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ThesiS, Supervisar: Professor Alec Lucas

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. '~ Villains in Dickens" s" Early Novels:

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A'Study of Alfred J~ngle in Pickwick papers,

Dan~el Quilp in Thé Old Curiosity Shop,

James Carker in Dombe~ and Son

@ Paul T • Murphy

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Submitted in Pàrtial Fulfi11ment

of the

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,Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts' 0

McGill University

:Mareh, 1981

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Villains in Dickens's Bprly Novels: A Study of

Alfred Jingle in,pickwick PaEers, Daniel Quilp in The

Dld Curiosity Shop, and James Carker in Dombey and So~

; by Paul Murphy

Abstract

Thi~ thesis closely in~estigates three of Charles

Dickens's early villai~s and analjzes how each one not only

presents 'a study of an evil psyche, but also helps to present

a study of an evil society_ Alfred Jingle, of Pickwick

Papers, is not r~ally a villain, but a victimi his deception \

is his logical reaction to a fallen world. Daniel Quilp, ,of

The DId Curiosity Shop, is Dickens's greatest conception of

a concentrated evil; he is hirnself both an evil individual repre'3eA\1S

and"evil society: the representative of one pole, in a nove+,

of great p61arity. James Carker, of Dornbey and Son, ~s- a

small part of the evil of his novel; he derives rnost of his

villainous power frorn a soci~ty which re~ards heartlessness. '" \

This study is selecti~e- for the purposes of concen~ration

but is designed to be an aid in the appraisal of' aIl Dickens's

villains~ \

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'Les Vilains dans les pre,miers romans'de'Dickens: ,

étude d'Alfred ,

Jingle dans Pickwick Papers, de

Daniel QÛilp dans The Old Curiosit~ ShoE ;:

et de James Carker da,ns bombey and Son.

I! par Paul Murphy

Abrégé'

,~

. En scrutant trois des premi~rs vilains d,e Charles

Dickens, cette th~se mettra en évidence non suelement

leur méchanceté foncière mais aussi leur engagement dans 1

, . 1 ' eng qmage d'urie soc i été pe rni,~ ieuse. l Al f red J ingle des

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Pickwick Papers est plutAt victime que vilan; la corruption

d'un monde déchu l~ pousse à" la fourberie. Daniel Quilp de

The Ola CuriositY Shop est le scélérat par excellence de

'Dickens: sa propre méchanceté est celle de la so.ciété. _ ~ l _ ..

Dqns ce roman d'antithl!sis, il représente le "pAle noir de

la perversité •. James Carker de Dombey and So~ n'est qu'un

personnage dangereux: sans etr~ positivement mauvais, il peut

e'xposer à quelque' maal. Sa malice provIent surtout de son

milieu'où la cruaut~ tr~ve,toujours sa rééompense. Toute

restreinte qu'elle soit, dans le but de délimiter sori sujét,

cette étude constitue néanmoins un guide pour l'évaluation

~e tous les vilains de Dickens • .!\.

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Copyright 1981 by paul Murphy

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Preface " '

?ickens's villains rank arnong the best of his charayters -rI'"

and are sorne of the most ~ividl~ presented and rnemorable ,1 - •

characters in English' literature ,as a whole: In alrnost eve,ry

book th~t Dickens wrote, o~e or'~ore villains stand out among

a large ~st. Oliver Twist~ to' cho~e an obvious exarnple, is

rernember~d today for it~ characterizatiohs of Fagin and of

__ tl1ol;t~ __ ~~ught il1_ Lgndpn' s underworld; the Maylles _and _the, ,-f

Brownlows of the nov~~-ând the society they represent, are o • ,

aIl quickly forgotten.in th~ face Qf a!more formidable, evil

world. Dickens' s two historical novels" Barnaby Rudge and A Cl

Tale of Two Cities, a~e rernernbered for their views of the

frènzies of mobs and those in mobs; Madame Defarge and Dennis

the hangrnan are more striking figures than Charles Darnay or

Dolly Varden. Sirnilarly,_ indiviClual villains such as wapk­

ford Squeers, Seth Pecksniff,,' and John Jasper are the f inest

and cio~t-carefully presented characters in their novels, and

UFiah Heep, Mr. Merdle, and Bradley ~eadstone also have

brilliant ana rnemorable roles. "

"Each one of Dickens' s villains' is successful in bis own

ways. It would be impossible to equate, for example, Ralph

Nickleby's villainy with Edward M~rdstone's in motivation,

intent, or acti Dickens's villains are more rernarkable for

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their differences than tWeir similaritiesJ Although these

differences usually seem'obvious, there are indications that

to sorne crifics they are note G. K. Chesterton tends ,to min-l

imize these differences 'when he writes.: .' ,

/ Nob~dy ever made less attempt 'to whitewash evil / ,than ,Dick~ns. Nobody black was ever less white 'han Dickensls black. He painted his villains and l st characters more black than they really are. H crowds his stories with a kind of villain rare in modern fiction -- ihe villain really without ny "redeeming point."

This statement implies that Dickens created a series of evil

things,\ that, aIl his villains are charactèrs of unrelieved .

darkness -- interchangeable foils or closely related demons

who aIl react to thè demands of reality in the sarne way~- in

a conscious, monotonous attempt to do evil for evills sake •

.oThis conception is just not true. Sorne of Dickens "s villains

tend to express or embody one vice rather than aIl of them.

John Fo+ster writes of Dickens's plans with Dombey and Son:

nIt was to do wîth pride what its predecessor had done with

Selfishness. n2 Selfishness is the one vice that Pecksniff

embodies, just as Mr. Dombey embodies cold mercantile pride.

A study of such marginal villains in Dickens is interesting,

but beyond·the scope of thlS thesis (except in the case of­

Dombey, who ia atudied, of course, in the chapter on James ,

Carker). l intend instead to investi~ate three characters

who appear to be villa~ns in a sense closer to Chesterton's:

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men~~~be prone JO ,a~; 'v';'~e, and who embrace evil

a others -. emb~ce ~~ne'ss -- char~cters that at fir,st glance

might ppear to'b, de~~ather ,than men. By closely inves­

tiga~'ing lfred Jing e in P'iPkwick Papers, Daniel Quilp in The

, 01 mes~ rker in Dombey 'and Son, 1 hope ..

to pro Di ens' s f-ert' ination was far above 1

churning oùt similar ' interchang embodiments of

Evil. Although one of t e character

-- is just pUcp an Evil char cter and mor 1

stigate -- Qullp

the'study of the

other two should suffice to sho that Dickens evolu-

tionary co,ception of Evil r and as ~ at conceptio deve ped,

so did his concept~on of the evil 'illdivi al change.

I s~ecifically limited my study t6 thre of Dickens's

early novels, for it is in the earlier novels th evil,. when

it exista, i~ much more the attribute of an individua psyche

than the attribute of a diseased society. The idea of tH

evil psyche, 1 hope to show, finds sorne expression (with more

than a hint of it? shortcomings) in Pickwick Papers, and finds

its greatest expression in The CId Curiosity Shop with Quilp.'

In Domber and Son, that idea has largely dïsappeared7 indi­

vidual evil is certainly seen in Carker (and others!, but

that evll ls subordinate to the greater evil that is iound

in society as a whole.

a minion. ,

Quilp is a master ~f Ev!l, Carket is

The three novels, then, aIl show Dickens grappling with

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the concept of the evil man and the evil soci , ' 1,

Pickwick .,

·J?apers, though the earliest of the three, . is the In t ftlexiblè' ., in that i t· atte~rts to disttngui~h between and treat. ,b h

individual and social evil. Pickwick Paper~ is the most op o

mistic of Dickens's novels, but evil still has a major role .

in it. Pickwick's lesson is not that his worl~ ii a~ Eden~ ..

but' that, even though the wo'rl<f' is. a fallep one ~ he can still,

thr,ougn benevolence and conviviality, be a happy ma~ in it.

To come to this çonclusion, Pi,èkwick must first l-earn the

hard truth that the world is indeed fallèn.·' 'Alfr~~i-ngle -------. li r '

is pi.ckwick 1 s first re~l example of a citizen of a fallen .~, '

world. In t~ limited s~, Jlngle cân ~e viewed as a snake , in Eden. This is much how Pickwick v·iews him at first, when'

he traverses En'gland to crush the beast; to Pickwick, for q

long ~hile, Jingle is,the only bad in a good world. IPickwick l " \

must change h~s views in time, however, as mùst tbe reader,

-J .0 for Jingle" is the"' victim of .~ harsh world, rtot the corrupte'r ~ ~ -~.~_~ne.~ His mo~ives for equ1vocatio~ and pretension

-~~~~~~it i~ impossible to accuse Jingle of unquali~ied "Evil") ,arê ... ca~ by his fears -- fears of starving to death, fears of

. ( a clasS stem that .rejects .him, and well-9r~unded fèars'that

the exposure 0 self ~ould' lead to his downfall. ~ ___ _ 1"'-

Jingle is for~ver ca by the 'pre,ssing needs of a~day-to-

Pickwickians are,miraculously \

to survive by creating

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various roles, whicQ are ~sually designed to tell people what

,.the,y want t'Q hear 'in return. for a rneal, a dr ink, or' a shel ter. "~ ,

EacQ,role that Jingle assumes intensifies his fea! of expo-

, sure, and that fear leads to a greater ,nee~' to Ià.ssume roles.

Jingle's evi!, then, is born of hunger; he is certainly nct ,

____ motivated by an irrational need to ~e evil-for ~vi!'s sake.

:pickwick may see Jingle as a sort of foil, but this is "an ",

illusion as much as are windmills' to Don Quixote. Jingle

is, rathe,r, a teacher; he prep~res Pi,ékw'i'c~ :for -ffie 9 re~et' .=-=,:::­

\ evils he faèes in the Fleet.

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The Fleet 1 a recur rent ~ymbo! in Di'ckens 1 s work s, reduces, ,

le to near nothingness and makes clear to Pickwick Jin-

ole as the victirn of a society capable of evil~ In

this Pickwiêk Papers is closer in theme to'Bleak House

or Little r'ri t or Dombey and Son thàn i t ià to The Old

CuriosH.y Shop," than The Old Curiosity Shop r~ to these

others. l realize thà ~ l consider Jingle' s evil a defense

rnechanism rather than an active fight against. good, then

Jingle can hardly be thought -of as a villain at aIl,' yet l

include hirn in this thesis because.his characte~ is the first ~

of Dicken~ls'atte~Pts in his novel-writing to place evil, in

any form, \ in an individual, and because the reaSons for Jin­

gle' s lack of villainy offer a Jiew of Dickens' S later f~s-:

cination with,social evils and evil society. Jingle is, as

,~ell, one of 'Dickens~s rnost vivid and hurn6rous characters,

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and, evet). i'f he is bad, his ch(lracter ,is optimistically pre'-\

sented, a~d he is redeemaole. JingIe's saivation Cand the , ~

, fact that he -i8 the only ch'aracter l concentrate on in this

\ thesis who makes it' ta the ënd of hi!?' no~l>,' -!s cèrta\~nIY no \~

\\, accident, and this fa~t aione makes him a valuable,study iri

~ c~ntra~t~th~r Vl~l~lns in Dickens.

\, Dlckens' s ,cohceptlon, first seen in P'ickwick Papers, of \ . , -

-a-s~ial ev'il grêater than an individual one, 'is not consis-

tentl~ devel?ped

Oliver\Twist, i8 \ '

in' his,.following novels. His next book,

directIy opposed to th}s idea1 it is the \

,criminal'I? who create and perpetuate their evi~ ~ociety, not ~ ~

the other wayaround. l very much regret that"I am unable to

discuss Oliver Twist at length in this thesis, for it, is that

novel that contains several studies of individually evil men:

Sikes, the boys, Monks,' and of eour,se Fagin are aIl examples.

l believe, however, that l shall serve my purposesbetter

by offering thr~~ specifie examples of evil individuals .' ~

and by allowlng 'those examples to form tbe,~asis for an "'

appraisal of aIl Diekens'~ villains, and_ especialiy pis early

ones. l shall certainly not hesitate to mention'other Dickens ..' . ."

villàins where they will further my specifie arguments.

Fagin's cha~aeter, for example, l shall certainly mention

in my section- on 9~1lp.

feel tbat\Ou11p . - \

. l study Qu11p after Jingle, "because l

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embodied, il,n f.n ..v

1s th: greatest example-1n Dickens of Evil

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individual. F~gins, Sikes, Squeers, John Chester, Pecksniff,

and other~ ~ê ;ndi~idua~s who embody. sorne .evil or sorne sort

of vice, but~P, 1 believe, is that char.cter in whicb'

Dickens allowed aIl his energi~s to go .lnto creating a~ alle­

g~rical representation of Evil.

There is not,hing, like Pickwick' s Fleet in" The Dld Curio­

sity Shop. Society in that novel is far from a pervasive . '

influence, and is usually ,toyed with by Quilp, who uses and -

abuses bis lawyer and the law alike to suit,his fancles. The -

novel is close~ to a·fairy tale or allegory than any othér

by Dickens and is lar,gely played out on a leve.1 that is above

so~iety in'la way that even the imaginaiiVe PiCk~i7k Papers is

riet., Quilp himself can be s~en, among other ~hin9s, as an ' , 'r

allegory ~f an evi! society. -One of tHe greatest failings

of critics in discussing Quilp, however, ~s that they try

to limit his allegQrical nature to one evil or another.

Such attempts usual1y e~d in silly conclusions •• . (

In the section on Quilp and his evil 1 must' diseuss Nell

land her corresponding good. Where Quilp ia ~aterial and 'i

earthy, Nell is spiritual. \Where Quilp is 'spitefully child~ 1 . ~ ,

'ish, 'Nell "ls mature far beyond her years. " It is in this nove! '"

that Dickens writes: "Everything'in our 17' es, whethe'r of good

or evil, affects us mdst by contrast •• .J and it ls ~n , 1

this novel, that- that !'detr finds its fullest expression. Un-(

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(ortunatelY, this concept leàds ta the mini failing,s of the

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void of interest. It ia what s~rrounds her that is bril -

liantlyand successfully presented, and it is'Quilp, above

aIl, who surrounds her: he is connected, directly or indir-. . ,

ectly, with almost every evil in the novel. ~

Even if Quilp is Dickens's greatest realization of an

evil man, he still does not conform to Chesterton's ide a of ,

blackness. His liveliness makes him a character far above

that. If'anything, QUilp is too colourful in his vividness.

Pickwi

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his overpoweringly allegorical significance both

the expense of the social realism se en somewhat ~n

Quilp's evil is largely for its own sake,

qt best espoused for extremely

spurio s reasons. Quilp is certainl~ not faced with any of )

the de of reality that face Jingle. There \

is not ing that wo~ld lead the reader to believ~ tha~ Quilp /

ia any less weIl-off than Pickwick.

Th's closed, quilpian universe in The Old Curiosity Sho~,

far ved from reality, was a dead end for the socially "

s Dickens. In later novels, evil is not allegorically

displaced, but becomes more and more rooted in Dickens's idea ~

of v!ctb{1an social reality.

For tbis reasOD; l have selected James' Carker as the

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th'1rd -villain 1 study. here. Carker is ,by no means a very "

suçcessful char acter -- far less vivid than either Jingle or 1

Quilp or man y of. Dickens's other villains.

~n's success depends largely upon Carker's

But Dombey and­

very blandness.

He has none of Quilp's inherent energy. Instead, Quilp's \ \

energy is t-ransfer red to a seething society a society that

allows for the heartless growth-of th~'firm of Dombey and

Son, that de faces cities overnight to allow for the growth

of train travel, and that finally kills little Paul: here,

society becomes the monster to parallel Quilp'somonstrosity.

Cérkei ls only the tool of that monster, and his role as

manag~r is brilliantlY apte Through most of the novel his

" whole personality is devoted to furthering the growth of t~e

world of business, or money-int'erest, at the expense of his

own feelings and the feelings of others. Carker finally 'be­

cornes, .lUe Jingle,~ a victim of society, as he is obliterated ,/ -'

by the ~'prces ~hat he is id~ntified with for- most of the

novel. Unlike Jingle, however, he is 'a strong sUI?Porte"r of

the new morality that surrounds'him -- in his case, a money

morality, one of development and acquisition.

When Carker gives ,up his position at the vanguard of - \

this new societ~~o~flee to Dijon, he dies. The train

~hat kills him, and trains in generàl, are an important image

in Dombey and Son, and 1 will ca~efully investigate that image

in this thesis.

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Carker's role as a servant to society forces hirn to be

a rather grey villaine He cannot be apart fro~ society as

is Jingle, or above societr as is Quilp, but must be a part

of its very dreariness. In this, he sets the tone for Many

of the yillains that follow him --, villains that rnay be more

vividly and successfully presented, 'but who are, liké Ca.rker,

clambering upan social ladders,~servin9, however selfishly, If

the iriterests of a growing world. Later villains become much h

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less powerful and significant in the face of stronger evils,

which are sometirnes anonyrnous (the fog and the Chancety suit,

or the Marshalsea) and sometimes semi-anonymous (Boodle, 1

Coodle, Bar, Bench, ~~ Bishop). Domber and Son 1s the first . major step away from Dickens's early novels and the first-

step towards later ones in this sense. l believe that Dornbey

and Son is much closer in theme to Bleak House than it is to <

The Old Curiosity Shop, and a close study ~f Carker's role

should make that trend clear.

Al though the three villains l have chosen to study' are r j

very different from one another, l have not chbsen them (to

the exclusion of others) fo{ this reason. A similar study

of Fagin, Pecksniff, or Heep would suffice to prove the fool­

ishness of that idea and would help to show the scope of , 0

Dickens's imagination. The three l bave chosen, rather, are

characters that are important steps, in the development of

Dickens's conception of good anà evil, and of the individual

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and ~ciety. Only one of the three (Quilp) 1 se~ as the full

realization of a conception (that of the comp~etely evil ~

individual) • * ,The other two have been chosen because they .

illustrate trends toward and away from this conception.

Therefore 1 would like to make it clear that variety is in

no way the reason for my choices, but it is no coincidence,

ei ther: i t reflects the variety and greatn~ss of"Di~kens' s

work.

,;

1 would like to thank aIl those people who made my

writing this thesis a pleasurable and rewarding experience • .

First of aIl 1 would like to thank the staffs of the l!b-

rarieswhere 1 spent ma~y hours: the'Boston Public·Library,

Bapst Library a~ Boston ~ollege Library, the Weidner Library

at Harvard University, and Mc~nnan Libr,ary at McGill Univer­

sity.

Also, my thanks to the English Department at McGill for ~

constant help and encouragement, throughout my years wi fh the

un~versity.

The list of those w~o gave me moral and intel~ectual

solace at those points in my study when the thesis seemingly

* The finest realization, of an evil society in Dickens 1 believe can be found in Bleak House, but the study of Dombey and Son should amply show the trend in that direction, and l have chosen to pinpoint the transition rather than, the fullest realization of the concept. A full study of that' realization wouldfbe the mater!al for another work.

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had ~o foréseeable end is to~ong' to

list three" families: the Dufgjns, _the

mention; l àhall simply

Gosling~, and the

Murphys, for whose encouragement l am now, and will be,

forever grateful.

l give special thanks ta Mrs. Henriette Salek for

providing much-néeded help,on the French abstract that~ 'J'

_ accompanies this thesis, and very special thanks to my uncle,

Robert Carrig, who made my typing duties much easier by

providing much computer and persona! tirne (and patience).

He is largely responsible for the final format of the thesis

Cwhich is, incidentally, a computer printout). ~,

- /

Finally, l would like to sincerely thanK my thesis

adviser, Alec Lucas, . for helping me to tur-n a v;a~ùe 'c'onception

iota a ,thesi~. His encouragement (concerning the thesis,

among.other things) was always available and his criticisrns

were always helpful. Also, his editorial corrections were

much needed and weIl appreciated. Of course, any errors now

in the text are exclusively my own.

Textual Note: AlI quotes from Dickens's works are taken from

the relevant edition in the Penguin Engli~b Libr~ry -- texts

which, with few exceptions, l have found consistently well­

edited and annotated. Therefore l am following the Penguin

house style in omitting the full stop after such wor'ds as ~

"Mr" when quoting from Dickens. l hav~, however, for the

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purposes of uniforrnity, gone-against P~nguin .style in usibg

double q'Uotation marks to 'enclose a quote- (they ùse single"

marks). Al~ quotes ~hat are from the -text will be given by

-both chapter and page number.

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. ,

. . Notes

\ -t- ""

K. Chestertorl,' Charles Dick.~ns (London: MetJi;en;J' 1 G. ". ~ 4

1906), p. 281.

2 John Forster, The Life of Charles Dickens, ed. J. W. T.

Ley (London: Cecil Palmer, 1928), p. 471.

J Charles Dickens, The Rld Çuriosity Shop (Harmondswor h: \

penguin, 1972), p. 493.

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Table -of çontents'

Preface / 1: The Actor: Alfred Jingle

II: The Monster: Daniel Quilp

I~I: The Manager: James Carker

Conclusion

B'ibliogr--aphy .\

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1: The Actor: Alfred Jingle

~

In mfs essay "D~ngley Dell and the Fleet," W. H. Auden

lists ten axioms which he believes are chara:'C:~eristic of aIl ~ .~.,

'-'lIo" "dream Edens," and thus cha~acteristic of ~ie Eden he sees in

Pickwick papers. The third of these axioms is as follows:

There is no distinction between the objective and the subjective. - what-a.person appears to others to be is identical with what he is to -himself. His name and his clothes are ,as much his as his body, so th1t, if he changes them, he turns into someone el'se. -

For the tirst few pages of the, novel, aIl characters of'

Pickwick Papers conform to this principle. Pickwick sees

hims~lf and 1s seen as an affable, benevolent gentleman. ,

Winkle, Tupman, and Snodgrass see themselves and are seen, at

first, as a sportsman, lover, and poet, respectively, and

although these appearances are later questioned, they are

questioned subjectively as weIl as objectively: any deception

in their ch~racters is both external and interna11 always

hum,orous and never, truly dangerous, and nev~l disruptive or

maliciously equivocal.

Pickwick, then)is surrounded by men who are exactly what

they seem to be. Never knowing human nature in Any other way, J

he expects to see this harmony in aIl men. When he steps

from the Eden pf the Pickwick Club into the streets of London,

however, he finds that human nature ls not always so perfecto

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Pickwick's first experience with equivocation occurs when he

talks with a London cabman in chapter two:

\

"How old is that horse, my friend?" inquired Mr Pickwick, rubbing his nose with the shilling he had reserved for his fare. ,

"Fort y-two, " replied the drivér, eyeing him askant.

"Whatl" ejaculated Mr Pickwick, laying his hand upon his notebook. The driver reiterated his former statement. Mr Pickwick looked very hard at the man's face, but his features were immoveable, so he noted down the fact forthwith. 2 -

Pickwick shows sorne doubt here, but he eventually -

believes this complete lie when he sees that the cabman's , "

external appearance is hones,t (" immoveable")' and wh en he q . -

equates the expression of honesty with honesty itself. At

this point in the story, Pickwick is too much a moral and

philosophical virgin to be aware of the exi~tence of a bald--

2

faced lie or of a dual nature. That awareness comes to Pick-

wick later, largely at the hands of one that Dickéns calls na

very different character from any l have yet described, who l,

flatter myself will make a decided hit"J-- Alfred Jingle, of

No Hall, Nowhere.

