Dickens, Ireland, and the Irish, Part II

Litvack, L. (2003). Dickens, Ireland, and the Irish, Part II. The Dickensian, 99(2), 6-22.

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Download date:27. Sep. 2021 Dickens in Finnegans Wake

AARON SANTESSO

ICKENS HAS NEVER BEEN A FIRST RECOURSE for explicators of Finnegans Wake. Though Joyce mentions him numerous times, DDickens has been consigned to the collector’s bin of authors whose appearances are isolated and trivial, and the resulting lack of attention means allusions to Dickens are occasionally overlooked.1 Recently, in discussing Ulysses, critics have begun to lament the underestimation of Dickens’s influence.2 Finnegans Wake supplies further evidence for the re-evaluation of Dickens’s influence on Joyce; indeed, closer attention to Dickens creates more convincing explanations of certain passages in that work. Dickens appears throughout Finnegans Wake: his various incarnations range from ‘dickens’ (157.27) to ‘Diggins’ (596.12) to ‘dickhuns’ (610.03). Dickens also appears in several of the portmanteau allusions which pepper Finnegans Wake. Joyce often combines references to two or more authors in these allusions, as when he transforms Jack and Martin (the two brothers representing the Anglican and Lutheran churches to Peter’s Catholic in A Tale of a Tub) into ‘Jack and Maturin’ (549.23-4), thereby alluding both to St Mathurin, patron saint of fools and to Charles Maturin, the Irish novelist who wrote Melmoth the Wanderer. The portmanteaus are occasionally overlooked, particularly if they contain a clear connection to a ‘major’ influence, such as Swift.3 Dickens has suffered from this pattern: the phrase ‘aspiring like the decan’s’ (423.06), for example, is glossed only as an allusion to Swift (‘Decanus’), though ‘decan’s’ certainly puns on ‘Dickens’ as well.4 In fact, there are several combinations of Swift and Dickens in Finnegans Wake: numerous references to ‘Pip and Estella’ (or variations thereon) blend the Stella of Swift’s ‘Journal to Stella’ with the Pip and Estella of Great Expectations.5 Other examples of Swift-Dickens portmanteaus have gone unnoticed. A passage previously believed only to contain an allusion to Swift is the washerwomens’ gossipy discussion of Anna Livia Plurabelle in Chapter 8 of Book 1, which builds to a mysterious interchange between two characters in the last sentence:

Fenny poor hex she must have charred. Kickhams a frumpier ever you saw. Making mush mullet’s eyes at her boys dobelon. And they crowned her their chariton queen, all the maids. Of the may? You don’t say! Well for her she couldn’t see herself. I recknitz wharfore the darling murrayed her mirror. She did? Mersey me! There was a koros of drouthdropping surfacemen, boomslanging and plugchewing, fruiteyeing and flowerfeeding, in contemplation of the fluctuation and the undification of her filimentation lolling and

1 leasing on North Lazers’ Waal all eelfare by the Jukar Yoicks and as soon as they saw her meander by that marritime way in her grasswinter’s weeds and twigged who was under her archdeaconess bonnet, Avondale’s fish and Clarence’s poison, sedges an to aneber, Wit-upon-Crutches to Master Bates: Between our two southsates and the granite they’re warming, or her face has been lifted or Alp has doped. (Finnegans Wake 208-9)

The final words of the passage, discussing Anna Livia Plurabelle’s artificially enhanced appearance, are spoken by two members of the ‘koros’ on the wall named ‘Wit-upon-Crutches’ and ‘Master Bates’. Critics have glossed the two as an allusion to Swift: ‘Master Bates’ was Gulliver’s teacher, and ‘Wit-upon-Crutches’ according to Adaline Glasheen, is ‘a poem once attributed to Swift’.6 Gulliver’s teacher was in fact named ‘Master Bates’:

When I came back, I resolved to settle in London, to which Mr. Bates, my Master, encouraged me... But, my good Master Bates dying two Years after, and I having few Friends, my Business began to fail...7

Swift does not use the pun again in Gulliver’s Travels. But Swift is not the only writer to have featured a ‘Master Bates’ in his work. Numerous writers have used the pun Ð Kipling has a ‘Headmaster Bates’ in his Stalky & Co., for example Ð but the most memorable ‘Master Bates’ is very likely the Charley Bates in Dickens’s Oliver Twist:

...the Dodger returned; accompanied by a very sprightly young friend, whom Oliver had seen smoking on the previous night; and who was now formally introduced to him as Charley Bates...” And what have you got, my dear? said Fagin to Charley Bates. “Wipes”, replied Master Bates; at the same time producing four pocket handkerchiefs.8

Unlike Swift, Dickens keeps the ‘Master Bates’ joke going for several chapters. Of the 95 references to Charley Bates in the novel, 45 are to ‘Master Bates’ and Dickens continually draws attention to the joke.9 Joyce knew Oliver Twist well: he had a copy of the book in his Trieste library.10 One reference to Oliver Twist by Joyce outside of Finnegans Wake is useful in showing how Joyce, though he paid generous and careful attention to Dickens, often disparaged his work in print:

And yet there are some simple people who complain that, though they like Dickens very much and have cried over the fate of Little Nell and over the death of poor Joe [sic], the crossing-sweeper, and laughed over the adventurous caprices of Pickwick and his fellow-musketeers and hated (as all good people should) Uriah Heep and Fagin the Jew, 2 yet he is after all a little exaggerated.11 Here, then, Joyce makes a typical complaint against Dickens’s lack of subtlety and over-sentimentality, and his habit of supporting narratives with heavy-handed humour or tragedy. He goes on to criticize other aspects of Dickens’s writing: ‘The form [Dickens] chose to write in, diffuse, overloaded with minute and often irrelevant observation, carefully relieved at regular intervals by the unfailing humorous note, is not the form of the novel which can carry the greatest conviction. ’ One of Joyce’s primary objections to Dickens, then, is the author’s predictable shift to low humour to relieve tension Ð presumably including the use of puns like ‘Master Bates’. The fact that ‘Master Bates’ is a Dickens character encourages a re- examination of the gloss of ‘Wit-upon-Crutches’. Glasheen points to an anonymous poem, ‘Wit Upon Crutches; Or, The Biter Bitten’. This work first appeared in a Dublin broadside in 1725, and was reprinted without its title in The British Journal of 27 August 1726 and then by Smedley, again without its title, in Gulliveriana in 1728. It has not been reprinted since.12 Joyce could have encountered the expression elsewhere: puns on the idea of ‘lame wit’ were a relatively common eighteenth-century topos. Pope, for example, describes a ‘wit’ advancing on two crutches in The Dunciad (IV.110). The fact that ‘Wit-upon-Crutches’ is a speaking character, however, raises the possibility that Joyce has a literary or historical character in mind. The Finnegans Wake passage is among other things a Christmas narrative, describing Anna Livia Plurabelle’s imitation of ‘Santa Claus’, as she doles out presents to children from a sack. This context fits well with the most famous literary character on crutches: Tiny Tim Cratchit, from Dickens’s A Christmas Carol. Tiny Tim, who seems to Joyce the embodiment of Dickens’s ‘lame wit’, represents another failing he sees in Dickens’s writing: tedious morality is relieved not by low humour but by arch sentimentality. Additional evidence that Joyce had Dickens in mind when he was working on this passage exists in the first drafts of Finnegans Wake. An early manuscript version of the Finnegans Wake passage clarifies the presence of Dickens:

Funny poor dear she must have looked. Dickens a funnier ever you saw. There was a gang of surfacemen [boomslanging & plugchewing [,lying & leasing,]] on Lazy Wall & as soon as they seen who was in it saw one to the other. Between you & me & the wall we are on beneath us as round as a hoop Alp has doped.13

‘Dickens a funnier ever you saw’ reappears in the final version as ‘Kickhams a funnier ever you saw’, a reference to the author overlooked by critics.14 Joyce’s other namings of Dickens in Finnegans Wake are often followed soon after by mentions of Dickens’s works and characters. The phrase ‘scoot, duckings and thuggery’ (Scott, Dickens and Thackeray) at 177.35 is followed in the next line by a reference to ‘bunnyboy rodger’, an allusion to Barnaby Rudge, as well as the Dodger 3 from Oliver Twist. On pg. 434, Joyce mentions ‘dickette’s place’ on line 27, and then lists ‘your meetual fan’ (Our Mutual Friend), ‘Doveyed Covetfilles’ (David Copperfield), ‘old cupiosity shape’ (The Old Curiosity Shop), and ‘Ulikah’ (Uriah Heep from David Copperfield) over the next three lines. And on page 610, the phrase ‘Who his dickhuns now rearranges’ is followed by ‘Ulloverum’ (Oliver from Oliver Twist) two lines later. We may now recognise a similar pattern in the washerwomen passage: a naming of Dickens (‘Kickhams’) is followed by allusions to Oliver Twist and A Christmas Carol. What does the presence of Dickens add to the passage? On one level, section 1.8 displays the process of characterisation: Joyce draws attention both to his characterisation of the washerwomen, and to their characterisation of Anna Livia Plurabelle. Joyce’s washerwomen are low urban characters speaking city slang: alluding to Dickens draws attention to another author who delighted in this type of characterisation. Joyce’s allusion captures the two extremes of Dickens’s characterisation, with the high Victorian (though often ‘lame’) sentimentality epitomised by Tiny Tim Cratchit at one end and the low crudity seen in Charley Bates at the other. And most importantly, the fact that Anna Livia Plurabelle is linked to Dickens by the washerwomens’ comparison (‘Dickens a funnier ever you saw’) suggests that Joyce sees the ‘creation’ of ALP by the washerwomen as akin to the kind of exaggerated characterisation he complains of in Dickens.

1Joyce’s familiarity with Dickens did not prevent him from criticising his sentimentality and occasionally-laboured wit. In ‘Stephen Hero’, for example, Joyce pokes fun at Dickens’s sentimentalised characters and the kind of people who appreciated them (86, 124). 2Most notably Jay Clayton, whose ‘Londublin: Dickens’s London in Joyce’s Dublin’ (Novel, 28:3 Spring 1995, 327-42) begins with a summary of what little work has been done on Dickens’s influence on Joyce (328), and argues throughout that Dickens’s works are the most important nineteenth-century intertext for Joyce. 3‘Swift is in the forefront of Joyce’s artistic consciousness.’ A. Nicholas Fargnoli and Michael Patrick Gillespie, James Joyce A to Z (New York: Facts on File, 1995), 211. 4See Roland McHugh, Annotations to Finnegans Wake, rev. ed (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1991), 423 5e.g. 178.27, 232.11, 276.20-1, 276.23. 6Adaline Glasheen, Third Census of Finnegans Wake (Berkeley: U of California P, 1977), 310. 7Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels. Ed. Herbert Davis (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1965), 19-20. 8Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist. Ed. Kathleen Tillotson (Oxford: Clarendon, 1966), 53- 4. 9David Paroissien, The Companion to Oliver Twist (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 1992), 105-6. 10Richard Ellmann, The Consciousness of Joyce (New York: Oxford UP, 1977), 107. 11James Joyce, ‘The Centenary of Charles Dickens’. James Joyce in Padua. Ed. Louis Berrone (New York: Random House, 1977), 33-37; 37. 12How Joyce would have encountered the poem is a mystery. The poem is not in any edition of Swift’s works, including Joyce’s (the 1869 Nimmo edition). Nor is it in any of the standard bibliographies of the time, most notably Teerink’s. Harold Williams mentions

4 the poem only to dismiss Ball’s ‘implication’ that it may have been Swift’s as ‘pure conjecture’ (The Poems of Jonathan Swift, [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1937, 2nd ed. 1958], 3.1128). Ball himself never directly attributes the work to Swift, nor does he mention the poem by name (Swift’s Verse [New York: Octagon 1970, reprint of 1928 first ed.], 203). In fact, the appearance of the poem’s title in Williams seems to have been its first since the original broadside. If this is the source for Joyce’s ‘Wit-upon-Crutches’, it would suggest that Williams is a more important influence than previously believed. 13James Joyce, A First Draft Version of Finnegans Wake, Ed. David Hayman (Austin: U of Texas P, 1963), 127. 14McHugh recognises the reference to C. J. Kickham, a nineteenth-century writer but does not notice the phonetic allusion to Dickens (McHugh, 208-9).

5 Dickens, Ireland and the Irish Part II

LEON LITVACK

N THE YEARS between Dickens’s first reading tour in Ireland, 1858 and his second visit in 1867, there was a significant volume of Iarticles on Irish subjects in All the Year Round, encompassing folklore, history, transport, tourism, medical practices, penology, policing, and politics, as well as Irish-English relations, and the state of the peasantry. Though Dickens did not author any of these pieces, he did comment on some in his correspondence. Indeed one of the first ones, ‘Her Majesty’s Irish Mail’, by George Walter Thornbury (who seems to have undertaken the ‘Irish Department’ in All the Year Round), drew adverse comment from Irish readers. The narrator, an English traveller, riding on a jaunting-car in County Wicklow, describes his situation thus:

A scene more intensely Irish and more intensely un-English could scarcely be conceived. Here was a mail-cart reckless of delays; a consequential, drunken, sporting farrier passing for a real doctor, and a driver quite indifferent to punctuality, parcels, passengers, or nightfall, stopping at the bidding of a half-drunken cow-doctor at a roadside whiskey-shop.1

A week after this piece appeared, the Freeman’s Journal carried a letter from ‘An Irish Male’, whose reaction to the piece was filled with fury and indignation. He described the author as ‘totally unacquainted with this country, and only distinguished by his buffoonery and vulgarity’. The letter ends by observing that Dickens’s acceptance of this piece for publication constitutes an ‘ungrateful and ungracious return’ to the Irish people who, when the novelist toured the previous year, ‘poured their money into the coffers of a peripatetic story teller, and rushed with generous avidity to hear Cockney slang read with a “thruthful” Northumbrian burr’.2 The Freeman’s Journal published a reply from Thornbury (a contributor to both Household Words and All the Year Round), who, in the guise of ‘The Writer of the Article’, expressed surprise at the response to his ‘innocent and playful’ piece. He asserted that he loved Ireland and admired its inhabitants; he also defended Dickens, who, he says, has ‘so grateful a sense of Irish hospitality’ and feels ‘nothing but good will’ towards the country.3 Dickens knew of the exchange, and discussed it with the Irish barrister, journalist, and author Percy Fitzgerald (1831-1925);4 he wrote:

Of the extraordinarily coarse and unreasonable attacks I have seen on

6 myself personally Ð so easily elicited by an innocently-meant article, in which I saw no harm when I read it in proof, and the desperate offence of which I do not even now understand Ð I will only remark that they have amazed me for my life.5

Another article by Thornbury, ‘Driver Mike’, features a similar setting and theme;6 Fitzgerald insisted that the tone adopted by this English writer (who was sent to Dublin in search of ‘copy’) was ‘quite à la mode in the All The Year Round system, where comic satire “spiced” everything’.7 The available evidence suggests that the ostensible purposes of the articles was entertainment. The fact that they caused offence, however, raises questions about the general tone of All the Year Round towards Ireland and the Irish. There were other articles in subsequent issues which might be termed informative or entertaining. They include ‘Dead (and Gone) Shots’, possibly by W. H. Wills, on duelling (AYR 7 [10 May 1862], pp. 212- 16);8 ‘The Irish Convict’s Progress’, concerning the superiority of the Irish prison system over the English one (AYR 8 [20 September 1862], pp. 31-7); ‘Illiberal Doctors’, on the failure of the Royal College of Surgeons of Ireland to sanction such practices as mesmerism (AYR 8 [7 February 1863], pp. 519-21); and ‘Irish Stew’, which includes reminiscences on the historical events which inspired Dion Boucicault’s play The Colleen Bawn (AYR 10 [7 November 1863], pp. 256-8).9 Alongside these, however, there were other pieces published in the early and mid-1860s which featured deprecatory Irish stereotypes and caricatures. ‘Thuggee in Ireland’ describes the supposedly violent tendencies of Irish ‘peasant-assassins’ (AYR 7 [28 June 1862], pp. 374- 8); the combativeness of the Irish is also the focus of ‘The Irish in England’, which concludes that national characteristics are difficult to alter (AYR 8 [27 December 1862], pp. 370-2).10 A change in English attitudes is not, however, necessarily seen as a key to improving the situation. In ‘A Dublin May Morning’, describing the remarkable progress Ireland had made by the time the 1865 Dublin Exhibition opened, the writer implies that while the interior of this Irish Crystal Palace promises much, the streets outside do not (AYR 13 [27 May 1865], pp. 421-4).11 It was unlikely that All the Year Round would alter its attitude at this time, because of the advent of a movement which aroused apprehension and fear in the minds of Dickens and others: the Irish republican movement known as Fenianism (Figs. 10, 11). According to Comerford the organisation, founded in the United States by John O’Mahony, and in Ireland by James Stephens, ‘paralysed’ normal political activity in Ireland in 1864-5 because of the belief that ‘they had in their midst a secret revolutionary army of unknown strength (with powerful allies across the Atlantic) about to throw the country into indescribable turmoil’.12 American support for the Fenians was the subject of All the Year Round’s first article on this topic, ‘The Fenian Brothers’, in June 1864. It described the ‘Irish National Fair’ held in Chicago in March of 7 that year to raise funds for the Fenian cause; it also outlined the aims of what is called ‘this absurd society’ (AYR 11 [4 June 1864], pp. 393, 395). The next article, ‘The Fenians’, published in October 1865, asserted that the ‘true Fenians’ (that is, Fianna Eireann, the legendary band of warriors led by Finn MacCumhaill, or MacCool) were ‘a very different class of heroes to those who have been trying to revolutionise Ireland’. After describing in some detail the ancient clan, the author shifts to the present, to re-emphasise Irish-American support for the Fenian cause (AYR 14 [21 October 1865], pp. 300-04).13 In December 1865 there appeared ‘A Recent Lounge in Dublin’, which includes a rather theatrical description of the trial of some of the Fenian leaders, who had been accused of high treason (AYR 14 [23 December 1865], p. 519. Dickens’s comments on this piece survive: in a hastily written note he confided to Samuel Lover, ‘Writer of Irish story of Diablerie, unquestionably Irish’.14 Dickens revealed nothing more concerning the author’s identity; yet there is evidence of his heightened interest in Irish affairs at this time. He had written the previous month to his Swiss friend W. W. F. de Cerjat, wondering if, ‘what with Ireland and Fenianism’, Britain would be drawn into a war with the United States. He also refers to ‘a Dublin jail not being able to hold a political prisoner’ Ð that is, James Stephens.15 It is true that Fenianism reached the peak of its strength in 1865; ultimately, however, the movement was not a formidable threat to British power in Ireland. In his authoritative analysis Comerford confirms that ‘it was a loose, undisciplined social organisation rather than a tight military one’; despite fears expressed about stockpiled weapons and raids on arsenals, the Irish Republican Brotherhood ‘had a totally inadequate command structure, and it was very poorly armed’.16 Dickens’s comments seem to be fuelled by rumour, as well as by sensational reportage Ð a propensity which characterised some of his own publications, as well as the unattributed ones on the Fenians that appeared in All the Year Round. Dickens’s apprehension may be explained by the fact that in the latter half of the 1860s the Fenians were considered by the authorities a growing threat to law and order in Britain. After Stephens’s escape in November 1865, he went to the United States to elicit support for a rising the following year. Assistance failed to materialise under his leadership; but by 1867, when Stephens’s rescuer, Colonel Thomas J. Kelly (1833- 1908), took charge, the call to action became more vociferous. The demobilisation of Irish-Americans who had served in the Civil War promised leadership by experienced military officers; among these was Captain Richard [sic] O’Sullivan Burke (1838-1922), who was sent by Kelly to lead Fenian operations in England.17 Burke’s purchases of arms and ammunition for the Brotherhood, and his attempts to draw support from among the 600,000 Irish emigrants living in the country, were the source of much apprehension. The threat of a Fenian insurrection in 1867 was reflected in All the Year Round by the increased space given to Irish affairs. The journal clearly appreciated the link between Fenians and the United Irishmen: it 8 issued a series of ‘Old Stories Re-Told’, by Thornbury, some of which recounted events from the 1798 rebellion and its aftermath, including the Battle of Vinegar Hill (AYR 17 [23 February 1867], pp. 205-11), the landing of the French forces in Killala (AYR 18 [6 July 1867], pp. 34-9), and the exploits of Robert Emmet (AYR 17 [1 June 1867], pp. 537-44). These stories (of which Dickens approved, though he considered Thornbury ‘rather given to horrors’) were published collectively in 1870;18 those concerning Ireland dealt with trials, insurrections, and murders, and, like the author’s previous contributions, highlighted the contrast between the English and the Irish. In a piece on the slaying of a farmer by Catholic Ribbonmen in 1816, Thornbury highlights the violent tendencies of Irish peasantry, and the ‘semi-Oriental imprecations with which the Irish language abounds’.19 In other pieces he emphasises the ‘unhappy and useless’ nature of ‘irrational’ insurrections by the ‘undisciplined Celts’; these inevitably resulted, he believed, in ‘more bloodshed and less liberty’ (AYR 17 [23 February 1867], p. 211; AYR 17 [1 June 1867], p. 541; AYR 18 [6 July 1867], p. 39). The effect of such pronouncements was to establish a historical precedent for what Thornbury called the ‘recklessness of the lower orders of Irish’; this characterisation could then be applied to the contemporary situation, in which the lower classes were thought to constitute the bulk of Fenian supporters.20 This is the technique employed in a series of three articles, beginning with ‘The Fifth of March in Dublin’, in which an eyewitness describes the abortive rising of several thousand Fenians around Tallaght Hill, at the foot of the Dublin mountains.21 A similar tone is employed in the second instalment of this narrative, ‘Fenian Facts’, which provides background material on the organisation (AYR 17 [20 April 1867], pp. 398-400), while the third focuses on a particular figure, ‘Fenian James Fitzpatrick’, and his American connections.22 There was a fourth article, written in a different style, on the consequences of the Tallaght Hill rising of 5 March: ‘Fenians on Trial’ is a luridly sensational, eyewitness account of the prosecution and sentencing of the Tallaght conspirators in late April- early May 1867 (AYR 17 [15 June 1867], pp. 582-5); given the penchant for ‘horrors’ in the piece, it is possible that Thornbury was the author. In any case it is probable that these articles about Tallaght had Dickens’s imprimatur, and, quite possibly, a certain amount of editorial intervention. By the time they appeared Dickens had returned from his tour of Ireland, and he would naturally have been aware of public interest in the events of 5 March.23 Dickens’s second Irish reading tour extended from 14 to 23 March. When he prepared to embark for Ireland, in the company of W. H. Wills and his manager George Dolby, Dickens described himself as ‘a disconsolate voyager with the Fenians before him’.24 Before his first Dublin reading he wrote to Georgina Hogarth, on 15 March, to confirm that his fears were well founded:

