Rereading the Nineteenth Century: Studies in the Old Criticism from Austen to Lawrence

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Rereading the Nineteenth Century

10.1057/9780230106116 - Rereading the Nineteenth Century, Igor Webb

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Studies in the Old Criticism from Austen to Lawrence

Igor Webb

10.1057/9780230106116 - Rereading the Nineteenth Century, Igor Webb

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Rereading the Nineteenth Century

REREADING THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

Copyright © Igor Webb, 2010. First published in 2010 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN: 978–0–230–10027–5 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Webb, Igor. Rereading the nineteenth century : studies in the old criticism from Austen to Lawrence / Igor Webb. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978–0–230–10027–5 (alk. paper) 1. English fiction—19th century—History and criticism. 2. Authors and readers—Great Britain—History—19th century. 3. Literature and society—Great Britain—History—19th century. 4. Religion and literature—Great Britain—History—19th century. I. Title. II. Title: Rereading the 19th century. PR861.W43 2010 823ⴕ.809—dc22

2009031633

A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library. Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India. First edition: March 2010 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America.

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Acknowledgments Preliminary

vii 1

Reading Mary Barton: The Writer and the Reader

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2 Charles Dickens in America: The Writer and Reality

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3 Narrative and the Problem of Evil: The Writer and Mortality

107

Toward a Conclusion

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Notes

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References

179

Index

185

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Contents

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A version of chapter one appeared originally as “Reading Mary Barton” in Literary Imagination 7 (2005) and a version of chapter two appeared originally as “Charles Dickens in America: The Writer and Reality” in Dickens Studies Annual 30 (2009) copyright © 2008 AMS Press, Inc. All rights reserved. As well, a portion of chapter three appeared in The Common Review 8, no. 2 (2009), the quarterly magazine of the Great Books Foundation. I am grateful to the editors and to Oxford University Press, AMS Press, and the Great Books Foundation for permission to use this material. I am also grateful to W.W. Norton & Company for permission to quote from Steven Marcus, From Pickwick to Dombey (1985 [1965]) and the Princeton University Press for permission to quote from Paul W. Kahn, Out of Eden; Adam and Eve and the Problem of Evil (2007).

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Acknowledgments

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T

his is a book about narrative in the aftermath of the revolutions in theory and criticism of the last several decades. I have borrowed my subtitle from George Steiner’s fine study of fifty years ago, Tolstoy or Dostoevsky: An Essay in the Old Criticism.1 Steiner meant to reach back, in 1959, to an earlier (and in his view better) moment and to stand against what he saw as the dominant form of criticism in his day, the New Criticism. Steiner had a fairly specific critical approach in mind as the old criticism. What I mean by the old criticism, in contrast, is not so much an old-fashioned method or any very specific school from a time before time, though I will draw on Steiner’s distinctions in a moment. I mean rather the sort of thing that has persisted, alongside the revolutions in theory and criticism, among almost all those I have known who have had anything to do with literature, from teachers to editors to writers: which is a certain practice of reading, the kind of reading it seems impossible for anyone bitten by books not to engage in. This is close reading at heart but moves outward as the text demands and as reflection or imagination or learning or the occasion or the times or just idiosyncrasy directs. This is reading, too, that continues to believe in reading and to engage in reading as a meaningful activity in the sense of what a work means to me as I live my life. In this respect, insofar as the work of criticism—reading as discourse—is to convey and try to make sense of the experience of reading, it is the reading that, in my view, must lead to the contexts of what is being read, rather than the other way around. Over a quarter century ago, in an earlier book, 2 I quoted a passage from Leslie Stephen’s English Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century (1904)3 to evoke an approach to criticism sensitive both to the particular work and to its contexts: The literary history, as I conceive it [Stephen writes], is an account of one strand, so to speak, in a very complex tissue; it is connected with the intellectual and social development; it represents movements of thought which may sometimes check and be sometimes propitious to the existing

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forms of art; it is the utterance of a class which may represent, or fail to represent, the main national movement; it is affected more or less directly by all manner of religious, political, social, and economic changes; and it is dependent upon the occurrence of individual genius for which we cannot even profess to account. (18–19)

When I originally quoted this passage (1981) I wrote about it both with admiration and irritation. On the one hand, Stephen makes no fuss; indeed he is delightfully sensible about literature being part of a dynamic social complexity, a point of view that seemed so refreshing when set next to the current notions, in my graduate school classes, of literature as a kind of self-contained artifact, closed off from personality and social processes, a walled realm all its own; on the other hand, there is so much here, so many possibilities, that Stephen’s account doesn’t seem to add up to something resembling “method” and, worse, doesn’t seem capable of making sense of any given historical moment and how history and literature intersect. Although I thought at the time (and think now) that the Marxist model of structure and superstructure presents a terribly misleading picture, still the model had at least the appeal that it suggests how to think about “social development” or “national movement.” And I found that the early work of Raymond Williams offered a persuasive resolution to the dilemmas posed by Stephen’s study of the eighteenth century, that is, a way to read more broadly than the New Critics on the one hand and the “crude” Marxists on the other while at the same time registering the actual social realities, including the relations of power, of any given historical moment. Williams’s term “structure of feeling” seemed usefully to join the vital idea that, as he puts it, “if art is part of society, there is no solid whole, outside of it, to which . . . we concede priority”4 with an insistence that in each historical and cultural moment there is a distinct “organization” of the complex of social activities, of perceived reality—an organization that shapes feeling too.5 At the end of the 1960s, however, the new theorists of art were just beginning to stake their claims. As the apparatus and importance of theory has evolved, it has naturally shifted attention from engagement with the particular work of art, that is, in the instance of literature, from reading, to questions about the nature, place, or function of art, or to the relation of a work to its historical context, or to similar questions. This seems an inexorable and inescapable process. Moreover, because theorists have demonstrated that the idea of writing without preconceptions is as foolish as the idea of reading without preconceptions, Virginia

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Woolf ’s common reader—a figure for whom, in my view, the nineteenth-century writer always wrote—has fallen into disrepute, if not into the dustbin of history. In retrospect, Steiner’s unhappiness with the New Criticism can be read as applying just as readily to the theorists who have come after the New Critics. About the New Criticism Steiner said it was “brilliant” but also “quizzical, captious, immensely aware of its philosophical ancestry and complex instruments,” and remarked dryly that “it often comes to bury rather than praise” (6). In contrast “the old criticism,” for Steiner, is about “admiration” and “moral purpose” and “tends to believe that the ‘supreme poets of the world’ have been men impelled either to acquiescence or rebellion by the mystery of God” (6–7). Steiner’s distinction between the old criticism and the new, however, is just the first part of his case. The second part is an attack on realism, and particularly Flaubert (for it seems we all sometimes come to bury rather than praise). The link between the first and second parts of his case—which is why I bring it up—is religion. “In rejecting the mythical and the preternatural,” Steiner says, “the modern novel [he means mainly the nineteenth-century novel] has broken with the essential worldview of the epic and of tragedy. It had claimed for its own what we might call the kingdom of this world. It is the vast kingdom of human psychology perceived through reason and of human behavior in a social context” (29). The kingdom may be vast but Steiner wants to get us to notice instead the inevitable limit to the merely social against which, he argues, the modernists—Faulkner, Kafka, Mann, Lawrence (and also, obviously, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky)—rebelled. He closes his argument by quoting this sentence from D. H. Lawrence (writing on February 24, 1913 to Ernest Collings): “One has to be so terribly religious, to be an artist” (7). Steiner makes several points that are important for my purposes here. He identifies two objectionable qualities in the New Criticism: first, although he concedes that it is brilliant and learned, he dislikes that it overemphasizes philosophical questions. The point is not that philosophy or theory are irrelevant or that we can somehow opt out of the kind of thinking done by historians or philosophers and just, well, read. But rather—for Steiner then and for me now—it is a question of what should be primary when writing about literature, of what, as we now say, “to privilege.” The motives of theoretician and reader as each approaches narrative may overlap: but inevitably the theoretician looks at narrative as a general category whereas the reader takes up a particular narrative. In this particular narrative, the reader finds through the pleasures of

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reading a meaning for use in his or her life. One of the consequences of the overemphasis on theory has been a denial or simply willful neglect of meaningful surprise in a work. If we look at, say, a volume in the representative Bedford/St. Martin’s Case Studies in Criticism series, we find that each essay commenting on a text is explicitly labeled “ReaderResponse Criticism” or “Feminist Criticism,” or “Cultural Criticism.” This labeling has several powerful, and not altogether helpful, implications: first, that any reading of a text should be and can only be an activity conducted within the exclusive frame of a single critical method; second, that the method not only precedes but predetermines the text; and finally that the last things to expect from reading are fun or anything actually applicable to one’s life. But it is exactly fun and applicability that we go to literature for. The late Paul Ricoeur has persuasively analyzed the qualities of narrative that justify these motives for reading; namely, that the creative nature of both language and narrative always contains the possibility of something new, something new that we might take from the text into our own lives.6 Ricoeur’s many-faceted insistence on intersections—between historical and cosmic time, between the world of the text and the world of the reader, and so on—as constitutively human seems to me a comprehensively argued refutation of the cumbersome hand of theory in places such as the Bedford/St. Martin’s series. Ricoeur provides us with a kind of high-level philosophical reinvention of the common reader (although he does not explicitly allude to the common reader, Ricoeur does offer a reading of Mrs. Dalloway in volume two of Time and Narrative).7 Steiner’s second objection to the New Criticism is that its overemphasis on philosophical questions goes hand in hand with a lack of concern for the existential questions that, for him, typify great art and great (old) criticism. This has to do with meaning in literature. For Steiner literature is a profoundly serious means of somehow facing mortality. He distinguishes between the long tradition of art developed around a tragic view of life and the modern (meaning nineteenth-century) novel, with its emphatically social focus. He wants to show that the modernists, the writers of the early twentieth century, are once again driven to create by existential anxiety and see their pursuit as religious in the broad sense of the word. But Lawrence’s appeal to religion, like Steiner’s reference to God, are ways of talking that, today, have f led the critical scene. The sidelining of religion need not imply—although often enough it does—a neglect or disdain for the questions traditionally associated with religion. But it does present one of the most troubling obstacles in our interpretation of

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the past, in the case of nineteenth-century England, my subject here, a past that was religious in ways it seems today we can scarcely imagine. And the difference between religious cultural practices and assumptions today and in, say, 1842, is only one example of the distance we have traveled from that world to ours. How then can we today even approximate the reading experience of the first readers of Jane Austen or Charles Dickens? Despite the remarkable work of social historians following Edward Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class (1963), it seems increasingly difficult to imagine sympathetically the unprecedented conditions of life of the English nineteenth century; the upheaval of the new in nineteenthcentury experience, its unprecedentedness, is now too distant but also too well known for us easily to experience the surprise, delight, fear, and dismay of those living in that time; the issues, therefore, have become abstract; and we can too readily assume, about political and social problems in particular, that what we find to be right today would clearly have been perceived as right yesterday. And of course, as I have already said, the elephant in the room is religion. By now God has been dead for a very long time. Even today’s fundamentalists do not believe in the God who reigned before the scientific revolution, for no one who daily f licks a switch to turn on the light or who swallows a baby aspirin or f lies in a plane can view the world as people did in the great religious ages.8 Our habits of mind are those of a world at a great remove, moreover, from the religious mainstream of nineteenth-century life, a time when literacy went hand-in-hand with some sort of theological speculation, when every reader not only knew the Bible intimately but came at experience, or, to put it crudely, experienced experience, through the medium of the biblical world and its symbolic modes of knowing.9 Steiner is right to say that the realist novel emanates from and is about the kingdom of this world. But just as today religious belief—indeed, every belief—is held in the context of or in relation to science, so in the nineteenth century every belief was held in the context of or in relation to unprecedented change and Christian doctrine. The cultural position from which human experience was viewed in the nineteenth century has been turned on its head in our own. This being so, it is very hard actually to appreciate the experience of a writer or reader in the nineteenth century. It is just here that this book begins. I have been chiefly concerned with achieving a reading, in the twenty-first century, of works from the nineteenth. Among the main questions I ask are: How can we realize in our reading the tenuousness of the continuities but also the

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discontinuities between our time and the past? How can we appreciate the ways that meaning was made in a culture at a great remove from our own? I explore these questions and their implications, as the subtitles to my chapters indicate, first by discussing the relation of the writer to the reader; then by looking at what preoccupied nineteenth-century writers most, which is the relation of the writer and social reality; and finally by examining the most fundamental aspect of these questions but also the one least studied, that is, the existential question or, as I have put it, the relation of the writer and mortality. I begin by looking at a fairly well-documented instance of reading, the reading of Elizabeth Gaskell’s first novel, Mary Barton, published in England in 1848. Gaskell began writing the novel as a way to take her mind off the death of her young son from scarlet fever: it was to serve as a form of healing. And healing might be said to be the main theme of the novel, which takes up some of the most disorienting phenomena of its time, including the migration from country to city, with its confusing, painful mix of liberation from ignorance and grinding labor, and loss of nature and a long-known way of life; the inclusion of women in the urban labor market, with, again, its confusing mix of liberation— from male dominance, from strictly domestic pursuits—and danger in the form of an imprisoning rootlessness; and, of course the factory system with its physical hazards, ugliness, pollution, and especially its gross inequalities and profound antagonisms, even hatred, between owners and workers. Gaskell applies to these unprecedented social circumstances the Christian morality that is her compass: she aims to show how a Christian ethos can heal the divisions of her Manchester community. The combination of subject, intention—to show the workers as they are, and in their own voices—and message (Christian healing) makes the book arguably the most representative of nineteenth-century fictions. It was, in any case, the most famous novel of its time among the group associated with the debate over what Carlyle called “the Condition of England.” From the moment of its publication until today Mary Barton has aroused passionate argument among its readers, who have quarreled not only about the novel’s politics but about its sociological accuracy, its use of literary conventions, its depiction of women, and not least about its religious convictions. Mary Barton provides, in short, a particularly vivid case study in the practical and theoretical questions that have to do with reading the past. I use the record of the reading of Mary Barton as a useful path, as it were, through the thickets of reading theory and as a way to lay the ground for my own view of the nature, value, and purpose of reading, to justify and guide my rereading

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of the fiction I have chosen to discuss here. At the same time I use this record of reading to sort through the many critical disputes about the novel from the date of its publication until now, to offer, in short, a rereading of Mary Barton. After addressing the dilemmas facing a twenty-first-century reader qua reader in his or her approach to a nineteenth-century writer, I move on in my second chapter to discuss the most vexing problem for every nineteenth-century writer, which was how to depict the unprecedented social circumstances of the age. I have chosen to do so by reference to travel—because going to unknown places, a common enough experience in the twenty-first century, is at least an approximation of the nineteenth-century writer’s encounter with things unprecedented. Moreover, the traveler I aim to track is Charles Dickens, whose disastrous first journey to the United States (in early 1842) itself jolted Dickens as any especially unsettling experience abroad might jolt us. The books that come directly out of Dickens’s encounter with the midcentury United States—American Notes and Martin Chuzzlewit—offer a fascinating and illuminating glimpse of the writer in the process of grappling with unprecedented experience. Dickens came to the United States much the same way that American leftists traveled to Russia in the 1920s: he came to find the future. But Dickens hated the trip and was profoundly disenchanted by the United States. He was revolted by the vulgarity of American social democracy, and was forced to reconsider his progressive ideals and even his vocation. In his effort to translate his disenchantment into writing in American Notes and Martin Chuzzlewit, he opened the way for the great novels—including his own—of the second half of the century. In particular, Martin Chuzzlewit opens a new phase in Dickens’s career and can be seen as a kind of laboratory in which the paramount formal and thematic dilemmas confronting the major nineteenth-century novelists are defined and an initial effort to “solve” them is made. The third chapter of this book leans heavily on Paul W. Kahn’s remarkable Out of Eden: Adam and Eve and the Problem of Evil (2007)10 to reread the development of narrative in the nineteenth century in relation to religion. In a stunning and persuasive reading of Genesis, Kahn argues that the opposition found in Genesis is not between good and evil but love and evil. Adam’s dilemma—the human dilemma—centers on the choice imposed on us by death. In the face of death, according to Kahn, we can either commit ourselves to a reality that succors the self but that is however definitively outside the self, a commitment that accepts the limits of the human, and hence death, as in Adam’s love for

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Eve; or we can assert that we are meaning, that is, that there is nothing greater than the self, an opening to evil that, Kahn maintains, is the denial of one’s own death enacted by imposing death on another, as Cain does. In this way every human action contains the possibility of evil, and, as Kahn puts it provocatively, “Evil makes us human” (3). There are two ways in which Kahn’s interpretation of Genesis (but see chapter three for a fuller exposition of his thought) allows a reinterpretation of narrative in the nineteenth century. First, it allows a symbolic reading of realism, and by this means a sympathetic engagement for the nonreligious twenty-first-century reader with the religious experience and intellectual habits of the nineteenth-century writer. Second, by demonstrating the bond as well as the opposition of love and evil, it sets the romantic trope at the very core of the nineteenth-century novel in a new light. I show this to be so through a discussion of Pride and Prejudice and Frankenstein, and bring the chapter to close with an account of Lady Chatterley’s Lover as the last nineteenth-century novel. *** In the late 1970s I was guiding a group of students through the streets of the City of London, following one of Moll Flanders’s escape routes (we were studying the novel), when, rounding a corner, we came upon St. Paul’s. I remarked on how impressively St. Paul’s still loomed over its surroundings, and how much more impressive the cathedral would have seemed in Moll’s day. Included in the group were two professors of English from Beijing University (part of a small program I ran at the time). One, pointing to St. Paul’s, asked, “And what is it used for today?” It emerged that the Chinese—things have obviously changed dramatically since then!—knew English as a kind of lexicon without depth or context. They understood what the words referred to, but not, as it were, what they meant. They had a reasonable knowledge of our language but knew precious little about our world. Looked at from the vantage point of a twentieth-century Communist culture, St. Paul’s was no more than a relic of the past, that childish old time when people worshipped an absent deity: it was inconceivable to them—and it never entered their minds—that the structure could still be serving as a place of worship. We are I believe in something of the same situation in the early twenty-first century with respect to the nineteenth-century novel as the professors from Beijing University were to St. Paul’s. The words used in

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the novels are, for the most part, our words too, and we assume we understand what they mean. The experiences narrated in the novels are familiar too, and we assume we understand them. But whereas, for the generation of readers, and critics, born in the late nineteenth century,11 the words, the ideas, the experiences found in nineteenth-century writing remained aspects of their own world of meaning, and these were felt as immediate, urgent, part of a life known almost intuitively, none of this is true of us today. The continuities and discontinuities between our world and the world of nineteenth-century writers and readers are, as I have said, tenuous and indeed elusive. It is my main purpose here, bearing these difficulties in mind, to find new routes of entry to some of the major nineteenth-century novels.

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Preliminary

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Reading Mary Barton: The Writer and the Reader

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f we set aside the roll-call of readings no one would want to do without, then the record of readers’ encounters with literary work from the past, the everyday record, as it were, seems mainly a curious mix of complacency and misreading. The complacency is essential to the whole enterprise of reading and has to do with our comfortable, routine, and heedless assumption that we can read something from the past without undue trouble. If we didn’t make this assumption much of the time then surely a lot less reading would get done. But still, our utilitarian complacency goes to the heart of one of the cardinal questions about reading the past: How confident can we be, as readers, about our understanding of any given moment before our time? In this way complacency can easily lead to misreading—as, for example, in the case of Thomas Bowdler and his Family Shakespeare. Bowdler’s misreading arises from his conviction that he can provide his time with a better Shakespeare than, well, Shakespeare. Bowdler’s success suggests that maybe he was more right than we’re willing to allow today— and anyhow wasn’t Bowdler doing what we all do, that is, offering a reading of a particular text? Bowdler’s case nevertheless leads to a second cardinal question about reading the past: How confident can we be that our understanding of a work is any more than an imposition on the past of our own preferences, prejudices, or ideologies? I propose to approach these questions by looking at a fairly welldocumented instance of reading, the reading of Elizabeth Gaskell’s first novel, Mary Barton, published in England in 1848. Mary Barton was the most famous novel of its time among the group associated with the debate over what Carlyle called “the Condition of England,” and of this group it is the one that has best sustained its reputation.1 And although the waning of general interest in the industrial novels may be explained

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CHAPTER ONE

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by arguing that we have entered a new era beyond the conditions and considerations of urban industrial life and politics, for those who have written about Mary Barton the issues, attitudes, and responses of the Condition of England debate have always been felt as pressing, urgent, and central. Moreover, Gaskell presents the industrial issues in new ways—for example, in the actual language of the workers—and as one part of a broad and intimately connected set of vital developments, such as the migration from country to city and the introduction of women into the labor force. And she is especially concerned to show how the deep divisions and confusions caused by these profoundly disorienting changes can be healed by her magnanimous rendering of Christian fellow-feeling. For these reasons Mary Barton can well serve as the representative nineteenth-century fiction. Of course it does not hurt that from the date of its publication to now it has roused conf licting passions, especially political passions, in its readers. “Mrs. Gaskell,” says the novelist Lettice Cooper, for example, in the final paragraph of her 1947 introduction to Mary Barton, wrote of the first skirmish in a battle still undecided. There are no starving children to-day in Manchester. . . . [But] the issue, how to live together as happy human beings in a world conditioned by the machine, is still the predominant issue of the time, even more so than it was when Mrs. Gaskell wrote Mary Barton a hundred years ago. 2

This edition of the novel, published immediately after the Second World War as part of John Lehmann’s “Chiltern Library,” probably is the first sign of the rise of interest in the book after a half century when it was little read and not much admired.3 (Gaskell’s work, like many things Victorian, doubtless suffered from Bloomsbury’s mordant ridicule. It is a nice irony that one early sign of the rise of the book’s reputation should be a publication by the Woolfs’s protégé John Lehmann.) In any event the terms of the Condition of England debate clearly govern Cooper’s response and attraction to the novel: “the issue” is not abstract or literary but rather the “predominant issue” of Cooper’s own time. And the same holds true for more recent introductions to the novel, notably in the 1996 Penguin edition: Mary Barton [writes the book’s editor, Macdonald Daly] is one of the most militant pieces of fiction to come out of the nineteenth century. In it Gaskell embarks on a mission to persuade her readers to steer clear of the siren voices of socialism and atheism; to resign themselves

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to the capitalist order which the former threatens, and to embrace the consolatory Christianity which the latter rejects. These were ambitious ideological aims. They still are. Present-day liberalism seeks to persuade us that capitalism is the ultimate stage of economic development; much contemporary conservatism relies on Christianity as an ideological buttress. The durability of Gaskell’s novel may be a sign that it is still considered a potential means of fostering liberal/conservative consciousness.4

As this irritated critique demonstrates, readers of Mary Barton continue to see it as a book with a special charge—a book that remains a kind of weapon or key document in the class wars, the cultural wars, and the political wars. In a sharper manner than usual, then, Mary Barton raises the question of how to read the past. I propose to approach this question both by exploring the record of the reading of the novel, and by looking at some of what people have been theorizing about reading—in the hope that such an exploration can help sort out a few of the outstanding disputes about the novel; and in the hope too that a discussion of the novel along these lines can in turn say something about the nature of reading, and in particular the reading of nineteenth-century fiction. My account of the reading of the novel draws especially on the introductions and commentary in popular editions of the book—Penguin, Everyman—in the half century since the Second World War, between, that is, Lettice Cooper’s edition and Macdonald Daly’s.5 I draw on these editions because they provide a particularly clear account of the response of readers to the novel over the last half century. And I look mainly at the last half century because the most interesting, and numerous, readings of Mary Barton, after the f lurry of initial responses at the time of its publication, begin to appear after the Second World War, with more and more appearing as one approaches the twenty-first century. These are the years too of the rise of new approaches to the theory and practice of reading literature, approaches that naturally have inf luenced the reading of Mary Barton. The first contested question about Mary Barton was whether it told the truth. “The great beauty of this ‘Tale of Manchester Life,’ ” wrote the anonymous reviewer in the Unitarian weekly Inquirer (November 11, 1848), “consists in its self-evident truthfulness.”6 “We might praise the ‘talent’ of the book,” said the Christian Socialist Charles Kingsley in Fraser’s (April 1849); “we might, and justly, attribute to it higher artistic excellency, than we have done even to the novel we last mentioned

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[Anne Bronte’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall ]; but the matter put the manner out of sight. The facts—the facts are all in all; for they are facts” (Easson 153). By “the facts” Kingsley means the “miseries” (his word) suffered by working people in Manchester in the 1840s. No one today will be puzzled about what Kingsley is referring to—the “facts” are by now so well known that this, the outstanding feature of Mary Barton for its time, is simply inaccessible to readers in our time. Kathleen Tillotson, in her remarkable Novels of the Eighteen-Forties, says of Mary Barton that “the factual detail was what really shocked the novel readers of the 1840s.” 7 This apparently mundane observation makes, I think, an exceptionally important point. The power of Mary Barton in 1848, the paramount feature of the book, was its shocking detail. More than any other work of literature, perhaps more than any other piece of writing in English, Mary Barton made known the condition of the mid-nineteenth-century working class. Readers of the time were shocked for any number of reasons—because they did not know, for example, or wished not to know; because the distance between rich and poor was so vast that the usual routines of life made it extremely unlikely that they would know (no radio, no television, no pictures in the papers) or would know in any depth; because fiction painted a graphic and personalized portrait that the well-off could not under any other circumstances easily have seen; because the piety of the Christian writer and the Christian audience made the novel’s facts, once set in the light of day, shameful. But, in any event, no reader of the novel in the beginning of the twenty-first century could say that these details any longer had any shock value. In other words, the record of the reading of Mary Barton shows that an essential, in fact the essential, feature of the reading of the book by its original readers was shock; and it also shows that at some point after that initial reading, certainly by the middle of the twentieth century, no one was any longer shocked. The experience of shock had become impossible—and therefore the very thing that had made Mary Barton so important in its own day, so powerful, and so widely read, is the very thing no twentieth- or twentyfirst-century reader could get from the book. This seems to me to be a humbling, chastening, and puzzling literary fact. It suggests that certain things about a work from the past may be simply inaccessible at a later date. Mary Barton, after all, appeared in nineteenth-century England, and we have access to a great deal of information about that time and place. If it can be the case that certain critical aspects of the reading of a novel by its original readers may become wholly inaccessible to future readers, even readers who come to the work no more than, say, fifty years

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after its publication, then this suggests definitive limits to reading, no matter what view you take of the nature of reading or of literature. I want to postpone for the moment discussion of the implications of this observation and to raise a related, equally vexing point. Even if we acknowledge that we are not and indeed cannot any longer be shocked by the factual details of Mary Barton, don’t we still have hanging the teasing question of what makes a fact a fact for the reader? After all, Gaskell’s original readers did not rush out to the Manchester working-class districts to confirm her facts; reading sufficed to persuade them that what she portrayed was actually so. “Reading convinces us,” says Edgar Wright in his introduction to the 1987 Oxford World Classics edition of the novel, “that the author started from a thoroughly known reality that is neither exaggerated nor sentimentalized.” 8 Wright doesn’t feel the need to explain, but most readers of the novel share his response. Almost all the original readers of the novel—insofar as the recorded responses can be said to represent them—have this response. Something in the manner of the writing persuades readers, from 1848 to the present, that Gaskell’s facts are facts. What can this be? Well, simply put, it’s that she is experienced by the reader as telling the truth. The words of the reviewer for the Inquirer_appear over and over: “the beauty” of the book “consists in its self-evident truthfulness” (my italics). And yet the point remains that, however self-evident Gaskell’s truthfulness may be, the writing, and so the reading, can’t establish a fact as a fact; and no matter how much we trust Gaskell, trust also doesn’t make a fact a fact. Now I want to be clear, for the record, as it were, that I believe that the kinds of facts we are talking about in Mary Barton—the hunger of the unemployed families, or the utter destitution of the Davenports, for example—are objective, in the old, unregenerate sense of the term. But, to repeat, no matter how objective the facts, the novel as novel cannot prove them to be so. The Davenports are not real: they “exist” only in the fictional world of the novel. Had the Davenports and their circumstances been invented by Gaskell out of whole cloth, her readers might still have found—might still find—reading about them wrenching. But it was believing that the Davenports represent the conditions suffered by a great many actual human beings that shocked readers in the 1840s, and that has moved readers of Mary Barton ever since. And the writing persuades us because of its qualities of truthfulness, which can be analyzed by reference to the usual standards of rhetoric and evidence. In this way fact and interpretation mix together.

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The intersection of fact and interpretation is an uncomfortable intellectual, moral, and aesthetic aspect of things, but, maybe for that very reason, it is the sort of thing that has fascinated many writers and theorists. Joseph Conrad’s great, and characteristic, story “Typhoon,” for example, might be read as having taken this “intersection” as its subject. “The China seas,” Conrad writes, north and south are narrow seas. They are seas full of everyday, eloquent facts, such as islands, sand banks, reefs, swift and changeable currents— tangled facts that nevertheless speak to a seaman in clear and definite language. Their speech appealed to Captain MacWhirr’s sense of realities so forcibly that he had given up his stateroom below and practically lived all his days on the bridge of his ship, often having his meals sent up, and sleeping at night in the chart room.9

Conrad’s narrator here, speaking in that slightly baffled, slightly amazed as well as irritated tone of so many of his narrators, including of course Marlow, seems to have discovered already—this passage occurs early in the story—that pinning down a fact as a fact is a particularly exasperating thing to try to do. Everyday facts are eloquent, so the second sentence seems to say, insofar as you have the wherewithal to appreciate their eloquence. But then there is a coyness about suggesting that a sand bank or a current is a fact at all. And then it appears these facts are better described as “tangled,” which for a seaman is the very worst sort of muddle, the opposite of ship-shape. This tangle “nevertheless,” the narrator hastens to add, “speaks to a seaman in clear and definite language.” The seaman in question, MacWhirr, the seaman for whom this tangle is clear and definite, is portrayed as not particularly sharp or even alert but rather as unusually literal-minded, unimaginative, and dull—even, in the words of some in his command, stupid. But it is MacWhirr whose dull perception of tangled facts stirs in him, in the moment of crisis, a moral acuity sufficient to wrest a kind of grandeur from the unaccountable survival of his ship. So in “Typhoon” facts are a form of speech. This language or speech, though, depends for its clarity on the ability, as well as the sympathy, of the hearer. By themselves the facts are everyday and incommunicative. They have to be read by the right eyes or heard by the right ears. But for the person able to hear, this speech, under certain circumstances, can rouse the deepest self and prompt not only self-knowledge but even something akin to a state of grace, or what Joyce called epiphany. I don’t think it would be wrong to say that Conrad was talking both about how to read life and how to read literature.

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Especially good on the facts in Mary Barton is John Lucas’s essay, “Engels, Mrs. Gaskell, and Manchester.”10 “Do facts amount to the truth?” Lucas asks. “Is Engels’s picture of Manchester the full story? And is his experience of it finally adequate?” (38). Lucas is interested in change—how do we get from rural society and the world of the rural laborer to urban society and, what he is in particular concerned with in this essay, “working class consciousness”? For Lucas, The Condition of the Working Class in England and Mary Barton are key documents in this story. He admires, but is also unhappy with, Engels’s account. “The real problem facing us,” he writes, “is whether we believe Engels is in a position to know how to relate facts to experience, to make the sensitive interpretations and connections; in short, whether we can trust him to know what he’s talking about” (38). For the most part, Lucas observes, Gaskell and Engels see things the same way. Gaskell, he says, is “decisively at one with much of Engels’s account of Manchester,” including “Engels’s perception of the energy of hatred that has much to do with the creation of [working-class] consciousness” (45, 49). But Lucas identifies two damaging limitations in Engels’s ability to understand what he sees: first, his ignorance of “the various habits of life, of speech, of amusement” (38) that workers brought with them from their life in the countryside and transformed into their new urban way of life; and second, his assumption that the workshop floor provides the definitive perspective from which to grasp all features of the life and consciousness of Manchester workers. Gaskell “can present evidence of structures of experience, ways of living, adaptations and changes that are importantly present in the creation of working-class consciousness, though they are set quite apart from the shopf loor,” Lucas says (49). For these reasons Gaskell’s understanding “goes wider and deeper” than Engels’s (54) and for these reasons they come to altogether different conclusions: “Mrs. Gaskell doesn’t think that hatred and vengeance make the sum total of working-class consciousness. Engels does” (50). Lucas considers both Gaskell and Engels to be acute, reliable observers of Manchester working-class life. But just because something is there in front of you, as Conrad shows in “Typhoon,” does not mean you can actually see it: so, beyond the “facts” on which Gaskell and Engels agree, Lucas points to features of working-class life that Gaskell is extremely sensitive to but that Engels seems hardly to notice. Conversely, Gaskell seems to know little about what Engels knows best—the shopf loor. It seems likely that Gaskell is sensitive to the complex of attitudes, habits, observances in Manchester working-class life that can be traced back to the migration from the countryside because of her intense personal

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attachment to the countryside, her intimate knowledge of it, and her own migration from town to country and back. Her awareness of the depth of religious feeling in the Manchester working class has equally obvious roots. Lucas says Engels was not in a position to grasp these things—but it seems clear, too, that his political views required a certain interpretation of the facts of working-class life, just as Gaskell’s required a different one. Remarkably, Gaskell and Engels record the same Manchester—but only up to a point. That point marks the limits of Engels’s political imagination, on the one side, and, on the other, of Gaskell’s. Lucas, writing from the perspective of and with the benefit of the rich, by now voluminous literature devoted to recapturing every segment of the social history of the English worker, can say that Gaskell’s “facts” usefully and importantly extend, when they do not outright challenge, Engels’s rigorous but more one-dimensional account. If we are to understand the condition of the Manchester working class in the 1840s, says Lucas, we “need” Mary Barton (his word, 56). This reading of the difference between Gaskell and Engels depends of course on Lucas’s view of “working class consciousness,” and it is not the only view. The matter is seen exactly the other way around, for example, by Macdonald Daly. “In response, then, to the contemporary crisis which Marx and Engels were busily sketching,” he writes, “Gaskell proposes a return to religion, chivalry, sentiment” (xi). Gaskell’s lack of political program—aside, that is, from education, compassion, and mutual understanding—is, for Daly, contemptible. Her “educative impulses are those derided by Engels” (xi) (Daly makes no mention of nor in any way addresses Lucas’s views): For her, no dissolution of the class structure is imaginable, no abolition of the bourgeoisie as prophesied in The Communist Manifesto: she does not envisage a society without “masters and men.” . . . There is nothing, for Gaskell, to be done [sic] so far as the prevailing economic relations are concerned. These are not perceived to be the problem. . . . The revolution urged by Mary Barton is a revolution in the emotional and mental dispositions of individuals towards each other. As such, the novel is a thoroughly idealist enterprise. (xii)

Daly does not mean this kindly. The Condition of England, he implies, called for, cried out for political revolution. Gaskell consciously rejects this, for Daly the only true, politically appropriate response. In fact, he says, she rejects change altogether: “The question of literature’s relationship to concrete social change [writes Macdonald] is cunningly raised

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and yet avoided by fictional texts that take such change as their central theme, leaving their more exasperated readers paraphrasing Marx’s aphorism on philosophers before him: novelists only interpret the world; the point, however, is to change it” (vii). Refusing to call for change, Gaskell is a purveyor of “sophistry” (xviii), the author of a “calculatedly political novel, an historical intervention in the cause of counter-revolution” (xvii). Where Lucas is measured and subtle on the vexing question of what it takes to render facts as truth, Daly is anything but measured. It is not that Daly’s judgment—Gaskell does not see the need for change—is either, in my view, “wrong” or in any event somehow beyond the circle of plausible response. But rather I find myself drawing back warily from Daly’s willingness to say that, because Gaskell does not believe what Daly wishes her to, she is “sophistical.” At best this seems to me an enormous presumption—although not one limited to Daly, whose angry denunciation of Gaskell, while extreme, nonetheless represents a notable tendency in contemporary criticism. This is a kind of progressivist bent, for lack of a better word, the view that the history of interpretation, or of theories of reading, or of politics, or patriarchy has advanced in such a remarkable way that we today are far better readers of any given work than anyone could have been in an earlier time, including the author. This posture is justified—so it seems—by “our” knowing better, or knowing more, than was known at some earlier time. And in some respects of course we do know more. We know things about Gaskell that her readers in the 1840s did not know (her first readers did not know, e.g., that she was a woman: the book appeared anonymously). And we know “what happened” (and so, infuriatingly for Daly, we also know what might have happened, if only . . . ). Now clearly we can’t not know what we know and simply edit it out of the process of reading, say, Mary Barton. But how can we keep “who we are” out of our reading of a work from the past? Here I am going to turn for help to Jorge Luis Borges’s story “Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote.” Borges’s narrator, like Conrad’s— they have more in common than first meets the eye—is a stickler for facts; but where in Conrad’s case the effort is to bring out the eloquent absurdity of the everyday, in Borges’s it is to make extravagant absurdities mundane. In the tone, then, of persnickety pedantry we are told that the great ambition of Menard, a scholar and novelist, was to write Don Quixote. But “[a]ny insinuation that Menard dedicated his life to the writing of a contemporary Don Quixote is a calumny of his illustrious memory.”11 On the contrary, Menard “did not want to compose another

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Don Quixote—which would be easy—but the Don Quixote . . . he did not propose to copy it. His admirable ambition was to produce pages which would coincide—word for word and line for line—with those of Miguel de Cervantes” (48–49). Ok—but how? “The initial method he conceived was relatively simple: to know Spanish well, to re-embrace the Catholic faith . . . to forget European history between 1602 and 1918, and to be Miguel de Cervantes” (49). Menard rejects this procedure “as too easy. . . . To be, in some way, Cervantes and to arrive at Don Quixote seemed to him less arduous . . . than to continue being Pierre Menard and to arrive at Don Quixote through the experiences of Pierre Menard” (49). And this is what Menard does—even though this approach forces him to exclude, for example, “the autobiographical prologue of the second part of Don Quixote. To include this prologue would have meant creating another personage—Cervantes . . . ” (49). The result? “The text of Cervantes and that of Menard are verbally identical, but the second is almost infinitely richer” (52). At the close, Borges’s narrator gives us a gloss on the story: Menard (perhaps without wishing to) has enriched by means of a new technique, the hesitant and rudimentary art of reading: the technique is one of deliberate anachronism and erroneous attributions. This technique, with its infinite applications, urges us to run through the Odyssey as if it were written after the Aeneid, and to read Le jardin du Centaure by Madame Henri Bachelier as if it were by Madame Henri Bachelier. (54–55)

It turns out the story is not so much about writing as about reading a dead-pan, wildly ironic, pedantically playful, and of course, serious joke, of the kind that Laurence Sterne or Diderot might make, and so a joke with a lot of message. This is reading as an amazing activity, an act that reperforms, word for word, someone else’s already extant book. Amazing—but even so Menard’s ambition is realized daily by millions of people around the world, some of them performing the same sentences as Menard and Cervantes. For this is what we do when we read, this is what happens. But how is this done, what “procedure” do we follow? Menard first considers becoming Cervantes; he will simply repopulate his consciousness with Cervantes’s world. Many critical approaches, obviously, take this (new-)historicist tack, and to some extent it’s inescapable. You can pick up Don Quixote or Mary Barton and just “read it” but you won’t get too far without some knowledge of time and place. But how much? And what kind of knowledge? In any

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case Menard doesn’t take this route, although Borges leaves unexplored the question of whether any amount of knowledge of Cervantes’s time and place, and of Cervantes, could get you into the consciousness of Cervantes-the-author, the Cervantes who is in the text, as it were. Be that as it may, Menard chooses a more “arduous” route, the one however that we are all forced to follow, which is to be himself and as himself, through his experiences, to arrive at Don Quixote. The first consequence of this approach is that some things in the original have to be abandoned because they cannot be realized in the person of Pierre Menard rather than in the person of Miguel de Cervantes, just as some things in Mary Barton cannot be experienced by readers today and are, simply, as experiences, inaccessible. The final consequence of Menard’s procedure is a text verbally identical to the original but infinitely richer. How can Menard’s words, identical with Cervantes’s words, be infinitely richer? By virtue of time. Menard not only “knows” Cervantes but also the thoughts, the history, the philosophies, and so forth of the 300 years between Cervantes’s time and his own, and so his recreation is imbued with, or encrusted with, the accumulated experience of these 300 years. But finally Borges wants to kick free of time, or anyway his narrator attributes to Menard an enrichment of the “rudimentary art of reading” through a technique of “deliberate anachronism and erroneous attributions.” In other words, if we can arrive at Don Quixote through our own experiences, haven’t we dislodged the novel from its historical moorings, slipping it away into some nontime and nonspace that is neither Cervantes’s time nor our own (Borges facetiously compares Menard’s style and Cervantes’s, saying that Menard’s is “archaic” and “suffers from a certain affectation. Not so that of his precursor, who handles easily the ordinary Spanish of his time” [53])? And isn’t it in this nontime and nonplace that literature “lives,” or rather isn’t it the capacity of literature to be brought to life in the reader (and therefore both in- and out-of-time and in- and out-of-place) that makes reading reading? I need to prolong my detour for a little before returning to Mary Barton, because Borges’s story is strikingly echoed by a passage in Georges Poulet that has especially intrigued the theorist of reading Wolfgang Iser. In reading, Iser says, explicating Poulet, the reader becomes the subject that does the thinking [Menard thinks the words of Cervantes]. Thus there disappears the subject-object division that otherwise is a prerequisite for all knowledge and observation. . . . From the idea that in reading we must think the thoughts of someone else, Poulet draws the following conclusion: “Whatever I think

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Iser continues: The strange subject that thinks the strange thought in the reader indicates the potential presence of the author, whose ideas can be “internalized” by the reader: “Such is the characteristic condition of every work I summon back into existence by placing my consciousness at its disposal. I give it not only existence, but awareness of its existence.” This would mean that consciousness forms the point at which author and reader converge. . . . This process gives rise to a form of communication which, however, according to Poulet, is dependent on two conditions: the lifestory of the author must be shut out of the work and the individual disposition of the reader must be shut out of the act of reading. Only then can the thoughts of the author take place subjectively in the reader, who thinks what he is not. (292–293)

Iser amends this final formulation. Reading, for Iser, is not a becoming of someone we are not but rather a realization of both author and reader, a performance where reader and writer become reading: “Someone else’s thoughts can only take a form in our consciousness if, in the process, our unformulated faculty for deciphering those thoughts is brought into play—a faculty which, in the act of deciphering, also formulates itself ” (294). In The Act of Reading Iser distinguishes three ways of characterizing the “consciousness” or formulating faculty that reads: the real or intended reader, the ideal reader, and the implied reader. The first is the reader who picks up the novel at the time of publication, an actual person shaped by time and place. For Iser this reader is important, and in some ways inescapable—there is no reading of the work without knowing this reader—but far from the whole story: because “the question remains open as to why, generations later, a reader can still grasp the meaning (perhaps we should say a meaning) of the text, even though he cannot be the intended reader.”13 In answering this open question the intended reader matters but “can never represent more than one aspect of the reader’s role” (Act 33). The ideal reader is more or less the opposite of the intended reader, the latter a person delimited in every way and the former an idea with no limits. But for Iser this ideal reader is too chameleon-like a creature, liable to be turned to any use and,

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is part of my mental world. And yet here I am thinking a thought which manifestly belongs to another mental world, which is being thought in me just as though I did not exist. . . . Whenever I read, I mentally pronounce an I, and yet the I which I pronounce is not myself.”12

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in any event, being ideal, impossible: no actual reader can fill the role of the ideal reader. Instead of these two readers, though not situated somewhere in between, Iser proposes an implied reader—someone who can both pick up the “instructions” of the text and actively think them into being, or “actualize” them through a process that will include the reader’s own “dispositions” and a filling-in of the “gaps” that every text contains as work-space for the reader (Act 34–38). From the point of view of the implied reader a text is always liable to many interpretations, and this model therefore also implies a certain kind of discipline for the critic: “The interpreter’s task should be to elucidate the potential meanings of a text, and not to restrict himself to just one” (Act 22).14 Now, with these views of reading in mind, I want to return to the main disagreements about Mary Barton. The first of these involves the question of whether the novel is about John Barton or about his daughter Mary. The book was originally called John Barton but Gaskell later changed the title at the behest of her publishers. Some readers of the novel have argued that the book obviously takes as its subject the condition of the working class, meaning mainly what is implied by the situation of the workers as wage earners within the developing urban-industrial system. In this view the novel is about John Barton, a millworker and Chartist, and is a statement within the Condition of England debate. Other readers have argued that the stories of father and daughter are complementary. Mary is not a factory hand; for a time she works as a milliner and dressmaker, but the novel traces not so much her work life as her love life. In this second view, the novel’s subtitle (“A Tale of Manchester Life”) applies to the working class as a whole and not simply to men, and so both to father and daughter. It is the case that the novel divides almost literally in two. In the first half, especially in its early chapters, the novel has a distinct documentary bent, first recording the life of the workers in a moment of prosperity and then recording the disastrous consequences of the economic collapse of the 1840s. Raymond Williams, whose discussion of the novel is a landmark in its modern interpretation, greatly admires these chapters—they are “the most moving response in literature to the industrial suffering of the 1840s. The really impressive thing about the book is the intensity of the effort to record, in its own terms, the feel of everyday life in the working-class homes.”15 Although these chapters forefront the collapse of working-class conditions of life from prosperity to famine, they also follow the story of the Barton women—in particular of Esther, the fallen sister of Barton’s wife, whose infatuation with a man above her class ruins her; and of Mary, whom Barton does not

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want to become a factory girl, and who also harbors dreams of marrying a gentleman (“she had early determined that her beauty should make her a lady” [26]). Barton’s wife dies in childbirth in an early chapter, extinguishing the domesticity that, Gaskell says, might have served as succor for Barton in hard times and in the absence of which his anger, sympathetically observed—observed, as Williams says, in Barton’s own terms—draws him into the union and Chartist movements and finally leads him to commit a political murder. Immediately after the murder is committed, John Barton recedes into the background—disappears from view altogether for many chapters—and Mary comes to center stage. Williams argues that the murder—of Harry Carson, son of a prominent millowner and also Mary’s love interest—is not representative. Although a handful of masters were in fact killed or attacked in the 1840s these acts, says Williams, were exceptional. Unemployment, famine, union organization, the rejection of the Chartist petition by Parliament, the disparity between the conditions of the classes—these things, on the other hand, were representative. Although Gaskell “was under no obligation to write a representative novel,” Williams says, up to the point of the murder “the tone” of the book “is deliberately representative” (97). The diversion in the plot from John Barton to Mary is, says Williams, “characteristic of the structure of feeling within which [Gaskell] was working”; “she recoils from the violence of the murder to the extent of being unable even to enter it as the experience of the man conceived as her hero” (96–97). What then can explain the turning away from sympathy with the workers of the writer of “the most moving response in literature to the industrial suffering of the 1840s”? For Williams the answer is “the fear of violence which was widespread among the upper and middle classes at the time, and which penetrated, as an arresting and controlling factor, even into the deep imaginative sympathy of a Mrs. Gaskell” (97; Williams’s italics). Williams’s knowledge of the historical record (the basis for his thinking that the murder of a millowner is not representative) drives him to two different judgments; in both cases these judgments were arrived at because his historical knowledge confirms, or is confirmed by, his reading experience. Williams experiences the early chapters of the novel, for example, as an unusually scrupulous effort to depict working-class life in its own terms. Among the details he cites to illustrate this reading are “the carefully annotated reproduction of dialect, the carefully included details of food prices,” and other, similar factual details (94). Not only does Gaskell aim to see things from the point of view of the workers,

