Dickens the Novelist

by F. R. Leavis

  Mr Jarndyce who has himself successfully opted out from the Jarndyce case, steadfastly practising a generous disinterestedness, has tried various idealisms to circumvent the system for others. One attempt had been to put his money to the use of the philanthropists, but he has learnt the hopelessness of that – they are only fostering their own egos, however they lay out the money. He has been more successful in using his money to save Esther and to make a home for her and the other orphans, his cousins Richard and Ada: but he cannot for all his good heart and wisdom save either of these last from misery and blight. We are not told where the money comes from, that enables him to stand au-dessus-de la mêlée; this would be a weakness in the novel if it were not shown that his money has not availed except in Esther’s case.

  Like Conrad, Dickens does believe in the discipline of a profession that demands disinterested service (the opposite of the profession of the law). Mr George and the Bagnets are admirable if simple-minded people formed by army discipline. But the detective, Mr Bucket, who hunts out the truth of things, is nevertheless in the service of a bad system, which he cannot afford to question or think about. Though shrewd, kindly and all-knowing, he is also morally simple-minded, as witness his concern for the dying Gridley whom he has come to arrest and whom he can only try to help by offering as consolation encouragement to go on braving the law; thus Dickens shows very neatly and with some humour (of the wry kind that characterizes Bleak House) that the good feelings Mr Bucket exercises whenever possible are merely paradoxical in his position and are constantly being disconcerted by the nature of the material he has to work in. Faced with the hopelessness of the system he is helpless, as we see in the dialogue arranged for this purpose with the brickmaker’s wife in Tom-all-Alone’s who thinks her baby would be better dead:

  ‘Why, you ain’t such an unnatural woman, I hope,’ returns Bucket, sternly, ‘as to wish your own child dead?’

  ‘God knows you are right, master,’ she returns. ‘I am not.’

  ‘Then don’t talk in that wrong manner,’ says Mr Bucket, mollified again. ‘Why do you do it?’

  She explains that the sight of the children round her and their inevitable fate is the cause:

  ‘Think of the children that your business lays with often and often, and that you see grow up!’

  ‘Well, well,’ says Mr Bucket, ‘you train him respectable, and he’ll be a comfort to you, and look after you in your old age, you know.’

  The irony of offering this prescription to anyone living in such conditions and such a world needs (and gets from Dickens here) no comment.10 Mr Bucket’s ‘Well, well!’ is an admission of the uselessness of his simple morality in the face of the undeniable facts that the woman has forced him to recognize for once, of which he never voluntarily accepts the implications. Mr Bucket with his domestic felicity, his fondness for children (when respectable) and the strict separation of his everyday good-heartedness from his bloodhound professionalism, is the precursor of the concept of the Split Man that Dickens is feeling his way towards with Mr Bucket. It is to be deliberately launched with Pancks in Little Dorrit, and elaborated as Wemmick in Great Expectations (nothing to do with Jekyll-and-Hyde morally dual man, whom Dickens originated in Edwin Drood’s uncle, the cathedral choirmaster and haunter of opium-dens).

  The medical profession, which it may be remembered came well out of the first chapter of Dombey and Son, is here put forward by Dickens as the type of disinterested service to humanity that is needed11 to counteract the Chancery fog. Allan Woodcourt therefore, who is shown as full of humanitarian classless feeling in his treatment of the brickmakers’ wives, Miss Flite and Jo, and at Nemo’s death-bed possessed of a humanity conspicuously lacking in Mr Tulkinghorn and Krook who are there too, as well as lacking in the beadle, coroner and others at the inquest, is even shown as one to whom heroism comes natural in a shipwreck. His sense of vocation and persistence in it against poverty are held up (explicitly by Mrs Bayham Badger) as a contrast to Richard’s lack of such necessary qualities. It is therefore proper that the novel should end with Allan’s appointment as a public health doctor – medical service in the public interest and not for private gain – and should marry Esther who exemplifies (and convincingly incarnates) selfless love and fully human sympathy. This is the limited hope for a future that may bring the defeat of the litigating spirit which has its roots in the claims of egotism, Dickens has shown – Esther’s marriage offsets the defeat of Ada’s. There is something more on the credit side and more of optimism in the marriage of Esther and Allan Woodcourt even though still in a (new) Bleak House than in Little Dorrit’s marriage with Arthur Clennam of the firm of Doyce, Clennam and Pancks in Bleeding Heart Yard; though Arthur and his wife are blessed in each other, they have no hope of making any impact on their world of ‘the arrogant, the froward and the vain’ who will continue to make ‘their usual uproar’. Bleak House is fortunate in coming mid-way in Dickens’s development before his scene darkens and thins.

