Dickens the Novelist

by F. R. Leavis

  APPENDIX C

  Dickens’s Exposure Scenes

  The exposure and denunciation, accompanied by bodily injury, of Uriah Heep in David Copperfield, following on the very similar exposure, denunciation and knocking down of Pecksniff by Martin Chuzzlewit in the earlier novel, has given rise to generalizations suggesting that these scenes are a characteristic of a Dickens novel and are psychologically revelatory as to their author, one recent Dickens critic observing not only that this is so but that he agrees with the self-evident conclusion drawn by someone else that these scenes are in the nature of sexual orgasms. Perhaps it would be as well therefore to take a closer look at them, to see whether they are as suggested, involuntary, or merely conventional and traditional, and how and why Dickens uses them.

  The first form of such a scene is to be found in Pickwick Papers where Mr Pickwick does indeed discharge his bottled-up wrath, very naturally, at having to pay the costs in an action in which he has been victimized by the rascally lawyers Dodson and Fogg; the scene is brief and kept in a mildly comic context, and is without excitement except on the part of Mr Pickwick; it is obtrusively staged, so to speak, so that we are aware we are witnessing something comparable to a stage comedy, by the stage directions, and it is mixed in with other things proper to the conclusion of traditional comedy which have been continuously maintained from Classical comedy to the Victorian pantomime, that is, marriages and comic business. Even in Martin Chuzzlewit this is so, where old Martin’s pent-up indignation and his revelation to the company that he has only been affecting senility to entrap Pecksniff and test the others, gives the scene much more force than in the other cases I mention; the ridiculous side of Pecksniff is stressed, his intermixed speeches let down the tension, along with the barely-concealed amusement of the young men present, and the sense of our being not in a realistic novel but in the audience witnessing a traditional scene enacted on the boards is very strong. In David Copperfield Dickens can be felt to be staging this scene on similar lines, since Micawber is the agent through whom the exposure is made and his absurdities of behaviour and literary Micawberisms dominate the business and set the tone, the humour being underlined by Miss Trotwood’s attacking Uriah bodily to make him restore her fortune that he has embezzled. In each of these two later novels there is only one scene of this type, whereas we may note in the first novel, that was written only as entertainment, the exposure scene is recurrent, where the easily-roused Mr Pickwick exposes Mr Jingle to the magistrate and has another such scene when he and Wardle catch the eloping couple in the inn and Mr Pickwick denounces Mr Jingle.

  Of course in all these cases such a scene is necessary to achieve a peripeteia, and in a manner indispensable to the loose form of the picaresque novel, whose only tension results from recurrent surprises or alarms in the plot. In the picaresque novel, a form which Dickens took over for the production of his early fictions, resolution was traditionally achieved by assembling most of the characters in prison, a destination most of them would very naturally find themselves at, and the rest by mischance or the machinations of the wicked; there an opportunity arose naturally for the éclaircissements that would clear up the plot and prepare for the happy ending with the vindication of the innocent, and we can see this occurs in Pickwick too. Dickens inherited this from his models and admired predecessors, Smollett, The Vicar of Wakefield and all the rest. But after Oliver Twist and Barnaby Rudge prison did not come naturally to the class of characters now employed. And as Dickens turned away from the picaresque novel as unsatisfactory for his now more serious purposes, he found the mode and techniques of the serious drama (not melodrama) could be adapted to the novelist’s needs. Here he could draw on Shakespeare, Molière and Ben Jonson, all of whom he admired and had seen performed, and assisted in producing or had acted in. His ambition to write an English Tartuffe which had produced Mr Pecksniff, the exponent of our national hypocrisy in its Early Victorian form, gave him also the scene of Tartuffe’s exposure, a scene inevitable with a dominant evil character of this type as we may see in the construction of Measure for Measure, Volpone, The School for Scandal and other such plays, all well known to Dickens, where the exposure of such a hypocrite as Volpone, Angelo or Joseph Surface necessitates the tense winding-up of expectation to a very dramatic and public exposure, before poetic justice can be achieved. Dickens made several versions of Tartuffe: Sampson Brass in The Old Curiosity Shop, Pecksniff himself, and two in David Copperfield – the ’umble Uriah and the respectable Littimer, where though Uriah gets the classical stage exposure Littimer is revealed, along with Uriah for a second exposure, (but this time purely satiric) in the picaresque novel’s prison set-up – an interesting mixture, while the villain who is not a hypocrite, Steerforth, doesn’t get ‘exposed’ at all. His punishment takes place off-stage, thus making very effectively the point that Dickens uses the stage exposure-scene only in connection with hypocrisy, where his models virtually imposed it on him. The scene in Copperfield which it genuinely excited Dickens to write, be it noted, was the storm scene with the shipwreck of Steerforth and the death of the heroic Ham. And the serious scene that balances the mainly comic one of Uriah’s exposure is the exposure scene in reverse where Annie vindicates her character to her husband and to the reader too, with a staged scene and supporting cast.

