Dickens the Novelist

by F. R. Leavis

  III

  Case-Histories of Life in Chancery

  There is another feature of the Skimpole conception that is important: his assumption of the character of the child. He is thus, with his mock-innocence, a pseudo-child, yet in so far as he is a child at all, the only one in the novel. This is a significant departure for Dickens, to whom the image of the child has hitherto been a necessary conception and the child’s sensibility that records criticism of the adult world a necessary technical mode. Here half the novel is Esther’s autobiographical narrative and yet Esther grows up early in her first chapter, indeed she can hardly be said ever to have had much childhood at all, and the same applies to such other children as figure in the novel: Charley, Tom and little Emma are prematurely forced to be little adults, responsible, stoical and sobered by extreme hardship, just as Esther had been cheated out of happy trusting childhood by the knowledge forced on her that she had no right to exist and was unloved. The wholly characteristic children of the Chancery world are the Smallweeds who were ‘little old men and women’ from birth because the family ‘strengthened itself in its practical character’ and therefore ‘discarded all amusements, discountenanced all story-books, fairytales, fictions and fables, and banished all levities whatsoever. Hence the gratifying fact, that it has had no little child born to it, and that the complete little men and women whom it has produced have been observed to bear a likeness to old monkeys with something depressing on their minds. … Judy never owned a doll, never played at any game’, etc. They are thus the idea of the child in a utilitarian society – that society which indeed ‘strengthened itself in its practical character’ – that Dickens next projected into the central theme of a novel as the Gradgrind children and Bitzer in Hard Times, who were disasters because likewise robbed of their natural inheritance of imaginative literature, play, fun and make-believe, all of which Dickens rightly saw to be essential to a healthy childhood. The Smallweeds, justly so named, are brought up to unenlightened self-interest only, and figure as puppets in a Punch-and-Judy show kind of entertainment, as awful warnings on the margin of the novel. That Dickens had already the whole of the anti-Utilitarian case crystallizing in his mind ready for Hard Times is shown by the development of the Smallweed characteristics in the Bitzer direction too:

  ‘Been along with your friend again, Bart?’

  Small nods.

  ‘Dining at his expense, Bart?’

  Small nods again.

  ‘That’s right. Live at his expense as much as you can, and take warning by his foolish example. That’s the use of such a friend. The only use you can put him to,’ says the venerable sage.

  Esther however is fully human and framed to be a very carefully complete study of what a sensitive child is made into in such circumstances as are posited for her. Her aunt is a very moderate version of a Murdstone; Esther understood her to be ‘a good, good woman’ and that it was Esther’s own fault that she was illegitimate. On her aunt’s death she feels obliged to bury her doll, her only friend, with tears – in a grave in the garden; it is left to us to deduce, since Esther doesn’t understand her action herself, that she was showing herself obedient to the rule laid down for her of ‘submission, self-denial, diligent work’. Esther, like Little Dorrit the child with the stigma of prison birth, accepts her lot without complaint or self-pity and is even excessively docile, though Esther nonetheless suffers from the ‘wound’ she knew she had received in childhood, ‘the fault I had been born with (of which I confessedly felt guilty and yet innocent)’ – the child’s confusion between what it is told it should feel, and what it feels instinctively, could hardly be better put. She undertakes to atone by being useful and trying to win love. Thus is explained her constantly noting down compliments paid her and marks of affection shown her, which are to her necessary proofs that she has won the right to be alive. Yet, ignoring the care and the wonderful imaginative insight it has taken to build up and maintain Esther’s case, criticism habitually complains of her for showing the traits that are proof of Dickens’s indignant and compassionate understanding of an aspect of the life of his time that only a great novelist could demonstrate. Esther can hardly believe people when they tell her how useful, pretty and lovable she is and writes it all down to be able to. Esther has never been Pet or Baby to anyone and even in Mr Jarndyce’s circle her excessive maturity is recognized by nicknames like ‘Dame Durden’ and ‘Little Old Woman’.

