Dickens, Money, and Society

By Grahame Smith

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1968.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of California Press
• Release date: Nov 15, 2023
• ISBN: 9780520336131

Grahame Smith

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Dickens, Money, and Society

Dickens, Money, And Society By Grahame Smith

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

Berkeley and Los Angeles 1968

University of California Press

Berkeley and Los Angeles, California

Cambridge University Press

London, England

Copyright © 1968 by The Regents of the University of California

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 68-19192

Designed by Douglas Nicholson

Printed in the United States of America

To my wife Angela

Contents

Contents

CHAPTER ONE The Problem of Form

CHAPTER TWO The Early Novels: From Pickwick to Barnaby Rudge

Benefactors, Benevolence, and Charity

Character and Environment

The Tragicomedy of Money

Conclusion

CHAPTER THREE The Man and His Times

CHAPTER FOUR The Mob And Society: America and Martin Chuzzlewit

CHAPTER FIVE The Middle Years

Dombey and Son

Interregnum

Bleak House

CHAPTER SIX The Darkening World

CHAPTER SEVEN The Years of Achievement

Little Dorrit

Great Expectations

CHAPTER EIGHT The Final Years: Our Mutual Friend

CHAPTER NINE Conclusions

Poetry and the Social Novel

Didacticism and Creative Autonomy

Radicalism and Pessimism

Money and the Novel Form

Index

CHAPTER ONE

The Problem of Form

In all my writings, I hope I have taken every available opportunity of showing the want of sanitary improvements in the neglected dwellings of the poor. Mrs. Sarah Gamp was, four-and-twenty years ago, a fair representation of the hired attendant on the poor in sickness. The Hospitals of London were, in many respects, noble Institutions; in others, very defective. I think it is not the least among their instances of mismanagement, that Mrs. Betsey Prig was a fair specimen of a Hospital Nurse; and that the Hospitals, with their means and funds, should have left it to private humanity and enterprise to enter on an attempt to improve that class of persons—since, greatly improved through the agency of good women.

(Preface to Martin Chuzzlewit)

In this way, in a passage that begins with the flatness of a sanitary inspectors report and ends with a compliment to a class of persons at the farthest possible remove from the coarse vitality of Mrs. Gamp herself, Dickens introduces one of the great characters of fiction. Almost all critics have succumbed to the overwhelming pressure of her presence, which continually explodes the tidy and seemingly secure fortifications of literary theory with an irresistible force. Any view of characterization must take her into account, and one can sense the nerveless despair with which the theorists anxiously peer out at her advancing bulk. Nearer and nearer she looms until, with one sweep of her umbrella, the whole flimsy edifice is sent skyward, and when the dust has settled, nothing is to be seen but the broken remains of limited categories: flat and round characters, types and individuals scattered in hopeless confusion.

It seems generally agreed that she is a character who belongs to the highest realms of artistic creation. To find the defining comparison we must go to Shakespeare. And yet it becomes clear that in placing Mrs. Gamp side by side with Falstaff, for example, the comparison limits as well as defines. Certainly she has, as Orwell says of all Dickens’ characters, no mental life,1 no moral complexity. Anecdote and obsessive monologue encompass the range of her metaphysical universe, while Falstaff can rise to the level of generalizing insight into the nature of the world he inhabits. His speech on honor is a devasting critique of the weaknesses of the knightly code as exemplified by Hotspur. Mrs. Gamp remains blissfully unaware of the possibility of criticizing the life she finds around her. Again, she is incapable of love or even affection: Mrs. Prig is nothing but a sounding board for her endless imaginary dialogue with Mrs. Harris. Insulated in her own private world, she knows nothing of the joy to be found in other people, such as that expressed in Falstaffs affection for Hal and his delight in Bardolph’s salamander face. And with the lack of self-knowledge of the utterly self-absorbed, she remains unconscious of her own evil. Falstaff s claims of imminent reformation are never serious, but they are part of the self-awareness of the man who feels himself to be in some kind of relation with his external world. There may be an essence of joyous anarchy at the heart of his character, but its surface shifts and glimmers with the possibility of change and amendment. Mrs. Gamp is a totally fixed character and so lacks all pathos.

