‘The
Condition of England’: Carlyle and Dickens
The
disconcertion and anomalies of early Victorian Britain are nowhere more
trenchantly examined than in the pamphlets, essays, lectures, and books of its
most noisy and effective critic, Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881). Carlyle was a late
product of the Scottish Enlightenment, and of the culture which had made the
Edinburgh Review (founded in 1802) an intellectual force to be reckoned with
beyond the borders of Scotland. The power and effect of his own writings do
not, however, derive exclusively from the classical rationality of late
eighteenth-century Edinburgh philosophy. Carlyle’s fundamental debt to the
rhythms and the confident, prophetic utterance of the Bible is profound, as is
his sense of himself as a latter-day Jeremiah, endowed with the urgent accents
of a Presbyterian pulpit. He was also exceptionally well read in modern German
thought which was already exerting a powerful cerebral influence over the
literatures of other European nations. His own Life of Schiller was
published in the London Magazine in 1823-4 and his translation of
Goethe’s seminal novel Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship appeared in
1824. When, in 1834, Carlyle settled in London he was seeking a broader
metropolitan base, and a wider audience, for his increasingly urgent
commentaries on the times. The year before his move he had begun the
serialization in Fraser’s Magazine of his perplexing fiction, Sartor
Resartus, a work which combines a theorizing German central character with
a mediating, and explicitly English, editor. Much earlier in his career he had
aspired to a fiction which would speak ‘with a tongue of fire — sharp,
sarcastic, apparently unfeeling’ but which would nevertheless convey the
central precepts of his philosophy: energy, earnestness, and duty. Sartor
Resartus (‘The Tailor Retailored’) realizes that ambition in the form of a
reflexive discourse moulded around a learned study of the philosophy of
clothes. Carlyle’s English editor describes the nature of this tract as made up
of two undemarcated parts and of ‘multifarious sections and subdivisions’ in
which each part ‘overlaps, and indents and indeed quite runs through the
other’. It is like ‘some mad banquet, wherein all courses had been confounded’.
The style in which it is written embodies this ‘labyrinthic combination’ by
intermixing German and English, by echoing earlier literature, and by playing
games with meanings and with translations from one language to another. Like
all Carlyle’s styles it works through a process of amalgamation and
assimilation. Although Sartor Resartus has its English precedents in
Swift’s Battle of the Books and Sterne’s Tristram Shandy,
it also looks uneasily forward to the experiments of James Joyce. Sartor
Resartus was more than simply game-playing. It also carried a message for
the times in which it was written, a message which warned of the dangers of
‘sham’ in all its forms and which contrasted the undoing force of the
‘Everlasting No’ with the constructive imperative of the ‘Everlasting Yea’, an
imperative which solves all
contradiction. This ‘Everlasting Yea’ demands a submission to the will
of God and an active commitment to work, though what Carlyle meant by ‘God’ and
‘work’ remained imprecise throughout his career (Nietzsche, for one, suspected
that ‘at bottom, Carlyle is an English atheist who makes it a point of honour
not to be one’). This ultimate elusiveness does not appear to have diminished
the effect of his writings upon his literary contemporaries. Those who
responded to the urgency of his warnings in the 1830s and 1840s seem to have
assented more to his analyses of
Historic
and modern ills rather than to his vaguer proposals for future remedies. In the
essay Chartism of 1839 he confronted the growing threat of class war
posed by the new political articulacy of industrial workers. In so doing, he
glanced back to the formative events of the French Revolution and to their
dislocating effect on all Europe, an effect which was ‘full of stern monition
to all countries’. But for England the warning was specific: ‘These Chartisms,
Radicalisms, Reform Bill, Tithe Bill, and infinite other discrepancy and acrid
argument and jargon that there is yet to be, are our French Revolution: God
grant that we, with our better methods, may be able to transact it by argument
alone!’ This essay begins by offering definitions of what Carlyle styles ‘the
Condition of England Question’, definitions which derive from the observation
of the state of a nation attempting to come to terms with its parliamentary and
social reforms aimed at deflecting revolution.
