackeray” (Cornhill,
Feb 1864). Here was witness to sides of Dickens not often seen. “We had our
differences of opinion. I thought that he too much feigned a want of earnestness,
and that he made a pretence of undervaluing his art, which was not good for the
art that he held in trust. But, when we fell upon these topics, it was never
very gravely, and I have a lively image of him in my mind, twisting both his
hands in his hair, and stamping about, laughing, to make an end of the
discussion.” Though Dickens’ poetic was certainly enigmatic, I now think he
maintained the enigma because he grasped that it went beyond what could then be
verbalized.]
Charles
Dickens: The Pickwick Papers (1836-37)
It was
1985. After nearly six months as an IT trainee I joined the support team for
the Accounting section of the Property Services Agency. This was at Ashdown
House, in
Staff
morale was treated with perfunctory contempt. Occasionally we were summoned
into the canteen to hear a man in a suit say things like this:
“What
that means effectively is that... Essentially the winners in those environments
are those prepared to get out and compete and to take the knocks from trying to
get your views across... In terms of the timescale it’s been altered by the
announcement ... The number-one goal is to keep PSA services as a single
entity... That will be announced, probably in the next couple of days...
looking to... (raises palm in
self-deprecation) That’s an awful jargon word... We can expect personnel
functions to come down the line, away from the old centralized personnel
function... an early-versus-later privatization... pie-in-the-sky... Clearly,
in going into that wider marketplace we need to go where our strengths lie... the head-in-the-sand view... play to your
strengths... Germany Region where we have to deal with the German Construction Association, or the German equivalent of that...
aggressive... input once-and-once-only... In terms of handling that, what we’re
looking to do is avoid any compulsory redundancy... You take Croydon and
It
couldn’t have been clearer. A skip full of buff folders and find another job
fast.
There
were other voices. Sometimes, as if they weren’t used to it, they appeared in
cards on the noticeboard. “Never knew I had so many friends... I have a passion
for crystal-cut glassware...” “For
Meanwhile
IT management made its own efforts at communication:
IT TRAINING – WHO NEEDS IT
You may know the feeling – you just leave
the office to make a cup of coffee and when you get back your desk has broken
out with a severe case of PC fever. Wherever you turn Personal Computers seem
to be mushrooming and multiplying. It is no surprise perhaps, when you realise
that there are currently in excess of 120,000 terminals and PCs in the Civil
Service.
A
support officer notes:
These users are sometimes nervous of new IT
invading their offices, but they quickly tame the whirring beast and use it
with some sophistication, pushing the software to its limits.
But I’m
looking ahead. Let’s go back to 1985. I was so new that the only thing I didn’t
understand was the long, gentle, bearded faces of my calm colleagues. I never
would.
In our
team Gerry was the acknowledged expert on the labyrinthine suites of COBOL
programs that ran in batch overnight. Files of code filled shelves all along
one side of the long office. There were no screens; the terminals we used
resembled typewriters, our entries and the computer’s responses being printed
out on rolls of paper that were stored for several months like medieval scrolls.
Testing of programs was a slow business. To run a program we had to embed it in
a test job, with all the physical devices and files specifically assigned, and
make up a punched card, which was submitted later that evening in the distant
and cavernous computer hall. This initiated the test run. Down there in the
computer hall, shifts of operators readied tape drives,
ran off prints, and so on.
Though Irish by ancestry, and a republican, Gerry was English in accent
and in all his tastes. He was a sweet-tempered and interesting man. His face had the “worn”
impression that always intrigued me about people who had been in the same place
for quite a long time - I was still young enough to regard seven years as an
almost millennial stint. (At the other end of the long office sat our HEO, the
diminutive Peter West, another paternal and awesome figure. He was blind, and operated various complex braille and speaking
devices which enabled him to “see” the computer system with a clarity that none
of us could match.) I think now that perhaps I was never fully accepted into
this team, but at the time I loved working with Peter and Gerry. It was with
them that I first heard the sort of civil-service speech, so evocative of the
fifties and still so influenced by the second world war,
that I now realize was on the verge of extinction. By this I don’t mean
Gerry and
I had literary conversations. Sometimes they were about Bulldog Drummond (I
could not contribute much to this, except from analogy with John Buchan).
Otherwise they were about Dickens, and principally if not exclusively the Pickwick
Papers, whose opening chapters Gerry admired - I think he considered the
cricket match to be Dickens’ highest achievement. When, after writing about the
biography, I took up Pickwick as the only Dickens novel currently on my
bookshelf, I glanced at Chapter 12 and fell in with it; I recognized that it
satisfied a need (now much less pressing than in the past) for “light” reading
- a need formerly met by Buchan and Wodehoouse. No other Dickens novel does
this, and I began to understand Gerry’s opinion.