/ Jingle is described by Dickens in his list of characters \ \

as "an itinerant actor" Cp. 64), although the reader never

~ctually sees or even hear1P about him performing on stage to ';"

eafn a living. This i8 not to say that the reader never ~es

J,ingle ~,- however, for he does so throughout the novel. On

a simple level, he ia seen to be an actor when he employa

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stage actions in everydày situations. I~ the scene where he \

propo~ed to Rachel ward~, for example, he spoke "in a stage

whisper," and he "sigh~d d~eply, fixed his eyes on the . spinster aunt's face for a èouple of minutes, started melo-

3

dramatically, and suddenly withdrew tpem.* Later in the scene

he "fell on his kneeé and remained theIeupon for five minutes

thereafter" CCh. viii, pp. 181-184). This scene is one in

which Jingle's equivocation is esp~cially called for '-- it'is

here that Dickens calls him "that insinuating gentleman" (p.

182) -- yet such stage conventions are always -an important

facet of Jingle's ~~rsonality. Early in the novel, wh en

Jingle tells a sad story, he ends up "applying ta his right 1

eye the brief remnant of a very old cambric handkerchief" (Ch.

ii, p. 81), and at the ba'~ at Rochester, he "commenced gazing "

with an air of respectful and melancholy admiration on the fat

countenance of the little old lady" (Ch. ii, p. 90). Th~se

sorts of actions certainly draw attention ta Jingle's insin­

cerity, but taken by themselves they show the insincerity of

a Vince-nt Crummles, and are exaggerations rather than fab-ri­

cations. Jingle's character as an actor is more fully seen

when he uses acting to create lies -- when he builds complete

roles around a series of lies, and gives s~stained perfor­

mances ta achieve his ends. J. Billis Miller writes of

.Jingle: ,"

he i8 a liaI and a shape-changer. He i8 constantly ' .

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reinventing himself to fit his 'situation ~ W atj is involuntary for other characters is delib~r te~for J+ngle. He fits himself instantaneou~ly i to eaeh new situation, and initiates a new Iole f r himself with the facilityof a skilled.ac~or. • hnd just as Jingle invents his ,identity aS

4 e goes

along, 50 he invents a past to fit it. r 1 •

Jingle' s dependenee on roles is responsiQle: fqr his false

appe, ance. He is quite different to' others/than he is to

and in this way he is a foreigner ~o Auden's

of Etlen.

- , Despi te this, J·ingle at fi rst seems to fit in weIl wi th Ill'

the Pickwickians. His early success with them happens" l'krgely

because he is 'what they want him. to be, and says what they \ ~

. ,

want hirn to say. .,.;..l,. ......

Soo~~after they meet, when Pickwick says ~ ... '\ '

that he is\n an qbserver of human nature," Jingle replies "so

am 1. If Whel1 he. finds tha~,-·s;,bdgrass "has a strong poetic

turn,"~Jf~le invenis a poe\ic and heroie event from sorne

imaginar; :as~: "JpiC poemj -- ten thousand lines -- revo-,

lution of July -- composed it on the spot Mars by day,

Apollo by night, -- bang the field piece, twang t~e lyre" <Ch.

ii, p. 79). Im~ediately after this, Jingle perceives that

Winkle is a "sportsman" and invents a dog story to fit that

taste. To Tupman hé telis of one of his many supposed, con­

quests. ~or e~eh tal~ Jingle has many more: concernirig ~he

dog he has a ~hundred more anecdotes of the same animal ./

• • •

and concerning his romance he has "fifty more if you like to

hear 'em" <Ch. ii, p. 8l>: The Pickwicki4nS completely

ft

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believe i:n a-i-ngl-e-', s stor ies; by the time they reaéh Rochester

Bridge, Wthe note-books, both of Mr Pickwick and Mr Snodg~ass,

were completely _filled with selections from his ad~entures"

(Ch. ii, p. 82). These notebooks are-a sure sign of the Pick-.

wickians' gullibility. They are fille~ only with hearsay, .

with the complete fabrications or at best the half-truths of

Jlngle, the cabman, and others. After ~illing his notebook on

the road to Rochester, Pickwick states of Jingle that he is . , "evidently a traveller in'many countries, and a close observer

1 ! of men and things" (p. 83), and at the time there seems, for \

Pickwick, to be ~o'distinction betw~en the evident and the

real. The truth~ of the world, it s~ems, need not be jotted

down, however; Pickwick i6 nev~r mentioned as touching a Jo"

notebook, for example, when he is >ifil the Fleet. The graduaI.

fading out ,of the notebooks parallels Pickwick's graduaI

enl ightenment . . ! --:: \

Jingle's stories, like ~s, are aramatic rather "

t,han, real/.'t,cThey come from an assumed past, and exist only for f)

the presen~. As Miller poirits out, his stories, his atti-

tudes, his mannerisms p- his whole identity -- changes imme-,",-,

~

diately as one situation gives way to another. When the \ /

Pickwickians, Jingle, and Wardle return from a celebration at

Muggletoh, â11 (except perhaps Jingle) quite drunk, Jingle af

one moment participates in the groupls antics, and at the next

m~~ent -- when faced by new characters and ,new attitudes

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changes hi~ manner complete1y:

"What a shockinç scene 1" said the spinst'er aunt.

"Diè-gustingl" ~jaculafed both the young ladies. .) ,

"Dreadful -- dreadfull" said Jihgle"looking very grave: he was about a bottle and a half ahead of any of his·companions. "Horrid ppectac1e~-­very!" (Ch,. viii, p. ·~178).

6

,

Jingle here s~ys what is perceived as the right thing at the

right time, and he is instantly popular ,with his new acquain­

tances ~ This sort of populari ty is, l'lere and throughout·, 1

\ nece~sar 1'ly ,immediate, ~nd usually ,ephemera1, intended to \

provioe the next'meal or sh~lter for the nig~t. It is tpe

popular i ty of a. theatr ical actor, caJ:cul-ated to gain quick

satisfactïon and applause, and unre1ated to other :ro1es in

other pèrformances.

Jing1e does more than simply believe that the world ~

stage. He believes that the world is his stage. He uses lies

to force hurnan interaction to conforrn to his will. His lies

~ompel_Tuprnan to do éxactly that which he would never want \

to do -- ignore Rachel. His lies force Rachel, ~the Fat Boy, •

and aIl the others at,Dingley Dell to serve his ends rather \

than their own. As Robert L. Patt~n states, Jingle "m~ni-1

~ul~tei pth,rs into assurnin9.roles in plays which he directs;

in WhiJ~\he stars, and for which he is the sole enlightened. 1 •

audie~ce. ,,5 \ The illusion~ that Jingle takes great pains to o..r e.

. create at Dingley Dell, however,,. dispelle:lqu; te quickly when he ) li

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drops his role as friend to ~ll to run away with Rachel. In

- Jingle's case, the "eternal frien~ship" (Ch. viii, ~1!6)

" .

1

proposed by Wardle lasts only four days •. His great love af-

fair with Rachel lasts a week, and disappears under the influ-

ence of one hbndred and twenty I\ounds. Later, J~ngle's role

Hunter's important ,

and his. r'ole as the as Mrs. Leo guest,

Nupkins family's well-connected captain both disappear in the

presence of the avenging Pickwick. With each revelation or

exposure of Jingle's roles, Jingle shows~bis true selfish

nature. But the vision is brief; Jingle flees, only to turn

up in another place, playing another role, even if h~ has the ,

same ends in mind. Acting is more than" a way of life to

Jingle. Acting is life.

Jingle has one great reason to project his whole psyche

into creating and sustaining many roles: fear. " He ls afraid

of poverty, af~aid of being manipulated by others, afraid of

lany attack upon his self, and especially afraid of his pést.

As these fears lead 1:0 his need to deceive, Jïngle has a

greater and greater fear of exposure and humiliation (which,

in turn, only serves to intensify,his other fears). In short, \

Jingle suffers from a self ... ·fueling identity crisis •

Some of Jingle's fears cer~afnly do have a solid basis in

facto Pickwick, the Pickwickians, and even the Wellers are

happily, ev en miraculously, free trom Any sort of economic

feargreater than Winkle's fear of being ·cut off· by his , "

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father for, marrying without permissioll". ,

~ingle is, however,

faced with, and eventually suffers from, terrible poverty.

While sorne critics see the interpolated tales in pickwick

Papers as an alternate" melancholy universe, divorced from . 6 -

Pickwick's own , they are very often part of Jingle's world.

"The Stroller's Tale," told by Job Trotter's brother, de-,

scribes the tate of one actor:

r

The man of' whom l speak was a low pantomime actor; and, like man y people of his class, an habituaI drunkard. In his better days, before he had become enfeebled by dissipation and emaciated by disease, he had been in the receipt of a good salary, whichj'. if he had be~n careful and prudent, he might have continued to receive for sorne years -- not many~ because these men either die early, or, by unnat­urally taxing their bodily energies, lose, prema­turely, those physical powers on which alone they can depend for subs,istence. :His besetting sin gained so fast upon him, however, that i t was found impossible to employ him in the situations in which he really was useful to the theatre. The public­house nad a fascination for him which he could not resist. Neglected diseas~ and hopeless poverty / were as certain to be his portion as death itself, if he persevered in the same course; yet he did persevere, and the result may be guessed. H~ould obtain no engagement, and he wanted bread (C~. Ill, p. 105) •

To Pickwick, this is only a nightmare. To Jingle,it i8 a

very probable result of the coursé'that he follows. Certain­

ly, he finds himself not far from that point; throughout the

novel he is forced to fight against poverty. However much /

the naive Pickwickians believe his lies about his financJal

strength: -Br6wn paper parcel' here, that '.s aIl other

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luggage go~e by water, -- packing cases, nailed up -- big as

houses -- heavy, heavy, damned heavy ••• " _(Ch. ii, p. 78)

--'Dickens~ description of Jingle, with his size~-too-small -..

coat, his worn trousers, a~d his dirty white stockings, rnake

his true state immediately apparenttQ the reader. His ap­

pearance does mysteriously improve when the Pickwickians meet

him at Muggleton ("His dress was slightly improv,ed, a~d he wore

boots, but there was no mistaking him" [Ch. vii, p. 162.J), \

but this windfall does not last long, a~d in the end Jingle

becomes the poorest of the poor in the Fleet, and proves that

his economic fears were justified.

pletely innocent of evil. Instead of attaining this sort of

innocence, however, Jing1e' s lies only serve to pr,ovide

Pickwick and his friends with a knowledge of-falsehood. ~

Pickwick completely lacks the sort of past that' Jingle

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tries to hide. His past is vague, and is unc10uded by evil or (

any taint of e.xper ience -- which i5, in the end, the same as

\ no pa&t at aIl. As Fred Kaplan writes:

When "Pickwick burst like another sun from his slumbers, threw open his chamber window, and looked' out upon the world beneath" (PP, II), he has no psychic inheritance to weigh down his sense of him­self in the present and the future. ~e floats like a bubble of inconsequentiality across the landscape of the present that mocks him gently, then harshly. His only past is that of vague historical abstrac­tion, the man of impractical reason from an eigh­teenth century ethos who believes in the 'dominance of'order, "domestic economy," and truth. He has dismissed relativism within hïmself and others. He has no autobiography -- no mother, father, family, story of origin, childhood impressions, defeats, tri~~phs, frustrations, anxieties, self-doubts • • . .

\

Auden has a similar idea: "In our minds Mr. Pickwick is born

. in middle age with independent means; his mental and physica1

powers are those of a middle-aged man, his experience of the

world that of a newborn child. ft8 The Pickwickians share in e

that ignorance. The nove! documents the progressiqn of all

these men, and especially of Pickwick himself, from ignorance

to knowledge, from foo1ishness to wisdom, and from being

apart from the real J,world to being largely in control of that

world. In order to attaîn knowl~dgeJ wisdom, and control,

hfwever, the Pickwickians need guides experienced in the ways

of the world. The two most.important of these gUidès are

~ingle and Sam WeIler.

Sam, like Jingle, does have ,a past -- one which must have

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been' 'at least as t:nreatened by'poverty as Jingle' s. Tony' " J

Weller says of his son "1 took a good deal o· pains with his , i

eddication, sir1 let hirn 'run in the streets when he was we~y

young, and shift for his-self. It's the only way to make a 4'

"l, ~ >1-

:~~oy'sharp, sir" <Ch. xx, p. 353). Experiences in Sarnls past-

~nclude sleeping under the arches of Waterloo bridge for a

fortnïght, and seeing: ·Sigh~s ••• as 'ud penetrate your

benèvolent heart, and come ou~the other ~ide· (Ch. xvi, p.

290), as he tells Pickwick. A~~pough Tony Weller's remark

about Sam is ironie, it is in a senseabsolutely true: Sam' ~ .

~ learn enoug~ so that he can defend PiékW\Ck frorn the

harshest realities of the wo~ld, and by doing that, better his\ -. - -

own position. His past is ~ series of stepping-stones which

lead eventually out of poverty, and w~ich Sam imagiKes will

lead him to prosperity:

When I wos first pitched nerék and crop into the world, to play at leap-frog with its troubles • • • l wos a carrier's boy at startin': then a vaggin­er's, then a helper, then a boots. Now l'm a gen'­l'm'n's servant. I shall be a gen'l'm'n myself one of these days, perhaps, with a pipe in my mouth, and a summer-house in the back garden.' ~ Who knows? l shouldn't be surprised, for one <Ch. xvi, p. 290).

Both Jingle and Sam are street-wise, and some of ~nàt wisdom

rubs off ,on the Pjckwickians. The two have completely

different ways of using their knowledge, however. Garrett

Stewart, in discussing one aspect of the two, makes this \

clear:

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Dickens makes Sam sound so much 1ike Jingle in order that we Will recognize such vita1ity as the

, shared asset Qf both men, the spontaneous and untutored poets of the street. While Sam thrives

-on this gift, however, Jingle capitalizes ~i~

\ . . /

Jingle's kn~wledge is competitive: he must manipulate and

bamboozle in order to prosper. Sam's 'khowledge, on the other

hand, is an open book, and is used to lead the Pickwickians

away from traps

guards Pickwick

rather than into them. In this way, Sam

from the law and lawyers,- f'rom the lleet, from' \

magistrates, servan~s, ~nd criminals, and from Jingle him~elt,

while Jing1e leads Pickwick into the disaster at Ding1ey Dell,

and intothe embarrassment at the girl' 5 school at Bury St.

Edmunds. Jingle finds his knowledge useful for parting fools

and their money, while Sam finds prosperity in protecting

fools and transformi~g thern into benevolent gentlemen. Since \'

Sam's past ts used to clarify and disarm the present, he can

,take p;ide in his own nature and past, but sinee Jing1e's pasto

is used to confuse and defeat others, he must deny his own

nature, and his past remains hidden.

Any exposure of Jingle's past separates him from his

liveli~ood, plunges 'him into poverty, and forces him to seek

another means of sustenance -- another narne, another iàenti~y~

ànother group of short-term friends. When exposed, Jingle1s .. insinuating facade beqornes simply another role identified with

, . his gui~ty past, and thus a part of the past whieh must be

\ . .

hidden fromall: goodorbad.helpfulordangerous.This is a

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major aspect of " ••• his almost fatal lack of discrimin­

ation: he sees Mr. Pickwick and his friends as indistinguish­

able from Dr. Slammer or Mrs. Leo Hunter. They are seen as

threats or opportunities, and he reacts accordingly

generally with parody or hostility."10 His indiscriminate

attitude may have at a time in his past been an unnecessary •

Dut profitable attribute, .but, with time and experience, it

becomes a necessary part of his personality. As he leaves

more and more victims behind him, he-must forever guard him-

self from' them so that they can never expose him to others.

\One manifestation of Jingle's careful self-protection is

seen in the use he makes of his riame. Al~hàugh Jingle first

appears in the second chapter of the novel, he does not give . ~

'his name, and it remains unknown, until close to the end of

chapter seven. When asked to give his name at the Rochester

baIl he s~ys: \

\

"No names at aIl;" and then he whisper [s toJ Mr Tupman, "Names won't do -- not known -- very good names in their way, but not great ones -­capital names for a small party, but won't make an impression in public assemblies -- incog. the thing -- Gentlemen from London -- distinguished foreign-ers anything" (Ch. ii, p. 87).

When Jingle refuses to give Dr. Slammer his card (and thus his

name) 1ater in ,the same evening, he sets in motion the events \

which lead to the nea~ duel between Winkle and, Sl4mmer.

Ouring the stay at Rochester, none of the Pickwickians ever

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learn the stranger's ident~ty, even though he thoroughly

ingratiates himself with the group. Snodgrass almost puts

Jingle in a position to reveal his name, but he i8 cut short \

when _' , Dr. Slammer recognizes Jingle as his adversary. Strangely

enough, no one, seems to mind Jingle's anonymity. Pickwick -,'

introduces him to Mr. Wardle as "a f~iend of mine" ~Ch. yii,

p~ 163). When Jingle does finally reveal his name (Ch. vii,

p. 167), the Pickwickians are not at aIl 8urprised to hear it.

He has by that time so effectively projected an identity

.without a name that a name is truly unnecessary. "Stranger"

seems to work just as effecëively. Even though Jingle's

presence is felt in màny of the pages· of the novel and in manyt

pages. of Pickwick's notebook, he remains a man whose person-<

alJty i5 still hidden and strange. The constant ~se of the

word "stranger" (it is used fully fifty-six times in reference , 1

to Jing1e in chapter two aione) rnakes a lasting impression on

the read'er, so that even .when Jingle 1s known ~ Jingle, he 1s

still adequately described as "the 8tranger." \

"' In fact, \

"stranger" i8 perhaps a better term of identificatijn for the

man than "J ingle, ft for J ingle' s str~nger quality Jike his

speech pattern, transcends his name and any temporary iden-.,.

titYi it is an obvious part of his character, no matter what

facade he has assûmed for the moment, whether he is Alfred

Jing1~ or Charles Fitz-Marshall. More questionable ia wheth&r

. 'Alfred Jingle is actually Alfred J'ing1e, or whether tha"t name ,1

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is just as superficial as Charles Fitz-Marshall. Considering

Jingle's chameleon nature, it would not be tao difficult ta \ / ,..

suppose that he\would use aIl his names as others would use .

boots -- to fië~the occasion and to be thrown away when worn

out. The only strong evidence that Jingle's real name is \

Jingle is that he retains it'at the end of the novel, but this

could be so because wJingle" is the name that Pickwick knows

Jingle by, and not because that is the name that Jingle-was

born with. Viewed objectively, "Charles Fitz-Marshall w fits

Jingle just as effectively, and one could easily imagine

Jingle being called "Smuffles," "Dingle,· or even "Pickwick,"

as the occasion demanded.-\ Until the last chapters, "Jingle"

is only one identity among many for the stranger.

Wh~n Jingle assumes a new narne, Charles Fit-z-Marshall, hé

shows that he feels forced to bury one of his identities and

to fabricate a new one. The former of these identities seems

quite a positive one, one in which Jingle establishes rnany 4 '

sincere friendships Csincere on the part of others), manyof

them potentially profitable. in the long term, and one that

establishes him in an Eden of canviviality. The fact that he

gives aIl this up for a few paunds shows a tragic quality in

Jingle's nature: he is unable ta respond to human gaadness in

any permanent way, since his frjends of one day became his

enemies of the next. He is, in a way, starved; he cannat

enjoy a situation in which he is in the company of ~lose and

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long-standing friends. Instead~ he finds his pl~asure ln the

Immediate, the transitory, and the exc~ting.

That love of the Immediate is seen in every aspect of -

Jingle's·character, but is perhaps ~est seen in his spee~h.

Obviously his speech Is full of lies, which in themselves

f sever him from developing any sor~_of lastiog relationship. It

is Jingle's distinctive syntax, however, ~that most dramatic-

ally shows his psychological fixatio~ with the immediate. His

speech is unique, and unlike that of any other character in

Pickwick papers or elsewhere. "Staid scholars hav~ spent far

too much time debating from what ephemeral fiction of tbe time

Dickens may have borrowed Jingle's fantastic utterance . . . writes Edgar Johnson. Certainly, there were models at the

time that Dickens could have borrowed from (the most critic-

,,11 ,

ally accepted of which is the speech of Goldfinch in Thomas

Holcroft's Play" The Road to Ruin 12 ). In the same way, Dickens

certainly based Sam's speech on actual models of the time.

Just as Sam infuses his own life and personality into bis

jok'~s, stori~s, "WeI1erf'sms," and' simple statements, however,

50 does Jingle give his ·own ~ unique life to aIl that he

says. Many critics have attempted to explain the relation of

Jingle's·speech to Jingle himself, and °to the-novel as a

"" wnole, and the variety of the explanations implies the scope

of that relation. J. Hillis Miller believes that: "The

breathless aQd broken quality of Jingle's staccato speech / \

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repeats in_miniature the disjointed quality and rapid pace of

the novel as a whole. n1J others see Jingle's speech as a fine

psychologica~ detail: nDickens was not uhaware of t"e associ-~

ation of ideas, a~ the dialogue of Flora Finching [from'

Little Dorrit] and Jingle Shows. n14 Steven Marcus writes: ~I"

Jingle is an approximation of uninflected lin­guistic energy. He seems incoherent but he is not; his speech proceeds rapidly and by associations; his syntactical mode is abbreviatory and contrac­tedi his logic is elliptical, abstractly minimal, and apropositional. ,He brings ufsinto closer / touch with the primary process."

To explain Jingle's speech, however, is to destroy sorne of its 1

magic, and, as Margaret Ganz writes:

The magic of Jingle's conversation, thatO"gift 0' the gab wery gallopin'" (as Tony WeIler, his first linguistic critic, puts it), perives precise­ly from its having no narl:'ow structural or symbolic­function in the work as a whole, while paradoxica~­ly seeming, in its affirmation of ~ife's incon­gruities, at once more essÎctial and more gratui­tous than other elements. ft

() \

Whatever his syntax may say about the novel, it is,. in the

end, distinctly Jingle talking. When Jingle appears at the

Eatanswill public breakfast as Mr. Charles Fitz-Marshall, the .?

·Pickwickians need not know his name, see his face, or hear· any ,

relevant fact about him in order to know who it is aIl they

do is hear a voice saying: "Coming, my dear ma'am •• as

quick as l can -- crowds pf people -- full room -- hard work

-- very" (Ch. xv, p. 286). This obvious mark of idéntifi-.,

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cation Ji~gle cannat hide; it is an undisquisable reflection

af the workings af bis super-imaginative and overexcited

mind.

Jingle betrays this excited mind in bis habits as weIl as

bis speech. One of the best examples of this i s his drink ing

behavior. Jingle, of course, 15 not alone in drinking heavily

'in this novel. George Ford, in Dickens and his Reader,s, men­

tions that in an article of 1888: "one anti-temperance stat­

istician enthusiastically camputed the number of referènces to

alcoholic drinks in Pickwick to be two bundred and ninety five

'including the Inwariable.,n 17 A fair number of these went

to the Pickwickians, the Wellers, and the Wardles. To these

cparacters~ however, alcohol is cheer, conducive to social

interact'ion and to the reaffirmation of human bonds. For

example, it i5 a combination of Mrr• Wardle' S benevolerrt

personality and the added stimulus of a'large quantity of

alconol which causes him to swear eternal friendship to

Jingle. During the same scene, Pickwick is ~rOv,S'ht, with the -

help of alcoho~, to be "shaking his head from side to side,

and producing a constant succession of the blandest and most

benevolenc sroiles without being moved thereunto by any dis-

cernible cause of pretence whatsoever" (Ch. viii, p. 175).

