Dickens and Character: ‘The Economy of Apprehension’ Tamsin Evernden Royal Holloway, University of London Submitted to the Department of English, for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy !1 Declaration of Authorship I, Tamsin Evernden, hereby declare that this thesis and the work presented in it is entirely my own. Where I have consulted the work of others, this is always clearly stated. Signed: Date: !2 Abstract In November 1867 a young Henry James encountered Charles Dickens at the height of his fame. James was only briefly in Dickens’s presence but noted ‘a kind of economy of apprehension’: a look in the older writer’s eye that he equated to power withheld; limiting local interaction, but also representative of the way Dickens now meted out his implicitly finite gifts, holding something in reserve. Two years previous, in 1865, James had submitted a damning review of Dickens’s last completed novel, Our Mutual Friend, in which he revisited arguments that had dogged Dickens from the beginning of his career, as to how he ‘created nothing but figure’ and ‘added nothing to our understanding of human character’. Although critical opinion has developed over the ensuing century and a half, the penumbra of superficiality remains, with a focus on Dickens’s overt stylisation: melodrama, grotesquerie; pattern and repetition forming the locus of scholarship reassessing Dickens’s prose techniques. I use James’s phrase to initiate a two-way premise; one speculative: that even in Dickens’s apparently simple characterisation there was supreme elective skill winnowing out generative components, so what is outwardly manifest belies the complexity of the founding structure. The more extensive premise, underpinning the body of my thesis, focuses on a few characters conceived as serious, so commonly held to lack the ‘power’ of Dickens’s comic creations. I posit that his characterisation herein was both founded on a more intellectual kind of mental processing than Dickens has been given credit for (whether purposed or sub-conscious); and that these characters provide route maps to thinking around a wide arena of issues, thereby delivering far more than has been appreciated. My thesis comprises a close study of three novels representing Dickens’s early, middle and late period: Oliver Twist, Dombey and Son, and Our Mutual Friend. !3 Contents Introduction 5 1. Oliver Twist: ‘How do you solve a problem like Oliver?’ 19 2. Dombey and Son: ‘Vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle’ 59 3. Our Mutual Friend: ‘To go about, wander, doubt’ 112 Conclusion 173 Bibliography 179 !4 Introduction If ‘character’ has long been ostracised from literary scholarship – to quote Peter Lamarque: ‘Character has been an unpopular and discredited conception for a generation of literary critics’ – Dickens, and analogously Dickens Studies, were bound to suffer an attenuated bilateral effect.1 The association between Dickens and his characters is unparalleled within the history of modern authorship: the result of a triplicate of distinctive factors: Dickens’s own proclaimed relationship with his creations, for whom he expressed an emotional bond; his public readings in the latter part of his career, which generated almost electric responses from audiences already – as the artist David Wilkie commented three decades earlier – ‘talk[ing] about the characters as if they were next-door neighbours’; and the novels’ dissemination within popular culture through media such as film and theatre, which has situated the characters within the wider public domain.2 The situation is further complicated by the dual perspective posited on Dickens’s characters by a loving public, and a critical tradition that has – and this is a great irony – long been suspicious of his craft in this respect, and the results (characters themselves). From George Henry Lewes in 1872, who remarked, ‘his characters have nothing fluctuating or incalculable about them, even when they embody true observation’, to Barbara Hardy a century later, who writes: ‘his individual characters are pretty plainly illustrations, created by needs and roles, seen as agents and victims, within a critical analysis of contemporary England’, the critical heritage is circumscribed by doubt.3 Hardy’s comment reveals, in fact, the benefit that has been seen to outweigh a defect: that Dickens’s overriding concern (different, of course, to his authorial pleasure) was the critique of society within the paradigm of the novel. Iris Murdoch, who rated Dickens highly and whose regard rather gives the lie to critical nit-picking, did not see the need to compartmentalise: ‘Dickens manages to do everything, to be a great imaginative writer and explicit social critic […] his most effective criticism of 1 See Peter Lamarque, ‘How to Create a Fictional Character’, in The Creation of Art: New Essays in Philosophical Aesthetics, ed. by Berys Gaut and Paisley Livingstone (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 33-52 (p. 34). 