And yet these figures do have enough in common to make it possible to speak of them in the same breath. The liberating laughter they arouse in us is quite without malice, for their creators communicate the delight they felt both in contemplating them and in the act of embodying their vision. Keats’s understanding of the nature of the artistic process is as relevant to Dickens as it is to Shakespeare. For him, the artist has as much delight in conceiving an Iago as an Imogen;2 and the excellence of every art is its intensity, capable of making all disagreeables evaporate from their being in close relationship with beauty and truth.3 Mrs. Gamp must be condemned in the preface and in the novel’s conventional conclusion, but in Dickens’ imagination she is accepted without reservation and she emerges from that fire purged of viciousness. The duality of her nature is conveyed, symbolically, by her function as both deathbed nurse and midwife: her evil incompetence in this first occupation ensures that we see her as a harbinger of death, while the second forces us to recognize that she is at the same time, however paradoxically, an affirmer of life. No matter how reprehensible she may be from a moral point of view, as an artistic creation her final effect is one of life-enhancing vitality. Similarly, we frequently see Falstaff disporting himself among the very dregs of Londons whores and villains, but his own enjoyment is presented with such gusto that the elements of evil are dissolved in life-giving laughter. Another basis for comparison between them is that Falstaff and Mrs. Gamp share, to an almost hallucinatory degree, an absolute physical reality. Every wrinkle and crease in Falstaffs heroic body is present in a single phrase: He hath a monstrous beauty, like the hindquarters of an elephant. And the wheezing, rustling, and creaking of Mrs. Gamp are as obtrusive as the sounds of a next-door neighbor. The minutiae of her dress, gestures, and mannerisms are set out in complete detail, but never simply with the effect of a Defoe-like catalog. The selection is always controlled by creative imagination, and so the details achieve an inner cohesion.

She was a fat old woman, this Mrs. Gamp, with a husky voice and a moist eye, which she had a remarkable power of turning up, and only showing the white of it. Having a very little neck, it cost her some trouble to look over herself, if one may say so, at those to whom she talked. She wore a very rusty black gown, rather the worse for snuff, and a shawl and bonnet to correspond. In these dilapidated articles of dress she had, on principle, arrayed herself, time out of mind, on such occasions as the present; for this at once expressed a decent amount of veneration for the deceased, and invited the next of kin to present her with a fresher suit of weeds: an appeal so frequently successful, that the very fetch and ghost of Mrs. Gamp, bonnet and all, might be seen hanging up, any hour in the day, in at least a dozen of the second-hand clothes shops about Holbom. The face of Mrs. Gamp—the nose in particular—was somewhat red and swollen, and it was difficult to enjoy her society without becoming conscious of a smell of spirits. Like most persons who have attained to great eminence in their profession, she took to hers very kindly; insomuch, that setting aside her natural predilections as a woman, she went to a lying-in or a laying-out with equal zest and relish. (XIX)

Like Falstaff, Mrs. Gamp is one of the great facts of English literature: she may not be liked, but she cannot be ignored.

Emboldened by the conviction that so secure an edifice of fact as Mrs. Gamp could never be explained away, one may attempt some elucidation of what it is that constitutes her greatness as a character. Many of the attempts to do this have centered on that most elusive of critical terms realism. I myself have already pointed out her extraordinary physical reality, but at the same time have been compelled to admit that she lacks human complexity when compared with Falstaff. And so, from one angle of vision she is just as realistic as Sir John, from another, less so. Again, K. J. Fielding claims that she and Pecksniff were founded on actual people and so, he seems to imply, are real because of this;⁴ while Dickens appears to regard her as a characteristic type, a fair representation of the hired attendant on the poor in sickness of twenty- four years earlier. At first sight, this last view seems the most unconvincing of all. The notion of that intransigent and gin- soaked individualist as a kind of Platonic form of inefficient midwifery, constructed to fulfill the most narrowly didactic of social aims, seems to indicate an almost willful blindness to the power of her achieved life on the part of the very man who called that life into being.

The necessary clue to the riddle of her triumphant vitality may be found if we return to the comparison with Falstaff. When we listen with breathless delight to him promising selfimprovement, disclaiming knowledge of his own wickedness, and, best of all, exaggerating the number of those who attacked him on Gad’s Hill, we feel that he leaves behind the raffish realism of the medieval London underworld and moves into the only fit world for such a monstrous and genial liar—that of poetry. FalstafFs evasions and subterfuges never serve the merely utilitarian purpose of saving his skin; he elaborates them beyond what is strictly necessary because he enjoys his lies for their own sake. They are the comic poetry of a man profoundly but resignedly aware of the vast gulf that exists between human aspiration and achievement. Surely it is true that Mrs. Gamp also belongs in this rarefied atmosphere; and there is a sense in which Dickens’ achievement is even greater than Shakespeare’s at this point (or, if not greater, at least purer). The fun of Henry IV is compounded of all the elements of drama: language, plot and situation, character. All of these are displayed in the Boar’s Head scene, for example, and they constitute an essentially social comedy; not in being a Jonsonian criticism of society, but because they make for the clash of character and the exposure of observable human idiosyncrasy. It is this last point that accounts for the fact that even FalstafFs wildest flights belong to a recognizable world. The comedy of Mrs. Gamp is pure fantasy because it is stripped of all social reference and exists self-sufficiently in and for itself. It is, above all, a construction of language. On our first meeting she is described to us with masterly force and compression, and from then on she simply speaks.

