Dickens the Novelist

by F. R. Leavis

  There are other family lawyers or lawyer-surrogates in Victorian novels who have some of Mr Tulkinghorn’s traits in a milder form – one thinks of, among others, Mr Forrester the agent of Trollope’s Duke of Omnium, Mathew Jermyn the family lawyer of the Transomes in Felix Holt, with his own knowledge of the lady’s guilty past, and Disraeli’s Baptist Hatton, in Sybil – all secretive men of power who manage their clients’ affairs to their own satisfaction – but none has the dreadful consistency and desire to torture of Dickens’s creation here. Dickens’s characters such as Bounderby and Tulkinghorn impinge uniquely on the reader because they represent an essence, containing the essential truth about some aspect of their society without being diluted by all the inessentials that make the characters of other novelists more acceptably ‘lifelike’. Thus Mrs Gaskell’s mill-owner Mr Thornton in North and South (co-eval with Hard Times) though first presented as rebarbative is carefully composed of both good qualities and obnoxious views about his ‘hands’ and the manufacturing ethos; eventually he is shown reclaimed by the heroine and circumstances, and fit for her to marry. He has in fact all the attitudes and principles and most of the traits of the bad Victorian mill-owner out of which Dickens has composed his Bounderby, but Mr Thornton’s significant characteristics have been so diluted and so counter-balanced by better qualities, to achieve authorial fairness, that their real viciousness can hardly be apprehended. Dickens, by selecting the essence of the type, his unique characteristics, and then activating the character so formed in a context which brings out their significance with a startling degree of vividness, lit up by sardonic humour, achieves a more important kind of success as art and criticism of life. (From instances in Francis Place’s Life it seems there were far more brutal masters even than Bounderby in the earlier period.)

  Turn to Mr Vholes and one realizes the inclusiveness of the mode of Bleak House, which is followed by a triumph of exclusive art in Hard Times, for Vholes represents a feat of creative brilliance in complexity, and in neither of the conventions that determine Esther and Tulkinghorn; he is not limited by psychological consistency or uniform presentation. He starts by being little more than a rhetorical conception to expose the true nature of the new Victorian middle-class ideal, respectability (in chapter XXXIX ‘Attorney and Client’), but just previously, in Esther’s first encounter with him, we get an intimation of his meaning in the general purpose of the novel:

  Dressed in black, black-gloved, and buttoned to the chin, there was nothing so remarkable in him as a lifeless manner, and a slow fixed way he had of looking at Richard … and now I observed that he was further remarkable for an inward manner of speaking … I never shall forget those two seated side by side in the lantern’s light; Richard, all flush and fire and laughter, with the reins in his hand; Mr Vholes, quite still, black-gloved and buttoned up, looking at him as if he were looking at his prey and charming it. I have before me the whole picture of the warm dark night, the summer lightning, the dusty track of road closed in by hedgerows and high trees, the gaunt pale horse with his ears pricked up, and the driving away at speed to Jarndyce and Jarndyce.

  Vholes has entangled Richard in the Jarndyce case and is to assist at his ruin; he is now come to take him back to London to watch the action in court. We hardly need the evocation of Death’s pale horse to identify the nature of the black figure with his lifelessness and inward manner of speaking and gaze riveted on his prey, to identify who is driving with Richard and to where.

  In the second appearance, which is in the third-person narrative, we first get an account of Vholes’s chambers in Symond’s Inn, remarkably like the allegorical description of Barnard’s Inn later in Great Expectations only here sinister and not humorous in tone. All the imagery associated with Vholes is sinister – e.g. his blue bags of legal documents are ‘hastily stuffed, out of all regularity of form, as the larger sorts of serpents are in their first gorged state’; he is identified with ‘the official cat’; he looks at Richard ‘never winking his hungry eyes’. Thus we come to Vholes himself. The name describes a rodent who undermines river-banks, the vole, but this was also used throughout the Victorian Age in a well-known term meaning ‘to win all the tricks’ in such card-games as écarté and other gambling-games of skill, and it would be quite like the Dickens of Bleak House to intend such a pun. We may compare Sir Leicester Dedlock’s attributing anything democratic that comes to his notice to an outbreak of Wat Tylerism and his Wat Tylerish adversary the ‘new man’ Mr Rouncewell having named his son Watt (after the inventor who launched the industrial age with steam power); this is a pun that Dickens undoubtedly intended, and I have noted others already.