As
in everything he wrote, history provides Carlyle with a pattern of precedents;
his evident dread is a process of Repetition and of an equally threatening
fracture of patterns and precedents. In the series of six lectures On
Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History (1841) he developed
aspects of the thesis of Sartor Resartus by stressing that heroism
manifested itself in a wide range of human activity and that the ‘hero’,
whether king or prophet, poet or
philosopher,
was a challenger of convention and of sham and a reformer of the defunct and
the empty. More significantly, the lectures outlined an idea of history which
profoundly, if sometimes maladroitly, influenced the work of Carlyle’s English
successors. ‘The History of the World’, he insisted, ‘is but the Biography of
great men ... Could we see them, we should get some glimpses into the
very marrow of the world’s history.’ Past and Present (1843) juxtaposes
the past-in the form of a highly sympathetic commentary on the recently
published Chronicle of Jocelin of Brakelond which describes the
achievements of the twelfth-century Abbot Samson of Bury St Edmunds — with the
confusions and contradictions of the present. The form of the book both
supports the Victorian medievalist idea of an organic, stratified, and securer
social past and challenges it by acknowledging that modern industrialization
and historical progress have utterly altered the nature of society and its
institutions. Carlyle, like the pragmatic, ‘heroic’ Abbot Samson, has no place
for sentimentalism or nostalgia. Despite the catalogue of modern ills described
in the second half of Past and Present, and despite the satiric wit
which sets up and demolishes the stock figures of Sir Jabesh Windbag and
Plugson of Undershot, there remains room for a visionary optimism of the type
indulged in elsewhere by ‘prophetic’ writers as diverse as Blake and D. H.
Lawrence. At the conclusion, Carlyle reassembles and reshuffles the images and
ideas he has developed through the narrative and looks forward to the sweeping
away of the ‘Sooty Hell of mutiny and savagery and despair’ to allow for a
benign heaven overarching the ‘cunning mechanisms and tall chimney-steeples’.
Even the world of the machine can be redeemed by human enterprise and
confidence. Carlyle’s central and most sustained achievement is his great
history of The French Revolution (1837). The history opens with
the death of Louis XV and with a scathing account of the deficiencies of French
government, institutions, and culture under the ancient régime and it
ends with Napoleon’s bid for power as the Revolution declines into
directionless anarchy. In a sense the ‘hero’ is set once again to sweep away
sham, but the book is much more than a tribute to the heroic in history; it is,
more significantly, a subtle and complex demonstration of the biographical
approach to the writing of history. The biographies are rarely those of heroes
or anti-heroes. Carlyle weaves and interweaves a variety of sources, notably
biographical and autobiographical ones, but, with considerable novelty, he also
exploits historical ephemera — letters, newspaper articles, pamphlets,
broadsheets, and advertisements. His text is a remarkable amalgam, built around
the evidence of a multiplicity of witnessing or interpreting voices, but moved
forward by a dominant, didactic narrator. Words, phrases, and slogans, in
English, French, and Latin, are played and replayed, turned on their heads,
deflated, or suddenly charged with fresh energy. The French Revolution implicitly
warns Victorian England of the nature, causes, and progress of civil
disruption, but it also creates stylistic effects and presents carefully
assembled, and highly individual, descriptions of characters and events which
render it more than just obstreperous didacticism. Carlyle’s influence over an
important group of early and mid-Victorian writers, notably Elizabeth Gaskell,
Charles Kingsley, Alfred Tennyson, John Ruskin, and William Morris, is of great
significance to the social direction of much of their work. But none of his contemporaries
was as well versed in Carlyle’s writings as was Charles Dickens (1812-70) and
none transformed that influence as spectacularly. Dickens, who once rashly
claimed to have read The French Revolution five hundred times,
shows his discipleship naturally enough in his own revolutionary novel, A
Tale of Two Cities, but echoes of Carlyle can also be heard in those
of his novels which deal most directly with the ‘Condition of England Question’
(such as Bleak House or Hard Times) and in the most urgent of the
Christmas Books of the so called ‘Hungry Forties’, The Chimes (1844).