  Woodcourt is not the only representative of medicine, the healing art, in the novel. There is also the surgeon for whom he works, Mr Bayham Badger, whom we may take as a ludicrous figure because of his subservience to the innocent vanity of his wife; but we should be wrong, for even she can serve as mouthpiece for some serious considerations. Dickens thus continues the technique he practised so successfully in David Copperfield of appearing to write merely to divert the reader while really pursuing a serious end. Thus Mrs Badger notices Richard’s lack of the sense of vocation for medicine because, as her husband points out, ‘“her mind has had the rare advantage of being formed by two such very distinguished public men as Captain Swosser and Professor Dingo”’, her two previous husbands. She is therefore able to point to the Captain’s maxim, ‘that if you only have to swab a plank, you should swab it as if Davy Jones were after you’ (a maxim which, Mr Badger says, applies to all professions) and to Professor Dingo’s reply when accused of disfiguring buildings with his geological hammer, ‘that he knew of no building save the Temple of Science’. No doubt Dickens felt that literature as he himself practised it was like the navy, science and medicine in requiring to be pursued in the spirit of these maxims, which he undoubtedly personally endorsed, and that all are citadels of disinterested service to humanity12 in their different ways. He sees them as combating the claims of the assertive ego that has produced the litigating or competitive society. ‘Public men’ in this sense are the very opposite of public women like Mrs Pardiggle, Mrs Jellyby and the betrothed of Mr Quale.

  Associated with the idea of doctor, scientist and naval officer is the idea of the gentleman, to which Dickens devotes a good deal of systematic attention in Bleak House, clearing the ground for Great Expectations where the idea is shown to have fallen on evil days and to be, as in the Marshalsea in Little Dorrit, a source of corruption. Dickens created the figure of Sir Leicester Dedlock deliberately to embody the qualities he believed, as a Radical, objectionable, but at a deeper level, and in spite of himself, what as an artist he could not help feeling to be valuable. Sir Leicester therefore inevitably exhibits Dickens’s ambivalence, which is conveniently visible in the initial introduction of him in chapter II:

  Sir Leicester Dedlock is only a baronet, but there is no mightier baronet than he. His family is as old as the hills, and infinitely more respectable. He has a general opinion that the world might get on without hills, but would be done up without Dedlocks. He would on the whole admit Nature to be a good idea (a little low, perhaps, when not enclosed with a park-fence), but an idea dependent for its execution on your great county families. He is a gentleman of strict conscience, disdainful of all littleness and meanness, and ready, on the shortest notice, to die any death you may please to mention rather than give occasion for the least impeachment of his integrity. He is an honourable, obstinate, truthful, high-spirited, intensely prejudiced, perfectly unreasonable man.

  Sir Leicester Dedlock is seen as ridiculous as regards his false idea of his import
ance and that of his class in a world that has no longer any use for an aristocracy as such – we see in due course that he has been quietly superseded, without his being able to recognize it, by Mr Rouncewell, the mill-owner and banker and inventor of industrial machinery, in every sphere but ‘the world of fashion’;13 the parable is wittily completed by making Rouncewell the son of Sir Leicester’s housekeeper (who is not proud of him but apologetic). Sir Leicester is also obsessively undemocratic and doesn’t even think much of Nature when natural, preferring it to be landscaped in a gentleman’s park when, of course, it is fenced off from the public. Here

  Dickens’s tone and style noticeably change slightly. The confident humour expressed in the robust alliteration and slang (‘done up without Dedlocks’) gives way to a more sensitive and complex sentence which ends seriously, and we see in the various accounts in the novel of Chesney Wold that Dickens was aesthetically very sensible of the man-made beauty of the estates of the ‘great county families’, to which his own powerful feeling for order and the beauty of utility must have made him partial. And we are therefore not surprised that Dickens shows he is weakening in the attitude he has taken up so blithely at first to the great landowner, whom it was evidently his intention at the outset to treat as something in a museum in a glass case, or a waxwork figure to be pointed at, and characterized as extinct. But now, with ‘a gentleman of strict conscience, disdainful of all littleness and meanness’ the figure comes alive and must be respected. Dickens, the artist now, is veracious and generous in admitting that the gentleman ideally stood for values that the industrial England of Mr Rouncewell (who is allowed his own business virtues of punctuality and keeping his word, which are not however the same thing as ‘integrity’ and ‘strict conscience’) can’t afford, and that the law-courts and lawyers are shown simply to despise. Nevertheless, Dickens recollects that an aristocrat is committed to a code of honour which in the modern world is a ridiculously inappropriate way of settling disputes: he is touchy and fights duels, therefore he is not the ideal enemy of the litigating society. (We are presently told that her part in the Jarndyce case ‘was the only property my Lady brought him’ and far from objecting, he approves of the institution of the Court of Chancery, holding that to listen to complaints about the system ‘would be to encourage some persons in the lower classes to rise up somewhere like Wat Tyler’.) The chivalrous Mr Boythorn expresses his willingness to decide his right to the disputed land by single combat with Sir Leicester ‘with any weapon known to mankind in any age or country’.