Incidentally
I also saw how seminal the book had been for Wodehouse. In Chapter 12 we have
the “conversation misconstrued as a proposal of marriage”; in Chapter 13 plying
the electors with drink, laudanum and green parasols; later, the necessity of
kissing a baby (“’Wouldn’t it have as good an effect if the proposer or
seconder did that?’ ... ‘Very well’ with a resigned air ‘then it must be done’”
- we almost hear Bertie Wooster saying “leead me to it”); in Chapter 14 the
bar-side storytelling with captious comments, a constant feature of the
Mulliner stories; later, numberless glasses of hot punch, with gradual change
of personality; in Chapter 15, the argument about Tupman’s choice of fancy
dress - a bandit (the germ of many Wodehouse conversations about Pierrots).
More radically transformed, the master-and-servant relationship is a source of
Jeeves and
* Tollgate House, a 3-spoked office high-rise in Bristol, built 1975,
demolished in 2006 - it was part of the site on the edge of St Jude's now gleamingly
occupied by Cabot Circus.
(2001)
Charles Dickens: The Old Curiosity Shop (1840-41)
The
Old Curiosity Shop and King Lear
“The
old gentleman again!” he would exclaim, “a very prepossessing old gentleman,
Mr. Richard – charming countenance, sir – extremely calm – benevolence in every
feature, sir. He quite realises my idea of King Lear, as he appeared when in
possession of his kingdom, Mr. Richard – the same good humour, the same white
hair and partial baldness, the same liability to be imposed upon. Ah! A sweet subject for contemplation, sir, very sweet!” (Ch.
LVII)
This is
Sampson Brass speaking to Dick Swiveller. Sampson is at a very early and tentative
– indeed nervous – stage in complying with Quilp’s instructions to dispose of
Kit. Old Mr Garland as Lear is the same kind of gloriously not-quite-right
rhapsody that, soon afterwards, has him saying of the pony “He literally looks
as if he had been varnished all over”. Sampson's speech also exemplifies
something rather frequent in The Old Curiosity Shop; words that seem to
have one intention about one thing but really and semi-ambiguously are
concerned with a different matter altogether. For obvious examples one might
note nearly everything that the parties say to each other during, and on the
day after, the trip to Astley’s: especially Barbara. Or the narrator’s refusal to
tell us in plain words that Nell’s health is failing when that's just what he
is insistently suggesting. We describe the nature of this duplicitous talk in
various ways according to the circumstances: delicacy, embarrassment, coyness,
euphemism, playing with our emotions, cruelty, evasiveness, fraud, etc. But it’s when we don’t have a label ready to
hand that things are most interesting.
Memories
of Lear do huddle in the shadows of The Old Curiosity Shop. When
the Victorian public sent agonized letters to the author imploring him to spare
Little Nell, they were registering something like Samuel Johnson’s shocked
reaction to the death of Cordelia, the scene he could not endure to re-read
until he edited the play. The long pages in which the author whispers to us of
Nell’s decline (LII-LV) have seemed to most later
readers as dull a succession of chapters as you can easily find in Dickens;
these were the pages, however, that troubled generous hearts and drove up the
circulation figures. (Edgar Allen Poe’s review [http://xroads.virginia.edu/~HYPER/poe/dickens.html]
gives a good idea of their impact on contemporary readers. For him the outstanding
figures in the book were Nell, her grandfather, the man by the furnace, and the
sexton.)
The last
scene of Lear is patently Dickens’ template for Nell’s grandfather in
Chapter LXXI: “’She used to feed them....’....Of the strangers he took no heed
whatever.... It was her hand, he said – a little – a very, very little – but he
was pretty sure she had moved it....’There was ever something mild and quiet
about her...’...’You plot among you to wean my heart from her...’
But the
most important parallel with Lear is the radical breakdown of a unified
narrative when Nell and her grandfather desert
Nell and
her grandfather, therefore, spend a large part of the novel in the
comparatively timeless space that is usually only opened up in Chapter the
Last. When The Old Curiosity Shop’s own Chapter the Last finally
arrives, it contains a few surprises. The vaguely positive pantomime energies
of the villainous Quilp are eventually developed into his boy Tom Scott’s
career as a tumbler with an Italian name. Then there are these:
two
wretched people were more than once observed to crawl at dusk from the inmost
recesses of St. Giles’s, and to take their way along the streets, with
shuffling steps and cowering shivering forms, looking into the roads and
kennels as they went in search of refuse food or disregarded offal. These forms
were never beheld but in those nights of cold and gloom, when the terrible
spectres, who lie at all other times in the obscene hiding-places of London, in
archways, dark vaults and cellars, venture to creep into the streets; the
embodied spirits of Disease, and Vice, and Famine.
These
houseless wretches, so like and yet (by sheer
authorial manipulation) so extremely unlike Nell and her grandfather, are the
Brasses.
The
final image of the book is also unexpected:
He
[Kit] sometimes took them [his children] to the street where she had lived; but
new improvements had altered it so much, it was not like the same. The old
house had been long ago pulled down, and a fine broad road was in its place. At
first he would draw with his stick a square upon the ground to show them where
it used to stand. But he soon became uncertain of the spot, and could only say
it was thereabouts, he thought, and that these alterations were confusing.