We can find the contrast I am attempting to elucidate within Dickens himself if we return, for a moment, to The Pickwick Papers. Monroe Engel claims that language and "particularly spoken language—is the major distinction The Pickwick Papers has over its predecessors."5 But it remains true that a great deal of its humor springs from what may be called situation comedy: Mr. Pickwick entering the wrong bedroom, the military parade, the first ride to Dingley Dell. This is the humor of social observation rather than comic imagination. The most important example of the second is to be found, of course, in the great trial scene. Here the laughter represents, as Edmund Wilson says, like the laughter of Aristophanes, a real escape from institutions.6 It has the wildness and inconsequentiality of fantasy. Yet even here we still find a strong sense of social reference, in the direct attack on the law, for example, and the implicit condemnation of unjust trials. The very richness of the comedy stems partly from the exaggerations by means of which a recognizable social reality is inflated into a grotesque parody of itself. Language plays its part in all of this, but it is a language that reflects, in however distorted a manner, the everyday world. But with Mrs. Gamp things are very different. When Gamp was summoned to his long home, and I see him a-lying in Guy’s Hospital with a penny-piece on each eye, and his wooden leg under his left arm, I thought I should have fainted away. But I bore up. (XLX)

The final thrust of genius in this bizarre picture lies in the nightmarish exactness of detail—"his wooden leg under his left arm"—and with it we recognize that we are enclosed in a magic circle of pure comedy from which it is impossible to break out with explanations of satirical intent or didactic purpose. This is even more true of the tea party with Betsey Prig, which moves from the rhythmical lyricism of

"Betsey … I will now propoge a toast. My frequent pardner, Betsey Prig!

Which, altering the name to Sairah Gamp; I drink … with love and tenderness,

through the terror of Mrs. Prig’s ‘memorable and tremendous words concerning Mrs. Harris—I don’t believe there’s no sich a person!"—and her equally awful irony:

"And you was a-goin’ to take me under you! … You was, was you? Oh, how kind! Why, deuce take your imperence, said Mrs. Prig, with a rapid change from banter to ferocity, what do you mean?"

to the coda of sublime nonsense: the words she spoke of Mrs. Harris, lambs could not forgive. No Betsey! … nor worms forget! (XLIX)

Mrs. Gamp, then, is a creation of the comic imagination in its purest form. It can be argued, of course, that she is representative in the sense that she embodies, in a comic vision, a kind of alienation from society and a consequent inner emigration⁷ that are held to be peculiarly characteristic of the modern world. But if this is true in general terms, it obviously is not so at the level of didactic or even thematic purpose This modern sense of isolation is clearly neither the message nor the theme of Martin Chuzzlewit. I later try to show that parts of this novel do have a significant relationship to the nineteenth century as a whole, but the attempt to demonstrate that it possesses an overall unity, and that Mrs. Gamp has a meaningful role to play within such a unity, is doomed to failure. Mrs. Gamp is representative in the same sense as Don Quixote; that is, by virtue of the power with which she is forced upon our imagination, and because she is a figure created on the grand scale, she is irresistibly linked to the whole sweep of our common humanity. But there is, ultimately, no incompatibility between a character’s echoes of the universally human and our view that, in purely literary terms, its deepest interest is to be found in and for itself. If all this is accurate, what are we to make of Dickens’ own words in describing Mrs. Gamp as a fair representation of the hired attendant on the poor in sickness? This is the question toward which my whole discussion has been tending, for it brings us face to face with one of the most difficult problems with which Dickens presents us: the relation in him between realist and poet; in his work, between didacticism and pure creativity.

