NECESSARY EVILS: AUTHORSHIP, ETHICS, AND THE READER IN BLAKE, DICKENS, AND JOYCE Dominic Rainsford Ph.D. University College London ProQuest Number: 10046136 All rights reserved INFORMATION TO ALL USERS The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. In the unlikely event that the author did not send a complete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. uest. ProQuest 10046136 Published by ProQuest LLC(2016). Copyright of the Dissertation is held by the Author. All rights reserved. This work is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code. Microform Edition © ProQuest LLC. ProQuest LLC 789 East Eisenhower Parkway P.O. Box 1346 Ann Arbor, Ml 48106-1346 Abstract This thesis examines the ways in which William Blake, Charles Dickens, and James Joyce construct their ethical status as authors. Each of these writers became more and more aware, as his career progressed, of the weight of moral responsibility which he imposed upon himself by writing about social and individual ills which paralleled the experience of real people. As a result, each came to incorporate misgivings about his own moral authority into his writings in vivid and alarming ways. In each case, the author, or the idea of the author that the reader is encouraged to hold, becomes a microcosm or synecdoche of wider moral problems that exercise that author. The fact that Blake, Dickens, and Joyce have doubts about their own benignity does not disqualify them from entering the discourse of right and wrong behaviour, the examination of moral concepts which constitutes ethics: rather it is the necessary symptom of rigorous and powerful ethical thought, and offers the opportunity of making moral problems fully tangible and alive. The central argument of this thesis, in summary, is that Blake, Dickens, and Joyce earn a special credibility for the role of the author as moral observer and ethical thinker through linking a scrutiny of themselves to a similar scrutiny of the world around them. The main body of the thesis is devoted to exploring some of the many ways in which this linkage is achieved in individual texts. The thesis concludes with the claim that its ethically attuned approach to literary criticism is distinctly more realistic and challenging than many earlier humanist perspectives. Contents Texts and Quotations 4 A Note on Style 4 Introduction 5 Part I: Blake Chapter 1: Melancholia, Moral Ambiguity, and the Search 13 for a System in Blake's Early Works Chapter 2 : Blake as Educator and Tormentor of the 46 Innocent : The Songs and The Book of Thel Chapter 3 : Images of Authorship and Experiments with 64 Ethics in the Shorter Prophetic Books Chapter 4: The Four Zoas, Milton, and Jerusalem: Blake 93 as the Analyst and Agent of Wrongs Part II: Dickens Chapter 5: Ethical Challenges and Jovial Evasions, 116 Heroes Indulged and Debunked: From Sketches by Boz to Nicholas Nickleby Chapter 6: Moralistic Allegory and Pathologic Vision: 140 The Old Curiosity Shop and Barnaby Rudge Chapter 7 : Narratorial Independence and Disruptiveness 158 in Martin Chuzzlewit and Dombey and Son Chapter 8: Weak but Decent Heroes, Altruistic 17 6 but Unfathomable Texts : David Copperfield and Bleak House Chapter 9: Flatness and Ethical Scepticism in Hard 197 Times, Little Dorrit, and A Tale of Two Cities Chapter 10: The Visionary Dickens: Characters, the Author, 224 and the Outer World in Great Expectations, Our Mutual Friend, and The Mystery of Edwin Drood Part III: Joyce Chapter 11: The Uses and Abuses of Blake and Dickens in 247 Joyce's Early Works Chapter 12: Paralysis and Neglect: The Terror of Ulysses 265 Conclusion 283 Bibliography 2 87 Texts and Quotations Blake Quotations from Blake, unless stated otherwise, are taken from The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake, ed. David V. Erdman, newly revised edn. (New York, 1988). Page references, both to Blake's texts and to Erdman's important textual notes, are given as E plus the page number. In addition, Blake's plate or manuscript page numbers, followed by line references, are given for all works except short poems. But it should be noted that due to the variations between different copies of some Prophetic Books, notably Milton, the use of these references with other editions may be difficult. For Blake's illustrations to his engraved texts I give page references to the reproductions in William Blake's Writings, ed. G. E. Bentley, Jr., 2 vols (Oxford, 1978). These references are expressed as B plus the page number. Dickens The Clarendon Dickens currently provides the standard texts for eight novels: The Pickwick Papers, Oliver Twist, Martin Chuzzlewit, Dombey and Son, David Copperfield, Little Dorrit, Great Expectations, and The Mystery of Edwin Drood. For Dickens's other works I