by F. R. Leavis
Through the various children such as Esther Summerson Dickens was working towards Arthur Clennam who really includes the earlier ones (he would even have married a Dora if both their parents had not intervened – and his realization that if he had been able to fulfil his youthful romantic dream he would have made a great mistake which the apparent cruelty of the parents had prevented, shows that Dickens no longer sees parents as simply the cause of their children’s frustrations). Arthur’s childhood is shown only retrospectively since it is on the adult thus produced, and his problems as an adult, that the mature novelist focuses now – we have seen that this was true of Esther too. Arthur had been ham-strung by his parents’ marital hostility, by the pressures of his (step-) mother’s Calvinism and by her not unrelated self-righteousness in forcing him against his inclinations into the family business of money-dealing – when he, now a man of forty, nerves himself after his father’s death to tell her he wishes to leave the firm she solemnly curses him. Having been treated always as a child naturally prone to evil who must be kept in the right path, he has no will-power, no capacity for happiness, and no belief in himself. That this combination and his circumstances were widely representative of the deep-seated ills of Dickens’s culture is of course why Arthur Clennam was chosen as the hero of the novel. There are Little Dorrits in Mayhew and such, their actuality is easily proved, but for Arthur Clennams we have better sources than social historians.
For instance, Matthew Smith the well-known painter showed a comparable case-history (one among many such). He was born in industrial Yorkshire in 1879 – I take the facts from the Biographical Note supplied by his friends to the volume of reproductions, published by Allen & Unwin. ‘His childhood and boyhood’, it tells us, were dominated by the personality of his father, who was a man of great force of character and hard-headed business vision. A strict Nonconformist, who went to chapel twice every Sunday and also taught in Sunday School, Frederic Smith was a cultured example of the successful industrialist of his day, but ‘he had no sympathy with Matthew’s growing awareness of his vocation as a painter. Frederic Smith ruled his family, as he ruled his business, absolutely … Matthew was haunted as a boy and as a youth by the fear of his father’s displeasure.’ Taken from school and put into the family works in Manchester, Matthew was ‘a complete failure’ and his health suffered seriously, yet his father would not consider letting him become an artist because the proper way of life was to be a business man and the arts, besides being a leisure activity rightly, were in the case of painting dubiously moral since the nudity of models was involved. The father’s significance is that he was widely representative, and so was the psychological strain on his family. Matthew was twenty-one before he could make his wishes known effectively: ‘Such was his frustration and despair that at last he nerved himself to stand up to his father, choosing the solemn occasion of Sunday tea. The family sat silent, heads bowed, while Matthew and his father fought it out.’ In the end, Matthew won (by threatening to leave home) and was allowed to attend the Manchester School of Art, ‘but applied design, not painting, was to be his main subject, and his father gave instructions that his son was on no account to be allowed near any class-room where women were posing in a state of undress.’ The combination Dickens had diagnosed, and represents in Mrs Clennam as typical, are all represented here (except for her sexual jealousy as a wronged wife – her marriage was never consummated since Arthur’s mother, a professional singer, had been her husband’s choice until his uncle forced him into a loveless marriage). Frederic Smith exhibits the self-righteousness, the inflexible prejudices of Nonconformity, the Puritan acquisitiveness and materialism, fear of pleasure and of the sensuous (Mrs Clennam’s ‘those accursed snares of Satan, the arts’), the belief in the absolute right of the parent to decide the lives of the children, even when adult, the painful effects of the domineering over the whole family, and the control of economic power to secure this23 – though Matthew was allowed for the next four years to attend art school and afterwards one in London even, ‘he had little or no pocket-money and was kept strictly under his father’s control’.
The inevitable consequences were to turn him into an Arthur Clennam, as Dickens had foreseen: his health troubles developed into breakdowns, he had no self-confidence even when he at last got abroad to Brittany which enchanted him (his father, when the doctor sent him abroad for his health, stipulated he should not go to wicked Paris; this was in his thirtieth year). It is surprising that he was able to marry at thirty-three, two years before his father’s death which at last gave him financial freedom though never freedom from the despair, and ‘nervous and emotional strains’, from which he continued to suffer even when, at forty-four, he found the voluptuous model who enabled him to produce his characteristic nudes and vivid sensual paintings of flowers and fruit, paintings flooded with rich colour and painted with the vigour of a young man. Though he was now free as an artist he never overcame the sense of isolation and self-distrust caused by his family history, and he could never settle into family life.
