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Uni International 300 N. Zeeb Road Ann Arbor, Ml 48106 8410361

Belcher, Diane Dewhurst

SERVANTS AND THEIR MASTERS IN THE NOVELS OF CHARLES DICKENS

The Ohio State University Ph.D. 1984

University Microfilms

International 300 N. Zeeb Road, Ann Arbor, Ml 48106

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University Microfilms International SERVANTS AND THEIR MASTERS IN THE

NOVELS OF CHARLES DICKENS

DISSERTATION

Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for

the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate

School of The Ohio State University

By

Diane Dewhurst Belcher, B.A., M.A.

*****

The Ohio State University

1984

Reading Committee: Approved By

Richard D. Altick

Robert Jones Advisor Arnold Shapiro Department of English © Copyright by

Diane Dewhurst Belcher

1984 VITA

January 9, 1951...... Born - Baltimore, Maryland

1973 ...... B.A., The George Washington University, Washington, D.C.

1974-1980...... Teaching Associate, Department of English, The Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio

1975 ...... M.A., The Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio

1980-1982...... Lecturer, Department of English, The Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio

1982-1983...... Foreign Expert, English Section, The Branch College of the Beijing Foreign Languages Institute, Beij ing, China

1983-198 4 ...... Lecturer, Department of English, The Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio

FIELDS OF STUDY

Major Field: Nineteenth-Century British Literature. Professor Richard D. Altick

Eighteenth-Century British Literature. Professor John Sena

Renaissance Literature. Professor Robert Jones

Medieval Literature. Professor Alan Brown

ii TABLE OF CONTENTS

Page VITA ...... ii

LIST OF FIGURES...... iv

INTRODUCTION ...... 1

Chapter

I. DICKENS AND SERVANTS REAL AND FICTIONAL...... 6

II. THE SERVANT-GUIDES...... 29

III. THE DOWNTRODDEN...... 54

IV. THE PROBLEM SERVANTS. . . '...... 108

V. THE SERVANT-CRIMINALS...... 154

VI. CONCLUSION...... 182

BIBLIOGRAPHY ...... 186

ill LIST OF FIGURES

Figure Page

1. The Marchioness...... 69

2. Susan Ni p p e r ...... 74

3. G u s t e r ...... 81

4. A f f e r y ...... 90

5. Frontispiece and titlepage ofThe Greatest Plague of Life; or The Adventures of a Lady in Search of fi Good Servant...... 109

6. Menservants...... 141

7. Charlotte...... 160

8. Jeremiah Flintwinch...... 174

iv INTRODUCTION

Dickens was not the first English novelist to give prominence

to servants in his works, but no other writer has ever peopled his/her

fiction with as many servants as Dickens has. During the nineteenth century servants did become the largest occupational group in

England.* But the fact that Dickens allotted so much more space in his fictional worlds to domestics than did other Victorian writers is yet further evidence of what Raymond Williams calls "the primary fact about Dickens"— "that he was a social novelist and a committed 2 novelist." Dickens' fictional servants have not been ignored by . his commentators. Seldom does a discussion of The Pickwick Papers, for example, fail to mention Pickwick's valet, Sam Weller, or a critical reading of Martin Chuzzlewit neglect Mark Tapley. Yet few Dickens critics have looked beyond individual servants in their respective novels at the broader subject of Dickens' fictionalization of the domestic servant class. One of the rare exceptions is N. N.

Feltes, whose essay "'The Greatest Plague of Life': Dickens, Masters and Servants" explicates the historical context in which all of

3 Dickens' servant portrayals belong. My concern, however, is more with Dickens' servants as characters and his characters as servants— with the roles that servants most often play in the narratives and how Dickens as artist exploits servantly functions, i.e., how his DICKENS' FICTIONAL SERVANTS*

The Pickwick Papers (1836-37) Bleak House (1852-53)

Job Trotter Charley Sam Weller Guster Hortense Oliver Twist (1837) Mrs. Rouncewell

Charlotte Hard Times (1854) Mrs. Bedwln Mrs. Sparsit Nicholas Nickleby (1838-39) Little Dorrit (1855-57) Peg Sliderskew John Baptist Cavalletto The Old Curiosity Shop (1840-41) Merdle's Chief Butler Affery Flintwinch The Marchioness Jeremiah Flintwinch Tom Scott Tattycoram Miss Wade Barnaby Rudge (1841) A Tale of Two Cities (1859) Miggs Rudge, the elder Miss Pross

Martin Chuzzlewit (1843-44) Great Expectations (1860-61)

Mark Tapley Pip's Avenger Flopson Dombey and Son (1846-48) Millers

Susan Nipper Our Mutual Friend (1864-65) Polly Toodle Rob Toodle Veneering's Analytical Chemist

David Copperfield (1849-50)

Littimer Clara Peggotty

*This is not an exhaustive list of Dickens' servants. It includes only those whom I refer to in this dissertation.

2 characters as servants are suited for the action and interaction in which he involves them.

Dickens' servant characterizations deserve attention because of their sheer numbers (see my selective list); they reward attention because of what they tell us about the shaping forces behind Dickens' artistry, as well as of the artistry itself. Perhaps more than any other class of characters in Dickens, servants, to put it simply, brought into conflict their creator's intense desire to please his audience and his commitment to improving them. As representatives of that segment of the lower classes who propped up the social standing and maintained (for small remuneration) the comfort of the higher classes, the servant characters certainly exemplify the

"poor, oppressed and unfortunate," those to whose cause Dickens

4 was devoted. Yet his own life style and social position, like that of most of his readers, depended to a certain extent on the continued inferior status of'this sizable portion of the population.** All of Dickens' servant characterizations reveal the tension in his relationship with his mainly servant-keeping readers (as one of them, yet their critic) and hence show us the ways in which he resolved it or failed to do so.

Steven Marcus notes: "By multiplying a particular character or situation, and embodying within a single work manifold and signi­ ficantly diversified images of the same kind of person or relationship, he £ Dickens] was able to render the conceptions in his novels more dramatic, subtle and complex than he could have done through any 4

other resource compatible with his kind of genius."** Because Dickens'

characterization is multiplicative and, as numerous commentators

have pointed out, so often takes the form of doubles,^ even the most

minor servant characters have greater significance than their brief

appearances would seem to allow. In their proximity to a master

or mistress, servants are especially well situated for Dickens'

parallel method of characterization. It is hard to find a servant-

keeper in Dickens who is not to some degree realized through his

servants. Such incidental figures as the Copperfield domestics

make graphic their mistress', Dora's, real inadequacy as David's

helpmate in his struggle for a socially secure and contented life.

Those far larger characters Sam Weller and Mark Tapley, who highlight

through contrast their masters' deficiencies, are also the agents

of their humanization— of both the actual changes that take place

in Pickwick and young Martin Chuzzlewit as well as our altered

perception of the two masters. In so awkwardly plotted a novel

as Little Dorrit servants can make a character's action at least

plausible. Mrs. Clennam's closeness to her butler, Jeremiah

Flintwinch, who is as impious as she is pious, and her indifference

to Affery, the maid that she and Jeremiah victimize, prepare us

for the revelation of the mistress' wrongdoing. But Dickens' servants

do not just make their employers seem more real. The servants'

relations with their keepers are. integral to what Raymond Williams

again, calls Dickens' dramatization of "the experience of a society, g not its isolable facts." NOTES

* Pamela Horn, The Rise and Fall of the Victorian Servant (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1975), p. 13. 2 Raymond Williams, "Social Criticism in Dickens: Some Problems of Method and Approach," Cricical Quarterly, 6, No. 3 (Autumn 1964), 216.

3 Feltes1 article is most valuable for its analysis of documents of the period, e.g., letters to the editor, that illustrate the difficult position of the Victorian servant: "the conflicting pulls of paternalism and the 'free market in labour.'" See N. N. Feltes, '"The Greatest Plague of Life': Dickens, Masters and Servants," Literature and History, No. 8 (Autumn 1978), 197-213.

^ Williams, p. 216. I completely reject George Orwell's labeling of Dickens' fictional servants as merely 'hangers-on" of the "London commercial bourgeosie," instead of as members of the real working classes. See George Orwell, Dickens, Dali and Others (New York: .Reynal and Hitchcock, 1946), p. 4.

^ Dickens once remarked (not wholly tongue in cheek I think) that few masters want a Joseph Andrews. Such a servant would be a "perpetual reminder of our own inferiority to one, who should be inferior in all things." See Dickens, "Old and New Servants," All the Year Round, 20 July 1867, pp. 82-83.

^ Steven Marcus, Dickens: From Pickwick to Dombey (New York: Basic Books, 1965), p. 40.

^ See, for example, Harland S. Nelson, Charles Dickens (Boston: Twayne, 1981), p. 126; Masao Miyoshi, The Divided Self: A Perspective on the Literature of the Victorians (New York: New York University Press, 1969), p. 269.

Q Williams, p. 218.

5 CHAPTER I

DICKENS AND SERVANTS REAL AND FICTIONAL

The grandson of servants himself, Dickens' own actual contact

with domestics was far more extensive than that of the average

nineteenth-century master. John Forster comments: "No man was so

inclined naturally to derive his happiness from home concerns.

Even the kind of interest in a house which is commonly confined

to women, he was full of."* Probably the fact that Dickens worked

at home had much to do with his desire that it be as smoothly run

as possible. He personally supervised the furnishing of his family's

many dwellings (frequently feeling the need for a larger one).

Dickens described his wife, Kate, as, typically, wandering around

and getting into fresh paint while he oversaw all the details of 2 moving into a new house. Judging from other contemporary reports,

Kate was rather languid and passive. She willingly handed over the

little power she had as mistress of Dickens' home to her much younger

3 sister, Georgina, when the latter reached adulthood. According to

Edgar Johnson, it was well known in London that Dickens routinely

handled numerous household matters usually managed by the Victorian

4 wife, such as grocery shopping. In thus personally holding reign

over his own household Dickens had ample opportunity to observe

at firsthand servant/master relations from both the master's and

the mistress' perspective. The type of servant/master relationship Dickens prized most in his private life was the same feudal servant/master bond he idealized in his fiction: domestic and employer attached to each other; responsibility accepted on both sides. Not surprisingly,

Dickens was closest to those of his servants who were more than competent servers, who could be depended on to serve him and his family with genuine affection and loyalty.

One of Dickens' favorite servants was Louis Roche, a "gem" of a courier, who functioned as his valet on the road and steward in his homes away from home in Italy, France, and Switzerland.^ In

Roche Dickens found his own Sam Weller. Roche continually amazed his master with his practical knowledge of roads, inns, food, and even pipes: "When he [Dickens' 'Hookahbadahrlj was at Cairo, he watched them getting up the Pipes, with a Courier's eye; and he does it quite in the Arabian Night manner."*’ Dickens boasted too of

Roche's seemingly inexhaustible vivacity and ability to befriend useful people everywhere:

I didn't tell you [ForsterJ that the day before I left Genoa, we had a dinner-party— our English consul and his wife; the banker . . . and some others, fourteen in all. At about nine in the morning, two men in immense paper caps enquired at the door for the brave C [Rochet , who presently introduced them in triumph as the Governor's cooks, his private friends, who had come to dress the dinner!^

Dickens especially relished Roche's care of him:

He puts out my clothes at every inn as if I were going to stay there twelve months; calls me to the instant every morning; lights the fire before I get up; gets hold of roast fowls and produces them in coaches at a distance from all other help in hungry moments; and is invaluable to me.®

Roche was devoted to his master, fond of the Dickens children, and

proud of his service to the family. In Dickens' eyes Roche was

the perfect servant, "one of the most honest and excellent servants

in the World.

Dickens' attitude toward Roche was clearly a paternalistic one:

He is such a good fellow too, that little rewards don't spoil him. I always give him, after I have dined, a tumbler of Sauteme or Hermitage . . . sometimes . . . I make him take his breakfast with me; and this renders him only more anxious than ever, by redoubling attention, to show me that he thinks he has got a good master.

The master's highest praise of his courier is tinctured with condescen sion. Whenever Dickens quotes Roche, he cannot resist a Podsnappian kind of parochialism, making his foreign servant sound distinctly childish:

Appropos, as we were crossing the Seine, within two stages of Paris, Roche suddenly said to me . . . : "the littel dog ave got a great lip!"H

Roche has just come in to know if he may "blow datter light."

(Dickens' command of Roche's native language, French, was probably not greatly superior to his courier's mastery of English.) But

Roche had reason to appreciate Dickens' fatherly solicitude. Before taking Roche to London in 1846, Dickens confided in Forster, "I shall bring the Brave, though I have no use for him. He'd die if 13 I didn't." Dickens did for Roche what he was to do repeatedly for his own sons— he found employment for him (i.e., when Dickens was not traveling). Finally, when Roche fell victim to a serious heart ailment, Dickens did all that he could to make his last year

comfortable. After securing Roche a hospital bed, Dickens encouraged

him to get well by promising the courier a new opportunity to serve his old master. They would go to Spain together: "En attendant

cette voyage a l'Espagne dont j'ai parle, il vous faudra devenir excessivement robuste et rouge. Courage done, mon ami!"*^ Despite

Dickens' very real fondness and admiration for Roche, they remained master and servant, apparently to the satisfaction of both.

Among Dickens' womenservants, the lady's maid and housekeeper,

Anne Brown Cornelius (as she later became), was his most dependable and loyal. In Dickens' earliest accounts of Anne, written during his first trip to America, he spoke of her in the same kind of glowing terms he later applied to his courier Roche. Anne was the one servant the Dickenses chose to take across the Atlantic: "The girl who is going with us, is a moral cork jacket, too, and gives great confi­ dence."*'’ Although while in America Dickens insisted Kate was a brave traveler, and this was one of the happiest periods in their married life together, Anne's strength and practicality far outshine Kate's in Dickens' letters home:

Kate is quite well, and so is Anne, whose smartness surpasses belief.

As we made our way on foot over the broken pavement, Anne measured her length upon the ground, but didn't hurt herself. I say nothing of Kate's troubles— but you recollect her propensity? She falls into, or out of, every coach or boat we enter; brings great sores and swellings on her feet; chips large fragments out of her ankle-bones; and makes herself blue with b r u i s e s . 17 10

Dickens relied on Anne to the degree that when Kate later had what

seems to have been a nervous breakdown, in 1851, Anne was the servant

he sent to Malvern to find a "cheerful cottage" for her to recuperate 18 in. When Dickens' marriage became unbearable it was Anne whom he

trusted to alter his sleeping arrangements by converting his dressing 19 room into a bedroom. ' Finally, when separated from his wife,

Dickens claimed that Kate had always been totally dependent on

Anne: "An old servant of ours . . . took care of her, like a poor 20 child, for sixteen years." (Certainly Dickens, bitter as he was at the time, had his reasons for making such a statement.) To the end of his life Dickens remained on better terms with his wife's

former maid than with his wife. In fact, he considered Anne a friend and part of his family long after she had left full-time service.

When Hans Christian Andersen came to England Dickens- advised him:

If you want . . . while you are with us, to pass the night in London, this house [.Tavistock J . . . will be at your disposal. A servant, who is our trustedfriend also, who lived with us many years and is now married, will be taking care of you too with all her heart.21

As in Roche's case, Dickens never ceased to regard Anne as a member of her class.. He found the same "astonishing pride of igno- 22 ance" in Anne that he noticed in almost all his other servants:

I don't think Anne has so much as seen an American Tree. She never looks at a prospect by any chance, or displays the smallest emotion at any sight whatever. She objects to Niagara that "its [sicj nothing but water", and considers that "there is too much of that"!!!^’

Dickens once referred to Anne as "more friend to both of us [Kate and him]] than a servant,yet in his will he left Anne exactly 11

the same amount,^£.19 19s, that he left to all his other domestics, 25 including those who had served him only one year.

In many respects Dickens' relationship with his domestic staff was not typically Victorian. One of his American guests, a Miss

Clarke, was astonished to- find his servants not in livery. He explained, "I do not consider that I own enough of any man to hang a badge upon [himj . In an age when few servants were even allowed "callers," Dickens permitted his to marry and stay in his 27 service if they desired. Though not pampered, his servants were

the reverse of downtrodden. Dickens took great pains to make their work as easy and their lives as comfortable as possible. He even went so far as to have a glass-backed "letter-box" installed in his street door so that a servant would be saved the chore of going 28 outside to check it. Forster praises Dickens for personally attending to his servants when they were ill: •". . . his mere 29 presence in the sickroom was a healing influence." Dickens was not at all reluctant to involve himself in physical labor with his servants:

The Brave, and I, and the postilion, were constantly at work, in extricating the whole concern [horses and harnessj from a tangle. . . .30

John and I wallowed in dust for four hours . . . getting books and papers put away. . . .31

But of course there was never any question about the proper place of any member of the Dickens household. The servants inhabited the top stories and basement, just as domestics did throughout 12 32 Victorian England.

While Dickens trusted that his own staff was content, he was under no illusion about the happiness of the average slavey. He had no patience with his contemporaries' propensity for finding high spirits among miners "and every other grade of poverty, neglect, 33 oppression and distress." Among his own circle, Dickens was personally acquainted with tyrranical masters in the wealthiest of homes. While residing at the stately Palazzo Peschiere in Genoa,

Dickens learned from his servants that some fellow residents of the villa tormented their meek footman by forcing him to do everything for them, including the cooking, dressed in crimson breeches (despite the climate) and locked him up at night in a basement room with iron 34 bars on the window. Dickens revealed to Forster that the wife of a friend

. . . would sometimes, on no other provocation than a pin out of its place or some such thing, fall upon a little maid she had, beat her till she couldn't stand, then tumble into hysterics, and be carried off to bed.35

Dickens fully appreciated people's tendency to misuse their power over others. In his reply to a "hard, bad-looking" American who claimed that "it's not the interest of a man to use his slaves ill,"

Dickens argued thus:

— I told him quietly that it was not a man's interest to get drunk, or to steal, or to game, or to indulge in any other vice, but he did indulge in it for all that. That cruelty, and the abuse of irresponsible power, were two of the bad passions of human nature, with the gratification of which, considerations of interest or of ruin had nothing whatever to do; and that, while every candid man must admit that even a slave might be happy enough with a good master, 13

all human beings knew that bad masters, cruel masters, and : masters who disgraced the form they bore, were matters of experience.and history, whose existence was as undisputed as that of slaves themselves.36

But Dickens was also well aware of the dissatisfaction of servants in the happiest of circumstances. More than once he was faced with the loss of his best servants. The clever cook that he took to 37 Italy, "quite delicate in her ideas" and, Dickens suspected, more 38 fluent in Italian than he, astonished him with her announcement of not just wedding plans but also plans to open her own restaurant.

Dickens saw to it that this Englishwoman's marriage to a French chef in Italy was legally performed, but he was extremely sorry to 39 lose "a most capital servant" and even gave her money for a return trip to England should she change her mind about the business venture 40 and decide to go back into service. Much later Dickens commiserated with his friend Bulwer Lytton over the loss of one of his favorite servants, a man named French, formerly employed by Dickens (before he ruptured himself and could no longer carry the family dinner trays). Dickens had recommended French to Lytton as "a remarkably willing, active, and ready fellow," who was used to "a literary man's ways."^ Upon French's unexpected resignation Dickens wrote to Lytton:

French's departure amazes me. I too thought he was yours for life. When I was at Knebworth he expressed as much, and was perfectly satisfied and extremely grateful. But there is always a latent hankering on the part of this class I believe, to get out of service if possible.42

Dickens' own condescending view of servants, which was indeed typically Victorian, may suggest Why even so warn and generous a master as he might have employees who "hankered" to get out of service. Dickens had little faith in most of his domestics. He felt that far from acting as guides in any sense, his servants required diligent guidance. When he took his domestic staff to Italy, he was surprised that, "contrary to all predictions," they behaved well. Dickens shared his contemporaries' concern with the so called "servant problem," i.e., the difficulty of finding servants who would actually serve— from his earliest days as a master, when he had to dismiss 44 a manservant for impudence to Kate (in 1837), to his last, when he discussed the servant problem with Queen Victoria (in 1870).^'*

Although Dickens was never victimized or intimidated by his staff to the extent that some of his fictional masters and mistresses are, he was more than once confronted with problem servants. As a young master,- one of his most disturbing experiences with a servant took place at the funeral of his friend Charles Smithson:

I grieve to report Cto Kate]] that Wallace was almost too drunk to wait at table yesterday; which is horribly dis­ couraging, in reference to one’s treatment of servants. I am sure no man ever had a kinder master than he had in poor Smithson.^6

By that time (1844) Dickens had already been publicly humiliated by an intoxicated servant of his own, a cook at Broadstairs, his favorite watering place. Constables had to remove the cook after she "lay down in front of the Chickens]] house and addressed the 47 multitude for some hours." Much later in his servant-keeping career, Dickens was still occasionally embarrassed by his domestics.

After one of his absences from Gad’s Hill, he discovered that his cook (a different one this time), attired in riding habit, and his 15

groom, In dress-coat and jewels, had mounted his daughter Mary's

and his horses "and scoured the neighbouring country at a rattling

pace."^ Yet, despite a lifetime of evidence that paternalistic

treatment of servants did not ensure loyal and reliable service,

Dickens clung to this ideal of the paternalistic employer:

If we try to do our duty by people we employ; by exacting their proper service from them on the one hand, and treating them with all possible consistency, gentleness, and consider­ ation, on the other; we know that we do right. ’

Much more of a strain on Dickens' faith in paternalism than

the "problem" servant was the criminal servant. To a certain extent

Dickens sympathized with servant law-breaking. He understood how unnaturally confining domestic service could be. When Dickens served as a juror at an inquest on an illegitimate infant allegedly murdered by its mother, Eliza Burgess, a young maidservant, he pressed hard for a reduced verdict, i.e., "found dead." (Aborted pregnancy was a not uncommon consequence of a mistresses' injunctions against callers.) Eliza then was tried only for concealment of birth. Years later Dickens remembered "how hard her QEliza'sJ mistress was upon her . . . and with what a cruel pertinacity that piece of Virtue spun her thread of evidence double, by intertwining it with the sternest thread of construction.""*^ Dickens had no sympathy, however, for another servant accused of murder, Courvoisier. Yet the spec­ tacular trial of the Swiss valet who stabbed his master, Lord William

Russell, to death fascinated Dickens. In spite of his loathing for public hangings, he found himself, along with 20,000 others, including a number of menservants, drawn to Courvoisier's execution.No doubt 16

more disturbing for Dickens than the Courvoisier case was the discovery

of a criminal in his own employ. Dickens had once reminded his

philanthropic friend Miss Coutts that a day did not pass "when you

do not tempt your butler with a hundred times worth of his year's 52 wages." But Dickens was shocked when his own footman, John Thompson,

was caught embezzling funds at the All the Year Round office.

Thompson had served Dickens for over two decades and apparently had 53 been robbing him for years. The pessimism in Dickens' comments

on a new family servant several years after the discovery of Thompson's

thievery shows how serious a blow the betrayal was to Dickens'

idealism: "I am glad to hear about Armatage [[a page at Gad's Hill]],

and hope that a service begun in a personal attachment to Plorn

CEdward Bulwer Lytton Dickens]] may go on well. I shall never be

over-confident in such matters, I think, any more.""^

Dickens' seemingly contradictory treatment of his own servants,

his un-Victorian closeness and quite Victorian condescension to them,

can perhaps best be understood in light of his paradoxical view of

himself. Dickens prided himself on being a champion of the poor,

and in fact was one. While working on The Chimes he told Forster, "I

like more and more my notion of making . . . a great blow for the

poor.""’’’ Yet Dickens never felt comfortable with his own humble origin. He kept the status of his paternal grandparents, steward

and housekeeper for Lord Crewe, as secret as possible. Edmund Wilson

suggests that "the background of domestic service was for an Englishman

Ti.e., gentleman]] of the nineteenth century probably felt as more 17

disgraceful than embezzlement fcwhich Dickens' maternal grandfather

was guilty Dickens’ dual attraction downstairs and upstairs,

so evident in his ambivalent relations with the lower class in his own

home— his sympathy for the poor and identification with the privileged—

is, no doubt, what compelled him to play the double role of intimate

and critic of his servant-keeping audience.

Considering what we know of Dickens' personal experience with

servants it is not surprising that amidst the multiplicity of servant/

master relationships in his fiction, four modes of service, hence

four types of servant, recur again and again: (1) those who are

models of virtue and faithful service, the most influential of whom

I will call the servant-guides; (2) those who at least for a time

submit to employer abuse, the downtrodden; (3) those whose mischievous­

ness and arrogance make them masterful rather than menial, the

problem servants; and (4) those who are totally reprobate, a threat

to the people they serve, the servant-criminals. While all four of

these types so prominent in Dickens' novels obviously bear some relation

to Dickens' experience with servants, they are also the successors

of the well established literary tradition of the servant.

The literary servant can be traced back to classical antiquity,

and in English literature to the Middle Ages, but Dickens was more

familiar with those servant incarnations closer to his own period.

He was, however, well acquainted with the first major literary servant- guide, Sancho Panza, in addition to later versions of the type in the 18

works of Smollett. The downtrodden servant made her first appearance

in English literature as early as the fourteenth century, in John

Trevisa's translation of Friar Bartholomaeus Angelicus' De Proprietar-

ibus Rerum. ^ Dickens knew her eighteenth-century counterparts,

among whom the most notable is certainly Richardson’s Pamela Andrews.

The roots of the Dickensian problem-servant type can be found in the 58 comedies of Menander and Plautus. Dickens was especially fond of

an eighteenth-century farce, very popular in the Victorian period

but little known today, James Townley's High Life Below Stairs,

in which the disguised hero discovers to what extent he is being

bilked by his domestics. Dickens himself appeared in a production 59 of High Life Below Stairs in Montreal in 1842. For Dickens' servant-

criminals the most significant English predecessor is Defoe's servant-

turned criminal, Moll Flanders, in whom Laura Hoffeld sees a great

resemblance to the earlier Continental picaro, often a servant,

e.g., Lazarillo de Tonnes.*’® But it is not my intention to attempt

to measure Dickens' indebtedness to these precedents (in itself

an ambitious enough undertaking for another dissertation). I would, nevertheless, like to point out that the literary servants of the

eighteenth century, so well known to Dickens, reflected the real

relations between master and servant more than those of any previous

century.61

Dickens' perception of servant/master relationships in his own

century may have been somewhat obscured by his middle-class ideology, 62 as N. N. Feltes claims. No doubt Dickens realized that the audience for his fictional servants was, like that of most Victorian novelists,

63 mainly middle class. Dickens’ life-long reliance on his friend

John Forster, the very successful son of a Newcastle butcher, "as

a judge of what the average reader would stand" indicates how well

Dickens understood whom he was writing for. It would be an under­

statement to say that his relationship with this audience meant a

lot to him. Dickens often spoke of the emotional ties between his

readers and himself. In preface after preface he addressed his readers

64 as his close personal friends. Closeness notwithstanding, it is

a rare servant/master relationship in Dickens' fiction in which

there is not at least implicit criticism of the servant-keeper.

Almost every servant in Dickens is superior to his master in some way— more intelligent, more cunning, more practical, more lively, and often more virtuous. Some of the most untrustworthy maidservants are depicted as better mothers or, housekeepers than their mistresses, and the least loyal menservants as manlier than their masters.

Through his fictional servant/master relationships Dickens gave his

fellow servant-keepers a reflection of their own world that was neither very flattering nor very comforting.

There was some comfort, however, for servant-keeping readers

in Dickens' depiction of faithful servants and their masters— servants

such as the guides, Sam Weller and Mark Tapley, as well as Mrs. Bedwin,

Clara Peggotty, and Mrs. Rouncewell. Rather than representing the average Victorian servant, these "feudal types," as George Orwell called them,*^ represent the servant that the average Victorian 20 master wished he had as free market forces strengthened and "old family retainers" were replaced by job-hopping employees (or so it seemed to the masters).^

It is noteworthy that Dickens' fictional faithful servants usually belong to the topmost echelon of the servant hierarchy. As valets, housekeepers, nursemaid-companions (e.g., Miss Pross) they are the aristocrats of domestic service. If loyal retainers were to be found anywhere in Victorian England it was among the upper servants (a very small percentage of the domestic work force).

These servants had the least to complain of. They were treated well by master and fellow servant alike. Upper servants drew the highest salaries, housekeepers typically making 2.5 to 5 times as much as 67 68 housemaids, and valets 2 to 3 times as much as footmen. They were usually provided with the best sleeping quarters too, often a private bedroom. (A housemaid was lucky if she had a bed to herself.)

Lower servants generally feared and admired, at least outwardly, their superiors belowstairs:

In all but the most exalted houses, the housekeeper and the upper servants descended to the servants' hall for the first part of their dinner. They entered strictly in order of precedence and the lower servants stood silently and respectfully to greet them. At the table, all sat according to a hallowed plan: the housekeeper at the head of the table; the butler at the lower end; the cook on the right of the housekeeper and the lady's maid qn the left .... There was considerable formality during the meal and the lower servants knew better than to strike up conver­ sation. . . .69

The social historian Frank Huggett has noted that many domestics of the highest rank were even more conservative and class conscious 21 than their masters.

Dickens' abused fictional domestics of course bring the reader closer to the dismal reality of Victorian servitude: low pay, stingy rations, and inhumane restrictions on personal freedom.^ Many of

Dickens' contemporaries justified their exploitation of the poor as a cheap source of labor by reasoning, as Dickens' Steerforth does in a different context, that the poor were less sensitive than those above them socially. One anonymous Victorian author's description of a working girl typifies this mentality: "... commonly but comfortably clad, not warmly enough perhaps for well-to-do people, but enough so for her class who don't feel the cold as we do."^ 72 Perhaps the submissiveness of so many domestics, especially women, reinforced their masters' sense of their insensitivity. Long-standing submissiveness is one of the most outstanding traits of Dickens' physically and psychologically downtrodden domestics, such as the

Marchioness and Guster. Even the feisty Susan Nipper, who keenly feels and resents the icy indifference of her master, Dombey, remains in his service for twelve years. Of course in Dickens' fictional master/downtrodden servant relationships it is the insensitivity of the master that is most manifest.

But Dickens' lazy, overbearing trouble-making servants— his fictional problem servants— probably struck many of his contemporaries as most typical of their class. Feltes cites a debate in the letters column of the Daily Telegraph in 1865 over whether or not "it was a social fact, 73 that the hardest thing in the world to find is a good servant." The 22 difficulty of controlling one's servants was indeed a common complaint among Victorian employers. In Dickens' hands loss of control over one's domestics became an indicator of a more profound incapacity within the servant-keepers themselves. The chaotic households of Mrs.

Pocket and Mrs. Jellyby are strong indictments of both the traditional 74 and the more emancipated middle-class notions of womanhood. As for

Dickens' fictional masters— Bounderby, Merdle, Veneering, etc.—

Dickens uses their disloyal servants to expose them as mere facades whose status relies on their acquisitions (servants included), the kind of moneyed men Dickens met in London society: "Sleek, slobbering, bow-paunched, over-fed, apoplectic, snorting cattle. . .

Dickens' problem servants, and the dirty houses, uncared-for children, slighted masters they are responsible for, are the means of retribution in his fiction, not the reason for it. While Dickens agreed with the popular complaint about domestics, his fictional problem servants serve to condemn his class' need for servants to be the mothers, housekeepers, and gentlemen that they were not.

The most recurrent embodiments of lower-class hostility against the privileged few in Dickens' fiction are the servant-criminals.

