DICKENS QUARTERLY 65

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June 2006 Volume XXIII Number 2

ARTICLES Paul Marchbanks: From Caricature to Character: The Intellectually Disabled In Dickens’s Novels (Part Two) 67 Mark Willis: Charles Dickens and Fictions of the Crowd 85 Arthur J. Cox: The Drood Remains Revisted: “First Fancy” 108

REVIEWS Dominic Rainsford on Terry Eagleton: The English Novel: An Introduction 121 Jeremy Tambling on Robert Alter: Imagined Cities: Urban Experience and the Language of the Novel 125 Natalie McKnight on Britta Zangen: Our Daughters Must be Wives: Marriage Young Women in the Novels of Dickens, Eliot, and Hardy 127 David Paroissien on George Gissing: The Collected Works of George Gissing on Charles Dickens 129

ANNOUNCEMENTS 134

THE DICKENS CHECKLIST—Elizabeth Bridgham 137

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS 142

t Dickens Quarterly is produced for the Dickens Society with assistance from the English Departments of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and the College of General Studies, Boston University. Printed in Northampton, Massachusetts by Tiger Press.

DQ

Copyright 2006 by the Dickens Society 66 DICKENS QUARTERLY

David Paroissien, General Editor Trey Philpotts, Review Editor Stas Radosh, Production Editor Elizabeth Bridgham, Bibliographer

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FROM CARICATURE TO CHARACTER: THE INTELLECTUALLY DISABLED IN DICKENS’S NOVELS (PART TWO)

PAUL MARCHBANKS (University of North Carolina)

Barnaby Rudge: Erstwhile Idiot and Plot Catalyst Smike is a Dickensian idiot whose dual roles produce an unsustain- able character situation, a social problematic the resolution of which requires extreme measures by the author. Barnaby Rudge is another. In Smike’s case, apparently insurmountable intellectual and social debilities prevent expression of those emotional desires Dickens has allowed him to develop, creating a disconcerting portrait of unrequited affection. Smike has an idiot’s intellectual powers but a normal person’s sensibilities. The only “logical” course left to him, once he realizes the impossibility of successfully wooing the kind and beautiful Kate, is self-termination, a path his already weakened body obligingly effects for him. Barnaby Rudge’s own stereotypical role as naïve plot mechanism, like Smike’s position as pitiable dependent, cannot be prolonged indefinitely either. As Dickens wishes, however, to pull this second idiot figure back into the communal fold (from which Barnaby will unwittingly take his leave mid-story), he decides to alter instead of eliminating him:

“God be with you through the night, dear boy! God be with you!” She tore herself away, and in a few seconds Barnaby was alone. He stood for a long time rooted to the spot, with his face hidden in his hands; then flung himself, sobbing, upon his miserable bed. But the moon came slowly up in all her gentle glory, and the stars looked out…looked down in sorrow on the sufferings and evil deeds of men; and [Barnaby] felt its peace sink deep into his heart. He, a poor idiot, caged in his narrow cell, was as much lifted up to God, while gazing on that mild light, as the freest and most favoured man in all the spacious city; and in his ill-remembered prayer, and in the fragment of the childish hymn, with which he sung and crooned himself asleep, there breathed as true a spirit as ever studied homily expressed, or old cathedral arches echoed. (609; ch. 73)

This melodramatic portrait corrals into one frame a number of variables important in understanding Dickens’s shifting construction 68 DICKENS QUARTERLY of the central figure in his critically neglected Barnaby Rudge: A Tale of the Riots of ‘Eighty. As this passage suggests, Barnaby consistently wears the label “idiot,” affixed to him here by the narrator and elsewhere by a host of other characters. He also plays a number of stereotypical roles ascribed to the idiot by literary tradition, including that of a natural more attuned than others to the heavens above and earth’s creatures below, as well as a moral yardstick against which the “evil deeds of men” can be measured. Unlike the intellec- tually deficient protagonist of Dickens’s third novel, that of his fifth boasts strong ties to community and family, evidenced here in the sorrow shared by an imprisoned boy-man of twenty-seven years and his anxious mother. These assorted factors would seem to relegate Barnaby to a relatively static imaginative space, one bound and secured by communal protections and predetermined narrative expectations for the idiot figure. Curiously, however, Dickens’s characterization of Barnaby changes significantly as the tale moves towards an ending that will rescue and reincorporate the misled and bewildered protagonist. Instead of requiring Barnaby’s removal from the stage on which romantic unions and joyful births will bow when the curtain falls, this comedy ultimately calls for a new and improved Barnaby to step forward and join in the festival of renewed associations. Dickens has effected this kind of makeover before. As Angus Easson points out, Dickens transforms young Kit of The Old Curiosity Shop (1804– 41) from the “near-idiot” he appears at the book’s opening into a literate hero “of sterling character” by its end.1 In the previously quoted scene from chapter seventy-three, Barnaby’s surprisingly normal emotional response to his serious situation already suggests a dramatically improved cognizance of consequences. His newly enhanced acumen accompanies a corresponding rise in spiritual status: once lamented for lacking a soul, a want “far more terrible in a living man than in a dead one” (35; ch. 3), Barnaby now prays with “as true a spirit as ever studied homily expressed.” In other words, Dickens’s desire to reclaim his titular hero requires stripping him of those “idiotic” faculties which had destabilized various communities over the course of the novel. Dickens slowly erases the young man’s naïveté and improves his intellect, memory, and discernment so that when Barnaby does return to his friends in the final pages, that troublesome ignorance which recently disrupted London society no longer exists to jeopardize this more intimate circle. And yet, at the same time that Barnaby undergoes this gradual change into one of “better memory and greater steadiness of purpose” (688; ch. 82), Dickens retains the period terminology (“idiot” and the more inclusive term “mad”) that works to delimit Barnaby’s DICKENS QUARTERLY 69 potential, and continues to assign him roles suggested by literary convention.2 The result is a highly protean, ultimately untenable portrayal of intellectual disability. Barnaby shares with Smike the unenviable status of “poor boy,” an easy target for objectifying pity (215; ch. 25, 471; ch. 57). Once again, the distressing origins of the idiot figure’s condition lie well outside his control, in this case linked back to evil wrought on the child around the time of his birth via Dickens’s employment of popular superstition. A double-homicide committed by his father and discovered by his horrified mother places a blot in the shape of “a smear of blood but half washed out” (50; ch. 5) across the unborn Barnaby’s wrist, thereby enacting the popular formula of maternal impression whereby shocking incidents witnessed by a pregnant woman transferred themselves onto the developing fetus. The birthmark serves as an outward sign of both Mr. Rudge’s crime and the disability that offense stamps onto Barnaby’s brain. Mysticism thus replaces physical abuse as the agent of affliction, effecting a quasi-Biblical transference of the father’s sin onto the unborn child.3 The nature of this curse, identified repeatedly by the narrator and long recognized by Mrs. Rudge (209; ch. 25, 611; ch. 73, 612; ch. 73), eventually confronts Barnaby (609; ch. 73) and even the morally insensate Mr. Rudge. Horrified, the hero’s father realizes that his own crime has been inscribed onto his son, one who quickly becomes to him

a torture and reproach; in his wild eyes, there were terrible images of that guilty night; with his unearthly aspect, and his half-formed mind, he seemed to the murderer a creature who had sprung into existence from his victim’s blood. (574; ch. 69)

In Dickens’s sentimental world, Barnaby’s ills demand a sympathetic response from those around him, a prescription Mr. Rudge declines when he refuses to confess either to earthly or heavenly authorities his culpability in creating those ills, a refusal which doubles as a rejection of that path to salvation articulated by his estranged wife (611; ch. 73). Despite the metaphysical curse tainting his mind and body, Barnaby remains the idiotic innocent for the first half of the novel, playing the predictable role of naïve natural at one with chaste Nature, and remaining unaware of society’s scheming. Barnaby’s absence from the main action usually indicates a carefree jaunt through the countryside with Grip, his pet raven, or perhaps some recently befriended dogs (371; ch. 45). When the threats and greed of Barnaby’s spectral father prompt Mrs. Rudge to flee London for a 70 DICKENS QUARTERLY distant country location, Barnaby adjusts quickly, enjoying the new ease with which he can indulge in daylong adventures:

Barnaby’s enjoyments were, to walk, and run, and leap, till he was tired; then to lie down in the long grass…There were wild-flowers to pluck…There were birds to watch; fish; ants…millions of living things to have an interest in, and lie in wait for, and clap hands and shout in memory of, when they had disappeared. In default of these…there was the merry sunlight to hunt out… there was slumber in the midst of all these soft delights, with the gentle wind murmuring like music in his ears, and everything around melting into one delicious dream. (372; ch. 45)

This perambulating impulse has long made Barnaby the perfect message carrier, “as much to be trusted as the post itself ’” (91; ch. 10), though his mind too tends to wander—just one symptom of that wildly associative imagination that can get him into trouble when he abandons the lonesome roads for communion with his fellows. His child-like conclusion that the “merry sunlight” betokens a reliable source of currency, for instance, seems innocuous enough when shared with only his mother. Though she does worry about Barnaby’s fiscal fancies (in light of his father’s murderous avarice), her son’s conclusion that the sun deposits gold on the ground sparks only harmless attempts to search out those elusive monies (373; ch. 45, 383; ch. 46). Not until the eavesdropping Stagg overhears Barnaby’s musings does the latter’s simplicity become problematic. Playing upon Barnaby’s craving for that elusive pot of gold, the villainous Stagg convinces him riches will be more readily found back in the city (where Stagg and his chum, Mr. Rudge, can more easily wheedle funds out of Barnaby’s mother). Barnaby’s mother returns to London, determined to keep her gullible son far from her evil pursuers, only to watch him run into an even larger pack of troublemakers eager to mislead him. As Stagg has noted, Barnaby is indeed a “likely lad” (381; ch. 45), one malleable enough to be quickly convinced of any enterprise’s virtue. This pliability makes Barnaby a reliable catalyst, a predictable tool in narrative hands which tend to place him in the action’s epicenter; repeatedly, his naïveté puts the necessary spark to this historical novel’s powder, explosively moving the plot along. The noble Gabriel Varden’s fears for “the lad—a notable person, sir, to put to bad uses” prove well placed (220; ch. 26). Coming upon an excited crowd of political dissidents on London’s outskirts, Barnaby is dazzled by the colorful ribbons and patriotic speeches, and quickly infers that the impending gathering must be a just one. After a few words from DICKENS QUARTERLY 71

Lord George and his even more corrupt henchman Gashford, Barnaby commits himself to the cause, convinced his participation will honor the king and maybe earn him some elusive gold in the process. This places Barnaby, with his devious friend Hugh, in the middle of an anti-Catholic disturbance outside Westminster, and culminates in Barnaby’s striking a soldier from his horse in the belief that such violence will best serve Lord George, the revolt’s spokesman (412; ch. 49). This audacious act propels the other demonstrators into action, unwittingly helping to inspire the atrocities at the heart of the novel. Though dismayed by what little of the subsequent violence Barnaby actually witnesses—Hugh and the other lawbreakers set him to guard an out of the way inn before they set about burning buildings—he remains steadfast, “evidently possessed with the idea that he was among the most virtuous and disinterested heroes in the world” (417–18; ch. 50). When soldiers later find and imprison Barnaby, the conspirators use their new hero’s incarceration as an excuse to storm and destroy detested Newgate. Again and again, Barnaby’s presence provides an impetus for plot movement. His pardon from a death sentence provides the tale with its most unabashedly pathetic moment, as the reader joins the London public in celebrating the last-minute liberation of the now well- known idiot. We can rejoice in Barnaby’s rescue because his involvement in the chaos, unlike that of the other agitators, is driven by some notion of honor. Though an active part of the mob’s carryings-on, he regularly provides a moral yardstick against which the rest of the rabble are measured. Trained from childhood to complete a daily toilette, Barnaby rises at five o’clock each morning to wash and prepare himself for another day of bravely defending the hideout’s entrance, while his compatriots sleep off the night’s debauch in their hideout’s dark recesses:

To Hugh and his companion, who lay in a dark corner of the gloomy shed, [Barnaby]…seemed like a bright picture framed by the door, and set off by the stable’s blackness. The whole formed such a contrast to themselves, as they lay wallowing, like some obscene animals, in their squalor and wickedness…that for a few moments they looked on without speaking, and felt almost ashamed. “Ah!” said Hugh at length…”He’s a rare fellow is Barnaby, and can do more, with less rest, or meat, or drink, than any of us.” (432; ch. 52)

The dramatic use of shadows here reiterates the point of Barnaby’s hygiene and Dickens’s bestial similes: an enormous moral divide separates Barnaby from his associates. Hugh may convince Barnaby 72 DICKENS QUARTERLY to defend the Boot, but doing so requires manipulation of his friend’s strong ethical sense; to prevent Barnaby from witnessing the imminent carnage, Hugh had to convince him that guarding the conspirator’s lair would aid an ill-used politician (433; ch. 52, 439; ch. 53). Involving Barnaby in acts of injustice requires appealing to his sense of justice, in addition to relying on his usual inability to uncover others’ hidden intentions. Barnaby often demonstrates want of moral discernment, a deficiency rooted in a more elementary ignorance of malice and deception. At times, however, Barnaby plays the tried and true role of the wise fool, the court jester who somehow sees further than others in spite of his odd behavior and comic appearance. What sounds like gibberish, for instance, may prove to be solid sense. Barnaby’s first extensive speech—delivered on a darkened highway over the bleeding and unconscious victim of a midnight robbery—sounds to Gabriel Varden like the drivel of an excited simpleton. Speaking over the wounded young man, Barnaby rambles:

“I know him…Hush!…He went out to-day a wooing. I wouldn’t for a light guinea that he should never go a wooing again, for if he did some eyes would grow dim that are now as bright as—see, when I talk of eyes, the stars come out. Whose eyes are they? If they are angels’ eyes, why do they look down here and see good men hurt, and only wink and sparkle all the night?” (35–36; ch. 3)

Though Gabriel questions whether “this silly fellow” can actually know the injured gentleman, later events reveal that Barnaby did indeed recognize the victim, Edward Chester, having long served as the secret liaison between Edward and the beautiful daughter of Mr. Chester’s greatest enemy (37; ch. 3). Barnaby has correctly discerned the seriousness of their romantic connection and, in the scene above, assumes correctly that Emma Haredale’s eyes would “grow dim” if Edward were seriously injured. Also, while Barnaby’s tendency to free-associate here produces the first of many pathetic fallacies, his intuitive linking of the stars with heavenly eyes also signals that sustained, serious concern with divine inaction that looms visibly above all Dickens’s social-justice novels. Another trait Barnaby shares with the fools and idiots of literary tradition is his small measure of prescience, a prophetic power that manifests itself waking and sleeping. One dream about “strange creatures crowded up together neck and heels” accurately predicts the violent mobs that will flood the streets in the middle of the novel, while another dream about his being chased by a man hidden in shadow accurately describes the specter of his father, who even DICKENS QUARTERLY 73 now dogs his steps (56–57; ch. 6). According to Juliet McMaster, “we are shown that his visions are previews, his shadows foreshadowings of actual events. He is…endowed with a path to truth more direct and immediate than that available to educated minds” (2). Barnaby articulates arguably his most disturbing vision while conscious, with his father—assumed by Barnaby to be dead— hiding directly behind him in his mother’s house. Recognizing the fear in his mother’s eyes, Barnaby looks about in a vague attempt to find that crimson color that marks his wrist and dashes “the ceiling and the walls” in his dreams, then collapses onto a chair in an epileptic, “shivering” fit (150; ch. 17). The blood in Barnaby’s dreams prefigures what we will later discover about his father’s crimes, as well as the impending “Riots of ‘Eighty.” As if to complete the portrait of knowing court fool, Barnaby also wears the appropriate costume: a hat decked out with broken peacock feathers, a bladeless sword hilt, and assorted ribbons and glass toys complement a green outfit awkwardly trimmed with bits of lace and cheap ruffles (35; ch. 3). Dickens’s characterization of Barnaby proves as motley as the character’s self-fashioned garb. In addition to playing virtually every stereotypical role assigned the idiot by literary convention, Barnaby also exhibits a quite variable, even incoherent, disorder. Though his peculiarities consistently earn him the diagnosis of “idiot” from the tale’s most sympathetic and presumably enlight- ened characters—including Mr. Haredale, Barnaby’s own mother, and the narrator—the specific nature of his disorder evades easy definition. Even so, some critics have made the attempt. Beginning with the doubtful contention that Dickens always “looked on disease with the observing eye of the expert clinician,” Russell Brain concludes that Barnaby Rudge constitutes his “best-described mental defective” (124, 135). Most elaborately described, perhaps. The confidence with which critics have variously labeled Barnaby a “naïve fool” (Schmidt 93), an “idiot” (Crawford 43), a “half-wit” (Buckley 32), and a “madman” (Dransfield 79), however, suggests the difficulty of definitively mapping Barnaby’s mental powers. Something is going on here, and it involves more than language’s inevitable slipperiness. Further clues to the enigma emerge from attempts by critics to sustain coherent diagnoses of Barnaby, diagnoses that usually rely on selective evidence. George Gissing once argued that calling Barnaby an “idiot” constituted an egregious “misuse of language,” claiming that Barnaby was “simply insane” (in the modern sense), an apparently influential re-diagnosis (Schmidt 93). Thelma Grove, on the other hand, uses more recent terminology and diagnostic tools to discover in Barnaby “strong autistic features” 74 DICKENS QUARTERLY consistent with those characterizing early infantile autism (143). Grove grounds her own declaration in a detailed but vulnerable argument. She overlooks Barnaby’s strong ties to his mother and his close friend Hugh, as well as his horror at bloodshed, to claim for Barnaby an “autistic withdrawal from normal relationships and lack of respon- siveness to other human beings,” then refers to Barnaby’s making string puzzles on his fingers and wearing of baubles on his clothing in order to assert “a pathological preoccupation with certain objects regardless of their common usage” (143, 144, my emphasis). She ignores Barnaby’s happy adventures outside the city so that she can sell his need for “adherence to a rigid routine” (143), then rediscovers that same wanderlust to demonstrate autistic “abnormalities of move- ment, which may be hyperkinetic” (145). The reason such divergent opinions and terminology can be vig- orously applied to a single character lies more in the instability of Dickens’s original portrait than in our own shifting vocabulary and constantly changing, growing knowledge concerning mental retarda- tions and autism spectrum disorders. Simply put, Dickens’s portrayal is imperfect, his case study of idiocy inconsistent. His celebrated, youthful experiences observing the idiosyncrasies of Members of Parliament and the urban poor’s street smarts undoubtedly sharpened his eye for character detail, but Brain’s praise of Dickens’s powers of observation requires moderation, at least as concerns the novelist’s earlier idiots. It will be useful to remember what Brain himself admits during a discussion of Old Chuffey’s senile dementia, that at times “clinical accuracy [has] to be sacrificed to the needs of the plot” (132; ch. 15). Barnaby most closely approximates a severely limiting form of developmental disability—what Victorian physicians categorized as “idiocy” and modern psychiatrists would identify as a species of severe mental retardation—when the reader first meets him on a lone- some road in the middle of the night and observes him through Gabriel Varden’s eyes. Homing in on repeated, increasingly vehement cries, Gabriel finds the distressed Barnaby hovering over a bloodied man he has found during one of his midnight rambles. In but a moment’s time, Barnaby executes a number of odd behaviors that quickly mark him as the archetypal idiot. He wildly waves his torch about, shoves his frenzied face into another’s personal space, communicates with a score of rapid, exaggerated nods and hand motions, and repeats the same word, “steel,” over again as he tries to convey how the unconscious man was injured (34; ch. 3). The narrator eliminates any doubts concerning Barnaby’s nature by describing his countenance as one “which told his history at once,” which was lit “by something which was not intellect (34; ch. 3).”4 DICKENS QUARTERLY 75

