Dickens, Nicholas Nickleby, and the Dance of Death

This study of Nicholas Nickleby takes the Dickens novel, which is perhaps the least critically discussed, though it is very popular, and examines its appeal and its significance, and finds it one of the most rewarding and powerful of Dickens’s texts. Nicholas Nickleby deals with the abduction and destruction of children, often with the collusion of their parents. It concentrates on this theme in a way which continues from Oliver Twist, describing such oppression, and the resistance to it, in the language of melodrama, of parody and comedy. With chapters on the school system that Dickens attacks, its grotesque embodiment in Squeers, and with discussion of how the novel reshapes ­eighteenth-century literary traditions, and such topics as the novel’s comedy, and the concept of the ‘humorist, and ‘theatricality’ and its debt to Carlyle, the book delves into how the novel explores madness within the city in those whose lives have been fractured, or ruined, as so many have been. It further considers the symptoms of hypocrisy in the lives of the oppressors and the oppressed alike, taking hypocrisy as a Dickensian subject which deserves further examination. Dickens, Nicholas Nickleby, and the Dance of Death explores how ­Dickens draws on medieval and baroque traditions, in analysing death and its ­grotesquerie, especially drawing on the visual tradition of the ‘dance of death’ which is ­referred to here and which is prevalent throughout Dickens’s novels. It shows these traditions to be at the heart of London, and aims to illuminate a strand within Dickens’s thinking from first to last. Drawing on the critical the- ory of Walter Benjamin, Freud, Nietzsche, and Marx, and with close detailed ­readings of such well-known figures as Mrs Nickleby, Vincent Crummles and his ­theatrical troupe, and Mr Mantalini, and attention to Dickens’s description, imagery, irony, and sense of the singular, this book is a major study which will help in the revaluation of Dickens’s early novels.

Jeremy Tambling was Professor of Literature at Manchester University, and ­before that, Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Hong Kong. He is author of several books, three of them on Dickens: Dickens, ­Violence and the Modern State: Dreams of the Scaffold (Macmillan 1995), Going Astray: Dickens and London (Longman, 2008), and Dickens’ Novels as Poetry: All­ egory and the Literature of the City (Routledge 2014). He edited David Copperfield for Penguin (2004) and has written numerous articles on early modern and nineteenth-century literature, and critical and cultural theory. His most recent book was Histories of the Devil: Marlowe to Mann and the Manichees (Palgrave - Macmillan, 2017). Routledge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature

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43 Women’s Emancipation Writing at the Fin de Siècle Edited by Elena V. Shabliy, Dmitry Kurochkin, and Karen O’Donnell

44 Dickens, Nicholas Nickleby, and the Dance of Death Jeremy Tambling

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Jeremy Tambling First published 2019 by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2019 Taylor & Francis The right of Jeremy Tambling to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this title has been requested

ISBN: 978-0-367-14308-4 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-429-03121-2 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by codeMantra Contents