They are usually not, however, as one might expect, in any real sense downtrodden. In fact, they are closer to the faithful feudal types in status, most of them coming from the top ranks of the servant hierarchy, e.g., the elder Rudge, a steward; Littimer, a valet;

Hortense, a lady's maid; Flintwinch, a butler. Among the ranks of actual Victorian criminals there were several notorious upper servants— 23

the already mentioned Courvoisier and Marie Manning, an ex-lady's maid. It is not difficult to imagine why upper servants might show

less respect for law and order than other workers, exposed as they were to the great inequities of the socioeconomic system. A cook,

for example, in a household wealthy enough to support a large staff would have had to prepare two quite different sets of meals daily, for upstairs and downstairs. But Dickens never justifies his fictional servant-criminals, who if shrewder than their masters, are sometimes not much less moral than they. Instead, Dickens lets the servant- criminals .stand as alarming representatives of that part of Victorian society which the middle and upper classes only provisionally controlled, and which they ignored at their own risk.

John Forster noted that "to set class against class he J2°ickensj never ceased to think as odious as he thought it righteous at all times to help each to a kindlier knowledge of the other.Dickens' fictional servants did indeed bring his readers closer to a class that they had little real knowledge of and less kindness for. NOTES

* John Forster, The Life of Charles Dickens (New York: Doubleday, Doran and Co., 19-”), p. 835. 2 Michael Slater argues that Dickens merely enjoyed indulging in "comic extravaganza" in his descriptions of Kate. Slater chivalrously defends Mrs. Dickens: "The legend of Catherine's domestic and general incompetence also seems based on distorted interpretations of certain letters and other documents." See Slater, Dickens and Women (London: Dent, 1983), pp. 127-8. 3 Edgar Johnson, Charles Dickens: His Tragedy and Triumph, 2 vols. (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1952), II, 906-9. 4 Ibid.

Dickens hired Roche before his first trip to Italy, in 1844. Roche then worked for Dickens off and on over the next four years.

8 To Count D'Orsay, 5 Aug. 1846, The Letters of Charles Dickens, ed. Madeline House, Graham Storey, et al. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965- ), IV, 597. Hereafter this edition of Dickens' letters will be referred to as the Pilgrim Letters.

^ To John Forster, 17-18 Nov. 1844, Pilgrim Letters, IV, 222-3.

8 Ibid.

® To Count D'Orsay, 5 July 1845, Pilgrim Letters, IV, 326.

To John Forster, 17-18 Nov. 1844, Pilgrim Letters, IV, 222.

To Daniel Maclise, 22 July 1844, Pilgrim Letters, IV, 162.

^ To Georgina Hogarth, 9 March 1847, Pilgrim Letters, V, 33.

To John Forster, 12 Dec. 1846, Pilgrim Letters, IV, 680.

^ To Louis Roche, 11 Nov. 1848, Pilgrim Letters, V, 438-9.

To W. C. Macreadys 29 Sept. 1841, Pilgrim Letters, II, 399.

To John Forster, 30 Jan. 1842, Pilgrim Letters, III, 40.

24 25

^ To John Forster, 24 and 26 April 1842, Pilgrim Letters, III, 204. 1 ft To Dr. James Wilson, 8 March 1851, The Letters of Charles Dickens, ed. Walter Dexter (London: Nonesuch Press, 1938), II, 278. Hereafter I will refer to Dexter's edition of Dickens' letters as the Nonesuch Letters.

^ To'Anne Cornelius, 11 Oct. 1857, Nonesuch Letters, II, 890.

^ Johnson, II, 919.

^ To Hans Andersen, 3 April 1857, Nonesuch Letters, II, 841-2. 99 To John Forster, 10-11 Aug. 1844, Pilgrim Letters, IV, 175.

^ To Henry Austin, 1 May 1842, Pilgrim Letters, III, 231.

^ To Arthur Smith, 25 May 1858, Nonesuch Letters, III, 22. 25 Forster, p. 857.

^ Johnson, II, 754-5. 27 Dickens' servant French was married. "The fact never came in my way," Dickens insisted. See To Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton, 20 Jan. 1860, Nonesuch Letters, III, 147.

Oft To Thomas Mitton, 14 April 1845, Pilgrim Letters, IV, 297. 29 Forster, pp. 835-6. 50 To John Forster, 15 June 1845, Pilgrim Letters, IV, 321. 31 To Georgina Hogarth, 5 May 1856, Nonesuch Letters, II, 769. . 32 See the description of No. 1 Devonshire Terrace in Pilgrim Letters, IV, 72n.

^ To the Editor of the Morning Chronicle, 25 July 1842, Pilgrim Letters, III, 281.

^ To John Forster, 24 May 1845, Pilgrim Letters, IV, 315.

^ To John Forster, 15-17 Aug. 1846, Pilgrim Letters, IV, 607. Of. To John Forster, 21 March 1842, Pilgrim Letters, III, 141. 37 To Daniel Maclise, 9 May 1845, Pilgrim Letters, IV, 307.

O f t To Thomas Mitton, 20 May 1845, Pilgrim Letters, IV, 314. ^ To John Forster, 12 May 1845, Pilgrim Letters, IV, 309. 41 To Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton, 20 Jan. 1860, Nonesuch Letters, III, 147.

^ To Lytton, 12 June 1862, Nonesuch Letters, III, 297. / O To the Countess of Blessington, 20 Nov. 1844, Pilgrim Letters, IV, 227.

^ Pilgrim Letters, I, 320n.

^ Johnson, II, 1147.

^ To Mrs. Charles Dickens, 6 April 1844, Pilgrim Letters, IV, 98.

^ To John Forster, 9 Sept. 1839, Pilgrim Letters, I, 578.

To W. F. de Cerjat, 1 Feb. 1861, Nonesuch Letters, III, 208-9. 4Q To W. H. Wills, 2 Sept. 1867, Nonesuch Letters, III, 543.

^ To John Forster, 15 Jan. 1840, Pilgrim Letters, II, 9, 9n.

51 Pamela Horn, The Rise and Fall of the Victorian Servant (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1975), pp. 144-5.

To Miss Coutts, 25 July 1846, Pilgrim Letters, IV, 588.

Johnson, II, 1066.

^ To Mary Dickens, 12 Oct. 1868, Nonesuch Letters, II, 672.

55 To John Forster, 8 Oct. 1844, Pilgrim Letters, IV, 200.

Edmund Wilson, "Dickens: The Two Scrooges," in The Wound and the Bow (New York: Oxford University Press, 1965), p. 9.

Dorothy Stuart, The Ehglish Abigail (London: Macmillan, 1946), p. 1. 58 Rosemary Woolf, The English Mystery Plays (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972), p. 128.

^ Playbill of the Public Theatricals, Montreal, 28 May 1842, in Pilgrim Letters, III, illus. between 246-7. 27

Laura Hoffeld, "The Servant Heroine in Eighteenth and Nineteenth- Century Fiction," Diss. N.Y.U. 1975, p. 50.

61 Hoffeld, p. 7. 62 N. N. Feltes, "'The Greatest Plague of Life': Dickens, Masters and Servants," Literature and History, No. 8 (Autumn 1978), 209. 63 John Butt and Kathleen Tillotson, Dickens at Work (London: Methuen, 1957), p. 23. For convenience' sake I use the term middle class, although, as Richard Altick points out, it would be more accurate to say middle classes "because this was the most pluralistic part of an increasingly pluralistic society." See Altick, Victorian People and Ideas (New York: Norton, 1973), p. 27n. 64 For example, in his preface to Dombey and Son Dickens addressed his audience thus: "I cannot forego my usual opportunity of saying farewell to my readers in this greeting place, though I have only to acknowledge the unbounded warmth and earnestness of their sympathy in every state of the journey we have just concluded." See Dombey and Son (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970), p. 41. Dickens was just as effusive a decade later in his preface to Little Dorritt: "Deeply sensible of the affection and confidence that have grown up between us, I add to this Preface . . . May we meet again!" See Little Dorritt (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967), p. 36.

George Orwell, Dickens, Dali and Others (New York: Reynal and Hitchcock, 1946), pp. 42-4.

^ E. P. Thompson, "Patrician Society, Plebeian Culture," Journal of Social History. VII, 4 (Summer 1974), 382-3; Dorothy Marshall, The English Domestic Servant in History (London: The Historical • Assoc., 1949), p. 12.

**7 Horn, pp. 184-5.

Marshall, p. 18.

^ E. S. Turner, What the Butler Saw (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1963), pp. 118-19.

7^ Horn, pp. 111-16.

7^ From My Secret Life, quoted in Frank Dawes, Not in Front of the Servants (London: Wayland Pub., 1973), p. 38.

73 Horn, p. 133.

73 Feltes, p. 197. 74 Actually, Dickens greatly admired Mrs. Jellyby s original, Caroline Chisholm, founder of the Family Colonization Loan Society which enabled many a fallen woman to find a new life in Australia. Yet he was plagued by nightmares about Mrs. Chisholm's neglected children. See Butt and Tillotson, p. 194.

^ To Douglas Jerrold, 3 May 1843, Nonesuch Letters, I, 517-18 quoted in Johnson, I, 451-2.

^ Forster, p. 348. CHAPTER II

THE SERVANT-GUIDES

For Dickens the servant/master relationship could be almost a thing of magic, not only as a literary device but also as an actual means of bringing classes of people together. Scattered throughout

Dickens' fiction one can find these representatives of the rich and poor, masters and servants, coexisting not just peaceably but amiably as well. However, it is only in Dickens' first and sixth novels,

The Pickwick Papers and Martin Chuzzlewit, that the dynamics of servant/ master relations are capable of affecting real miracles in mutual understanding.

Dickens endowed his young valets, Sam Weller and Mark Tapley, with the power of saving masters. Of course, the master/man relationship is inherently one of special intimacy.. And in nineteenth-century

England the valet's position was quite apart from and above that of most other servants, especially womenservants. E. S. Turner found in surveying Victorian servant manuals that "although writers tumbled over each other to give advice to the lady's maid, hardly anyone presumed to instruct her male equivalent, the valet.This Victorian respect for valets is nowhere more evident than in Dickens. He developed his valet-squires, who Sancho-like accompany their masters on picaresque adventures, more extensively than he did any of his other faithful servants.

29 30

Most of the other harmonious servant/master relationships in

Dickens involve loyal elderly womenservants, usually housekeepers and nursemaids, who provide a measure of comfort and security in a

chaotic and threatening world. These servants, such as Mrs. Bedwin

in Oliver Twist, Clara Peggotty in David Copperfield, and Miss Pross

in A Tale of Two Cities, are markedly maternal, in fact sometimes

taking the place of a dead mother. Dickens encourages his reader to admire the devotion of the older womenservants even when, as Mrs.

Rouncewell does, they support a master and mistress as flawed as the Dedlocks. Yet only occasionally does Dickens make these servants responsible for some significant action. Miss Pross is the one who finally defeats Madame Defarge. Mrs. Rouncewell is essential to the

denouement of Bleak House. But more often these women merely offer

safe harbor. They are incapable of any great salutary influence.

Even Peggotty, whose role is larger than that of any of the other servant-mothers, is severely limited in her ability to help Master

Davy either materially or spiritually. Copperfield's affection for his old nurse and her family cannot neutralize the attractions of a Steerforth.

But Pickwick's and Chuzzlewit's menservants do alter the course of their employers' lives. Granted, there is nothing novel in noting that these servants are instrumental in their masters' transformations, but the servant/master relationship itself seldom receives the credit it deserves. Their roles as servants enable Sam Weller and Mark

Tapley to humanize their masters. 31 4

I realize that any discussion of change in Sam Weller's master

places me on a perhaps too well trodden path. Countless readers

of The Pickwick Papers, as well as the author himself, have commented

on the change that occurs (or does not occur) in Pickwick. Some trace

a fundamental mutation in Pickwick as he journeys through the Papers.

James Kincaid, one of the most eloquent advocates for this reading

of Pickwick, argues:

The central fact of the novel is that Mr. Pickwick does change: he must be educated. He must first learn the nature of the real world and, without becoming cynical and despairing, discover the limits of benevolence and innocence. . . .2 4 Others, including Dickens and more recently J. Hillis Miller, find

the real change not in Pickwick but in the reader's perception of him. Dickens remarked in his Preface to the Cheap Edition of The

Pickwick Papers:

I do not think this change Cin PickwickU will appear forced or unnatural to my readers, if they will reflect that in real life the peculiarities of a man who has anything whimsical about him, generally impress us first, and that it is not until we are better acquainted with him that we usually begin to look below these superficial traits, and to know the better part of him. (PP, 45)

But some critics have countered that it was Dickens himself who changed. Among these, Sylvere Monod was one of the first to suggest

that in the process of creating The Pickwick Papers Dickens underwent an "evolution in his conception of the novelist's art, when the growing number of his readers enhanced his feeling of moral responsibility and his hope of exerting a beneficial influence. . . ."■* No matter where one locates the change, there is no denying that the Pickwick 32

we bid a fond farewell to at Dulwich is not the same Pickwick who

sets out to investigate the world beginning at Rochester.

Perhaps the second most mentioned topic in Pickwick criticism

in this century, i.e., after Pickwick's metamorphosis, has been the

change that occurs in Sam Weller under Pickwick's tutelage, usually

seen as a move away from cynicism, toward idealism.^ When Dickens

took William Jerdan's advice to develop Sam "to the utmost," he did

so along obviously Cervantean lines. His contemporaries were quick

to recognize the parallels. The Metro Magazine, for example, referred

to Sam's master as "the Cockney Quixote of the nineteenth century."^

Monod's comment on the Pickwick-Quixote resemblance is, I think,

equally applicable to Sam and Sancho: "By dint of scrutinizing it

too carefully, one would run the risk of losing sight of the essentials g in Pickwick's character. ..." But in broad terms Sam does become

like Sancho, that is, a devoted servant. Or, as N. N. Feltes would

say, Sam's relationship with his master shifts from a purely contrac­

tual one to a feudal one. Barbara Hardy is one of the few critics

since Orwell's dictum that the only good servants to be found in

Dickens are feudal to imply that there is something retrogressive about this change in Sam. Hardy asserts that Sam's self-denial at the end of Pickwick, his postponing of his own marriage for his q master's sake, may be offensive to egalitarians. I do not want to suggest that Dickens deliberately tamed Sam in order to hold onto what he sensed was a largely servant-keeping audience. But I do

feel that Dickens' feudalization of Sam goes far to explain his 33 continued immense popularity among readers of the serialized Pickwick

Papers as his role evolved into that of his master's mentor.

It is not difficult to conjecture what it was about Sam Weller that so immediately appealed to Dickens1 contemporaries. As one commentator in the Edinburgh Review remarked:

Weller is a character which we do not remember to have seen attempted before. He is a favourable, yet, in many respects, faithful representative of the Londoner of humble life,— rich in native humor, full of the confidence, and address, and knowledge of the world, which is given by circumstances to a dweller in cities, combined with many of the most attractive qualities of the English character,— such as writers love to show in the brave, frank, honest, light-hearted sailor.*0

Another, writing for Court Magazine, cites Weller in his (the. reviewer's) praise of Dickens' "knowledge of human character in the classes he depicts."•*■ * It does not really matter that Sam Weller may not have been a realistic representative of the lower classes. He may instead have been, as Sheila Smith complains, an eccentric in his own community, with "exaggerated Cockney mannerisms which had become a convention 12 of low comedy." Sam's brand of humor and wit may be highly deriva­ tive. He may sound much like the comic servant Simm Spatterdash in the popular early nineteenth-century farce The Boarding House, 13 by Samuel Beazley. The famous Wellerisms may also have been inspired, as Earle Davis suggests, by the "tag-line catch phrases" of the well 14 known actor Charles Matthews. In fact, these very similatiries, these artifices, may have helped Sam Weller look real, or I should say sound familiar, to Dickens' readers. Clearly Sam must have been what Dickens' contemporaries wanted to think the lower classes 34

were: high-spirited, practical, and able to laugh at the darker

and inescapable aspects of life.

Yet much of what made Sam so popular a lower-class represen­

tative— his boldness, his knowing loquaciousness— disqualified him

for conventional domestic service.^ That Sam retains these charac­

teristics even after being thoroughly domesticated has much to do

with Dickens' making the progress of Sam and Pickwick's relationship

not just the story of a cheeky Cockney who becomes a good servant

but also that of a master who learns the value of listening to

his man.

Pickwick commentators have so often highlighted, with just reason,

Sam Weller's role as his master's guide^ that the obvious bears

restating: Sam does not arrive one morning at Mrs. Bardell's immediate­

ly ready to take his new master in hand and lead him to enlightenment.

In effect Sam, of course, begins to instruct Mr. Pickwick as soon

as he is hired, in that he so often spouts macabre similes that

expose his master to an uglier side of the world than he is used to 18 seeing. But initially Sam is far from willing to accept anything

like the role of overseer of Pickwick's education. G. L. Brook

and more lately Dennis Walder have reminded us that Sam at first has 19 quite a "cool attitude to his new 'sitiwation'" and a "patronizing 20 tolerance toward his master.

In fact, when Sam is introduced at the White Hart Inn, he looks more like a potential member of the Jingle camp than of the Pickwick.

Sam's long-winded account of Tony Weller's unfortunate experience 35

at Doctor’s Commons, addressed to Jingle himself, sounds remarkably

like one of Jingle's own staccato and absurd anecdotes. Angus Wilson 21 has observed that Sam's black humor is also Jingle's And Sam's moral standards are not much above Jingle's. Sam too can be bought.

When offered half a guinea, Sam drops his boots and helps Pickwick,

Perker, and Wardle, confirming Mr. Pickwick's not-so-innocent assumption

that most men have their price: "I made use of the argument £money which my experience of men has taught me is the most likely to succeed

in any case" (PP, 204). Sam takes real delight in Jingle's gammoning of Pickwick at al, a fact which Sam does not bother to conceal at what he surely realizes is his job interview:

"Oh— you remember me, I suppose?" said Mr. Pickwick. "I should think so," replied Sam, with a patronizing wink. "Queer start that 'ere, but he was one too many for you, warn't he? Up to snuff and a pinch or two over — eh?" "Never mind that matter now," said Mr. Pickwick hastily, "I want to speak to you about something else. ..." (PP, 234-5)

While Sam Weller is not the conniver Jingle is, he does possess a certain Jingleistic mentality— you do what you can to get what you want or need. The example of his filial piety that Sam gives

Pickwick reveals as much: ". . . i f ever I wanted anythin' o' my father, I always asked for it in a wery 'spectful and obligin' manner.

If he didn't give it me, I took it, for fear I should be led to do anythin' wrong, through not havin' it. I saved him a world a trouble in this way, sir" (PP, 448). Sam is happy to serve Pickwick because it means "a change of air, plenty to see, and little to do" (PP, 236).

Valethood, Sam explains to his master, is a stepping stone to middle 36

classdom, i.e., independence: "Now I'm a gen'l'm'n's servant. I

shall be a gen'l'm'n myself one of these days, with a pipe in my mouth, and a summerhouse in the back garden" (PP, 290). When Sergeant

Buzfuz much later sizes up Sam's job, "Little to do, and plenty to

get, I suppose?" (PP, 572) Sam's indignation, and probably every

reader's, tells us how far Sam moves from both his egocentric attitude

toward his relationship with Mr. Pickwick and his desire for indepen­ dence.

Of course it is not just the employee whose attitude changes.

Mr. Pickwick, despite his "benevolent countenance" (PP, 203) upon meeting Sam, does not decide to hire him for any altruistic reasons.

Picwick sees in Sam "a considerable knowledge of the world, and a great deal of sharpness . . . which may be of material use to me" 22 (PP, 231). Clearly Pickwick is not above viewing people, especially those socially beneath him, in terms of their usefulness to him, in providing a service or some curious facts. He pursues a conver­ sation with a cab driver, for example, only because the driver claims his horse is forty-two (PP, 73). No doubt much of Pickwick's unset­ tledness when he contemplates hiring Sam results from the prospect of letting a member of the lower classes share his life more than anyone ever has. (Pickwick's cryptic questioning of Mrs. Bardell, actually a defense of his decision to take a valet, indicates that

Pickwick has never had a manservant before.) After Sam starts to work for him, Pickwick carefully keeps him at arm's length. Mr.

Pickwick wants what he contracted for— valet service. The running commentary that Sam provides along with it is more tolerated than

appreciated by Pickwick. For instance, after Sam's narration of

his father's canal accident at another election time in Eatanswill,

Pickwick abruptly concludes the conversation: "'It is, no doubt,

a very extraordinary circumstance indeed,' said Mr. Pickwick. 'But

brush my hat, Sam, for I hear Mr. Winkle calling me to breakfast'"

(PP, 248). Pickwick does not take much interest in his manservant's

chatter until Sam says something that calls his master's attention

to him as a person with some sensibilities and a past. On the way

to Bury St. Edmonds Sam recites his colorful and pathetic job history:

carrier's boy, wagoner's boy, "helper," boots, with an interval under

the dry arches of Waterloo Bridge. Sam succeeds in arousing not

just his master's curiosity but'also his sympathy, for his servant

and others forced to seek "unfurnished lodgings": '"Sights, sir,'

resumed Mr. Weller, 'as 'ud penetrate your benevolent heart, and

come out on the other side'" (PP, 290). Significantly, this time not the master but the servant ends their conversation. This marks a major turning point in Mr. Pickwick's relationship with Sam.

Finally the master begins to acknowledge the common sense and worldly wisdom of his man:

"Now Sam," said Mr. Pickwick, "the first thing to be done is to— " "Order dinner, sir," interposed Mr. Weller. "It's very late, sir." "Ah, so it is," said Mr. Pickwick, looking at his watch. "You are right, Sam." (PP, 291)

But Sam, if more willing at Bury to guide his master, is not yet qualified for the job. He is still at that point more of a genial 38

hedonist than a devoted servant. Sam spends his first night at Bury

carousing so raucously that his master's sleep is shortened by three

hours (PP, 292). Far more serious repercussions result when Pickwick

counts on his valet to help him avenge the wrongs of Jingle. Sam

leads his master straight into Job's trap. Tony Weller's education

of his son, letting him roam the streets of London, may have made

Sam sharp, but it taught him little of the bonds that can exist between men. Sam's own reluctance to trust others makes him particularly vulnerable to the maneuvers of Jingle and Job. Sam just expects

servants to be of dubious loyalty:

"Now, sir," argued Mr. Weller, when he had concluded his report Con Jingle"J, if I can get a talk with this here servant CJob]] in the mornin', he'll tell me all his master's concerns." "How do you know that?" interposed Mr. Pickwick. "Bless your heart, sir, servants always, do," replied Mr. Weller. (PP, 292)

Later when Job delivers his tearful oration about the difficulty of betraying a master "whose clothes you wear, and whose bread you eat

£and Jingle probably does furnish these for Jobjf, even though he is a scoundrel" (PP, 296), Pickwick is moved, but Sam is annoyed, not because he thinks Job is dissembling but because he is convinced Job is "soft." Sam is defeated by Job's loyalty to Jingle. The Job/

Jingle relationship totally baffles Sam— "Friend or master, or whatever he £ JingleJ is . . ." (PP, 308), as it later does his father, Tony, and Perker's benighted clerk, Lowten. The valet who deserts his master in his CPickwick'sJ drunkenness and distrusts him when he is accused of playing fast and loose with a lady's heart manifestly feels no 39

Job-like attachment.

Thus for Sam the turning point in his relationship with Pickwick comes at a later date than it does for his master. Not until Sam sees Pickwick pitted against those legal piranhas Dodson and Fogg, sees his master too as a victim, does his cavalier attitude toward service do a real about-face. It has been repeatedly noted by

Pickwick critics that Sam Weller had never before known such innocence as Pickwick's, and implied that this new knowledge is what wins 23 the valet over. But hand in hand with Sam's recognition of his master's unaffected naivete about man's capacity for evil, comes his realization that no one he has ever been connected with has depended on him for so much. If Pickwick learns that Sam can offer much more than he contracted for, Sam learns that Pickwick needs him for much more. Shortly after that initial confrontation with

Dodson and Fogg, Sam rescues his master from the bewildering passages of the White Horse Inn, and saucily informs him, "You rayther want somebody to look arter you, sir, wen your judgment goes out a wisitin'" (PP, 395). As Sam ambles "slowly to his chamber, apparently burled in the profoundest meditation" (PP, 395), he clearly is mentally making his commitment to Pickwick and service.

No one, indeed, is better equipped to defend Mr. Pickwick than a fully committed Sam Weller, as he deftly demonstrates in the courtroom at the Bardell vs. Pickwick trial. It is not just Sam's quick wit and cool-headedness that makes him such a strong witness for Pickwick; his regard for a master whose kindness he is happy 40

to publicize also helps underscore the pettiness of Buzfuz as well

as the duplicity of Dodson and Fogg. Quite unwittingly Buzfuz encour­

ages Sam to draw a sharp, albeit implicit, contrast between his

master's very real generosity to his man and Dodson and Fogg's

"generous" behavior toward Mrs. Bardell:

"The attorneys for the plaintiff," said Mr. Sergeant Buzfuz. "Well! They Cthe ladies at Mrs. Bardell's] spoke in high praise of the honourable conduct of Messrs. Dodson and Fogg, the attorneys for the plaintiff, did they?" "Yes," said Sam, "they said what a wery gen'rous thing it was o' them to have taken up the case on spec, and to charge nothing at all for costs, unless they got 'em out of Mr. Pickwick." (PP, 574)

There can be no doubt that Sam is at last Dickens' ideal servant when

soon after the trial, he makes an appearance at the select footman's

"swarry" in Bath. The "gentleman in blue" who confides in Sam plainly

has chosen the wrong man: "... and we know, Mr. Weller— we, who

are men of the world— that a good uniform must work its way with

the women Lof the houses where they served sooner or later. In fact,

that's the only thing, between you and me, that makes the service worth entering into" (PP, 614). Sam is no modern mock-gentleman

type servant. His distance from the democratic ("mississes" is not

a title they care to use) Bath footmen emphasizes Sam's now feudal

loyalty to Mr. Pickwick. Sam the devoted valet views his master

as his superior, a lord who merits all the protection Sam can provide:

". . . if I can help it, I won't have him put upon by nobody, and

that's all about it" (PP, 633). And in fact Pickwick does deserve

Sam's increased respect. Pickwick the fact gatherer, or "scientist 24 gloriosus" humor character as Barbara Hardy calls him, has been 41

transformed into a man more involved with his fellow men, as his

assistance in the Winkle wooing just before beginning his term in the

Fleet shows. Kincaid aptly remarks that this is "one of the first

creatively outgoing things he CPickwickI?has done and therefore a 25 sign . . . of his developing humanization."

It is difficult, however, to agree with Kincaid when he argues

that Sam Weller allows his master to go to prison so that he can 26 complete his education. It seems to me that in Sam's sacrifice

of his freedom, negotiating his ora imprisonment in the Fleet, there

is powerful evidence of Sam's desire to put a halt to Pickwick's

"education."

"Wy, they'll eat him up alive, Sammy," exclaimed Mr. Weller. Sam nodded his concurrence in the opinion. "He goes in rayther raw, Sammy," said Mr. Weller metaphorically, "and he'll come out, done so ex-ceedin' brown, that his most familiar friends won't know him. Roast pigeon's nothing' to it, Sammy." Again Sam Weller nodded. (PP, 699)

Mr. Pickwick's forgiveness of his nemesis, Jingle, which confirms

for Sam his sense of his master's moral superiority— "he's a reg'lar

thorough-bred angel. . . and let me see the man as wenturs to tell me he knows a better vun" (PP, 734), reveals a sympathy for and

optimism about the lower classes that might easily disintegrate

beneath the weight of too many Smangles and Mivinses. Pickwick himself seems to realize this danger. It is Sam's presence that

enables Pickwick to retire to his room and remain there unmolested

for the three months he spends in the Fleet. And it is Sam who

starts the machinery, by dispatching Job to Perker, that eventually 42 releases Pickwick from the too real world of the Fleet.

Perhaps the most disturbing irony in The Pickwick Papers (not that there is a great deal of irony in it) is that the Fleet experience leaves Mr. Pickwick with such a deep feeling of gratitude for the extraordinary service of his valet that he decides to give Sam exactly what he once dreamt that his service to Pickwick would lead to:

Pickwick offers to set Sam and Mary up in a small business of their own. But by the time the opportunity to rise above service comes,

Sam only wishes to bind himself more tightly to his master— "vages or no vages, notice or no notice, board or no board, lodgin' or no lodgin1, Sam Veller, as you took from the old inn in the Borough, sticks by you, come what come may" (PP, 887). The same feudal devotion of his servant that makes Pickwick want to reward Sam with relative financial independence prevents his valet from accepting it. So convinced is Sam of his master's need that he cannot imagine Pickwick surviving without him. The Pickwick Papers ends with a moving ex­ pression of the love between two men, but it is a love that locks

Sam Weller into servanthood: "Every year, he CPickwickHrepairs to a large family merry-making at Mr. Wardle's; on this, as on all other occasions, he is invariably attended by the faithful Sam, between whom and his master there exists a steady and reciprocal attachment which nothing but death will terminate" (PP, 898).

In many respects the ever cheerful and loyal valet of Martin

Chuzzlewit, Mark Tapley, seems a replay of Sam Weller. John Forster tells us that Dickens' major ploy to bolster the low serial sales 43

27 of Martin Chuzzlewit was to send his young protagonist to America.

But judging by the conspicuous similarities between the servant/

companion Martin takes with him and Pickwick's Sam, Dickens may also

have been counting on a new Weller-style domestic to lure back his 28 lost audience. Yet perhaps the very fact that Mark Tapley was like 29 Sam Weller made him a less effective audience-pleaser. Several

more recent critics of Martin Chuzzlewit have suggested that Dickens

was unable to completely revive the spirit of Sam. Garrett Stewart 30 says of Mark that he "fans what is left of the Weller spark."

S. J. Newman remarks that although Tapley is the liveliest of the

virtuous characters in Martin Chuzzlewit, he is "a cut-price Sam 31 Weller." Certainly for the reader with the joie de vivre of Sam

in mind, Mark is a disappointment. But I think that for Dickens'

contemporaries Mark was more than disappointing. He was disturbing.

For in Mark Tapley Dickens gave them not a contented Sam Weller, but

a pointedly more restless and dissatisfied lower-class figure, who

serves not so much as his master's guide to the real world as guide

to Martin's own unsound psyche. Stephen Marcus was the first to

articulate what probably many readers had felt and some since have

repeated: that Martin Chuzzlewit "amounted to something in the 32 way of an assault upon Dickens's audience." Forster must have

sensed this antagonistic tendency even while Dickens was still at work on Martin Chuzzlewit, for he advised him to drop the motto 33 "Your homes the scene, yourselves the actors here." Of course

Dickens wanted Martin Chuzzlewit to be successful. His material 44

and emotional well-being depended on audience approval. But the means

Dickens chose to win an audience for this work, sending young Martin

to America with Mark, actually intensified this his most searing

criticism of the servant-keeping classes to date (which may well 34 be what alienated readers from the very start).

It is hard to imagine a better parody of Sam Weller as he is at

the end of The Pickwick Papers, a convert to Pickwickian service, than Mark Tapley, for he carries Sam's genial self-denial to the point of absurdity. Like Sam, Mark appreciates the simple joys of life— good food, good drink, good company— which are found in such abundance at the Blue Dragon, where Mark works and lives. Also like Sam, Mark enjoys the admiration of the female sex, ably represented by Mrs.

Lupin, a buxom blossom of a woman, the equivalent of several of

Sam's Marys. And like Sam, Mark postpones the pleasure of union.

Mark too is given the opportunity to become his own master (landlord of the Dragon) but refuses it. Mark turns his back on all this for a different kind of life: domestic service. But whereas Sam chooses service first as a means to improve his social position and finally out of devotion to his master, Mark chooses service because it is the worst profession he can find. Gravedigging, undertaking, tax collecting are all "jolly" jobs compared to serving the middle 35 and upper classes. For Mark, domestic service is the perfect occu­ pation, because with such a wide range of disagreeable servant-keeping families to choose from— envious, quarrelsome, malicious, "good out- and-out mean"— the opportunities for misery, hence "credit," surpass 45

Chose of any other profession.