Dickens learned, as did his literary contemporaries, to direct his fiction to a
questioning of social priorities and inequalities, to a distrust of
institutions, particularly defunct or malfunctioning ones, and to a pressing
appeal for action and earnestness. If he cannot exactly be called a ‘reforming’
novelist, Dickens was prone to take up issues, and to campaign against what he
saw as injustice or desuetude, using fiction as his vehicle. He was not alone
in this in his own time, but his name continues to be popularly associated with
good causes and with remedies for social abuses because his was quite the
wittiest, the most persuasive, and the most influential voice. Dickens’s
success in propaganda lay not in the causes he espoused, in the changes of
opinion he effected, or in the propriety or the logic of his arguments, but in
the very nature of his writing and its appeal to an exceptionally broad
spectrum of Victorian readers. He was faithful to the teaching, and to the
general theological framework, of Christianity as a moral basis for his
thought, his action and, above all, for his writing. Nevertheless, a critical
awareness that there was something deeply wrong with the society in which he
lived sharpened the nature of his fiction and gave it its distinct political
edge. Like all great comic writers, Dickens allows humour to subvert
assumptions, both general and particular. More significantly, the very vitality
and variety of his comedy confronts, and to a degree subsumes, the potential
anarchy he saw around him.
Dickens’s
novels are multifarious, digressive and generous. In an important way, they
reflect the nature of Victorian urban society with all its conflicts and
disharmonies, its eccentricities and its constrictions, its energy and its
extraordinary fertility, both physical and intellectual. Whereas Dickens’s
fictional roots lie in the novels of Defoe, Fielding, Smollett and Goldsmith
(as we know from the records of his own and of David Copper field’s early
reading),he was uniquely equipped to transform eighteenth-century models into
the fluid, urban fiction of a new age. His own first experiments, later
republished as the Sketches by ‘Boz’ (1833-6, 1836-7), reveal a writer
with an acute ear for speech, and for aberrations of speech, and with an
equally acute observation of gesture and habit, of London streets and London
interiors, of spontaneity and of misery. The Sketches are essentially
anecdotal and descriptive. Dickens’s first full-scale work of fiction, The
Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club (1836-7) (generally known simply as The
Pickwick Papers), suggests the degree to which he gradually, but easily,
adapted from the small scale to a larger narrative sweep. The origins of Pickwick
lie in a commission for a series of linked anecdotal stories concerning the
members of a London club, to be published on a monthly basis accompanied by
illustrations. The peregrinatory and exploratory nature of the club, as Dickens
initially defined it, allows him to move his characters around England and into
various comic encounters, but its ‘plot’ achieves greater direction once
Pickwick becomes caught up in the snaresof the law and is briefly confined to
prison.
This
darker side to Dickens’s imagination is also reflected in Oliver Twist,
the shorter, tighter novel he embarked on while he was still serializing Pickwick.
In Oliver Twist: or The Parish Boy’s Progress (1837-8) he again glances
back to the eighteenth-century, or more specifically Hogarthian, precedents,
but he was also reacting to two contemporary stimuli, the propagandizing of the
supporters of the New Poor Law of 1834 and the popularity of fiction adulating
the careers and adventures of criminals (the so-called ‘New gate Novels’). His
attack on the effects of the workhouse system is confined to the novel’s
opening chapters, but its stark juxtapositions, and the very blackness of its
comedy, succeeded in damning workhouse abuses in the popular imagination, if
not in eliminating them from physical reality. The scene of Oliver Twist asking
for more, so graphically caught by Dickens’s illustrator, George Cruikshank,
rapidly became, and has remained, the most familiar incident in any English
novel. Oliver’s adventures in London, and the opposition of the insecurities of
criminal life to the comforts of bourgeois respectability, are again rendered
through a series of sharp contrasts of scene, mood, and narrative style, an
effect Dickens himself compared to ‘streaky bacon’. In Nicholas Nickleby,
which was serialized between April 1838 and October 1839, Dickens again took a
particular abuse as the focus of his story. The description of Do the boys Hall
exposes the exploitation of unwanted children in a bleak Yorkshire school, but
the novel also attacks a do-nothing and snobbish aristocracy, the creaking
inefficiency of Parliament, and the aggression of market capitalism. Nicholas
Nickleby
is
an untidy novel, rambling, excursive, and occasionally interpolated with short
stories which have no real
bearing
on the plot; its strengths lie essentially in its comedy and in its brilliantly
eccentric characters. Dickens’s Introduction in chapter 22 of the seedy
theatrical company run by Vincent Crummles allows him to express something of
his own fascination with the nature, the whims, and the mentality of Victorian
actors (a profession which he had once, very briefly, considered joining).