He tells us Barnaby’s “noblest powers were wanting,” notes that the “confused disposition” of his clothes reflects “the disorder of his mind,” and sets a precedent for every other character’s linguistic practice by bestowing on Barnaby the time-honored, delimiting tag of “idiot” (34–37; ch. 3). Barnaby maintains at least some of the idiotic raiment given him here through most of the novel. That he lives in a world governed by his own interest and peculiar perspective grows clearer with every “vacant look and restless eye,” with each failure to properly interpret or even notice his mother’s anxiety, and with gradually accruing examples of a tendency to yield “to every inconstant impulse” (212; ch. 25, 373; ch. 45, 207; ch. 25). The intellectual “disorder” noted by the narrator expresses itself in a profoundly atypical social posture. In addition to a predictable negligence of social graces—like that demonstrated when Barnaby horrifies innkeeper John Willet by placing his hand on a wealthy guest’s sleeve (94; ch. 10)—Barnaby fails to understand the practical significance of human antagonisms. The patron whose arm he has touched, the villainous Mr. Chester, shares a longstanding animosity with Barnaby’s old friend Mr. Haredale. This tension remains totally outside Barnaby’s ken as he runs messages back and forth between the two men, absurdly taking the liberty of inserting the endearment “loving friend” into Haredale’s message to his enemy (96; ch. 10). The same thing occurs when Barnaby discovers that his father still lives and, before he has learned of his father’s crimes, assumes that his mother will be happy to rejoin her husband (566; ch. 68). This tendency to read friendly relations into all kinds of associations also shapes Barnaby’s comic anthropomorphizing of Grip, a pet crow whom Barnaby believes both directs and protects his human companion (61; ch. 6, 147; ch. 17). Barnaby definitely requires someone to watch out for him, especially as he sometimes shows little tendency towards self- preservation. In the same way that he neglects the bodily threat presented by a torch’s flames and freezing temperatures in his first scene (34; ch. 3, 44; ch. 4), so does he appear inattentive to impending danger during the pre-riot period five years later. While his intellectual limitations can endanger Barnaby, at times they actually allow his mother to mold his behavior and knowledge for his own protection. The seizure which incapacitates Barnaby during the visit of his (hidden) father gives his mother time to collect herself and better pretend that all is well when Barnaby comes to (150; ch. 17). She also relies on his faulty memory and rapidly shifting attention to shape Barnaby’s understanding of their current situation. When Barnaby persists early on in the tale that it is his birthday, forgetting the occasion’s celebration a week before, she 76 DICKENS QUARTERLY tries “to make light of Barnaby’s remark, and endeavour[s] to divert his attention to some new subject; too easy a task at all times, as she knew” (152; ch. 17), just as she later hopes his rapidly shifting thoughts will erase any memory of Stagg’s duplicitous promises (394; ch. 47). More successful are attempts to use Barnaby’s faulty memory to keep him close during their secret sojourn in the country, repeating the same stories each day with hopes he will postpone his wandering, if only for a time:

He had no recollection of these little narratives; the tale of yesterday was new upon the morrow; but he liked them at the moment; and when the humour held him, would remain patiently within doors, hearing her stories like a little child, and working cheerfully from sunrise until it was too dark to see. (371; ch. 45)

When circumstances require abandoning their straw-weaving occupation, Barnaby’s pliability allows his mother to convince him quickly of the need to relocate: “Little persuasion was required to reconcile Barnaby to anything that promised change” (386; ch. 46). Barnaby will follow his mother anywhere because, though naïve and changeable, he recognizes his mother’s commitment to his well-being—even when he mistakenly thinks he knows better. It is a relational commitment he reciprocates. The plenteous kisses with which he peppers her after a long day’s adventure (147; ch. 17) betoken an affectionate dependent unembarrassed at admitting that dependence. Much of what Barnaby does, in fact, springs from a desire to recognize his mother’s claim on him; he wishes first and foremost to please this primary caregiver and best friend. Convinced by Stagg that the crowded streets of London contain gold for the taking, Barnaby contemplates solely how money will change his mother’s life. She will, he thinks, be happier once she has discontinued working long days and has adopted a finer wardrobe (383; ch. 46, 374; ch. 45). After returning to London, he ignores her pleas to avoid the mob of activists gathering outside the city, “bidding her be of good cheer, for their fortunes were both made now” (400; ch. 48). Though he soon forgets about money after joining the dissenters’ ranks, Barnaby remains motivated by the image of his mother. He easily convinces himself not only that his actions will benefit a righteous cause, but that his cutting a dashing figure in the public arena will delight his mother. Riding in front of the crowd with his friend Hugh, Barnaby enjoys the pomp and circumstance only insofar as he can imagine viewing the spectacle through her eyes: DICKENS QUARTERLY 77

‘Wouldn’t it make her glad to see me at the head of this large show? She’d cry with joy, I know she would. Where can she be? She never sees me at my best, and what do I care to be gay and fine if she’s not by?’ (405; ch. 49)

As the narrator later explains during Barnaby’s defense of the rioters’ hideout, Barnaby’s current contentment springs from the conviction that his joining the movement has not grieved, but gratified, his mother: “She was at the heart of all his cheerful hopes and proud reflections. It was she whom all this honour and distinction were to gladden; the joy and profit were for her” (471; ch. 57). That his assumptions about his mother’s feelings fall wide of the mark does not invalidate the singular nature of his enthusiasm. These apparent lacunae in Barnaby’s perception begin to close up, however, when one considers his occasionally acute awareness of his mother’s emotional state which he occasionally demonstrates. Hints of such sensitivity—inconsistent with the portrayal of either an idiot or imbecile—appear rather early in the novel. Consider, for instance, the evening we meet Barnaby and follow him home to his mother, in whose pale face he immediately reads unease. Though unable to determine the cause of her present state (her greedy, murderous husband has just paid a visit), and unaware that her anxiety arises from concern for her son more than for herself, Barnaby accurately comprehends his mother’s anxiety; his own body registers the intensity of her feelings in a bout of uncontrollable shaking (148; ch. 17). After recovering from this seizure-like episode, Barnaby demonstrates additional flashes of intellectual strength across a scene which, ironically, works to inscribe Barnaby’s intellectual weakness and faulty memory. Note the response to a reminder that his next birthday lies a year away:

‘I remember that it has been so till now,’ said Barnaby. ‘But I think to-day must be my birthday too, for all that…I’ll tell you why,’ he said. ‘I have always seen you—I didn’t let you know it, but I have—on the evening of that day grow very sad. I have seen you cry when Grip and I were most glad; and look frightened with no reason; and I have touched your hand, and felt that it was cold—as it is now. Once, mother (on a birthday that was, also) Grip and I thought of this after we went up stairs to bed…you said something in a prayer; and when you rose and walked about, you looked (as you have done ever since, mother, towards night on my birthday) just as you do now. I have found that out, you see, though I am silly. So I say you’re wrong; and this must be my birthday …(152; ch. 17, my emphasis) 78 DICKENS QUARTERLY

This passage illustrates nicely Dickens’s desire to have it both ways, to render a pitiable, “silly” innocent who will solicit our sympathies, and at the same time provide an active player in the novel’s central mystery who can help the audience begin to collect scattered clues. Though Barnaby’s comedic conviction that another birthday has arrived only weeks after the last one plays as ridiculous and some- what sad, tucked under his foolishness and impaired recollection is striking recall of distant details, plus the associative powers that provide those memories with significance. He remembers well that his mother has grown oddly cold, tearful, and frightened on each of his birthdays, and assumes the presence of such uncharacteristically severe melancholy can only connote another such holiday. Barnaby reveals, too, a conscious awareness of and ability to explain (!) his own, repeated subterfuge (in repeatedly observing his mother’s annual sadness without letting her know she is observed), an advanced capacity of dissimulation suggested elsewhere by both Gabriel Varden and Stagg (58; ch. 6, 377; ch. 45). This passage also parades Barnaby’s strikingly normal language. The inarticulateness that introduced him as an “idiot” has disappeared. Barnaby speaks with the sophistication of an educated adult, dem- onstrated above by his smoothly injecting an independent clause (“I didn’t let you know it”) into the midst of another clause, and his frequent use of adverbial phrases (“till now,” “with no reason,” etc.). Note also the logical ordering of his mother’s growing distress as Barnaby describes first her generalized mood (sadness), then her physical expression of emotion (crying), next her heightened state of anxiety (fright), and lastly the tangible, empirical proof that her state was serious (he felt her cold hand). His language reflects a similar sophistication when he describes his shadow’s height as alternating between that of a church and that of a dwarf, then employs a long series of prepositions and geographic markers to describe how the shadow constantly shifted its position relative to his own body (56; ch. 6). The creativity on display in Barnaby’s personification of his shadow—as with his impromptu mime of the appearance and posture of the figure who robbed Mr. Chester (150; ch. 17), or the vision of dancing and plotting conspirators he finds in some wind-whipped shirts hanging on a clothesline (94; ch. 10)—helps complicate still further the portrayal of one who began as a mere idiot. Dickens apparently feels he must have a central character whose language the reader and other characters can immediately identify, leaving them to be intrigued more by the strangeness of his ideas than the phrases he uses to express them. Perhaps the extra layer of linguistic complexity introduced by an idiot’s faithfully rendered, compromised speech would have turned DICKENS QUARTERLY 79 off even more of Dickens’s readership in the early 40s, those accus- tomed to the sad but identifiable emotional and cognitive experience of protagonists like Oliver Twist and Nicholas Nickleby. That Barnaby’s portrayal is not just complex but internally inconsistent emerges across scenes in which Barnaby does or under- stands something recently identified as beyond him. Mrs. Rudge’s attempt to escape the husband whom only she knows still exists provides one example of such proximate disparities. Determined to cut all ties with society when she moves to the country, Mrs. Rudge asks Mr. Haredale not to tempt Barnaby into divulging his mother’s whereabouts if he should later wander onto the Haredale estate. In doing so, she signals her fear that Barnaby could be easily led to respond openly to anything asked him by old friends (215; ch. 25). It serves Dickens’s purpose here to emphasize Barnaby’s gullibility so as to dramatize the difficulty of keeping confidential their undisclosed destination. A few pages later, however, Dickens wants to stress the difficulties faced by the other players in this friendship—the challenge Haredale and Gabriel Varden face in locating Mrs. Rudge against her will—and he accordingly constructs Barnaby Rudge anew, as one from whom it is nearly impossible to extract information (220; ch. 26).5 A similarly conflicted represen- tation of Barnaby appears during the London riots, immediately before Hugh sets Barnaby to guard the Boot. In a matter of moments, Barnaby displays both strong deductive powers and a marked susceptibility to distraction, both loyalty and indifference. Over- hearing ringleader Gashford’s report that “the rioters who have been taken (poor fellows) are committed for trial, and that some very active witnesses have had the temerity to appear against them. Among others…a gentleman…one Haredale,” Barnaby turns quickly around in astonishment and anger (440–41; ch. 53). Apparently, Barnaby not only understands words like “witness” and “temerity,” but has a working knowledge of the court system, recognizes the role of his close friend Haredale in it, and understands Gashford’s condemnation of his friend enough to be enraged! Unlikely enough in itself, this moment of intellectual prowess becomes still more incredible when Hugh quickly, completely erases both anger and epiphany from this suddenly perceptive idiot with a few well-placed, distracting words (440–41; ch. 53). Immediately after this crisis has been averted and Barnaby dispatched to his new occupation, Gashford notes his surprise at Barnaby’s “quick” understanding. Hugh’s reply that “He’s as quick sometimes…with his head—as you, or any man” (441; ch. 53) brings to the table the very issue in hand, one Dickens seems willing to recognize occasionally, if not immediately resolve. Over the course 80 DICKENS QUARTERLY of the novel, Dickens actually sets a number of characters to questioning whether Barnaby indeed has an intellectual disability. During their return to London, Barnaby and Mrs. Rudge run into a presumptuous country gentleman determined to have Barnaby’s talking crow as his own. Amidst his offers and growing demands for Grip, the gentleman repeatedly denies the authenticity of Barnaby’s intellectual deficiency. He calls the claim of idiocy an excuse for laziness curable with a ten minutes’ flogging, cries that all real idiots should be locked up in institutions, then reiterates his doubt about Barnaby’s condition when Barnaby refuses to sell his feathered friend and hurries to leave (389–91; ch. 47). Lord George Gordon, a political lynchpin in the tale’s violent, historical backdrop, provides a second incredulous voice. Lord George runs into Barnaby as the crowd of demonstrators forms and, predictably, embraces the young man’s enthusiasm with open arms. When Barnaby’s mother asks that he reject Barnaby’s bid to participate because he is “not in his right senses,” Lord George bristles at the suggestion that supporting “the right cause” could be equated with mental instability (400; ch. 48). That his duplicitous secretary, Gashford, steps in to reject Mrs. Rudge’s plea as “a very sad picture of female depravity,” while Gordon’s honest servant John Grueby later risks (and loses) his job trying to convince his employer of Barnaby’s disability, only clarifies Lord George’s mistake (400; ch. 48, 474; ch. 57). That is, Dickens cuts short these rather reasonable questions about Barnaby’s true state by raising doubts about each questioner’s motivation and character. The narrator implies that those inquiring into Barnaby’s deficiency (villains, all of them) are in error, that their very doubt signals at least a lack of discernment and probably a disinterest in truth. Such moments seem intended to effectively quiet any questions about Barnaby’s idiocy. Perhaps Dickens wants to exhibit Barnaby’s potential while simultaneously maintaining his idiocy so that his late change into a higher-functioning member of society seems the more remarkable by contrast. Up to the point when British soldiers take Barnaby prisoner for his involvement in the riots, Dickens has stressed repeatedly that Barnaby bears an authentic, very stable intellectual disability. In addition to rebutting implicitly the cross-examinations of each doubter, the narrator states directly that his five years in the country “had shed no brighter gleam of reason on his mind; [that] no dawn had broken on his long, dark night” (371; ch. 45), while Barnaby himself tells the country gentleman that he has “always” been an idiot (390; ch. 47). And though Mrs. Rudge’s good friend Gabriel Varden claims Barnaby “grows wiser every day,” that “He will be a ‘cute man yet’” who one day puts “us to the blush,” Mrs. Rudge and DICKENS QUARTERLY 81 the reader know that kindness, “no conviction of his own,” motivates the locksmith’s words (51; ch. 5). Once Barnaby’s defense of the Boot has been interrupted by a detachment of Foot Guards who successfully (though with effort) disarm and capture him, matters change rapidly. As the soldiers lead Barnaby through crowded streets at the close of chapter fifty-seven, the narrator marches the reader straight into Barnaby’s mind. This shift in perspective, presumably meant to help us identify closely with Barnaby’s plight, apparently necessitates granting Barnaby a greater degree of self-reflection, perception, and deductive power. With the marching soldiers looking away from him, he can “hardly believe he [is] a Prisoner. But at the word, though only thought, not spoken, he [feels] the handcuffs galling his wrists” and “the warm current of his life run cold” (480; ch. 57). In this moment, Barnaby figures out his new legal status without its being explained to him, and knows enough to fear for his life. Led into the barracks for temporary safekeeping, Barnaby looks about with the attentiveness of one who knows what his situation portends: “nothing escaped his notice” as a long list of details impress themselves “upon his obser- vation, as though he had noticed them in the same place a hundred times” (481; ch. 58). Placed in a dark cell, Barnaby fixes his gaze on the door in an attempt to “accustom himself to the gloom,” notes the similarity between the sentinel’s step and his own recent pacing at the Boot, and has “wit enough” to remain perfectly still while listening to a discussion of what he recognizes as his own fate— though neither his name nor recent actions are mentioned (481–83; ch. 58). A natural mix of anger and tears erupts from Barnaby during a soldier’s cruel reflections on how fun it would be too twist off Grip’s head, and he adds the syntactically and linguistically sophisticated resignation, “Kill anything you can, and so revenge yourself on those who with their bare hands untied could do as much to you!” (485; ch. 58). The image of a newly minted, self-assured Barnaby comes into sharper focus as he steps from this holding area into the hands of those who lead him to Newgate prison, assuming a defiant posture: “he would not have them think he was subdued or frightened. He walked out like a man, and looked haughtily from face to face” (485; ch. 58). This increasingly acute Barnaby will show only hints of the old deficits as he grows more aware of his decadent environment and of his new, heroic role within it. As Barnaby and the father he discovers in prison wander about the countryside after Newgate’s destruction, “a vague and shadowy crowd” of memories concerning other children’s fathers and his mother’s old grief surge into Barnaby’s mind. Though the narrator attempts to qualify these as “strange promptings of nature, intelligible 82 DICKENS QUARTERLY to him as to a man of radiant mind and most enlarged capacity,” and though these associations lead Barnaby to the unlikely vision of a reunited, nuclear family, the hero demonstrates that he indeed possesses a “radiant mind” and “enlarged capacity” by his transformed perceptions (566; ch. 68, my emphasis). When he follows his father’s directions to search London for the blind Stagg, he begins to see the violent rioters with new eyes, as “a legion of devils” (567; ch. 68). He grows physically ill at the fire, drunkenness, and destruction about him, but still manages to rescue his injured friend Hugh from a scene of rampant self-destruction by riding him out of town on an available horse (567–71; ch. 68). Later recaptured, Barnaby faces almost certain execution with aplomb, sorry only that he must watch Hugh be led away to his death first instead of being allowed to join him on the scaffold. Refurbished with his new, heroic trappings, this character the narrator persists in calling an “idiot” finds rescue in the last-minute legal maneuverings of his friends and family, and accordingly participates in the ending’s ratification of relationships both present and future. (The farseeing narrator even grants him grey hair and long life—relatively rare occurrences among those with developmental disabilities.) The tale completes the morphing of an unpredictable dependent into a sharp and capable member of society when the narrator describes Barnaby’s psychological and physical recovery from recent events:

though he could never separate his condemnation and escape from the idea of a terrific dream, he became, in other respects, more rational. Dating from the time of his recovery, he had a better memory and greater steadiness of purpose; but a dark cloud overhung his whole previous existence, and never cleared away. He was not the less happy for this.…He lived with his mother on the Maypole farm.…Never was there a lighter-hearted husbandman…It was remarkable that although he had that dim sense of the past, he sought out Hugh’s dog, and took him under his care; and that he could never be tempted into London. (687–88; ch. 82)

To the last, the narrator continues his contrary claims, insisting in the same breath that Barnaby’s memory has improved and also remains imperfect, that Barnaby largely forgets his London adventures and remembers specific details from them. (Hugh’s dying request was that someone care for his dog.) Not long after explaining how the scene of maddened rioters and burning buildings was “fixed indelibly upon [Barnaby’s] mind,” a shocking spectacle to be sure, the narrator is trying to dismiss Barnaby’s abhorrence of London DICKENS QUARTERLY 83 as inexplicable (571; ch. 68). Dickens apparently felt that reassimilating this important character into a predictable, comedic ending marked by renewed communities and requisite marriages required recasting Barnaby as someone who could be a more equal member of that welcoming circle. For years, Barnaby’s mother has persisted in caring for what the narrator calls a problematic, “despised and slighted work,” one whose gaiety gladdens her while his “ghastly and unchild-like cunning” sometimes frightens (208–9; ch. 25). Though she found some measure of comfort in his continuing innocence, she also despaired in long “watching for the dawn of mind that never came” (154; ch. 17, 209; ch. 25). Experience gave her face “the patient composure of long effort and quiet resig- nation” as she slowly realized her Barnaby’s adult years would not diminish his dependence. The two long ago moved from the home- town where everyone knew them to the anonymity of London, a metropolis where they could craft a life of isolation relieved only by occasional contact with a few persistent friends. In order to reestablish Barnaby and his mother’s place in a large and more intimate network of personal relationships, as Dickens does in the novel’s close, he must not only erase Mrs. Rudge’s desire for seclusion by bringing the family secret out into the open, but mitigate Barnaby’s dependence by diminishing the source of that dependence and thereby forming a more egalitarian domestic and social space on which to dim the stage lights. Instead of eliminating this particularly troublesome, intellectually disabled figure, Dickens eliminates his inconsistent disability.