  Thus prepared, we approach Vholes as a representative figure in his age:

  Mr Vholes is a very respectable man. He has not a large business, but he is a very respectable man. He is allowed by the greater attorneys who have made good fortunes, or are making them, to be a most respectable man. He never misses a chance in his practice; which is a mark of respectability. He never takes any pleasure; which is another mark of respectability. He is reserved and serious; which is another mark of respectability. His digestion is impaired, which is highly respectable. And he is making hay of the grass which is flesh, for his three daughters. And his father is dependent on him in the Vale of Taunton.

  Mr Vholes is cited by the forces of reaction, on account of his respectability, as reason for blocking all attempts at reform of the English law:

  … Take a few more steps in this direction, say they, and what is to become of Vholes’s father? Is he to perish? And of Vholes’s daughters? Are they to be shirt-makers or governesses? As though, Mr Vholes and his relations being minor cannibal chiefs, and it being proposed to abolish cannibalism, indignant champions were to put the case thus: Make man-eating unlawful, and you starve the Vholeses!

  Evidently Dickens had a Shakespearean model in mind here, as so often in Bleak House,20 in this case the ironic technique of Mark Antony in his funeral oration on Caesar, the shifting implications of ‘honourable man’ being paralleled by the gradual undermining of the concept of ‘respectable man’. Thus we learn successively that a respectable man is expected to have a large business, that a reliable testimony to respectability is that of attorneys who have made large fortunes out of the law ‘or are making them’ – we know how, having sat in on Chancery procedure for over half the novel – and now (coming into the open) that a mark of respectability is to be unscrupulous. This, Dickens was telling his readers, is what your ideal of respectability is worth! Then we get another glimpse of respectability as conceived by a society that is in Chancery: ‘He never takes any pleasure’ – to do so would be a waste of time and a reprehensible desire to enjoy oneself (hits at the Evangelical and the business outlooks, which are seen to converge here). The sense of how ridiculous all this is has for the moment replaced Dickens’s indignation and contempt and the author of Pickwick emerges to pillory the notion that to enjoy food and conviviality should be now held to be reprehensible. The joking parody of piety follows in the finale: ‘And he is making hay of the grass which is flesh, for his three daughters.’ The last thrust and its repetitions in the following paragraphs of the rhetoric are like the irony of Matthew Arnold in Culture and Anarchy and have a similar target – Puritanism and middle-class morality in the Victorian Age. The argument about the nature of English institutions in general is developed with wit as well as high spirits from the fact that Mr Vholes is too respectable to be sacrificed – ‘As though, Mr Vholes and his relations being minor cannibal chiefs, and it being proposed to abolish cannibalism, indignant champions were to put the case thus: Make man-eating unlawful, and you starve the Vholeses!’ In fact, the Vholeses do live by man-eating and the joke reminds us of the actuality.

  So that we then see Mr Vholes in his personally sinister aspect again:

  Mr Vholes, quiet and unmoved, as a man of so much respectability ought to be, takes off his close black gloves as if he were skinning his hands, lifts
off his tight black hat as if he were scalping himself, and sits down at his desk … and proceeds in his buttoned-up half-audible voice, as if there were an unclean spirit in him that will neither come out nor speak out.

  – where the sinister implications of their being nothing under the gloves but a skeletal hand and nothing under the hat but a skull is capped by the concluding suggestion that this corpse is animated by an evil spirit. Urging Richard then to put his trust in Vholes’s zeal for his cause, he says: ‘“This desk is your rock, sir!” Mr Vholes gives it a rap, and it sounds as hollow as a coffin.’