Mark finds his ideal master with remarkable ease. Even before he leaves the Dragon he meets three good prospects— Tigg and Slyme, and also Martin Chuzzlewit, the elder, to whom Mark does eventually proffer his unwanted services. When Tapley is employed by the younger version of Old Martin, he acquires precisely what he set his sights on, a master whom it would be a "credit" (in Mark's economy) to serve. In fact, Mark is the one who hires his master, and in so doing he makes a Wellerian commitment: he will work even without wages if need be. In accepting Mark, Martin reveals an ego quite at ease with others' sacrifices. Closer acquaintance with his master in America gives Mark the satisfaction of knowing he has chosen well: "'I want a man as is his own great-coat and cloak, and is always a-wrapping himself up in himself. And I have got him too,' said

Mr. Tapley, after a moment's silence. 'What a happiness!"' (MC, 584).

This is hardly a servant/master paradigm calculated to comfort a servant-keeping readership. Victorian employers commonly assumed 36 a watchdog role over their domestics' souls. Mark is not just more awake to his master's shortcomings than Martin is; in this case the servant presents the master with the only likely means of 37 salvation from himself.

Mark Tapley is one of the many foils for Martin Chuzzlewit.

Tom Pinch, John Westlock, and even Martin's fiancee, Mary Graham, all serve to highlight Martin's defects. But none plays this role 38 so protractedly and effectively as Mark. Throughout their travels 46

in America (until Mark's illness) and indeed long before they even

set foot on New York soil, Mark's patient and assiduous fulfillment

of his duties as Martin's servant, from which Mark always manages

to reserve enough energy and time for service to others in far

greater need than his master, sharply contrasts with the self-serving,

class-conscious existence of his master. But young Martin is not

an exceptionally self-indulgent or heartless master. He is, rather,

the norm, as Mark implies, and through him surely Dickens also.

When Martin, still on board the Screw, headed for America, refuses

to "be seen by the ladies and gentlemen on the after-deck, mingling

with the beggarly crowd that are stowed away in this vile hole" (MC,

314), Mark's response has reference to more than Martin: "I'm thankful

that I can't say from my own experience what the feelings of a gentleman may be" (MC, 314).

If the journey to and through America gives the reader numerous opportunities to see Mark Tapley as his master's foil, it also eventual­ ly leads Martin Chuzzlewit to the recognition of his servant as such.

Yet, ever since the American scenes of Martin Chuzzlewit first appeared

in print they have inspired such comments as: "These chapters are an unaccountable excrescence, and while they add to the bulk, mar 39 the unity and effect of the book as a work of art." John Forster, with characteristic acuteness, fathered still another tradition in

Dickens criticism when he defended the functionality of the American 40 scenes with respect to the development of the young protagonist.

But it is not just "the poisonous swamp of Eden" that enables Martin to "cast off his slough of selfishness," as Forster puts i t . ^

Although in the pre-Eden episodes in America Martin Chuzzlewit does 42 look at times as many have complained, more like the young Charles

Dickens aghast at the violence and intolerance of America than like

a spoiled young man in search not of progressive ideas and institutions

but financial success, the Martin of earlier days does survive in

Martin the master, who takes for granted the service and sacrifices

of Mark Tapley in America. Martin has no qualms, for instance,

about using Mark's savings to purchase a plot of land and celebrating

their new "partnership" by sending Mark out to fetch sherry cobblers

(MC, 417). But what begins to happen to this Martin even before he

reaches Eden is that hs is pushed closer and closer to his servant.

Martin depends on Mark for much, much more among the barbaric people and in the hostile environment of America than he probably ever would have in England. Martin counts on Mark not just for cobblers and cash, but also for the respect and understanding so seldom met with

in Dickens' America. When, finally in Eden, Martin feels a "thrill of terror" (MC, 589) just at the thought of Mark's falling ill, his reaction is "the selfishness specifically of the gentleman wholly 43 dependent upon his servant," as Geoffrey Thurley remarks. Thurley offers one of the most preceptive accounts of the process which ultimately results in Martin's reformation: "... Martin starts finding out about himself through being forced into a different situation, into a role he has never played before, that of the helper or servant. And it is this exchange of roles that throws 48 44 his personality into focus. ..." What Martin realizes when he serves his servant, and this is what precipitates his own transforma- 45 tion, is that Mark is his moral superior. Thus Martin and Mark reverse the progress of The Pickwick Papers, where servant learns to revere master.

Yet, Mark, too, is a new man after Eden, partly because of his brush with death— the ultimate test of jollity— and partly because of Martin's metamorphosis. Along with dismal circumstances, Mark had had his heart set on that elusive "credit." Before he knew his quest would take him to America, Mark gave an astonished Tom Pinch his reason for leaving the too comfortable Dragon: "It's my opinion that nobody never will know half of what's in me, unless something very unexpected turns up" (MC, 121). By the time Mark returns to

England he has abandoned his search for credit, having recognized the foolishness of it, but he does so with the satisfaction of knowing that one man, and that the one he would have thought the least likely, has acknowledged more than half of what is in him: '"You are the best master in the world, Mark,' said Martin, 'and I will not be a bad scholar if I can help it, I am resolved!"' (MC, 628) After receiving

Martin's tribute, Mark assumes various servant roles— temporary cook on the homeward-bound Screw, instant butler at the Pinches', valet for Old Martin— but he is ready to accept Mrs. Lupin and her Dragon, to become a master himself.

So while in The Pickwick Papers the respect that emerges between master and man culminates in a till-death-do-us-part bond, in Martin 49

Chuzzlewit the final mutual admiration of Martin and Mark frees Mark from the need to serve. Nevertheless, in both The Pickwick Papers and

Martin Chuzzlewit it is the servant/master relationship that makes pos­ sible the appreciation that such disparate men as Pickwick and Sam,

Martin and Mark eventually have of each other. NOTES

* E. S. Turner, What the Butler Saw: Two Hundred and Fifty Years of the Servant Problem (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1963), p. 166. 2 James Kincaid, Dickens and the Rhetoric of Laughter (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), p. 22. 3 Charles Dickens, "Preface to the Cheap Edition, 1847," The Pickwick Papers (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972), p. 45. Further references to Pickwick will appear in the text.

^ J. Hillis Miller, Charles Dickens: The World of His Novels (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1958), p. 27.

^ Sylvere Monod, Dickens: The Novelist (Norman, Oklahoma: University of Oklahoma Press, 1968), p. 110.

^ See for example Robert Patten, "Introduction," the Penguin Pickwick Papers, p. 25, and William Axton,' "Unity and Coherence in The Pickwick Papers," SEL 5 (1965), 670.

^ Unsigned review, Metropolitan Magazine, Jan* 1837, 6, in Dickens: The Critical Heritage, ed. Philip Collins (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1971), p. 31. O Mon,od, p. 109. g Barbara Hardy, The Moral Art of Dickens (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970), p. 99; George Orwell, Dickens, Dali and Others (New York: Reynal and Hitchock, 1946), p. 42. But most egalitarians are probably more pleased than annoyed by Sam generally. His cheerful impudence and worldly superiority over the Pickwickians make it easy to overlook his feudal tendency. Even such a Marxist critic as Annette Rubinstein greatly admires and enjoys Sam. See her survey The Great Tradition in English Literature from Shakespeare to Shaw (New York: The Citadel press, 1953), p. 699. This is one of the most widely read works on English literature in the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China.

[Thomas Henry Lister], Review of Sketches, Pickwick, Nickleby, and Oliver Twist, Edinburgh Review, Oct. 1838, lxviii, in Collins, p. 75.

^ Unsigned article, "Some Thoughts on Arch-Waggery, and in Especial, on the Genius of 'Boz,'" Court Magazine, April 1837, x, in Collins, p. 34. 50 51 12 Sheila Smith, The Other Nation: The Poor in English Novels of the 1840's and 1850's (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), pp. 192-3. 13 John Butt and Kathleen Tillotson, Dickens at Work (London: Methuen, 1957), p. 70. 14 Earle Davis, The Flint and the Flame: .The Artistry of Charles Dickens (Columbia, Missouri: University of Missouri Press, 1963), p. 43.

^ Pamela Horn notes that in the numerous manuals and magazines published then for domestics they were "warned under no circumstances to 'offer any opinion1 to their master and mistress, 'nor even to say "good night" or "good morning" except in reply to that salutation.'" Horn concedes that there were plenty of exceptions to the rule, yet the distance between servant and master was one of the distinguishing characteristics of nineteenth-century servant/master relations, no doubt because so many masters were nouveau middle class. See Horn, The Rise and Fall of the Victorian Servant (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1975, p. 112.

^ Sam's outspokenness continues unabated throughout his relation­ ship with Pickwick. There are at least eight Pickwickian reprimands of Sam's too free tongue.

^ See Angus Wilson, The World of Charles Dickens (New York: Viking Press, 1970), p. 121; Miller, p. 3; Kincaid, p. 31; Patten, p. 25. 18 "He [Sam] very slowly forces grim reality on to his master's hasty demand for comic reassurance. Sam's instinct is decidely anticomic, both here [Sam's account of Tony's canal accident] and in his dark similes. He hates the happy endings which deny reality ..." (Kincaid, p. 35). 19 Dennis Walder, Dickens and Religion (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1981), p. 21. 20 G. L. Brook, The Language of Dickens (London: Andre Deutsch, 1970), p. 220.

^ Wilson, p. 121. 22 George Orwell and Humphrey House both wondered how Pickwick could ever have made as much in the City as he spends on his travels. See Orwell, Dickens, Dali and Others, p. 7; House, The Dickens World (New York; Oxford University Press, 1941), p. 63. But Pickwick's early dealings with Sam reveal some of the astuteness one would expect to find in a well-off retired businessman. 23 See W. H. Auden, "Dingley Dell and the Fleet," in Dickens: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Martin Price (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1967), p. 75; Walder, p. 23. 52

^ Hardy, p. 87.

^ Kincaid, p. 44. 26 Kincaid, p. 45. 27 John Forster, The Life of Charles Dickens, ed. J. W. T. Ley (New York: Doubleday, Doran & Co., 19— ), p. 302 28 For instance, both Sam and Mark make their first appearance as inn employees. There is even a sartorial resemblance. Both sport jaunty scarves. 29 George Ford in Dickens and His Readers: Aspects of Novel Criticism Since 1836 (New York: Norton, 1965), p. 95, has pointed out that in book form Martin Chuzzlewit actually was outsold only by The Pickwick Papers and David Copperfield during Dickens' lifetime. The serial sales, however, are a more telling gauge of how Dickens' contemporaries responded to the specific ingredients of Martin Chuzzlewit. 30 Garrett Stewart, Dickens and the Trials of Imagination Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1974), p. 116. 31 S. J. Newman, Dickens at Play (London: Macmillan, 1981), p. 105. 32 Steven Marcus, Dickens: From Pickwick to Dombey (New York: Basic Books, 1965), p. 223.

Ford, p. 48. 34 Readers of the serialized Martin Chuzzlewit would have been the first to be exposed to this more serious, darker satire of themselves, thus less prepared for it than later readers of the novel. Those earlier readers had reason to expect a less critical Dickens. 35 Charles Dickens, Martin Chuzzlewit (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968), p. 168. Further references will appear in my text.

^ Horn, pp. 114-15. 37 Walder comments: "Mark is a redemptive figure in the same cate­ gory as Florence Dombey or Agnes Wickfield, in the same way essential for the emergence of a better nature in the hero." See Walder, p. 119. 38 Mark is much more of an obvious foil for Martin than Sam is for Pickwick. Mark and Martin are both in their twenties, both setting out on their first real adventure in life, but with very dissimilar goals: the servant aims to prove his strength of character; the master to make his fortune. 53 39 Thomas Cleghom? "Writings of Charles Dickens," North British Review, May 1845, iii, in Collins, p. 187. 40 Forster, p. 308.

P. N. Furbank, for example, in his "Introduction" to the Penguin Martin Chuzzlewit says, "Dickens allows himself to make very opportunist use of his English travellers, employing Martin as the spokesman of generous indignation against American slave-owners and piratical publishers, with no particular relevance (and indeed some unsuitability) to his official role in the novel" (MC, 23). 43 Geoffrey Thurley, The Dickens Myth: Its Genesis and Structure (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1976), p. 91. 44 Thurley, p. 91. 45 The change in Martin Chuzzlewit has inspired some of the most caustic criticism of Dickens put into print in this century. Robert Garis describes it as "laboriously tedious." See Garis, The Dickens Theatre: A Reassessment of the Novels (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), p. 93. H. M. Daleski refers to Martin's metamorphosis as a "shallow, unconvincing . . . rendering of spiritual experience." See Daleski, Dickens and the Art of Analogy (New York: Schocken Books, 1970), p. 109. James Wright damns the conversion as "pallid and artistically lifeless,'? one of the "idiocies" of Dickens. See Wright, "The Comic Imagination of the Young Dickens," Diss. University of Washington, 1959, pp. 298, 289. Personally I find it hard to resist the feeling when reading these critics that they are not just objecting to Dickens' handling of Martin's reformation but to the very fact that he does reform. CHAPTER III

THE DOWNTRODDEN

It would be easy to argue that after the creation of those superservants Sam Weller and Mark Tapley, six years apart, there was a great falling off. No other Dickensian servants were ever again allowed to play such formative roles in their masters' lives. But there are other domestics in the Dickens canon who were and are more likely to effect a change of heart in the reader. Victims rather than guides of their masters, Dickens' downtrodden servants are unable to miraculously reform their oppressors. Far from being as idealized as Sam and Mark are, the downtrodden, such as the

Marchioness, Susan Nipper, Guster, and Affery Flintwinah, usually appear as a subhuman breed of comic grotesques, a fact which certainly opens Dickens to criticism. Was Dickens through his comic-grotesque portrayal of the downtrodden participating in the sins of the masters, fictional and nonfictional, guilty of denying their servants' humanity?* I would like to show that Dickens' downtrodden in all their grotesqueness are actually informed by an uncommon awareness of the reality of Victorian service, indeed reflect the state that innumerable Victorian domestics were reduced to as well as the social mentality that reduced them to it, and as a result, more than any other type of domestic in Dickens, elicit sympathy for the serving class.

54 55

Other Victorian workers may have worked as hard, if not harder, and endured worse living conditions but none had their individual humanity so routinely supressed as did domestic servants. Since the workplace was also home for the domestic, even off-duty hours could 2 be and were regulated by the employer. Harriet Martineau remarked of the profession:

The peculiarity in the life of domestic service is subjec­ tion to the will of another. There may be more or less of this, avowedly or virtually, in other modes of life; ^ but of no other is it the distinguishing peculiarity. . . .

"Slavery" was the term used by more than one Victorian social critic to describe domestic service. One such observer, the prolific inventor and essayist W. B. Adams, a.k.a. "Helix," commented in 1849:

The position of both men and women domestic servants, is that of painful privation. Taken as a mass, good feeding is the highest of their enjoyments; good lodging a rare exception; social intercourse is practically denied. They are, in short, mostly treated as a species of white slaves. . . .^

From the vantage point of this century, "beasts of burden" seems a still more appropriate term to describe those whose job was to satisfy the needs and whims of the more fortunate in the nineteenth century. Recently such social historians as Frank Dawes, Pamela

Horn, Theresa McBride, and Frank Hugget have made disturbingly clear to us the colossal amount of lower class drudgery exacted to maintain the middle and upper class Victorian home, replete with dirt-generating fireplaces and dust-collecting bric-a-brac."’

The vast majority of Victorian servants toiled from dawn till long after dusk, dutifully performing monotonous, exhausting and filthy tasks— daily carrying upstairs gallons of hot water and 56

bushels of coal, returning downstairs with soiled laundry and full

chamberpots. A typical Victorian servant's career might begin at

the ageof twelve, with an income of^ 6 to 7 per annum, and end,

if she were not lucky enough to find a spouse, whenever the pensionless

domestic was no longer capable of the taxing duties of service.

She then would be forced to enter a workhouse or asylum.^ Horn

informs us that

At the time of the 1871 census approximately one female inmate in three at the St. George's Workhouse, Hanover Square, was a domestic servant, and those aged sixty or over comprised nearly half of the total. At Fulham and Kensington Workhouses similar proportions operated.^

When Dickens visited St. Luke's Hospital for the Insane earlier,

in 1851, he was especially interested in the female patients, who

comprised the bulk of the inmates. In the account of this excursion

he wrote for Household Words Dickens remarked, "Female servants are, as is well known, more frequently afflicted with lunacy than any other class of persons." Martineau suggested that there were obvious reasons for the large proportion of female servants in asylums: "Want of sufficient sleep from late and early hours, unremitting fatigue and hurry and . . . anxiety about the future from the smallness of* wages. ,.9

But while Dickens, Martineau, and Adams took a genuinely sympa­ thetic interest in domestic servants, most of their fellow Victorians preferred to ignore the human needs and rights of the class that served them. Dawes notes that Victorian servant-keepers were apathetic about working conditions in their own homes: 57

In 1842 public opinion had been aroused by a Royal Commission's report on the appalling conditions in which women and children were forced to work in the mines, and this led to laws removing all women and children under ten from employment underground. But, fond as the Victorians were of Commissions of Inquiry, they never ordered one to inquire into the conditions of service in their own homes. Mistresses de­ plored the fact that shop girls were kept on their feet for fourteen hours a day, and quite ignored the fact that their own servants were sometimes on duty as many as eighteen hours.^

There were charitable organizations for the relief of servants but

they received far less attention than did other charities. In 1861

the servant charities of London received a total of^6,250, while

the Bible and missionary societies were given ^332,679 in donations.

Some Victorian observers of the servant-master relationship quite

candidly admitted that it was one mutual ignorance. Martineau noted:

There is no want of good intention. . . The want is of sympathy— of mutual knowledge. There is perhaps no parallel instance of two classes of people living in such close conjunction amidst so entire a mutual ignorance, as in that of master and servants. They see one another many times in a day; but, the blind sides of their minds being mutually presented, they might as well be living on different halves of the globe for anything they know of each o t h e r . 12

Martineau's assessment appears just. Victorians who professed the

greatest sympathy for servants revealed remarkable ignorance of the

actual conditions of service. Even a woman so knowledgeable about

housekeeping as Isabella Beeton, author of the popular Book of Household

Management. seems to have had some rather etherealized notions about

servant life. Mrs. Beeton claimed that "a bustling and active girl

[referring to a maid-of-all-work] will always find time to do a

little needlework for herself, if she lives with consistent and 13 reasonable people." One wonders if Mrs. Beeton realized how hugely 58 qualifying her "if" was. According to Pamela Horn, "Only where the household was a very small one [not a common phenomenon in Victorian times], consisting of perhaps one elderly lady, like Miss Matty's home in Cranford, would there seem to be much opportunity for leisure."^ Another Victorian, the women's rights advocate Frances

Cobbe, even while recommending the use of contracts to protect the rights of servants, exposed her complacency towards the conditions of service, an attitude which surely resulted from willful ignorance:

For servants' own sake, we confess we see much more to lose than gain by the abolition (or what is, of course, the practicable scheme), the extensive diminution of household labour, good food, healthy abode, ample warmth, work rarely excessive or disgusting, and often extremely moderate and pleasant,— these, with a certain fixed stipend, proportion­ ately extremely high, are constituents of comfort and security which he who is prepared to despise must be little acquainted with the wants and cares of the humbler class of the community.

Cobbe obviously saw the servant's life in a rosier light than did her contemporary W. B. Adams. Of course, it is understandable that most servant-keepers, who slept while their homes were cleaned, visited friends while their multi-course meals were prepared, and listened to recitals or Dickens read aloud while the mounds of dishes were washed, would have little comprehension of what it meant to be a servant.

Ignorance such as Cobbe's led not just to complacency but also to a comfortable self-righteousness. Hundreds of tracts and thousands of sermons were written encouraging servants to feel grateful for the opportunity to serve. "Christianity was pressed into secular service," Hugget observes.^ Martineau, with her usual shrewdness, 59

recognized the one-sidedness of the typical message:

Gratitude is preached throughout— gratitude for lodging, food, and clothing; gratitude for health being regarded; gratitude for notice; gratitude for promotion; gratitude, in short, for whatever may be claimed and whatever is earned, as well as for whatever may be bestowed. All this while, not a syllable is breathed about any reciprocity of duty; and the one moral lesson taught is servility. Servants are to be blind to their employers' faults, patient under wrongs and sufferings: nowhere is there found a hint of the duty of resistance to oppression, of steady rejection of insult. For the reward of labour, the exhorted are referred to another world. . . .I?

At the root of the condescending advice preached to servants obviously lies class consciousness. Domestics were expected to be content with their position in society and not aspire to anything higher.

It went without saying that no self-respecting lady or gentleman would demean her/himself by doing a servant's work. In her ridicule of the lady who personally cares for her own house and family, Cobbe articulates the sensibility shared by countless servant-keepers:

. . . the notion of making it a virtue for a lady to do servants' work is absurd. It is to undo the civilisation of ages, which has gone to form, in body, mind, and habits, that very beautiful thing, a high-bred lady. We think a gentleman who adopts the profession of driving a coach, or an Oxford scholar who herds sheep in Australia, each of them somewhat thrown away. The lady who takes to cooking and sweeping is surely not much less displaced...... The lady alone can fill the lady's place; and to send her out of it to take that of the servants, who cannot fill hers, is mere waste of social material, of the most rare and precious of all social materials, refinement, grace, and culture.

It seems quite safe to assume that Dickens' contemporary readers were largely unappreciative of domestic servants— more concerned with "rare and precious social material," to quote Cobbe, than with ordinary human material. That Dickens hoped to change the attitude 60

of the people he wrote for is, I think, evident in the downtrodden

servants dispersed throughout his fiction. The four most prominent and eminently oppressed of these— the already mentioned Marchioness,

Susan Nipper, Guster, and Affery, whom I want to focus on in this chapter— span Dickens' career from The Old Curiosity Shop to Little

Dorrit.

The earlier of these domestics, the Marchioness and Susan, have struck some readers as far more natural and poignant than the more refined and graceful protagonists of The Old Curiosity Shop and

19 Dombey and Son. Of course, for the majority of Dickens' contemporaries

Little Nell and Florence Dombey (along with her brother) were the most affecting characters in their novels. Philip Collins remarks that for most Victorians The Old Curiosity Shop was "the story of 20 Little Nell." Florence too brought Victorians to tears. Macaulay's 21 response was typical: he "wept over her as if his heart would break."

Yet a few particularly noteworthy Victorians were more impressed by Dickens' maidservants than by his heroines. Thackeray claimed to have "never read the Nelly part of The Old Curiosity Shop more than once; whereas I have Dick Swiveller and the Marchioness by 22 heart." And the popular Victorian novelist and reviewer Margaret

Oliphant found Susan Nipper, but not Florence Dombey, "above criticism.

What is especially curious about the fact that some readers have found Dickens' rendering of the Marchioness and Susan superior

(by which they usually mean more realistic) to that of Nell and 61

Florence is that these servants first appear as comic grotesques, as I remarked earlier. Chesterton was one of the first to acknowledge the tendency of humorous-grotesque characters in Dickens to become serious-realistic ones:

His characters that begin solemn end futile; his characters that begin frivolous end solemn in the best sense. His foolish figures are not only more entertaining than his serious figures, they are also much more serious.

He could only get to the most solemn emotions adequately if he got to them through the grotesque. He could only . . . really get into the inner chamber by coming down the chimney, like his own most lovable lunatic in Nicholas Nickleby.2*

As is well known, humor was Dickens' favorite means of making ugly truths palatable to his audience. In a letter to a fellow writer

Dickens noted of Dotheboys Hall in Nicholas Nickleby that he had

"thrown as much comicality over it" as he could, "rather than disgust 25 and weary the reader with its fouler aspects." But while Dickens 26 makes us laugh at "the rascalities of those Yorkshire schoolmasters" in the person of Squeers, there is nothing very amusing about the vic­ tims, Squeers' pupils. In later works Dickens encourages laughter at the victims themselves, i.e., abused domestic servants.

James Kincaid, who has made one of the most ambitious recent inquiries into Dickens' humor, offers an analysis of Dickens' use of laughter that I think brings us closer to an understanding of his comic-pathetic downtrodden, from the Marchioness to Mrs. Flintwinch.

Relying mainly on Bergson and Freud, Kincaid very convincingly argues that laughter "cements our involvement" in the major concerns of

Dickens' novels: 62

The long procession of mechanical humans and living things in Dickens suggests . . . a use of laughter as a rhetorical tool to enlist his readers in a protest against isolation and mechanistic dominance and in support of imaginative sympathy and identification with o t h e r s . ^7

The road to this sympathetic identification is by no means a smooth one, according to Kincaid. While laughter works as an "emotional anesthetic" momentarily divorcing us from any hostility, affection, or pity we may have felt for a character, it also makes us extremely vulnerable:

Having released the energies ordinarily used to guard our hostilities, inhibitions or fears, we are especially un­ protected if the promised safety which allowed us to laugh proves to be i l l u s o r y . 28

Dickens' contemporaries must have been especially vulnerable when they were amused by Dickens' oppressed domestics. Victorian servant-keepers were in the habit of laughing at domestics. The social historian Leonore Davidoff remarks, "It was the essence of mastery that the lives of subordinates did not matter, that their concerns were, on the whole, of no interest or importance and were 29 even faintly ridiculous [my emphasisj ." A multitude of Punch cartoons (about which more in the next chapter) with servants as their comic butts, usually depicting them as idiots or with a penchant for aping the pretensions of their betters, attest to the continued pleasure many Victorians found in this brand of humor. The Victorian reader who laughed at Sally Brass’ serving two square inches of cold mutton to her maid would have been in exactly such an unprotected position as Kincaid describes. This is the point at which the laugher may make the discovery that the object of his laughter, the fat old 63 man slipping on a banana peel, to use Kincaid's example, is really 30 his brother, seriously injured; or in the case of the Victorian reader, that the comic-grotesque slavey (as maids-of-all-work were commonly called) is really an overworked, unattended-to little girl, perhaps not unlike his own general servant.

Laughter is not the only means Dickens employs to bring his reader closer to this type of servant but in most cases it is the initial one. In the rest of this chapter as I examine the changing face of Dickens' downtrodden over the course of two decades I will also look at how Dickens leads the reader toward involvement with these representatives of the most neglected stratum of domestic servants.

It should come as no surprise that the face of Dickens' down­ trodden is most often female. Most Victorian domestics were in fact women. In 1851 there were 751,641 womenservants but only 31 96,610 menservants in Great Britain. Male servants were not only in the minority but as butlers and footmen they were more ornamental than their female colleagues, and their duties less onerous and demeaning. It is interesting that such downtrodden male domestics as one finds in Dickens are either children, like Quilp's Tom Scott and Carker's Rob Toodle, or foreigners, such as Major Bagstock's

Native and Blandois/Rigaud's Cavalletto. They have little or no sense of oppression. Edmund Wilson has remarked of Tom Scott that although

Quilp ceaselessly browbeats him, Tom never tries to escape. Indeed, 32 Wilson adds, Tom admires, even loves Quilp. Cavalletto has a naturally subservient disposition and appears, when introduced in the 64

Marseilles prison, more comfortable as a menial than Rigaud is as a "gentleman." Also, of these four abused menservants, three of them are not, strictly speaking, domestic servants.

Dickens' servants most conscious of privation are usually maids- of-all-work. Again Dickens* fiction mirrors fact, as he was so eager to assert in his prefaces. Six out of every ten female servants in 33 Victorian England worked as general maids. These were the most overburdened of all domestics. Hugget comments:

Like some quick-change artiste in a fourth-rate palace of varieties, general servants were expected to play the part of housemaid, nurse, parlourmaid and cook as the need arose, without any aid from the daughters of the house (who were too busily engaged in piano-playing, cross stitch or crochet) and not much more help from the mistress.34

Of all the categories of servants, Mrs. Beeton singled out the maid- of-all-work as most "deserving of commiseration" for "her life is 35 a solitary one, and, in some places, her work is never done."

The earliest and in some respects most impressive downtrodden maid-of-all-work in Dickens is, of course, the Marchioness. It is difficult to talk about her without also bringing in Dick Swiveller.

Dick is the first and most prominent of the "outsiders" I will be calling attention to in this analysis of Dickens' downtrodden. In almost every oppressed servant/oppressive master relationship in

Dickens one finds a third party, who, like the reader, observes the relationship from the outside. This outsider, if not at first, always eventually comes to appreciate the servant as the master never can. Dick Swiveller, more than just appreciating the Marchioness, 65

succeeds in liberating her and simultaneously saves himself from a

purposeless and self-destructive existence. In the presence of the

Marchioness, Swiveller emerges as a comic hero who has, in addition

to the temperament, diction, and name, the sympathies of Dickens.

It is this outsider who involves us with the Marchioness.

Gabriel Pearson is no doubt right when he asserts that after Dick 36 joins the Brasses "we are with Dick as we are with no one else."

Other critics, such as Malcolm Andrews, have maintained that Dick

acts as the major intermediary between us and the action of the 37 novel. Given the nature of the narrative in the Brass/Swiveller

episodes, i.e., third person but mainly from the perspective of Dick,

our response to the Marchioness is bound, to a great extent, to be

governed by our response to Dick. However, there is no simple linear

progression in our reaction to the Marchioness via Dick. We are not

simply led from laughter to pity as we become more intimate with

the small servant. Instead, we repeatedly alternate between the

two reactions until we are able to transcend them both— until we

admire a Marchioness who is no longer either comically or pathetically

grotesque.

"Grotesque" is certainly the most fitting epithet for the Brasses' maid-of-all-work as first seen by Dick:

Dick leant over the table, and descried a small slipshod girl in a dirty coarse apron and bib, which left nothing of her visible but her face and feet. She might as well have been dressed in a violin-case.

Inside this walking violin-case is "such an old-fashioned child in

her looks and manner" as to seem to have "been at work from her 66

cradle" (PCS, 332). Very early in his acquaintance with the Brasses'

servant Dick begins to worry about her, but his ready sense of humor

keeps him safely distant from this "staggerer."

Nevertheless, the Marchioness' intrusion upon Dick's consciousness

is the catalyst for the remarkable changes that occur in his person- 39 ality. Before coming to the Brasses, Swiveller is nothing if not

congenial, but he is also selfish and insensitive. He has no sympathy

for Mrs. Quilp or Little Nell. In fact, Dick is perfectly willing

to take advantage of Nell through Fred Trent's get-rich-quick marriage

scheme. (It is one of the ironies of The Old Curiosity Shop that

Nell, innocence personified, inspires most of the villainy in the novel, e.g., Quilp's plots and her grandfather's gambling, while

the Marchioness, probably the offspring of Quilp and Sally Brass, effects Dick's reformation.)

The Marchioness' suffering is what attracts Dick to her, not beauty or virtue, which draw people to Nell. Dick realizes that if he, as the Brasses' clerk, is confined and subject to their will, the small servant is ten times more so:

One circumstance troubled Mr. Swiveller's mind very much, and that was that the small servant always remained some­ where in the bowels of the earth under Bevis Marks . . . She never went out, or came into the office, or had a clean face, or took off the coarse apron, or looked out of any one of the windows, or stood at the street-door for a breath of air, or had any rest or enjoyment whatever. Nobody ever came to see her, nobody cared about her. (PCS, 349)

When Dick discovers the actual extent of the Marchioness' subjection— sees Sally feed her minuscule portions of cold leftovers and administer 67- sundry hard blows, hears the small servant crying softly "as if she feared to raise her voice"— then he is converted from passive ob­ server to active participant, from one who accepts fate to one who 40 dares alter it.

The Dick Swiveller who "decides to brave the dragon, explore the cellars and save his Brynhild, the Marchioness," as Steven Marcus says,^* is a man who has learned to distinguish his "staggerers."