Preface vii

Introduction: Early Dickens 1

1 From Papers to Novel 15

2 Mr Squeers 39

3 Benevolence and Humour 60

4 Pantomime and Melodrama 86

5 Of ‘Conglomeration’ and Hypocrisy 109

6 London and the Dance of Death 132

Conclusion: London’s Squares 154

Abbreviations 159 Bibliography 161 Index 171

Preface

In three books on Dickens, I have not written much on Nicholas ­Nickleby (1838–1839), the early novel after Sketches by Boz, ­Pickwick Papers, and Oliver Twist, and I began wondering why. In Dickens, ­Violence, and the Modern State: Dreams of the Scaffold (1995), much of which reflected early research on Dickens at Nottingham, but which added in Foucault, and his work on discipline and the prison, and on the construction of personal subjectivity; an interest which has remained as second ­nature, there seemed no need for Nicholas Nickleby. With ­Going Astray: ­Dickens and London (2008) on Dickens’s place in ­writing about urban modernity, Nicholas Nickleby was discussed, but not given prime atten- tion. Perhaps I was deflected by its scenes outside London, ­Yorkshire, Portsmouth, and Devon. In Dickens’ Novels as Poetry: ­Allegory and the Literature of the City (2014), the theoretical approach, which was to ask whether Dickens’s writing might be called ‘poetry’, was psycho- analytic and deconstructive, in attending to language, speaking and constructing a split subjectivity: conscious of itself, but also unaware how the unconscious insists within the utterances of the self. It began to dawn on me that Nicholas Nickleby was not foremost for me for textual ­examples. Perhaps I had resisted drawing upon such purple patches as Mrs Nickleby’s speeches, which are often singled out as the most dis- tinctive parts of the novel and discussed lightly in terms of Dickens’s comedy; perhaps I was over-critical of the novel’s melodrama. It was certainly an inattentiveness. Yet in 1969, still an undergraduate at York, I asked the great critic Dr F.R. Leavis, who thought the ‘great’ Dickens began with Dombey and Son (1846–1848), what attention should be paid to the earlier Dickens, and he replied that it should be read like early Shakespeare. This book pays tribute to that remark, and tries to think about its terms of reference. Now I have finished, I realize how many things in the novel remain undiscussed, and know that there is much more that could be done on it. The book began as a gamble to see what could be said about the novel, with the results that follow, but in between Dickens’s Novels as Poetry and this, I brought out Histories of the Devil (Palgrave, 2017) a book reflecting much of my undergraduate teaching, and deliberately making viii Preface no reference to Dickens; but Old Nick has made his way into ­Nicholas Nickleby too, and has influenced not a few of its ideas. But I have been ­influenced by many others, less conversant with the old one, whose talk, or whose answering questions have helped the ­writing: ­Malcolm ­Andrews, Michael Hollington, Louis Lo, Priscilla Martin, Robert ­Patten, Michael Slater, and Dennis Walder for specific points. Robert ­Kirkpatrick ­generously sent me a pdf of his book Charles ­Dickens, ­Nicholas Nickleby, and the Yorkshire Schools just when I needed it, and before the London Library secured it for me. Louis James invited me to speak to the Dickens fellowship at Canterbury in January 2016, which made for the writing of the first draft of the Squeers chapter. Nat­ halie Vanfasse and Leon Litvack invited me to an ESSE conference at Galway in 2016, which produced a draft of chapter 5. In 2016, Simon­ James ­invited me to the workshops for the Comparative History of ­Literature in European Languages; the specific project being ‘Landscapes of Reali­ sm: ­Rethinking Literary Realisms in Global Perspectives’. There, I gave a paper on what has become chapter 4. Late in revision, and as part of the same project I sat in a restaurant opposite Margaret Higonnet, and it dawned on me that I was talking to the person who had translated Jean Paul in her Horn of Oberon, a book I had borrowed from the library for I do not know how long; she sent me a copy of Horn of Oberon to prove a literary friendship and kinship: a nice example of the world’s strange- ness yet familiarity, and life’s coincidences. I am grateful to those who have commented on all these occasions and to Routledge’s anonymous readers of the draft; to Mark Gardner, Sandra Hopkins, Pam Morris and Brian Worthington, and Przemyslaw Uscinski for ­comments on parts or all of a later draft, and John Sharp for encouraging comments on the novel’s worth. And thanks to Kaspar Loftin for help with the Bibliography. I thank my family for opportune help, and Pauline, who I hope will accept the dedication although it is no reward for her ability to find books missing from shelves, and certainly not of her patience or support. Quotations from Nicholas Nickleby are from the Penguin, edited by Mark Ford (2003), with chapter numbers given for readers using other editions. I have kept footnoting to a minimum, and for all references, save for those from Shakespeare, where I have just used whatever edition was to hand, the bibliography is essential. Introduction Early Dickens

Here’s richness. (NN 5.58)

