Riego de cebolla

In writing of Waverley, Sir Walter Scott confessed:

I am a bad hand at depicting a hero properly so called, and have an unfortunate propensity for the dubious characters of borderers, Hig^and robbers, and all others o f a Robin Hood description/

Characters 'of a Robin Hood description' proved particularly problematic for Victorian critics.

Neidier heroes nœ villains 'properly so called', they flaunted their moral ambiguity, both on the

stage and in the novel, in a manner bound to irritate latent anxieties peculiar to the Victorian age.

Popular novelists, especially admirers of Scott, like Ainsworth and Bulwer, caused a welter of

critical controversy by making their protagcmists criminals - and writers of stage melodram^ as we

have seen in Chapter 2, exploited the public appetite for glamorous offenders. Bulwer's Paul

Clifford, like Ainsworth's Dick Turpin and Jack Sheppard, were no ordinary criminals; they were

highwaymen, courageous, charming, gallant, attractive to women - and predictably, to the reading

and theatre-going public. To their admirers, these characters were heroes; to their detractors, they

were the worst type of villains. This chapter will examine firstly the impact of such charactMS on

debates about the evolving novel form, and secondly Dickens's response, in the novelistic context of

Oliver Twist, to the rmnanticising of crime.

Critics branded bodes sporting these morally ambiguous characters 'Newgate' novels. The

term 'Newgate', of course, refers to both the 6mous prison whose destructimi by fire in 1780

Dickens dramatises in Bamaby Rudge,^ and to The Newgate Calendar; or, The Malefactors'

Bloody Register, a popular collection o f criminal biogr^hies published in 1773. In his

comprehensive work. The Newgate Novel, Keith Hollingsworth explains that as a literary critical

term, the 'Newgate' tag is nothing but a ccxivment historical label. In practice, it was used

insultingly by contemporary commentators about a series of novels published between 1830 and

1847 which had 'criminals as prominent characters'. According to Holhngswcxdi, 'a book was not

' Cited by F. W. Chandler, The Literature o f Roguery, 2 vols (London: Constable, 1907), II, 342. ^ was predictably branded a Newgate novel.

likely to be damned with the accusing name unless it seemed to arouse an unfitting sympathy for

the criminal'/

As Oliver Twist was pubhshed in serial form between 1837 and 1838 in Bentley's

Miscellany - the same journal that pubhshed the 'Newgate' novels of Ainsworth - it was in some

ways inevitable that it would be labelled a Newgate novel. Indeed, the fact that Dickens chose to

write Oliver Twist with its veritable rogues' gallery, despite critical antipathy to books about

criminals, shows a typical Dickensian blend of courage and opportunism - that is, controversy sells.

But in 1841, after Oliver Twist had been fiercely attacked as a Newgate novel, particularly by the

staunchly 'anti-Newgate' journal, Fraser's Magazine, Dickens felt the need to add a preface to the

third edition of his novel defarding his artistic methods and motives.

The Preface to Oliver Twist is comnKxily acknowledged to be an attempt by Dickens to

divorce himself fiom the Newgate novelists, and to clarify the moral, artistic and class issues

surrounding the representation of crime in fictirm. Two of the principal charges that Dickens w as

defending himself against were firstly, that his subject matter was essentially immoral, and

secondly that it was 'low*. His choice of epigraph from Fielding mocks the stupidity of critics who

automatically assume fiiat because the subject matter of a novd is low", it is also immmal;

'Some of the author's friends cried, Txx)kee, gentlemen, the man is a villain; but it is Nature for all that;" and the young critics of the age, the clerks, apprentices, &c., called it low, and fell a groanii%.' - FIELDING, (p. Ixi)

The imphcation of Fielding and Dickens is that nothing which is in nature - however immoral or

'low* - should be banned from the magic circle of fiction. That is, no subject is innately good or evil,

beneficial or harmful. Dickens states outright:

I confess I have yet to learn that a lesson o f the purest good may not be drawn fi-om the vilest evil. [...] I saw no reason, when I wrote this book, why the very dregs of life, so long as their speech did not offend the ear, should not serve the purpose o f a moral, at least as well as its fioth and cream, (p. Ixi)

^ The Newgate Novel, 1830-1847: Bulwer, Ainsworth, Dickens, and Thackeray (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1963), pp. 14-15.

