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Nobody's Child the Theme of Illegitimacy in the Novels of Charles Dickens. George Eliot and Wilkie Collins Nicola Justine Louise

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Nobody's Child the Theme of Illegitimacy in the Novels of Charles Dickens. George Eliot and Wilkie Collins Nicola Justine Louise NOBODY'S CHILD THE THEME OF ILLEGITIMACY IN THE NOVELS OF CHARLES DICKENS. GEORGE ELIOT AND WILKIE COLLINS NICOLA JUSTINE LOUISE SHUTT D. PHIL. THE UNIVERSITY OF YORK DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH AND RELATED LITERATURE DECEMBER 1990 IABLE_OF CONTENTS Page Acknowledgements iv Lbstract Abbreviations vi A Note On Terms vi INTRODUCTION 1 (..HAPTER 1 Illegitimacy in England - A Brief Survey 5 What is Illegitimacy? 5 ii The Legal Background to Illegitimacy 6 iii Changing Social Attitudes to Illegitimacy 7 iv Illegitimacy in Culture and Literature 23 CHAPTER 2 Charles Dickens: The Drama of the Abused Child 46 Oliver Twist: The Workhouse Brat 46 ii Barnaby Rudge: The Natural Child 51 iii Dombey and Son: The Fallen Woman 56 iv Bleak House.: The Child Which Should Never Have Been Born 60 Little Dorrit: The Imprisoned Revolutionary 75 vi Great Expectations: The Orphan Prince and the Bastard Princess 91 vii Conclusion: The Drama of the Abused Child 101 CHAPTER 3 George Eliot: The Problems of Parenting 113 Adam Bede.: Infanticide, Kinship and Community 113 ii Romoia: Adoption, Rejection and Parricide 121 iii Felix Holt: Heirship, The Law and Economics 132 iv Ifiddlemarch: The Insecurity of Inheritance and the Impotence of the Law 143 Daniel Deronda: The Bastard in English Society and an the World Stage 149 vi Conclusion: The Problems of Parenting 166 CHAPTER 4 Wilkie Collins: Sensation and Psychosis 176 Elde and Seek and The Dead Secret: Lies, 176 Secrets and Silences ii The Woman in White: The Illegitimate Identity in Peril 182 iii No Name: The Destruction of the Bourgeois Family 199 iv Armadale: Feminism, Crime and the Law 214 The Moonstone: Illegitimacy and the Social Construction of Femininity 219 vi Man and Wife: The Bourgeois Marriage in Danger 222 vii The Two Destinies: The Male Narrator and the Conservative Backlash 227 viii The Fallen Leaves: Sex and Class and the Economics of Illegitimacy 229 ix The Black Robe: The Dynamics of Religion 236 Conclusion: Sensation and Psychosis 240 CHAPTER 5 The End of an Era - Wilde, Rutherford and Illegitimacy in the Twentieth Century 248 )(APPENDIX 1 i The Bastards of Dickens, George Eliot and Collins 267 ii A Bastard Chronology 1834-1900 269 )(BIBLIOGRAPHY 271 iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS My first thanks must go to my thesis supervisor at York University, Mr Bob Jones, for giving me his time, answering my questions, lending me his books and feeding me on several enjoyable occasions, while never trying to influence my views in any way. In the early stages of my research, I also had several profitable discussions with Dr Tony Ward and Mr David Howard. Dr Alison Findlay of Bretton Hall College, was also most generous with her tine, answering many questions about her work on Shakespearean bastards, and giving me some useful pointers with regard to my own thesis. The staff of several libraries, in particular the J.B. Morrell in York and the Brotherton in Leeds, were always helpful. Special thanks are due to Dr B.S. Benedikz of the Special Collections section of Birmingham University Library, for allowing me to quote from Alison Findlay's unpublished PhD thesis. I am also very grateful to Mr David Goodes, of the King's School, Canterbury, for supplying me with a microfilm copy of the complete holograph manuscript of Wilkie Collins's Na Name, which is in the school's collection. As he rightly warned me, Collins's handwriting really was abominable. Finally, for support, advice and encouragement above and beyond the call of duty, I owe an especially large debt of thanks to my family and friends. Each of them helped in some way, but I am perhaps most grateful to my father and stepmother, Alan and Christine Shutt, who wardprocessed themselves nearly senseless at tines; my mother and stepfather, Margaret and Neville Preston, who backed me emotionally and financially during the last few months of the writing process; Rosalind Head, who was never too busy to discuss the finer points of Dickens with me, even when she should have been reading Gertrude Stein instead; Nigel Burchell and Cheryl Stevenson, who both put up with a lot while I was living with them in York; and, of course, my husband, Robert Onyett, for supporting me through the simultaneous final stages of a planned thesis and a surprise pregnancy! iv ABSTRACT This thesis is a study of the theme of illegitimacy in the novels of three mid-Victorian novelists, Charles Dickens, George Eliot and Wilkie Collins. It will seek to identify where and why the figure of the bastard appears in their fiction and to demonstrate how wideranging its forms can be. In particular it will draw attention to the major reworkings of a well-established literary convention achieved by three very different writers. I believe that Dickens, George Eliot and Collins dealt in a currency