NOTES

1 See Easson’s editorial notes to chapter twenty-two (692). 2 What David Wright says of the word “insane” applies readily to its close cousin “mad.” In his historiography of the Earlswood Asylum, Wright notes that nineteenth- century medical and legal usage of the term “insane” encompassed “idiots” as well as “lunatics.” The association of “insane” specifically with mental illness would be a twentieth-century development (10). 3 “The Lord is slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love, forgiving iniquity and transgression, but he will by no means clear the guilty, visiting the iniquity of fathers upon children, upon the third and upon the fourth generation’” (Numbers 14:18). 4 This first detail is doubly ironic. Until we turn the page and come upon Phiz’s fourth illustration, we do not have the facial features to read and thus cannot know Barnaby’s “history at once.” Also, despite the assertion that character can be read in one’s countenance, the narrator obviously feels two full pages of exposition necessary to 84 DICKENS QUARTERLY elaborate upon the clue provided by the illustration, a situation that, perhaps unwittingly, begins to interrogate those physiognomic assumptions with which Dickens holds a troubled alliance. 5 This disparity reflects not just a shift in perspective from that of a protective mother to that of concerned friends, but a highly variable construction of Barnaby’s facilities. These various heroes might have different slants on Barnaby’s abilities, but totally polarized opinions? Unlikely.

To be continued in the September issue, at which time the list of WORKS CITED will appear N DICKENS QUARTERLY 85

CHARLES DICKENS AND FICTIONS OF THE CROWD MARK WILLIS (Hertford University and Bedford College)

n 1838, four years after the Tolpuddle Martyrs were deported for forming a trade union, and four years after the Poor Law Amend- I ment Act, the People’s Charter was published in London. The working classes, engendered as a class-conscious body by the 1832 Reform Bill which enfranchised the propertied bourgeoisie but left un-propertied working people without access to parliamentary representation, found in Chartism a platform for protest and debate. Chartism was the movement organized around the Charter that was drafted in 1837 by the London Working Men’s Association to demand the political enfranchisement of working-class men. Lenin was to call the Chartists the “first broad and politically organised proletarian-revolutionary movement of the masses” (Briggs 7). If the demands of the Charter themselves did not strike fear into the hearts of the establishment, then the tactics of the Chartists did, with their mass platform tradition, and the underlying threat of confrontational physical violence. As Asa Briggs notes: “Even Chartists who were repelled by the language of physical force believed in the slogan ‘Peacefully if we may, forcibly if we must’” (Briggs 13). The debate concerning the justification of “physical force” protest would be at the center of many of the representations of Chartism. The early days of radical activity following the writing of The Charter were reported in the establishment press, but without Chartism itself carrying the name of the cause. On 18 September 1838, The Times reported on a “Meeting of the Working Classes in Palace-Yard,” a London gathering. The report describes the gathering as though it were a new phenomena:

Yesterday was a sort of field-day with a class of persons who style themselves ‘the working classes’…The announcement of the meeting assumed the title of ‘The Great Metropolitan Demonstration of the Working Classes’…upon no occasion has it fallen to our lot to witness a more complete failure, for at no time throughout the day could there have been more than 4,000 or 5,000 persons present. (18 Sept 1838, p.6, c. 1–6) 86 DICKENS QUARTERLY

The report belittles the potency of the gathering, with a bemused, patrician tone. The term “working classes” is still a new expression; a new label of political identity for those left without representation after the 1832 Reform Bill. The term “Chartism” is yet to be adopted by the movement or by the press. A more substantial gathering, this time held in Manchester under the title of “The Manchester Demonstration in favour of Ultra-Radicalism,” was covered eight days later (The Times, 26 September 1838, p.5, c 4–6). Some three hundred thousand people were reported to have attended. The meeting had a celebratory, carnivalesque color, with a formal procession, “two trumpeteers on horseback,” the “Manchester concert band” and banners promoting such diverse collectives as the “Ladies Shoemakers,” “Spinners” and “Marble Masons.” The report retains the air of dismissal, with the label of “facetious” for the National Petition, and the term “idlers” used to describe the crowd, suggesting those who would not work. The celebratory nature of the event, the mood of leisure and entertainment along side the radical agenda is recorded. The recently engendered “working classes” were apparently at play and enjoying their collective self-expression. In “Folk Humour and Carnival Laughter,” Mikhial Bakhtin says this of “the carnival:”

Carnival is not a spectacle seen by the people; they live in it, and everyone participates because its very idea embraces all the people. While carnival lasts, there is no other life outside it. During carnival time life is subject only to its laws, that is, the laws of its own freedom. It has a universal spirit; it is a special condition of the entire world, of the world’s revival and renewal, in which all take part. Such is the essence of carnival, vividly felt by all its participants. (198)

There is something transgressive about “carnival” in its defiance of received authority and the establishment of something autonomous and “of the people.” During the carnival, the people establish their own sense of self-determination. In the context of the Chartist gathering, the carnival atmosphere becomes a rehearsal of a possible society, the people acting out the drama of self-rule. Elsewhere, Bakhtin observes: “the carnivalesque crowd in the marketplace or in the streets is not merely a crowd. It is the people as a whole, but organized in their own way, the way of the people. It is outside of and contrary to all existing forms of the coercive socio-economic and political organisation, which is suspended for the time of the festivity” (“Carnival Ambivalence” 225). For the gathering to become some- thing more concrete it would have to burst out over the boundaries of the established order, and develop a structure of its own: carnival DICKENS QUARTERLY 87 would need to become revolution. The Chartist era was developing in a Victorian society still haunted by the events of Paris in 1789. The early optimism in Britain for the French Revolution, exemplified by Wordsworth’s famous pronounce- ment, “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, / But to be young was very heaven!” came from the belief that the French were at last catching up with the modernization which the British constitution had enjoyed in 1688 (The Prelude bk. 11. l. 108). It was not until the Terror that it was realized that French modernization was going down a further, bloodier path. Conservatives like Edmund Burke were already fearful in 1790. Initial enthusiasm in Britain was followed by fearful reaction to the guillotine. The impact of the French Revolution was felt in a British context which was itself in a state of transformation, and hence one which appeared unstable to its own establishment. England, and particularly London, was seen as being under threat from those seeking to copy the example of the French, and over-run the old established order, even though it was a widely held belief that the French Revolution was itself the fulfilment of a tradition that the English had started. The French Revolution itself becomes a vehicle for the literary application of the event; it becomes an imaginary sign creatively adapted to illustrate a greater theme, of constructive change or a dangerous chaos. Edmund Burke used the scientific metaphor of “the wild gas, the fixed air is plainly broke loose,” to capture the energies of Revolution (Burke 8). The Revolution became mapped onto abstract notions of transformation, and a symbol of a cataclysmic change. In more recent history, it echoed the violent riots in London of the previous decade, where anti-Catholic fervor led to much destruction in the streets of the capital. If the French Revolution haunts the memory of the Victorian imagination, it does so as a literary, as well as an historic event. Thomas Carlyle was its first British biographer, publishing The French Revolution: A History in 1837. The work came to influence Victorian writing on the subject of the city and the crowd as much as any other text in the period. Its influence can be read in the Condition- of-England fictions of the following decade. Carlyle begins his account by suggesting the newness of French events. Edmund Burke had remarked that “The French Revolution is the most astonishing that has hitherto happened in the world,” suggesting that the French example echoes previous revolutions, most notably the English exchange of power in 1688 (10). Carlyle stresses that the French Revolution is a new, apocalyptic event, unprecedented in history. The course of change will bring about something anarchic, primitive, diabolic, where the old order, with its traditions and laws, is thrown 88 DICKENS QUARTERLY over: “the whole daemonic nature of man will remain,—hurled forth to rage blindly without rule or rein; savage itself, yet with all the tools and weapons of civilisation: a spectacle new in History…Chaos swallows the whole again, and there is left nothing but a smell of brimstone” (16–7). The democracy movement, the “Sansculottic Earthquake” (19), is akin to a human regression back from rational civilization, towards something primitive, Babylonian. One senses that Carlyle both admires and fears the Revolutionary crowd. He demonizes it, and yet the power that it represents clearly impresses him. The streets take on the site of revelry usually associated with theatre and dance: the crowd is a celebration of spontaneous human energies, yet it is diabolic. Carlyle sees the French Revolution as the defining moment of the era, a watershed for Modernity: “Surely a great Phenomenon: nay it is a transcendental one, overstepping all rules and experience; the crowning Phenomenon of our Modern Time” (222). As a student of class, Carlyle sees in the French people a new manifestation of citizenship, a popular force that had not previously found a collective voice: “on a sudden, the Earth yawns asunder, and amid Tartarean smoke, and glare of fierce brightness, rises SANSCULOTTISM, many-headed, fire-breathing, and asks: What think ye of me?” (222). The modern crowd is born, infused by our commentator with traces of the celebrated crowds of history, from the Old Testament onwards, now with a defining feature, not of religious, but of class difference. The impact of the French Revolution had a profound effect on the imagination of Victorian commentators. The novels of the 1830s and 1840s engendered by the Chartist “uprising” are haunted by the path taken by the Parisian crowd. Disraeli’s Sybil and Kingsley’s Alton Locke make fearful predictions of English revolt, shaped and informed by the French example, and almost certainly by Carlyle’s mythologized narrative of Revolution. Carlyle’s dramatic telling of the tale of France represents an attempt to understand the conditions that might have brought about a revolution, at a time when there was a genuine fear that an uprising might form itself in England. By understanding the French Revolution, Carlyle sought to discover the means to avert a similar disaster befalling the English. Dickens was to pursue the same goal in plotting his own fictive narratives of revolt. The crowd is most commonly rendered as a murderous, unchained mob, how- ever pacific its initial formation or the reasonableness of the fictive heroes who get caught up in it. It is the old Babylonian, primitive force, unleashed in the midst of civilization, the fault of a lawless residuum, and initiated by the poor conditions of an uncaring society, which the novelist seeks to reform. DICKENS QUARTERLY 89

The earliest specific “literary” representation of the Chartist movement itself was Carlyle’s 1839 tract “Chartism.” Carlyle wrote directly after the failure of the first Chartist petition of the same year, with the Chartist program now feared by some to be heading into un-parliamentary violence. Carlyle’s reading of Chartism is peppered with references to the more inflammatory features of the movement, so far as Carlyle gives Chartism the credit of being a movement at all. He subdivides his analysis into chapters, beginning with the “Condition-of-England Question.” His opening paragraphs convey anxiety for future developments of Chartist activity towards greater violence. The times are “ominous.” He imagines that “Chartism numbered by the million and half, taking nothing by its iron-hooped Petition, breaks out into brickbats, cheap pikes, and even into splutterings of conflagration, such very general feeling cannot be considered unnatural!” (“Chartism” 151). The newspaper reports of the “chimera of Chartism” convey the surface manifestations of unrest, which Carlyle records, not as aberrations, but as “natural” acts, symptoms of legitimate unease. He continues: “Chartism means the bitter discontent grown fierce and mad, the wrong condition therefore or the wrong disposition, of the Working Classes of England.” Carlyle reacts against the more violent features of Chartist radicalism, and labelling the whole movement, as “bitter” or “mad” in its methods and objectives, despite sympathizing with its origins. He does not seem to perceive any focus or genuine intelligence in the Chartist project. Less than a year after its inception, Carlyle labels it “mad, incendiary, nefarious…Delirious Chartism” (152). Carlyle questions whether Chartism is the wrong response from the working class to its justifiable indignation at parliamentary and social injustice. It is “Not the condition of the working people that is wrong; but their disposition, their own thoughts, beliefs and feelings that are wrong” (153). Hence the passions of the workers are rising up to challenge oligarchy with rebellious, democratic impulses. Carlyle is ambivalent in his support for the Chartist cause, sympathizing with industrially engendered conditions but uneasy about Chartist practices. He credits the democracy movement with numerical legitimacy: “The condition of the great body of people in a country is the condition of the country itself” (153). The people are painted as the malformed passions of society, primitive and voice- less: “these wild inarticulate souls, struggling there, with inarticulate uproar, like dumb creatures in pain, unable to speak what is in them” (155). Carlyle acknowledges later: “Chartism with its pikes, Swing with his tinder-box, speak a most loud though inarticulate language” (180). The Chartists are like industrial Calibans, who have learnt the language of Capitalist Prospero, and now curse with it. The 90 DICKENS QUARTERLY violence of the vitriol-bottle reported in the newspapers suggests just such a blind struggle, yet the six-points of the Charter itself, well known to Carlyle, indicate a collective purpose and voice for the wild souls that belie the author’s rhetoric. Carlyle is himself struggling to give a voice to Chartism that will translate its message, and its threat, for the anxious reader. Indeed, his article undoubtedly did much to cement the name of “Chartism” in the consciousness of the nation. In 1839, the early days of Chartism, there was as yet little more than the Charter itself to read, though that document voiced clearly the working-class complaint. Soon there would be a wealth of pamphlets, journals and newspapers dedicated to giving voice to the voiceless. So at this stage, the movement appeared as an “infantile” (literally “without speech”) crowd. The Chartist meetings represented a new sense of political language. The public arena was being re-defined by the Chartist gatherings, and a new, articulate political discourse was being uttered, both by Chartist texts and by Chartist numbers on the streets. Yet Carlyle laments the separation of the “speaking classes,” and the “great dumb, deep-buried class” (215). His final suggestion that “all English persons should be taught to read” (226) is a bid for harmony between “rational Englishmen, of all creeds, classes and colours,” and particularly a call for Chartists to find a voice rather than the vitriol-bottle. In Dickens’s The Old Curiosity Shop (1840), Little Nell is depicted wandering adrift in a sprawling industrial town, with only her grand- father to keep her company. The town is busy with trade: “The throng of people hurried by, in two opposite streams, with no symptom of cessation or exhaustion; intent upon their own affairs” (337; ch. 44). The urban environment is abstract and alienating, a town of material experience. Individuality is lost: “and there the same expression, with little variety, is repeated a hundred times…They were but an atom, here, in a mountain heap of misery.” The country is idealized as a comforting, natural setting. By contrast, the industrial town is satanic: “In a large and lofty building…echoing to the roof with the beating of hammers and roar of furnaces…a hundred strange unearthly noises never heard elsewhere; in this gloomy place moving like demons among the flame and smoke…a number of men laboured like giants” (345 ch. 45). The urban setting has reduced natural man to a beast-like existence and the industrial town has led its inhabitants into primitive behavior, into demonic collectivism. The darkest environment is found as the two travelers venture deeper into industrial England: “On every side, and far as the eye could see into the heavy distance, tall chimneys, crowding on each other…the same dull, ugly, form, which is the horror of repressive DICKENS QUARTERLY 91 dreams, poured out their plague of smoke, obscured the light, and made foul the melancholy air” (346; ch.45). Utilitarian regularity has strangled the liberty of nature, and reduced the population to animals: “Men, women, children wan in their look and ragged in attire, tended the engines, fed their tributary fire, begged upon the road, or scowled half-naked from the doorless houses”. They are “wrathful monsters…screeching and turning round and round again”. It seems almost inevitable that such dehumanized people would resort to the political violence that Dickens feared. Crowd disturbance may be a social evil, Dickens suggests, but the environment which industrialism creates is the primary cause and greater evil. Dickens fears the night:

when bands of unemployed labourers paraded the roads, or clustered by torch-light round their leaders, who told them, in stern language, of their wrongs, and urged them on to frightful cries and threats; when maddened men, armed with sword and firebrand…rushed forth on errands of terror and destruction, to work no ruin half so surely as their own. (348; ch. 45)

The political crowd is seen in embryo here, with industrial unrest rooted firmly in the poverty of urban conditions. Barnaby Rudge followed in 1841. Dickens chose as his subject matter the Gordon Riots of 1780, a clear model for the disruptive crowd behavior which haunted his own age. The crowd in Barnaby Rudge is a destructive monster. The specific character of its monstrosity is that of religious zealotry, a Protestant intolerance towards Roman Catholicism which in 1780 saw the wanton destruction of London property under the banner of “No Popery.” E.P. Thompson describes the Gordon Riots as follows: “Here we see a popular agitation which passed swiftly through three phases. In the first phase the ‘revolutionary crowd’, well organized by the popular Protestant Association, marched in fair order behind great banners to present a petition against Catholic toleration to the Houses of Parliament…This was Dissenting London” (77). Thompson charts the progress of the riot with a familiar narrative of orderly protest, and carnival, falling into something more destructive, with a violent element within the crowd rising up and leading the day into chaos. Thompson describes “the second phase”: “This phase may be described as one of licensed spontaneity, leading on to mob violence informed by ‘a groping desire to settle accounts with the rich, if only for a day’; some of the ‘better sort of tradesmen’ faded away, while journeymen, apprentices, and servants—and some criminals—thronged the streets.” The Protestant facade falls away and class antagonism is 92 DICKENS QUARTERLY revealed beneath it. The riot is given its head by the authorities, the action of the crowd is a “licensed spontaneity,” rather than a genuine seizing of power or territory by the poor. The “third stage” of the riot represented the end of the policy of non-confrontation by the authorities:

It was only when the third phase commenced—the attack on the Bank on one hand, and indiscriminate orgies of drunkenness, arson, and pick-pocketing on the other—that the ‘licence’ was withdrawn: the inactive Lord Mayor at last sent a desperate message to the ‘Commander- in-Chief calling for ‘Horse and Foot to assist the ‘civil power’…The rapidity with which the riots were quelled emphasised the previous inactivity of the City authorities. (77–8)