Jingle, on the other hand, finds no such relief; to him, any

bonds which ~rinking serve to intensif y arè bonds barn of

dec~ption. It is in the above scene that h~ describes the

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actions of his "friends" to the Misses Ward1e as "dreadful,"

, and that he indulges in so"'rne of his most blatant .t'equivocation. /

At the Bull Inn, in Rochester, Jing1e views drinking as a

sort of race, and he abuses soçial convention ,to get as much '-

as he can to drink in a short tirne: • • • • the stranger took

wine, first with him ,[Pickwick], and then with Kr Snodgrass, \

and then with Hr Tupman, and then with Mr Winkle, and then

with the who1e party together, alrnost as rapidy as he talked"

(Ch. ii, p. 84). While Dickens keeps count, Jing1e has six

glasses of wine to'Tuprnan's three and the rest of the Pick­

~ickian~',two. EveQ though,th~ Pickwickians often drink in

excess, Jing1e aisplays a tendency towards a1coholism which 1

they do not share. bronically, Jingle is little affected by

heavy consumption of alcohol. There seems to be two reasons

for this. For one thing, he is presented as a seri~us and ex-,'t-.'

perienced drinker: "he emptied his glass, which he had filled

about two rninut~s before, and poured out another, with the air

of à man who was used to it" è-Ch. ii, p. 8S). On the'other

hand, his excited' ,imagination and fervent mental processes \

prove too powerful for alcohol to relax:, in the struggle of

aIl his defenses against the depressant qua1ity of alcohol,

his defenses always prove a c1ear winner. Thus, paradoxi-..

,

cally, while his defenses and his need for relaxation drive \

him to the re1axing powers of alcohol, those sarne mechanisms

prevent him from eV,er enjoying those soothing powers as the

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Pickwickiëins do. The insatiaple nëed for 1I10re is certainly .r

another' rea-son \f~r Jingle' s subsequent fall- into penury.

That fall, when it eventually .h~ppens,_.strangely seems ~

>

both inevitable and unjus~; Because of thefway he treata

Pickwick and ~ther "victims,R an unhappy end would only be , ,

poetically'just •. But Jingle's position in a debtor's prison . ~

is aSlnorally unjust as Pickwick's; his .greatest legal 'crime, , '- .

like pickwick' s, ia talling into debt., Throughout the novel, . , ~. ~

his actions, although deeme~ morally reprehensible, are

clearly ~egal. He shirks dueling with Dr. Slammer; dueling

-wa~, of cou;se, illegal a( the tim~. He is perfectly within

. his rights when he elopes with :4aqhel Wardle~ and has the law, ,

on his side when conftonted by Wardle, Pickwick, anB Perker:

when Wardle calls him "a nice rascal," Per~er says: Rpray \ . , ~r

consider -- pray.' Defamat.ion of char acter: action for dam-. ages. Calm y<?urself" my dear' sir, pray __ " (Ch. x, 1 p.' }06~.

When Jingle, through the machinations of Job Trotter, induces

_P~6kwick tb sneak onto.the grounds of the girl's school in

Bury St •. Edmunds, i t is Pickwick who breaks the law, not Jin-1

91e. One of the major themes in Pickwick Papers, of course, , '

. -<bat the law ls agame. in which the most knowledgeable --

not the most moral, proper, or just -- are winners, but Jin-. '

91e' s actions, however immoral, 'W~U1d be viewed as le9a1 in . \ \, Any reasonab1y humanistic society.

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If Pickwick understands aIl this, _ he stiill decides to f

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pur sue Jingle on the basis of Jingle' s moral villainy: "He .'J"

deceived a worthy man once, and we were the innoè~nt cause. / , ___ r <:> \y

He sha~l not do it a~ain, if 1 c~n h~lp i~1 l'Il expose himl"

CCh. xv, p. 288>" It is Jingle' s attempts to .defend himself

from this pursuit, rather than any deltberate ma~ice on his 'f. , ~

p~rt " that lead Pickwick into' pfs Most humiliating scenes. -~~ .. ~

When Pickwick does catch up with Jingle at the Nupkins', he .. cannot accuse Jingle of being more than an impostor -- but • that" seems to be enough.

The Nupkins, like the Pickwic:k'ia.ns, become'hypnotized by

one of Jingle's facades Chere, /the facade of CpaFles Fitz-\

Marshall) :

J Charmed wi th his long list of aristocratie acquain­tance, his extensive travel, and his fashionable derneanour, Mrs Nupkins and Miss Nupkins had exhib­ited-captain Fitz~Marshall, and quoted Captain F,itz-Marshall, and hurled Captain Fitz-Marshall at thé devoted heads of their select circle of acquaintance, until their bosom friends, Mrs pork­enham apd the Miss Porkenhams, and.Mr Sidney Pôrk~ enham, were ready to burst with jealousy and des­pair. An~ now, to hear, after aIl, that he was a needy swindler, sornething so very like it that it was hard ta tell the differenceJ H,avenS! What would the Porkenhams .sayl (Ch: xxv, p. 429)

1

As far as is known, Jingle has no evil designs here greater .. than having free rneals, free drinks, and the introduction to

thé Nupkins' ·select circle of acquaintence.- The Nupkins do d'

not pare if Jingle is a grasping or defensive person as/long Q

.as he truly holds the place in society that he says he does.

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The only difference between the Jingle they love and the

Jingle they despise is that the latter is known'to be a \ ,

"strolling acto~." Jingle's aspiration~,. here, are the basia , ,\

for a social, not a legal, ~ransgression.

Pickwick succeeds at exposing Jingle here, and once again

separates' him from soèiety. Pick.wick bec'ornes, here and else-

where, a 'hauntin~ legacy of Jingle's past -- so rnuch so that

J~gle's fear of exposure becomes very-much a fear'of Pickwick

himself. J His constant pur suit of ..Jingle changes Pickwick from

a moral innocent into a "Knight Errant.- lB After the p'ainful , .

revelationJ with Jingle's first betrayal, that the earth can-.,

not be the Eden that he thought it was, Pickwick seerns t~want

to ~xorcise Jingle from~ every plàce that he encounters him, , .#/

,trying desperately ta hol~ on to a parad4se which, later, he /

realizes does not existe ~

w. H. Auden sees Jingle as a' serpent in Eden, and Robert \

L. Patten points out the recurring use of garden images in

Pickwick papers. 19 Jingle does fill the role of serpent in

many ways, but this analogy can be taken too far. Jingle is /

not a satanic figure; he never expresses a diabolical thought'

or espouses a diabolical cause ,in the way that Quilp certainly

does. He does not lead Pickwick to an undeTstanding that evil

exista ...simply because he is evil for evil' s sake, but rathér

shows him that the world ia nOt paradise because hunget

exista, and because he is hungry. Like Sam! he has learned to

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survive in a hoàtile w~rld. Dnlike Sam, he fights that

hostility with his own. 'His failings, are selfishness and

need, and not malice or sadism" or any fascination with evil.

Most of the hostility cornes from one class: the class of the

Nupkins, the Porkenhams, the potts, the Wardles, and the

Pickwickians -- a class that he feel;, he ,-must identify wi th to

survive. Fighting their hostility with his own 'leads to both b ,

his constant exposure and their knowledge. Sinee Ji~gle be-l .... ,. \

comes the teacher to Piekwick when he forces the fruits of his . experience upon his real and perceive'd advers"ries20 , he" is

largely responsible for Pickwick's eharaeter transformation:

"The silly' old fool, solemnly busied in the investigation of

tittlebats and tricked by any impostor, started to disappear

with the' unmasking of Mr. Jingle and has sinee faded away. "21 ,)

If Jingle ls responsible for br~nging the fruits of knowledge

to Pickwick, however, he did not pick them from one tree" but .

rather he gatheced them in the streets of London and on the

r~ads of England. The eabman, Sam and Tony WeIler, Job

Trotter, Mr. Perker, and almost every character short of the

Wardles and the P,ickwickians, are privy to at least sorne of

that knowledge. Dingley Dell may bè an Eden, but the rest of

the ",-world is a fallen place, and Pickwick 'can only gain by

sharing in the world's knowledge.

Jingle's human, undiabolical nature, ia best seen in bis

pitiful ... fal!. His inearceration for debt cannot-be seen as \

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anythin~ other than a great wrong, and if Jingle is evil, he

is thwarted by an evil much greater thàn he is: "Dickens al­

lows Jingle, the keenest of blades L to lose al1 his wonderful

/ skil1 at thrust and par ry in order that' the evils of the Fleet ,

('it's unekal, and that's the fa~lt on ~t') should be im-

~ressed upon thè reader.~~ The !leet exposes the absurdity of

\ Pickwick' s unceasing crusade to show Jingle as a snake in

Eden, and shows the foolishness of the assumption that

Jing1e's elimination from this or that &ircle of acquaintance '-would transform the world into a Utopia. When he'is thrown

into <the Fleet, Piekwick i8 thrust into a part of society

which .he has never seen before, about whieh 'Tony WeIler says

"He gdes in rayther raw, Sammy ••• and he'll come out,

do~e so exceedin' brown, that his most familiar friends won't

know him. Roast pigeon' s nothin' to it, Sammy" (Ch. ~lvi, p. /

699). The world' of the law courts and the Fleet-is one in , ,

1

which experience ~nd worldly wisdom ie essential, and its lack ---y '

could be fatal. -The,world ls a part of a great~r world in

which exists: " ,

the polarities of cQntention and resolution: men of business <competitive lawyers ~nd phy­sicians> versus men whose business is mankind~ to' those who attend to the letter (lawyers, ministers) versus those who attend to the spirit; those who employ language to deceive Clawyers, doctora, act­ors, pretenders "to ,knowledge) versus those who ~mploy it to reveal, bbwever ineptly they may set about doing it. And these polarities appear in mu1tjple ~»ises, positive, inverted; comie, serious. j \

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Jingle is certainly one of tbe~ rogues in ~his -list, but he i5

one among many. With the advent of Dodson and Fogg, pick-/

wick's knightlY qu~t is distracted and interr~pted -- )

Jingle's evil is nothing compared to the evil they represent.

When Pickwick meets Jingle in the Fleet, he sees a feLlow

human belng broken by a universal and powerful evil. The

atti tude of the reader" like that of Pickwick,- towards this -,,-

crushed Jingle changes guickly from one of antipathy to one of

sympathy. Suddenly, Jingle i~ no l~nger a stranger tp Pick-

wick, but a comrade'. Wi th no reason to project any sort of

facade other than a need to preserve a semblance-of human

dign-ity;\4: breaks down" and what Pickwick finds is the

remnant of Jingle's true nature. What ls left of his pride

causes-Jingle to make weak attemmpts at humorous deception

which he kn~ws are useleas.

~alk!] t,o J ingle in the Fleet:

For example, when Pickwick first \

"You have.forgotten your coat," sa id MI Pick­wick, as they walked out to the staircase, and closed the door after them.

"Eh?" said Jingle. "Spout -- dear relation uncle Tom -- couldn't help it -- must eat, you know. Wants of nature -- and aIl that."

"What do you mean?" "Gone, my dear _sir -- last coat -- can't help

i.t. 11ve~ on a pair of boots -- whole fortnight,. Silk umbrella -- Ivory handle -- week -- fae~ --honour -- ask Job -- knQws it." '.

"Liv,ed for three weeks upon' a pair of boot:s', and a sil-k umbrella with an ivory handle!" exclai~­ed Mr Pickwick, who had only heard of auch thingB in shipwrecks, or read of them in Constable's Miscellany. .

"True,· said Jin91e, nodding his heàd. Pawn-

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broker's shop -- dupltcates here -- small surns mere nothing -- aIl ras"cals~ <Ch. ~lii, pp. 688-690>;

26

What rnay once have been a deception on Jingle's part i5 now,

at most, an euphernism, and for once Jingle uses his speech to

enlighten Pickwick rather than confuse hi.m. Jingle' s' language

may still be colourful, but it is no longer equiv~cal.

The meeting between Jingle and Pickwick, and the Fleèt

itself, is painful to Pickwick~ but is Very necessary for his

development. Only when Pic.kwick himself ia a -victim can he

understand the system that makes victims of other men. Only

when Pickwick sees the world that Sam, Jingle, Job Trotter,

and others have coped with and fought to stay whole in sLnce

birth, dQes his role as benevolent gentleman become more than , .....

just a humorous attribute. 1

Pickwick is a benevolent gentleman from the,beginning of

Pickwick Papers. His benevolence in the gardens of Dingley

Dell, Eatanswill, and Bath, however, is of a passive type, \

often associated, as has been seen, wlth drunkenness. The

energy is there, but finds littl~ expression for rnost of the

novel except in giving cheer. With the education given him

throughout the novel, however, Pickwick 1earns to direct that \,

energy, and is able to provide h'ope, as weIl as cheer, to the

world •. Although P~ckwick shuts himself away from the horrors

of the Fleet '("My head"'aches with these s,cenes, and/my heatt "\

too. Henceforth 1 will be a prisoner in ~y own room n ' [Ch.

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xlv, p. 737J), he stiil finds a way to show everyone his

benevolence: leaving the Fleet, "He turned • .' . to look about

him, and his eye lightened as he did so. In aIl the crowd Qf

wan, emaciated faces, he saw not one which was not the happier

for his sympathyand charity" CCh. xlvii, p. ~60). Even in

this place (or even because of this place) there is a sense of \ -

exhilaration. Harry Stone wr~tes:

\

Mr. Pickwick's exit from prison i8 a fairy tale pure and simple: he takes with him his entire entourage -- Jingle, Job, Mrs. Bardell and Sam -­enemies and persecutors as weIl as friends. Dic­kens is projecting his childhood daydream of res­cuing his fathei, releasing his father's friends~ and pardoning his father' s pe.rsecutors~4 he is triumphing vicariously over ~he past."

Despite the glory of this scene, Pick~ick's triumph ia only

a partial one. He does not crush the Fleet, or do anything

major to change the system that the Fleet represents. He

,saves sorne of the victims, but leaves behind others. His

1 triumph is not in magically trarisforming the fallen world, but

in learning to cope and in helping others to cope in it:

The "moral" of the story, if there is a simple one that can be expressed in a few word~, is that one must act on the basls of a determined optimism~ and practise charity towards aIl. For, whatever the outcome, as perker observes about Pickwick's benevolent treatment of Job and Jingle, that Act ia worthy. Though one should know of its existence, one ahould not brood on the dark side of life -­such a point of view only intensifies and spreads the darkness. ,And one should develop the capaci ty to distingU~sh between darkfictions and dark . realittés. 2 "

Jo'. '~j ,

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Jin'gle ls not only saved, but is transformed I>y Pick--

wick. When he iB first~ Been after he gets out of the F1eet,

he iB described as "decently and cleanly dressed" (Ch. liii, i

pp. 840-841). Refering back to Auden's third axiom on Edens,

a change of c10thing inv01ves a change of personality. Al­

though Jingle-is never actually a citizen of Eden, this still­

seems ta hOld,true. in an even greater way than before. Jin­

gle iB a new man; his defenses, once crushed, do not reappear.

At the end of the novel Dickens writes of Jingle and Job that

they "became, in time, worthy mernbers of society, although ~;/

they have always st~adi!y objected tq ,return to the scenes of ,/1 their old haunts and temptations" (Ch. Ivi!, p'",_897). The Il

Fleet is a purge for Jingie. "When he is found by PiCkW'iCk/

his rale-making has been rendered absurd -- he cannot P~it . !

from pretense. Because he has finally reached the poverty­

stricken future he had feared, the ghosts of his past have

done their worst. When Pdckwick saves him, Jingle leaves

those ghosts, and the Fleet, behind him. By staying free of

·old haunts and temptations," he remains free of the need to

hide his past behind tbe facade of a temporary personality~

because there is no one to expose him in Demerara, where he ,

makes a new life, he has no fear of exposure.

Emigration often seems ta be a magical device in Dickens:

it makes winners out of such losers as Mr. Micawber, Little

Em'ly, Magwitch, and Jingle. In Jingle's case, however, and

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device to achieve self-~ufillment~-- not so much becau1e it

exposes the loser to new and magical opportunities, but be-

cause ft divorces the victim from a haunting pasto Although

Jingle's salvation is by no means certain (and Pickwick and

Pe~ker have a few doubts about this) , he is fortunate enough

--to be-given the" opportunity to do so. His salvation, then, is

a logical, but not necessary, outcome of the novel.'

Jingl~ is a bad character whom no reader of Dickens can

dismiss as completely or even as mostly evil. He is aman

who, it can be assumed, was born as free from any taint of

evil as Pickwick is at the noVel's start. The evil which he 1 \

b-~omes 'i,dentified with only cornes into being when Jingle is

faced with ~he\trials and pain of-bis reality. To paraphrase

Tony WeIler, Jingle is one of the many who wen~n raw and

came out exceedingly orown. Jingle's evi! is ~ot that ,of a

man -who worships evil for its own sake, but is the evil of a

weak man, who sees hostility as the only response to a world \

capable of being hostile. If he is a villain, it is only , ,

through a perceived necessity, rather than through inclina-

tion: "his responses to the world, in one sense preposte~ou~.

are yet emblematic approximations of genuine strate~ies by

which the human psyche tries to cope with the anamalous, para­

doxical, threatening terms on which (it exists •• ,26 Pickwick

matures through knowledge of Jingle's tIue self. To the Pick-

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l ,

wick_with an infant's grasp on reality, Jingle is ,a monster,

to the adult Pickwick,' tQe "benevolent gentleman,· Jing~e is a

weakling, using the imperfect weapons of his o~n hostility to

fight the monster o~ harsh social reality.

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Notes

1 w. H. Auden, "Dingley Dell and the Fleet," in his The

Dyer's Band and other Essays (New York: Random House, 1962),

p.' 411.

2 Charles Dickens, The Pickwick papers, ed. Robert L • ... , Patten (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972), Ch. ii, p. 73. AlI

.further references to this work appear in the texte

? "To Miss Catherine Hogarth," 21 February 1836, The '/ .

Letters of Charles Dickens, ed. Madeline House and Graham

Storey (Oxford: Clarendon, 1965-), l, 133.

4 J~ Hillis Miller, Charles Dickens: The World 0 his

.... ,

Noy~ls (Cambridg~. Massachusetts:-Barvard University pr s~~~ p. 24.

5 Robert L. Patten, ed., The Pickwick Papers, by Charles

Dickens (Harrnondsworth: penguin, 1972>, p. 24.

6 For example, Edmund Wilson states that they "make a

contrast with the narrative proper." W. H. Auden states: ,"to

Mr. Pickwick ••• literature [i.e. the interpolated tales]

and life are separate universes;'evil and suffering do not

exist in the world he perceives with his senses, only in the

world of entertaining fiction." Edmund Wi~son, "Dickens: The

Two scrooges," in his The Wound and tQe Bow (New York: Oxford

University Press, 1947)~ p. 10; Auden, p. 418.

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7 Fred Kaplan, Dickens and Mesmeri§m: The Hidden

Springs of Fiction (Princeton: Princeton University Press,

1975), p. 140.

8 Auden, p. 416.

9 Gar-rett Stewart, Dickens and the Trials of Imagination

(Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard univèrsity Press, 1974),

p. 67.

10 James R. Kinca'id, Dickens and the Rhetoric of. Lau9~- .

ter (Oxford: Clarendon, 1971), p. 27 • ~ -

~lEdgar Johnson, Charles Dickens: The Tragedy an~ the

Triumph (London: yictor Gollancz, 1953); l, 159. For inves­

tigatio~s into the origin of Jingle's speech, see Sy1~~re -

Monod, Dickens the Novelist (Norman, Oklahoma: University Of ,

Oklahoma Press, 1967), p. 109 and n.1 Louis ~ames, "Fiétibn -

for the Working Man," rpt. partia11y ~n Charles Dickens, ed.

Stephen Wall (Harmondsworth, Pengiun, 1970), p. 4741 and'

walter Dexter, "Jorrocks ~gain," Dickensian, 30 Cl934),

p. 239:

12 Thomas\Holcroft, The Road to Ruin (London: J~ Deb-J

rett, 1792), but see James and Dexter Aboye.

13 Miller, pp. 23--24

1-4 'Harv~~,~peter Sucksmith,' The Narrâtive Art of Charles

Qickens -(Oxford: ClarendoJÎ'~ 1970), p.167

15 Steven Man:us~ "La,nguage into Structure: Pickwick ;

Revisited," Daede1us, 101 (1972), p. 191. . .

, v •. ,"-._>._,_~,1i..,-"lIo."'.'-·"~~_~'Al .. h . . ~.~.'.-.....J. .... _"~'" _.~ r .......... '~._." __ .~ ... ~

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.: 33

16 Margaret Ganz, "piekwick Papers ang .. ..t-l'fe RefashiorlÎng

of Reality, Il Dickens Studies Annual, 4 (I97,?), p.' 37. i

J 7 Ge~rge H. Ford, Dickens and his Readers: Aspects of

Novel-Criticism sinee 1836 (New York: Norton,'1965J, p. Il.

18 Auden, p. 419.

"19 u Auden, p. 419, Patten, pp. 27-28 •

20 See Kincaid, p. \ 31, pattèn, p •. 24, for more on Jingle o ,

as teacher. --.

21 Johnson, I, 171.

22 John -Killharn', "Pickwiek: Dickens and the Art of Fic-

tiQn, Il in Dickens and \the Twentieth Century, ed. John' Gross'

and Gabriel Pearson (London: Routledge and Keegan Paul, 1962),

p. 40. 2) 0

"Patten"p. 28. ,

24 Harry Stone, Dickens and. the Invisible World: Fairy' , 1

Tales, Fantasy" and Novel! Making CBloomington and London:

Indiana University Press, 1~79), p. 73~

25 Patten, p. 30.

26 Ganz, p. 40.

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. II: The ~onster: Dariiel aUilP'

ê)

·One of' the most interesting and yet easily forgotten " \ ,

facts about The Old Curiosity Shop is that ifs chief villain,

,# Daniel Quil,p, is -hardly a cr inlÏnal at aIl.. Despi te his\ un-

.

, changing and unce,asing malice, he does little that -he could be

tried for and found guilty of in a court of law. There is an 1 4

that h4 ~s involyed with the Gri~inal ~ ~,smoked his, smugg~ cigars under the very nos~

early mention

of London: he

of the Custorn HOus~"l. but nothing else of this world 'is seen \ .

or~h~ard of in the novel. His physical attac~s upon his wife

and Samps6n Brass, which occur often"seem out of the juris­

diction of' the, courts of the time. The law doe's not tàke an

interest in Quilp un"til the plot to frame Kit ,for ,theft is

discovered. Quilp makes a point of "separating himself from \. 1

the crime, however,.when he tells Sarnpson Brasa: ~Now, you

know the lad, and' can guess the rest. Devise your own rneans /

of putting h1m out of my way, and execute them" (Ch. li,.p.

, 479). He is aloof enough, from the actual crime that. he Gan

truly later say to Brass: "Why do you talk to me of comb~ning

,together? Do 1 combine? Do 1

binings?" (Ch. lxii, p. 567).

\ , know anything about your cOm-

\

The ?nly testimony whlch seri-" ,

ously incriminates Quilp';-- Sampson" Brass's own -- Ois extreme-,\ '/

ly biased: "Mr Brass, in a great hurry, revealed the whole .

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35

story; beàring as heavily as possible on his amiable employer,

and making himself out ta be rather a-saint-like and holy

character, though subject he ack~owledged ta hutnan weaJç-

nesses" ~Ch. lxvi, 608). Althou~h Quilp may be the nchief

agent in this villainyn (ch.lxvi,. p. 598), be cannot be con­

-sidered legally r'esponsible. His one true attempt to commit

an obViously illegal Act -- fleeing from a warrant -- is un­

successful, and ends in hjs ~eath.

In a strictly legal sense, then, Julian Symons is correct

when4Q writes: "Quilp is one of~ the most extraordimiry of _

Dickens's creations, and yet one of the most unsucces~ful:

for, having created this monstrous machine, Dickens can find

no adequ~e wo~k f~r it ta do. n2 Quilp is, however, 'intens~ly alive, active, and evi~nd ~hat evil i8 usually above legal-

~ \ !

ity.' No one could be convicted of anythin~ ih Engla~d for

saying nI don't eat babies; l don't like 'em n (~h. xxi, p. \

·223), but it is such a phrase, with its evil-flavoured'humor, \

that brilliantly characterizes some sort of demon or monster , /

or some sort of Quilp.

