Dickens, Ireland, and the Irish, Part II Litvack, L. (2003). Dickens, Ireland, and the Irish, Part II. The Dickensian, 99(2), 6-22. Published in: The Dickensian Document Version: Version created as part of publication process; publisher's layout; not normally made publicly available Queen's University Belfast - Research Portal: Link to publication record in Queen's University Belfast Research Portal General rights Copyright for the publications made accessible via the Queen's University Belfast Research Portal is retained by the author(s) and / or other copyright owners and it is a condition of accessing these publications that users recognise and abide by the legal requirements associated with these rights. Take down policy The Research Portal is Queen's institutional repository that provides access to Queen's research output. Every effort has been made to ensure that content in the Research Portal does not infringe any person's rights, or applicable UK laws. If you discover content in the Research Portal that you believe breaches copyright or violates any law, please contact [email protected]. Download date:27. Sep. 2021 Dickens in Finnegans Wake AARON SANTESSO ICKENS HAS NEVER BEEN A FIRST RECOURSE for explicators of Finnegans Wake. Though Joyce mentions him numerous times, DDickens has been consigned to the collector’s bin of authors whose appearances are isolated and trivial, and the resulting lack of attention means allusions to Dickens are occasionally overlooked.1 Recently, in discussing Ulysses, critics have begun to lament the underestimation of Dickens’s influence.2 Finnegans Wake supplies further evidence for the re-evaluation of Dickens’s influence on Joyce; indeed, closer attention to Dickens creates more convincing explanations of certain passages in that work. Dickens appears throughout Finnegans Wake: his various incarnations range from ‘dickens’ (157.27) to ‘Diggins’ (596.12) to ‘dickhuns’ (610.03). Dickens also appears in several of the portmanteau allusions which pepper Finnegans Wake. Joyce often combines references to two or more authors in these allusions, as when he transforms Jack and Martin (the two brothers representing the Anglican and Lutheran churches to Peter’s Catholic in A Tale of a Tub) into ‘Jack and Maturin’ (549.23-4), thereby alluding both to St Mathurin, patron saint of fools and to Charles Maturin, the Irish novelist who wrote Melmoth the Wanderer. The portmanteaus are occasionally overlooked, particularly if they contain a clear connection to a ‘major’ influence, such as Swift.3 Dickens has suffered from this pattern: the phrase ‘aspiring like the decan’s’ (423.06), for example, is glossed only as an allusion to Swift (‘Decanus’), though ‘decan’s’ certainly puns on ‘Dickens’ as well.4 In fact, there are several combinations of Swift and Dickens in Finnegans Wake: numerous references to ‘Pip and Estella’ (or variations thereon) blend the Stella of Swift’s ‘Journal to Stella’ with the Pip and Estella of Great Expectations.5 Other examples of Swift-Dickens portmanteaus have gone unnoticed. A passage previously believed only to contain an allusion to Swift is the washerwomens’ gossipy discussion of Anna Livia Plurabelle in Chapter 8 of Book 1, which builds to a mysterious interchange between two characters in the last sentence: Fenny poor hex she must have charred. Kickhams a frumpier ever you saw. Making mush mullet’s eyes at her boys dobelon. And they crowned her their chariton queen, all the maids. Of the may? You don’t say! Well for her she couldn’t see herself. I recknitz wharfore the darling murrayed her mirror. She did? Mersey me! There was a koros of drouthdropping surfacemen, boomslanging and plugchewing, fruiteyeing and flowerfeeding, in contemplation of the fluctuation and the undification of her filimentation lolling and 1 leasing on North Lazers’ Waal all eelfare by the Jukar Yoicks and as soon as they saw her meander by that marritime way in her grasswinter’s weeds and twigged who was under her archdeaconess bonnet, Avondale’s fish and Clarence’s poison, sedges an to aneber, Wit-upon-Crutches to Master Bates: Between our two southsates and the granite they’re warming, or her face has been lifted or Alp has doped. (Finnegans Wake 208-9) The final words of the passage, discussing Anna Livia Plurabelle’s artificially enhanced appearance, are spoken by two members of the ‘koros’ on the wall named ‘Wit-upon-Crutches’ and ‘Master Bates’. Critics have glossed the two as an allusion to Swift: ‘Master Bates’ was Gulliver’s teacher, and ‘Wit-upon-Crutches’ according to Adaline Glasheen, is ‘a poem once attributed to Swift’.6 Gulliver’s teacher was in fact named ‘Master Bates’: When I came back, I resolved to settle in London, to which Mr. Bates, my Master, encouraged me... But, my good Master Bates dying two Years after, and I having few Friends, my