In Dickens's view, the writer’s treatment of his subject matter, artistic method or style, should be

the true object of critical scrutiny; for the moral bias of a work depends on this.

This reading of the Preface is largely self-evident. But what is not often noticed is that,

nowhere in the Pre6ce does Dickens mention the term 'Newgate'. He makes one particulariy

dishonest and slippeiy reference to Edward Bulwer's 'Newgate' novel Paul Clifford (1830):

In fact. Gay's witty satire on society had a general object, which made him careless of example [.. .], and gave him other, wiser, and higher aims. The same can be said of Sir Edward Bulwer's admirable and most powerful novel o f Paul Clifford, which cannot be fairly (XHisidered as having, or being intended to have, any bearing on this part of the subject, one way or another, (pp. bdi-lxiii)

Bulwer's novels obviously do have a bearing on the subject in every respect, but Dickens, by a

rhetorical sleight of hand, chooses to divorce himself from such literary midgets by listing

precedents for his own moral art set by giants like 'Fielding, De Foe, Goldsmith, Smollett,

Richardson, Mackenzie' and Hc^ardi. All these writers, Dickens claims, 'for wise purposes [...]

brought upon the scene the very scum and refuse of the land'. Yet all were reproached by 'Ae

insects of the hour', the critics 'who raised tl^ir little hum, and died, and were forgotten' (p. bciv).

No doubt the 6 c t that Dickens deliberately avoids the word 'Newgate' can be explained if

we acknowledge that the Pre&ce is on erne level a piece of literary prq>aganda designed literally to

erase any associations between Oliver Twist and the Newgate novels, and to carve a niche fw

Dickens the novelist among the literary greats. But there is also a second, and 6 r more important,

reason why Dickens avoids mentioning Newgate and that is because he substitutes Aw it aix)ther

key term - 'romance'. It seems strange that many critics today ignore the 6 c t that the PreAtce

signals itself as an attack on romance. Keith Hollingsworth, in fact, may have shifted critical

interest away from importance of romance as a concept in the Newgate controversy, because in The

Newgate Novel he incomprehensibly claims that the Newgate tag was not applied to 'romantic

accounts of banditry'. He goes further, maintaining that 'picaro, gipsy, highwayman, and onhnary

criminal all fall within the province of F. W. Chandler's inclusive work. The Literature o f

Harrison Ainswortii's Rookwood (1834) and Jack Sheppard (1839-40) are both subtitled 'A

Romance'. Moreover, the eponymous hero of Bulwer's Paul Clifford, the first of the 'Newgate'

novels, is a highwayman, as is Dick Turpin, the hero of Rookwood. Again, Rookwood is riddled

with gipsies and other species of ixxnantic bandits or outlaws, and it is in Ainsworth's Jack

Sheppard that the 'romance of crime' enjoyed 'its wildest fling', in the words of Maurice Willson

Disher/

This chapter will argue that the term 'romance' lies at 6 e heart of the Newgate ccmtroversy,

and fiirther, that the unacknowledged, perhaps subconscious project of those involved in the debate,

was to estabhsh the correct relationship in fiction between the rcmnantic and the real. That is,

Newgate novelists and critics were grappling semi-consciousty with forms and concepts of'realism'

before the word emerged as a literary critical term, before the emergence of Balzac, and before

British writers like George EUot and 0 . H Lewes tackled the many paradoxes and problems it

presented.^

Newgate commentators were embroiled in, but not fully alive to, the cwnplexity of the

relationship between life and fiction - hence the confusion about moral and artistic issues which

marks the debate. One point which was clear to many, however, was that rcanance was the enemy,

since it was a genre which falsified reality and was therefore immoral. At the same time, definititms

of 'romance' varied greatly. In fire case of Dickens, anyway, his understanding of the word evolved

and metamorphosed throughout his career. In the Prefoce to Oliver Twist, the term romance is

^ Ibid., p. 15.

^ Blood and Thunder, p. 133.

® In the 1842 Preface to La Comédie humaine, ed. by Marcel Bouteron (Paris: Gallimard, 1951), Balzac claimed, 'French society was to be the historian, I had merely to be its secretary' (I, 7); repr. in Realism, ed. by Lilian R. Furst, Modem Literatures in Perspective (Lcmdon: Lcmgman, 1992), p. 29.