Both the small servant and her mistress may look absurd but the

Marchioness' grotesqueness is thrust upon her, while Sally chooses hers. The ridiculous appearance of the servant is the measure of the ill usage she suffers, whereas Miss Sally's dirty-sallow complexion, dress "not unlike the curtain of the office window," and brown gauze scarf "like the wing of the fabled vampire" are the outward signs of her inward vileness. Although Sally seems to soften under Dick's influence, her treatment of the small servant reveals to Dick and to us that she is in fact the monster she appears to be.

Dick's relationship with his employer curiously foreshadows his involvement with her small servant, heightening through contrast our sense of the slavey's privations. If Dick "burstCsJ in full freshness as something undreamed of" upon Sally, "lighting up the office with scraps of song and merriment," his arrival must seem even more miraculous to the lonely maidservant relegated to a dark and damp kitchen. Sally finds Dick's feats— "conjuring with inkstands and boxes of wafers, catching three oranges in one hand, balancing stools upon his chin"— a pleasant office diversion. For the small 68 servant, keyhole glimpses of Dick's "fantastic exercises" afford her the only companionship available at Bevis Marks. Dick teaches

Sally "the mystery of going the odd man or plain Newmarket for fruit, ginger beer, baked potatoes," but when he descends into the servant's underground world he brings food to a literally starving child, forced to scrounge for "bits of biscuit." Like the Prince in an inverted version of the Cinderella story (the Marchioness even loses her shoe later), Dick brings a "ball" or banquet to the maid— a plate of beef and bread and a steaming pot of "choice purl"— which stands in marked contrast to the "waste" of potatoes "looking as eatable as Stonehenge" the small servant humbly receives from Sally's hands.

By feeding the servant, teaching her to play cribbage, and christening her the "Marchioness," Dick provides her with the essentials of 42 childhood and life itself— food, fellowship, and fantasy. Thus

Dick, the stranger, acts as a surrogate parent to the Marchioness, while Sally, perhaps her mother, threatens her existence:

"Well,— come in," he CDickU said, after a little consideration. "Here— sit down, and I'll teach you how to play." "Oh! I durstn't do it," rejoined the small servant; "Miss Sally 'ud kill me, if she know'd I came up here." (PCS. 537)

Michael Steig has pointed out how much the Marchioness and Sally look alike in Phiz's illustration of the Brasses attempting to rouse 43 their lodger. I find an even more striking resemblance between

Phiz's witchlike Marchioness in her hellish basement abode and Quilp as he leers out of a window. Here the Marchioness looks as much the embodiment of evil as Quilp does. The narrator's description of THE MARCHIONESS the servant as "small," "cunning," and "shrewd" certainly brings

Quilp to mind. If George Gissing could see Nell as "the type" of

"those hapless children who were then being tortured in England’s

mines and factories," we can still more easily see the Marchioness

as representative of the young victims of domestic service, the

wizened product of a system which permitted evil in the form of child 44 abuse to flourish. Dick quite naturally assumes the Marchioness

to be immoral or amoral, i.e., the robber of Sally's silver pencil

case:

When he considered on what a spare allowance of food she lived, how neglected and untaught she was, and how her natural cunning had been sharpened by necessity and privation, he scarcely doubted it. (PCS, 536)

But Dick accepts the Marchioness with all her faults, forbearing

to correct her diction or expose her probable guilt, so as not to

disturb "the oddity of their acquaintance." It is this recognition of the Marchioness as a fellow human being deserving of pity despite her apparent handicaps that makes her liberation possible.

The turning point in the Marchioness' career comes when Dick's

life of self-indulgence catches up with him, when he needs her as much as she needed him. As Dick alone sympathized with the Marchioness,

she alone sympathizes with his plight when he falls victim to a raging fever. The Brasses deny him as they did the Marchioness: "He's a funny chap, but it's no business of mine" (PCS, 584). The small servant's acceptance of responsibility for Dick enables her to overcome all odds: to escape from Bevis Marks, gain entry into

Dick's lodging by posing as his sister (surely signifying her capacity for Christian love), and nurse the dying man back to health.

The Marchioness assumes the role that Dick played earlier with her

(see Phiz's parallel illustrations). In effect she becomes his parent,

giving him life: "'I'm so glad you're better, Mr. Liverer.' 'Liverer

indeed!' said Dick thoughtfully. 'It's well I am a liverer. I

strongly suspect I should have died, Marchioness, but for you'"

(PCS, 585). She feeds and bathes him "as if he were a very little

boy, and she his grown-up nurse" (PCS, 597). By participating in

Dick's hell (his feverish thoughts are plagued by devils), the March­

ioness is transformed before Dick's eyes into an Arabian Nights'

Genie, suddenly capable of such miracles as the proving of Kit’s

innocence and, at the same time, the Brasses' and Quilp's guilt. (The

Marchioness' very privations bring about justice in the end, i.e.,

her search for the key to the meatsafe led to her overhearing the

Brasses' plans to frame Kit.) The Marchioness truly becomes "Provi­

dential," as she is several times described. Her reward is a life

far removed from domestic service and filled with "many hundred

thousand games of cribbage" as the "good-looking, clever, and good-

humoured" wife of that "literary gentleman of eccentric habits," 45 Mr. Swiveller. So, just as Little Nell ascends from earth to heaven,

the Marchioness, after six years of refining with the help of Dick's

unexpected inheritance, ascends to a type of heaven on earth, meriting

happiness in this world as much as Nell does in the next.

In Dombey and Son Dickens gave another downtrodden servant a

salient role to play. Susan Nipper is neither a maid-of-all-work nor a victim of flagrant physical abuse. She is, nevertheless, subject to dehumanizing treatment. Her master, Dombey, treats her as he does all his dependents— servants, children and wives— as possessions rather than persons. Like the Marchioness, Susan is portrayed as a comic- grotesque figure, but unlike the earlier servant, the Nipper's progress, from nursemaid to lady's maid to lady, is not kept separate from the main plot of the novel. Gerald Grubb hypothesizes that in The Old

Curiosity Shop Dickens deliberately de-emphasized the Marchioness when he realized she was "becoming a real threat to Nell," i.e., "a distractive element.Dickens does, in fact, discourage comparison of the Marchioness and Nell by keeping them quite apart. Sally's maid never once meets Nell. But Susan Nipper, as Florence Dombey's maid, is in almost continual contact with the heroine throughout the novel. Whether or not one agrees with the critical consensus that the reader's appreciation of Florence suffers from her proximity to

Susan, it is clear that Dickens' intertwining of the lives of the two characters makes comparison, either conscious or subconscious, inevit­ able.

The grotesqueness of Susan Nipper is quite different from that of the Marchioness. The small servant initially appears as the pathetic yet amusing victim of Sally Brass' unexplained aggression.

Susan, on the other hand, first appears to be the victimizer of her little charge, Florence; but direct commentary from the narrator quickly reveals that the black-eyed, snub-nosed nursemaid, "so desperately sharp and biting that she seemed to make one's eyes water," is not the Nipper she pretends to be:

. . . young Spitfire . . . detached the child from her new friend C PollyJ by a wrench— as if she were a tooth. But she seemed to do it, more in the excessive sharp exercise of her official functions, than with any deliberate unkind­ ness.

Spitfire seemed to be in the main a good-natured little body, although a disciple of that school of trainers of the young idea which holds that childhood, like money, must be shaken and rattled and jostled about a good deal to keep it bright.47

We can laugh then at Susan's bullying of Florence, assured that no real harm is intended to the child. What we may not realize, though, is that we are laughing at another victimized child, Susan Nipper, who at a "womanly" fourteen is totally responsible for the care of

Florence. As a child raising a child, Susan represents the average underage Victorian nuresmaid. Horn tells us that in the mid-nineteenth century, when Dombey and Son was written, over half of all nursemaids 48 were under twenty. Martineau found the best of them to be "young girls, properly looked after by the mamma" and wondered that "fond papas, who think that their children are not made of the same clay as other people's" should be willing to spend no more on the hiring of attendants for their darlings than they did to have their chambers 49 cleaned or grates polished.

Like the Marchioness, who eventually emerges from her violin-case as the lovely Mrs. Swiveller, Susan Nipper becomes decidedly less grotesque as Dombey and Son progresses. The short, brown nursemaid with the sharp features and even sharper tongue is transformed into a "smart young woman" when she assumes the role of lady's maid 74

Susan

Nurse

tit OtmtitoUt Grindtr

Susan

T k t tt'uuJtn M iitkipntan onA t L o o k -o u t Jkfr Toott bocomot purtuular - D iofnui oho

2. SUSAN NIPPER 75

As in the case of the Marchioness, Phiz's illustrations reinforce

the narrative, depicting a notably more attractive older Susan than the young nurse shown in the earliest episodes. Susan improves mentally as well as physically: . . i n her attendance on the studies of her young mistress, CsheJ began to grow quite learned herself" (PS, 395). Yet Florence's servant is never as genteel and mild-mannered as Florence herself. Clearly, as long as Susan remains in service she can be nothing but Nipperish, quick-tempered and quick- tongued, dependent on outlandish negative metaphors to vent her frustration and anger: "I may not be a Indian widow Sir and I am not and I would not so become but if I once made my mind up to burn myself alive, I'd do it!" (PS, 704) Yet it is this lack of refinement in

Susan that allows her a vitality notably absent from Florence.

Susan's mistress in effect calls attention to her maid's social inferiority by correcting her grammar and censuring her irreverence:

"'. . . a visit to them old Skettleses will be.a Godsend.' 'It is very good of Sir Barnet and Lady Skettles, Susan,' returned Florence, with a mild correction of that young lady's familiar mention of the family in question, 'to repeat their invitation so kindly'" (PS, 398).

In Bleak House Esther Summerson is similarly condescending to her maid,

Charley.Esther is embarrassed by her failure to improve Charley's speech habits and utters what John Lucas calls "appallingly trivial" remarks about her maid's poor penmanship. Lucas' comments on Pickens' portrayal of Esther certainly can be applied to Florence. Lucas wonders if Pickens consciously intended to show Esther trapped in 76

class consciousness and whether or not Dickens himself Identified with Esther's condescension.^* In Dombey and Son Dickens (deliberately

or otherwise) makes Florence look, in her treatment of Susan, like

a true Dombey. The Nipper seems to sense that there is class con­

sciousness lurking in Miss Dombey, although Florence herself is un­

aware of its presence. When Florence, after her return from abroad, expresses surprise at finding Susan in her old uniform, although no longer a maid, Susan's husband explains:

She has always said— she said before we were married, and has said to this day— that whenever you came home, she'd come to you in no dress but the dress she used to serve you in, for fear she might seem strange to you, and you might like her less. (DS, 956)

Yet if Dickens could not endow Susan as servant with the social graces of Florence, he does give her powers of penetration far beyond those of her mistress. Susan, not Florence, sees that the Skettles family act out of more than kindness when they invite Dombey's daughter to visit them: '"They know what they're about, if ever people did,' murmured Miss Nipper, drawing in her breath ..." (DS, 398). Susan understands Edith Dombey perhaps better than any other character in the novel does, even though her assessment of her mistress' stepmother is colored by jealousy: "... she fSusanJ could not relinquish any part of her own dominion to the handsome wife, without a grudge and a vague feeling of ill-will, for which she did not fail to find a disinterested justification in her sharp perception of the pride and passion of the lady's character" (DS, 695).

Even more winning than Susan's clearsightedness is her readiness 77 to do battle with oppressors everywhere. While Susan's mistress is obsessed with her father's neglect of her, Susan, herself neglected, 52 is mainly concerned with the mistreatment of others. She loses no time in declaring war on that enemy of children and servants alike,

Mrs. Pipchin. Captain Cuttle is delighted by Susan's desire to ideal with" Mrs. MacStinger. But Susan's most audacious attack is on her own master, Mr. Dombey:

Mr. Dombey, in a fury, put his hand out for the bell-rope; but there was no bell-rope on that side of the fire, and he could not rise and cross to the other without assistance. The quick eye of the Nipper detected his helplessness immediately, and now, as she afterwards observed, she felt she had got him. (DS, 703-4)

Like that of the Marchioness, whose concern for the ailing Dick

Swiveller impels her to finally flee from the Brasses, Susan's love for Florence and her righteous indignation at Dombey's mistreatment of his daughter (rather than of herself during her twelve years of service) enable the Nipper to effect her own liberation as well as

Florence's. When Dombey, insulted by Susan as he has never been by anyone else, has his daughter's maid fired, she leaves Florence 53 completely unprotected for the first time on the Dombey "Antarctica," and hence forces her to seek shelter and warmth elsewhere.

It is not Florence, so indebted to Susan, who rewards the maid's valor and frees her forever from domestic service, but the bumbling, lovesick Toots. Just as the Marchioness was rewarded with Nell's comic suitor, Dick, Susan is rewarded with Florence's comic suitor,

Toots. But there is a world of difference between the two men.

Misty-minded Toots, the outsider who comes to the fullest appreciation 78

of Susan, could never have served as our "eyes," as Swiveller did.

In this case the outsider confirms rather than leads. Toots lacks

Dick's verbal skills and imagination. On the other hand, Toots is

warmhearted from the start and, as Chesterton and others have observed,

he instinctively sides with all the right people though he calls 54 them all the wrong names. Toots requires none of the moral reformation

that Dick needs. However, Toots does need to be rescued from "the

silent tomb." While Susan does not literally save Toots' life, as

the Marchioness does Dick's, she gives him a new reason to live.

Susan also temporarily plays Toots' parent. In an interesting reversal

of the Marchioness/Dick relationship, Susan advises Toots' cribbage-

playing. Under Susan's tutelage Toots learns to speak with some

confidence, sounding after his marriage to Susan, as Nina Auerbach puts

it, like a "more reverent Mr. Dombey. With his newly acquired

loquacity, Toots pays his now more sedate wife, the former servant,

the highest compliment received by any woman in Dombev and Son;

Nobody but myself can tell what the capacity of that woman's mind is. If ever the Rights of Women, and all that kind of thing, are properly attended to, it will be through her powerful intellect. (DS, 946)

In some respects the Marchioness and Susan Nipper, like Nell

and Florence, belong more to the world of fairy tale than to that of

nineteenth-century England. Both servants are ugly ducklings who turn

into swans, which is particularly unbelievable in the Marchioness'

case, considering the physical abuse she suffers as a child. Each maid finds a Prince Charming who is independently minded and wealthy

enough to make her a "lady." In reality most Victorian maidservants 79

who did marry wed laborers or shopkeepers. While marriage did free

the women from domestic service, it did not result in any great

change in status.So rare was it for a gentleman to marry a menial,

that in 1873 when the London barrister A. J. Munby married his servant,

Hannah Cullwick, after an eighteen-year courtship, he felt compelled

to keep their altered relationship secret for fear of being ostra­

cized."^ That a Richard Swiveller, especially after receiving his

aunt's bequest, or a Toots would marry a general servant or a lady's

maid was certainly improbable. Yet Dickens was being realistic in

showing that no matter how shrewd or spunky the Marchioness and Susan

Nipper might be, only the interest of a socially superior male would

be likely to improve their station in life.

The optimism apparent in Dickens' depiction of the Marchioness

and Susan Nipper is nowhere to be found in the portrayal of his later

downtrodden Guster and Affery. Although the earlier maids lack the

power to reform their employers, they are indeed miracle-workers in

their effect on the outsiders who discover their real value. While, as we have seen, certain desirable characteristics of the Marchioness and Susan rival and even outshine those of Nell and Florence, Dickens was careful not to let his maids usurp the roles of his higher class heroines. Guster and Affery never come close to threatening the prominence of Esther and Little Dorrit. Through these infinitely more pathetic later maids Dickens recreates far more disturbingly than ever before the stifling entrapment that domestic service too often was. 80

For the epileptic maid-of-all-work in Bleak House, Guster, there

is no hope of escape via marriage to a gentleman. Like the Marchioness

and Susan when first introduced, Guster looks old beyond her years,

"a round ten years older" than she is. But unlike the earlier two

servants, Guster does not first appear as an adolescent who may still

grow up pretty. Guster is a full grown woman of twenty-three or four.

The cold, almost callous voice of the third person narrator makes

it quite clear that Guster will never be a swan. In addition to her 58 unattractive fits, her "hair won't grow, and never would." The

sardonic narrator assures us, "She is a satisfaction to the parents

and guardians of the CGuster's master's! 'prentices, who feel that

there is little danger of her inspiring tender emotions in the breast

of youth" (BH, 180).

Phiz's one illustration of Guster, "Mr. Chadband 'improving'

a tough subject," shows a plain, rather thin, stoop-shouldered maid

staring dejectedly at the floor, while the apprentices, seated behind

Chadband and Guster, giggle and "nudge each other." No doubt most

readers are amused by Chadband, who, in all his oily pomposity, deserves

to be ridiculed. Guster does not. Gissing felt more than a little uncomfortable with what we today would call the black humor in Dickens' portrayal of Guster:

Plainly described, this girl is an underpaid, underfed, and overworked slavey, without a friend in the world,— unless it be Mr. Snagsby. . . . And we roar with laughter as often as she is named! . . . the humour here perceivable is not of the kind we usually attribute to Dickens; it has something either of philosophic sublimity or of mortal bitterness.^9 02. "Mr. Chadband 'improving* a tough subject,*' etching for Bleak Home, 1852.

3. GUSTER 82

The Marchioness surely suffered as much physically as Guster does, but the genial outsider, Swiveller, acted as a leavening agent, by both lightening the pathos of the small servant's situation with his humorous perception of her and providing some relief, through his sympathy, from the grotesque comedy. No such savior enters the Snagsby household, although there are some sensitive outsiders in the last of the Guster episodes. Even if a Dick Swiveller were to rescue

Guster, given the damage already done to her at the workhouse, it is clear that no amount of fine food or education could turn her into a Sophronia Sphynx. Forster may have had Guster (as well as Jo) in mind when he criticized Bleak House as a "romance of discontent and misery," offering little escape "into the old freedom and freshness of the author's imaginative worlds.

Dickens' awareness of several tragic events and continuing problems in the late 1840s and early 1850s may explain much of what is indeed bleak in his portrayal of a downtrodden servant in Bleak

House. Early in his career, in Oliver Twist (1837-38), Dickens had attacked, in effect, both the Old and the New Poor Laws, i.e., the baby farm, the workhouse, and the parish apprenticeship. The orphan Oliver is consigned for the first nine years of his life to Mrs. Mann's farm, where the system of child-rearing so eases the burden of the poor on the parish that in eight and a half cases out of ten her wards

"either sickened from want and cold, or fell into the fire from 61 neglect, or got half-smothered by accident." Ten years later farms as outrageously indifferent to infant life as Mrs. Mann's still 83 existed. In 1849 a cholera epidemic killed 150 malnourished boys at Drouet's overcrowded farm in Tooting. Dickens responded with 62 four acerb articles for The Examiner. (Drouet, by the way, was found legally innocent of implication in the deaths.) Trevor Blount suggests that the Drout scandal "partly actuates the Guster satire 63 and explains why she had a 'patron saint' at Tooting."

The next step for the survivors of parochial baby farms was the workhouse, where they were supposedly trained to be self-supporting.

In Oliver Twist the workhouse board apprentices Oliver as "general house lad" to an undertaker, Mr. Sowerberry, who forces the child to sleep among his coffins. Workhouse girls were usually sent out 64 beginning at age twelve or thirteen as maids-of-all-work. Although workhouses throughout England claimed to have trained their young female inmates in the art of service before allowing them to hire themselves out, many mistresses complained that workhouse girls were ignorant of the simplest household tasks. A survey taken as late as 1871-2 in London found the situation unimproved. Most employers were as unhappy with their workhouse domestics as Mrs. Snagsby is with Guster. Thirty-eight percent of the girls were judged "unsatisfac­ tory" and sixteen percent "bad."*’'’ But according to an article that

Dickens himself wrote about "The Girl from the Workhouse" in 1862, the maids had as much to complain about as their mistresses did:

If they could enter their first service under fair conditions of comfort, to receive the friendly care of a mistress wise and kind, the chances for their future would be very, very different. As a common rule, girls of fourteen are hired out of the workhouse by persons who are in need of 84

a cheap drudge. They get wages that will scarcely buy them clothes ^ G u s t e r earns only 50 shillings p.a7J; are overworked; are left untaught or ill-taught to become weary, slovenly and out of heart with life . . . .66

Employers of workhouse slaveys were often just one socioeconomic step above their employees. This very closeness in status, instead of making the employers more sympathetic to their help, often led to ill usage of the domestic for, as Hugget puts it, "the mistress needed to prove her own superiority and to ensure her own personal progress by exploiting the maid as much as possible.

Two of the most notorious cases involving the abuse of workhouse maids were brought to the Victorian public's attention just a few years before Dickens began Bleak House. Dickens' own monthly Household

Narrative of Current Events reported both scandals. In 1850 Mr. and

Mrs. Bird were accused of murdering their servant, Mary Ann Parsons, a parish apprentice. Although acquitted of murder, they were later found guilty of "cruelty, wounding with intent to do grievous bodily 68 harm, and common assault," and were sentenced to hard labor. In the second case George Sloane, a special pleader in the Temple, and his wife were accused and proven guilty of starving and mistreating their maid-of-all-wbrk from the West London Union Workhouse, Jane

Wilbred. The mistreatment consisted of forcing Jane to eat her own excrement, feeding her meals of mustard and pepper while denying her any liquid including water, and beating her "nearly every morning.

Dickens may have sensed that his audience, outraged by the much publicized Bird and Sloane cases (public sentiment ran so high against

Sloane that he required police protection when out on bail), could 85

no longer, and indeed should no longer, easily escape into his "old

free and fresh imaginative worlds," where the Marchioness and Susan

Nipper lived happily ever after. Also, Dickens may have hoped that

the echoes of the Bird and Sloane scandals in the Snagsby scenes

would lead his readers to the realization that while Guster's suffering

is less severe than Parson's or Wilbred's, it is more representative

and more ignored.

It is easy to see why the victim of Tooting and Mrs. Snagsby

is no rival of Esther Summerson for the female lead in Bleak House.

Guster is every bit as oppressed as the Marchioness and Susan Nipper but she lacks their vitality. The slightest emotional disturbance is likely to send Guster tumbling "down the kitchen stairs out of one

TfitJ into another" (BH, 641). Imagination enables both the small servant and Susan to cope with tyranny. The Marchioness can savor the aroma of fine wine in a glass of cold water with orange peel (PCS, 587).

The Nipper's fanciful flights of rhetoric serve her instead of actual fisticuffs. Guster, on the other hand, has only "a susceptible something that possibly might have been imagination, but for Tooting and her patron saint" (BH, 201). She is also far less intelligent than the Marchioness and Susan, who both recognize their employers as "Tartars." Guster's shrewish mistress does have much in common with Sally Brass. Just as Sally is more of a man than her brother,

Sampson, Mrs. Snagsby too wears the pants in her family: "She manages the money, reproaches the Taxgatherers, appoints the times and places of devotion on Sundays, licenses Mr. Snagsby's entertainments, and 86 acknowledges no responsibility as to what she thinks fit to provide for dinner. . . (BH, 181). Also like Sally, Mrs. Snagsby lacks any maternal instinct, judging by her harassment of Guster. Far from seeing her mistress as the tyrant she is, Guster only fears she will be given "warning." The Snagsbys' maid finds "recompense for her many privations" in what she perceives as "the plenty and splendour" of their establishment (BH, 181). Susan Nipper was notably unimpressed by the true grandeur of Dombey's home, and rendered "rigid justice to its gloom" (DS, 482). Thus, while Dickens invites us to sympathize with and eventually admire his earlier downtrodden, for Guster he calls for sympathy alone.

But in spite of. Guster's mental limitations, she, like the

Marchioness and Susan before her,- does manage, however unconsciously, to bring about some justice in her world. Guster may feel proud to be the temporary handmaid of Chadband, yet she persecutes that "gorging vessel," making nonsense of his name by announcing the Chadbands as

"Mr. and Mrs. Cheeseming, least which, Imeantersay, whatsername!"

(BH, 316) and later, still flustered, "unexpectedly performing clashing military music on Mr. Chadband's head with plates, and afterwards crowning that gentleman with muffins" (BH, 319). Although Guster regards the Snagsbys' home as a haven, she does punish them for their exploitation of her by keeping them up at all hours of the night with her seizures. That the sympathetic Mr. Snagsby should suffer along with the sharp, "dentistical" Mrs. Snagsby is only just, considering that his extreme uxoriousness is what allows his wife to tyrannize 87

the household. When Snagsby tells his apprentices "I think my little woman is a-giving it to Guster" (BH, 180), he seems to be expressing a sense of relief that he is not the present victim of his spouse's irascibility.

Dickens remarks in his essay on workhouse girls that they fre­ quently "sink under temptations to vice" and must return to their parochial homes "not seldom with illegitimate children in their arms."^

But Dickens' homely Guster is a model of Christian virtue. Her charity, to those from the lowest to the highest levels of society, rivals that of even Jarndyce and Esther. Dickens pointedly contrasts the hypocritical benevolence of organized religion, in the person of

Chadband, with the spontaneous, affectionate generosity of the poor workhouse girl:

Stretching forth his flabby paw, Mr. Chadband lays the same on Jo's arm, and considers where to station him. Jo, very doubtful of his reverend friend's intentions and not at all clear but that something practical and painful is going to be done to him, mutters, "You let me alone. I never said nothink to you. You let me alone." (BH, 412)

. . . downstairs is the charitable Guster, holding by the handrail of the kitchen stairs, and working off a fit, as yet doubtfully, the same having been induced by Mrs. Snagsby's screaming. She has her own supper of bread and cheese to hand to Jo; with whom she ventures to interchange a word or so, for the first time. "Here's something to eat, poor boy," says Guster. "Thank'ee mum," says Jo. "Are you hungry?" "Jist!" says Jo. "What's gone of your father and your mother, eh?" Jo stops in the middle of a bite, and looks petrified. For this orphan charge of the Christian saint whose shrine was at Tooting, has patted him on the shoulder; and it is the first time in his life that any decent £my emphasisj hand has been so laid upon him. (BH,-417) 88

Guster's kindness to another, the disguised and dying Lady Dedlock, is what finally leads to some alleviation of her suffering at the

Snagsbys', although it does not free her from service as warmheartedness does for the Marchioness and Susan. The letter and blessing that

Lady Dedlock gives to Guster bring to the law stationer's a trio of outsiders— a surrogate mother (Esther), a doctor (Woodcourt), and a police detective (Bucket)— who surround the maidservant with more concern and comfort than she has hitherto known. In this last Guster episode, narrated by the warmer voice of Esther, the workhouse girl finally receives the kind of attention which she gave to the crossing sweeper and which was denied her at Tooting and previously at Cursitor

Street. The daughter of the lady that Guster has helped actually kneels to the maid-of-all-work and caresses her. A contrite Mrs.

Snagsby, reprimanded by Bucket, follows suit and for the first time extends sympathy to her maid. Clearly there is no permanent escape for Guster from the aftereffects of Tooting, i.e., epilepsy, or from

Mrs. Snagsby's temper, yet there remains the possibility that Guster's life in service will be less lonely and painful with a mistress who has been shamed into caring for her.

Although the Marchioness, Susan Nipper, and Guster are all abused by their employers, not one of them is subject to the most humiliating abuse of all. Female domestics were, in reality, particularly vulnerable to sexual attack. Their continued employment hinged upon willingness to obey their masters. - Concomitantly, illegitimate pregnancy, no matter who the father, was reason enough for immediate dismissal in 89 most households. Frank Dawes alleges that "the pursuit of servant

girls" was almost an upper class national sport, conducted under cover and according to no rules. In My Secret Life, one Victorian gentleman's eleven-volume testimonial to his own lubricity as well as that of maidservants and other working girls, Steven Marcus finds

"a number of assumptions that governed the relations of masters and servants." Marcus notes that everyone, servants included, seems to assume the author, "Walter," has a right to do what he wants to do.

Walter himself says: "As to servants and women of the humbler class

. . . they all took cock on the quiet and were proud of having a gentleman to cover them. Such was the opinion of men of my class of life and of my age. My experience with my mother's servants cor­ roborated it." While professing to be greatly appreciative of his lower class sexual partners, the author speaks of them as though they were subhuman. Marcus points out that "the language he uses is that of a horse-fancier or a stableman: 'a nice fresh servant' is

'clean, well-fed, fullblooded,' has not been used, ridden or raced 72 for a week, and is ready for service." Needless to say, in the whole

Dickens cannon one meets no fictional master with such an appetite for female domestics as that of the author of My Secret Life. However,

Dickens did subject one of his servants, the most dehumanized of all his downtrodden menials, Affery Flintwinch, to profound sexual abuse, albeit under the guise of marriage.

As the oldest of Dickens' maids-of-all-work, Affery appears an unlikely object of anyone’s sexual attention. She bears a striking 90

t. • *:r U r FSmwvtcA hoi a m ild attack o f irritability

4. AFFERY resemblance to that manly Virgin of Bevis, Sally Brass (who, inexplic­

ably, may have been the recipient of Quilp's sexual favors). Both

Affery and Sally are bony enough to be Foot Guards, but Mrs. Flintwinch 73 has none of the Virgin's "resolute bearing." In fact, the contrast between Affery's "tall, hard-favored, sinewy" appearance and her mousy manner makes comic her very subjection to her husband, the surrogate master in the Clennam household. Scenes of violent physical aggres­ sion almost seem amusing when the victim is a cowering Amazon and the persecutor a "little keen-eyed crab-like old man" (LD, 76). That

Mr. Flintwinch's aggression against Affery, which Dickens encourages us to laugh at, is sexual in nature of course is only implied. Yet

I think it is hard for us to avoid seeing sexual abuse in the apparent sadistic pleasure Flintwinch takes in pouncing upon, squeezing, and charging at his wife. Affery describes to Arthur Clennam her husband's method of "running her up":

So he took and squeezed the back of my neck in his hand, till it made me open my mouth, and then he pushed me before him to bed, squeezing all the way. That's what he calls running me up, he do. Oh he's a wicked one! (LD, 754)

At one point Flintwinch threatens Affery, ". . . I'll come rolling down the banisters, and tumbling over you!" (LD , 750)

The numerous offensives Flintwinch launches against his wife stand in marked contrast with the harmonious relations of Dick and the Marchioness, Toots and Susan. A revealing parallel between Flint­ winch and the earlier husbands can be seen in their smoking habits.

Flintwinch appears on the steps of the Clennam house, in front of an open door, "with his neck twisted and one eye shut up . . . smoking 92 with a vicious expression upon him; more as if he were trying to bite off the stem of his pipe, than as if he were enjoying it. Yet he was enjoying it in his own way" (LD, 744). In the conclusion of

The Old Curiosity Shop and of Dombey and Son those happily married men

Dick and Toots are last seen contentedly smoking:

Mr. Swiveller . . . grew immensely contemplative, at times, in the smoking-box, and was accustomed at such periods to debate in his own mind the mysterious question of Sophron- ia's parentage. . . . These speculations, however, gave him no uneasiness; for Sophronia was ever a most cheerful, affectionate, provident wife to him. . . . (PCS, 669)

"Then," resumes Mr. Toots, after some remarkable pulling at his pipe, during which his visage has expressed the most contented reflection, "what an observant woman my wife is! What sagacity she possesses! What remarks she makes! It was only last night, when were sitting in the enjoyment of connubial bliss— which, upon my word and honour, is a feeble term to express my feelings in the society of my wife. . . . (DS, 973) i John Lucas has noted that in Little Dorrit "marriage is often the token of evil . . . Pet, Affery, even Flora . . . are all the hapless 74 victims of other people's wills." Considering the perverse ways in which Flintwinch enjoys himself, so different from that of the relatively sedate Swiveller and Toots, the will which marriage totally subjects Affery to is one that truly delights in brutalizing her.