Facing, and attempting to account for, this strange duality gives one, I think, a means of understanding both the isolated fictional moment and the overall pattern of Dickens’ career. And it is a way of understanding that is doubly meaningful in that it can help to elucidate the weakness as well as the strength of Dickens’ work. Dickens is a didactic writer with social concerns that range from the superficial to the profound, and he is a poet who can create characters and worlds with the huge implications of myth. These facts have been so long recognized that such a statement has an air of banality. But I think it is salutary to remember what an amazing, perhaps even unique, combination of qualities this makes for. Ours is the writer who can move from the absurd propaganda of Mr. Bevan’s farewell words to young Martin Chuzzlewit:

If you ever become a rich man, or a powerful one … you shall try to make your Government more careful of its subjects when they roam abroad to live. Tell it what you know of emigration in your own case, and impress upon it how much suffering may be prevented with a little pains! (XXXIV)

through the freely achieved life of a Mr. Micawber, to the wonderfully subtle mixture of social meaning and human reality in William Dorrit. With this in mind, it seems false to the richness of Dickens’ vision to concentrate only on the social or the poetic side of his genius. Coming to terms with his greatness involves bringing these two aspects of his work together.

In attempting to do this, I have begun by raising the problem of a duality that makes itself felt in every area of Dickens’ fiction. I found it convenient to open with characterization because there this duality can be seen in a particularly heightened form, but it is possible to pose many other questions that are intimately connected with it. What, for example, is the relationship between Dickens’ total fictional form—complexity of plot, characterization, symbolism, use of language—and social criticism? Again, what is the connection between his development as an artist and the social concerns that continue to be of consuming interest to him throughout his career? I have already suggested that Dickens’ mixture of didacticism and poetry is one of the basic facts of his work which has never been satisfactorily explained. It is clearly recognized today that an earlier approach to Dickens such as that of T. A. Jackson in his Charles Dickens: The Progress of a Radical fails because of an almost absurd concentration on Dickens as social propagandist, even as revolutionary. But it can be argued that more modern studies are equally eccentric in their insistence on the primacy of a sometimes morbid psychologizing or of the use of myth in understanding the great novels of Dickens’ later period. Such critics often seem to forget that Dickens’ complexities of personality are those of genius, not sickness, and that the roots of myth lie in the world of external reality as much as in the mind of the creative artist. To raise a second major point, although the increasing darkness of Dickens’ vision has been a constant critical preoccupation for many years, the complexity of structure that accompanied this darkening vision has been noticed rather than elucidated.

In my view, the Dickens problem presents itself essentially as a question of fictional form which is related to the analysis of society. As with any other great writer, there are several crucial strands of personality in Dickens from the interaction of which the body of his work emerges, and any coherent account of his fiction must consider all of them. I think it is possible to isolate in Dickens an aesthetic interest, a social concern, and a psychological pressure. Concerning the first, it is a commonplace to point out that Dickens never indulged in any extended theorizing about the novel, but the burden of the evidence that we possess points to an intense preoccupation with the form of fiction. Scattered remarks in letters and articles, his deep-seated professionalism (Dickens regarded himself preeminently as a man who is content to rest his station and claims quietly on literature, and to make no feint of living by anything else8 ), the intensity of his creative agony, the significance of the work sheets so ably brought out by Butt and Tillotson,9 and above all the testimony of the novels themselves, with their ceaseless development toward greater complexity-all of this justifies the anger Dickens expressed in a letter of December, 1852, to Wilkie Collins in writing of the conceited idiots who suppose that volumes are to be tossed off like pancakes, and that any writing can be done without the utmost application, the greatest patience, and the steadiest energy of which the writer is capable.10 Second, both life and art testify to a concern with society which is part of the very lifeblood of Dickens’ being. We can see the artistic proof of this in the fact that, in his greatest work, social criticism is never merely a part of the subject matter competing with other elements for our interest, but a thematic force that informs character, plot, and language with its unifying presence. Last, working sometimes at a less conscious level are the various psychological pressures that contribute to the richness of Dickens’ work: the violence, the sadness of deprived childhood, the transmutation of adult problems into the material of art.

And so, bearing these three strands of personality in mind, it might be possible to see Dickens as an ivory-towered aestheti- cian, a social propagandist, or a treasure house of unconscious Freudian symbolism. But each of these approaches limits the complexity of his greatness. The increasing richness of Dickens’ fictional structure is not an end in itself, but the necessary form for his increasing understanding and mastery of society. Similarly, the most interesting psychological pressures have a meaning beyond the purely personal. The almost hysterical power of the mob scenes in Barnaby Rudge may convey a repressed strain of anarchy in Dickens’ character and express something of the early-Victorian fear of revolution, but they remain isolated pieces essentially unrelated to a story of almost childish melodrama. The possibly unconscious elements of interest in a character such as Arthur Clennam, however, are part of an artistically unified density of texture. The judgment underlying these remarks is, of course, a conviction that any great work of art is significantly a creation of the conscious mind and will. The psychological interest of the great artist lies not so much in the almost, by definition, unchartable regions of his unconscious mind, but in the fascinating link that often seems to exist between his consciously held purposes and the more hidden layers of his personality. Whatever fragmentation may exist on the surface, it seems characteristic of the great artist that emotion and will should finally be fused in him. At any rate, it appears to be this fusion of intellectual purpose, richness of feeling, and echoes from the depths of the human personality that we are talking about when we discuss artistic greatness. Those mysterious father and daughter relationships in Shakespeare’s last plays add a powerful vibrancy to their meaning, but we remain convinced that they are part of a coherent and consistent unity of purpose. The choice of a daughter as the symbol of forgiveness and regeneration may have been of personal significance to Shakespeare, but this is not a factor of overriding value as far as our response is concerned. In The Tempest, for example, Ferdinand seems eventually to have a function similar to that of Miranda, at least with regard to his own father. The choice of a daughter for the symbolic role calls up a series of meaningful responses in us—to the idea of the Virgin, for example, and the healing and reconciling force of the universal feminine—but this choice could be as much a matter of artistic understanding as psychological pressure.