  The final impression of Vholes comes from Esther and has therefore her peculiar perceptiveness:

  I happened to turn my eyes towards the house, and I saw a long thin shadow going in which looked like Mr Vholes … Mr Vholes who had looked at me while speaking, here emerged into the silence he could hardly be said to have broken, so stifled was his tone … gauntly stalked to the fire, and warmed his funeral gloves. … Mr Vholes put his dead glove, which scarcely seemed to have any hand in it, on my fingers, and took his long thin shadow away. I thought of it on the outside of the coach, passing over all the sunny landscape between us and London, chilling the seed in the ground as it glided along.

  Thus Vholes, by the sensitive Esther, is perceived to be nothing but his shadow – a shadow without a man – an ‘it’, no hand in the glove, no voice to break the silence; we don’t need to speculate what Esther feels the shadow is of as she imagines it, in that blood-curdling image, ‘chilling the seed in the ground’ wherever it passed between Jarndyce’s Bleak House and that other Bleak House made by Chancery. The macabre effect of Mr Vholes is free from any touch of the theatrical or the melodramatic in its creation in simple and unrhetorical words; he weaves in and out of the other characters’ lives, fixing on Richard as his prey whom no one – wife or friend – can save, intimating that life in the Chancery world is a Dance of Death. In any novel before Copperfield Dickens would have presented Vholes in a Hogarthian satiric mode, but there is nothing of the eighteenth-century satiric or of Hogarth’s moral commentary on his age in these images.

  Bleak House thus has an extraordinary imaginative richness which is not just a matter of length or of showing a complete social world from the pinnacle of fashion to the London slum and from the High Court of Chancery to Chesney Wold. Its greatness lies in its genuine complexity, variety that is fully controlled in the interest of a deeply-felt theme without thereby being impoverished as Our Mutual Friend may be felt to have been. And yet the path Dickens followed from Dombey to Hard Times and Little Dorrit passes, as I’ve shown, through David Copperfield and Bleak House necessarily, and without these two experiments he would not have got there. There is a more profound and sober understanding in Bleak House than in any previous Dickens novel of the nature of living and the interaction of members of a society, though I can’t agree that the chain of cause and effect that brings Lady Dedlock to her death in the clothes of the brickmaker’s wife at the threshold of the paupers’ burial-ground is convincing: it is, however, felt to be right in the context of the novel, which is perhaps sufficient – reason may baulk at it afterwards but the whole mode of the novel undercuts a merely rational reading. Is it made sufficiently clear that Lady Dedlock is being punished not for a ‘guilty’ past but for being the pinnacle of an irresponsible society? I think so, for no one in the novel except the contemptible characters or the unco’ guid has anything but compassion towards her and Captain Hawdon, and her relation with him is shown as the only real life she had had. Two genuine lovers were doomed to misery and disgrace, a tragedy forecasting Ada and Richard’s. Quite unambiguous and a more subtle moral point is that Esther has to lose her looks for her charity and humanity in taking in Jo and nursing Charley – good intentions are irrelevant if one is part of a society based on injustice and irresponsibility, making the point that society is one and indivisible as regards infectious diseases at least. Carlyle had pointed this out by delaring in Past and Present that in the laissez-faire state there was one sole link between high and low: typhus fever. Kingsley two years earlier in Alton Locke had found a novelistic form for Carlyle’s idea by showing in his terrible account of the tailors’ sweatshops how typhus and other diseases due to the disgusting conditions in which the tailors worked and lived were transmitted to the well-to-do via the clothes made for them there, and no doubt Dickens adapted this for his own purpose in Bleak House. It is impossible to read nineteenth-century novels in bulk without coming to the conclusion, I find, that the Victorian novelists read and used each other’s work quite as freely as Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatists did theirs. This was more or less recognized, the Early Victorian novelists being inevitably the main source of ideas and techniques. Thus Dickens wrote resignedly in a letter in 1852 about Uncle Tom’s Cabin: ‘She (I mean Mrs Stowe) is a leetle unscrupulous in the appropriatin’ way. I seem to see a writer with whom I am very intimate (and whom nobody can possibly admire more than myself) peeping very often through the thinness of the paper. Further I descry the ghost of Mary Barton, and the very palpable mirage of a scene in The Children of the Mist; but in spite of this, I consider the book a fine one.’ We may also remember Thackeray’s feeling – of satisfaction, not resentment – that he thought Dickens with David Copperfield had improved by turning to domestic life and the history of a young man’s difficulties and progress, by taking a leaf out of his book (Pendennis, 1848–1850). I have argued in my introductory essay to Miss Marjoribanks by Mrs Oliphant (Chatto & Windus) that George Eliot was indebted to it for the new tone and attitude to her heroine of Middlemarch, while Mrs Oliphant had herself evidently arrived at the idea of her ‘Chronicles of Carlingford’ series, of which Miss Marjoribanks formed part, by the success in the previous decade that novelists had had with Cranford, Barchester and Milby (the scene of the last of George Eliot’s ‘Scenes from Clerical Life’). The complicated inter-relatedness of Oliver Twist, Jane Eyre and David Copperfield I have already illustrated. A great deal of the Victorian novelists’ achievement is due to such cross-fertilization, illustrated still more by Henry James’s debt to them for themes, characters, settings, ideas, symbols and imagery – above all those of Dickens and George Eliot.

