Dickens
Page 36
The personal themes of Bleak House are inseparable from the social and philosophical. Esther’s abandonment is as much the product of false social values as it is of maternal unnatural-ness. Her redemption derives partly from the existence of benevolent forces in a generally corrupt social structure, mostly from her innate goodness, the strength and depth of her moral sentiments. Like her creator, she has the inner resources to triumph over adversity. She also has help. Standing as counterpoint to Dickens’ successful struggle with abandonment and impoverishment, Jo the crossing sweep embodies his childhood fear of orphanhood and lifelong anxiety about money. Those feelings, though, are correlatives in the novel for Dickens’ analysis of the sharklike materialism of nineteenth-century capitalistic England, whose wealth was, he believed, based partly on the exploitation and brutalization of surplus labor. It was a culture that needed orphans. The unprotected were malleable raw material to be purchased cheaply, for the mills, mines, and factories, for the knee-deep-mud-and-feces street crossings of London. Convinced that England was divided into the rich and the poor, without a middle class to speak of, he found the apathy, ignorance, and unwarranted power of the upper classes increasingly threatening to the social equilibrium that he believed a healthy and humane class structure promoted. Somewhere, somehow, things had gone disastrously wrong with the body politic. The symptoms were class conflict and social disease: poverty, ignorance, crime, dislocation, typhoid, cholera. Their fictional and psychological representations are shameful secrets of parenthood and plot, intricate and twisted chains of misery.
In Bleak House he untwists the chains and unravels the plots sufficiently to promote possibilities of personal if not societal redemption. No matter how gloomy the contemporary reality, he maintained a residual hope for social reform. As the decade advanced, he did become more selective about which causes he would actively support. His energy and his privacy became even more precious to him. He also, though, began to fear that unless some of the blatant problems were addressed, bloody revolution in the French manner would be the English fate. Though the legal system that he satirizes, remembering his costly Chancery effort to stop piracies of his novels, was in the process of being reformed while he wrote Bleak House, he found it convenient to use as a symbol of the society as a whole. The middle class was small, fragmented, subservient, the lower class mentally as well as physically enslaved, taught to kiss the hand of its master. And the master could not readily see that it was in his self-interest to be humane. For the characters of Bleak House who are not destroyed by the system or their own weaknesses, salvation resides in personal strength, in encouraging the innate moral sentiments, in rejecting materialism in favor of love and charity, and in accepting the responsibilities of constructive work. For the angry voice of the author-narrator, moving restlessly though the novel like a prophetic spirit, there seems to be no rest, no salvation, except, perhaps, in that most restless of all activities, writing novels.
Returning from Italy in December 1853, Dickens soon succumbed to pressure to write a new novel for weekly serial publication in Household Words. In Birmingham, he read A Christmas Carol twice, first to an audience of 1,700 people who came despite a heavy snow storm, then to 2,000 working people, for the benefit of the Birmingham and Midland Institute. Between those two performances, he read The Cricket on the Hearth. With his special interest in working-class education, he felt pleased that it would be “impossible to imagine … a more delicately observant audience.… They lost nothing, misinterpreted nothing, followed everything closely, laughed and cried with most delightful earnestness.” He felt as if he were talking to a group of friends around his fireside. It had the effect of both an emotional and an intellectual high, animating him “to that extent that I felt as if we were all bodily going up into the clouds together.” The sales of Household Words also needed to be raised. Though he had had no intention of beginning a new novel until the next autumn, “there is such a fixed idea on the part of my printers and co-partners… that a story by me, continued from week to week, would make some unheard-of effect… that I am going to write one.”16
It did not take much persuasion. The security of a valuable property was sufficient explicit motivation. As an editor, he diffused himself “with infinite pains through Household Words,” leaving “very few papers, indeed, untouched.”17 But the expectation of the readers that a magazine conducted by their most famous living novelist would excel in the publication of fiction was hard to fulfill. Constantly flattering contributors like Elizabeth Gaskell, and extensively editing manuscripts for the Household Words format, he knew how difficult it was for writers to tailor their novels to the requirements of weekly serial publication. All too often, he found himself having to decide between rejecting a manuscript or undertaking the time-consuming, thankless work of heavily editing it for publication. It was inevitable, then, that he would himself have to write fiction for Household Words. At some point, the readers would demand it. Since his inner imperative demanded that he write novels, he found it sensible to combine a practical advantage with one of the necessary expressions of his restlessness. Once he returned to London, writing a new novel became only a matter of sooner rather than slightly later. By late January 1854, its first page stared at him “from under [the] sheet of note paper” on which he was writing a letter to Miss Coutts. The main idea of the new story, which was to be one fourth as long as his novels in twenty monthly parts and to appear over five months in Household Words, was one “[of] which you and I and Mrs Brown have often spoken.”
