Thesis submitted to the Acuity of Arts of the University of Birmingham for the degree of Master of Arts A.R. ROULSTONE University of Birmingham Research Archive e-theses repository This unpublished thesis/dissertation is copyright of the author and/or third parties. The intellectual property rights of the author or third parties in respect of this work are as defined by The Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988 or as modified by any successor legislation. Any use made of information contained in this thesis/dissertation must be in accordance with that legislation and must be properly acknowledged. Further distribution or reproduction in any format is prohibited without the permission of the copyright holder. Summary of Thesis In this study the role and importance of the child and parent-child relationships are examined. It is suggested that these topics, together with the associated symbol of the inheritance, form the centre of Dickens's creative interest. The child is important in Dickens's novels as a character; but Dickens's interest in and understanding of childhood are distinctively expressed in his characteristic adoption of the child's point of view. The vision of the world presented in Dickens, in its concrete immediacy, its imaginative freshness and its contact with fairy tale, magic and mythology, is frequently that of the young child. This deDloyment of the child's iDoint of view, which is seen as an important source of Dickens's insight into human life and society, is studied in the first chapter. This interest in the child is part of Dickens f s deep concern with the confrontation and the resolution of the conflict and guilt that he finds in the parent-child relationship. His methods of approaching, exploring and resolving this conflict and guilt are studied in the second chapter. The chief problem of life is seen as adjusting to one's relationship to one's parents. The inheritance, which is used throughout Dickens's work as an important symbol of the complex bond between parent and child, forms the subject of the third chapter. 11 CHILDREN AND PARENTS THE WORKS OF CHARLES DIG] A.R. ROULSTOWE Ill Contents i^otes on Abbreviations Introduction vi Chapter One - The "orld of tfce Child 1 I - Dickens and the Child 1 II - The Conception of Childhood 12 III - The Suffering Child 46 IV - The Alien Vision of the Child 77 Chapter Two - The Parent-Child Relationship 146 I - Parent-^hild Relationships and Guilt 147 II - The Origins of Guilt 171 III - Methods of Confrontation 192 IV - Patterns of Conflict and Adjustment 219 Chapter Three - The Inheritance 302 Bibliography 384 iv Notes on Abbreviations Quotations from Dickens's works in the text are followed by a chapter number in Arabic numerals within parentheses. Where a novel is also divided into books or parts, the appropriate number is given in Roman numerals before the chapter number. Sketches by Boz; S.B. The Pickwick Papers; T.P.P. Oliver Twist; O.T. Nicholas Nickleby; N.N. The Old Curiosity Shop; O.C.S. Barnaby Budge; B.R. Martin Ghuzzlewit; M.C. Dombey and Son; D.S. Davjd Copperfield; B.C. Bleak House; B.H. Hard Times; H.T. Little Dorrits; L.D. A Tale of Two Cities; A T.T.C. The Uncommercial Traveller; U.T. Great .fcx'oec tat ions; G.E. Our Mutual Friend; O.M.F. The Mystery of Edwin Drood; E.D. Christmas Books; C.B. Christmas Stories: C.S. A Christmas Carol: A C.C vi Introduction Charles Dickens was a complex poetic and symbolic artist; his creative impulse was only incidentally real­ istic or naturalistic. The critical approach which takes characters out of the context of the work in which they appear and discusses how far they are convincing or "true to life" does little to further the understanding of any novelist; but it is particularly irrelevant to the works of Dickens. His novels require a rather more serious critical examination if their underlying significance and artistic integrity are to be discovered. In this study ideas and comparisons from psychology and psycho-analysis have sometimes been introduced to elucidate the significance of Dickens's work. This material has, it is hoped, been used in the manner and spirit recommended by Lionel Trilling. It has been used as a means "of finding grounds for sympathy with the writer and for increasing the possible significances of the work".