Our business here is very bad, though Belfast is enormous. There is 9 no doubt that great alarm prevails here. This hotel is constantly filling and emptying, as families leave the country, and set in a current to the Steamers. There is apprehension of some disturbance between tomorrow night and Monday night (both inclusive); and I learn this morning that all the drinking shops are to be closed from tonight until Tuesday. Of course you will not be in the least uneasy about me. If any commotion occurs, I shall instantly stop the Dublin Readings, and of course I shall not put myself in harm’s way... There is no doubt whatever that alarm prevails.25

The remark about ‘very bad’ business (echoed by Dolby, who predicted that ‘our house would not be very good’, and that there were ‘good grounds for alarm’)26 was, however, unfounded: he played to packed houses of up to 4,000 people,27 and the expected St Patrick’s Day disturbance never materialised. From several accounts, including Dickens’s own, his penchant for sensationalising is apparent. His letters to his family (whom he wishes to set ‘at ease on riotous points’) contain references to ‘considerable alarm’, ‘apprehensions of some disturbance’, ‘acute rebellion’ and ‘critical time’;28 nevertheless Dickens was undeterred: he wished to observe Fenian disturbances first-hand. George Dolby recalls that at a dinner party held in the novelist’s honour on 16 March, one of the guests was ‘a distinguished colonel of Guards, who up to that time had made the Fenian organization his special study, being reputed to know more about it than anyone in the service’; he and several other officials assembled received messages throughout dinner about possible risings.29 The circumstances did not alarm Dickens; on the contrary: he ‘expressed a wish to make an inspection of the city, and as some of the guests... had to do the same thing officially, his desire was very easily gratified’. After a quick change of clothes, he and Dolby were off on a nocturnal excursion:

We sallied forth in the dead of the night on outside cars, and under police care, to make a tour of the city; and so effectual were the precautions taken by the Government, that in a drive from midnight until about two o’clock in the morning, we did not see more than about half a dozen persons in the streets, with the exception of the ordinary policemen on their beats. Several arrests of suspected persons had been made in the night, and some of these became our fellow-travellers in the Irish mail on our return to England.30

There is an interesting similarity between the motivation for this expedition, and those undertaken by Dickens in the company of Inspector Field, which were informed and motivated by a certain ‘attraction of repulsion’. In Ireland, however, despite the sensationalising of Dickens’s Fenian expectations, they remained unfulfilled, and the reading tour amounted, by his own admission, to a ‘perfect rage’ and ‘tremendous success’.31

10 Late in 1867, when Dickens was preparing to embark for America, he demonstrated his continued concern with the Fenian threat. He composed a memo to Wills in November which contained restrictions on the material which could be published in All the Year Round during his absence:

Remember that no reference, however slight, is to be made to America in any article whatever, unless by myself. Remember that the same remark applies to the subject of the Fenians.32

These instructions are easily explained: Dickens wished to ensure that nothing controversial appeared in his journal while he was in the United States Ð especially since, as he intimated to Forster, ‘I have an opinion myself that the Irish element in New York is very dangerous’, and ‘no doubt large sections of the Irish population of this state are themselves Fenian’; indeed before his departure he expressed the fear that ‘the Fenians would be glad to damage a conspicuous Englishman’.33 The directions to Wills are relevant to the Fenian articles discussed above: given Dickens’s recent visit to Ireland and his sensitivity to this issue, he would almost certainly have read these pieces with great care before they were published, and would possibly have fine-tuned them, to avoid too much variance with what he himself believed. Dickens’s last visit to Ireland was made, in the company of Dolby and Georgina Hogarth, in January 1869, as part of his ‘Farewell’ reading tour. He was aware of a growing nationalist sentiment, and recognised the importance of issues like Home Rule and the disestablishment of the Church of Ireland. In a letter to W. W. F. de Cerjat, written shortly before his departure, he made known his views on some of these issues:

Take my guarantee for it, Ð you may be quite comfortable on the subject of papal aspirations and encroachments. The English people are in unconquerable opposition to that church. They have the animosity in the blood... But they do sincerely want to win Ireland over if they can. They know that since the Union she has been hardly used. They know that Scotland has her religion, and a very uncomfortable one. They know that Scotland, though intensely anti- Papal, perceives it to be unjust that Ireland has not her religion too, and has very emphatically declared her opinion in the late Elections. They know that a richly-endowed church, forced upon a people that don’t belong to it, is a grievance with these people. They know that... an artfully and schemingly managed institution like the Romish Church, thrive[s] upon a grievance, and that Rome has thriven exceedingly upon this, and made the most of it. Lastly, the best among them know that there is a gathering cloud in the West, considerably bigger than a man’s hand, under which a powerful Irish- American body, rich and active, is always drawing Ireland in that direction. And that these are not times in which other powers would 11 back our holding Ireland by force unless we could make our claim good in proving fair and equal government.34

The observations offer insight into the anti-Catholic rhetoric which Dickens sustained in correspondence up to the end of his life, and into his views on disestablishment, which was confirmed by the passage of Gladstone’s Irish Church Act in July 1869.35 The year also saw the release of forty Fenian prisoners from English jails, and the restoration of habeas corpus, which had been suspended in February 1866 as a response to the Fenian disturbances.36 It is clear, however, that Dickens appreciated the diminished threat of insurrection, and sailed for Ireland with far less apprehension than in 1867. Sikes and Nancy was included in his programme, and the reaction in the press was overwhelmingly favourable; the Freeman’s Journal reported:

Nothing we have ever heard Mr Dickens read can compare with his thrilling and powerful delivery of Nancy’s burning words to Mr Brownlow, and still more her appeal to Sikes for her life. There was an amount of natural and genuine acting which we had not expected to see now-a-days. Without the accessories of the stage it was more truthful and effective than anything of the kind we have ever seen on stage. It was a masterpiece of reading, quite unparalleled in its way; and it is with no small pride one feels it can honestly be said that Mr Dickens is the greatest reader of the greatest writer of the age.37

This Dublin event, on 13 January, was among the first public performances of this reading.38 According to Collins Sikes and Nancy received ‘rave reviews’, and adverse reactions were extremely scarce;39 it is, therefore, difficult to reconcile adulatory reports in the press with Percy Fitzgerald’s assessment:

The tragic episode of Nancy’s murder by Sikes in “Oliver Twist” Boz had persuaded himself [sic] was one of his most powerful and effective efforts for the Readings. But this was not the general opinion... The Dublin audience showed little appreciation, and indeed seemed scarcely to understand. I had tried to make some excuses for them, on which he good-naturedly wrote to me.

BELFAST, Friday, Fifteenth January, 1869 MY DEAR FITZGERALD, It was very considerate and thoughtful in you to write to me, and I have been much gratified by your note. It is extraordinarily difficult to understand (from the point of action) an audience that does not express itself, and I certainly mistook mine on Wednesday night. When the murder was done in London, the people were frozen while it went on, but came to life when it was over and rose to boiling- 12 point. I have now told Dolby that henceforth it must be set apart from all our other effects, and judged by no other “Reading” standard.40

Dickens’s comments are surprising Ð indeed incongruous Ð when compared with the ecstatic notice in the Freeman’s Journal, and with Dolby’s exultant account.41 All the evidence points to Dickens’s relishing his Irish triumphs, and appreciating the warm hospitality of the Irish people. Fitzgerald recalled the ‘delightful days at Belfast’ and the walks about the town, when ‘everybody stared hard at [Dickens’s] remarkable face and figure’; a banquet was also proposed in his honour.42 It is, therefore, surprising to find the sycophantic Fitzgerald writing Ð not only at odds with general opinion, but at odds with himself Ð as follows: ‘The truth was, and I say it reluctantly, there never was much sympathy or liking between the Irish and the great writer. He did not care for them... He was not much read in Ireland, perhaps not wholly understood’.43 An investigation of Dickens’s views on Ireland and the Irish would not be complete without brief consideration of one of the novelist’s closest personal associations, which far surpassed his acquaintance with either Percy Fitzgerald or Francis Finlay: his friendship with the Irish artist Daniel Maclise (1806-70), to whom he was introduced by John Forster in 1838.44 The artist was clearly a favourite in the Dickens household, and the works for which the Dickens family served as Maclise’s subjects are well known.45 Existing scholarship does not, however, offer a clear impression of whether Maclise’s Irish background or sympathies were ever recognised or emphasised by Dickens, and, indeed, whether ‘Irishness’ was a prominent feature of the artist’s life and work.46 Maclise, the self-confessed ‘Cockneyfied Corkonian’,47 had spent his formative years in Ireland, and would have spoken with a Cork accent. On at least one occasion Dickens consulted about Irish turns of phrase.48 Though subjects with Irish resonances feature in Maclise’s work throughout his career, it is clear that Dickens considered him an ‘English artist who has set his genius on this English stake’.49 They both venerated Moore’s Irish Melodies (Fig. 12), though the ways in which the two friends perceived the volume were markedly different. Ormond explains that for Maclise Moore ‘was the great champion of Celtic civilization, and the poet of Ireland’s tragic past’,50 whereas for Dickens, as explained above, Moore was a domesticated cultural icon, made palatable for consumption by an English metropolitan audience. In the Regency period, which coincided with the formative years of Dickens’s youth, the Irish Poet’s work epitomised, according to W. J. McCormack, how ‘cultural material from the old Gaelic domain could be accommodated in a new and distinctly “genteel” aesthetic’.51 Nevertheless, their apparently differing views did not prevent Dickens and Maclise from enjoying the Irish Melodies in each other’s company. The works are mentioned in correspondence,52 and Dickens’s daughter Kate confirms that at Devonshire Terrace the pair would, of an evening, ‘hum or sing over the 13 Irish Melodies together’.53 The research on Dickens’s interest in and relations with Ireland and the Irish has involved an exploration of disparate areas of his life and work; the observations which emerge contain many anomalies. On a cultural level, Dickens was interested in responding to popular trends and conceptions: the stage Irishman was a well-known element of theatrical performance, while Thomas Moore’s Irish Melodies were sung unproblematically in fashionable English drawing-rooms. Dickens could distinguish in his own mind between the Irish at home and the Irish abroad, while never once expressing any views on one of the greatest disasters in these islands in modern times. His reactions to the Repeal Movement and to Fenianism mark him as a Unionist, who could travel the length of Ireland, safe in the knowledge that his reception Ð and receipts Ð did not differ significantly from what he could expect in many parts of Britain. Finally, in his friendship with famous figures like Maclise there is little evidence of a particular Irish dimension, or an appreciation of any notion of romantic Irish nationalism. Perhaps what can be said is that in his pronouncements on this subject Dickens emerges as the most English of writers, who clearly appealed to the other island, but did not need to engage in a detailed or deferential examination of its people, politics, or culture in his quest for a place in the sun.

1[George Walter Thornbury], ‘Her Majesty’s Irish Mail’, All the Year Round 1 (16 July 1859), p. 285 (hereafter ‘AYR’). 2‘Mr Charles Dickens on the Irish Mail System’, Freeman’s Journal, 23 July 1859. 3[G. W. Thornbury], ‘“Her Majesty’s Irish Mail”: To the Editor of the Freeman’, Freeman’s Journal, 29 July 1859; the letter, written from London, is dated 25 July. For further details about Thornbury see Lohrli, pp. 447-8. 4Dickens’s relationship with the sycophantic Fitzgerald is somewhat troubling: it is unclear why the novelist accepted the Irishman’s laudations without any sense that Fitzgerald was cultivating him. 5Pilgrim Letters 9, p. 101; dated 2 August 1859. See also Fitzgerald’s description of the attack in Memoirs of an Author (London: R. Bentley & Son, 1894) 1, p. 113, and in Memoirs of Charles Dickens, pp. 10, 304-5. Fitzgerald identifies Thornbury as the author of ‘Her Majesty’s Irish Mail’. 6[G. W. Thornbury], ‘Driver Mike’, AYR 1 (13 August 1859), pp. 374-8. Thornbury’s authorship is confirmed by Ella Ann Oppenlander, in Dickens’s All the Year Round: Descriptive Index and Contributor List (Troy, NY: Whitson Publishing, 1984), p. 69. Given the motif of the English traveller engaged in conversation with a jaunting-car driver, it is possible that Thornbury might also have written ‘A Car-Full of Fairies’ (AYR 1 [25 June 1859], pp. 210-16). 7Fitzgerald, Memories of Charles Dickens, p. 304. 8See Oppenlander, p. 112. 9For an analysis of Boucicault’s sources see Leon Litvack, Literatures of the Nineteenth Century: Romanticism to Victorianism (Dublin: National Distance Education Centre, 1996), Unit 21, pp. 8-11. 10It is interesting to compare this article with ‘The Irish in America’ (AYR ns 1 [1 May 1869], pp. 510-14). 11On the Dublin Exhibition of 1865 see John Turpin, ‘Exhibitions of Art and Industries in Victorian Ireland’, Dublin Historical Record 35 (1981-82), pp. 2-13, 42-51. 12R. V. Comerford, The Fenians in Context: Irish Politics and Society, 1848-82 (Dublin: Wolfhound Press, 1985), p. 109. See also Patrick Quinlivan and Paul Rose, The

14 Fenians in England 1865-1872: a Sense of Insecurity (London: Calder, 1982) and Oliver P. Rafferty, The Church, the State and the Fenian Threat, 1861-75 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999). A critical response to Comerford is provided by John Newsinger, in Fenianism in Mid-Victorian Britain (London: Pluto Press, 1994). The Irish wing of the organisation was sometimes called the Irish Republican Brotherhood Ð a name that continued to be used after Fenianism proper had died out in the early 1870s. Arthur Griffith (a member of the Brotherhood) founded the Irish nationalist party Sinn Féin (‘We Ourselves’) in 1905. 13Portions of this article are reprinted by Cooke (pp. 184-6). 14Pilgrim Letters 11, p. 128; dated 29 December 1865. Lover, who was born in Dublin, wrote songs in the style of Thomas Moore. 15Pilgrim Letters 11, pp. 115, 116; dated 30 November 1865. In the same letter Dickens mentions ‘what with Canada’ Ð possibly referring to the abortive raid by American Fenians across the border into Canada in 1866 (similar attempts to enter Canada were made in 1870 and 1871). 16Comerford, The Fenians in Context, p. 127. 17According to Comerford, up to 150,000 Irish -Americans may have served in the Union armies, and up to 40,000 in the Confederate forces (p. 120). 18G. W. Thornbury, Old Stories Re-Told (London, 1870). For Dickens’s reaction see Pilgrim Letters 11, p. 247 (to Thornbury, dated 15 September 1866); for Thornbury’s being ‘rather given to horrors’ see Pilgrim Letters 11, p. 371 (dated 23 May 1867, to Sir James Emerson Tennent). 19[G. W. Thornbury], ‘Old Stories Re-Told: The Burning of Wildgoose Lodge (County Louth)’, AYR 17 (27 April 1867), pp. 417-23. The Ribbonmen, who drew support from both Ireland and America, were active between 1814 and 1834; for the roots of this agrrarian movement see T. Desmond Williams, ed., Secret Societies in Ireland (Dublin: Gill & Macmillan, 1973). 20AYR 17 (1 June 1867), p. 539. Comerford has, however, shown that Fenianism appealed predominantly to ‘respectable’ wage earners and some of the urban lower-middle class (R. V. Comerford, ‘Patriotism as pastime: the appeal of Fenianism in the mid-1860s’, Irish Historical Studies 22 [1980-1], pp. 239-50). 21‘The Fifth of March in Dublin’, AYR 17 (6 April 1867), p. 342-5; this article is reprinted in an abbreviated form by Cooke (pp. 187-90). For a detailed account of the events of 5 March see Shin-Ichi Takagami, ‘The Fenian Rising in Dublin, March 1867’, Irish Historical Studies 29 (1995), pp. 340-62; the rebellion failed largely because of poor organisation. On 7 March 1867 the Freeman’s Journal, in a report headlined ‘THE FENIAN RISING’, emphasised the absence of a threat: ‘Those who assembled [at Tallaght] have been utterly dispersed, in fact driven about by a few policemen, who acted... entirely without the air of the military’. 22‘Fenian James Fitzpatrick’, AYR 17 (18 May 1867), pp. 488-92. Two other pieces published in 1867 which relate to the Fenians discuss the constitution of the Irish Constabulary (AYR 17 [13 April 1867], pp. 375-7), and rumours of Fenian membership among the soldiers stationed at the Curragh (AYR 17 [25 May 1867], pp. 520-4). Both of these articles mention the Tallaght Hill rising in passing. 23Throughout March the Freeman’s Journal carried daily reports headed ‘THE FENIAN RISING’. 24Pilgrim Letters 11, p. 332; to Wilkie Collins, dated 13 March 1867. Dickens’s earliest recorded reference to the Fenians came in 1865, when he expressed ‘strong apprehensions’ in a letter to W. W. F. de Cerjat (Pilgrim Letters 11, p. 115; dated 30 November 1865). Something of Dickens’s sentiments concerning Fenians might also be gleaned from his comments about his aggressive dog Sultan, a gift from Percy Fitzgerald; Forster writes that ‘Dickens always protested that Sultan was a Fenian, for that no dog, not a secretly sworn member of that body, would ever have made such a point, muzzled as he was, of rushing at and bearing down with fury anything in scarlet with the remotest resemblance to a British uniform’ (Life of Charles Dickens, p. 657); after Sultan attacked a small girl, he had to be put down. See also Fitzgerald, Memories of Charles Dickens, pp. 13-15, and Pilgrim Letters 11, pp. 95-6, 118-9, 264 (dated 23 and 30 September 1865, and 6 November 1866). 25Pilgrim Letters 11, pp. 333-4.