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but the care she takes to include these details draws Williams to the conclusion that she intends the book to be representative. Yet Harry Carson’s murder and the whole of Mary’s story, for Williams, violate this intention. They are unrepresentative in the sense that few actual murders occurred and in the sense that most details of Mary’s story reflect a tradition in fiction (melodrama) rather than the actual condition of life of working women in Manchester. Finally, Williams draws these strands of the novel into a meaningful pattern by reference to the “structure of feeling” in which Gaskell “was working.” The key feature of this “structure” for Williams, at least in his reading of Mary Barton, is fear of working-class violence. This being the case, Williams sees a rift in the novel. He argues that Gaskell falls back into the mentality characteristic of “the upper and middle classes of the time” rather than remaining true to the animating vision of the early chapters, the vision of working-class life depicted in its own terms that for Williams reveals Gaskell’s intention in writing the novel in the first place. Williams’s reading of the novel, then, invokes at least three kinds of knowledge: of historical details or facts; of literary conventions; and of “structure of feeling.” Insofar as I can tell from reading Culture and Society Williams gained this knowledge prior to and independent of his first encounter with Mary Barton. But for my purposes here the question is: Could you have gained this knowledge simply from your reading of Mary Barton, without recourse to anything outside it? In other words, does the novel—and does every novel?—provide the reader with enough guidance to grasp from what vantage point its details should be seen? What, in this case, should be our attitude toward melodrama? Finally, what worldview or complex of ideas and emotions leads the author to bring us along to this or that standpoint? The answer to these interconnected questions is that you can read Mary Barton cold, as it were, but your reading will inevitably be incomplete and you are likely to misread many things in the book. To read the book more successfully means going some way toward the intended reader and his or her knowledge and outlook. Let me use Wolfgang Iser as a foil once more; he has this to say about “the nineteenth century novel”: The nineteenth century novel achieves its artistic effect by sharpening its readers’ reactions so that they can discover the conditionality of their world and so be better able to deal with the mounting strain of the increasingly complex situations to which they are exposed. Reactions, of course, are actions—they cannot be represented, but have to be set off. And this is how the reader can produce the answer to problems which the

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novel poses but, if it is to be effective, must not explicitly solve. It also explains why readers of a later age may reconstruct the historic past and so comprehend the text, for they too are constrained by the blank spaces to react to the very same conf licting positions in the referential field of the viewpoint. Being subjected to and realizing these very operations enables the later reader to experience the historical situation which had to be matched by the reaction the text intended to arouse. (Act 206)

Iser says—if I understand him, which I am not altogether sure I dothat the nineteenth-century world, in its rapidly increasing and disorienting complexity, required a citizenry aware of change so as to be able to adapt to change. The general program of the nineteenth-century novel, then, as a kind of group entity—according to Iser—is to set the movable present against the fixed “disposition” of the reader, stimulating the reader’s “range of reactions” (206). The novels achieve this goal through the “negativity” of literature, its inherent incompleteness, so that readers are always obliged to fill the “gaps” in a work through their own self-formulation (206). Iser therefore explains, if you accept this generalizing account, how you can understand a work from the past by saying that the work recreates in you the experience, the range of reactions of the real or intended reader—or does so, anyway, insofar as you “reconstruct the historic past.”16 For Raymond Williams the question of whether Mary Barton intends to be representative is raised by its “tone.” It is not quite the case, in other words, that he knew something and then found it affirmed or contradicted by the novel, but rather that this feature of the novel’s voice, of its rhetoric, created certain reactions in him and raised certain kinds of expectations. As it happens, these expectations—of being representative—are satisfied, in some aspects of the book, in ways that are liable to easy verification. Barton’s dialect, for example, can be checked for accuracy against reasonably accessible sources. The contingent nature of speech, in a society as finely shaded and as speech conscious as Victorian England, is a powerful fact—and is experienced as an aesthetic negativity as much by the modern reader, perhaps more, as by Gaskell’s contemporaries. In short, in the matter of dialect, the reading of Mary Barton—for Williams too is representative in this case— conforms to Iser’s general account. However, when we come to Williams’s analysis of Harry Carson’s murder, things are not as clear. Williams is right to say that Carson’s murder is not representative, as he uses the word. But it does not follow that because few historical murders occurred—and because the thrust

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of union organizing was economic and political rather than revolutionary—a murder in fiction could not be rendered as representative. Gaskell shows in painful drama—in drama some have read as tragic— the growing hatred in John Barton. She shows us in dramatically persuasive ways why Barton is filled with hate and rage. It was during this time that his little son, the apple of his eye, the cynosure of all his strong power of love, fell ill of the scarlet fever. They dragged him through the crisis, but his life hung on a gossamer thread. Everything, the doctor said, depended on good nourishment, on generous living, to keep up the little fellow’s strength, in the prostration in which the fever had left him. Mocking words! when the commonest food in the house would not furnish one little meal. Barton tried credit; but it was worn out at the little provision shops, which were now suffering in their turn. He thought it would be no sin to steal, and would have stolen; but he could not get the opportunity in the few days the child lingered. Hungry himself, almost to an animal pitch of ravenousness, but with the bodily pain swallowed up in anxiety for his little sinking lad, he stood at one of the shop windows where all edible luxuries are displayed; haunches of venison, Stilton cheeses, moulds of jelly—all appetising sights to the common passer-by. And out of this shop came [the wife of Barton’s master, whose factory had failed, throwing him out of work]. She crossed to her carriage, followed by the shopman loaded with purchases for a party. The door was quickly slammed to, and she drove away; and Barton returned home with a bitter spirit of wrath in his heart, to see his only boy a corpse! You can fancy, now, the hoards of vengeance in his heart against the employers. (25)

Gaskell goes on to qualify her apparent sympathy with Barton’s anger by saying there are always those around ready to fan these sentiments into dangerous f lames, but the passage stands with its accusation unanswered throughout the novel. This passage occurs early in the novel, moreover, in the early chapter containing the death of Barton’s wife. A couple of hundred pages later, the now even more embittered Barton, speaking at a pivotal union meeting, says, “It’s the masters as has wrought this woe; it’s the masters as should pay for it. Him as called me coward just now [for opposing violence against blacklegs], may try if I am one or not. Set me to serve out the masters, and see if there’s aught I’ll stick at” (190). The meeting ends with Barton drawing the marked lot. It may be that few actual murders occurred. But Gaskell paints Barton as a man of deep feeling who cannot stomach the injustice before

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him, with hoards of vengeance in his heart against the employers—and for good reason, the novel shows, for reasons the novel never refutes. Whatever else, it is symbolically right that Barton commits murder; his act is neither arbitrary nor unexpected. Gaskell has prepared us for the murder from the very start. The murder is the logical outcome, in feeling, in the signs of fiction, of Barton’s observation of his circumstances and those of his class, of his analysis of those circumstances (rendered sympathetically), of his character, and of his rage. Finally, Gaskell never condemns Barton as conventional justice would demand: he is not brought before the law; he is not executed. “Just as he is the first working-class hero of the Victorian novel,” writes Alan Shelston in his introduction to the 1996 Everyman edition of the novel (the first Everyman edition appeared in 1911), so is he the only hero in Victorian fiction to commit murder and die in his own bed. The retributive vengeance that Mr Carson seeks is a vengeance with which Gaskell’s readers might have been expected to identify, and it is a satisfaction that she denies both him and them. This is the real significance of John Barton’s role in Mary Barton.17

Shelston’s reading rests partly on the plot and partly on both the literary record and what Williams calls the structure of feeling. Why, then, don’t Williams and Shelston see eye to eye? The difference between them—a difference in reading, I would say, rather than in interpretation—illustrates the main divide in the reading of Mary Barton, a parting that has important implications, too, for theories of reading. Williams is extraordinarily vigilant about the extent to which Gaskell does or does not render Barton’s situation in his own terms. He means by this in the terms that, insofar as he can see from the historical record, her characters would have presented themselves. He observes in Gaskell’s portrait an intention that is not realized, that is in fact betrayed, and this rift between the plot as it ought to have been and the plot as it is becomes Williams’s reading. But Williams is not similarly scrupulous about whether he is reading Gaskell in her own terms. His understanding of the structure of feeling so dominates his reading that he neglects or misses obvious features of the novel. Shelston, in contrast, reacts to the plot as it is—Barton is not punished—and compares this outcome to what happens in other Victorian novels, and on this basis deduces an effect. Partly the difference between Williams and Shelston, then, is a matter of sympathy, of reading the book in its own terms. But what can this

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mean, exactly, “in its own terms”? Let’s take the details of the plot, for instance. They are not—between Williams and Shelston—in dispute: but they sit incommunicative on the page. They are, for every reader, there. But how are they to be understood? Is this a question of reconstructing history? Or reconstructing literary history (melodrama)? Or is this about how to read, in the sense of catching the author’s drift? Or all of the above? Shelston’s reading seems more suited to Iser’s view of the nineteenth-century novel. If we follow Iser, we can say that the violation of the expectation of punishment, in particular for the intended reader, is precisely the sort of effect endemic to the nineteenth-century novel. Williams, on the other hand, observes in the novel features of the “structure of feeling” of the dominant classes of the time. The differences between Williams and Shelston, then, center on how to reconstruct the past for the purpose of reading. How do we answer the question: What did the Victorians think and feel? Broadly speaking, one answer—Shelston’s and sometimes Williams’s—sticks pretty closely to social or literary history, to the documents of the time taken more or less, or as much as possible, in the terms of the time. In this view, the intended reader is the most important reader and the process of reading at a later point in time seeks to heed the author’s effects in her own terms. Another view tries to fathom what Williams calls structure of feeling or incorporates the reading of the novel into a reconstruction of the structure of feeling. Now the reader looks farther afield, sometimes to surprising or unexpected places, asserting homologous relations among discourses. I am not sure what notion of a reader this approach may assume, but it is not fully entailed by Iser’s implied reader. In Williams’s analysis, for example, the context enlarges and the writing shrinks, suggesting an authoritativeness or definitiveness alien to Iser’s concept of the reader. More can be learned about what these differing approaches imply— they are not really mutually exclusive—by turning to another of the disputes about the novel, this one about Mary. Many readers of the novel, like Williams, read Mary’s story as pure melodrama. For these readers Mary’s story is subservient to, or even an escape from, the real subject of the book, which is contained in John Barton’s story. Other readers, as I have said, see Mary’s story as complementary to and equally important as her father’s. Some of these readers have argued that Gaskell consciously employs melodrama to expose its inadequacies as an account of women’s experience. “To read Mary’s story melodramatically,” says Susan Zlotnick, for example, “is to ignore Gaskell’s warnings about the distortions

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of melodrama.”18 Specifically, Zlotnick says that “Mary Barton focuses on the way melodrama misrepresents women’s lives by erasing their role within a political economy” (81). Zlotnick builds her reading on Catherine Gallagher’s The Industrial Reformation of English Fiction: Social Discourse and Narrative Form 1832–186719, a turning point in criticism of Gaskell and industrial fiction. Gallagher, drawing on Foucault and following the lead of Stephen Greenblatt, devotes considerable scholarship to support the argument that contradictions or ruptures within a variety of positions in the Condition of England debate are the origin of similar ruptures or contradictions in the industrial novels—and not formal failures or failures of vision. “The industrial novels,” Gallagher writes, “could hardly be expected to escape these deep contradictions that consistently marked both middle-class and working-class social criticism” (34). Gallagher explores the inf luence, for example, of Harriet Martineau’s brother James on Unitarian thought, moving the religion from an emphasis on “causality” to an emphasis on “conscience” (64ff.) She sees this division as mirrored in Gaskell’s alternating characterizations of John Barton, sometimes as a man incapable of moral choice, that is, a man molded by his destructive environment, and sometimes as a man responsible for his actions. Gallagher then goes on to argue that this paradox or tension in the characterization of Barton “forces” Gaskell to abandon it in the novel’s second half, where Barton must be portrayed as one-dimensional (75). Now however, Gallagher continues, the novel takes up one and another literary form in its search for an adequate vehicle for Mary’s quest, each form—melodrama, domestic tale—found to be more inadequate than the last. “Far from being melodramatic,” Gallagher says, “the last half of the book takes melodrama as its specific point of contrast” (77). Gallagher’s work, though full of fresh material and ideas, leaves me with a lot of nagging doubts both about her method and then about her reading of Gaskell. It may be, for example, that Unitarian thought was divided between stress on causality and on conscience. But then Christianity in general asserts the benevolence of God and the existence of evil, or the omnipotence of God and free will. Marx says our class position determines our consciousness, but also calls on philosophers to change the world. In other words, in emphasizing contradictions is Gallagher missing the point? Are these kinds of divisions especially notable because they are obscured but informative fissures in thought that reveal a hidden but fundamental truth, or are they normative of thought? Is there maybe an inevitable incommensurability in the ways people think about, or react to, complex issues, rather than a totalizing

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consistency? And in any case does it follow that the absence of consistency in one mode or realm necessarily implies anything in particular for another? What to do with these mixed signals when bringing them to bear on a reading of fiction may in fact require a broader appreciation of the evidence, in its own terms, as well as greater caution than Gallagher sometimes displays. Surely one of our main temptations is to think that our reading of what the historical record contains is naturally what contemporaries would also think. A second methodological problem in Gallagher is that there is no way to show conclusively that whatever Gaskell thought about James Martineau’s ideas, she, as author of Mary Barton, necessarily mirrored or departed from or ignored or misremembered his ideas. The maxim “Trust the tale not the teller” long ago warned that one had better shy clear of identifying the writer as tax payer and the writer as author-in-the-text. So that whereas it may be interesting to look at how Mary Barton does or does not mirror Unitarian thought, there is no way of showing that because Elizabeth Gaskell was the wife of a Unitarian minister or because Elizabeth Gaskell was knowledgeable about Unitarian thought any of this actually guided her narrative pen. 20 Anthony Appiah, writing about Stephen Greenblatt and Walter Benn Michaels—but his remarks apply equally to Gallagher—notes “a certain tendency” in historicist criticism toward what he calls “ ‘structural determinism’: to the view that, once an agent’s socio-cultural location is fixed, his or her capacities for and in agency are fixed also; and, more particularly, that we will understand the outcome of social process only as the consequence of social structure and not ‘merely’ as the result of individual acts.” 21 Williams’s view of Gaskell as “working within” a certain structure of feeling yields an important insight with respect to the rift in the plot between the first- and second halves of the novel. But then this very insight blinds Williams to obvious features of the novel, such as the carefully plotted weaving of Mary’s story with that of her father. Gaskell suggests that one cause of the death of Barton’s wife is her distress over the disappearance of her sister Esther. The analogy between Esther and Mary, moreover, is established in the early chapters of the book. So the loss that helps propel Barton to murder is the same loss that propels Mary to moral crisis. Similarly Gallagher reads necessities and strategies into the text on the basis of her understanding of (I think the rubric can be kept) structure of feeling—and, like Williams, is blinded to obvious features of the novel. She ignores, for example, what would have been hugely significant to Gaskell’s original readers—the fact that Mary for the most part

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doesn’t speak in dialect. One of Gaskell’s innovations in Mary Barton, or maybe it would be better to say one of her commitments to her working-class characters, is to render these usually obscured individuals as whole people by letting them speak in their own voices, meaning, in the first place, literally in the speech that is theirs. For Gaskell’s readers at the time and for her readers since—as Williams illustrates—this aspect of the novel is striking and drives home in the most tangible way the ambition of the novelist to make her readers see. But Mary speaks Standard English—even though she could not possibly have spoken Standard English as a Manchester working-class girl. Why then does Gaskell make an exception of Mary? Here is what Kathleen Tillotson thinks: It may be a concession to novel-convention that Mary alone of the working-class characters usually speaks ordinary English, not dialect; but it has its dangers. “Now I scorn you, sir, for plotting to ruin a poor girl” (Ch. xi) f lattens a climax of the narrative into a stage situation and is far removed from the Old Testament dignity of John Barton’s utterances. (213–214)

Tillotson offers the only plausible explanation for Mary’s speech, which is that since the intended readers of the novel are not the likes of Barton and his daughter but of Carson and his daughters, in order for Mary to be seen as sympathetic, and as indeed the inhabitant of a conventional fiction rather than of the radical one Gaskell intended and in part realized—for these reasons Mary needs to be read without the distancing obstacle of dialect. 22 But this choice makes it inconceivable that Gaskell also chose to employ the conventions of melodrama to unmask melodrama. Gaskell’s use of dialect, furthermore, is one with the narrative strategy of the first half of the novel, which is to render characters and events in their own terms—to offer, in short, a kind of heightened verisimilitude. But Mary’s story is told in exactly the opposite way. Where in Barton’s story we have an arguably representative realism, in Mary’s case we have an unrepresentative, distorting resort to hackneyed convention. Barton’s story is new and fresh; Mary’s is old and clichéd. Other portraits of women in the novel are not clichéd, and show, as in the case of Margaret or Alice, precisely what we are shown in the case of John Barton—a compelling account of a working-class individual in her own terms. Gallagher’s reading of the novel discovers effects that the original or intended readers of the book would have been extremely unlikely to

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have noticed, and for which we have no evidence in the record of contemporary responses; and Gallagher ignores features of the novel that its original readers would most have noticed. But does any of this matter? How much weight should we give to the potential interpretations of the intended reader? Isn’t Iser right, after all, when he says that although clearly the intended reader has to be taken into account, he can only represent one possible role for the reader of a work? I want to talk about these questions by looking at two final disputes in the reading of Mary Barton, one having to do with the role of religion in the novel, and the other with the adequacy of its ending. After Barton murders Harry Carson, Jem Wilson, Mary’s repulsed suitor and the son of Barton’s closest friend, is arrested for the crime. Mary, however, discovers that her father is the actual murderer, and manages through a hectic chase to find corroboration for Jem’s innocence, in the process also discovering that she loves and has always loved Jem. Once Jem is freed, Barton calls Jem to see him. At the appointed time, Jem and Mary find Barton at home—with Mr. Carson and a family friend, Job Legh. Barton has just confessed to the crime: ‘Don’t dare to think [Carson replies] that I shall be merciful, and spare you, because you have come forward to accuse yourself. I tell you I will not spare you the least pang the law can inf lict—you, who did not show pity on my boy, shall have none from me’ (363). Barton tells him his life has been agony since he committed the crime. Carson replies, ‘Have I had no suffering to blanch these hairs. . . . Who shall ever imagine the love I bore [my son]?’ (365) Barton is moved to comfort Carson but, as if it were a new thought, recalls he is the cause of Carson’s suffering and has “forfeited all right to bind up his brother’s wounds. Stunned by the thought, he sank upon the seat, almost crushed with the knowledge of the consequences of his own action. . . . ‘I did not know what I was doing, Job Legh; God knows I didn’t’ (366–367). Legh mutters “ ‘Forgive us our trespasses . . . ’ ” but Carson exits saying ‘Let my trespasses be unforgiven, so that I may have vengeance for my son’s murder’ (367). And yet Carson finds he cannot quite hate Barton as vengeance requires. He does not head for the police station but heads home, and once home he takes down from the shelf “the great, large handsome Bible, all grand and golden, with its leaves adhering together from the bookbinder’s press, so little had it been used” (369). He succumbs “to the narrative now afresh, with all the interest of a little child.” (370). Gaskell takes us back, in the next paragraph, to Barton, who tells us that he, ‘afore my child died o’ hunger,’ had also had his ‘Gospel days’ (371).

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In the morning Carson returns to the Barton home to find Barton dying. He props Barton in his arms and says, “ ‘God be merciful to us sinners.—Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive them that trespass against us.’ And when the words were said, John Barton lay a corpse in Mr. Carson’s arms. So ended the tragedy of a poor man’s life” (372). Wendy Craik, in her account of the novel, tries to reinforce what as readers in an irredeemably secular society we know to be true but find hard fully to credit, which is the permeating Christianity of Gaskell’s age. The book’s message, for Craik, is “ ‘Go and sin no more,’ ” which she says “means less to a modern reader than to contemporary ones” (25). Carson and Barton ought never to have left their Bibles to collect dust on a back shelf, this scene says clearly, but rather ought to have lived by the Book. This point, Craik wants to remind us, would have appeared persuasive and powerful to Gaskell’s intended readers. Gallagher, however, sees this ending as Gaskell’s final recourse to a conventional narrative form, wholly displacing the potential “tragic causality” of John Barton’s story: “Finally, however, salvation comes in this novel not through retelling John Barton’s story but through making it irrelevant. All John Barton’s and the narrator’s explanations are for naught; his story is redeemed through the intervention of another story that makes all talk of causality superf luous” (84). In contrast, for Alan Shelston “the real point” of Barton’s death scene “is that Barton, the murderer, is effectively reprieved and put on terms of equality with the millowner whose son he has murdered. The Christianity to which Gaskell appeals is not the institutional Christianity of the Victorian middle class but the truly radical Christianity that insists that the words of the New Testament be taken literally” (xxvi). Gallagher and Shelston’s readings can be taken as equally applicable to the novel—so long as we do not care what the ending “means.” Both readings open for the twenty-first-century reader a potential in the text. But I don’t think Gallagher’s reading would have made any sense to Gaskell’s intended audience, and I don’t think Gallagher’s reading takes Gaskell’s Christianity seriously. In this way Gallagher reveals one of the formidable obstacles that stand in the way of the twenty-firstcentury reader and a nineteenth-century text. Gallagher is intrigued by the relation between various emphases in Unitarian thought and Gaskell’s novel, but she cannot credit as relevant the most fundamental quality of Gaskell’s Christianity, which is that it is not theoretical or an intellectual construct but belief. Shelston, in contrast, once more aims to read the novel in its own terms, and frames its Christian message as if it were in fact something to live by, surely how Elizabeth Gaskell saw

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her Christianity. It’s not, obviously, that we can’t think of the Bible as a story—but if we do think of it as a story, we have at least to remember that for Gaskell and her readers it is a sacred story, the utterance of truth. If we forget what the Bible means to Gaskell, we no longer read her “in her own terms”—we now transform her novel from fiction to cultural artifact, often a fascinating transformation but nonetheless one that empties the novel of human agency: it can no longer tell us how we might live, or what to live for. Many readers experience Mary Barton as ending with John Barton’s death. The novel easily could have ended there. But that’s not in fact how it ends. Three chapters are yet to come—one providing Jem with the opportunity to emigrate to Canada; one bringing Job Legh, Jem, and Mr. Carson together for a final exchange about the relations of masters and men; and a conclusion, giving us a glimpse of the future. Gaskell wants to show us the impact of her Christian message on the relations of masters and men, and in this way to bring John Barton’s story to a close; and she wants to propel us into the future of the lives of the characters who have most engaged her so that their moral deserts, as it were, can be made palpable. In the event, the palliative that Gaskell proposes for the suffering of the workers is not very strong. In the penultimate chapter, Carson and Job Legh discuss the industrial situation. Legh responds to Carson’s orthodox laissez-faire views by saying: “I have lived long enough . . . to see that it is a part of His plan to send suffering to bring out a higher good; but surely it’s also a part of His plan that so much of the burden of suffering as can be should be lightened by those whom it is His pleasure to make happy, and content in their own circumstances.” (385)

As for Mary, Jem, and the others Gaskell places them in a cleared wilderness, a happy pastoral setting near Toronto where Mary tends to a comfortable home and to her son Johnnie, and eagerly reads the mail from England—mail which that day informs her that Margaret has regained her sight and will soon be coming out with Will and maybe Job to join her. So the book ends. From the vantage point of this actual ending, some of the readings of the novel seem hard to sustain. If Mary in any respect breaks out of stereotype, or if we accept the argument that she is portrayed stereotypically to warn us about the inadequacies of stereotype—then the book’s ending is, surely, baff ling. For Mary’s wholly stereotypical role at the novel’s end just cannot be read as intending, say, to unmask domestic

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tales without making the novel as a whole meaningless and ridiculous. We face the same dilemma in trying to find ulterior explanations for the fact that, in the end, Gaskell plucks her main characters out of Manchester and sets them down in the middle of nowhere. It seems inescapable that she sets them in the middle of nowhere because that’s the only place she can imagine them living happily ever after. Now it’s true that this is not the only Victorian novel to resolve a social struggle of one form or another by landing its main characters in the wilderness— there are Jane and Rochester in their Ferndean isolation, for example. Nor is this the only Victorian novel to transport its main characters to the colonies—as happens to Pip. In the latter case, though, Pip’s exile is completely in accord with Dickens’s plot, and beautifully limns Pip’s moral trajectory; and in the former, as in Mary Barton but for different reasons, the main characters cannot be imagined as living in society, and the best even an amazing fantasist like Charlotte Bronte can manage is to let them be happy in their woodland retreat. Raymond Williams says of Job Legh’s comments to Carson that they articulate the characteristic humanitarian conclusion, and it must certainly be respected. But it was not enough, we notice, for the persons with whom Mrs. Gaskell’s sympathies were engaged. Mary Barton, Jem Wilson, Mrs. Wilson, Margaret, Will, Job Legh . . . end the book far removed from the situation which she had set out to examine. All are going to Canada; there could be no more devastating conclusion. (98)

The conclusion is devastating because, for Williams, the ending shows that Gaskell did not have faith in her own nostrums, and, worse, could not imagine a future for her characters in Manchester. That’s how I read the novel too: There can be no future for the working class in the conditions she has depicted; her working-class characters, therefore, have to be transported to an unpopulated rural setting in one of the colonies. Other readers, however, have found Gaskell’s “humanitarian conclusion” more radical, and commanding, than Williams. “Elizabeth Gaskell’s contemporaries were in no doubt about the implications of her message,” writes Alan Shelston. “If we read Mary Barton in its own spirit, and in its own context, we shall not find it a novel of compromise” (xxvi). For Shelston the radical message of the novel, enacted in each aspect of the plot—which he sees as one plot, the stories of father and daughter interwoven from the start—is that worker and owner are equal. Gaskell’s great achievement, for Shelston, is her persuasive

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rendering of the lives of her working-class characters as fully of equal value, fully as worthy in human terms, as those of the owners, or of Gaskell’s readers. And, he says—and I think he’s right—this is what Gaskell’s original readers took from the book; this is what it clearly meant to them. One of the contemporary admirers of Mary Barton was Thomas Carlyle, who wrote an appreciative letter to the book’s publisher, intended for its (then still anonymous) author, and headed “Dear Madam (for I catch the treble of that fine melodious voice very well) . . . ”. 23 This being Carlyle, in addition to praise, he offers the novice writer some advice; but he says: “On the side of ‘veracity,’ or devout earnestness of mind, I find you are already strong” (73). This is an acute insight into the source of Gaskell’s persuasiveness, and stylistic character. What does it take to be true to the facts, or to convey the facts so they are seen to be true? It takes “devout earnestness of mind.” And it takes, I think, a sensitive receptiveness to this quality of mind to read Mary Barton. In the writing about Mary Barton, this sensitive receptiveness is particularly notable, I think, in the responses to the novel around the middle twentieth century, those by writers most of whom were born in the last years of the nineteenth or the early years of the twentieth centuries, such as Lettice Cooper (born 1897). In these responses one still hears the echoes—in diction, in values, in feeling—of the Condition of England debate. For these writers, the world of Mary Barton seems, in broad outlines, also their world, despite the passage of time. It’s not just that the issues are seen as still being alive, which would be one thing, but that the details themselves still seem alive, that these writers respond fully to Gaskell’s devout earnestness. For these writers there is a highly emotional drama conveyed by Gaskell’s details, and this drama is palpable in the most ordinary sentences these writers put on paper about the novel, that is, in sentences in no respect intended to be unusual. You find sentences of this kind everywhere, for example, in Kathleen Tillotson’s Novels of the Eighteen-Forties. Or here in, again, Lettice Cooper: After a bitter struggle the machine had displaced the hand, and changed a civilization. The boy born in the country shouldered his pack, climbed the stone wall into the lane, and walked into the town to the new factories, there to bring up his own children in unplanned streets and yards, in houses thrown together by the speculative builder to meet the new urban drift, and the rise in the birthrate which followed [Waterloo]. (v)

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Reading Mary Barton

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This account—in its overall analysis, its diction, its emotion, its assumed values—derives from the Condition of England debate, but recounts its picture of the past as a present-meaning civilizational portent. Carlyle, in launching the debate, cast it as being about civilization, that is, about a whole way of life. The triumph of the machine, in this view, introduced the dreadful hegemony of the mechanical over the natural, displacing an order aligned with the seasons and the capacities of the human body (the hand) with the cold, impersonal, nonhuman chaos of urban drift. For Lettice Cooper and Kathleen Tillotson—among many others, of course—the dilemma Gaskell confronts is a persistent human dilemma, not something buried back in history and done with. And so, for Tillotson, “not this or that feature of industrial society is being criticized, but its whole principle, excluding any human contact between masters and men; and the hope of betterment lies not in this or that reform, but in the persistence, against all odds, of humanheartedness” (212). In the last of the industrial novels, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Mellors answers Connie’s “ ‘But what do you believe in?’ ” by saying “ ‘I do believe in something. I believe in being warm-hearted.’ ” 24 Tillotson’s allusion to Lawrence suggests a continuity of engagement, a conviction, as Lettice Cooper says, that Gaskell “wrote of the first skirmish in a battle still undecided.” The readers of Mary Barton in our time divide broadly between those for whom the battle is ongoing—about the very nature of civilization, and therefore a matter of personal fate—and those for whom the battle is history and engaging insofar as it pertains to present battles, which may be related but which are nonetheless essentially different. It turns out, of course, that these two broad emphases can mix, or that any given reader may find, say, John Barton’s story history but Mary’s an urgent presence. My guess is that confronted with these differences and the different readings they create Wolfgang Iser would say there is no problem here: “The interpreter’s task should be to elucidate the potential meanings of a text, and not restrict himself to just one.” Now you can’t track the reading of Mary Barton without concluding that, whatever else and for whatever reasons, the novel enables many potential readings. And who is going to propose that a book can only be read one way, in fact, my way? And yet, mainly that’s what people do—and continue to do even after Derrida, Foucault, Stanley Fish, Iser, Lacan, and others. Why? Because the motives for reading literature have always been and continue to be pleasure and wisdom. Both motives arise, surely, from the universals of the human condition, such

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as death or time. I know that these too are subject, in various ways that have been brilliantly analyzed, to culture and power and so forth. But not always, never completely, and, more to the point, never completely for the individual. Whatever else may be true of my sense-making, the thing that matters for me is to make sense for myself. I want to know how to live, how to be. I cannot choose all the potential interpretations any more than I can choose potential lives. Even if I may do more than recognize many potential truths and actually take their potentiality to heart, I still want one to take me to my end. And because everything is at stake for me in this choice, I look on the person who can offer me pleasure and wisdom with wonder, gratitude, even reverence. The book, in this sense, is not a construction or a text but a surrogate—for . . . not so much an author or a writer as maybe a Bard. In order to receive pleasure and wisdom I have to know how to read this person’s signals and to be worthy. I don’t want to be misunderstood as saying that this is the only way to read. Clearly there are many other ways to regard the work of literature—but I think that the line of thinking I have outlined reasonably represents the thought process of the reader in all of us who corresponds to Virginia Woolf ’s “common reader.” This reader loves reading but is neither a scholar nor a theorist. And this reader, who reads for pleasure and wisdom, functions along the lines of Poulet or Menard, that is, as if he or she were free of time, as if the author has no life-story (but lives as Bard-in-the-text), as if he or she comes to a work also without any baggage, and as if it is irrelevant whether the Aeneid comes before or after the Odyssey. The books are piled on the bedside table willy-nilly. Of course I have to pull away, as we all do, from this false freedom— but not before insisting that there is no pleasure or wisdom in reading without this suspension of time and self, and that therefore no criticism or theory can be adequate unless it takes this fantastic and essential condition into account. Still, as Frank Kermode points out, to “be really free of time we should have, perhaps, to be totally unconscious, or in some other way indifferent to what we normally call real. . . . To see everything as out of mere succession is to behave like a man drugged or insane.” 25 There is no way, altogether, to mimic Pierre Menard— though as readers we can, I think, follow his “arduous” path, aiming as ourselves to write Don Quixote word for word and line by line, and not some other Quixote that we think Cervantes ought to have written, or that, with the illusory benefit of hindsight, we think we would have written had we been Cervantes. To reperform Don Quixote, or Mary Barton, word for word but as ourselves—that is the challenge.

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Reading Mary Barton

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Charles Dickens in America: The Writer and Reality

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n Hard Times Charles Dickens seems to parody the source of Elizabeth Gaskell’s authority in Mary Barton, the quality that made her book shocking and convincing at the time it was first published and that has sustained its reputation ever since—that is, Fact. The very thing that readers have most admired about Mary Barton, its “self-evident truthfulness,” Dickens seems to say is just not to be found in facts but in the heart and imagination. The contrast between the two books throws the very essence of what realism aims to capture—reality—into question, or into a basket crammed with metaphysical and aesthetic ambiguities so that what is real and how to convey that reality both emerge as radically puzzling.1 One might say that Gaskell and Dickens, writers who admired each other and saw each other as political allies, offer two divergent views of modernity. In Gaskell the factory system and all it implies stands for something remarkable, new, troubling, but of human scale, perhaps a system gone awry but certainly not beyond correction, not beyond the terms of a magnanimous Christianity. But usually in Dickens modernity, typically a feature of the brash, all-elbows new London, while embodied in vigorous human types, characters of enormous energy, individuality, and force, can easily seem something larger than life, more a force of nature than, as in Gaskell, something man-made. But both Gaskell’s Manchester and Dickens’s London, strange, unsettling, unhinging as they once may have been, are utterly familiar to us in the twenty-first century. The most formidable truth a nineteenth-century writer had to convey was that to step outside one’s door in any one of the cities in which the majority of the English population now lived was to enter a world without precedent, without any comforting or illuminating—and which would be more desirable?—frames

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CHAPTER TWO

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of reference, with curiously blurred points—sensory and otherwise—of orientation, without received forms of expression, relation, and communication to fall back on; a condition of life genuinely, powerfully, often menacingly unprecedented. In the twenty-first century we know this to be true but we are completely familiar with these unprecedented circumstances. We are inured to change: we can f ly and touch if not the stars at least the moon, we can assume multiple identities in cyberspace, we can have a facelift and a heart transplant. How then can the nineteenth-century writer’s encounter with things unprecedented be conveyed? And isn’t at least a twinge of dread essential to our reading of that encounter today, in the twenty-first century? I hope to suggest something of the experience of the nineteenthcentury writer in encountering and aiming to depict unprecedented circumstances by reference to travel. I have two main reasons for choosing this approach. In the first place, perhaps too obviously, in travelling to places unknown we find ourselves in something like an encounter with the unprecedented—except of course that travelling is not everyday, and is therefore expected to be odd and hoped to be exotic. Still, it can serve as a start, an approximation. Second, in the literary outcomes of Charles Dickens’s disastrous first trip to the United States, American Notes and (especially) Martin Chuzzlewit, we can observe in Dickens a complex, multifaceted reaction to places unknown in the urban and frontier United States of the antebellum years—a reaction that we can see, looking back on his career, as a moment of determining transition, a moment that reveals Dickens wrestling with how to write a fiction appropriate to his times. Wider Views Charles Dickens and his young wife Catherine first set foot on American soil at Boston on January 22, 1842. Dickens decided on the trip on the spur of the moment—no one seems quite to know why he chose to travel just then—but in a mood of highly anticipatory optimism. He had not long before published Barnaby Rudge (November 1841), his fifth major work of fiction since Sketches by Boz appeared in book form in 1836. At this career summit, having leapt from achievement to achievement, Dickens negotiated a kind of sabbatical with his publishers, Chapman and Hall. He needed a breather; he was not yet thirty years old. But then, instead of settling into rest, he decided suddenly, in the depth of winter, to travel to the United States. Moreover, to help pay for the trip, he committed himself to a book about his travels. It seems on reflection

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that, as a young man perhaps sensing the full extent of his powers, he needed not so much a rest, or even a change, as an external confirmation or better extension of his vision of life, some view from abroad that would show him what he could not find at home and that would serve him as an impetus for his next phase of work. He clearly expected to find that confirmation and impetus in the conditions of life of the United States. At first, and while he remained in Boston, Dickens seemed delighted by more or less everything he encountered. But already by the time he arrived in New York on February 12, five days after his thirtieth birthday, he was unsettled and disillusioned; and soon he wanted nothing better than to be back home. A journey that began with high hopes ended just this side of disaster. A number of critics have advanced the view that Dickens’s months in America ought to be understood as a period of determining transition in his career, a series of mainly disturbing experiences that were the making of the mature Dickens who first shows himself in Martin Chuzzlewit (1843–1844). 2 And indeed John Forster says in his biography that Dickens “returned from America with wider views . . . and with more maturity of mind.”3 What were these wider views? And what happened? Dickens’s experiences during his American journey can be divided into two broad categories, each, I believe, offering a window not only into the development of Dickens as a man and a writer but as much into the whole landscape of the nineteenth-century novel. The first category of experiences has to do with the new role of the writer in the new mass market for fiction. The second has to do with the problem of form in relation to the unprecedented social realities of nineteenth-century life. Under the first I would include Dickens’s bullheaded campaign in the United States for international copyright, his distaste for and collusion in his role as celebrity (he was literally mobbed everywhere he went), and his revulsion with American social democracy (the broader nineteenth-century ambivalence about democratic society, and each of its explosive implications, is conveniently encapsulated by Dickens’s American journey). These topics reveal the central motif governing Dickens’s visit, which might be called the disenchantment of unexamined premises. Dickens came to the United States expecting, like other English travelers, that he would glimpse the future but, of course, he assumed confidently that the future would conform nicely to expectations.4 The obdurate, offensive, unexpected, unsettling reality he encountered in America, the future as America seemed to foreshadow it, disenchanted him.

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Charles Dickens in America

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The second aspect of his travels has to do with Dickens’s effort to translate this disenchantment into writing. The vexing problem of how to convey the subjective nature of ostensibly objective experience, especially when that experience is literally unprecedented, may not have been new to Dickens but was given new force and even a suggestion of danger in his encounter with America. In this respect his American trip included most importantly an element of aesthetic revaluation. Dickens failed in his first effort to put his disenchantment into words, the halfhearted American Notes. But Martin Chuzzlewit opens a new phase in Dickens’s career and can be seen as a kind of laboratory in which the paramount formal and thematic dilemmas confronting the major nineteenth-century novelists are defined and an initial effort to “solve” them is made. Alexander Welsh argues persuasively that Dickens’s time in the United States is best understood as a “moratorium,” a term he borrows from Erik Erikson that is intended to define a kind pause for breath, usually early in the life of an active individual, a pause in which to ref lect and gather one’s resources, consider one’s options, and rediscover with new fervor one’s life mission.5 Dickens’s American visit clearly offered him a fresh perspective from which to reconsider the direction of his writing career or indeed whether he ought to abandon that career altogether and try something else. In this light, Martin Chuzzlewit, as the main literary outcome of Dickens’s visit, is a book that is as much about the efficacy of literature as it is a study of selfishness. The questions that loom over the book are fundamental questions about writing in the nineteenth century given a special edge by the perspective of travel. When reality seems to evade all preconceptions, how should or can a writer proceed? Can the writer hope to capture the reality that is “out there” (the facts) or is the reality of fiction necessarily a matter of form and invention (“how to relate the facts to experience,” in John Lucas’s words)? Is fiction necessarily a study in how to finesse the limitations of epistemology? Dickens seems to have entertained any number of answers to these questions. In Martin Chuzzlewit we find a curious mixture of assured, authoritative narration by a storyteller apparently standing on the absolutely solid ground of certainty and conviction—Dickens the satirist; a storyteller devoted to unity and coherence of composition; a storyteller who is persuaded that narrative is the surest route through the labyrinth of history; a storyteller committed above all to the orderliness and efficacy of literature, indeed of literature as a collective value in the form of a library.6 And we find a radically different storyteller, one who is apparently at a loss about where to stand; a storyteller able to mimic a vivid cast of theatrical

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voices, personas, and viewpoints but uncertain that any one vantage point can or should be controlling; an improviser extraordinaire; a storyteller for whom the observing or all-seeing eye of the narrator seems complicit in the unsavory and monolithic qualities of surveillance; a storyteller in the grip of a multifaceted crisis about authority. Thus, the novel seems less to resolve the questions it poses than to display a vivacious tableau of possible answers. In these ways, then, Dickens’s American journey is a kind of lens that brings into focus the wider experience of the writer in the Victorian period. The nineteenth-century writer confronted the dilemma every writer confronts—how to say something fresh and true—but under extreme conditions, that is, at a time when it really was the case that the world the writer was aiming to lasso into words was unprecedented in just about every respect.7 European developments were magnified in the United States or occurred on a scale that made them seem, to the European visitor, especially dramatic. America forced a new set of realities on Dickens and in response he thought anew about how to represent the unprecedented experience of life in England. Fortunately we have a very full record of Dickens’s visit, not least in Dickens’s own hand, first in his letters to friends in England, notably John Forster, 8 then in American Notes (1843), the travel book he composed about the visit a few months after his return to England; and last in Martin Chuzzlewit, the novel he wrote soon after his visit, a large chunk of which is set in the United States. In addition to Dickens’s own words, finally, there are the private and public accounts of many people who met him in the United States as well the comment on his visit in the newspapers. Dickens and William Cullen Bryant The most important and representative person Dickens met in the United States was William Cullen Bryant, who provides a perspective on Dickens’s experience from the American point of view. Bryant’s reputation has plummeted in the last half century, and he now requires something of an introduction. Maybe Bryant’s stature can best be suggested by saying that he is the George Washington of American letters.9 While in Florence in 1858 Nathaniel Hawthorne asks the expatriate American sculptor Hiram Powers, whom he has befriended, what, if he had a free hand, “would he do with Washington, the most decorous and respectable personage that ever went ceremoniously through the realities of life? Did anybody ever see Washington nude? It is inconceivable.

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He had no nakedness, but I imagine he was born with his clothes on, and his hair powdered, and made a stately bow on his first appearance in the world.”10 Hawthorne’s mixture of reverence and irreverence about Washington is repeated exactly in his judgment of Bryant, whom he meets in Florence at the Brownings’ in June 1858. “Mr. Bryant, as usual, was homely and plain of manner,” Hawthorne writes, “with an old-fashioned dignity, nevertheless, and a remarkable deference and gentleness of tone in addressing Mrs. Browning.” He calls him “so good a man, so cool, so calm, so bright” but not “eminently affectionate” because “of his not having sufficiently cultivated his emotional nature.” “His personal intercourse,” Hawthorne concludes, “does not stir one’s blood in the least” (IV, 71, 73). Emerson, similarly, found Bryant “gentlemanlike,” “good,” but “dull.”11 This good but dull man was the nation’s first great poet and, in today’s language, the greatest public intellectual of his day, the Washington of American letters. For half a century or more American schoolchildren memorized “Thanatopsis,” the main stanzas of which Bryant wrote when he was seventeen. It remains a striking poem to read today, notably contemporary in its elegant high-informal rhythms and diction, its stunning management of the relation between sentence and line, idea and detail, a contemplative poem on a par with Wordsworth’s great contemplative poems.12 (It says a great deal about the enormous distance we have traveled since the nineteenth century that a poem titled something as arcane as “Thanatopsis” and on the subject of “Thanatopsis” could once have been the poster child of the school canon.) But Bryant’s stature derived as much from his editorship of the New York Evening Post as from his poetry. Founded by Alexander Hamilton, the Post, in Bryant’s hands, became the nation’s leading serious newspaper. Bryant began working on the Post in 1827 and ran it until his death in 1878. No person other than Franklin had so dominated the press. Bryant entered New York journalism in its infancy13 and it was Bryant, more than any other figure, who led the press from infamy (Dickens was appalled by the vulgarity and sheer impudence of the American papers) to respectability to influence. At a time when Walt Whitman, as editor of the Brooklyn paper The Aurora, was calling the New York Irish “bog trotters” (Brown 273) and when Horace Greeley was waffling about slavery, Bryant steered a steady, lofty, unwavering course. He was the supreme artist of the newspaper editorial,14 and the first to use the editorial pages for various campaigns—the campaign for the abolition of slavery (in the early years of the century New York was an antiabolitionist town), for the preservation of the Union, for Central Park (it was Bryant who

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first proposed the creation of such a park in the city), for apartment houses, police uniforms, the zoo and, along with many other civic improvements, for a cause that Dickens imprudently espoused while in the United States—international copyright. Many of these ideas can be traced to another of Bryant’s important contributions to the culture, his travel writing. Although travel reports featured prominently in the New York press beginning with the 1840s, Bryant especially taught Americans about the world and how to appreciate it. His letters from abroad were one of the most popular sections of the Post. Bryant was born and raised in a frontier hamlet in Western Massachusetts but his letters show him to have had a calm confidence about the stature of American culture right from the start. He seems to have been born a Jacksonian Democrat but it’s clear in Bryant’s letters and writing that his political convictions sat easily next to his distinctly restrained New England temperament, his unf lappable personality, and his learning. Egalitarianism and high culture coexisted in him without any friction. Moreover, unlike many of his fellow journalists, Bryant was not defensive about the defects of American society or the paucity of great American writing. But he was a visceral democrat—class snobbery in England repulsed him15 —and more importantly he foresaw that American writers would soon enough outdo or anyway stand equal with their British counterparts. Consequently he argued for international copyright not only because of the obvious merits of the cause but because he understood that American writers would be more harmed by absence of international copyright protection than the British and Europeans. At the memorial in Bryant’s honor held on December 30, 1878, George William Curtis delivered an apt eulogy, saying that “Whoever saw Bryant saw America. Whoever talked with him felt the characteristic tone of American life” (Godwin II, 418–419). When Dickens arrived in New York he told Bryant that, aside from Washington Irving, he was the person in the United States he most wanted to see (Letters 58). The two men, and their wives too, saw a good deal of each other while Dickens was in New York, and they seem to have hit it off.16 On the surface, the two writers had much in common. They were both radical democrats (but after what he saw of democracy in the United States Dickens was never quite so radical or democratic again); they were both masters of the business side of letters and both kept control of the publication of most of their writing in their own hands, a practice that made both men wealthy;17 both were boys from the provinces who became great men in the two main English-speaking cities of the world; both came from modest family backgrounds well

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away from the centers of power, and both felt the need to settle again as renowned figures in the places of their upbringing; and they even had in common that both their fathers had spent time in debtor’s prison, though this was something neither man could have known about the other. These similarities however were eventually outweighed by their differences of temperament and intuitive outlook, and especially by the disgust that Dickens’s writing about America evoked in Bryant and indeed in Washington Irving and the Knickerbocker School in general. Bryant, although in his correspondence charming and amusing, was nonetheless a cool New England customer. He was parsimonious and exceptionally temperate in his appetites.18 He disliked show and never adopted the courtliness of manner usually synonymous with getting on in the great world. Dickens was a dramatic personality, fond of doing up his hair and wearing f lashy waistcoats and equally f lashy jewelry. His personal correspondence is not simply assured and big hearted, but adept at the large and small verbal gestures of sophisticated Society. In America he preferred men of quasi-aristocratic turns of mind and men-of-the-world who shared his passion for oysters. But all of this might have mattered less had he not written American Notes and the American sections of Martin Chuzzlewit. As it was, when Bryant traveled to England not long after Dickens’s return home he didn’t visit Dickens; and when Dickens at last came once more to the United States twenty-five years later Bryant did not bother to see him. But all that is to rush ahead. At the time of Dickens’s first entry to New York the two men immediately liked each other and seemed to see eye to eye on all the issues of the day, including those Dickens cared about most. Still, despite Dickens’s professed interest in meeting Bryant, he doesn’t seem to have read Bryant’s poems19 and it is safe to assume that what Dickens really wanted was the support of the Evening Post for U.S. approval of an International Copyright Agreement with Great Britain. Dickens and International Copyright International copyright was the most contentious issue of Dickens’s journey in the United States. It aroused the nastiest comments about him in the press, which in turn infuriated Dickens. The controversy revealed a conniving spirit among many of those who were entangled by it, not least Dickens. Although Dickens’s views were shared by the leading writers on both sides of the Atlantic it proved troublesome, to say nothing more, that he came to the United States with a fixed idea, did

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not bother to consider the differences between the United States and Britain in general or the differences between the book trade in the two nations in particular, and bothered even less to heed the objections people made to his own position. He was utterly persuaded that his point of view was not only correct but morally superior and he responded to objections by maligning those who would not see things his way. All of this casts an informative light on the impact of Dickens’s American journey on Dickens himself. But of wider interest than how Dickens handled the controversy is what the contention about international copyright revealed about the new conditions of work for writers in the nineteenth century. Dickens’s mention—the first time he raised the subject, it was almost casually (see Letters 59 n. 4)—of international copyright was of course hardly the first anyone in America had heard of it. The Federal Act of 1790, establishing copyright in the United States, explicitly excluded foreign books from copyright protection. The immediate consequence for the young republic was rapid growth of reading, although also intellectual domination by writers from the mother country. In the nineteenth century, the United States far more than Britain was the land of the general reader and the print runs for British books in the United States were often larger than the print runs for the same books in Britain. Ironically, copyright protection in Great Britain steadily restricted access to literature among the general population, and for a time sharply restricted readership as a consequence of the passage of the 1842 Copyright Act. 20 The results of copyright policy in the two nations were therefore diametrically opposed, and came out of opposed needs, traditions, and cultures. In the United States copyright laws served the democratic end of expanding the reading public and the economic end of expanding the printing and publishing industries; in Britain they caused the opposite. In the United States the absence of international copyright meant reading material was fairly cheap; in Britain copyright law tended to create monopoly and to raise prices. At the same time, however, the underlying movement toward a mass market forced British writers and publishers to reconsider the relation between literature and readers well before the same dilemmas faced American writers. The British literary culture was, obviously, far more developed in every way than the American. Whatever the impact of copyright laws on the size and nature of the reading public in Britain, there was no shortage of writers or, even more, of great journals. British writers, moreover, were fully aware of a world audience for their work. In the United States the situation was altogether different. When Bryant

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first came to New York in the 1820s he looked for work on a literary journal but he was forced to shift to a newspaper because of the difficulty of sustaining a literary journal at that time in New York. There were neither enough readers nor enough writers to keep a journal going. In the early years of the century, consequently, there simply weren’t any American publications to compare with the great British periodicals of the time (Brown 128–130). Far from being the economic hub of the world, or the center of an empire, the United States was a young nation building every aspect of its society. On the specific issue of international copyright, nonetheless, Harriet Martineau, a more ardent and ideologically committed democrat than Dickens, organized and circulated a petition in 1837, toward the end of her extended stay in the United States, favoring the cause of international copyright signed by fifty-six British authors (interestingly, Dickens was approached about the petition but did not sign it). The petition was sent to Bryant (Bryant and Martineau had become friends upon her arrival) and was introduced to the Senate by Henry Clay on February 2, 1837. But, among other things, the impact of the depression of 1837–1843 on the book trade killed the idea. 21 The impact of the depression on American publishing made the case for international copyright a lost cause in 1837 and even more so when Dickens raised the subject five years later. The depression spawned the “mammoth” papers, newspapers of enormous physical size that specialized in literary piracy, led by Brother Jonathan, which Park Benjamin launched in 1839, and the New World, which Benjamin came to edit. The New World was four-feet long and divided its pages into eleven columns! These cheap papers circulated across the nation and—unlike the established book publishers—thrived despite very narrow profit margins on the volume of their sales, fueled by complete runs of mainly British works of fiction and nonfiction. These ran both in the pages of the papers proper and in what they boasted of as “extras,” often complete books in themselves. The mammoths forced the book trade, wounded like most industries by the dreadful economic climate, to cut costs and otherwise to scramble to survive. In this respect international copyright was a direct threat to an industry struggling to keep af loat while rethinking its way of doing business. All of this is not to say that Dickens and other British writers had no grounds for complaint. Brother Jonathan carried Nicholas Nickleby in its early numbers, without any recompense to Dickens. In 1842 alone the New World printed twenty-one complete works as extras; in 1843 it produced thirty-six. To add insult to injury the New World ran Dickens’s American Notes almost

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immediately after it appeared in England, attracting 50,000 readers to the paper—and to Dickens not a penny (Barnes 11). 22 Dickens first raised the question of international copyright in a speech in Boston on February 1 and then in Hartford on February 8. After the latter the papers began to attack him for barging in where he did not belong, for venal motives, for violating the courtesies a guest owes his host, and so on. Dickens responded more or less in kind—albeit largely in private. “I’ll tell you what the two obstacles to the passing of an international copyright law with England, are,” he wrote to John Forster at the beginning of May; “firstly, the national love of ‘doing’ a man in any bargain or matter of business; secondly, national vanity” (Letters 231). He secretly organized an open letter from eminent British writers, many his friends, in support of a copyright agreement, 23 which he presented innocently to the American newspapers as unsolicited; and he also, through the good offices of Irving, secretly organized a complementary petition to Congress signed by twenty-four leading American writers, including, in addition to Irving, Bryant, W. A. Duer (the president of Columbia), a number of prominent editors, and Fitz-Greene Halleck (Houtchens 19–20). Dickens personally took the petition to Henry Clay, then at the very end of his years in the Senate. Many prominent Americans had begun to speak out for international copyright before Dickens’s visit, and spoke or wrote on its behalf during his visit. Bryant defended the idea in the Post, for example, on February 11 aiming to assuage the concern that international copyright might reduce the demand for paper. Cornelius Matthews, one of the editors of Arcturus, on the occasion of the literary dinner held in Dickens’s honor in New York on February 18, offered the toast: “An International Copyright—The only honest turnpike between the readers of two great nations” (Evening Post February 19). The American Copyright Club was formed in August 1843, with Bryant as its first president. But the United States did not sign a copyright agreement with Britain until 1891, for a variety of reasons already well elucidated in 1842 but that Dickens refused to heed. The first, and at the time of Dickens’s visit the most powerful, was, as I have outlined earlier, economic. In addition to the paper-makers, the printers and publishers fought an agreement, persuasively marshalling charts and statistics to show how many people would be thrown out of work and how much capital would be lost if a copyright agreement were signed. Quite simply, the printers, publishers, and paper-makers asked Congress to protect home industry at a time of poor trade. No argument on the side of copyright could outweigh this obvious practical counterargument. But the trade had

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other points to make too. The American publishers saw themselves as at a distinct disadvantage with respect to the British. Although Bryant and others argued that America was well on the way to producing sufficient talent to compete in the international market, the publishers worried that they would be thrown out of business by the burden of paying for what they now could have for free. There was a certain sense of necessary cultural protectionism too, fearing entry into the United States of a foreign literature that publishers could not adapt “to our wants, our institutions, and our state of society” (Houtchens 22). In the most detailed study of the failure of the campaign for international copyright at mid-century, James J. Barnes concludes that as “a young nation, the United States wanted the freedom to borrow literature as well as technology from any quarter of the globe” (ix). There was one more argument advanced, one that particularly angered Dickens. “Has Mr Dickens yet to learn,” the New World wrote on February 12, that to the very absence of such a law as he advocates, he is mainly indebted for his widespread popularity? To that class of his readers— dwellers in log cabins, in our back settlements—whose good opinion, he says, is dearer to him than gold, his name would hardly have been known had an international copy-right law been in existence.