Plenty of Dickens’s readers, fewer academic scholars, have written on Nicholas Nickleby. There has been plentiful good amateur interest in Squeers and the Yorkshire schools and on Mr Crummles and his ­theatrical troupe, much of it enlightening, even essential. Biographical speculation on both figures has abounded, perhaps with the limita- tion of assuming that Dickens’s writing can be taken as having a literal meaning: that references in the text will fall into place if we know what ­Dickens knew or knew more of his associates, or saw the sites that he did. That kind of realism often pays off, as, for instance, with two books on ­Dickens’s London by Beresford Chancellor and W.H. Dexter, written in the 1920s, before World War II destroyed so much, and post-war ­‘developers’ completed the bombers’ work. They remain indispensable while assuming that Dickens and London have an unproblematic one- to-one relation. And where would any editor of Dickens be without T.W. Hill’s annotations of the novels in the Dickensian? Biography is the only mode of literary criticism that journalism, even smart journalism, knows: it assumes, reductively, that if you know the life, you have the key to the book, and the book gives the key to the life. Dickens’s prefaces to his novels – as here – unfortunately encourage that kind of literalism. He defends the treatment of the Yorkshire schools in this novel, as though he wanted to insist that ‘all is true’, the text bearing a direct relation to lives that could be checked up on.1 Nicholas Nickleby has been a frequent text for stage and film adaptation: a popular version came from the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1980, over two evenings; it was later filmed, and it stressed the theatrical aspects of the novel. As with the endless annual musicals of A Christmas Carol, it was over-­ affirmative, trying to establish the easy possibility of an inclusive society of all-round good feelings. But that is Dickens at the popular level, and it is pushed by journalism, and it has Dickens’s own public readings for support. As with Shakespeare, known mainly through performances 2 Introduction which remain as wide of the text as they were in Dickens’s time, there is a rift between popular reception of Dickens and what critical writing would say. Perhaps only with these writers does this rift so show itself, to the detriment of both sides. Early Dickens, meaning the novels before Dombey and Son, have ­always been popular with non-academic readers, and less so with ­academics. A pioneer critique of Nicholas Nickleby, and a very good one, comes in the late Steven Marcus’s Dickens from Pickwick to Dombey (1965). When this appeared, a largely negative review from Barbara Hardy in Victorian Studies, reading contra Marcus’s sense of Pickwick Papers as a ‘classic’, said she had hardly ever met a student (and few ­colleagues) who had read it through (Hardy, 1966: 206). That was ­looking in the wrong place: not at the common reader, nor was it thinking about the impact the book had on earlier readers, such as ­Dostoevsky. But the comment shows how critics had to be coaxed to take Dickens seriously.2 However, even among the early novels, David Parker’s edition of the Everyman Nicholas Nickleby (1994) confirms that it has received ‘surprisingly little critical attention’ (803). This is easily verified. In the formative reading of Dickens by Edmund Wilson in ‘Dickens: The Two Scrooges’ (1941), a text at the beginning of modern Dickens criticism, there is nothing on it. Early anthologies of criticism by Ford and Lane, The Dickens Critics (1961), and by Martin Price (1967) left it out. Hillis Miller, in an essential book on Dickens, Charles ­Dickens: The World of his Novels (1958), has only a few pages on it, together with The Old Curiosity Shop and Barnaby Rudge; in what he says, he identifies its subject as isolation and solitude. There is no chapter on it in Butt and Tillotson’s Dickens at Work (1957). Though it is universally acknowledged to be funny, James Kincaid omits it in Dickens and the Rhetoric of Laughter (1971). So too does H.M. Daleski in his fine Dickens and the Art of Analogy (1970). Its virtues are said to be those of the theatre, but William Axton, in Circle of Fire: Dickens’s Vision and Style and the Popular Victorian Theater (1966) and Robert Garis’s The Dickens ­Theatre (1965) ignore it. Garrett Stewart, in Dick- ens and the Trials of the Imagination (1974), has only one reference, though a smart one, to the name ‘Pugstyles’, referring to the pugna- cious questioner of the ­hectoring and lying Mr Gregsbury, M.P. Again, Philip Collins gives only Forster’s Examiner review in his Dickens: The ­Critical Heritage (1971), and ­Collins’s opinion of the book in his two big studies Dickens and Crime and Dickens and Education seems neg- ative. Collins draws much of his method from Humphry House’s The Dickens World, which says that he has ‘deliberately treated [Dickens] as if he were a journalist more than a creative artist’ (House, 1942: 215). Dickens was a fine journalist as well as a novelist; in his decided down- playing of the second, House implies that Dickens can be seen in terms of a realism which assumes there may be a direct approach to social Introduction 3 problems, and needs to be analyzed in relation to the social reality he claims he is addressing: this trumps any other discussion of the novel. The academic is on the same page as the Dickensian non-academic writ- ers, only more critical, if not superior, in that he finds a complacency in Dickens, while accusations that Dickens exaggerates may suit either the critic who ­objects that Dickens writes melodrama or the critic who finds the realism insufficient.3 Editors of the novel, whether Sybil Thorndike for the Oxford ­Dickens in 1950, Michael Slater for the Penguin (1978), Paul Schlicke for Oxf­ ord (1990) – there is no Clarendon edition – and Mark Ford again for ­Penguin (2003), as well as David Parker (1994), have shown signs of strain in find- ing fresh things to say about it. There are good recent acco­ unts by John Bowen and Robert Patten, the first looking at its treatment of the family. By observing its Hamlet-like plot, Bowen considers the extent to which it deals with hauntings, by ancestral voices working inside the present, by char- acters haunting each other, with the ­weakening effects this implies. And he notes the failure of ‘haunting’ to change anything, as with Smike, who seems to have a ghost-like power over his father, Ralph (Bowen, 2000: 10b7–131). Patten uses the novel to trace how Dickens becomes Boz and Boz Dickens (Patten, 2012: ­178–225). ­Beyond these, a chapter by Helen Mitchie, ‘The Avuncular and Beyond’, ­examines the traces of incest and incest-fear in the novel, and the role of various uncl­ es, Ralph and the Cheeryble brothers included (Mitche, 1996: 80–97). In scholarly jour- nals, an impressive examination by Tore Rem, in two separate art­ icles, takes the melodrama of the Crummles and much else in the novel as a cue for discussing the novel’s subtleties, and not as cause for dismissal. Tatiana M. Holway also has a sharp discussion in Dickens Quarterly of the word ‘speculation’, which has a financial sense; she compares it with the then-newly created game of Speculation, which appears in Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park ­(Holway, 1992: 103–114), as it is also played in Nicholas Nickleby (9.117). ­Holway discusses how to ‘speculate’ has changed from its earlier sense of looking and having the ability to look, that is, having vision, as well as seeing in a mirror (a speculum), which gives a form of self-knowing. In modern ‘speculation’, reality is misrep- resented, having no current objective reality since it means betting on the state of an unknown future market-place, and people now only see the reality they wish for. The world of ‘speculation’ asks how we represent the world, and what game is played with it. Fanny Squeers looks in her glass, ‘where, like most of us, she saw – not herself but the reflection of some pleasant image in her own brain’ (NN 12.140). This is developed with the later comment: ‘most men live in a world of their own’ (28.344). Mrs Nickleby, speaking generally, but meaning Miss La Creevy, thinks ‘we never see ourselves – never do and never did – and I suppose we never shall’ (63.756). Dickens notes the extent of egregious and tyrannical behaviour; why so many 4 Introduction set at defiance the ‘opinion of the world’, but states that ‘it is precisely because they do consult the opinion of their own little world that such things take place at all’ (28.344). Much behaviour is solipsistic then, even mad. In Dickens, such madness reveals itself principally in speech, more than action. Early Dickens, while showing what will emerge in the later novels, shows what is already unique and distinctive. Reading it should note the flexible prose, for which critics such as Bahktin (1981) on the parodic as well as polyphonic nature of novelistic writing are essential. Taking one example, Mr Snevellicci, the retired actor, who calls Nicholas ‘buck’, wants to act the Regency dandy. Getting drunk, he has just kissed all the women present including the recent bride, Mrs Lillyvick:

Miss Snevellicci’s papa being greatly exalted by this triumph, and incontestible proof of his popularity with the fair sex, quickly grew convivial, not to say uproarious; volunteering more than one song of no inconsiderable length, and regaling the social circle ­between-times with recollections of divers splendid women who had been supposed to entertain a passion for himself, several of whom he toasted by name, taking occasion to remark at the same time that if he had been a little more alive to his own interest, he might have been ­rolling at that moment in his chariot-and-four. These ­reminiscences appeared to awaken no very torturing pangs in the breast of Mrs Snevellicci…. (30.377–378)

The writing – free indirect discourse, with no single voice speaking – combines euphemism (‘convivial’) and two textbook examples of ­litotes: ‘no inconsiderable length’ and ‘no very torturing pangs’ – in ­reporting what ‘papa’ said. In the word ‘regaling’, it ironizes his self-­ belief, confidence in his sexual authority and ability to use that, and his braggart qualities, which presumably extend to a self-invented name. ­Braggadocio is always mocked by Dickens and accords with his interest in Ben Jonson. Snevellicci’s protestation of not looking out for his own ­interest, not being ‘alive’ to it, turns out to be his attracting women for his self-interest. ‘Rolling’ implies being moved along by the wheels of a chariot-and-four, but also a rolling motion inside the coach, expressive of Mr Snevellici’s Regency sense of his worth, his drunkenness, or his behaviour – or actions – with the ladies. The word is both what he says and what he means and a criticism of these things. Everything here, as in early Dickens, is strictly unnecessary to either the plot or the scene, but we would not be without it, and it prepares the way for Turveydrop and Bounderby. Is this the first time Dickens writes a novel? The title ‘novel’ could not be given to Sketches by Boz, and only in a qualified way does it fit Introduction 5 Pickwick Papers, though a plot-line begins in chapter 12, where Mrs Bardell misunderstands Mr Pickwick. At what stage of writing did ­Oliver Twist become the ‘prose epic’ which chapter 15 announces that the author ‘means it to be’, based, he says, on ‘long-considered intentions and plans’? (OT 1.15.115). Is that statement a parody or a serious point? It has been argued that Oliver Twist only shaped itself into a novel in the course of writing (Wheeler, 1983: 41–61), contradicting the arguments of Kathleen Tillotson in the 1966 Clarendon edition of the novel; if so, this makes Nicholas Nickleby the first Dickens novel to be thought of as such from the beginning. And evidences of planning in it are more evident than has been assumed and will be noted here. ‘If anyone ­created the modern novel it is Dickens’, says Leavis (1983: 30), where ‘the novel’ for this critic is that which integrates its ‘cr­ iticism of life’ with an ­‘interrelatedness’ which makes for complex and imaginative judgements, hence, for instance, refusing the valuations of a single point of view, such as a ‘hero’.4 Nicholas Nickleby was the first text to be thought of as a novel, as well as a periodical performance, in that sense being different from Sketches by Boz, or Pickwick Papers, or even Oliver Twist, which, planned or not, shows signs of improvisation, and backtracking neces- sary to make it consistent. Serialization should not deflect attention from how reviewers regarded it then as a novel, as shown by comparisons which they made with Fielding and Smollett. The editors of Dickens’s Letters give examples: ‘the truest and most spirited delineator of Eng­ lish life, among the middle and lower classes, since the days of Smollett and Fielding’ – so the Edinburgh Review says, before linking Dickens with Hogarth (Letters 1.438). Again, with installment no. 16, ‘there is ­nothing in Fielding better than this’ (Letters 1.562). Of course, Fielding had linked himself with Hogarth, making the comparison a standard one. Forster wondered if Miss Bates, in Emma, had ­contributed to Mrs Nickleby’s and Miss Knag’s conversations, and found that Dickens had not yet read Jane Austen (Life 2.4.96) – but it might be wondered, when we also draw in the Fanny Squeers and Tilda Price scenes in chapter 9, if that was right.5 But Miss Bates is much less disturbed, mentally, than Mrs Nickleby. What did Oliver Twist mean by ‘prose epic’? The phrase evokes Field- ing’s Preface to Joseph Andrews: ‘a comic Romance is a comic Epic­ -Poem in Prose’ where the action of ‘epic’ is ‘extended and comprehensive’ (Fielding, 1999: 3). Would anyone in 1837 have thought that an episodic narrative appearing in monthly in a miscellany, not as a three-volume novel, could compare with Fielding? Yet, Dickens was turning people’s critical attention in his direction with the serial form though he had been nursing the idea of writing a Scott-like three-­volume novel, to be called Gabriel Vardon, the Locksmith of London; its destiny was to become the weekly serial Barnaby Rudge. Never again would he con- sider the three-volume form, though while writing Nicholas Nickleby 6 Introduction he reflects on the circulation of the traditional novel, and on what he was being paid for in writing Oliver Twist for Bentley’s Miscellany as a serial (Letters 1.493). Scott’s mode was to be continued by W.H. Ainsworth, in Jack Sheppard in Bentley’s Miscellany (Chittick, 1990: 166). In the comic and parodic ‘Introductory Epistle’ to The Fortunes of Nigel (1822), a novel Dickens knew well, since he quotes from its usurer, Trapbois (Letters 3.466), he makes one Scott alias, Captain Clutterbuck, meets another: ‘the Author of Waverley’. In conversation, ‘the Author’ says he must write digressively, though