15 26George Dolby, Charles Dickens as I Knew Him: The Story of the Reading Tours in Great Britain and America (1866-1870) (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1885), p. 74. 27See reports in the Freeman’s Journal and Irish Times, 16, 19, and 23 March 1867, and in the Belfast News-Letter and Northern Whig, 21 March 1867. Dickens’s Dublin venue, the Rotundo, was (ironically) an important location for political gatherings. 28See Pilgrim Letters 11, pp. 334-7; letters to Mamie Dickens and Georgina Hogarth, dated 16 and 17 March 1867. 29In a letter to his daughter Dickens confirms that he had ‘a good deal of talk’ with this unidentified colonel (Pilgrim Letters 11, p. 339; dated 21 March 1867). 30Dolby, pp. 75-6/ At the close of his tour, as he sailed towards North Wales on 23 March, the Nation reported that ‘Mr. Dickens, who took passage on Saturday morning to Holyhead, in the mail steamer Munster, evinced great interest in twelve Fenian convicts going in the same boat, under escort of a body of Royal Marines, en route to English prisons’. See ‘Mr Dickens and the Fenians’, The Nation, 30 March 1867, p. 501. A note in Pilgrim Letters 11, p. 331, erroneously relates this event to Dickens’s arrival in Dublin, and incorrectly identifies this publication as a Belfast paper. 31Pilgrim Letters 11, pp. 340, 338; to Forster, dated 22 March 1867, and to Mrs Elliot, dated 20 March 1867. There are, however, some signs that Dickens did feel the matter of the Fenians acutely, as indicated in a letter to Catherine (Mrs Ralph Bernal) Osborne: ‘When, when, when, will you be at peace in Ireland and sit under your vines and fig-trees without hanging revolvers and Enfield rifles on the branches? I feel as if I were in a more than usually incomprehensible dream when I am shown a hosiery establishment in Sackville Street here, from which some scores of young men decamped in the last wretched “risings” to starve in wildernesses or pine in jails. So the notion of your being guarded in your house, and of our getting involved with America (as we shall at last) on this mad head, has a grim absurdity in it of such nightmare breed that I half believe I shall wake presently and wonder how I ever came to invent in my sleep the word “Fenian”’ (Pilgrim Letters 11, p. 336; dated 16 March 1867). Catherine Osborne (wife of the liberal MP Ralph Bernal Osborne) was the heiress of Sir Thomas Osborne, Bart, of Thicknesse, Co. Waterford and Newtown Anner, Co. Tipperary. 32Pilgrim Letters 11, p. 475; memo dated early November 1867. Dickens left for the United States on 9 November. 33Pilgrim Letters 11, pp. 537, 512; dated 24 September and 15 December 1867. When Dickens wrote the second of these letters he had just learned of the Clerkenwell explosion Ð news of which had been conveyed to the United States by telegraph. On 13 December an attempt was made to rescue Richard O’Sullivan Burke and Joseph Theobald Casey by blowing a large hole in the outer wall of Clerkenwell prison. The attempt failed, but the explosion devastated the surrounding area, and several people were killed. The news prompted Dickens to comment to James T. Fields two weeks later, ‘I hear from London that the general question in society is, what will be blown up next by the Fenians’ (Pilgrim Letters 11, p. 525; dated 29 December 1867). For further details of the Clerkenwell explosion see Quinlivan and Rose, pp. 76-94. Dickens would also have known of the rescue of Thomas Kelly and Timothy Deasy from a police van in Manchester on 18 September, and the subsequent execution of Michael O’Brien, Michael Larkin, and William Philip Allen (who became known as the ‘Manchester Martyrs’) on 23 November; the New York Times (generally hostile to Fenianism) called the death sentences a ‘grievous blunder’ (26 November 1867); for a full account see Quinlivan and Rose, pp. 43-75. 34Pilgrim Letters 12, p. 267; to W. W. F. de Cerjat, dated 4 January 1869. 35The Irish Church Act (passed on 26 July 1869) took effect on 1 January 1871. 36The suspension of habeas corpus allowed the police to arrest and detain known Fenians Ð especially those held on fragile evidence. The eleven hundred Fenians arrested in the years 1866-8 became known as ‘H.C.S.A. prisoners’ (the initials referring, of course, to the Habeas Corpus Suspension Act). For Dickens’s reaction to Gladstone’s plan for granting amnesty to Fenian prisoners see Pilgrim Letters 12, p. 430. 37‘Mr Dickens’s Farewell Reading’, Freeman’s Journal, 14 January 1869. This adulation follows the comments of the previous day, when the paper labelled Dickens ‘the greatest writer of this age’. 38Sikes and Nancy was first performed to an audience of the general public on 5

16 January 1869 in St James’s Hall, London. 39See Philip Collins (ed.), Charles Dickens: The Public Readings (Oxford: Clarendon, 1975), pp. 465-71. 40Fitzgerald, Memories of Charles Dickens, pp. 61-2; reprinted in Pilgrim Letters 12, pp. 274-5. Fitzgerald might have given an incorrect date for Dickens’s letter, given that the pair were together in Belfast on 15 January. 41Charles Dickens as I Knew Him, pp. 364-6. 42Memories of Charles Dickens, pp. 82, 59; Charles Dickens as I Knew Him, p. 366. Dickens declined the invitation to the banquet. 43Memories of Charles Dickens, p. 305. It should, however, be noted that Fitzgerald’s narrative suffers from loose organisation, and lacks a tight chronological structure; the negative comments about the Irish appear in close proximity to the writer’s assessment of Irish reaction to ‘Her Majesty’s Irish Mail’, considered above. He might have intended to comment specifically on reaction to Thornbury’s essay, though from their tenor the remarks seem to apply to Dickens’s general opinion of Ireland and the Irish. 44John Turpin maintains that Maclise met Dickens through Forster (‘Daniel Maclise and Charles Dickens: A Study of their Friendship’, Studies 73 [1984], p. 47), whereas Johnson provides evidence for the artist’s introduction through William Harrison Ainsworth (p. 220). Maclise and Forster remained friends until the artist’s death; towards the end of his life Maclise intimated to Forster that ‘You are my oldest friend and companion. I love you my dearest Forster better than anyone’ (in volume of autograph letters from Daniel Maclise to John Forster, in the Forster Collection, National Art Library, Victoria and Albert Museum, MS no. 48.E.19, item no. 264). 45These works include the full-length ‘Nickleby’ portrait of Dickens at his writing desk, completed in 1839; the watercolour of the four Dickens children, painted for Catherine to take on the 1842 American tour; the painting Waterfall at St. Nighton’s Keive, near Tintagel (1842), for which Georgina Hogarth posed; and the triple portrait of Dickens, Catherine, and Georgina, executed in 1843, and the portrait of Catherine (1846) Most of these images are reproduced by Jane R. Cohen in her Charles Dickens and His Original Illustrators (Columbus, OH: Ohio State UP, 1980). 46Nancy Weston offers a misinformed, problematic assessment of the artist’s Irish sentiments and identity in her Daniel Maclise: Irish Artist in Victorian London, (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2001). See Leon Litvack’s review in The Dickensian 97.3 (2001), pp. 249-51. Some doubt is cast on the ‘Irishness’ of Maclise’s work by Fintan Cullen, in Visual Politics: The Representation of Ireland, 1750-1950 (Cork: Cork UP, 1997). 47Pilgrim Letters 5, p. 6006, note 2. 48In 1842, when Dickens was composing chapter 6 of American Notes (considered above), he appealed to Maclise for assistance with a particular word: ‘I want to know... what an old Irishwoman would call an old burying ground at home. Would she call that place in which the bones of her kindred lie Ð a Burying Ground Ð a Chapel Yard Ð or what’ (Pilgrim Letters 3, p. 308; dated 14 August 1842). The word which Dickens chose was ‘graveyard’ Ð though there is no evidence to confirm that this word was recommended by Maclise. 49‘The Spirit of Chivalry in Westminster Hall’, Dickens’ Journalism, Volume 2, p. 79; the review appeared in Douglas Jerrold’s Shilling Magazine for August 1845. Maclise executed the drawing in response to an invitation by the Royal Commission of Fine Arts (chaired by Prince Albert), for cartoons for frescoes which would occupy the six arched compartments in the new House of Lords, and would be illustrative of the chamber’s function and its relation to the Sovereign. Dickens’s remarks about Maclise as an English artist were cancelled at proof stage, as was his assertion that ‘The object of this competition was encouragement and exaltation of English art; and in this work, albeit done on paper which soon rots, the Art of England will survive, assert itself, and triumph’. 50Richard Ormond, Daniel Maclise 1806-1870 (London: Arts Council of Great Britain, 1972), p. 79. 51W. J. McCormack, introduction to ‘Language, Class and Genre’, The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, ed. Seamus Deane (Derry: Field Day Publications, 1991), 1, p. 1079. 52See Pilgrim Letters 2, p. 79; dated 2 June 1840. Dickens knew of Maclise’s

17 commission to illustrate a new edition of the Irish Melodies, published in 1845; but he is not known to have commented on the published volume. 53Kate Perugini, ‘Charles Dickens as a Lover of Art and Artists’, The Magazine of Arts, ns 1 (1903), p. 127.

18 Fig. 10. Title page for Punch 53 (1867). Mr Punch, mounted on a British lion, disperses legions of armed Fenians. The image serves to indicate the interest of the press in the threat of Fenian insurrection.

19 Fig. 11. ‘The Fenian Guy Fawkes’, in Punch 53 (1867), p. 263.

20 Fig. 12. ??????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????? ?????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????

21 Fig. 13. Self-portrait of Daniel Maclise, aged 23; frontispiece to W. Justin O’Driscoll, A Memoir of Daniel Maclise, R.A. This drawing conveys the charm and good looks of a young man who considered himself something of a dandy. In the early 1830s the artist changed the spelling of his name from ‘McClise’ to ‘Maclise’.

22 Martin Chuzzlewit and Hood’s ‘Dream of Eugene Aram’

RODNEY STENNING EDGECOMBE

ICKENS HAS OFTEN BEEN PRAISED for the extraordinary inwardness with which he renders the experience of criminal guilt Ð that of DFagin, for example, or Jonas Chuzzlewit. Given his admiration for the work of Thomas Hood, it seems probable that ‘The Dream of Eugene Aram’ provided Dickens with a point of departure for the latter, since, like the poem, the relevant passages in the novel present a consuming monomania, and even recall some of its incidental details. On a purely superficial level, we have the common denominator of the woodland setting, and the clothing of the corpse in leaves:

“With breathless speed, like a soul in chase, I took him up and ran; There was no time to dig a grave Before the day began: In a lonesome wood, with heaps of leaves, I hid the murdered man! [”] (299)

It is also significant that Hood should transfuse the murderer’s guilt through the circumambient air:

He told how murderers walk the earth Beneath the curse of Cain, Ð With crimson clouds before their eyes, And flames about their brain: (296) * * * “And lo! the universal air Seemed lit with ghastly flame; Ten thousand thousand dreadful eyes Were looking down in blame: [”] (297)

Dickens, as we can see, apocalyptically transfers the blood of Montague Tigg into the ruddy sunset, additionally inspired, perhaps, by a recollection of Doctor Faustus):

What he had left within the wood, that he sprang out if it as if it were a hell! The body of a murdered man. In one thick solitary spot, it lay among the last year’s leaves of oak and beech, just as it had fallen headlong down. Sopping and soaking in among the leaves that

23 formed its pillow; oozing down into the boggy ground, as if to cover itself from human sight; forcing its way between and through the curling leaves, as if those senseless things rejected and forswore it, and were coiled up in abhorrence; went a dark, dark stain that dyed the whole summer night from earth to heaven. (802)

He had done murder for this! He had girdled himself about with perils, agonies of mind, innumerable fears, for this! He had hidden his secret in the wood; pressed and stamped it down into the bloody ground; and here it started up when least expected, miles upon miles away; known to many; proclaiming itself from the lips of an old man who had renewed his strength and vigour as by a miracle, to give voice against him! (859)

This duplicates Aram’s sense of the body’s relentless self-disclosure, especially in way ‘stamped it down’ echoes ‘trodden down’?

“Then down I cast me on my face, And first began to weep, For I knew my secret then was one That earth refused to keep: Or land or sea, though he should be Ten thousand fathoms deep.

“So wills the fierce avenging Sprite, Til blood for blood atones! Ay, though he’s buried in a cave, And trodden down with stones, And years have rotted off his flesh, Ð the world shall see his bones! [”] (299-300)

The powm and novel also measure the enormity of the crime against the innocence of the natural cycle, imaged (tangentially in Hood –‘Merrily rose the lark, and shook / The dewdrop from its wing’ Ð p. 299) through the dawn:

Setting off from this point, and measuring time by the rapid hurry of his guilty thoughts, and what had gone before the bloodshed, and the troops of incoherent and disordered images of which he was the constant prey; he came by daylight to regard the murder as an old murder, and to think himself comparatively safe, because it had not been discovered yet. Yet! When the sun which looked into the wood, and gilded with its rising light a dead man’s face, had seen that man alive, and sought to win him to a thought of Heaven, on its going down last night! (p. 804)

Other connecting factors are the common sense of physical burdenment (Aram literally, and Chuzzlewit notionally, shoulders the corpse Ð ‘If he 24 had been condemned to bear the body in his arms, and lay it down for recognition at the feet of everyone he met, it could not have been more constantly with him’ Ð p. 853), and the sleeplessness of the guilty parties. Although Shakeapeare had already treated guilt definitively in Macbeth, both Hood and Dickens enhance the idea with a sense of the bedroom as a place of claustrophobic entrapment. Here is Hood:

But Guilt was my grim Chamberlain That lighted me to bed; And drew my midnight curtains round, With fingers bloody red! (298) and here is Dickens: ‘The raging thirst, the fire that burnt within him as he lay beneath the clothers, the augmented horror of the room when they shut it out from his view’ (805). In both narratives, finally, the murderers compulsively revisit the scene of the crime, Aram literally:

“One stern tyrannic thought, that made All other thoughts its slave; Stronger and stronger every pulse Did that temptation crave, Ð Still urging me to go and see The Dead Man in his grave! [”] (298-99) and Chuzzlewit through its perpetual reconstruction in his mind:

He tried Ð he had never left off trying Ð not to forget it was there, for that was impossible, but to forget to weary himself by drawing vivid pictures of it in his fancy: by going softly about it and about it among the leaves, approaching it nearer and nearer through a gap in the boughs, and startling the very flies that were thickly sprinkled all over it, like heaps of dried currants. (853)

Works Cited Thomas Hood, The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood. London: Frederick Warne, no date. Charles Dickens, Martin Chuzzlewit. Ed. P. N. Furbank. Harmondworth: Penguin, 1968.

25 ‘The Jew’ and the Philosophers

CORNELIA COOK

ICKENS’S ATTACK ON THE NEW POOR LAW in Oliver Twist is not just an exposure of malpractice in the implementation of public Dcharitable provision; it is an attack on the ideological bases of the legislation. The novel’s satire on greedy guardians and incompetent public employees is sweeping and anachronistic, drawing into its comic and pathetic compass features of the Old Poor Law1 as well as reference to the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834. Its ideological thrust identifies the centralised organisation and stringently managed welfare system of the New Poor Law with its utilitarian sponsors and with the doctrine of political Economy. Before we are plunged with Oliver into the criminal underworld of London in the 1830s we are exposed, in the summary of his coming-to-be, to the exploitative ‘Philosophers’ of the welfare system and the workhouse staff. The two groups Ð criminals and ‘Philosophers’ Ð will ultimately be linked, by plot and argument, and from this link may emerge the rationale for the identity of the novel’s compelling villain: Fagin, ‘the Jew’. Even before Adam Smith’s Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776) proposed an economic theory in which the promotion of individual interests was the only route to the general good and in which not ‘regulation of commerce’ but ‘the study of his own advantge’2 would ensure the best deployment of capital, Smith had advaced the notion of ‘self-interest’ in relation to morality. The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) proposed that the prime motivation to virtue was ‘our selfish ...afections’. ‘Concern for our own happiness recommends to us the virtue of prudence’.3 Only after that does our concern for others promote justice and beneficence, and even then we act in response to a self-censoring notion of personal surveillance, engendering prudence. For Smith, humans were commercial animals, shaped by an inherent ‘propensity to truck, barter, and exchange one thing for another’ (WN 21). Whatever ‘publick good’, whatever general social or economic ‘advantage’ might be gained, it would Ð morally or economically Ð originate in the intention of ‘his own gain’, in self- interest. Smith’s morality of self-interest underpins the political and economic doctrines of utilitarianism and laissez-faire. Economic calculation turned to public policy, too, in the writings of Malthus on surplus population. Describing Malthus’s doctrine in his attack on Poor Law administration and workhouse conditions five years after Oliver Twist, Friedrich Engels summed up: for Malthus

the earth is perennially over-populated, whence poverty, misery, distress, and immorality must prevail;...the whole problem is not how

26 to support the surplus population, but how to restrain it as far as possible.4

The Poor Law for Engels was the all-too-logical child of political economy and Malthusian principle. Since, however, the rich hold all the power, the proletarians must submit...to have the law actually declare them superflous. This has been done by the New Poor Law. The Old Poor Law which rested upon the act of 1601 (the 43rd of Elizabeth) naively started from the notion that it is the duty of the parish to provide for the maintenance of th poor. Whoever had no work received relief, and the poor man regarded the parish as pleged to protect him from starvation...In 1833, when the bourgeoisie had just reached its full development, the bourgeoisie began the reform of the Poor Law according to its own point of view. A commission was appointed...it was found that this system was ruining the nation...Convinced with Malthus and the rest of the adherents of free competition that it is best to let each one take care of himself...they proposed a Poor Law constructed as far as possible in harmony with the doctrine of Malthus...(Engels, 571-572)

The Poor Law Amendment Act passed in 1834 was designed to eliminate dependency on the Poor Rate and to replace a lax and often corrupt system of local administration of relief. The Report of the Poor Law Commissioners (1833) saw the existing system as

a check to industry...a stimulant to population...a national institution for discountenancing the industrious and honest, and for protecting the idle, the improvident and the vicious; the destroyer of the bonds of family life; a system for preventing the accumulation of capital...and for reducing the rate-payer to pauperism...5

That system was replaced by a more stringent regime and administered locally by Boards of Guardians under supervision by three Poor Law Commissioners in London. Out-relief to the able-bodied was abolished. Workhouses which had come into being in 1782 were now to be the only form of relief to the poor.

they established the rule, that all poor people should have the alternative...of being starved by a gradual process in the house, or by a quick one out of it.6

New regulations set forth in the Act provided for a minimal diet, debasing and debilitating work, and, to ‘prevent the “superflous” from multiplying, and “demoralized” parents from influencing their children’ (Engels, 573), families were separated and kept apart.

They...kindly undertook to divorce married people...and, instead of compelling a man to support his family, as they had heretofore done, 27 took his family away from him, and made him a bachelor! (OT, 55)

Both Carlyle in 1839 and Engels in 1844 invoke the popular epithet ‘Poor Law Bastilles’, the latter summing up:

the law in its essence proclaims the poor criminals, the workhouses prisons, their inmates beyond the pale of law, beyond the pale of humanity, objects of disgust and repulsion...(Engels, 574)

If the biographer of Oliver Twist is to be believed, the economic aims of the system were realised.

For the first six months after Oliver Twist was removed, the system was in full operation. It was rather expensive at first, in consequence of the increase in the undertaker’s bill, and the necessity of taking in the clothes of all the paupers, which fluttered loosely on their wasted, shrunken forms, after a week or two’s gruel. But the number of inmates got thin as well as the paupers; and the board were in ecstasies. (OT, 55)

Engels located the limitations of the New Poor Law in the principles of political economy as interpreted by the particular interests of the English bourgeoisie.

Supply and demand are the formulas according to which the logic of the English Bourgeois judges all human life. Hence free competition in every respect, hence the regime of laissez faire, laissex aller... (Engels, 564)

The rate-payer whose ‘ruin’ the Old Poor Law was, in the eyes of the Commissioners, ‘calculated’7 to effect, is Engels’s pre-eminently calculating bourgeois. Even his philanthropic activity is self-interested.