The New World may have been advancing a cynically self-serving argument but on its face the argument is not only true, and not only states the case for the difference between the reading public in England and America, but finally exposes one of the most confusing circumstances governing the production of literature in the age of a mass audience, which is that the interests of writer and reader are at odds. Bryant, for example, would have liked best to have pursued a career as a poet—but of course there was no such career. No one could earn a living in the United States of his day, not to say raise a family, as a poet. He became a newspaper proprietor and editor. Bryant’s actual circumstances confirm (if confirmation were necessary) that the essential condition that makes it possible for a person in a market economy to become a professional writer is, naturally enough, pay for work. Ignoring for the moment the nature of publishing and distribution and the market, the obvious interest of the writer is to be paid as much as possible whereas the obvious desire of the reader is to pay as little as possible. If this sounds ridiculously simple-minded, something out of the imaginings of Adam Smith, think of the situation of a pop singer today and

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the confusion and acrimony caused by the ability of listeners simply to pirate songs onto their computers. So the argument of the New World, outrageous as it seemed to Dickens, was nonetheless valid: by printing huge runs of his work and selling them at extremely cheap prices the paper was indeed providing him with a mass audience he could not possibly have had otherwise. The interest of the reader is to have access to the greatest number of books or their equivalent at the lowest price, or if possible for no price at all. The more this situation obtains the larger the reading public and the stronger the literary culture. Again, the situation of music today persuasively illustrates the general point. Looked at strictly from the point of view of the reading public, the pirating of Dickens’s writing spread literature widely, encouraged literacy, and diffused not only knowledge but a whole world of values, including valuation of reading and of the book, across American society. For a young nation all of these results were good. It is also obviously the case that if Dickens had been paid nothing at all by his publishers in Great Britain he, like Bryant, would have had to seek another trade. American pirates evaded the truth that they were stealing Dickens’s labor by taking comfort in his considerable income at home; besides, their activities were not only legal but were in truth encouraged by American law. And American law protected and encouraged their literary piracy because American lawmakers judged the growth of reading (and the industries associated with it) to be a more urgent national interest than pay for Dickens. Having said that, it’s important to add that although Dickens did not, like Bryant, seek another trade, he did reinvent his trade: he became, insofar as possible, his own publisher. And in becoming his own publisher he aimed for a relation to his readers just like that of the New World. He aimed for huge print runs, for communication with a mass audience; he achieved huge sales by writing serially, so that people of modest means who could not afford the very high cost of a three-volume novel could afford the cost of a weekly or monthly serial. The cheap newsstand price of his magazines, finally, earned him a very handsome return because of the volume of sales. 24 In this respect as in so many others, international copyright forced upon Dickens a different, often unpleasant or alarming, perspective on practices and beliefs that, in the British context, he not only considered proper but that he took pride in vigorously promoting. Dickens thrived on the system of serial production, materially, of course, but even more as a writer. His enormous verbal energy, seemed, if anything, to feed on the pressure of writing for a deadline. The very mass audience that

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international copyright would have denied him in the United States, and that publication strictly in three-volume format would have denied him at home, Dickens avidly pursued through serial publication. He clearly relished his intimacy-at-a-distance with a mass readership. His reading tours later in his career show, I think, that from the start Dickens understood—and also craved—the absolutely essential new requirement of the mass reading public: that the writer as personality be as vivid, and present to the reader, as the writer’s work. Dickens courted the mass reading public as no writer had before him. But when he arrived in the United States Dickens suffered a kind of Frankenstein moment. As he was mobbed, touched, forced to shake hands for hours, as intrusive fans invaded his hotel rooms, he experienced the fame he created and courted—this figure he had concocted called “Boz”—as a monster; and more than once he must have asked: What have I done? Dickens and Celebrity I can do nothing that I want to do, go nowhere where I want to go, and see nothing that I want to see. If I turn into the street, I am followed by a multitude. If I stay at home, the house becomes, with callers, like a fair. . . . I go to a party in the evening, and am so inclosed and hemmed about by people, stand where I will, that I am exhausted for want of air. I dine out, and have to talk about everything, to everybody. I go to church for quiet, and there is a violent rush to the neighbourhood of the pew I sit in . . . I take my seat in a railroad car, and the very conductor won’t leave me alone. I get out at a station, and can’t drink a glass of water, without having a hundred people looking down my throat when I open my mouth to swallow. . . . I have no rest or peace, and am in a perpetual worry. Dickens to John Forster, February 24, 1842 (Letters 87)

Dickens’s visit to the United States was the most important visit by any foreigner in the first half of the nineteenth century. He was welcomed triumphantly to the New World as the champion of American values within the corrupt old heart of Great Britain. The mammoths had circulated his novels to a huge audience and made him greater than any king. To the Americans, he was a king but absent an aristocracy, a hero without a lineage, a lord without privilege, a prime minister without government. 25 His protagonists were not the great but the humble. He gave voice to the voiceless; his English was neither highfalutin nor packed with Latin quotations but vividly colloquial. He had single-handedly created an enormously entertaining circus in words that melded high

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and low, art and the populace. He had made his own way, like any American farmer, grocer, builder, or sailor. All this turned Dickens into a celebrity. The man himself, however, was horrified. He was horrified in the main because living as a celebrity was an unbearable, exhausting nuisance. Perhaps he felt something alarming too about the disappearance of his actual identity into that mobbed public figure. Indeed he became only a public figure—his privacy was severely curtailed, invaded, and all but obliterated (he was identified everywhere as “Boz”; the extravagant evening mounted for thousands in his honor in New York was called the “Boz Ball”). But no matter how one might sympathize with Dickens the man under these circumstances, Dickens the writer and Dickens the man of business vigorously, ingeniously, and successfully exploited the new conditions of literary production and in this way helped significantly to create the celebrity culture he found, when writ large in America, to be repulsive. Dickens was the greatest literary entertainer and the best literary man of business of his age. 26 Everything in his career led logically to celebrity status for the writer. In this respect too his American experience reflects a new reality, one from which there was to be no turning away. In Martin Chuzzlewit Dickens satirized the impudence and presumptuousness, the vulgarity of American celebrity culture. But as the master literary marketer, the supreme literary promoter and entertainer of the nineteenth century, he could not avoid the hard truth that the very methods essential to his enterprise—artistic and financial—were not only the same as but led directly to the very celebrity culture that horrified him in the United States. The emergence of celebrity culture in the nineteenth century— already in the early nineteenth century27—announced the triumph of urban, democratic society and of the public domain well before politics was fully transformed from its exclusively aristocratic basis, its male system of privilege, into a voting system based on all the people: rich and poor, male and female, free and ex-slave. The cultural revolution established new sources of authority and revealed a new relation to time, both of determining importance to literature. Aristocratic culture aspired to, and acted on the assumption of, a kind of timelessness. The estate was valued as the product of tradition, of the long view; the large trees had been planted long ago; the saplings would become great oaks when all those who planted them were dead. The hierarchy of the estate bound one and all in ascending and descending orders of affective kinship. National government was a private, inherited responsibility and culture—that is, principally art, literature, and music—an exclusive, and

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expensive, privilege available especially in the winter season when the landowner came to town. Culture was both a welcome adornment and at its best also an expression of the deepest goods of aristocratic life. By the time Dickens visited the United States, however, the end of aristocratic society was in sight. “The divine right of the masses,” wrote Gustav Le Bon in his seminal study of the crowd, “[was] about to replace the divine right of kings.” 28 The mass society produced by industrial capitalism, urbanism, technology, and commodities rendered hierarchies irrelevant and archaic. Severed from land and government, aristocratic society lost its authority to the public domain, at once something democratic, tolerant, inventive, and empowering—and amorphous, ephemeral, traditionless, and short-sighted (compare the quarterly profit report and planting an orchard for future generations). Government, the making of policy in private by the aristocracy, was not simply transformed politically but devalued, and the force of culture in its broadest terms came to have unprecedented impact on policy through the medium of the public domain. If the country estate is the site of aristocratic culture, the city is the site of the public domain. These developments are much easier to write down than they were—and to some extent than they still are—to live with. The loss of memory goes hand in hand with the loss of foresight. The fleeting nature of celebrity highlights the easy way the new culture would have with values: here today, gone tomorrow. The market in ideas that came into existence to bond civil society around acceptable, democratically arrived-at policies—that is, the public domain—at once elevated culture and degraded it, enfranchised the majority and gave it the power to tyrannize the minority. The devaluation of tradition in art was not only immensely liberating but it also inescapably launched a perpetual crisis of form and meaning, imposing terrible burdens on every artist always to invent and invent anew. The city was at once leveling, exhilarating, a sensuous delight, a boundless market in goods, people, and ideas, an infinite prospect—and alienating, isolating, a loud public space where people lived among strangers in dirty, noisy, cramped circumstances, a place where money was all and getting-done was the intimate of getting-on. The landed estate consciously fashioned a complete, coherent, purposeful way of life, well represented by Augustan verse. But prose made to sell in the market necessarily raised entertainment as the paramount value29 and relegated literary tradition to a very dusty corner, to be lit up or left dark as the writer chose. Although then as now it seemed impossible to conceive of art as incoherent and purposeless, the novel from the outset incorporated conflict and gave equal play to many competing voices within its two covers. At the very least just what total

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social vision, if any, should replace, in society and in art, the vision represented by the estate was not at all obvious. In all these respects Dickens as celebrity represented the rise of a mass society he both championed and dreaded, one that he dreaded especially once he saw where things were going in America.30 The movie star Esther Williams, having absorbed a century of experience, memorably captured the wisdom of her kind. “Walk fast,” she said. “You touch them, they don’t touch you.”31 If celebrity announces the boundless possibilities of a free society (of democracy and the free market), and is therefore at least arguably “touchable by the multitude” (Marshall 6), it simultaneously signals the impossibility of grand attainment and indeed insists on celebrity as fantasy rather than reality. The celebrity has to fulfill every conscious and unconscious expectation of the millions of noncelebrities. Celebrity culture is therefore full of danger, as Dickens discovered. He constantly found himself betraying expectations he could not have known he had aroused. “This man is offended because I won’t live in his house; and that man is thoroughly disgusted because I won’t go out more than four times in one evening” (Letters 87). Not only does celebrity, to quote Le Bon once more, “represent the disintegration of the distinction between the private and the public” (247) so that Dickens’s admirers thought nothing of barging into his hotel room uninvited—since after all Dickens was not a real but rather a symbolic person and hence could not possibly have about him anything private—but celebrity culture literally endangers the celebrity and can quickly turn adulation (touching what you want to be and may become) to violence and violence to murder, “the most intimate of acts” (Schickel 8). As Richard Schickel argues, the fan wants intimacy from the celebrity, wants the celebrity to be at one and the same time a glorious “star” and a regular gal or guy, just like the man or woman in the street. It is very easy to be disappointed. “The worst fears of rejection surface,” he writes. “And [these] are expressed as democratic resentment: ‘Who does she think she is, anyway?’ ” (5). It is a short step from resentment to murderous rage. So, as Esther Williams says, it is necessary to walk fast because the touch of adulation can turn into something dangerous in a flash. In Martin Chuzzlewit Dickens explores celebrity culture in a number of ways, including a murder that is illuminated, I think, when seen as the vengeance of a resentful fan against a celebrity who has disappointed him and exposed his miserable pettiness. Isn’t what Jonas thinks of Tigg precisely this?: “Who does he think he is, anyway?” Being forced to see America from the vantage point of a celebrity, Dickens was repulsed by what he saw. His revulsion took the form of

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I am disappointed. This is not the Republic I came to see. This is not the Republic of my imagination. I infinitely prefer a liberal Monarchy . . . to such a Government as this. In every respect but that of National Education, the Country disappoints me. . . . In everything of which it has made a boast . . . it sinks immeasurably below the level I had placed it upon. And England, even England, bad and faulty as the old land is, and miserable as millions of her people are, rises in comparison. [ . . . ] The man who comes to this Country a Radical and goes home again with his old opinions unchanged, must be a Radical on reason, sympathy, and ref lection, and one who has so well considered the subject that he has no chance of wavering. (Dickens to W. C. Macready, March 22, 1842 [Letters 156])

Presumably Dickens is the man who came to the United States a Radical and went home with his opinions changed. He came to the United States in the same way that later many Americans would go to the Soviet Union—to see the next stage of human progress in its concrete development, to find progressive, Radical ideals given shape and form in everyday life. But American realities were not what he expected. Worse, he hated the place. The full impact of America on Dickens is hard to gauge, and may have taken some years to work itself through. 32 But Dickens had little time to ref lect. He had engaged to write a travel book about the country and had to set to work more or less immediately after he arrived back home. Dickens the Traveler The literature of travel confronts us immediately with the unpleasant truth that preconceptions are almost always impermeable to reality. It seems there are two recurring possibilities: the writer finds what he or she seeks, and is pleased; the writer does not find what he or she seeks, and is disappointed. But then, what about what’s there, how can the travel writer recognize and then convey the truth of what he or she sees? In his elegant Imagined Cities (2005), Robert Alter makes the intriguing observation that because “the realist novel is to such a large degree about the encounter with new social and moral experience and how it shapes the protagonist, one of the defining novelistic scenes—a kind of topos of the novel—is the entrance of the protagonist into unfamiliar space” (Alter 32).33 The literature of travel in the nineteenth century,

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“This is not what I meant at all.” By the end of March he was writing in distress to his friend the actor W. C. Macready:

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in particular the travel literature of the novelists—that is, their report of their encounter with “unfamiliar space”—is in this respect a kind of analog or companion to the novel.34 The middle nineteenth century, moreover, was a time of one of the great human migrations: as a consequence of the famine in Ireland and the failure of the 1848 revolutions large numbers of people came to the United States. These immigrants profoundly affected U.S. life and subjected American customs and institutions to intimate scrutiny. But already before these events and independent of them hundreds of Britons not only traveled to the United States but wrote about their visits. The number of literary visitors alone is striking.35 Of this number, however, only one, to my knowledge, felt the need to go beyond recording her impressions and went ahead to publish a quasi-academic guide to how one’s visit should be properly, even scientifically, conducted. This visitor was the formidable Harriet Martineau. About a year after completing her inf luential Society in America (1838) Martineau brought out How to Study Manners and Morals (1839), a book actually penned several years earlier while Martineau was at sea on her way to the United States in 1834. The book opens with these words of caution: There is no department of inquiry in which it is not full as easy to miss the truth as to find it, even when the materials from which truth is to be drawn are actually present to our senses. A child does not catch a goldfish in water at the first trial . . . knowledge and method are necessary to enable him to take what is actually before his eyes and under his hand. . . . . [But] every man seems to imagine that he can understand men at a glance; he supposes that it is enough to be among them to know what they are doing; he thinks that eyes, ears, and memory are enough for morals, though they would not qualify him for botanical or statistical observation.36

Martineau proposes what we would now call a social science, or sociological, approach to travel writing.37 The dilemma she brings into focus is epistemological. The goldfish “truth” is right there in front of our eyes, but can we catch it? We can only catch it, she maintains, by study and intellectual discipline. In seeking to overcome the disabilities of prior assumptions, Martineau relies on method to achieve objectivity. At its best her prescription leads to modern anthropological study of other cultures and, in a more popular form, to those books, like John Gunther’s famous “Inside . . . ” series, that value statistics over impressions. But later in her book Martineau offers a different species of advice: “The observer,” she says, “must have sympathy; and his sympathy must

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be untrammeled and unreserved. . . . Unless a traveler interprets by his sympathies what he sees, he cannot but misunderstand the greater part of that which comes under his observation” (Martineau, How to Observe Morals and Manners 52). She uses the following example to clarify what she means: “A stranger who has never felt any strong political interest, and cannot sympathize with American sentiment about the majesty of social equality, and the beauty of mutual government, can never understand the political religion of the United States” (Martineau HTO 55). Martineau, then, proposes two not unrelated but certainly distinct ways of getting at the truth of what the travel writer is observing: rigorous scientific method and unreserved sympathy. These alternatives clearly have their parallels in the outlook of nineteenth-century writers—in the dispassionate intensity of Flaubert’s search for le mot juste, for example, and its apparent contrary in Keats’s negative capability. Before discussing how all this plays out in Dickens’s American Notes and Martin Chuzzlewit I propose first to pause and look at two accounts of travel the better to locate Dickens’s own experience of travel and its impact on his writing. The first account I discuss is by William Cullen Bryant of a trip to Algiers in 1857. The second is of a visit made one hundred years later to Marrakesh by the Bulgarian-born Nobel Prize–winning writer Elias Canetti. Out of Bryant’s volumes of travel literature, I have chosen his writing about North Africa because it takes him about as far from home as possible and, therefore, stretches his capabilities. The title of Bryant’s first collection of travel writing, published in 1850, Letters of a Traveller: Notes of Things Seen in Europe and America, tells us what to expect from him: he writes more or less on the spot; he writes about “things seen” not in the form of shaped works of literature but as “notes”; even though these letters are public, written not to any person but to the Evening Post, Bryant writes as if his reader were a good friend: he uses the first person freely, he does not hesitate to include himself as an object of interest along with what he sees, and at the same time he assumes he’s showing the reader something the reader has not yet seen. His letters are fairly close in genre and serve as a fair point of comparison to Dickens’s American Notes, a book based on letters that also announced itself as taking the humble form of “notes.” Canetti’s short, extraordinary book about Marrakesh, Voices of Marrakesh: A Record of a Visit (1967),38 is in contrast, like everything else he wrote, subtle and oblique and at every turn probes the realist tradition. Bryant’s and Canetti’s work stands at opposite ends of the spectrum of practice in travel writing, and helps place Dickens’s book.

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Bryant is comfortable in his role as truthful observer (Carlyle’s praise of Gaskell for her “devout earnestness” could easily be applied to Bryant’s travel writing); Canetti is far more introspective and philosophically on guard. Even for a man as peripatetic as Canetti—born in Bulgaria, raised in Vienna and Zurich, and settled in f light from the Nazis in London—Marrakesh is an alien environment, emphatically not-home. But Canetti’s writing is not in the form of letters quickly put together on the spot. Unlike both Dickens’s and Bryant’s notes, Canetti’s book was written long after the fact—he visited Marrakesh in 1954 and published his book in 1967—and is only a “record” in the sense of a literary ruse. It is not so much about things seen as about “voices,” and, again unlike Dickens and Bryant, Canetti is extremely conscious of these voices—human and animal—as expressing a language other than his own. Both the similarities and differences between Bryant’s and Canetti’s writing—and the century that separates them is by far the least important of their differences, and in any event seems not to have touched Algiers and Marrakesh quite as drastically as London—cast an informative light on Dickens’s books about America. As well, these fine examples of travel writing also serve as illuminating points of reference for study of the approach to reality—to strangeness, otherness, to unfamiliar space, the unprecedented, to the goldfish “truth”—of nineteenth-century fiction. Here is Bryant in Algiers: I walked in a sort of twilight, in narrow winding lanes, into which the sun never shone, where the wind never blew, and where the projecting walls of the houses often met overhead. No windows look from the dwellings into those shadowy lanes; nobody was standing at the quaint Moorish doors. Arab men, in their dresses of dull white, were creeping about; I did not hear their voices. I met little companies of native women, swaddled in white, from the crown of their head to where the pantaloons were gathered about the bare ankles, above the slippered feet; they passed me in silence; only the younger looked at me; I could see they were younger by a glance; for age plants its marks as distinctly about the eyes as on any other part of the face. In a spot where the streets opened a little, I passed a row of Mussulmans sitting on the pavement, with their backs against the wall; they turned their great Oriental eyes upon me, and if I heard their voices at all, it was only a low, indistinct murmur. I could almost fancy myself in a city of the dead, walking among the specters that haunted it. My own footsteps sounded disagreeably loud in this stillness, and it was a relief to hear the click of a donkey’s small hoofs against the pavement. . . .

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Bryant was a practiced and successful travel writer, and this passage shows off his qualities. The passage rests securely on the solidity of the writer’s relation to his reader and to his subject. Although Bryant obviously is a central presence in the passage, the writing is neither about him nor is it written, as it were, for him. Unlike Canetti, Bryant is not a man gone traveling to find himself. He knows without any, or almost any, wavering exactly who he is. A man who knows exactly who he is thoroughly understands his purpose, and on that comforting ground can speak without self-consciousness to others. No impersonation is required. Bryant is always simply himself, plain-spoken, just, and even more judicious. For these same reasons we are extremely comfortable with him, so reliable, so lucid, so transparent, an avuncular guide rather like the uncles who are assigned the task of looking after you when you go to college in their city. The experience of Bryant’s contemporaries, that to know Bryant is to know America, is also palpable in this passage. Bryant is the sensibility of the nation encountering alien cultures. Not only does he know who he is, he knows who his readers are and therefore can “see” these others without undue self-consciousness. “Children were playing about, laughing, shouting, and crying, just as children laugh, shout, and cry in the most civilized countries” (231). The most civilized country of all, Letters of a Traveller suggests, is Bryant himself. He has at his disposal a beautifully delicate tact, a sensibility sympathetic in its enclosure of those obviously unlike him, unlike America, within the circle of civilization. At the same time, the very certainties that make him so reliable and equable cut him off from unsettling possibilities: at heart Bryant is sure that however strange the world of people, animals, and plants may appear far from home, fundamentally we and it are much the same. Precisely because he is an unassuming American, he exudes universals. It is chastening to see how hard it is even for a man such as Bryant to convey what he observes. The “narrow winding lanes” of the opening are concrete enough; but to be told that the sun never shines and the wind never blows in these lanes is to be told something that is obviously untrue. Bryant’s concreteness, then, easily includes impressions, but impressions built on rhetorical convention. The words are

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It was some time before I could find my way out of this maze of twilight lanes into the broad streets along the shore, full of light and activity, and when I did so, it was like a return from the abodes of death to the upper world. (Bryant, Traveller 236–237)39

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understood by writer and reader to mean something close to but other than what they actually say. Bryant is being neither clever nor stylish nor self-consciously manipulative—but rather, well, conventional, and the passage neatly illustrates the importance of conventional devices for realistic description. At the same time the passage is masterfully managed, for example, in its pacing or in the way it introduces silence as something walled-in, a kind of vacancy within these walled lanes. And what is especially effective is Bryant’s deft, and honest, registering of unease, of the inadequacies, limits, incompletenesses of convention. Here is a fine example from Bryant’s report of his visit to a different quarter of Algiers: As we descended the hill, we passed little companies of women, and some who sat by the wayside and asked alms. One of these was a little thin woman in a clean white dress, whose eyes, which were all of her face that could be seen, gave token of the middle age of life. She silently held out a small hand, with nails sharpened to a point like the nib of a pen, and the ends of the slender fingers were reddened with henna. I see that delicate, thin hand now as I write, and as I always see it when I recollect our walk of that day, and my heart smites me when I think that I put nothing into it. (243)

The poignancy of regret is powerfully conveyed here, all the more so because both the experience and the recollection refuse conventional resolution. In this case the woman’s hand is described without additional verbal gestures but those red, sharpened nails are immensely suggestive—as if in reaching out to Bryant the beggar had drawn blood. The image not only stays in Bryant’s mind, but in ours. What does it mean? There is no time for reflection: Bryant hurries us along. The next sentence reads: “We afterwards went up to the Casbah, a former residence of the Deys, serving both as a fortress and a palace, but now turned into barracks for the troops” (243). Bryant reports on things seen, as he promises, and his accounts are always unmistakably pictures of places we believe in. But these persuasive portrayals are random; lacking context and meditative purpose they lack meaning. They are in the end curiously, even intentionally, one-dimensional. At first glance The Voices of Marrakesh also seems to mirror the aimlessness of travel. But the apparent arbitrariness of the scenes in this book could not be more deceptive. Canetti knows exactly what an encounter with another culture involves. In order to get anywhere,

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Here I am, trying to give an account of something, and as soon as I pause I realize that I have not yet said anything at all. A marvelously luminous, viscid substance is left behind in me, defying words. Is it the language I did not understand there, and that must now gradually find its translation in me? There were incidents, images, sounds, the meaning of which is only now emerging; that words neither recorded nor edited; that are beyond words, deeper and more equivocal than words. A dream: a man who unlearns the world’s languages until nowhere on earth does he understand what people are saying. What is there in language? What does it conceal? What does it rob one of? During the weeks I spent in Morocco I made no attempt to acquire either Arabic or any of the Berber languages. I wanted to lose none of the force of those foreign-sounding cries. I wanted sounds to affect me as much as lay in their power, unmitigated by deficient and artificial knowledge on my part. I had not read anything about the country. Its customs were as unknown to me as its people. The little that one picks up in the course of one’s life about every country and every people fell away in the first few hours. But the word “Allah” remained; there was no getting round that. With it I was equipped for that part of my experience that was most ubiquitous and insistent, and most persistent: the blind. Travelling, one accepts everything; indignation stays at home. One looks, one listens, one is roused to enthusiasm by the most dreadful things because they are new. Good travelers are heartless. (23–24) 40

Canetti’s Marrakesh is a city of blind beggars at the center of which is the Mella, the Jewish ghetto. These beggars are everywhere occupied in making haunting, piercing cries, perhaps cries that were once words, or might be associated with words, but whose quality is “deeper and more equivocal than words.” When he reaches a small square at the heart of the Mella (almost precisely in the middle of the book), Canetti declares that he has reached the goal of my journey. I did not want to leave; I had been here hundreds of years ago but I had forgotten and now it was all coming back to me. I found exhibited the same density and warmth of life as I feel in myself. I was the square as I stood in it. I believe I am in it always. (45)

Well, this is not travel writing as Bryant practices it, in particular because Canetti is in quest of identity—his own and the identity of

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Canetti begins by taking aim at the chief instrument available to him as a reporter: words.

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Man—whereas Bryant of course is identity personified and exhibits only curiosity: he is not hungry for meaning, and has no need of questing. This is not the place to probe Canetti’s Jewishness. More pertinent here are the blind beggars. Like Bryant, Canetti often feels immured in the city (“The houses are like walls; often you have the feeling of walking for a long time between walls” [35]) but unlike Bryant he gains access to the courts, gardens, rooms, and people behind the walls. Language, Canetti seems to say, is like these wall-houses: its life, the goldfish truth, lies within. A highly literate product of a sophisticated, print-centered society, a society whose primary tools—sight and language—conceal what is irreducibly human, Canetti wants to experience the before-language of homo sapiens. Voices of Marrakesh is the record of this quest. But the experience of before-language is at an immense distance from us. Even if one somehow succeeds in catching a glimpse of this long-gone human condition, how can one possibly express it in words, its very antithesis? Maybe a step in this direction is appreciation of oral culture, in fact the culture of the beggars. We know more about oral culture, clearly, than about human society before language. The American Indian writer N. Scott Momaday observes that writing “encourages us to take words for granted” since we can “store them” on a page or in a book. Consequently we have become insensitive to language and “in proportion insensitive to silence.”41 But in the oral tradition words must be remembered and are therefore treasured, scarce, and powerful. “By means of words one can bring about physical change in the universe . . . quiet the raging weather, bring forth the harvest. . . . ” In the oral tradition, words “are magical.” (15–16). The blindness of Canetti’s beggars intensifies this magic because it eliminates all distractions from the sensuous quality of words; the blind beggar feels himself making meaning with his body. Upon leaving the Jewish cemetery in the Mella Canetti is besieged by beggars. They pressed round me from all sides as if I might miss precisely their infirmity. . . . They clutched my knees and kissed the f laps of my jacket. They seemed to be blessing every bit of my body. It was as if a throng of people had brought their mouths and eyes and noses, their arms and legs, their rags and crutches, everything they had, everything they consisted of, to bear upon praying to you. I was frightened, but I cannot deny that I was also deeply moved and that my fright was soon lost in this emotion. Never before had people come physically so close to me. I forgot their

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This is one of many astonishing moments in Canetti’s book. He seems to have taken to its logical conclusion the implicit message of the red nails on the hand of Bryant’s beggar. The notion of the Other has been around now long enough to have become just another comfortable, and needless to say abstract, category. Canetti brings the concept to life with a vengeance, in this passage literally with a vengeance.42 It is impossible to say just exactly what happened when Canetti left the cemetery, but as he reconstructs the scene he experiences first the fright of losing his body in the mass-body and then the joy of losing his body to the adulation of the crowd. Canetti is to the beggars what the celebrity is to the mob of fans. Dickens retreated from the touch of all those strangers; Canetti is attentive to the desire in himself for the spiritual high of being murdered, for being torn limb from limb by the adoring crowd, and making out of his sacrifice powerful magic. (Dickens draws on both sensations—revulsion at the touch of strangers and “the seduction of having oneself dismembered alive”—in the murder scenes in Martin Chuzzlewit.)43 Canetti closes The Voices of Marrakesh with a brief sketch titled “The Unseen”: “At twilight I went to the great square in the middle of the city, and what I sought there were not its colour and bustle, those I was familiar with, I sought a small, brown bundle on the ground consisting not even of a voice but a single sound. This was deep, long-drawn-out, buzzing ‘e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-‘” (100). Typical of Canetti’s recording, he tells us nothing definite about when he goes to the square—is it every day? Is it on the last day? This unseen “creature,” as Canetti calls it, has no visible body because Canetti only sees it covered under a “brown, soiled cloth . . . pulled right down over the head, like a hood.” He has never seen it stand; it lies so low to the ground you might easily stumble over it unawares; he has never seen it come or go. It is there every day, in “the most open part of the square.” When the square is full it is all but invisible; when people disperse there it is “like an old and very dirty garment that someone had wanted to get rid of and had surreptitiously dropped in the midst of all the people where no one would notice” (102).44 Canetti never tries “to discover the bundle’s secret.” “How it got there and how it got away again were matters more sacred to me than my own movements.” Canetti is proud of and fearful for the bundle and he is as much awed as baffled by it. “The meaning of its call remained

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dirt, I did not care, I forgot about lice. I could feel the seduction of having oneself dismembered alive for others. That terrible weight of worship seems to justify the sacrifice, and how could it not work miracles? (52)

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as obscure to me as its whole existence: but it was alive, and every day at the same time, there it was . . . it uttered its one sound, uttered it hour after hour, until it was the only sound in the whole enormous square, the sound that outlived all others” (102–103). Those are the last words of the book, which Canetti has the cheekiness to call the “record of a visit.” What, exactly, did he visit? At the close of the book we know precious little, in the usual sense, about Marrakesh, even though it’s clear that Canetti traveled with the intention of catching the goldfish truth. His first discovery seems to have been that his usual, wonderfully reliable net did not work in Morocco. He could not, that is, rely on words; he needed some means of capturing and communicating experiences that were “beyond words, deeper and more equivocal than words,” that were within and concealed by words. Put differently, Canetti struggled with two enormously treacherous dilemmas: how to capture nonverbal experience in words and how to understand the life of others—or of the Other. Canetti chief ly discovers that there is no obvious method readily at hand, that there are no good answers to those questions. I do not mean that he does not try to answer them, for he does. As a traveler he altogether eschews Martineau’s advice about knowledge—he avoids learning anything at all about Marrakesh and forgets the little he does know the minute he arrives; but he employs a subtle, not to say ingenious, and deeply empathetic, method. And still the fish slips away. “The meaning of its call remained as obscure to me as its whole existence:”—that’s the way the sentence is written, with a colon at the end of this declaration of ignorance and baff lement. After the colon Canetti writes: “but it was alive.” Not only was it alive but in the end, hour after hour, it uttered “the sound that outlived all others.” Canetti resorts to a series of paradoxes, inconclusive glosses on uncertain impressions. He attempts translations from the sensuous to the verbal, notoriously a violation of categories; and he attempts a sympathetic embrace of others who, like the beggars at the cemetery, seem to threaten his extinction or, like the bundle, whom he never touches. On the one hand, Canetti’s quest is doomed to failure; on the other hand his answer or solution has a classical integrity. Canetti relies in the end on the symbolism of the sound and appearance and location of the bundle.45 In Canetti’s hands, this symbol is the same for us as for him, that is, we know it for what it is, we experience its attraction, we recognize it as the irreducible instance of the thing we most value—life!— but we can no more say what its meaning is than he can. We cannot say what its meaning is, but we do have a sense of that meaning, in fact a

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American Notes The editors of the redoubtable Pilgrim Edition of Dickens’s Letters remark dryly that Dickens’s itinerary in the United States simply retraced the routes that everyone who visited from England followed: “he saw nothing new, nor . . . did he think very profoundly about what he saw; yet all his descriptions bore ‘Boz’s peculiar colours,’ characteristic of his novels” (ix). Dickens may not have thought very profoundly about what he saw but it does seem he was deeply moved, albeit not in ways he expected. And his emotions—of distress, of disgust, of dismay—if nothing more contributed to the rethinking of and indeed the formal abandonment of Boz.46 Boz’s peculiar colors turned out not to be quite right, quite enough to capture the emotional truth of Dickens’s American experience. The book gets off to a good start, which is with an entertaining account of Dickens’s first glimpse of his quarters aboard the Brittania. That this state-room had been specially engaged for “Charles Dickens, Esquire, and Lady,” was rendered sufficiently clear even to my scared intellect by a very small manuscript, announcing the fact, which was pinned on a very f lat quilt, covering a very thin mattress, spread like a surgical plaster on a most inaccessible shelf. But that this . . . could by any possibility be that small snug chamber of imagination, which Charles Dickens, Squire, with the spirit of prophecy strong upon him, had always foretold would contain at least one little sofa, and which his lady, with a modest yet most magnificent sense of its limited dimensions, had from the first opined would not hold more than two enormous portmanteaus in some odd corner out of sight (portmanteaus which could now no more be got in at the door, not to say stowed away, than a giraffe could be persuaded or forced into a f lower-pot): that this utterly impracticable, thoroughly hopeless, and profoundly preposterous box, had the remotest reference to, or connexion with, those chaste and pretty, not to say gorgeous little bowers, sketched by a masterly hand, in the highly varnished lithographic plan hanging in the agent’s counting-house in the city of London; that this room of state, in short, could be anything but a pleasant fiction and cheerful jest of the captain’s, invented and put in practice for the better relish and enjoyment of the real state-room presently to be

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very powerful, albeit inarticulate, sense of that meaning, just the sort of ambiguous precision that symbolism engenders. The fish you catch with knowledge, method, and sympathy will, in your hand, be a dead fish; to catch the fish living takes art.

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Here are the Boz colors well displayed. But all too soon, when Dickens has to get down to the business of conveying what’s there in the New World, his usual inventiveness deserts him. Neither the cities of the United States nor the vast unsettled country toward the West seem truly to have interested him. He is detached, cavalier, whimsical. Which is all the more surprising since a few months after his return home, and right after he finishes American Notes, he writes, in Martin Chuzzlewit, some of his most remarkable accounts of London. The very most obvious qualities of American cities, such as their newness, qualities that can hardly have come as a surprise to Dickens, these very qualities, when he actually comes upon them, seem to have been precisely those that either bored or offended him. Compare, for example, Bryant’s and Dickens’s descriptions of burgeoning cities in Massachusetts. Here is Bryant writing, in 1847, of Lawrence: A year ago last February, the building of the city was begun; it has now five or six thousand inhabitants, and new colonists are daily thronging in. Brickkilns are smoking all over the country, to supply materials for the walls of the dwellings. The place, I was told, astonishes visitors with its bustle and confusion. The streets are encumbered with heaps of fresh earth, and piles of stone, brick, beams, and boards, and people can with difficulty hear each other speak, for the constant thundering of hammers, and the shouts of cartmen and wagoners urging their oxen and horses with their loads through the deep sand of the ways. “Before the last shower,” said a passenger, “you could hardly see the city from this spot, on account of the cloud of dust that hung perpetually over it.” “Rome,” says the old adage, “was not built in a day,” but here is a city which, in respect of its growth, puts Rome to shame. (Godwin I, 32)

And this is Dickens on Lowell: It was a very dirty winter’s day, and nothing in the whole town looked old to me, except the mud, which in some parts was almost knee-deep, and might have been deposited there, on the subsiding of the waters after the Deluge. In one place, there was a new wooden church, which, having no steeple, and being yet unpainted, looked like an enormous packingcase without any direction upon it. In another there was a large hotel, whose walls and colonnades were so crisp, and thin, and slight, that it had exactly the appearance of being built with cards. I was careful not to

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disclosed:—these were truths which I really could not, for the moment, bring my mind at all to bear upon or comprehend. (2)

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draw my breath as we passed, and trembled when I saw a workman come out upon the roof, lest with one thoughtless stamp of his foot he should crush the structure beneath him. . . . One would swear that every “Bakery,” “Grocery,” and “Bookbindery,” and other kind of store, took it shutters down for the first time, and started business yesterday. The golden pestles and mortars fixed as signs upon the sun-blind frames outside the Druggists’, appear to have been just turned out of the United States’ Mint; and when I saw a baby of some week or ten days old in a woman’s arms at a street corner, I found myself unconsciously wondering where it came from: never supposing for an instant that it could have been born in a young town as that. (65)

Bryant assumes that the reader of his matter-of-fact report will admire the hectic, dusty chaos of a city being built at an unprecedented pace. It would be possible to use the details of Bryant’s description to suggest any number of unpleasantnesses, but obviously that’s not the point. The cartmen driving their oxen through the “deep sand of the ways” ref lect rather the unparalleled energy and drive of the young republic. They put Rome to shame. For Dickens the deep sand of the ways brings to mind the mud deposited after the Deluge. The ancient earth recalls to his startled perception that there is (thank goodness!) such a thing as historical time and contingency, because otherwise the place is all new, all too new. Does Dickens find the mud comforting and the newness of everything else in Lowell a sorry contrast? If it were the case that every bakery and so on had opened for business yesterday, what should we think? Is there a problem? Dickens’s implicit judgment is that such newness is somehow vulgar or, because it is new, evanescent—so thin a veneer of civilization that, like the walls of the hotel, it all might vanish again as easily as it has arisen. Dickens seems to feel he need not go any farther in spelling out his reaction: obviously, anything this new has to be insubstantial. And when we come to New York, his account is so brief, episodic, and hasty that often it reads as though he could barely be bothered to write about the city at all. This narrow thoroughfare, baking and blistering in the sun, is Wall Street: the Stock Exchange and Lombard Street of New York. Many a rapid fortune has been made in this street, and many a no less rapid ruin. Some of these very merchants whom you see hanging about here now, have locked up money in their strong-boxes, like the man in the Arabian Nights, and opening them again, have found but withered leaves. Below, here by the waterside, where the bowsprits of ships stretch across the

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footway, and almost thrust themselves into the windows, lie the noble American vessels which have made their Packet Service the finest in the world. They have brought hither the foreigners who abound in all the streets: not, perhaps, that there are more here, than in other commercial cities; but elsewhere, they have particular haunts, and you must find them out; here, they pervade the town. We must cross Broadway again. . . . (82)

Dickens is bored. How can his apparently superficial responses to the American city, his disengagement with American urban life, be explained?47 One answer is that New York turned out not to be London.48 Here is Dickens in 1841 inviting Washington Irving to tour London with him: I wish I could find in your welcome letter some hint of an intention to visit England. I should love to go with you, as I have gone, God knows how often, into Little Britain, and East Cheap, and Green Arbour Court, and Westminster Abbey. . . . It would gladden my heart to compare notes with you about all those delightful places and people that I used to walk about and dream of in daytime when a very small and not-overparticularly-taken-care-of-boy. (Forster I, 171)

Nineteenth-century London appears in discussions of Dickens and the city as a place of epochal darkness, the city as disrupter of human community, the city as baff ling, the city as a cacophony without discernible meaning, the city as a chaos threatening to reduce the individual, and individual identity, to nullity. But in this letter, with its loving list of evocative names, its protective desire to take a friend to see “all those delightful places and people,” Dickens evokes an altogether different London—London seen through his childhood’s eye. It’s worth recalling that this long-established perception of Dickens’s sense of London includes threat, yes, but also dreams; anxiety but also delight. The London he invites Irving to tour is a city of delightful fantasy and cherished memories. It is a city the creative force of which lies in the past, depends on the past, emerges from the past. The London Dickens wants to show Irving is the commercial London of the eighteenth century, partly the London of Johnson (and Hazlitt) in the sense of London as a vivacious place that contains all of humanity, but mainly the London of Defoe. I don’t mean London as it was in the eighteenth century or in Moll Flanders but rather that eighteenth-century city sentimentalized, or, if you prefer, transformed by the passage of time, by

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history, tradition, childhood, and memory into the Dickensian city of the nineteenth century. The Dickensian city of the novels is the city of Defoe and Johnson that Dickens day-dreamed through as a boy and recalled as a man, confronting the other London, the hard-nosed capital of the industrial revolution. The centers of the industrial revolution— Manchester, Leeds—rarely appear in Dickens’s fiction: but industrial capitalism does, in the powerful but indirect ways it affects London. Defoe’s actual London however is much more like Lowell or New York than like Dickens’s London. When Moll comes to the New World she is not, like Dickens, horrified by its lack of history: rather, for Moll Virginia no less than London is a place to make money, a place whose focus is always on its prospects and where, as in London, everyone has his and her eye on Number One. This way of seeing the world seems either infantile or threatening to Dickens when he encounters it in the nineteenth-century cities of the United States. Lowell and New York were rambunctious cities where the future was all. When in the nineteenth century a fire destroyed a New York building, as fires often did, it was simply replaced fast in a new form. Whatever history the young city of New York may have had was constantly being erased and then, just as constantly, reinvented.49 This turmoil seemed to offer Dickens nothing he could draw on for his creative purposes. It’s true that Dickens set a good deal of Martin Chuzzlewit in the United States. But if the United States appears in the novel as a setting, as a subject for satire, even as a warning, it remains just material to be used rather than, as I think Dickens expected on setting out, as a source of new creative energy, an impetus for creative growth. The United States did not feed Dickens’s creative imagination in the ways he had expected. But the United States does seem both to have overturned some of Dickens’s fundamental convictions and to have shown him a face of reality he found, at least on initial encounter, deeply upsetting. The struggle to transform the more disturbing realities of his American encounter into fiction absorbed the rest of his writing career, both as a matter of form and content. For Martin Chuzzlewit these were especially the realities of Cairo, Illinois, and the Mississippi, for which the relevant passages in American Notes are these: Nor was the scenery, as we approached the junction of the Ohio and Mississippi rivers, at all inspiriting in its inf luence. The trees were stunted in their growth; the banks were low and f lat; the settlements and log cabins fewer in number: their inhabitants more wan and wretched