Kit’s
pettish vagueness is very unlike the personality we have seen in the rest of
the novel. It suggests that the alterations are not to the street alone, and
disquietingly enacts the sexton’s account of how graves cease to be tended, and
Nell’s grief “that those who die about us, are so soon forgotten” (Ch. LIV). On
that occasion the schoolmaster persuades her that “There is nothing, no,
nothing innocent or good, that dies, and is
forgotten”; its “blessed work” persists. At the end of the book Dickens finally
seems prepared to lay that thought aside.
The
accidental novel
Improvisation
plays a fairly generous part in all Dickens’ early novels, but
The
Old Curiosity Shop is often thought of as the most extreme instance, since DIckens was
already engaged on it (as a fairly low-key amusement in a miscellany called Master
Humphrey’s Clock) when he was forced to re-envisage it as a novel. Dickens’
initial conception was no doubt vague but must have been a sentimental
narrative based around the child, perhaps not unlike his later Christmas Book, The
Battle of Life (1846). The
novel was thus already embarked on and committed to certain lines of
development before there was any plan of a narrative sufficient to fill the
pages.
This
workroom view supplies some useful insights but is ultimately misleading. One
obvious way of elongating a narrative that had got itself started without a
plan was to disembarrass it of continuous plot and to restructure it along
picaresque lines, and that may be why Dickens thought of sending his heroine on
her travels (and thus away from the titular shop where he had doubtless at
first planned to keep her). However, that still left some London-based characters
who were plainly born to plotting and subterfuge, and who now found themselves scrapping over an essentially empty pot. The
fault-lines are apparent; Quilp’s malignity loses its object and has to be
re-trained against Kit; Dick Swiveller’s character is steadily re-modelled as
we go along. At its most distracted, this hand-to-mouth improvisation produces
the idling of chapters XLVII-XLVIII, in which two minor characters (the single
gentleman and Kit’s mother) fail to spark each other into life during a journey
that leads to no result whatever.
Improvisation
also seems like quite a good explanation for the deep and inchoate material
that the book liberates but does not master in a rational way; for the
disengagement of the surface business of the book from centres of interest that
are barely at the level of consciousness; for our recurrent sense that the
characters in the book (magnificent as they may be) are, like characters in a
dream, inconstantly symbolic of other things and of each other.
But it’s
misleading, I think, if we then assume that Dickens never got his head right
about the novel and just made a game play of the hand he’d unintentionally
dealt himself, the result a novel that is still amazingly good in a
patchily-inspired early-Dickens kind of way but undeniably rather a mess. It
seems clear, on the contrary, that the author got serious about what he was
doing at quite an early stage. “The difficulty has been tremendous – the
anguish unspeakable,” he wrote to Forster. He was not talking about pulling the
plot back on course (and in fact, as is apparent, he did not work very hard at
that), but about a project he had become profoundly immersed in, particularly
with regard to Nell. The “difficulty” implies a deeply-nurtured objective,
though the “anguish” is the author’s own grief about young and innocent death,
not any particular anguish of technical realisation. But his own strong feeling
is, I suppose, conceived as instrumental in producing a feeling narrative.
The
wanderers
This
commitment to a definite and envisaged course must, I suggest, have come to
birth very early indeed – perhaps around the time that Master Humphrey
dismisses himself from the novel (end of Ch III). The next chapter already
introduces Mrs Quilp, whose subsequent questioning of
Nell (Ch VI) will cause the loans to dry up and precipitate the crisis that
makes the old man and his grand-daughter run away. During that conversation the
theme of Nell and her grandfather wandering “in the fields and among the green
trees” is first introduced; what’s more, Nell associates it with the timeless
country where her dead mother is said to have flown. In these same chapters
Dickens begins to give casual indications of the season – early and fresh
summer, with the trees in full leaf.
When
Nell and her grandfather first talk about taking their chances in the open
fields (Ch IX), this is Nell’s childish ideal and it has no meaning for her grandfather;
he is still hoping to borrow more money, and besides it's not a very sensible
plan. The sensible solution that most penniless people would look for (to go
and live for a while with a friend) is in fact proffered in Ch XI. There would
be difficulties, no doubt (i.e. overcoming the grandfather’s distrust of Kit),
but Dickens does not make clear that Nell would refuse. In the end it is the
grandfather who precipitates their flight; he derangedly submits to her
manifestly childish idea and the whole subject is so sacred to her that Kit’s
alternative is never discussed. Both parties are already half-driven by a
death-wish though neither foresees the harshness of their choice.
The
wanderings are described in three groups of chapters; in between them the scene
switches back to what the
Once
roofless, seasons become critical. Dickens is very unemphatic but he has a good
grasp of their passing, and as it happens they closely match the actual dates
of serialisation, from April 1840 to February 1841. When Nell and her
grandfather set off it is early summer (“June” – Ch XII), the time of full
sunlight before waking, of country fairs and horse-races and flowers, the corn
still green. It’s the perfect time of year for forgetting, at least for a
while, that we can’t really live outside; the prospect of fair weather extends
hopefully into so dim a distance. During their time with Mrs Jarley it’s high summer – close weather, a thunderstorm, the long
tranquil evenings of following the sisters. By the time they depart there are
indications of September – morning mist, and a day or so later (when the barge
arrives in the industrial town) a long, cold rain. When Nell (after the
schoolmaster has rescued them) is looking out from the church porch she looks
at fallen leaves strewing the paths. She is autumnally gardening during the
premonitory chapters, and thinking of spring. When Kit and the others travel
west to find her already dead, it’s midwinter.