The English bourgeoisie is charitable out of self-interest; it...regards its gifts as a business matter... (Engels, 565)

The purchase of self-protection from the needy emerges as a perverse version of a philosophy designed to find in the prudent individual the basis for the common good. For Engels, ‘the bourgeoisie assumes a hypocritical, boundless philanthropy, but only when its own interests require it; as in its Politics and Political Economy’ (Engels, 565). Carlyle, whose ‘Tory’ radicalism Engels admired (‘He has sounded the social disorder more deeply than any other English bourgeois’ and gives ‘a splendid description of the English bourgeoisie and its disgusting money-greed’ (289-92)), saw the Poor Law Amendment act as a manifestation of ‘social principle...A chief social principle...false, heretical and damnable, if ever aught was!’8 Nonetheless it was a badly conceived right thing for the wrong reasons (for ‘for the idle man there is 28 no place in this England of ours’). And its architects were, however misguidedly, ‘men filled with an idea of a theory’. Engels’s political economists and Carlyle’s ‘men filled with an idea of a theory’ are Dickens’s ‘philosophers’. The world of Oliver Twist is inhabited, as Engels’s bourgeois England is, by philosophers Ð people in whom the pursuit of self-interst makes a fine parody of the political economy of Adam Smith. Oliver’s world is shaped, as Carlyle’s post-Reform act England was, by ‘men filled with a theory’ whose principles and laws ‘exercise their most material influence over all his fortunes’ (OT, 54). And Dickens peoples his novel with representative examples whom he labels ‘philosophers’. The elderly female superintendent of workhouse children (‘juvenile offenders’)

was a woman of wisdom and experience; she knew what was good for children, and she had a very accurate perception of what was good for herself. So, she approrpriated the greater part of the weekly stipend for her own use...proving herself a very great experimental philosopher. (OT, 48)

She is compared closely with another apocryphal

experimental philosopher, who had a great theory about a horse being able to live without eating, and who demonstrated it so well, that he got his own horse down to a straw a day, and would unquestionably have rendered him a very spirited and rampacious animal on nothing at all, if he had not died just four-and-twenty hours before he was to have had his first comfortable bait of air. (OT, 48)

The inception of the New Poor Law is represented in the novel as a ‘decision’ arrived at by ‘the board’, and the narrative immediately informs us that ‘The members of this board were very sage, deep, philosophical men’ (OT, 55). The irony with which the narrative habitually presents such ‘philosophical’ wisdom and those who turn it to social practice, fades behind outraged direct address at the conclusion of Chapter Four (and the instalment).

I wish some well-fed philosopher, whose meat and drink turn to gall within him; whose blood is ice, whose heart is iron; could have seen Oliver Twist clutching at the dainty viands that the dog had neglected...There is only one thing I should like better; and that would be to see the Philosopher making the same sort of meal himself...(OT, 74)

Although the story largely loses sight of the workhouse, its development unfolds the ubiquity of ‘philosophers’ in English society Ð not least in the slums and criminal haunts of London. Nor are those in whom the crude utilitarian development of Smith’s principles of moral sentiment is most 29 advanced solely the typical bourgeois or the official. London’s streets are an academy for philosophers of enlightened self-interest. The actions of the Artful Dodger and Charley Bates in abandoning Oliver to take the blame and likely punishment for their act of theft provide the narrative’s occasion for a detailed and informed discourse on the principles of political economy.

they were actuated...by a very laudable and becoming regard for themselves; and forasmuch as the freedom of the subject and the liberty of the individual are among the first and proudest boasts of a true-hearted Englishman...this action should tend to exalt them in the opinion of all public and patriotic men, in almost as great a degree as this strong proof of their anxiety for their own preservation and safety goes to corroborate and confirm the little code of laws which certain profound and sound-judging philosophers have laid down as the mainsprings of all nature’s deeds and actions: the said philosophers very wisely reducing the good lady’s proceedings to matters of maxim and theory... If I wanted any further proof of the strictly philosophical nature of the conduct of these young gentlemen in their very delicate predicament, I should at once find it in the fact...of their quitting the pursuit, when the general attention was fixed upon Oliver...it is the invariable practice of many mighty philosophers, in carrying out their themes, to evince great wisdom and foresight in providing against every possible contingency which can be supposed at all likely to affect themselves. Thus, to do a great right, you may do a little wrong, and you may take any means which the ends to be attained will justify; the amount of the right, or the amount of the wrong, or indeed the distinction between the two, being left entirely to the philosopher concerned, to be settled and determined by his clear, comprehensive, and impartial view of his own particular case. (OT, 132-133)

A more colloquial, more dramatic and no less clear delivery of the principle of enlightened self-interest is the lesson read by Fagin himself to Noah Claypole (a.k.a. Morris Bolter) in Chapter 43.

‘Every man’s his own friend, my dear,’ replied Fagin, with his most insinuating grin. ‘He hasn’t as good a one as himself anywhere.’

‘... Some conjurers say that number three is the magic number, and some say seven. It’s neither, my friend, neither. It’s number one.’

‘In a little community like ours, my dear,’ said Fagin,... ‘we have a general number one; that is, you can’t consider yourself as number one, without considering me too as the same, and all the other young people.’

30 ‘You see’, pursued Fagin... ‘we are so mixed up together, and identified in our interests, that it must be so. For instance, it’s your object to take care of number one Ð meaning yourself.’

‘Well! You can’t take care of yourself, number one, without taking care of me, number one.’

‘To be able to do that, you depend on me. To keep my little business all snug, I depend on you. The first is your number one, the second my number one. The more you value your number one, the more careful you must be of mine; so we come at last to what I told you at first Ð that a regard for number one holds us all together, and must do so, unless we would all go to pieces in company.’ (OT, 387-88)

In so clearly expounding a utilitarian ethic which makes abundantly clear the community good to be derived from the pursuit of self interest, Fagin allows the reader to entertain links between criminality, self-interest and political economy. But Fagin stands out in the ‘little community’ of thieves Ð as in the wider society Ð by his constant identification as ‘the Jew’. It is worth exploring the possible significance of this identification in the context of the novel’s political preoccupations. There is no effort in Oliver Twist to present Fagin in this light as anything other than stereotypical. His life is dramatised as that of a criminal: the details of his dwelling and pursuits are of the den and haunts of a thief, a fence and probably a pimp. There is no exploration of his religion, his history, or Ð but for a minor and equally stereotypical confederate Ð of the London Jewish community. That community was considerably investigated and documented in the work of Dickens’s contemporary Henry Mayhew. The first volume of London Labour and the London Poor (1851-52) details Mayhew’s and his reporters’ observations ‘Of the Street Jews of London’, their trades, localities, dress, food and religious practices. They are represented as trading in foreign commodities, from watches and jewels to fruits, exotic birds and cigars, and in clothing. Poorer Jews, Mayhew explains, continue preeminently to trade, as they have historically done, in old clothes. He represents even these poor as sharp in business, fond of speculation, but averse to theft. ‘There are certainly some old-clothes men who will buy articles at such price that they must know them to have been stolen,’ Mayhew’s educated Jewish ‘informant’ explains. ‘Their rule, however, is to ask no questions, and to get the article as cheap as possible’ in the interest of profit.

‘I expect there’s a good many of ‘em,’ he continued, for he sometimes spoke of his co-traders, as if they were not of his own class, ‘is fond of cheating...’9

But sharp trading and successful bartering are the limits of dubious conduct in the view of the informant who concludes: ‘They are fond of 31 money, and will do almost anything to get it. Jews are perhaps the most money-loving people in England’ (LLLP, 198). Mayhew’s ‘informant’, as he warms to his task, describes his co- religionists and fellow-traders as fond of gambling, indifferent to dietary laws and to the synagogue, lazy in household matters, but energetic in pursuit of a ‘deal’, and invariably provided with domestic or sabbath comforts by ‘parents or wife’ or neighbours. This informant’s testimony is corroborated but corrected as exaggerated by that of ‘a Jewish professional gentleman’. Mayhew’s text further explains that ‘Jew old- clothes men, in addition to being notably cleanly in their habits’ and observant of rudimentary dietary prohibitions, are responsible patriarchal figures, ‘exemplary family men’ and ‘good providers’ (200). This account, still implicitly derived from the authoritative ‘Jewish professional gentleman’, reiterates, ‘their principal characteristic is their extreme love of money’ (LLLP, 201). Needles to say, this characteristic which Mayhew takes pains to derive and authenticate through Jewish commentators, informs the crude stereotype, extant throughout Europe from at least medieval times, which also gives Fagin his ‘villanous-looking and repulsive face...matted red hair...’ (OT, 105), his beard and the ‘shrivelled’ bent posture of the man in his ‘greasy flannel gown’ or his ‘old patched greatcoat’. But in Europe of the nineteenth century this stereotype was both recognised for the offensive travesty it is and supplanted by more sophisticated versions of the Jew with his ‘love of speculation’ (LLLP, 197), his acumen in commercial dealings, the capitalist practices which, even among the London street poor, ‘the Jew boy’ and ‘the old Jew’ are adept in. When Karl Marx replied to Bruno Bauer in 1843 on ‘the Jewish Question’ in relation to Jewish emancipation, he proposed neither the emancipation of the Jews nor, like Bauer, their emancipation from Judaism. Marx identified all of bourgeois capitalist Europe with the stereotypical Jew and demanded ‘the emancipation of society from Judaism’.10 The terms in which he made his identification are those of his materialist attack on religion, capitalism and consequent alienation allied with those of the contemporary image of the Jew as trader, as guided by ‘practical need, self-interest’: ‘What is the worldly religion of the jew? Huckstering. What is his wordly God? Money’ (Marx, 170) This, for Marx, is ‘the actual worldley Jew’. Marx’s argument is rooted in criticism of an individualist notion of citizenship and of human rights: ‘egotistic man...withdrawn into himself, into the confines of his private interests and private caprice, and separated from the community’ (Marx, 164). Marx’s characteristic diagnosis is ‘In the rights of man, he is far from being conceived as a species-being...’. In this ethos the man who enjoys rights is ‘egotistic man’, ‘not man as citoyen, but man as bourgeois’. From this overview of capitalist society Marx constructs ‘the Jew’ as not a stranger in, but an exemplification of civil society. ‘The Jew is perpetually created by civil society from its own entrails’ (Marx, 171). This specious argument finds a ‘secular basis of Judaism’ in ‘practical need and self-interest’ (Marx, 172), producing a ‘worldly religion’ of 32 huckstering in the service of a money-god. ‘Very well then! Emancipation from huckstering and money, consquently from the practical, real Judaism, would be the self-emancipation of our time’ (Marx, 170). Marx’s argument is large. ‘Money has become a world power and the practical Jewish spirit has become the practical spirit of the Christian nations. The...Christians have become Jews’ (Marx, 170). That argument that Christian society has become capitalist and adopted utilitarian principles issues repeatedly in the conclusion that ‘the god of practical need and self interest is money’; money is now what ‘the jealous God of Israel’ was: ‘the estranged essence of man’s work and man’s existence, and this alien essence dominates him and he worships it’ (Marx, 172). ‘The God of the Jews’ has thus ‘become secularised and has become the god of the world’ (Marx, 172) and so, ‘the social emancipation of the Jew is the emancipation of society from Judaism’. (Marx, 174). Dickens was not, as Engels was to become, an associate of Marx, nor was On the Jewish Question a widely known text. But even its topical and Marxist argument urges an equation which was not confined to Marx alone and which seems to have, in some quarters, acquired already the nature of a new stereotype. Marx’s own essay brings together capitalism, the bourgeois, the ideological dominance of self-interest linked to enlightenment principles of political economy, and ‘the Jew’. Engels invokes the same cluster of associations in his description of the English bourgeoisie,

a class so deeply demoralised, so incurably debased by selfishness, so corroded within,...for [whom] nothing exists in this world, except for the sake of money... (Engels, 562)

Indifference to the fate of the proletariat results from this. But what is fascinating is Engels’s description of ‘these English bourgeois’. They are ‘good husbands and family men’ (and they don’t ‘higgle and haggle’ quite so much as the Germans), but their class ‘knows no bliss save that of rapid gain, no pain save that of losing gold’ (562). ‘Ultimately it is self-interest, and especially money-gain which alone determines them’ (Engels, 563).

It is perhaps not surprising, then, that Engels invokes an old stereotype and, like Marx, gives it a new dimension in summing them up:

All the conditions of life are measured by money, and what brings no money is nonsense, unpractical, idealistic bosh. Hence, Political Economy, the Science of Wealth, is the favourite study of these bartering Jews. Every one of them is a Political Economist. (Engels, 563)

Oliver Twist suggest that an ideology of self-interest, which it associates with the ‘philosophers’ of utilitarianism and political economy, infects 33 the whole population, from Bumble and Mrs. Mann, to Monks and Fagin, the Poor Law Commissioners and politicians. The association allows the text to generate several awarenesses. Low-life criminals become parodic likenesses of their social and political betters in a device widely used since the eighteenth century but here resonating with the priorities of the burgeoning bourgeoisie. In a further step, however, the ideology of self- interest not only reflects but also legitimises the procedures of thieves, as Fagin so eloquently insists. Finally the novel summons an old stereotype of the demonised, exploitive ‘Jew’, obsessive in pursuit of money, and fuses it with a newer image Ð the political economist as a figure of narrow self-interest and exploitative commerce Ð to make Fagin the novel’s most striking and readily recognised embodiment of moral abandon and an inhumane politics. This procedure will again be embraced in the rhetoric of Marx and Engels. The association of these texts might go some way to attributing an ideological underpinning to the novel’s extraordinary invocation of a theatrically stylised and offensive stereotype, of more recent currency than medieval Christianity’s demonised Jewish other. Whether Marx and Engels were echoing a new association of stereotypes already in the air of the 1830s is unclear, as is Dickens’s access to such associations in political or social commentary. What is clear is that Dickens, like Engels a few years later, associates under the rubric of ‘philosophers’ of self-interest utilitarian government, the system and executors of a harsh New Poor Law, petty criminals in public employ and street criminals of the urban slums. Engels’s bourgeoisie are such philosophers: ‘Political Economy...is the favourite study of these bartering Jews. Every one of them is a Political Economist.’ Fagin, the melodramatic parody of the patriarch and the man of commerce, the expositor of the philosophy of the interests of number one, emerges in the novel’s dramatised criticism as the quintessential political economist.

1The accumulated Poor Law legislation which the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834 (New Poor Law) replaced began with the Statue of the Forty-third of Elizabeth (1601). This law, based on the entitlement to work, provided for a poor-rate to subsidise employment for the able-bodied unemployed. In 1782 parishes were given power to combine for the provision of institutions for the maintenance of all classes of the destitute except the able- bodied. These workhouses were oppressive and ill-managed. The baby-farming system which the novel describes operated from the early nineteenth century. 2Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, ed. Kathryn Sutherland, Oxford: OUP, 1993, p. 289. 3Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, (6th edition (1790) VI.iv.1), ed. D. D. Raphael and A. L. Macfie, The Glasgow Edition of the Works of Adam Smith, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979, reprint Indianapolis: The Liberty Fund, Inc., 1982, p. 262. 4Frederick Engels, The Condition of the Working-Class in England, Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Collected Works, Vol. 4, London, Lawrence and Wishart, 1975, p. 570. 5‘Extracts from Information received from the Poor Law Commissioners, Published by authority, London 1833’, Engels, p. 571. 6Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1966 (First Published 1837-9), p. 55. 7The words are from the Wischnewsky translation (1886), Friedrich Engels, The

34 Condition of the Working Class in England, ed. V. G. Kiernan, Harmondsworth, Penguin Books, 1987, p. 283. 8Thomas Carlyle, Chartism (1839), Thomas Carlyle: Selected Writings, ed. Alan Shelston, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1971, p. 164 9Henry Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor, ed. Victor Neuburg, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1985, p. 198. 10Karl Marx, ‘On the Jewish Question’, Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Collected Works, Vol. 3, London, Lawrence and Wishart, 1975. p. 174.

35 Pickwick’s Stage-Manager

EDWARD COSTIGAN

LWAYS DRAWN TO THE POSITION OF EDITOR, in fact or as an authorial stance, Dickens had a strong sense of his role as Aintermediary between the world of his creation and the customary cultural world of his readers. One aspect of this is the frequent reference implicitly made to material or to modes of presentation familiar from literary tradition or the cultural environment Ð from fiction and folklore and from contemporary journalism and theatre. Any consideration of how such echoes contribute to the full performance has to take into account the way they are projected and combined. A convention or style that in one case is employed directly may in another be used slantingly and the reader invited to take a sidelong look at what is presented which invokes a familiar situation, character-type, or stylistic manner. Dickens too, ‘do the Police in different voices’ Ð to give the idiomatic phrase from Our Mutual Friend the broad application that T. S. Eliot intended when he thought of borrowing it. He is the most resourceful of nineteenth-century novelists in drawing on established modes and styles, and the most skilful in suggesting a meditating voice whose transitions of tone create a variety of points of view. The procedure gives rise to subtle and sometimes elusive effects, especially where what is brought forward recalls a familiar model or pattern while the narrative presentation signals that it is adopting a manner in imitation of a particular style of commentary. Aleady in the early work there is immediate interest and pleasure in the interplay of the diverse attitudes ventriloquised by ‘Boz’, a lightly assumed presence that allows for a variety of impersonations. The sprightliness of Sketches by Boz, particularly in the Tales, often comes from qualified imitation of theatrical patterns brought into apposition with occasions and assumptions in everyday life.1 The success of the collected Sketches, a ‘pilot balloon’, prompted the proposal for the ‘monthly something’ that became The Pickwick Papers, its ‘constant succession of characters and incidents’ apparently contained in documents edited by a historian.2 Dickens had already considered using this narrative device: at the end of the Sketches by Boz tale ‘A Passage in the Life of Mr. Watkins Tottle’ on its first publication in February 1835 a playful conclusion announced that ‘a variety of papers’ describing Tottle’s ‘wanderings among different classes of society’ were left in the hands of his landlady and to settle unpaid bills would be published from time to time, arranged ‘with all due humility by BOZ’.3 The basick stance in Pickwick is that Boz is the humble editor, but this is transformed on occasioon to the pose struck in the Address to readers half-way through the serial publication where the Author comes forward to assure the audience that the show will go on, in the boisterous persona of ‘Mr. Pickwick’s Stage Manager’.4

36 ‘I thought of Mr. Pickwick, and wrote the first number.’ It is this aspect of the inception of the novel that Dickens singles out in the 1847 Preface Ð a name and appearance at the steady centre of a ‘range of English scenes and people’. Reviewers at once saw a connection with a well-known fictional figure: Mr Pickwick was ‘the modern Quixote’ or, more pointedly, ‘the cockney Quixote of the nineteenth century’.5 Respectably and wealthily retired, his curiosity overcomes the sedentary reserve to which his age and position would entitle him. Even before he is differentiated from the other members of the Club there is the suggestion of a fruitful comic division as he emerges from a past of retierement into the arena of contemporary activity. Nostalgic harking- back is found at its simplest in passages of reflection and description.6 In the presentation of the incidents the tone is more complex. With something of the ironic attitude that presides over the Club’s antiquarian researches, standard comic situations and dilemmas are produced with an air of discovery, re-enacted by the figures the narrative introduces us to. Pickwick was in more ways than the obvious one a ‘serial’: a series of scenes in which the familiar recurs with novel variations, a combination of the known and the new. It has often been remarked that some of the plot material draws on elements in the eighteenth-century novels Dickens was fond of. For its organisation and treatment that other life-long assegince was influential: dramatic literature and the stage. Pickwick was begun just after the period when he ‘went to the theatre every night for a long time’,7 had not given up the idea of making a name as a playwright, and still thought of a novel proper as a three-volume publication. Reviewers also easily noticed the links with the stage. Retrieving the connections involves conjecture: in some cases it is possible to specify plays known to Dickens; in others, only to suggest likely examples and describe common features. Often, he chose the plays he would see by the performers Ð the surest recommendation, perhaps, for contemporary plays, which commonly were simply written to order Ð and he took away impressions that stayed with him for a long time. His admiration for Charles Mathews the Elder is well known; and there was Mathews the Younger, and other actors that Dickens makes familiar reference to, sometimes recalling after many years the details of scenes and performances: among them J. B. Buckstone, Frederick Yates, John Pritt Harley and Robert Keeley.8 (Pleased with his own performance in a farce in 1842, Dickens said that his playing was ‘a mixture of T Ð , Harley, Yates, Keeley, and Jerry Sneak’).9 These were, in their own realm, distinguished players who regularly appeared in the sort of popular comic drama Dickens took a warm, and wry, interest in.