Its two central concerns had been with him for some time. In 1842, in his letter to the Morning Chronicle on the “Mines and Collieries Bill,” he had attacked industrial working conditions and exploitative owners. Influential proponents of industrial and social laissez-faire continued their effective advocacy of a free-market economy and a social system in which the laws of supply and demand could not be managed for social and humanitarian purposes. The working poor had to survive without any help or protection from government. In 1853, in “Fraud on the Fairies,” he had criticized utilitarian efforts to rationalize fairy tales and to use them for propaganda. “Kaye-Shuttleworthian” social and educational reformers, associated with Jeremy Bentham, James Mill, and John Stuart Mill, had been reforming the educational system to take the “fairy” out of “tale,” the fanciful out of literature and life. In the presence of “the supernatural dreariness” of such people, he felt as if he “had just come out of the Great Desert of Sahara where my camel died a fortnight ago.” The imagination was treated as a poor second cousin of reason, logic, and science.
At some point, he had shared with Miss Coutts his thought of writing a novel connecting “dry-as-dust” political economists for whom unfeeling and abstract rationality was more important than human happiness with educational rationalists who were choking the imagination to death. Many of the utilitarian political economists and educational reformers focused on the working class. In a climate of economic and class tension that became increasingly raw in the early 1850s, it occurred to him that he could provide fictional focus for his attack on utilitarianism and strike a blow against dehumanization and the “wicked masters” of the Midlands factories by dramatizing the destructive economic, social, and class conflicts of an archetypal industrial city, “Coketown.” In November, he had read in an Italian newspaper about “disturbances in Lancashire, arising out of the unhappy strikes” and about industrial actions that threatened violence in Preston. In the middle of January 1854, “the sad affair of the Preston strike remains unsettled; and I hear, on strong authority, that if that were settled, the Manchester people are prepared to strike next.” In his judgment, the English were “the hardest-working people on whom the sun shines.… They are born at the oar, and they live and die at it. Good God, what would we have of them!” The provocation for a strike, which had then resulted in a lockout, had to be extreme. A few days later, he sent Forster a list of possible titles, among which “there are three ve
ry good ones.”18 They soon agreed on the sixth, Hard Times.
On the spur of the moment, at the end of January 1854, Dickens went north to see for himself what Preston was like. He had been led to think it a model town. Instead, it was “a nasty place” that seemed especially frigid with the absence of smoke from the chimneys, the unnatural silence and emptiness. The workers huddled in their houses. The streets were peaceful. The next day, he saw the dull drama, insidious in its meagerness, of the distribution to the locked-out strikers of small amounts of money raised by subscription from workers in other towns. The Bull Hotel, described in the Italian newspaper as “the Palazzo Bull,” was an “old, grubby, mean, intensely formal red brick house with a narrow gateway and a dingy yard.” The imagination could not survive, let alone flourish, in such physical and aesthetic poverty. The strike, which was to fail by April, hardly spoke to the real problems. The range of social issues, which included low wages, poor sanitation, and dangerous working conditions, also included social and educational brainwashing through the creation of schools that served as extensions of the factory assembly line.