Chapter
XV begins with a description of leaving
At
length these streets, becoming more straggling yet, dwindled and dwindled away,
until there were only garden patches bordering the road, with many a
summer-house innocent of paint and built of old timber or some fragments of a
boat, green as the tough cabbage-stalks that grew about it, and grottoed at the
seams with toadstools and tight-sticking snails..... Then came a turnpike; then
fields again with trees and haystacks; then a hill; and on the top of that the
traveller might stop, and – looking back at Saint Paul’s looming through the
smoke, its cross peeping above the cloud (if the day were clear), and
glittering in the sun; and casting his eyes upon the Babel out of which it grew
until he traced it down to the furthest outposts of the invading army of bricks
and mortar whose station lay for the present nearly at his feet – might feel at
last that he was clear of London.
Near
such a spot as this, and in a pleasant field, the old man and his little guide
(if guide she were, who knew not whither they were bound) sat down to rest. She
had had the precaution to furnish her basket with some slices of bread and
meat, and here they made their frugal breakfast.
It’s a
blissful spot. If we share with that generalised traveller who stands on the
hill a shout of joy arising from the liberation of this comprehensive survey,
we are suddenly reminded by that parenthesis in the second paragraph that our
two wanderers are not in his case. They are not roaming for pleasure, they are
never going back, and they’re not on their way to anywhere else in particular;
Nell, as guide, is merely heading out. The strangeness of their
situation comes back to us.
They are
an odd and damaged pair, and the damage is best understood as referring to
their lethal relationship rather than to the two of them separately. Nell’s
grandfather is helpless without Nell, and he is helpless to Nell; in fact he
shuts off any practical course of survival. At the very first labourer’s
cottage they stop at (still in Chapter XV) they are offered the chance to stay
overnight, but the old man's fretfulness means they have to toil onward instead.
Even during this first idyllic picnic, he soon becomes distressed:
“I
can do nothing for myself, my darling,” said the grandfather, “I don’t know how
it is, I could once, but the time’s gone. Don’t leave me, Nell; say that thou’lt not leave me. I loved thee all the while,
indeed I did. If I lose thee too, my dear, I must die!”
The
mechanism of the relationship couldn’t be clearer. He has slipped into mental
dependence on a child, and the child is helpless to resist his emotional
demand. She cannot think beyond her duty; he would die! Her own existence
becomes purely a carer’s, and revolves entirely around him. She can have no
pleasures unrelated to him – that is, no normal pleasures (she just sleeps
through the Punch and Judy show). At the public-house the landlady is kindly to
her, but
As
nothing could induce the child to leave him alone, however, or to touch
anything in which he was not the first and greatest sharer, the old lady was
obliged to help him first.
To call
Nell idealised or lacking in personality is to miss the point. She cannot
possibly help behaving in an “ideal” way because the relationship has steadily
developed along lines that force her to do this. It’s impossible to speculate
how she might “naturally” behave without the constraint of this relationship,
which is lodged so deeply that she only exists within it. The frequency of
early mortality in Dickens’ time is often mentioned in connexion with The
Old Curiosity Shop – the frequency of juvenile self-sacrifice is just as
relevant.
Dickens,
therefore, takes us on a tour of
The
extremism of Nell’s viewpoint comes out during this very first stop. The
pleasant field reminds her of a picture in the Pilgrim’s Progress, and
she says:
“Dear
grandfather... only that this place is prettier and great deal better than the
real one, if that in the book is like it, I feel as if we were both Christian,
and laid down on this grass all the cares and troubles we brought with us;
never to take them up again.”
“No
– never to return – never to return” – replied the old man...
(He
appears to agree with her, but he isn’t really listening; each is locked in a
separate though equally drastic view of their experience.) Nell does not see
the place they’re in as different in kind from Christian’s allegorical vale;
she sees it as precisely a place with that significance, and though noting that
it is prettier and better, she does not understand sanely that this is because
it has the reality of what we call an actual place; in fact she finds it less
real than the place spoken of in the book, with its immense potency for
spiritual resignation. In any landscape her eye only quickens at portals to the
world in which her imagination lives: graveyards and death-beds above all. She
doesn’t know she is doing this to herself; her eye registers an utter
disengagement from the things that other people live for. It’s only as a carer
for the dead that her life has a meaningful role and she can enjoy a mournful
companionship; it’s only in the environments of death that she becomes eager to
learn something.
The
novel’s account of their wanderings is therefore continuously duplicitous: it
promises a wealth of participatory detail, and Dickens is always getting
started on this as only he can, but in Nell’s story all local colour is a dream
in which she cannot involve herself.