Ian Watt claims that ' "Réalisme" was apparently first used as an aesfoetic description in 1835 to denote the "vérité humaine" of Rembrandt as opposed to the "idéalité poétique" of neo-classical painting; it was later consecrated as a specific literary term by the foundation in 1856 o f Réalisme,

ajournai edited by Duranty* - The Rise o f the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding

(Berkelej : University of California Press, 1957), p. 10. Watt's source is Bernard Weinberg's

French Realism: The Critical Reaction, 1830-1870, MLA of America General Series (London: [n. pub.], 1937), p. 114.

closely associated with fiction which glamorises crime and distorts reality; the term is in feet almost

a convenient shorthand for Newgate novels. The Prefece as a whde is an uncompromising attack

on romance as a genre, but the attack is concentrated in the lines:

there are people of so refined and delicate a nature, that they cannot bear the contemplation of these horrors. Not that they turn instinctively from crime; but that criminal characters, to suit them, must be like their meat, in delicate disguise. A Massaroni in green velvet is quite an enchanting creature; but a Sikes in fustian is insupportable. A Mrs. Massaroni, being a lady in short petticoats and a fancy dress, is a thing to imitate in tableaux and have in lithograph on pretty songs; but a Nancy, being a creature in a cotton gown and cheap shawl, is not to be thought of. It is wonderful how Virtue turns from dirty stockings; and how Vice, married to ribbons and a little gay attire, changes her name, as wedded ladies do, and becomes Romance, (p. Ixiii) (Italics mine)

Again, in a scarcely veiled reference to the protagonists of popular romance, Dickens writes in one

place -

I had read of thieves by scores - seductive fellows (amiable for the most part), faultless in dress, plump in pocket, choice in horseflesh, bold in bearing, fortunate in gallantry, great at a soi%, a bottle, pack of cards or dice-box, and fit companions for the bravest. But I had never met (except in HOGARTH) with the miserable reality, (p. Ixii)

- and in another:

Here are no canterings upon moonlit heaths, no merry-makings in the snuggest of all possible caverns, none of the attractions of dress, no embroidery, no lace, no jack-boots, no crimson coats and rufifies, none of the dash and fi-eedom with which "the road' has been, time out of mind, invested, (p. Ixiii)

Dickens is in no doubt that the protagonists of romance, though fashionable or genteel, are

nonetheless villainous. This in itself is not an artistic crime; an outlaw like Jack Shq>pard, for

instance, the "hero' of Ainsworth's novel of that name and the darling of nineteenth-century stage

productions, actually existed and should not thus be banned from novel or stage. It is the feet that

Newgate villains are glamorised, presented as heroes and given what Thackeray calls poetic

adomment[s]',’ that is reprehensible. G. H. Lewes's term 'felsism' helps illuminate why Dickens

objected to Newgate romances so particularly. In the Westminster Review in 1858, Lewes argued,

'Reahsm is thus the basis of all Art, and its antithesis is not idealism, but Falsism^f Dickens's

’ Cited fi’om 'Hints for a History of Highwaymen', Fraser’s Magazine, 9 (March 1834), 279-87 (p. 287).

attack on romance is an attack on what Dickens sees as romance's distortion of reality, rather than

its subject matter.

In the Preface to Oliver Twist then, Dickens declares himself to be an opponent of

romance and an exponent of a comparatively realistic style of writing. He states boldly

It appeared to me that to draw a knot of such associates in crime as really did exist; to paint them in all their deformity, in all their wretchedness, in all the squalid poverty of their lives; to shew them as they really are, forever skulking uneasily Üirough the dirtiest paths of hfe, with the great, black, ghastly gallows closing up their prospect, turn them where they may; it appeared to me that to do this, would be to attempt a something which was greatly needed, aiui which would be a service to society, (p. Ixii)

Again, he emphasises:

as the stem and plain truth, even in the dress of this (in novels) much exalted race, was a part of the purpose of this book, I will not [...] abate one hole in the Dodger's coat, or one scrap of curl-paper in the girl's dishevelled hair. (p. Ixiii)

Comparing his project to tiiat of Cervantes, he argues that:

It was my attempt, in my humble and far distant sphere, to dim the false glitter surrounding something which really did exist, by shewing it in its unattractive and repulsive truth, (p. bdv)

Furthermore, Dickens's emphatic response to critics of Nancy - It is useless to discuss whether the

conduct and character of the girl seems natural or unnatural, probable or improbable, right or

wrong. IT IS TRUE.' (p. Ixv) - is remarkably similar to the pronouncement by the fore&ther of

French realism, Balzac, on his character, le père Goriot:

After reading about the secret misfortunes of Père Goriot, you will eat your dinner with relish, blaming the author for your insensibility, charging him with exaggeration, accusing him of poetic licence, but, let me tell you, this drama is not fictirm or romance. All is true.