Even if Flintwinch were not the sadist he is, his marriage to

Affery would constitute sexual abuse since Affery is really given no choice in the matter: "It was no doing of mine. I'd never thought of it. I'd got something to do, without thinking indeed! She ^Affery's mistress, Mrs. ClennanT] kept me to it when she could to about, and she could go about then" (LD, 78). This explanation which Affery offers Arthur Clennam may seem farfetched. Avrom Fleishman sees in it "the traditional excuse of the slave: 'How could I help myself?"'

To Fleishman this is just another example of Affery's renunciation of responsibility for her own thoughts and actions.^ But when one considers the options an elderly maid-of-all-work would have in Affery's situation, it becomes quite clear why she could not help herself.

Refusing to marry Flintwinch when her mistress had decided it was necessary, or as Mrs. Clennam herself stated, "very welcome under the circumstances to me," would have meant for Affery the loss of her job.

Aged general servants were not a sought after commodity. Since their wages were too slight to allow for much "rainy day" saving, unemployment

(as mentioned earlier) led the majority of them into either the workhouse or an asylum. Thus, Affery was forced to choose between continued employment and unremitting poverty.

Another factor not to be overlooked is the influence that "upper" servants usually exerted over "lower" servants. Martineau remarked in 1862, "Then what have not hundreds of domestics to bear from the tyranny of housekeepers, house-stewards, or other superiors of their own social denomination? The stable-boy and the scullion stand to 76 the coachman and the cook as the mule to the Carolina nigger. ..."

Butlers in particular were encouraged to be authoritative. Horn calls attention to one Victorian butler (probably not atypical) who succeeded in seducing many of the womenservants on his staff. The Charlton family decided to retain their licentious Inkley because, according to them, a "sober and efficient butler" was hard to find. Of course, 77 the fallen women were all dismissed. After working under Mrs. 94

Clennam's trusted confidant and butler, Flintwinch, "for a many years,"

Affery is accustomed to following his orders. Flintwinch's marriage proposal is couched in such terms that a "No" from Affery would have been tantamount to insubordination to her superior and disloyalty to her mistress:

Affery, you and me must be married, and I'll tell you why. She’s failing in health, and she'll want pretty constant attendance up in her room, and we shall have to be much with her, and there'll be nobody about now but ourselves when we're away from her, and altogether it will be more convenient. (LD, 79)

How could Affery have resisted "them two clever ones"?

In the earlier Dickens novels marriage is the means of escape from domestic service. In Little Dorrit Affery's marriage only tightens the chains of her bondage. Flintwinch's own rise in station, when he is chosen as Mrs. Clennam's new business partner, increases his contempt for his menial wife. Like the later Mr. and Mrs. Munby, the Flintwinches' marriage becomes a secret one: "Perhaps because her appearance was not of a commercial cast, or perhaps because it occurred to him that, his having taken her to wife might expose his judgment to doubt in the minds of customers, Mr. Flintwinch laid his commands upon her that she should hold her peace on the subject of conjugal relations . . ." (LD, 389). Affery's inability to lead this double life, her frequent absent-minded utterance of her husband's first name in front of others, causes the vengeful Jeremiah to shower his wife with so many surprise attacks that she becomes "always nervously uncertain" (LD, 389). Obviously Flintwinch does more than jeopardize Affery's physical well being. He destroys whatever 95

self-respect she has left after the "Smothering" that was their wedding.

When company comes, Flintwinch apologizes for the maid, "You'll excuse her, Mr. Blandois, she's failing and breaking up" (LD, 405). When

Affery sees what Flintwinch wishes her not to, he convinces her she

is dreaming and threatens her with "such a dose" of physic. When Mrs.

Flintwinch hears a strange sound in the kitchen, her husband checks her breath for "spiritous liquors." Geoffrey Thurley has noted that

Dickens forces us to identify with the befuddled servant: ". . . w e along with Affery are unsure about where guilt and nightmare end, and 78 horrible reality begins." And Kincaid has pointed out that "Dickens establishes a tone which disrupts our comfortable relation to the 79 novel." We may find ourselves agreeing with Flintwinch's appraisal of his wife as a simple-minded paranoiac even while we too share in her confusion.

"Next to governesses, the largest class of female patients in 80 lunatic asylums is Maids of All Work," observed Martineau in 1838.

Dickens' portrayal of Affery makes it easy for us to understand why women in her occupation were so often susceptible to mental illness throughout the Victorian period. Admittedly, Affery's marriage to a fellow servant/quasi master makes her atypical, but, as we have already seen, her wedded state, far from alleviating, actually inten­ sifies the hardships of service and makes her feel more subordinate.

Loneliness was the common complaint of maids-of-all-work. Hugget cites one former slavey:

. . . there I was alone, and this was a great big house— oh so big! and they told me to go downstairs, in a room by 96

the kitchen all alone, with a long black passage. I might have screamed, but nobody would have h e a r d . 81

Horn quotes another general servant's description of her workplace:

"... such a quiet place with no one to speak to except when my mistress 82 gave an order. I felt like a prisoner." Affery is no less alone when married to Flintwinch. She spends her evenings in the dimness of her solitary kitchen "occupied with crowds of wild speculations and suspicions" (LD, 230). Encouraged by her husband to distrust her own perception of reality, Affery cuts herself off still further from the world by retreating behind her apron from the ghostly shadows and noises that terrify her. As to be expected, Flintwinch aggravates the timorousness fostered by isolation through his very berating of it: "... taking her veiled nose between his thumb and finger, ['he]] appeared to throw the whole screw-power of his person into the wring he gave it" (LD, 755). How different was Dickens1 earliest and far younger maid-of-all-work, the Marchioness, who was all eyes, peeking through keyholes and bravely searching her house at night for sustenance.

In Affery, who denies her own senses (hence her own existence) and 83 accepts imprisonment in the "dark labyrinth" of the Clennam house,

Dickens shows us the logical result of a whole lifetime of subordination to the will of others.

Of all Dickens' downtrodden servants Affery is probably the least helpful and the least helped. William Myers claims "Dickens recognized

. . . that the problems posed by non-violence were every bit as complex as those posed by violence. The former point of view is clearly suggested in the excesses endured by Affery at the hand of Flintwinch. . • . Far more disturbing, I think, than Affery's

passive endurance of her own suffering, is her passivity in response

to the suffering of others. Affery does not pass the test of sympathy

which the Marchioness, Susan Nipper and Guster come through with

flying colors. Kincaid has remarked that Affery's "good-hearted

instincts" are rendered nearly powerless by her mistress and husband.

But Affery's indifference to Little Dorrit and Arthur Clennam makes

one wonder how much goodness there is in this servant's heart.

Dickens assures that "if Mrs. Affery had had any will or way of her

own, it would have been unfavorable" to the pale, thin, shabbily-

dressed girl who "plied her needle in such removed comers" at Mrs.

Clennam's (LD, 94). Still more damaging is Dickens' assertion that

Affery would acquiesce in the murder of Little Dorrit if ordered:

"Mrs. Affery, being required to hold the candle, would no doubt have

done it" (LD, 94). As far as Arthur goes, it is true that Affery gives

him the warmest welcome he receives at the Clennam house upon his

return to England. However, she obviously has ulterior motives.

"It's no reason, Arthur," said the old woman, bending over him to whisper, "that because I am feared of my life of 'em, you should be. You've got half the property, haven't you?" "Yes, yes." "Well then, don't you be cowed. You're clever, Arthur, an't you?" (LD, 76)

When Arthur fails to stand up to his mother and Flintwinch, Affery returns to her shell. No amount of pleading on Arthur's part brings her out of it. Furthermore, Affery pointedly refuses to help Arthur when she alone can, until he "gets the better" of the two clever ones.

So obsessed is she with her own struggle for survival— "There never 98 was such a house for noises. I shall die of 'em, if Jeremiah don't strangle me first. As I expect he will" (LD, 753). — so "swallowed up" is she by the evil ones, there is no room in Affery's life for anyone else.

If any character in Little Dorrit plays the role of the outsider it is Arthur Clennam. F. R. Leavis notes that we tend to be Clennam:

". . . . w e accept with ready sympathy the sense of the world represented 85 by this earnest, intelligent and pre-eminently civilized man. ..."

Arthur Clennam is certainly the most aware of Affery's plight and makes us realize the full extent of her debasement. Clennam's surprise at discovering Affery married to Flintwinch indicates that she once must have been a very different sort of woman. Indeed, Arthur con­ siders his family's slavey one of his "few agreeable early remembrances," his "old friend." But just as Mrs. Flintwinch has no helping hand to lend to Clennam, he has none for her. Both are too absorbed in their own problems. Lionel Trilling has suggested that while writing

Little Dorrit, finished the year before his separation from his wife,

Dickens was in the midst of a "crisis of the will," or what psycholo­ gists now would call "mid-life crisis":

This moral crisis is most immediately represented by the condition of Arthur Clennam's will, by his sense of guilt, by his belief that he is unloved and unlovable, by his retirement to the MarshalseaQfL as by * an act of choice, 9 by 9 his sickness unto death.

The forty-year-old protagonist does manage to help Affery indirectly when he sends Pancks with the message "Tell your dream!" which gives her the confidence to rebel against the clever ones. But clearly, 87 as Fleishman has remarked, Mrs. Clennam and Flintwinch have already 99 lost their power when Affery finally asserts herself and comes to

Arthur's side:

. . . I won't be run up by Jeremiah, not yet I won't be dazed and scared, not made a party to I don't know what, no more. I won't, I won't, I won't! I'll up for Arthur when he has nothing left, and is ill, and in prison, and can't up for himself. I will, I will, I will! (LD, 835)

Significantly, Affery has no real aid to give Arthur. She can shed no new light on the family secrets. Moreover, it is no word or deed of Arthur that frees Affery from the house which haunts her and the husband who abuses her. Arthur has nothing to do with the collapse of the Clennam house or the disappearance of Flintwinch. (Affery finally does perform one truly good-hearted, selfless, and brave act when she runs off in pursuit of Mrs. Clennam. This expression of concern.fot her mistress is what saves the maid from death in the collapsed house.) The prisoner, Arthur, is kept ignorant of the exposure and humiliation of his supposed mother and consequently does not even know of the altered relationship between mistress and maid. Affery's vastly improved conditions of service seem almost completely fortuitous. Dickens once considered calling Little Dorrit

Nobody's Fault. An equally apt title might have been Nobody's Solution.

At the time he wrote Little Dorrit (1855-7) Dickens the novelist

(if not the master) apparently began to entertain grave doubts about about the possibility of domestic service ever being anything but demoralizing even under the best-intentioned of masters. Pet Meagles' maid, Tattycoram, testifies to these doubts. Tatty suffers none of the privations usually associated with being downtrodden. She is 100 not overworked, not underfed, not ignored. Mr. and Mrs. Meagles in

fact had provided the orphaned Harriet Beadle, formerly of the Foundling

Hospital, with a home and the companionship of their daughter. Yet, because she is never more than their well-cared-for servant, Tatty

feels the Meagles misuse her:

Then it all burst out. She detested us, she was miserable with us, she couldn't bear it, she wouldn't bear it, she was determined to go away. She was younger than her young mistress, and would she remain to see her always held up as the only creature who was young and interesting, and to be cherished and loved? No. (LD, 371)

Mr. Meagles' astonishment at Tatty's rebellion (encouraged by an outsider of questionable intentions, Miss Wade) exposes the insensi­ tivity and smug self-satisfaction of the master. Nevertheless, Dickens returns Tatty on bended knees to the service of Meagles and submits her to a lecture delivered by that gentleman on the merits of Christian

"duty" as exemplified by Little Dorrit: "... her young life has been one of active resignation, goodness, and noble service" (LD, 881).

While Meagles may confuse Little Dorrit's voluntary service to her loved ones with the acceptance of one's lot as a paid (and usually 88 underpaid) servant to the socially superior, I doubt that we do.

Dickens comes close to condemning the entire institution of domestic service through his portrayal of Tattycoram, but he shies away from it at the last moment, i.e., the last few pages of Little Dorrit.

Edmund Wilson has seen in Tattycoram's "painful alternations between the extremes of affection and resentment" a reflection of Dickens' own ambivalence towards the servant-keeping class. This ambivalence is conspicuous in Dickens' downtrodden servants early and late— in his feeling depiction of their oppression and in the limitations he places on their roles in the novels. NOTES

Of Dickens' class feeling John Carey observes: "The disdainful and supercilious note of Dickens' humor is not confined to fiction. On his frequent visits to workhouses, lunatic asylums, and other haunts of the poor and suffering, we find that he derives a surprising amount of amusement from contemplating the inferior creatures they contain. In Wapping workhouse he is struck by the way the old women sit in a line, 'silently working their mouths like a sort of poor old cows'" (The Violent Effigy: A Study of Dickens' Imagination [London: Faber & Faber, 1973], p. 74). 2 Pamela Horn, The Rise and Fall of the Victorian Servant (New York: St. Martin't Press, 1975, pp. 113-15. 3 Harriet Martineau, "Domestic Service," The London and Westminster Review, 29 (April-August 1838), 411. 4 W. B. Adams (Helix), "Human Progress," Westiminster Review, 52 (1849), 21.

See, for example, chap. 5, "Up with the Lark!", in Frank Hugget's Life Below Stairs: Domestic Servants in England from Victorian Times (London: Book Club Assoc., 1977).

^ McBride reports that according to popular Victorian prejudice, women over 45 were considered too old for domestic service. See Theresa McBride, The Domestic Revolution: The Modernisation of Household Service in England and France 1820-1920 (New York: Holmes & Meier Publishers, 1976), p. 101.

^ Horn, pp. 164-5. g Charles Dickens, "A Curious Dance Round a Curious Tree," Household Words, 17 Jan. 1852, in Charles Dickens* Uncollected Writings from "Household Words," 1850-1859, ed. Harry Stone (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1968), II, 387-8. 9 Harriet Martineau, "Female Industry," Edinburgh Review, 110 (1859), 307.

Frank Dawes, Not in Front of the Servants: Domestic Service in England, 1850-1939 (London: Wayland Publishers, 1973), p. 76.

Hugget, p. 115. 102 103

12 Martineau, "Domestic Service," pp. 423-4. 13 Isabella Beeton, The Book of Household Management (1861; rpt. London: Jonathan Cape Ltd., 1968), p. 1005.

^ Horn, p. 52.

*** Frances Power Cobbe, "Household Service," Fraser's Magazine, 77 (Jan. 1868), in Working Conditions in the Victorian Age (Westmead, England: Gregg International Publishers, 1973), p. 126. 16 Hugget, p. 63.

^ Martineau, "Domestic Service," p. 421.

18 Cobbe, p. 128. 19 See, for example, G. K. Chesterton, Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens (London: Dent. 1911), p. 55; K. J. Fielding, Charles Dickens: A Critical Introduction (Boston: Houghton Miflin, 1964), p. 70; Gabriel Pearson, "The Old Curiosity Shop," in Dickens and the Twentieth Century, ed. Gabriel Pearson and John Gross (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962), p. 85; and G. K. Chesterton, Charles Dickens (New York: Schocken Books, 1965), pp. 188, 248. 20 Philip Collins, Dickens: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1871), p. 91.

21 Collins, p. 212. 22 William Makepeace Thackeray, "Jerome PaCurot," Fraser's Magazine, Sept. 1843, xxviii, 351, in Collins, p. 91. 23 Margaret Oliphant, "Charles Dickens," Blackwood's Magazine. April 1855, lxxvii, 459, in Collins, p. 332 24 Chesterton, Charles Dickens, p. 188, pp. 186-7.

2^ To Mrs. S. C. Hall, 29 Dec. 1838, Pilgrim Letters, I, 481.

27 James Kincaid, Dickens and the Rhetoric of Laughter (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971)_, p. 11. OO Kincaid, p. 16. 29 Leonore Davidoff, "Mastered for Life: Servant, Wife, and Mother in Victorian and Edwardian Britain," Journal of Social History. 7 (1974), 419. “30 Kincaid, p. 16. 31 Annals of Labour: Autobiographies of British Working-Class People, 1820-1920, ed. John Burnett (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1974), p. 138. 32 Edmund Wilson, "Dickens: The Two Scrooges," The Wound and the Bow (New York: Oxford University Press, 1965), p. 52.

Hugget, p. 106

^ Beeton, p. 1001. 36 Pearson, p. 88. 37 Malcolm Andrews, "Introduction," to The Old Curiosity Shop (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972), p. 24. 38 Charles Dickens, The Old Curiosity Shop (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972), p. 332. Further references to this work will appear in the text. 39 Monod finds Dick's conversion unbelievable and "not very artfully contrived." See Sylvere Monod, Dickens: The Novelist (Norman, Oklahoma: University of Oklahoma Press, 1968), p. 180. Yet Pearson admires Dick's transformation: "He [Dick] remains . . . with the Marchioness, the one person in whom potentialities are released and who changes his situation by changing himself." See Pearson, p. 87. Both critical responses indicate the extent of the alteration in Dick. 40 Slater explains Sally's treatment of the Marchioness thus: "In Sally he [Dickens] was seeking to depict, though still comically (that is, unsympathetically), a woman who had not been as successful as she had wanted in suppressing all 'normal' female feelings. The child would be a constant, resented reminder to her of this failure, as would Quilp's facetiousness, and so her cruelty to the Marchioness would he under­ standable to the reader if not to Dick Swiveller." See Michael Slater, Dickens and Women (London: Dent, 1983), p. 228. 41 Steven Marcus, Dickens: From Pickwick to Dombey (New York: Basic Books, 1965), p. 156. 42 Harry Stone sees the Marchioness and Swiveller episodes as a consolidation of the Cinderella and Beauty and the Beast tales. Vide Harry Stone, Dickens and the Invisible World: Fairy Tales, Fantasy, and Novel-making (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1979), p. 112. 43 Michael Steig, Dickens and Phiz (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978), p. 54. 105 44 George Gissing, Charles Dickens (New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1924), p. 211. Slater points out, as have others before him, that Dickens' portrait of the Marchioness is based on an actual maid-of-all- work from the Chatham workhouse employed by the Dickens family when at Camden Town and the Marshalsea. See Slater, p. 430, n. 34.

^ Slater laments the Marchioness' transformation: "The reader feels naturally somewhat disappointed that the vital, highly individual­ ized figure of the Marchioness has dwindled into a wife in this conventional way ..." (p. 241). Slater finds the change in the later Susan Nipper much more acceptable (p. 241).

^ Gerald Grubb, "Dickens' Marchioness Identified," MLN, 68 (1953), 165.

^ Charles Dickens, Dombey and Son (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970), pp. 78-80. Further references to this work will appear in the text.

Horn. p. 66. / Q Martineau. "Female Industry," p. 309.

I have chosen not to focus on Charley In my discussion of Dickens' downtrodden because although as Judy Smallweed's charwoman Charley is certainly oppressed after Jarndyce's rescue of her she is quite content as Esther's maid and oblivious to her mistress' conde­ scension.

John Lucas, The Melancholy Man: A Study of Dickens's Novels (London: Methuen & Co., 1970), pp. 220-1. 52 Monod claims that Florence cries an astonishing eighty-eight times in Dombey and Son. See Monod, p. 249. Susan Nipper sheds a number of tears herself, but hers are more often preliminary to or the aftereffects of action, not a substitute for it.

^ Lucas, pp. 220-1. 54 Chesterton, Appreciations, p. 127. 55 Nina Auerbach, "Dickens and Dombey: A Daughter After All," Dickens Studies Annual, V (1976), 112.

McBride, p. 90.

^ Dawes, pp. 40-2 58 Charles Dickens, Bleak House (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971), p. 184. Further references to this work will appear in my text. 59 Gissing, pp. 165-6. 106

^ John Forster, The Life of Charles Dickens (New York: Doubleday, Doran and Co., 19— ), p. 561.

Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966), p. 48. 62 Richard Altick, Victorian Studies in Scarlet (New York: Norton, 1970), pp. 284-5. 63 Trevor Blount, "Bleak House and the Sloane Scandal of 1850 Again," Dickens Studies III, 1 (March 1967), 65n. 64 Hugget, p. 110

66 Charles Dickens, "The Girl from the Workhouse," All the Year Round, Oct. 18, 1862, p. 133.

^ Hugget, p. 108. 68 P. A. W. Collins, "Bleak House and Dickens's Household Narrative," NCF, 14 (1960), 346-7 69 Collins, p. 347; Blount, pp. 66-7

^ Dickens, "The Girl . . . Workhouse," p. 133.

Dawes, p. 38. 72 Steven Marcus, The Other Victorians (New York: New American Library, 1964), pp. 131-3. 73 Charles Dickens, Little Dorrit (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967), p. 76. Further references to this work will appear in the text. For the description of Sally see PCS, pp. 665, 320.

^ Lucas, pp. 272-3.

Avrom Fleishman, "Master and Servant in Little Dorrit," SEL, 14 (1974), 577.

^ Martineau, "Modern Domestic Service," Edinburgh Review, 115 (April, 1862), p. 432.

^ Horn, pp. 103-4. 78 Geoffrey Thurley, The Dickens Myth: Its Genesis and Structure (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1976), pp. 234-5.

^ Kincaid, p. 203. 107

Martineau, "Domestic Service," p. 423.

01 Hugget, p. 108.

Horn, p. 105.

J. Hillis Miller, Charles Dickens: The World of His Novels (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard U. Press, 1958), p. 236.

William Myers, "The Radicalism of Little Dorrit," in Literature and Politics in the Ninetheenth Century, ed. John Lucas (London: Methuen and Co., 1971), p. 95. QC Leavis, p. 219.

Lionel Trilling, "Little Dorrit," in Dickens: A Collection of Critical Essays, p. 156. 87 Fleishman, p. 578. 88 Susan Horton comments on the ambiguity of this final Tattycoram espisode: "Because of Dickens's evasive or reticent rhetoric here, we can never really know exactly where Dickens's sympathies lie in this scene and all others like it. Ought servants to be treated with dignity and gentility, or were they to be given speeches about 'duty' by their masters? Was Dickens afraid to offend the Meagles segment of the population as the Leavises contend, or did he in actuality share their sentiments himself? In large part we cannot know. ..." See Susan Horton, The Reader in the Dickens World (Pittsburgh: U. of Pittsburgh Press, 1981), 43. CHAPTER IV

THE PROBLEM SERVANTS

At this point it may be prudent to invoke some words of warning

from Barbara Hardy:

It is always dangerous to patronize Dickens' social complacency: he may not be consistently critical, but the very unpredictability with which he can jump over his own Victorian fence makes it safer to expect subtlety and insight rather than blindness.*

It happens that in Dickens' army of fictional domestics for every

loyal and long-suffering servant we can also find one (or more) who

is disloyal, who inflicts rather than endures. Among the latter are

the problem servants. These servants, usually surly, scheming,

dishonest, and/or drunken, embody a vast range of Victorian middle-class

prejudices against the servant. Dickens' problem servants attach

themselves to a household and batten on its contents. In no real

sense are they rebels. The problem servants are quite content with domestic service largely because they do not serve— they rule.

The servant problem is most conspicuous in Dickens' novels of

the 1850s and '60s, beginning with David Copperfield. During this period the press was full of farcical, satirical, and quite somber 2 commentary on the servant problem.

In 1847, two years before Dickens began David Copperfield, Henry and Augustus Mayhew published a comic novel entitled The Greatest Plague of Life: or the Adventures of a Lady in Search of a Good Servant, by

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"One Who Has Been 'Almost Worried to Death."' As the title implies and Cruikshank's illustrations for the novel show (see frontispiece and t i d e page), this is a lighthearted look at the servant problem, replete with humorous sketches of bungling and thieving servants.

However, as Dorothy Stuart has noted, the real thrust of the satire is aimed at the mistress: "At an early stage Tin The Greatest Plague it becomes clear that we are not expected either to like or to pity the shrewish, despotic little snob who tells the tale. ..."

Dickens' mistresses Mmes. Copperfield, Jellyby and Pocket may not be shrews but their households abound in "Mayhewian farce.

From 1857 to 1864 Dickens' friend John Leech drew two series of cartoons called "Servantgalism" and "Flunkeiana" for Punch. Leech's servant gals have the appearance and sensitivities of stylish ladies.

A scullery maid, for instance, is depicted wearing an ungainly but fashionable crinoline while on the job. Leech's menservants are leisured gentlemen, refusing to carry coal upstairs or to wear red livery when it does not suit their complexions. George Orwell observed that all of these cartoons divulge the "then astonishing fact that a servant is a human being.(The reader may remember that in David

Copperfield one of David and Dora's many servants is "a young person g of genteel appearance, who went to Greenwich Fair in Dora's bonnet."

In the 1860s numerous sober essays on the causes and cures of the servant problem appeared in print. Writing for the Edinburgh

Review, Harriet Martineau admitted that every generation complains about servants, but in 1862 "the case is altogether graver than of Ill old.11 ^ No longer was it simply a matter of the family's "half-pies and odd custards" being surreptitiously consumed in the kitchen, but according to Martineau

It is far worse than this. We are told that it is difficult to obtain good service at all. We hear that domestic servants have become so "insolent," and even domineering that it is difficult to deal with them, and impossible to be on comfort­ able terms with them. Wages are high and still rising; the habits of the kitchen and servants' hall are costly; and, after all the expenditure, the cooks cannot cook, the house­ maids do not keep the house clean, and the men-servants take their own way, as if they were so many masters.®

Martineau saw the servant problem as stemming from the degraded position of domestic service in public opinion. She noted the tendency among the lower classes to put factory work on a higher plane than domestic service: "To be one's own master or mistress is a luxury worth more 9, to them than any indulgence under any other master or mistress."

Martineau understood why many who entered service felt compelled to

"run to extremes." To them misconduct was a way of asserting their dignity (which was compromised by entering service) and was not merely a matter of childish self-indulgence.

Yet while Martineau is sympathetic to workers in her analysis, her solutions to the servant problem are, as Feltes has observed, quite middle class.^ Martineau recommends that masters show their servants more respect in order to help them overcome their sense of inferiority and hence make them more productive. She also advocates tha founding of servant-training schools for the truly destitute, who will be forever grateful to their masters for the chance to better themselves.

Feltes finds Martineau's advice similar to that of other Victorian 112 essayists writing in the '60s. Ruskin argued that servants would respond best to masters who were kind without any ulterior motives.

Frances Cobbe suggested that the negotiation of rigorous contracts would instill new spirit into domestic service.** Clearly the object of all these recommendations is the restoration of faithful service to the masters. Improving the conditions of servitude is seen as a means to that end.

Dickens himself did not address the servant problem in essay form until 1867. In "Old and New Servants" for his own All the Year

Round Dickens echoes the prevailing sentiments of his day, while at the same time revealing an awareness of a more complex situation than his facetious tone and practical solution suggest. Dickens combines the humor of Mayhew, Cruikshank, and Leech with the sobriety of the

’60s essayists' approaches to the problem. Using comic thumbnail sketches of insolent servants, Dickens convinces the reader of the need for reform. After the tableau of "long and languid men £i.e., footmen^, flabby in texture, Cwho] would appear to take the function of the slave on the car of the Roman general," we can readily appreciate

Dickens' ideal, the "neat-handed Phyllis, trim— perhaps pretty— smart, 12 light of touch, soft in walk, nimble, brisk, and, above all, willing."

As Martineau had done five years before, Dickens claims in his essay that the servant problem has gotten out of hand. He sees domes­ tics, especially males, lording it over their masters, menials acting 13 like "Wonderful aristocrats! We serve them, not they us." Like

Martineau also, Dickens offers a solution designed to improve service 113

to the masters: Fire your haughty, purely ornamental menservants

and hire deferential, efficient housemaids. Yet unlike Martineau,

Dickens did not see the servant problem as one of the unpleasant side

effects of the Industrial Revolution. Dickens' article discloses a

fact that many masters who lamented the servant problem failed or

refused to see. One reason why many Victorian servants were "problems" was that their socially pretentious masters sought not competence and conscientiousness when hiring servants but a manner and appearance

that would intimidate guests. In his essay Dickens describes a typical reception at a "great house":

We are invited on a visit to the Most Noble the Marquis of Frendlesham, and find a tall white being, whose address and calmness, whose placid stare, make us feel uncomfortable, "told off" specially to look after our happiness. His name is perhaps "Churles." In vain do we reassure ourselves that this is only some "common fellow," a mere footman, certainly of inferior clay; for still the result is uncomfortable.^-^

Dickens also lampoons the masters who allow themselves to be intimidated by their own servants, who let "the family treasure" keep them in

"a decent bondage" and their wives "in a sort of terrorism": "... grave consultations have to be held, and mutual support conceded, before 'John' or 'William' can be asked to go out on some message, or worse, have the news broken to him that Mr. and Mrs. Brown are coming to dinner.Obviously Dickens is exaggerating here at least partly for comic effect, but the aim of his humor throughout the article is quite serious: to focus attention on the popular practice of using servants as human advertisements for one's social status. (Pamela

Horn asserts that the vast majority of Victorians, not just the few 114

who could afford to keep men in livery, hired servants for the sake 16 of appearing respectable. ) By no means does Dickens portray servants

in this essay as the innocent victims of their masters' social ambi­

tions, but neither are they seen as the creators of the servant problem.

The implication that runs all through Dickens' "Old and New Servants" is that those who feel themselves most victimized by the servant problem are indeed the authors of it: the masters.

Dickens' understanding of the Victorian domestic dilemma gave him access to a device rich in narrative and satirical possibilities.

Over and over again, in David Copperfield, Bleak House, Hard Times, and

Our Mutual Friend, Dickens used the inverted servant/master relationship to display in very visible terms the flaws of his servant-keepers.

Thus, in Dickens' hands the servant problem became a valuable method of characterization. Looked at from one angle, the flawed masters and mistresses that Dickens depicted reveal his class allegiance, for

Dickens' message is Mrs. Beeton's:

. . . there are few families of respectability, from the shopkeeper in the next street to the nobleman whose mansion dignifies the next square, which do not contain among their dependents attached and useful servants; and where these are absent altogether, there are good reasons for it. ' The reasons, Mrs. Beeton claims, were to be found in the unwillingness or inability of the employers to properly exercise their authority.

The extent of the popularity of Mrs. Beeton's Book of Household

Management, which in book form sold 60,000 in its first year, and 18 640,000 by 1898, gives us some idea of how widely accepted her view was, as well as how likely Dickens' contemporary readers would have been to take his unruly servants as symptomatic of their employers' 115

failure to live up to certain middle-class standards of behavior.

But looked at from another perspective, these same servant-keepers in

Dickens figure in an almost Hegelian critique of the middle (and higher) class' need for servants. Dickens was not familiar with the "Lordship and Bondage" chapter of Pheriomenolo gy of Mind, in which Hegel observes that mastery inevitably yields a dependent consciousness, yet Dickens 19 repeatedly illustrates this principle in his fiction.

Since the Victorian mistress, not the master, was the immediate supervisor of the servants, the physical state of her house and of her children, both cared for by domestics, were the outward signs of the degree to which she fulfilled her duties as a wife and mother.

Of course, in homes where there was a steward or a housekeeper whose job was to oversee the other servants, the mistress had less super­ visory work to do. But such households were rare in Victorian England.

According to Horn, an establishment needed an income of at least^1,500 20 to afford a servant-superintendent. The master, on the other hand, with an active life outside the home, had far less contact with his domestic staff. As the proprietor of the household, the master was the lord who reigned over all— family and servants. But while the fulfillment of his breadwinning, paterfamilial responsibilities did not depend on his mastery of the servants, his status as a middle-class gentleman to a great extend did. Jenni Calder remarks in Women and

Marriage in Victorian Fiction: "The criterion of worth, from a man's point of view, in servants, wives and children was very much the same.