Fielding had high notions of the dignity of an art which he may be considered as having founded. He challenges a distinction between the Novel and the Epic. Smollett, Le Sage, and others, ema­ ncipating themselves from the strictness of the rules he has laid down, have written rather a history of the miscellaneous adventures which be- fall an individual in the course of life, than the plot of a regular and connected epopeia [i.e. epic], where every step brings us a point nearer to the final catastrophe. These great masters have been satis- fied if they amused the reader upon the road, though the conclusion only arrived because the tale must have an end, just as the traveller alights at the inn because it is evening. (Scott, 2004: 7)

On this basis, Scott sides with Fielding, by calling the novel an epic, but he says he cannot write non-digressively, for

there is a daemon who seats himself on the feather of my pen when I begin to write, and leads it astray from the purpose. Characters expand under my hand; incidents are multiplied; the story lingers, while the materials increase – my regular mansion turns out a Gothic anomaly…. (10)

He gives that as a reason for not being able to write a play; the novel ­having a lesser status in the 1820s than drama, and only possible ­because of a decline in the drama, and, since Byron’s death, a perceived decline in poetry (Chittick, 1990: 18–23). Dickens was intensely con- scious of Scott, and of his writing himself out of poverty (Letters 2.265; Duncan, 1992: 282). He responds to Scott’s interest in the drama of Shakespeare’s contemporaries, for example Jonson, from whom Scott often quotes. That drama informs the early seventeenth-century plot of The Fortunes of Nigel for instance (it begins with London apprentices, who give something to Barnaby Rudge).6 But because Scott was not one of those for­ mative eighteenth-century writers – Smollett, Fiel­ ding, Introduction 7 Goldsmith, Le Sage, Defoe, nor the author of The Arabian Nights – in Dickens’s father’s collection, which the boy Dickens read so avidly (see David Copperfield 4.66–67), he was one that Dickens could move away from, though Scott shows the same generosity towards the people, whose prominence ­exceeds the individual hero. As Georg Lukács writes, quoting the ­Russian critic Vissarion Belinsky (1811–1848):

the hero of the epic is life itself and not the individual. In epic, the in- dividual is, so to speak, subject to the event; the event over-shadows the human personality by its magnitude and importance, drawing our attention away from him by the interestingness, diversity and multiplicity of its images. (Lukács, 1962: 35)

The European ‘event’ was the French Revolution, which Lukács argued was echoed in Scott’s writing of the eighteenth-century shake-ups in Scotland, which he remembered in the ‘Postscript, which should have been a Preface’ to Waverley (Scott, 1972:490). English society had no such violent event, pace the events of Barnaby Rudge, yet Dickens works with a sense of violent changes at work in class society, of which ­financial ‘speculation’ in Nicholas Nickleby is one example, and his writing is always aware of violent reversals which upset any heroism, as with, outstandingly, the tearing effect of the storm in the chapter ‘Tempest’ in ­David Copperfield; and writes always under the shadow of disaster – death, financial ruin, kidnapping (a Scott theme, too), ­violent exploitation, pain, even war, if we recollect Mr Lillyvick’s pro- nouncements on the Napoleonic wars and their effects on the French language: ‘I can only say that I’ve heard the French prisoners, who were natives, and ought to know how to speak it, talking in such a dismal manner, that it made one miserable to hear them…’ (16.201). Beyond all that, there is a sense of troubling memories, indefinable, but enforcing ­anxiety, or hysteria.

On the Grotesque This book is called Dickens, Nicholas Nickleby, and the Dance of Death, and though I do not discuss the medieval ‘Dance of Death’ ­until chapter 6, it is implicit throughout each chapter, and pervades the sense of ‘speculation’ as a game played with an unknowable other, that is, death, or the future, and showing itself from the beginning in the ­deathliness of the children at Dotheboys Hall. It comes in the novel’s sense of an unknown fear, or trauma, which stalks Smike in particular, and it creates anxiety throughout. The ‘dance’ may imply the drama: in ­Pickwick Papers (1836–1837), a strolling actor who has been playing in 8 Introduction one of the Southwark theatres, talks about another in pantomime whom he sees in the theatre:

Never shall I forget the repulsive sight when I turned round. He was dressed for the pantomime, in all the absurdity of a clown’s costume. The spectral figures in the Dance of Death, the most frightful shapes that the ablest painter ever portrayed on canvas, never presented an appearance half so ghastly. His bloated body and shrunken legs – their deformity enhanced a hundred fold by the fantastic dress – the glassy eyes, contrasting fearfully with the thick white paint with which the face was besmeared: the grotesquely-ornamented head trembling with paralysis, and the long skinny hands, rubbed with white chalk – all gave him a hideous and unnatural appearance…. (PP 3.50)

A moment later, the clown is on the stage and ‘I heard the roar of ­laughter which followed his first tumble on the stage’: ‘tumble’ being a rare tech- nical term of the 1820s (OED ‘tumble’ sub.1). If an audience laughs at tumbling, that is because it anticipates, and temporarily avoids, death. Hans Holbein, in a series of woodcuts of 1538, shows a skeletal Death dancing with various figures of life. In Pickwick Papers, the clown is death, his glassy eyes resembling unseeing glass eyes, recalling ­Macbeth’s ‘thou hast no speculation in those eyes/ Which thou dost glare with’ (3.4.93–94). As with the ghost’s whiteness, the absence of colour is the mask and is the colour of death. The idea of the mutual identity of the comedian and death makes death comic, and, more, the parody of ­comedy, which may be another name for the ironic. The comic divides into two: first the situa- tion and the person inside a comic situation, this being un-self-­consciously funny; then second, into that which comments on it, which is also comic, and, in seeing something else there, sees what the person inside the situa- tion cannot know; this which is other, is like death, unknowable. A per- son’s ‘humour’, their ruling passion, i.e. what possesses and characterizes them, is unconscious of that ‘other’, not merely because people are in ‘their own little world’, but because the definition of irony means that something exceeds the comprehension of anyone acting in a situation. To attempt to see everything in double terms, as irony requires, is truly Dickensian; and its achievement entails the grotesque. Occ­ asionally, Dickens shows consciousness that this is what he is doing, as opposed to presenting it spontaneously. An example may be given from the end of a long paragraph describing Dotheboys Hall boys as they queue for brimstone and treacle, served by Mrs Squeers:

With every kindly sympathy and affection blasted in its birth, with every young and healthy feeling flogged and starved down, with ­every revengeful passion that can fester in swollen hearts, eating its evil way to their core in silence, what an incipient Hell was breeding there! Introduction 9 And yet this scene, painful as it was, had its grotesque features, which, in a less interested observer than Nicholas, might have ­provoked a smile. (8.97)

In the first paragraph, the boys are virtually possessed by death. But the horrified perception becomes another that the whole thing is also funny, in how the food is ladled into the mouth. John Carey quotes this passage, noting the heavy rhetoric (e.g. the anaphora) in the first paragraph, but says of the second, that ‘Dickens has stopped feeling and started to write well’ (Carey, 1973: 70–71). It is a good example, but Carey patronizes, as in his phrase ‘writing well’, which he thinks exhib- its Dickens’s ­violent imagination. There is no appropriate way to express the benighted state of the boys: if it could be done better it would risk an aestheticism distancing itself from the human situation described to ‘write well’. Dickens is alive to the horrific and the comic being inside the same situation, ­creating something new, which is called the ‘grotesque’, a word in both the Pickwick Papers and Nicholas Nickleby passages. Not just ‘the terrible in harmless guise’, or playfulness about to give way to terror (Jennings, 1963: 16), this grotesque in Dickens, subject of an excellent analysis (Hollington, 1984), is best evoked by ­Baudelaire (1821–1867) in ‘On the Essence of Laughter’ (1855). Baudelaire has de- clared ‘laughter is satanic’, therefore profoundly human and it is ‘essen- tially contradictory’, a sign of greatness (in relation to animals, which cannot laugh) and of wretchedness (because it always has to do with failure to be ideal). ‘C’est du choc perpétuel de ces deux infinis que se dégage le rire’ – it is from the shock of these two infinites that laugh- ter flows (Baudelaire, 1976: 2.532, 1972: 148). We can take from this that laughter is disruptive, and the sign of a contradictory, double state within the one who laughs. That is capped, in ‘laughter provoked by what is grotesque’, by seeing what is contradictory, double; by ‘fabulous creations’ which,

often excite in us a wild hilarity, excessive fits and swoons of ­laughter. Evidently a distinction is called for here … From the ­artistic point of view the comic is an imitation; the grotesque a cre- ation. The comic is an imitation mixed with a certain degree of creative capacity, or in other words, of artistic ideality. Now human pride, which always gets the upper hand, and which is the natural cause of laughter in the case of the comic, also becomes the natural cause of laughter in the case of the grotesque, which is a creation, mixed with a certain ­faculty of imitating elements pre-existing in nature. I mean to say that, in this case, laughter is the expression of the idea of ­superiority, no longer of man over man, but man over ­nature. … Laughter ­excited by the grotesque has in itself something ­profound, axiomatic and primitive, which comes much closer to the 10 Introduction life of innocence and absolute joy than the laughter aroused by the comic derived from social manners. … The grotesque looks down on the comic…. (Baudelaire, 1972: 151–152, 1976: 2.535)7

The grotesque, ‘the absolute comic’, is known by spontaneous lau­ ghter, which happens as shock, as something perceived as contradictory. In thinking of ‘the Dance of Death’, as something double, non-isometric, split, indescribable literally, I consider how Dickens has an insight, as in the Dotheboys Hall quotation, of something new and impossible ­emerging, whose shocking effect necessitates the antithesis of ‘writing well’. Suddenly everything becomes impossible, discontinuous from what has gone before (a smile connotes continuity, but laughter breaks that up), and making writing catachrestic since there is no proper way to express the doubleness which makes a situation itself and its ironizing of itself, as the clown in Pickwick Papers is himself, and death overtaking him. Typical speeches in Nicholas Nickleby are absolute comic language abuses, expressing what cannot be written well.