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than any we had encountered yet. No songs of birds were in the air, no pleasant scents, no moving lights and shadows from swift passing clouds. Hour after hour, the changeless glare of the hot, unwinking sky, shone upon the same monotonous objects. Hour after hour, the river rolled along, as wearily and slowly as the time itself. At length, upon the morning of the third day, we arrived at a spot so much more desolate than any we had yet beheld, that the forlornest places we had passed were, in comparison with it, full of interest. At the junction of the two rivers, on ground so f lat and low and marshy, that at certain seasons of the year it is inundated to the house-tops, lies a breeding-place of fever, ague, and death; vaunted in England as a mine of Golden Hope, and speculated in, on the faith of monstrous representations, to many people’s ruin. A dismal swamp, on which the half-built houses rot away: cleared here and there for the space of a few yards; and teeming, then, with rank, unwholesome vegetation, in whose baleful shade the wretched wanderers who are tempted hither, droop, and die, and lay their bones; the hateful Mississippi circling and eddying before it, and turning off upon its southern course a slimy monster hideous to behold; a hotbed of disease, an ugly sepulcher, a grave uncheered by any gleam of promise; a place without one single quality, in earth or air or water, to commend it: such is this dismal Cairo. But what words shall describe the Mississippi, great father of rivers, who (praise be to Heaven) has no young children like him! An enormous ditch, sometimes two or three miles wide, running liquid mud, six miles an hour: its strong and frothy current choked and obstructed everywhere by huge logs and whole forest trees: now twining themselves together in great rafts, from the interstices of which a sedgy lazy foam works up, to f loat upon the water’s top; now rolling past like monstrous bodies, their tangled roots showing like matted hair; now glancing singly by like giant leeches; and now writhing round and round in the vortex of some small whirlpool, like wounded snakes. The banks low, the trees dwarfish, the marshes swarming with frogs, the wretched cabins few and far apart, their inmates hollow-cheeked and pale, the weather very hot, mosquitoes penetrating into every crack and crevice of the boat, mud and slime on everything: nothing pleasant in its aspect, but the harmless lightning which f lickers every night upon the dark horizon. (171–172)

Dickens has penetrated to the heart of darkness. Many European visitors saw nature in America in the same way. The very openness of open country, the absence of hedged cultivation, of country seats, neat villages, ancient towns, the essential nonhumanity of American nature seems to have stirred some unconscious phobias in the Europeans.50 Dickens’s picture has the quality of a horrified encounter with primeval slime. Needless to say the Americans saw things differently. Actual

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conditions on the frontier must often have been grim, but that did not stop Americans from finding the West bracing and romantic, as in this account by Bryant, in a letter to his close friend Richard H. Dana, of his first trip to the very places Dickens a decade later finds appalling: “I have seen the great west,” he writes, “where I ate corn bread and hominy, & [sic] slept in log houses with twenty men women and children in the same room.” Later in his enthusiastic report he tells Dana that “traveling in western steam boats is much pleasanter than in eastern ones. There is not so much hurry, ill manners and confusion” (Letters Vol. I, October 8, 1832). But the most illuminating contrast of perceptions is between Dickens’s revulsion and the philosophical elation of Thoreau in the face of nature in its “aboriginal state” (the words are Thoreau’s): It is difficult to conceive of a region uninhabited by man. . . . Nature was here [Maine] something savage and awful, though beautiful. I looked with awe at the ground I trod on, to see what the Powers had made there. . . . This was that Earth of which we have heard, made out of Chaos and Old Night. Here was no man’s garden, but the unhandselled globe. . . . Man was not to be associated with it. It was Matter, vast, terrific,—not his Mother Earth that we have heard of, not for him to tread on, or be buried in,—no, it were being too familiar even to let his bones lie there—the home this of Necessity and Fate. There was there felt the presence of a force not bound to be kind to man. It was a place for heathenism and superstitious rites,—to be inhabited by men nearer of kin to the rocks and to wild animals than we. . . . . Talk of the mysteries!—to come in contact with it,—rocks, trees, wind on our cheeks! the solid earth! the actual world! . . . Who are we? where are we?51

Thoreau may be exhibiting a distinctly Romantic exuberance but even in the work of the English Romantics nature rarely looks this wild. His relish for finding deep philosophy in “the unhandselled globe” comes across as characteristically American. The European visitor to the United States, especially the Englishman, far from reveling in formless vastness or feeling the bracing force of Necessity and Fate in the aboriginal forests, looked on nature as requiring a frame, an indication of limits, in order to be susceptible to human understanding and appreciation. In Mansfield Park, Jane Austen offers us both a topography and typology of nature in relation to human nature when she names the spaces on Mr. Rushworth’s estate. Unable to bear their house tour a moment longer, choking from the emotional claustrophobia of their pent-up sexual emotions, the Bertrams, the Crawfords, Mr. Rushworth, and Fanny burst out of the Rushworth house and onto the grounds. “The

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lawn, bounded on each side by a high wall, contained beyond the first planted area, a bowling-green, and beyond the bowling-green a long terrace walk, backed by iron palisades; and commanding a view over them into the tops of the trees of the wilderness immediately adjoining.”52 It probably would have been better had this repressed party found itself in Thoreau’s aboriginal Maine, but in any event Austen’s typology is an archetype of a certain view of the relation between nature and human society. The human world is carefully circumscribed: from house to walled garden, from garden to terrace, from terrace to wilderness, and from wilderness to the wood. Each terrain is bounded; passing through the gates from one realm to another involves huge metaphorical steps. And even then, to be lost in the wilderness, dangerous as Austen makes this feel, is still to find oneself within the confines of a bound territory, fenced, defined by human constructions and cultivation, and having only faint suggestions of Matter and the mysteries. Even Dickens’s swamp can look different to American eyes. “When I would recreate myself,” Thoreau writes, I seek the darkest wood, the thickest and most interminable and, to the citizen [e.g., that citified gent Charles Dickens], most dismal swamp. I enter a swamp as a sacred place,—a sanctum sanctorum. There is the strength, the marrow of Nature. . . . A town is saved, not more by the righteous men in it than by the woods and swamps that surround it. A township where one primitive forest waves above while another primitive forest rots below,—such a town is fitted to raise not only corn and potatoes, but poets and philosophers for the coming ages. In such soil grew Homer and Confucius and the rest, and out of such a wilderness comes the Reformer eating locusts and wild honey.53

It is at least an arguable thesis that the whole body of the English novel in the nineteenth century weighs against the possibility of recreating oneself, never mind doing so whenever inspiration calls. Be that as it may, Thoreau offers an American refutation of Dickens’s view of Cairo as a dismal swamp, a grave for all human aspirations with nothing whatever to commend it. On the contrary, says Thoreau, this is the muck on which poets and philosophers are fed. From the point of view of the evolution of his fiction, Dickens’s disgust with nature in America goes hand in hand with his revulsion with American democratic (read: boorish) manners and democratic (read: vulgar and demagogic) values, with his disdain for the ideology of Make It New, and with his boredom with evanescent New York. He came to the United States after several years of mounting success, a confident,

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willful, headstrong, but not-yet-thirty young man. Angry about injustice at home, he expected to find his radical democratic views amplified by political and social conditions in the United States; he expected to be able to appreciate America as no English traveler had before him; he expected that his gifts as entertainer would receive new impetus from the confirmation America would give to his worldview. He expected that he would have no trouble translating his experiences into memorable prose. In sum, Dickens came to the United States a young man confident in his essentially comic view of life, comic in the sense of belief in the ameliorative power of democratic government, belief that the essential goodness of human beings could be nurtured and made to flourish in the commerce and culture of a nation through progressive institutions and policies. Similarly, Dickens came to the United States if not altogether complacent about his ability to improvise out of his enormous verbal facility and imaginative inventiveness an endless number of fictional entertainments, then anyway confident that fresh sights would sufficiently invigorate his powers, and that nothing more was required. In all these ways travel to America was far better than a rest.54 All his expectations were dashed. Maybe the thing that Dickens came away with most from his American journey was that his expectations could be dashed, that he could profoundly misunderstand. As I have already said, much of his experience in the United States took the form of “That is not what I meant at all.” He never meant his democratic inclinations to extend to the braggadocio of leveling he encountered in the United States or the ridiculousness of American political and cultural pretensions. Egalitarianism in the United States seemed to embrace presumption in a way he had not anticipated. Everyone took too many liberties. But the hardest thing, what I believe especially jolted him, was that the New World, able to start afresh, able to reinvent and recreate nonetheless revealed the same old worn human face. His comic worldview could not withstand the evidence to the contrary in America—in the cities, in nature, in institutions, in the quality of human relations. He discovered not only that in the American Eden men are not better than in their fallen state back on the other side of the Atlantic but, worse, that he was deeply attached to humanity as he had known it in the corrupt Old World. America revealed to Dickens a tragic dimension to human life he seems not to have fully registered before, that he had not fully acknowledged. Many of his initial responses to the United States, in his letters and in American Notes, seem to be protective of his comic worldview and of how he had given that worldview expression in his art. He seemed to recoil in order to sustain his creative powers. But

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Martin Chuzzlewit Dickens’s American journey challenged his assumptions about life and his approach to art. A famous occasion in Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina clarifies the nature of these challenges. Unable to live together in Russia Vronsky and Anna Karenina travel abroad, and in Italy Vronsky takes up painting for which he fancies he has a gift. The resident Russian painter, Mikhailov, baff les and irritates the Count, but when Mikhailov finishes his portrait of Anna, Vronsky is astonished. “ ‘One needs to know her and love her as I have loved her to discover the very sweetest expression of her soul,’ Vronsky thought, though it was only from this portrait that he had himself learned this sweetest expression of her soul.”55 By this account—and surely if anyone knew what he was talking about it was Tolstoy—even the truth about those we love most is hidden from us, and can only be discovered through art. The role of the artist is to capture the truth and show it to us. But the passage leaves many questions unexplored: Is this truth that we cannot see in life only present in the work of art? Is there a truth “out there” or does the artist simply persuade us through the elusive tricks of art (method? sympathy? devout earnestness?) that what we see on the canvas is truth; and do we only then, looking away from the canvas and back to Anna, find this truth in her too? Is the point of the work of art to have us turn back to “reality” with fresh eyes (as seems to be Gaskell’s aim in Mary Barton)? We first meet Pecksniff in the second chapter of Martin Chuzzlewit, at the end of a series of paragraphs tracking the night wind: Out upon the angry wind! how from sighing, it began to bluster round the merry forge, banging at the wicket, and grumbling in the chimney, as if it bullied the jolly bellows for doing anything to order. . . . so off it f lew with a howl: giving the old sign before the ale-house door such a cuff as it went, that the Blue Dragon was more rampant than usual afterwards, and indeed, before Christmas, reared clean out of his crazy frame. It was small tyranny for a respectable wind to go wreaking its vengeance on such poor creatures as the fallen leaves, but this wind happening to come up with a great heap of them just after venting its humour

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he now had to make room in his art, to recreate his fiction so as to give full expression to the tragic realities revealed by his American journey. His first attempt to incorporate his American experience—literally but also in its implications—into his fiction is Martin Chuzzlewit.

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on the insulted Dragon, did so disperse and scatter them that they f led away, pell-mell. . . . whew! How it drove them on and followed at their heels! The scared leaves only f lew faster for all this, and a giddy chase it was: for they got into unfrequented places, where there was no outlet, and where their pursuer kept them eddying round and round at his pleasure. . . . But the oddest feat they achieved was, to take advantage of the sudden opening of Mr Pecksniff ’s front-door, to dash wildly into his passage; whither the wind following close upon them, and finding the backdoor open, incontinently blew out the lighted candle held by Miss Pecksniff, and slammed the front door against Mr Pecksniff who was at that moment entering, with such violence, that in the twinkling of an eye he lay on his back at the bottom of the steps. Being by this time weary of such trifling performances, the boisterous rover hurried away rejoicing, roaring over moor and meadow, hill and f lat, until it got out to sea, where it met with other winds similarly disposed, and made a night of it. (58–61)

Vronsky discovers a core truth about Anna through Mikhailov’s painting but fails to realize it: he believes, rather, that the marvel of Mikhailov’s painting is that the artist was somehow able to capture a quality in Anna that only someone who loved her deeply, in fact, only Vronsky, could possibly have glimpsed. The artist’s secret then, at least as Tolstoy reveals it here, is that he makes us believe that he has uncovered a truth we had previously thought no one could have discovered except ourselves; when in fact we only come into possession of that truth when we encounter it in the work of art. But, ironically, the reader only knows that Vronsky has been deceived, and has deceived himself, because Tolstoy as narrator tells us. This is the narrator both as deity and as inextricable from, or invisible within, the narration itself. Tolstoy’s voice, his “telling,” in the novel is so absolute, his authority so total, that paradoxically we are unaware of any narrator doing the narration: we experience the narration as the truth. Where is Dickens in the aforementioned passage? We know that Mikhailov has revealed to Vronksy the very sweetest expression of Anna’s soul. What is Dickens showing us? Vronksy is unmistakably led to apprehension of the goldfish truth: Mikahilov reveals Anna’s inner being, and Tolstoy tells us explicitly that that’s what he’s doing too. Is Dickens’s purpose analogous? One way to read the passage is to see Dickens as the wind. The wind here is petulant, impulsive, mischievous, vengeful, tyrannical but in all recognizable in its classical guise as inspired creator or maker. All of this is nicely suggested in Dickens’s

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word “incontinently,” meaning at once without restraint, morally loose, and acting without hesitation, acting immediately and decisively. That’s how Dickens whacks Pecksniff, foreshadowing our final glimpse of him in our first. Both at the beginning and at the end Pecksniff suffers a literary comeuppance. It is important to note that the appearance of Pecksniff in these paragraphs seems incidental: the main story is the wind’s fraternity house romp. The introduction of Pecksniff, one of the great malicious energies of the book, as a slapstick victim of the elements assures us at the very outset that the real power lies with the wind. The wind not only can, when it wishes, knock the man f lat on his back just like that, but to the wind the man is of no consequence: the “boisterous rover” rushes on to make a night of it with his mates. Dickens the narrator is in control, can and will have his fun, and not to worry. The narrator of this scene combines two qualities that, it seems, represent in combination Dickens’s ideal form of narration—that is, a union of spontaneity and control, of planned composition and improvisation. One phrase that Dickens’s venture in Martin Chuzzlewit does not bring to mind is the one Carlyle applies to Elizabeth Gaskell: “devout earnestness.” In his letter to Gaskell Carlyle equates “devout earnestness” with “veracity” (see pp. 37–38). The one place where this phrase might conceivably be applied to Dickens’s fiction is Hard Times, and it merits noting that in that novel Dickens, uncharacteristically, ventured north, and at last addressed the industrial system directly. But even there Dickens’s notion of “veracity” is hardly Gaskell’s (see my discussion in chapter three, pp. 14, 24–28, 41). In Martin Chuzzlewit the very notion of veracity seems up for grabs. Just how and why this might be so is suggested by Dorothy Van Ghent in her brilliant essay “The Dickens World: A View from Todgers’s.” “The course of things demonically possessed,” Van Ghent begins, in something of a startling opening, “is to imitate the human, while the course of human possession is to imitate the inhuman. This transposition of attributes . . . is the principle of relationship between things and people in the novels of Dickens.” Dickens’s world, she goes on to say, is “a world undergoing gruesome spiritual transformation.”56 The anthropomorphizing of the wind and leaves in the passage that introduces Pecknsiff, in this reading, is an instance of a world in the throes, unending, of “gruesome” reversal and metamorphosis. All of the inanimate objects in the passage have a curious life of their own (the Blue Dragon rears clean out of his frame). To follow Van Ghent, they are possessed and have, as it were, been puffed up with human purposes, which they sometimes comically and sometimes horrifically

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and tragically enact in their helter-skelter mimicry. There’s no devout earnestness at play here. Van Ghent reads Dickens as working with meanings through figurations rather than character or plot. His meanings are his world. Sylvere Monod, drawing on Dickens’s account of his method of composing Dombey and Son as he reports it to John Forster, says that Dickens distinguished “two elements” in his writing: “the elements he has determined on, and the rest. His materials, he knows, will proliferate spontaneously, not perhaps uncontrollably, but without needing much guidance from him” (109). In Martin Chuzzlewit and the great novels that follow, these elements might be described as comprising theme and plot, on the one hand, and most of what it takes to flesh those out, on the other. Dickens expects his materials to proliferate spontaneously; it seems as though the very plunge into language propels this spontaneous proliferation, that this writerless composition is generated by and generates language. The paragraphs that track the evening wind seem precisely to illustrate what Monod has in mind. In this respect, verbal play is an unalloyed pleasure: for writer and reader there is no other purpose, or seems to be no other purpose, to the play with words than that it’s fun. The figurative game is spontaneous and proceeds as though by itself and for itself. When Vronsky first views Mikhailov’s paintings, he wants to know what technique he employs to achieve his effects. But Mikhailov— speaking for Tolstoy?—finds all such thinking irritating: art is the product of the artist’s vision, which has nothing to do with technique and which no technique can mimic. Beyond knowledge, method, and sympathy there is art. Dickens’s effects, “Boz’s peculiar colours,” are, like Mikhailov’s, spontaneous, achieved as if independent of the writer. But as we know from Freud and also from Jung spontaneous is possibly the opposite of aimless. The writer may be both the wind and the leaves, inspired or driven by not altogether conscious patterns, wishes, and purposes. If meaning in Dickens is generated in this way, by what Dorothy Van Ghent styles a principle of composition, then at the least we can conclude that language itself, less as a system of signs and more as a medium, plays a greater role in “painting” the view from Todgers’s than Tolstoy’s account of artistic composition allows. The depth of anguish, in Anna Karenina, remains within the “realistic” bounds of the social emotions whereas the social emotions in Dickens seem always to contain or to possess the ability at any moment of unleashing passions that transcend the social or that want to express essential truths through symbols. Speaking for all of Gaskell’s admirers from 1848 to today Carlyle names “veracity” as the fundamental quality of Gaskell’s

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writing, a quality manifested through her “devout earnestness.” But famously in Dickens the reader is hard-pressed to explain the connection between Dickens’s effects and “reality.”57 His settings, his characters are neither incredible nor allegorical but some indefinable mix of realism and symbolism. It isn’t surprising to find that Mikhail Bakhtin prefers Dostoevsky to Tolstoy: it seems a stretch to read Tolstoy as confirming Bakhtin’s understanding of the novel as a radical questioning of reality (“The novel begins by presuming a verbal and semantic decentring of the ideological world, a certain linguistic homelessness of literary consciousness, which no longer possesses a sacrosanct and unitary linguistic medium for containing ideological thought”58); but it is far less a stretch to read Dickens that way. The world of Dickens’s mature work is not a unitary linguistic medium, and certainly Martin Chuzzlewit is vividly, sometimes dizzyingly polyphonic. These contending voices and viewpoints seem at one and the same time to question reality, to be reality (the reality of the old and new London), and to transform reality into a sort of dynamic symbolism. Vronsky turns back with fresh eyes from Anna’s portrait to Anna. Can we turn back from Dickens’s description of the wind to some “reality” and say “Aha—how wonderfully Dickens has caught the soul of the thing”? The answer is partially yes but mainly no. In his famous letter to Douglas Kinnaird about Don Juan, Byron writes: “As to ‘Don Juan’—confess—confess—you dog—and be candid—that it is the sublime of that there sort of writing—it may be bawdy—but is it not good English?—it may be prof ligate—but is it not life, is it not the thing?” (Venice, October 26, 1819).59 Dickens and Byron, who have little otherwise in common, do have this: they are both fabulous entertainers. And their way with words is one key reason they are so entertaining. Their verbal inventiveness postpones or mutes any questions about the reality of their fictions. It’s just as hard to say how Juan’s adventures, fanciful and fantastic, could be called life-like as it is to say how Dickens’s description of the wind could be called life-like. We do not read Dickens or Byron with the same loss of self that we do Tolstoy, deceived, that is, into thinking the story is somehow telling itself, that narration is truth. We read Dickens and Byron delighted by and fully conscious of the play with words. This distinguishes them, too, from Gaskell. Their language is a universe that is, yes, “related to reality,” but in ways that are elusive and hard to pin down. Whatever else, our delight derives as much, if not more, from the play with language as from what the language might, literally or even figuratively, signify. We are in this way more aware of ourselves reading and more aware of the writer as a presence.

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In this respect it’s possible to understand the work of art as conveying a truth that is only available in art, that is almost independent of what’s “outside” art, out there. Even in a portrait, the portrait of Anna Karenina, the truth that the portrait reveals inheres, in this view, in the portrait itself, and won’t be found if you turn to look at Anna herself. But it’s necessary to say that for the most part the nineteenth-century novelists seemed to think otherwise; they saw fiction as “a self-conscious effort,” in the words of George Levine, “usually in the name of some moral enterprise of truth telling and extending the limits of human sympathy to make literature appear to be describing directly not some other language but reality itself.”60 This claim is the essence of realism and applies obviously to Mary Barton. And the claim seems as it were natural and to arise from every page of every writing, intentionally realistic or not, because of our life-long and inescapable acculturation to words as referents. It may be, as Bakhtin says, that the novel “presumes . . . a certain linguistic homelessness,” and this may be an illuminating way to account for artistic truth-telling as somehow nonreferential, but expecting words to function as referents is surely so inbred in us that it arises as an expectation no matter what. This is certainly the case when we read Dickens. Even as we delight in Dickens’s spontaneous f lights, even when we encounter in Dickens characters or events no less outlandish than Juan and Haidee and their adventures, the novel’s implicit commitment to reality makes itself felt, so that we are unable to quash questions such as: Shouldn’t there be a strong connection between the two elements of Dickens’s composition, the one conscious and plotted and the other spontaneous? Shouldn’t Dickens’s spontaneous effects express his themes and coherently develop his plots? Martin Chuzzlewit, to be sure, has not lacked for critics exasperated by what they see as the novel’s incoherence, disorganization, and lack of unity, among them such shrewd readers and keen admirers of Dickens as George Gissing and Barbara Hardy.61 The coherence and unity of Martin Chuzzlewit—or the lack of these qualities—goes to the heart not only of how we should read Dickens but more broadly the nineteenth-century novel as a whole. Is unity in a work of art an essential feature of its truth-telling? Is coherence and unity within the work a sign of coherence between the work and “reality”? Can the experience of modernity be symbolized in the absence of a unitary language? These questions are not made easier, in any discussion of Martin Chuzzlewit, by the fact that the novel provides plenty of evidence for contradictory answers. The relation between small, easily overlooked details and theme, for instance, is often remarkable. I will offer one

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example, which has to do with the way books and reading are used in the novel. Often in Dickens a character or an object or an idea matters less for itself and more as a test for others: if the person or thing is good, then we know good characters will value it and bad will despise it. That’s the role of books in Martin Chuzzlewit. Moreover, in a novel that wants to identify literature as a primary source of value—to pit the domain of selfish materialism against compassion in the symbolic domain—, the place of books in Martin Chuzzlewit might be said to stand for Dickens’s recommitment to his vocation as a writer. Early in the novel Mary Graham is tending to Old Martin at the Dragon, a chore Mrs. Lupin offers to share with her. Mary returns her “many thanks for her solicitude and company, [but tells her] that she would remain there some time longer; and she begged her not to share her watch, as she was well used to being alone, and would pass the time in reading” (85). Mary’s reading seems inconsequential, in no way a detail bearing thematic weight, until Pecksniff draws attention to it when he appears on the scene. He and Mrs. Lupin enter Old Martin’s room unannounced and find him asleep and Mary reading. “ ‘I am afraid that this looks artful,’ ” Pecksniff says. “ ‘I am afraid, Mrs Lupin, do you know, that this looks very artful!’ ” As he finished this whisper, he advanced before the hostess; and at the same time the young lady, hearing footsteps, rose. Mr Pecksniff glanced at the volume she held, and whispered Mrs Lupin again: if possible, with increased despondency. “Yes, ma’am,” he said, “it is a good book. I was fearful of that beforehand. I am apprehensive that this is a very deep thing indeed!” (87)

At this point we know nothing about Mary, except that she’s reading a book. Pecksniff ’s characteristic effort to twist this innocent activity into something ominous—artful!—alerts us immediately to her goodness and is yet another foreshadowing of Pecksniff ’s end. Just as our first associations with Mary are in this way directed toward reading, so too our early acquaintance with Tom Pinch involves books. Tom has been sent to Salisbury to meet Pecksniff ’s new pupil, Young Martin. He wanders happily among the shops. But what were even gold and silver, precious stones and clockwork, to the bookshops, whence a pleasant smell of paper freshly pressed came issuing forth. . . . That whiff of Russia leather too, and all those rows on rows of volumes . . . what happiness did they suggest! And in the window were the spick-and-span new works from London, with the title-pages, and

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sometimes even the first page of the first chapter, laid wide open: tempting unwary men to begin to read the book, and then, in the impossibility of turning over, to rush blindly in, and buy it! Here too were the dainty frontispiece and trim vignette, pointing like handposts on the outskirts of great cities of the rich stock of incident beyond; and store of books, with many a grave portrait and time-honoured name, whose matter he knew well, and would have given mines to have, in any form, upon the narrow shelf beside his bed at Mr Pecksniff ’s. What a heart-breaking shop it was! (125)

At the tavern, waiting for Martin, Tom, like Mary, reads to pass the time. All this—Tom’s unalloyed delight in all the sensuous qualities of books, the echo in his reading of Mary’s reading, the contrast between Tom’s and Mary’s direct and as it were selfless immersion in the imaginative, lusciously described world of books and Pecksniff ’s hypocritical, stinting relation to the same (Pecksniff allows Tom only a narrow shelf for this, by implication, useless activity)—all this establishes a web of associations that the novel densely elaborates. Young Martin, shortly after his arrival at Pecksniff ’s, asks Tom to read to him. Tom readily complies. “What will you like? Shakespeare?” “Aye!” replied his friend, yawning and stretching himself. “He’ll do. I am tired with the bustle of to-day, and the novelty of everything about me; and in such a case, there’s no greater luxury in the world, I think, than being read to sleep.” (155)

And, having hogged the fire, go to sleep he does. But Tom “went on reading. . . . He gradually became so much interested, that he quite forgot to replenish the fire . . . ” (156). The contrast between Tom’s outgoing virtue and Martin’s exasperating, voluminous self-regard is emphasized by their contrary responses to books. Soon after Tom reads Martin to sleep they encounter Mr. Chevy Slyme. “I swear,” cried Mr. Slyme . . . “that I am the wretchedest creature on record. Society is in a conspiracy against me. I’m the most literary man alive. I’m full of scholarship; I’m full of genius; I’m full of information; I’m full of novel views on every subject; yet look at my condition! I’m at this moment obliged to two strangers for a tavern bill!” (164)

Well, in fact, Tom pays for the lot, and is shown to be the exploited (but worthy) subscriber even to this debased literary man. Just as Tom

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is always ready to enter sympathetically into another point of view, to lose himself in books, so Slyme is the bragging self-promoter for whom literature is the agency of narcissism, sly grandiloquence, cynicism, and emotional dishonesty. When the novel takes Martin to the United States Slyme’s self-promotion and self-invention are magnified in the grotesqueries of American culture. General Choke condescends to lecture Martin on the Queen’s residences, insisting she resides mainly in the Tower of London. When in disbelief Martin asks, “ ‘Have you been in England?’ ” the General, unabashed, replies: “ ‘In print I have, sir . . . not otherwise. We air a reading people here, sir. You will meet with much information among us that will surprise you, sir.” Martin, by this time on the way to his conversion—among the Americans Martin suddenly sounds sensible and mature—has the good humor to reply, “ ‘I have not the least doubt of it’ ” (412). Books are the currency of kindness, virtue, and finally justice in the novel. When Martin is forced peremptorily to quit Pecksniff ’s he receives a book from Tom, a book containing as a gift all the money Tom has. The morning after he has eaten of Ruth Pinch’s first-ever beef pudding, John Westlock gives her a cook book “with the beef-steakpudding-leaf turned down and blotted out” (692).62 The full dimensions of this motif are unveiled in Tom’s mysterious windfall, his London job as a “kind of secretary and librarian” (681) and, finally, in the climactic scene in which the tables are turned and Old Martin beats Pecksniff. Tom’s place of work is four dusty and apparently long-disused rooms in a dark courtyard deep in the Temple. The place is a shambles, “a tomb” with a “haunted air.” Movables of every kind lay strewn about, without the least attempt at order, and were intermixed with boxes, hampers, and all sorts of lumber. On all the f loors were piles of books, to the amount, perhaps, of some thousands of volumes: these, still in bales: those, wrapped in paper, as they had been purchased: others scattered singly or in heaps: not one upon the selves which lined the walls. (687)

Tom is charged with putting all these books in order, “an occupation full of interest for me” (687), he confesses. In dutifully performing his assigned tasks Tom redeems the place from death to life, building a kind of animated shrine to literary values, a neat, clean, handsome library that, upon Old Martin’s arrival, becomes a place of reckoning with the books themselves coming into service as agents of the administration of justice. In Phiz’s illustration Pecksniff is felled not only by Old Martin

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but “literally” by the books, in particular Paradise Lost and Tartuffe, pictured as tumbling on Pecksniff ’s head.63 In this chapter of revelations, a not unimportant revelation is the symbolic power of literature to combat the wrongs of Self, of which, in Old Martin’s eyes, Pecksniff “had become the incarnation” (875). Literature serves a religious function, and, like the Christian cross, is at once extremely concrete and material and symbolic. The novel’s use of books as a moral touchstone is one example, then, of a sustained coherence in Martin Chuzzlewit, albeit in a minor key. Having said that, I hasten to add that nonetheless the book’s most powerful passages are those where Dickens, rather like a jazz saxophonist, a Victorian Charlie Parker, spontaneously elaborates his theme, in particular in his improvisations on place. Among these the most characteristic, and important, is his long description of Todgers’s, both as a neighborhood and, as he says, “as a house in that neighbourhood” independent of “its merits as a commercial boarding establishment” (187). Dickens’s narration takes us from the baff ling alleyways around Todgers’s to its cellarage and finally to the rooftop. For a moment the view from the rooftop seems benign—“Then there were steeples, towers, belfries, shining vanes, and masts of ships: a very forest” (188)—and echoes Wordsworth’s “Westminster Bridge” (1802). The city now doth, like a garment, wear The beauty of the morning; silent, bare, Ships, towers, domes, theatres, and temples lie Open to the fields, and to the sky.

But where the spondaic listing of figures in Wordsworth ref lects the vivacity of the city clothed in the peaceful beauty of morning, in the view from Todgers’s this prospect quickly darkens: “Gables, housetops, garret-windows, wilderness upon wilderness.” Abruptly the “crowd of objects” turns on the viewer, and possesses him. There is no way to improve on Dorothy Van Ghent’s reading of the passage that follows, but I would like to borrow her insights and adapt them to purposes not altogether her own. After noting the animate, dizzying activity of the objects in view, Dickens’s passage concludes: . . . the tumult swelled into a roar; the hosts of objects seemed to thicken and expand a hundredfold; and after gazing round him quite scared, [the onlooker] turned into Todgers’ again, much more rapidly than he came out; and ten to one he told M. Todgers afterwards that if he hadn’t done

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Van Ghent comments: “The prospect from Todgers’ is one in which categorical determinations of the relative significance of objects . . . have broken down, and the observer on Todgers’ roof is seized with suicidal nausea at the momentary vision of a world in which significance has been replaced by naked and aggressive existence.” She adds: “The grotesque transpositions are a coherent imagination of a reality that has lost coherence” (29). These incoherent transpositions, Van Ghent goes on to say, create a ubiquitous but somehow unmoored anxiety. If Dickens’s meanings are his world the view from Todgers’s shows us a world cut loose from meaning, not liable to coherent summation, scary, a world whose dislocations are so dizzying that one might at any moment leap for succor to one’s death. Participating in this world is much harder than observing it, but simply to observe it is dangerous. The approach to Todgers’s, through the labyrinth of streets, reveals the London that Dickens wanted to show Washington Irving, the city whose history and associations delight and fascinate Dickens, the labyrinth city to which Dickens the writer has privileged access. But the view from Todgers’s is another thing altogether. Where the approach to Todgers’s might be understood as representing conscious composition and control, the view from Todgers’s radically undermines control and suggests that what a controlled vision can reveal for us is not just incomplete but maybe untrue. But if the view from Todgers’s reveals the essential reality of the new London of the industrial age, it also opens for us a dangerous prospect. Is the vantage point on the roof of Todgers’s the place where the narrator should perch himself? How can the dangerous, unsettling reality visible from Todgers’ rooftop, in its impact on the viewer not unlike the reality, in life and in fiction, of Cairo and the Mississippi, best be observed? What is the narrative form appropriate to, or analogous to, this reality? The ultimate observer, in this novel, is the professional spy Nadgett. When we first meet him Dickens stresses a paradoxical quality of his, which is that “he was born to be a secret.” This seems to mean two things. “How he lived was a secret; where he lived was a secret; and even what he was, was a secret. . . . And yet he belonged to a class; a race peculiar to the City; who are secrets as profound to one another, as they are to the rest of mankind” (517). Nadgett is the epitome, to use the contemporary word, of surveillance. On the one hand, then, everything he does, everything he values, is secret. No one knows what he does,

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so, he would certainly have come into the street by the shortest cut: that is to say, head-foremost. (188–189)

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who he is, where he lives. He exemplifies the city as a congregation of the anonymous, every person unknown to every other person. On the other hand, because of the class of Nadgetts, London is a city where no one can have a secret, where all secrets will out, where everyone is under surveillance. Nadgett’s spying on Jonas is total, and as the moment of murder approaches is transposed into nature itself, becomes, as it were, metaphysical. As Jonas, riding into the country to trap Tigg, sleeps in his coach, in their stalls and pastures beasts were quiet; and human creatures slept. But what of that, when the solemn night was watching, when it never winked, when its darkness watched no less than its light! The stately trees, the moon and shining stars, the softly-stirring wind, the overshadowed lane, the broad, bright countryside, they all kept watch. There was not a blade of growing grass or corn, but watched; and the quieter it was, the more intent and fixed its watch upon him seemed to be. (798) 64

At the same time, Nadgett’s surveillance creates an invisible, but powerful, web of connections among people in the city who appear to have nothing to do with one another, who pass each other on the thronged streets unaware. In walking from the City . . . Tom Pinch had looked into the face, and brushed against the threadbare sleeve, of Mr Nadgett. . . . As there are a vast number of people in the huge metropolis of England who rise up every morning not knowing where their heads will rest at night, so there are a multitude who shooting arrows over houses as their daily business, never know on whom they fall. Mr Nadgett might have passed Tom Pinch ten thousand times . . . yet never once have dreamed that Tom had any interest in any act or mystery of his. Tom might have done the like by him, of course. But the same private man out of all the men alive, was in the mind of each at the same moment; was prominently connected, though in a different manner, with the day’s adventures of both; and formed, when they passed each other in the street, the one absorbing topic of their thoughts. (661–662)

This topic, of course, is Jonas. As in so many aspects of urban life, the web of connections is curiously ambiguous, binding each actor in the huge melodrama to each other actor but not necessarily for the purposes of community. In fact no one of this trio—Tom, Nadgett, Jonas—would have been anything but dismayed to discover how they are bound, one

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to another. The point seems to be that the life of the city, where each person pursues his or her cares—naked and aggressive existence—is at once the dynamic product of these aggregated individuals and, as a general mode of being, as experience and ideology, also feeds back into the individual life, so that each person participates in and draws on each other’s individual life, not for the purposes of community but simply for good or for bad. As a narrative form surveillance is hugely informed and informative—but lacks a moral. As a matter of realism Nadgett’s omnipresent gaze is hardly credible, though it is nonetheless scary; but in the symbolic domain it takes on an existential quality that is utterly convincing. The veracity of Nadgett’s observation derives, then, from sources about as far as possible from devout earnestness. It should be said at this point that while Todgers’s is the outstanding instance of Dickens’s spontaneous depiction of the city, of the heart of the labyrinth of London, which is to say the heart of Dickens’s world, 65 there are other significant locales in the book, especially Eden and Fountain Court. In the following passage the emigrants Young Martin and Mark Tapley, after a pause on the outskirts of Western American civilization, finally are approaching Eden, the place where Martin expects to make his fortune. As they . . . came more and more towards their journey’s end, the monotonous desolation of the scene increased. . . . A f lat morass, bestrewn with fallen timber; a marsh on which the good growth of the earth seemed to have been wrecked and cast away, that from its decomposing ashes vile and ugly things might rise; where the very trees took the aspect of huge weeds, begotten of the slime from which they sprung, by the hot sun that burnt them up; where fatal maladies, seeking whom they might infect, came forth at night in misty shapes . . . At last they stopped. At Eden too. The waters of the Deluge might have left it but a week before: so choked with slime and matted growth was the hideous swamp which bore that name. (442)

The view from Todgers’s seems, at first glance, an unnecessary “element” in the novel, extraneous to the aims announced in the novel’s opening chapter. Unlike most of Dickens’s openings, which pull us immediately, dramatically, into the action, the opening of Martin Chuzzlewit is a long, ironic genealogy of the Chuzzlewits, who by dint of “their ancient birth [have had] a pretty large share in the foundation and increase of the human family [and indeed] have still many counterparts and prototypes in the Great World about us” [56]. The novel’s title plays with this conceit: does the title refer to Old or Young Martin? If we read the novel

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following the lead of its title and its opening, the purpose of the story is to catch the human family at a moment of portentous transition, the genetic inheritance of horrible Chuzzlewitian self-centeredness about to be dispersed throughout the continents, or anyway from Europe to America, unless the new generation, in the person of Young Martin, can find within itself a way to save the race. It is, throughout, a very close thing, not least because Young Martin is a papier-mache hero. What Dickens shows us of the Chuzzlewits is a diverse family unified, up to if not beyond the last moment, by all varieties of voracious self-interest. Can anything save this bunch? The novel’s way of answering this question is Dickens’s initial attempt to grapple with the impact of his American journey. He anticipated finding in the United States a new departure, a kind of refutation of the premises that, in his eyes, were the foundation for practices, attitudes, valuations he detested in England. He found instead the very things he hated taken to extremes that horrified him.66 Hoping to find in the United States new sources of vitality for his fiction, he found instead of narrative possibilities only endless verbiage. Consequently he wants his readers to see where England might find itself—in the dystopia he, not very subtly, calls Eden—if the system of each against all is not countered. (In contrast, at the close of Mary Barton Gaskell sends her heroine and her heroine’s husband to live and thrive in the new world.) The description of Eden, following fairly closely the description of Cairo in American Notes, emphasizes the heart-of-darkness quality of the place. This is as far from civilization as you are likely to get: but the real distance here is not between the new world and the old as much as between the world before time and history. Here again we come upon the primordial slime that revolted Dickens when he actually traveled the Mississippi; but in this passage he once more associates the slime of Eden with the Deluge, using almost verbatim the words he used to describe, significantly, not the Mississippi or Cairo but the mud of the newly minted Lowell, Massachusetts. The real contrast then is between Lowell or its representations in the novel and Todgers’s, that is, between the brand new American city, built, as it were, in a f lash on the slime left by the Deluge, and hence a city without history, and the vital center of a labyrinth of human purposes accumulated over such a great stretch of time as to be impenetrable, immured by its long chain of associations between past and present. Steven Marcus has superbly captured this Todgers’s: “Congested, shabby, haphazard, impenetrable, irrational, and withal utterly humanized, the visible and palpable presence of a

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complex civilization and its history, eccentric, elaborate, thick, various, outlandish, absurd, Todgers’ . . . very chaos is human, inundated by the past, and reeking of mortality” (257).But if this Todgers’s is a fitting, richly human antithesis to Eden, what about the other one, the one Dorothy Van Ghent so persuasively explicates? Before answering this question let me bring in Fountain Court, which stands in the same relation to the Temple as Todgers’s does to the Monument. After each day’s work Tom has arranged with his sister that he “should always come out of the Temple . . . past the fountain. Coming through Fountain Court, he was just to glance down the steps leading into Garden Court, and to look once all round him; and if Ruth had come to meet him, there he would see her . . . ” Whether there was life enough left in the slow vegetation of Fountain Court for the smoky shrubs to have any consciousness of the brightest and purest-hearted little woman in the world, is a question for gardeners . . . But, that it was a good thing for that same paved yard to have such a delicate little figure f litting through it; that it passed like a smile from the grimy old houses, and the worn f lagstones, and left them duller, darker, sterner than before; there is no sort of doubt. The Temple fountain might have leaped up twenty feet to greet the spring of hopeful maidenhood . . . the chirping sparrows . . . might have held their peace . . . as so fresh a little creature passed . . . old love letters, shut up in iron boxes in the neighbouring offices . . . might have stirred and f luttered with a moment’s recollection of their ancient tenderness, as she went lightly by. Anything might have happened that did not happen, and never will, for the love of Ruth. Something happened, too. . . . Why, the fact is, that Mr Westlock was passing at that moment. (762–763)

Todgers’s lies at the center of a labyrinth that no stranger can penetrate; at Todgers’s the houses and their objects lord it over the people; at Todgers’s urbanity is so begrimed with time that it seems nothing could grow there; that no light could penetrate there; and no human action make any impact there. But Fountain Court has at its center a fountain; its vegetation may be “slow” and “smoky” but it lives; and most important Ruth is not only more potent than the “grimy old houses, and the worn flagstones” but it seems possible that her power of love will brighten up even the “dry and dusty channels of the Law.” And as if to force the point home, whom should she, accidentally, run into just there at Fountain Court except John Westlock, the book’s only altogether sane, competent, and effective person, and so naturally the perfect mate

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for such a delicate, pure-hearted little woman? Whatever we may think about the gross sentimentality of this passage, it clearly serves to advance both plot and theme. But insofar as it does, it depicts a city significantly different from, and significantly more hopeful than, Todgers’s. These contrasts—between the two kinds of elements in Dickens’s composition, between different views both of Todgers’s and of the city— are, I think, ultimately about authority, authority in the moral and political sense, and authority in the guise of the authority of the writer. “The problem of self in Martin Chuzzlewit,” writes Steven Marcus, “is synonymous with the problem of authority. . . . ” [Dickens] saw that authority and morality were in the process of becoming self-made, and that the older forms of authority no longer held in a world given over to self as vigorously and urgently as his own was. Nineteenth-century man was free, in a way man had never been free before, to choose his own authority, to reject old ones, to renovate beliefs and remodel conduct. (225–226)

There is, as Marcus says, a crisis of authority in Martin Chuzzlewit, and it does have to do with the problem of self, or Self. The crisis is clear enough, and maybe best represented by the two Martin Chuzzlewits, the one having violated his authority as Father (or surrogate father) and the other his obligations as Son. But in neither case is the moral trajectory that the character follows either persuasive or exemplary of some universal condition. Old Martin functions either as a mysteriously and extravagantly bitter old man or a deus ex machina: we can hardly generalize from him; and Young Martin, said by Dickens to be the novel’s hero, is feckless from start to finish. 67 He whines about what’s due to him from his grandfather but never acts to secure anything on his own. Each difficulty he faces leaves him resourceless; and were it not for the amazing help he receives from others—Tom, of course Mark, Mary (but Lord knows why), and especially Old Martin—he would surely, and rightly, have been sucked underground into a merited oblivion early in the novel. All the interest of the novel lies outside of these two. For some readers, notably Barbara Hardy, the crux of the matter is that although Dickens wants to show us moral change, to make moral growth compelling, he seems to be able to manage no more than sudden conversions, of which Martin’s is certainly an excellent example. 68 The thematic center of the novel, therefore, in her view, does not hold; there are interesting bits here and there, but the novel makes no coherent statement. “There is no visible relation between Martin’s selfishness and

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the dramatization on a national scale of the hypocritical and aggressive selfishness of America” (Hardy, Martin Chuzzlewit 115). The failures of authority in the novel, for Steven Marcus, mimic the failures of the social and political world. For Marcus “the hypocritical and aggressive selfishness of America” is only the most extreme evidence of a profound modern error, well encapsulated in the slogan laissez-faire. Martin, thinking of what is due to him rather than what he owes others (caught on the wrong end of the opposition between self-centeredness and love), appropriately, therefore, seeks his fortune in the United States, where a whole nation is being “built,” to borrow Dickens’s architectural metaphor, on the false foundation of belief in the possibility that human beings can be made anew if only left to their natural self-development. There is no hope that way, in Marcus’s view: rather “we must turn back toward society, and somehow undertake to live in it” (255). This sounds right, and may even be right as a general truth, but society in Martin Chuzzlewit is grimly unattractive, and no persuasive way of living in it is narrated by Dickens. The book’s opening chapter shows us history as the long unfolding and accumulation over time of human actions and purposes. But the opening also shows that far from being creatures of nineteenth-century laissez-faire, of a modern error, the Chuzzlewits were vile and venal right from the start, aeons ago. In this respect, Dickens as historian resembles Sir Walter Ralegh more than Marx. Ten years after being jailed for treason by James, Ralegh published his ambitious and groundbreaking (and unfinished) The History of the World (1614), the first such work in English. Ralegh saw the record of human affairs as a revelation of God’s will, as “providential.” His history opens with a long account of Creation, contrasting the universal chaos that preceded God’s Creation with the order and plan that followed it. The theme of Ralegh’s whole unfinished book, from the moment of Creation to the development of English history, is of the underlying divine order unfolding below the chaos and disorder of so much misguided human activity. This kind of historical authority is what Marcus attributes to Dickens as a writer. “The transaction between Dickens and his reader,” Marcus writes, “in respect of what is being experienced, or ‘observed,’ is an epitome of the relation between author and audience which characterizes the first major phase of the modern novel” (216). He means that the “presence of the novelist—of his disciplined, magisterial sensibility, acting as a kind of deity, freely creating and controlling the experience he imposes on his readers—is as natural and appropriate here [in Martin Chuzzlewit] as is his absence in the later James and in Joyce” (217).