In all of them duty and obedience to those in authority were of prime 116

21 importance." Hence, the degree of docility among a master's servants, their attitude towards him, could be an index to his standing as the head of a respectable household. Considering, then, the differences in the relationships that Victorian mistresses and masters had with their domestics— the mistress as a sort of prime minister, the master as monarch, servants as subjects under the rule of both— it should not be surprising that Dickens was able to use his fictional problem servants to expose flaws in their mistresses quite unlike those in their masters. In other words, domestics might reflect their mistress' failing as housekeeper, mother, wife. For the master, however, the servants might magnify a more personal kind of failure, by calling into question his ability to command respect from his own dependents.

Despite the fact that it was servants, not their mistresses, who cared for middle and upper-class houses, in the Victorian mind's eye the house was seen as an extension of its mistress' personality

(as well, of course, as an indication of its master's wealth). Mrs.

Beeton elucidates the rationale behind this house = mistress equation in the first chapter of her guidebook, on the role of mistress:

As with the Commander of an Army, or the leader of any enterprise, so is it with the mistress of a house. Her spirit will be seen through the whole establishment; and just in proportion as she performs her duties intelligently and thoroughly, so will her domestics follow in her path. Of all these acquirements, which more particularly belong to the feminine character, there are none which take higher rank, in our estimation, than such as enter into a knowledge of household duties; for on these are perpetually dependent the happiness, comfort, and well-being of a family. 2

The Victorian house reflected its mistress not just because she chose the furniture and knickknacks, but because the care of that house 117

depended on her control of the servants. Thus, the house was a

measure of more than taste; It coule be a measure of the mistress'

strength of character. In David and Dora's home in David Copperfield,

as well as in the Pockets' in Great Expectations and the Jellybys' in

Bleak House, we find Dickens taking full advantage of this Victorian

identification of houses with their mistresses.

At first sight David and Dora's cottage may seem an exception

to the rule that the Victorian house reflects its mistress' rather 23 than master's psyche. With his frequent use of first person plural,

e.g., "Our Housekeeping," David pointedly (and characteristically)

shares the blame for his chaotic household, where, as Fran^oise Basch

puts it, "the servant problem takes on the proportions of a permanent 24 disaster." Yet to the Victorian reader it would have been quite .

clear who should be held accountable for the lack of comfort and

\ tranquility in the Copperfield home. Dora is no Commander a la Beeton.

Although David fails miserably in his attempts to set his home to rights,

Dickens implies that this is not David's fault. No matter how

assiduously David follows the Cookery Book's directions, the joints will always be raw or ruined as long as the mistress is not in charge.

In one of her more serious moments, sobered by the prospect of death,

Dora accepts full responsibility for the couple's domestic trials:

". . . if I had been more fit to be married I might have made you more 25 so, too" (DC, 837). When David "graduates" to Agnes, the ensuing harmony and happiness are not the result of David's having finally mastered the art of household management, which he so highly values, 118 but of his marrying someone who has. Curiously, this later marriage to the perfect housewife has a chilling effect on many readers, no doubt at least partly because of our altered conception of the female role. But even the Victorian John Forster was less than pleased with the "too unfailing wisdom and self-sacrificing goodness of the angel- 26 wife Agnes." It was David's "child-wife," the total failure at servant-keeping, who was the "great favourite" of Dickens' contempor­ aries Forster claimed. And, according to Forster, Dickens' "principal hesitation" in the writing of David Copperfield was over what to do 27 with David's endearing but incompetent wife.

Dora's popularity and Dickens' indecision I think can be largely credited to Dora's being at once more complex and more problematic than her antithesis, the idealized Agnes, and her fellow failed mis­ tresses, the more satirically forceful Mmes. Pocket and Jellyby.

No doubt Dora's very domestic ineptitude does much to save her from the cloying sweetness that nullifies Agnes. What preserves Dora from the grossly unwifely appearance of a Mrs. Pocket or Jellyby is the fact that the Copperfield household problems are narrated not by a stranger, a neutral observer such as Pip and Esther are, but by a young, still-very-much-in-love husband. Because of David's narration,

Dora appears as both the major obstacle to her husband's contentedness and more deserving of happiness than he.

Although David good-humoredly minimizes his domestic problems

("our first little quarrel"), clearly his suffering in a servant-run 28 household is not slight. In addition to the disorder and frequent 119 indigestion he must live with, David is forced to shoulder the burden of supporting a household outrageously expensive yet woefully under­ stocked as a result of dishonest servants. David's efforts to acquire more reliable servants lead only to a "long line of Incapables."

This failure is but another indication of the difficulty of assuming what is properly the mistress' role. Most painful of all for David is the humiliation he suffers when his page, following in the footsteps of the teaspoon-stealing Mary Anne Paragon and the bonnet-borrowing maid, robs Dora's watch and is arrested. The page's cooperation with the police, revealing a seemingly endless number of thefts— of wine, sheets, sirloins, et cetera— committed by the cook in collusion with others, mortifies David because it reveals his distance from the paternalistic ideal of the day. David wholeheartedly accepts the prevailing and certainly condescending Victorian view that employers are responsible for their servants' morality: "We are positively corrupting people,"

David tells Dora (DC, 762). The source of David's distress is clearly not the servants but the child-wife who cannot control them:

"Don't you think, my dear," said I, "it would be better for you to remonstrate with Mary Anne?" "Oh no, please! I couldn't, Doady!" said Dora. "Why not, my love?" I gently asked. "Oh, because I am such a little goose," said Dora, "and she knows I am!" (DC, 702)

David's narrative makes it obvious that he is trapped in a marriage with a woman who cannot be taught to meet his needs, for the household 29 problems are also the signs of that more serious failing. Michael

Slater has remarked that the Copperfield housekeeping episodes are yet 30 another attack on the middle class girl's education. Dora, the 120 product of that education, sings and paints very prettily, but is a 31 costly ornament to have in a struggling middle-class household.

This Dora who, as Ross Dabney says, "closeCs] the protagonist's prospect 32 into the future and renderfsj useless what he has learned" must die.

Dickens opted for freeing David from Dora and the servants. That

Dickens remained content with this decision is implicit in his creation ten years after David Copperfield of a character who is the type of wife that Dora saw herself as someday becoming. Mrs. Pocket has all

Dora's inadequacies and none of her charm. To use E. M. Forster's terminology, Mrs. Pocket is a flat, not a round, character, and clearly what Dickens solicits from the reader through her is judgment, not 33 sympathetic understanding. Pip's narration of his first visit to the Pocket home reads like a manual on how not to be a Victorian mistress. Worthy of note is the fact that Mrs. Beeton's popular precepts on household management were published concurrently with

Great Expectations, the former in 1859-61, the latter in 1860-61.

Inasmuch as Mrs. Beeton reveals the duties and responsibilities of

Victorian mistresshood she helps us perceive the comprehensiveness of Dickens' censure of Mrs. Pocket (as well as of the earlier Mrs.

Jellyby) as middle-class wife and mother.

The Pocket family is one of Dickens' most lighthearted portraits of a servant-dominated household. Through Pip's amazed eyes we see the Pocket home as the site of one scene after another of slapstick comedy, with the children and maids taking turns falling over a footstool and the Pocket baby continually performing death-defying acts— flying 121

through the air, receiving a concussion at the dinner table, imperiling

brain and eyes with a nutcracker. From the start of this episode

the center of attention is Mrs. Pocket, serenely seated in her garden

surrounded by her seven tumbling children and two tripping nursery

maids. Even the relatively unsophisticated Pip, with his limited

social experiences (he was still at the stage where his knife and

fork were "potential instruments of self-destruction") realized that

there is something greatly amiss in the Pocket home. That something

is Mrs. Pocket.

Greeting Pip buried in a book, Mrs. Pocket is far from the gracious hostess the Victorian mistress was expected to be. In her handbook

Mrs. Beeton gives detailed instructions to the mistress regarding hospitality— how to dress for morning calls, how to give and accept

invitations, how to lead dinner guests through every stage of a meal— apparently expecting the mistress to be a combination public relations 34 expert and master of ceremonies for her family. Mrs. Pocket is neither.

What quickly becomes obvious about Mrs. Pocket is that her small interest in her guest Pip is neither more nor less than her interest in her own family. Not only is Mrs. Pocket no solicitous hostess, but far worse, she is no devoted mother. She has completely abdicated her maternal role. The nursemaids, Flopson and Millers (notably more competent than the Copperfields' "Incapables"), reign in her stead.

The contrast between Flopson and Millers' attendance on the Pocket children, albeit imperfect, and Mrs. Pocket's neglect of them 122

underscores that mistress' failure as a mother. The Pocket baby's

frequent exposure to danger is invariably the mother's fault. Mrs.

Pocket cannot even hold her baby without almost or actually hurting

it. That Mrs. Pocket can only "inexpertly dance" baby on her lap, although she has given birth to eight and is awaiting the ninth, indicates the degree of her indifference. So too does the order

Mrs. Pocket most often voices, for the children to be put to bed.

Mrs. Pocket's nursemaids, the surrogate mothers Flopson and Millers, view their apathetic mistress not as their supervisor but as one of their charges. Flopson talks to Mrs. Pocket as though she were a child. She reproaches her for dropping her handkerchief: "If that don't make six times you've dropped it, Mum!" When Flopson discovers that it is Mrs. Pocket's footstool under her skirts that has caused such a rash of tripping, she scolds her: "And if you keep it under 35 your skirts like that, who's to help tumbling?" Clearly it would be calamitous for the Pocket family if these impudent-sounding servants did not assume the role that their mistress refuses.

Belinda Pocket's failure as a mistress extends beyond hospitality 36 and child care. Pip's dismal meals at the Pocket's attest to this failure. Barbara Hardy has taught us how telling meals can be in

Dickens. In her Moral Art of Dickens Hardy suggests that the meals do not function as symbols but rather can be seen as "an extension of the particular definition of character, a way of emphasizing the connections and distances between different characters or events, showing the irony and necessity of the internal moral pattern." Hardy claims that in Great Expectations "nearly all the characters and families 37 are given . . . their significant ceremony of food." Hardy does not analyze Pip’s dinner and supper at the Pockets', but it is easy to see that they perform the kind of function she so well describes. The

tedium and discomfort at the Pockets' table, thanks to such "dis­ agreeable domestic occurrences" as the cook's temporarily losing the beef, provide further evidence of Mrs. Pocket's abdication. Just as she has allowed Flopson and Millers to raise her children, she has allowed the other servants to run her house. It is no wonder that to Pip "Mr. and Mrs. Pocket had such a noticeable air of being in somebody else's hands" (GE, 213). The effects of giving the servants

"possession of the house" prove to be as expensive for the Pockets as they were for the earlier Copperfields. . Pip notes that while the

Pockets' servants do "allow" them "a very liberal table," they treat themselves still better downstairs: "by far the best part of the house to have boarded in would have been the kitchen" (GE, 213).

Despite, or perhaps because of, the servants' having free run of the house and being entrusted in default with extensive responsibilities, the Pockets' domestics, like the Copperfields', show little loyalty to their employers. The cook drinks, and sells the family butter as 38 grease. The other servants squabble among themselves: "... the two nurses left the room and had a lively scuffle on the staircase with a dissipated page who had waited at dinner, and who had already lost half his buttons at the gaming table" (GE, 216). To all of this insubordination Mrs. Pocket closes her eyes even when it is pointed 124 . out to her. When a neighbor informs her that Millers has been slapping the baby, Mrs. Pocket bursts into tears, not because her maid has been cruel or her baby harmed, but because her neighbor has not minded her own business. When the housemaid Sophie reports some trouble in the kitchen to the master (apparently realizing there is no point in telling the mistress), Mrs. Pocket again lashes out at the mischief- maker who has called attention to domestic misconduct. Of course, if Mrs. Pocket admitted that her servants misbehaved, she would be admitting her own culpable negligence. As mistress of the house, Mrs.

Pocket was responsible for the hiring as well as the supervising of the servants. Mrs. Beeton calls the selection of servants "one of the general duties of the mistress, relative to the moral government 39 of her household." The Victorian mistress was expected to shield her family from worldly corruption, not invite drunks, thieves, and gamblers to run her house for her.

But Dickens' portrayal of Belinda Pocket is not totally devoid of sympathy. Mrs. Pocket does realize that she lacks the authority she should have in her own home, yet she feels she deserves more deferential treatment not because she is mistress of the house but because she is "grandpappa's granddaughter." Like Dora, Mrs. Pocket has not been trained for the position that marriage has placed her in.

According to Pip, Mrs. Pocket was raised from the cradle to marry a title and "guarded from the acquisition of plebeian domestic knowledge"

(GE, 212). With a commoner for a husband, Mrs. Pocket naturally finds little joy in life outside of books on hereditary titles. But her 125

family survives in spite of her. Their parents' unhappiness (Mr.

Pocket is habitually pulling himself up by his hair) does not discourage

the Pocket children from getting married themselves. All but the baby consider themselves engaged. Nevertheless, the Pockets' optimism does not conceal the dangers inherent in so anarchic a household as

Mrs. Pocket's.

Servant tyranny is most destructive not in the homes of Dickens' frivolous women, Dora and Belinda, but rather in that of the woman dedicated to a cause. Mrs. Jellyby abandons even more of her authority to her servants than do Mmes. Copperfield and Pocket. And the results are correspondingly more disastrous.

As in the Pocket home, slapstick humor fills the initial scenes that the stranger, i.e., Esther, witnesses, with the Jellyby children

"tumbling" everywhere. Little Peepy Jellyby performs almost as many daring feats as the Pocket baby does, such as getting his head lodged between iron railings and careening down a flight of stairs. Esther finds Mrs. Jellyby not seated amidst her many offspring, but immersed in paperwork. With her telescopic sights set on Borrioboola Gha, a colony in Africa, Mrs. Jellyby can ignore all around her. Her ability to preserve her equanimity in the face of her children's calamities astonishes the instinctively maternal Esther. It does not take us long to see that the only child Mrs. Jellyby has any fondness for is her pet Aftican project. (At one point Mrs. Jellyby actually prefaces a remark to her daughter with, "Now if my public duty were not a 40 favourite child to me." ) 126

Mrs. Beeton must have had the Mrs. Jellybys of England in mind when she decided to write her guide. Indeed, in her preface she claims:

What moved me, in the first instance, to attempt a work like this, was the discomfort and suffering which I had seen brought upon men and women by household mismanagement. I have always thought there is no more fruitful source of family discontent than a housewife's badly cooked dinners and untidy ways.^ *

Mrs. Jellyby is still farther from the ideal Victorian mistress than

Mrs. Pocket. Every bit as inhospitable as the latter, Mrs. Jellyby, with little time to spare from her philanthropic work, consigns Esther,

Richard, and Ada, her house guests, to comfortless rooms where they must fend for themselves. Yet Mrs. Jellyby treats her guests no worse than she treats herself, as Esther's description of her shows:

Mrs. Jellyby had very good hair, but was too much occupied with her African duties to brush it. The shawl in which she had been loosely muffled, dropped on to her chair . . . we could not help noticing that her dress didn't nearly meet up the back, and that the open space was railed across with a lattice-work of stay-lace— like a summer-house. (BH, 85)

If not consciously denying her femininity, Mrs. Jellyby certainly ignores it.

Whatever attention is paid to the Jellyby children comes from the servants. Judging by the children's appearance and behavior, they are the victims of gross neglect. Unwashed and uncivil, they are little better than animals. Peepy, in fact, bites. The Jellyby children lack even a semi-competent Flopson or Millers. Mrs. Jellyby, whose only command to the children, like Mrs. Pocket's frequent one, is that they go to bed, puts them in the hands of a maid "who charged 127 into the midst of the little family like a dragon, and overturned them into cribs" (BH, 90).

Of course, Mrs. Jellyby has no interest in housekeeping either.

Once again the dinner table provides strong evidence of the mistress' failure to nurture her family:

We had a fine cod-fish, a piece of roast beef, a dish of cutlets, and a pudding; an excellent dinner, if it had any cooking to speak of, but it was almost raw. The young woman with the flannel bandage waited, and dropped everything on the table wherever it happened to go, and never moved it again until she put it on the stairs. The person I CEstherU had seen in pattens (who I suppose to have been the Cook), frequently came and skirmished with her at the door, and there appeared to be ill-will between them. (BH, 88)

More concrete evidence of Mrs. Jellyby's domestic apathy is presented by the Jellyby house itself. It is a chamber of horrors— cold, dark, and dirty. Esther appreciates the absurdity of such things as curtains attached to windows by forks, but she also notices stair-carpets "so torn as to be absolute traps" (BH, 88). The whole Jellyby house is testimony to the servants' laziness, incompetence, and disloyalty, encouraged, of course, by the absence of a governing mistress.

(Strikingly different from Mrs. Jellyby is Mrs. Bagnet, an equally strong- minded woman who, with no servants at all, does the work of an entire domestic staff— cook, butler, scullery maid, and so on.)

The effects on this family abandoned to servants are obviously meant to be disturbing. The Jellyby children, unlike the Pockets, whose good nature and health remain miraculously intact, are physically and emotionally scarred. When we look at the eldest Jellyby child,

Caddy (while she is still at home), we find a girl whose numerous 128 ink stains reflect her unnaturally darkened temperament. Full of bitterness, hostility, and self-pity, Caddy stands in marked contrast to Pip’s friend, Herbert, the easy-going and amiable eldest Pocket child. Mrs. Jellyby's husband also suffers. Treated by the servants on a par with the cat (he has milk for breakfast only if the cat has not had it for dinner), Mr. Jellyby is only a shell of a man. Lacking the energy for Mr. Pocket's hair-pulling habit, Mr. Jellyby just sits with his head against the wall when home for the evening. Far from being able to give pleasant lectures on domestic economy, Mr. Jellyby can barely talk. The most vitality Mr. Jellyby ever exhibits in

Bleak House is his throwing himself at a window when trying to come to grips with his accounts.

Yet both Mrs. Jellyby and Mrs. Pocket, unlike Dora Copperfield, survive their abdication to domestics practically unscathed. We never see Mrs. Pocket disheveling her hair, and Mrs. Jellyby is oblivious to her husband's bankruptcy. Probably the very indifference to maternal and domestic duties which gives their servants control over their homes (Dora is more conscious of her shortcomings) insulates Mrs.

Pocket and Mrs. Jellyby from a sense of the unhappy results. But

Dickens does not permit his masters who yield to their servants to escape so easily. (I am not referring her to Messrs. Pocket and

Jellyby, who are shown as the victims, not the causes of their servants' control of their homes. These masters' only real fault seems to be in their choice of a wife.) Dickens' male characters are usually more personally affected by their failure to master their servants. 129 The failed master/servant relationship takes a very different form from that of the mistress/servant. Whereas we saw mistresses exposed by their domestic staff, more often we will find masters characterized by means of a one-to-one relationship with a servant.

The servants in these relationships are much more fully developed than are the stick figures serving the Copperfields, Pockets, and Jellybys, e.g., the drunken cook, the dissipated page, the dragon-nursemaid.

While the mistresses fail as supervisors of their whole household staff, masters fail to earn the respect of individual servants. The evidence of the masters' failure is not as concrete as that of the mistresses. Dickens does not use the physical state of these masters' houses to reveal the extent of their domination by servants. Mardle's well-ordered mansion in Little Dorrit, for instance, shows no signs of the the Chief Butler's power over his master. All of the mastered masters live in comfortable surroundings, yet they appear to be little more than the titular sovereigns of their domestic realms.

The changed nature of the master/servant relationship in the

Victorian period made it even more valuable to Dickens in the portrayal of male characters than female. Horn tells us that before the nine- 42 teenth century employers could treat their menials as friends. Secure in their social position, masters could fraternize with their domestics without feeling their superiority threatened. Eighteenth-century masters and mistresses, Frank Dawes informs us, even permitted their servants to dress as they did. Servants then were routinely given their masters' cast-off clothes. "When there was a death 'upstairs,' wardrobes of considerable size and fine quality were bequeathed to 43 be divided among the servants." As I mentioned briefly earlier, in the "Servant-Guides" chapter, with the expansion of the middle class in the nineteenth century, the servant/master relationship became far less intimate and casual. Since new members of the middle class hired servants not just for convenience but to demonstrate their rise above working-class status, they were anxious to distinguish themselves from the laborers in their homes. Middle-class Victorians needed the illusion of a social security that quietly obsequious servants in uniform could offer. Dress and behavior reflecting the distance between employer and domestic were the order of the day. And the servants' distance, both literally and metaphorically, was much greater from the master than from the mistress. While the mistress needed to stay in touch with her servants for practical reasons, e.g., meal planning, dinner party arrangements, and nursery matters, the master could and often did insist on having as little contact as possible with the domestics. Horn cites several examples of Victorian masters notorious for their refusal to notice the people who cleaned and cooked for them. Apparently even titled noblemen felt it necessary to keep their distance from menials, perhaps because they agreed with Sir Leicester

Dedlock that the floodgates of society had burst open. The aged third

Lord Crewe ordered that "No housemaids were to be seen . . . except in chapel." (Dickens’ own grandfather had been a steward at Crewe Hall.^)

The Duke of Bedford was equally strict: "To cross his path, unless he wished . . . , was little short of a crime, and any of the women 131 servants who met him after twelve o'clock in the day, when their duties might be supposed to be done, could immediately lose their 45 place." No doubt in an age when servants were instructed not to bother their masters, as a measure of their respect for and obedience to them, readers would take a very dim view of Dickens' fictional masters who allow their domestics to annoy, intimidate, or worse, manipulate them.

Not only did many newly rich Victorians find themselves employing people who had shortly before been their social and economic equals, but some actually ended up hiring servants who by birth, education, and/ or marriage were their superiors. Josiah Bounderby of Hard Times with his lady housekeeper, Mrs. Sparsis, is in this latter position. I Mrs. Sparsit falls into a category of servants that Pamela Horn calls

"lady helps." Lady helps were gentlewomen fallen upon difficult times, 46 forced to enter service to make a living. For a while, lady helps were seen as the solution to the servant shortage problem, caused by the steadily increasing demand for domestics as more and more Victorians attained middle-class status, and the steadily decreasing supply as more of the poor entered factories (something no lady could do). But the lady help caused more of a problem than she solved. Horn and E. S.

Turner both note that friction between lady helps and other servants

(like that between governesses and servants) was inevitable. Members of neither the master’s world nor the servants', the ladies kept themselves apart, eating in odd corners, anywhere but with other 47 domestics. In his portrayal of Mrs. Sparsit, however, Dickens 132 focuses on another type of friction that must have been inevitable, that between lady help and master.

Josiah Bounderby*s relationship with his housekeeper appears at first to be a symbiotic one. An impoverished widow, Mrs. Sparsit manages to earn a decent salary,^ 1 0 0 a year, and to "spite" her noble aunt, Lady Scadgers, by serving a factory owner, Bounderby. In turn, the blustering Bounderby is able to puff himself up both at home and abroad (in Coketown) by having a "lady" in his employ.^®

At every chance he gets, Bounderby refers to his housekeeper as a lady. For example, when Sissy Jupe neglects to curtsey to Mrs.

Sparsit, Bounderby quickly corrects her:

"Now, I'll tell you what, my girl. The name of that lady by the teapot is Mrs. Sparsit. That lady acts as mistress of this house, and she is a highly connected lady. Consequent­ ly, if ever you come again into any room in this house, you will make short stay in it if you don't behave towards that lady in your most respectful manner. Now, I don't care a button what you do to me, because I don't affect to be anybody. So far from having high connexions I have no connexions at all, and I come of the scum of the garth. But towards that lady, I do care what you do. . . ."

And when Stephen Blackpool wishes to speak privately with Bounderby, he responds:

"Now you know, this good lady is a born lady, a high lady. You are not to suppose because she keeps my house for me, that she hasn't been very high up the tree— ah, up at the top of the tree! Now, if you have got anything to say that can't be said before a born lady, this lady will leave the room. If what you have got to say can be said before a born lady, this lady will stay where she is." (HT, 109-10)

(In both of the preceding quotations the emphasis on "lady" is my own.)

Far from being resentful of Bounderby's use of her as a foil to call attention to his rise from rags to riches, Mrs. Sparsit appears to 133 eat up his flattery, accepting it as assurance that she is still appreciated as a lady and is no common housekeeper. Indeed she is not. We never see Mrs. Sparsit do any of the multifarious tasks that housekeepers in wealthy Victorian households usually were expected to do according to Mrs. Beeton."*^ Mrs. Sparsit never tallies household accounts, supervises the pickling and preserving, or makes sure the underservants are doing their jobs. Instead, Mrs. Sparsit is shown serving her master's tea or at work on some decorative sewing, activities fit for any lady. It is as a lady that Mrs. Sparsit makes every effort to appear in her world, by wearing mittens, insisting on calling her salary an "annual compliment," and "observing with a lofty grace: particularly when any of the domestics were present, 'that what I was,

I am no longer'" (HT, 213). Yet through these same genteel actions that Mrs. Sparsit so delights in, we can see someone who is far from delicate or sensitive. In fact, while working on a piece of cambric

"for some inscrutable ornamental purpose" Mrs. Sparsit looks decidedly inhuman. She uses sharp scissors to pick out holes in the cloth:

"an operation which taken in connexion with the bushy eyebrows and the

Roman nose suggested with some liveliness the idea of a hawk engaged upon the eyes of a tough little bird" (HT, 139).

It is surely no accident that Mrs. Sparsit most often appears either presiding over meals or consuming them. No other character in

Hard Times spends as much time at the table as does Mrs. Sparsit. For her, the table is a place where she can demonstrate her superiority while ostensibly serving her master: "It was a part, at once of Mrs. 134

Sparsit's dignity and service, not to lunch. She supervised the meal officially, but implied that in her own stately person she considered lunch a weakness" (HT, 109). After her ouster from the housekeeping post, Mrs. Sparsit turns Bounderby's table into a battleground where she wages war on his domestic peace, as I shall soon show. But Mrs.

Sparsit also occasionally sits down to a table simply to eat her favorite food, sweetbread, an internal organ. The cumulative effect of all this dining and food imagery is our eventual sense of Mrs.

Sparsit not as a gracious lady but as a predatory bird. Her unsuspec­ ting victim is, of course, her master, the "Noodle."

Mrs. Sparsit understands Bounderby better than he does himself, and it is through her beady hawk's eyes that we best see his weakness.

A bully at his factory and bank, Bounderby is a mouse at home with his housekeeper. While in her master's company, Mrs. Sparsit reveals

(to us) her expertise at a far more subtle and effective kind of bullying than Bounderby is capable of. For example, when Mrs. Sparsit suspects Bounderby of harboring matrimonial intentions regarding

Louisa Gradgrind, she attempts to maneuver him away from the altar.

Well aware of his vanity, Mrs. Sparsit praises her master in order to discomfit him: "You are quite another father to Louisa, sir" (HT, 85).

When Blackpool comes to Bounderby for advice on his insoluble marital dilemma, Mrs. Sparsit disconcerts her master by making seemingly innocent inquiries:

"Was it an unequal marriage, sir, in point of years?". . . . "You hear what this lady asks. Was it an unequal marriage in point of years, this unlucky job of yours?" said Mr. Bounderby. 135

"Not e'en so. I were one and twenty myself; she were twenty nighbut." "Indeed, sir?" said Mrs. Sparsit to her chief, with great placidity. "I inferred, from its being so miserable a marriage, that it was probably an unequal one in point of years." Mr. Bounderby looked very hard at the good lady in a sidelong way that had an odd sheepishness about it. He fortified himself with a little more sherry. (HT, 111)

Mrs. Sparsit's efforts to head off Bounderby's union with Louisa are not necessarily or merely signs of her own desire to marry him.

(Tom Gradgrind's comment to Harthouse does indicate that her inclina­ tions were plain to all: "Mother Sparsit never set her cap at Bounderby when he was a bachelor. Oh no!"J^HT, 169j) Mrs. Sparsit realizes that her job at Bounderby's will be terminated if her master marries Louisa.

Why should it be when Bounderby is obviously wealthy enough to keep both a wife and a housekeeper? The relationship between the Victorian housekeeper and her mistress was such that it would be impossible for

Mrs. Sparsit to live in the same house with a Louisa Bounderby. As long as Bounderby was single, Sparsit was acting mistress of his house. As soon as he married, however, she would be demoted to

"second-in-command" (Beeton's phrase). In her handbook Mrs. Beeton explains that "the housekeeper must consider herself as the immediate representative of the mistress."'**' Proud Mrs. Sparsit could hardly have been that for Louisa, a mistress a generation younger then she, whom Sparsit regards as "a little girl," a mere "chit."

Although Sparsit does not succeed in preventing Bounderby from taking the matrimonial plunge, she is able to make the waters icy for him. After Louisa accepts Bounderby's proposal, his first "disquietude" comes at the prospect of announcing the news to his housekeeper. This

scene gives ample evidence that Bounderby has less than total mastery

over his own hearth. Armed with the strongest smelling salts, "he

entered his own house with anything but a courageous air, and appeared

before the object of his misgivings, like a dog who was conscious of

coming direct from the pantry" (HT, 139). By calmly accepting her master's announcement as any loyal, well-wishing servant should, Sparsit

discomposes Bounderby more than "if she had thrown her work-box at

the mirror" (HT, 140). This is Sparsit's favorite tactic. By acting

the obedient servant, she asserts her mastery over her master, attacking his pride with her condescending humility: "She was polite, obliging,

cheerful, the more hopeful, the more exemplary altogether, she; the

forlomer Sacrifice and Victim [[as Louisa's husband] he" (HT, 141). So

successful a tactician is Sparsit that Bounderby, instead of taking advantage of his approaching marriage to free himself from her, proves how personally dependent he is on her dependence on him, by offering her a sinecure at his bank.

It is after losing her influential position as Bounderby's house­ keeper that Mrs. Sparsit launches her fiercest attack on her master.

Again, Bounderby's own table is her most frequent battleground.

Visiting Bounderby to recover her nerves after the bank robbery, Mrs.

Sparsit finds meals daily opportunities to exhibit her humility and gratitude to her master:

The same Hermitical state of mind led to her renunciation of made dishes and wines at dinner, until fairly commanded by Mr Bounderby to take them; when she said, "Indeed you are 137

very good, sir;" and departed from a resolution of which she had made rather a formal and public announcement, to "wait for the simple mutton." She was likewise, deeply apologetic for wanting the salt. . . . (HT, 213)

By offering to fix Bounderby’s "sherry warm, with lemon-peel and nutmeg" before retiring as she always had as his housekeeper and Louisa never does as his wife, Sparsit reinforces Bounderby's growing sense

(thanks to her) that he really is to be pitied as Louisa's spouse. The concomitant implication is that no one can satisfy her master's appetites as she can. But it is at the breakfast table one morning that Sparsit makes her most triumphant coup:

Now, these persistent assuagements of his misery, and lightenings of his load, had by this time begun to have the effect of making Mr. Bounderby softer than usual towards Mrs. Sparsit, and harder than usual to most other people from his wife downward. So, when Mrs. Sparsit said with forced lightness of heart, "You want your breakfast, sir, but I dare say Miss Gradgrind will be here to preside at the table," Mr. Bounderby replied, "If I waited to be taken care of by my wife, ma'am, I believe you know pretty well I should wait till Doomsday, so I'll trouble you to take charge of the teapot." Mrs. Sparsit complied, and assumed her old position at table. (HT, 220)

Truly, Mrs. Sparsit has assumed her old position, and dislodged Louisa from her newer one. Louisa's indifference to her boorish husband, contrasted with Sparsit's studious attentions to her "benefactor," so swells Bounderby's "sense of slight" that he is unable to contain it.

Sparsit's maneuvers indeed precipitate the crisis in Bounderby and

Loo's marital relationship: ". . .from this day, the Sparsit action upon Mr. Bounderby threw Louisa and James Harthouse more together, and strengthened the dangerous alienation from her husband and confidence against him with another" (HT. 221-2). Thus by playing the obsequious, admiring servant Mrs. Sparsit destroys her master's 138

marriage and clears the way for the resumption of her former mastery

of his house.

It is only when Sparsit changes tactics that she loses ground.