  Esther has an interesting psychological consistency, and is the more remarkable for being Dickens’s first successful attempt at creating a girl from the inside – Florence Dombey is convincing only in childhood and Agnes never at any time. Esther is even a young lady too, so that to have established her through autobiography is a real triumph for such a thoroughly masculine writer. We know more about Esther than any other young woman in Dickens’s novels and she has more reality than any except Bella Wilfer (before Bella’s marriage). Esther is always true to her own peculiarities but they are not mannerisms; her individual sensibility is shown in her unusual sensitiveness to her surroundings anywhere and her quite personal descriptions of natural scenery. Chapter III, Esther’s first, is as a chapter one of the very best Dickens ever wrote in a mode not committed to satire (as the remarkable first chapter of Dombey is). Her submissiveness makes her blame herself whenever as a child she is unsuccessful in winning the affection she craves, but she never criticizes the others, so that her submissiveness becomes painful to us, as it was meant to. The psychology of an illegitimate child of her time can never have been caught with greater fidelity.18 She is intelligent through the intensity of her sensibility but, unlike Pip, not morally timid or weak. On the contrary, she demands respect by her strength of character and resourcefulness, which comes out in all her contacts with Mr Guppy, in her sympathy with Miss Flite, Caddy, Jenny, Jo and any other unfortunates she meets, and in her very natural self-compensation in instinctively mothering younger girls like Charley, Caddy and Ada. It is in keeping too that she doesn’t allow herself to entertain the idea that Allan Woodcourt is attracted by herself or that she is entitled to love and marry him, and that she should persuade herself it is her duty to refuse him in order to marry her guardian out of gratitude – this looks like Dickens reconsidering the idea of the Strong marriage and admitting his mistake there, for Jarndyce himself sees such a marriage would be wrong and resigns Esther to a more appropriate husband. Esther has forced herself to burn the treasured posy Woodcourt had left for her exactly as she had buried the beloved doll in her younger phase. (One is constantly surprised by Dickens’s persistence in ‘filling in’ Esther when he has so much else on his hands in this demanding novel.) What is even more remarkable is Dickens’s imaginative insight into her reactions to exceptional situations, as when, her looks having been ruined by the smallpox, she cannot bear to meet Ada in case she sees signs in Ada’s face of being shocked or repelled; after steeling herself to the meeting she hides behind the door at the last minute. When she learns from her mother the secret of her birth her second reaction – the first having been to reassure and comfort her mother – is to relapse into the feelings of her childhood and wish she had never been born. While it is Dickens who had treasured the anecdote of the village girl who, though literate, follows her illiterate bridegroom in making a cross instead of signing the marriage register, in order not to ‘shame him’, it is appropriate that the novelist should give it to Esther to tell and comfort herself with because it represents the delicacy of feeling19 which she desires to find in others at this point, to support her in her distress, against her fear of being shamed by those she loves. All this and much more in Esther’s history is proof that Dickens had the true creative artist’s power of feeling himself into and sustaining a character who is as far as possible from being himself. But there is even more striking testimony, in demonstrating that Dickens also understood that such a nature under such strains must develop signs of psychic stress, and though Esther is not driven to the borders of mania l
ike Miss Wade, Dickens gives remarkably convincing glimpses of her difficulties. When Esther has learnt that Lady Dedlock is her mother:

  Knowing that my mere existence as a living creature was an unforeseen danger in her way, I could not always conquer that terror of myself which had seized me when I first knew the secret. At no time did I dare to utter her name. I felt as if I did not even dare to hear it. If the conversation anywhere, when I was present, took that direction, as it sometimes naturally did, I tried not to hear it – I mentally counted, repeated something that I knew, or went out of the room. I am conscious, now, that I often did these things when there can have been no danger of her being spoken of; but I did them in the dread I had of hearing anything that might lead to her betrayal through me.

  Again, Dickens’s understanding of the relation between dreams and the hidden truths of experience is shown in Esther’s noting, without being able to say why, that she always dreamt of the period of her life when she lived with her aunt, and in her delirious dreams during her fever:

  Everything else seemed to have retired into a remote distance, where there was little or no separation between the various stages of my life which had really been divided by years. In falling ill, I seemed to have crossed a dark lake, and to have left all my experiences, mingled together by the great distance, on the healthy shore…. While I was vey ill, the way in which these divisions of time became confused with one another, distressed my mind exceedingly. At once a child, an elder girl, and the little woman I had been so happy as, I was not only oppressed by cares and difficulties adapted to each station, but by the great perplexity of endlessly trying to reconcile them … I laboured up colossal staircases, ever striving to reach the top, and ever turned, as I have seen a worm in a garden path, by some obstruction, and labouring again … that worse time when, strung together somewhere in great black space, there was a flaming necklace, or ring, or starry circle of some kind, of which I was one of the beads! And when my only prayer was to be taken off from the rest, and when it was such an inexplicable agony and misery to be a part of the dreadful thing.