  Dickens did always feel the need for a strong staged scene towards the end of his novel, but it is not necessarily or even generally the one where excitement on the author’s part is felt to inhere. In Dombey and Son the ‘strong’ scene is the exposure scene of a more complex kind, which has no supporting cast but is indisputably acted on the boards, being seen and directed as such by the novelist. This is the meeting at Dijon of Edith Dombey and Carker, where she denounces him as a villain and, like Annie Strong, vindicates her own character to the reader, which gives us the necessary surprise that makes the scene, since we know all about Carker’s villainy already. But the excitement in the novel is attached to Mr Dombey’s pursuit and hunting down of Carker, who is finally killed by the engine of Nemesis (and his blood, like Jezebel’s, licked up by the dogs, a nice implied Biblical reference). Florence Dombey’s return in the nick of time to stop her father from committing suicide is in comparison not in the least forceful or interesting.

  So also in the later novels: Dickens’s increasing powers as an artist incline him away from the melodramatic and even the theatrical, so that in Bleak House the only excitement is Mr Bucket’s (played off against the stony absence of sympathetic reaction by Sir Leicester Dedlock) when he unfolds before Sir Leicester, and later before the French maid too, the true story behind Mr Tulkinghorn’s murder. This has involved the exposure of the truth about both the lawyer and Lady Dedlock to the unsuspecting husband and the thrilling incrimination and arrest of Hortense in front of our eyes – altogether a mode of winding up a mystery story which subsequently became a stock feature of the detective novel, in which Dickens was a pioneer. But the real excitement for the reader, and what shows the art of the novelist, is in what corresponds to Mr Dombey’s hunting down Carker – Mr Bucket’s and Esther’s chase up and down between St Alban’s and London after her fugitive mother, in the hope of saving, not punishing, her. The true surprise in the novel is a wholly novelistic one (not in the least theatrical or stagey but psychological and truly human), to which the scene of the murderess’s arrest is necessary but incidental: Sir Leicester’s unpredictable reaction to what affects his honour and his family’s standing. Here we have the opposite of an ex posure and denunciation scene as the climax of the novel since Sir Leicester steadily continues, throughout the chase that is going on outside, to demand our mounting sympathy, admiration and compassion, reversing the usual climax that we have been assured is characteristic of Dickens. Dickens has got way from his dramatic model again.

  The next novel, Hard Times, shows a comic exposure of both Bounderby and Mrs Sparsit, with the disappointment and frustration of both, but these are perfectly controlled and nothing c
ompared with the main scene with which the excitement is achieved, that of the pathetic and yet comic interview between Tom Gradgrind and his father in the circus ring and the concurrent exposure of Bitzer as the human machine constructed on the self-interest principle – and Bitzer’s frustration and defeat is also entirely and appropriately comedy, as reported by the ring-master. Mr Gradgrind’s crowning self-exposure in his admission of his fatal mistakes is painful and not theatrical in the least, nor, as we had known that he was mistaken all along, is it stimulating. Louisa’s escape from her lover and from the pursuing Mrs Sparsit is truly exciting too, and has clearly excited the novelist in the writing.

  With Little Dorrit Dickens has found a wholly unexceptionable use of the exposure scene which, while retaining the original elements of dramatic surprise and éclaircissement, makes use of the psychological (non-theatrical) self-exposure and apologia shown in Mr Gradgrind’s case that lay at the root of Hard Times. The mysteries of the plot, of the Glennam house and of the household are all explained by Mrs Glennam herself, the prime mover, in the chapter, ‘Closing In’, when she takes the words out of the mouth of Blandois who is about to ‘expose’ her, on the grounds that she cannot bear to see herself ‘in such a glass as that’. Sitting in the wheel-chair to which she has doomed herself (‘like Fate in a go-cart’ as Flora had said with her usual aptness) she is driven to make her own apologia, and having confessed she is freed from her guilt-induced paralysis to stand on her feet and take steps to retrieve herself. An earlier opportunity for an exposure of the guilty, Miss Wade’s case, is similarly avoided as a theatrical occasion, this time by being delivered in manuscript to Arthur Clennam to read, not in the least improbably since Dickens makes us see that it is part of her case that she should find communication with others impossible and yet needs to explain herself to make manifest her grievances. In Arthur Clennam, unlike his kind ordinary friend Mr Meagles who is insufferable to her, she senses the appropriate person to whom to confide her apologia. The only traditional dramatic exposure in this novel is that of Mr Casby, when Pancks exposes him to his victims in Bleeding Heart Yard as no Patriarch but a heartless slum landlord and, by shearing his locks, shows him as not venerable but a figure of fun. Pancks then runs away from the shocking spectacle he has created, pursued by waves of laughter from the witnesses, in a staged scene that is wholly comedy and almost farce.

