CONTRASTACIÓN DE LA HIPÓTESIS ESPECÍFICA N°

CHAPTER 5

Ethical Challenges and Jovial Evasions, Heroes Indulged and Debunked: From Sketches by Boz to Nicholas Nickleby

In 1824, Charles Dickens, aged twelve, was working in the blacking

warehouse at Hungerford Stairs, the Strand. At the same time, the

sixty-six year old William Blake was illustrating Job and Dante at Number Three, Fountain Court: at the other end of the Strand, half a mile

away.i Later, Dickens knew Fountain Court well. It provides a setting

for the meetings of John Westlock and Ruth Pinch in Martin Chuzzlewit.^ And it is conceivable that Blake and the 1824 Dickens passed one another

in the Strand. If so, Blake might have been reminded of his own lines

from 'The Chimney Sweeper':

A little black thing among the snow: Crying weep, weep, in notes of woe! Where are thy father & mother? say?

They are both gone up to the church to pray.

(E22) Dickens's father and mother were not at church, but at the Marshalsea Prison -- a situation for which Blake would have had much more sympathy. But Blake died several years before Dickens began to write, and it is probable that Dickens never heard of his neglected predecessor. And yet, these two authors had much in common.

Blake too experienced arduous employment at an early age, though

nothing so unpleasant as the blacking warehouse. Both writers came to

be much interested in the plight of other young people in worse

conditions, and in the subject of children generally. Both wrote with

great exuberance, but both were drawn, in their writing, towards

violence, imprisonment, insanity, and death. Of the two, Blake is

commonly regarded as the more advanced proponent of social change, and yet, while Dickens came to be infinitely more successful in material terms, it was Dickens again who had the more direct experience of the

^ See Norman Page, A Dickens Chronology, Macmillan Author Chrono­

logies (London, 1988), pp. 3--5; G. E. Bentley, Jr., Blake Records

(Oxford, 1969), pp. 564--6V. For a recent account of Dickens's time at

Warren's Blacking see Michael Allen, Charles Dickens' Childhood

(Basingstoke, 1988), especially pp. 80--83.

^ See Martin Chuzzlewit, ed. Margaret Cardwell, The Clarendon

Dickens (Oxford, 1982), especially pp. 684 and 811. Also Barnaby Rudge, ed. Gordon Spence (Harmondsworth, 1973), p. 168.

abuses that revolution might be expected to extinguish. Like Blake, Dickens was contemptuous of parliamentary politics; but that did not stop him from exerting a political influence -- on, for example, George Bernard Shaw: 'One of the greatest books in the English language is

Little Dorrit, and when the English nation realizes it is a great book

and a true book there will be a revolution in this country. One of the reasons I am a revolutionist is that I read Little Dorrit when I was a very small boy.'^ He might have been referring to Jerusalem.

The critic who has drawn the most significant comparisons between

Blake and Dickens is F. R. Leavis:

One can say that [Dickens's] genius, entailing a completeness of

interest in human life . . . spontaneously took those promptings

of the complex romantic heritage which confirmed his response to early Victorian England; confirmed the intuitions and affirmations that, present organically in the structure and significance of

Hard Times and Little Dorrit, make one think of Blake.

I have in mind, of course, the way in which the irrelevance of the Benthamite calculus is exposed; the insistence that life is spontaneous and creative, so that the appeal to self-interest as the essential motive is life-defeating; the vindication in terms of childhood, of spontaneity, disinterestedness, love and wonder; and the significant place given to Art.*

The essence of Leavis's approach is 'tradition': a cumulative process, in which Blake and Dickens are both seen as advocates of flexible,

liberal virtues, in defiance of scientific impersonality and the

concomitant social restraint. Leavis himself is part of a Cambridge

tradition of interpretation along these lines. Thus, Raymond Williams

is another who links Blake and Dickens as instinctive opponents of impersonal systems, and as romantics: 'to give that kind of value to human longing and need, to that absolute emphasis on commitment to another, is to clash as sharply with the emerging system, the emerging priorities, as in any assault on material poverty'.^ And Heather Glen's 'potentia' represents a comparable stand, on the part of English literature, against the present-day depredations of utilitarian economics

^ George Bernard Shaw, Shaw on Dickens, ed. Dan H. Laurence and

Martin Quinn (New York, 1985), p. 111.

* F . R. and Q. D. Leavis, Dickens: The Novelist (London, 1970), p.

228.

^ Raymond Williams, The English Novel: From Dickens to Lawrence (London, 1970), p. 61.

and technology.®

Blake and Dickens were both heavily indebted to Shakespeare.

Neither had much time for organized religion. Both were confirmed

Londoners, and the metropolis figures very largely in their writing. Dickens tended to write about a time some fifty years before his own, and so the London of his fiction is, in part, contemporary with Blake's.

Both regarded London with a mixture of affection and horror. Both were

fascinated by names. Both have received critical reprimands for their

depictions of women. These and other similarities will be discussed

below, but the main thrust of my argument will be to show that Dickens, like Blake, was acutely aware that his authorial stance involved him in ethical problems, and that, as his career progressed, he made this awareness more and more an explicit feature of his writing, displaying it, again like Blake, through the use of morally dubious intimations of himself as an author and as a private individual. This process, I shall argue, is what gives Dickens's writing, like Blake's, its special credibility as a vehicle for ethical debate.

* * *

Blake's career, like Dickens's, began with 'sketches'. But the closest Blakean parallels both to Sketches by Boz and to Dickens's first novel.

The Pickwick Papers, are to be found in An Island in the Moon. These

three works are alike in their intermingling of serious issues and unsophisticated humour, and in the sense that each puts forward an idea of its author as fitfully brilliant but also, at times, as purposeless,

detached, and amoral. Thus, Dickens represents 'Boz' exploring London

in a promiscuous hunt for literary raw material, looking for characters and situations that will permit him to display his descriptive talents, acting like a freelance journalist with no specific brief: 'Somehow, we never can resist joining a c r o w d . T h e prevailing tone is correspon­ dingly inconsequential. And yet, the preoccupations of the Sketches are mostly grim, including vanity, superciliousness, inter-familial rivalry.

® Heather Glen, Vision and Disenchantment: Blake's 'Songs' and Wordsworth's 'Lyrical Ballads' (Cambridge, 1983), p. 140.

'The Hospital Patient', Sketches by Boz, intro. Thea Holme, The New Oxford Illustrated Dickens (London, 1957), p. 241.

the snobbery of nouveaux riches, social climbing, futile matrimonial

ventures, confidence tricks, crime, sickness, and death. These themes

were characteristic of the literary periodical establishment that Dickens was working for, but he took them up with exceptional readiness.

One favourite subject is the abuse of women by their drunken

husbands: this is the main theme of 'The Hospital Patient' and 'The

Drunkard's Death', and appears in 'The Pawnbroker's Shop'. It reappears

in the sombre stories that are incongruously positioned amongst the

jollities of The Pickwick Papers,in 'The Stroller's Tale', 'A Madman's

Manuscript', 'The Queer Client', and, as here, 'The Convict's Return':

'The recollection of what he had been to her, awakened feelings of forbearance and meekness under suffering in her bosom, to which all God's

creatures, but women, are strangers.'® That is a lazy sentence,

complacently generalizing the specific crime, making it seem sad but inevitable -- in which case the literary depiction can only be lugubri­

ous. 'The Queer Client' meets with a frivolous reaction from the

Pickwickians (p. 325), while the similarly tragic 'Clergyman's Tale' has a 'somniferous influence' upon them (p. 93), recalling the sleepiness and boredom to be discovered among the inhabitants of Blake's morally

noncommittal Island. Elsewhere in Pickwick, the horrible and the trivial

are linked in Sam's 'Wellerisms'.

Dickens's ability to dwell heavily on suffering and then suddenly

to forget it is symptomatic of a general secondariness of response. In

Sketches by Boz, observation, especially the observation of emotion,

tends to be undercut by cold bathos, and by a way of putting an imaginary frame around a scene, transferring it from life to a lifeless kind of art: 'And Mr. Cymon Tuggs and all the ladies forthwith fainted away, and

formed a tableau. This is a joke at the expense of the Tuggs circle,

anticipating all Dickens's subsequent attacks on affectation, but Dickens himself does not yet give the impression of naturalness and moral soundness which he seems to be reaching after, much of the time, in his

later authorial presence. His sharpness is not yet harnessed to any

® The Pickwick Papers, ed. James Kinsley, The Clarendon Dickens

(Oxford, 1986), pp. 41 ff., 161 ff., 314 ff., 85 ff., 86.

reforming aspiration. Moreover, there is already a relish for the kind of ghoulish, cannibalistic, and dehumanizing conceit detailed in John

Carey's The Violent Effigy, as in this admiration of babies: '"Oh! what

dear little arms !" said a fourth, holding up an arm and a fist about the

size and shape of the leg of a fowl cleanly picked.'^® Even beauty is

made odd, distant, and disquieting by being tipped into a grotesquely

paradoxical context: '"Nice figure, Amelia", whispered the stout lady to

a thin youth beside her.'^ We do not see Amelia here, but rather the hungry images of her admirers. Amelia is made contingent: a projection, or, to use Blake's phrase, a 'ratio', without absolute value.

But despite this bathetic, cynical style of humour, the young Dickens is capable of warmth and sympathy, the qualities that ensured him

his early success. For example, number XV of The Pickwick Papers

concludes with a short scene of obvious sentimental appeal, which Dickens, through his already very skilful manipulation of character and

timing, makes fresh and realistic. Sam Weller has just had his father

arraign him for debt, so that he can remain with Pickwick in the Fleet, despite Pickwick's self-sacrificing wishes to the contrary:

'You arrested for debt!' exclaimed Mr. Pickwick, sinking into a chair.

'Yes, for debt. Sir,' replied Sam; 'and the man as put me in 'ull never let me out, till you go yourself.'

'Bless my heart and soul!' ejaculated Mr. Pickwick. 'What

do you mean?'

'Wot I say. Sir,' rejoined Sam. 'If it's forty year to

come, I shall be a pris'ner, and I'm very glad on it; and if it

had been Newgate, it vould ha' been just the same. Now the

murder's out, and damme, there's an end on it.'

With these words, which he repeated with great emphasis and violence, Sam Weller dashed his hat upon the ground, in a most unusual state of excitement; and then, folding his arms, looked

firmly and fixedly in his master's face.

(p. 674)

Sam's 'murder' and 'violence' suggest a way of provisionally reconciling

Dickens's literary immersion in crime with his apparent admiration for the kind and the good: like Blake, he approves of energy, and will tend to make the actively evil as engaging as the passively good, and,

furthermore, to express good actions in the language of evil. Sam's

'The Bloomsbury Christening', Sketches, p. 479. See John Carey,

The Violent Effigy: A Study of Dickens's Imagination, 2nd edn. (London, 1991) .

'murder' is comparable to Blake's 'Sooner murder an infant in its cradle

than nurse unacted desires'. Both examples warn us against taking their

authors too literally, as moralists.

The silence that follows Sam's impassioned declaration (a month,

for the novel's first readers) works well. Pickwick, at the beginning,

was a caricature: just a mild, innocent, overweight eccentric. Sam

Weller, at his first appearance, was a wag, a 'specimen of London life',^^ executing modest flights of imaginational prestidigitation, classifying the guests at the White Hart according to their boots (pp.

145--46) -- very like the Boz of 'Meditations in Monmouth Street' . But,

in the passage above, Dickens catches them both in a moment of convincing development: their mutual understanding is suddenly enriched, and they

behave in a way which is new and yet consistent. They are warmly

realizing a mutual indispensability, and, from this point, although more conventional amours are in the offing, their romance could be seen as the book's principal concern.

Some critics have argued that The Pickwick Papers carries a redemptive, almost millenarian message which it would be easy to compare

with the prophetic impulse in Blake. Joseph Rosenblum, for example,

writes that Pickwick 'is full of the laughter of the mock-heroic, but it is also charged with the epic theme of man's ability to transcend his

imperfections'." Certainly, Pickwick goes far beyond the picaresque

eighteenth-century mode of adventitious happenings suggested by Chapman

and Hall's 'Nimrod Club . . . out shooting, fishing, and so forth, and

getting themselves into difficulties'." And it does this primarily

through the relationship of Pickwick and Sam Weller, which is dynamic,

bringing development on both sides. But this relationship suffers no

significant reverses. Dickens indulges himself, his readers, and his

characters. Take, for example, Joe, the Fat Boy, the 'wonderfully fat

boy', the 'corpulent intruder' (pp. 826, 833) : he represents pure sensual

The Letters of Charles Dickens, ed. Madeline House and others.

The Pilgrim Edition (Oxford, 1965--), I (1965), 154.

Joseph Rosenblum, 'The Pickwick Papers and Paradise Lost',

Dickens Quarterly, 3 (1986), 47--54 (53).

Quoted in the introduction to The Pickwick Papers, ed. Kinsley,

enjoyment, for us as well as himself. And when Dickens comes up with such charmingly self-congratulatory drolleries as the image of Joe and Sam Weller exercising themselves upon the ice 'in a very masterly and brilliant manner' (p. 452) he is gorging on the equivalent of a 'prime' plum pie, and presuming, as he does so, on our jovial acquiescence.

In Pickwick, Dickens does not attempt to cover up social

iniquities, but he is not prepared to involve himself in them heavily. Pickwick pays his way out of his troubles, and those of his friends and acquaintances, but feels no compulsion to undertake the 'telescopic philanthropy' of doing good to total strangers. While Pickwick is in the Fleet, the prison begins to resemble a hotel; when he leaves, it will

obviously revert. The world is a big place, full of trouble, the novel

implies, and we should not let it worry us too much. We should care for human beings without addling our heads for humanity. So Pickwick is not really the paragon that he is sometimes made out to be, within the novel

and without. He is a fairly ordinary good old man: unpretentious,

frequently ridiculous, old-fashioned, and a little shabby (almost, at

times, a fool). The esteem in which he is held by his associates is a

touching matter of faithful enthusiasm. When Pickwick dispatches Sam

Weller in pursuit of Winkle, with the words, 'You have my full authority,

Sam' (p. 582), Dickens seems to invite us to ask what, exactly,

Pickwick's 'authority' is -- apart from the good will of his friends. Dickens's most convincing heroes all have flaws, and their best attributes include the ability to call forth the virtue of tolerance in those around them.

'Everything' in Pickwick is 'concluded to the satisfaction of everybody' (title, p. 870). Even the supposedly disagreeable characters are nasty in an engaging way: Fogg, the solicitor, goes 'He! he! he!' as he contemplates his abominable sharp practice, and 'then both the partners laughed together -- pleasantly and cheerfully, as men who are

going to receive money often do'. These are not villains to put beside

Quilp or darker, let alone Tulkinghorn. The epilogue (pp. 875--V7)

reveals that Dodson and Fogg escape the comeuppance that had always seemed to be looming, while Sam Weller marries Mary and stays with Pickwick, the novel concluding with the 'reciprocal attachment' of master

and man, which 'nothing but death will sever' (p. 877) . Only the Fat Boy, last seen being pummelled by Sam for his presumption in admiring

Mary (pp. 869--70), fails to have his cake and eat it.

The Pickwick Papers was the first volume to appear in the first collected edition of Dickens's works, the 'Cheap Edition'. For this, in 1847, Dickens wrote a preface which attaches a new seriousness to the novel, clearly indicating that he now saw himself as an instrument for social reform, not merely an entertainer:

Who knows, but by the time [the Cheap Edition] reaches its conclusion, it may be discovered that there are even magistrates in town and country, who should be taught to shake hands every day with Common-sense and Justice; that even Poor Laws may have mercy on the weak, the aged, and unfortunate; that Schools, on the broad principles of Christianity, are the last adornment for the length and breadth of this civilized land; that Prison-doors should be barred on the outside, no less heavily and carefully than they are within; that the universal diffusion of common means of decency and health is as much the right of the poorest of the poor, as it is indispensable to the safety of the rich, and of the State; that a few petty boards and bodies -- less than drops in the great ocean of humanity, which roars around them -- are not to let loose Fever and Consumption on God's creatures at their will, or always to keep their little fiddles going, for a Dance of Death!

(p. 888) It is unlikely that Dickens saw any of Blake's Prophetic Books. But the Blake-like imagery of Dickens's concluding sentence signifies a shared Biblical and radical heritage, and a shared disposition towards the

grandly metaphorical. 'Loud sport the dancers in the dance of death',

in Milton, accompanied by 'Timbrels & violins' (24.62, 27.11; E121,

E124); and Dickens's 'Fever and Consumption' recall the 'fogs' and 'plagues' emanating from the strongholds of tyranny in The French Revolution or America.

Blake's denunciations are usually fiercer, more freely eccentric,

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