Business began to fail...7 Swift does not use the pun again in Gulliver’s Travels. But Swift is not the only writer to have featured a ‘Master Bates’ in his work. Numerous writers have used the pun – Kipling has a ‘Headmaster Bates’ in his Stalky & Co., for example – but the most memorable ‘Master Bates’ is very likely the Charley Bates in Dickens’s Oliver Twist: ...the Dodger returned; accompanied by a very sprightly young friend, whom Oliver had seen smoking on the previous night; and who was now formally introduced to him as Charley Bates...” And what have you got, my dear? said Fagin to Charley Bates. “Wipes”, replied Master Bates; at the same time producing four pocket handkerchiefs.8 Unlike Swift, Dickens keeps the ‘Master Bates’ joke going for several chapters. Of the 95 references to Charley Bates in the novel, 45 are to ‘Master Bates’ and Dickens continually draws attention to the joke.9 Joyce knew Oliver Twist well: he had a copy of the book in his Trieste library.10 One reference to Oliver Twist by Joyce outside of Finnegans Wake is useful in showing how Joyce, though he paid generous and careful attention to Dickens, often disparaged his work in print: And yet there are some simple people who complain that, though they like Dickens very much and have cried over the fate of Little Nell and over the death of poor Joe [sic], the crossing-sweeper, and laughed over the adventurous caprices of Pickwick and his fellow-musketeers and hated (as all good people should) Uriah Heep and Fagin the Jew, 2 yet he is after all a little exaggerated.11 Here, then, Joyce makes a typical complaint against Dickens’s lack of subtlety and over-sentimentality, and his habit of supporting narratives with heavy-handed humour or tragedy. He goes on to criticize other aspects of Dickens’s writing: ‘The form [Dickens] chose to write in, diffuse, overloaded with minute and often irrelevant observation, carefully relieved at regular intervals by the unfailing humorous note, is not the form of the novel which can carry the greatest conviction. ’ One of Joyce’s primary objections to Dickens, then, is the author’s predictable shift to low humour to relieve tension – presumably including the use of puns like ‘Master Bates’. The fact that ‘Master Bates’ is a Dickens character encourages a re- examination of the gloss of ‘Wit-upon-Crutches’. Glasheen points to an anonymous poem, ‘Wit Upon Crutches; Or, The Biter Bitten’. This work first appeared in a Dublin broadside in 1725, and was reprinted without its title in The British Journal of 27 August 1726 and then by Smedley, again without its title, in Gulliveriana in 1728. It has not been reprinted since.12 Joyce could have encountered the expression elsewhere: puns on the idea of ‘lame wit’ were a relatively common eighteenth-century topos. Pope, for example, describes a ‘wit’ advancing on two crutches in The Dunciad (IV.110). The fact that ‘Wit-upon-Crutches’ is a speaking character, however, raises the possibility that Joyce has a literary or historical character in mind. The Finnegans Wake passage is among other things a Christmas narrative, describing Anna Livia Plurabelle’s imitation of ‘Santa Claus’, as she doles out presents to children from a sack. This context fits well with the most famous literary character on crutches: Tiny Tim Cratchit, from Dickens’s A Christmas Carol. Tiny Tim, who seems to Joyce the embodiment of Dickens’s ‘lame wit’, represents another failing he sees in Dickens’s writing: tedious morality is relieved not by low humour but by arch sentimentality. Additional evidence that Joyce had Dickens in mind when he was working on this passage exists in the first drafts of Finnegans Wake. An early manuscript version of the Finnegans Wake passage clarifies the presence of Dickens: Funny poor dear she must have looked. Dickens a funnier ever you saw. There was a gang of surfacemen [boomslanging & plugchewing [,lying & leasing,]] on Lazy Wall & as soon as they seen who was in it saw one to the other. Between you & me & the wall we are on beneath us as round as a hoop Alp has doped.13 ‘Dickens a funnier ever you saw’ reappears in the final version as ‘Kickhams a funnier ever you saw’, a reference to the author overlooked by critics.14 Joyce’s other namings of Dickens in Finnegans Wake are often followed soon after by mentions of Dickens’s works and characters. The phrase ‘scoot, duckings and thuggery’ (Scott, Dickens and Thackeray) at 177.35 is followed in the next line by a reference to ‘bunnyboy rodger’, an allusion to Barnaby Rudge, as well as the Dodger 3 from Oliver Twist. On pg. 434, Joyce mentions ‘dickette’s place’ on line 27, and then lists ‘your meetual fan’ (Our Mutual Friend), ‘Doveyed Covetfilles’ (David Copperfield), ‘old cupiosity shape’ (The Old Curiosity Shop), and ‘Ulikah’ (Uriah Heep from David Copperfield) over the next three lines.