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The essence of the natural is that we are oblivious to its having been created: it just is. Something that is natural must be the way it is; the very question whether it could take any other form, or of how it came to be, does not arise. No one was more aware of this than Marx, who spent prodigious energy in his writing trying to unmask the apparently natural features of man-made society. Insofar as the writer mimics Godthe-historian he functions, I believe, like Tolstoy in Anna Karenina. Tolstoy’s narration is natural, he narrates as “a kind of deity,” precisely in that we are unaware of him; as I have already said, in Anna Karenina we experience the narration as truth. We are lost in the narration, unaware of ourselves as reading and simply immersed in experience. Gerhard Joseph indicates how different Dickens as narrator is from Tolstoy. Joseph remarks that in reading the mature Dickens, we seem to experience the thrust toward omniscience . . . [Dickens] would become a kind of god, freely creating and controlling experience . . . [Nevertheless] the later Dickens serves to explode the progressivist myth that totalized vision is either feasible or that its mimicry in the novelist’s “omniscience” would supply the redemptive vantage point above a corrupt society. (20)

Joseph concludes that Martin Chuzzlewit “prepares for one of the major emphases of the mature Dickens, his disillusioned sense of man’s (and the artist’s) cognitive limits” (21). To put this slightly differently, I would say that whereas we are unaware of Tolstoy as narrator, deceived into experiencing the narration as truth, we are, in Martin Chuzzlewit, supremely aware of Dickens as narrator precisely because of his dispersal among kinds of narration in the novel. From what vantage point should the unsettling reality of the novel be narrated? Where should Dickens stand, in the middle of the labyrinth leading to Todgers’s or on the roof? Should he be like the wind or like Nadgett? To paraphrase Alexander Welsh, Boz as narrator is everyplace in Martin Chuzzlewit. Consequently, even Dickens’s main effects in the novel can either be contradictory or can appear to be incompletely realized, or both. Chapter 9, “Town and Todgers’,” where Todgers’s first appears, is a good example. The chapter opens with an account of the neighborhood as a “labyrinth, whereof the mystery was known but to a chosen few” (185). These chosen few are never identified—again, Dickens seems to be speaking of himself—but the essence of Todgers’s as labyrinth is its historical density, that is, its having been built not on purpose or with a plan but rather haphazardly over time. Everything

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about Todgers’s is very old. “Among the narrow thoroughfares at hand, there lingered, here and there, an ancient doorway of carved oak, from which, of old, the sounds of revelry and feasting often came, but now these mansions, only used for storehouses, were dark and dull . . . ” (186). But paradoxically this ancient, apparently abandoned quarter is actually full of life; the “wine-merchants and wholesale dealers in grocery-ware had perfect little towns of their own”; tales of “the queer old taverns . . . would fill a goodly book.” The “ancient inhabitants” who frequented these establishments “were much opposed to steam and all new-fangled ways . . . the major part of the company inclined to the belief that virtue went out with hairpowder, and that Old England’s greatness had decayed amain with barbers” (187). Only now do we arrive at Todgers’s itself. The neighborhood, insofar as it represents London as a whole, is affectionately portrayed, a locale full of color and colorful old codgers (the appropriate association Dickens wants us to make with Todgers’?); its essential qualities are all associated with age; the place flourished when England—Old England—was great, and although things sound as if they have gone very badly to seed the quarter clearly continues to flourish. This neighborhood, in the heart of the City, up to this point in Dickens’s description, betrays no evidence of the City as the business and financial center of the modern world. What we first see of Todgers’s itself is also quaint if not archaic, as if the house were a relic of a livelier time and livelier circumstances: [T]he grand mystery of Todgers’ was the cellarage, approachable only by a little back door and a rusty grating: which cellarage within the memory of man had had no connexion with the house . . . and was reported to be full of wealth: though in what shape—whether in silver, brass, or gold, or butts of wine or casks of gunpowder—was a matter of profound uncertainty and supreme indifference to Todgers’, and all its inmates. (187–188)

The description of the top of the house begins with the next sentence: if Dickens had moved us inside without ever having inserted the next two paragraphs, Van Ghent’s explication of the view from Todgers’s could never have been written and we would have a very different sense of the place altogether. Dickens’s effects in this respect depend on our awareness of ourselves as readers and our awareness of Dickens as writer. We are far from Tolstoy. The dizzying encounter between ancient and contemporary London,

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between what we can experience in the labyrinth on the ground and what we can see from the housetop, like the contrast between Dickens’s realistic characters and his amazing types—say between Westlock and Sairey Gamp—draws us up sharply into the realization that we are reading something made-up; the illusion of actually entering another world ends with a jolt. Far from displaying the narrator-as-deity Martin Chuzzlewit, as I read it, repeatedly undermines, or displaces, the totalistic authority of the narrator. In all ways, Martin Chuzzlewit is a novel in search of authority. And this search, I believe, is at once a reaction to, and best understood in the light of, Dickens’s American journey, with its simultaneous impact on Dickens’s outlook and his art. The world as seen from Todgers’s, which shows us not significance but “naked and aggressive existence,” is the world as Dickens saw it before ever going to America. His letters from America, American Notes, and Martin Chuzzlewit show that what he hoped to find in the United States was a different world, a confirmation that people could not only start anew but get somewhere else. He discovered quickly, already in Lowell, how foolish he had been. What he saw in Lowell was that human society, from its primitive life in the slime following the Deluge right up to the present in London, the heart of the civilized world, had never taken any other form than naked and aggressive existence. The Chuzzlewits are not made into modern monsters of Self by laissez-faire; laissez-faire is simply the form that naked and aggressive existence, the life of Self, has taken in the modern world Dickens inhabits. The “quaint old guests” of “the queer old taverns” around Todgers’s represent what Dickens seems to see as a supplanted standard of authority rooted in “Old England’s greatness.” Obviously such a view is self-consciously sentimental and anyway doubtful (what were the Chuzzlewit ancestors up to in Old England?). But still it is the only social standard of authority in a novel otherwise demonstrably anxious about the efficacy of all the sources of authority it can imagine. This may explain Dickens’s sentimentality. Martin Chuzzlewit opens a window onto Dickens’s characteristic oppositions: on one side is Self, capitalized and allegorized. This is one feature of the human since the Fall but rendered especially public, as it were, as the defining quality of the body politic, by the modern industrial system. This self-centeredness, as Dickens sees it, imposes its-self on the world, denies everything and everyone outside the self, recoils from the touch of human sympathy, and exhibits an evil that often as not ends in murder, sometimes murder in a horrible psychological sense but frequently murder pure and simple.69 Opposed to this pernicious self-centeredness is the sacrificial

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selflessness of Dickens’s “good” characters, those who love, or can love, or learn to love, as Young Martin does. But Dickens seems always uncertain that love can act with authority. In Martin Chuzzlewit, the characters who portend death are many, potent, and their moments in the writing make for gripping reading. What can contain, never mind overcome or oppose, Pecksniff, Jonas, Tigg . . . ? Not Tom Pinch or Young Martin, who survive strictly and solely on the provender charitably awarded them by the deus ex machina Old Martin. And in this novel as in all Dickens’s novels his good women are doubted at every turn—not that we doubt their capacity for love but rather that we doubt they can by themselves vouchsafe to love a status in reality that can stand against the force of the evil that surrounds them. There is a further complication, in Martin Chuzzlewit, one that also foreshadows the novels that follow. Social existence in the novel shows us two faces: a public face that masks a whole universe of secrets. Deception is the real currency of the world of Martin Chuzzlewit. Over and over things are not what they seem; worse, almost everyone seems involved in secret machinations. These observations apply obviously to Pecksniff—whose distinctive acts are acts of spying—but even more dramatically to Jonas, Tigg, Sairey Gamp, and, lest we forget, to Old Martin. The world of the novel is a world of schemes, secrets, spying, deception. The characters neatly divide between the gullible and guileless and the schemers. Old Martin is an uncomfortable exception, because it’s essential, if we are to be offered any ray of hope, that the story shows us on what, in such a world, we might rely for safety. How can love triumph? Old Martin’s magical intervention however is no comfort. Tom, Young Martin, Mary, and Ruth cannot take care of themselves. The one, the only ray of hope is John Westlock, and perhaps this explains his otherwise puzzling presence in the novel. Westlock appears at the opening of the novel as the sole figure to see through Pecksniff. His sanity is displayed in the fact that he can assess and judge Pecksniff without bitterness. Then he vanishes from the novel only to reappear after several hundred pages when there’s need of someone to take care of business. The plot could easily have been managed without him. But absent Westlock the novel drifts ominously: Dickens needs him for ballast. Nevertheless Westlock, without occupation, family, social place, is way too thin a reed to pit against the fully developed, engrossing malice of Pecksniff, Jonas, and Tigg. Where can Dickens find a place to stand—a vantage point and a commitment—in this world without authority? Thinking about this question brings Nadgett immediately to mind. Dickens is the Nadgett-like

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ubiquitous observer of the novel, master of surveillance, writing notes to himself, connecting the apparently unrelated personages of his world, uncovering the secret truth, the unseen web of meanings. It’s true that Nadgett has, or appears to have, a master; but famously the great spies are in the game for the sake of the game, and are as likely to control their handlers as the other way around. Like Nadgett, then, Dickens is a rapt, amoral observer. His curiosity, and his negative capability, are attracted to every nook and cranny of the dizzying world visible from Todgers’s. What is exposed in this way can be, as is the case with Nadgett’s discoveries, neither altogether moral nor without danger. Characters such as Mrs. Gamp foreshadow Bertolt Brecht’s “alienated” personages, who never let us forget that we are watching a play even as they rouse us to anger or tears. Similarly, Dorothy Van Ghent’s slap at lazy readings of Dickens—“In the art [sic] of Dickens . . . there is a great deal of ‘inner life’ transposed to other forms than that of character” (27)—also points beyond the nineteenth century to Kafka. The sentimental rendition of the good and guileless in the novel perhaps reflects not so much a moral laziness or anxiety on Dickens’s part, then, as much as that he comes most fully to life, he is most vividly creative, as an observer. From the point of view of the observer, Todgers’s incoherent vista necessarily eludes any effort to reduce it by plot or frame into a single or uniform meaning. It would be pointless to draw a single theme from the aggressive vitality of the city. The authority of the novel in this way resides not in its plot or in its characters or in the deistic manipulations of the author but as it were in itself, in its engrossing act of narration. This is what Phiz captures in his illustration of the novel’s climax, all the characters artfully distributed around the central event, Old Martin with his stick raised, and the volumes of Moliere and Milton literally felling the momentarily cowed Pecksniff. What can overcome Pecksniff, Jason, Tigg; what can salve the naked and aggressive existence of Dickens’s world? Why, Dickens seems to say hopefully, the improvisations of literature can. Coda: You Can’t Go Home Again Literature, however, is not reality; can it be simply an especially beguiling form of veracity? In a world without any authority outside the self, can we lay claim to veracity if we are not devoutly earnest? How can the subjective authority of the self express truths that, if they are not exactly universal, nevertheless tend toward something objective, or at least something more than, and of greater weight than, simply Self? The person to answer these questions at the close of the nineteenth century

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is Henry James. What Dickens might be said to have started in 1842 James brought to a close with the publication of The American Scene in 1907. Dickens’s American Notes poses the problem or problems; The American Scene registers the enormous impact these problems made on literature and society as well as displays, as perhaps no other book does, the “solution” arrived at in response to these problems by the most selfaware literary mind of the age. James arrived in the United States in 1904, after a twenty-one-year absence from his native land. Like Dickens three-quarters of a century earlier, he traveled to the United States after a period of remarkable creative work: in the four years between 1900 and his return to the United States James had published The Sacred Fount, The Ambassadors, The Wings of the Dove, and The Golden Bowl. But these were, unlike Dickens’s books before his first journey to the United States, James’s last books: he wrote no novel after The Golden Bowl. Dickens had come to the United States as a young English writer at the start of his career; James returned to the United States as an ageing Anglo-American writer aware that he was drawing to the end of his career. For these reasons alone, the differences between James’s and Dickens’s books are probably what’s most important; but there are similarities too, which are worth pausing over. The chief similarity between their American experiences is that both found the United States disappointing, unsettling, more often than not revolting, and all in all absent of inspiration. Neither man found anything there to charge his creative energies and James in particular explicitly remarked that his visit was like attending on a “vacancy”: there was nothing there to be garnered; rather, everything depended on the sensibility of the visitor who had “to gouge an interest out [sic] of the vacancy.” 70 But Dickens was subtle, oblique, and guarded—and perhaps, too, not interested in accounting to himself for the grounds of his reactions—compared to James. Dickens gave offense because so much was expected of him in praise from so many people. James however wrote a book that no one could dream of publishing today. Throughout The American Scene James is not simply harsh in his judgment of Americans high and low but vulgar and racist in his writing about Jews, other immigrants, and African-Americans.71 Moreover James is direct and explicit, and argues a developed philosophy, where Dickens was disguised and unref lective. For example, here is James on New Hampshire: A sordid ugliness and shabbiness hung, inveterately, about the wayside “farms,” and all their appurtenances and incidents—above all, about

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their inmates. . . . The teams, the carts, the conveyances in their kinds, the sallow, saturnine natives in charge of them, the enclosures, the fences, the gates, the wayside “bits” of whatever sort, so far as these were referable to human attention or human neglect, kept telling the difference made, in a land of long winters, by the suppression of the two great factors of the familiar English landscape, the squire and the parson. (21)72

The squire and the parson are not at the center of what Dickens might have claimed as the sources of value—at least in 1842—but they do properly represent essential parts of what for both Dickens and James constitutes civilized society. James is quite clear about what he means. He associates the squire and the parson with “scenes, predominantly Anglo-Saxon” (21) whereas, while “other impressions might come and go . . . this affirmed claim of the alien, however immeasurably alien, to share in one’s supreme relation [that is, to one’s country] was everywhere the fixed element, the reminder not to be dodged” (67) in the United States. James doesn’t, actually, dodge: and so, however we may today recoil from his words and his responses, it is important not to evade the fact that here James articulates an absolutely critical emotion of modernity, which is the panic of the settled individual in the face of the constant migration of peoples: One’s supreme relation, as one had always put it, was one’s relation to one’s country—a conception made up so largely of one’s countrymen and one’s countrywomen. Thus it was as if . . . with such a fond tradition of what these products predominantly were [that is, Anglo-Saxon], the idea of the country itself underwent something of that profane overhauling through which it appears to suffer the indignity of change. . . . . To touch [national identity] over much, to pull it about, is to put it in peril of weakening; yet on . . . this readjustment of it in their [sic] monstrous, presumptuous interest, the aliens, in New York, seemed perpetually to insist. (67)

And, since there are so many aliens, James goes on, the natives begin to feel they must adjust. “We must go, in other words, more than half-way to meet them; which is all the difference, for us, between possession and dispossession.” This sense of dispossession, he says, “haunted” him in the streets of New York. Having come back to New York to visit the city of his childhood, he found that his “birth-house” in Washington Place had been torn down (“ruthlessly suppressed”), the effect of which on him “was of having been amputated of half my history” (71).73 Not only had the houses of his youth vanished but the people he held in memory

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as American had also been supplanted—by aliens! Finally the Babel of tongues, says James, was rendering American cities into “torture-rooms of the living idiom” so that whatever the language might become in future, “whatever we shall know it for, certainly, we shall not know it for English” (106).74 American life maybe can be seen as exhibiting a persistent tension, doubtless within as well as between people, between Crevecoeur’s exuberant account of the new republic as a melting pot of peoples, of a society of smallholders enjoying modest but universal prosperity, and James’s panicked sense of American identity as suffering irreparable alteration, or being outright hijacked, by aliens. Although James knows that, whatever he may think of the wave of newcomers into the United States, change is the main theme of life everywhere in his time, he senses that change in the United States is unique and represents a unique social idea. “There are new cities enough about the world,” he says, “but the newness of New York . . . had this mark of its very own . . . [namely, that the] new Paris and the new Rome do at least propose, I think, to be old—one of these days” (84). New York proposes never to be old: it is the capital of perpetual change, constant redefinition, eternal impermanence, daily reinvention. Make It New. For a New Yorker this destroying and building is bracing, inspiring, fun: the lifeblood of an always-up-to-date city. But Dickens experiences this brand-newness as primeval slime. James does not conjure up such a primitive image but rather raises against New York an important, importantly inf luential, argument about the nature of culture and art. Here is James on skyscrapers: Crowned not only with no history, but with no credible possibility of time for history, and consecrated by no uses save the commercial at any cost, they are simply the most piercing notes in that concert of the expensively provisional into which your supreme sense of New York resolves itself. They never begin to speak to you, in the manner of the builded majestics of the world . . . with the authority of things of permanence. . . . One story is good only till another is told, and skyscrapers are the last word of economic ingenuity only till another word be written. (60–61)

Authority derives from history, and history is experience made permanent. When trying to assess the stature of Hawthorne as an artist, James decides that “we render him a poor service in contrasting his proportions with those of a great civilization. [For] the flower of art blooms

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only where the soil is deep . . . it takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature.” 75 This, for James, is the heart of the matter: without history there can be no inner life. In the United States not only is there no history but, worse, James says he found himself “in presence, everywhere, of the refusal to consent to history” (19; my italics). James’s view of culture and art is also Marx’s: culture depends on leisure; leisure is the product of wealth. Ruskin’s and William Morris’s correction of Marx never seems to have fully entered the mainstream: in the face of unemployment, having work always trumped the question of the kind of work one might have. But Ruskin and Morris clearly are right and Marx and James wrong. The vase is beautiful as made. It is an object that serves simultaneously for use and for pleasure. It is beautiful as the outcome both of the labor and the inner eye of the maker. In the American experience, ironically, the appropriation and recasting of tradition and the Anglo-American language by aliens is exactly the secret of the vitality of the American literature. But what’s pertinent here is not whether James’s sociology of art stands up to scrutiny as much as what it reveals about the situation of the novelist in the nineteenth century. It’s one thing that the United States has no history: it’s far worse, it’s wholly disabling from James’s point of view, that it refuses history. If authority depends on permanence, and existence in the nineteenth century is a condition of unprecedented change, then how shall the writer make his art? James in his preface to The American Scene shows that he sees writing that book as entailing an answer to just this question. He naturally is not thrilled with the idea of a travel book that might follow some of Harriet Martineau’s prescriptions for practice: “There are features of the human scene . . . that the newspapers, reports, surveys and bluebooks would seem to confess themselves powerless to ‘handle’ ” (4). The facts may be enormous, unprecedented, but in themselves they offer a very limited insight to the student of “the human scene.” Even so, he says there’s too much there, in the United States, to grasp; for that very reason James has an advantage and can offer us something of special value, he claims, since “artistically concerned as I had been all my days with the human subject, with the appreciation of life itself, and with the consequent question of literary representation, I should not find such matters scant or simple” (4). After a lifetime of writing, James isn’t going to be deceived into thinking that “representing” the United States is a simple matter (as Dickens did, or at least at first). On the contrary, since the United States is the extreme that stands for the

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norm of nineteenth-century life, James tells us he is going to bring a lifetime of thought and practice about such things to his representation of the United States. In this way The American Scene is the enactment of and the manifesto for an aesthetic credo.76 The enormity of the subject draws from James an immediate, maybe misleading, concession, which is that he admits there may well be features of American life that for him will have to remain “impenetrable” (3). Having said that, he adds: “I would take my stand on my gathered impressions, since it was all for them, for them only, that I returned; I would in fact go to the stake for them—which is a sign of the value that I both in particular and in general attach to them” (4). James’s posture as he introduces his book about America is, like Dickens’s so long before him, at once aggressive and defensive. He is going to take a stand; he may have got things wrong, but he would go to the stake for his impressions; for his impressions in particular and in general! But unlike Dickens, James is supremely self-aware; he is not really talking about whether he has read the United States correctly as much as he is talking about how to represent the United States. The sentence is, as it were, about art and not about life. Or rather it is about what sort of art might, in words, convey the experience of life in America. James is at once explicit and exceptionally oblique in his assertion of “gathered impressions” as the sum of his art. He does not outright reject facts, the least personal evidence of things out there; he does however insist that the facts qua facts do not yield up the very thing of which the facts themselves are no more than a kind of summary. The facts both obscure and are different from the experience of the facts. The experience of the facts requires a human sensibility—the facts can never speak for themselves—and can best be conveyed, so James implies, through gathered impressions. His impressions will be both particular—networks or webs of insight about something specific, the impression at least arguably uniting inner and outer, subject and object—and general, by which he means to say something fairly definitive, as I read him, about reality. Reality, the quality that the realist novel seeks to convey, is not in the facts (not, in other words, in the very quality that for so many of her contemporaries made Mary Barton such a powerful book). For one thing, the facts can only be derived from a particular relation to reality, a reality separate from experience, and for James the relation of the writer to reality is, as he over and over describes himself in The American Scene, as “spectator” or “restless analyst.” The disciplined, sensitive awareness of the analyst can reveal, in the language of experience, the meaning of the facts

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(or, as John Lucas puts it, see pp. 17–18, the relation of the facts to experience). James’s spectator therefore is not Martineau’s spectator, well read-up on the foreign scene, well supplied with clipboard and pencils and calipers and system. But neither is he a spectator along the lines of either Bryant or Dickens. Bryant’s avuncular, fastidious, upstanding relation both to his subject and to his reader is way too simple, too commonsense, or, to pick up Hawthorne’s shrewd judgment, too uncultivated for James. And Dickens’s restlessness reaches too much for the out there, is too heedlessly transformative, entering into everything seen, human and nonhuman, living and inanimate without vantage point or fixed reference. James’s sensibility is neither Washingtonian, like Bryant’s, nor Keatsean, like Dickens’s. But neither is James yet ready to accept the existential implications of his aesthetic dislodging of authority, his sense of America as a “vacancy”: Canetti waits in the future. For James, rather, the process of fine discrimination, the registering of the vibrations of experience is at once the way and the destination. James allegorizes the authority of history in his gathered impressions; the two categories are bound in a continual dialogue and speak both for and to one another. The “clue” to this view of things, to use a favorite Jamesean word, is in the way he deals with the overabundance of sense-data, as he reports it, in the United States. “It was perhaps this simple sense of treasure to be gathered in,” he writes upon his first glimpse of Gramercy Park, “it was doubtless this very confidence in the objective reality of impressions . . . that gave a charm [to being again in New York]” (8). “The objective reality of impressions”! What gives James such enormous confidence in something as obviously problematic as the objective reality of impressions? I think he intends The American Scene to serve as a proof not only of how sense impressions can be objective; and not only of what social conditions are necessary to enable the gathering, discriminating, and registering of impressions; but also of how one might write these up, what literary form might actually represent the fine, fast-moving, complex, evanescent-permanence of impressions.77 James intends The American Scene to assert and demonstrate the objective reality of impressions in and through the representative persona of the artist (the restless analyst), that is, in the persona of someone able to “vibrate,” as James would have it, to the vivacity of sensuous messages for the very reason that he vibrates to and is the most refined product of the accumulated experience, the history, of the culture. By means of this aesthetic, James as artist, as narrator, ceases to be “the lone observer,” his characterization of himself on the very last page of

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the book, and becomes the privileged agent of authority. After more than half a century of trial and error, James offers an evidently tenuous but nonetheless ingenious, and, at least brief ly, plausible way of making the relation of the writer and reality, the circle that Dickens’s American journey showed to be broken, once again whole.

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Narrative and the Problem of Evil: The Writer and Mortality

I

n my opening chapter I aimed to show both the importance of and the difficulties with a reading of the past that hopes, at least for starters, to see a work “in its own terms.” One of the most formidable difficulties in attempting to see a work from the nineteenth century in its own terms, I argued, has to do with religion, as the case of Mary Barton illustrates. Just how does the Christianity of Elizabeth Gaskell, the wife of a Unitarian minister, manifest itself in the novel? This is an exceptionally difficult question to answer for several reasons. One reason, for example, is that Gaskell does not seem to impose what Alan Shelston refers to as “the institutional Christianity of the Victorian middle-class” onto the novel (see pp. 34–35). There is no simple way to equate a documentable version of Christianity outside the novel with the presence of Christianity in the novel. But a century and a half after the triumph of what Dickens capitalized as Self, that is, to use Steven Marcus’s words, after a century and a half of self-made authority and morality, trying to equate a Christian or Unitarian set of Victorian beliefs and what we may encounter in any particular novel seems far less useful than finding a way to make the felt experience of nineteenth-century religion at least partially accessible to us today. How might we enter the religious world of the nineteenth-century writer? Can this be done at all? And if it can be done, what will we find? These are the questions I want to address in this chapter. I would like to observe, to begin, that although the usual approaches to the impact of nineteenth-century religion on fiction—say, reference to observance or overt Christian belief—clearly will yield something, they don’t, in my view, get to the heart of the matter. There is nothing there in the reconstructed history of nineteenth-century religion to catch us by surprise or off guard, and so there is nothing that might actually get us to see the world

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CHAPTER THREE

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differently. If we do not learn to see the world differently we will have a hard time seeing beyond our own experience, or nonexperience, of religion. And for this reason, I think, readers today tend to ignore the question of religion; that is, the omnipresence of belief and the habits of belief in the nineteenth century. The question is at too great a remove from our own habits. And I do not want to pretend to any moral superiority on this point: I would not have posed the questions with which this chapter opens had I not read Paul W. Kahn’s Out of Eden: Adam and Eve and the Problem of Evil.1 At first glance the problem of evil must seem an even less likely route of entry to the religious world of the nineteenth century than the usual historical study. For however much the problem of evil may once have troubled many people as a terrifying puzzle within the self and as an obstacle to making sense of the human predicament (a truth threatening to upend all other truths), today, at least in Western society, to speak of evil surely seems melodramatic or stolidly old-fashioned. Aside from the bombast of politics, evil has all but disappeared as a meaningful presence in people’s lives. But Kahn’s compelling book, as I hope to show, offers not only a profound interpretation of evil genuinely of contemporary relevance but also an immensely suggestive paradigm for understanding the development of narrative in the modern era.2 The application of Kahn’s paradigm to a discussion of narrative is well illustrated by the most celebrated works of two young women: Pride and Prejudice, published in 1813 but first drafted in 1796 when Jane Austen was twenty-one; and Frankenstein, published in 1818 when Mary Shelley was twenty-one (drafted in 1816, when she was not yet nineteen). Both books—fiction about the problems of the young by the young—stand planted squarely in two centuries and the impress of where the culture has been and of where it is going is strong in both. One might subtitle both novels: Coming-of-Age in the Waning of the Enlightenment. As turn-of-the-century works both books seek to reclaim authority in the face of doubt, not only doubt about normative beliefs but also about the capacity of narrative to be authoritative. At heart this tension between doubt and authority is about meaning in the absence of certainty, and is in this way related to the problem of evil (and prefigures Martin Chuzzlewit). The root literary question, then, is: How can one fashion an aesthetic for uncertainty? Austen and Shelley adopt almost opposed strategies for addressing this question, strategies that the major writers who follow them—from the Brontes and Dickens to D. H. Lawrence—rely on and develop. I propose here first to offer a brief summary of Kahn’s interpretation of evil, then to look at the problem of evil as it informs Pride and Prejudice and Frankenstein, and

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Consciousness and Evil People in the nineteenth century clearly lived in a world far more religious than our own; consequently, we need to be attentive to the difference between their experience and ours. But can we any longer appreciate the full meaning of this difference? Half a century ago the theologian Paul Tillich addressed just this question in his “The Lost Dimension in Religion” (an essay that appeared in the Saturday Evening Post [!] on June 14, 1958). Tillich says that the “decisive element in the predicament of Western man in our period is his loss of the dimension of depth,” by which he means that we have “lost an answer to the question: What is the meaning of life?” This question, Tillich argues, ref lects an “infinite concern” and cannot be answered in the “horizontal dimension” of modern life. Rather it requires a revaluation of symbols.3 To occupy the dimension of depth we have to be able to think symbolically; but this is a kind of thinking for which we have lost the taste. The enormous value of Kahn’s Out of Eden is precisely that it models symbolic thinking, in particular about our most radical attribute: our awareness of our own mortality. Kahn’s analysis, an extended reading of Genesis and in particular of the second account of creation in Genesis, is compressed in his opening sentence: “Evil makes us human” (1). The original experience of Adam in Genesis 2, Kahn argues, is the experience of an appalling loneliness and incompleteness, a suffering to which even God responds with concern, offering Adam this and that companion until he finally settles on Eve, who is of Adam in that she represents the paradisiacal version of love, what Kahn calls the two-in-one of love. In this reading, evil arrives with creation in the sense that creation immediately ushers human selfconsciousness into being: Adam is always aware of his finitude. Even before the Fall he knows he is incomplete and dependent. This is our condition too. “No life ever realizes its full potential,” Kahn writes, no work of art is adequate to the artist’s full aesthetic vision; and no narrative is adequate to the fullness of experience. In every direction, man knows himself to be more than he can realize. If we begin with this tension, the problem of evil has less to do with the body’s uncontrolled desires than with the problem of a finite will that seeks to realize an infinite meaning. (68)

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finally to sketch how narrative in the long nineteenth century develops Austen’s and Shelley’s concerns and rhetorical strategies.

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Adam chooses Eve over God because he has known life before Eve and found it unbearable. Kahn reads Adam’s eating of the apple as an act of love, of self-sacrifice for the beloved (the sine qua non of love). But now, having eaten, Adam passes from awareness of incompleteness to the awareness of his own death. He experiences longing for a return to the completeness of love, for self-transcendence through love, and also longing for f light from the awareness of death, a desire to deny death and triumph over it. This, “the flight from recognition of mortality,” says Kahn, is what constitutes evil, because in “[r]efusing to recognize one’s own finitude, death is projected on to an other” (3) in a literal or figurative murder. Here is one sense, then, in which evil makes us human. Evil arises from within, and is neither an aberration nor a failure but “an effort [by “the free subject”] to make the world anew, to create meaning on a new basis” by making the self infinite through triumph over death. “Every human action,” therefore, “contains the germ of evil” (11) (perhaps a formulation of the truth Dickens unwillingly discovered in America). In his Fall Adam ceases to be man, and becomes a man (48), a circumstance prefigured by the serpent. The serpent, Kahn says, represents the possibility of action; action is undertaken by singular beings, by, to use the philosophical term, “a subject.” And so “with the appearance of the serpent, we move immediately from a world in which speech is naming to one in which speech is narrative. The possibility of the willed act marks a before and an after, and that is the domain of narrative. Thus the origin of the subject brings together discourse, will, action, and time” (39–40). The serpent is the first rhetorician. Kahn’s analysis in this way shows one essential connection between fiction and the problem of evil. (For Kahn, as for Paul Ricoeur, narrative is a meaningmaking structure—see Toward a Conclusion, in this book.) Kahn sees the story of Adam and Eve as reiterated in the story of Cain and Abel. Love for another requires, Kahn argues, recognition of the other as a subject and thus the ability, the willing-ness “to imagine oneself as an object of that person’s knowledge. . . . To that subject I can appear as just one more object. . . . This thought is inseparable from the thought of death.” Cain, Kahn says, wishes to be immortal, to flee the thought of his own death. “God’s recognition of Abel suggests Abel’s capacity for love, which Cain cannot tolerate. . . . If love forces upon us acknowledgment of our own death, then the avoidance of love is avoidance of death” (127–129). This avoidance can be achieved through literal and also through metaphorical murder. Insofar as murder can be, and in intimate relations usually is, metaphorical “it is not always easy

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to distinguish love from evil” (130). Adam’s story is “the story of selfsacrificing love, the other [Cain’s] of murderous evil. . . . We can overcome shame—the condition of being observed in our nakedness, itself a symbol of death—either by love or murder. Love and murder are bound to each other in the symbolic dimension” (130). Cain, the first murderer, is also the person whom God establishes as the father of countless human generations. Evil makes us human. Irony and Evil in Pride and Prejudice Nevertheless it is hard to see evil in Pride and Prejudice. Error, perhaps, but evil? We do not find evil because of Austen’s irony. Austen’s irony makes the facts of the book bearable and allows her more safely to probe the essential strategy landed society deployed to transcend or overcome death—that is, primogeniture—represented in the novel in its most extreme form, entail. Is primogeniture/entail an expression of love or of evil? It is an expression of love if we accept Alexis de Tocqueville’s account of aristocratic society. Among aristocratic nations, as families remain for centuries in the same condition, often on the same spot, all generations become, as it were, contemporaneous. A man almost always knows his forefathers and respects them; he thinks he already sees his remote descendants and he loves them. He willingly imposes duties on himself toward the former and the latter, and he will frequently sacrifice his personal gratifications to those who went before and to those who will come after him. . . . Men living in aristocratic ages are therefore almost always closely attached to something placed out of their own sphere, and they are often disposed to forget themselves.4

This is love very much in Kahn’s terms. In the face of death the estate becomes the transcendence of the subject, achieved through personal sacrifice. “To find the self in the other,” Kahn writes, “to overcome the subject-object divide without doing violence to either subject or object is love. . . . This experience is at the heart of every experience of ultimate meaning—familial, political, or religious” (119). The aristocrat finds himself not only in one Other but in those family Others who came before and those unknown who will come after. This is what gives his life meaning. Hence the preservation of the estate through primogeniture is an action of unalloyed good; primogeniture reenacts ultimate meaning in each generation not only for the family but by implication for the society as a whole.

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So what could be the problem? I don’t think that the answers that first spring to mind are the ones we should focus on; that is, the problem of siblings and the problem of gender. Although clearly these pose significant threats to primogeniture, they are problems of justice rather than of love and evil. Besides, Austen’s novel is a fascinating structure of male prerogatives and male failures in which the latter, paradoxically, serve in the end to buttress the former. She shrewdly keeps brothers out of the way (and insofar as he is Darcy’s unofficial brother, Wickham shows how disastrous even a gesture in the direction of sharing the estate can be); and the main example of a woman as head of the estate, Lady de Bourgh, does not seem intended to rouse admiration in us about women’s executive capabilities. There are nevertheless plenty of instances of injustice in the novel, related precisely to siblings and gender, and I will return to these—but they are not, in my view, fundamental. What is fundamental is the conf lict, both within and between persons, between transcendence and triumph over death represented by the two sides of primogeniture/entail, the institutional foundation of landed society and therefore the ground of ultimate meaning in the novel. From such a perspective the candidates for evil in the book are Mr. Bennet and Darcy’s father. The book contains—in both senses of the word—a considerable rage against the Father. The failures of the fathers are in each instance the same: denial of their awareness of their own deaths, which Kahn identifies as the opening to evil: “To refuse to imagine my own death is the beginning of evil” (137). This denial applies to Darcy’s father as it does to Mr. Bennet,5 but it is Mr. Bennet whom we see the most of. It goes against the grain, I of course agree, to place evil and Mr. Bennet in the same sentence. If we cut through Austen’s irony, however, we find exhibited in Mr. Bennet a self-absorption so extreme that it has brought his family to the edge of disaster. To appreciate the dread that the novel at once probes and masks, we have to acknowledge the full dimensions of this impending disaster. In the society of the novel, the consequence of Mr. Bennet’s death for his daughters would clearly be comparable to something one might, trying to avoid exaggeration, call social murder (or, in Kahn’s terms, metaphorical murder): they would not literally die, but they would be wholly cast out of “society,” which in the novel seems indistinguishable from life. This is the meaning of Elizabeth’s agonized cry to Darcy upon first hearing of Lydia having run off with Wickham: “ ‘she is lost for ever.’ ”6 Elizabeth does not mean, does not even imply, that Lydia is morally lost; she is however lost to society. We have the sense that, as Elizabeth experiences the situation—now consciously as someone who might be called

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Mrs. Darcy—Lydia will plummet into oblivion, possibly dragging the rest of the family with her. Mr. Bennet’s explanations for his behavior late in the novel (Vol. 3, Ch. 8), such as they are, are hardly persuasive, and are themselves self-indulgent; and we never learn from him just what he imagines might save his daughters from the deadly fate he has chosen for them. Austen acknowledges Mr. Bennet’s folly—Elizabeth, after all, herself states the rebuke—but she too indulges him. It seems inconceivable that he might be capable of evil. He is amusing and good-hearted—and loves Elizabeth above all. The facts of his self-absorption are presented to us, but we are never allowed to feel them as more than endearing lapses. We are eager to forgive him. Few readers, I imagine, are anything but delighted with him. This then is the meaning of Austen’s irony. Through irony the novel recasts the existential problem—awareness of our own deaths—as well as Mr. Bennet’s response to it into a strictly social or domesticated form. The dire facts of the human condition appear in the drawing room almost as quaint, no more serious than Mr. Bennet’s habit of hiding away in his library. And so while the narrative derives its meaning from the underlying, deadly serious existential theme, it entertains us by recasting this theme into a comedy of manners. In this way Austen’s irony allows us to feel the real shudder of apprehension aroused by Mr. Bennet’s relinquishing of his children to oblivion at the same time that it distances and meliorates his action or, more precisely, inaction. Socialized or domesticated, Mr. Bennet’s inaction, in another context properly described as evil, becomes a f law of character, a lapse of judgment, irresponsible but finally more than forgivable. Austen’s system of values does not stray far from reason. What, finally, are we to think of Mr. Bennet’s inaction? He has been unreasonable! This is the harshest judgment within the lexicon of the comedy of manners, because if pain is to be felt beyond reason the comedy ends. This judgment, then, beckons us—Austen, the Bennets, and the reader—into a happily secular domain, the world of rationalism forged by the Enlightenment. The narrative’s ironic embrace of Mr. Bennet is emblematic of the novel’s rhetorical strategy, its formal response to the various crises of authority that it explores, including by implication the authority of fiction itself. Kahn interprets the serpent’s intervention in Genesis as launching narrative in this sequence: discourse, will, action, and time; but the rhetorical strategy of Pride and Prejudice could be read in reverse order. In Genesis, speech (the discourse of free subjects) activates human capacities (choice) and propels Adam and Eve—and us—into

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time (indeed into narrative time, including recollection and anticipation). But Austen demonstrates in Pride and Prejudice that in fiction not only can discourse be all—at once beginning and ending—but also that the movement of the plot (meaning the argument of the novel) and the movement of the story (what happens) can proceed at different speeds and even independently. Time in the novel, famously, is elusive and strange. The various romances of Pride and Prejudice appear to move forward, as we expect, from conf lict to union. But insofar as the novel is set in motion by a crisis in the workings of primogeniture, its ending seems to have occurred even before the first page. The goal of the novel is to return to a place of secure contentment (the essence of conservatism). From Mr. Bennet’s perspective the best thing would be for time to stand still, or better to be pushed back. Having for years denied the possibility of his own death, he is stuck in the ironic (and perilous) stance of a man who knows everything will be fine only if somehow time stands still, his daughters do not grow up, and he does not die. With the exception of an occasional twinge of recognition, Mr. Bennet is in denial about consequences to the very end. In contrast to Mr. Bennet, the enforcers of primogeniture/entail in the novel, Mr. Collins and Lady Catherine, insist on consequences no matter what. That they are comic and grotesque does not change the fact that, perhaps more than any other characters, they speak the truth of power. Both Mr. Bennet’s idiosyncratic and Mr. Collins’s and Lady Catherine’s conventional efforts to deny time and death reveal the novel’s plot as a movement of return, of return, as it were, to a time before time. Continuing backward along the narrative sequence that Kahn finds in Genesis, we move in Pride and Prejudice from the damming up of time to the choices that generated the novel’s crisis—Mr. Bennet’s inaction and the elder Darcy’s writing Wickham into his estate’s future—and finally to the ironic discourse that conveys the story to the reader. In this way Pride and Prejudice ends before its beginning, returning us to a paradisiacal condition prior to the all-butdisastrous actions of Mr. Bennet and the elder Darcy.7 The novel’s irony masks this backward movement, a movement of return. The movement of return is necessitated by the core dilemma of the novel, namely, that a very thin line divides love and evil in primogeniture/entail. The very basis of meaning is shown to bear within it the most destructive elements. Invented as the preserver of value, love, and meaning, primogeniture/entail is exposed as capable of destroying value, love, and meaning. The very foundation of society is at risk. Within the domain of belief primogeniture/entail is the foundation of meaning and the enactment of love, as my allusion to Tocqueville shows.

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But Austen ref lects the impact of the developing ideas of the coming age, disenchanted ideas that finally bring the practice of primogeniture to an end, and thus ideas that create the crisis of meaning at the heart of the novel. The novel responds to this modern crisis through creation of an immensely persuasive narrative discourse, a discourse so compelling and dominating that the reader is drawn utterly into mimicking the valuations of this sophisticated, charming, stern, witty, humanely moral narrator, an actor supremely deft at the politics of persuasion. While reading we marvel at the comprehensive judiciousness of the narrator, her unwavering, sure-footed, wholly reliable, and magnanimous authority. We want to be one of the narrator’s confidants rather than someone of whom she might not quite approve. Who could feel more correctly than the narrator of Pride and Prejudice? Doubt is silenced by the authority of Austen’s ironic narrative voice. In fact, Austen’s discourse succeeds in establishing the authority of fiction by demonstrating how rhetoric can heal and bind the divisive forces of her time, how the problem of evil itself can be contained (socialized and domesticated). But there can be no moving forward, no change, in Pride and Prejudice, because there is no rational solution to the problem posed by primogeniture/entail. At the very heart of Austen’s concluding chapter, with its tying up of loose ends and its glimpse into the future, there is an ominous omission: there is no mention of any children for Darcy and Elizabeth. It is as if even the barest mention of children would threaten the precarious union-of-opposites that Austen’s discourse has achieved. For the presence of children would once again introduce the problem of primogeniture, the problem of how the parents would behave in response to their awareness of their own deaths, the very problem the novel could not resolve. But what about Darcy’s pride, Elizabeth’s prejudice, courtship, the role of the Gardiners, and so forth? Isn’t this a love story? Well, yes, but then so is the story of Adam and Eve. Here once more Kahn is immensely suggestive. We discover from Genesis, he argues, that through love “we learn of good and evil, we learn that our actions do not meet the standard of justice” (110). Not only do our actions not meet the standard of justice, they are, insofar as we are lovers, incompatible and incommensurable with justice, since our overriding commitment, our bond above all bonds, is with the beloved. This bond—as Adam proves—is stronger even than our obligation to the divine. If, however, we “evaluate love under the standard of justice,” says Kahn, then we will quarrel about important but secondary concerns: we “will object to commodification, we will demand autonomy and equality” (119). Bearing these

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distinctions in mind we can say that in Pride and Prejudice injustices are overcome within the realm of reason, the domain, as Kahn observes, of justice. We can see, for example, that the unjust class prejudice against the Gardiners can be made right by reason; and similarly we can say that Darcy’s pride and Elizabeth’s prejudice are overcome by reason. But no amount of reasoning explains their love for each other. We might claim, instead, that their love doesn’t make sense, and indeed that’s the view of more or less everyone in the novel except the lovers. When Elizabeth has to explain why she loves Darcy she is, for once, stumped; she can only affirm her feelings. Because, as Kahn argues, love is “incomprehensible. . . . If we try to explain [why we love], we end up sounding trite” (124). For Kahn love is better understood differently, as inhabiting not the domain of justice but the “domain of the symbolic” (140). This is not to say that the claims of justice are somehow negated or surpassed by the symbolic, but rather that justice is a different kind of category from love. For one thing, the symbol is never fully reducible to reasoned argument nor is it capable of being fully captured by rational analysis. It always “carries something indeterminate and, however we try, there is a residual mystery that escapes our intellects.”8 In Pride and Prejudice injustice is overcome by reason, usually through deployment of one of reason’s powerful weapons, irony. But the novel suspends irony to bless the union of Darcy and Elizabeth and, on the symbolic level, sets their love against the evil of primogeniture. (“Justice cannot cure evil,” writes Kahn, “any more than justice can bring love” [138].) The novel does not, finally, engage the problem of primogeniture within the domain of justice—hence the absence of any talk of children for the book’s lovers—but within the domain of symbols, in which the nonrational residue, a mix of emotion and aesthetics, can achieve a resolution otherwise unattainable. Austen’s ironic discourse can only go so far. In the end it is love that resolves doubt and asserts meaning. This symbolic resolution contains an important aesthetic component. Inseparable from our assent to the proposition of the novel’s ending is the pleasure we take in the thought of Darcy and Elizabeth at Pemberley. We are pleased too by the beauty of the story’s denouement, its lovely tying of the knots. We are pleased by the effortless way in which content becomes form in the novel, and vice versa. This perhaps needs amplification. I mean that Pride and Prejudice can be understood both as the response to an intense awareness of primogeniture as the product of loving and evil impulses and as the “solution” to the crisis of authority that such awareness exposes. The problem is at one and the

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same time explored and resolved. Austen does this through ironic discourse and comic myth (the symbolic love that binds all of the novel’s persons and also all of the novel’s issues). This delightfully authoritative narration lets us have our cake and eat it too, which is perhaps the signal experience of great fiction. To have our cake and eat it too requires that the experience of reading carry an unquestionable authority (unquestioned, in particular, by the reader) founded on the singleness of understanding and feeling. But how can the experience of reading be made to feel real, even more real than life? The nineteenth-century writer most concerned with this distinction—between understanding and feeling—is Soren Kierkegaard, and his idiosyncratic analysis provides a bridge from Austen to Shelley. Like Pride and Prejudice and Frankenstein, Kierkegaard’s best-known work, Fear and Trembling (1843),9 is the book of a young man about a young man’s problem (he wrote it when he was not yet thirty); like Austen and Shelley, Kierkegaard writes in response to the commercial culture of modernity; like Austen and Shelley, Kierkegaard does not write in his own name; and, like Austen, Kierkegaard chooses irony as his chief rhetorical weapon. At the same time, Kierkegaard is a far more self-conscious and sly literary operator than either Austen or Shelley. Although he doesn’t write in his own name, he invents an ironic pseudonym—Johannes de silentio—through whom he can mock the complacent bourgeois that he singles out to be his audience. Johannes is not intended to cloak Kierkegaard in an authority he might not otherwise have, the benefit of anonymous publication for Austen and Shelley. On the contrary, Johannes is Kierkegaard in the form of a philosophical jester or slight-of-hand man. Living in an age of complacent doubt Kierkegaard focuses his work on Abraham, posing the iconoclastic and ironic question of what would have happened had Abraham doubted. The question is provocative and preposterous, but not for the reason Kierkegaard’s straw man, his reader as doubting Thomas, might think, that is, because Abraham had faith. Even more than the readiness to doubt, Kierkegaard is contemptuous of the readiness to declare faith. He demonstrates that no matter how Abraham’s story is interpreted, it remains closed to understanding. Every interpretation ends in the cul-de-sac of paradox or absurdity, a cul-de-sac that you cannot find a way out of through reasoned thought or understanding. To borrow Tillich’s terms, Kierkegaard maintains that Abraham cannot be understood in the horizontal dimension. In the horizontal dimension, “what is left out of the Abraham story is the anguish [sometimes translated as “dread”]” (29). Kierkegaard returns

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to this central point over and over, as if he cannot find another way to knock sense into his foolish reader. If you can’t feel Abraham’s anguish, the story is meaningless. If you can’t experience Abraham’s story as if it were of today rather than of centuries ago, then the story is meaningless. For Kierkegaard this is not a matter of reasoning or thought: no amount of reasoning will make it possible for a person to experience Abraham’s dread. What is required is passion: “Every movement of infinity occurs with passion and no ref lection can bring about a movement. . . . . What we lack today is not ref lection but passion. For that reason our age is really in a sense too tenacious of life to die, for dying is one of the most remarkable leaps” (47 n.). The materialism of modern life seduces the senses and dulls the spirit: well-being and the amazing variety of sensuous pleasures drug us into believing that we cannot possibly be mortal. Here is the serpent’s seductive voice in modern times. Modernity has so recast the foundation of being, Kierkegaard argues, that even those who are not complacent are nonetheless satisfied with reduced, sanitized, or socialized ends for life. At best, good conduct is misunderstood as salvation. But above the ethical, even in contradiction to it, is “the highest passion in a human being” (150), which Kierkegaard names faith. The closest he comes to defining faith is to say it is “the paradox of existence” (53). Like Austen and Shelley, though maybe much more self-consciously, Kierkegaard then sets out to shape an aesthetic for uncertainty or, better, to overcome uncertainty. He chooses an ironic, sarcastic, sideways rhetoric because he wants to take his reader by ambush or puzzlement. The point is not to argue his reader out of doubt but to make the reader feel the limitations or aridity of doubt, its entrapment in the horizontal dimension. In this way he can take the reader from the complacency of doubt to dread in the face of the paradox of existence. What can persuade the reader to see things Kierkegaard’s way? How can the reader be made to feel rather than to reason? The answer, insofar as there is an answer, is what we would today call witness. “I can only refer to my own experience,” Kierkegaard writes at the very end of Fear and Trembling, “that of one who makes no secret of the fact that he has far to go, yet without therefore wishing to deceive either himself or what is great by reducing this latter to triviality” (151). I don’t know whether Kierkegaard would have thought Austen had reduced great issues to triviality but clearly he sees his task as restoring the idea, or maybe just the suspicion, that there are great things and great people. He has consequently chosen a different aesthetic than Austen with which to address uncertainty. Austen places the paradox

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of existence on a social plane, and achieves authority through rational discourse. The novel’s narrative authority derives from her complete confidence that the speech of the narrator will be heard by the reader not as a particular voice transmitting values and judgments but rather as experience itself, containing not the values and judgments of a particular narrator but values and judgments that are universal and hence the reader’s own. In this way Austen’s narrative places her implied reader within a community of readers.10 Kierkegaard’s rhetorical strategies, in contrast, suggest a radical distrust of more or less everyone who might pick up his book. He explicitly identifies a kind of stolid but not very ref lective burgher as his audience, a burgher who sometimes seems an everyday businessman and sometimes seems an intellectual with the habits and outlook of a businessman. Having thus identified his audience Kierkegaard deploys an ironic, often sarcastic rhetoric to expose the shallowness of this figure to the reader, distinguishing audience and reader. Austen aims for authority by asserting the unity of writer, narrator, and reader. But Kierkegaard, writing in and against a far more uncertain context, the context of a complacent, secularized rationalism, opens an ironic space—sometimes quite visible and large, sometimes all but invisible—between audience and reader. He seems unsure that “reader” can mean “community of readers”: his speech has too much of the acid whiff of prophecy to be heard as the voice of the way things are. Finally, when he claims meaning depends on felt experience and writes “I can only refer to my own experience,” not only is he writing in a voice not his own, but his invented reasoner, Johannes, admits he can only take the reader so far and no farther. The final step, the leap of faith to ultimate meaning, has to be made by the reader on his or her own; at best Johannes can point to the nature of this final leap, can make us aware of this leap as an event not in Tillich’s horizontal dimension but in the symbolic dimension of depth. Frankenstein and the Perpetual Self Austen establishes a community of readers; Shelley establishes a single reader, Mrs. Saville. The entire book is addressed to her. But who is she? Why is she singled out as the reader of the narrative? How does her explicit identification as the recipient of the narrative help us understand the narrative? We know little about her except that she is married, is the adventurer Captain Robert Walton’s sister, and lives in England. We can assume that, alongside her brother, she grew up as an orphan in the care of an uncle; we can speculate that she is not very well educated,