  This last dream is the one that is representative of the theme of the novel, a nightmare version of what Ada and Richard had debated at the beginning of the novel when they had been inducted into the Chancery world where there is no freewill except in moral decisions. Esther can pray ‘to be taken off’ and not to be a ‘part of the dreadful thing’ but it is only by her love and sympathy that she can get off. We are in Bleak House well on the way to the prison world of Little Dorrit where each is locked into his own appointed or self-made cell, and to the still worse state of Pip in Great Expectations who, wholly passive, has not even moral choice until his world falls into ruins around him and he sees that he is tied hand and foot to the Newgate society by a contract he never knowingly entered into. Esther’s sensibility is unique in Dickens’s novels not only in being essentially feminine but in being different from the sensitiveness shown by other unhappy Dickens children, even Little Dorrit, who is a working-girl and not a lady and whose experience is limited to the society of the poor, and her possibilities of action very circumscribed. And Esther is mature, not innocent with David Copperfield’s disabilities, her early experiences having given her a precocious understanding of the painfulness of life and the cruelty of circumstance which enables her to understand John Jarndyce’s kind of innocent goodness and appreciate it and yet see that it was as to Skimpole self-indulgent and that Skimpoles need firm treatment (which she can and does provide). Yet she has womanly tact and, like the Ibsen of The Wild Duck, she sees that in some circumstances it is better to let well alone, in accordance with which she hopes that Caddy and Prince will never see through Mr Turveydrop but go on believing in him happily since they will have to put up with him anyway. Esther is not sentimentalized and as a good angel is altogether more acceptable than Agnes, showing an advance on that part of the previous novel. For Dickens is also prepared to show us Esther’s limitations – her shrinking from criticism of mothers (psychologically this is right, from her), as in her attempt to stop Caddy from judging her mother to have failed in her duty – Dickens is clearly on Caddy’s side here – and her own effort to deny her dislike of Mrs Woodcourt who is anxious her son should not be recognized by Esther as a suitor.

  It is necessary to insist on the success Esther represents for the novelist since she is so important to the novel as the registering consciousness and has been consistently underrated by critics; it is she through whom we apprehend the truth about Mr Vholes who is thus brought into the mode of the book as not merely a legal shark, like Conversation Kenge and Guppy, but a thematic presence. We might not rejoice in Esther’s society ourselves but she is impressive as a similar character, Fanny Price, is in Mansfield Park (another link with that novel, and there is something incipiently Victorian about both Fanny herself and Jane Austen’s attitude to her). Through Esther, as through Fanny, we get a just apprehension of the other performers in her world.

  *

  Esther is not the only case-history in Bleak House, since it seems that Dickens had the intention of showing that such a society warps its products (we are on the way to the disappearance of the Romantic image of childhood and its replacement by the sociologically realistic child produced by our Bleak House, the Doll’s Dressmaker). Mr Tulkinghorn is another masterly study in abnormality, though completely a human being – Dickens has outgrown the stage of throwing up inexplicable monsters like Fagin, Quilp, Squeers and Pecksniff. Yet Tulkinghorn, though all of a piece and thoroughly accounted for, is commonly seen as a mystery or an engine of melodrama. Actually, the only extraordinary thing about him is the contrast between his public self and his private self, that inner self which drives him; and while his innocuous public self makes him seem negligible to his employers, the revelation of his private self is terrifying to those who like Lady Dedlock stand in his way or arouse his antipathies. He lives only in his sense of power, hating Lady Dedlock for having more influence with her husband than himself, and all women for their role in life and that irrational nature of theirs which he can’t control. He has of necessity to suppress both his pleasure in dominating and his distaste for women, when with his employers, but relieves himself when it is safe to exhibit these passions openly as in bullying and torturing poor innocent George (because he has dared to withhold his specimen of Captain Hawdon’s handwriting – this chapter is called ‘The Turn of the Screw’ and George describes Mr Tulkinghorn as ‘a slow-torturing kind of man’), and torturing Lady Dedlock with his knowledge of her past and his threats of exposing her to her husband (though this is a bluff which she should have known he would never dare to bring off since his position depended on keeping the secrets of the aristocracy – ‘as it were, the steward of the legal mysteries, the butler of the legal cellar, of the Dedlocks’). He cheats and coarsely abuses the French maid to the point of goading her into murdering him – if she hadn’t, someone else eventually would have done, as Dickens intimates by showing the fateful Roman on the ceiling pointing eternally to Tulkinghorn’s predestined end. It is only Dickens (before Dostoievsky) who would comprehend that such a case as Mr Tulkinghorn invites murder. Content to move in the world in rusty black and never conversing, he rests on his sense of power and if possible exercises it discreetly even there, as when he enjoys telling Sir Leicester that Rouncewell has beaten him in the election, and in letting Lady Dedlock know in public that he has discovered her past, with the hint: ‘I leave you to imagine, Sir Leicester, the husband’s grief.’