  IV

  I would like to illustrate what I meant by saying that there is a new Dickens mode in Bleak House over and above the numerous points of growth that I have pointed to in David Copperfield which are seen developed here. There is this extraordinary combination of the painfully serious that tends towards the macabre even, which yet consorts with a high-spirited, witty and sometimes humorous apprehension of life without discordance, and runs to a finer awareness of the quality of personality and human relations – I think of Dickens’s writing of the trooper George: ‘from his superfluity of life and strength seeming to shed down temporary vigour upon’ the dying Jo, or of the Bleak House of the poor’s existence in the country as seen in this bird’s eye view:

  On the waste, where the brick-kilns are burning with a pale blue flare; where the straw-roofs of the wretched huts in which the bricks are made, are being scattered to the wind; where the clay and water are hard frozen, and the mill in which the gaunt blind horse goes round all day, look like an instrument of torture …

  and which yet exist without incongruity in the same novel as this grimly funny account of a Victorian funeral (Mr Tulkinghorn’s), recording a ridiculous ritual of the age; too high-spirited for a Hogarth or a Gillray satire, it is characteristically Dickensian in tone:

  … strictly speaking, there are only three other human followers, but the amount of inconsolable carriages is immense. The peerage contributes more four-wheeled affliction than has ever been seen in that neighbourhood. Such is the assemblage of armorial bearings on coach panels, that the Heralds’ College might be supposed to have lost its father and mother at a blow. The Duke of Foodle sends a splendid pile of dust and ashes, with silver wheel-boxes, patent axles, all the last improvements, and three bereaved worms,
six feet high, holding on behind, in a bunch of woe. All the state coachmen in London seem plunged into mourning; and if that dead old man of the rusty garb …