II For the opening Number of Pickwick Dickens chose an adventure which had been played out many times before Ð the affair of the reluctant duellist. This, it has been said, is modelled on the duel between Pallet and the Physician in Peregrine Pickle, but there are telling differences: 37 Smollett emphasises the motives behind the confrontation and the consequences of it; it is deliberately fomented and causes humiliation. Dickens concentrates on the action, which circumstances conspire to bring about and to bring to a harmless conclusion. In its structure the episode is more like The Rivals; in its burlesque tone closer to farces of the 1830s that extracted fun from duelling. Fighting by Proxy, about a substituted duellist, is one typical example, An Affair of Honour another. Keeley appeared in these (together with the celebrated Liston), in the latter taking the key role of the comic-ferocious military man, Captain Carnage.10 A review of the first Number pointed out that the incidents so far ‘belong to the stage rather than real life’ and that the duelling business is ‘a scene for a farce.’11 It proved to be a recurrent resource. Mr Pickwick’s mistake about his room at the Ipswich inn appears to be leading to a duel that the frightened Miss Witherfield forestalls (ch. XXIV); and at Bath vengeance is threatened after Winkle takes refuge in Mrs Dowler’s sedan-chair, rousing the jealous ire of her husband, the same character-type as Dr Slammer, a whiskery army man (ch. XXVI).12 These threats come to nothing: Dowler is averse to risk, and in the previous case the ferocity was, the narrative divulges, ‘the most harmless thing in nature’, mere rhetorical bluster, as Miss Witherfield would have known if she had ‘mingled much with the busy world’ and known contemporary ‘manners and customs’, or had read ‘the parliamentary debates’ (p. 357). The comic extravagance the narrative connives with, it also punctures with a satirical reference to current realities. The same thing happens when the duel plot is set going again but soon breaks down. The young Bob Sawyer, making claim to the hand of Arabella Allen, assumes the part of the wronged cavalier and commences a high- flown stage ritual: ‘He shall be an object to me, Sir, at twelve paces, and a very pretty object I’ll make of him, Sir...’ Ð which is at once brought down to earth in the narrative continuation,

a very pretty denunciation... but Mr. Bob Sawyer rather weakened its effect, by winding up with some general obserbations concerning the punching of heads and knocking out of eyes, which were commonplace by comparison. (p. 742)

The heroic flourish and the pose Ð folding his arms and biting his lips Ð are the assumption of a role (like his profession of conventional romantic sentiment) which he cannot for long sustain. Duelling, Leigh Hunt remarked in one of his ‘Table Talk’ pieces, ‘has a natural tendency to the burlesque’.13 The theatre of the 1830s took full advantage of the tendency, just as it did Ð and where duels were concerned, often in association with them Ð professions of amorous attachment. Sentimental comedy was largely superseded by farce, just as, in serious drama, violence and suffering became associated with Crime. The popular theatre was becoming urban and domestic in outlook, assuming a mildly republican sceptical spirit. Dickens had already used the duelling business for the plot of ‘The Great Winglebury Duel’ 38 (October 1835) and his stage version of it, The Strange Gentleman. In Pickwick the comedy is sharpened by the presence of Jingle. He precipitates the affair while remaining aloof, taking a disrespectful view of the principles being championed Ð not only romantic loyalty and the honour due to uniforms but also the inviolable rules governing class distinctions, as his comment on ‘ranks’ makes explicit (p. 24). Jingle is in effect the embodiment of an attitude projected through the narration, where the conducting presence, in conspiratorial intimacy with the reader, surreptitiously conveys an unillusioned understanding of the situations presented with dramatic directness. Boz and Jingle are both performers, knowingly creating illusion by their high-spirited elaboration of conventional scenarios. Mr Pickwick and the other members of the Club have, as far as we see, no past to speak of; Jingle makes a rich biography for himself composed of exraordianar romantic and heroic encounters. As footloose as the Pickwickians, he is their antithesis in having no fixed identity or social position and can confidently adapt himself to whatever circumstances chance throws up, drawing on professional skills to do so. At first he lacks even a name, is simply ‘the stranger’, and then in the third Number is forced to give himself one to get a free meal, filling a little dramatic hiatus:

“Of course,” said Mr. Wardle, “among our friends we include Mr.Ð,” and he looked towards the stranger. “Jingle,” said that versatile gentleman, taking the hint at once. “Jingle Ð Alfred Jingle, Esq., of No Hall, Nowhere.” (p. 105)

The self-introduction is exactly apposite. Jingle is above all ‘versatile’, an aptitude, as is hinted to us, not altogether accordant with some of the meanings in ‘gentleman’. This will bring him into conflict with steady Mr Pickwick and his upholding of what a Wellerism celebrates as ‘principle’ (p. 536). It was by an exact stroke of comic invention that Dickens introduced an actor into his ‘history’. There is a doubled reflection of the stage in his presentation: Jingle is an actor called upon to enact the roles that in one species of popular farce were filled by a strolling player whose trickery creates the comic intrigue. He would, Dickens confidently predicted, ‘make a decided hit’.14 There have been proposals for a specific prototype for the character. Charles Mathews’s performance in his At Homes and in Holcroft’s Road to Ruin is often mentioned, mainly because of correspondences with details of Jingle’s tall stories and his staccato speech.15 But Dickens is drawing on a whole genre, or sub-genre, of popular farce, where the strolling player was a central figure: a down-at- heel adventurer with the knack of using his professional skills for his own ends. The part, as a sort of contemporary harlequin, was one any comic actor would relish and had been taken by some of Dickens’s fabourites in plays performed in the 1830s. Theodore Hook’s Killing No Murder (1809) was still often performed: Charles Mathews the Elder had 39 been its original Buskin, an itinerant actor who impersonates a series of people, the impersonation never quite concealing his own genial impudence. Later, the role was taken by Harley.16 Another popular play was The Spoiled Child (1792), largely because of the unscrupulous strolling player Tagg, a role that was ‘a great favourite with many star- performers’ including Mathews the Younger, who outdid all others in ragged effrontery.17 Dickens saw the play just before beginning Pickwick and its central scene is echoed in a famous one in the novel, as I shall show.18 Another example is worth mention because of some special features: The P.L.; or, 30, Strand!, a contemporary one-act farce by Mark Lemon with as its main character a strolling actor Ð his best success was in the part of Jeremy Diddler Ð who is out of work in a professional capacity and is struggling to scrape an income from Warren’s Blacking (their address is the alternative title) as a rhymester for their advertisements. Hence the name of this ‘nobody’, a he calls himself Ð Jingle. The play was first performed in 1835, its central action depending on the strolling actor’s usual knack of creating imbroglios and buoyant high spirits in pressing financial straits.19 True to type, Alfred Jingle causes complications among the other personnel, defined by being labelled as ‘humours’, in situations recognisable as set routines. Versatility is the leading characteristic of Jingle just as it is of Sam Weller, though in Sam Weller’s case it is the product of frank pragmatism. Independent and freewheeling, the two give an impetus to the story whenever they appear: one reviewer found what he called the ‘come and go’ characters much better than the ‘standing’ characters.20 Sam Weller too is a refinement on a stage type. The humorous manservant or ‘tiger’ was a common figure in eighteenth- century comedy and, brought up to date, became a favourite of audiences in the 1830s. The revision was largely a matter of making him an urban, specifically London, character, not just the mouthpiece for witty remarks but a self-assured observer, unillusioned and street-wise. Billy Downey in The Unfinished Gentleman!, which played at the Adelphi in 1834, is representative: a porter and shoe-black taken on by a gentleman as a specimen of London life, a ‘philosopher’, diffuser of knowledge... a citizen of the world’ who has picked up the wisdom of the streets where he was formerly a crossing-sweeper.21 The performance in a similar part by Keeley was the main reason for the success of The Hundred Pound Note, in which he played the boots at an inn set to keep a sharp eye on a mysterious stranger. The plot, with its pursuit to the inn and mix-up of identities, anticipates Dickens’s ‘The Great Winglebury Duel’ and his burletta, The Strange Gengleman, which are in turn related to Pickwick.22 The Hundred Pound Note owed its popularity to the genial Cockney impudence and jokiness of Billy Black, ‘born with a bag of conundrums in his belly... budget of mirth, cosey, contented, full of comfort and conceit’.23 A marked verbal mannerism was essential to the stage presence of the strolling actor and the Cockney wag, and Dickens took over the main features of the characterising idiolect. Parallels can be found for Jingle’s 40 tall stories in earlier literary liars; Sam Weller’s far-fetched similes have been traced to Simm Spatterdash in Beazley’s The Boarding House.24 It is, however, their conception and general locution that is distinctive, a more concentrated rendering of dramatic styles. Hook’s Killing No Murder provides an example of the representation of the actor, epitomised by his name, his use of theatrical jargon, and by the parody of a clipped, histrionic delivery. Buskin enters asking if he is intruding:

Fanny. Not in the least. Buskin. If I do, say so Ð verbum sat Ð I am theatrical Ð give me my cue. O.P. Ð P.S. I’m off. Exit in a hurry. Fanny. We are all in a hurry here, our house is quite full. Buskin. Full house Ð good sign Ð the dinner, produced for the first time yesterday... (Act I, sc. ii)

Billy Downey, the London shoe-black of The Unfinished Gentleman!, discourses about his earlier job as a crossing-sweeper like this:

Bill. ...as I hadn’t got no money to tip the street-keepers for a parminent siteation, and I didn’t belong to no sweepers’’sociation, I wur obligated to give up the hidea of a public hoffice, and turn wagabond. (sc. ii)

Both styles are dramatic exaggerations. The first is a method of showing a manner of delivery by the use of dashes in a script in a kind of shorthand which is, as it were, taken literally; the latter is not slang exactly but a colloquial distortion of orotund formal utterance, a burlesque diction that is Sam Weller’s when he most assumes an outward gravitas (at the trial, for instance) or like Weller Senior’s when he gives sage advice.25 Jingle’s style of delivery is in contrast with that of his follower Job Trotter, a fraudulent sentimentalist who imitates the stage pathetics of his brother Dismal Jemmy, an actor specialising in the ‘heavy business’ (p. 40). The dramatic device of paired opposites is often prominent (tall, sandy-haired Pott against the short and dark Slurk; unhealthy-looking Fogg against the robust Dodson, and so on). Sam is linked, first through anecdotes and then directly, with the elder Mr Weller. They share the same idiolect but embody a contrast that in various forms is a pervasive presence in Pickwick Ð a stolid, old- fashioned knowledgeability with a casual, up-to-date knowingness. The partnership was foreshadowed in a celebrated play first performed in December 1835, The Old and Young Stager, which has lively scenes of Cockney understanding between a bluff conservative father steadily sceptical of wedlock, and his carefree son: the one a coachman and the other a gentleman’s servant. The play introduced Charles Mathews the Younger to the stage, where he played opposite the old comic actor Liston (the title is a pun) and their nodding and winking mutuality won great acclaim. The production was long remembered: Westland Marston recalled the ‘arch, easy gaiety’ of Mathew’s playing, toned down to 41 match Liston’s quieter style, making the part ‘a sort of aristocratic prototype of Sam Weller’.26

II In conception and format The Pickwick Papers belonged in a cultural area that could be dismissed as ‘low’ or ‘cheap’ as, the 1847 Preface confides, friends of Dickens had cautioned him. Such was indeed the response of some early readers. This was a sub-literary region that encompassed the medium of print and of the stage. There was a rapid two-way exchange between minor fiction and the theatre: the tales in Hook’s Sayings and Doings (1824-5) according to a reviewer, ‘soon found themselves out of their proper element, and soon wriggled themselves back into small farces’.27 Dickens himself had planned ‘a dramatic destination’ for some of his Sketches.28 Pickwick in its turn gave rise to dramatic versions, its popularity naturally inviting such attention but the general falling on it of literary cannibals shows that it was seen as being readily assimilable. One of the more distinguished of them (in the small world of minor theatre), W. T. Moncrieff, complained of a difficulty, however: it had too many set scenes and not enough ‘regular plot’ for smooth adaptation.29 Dickens, for his part, did not simply take over standard character-types and situations and put them into a story: within the narrative framework organised around ‘Boz’ he recreates dramatic prsentation in prose, pitching the burlesque tone up to a higher key by taking motifs of admitted theatricality, amalgamating and juxtaposing them. This can be seen by comparing some episodes with the patterns in pieces current on the contemporary stage. The subject which dominates the third and fourth Numbers (chapters VI to XI) is Jingle’s pursuit of the hand, and money, of Rachel Wardle Ð one variant in the comedy tradition of misdirected or irregular attachments that is drawn upon a number of times. Wealthy spinsters, dangerously susceptible to romance, needed no more definition than their name or a word or two in the list of dramatis personae, and were the rightful prey of down-at-heel adventurers. Jeremy Diddler was a proverbial representative of the latter type, bluffing his way into the forthcoming favour of Miss Durable in the lastingly popular Raising the Wind (1803), one of the Crummles Company’s plays.30 The strolling player, a developed specimen of this kind of trickster, was specially adept at the romance business. In The Spoiled Child, the stock piece Dickens saw shortly before beginning Pickwick, the ragged itinerant actor Tagg overcomes the feigned reluctance of Miss Pickle by adopting, in the words of a theatre commentator, ‘the style of a finished enamorato’, evading the watchful eye of her brother who fears ‘lest the venerable maiden, in transferring her charms to Mr. Tagg, should, at the same time, cause her Consols and India stock to undergo a similar transfer’.31 The audience is in the know, Tagg’s perfidy is self- confessed:

42 ...I await you in this happy spot Ð but why, my soul Ð why not this instant fly? Ð this moment will I seize my tender bit of lamb Ð D Ð me, there I had her as dead as mutton. (Aside) (Act II, sc. ii)

Jingle’s real attitude is made obvious to us in a way that creates the effect of a stage aside:

“Long away from you? Ð Cruel charmer,” and Mr. Jingle skipped playfully up to the spinster aunt, imprinted a chaste kiss upon her lips, and danced out of the room. “Dear man!” said the spinster, as the door closed after him. “Rum old girl,” said Mr. Jingle, as he walked down the passage. (p. 141)

The whole episode is dramatically shaped and Dickens has intensified the comedy by running together two amorous intrigues and two trains of comic plotting. In The Spoiled Child Tagg’s buoyant wooing is aided by the ideal setting, a flowery arbour, only to founder when it is suddenly discovered by the meddlesome boy of the play’s title. Drawing on professional experience, Tagg packs conventional tributes into his performance:

Tagg. Thus, most charming of her sex, do I prostrate myself before the shrine of your beauty. (Kneels) Miss Pickle. Mr. Tagg, I fear I never can be yours. Tagg. Adorable, lovely, the most beautified Ophelia. Miss Pickle. Indeed, Mr. Tagg, you make me blush with your compliments. Tagg. Compliments! Oh! Call not by that hacknied term the voice of truth.

In Pickwick the arbour is the setting for the first love intrigue. Tupman declares his devotion without the help of professional skill but achieves histrionic fervour:

The lady turned aside her head. “Men are such deceivers,” she softly whispered. “They are, they are,” ejaculated Mr. Tupman; “but not all men. There lives at least one being who would be content to devote his whole existence to your happiness Ð who lives but in your eyes Ð who breathes but in your smiles Ð who bears the heavy burden of life itself only for you.” (p. 110)

Tupman is not acting; he is simply giving dramatic voice to the amorous bent attributed to him. Both he and Rachel Wardle are prostrated before their own romantic illusions, which are as quaintly extravagant as the picture on Sam Weller’s valentine Ð and similarly deflated in the narrative: the arbour is a ‘sweet retreat’ but mainly for spiders; the watering-pot the lady has been using is a constantly awkward presence 43 and when she trembles the pebbles in it shake ‘like an infant’s rattle’ (p. 110). The sardonic attitude is signalled in the title of Chapter VIII, ‘Strongly illustrative of the position, that the course of true love is not a railway’, which disturbs the familiar quotation with a discordant reference Ð drawn not from the Pickwick world but from the reader’s. The courting of Rachel Wardle is played twice: first genuinely with the narrative voice effecting the comic exposure, then hypocritically, the ironic view handed over to the spectator. In The Spoiled Child when Tagg’s scheme is discovered the spinster’s brother intervenes. Dickens doubles the comedy: Jingle turns the Fat Boy’s revelations to account, using his experience to set up a plot, speaking in ‘a stage whisper’, starting ‘melodramatically’ and putting on a ‘low deep voice’ Ð altogether, that is, ‘with a professional (i.e. theatrical) air’ (pp. 121-2). Miss Wardle and Tupman are primed on how they should conduct themselves in dialogue that has the heightened tempo and rhetorical patterning of farce. Jingle’s trick was a standard device, a neat piece of ‘turning the tables’.32 The transference from the first love plot to the second and from one form of presentation to the other is indicated in a passage of bridging commentary where a mock-heroic tone passes into one of parody:

Fielding tells us that man is fire, and woman tow, and the Prince of Darkness sets a light to ’em. Mr. Jingle knew that young men, to spinster aunts, are as lighted gas to gunpowder, and he determined to assay the effect of an explosion without loss of time. (p. 120)

Possibilities available only to narrative are called on for the setting up of the inset scene of Jingle’s priming of Tupman: Tupman’s conduct at the dinner-table is reported in summary and then the set-piece is shown, ‘to explain to our readers, this apparently unaccountable alteration’. It is elaborately staged: ‘The time was evening; the scene the garden. There were two figures... The short figure commenced the dialogue.’ And the dialogue has the pointed interplay of farce, ending,

“I’ll take care,” said Mr. Tupman, aloud. “And I’ll take care,” said Mr. Jingle internally... (pp. 124-5)

Jingle wins; Tupman’s performance of indifference puts paid to his aspirations. The whole episode, said a reviewer, is ‘a very rich scene’.33 The richness is in the texture, an interplay of styles of presentation and implied attitudes that is half-way to the vitality of inimitable Dickensian comedy.