have selected whichever edition seemed the most authoritative available. Full details appear in footnotes and the bibliography. Joyce Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man are quoted from the Viking Critical editions, which are not in print in the United Kingdom, but which are otherwise the most useful for scholarly purposes. My references to Ulysses use the episode and line numbers first employed in Hans Walter Gabler's critical edition (New York, 1984). These numbers also appear in the Penguin 'Student's Edition' and the Bodley Head edition of 'the Corrected Text' with a preface by Richard Ellmann (London, 1986). This last, which is a corrected printing of Gabler's reading text, is the source for all my quotations. For further details of these and Joyce's other works, see footnotes and the bibliography. A Note on Style This thesis has been prepared using conventions set out in the MHRA Style Book: Notes for Authors, Editors, and Writers of Dissertations, 3rd edn. , ed. A. S. Maney and R. L. Smallwood (London: Modern Humanities Research Association, 1981). First references to a book or article within a given chapter appear in footnotes and include full bibliographical details. Subsequent references appear in the shortest intelligible form, either in a footnote or, if no ambiguity is possible (for example, if no other work by the same author is mentioned in the thesis), as a page reference in parentheses within the main text (see Sections 10 [b] and [c] of the Style Book). All texts cited also appear, together with all other texts which have directly influenced or are especially relevant to the thesis, in the bibliography. Introduction The works of William Blake, Charles Dickens, and James Joyce contain a great deal of imaginative recreation and scrutiny of, on the one hand, the helpful or benevolent behaviour of human beings towards one another, and, on the other, their oppressive or destructive interactions, whether in a domestic context or in such fields as politics, commerce, the law, education, industry, or warfare. Such forms of behaviour are of pressing and constant concern in real life: people are doing things all the time that we feel inclined to applaud, and other things that we deplore. And we have to select our own actions too, according to our sense of what is desirable or undesirable, or, as we are likely to think and say, 'right' or 'wrong'. Our decisions in these matters, even if we do not believe in a morality grounded on anything more than contingency, expediency, or self-interest, can be said to be governed by moral concepts: ideas of how to behave when we find ourselves in certain relations to other individ­ uals, relations which affect their happiness or well-being. In so far as we reflect upon, question, and theorize these moral concepts we may be said to be engaging in moral philosophy or ethics. It is in this sense that this thesis concerns itself with ethics in Blake, Dickens, and Joyce.^ No piece of writing which shows human beings interacting in any but the most superficial ways can avoid implicating itself in the moral concerns and ethical debates to which I have just alluded. And to a certain extent my choice of Blake, Dickens, and Joyce as subjects could be said to be arbitrary. I draw many specific parallels, in the ensuing chapters, between the respective works of these authors, but this is not an influence study: I am interested in describing causal links between Blake, Dickens, and Joyce only in so far as this helps me to study a particular set of attitudes to authorship, which could be found in the work of many writers, but for which Blake, Dickens, and Joyce provide ^ The following texts have been useful in clarifying the understand­ ing of ethics outlined here and elsewhere in this thesis: William K. Frankena, Ethics, 2nd edn. (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, 1973); Richard Norman, The Moral Philosophers: An Introduction to Ethics (Oxford, 1983); Peter Singer, ed. , A Companion to Ethics, Blackwell Companions to Philosophy (Oxford, 1991). INTRODUCTION 6 outstandingly strong examples. Each of these authors, I shall argue, became more and more aware, as his career progressed, of the weight of moral responsibility which he imposed upon himself by writing about social and individual ills which paralleled the experience of real people, and this led, within his texts, to an increasingly sceptical and ironic sense of the author. As a result, Blake, Dickens, and Joyce all came to incorporate misgivings about their own moral authority into their writings in vivid and alarming ways: in each case, the author, or the idea of the author that the reader is encouraged to hold, becomes a microcosm or synecdoche of wider moral problems that exercise that author.