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since Walton tells us that his own education was “neglected,”11 though whether, as a girl, she was as “passionately fond of reading” (2) as her brother we can’t say; we can speculate that she is one of the comfortable upper class, though whether she inherited any part of the fortune the Waltons’ cousin left Robert or whether, like the Bennet girls, she was dispossessed by primogeniture, we can’t say. Her most important attribute is that she is Walton’s sister, and it is as a sister that she qualifies for the role of the book’s designated reader: we come across many sisters as the novel progresses, women whose stories it seems can best be appreciated by someone rather like themselves. The ultimate meaning of the novel seems to inhere in the handing over to Mrs. Saville, in the fact that the novel is for her. To grasp the implications of this handing over, a kind of gifting of narrative, requires a reader besides Mrs. Saville, someone who can see her as part of rather than as outside of the narrative. If this is a book for a sister, it can also be read as a book about sisters. Frankenstein is a novel that takes the form of numerous iterations, as if Shelley isn’t quite sure that she has got to the heart of the matter in this version of the story or in that. There is an array of witnesses conveying their immediate experiences: Frankenstein is a book of stories within stories. Like Fear and Trembling it establishes an audience for itself rather than a community. In this respect Austen’s work, appearing to be utterly oblivious of the political context, is in a fundamental way political, whereas Shelley’s novel, appearing to be much more directly engaged in contemporary issues, functions more as myth than as social or political commentary. The key to the novel’s many stories is the story of the Frankenstein family which, like the Adam and Eve myth, is about the close relation of love and evil. We pick up the story of the Frankenstein family, as narrated by Victor, when the elder Frankenstein (Alphonse) is in “the decline of life.” At this time he “[becomes] a husband and the father of a family” (14). The decline of life is usually associated with the prospect of and ref lection on death. But here instead Alphonse becomes a husband and father. Marriage is usually a community affair, a public ritual about the generations (the focus on the marriage celebration in the original Frankenstein movie [1931] is therefore exactly right). And parenthood usually involves “an other” with whom, through sex, one can make a child. These are the features of love. But not quite in this case. The Frankenstein family is curiously isolated and turned in on itself. And the requirements of procreation—sexual relations with another— look less like pleasure or duty in the Frankenstein family story than like a problem to be solved. The family solution to this problem, focused

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almost exclusively on the male figures, turns out to be disastrous, in fact evil. How does the elder Frankenstein become the father of a family? No sooner is Victor embarked on the story of his father than he launches into a digression—or what appears to be a digression—about his father’s friend Beaufort, a wealthy merchant who inexplicably falls into poverty and, in his shame, goes to ground with his daughter, Caroline. We never hear of a wife/mother. We might say that insofar as Frankenstein mimics or ref lects the Adam and Eve myth, it retells the myth with Eve missing. In fact, the point seems to be to get on with generation without a sexual partner. In any event, the loyal Alphonse eventually tracks Beaufort down—but too late, for he comes across Caroline weeping over her father’s coffin. Two years later Alphonse marries Caroline. On the symbolic level, this union results in two offspring: Victor Frankenstein (“the innocent and helpless creature bestowed on them by Heaven” [16]) and the orphaned Elizabeth, adopted into the family as a “gift” for Victor, who looks on her as his “possession” (Shelley’s words; 18). (The younger brother, William, appears in the story as just a victim and cipher rather than, in Kahn’s terms, as a subject.) The incestuous and self-reproducing nature of the family story provides one way of understanding it—and all of the stories in the novel, which ask to be read either in light of the Frankenstein family story or as extensions or aspects of that story. In his analysis of the Adam and Eve myth Kahn observes that in Genesis there are two sources of ultimate meaning, one outside the self and one contained by the self. In the latter case, which Kahn identifies with evil, the “free subject” seeks “to make the world anew, to create meaning on a new basis,” that is, by asserting the self as all. In this “new world—the world of evil . . . death is projected onto the other” (11). Love recognizes ultimate meaning outside the self; evil f lees from that recognition, for such recognition announces the subject’s own death. To overcome one’s existential loneliness, then, Kahn argues one can choose to be with another in the full awareness of one’s own finiteness, of one’s own death; or one can seek to triumph over death by becoming one’s own meaning. But of course for mortal beings there is no escape from death; evil then is “a strategy of denial” of one’s own limits, one’s own death. One triumphs over death, and achieves (a false) immortality, by murdering the other who, by rousing in oneself the recognition of the other as subject, also rouses in oneself the (unbearable) knowledge of one’s own death (37–54 passim). Kahn’s analysis helps explain the Frankenstein family story, and answers one of the most puzzling questions in the novel: Why does Victor want to murder Elizabeth? The story of the Frankenstein family

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is the story of a perpetual self, which might be taken as the sign of incest. The horror of the story does not reside in the violation of a taboo but in the desire to deny death. Few novels, indeed, dramatize denial on such a grand scale as Frankenstein. Beginning with the elder Frankenstein in his declining years, the story of the Frankenstein family can be understood as an effort to deny death by creating meaning within a self-reproducing “family,” a family that proceeds through the generations by a virtual cloning of the male line. This family is autonomous, self-referring, and—obviously—needs no outsiders: Alphonse marries his (step-)daughter, and then provides his son with a sister for a bride. Frankenstein’s dream immediately after he succeeds in bringing his Creature to life shows that Caroline/Elizabeth (and then Justine . . . etc.) are best understood as the same person. The daughter/wife becomes the sister and the sister is the mother. I thought I saw Elizabeth, in the bloom of health, walking in the streets of Ingolstadt. Delighted and surprised, I embraced her, but as I imprinted the first kiss on her lips, they became livid with the hue of death; her features appeared to change, and I thought that I held the corpse of my dead mother in my arms. (35)

The dream reveals Frankenstein’s wish to kill Elizabeth; but even more it reveals the singular identity of the Frankenstein women, each fulfilling in their persons all the female roles. These multiple identities make the need for human relationships with an Other, the essence of love, redundant. Frankenstein, in making his Creature, has taken the family’s logic of self-perpetuation to its ultimate conclusion, and has done away with Eve. Frankenstein’s Creature, then, is the emanation and the embodiment of the family existential strategy, revealing the meaning of the family story. One reason the Creature appears so appallingly grotesque to Frankenstein is that the idea of a subject outside the self, the beloved as truly Other, horrifies him. The first thing Frankenstein sees when he wakes from this dream is “the miserable monster whom [he] had created. He held up the curtain of the bed; and his eyes . . . were fixed on me” (35). Who is this monster? “I considered the being whom I had cast among mankind,” Frankenstein tells us, “endowed with the will and the power to effect purposes of horror . . . in the light of my own vampire, my own spirit let loose from the grave, and forced to destroy all that was dear to me” (51).12 The Creature as double is one of many doubles in nineteenth-century fiction, and is an excellent example of the kind. Why is Frankenstein’s

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vampire “forced” to kill all that he claims is dear to him? Frankenstein’s relation to his Creature is perhaps best informed by Adam’s relation to Cain, which Kahn interprets as a story of the relation of shame to murder. Adam and Eve experience shame as a consequence of a triple observation: they are observed by God, they observe each other, and they imaginatively observe themselves (through choice, which yields selfknowledge). “Shame first arises,” Kahn says, “when the subject imagines himself to be observed, for in the thought of observation is that of judgment” (44). Every human will judge him or herself as falling short—of possibility or potential, and in the context of the Adam and Eve story, of the good (112–113). Observed by his Creation Frankenstein is ashamed, a shame that arises out of self-awareness. Paradoxically, aware of himself as observed, Frankenstein encounters not just Death in the abstract— that capitalized Death which he has naively sought to overcome—but, far worse, his own death. “There is only a short step—perhaps no step at all—from imagining oneself as dead to imagining oneself as murdered. . . . Cain shows us the response to this dread: it is murder” (129). Kahn sees Cain and Abel’s story as an extension of Adam and Eve’s. The myth is opaque on the matter of why God recognizes one brother and not the other, but the fact of God’s recognition, Kahn argues, implies “Abel’s capacity for love, which Cain cannot tolerate” for love “forces upon us acknowledgement of our own death” (127–128). To avoid love, Cain commits murder: “If Cain’s is the power of life and death, then he would be immortal” (128). Adam, Kahn argues, confronts within himself both the potential for love and the potential for evil, since each offers him a strategy for encountering death, which is the burden of his self-consciousness. In the former case Adam chooses Eve and exhibits the essential nature of love, which is self-sacrifice for another. In the latter, Adam-as-Cain chooses to deny his awareness of himself as a limited subject and chooses to wield power over life and death through murder. Frankenstein’s hubris does not then originate in a perverse pursuit of science (knowledge), or in some quirk of character, but instead emerges directly from the Frankenstein family story, from the familial denial of mortality through incest, its strategy for self-perpetuation. Frankenstein is to his Creature as Kafka’s Gregor Samsa is to the bug in The Metamorphosis: the dutiful family man projects the deadly meaning of his (and his family’s) choices onto his “vampire,” who reveals the grotesque truth of the self ’s experience. Frankenstein wants to kill Elizabeth for the same reason Cain wants to kill Abel: to avoid love, to f lee the awareness of his own death. This is not an aberration in Frankenstein so much as it is the emanation of his family’s incestuous

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strategy of self-perpetuation. In appearing to turn his back on his family in his pursuit of science, Frankenstein only reenacts the family story with greater melodrama—and horror—, bringing to life a grotesque, monstrous, murderous child as the true embodiment of his and his family’s strategy of denial. The curiously body-less quality of the novel further emphasizes the strategy of denial. Kahn argues that love “is always an attachment to the body of the beloved [whether] lover/spouse, child, or sovereign” (119). Our attachment to the beloved’s body reveals to us in the most visceral way that we are finite and incomplete; in the presence of sex, Kahn observes, we are never far from death. But in Frankenstein there is neither sex nor bodies since in the Frankenstein family story love is avoided so death can be denied. Elizabeth, representing all of the novel’s women, is an idea in body-less form, and has no physical dimension. We are asked to believe Frankenstein is devoted to her, but we know he does not desire her. Instead he fears that on his wedding night she will cease being his (ideological) possession and will become, against all his wishes, a woman’s body, thereby turning his gift to ashes. To avoid this realization, through his vampire he murders her. There are, in fact, no bodies in the novel except the Creature’s, and even the making of the Creature, although narrated as revolting, lacks bodily detail. The making of the Creature after all ought to be, if anything, intensely physical, involving cutting, hacking, sewing. But the narrative shies away from all things physical, and we are shown almost nothing of this: at best, we only know the Creature physically once he is “born.” Having isolated himself from his family, Frankenstein finds the meaning of his upcoming marriage grotesquely revealed to him in the form he most dreads. The Creature’s fault is not his ugliness but his sheer physicality. Shelley seems uncertain about how to get at the truth of Frankenstein’s story, about its message, and about how to get that message across. She begins as if set on an epistolary novel but then abruptly introduces chapters. We find two main narrators—Walton and Frankenstein— and then an important third narrator in the person of Frankenstein’s Creature, as well as any number of minor narrators telling us yet more stories, each, as I have argued, best understood in the light of the story of the Frankenstein family. And all of this is bound and delivered to Mrs. Saville. Like Kierkegaard, Shelley considers her tale to be instructive. Frankenstein tells Walton that he will find an “apt moral” (13) in his story, and we read on, then, in search of a moral. But, again like Kierkegaard, Shelley seems wary both of her subject and of her reader,

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at once distancing the reader through her main and minor narrative frames and opting for witness as the most persuasive way to make an incredible story credible, to communicate dread. Shelley’s use of multiple narrators clearly foreshadows one of the most common narrative strategies writers will employ in the coming century, usually for her reasons, that is, as a means of making the narrative experience feel as real as possible while at the same time leaving open the question of truth or ultimate meaning. Personal experience has the force of truth, but of course comes across as no more than one, deeply felt point of view, all the more so if the novel conveys its narrative through multiple voices. Shelley’s notion of authority, then, is radically different from Austen’s. Austen establishes a single discourse for writer, narrator, and reader, reaching for the authority of universal experience. But Shelley’s discourse, like Kierkegaard’s, far from being the medium of universal understanding is a rhetorical weapon directed at undermining the selfregard of her main narrators and of the implied reader him- or herself. For Shelley’s discourse is itself the speech of denial, the language of a certain optimistic rationalism that it is fair to identify with the rationalism of the Enlightenment. Here is Walton, in a passage from his first letter to Mrs. Saville: What may not be expected in a country of eternal light? I may there discover the wondrous power which attracts the needle; and may regulate a thousand celestial observations, that require only this voyage to render their seeming eccentricities consistent for ever. I shall satiate my ardent curiosity with the sight of a part of the world never before visited, and may tread a land never before imprinted by the foot of man. These are my enticements, and they are sufficient to conquer all fear of danger or death, and to induce me to commence this laborious voyage with the joy a child feels when he embarks in a little boat . . . on an expedition of discovery up his native river. (2–3)

In his next letter Walton uses a word that well describes this speech, the word “romantic” (4) used in the sense that Flaubert and Conrad will use it later, to mean out of touch with reality, idealistic and noble maybe but in denial of the destructive element, the romanticism not of Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Percy Shelley but of Emma Bovary’s adolescent pulp romances and Jim’s adolescent dreams of adventure. This is an embarrassingly inf lated discourse, lacking self-awareness, self-knowledge, and knowledge of the world, a discourse apt for the sort of rash and foolish person who can shamelessly confess his desire for glory and go on to assert that the quest for glory conquers “all fear of

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danger or death.” In this narrative—Walton’s—and in the book’s many others, including centrally Frankenstein’s, this discourse can be seen as simultaneously expressing nobility and denial. It finds echoes in the world’s many heroic addresses, in the language of adventure—and of conquest. It is a manly rhetoric. More than anything, it is the rhetoric of Enlightenment idealism and rationalism, the rhetoric of Frankenstein’s scientific mentors, and the rhetoric his Creature learns from his abbreviated Humanities core curriculum. When he finally corners his maker, and speaks, the Creature tells the story of our radical aloneness and how it propels us toward love and evil, a story so poignant that even the love-denying Frankenstein is moved. The story is exemplary, and while it may be directed mainly at Frankenstein it is equally a story for Walton, Mrs. Saville, and of course the reader. We as readers are asked not only to ref lect on the story, but on the chain of transmission too. The Creature’s account of his experiences paints a chastening and all-but-unbearable portrait of the dawning of human consciousness. His first emotions are of wonder, delight, and magnanimity. He is good and wishes to do good. But then he glimpses himself in a pool and is appalled by the dreadful mismatch between his inner beauty and his physical appearance. Within, he is the progressive agent (the subject) of ratiocination; but once he observes himself, he suffers the shock of self-knowledge. There is no reasoning this shock away. His shock is profoundly human: we are all lovely inside, to ourselves, filled with good feeling, sound thinking, and great potential, but are forced to come to terms with the brutal fact that this fabulous consciousness inhabits and is the slave of a very f lawed, limited, and unsatisfactory body (the most beautiful people seem as dissatisfied with their looks as the rest of us). In relation to our inner experience we are all outwardly grotesque, and only habit and denial enable us to go on living as if we were not, truly, what we are. We are radically isolated in nature by our entrapment in our bodies, by our existence as our bodies. As Kahn shows in his analysis of Adam and Eve, the myth of origin indicates two responses to this radical aloneness: love and evil, and these are precisely the Creature’s responses. He can’t bear being alone and longs for love. Love can assuage his shocked self-awareness. Rejected, he f lies immediately into a murderous rage. He wants a mate; if he cannot have a mate he will wreak havoc. Still, in Kahn’s terms the Creature confuses justice and love, an error derived from his teachers. “I intended to reason,” he tells Frankenstein (105), but, as Kahn shows, when speaking of love and evil we are out of the range of reason. The Creature wants justice, to be treated fairly,

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to reciprocate: love for love, hate for hate. Having learned well at his studies he makes a civilized mistake, expecting that his injuries will be recognized and that, in the recognition of the injustice he has suffered, he will be rewarded with love. If he cannot have love, he will exterminate the brutes. But Kahn shows that love is better understood in the dimension of depth or on the plane of myth rather than reason. The Creature’s autobiography—at once emotional and intellectual, personal and public (representing us all)—is cast, then, in a discourse unable to include the category of his need. The nobility of intention that Walton, Frankenstein, Felix, and the Creature have in common is at once admirably idealistic and hopelessly out of touch with the foundations of life. They speak an inf lated language, literally af loat above the weight of earthly being. Conrad’s Jim and Kurtz are here anticipated: the language of each of these male adventurers is the puffed-up discourse of an overreaching rationalism. Walton could easily have spoken Kurtz’s lofty addresses upon his departure for the jungle, and then just as easily have written Kurtz’s treatise on the tribes of the Congo. Marlow is endlessly irritated by the lack of self-knowledge, and hence the hypocrisy, of these romantic gentlemen; and yet, he admires them too, for compared with the crass commercial men all around, hollow men, his romantics at least have a reach and a vision. But this vision is mocked and undermined by the very words in which it is expressed. The Enlightenment language of universal reason is exposed as both limited—but apt enough, as far as it goes—and, because it denies its limitations, potentially lethal. No novel is harder on those who make category errors. A prime example of how reason and the domain of justice can cause havoc is the Creature’s romantic expectation of the De Laceys. Having observed them and learned to admire them he reasons that, once he recounts his tale and throws himself on their better judgment, they will embrace and respect him. In other words, the Creature mistakenly assumes that observation can be harmless, and neglects to imagine himself being observed, or neglects to connect what he saw in the pool with what the De Laceys will see. His appeal to a blind man tempts him to neglect the power of imagination and moral vision, to assume that his condition can be easily healed by no more complex a ruse than casting his appearance into shadow. But the Creature’s condition is not so easily healed; it is not a matter simply of appearances. This bitter knowledge is the fate he wishes somehow to escape. His appeal to the elder De Lacey is a form of denial of what the Creature knows most deeply, which is that he is a stranger in the world

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of man and nature, a man made monstrous by his evasion of death. Kahn argues that, upon eating the apple, Adam and Eve not only experience being seen but, more important, suddenly see themselves—as limited, sinful, mortal—and are ashamed. Just as the Creature is Frankenstein’s denial made f lesh, so too he is the De Lacey’s shame made f lesh. In the horizontal dimension he is a reasonable being, seeking justice; in the symbolic dimension, he is what Frankenstein and the De Laceys—and the reader?—would deny, our vampire set loose on the world. The whole package—from the sub-subplots to the Creature’s tale to Frankenstein’s story to Walton’s—is delivered to Mrs. Saville because there is some hope, so it seems, that she can appreciate what has gone wrong. (At the end of the century, Conrad places Marlow in the position of choosing whether to relate Kurtz’s story to his “Intended,” a latter-day Mrs. Saville. In the darkest of the novel’s dark places, he can’t bring himself to do it.) But this “gift” of narrative is a far cry from Austen’s assertion of universal understanding, her establishment through narrative of a community of readers. Nonetheless this sister need not, like the Bennet girls, be dispossessed; if she takes her gift to heart, she will be able to avoid the blind choices made by Caroline and Elizabeth. Unlike these other sisters, she will—perhaps—be able to see through the romantic rhetoric of suitors and adventurers, and be able to live in the world and for real. Shelley forces us upon the “perhaps” in the previous sentence in a way that Austen would not dream of doing, and on this word the two main paths of narrative development in the nineteenth century diverge. Realism, Symbolism, and Eroticism The two paths diverge in this way. In writing along the lines of Pride and Prejudice, uncertainty is met with the assertion of the authority of a rational discourse that binds writer, narrator, and reader in the very same world of meaning, and that leaves no room for doubt (Middlemarch).13 In the writing that instead follows Frankenstein, uncertainty is met by oblique and subjective devices that carefully, sometimes gingerly, explore irrationality, and that resort to storytelling by one or more “unreliable” narrators (Wuthering Heights, Lord Jim). The former tend toward realism, the latter toward symbolism. But these distinctions are matters of emphasis and don’t always hold up. The last nineteenthcentury novel, the work that closes this chapter of the history of fiction, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, combines, or recasts, the realistic and the symbolic in its extended ref lection on the erotic body. I would like to

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close my discussion by pursuing some connections between Dickens and Lawrence, and, in light of Kahn’s analysis, to sketch the case for Lady Chatterley’s Lover as the last nineteenth-century novel.14 Kahn’s paradigm is a symbolic reading of myth. But verisimilitude—the default truth of the nineteenth-century novelist—is neither myth nor symbol but rather the representation in narrative of the nineteenth-century explosion of things. Dorothy Van Ghent, writing about the quality of things in Dickens in “The Dickens World: A View from Todgers’s,” says that “[t]he course of things demonically possessed is to imitate the human, while the course of human possession is to imitate the inhuman. This transposition of attributes . . . is the principal relationship between things and people in the novels of Dickens.”15 Van Ghent’s trenchant observation illuminates what I think is fairly identified as the central experience of the nineteenth century, which is the displacement of nature, and of the human relation to nature, by the unprecedented proliferation of fabulous, imaginative, fascinating, seductive, omnipresent, increasingly essential and inspiriting things, from huge gadgets such as railroad engines to everyday wonders such as pins, soap, and . . . books.16 These things, this mob of things, crowds onto the ground of meaning for all nineteenth-century writers, all of whom have something of the sense that these things have taken on a (monstrous) life of their own. (One reason that Frankenstein’s Creature is monstrous is that he is a man-thing.) The unprecedented experience of the nineteenth century is that the world is now composed not simply of men and women, nature, and human tools (arguably an “extension” of the human)—the human situation for centuries—but of nature, humanity, and things, of things that somehow live on their own. This quality of things, that they are not natural, engages the disturbed attention of every nineteenth-century writer, either obliquely or indirectly, or front and center, as in Dickens. Sometimes things are valued as beneficent and rich in potential for doing good, the view of the industrial visionaries and of, say, Disraeli’s industrial novels. This view can be Dickens’s too. But more often things appear demonic. In either case, this is verisimilitude aspiring to the symbolic. One can approach this tendency of nineteenth-century fiction, the tendency to see in the material world a kind of fate, to make the omnipresence of things symbolic, in another way. The claim of realism is implicitly progressive. In realistic fiction we find a society of accomplished well-being (the vast divide between rich and poor that is the focus of some realistic novels merely underscores the point) and sophisticated awareness. These works, the fiction of the nineteenth century,

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are, sometimes implicitly but usually explicitly, the writings of modern men and women and everything about them proclaims an idea of civilization—the real world around and the fictional world within the book—as advanced, as above and beyond the more primitive human eras for which myth was a meaningful epistemology. And so, inexorably, the domain of meaning appropriate to myth, that is symbolism, is also left behind. Evil is translated from the mythic and existential to the social or historical plane. The human condition is made historical and the individual life is understood less on the plane of being than in relation to social constructs. There is a kind of forefronting of the commoditization of everyday life; every nineteenth-century writer depicts this experience in some fashion. The materiality of the novel, its gorgeous and substantial appearance in cloth or leather covers, is itself an aspect of the commoditization of the late eighteenth- and of the nineteenth-century worlds. The novel is first and foremost an object among objects. The very materiality of the novel in this way doubtless contributed to its status and authority.17 Not only is the object expensive and beautiful, but it proclaims itself as a notable player in the new world, the world of things living, the world of commodities in which things have become experience, power, and meaning. This external material heft is represented within the book by the language of narration. The narrative voice is the voice of authority, not the voice of the individual but the voice of the culture or the society expressed in what we can recognize as Standard English. The community of readers is implicitly the community addressed in a common language—Standard English—by the narrators of fiction. You might say the novel brought this community into existence as a sort of parallel to the actual communities of the nineteenth century, since very few people, if any one at all, actually spoke Standard English. The situation may consequently seem profoundly ironic but nonetheless, insofar as every novel was narrated in Standard English, the extraordinary impact of fiction was to establish an unacknowledged and maybe unnoticed yet extremely powerful form of authority outside of the usual venues of politics. Nothing about the nineteenth-century English novel was more political than this almost subliminal establishment of a normative language. It is true of course that there is something of a contrary story to be recorded, too. Against the three-volume leather edition we can place the cheap serialized version; against the universalizing omniscient narrator we can place the first-person witness, subjectively affirming his or her individual experience; against the conventional language of rule we can

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place the local or class dialect. The novel in this way at once ref lects and strains against the new social realities. In particular the explosion of things distracts the writer, since nothing can be done before he or she finds a way to convey this unprecedented experience of life. In this respect verisimilitude signals the primary rhetorical move every nineteenth-century writer had to make, that is, the depiction of the unprecedented experience of the world created by the machine system. Before speaking about how Dickens and Lawrence handled this dilemma, I want to raise two closely related questions. The first has to do with how to convey the most deep-seated, utterly familiar, and yet, curiously, almost invisible relationship in Victorian society—the relationship among classes. I don’t mean that writers somehow missed the fact that they lived in a world of strict class distinctions. But I do mean that these were taken so much as the way things are—of course there are strict class distinctions—that they often tend to appear in the novels simply as a given. Most important for fiction is that, in England, these distinctions among classes are significantly a matter of language (see Pygmalion), of speech, and this means an intricate modulation of feelings within sounds, impossible to avoid yet as impossible to stand outside of, a kind of aural periodic table distinguishing among fine but utterly rigid human placements. Thus, when something other than Standard English appears in a text, the effect is, and was, startling: “ ‘I donno want it for mysel’, tho’ we’ve none to spare. But don yet know Ben Davenport as worked at Carsons? He’s down wi’ the fever, and ne’er a stick o’ fire nor a cowd potato in the house’ ” (59). This is a speech, taken at random, from Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton. One of the novel’s notable achievements (see chapter one) is that it enables the workers to speak for themselves. Gaskell intended this literally. She wished the Manchester factory workers to be accurately represented in their native Lancashire-ese and not as in, say, Disraeli’s Sybil (1846), in some transmogrified form of speech, or, worse, in the language of their masters. But much to Gaskell’s irritation, her publisher, Edward Chapman, standardized some of her spelling and added dialect glosses. The passage just quoted, for example, came with a reference to Chaucer to justify the use of “don” for “do”—“But for th’entent to don this sinne”—and the following to explain “cowd”: “cold. Teut. Kaud. Dutch, koud ” (59). For all of Gaskell’s good intentions, even she does not succeed in breaking free of the web of class-bound language. Her heroine, Mary Barton, for example, with whom Gaskell wants the reader to identify, alone among the workers does not speak in dialect; and the language of narration in the novel is, as it has to be, Standard English. When all the characters

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in a work speak the same English; and when that English is also the English of the work’s narration, the differences of class (and of region) are, at the least, masked and at the worst denied. When characters are allowed to speak in their own voices—unusual—they are nonetheless contextualized as Other within the normative language of narration. When the central characters are not upper class and the narrative is written in the language that they speak—rare—most readers are alienated from the work simply because they now have to struggle to figure out what is being said (dialect translated into nonorthodox spellings often defeats comprehension even by those who speak the dialect). Is there any escape from these contraries?18 A similar, and related, difficulty to class, intricate, nuanced, and complicated, confronts the nineteenth-century writer when it comes to the necessity of noting, somehow, that characters, especially female characters, have bodies. Here too things can seem to displace even the most erotic bodily parts. In Great Expectations, for example, Pip’s sister (so little his sister that he has no filial name for her, and calls her “Mrs. Joe”) torments him with the varieties of her self-sacrifice, including notably that she raised him “by hand,” that is, by bottle rather than breast. But, in a bit of grotesque slapstick, Dickens describes Mrs. Joe as not only breastless but bristling with pins and needles instead of nipples. She was tall and bony, almost always wore a coarse apron . . . having a square impregnable bib in front, that was stuck full of pins and needles. She made it a powerful merit in herself, and a strong reproach against Joe, that she wore this apron so much. Though I really see no reason why she should have worn it at all: or why, if she did wear it at all, she should not have taken it off, every day of her life. (8).19

A good deal of Great Expectations is prefigured in this early passage, with its apparently unaware but nonetheless definitive moral judgments. The good-natured and naturally good blacksmith and the innocent younger brother are tormented by the unnatural repression of bodily vitality and indeed of the very fact of the body on the part of Mrs. Joe, who has chosen to don her literal and figurative armor as a permanent fixture, a comical but nonetheless painful emblem of her hypocritical, life-destroying inner self. Joe and Mrs. Joe, little wonder, have not managed to produce any children. When, at the novel’s close, Pip encounters Biddy and Joe’s son, whom he takes to be none other than himself as a child, the novel neatly comes full circle, showing what could have been Pip’s

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home, what ought to have been Pip’s home had the first Mrs. Joe been a woman of f lesh rather than pins and needles. In this way the novel is impelled, as it were, by the first Mrs. Joe and is brought to resolution by the second. These concerns—with how to convey the transformed, unprecedented reality of everyday life, the intricate relations of classes, and the body itself—seem to engage, delight, inspire, and exasperate every nineteenth-century writer. In Lady Chatterley’s Lover Lawrence brings each of these topics or, as they became for nineteenth-century writers, dilemmas, toward something like resolution. Above all, Lady Chatterley’s Lover—like all of Lawrence’s work?—is an angry protest against realism, that is, against the devaluing or gutting of the symbolic dimension by what Lawrence called, drawing on the language of the Condition of England debates, the mechanical. 20 In this respect, Lawrence ref lects the broader modernist dissatisfaction with realism. But unlike, say, Virginia Woolf, whose objection is not to verisimilitude per se but rather to the version of verisimilitude that she attributes to the late Victorians—“life,” she says is not like that: it’s like this—Lawrence wants to use the novel to resacralize experience, to break through the world of things and gain access once more to the symbolic dimension. Lawrence’s moral aesthetic, it seems important to note, is strikingly like that of Pablo Picasso. 21 At a crossroads in the process of his composition of Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, which he completed in 1907, Picasso visited the Musee d’Ethnographie du Trocadero. His encounter with the African figures, masks, and artifacts at the Musee brought him to a sort of Laurentian epiphany. “At that moment,” he said, “I realized that this was what painting was all about” (Demoiselles 121). I understand Picasso to mean that through the ritual of giving form to the interior forces of man and nature, art can make us “see,” make us come alive to our circumstances in the world, and in doing so can liberate the individual from the thrall of mere externals (a function of myth). Art in this way is a talisman against superstition (the superstition that nature is arbitrary). For the Picasso of Demoiselles, then, as for the Lawrence of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, art is a religious activity, erotic, creative, ritualistic, magical, curative, formative, transformative, symbolic. Art may be the product of disciplined observation, but the aim of observation, in this view, is not mimicry or objectification but vision. I am not sure whether Picasso fully grasped the nature of the African world represented by the objects exhibited at the Trocadero. But what he clearly did grasp was the difference between realistic representation and symbolism. He recognized in the function of African art a making

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of meaning, a habit of mind, a relation to experience, radically different from realism. 22 The symbolizing African world that propelled Picasso into a new understanding of art, the world of scarcity, locality, and orality, is however at a very great remove from the world of the Great Age of Reading and of the urban upheaval of nascent industrial capitalism. Not only is the nineteenth-century European writer, to use our contemporary categories, a first-world citizen looking out self-consciously on the rest of the world, but the very conditions of his life raise a formidable obstacle between depicting “what is there” to symbol, and that is, simply put, the industrial age. Nowhere is this clearer than in Dickens. Here, for example, is a passage from Hard Times, the nineteenth-century novel most necessary to Lady Chatterley. It was a town of red brick, or of brick that would have been red if the smoke and ashes had allowed it; but as matters stood it was a town of unnatural red and black like the painted face of a savage. It was a town of machinery and tall chimneys out of which interminable serpents of smoke trailed themselves for ever and ever . . . [ . . . a town] where the piston of the steam-engine worked monotonously up and down like the head of an elephant in a state of melancholy madness. 23

This description of Coketown, from the opening of the novel’s fifth chapter, shows Dickens aiming to convey the essence of the industrial scene, to capture both its materiality and, through this very concreteness, its symbolic meaning. The passage fixes on bricks, machines, chimneys. But almost immediately Dickens reaches for comparisons. We know that in the novel’s plot the hardness of the physical world is mirrored by the hardness of the industrial outlook, the worldview of Gradgrind and Bounderby. Still, the problems of describing Coketown pose the fundamental rhetorical dilemma. If things have become meaningful in themselves—the material world as fate—then naming them should register their meaning. Aiming to say that the world has been taken over by the horizontal dimension of things, Dickens is compelled nevertheless, and understandably, to note the meaning of this takeover in the dimension of depth. But as this passage demonstrates, even Dickens, usually a man of amazing verbal facility, finds bringing out the inner meaning of these demonic outer things very hard to do. In the three key comparisons of the passage (the “Keynote” Dickens calls it), the three places where Dickens departs from simple declarative information, he seems quite literally at a loss for words. The town is smeared black by

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smoke: how should this be evocatively conveyed? Dickens compares the face of the houses to “the painted face of a savage” (he originally wrote: “the painted face of an ugly savage”; [n. 245]). The smoke pouring from the factory chimneys is compared to serpents, and the steam engine pistons to the “head of an elephant in a state of melancholy madness.” Dickens’s readers, in 1854, are almost certain to have seen snakes, and obviously the evil connotations of “serpent” can have escaped no one; 24 but few will have had any encounter with either “savages”—and whom exactly does Dickens have in mind?—or elephants (not to say mad elephants). The wild west shows were still a way off (Buffalo Bill was not born until 1846) and whereas some poor elephant was displayed at Versailles as early as 1665, Jumbo didn’t arrive at the London Zoo until 1865, about the time elephants assumed their modern role in the circus (is that elephant invoked because Dickens is thinking about Sleary’s Circus?). In short, when Dickens wants to convey the essential quality of industrial life, the transformation of everyday experience in his time, he reaches for comparisons from biblical banalities or from the alien and exotic. The comparisons are either formulaic or outside the range of his audience’s experience. It is difficult to judge whether these comparisons are effective. Is the contrast between the mechanical and the organic (the state of nature) a brilliant, powerful, and even economical way of getting across the idea of just how alien to nature modern factory production and its attendant civilization truly are? Is the new industrial civilization driving nature mad? Or is the recourse to the mad, melancholy elephant totally misleading and artificial, making the reality of industrial production something falsely exotic, something akin to what you might find on tour in the tropics? It is hard to say. One reason it is hard to say is because, as Kahn observes, “[i]n the abstract, we can never say what is natural and what is conventional. Any particular context can be described as natural or conventional; we cannot know which it is in advance of a particular argumentative situation” (151). The red and black of the buildings are “unnatural” Dickens says. The colors are unnatural because . . . but here, the moment we pause to think over what Dickens is getting at, we come across something of a puzzle or better a maze. It seems Dickens is saying the colors are unnatural because they are man-made; but obviously that is not what he means. He means that the factories—the mechanical—are unnatural because they are ugly, oppressive (an environment of smoke rather than air), monolithic, monotonous, and in these ways inhuman or antihuman. But even as one writes out this list, the argument seems insufficient and unsatisfactory. For one thing, since what

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Dickens approves is implied in what he disapproves, it does seem he has a notion of what’s natural that excludes the man-made as hostile to human well-being but as this formulation immediately shows, such a position is untenable (although Lawrence will make a similar argument). Another reason Dickens’s stance is unsatisfactory is the reason Kahn adduces in the aforementioned quotation, namely, that there is nothing inherently unnatural about what he attributes to the factories: each of his implicit objections depend on a certain worldview to make sense. This was the precise reason why F. R. Leavis was so taken with Hard Times at a period of his life when he didn’t much like any other work of Dickens: he found in Hard Times, “for once” in Dickens, a “comprehensive vision.” 25 And on this basis he associated Dickens with Lawrence. But although at the heart of Hard Times there is a coherent argument—that a “hard” morality and a hard education in child-choking facts is the direct ref lection and equivalent of a hard industrial outlook—the novel as a whole is full of incoherencies. Is the problem with Bounderby, for example, really that he has obscured his comfortable upbringing? Is Sleary’s Circus an appropriate counter to the factory system? Dickens’s analogies seem to draw less on the unnatural than on nature gone mad or dangerous, like his elephant or painted savage or evil serpent. On the one hand, the novel is vulnerable to a simple political objection, which is that a critique of an “unnatural” system of production and education requires an alternative model of “natural” production and education. But what would be natural, given Dickens’s comparisons? Unpainted savages? Moreover, Dickens’s chief vehicle for a different way of being, Sleary’s circus, looks absurd in this light, that is, as a sociopolitical alternative to industrial capitalism. On the other hand, if the contraries are love and evil, then Sleary’s Circus looks altogether different, at least on the symbolic level. Still, it needs to be said that there’s nothing “natural” about Sleary’s: it’s as man-made as anything else in the human world, which is after all, from Genesis on, a world that, if it is not exactly unnatural, is nonetheless apart from nature. “Man is fully himself,” Kahn says, “only in a world of human convention” (149)—and what could be more conventional than art, that is, than the forms of imagination, one of which is the circus? This very same dilemma—how to reclaim nature within society; how to use convention (the novel) to transcend convention—will plague Lawrence too. In his case the task might be recast as a quest for a transformed and updated Genesis. He wants to rediscover love and rename or reconceive evil and so needs a new form and a new language. A good

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place to look at how Lawrence goes about this work is Chapter XI of Lady Chatterley’s Lover. 26 The chapter opens with Connie and Mrs. Bolton sorting out one of Wragby’s lumber rooms and coming across “the old family cradle.” From this beginning Lawrence pursues a subtle, complex, many-faceted, and, one might even say, comprehensive exploration, at once personal and public, realistic and symbolic, of everything having to do with an old family cradle. It is apt (not to say kinky) that the two women should be undertaking this task together, one the lady of the manor, and the other . . . well, Mrs. Bolton fills many roles for Connie, including serving as a sort of surrogate mother as well as servant, confidante, and of course as her replacement as Clifford’s nurse, intellectual companion, and sexual partner. The women are at once very close and in cahoots, and yet propelled in opposite directions: Connie striding with increasing pride to break free of Clifford’s perversions, Mrs. Bolton fascinated by them and drawn to them. You might say that it is their common task to sort out the house’s lumber rooms. (The cradle is carefully wrapped up “to preserve it from damage and dry-rot.”) Mrs. Bolton gets things going by saying it’s too bad there’ll be no use for the cradle but Connie replies (“casually, as if saying she might have a new hat”): “ ‘It might be called for. I might have a child.’ ” Connie is thinking of Clifford’s hope that his “seed” might somehow be “transferred” but more that “she would have a child if she could”: however, not Clifford’s. And Mrs. Bolton, a woman whom Lawrence portrays very sympathetically and about whom he says in particular that she had known the full power of sexual love, immediately thinks to herself, “Is it Oliver Mellors’ child you’re preparing us for? Oh my dear, that would be a Tevershall baby in the Wragby cradle, my word! Wouldn’t shame it, neither!” (147–148). 27 The social and political implications of this many-layered exchange are underscored, on the male side, when a neighboring squire of the older generation, Leslie Winter (“every inch a gentleman”), comes to call on Clifford. Lawrence is fond of these old gentlemen, whom he sees as proud, hearty, the real thing. Lawrence’s Nietzschean fascination with will is absent in Dickens. Dickens’s willful characters are studies in grotesque manipulation of others; and his aristocrats are rarely portrayed sympathetically. But Lawrence admires the old England, with its amour propre and noblesse oblige, an England of vivid men and women and, despite the coal mines, of a thriving countryside. He wishes that old England could be reclaimed; and, insofar as he is out to revivify, he means to speak both to the upper- and the lower classes. Winter (!), whose kind are leaving the land (he is the last of them), asks with

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pointed interest—self-interest and magnanimity both—if there’s anything to the rumor “that we may entertain hopes of an heir to Wragby?” Clifford replies (“uneasily”) that indeed there is a hope, and when Winter has left he runs the rumor by Connie. “ ‘Is it a joke,’ ” she asks, “ ‘or malice?’ ” “ ‘I hope,’ ” answers Clifford, “ ‘it may be a prophecy’ ” (149–150). It is all three, an ironic triad. The joke of course is on Clifford but then Mellors and Connie have the sense throughout that a nasty joke has been played on them—by the accidents of their births; by the times—the War and the industrial system and the marriage and divorce laws; by the class system. Love is shadowed by powerful and destructive social forces, and mocked. The novel’s defense of love is an appeal, like Clifford’s appeal, to prophecy. Lawrence has taken the core question of the nineteenth-century English novel—Who shall inherit the estate?—, transplanted it into the industrial Midlands, and, as it were, made it flesh. His representation of the Midlands, as Connie is driven to the village on an errand, refers directly back to the fifth chapter of the first volume of Hard Times. The car ploughed uphill through the long squalid straggle of Tevershall, the blackened brick dwellings, the black slate roofs . . . the mud black with coal-dust, the pavements wet and black. It was as if dismalness had soaked through and through everything. The utter negation of natural beauty, the utter negation of the gladness of life, the utter absence of the instinct for shapely beauty which every bird and beast has, the utter death of the human intuitive faculty was appalling . . . and the new big Primitive chapel. . . . The Wesleyan chapel, higher up, was of blackened brick and stood behind iron railings and blackened shrubs. The Congregational chapel . . . was built of rusticated sandstone. . . . Just beyond were the new school buildings, expensive pink brick . . . mixing the suggestion of a chapel and a prison. The Standard Five girls were having a singing lesson. . . . Anything unlike song, spontaneous song, would be impossible to imagine. . . . It was not like savages: savages have subtle rhythms. . . . What could possibly become of such a people, a people in whom the living intuitive faculty was dead as nails, and only queer mechanical yells and uncanny will-power remained? (152)28

Lawrence, like Dickens, is appalled and indignant. But much more explicit. There’s no doubt about what Lawrence means by “natural”; his savages (like Picasso’s) are admired as authentic, truly primitive, that is, subtle, intuitive, vivid. 29 The main difference between the passages, however, is that Lawrence narrates the experience through Connie’s eyes.

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Even if she speaks his thoughts, his propaganda, if you like, still the difference is definitive the moment Lawrence comes to the heart of the matter, to the problem of making a baby. At this point in the novel, about half-way, Connie has been aroused into what Lawrence would call bodily awareness; she has not yet experienced the full power of her sexuality or the full meaning of making life; but she has got this far: to make a baby she knows she needs a man. As her car is leaving Tevershall on the way to Uthwaite, her destination, she passes trucks carrying steel workers for an excursion. She is horrified: “With such creatures for the industrial masses, and the upper classes as she knew them, there was no hope . . . Yet she was wanting a baby, an heir to Wragby! An heir to Wragby! She shuddered with dread” (153). Connie’s revulsion is not ideological: she is horrified at the thought of taking one of these men, the miners or steelworkers (“weird distorted smallish beings”), to her bed. Lawrence draws directly on the early chapters of Hard Times as though he were simply continuing a conversation that Dickens had begun. Dickens, Dickens-the-Victorian, could not take the conversation to the place Lawrence does, yet both men take their stand with the intuitive against the mechanical. For Dickens the intuitive includes imagination and fellowship; its implications for both politics and relationship, however, are muddled. For Lawrence, intuition is of the body and he is quite clear that everything comes of the body. He follows the implications of this view of human being to its full conclusion, as no writer of the nineteenth century had been able to. When Lawrence says body, moreover, he means body: “ ‘An’ if tha shits an’ if tha pisses, I’m glad. I don’t want a woman as couldna shit nor piss. . . . Here tha shits an’ here tha pisses: an’ I lay my hand on ‘em both, an’ I like thee for it.’ ” (223) Lawrence is often embarrassing or offensive but not in passages such as these. Nor is what Mellors says here to Connie, well, obvious. There is in fact nothing obvious about it. In the Western tradition the naked female body is either too unhinging to observe and is, therefore, in life and in art, taboo; or too gross to observe and, therefore, appears, in life and in art, obscured, sanitized, or idealized. Gustave Courbet’s “The Origin of the World” (1866), the exception that proves the rule, provides a helpful comparison to Lawrence. You might say Courbet’s painting is the height of verisimilitude. The painting is almost without affect: there is no emotion except interest in the facts (whether there’s an inescapably voyeuristic quality to the painting, I will leave to one side). The beauty and propriety of the painting reside in its realism. Clearly, for Lawrence, in contrast, the body, and in particular (to use the word he would have insisted on) the cunt, is charged with emotion,

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is emotion made f lesh. This is the basis for its iconic status, that is, its possibility of being at once the very essence of the physical and a symbol. But Courbet’s painting is rendered and structured in a way that could easily be mistaken for, say, the work of Titian or Veronese (look at the draped cloth, for example). So even this radical work belongs within the tradition of representation of the female nude, a tradition in which women are frequently represented at their toilette—but not, as Lawrence does more or less, on the toilet. And yet, in working against the Western view, the view from Eden, as it were, that sees the human body as fallen, Courbet and Lawrence confront the same vexing and fundamental aesthetic problem. “The nude that is the object of beauty in art,” writes Kahn, “is not the shameful, naked body of Genesis two. It may indeed be the divine image of Genesis one. Nevertheless, from the perspective of the Fall, recovery of that image is the product of the labor of culture” (149). Lawrence wants to say that the naked body, male and female, and everything about the body and sex, is natural (which is Courbet’s point in a more limited way). But quite clearly in neither Courbet’s painting nor Lawrence’s novel does “natural” mean much without context, and in particular the context of convention. Courbet accepts the epistemology behind the Renaissance portrayal of nature and relies on the Renaissance manner and its authority to justify his painting. Perhaps the argument is a little arch and disingenuous, but his manner of coloring, representation, and composition all say: Why, this is no more than emulation of the great masters, the fathers of painterly convention. (Something of the same argument was made at the trial of Lady Chatterley in the 1960s.) But Lawrence’s novel, as I have already said, is a protest against realism. Like Dickens, he wants at one and the same time to depict the horizontal dimension as it has never been depicted before—to catch the streamingness of things, as George Levine puts it—and at the same time and by the same means to break into the dimension of depth. So not only does Lawrence’s body include everything about the body, but Lawrence wants to make us experience the symbolic meaning of the body. In trying to overturn, or cut through, convention he is forced nonetheless, as an artist, to employ convention, a necessity that sometimes invites misreadings of the novel. It is not easy to look at Clifford with sympathy, for example; nonetheless, as a matter of realism, in the horizontal dimension, Clifford’s effort to cope with his condition can seem if not admirable then at least perfectly understandable. What is he to do? Since he cannot have sex, why is it offensive that he dreams of transferring his seed to Connie by

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some mechanical means? Don’t many people today conceive children more or less that way? And if that isn’t possible, why is his willingness to let Connie have a child by another man reprehensible, or worse? There are many possible answers to these and other similar questions one might pose, in the horizontal dimension, as if the novel ought to be read as mimicry of life. But of course that isn’t how the novel ought to be read. If we stop in the horizontal dimension we lose the novel altogether and are stranded among psychological or sociological dilemmas or sexual techniques.30 But in the symbolic dimension Clifford is depicted with great clarity: he is the voice and agent of evil. In depicting him as evil Lawrence succeeds where Dickens, in Hard Times, failed. Clifford is at once the product and the agent of his age, which Lawrence sees as murderous in every respect. Lawrence sketches the basic facts about Clifford in his sarcastic opening paragraphs, which can be read as a sort of anticreation myth. Destiny or Divinity, instead of making a man and a woman in its image, has turned destroyer; the “cataclysm,” Lawrence says, choosing a word originally used to refer to the Flood in Genesis, “has happened” (5) and has left the world in bits, among them the bits of Clifford’s body. Like Frankenstein’s Creature, Clifford has been patched together a little crudely: his pieces are put together but he comes through crippled and impotent. His is not the beautiful body of Genesis 1 but rather a broken body, grotesque, the creation not of God but of a perverse, heedless, death-denying, manmade modernity, Frankenstein become the culture as a whole. Clifford, however, unlike Frankenstein’s Creature, embraces the spirit of his age and acts as its agent. The idolatry that has heedlessly put him together, fathered him, is what he worships. It is as if Frankenstein and his Creature had become one, the broken body now the proper manifestation of the inner man and his murderous culture. Having been plucked back from death, Clifford is not a man chastened by mortality but rather in denial of his condition. He fails to acknowledge that what he fosters and stands for is what almost destroyed him. On the contrary, he seeks every mechanical means to deny his physical infirmities and every “mental” means to deny his emotional infirmities. In particular he is like Frankenstein in wishing to substitute self-perpetuation for sex and childbirth (the incest motif in Frankenstein is enacted in Lady Chatterley in the creepy mother-child bond between Clifford and Mrs. Bolton). He does not imagine the child he wants Connie to provide as his child, for even that is a category too far outside the self for Clifford. Rather, as he chooses to see it, the child will be him. The novel lets us assume that Clifford, like Connie, does actually want a child. He

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only wants a child, however, if it can be done, as it were, without actual sex, without involving bodies that feel and can love. Clifford is the great mind-fucking figure in the English novel. He wants Connie to see sex as he does, like a morning cup of coffee; he wants therefore to kill the child-making within Connie’s being, because if to make a child cannot be a mental thing and he must accept Connie as a physical, mortal woman, then, in Kahn’s terms, he would need to accept Connie’s potential for love, a powerful reality outside his self. He cannot and will not do this. If Connie refuses her role in his self-perpetuation strategy and insists on being a woman, a woman of f lesh and blood, a true cunt, as it were, then he would rather kill both her and her child. These qualities of Clifford’s nature come out with brutal clarity when Connie finally tells him she will have Mellors’s child. “ ‘My God, you ought to be wiped off the face of the earth!’ ” Clifford bursts out. He is enraged (his outburst is uncannily Nazi-like). “ ‘You’d wonder . . . that such beings were ever allowed to be born.’ ” Most revealing, when Connie does not back down and maintains she wants to marry Mellors and take his name, Clifford says, “ ‘That proves that what I’ve always thought about you is correct: you’re not normal, you’re not in your right senses. You’re one of those half-insane, perverted women who must run after depravity, the nostalgie de la boue’ ” (my italics; the nostalgie de la boue is Lawrence’s, who wants to reach Eden in the present). He will not divorce Connie even if her child will be his heir: “ ‘I care nothing about the child’ ” (296–297). For Clifford, meaning is strictly mental and resides in himself: to acknowledge meaning outside of himself would be to accept his body and his own death, a truth from which he flees in every aspect of his life. Just as he turns murderous when confronted with Connie’s insistent otherness, so too he turns murderous when confronted with the otherness of the miners or the otherness of the spring f lowers. There’s nothing incoherent about Lady Chatterley’s Lover. How can the world be reclaimed after the cataclysm? Through what Lawrence calls tenderness, which he renders in dialect. The Midlands dialect he uses in the novel is the speech Lawrence was born into, his mother tongue, about which Lawrence must often have felt deeply ambivalent, for it will have immediately placed him as a working-class boy from the Midlands, a tag that frequently must have hurt. Some of that ambivalence remains in the novel because there’s always a suggestion that dialect is the speech of the uneducated, and no writer can maintain that he or she would rather be uneducated than educated. I will say more about this later. Lawrence nonetheless resorts to dialect here in a revolutionary way, radically unlike earlier uses of dialect: when

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Mellors drops into dialect Lawrence is one-upping the speakers of “proper” English and, indeed, usually, everything else that’s proper. In Hard Times, Stephen speaks in dialect and clearly Dickens wants us to see him as sympathetic and maybe a touch prophetic: but his speech sticks out uncomfortably from the language of narration in the novel and, despite whatever we might attribute to Dickens as intentions, places him exactly as I’ve suggested Lawrence would have been placed as a boy. Dickens may be sympathetic to Stephen but he certainly doesn’t identify with him, and I doubt any reader identifies with him. Moreover, Stephen cannot speak proper: but Mellors can and usually does. On the one hand, in Lady Chatterley the language of narration corresponds at least in part, is accessible to, and partly claimed by the central nonupper-class figure. On the other hand, Mellors’s two languages exhibit an irresolvable conflict, within him, within Lawrence, and within the culture as a whole. Mellors’s double identity—as an uneducated working man who speaks in dialect and as an officer who can speak like and take his place among the upper classes—is an ingenious and, in a novel full of darkness, pretty hopeful device. As insider and outsider, Mellors can draw upon a diversity of direct experiences that enable him both to sympathize and criticize with authority and conviction. Clifford looks on Mellors as Bounderby looks on Stephen: but unlike Stephen, Mellors can out-master his masters, and his two languages expand rather than shrink his person. Mellors is not placed or rather displaced by the language of narration; indeed, Standard English can seem, in this novel, as just a dialect among other dialects. In what he understands to be a murderous age, however, Lawrence uses dialect to speak the body, as it were, to express passion, tenderness, and love. On the other hand, if the world after the cataclysm can be redeemed through the body, this is not to say we can do without reason and mental knowledge. The antinomy between mind and body, master and miner, Standard English and dialect is irresolvable. You cannot choose one over the other without losing a whole world. In this way Lawrence captures the irresolvable ambivalence of modern consciousness, that is, the self-awareness of people born into one condition and who become adults in another. Lawrence can quickly become preachy and contemptuously selfrighteous. And yet Lady Chatterley’s Lover is a strikingly tentative book. Because he has a foot in both camps—the rulers and the ruled, the proper and the improper, and so on—Lawrence can, to coin a phrase, feel everyone’s pain, and can be furious at the whole shebang. His manner of composition, however—nowhere more evident than in the three complete versions of Lady Chatterley—is about trying things out rather

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than arriving at conclusions. And this exploratory quality is always there in Lawrence. Frequently Lawrence will give us one account of something, and then seem to begin again in the next paragraph. Each of his new starts is partly repetition, partly moving forward from a slightly different angle. Above all his engagement with the page, one feels, has to be active, alive to possibilities, attentive to new discoveries, which are the outcome of an inquisitive process. You do not find in Lawrence the complete certainty of the Victorians, the sense that the writer had thought it all out before putting anything down on the page. This is not Lawrence’s way. In Lady Chatterley’s Lover he lets Mellors fully register uncertainty about where the world is going. The industrial system may triumph; love may not last. “ ‘I’m frightened, really,’ ” Mellors writes to Connie at the novel’s end. “ ‘I feel the devil in the air, and he’ll try to get us.’ ” And yet: “ ‘And though I’m frightened, I believe in your being with me’ ” (300).31 The novel’s tentativeness of means and message is the bridge between the long nineteenth century and writing after the cataclysm of the twentieth. Or perhaps it is not so much a bridge as one of those suburban roads that change their names from one town to another. For while Lady Chatterley’s Lover, as I have said, draws the arguments of the nineteenth-century English novel to a kind of resolution or end, it is not a dead end. The road, the voyage continues; but the travelers and the terrain are transformed. From the vantage point of the 1920s, Lawrence’s novel seems at once daring, conclusive, and yet tentative and dark. Looked at from after the Second World War it seems fresh, simple, hopeful, but already of the past, of a world gone by, like the world of the Condition of England debate and like Lawrence’s self-ref lective comment in his letter to Ernest Collings: “One has to be so terribly religious, to be an artist.”