IV Much of the packed incident in Pickwick is based on fully evolved comic plots reproduced in different guises. Though a loosely inclusive chronicle, rhythmic patterns emerge of another kind than those made by 44 the scheme of the monthly numbers and the matching progress through the real calendar of the original readers. From time to time there is unironic contact with a journalistic narrator. After an account of the furious pursuit of the eloping couple, Chapter X settles down to a scene introduced by a passage that confidingly reflects with nostalgia on London inns and the changes that have befalle them in ‘the rage for public improvement’ (p. 136). The focus narrows to the White Hart and its morning routine (the first spoken word the cry ‘Sam!) and then a series of unnamed figures appears, a ‘lady and gentleman’ followed by ‘two plump gentlemen and one thin one’. The narrative withholds identification for some time, creating suspense while teasingly aware that it is a fabrication, since the reader is well ahead in interpreting the clues that indicate familiar characters. Scott uses this device to recreate the excitement aroused in historical drama of seeing known people before us.34 The emphatic staging is appropriate because this is leading to an exposure scene on traditional lines, the customary conclusion in farce and pantomime. The confrontation is set in motion when Mr Pickwick, Wardle, and the lawyer Perker Ð ‘the whole three’ (p. 146) Ð make their entrance as an ensemble at the precise moment when the marriage licence is presented to the spinster. Denunciation of the villain takes centre-stage, with blunt language and the comic threat of violence. Rachel Wardle ‘forments’ herself into hysterics, with the landlady redressing an imbalance by supporting the feminine side, doing service for the character often present in similiar discovery scenes, the part the maid Goodwin enacts in the denouement of the farcical romantic affair involving Winkle, Mrs Pott and her jealous husband in Chapter XVIII Ð a role described by George Daniel the theatre commentator as ‘that indispensible appendage to a love-plot Ð the pert abigail’.35 The main action closes when the ‘quartette’ (p. 149) withdraw to another room, a money settlement is made and Jingle dismissed unruffled. The narrator intervenes, considers transferring the ‘heart-rending scene’ of Miss Wardle’s lamentations from Mr Pickwick’s notebook Ð ‘one word, and it is in the printer’s hands’ Ð but refrains (p. 151). The chronicler comes forward and the action is framed and distanced. The exposure scene, which carries a sense of closure, makes recurrent appearance in Pickwick. Here it marks the end of a phase and initiates a new one. Such scenes normally involve some sort of physical aggression: the assault on Uriah Heep, for example, or in Pickwick the fantastic violence visited on Gabriel Grub, which follows the routine exposure scenes in pantomime, in the interpolated Christmas story, introduced with the request, ‘A clear stage and no favour for the goblins, ladies and gentlemen, if you please’ (p. 432). In those where Mr Pickwick presides, punishment takes the form only of denunciation. He never does inflict on Jingle the ‘personal chastisement’ he threatens after the girls’ school episode in Chapter XVI, punching a pillow as he swears vengeance. The closest he comes to it is in this scene at the White Hart when Jingle’s parting insult upsets his philosophical equipoise (‘philosophers are only men in armour, after all’) and he madly hurls an inkstand at him: ‘But 45 Mr. Jingle had disappeared, and he found himself caught in the arms of Sam’ (p. 151). The collision of events and persons is a milestone in the story. With Sam’s guardianship, Mr Pickwick is enabled to maintain his ‘philosophic’ bearing: not in the satirical sense prominent in Oliver Twist; rather with that in the title of Chapter XX of The Vicar of Wakefield, as a ‘philosophic vagabond’. Henceforth the wrathful indignation is kept bottled up and it is Sam who has all the capability for active aggression. Another exposure scene occurs at the house of the Ipswich magistrate in Chapter XXV. This time it is two-fold. Jingle, following a tendency of his kind, has been passing as a military man,36 and is confronted in the parlour while Sam deals with Job Trotter below stairs. We see Job Trotter’s pretences demolished but only the aftermath of the confrontation with Jingle in the equivalent of a stage ‘picture’: ‘It was an impressive tableau’ (p. 387). Mr Pickwick declares that he might have taken a harsher revenge, ‘but I content myself with exposing you, which I consider a duty I owe to society’ (p. 388) and restrains Sam from ‘polishing off’ Job Trotter. The exposure is a verbal infliction. Mr Pickwick keeps his dignified authority, Jingle his poise. Sam and Job Trotter are their substitutes, protecting the narrative status of the other two, who are not involved in a physical routine of denouement. The episode has called for a quick change in Mr Pickwick’s position: at first a victim brought before the arrogant magistrate on a charge of duelling, he is then entertained as a guest. The change, one of the licensed improbabilities of farce, is marked by the shift of scene from a public to a private room. Expectation of a justified assault on the tormentors is given a final flourish when, in Chapter XLII, Job Trotter is encountered in the Fleet:

“Take that, Sir.” Take what? In the ordinary acceptation of such language, it should have been a blow. As the world runs, it ought to have been a sound, hearty cuff... (p. 659)

Rather that that, it is the gift of money. This time the apparent move towards physical confrontation resolves into an act of benevolence. Sam Weller follows suit, dragging off Job Trotter ‘with great violence’ and without explanation Ð to the tap-room to buy him a drink (p. 703). Pickwick stays close to the natural temper of farce in bringing romantic ardour and threats of punishment into association: forces that surround the central figure (a ‘victim of circumstances’ (p. 269)) without quite upsetting his philosophical detachment. Instead of having the weapons of Quixote, a reviewer pointed out, Mr Pickwick has ‘powers of declamation’: instead of armour he is ‘encased in a good coating of aldermanic fur’ Ð an odd, and illuminating, way of putting it. Nor does he, like Quixote, become, as the same reader expected, ‘the victim of a veritable flame’.37 He is not immune: he has, he reveals, formed ideas on the subject of love but has ‘never submitted them to the test of experience’ (p. 353) Ð this, just before the scene at the magistrate’s when 46 Sam makes the acquaintance of Mary. Romantic involvement is also passed over to Sam as his comfortably orthodox courtship begins. The patriarchal bond with Sam Weller is confirmed in circumstances whic link Mr Pickwick’s closest brush with romance to his most outrageous victimization. Any playgoer of the 1830s would have recognised the cosy widow as a dangerous specimen: Weller Senior’s terror of all widows would not be absurd if it were based on theatrical experience. There were many representatives: Mrs Trapper in J. B. Buckstone’s Second Thoughts ensnares the impulsive Mr Sudden and sues him for breach of promise; his Popping the Question has two eager ladies mistaking the intentions of a fussy old bachelor.38 Mr Pickwick does not mean to propose but his words about hiring Sam, to Mrs Bardell’s ears and to ours, can have a warmer interpretation. The same kind of misunderstanding occurs in ‘A Passage in the Life of Mr. Watkins Tottle’ and also in ‘The Boarding House’ where it is described by the stage term ‘equivoque’.39 We are not told of Mr Pickwick’s real intention until after the climactic action when, with exactly appropriate timing, Master Bardell and the Pickwickians make a group entrance as Mrs Bardell faints, a ‘tableau’ Phiz captures in his illustration (p. 173). The situation is given added liveliness by the violent intervention of the spoiled child who thinks his mother is being attacked. Dickens’s enhancement of the stock business is not only a matter of enriched surface detail. The ‘equivoque’ makes a structural parallel. Usually, the true meaning of the misinterpreted words is nothing of any moment, they arise by chance: here, they have a double-sided significance since the intended proposal marks the start of a closer relationship with Sam. At this point, Sam himself is characteristically pragmatic: with a hint of harlequinade, the close of the chapter has ‘that suddenly-transformed individual’, in Pickwickian uniform, expressing satisfaction that there will be ‘plenty to see, and little to do’ (p. 177). But it is to be for him as well as for his master ‘an epoch in his life’, as the chapter title observes Ð not only in view of the court case but because the new arrangement leads to the closest, most enduring personal relationship in the story, one that is put to the test and found true when the free-spirited Sam chooses to stay beside his master and is imprisoned. Sam confirms his allegiance by contriving a break with his father, opting to become a debtor to be remorselessly handed over to the Law:

“P’raps my cruel pa ’ull relent afore that,” replied Sam, with a broad grin. “Not I,” said the elder Mr. Weller. “Do,” said Sam. “Not on no account,” replied the inexorable creditor. (p. 672)

Adopting the roles of resentful victim and vindictive oppressor, the two knowingly enact a stock confrontation from melodrama that Dickens can make serious use of elsewhere.40 Here the pretence is transparent. Yet in the ironic atmosphere of Pickwick such enactments are not quite empty 47 mockery but by invoking alternative possibilities as a reference have a sort of conjectural validity. The same stereotyped postures can be the medium of deliberate trickery or unconscious affectation Ð the two closely similar but distinguishable, as with Jingle’s and Tupman’s displays of affection. Or again, two kinds of suspect motivation may be blurred together, as with Mrs Bardell’s attitude to Mr Pickwick Ð and yet again, as in Mrs Bardell’s case, not entirely separable from genuine sentiment.

V In the brief confrontation staged by Sam and his father imitation of the formulaic character categories and procedure of melodrama ironically confirms the real attitude that inspires the performance. Mimicry becomes mimesis. More generally, implicit reference to generic types and situations provides a framework for comic extravagance that keeps in touch with ordinary realities. Behind the comedy provided by Stiggins and Mrs Weller, for example, there is a stage motif. The canting pietist, a regular target of eighteenth-century satire, was a central figure in some long-lived plays. In Samuel Foote’s The Minor (1760) Dr Squintum is paired with an admiring female convert who in spite of her ‘new birth’ and disavowal of drink as an ‘idle vanity’ nevertheless indulges herself pretty freely.41 Isaac Bickerstaffe’s The Hypocrite (1769), based on Tartuffe, introduced, in the same pairing with a female devotee, Dr Cantwell, who came to represent a satiric type: a standard handbook on acting of the early Nineteenth Century advised that Cantwell should be the model for a player representing ‘Affectation’.42 In 1835 Harley was portraying another canting pietist, Ephraim Smooth.43 Pickwick follows the outline of the role but the representative of cant and pretence is given a different status Ð epitomised in the style of his name Ð and a different function: Stiggins is a low-class religious fraud, chiefly culpable for his invasion of domestic territory. His discomfiture, correspondingly, is effected by the Wellers and his exposure is two-fold: enacted first before the audience at a temperance meeting and then again in a private revenge-taking.44 Eighteenth-century plays that have now passed into obscurity were standard offerings in the early nineteenth-century playhouses. Pickwick harks back to them particularly where the episodes have a satirical aspect. A convenient resource for the hard-pressed author of a serial publication, they were also consonant with the spirit of Dickens’s work where though the comedy is given contemporary relevance it follows a traditional procedure of exposing basic human failings. The personnel of the pieces in Sketches by Boz, taken together, inhabit a world of greater social density, the observation more specific and topical, since there Boz is the ‘speculative pedestrian’ of London streets (Sketches by Boz, p. 190) rather than the omniscient commentator with a surrogate in the ‘philosopher’ who leaves Goswell Street, notebook at the ready, as a roving ‘observer of human nature’ (p. 17). In a manner akin to that of the 48 more formal style of mock-heroic, affectation and pretence are brought down to earth. The tensions at work in the process are closer to those in parody and burlesque: assertions of authority and authenticity are upset; the representatives of established orthodoxies, staid and given to circumlocution, are jostled by a mobile youthful irreverence. The plays of Samuel Foote, which maintained a place in the theatre, are in this vein.45 A speciality of Foote’s (as of Dickens) was the presentation of foolish speechifying. Good opportunities for it occur in his celebrated The Mayor of Garratt (1764), about a provincial election, a long-lived piece in the theatrical repertoire that Dickens knew well.46 Though there was ample fictional precedent for the Eatanswill episode and Dickens had his own experience as a reporter to draw on, it seems likely that the farce provided a structural outline. It has the usual ingredients Ð a fractious mob and lofty oratory applied to lowly parochial concerns (the cultivation of asparagus, in particular) Ð but the significant feature the play and Pickwick have in common is the running counterpart to the public affair of a domestic one: in Pickwick the self-important Pott is under the ‘contemptuous controul and sway’ of his wife (p. 184); in the play the downtrodden Jerry Sneak is in the same unlucky position. The climax comes when Sneak detects his wife in an illicit relationship with a swaggering military man and attempts to get the upper hand only to have the tables turned on him and be completely crushed by a show of hysterical indignation Ð the same sequence of events that moves the plot in the Eatanswill episode, culminating in the scene ‘illustrative’, the chapter title says, of ‘the Power of Hysterics’ (ch. XVIII). Winkle is not really an intriguer, only drawn by vanity into a timid assertiveness. Innocently, he gets himself embroiled in a scenario with a predictable outcome. A different strategy is employed in Dickens’s adaptation of another classic farce situation in the thirteenth Number for the scene which ends the episode mocking absurdities in the social life of Bath. It is based on a play he knew well, High Life Below Stairs (1759), which turns on Lovel, a retired West Indian planter, disguising himself to detect the dishonesties of his servants.47 Sam takes the place of the hero, motivated not by any particular purpose but by his native Cockney antagonism to affectation. He assumes an attitude of ingenuous acceptance while all the time being, the narrative confides, ‘in a highly enviable state of inward merriment’ (p. 573). The reader participates in the double response to the goings-on. In High Life Below Stairs the servants affect the genteel manners of their betters Ð ‘We are above the common forms.. and are as lazy and luxurious as our masters’ Ð and unwittingly favour Lovel with an awkwardly pompous invitation desiring ‘the honour of his company... to be of a smart party, and eat a bit of supper’ (Act I. Sc. ii). The final scene is this below-stairs party, where the comedy comes from the affectations of footmen who disdain the under-servants and neglect their work, boasting of their refined tastes and talking of women with a dissipated air. Exposure comes when Lovel intervenes: in the knockabout action the one good and faithful servant is vindicated and the closing 49 lines point the specific moral that if ‘persons of rank would act up to their standard’ their dignity could not be impugned by any caricature of their manners by the lower orders. The Pickwick scene, characteristically, enlarges on the earlier incident at the Ipswich magistrate’s house when Nupkins’s grand footman condescends to ask Sam down to the kitchen where he demolishes Job Trotter’s pretences. He is introduced into this subsequent set-piece almost by chance when he is formally invited to a ‘friendly swarry, consisting of a boiled leg of mutton with the usual trimmings’ (p. 570). It is essentially an extended exposure scene: the situation is borrowed from the play but Sam, with his usual ‘great outward simplicity’ (p. 693), is the touchstone of naturalness for the mockery of social posturing, finally squashing the drunken ringleader. The narrative joins with him in the disruptio of the parade of conventional snobberies by confiding, with outward simplicity, details of the setting: “Some of the knife handles were green, others red, and a few more yellow; and as all the forks were black, the combination of colours was exceedingly striking’ (p. 573). Dr Johnson thought High Life Below Stairs flimsy as reading-matter but ‘very diverting when you see it acted’.48 Dickens reproduces the liveliness of performance, renewing the comic business by having the narrative place an established character at its centre, bringing it up to date by the substitution, instead of the colonial gentleman, of plebeian Sam Weller. The hero of the play reasserts control by acting the minor character-part of an absurdly naïve countryman and mimicking low-life speech. Sam Weller, on the other hand, has the warrant of a genuine integrity. The same might be said of Jingle, whose clowning irrevernce has behind it something of their communion, as it were, with narrative irony. This is a quality in their presentation that distinguishes Dickens’s attitude from Pierce Egan’s Hook’s and from other comic fiction of the previous decade. A change of temper can be observed in minor drama of the time, where ‘low-life’ characters were beginning to be treated in a less patrician spirit, a change made more readily, perhaps, in theatrical representation. The new attitude to social relationships can be seen at its most earnest in the plays of Douglas Jerrold, where the portrayal of the lives of the lowly, showing their troubles and reproducing their speech, was the aim of the ‘domestic drama’ he proudly considered he had originated.49 Jerrold intended to strike a note of republican challenge even in lighter pieces such as Beau Nash; the King of Bath (1834), a period comedy with, his Preface says, a contemporary ‘purpose’ or ‘tendency’, or Doves in a Cage (1835), a romantic comedy set in the Fleet Prison and showing, according to his Note, some grim actual detail.50 Workaday playwrights with no political programme produced a hybrid variety of farce (a form prone to hybridization) by giving common-life characters a central role in pieces where the main action was a replaying of established paradigms of eighteenth-century comedy. The play by Mark Lemon mentioned earlier, The P.L.; or, 30, Strand!, shows the struggles of the strolling actor in his garret while the plot is a matter of releasing the heroine from an arranged marriage. In another play of the period, P.S. 50 Ð “Come to Dinner!”, a titled father’s scheme to marry off his reluctant daughter is forestalled when by chance a shopkeeper gets caught up in things Ð a grocer who, as it happens, is named Pickwick.51 In the peripetia and conclusion of Pickwick chance and mischance are brought to heel and the common-life disruptors disarmed and contained: Jingle is sent abroad, as are Benjamin Allen and Bob Sawyer, where he can find legitimate channels for his vitality (as Mr Micawber was to do); Sam Weller settles down in the sunshine of his master’s second retirement, his irreverence confined to remarks on Mr Pickwick’s memoranda of past adventures (p. 452) and that he gained his wealth in business (p. 872). Like the personification of Christmas in Chapter XXVII, he is a ‘gentleman of the old school’ (p. 409) but retains enough youthful insouciance to mix democratically with juniors of lower status and with less sense of responsibility. He has an allegiance to respected proprieties yet is drawn into occasions of frisky unorthodoxy, a Dr Johnson more than a Don Quixote. This productive comic duality is evident in his involvement with the Winkle-Arabella courtship, which gives rise to dilemmas standard in farce where, principled but sympathetic, Mr Pickwick has to maintain a precarious poise. The lovers’ clandestine meeting in Chapter XXXIX echoes the sort of situation well represented by the lastingly popular Ways and Means with its comic difficulties of a midnight elopement.52 Mr Pickwick carefully supervises the nocturnal rendezvous, where an elopement seems to be in the offing, in the course of it recalling his ‘last garden expedition’ (p. 608), the nighttime mission to the girls’ school to intervene in a scandalous intrigue that turns out to be of Jingle’s invention. The sequence culminates in Chapter L, the interview with the elder Mr Winkle on his son’s behalf, where Mr Pickwick must treat the old father with respect while presenting the enthusiastic lover’s case. The scene is arranged along the lines of the stereotype of a confrontation between an authoritarian figure of uncertain temper and a dependent likely to be cut off on account of a love-match.53 It develops with a preordained rhythm, with the circumstances redefined: the move to a new setting (bleak industrial Birmingham) and the approach to the intimidating authority (not of the landed gentry but an affluent wharfinger). The narrative presentation creates the tensions of a performance, with the reader an onlooker on the scene. Mr Pickwick is Winkle’s representative, his position complicated by the presence of his associates, the pair of irresponsible young physicians. Solemn Old Winkle’s deportment is pictured with elaborate precision Ð reading his son’s letter he turns ‘from the bottom line of the first page to the top line of the second, and from the bottom of the second to the top of the third...’ Ð and contrasted with the inebriated Bob Sawyer surreptitiously clowning, pulling a face ‘after the portraits of the late Mr. Grimaldi’ (p. 781). The encounter brings together the old-fashioned father and the casual, modern young practitioners; Mr Pickwick is an embarrassed ambassador caught between the formal and the familiar and trying to keep up appearances.

51 Pickwick, like stage comedy, makes much of appearances. At the level of plot there is the climatic unmasking of pretenders; at the rhetorical level, a confidential exposure takes place all along. A pretended denial allows us to glimpse the ‘machinery’ (to extend the term used in the 1847 Preface) that moves the surface events. The presentation involves the reader in set routines that in their shape and rhythm reproduce the machanisms of dramatic pieces, at the same time intimating the artifice in their deployment Ð an attitude in accord with Dickens’s perception of the way people adopt conventional postures and attitudes to project their true feelings, the feelings they aspire to, or those they merely affect. Content and tone are in oblique relationship, in the controlled disharmony that is the dialectic of farce. The constant impression is of continuous instant invention yet with the expectation, aroused by repetition, of unexpected variations. Through stylistic transitions the reader is attuned to shiftin ambivalences. At times, the equivocal tone is precariously pitched: Dickens himself mistook it, the Clarendon Editor points out (p. 1xxx), in his revision for the 1847 edition, inserting a jocular comment into a pathetic description. We are invited to collaborate with a presenter who, while professing to be a staid editor-historian Ð the manner serious but covertly dirided by an irony we can share in Ð allows his audience to understand that behind the scenes there is a stage-manager at work.