The
dancing-dogs, the stilts, the little lady and the tall man, and all the other
attractions, with organs out of number and bands innumerable, emerged from the
holes and corners in which they had passed the night, and flourished boldly in
the sun.
Dickens
could give way to the delights of race-day, as to the delights of Astley’s, but
a sombre and highly judgmental undertone is lurking here. Nell's presence
constrains him from quite giving way even to Mrs Jarley’s view of her wax-work,
and we end up not quite disbelieving in her lowness of spirits. Nell
(“frightened and repelled by all she saw”) automatically turns race-day into a
test that is pre-determined to fail; she plucks her humble nosegays not in the
practical hope of earning some money but as a pitiful cry for attention, which
only other unhappy people (like the ruined lady in the carriage) can interpret.
Many
a time they went up and down those long, long lines, seeing everything but the
horses and the race; when the bell rang to clear the course, going back to rest
among the carts and donkeys, and not coming out again until the heat was over.
This in
fact gives a true sense of how huge entertainments are experienced in a filtered
way, and not only by Nell; none of the stallholders would get to see much
horse-racing. The narrator abdicates his position as master of ceremonies.
Nell’s viewpoint is therefore challenging, since she shares an
unillusioned point of view with anyone else whose daily agenda is merely to
keep head above water. Also, we see how Nell’s frail nosegays are, for us and
the visitors, just another detail in the agreeable local colour.
Nell
as action hero
It is
not to be supposed that a child who so greatly values seclusion, humility and
meditation will undertake such actions as to get her involved in the world
around her. But she does have great power.
The
child sat silently beneath a tree, hushed in her very breath by the stillness
of the night, and all its attendant wonders (nb the stars). The time and
place awoke reflection, and she thought with a quiet hope – less hope, perhaps,
than resignation – on the past, and present, and what was yet before her. (Ch
XLII)
The word
“hope”, at first qualified by “quiet” and then progressively withdrawn, – because how would
you think hopefully about the past, and how meagre is that expression for the
future, “what was yet before her”? – emphasises the extent to which she has
shut down. At the sound of the clock she goes home, and passing a gipsy
encampment makes “a movement of timid curiosity”, the utmost she can stretch
to, – the gipsies being at any rate not quite so occluded as Miss Monflathers
and her like behind their gates. Then, realising her grandfather is by the
fire, she creeps along the hedge to spy, in a carer’s sort of way.
In
this way she advanced within a few feet of the fire, and standing among a few
young trees, could both see and hear, without much danger of being observed.
Dickens
suppresses the inevitable dogs in order to make it conceivable that Nell could
execute this R L Stevenson kind of manoeuvre, and very agile she seems among
the young trees: if she was a stayer-in at nights, this could hardly be
expected, but then she might have had a support network, which would have been
much more useful. As it is, her only (strong and
impassioned) response to what she discovers here is to drag her grandfather
away on a hopeless escape that can only end one way. And it does, of course,
though the good fortune of meeting the schoolmaster delays it for a few months.
It would be incorrect to say that she chooses her death, or that it’s a cry of
rage or any kind of statement for the attention of the world she has been
indifferent to. But she does make it happen.
*
In between the end of The Old Curiosity
Shop and the beginning of Barnaby Rudge, Dickens briefly returned
his readers to Master Humphrey and his companions. They voice some disquiet
about why the “single gentleman” is never given a name. Master Humphrey has a
surprise in store for us.
‘My
friends... do you remember that this story bore another title besides that one
we have so often heard of late?’
Mr.
Miles had his pocket-book out in an instant, and referring to an entry therein,
rejoined, ‘Certainly. Personal Adventures of Master Humphrey.
Here it is. I made a note of it at the time.’
I
was about to resume what I had to tell them, when the same Mr. Miles again
interrupted me, observing that the narrative originated in a personal adventure
of my own, and that was no doubt the reason for its being thus designated.
This
led me to the point at once.
‘You
will one and all forgive me,’ I returned, ‘if for the greater convenience of
the story, and for its better introduction, that
adventure was fictitious. I had my share, indeed, – no light or trivial one, –
in the pages we have read, but it was not the share I feigned to have at first.
The younger brother, the single gentleman, the nameless actor in this little
drama, stands before you now.
The story is thus unexpectedly re-oriented
into an account (characteristically cloaked) of “the chief sorrows of my
life”. Poe complained that Master
Humphrey and the single gentleman do not even look alike, and when The Old
Curiosity Shop was published independently, this revelation was
dropped.
Nevertheless, it’s an odd and beautiful
idea. It must have arisen at the same time that Dickens was disentangling
Master Humphrey from his narrative at the end of Chapter III (though Humphrey’s
sorrows are mentioned at the very start of Master Humphrey’s Clock).
How, he no doubt asked himself, to account for this deeply interested party
having no further involvement in Nell’s story; not being thought of, for
instance, when Nell and her grandfather are desperately seeking an escape from
their situation? Then he suddenly reviewed Master Humphrey’s presence in the
curiosity shop and re-conceived it as a fiction within the fiction: a fiction
of a kindly but helpless wraith who observes the other characters interacting, but
to whom no-one says anything that tends to involve him in their affairs. And
now we understand that the Master Humphrey who appeared as an old man alongside
Nell’s grandfather was in fact an anachronism; these scenes took place twenty
years formerly, when Master Humphrey was still in the full vigour of middle
age; and when he was urgently searching for Nell but would never see her alive.