  So that in the next novel, Great Expectations, where Dickens achieved the greatest mastery of his medium, the exposure scenes are, as we might anticipate, much more interesting than in any other of his novels. The only exposure in a serious sense can be of Pip the protagonist – of himself to himself, as with Mr Gradgrind and Mrs Clennam – and of the mysterious Orlick. Pip has to realize that his expectations were fallacious and to see himself for the first time squarely as contemptible (he has long suspected this, of course, as his recurrent uneasiness betrayed), and the two are made to follow inevitably on the return of Magwitch when he reveals himself to Pip. This occurs not towards the end, as a prelude to a happy ending, but exactly in the middle of the novel and is integral to the whole conception, not contrived for a scene, nor staged as one with witnesses. The scene is nonetheless dramatic and exciting on account of the peripeteia it achieves by the explanations of Magwitch which strip, layer by layer, all the illusions from Pip of what he is and where he stands now. This is to use the conventional exposure scene for the finest purposes of a novelist. Moreover it is completed by an even more remarkable exposure scene, also with two only present, which takes place not on any human stage but in a realm which is at once non-realistic and yet touches reality. Pip is lured to it and made to endure Orlick’s exposure of himself which is also an accusation of Pip, making Pip admit even more damaging truths about himself than he had found when reunited with Magwitch, and this scene is finally ended with Pip’s acceptance of his role of criminal. The chase that we have noted as also a feature of Dickens’s compositions is this time not, like Esther’s in the company of the detective, to rescue the guilty, but to help the guilty and yet innocent criminal Magwitch to escape the law by Pip’s aid. The public staged scene is when Pip stands trial along with Magwitch to be denounced by the Judge at the Assizes, and this is the finale of the denunciation and exposure – not of Pip but of his society by itself; and the reader of the novel finds himself automatically accused as part of the society that sanctions the Judge’s mass sentence of executions, a powerful and disturbing corollary.

  Our Mutual Friend, which seems to me to show very decidedly the breaking-down of Dickens’s powers, has therefore as might be expected a reversion to the early type of exposure scene. Bella denounces Mr Boffin in the regular stage setting and this is followed by the appropriate features wedding and comedy; but we have all been taken in, for another finale is needed to show us that Bella like the reader has been kept in the dark: not only about her husband’s identity but that Mr Boffin has been only a sham miser, a piece of theatrical nonsense resolved with disgusting sentimentality and whimsicality. There is yet another exposure scene, dull and mechanical, where Silas Wegg, a poor apology for a villain, is exposed to his own circle with unnecessary seriousness by John Harmon and undergoes a comic Nemesis by the hand of Sloppy. None of all this can be taken as anything but deplorable – tired writing and trivial moralizing that are totally out of keeping with the serious parts of the novel and are (like Mr Venus) too dreary to be the comic relief they may be supposed to have been intended for.

  Thus the last novel, Edwin Drood, shows that though unfinished it was working up to a merely melodramatic exposure scene, possibly, in Jasper’s prison, after a chase through the cathedral at night, where the intricate plot would be explained and the choirmaster exposed in his true colours, that is, as hypocrite and murderer (or, some think, only would-be murderer). There is certainly an undercurrent of heightened feeling in every part of the novel concerned with Jasper. This is associated partly with his creepy powers of an abnormal kind (something more than hypnotism seems needed to account for it) but mainly with the tension set up between his public role of respectable choirmaster in the cathedral, and his secret life in the underworld of opium-addiction and his privately fostered murderous enmity to his nephew, his unconscious rival in love. The suggestion of moral interest here is minimal but what possibilities it had are not explored in the novel as it develops, we can see. Such a set-up can be only melodramatic in its working out and dénouement, and there is no reason to suppose that we have lost anything of value by The Mystery of Edwin Drood’s not having been revealed to us.