Summarizing the Book Nicholas Nickleby comes from multiple sources: Smollett, Fielding, ­Hogarth, Goldsmith, and Sheridan, Crabbe, Scott, and ­Washington Irving, for example. These influences are noted as they appear. Others include some German contexts, some refracted through ­Carlyle, and to a lesser extent Edward Bulwer (1803–1873) who ­became Bul- wer Lytton and a Baronet in 1838: Jean Paul Richter, E.T.A. Hoff- mann, and Goethe. Among essayists, I assume Hazlitt and Lamb, and the sketches by Washington Irving. Nicholas ­Nickleby relates to the ‘fashionable novel’ which Bulwer wrote, as with Pelham: Or The Adventures of a Gentleman (1828), for Nich­ olas Nickleby reveals its loyalties: neither to privilege or class nor to looking down on the lower depths of Lon­ don, but rather identifying with what the dandy in the novel of fashion ­patronizes.8 If some of these contexts seem too wide of Dickens that may show critical writing in the English tradition underestimating Dickens: the relevance of some of ­Nicholas Nickleby’s cultural references – some partly visible or conscious, some second-hand – has been insufficiently noted. The text absorbs multiple contexts, refracted through Dickens’s own autobiography, some of which is distilled, or unconsciously written here. I look at concepts, which reveal their significance by an excess of image, and concentrated language. Each chapter reads separately, illum­ inating single topics, but the themes accumulate. Chapter 1 maps the publication details of the novel and its serializa- tion, discusses the theatre through his relationship to W.C. Macready, Introduction 11 the actor to whom the novel was dedicated, and makes comparison with Shakespeare, the outstanding ‘author’ Dickens wanted to be. To that end, it analyses a speech by Mrs Nickleby, showing that what is said ­indicates that the novel may be possessed by a hysteria and memory which it cannot quite work through, but which is implicit throughout. Chapter 2 concentrates on Mr Squeers and Dotheboys Hall. The ­mixture of the comic and horrific, which generates one of Dickens’s most vivid and surprising characterizations, feeds into traumas centred on child abuse by parents and guardians; yet Squeers fascinates, having grotesque moments exceeding mimesis. Chapter 3, on the kind of novel this is, starts with the eighteenth-­century novel, and drama, as a mixed genre. I assume Dickens’s awareness of Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister, which makes Hamlet central to its interests. I continue with the Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus, and the ­German writer Carlyle admired: Jean Paul Richter (1763–1825) writing a ­digressive and exuberant prose which becomes an indirect source of Dickens’s poe­ try, and control of so many linguistic registers and ­excess in relation to each. The third section asks what Forster meant in opening his ­biography of Dickens by calling him ‘one of the greatest ­humorists that England has produced’? The word ‘humour’ relates to the ­‘humorist’; both words coming from Jonson and the eighteenth-century to which Dickens is so much in debt; and ‘humour’ lends itself to arguments about the comic, where Jean Paul is an essential voice. ‘Humour’, with whatever ­meaning, will be spelled throughout the book with the u, but ‘humorist’, meaning a witty person, or a person in a state of ‘humour’, including a ‘good ­humour’, without. I silently change some spellings in quoting, to preserve this point. Dickens, as a ‘humorist’, is Jonsonian in satirizing ­people’s ‘humours’ and a humorist in wri­ ting with benevolence about the world’s follies. Everything is turned towards the comic, finding – as Jean Paul says – the sublime inside finite things, seeing ever­ ything doubly, inverting modes of perception. The comic fringes, in Jean Paul, on the grotesque, and, as in Baudelaire, has a ‘di­ abolical origin’ (Baude- laire, 1972: 144, 1976: 2.528), overturning, anarchic, and threatening. Chapter 4 discusses pantomime, melodrama, and violence, remem­ bering that the violent connects with the comic and the horrific at once. The ­novel’s ‘theatricality’ shows everything to be a matter of presentation which does not assume the single self authorizing it, the opposite of realism if this ­assumes there is a knowable unchanging subject behind utterance. Theat- ricality considers speech, and gestures as taking part in something which exists on the condition that it can be, and has been, repeated, though every- thing happening is singular, different, and indescribable. And fascination with violence, a leitmotif for this book bec­ ause it informs state structures, public language, and hanging, as well as what Žižek calls ‘subjective vio- lence’ towards others, reveals much about paranoid states and their break- down. For the self which is violent may also be masochistic and interpret 12 Introduction itself as the object of violence; it reveals the self’s contradictions, subject and object together; as also, perhaps, in the Dance of Death. Chapter 5 begins with the legal tangles which ensnare Dickens’s fig- ures, producing a state of ‘conglomeration’. The madness this threatens, and the confusions which the law produces, makes hypocrisy the basis of the state and its controls. Incipient anxiety, or madness, fascinates Dickens, but hypocrisy too becomes a specific issue to be examined. An eighteenth-­century vice (‘affectation’), it may be read through Fielding or Sheridan, but it is not a simple state because it becomes inevitable in whenever the self must speak as a single, unified subject. It threatens to become a necessary pose, and an unconscious condition, producing schizoid conditions, or further ‘conglomeration’. Chapter 6, closing with Ralph, reads an allegorical topography in the London of the novel, and relates the speed witnessed in the town’s streets and shops, and people’s fascination with goods – what Marxism characterizes as ‘the comm­ odity’ to the Dance of Death, as an element of the popular tradition in which Dickens worked. People ‘dance’ with what they cannot know, which ­unconsciously, uncannily possesses them in their actions. A short conclu- sion winds up the text. If it is thought that some parts of the study go too far afield, this is because literary criticism, while keeping hold of the work of art as that, and as not only an assemblage of historical and cultural documents, can have no limits in what it engages with. In this novel, self-consciously ­interested in ‘philosophy’ as it is, cultural criticism and critical ­theory, and psychoanalysis, which, in Freud and Lacan, turns so much on ­investigation of language, seem necessary tools, and Dickens demands criticism from a European perspective. The novel, indeed, justifies such attention. I do not announce parts of Nicholas Nickleby as weak, or as lesser than others, first because my estimate of the novel has gone up immeasurably, and many of its ‘faults’ seem less isolatable from the conditions that make the good pieces exceptional. And the failures are not individual, Dickens’s fault; they are rather nobody’s fault. Finan- cial failures and ruin deriving from capitalist ‘speculation’ comment on Britain as it was emerging in the 1830s, indicating that the attempt to write an analysis of society and to offer thoughts which will move things forward politically, ­requires radical solutions impossible in then exist- ing conditions of soc­ iety, and may force, instead, other political or so- cial solutions which seem retrogressive. The emerging confident author, commissioned to write a successful serial to repeat Pickwick Papers, discovers a ­nervousness in himself akin to hysteria, taking this term in Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalytic sense of hysteria being an inability to relate to the ‘symbolic order’ i.e., the discourse which assigns everyone a subject-place in language and gender, and a conditional place within family and state structures (Lacan, 1993: 168–172). Failure to relate to Introduction 13 the symbolic order, in sexual, or gender, or class terms, or because of some anxiety which is the condition of people’s identity, constructs hys- teria, in male or female, where writing discovers that it is blocked in one way, and where failure of utterance becomes a symptom of a problem elsewhere. The reading of Dickens which we do not need domesticates him, ­patronizes his brilliance by pointing out his failings. Nor do we need a ‘professional’ and value-free criticism which reads Dickens to fit him into what is considered the consciously recognized and recorded ­historical conditions of his times, disregarding the novel’s counter-memories, which skew what the historian can know, and what the half-smiling ­‘author’ qua ‘author’, in Maclise’s portrait, may conceal in the ­interests of preserving a persona.9 If the best and the worst emerge simultaneously in Dickens, as they sometimes do, both may relate to history recorded in the unconscious, which is formed and scarred personally within the self, but also visible in the symptomatic formations of society, and ex­ perienced often in disguised form, within the text.