What is also poignantly emphasised is the isolation of Nell from anyone who
could have helped her: an isolation that she and her grandfather impose on
themselves, but absolute nonetheless. The shrewd visitor who sees at once how
much is amiss; who should be her salvation; proves to be merely a fictional
“if-only” who expresses the unconsolable regret of another character in a later
time.
*
In the days when people tried to draw maps
of Little Nell’s Journey, it was agreed that she died in Tong (
Charles Dickens: A Child’s History of
It would
be sensible to read nothing of Dickens but his novels, which are
all-sufficient. But since much of the material of A Child’s History is
now outside the common knowledge of adult readers, it has become a more
interesting book. The most satisfactory part, probably, is the earlier phase up
to the sixteenth century, when Dickens is competently summarising the national
epic, mixing lively narration with a very faint colouring of Dickensian satire,
rhetoric, and romance. Mainly satire, since the epic is concerned with the
actions of kings and queens, and Dickens is temperamentally hostile to this
sort of company.
Within
a week or two after Harold’s return to
This is
a quotation, not to sell the Child’s History to you, but to give you a
fair idea of what it is like. Most of the things that can be criticized are
exemplified here: tendentiousness, condescension, opinionatedness, a basic lack
of sympathy with his materials, and even with the business of history itself.
At the same time we are undoubtedly learning something about Edward the
Confessor – and so, though I really don’t want to sell the book, it strikes me
as perfect for someone who wants to read some history but whose tastes don’t
lead them towards ordinary historians.
If I
wanted to sell it, I’d move forward a couple of pages, to the close of the next
chapter:
O
what a sight beneath the moon and stars, when lights were shining in the tent
of the victorious Duke William, which was pitched near the spot where Harold
fell – and he and his knights were carousing within – and soldiers with
torches, going slowly to and fro, without, sought the corpse of Harold among
piles of dead – and the Warrior, worked in gold thread and precious stones, lay
low, all torn and soiled with blood – and the three Norman Lions kept watch
over the field!
Dickens
was seriously uninterested in history, but he was not averse to legends, and
when we read the earlier part of the book (say, up to the reign of Elizabeth)
we are reading material that we more or less accept as legends, because no
character-sketch by Dickens or anyone else will convince us that we really can
know what the character of, say, Edward Longshanks, was like. Considering the
serious uninterest, we must admire the competence he nevertheless demonstrates;
he can still make us read this book. And when he has a great story to tell (the
White Ship, Thomas à Becket,
But with
the entry of James I, the great tension between Dickens and his material starts
to cause buckling. It doesn’t matter very much what Dickens, or anyone else,
thinks of Richard Coeur de Lion, because we accept that this material is just
mist and you can make what you like of it. But the seventeenth century was,
clearly, still a “live issue”. Dickens really intends to persuade us of the
picture he supplies here (I first wrote, “he really believes in the picture”,
but that’s more than I’m sure of) – this is, though he doesn’t say so, a
Macaulayan, anti-Tory interpretation of the recent past. He is dead against the
Stuarts – all of them, but especially James I and Charles II, for whom he
reserves his most ponderous humour (James is constantly referred to as “His
Sowship” – Buckingham’s phrase, apparently – while his account of the “Merry
Monarch” makes dismal play of the word “merry”). This distaste drives him
towards the strange positions of almost-hero-worship for Cromwell and William
of Orange. This back end of the book is interesting for the recurring sensation
(never experienced in the novels) that the Dickens processing-plant is being
set to work on material that is wholly unsuited to it – and the material rises
up and begins to suggest a fundamental critique of the processing. But the
author himself is uneasy, and you can feel that he is beginning to find it all
a bit of a problem, which writing a “child’s history” should never be – for
controversy and polemics require a greater commitment to historical detail than
Dickens is prepared to give. His perfunctory accounts of the Plague and the
Fire of London suggest flagging belief in the project. After all that has gone before,
his closing sentence on
She is very good, and much beloved. So I
end, like the crier, with GOD SAVE THE QUEEN!
Unlike
the crier, we suppose, he is tired and wants to get shot of the thing.
I think
I have been extremely sensible about A Child’s History, so I am doubly
pleased to have made the chance discovery of this wilder piece, by Howard
MacAyeal:http://www.geocities.com/Athens/9688/aae-Myoldman.htm
which might be the only story ever written that is concerned with Dickens’ book
– and it’s a good one.
(2003)
Charles Dickens: Bleak House
(1852-53)
Bleak
House is I
suppose universally acknowledged to be one of the great masterpieces of a great
genre. When such reputation overtakes a large-scale work of art, it sometimes
gets in the way, not of reading it, but of talking about it. We begin to
interpret the intense power of the opening pages as being about the
announcement of a great work of art – as we do when we hear the opening notes
of the fifth or ninth symphony.