* The concepts of psycho-analysis are often needed to explain objectively whfett Dickens created imaginatively. Dickens, of course, knew nothing of Freud, although his *See Lionel Trilling: The Liberal Imagination, Freud and Literature, p.48. Vll interest in the unconscious is attested by, among other things, his practice of mesmerism. It is very likely, however, that had he lived in the age of psycho-analysis he would have been unable to write as he did. His work has much in common with that of the psycho­ analysts. They seek for the explanation of psychological problems in the patient's past, in the years of early childhood and in the parent-child relationship. Dickens's novels normally take the form of an exploration of the past which is also an attempt to resolve the problems of the present. It is above all 'Dickens's attitude to his own past as a child that shapes the direction of his creative effort, i'hese problems are, in one form or another, common to everyone; and herein lies the source of his power as an artist. CHAPTER ONE THE rt'OJttLD 0? THE CHILD 1. I Dickens ,- nd ^ -> C u lld The figure of the child pervades the work of Dickens. The emphasis and intention may vary from novel to novel, but with the partial exceptions of Martin Chuzzlewit and The Pickwick Papers the experience of a child or children plays an important role in shaping the significance of each work. Even in the two works mentioned as exceptions the nature of Dickens*s attitude to children is extremely important. Through all the complexity of plot and multiplicity of character and incident, it is the recurrent figure of the child - and the lonely and unhappy child in particular - which insistently impinges upon the attention. The emphasis is generally upon the separation of the child from the world of adult experience: the child is a kind of alien or stranger, and his role as an outsider establishes itself in & long series of portraits from Oliver in the workhouse, through Paul Dombey sitting bewildered on the table in Doctor Blimber's study, and Pip alone among the gravestones on the marshes, to the lonely and unhappy childhood of John Harmon. This interest in the child is already apparent in Sketches by Boz« where the main aspects of Dickens's view of the child are established. There are portraits of children living in poverty, commentaries on the way society treats poor or criminal children, and satirical sketches 2. of the way parents treat their children. There are also several accounts of the deaths of children. Oliver Twist opens with the birth in a workhouse of the illegitimate son of a destitute woman who dies shortly after her son is born. Thus Oliver is at once pauper, orphan and illegitimate, and his subsequent experience of cruelty and rejection is in keeping with this beginning. He is constantly accused of viciousness or stupidity, constantly beaten or imprisoned. At best, he is ignored. Until he meets Mr. Brownlow any kindness he experiences is either accidental or the result of the adult world's attempts to exploit him. Mr. Bumble sums him up as "a naughty orphan whic& nobody can't love". (O.T., 3)« In Nicholas Nickleby the most memorable scenes are those in Dotheboys Hall where children, rejected or deserted by their parents or families, live a life of hopeless misery. Here it is the anguish of the child suffering the effects of parental negligence and enduring the cruelty of the savage schoolmaster, Squeers, that stimulates Dickens's imagination. With the exception of Smike, who is a defective adult, the boys at Dotheboys arejaot individually distinguished. They are presented as a collection of "ghosts": Pale and haggard faces, lank and bony figures, children with the countenances of old men, deformities with irons upon their limbs, boys of stunted growth, and others whose long meagre legs would hardly bear 3- their stooping bodies, all crowded on view together; there were the bleared eye, the hare lip, the crooked foot, and every ugliness or distortion that told of unnatural aversion conceived by parents for their offspring, or of young lives which, from the earliest dawn of infancy, had been one horrible endurance of cruelty and neglect. There were little faces which should have been handsome, darkened with the scowl of sullen, dogged suffering; there was childhood with the light of its eye quenched, its beauty gone, and its helplessness alone remaining; there were vicious- faced boys, brooding with leaden eyes, like malefactors, in a jail; and there were young creatures on whom the sins of their frail parents had descended, weeping even for the mercenary nurses they had known, and lonesome even in their loneliness. 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 here! (N.N.,8) In its combination of pity and horror, in its tone of outraged indignation at the cruelty of the adult world towards children, in its emphasis upon parental neglect at negligence and in its suggestion of the transmission of weakness or defects from generation to generation, this important passage is wholly characteristic of the general drift of Dickens's representation of childhood in his novels.