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n moving to a conclusion I aim to recast my main line of argument in chronological order—as a way of summing up, clarifying, and also revisiting the concerns of the earlier chapters. I propose to pick up the thread of the argument by posing one final question about Lady Chatterley’s Lover, namely: How is Lawrence’s tentative ending of the novel a reflection of his religious view of art and the artist? I am going to look at the implications of one answer to this question by reference to some of the work of Frank Kermode and Paul Ricoeur and will use that discussion to retrace and recast my main argument. For both of these formidable thinkers meaning emerges from endings, and I hope to benefit from their analyses as I pursue an ending of my own. How then is the ending of Lady Chatterley’s Lover a ref lection of Lawrence’s religious views? One answer is that Lawrence does not use “religious” to mean something sectarian, theological, or having to do with organized worship. Religious, rather, is an attitude to being that includes reverence and awe. Lawrence’s use of “religious” is, then, at once old-fashioned—a view that appeals in feeling to a certain nineteenth-century outlook, and that would have been utterly familiar to, say, William Blake and later to John Ruskin—and notably contemporary, an expression of belief that would have been utterly familiar to Allen Ginsberg. The contemporary view might be styled a tentative conviction, and so we might say that Lawrence’s tentative conclusion accurately or precisely reflects his religious outlook. The relation between religious outlook and literary form has been profoundly studied by Frank Kermode in his The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction, a work that Paul Ricoeur discusses at some length in the second volume of Time and Narrative (23–28).1 Kermode argues that the Biblical Apocalypse, with its notion of an ending that itself contains ultimate meaning, established a universal expectation for a certain kind of closure for fiction. This argument interests Ricoeur for two reasons. He sees narrative as a structure in life as well as in art, indeed as our way of experiencing and making 10.1057/9780230106116 - Rereading the Nineteenth Century, Igor Webb

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sense of being-in-time. Fiction, for Ricoeur, has three mimetic components: one (“prefiguration”) is our inherent capacity for intellectualizing everyday events in narrative terms; the second (“configuration”) is the whole activity of making fiction or a fictional text through various compositional devices; and the third (“refiguration”) is the meaninggiving activity of reading. Configuration mediates between our lived experience before encountering a text and the understanding achieved by us—as f lesh-and-blood readers—through the experience of reading. In Ricoeur’s account in the last stage of mimesis the reader grasps a work from the vantage point of the ending, and looking back, as it were, sees the mass of detail and so forth now for the first time as something coherent and whole (Time and Narrative I, 68–87). This, then, is the first reason Ricoeur is interested in Kermode’s argument. The second is that he, like Kermode, is troubled by the apparent death of the ending that seems to have accompanied the death of God, a transition from closure to crisis. Kermode observes the weakening of the Apocalyptic paradigm already in Elizabethan tragedy; in nineteenth-century fiction we see something of a revival of this paradigm accompanied by the onset of crisis. Or perhaps it would be better to say that the crisis is inexorably underway but that writers variously resist its force, its implications, and its apparent inevitability. Kermode’s and Ricoeur’s accounts of the relation of narrative to life and of life to narrative offer a subtle and penetrating analysis of the source and aesthetic impact of a theme evident in each book I have discussed here, namely, to use Steven Marcus’s formulation, of the realization that “authority is in the process of becoming ‘self made’ ” (pp. 92–93). In Jane Austen the notion of self-made authority is narrated as the illusory confidence of an exceptional person that he or she—obviously, it is usually she—is somehow exempt from the contingent powers that bind less complex individuals. Austen enthralls (and deceives) us into consenting to the errors of judgment of her most attractive heroines, that is, their profoundly mistaken division of their world between people recognizable, in the language of philosophy, as subjects, and those who are merely objects. Those who are subjects, active agents in the world, conceive of themselves as capable of, and worthy of, independent judgment, that is, of self-made authority. The others are there for entertainment and wry observation—but they don’t really count when it comes to questions about how to live and behave. In Pride and Prejudice Elizabeth, objectively in far more tenuous circumstances than her friend Charlotte, nonetheless has the energy to believe that she can make a choice in marriage utterly free of everything

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except character and personal taste (and she thinks of character and personal taste as Jean-Paul Sartre does, as firmly within the individual’s power to shape). Similarly, what applies to Mr. Bennet does not apply to Mrs. Bennet; what applies to the Gardiners does not apply to the Lucas’—and so forth. When Charlotte confesses to a practical view of marriage, Elizabeth is shocked: not because she has never run across such views before but because she associates those views with one-dimensional people, not with her complex friend Charlotte. You might say that Austen has dared to pose the most difficult objections to primogeniture/entail to see whether she can narrate herself out of these difficulties. How can the vivacity of the independent individual be reconciled with the subordination that is fundamental to the aristocratic system? How can the privileges of one son be made consonant with the well-being of his siblings, in particular his sisters? How can the qualities of intellect and character of persons not destined for the role of Lord of the Manor be harnessed in the service of society as a whole while at the same time maintaining the totalistic authority of the firstborn, or eldest, male heir? These difficulties—in Austen’s version of them and in history—are formidable enough, but they are made more formidable when we look at their implications for narrative through the lens of Kermode’s and Ricoeur’s analyses. What Kermode and Ricoeur add to an already tough problem is cultural expectation. Christianity, Kermode says, creates the normative cultural expectation of a certain kind of ending, to life and to art (and because to art also to life). For this expectation to be fulfilled, however, Ricoeur’s conditions for narrative must hold: the ending must refigure, through the reader’s experience of reading, the text as a whole. In turn, this refiguring only works if whole means coherent. Primogeniture is a coherent system if we understand it as Alexis de Tocqueville does (see p. 111). Especially striking in Tocqueville’s view is how primogeniture solves the riddle of time, that is, how the life of the individual is set meaningfully at once within calendar time, generational time, and time as a dimension of divinity (compare Time and Narrative 3, 104–126). But the introduction of self-made authority into this system threatens its very foundations. In chapter three I have discussed how this applies to Mr. Bennet, but it applies to Elizabeth as well. Elizabeth’s expectations, and Elizabeth’s views, if plotted unchecked to plausible outcomes, lead to disaster: the penury following Mr. Bennet’s death or the penury following an impractical marriage for Elizabeth based solely on her free judgment and on love (say, marriage to Wickham). Self-made authority is emphatically present-minded: it

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does not mediate between past, present, and future; denies the presence of the past in the present; and denies rather than invokes the divine. It is iconoclastic and blasphemous (as we see from Lydia’s way of being). If we look at the problem Austen poses in Pride and Prejudice from Kermode’s viewpoint, we can say that the reader expects closure to apparently irresolvable conflicts. If we look at the problem from Ricoeur’s viewpoint, we can say the ending has to strike into order a set of plot elements that seem incoherent. It appears as if the refiguration that through the experience of reading should render a work meaningful just can’t come about in Pride and Prejudice. So how does Austen do it? To restate in slightly different form what I have argued in chapter three, Austen appropriates authority for herself as narrator and renders plot a function of a certain, definitive narrative voice. This narrative voice is born out of the demise of the epistolary form. In abandoning her original (epistolary) scheme for the novel, Austen announces a new recognition of the crisis of authority. The epistolary method popular in the eighteenth century was eclipsed in the nineteenth, and at least these reasons for its demise are pertinent to Pride and Prejudice: on the one hand, the use of many voices in a novel of letters presupposes a unitary, coherent reading culture, an audience that knows just how to weigh the correspondence. The many voices of the assorted letters make it harder for a coherent moral to be articulated or for irony to do its amusing but precise work. On the other hand, the epistolary form seems not radical enough to capture the audacity of self-made authority. In Pride and Prejudice, the great achievement of Austen’s appropriation of authority for the narrator is her persuasive assertion of the unity of worldview of writer, narrator, reader, and society. What threatens to f ly apart is held in pleasing and satisfying balance by the compact Austen elicits from us to participate in the narrator’s judgments, including the plotting of the novel into the future. In Frankenstein we can see Mary Shelley grappling with the epistolary form in a kind of replay of Austen’s experience, but within one text, and apparently without resolution. She begins with Walton’s letters and then abruptly abandons them for “chapters” in Frankenstein’s voice, returning to the letters at the end. But Shelley does not opt for a single narrative form, does not choose to establish an authoritative all-knowing narration, and apparently is not troubled by the impression of incoherence and discordance in her presentation. In all Shelley’s management of her materials seems to ref lect her uncertainty about how best to contextualize Frankenstein’s story. Not only do we hear from Walton and Frankenstein but the Creature also eventually gets his say; and then

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there are additional stories within stories. In Walton’s, Frankenstein’s, and the Creature’s stories Shelley is again divided between emphasis on witness—this happened to me, this is how I felt/feel—and on distancing achieved by making the reader an observer of the observers. We experience Walton and Frankenstein as unreliable narrators at least insofar as they can be blind to their motives or reveal more to us as readers than is encompassed by their own self-awareness. From both Kermode’s and Ricoeur’s points of view, the novel’s ending is problematic. Shelley promises a moral, and appears to be working within the paradigm Kermode proposes as normative. Self-made authority can be exposed as evil. But in the end we only get a partial closure: we don’t know what happens to Walton; we don’t see at all into the future; and we do not receive a clear moral. What does Mrs. Saville make of it all? I have argued that insofar as Frankenstein is a novel for and about sisters, it pits unconditional caring against self-made authority: this is the possibility, the “perhaps,” the novel offers Mrs. Saville. Unlike the knowledge sought by her brother and gained by Frankenstein, and unlike, too, the knowledge gained by the Creature—in all these instances, the novel shows, knowledge that tends to disaster and the destruction of self and others—the knowledge made available to her is the narrative itself, containing, so the structure of the book asserts, a different, salving, life-affirming path. In Pride and Prejudice we learn what happens next, how the enlightenment hard-won by the main characters is transformed into living. This is just what we don’t learn in Frankenstein. If we recast our understanding of these two novels within the frame of Kermode’s and Ricoeur’s analyses, we can say that, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, these novels reveal the dimensions of a developing crisis within English society, that is, of a long and often tense transition from one system of authority to another, or of transition from authority as a broad or even transcendent power to self-made authority. The novels depict their themes separately as crises of the social and the intellectual orders, of a worldview in radical transition on account of the weakening of primogeniture, in the one instance, and the rise of science, in the other. Both primogeniture and science make their claims and their assertions, in the early nineteenth century, in the context of religion, and so at a time when Kermode’s paradigm ought to pertain. Both primogeniture and science, moreover, can be seen as mimicking different versions of a divine order, and to be powerful forms of response to death. As responses to death—now to bring in Paul W. Kahn—both oppose, and explore, love and evil, the transcending of self and the devolution into self. Both novels, in sum, display the

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movement from closure to crisis: in Pride and Prejudice crisis seems to be contained within closure, within the circle of authoritative narrative; in Frankenstein crisis impels a kind of nonstop effort to arrive at closure, each of the novel’s stories searching for an ending that is never found. The book consequently does not so much end as stop with its transmission to Mrs. Saville, an opaque and inconclusive closure. But of course the movement from closure to crisis was not a development arising out of fiction as much as it was an unsettling experience besetting everyone alive at the time, a crisis for readers as much as writers, a crisis of the culture. This brings me once more to the question with which this book begins, the question of how we should read the past. This question opens onto two separate, though of course closely related, lines of inquiry, one aiming to comprehend the act of reading itself, and one about how to register in our own reading experience in the early twenty-first century the experience—of reading, of life—of the people who first sat down with the novels here under discussion. The first line of inquiry, aimed at understanding the act of reading, opens onto an intellectual landscape that sometimes can seem to have been colonized by people especially fond of the paradoxes of Zeno of Elea. Here is one of Zeno’s paradoxes, the dichotomy paradox, as Aristotle states it in his Physics (VI: 9): “That which is in locomotion must arrive at its half-way stage before it arrives at the goal.” This statement proves that there is no way I can get from one side of the room to the other. Before I can reach the other side of the room, I have to get half-way; in order to get half-way, I have to . . . And so forth, leaving me forever in pursuit of my goal. If I take Zeno by the hand and walk him across the room, I only elicit a sympathetic smile from him, a smile of pity for a poor dunce trapped in pedestrian thinking. Literary theory has no shortage of Zeno-like paradoxes (e.g., the argument that it is actually the reader who writes the text), and, like Zeno’s, these arguments are often playful, brilliant, and break open illuminating and intriguing new ways of looking at things. Zeno, moreover, shows that the most difficult thing for theory to accomplish is to account for what everyone knows to be true, such as how we can cross the room or just what it is, in literature, that we are interpreting. 2 But obviously it would be rash—intellectually and practically—to assume that because theory cannot prove it, it cannot be. “Everyone knows” that we can, and do, cross from one side of the room to the other. And it is just this, that the ground of his work is “what everyone knows,” that makes the thought of Paul Ricoeur so thrilling and useful.3 Broadly speaking Ricoeur follows Wolfgang Iser’s views on the act of reading, though he amplifies these

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views especially insofar as reading concludes in understanding or meaning. Ricoeur and Iser acknowledge that the writer who writes the text places his/her intentions into the text in a way (for Ricoeur, “emplotment”) that needs some qualification, suggesting an “implied” writer in the same ways that the text suggests an “implied” reader (see my discussion on pp. 22–23. For Ricoeur there is a palpable and increasingly illuminating continuity from the imaginative act that launches the text to the reception of the formal consequences of that creative act by the reader. Configuration “is the joint work of the text and the reader” (Time and Narrative 1, 76). This joint work results in an ever-more-pertinent vision, a widening resonance fueled by the pleasures of the text.4 “What a reader receives is not just the sense of the work, but, through its sense, its reference, that is, the experience it brings to language and, in the last analysis, the world and the temporality it unfolds in the face of this experience” (Time and Narrative 1, 78–79). This new experience “received” by the reader, this new world, has for Ricoeur very concrete implications: “what is interpreted in a text is the proposing of a world that I might inhabit and into which I might project my ownmost powers” (Time and Narrative 1, 81). Finally what this means for Ricoeur is that Iser’s notion of the implied reader needs to be taken one more step, toward, as it were, what everyone knows: “The phenomenology of the act of reading requires a f lesh-and-blood reader, who, in actualizing the role of the reader prestructured in and through the text, transforms it” (Time and Narrative 3, 171). Even implied readers can’t read a book: it takes an actual person.5 When, as a flesh-and-blood reader, I choose a novel from the bookstore shelf, I know perfectly well that I have not written it; and even if it does not bear the name of an author on its title page, I encounter the author the moment I begin to read. Through his or her words, the author struggles to get to me and I struggle to get to him or her. Even when my reading is frivolous, it is for use—that is, for pleasure, for knowledge, for understanding, for wisdom. It does not matter whether some or all of this leads to action, or leaves me feeling or thinking that I am a new man: the usefulness of the reading is that at a minimum it brings me into an intimate encounter with something new. This something new may be momentous—Joyce’s epiphanies—or it may just be the discovery of who committed the murder in a Dorothy Sayers mystery. In the case of Mary Barton, moreover, it seems clear that Elizabeth Gaskell’s first readers experienced this something new as an encounter with the self-evident truthfulness of the writer, that is, with the writer’s creative intention. The experience of reading Mary Barton, especially

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for its first readers, was the experience of being persuaded. The novel is exactly described by George Levine’s generally applicable account of the realistic novel as “a self-conscious effort . . . of truth telling” for the purpose of making “literature appear to be describing directly not some other language but reality itself.”6 In chapter one I show at length that this was precisely the experience not only of Gaskell’s first readers but of most of Gaskell’s readers right up to the present. At the least, then, this richly representative mid-century novel can be seen to extend the reader’s sympathies. Bearing in mind Kermode and Ricoeur, however, one is brought back once more to the novel’s two endings, one having to do with John Barton and the other with his daughter Mary. The former, overtly Christian ending proposes a way of channeling the reader’s enlivened sympathies into a form of healing, a healing that meets the needs of the time in ways that are at once personal, political, and religious. This ending fits both Kermode’s Apocalyptic and Ricouer’s refiguring models. But the second ending does not work on any level and for any model. It reveals, perhaps, less a failure of imagination than the limits of imagination, that is, the limits of what it was possible to imagine at a particularly daunting, puzzling, and indeed unprecedented historical moment. In any event, Mary’s emigration does not allow a backward reordering into coherence of the novel’s configuration; rather it shows that the novel’s extension of the reader’s sympathies leads nowhere in particular, or not far enough to translate Christian healing into social and political reality.7 What is asserted in the first instance as truth-telling is at least partly undermined by the dead end of the second ending: a rift opens at the end of Mary Barton in the very core enterprise of the realistic novel. One way to speak of this rift is to say that it is between truth and interpretation. When verisimilitude aspires to the symbolic—fact as fate—the implied assumption is that no interpretation is needed: the facts are selfevident. Mary Barton shows just how far that assumption can take us. Had the novel been simply about John Barton, the limits of the novel’s aesthetic faith might never have come to trouble any reader: the healing message is a fitting closure. But Gaskell pays heed to Mary as much as to her father not because she sees their stories as parallel but because she sees them as one story. In telling us about the Bartons Gaskell aims to tell us about Manchester as a whole. A whole way of life is to be revealed and its fissures healed. But it turns out—of course—that in Mary Barton as in every other fiction the facts do indeed require interpretation. Gaskell’s second ending may not throw her whole enterprise into doubt but it does, as I have already noted, reveal a rift at the very core of the realistic novel.

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Another way to look at this rift is through Kermode’s movement from closure to crisis. Fictions such as Mary Barton promise a sure movement to closure, and require closure. But Mary’s emigration, as I have already argued, not only does not provide closure but suggests that closure cannot be reached or imagined. Gaskell’s healing message is thrown into doubt. We may need to read the novel differently. Both Kermode and Ricoeur understand full well that closure in the Apocalyptic sense is less evident in the modern world than crisis. And for both men crisis poses an ultimate challenge, a challenge to their whole understanding of life and art. Ricoeur says that Kermode seems to reach “a point of perplexity” in his analysis caused by focusing exclusively on the form of a text. One might add that Kermode’s perplexity, if that is the right word, arises or is inextricable from his place in the late twentieth century, that is, in the midst of crisis. The crisis is not a record of a transcended historical moment somewhere comfortably in the distant past. It is, literally, his (and our) crisis. Consequently, how we, as twenty-first-century readers, understand this crisis and ref lect its impact profoundly affects how we read, or reread, the nineteenth century, and in particular how we weigh the importance of reading a nineteenth-century novel in its own terms. Ricoeur’s resolution of Kermode’s perplexity is therefore especially relevant to the question I have raised here about how we should read the past. Ricoeur’s way out of Kermode’s cul de sac is to enlarge the focus of the inquiry. Modern forms may well appear inadequate or broken insofar as they fail to fulfill the Apocalyptic paradigm, insofar as they fail to transcend dissonance. But by looking exclusively at forms Kermode, according to Ricoeur, neglects “the reader’s expectations” (Ricoeur’s italics) and “what seems unsurpassable in the last analysis,” Ricoeur says, “is the reader’s expectation that some form of consonance will finally prevail.” Ricoeur argues in short that even a modern nonending works within a paradigm, albeit one in which the reader completes more of the work of interpretation than within the Apocalyptic paradigm. “A leap beyond every paradigmatic expectation,” he says, “is impossible.” Here as elsewhere for Ricoeur there are certain intersections, existential paradoxes, that are axiomatically human. The nonending is itself a kind of paradigm, and each paradigmatic overturning results in a new paradigm. “Does crisis,” he asks, “equally signify for us catastrophe and renovation?” And he answers, citing the first and fifth parts of Kermode’s book (pitting one Kermode against another, as it were), “This is Kermode’s deep conviction and it is one that I fully share” (Time and Narrative 2, 24–25).

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Ricoeur’s conviction that the reader always expects order and that narrative always fulfills that expectation raises a tempting standard, a credo one would like to believe in. But how can Ricoeur’s view hold up against the obvious crisis of modern culture that is so amply reproduced in nineteenth-century fiction? As Mary Barton demonstrates the world of the nineteenth-century writer and reader is not easily cast into narrative. The literary realism that Mary Barton represents, and that we associate with the nineteenth century, at once vivifies this world, apparently conveying its tumult and vivacity, and fails to capture it, fails to reach the expected closure. These strains within realism are much magnified in Martin Chuzzlewit.8 We might begin to compare the two books before contrasting them by noting that each depicts a radically displacing new world. In Gaskell industrial capitalism displaces nature and the natural routines of country life. Manchester is viewed from the perspective of the countryside, and from this perspective the slums, factories, and shops are dreadfully, literally and figuratively, impoverishing. As Gaskell sees it, the rich, natural, knowable human communities of the old countryside are displaced by a crushing, unnatural, alienating urban disorder. In Dickens industrial capitalism displaces Old England; the world of things upends the world of people, and the moral cohesiveness of the old order is exploded by self-made authority. London is viewed from the roof of Todgers’s and from that perspective the city is dizzying, terrifying, inducing a vertigo so extreme that it is all the viewer can do not to achieve peace and quiet by throwing himself from the parapet to his death. Each book reaches for closure by contrasting the new world of capital and commodities and the new world across the Atlantic. And although each book concludes that to be healed one must heal oneself, there the comparisons begin to end. Gaskell reaches across the Atlantic in earnest: Manchester is no place to live, and cannot be remade anew, so Go West, Young Woman! Dickens, having already tried that, shows that there is no West to which one might escape, America revealing even more grotesque forms of selfmade authority than England. Gaskell’s self-evident truthfulness goes hand in hand with her conviction that there can be a moral to this tale of Manchester life; and although Dickens displays his own version of self-evident truthfulness in the form of such characters as Tom Pinch, he just as much seems uncertain where to look for truthfulness and offers us no moral. In fact, in Martin Chuzzlewit, it seems pointless to refigure the book from the vantage point of its ending. The ending— the reversal, the marriages, and so on—merely ref lects the close of the

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overt plot, as it were, which is a sequence of events of no meaning: the real plot, the meaningful story, violates the, let’s call them Aristotelian, expectations of narrative, if for no other reason than that it barely can be said to have any before and after. Both plots are launched with Dickens’s uncharacteristic opening chapter, his genealogy of self-made authority. The overt plot tracks the careers of the two Martins but this plot is in every respect unremarkable. Dickens’s introduction is better understood as the preamble to a line of inquiry than to a plot, and this line of inquiry is essentially about how the view from Todgers’s might be held in consciousness. If Alexander Welsh is right and we should see Dickens’s American journey as a “moratorium,” a time when Dickens not only paused to consider his options but considered whether he ought to opt for a career outside of literature, then Martin Chuzzlewit emerges as an affirmation, a rereading, and a foretelling. It is an affirmation of Dickens’s literary vocation, a rereading of the world in which this vocation will be pursued, and a foretelling of the characteristic form of Dickens’s novels from Martin Chuzzlewit on. The world Dickens was forced to confront in his American journey was the realm of self-made authority, a world, in the words of Dorothy Van Ghent, of “naked and aggressive existence.” 9 How can the powerful, seductive incoherence of this world be rendered, be held in consciousness? Dickens answers: through fiction. What makes fiction especially qualified to serve as the form of consciousness appropriate to naked and aggressive existence is not, at first blush, what constitutes narrative for Ricoeur but rather the novel’s versatility, adaptability, capaciousness, even formlessness, its ability to give voice to many views and many people. It is this amoral narrative voraciousness that constitutes Dickens’s method and style, and makes them so difficult to label. Clearly Dickens’s novels are for the most part carefully and satisfyingly plotted. But Dickens’s “special effects” derive not from his plots but from the elusive quality of being neither one thing nor another that characterizes his writing, at once realism and symbolism, crisis and closure. Like his spy Nadgett, Dickens values, revels in observation, and more than Nadgett Dickens observes for observation’s sake: if there are judgments to be made, or order to be found, these are more for us than for him. If there is too much in the novel—too many scenes, too many characters, too many stories, too many places, too many words—this is the too-muchness of the flaneur for whom destination, an ending, is besides the point, and for whom every bit of the human and nonhuman street world is gripping and narcotic. The vivification of the observer’s too-rich experience is what

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renders meaning as much as, and in Martin Chuzzlewit more than, the outcomes of the plot. Can such a novel be read, that is, made sense of? Is there an order to be discovered in the novel to satisfy our expectations? In the absence of self-evident truths, what kind of authority can anchor our interpretations? Dickens’s disgust with the most crass displays of self-made authority in Martin Chuzzlewit shows that no matter how puffed up and righteously iconoclastic self-made authority may be it nonetheless contains some notion of authority: even the most bragging individualism, precisely because it brags, implies its contrary, the authoritative system that the self, more or less f lamboyantly, rejects. This is the effect of, and the message of, Dickens’s introduction of the United States into the middle of Young Martin’s pilgrimage. Similarly, evil in the novel— very much along the lines expounded by Paul W. Kahn—is revealed by its rejection of the touch of love, its revulsion and denial of the world beyond self—as we see dramatically in the person of Jonas. Historically, the rise of self-made authority first occurs in the context of the established aristocratic order and then thrives in the absence of aristocratic order. If the aristocratic order was one manifestation of a coherent world, does its demise imply the rise of a new world? The phrase “self-made authority” suggests otherwise, and Henry James, returning to New York half a century after Dickens’s first visit, certainly seems to fear that the end of one kind of society, one system, may well not lead to another, or anyway not to something he can understand as civilization. On the other hand, James as much as Dickens identifies himself as an observer, a student of life, and he prides himself on noting, with clarity, what is there, on seeing things as they are. Still, James is too much the Master not to know that there can be no observation without a point of view. Like Ricoeur, James can be very concrete in the midst of his being most abstract. Observation requires not just a point of view but a f lesh-and-blood observer. A f lesh-andblood observer is a person occupying a specific time and place, located within history. And for James, one’s location within a history is a circumstance of enormous power. He conceives of history as indispensable for the full f lowering of human beings and sees history as a kind of dense sensuous atmosphere composed of the accumulated subjective experiences of people over time, a process that transforms the passage of experiences in the flow of time into the monumental and permanent form of culture, at once fixed and vibrant. James condescends to Hawthorne not just because he represents for James the myopia of the American abroad, surrounded by “the massive consistency of fact”10

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and yet unseeing, but because Hawthorne lays claim to being a writer. For James there can be no writing without history; since Hawthorne lacks the percipient faculties needed to register and respond to the massive consistency of culture/history, how can he aspire to greatness? For James the writer’s authority is an enactment through sensibility of the “fact” of history. The writer’s impressions are “objective” and authoritative in that they articulate the massive consistency of fact. In this fashion James, more or less self-consciously, filches “fact” from the opposing camp, from those for whom fact is utilitarian or sociological or self-evident rather than “the objective reality of impressions,” a reality that merges objective and subjective, the individual writer in his specific moment and the massive consistency of fact, that is, history. In answer to the question of how the view from Todgers’s can be held in consciousness, James answers that it is a matter of trained receptivity. The essential qualities of the Master are that his impressions have the force of authority and convey reality (fact): the Master is not the actualizer of the culture’s essential paradigm as much as he is himself that paradigm in f lesh and blood. “He is the rock of defence of human nature; an upholder and preserver, carrying everywhere with him relationship and love.”11 Wordsworth’s eloquent overstatement is a response to the profound tremors of the developing cultural crisis Kermode locates even earlier, in the Elizabethan period, and to which James, just this side of Modernism, responds in a surprisingly similar, in a similarly Romantic manner. Henry James may not seem the best choice of writer in whom to discover the persistence of Romanticism into the twentieth century. But the passage from Wordsworth I have quoted represents Wordsworth the conservative, and aptly connects with James’s conservative notion of the writer as the culture’s authoritative observer and interpreter. There is an interesting distinction, or tension, in this respect, between the idea of a Master—the label James invites—and the idea of a Bard—the label D. H. Lawrence invites. In particular Master suggests a connection to power: the Master is not so much the defender of human nature as of the dominant cultural identity; in contrast Bard suggests independence from and even antagonism to power: the human nature the Bard upholds is transcendent, the Bard’s authority deriving from something trans-temporal. The Master is assigned a role, a house, and a pension by the State; the Bard roams the moors and speaks truth to power. Nonetheless both notions fall within the circle of the religion of art and in both upholding and preserving serve as contending but affirming goals.

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Lawrence opens Lady Chatterley’s Lover after history has been blown to smithereens, after the cataclysm. Still, we have to go on somehow. These sentences convey the human situation at the end of one era and the commencement of the next. Clearly this is a situation of crisis in a vacuum of authority. All the big words have gone dead; the normative language of the novel, Standard English, has lost its universality and has become just a sad or grating or cruel exhibition of class. Absent any cohesive, vital relations between men and men, men and women, and Man and Nature, the physical culture of the Midlands, the mines, the towns, the great and small houses, the clothes—all this has become oppressively, irredeemably ugly. The bodies have been broken and in any case severed from mind, now a quality of abstract feeling, that is, of words once used to convey feelings that no longer have any feeling (Clifford’s stories). England has in these ways come to the end of days, for there can be no babies made by these hollow men and women in this wasteland. What does Lawrence’s rereading of the nineteenth century imply for us as twenty-first-century readers? First, and probably most important, Lawrence takes up what most troubled nineteenth-century writers not so he can fashion an historical novel or to reinterpret the past but rather to fully register the presence of the past as a reality to be reckoned with in the actual life of a flesh-and-blood reader, and in his, Lawrence’s, life. What Ricoeur says every reader expects—“that some form of consonance will finally prevail”—Lawrence expects of himself: we experience through his writing that Lawrence has cast his own fate into the form of a novel, that everything is at stake for him just as it is for his characters. I do not mean that he has no distance from his characters or uses them simply as mouthpieces: Lawrence is no more guilty of succumbing to these temptations than any other novelist. I do mean that he employs the novel in dead earnest, that there is that whiff of the fire and brimstone of Apocalypse about his writing. I hasten to add, however, that although Lawrence may seek, may wish for, may be devoutly earnest about the Apocalyptic paradigm, none of this means that we are necessarily going to find closure rather than crisis at the end of Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Closure, as Kermode shows, mimics or enacts a vision of divine order; it fulfills an expectation about ultimate meaning and ultimate authority; it expresses an intersection of the temporal and the eternal. When history—the combined force of the First World War and the many-layered British response to the War, as this came to impinge on Lawrence’s and Frieda’s lives—tossed Lawrence out of England, he set

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out on a lifelong search for God. After a lifetime of serious observance among many peoples, in many different places, and among many deities, Lawrence’s return, in his last novel, to the world of his origin suggests— for we can’t be sure what he might have written next—a readiness to try his accumulated impressions against the daunting, demoralizing conditions of life in what still must have seemed the most “advanced” corner of civilization. All of the deepest dilemmas of the nineteenth-century novel, certainly all of the dilemmas confronted in the novels I have here discussed, are brought up to date in Lady Chatterley’s Lover. And these are concentrated into one overriding question: How can babies be made by these barren people hopelessly adrift after the cataclysm? I argue in chapter three that Lawrence’s answer to this question is a project of reconsecration of the human body. If there is to be someone to inherit the estate, it can only happen, in Lawrence’s view, if human sexuality, the embodiment of the human being, is once more held sacred. Convinced that mind, the whole regime of Fact, has obliterated body, Lawrence wants to redress the imbalance, and, like James, to reclaim fact from the Frankensteins, Bounderbys, and Cliffords. On the one hand, Lawrence says: Look at what we’ve made of Eden. On the other hand, Lawrence shows how the unity of mind, body, and spirit in Eden can, if only fleetingly, be experienced, even after the cataclysm. In Lawrence these questions, as they come to him from the Condition of England debate, are brought to closure; and then cast forward into the next century. And today, a century later, Lawrence’s radical effort to return to origin seems ever more prescient: everywhere are the signs of our unabated, extreme interest in, our adulation and our fear of, our sexuality, so that public discourse—and war and peace—seem to hang on such matters as whether the body can be uncovered in public, whether pregnancies can be terminated, whether female genitals can be mutilated, whether one can have as many babies as one likes, and on and on. Lady Chatterley’s Lover advances an important caveat against Ricoeur’s view that “in the last analysis” readers always expect closure. Lawrence’s hypersensitivity to the quick shifts in mood, thought, conviction of any human consciousness and any human relationship, his insistence that anger can be part of passion or that love and hate, love and evil constantly impinge on one another both between and within people—this persistent, raw insistence in his work questions whether there ever can be, in human affairs, any such thing as “the last analysis,” a fixed terminal point, a permanent resolution. Rather, for Lawrence, as for Freud, consciousness is not just fluid but roiling, with reason, emotion, impulse, intuition, sensation, instinct, all in active assertion

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of meaning, moment to moment, without end. This is the difference, already noted long ago by Sir Philip Sidney, between philosophy and literature, the one focused on a reasoned articulation of thought, the other on felt experience; the one necessarily exclusive, aiming always to keep its eye on the ball, the other happily inclusive, and not too bothered about consistency. And this is why, too, it is better for criticism not to have too much to do with philosophy and theory. If your goal is to figure out what will hold “in the last analysis” you are always tempted, or even forced of necessity by the analytical system, to excise from fiction whatever seems, in the last analysis, to be of less importance or just not to fit. In fiction the trees seem frequently to elude being included in something coherent and general: only in fiction do we want not to lose the trees for the wood. The conclusion of Lady Chatterley’s Lover is a letter from Mellors to Connie, a reference and echo of the epistolary form out of which the nineteenth-century novel developed. The letter lets us hear Mellors directly in his new role, as a man committed to family life with Connie. It is a poignantly tentative letter, hesitant, aware of love and evil equally. “We’ll be together next year. And though I’m frightened, I believe in your being with me. A man has to fend and fettle for the best, and then trust in something beyond himself. You can’t insure against the future, except by really believing in the best bit of you, and in the power beyond it. So I believe in the little f lame between us. For me now, it’s the only thing in the world.” (300)

This seems the voice of self-made authority transformed, that is, painfully self-aware in its commitment, not overassertive, or heedless, but rather knowing full well that the little flame of love and relationship is threatened all around. This is the world after the cataclysm: but then, we realize at the novel’s close, our world—not just the modern world but the human world—is always the world after the cataclysm. The only honest stance appropriate to the novel is Mellors’s earnest, disenchanted note of tentative conviction. What is the role, then, of narrative in a post-cataclysmic world? Lawrence’s most bitter message to those of us who think of ourselves as intellectuals is also Kierkegaard’s (and Paul Tillich’s and Paul W. Kahn’s), namely, that meaning is not to be had by thinking (which is not to say that meaning is to be had by not thinking). This is the motive for his effort to resacralize experience, to bring to consciousness what

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Paul Tillich calls the dimension of depth and Paul W. Kahn calls the symbolic dimension. Lawrence, like Picasso, wants to singe our hands in the mystery of God (hence George Steiner’s reference to Lawrence’s view of writing as religious). Typically, for Lawrence, this is a matter of continual struggle, of perpetual gain and loss, the creation of form out of the changeableness of human being. Here, from the ninth chapter of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, is his well-known and lovely rendition of how the human condition inheres in art and how art, in turn, feeds the f lame of our humanity: It is the way our sympathy f lows and recoils that really determines our lives. And here lies the vast importance of the novel, properly handled. It can inform and lead into new places the f low of our sympathetic con sciousness, and it can lead our sympathy away in recoil from things gone dead. Therefore the novel, properly handled, can reveal the most secret places of life: for it is in the passional secret places of life, above all, that the tide of sensitive awareness needs to ebb and f low, cleansing and freshening.12

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Toward a Conclusion

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Preliminary 1. George Steiner, Tolstoy or Dostoevsky: An Essay in the Old Criticism (New York: Knopf, 1959). Further references are cited in the text. 2. Igor Webb, From Custom to Capital: The English Novel and the Industrial Revolution (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1981). 3. Leslie Stephen, English Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1962 [1904]). 4. Raymond Williams, The Long Revolution (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1965), 61. 5. At the same time that Williams was working on his groundbreaking work, Culture and Society (1960 [1958]), Eric Kahler was publishing, in German, his The Inward Turn of Narrative (eventually published in English, in 1973, by the Princeton University Press as number LXXXIII of the Bollingen Series). Kahler, an intimate of Thomas Mann, Herman Broch, and Paul Celan, a scholar in the tradition of Karl Jaspers and Ernst Cassirer, wrote: If we wish to understand what has happened to the novel, we must grasp both the transformation of our reality and the transformation within man’s consciousness. . . . [The arts] create the cultural atmosphere of each given age. And by virtue of this function they play as active a part in man’s development as other, seemingly more practical human activities such as science, technology, and politics. . . . Only when viewed in terms of this dualistic aspect—the development of consciousness and the development of the reality corresponding to it—do the arts gain their full human significance. . . . The transformation of man’s consciousness and the transformation of the reality that this consciousness must deal with combine into a single coherent process. . . . The reality in which man moves and which he must manipulate changes in extent and character. . . . Early, mature, and highly civilized man are not the same man; their consciousness is not the same. And similarly, the reality of classical antiquity, of the Middle Ages, of the Renaissance, of the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries is not the same reality. The dramatic event we call “the arts” takes place in the arena of this interaction between consciousness and reality. (3–4)

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6. See Time and Narrative, Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer, trans., 3 vols. (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1983–1985). 7. See my extended discussion of Ricoeur in “Toward a Conclusion,” in this book. 8. In Human, All Too Human, R. J. Hollingdale, trans. (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986), Nietzsche writes: If we transport ourselves back to the ages in which the religious life flourished most vigorously we discover a fundamental conviction which we no longer share and on account of which we see the door to the religious life once and for all closed to us: it concerns nature and our traffic with nature. In those ages one as yet knows nothing of natural laws; neither earth nor sky are constrained by any compulsion; a season, sunshine, rain can come or they can fail to come. Any conception of natural causality is altogether lacking. When one rows it is not the rowing which moves the ship: rowing is only a magical ceremony by means of which one compels a demon to move the ship . . . (111) 9. Many years ago I asked the greatest proselytizer for the importance of religious doctrine in public life, Maurice Cowling (see his monumental Religion and Public Doctrine in Modern England [Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1980, 1985]), about his religious practice. He replied that, like many others, he found it impossible to practice what he preached and rarely attended religious services. 10. Paul W. Kahn, Out of Eden: Adam and Eve and the Problem of Evil (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007). Further references are cited in the text. 11. See my discussion on pp. 37–38.

Chapter One 1. These novels are usually understood to include Frances Trollope’s Michael Armstrong, The Factory Boy (1840), Charlotte Elizabeth’s (Mrs. Tonna’s) Helen Fleetwood (1841), Benjamin Disraeli’s Sybil (1845), Charles Kingsley’s Alton Locke (1850) and Yeast (1851), Charles Dickens’s Hard Times (1854), Gaskell’s North and South (1855), and George Eliot’s Felix Holt (1866). 2. Lettice Cooper, Introduction to Mary Barton (London: John Lehmann, 1947), x. Subsequent references are cited in the text. 3. Gaskell, e.g., gets just one, not altogether accurate sentence in A Companion to Victorian Literature (New York: Scribner, 1955), a standard reference, built upon literary scholarship of the 1940s, by two eminent Princeton professors, Thomas Marc Parrott and Robert Bernard Martin: “Mrs. Gaskell’s first novel, Mary Barton, 1848, dealt with the shocking condition of the slums in a manufacturing city and with the struggle of workers against their employers” (71).

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4. Macdonald Daly, Introduction to Mary Barton (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1996), xxviii. Subsequent references are cited in the text. My own references to the novel are to this edition. 5. Since MacDonald Daly’s version, three significant editions have appeared: Jennifer Foster, ed., Mary Barton (Toronto: Broadview Press, 2000); Shirley Foster, ed., Mary Barton, 5th ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006); and Thomas Recchio, ed., Mary Barton (New York: Norton, 2008). 6. Angus Easson, Elizabeth Gaskell: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge, 1991), 74. Subsequent references are cited in the text. 7. Kathleen Tillotson, Novels of the Eighteen-Forties (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1961), 79. Subsequent references are cited in the text. 8. Edgar Wright, Introduction to Mary Barton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), xii. Subsequent references are cited in the text. See too Wright’s Mrs. Gaskell: The Basis for Reassessment (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965), an important contribution to the rise in Gaskell’s reputation. 9. Joseph Conrad, The Secret Sharer and Other Stories (New York: Dover, 1993 [1912]), 32. 10. John Lucas’s The Literature of Change: Studies in the Nineteenth Century Provincial Novel (Hassocks, Sussex: Harvester Press, 1977). References are cited in the text. 11. Jorge Luis Borges, Ficciones, Emcee Editores, trans. (New York: Grove Press, 1962), 48. Subsequent references are cited in the text. 12. Georges Poulet, “Phenomenology of Reading,” New Literary History I (1969) quoted in Wolfgang Iser, The Implied Reader (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974), 292. Subsequent references to Iser are cited in the text. Note that Iser again discusses this passage in his The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), 152–155. 13. Iser, The Act of Reading, 33. Subsequent references are cited in the text. 14. Frank Lentricchia objects that Iser “ignores both author and reader as cultural constructions” and offers a view of reading that is just “hedonistic” (After the New Criticism [Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1980], 149). Although there is something to this objection—though what is so bad about hedonism?—Iser’s concern is with the process of reading, which he sees as of course historical but even more, and necessarily, as aesthetic. 15. Raymond Williams, Culture and Society, 1780–1950 (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1960), 94; my italics. Subsequent references are cited in the text. 16. Cf. Hippolyte Taine’s opening to The History of English Literature, H. van Laun, trans. (Edinburgh: Edmonston and Douglas, 1871): History has been transformed, within a hundred years in Germany, within sixty years in France, and that by the study of their literatures. . . . It was perceived that a literary work is not a mere individual play of imagination, the isolated caprice of an excited brain, but a transcript of contemporary manners, a manifestation of a certain kind of

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Notes

17. 18.

19.

20.

21.

22.

23. 24. 25.