In the same way, it seems to me that Dickens is not a subject for psychoanalysis, but a creative writer who is to be understood by means of literary criticism. My contention is for the importance and for the unity, in his greatest work, of these three elements: the aesthetic, the social, and the psychological. The resolution of these elements into the relationship between didacticism and creative autonomy seems to me crucial, and my major aim is to show that this relationship, again in the greatest work, is indissoluble and is at least one key to the understanding of Dickens’ development and the meaning of his later work.

1 Charles Dickens, in A Collection of Essays (New York: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1954), p. 106.

2 Letter to Richard Woodhouse, Tues., Oct. 27, 1818, in The Letters of John Keats, ed. Maurice Buxton Forman (London: Oxford University Press, 1960), p. 227.

3 To George Thomas Keats, Sun., Dec. 21, 1819, ibid. p. 70.

4 Charles Dickens (London: Longmans, 1958), p. 77.

5 The Maturity of Dickens (Oxford: University Press, 1959), p. 84.

6 "Dickens: The Two Scrooges/’ in The Wound and the Bow (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1941), p. 13.

7 Oswald Schwarz, The Psychology of Sex (Penguin Books, 1949), p. 145 n. 1.

8 Letter to John Forster, April 22, 1843, in Letters, ed. Walter Dexter (London: Nonesuch Press, 1938), II, 83.

9 John Butt and Kathleen Tillotson, Dickens at Work (London: Methuen, 1957).

10 Letters, II, 436.

CHAPTER TWO

The Early Novels:

From Pickwick to

Barnaby Rudge

The relationship between didacticism and creative autonomy provides one way of viewing Dickens’ early novels; and I would here stress viewing rather than understanding as the appropriate word. The understanding of a novel seems to me the process whereby one reaches the end of grasping some sense of its total meaning; that is, the connection in it between content and its embodying form. Dickens’ early work does not appear to be open to understanding in this sense. The connection between content and form may exist in isolated passages— the workhouse scenes in Oliver Twist, for example, and the wanderings of Nell and her grandfather—but it does not operate within the structure of any of these novels as a whole. Such passages have their own specific tone and feeling, but we find them side by side with those of a totally different character, and the connection between them is fortuitous rather than significant. The possible exception is Pickwick, but there the general unity of tone is maintained by a balance of content and form that is too straightforward to need critical discussion.

In considering these early novels, the despised word appreciation would seem to be for more appropriate than understanding. Understanding engages itself with the whole, appreciation can be content with the part. The Chestertonian function of taking us back into their glorious comedy is worthwhile in that it makes us want to return to these great moments eagerly and with a heightened awareness of the details that go to make up the comic effects. The dangers of misplaced modern criticism have been amply demonstrated in the treatment of Milton, whose dislodgement … after his two centuries of pre dominance, was affected with remarkably little fuss,1 as Dr. Leavis claims, but by means of criteria that are quite inapplicable to the intentions and achievement of Paradise Lost. Similarly, the modern fictional criteria of thematic unity, symbolic richness, and total form should simply not be brought to bear on Dickens’ early novels. The serious modern respect for Dickens is wholly admirable, but it is bound to fail, and even to become ridiculous, if it seeks to apply Jamesian criteria to such works as Nicholas Nickleby and The Old Curosity Shop. The formal anarchy of these novels bears no relation to the critical principles that can be drawn from The Ambassadors or The Wings of the Dove. The modern concept of myth can find more on which to sharpen its critical perceptions, and few would deny that Mr. Pickwick is a figure with universal overtones of benevolence and goodwill, and that his England is, until toward the end of the novel, paradisal in its disconnection from harsh