On the issues of industrial safety and the efficacy of striking, he quickly spoke out in Household Words. Though his initial impulse was to support the right to strike, he increasingly saw himself as a mediating voice supporting neither the workers nor the masters but common sense. The enemy was an abstract political economy that broke human beings on the wheel of iron theory, the dogma that government interference in a free economy was destructive tampering with the sacred laws of nature and god. Statistics seemed weapons manipulated to undermine humane considerations. Both the strike and the lockout were “a deplorable calamity. In its waste of time, in its waste of a great people’s energy, in its waste of wages, in its waste of wealth that seeks to be employed … in the gulf of separation it hourly deepens between those whose interests must be understood to be identical or must be destroyed, it is a great national affliction.”19 Refusing to believe that the interests of workers and masters significantly diverged, he saw stupidity and stubbornness as the source of the strike. With the advantage of education and training, with the responsibility for enlightened leadership, the masters were more to blame than the men. Unions existed only because incompetent masters had made ignorant workmen vulnerable to the manipulations of venal union leaders.
Early in February 1854, he took two brief holidays, a day excursion to Gravesend to celebrate his birthday with a “walk to Rochester, and return through Cobham woods,” and a week in Paris. There were “motes of new stories floating” before his eyes, possibilities for Hard Times and perhaps some of the motifs for what was to become Little Dorrit. By the middle of the month, the plural had become a singular. He was now preoccupied with “my story.” With the main plan for the novel clear to him, he asked Mark Lemon to send him any “slang terms among the tumblers and circus people, that you can call to mind.” To his surprise, he found the limited elbowroom of weekly serial publication chokingly restrictive, “absolutely CRUSHING.” He had written both Oliver Twist and Barnaby Rudge that way. But it had been long ago, he had paid less attention to structural problems, and he had been a less self-consciously purposeful artist. “Nobody can have an idea of it who has not had an experience of patient fiction-writing with some elbow-room always, and open places in perspective.” The first installment, contrasting, on the one hand, the imagination and circus life represented by Sissy Jupe with, on the other, utilitarian rationalism represented by M’Choakumchild, Gradgrind, Bitzer, and Bounderby, appeared on the first of April. He complained that he was “in a dreary state, planning and planning the story … out of material for I don’t know how long a story, and consequently writing little.”
Sensitive to claims that he had gotten the idea for Hard Times from the Preston strike, he exaggerated just how long before visiting Preston he had had the story in mind. Sensitive to the concern that he would support the strike, he assured Elizabeth Gaskell, also writing a novel about industrial relations, that he was “not going to strike. So don’t be afraid of me.” He was interested in compromise, not confrontation. “I often say to Mr. Gradgrind that there is reason and good intention in much that he does—in fact, in all that he does—but that he over-does it. Perhaps by dint of his going his way and my going mine, we shall meet at last at some halfway house where there are flowers on the carpets, and a little standing-room for Queen Mab’s chariot among the steam engines.” By late spring, he was in Boulogne, having the end of the novel in sight. “Bobbing up, corkwise, from a sea of Hard Times,” he felt “three parts mad, and the fourth delirious, with perpetual rushing” at it.20 By the middle of July, he had finished the novel, and on August 12 the final installment appeared.
The one-volume edition that appeared in August 1854 was dedicated to Carlyle. “It contains nothing in which you do not think with me, for no man knows your books better than I.” Hard Times, though, has less of the radical Carlyle in it than Dickens liked to imagine. Democratic in principle, elitist in practice, he always sought pluralistic compromise. He was unambivalently against revolution. He did not have, as did Carlyle, the anger of the prophetic anarchist, for whom conditions are so intolerable that even total destruction sometimes seems better than the perpetuation of the current situation. What to him seemed a human muddle was for Carlyle a cosmic disease. He recognized that Carlyle’s anger took him to places his own could not approach. “You know that it is impossible for anyone to admire him as a great original genius … more than I do,” Dickens told Forster in May. “The extraordinary peculiarity of his mind,” though, “always is a respect for power when it is exercised by a determined man. Some years ago when I was not familiarly acquainted with his writing, I said to you, after meeting him one night in your rooms with Emerson, that it was an anomaly I could not get out of mind, to hear him immensely lauding even the present Emperor of Russia.… A Tyrant is always a detestable creature, publicly, however virtuous privately.… Spare him two hundred years after he is dead, and you don’t know what you do towards the birth of his successor next year.”21 On social matters, Carlyle thought Dickens well intentioned but superficial, an exemplification of the Whig delusion that nineteenth-century secular culture could be redeemed by liberal good works. It was a skepticism that Dickens was to share more fully in the next decade.