Thompson suggests that the City authorities might have been happy to see Catholic buildings destroyed, and it was only when the institutions of the Establishment were threatened that the mob was restrained. The late nineteenth century historian Alexius Mills gives us what is the fullest account of the progress of the riots, besides Dickens’s own fictional version. Mills published his description of events in 1883, during a time of widespread unemployment and renewed crowd disturbance in London. As Dickens reflects his own turbulent era, so does Mill write about the 1780 riot against a background of developing “mob” politics. At the time of the Gordon riots, “No Catholic could be attorney, or Justice, or postmaster, nor sit in Parliament, nor vote at elections” (1). The Catholic Relief Bill, sympathetic to the Catholic cause, was presented to Parliament in 1780, for “the relief of the Catholics in England from their present grievances and shameful disabilities” (5). The Protestant Association, headed by Lord Gordon, opposed The Bill. The Association produced a petition against the passing of the Bill, and, under Lord Gordon’s leadership, proceeded first to gather and then to riot in the streets of London. The ensuing mob tore down known Catholic establishments including churches, schools and private houses at Moorfields and Hoxton, before moving on to destroy both Newgate and Fleet pris- ons, and threatening to assault the Bank of England. The riot lasted in earnest from June 2nd until June 8th, and left 210 shot dead by the army, with a further 75 to die later of their injuries. Though Dickens professes “no sympathy with the Romish Church,” he is at pains in the Preface to Barnaby Rudge, to distance himself from this alleged Protestant movement. The rioters are an undirected mob, labeled by Dickens as “those shameful tumults” before the narrative has began. Mills is no less condemning: “The prospect of a DICKENS QUARTERLY 93 season of violence and riot, the greed for plunder, added to the excitement and irreligious hate, had roused the worst blood of the fiercest mob in Europe” (15). The violence of an abstract mob had been hidden behind the mask of Protestant endeavor. Dickens identifies what he sees as the wrong-headedness of the Gordon Riots, and the barbarity of those involved: “what we falsely call a religious cry is easily raised by men who have no religion…it is begotten of intolerance and persecution…it is senseless, besotted, inveterate and unmerciful” (Preface). Dickens, then, has no sympathy with the objectives of the rioting crowd or its leader. What he does have is a preoccupation with what a riotous London crowd may be capable of. He may be appalled by social injustice, but Dickens feared social rebellion and class conflict. Dickens is unsympathetic with the religious fervor of the crowd, and the extremes to which they took their protest, but may be sympathetic to the conditions that engendered the protest. There is some ambiguity as to whether Dickens’s depiction of the Gordon riots illustrates an agency that might be deemed “radical,” if not quite “Chartist.” The author had reason to identify with Chartist program. He is seemingly both aligned with the property- owning gentry of London, horrified by rioting and at the same time at one with the disenfranchised and with them as they assault London’s repressive institutions. The attack upon London prisons is particularly resonant for Dickens, whose father had been imprisoned in the Marshalsea. At the time of the composition of Barnaby Rudge, the Chartists addressed many of the social problems that concerned Dickens: poverty, unsanitary living conditions, crime, the New Poor Law, factory conditions. In The Old Curiosity Shop, Dickens depicts an impoverished interior, where “a couple of poor families lived in this hovel…two women, each among children of her own, occupied different portions of the room” (348; ch.45). The details are of the sort favored by Chartist newspapers and authors in reviews of Dickens’s work. Despite his fear of Chartist organization, Dickens, in his fiction, was seen as an ally to the Chartist cause. However, Chartist methods, or at least the methods imagined by London’s establishment, evoked civil disruptions such as the Peterloo distur- bance of 1819, and alienated those like Dickens who feared their return. Dickens was to proclaim in Household Words in 1850 “I am not a Chartist, and I never was. I don’t mean to say but what I see as a good many public points to complain of, still I don’t think that’s the way to set them right…I know many good men and workmen who are Chartists. Note. Not Physical force” (Journalism 2: 285). Dickens is at pains to distance himself particularly from the perceived violent wing of the Chartist movement. Insurrection and revolution, 94 DICKENS QUARTERLY suggested by contemporary Chartist activity, were for Dickens seemingly greater evils than the exploitation of the poor. Dickens’s antipathy towards civic unrest resembles views Plato expressed in The Republic about the threat to the city-state or polis posed by the riotous crowd. In Plato’s account, the city-state is structured on a three-part model that parallels the workings of the body: “Reason” equates to the city’s elite guardians, “Courage” parallels the city’s soldiers, “Appetites” suggests “The Masses” or “Hoi Polloi” (177–95). Hence the disruptions of the crowd are the appetites or passions of the city rising up and presenting a challenge to stabilizing reason. Plato’s model is an aristocratic one, presuming that each citizen must recognize his place in the urban scheme of things. His idealized polis stands behind Dickens’s London of the 1840s, where the activity of the crowd is perceived as inherently opposed to the stability of the city, and to the urban equilibrium desired by the author-observer. The ideal of the Christian City, which Disraeli in Sybil or The Two Nations (1845) had lamented as being largely unacknowledged in Victorian society, remains a model for human endeavor to which Dickens is sympathetic. Writing at the beginning of the 1840s, Dickens’s fear of the mob reflects a residual fear of revolution, that the crowd will reprise the disturbances not merely of three days in the London of 1780, but the specter of 1789 in Paris. The crowd was no longer necessarily fleeting or particular to specific causes: it would now always invoke the great revolutionary moment. So Dickens the Victorian guardian of the polis can decry Chartism because of its revolutionary potential. In Barnaby Rudge the message is that radicalism is not permitted to register any revolutionary impetus, for fear that it might be not merely a revolution, but metonymic of the Revolution. Gustave Le Bon’s The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind, which was published in 1895, is pertinent here. Someone caught up by the collective, Le Bon theorizes, undergoes a transformation. “Isolated, he may be a cultivated individual; in a crowd, he is a barbarian— that is, a creature acting by instinct. He possesses the spontaneity, the violence, the ferocity, and also the enthusiasm and heroism of the primitive beings” (32). Le Bon’s crowd is dangerously ambivalent. From the perspective of a sociologist on the cusp of the Freudian era, the crowd is rendered less a political entity, and more an urban unconscious, a manifestation of a city in a state of hysteria. He writes: “crowds, doubtless, are always unconscious, but this very uncon- sciousness is perhaps one of the secrets of their strength.” Le Bon is fearful of what might follow the actions of the crowd; the post- revolutionary “Terror” such as befell Paris after 1789. This is the power of the crowd’s potential that haunts the Victorian imagination. DICKENS QUARTERLY 95

In Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1921), Freud talks about “the social instinct,” which he also terms “herd instinct” or “group mind,” and asks: “what is the nature of the mental change which [a group] forces upon the individual?” (96–8). Having referred to the work of Le Bon, Freud comments:

A group is impulsive, changeable and irritable. It is led almost exclusively by the unconscious. The impulses which a group obeys may according to circumstances be generous or cruel, heroic or cowardly, but they are always so imperious that no personal interest, not even that of self-preservation, can make itself felt. Nothing about it is premeditated…It has a sense of omnipotence; the notion of impossibility disappears for the individual in a group. (104)

Freud identifies the central issue concerning the crowd as it appears in the writing of Victorian commentators: how individual conscience and behavior can become lost in “mob” unrest. He describes how the group can be persuaded by a charismatic leader: “A group is extraordinarily credulous and open to influence, it has no critical faculty…It respects force and can only be slightly influenced by kindness, which it regards merely as a form of weakness. What it demands of its heroes is strength, or even violence…A group, further, is subject to the truly magical power of words” (104–5). Freud understands how the crowd experience can suggest to the individual a liberation of individuality, an ecstatic loss of self into the exhilaration of the many. He writes: “it is a pleasurable experience for those who are concerned, to surrender themselves so unreservedly to their passions and thus to become merged in the group and to lose the sense of the limits of their individuality” (112). The contrast between collective and individual identity fits exactly with the class-bound debates of the period, with the loss of individual “self” being a fearful development for many authors, while for more radical voices like Marx, it represents a revolutionary leap forward. In a journalistic account of the Sunday Trading riots of 1855, Marx had celebrated the energies of the disruptive crowd as:

a babel of jeering, taunting and discordant noises—in which no lan- guage is so rich as the English…and what a diabolical concert it was: a cacophony of grunting, hissing, whistling, squawking, snarling, growling, croaking, yelling, groaning, rattling, shrieking, gnashing sounds. Music to drive a man out of his mind, music to move a stone. (292)

For Marx, the violent potential of the crowd is something terrible but necessary and to be celebrated. Freud ultimately sees the group 96 DICKENS QUARTERLY experience as something regressive: “thus the group appears to us as a revival of the primal horde. Just as primitive man survives potentially in every individual, so the primal horde may arise once more out of any random collection” (155). The fear of something primitive and violent arising in the midst of the modern crowd is an idea shared by many mid-Victorian authors, with the exception of Marx, who celebrates the unbounded in the rioting crowd. Dickens read Carlyle diligently but seemingly failed to recognize in Chartists’ program the potential for a different kind of revolution. Carlyle was more perceptive when he remarked in “Chartism”: “These Chartisms, Radicalisms, Reform Bill, Tithe Bill…are our French Revolution: God grant that we, with our better methods, may be able to transact it by argument alone!” (181) Carlyle hoped that the British parliamentary system would be broad enough to contain an English Revolution; Dickens feared that political agitation would spill out into the streets. The Gordon Riots provided the perfect model for such a feared outcome, because of the role in the riots of Lord Gordon himself. As Parliament debated his anti- Catholic Bill, “Lord Gordon gave the mob a running commentary on the debate on the petition inside the Commons chamber by addressing them through an open window from the chamber itself” (McClelland 106). According to Mills: “with a restless irritation, he was incessantly moving in and out of the House, and from the gallery that looked down into the lobby, acted the part of fugleman to direct the cheers or the groaning of his lawless followers” (45). The spilling over into the streets of political agitation is neatly illustrated by Dickens. Irresponsible leadership is coupled with an insurgent, increasingly desperate populace, and violence ensues. The revolutionary gathering of “the crowd” signifies not the forces of progress, but of atavism. In reading Barnaby Rudge and A Tale of Two Cities, we will find Dickens treating the crowd as a regressive force, whose anger draws its energy from his own violent imagination and threatens to destroy the institutions that the novel appears to be defending. Describing his progress while at work on Barnaby Rudge, Dickens reported to John Forster: “I have just burnt into Newgate, and am going in the next number to tear the prisoners out by the hair of their heads.” And later: “I have let all the prisoners out of Newgate, burnt down Lord Mansfield’s and played the very devil. Another number will finish the fires…I feel quite smoky when I am at work” (Letters 2: 377; 385). In Barnaby Rudge, Dickens describes the nascent crowd’s religious zealousness. John Willet anticipates the riots, expressing concern for the actions of Lord Gordon, whose sanity he doubts: DICKENS QUARTERLY 97

my lord’s half off his head. When we go out o’ doors, such a set of ragamuffins comes a-shouting after us, “Gordon forever!” that I’m ashamed of myself and don’t know where to look. When we’re in doors, they come a-roaring and screaming about the house like so many devils … One of these evenings, when the weather gets warmer and the Protestants are thirsty, they’ll be pulling London down. (342; ch.35)

The impetus for the riot is born from an uneasy alliance between a decadent and unstable aristocrat and an unruly, demonized populace. It is a black parody of the hoped-for alliance between the people and the aristocracy that Disraeli later popularized as Tory Democracy. Dickens charts the continuing progress of the conspirators, where “the worst passions of the worst men were thus working in the dark, and the mantle of religion, assumed to cover the ugliest deformities, threatened to become the shroud of all that was good and peaceful in society” (415; ch.45). Dickens’s distrust of institutions sees the supposed religious organization of the crowd as inherently dangerous and deceiving. Institutions, including the Church, can mask the machinations of nefarious subjects. The Protestant Association had bred a lack of personal responsibility. Dickens continues his demonizing in scenes depicting the crowd. “The great mass never reasoned or thought at all, but were stimu- lated by their own headlong passions, by poverty, by ignorance, by the love of mischief, and the hope of plunder” (484–5; ch.53). The relationship between crowd violence and contagion echoes Carlyle and looks forward to Bleak House. The crowd corrupts itself, drawing civilized men back into primitivism: “sober workmen, going home from their day’s labour, were seen to cast down their baskets of tools and become rioters in an instant.” Dickens sees an atavistic force in the very nature of the crowd that corrupts all. Something happens in the event of rioting which for Dickens is detached from any overarching narrative of cause. Marx would find a legitimized class conflict; Dickens is on the other side of the barricades, and sees a destructive enemy at work. George Rudé suggests: “Behind the slogan of ‘No Popery’ and the other outward forms of religious fanaticism there lay a deeper social purpose: a groping desire to settle accounts with the rich, if only for a day, and to achieve some rough kind of social justice” (289). This offers a justification for rioting that Dickens would not have entertained. Dickens’s view of crowd behavior, coming fifty years before Gustave Le Bon, nevertheless shares much in common with the findings of the Frenchman. Le Bon identifies the de-civilizing process, echoing the transformation of Dickens’s “sober workman”: “the 98 DICKENS QUARTERLY individual forming part of the crowd acquires, solely from numerical considerations, a sentiment of invincible power which allows him to yield to instincts which, had he been alone, he would perforce have kept under restraint.” Le Bon also employs the idea of the crowd leading to a regression into a more primitive state: “by the mere fact that he forms part of an organized crowd, a man descends several rungs in the ladder of civilization…an individual in a crowd is a grain of sand amid other grains of sand, which the wind stirs up at will” (32). The climax of the riot in Barnaby Rudge presents an equally disturbing picture of the rioting populace. They are equated with the mad. “If Bedlam gates had been flung wide open, there would not have issued forth such maniacs as the frenzy of that night had made” (508; ch. 55). Dickens relishes sketching in the grisly details of the crowd at its height. With buildings set to burning from the rioters’ torches, Dickens picks out “one drunken lad…who lay upon the ground with a bottle to his mouth, the lead from the roof came streaming down in a shower of liquid fire, white hot; melting his head like wax.” The excess of the riot leads not to euphoria but to calamity. The burning lad becomes a metonym of the process of self-damnation that Dickens traces for the crowd. The culmination of the riot finds the people awash in a burning lake of alcohol. It is a Dantesque damnation:

Some men were drawn, alive, but all alight from head to foot; who, in their unendurable anguish and suffering, making for anything that had the look of water, rolled, hissing, in this hideous lake, and splashed up liquid fire which lapped in all it met with as it ran along the surface, and neither spared the living or the dead (618; ch. 68).

The rioters consume themselves as Dickens imaginatively leads them towards damnation as ruinous as that devised by Milton for his fallen angels. The streets of London are reaffirmed as the rioters become mere “dust and ashes” beneath the feet of the enduring city. Dickens equates the loss of government that the riot represents with an irredeemable chaos. He is able to draw the conclusions that “The crowd was the law” (568; ch.63) and that “The whole great mass were mad” (583; ch.64) and find in those two statements equivalence. At no time is the law of the crowd a positive. Not for Dickens the optimism for the democratic potential of the riotous crowd which can be found in the work of twentieth century author Elias Canetti, who affirms “the banging of windows and the crashing of glass are the robust sounds of fresh life, the cries of something new-born” (20). Dickens’s crowd marches relentlessly on towards its own destruction. DICKENS QUARTERLY 99

The political consciousness of the Chartist movement caused Dickens great disquiet, lacking as it did in his eyes any validating government from above. Anne Janowitz suggests that “the middle-class version of the Chartists as brutes is a particularly telling misrepre- sentation of the movement, since Chartism placed literature and literary practice near the heart of its political agenda” (245). As Dickens wrote Barnaby Rudge, Chartism was still not widely seen to have a legitimate form of organization through which to channel its energies constructively and peaceably. The mob of Barnaby Rudge is so terrible because of its incivility. Its leadership is also corrupt. At the book’s end, Lord Gordon is depicted in the Tower awaiting his fate: “feeling for the time their guilt his own, and their lives put in peril by himself; and finding, amidst such reflections, little comfort in fanaticism, or in his fancied call: sat the unhappy author of all” (661; ch.73). He is like Satan sitting atop Pandemonium, having led his troops into Hell. Barnaby Rudge was written at the beginning of the 1840s, when Chartism was still a young movement. Dickens’s novel suggests an awareness of the political crowd as a character on the social stage, rather than a familiarity with the growing language of Chartism itself. A Tale of Two Cities was published in 1859, some time after the Chartists had found a more defined profile and language of representation, and had had their most celebrated public gathering in the 1848. The Chartist peak came on April the 10th of that year, when a vast crowd gathered at Kennington Common in South London under the Chartist banner. Anticipation of the event had a great impact on the civic life of London. The following editorial appeared in The Times on the same day.

We entertain very little doubt as to the sort of demonstration which London will this day make before the world. It will exhibit a firm, peaceful, and most majestic union of all classes in defence of constitu- tional liberty and order…The loyal guardians of order will be at their several posts throughout our vast metropolis; while…forces of ‘physi- cal’ Chartists…will hide their real paucity with the fallacious show of a military procession…London, however, and all the world, will see how really insignificant and powerless is the faction which has dared to threaten the legislature. The malcontents will find every street a rampart, and every house a castle against them. (p. 4, ch. 3)

The newspaper anticipated a show of strength by the law-abiding “guardians” of London, and ridicule for the alien invaders. Violence was not expected, because “no English mob, however wanton and destructive, is ever bloodthirsty.” With revolutionary potential 100 DICKENS QUARTERLY throughout mainland Europe, many establishment figures feared for England. Several days before the rally, the Queen left London for Osborne House on the Isle of Wight. All the bridges over the Thames were barricaded, and soldiers were positioned along the banks of the river and around the Bank of England. Chartist accounts suggested four hundred thousand people would be present. Conservative estimates reported that only ten thousand came, outnumbered by special constables by fifteen-to-one. It was the turning point in the history of Chartism, marking the end of the mass platform protest, and the dissipation of the Chartist crowd. The period after the 1848 Chartist uprising saw significant de- velopments as mass protests gave way to calls for social reform channeled through the press. Feargus O’Connor’s Northern Star, Ernest Jones’s Peoples Paper, and small collectives—described by Gustav Mayer as a “vigorous club and public house culture” (15)— assumed a greater role. The movement also became increasingly internationalist, with the International Committee established between 1854–6, and the International Association from 1856–9, both led by Ernest Jones (Finn 76). Chartists, too, followed a similar evolution, directing their energies towards specific social reforms. Although the political crowd thus declined as a force by the 1850s, the fear of the crowd persisted in Dickens’s work. In 1854 he published Hard Times, which featured a less than flattering portrait of working-class collectivism under the manipulative leadership of the charismatic Slackbridge, who rouses his “Men and Brothers” with the promise that “the hour is come when we must rally round one another as One united power, and crumble into dust the oppressors.” Dickens diminishes Slackbridge’s virtues as a leader by suggesting that he “was above the mass in very little but the stage on which he stood…He was not so honest…he substituted cunning for their simplicity, and passion for their safe solid sense” (bk. 2, ch.4). Trade Unionism is rendered with much suspicion and its leadership depicted as untrustworthy, while the individuals within the crowd are shown to be decent and law-abiding. Dickens fears the possibility of the industrial crowd taking “a wolfish turn” under mendacious leadership. In A Tale of Two Cities the crowd again appears as a primitive character within the drama of the novel, rather than as a conscious reaction against repressive conditions. The destructive path that Dickens describes as the Parisian mob tears through the city indicates just how fearful Dickens remained of collective protests. Dickens places more emphasis on the transforming possibilities of the indi- vidual, the potential for Christian self-sacrifice, rather than a loss of self to the mayhem of the multitude. The Chartist era appears to have led Dickens to re-examine the relationship between the DICKENS QUARTERLY 101 individual and the crowd. He considers the possible spheres of political agency, and sees the more empowering revolution coming not in the language of the “mob,” but in the private realm, in the gesture of individual selflessness. Dickens is sympathetic to the plight of the socially and politically excluded, identifies with specific figures in the crowd, but still fears the crowd en masse. In A Tale of Two Cities, the crowd remains barbarous, the historical period again suggesting a parallel to Dickens’s own times. As the opening proclaims: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only” (bk.1, ch.1). Dickens again hears echoes of past disturbance in his own era. Throughout the novel, the activity of the crowd is juxtaposed with the actions of the individual. Dickens explores the possibility of transcendence, be it through the collectivism of the many or the spiritual agency of the individual. The transcendence Dickens seeks in telling the story promises to offer a way of overcoming the perceived alienation of city inhabitants: “A wonderful fact to reflect upon, that every human creature is constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every other. A solemn consideration, when I enter a great city by night, that every one of those darkly clustered houses encloses its own secret…Something of the awfulness, even of Death itself, is referable to this” (bk. 1, ch.3). The novel explores how the secret life of the individual might be made known to the collective, and how isolation might be over- come. It offers two alternatives: the actions of the many in the crowd, and the sacrifice of the individual. The failure of the Chartists in 1848 indicated that social change was not yet to be achieved through a reformation of the franchise effected by a mass movement. Dickens had resisted this partly through a distrust of Chartism, and also a lack of faith in the machinery of Parliament. Instead, he now looked to the role of the philanthropic individual, the concerned Guardian of the polis, who might succeed in changing the nature of the world in which he lived, through social and environmental reform. Dickens thus privileges the agency of the Christian citizen, striving to establish the City of God in his heart and in the environment within which he sojourned, rather than the appetitive cries of the mass. For Dickens, after 1848, the language of the crowd had to be heeded, lest it unleash the primitive within the city, and the sacrifice of the good citizen must be made for the common good of the polis. The two revolutions are needed; the Two Cities must come together, rather than remain separate nations at war with one another. The heroism of the individual is of course the classic action of the novel form. 102 DICKENS QUARTERLY