But Bleak
House lives most securely in its manifold details. Something, not very
much, should be said about its double narrative.
Innumerable
children have been born into the cause; innumerable young people have married
into it; innumerable old people have died out of it.
Esther’s
narrative exists to put meaning into that sentence. The other narrator, with
his universal present tense, gives us something that occasionally suggests film
noir both in its predilection for chiaroscuro and in its dramatic presentation.
Esther by contrast gives us time and memory, grief and meditation. The two
together give a span of life from infancy to senility,
and from the brickmakers’ women to Lord Boodle and Sir Thomas Doodle.
The
chapters titled “Esther’s Narrative” appear to describe a smooth tenor of life,
but this hides chasms. The pseudo-family life that is idealistically and
eagerly constructed by John Jarndyce is provisional; it has to be maintained by means
of a strict code of forbidden subjects, and relieved by certain licensed
euphemisms about Growleries and east winds.
Take
Chapter XVII as an example. The first sentence tells us that Richard “very
often came to see us while we remained in
Everyone
knows that Esther’s narrative is evasive in certain respects; principally, her
coyness about Allen Woodcourt and her refusal to accept that there is any sense
in the glowing tributes she attracts. Both features have proved highly annoying
to readers, but Dickens does not intend them purely as charming mannerisms. In
fact her whole narrative is in code, like Jarndyce’s eccentric likes and
dislikes. Indeed every member of the Jarndyce “family” is busy with a certain
amount of day-to-day evasion; but Jarndyce and Esther are the most continuously
engaged in it. That the book ends well enough for them suggests that their
evasiveness may, after all, be a sane and sensible way of proceeding. The
workbasket and the cast-aside book are props; they do not need to labour, but
can attempt something more delicate; they can try to defend an island of
quietness.
I once
compiled a list of all the food mentioned in Bleak House (the clerks’
luncheon – Guppy, Jobling and Small – assumed an unexpected significance). The
extraordinary range of the novel could just as well be shown from – say, bodily
afflictions. Esther is temporarily blind; Sir Leicester is nearly blind at the
end, and has a speech impediment. Caddy’s baby is deaf and dumb; Mrs Smallweed
is deaf and deranged; Esther and Phil Squod disfigured, Jenny’s face bruised
from a husbandly beating. Mr Jellyby is more or less dumb; Prince Turveydrop
goes lame, Sir Leicester suffers from gout; and so on.
The problem with lists like this is that they flatten the novel, which changes
its character as it proceeds. Consider, for instance, the high profile given to
Mrs Jellyby and the Bayham Badgers in the early chapters; the prominence of
Bucket towards the end; the importance of certain catastrophes in the book such
as Esther’s illness, the combustion of Krook
or the
pursuit of Lady Dedlock. Dickens goes to considerable pains to conceal the
changes that these decisive steps produce; and not just because he doesn’t want
to lose any readers along the way.
But even
now I am generalising. Here is a memorandum of some sentences and passages
that, on a fourth or fifth reading, provoke something more substantial than
wonder.
“I
found him dead.”
“Oh
dear me!” remonstrated Sir Leicester. Not so much shocked by the fact, as by
the fact of the fact being mentioned.
[This is
Sir Leicester being stiff, self-centred, complacent and stupid. None of which
characteristics is inconsistent with being, as we shall see, passionately in
love. Boythorn, with that happy knack of getting all the right ingredients and
putting them together just wrong – which is the essence of a good insult –
calls him “Sir Arrogant Numbskull”.]
“Look
at the rat!” cries Jo, excited. “Hi! Look! There he goes! Ho! Into the ground!”
....
[Jo’s
horrible innocence comes up hard against our participation in Lady Dedlock’s
emotions. The clash forces us into an exceedingly complex response. Lady
Dedlock’s love is both more precious than, and less than, the love that might
comprehend Jo, or the rat.]
(Jo not understanding the term, “consecrated
ground”...)
“Is
it blessed?”
“WHICH?” says Jo, in the
last degree amazed.
“Is
it blessed?”
“I’m
blest if I know,” says Jo, staring more than ever; “but I shouldn’t think it
warn’t. Blest?” repeats Jo, something troubled in his mind. “It
an’t done it much good if it is. Blest? I should think it was t’othered myself...”
The
chapter (XXXIII) set in and around the Sol’s Arms after Krook’s sensational
death:
Mr.
Weevle and his friend Mr. Guppy are within the bar at the Sol, and are worth
anything to the Sol that the bar contains if they will only stay there. “This
is not a time,” says Mr. Bogsby, “to haggle about money,” though he looks
something sharply after it, over the counter; “give your orders, you two
gentlemen, and you’re welcome to whatever you put a name to.”
Thus
entreated, the two gentlemen (Mr. Weevle especially) put names to so many
things that in course of time they find it difficult to put a name to anything
quite distinctly...
[This
would be funny in any circumstances, but is somehow more so because we
understand that they do really need a drink, and are somewhat ruffled young
gentlemen at this moment.]