The most monstrous of Quilp' s actions -- those whieh

force Nell and old T~ent to flee their house and eventually to

die, are not at aIl illegal. -In fact, they are sanctioned by .

" the law: "The old man's illness'had not lasted man y days when

he [Quilp] took

them, in ~irtue

premises and/aIl upon

to that effect, which - .

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36

fe~~nderstood and none presurned to calI in question" '(Ch. xi,

p. ~36). The law ls a plaything to ouilp'~ he abuses it as he

abuset his lawyer, Brass. Through the Brasses he uses the

Iaw's ·slippery and eel-like crawlings,· ra,ther th an its

"eagle-flights, which are rare~ (C~ xxxiii, p. 321). ~Until

Ouilp'dies and the Brasses fall, soèiety as a just and

avenging force ls hardly present in The Old Curiosity,Shop

where society should help Nell and hinder Quilp, lt does

nothing of the sort. In The Old Curiosity Shop, Dickens

chooses ta largely ignore·social~mechanisms and lnstead to

investigate powers that transcended early Victorian~society.

Of aIl Dickens's novels, The Old Curiosity Shop ia

certainly the least rooted in concrete zeality. The chron-t:. ,

ology of the novel Is vague; at one point Dickens implies that

Queen Victoria reigns (Ch~ xiii, p. 152), but later in the

novel, ~eference ls made to His Majesty, meanin~ ei~her George

IV or William IV. Thé geography, too, is vague. Dickens

gives no names for any of the places that Nell wanders through

(even thougp these places were often based on actual loca-

tions). This deliberate obscurity tends to place the tale (

apart from specifie social issues and concerns -- so mu ch so,

/ that many cri tics see the world of The Old Curiosity Shop as

an alternate one. K. J. Fielding feels that: ·The story m~st

be read as a kind of fairy-tale.· 3 To J. Billie Miller, -The ,. 4'.­

Old Curiosity .Shop ls Dickens's most dreamlike novel,· and to /

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Edg~r Johnson, "the entire tale has about it something fabu-

lous. ft)

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Harvey Peter Sucksmixh sees Nell's wanderings as "an /1

a!chetypal journey through hell and purgatory ~oward paradlse

. . . . Dickens himself is conscious of this transcen-

dent aspect of the novel when he writes of" Nell (through Kas­

ter Humphrey) "she seemed to exist in a kind of allegory ,,1' •. If The_Old Curiosity Shop is viewed as a fairy tale,

drearn, fable, or allegory, the role of Quilp is given added

significance. His evil 15 not a sort of petty, amoral evil

that sort of evil that Jingle uses as a defense against real­

ity -- but is a superhuman force, a conscioüs attack on good­

ness, which is'almost omnipresent and yet emanates from one

being. Quilp ~s the "evil genius" of Nell and the other virt­

uous characters, and no matter how far they run his presence , ~

~ . seems somehow to sur round them. Dickens, very ambitiously,

creates a character that is Evil, and one to which almost

every evil in. the novel is connected, directly oiÇ_~ndirectly,

or reflected. Dickens ~ble to maintain the cha,racter of' \

Quilp by providing him with a strong vitality, a vitality

which makes him both absolutely evil and uniquely the one man

Daniel Quilp. The legal mechanism of early nineteenth-century , ry England is in no way equipped to deal 'with such a monster as

this: although legally he May not be a thlef or a murderer,

(an~ although su ch villains certalnly do. exist i~~

Daniel Quilp ls th,e Most completely ev!l character in -

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·l Dickens's works. , \

The force whièh Daniel Ouilp embodies ls partially pre-\

sented before Quilp makes bis fir't appearaI}ce, with the

description' of .the Old Curiosity Shop itself. Thomas Heed

wrote ~n 1840, during the seriaI publication of the book (and

therëfore before its completion):

To turn from old loves to new, we do not know where we have met, in fiction, with a more'stri~ing and picturesque combination of images than is presented by the simple, childish figure of Little Nelly, amidst a chaos of such obsolete, grotesque, old-world commodities as form the stock in trade of the Old Curiosity Shop. Look at the Artist's 'picture of the child, asleep in her little bed, surrounded, or r~ther mobbed, by ancient armour. and arms, antique furhiture, and relies sacred or profane, hideQus or grotesque: -- it is like an Allegory of the peace and innocence of Childhood in the midst of violence, Superstition, and aSI the hateful or hurtfu1 Passions of the world.

Quilp is the active expression of these "hateful or hurtful 1

~ Passions," of the evil, and of the danger that is dormant

and merely potential in ttre the Old Curiosity Shop itself.

John Forster writes: "The hideous lumber and rottenness that

~urround/the 'child in her grandfather's home, take shape again

in Quilp and his filthy gang."9 Qui-lp ia more than simply one

curiosity among others, but lord over them, in the same way

that he ~s lord over his human gang. Quilp and his gang

are not simply confined to the old Curiosity Shop, as the im­

material grotesques are, butjnhabit a larger world that is . hardly less cur;ous than thé shop. In this sense, even though

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the actuâl Old CUfiosity Shop disappears forever before one~

fifth of the novel passes, the title is appropriate through­

out. Besides the curious world of the shop, there are the

curious haunts of Quilp, and the odd assortment of curious

places Nell discovers on her journey. More than this, though,

there are the extended curiosity shops of London, of England,

or even of the corporeal world as a whole -- and, whilel she

lives, Nell cannot escape the influence of that great' "shop."

Before Nell flees from her home, she c~tches a glimpse 'of ~

the larger c urio si t Y shop outside: "There was a crooked

stack of chimneys on one of the roofs, in which by often look­

ing at them she had fancied ugly faces that were frowning over Iv

at her and trying to peer into the r,oom • • • " ·(Ch. ix, p.

120). On the jo~rney out of the city and towards a pastoral

wonderland, Nell'constantly encounter~e such curiosities

-- the Punch show, the description of the habits of carnival

freaks by the ugly "Sweet William" Vuffin in the Jolly Sand­

boys (Ch. xix, pp. 204-6), the gypsies, tramps, gamblers, and

·vagabond groups" at the races, which "frightened and re-\

pelled" Nell (Ch. xix, pp. 209-210), the murderers, clowns,

and despots of Mrs. Jarley's waxworks (especially terrifying

a~ight), the hell of the Black 'country, and finally, the

mute~, disarmed i and mostly dead .curiosities of the village \

in which Nell meets her death: "a place to live and learn to

die inl" (Ch. Iii, p. 482).

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While NeIll s journey is' an attempt to free herself from

the grotesque forms of the Dld Curiosity Shop and the'larger'

curiosity shop of the city and the,world, Ouilp delights

in those forms. His London is one'larg~ curiosity shop con-

, taining a host of others: the junkyard of ouilp's wharf, the

confusion and noise of the river, and the ·summer-house" that

ouilp frequents, "a rugged wooden box, rotten and bare to

see" (Ch. xxi, p. 225), which is appropriately called "the

Wilder~ess" despite, or even because of, it~ location in the

city. There is also the Brasses' residence and office, which

Dick Swiveller calls "a most 'remarkable and supernatural sort.

of house!" (Ch. xxxiv, p. 334). G. K. Chesterton writes that /

Dickens' s "idea of 'a desolate place is a place where, anything

can happen; he has no'idea of, that desolate place where no­

thing can happen" -- and in these city wastelands, it is

largely Ouilp who provides that great ~otentiality.l0

Ouilp's energy always is associated with a will to domi­

nate and/ ta control his situation ·and environment completely,

aIl of which he usually does. Th~ earliest and most obvious

example of this occurs when he cornes to cont~ol the original

and symbolic curiosity shop. When Ouilp is first seen in the

shop, he seems to have a strange and uniq,ue power over aIl tne

curiosities when h~ looks "with a keen glance around which

seemed to comprebend every object within bis range of vision,

'however small or trivial • . .' • CCb. iii, pp. 69-70). That

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41

comprehensiolL-..becomes, later,' an economic control, of/he

~ouse, and a psychological and physical control of its inhab-, ,

itants, when Quilp takes over t~e shop and moves in. rHe makes

- ---a--s.Q{t of throne-rooItl in the back parlour, and is care'ful to

take "a minute inventory of aIl the goods in the place" (Ch.

,xi, p. 141). In this crowded and tiny kingdom he is happiest

when he can make an atready claustrophic at~osphere even more

so by smoking withoùt cessation. His u1timate act of p~rver­

sion and dominance of the cu~iosity shop occurs when he requi-

, sitions Ne~l's bed to'use as his own -~ an action with obvious

sexual overtones: "the bed being soft and comfortable, Mr

Quilp determined'to use it, both as a sleeping place by night

and as a kind of Divan by day" (Ch. xi, p. 141). The image of

the chi1d that Haster Humphrey has in chapter one: "surrounded \

~ and beset by everything that was foreign to its nature, and

furthest rernoved from the sympathies of her sex and age" (p.

56), goes a step further in this later scen~ when the greatest

curiosity of thema1l overwhelms that one place in the shop

. which once appearèd so holy and somehow inviolable.

this point in the story that Nell ia forced to flee.

It is at

In the world in which Ouilp thrives, humans are as 1ikely

as objects t~be curlosltles. Obviously Sampson Brase 18

1ittle more than a device to,Quilp; and when he ia in the Old

Curloaity.Shop, he is called -the ugliest piece of goods in

aIl the stock- (Ch. xii, p. 150). Q~ilp delights ~n his power

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42

to control and abuse objects and people alike. That power is­

strong and outgoing, and it largely dictates the actions and

energies of his thralls in London, and which finds a haunting

expression in the unending sense of persecution that Nell

encounters in the countryaide. It ia a force which is, more

than anything else, vital -- a hypnotic, unceasing, and con­

suming life-force.

-~ .. -

That force is seen in every aspect of Ouilp's being. In

his physical ~ovementa he ia unceasingly active; he ia one of \.

those charactera of which "the ferocity_of their animation

suggests a large energy and life compelled into tight bonds.-ll

Be desirea that sort of animation in others; he keeps his wife

awake for a whole night to torture her, and is overjoyed to

turn the near-museum of the Curiosity Shop into a near-circus.

Even in his sleep he betrays a sort of liveliness·-- he.,sleeps

with his eyes partially open <Ch. xii, p. 150).

Quilp's symbolic role as the life force in the novel ia

emphasized by his usual, and his favorite, geographical 10-

cation the heart of London, and thus the most act,ive area

in aIl of Great Britain. When Dickens describes life upon the

Thames, he describes a world in which Nell ls lost and Qu~lp . . ia very much at home:

Coming slow1y on through the forest of masts was a great steam ship, beating the vater in short impatient stroke·s with her heavy padd1es as though she wanted room to bteathe, and advancing in her\ huge bulk like a se~ mQn~ter among' the minnows of

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the Thames. On either h~nd were long black tiers of-colliersi between them vessels slowly working out of harbour with sails glistening in the sun, and creaking noise on board, re-echoed from a hun­dred quarters. The water and aIl upon it was in ~ctive motion, dancing and buoyant and bubbling up • • •• (Ch. v, p. 86)

Quilp's phys~cal activity never fails ta match the activity of

the world around him.

Steven ~arcus describes Qu~lpls role , and Nell's con­

traating raIe, in the novel:

Nell is the spirit moving toward the peace of death, detached in her immaculàteness from the source out of whièh spirit springs. Quilp, how­ever, is that source; he is flesh gone wild, and in a novel whose overpowering movement is toward death, hé personifies the energy of life -- life conceived as a perver~ and destructi~e element,

\ but. life nonetheless.

In The Old Curiosity Shop, Dickens makes a, balance be­

tween life-force and death-force~ Nell'a death-force ia, like

Quilp's life-force, almost omnipresent and yet largely

embodied in one individual. To truly understand Quilp's great

force, it ia n~tessart to understand the force of his toile

From the plot of the book, it would seem that Quilp is

powerful and Nell iS,weak, but this i~-only true in a limited

sense. Nell, tao; has her power, but it ls a power\divorced

from the materi~l and the earthly. As A. C. Swinburne writes,

somewhat

wings at

unkindly,

once. _13

-Dickens might as weIl have fitted her vith

Nell appears ~p commune with the angels an~ j

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feast on deat~ f~om the start; the first illustration of her,

and the second-Iast one (ju~t before one that shows her being )

lifted up to he aven by a group of angels) both show her in a

"similar state: unc<?nscious (in one, dead), in bed, surrounded

by and aloof from the world of curiosities. The similarities

in the illusti'ations imply a ciose connection between the liv­

ing-Nell and the de ad one -- the connection between death and

living death. John Forster is just being silly when he wribes

about The CId Curiosity Shop:

1 was responsible for its trag~c ending. He [Dickens] had not thought of -killing her, when, about half-way through, I asked him to consider whether it did not necessarily belong to his own conception, after taking so mere a child through such a tragedy of sorrow, to lift her also out of the commonplace of ordinary happy endings, so that the gentle pure little figure and form-should' never· change to the fancy.

According to Forster: RAIl 1 meant he seized on at once and

never turried aside from it again. ft14 Forster was, however, as

he n~arly admits, only pointing out the inevitable to Dickens.

While it is true that Dickens sometirnes did alter his con-

ceived plots on the suggestion of acguaintences (it was done, or':;'" ,(. \

~;, '\ for exarni'l:e, in the case of James Carker>, in tnis case Nell' s

death is a necessity from the start. Although'· Dickens can

write, at the end of ~ittle Dorrit of John Cleunam and Little

Dorrit hers:rf ~Tney went quietly down into the roaring ~

street'S, i~epaàlble-" and blessed~ and as they passed along in \ ..,.,.-~

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SUDSbiD

t and shade. the noisy and the eager, and the ~rrogant

and the forward and the vain, fretted and chafed, and made

their usual upro~r .. 15 he can never say anything of the . . . , kind ab9ut Nell, a creature of extremes" forever repelled by

the things that Clennam and Little Dorrit (who is, like Nell,

a stunted and virtuous girl-child, albeit a modified on.> have

adapted to. In The Old Curiosity Shop, no compromises are

possible; it i~ efther Nell or the grotesques who must dis-

appear from the earth, and the novel ia at least enough rooted

in reality that it is Nell who dies.

Her death is a process that begins quite early iri the

novel~ when she begins to see a pastoral alternative to the

woes she and her grandfat~er face in Ouilp's London:

- , Let us walk through country placés, and sleep in fields and under trees, and never think of money again, or anything that can make you sad, but rest at nights, and have the sun and wind upon our faces in the day, and thank God together. Let us never set foot in dark rooms or melancholy houses any­more, but wander up and down wherever we like to go, and when you are tired, you shall stop to rest in the pleasantest place that we can find, and 1 will go and beg for both. (Ch. ix, p. 124).

More interesting than what they would have in this dream worl~

is what tbey would ~ bave. Money and shelter in this state,

it seems, are only things to ma~e one sad, aIl human contact

except that whicb would come through the unavoidable and

unromantic dut Y of begging -- is unnecessary, and because of

the need for perpetuaI movement, discouraged. Also missing ia

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.. ' any conception of rain or snow. In this somewhat absurd visIOn .

only the need for food holds ~ell anywhere neàr ... ~ to earth. , . .

In this scene, and in latér ones, pastoral images are " /

close1y related to death. Steven Marcus write.s of The Old

"Curiosity Shop: "The" Eng1and of the novel is nothing less than

a vast necrop~lis. Those who are not in their graves soon . will be -- they are merely the living dead-•• 16 When her

ramblings are not ,interrupted

ana Jar1eys of the novel Cand

• if • ~L

by the lively Codlins ~pd Short~ , b

sometimes ~ven when they ~re);

Nell encounters death at every turne At the firet place that Q

Nell begs, an old man, without any pro~~ting, tells' her about \

- his dead son. Soon after ~his we read that Nell ·felt a cur-.

ious k,ind of pleasure 0 in 'lingerin9 among the bouses of the

de ad • .' • • CCh. xvii, pp. 186-7). It is in a graveyard that

she meets Codlin and Short. 17 It is in the sarne graveyard

that she later meets an old woman visiting the grave of her

husband who has been dead 'fÇ)'r, fifty-si'x years. Later Nell '"j

meets the kind schoolmasterï' a' sort of guide to death, who/

~ 1eads her tO,see the schoolboy's death and later almost su­

pe'rvises her own. The images of death, graves, age, slow

decline, and angels, incre~se as Nell and her\ grandfather'

progress, until, at the village in which she is to die, every­

thing Is related to death and is meant to .foreshadow Nell's ~ own. She "lives in a place that is almost a tomb. Almost aIl

her acquaintances are 014 men who seem neal; death: the grave-

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47

digger, the sexton (who takes pleasure in showing Nell graves

and crypts) ~ and the -Bachelor,· who studies the history, of ~

the '<::orpses of the town. Ev;e.,ry thought and image, conscious ,

or dreaming, that Nell has, is on a happy death. The'refer-, .. 1

ences to death in the relevant chapters Clii-lv) are far too

" numerous to relate. Even the village 1s_ dying; Dickens _pur­

posefully presents, and Nell realizes, -the solemn pre~énce

within,- of that decay which falls on senseless things the most b

-enduring in their na_ture; and, without,_ and round a:bout on r--

every side, of Death" CCh. Iii, p. 484). From tllis village of

death to Nell's actual death is no great step, although'

Dickens greets it with the overblown burst of blank verse

sentimentality which has tended to give the entire novel,

unfortunately, its tarnished reputation,.' In a way, though,

tliat sentimentality is necessary: Nell' s death is the bitter-<}',

tl 1 ...

swee~ triumph of her entire progress l , and ,like Christian

r~achin~ the Ce.lestial City, that deserves, sorne celebration.

The comparison between Pilgrim's progress and Tbe Old

Curiosity Shop is not an arbitrary one. Nell makes the com-$""

~ parison herself when she saya to ,her grandfather~ "1 feel: aà if

we were ,t5'oth Christian, and laid down on this grass all the '1

cares/and troubles we brought with us, never to take them up

again~_)Ch.p xv, p.17S). Like Christian in pilgrim's" Progr-ess,

Nell's adversaries have been seen _~~ especially, by

Dickens's contemporarie8 -- aa •• re foils t~' and only

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.. important because of their relation to he~. ' As Una pope-

Hennessy writes: ' / \

Neither Codl::in and Short, nor Mrs. Jarley, n'Or indeed any of the comie characters, interested contemporary readers to the sarne degree as his heroine', Nell: their .... attention and sympathy were fixed on Nell, and Nell alone. The other figures in the book were accepted as necessary to the dev,elopment of the story and as foHs1SO the angelic quali ties of "the li tUe girl. ,

The ravings of Thomas Hood and John Forster over Nell tend to

reflect this position. n,ickens may have had this view in"

mind 'for sorne' of t:he n,ovel, and especially in the fir~t ehap':" , '!.' \ '

ter, when Nell is surrounded by grotesques and is eertainly

the focal point; of the scene. But later in the novel, Dickens

writes: -Everything"in our lives, whether, of good or evil,

affects us rnost by contrast'" ,(Ch. liii, p. 493), and unlike

Pilgrim's Progiess, ev!l in The C1d Curiosity Shop is centered

around one person. If ouilp is a foil to Nell, then Nell is

just as much a foil to Ouilp. The polarizati"On between the

two sets the standard for the complete polarization of the /

novel itself. Malcolm Andrews writes:

/

More than 'any other of Dickens' s novels; The Old Cur ios1 ty Shoe' s design is dependent on tne reéJ.l­ization of • • • broad contrasts: youth and 'old age, beaut.y: and ,deformity, country and city, ,light and darkness" freedom and cQnstraint, illusion and reality. "'l'hey are 'amplified to such a degree that the novel virtually breaks in two, aa we follow in sequences of, cb~pters first. Nell and her grand-fat.ller in the countrvltt th"en QUilp, Kit and Dick SWiveller in London.~"

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/ 49

Andréws points out one of the greatest !aults in the plot of

The Old Curiosi ty Sho;p: after a horrifying vision that Nell

has of Quilp in the count ryside, half-way through the novel,

the two never meet again -- and the last time Quilp sees Nell

is much earlier, in ch~pter twet_.ye. In a sense, this di ver­

gence matbers little -- Dickens is still able ta play off

Nell' s goodness against Quilp' s evil through theï-r inter­

actions with the world rather than with each other. A far i;I T

greater problém with ~J'le novel concerns the cosmÙ: struggle

between the two" and the forces they represent. The Old

Curiosity Shop should be, on its level of myth, fable, or

allegory, the presentation of a battle for the earth, a battle

, fought between the other-worldly Nell-force and the under­

worldly Quilp force. In that battle, however, Quilp is, from

the start, a winner by default. One contrast which Andrews

neglects to mention is one of the mpst important -- the con­

trast between th"e ·material and the immaterial: the wor1d of

'"' the material, 'of course, being strictly Quilp's domaine , 1

In

presenting Nell as a spirit, Dickens :\is aIl too successfull , ,

Nell is the living dead' in its most 'contradictory sense. By

cornparison, Ouilp's assertion of life, and his fufillment

through controlling the things of this world..;nakes b..im one who ,

lives life in the most emphatic sense of that phrase. By

being repelled by the material, Nell i8 an impossib11ity.

Quilp' s problem, if he has one, 1s that he i8 aIl too attrac-

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ted to and triumphan.t over the material., That triumph over

,matt'er forces the reader to 'hink that matter i t~elf is- evil.

On an earthly plane, Nell' s only triumph is that she is able

to die and escape' Quilp and the material.

Quilp' s close symbolic association with the earthly and

material is se en throughout, the novel. Whereas Nell is a;;r;

to remain impossibly immaculate during her long wanderings,,'

Quilp seems always to attract dirt. Even his~washings serve

to make hrm dirtier: "Mr Quilp withdrew ,.to the adjoining room

and turning back hi p coat-collar, proceeded' to srnear his

countenance wi th a damp towel of a very unwholesome apearance,

which madehis complexion rather more cloudy than i t was be­

fore" CCh. v, p. ~5). As d~rt i8 att.racted to' Qùilp, SO i8

Quilp attracted to di rt: at Quilp' s Wharf, where Quilp appears

to the reader to be m'Ost at home, he sleeps "amidst the con­

genial accornpaniments of rain, rnl)d, dirt, damp, fog, and rats

••• " <Ch. li, p. 472>' In a characteristic pose, Quilp ts \

, seen "throwing himself on the ground" where he "screamed and

rolled ~bout in the most uncontrollable deliciht" <Ch. xxi, p.

227). When Nell spots' Quilp in the countryside, he i6 once ~

again associated ,with the ground in a different sense~ ".he

seemed ·to have risen out of the ear~h" <Ch. 27, p. 276).

Northrop Frye sees Quilp as an inanirnate object anima-

ted:

In ~he Old Curiosity Shop, after we have been

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introduced ta Quilp, Little Nell and her grand­father set out on their travels and see a Punch and Judy show. It occurs to us that Quflp, who ia described as a "grotesque puppet,n who lies,

'cheats, beats his wife, gets in'bo fistfights, 'drinks like a salamander, and cornes to a sticky end in, a bog6 is Punch, brought ta life as a char acter • "2 \,

51

Frye 1 s view is somewhat nar raw, however; he certainly realizes

Quilp' s vitality but redùces Hs symbolic depth by seeing him \

as an animate puppet. Arthur Washburn Brown 1 s view of Quilp

as" "king of the goblins in The Old Curiosity Shop"21 ia more

effective -- it combines the sense of matter with the supèr-. natural energy and potential which a Punch could no t, have.