  Thus it is demonstrated that the gentleman is an anachronism, though Dickens stresses the delicacy of feeling and chivalry to women shown by both Sir Leicester and Mr Boythorn which is foreign to a Rouncewell. In the alternately arranged adjectives in the last sentence of this introductory description of Sir Leicester we see the Dickens scales oscillating and ending by registering rejection: a gentleman has his virtues – a pity we can’t any longer afford them – but his drawbacks render him impossible. An aristocrat is ultimately one who won’t compromise (‘perfectly unreasonable man’) and can’t therefore be fitted into the world of middle-class enterprise and institutions. This is recognized perhaps by the consistent and intentionally irritating use of ‘my Lady’ in naming Lady Dedlock throughout the novel, an address demanding subservience.

  Yet Dickens, as regards Sir Leicester, carries on this debate, and in the same open-minded manner: Sir Leicester and his set are retrograde politically, we are shown, and want to run the country in the interest of their own class and by personal influence. Pocket boroughs having been abolished, they bribe the electorate (Sir Leicester’s embarrassment when Volumnia innocently elicits this fact is revealing) – yet Mr Rouncewell’s candidate gets into Parliament largely through Mr Rouncewell’s influence and speeches. Chesney Wold and the country-house way of life, alleged to be insufferably boring, is Lady Dedlock’s punishment for having married a man twenty years older than herself when she had previously had a lover, the father of her child, who still filled her thoughts, we gather. Yet Chesney Wold is beautifully ordered with contented servants and retainers and seems comparatively idyllic when measured against all the other places in the novel – even Mr Jarndyce’s home has the brickmakers’ country slum at its doors. We have only to accompany Jane Austen on the trip to Sotherton (in Mansfield Park) to get the real feel of a way of living that is a dead conventionality with its empty pride and an air that suffocates with boredom. Jane Austen of course knew a great deal more of country houses and the old aristocracy than Dickens, but in over-formal Mansfield Park and its owner the pompous, kindly Sir Thomas Bertram, we get something like that blend of the insufferable and the invaluable that Dickens incarnates almost in spite of himself in Chesney Wold and Sir Leicester Dedlock; and for the same reason. (Probably Dickens had read Jane Austen by now – he hadn’t, we know, at the time he wrote Nicholas Nickleby – and he may have got inspiration there. If not, it is interesting that he had made an identical analysis.) Dickens is aware of this complexity enough to try to investigate it, and finds it fascinating; this occasions some of his loveliest and most unusual prose descriptions where, in an effort to express adequately what he feels, his imagination is fired to a poetic intensity by the beauty, dignity, decorum and continuity that the great house represented.14 The earlier Dickens novels show in several ways the prevailing influence on Dickens of the 18th century of Hogarth, Swift, Gay and Smollett; in David Copperfield and Bleak House these are seen to have lost their ascendancy and more sophisticated influences are felt to be present – Shakespeare, Jane Austen, Disraeli, and incontestably here, also, it seems to me, Pope – the Pope of the Moral Epistles, and particularly of Epistle IV, ‘On the use of Riches’. (We know Dickens read and admired Pope.)

  Though the second chapter is given up to the Dedlocks and a verbal view of Chesney Wold in the rain, it is not till chapter VII that we get there, the family being still absent. Dickens’s first criticism is that there is a want of imagination in the Dedlock class, that there is not ‘any superabundant life of imagination on the spot’ and that Sir Leicester even when present ‘would not do much for it in that particular’ – this is very interesting since it is also Jane Austen’s implicit criticism of the life at Mansfield and Sotherton. Dickens goes on to enquire into the possibility of a superior life of the imagination in the domestic animals, poultry and wild life, entering into their possible feelings and suggesting that they are no more limited than the people who tend them and work on the estate, a feudal entity, whose thinking is done for them by their master. The house itself is really the housekeeper’s, who shows visitors over it, treasures the family traditions, and lives solely in her devotion to the idea of the Dedlock family (she is never ridiculed):

  She sits in her room (in a side passage on the ground floor, with an arched window commanding a smooth quadrangle, adorned at regular intervals with smooth round blocks of stone, as if the trees were going to play at bowls with the stones), and the whole house reposes on her mind. She can open it on occasion, and be busy and fluttered; but it is shut up now, and lies on the breadth of Mrs Rouncewell’s iron-bound bosom, in a majestic sleep.