1See Edward Costign, ‘Drama and Everyday Life in Sketches by Boz’, Review of English Studies, NS, vol. 27 (1976), 403-21. 2The first phrase is from the original Preface to Sketches by Boz (1836); the next is from the Preface to The Pickwick Papers of 1847, and the third from the Preface of 1837. Hereafter, references to Sketches by Boz are to the Oxford Illustrated Edition (Oxford, 1957); those to The Pickwick Papers are to the Clarendon Edition, ed. James Kinsley (Oxford, 1986). 3Monthly Magazine, NS, 19, 137. This was excised when the tale was collected for the First Series. Until 1850 the title was ‘Passage in the Life...’, with a grim joke: Tottle has indeed undergone ‘passage’ since he commit suicide. 4‘Address’, January 1837 (Number X): see The Pickwick Papers, pp. 881-2. 5Edinburth Review, October 1838; Metropolitan Magazine, January 1837. 6Especially in the pastoral ‘genre-pictures’ such as the opening of Chapter V and of Chapter XVI; and the Christmas scene which, as James Kinsley says, has an ‘almost antiquarian air’: The Pickwick Papers, p. 1x. 7John Forster, The Life of Charles Dickens, ed. J. W. T. Ley (London, 1928), Book I, section iv. Hereafter cited as Forster, with reference by Book and section. 8There are many occasional mentions of these in Dickens’s letters: see The Letters of Charles Dickens, ed. Madeline House, Graham Storey, Kathleen Tillotson et al, Pilgrim Edition (Oxford, 1965-), hereafter cited as Letters. Substantial information appears in the following. For Mathews: Forster, I. iv, and Earle R. Davis, The Flint and the Flame (Columbia, 1963), ch. 3. For Buckstone: The Speeches of Charles Dickens, ed. K. J. Fielding (Oxford, 1960), pp. 186-7. For Yates: Edmund Yates, Recollections and Experiences (London, 1884), I. 6-7, 257. For Harley: Letters, I. 167, and John Butt and Kathleen Tillotson, Dickens at Work (London, 1963), p. 47. For Keeley: Dickens’s ‘Robert Keeley’, All the Year Round, NS, I (1869), 438-41, and Letters, II. 455. 9Letters, III. 246-7. Jerry Sneak is the main character in Samuel Foote’s The Mayor of Garratt (1764), a play referred to later. 10Both plays are in Miller’s Modern Acting Drama (London, 1835): Fighting by Proxy

52 (performed from late 1833) is by James Kenney; An Affair of Honour (1835) by W. L. Rede. Another popular farce was Charles Selby’s Captain Stevens (1832), which turns on the borrowing of a coat: Duncombe’s British Theatre (London, 1828-), XI. This collection is cited hereafter as Duncombe’s. 11Spectator, 16 April 1836. 12Dowler was formerly in the army. His depiction by Phiz is similar to that of Dr Slammer by Seymour. The two belong to a stage type exemplified in a burletta Dickens saw in October 1835, Morris Barnett’s The Yellow Kids (Duncombe’s, XVIII), which eh reviewed in the Morning Chronicle (see Letters, I. 77). Dickens commends the representation of Captain Rocket by the actor O. Smith, famous for his comic-ferocious characters, as a reference in ‘The Poetical Young Gentleman’ expects the reader to know (Sketches by Boz, p. 537). 13‘Duels’, reprinted in Table Talk (London, 1851), pp. 89-91. 14Letters, I. 133, saying that Jingle was ‘a very different character from any I have yet described’. 15See Earle Davis, The Flint and the Flame, pp. 43-6. For the tall stories Dickens may be drawing directly on Samuel Foote, especially The Liar (1762). It is the case, however, that Mathews borrowed from Foote’s play for some of his Entertainments. 16The play is in Cumberland’s British Theatre (London, 1826-), XXXI. This collection is referred to hereafter as Cumberland’s. Harley appeared in the play in 1830 and 1832. He took a similar role as Billy Bombast in another stock piece, The Disagreeable Surprise (1819), which is in Cumberland’s, XIV. 17The play, ascribed to Bickerstaffe or Mrs Jordan, is in Cumberland’s, XIV; the comment on Mathews is in the introduction. The comment on the role of Tagg is in Walter Goodman, The Keeleys on the Stage and at Home (London, 1895), p. 101. Mrs Keeley, whom Dickens admired, was often in the play. 18He reviewed the play in the Morning Chronicle, 15 January 1836: see W. J. Carlton, ‘Charles Dickens, Dramatic Critic’, Dickensian, LVI (1960), 11-27. In a letter of 1842 Dickens recalled performances in the earlier career (1834-6) of an actor he admired, William Mitchell, who had taken the part of Tagg at the St James’s Theatre: see Letters, III. 64-5. 19The play is in Duncombe’s, XXI, which says that it was in performance in April 1836, a month before Dickens gave Jingle a name. Some details are of interest: the play’s Jingle airily dismisses the fact that his clothes are tattered (‘your washerwoman must live near an artillery ground’) by saying, ‘Ventilation Ð nothing like ventilation’, which is Sam Weller’s joke (pp. 175-6); he astonishes a friend by declaring he has survived by ‘eating’ two quires of foolscap (that is, sold it as waste paper) just as Alfred Jingle appals Mr Pickwick by saying he has ‘lived on’ a pair of boots and an umbrella (p. 658). If Dickens was indeed remembering the play then the borrowing of the name may be the kind of private reference he was fond of at this period. His first recorded contact with Lemon appears to have been when Lemon submitted a paper for Bentley’s Miscellany in 1837, ‘Some Passages in the Life of a Disappointed Man’ (see Letters, I. 293). 20Fraser’s Magazine, XXI (April, 1840), 382. 21By Charles Selby, in Duncombe’s, XV. The description is from scene iii and the Dramatis Personae. 22See P. D. A. Harvey, ‘Charles Dickens as Playwright’, British Museum Quarterly, XXIV (1961), 22-5. 23By R. B. Peake, in Cumberland’s, XXXIV. First performed in 1827 and often repeated later. The description is from the Remarks, pp. 6-7. 24See Butt and Tillotson, Dickens at Work, p. 70, and Pickwick, p. xli, n. 1. Tillotson adds that Wellerisms were more probably taken from life. 25The Quarterly Review (October 1837) objected that the Wellers’ talk was ‘irreconcilable with their habits and station’. 26The play is by W. L. Rede, in Duncombe’s, XXVIII. The contemporary account of the performance is in ‘Memoir of Charles Mathews the Younger’, Cumberland’s Minor Theatre (London, 1828-), XII. Marston’s comment is in Our Recent Actors, 2 vols. (London, 1888), II. 160. 27Athenaeum, 24 February 1838, pp. 138-9. 53 28He says this of ‘The Bloomsbury Christening’: Letters, I. 42. He may have had the same plan for ‘Sentiment’: see Butt and Tillotson, Dickens at Work, p. 42. In offering his farce, Is She His Wife? or Something Singular, to J. P. Harley he said it was written ‘long before I was Boz’: Letters, I. 226. 29In the Introduction to his Sam Weller, or, The Pickwickians (London, 1837), p. iii, produced before the completion of the novel and, he claims, increasing its popularity. 30See Nicholas Nickleby, ch. XXIII. The play is in Mrs Inchbald’s Collection of Farces and Other Afterpieces (1815), part of Dickens’s boyhood reading mentioned in David Copperfield. 31Remarks, Cumberland’s, XIV. 6,8. 32It is central to John Poole’s Turning the Tables (1830), in Duncombe’s, XIII, and used to expose romantic pretension. The play was chosen by Dickens for his theatricals of 1847, part of the proceeds going to Poole. The main action of The P.L.; or 30, Strand! has the play’s Jingle secretly instructing a couple about altering their deportment to each other. 33Metropolitan Magazine, August 1836. 34In the climactic scene of the meeting of Jeanie Deans with Queen Caroline, for example: The Heart of Midlothian, ch. XXXVII. Dickens was to use it quite seriously a number of times in Oliver Twist: for instance in the opening of Chapter XLVI, ‘The Appointment Kept’. 35In his Remarks on The Disagreeable Surprise, Cumberland’s, XIV. 5. Dickens was to develop this stock character (which has a venerable history) in, among others, the supreme pert abigail Susan Nipper in Dombey and Son, and that extraordinary elaboration of it, Mr F’s Aunt, in Little Dorrit. 36Similiarly, Jeremy Diddler poses as a military man in Raising the Wind, and in ‘The Tuggses at Ramsgate’ (Sketches by Boz) the Tuggs family is imposed on by the pretended Captain Waters. 37Metropolitan Magazine, January 1837, reviewing Number IX. 38Second Thoughts (1832) is in the British Museum Lord Chamberlain’s MSS, July- August 1832; Popping the Question (1830, in performance again 1835) is in Cumberland’s, XXV. 39Sketches by Boz, p. 286. Dickens praised the ‘humerous [sic] equivoques’ in Buckstone’s adaptation of ‘The Bloomsbury Christening’ in his review of the play in the Morning Chronicle, 14 October 1834. 40The situation of vindictive father and wronged son appears in starkly unqualified form in the interpolated tale ‘The Convict’s Return’, also in the Sketches by Boz tale, ‘The Drunkard’s Death’, first published in December 1836. 41In Mrs Inchbald’s Collection of Farces. The phrases are from Act I. 42Thomas Leman Rede’s The Road to the Stage, London, first edition 1827. 43In John O’Keeffe’s Wild Oats: or, The Strolling Gentlemen (1791), Cumberland’s XXXIV. 44The subject had become somewhat controversial. It is clear from the 1847 Preface that Dickens had met with rebuke for the mocking treatment of Stiggins. In the 1820s the anti-methodist part of Hook’s Killing No Murder was disallowed by the Lord Chamberlain: see Remarks on the play in Cumberland’s, XXXI. One stage version of Pickwick, Edward Stirling’s The Pickwick Club, perhaps from caution turned Stiggins into another of Jingle’s impostures. 45Two editions of Foote’s Works were in Dickens’s library, one of 1788, the other, with a Life, of 1830: see J. H. Stonehouse, Catalogue of the Libraries of Charles Dickens and W. M. Thackeray (London, 1935), p. 47; the latter is in the 1844 listing of his books: Letters, IV. 713. The Nabob (1788), still sometimes performed, has a lively scene of an antiquarian society meeting where a theory about Whittington’s cat is propounded. 46In Mrs Inchbald’s Collection of Farces. Dickens planned to use it for amateur theatricals in 1845. He several times referst to its main character: for example, Letters, III. 247. An edition of the play with an account of the actual election was published in 1831 with illustrations by Seymour. 47By James Townley, in Mrs Inchbald’s Collection of Farces. It was enduringly popular: Mathews sometimes appeared in it, and it was one of the plays Dickens acted in at

54 Montreal in 1842. 48Boswell, Life of Johnson (Oxford, 1922), II. 338. 49See Blanchard Jerrold, The Life and Remains of Douglas Jerrold (London, 1859), p. 79. Dickens, eager to enroll Jerrold as a contributor to the new Bentley’s Miscellany, assured him that he was on ‘intimate terms’ with his writings: Letters, I. 192-3 [? 10 November 1836]. 50Beau Nash (London, 1834); Doves in a Cage, Duncombe’s, XXVIII. 51Perhaps not just a coincidence? The play’s Pickwick is a member of a ‘Spouting Club’ and the main business, like that of the first Number of Pickwick, turns on a borrowed coat that is recognised by the emblem on its buttons. It is by R. J. Raymond, in Duncombe’s, VII, and was in performance from 1830 with the popular low comedian Sam Vale playing Peter Pickwick. 52By George Colman, in Mrs Inchbald’s Collection of Farces. The Crummles company were so familiar with the play that they needed only one rehearsal (Nicholas Nickleby, ch. XXIII). 53A good example of the situation is John Poole’s Old and Young (1826, in performance in 1831), Cumberland’s, XXXIX-XXX.

55 Book Reviews

JEROME MECKIER, Great Expectations: Misnar’s Pavilion versus Cinderella. University Press of Kentucky, 2002, pp. xx + 276. ISBN 06 05 04 03 02 5 4 3 2 1.

Jerome Meckier’s book is the third of what he calls an ‘informal trilogy’, the first being Hidden Rivalries in Victorian Fiction: Dickens, Realism and Revaluation (1987) Ð a book often cited in this new study, which carries out its method in more detail Ð and the second, Innocent Abroad: Charles Dickens’ American Engagements (1990). This book, studying Great Expectations as a ‘tragi-comic’ novel, has three projects, described in chapter 1. It explains the symbolism of the reference to The Tales of the Genii at the end of Great Expectations chapter 38. It reads the novel as a critique of Cinderella, asssuming that the Cinderella story is important to Victorian novel-writing. Third, it suggests that the novel was written in deliberate rivalry to the following: Charles Lever’s A Day’s Ride: A Life’s Romance which predated Great Expectations in being serialised in All the Year Round; Thackeray’s Pendennis and his Book of Snobs; David Copperfield; Wilkie Collins’ Hide and Seek and The Woman in White; Frankenstein and Paradise Lost and Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights. There is also discussion of Samuel Smiles’s Self Help. Meckier sees Great Expectations deliberately counteracting all these, and, as with Jane Eyre, parodying what is distinctive in them. The result is that making a case for Great Expectations necessitates sidelining all the other novels by arguing that Dickens is better. There is undoubtedly an argument to be made about The Tales of the Genii, and there are Cinderella-motifs in Dickens, but the observation here is not very original. The comparison between the prince let down in The Tales of the Genii and the princess set up in Cinderella does not get far beyond helping with the story-level of Great Expectations and the generalised Cinderella comparisons grate (especially when they get onto the topic of the ‘Cinderfella’ [sic]). What does it mean (p. 145) that Pip has a ‘Cinderella complex’? Did Cinderella motivate much in Victorian ideology? But, leaving these issues, Meckier’s contention about Dickens writing against rivals is most problematic. First, because he takes each counter-author or text separately, Meckier discusses Great Expectations

56 not once but eight times (the number of his chapters), each time producing, substantially, the same material on the novel. There seem few places where he deals with material uniquely derived from his particular model, so that the reader has to go through a substantial amount of repetition. Better, surely, to have written one account of Great Expectations and fitted everything he wanted to say into that. Failing to do so makes this reader feel that he is reading the work of someone obsessed with a novel about which he has little new to say. He sees Pip as a snob, yet Q. D. Leavis’s account of the novel in Dickens the Novelist (1970) Ð which Meckier is aware of (p. 236), though he calls Q. D. Leavis F. R. Leavis (p. 263) Ð should have made that view seem too flat and unironical, and Meckier might have engaged more with it. Second, the distinction made between ‘Mr Pirrip’, Meckier’s virtual neologism for the narrator of the book, and Pip, the character in the book, proves irritating. His idea is to avoid debates about how far the narrator understands the ironies of what happens in the text. The result is a considerable flattening. Meckier asks, referring to the idea that there is something sexual in the way that Pip wrestles with Miss Havisham in saving her from burning, ‘Why would Mr Pirrip invest with sexual overtones his twenty-three year old’s self’s efforts to save a woman more than twice that age?’ (p. 192). We need not take up a position on that subject to see that Meckier is determined to be non-Freudian: there is no unconscious in Dickens’s writing. (Yet is there anything more Freudian than Meckier’s concept of an influence which has to be resisted, or a prior mode of writing which has to be refuted?) The absence of unconscious motivation produces overstatements. One example of many: ‘Jane Eyre boasts nothing of similar psychological complexity, Dickens avowed’ (p. 195). But Dickens hardly commented openly on Jane Eyre. He might have thought many things about it, or even have written against it, but at the level of only partly conscious awareness. The overstatement becomes pervasive, as where George Eliot is said to have ‘warlike intentions’ against Dickens’s mode of writing (p. 242). Were relations really so hostile all round? Meckier has a limited sense of what influence is. He made much of it, valuably, in his book on ‘hidden rivalries’, but what was there an aspect of writing has now become a dominant, and almost imperialistic drive: Dickens must outdo all other writers Ð including himself in David Copperfield Ð to produce a text which is better than theirs. There seems little evidence to be offered here, not least because of Dickens’s own comparative reticence about his contemporaries (a theme Meckier might have further pursued). It is symptomatic that he says Magwitch and Miss Havishm ‘seem as interested in revenge as in benefaction’ (p. 104) Ð which is not a wrong statement but is misleading about both Ð for reading Magwitch as so antagonistic to others seems to fit Meckier’s sense of the relationships between Dickens and his contemporaries. This model of influence has not enough sense of things entering into the novel from sources that Dickens might not have recognised and so overturning the text. Influence is only literary, so that, despite some comments on Smiles 57 and self-help, there is too little offered on Dickens’s culture, or on the changing expectations of Victorian life beyond the general. Yet such changes over ten years must also account for differences between David Copperfield and Great Expectations. Lastly, Meckier begins by listing all his references, and giving the abbreviations by initials for them: these then appear in the body of the text in initial form. There is no larger bibliography; footnotes continue the argument with those people listed by their initials. The book therefore occasionally reads like Mr Spiker and Mr Gulpidge discussing the D of A’s and the C of B’s in David Copperfield (chapter 25). The effect is symbolic, making Professor Meckier’s book seem hermetically sealed, complete only in its own world.

University of Hong Kong JEREMY TAMBLING

58 JONATHAN H. GROSSMAN, The Art of Alibi: Englsish Law Courts and the Novel. The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002, pp. xii + 202. ISBN 0-8018-675-X. £29.50.

The Art of Alibi offers an interesting new perspective on the history of crime fiction by arguing that between the gallows literature of the eighteenth century and the detective fiction of the later Victorian period lies an overlooked period of crime literature which in its structures and aims was heavily influenced by the law courts. Jonathan Grossman argues that in the early nineteenth-century novel a new trial-focused paradigm developed at a time when court houses were not only being physically built but were also influencing how stories were told within law and literature. The book’s title refers to the emergence in the eighteenth century of the word alibi which in a broad sense, Grossman suggests, implied the idea of a narrative told in court. As the notion of alibi grew more important public awareness of the similarities between legal and literary storytelling also increased. Examining links between the nineteenth-century English novel and the law courts The Art of Alibi opens by giving an overview of legal and literary history in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Grossman traces a move from the scaffold-oriented justice of the eighteenth-century when trials were swift, lawyerless, and spectacle lay in hangings, through to the new trial-centred justice system of the early nineteenth-century when lawyers prepared criminal ‘cases’, trials were longer, and the courtroom itself became the site for spectacle. During the 1790s to 1840s Grossman posits, the criminal trial rather than the gallows came to be seen as the ‘culmination of justice’ (4), and the rising importance of the novel had a role to play in this development. Grossman devotes chapters to William Godwin’s Caleb Williams and to Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s Frankenstein. This father and daughter pair, Grossman shows, moved away from gallows writing and developed a new form of novel ‘predicated on the cultural consumption of trial narratives and a new juridical ideology of justice’ (5). Chapters on two writers influenced by this new development follow: Dickens in Pickwick Papers and Elizabeth Gaskell in Mary Barton. The final chapter examines the subgenre of the Newgate novel, including Oliver Twist, and the nascence of detective fiction in the 1840s and 1850s. Of keenest interest to Dickensians is Grossman’s chapter on The Pickwick Papers which focuses on aspects of Pickwick’s ‘forensic structuring’, and his later discussion of Oliver Twist. Central to the Pickwick discussion is that famous civil trial for breach of promise to marry, Bardell v. Pickwick. Grossman suggests that chapter 34, which reports the trial, marks the change of Pickwick from collection of fragmentary sketches to Victorian novel. Through the trial, Grossman argues, Pickwick becomes part of an extended literary plot as well as the central figure in a plot created by the lawyers Dodson and Fogg. This chapter also puts forward the idea that Dickens creates both his book and his role as a novelist through the legal world. Grossman asserts that the 59 novels’ lawyers mirror Dickens’s role as author as both create Pickwick and his story, both have pecuniary aims in doing so, and the lawyers’ offices mirror Dickens’s writing space. Dickens, he proposes, was trying to establish himself as a professional author partially by following the model of professional lawyers. The courtroom in Pickwick is revealed as a site for the production of narrative and the construction and representation of character. Pickwick, Grossman shows, is also ambivalent in its representation of lawyers, depicting them not simply as scoundrels but also as characters viewed through the lens of Pickwick’s class snobbery. Pickwick’s own lawyer, Perker, is no better or worse that Dodson and Fogg; both legal sides play a professional role for payment. Although Pickwick is usually regarded as a novel revelatory of the perfidy of lawyers, Grossman suggests that ultimately the novel takes ‘a benign view of their profession’ (99). Grossman also provides an interesting discussion of the influence on Pickwick of the new urban courthouses which were being built in the early nineteenth century reflecting the law’s move into the hands of middle-class professionals. Grossman usefully argues that ‘Pickwick brings us news from the law courts of both a new middle-class, professional role for the author and a new Victorian structure for the novel’ (106). In a briefer discussion of Oliver Twist in the context of the Newgate controversy Grossman examines metatextual links between Dickens’s novel and The Newgate Calendar. He also discusses the depiction of Nancy, Sikes’s experiences after murdering Nancy, and Fagin’s end. He shows that with these three characters the omniscient narrative merges with the more typically Newgate personal perspective of these criminals. By contrast the interpolated descriptions of the villain Monks divide the middle-class reader from criminal experience, and his capture by Brownlow foreshadows later detective fiction. With its ten illustrations and its astute and well-told argument The Art of Alibi is an important plinth under the bridge linking law and literary studies and offers much both to those interested in the field of law and literature and to those looking for new light on the novels discussed.

Canterbury Christ Church University College ADRIENE E. GAVIN

60 Radio Review

George Silverman’s Explanation, adapted by Michael Eaton: BBC Radio 4, 1 May 2003.