Other cri tica hav~ realized that supernatural, non-spiritual

or anti-spiritual energy, and have seen Quilp as such thing$

as one of the ndevUs and demons of darkness" (with Fagin),

and' as "a n fire-eating demon, JI or as "entirely Sabttnic," and

,,22 "utterly monstrous . . . . Dickens carefully develops this

\ monstrosi ty Jn his c("eation of Quilp; and although Many

cri tics see aH of Dickens 1 s villains as monsters of one type

'or anather, only one other has a truly, supernaturally man­

strous aspect: Fagin. The supernatural eneigy of these two

serves to set them apart from the more socially motivated and \

restricted villains in Dickens -- villain~ such' as Bill Sikes, (>- '

Ralph Nickleby, Jona/s Chuzzlewit, Sir Johii'<::hester, and James

Carker. 'Quilp is set apart even from Fagin in th~ complete­

ness of his supernaturality; Fagin, though often seen as a

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demon, is still closely connected wrth the criminal underworld

of London and is caugQt in the workings ,of society and the

law: he, unlike Quilp, is caught and put down by a powerful ,

society'. Quilp is not nearly as, restricted. 1

Many of Quilp's actions are sufficiently amazing to' cause

th~ reader to doubt his humanity. There;âre, first of aIl, /

his supernatural appearances -- he has the ability to show up~ ri.

when his appearance is least expected and least desired. When

Nell describes her pastoral dre~m to her grandfather early in­

the novel, both they ~md the r-eader are sup'rised to learn that

"other ears and eyes w~re there and greedily taking in aIl ,

that passed, and moreover-they were the eyes and ears of no

less a person than Mr Daniel Quilp •••• ft The figure's

presence causes Nell and her grandfather to "half-doubt its

'reali~yn (Ch. vii, p.124). Later, Quilp descends upon his .. wife and her friends just as they are disc~ssing him. In

another scene, a drunk~n lioli.loquy· of Dick Sw~veller' s turns

out not to be a Boliloquy at aIl -- Quilp has been the- unob­

served spectator of the whole thing. Quilp later goes through

a mock res-urrection when he appears to his family and to Samp­

son Brass after they believed he was dead. When Quilp appears . .

to Nell in the country, his appearance is truly magical, and

to Nell, truly demonic; he is seen "showing in the m~onlight

like'some~monstrous image that had corne down from its niche

and was casting a backwards glance at its old house" ,(Ch.

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xxvii, p. 276) ~ ..,;

It is in b.his-s~~îihe~e Quilp appears to /"

have arisen out of the earth'. ,J,

Quilp's humanity is elsewhere doubted. After viewing his \

\ -~ eating habits, his wife and mother-in-law "were nearly fright-

ened out of their wits, and began to doubt if he were really a

human creature" (Ch. v, p. 86). Their doubt is certainly --

merited, for they had just watched him as "he ate hard eggs,

shell and aIl, devoured gigantic prawns with the heads and

tails on, chewed tobacco and water-cresses at the sarne time

and with extraordinary greediness, drank boiling tea without

winking, [and] bit his fork and spoon till they bent again • •

.. His drinking habits are just as inhuman; at one pqint in • •

the Il.ovel he cheerfully puts down near-ly a half-pint of boil-

'\. ing rum <Ch. ·lxii, p. 567-8). When he asks Dick if he enjoys

his ~lass of "the noblest Schiedam," he says: "15 it good • ~Y'

• is it strong and fiery? Does it make you wink, and choak,

and your eyes water, and your breath corne short -- does it?".

TO'which Dick -- no innocent to the world of alcoholic con--_ ~ ~~f'

sumption -- answ~ "Why, man, yo~ don't mean to tell me that

you drinl( such fire as this?· (Ch. xxi, p. 226). Unlikè Jin­

gle, who. betrays a dependen,cy of sorts on alcohol, Qu:i;lp de­

lights in drinking fire, or eating garbage, or smoking rank­

ness simply because they are so na st y, and by doing so he

shows his power over the immaterial. He ~lso finds pleasur~ .. in tor:.turing normal human beings to partake of inhuman in-

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54

Sampson B'rass is the constant v·ictim to this

Nubbles is another character who doubts Quilp' s

and she ,even sees him as Satan himself:

Qui~p derived in. the course of his journey much cheerfullness of .. spi rit inasmpch as her sOl'i tary condition enabled him to terrify ber with many extraordinary annoyances; such as hanging over the side of't~e coach at th~ risk of bis life, and starin9 in with his great goggle eyes, which seemed in hers the more horrible from his face being up­side down; dodging her in this way from one window to another, getting nirnbly down wbenever they changed horses and thrusting his bead in at the window with a dismal squint: which ingenious tor­tures had such an effect on Mrs Nubbles, that she was quite unable for the time to resist the belief that Mr Quilp did in his own person represent and embody that' Evil Power, who was so vigorously at­tacked at Little BetheÏ, and who, by reason of her backsliding in respect of Astley's and oysters, was now frolicksome and rampant. (~h. xlviii,' p. 454).

Indeed, despite its overall comic tone, this_scene has some-

thing in i t o~ .such religious temptations as are found in

lives of early and medieval saints. One remarkable aspect of

O~lp seen here is his extreme agility. It is certainly t~,ue

that "Quilp leaps and quivers like a charge of pure energy. ,,2) ,~

As Dickens writes,.he had a "taste for doing"something fan-

tastic and monkey-like, wh1ch on aIl occasions had strong

possession of him" <Ch. ix, p. 124). This yen for the fan­

tastic is quite incredible, considering his stature and ap-

pearance, but neither apparently has any negative effect upon

his movement. In orie scene, while playing cards, he is-~een

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55

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t~~rether -,~

"often treading on' bis wife' s toes she cried

out or rernained silent under the infl iction" (Ch. xxiii, p.

244),' and this malicious act becornes an amazing feat, consi-

~ering Quilp's size, and considering the fact that in every ~

illustration of Quilp sitting down, his feet never come close , '

to touching tbe ground. Apparent1y, for Quilp, small size is

never an obstacle.

Quilp's inhuman appearance is the most obvious sign of

bis rnonstros~ty.··He is, without ~uestion; the rnost hideous of

aIl Dickens~ creations; his ugliness matches his evil: -Quilp

is indeed a villain out of convent~onal romance, where ug1i-o \,

,ness or beauty is no mere metapbor in morali ty, i t is the

thing i tself.," 24 Quilp ~aradoxically finds more relaxation

and satisfaction in purposely contorting his face, at times,

than in leaving it at rest. After a scene which calls for him

to maintain a serious demeanor, , Quilp is seen. "recompen.sing

himself for the restraint he had 1atel~ put upon bis counten­

ance by twisting it into aIl' imaginable varieties of ugli­

ness", <Ch. xlviii, p. 451). Often, cruelty and ·ugliness are

to Quilp the same thing:

Mr Quilp now walked up to the front of a looking-glass, and was standing there puttin9 on

_ his neckerchief when Mrs Jiniwin, happening to be ---behind him, could not resist the inclination she

felt ,to shake her fist at her tyrant son-in-law. It was the gesture of an instant, but as éhe did so and accornpanied the action witb a'menacing look, she met his eye in the glass, catching her in the very act. The sarne glance at the mirror conveyed

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to her the reflection of a horribly grotesque and distorted face with the tangue loiling out; and the next instant the dwarf, turning about with a per­fectly bland.and placid look, inquired in a tone of great affection, .

"How are you now, my dear old darling~" Slight and ridiculous as the incident was, it

made him appear such a little fiend, and withal such a keen and knowing one tbat the old woman felt tao much afraid of him to utter a single word, and suffered herself to be led with extraordinary 'politeness to the breakfast-table. <Ch. iv, pp 85-86)

Quilp is able, here and elsewhere, to use his body to fas­

cïnate -- or as a hypilotic prop. That rnesmerism is clearly

apparent in his relat~on with ~rs. Ouilp, and it is hinted

that most women would feel the same attraction when MIS. Quilp

says,"QuilP has such a way with hirn when he likes, that the

best-looking woman here couldn't refuse him if l was dead, and

she was free, and he chose to make love to her" <Ch. Iv, p. \

76). ~teven Marcus notices this great attraction: ~Despite

his monstrous deformity and uncouthness, he is endowed with a

creaturely wit and charm ~hich he directs at women -- and

they, despite' their repugnance and fear, are somehow compelled

to respond. n25 Marcus fails to notice, however, that it is

just this repugnance and fear that ailows Ouilp to dominate

others. This i5 certainly true in his handling of Mrs. Jini-

win in the above scene. His "wit and charm" are products'of

his malevolénc~, and are a mockery of the good humor and

good intentions of wit and charm. In other words, Ouilp i8

a specialist i~ satire and spi te: "He desires to hurt people

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\ the same hearty way that a good natured man desires to help

... them. "26 Quilp is forever asking after his companions' co~-

,fort, and forever'desiring them ta enjoy themselVes. In t'his

respect his attention is something like Wardle's in Pickwick

Papers. .Quilp' s concern, however, is with everyone 1 s discom-

fort. He demands that Brass enjoys the pleasures of smoking

when Brass is "winking very much in the pnguish of his pip~"

<Ch. xi, p. 139"). He is careful to ask Nell of h~r ailing

grandfather's health when he would like to' see that man dead.

When Quilp has b~en believed dead, he parodies kindness when

he encounters those that have searched the Thames for him:

"Have you been dragging the river aIl day, gentlemen?" said the dwarf, holding the door open with great politeness.

"And yesterday too, master." \ "Dear me, you've had a deal of trouble. Pray

consider everything yours tnat you find upon the upon the body. Good night!" <Ch. xlix, p. 462)

With sentiments such as this; Quilp is an excellent example of

Walter Allents statement that, in Dickens, "the difference .. between the characters we think of as primarily comic and

those we think of as sinister and melodramatic is often no' . more than a h~ir's breadth."27 Quilp is,.however, most

certainly a villain first and a comic character second: his ,

humor constitutes a vivid and necessary part of his evil per-

sonality. As George Ford writes: "Dickens's methad ~s ta make

. ... . 'strongly-marked' black characters prob~ble by gr~yin9

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58

them not with virtues but with humor. It is a form of com­

plexity, diffe~ent from George Eliot's for example, but still

a form of complexity." Ford goes on to say, "for his white

cha'racters, whose goodness is • strongly marked,' h~ often uses \

no comparable ,rnethod of greying. That is one of the reasons

why the purely virt~ous figures such as Li~tle Nell, Agnes,

and Little Dorrit, seem improbable. n28 Humor is a strong ,

component of Ouilp' s liveliness, and any comparable humor in

Nell would serve only to destroY,her placid lifelessness.

Another natural human ,attr ibute that Ouilp' is overcharged'

with (and that Nell is completely and necessarily lacking) is

sexuality. Even though Quilp's sexual nature is only hinted

at, he i5 one of the few Dick"e'ns creations that truly has -a

personali ty which can be considered well-rounded enough to

include a sexual aspect. There are sorne obvious clues' in the

novel to Quilp'~ sexual activity. Although Dickens decided·to

, suppress the 1 ine of the plot thàt has Sally Brass as the

~archioness' s mother, he leaves evidence that --not, only is this

50, but that Ouilp is the girl's father; Dickens writes that

Dick Swiveller ......

, was accustomed • • • to debate in his own mind the

• mysterious question of Sophronia's parentage. Sophronia herselt supposed she was'an orphan1 but Mr Swiveller, putting various slight circumstances together, often thought Miss Brass must know better

.than thati and, having heard from his wife of her strange interview with Quilp, entertained sundry misgivings whet'her that person, in his lifetime, , might not also have been able to-solve the riddle,

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had he chosen. (Ch. lxxiii, p. 669).

sally Brass rivaIs Quilp in ugliness, and she, too, can be

seen in terms of monsters (at least by Dick Swiveller,·who

calls her a dragon several times), yet Quilp's attraction to

Sally indictes his voracious sexual appetite: "While Sally'!

moustache and other dubious charms might repel leser crea­

tures, Quilp will ecstatically rape anyone who gives him~he "

most trifling excuse to drop his 'only just barely maintained

restraints ... 29 -

Quilp's sexuality finds its greatest expression, and its

~reatest perversion, when directed towards t~e sexless Nell.

Quilp Is' a sexual ~rce wholly devoid of love. Dickens in­

tended Nell to be a loving creature wholly devoid of a sexual

nature, and in this aspect of her, he largely succeeded. No

one but Quilp ~ould dare entertain the idea of Nell as a

sexual ooject. It is teue that Dick Swiveller and Fred Trent

conspire to have Nell marry Dick, but Fred's motives are en-

tirely mercenary, and the easy-going Dick simply allows him­

self to be persuaded. Quilp has no such motive. His contem­

plations of a relationship with Nell involve the death of his

present wife:

"Sow sbould y.ou 11ke to be my number two, Nelly?" "To be wHat, sir?"

\ "My number ,two, Nelly, my second, my Mrs Quilp,· said the dwarf. .

'~he child looked frightened, but seemed not to understand him, which Mr Quilp observing, hastened

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60

to explain his meaning mo~e distinctty. "To be Mrs Quilp the second, when Mrs Quilp

the first is dead, swee~ Nell," said Quilp, wrink­ling up his eyes and lu,ring her towards him vith \ his bent forefin'ger" "to be my wife, my: li ttle . cherry-cheeked, red-lipped wife. Say'that Mrs Quilp lives five years, or only four, you'll be just the proper age for me. Ha, ha! Be a good girl, Nelly, a very good girl, and see if one of these days you don't come to be MIS Quilp of'Tower Hil!. ", (C~. vi, p. 93)

The image of a "cherry-cheeked, red-lipped" Nell is one that

Quilp uses .often: he calls her "such a fresh, blooming, modest

little bud •• e such a chubby, rosy, c~sy, little Nell!~ (Ch.

ix, p.12S) , "li ttle rosy Nell" (Ch. xxiii, p. 244), and,

"chupby, rosy Nell" CCh.' xlviii, .

453) e When Quilp ob-p.

, serves Nell' s grandfather g'ive her a sexless, paternal kiss,

he says "what a nice kiss that was -- just upon the roay part.

What a capital kisSl" (ix, p. 125). By calling Nell "rosy"

Quilp gi ves her a body and a sexual identity~ what would be a

compliment to anyone else ls a grotesque perversion of Ne'll' s . , complete incorporeality. Quilp tries, through giving Nell the

s11ghtest. hint of physical colour, to reduce, her to. bei'ng part

of the material world· that he controls so successfully. As

Arthur Washburn Brown writes:

_0 (

To know Nell js to love her. To know Nellis caritative pure sprit is to desire her erotl~ally. Nell' s caritative loving nature ls almost' pure Spirit e, Qullp' s erotic force ls almost unrelieved earthiness. As long as Nell is alive she i8 for­ever s~rrounded by earthiness. Quilp fs, in other

, " words, aIl arO\lsd Nell aIl the time until she dies to escape him. j

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Ouilp tries to reduce other characters in the novel,

a1so, and since they are already somewhat trapped in the \. , /

61

material world, he tries to reduce 'them even further. While .

he ·perversely tries to give a human nature to Nell, to others

he tries to give an animal nature. FOr example, a1though the

reader does not ,learn the name of O~ilp's "boy" -- Tom Scott ,

-- until two-thirds of the way through the' novel, it matters

little: Quilp constantly addrèsses him as "you dog." Kit,

too, he 'often sees in this way:

This Kit ls one of your honest people,' one of your fai.JZé characters; a prowling prying hound; a hypo­crite~ a double-faced, white~livered, sneaking spy; a crouching cur to those that feed and coax him, and a barking yelping dog to aIl besides. Il ( Ch • l, p. 478 )

Only if Kit can be seen in such terms can he be considered

on a level with Ç)uilp. Ouilp himself does not' escape canine

association: he had a "few di~coloured fangs that were yet

scattered in his mouth and gave h~m the aspect of a panting , \

dog" (Ch. iii, p. 65)" and he has a "doglike smile" and a

,"very dogl ike manner" (Ch~ v, p.. 85). 'l'hi s aspect of Quilp q ,

. . is no less and no more important than his aspect as earth, as

l

• Punch, as a goblin, or as a demon. AlI constitute Quilp the

monster, and aIl a'~e used, whenever effective, to con,trol q..is

world. 'l'hus he betrays his own animal nat:ure 14'1 order to

excite, and to somewhat control the ani'mal natures of Kit and

Tom when they dog-fight in chapter six. Throuqhout the novel,

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Ouilp.can communicate with human beings only when they ignore

their splrltua~·natures~

'-The world of ,The Old Curiosity Sho~ so far presented in " this essay is one of a black-and-white world of repulsive

con.tra~ts and c~mplete polarity; ,a world unreli~ved 6y a 1

vision of a p~int between extremes -- unrelieved, that la, ,.

except byOuilp's'malicious ~ut genuine humor -- but that

humor ia itself'always "black." Certainly, the two poles and

the', two polar charac'ters in the novel creàte a vacuum. That o

vacu~m would indeed be a,cause for the failure of the novel, if

it were unfilled, but fortunately it ls filled, and' filled \

1

qui te effe~tively, by a number of characters,c the most impor- ~ /

tant aQd ~mpresslv~ of whom i8 Dick Swiveller.

This essay cannot begin to desFribe die fun~tion of th~-. -

aptly-named Swiveller in this novel. -Fortunately, that task / -

has been done br ~abrlel Pearson, ~rid later developed by

"James R. Kincaid" and also by Garrett Stewart. AlI these 1 •

critics' realize 'that pick ia an example of the necBssa:ry int'eg-

ration 0t"the earthly' and the ~iritual'in man. Ji This does

~not mean that Dick ls i~ Any way a ~normal" human being; he is

0

0 a gr'otesque 'as muc.h as QuU.p or Jlngle' are. Indeed,' one cri-0 6 Il 1"

ti·c sees much 'of J ~ngle in Dick: in "The Old 'Cur iosi ty ShoE

" .sam,wel~~r has bée~ reinstàted, in proxima' persona, wi~h a

significant ~ouch of AlfFe~ Jin91è as weIl: the first'~mer9-0. . .

ing from the second in a .compl~x char~cterization known as

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63

\

Dick Swiveller Li~e Jingle, Dick'j humor is at

. first a barely successful defense against the hostile forces

in the world -- which in The Old Curiosity Shop, because of

Quilp, is much more in evidence and thus more justified~than

it would bein~Pickwick Papers. Dick is caught between

Quilp's è~il life-force and Nell's good death-force, and he,

along with just about eveçyone else in the novel, has elements

of,both those.character-forces. From the Nell-force, aIl

thes~ qharacters ~ave a spirituality, albeit an imperfect on~. , /

~s spirituality directs'their actiong towards that which is

"young, beautiful,land'good,· but is imperfect enough to sur­

vive in an imperfect world. They gain t,hat imperfection from .. ,

the Quilp-force, and often reflect that spiritual stunting

with sorne sort of physical deformity. Kit has, to Master

H~mphrey, "certainly the most comical expression of face l

ever saw" 1

.~ ( Ch • ~, p. 49). Dick is afflicted with a stupid,

drunken face, and his attire is usually in "a state of dis-

1 1

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~ , ~ order which strongly induced the idea that he had gone to

bed in it" (Ch. ii, p. 61). Krs. Jarley is obese, pnd takes

constant solace in her "suspicious bottle." For aIl these

chara~ters, the physical matches the spiritual, and defects

even fleasant ones -- separate'them -from Neilis world.

For two characters in th~ novel, Haster Humphrey and the

Marchioness, deformity is ev en harsher, and is a constànt re­

minder of their entrapment in an imperfect world. Master

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64'

Humphrey is a "mis-shapen, deformed old man" (Appendix, p.

675), so much so that he i's at ohe point rumoured to be a / ,-monster CAppendix, p. 674). Dickens leaves no doubt that his , '

~eformity separates him ftom co~~etelY realizing sornething,

like a Nell-nature, when he describes one of Master Hurnphrey's

childhood exp~riences: '

·A little knot of playmates -- they must have been beautiful, for l see them now -- were clustered/one day round my mother's knee in eager admiration of sorne picture representing a group of infant angels, which she~held in her hand •••• There were rnany lovely angels in this picture, and 1 remember the fancy coming .upon me to point out which of them represented each child there, and that when l had gone through all my companions, l stopped and hes­itated, wondering which was Most Iike me. l re--member the children lookiRg a~ each other, and my turning red and hot, and their crpwding round to kiss me, saying that they loved me aIl the sarne; and then, and ~hen the old sorrow carne into my dear mo~her' s mi Id :fand tender look,' the truth brôk'e upon me for the first tirne, and l knew" while watching rny awkward and ungainlY spoçts, how,JteenlY she had felt for her poor crippled boy. (Appendix,' p. 676)

~

.... In this passage, no one questions the idea that Master Humph­

"" rey is a fallen spirit". ~nd jat his deformity is a spiritual

anchor. ,..7--" \ )

/

The Marchioness i~a character who is in rnany ways much .. like Nell, a 'young girl abused and stunted by a cUrioaity-shop

world. Because of her upbringing, the Marchioness is eQough

d~formeèl in body and mind to remain fat- fom any perfection

like that which Nell hase A description of the kitchen at the

1 Brasses', which ia the Marchioness'~prisQn and a curiosity-shop

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in its own right, ~oes far i,n expl~ining the girl' s deformity:

It was a very dark miserable place, very'low and - v~ry damp, the walls disfigured by a thousand rents

and blotches. The water was trickling out of a leaky butt, and a most wretched cat was lapping up the drops with the sickly eagerness of starvation. The grate, which was a wide one, was wound and" screwed ùp ti~t, sa as ta hold no more than a little thin sandwich Qf fire. Everything was locked up; the coal-cellar, the\çandle-box, the salt-box, the meat-safe,' were aIl padlocked. There was n~ing that a beetle could have lunched upon. The pinch~d and meagre aspect of the place would Qave killed a chamelion. He would have known at the first mouthful that the air was not eatabie, and must have given up the ghost in despair. (Ch. xxxvi~ pp. 350-1)\

t:

This is the sort of place t6at Quilp would delight in. The , '

~eminine, passive spirit of the Marc~ioness must necessarily

suffer here, and develop mental defenses ta cope,with an im-- .\ / /

perfect world d~fenses, which 1n contrast to Nell, are de-~.

formi ties. -\

Strangely, ~he March(oness, 1<i t, and Dick ,(~nd Master

Hump~reyf grow ta be less and less deformed as the novel

progresses., Rit, nearlyan idiot-boy at the beginning of the

novel, becomes the closest thing ta a male lead b~ the end,

with the seriousness such a 'raIe usually carries in Dickens.

Dick's humorous'defense turns ïnto a spirited offènse against

evil. In this change, Dick 'loses littl~ of his humor; his .'

transformation, as noticed by Garret stewart earlier, is from

a J1ngle-typ~ to a WeIler-type. The March1oness's transform­

ation 1é the most spectacular; she 'changes,from a pinched ;

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dwarf to an attractive maiden.

On thefairy-tale level on which The Old Curiosity snop

must be viewed, these changes are the logical results of

positive moral developments, as aIl three of these imperfect , !' creatures go through various trials and emerge triumphantly to

show that a persoh can live happily in a curiosity-shop world.

It is important to note that those three, ~nd- the Garlands,

and Barbara, and Master Humphrey, and Mrs. Jiniwin, and even

the elderly men of Neilis death village, aIl survive when

Quilp and Nell do note So do the, Brasses, brit their lives )

become, in a sense, spiritual death as they become animaIs and

"take their way alon-g the streets, with shuff.ling steps and

cowering shivering forms, looking into the roa,ds and kennels

as the~ went in se arch of refuse food or disregarded offal" / '

(Ch. lxxii, p. 665). While the two forces of ,Nell and Quilp

cancel each other out, the\characters who in any way combine

those forces survive.

The deaths of Nell and Quilp are within hours of each

other, even though the weathe~conditions are completely

different for each one -- Quilp dies in a tank and dark fog,

and Ne~es in pleasant weather, soon after d~ybreak. The

symbolic natures of the deaths are completely different.

Quilpls 'corpse is described as follows:

. . And there it lay, alone •••• The hair, stirred by the damp breeze, played in-a klnd of mockery of death such a mockery as the dead man himself

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would have revelled in wh en alive -- about its head, and its dress ~luttered idly in the night wind. (Ch. lxvii, p. 620)

67

Quilp is tIow pure matter, at one w\i th the elements, even

though he retains sorne of his maliciously humorous potential.

Neills corpse, on the other hand, lacks any sort of corp­

oreality: n5he was deadJ No>, sleep 50 beautiful and calm,

so free from trace of pain, so fair to look upon. She seemed .. ' a creature {resh from the hand of, God, and waiting for" the

\ breath of'life; not one whq had lived and suffered death n <Ch.

lxxi, p. 652)., Ne.ll' s fI ight is complete wi th her death, as

she leaves the earth that she is never !much a part of.

The Old Curiosity Shop is unique among Dickens's novels

in its rigid Lairy-tale contrasts and its sense of reality

that is largely unconcerned with the workings of society.

Because of that disregard, Dickens can concentrate more than

anywhere else on forces that transcend society. In his por­

trayal of Quilp as Evil, he,ls successful -- Quilp ls both J

evil and ehtertaining, a pure ~llegory that is alive and

unique as a character. Certain c~itics have tried to see

Quilp as 'sorne sort of social force, as for exarnple John Lucas,

who sees him as lia ver,y impressive image or, embodiment of the

infallible can~er of money-interest.wJ~ In the same way, ~

\

Julian Symons see~iIP as Wthe. sinister side of radicalism ... 34

Su ch interpretations,'however, like the views of Quilp as a,

goblin, a,demon, a dqg, or as punch, take account of his

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energy but neglect his variety; Quilp incorporates and yet

transcends aIl these attributes. Ouilp's vividness and\var­

iety is ironically one of the faults ot the novel: thrown . ' into battle with such a white nothing as Nell, Quilp's energy

is an unst'oppable force. Nell r s unearthiness causes the world

of The DId Curiosity s~p to be a Man~chean world in which

deformity and atrophy is the necessary priee to pay for exis­

tence )5- , Nell' s virtue is a vague ,and distant light; hurnans

rnost dwell as'best they can surrounded by the unavoidable, / " , -,

fantastic, and often dangerous curiosities of the world. 1

In later novels, aS/Dickens's vision of society develops,

he is able to concentrate on a more realistic world .. -- one

that exists sornewhere closer to the mid-point of the poles

which Ouilp and Nell embody. In that worl~, animate curios­

ities have a different appearance. Humphry House writes about . \

Dickens's later novels: _

Everybody is more restrained. The eccentrics and roonsters in the earlier books walk through a crowd without exciting particular attention: in the lat~ ter they are likely. to be pointed out in the streets, and are forced into bitter seclusion; ~ocial conformity has taken on a new meaning. ~ilas Wegg and Mr. Venus are at odds

6and ends with

their world as Daniel Quilp is not.) \

To effectively describe the social reality targeted in the -

later novels, Dickens must abandon the idea of having a char-

acter in'which ois "heaped together . . • aIl possible hideous-

ness •• 37 The black and white=~ichotomy of this novel t~s, \\ ~ ~

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in later ones, to a greyness. that might have ch'aracters (and

criminals) who are more complex and iifelike in q,ppearance and

characterization, but who are also more restrained, less

lively, ~nd oLten less humorous than'those in earlier novels.

Quilp is Dickens's fir~t and last completely inhuman char-\

a~ter, and after him, monsters would be found much more in

society as a whole than in any individual.

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Notes'

1 Charles Dickens, The CId Curiosity Shop, ed. Malcolm

Andrews JHarmondsworth, Penguin, 1972), Ch. iii, p. 73. AlI -further references to this work appear,in the texte

~ Juli~n Symons, Charles Dickens (New York: Roy Publish­

ers, 1951), p. 41.

• 3 K. J. Fielding, Charles Dickens: A Critical Intro-

duction (Bostbn: Houghton Mifflin, 1958)~ p. 67. 4 Miller, p. 95.

5 John,son, l, 325. ~ Sucksrnith, .p. 80

7 This p~ticular phrase is in a portion of The Old.

Curiosity Shop that was added when the first book edition was 4

pûblished, and ls n6t found in the seriaI version',. The sense

of allegory, however, was not lost on seriaI readers and

critics, as Thomas Hood, b~low, shows. Ch. i, p. ,56. 0

8 -. Thomas Hood, rev. of Haster Humehrey's Clock, by

Charles Dickens, '''7mthen~eum, 7 November 1840, pp. 887-8; rpt.

in Philip Collins, Dickens: The Critica1 Heritage (New York: 1

Barnes and NOble, 1971), p~. 96-7.

9 John Forster, The Life of Charles Dickens, ed l', J. ~w. T.

Ley (Lo~don: fecil Palmer, 1928), p. 152. 10

G. K. Chc:;sterton, Charles Dickens (London: Methuen, ,

..).906) "l p. 279. 1 have purpose1y exc1uded Quilp' s "bower~ from

,~

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this 1ist of cutiosities~ Indeed, the hou se appears to be

q~ite cornfortable; it is on1y Quilp's appearance, and the

appearance of other grotesques ~uch as Mrs. Jin~~in"that

make it anything like a curiosity shop. Quilp often seems

an intruder in this place. The pleasant appearance of the -

71

b0wer is ~lmost certain1y the wopk of the virtuous but trapped

Mrs. Quilp, and that very p1easantness is probab1y one of the

reasons that Quilp abandons his,house for the more deso1ate

\ and qui~pian atmosphere of Quilp's Wharf •

11 Barbara Ha~dy, ,"The- Complexi ty of Dickens, n in Dickens

1970, Michael Slater, ed. (New York, S.tein and Day, 1970)',_ p.

12 steven Mareus, Dickens: From Pickwick to Dombey (New 1

Y~k: Basic Books, 1965), p. 152 \ , -,

,.-13 Algernon" Charles Swinburne, "Charles Dick~rs," in Th~

Complete Works of Algernon Charles Swinburne, ed. Sir Edmund

Gosse and Thomas JarnesWise, The'Bonchurch Edition (New York:

Russell & Russell, 1925) XIV (Prose Works IV), 65. 14 0 Forster, p. 151.

15 Charles Dickens, Little Dorrit, ed. John Holloway

lHarmondsworth: Pen~uin, 1967), Ch. xxxiv, ~f 895.

16 Mareus, Dickena From Plckwiek to Dombey, p. 145.

17 It is interesting to notice the contrast betwee~

Nel1's use of the graveyard and Codlin and Short'a: Nell

atrolls in the graveyard to commune with the dead, while J, -t

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72

Codl~n and Short use the graveyard as a li~ room (in the

broadest sense of that term); they use gravestones as tables

on which to work, and even use one as a chair for ~unch (Ch.

xvi, pp. 18)0-2).

18 Una Pope-Hennessy, Charles·Dickens (New York: H~well &

'Soskin, 1946), p. 146. "

19 Malcolm A'ndrews, Intro. to Tpe 01d Curiosity ,Shop, by

Charles Dickens·(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972), pp. 18-9. r 20 '

Northrop Frye, nDick~ns and the Comedy of Humors,n in

Experience in ~he Novel: Selecfed Papers from the English ,

Institute, Roy Harvey Pearce, ed. (New York and London;

Columbia Uni~er~ity Press, 1968) p. 62 •

21 Arthur washburn Brown, Sexual Analysis of Dickens'

. Props (New York: Emerson Books, 1971), p. 99 •

22 stone, p. 83; Michael G01dbérg, Carlyle and Dickens ,',

(Athens" Georgia: Un.i versi ty of Georgia Press, 1'972), p. 209 ~

J. Murray Minck, "Daniel Quilp,n Dickensian 13 (1917), p. 73:

Arthur Clayborough, The Grotesque in Engli§h Literature

'.. "" \ (Oxford: Clarendon, 1965), p: 222.

2JGrahame smith, 'Dickens, Money, and Society (Berk~ly and \

Los Angeles: UniveJ;sity of Ca1ifornia Press, 1968),\ p. 35. .J

24 Stewart, p. 90 •

.... ;)-25 Marcus, Dickens: .From Pickwick to Dombey, p. 152. In

a letter to a Mr. Synge, 22 April 1846, Dickens declares his

agreement with this ,point: '"Mr. Charles Dickens presents his

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compliments to Mr. Synge, and begs to say, in reply to Mr.

Syn'1e' s letter, that he thinks ~Mrs. Quilp rn~st have had gOOd,

reasons for bearin~ witness to the attractive qualities of .

her husband. Mr. Dickens cannot speak qui te. confidently of

- any lady's reasons for anything, but. he is inclined to

believe that Mr. Quilp could have easily provided himself

with another pretty wife, in the event of Mrs. Quilp's

decease; it being .generally observable t4at men who are

very hideous and disagreable are successful in matrimonial

ventures .," Letters, ed. Madeline House and Graham Storey,

IV, 540.

26 Chesterton, p. 283.

27 Walter Allen, "The Comedy of 'Dickens, " Slater, ed, ~ ; (,

p. 9. Allen goes on to say Il obvious instances are,"'~Fagin,

Quilp and Jonas C~lewit 28 1.,. Ford, p • .140.

29 Brown, pp. 32-33.

30 Brown, p. 99 •

• and Uriah~eep." .

31 Gabriel Pearson, "The 01d Curiosity Shop," in Dickens

and the Twentieth Century, ed. John Gross 'and Gabriel Pearson

(Londen:, Rout1edge and Keegan Paul, 1962), pp. 77-90J

Kincaid, pp. 76-l04~ Stewart, pp. 89-113.

32 Stewart, p. 89.

33 John Lucas, The Me1ancholy Man: A study of Dickens's l

Nove1s (London: Methuen, 1970), p. 86.

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Symons, p. 41 • .

cf. Graham Greene; s study of _the Man4chean world of

74

Oliver Twist, "The Young Dickens,· pp. 51-57 of his The Lost

Childhood and Other Essays (London: Eyre & spottiswoode,

1951) . 36 Humphty House, The Dickens World (London: Oxford

University Press, 1941.), pp. 1'34-5. -37\ Rev. Samuel Longfei1~w .(Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's

brother) writing to his sister, Mrs. James Greenleaf, 9 Feb­

ruary 1843, of ter meeting Dickens on 4·FebrUarY~n Henry:"

apartments. Rpt. by Edwa~d Wagenknecht, "Dickens in Long-

'" . fellow's letters and Jo~rnals," Dickel.lsian, 52' (1956), p. 9;

also in riick~ns's Lêtters, ed. Madeline Bouse and Graham

storey, III, 39-40n..

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III: The Manager: Jame~Carker

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In 1851, just thr~e years ~fter Dickens finishèd Dombey

and Son, John Francis, in hi~ A History tN. the Englfsh Rail-j

way: 'Its Social Relations (. Revelations 1820-1845, draws ,a

r connection between a new type of businessman'" and the 'growth of

~ railtoads·:

Twenty years àgo • • • the comme~cial houses of London veré pX'incipally of that class which could claim anéestral honours. Their fathers had

,·fou9ht for commercial rights, and had been graced with commercial dlgnitiep. They had peen honoured

~ with titles, they had founded great charities, they had everobeen ready to aid an impoverished state wi,th ,their c,apita1. • i .'- By 1830, the position of these houses was beginning 'to change ••• a new race of tr,aders had arisen -to pu'sh ,th~ from their stools. -Such men made up for smaii capital by great activity. Hitherto the',oId hôuses had been pa~amount in the~r business, and peremptQry in th ir mode of conducting it. They "had fixed their ov ,terms in the ol~ times, and they refused to . change them in the new. They co~ld scarce1y,be said t~ have sought their profits; so easily hâd those profits fallen to them. They'rarely'ventured on ànything novel, and the utmost stretc'h of spec- . ula~ion was *,n spme adventurous member .. of' the firm startle is seniors by sending a,Cdurier to' Vienna to ~ake advantage. of the exchanges., .or an estafette to'st. Pete~sbur9 to forestall th~ . tallow-market. '

. The '-new men· saw at once the posi'tion .of th~e ,houses', and the prospect vl1ich <?pened ta their own ambition. • • • They w~re ~he type of earnèst, progressive spirit which'for gQod dr· il1

t ha~ inèr~ase~ for t~e las~ twenty,years! They were empn~tically men of the tlmef they'carr~ed t~at competitivé spirit into the higper bran~es of , commerce which hàd long been in existénce in the

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. ~ The consequence was so·far ap the railway is

concerned, that while the old commercial houses rejoiced in placing their sons in the directorates of insurance companies, engrossed the share~ in the New-River Company, or gave their imperial sanction to the<gas corporations, they were too determined to support their order at once to recognise th~ new and mighty power which silent~y, but surely, was abolishing aIl that .th~Y reg~ded a~ sacred., (

to Francis, the nnew man n ha? no such qualms, and

supported the railroads as weIl as other new and untried

markets: nIf the old houses wanted the will, the new houses .

wanted the ~owe~. Every shilling of their funds was employed . '

in what they were pleased to.call legitimate speculation. n1

The railway that Francis is specifically discussing here

is the London-Birmingham Line,'which was oegun in 1834~ and

which plays so great a pa,rt i~' Dombey and Son. fran~s's qyote emphasizes the fact that Dickens does not ch~e·train

" . and traiQ-l~nes haphazardly as a central image in this, his , ~ .

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novel about ah august and prestigious old hou se of the type

Francis describes. Both ~he fitm of Dornbey ~nd Son, and

England in the l830's and'1840 J s, were faced wi~h ~h~pro~lemt~ and qpvantages of·progress and,mercantile growth, and by new,

o ,

unstoppabl'e' powers that were sornet'imes destructive, sornetimes c

beneficial, and sometimes botp at the same ,time. Railroads '~~ \

were tbe most visible prooucts of that progress for the , " p -

country as a whole. For'Dombey and Son, that same type of

unceasingly powerful progression is'most thoroughly presented

in one man the manager of the firm, James Carker.

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Tlfe ima'ge of the railroad, 'and the 'conn~ction's made by \ JP

Francis, help ta show that Carker i5 not àt aIl unique, but

rather is oqe of many of those growing\numbers mf ~~éw men."

Carker d? nothing like a ~erversion of a "businessman" as

Quilp :ts a p~rversion of moneylender and landford, nor is he an

"outcast of S~ciety, like JiJ le, but is, rather, an integral lp l-

and supporting part Qf a changing world, and f~ts into

Francis'I a description of his type quite snugly. Both • ,

èarker's actions and character reilect Dicken,s's ideas 6f the', , . '

progress o! Early- and'Mid-Victorian society, a progress

whiéh was not without a great de~l of heartlessness, cruelty,

ana evil. Carker is without question the viI Iain of Dombey

~ and Son, as far as Dombey and Son has one ~il!ain, but his ~ ---

villainy is only a srnall part of the villainy present in the . society that'fosters and rewards him •

.. "Managèr R is the best wQrd to descr~be Carker, and just

as Dickens uses tne term "stranger" 'to name and describe

Jingle, he repeats Carker's position as his usual mode of

address. This is partly done to separate Jamès Carker from

his brother JOhn, but .more importantly" it is used to assoc'-.. " , \

iate Caz::ker' s entire being with that 'term; he f:inds his SI

greatest expression inrmanaging others. His job as manager //

.'

b~th helps and ~urts the firme While he brings te the job

gre4t efficierlcy and a strong sense of direction, he also uses \ ~

, Ris position to blinker the f1~m's emplOyees and Dombey aim- . 1

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» • self, largely bending them to his will by managing what they

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see or do~- Dickent sees Carker's work as similar to the,work . ' ,

of a man playiftg cards~ . '

. ,

\

The post had come in heavy éhat morning, and Mr . Carker the Mangager had a good ~eal to do. The generàl action of'a man so engageà -- pausing to loo~ over a bundle of papers in his hand, dealing

. them round in various\portions, taking 'up another bundle and examining its contents with knitted brows and pursed-ou~ lips -- dealing, and sorting~ ând pondering by turns -- would easily suggest sorne whimsical' resemblance to a player at cards. The face of Mr Carker the Manager was.in gQod keeping with su~h a fancy: It was the face of a man wh6 studied his play, warily: who made himself master of ~ll the strong and weak points of the game: ~ho

. registered the cards ih hi~ mind as they fell about him, knew exactly what was on them, what they missed, and what they made: who was crafty to find'

, ôut what the oth&r players held, and who,never bet~ared his own h~nd.

The letters were in various'languages, but Mr Ca1;;ker the Manager read them aIl. ( If there had been' anything in the offices of Dombey and Son that he could not read, th~re would have been a card wanting in the pack. He read almost at a glance, and made combinations of one letter.with another and one business with another as he went on, adding' new matter to ~he heaps'-- much as a man would know' the cards a~ sight, and work out their combinati9ns

. in his mind after they w.ere turned. Something too deep for a partner, and much too deep for an adver­sary, Mr Carker the Manâger sat in the rays of the 'sun that came down slanting on

2 him through the sky-'

light, playing his.game alo~e.

o ,

The image of games here certainly does not mean'that Carkeç·s

work ~s concerned with trifles -- his seriopsness and ftdepth~

" counter that ·idea. Instead, tpe image graphically describes ~ tJ ....-

his position as managerJ a position that forces him to b~

aware of every resource available to him, and to use those

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resources' c~refully.,· in' order',tô hav an advantage over 'others ~ ..

or to wr~st ~ontrol f~orn, them. . . , .' ;-':", f'Jany ëxamples are given :to . show that 'Carker manages ~ f' -;

.Dombey in this way. When Carker fJrst àppears in the novel,

~ he lB seen. subtly'separating D~mbJy ~rom\\he day-to-day act-~ \' ~ \.

ivities of the office; ~hen pombey asks:

"Have you anything for me?·~ . nI don' t know that 1· need trouble you," re'" -­

turned Carker ~ ,turning: overo the papers in his hand .• "You have a commi tt'ee to-day at' three, you know."

Characteristically, Carker d~sguises his management with

humility: . •

•

nAnd one at three, three-quarters,· added Mr Dombey.

"Catch you 'forgetting anythingl" exclaimed Carker, still turning over his papers. "If Mr Paul inherits your memory, he'll be.a troublesome customer in the Bouse. One of you is enough." (Çh. xiii, p, 240) "

, When Carker visits Dombey at Lewnqton, 'after Dombey' s long

absence from th~ Dusiness, Carker answers Dombey's request for 1

business in,tell'igence vith: "There is very little •• b

Upon the whole we have not had our usual good fortune of late,

but that is of little moment to you" (Ch.~xxvi, p. 442). Dom­

bey is throughout the novel little more than a figurehead; any . ... \

decision he maltes i,s either one that secures the prestige of

. the f{rm (in this way, his marriage t,o Edith is the product of

a business decision), or- one of van~ty or pride, with little

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business purppse. His exiling of Walter Gay is the best ex-. . , '

'. ample of tbisi it is a decision that he makes on a whi~ and

tegrets later, and it 1s a decision that the more business-:

tensical C~i'ke~ uses ror his own purp0ges.. .,'

Just as Cark~r is called a' "manager" by Dickens in many'

situations outside ·'the off.icé, so does ~hat, role transcend his ,

work *in the office,. ' Carker: is effective as a manipulator not ..

just be~a~~e ~e us~s the'office paper~ as his cards, but be-

cause i~side and 0utside the office, Carker' uses~every device \

available to him"-- economic stature, social codes;physîcal'

appearance, sex~al de~ire, charm, humility, and even Qlackmail

-~ to·domiPate (or maijage) ,others and to remain in complete

control "'of any situation.

One physical attribute that Carke~ uses ove·r an.d over to

achieve his ends is' his sparkling. set of teeth. ' The repi ti-\

tion (to the point of monotony) of this imâg.e is not aeeiden-.

. - ,

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tal, aceording to Northrop. Fr=e: " 1/ Repetition which i8' excessive even by D~ckenSi'an·.! .. : standards, like the emphasis on:.Carker· s teeth in 1 l, Dombey and Son, is appropriate .for· a villain, as / .. l its effect ~s to dehumanize and eut Off~ syrn~thy. ~ 1 ' We cannot feel much eoncern over the ate of a / ~ character who is pre~ented to us mainly as a set, of .î teeth . . . . .. j ~v ~ ~ 'i ~

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Carker himself takes advantage ot 'this "dehümanizingW quality

given by his teeth -- he uses t~e~ to separat~ bis true self , ,

• from tbose around him; "in the fine image of the fla~hing

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• teeth," 'writes Jack L,indsay of Dickens, "he communicates a

sense of the' face as a tightenin; ma~k"4. Carker can use the

masK Gf his tee th to disarm others, as he does with Capta in

Cuttle, or to insinuate hi~self into the company and the good

graces ~f others, 'as he does with Cleopatra. Through his , teeth Carker maintains a facade of humility before his· employ-

er. The ease at which Carker can, drop ~his dental pretension,

is shown after'aconve~sation be?r~en Carker and Domb~y:

" As Mr Dombey.dropped his eyes, and adjusted his neck-cloth again, the,smiling face of Mr Carker the Manager became in a moment, and without any stage of transition, transformed into a most intent and frowning face, scanning his closely, and with an ugly sneer. As Mr Dombey raised his eyes, it,

·changed back, no less quickly, to its .ld ex­pression, ,and showed him every gum o~ which it stood posessed., (Ch. xxvi, p. 442)

This .action is almost quilpian" and shows an attribute that 7'

Quilp, ,Carker, and Jin~le share: a strong control of face,~nd .

body, and the ability to use that control to create a true or

false impression • Later,'when Carker aids Dombey after Dombey , . , ,

falls from his horse, Carker shows, ~ physical agility to match

his facial control (Ch. xlïi, p. 689). \ " Another aspect of Carke~'s teeth, whic~ Fred.Kaplan

points out in Dickens and ~esmerism5, is that they can be used

- to hypnotize and in that way to dominate. Rob the Grinde? is

the mos~ obvious victim of Carker in this way; when Rob give,s

Carker information, he speaks "just as l'f the teeth of MI

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82

cark~f drew it out of him, and he had,Do P9wer of concealing­

'any'thing wi th -that battery 0(, attraction in full play"' (Ch. ~

xxii, ~. 37'9). ,

Carker has more than his teeth to rely on in order to . . In' pis spotless cJ:'lil.vat, his hide his true self trom others.

>

whiskers, ~is mouth, and pis manners, he is "desperately cat-)

like" ,-,(Ch. xvii, p. 308). The imag-è serves to separate him '

. from -oth~rs, and to d,escribe hj..m further, to the reader. When..-~-=---~---~

vièweçl by others<J'in the novel, t.his 'paI;t of his nature is ex- ,~ . . ' ~

pressed 'by his neatness, by his apparent affection for ~ ~ "1..

nbetters," and by his tamenes~, as well ~s by the shape of his

face. To Carker hirnself, however, that cat-sense finès a /

cornpietely different expression: he is a heartless, instinc~-

tuaI pred~tor, who views anyone as his prey and is often

crouched and ready to spring •. Directly after the image, ~ \ '! >~-

quoted earlier, of ,carker as a winning card-player, 'we f ind

that:

Mr Carker the Manager, sly of manner, sharp of ·tooth,;soft of foot, watchful of eye, oilyof t6ngue, cruel.of heart, niee of habit, sat with a, dainty steadfastness and patience at,his,work, as if he ,were w~iting at a mouse l s hQIe;· ,(Ch. xxii, pp. ~72-3).