of illegitimacy which has hitherto gone unrecorded. The convention had been a staple of English literature for centuries before it made its last stand in the Victorian era. Hence my thesis will be the first systematic attempt to assess why the theme reached its zenith in the years between 1850 and 1870, only to become debased currency by the turn of the century. I will consider the extent to which the bastard's perceived social status as a malcontent led to the creation of a range of damaging stereotypes which finally began to be seriously revised and challenged - although never wholly destroyed - in the works of these novelists. ABBREVIATIONS I have done my best to use only the most obvious abbreviations in this thesis. Daniel Deronda, for instance, becomes 'DD' and The Fallen Leaves becomes 'FL' when I am identifying quotations from the primary texts. With regard to journals and periodicals, I have used only standard short forms in common use, such as 'PMLA' for Publications of the Modern Language Association of America. A NOTE ON TERMS I have referred to the bastard as 'he' throughout this thesis solely because it is so often necessary to mention the child and its mother in the same sentence. When this happens, the distinct use of 'he' and 'she' avoids heaps of tangled pronouns. More importantly, although it is the official policy of the National Council for One-Parent Families never to use the term 'illegitimate' (let alone 'bastard') I have decided to employ both. This is because these are the words which ordinary people have used and understood for centuries. In Victorian England embarrassing circumlocutions such as 'the child born in a non-wedlock situation' (which was coined by two American sociologists) would have been quite Incomprehensible. vi INTRODUCTION Chapter One of my thesis is essentially a definition of terms and an overview of the social, cultural and legal history of illegitimacy in England. Although my work is a literary study, its subject matter is of course both historically and sociologically based: therefore I feel that it must benefit from a wider contextualization. The first chapter describes - in necessarily broad terms - the changing social awareness of the subject of illegitimacy, and the parallel responses of the ruling authorities to the phenomenon. It seeks to clarify the theme as it appears in the nineteenth-century novel by providing a brief outline of the ways in which illegitimacy was defined in that period, and also the extent to which the Victorian view of the subject differed from and drew upon the beliefs and prejudices of previous generations. In my opening chapter, I try to ascertain how and why the bastard cane to occupy such a central place in nineteenth-century demonology and investigate the reasons why - as well as being written about - illegitimate children were also painted, investigated, spoken about in parliament and generally scrutinised to such an unprecedented extent at this tine. The existence of a moral panic underlies the Victorian attitude to the subject, and I have put forward several reasons for why this should be. The latter part of Chapter One is designed to clarify how, why and to what extent Charles Dickens, George Eliot and Vilkie Collins consciously or unconsciously destroyed, developed, adapted and upheld the existing literary stereotypes of the bastard which had evolved since the age of Elizabeth I. The extent to which the novelistic treatment of illegitimacy reflects the cultural milieu of nineteenth-century England is also discussed - that is, I seek to define the specifically 'Victorian' legal, social, sexual and economic concerns which were tapped into. In addition I discuss the possible historical accuracy of the fictional representation of the bastard, and the question of just how accurate the writers in fact wanted (or needed) to be. 1 Chapter Two focusses upon the first of my chosen authors, Charles Dickens, and covers each of his bastard characters in self-contained chronological sections. I hope that this lay-out will help the reader to develop a sense of how a changing literary landscape gradually enabled Dickens (and George Eliot, and Wilkie Collins) to build up their understanding of the convention's possibilities. It is clearly possible to trace Dickens's use of illegitimacy as a cypher for the abandonment of parental and filial obligations, and as a microcosm for an apparently imminent wholesale breakdown in social relations. The moral chaos which ensues when parents overlook, abuse or simply fail to protect their children is linked to a more general crisis theory about what can happen to the powerless in a society which is geared to the needs and aspirations of the confident and successful. The personal neglect of the bastard in Dickens parallels society's wholesale neglect of its weakest members. Consequently his bastards suffer on two interrelated levels, firstly as unloved and mistreated individuals and secondly as that part of the mass of the population which is cannon-fodder for the big institutional guns of Victorian society, such as the foundling hospital, the workhouse, the court and the prison.
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