In the succinct words of the Pilgrim editors of Dickens’s letters, ‘George Silverman’s Explanation’ is ‘a strange tale in which the motives of the passive, and suffering timid narrator are constantly misconstrued’ (Volume 11, p. 385). It is an intriguing and subtle story, which may hide some secret confession (as Peter Ackroyd suggests in his biography) and which was the subject of a Freudian analysis by M. K. Bradby in The Dickensian over sixty years ago (Volume 36). A forty-five minute radio adaptation by Michael Eaton directed by Sebastian Graham-Jones was broadcast on Radio 4 on 1 May 2003. Following the first hesitant scratchings of George Silverman’s quill, as he comes upon his story ‘by degrees’, this was a sympathetic and faithful presentation of his memories and reflections, with a few of the narrator’s hints and suggestions convincingly made explicit (such as Brother Gimblet’s eventual hold over Brother Hawkyard). In a wonderfully strong cast, Paul Scholfield was the sixty-year-old George gravely searching for an explanation, David Warner the hypocritically eloquent Brother Hawkyard, and Gemma Jones an imperious Lady Fareway. Alan Cox played George as a young man and Katherine Heath doubled the roles of Sylvia and Adelina, the girls who captured his affections at different times in his early life. The music was by John Tams (whom we heard as Brother Gimblet). This was an enterprising productions of a late work by Dickens that is not nearly so well-known as it deserves to be.

DONALD HAWES

61 The Letters of Charles Dickens: Supplement Ð II

References (at the top left of each entry) to the earlier volumes of the British Academy-Pilgrim edition of The Letters of Charles Dickens are by page and line, every printed line below the running head being counted. Where appropriate, note and column number are included. The Editors gratefully acknowledge the help given by Donald Hawes in the annotation to the present Supplement. ANGUS EASSON MARGARET BROWN

II,313.6. To GEORGE JERDAN,1 [26-28 JUNE 1841]

Mention in To William Jerdan, 28 June 41. Date: after the Edinburgh dinner, 25 June.

1 George Jerdan, fourth son of John Jerdan of Kelso; writer and attorney; factor to local landowners, 1818; m. Sarah Smith, also of Kelso, 1819; by 1826 was proprietor of the Kelso Mail and agent for the Sun Insurance Company. William’s younger brother and the only one to remain in Kelso; two elder brothers had both died: John Stuart joined the army and died at the Cape of Good Hope in 1822, and Gilbert moved to Glasgow and died in London, 1827.

II,313.7. Replaces N and catalogue extracts

. To WILLIAM JERDAN,2 28 JUNE 1841

MS David H. Kilmer. Royal Hotel Edinburgh Thursday Twenty Eighth June / 41 My Dear Jerdan. Your letter is coming to me, I have no doubt. I am very sorry that I shall not be able to get to Kelso, but I have written my hearty thanks to your brother.3 The dinner was a very brilliant affair indeed Ð they say here, the best on record.4 It included all parties and persuasions. They were obliged for lack of room to turn away nearly a hundred applicants for tickets, and besides the diners we had more than a hundred and fifty ladies. Blackwoods are going to publish a good account of the speechifying.5 When they do, I’ll send you one. Meanwhile I forward you two papers, wherein the reporting is dismal.6 It’s November here. Ð I hope it may be June in London. Always / Faithfully Yours W. Jerdan Esquire CHARLES DICKENS

2 William Jerdan (1782-1869; DNB); 3rd son and 7th child of John Jerdan and Agnes Stuart; his father was a rather easygoing, though respectable, small landowner of Kelso, Roxburghshire. William was editor of the Literary Gazette 1817-50; from 1820 a leading figure in literary society: see Vol. I, p. 207, also Jerdan’s Autobiography (4 vols, 1852-3).

62 3 See last. 4 The dinner in CD’s honour held at the Waterloo Rooms, Edinburgh, on 25 June: see Vol. II, pp. 310-11 for full annotation. 5 In fact they did not do so. 6 The Caledonian Mercury gave a brief report and the Edinburgh Evening Courant a slightly fuller one: see ibid., pp. 311-313.

VI,92.12. To JOHN DELANE,7 2 MAY 1850

Text from facsimile in University Archives, Autographs and Historic Manuscripts catalogue, 2003. Devonshire Terrace Thursday Morning / Second May, 1850. My Dear Sir I cannot receive your very kind note, without writing this line of cordial acknowledgement, and of hearty assurance that I reciprocate all your friendly feelings. As you ask me about Household Words,8 I will not hesitate to say that I have no doubt an occasional quotation9 would do it good. Slips are always sent with the number, for this purpose.10 It is doing wonderfully well, but there is a great deal of filth to be carted away;11 and such help as you offer is very valuable in the youth of so extensive a design. You have made the Dean12 (I am afraid he is a reduced one)13 perfectly happy.14 Believe me / Very faithfully Yours John Delane Esquire. CHARLES DICKENS

7 John Thadeus Delane (1817-79; DNB), editor of The Times, 1841-77: see Vol. VII, p. 145n. This is the first known letter, though CD had met Delane by 1847 according to Forster. 8 The first number of Household Words was published 27 Mar. 9 In May 50, seven extracts from HW were printed in The Times: 9 (two), 13, 16, 27, 30 (two) May. On 16 May, an extract from CD’s “The Begging-Letter Writer”, HW, 18 may 50, fills a column. 10 The slips of HW, printed, like proofs, on one side of separate sheets, allowed extracts to be cut out for the printer, while the number itself was kept on file intact. 11 CD speaks metaphorically of the reforming tasks of HW and The Times, but The Times had recently been attacking the inefficiency of the Metropolitan Commissioners of Sewers (e.g. 19 Mar, 6 Apr) and two of the extracts from HW stressed the filthy state of Smithfield Market (ibid., 9, 13 May). 12 Gilbert Elliot, DD (1800-91); Rector of Holy Trinity, Marylebone (1846-50), during which time he and CD became friends; his appointment as Dean of Bristol was announced in The Times, 1 May; was opposed to the Romanising movement: see Vols VI, p. 538n and XII (Addenda), pp. 627 and 631 (two new letters of 1850 & 1851), which throw light on CD’s earlier relationship with the Dean). 13 It was proposed that all Deans should have a stipend of £1,000 (a reduction in many cases) and that rules about residence and plurality be enforced (Elliot’s predecessor had been Dean while Master of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge): see The Times, 23 and 30 Apr 50. 14 Perhaps a reference to The Times’s leaders about the Gorham Controversy (see Vol. VI, p. 30 and n) and the consequent reaction of High Church elements. Priscilla Sellon (1821-76; DNB), Superior of the Plymouth Sister of Mercy, had requested the Lord Chief Justice to stand down from her committee, following judgement in the Gorham case, a demand which The Times (16 Apr) characterised as “an act of disaffection to the English church” and evidence that those so acting were endeavouring to thrust Anglican articles and formularies “into meanings nearly akin to those of the Romish theology”. For CD’s own unhappiness under Elliot’s successor and move to St Marylebone church, see Vol. XII (Addemda), p. 631n.

63 VII,338.25. To ARTHUR RYLAND,1 25 MAY 1854

Text from facsimile in John Wilson Manuscripts Ltd. catalogue, 2003. Tavistock House Thursday Twenty Fifth May / 1854. My Dear Sir I have gone ove rthe list2 with great interest, I assure you, and am extremely glad to have the pleasure of hearing from you again. Mrs. Dickens and her sister unite in kindest regards. Always My Dear Sir / Very faithfully Yours Arthur Ryland Esquire. CHARLES DICKENS

1 Arthur Ryland (1807-77), solicitor: see Vol IV, p. 29n. Founder of the Birmingham and Midland Institute in 1853. 2 A list of people to ask to give readings or lectures in aid of the Institute (above) compiled by the Canvassing Committee; Bulwer Lytton was among those applied to: see Vol. VII, p. 478 and n.

X,12.18. To THOMAS P. BALL,11 11 JANUARY 1862

MS Peter Trusedale. Exeter,12 Saturday Eleventh January 1862 Dear Sir I think your Poem on Prince Albert’s Death,13 a production of very great merit Ð full of lofty feeling and expression, and quite apart from the common-places of such an occasion. It does you infinite credit, and I congratulate you upon it very cordially. Dear Sir, Believe me / Faithfully Yours Mr. Thomas P Ball. CHARLES DICKENS

11 Possibly Thomas Prideaux Ball, 22 Onslow Sq., W. Brompton. 12 CD read at the Royal Public Rooms, Exeter, on 10 and 11 January. 13 Prince Albert had died on 14 Dec 61; CD postponed his readings for that week in Liverpool until 27-29 Jan 62. Ball’s poem has not been traced and was probably unpublished; a poem by Robert Lytton, “A Great Man”, was published in AYR, VI, p. 421 (25 Jan 62).

XI,61.29. Replaces catalogue extract (aa) XII, 737

. To HENRY GLASSFORD BELL,14 21 FEBRUARY 1866

MS Carol Chapman. GAD’S HILL PLACE, / HIGHAM BY ROCHESTER, KENT. Wednesday Twenty First February 1866 My Dear Sir I beg you to accept my cordial thanks for your acharming volume.15 I have read it with great pleasure and admiration, and with renewed remembrance of a certain elegant sandal-wood box16 that stands among my books.a Do not think me remiss in not having written to you sooner, 64 for aI have been too unwell to do much.a17 My daughters (the younger of whom is married) beg me to send you their kind regard. aIt is not very likely that I may have the pleasure of seeing you in Glasgow18 before long.a Faithfully Yours alwys Henry Glassford Bell Esquire. CHARLES DICKENS

14 Henry Glassford Bell (1803-74; DNB), of Glasgow, sheriff and man of letters: see Vol. V, p. 428n. 15 Romances and Minor Poems, 1866, which was in CD’s library at his death (Catalogue of the Library of CD, ed. J. H. Stonehouse). 16 The History of a Sandal Wood Box: written by itself., priv. printed [1848]. Written by Mrs Bell for her daughters before her death in Dec 47: see Vol. V, ibid; not given in Stonehouse however. 17 CD’s heart seems to have been causing some anxiety at this time; Frank Beard (his doctor) had prescribed iron, quinine and digitalis earlier that month: see To Georgina, 9 Feb 66 and To Beard, 16 Feb 66 (Vol. XI, p. 155-6). 18 CD gave readings there on 17, 19 Apr and 18 May 66; but they may not have met after all as Bell had suffered a bereavement: see To Bell, 19 Apr 66 (Vol. XI, p. 189 and n).

XI,223.8. Replaces catalogue extract (aa) XII, 737

. To THE MARQUIS TOWNSHEND,25 15 JULY 1866

MS Carol Chapman.

Text from facsimile in Albersheim’s catalogue, 2002. GAD’S HILL PLACE, HIGHAM BY ROCHESTER, KENT. Fifteenth July 1866 Dear Lord Townshend I regret that I cannot have the pleasure of dining with Lady Townshend26 and yourself on the Seventeenth, as aI have left town for the Season and have family visitors here.a Your kind note reached me only today, in consequence of my having been on a ramble.27 Let me assure you that your remembrance was very welcome to me. Faithfully Yours The / Marquis Townshend CHARLES DICKENS

25 John Villiers Stuart Townshend (1831-99), 5th Marquis Townshend since 1863; CD had known him since 1856, when as Viscount Raynham he had been Treasurer of the Royal Hospital for Incurables: see Vol. VIII, p. 106. 26 Lady Anne Elizabeth Clementina (1847-1925), daughter of James (Duff) 5th Earl of Fife; they married 17 Oct 65. 27 There are no letters between 11 and 15 July; CD may have been with Ellen Ternan.

XI,407.16.

. To MRS ROSS CHURCH,28 6 AUGUST 1867

Ms The Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. GAD’S HILL PLACE,

65 HIGHAM BY ROCHESTER, KENT. Tuesday Sixth August, 1867 Dear Mrs. Ross Church I have read your book,29 and I think it evinces your possession of considerable power. I cannot honestly say that I find your power to be always well directed, or that I do not find many evidences of its being impetuously and daringly used. But I have not the slightest doubt of its existence within you. You will excuse my adding that I think you unwise in freely touching forbidden topics.30 If I also object that you do so with a certain “coarseness”, I do not use that word in its conventional acceptation, but as meaning with an absence of that very great delicacy of art which can alone carry so difficult a load. Your general idea too, of the dissipated part of such a life as your hero’s, is (so far as I know) not like the Truth, and suggests something worse. Similarly, he very often speaks as educated gentlemen (to say nothing of this gentleman’s being imaginative too) do not speak.31 It is very remarkable to me that while you are indignant with men32 for making laws unjust and oppressive towards women, you do not see that the cruel persecutors of erring women are their own sex. Against the cruelty of women to women, men are mostly powerless. And yet in the very same breath you indicate this last lamentable fact. The opening of the book is very good indeed, both as an indication of character and a piece of construction. Gerald’s father and mother, both highly meritorious. The father’s death, excellent. Ada (except that she does not swim as well in philosophical waters as in those of the Isle of Wight) very good too. All about her child, natural and affecting. I write with difficulty, being laid up with erysipelas in the foot,33 which puts me into a highly inconvenient attitude. But I desire to lose no time in telling you what you ask me to tell you Ð the truth to the best of my belief. Always / Faithfully Yours CHARLES DICKENS The last volume looks as if it had cost you the least pains?

28 Florence marryat (1838-99; DNB), daughter of Capt. Frederick Marryat (1792-1848; DNB); married Thomas Ross Church, June 54; prolific novelist, playwright, actress and singer: see Vol. VII, p. 67 and later vols. 29 The Confessions of Gerald Estcourt, 3 vols, 1867. 30 These topics include marital separation, elopement, Estcourt’s living with Julia before making her his first wife, and suggestions of various vices and sins in high society. According to Michael Sadleir, during the first part of her writing life Florence Marryat was regarded “as a purveyor of dangerously inflammatory fiction, unsuitable for reading by young ladies, yet highly to their taste” (XIX Century Fiction, 1951, I, 299). 31 Estcourt is often outspoken, using slang expressions and mild expletives (for which he is sometimes rebuked). 32 Ada, who eventually becomes Estcourt’s second wife, passionately expresses her indignation at the treatment of women in conversation with him (e.g., Vol. I, Ch. 10 and Vol. 2, Ch. 10). 33 Described in To Forster, [6 Aug 67], ibid., pp. 407-408; ????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????? ?????????????????

66 XII,313.1.

. To SAMUEL JOHNSON,27 15 MARCH 1869

MS Garth Johnson. Address: Mr. Samuel Johnson / 28 South Castle Street / Liverpool. 26 Wellington Street, Strand, London. Monday Fifthteenth March 1869. Sir I must distinctly inform you that I cannot in any way whatever enter upon the consideration of the circumstances you state to me. They are associated with complicated affairs of other people, of which I have never had the slightest knowledge, and with which I have nothing to do.28 Your obedt. Servant CHARLES DICKENS29

27 Samuel Johnson (1820-1899); Liverpool printer and book publisher whose business appears to have failed c. 1861; since then he had moved from job to job including bookseller, photographic artist, clerk in a brewery; he married twice and had 14 children but at this date his first wife had died leaving him with eight children of whom the youngest was 12 years old. 28 It is possible that Johnson hoped to get back into publishing himself, or to advance either his brother’s or one of his elder sons’ careers with CD’s help. 29 CD was on the Provincial reading tour of Oct 68-Apr 69 which ended in his collapse at Preston on 22 Apr; he read six times in Liverpool in Oct and it is probable that Johnson heard him; on 11 Mar CD, who had learnt of the death of his friend, Sir James Emerson Tennent (see Vols VI, p. 701n and XII, passim), rushed south after his reading in York, cancelling a second reading in Hull on 12 Mar in order to be at the funeral that day. CD’s next reading was in London on 16 Mar.

XII,320.1.

. To MRS ROSS CHURCH, 29 MARCH 1869

MS The Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. OFFICE OF ALL THE YEAR ROUND, Monday Twenty Ninth March 1869. My Dear Mrs. Ross Church Let me assure you that I very highly esteem the honour you propose to render me, and that I truly feel the terms in which it is proffered. I accept it with all my heart.33 Unfortunately it is quite out of my power to make any safe appointment for any day in the next month or in May. My “Farewell Readings” (which will not be finished until June), keep me perpetually travelling in all parts of the Empire; and within a few hours of my being brought back to London to read there, I am spirited away again, at the cost of immense fatigue, to read elsewhere. This will go on until the appointed list is read out. Believe me always / Very faithfully Yours Mrs. Ross Church CHARLES DICKENS

33 Her new novel, Véronique: A Romance, dedicated to CD; copy at Gad’s Hill on CD’s death (Catalogue of the Library of CD, ed. J. H. Stonehouse): see Vol. XII, p. 406 and n, where we quote part of her dedicatory letter.

67 XII,370.14. Replaces catalogue mention.

. To MRS LYNN LINTON,34 19 JUNE 1869

Text from G. S. Layard, Mrs Lynn Linton, her Life, Letters and Opinions, 1901, pp. 160-1. 26 WELLINGTON STREET, STRAND, Saturday, 19th June 1869. My Dear Mrs. Linton Although your article on our old friend is interesting as a piece of personal remembrance, it does not satisfy my desires as a review of Forster’s book.35 It could hardly be otherwise than painful to Forster and I, one of his oldest literary friends, and certainly of all others his most intimate and confidential, should insert in these pages an account of Landor Ð or touch the subject Ð without a word of commendation of a biography that has cost, to my knowledge, a world of care and trouble. I find from your letter to my son that you do not think well of the said book. Admitting that the life was to be written at all, I do. And it is because I think well of it, and wish highly to commend it on what I deem to be its deserts, that I am staggered and stopped short by your paper,39 and fear that I must turn to and write another in its steead.40 I want you to understand the case on my own presentation of it, and hence I trouble you with this note. Believe me always / faithfully yours, CHARLES DICKENS

34 Eliza Lynn (1822-98; DNB), journalist and novelist known as Mrs Lynn Linton after her marriage to W. J. Linton, 1858; close friend of W. S. Landor, at whose house she first met CD in 1849; regular contributor to AYR: see Vol. VII, p. 114 and later vols. 35 Forster’s W. S. Landor: a Biography, pubd June 69: see Vol. XII, p. 352 and n. CD had asked Mrs Lynn Linton to write a review for AYR, no doubt because he knew she was a very old friend of Landor’s. 39 According to Layard in his Life (above), the article she wrote began with the words: “The Life of Walter Savage Landor has yet to be written”; however, no review with these opening words has been found so far. 40 CD wrote a review himself, recommending Forster’s book and describing Landor himself with affection and understanding; it appeared in AYR, N.S. Vol II, No. 34, 24 July 1869: see The Uncommercial Traveller and Other Paprs, ed. Michael Slater and John Drew, Vol. 4 (2000), Dickens’s Journalism, Dent.

XII,370.26

. To MRS LYNN LINTON, 21 JUNE 1869

Text from Swann Auction Galleries catalogue, Oct 2002. OFFICE OF ALL THE YEAR ROUND, Monday Twenty First June 1869. My Dear Mrs. Linton I had not the least intention of returning you the enclosed paper,41 and had ordered it Ð in right of our long association Ð to be placed to your credit in the business account. That order I shall certainly not cancel

68 (except under compulsion) but you are perfectly free to publish the paper nevertheless. Believe me Very faithfully Yours CHARLES DICKENS

41 Clearly Mrs Linton had asked CD to return her review of Forster’s Biography of W. S. Landor. Fraser’s Magazine, N. S. Vol. II, July 70 published an article by her entitled “Reminiscences of Walter Savage Landor” in which she endeavoured “to redress, by my testimonly, the unjust balance of public opinion by which he has been weighed only according to his demerits”; although she mentions both Forster and Dickens, nowhere does she refer to Forster’s book; no reprint with the opening words quoted by Layard (To Linton, 19 June, n) yet discovered.

XII,528.23. Replaces catalogue extract (aa)

. To MRS ROSS CHURCH 17 MAY 1870

MS Free Library of Philadelphia. Address: Mrs. Frances Marryat Church / 58 York Terrace / Regents Park / N.W. GAD’S HILL PLACE, / HIGHAM BY ROCHESTER, KENT. Tuesday Seventeenth May 1870 My Dear Mrs. Church aI have been much inconvenienced and pained this last week by a neuralgic attack in the foot to which I am sometimes liable, and which originally came of over walking in deep snow.a42 The moment I can stand after such a seizure (which in the present case is this moment of writing), I have recourse to change of air. But I shall be back here on Sunday, and happy to receive a call from you on that day between 2 and 3, if that should suit your convenience. Faithfully Yours always CHARLES DICKENS

42 ???? Feb 65; see Vol. XI, pp. 18-19, and above, To Mrs Ross Church, 6 Aug 67, for a similar attack.

69