Even in Hard Times, though, Dickens is as much concerned about individual salvation and human relations as he is about social problems. Key elements of the story draw on his personal preoccupation with father-daughter and father-son relationships, and on the seemingly intractable problem of his marriage. Thomas Gradgrind educates his children into an insensibility of the heart that their hearts rebel against. Intent on being a good father, he denies his children their human patrimony. Eventually, father and daughter are reconciled; father and son are not. Louisa contains within herself an inherent goodness that her father’s system does not destroy, though she is badly damaged. Young Thomas Gradgrind is destroyed by a combination of his father’s utilitarian world and his own insufficiencies. With an affinity for daughters rather than sons, Dickens locates the crucial drama of the novel in the relationship between Louisa, Sissy Jupe, whose father has deserted her out of misplaced love, and Thomas Gradgrind. Eventually, patriarchy is redeemed by sisterhood, by daughters and sisters. In the portraits of the young women, including Rachael, there are resonances of Georgina, Mamie, and Katie, and memories of Mary Hogarth. The shadowy emotional outline of John Dickens appears in the transformation of Thomas Gradgrind into a redeemed father. The unredeemed father who put him to work in the blacking factory appears in aspects of Mr. Bounderby, the mother who insisted on his remaining there in the portrait of Mrs. Sparsit. With a sharp twist of the knife of his imagination, his view of Catherine’s incompetence, clumsiness, withdrawal from responsibility, and unsuitability as his wife appears in his depiction of Stephen Blackpool’s alcoholic wife, from whom he is separated. The rigid divorce laws prevent him from marrying Rachael. Trap
ped in an inappropriate marriage, frequently depressed, and morally self-conscious, Stephen can do nothing but shoulder his burdens and carry on manfully. Dickens was soon to write in his notebook the idea for a story of “a misplaced and mismarried man. Always, as it were, playing hide and seek with the world and never finding what Fortune seems to have hidden when he was born.”22
ON A BRIGHT SUMMER DAY IN 1854 A KITE ROSE INTO “HALF A GALE of wind,” climbing briskly into the cloudless sky over the Villa du Camp de Droite in Boulogne. The two kite makers, like Daedalus, were proud of their achievement. “Jointly produced by the labour and ingenuity of Dickens and your humble servant,” Wilkie Collins boasted, it is “capable of taking up more string than ever can be brought to accommodate it.” For Dickens, midsummer brought the exhaustion of having finished Hard Times. He tried to knock himself into relaxation by “a blaze of dissipation” in London: the opera, dinner engagements, sitting for his portrait. His tiredness distressed him. It seemed uncharacteristic, unacceptable. Back in Boulogne, with his friend’s summer-long company, he felt a luxuriant indolence, a stupor out of which he could hardly stir himself to write letters. For a few weeks he delighted in refreshing breezes, “reading books and going to sleep on the grass,” curling into a comfortable haystack to take the sun and dream in “a state of Elysian laziness.” Household Words business, though, infringed, dealings with authors like Gaskell, whose North and South, the size of which alarmed him, he was about to begin publishing. As August began, he tried to balance relaxation and restlessness. But he was aware that the kite could take more string, that there could never be enough to accommodate it. The image of ascension attracted him. If not a kite, then a balloon, on which he would rise. By October, he “had dreadful thoughts of getting away somewhere” altogether by himself, a “floating idea of going up above the snow-line in Switzerland.… Restlessness … is always driving me, and I cannot help it. I have rested nine or ten weeks, and sometimes feel as if it had been a year—though I had the strangest nervous miseries before I stopped. If I couldn’t walk fast and far, I should just explode and perish.”23