An expert at controlling her master through subservience, Sparsit is

far less adept at more actively pursuing her goals. When Mrs. Sparsit

follows Louisa down that allegorical staircase, she begins her own

descent towards a different kind of destruction. Used to viewing his

dependent Sparsit as an essential pillar to his public image, Bounderby

is for the first time embarrassed as a result of his connection with

her when she leads him to a confrontation with Gradgrind over Louisa's

suspected adultery. Faced with his wife's unexpected innocence,

Bounderby turns on Lady Scadgers' niece, showing unwonted courage in

her presence: "Now, ma'am! We shall be happy to hear any little

apology you may think proper to offer, for going about the country

at express pace, with no other luggage than a Cock-and-a-Bull, ma'am!"

(HT, 259-60) For the first time, Bounderby cannot appreciate Sparsit's

service to him. He is still less appreciative when Sparsit attempts

to make herself invaluable to him by solving the bank mystery. Dragging

Mrs. Pegler, Bounderby's mother, back to Coketown, the servant hired

to inflate her master's image unwittingly succeeds in deflating it.

It takes public humiliation to convince Bounderby that he does not

need such service as Mrs. Sparsit's.

When Bouncerby finally decides to cashier Sparsit it is not

because of any transformation that has taken place within him. He is moved by the startling realization that his servant has "presumed to be 139

wiser than he." The reasoning behind Bounderby's firing of Sparsit

is of a kind with that for hiring her: "At last he made the discovery

that to discharge this highly connected female— to have it in his power

to say, 'She was a woman of family, and wanted to stick to me, but

I wouldn't have it, and got rid of her'— would be to get the utmost

glory out of the connexion" (HT, 309). Although Bounderby has the

satisfaction of punishing Mrs. Sparsit (significantly insisting that

she eat her meals privately as long as she remains in his house), he has already suffered serious losses that Sparsit's removal to Lady

Scadgers' "mean little airless lodging" will not repair. Losing both his young wife and his cherished reputation, Bounderby pays an exorbitant price for his dependence on a servant.

Male domestics are also capable of mastering their masters in

Dickens' fiction. But the male servants' mastery Dickens portrays differs from what we have witnessed in the Sparsit/Bounderby relation­ ship, as the roles of male and female servants differed in Dickens' day. Female servants, as I indicated earlier, tended to be more prac­ tical than menservants. The "Flunkeiana" Punch cartoon of the statuesque footman carrying an envelope on a salver while a maid struggles up the stairs with a loaded coal scuttle was no great exaggeration of the actual state of affairs in many Victorian homes. Even though

Bounderby uses Mrs. Sparsit for his personal self-aggrandizement, her jobs as housekeeper and later bank housemother are not primarily ornamental. Victorian menservants, as Dickens complained in his essay

"Old and New Servants," were often expected to do little more than 140

look Imposing, i.e., to intimidate.

Perhaps the most frequently intimidating of all Victorian

domestics was the butler. Unlike other male servants who performed

a largely ornamental function, the butler did not wear flashy livery.

(Note the frontispiece to Little Dorrit.) He dressed as a gentleman,

with "a deliberate solecism, such as the wrong tie or the wrong 52 trousers" to distinguish him. It was as a gentleman that he was

treated by his fellow servants as well as by his employers. According

to Lady Violet Greville, butlers in the employ of solitary elderly

ladies would even go so far as to assume the master's role, deciding

not just what and when their mistresses should drink but "how they 53 shall live." It seems only natural that Victorian ladies, trained

to be helpless and dependent, would fall under the sway of their

butlers when alone in the world. Gentlemen, however, were expected

to be more forceful and independent. Thus it was much more demeaning

for a master than a mistress to be under the control of a butler.

Dickens explores just such a butler/master relationship in Little

Dorrit.

Although one of the villains of the novel, Mr. Merdle is sympathe­

tically rendered. This sympathetic portrayal of villainy in itself is not so unuaual. There was a whole subgenre of Victorian fiction, the most famous practitioner of which was Dickens' friend Bulwer Lytton,

that routinely turned criminals into pathetic, even likable characters.

The usual strategy of the popular Newgate novel was to make the reader understand why the protagonist feels forced to commit his dreadful 141

ivlkm iHtf/ifHitKm n/M fft'

Fanny and Little D orrit call on M rs M erdlt

6. MENSERVANTS 142 crime, and then to focus on his ensuing guilty conscience. Dickens' strategy in portraying Merdle is quite different. In fact, it marks a departure from his own characterization of evil. Michael Steig, in attempting to explain why Merdle was such a difficult character for Dickens' illustrator Phiz to draw (traditional iconography just did not work), observes: "He £Merdle] is not a monster like such earlier characters who epitomize the cash-nexus values of Dickens' society— Pecksniff, Dombey, Heep, or Bounderby. Dickens humanizes

Merdle. He does this not as the Newgate novelists did— by exploring motives or dwelling on guilt pangs— but by dramatizing the effects of the fraud on the culprit's social behavior. Dickens reveals the man in his society first, the crime and its effects on society last.

(This basic movement, from man to crime, is similar to Newgate fiction, but the latter usually works its way gradually to the crime, whereas

Merdle's, only vaguely described, is already in progress when we first meet him.) As a result, we the readers are deceived by Merdle, just as his lionizers and investors are, but for different reasons. Merdle's

Chief Butler's tyranny over his master is partly responsible for our deception.

While Bounderby is for the most part ignorant of his housekeeper's power over him, Merdle's behavior betrays a painful consciousness of his Chief Butler's mastery. In the series of dinner scenes involving

Merdle and his butler we are repeatedly shown that despite the adulation of anonymous millions and the company of fawning Bar, Bishop, and

Treasury, Merdle is not master in his own home. In the first of these 143

"dinner givings" at his Harley Street Mansion, Merdle is overshadowed

by his gifts to Society, that dazzingly bejeweled bosom, his wife,

and "the next magnificent institution of the day," his butler— "the

stateliest man in the company.This dinner obviously serves to

show us what a remarkably small amount of satisfaction Merdle derives

from his wealth: "Mr. Merdle was at home, the best of the jewels were hung out to be seen, Society got what it came for, Mr. Merdle

drank twopenny worth of tea in a corner and got more than he wanted"

(LD, 299). Besides not having the tastes of a moneyed gentleman,

Merdle is much less adept at acting as "one of England's world-famed

capitalists" than his butler is. Merdle's butler is well aware of his master's inadequacy and makes no effort to conceal his knowledge:

. . . the other magnates gradually floated up after him until there was no one left below but Mr. Merdle. That gentleman, after looking at the table cloth until the soul of the chief butler glowed with resentment, went slowly up after the rest, and became of no account in the stream of people on the grand staircase. (LD, 298-99)

When Merdle dines away from home, out of his chief butler's presence, he is better able to appreciate his fame and fortune. But as soon as he returns, he is "instantly put out again in his own hall, like a rushlight, by the chief butler" (LD, 449). Thus, the servant hired

to represent the master's greatness to society, serves as a continual reminder to that master of his inferiority. So intimidated by his butler is Merdle that he is not free to act as he pleases while at home. He is reduced to sneaking from room to room to escape the butler's critical gaze. Before the second dinner party at Merdle's we see the master take the unusual "liberty" of standing with his back 144 to the fire:

In the presence of the Chief Butler, he could not have done such a deed. He would have clasped himself by the wrists in that constabulary manner of his and have paced up and down the hearthrug, or gone creeping about among the rich objects of furniture, if his oppressive retainer had appeared in the room at that very moment. (LD, 613)

While Merdle purchases his mansion, wife, son, and domestics for the sake of his standing in Society, his butler views the great Merdle who has purchased him as something necessary to support his (the but­ ler's) own rank. Though the Chief Butler has a higher regard for Mrs.

Merdle and her daughter-in-law, Fanny Sparkler, than for his master, they too serve in his mind only as objects to increase his dignity:

If he missed the presiding bosom, it was as a part of his own state of which he was . . . temporarily deprived. Just as he might have missed a centre-piece, or a choice wine- cooler, which had been sent to the Banker's. (LD, 612)

It is Merdle's great failing in his butler's eyes that he is not as ornamental as he chould be, and as Mrs. Merdle and Fanny are. Nowhere is the butler's condescension to his master better seen than in his response to Merdle's death. When Merdle slits his jugular in a bath, his butler is not moved by the tragic ending of his master's life but confirmed in his opinion that Merdle is no gentleman:

Then he Cthe butlerU approached the window with dignity; looking on at Physician's news exactly as he had looked on at the dinners in that very room. "Mr. Merdle is dead." "I should wish," said the Chief Butler, "to give a month's notice." "Mr. Merdle has destroyed himself." "Sir," said the Chief Butler, "that is very unpleasant to the feelings of one in my position, as calculated to awaken prejudice; and I should wish to leave immediately." "If you are not shocked, are you not surprised, man?" 145

demanded the Physician warmly. The Chief Butler, erect and calm, replied in these words. "Sir, Mr. Merdle never was the gentleman, and no ungentle- manly act on Merdle's part would surprise me." (LD, 774)

Merdle's relationship with his disloyal butler does show him to be unworthy of his reputation as the Great Merdle, but at the same time it reveals a lonely and tormented man, worthy of the Physician's and our sympathy.

Dickens completes his portrait Of Merdle with what William Myers calls "a great wave of impassioned, angry prose," as though Merdle were the monster Dickens has so effectively shown him not to be. Myers suggests that Dickens' portrayal of Merdle calls into question "the whole simplification" of his final denunciation, i.e., of Merdle as

"the greatest Forger and the greatest Thief that ever cheated the gallows.Was Dickens the social critic at odds with Dickens the realist in the creation of Merdle? Does the characterization work against the theme? Dickens' preface to Little Dorrit tells us that through Merdle he was attacking the railway speculators and banking adventurers of his time. (Myers observes that although the novel is set in the 1820s it clearly deals with the political problems of the

1850s.Certainly when one looks at the victims of such a swindler as Merdle, as Dickens does after the suicide, at the "hundreds and thousands of beggared people," then Merdle does appear monstrous.

But when one focuses on the private life of Merdle, completely surrounded, if not smothered by hangers-on such as the Chief Butler, it is inevitable to see Merdle himself as more victim than victimizer.

In his last completed novel Dickens put the butler/master 146

relationship to use again in the delineation of an important character.

Veneering, like Merdle, is nouveau riche and "indefatigably dealing 58 dinner cards to Society." His butler, the Analytical Chemist, is

like Merdle's. The Chemist serves his employers in body but not in

mind. For example, after their "dearest and oldest" friends, the

Lammles, crash, the Veneerings give a "wondering dinner":

"But how," says Veneering, "CAN people do that!" Hah! That is felt on all hands to be a shot in the bull's eye. How CAN people do that! The Analytical Chemist going round with champagne, looks very much asif he could give them a pretty good idea how people did that, if he had a mind. (OMF, 691)

Mr. Veneering is never intimidated by his butler. He and Mrs.

Veneering are totally oblivious to their dour servant's powers of

discernment, his ability to see the people beneath the veneer. After

Veneering successfully runs for Parliament, his wife recites an anecdote:

"You will all think it foolish of me, I know, but I must mention it. As I sat by Baby's crib, on the night before the election, Baby was very uneasy in her sleep." The Analytical Chemist who is gloomily looking on, has diabolical impulses to suggest "Wind" and throw up his situation. . . . (OMF, 305)

But the Chemist never does say "Wind" and the Veneerings never suspect him of thinking them human. The implications of this butler/ master relationship are far darker than those of the tense Chief

Butler/Merdle relationship. Although Veneering does not bring thousands down with him when he goes bankrupt, the contrast between him and his justifiably cynical butler makes him appear the epitome of complacence and self-glorification. Veneering is completely satisfied with his 147 life of "high varnish and polish," in which every new acquaintance is his most intimate friend in the world. He is at once simpler than Merdle and more appalling.

Not all of Dickens' masters who fail to command respect from their servants end up having apoplectic fits (Bounderby), committing suicide (Merdle), or going broke (Veneering). In Great Expectations

Dickens gives us a master who does not just survive a topsy-turvy servant/master relationship, but becomes a better man as a result of it. Like Merdle, Pip is for a short period in his life intimidated by an ornamental male servant. In Pip's case, however, the servant is not an overbearing butler but just a small boy. Again like Merdle,

Pip is continually humiliated by the presence of his domestic and finds himself more servant than master: "A better proof of my bondage to that taskmaster could scarcely be afforded, than the degrading shifts to which I was constantly driven to find him employment. So mean is extremity, that I sometimes sent him to Hyde Park Corner to see what o'clock it was" (GE, 268).

While employing this gentleman's servant, Pip lives with the irrational fear that his servant will discover he is not a gentleman.

(How much knowledge of gentlemanly behavior would a washerwoman's son be likely to have?) Although Pip wishes to take his "expensive

Mercury" back home with him to impress the folks he grew up with, he decides against it because "Trabb's boy might worm himself into his intimacy and tell him things" (GE, 247). When someone from home,

Joe, visits Pip, he is so anxious to keep face before his servant 148

that he allows Pepper, in effect, to come between him and his old

friend: "... here his fJoe'sl eyes fell to the Avenger," who was

putting some toast on table, and so plainly denoted an intention to

make that young gentleman one of the family, that I frowned it down

and confused him more" (GE, 243). Pip's nickname for his page, the

"Avenger" (Merdle"s butler is called the "Avenging Spirit"), is more

than an amusing exaggeration of that servant's function in Pip's life.

While David Copperfield's page moved his master to "serious reflections"

upon "our want of system and management" (DC, 760), the Avenger awakens 59 in Pip thoughts of a more self-critical kind. Pip eventually recog­ nizes that he is guilty of excessive vanity and deserving of punishment.

Not until Magwitch re-enters his life does Pip fully realize the extent of his superficiality and selfishness, but Pip's fretful relationship with his page does push him in that direction, by making him

dissatisfied with himself and with his effect on others:

Now, concerning the influence of my position on others . . . I perceived— though dimly enough perhaps— that it was not beneficial to Herbert. My lavish habits led his easy nature into expenses that he could not afford, corrupted the simplicity of his life, and disturbed his peace with anxieties and regrets. .. . . i t often caused me a twinge to think that I had done him evil service in crowding his sparsely furnished chamber with incongruous upholstery work and placing the canary-breasted Avenger at his disposal. (GE, 292)

More than one biographer of Dickens has pointed out the parallels between Pip and Dickens himself. The resemblance, Edgar Johnson claims, is not in "outward events" but in "emblematic significance."

Johnson, however, believes that in Great Expectations Dickens goes beyond his "personal triumph over false social values" to a deeper 149 kind of criticism:

It pierces to the very core of the leisure-class ideal that lurks in the heart of a pecuniary society. This is symbolized in Pip's dream of becoming a gentleman living in decorative grandeur on money he has done nothing to earn, supported entirely by the labors of others. . . . Pip's "great expectations" were the great expectations of Victorian society...... And Dickens' analysis of the frivolity, falseness, emptiness, loss of honor . . . that the acceptance of that ideal imposed upon Pip is a measure of the rottenness and corruption he now found in a society dominated by it.^O

Dickens' fictional servant-masters of the 1850s and '60s show us that

Dickens began to see the corruption and pierce the leisure-class ideal at least a decade before Great Expectations, and that he con­ tinued to do so until he completed his last novel. In servant/master relationships from David Copperfield to Our Mutual Friend Dickens repeatedly exposes his masters and mistresses as idle dreamers eager to be something they are not or should not be, willing to rely on the labor of servants who see only too well what their employers are. NOTES

* Barbara Hardy, The Moral Art of Dickens (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970), p. 126. 2 I am greatly indebted to N. N. Feltes' survey of Victorian reflections on the servant problem in his article-"1 The Greatest Plague of Life1: Dickens, Masters and Servants," Literature and History, 8 (Autumn 1978), 197-207. 3 Dorothy Stuart, The English Abigail (London: Macmillan, 1946), p. 204.

A Feltes, p. 210.

3 George Orwell, Dickens, Dali and Others (New York: Reynal and Hitchcock, 1946), p. 46.

3 Charles Dickens, David Copperfield (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966), p. 707. Further references to this work will appear in the text.

^ Harriet Martineau, "Modern Domestic Service," Edinburgh Review, 115 (April 1862), 409. Q Martineau, p. 409. Q Martineau, p. 414.

Feltes, p. 207.

^ Feltes, pp. 205, 197. 19 Charles Dickens, "Old and New Servants," All the Year Round, July 20, 1867, p. 83.

13 Ibid., p. 80.

15 Ibid., p. 82. 16 Pamela Horn, The Rise and Fall of the Victorian Sfervant (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1975), p. 17.

^ Isabella Beeton, The Book Of Household Management (1861; rpt. London: Jonathan Cape Ltd., 1968), p. 961. 150 151

18 Richard Altlck, The English Common Reader (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2957), p. 389. 19 G. W. F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Mind, trans. J. B. Baillie (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1966), pp. 236-37. Avrom Fleishman calls attention to the ideological parallels between Dickens and Hegel in his essay "Master and Servant in Little Dorrit," SEL, 14 (1974). See pp. 575-76.

^ Horn, p. 53. 21 Jenni Calder, Women and Marriage in Victorian Fiction (London: Thames and Hudson, Ltd., 1976), pp. 85-6.

22 Beeton, p. 1. 23 Wemmick's Castle is a notable exception. It has no mistress until very near the end of Great Expectations. 24 Fran^oise Basch, Relative Creatures: Victorian Women in Society and the Novel, 1837-67, trans. Anthony Rudolf (London: Allen Lane, 1974), p. 62.

^ Calder, p. 101. 26 John Forster, The Life of Charles Dickens, ed. J. W. T. Ley (New York: Doubleday, Doran & Co., 19— ), p. 557. 27 Forster, p. 536. 28 John Kucich, Excess and Restraint in the Novels of Charles Dickens (Athens, Georgia: University of Georgia Press, 1981), p. 217. 29 F. R. and Q. D. Leavis, Dickens the Novelist (New York: Pantheon Books, 1970), p. 56. 30 Michael Slater, Dickens and Women (London: Dent, 1983), p. 324. 31 Basch, p. 63. 32 Ross Dabney, Love and Property in the Novels of Dickens (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), p. 73. 33 I have found Garis' remarks on Mrs. Jellyby just as appropriate for Mrs. Pocket. Garis sees Mrs. Jellyby as "flat": "She does not change, she does not grow, she never engages in any dramatic action, she has no centre of self and therefore we do not engage with her." About the Jellyby household Garis observes: ". . . w e translate every detail into a judgment with a rapidity which makes the judgments very simple ones." See Robert Garis, The Dickens Theatre: A Reassessment of the Novels (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), pp. 112, 109. 152 34 Beeton, pp. 10-16. 35 Charles Dickens, Great Expectations (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965), pp. 210-11. Further references to this work will appear in my text. 36 Perhaps in conferring the name Belinda on Mrs. Pocket Dickens hoped to remind us of another Belinda, Pope's in "The Rape of the Lock." Belinda Pocket shares the frivolousness of Pope's "gentle belle," but she obviously lacks the beauty and youth which can make it excusable and even charming.

^ Hardy, pp. 140-1, 148. 38 Selling fat, but not butter, was a customary perquisite of the Victorian cook. See Horn, p. 60. 39 Beeton, p. 3.

Charles Dickens, Bleak House (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971), p. 387. Further references to this work will appear in the text. 41 Beeton, p. iii. 42 Horn, p. 13.

t O Frank Dawes, Not in Front of the Servants (London: Wayland, 1973), pp. 91-2. 44 Edgar Johnson, Charles Dickens: His Tragedy and Triumph, 2 vols. (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1952), p. 5. 45 Horn, p. 22.

^ Horn, p. 29. 47 Horn, p. 29; E. S. Turner, What the Butler Saw (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1963), p. 238. 48 Dyson asserts: "In fact, both of them [Bounderby and Mrs. Sparsit] come from almost precisely the same kind of background — middle to lower middle class — and their respective roles represent nothing so much as an exquisitely balanced marriage of untrue minds." See A. E. Dyson, The Inimitable Dickens: A Reading of the Novels (London: Macmillan, 1970), p. 189. 49 Charles Dickens, Hard Times (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969), p. 87. Further references to this work will appear in the text.

Beeton, pp. 22-4. 153

Beeton, p. 21.

Horn, p. 77.

Michael Stelg, Dickens and Phiz (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978), p. 168.

Charles Dickens, Little Dorrit (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967), p. 294. Further references to this work will appear in my text.

William Myers, "The Radicalism of Little Dorrit," in Literature and Politics in the Nineteenth Century, ed. John Lucas (London: Methuen, 1971), p. 92. 57 Myers, p. 79. 58 Charles Dickens, Our Mutual Friend (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971), p. 886. Further references to this work will appear in my text. 59 Feltes notes of David's response to his page's post-arrest behavior: "... the middle-class ideology of system is reasserted, the class problem is subsumed . . . and the whold episode becomes simply another stage in David's personal history." See Feltes, p. 210.

^ Johnson, pp. 989-90 CHAPTER V

THE SERVANT-CRIMINAL S

Just as Dickens appropriated the popular Victorian bias against servants to highlight his fictional mistresses and masters' failure to be all that they chould be, or all they appear to be, he also employed the servant-keeping class' most unsettling fears with respect to servants to disclose his fictional employers' most anti-social, indeed anti­ human inclinations. These fears are not merely employers' suspicions about servants' responsibility for diluted wine, a missing watch, or even a family's gradual slide into bankruptcy. I am referring instead to apprehensiveness— the feeling that one's servants might commit the very worst sorts of crimes.

In his essay "Thieves and Swindlers" for Henry Mayhew's London

Labour and the London Poor John Binny claimed that in fact servants were often involved in major felonies. According to Minny, a number of maids were actually burglars' molls who frequently changed households in order to facilitate their boyfriends' access to their many successive masters' homes.* But Binny's contribution to London Labour may be one of the most sensationalized, leas reliable reports in it. In reality it is hard to tell how widespread felonies were among domestics 2 since crime statistics were rarely classified into occupational groups.

Theresa McBride has found that many Victorian servants were indicted but few convicted. Because it was so easy to accuse and catch servants,

154 155

they were more likely than other members of the working classes to

3 be charged with theft or other crimes. Pamela Horn, once again,

assures us that most Victorian domestics "spent their days working

honestly and diligently for long hours and little pay."^ The fact

that Binny's voice was a relatively lonely one (few Victorian lamenters

of the servant problem painted so ominous a picture of domestics as

did Binny) testifies to the extreme reluctance of servant-keepers to

articulate their most serious misgivings about the servant class. It must have been difficult for servant-keepers not to feel some anxiety over the possible threat posed by their servants, considering how well

informed the Victorian press kept the public of the most heinous offenses, i.e., murders, committed by the criminal minority of domestics.

Cases such as Eliza Smalley's murder of her mistress in 1850, reported in Dickens' own Household Narrative, a monthly news supplement to Household Words, must have reinforced for many their sense of the unpredictability of hired help. Smalley, a seventeen-year-old kitchen- maid, confessed to serving her employers, Mr. and Mrs. Page, coffee laced with arsenic, which despite the maid's efforts did not prove fatal to her master. Eliza admitted that she had no real reason to complain of her employers' general treatment of her, but Mrs. Page had wrongly accused her of "killing a fowl." This insult inspired the arsenic breakfast. Smalley's insistence that she had not intended to murder Mrs. Page— "I only thought it would have made her badly."— could not have been very reassuring to Victorian servant-keepers.^

Two of the most highly publicized murder cases in Victorian 156

England were those of a valet, Francois Courvoisier, and a former lady's maid, Marie Manning. No doubt their cases were deemed particularly newsworthy because people in high places were involved, directly in

Courvoisier's, indirectly in Manning's. (Courvoisier's and Manning's hangings were the two executions that we definitely know Dickens attended. See my "Introduction" for more on the Courvoisier hanging.)

One of the most curious aspects of these cases is the response of the class that should bave been most appalled by them, the class that

Courvoisier and Manning served. Although the evidence clearly pointed to Courvoisier's having fatally stabbed his sleeping master, the elderly Lord William Russell, Courvoisier's earlier employers were unwavering in their high opinion of him. Lady Julia Lockwood, for whom Courvoisier had been second footman for nine months, insisted that he was a "harmless young man of gentle and inoffensive habits."

Mr. Fector, M.P., Courvoisier's master for two years, spoke glowingly of the servant at his trial, referring to him as "obliging, efficient, and respectful."^ It was also reported in the London newspapers that those who knew Courvoisier when in Mr. Fector's service found him

"to be a most attentive servant, not only to his immediate employers, but to any of their friends and visitors, and always conducted himself in such a manner as to appear a trustworthy person."^ According to

Thackeray, Courvoisier's case was the chief topic in the London clubs, where, by the end of the first day of the trial, the betting g ran heavily for Courvoisier's acquittal.

Unlike Courvoisier, Mrs. Manning did not murder her employer but, with her husband's help, her lover, Patrick O'Connor (in 1849, nine 157

years after the Courvoisier homicide). The press was quick to point

out how shocking it was that as maid to Lady Palk and later to Lady

Blantyre, Marie Manning had traveled in aristocratic circles and had 9 often seen the queen. Although public sentiment against Mrs. Manning

was so great that it was readily and widely believed that Marie had

calmly roasted a goose over the spot in her kitchen where she had

buried O'Connor in lime, Sheriff Donald Nicoll observed that "many

persons of rank sought in behalf of Marie Manning the exercise of

Royal clemency."Lord Carlisle remarked that Mrs. Manning, who

served his sister's family, "was always singing in the house— and

that all the ladies adored her.(Mrs. Manning's fellow servants,

however, as well as Courvoisier's, were far less favorably impressed 12 by their colleague. ) When John Forster attended Marie's execution,

although convinced of her guilt, even he found himself admiring the

"noble" Mrs. Manning:

You CBulwer LyttonJ should have seen this woman ascend the drop, blindfold TsicJ, and with fa]] black lace veil over her face— with a step as firm as if she had been walking to a feast. She was beautifully dressed, every part of her noble figure finely and fully expressed by close fitting black satin, spotless white collar round her neck loose enough to allow the rope without its removal, and gloves on her manicured hands. She stood while the rope was ad­ justed as steadily as the scaffold itself, and when flung off, seemed to die at once. But there was nothing hideous in her as she flung to and fro afterwards. . . . she had lost nothing of her graceful aspect! This is heroine- worship, I think!

The surprising amount of support given both of these convicted killers,

Manning and Courvoisier, surely signifies an unwillingness on the part of the upper class to look beneath the genteel surface of their 158

help or to admit their own vulnerability.

According to Charles Greville, there was widespread paranoia

after the Courvoisier murder. In Greville's words it "frightened all

London out of its wits. Visionary servants and air-drawn razors or

carving knives dance before everybody's imagination and half the 14 world go to sleep expecting to have their throats cut before morning."

But there was no concomitant diminution in the employment of servants.

The domestic work force suffered no decline after the Courvoisier

conviction, or the Manning, or indeed at any time during the Victorian period.Lulled by the habitual deference of their servers (and,

to reiterate, they were deferential more often than not, despite masters' complaints to the contrary), most members of the upper and middle classes, albeit occasionally fearful, did not view their relations with servants as Hariet Martineau did in 1838. To Martineau the ser­ vant/master relationship was an index of the uneasy coexistence of rich and poor, "a fair exponent of our social warfare.

Finally, to return to Dickens, he too eventually became convinced, by 1855, that the discontent among the lower orders was "extremely like the general mind of France before the breaking out of the first

Revolution . . . into such a devil of a conflagration. . . ." ^

But Littimer, Hortense, and Flintwinch, the hostile fictional servants

I want to focus on most closely, are hardly revolutionaries. As valet, lady's maid, and butler, respectively, they are acutely class conscious and jealous of their social position. (However, Madame

Defarge does bear a resemblance to Hortense. Significantly they both 159 18 share, as Theresa Love puts it, an "insatiate desire for vengeance." )

Nevertheless, through these servant-criminals1 relationships with

their masters Dickens exposes the proud employers' dangerous ignorance of the intensity and real strength of lower-class malevolence. And, in addition to giving his major servant-criminals, i.e., post Barnaby

Rudge, psychologically interesting roles as dissemblers, Dickens makes them the keys to their masters' secret selves, for the servant-criminals are their monstrous doubles.

Dickens' earliest servant-criminals appear markedly less malevolent than their successors. Charlotte, the Sowerberrys' maid-of-all-work in Oliver Twist, for example, empties her employers' till and runs off with the undertaker's assistant, Noah Claypole, to London, where she apparently rather contentedly falls into the company of Fagin and friends (in obvious contrast to Oliver). But in spite of her acceptance of the exigencies of life in the London underworld, Charlotte is far too generous to be labeled malicious. While still at the Sowerberrys',

Charlotte mistreats Oliver only in response to Noah's hostility toward him. (Her mistress provides no better model of behavior.) Charlotte's one major flaw is her simple-minded eagerness to please her boyfriend.

In Cruikshank's illustration of Noah and the maid enjoying an evening alone, the buxom Charlotte radiates warmth and agreeability as she feeds oysters to her comfortably-seated Noah. S. J. Newman has remarked that "there can be no doubt that they ^Noah and CharlotteJ are on the 19 side of life here." What Dickens makes abundantly clear in the progress of Noah and Charlotte is that for such as they, lacking the M r Claypolt a t he appeared when h it M atter wat out

7. CHARLOTTE 161

innate moral nicety of an Oliver, the criminal world of London presents

an irresistibly attractive alternative to the confinement and small

prospects of legitimate service.

In Nicholas Nickleby Arthur Gride's old gargoyle of a housekepper,

Peg Sliderskew, betrays her master by stealing not money but documents,

with which she hopes to "get him into trouble . . . and fret and waste 20 away his heart to shreds." Yet Peg's master is largely responsible

for his servant's attitude towards him. After years of self-denial

in Gride's service, living on "short food, small wages, and little

fire" (NN, 807), fortified by the hope (which Gride continually

encouraged) of being remembered in the master's will, naturally Peg

feels cheated when Gride decides to marry a pretty young thing.

While Peg's disappointment takes a prospectively more brutal form—

". . . if I TPeg] could, I'd kill him" (NN, 853). — than that of a

later housekeeper, Mrs. Sparsit, who is similarly rejected, Peg does

suffer commensurately more in her service to Gride. What reader is greatly moved when she/he learns that Gride meets the grisly kind of fate Peg wished for him: He is "horribly murdered in his bed" by robbers (NN, 932)?

Not until Barnaby Rudge did Dickens create a servant-criminal who is thoroughly malevolent, whose crimes result from neither an ignorant amorality such as Charlotte's nor an understandable, if not justifiable, desire for revenge such as Peg's. To John Forster, the elder Rudge, who murders both his master, the wealthy Reuben Haredale, and a fellow servant, a gardener, was as "powerful a picture as any in his [[DickensQ writings of the inevitable and unfathomable 162 21 consequences of sin." But more often, in Dickens' day and our own, commentators have complained about Dickens' characterization of Rudge.

Edgar Allan Poe considered Rudge flagrantly unrealistic: "That Rudge should so long and so deeply feel the sting of conscience is inconsis- 22 tent with his brutality." More recently Edgar Johnson pronounced

Rudge "an incredible silhouette of sneaking villainy, skulking in 23 obscure corners and forever turning up at midnight." Philip Collins has accused Rudge's creator of "gross over-writing." Collins finds 24 Rudge "entirely unconvincing."