2 Dickens gave his first public reading in 1853, and increasingly bravado performances over the ensuing decade. See Graham Storey, ‘Preface’, The Letters of Charles Dickens, ed. by Madeline House, Graham Storey and Angus Easson, 12 vols (Oxford: Clarendon, 1965-2002), X (1862-4), vii-xiii, ix. Dickens’s paternalistic attitude towards his characters is expressed in both private letters and published prefaces; he famously dubbed David Copperfield his ‘favourite child’. See ‘Preface to the Charles Dickens edition’ (1867), reproduced in Charles Dickens, David Copperfield, ed. by Nina Burgis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), Appendix B, p. 870; David Wilkie’s comment, recorded at a dinner in 1839, is quoted in Leonée Ormond, ‘Dickens and Painting: Contemporary Art’, Dickensian, 80 (1984), 3-25 (p. 4). On Dickens and popular culture see Juliet John, Dickens and Mass Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). 3 G. H. Lewes, from a review of Vol. I of Forster’s Life, Fortnightly Review, February 1872, reproduced in Charles Dickens: The Critical Heritage, ed. by Philip Collins, 2nd edn (London: Routledge, 1995), pp. 572-76 (p. 574); Barbara Hardy, The Moral Art of Charles Dickens (London: The Athlone Press, 1970), p. 4. !5 society are made through live and touching characters […] Dickens is a great writer because of his ability to create character’.4 Murdoch fuses a potentially reductionist judgment into a generative one. Dickens’s characters may be ‘created by needs and roles’, but they are transmitters of a critique that works auxiliary effects: ‘live and touching characters’ involve us in empathetic engagement, imprinting the reader’s consciousness not only as personifications of sociopolitical ideas, but as expansive amalgams of affect. This steers us to another tension point within the critical heritage pertaining to character studies: that between affect and form. A professional scholar might understandably resist being absorbed into a character’s story (something that Victorian critics did not see as an indignity, with Thackeray conveying his praise for Dickens’s technique through an emotional response: ‘There’s no writing against such powers as this – one has no chance!’).5 There is a residing assumption within the academy that to be ‘drawn in’ means treating the text as a glass through which we see a parallel reality, an unforgivable naivety under the aegis of theoretical approaches beholden to form. Here, for example, is Terry Eagleton, in his ‘Preface’ to Steven Connor’s structuralist study of Dickens: Criticism of Dickens can be roughly divided into two major camps. On the one hand there are those readings which fasten upon plot, character and relationship, discovering in the novels all the prodigal richness of ‘life’ itself […] The fictionality of the novels is accordingly repressed: they become instead windows onto the Victorian world, in which plot and character are seen less as complex effects of language than as living entities to be directly correlated with what we supposedly agree to be ‘human life’. The second major form of criticism, in reaction to such reductionism, approaches the novels as structures of symbolic meaning, rescuing them from the shame of mere entertainment or documentation for a certain ideology of Literature.6 Though it belongs to a very specific epoch in the history of critical practice, the passage is suggestive of schisms still extant. It posits the assumption that we are in the business of ratios; that an appreciation of fiction through the locus of personal experience or observation (‘life’) will derogate that text’s status as art; that attention to language and metaphor puts into abeyance our susceptibility to affect. My thesis presents a way of looking at Dickens’s construction of character which attempts to give due regard to both the formal structuring and the affective ‘power’. The unscholarly word passes muster here, due to its prominence in the critical heritage: it pinpoints something that has never been quite resolved, and there is a 4 See ‘Literature and Philosophy: A Conversation with Brian Magee’ (1978), in Iris Murdoch, Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on Philosophy and Literature, ed. by Peter Conradi (London: Penguin, 1999), pp. 3-30 (p. 17). 5 William Makepeace Thackeray, responding to the death of Paul Dombey in a letter of 1847, cited in Alan Shelston, Charles Dickens: Dombey and Son and Little Dorrit, ed. by Alan Shelston (London: Macmillan, 1985), p. 34. 6 Terry Eagleton, ‘Preface’, Steven Connor, Charles Dickens (Oxford: Blackwell, 1985), iv-v (iv).