Dickens’s endeavor to create a narrative that includes both the drama of the crowd and the journey of the individual indicates the work he performs as a writer to make the novel form fit both the history of the crowd and the story of the individual. Dickens writes both the story of the Christian pilgrimage, and the Carlylean history of Revolution, the story of the crowd, within the same work. The dynamics of the revolutionary crowd are rendered as terrible and frightening. The actions of the mob are prefaced in an incident when a wine cask is accidentally broken, “shattered like a walnut-shell” on the Parisian streets (bk 1, ch.5). A crowd of impoverished citizens gathers to lap up the spilled wine. They are rendered as though at a carnival: “a shrill sound of laughter and of amused voices…resounded in the street while this wine game lasted. There was little roughness in the sport, and much playfulness. There was a special companionship in it.” The description recalls Bakhtin’s theory of the carnival as a festival of allowed transgression whose pleasures offer individuals the means to transcend the separateness of urban living. Freud’s analysis of the group mind is also pertinent: “The Saturnalia of the Romans and our modern carnival agree in this essential feature with the festivals of primitive people, which usually end in debaucheries of every kind and the transgression of what are at other times the most sacred commandments” (163–4). Dickens’s revelers display this transgression to the point of blasphemy. The wine which stains the ground soon turns to blood (bk. 1, ch. 5), as the narrative moves from joy to terror. The crowd enacts a diabolic parody of Christian worship before progressing to criminal destructiveness and the loss of all distinctions between individuals. “The sea of black and threatening waters, and of destructive upheaving of wave against wave…The remorseless sea of turbulently swaying shapes, voices of vengeance, and faces hardened in the furnaces of suffering until the touch of pity could make no mark on them” (bk.2, ch.21). Conditions have engendered the mob, but the progress of it thereafter moves from the particulars of the French situation to a generalized rampage. All revolutions are by implication equally negative. The revolution that Dickens truly supports is in the private realm, in the sacrifice of Sydney Carton, who gives his life so that Charles Darnay might live, and find happiness with Lucie Manette. It is an act of heroism in the world of the individual rather than the political collective. As he prepares for death, Carton proclaims “I see a beautiful city and a brilliant people rising from this abyss, and in their struggles to be truly free, in their triumphs and defeats, through long years to come, I see the evil of this time and of the previous time of which this is the natural birth, gradually making expiation DICKENS QUARTERLY 103 for itself and wearing out” (bk.3, ch.15). The “Two Cities” of the title refer not merely to Paris and London, but to the alternative cities of war and peace, hate and love, of Man and of God, which Dickens imagines. Carton hopes that a city of Christian sacrifice will eventually overcome the city of Terror that the novel has charted. The world of individual moral action opposes the collective of the revolution. Dickens’s crowd fictions illustrate how the nineteenth century novel coped with the new character of the crowd. As we have seen, there are grounds to suggest that the very novel form is at odds with the dynamics of the crowd. The crowd belongs to the epic narrative, the historical sweep, as employed by Carlyle in The French Revolution. The story of the novel is invariably the journey of the individual, on a spiritual quest, or thrown into a picaresque adventure. Georg Lukács explores this collision of forms: “The inner form of the novel has been understood as the process of the problematic individual’s journeying towards himself, the road from dull captivity within a merely present reality—a reality that is heterogeneous in itself and meaningless to the individual—towards clear self-recognition.” Lukács writes as a Marxist and an atheist, and so sees the goal of his subject’s “journey” as being knowledge of self, rather than community with God, as the traditional Pilgrim’s Progress would seek. This journey appears to be at odds with the progress of the epic, the movement of armies and nations, or as Lukács would see it, the struggle of the classes:

The inner shape of the process and the most adequate means of shaping it—the biographical form—reveal the great difference between the discrete, unlimited nature of the material of the novel and the continuum-like infinity of the material of the epic. This lack of limits in the novel has a ‘bad’ infinity about it: therefore it needs certain imposed limits in order to become form. (80–1)

Lukács suggests that the novel form overcomes the problem of the “bad” infinity of its material by employing a biographical structure, by tying the life of the individual to the multifarious events of history, by having the central journey of the subject as the unifying principle of the narrative. This would certainly appear to be true of Dickens in A Tale of Two Cities, where the “infinity” of the revolutionary crowd is linked explicitly to the revolutionary sacrifice of the novel’s hero. The same reconciliation of individual character and the history of class dynamics is pursued by other authors of the Chartist era. The novel form, and specifically, the realist novel, was the vehicle of choice for the fictive chroniclers of the Chartist crowd, 104 DICKENS QUARTERLY and biographers of the Chartist subject. In an age when print-media was the most immediate means of communicating news of contem- porary social and political events, the realist novel functioned as a forum for debate of current affairs. It also offered a means for recon- ciling the imagined plight and path of the epic multitude, and the journey of the individual hero. Realism rendered as historically vital the energies of the crowd, while legitimizing the quest-narrative of the individual, be it spiritual or material, as the binding agent within the sweep of history. Clearly, the arrival of the crowd as a new character in the nine- teenth century novel was influenced by the growth of the Chartist movement. In Barnaby Rudge the crowd is a regressive force, in keeping with early anxieties at the rise of Chartism. In A Tale of Two Cities it is given a greater sense of international and historical significance, just as Chartism had become more defined and respected, though the novel’s crowd is still a brutal force. What Lukács terms as “Bour- geois Realism” was challenged to develop new forms after 1848, because the world which had formed the landscape of realism up to that point shifted dramatically following the events of that year. The assurance of the world-view that gave such authority to the novel form, to the assumed universality of the realist mode, was thrown into uncertainty by the changes of the political and social tapestry. A new character entered the realm of the bourgeois hero, the character of the industrial crowd. Like Frankenstein’s monster, engendered from the bodies of the disenfranchised, or like Heathcliff, gathered up from the streets of the manufacturing north and brought to wreak havoc in the midst of the middle-classes, the industrial crowd was formed into fiction. Social history had shifted, and writers of realist novels, observers and creators of quotidian life, found that their world was being transformed by a force outside of their jurisdiction. Prior to 1848, it is the bourgeois mode of history, as epitomized by the realist novel, which carried the day. After 1848, a different notion of history emerges, one more conscious of class dynamics, which challenges the hegemony of the middle-class monopoly on fictive world-views. Realism was revealed to be an ideological construct. The certainties of the Realist form, which had ascended with the rise of the industrial bourgeoisie, were challenged by the changes of 1848. The more “passionate” genres of melodrama and the historical epic were forcing their way back into literary narrative just as “the crowd” was forcing itself and its agenda into the political drama of British life. Whether one can ever describe Dickens with confidence as a “realist” novelist, there is little doubt that his rendering of public DICKENS QUARTERLY 105 life is affected by the dynamics of the 1840s in this manner. However, if Barnaby Rudge and A Tale of Two Cities can in some ways be seen as representing a reaction against Chartist aims, is Dickens the “true” revolutionary to be found elsewhere? G.K. Chesterton believed so: “the early Dickens period…may have been full of inhuman institutions, but it was full of humanitarian people…It was a shouting, fighting, drinking philanthropy—a noble thing. But in any case, this atmosphere was the atmosphere of the Revolution” (13). Chesterton confirms that it is in the realm of the individual sacrifice, of Christian charity, rather than the organization of institutions, including revolutionary ones, that Dickens the radical is to be found: “His best books are a carnival of liberty...His work has the great glory of the Revolution, the bidding of every man to be himself...The truth he exaggerates is exactly this old Revolution sense of infinite opportunity and boisterous brotherhood” (18). Dickens’s revolution is not to be achieved in the streets with vitriol bottles, but in the reform process of individual sacrifice. Perhaps Dickens the true Radical is to be found in Little Dorrit (1855–7), represented not through the depiction of a structured working class radicalism, but in the heroic actions of the revolutionary individual. Mr. Pancks confronts the Capitalist Casby before the crowd of Bleeding Heart Yard. Pancks has been forced by “The Patriach” to extract money from those at the Yard: “Bleeding Heart Yard had been harrowed by Mr. Pancks, and cropped by Mr. Casby, at the regular seasons; Mr. Pancks had taken all the drudgery and all of the dirt of the business as his share; Mr. Casby had taken all the profits, all the ethereal vapor, and all the moonshine, as his share” (bk.2, ch.32). As Casby has it, Pancks’s role is purely to collect funds: “You are paid to squeeze, and you must squeeze to pay.” Instead of doing his duty by Casby, Pancks knocks his hat off, calls him a “sugary swindler” and “a driver in disguise, a screwer by deputy, a wringer, and squeezer, and shaver by substitute” before the gathered crowd, who cheer Pancks on. Casby is exposed and de-throned, symbolically sheared of his patriarchal locks. The Victorian Capitalist is revealed as a sham. Here is Dickens at his most revolutionary even though the Bleeding Heart crowd makes no movement towards rising up and taking possession of the means of production. As George Bernard Shaw has it, “The difference between Marx and Dickens was that Marx knew he was a revolutionist whilst Dickens had not the faintest suspicion of that part of his calling” (49). In conclusion, we have seen how the perceived inarticulate and unruly crowd is offered a fictive platform by Dickens, albeit a markedly different one from that which Chartism sought to give itself. The apocalyptic influence of Carlyle is clearly apparent 106 DICKENS QUARTERLY throughout. The radical working-class crowd entered the drama of middle-class life, first as a voiceless mass, and then progressively as legitimized individuals, incorporated into the biographical mode, just as the working-classes were eventually to be gathered onto the respectable stage of political enfranchisement.

WORKS CITED

Bakhtin, Mikhail. “Carnival Ambivalence: Laughter, Praise and Abuse.” The Bakhtin Reader. Ed. Pam Morris. London: Edward Arnold, 1994. 206–25. ______. “Folk Humour and Carnival Laughter.” In Morris. 194–205. Briggs, Asa. Chartism. Stroud: Sutton, 1998. Burke, Edmund. Reflections on the Revolution in France. Oxford Oxford UP. 1993. Canetti, Elias. Crowds and Power. Trans. Carol Stewart. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1960. Carlyle, Thomas. “Chartism.” In Selected Writings. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971. ______. The French Revolution: A History. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1989. Chesterton, G.K. Charles Dickens. London: Methuen, 1913. Dickens, Charles. Barnaby Rudge.. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973. ______. Dickens’ Journalism. Volume 2. Ed. Michael Slater. London: J. M. Dent, 1996. ______. Hard Times. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969. ______. The Letters of Charles Dickens. Pilgrim Edition. Ed. Madeline House, et al. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965–2002. ______. Little Dorrit.. Harmonsworth: Penguin, 1998. ______. The Old Curiosity Shop. Harmonsworth: Penguin, 2001. ______. A Tale of Two Cities (1859). Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970. Finn, Margot. After Chartism: Class and Nation in English Radical Politics, 1848–1874. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1993. Freud, Sigmund. “Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego.” In Civilization, Society and Religion. Trans. James Strachey. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985. 91–178. Janowitz, Anne. “Class and Literature: The Case of Romantic Chartism.” Rethinking Class. Ed. Wai Chee Dimock and Michale T. New York: Columbia UP, 1994. 239–66. Le Bon, Gustav. The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind. Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1960. Lukács, Georg. The Theory of the Novel. Trans. Anna Bostock. London: Merlin Press, 1978. McClelland, J.S. The Crowd and the Mob: From Plato to Canetti. London: Unwin Hyman, 1989. Marx, Karl. “Agitation Against the Sunday Trading Bill”. Surveys from Exile: Political Writings Vol II. Ed. David Fernbach. London: Penguin, 1973. 288–98. DICKENS QUARTERLY 107

Mayer, Gustav. Ed. The Era of the Reform League: English Labour and radical Politics1858– 1872. Mannheim: J & J Verlag, 1995. Mills, Rev. Alexius J. F. The History of Riots in London in the Year 1780, Commonly called theGordon Riots. London: Lane & Son, 1883. Plato. The Republic. Trans. Desmond Lee. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1995. Rudé, George. Paris and London in the 18th Century. London: Collins, 1970. Shaw, George Bernard. “Forward to Great Expectations.” Shaw on Dickens. Ed. Dan H. Lawrence and Martin Quinn. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1985. 45–59. Thompson, E. P. The Making of The English Working Class. Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1963. The Times. “Meeting of the Working Classes in Palace Yard.” 18 Sept. 1838. 6, col.1–6. ______. “The Manchester Demonstration in favour of Ultra-Radicalism.” 26 Sept. 1838. 5, col. 4–6. ______. “London, Monday, April 10th, 1848.” 10 April 1848. 4, col. 3. N 108 DICKENS QUARTERLY

THE DROOD REMAINS REVISITED: “FIRST FANCY”

ARTHUR J. COX

et us begin at the beginning, with (despite its familiarity) John LForster’s original testimony: His first fancy for the tale was expressed in a letter in the middle of July. “What would you think of the idea of a story beginning in this way?—two people, boy and girl, or very young, going apart from one another, pledged to be married after many years—at the end of the book. The interest to arise out of the tracing of their separate ways, and the impossibility of telling what will be done with that impending fate.” This was laid aside; but it left a marked trace on the story as afterwards designed, in the position of Edwin Drood and his betrothed. (11, 2 807)

However, as George H. Ford pointed out in 1952 (279), the lines Forster quotes are almost identical with those of an entry in a notebook Dickens kept for some years, starting in January of 1855: “The idea of a story beginning in this;—two people—boy and girl, or very young—going apart from another”; with the rest being identical, even as to punctuation, with the contents of the letter as quoted by Forster.1 Felix Aylmer, commenting on this in The Drood Case (1964), says uncompromisingly:

Forster has copied this out verbatim, and presents it as a personal letter written to himself. The notion that Dickens might have turned up the entry and copied it is clearly as improbable as that it should fall from his pen seven years later in identical words. 2

The language of the first half of that second sentence rather prejudices the matter. There is nothing inherently improbable in a writer consulting an old notebook and deciding to use some idea he finds there as the subject of a new work; and we know that Dickens requisitioned from this notebook some names used in three of his compositions of the late 1860s: “George Silverman’s Explanation” (1868), The Mystery of Edwin Drood (begun 1869) and the so-called Sapsea Fragment (to which I will assign no date at the moment).3 Still, there remains the curious coincidence of phrasing that DICKENS QUARTERLY 109 troubled Ford and Aylmer, and there is something else too that arouses suspicion. Forster included in the Life a chapter, “Hints for Books Written and Unwritten” (9, 7), in which he reproduces most of the entries he found in the Book of Memoranda, but among those he does not reproduce—“for some reason, perhaps a perverse one,” says Ford (279)—is the one supposedly echoed in the letter of July of 1869. But Forster’s failure to disclose the passage he quotes as being also a notebook entry is of doubtful evidentiary value. Its appearance in the earlier “Hints” chapter would not only undercut the strong dramatic interest of the letter but would also have another undesirable effect: Dickens’s dredging up of a notebook entry made a dozen years before as inspiration for his new book would, as Forster had reason to know, confirm the judgment of “those who have asserted that the hopeless decadence of Dickens as a writer had set in before his death” (11, 2; 810). As it happens, there is an instance in which Forster presents one of Dickens’s ideas as both a notebook jotting and as the contents of a letter, and this provides us with a means of comparing the two cases.

Open a story by bringing two strongly contrasted places and strongly contrasted sets of people into the connexion necessary for the story, by means of an electric message—flashing along through space—over the earth and under the sea.

This is Kaplan’s entry 89. Forster quotes it, with minor inaccuracies (9, 7; 751), as a notion from the Book of Memoranda, and also, in a footnote on the same page, as among the contents of a letter Dickens had written him on 25 August 25 1862. I think this second version should be given in full too, to demonstrate its evident authenticity:

I am trying to coerce my thoughts into hammering out the Christmas number. And I have an idea of opening a book (not the Christmas number—a book) by bringing together two strongly contrasted places and two strongly contrasted sets of people, which and with whom the story is to rest, through the agency of an electric message. I think a fine thing may be made of the message itself shooting over the land and under the sea and it would be a curious way of sounding the keynote. (Letters 10: 120)

Dickens obviously has the notebook before him here, but he does not simply copy out the entry but casually varies the wording in writing to his friend—it is difficult to imagine him doing anything else. The note, as should be expected, has more energy, but the 110 DICKENS QUARTERLY letter has the advantage of an added touch: that small but telling detail about the keynote, or motif, of the book, which was to be given a novel charge (for the early 1860s) by being expressed in, or as, the contents of an electrically transmitted message. It will be noticed that there are no such differences between the words of the boy-and-girl entry in the notebook and the passage as quoted by Forster from the mid-July letter. In the last the entry has been closely copied (though with the punctuation standardized and a few words added for intelligibility) and that strongly suggests that Dickens did not, on this occasion, write the words Forster quotes. Aylmer’s pronouncement was a daring one at the time, but it received unexpected support the next year when the first volume of the new Pilgrim Letters was published. The editors, Madeline House and Graham Storey, speaking of Forster’s Life of Charles Dickens, say:

Into later chapters he introduced, once more as if quoting from letters to himself, early ideas for Our Mutual Friend and Edwin Drood which Dickens had noted down in his ‘Book of Memoranda’. (1: xi)

There is, however, an additional reason for regarding Forster’s account with skepticism and that is that the idea itself seems a rather thin notion for Dickens to have contemplated as the subject of a novel at this stage of his career. It might sustain a serial in All the Year Round of about the same length as Hard Times, but it could hardly support twenty monthly numbers, as did the subjects of his major novels, nor perhaps even one in twelve numbers, such as Drood was meant to be. That a book of the first mentioned length could be based on the notion cannot be doubted, for one was: Wilkie Collins used it as the basis of his novel The Two Destinies in 1876.4 But Dickens, since he had begun keeping the notebook, had written Little Dorrit, A Tale of Two Cities, Great Expectations and Our Mutual Friend, and a whole book based on this charming but slight idea would have meant (would it not?) a rather steep step down. Forster tells us that Dickens wrote again on 6 August 1869, saying, in words quoted even oftener than those of the letter of mid-July: “I have laid aside the fancy I told you of, and have a very curious and new idea for my new story. …Not a communicable idea (or the interest of the book would be gone), but a very strong one, though difficult to work” (Letters 12: 389–90). Like everyone, I believe this letter to be genuine, but I would extend that acceptance even to its opening phrase, “I laid aside the fancy I told you of.” Why would Forster invent a situation in which Dickens changed his mind about the subject of his next novel? The impression I have of him is that he would never mislead his readers perversely DICKENS QUARTERLY 111 or capriciously—for John Forster was a man of conscience. That is to say, he lied only when conscience advised him to lie. It often did, but even when it did, he observed certain constraints. “The Life,” say the editors of the Pilgrim Letters, “contains numerous small distortions of fact, but paradoxically those distortions were in the interests of a larger, or ideal, truth” (Letters 1: xi). After giving some examples of his habit of implying that letters Dickens wrote to Lytton and Maclise and to members of his own family were to Forster himself, they add: “Here, as when drawing on the ‘Book of Memoranda,’ Forster disingenuously chose his words so that nothing he said was actually untrue.”5 I take this to mean that the sentence from Forster with which we began, “His first fancy for the tale was expressed in a letter in the middle of July,” is literally true—but that the assumption that it has a direct and immediate connection with the sentences that follow is the reader’s assumption and the reader’s mistake. In other words: Dickens had in fact communicated a “fancy” to him at the time, but it was not about two young people pledged to each other and then parted. But if it were not that, what was it? It must have been an idea that Forster did not care to share with the public. That is to say, it must have been a dangerous idea, one in which Dickens touched—touched lightly, perhaps, and, as he might say, delicately, but nevertheless touched—upon a suspect, sensitive or even offensive topic. It is impossible not to ask ourselves what that might have been. It may be supposed that there is no way in which such a question could be answered, and yet there is, I think, an avenue of approach: Forster’s character as a biographer. The man who could not bring himself to commit an unambiguous lie would also shrink from lying unambiguously by omission. If he thought it best to withhold some bit of information from the reader, he would hedge the offense by giving some intimation of it, if not at the moment, then elsewhere. The most congenial place for such a hint in the volume the reader was presently holding in his hand, the third and last volume, would be the chapter, “Hints for Books Written and Unwritten”—and, actually, after canvassing the volume, I have concluded that it is not only the most likely place but the only place it could be. And I believe I have identified it. The “two young people pledged to be married” is listed by Fred Kaplan in his Charles Dickens’ Book of Memoranda as entry 72. This is entry 65, two pages earlier:

The father (married young) who, in perfect innocence, venerates his son’s young wife, as the realisation of his ideal of woman. (He not 112 DICKENS QUARTERLY

happy in his own choice.) The son slights her, and knows nothing of her worth. The father watches her, protects her, labors for her, endures for her—is forever divided between his strong natural affection for his son as his son, and his resentment against him as this young creature’s husband.