It is hard not to wonder if Dickens' interest in Courvoisier, who was executed just seven months before Dickens began Barnaby Rudge, has any bearing on the melodramatic rendering of Rudge. One obvious

(but unimpresive) parallel between the real and fictional murders is the fact that Reuben Haredale is slain in his bedchamber as was

Russell. But whether or not one sees a causal relationship between

Courvoisier's crime and Dickens' creation of Rudge, it is clear that

Dickens could not allow a servant who commits what Steven Marcus calls the "ultimate act of rebellion" against order and society, viz. murder, 25 to appear other than as a moral monster. Dickens denies the reader any real comprehension of Rudge's crime by pushing it back twenty years before the action of the novel. Although we can assume Rudge was moti­ vated by greed, since a cash box was found missing, we never know 26 exactly why he murdered his master. (Interestingly, Courvoisier insisted that he had stolen money as well as silver and gold items to give his crime the appearance of having been committed by a burg- 27 lar. ) Dickens depicts Rudge as a man bereft of most normal human 163

sensibilities, as his cruelty to his wife and son demonstrate. He is

totally unregenerate. Not even the prospect of hanging softens Rudge's

heart. Rudge's double murder and his "sheer criminality," to use

Gordon Spence's apt phrase, make him a fitting harbinger of the sense- 28 less destructiveness of the Gordon Riots.

In several significant respects Rudge is the prototype for all

Dickens' later servant-criminals. Rudge's inherent malignancy and his dissimulation (which enables him to evade justice for over twenty years) are the hallmarks of post-Barnaby Rudge domestic criminality.

But none of the later servant-criminals experiences the mental agony

that makes Rudge so pathetic and, to many, unbelievable.

About a month before the Manning execution Dickens introduced into David Copperfield a servant-criminal whose powers of dissimulation greatly surpass those of Rudge. Like that earlier notorious real- life valet Courvoisier, Steerforth's man, Littimer, is the "pattern of respectability": "taciturn, soft-footed, very quiet in his manner, 29 deferential, observant." Littimer's sudden appearance at an informal dinner party (David's for the Micawbers) instantly transforms it into a more decorous and subdued affair. For David, Littimer's respect­ ability is so awesome that his presence makes David feel guilty just for having entertained some doubts about Littimer's master, at a time when there is good reason to. But Littimer puts on his most dazzling display of respectability after being convicted of robbing his latest young master on the eve of their trip abroad. Not only does Littimer impress his audience at the experimental prison as a model of piety 164

and remorse, but also as the moral superior of David, one of those

young men whose "wickedness and sin" lead menservants astray (DC,

927). Thus, one of the most conspicuous functions Littimer performs

in David Copperfield is that of satirizing the enormous premium

Victorians placed on respectability, certainly (as I have noted before)

one of the primary considerations in the hiring of servants.

Littimer is more than just a respectable-looking servant; he

is his master's right hand. Butt and Tillotson have called attention

to a passage that Dickens removed at the proof stage of the novel,

in which David notes how remarkably attentive Littimer is to Steerforth:

". . . h e seemed to have the power of divining his wants. . . . He never showed the least sense of there being anything meritorious in 30 this; neither did his master." Dickens left intact David's obser­ vations on the extraordinary care with which Littimer fulfills his duties— from blowing specks of dust off a coat "as he laid it down like a baby" (DC, 357) to arranging portmanteaux in a carriage "as if they were intended to defy the shocks of ages." (DC, 357). But if

Littimer's meticulous performance may be reminiscent of Courvoisier's much-praised deportment, Dickens' valet's depravity manifests itself not in betrayal of his master as Courvoisier's did but in obedience to him. Littimer loyally assists Steerforth's seduction of Little

Em'ly. Littimer is the one who sets up Miss Mowcher as the initial go-between and makes clandestine arrangements in Yarmouth for the elopement. He even agrees to take Emily off his master's hands when

Steerforth grows tired of his low-spirited mistress, in effect accepting 165 her as pay-off for services rendered. By facilitation Steerforth's 31 "violation of innocence" Littimer helps blight not only Emily's home but his master's as well.

According to those who are obviously meant as reliable judges of moral matters in David Copperfield (though not necessarily flawless themselves), Littimer's baseness is far worse than his master's. The fallen Emily apparently finds Littimer, the man who offers her his hand, more abhorrent than the one who seduces and deserts her: "If I

£LittimerJ hadn't been upon my guard, I am convinced she would have had my blood" (DC, 738). Mr. Peggotty is equally antagonistic, referring to Littimer as "that theer spotted snake": "Let him never come nigh 32 me. I doen't know what hurt I might do him!" (DC, 796) When Miss

Mowcher wishes that "the Father of all Evil" confound Steerforth, she hopes that he "ten times more confound that wicked servant" (DC, 524).

It is Mowcher's tenacious pursuit (worse than a bloodhound she says) not of Steerforth but Littimer that results in the latter's being brought to at least a modicum of justice. Significantly, Mowcher succeeds in capturing Littimer because she can see the man beneath his disguise: "a flaxen wig, and whiskers, . . . such a complete disguise as never you see in all your born days" (DC, 929). And by unmasking Littimer Little Miss Mowcher uncovers his essential un­ respectability, for he responds to her recognition by slitting open her face.

Compared to his valet, Steerforth, the actual violator of Emily, is quite sympathetically drawn. Spoiled by a doting mother, Steerforth himself feels the lack of paternal guidance in his life. Littimer, as Steerforth’s elder (somewhere between thirty and fifty) and his only confidant in the Emily business, stands in stark contrast to

Dickens' earlier valets, the moral guides, Sam Weller and Mark Tapley.

It would appear that at the David Copperfield stage of his career,

Dickens found it easier to sympathetically imagine upper-middle class wrongdoing than lower-class villainy. But perhaps the discrepancy in Dickens' treatment of Steerforth and Littimer has more to do with personality preference than class bias. (Of course one can counter that Steerforth's personality is the product of his upper-middle class milieu.) Dickens could have identified more with a talented, gregarious, and restless character than its antithesis, "distant and quiet as the North Pole" (DC, 383) and absolutely controlled. Dyson suggests, however, that both Steerforth and Littimer reflect aspects of Dickens:

". . . David was nothing like a vehicle for the whole of Dickens . . . whatever was more worldly or sophisticated in Dickens himself was exiled to the outer darkness inhabited by Littimer, Heep, Steerforth 33 . . . ." Indeed, in spite of temperamental differences between

Steerforth and LLttimer, the servant does mirror the master. Littimer's parasitism parallels Steerforth's own. The valet enjoys almost as much a life of leisure as the master;

To have imposed any derogatory work upon him £LittimerJ would have been to inflict a wanton insult on the feelings of a most respectable man. And of this, I £DavidJ noticed the women-servants in the household were so intuitively conscious, that they always did such work themselves, and generally while he read the paper by the pantry fire. (DC, 357) 167

Littimer and Steerforth both attach themselves to others for purposes

of self-aggrandizement: The servant basks in the reflected glory

of his master's rank; the master in the adulation of those less for­

tunate than he. David's inability to see the affinity between master

and man, to appreciate the implications of Steerforth's keeping such

a servant, is one of the major indicators of his perilous naivete.

Littimer's effect on David is in fact a gauge of his growth. When

Steerforth is alive, David always feels himself "at a disadvantage"

in the presence of his friend's servant. What the indeed green David

cannot see when Littimer makes him feel "the greenest of the green"

is that the valet's disdain for his immaturity is a species of class

snobbery. Littimer is critical of David because he lacks the quali­

fications of the privileged— not just the ability to fence and ride

on a par with Steerforth, but that overall self-confidence that enables

one to casually address menservants. David also fails to realize

that this same deficiency is largely the cause of Steerforth's fondness

for him. After Steerforth's death, David responds with apparent

equanimity to his final meeting with Littimer. Publicly embarrassed

by Prisoner Twenty Eight, David is quick to sense support in the warders.

At this point in his life David is finally confident enough of his

self-worth not to feel threatened by Littimer.

Littimer's last appearance in David Copperfield finalizes our view of him as an embodiment of evil, morally akin to that other model prisoner Uriah Heep, but also as a survivor. The ex-servant looks

forward to a new field of operations, knowing the "immediate service" 168

his feigned reform will do him when expatriated; the ex-master has

of course already gone to his grave.

Much closer than Littimer or Rudge to an actual Victorian servant-

criminal is Mademoiselle Hortense in Bleak House. To many of Dickens1

contemporaries the likeness between Hortense and Marie Manning, hanged

two years before Dickens began Bleak House, was striking. Like Marie,

Hortense is a good-looking, French-speaking lady's maid with a penchant

for melodramatic gestures. At the Manning trial, which Dickens

attended, Marie stunned the court when asked why she should not be

given the death sentence:

. . . with a voice and gesture, which, in point of effective expression, could not have been surpassed by a Siddons, she, grasping a handful of herbs, threw them violently at all seated on the Bench, exclaiming, "Cowards, will you then see a woman condemned to die!"

But Hortense's disposition and motivation make her something other

than a fictional version of Marie Manning. A respected, well-liked lady's maid, Mra Manning murdered her lover (assuming she actually did it, not her husband, Fred) apparently for coolly calculated

financial reasons. Hortense, "the most implacable and unmanageable 35 of women," is not nearly so successful a servant as Marie was.

Lady Dedlock replaces her French maid with a younger and more agreeable domestic model. The resulting wrath of this proud woman who is denied even the position of servant is what wreaks havoc on Tulkinghom,

Lady Dedlock, and Sir Leicester.

Because of Hortense's inflammability it is easy for us to overlook what I think Dickens' contemporaries would have been very much aware of— 169

that the maid is in desperate straits after her lady rejects her.

French lady's maids were in great demand in Victorian Ehgland but not 36 when over thirty and without a character reference. It is likely

that only a reputable Tulkinghom could help such as Hortense obtain

a position, hence her haunting of his chambers. Tulkinghorn does

indeed renege on his promise and the two sovereigns Hortense throws back to him are certainly small recompense. In a society with next

to no safety nets for unemployed maids, Hortense would have little 37 to look forward to beyond the streets.

Yet I doubt that a fuller awareness of Hortense's desperate

situation made her seem any more deserving of sympathy to Dickens’

contemporaries than she does to us, for her plight only turns her passion in increasingly more malevolent directions. Despite a certain degree of self-possession, Hortense repeatedly exhibits a malicious

intensity more in possession of her than the reverse. In Hortense's

first appearance in Bleak House, in the servants' hall, she voices

"such grim ridicule" of Lady Dedlock's new favorite, Rosa, that her dinner companion "is rather relieved when she arrives at the spoon stage of that performance" (BH, 209). Later, when deliberately and publicly snubbed by Lady Dedlock, Hortense maintains her composure, yet she makes such a singular journey home, shoeless in wet grass,

that she amazes those onlookers unacquainted with her, Esther and

Jarndyce. For the lodge keeper and his wife, who know Hortense and also witness the event, her actions reinforce their view of the maid as "mortal high and passionate," so passionate indeed that she could 170 walk through blood, the keeper's wife suggests (BH, 312). Hortense's

"hovering" around Snagsby's shop terrifies Guster: "... taking fright at the foreigner's looks— which are fierce— and at a grinding manner that she has of speaking— which is calculated to alarm a weak mind— LGusterJ gave way to it . . . and tumbled down the kitchen stairs out of one £fitj into another ..." (BH, 641). And in Snagsby himself Hortense inspires visions of murder: ". . . i t wouldn't be a consolation to have some weapon or another in the form of a foreign dagger, planted in the family" (BH, 642).

When Hortense makes an effort to dissemble she fails utterly.

Offering her services as a lady* s maid to Esther, Hortense so over­ states her case that Esther is disconcerted by her behavior: "Without appearing to notice it, in her ardour she still pressed herself upon me; speaking in a rapid subdued voice, though always with a certain grace and propriety" (BH, 373). Esther sees in Hortense "a lowering energy" that brings to mind "some woman from the streets of Paris in the reign of terror" (BH, 373). Hortense gives one of her least convincing performances after she actually becomes a murderess and it is a matter of life and death for her to appear innocent. Hor­ tense' s overacting convinces Inspector Bucket of her guilt:

"She had made a mighty show of being fond of Mrs. Bucket from her first offering herself as our lodger, but that night Cafter the discovery of the dead TulkinghornJ she made more than ever— in fact, overdid it. Likewise she overdid her respect, and all that, for the lamented memory of the deceased Mr. Tulkinghorn. By the living Lord it flashed upon me, as 1 sat opposite to her at the table and saw her with a knife in her hand, that she had done it!" (BH, 795) 171

Of all those who observe Hortense only Lady Dedlock and Tulkinghorn

seem oblivious to her sanguinary tendency, although they do find her nuisance enough.

Like Littimer, Hortense is her employer's foil, as hot-tempered as Lady Dedlock is locked in "the freezing mood" (BH, 57). But also like Littimer, Hortense is ultimately a double. It is noteworthy that when Lady Dedlock surreptitiously visits her lover's grave she dis­ guises herself in the garb of her maid, the personification of un­ restrained passion. Another ominous pairing of the two, the signifi­ cance of which, like the above-mentioned scene, can only be fully appreciated at a much later point in Bleak House, occurs when Hortense is in Lady Dedlock's attendance. The reflections of both women appear itf one mirror, the maid's black eyes intently fixed on her mistress'

"brooding face" (BH, 213). Taylor Stoehr no doubt articulates the thoughts of many a Bleak House reader when he points out that Hortense

"acts out Lady Dedlock's deadly wishes, with the result that the 38 deadlock of impulse and constraint . . . is finally shattered. ..."

When Hortense impels her former mistress onto her own fatal path, clearly it is Passion that is Lady Dedlock's undoing. She flees at the pros­ pect of the exposure of both her illicit love and the murder she looks and feels guilty of. There is no room in the Dedlock sphere for such excesses of love and hate as Lady Dedlock feels.

In the end, as destructive as Hortense is, she nevertheless is an ambiguous figure. After all, Hortense murders a despicable man, who is, as James Brown notes, "consistently likened to a destructive 172

39 machine." In driving Lady Dedlock to her untimely end Hortense, in

effect, helps terminate a tortured existense (although she does so

by heightening the torture). And Hortense's role in the ruin of Sir

Leicester can be interpreted as a blow against the aristocracy, "a

world which," to quote Brown again, "has outlived its social utility

and justification."^ Yet Dickens insists on Hortense's loathsomeness.

In her last appearance in Bleak House Hortense gloats over the lives

she has shattered:

"Listen then, my angel," says she CHortense]], after several sarcastic nods. "You are very spiritual. But can you restore him back to life?" Mr. Bucket answers "Not exactly." ’’That is droll. Listen yet one time. You are very spiritual. Can you make a honourable lady of Her?" "Don't be so malicious," says Mr. Bucket. "Or a haughty gentleman of Him?" cries Mademoiselle, referring to Sir Leicester with ineffable disdain. "Eh! 0 then regard him! The poor infant! Ha! ha! ha!" "Come, come, why this is worse Parlaying than the other," says Mr. Bucket. "Come along!" "You cannot do these things? Then you can do as you please with me. It is but the death, it is all the same. (BH, 799)

Thus, there can be no question that Hortense merits Bucket's manacles

and her inevitable execution.

Equally ambiguous in their significance are the crimes of

Dickens' next major servant-criminal, Jeremiah Flintwinch, in Little

Dorrit (who is modeled after no one on the Victorian criminal scene as far as I can tell). Although Flintwinch robs his employer of a document and later of securities, his thefts have the appearance of poetic justice, given that the document is a codicil, Mrs. Clennam's

illegal suppression of which had kept her family 2,000 guineas richer 173 than it otherwise would have been. It is Mrs. Clennam's servant's betrayal of her that forces her to confess her wrongdoing and humble herself before one whose legacy she has withheld, her own former needle­ woman, Little Dorrit.

Not only does Dickens qualify Flintwinch's crimes by the justice they effect but he allows this servant-criminal to voice some valid criticism of the closed nature of Victorian society, where blood is a better guarantor of eventual financial success than aptitude or hard work:

"I served Arthur's father's uncle, in this house, when Arthur's father was not much above me— was poorer as far as his pocket went— and when his uncle might as soon have left me his heir as have left him. He starved in the parlour, and I starved in the kitchen. . . . I never took to him in those times. . . . He was an undecided, irresolute chap, who had everything but his orphan life scared out of him. . . . But Flintwinch does finally take Arthur's father's place in the

Clennam business and the very fact that Flintwinch 'is the one who utters this criticism (actuated as he is, at least in part, by his contempt for Arthur's father's softness, i.e., sensitivity) undermines it.

Even more than he does with Hortense, Dickens accentuates Flint­ winch' s inhumanity. In addition to being a wife-beater, Flintwinch is a divisive factor in the family he serves. He quite enjoys his role in the widening breach between mother and son. Dickens further underscores Flintwinch's unnaturalness by associating numerous non­ human— animal, vegetable, and mechanical— images with him: dog, screw machine, crab, jackdaw, yew tree, as well as those images suggested 174

' y . nmuiiiii.

M r Flintw inch m tdiaui as a fritn d o f th t Fam ily

8 . JEREMIAH FLINTWINCH 175

by the name "Flintwinch." Although never as lethal as Hortense, Flint­

winch looks like one who has already been executed: "His neck was

so twisted that the knotted ends of his white cravat usually dangled

under one ear . . . and altogether, he had a weird appearance of

having hanged himself ..." (LD, 77). To Arthur Clennam the grim

butler looks capable of murder. Only Flintwinch's employer and business

partner, Mrs. Clennam, demonstrates any real trust in him. (That

Clennam accepts his mother's alliance with Flintwinch, does not become

suspicious at her apparent preference for his company over her son's,

is one of the early signs of the lowness of his self-esteem.)

This mistress/man relationship is indeed one of mutual respect

but on a very debased level. Flintwinch is able to render satisfying

service to his mistress because he understands her preferences well:

they are his. Flintwinch knows that while Mrs. Clennam values foree-

fulness in those who serve her (as he does in his mistress), she is

"a female Lucifer in appetite for power" (LD, 851). Thus, Flintwinch feels free to "give it her when he has a mind to't" (LD, 76) but stops

short when she warns he may go "a word too far" (LD, 223). Thus,

Flintwinch does not cease to be Mrs. Clennam's servant after he becomes her partner. The very moment after receiving his appointment

Flintwinch, the butler, orders his mistress' meal: "... 'Eleven.

Time for your oysters!' and with that change of subject which involved no change of expression or manner,£ hej rang the bell" (LD, 92).

The price for keeping a double as servant tends to be high in Dickens.

Flintwinch lacks his employers' Old Testament piety, but he is fully 176 as "bumptious" as she, and as one who cannot bear to be "swallowed alive" by another, Flintwinch must redress the uneven balance of power.

That is precisely what his theft of the codicil does— it provides power over the woman who "rasped" Flintwinch for forty years.

Unlike Dickens' earlier servant-criminals, Jeremiah Flintwinch has his own double. In one of Affery's "dreams" she thinks she sees two Jeremiahs: "For, Mr. Flintwinch awake, was watching Mr. Flintwinch asleep" (LD, 82). P. J. M. Scott tells us that according to modern psychology this bifurcation is a perfect model of response to repression, 42 the revenge of deep inner needs long buried. In the company of his brother Ephraim, a drunkard and lunatic-roaster, Jeremiah lets surface the hostility which he usually reveals only to one far weaker than he, his wife: "He looked about him for an offensive weapon, caught up the snuffers, and . . . lunged at the sleeper fEphraimJ as though he would have run him through the body" (LD, 82). In response to his brother's request for a "second glass" Jeremiah replies, "Drink it! . . . and— choke yourself, I was going to say— but go, I mean" (LD, 83).

When, finally, Jeremiah flees England and is freed from the demands of Mrs Clennam and domestic service, he becomes his double, replacing the dead Ephraim "on the quaint banks of the canals of the Hague and in the drinking-shops of Amsterdam" (LD, 864). In so doing Flintwinch fits the servant-criminal pattern of survival— of malevolent servants outlasting their masters. The false mother suffers a far more tragic fate than the false servant (paralysis and death for Mrs. Clennam) just as the false wife, Lady Dedlock, and the false friend and lover,

Steerforth, do. 177

The only servant-criminal in the Dickens canon who meets unmistakable

defeat is Miss Wade in Little Dorrit. But the servant-criminal title

rests uneasily on Wade. Like Flintwinch, Wade looks capable of worse

crimes than she actually commits: '"I wouldn't trust myself to that

woman, young and handsome as she is, if I had wronged her; no, not

for twice my proprietor's money! Unless,' Pancks added as a saving

clause, 'I had a lingering illness on me, and wanted to get it over'"

(LD, 595). Miss Wade's one real crime is concealing the box with the

codicil which Blandois has indirectly stolen from Jeremiah Flintwinch,

and the latter stolen from Mrs. Clennam. As far as her servanthood goes, Wade is in fact an ex-governess. The status of Victorian governesses was definitely higher than that of domestics, yet they received "paltry remuneration . . . generally below that of the cook and butler, and not above that of the housekeeper, footman and lady's maid." Although Wade is quite lucky in her employers, one lady even objecting to her use of "that disagreeable word, 'Mistress'" (LD, 729),

Wade does insist on seeing her governessing as service.

Miss Wade's view of herself as condescended-to servant is one of the by-products of the grudge she holds against the whole world. In 44 her "war against society" Wade s most conspicuous battleground is

Pet Meagles' maid Tattycoram, in whom Wade sees an earlier version of herself: . . . I was interested and pleased to see £in TattycoramJ much of the rising against swollen patronage and selfishness, calling themselves kindness, protection, benevolence, and other fine names"

(LD, 734). As in a medieval morality play, Miss Wade, the ill-willed 178 rebel, contends with Mr. Meagles, the kind-hearted master. But the

Wade/Meagles conflict is no simple evil versus good contest. The masochistic Miss Wade is herself a victim (and arguably more realistic in her maimed psychological state than Dickens' earlier illegitimates

Oliver Twist and Esther Summerson). Furthermore, Wade's criticism of

Meagles is not entirely groundless. As I noted earlier, in the

"Downtrodden" chapter, the smugly insensitive Meagles does fail to recognize Tattycoram's need and longing for much more than employers.

By restoring Meagles' servant to him Dickens appears to come firmly down on the side of paternalism after having called attention to its shortcomings. But Tattycoram's desertion of Wade is also a demonstration of the power of the well-intentioned master to save his servant from an implicitly lesbian and/or demonic possession:

"I rMeaglesl don't know what you CWade] are, but you don't hide, can't hide, what a dark spirit you have within you. If it should happen that you are a woman, who, from whatever cause, has a perverted delight in making a sister- woman as wretched as she fTattycoramJ is (I am old enough to have heard of such), I warn her against you, and I warn you against yourself." (LD, 379)

Obviously the Wade experience teaches Tattycoram to prefer a loving bondage to hate-engendered freedom. I think this was Dickens' position too. However much he found fault with the institution of domestic service, exposed abuses on both sides (servant and master), he could not repudiate it in his fiction or in his private life, for it offered a channel of reciprocal care, even if as imperfect as that between

Mr. Meagles and Tattycoram. NOTES

Henry Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor, 4 vols. (1861— 62; rpt. London: Frank Cass and Co., 1967), IV, 289-90. 2 Theresa McBride, The Domestic Revolution: The Modernisation of Household Service in England and France 1820-1920 (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1976), p. 99.

^ McBride, p. 107.

^ Pamela Horn, The Rise and Fall of the Victorian Servant (New York: 1975). p. 133.

^ The Household Narrative: A Monthly Supplement to "Household Words," Nov. 1850, p. 250.

^ Yseult Bridges, Two Studies in Crime (London: Hutchinson and Co., 1959), pp. 62, 83.

^ Bridges, p. 16. g Bridges, pp. 62, 78. q Albert Borowitz, The Woman Who Murdered Black Satin (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1981), pp. 18, 92.

Borowitz, pp. 96, 224.

James Atterbury Davies, "John Forster at the Mannings' Execution," The Dickensian, 67 (Jan. 1971), 14. 12 Davies, p. 14; Bridges, p. 15. 13 Davies, pp. 12, 13.

^ Horn, p. 145.

Horn, pp. 23-4.

Harriet Martineau, "Domestic Service," The London and Westminster Review, April-Aug. 1838, p. 427.

^ To Austen Henry Layard, 10 April 1855, Nonesuch Letters, II, 652. 18 Theresa Love, Dickens and the Seven Deadly Sins (Danville, 111.: Interstate, 1979), p. 126. 179 180 19 S. J. Newman, Dickens at Play (London: Macmillan, 1981), p. 48; See Oliver Twist (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966), pp. 251-53. 20 Charles Dickens, Nicholas Nickleby (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978), p. 853. All further references to this work will appear in the text. 21 John Forster, The Life of Charles Dickens (New York: Doubleday, Doran, and Co., 19.— , p. 170. 22 Edgar Allan Poe, in a review in Graham's Magazine, Feb. 1842, xix, in Philip Collins' Dickens: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1971), p. 110. 23 Edgar Johnson, Charles Dickens: His Tragedy and Triumph, 2 vols. (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1952), I, 330. 24 Philip Collins, Dickens and Crime (London: Macmillan, 1962), p. 276. 25 Steven Marcus, Dickens: From Pickwick to Dombey (New York: Basic Books, Inc., 1965), p. 178. 26 See Barnaby Rudge (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973), pp. 57-8 for a description of the crime.

^ Horn, p. 144. 28 Gordon Spence, "Introduction," the Penguin Barnaby Rudge, p. 25. 29 Charles Dickens, David Copperfield (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966), p. 356. All further references will appear in the text. 30 John Butt and Kathleen Tillotson, Dickens at Work (London: Methuen and Co., 1957), p. 38. 31 A. E. Dyson, The Inimitable Dickens: A Reading of the Novels (London: Macmillan, 1970), p. 152. 32 Peggotty's sobriquet for Littimer is not the first Satanic allusion made with respect to Steerfourth’s valet. One of the first things David points out about Littimer is his hissing speech: "... a soft way of speaking, with a peculiar habit of whispering the letter S so distinctly, that he seemed to use it oftener than any other man . . ." (DC, 356).

Dyson, p. 152. 34 Donald Nicoll, Man's Revenge: Personal Reminiscences with Quota­ tions from Causes Celebres (London: King, Sell, Railton, n.d.), p. 73. 181

35 Charles Dickens, Bleak House (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971), p. 646. Further references to Bleak House will appear in the text.

^ Horn, pp. 57-9. 37 Horn remarks, "Yet if some girls did temporarily become prosti­ tutes for the apparently frivolous reasons mentioned by Mayhew, most moved in that direction only because of hard necessity, when they were out of place/and had no other means of earning their living." See Horn, p. 134. 38 Taylor Stoehr, Dickens; The Dreamer's Stance (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1965), p. 166. 39 James Brown, Dickens: Novelist in the Market-Place (Totowa, N. J.: Barnes and Noble, 1982), p. 65.

^ Brown, p. 66.

^ Charles Dickens, Little Dorrit (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967), pp. 223-4. All further references will appear in the text. 42 P. J. M. Scott, Reality and Comic Confidence in Charles Dickens (London: Macmillan, 1979), p. 169.

^ "Governesses," Eliza Cook's Journal, 15 Sept. 1849, p. 306, cited in Francoise Basch's Relative Creatures: Victorian Women in Society and the Novel, 1837-67, trans. Anthony Rudolf (London: Allen Lane, 1974), p. 112.

^ Avrom Fleishman, "Master and Servant in Little Dorrit," SEL, 14 (1974), 578. CONCLUSION

It is inevitable in a survey such as mine of so wide a field as

Dickens' fictional servants that some characters should be neglected.

My goal, of course, was not a dictionary of Dickens' servants. I

chose, rather, to focus on a more limited number of characters who

well represent the various functions Dickens' multitude of servants

perform in the narrative/thematic scheme of his novels. Some of the

characters I have slighted fit even less well than Miss Wade into my

somewhat arbitrary categorization of Dickens' servants.

Jingle's man, Job, in The Pickwick Papers, is a prime example

of servants who resist my classification. As the servant of a con

man, Job is Jingle's partner in deceit, but he eventually becomes

his master's moral guide, guaranteeing Jingle's continued reform in

Demerara. In fact, Angus Wilson includes Job with Sam Weller and

Mark Tapley in his list of faithful Dickensian servants.^

In Barnaby Rudge the Vardens' maid-of-all-work, Miggs, who is

part Mrs. Malaprop, part stereotypical ill-tempered old maid, but

greater than the sum of all her parts, also straddles several of my

categories. She is certainly criminal in her treatment of the Varden

family, handing her master over to a band of frenzied rioters and

assisting in the plot to abduct Dolly. Yet, unlike most of Dickens'

other servant-criminals, Miggs can also be considered downtrodden.

While she is her termagant mistress' "chief aider and abettor," she

182 183 2 is her "principal victim and object of wrath" too. Miggs is not

far off the mark when she identifies herself as "a toiling, moiling,

constantly-working, always-being-found-fault-with, never-giving-

satisfactions, not-having-no-time-to-clean-oneself, potter's wessel."3

( Although I have examined the majority of servant functions in

Dickens' fiction, there is yet another worth mentioning here. While at work on Dombey and Son Dickens hit upon the idea of using Dombey's domestic staff "as a sort of odd chorus to the story.Dombey's servants comment, in one way or another, on all the major events in the Dombey household. Steven Marcus has pointed out how skillfully

Dickens uses time in the servant chorus' commentary."* When Paul dies, it seems to the Dombey staff as though the death has occurred long ago.

Of course, Paul was doomed early on, when Dombey cashiered his son's nursemaid Polly Toodle, who was more than a source of nourishment.

When Dombey marries a second time, his servants have the feeling that it is night in the middle of the afternoon. Again they are correct.

It is too late for Dombey to start a new family. Thus, the apparently trivial remarks of domestics serve as quite serious omens in Dombey and

Son.

Dickens never went as far as his predecessor Samuel Richardson or his successor George Moore, who cast domestics as the protagonists of their respective novels Pamela and Esther Waters.** Yet even when

Dickens' servants are as peripheral as Dombey's nameless cook and house­ maid, they are always more than the obligatory furniture in their master's household. Just as throughout his fiction Dickens repeatedly 184

demonstrates the masters' dependence on their servants, so too he

makes our sense of who those non-servant characters are and what they

signify dependent on our understanding of those who serve them.

t NOTES

* Angus Wilson, The World of Charles Dickens (New York: Viking Press, 1970), p. 35. i o Charles Dickens, Barnaby Rudge (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973), p. 102.

3 Barnaby Rudge, p. 640.

A \ Sylvere Monod, Dickens: The Novelist (Norman, Oklahoma: University of Oklahoma Press, 1968), p. 261.

Steven Marcus, Dickens: from Pickwick to Dombey (New York: Basic Books, 1965), p. 333. £ But Esther Summerson, as Ada Clare's companion and Jarndyce's housekeeper/fiancee, Amy Dorrit as Mrs. Clennam's needlewoman, and John Rokesmith as Boffin's secretary/steward are all quasi servants.

185 BIBLIOGRAPHY

Works by Charles Dickens

(a) Novels

I have used the Penguin edition of all of the following novels.

Barnaby Rudge Bleak House David Copperfield Dombey and Son Great Expectations Hard Times Little Dorrit Martin Chuzzlewit Nicholas Nickleby The Old Curiosity Shop Oliver Twist Our Mutual Friend The Pickwick Papers A Tale of Two Cities

(b) Articles

"A Curious Dance Round a Curious Tree." Household Words, 17 Jan. 1852. In Charles Dickens1 Uncollected Writings from "Household Words," 1850-1859. Ed. Harry Stone. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1968. Vol. II, 381-91.

"The Girl from the Workhouse." All the Year Round, 18 Oct. 1862, pp. 132-36.

"Old and New Servants." All the Year Round, 20 July 1867, pp. 79-83.

"Some Recollections of Mortality." In The Uncommercial Traveler. 1860; rpt. London: Chapman and Hall, 1907, pp. 239-51.

(c) Letters

The Letters of Charles Dickens. Ed. Walter Dexter. London: Nonesuch Press, 1938. Vol. II.

The Letters of Charles Dickens. Ed. Madeline House, Graham Storey, et al. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965- .

186 187

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