The difficulty of being an artist of any kind in such a culture is manifest, and perhaps Dickens’s increasing appreciation of his father owed a good deal to the son’s realization that he had been spared the respectable middle-class upbringing and conventional schooling of the time which were, as he shows in many of his novels he believed them to be, the enemy of the creative spirit. The tension in the family of Matthew Smith I’ve cited is feelingly presented by Dickens in the remembered childhood of chapter III of Little Dorrit, called ‘Home’ to make the point clear, and in Mrs Clennam’s account in her apologia at the end of the novel of her own life and her reasons for her persecution of the Dorrits (she had caused their rotting away in a long imprisonment for debt by withholding a legacy due to Frederick Dorrit, a patron of the arts – if the fact is not very plausible the motivation is and essential to Dickens’s case, and we can now see that it was symbolically right). Yet Dickens was himself spared these psychological conditions of Victorian family life, and to create them so successfully, having diagnosed and comprehended their causes, represents a very considerable feat. One understands why Dickens filled his own children’s lives with acting, jokes, dancing, singing, parties, travel, seaside spells, and all kinds of happy nonsense (Edmund Wilson of course finds a sinister explanation for such things), and why he liked to describe scenes of joviality as well as to show the horrors of such family life as that of the Clennams, the Wilfers, the Snagsbys, the Gradgrinds and the Murdstone, among others such as Esther’s childhood home.
APPENDIX A
The Symbolic Function of the Doctor in Victorian Novels
Victorian novelists of the unoriginating kind go on using the doctor as physician in his traditional aspect of either wise family friend or humorously as a self-important old humbug, but in either case his chief asset is the bedside manner – as it inevitably was, of course, before medical science had been developed on modern lines. Encouraging the patient and his family to pin their faith on him and Nature’s healing power was probably most of what the doctor could do without harm, outside elementary surgery. Just as a science of nursing and hospital management resulted from the Crimean War so the necessity for sanitary reforms and public health services resulted in England from the epidemics produced by crowded cities and the new industrial slums, and from the advent of cholera. The doctor had thus to be thought of as filling quite a new role, a modern figure concerned not for private practice among the well-to-do but for public health and the scientific advancement of medicine, a figure as disinterested as the cleric and visibly more important in the new social conditions. Thus he became an evident symbol and available as such to the novelist as a central character instead of a stock background-filler.24
Dickens in Bleak House (1852) is early in the field in using the doctor in this way. I have pointed out Allan Woodcourt’s part in the novel’s theme, Dickens’s use of the surgeon who cites naval officer and academic scientist to state his
professional theory, and that the aesthete is there represented as a renegade doctor – all interesting ideas for that date, and particularly in that the grounds for optimism of the novel consist in the marriage of the doctor, now become a public health official, to Esther Summerson25 – love and charity wedded to disinterested service and scientific knowledge. But it is Kingsley, generally in the lead as to ideas, however wildly and patchily he developed them in his novels, who in Two Years Ago (1857) produced the doctor as hero and as the genuinely modern figure required for the role – ‘two years ago’ being when the cholera epidemic hit England. Tom Thurnall, son of a doctor and with a vocation for medical practice as well as a generally scientific bent, has also a strong social conscience, though tough-minded and a rolling stone. Wrecked on the Cornish coast, he stays on in the fishing village mainly in order to see it through the cholera which he knows is on the way. He fights disease in the same spirit as earlier heroes fought sin and the pursuit of science is his religion, he being a sceptic as regards Christianity. Rather surprisingly he cuts a better figure than the good young High Church curate who is simply ineffective in spite of his idealism and good-will, having antagonized the fishermen as a gentleman and, they believe, a crypto-Papist, while the widely-experienced doctor is shown tactfully managing them, and the reactionary, the vicious and the foolish, fighting vested interests, winning respect all round and completely indifferent to class considerations, as well as physically courageous. Kingsley has put much more into him than Dickens has into Allan Woodcourt, and the great speech Tom is given to explain to the curate his obsessive sense of vocation is really convincing:
‘I do it because I like it. It’s a sort of sporting with your true doctor. He blazes away at a disease where he sees one, as he would at a bear or a lion; the very sight of it excites his organ of destructiveness. Don’t you understand me? You hate sin, you know. Well, I hate disease. Moral evil is your devil, and physical evil is mine. I hate it, little or big; I hate to see a fellow sick; I hate to see a child rickety and pale; I hate to see a speck of dirt in the street; I hate to see a woman’s gown torn; I hate to see her stockings down at heel; I hate to see anything wasted, anything awry, anything going wrong; I hate to see water-power wasted, manure wasted, land wasted, muscle wasted, pluck wasted, brains wasted; I hate neglect, incapacity, idleness, ignorance, and all the disease and misery which spring out of that. There’s my devil; and I can’t help, for the life of me, going right at his throat, wheresoever I meet him!’