  The absurdity of the parade of mourning without any real mourners is not only a macabre joke, it is presented as another instance of the Chancery way of life. Thus Dickens is also able to let us savour the humours relevant to Sir Leicester – who ‘repeats in a killing voice: “The young man of the name of Guppy?”’ or (a hit at a Victorian characteristic) is ‘not so much shocked by the fact, as the fact of the fact being mentioned’, those brought out by the colloquies between Sir Leicester and Mr Bucket with his new classless familiarity which is without deference but is willing to humour: ‘If there’s a blow to be inflicted on you, you naturally think of your family. You ask yourself, how would all them ancestors of yours, away to Julius Caesar – not to go beyond him at the present – have borne that blow?’ and the debilitated cousin’s ‘Haven’t a doubt – zample – far better hang wrong fler than no fler.’ The presentation of Mrs Pardiggle is of the same order, with her voice that impressed Esther’s fancy ‘as if it had a sort of spectacles on too’, who ‘pulled out a good book as if it were a constable’s staff, and took the whole family into custody’ but who is still less of a joke, for it is clear that it is she and her kind who erected the ‘iron barrier’ which Esther was ‘painfully sensible’ existed ‘between us and those people’ (the brick-makers whose homes Mrs Pardiggle is shown invading).

  Mr Guppy has only to be compared to Dickens’s earlier examples of the Cockney-clerk model, such as Dick Swiveller, to see that he is at least as entertaining but also a great deal more than a joke: he is further illustration of the theme of the novel, and the amusing and the serious aspects of him are quite inseparable, from his first introducing himself into Chesney Wold (when it is not open to the public) in that idiom Dickens handles so expertly: ‘Us London lawyers don’t often get an out’, and his forcing himself on Lady Dedlock to prise her secrets out of her to assist him in marrying Esther, in order to advance himself in the world, throughout his proposals and retractions of his proposal to Esther in his characteristic mixture of legal jargon and romantic clichés. Dickens is a master of the use of the clichés of Romanticism (and unlike Mark Twain he sees that they represent something more than an absurdity). The Romantic and its idiom had indeed fallen on evil days and into vulgar minds by mid-Victorian times. Mostly a blend of the tricks and sentimentality of Byron at his worst, Tom Moore and Victorian drawing-room ballads, the language of feeling and sentiment is used to amuse by Dickens with a full appreciation of its ludicrous inappropriateness to his Dick Swivellers, Young John Chiveries, Mr Moddles and so forth of lowish life, and to sentimental young ladies like Julia Mills. But in William Guppy’s use it sharpens a satire: the sentimental idiom and professions never for a moment prevent Mr Guppy from putting his business interests first. The lifelessness and artificiality of this jargon bring out the remoteness of such sentiments from anything Guppy really feels and is actuated by; the fact of such a meaningless idiom being in use to express alleged feeling is proof that such a society has no real feelings to express of this kind, but that it has a desire to lay claim to a language of the heart, because it is somehow aware that self-interest is not enough, an unconscious recognition of a fact on which Dickens’s optimism is based. Only a Bitzer, constructed by the novelist for the purpose of showing the impossibility of a human machine actuated solely by self-interest, can exist without the idealism and feelings that make us human, and Mr Guppy is far from being a Bitzer. The human complexity is registered in his ‘going with one leg and staying with the other’ when he is torn between what his decent instincts tell him is mean behaviour to Esther and what his self-interest tells him is expedient, when in spite of his ‘witness-box face’ he can’t help showing he is ashamed, and is therefore a pitiable human being; his discomfort is heightened when he discovers that Esther has in fact come to let him off, making a scene essentially humorous but not simply comic. Setting off the absurdity of his sentimental idiom is the fact that his genuine affection for his very trying mother is always expressed in restrained exasperation – the Guppys are a great advance on the Heep mother and son. Thus though Mr Guppy is an agent of Chancery and so trained that sharp practice is second nature to him (he is the precursor of Mr Jaggers in carrying over to private life the habit of cross-examination as a form of conversation) he has another nature too, the first nature of all human beings (Dickens thinks), if only it were given a chance. A pathetic example of this need for an idealism, the consciousness that something is needed outside Chancery practice to make life worth living, is shown in Guppy’s and his friends’ passion for connoisseuring fashionable British Beauty and covering their walls with the Galaxy Gallery collection of engravings of it; even the Bitzer-like Bart Smallweed has his ideal and models himself on Guppy, in spite of his grandfather’s admonitions.