Notes 1 ‘All is true’ appears, in English, in Balzac’s Père Goriot (1835) no doubt as a rhetorical trick when saying that the novel is neither drama nor romance, slyly allowing the possibility that it may be both (Balzac, 1991: 2). 2 The critical poor reception of the early Dickens is discussed well by P.N. Furbank in his Introduction to Martin Chuzzlewit (Furbank, 1968: 11–27). 3 R.C. Churchill in Scrutiny (1942: 358–375), the journal which F.R. Leavis edited, makes illuminating but limiting judgements on Dickens and melo- drama in Nicholas Nickleby while addressing his relation to Jonsonian comedy. The criticisms at least register that what is to be said of Dickens is in relation to his language, not to an imagined responsiveness to social conditions. Leavis underestimated Dickens in The Great Tradition (1948) on the basis of a ‘loose inclusiveness’ which kept them back from a unity of conception (Marcus, 1965: 7,8), but his critique then is attuned to Dickens as a poet, to his ‘dramatic creation and imaginative genius’ (Leavis, 1964: 274). 4 Leavis’s sense of the novel is best seen in his discussion of Tolstoy (Leavis, 1967: 9–32). And see, behind this, D.H. Lawrence, ‘The Novel’ (Lawrence, 1968: 416–426). 5 Copeland, 2012: 44 suggests that Austen might have been seen as similar to the silver-fork school of fashionable novels (see note 3). ‘Silver fork’ comes from Hazlitt’s essay ‘The Dandy School’, Examiner 28 November 1827, alluding to Theodore Hook (1788–1841), reviewing Disraeli’s Vivien Grey (Hazlitt, 1904: vol. 11. 343–348). 6 Scott’s qualities as a critic, and failure to go further than seeing the novel as a ‘story’, are discussed by Ioan Williams (1968: 1–12). Noting Scott’s awareness of European fiction, he shows Scott admiring the tendency in the novel – in this going further than the Romance – to bring about natural events by natural means, and … preserve curiosity alive without the help of wonder – in which human life is exhibited in its 14 Introduction true state, diversified only by accidents that daily happen in the world, and influenced only by passions which are actually to be found in our intercourse with mankind. (commenting on La Princesse de Clèves (1678) (2) 7 Baudelaire has in mind Hobbes’s sense in Leviathan (1651) of laughter as showing a ‘sudden glory’ over another; this sense of superiority applies to the ‘significative’ or ‘ordinary’ comic, not to the ‘absolute’ (Hobbes, 1985: 125). 8 Pelham, influenced by Byron, like Bulwer, gives the autobiography of a fash- ionable young dandy in London and Paris, being full of French fashions and phrases. Since Dickens parodies the ‘silver fork novel’, in Nicholas Nickleby, drawing on Sartor Resartus (see Chapter 3), it should be noted that Pelham is unlike the non-aristocratic Nicholas in being a Utilitarian. The fashionable novel becomes detective fiction: Pelham tracks down the killer of Sir John Tyrell (the name deriving from Caleb Williams). The murderer, John Thornton, was based on John Thurtell, hanged on 9 January 1824 for murdering the gambler William Weare. After Pelham, Bulwer initiated the ‘Newgate novel’ with Paul Clifford (1830), and Eugene Aram (1832); Nicholas Nickleby uses ‘Newgate’ motifs, with Brooker; Chapter 57 par- odies the necessity to visit London’s worst parts to find the truth. Pelham, unlike Nickleby, hardly goes wrong though tricked by the Job Trotter-like Job Johnson (vol. 3 chapter 5). Dandy coolness suits the detective: ‘nothing is superficial to a deep observer! It is in trifles that the mind betrays itself’ (Bulwer, 1828: 2.68). 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