  This is a surprising kind of writing of which there is a great deal in Bleak House, and recognizable as characterizing the novel, yet it is hard to describe its unique effect, poetic, non-rational without being whimsical, alive with humour without being arch or playful, suggestive of metaphorical implications, and with moving overtones. Mrs Rouncewell’s limitations are not avoided: she sees everything, as in duty bound, through Dedlock eyes; her discomfort at having produced a son who, as a mechanical genius, is felt to be inimical by Sir Leicester and banished to ‘the iron country farther north’, and who, having become a rich iron-master, holds anti-Dedlock political views, is communicated with wit and a light touch. The presence of Sir Leicester at Chesney Wold brings out his virtues: an excellent master, though proud and lofty in his ideas he is more than courteous and always shakes hands wit
h Mrs Rouncewell as a mark of his genuine attachment to her, a personal relation that Dickens shows later is impossible between the self-made mill-owner and his ‘hands’. (Later we learn Sir Leicester feels a personal bond with George, her younger son, too.) Dickens, however, grudges crediting the Dedlock class with having created or supported a real civilization and shows Sir Leicester in his study as habitually contemplating the backs of his books (Dickens had the library of Timon’s villa in mind, I imagine).

  One of the most telling points in favour of the Dedlocks is scored in one of the best scenes of social comedy in the novel (chapter XXVIII) when the iron-master, his own housekeeper’s son, beards Sir Leicester in his own drawing-room, over the question of removing Lady Dedlock’s maid Rosa for a quick course in higher education to fit her for becoming Mr Rouncewell’s daughter-in-law. Mr Rouncewell, it then appears, though self-educated, and his wife likewise, is proud of having risen socially and expected his children to rise by marriage higher still (in the new fluid society which Dickens in general backs against the caste system); he explains that these are the usual ambitions and feelings of the new class to which he belongs. Dickens does not actually comment on this – he is not one to make even a hero say, as George Eliot’s Felix Holt does, that a man owes something to the class he was born into and should help it to rise too if he is lucky himself – but there is an unspoken reflection; Dickens certainly leaves the impression that a society represented by a Mr Rouncewell’s ideals is open to serious criticism. And this is borne out by the great scene, a set piece, in chapter XL, when Mr Tulkinghorn tells the story designed to let Lady Dedlock know that he has found out her secrets. The alleged ‘fellow-townsman’ of Mr Rouncewell’s (who is described as being in the position Mr Rouncewell would be in if he had known of Lady Dedlock’s past) takes the girl, his daughter, who is a great lady’s protégée, away ‘as if from reproach and disgrace’ when the discovery is made: like Little Em’ly Lady Dedlock would be considered a source of contamination to young girls by the Rouncewell class. But Mr Tulkinghorn’s insolent fiction is more than a notification to Lady Dedlock, it serves to sound the company’s moral reaction, which turns out to be wholly opposed to the automatic response based on the bourgeois theory that women can be divided into the pure and the fallen. Volumnia refuses to entertain the possibility of such a history at all, Sir Leicester ‘generally refers back in his mind to Wat Tyler’ (thus forecasting his indignant reaction when Mr Bucket tells him that the late Mr Tulkinghorn had entertained suspicions of Lady Dedlock), while ‘The majority incline to the debilitated cousin’s sentiment, which is in few words – “No business – Rouncewell’s fernal townsman.”’ As so often, the throwaway line disguises, without detracting from, the intended seriousness of the content, and is here made more effective by the contempt conveyed by the languid cousin’s drawl. Thus we see that Dickens saw in the Great House class an alternative moral code to the cruel blanket morality of Victorian public opinion, made by the new dominant middle-class; the upper class were capable of personal judgement and would stand by their own, refusing to allow the bourgeoisie to apply their rules to its members. We are invited to admire the moral courage and independence shown here explicitly when (in chapter LIV and subsequently) Sir Leicester does behave accordingly when the scandal about his wife reaches him and she, mistakenly, takes flight. Ironically, this was unnecessary, we learn. When the disclosure of her ‘guilty’ past is made to him, he declares unequivocally that he has nothing to forgive and thinks no less of his wife than before (as she did not belong to his class by birth she could not know this, but took her line from her religious sister who had cast her off for her ‘sin’). Dickens ends the chapter of the disclosure by three paragraphs of plain, unrhetorical prose which enter with the most delicate imaginative insight into the feelings of the unhappy elderly gentleman who has suffered a series of shocks to all he believed in and felt most deeply, and is succumbing to a stroke and paralysis from it. He sees his privacy and family pride exposed to vulgar scandal, but he feels only for his wife as the sufferer, since he is capable of real, personal, unselfish feeling: