by F. R. Leavis
APPENDIX B
Mayhew and Dickens
Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor was published in three volumes in 1851 and followed by a fourth in 1862. While confirmation for Dickens’s material accounts of the nature and sufferings of the lives of poor and submerged classes of Londoners, and country boys and girls attracted to London, are provided by Mayhew, the main interest for readers of Dickens’s novels is that he incidentally furnishes collateral evidence about the effects on children of having to support themselves and younger brother and sisters, which bear out what in Dickens’s novels might be disbelieved otherwise. Dickens, in his constant patrolling of the streets of London – his ‘magic lantern’ – for exercise and inspiration, and in his considerable charities, had plenty of opportunities of making his own observations, but Mayhew, being factual, escapes the possible charge of romanticizing or sentimentalizing his evidence, though evidently he must in the cases of his underworld characters have frequently bowdlerized what he was told for publication.
As to the truth to life of Charley and her family in Bleak House, Amy Dorrit in Little Dorrit and Jenny Wren in Our Mutual Friend, Mayhew in some of his characters, such as the Orphan Flower Girl and the Water Cress Girl, gives confirmation of the unchildlike nature, the respectability maintained under the most unlikely circumstances, the fortitude, and the touching depth of affection and unselfishness of such children, as well as their (and many old people too) having Betty Higden’s pride in not taking charity and in escaping the workhouse (or ‘Union’).
He tells of ‘The little watercress girl, who, although only eight years of age, had entirely lost all childish ways, and was, indeed, in thoughts and manner, a woman. There was something cruelly pathetic in hearing this infant, so young that her features had scarcely formed themselves, talking of the bitterest struggles of her life, with the calm earnestness of one who had endured them all. I did not know how to talk with her … Her little face, pale and thin with privation, was wrinkled where the dimples ought to have been, and she would sigh frequently.’ She had already been a twelvemonth in the streets selling cresses and before that had taken care of a young baby with real pleasure. When she got home she scrubbed the floor ‘“and put the room to rights … All my money I earns I puts in a club and draws out to buy clothes with. It’s better than spending it in sweet-stuff, for them as has a living to earn. Besides it’s like a child to care for sugar-sticks, and not like one who’s got a living and vittals to earn. I ain’t a child but I’m past eight, I am.”’ etc.
The orphan flower-girl supported her younger sister and brother with what help they could give, sharing one room with a married couple, the woman (their landlady) giving the children friendly services like Mrs Blinder. The eldest, now fifteen, told Mayhew: ‘“Mother died seven years ago last Guy Faux day. I’ve got myself, and my brother and sister, a bit o’ bread ever since, and never had any help but from the neighbours. I never troubled the parish. … We can all read. I put myself and I put my brother and sister to a Roman Catholic school – and to Ragged schools. My brother can write, and I pray to God that he’ll do well with it,”’ etc.
Hence we can trust Dickens in his presentation of such characteristics – to us of the Welfare State Society unbelievable – as he attributes to his Dolls’ Dressmaker and to young sister-mothers like Lizzie Hexam, Little Dorrit and Charley, while we may note that their impressive qualities, as well as their sufferings and sacrifices and stunted physique, were brought into being and operation by that social system which Dickens criticizes so radically. Self-help, one of its by-products, is after all the best kind of help. (Dickens’s findings on what the Welfare State ethos has done in altering the character, mentality and outlook of the English working-class – that is, on the Trade Union state of mind thus engendered – would also have been worth having.) From his observation of the London streets alone Dickens must clearly have been struck by the difference between the premature gravity, the precocity and the excessive responsibilities of the children of the poor, in contrast to what he saw to be the arrested development, particularly of the girls, of the petted children of the well-off, so much so as to make this a recurrent and ultimately a leading idea in his novels.
Mayhew also frees Dickens from charges of sentimentalizing the poor, for he documents Dickens’s belief that it was the poor who showed sympathy and charity for the destitute, that aged husbands and wives in extreme poverty and illness could show themselves, in Mayhew’s own words, ‘heroic’ in their devoted attachment and loyalty to each other, and he illustrates the touching affection of the shockingly poor in their human relations, as well as the liveliness of language in idiom and capabilities of self-expression in the illiterate and ignorant of all ages then. His interviews with what he called ‘the humbler classes’ in their homes and in the streets of London furnish evidence of the actuality of Artful Dodgers and Noah Claypoles, Fagins, Orlicks and Magwitches, Martha Endells, Betty Higdens, Lizzie Hexams and Little Dorrits. We have his evidence of the truth of Dickens’s observation of the clinging to respectability, or the still more astonishing yearning for it, in those almost or quite at the bottom of the social and moral ladder, as a Victorian characteristic. What we might dismiss as the improbable fantasy-dreams related by Jenny Wren are realized in the case of the Crippled Street Bird-Seller (‘I’ve never seemed to myself to be a cripple in my dreams. Well, I can’t explain how, but I feel as if my limbs was all free like – so beautiful’ etc.)
Dickens of course was quite capable of doing his own Mayhewing, and from his letters, and articles in periodicals, as well as his early (pre-Mayhew) novels, can be seen to have done so.
1. Dickens wrote to Wills in 1858: ‘I particularly wish you to look well to Wilkie’s article … and not to leave anything in it that may be sweeping and unnecessarily offensive to the middle class. He always has a tendency to overdo that.’ Note the ‘unnecessarily’ and the ‘overdo’ which show the presence of integrity with the desire not to alienate, in Dickens’s attitude to the question I have been discussing. Wilkie Collins was aggressively Bohemian in his habits and enjoyed sniping at the virtuous, which Dickens had more sense than to encourage.
2. Dickens is not the only novelist whose prefaces are liable to mislead. Henry James often seems, by the time he came to write a Preface, to have forgotten why he wrote the novel (this is particularly evident in the preface to The Awkward Age). Dickens did in fact disapprove of prefaces on principle: ‘a book should speak for and explain itself’, he wrote.
3. The association of legal processes with fog is already present in Pickwick Papers where the rascally lawyers are called ‘Dodson and Fogg’ and are denounced eventually by their victim Mr Pickwick as ‘mean, rascally, pettifogging robbers’. ‘It is all summed up in that’, he repeats.
4. Though Past and Present was not published till 1843, the gist of the ‘Present’ section appeared in 1840, as ‘Chartism’.
5. Miss Flite’s reiterated ‘youth, hope and beauty’ is echoed by Mr George in describing his abiding devotion to his officer Captain Hawdon, who, he says, ‘had been young, hopeful and handsome in the days gone by’ and ‘went to ruin’ like Miss Flite and Richard; and, it is implied, this is the fate of mankind in general ‘in Chancery’. In the novel’s present Captain Hawdon is the wretched, degraded, Nemo, the law-writer, who kills himself with opium and is thrust into a pauper’s mass grave, having become nobody. The elegiac note that characterizes Bleak House is sounded at the announcement of Richard and Ada’s engagement: ‘So young, so beautiful, so full of hope and promise, they went lightly on through the sunlight, as their own happy thoughts might then be traversing the years to come, and making them all years of brightness. So they passed away into the shadow, and were gone.’
6. Dickens constantly uses the symbol of the caged bird, and in such a Blakean context that one would be inclined to believe that he must have been acquainted with Blake’s lyrics. Particularly ‘The Schoolboy’ in Songs of Experien
ce, which is so close to the Blimber section of Dombey and Son – which has a Blake-like lyric in prose as a separate ending to the novel, summarizing the theme: the new generation of Dombey children are wandering ‘free and stirring’ on the beach. Blake’s enquiry: ‘How can the bird that is born for joy sit in the cage and sing?’ is repeated in the history of little Paul who is described pining in his room at Dr Blimber’s as ‘breasting the window of his solitary cage when birds flew by, as if he would have emulated them, and soared away’ – probably the first form in which the idea of Miss Flite’s birds was conceived by Dickens. However, I notice one even earlier, when the wretched boys, released by Squeers’s imprisonment, escape from Dotheboys Hall, some young children who have no homes to go to are in even worse plight at being loose, ‘frightened by the solitude’ (cage birds indeed!) of whom ‘One had a dead bird in a little cage; he had wandered nearly twenty miles, and when his poor favourite died, lost courage, and lay down beside him.’ More explicitly, when the grown-up David Copperfield passes Salem House, his old school: ‘I would have given all I had, for lawful permission to get down and thrash him (the headmaster), and let all the boys out like so many caged sparrows.’ Esther, after the break-up of the only home she has known, goes off to school in a stage-coach with her bird-cage at her feet, having buried her doll as a sign that her childhood is ended. Arthur Clennam’s mother was ‘The singing-bird kept in a cage.’
7. Dickens has dispensed with the diabolical; all evil in Bleak House is in certain human instincts that his form of society sanctions and institutionalizes. The Devil is an unnecessary concept. Krook remarks to Mr Tulkinghorn of Nemo: ‘They say he has sold himself to the enemy; but you and I know better – he don’t buy.’
8. Those who would write off Mr Chadband as a slanderous fiction and his idiom as too grossly nonsensical even for a caricature, must remember that Leonard Woolf, disgusted with the verbiage of Middleton Murry’s spiritual utterances in The Adelphi, once mixed sentences or phrases of Chadband’s with passages from Murry’s unctuous prose and defied the reader (successfully) to distinguish the two. Moreover, research has shown that Chadband’s is only a slight caricature of the customary idiom of purveyors of improving and spiritual ideas at that date.
9. Dickens’s Will as printed by Forster in an appendix to the Life ends:
‘I rest my claims to the remembrance of my country upon my published works, and to my friends upon their experience of me in addition thereto. I commit my soul to the mercy of God through our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, and I exhort my dear children humbly to try to guide themselves by the teaching of the New Testament in its broad spirit, and to put no faith in any man’s narrow construction of its letter here or there.’
Dickens himself was considered as a valuable unifying Christian influence through his novels, by many of his contemporaries, since he operated a highest common factor of Christian attitudes and implied values without activating the aggressive forces that resided in the different practices of worship.
10. If we remember the comparable dialogue in The Old Curiosity Shop between the magistrate and the two mothers, one of them of a deaf-and-dumb boy, which is conducted in rhetorical stage terms and is merely an unconnected episode dropped into the novel arbitrarily and inserted as something overheard by accident, but not comprehended by, Little Nell, and then forgotten, we can see both how much more of an artist Dickens now is and also how he trusts the reader – or how far he can now afford to ignore the limitations as readers of much of his public. Dickens in 1860 wrote to Wilkie Collins: ‘You know that I always contest your disposition to give an audience credit for nothing, which necessarily involves the forcing of points on their attention’.
11. For the Victorian novelists’ use of the idea of the doctor and medical science v. Appendix A.
12. Dickens approves as a class of soldiers, sailors, and doctors, who are all protectors, whereas he sees lawyers, most schoolmasters and officers of the then local government (especially beadles) and of Victorian religion (especially self-appointed chapel ministers) as preying on society or the psyche. In Bleak House we note Esther, the sensitive and enquiring consciousness, speculating that Richard’s having been eight years at Winchester and spending them largely in making Latin verses as an end in itself and learning nothing much besides, may be responsible for his unsatisfactoriness – because ‘having never had much chance of finding out what he was fit for’ – ‘I wondered whether Latin verses often ended in this.’ Dickens however took pains to follow Dr Blimber’s cramming academy by the favourable picture of a Dr Strong’s and in Our Mutual Friend pays tribute to the function of the parish clergyman and his wife. Dickens has a well-thought-out selective criticism of his society and does not use his remarkable powers of ridicule and satire irresponsibly – perhaps the true sign of great art. It would in any other age than ours be unnecessary to point this out, but in the world of Kingsley Amis – he is a portent, since reviewers in serious quarters and academic critics are visibly unwilling or afraid to make adverse judgements on his productions – this is not axiomatic. It is worth pointing out here, as throwing into relief Dickens’s achievement, that all that now constitutes what Coleridge described as the clerisy, our only bastions against barbarism, are the consistent and systematic objects of Amis’s animus: in turn his fictions have taken as targets for denigration the university lecturer, the librarian, the man of letters, the serious novelist, the grammar-schoolmaster, the learned societies, the social worker; I used to remark that he would in time get to the parson, and I gather from the reviews that his last novel does. Dickens, besides making the careful discriminations that I’ve noted, also took care to dissociate himself from two kinds of writers – the amateur and aesthete (Skimpole) and the man occupying Amis’s position – Henry Gowan.
13. Disraeli in Coningsby (1844) provided Dickens, I feel sure, with the situation represented by Sir Leicester and the ironmaster with his private bank, in his similar antagonists the superb elderly Marquess of Monmouth and the wealthy Lancashire manufacturer Mr Millbank. Though they have no personal confrontation Millbank wins an election for his candidate against the Marquess’s similarly, by his energy and speeches, also sets up his family in an estate neighbouring the Marquess’s. Millbank has similar ambitions to Rouncewell’s for his children: his ‘opinions were of a very democratic bent’ so he ‘sent his son to Eton, though he disapproved of the system of education pursued there, to show that he had as much right to do so as any duke in the land. He had, however, brought up his only boy with a due prejudice against every sentiment or institution of an aristocratic character.’ Disraeli presents Millbank with the same mixture of respect and a little amusement as Dickens does Rouncewell, but his attitude to Monmouth is much more one of firm rejection than Dickens’s to Sir Leicester Dedlock, for Disraeli while appreciating the grand style and the high development of individuality that the old aristocracy achieved, understood that its basis was amoral and heartlessly selfish, and this he exhibits with wit, subtlety and controlled disgust, in a quite Stendhalian way. Disraeli in this novel also as Dickens does, attacks ‘the idolatry of Respectability’, and there is a gentleman who feels the east wind when made morally uncomfortable, like John Jarndyce. Basic to Coningsby even more than to Bleak House is the idea of playing off the still-wealthy and proud landowner who has lost his political power with the passing of pocket-boroughs, against the new-rich manufacturer-banker, equally class-conscious and proud of a superiority of achievement which determines him to usurp the privileges of the effete aristocracy, their battle-ground being inevitably the elections for Parliament.
14. It is noticeable that Dickens makes up for this inconsistency by stressing the defects of the Dedlock caste – satirizing poor harmless Volumnia, the dandy cousins, the Coodle and Doodle factions, and by providing a comic caricature of the gentleman in his great days (George IV’s) in old Mr Turveydrop, the bogus representative of Deportment who throws a satiric light on the genuine Grand Style o
f Sir Leicester himself.
15. Dickens’s view of the nature and function of an aristocracy is here remarkably like Yeats’s, who saw the great house as the creation and home of proud, passionate, violent men who thereby nourished the arts and inspired artists to creativity.
16. This is very neat: Skimpole is tied into the thematic structure of the novel as a renegade doctor. Cf. Kingsley’s Romantic poetaster in Two Years Ago who deserted his medical apprenticeship for poetry and comes to a bad end, discussed in Appendix A.
17. If this is thought too much to believe of even a Skimpole, we may remember Wilde shows in The Picture of Dorian Gray that the aesthete does not, quite logically, shrink even from murder if his comfort demands it.
18. About ten years ago one of our most responsible newspapers printed an article enquiring about illegitimacy in these post-Victorian times when no one believes in Miss Barbary’s religious horror of it, and published an interesting correspondence that ensued from many wishing to give their own experience. This bore out surprisingly Dickens’s insights. One started: ‘I am illegitimate, and have been in social work for 20 years, so I have had ample opportunity to study the problem. I have noticed one point above all: whatever their background or experience, illegitimates seem to feel the need to apologize for their existence…’