Kingsley’s novel, like its predecessor Bleak House, is deliberately schematic and the doctor is in the centre of a system of representative characters – an aristocratic landlord and an objectionable squire; the curate for whom the villagers have no use till the cholera epidemic shows his moral stamina and he finds his function; a Romantic poet who ‘had been apprenticed to Tom’s father but had run away from medicine to literature’, and comes to a bad end generally as, like Skimpole, an aesthete, one who ‘had also (and prided himself too, on having) all Goethe’s dislike of anything terrible or horrible, of sickness, disease, wounds, death, anything which jarred with that “beautiful” which was his idol’; and a contrasting character who is the true artist. A painter who, seeing that the invention of photography is a science that must have sooner or later an impact on art, he has given up painting when the novel starts in order to experiment with the camera for a spell to find out what it can do as well as or better than the painter and what it can’t do, so that he can rethink the question of the function of the artist in a new scientific age – whereas the Romantic poet had rejected Tom’s suggestion that the poets ought to ‘take to the microscope’ and write poems about the new realities thus made manifest. The heroine is a Methodistical Cornish girl called Grace who thus symbolically provides Tom with the faith he has rejected hitherto since he ultimately marries her, as his only salvation, after a long resistance, for she is a village girl, though beautiful, saintly and gifted – this shows a characteristic collapse into hysterical emotionalism that seems the only way Kingsley could bring a novel to an end.
We can see that George Eliot, in supplying Dr Lydgate with a central role in Middlemarch in 1872, was therefore not particularly original, except in putting him back into an earlier age of unscientific medicine in the English provincial scene (as we see from Trollope whose Barsetshire doctors are of the thoroughly old-fashioned type, even his hero Dr Thorne of the novel of that name of a year later than Two Years Ago). But Mrs Oliphant, like George Eliot a thoroughly up-to-date intellectual, had published in 1865 her best novel, Miss Marjoribanks, where a leading figure, the heroine’s father, is a Scotch doctor who is hard, sardonic of tongue and outlook, and takes a wholly scientific view of people; his life is centred on the scientific advancement of medicine and he is shown as having considerable contempt for the drawing-room where his daughter reigns, slipping away to his study to write up his cases for The Lancet. Like Lydgate too he is very conscious of being of good family. I have argued in my introduction to the Zodiac edition of Miss Marjoribanks (Chatto & Windus, 1969) that George Eliot probably took from this novel the tone of her original attitude to her heroine in Middlemarch and that the presence of Dr Lydgate there owes much to the scientific-oriented doctor who dominates Carlingford in the earlier novel. Possibly also to the whole tradition going back to Bleak House, which had provided the form of a social microcosm which George Eliot uses in Middlemarch, except that she replaces London by a provincial town in the Midlands and that instead of Chesney Wold we have two contrasted estates and landlords, one the good old Tory landlord (Sir James Chettam who is her Sir Leicester Dedlock, and even shows himself willing to fight a duel) and the other as a source of humour, a bad landlord, Mr Brooke, who has Radical views though not to the extent of doing his duty by his tenants. The idea of putting a modern scientific medical man into such an unpromising context had already been suggested by Kingsley, as I’ve shown. Lydgate, who in Bleak House or Two Years Ago would have been allowed to marry the symbolically fitting character Dorothea Brooke, and so fulfilled and provided with a field of action suited to his qualities and talents, touches her life only ideally, so to speak, and comes to grief partly through defeat by the reactionary elements in the town but mainly through marrying the wrong woman who deflects him from public service to private practice among the rich to satisfy her social ambitions; he dies in the bitterness of self-contempt, and his widow then marries a physician of the old school who can provide her with a carriage. It is thus George Eliot the ‘meliorist’, as she considered herself (neither an optimist nor a pessimist) who follows the comparatively hopeful uses of the new doctor-figure by a thoroughly defeatist one.
Another reason for the usefulness of the doctor as a symbol for Victorian novelists was that he was necessarily outside class,26 privileged to tell the truth to the upper classes and handle them impartially, frequently having to be let into secrets not even revealed to the family lawyer. Dickens in Little Dorrit makes a very marked distinction between Physician, who is straightforward, self-respecting and immune to the snobbery and Mammon-worship practised by all around him, and representatives of the other professions such as Bar and Bishop. Trollope’s Dr Thorne is habitually shown snubbing ladies of noble birth who try unsuccessfully to put him down, and maintaining a position of moral superiority to the aristocracy and the new rich alike; Dr Lydgate, Dr Marjoribanks and Dr Tom Thurnall are of the same pattern – all happily born gentlemen, but despising the drawing-room and its values and refusing to bow the neck to Mammon (except for Lydgate’s defeat by his wife eventually.) But ‘Physician’ in Little Dorrit, named generically like a character in a morality-play – which the scenes in the Merdles’ house would seem to suggest – is much loftier in conception than any of these actual physicians. ‘Where he was, something real was’: he causes everyone, even Mrs Merdle, to speak the truth to him, he is shown practising charity and, imperturbable, looking on the just and the unjust alike, ‘his equality of compassion no more distu
rbed than the Divine Master’s of all healing was’. In fact, he is the truly wise man as well as truly good. Thus for Dickens the physician in essence is virtually sanctified, but as we have seen, by the time Dickens was ending Little Dorrit, where Physician appears in the late chapters, (snubbing ‘Bishop’ incidentally), the character had been evolving in this direction. Henry James merely follows on the Dickens of Little Dorrit in this, as so often, when in The Wings of the Dove he makes his physician, Sir Luke Strett, all-knowing and apostolic.