The
monthly parts of Nicholas Nickleby sold vastly well, firmly establishing
Dickens as the dominant novelist of his time and as an unrivalled literary
phenomenon. At a banquet to celebrate the completion of the book the painter
David Wilkie made a speech noting that there had been nothing comparable to him
since the days of Richardson for
‘in
both cases people talked about the characters as if they were next-door
neighbours or friends’. Letters, he claimed, had been written to the author
imploring him not to kill Smike, much as Richardson had been begged to ‘save Lovelace’s
soul alive’. Dickens relished, cultivated, and honoured the intimate
relationship with his readers opened up to him by monthly and occasionally
weekly, serialization. In his earlier fiction he readily responded to the
evident popularity of certain characters and he carefully attuned himself to
what his public demanded, in terms both of sentiment and of comic and stylistic
variety. He nevertheless appears to have retained certain restlessness about
the burgeoning nature of his career and as to the particular form his future
novels should take. The somewhat awkward origins of The Old Curiosity Shop,
first published in his anecdotal weekly magazine, Master Humphrey’s Clock,
in 1840, suggest something of this restlessness. The ‘Master Humphrey’ stories necessarily
diminished as the pressing demand for a full-length story increased, but
Dickens’s control over a narrative inexorably following Little Nell to her
rural death-bed rarely falters after the initial chapters. Little Nell’s
mortality, which so profoundly moved the first readers of the novel (including
the lachrymose former editor of the Edinburgh Review, Francis Jeffrey,
who had once damned Wordsworth’s ‘unlucky habit of debasing pathos with
vulgarity’), gives direction, and a certain solemnity, to an extraordinarily
diverse novel. Later readers have often, wrongly, balked at what has all too
often been assumed to be Dickens’s vulgar exploitation of sentimentality. Barnaby
Rudge, which succeeded The Old Curiosity Shop in the pages of Master
Humphrey’s Clock in 1841, is amongst Dickens's most neglected works. It is
a historical novel, set at the time of the Gordon Riots of 1780, which begins
somewhat slowly and archly by establishing the concerns, origins, and
obsessions of its characters; it comes vividly and distinctively to life once
these same characters get caught up in the violent progress of the Riots. Some
of its descriptive passages show a mastery of rhythm and image that he never
excelled. Both Martin Chuzzlewit (1843-4) and Dombey and Son (1846-8)
reveal the extent to which Dickens developed his mastery over the sprawling
serial forms he and his readers enjoyed. Martin Chuzzlewit examines a
wide range of selfishness, self-centredness, criminality, and exploitation, and
allows for the title character’s discovery that America contains as many shams,
frauds, and delusions as does his native England. It did not, initially, please
many American readers despite the real popularity Dickens discovered he had
earned during his trip to the United States in 1842. Dombey and Son has
an even greater degree of narrative tightness derived from thematic consistency
and its almost symphonic use of motifs, repeated phrases, and images. To those
readers who prefer Dickens’s darker, tidier, and less exuberant later fiction, Dombey
and Son has often been seen as ushering in a new phase in his art. The use
of semi-autobiographical material and the discipline imposed by the
introduction of a first-person narrator in its immediate successor, David
Copperfield (1849-50), suggest the extent to which he had moved away from
the laxer, digressive, inclusive forms of Pickwick or Nicholas
Nickleby. David Copperfield is central to Dickens’s career in more
than simply the chronological sense; its evocation of suffering derives
directly from the novelist’s acute awareness of his own boyhood reverses, but
its wit, its detailed observation, and its description of the slow
‘disciplining’ of the heart give it a confident vitality and a progressive optimism
which allow for the transmutation of tragedy. Although the novel examines a
series of relationships and marriages, happy and unhappy, its satire and its
treatment of social problems are marginal compared to those of the complex and
demanding Bleak House of 1852-3. Here the use of a double narrative, one
narrator employing the present, the other the past tense, helps create a sense
of unfolding mystery, even confusion. The confusion itself reflects that of the
main object of the novel’s satire, the convoluted workings of the Court of
Chancery, but the legal obliquity is in turn echoed and re-echoed in the words
and actions of a succession of purblind characters muddling their way through a
miry, fog-bound London. While private mysteries, lawsuits, and crimes are
solved, the underlying problems of dirt, disease, and urban decay remain
intractable. Dickens uniquely transferred his concern with the modern condition
of England out of London in his succinct and often bitter satire on the effects
of the Industrial Revolution in northern England, Hard Times (1854).
Private pasts, private secrets, illusions, and the corrupting power of
possession equally haunt his most sombre novel, Little Dorrit (1855-7).
It returns to the oppressive image, and the multiple ramifications, of a London
debtors’ prison, but it also has a broader European frame of reference. Two
very different prisons, Newgate and the Bastille, dominate the first two books
of A Tale of Two Cities (1859), set in London and Paris in the 1770s and
1780s. Its third section moves to revolutionary France and to the penal
consequences of the overturn of old oppressions and the introduction of new ones.
A Tale of Two Cities has Dickens’s most carefully constructed plot, and,
by means of its charged and very public historical setting, particularly
successfully dramatizes personal dilemmas, divisions, and commitments. The idea
of the divided self marks all Dickens’s late works. From 1858, when he began to
give the series of public readings from his novels which so mark his last
years, Dickens intensifies his ‘particular relation (personally affectionate
and like no other man’s)’ between himself and his public. He had always been a
talented and passionate amateur actor and it is likely that this new-found
professional role-playing on public platforms added to his existing fascination
with double lives and masks. Sydney Carton’s ‘dead life’ is answered by his
final self-sacrifice, but the careers of his male-successors are not always as
providentially blessed. Pip in Great Expectations (1860-1) is manipulated
and gentrified and left empty; John Harmon in Our Mutual Friend (1864-5)
is obliged to adopt the persona of a dead man; and, most disturbingly, the
probably murderous John Jasper in The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870)
agonizes over the chasm between his respectable life as a cathedral choirman
and his London-based opium addiction. Each of the three last novels differs
from the others, each suggesting a new experimentation on Dickens’s part. Great
Expectations again uses a confessional, first-person narrator, but Pip is
of a lower social class than David Copperfield and lacks his ebullience and
resilience and his final reward consists merely of a muted semi-fulfillment.
Too many readers, however, it remains the most completely satisfying and haunting
of Dickens’s works. Our Mutual Friend seems ungainly by
comparison. The London of the novel is dreary, dusty, and unredeemed and it is
only in the exploratory independence of the four central characters that any
future hope appears to rest. Nevertheless, it contains some of Dickens’s most
fluently inventive dialogue and some of his finest gestures towards the variety
of comedy which is properly called ‘black’ (notably in his picture of Mr
Venus’s shop). The unfinished The Mystery of Edwin Drood would almost
certainly have been a murder story, though the fragment which we have leaves
both the murder and the potential murderer unspecific. It has consistently
invited much speculation as to how Dickens would have proceeded with such a
tantalizing narrative. Perhaps fortunately, most attempts to provide solutions
have proved less than
satisfying. In some ways it is appropriate that Dickens’s last work should be
an unfinishable, obsessive, mystery story. He remained to the end ‘The
Inimitable’. Despite the specificity of his detailing and the acuteness of his
observation of the outward traits of character, Dickens cannot be properly
defined as a ‘realist’. He rarely speculates about the workings of his
characters’ minds and consciences, but he is perhaps the finest delineator in
English of mental aberration and he is the creator of a surprisingly varied
line of murderers, self-tormentors, and Gothic villains. Above all, Dickens
both recognized and exploited the relationship between character and
environment, moulding them into a singular but always recognizable fictional
world. Though he was neither born nor died in London, he made a protean,
physical London, the greatest city of the nineteenth century, the centre of his
work and its drab tangle of streets his major source of inspiration.