Kaplan dates this as 1857 and reminds us that Dickens, “(not happy in his own choice),” had met the much younger Ellen Ternan in the summer of 1857. Forster includes this “fancy,” as he calls it, in his “Hints” chapter, with the cautionary comment that it is “A theme verging closely on ground that some might think dangerous” (9, 7; 752) My suggestion—of course—is that entry 65 was in fact the idea that Dickens presented to Forster in the middle of July of 1869 as the basis of his next novel, and that Forster—again: of course— disapproved, thinking it injurious to Dickens’s reputation and to the common good. If the suppressed idea were not what we now know as entry 65, it would have to be some other “dangerous” idea, and, in that case too, we would find it in “Hints for Books Written and Unwritten,” as it provides a context that would render almost any story-idea (or, anyway, any that Dickens would be likely to suggest) harmless. A brief survey of the chapter will give us a better idea of the other candidates for suppression and of the weight that should be given to entry 65. There are two “Hints” that touch upon what were at the time sensitive subjects. Forster says (9, 7; 753) that a “troubled note is sounded” in the first of these: “I am a common woman, fallen. Is it devilry in me—is it wicked comfort—what is it—that induces me to be always tempting other women down, while I hate myself” (Kaplan, entry 52). Forster adds, same page, “This next, with as much truth in it, goes deeper than the last.” Longer than the other, it begins: “The Prostitute who will not let a certain youth approach her. ‘O let there be someone in the world—who, having an inclination to me, has not gratified it, and has not known me in my degradation!” (Kaplan, entry 27). Dickens evidently thought he might make use of one or both of these ideas at some later time, but neither could be the “fancy” he had laid aside. That was clearly meant to be the subject of a novel and these two jottings are not of subjects for books but of characters for use in books, and probably secondary characters. There is one other entry that looks, at first glance, as if it might be a candidate for suppression. Immediately after speaking of the entry verging closely on dangerous ground, Forster says (9, 7; 752), “Here is another, less dangerous, which he took from an actual occurrence DICKENS QUARTERLY 113 made known to him when he was at Bonchurch”:

The idea of my being brought up by my mother—me, the narrator— my father being dead; and growing up in this belief until I find that my father is the gentleman I have seen, and oftener heard of, who has the handsome young wife, and the Dog I once took notice of when I was a little child, and who lives in the great house and drives about.6

This notion is indeed less dangerous and since, in addition, it has no personal connection to Dickens, it seems unlikely that Forster would have suppressed it—and even less likely that Dickens would have suggested it, for it hardly seems possible that the author of Our Mutual Friend would have contemplated this scrap of worldly gossip as the subject of that book’s successor. There is no other idea lifted from the notebook to which Forster expresses even the slightest objection—and an objection is essential, as it would be his motive for not disclosing it as the content of the July letter. However, it has to be added that he does not include all the notebook entries in his “Hints” chapter. He mentions seven in other chapters and leaves out twenty-five altogether—Kaplan gives a complete list of all these (pp. 7–8). Of those mentioned in other chapters, two are small puns and three are names used in Our Mutual Friend. Only two are ideas for stories, one being the already familiar boy-and-girl entry, and the other, equally harmless, a sketch of a self-sacrificing woman, transparently based on Dickens’s sister- in-law, Georgina Hogarth. The twenty-five with which Forster did not bother at all are even less promising. Most are very spare, consisting of only two or three words, some so cryptic and private that it is impossible to tell what Dickens had in mind. The most pregnant with possibility is one (Kaplan’s 87), which reads, in its entirety, “WE, fettered together.” Even if this were developed further, it is not likely that Dickens would have offered it to Forster as the subject of his next novel, because of its troubling evocation of his own marriage and his certain knowledge that his friend would instinctively object to it. In short, it appears that of all the notebook entries, whether reproduced in “Hints for Books Written and Unwritten” or elsewhere in the volume, or not reproduced at all, only entry 65 is a plausible and likely candidate for suppression. Forster, then, working a few years later on the last chapters of the Life, would have been sorely divided as whether or not to mention this matter. As an honest man he would have preferred to speak with perfect candor, but his primary purpose in writing this laborious biography (begun when he was old and ill and now in no better 114 DICKENS QUARTERLY condition) was to build a monument to his friend, and this necessarily meant presenting him in the best possible light. He quietly dropped matters that were of a purely private nature and softened others; but in this respect he was, as the editors of the Letters observe (1: xii, note 2), not much different from other biographers of the time. He wanted to speak the truth if he decently could, but in the end could not bring himself to blot his book by including in it a notion for a Dickens novel in which an older man falls in love with his son’s wife—for that would be the light in which a considerable portion of his readership would view the suggested story. This was not only undesirable in itself, it would drag in its wake another consequence, one that would be more personally and sharply felt: he would be putting a weapon into the hands of those detractors of Dickens who had sprung up after his separation from his wife, and he knew that among those would be some who would be able to make the connection with the writer’s own relationship with a younger woman. So he decided not to follow that example of complete truthfulness and openness set by Mr. Crisparkle, to such disastrous effect, in chapter 16 of Edwin Drood 7 but instead to observe a more ancient principle: you may speak of this at home, “but tell it not in the streets of Gath, lest the daughters of the Philistines rejoice.” And yet how could he not tell the reader of this important statement about a novel the greatest writer of the age had thought of writing without failing in his duty as a biographer? This was the moral and professional dilemma with which he was faced; but the resourceful Forster (for whom I have the greatest respect, despite what I must say about him now and will say in the future) found a way out. After his friend’s death, he had necessarily, in his capacity as literary co-executor, examined Dickens’s memoranda book (from which he later gleaned the materials for “Hints for Books Written and Unwritten”) and recognized entry 65 as the idea Dickens had commu- nicated to him in July of 1869, and which he—we can hardly doubt it—had solemnly advised against. Dickens must have jotted it down some years before, perhaps in 1857, as Kaplan proposes, but he is not likely to have forgotten it. By the late 1860s the idea would have acquired for him an even greater resonance because of his sustained relationship with Ellen; but, regardless, he ran across it again when looking through his old notebook in search of names for use in what would prove to be his last three works of fiction. For Forster the entry was a lucky find. It meant that he could still pass on the idea to his readers, but in the guise of a mere notebook jotting (which indeed it was), without informing them that Dickens had seriously considered it as the subject of his next novel. He did so, telling his readers that Dickens had presented him with an idea DICKENS QUARTERLY 115 in the middle of July and telling them what it was—after neatly detaching the idea from its context and displaying it, as it were, to one side. He doled out the date of the letter and the subject of the letter as separate fragments of truth having no connection with each other, but nevertheless he had supplied both bits of information and so, in a sense, had withheld nothing. There is an obvious, if somewhat obtuse, objection that could be made here. Is it plausible that Forster would suppress the fact that Dickens had suggested such an idea in a letter and then publish it elsewhere in his book? Wouldn’t the same objections that kept him from mentioning it on one page also prevent him from bringing it to the reader’s attention on another? No: for it is one thing to entertain an idea—that is, to suggest a possibility, one of scores of possibilities sent up in a pyrotechnic display of ideas within the compass of a few pages—and another to actually work it out through a full-length novel. The sympathetic portrayal of the older man’s love, however innocent, for his son’s wife, with all the detailed conviction and realized feelings of a novel, would have for certain persons in Dickens’s large audience, as Forster knew, the effect of giving license.8 It would necessarily involve the writer in the responsibility for the story and its consequences—the human consequences being of greater weight to both Dickens and Forster than the mere infringement of a propriety. Forster’s most important pronouncement on this subject comes in what should have been the last chapter of his book, “Closing Word”:

Looking back over the series of his writings, the first reflection that rises to the mind of any thoughtful person, is one of thankfulness that the most popular of writers…should never have sullied that world- wide influence by a hint of impurity or a possibility of harm. (9, 8; 761–2)

If the suppositious novel had been written, these words might have stuck in his throat a little. Even if he felt, as he surely would, that the story, properly understood, was harmless, he would have known that there would be those who would discount the innocence of the older man’s love and regard it as coming within hailing distance of unwholesome impulses of a peculiarly offensive nature. This was the dangerous ground so closely verged upon, ground rather flatly, perhaps a little too flatly, identified by Fred Kaplan in his discussion of entry 65 (p. 95) as “incest.”9 Although Forster had solved one problem by including the objectionable idea, in passing, as one of the “Hints for Books Written and Unwritten,” he was still faced with another—for a blank 116 DICKENS QUARTERLY had been left. What was the subject of the letter of mid-July? Dickens’s opening words, as quoted from the letter of 6 August, “I laid aside the fancy I told you of, and have a very curious and new idea for my new story,” are such an integral and harmless part, and such a fascinating part, of the statement that Forster could not lay them aside without violating his own editorial ideals and instincts. His modus operandi was to tell the truth, except where it might give aid and comfort to a greater untruth; and in that case either to withhold all or part of the truth, or, if necessary and possible, to practice some harmless sleight of hand. In this particular case, he had to satisfy his reader’s natural curiosity as to the fancy that had been laid aside. Fortunately, the Book of Memoranda was still at hand. The dangerous idea was mentioned on the fourteenth page. Two pages further on he noticed an entry that not only expressed an idea that was completely harmless and innocent in itself but had the added advantage of being anticipatory of one of the story-elements of Drood. The resemblance was slight, but it was substantial enough for him to plausibly suggest that “it left a marked trace on the story afterwards designed, in the position of Edwin Drood and his betrothed.” And so he quietly replaced what is now entry 65 with what is now entry 72. We might take a moment to consider whether the situation of the boy and girl in entry 72 really is similar to the position of Rosa and Edwin in respect to each other. At a glance it seems to be: both couples are very young, each couple is engaged to marry, and both couples part. But the idea as expressed in the notebook jotting appears to be that the two have voluntarily pledged each other as childhood sweethearts, and this has no bearing on Edwin and Rosa. They were pledged in marriage by their fathers when they were still small children and they feel no more attraction to each other than do birds raised in the same nest. There is no sentimental attachment between them except, finally, after they themselves bravely dissolve their imposed engagement, that of “brother and sister from this day forth” (146; ch. 13). It should be noted that they disengage them- selves and part not at the beginning of the book, in the first monthly number, but in the fourth, about one third of the way through the projected story: and I would add that is impossible to believe that there is any earthly chance that Edwin would be reunited with Rosa at the close of the story. This would be true even if he were not dead (a grave drawback), and it would be true too even if his replacement, the gallant Tartar, were not so soon afterwards on the scene. Anyone who feels a lingering affection for the notion that these attractive young people, Edwin and Rosa, are naturally meant for each other should re-read chapter 13, ‘Both at Their Best,” while keeping in DICKENS QUARTERLY 117 mind the marital history of the author. The sobering words Dickens puts into Rosa’s mouth (147) are not those of a writer planning to re-join the two as a romantic couple in the last pages. Still, there are the three points of resemblance noted and so Forster’s modest claim that the boy-and-girl notion left a “marked trace” on Drood is barely worth disputing10 ; but I believe that if he had not falsely presented it as Dickens’s “first fancy for the tale,” no one going through the notebook from his day to ours, would have detected even the slightest connection between entry 72 and The Mystery of Edwin Drood. My line of argument and conjecture so far is based upon two assumptions—that the suppressed notion had to be one Forster thought dangerous and that it is to be found among the ideas in Dickens’s notebook—to which there are two rather obvious challenges. The first is that it may not have been a dangerous idea but one that Forster objected to for some other reason; the second, that even if it were a dangerous idea, it may not have been one listed in the notebook. There would seem to be only one way in which that first possibility could have been realized, and that is if Dickens had proposed as the subject of his next novel a story-idea which Forster, always protective of his friend’s reputation, thought too lame to be exposed to public notice. This is not a possibility that need detain us long. No doubt, many feeble fancies drifted through Dickens’s head as he pottered about his desk and study, but if we look again at his Book of Memoranda we see that, though many are cryptic, most are slight and all need development, none strike us as pointless, common- place or ridiculous. He obviously maintained certain standards even while jotting down stray notions in what was meant to be a private notebook, so it is not likely that he would have passed on a weak story-idea to the always-exacting Forster. It must, after all, have been an offensive idea that his biographer withheld from us. But that still leaves us with the second challenge, which has to be taken more seriously than the first. Dickens evidently kept up the Book of Memoranda during the years 1855 to 1865 and he communicated the disputed idea, what- ever it was, to Forster about the middle of 1869. What would have prevented him from coming up with a new idea in the four years since 1865? We would expect that such an inventive writer would have had, despite any fears of failing memory and inspiration (his supposed reason for keeping the notebook: see Life, 8, 2; 636–7), a good many ideas for novels during that time, and he might well have passed on one of these to Forster. Our first thought is that in such case we would be at a loss for 118 DICKENS QUARTERLY comment, as there would be nothing of which to take hold—except, on further reflection, once again, the character and habits of Forster as a biographer. If Dickens had seriously proposed an objectionable idea for which there was no corresponding entry in the notebook, he, the conscientious Forster, would not have been able to pass it off as merely an idea entertained in passing. What, then, could he do? His alternatives would have been these: First, to candidly declare it as the subject of the July letter—which he did not do. Second, to devise some other means of hiding it in plain sight—and if he has done that, he would have cause to congratulate himself, for it has eluded me and, or so I suppose, all other readers. Third, to suppress it entirely—which would be, I think, painfully out of character for him. He could satisfy his conscience only by giving us, however obliquely, some indication of it, and that, as far as I have been able to determine, he has not done. It might be supposed that there is still another possibility: that the proffered fancy was so discreditable to Dickens and potentially so pernicious in its effects that its very existence could not be acknowledged in any form. But such a notion cannot be accepted, for a reason that is both obvious and final: it is impossible to imagine Charles Dickens proposing such an idea to John Forster. What, then, can we conclude about this matter? The suggestion made here—that Dickens’s “first fancy” for his new book was the same as that expressed in the notebook about the older man’s tender concern for his son’s wife—remains, after careful consider- ation, the only likely possibility. Although it cannot be said to be a certainty, it has so much to recommend it that it can safely be regarded as not only possible but probable. Unarguable proof or disproof must wait upon the discovery of the actual letter of July of 1869.

NOTES

1 Wording taken from Kaplan, where it appears as entry 72. I will refer to the MS volume consulted by Forster as the Book of Memoranda (without italics) or as the notebook. 2 Aylmer says “seven years later,” because he assumes that the entry may have been made as late as August 1862. Kaplan disagrees: “Undoubtedly entry 72 is no earlier than May 1857 and no later than Nov 1860” (97). 3 The names he used are Silverman and Hawkyard in “George Silverman’s Explanation,” Sapsea, Kimber and Peartree in the Sapsea Fragment, and Sapsea in The Mystery of Edwin Drood. See Kaplan, entry 111 for Hawkyard and 109 for the others. DICKENS QUARTERLY 119

4 London: Chatto and Windus, 1876; 2 vols., after being serialized in Temple Bar, January to September 1876. The book has exactly the same premise as that which Dickens supposedly proposed to Forster, although Collins does what Dickens would not have done by giving it a morbid, occultish flavor. The initial public airing of CD’s “first fancy” was in the third volume of the Life, issued in 1874, and so Collins, though busy with a novel and a play in 1874–5, must have seized upon it with a marvelous alacrity. I estimate its length as about 95,000 words, a little longer than that of Hard Times. Catherine Peters comments in The King of Inventors: A Life of Wilkie Collins (London: Minerva Press, 1991): “It would have been adequate as a short story…. Stretched on the procrustean bed of the library novel, with the anagnorisis repeatedly postponed, it becomes absurd” (381). The Two Destinies is included as volume 28 of The Works of Wilkie Collins (1900). 5 There is a curious echo of these last words in chapter 19 of The Mystery of Edwin Drood. In the scene in the garden, Jasper, speaking of the missing Drood, tells Rosa, “So long as you were his, so long as I supposed you to be his, I hid my secret loyally. Did I not?” Comments the narrator, “This lie, so gross, while the mere words in which it is told are so true, is more than Rosa can endure.” (214). My intention is not to equate John Forster with John Jasper: the equivocations by Dickens’s friend were, on the whole, benign rather than diabolical. For a balanced and persuasive account of Forster’s philosophy and methods in writing the Life, see the second section (pp. xi–xvii) of House and Storey’s Preface to the first volume of the Letters. 6 (Life 9, 7; 752); and see entry 66 in the Kaplan volume. Forster does not reproduce the parenthetical notation with which the entry ends: “(White’s ‘Harriet’s’ boy).” Kaplan comments: “The source of the idea was the Reverend James White (1803–62), Dickens’s friend, neighbor and landlord at Bonchurch” (94). 7 “He was among the truest of men, but he had been balancing in his mind, much to its distress, whether his volunteering to tell these two fragments of truth, at this time, would not be tantamount to a piecing together of falsehood in place of truth” (180; ch. 16). Still, he does so, with the effect he feared. The phrase “fragments of truth” is worth keeping in mind. 8 Dickens’s most revealing statement on this subject is to be found in his letter to Forster of 15 August 1856, which is often quoted and always misunderstood. The “smooth gentleman” who complains that the heroes of English novels are “too good— not natural, &c,” is descended from “that smooth-faced gentleman” of King John (2. 1, 571–4), who would cheat a poor maid of the only thing she has (Life 9, 1; 715–6). That is, he is not a prude or a philistine, as he is invariably taken to be, but a libertine. Dickens is saying to the libertine that it is because of you that I cannot write candidly about these matters—the implication being that if all men were “decent,” he could (though within certain limits of language, no doubt). It should be noted that in Letters “not natural,” above, appears as “too natural” (8: 178). 9 There appears to be a reminiscence of entry 65 in chapter 10 of Drood. Neville Landless finds that he is in love with Rosa and tells Crisparkle, “I admire Miss Bud, sir, so very much that I cannot bear her being treated with conceit or indifference,” as he imagines she is by Edwin Drood. The amazed Crisparkle tells Neville that his 120 DICKENS QUARTERLY

“admiration, if it be of that special nature which you seem to indicate, is outrageously misplaced. Moreover, it is monstrous that you should take upon yourself to be the young lady’s champion against her chosen husband” (106; ch. 10). And yet the older man in entry 65, who is meant to be not only sympathetic but admirable, bears in this respect a distinct resemblance to Neville. He resents his son’s treatment of his daughter-in- law—with good reason, for his son “slights her, and knows nothing of her worth,” with the result that he, the father, “watches her, protects her, labors for her,” and in short, is to some degree the young lady’s champion against her chosen husband. The difference between his situation and that of Neville is that he has a legitimate interest in her well-being, and, also, his admiration for her is not of that “special nature.” It is “innocent,” in that it has no acknowledged sexual element (and so any explicit charge of incest is not actionable). Dickens wrote this passage in Drood a dozen years after he entered the note about the older man’s love in his Book of Memoranda and perhaps half a year after he had presented Forster with that “first fancy.” If we are right in our conjecture as to what that fancy was, we can wonder whether Crisparkle’s words to Neville echo in any way what Forster had to say about the matter. Perhaps…but probably not. The casualness of Dickens’s wording in his letter of August 6 (“I laid aside the fancy I told you of”) indicates that there had been nothing momentous in Forster’s response. It certainly could not have been as severe as Crisparkle’s reproof to Neville, and may have been only a careful judgment along the lines of the comment already quoted, that it was “a theme verging closely on ground some might think dangerous.” 10 If Dickens had died a few years earlier, Forster would have been able to claim that entry 72 had left “a marked trace on the story” of Our Mutual Friend, in the positions of John Rokesmith and Bella Wilfer in respect to each other.