The
chapter (LVIII), A Wintry Day and Night, in which Sir Leicester waits
for news of his wife, which painfully arrives at this:
“Not
so very long, Sir Leicester. Not twenty-four hours yet.”
“But
that is a long time! O it is a long time!”
[Sir
Leicester’s stroke stuns him into eloquence. We are perfectly sure that he has
never spoken these words before; that he discovers the loss of his wife
and his happiness, and that the simplicity of his words registers a dreadful
breakthrough into the admission of agony and helplessness. Despite the
breakthrough, he remains completely in character, dignified even in
childishness.]
However,
Mr. Guppy and Mr. Jobling together closed on Mr. Guppy’s mother (who began to
be quite abusive), and took her, very much against her will, downstairs; her
voice rising a stair higher every time her figure got a stair lower...
[Dickens’
achievement in persuading us of Esther’s voice, through so many hundred pages,
is really remarkable though we are at first more prone to notice the occasional
failures. Her most impressive sentences are those that give play to sharp
intelligence without the exclusivity of satire. The sharp intelligence is the
author’s, but he adapts it to her pragmatism, so that it becomes “hers”, and we
are never again inclined to speak of “merely” domestic or housekeeperly
talents. Everyone speaks louder as they go downstairs angry. Another example: “...it
had been quite a fine house once, when it was anybody’s business to keep it
clean and fresh, and nobody’s business to smoke in it all day...”]
(2003)
Charles Dickens: A Tale of Two CIties
(1859)
Everyone should agree that the first few chapters of the book are good (up to Part II, Ch 5). And so, it seems to me, are the last few. Still, one has the feeling that Dickens is using the French Revolution for his own ends - this is not a historical novel; it’s in a way more illuminating. His own preoccupations with prisons and resurrections are now more barely personal and psychological than they were in Little Dorrit. Yet his presentation of The Terror, something rather unlike what he had known yet extremely like some more recent societies, is deeply felt in its essence, though (or because?) it was imagined.
Psychologically, Madame Defarge and Sidney Carton are true images. The latter may need some defence, since we feel that Charles Darnay must, in logic, go to the wall and he speaks the plain truth when he says “Good could never come of such evil”. Charles and Lucie happy ever after is as impossible as Romeo and Juliet happy ever after. But still, Carton quickens the pulse; his expertise in this crisis and his flush of pride. Though he represents, perhaps, Dickens’ fantasy of a great, redeeming self-sacrifice; the fantasy of one who lives guiltily. I am certain that some have really gone to their deaths comforted by Carton at their elbow.
Of course this may seem a preposterous
defence, and it needs no great effort to recall “the case against” - the tedium
of those echoey footsteps in
Still, these scenes are primarily dramatic scenes. It’s in the construction and the dialogue that the book is strong. (The construction, as we all know now, is based on an elaborate allegory of which the motif is “Recalled to Life”.) Another Dickens, the vigorous, comic, fanciful imaginer, is kept out of the book. The decriptive prose is thin, and the reason, oddly, is anger. In the description of the grindstone (Part III, Ch 2) an account of hideous preparations for murder ends like this:
And as the frantic wielders
of these weapons snatched them from the stream of sparks and tore away into the
streets, the same red hue was red in their frenzied eyes; - eyes which any
unbrutalised beholder would have given twenty years of life, to petrify with a
well-directed gun.
The decription of the Carmagnole (Part III, Ch 5) is another example - the author hates it, and his fancy fails him. So, in the next chapter, Darnay’s acquittal - how unlike Pickwick’s trial, and even the English trial of Darnay himself. Nothing here like the Attorney-General who “turned the whole suit of clothes Mr Stryver had fitted on the jury, inside out; showing how Barsad and Cly were even a hundred times better than he had thought them, and the prisoner a hundred times worse”.
A Tale of Two Cities lends itself to dramatization, and to changes of title, because its own is an unhelpful one. The Only Way, by Freeman Wills. Let me make my own old-fashioned suggestion: The Death Penalty. This is a feature of the punitive apparatus that plays no part in Little Dorrit, but here it is made present. Culture, and history, and fantasy, all retire. But this anger, like the “well-directed gun”, claims to be tit for tat. When the wood-sawyer says, “But it’s not my business”, we expect a twinkle in his eye. It turns out that his “jocose” gestures do not mean sympathy. His little fancy (“Tickle, tickle; Pickle, pickle”) is a joke that denies human engagement. Jacques Three and Madame Defarge underline the point - they don’t soften. And so Dickens won’t soften either. His art becomes stalled and reactionary.
Yet in the moment of execution this doesn’t matter.
And now, while he was
composed, and hoped to meet the end with quiet heroism, a new action began in
his waking thoughts, which was very difficult to master. He had never seen the
instrument that was to terminate his life. How high it was from the ground, how
many steps it had, where he would be stood, how he would be touched, whether
the touching hands would be dyed red, which way his face would be turned,
whether he would be the first, or might be the last... (Pt III, Ch 13).
Dickens’s anger is displaced, I think; but his guillotine is very sharp.
(2002)
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A Brief History of Western Culture – Michael Peverett |
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