This image àescrib~s quite effectively' Car'ker' s 'business-J

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Sense, and a later development of the -same "image, shows that

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\\hiS cat-natufe is not confined to office ~ork: on the roa~

from Leamingfon tô warwick, when Dombey; Edith, Cleopatra, and

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, -. Joe Bagstock travel together, "Mr Carker cantered behind the

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carriage, at the distance of- a hundred yards or so, and

watched it, during aIl th~ ride, as if he were a cat, indeed, . f t~ '.

and aIl its four ocçupant~, mice" <Ch. 'xxvii, pp. 464-5).

Although The 'Origin .of' th~ Species, was not f?~bl.Ç"od until 1859,

'Carker is a prefiguring example of the correlation between

'. 1 natural and social darwinism, and he shows~bot? the airtight

efficiency an~ the heartless cruelty of both ~he natural

1

.. _._l,t-heo-r-y---and-the 'social-philcsophy;- '~._. --- - ~.~ ~ _ .. _- ~- .'

As cruel as Carker may~ or e,ven because -of his" . ,

cruelty, he is indispensable to Dombey. It is !nteresting '.

to note,. from evidence given by John earker i~o discussing his,

crimes <Ch. xiii, p. 249) that Ja~es Carker and Mr. Dombey

appear eo have ~egun working at,the,fIrm a~ roughly the sa~e

,1 time. Dombey' s human crutch was., it seems, at least available

to him for aIl his working years if not actually utilized. . , . There. is quiee a bit of evidence that Carker's role'a~/a '

crutch to Dombey was used, and must have Qeen for many years

the basis of a profitable relationshl~ for bot~ men.~ MOst 6f

that evidence lies :Ln Dombey' s inc6mpetence. The firm sirnplx, . ~

coll~pses after Carker's death. Dombey~s only ,"busine~s

sense" is a p~rverted ~ense of mercantile pride which stifles

him into. incompetency. Like those in the prestig~ous houses , . ,

mentione,d by Francis, he does not seek progress, but foolishl:y -desires sorne sort of '1'11usor'y status quo. In his rigid,

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blinding prlde, Dombe~ is as sol~d, stubborn; decorative,

anEi useless .al? t'he Wo~den Midshipman, ob1iviou~: 'and irnper-, .,

.vious to the change-aIl about hirn. Indeed, Do~bey dresses

a,na poses as if he were a statue; he is so stiff tpat the

starch in his cravat cracks when he bows. At Dombpy's

'wedding, the Game Chicken believes nthat he's as stiff a coye

as ever he see n <Ch. xxxi, p. 522) •. ' Dickens blends this image,'

wi th anothe'r -- Dombey 1 s coldness -- to p!esent i)ombey 1 s

ludi~rous irnmobi1ify: nHe mïght have been hung up for sale ~at

a Russian fair as a specimen of a frozen gentle~an" (Ch. v, p.

116).

The coldness that sùrrounds Dombey ls oo1y the physica1

m~nifestati0n of'Pombey's narrow Business and world view. t 1

That view, however, in its very'narrowness, can be quite

spectacular:

~ The earth was made for Dombey and Son to trade in, and the sun-and moon were made to give them~light. Rivers and seas were formed to float their ships; rainbowsgave thern promise of fair.weather; winds blew for or against their enter~rises; stars and plane~s circled in their~orbits, to preserve in­violate a system of which they wer~ the center'. Common abbrevjations took on new meanings in his [Dombey'sJ eye~,{an? had sole reference to them. A. D. had no con~ern with anno -Domini, but stood for anno Dombei'-~ and ~on. (Ch. i, p. 50)

D~mbey c~nnot!see the beauty in nature as nature, but rather :7 \

sees its beauty in the way it aids \ a

the firm., In the same

chapter, Dombey be~rays,a similar b1indness' to the value of ~

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human nature:'

To record~ of Mr Dombey. thàt he was,lnot in hi's way ~ affected by this intelligence (of his wife's fail­

lng-condition], would be to do him an injustice. He was not a man of whom it could properly be said that he was ever startled, or shocked1 but he'cer~ tainly,had a sense within him, that if his wife should sicken.and decay, he would be very sorry, and 'that he would Und a' something gone from among his plate and furniture, and other household pos­sessions, which was weIl worth the having, and could not be lost without sincere regret. Though it would be, 'a cool,., business-like, gentlemanly, self-po~sessed regret, no doubt. (Ch. i, p. 54) (

In this way, 'Dombey views Edith as\ a merè replacement for his

first wife; he expects her tG be his prope~ty, and expects her " ,

to be c,ontent to bé his property •. Because of this,. he canno,t " , '" • ...."l

help but be shocked and'confuséd by her rebell~ous attitude. \')

Paul Oombey, Jr., thè only true recipient of Dombey's , \

love ("If there were, a' 'wartn place in his frosty \heart, his son ~, .

'_ ... -. '

occupied it ••• " Ch. viii, p • .151 ), i,s ironicall,y Il

Dombey' s greatest victiDm: _RDerivirrg no reassurance from his }-~-=~

father that the "'orl~"is a céngenial or even .hu~~~ place t6 . , t ~ ..

" live in, he declines toward a death bro\lght on ,J.atgely by the ~ ." 6 '

implacable cbldness of his environment.~ Seeing in Paul the

"Son" of "Dombey and Son," and not the innocent, growing­

'child, . Dombey forces upon the boy his cold, 'st'arched, and c~,

'sterile world, first at paul's frosty christening, and later

'under the tutelage of Mrs. pipchin and the Blimbers., ~ore-

over, Dombey separates Paul trom the nurturing and loving in-

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86

fluence of Polly Toodle, whose milk and warmth actu'ally make , ,

P"auJ., ~t first: nQuite thriving, Sir, and weIl" (Ch. iB, 'p.

82). Dombey seeks more a frigid clone than a son, and his

attempt to freeze the humanity from the boy, a~ it is frozen

in' himself, is fa'tal. / . -a son, or rath"er, a 'Dombey, then, must ~ook~eI8ewhete for

Son (as in "the firm of DOmbey ~~d.Son:), for tke role is at tif . "" best secondarily genetic: ' ,

, There is also Son the abstraction, a -position precariollsly filled by Paul in his short lifetime, and a .complex vacanoy after pis ~éath~L Captain Cuttl'e\ in his disastrous inte-rview wi':~ Carker proposes Walter as repl~cement, Carker in secret counBels proposes himself;( ,

Although Florence and Walter eventually do fill the vacancy,

Carker iB the only candidate who actively pursueB the role for

muctî of the -novel. He has much to qis a'dvantage in this

quest. First of aIl, he is an essential part of the firm, and , ,

an essential aid ta Dombey in almost every respect. Even

though hé i8 the true,driving force of ~he firm)he preserits

the appearance of an,almost filial d~ference and loyalty ta

DombeY1 he constantly speaks of Dombey's superiority in so-J

ciety and business. He eve~ uses Dombey as a ~ole model of

sorts: he is "always somewhat formaI, in his dres~~ in imi-

tation of the great man whom he served • , n . . . Even.this has

its' limits ·he sfopped short of the extent of Mr Dombey's

stiffness· (Ch. xxii, p. 457).\

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t . . \ Another:May in which ca~~er trféS to fill the rolft'of son

to Dombey is by JnSinuating,J1Jmself into the Dombey, farnily. ~~ ~

This happens gradually. Carker first ma~es tbe transition

f rom ernployee to f r iend. When he introduc~s Carker to Cleo-\ '

patra and says: ni Let- me gratify my friEmd Carker: 1 Mr Dornbey ~

unconsc io-uS-ly emphas ised the word f r iend, as say ing 1 no

really; l do al'low hirn to take credit for that distinction • .-

• 1" <Ch. &xvii, p. 461>. _ By this t,ime, Carker has elsewhere .. insinuated himself into family rnatters by payin9 forcëd visits

\

upon Florence at the Skettles at Fulh~m~ Later, apparently

because Dorobey wills it, but also because Carker does too,

Carker gets deeply involved in the relationship between Dombey / \

and Edi th. In the chapter tttled "Domestic Relations; Dornbey 1

rnakes it clear, in speakingto Edith,_ that Carker has jumped

over the ambiguous line between Dombey and Son the firm,' and 1

Dombey and son the family, while still retaining a perverse :J .

business nature:

1 \ l hope, Mr s Dornbey . • . l may not find i t necess-ary ever to entrust Mr Carker ~ith any message of objection or remonstrance to you; but as it would be derogatory to my position and reputation to be frequently ho}àing trivial disputes with a lady upon whom"I have conferred the highest- distinction that it is in rny power to bestow, l shall not scruple to avail myself of his services if l see occasion. <Ch. -xl, p. 653)

Dombey does not realize the extent to which he brings Carker

into his family; wh en he does ask for Carker's services i~

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88

tqis matter, Dombey referB to him as "my confidential agent" , ,

(Ch. xlii, p. 683), and couches his request in a haze of

busine~slike diction and syntax.. As far as Dombey can tell;

h~ is using Carker aè a rnere tool or weapon against Ed~th.

This is another aspect' of Dombey's blindnessl he cannot see

the line between Son and son, firm and home. To him, the firm

is iamily, anè family is just another departmen~ of ~he firme

To Dombey, Carker's role as manager of Edith is as natural as , '

- his rnanagemIfent r~l~ in the office,o' for to him, Edith is, in_

(,

1& a sense, an Employee. Dickens writes of Dombey:

~

It flattered him to picture to himself, this proud and stately woman doing the honours of his h~use, and chilling his guests after his own rnanner. Th~ dignity of Dombey and Son would be heightened and maintained, indeed, in such hands. (Ch. xxx, p. 509)

",

, Carker'e and Edith's defections take Dombey completely by

suprise; it is, by both, a flight from the firm as weIl as a

fligbt 't'rom himself. The most suprising fli$J~t of the two, ~o

him, is car~er' s. Wh'ere Edi~h proves herself from the start

!ln errant member of -family and firm, Carker. .proves hirns~lf to 1

be not only an indispensable member of the firm, but also a , ~ /

seemingly i~eal family memberl' one leads to the other. By the

same reason, Flore,nce# whose position in terms of the firm is

negligible, i6 not only cast off by Dômbey, but f'orgotten~ At \

Paul's funeral, 1 l,

.. \ The statuary gives him [Dornbey] back the

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paper, and points' out, with his pocket rule, the' words, "beloved and only child."

, nIt should be 'son,' I think( Sir?" (Ch • . xViii, p. '312)

89

In his home, ,as in his firm, Dombey understands effectiveness,

and not love. ~ ~,

'Carkêr seems' to sha're Dombey' s hl indness in this respect,

aince l'îis disdàin of the lovE!' of his own family matches \

Dombey' s, but-wha't is :i.nvo1untary an'd ing'rained to Dombey is . , . chosen by Carker. Carker is perfectly aware of the power (and

"to him'- ~e threatl of Florence' s ,and Paul' s goodnes's, and is - 1.

rt "

careful,tO guard 'Dorobey against them; -He thought how j'ealous

. he had beèn of the boy, how jea}<>us he, had been of the girl,

how ari;fully he: ha~. kJept intrude'r-s-.~t a ,distance, a~d drawn a

circle arounâ his dupe that non~t1f: himself should cross

• ~ ,'\ " (Ch. Iv, p. 866). Carker is ve,y capable of ,seeing • IC 1 l. ...

people' s warm natures. For example" his,-stares can pierce

direc~ly throl-ug~ Edith' s prï'"de and quickly' comprehend her love' "'-J 7

for Florence. Few charactets in Dombey and Son are more awa~e

of the existence of goodness than Carker. . In ~the same way,

, few in The Did Curiosity Sho;e are as aware of goodness as .. . Qu!1p. But wqile' Quilp desi res ,to consume goodness, and to

turn white into black, éar~er tends to minimiie the power and "

attraction of' goodness in the face of personal se1fishness

and gain. While he is aware of his brother 1 s truly humble arid

loving nature, he ignores it when he sees his chance to parlay \

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his .brother' s disgrac::e into his own gain. John Car,ker puts i t

best: ft l have been '. • .~ a useful foil to you.. You h~ve trod":'

den on me free:Ly in your clirnbing up" (Ch. xiii, p. 248). The ,

irony of John ~arker~\ the eIder brother, bein~ termed "Carker

the Junior" shows the: 'extent, to .. ~..which· Carker (and, less con-

. sciously,' Dombey) rninimizes great emotional treasure.e in 'order

to attain° the slightest financial or promotional gain. ~I'!I-C

Another way thdt Ca~ker gains, in the business world is by~ .-

(l, using the blindnesses 'Of others. Obviously, Do~b~y i p the mdh \ ,

mos,t- vic,timized in this way: , "

Mr. Marfin even says of ~arker

that Dombèy is "the man he managed" (Ch. lii~, p~ .841). :While , ,

Dombey sees the ~hideously artificial Mrs. Skewton as "perfect-\ ".Ji ta

~

ly genteel" (Ch. xxi, p. 364), and nis equaJ.Iy narrow sister,

Mrs. Chick, sees her 'as "a DlOSt genteel and elegant creature~ o , ~

CCl1. xxix, p,' 494), Carker sees ,the woman }n aIl her falsi ty"

and yet, in his visit to Lea~ington, he draws out and;flatters

her by agr,eing to aIl her foolish and blind-ideas, and to one

.' espe/cial.ly --~ her staternent: "We are dreadfullYoreal, Mr

Carkex ••• ' are we "not?", (Ch. xlWii, p.463). Thus pampered,

Cleo~atra'is completely taken by Carker's facade, and sees him ,

as: "That very 'sensible person! n (Ch. xxxviii; p'.1 606). Carker

~s able ta ~anipùlat~ Joe Bagatock similarly; Dickens presents ~ /

Bagstock as "having secured ~n attentive listener, and ~ - .

amiler who had not his match in. all'the world ,-- lin, short, a l '

de':'v.ilish 'intelligent and agreeabJ.e feIlow,' as he often " 0

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91

1 afterwards dèclared " (Ch. xxvi, '" ' p. 455). "'Carker uses

, both these people to reinforce his position in respect to ,

~ Dombey. To superficial people, Car~er presents a seerningly "'c, equal and-pleasant superficiality. In the words of Steven

Marcus, "Carker asserts hirnself ~ in .secret, and responds

to others like a charneleon."8 ly to th9se who have -

~ rnor~. loving ~ virtuous nat is se en at any

time as the manipulating da he truly ia. -1)

Florence, fôr exarnple, loathing of the

apparently ki."nd Carker":

\ Florence had no temembrance of having ever seen him, but she started b'ack involuntarily wh en he carne near he~, and drew back •

(j

"My horse is perfectly quiet, l assure you," said the 'gentleman. .

It was not that, but1sornething in the man hirnse~f -- Florence could not say what

• made her ,recoil as if she had been stung. xxiv, p. 427)

/ 'P

gentle­-- that (Ch,.

? This passage recalls the relationship betwe~Quilp and~Nell

--~a sup~a-rational repulsion of polarities. The 'contiasts in

Dornbey and Son are n?t nearly as extrerne as 'they are in The

01d Curiosity Shop"however; in Dombey and Son, ev en the . ,

virtuoul characters' -- Florence, Paul, Walter, to an extent

Edith, fnd the rest (those who are opposed to Carker in spirit ,b

if not' always in act~) __ 0 are themselves ~lind to much of

what Carker is and represents. Just as he minimizes the

"Stùdy of a L9vin9 Beart" (Ch. xxiv, p. 417) that they aIl

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indulge in Cand which florence turns into a science), so ,they 4

,

are obliV;ious to) ~r ig.norant of) t,he forces of economic and so-I

cial change that Carker is a part of. Indeed, the virtuous \ ' ..

")

characters are usually somehow abov~ those forces in rnuqh the j

same ~aylthat Pickwick ls. Toots, aIl heart and no mind,

seemingly needs no mind, for business a~ least; Qe hasoa

mysterio~ ~ut apparently

proprieto~of an obsolete

generous incorne. Sol Gills, ~he

and unprof i table busïness ,\ rnig~t \

weIl bemoan his ignorance of the modern world:

1

,

As l said just now, the world has gone past me. l don't blame it, but l no longer understand it. Tradesrnen are not the same as they used to be, ap-prentices are not the same, business is not the \ same, business, commodities are not the, same. Seven-· eighths of my stoc'k is old-fashioned. l am an old­fashioned man in an old-fashioned' shop, in a street L that is not the same as l remember it. l have fallen behind the time, and am too old to catch it again. Even the noise i t makes. confuses me." <Ch.', iv, p. 94)

Yet Gills appears, despite his eonfusion, to do quite niee~y

in his backward world. While it is true that Gills 'does not

prosper until the end, he is never actually seen as po~r, he o

never really seerns to need the business. Captain Cuttle is

similarly blessed. Florence, though lacking in other ways, is

at least ne~er o"!anting for any mate.ri~l good. Sinee these 1

\ char~cters are above the need for great economic and social

change, they ignore the positive aspects of progress: an \

increased standard of living, jobs for the poor Cand others), ~

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93~

greater productivity, and better transport. ~The· train image /

in the novel clearly shows this progress. Both th~ power and

the promise'of the train is sho~n in the following passage: , '

As to the neighbourhood which had hesitated to ao­knowledge the railroad in' its straggling days, that had;9rown wise and penitent,-as any Christian might

"in such a case" and now boa-sted of its powerful and­prosperous re~ati~n. • •• There was even railway time ob~erved in clocks, aS if the sun itself had given in. Among the ~anquished was thè master chimney-sweeper, whilom incredulous at Staggs's gardens, who now liveq in a stuccoed bouse three stories high, and gave himself out, with golden flourishes upon a varnished board, as contractor for the cleans~ng of railway chimneys by machinery. (Ch. xv, pp. 289-90)

~ . ' Most of the v1rtuous characte~s of the novel are never seen

near the often-mentioned railroads; most seek refuge agafnst

the world iriste~d in the "old-fashioned, n almost fcüry-tale \ \

~ike calm of the Wooden Midshipman.

For tRis reason, tbe Toodle family is a very interest~ng

group. Not as economi~ally fortunate as the Midshipman-group, . \

Toodle must work for a liying, and fittingly finds a job with

the railroad, and hence ties himself into the economic world, \

of Dombey and·çarker. .

A. O. J. Cockshut even goes sa far as .

to say: "The link between Toodle and Dombey is the link be­

tween capital and labour. n9 Toodle, however, is either ignor-'

ant of) or somehow ~bove)the heartlessness of the system; his

priority of love over economics ia made quite clear when he

speaks with Dom~ey:

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"You have a son, l

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belieVe?J~~aid Mr Dombey. Four hims and a her. <'~ll

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94

\ "FOUrjOn"e~ Sir.

"Why, it' s as much the~" said ~r Dombey.

p "1 .t:ouldn 1 t hardly world less, Sit."

as you can afford to keep

affor~but one thing in the

',-- "What is that?"; "To lose lem, Sir." (Ch. ii, ~ p. 69)

Even this family, most closely associated,with Carker's world,

never ceases f!ghting against its worst aspects -- impersonal­

ity, coldness,~nd har.dness. Toodle, like Wemmick~in,Great . ,/ '''.............'

,Expectations~ separat-es- his life into two wo'rIds. Unlike Wem-

~ick, he subordinates one tq the ·other. He i~ the antithesis

of Do~beYJ he sees the marketplace as a means rat"her (han an

end. Instead, his end is the warmth of a loving family.

Through POlly, Paul briefly thrives on that warmth.

Separated from the harsher demands of reality, the other

virtuous characters do not have to fight such a concrete /

• ba~tle against the coldnes. and cruelty of p~ogress. Their

battles are more abstract; they a're battles of the heart. Paul

becomes the!r idol and their martyr. It 18 Pau,l who best

vocalizes their cause wh en he ask~ ~Papa! What's money?" (Ch.

viii, p. 152) and receives no suitable' answer. John Romano

paul's transcendent wisdom, of whfch so mu ch is made in the novel, is in fact ignorance -- the ignorance of Socrates. It is the wisdom, in other words! of not haY!~8 answers, of abounding in quest10ns • • • •

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95

Althou~h he only truly finds thern with his death, Paul is

His fasci-

\" nation with the voices in the 'wave§' shows his yearning for a . .

tirnelessness -- not the stagnant maintenance of a time'which

is what Dombey desires, but rather the tirneless truths, and

t~ove, that lies behindr

and ahead of th~ one' cold age that

carke\ is so much a part of. Surrounde~by those who have

forgotten or tried to replace those tiuths, Paul cannot

t.hrive, and, like Nell, fades %tto a better world. PalU' S , ,

worshippers, on 'the other hand, are not as delicate as pe is,'

. ana they must do their best .to find those truths and that love

in the world itself. In this they large~y succeed, but are

sornewhat constrained ,by the demands of a society,which brings ,

,them in touch with Carkér and his tYP,e. They do not truly .'

thrive until both Carker and the firm'of Dombe~ and Son are

dead.

Carker, is, at least, aware of the power o~the love which ,'\.

';; nurtures this group, but is al: the same time hardened to that ~ ,

love, and love viewed dispassionately is insignificant. He

knows its power enough to ibuse it (as, for-example, when he r~

abuses Captain Cuttle' s good intentions to spy on Walter, ~or

uses Florence's goodness a~ a weapon against Edith) ,\but

chooses not to, or 'is somehow stopped from, enjoying it

himself. Carker is ,given a choice between two moralities, '"' '

a choice \hat Dombey, with his ridiculously blinkered

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perception, cannot make: ~ choice between an "pld-fashioned~

mor~lity an~,a ~?werful new one. " ~he ~irst ~s Paul's morality: "old-fashioned," platonic

in Ideals and Christian in its emphasis~on love. I~ is ,a

morality. which is a,t the same time obvious and vague. It i8 . obvious in ·~ts existenc~, when seen in the, good nature of a

'\

Florence or a Cuttle or,a Toodle, and obvious in its absence r ' • '~

"in aQDomb~y o'~ a Car~·er. It is, h~wever, vague in,!'ii:} laws

" 1

and defir:li tion. ,FloreQce' fails~ in her st~dy of f loving

heart, but still finds that heart. It ,is a morflity, which,

most of aIl, w~rships go'odness, and which is /fen~, rather than

unde~stood. )

The second-moraLity, the one that Carker cho~es, is a, ~ ~ .

machine morality or business et~~c, one ·that twis\s 'the GOrden

Rule ;nto 'something like "do unto others so that y~will }have '\ . .. "- -----~./

a profitible return come unto you." It is a morality which

sees aIl hfmans às cog's, important for what they produce '" .

rather th~n what they are, which takes into,account the ~ine­

teenth-century philosophies of Bentham and Malthu~ in aIl

their coldness, ,and which prefigures social darwinisme It is

a motality'which makes a god of money and of ~elf, a prophet

of Adam Smith, and a.faith of growth and progresse Finally,

it is a mor"~llity which must sw7ep away any sign of true love

or trùe feéling for others ïn order to be,vali~.

The two moralities are nearly as divergent as the forces

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of good and evil 'are in The Old Curiosity Shop, and a battle, \

with two camps, is fought in both novels. The struggle 'in \ , .

Domber and Son i~ usually less obvious, however; Dombey and .

, Son is by far the more realistic novel of the two, and much of -. , '

the realism depends on shading most of the characters with at

least some grey. It is exactly when Dickens does not do this

that he goes against the general direction of the novel, a

novel which, "more than any of his'major works, shows how

quickly and surely Dickens could sense the mood of his time, , 11

ana incorporate,new sensations in imaginative literature."