WORKS CITED

Aylmer, Felix. The Drood Case. London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1964. Dickens, Charles. The Letters of Charles Dickens. Vol 1. Eds.Madeline House and Graham Storey. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965. Dickens, Charles. The Mystery of Edwin Drood. Ed. David Paroissien. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2002. Ford, George H. “Dickens’s Notebook and Edwin Drood.” Nineteenth-Century Fiction 6 (1952): 275–80. Forster, John. The Life of Charles Dickens (1872-74). Ed. J.W.T. Ley. London: Cecil Palmer, 1928. All references to this book will give the book and chapter numbers common to all editions, with the page numbers of the Ley edition. Kaplan, Fred. Ed. Charles Dickens’s Book of Memoranda. New York Public Library, 1981. DICKENS QUARTERLY 121

REVIEWS

Terry Eagleton. The English Novel: An Introduction. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005. Pp. x + 365. $24.95.

he first thing that is striking about this book is its canonical conservatism. Eagleton accommodates eighteen significant T practitioners of “the English novel”: Defoe, Swift, Fielding, Richardson, Sterne, Scott, Austen, the Brontës (Anne is swept in by her sisters), Dickens, Eliot, Hardy, James, Conrad, Lawrence, Joyce and Woolf. Like Ian Watt fifty years ago (The Rise of the Novel), he accords such an innovative writer as Tobias Smollett one passing reference (109; not indexed), while the “mothers of the novel” are nowhere to be seen. There is no Aphra Behn here, no Eliza Heywood. Later absentees include Burney, Radcliffe, Mary Shelley (indeed, Gothic novelists in general), Godwin, Thackeray, Trollope, Collins and Gaskell. According to Eagleton’s would-be pre-emptive preface, this selectivity “was determined by the need to discuss authors whom students are at present most likely to encounter in their work” (ix), but does this adequately reflect the courses that are nowadays taught? Besides, is Eagleton not being too modest about his own role in canon-formation? If these same authors do go on being taught to the exclusion of all others, this would partly be the result of this book. Eagleton’s elitism is especially problematical because he fitfully seeks to make points about the novel as a developing genre, not just about great writers. There is enough in the chapter on Scott and Austen to suggest that the former was as significant as the latter, and that he played a particular role in developing the novel as a genre that criticised and shaped society, but when Eagleton claims that Scott re-packaged the novel as more than “just a genre for fantasizing females” (95), the reader has no way to determine where this reputation came from. It does not seem to fit Eagleton’s discussions of Defoe or Swift or Sterne, whose various forms of political and philosophical engagement he brings out very well. Is it Pamela that was responsible? That is the only novel that Eagleton has mentioned that seems remotely to fit the bill. “The realist novel represents one of the great cultural forms of human history. In the domain of culture, it has something like the importance of steam-power or electricity in the material realm, or of democracy in the political sphere” (19). But this allusion to democracy, together with Eagleton’s regular classification of authors as conservative or radical (or partly one and partly the other), sits very oddly with his lack of real interest in the novel as a form for the masses: masses of writers, not just readers. 122 DICKENS QUARTERLY

Nevertheless, Eagleton does seek to evaluate his individual star novelists in socio-political terms, and the Dickens chapter is typical in this respect. Thus, Dickens’s work coincides with and expresses the demographic shift to the city: “As the urban population swelled, people would for the first time no longer know where their food and drink came from” (143). This can be linked to a whole different level of fascinating and terrifying rootlessness, in novels such as Oliver Twist, Little Dorrit and Great Expectations, where, despite what Eagleton will elsewhere identify as Dickens’s intellectual short- comings, he manages to address “the mysterious sources of human identity—…how we come to be who we are, whether we are who we think we are ” (144). Dickens, on the evidence of Hard Times, is “pretty ignorant of industrialism” (143), but, in other ways, he is grittily embroiled in working-class life: “It is an art of the streets rather than simply about them: graphic, flamboyant, amplified, some- times brash and shamelessly manipulative” (145). Harsh social realities dictate not just the tone and vocabulary, but also the imagery, structure and ethos of Dickens’s novels: “We have entered a phase of social history in which all the real power seems to have been taken over by material things—money, institutions, commodities, power relations—while human beings themselves, falling under their tyrannical sway, are reduced to the level of coalbuckets and candlesticks. It is money which motivates Dickens’s plots from start to finish” (146). All of this is pertinent and lucid; it points readers towards aspects of Dickens that are among the most important, and may enrich their experience of his texts. It is a pity, therefore, that Eagleton also repeats a lot of familiar claims about Dickens that are erroneous and condescending, and that encourage the reader to take him less seriously. “Almost everyone in Dickens…has his or her inimitable quick-fire delivery, churlish mumble, wheedling whine, verbose ramblings, pious cant or portentous rhetoric” (147). Hardly. These are just the “memorable” characters. Dickens’s novels typically consist of interactions between characters like these and a whole other category who are well spoken and (in a way) colorless: if this contrast were not there, the novels would be very different and considerably less provocative. “In Dickens, you cannot be virtuous and have greasy skin” (148). Well, think about this in relation to Bleak House and smallpox: it is not that there is no truth whatever in the claim, but its glibness belies a much more complex textual reality. Apparently, Dickens “has none of the intellectual resources of George Eliot, and little of the psychological subtlety of Henry James. …his psychological effects are the kind that can be seen from the back of the hall” (161–62). The first half of this claim is DICKENS QUARTERLY 123 true enough, if indeed you judge Dickens by a specifically Eliotic kind of intellectualism and a specifically Jamesian kind of subtlety. And the second half does a kind of justice to Dickens the public reader—but certainly not to his printed texts. Eagleton’s knowledge of the critical literature seems to be seriously out of date, circa 1970. More post-Raymond Williams reading would have helped him acquire a fuller picture of what Dickens has to offer, of how his texts, in their minutiae, do their work. It may be true that many of Dickens’s individual psychological types and “portraits” are crude, and yet, as many recent critics have demonstrated, they are deployed within their context in such a way that the whole effect, in terms of psychological and philosophical questions (not just social ones), is far from crude. It is all very well to talk about sitting at the back of the hall in a critical study that hardly every pays attention to a specific line of text. Similar reservations have to be expressed about Eagleton’s accounts of other authors. In the Conrad chapter, for example, there is a good passage where Eagleton actually quotes a few phrases from Heart of Darkness (244–45) to back up his vigorous, aggressive and (for those who have an independent knowledge both of the primary texts and of some of the critical literature) rather persuasive account of Conrad’s moral and political vision. But elsewhere he makes claims like this: “Conrad admires stolidly unimaginative types like McWhirr in Typhoon, the French lieutenant in Lord Jim or Captain Mitchell in Nostromo, men whose very obtuseness or insensitive egoism lend them a kind of bovine courage” (234). How are emphatic judgments of this kind (so eminently quotable in undergraduate essays) arrived at? Given that Eagleton is best known for Literary Theory: An Introduction, this is strangely pre-theoretical; it is very much criticism before the textual turn. Allegedly, Conrad “admires” these characters, but where has the impression that they are “obtuse,” “insensitive” and “bovine” come from, if not from Conrad’s texts? Has Eagleton met them somewhere else? It is not altogether Eagleton’s fault that he is frequently identified as the British Isles’ leading literary theorist, but it is hardly any better than saying, on the basis of this book, that he is our leading novelist. What he is extremely good at is making the theories of others accessible and, now and then, applying them—as, for example, when he shows Richardson wrestling with the curse of the supplement, where he assumes (probably correctly) that some Derridean ideas can by now be taken for granted: “Writing is needed to convey truth and reality to a reader; but it is also a sprawling mesh of dangerously open-ended signs. …Richardson adds more writing to what he has written already, in order to insulate his work from all conceivable 124 DICKENS QUARTERLY misconceptions. But the more writing he adds, the more material there is to be misinterpreted” (71). Eagleton applies high theory when it seems to work for the author in question. He has surely also absorbed a good deal of contemporary, theory-driven criticism. But he is reluctant to let this show. The critics whom he names are almost all dead: Lukács, Bakhtin, Leavis, Williams. The criticism of our own time, Eagleton generally implies, is not to be taken seriously; indeed, it deserves to be mocked. Some “Anglo Saxon critics,” for example, “prefer to adopt [Joyce] as a kind of honorary English liberal humanist with a mildly unfamiliar accent” (291). Really? Who? On the contrary, it has always seemed to me that the Joyce industry was deeply preoccupied by his Irishness. But not one critic is actually named in Eagleton’s entire Joyce chapter. “The idea that the world is fractured, but that art makes it whole…has become one of the great pieties of literary criticism” (311). Really? Fifty years ago, perhaps. Needless to say, no specific pious humbug is cited. Do (other) literary critics really enjoy such inflated status in our society, that we need Eagleton to undermine them? He alludes thought-provokingly (if not quite convincingly) to “the long-standing English antipathy to psychology, sociology, political science and the like, none of which was really necessary for a gentleman who had read his Aeschylus” and which “is reflected in the popularity of the novel” as “a kind of ‘amateur’ human wisdom” (56). The Aeschylus quip is presumably meant to show this “cult of amateurism” in a negative light, and yet, in his own way, Eagleton endorses and perpetuates anti-professionalism and anti-intellectualism. Despite all of this, there are good things in the book. Each chapter contains pungent assertions that are worth testing against our own experiences of the texts in question. Eagleton says what he says with marvelous clarity. His Wilde-ish quips and aphorisms (“beneath [Heathcliff’s] flinty exterior beats a heart of stone” [137]) are agreeable enough, even if one has the feeling of having heard them before. Eagleton draws transparently on his own experience as an Irishman at home in English culture to develop a consistent account of the most important fiction as developing from situations of intersection and transition: in writers who are placed between classes (Dickens or Lawrence, for example) or between nations and languages (Conrad or Joyce). Indeed, Eagleton has dedicated the book to Franco Moretti (Atlas of the European Novel), and frequently seems about to develop a map, both geographical and ideological, that would link his largely self-contained discussions of great novelists to the vicissitudes of the genre as a whole. But, in the end, the will to venture beyond the predictable is not there. At the end of Eagleton’s postscript, “After the Wake” (the 2% of the book that he devotes to everything DICKENS QUARTERLY 125 post-Woolf), he remarks bleakly that “in a postsocialist, postfeminist world, in which Salman Rushdie has come to embrace aspects of American imperial power, Doris Lessing to break with her radical past, and Fay Weldon to renounce her commitment to the women’s movement, the contemporary English novel is doing dismally little to disturb the reigning orthodoxies” (337). This is a judgment that can all too easily be spun back upon its author, whose frequent use of the word “radical” doesn’t make him one.

University of Aarhus Dominic Rainsford

Robert Alter. Imagined Cities: Urban Experience and the Language of the Novel. New Haven, Connecticut: Yale UP, 2005. Pp. xiii and 175. $18.15, £18.00.

ear the end of this interesting book, first delivered as the Weidenfeld Lectures in European Comparative Literature N at Oxford (which partly explains the omission of American cities), Robert Alter reminds the reader that “the focus of my study throughout has not been on an objective entity called the modern city which is somehow ‘reflected’ in the novel but rather on a certain range of experience, much of it quite distinctive in nature, that is generated by the new metropolises and for which innovative writers found compelling means of expression” (141). Hence, although there are some wonderful black-and-white photographs of nine- teenth-century London in the book, not, however, integrated into the argument, there is less emphasis on mapping the cities chosen for discussion––Paris, London, St. Petersburg, Dublin, and whatever city is the context for The Trial––than there is on reactions to these cities. Though there are some excellent insights on changes in perceptions––in terms of evanescence of vision, for instance––there is tantalizingly little discussion of the topography of these cities, and much of what is said about them, for example their population- growths, is well known. Here it seems that the lecture format does not translate so well into book form. First, at each stage, when the topic becomes interesting, the subject is broken off. This is certainly a book in which more could have been written on each topic, and more on the overall topic. Second, there are virtually no notes, and thus no secondary literature referenced, even though it is obvious that much must have been read. (The approach is, broadly, New Critical, and none the worse for that, but of course the subject of the nineteenth century city, and Dickens and the city, is the 126 DICKENS QUARTERLY substance of so much writing some of which, at least, could have been engaged with.) Third, the lecture format allows for jumps in the argument. Alter makes good use of Walter Benjamin’s Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Age of High Capitalism (London: Verso, 1973) to discuss Paris, but it would have been wonderful if Alter had thought about applying Benjamin’s work to London. (Benjamin does give some hints.) Or again, there are two interesting chapters on Flaubert’s Sentimental Education, and a few disclaimers in the first chapter about treating Balzac, saying that he “represents the city from a standpoint of assumed authority that does not do full justice to the kinetic and disorienting reality of the new nineteenth-century urban scene” (7). But Balzac’s “assumed authority” is also a mode of response to the urban, and need not be read on its own confident terms: I certainly feel that Le Père Goriot shows an unsettled way of seeing Paris, while the withdrawal from discussing Balzac means a valuable opportunity is missed for comparing his work with Dickens, whose writing spans the times of both Balzac and Flaubert. Similarly, while a reading of Bely’s Petersburg is interesting, the omission of Dostoyevsky, who is teasingly referred to once or twice in relation to both Dickens and Flaubert, seems another opportunity missed, and, though there is an interesting treatment of London in Mrs. Dalloway in terms of “urban pastoral” and crossing thresholds, the chapter on Ulysses (which I think overplays its stress on the novel as giving a “stream of consciousness”) does not quite make Dublin as central to that novel. The chapter on Kafka discusses the city in terms of paranoia; it is rewarding, but it still leaves the questions: what of Zola, what of Gissing, or Proust, what of representations of Berlin, or Vienna, and, given the book’s title, what would Alter make of the point that some of the most remarkable writing about the nineteenth-century city comes from poets (Baudelaire, Rimbaud) and not from novelists? And since Kafka was so much a reader of Dickens, it would have been good to have had more discussion of this in the representation of cities. Readers of this journal will be interested most in the focus on Dickens. Here, the writing is impressionistic, like the dominant emphasis in the two chapters given over to Dickens, on the weather, on mist and fog (fog is discussed in relation to London, Paris and St. Petersburg) and on the wind and on the effects of water, and on dirt, and on the sense of “the death of the sun” (from the first page of Bleak House, a passage which leads into discussion of Dickens’s London as apocalyptic). The text most used is Our Mutual Friend, and here the analysis is splendid, with several descriptive pieces about London, and especially its suburbs given close treatment. The discussion of the City (71–2) from Our Mutual Friend (3. 16), with DICKENS QUARTERLY 127 its use of “grit,” “mills,” “the tread of a million feet,” “whirling,” and “grinding” suggests to me how the name Gradgrind emerges from the matrix of these words, revealed here in the later novel. Yet even here, the impressionism of the writing leaves questions. What differences are there from the writing of London in Sketches by Boz to Dickens’s writing of London in the 1860s? Is nothing to be said of the view from Todgers’s? What is to be made of the point that so often Dickens’s London is historical, and not the city of his own present (Our Mutual Friend is exceptional in this regard, and may be why this novel was chosen to be written about)? Is writing about a past London an attempt to assume authority? How would Alter discuss the “violence done to the cityscape” by the building of the railway in Dombey and Son? It is because Alter’s prose is so nicely free from clutter, because he writes so distinctively and authoritatively, and convinces the reader that he has much to say, that the book leaves, finally, the sense that there could be so much more to it.