So true that everyone can recognize its elements in his own circle, p e ih ^ s in his own heart.^

However, although on a superficial level, the Preface to Oliver Twist can be read as

dramatising a straightforward debate between romance and a burgeoning 'realism', things are not

* 'Realism in Art: Recent German Fiction', Westminster Review, 14 (1858), 488-518 (p. 493). ^ Père Goriot (1834-35), trans. by A. J. Krailsheimer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991; repr. 1992), p. 2.

quite that simple. After all his fierce talking, for example, Dickens significantly qualifies his

presentation of Oliver Twist as realistic:

No less (xxisulting my own taste, than the manners of the age, I endeavoured, while I painted it in all its fallen and degraded aspect, to banish fi-om the lips of the lowest

character I introduced, any expression that could by possibility offend; and rather to lead to the unavoidable inference that its existence was of the most debased and vicious kind, than to prove it elaborately by words and deeds, (p. Ixiv)

Indeed, Dickens hints at this qualification earlier in the Pre6ce when he states that he saw no

objections to presenting *the very d r^ s of life' in ficticm, 'so long as their speech did not offend the

ear' (p. Ixi).

The Preface to Oliver Twist was, after all, written as a piece of literary propaganda in a

local critical debate. A more balanced understanding of Dickens's textual responses to the

reiaticmship between romance and 'realism' can be attained by spreading the critical net more

widely. In Nicholas Nickleby, Dickens appears, at first sight, to be uncharacteristically consistent

in his denunciation of the moral and artistic ftdsity of romance. Crummies's illegitimate 6 re is

riddled with dramatisations of romantic criminality and Dickens leaves us in no doubt about the

standard or style of theatrical productions which have little to do with realism or morality.

Crummies tells Nicholas:

'You shall study Romeo [...] - don't forget to dirow the pump and tubs in by-the-bye - Juliet Miss Snevellicci, old Grudden the nurse. [...] Rover too; - you might get up Rover while you were about it, and Cassio, and Jeremy Diddler. You can easily knock them off; one part helps the other so much'. (Chapter 23, p. 298)

Shakespeare's heroes and such 'heroes' from romance such as Rover are treated wifii equally little

respect. Spectacle, sensation and 6vour with the masses are more important than realistic portraits

of vice. Elsewhere in Nicholas Nickleby, Crummies praises his wife's ability to play a

Shakespearean heroine and die wife of popular romantic Tiero', Rob Roy, in memorable terms:

1 didn't even know she could dance till her last bmefit, and thm she played Juliet, and Helen Macgregor, and did the skipping-rope hornpipe between the pieces'. (Chapter 25, p. 318)

Once more, the moral significance of romance is less important than its abihty to provide

entertainment.

But Dickens's most important statement on romance in Nicholas Nickleby is of essential

relevance to this study and must be analysed alongside the Preface to Oliver Twist for an accurate

understanding of Dickens’s attitudes to romance. Ostensibly venting his distaste for the kind of

misdirected charity later practised by Mrs Jeilyby in Bleak House, the narrator draws an

unexpected ccHnpariscm between the charity worker and fire romance wiiter:

In short, charity must have its romance, as the novelist or playwright must have his. A thief in fustian is a vulgar character, scarcely to be thought of by persons of refinement; but dress him in green velvet, with a high-crowned hat, and change the scene of his operations, from a thickly-peopled city to a mountain road, and you shall find in him the very soul of poetry and adventure. So it is with the one great cardinal virtue, which, properly

nourished and exercised, leads to, i f it does not necessarily include, all the others. It must have its romance; and the less of real, hard, struggling work-a-<lay life diere is in that romance, the better. (Chapter 18, p. 215) (Itahcs mine)

Initially, this passage appears to echo the mihtant anti-romance sentiments of Üie Pre^ce to Oliver

In document Diseño y construcción de un prototipo automatizado de un sistema de bombeo de agua para riego, pecuario y consumo humano utilizando energía fotovoltaica (página 70-74)