Certainly, Toots is out of place 'in the world of thïs novel, -

in a way tha~ comparable grotesques in earlier novéls (includ-, .

jng Jingle and Dick Swiveller) are note An eve{l greater

absurdity in Dombey and Son is Captain CuttIe, who, though' he

looks'like a salt y sea-dog, is a moral virgin. This is'seen J

when he is compared to Florence: ".in simple innocence of the

world's ways and the world's perplexities and dangers, they

were nearl~ on ~ level" {Ch. ~lix, p. 776?, Paul, too, is an

unreal . character; he is on a level wi th Nell Ill" 'his perfec- :,

tian. His death r quite early in the novel, i6 a,sign of the'

greater realisrn of Dornbey and Son over The Old Curiosity Shop;

in Dombey~nd ~on, Dickens is more interested in the society

that kills the innocent than in the innocen~ himself.

It i6 tbose characters who are on the border betwe€j the

two moralities and who are given a cboice t'bat are usually

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98

more realiptically presented. The Toodles have ,been already

given as an example of this. Edit~ is another; her spirit is .~ ,

in constant torment as she is caught in 'a woild which ehcour-

ages marriage for ~oney. Walter Gay is an interesting study

in this respect. Dickens origina11y had a different intention

for him; a letter to John 'Forster states that Dickens is con-, sidering showing Walter

gradUal~y and natural1y tr-ailing away, from th~t love ofradventure and boyish light-heartedness, into negligence/ idleness,'dissipation, dishonesty, and ruine To show, in short, that common, every­day, miserable declension of which we know sa much in our ordinary life, to exhibit something of the philosophy of it, in great temptations and an easy nature; 12d to show how the good turns 'into bad, by degrees.

To put it anoth~r way, Dickens thought of having one character

_make th~ transition from "old~fashioned" morality to "business

morality." Dickens chose instead to lift Walter out: of, this '

, type of "every-day" reality, and no such study was made in

Dombey and 'Son Calthough one very much like,it W8S attempted

with Richard Car stone in B1eak Bouse). Because -of this,

Wal ter ,\loses much of his potential energy as a character, and .

he becomes l.ittle more than a plot-device.

It is the predominantly immoral, or business-moral char­

acters, who are MOst softened by th'ls gr,eyfng. Major Bagstock

is 'saved from melodramatic vill,ainy by his-stupidi ty an':' his

humor; "he ls used more than he uses. ~leopatra~ another joke,

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is g~ven .enough humanity to at least be pitied. Dombey,.~ppar­

ently foreyer frozen into this new ethic~ is at tbe end of the

novel given a chance to embrace the ~old-fashioned" morality,

and Dickens tries, irr his preface, to rnake it clear that this - ,

asp~ct of Dombey was a part of him aIl the tirne: "Mr Dombey

undergoes no violent change, either in this book, or in real

life. A sense of bis injustice is within bim, aIl along. The

more he repres~es it, the more unjust he necessarily is"

(Preface, p. 43). Dombey is never a black villain, but rather

a blinded veryrnan, who is potentially good or evil, black or \ '

white, and cornes across, on the whole, as consistently

grey. ,

Carker "gieyed,no too, but done sa pervelsely. He too

bas a heart, hich, however warped or bitter, eventually cornes

ta domi.nate usually rigid and controlled business mind. "

This change place wh en Carker begins to grow more

absorbed ~ith t e familial side of Dombey and Son. Late in \

the novel, and n his own way, he can truly be sa id to have -

fallen in love ith Edith.

The effect of that powerful feeling ,disrupts Carker's

office concentration -- where he at,one tîme deals with his o

business matters with the concentration and efficiency of a

card-pl~yer, his emoti~n later leads him to distra~ion and

deep medi tatio'n. He even lOSEfs consciousness of at least

one aspect of his power to manipul'te:

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100

, He was v~ry thoughtfu1 as he went along, and very thoughtful there~ and very tboughtful in the car­ria~e on his way back to,the place wbeIe MI Dombey

'had been left. It was only wben sitting by that gentleman's coucb that, ~e was quite bimself again, and conscious Qf bis teeth. (Ch. xlii, p. 692)

Carker's pursuit of bis twisted love causes bim to lose sight , 1

of the power of the markrtPlace, and tbis is wbat finally

leads to bis undoing. ~h carry tbe analogyaof the cards a bit

further, Carker throws in bis hand too soon, or, as Edith puts

it to him: "You \i9ht bave cajoled, and fawned, and p1c:tyed

your traitor's part, a little longer, and grown richer. You

purchase yOUI voluptuous retirement dear!" (Cb.,liv, p. 859).

Dickens makes it clear that Carker flees for sorne sort of

love oth~r than l~e of money; in chapter fifty-three, Mr.

Mor,fin o~tatés that èarker bas embezzled no money at aIl. .

. Despi te bis lengthy medi tations, 1 Carker' s actions are fool ish

and futile; his passions blind him for once to both Dombey's

vengeful pride and Edith's haugh~y disdain. Indeed, when ~

Carker flees, he flees from any sort of alliance or conoec-

tion, emotional or economic. He turns away from both'moral-

ities, and is destroyed.

The melodramatic ,meeting between Carker and Edith was the

product of a sudden decision by Dickens, and went against

Dickens's original design. In a letter to Forster, Dickens

writes: J

Note from Jeffrey this mOIning, who won' t be1ieve'

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(positively refuses) that Edith is Carkèr's mis­tresSe What do you think of a kind of inverted ,Maid' s Tragedy, and a tr~mendous scene of her undeceiving Carker, and giving him to know that she never rneant that?l)

There is, however, sorne similarity between this change, and .. the one that Forster boasts that he prornpted.Dickens to for

Nell: in each case, someone pointed out the inevitable. The

reaSon Edith's change seemed impossible to Jeffe!y lies not

in Jeffer'" s sensibili.ties but in the logi·c of the narrativ~.

Edith' s flight, and her presence in Dijon, seemed contrived.

and silly, but her hate of Carker rings true. Unfortunately,

wl]i1e. the scene at Dijon ïs potentially one of the most power- .

fuI in tha book, and.potentially one of the rnost revealing

about Carker, it is largely a failure: "one of the worst· in - ' 14

Dickens," in the opinion of Edmund Wj.lson. Arlene Jackson

gives a credible reason for this:

The rnelodramatic touches in the scene seern to be us'ed as a kind of cloak for the sexual meaning: the demand and refusaI are such potentially charged events that Dickens, for reasons of audience reac­tion orA of persOllai reticence,' could not bear to present more openly. In such case's'. Dickens' s tech­nique is in danger of hiding aIl too weIl, bu~ the

. rneaning heIe ia discemible, especially when viewed in relation. to D9rnbey's earlier reference to Edith's "duty. "1,

1

If Carker ia a "fIat" character, this is not because he lacks

a strong se~uality. In fact, Carker is, like Quilp, ône of , the most sexual of Dickens's creations. Although far from

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explici~, the scene at Dijon at one point clearly shows Car­

ker' s powerful sexuali ty: "He would have sold his soul to root

. her-, "in her beauty, to' the floor, and make her arms drop at ,

her sides, and have her at <his.mercy". <Ch. liv, p. 860). <}

Carker's sexuality is closely tied into both his rise and

fall. Early in. the novel, "a"nd before the events of the novel • 1

"

'take place, _his sexuality i5 an asset, subordinated to, but

" not wholly s~blimated into, his business energy. He seduces

Alice Marwood, but she is not sent to jail for fornicationfr

prosti tutiop, but rather (or embezzlement; she is a bUS~&S tooi as weli as a sexual one. Both Ca;ker's business ener~y

and his perqonal cruelty betray a sadistic streak: he is an 1

excellent example for Fred Kaplan's staternent: \ .

Many of Dickens!s rnost dynamic cnaracters seem to desire nothing as rnuch as the dominance of otqers or the gratification of their 'own needs. To sub­jugate others to their wish is inseparable from ~hei16sexualit'y: indeed, often J.t i9 their sexual-lty. )

\

g \ Unlike Dombey', who appears to sublimate aIl his sexual energy

into his mercantile prid~i Carke~ combines both pride and ! /

G\esire into his selfishness, and the two seem\ to work weIl

together for most of the novel. It is only when Carker·gives

c'ompletely in. to hOis sexual desire at the eXPiense of his care-, \

fully developed role as mana~er that he falls!. What remai?B , .

to him is chaos. Losing' sight of .his business"'morality, and

never tru1y foilowing the heart-morality, rre loses any sense

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.' of' direction ~nd any control, and he ~s'finally k~11ed by the

• symbol of the new society that he ha.s helped to build. -'This , .' \. . d t lrony lS no aCC1 en :' ..

'"

The law of talion operates very·extensively in Dickens 1 s ficti'on ,. • • the- distinctive feature of the lex'talionis is not~its harshness but 'ius rigjd insistence on exact retaliation. Thé sharpness of tbe ironie effect derives from this exactness in r1etribution since no reversaI could be more com­plete than when a character brings upon himself the very fate (or elements in that fate) which hé had

. either tried to avo,ia~ sought to bring upon others. The manner 0 ' unishment sharply recalls' precise features of the offence. 17 .

\ ." No death could be ~ore ~oeticallY.just for Carker th an de~th

, ' ,

by the very power that he is such a 'great di~ciple of. " 1

Even when ~ne train is presented in its best aspects

as a reformer, as'a source of employment, or as the cause of a

better, standard' of living -- it is seen as a roonster of sorne

soit. The new, prosperous neighborhood that replaces the

decrepit Staggs's Gardens Is centered-about a "monster train n

(Ch. xv, p. 289? 'Dombey betraya the slightest hint of warmth \ . when Edith plays the harp for him "and perha~s he ~eard among l-

the soundi,n9 strings some,distant music of his own, that tamed \

the monster'of the Iron road, and made it less inexorable" . (Ch. xxi,-p. 371). On Dombey' s jour'ney .to . ,

t~tln becomes an image~of tQe greatest mons

( The very speed at which the train w~s·whirl ,j' (~: al~ng, mocked the swift course' of the Ydoung ~ -' / that had been·, borne away so steadil:!( an so

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104

{nexorably to its foredoomed end. The power that forced itself upon its iron way -- its own -­defiant of aIl paths and roads, piercing through the heart of every obstacle, and dragging living creatures of aIl classes, ages, ~nd degrees behind it, was a type of the triumphant monster, Death. (Ch. xx, p ... 354)

In such passages, ra'ils are as important images a~ the trains

that run upon them, an~ for good reason; the power or the

train, when harnessed, is almost without exception beneficial,

if still frightening. The s~me power, separated from the " control of the "iron road," wh en abused or uncpecked, i5

dangerous. Carker has a similar nature; when his energies,

however heartless and frightening, are devoted to the firm, ,

the firm thrives, financially. It is only when Carker turns

away from the firm, and turns from mercantile selfisnness to

em~tioQal selfishness, that he dies. In the end, it is Carker

J.. who derails, not-the train.

During'Carker's flight, the powerful energy that he once

devoted to wotk He now turns upon himself:

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••• the springing of ,his mine upon himself, seemed to havë rent and shivered aIl his hardihood and self-reliance. Spurned like any reptile; en­trapped and mocked; turned upon, and trodden down by the proud woman whose mind he had sl'owly pois­oned, as he thought, until she had ~unk into the mere creature of his pleasure; undeèeived in his deceit, and with his fox's hide stripped off, he sneaked away, abashed, degraded, and afraid. CCh. Iv, p. 863)

Once his own energy b~om~s his enemy, Carker isplost; the

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105

mental f~grnentation he experienees on his,jouiney baek to

England is the psychological equivalent of his later physical \

obliteration by the train. ,St~ Mareus writes: ",-. " 4

This journey is described in ten stunning pages -­as far as l know/ nothing quite like it ever appeared before'~n the history of the\novel. Car­ker's consciousness is registered in its immediacy; the very syntax and rhythms of the prose becorne a part of it. 18

This prefigur~ng of stream-of-consciousness allows the reader \

ta see cl~arly Carker' ~ destr.uctive, inverted power.' In the

same way that nature, for Dombey, is Qnly made to further the -

~ortunes of Dombeyand Son~p aIl nature, for Carker.on his

flight, only exists to~orce ~pon him the realization of his

. own destruction:

again the nameless shock [of deathJ cornes speedin9 up, ~nd as it passes, the bells ring in his ears Wwhither?" The wheels roar in his ears ·whither?" AlI the noise 'and rattle sh~pes itself into that cry. The lights and shadows dance upon the horses' heads like imps. eCh. lV/ p. 865)

1 Carker loses aIl ability to think clearly, aIl ability to

sleep~ and aIl his capacity for enjoyment. He is a walking /

corpse before he me~ts the frain, to wh±ch he,is "irresistibly

attracted -- or he thought sa" (Ch. Iv, p. 872). He sperids

his last hours simply sitting and watching the incredible

force of passing trains, and from 'his, vantage point, he sees

that fo~ce in aIl its 'hor~or~

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A trembling of the ground, and quick vibration in his' earSi a distant shriek; a dull light advancing, quickly changed to red eyes, anp a fierce fire, dropping glowing coalsi an irresistable bearing on of a great roaring and dilating maSSi .~ high wind t

and a rattle -- another come' and gone, and he hold­ing to a gatë, as if to save himself! (Ch. Iv, p. 872)

For once, his own power and the power of theotrain are at

loggerheads. In a contest between the two, there is no ques-.

tion which is the greater; Carker only derives his power from

the forces of progress in the world about him. Wh~n he flees

from that world, he is rende~ed insignificant, and destroyed. \ '

In~an important departure from Thé Old Curiosity Shop,

the death of the villain in Dornbey and Son does not destroy '"

most or even much ofOthe evil in the society present~d in the

novel. Carker is not a grotesque, as Jipgle and Quilp are, .' .

but rather a type, for which many counterparts ,(i~ aims and in

methods) could be found in the real world. The firm of

Dombey and Son is not a curiositYi one can assume that

it more closely approacoes the norm,than ~he e~ception as \

a description of â typical Mid-Victo~ian business; For ,

better or for worse, the progress and the power of the train -

age does not come to an end with the isolated abuse, of power.

,Even the viriuous-char~cters, ln their paradise of the Wooden , ,

Midshipman, finally are passengers on the train to a mod~rn

agei Sol Gills becomes a (~~ceSSful speculator ~f the market,

and Walter becomes, to a larg'e extent, the Son in a new,

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107

revitalized Dombey and Son.' ~AIso, a new Paul is born --,one

who combines the heart-nature of ~he original'Paul with (it \

seems) the mercantile hope of becoming the director of the

second'Dambey and Son.

,Dorobey and Son, then, ends on an optirnistic note, but it

does not, like Pickwick papers, ignore the monsters of soci-

ety, for the rnon~ters of the new train age are unavoidable;

Not ce~#ed about one man! they cannat be slain1' no matter 1.

how happy thls novel may be at its end, that end can not be

fully understood without the consciousness of the heartless ,',

anod inhuman forces that were uprooting 'and changing Mid-Vic~

torian society:

Night and day tlie conque ring engines rumbled at their distant work, or, advancing smoQthly to their journey's end, and gliding like tame dragons into the alloted corn~s grooved out to the inch for their reception, stood bubbling and trembling there, making the walls quake, as if they were dilating with-the secret knowledge of great powers yet unsuspected in them, and strong purposes not yet achieved. <Ch. xv, p. 290)

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Notes

1 John Francis, A Bistort of the Englis'h Railway: Its

Social Relations & Revelations 1820-1845 C185l; rpt. by \

Reprints of Economie ClassicsJ New York: Au9~stus' M. Kelly,

1968), l, ~77-89.

2 Charles Dickens, Dombey and Son, ed. Peter Fairclough,'

intro. by Raymond Williams (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970), \ \

Ch: xxii, p. 372. JAll further ref~rences to this work àppear

in the texte

3 Frye, "Dickens and the Comedy o~ ~umors," p; 54.

4 Jack Lindsay, Charles Dickens: A Bi6graphical and

Critical Study (New York: Philosophical Librar~, 1950), p.

283 •

5 Kaplan, pp. 136-7, 183-4, 197-201. 6 \,

Goldberg, p. 55.

7 A. E. Dyson, The Inimitable Dickens: A Reading of the

Novels (London: Macmillan, 1970), pp. 100-~pl. ,

8 Marcus, Dickens: From ~ickwick to Dombey, p. 349.

9 A. o. J. cockshut, The Imagination 'of Charles Dickens

(New York: New York University Press, 1962), p. 98.

10 John Romano, Dickens and Rea1ity (New York: Columbia

University Press, 1978), p. 160. 11'

Humphry Bouse, p. 137. \

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109

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12 1 ~ Dickens, "To John/Forster," 25-26 July 1846, Lette~s,

~

IV (1977), 593. ,

13 Forster, ,p."484 •

14, Wilson, p. 67.

15 Arlene M. Jack~oil,. "Reward, Punishment, and the Con-q

clusion of 'Dombe~ and Son," Di.ckens Studies Annual, 7 (197S),

" p. 124.

) 16 Kapl'an, p. Ill.

17 Sucksrnith, pp. 247-S. ' l'

18 \ 'Marcus, Dickens: From Pickwick to Dombe,ïr pp. 333-4.

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Conèlusion

Thi~thesis could weIl have been called "Monsters in

Dickens's Early Novels," for it is just as concerned with

the monsters in the three books l have studied as it, is with

the "villains. The terms are ,not inte'rchangeable, however 1

if there is one point which l hope l have made with this

thesis, it is tha\: Dickens' s early villains do not ne_cessar ily

constitute the only or ev en the greatest evils in their \

novels. It is a misconception to be~ieve that Dickens's

novels can be uncategorically divided into two grQups!- "light"

(or early) novels which are generally optimistic and in which

990d 'triump~s wholeheartedly over evil, and "dark" (or late)

novels which explore social evils, and which are largely pes-

simistic. Certainly, there is a tre~d of increasing pe6simism

" when Dickens's novels are viewed chronologicallY1 a comparison_

" between Nicholas Nickleby and Great E~pectations or Pickwi~k 1

Papers and Our Mutual Friend makes that obvious. /But to

con tend that such a division i8 un,~edlY so 16 to make 1

the assumption t'hat one group is oitly concerned with

conquerable, individual evils and t~he~ is concerned with

unconquerable social evils, or, to put it another way, that in'

Dickens's early novel.s, individuals were monsters, and in bis

l~t~r novels, society was the 9re~t monster. Such'an

assumption is false • Dickens may have been increa~ingly

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preoccupied with evil society as he grew older, but in his

early works he also was concerned wi~h the question of the

evil individu~l and evil society and with the differences

and affinities between the two. 1

III

Even though Pickwick-Papers is ~is first novel, Dickens

takes a suprisingly mature look at this'question in ~t.

Jingle ls the false monster of the book1 Plckwick makes it

his only occupation, f,or a time, to hunt Jingle down and "

1

expose him. But pickwick's conception of Jingle as a monster \

changes dra~tically by the end of the"",nô'lel. It is only when

Jingle is a victim does aqy real monster emerge to seriously

disturb Pickwick's society. Jingle's disruption of his'

socie,ty lis brief· and minor. - He might outrage the Pickwick-

\ ians, but this is largely a productof their own naivete.

His antics cause only laughter f9r the reader -- not the

nervous laugqter that 9u11p usually engenders, but out and

out and undisturbed- laughter. The on~y injury ttat Jinglé

does--toPicKwick is that he makes him blush~ ,

The Fleet, on the other band" ls terribly destructive;

it kills bodies and spirits. It attacks Pickwick, Mrs.

Bardell, and Jingle allke; it,is heartless and irrational.

T~e whole Fleet episode goes against the ~enera~ly giddy \

tonè of the novel. Inside the claustrophobie prison, the

at~ospbere is not unlike the atmospheres of Bleak Bouse or

Little Dorri~. In the Fleet, pain, want, and death all existe

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112'

Jicngle 1 S evil ls not at aIl comparable to the Fleet 1 s,

but is, rather a struggle against that greater evil,'or a

struggle against opain, ';ant, and death., Of the three novels (

that l study, the villain and ~he monster in Pickwick PaEers

are furthest apart, and most opposed. Jingle i8 Pickwick's

ally in Pickwick~s opposition to the monster of the Fleet, \

and to the society that could foster the Fleet.

Any distinctions between individual and social evils made

in Pickwick Papersg..re forgotten in The 01d Curiosity Shop. -. ,

Quilp is a study in personal cruelty, a completely individual

evil. Moreover; Quilp largely embodies'the evil presented by \

the Fleet in Pickwick PaEers: an atmospherfc or spcial, rather

than individual, evil. His evil is a pervasive forcei its

influence can pe felt even though h~ is not physically

present. Even though he spends most of his time in the vital

heart of Eng~and, his evil travels out as if in wave~, to

disturb the dreams of his symbolic foil, Nell, wherever she

travels. Quilp is ~ithout.question ~he monster of The 01d ,

Curiosity Shop, the being to which aIl evil is-attracted and

from which àll good is repelled. Dickens holds back no ugli­

ness or cruelty in his portrait of Quilp, and the brilliance

of that portrayal is itself a problem: as a true representa­

tion of evil, or a refiection of ev!l society, Quilp is a

dismal failure. The Old Curiosity Shop cannot be se en as

anyth!ng other than a fairy-tale. Quilp cannot sustain a

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role as a social evil as weIl as the Fleet can, nor can hi p

character describe, the discr.epency between' individual- and

social evil. In Pickwick Papers the two collide; the strength

of one and the weakness of the other ~s"shown. Su ch a col­

lision does not happen in The Dld Curiosity Shop; it cannot.

Quilp~s allegorical energy trav~ls in one direction. He is

too ~vil to be a man, but fs tao indi vidual to bOa any sort of

social evil~ Quilp must be enjoyed for himself as th~ riovel

must be: it is too far removed from society to question it.

The.re is. no such problem 'in ,Dombey and Son. In that

novelAthere is bot~ a'villain and a separate monster, as in

Pickwick Papers. Unlike Pickwick Paperà, however, those evils

are for the most part similarly directed -- towards growth and

progresse The obvious monster of Dombey and Son is tQe train.

The energy of the train is ambiguous; it is a symbol of , f

necessary, but also of heartless, progresse The true monster

of Dombey and Son, howev~r, is the society which sires the

railroads and fosters the mercantile pr ide _ and_ the commonplace . cruelty of the novel. Its influence is greater than the

Fleet' Si; the Edens of the later novel are less obvious an-d'

more transitory. The Eden 'of D~ngley Dell-never touches the

reality of the Fleet; the world of the Wooden Midshipman

cannot escap~ the influence of t~e dreary world about it.

In that world, the villain is a servant rather than a nebel,

and fights for a cold, heartless world rather than against "

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it. l

Dickens later, ftoark ft novels are darker than Dickens's

ea~lier ones because their ~aikness is largely unrelieved; if

it is not always Present, it is alrnost always lurking around

the corner. The earlier novels may be ftlight,ft but ehls light

is largely by contrast. There is not an uncornpromising split

between the two groups; both conta in elements of the'oth~.

In many ways, Pickwick Papers is a study for Little Dorrit •

is a Jingle; as Dickens concentrates more a~d more on social 1

eyil, individual evil becomes less and less separate .and ~ \ .

alive. Without such a target on which to projec~ the evils \

of the world, evil becomes an anonymous, heartless, unconquer-,

able inev~tability; Dickens's later novels are rnuch more

novels of despair. Thus, paradoxically, because Jingle and

~uilp, and to a lesser extent Catker, exist in the worlds of

their novels, and can~be confronted, and either converted or

'destroyed, then those worlds are worlds capable of posi~ive . ,

change, hope, and unqualified, unrestrained happiness.

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Bibliography

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Allen, wal tEir. "The Cornedy of Dickens." ,. In Dickens 1970. ~

Ed. Machael Slater, pp. 3-27.

Andrews, Malcolm, introd. The Old Cur-iosity Shop. By. Charles\

Dickens. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972, pp. 11-31.

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