University of Manchester Jeremy Tambling

Britta Zangen. Our Daughters Must be Wives: Marriageable Young Women in the Novels of Dickens, Eliot, and Hardy. (Feministische Forschungen. Herausgegeben von Marion Heinz and Friederike Kuster. Band 2.). Frankfurt, Germany: Peter Lang, 2004. Pp. 391. $62.95.

n this feminist, New Historical study, Britta Zangen explores how Dickens, Eliot and Hardy reflected and helped to shape I changing Victorian attitudes toward the roles of middle-class women in society. “The novel,” Zangen argues, “constituted an ideology that was presented to real young Victorian women readers so that, by aspiring to imitate the exemplary representations they were offered, they would conform to the worldview of those in power—or, perhaps, be encouraged to rebel against it” (15). Zangen divides her book into four sections: part one focuses on the socio- historical context of the Woman Question from the 1840s to the 1870s; part two examines the fiction of Dickens and Eliot from the same time period; part three traces the socio-historical context of the 1870s to the 1890s; and part four analyzes Hardy’s fiction. In her analysis of the evolving expectations of women between 1840 to 1890, Zangen makes a good case for choosing 1870 as a pivotal date, not only because it marks the end of Dickens’s life, but also because in the 1870s the critiques of the dominant Victorian view 128 DICKENS QUARTERLY of women “became so numerous and so resounding that the changes they effected became more broadly visible” (20). Zangen begins her study by tracing the changing roles of men due to the Industrial Revolution and then turns to the effects of the Industrial Revolution on women. The work demands of the Industrial Revolution led to a diminishment of male compassion and a transferal of emotion and compassion to the home and, more specifically, to women, an observation emphasized by Ruskin in his lectures, as Zangen points out. The expectation that middle-class mothers would be angels in the house emerged from a need to counterbalance the ruthlessness of the work world with the morality and sentiments of the hearth. Zangen carefully traces what this role of “angel” actually meant for Victorian women, and, in fact, what it continues to mean today since women have never entirely shed Victorian expectations. Zangen does an excellent job of synthesizing both English and German socio-historical studies of the Woman Question; in fact, her footnotes constitute a thorough bibliography of most of the best works in the field, and many that have not received much attention because they are written in German. Although most of her observa- tions about the socio-historical context are well-known to scholars in the field, the specificity of her information makes her overview of the context worthwhile, particularly quotations from autobiographical accounts such as those by Emmeline Pankhurst (1914) and Annie Besant (1893). Their words breathe life into the social generalizations. The socio-historical context offered in Our Daughters Must Be Wives constitutes its chief strength; the chapters of literary analysis on Dickens, Eliot and Hardy are unfortunately less helpful. Zangen organizes these chapters by author with a subsection under each author for each book in order of the publication dates. The subsections range from very brief—two scant paragraphs for Pickwick Papers, for instance—to fairly substantial—fifteen pages for Daniel Deronda. While this organizational strategy makes sense, it leads to a relentless sequentiality, so that twenty-three pages into the analysis of Dickens’s works, after having read about his first six novels, a knowledgeable reader may find herself thinking ruefully “only eight novels to go.” The chronological approach, while orderly, tends to undercut Zangen’s ability to trace overarching themes and motifs. Also, her emphasis on courtship plots, essential to the theme of her study and central to many of the novels, too often leads her to plot summary more than analysis. A stronger assertion of a thesis and more inter- connections between social context and literary analysis would have helped; Zangen simply does not make enough use of her excellent historical material to illuminate the works of fiction. Zangen’s desire to see the novels as reflecting and shaping changing DICKENS QUARTERLY 129

Victorian norms for women leads her to exclude characters who clearly fall outside the patterns she has established in the socio- economic chapters, such as Great Expectation’s Estella, for instance, who Zangen dismisses as “neither a model heroine nor her cautionary opposite…but an instrument for Miss Havisham’s prevented hopes” (138). Zangen devotes only two paragraphs to Great Expectations, even though it has two of Dickens’s most fascinating women. Zangen’s analysis of Dickens’s novels is the weakest section of the book. In her analysis of Eliot’s and Hardy’s novels, she partially escapes the chronological trap by comparing their works to Dickens’s, although the tendency to fall into plot summary more than critical analysis persists. Zangen clearly shows that the three novelists reflect the growing questioning of the limited roles of middle-class women, as well as a growing critique of marriage itself, culminating in Jude the Obscure. But she could have made the same point without ignoring characters who fall somewhat outside this pattern. Zangen’s style is always lucid and at times has an appealing informal and expressive touch. Her study offers a substantial socio-historic overview of the changing roles of middle-class Victorian women, clearly demonstrating that the expectations and beliefs concerning these women were not monolithic. Newcomers to this history will learn much, and even veteran scholars would benefit from Zangen’s thorough overview and synthesis of important works in the field. Her analysis of the novels, however, offers little new ground for those familiar with existing criticism on Victorian fiction.

Boston University Natalie McKnight

Collected Works of George Gissing on Charles Dickens. Volume 1, Essays, Introductions and Reviews. Ed. Pierre Coustillas. Grayswood, England: Grayswood Press, 2004. Pp. 261; Volume 2, Charles Dickens: A Critical Study. Ed. Simon J. James. Grayswood, England: Grayswood Press, 2004. Pp. 274; Volume 3, Abridgement of Forster’s Life of Dickens. Ed. Christine DeVine. Grayswood, England: Grayswood Press, 2005. Pp. 291. Individual volumes £30 or $55; or as hardback sets at £80 or $150; or as paperback sets at £40 or $75.00.

eorge Gissing entered the lists as a literary critic late in life. An unexpected invitation to write a monograph on Dickens G came to him when his career as a novelist had reached a plateau. With his major works behind him and with few solid commitments ahead, the offer he received on 27 December 1896 130 DICKENS QUARTERLY

(six years before he died in 1903) seemed like a delayed Christmas present. “Shall be glad to have this change from fiction-grinding,” he wrote in assenting. The details he received in answer to a request for information about the terms on offer proved satisfactory and he immediately set to work. The legacy of this fortuitous development casts a long glow. Though a newcomer to the profession of criticism, Gissing was no stranger to Dickens. He had grown up in a family where the author’s name reigned as one of the household gods. He had also grown up as a constant re-reader of Dickens’s works, familiar, too, with Forster’s Life, so “glorious” an account of the author, he thought, he made the abridgement of its 1000 or so pages one of his final contractual obligations. Setting to work on the monograph, therefore, was clearly a labor of love, one that required making notes and jotting down ideas in preparation for writing. Fully confident of the task that lay ahead, Gissing took the decision in the summer of 1897 to spend the remainder of the year abroad. His destination, Siena, an attractive provincial town in southern Tuscany, provided the tranquility he sought without the more extensive distractions of Rome, Naples or Florence. Settled in his temporary residence by 27 September 1897, Gissing began. Ahead lay the target of some sixty to seventy thousand words to be delivered by 31 December of the same year. Although he did not write with the clockwork precision of Trollope, he set to methodically. The manuscript was completed by 5 November and duly dispatched. Gissing received the proofs in three batches beginning on New Year’s Day, returned them without delay, and awaited the book’s publication on 15 February 1898. The twelve chapters that comprise Charles Dickens: A Critical Study bear no signs of haste. Rather they reflect a writer closely attuned to his subject, fluent in his expression of ideas and a master of clear prose. Not for Gissing the kind of critic-speak that sets one’s teeth on edge or numbs the mind. Chapters that deal with Dickens’s humor, satire, women and children, some might object, hardly sound original, a protest that loses its sting on two counts. First, Gissing considered these and other key issues in 1898, long before Dickens studies became an international industry. Second, what Gissing said exhibits the hallmarks of both good sense and good judgment, qualities that command respect and merit continued attention. To read this study, the twelve additional essays he wrote as introductions to the Rochester Edition of Dickens’s works, and the miscellaneous pieces conveniently assembled and edited for these three volumes represents time well spent. Dickens, Gissing reminds us, merits consideration on his own terms rather than subject to “our modern laws of fiction,” by which he DICKENS QUARTERLY 131 means the then ascendant European naturalism and the realism of the variety pushed so strenuously by George Eliot and G. H. Lewes. We have now to ask ourselves, Gissing reminds readers, “in what other aspects his work differs markedly from our present conception of the art of novel-writing.” If we are unwilling to do so, he notes, Dickens “suffers from a comparison” with other writers (2. 59). Cautioned thus, we find salutary reminders that one needs to bear in mind “how greatly Dickens was under the influence of the stage” (1. 92). Alternatively, if impatient with the presence of pathos surrounding his child figures, we might usefully recall Gissing’s “defense” of Dickens’s “mawkishness.” Let us not be too hasty in condemning the deaths of Paul Dombey, little Nell and others as “cheap.” “I can only repeat that in Dickens’s day, the lives, the happiness of children were very cheap indeed, and that he had his purpose in insisting on their claims to attention” (2. 143). This is not to suggest Gissing is infallible or capable of inconsistency. If context and purpose deserve consideration, in one instance, why not invoke it elsewhere? Writing about the persistence of melodrama in Dickens’s fiction, Gissing grants that in Oliver Twist Dickens saw a good deal of that novel “as if from before the footlights” (1. 92). Yet on other occasions he cites Dickens’s predilection for this mode as perhaps the greatest “blemish” on his art. Reiterated throughout his comments is the charge that Dickens lacked artistry, a fault he accounts for in various ways. The creation of “a continuous story” eluded Dickens partly owing to the mode of serial composition he adopted. Printing parts of a story while writing it “can never be anything but unsatisfactory,” Gissing observes. Even extensive planning, as in the case of novels from Dombey and Son onwards, failed to check these “shortcomings,” faults which “are directly due to this [serial] system” of production (1. 126). Elsewhere, Gissing shifts his grounds to make the same point. He seems to misunder- stand the role Romance plays in Dickens’s fiction and blames him for his limited version of verisimilitude and insistence on “pleasant” rather than “probable” outcomes (1. 150). He even goes so far as to hold the whole tradition of English fiction partially responsible. English novelists, he writes, “have always preferred a long rambling story, improvised as they went on, to the neat and complete picture of a morsel of life which is the French ideal” (1. 161). Gissing’s awareness of the big picture, however, remains more firmly etched in one’s mind that any misplaced cavils. He writes well about Dickens’s broad social and political orientation. The interests of “our poor classes” always lay at the heart of his agenda. Vigilant about the extent to which “cold-blooded theory” or “mechanical philosophy” might combine with vested interests, Dickens’s constant 132 DICKENS QUARTERLY mistrust of government and its ministers meets Gissing’s approval. He also credits Dickens for the cautionary note he sounded about the consequences of commercialism driven by selfish concerns with material comfort unattached to any moral agenda. Trenchant though his criticism was, especially in the expression of contempt for politicians and the workings of government, Dickens, Gissing appropriately notes, wrote for the English middle classes and remained one of them. “His English spirit knows nothing of egalitarianism,” he concludes. An advocate of the poor, yes; one who demanded that they should be raised “above the status of poverty,” no. “Morally, he would change the world; socially, he is a thorough conservative” (2. 118–19). Gissing sees Dickens’s limited “radicalism” as consistent with the overall aim of his fiction. Dickens, Gissing argues, wrote “to amuse, to elevate, and finally to calm. When his evil-doers have been got rid of, he delights in apportioning quiet happiness to every character in the novel beloved by him and his readers” (1. 154). That verdict perhaps suffices for Dombey and Son, but surely proves less suited to Our Mutual Friend. [or to Hard Times for that matter] Not debatable, however, are his pronouncements on humor and style. “To write of Dickens at all, is to presuppose his humour.” Without this quality, Gissing concludes, Dickens might have come down to us as “a vigorous advocate of social reform,” but as a novelist “he would have failed.” Only because people laugh with him so heartily “did multitudes of people turn to discussing the question his page suggested” (2. 135). Similarly, various aspects of his style preserve him for posterity as “one of the masters of prose.” Not without faults, he commanded an impressive range of effects. Variously “simple, direct, and forcible,” Dickens was equally adept at describing rapid journeys, conveying the atmosphere of entire localities or in invoking extraordinary power from the description of “a wretched little room a few feet square,” when in Martin Chuzzlewit, for example, Jonas, the murderer, lurks in his own house (ch. 46). “I suppose,” concludes Gissing, “there is no English writer, perhaps no writer in any literature, who so often gives proof of wonderfully minute observation.” It is this strength, he thinks, that accounts for yet another supreme skill: his ability to put “people and things before us more clearly than, as a rule, we should ourselves see them” (2. 149–55). From Gissing the critical baton passes to G. K. Chesterton, himself an early and important figure and one quick to recognize his predecessor. He was, wrote Chesterton in 1911, “the soundest of the Dickens critics,” a verdict these three volumes corroborate. For readers today, consequences of the chance occasion that drew Gissing into the critical fray continue to play out. The Collected DICKENS QUARTERLY 133

Works of Gissing on Dickens are now available in two formats (paper- back or hardback) and on special offer at a tempting reduced price, respectively either £40 or £80.

Paroissien 134 DICKENS QUARTERLY

INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ‘DICKENS, VICTORIAN CULTURE, ITALY’ GENOVA (GENOA), ITALY JUNE 13–17, 2007

CALL FOR PAPERS

ickens’s love of Italy, his prolonged stay there in 1844–5 and his subsequent active engagement in England on behalf of the Risorgimento, are widely known D and frequently studied. It comes as a surprise, therefore, that no previous attempt appears to have been made to stage a meeting of Dickensians and others in the city of Genoa, which is by some distance the most important in the peninsula for the study, both of Dickens in Italy and of the Risorgimento. As a cultural treasure house of the first order—in the middle ages and beyond, it was the rival of Venice— Genoa is also an ideal place for an early summer conference combining business and pleasure. A group of Italian scholars, with advice from Dickensians in France, Britain, Spain, the USA, and Australia, propose to rectify this omission next year. The conference will be held in one of the numerous Genoese palaces, and will figure as prominently as possible visits to the chief Dickensian sites. These include most notably the Palazzo Peschiere, a mannerist masterpiece built for Tobia Pallavicino in 1552 and decorated with magnificent frescoes, and the Villa Bagnerello (dubbed by Dickens ‘The Pink Jail’) in Albaro. Our aim is to provide as rich a cultural context as possible for the study of Dickens in relation to Italy. Papers are therefore invited on a wide range of subjects within the general rubric ‘Dickens, Victorian Culture, Italy.’ It is hoped that prospective contributors will be able to address at least two of the three areas covered by the conference theme. Thus, in the first place, it is obvious that papers on any aspect of Dickens’s life or writings that have a bearing on his relation to Italy—e.g. his views on Italian art, his friendships with Italian exiles, the treatment of Italy in his novels, as well as of course all aspects of the key text Pictures from Italy—would be most welcome. More generally, papers are sought on a wide range of Dickens’s relevant cultural concerns— the political, religious, social, intellectual discourses that figure prominently in his work—these, not necessarily particularly tied to the question of Italy but with the potential to illuminate Dickens’s reactions to that country. Thirdly, papers dealing either with other Victorians living in or visiting Italy—Thackeray, Turner, Wilkie Collins, Thomas Adolphus Trollope, Samuel Palmer—or more gen- erally with Victorian views upon, prejudices about, and responses to Italian themes in the 19th century will receive favourable attention. Our aim is to be as inclusive as possible, though it perhaps should be made plain that close readings of Dickensian texts that do not have a bearing on Italy are not sought on this particular occasion. Prospective panellists are invited to send a one-page abstract by email to [email protected] by September 30, 2006. Submissions will be considered by an international panel of specialists before the drawing up of a provisional programme in early 2007. The website to be used for the conference will be http://users.unimi.it/dickens. Registration forms etc will be posted there in due course. DICKENS QUARTERLY 135

11TH ANNUAL DICKENS SOCIETY SYMPOSIUM QUEEN’S UNIVERSITY BELFAST, NORTHERN IRELAND 11–13 AUGUST 2006 CALL FOR PAPERS

harles Dickens visited Belfast in 1858, 1867, and 1869, to deliver those public readings which so captivated audiences on both sides of the Atlantic. He gave C renditions of such favourites as The Story of Little Dombey, Boots at the Holly-Tree Inn, Mrs Gamp, and Sikes and Nancy. He also developed close friendships with the Belfast- born politician and merchant James Emerson Tennent and with Francis Dalziel Finlay, owner and editor of The Northern Whig. He enjoyed his sojourns in Ulster, remarking on his ‘delightful days’ in Belfast, where he was widely recognised and warmly welcomed. Belfast is the venue for the 11th annual symposium of the Dickens Society of America. This organisation, founded in 1970, aims to conduct, encourage, foster and further support research, publication, instruction and general interest in the life, times and literature of Charles Dickens. Papers are welcomed on any aspect of Dickens and his works. Final papers must be readable in twenty minutes. Prospective panellists should send a one-page abstract, by post or email, to:

Dr Leon Litvack School of English Queen’s University Belfast BT7 1NN [email protected] Tel. +44-28-90973266

Conference participants will have the opportunity to sign up for excursions to local sites of interest including the Giant’s Causeway and the North Antrim coast. The highlight of the conference is the will be the Dickens dinner, where delegates will experience traditional Irish singing and storytelling, provided by the famed local duo Len Graham and John Campbell, who have delighted audiences throughout Ireland, the U.K., Europe, Australia, Canada and the USA. Accommodation will be offered at the Elms Student Village, 78 Malone Road, Belfast. Conference information and registration forms can be obtained at the conference website:

http://www.qub.ac.uk/en/dickens The deadline for submission of proposals is 31 May 2006 Further information on the Dickens Society, and its journal The Dickens Quarterly may be found at http://www.dickensquarterly.org/ 136 DICKENS QUARTERLY

DICKENS JOURNALS ONLINE (DJO) A BICENTENARY PROJECT

A major project is underway at the University of Buckingham. Its aim is to create, by the time of the Dickens bicentenary in 2012, a complete online edition of Dickens’s Household Words and All the Year Round (1850–70). It will be free at point of delivery. Readers will have access to high-quality facsimile downloads of each weekly number, which will also be fully indexed and searchable, not only on the text but on keywords (i.e. a search under “firearms,” “exploration,” or “Medway towns” will produce a comprehensive list of hits). Author’s names will be supplied where known, linked to biographical profiles and bibliographies. The site will also document and where possible make freely available all good scholarship relating to the journals. Resources and “learning journeys” based on Britain’s National Curriculum requirements will be developed for school readers of Hard Times and Great Expectations at GCSE and A Level. The project is led by John Drew, author of Dickens the Journalist, and co-editor with Michael Slater of the final volume of the Dent Uniform Edition of Dickens’s journalism. He authored entries on All the Year Round and Household Words in the Oxford Reader’s Companion to Dickens, and is an ardent admirer of the journals. The University of Buckingham is independent of state funding, and the DJO project looks to private individuals, institutions, charities and the corporate world for support. Opportunities to sponsor the digitisation of individual weekly numbers of the journals are available (£10 per annum), as is a full Business Plan for 2006. All enquiries to . Y DICKENS QUARTERLY 137

The Dickens Quarterly Checklist

Primary Sources 138 DICKENS QUARTERLY DICKENS QUARTERLY 139 140 DICKENS QUARTERLY

A N E N G L IS H L A D Y I N P A R IS the diary of Frances Anne Crewe, 1786 edited and introduced by Michael Allen hardback; 24 x 16cm; 244pp; col.illus; extensive annotation; appendices; bibliography; index ISB N 0 9552490 0 7 $59.50

Date of publication 27th April 2006 O X F O R D -S T O C K L E Y P U B L I C A T I O N S

In 1786 Frances Anne Crewe, employer of Charles Dickens’ gra n d-paren ts, close frien d of G eorgia n a D uchess of Devonshire, and lover of the dramatist Sheridan travelled to Paris for a visit of three months. Her fascinating observations of the scene just prior to the French revolution were kept as a diary, now held at The British Library. It has been often quoted but never before published. H er descriptions of Louis X VI and Marie Antoinette spring vividly to life. Fashion, theatre, balls, coach-travel, science, literature – the life of Paris in 1786 fills the pages of this unique account. Michael Allen, author of Charles Dickens’ Childhood, provides a masterly introduction to the Crewe family, to the background in which Dickens’ grandparents lived and his father grew up, and to a fascinating piece of real history. o Available (carriage-free) from Oxford-Stockley Publications, 17 H eather Close, St Leonards, B H 24 2QJ, United Kingdom email [email protected] DICKENS QUARTERLY 141 142 DICKENS QUARTERLY

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS Arthur J. Cox has written extensively on The Mystery of Edwin Drood. His reading of the manuscript of the novel is the textual basis of editions of The Mystery of Edwin Drood published by Penguin Books in 1974 and 2002 and by the Folio Society in 1982.

Paul Marchbanks is a Jacob K. Javits Fellow at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill and is completing his dissertation under the co-directorship of Beverly Taylor and Weldon Thornton. His larger project tackles fictional and socio-historical representations of intellectual disability in Victorian poetry and prose, under the working title Idiot Mine: Excavating Enlightened Intimations of Intellectual Disability from 19th Century Literature.

Mark Willis is a visiting lecturer at Hertford University and Bedford College. He has taught at Birkbeck College, Westminster University and The City Literary Institute in London.