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mind. It was concluded that we might recover, from the monuments of literature, a knowledge of the manner in which men thought and felt centuries ago. (1) Alan Shelston, Introduction to Mary Barton (London: J.M. Dent, 1996), xxiv. Subsequent references are cited in the text. Susan Zlotnick, Women, Writing, and the Industrial Revolution (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), 81. Subsequent references are cited in the text. Catherine Gallagher, The Industrial Reformation of English Fiction: Social Discourse and Narrative Form 1832–1867 (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1985). Further references are cited parenthetically. Cf. W. A. Craik’s remark in her Elizabeth Gaskell and the English Provincial Novel (London: Methuen, 1975), 25: “From reading it would be impossible to deduce that it is the work of a Unitarian by upbringing, who was the wife of a Unitarian minister.” Anthony Appiah, “Tolerable Falsehoods: Agency and the Interests of Theory,” in Jonathan Arac and Barbara Johnson, eds., Consequences of Theory (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), 66–67. Cf. W. A. Craik’s observation that Mary’s plot “is a sign of [Gaskell] depending on what she knows will be acceptable to a novel-reading public” (Provincial Novel, 5). Mary Poovey says that as Mary’s situation develops she “begins to resemble the middle-class heroines of novels like Clarissa, Evelina, or Sense and Sensibility.” Making a Social Body: British Cultural Formation, 1830–1864 (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 152. Easson, Elizabeth Gaskell, 72. D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley’s Lover (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1994 [1928]), 206. See my full discussion of the novel in chapter three. Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967), 56.

Chapter Two 1. See my discussion of Hard Times in chapter three. 2. Sylvere Monod, observing that this was the last novel Dickens signed “Boz,” says that “Chuzzlewit is thus either the last novel of the first period or the earliest of the later novels.” Martin Chuzzlewit (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1985), 8. 3. John Forster, The Life of Charles Dickens, 2 vols. (J.M. Dent, 1966 [1927]), I, 291. 4. Christopher Mulvey, Anglo-American Landscapes: A Study of Nineteenth Century Anglo-American Travel Literature (London: Cambridge University Press, 1983), offers a number of illuminating remarks about the differences between English and American travelers (9–14), including the comment that the Englishman “often gave the impression that he had crossed the Atlantic

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5. 6. 7.

8.

9. 10.

11. 12.

13. 14. 15.

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to confront his fears; the American often gave the impression that he had crossed the Atlantic to take possession of things long dreamt about” (14). He observes that Dickens’s “instinct to compare districts of New York with those of London in 1842 . . . reflected the habit of the English traveler to refer all back to the country that he had left behind him” (161). Alexander Welsh, From Copyright to Copperfield: The Identity of Dickens (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), 10–12. See Gerhard Joseph, “The Labyrinth and the Library: A View from the Temple in Martin Chuzzlewit,” Dickens Studies Annual 15 (1986): 1–22. In Imagined Cities: Urban Experience and the Language of the Novel (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005), Robert Alter observes that the nineteenthcentury city seems “increasingly a theater of perplexity, defying summation, lacking social, political, and therefore thematic coherence” (9). The editors of the third volume Pilgrim Edition of the Letters (1842–1843) remark that since Dickens’s American journey had not been much noticed (i.e., at the time of publication, 1974) they would devote more attention to background than usual, resulting in an immensely useful, detailed, and informative volume. See Madeleine House, Graham Storey, Kathleen Tillotson et al., The Letters of Charles Dickens, Vol. 3 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974). Was it sheer accident that Dickens arrived in the United States on the S.S. Britannia and departed, on June 7, 1842, on the George Washington? Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Complete Writings of Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Old Manse Edition, 22 vols. (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1900 [1870]), IV, 43. Further references are cited in the text. Charles H. Brown, William Cullen Bryant (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1971), 275. Further references are cited in the text. “Mr. Bryant,” writes his biographer and son-in-law Parke Godwin, often recurred in conversation to his pleasant visit to Wordsworth; but one always suspected that, much as he reverenced the poet, he was not very strongly impressed by the man. Wordsworth had a way of talking of himself and his poetry, which must have seemed strange, if not ludicrous, to one so habitually reticent, in the same respects, as our traveler. Besides . . . Mr. Bryant was a thorough Democrat, and Wordsworth a Tory. (A Biography of William Cullen Bryant with Extracts from His Private Correspondence, 2 vols. [New York, 1883], II, 9). Further references are cited in the text. When Bryant began working on the Post it was a paper of four pages with six columns per page; the first page was all ads. The circulation was 1,700. Allen Nevins, The Evening Post: A Century of Journalism (New York: Russell and Russell, 1968 [1922]), 134. “During his travels in England, while staying in the house of a businessman, he was once invited to dine with a country gentleman near by, and accepted in the belief that, as a matter of course, his host had also been invited. When he learned that this was not true, and that his host, being in trade, never thought

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16.

17. 18.

19.

20.

21.

22.

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of entering the gentleman’s house, Bryant angrily cancelled his acceptance” (ibid., 353). See Robert B Sargent, “Anglo-American Encounter: William Cullen Bryant, Dickens, and Others,” in William Cullen Bryant and His America. Centennial Conference Proceedings 1878–1978, Hofstra University Cultural and Intercultural Studies No. 4 (New York: AMS Press, 1983), 179–194. “[T]he Evening Post made him by far the richest poet the country has had” (Nevins 359). Bryant wrote about his habits to Joseph H. Richards (March 30, 1871): I rise early, at this time of year about half past five; in summer half an hour, or even an hour, earlier. Immediately, with very little encumbrance of clothing, I begin a series of exercises. . . . These are performed with dumb-bells—the very lightest, covered with flannel—with a pole, a horizontal bar, and a light chair swung round my head. After a full hour, and sometimes more, passed in this manner, I bathe from head to foot. He reports that he usually has “hominy and milk” for breakfast—“but animal food I never take at breakfast. Tea and coffee I never touch at any time.” His main meal consists primarily of vegetables. At the meal which is called tea I take only a little bread and butter, with fruit, if it be on the table. . . . My drink is water, yet I sometimes, though rarely, take a glass of wine. . . . That I may rise early, I, of course, go to bed early. . . . I abominate drugs and narcotics, and have always carefully avoided anything which spurs nature to exertions which it would not otherwise make. (Godwin 297–299) Dickens’s editors note that only the copy of Bryant’s poems given to Dickens in Boston by Bryant’s friend the elder Richard H. Dana was found in his library at his death (Letters 59 n. 2). William St. Clair, The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 355–356. Further references are cited in the text. James J. Barnes, Authors, Publishers, and Politicians: The Quest for an AngloAmerican Copyright Agreement 1815–1854 (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 1974), 60. Further references are cited in the text. See also Godwin, A Biography of William Cullen Bryant I, 315. See too Lawrence H. Houtchens, “Charles Dickens and International Copyright,” American Literature 13 (1941): 18–28. Further references are cited in the text. The letter was signed by, among others, Bulwer, Thomas Campbell, Tennyson, Hood, Hunt, Sydney Smith, Rogers, Forster (of course), and Carlyle (Letters 213 n. 1; Godwin 397). In her study Victorian Publishing: The Economics of Book Production for a Mass Market 1836–1916 (Aldershot, England: Ashgate, 2003), Alexis Wheedon observes that “the profitability of literary works is closely linked to the

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25.

26.

27.

28.

29.

30.

31. 32.

33. 34. 35.

36.

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publishers’ ability to meet the demand for cheaper works,” a situation that persisted for the whole Victorian period—a period of “book hunger” (46). “America, it seems,” writes Michael Slater, “expected a sort of young messiah of Democracy whilst Dickens, for his part, expected to behold the promised land.” Michael Slater, ed., Dickens on America and the Americans (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1978), 9. Dickens, according to J. A. Sutherland, “had the keenest business mind of all his colleagues.” Victorian Novelists and Publishers (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1976), 47. Cf. Edward Lytton Bulwer on Byron in his still illuminating, and entertaining, England and the English (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1970 [1833]), 266–267. Gustave Le Bon, The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind (New York: Viking, 1960 [1896]), 16. See also the extremely useful etymology of “celebrity” in David Marshall, Celebrity and Power: Fame in Contemporary Culture (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 6–7. Further references are cited in the text. In her definitive The Printing Press as an Agent of Change: Communications and Cultural Transformations, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), however, Elizabeth L. Eisenstein points out that the conflict between commercial success and “eternal” standing for art began the moment works could be printed and distributed (I, 158). Steven Marcus, Dickens from Pickwick to Dombey (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1965), says Dickens’s American experience led him to see “through to the deeper social implications of what it meant to be a quasi-heroic figure, a ‘celebrity’ ” (243). Further references are cited in the text. Richard Schickel, Intimate Strangers: The Culture of Celebrity (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1985), 5. Further references are cited in the text. Cf. Jeremy Tambling’s observation in Lost in the American City: Dickens, James and Kafka (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001) that “Bleak House comes ten years after Dickens’ visit to the United States, as if not until Bleak House can the city which before he thought could be read, be looked at in the decentring terms which align it with the language generated by the sense of America” (19). Alter, Imagined Cities, 32. Further references are cited in the text. Maybe we should keep in mind too Frederick Douglass’s remark that “travelers are said to be great liars” (quoted in Mulvey 4). These included Frances and Anthony Trollope, Captain Marryat, Thackeray, Charles Kingsley, Arthur Hugh Clough, Matthew Arnold, Oscar Wilde, and Edmund Gosse. Harriet Martineau, How to Observe Morals and Manners, Michael R. Hill, ed. (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1989 [1838]), 2–3. Further references are cited in the text. “Truth becomes the single value of widest currency in the nineteenth century,” according to Alexander Welsh, who adds that “the

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history of truth in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is of steady secularization, a process that paradoxically enhances the value and may even render it more nearly absolute” (The City of Dickens [Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1971], 168). 37. Seymour Martin Lipset says How To . . . is “the first book on the methodology of social research in the ten still unborn disciplines of sociology and anthropology.” Introduction to Harriet Martineau, Society in America (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1962), 7. 38. Elias Canetti, The Voices of Marrakesh: A Record of a Visit, J. A. Underwood, trans. (London: Marion Boyars, 2001 [1967]). 39. Cf. Flaubert in Cairo: “I keep losing my way in the maze of alleys and running into dead-ends. . . . Dazzling sun effects when one suddenly emerges from these alleys, so narrow that the roofs of the moucharbiehs [shuttered bay windows: ed.] on each side touch each other.” Flaubert in Egypt: A Sensibility on Tour, Francis Steegmuller, ed. and trans. (London: Penguin, 1996), 77. 40. Canetti’s book, like Bryant’s writing about Algiers, is unlikely to be familiar to most readers, and I have quoted therefore more liberally than usual. 41. N. Scott Momaday, The Man Made of Words (New York: St. Martin’s-Griffin, 1997), 15. Further references are cited in the text. 42. Cf. Anne Fuchs, “The Dignity of Difference: Self and Other in Elias Canetti’s Voices of Marrakesh,” in David Darby, ed., Critical Essays on Elias Canetti (New York: G.K. Hall, 2000). “Canetti’s journey,” she writes, “is an exploration of the dignity of difference” (201). 43. See my discussion of the relationship of sacrifice and love in the work of Paul W. Kahn in chapter three. 44. Cf. again Flaubert in Cairo: “There is one new element which I hadn’t expected to see and which is tremendous here, and that is the grotesque” (42). 45. Cf. Gerhard Melzer, “At the Edge of Silence: Mystery in the Work of Elias Canetti,” in Darby, ed., Critical Essays on Elias Canetti. Melzer says Voices “is exceptionally indebted to the concept of hidden symbolization” (193). 46. Monod points out that Martin Chuzzlewit is the last novel Dickens signed “Boz” (8). 47. Among the many studies relevant to Dickens in America, see, e.g. (in chronological order), W. G. Wilkins, Charles Dickens in America (New York: Haskell House, 1970 [1911]); Robert Heilman, “The New World in Charles Dickens’ Writings,” The Trollopian 1, no. 3 (1946): 25–43; J. Hillis Miller, Charles Dickens: The World of His Novels (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1958); Welsh, The City of Dickens and see also From Copyright to Copperfield (see n. 23); Slater, ed., Dickens on America and the Americans; Patricia M. Ard, “Charles Dickens’ Stormy Crossing: The Rhetorical Voyage from Letters to American Notes,” Nineteenth Century Prose 23 (1996): 34–42 ; David Stevens, “Dickens in Eden: The Framing of America in American Notes,” Nineteenth Century Prose 23 (1996): 43–52; Jerome Meckier, Innocent Abroad: Charles Dickens’ American Engagements (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 1990); Tambling, Lost in the American City; and Efraim Sicher, Rereading the City, Rereading Dickens:

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48.

49.

50.

51. 52.

53.

54.

55.

56.

57.

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Representation, the Novel, and Urban Realism (New York: AMS, 2003). More generally on Anglo-American travel literature, see Jane Louise Mesick, The English Traveller in America 1783–1835 (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1950 [1922]); Max Berger, The British Traveller in America 1836–1860 (Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1964 [1943]); Mulvey, Anglo-American Landscapes; James Buzard, The Beaten Track: European Tourism, Literature, and the Ways of Culture 1800–1918 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993); and Rupert Christiansen, Victorian Visitors: Culture Shock in Nineteenth-Century Britain (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2000). Further references to any of these studies are cited in the text. Cf. Mulvey: “Dickens’ instinct to compare districts of New York with those of London in 1842 . . . reflected the habit of the English traveler to refer all back to the country he had left behind him” (161). Buzard makes a similar point: “Abroad, the tourist is the relentless representative of home” (8). Sicher points out that this process was hardly limited to New York, since Warren’s Blacking House was “erased” by Hungerford Market, itself demolished in 1862 (xv). The sense of things vanishing in New York because of its incessant destruction and rebuilding is of course especially strong in James, for whom see the discussion of The American Scene later. Cf. Mulvey: “The American wilderness filled most [English] travelers with a sense of threat and oppression. It contrasted so absolutely with the garden-like appearance of England that so impressed American travelers” (11). Henry David Thoreau, The Maine Woods, Joseph J. Moldenhauer, ed. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1972 [1864]), 70–71. Jane Austen, Mansfield Park, Tony Tanner, ed. (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966), 118. Austen does not mean by “wilderness” what Thoreau does: she refers simply to an unplanted area that is however not a wood. But the connotations of the word are what she draws on when her characters lose themselves in that wilderness. Henry David Thoreau, “Walking” (1862) in Walden and Other Writings of Henry David Thoreau, Brooks Atkinson, ed. (New York: Modern Library, 1950), 616–617. “As a young man of radical tendencies,” writes Steven Marcus, “Dickens had the most pious preconceptions about America. . . . America seemed the promise of humanity’s oldest dream, the world made new again” (241). Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina, Introduction by Mona Simpson, Leonard J. Kent and Nina Berberova, eds., Constance Garnett, trans. (New York: The Modern Library, 2000), 543. Further references are cited in the text. Dorothy Van Ghent, “The Dickens World: The View from Todgers’s,” in Martin Price, ed., Dickens: A Collection of Critical Essays (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1967), 24. Further references are cited in the text. Monod says that for Dickens “dialogue clearly serves . . . to render not the real world but a fictional world that is amazingly vivid and varied.” But, he proceeds, “[t]he speech of Dickens’ characters could not please and convince the reader as it undoubtedly does if the ‘accurate observation’ had not been called into play” (162).

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58. M. M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, trans., Michael Holquist, ed. (Austin, TX and London: University of Texas Press, 1981), 367. 59. George Gordon Byron, Lord Byron: Selected Letters and Journals, Leslie Marchand, ed. (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1982), 220. 60. George Levine, The Realistic Imagination; English Fiction from Frankenstein to Lady Chatterley (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 8. Further references are cited in the text. 61. In Victorian Novelists: Essays in Revaluation (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1958 [1935]), David Cecil maintains that it was “very rare for a Victorian novelist before George Eliot to conceive the story as an organic whole of which every incident and character forms a contributory and integral part” (5). Gissing, in any event, says that “a novel more shapeless, a story less coherent than Martin Chuzzlewit, will not easily be found in any literature” (Charles Dickens: A Critical Study [London: Gresham,1903 (1898)], 54), a judgment with which Barbara Hardy, in “The Change of Heart in Dickens’ Novels,” agrees (see Price, ed., Dickens: A Collection of Critical Essays). 62. Although Mrs. Beeton’s Book of Household Management appeared in 1861 the Victorian ideal of domesticity was significantly fostered by cookbooks such as Isabella Beeton’s, which offered detailed guidance on how to prepare family meals. Beeton’s husband Samuel published the Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine, which was explicitly intended to initiate women “in the secrets of making ‘home happy.’ ” Mrs. Beeton’s Book of Household Management, Nicola Humble, ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), xi. Nicola Humble, Mrs. Beeton’s most recent editor, also points out that one of Beeton’s motivations for her book was the desire to have her husband, who like most midVictorian men ate many meals away from home, change his habits. “It is no exaggeration to say,” Humble writes, “that Isabella Beeton’s preoccupation with getting her husband to spend more time at home was in no small part responsible for the new cult of domesticity that was to play such a major role in mid-Victorian life” (xii). 63. Phiz’s illustration also draws the notice of Monod (74–75) and Welsh (The City of Dickens 122). 64. Nadgett belongs to a literary class too and appears in various forms in, e.g., Great Expectations, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, and The Mayor of Casterbridge. 65. Cf. J. Hillis Miller’s observation that, for Dickens, “the concrete embodiment of this totality [ the “world”] is the great modern commercial city, made up of millions of people all connected to one another without knowing it, and yet separated from one another and living in isolation and secrecy” (Charles Dickens 1). 66. David Parker contends that “America excited Dickens’ rage because it repeatedly placed before him behavior and attitudes calling up unresolved conflicts in his mind, testing habits of response laden with anxiety. . . . For Dickens

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67. 68.

69. 70. 71.

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America was an unflattering glass.” See his “Dickens and America: The Unflattering Glass,” Dickens Studies Annual 15 (1986): 58. The one thing every critic of Martin Chuzzlewit agrees on is that Young Martin is a sad failure as a character—flat, inactive, and unbelievable. Hardy’s views are contained in her essays “The Change of Heart in Dickens’ Novels,” in Price, ed., Dickens: A Collection of Critical Essays and “Martin Chuzzlewit,” in John Gross and Gabriel Pearson, eds., Dickens and the Twentieth Century (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1962), 107–120. See my discussion of Out of Eden in chapter three, passim. Henry James, The American Scene, John F. Sears, ed. (New York: Penguin Books, 1994 [1904]), 13. Further references are cited in the text. For example: There is no swarming like that of Israel when once Israel has got a start, and the scene here [the Lower East Side] bristled, at every step, with the signs and sounds, immitigable, unmistakable, of a Jewry that had burst all bounds. . . . It was as if we had been thus, in the crowded, hustled roadway, where multiplication, multiplication of everything, was the dominant note, at the bottom of some vast sallow aquarium in which innumerable fish, of overdeveloped proboscis, were to bump together, for ever, amid heaped spoils of the sea. (The American Scene 100) “Just what,” writes W. H. Auden in his witty and trenchant essay “Henry James’ The American Scene,” Horizon 15 (1947), “one asks with nostalgic awe, would James have said if confronted with the spectacle of a drummajorette?” (79). “Our streets are calendars,” writes Colson Whitehead in The Colossus of New York (New York: Random House, 2003), containing who we were and who we will be next week. We see ourselves in this city every day when we walk down the sidewalk and catch our reflections in store windows, seek ourselves in this city every time we reminisce about what was there fifteen, ten, forty years ago, because all our old places are proof that we were here. One day the city we built will be gone, and when it goes, we go. When the buildings fall, we topple, too. (9) Jeremy Tambling says James becomes aware, upon his return to the United States, that far sooner than he expected America had made Europe irrelevant. The American Scene is full of that awareness, which makes it a text implicitly aware of trauma. . . . In Lacan, trauma means a missed encounter with the real. . . . The figure for this [“something real that had not been described”] in James is always the ghost. . . . James’ fascination for ghosts may be read as a desire for trauma, which makes The American Scene dual, both opening itself up to otherness as well as conservatively self-protective. . . . As Dickens found America something that went beyond his subjective understanding, James found that America questioned his being as a “European.” (101–102)

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75. Henry James, Hawthorne (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1956 [1907]), 2. 76. Auden says that “perhaps the best way to approach this book is as a prose poem of the first order” (81). 77. That many readers have found passages of The American Scene unreadable has to be noted as an objection to James’s “proof ” but not as a refutation. Even where he is exasperatingly “fine,” he succeeds in suggesting what he is getting at. Auden, usually a sure judge of quality, thought the book was the best of James’s travel writings. Mulvey has a slightly different take on James’s impressionism: The solution to his perceptual problems he found difficult to describe for he had had “as who should say, to improvise a local medium and to arrange a local consciousness.” No traveler [has come] any closer to identifying this perceptual experience of the alien [Mulvey does not mean immigrants, etc. but the Other or the unprecedented]. . . . As James later realized, the “local medium” and “local consciousness” created by the needs of extraordinary-sense perception made for distortions of common-sense perception that put the traveler at a distance from the very thing that he saw so clearly and which he would, were he able, contact so closely. (260)

Chapter Three 1. Although I cite Out of Eden: Adam and Eve and the Problem of Evil (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007) throughout this chapter, my citations do not come close to capturing my debt to Kahn, a debt I wish to acknowledge here. 2. I am using the word “modernity” loosely and assuming that “modernity” only comes fully into people’s lives in the long nineteenth century; that is, beginning toward the end of the eighteenth century and continuing into the early twentieth century. I am therefore writing mainly about the English novel. While most of what I argue applies, I believe, equally to writing in America and in Europe, there are naturally special contexts for the English novel that suggest differences and exceptions all along the line. 3. Kahn agrees: “To understand love and evil we must remain within the domain of the symbolic” (140). 4. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 2 vols., The Henry Reeve Text (New York: Vintage Books, 1990), II, 98–99. 5. Darcy’s father, in an echo of King Lear, entertains the possibility that the estate might fall to two sons, an idea that Wickham takes wholly to heart, and that in any event has disastrous consequences. 6. Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice, Robert P. Irvine, ed. (Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press, 2002), 287. Further citations are found in the text. 7. The many movies and television serials made of the novel beautifully demonstrate that everyone understands the novel as an idyll: the opening credits

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9. 10. 11.

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invariably show us that we are going back to before the beginning, that the world of the novel is a fixed world, in all senses of the word. This is William York Tindall’s key insight about the literary symbol in his still persuasive The Literary Symbol (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1974 [1955]), 11. Soren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, Alastair Hannay, trans. (New York: Penguin Books, 2006). References are cited in the text. See Wolfgang Iser, The Implied Reader (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974) and chapter one in this book, pp. 22–23. I am using the Dover edition—Candace Ward, ed. (New York: Dover Publications, 1994), which reprints the 1831 edition of the novel. References are cited in the text. Given the fascination with ghosts and the suggestion here of a kind of ghost set loose in the story, it seems worth observing that a ghost can be either a good or evil spirit. The first meaning you encounter for the word in the OED is: “The spirit or immaterial part of man, as distinct from the body or material part; the seat of feeling, thought, and moral action. Also, in New Testament language, the spirit or higher moral nature of man; opposed to flesh. . . . ” And even more War and Peace: in the first description in the novel of the moment before battle, Tolstoy abruptly inserts within quotations marks attributed to no one the observation that “ ‘One step beyond that line, reminiscent of the line separating the living and the dead . . . you will inevitably find out what is there on the other side of death . . . ’ ” and adds: “So, if he does not think it, every man feels who finds himself within sight of an enemy . . . ” [sic!] (Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, trans. [New York: Knopf, 2007], 143). Needless to say, many more comments of the same kind appear throughout the novel. Cf. George Levine: The Victorian realists had put their faith in the “fact,” and the fact had failed them. But the fact of Victorian realism remained beyond the particular surfaces and conventions of order, or disorder, we may find from novel to novel. We can hear in Lawrence’s own comments, in Lady Chatterley’s Lover, on the spirit of genuine fiction, echoes of the ideals and the achievements of the Victorians themselves. In the intensity of his moral engagement, in his radical attempt to infuse vitality and meaning into a world from which meaning had been withdrawn, in his quest to find a form that would honor the streamingness of experience without Thackerayan diffusion of plots, in his effort to find a new language to make a vital conjunction between art and experience, Lawrence was perhaps the last of the great Victorians. (The Realistic Imagination: English Fiction from Frankenstein to Lady Chatterley [Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1981], 327) Further references are cited in the text. Dorothy Van Ghent, “The Dickens World: The View from Todgers’s,” in Martin Price, ed., Dickens: A Collection of Critical Essays (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1967), 3–5.

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16. Already at the beginning of the century, Hazlitt notes that “[t]he accumulation of knowledge has been so great, that we are lost in wonder at the height it has reached . . . while the variety of objects distracts and dazzles the looker-on,” The Spirit of the Age, Vol. 11 of The Complete Works of William Hazlitt, P. P. Howe, ed., 21 vols. (London: J. M. Dent and Sons, 1932), 28–29. 17. Cf. Graham Law, who, in “The Professional Writer and the Literary Marketplace,” in Jenny Bourne Taylor, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Wilkie Collins (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 97–111, argues that the commoditization of fiction really took off simultaneous to Collins’s career, especially with Woman in White, which, like today’s blockbuster movies, spawned Woman in White cloaks, perfumes, and waltzes. 18. That formidable, enlightened, right-thinking Victorian, George Eliot, reveals just how invisible class prejudices could be when, in Middlemarch, Mrs. Garth, responding to the recalcitrant Ben’s complaint that grammar and spelling are useless, says to him that they “ ‘teach you to speak and write correctly’ ” and throws at him a supposedly definitive contrary example: “ ‘Should you like to speak as old Job does?’ ” Middlemarch, Rosemary Ashton, ed. (London: Penguin Books, 1994), 244. Later, Mr. Booke’s tenant Dagley scolds the squire about his parliamentary ambitions, reporting to him what “they say”: “ ‘“He’s the man for Rinform,” says they. That’s what they says. An’ I made out what the Rinform were—an’ it were to sen you an’ your like a-scuttlin’; and wi’ pretty strong-smellin’ things too’ ” (397). 19. Charles Dickens, Great Expectations, David Trotter, ed. (New York: Penguin Books, 1996), 8. References are cited in the text. 20. “In his rejection of the conventions of realism,” writes George Levine, “Lawrence belongs nevertheless to that great struggle of the realists both to use and reject literature and language, for the sake of a reality beyond language” (The Realistic Imagination 327). 21. “Picasso’s ambition,” says William Rubin, “became nothing less than the recovery of the magical function that first led humankind to make images: the power to change life,” “The Genesis of Les Demoiselles d’Avignon,” in William Rubin, Helene Sieckel, and Judith Cousins, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, Studies in Modern Art, 3 (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1994), 13. Further references are cited in the text. 22. The essential quality of African life, in the words of one of the great twentiethcentury Western travelers in Africa, Ryszard Kapucinksi, resides in “the symbolic values the African imparts to the most mundane things.” The Shadow of the Sun, Klara Glowczewska, trans. (New York: Vintage, 1998), 319. 23. Charles Dickens, Hard Times, George Ford and Sylvere Monod, eds. (New York: Norton, 1966), 17. Further references are cited in the text. 24. “Although the dragons and serpents in Dickens . . . imply a fallen world,” writes Anne Fernihough, “Lawrence articulates the nature of that fallenness in a new way, transmuting the dragons and demons of industry into the dragons not just of dirt and smoke but of the word itself.” D. H. Lawrence: Aesthetics and Ideology (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), 137.

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25. F. R. Leavis, The Great Tradition (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1966 [1948]), 250. 26. D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Michael Squires, ed. (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1994). References are cited in the text. 27. Just after this exchange Connie discovers “a largeish black japanned box” that Lawrence uses to critique the “monstrous” repressions and artificiality of the Wragby Victorians. She is revolted by the thing but Mrs. Bolton, drawn to the aristocracy, is fascinated, and Connie gives it to her. 28. Dickens wrote: You saw nothing in Coketown but what was severely workful. If the members of a religious persuasion built a chapel there—as the members of eighteen religious persuasions had done—they made it a pious warehouse of red brick. . . . The jail might have been the infirmary, the infirmary might have been the jail, the town-hall might have been either, or both. . . . Fact, fact, fact, everywhere in the material aspect of town; fact, fact, fact, everywhere in the immaterial. The M’Choakumchild school was all fact, the school of design was all fact, and the relations between master and man were all fact. . . . (17) 29. “Lawrence’s entire life-work,” says Fernihough, “can be read as an allegory of the way in which the uncanny shapes of technology and urban sprawl, ‘shapes not before known to man,’ have ‘surprised’ the earth” (138). 30. I do not know whether anyone any longer reads Lady Chatterley as a sexual primer, but there is plenty of evidence that it was read that way by a great many people in its time. Lawrence’s details are often silly but the spirit is right and clearly mattered to several generations of readers. On this subject, see Doris Lessing’s Introduction to the Penguin Deluxe Edition of the novel (2006). 31. The novel’s end echoes the close of Chapter XI: Chapter XI ends as it begins, with an exchange between Connie and Mrs. Bolton. They speak about Mrs. Bolton’s long dead husband. Mrs. Bolton validates Connie’s still half-formed sense of how things are. Her husband, Mrs. Bolton tells her, was a sensitive man. When he saw the agony childbirth had been to her, he never “ ‘had any right pleasure with me at nights after’ ” (162). At the core of her being is the tactile memory of the man, “ ‘the touch of him! I’ve never got over it to this day, and never shall. And if there’s a heaven above, he’ll be there, and will lie up against me so I can sleep’ ” (163).

Toward a Conclusion 1. Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer, trans., 3 vols. (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1983–1985). Further references are cited in the text. 2. Here is the problem as Stanley Fish puts it in his enormously influential “Interpreting the Variorum”: This, then, is my thesis: that the form of the reader’s experience . . . and the structure of intention are one, that they come into 10.1057/9780230106116 - Rereading the Nineteenth Century, Igor Webb

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3. 4.

5.

6. 7.

8.

9.

10.

11. 12.

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Notes

view simultaneously, and that therefore the questions of priority and independence do not arise. What does arise is another question: what produces them? That is, if intention, form, and the shape of the reader’s experience are simply ways of referring to . . . the same interpretive act, what is that act an interpretation of ? I cannot answer that question, but neither, I would claim, can anyone else. (Critical Inquiry 2, no. 3 [1976]: 479) “We tell stories,” he says, e.g., “because in the last analysis human lives need and merit being narrated” (Time and Narrative I, 75). Ricoeur adds to Iser’s views those of Hans Robert Jauss, who in Toward an Aesthetic of Reception, Timothy Bahti, trans. (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1982), argues that pleasure actively leads to, makes the way for, understanding. Ricoeur offers a concise review of the reading dynamic as he understands it in his Oneself as Another, Kathleen Blamey, trans. (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 141–142. George Levine, The Realistic Imagination: English Fiction from Frankenstein to Lady Chatterley (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 8. I do not mean to say that Ricoeur’s notion of refiguration implies only one kind of ending. Mary’s “fate” strikes the novel into coherence whether we see it as satisfying or a failure of imagination: both interpretations already contain a coherent view of the novel, a meaningful completion of our reading experience. Martin Chuzzlewit appeared five years before the publication of Mary Barton but, to keep the argument going, I treat them both as novels of the midcentury. Dorothy Van Ghent, “The Dickens World: The View from Todgers’s,” in Martin Price, ed., Dickens: A Collection of Critical Essays (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1967), 29. The phrase appears in James’s critique of Hawthorne’s French and Italian Notebooks: “The strangeness, the remoteness, the Italianism of manners and objects, seem to oppress and confound [Hawthorne]. He walks about bending a puzzled, ineffective gaze at things . . . with the light wings of his fancy just touching the surface of the massive consistency of fact about him . . . ” Quoted in James Buzard, The Beaten Track: European Tourism, Literature, and the Ways of Culture 1800–1918 (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1993), 231. Wordsworth and Coleridge: Lyrical Ballads, R. L. Brett and A. R. Jones, eds. (London: Routledge, 1991), 259. D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Michael Squires, ed. (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1994), 101.

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Alter, Robert. Imagined Cities: Urban Experience and the Language of the Novel. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005. Appiah, Anthony. “Tolerable Falsehoods: Agency and the Interests of Theory.” In Jonathan Arac and Barbara Johnson, eds., Consequences of Theory. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991. Ard, Patricia M. “Charles Dickens’ Stormy Crossing: The Rhetorical Voyage from Letters to American Notes.” Nineteenth Century Prose 23 (1996): 34–42. Auden, W. H. “Henry James’s The American Scene.” Horizon 15 (1947): 77–90. Austen, Jane. Mansfield Park. Edited by Tony Tanner. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966. ———. Pride and Prejudice. Edited by Robert P. Irvine. Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press, 2002. Bakhtin, M. M. The Dialogic Imagination. Translated by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Edited by Michael Holquist. Austin, TX and London: University of Texas Press, 1981. Barnes, James J. Authors, Publishers, and Politicians: The Quest for an Anglo-American Copyright Agreement 1815–1854. Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 1974. Beeton, Isabella. Mrs. Beeton’s Book of Household Management. 1861. Edited by Nicola Humble. Reprint, New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. Berger, Max. The British Traveller in America, 1836–1860. 1943. Reprint, Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1964. Borges, Jorge Luis. Ficciones. Translated by Emcee Editores. New York: Grove Press, 1962. Brett, R. L. and A. R. Jones, eds. Wordsworth and Coleridge: Lyrical Ballads. London: Routledge, 1991. Brown, Charles H. William Cullen Bryant. New York: Scribner’s, 1971. Bryant, William Cullen. The Letters of William Cullen Bryant. 6 vols. Edited by William Cullen Bryant II and Thomas G. Voss. New York: Fordham University Press, 1977. ———. Letters of a Traveller, Second Series. New York, 1859. Bulwer, Edward Lytton. England and the English. 1833. Edited by Standish Meacham. Reprint, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1970.

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Abraham, 117 Act of Reading, The, see Iser, Wolfgang Adam and Eve, 109–111, 115 Algiers, 60, 61, 63 Alter, Robert, 58 Imagined Cities, 58, 167n7, 169n33 Alton Locke, see Kingsley, Charles American Copyright Club, 51 American Notes, see Dickens, Charles; see also James, Henry Anglo-American Landscapes: A Study of Nineteenth Century AngloAmerican Travel Literature, see Mulvey, Christopher Anglo-American travel, 68 Anna Karenina, see Tolstoy, Leo Apocalypse, the, 145, 158 Appiah, Anthony, 31 “Tolerable Falsehoods; Agency and the Interests of Theory,” 166n21 Arcturus, 51 Ard, Patricia M., “Charles Dickens’s Stormy Crossing,” 170n47 aristocratic society, 56, 111 Auden, W. H., “Henry James’s The American Scene,” 173n72, 174n76 Aurora, The, 46 Austen, Jane, 5, 46, 108, 109, 112, 117, 118–119, 120, 125, 128, 146–147, 148 Mansfield Park, 74–75

Pride and Prejudice, 8, 108–117, 146, 148, 149, 150, 174n6 evil in, 112–113 irony in, 11, 112–113, 114, 116, 117 and justice, 112, 115–116 and love, 114, 115 narrative authority in, 115–116, 119 primogeniture/entail in, 111–112, 113, 114, 115, 116 rhetorical strategy of, 112–113 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 81, 82, 172n58 Barnaby Rudge, see Dickens, Charles Barnes, James J., 52 Authors, Publishers, and Politicians: The Quest for Anglo-American Copyright Agreement, 168n21 Bedford/St. Martin’s Case Studies, 4 Beeton, Isabella, Mrs. Beeton’s Book of Household Management, 172n62 Benjamin, Park, 50 Berger, Max, The English Traveler in America 1836–1860, 171n47 Blake, William, 145 Bloomsbury, 12 Borges, Jorge Luis, 19, 21 Ficciones, 165n11 “Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote,” 19–21 Bowdler, Thomas, 11 Boz, see Dickens, Charles

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Index

Brecht, Bertolt, 98 Bronte, Anne, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, 14 Bronte, Emily, Wuthering Heights, 128 Bronte, Charlotte, 36 Brother Jonathan, 50 Brown, Charles H., William Cullen Bryant, 167n11 Bryant, William Cullen, 45–48, 60, 65, 66, 70, 104 Evening Post, The, 46, 60 friendship with Dickens, 45–48 Hawthorne’s view of, 46 and international copyright, 47, 51, 52 on Lawrence, Massachusetts, 69–70 on the Mississippi, 74 and snobbery, 46 on Tangiers, 60 travel writing, 46, 60–62 Letters of a Traveller, 60, 62 “Thanatopsis,” 46 Buffalo Bill, 135 Bulwer, Edward Lytton, England and the English, 169n27 Buzard, James, The Beaten Track, 171n47, 178n10 Byron, George Gordon, Lord, 81, 172n59 and Dickens, 81 Don Juan, 81, 82 Cain and Abel, 8, 110, 11, 123, see also Kahn, Paul W Cairo, Illinois, 72, 75, 87, 90 Canetti, Elias, 60, 61, 62, 63–68, 170n38 Voices of Marrakesh, The, 60, 63–68, 170n38 Carlyle, Thomas, 6, 11, 37, 38, 61, 80 on Mary Barton, 37, 80 see also Condition of England, the Cecil, David, Victorian Novelists, 172n61

celebrity, 54–58 Cervantes, Miguel de, 20–21, 39 Don Quixote, 19–21, 39 Chapman and Hall, 42 Chapman, Edward, 131 Chartism, 23, 24 Chaucer, 131 Chiltern Library, 12 Christianity, 6, 12, 13, 14, 34–35, 41, 107, 147, 152 Christianssen, Rupert, Victorian Visitors, 171n47 Clay, Henry, 50, 51 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 125 Coketown, 134, 177, see also Dickens, Charles Collins, Wilkie, 176n17 common reader, the, 3, 4, 39, see also Woolf, Virginia Communist Manifesto, The, 18 Companion to Victorian Literature, A, 164n3 Condition of England, the, 6, 11–12, 18, 23, 30, 37–38, 132, 143 Condition of the Working-Class in England, The, see Engels, Frederic Conrad, Joseph, 16, 17, 19, 125, 127, 128 Lord Jim, 128 The Secret Sharer and Other Stories, 165n9 “Typhoon,” 16–17 Cooper, Lettice, 12, 13, 37–38, 164n2 Courbet, Gustave,” The Origin of the World,” 139–140 Cowling, Maurice, 164n9 Craik, W.A., 34, 166n20, 166n22 Elizabeth Gaskell and the English Provincial Novel, 166n20 Crevecoeur, Hector de, 101

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Culture and Society, see Williams, Raymond Curtis, George William, 47 Daly, Macdonald, 12, 13, 18–19, 165n4 Dana, Richard H., 74 Defoe, Daniel, 71, 72 Moll Flanders, 8, 71, 72 Democracy in America, see Tocqueville, Alexis de Demoiselles d’Avignon, see Picasso, Pablo Diderot, Denis, 120 Derrida, Jacques, 138 dialect, 131 in Lady Chatterley’s Lover, 142–143 in Mary Barton, 24, 26, 32 Dickens, Charles, 41–105, 108, 110, 129, 131, 134–135, 138, 140, 141, 143, 154, 155 Boston, 43 Boz, 42, 54, 55, 68–69, 70, 94 Cairo, Illinois, 72–73 celebrity, 43, 54–58 democracy, attitude toward, 43, 47, 75 friendship with Bryant, 45–48 improvisation and spontaneity, 19, 81, 82 international copyright, 43, 46, 48–54 and Washington Irving, 47, 48 London, view of, 41, 71, 87, 89 on Lowell, Massachusetts, 69–70, 72, 96 manners, American, 35 and Harriet Martineau, 50 mass reading public, 43, 49, 52, 53–54 Mississippi, 72 New York, 43, 70–72, 75, 87 Nicholas Nickleby, 50

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Martin Chuzzlewit, 7, 42, 43, 44, 45, 48, 54, 57, 60, 65, 69, 72, 76–98, 108, 154, 155, 156 and authority, 92–93, 96–98 books and libraries in, 83–86 coherence of, 82 Mississippi in, 89, 90 and narration, 87, 93–96 realism and symbolism in, 81 and surveillance, 87–89, 98 Todgers’s, interpretations of, 86–91, 94–96 and the United States, 7, 42, 48 Sketches by Boz, 42, see also Gissing, George; Hardy, Barbara; Joseph, Gerhard; Marcus, Steven; Van Ghent, Dorothy; Welsh, Alexander and 170n47 Dickens and the Twentieth Century, 173n68 Dickens from Pickwick to Dombey, see Marcus, Steven Disraeli, Benjamin, 129 Sybil, 129, 131, 164n1 Don Juan, see Byron Don Quixote, see Cervantes Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 3, 81 Easson, Angus, Elizabeth Gaskell: The Critical Heritage, 14, 165n6, 166n23 Eliot, George Felix Holt, 164n1 Middlemarch, 128, 176n18 Elizabeth, Charlotte (Mrs. Tonna), Helen Fleetwood, 164n1 Eisenstein, Elizabeth L., The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, 169n29 Engels, Frederic, 17–18 Condition of the Working-Class in England, The, 17–18 entail, see primogeniture epistolary novel, 148, 160

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Erikson, Erik, 43 Evening Post, The, 46, see also Bryant, William Cullen evil, 108–111 in Frankenstein, 121–124 in Genesis, 7–8, 109–111 Kahn’s (Paul. W) view of, 7–8, 108–111 in Pride and Prejudice, 112–113 fact in fiction, 15 in Hard Times, 41 in Mary Barton, 14, 37, 41 in The American Scene, 103, 157 Faulkner, William, 3 Fear and Trembling, see Kierkegaard, Soren Felix Holt, see Eliot, George Fernihough, Anne, D. H. Lawrence: Aesthetics and Ideology, 176n24, 176n26 Fish, Stanley, 38 “Interpreting the Variorum,” 177n2 Flaubert, Gustave, 3, 60, 125 Flaubert in Egypt, 170n39, 170n44 Foster, Jennifer, 165n5 Foster, John, 43, 51, 54, 80 The Life of Charles Dickens, 166n3 Foster, Shirley, 165n5 Foucault, Michel, 30, 38 Frankenstein, see Shelley, Mary Franklin, Benjamin, 46 Freud, Sigmund, 80 From Copyright to Copperfield: The Identity of Dickens, see Welsh, Alexander Fuchs, Anne, “The Dignity of Difference: Self and Other in Elias Canetti’s Voices of Marrakesh, 170n42 Gallagher, Catherine, 30–33, 34 The Industrial Reformation of English Fiction: Social Discourse and

Narrative Form 1832–1867, 30, 166n19 Gaskell, Elizabeth, 6, 11–39, 41, 61, 77, 80, 81, 90, 107, 131, 151–153, 154 Mary Barton, 11–39, 41, 77, 82, 90, 103, 107, 131, 151, 154 Carlyle on, 37, 80 and Chartism, 23, 24 dialect in, 24, 26, 32 endings of, 35–37 fact in, 14, 41 Harry Carson’s murder, 24–28 historical accuracy of, 24–28 and Marx and Engels, 17–18 melodrama in, 25, 29–32 migration from the countryside in, 6, 12, 17–18 politics of, 12–13, 17–19 religion in, 30, 33–35 and self-evident truth, 13, 15, 41, 82, 151, 154 and Unitarianism, 30–31, 34 North and South, 164n1 see also Craik, Wendy; Cooper, Lettice; Daly, Macdonald; Easson, Angus; Gallagher, Catherine; Shelston, Alan; Tillotson, Kathleen; Williams, Raymond; Wright, Edgar; Zlotnick, Susan Genesis, 7, 8, 41, 109, 113–115, 121, 136, 140, 176 see also Kahn, Paul H. Ginsberg, Allen, 145 Gissing, George, 82 Charles Dickens, 172n61 Godwin, Parke, A Biography of William Cullen Bryant, 167n12, 168n18, 168n21, 168n23 Gosse, Edmund, 169n35 Great Expectations see Dickens, Charles Great Tradition, The see Leavis, F. R.

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Greeley, Horace, 46 Greenblatt, Stephen, 30, 31 Gross, John see Dickens and the Twentieth Century Gunther, John, 59 Halleck, Fitz-Greene, 51 Hamilton, Alexander, 46 Hard Times see Dickens, Charles Hardy, Barbara, 82, 92–93 “The Change of Heart in Dickens’s Novels,” 172n61, 173n68 “Martin Chuzzlewit,” 173n68 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 104, 167n10 on Bryant, 46 James, Henry on, 101–102 on Washington, George, 45–46 Hazlitt, William, 71 The Spirit of the Age, 176n16 Heilman, Robert, 170n47 Helen Fleetwood, 164n1 Houtchens, Laurence, H., “Charles Dickens and International Copyright,” 168n22 How To Study Manners and Morals see Martineau, Harriet Imagined Cities see Alter, Robert implied reader see Iser, Wolfgang industrial novels, 11–12, 30 The Industrial Reformation of English Fiction: Social Discourse and Narrative Form 1832–1867 see Gallagher, Catherine international copyright, 43, 46, 48–54 irony, 11, 112–113, Irving, Washington Iser, Wolfgang, 21–23, 25–26, 29, 33, 38, 71, 87, 150–151 implied reader, idea of, 22–23, 29, 119, 125, 151

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on nineteenth century novel, 25–26, 29 and Poulet, George, 21–22 and Ricoeur, Paul, 151 Act of Reading, The, 22, 165n12 Implied Reader, The, 165n12, 175n10 James, Henry, 93, 99, 156, 157 on American refusal of history, 102 and change, 100–101 Dickens and, 99 dispossession in New York, 100 fact and, 157 on Hawthorne, 101–102, 157–158, 178n10 on history, 101–102, 157–158 on immigration to U.S., 100–101 on impressions, 103–105 on New York as perpetually new, 101 on representation, 102–103 American Scene, The, 99–105, 173n70, 173n71 Golden Bowl, The, 99 Hawthorne, 174n75 Sacred Fount, The, 99 Wings of the Dove, The, 99 Jauss, Hans Robert, Toward an Aesthetic of Reception, 178n4 Johnson, Samuel, 71, 72 Joseph, Gerhard, 94 “The Labyrinth and the Library: A View from the Temple in Martin Chuzzlewit,” 167n6 Joyce, James, 16, 93, 151 Jung, Carl, 80 Kafka, Franz, 3, 98, 123 Kahler, Eric, Inward Turn of narrative, The, 163n5 Kahn, Paul W., 7–8, 108, 109–111, 115, 121, 123, 124, 126–127, 128, 129, 135, 136, 137, 140, 149, 156, 158, 174n3 on Adam and Eve, 7–8, 109–111, 123, 128

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Kahn, Paul—Continued on Cain and Abel, 110–111, 123 on evil, 109–111, 112 on justice, 115–116 on love, 109, 111, 115, 124, 126–127 on narrative, 110 on shame, 111, 123, 128, 140 Out of Eden: Adam and Eve and the Problem of Evil, 7, 108–111, 164n10, 174n1 Kapucinski, Ryszard, The Shadow of the Sun, 176n22 Keats, John, 60, 104 Kermode, Frank, 39, 145–161 The Sense of an Ending, 145–161, 166n25 see also Ricoeur, Paul Kierkegaard, Soren, 124, 125, 175n9 Fear and Trembling, 117–119, 120, 175n9 Kingsley, Charles, 13–14 Alton Locke, 164n1 Yeast, 164n1 Kinnaird, Douglas, 81 Knickerbocker School, the, 48 Kurtz (in Conrad), 127 Lacan, Jacques, 38 Lady Chatterley’s Lover, see Lawrence, D. H. Law, Graham, “The Professional Writer and the Literary Marketplace,” 175n17 Lawrence, D. H., 3, 4, 108, 129–144, 145, 157–158 and dialect, 142–143 and Old England, 138 and Picasso, 133–134 and religion, 3, 4, 145 and resacralizing experience, 133 Lady Chatterley’s Lover, 8, 38, 129–144, 145, 148, 166n24, 177n26, 178n12 and Courbet’s “The Origin of the World,” 139–140

dialect in, 142–143 and Frankenstein, 141–142 and Genesis, 136–137 and Hard Times, 134 and industry, 139 and making a baby, 139, 141–142 and the natural, 138 and realism, 132 LeBon, Gustav, 56, 57 Leavis, F.R., 136 on Hard Times, 136 The Great Tradition, 177n25 Lehmann, John, 12 Lentricchia, Frank, After The New Criticism, 165n14 Levine, George, 82, 140, 152 The Realistic Imagination, 172n60, 175n14, 176n20, 178n6 libraries Joseph, Gerhard’s view of in Dickens, 94, 167n6 significance in Martin Chuzzelwit, 83–86 Lipset, Seymour Martin, 170n37 Literacy, 5, 53, see also Canetti, Elias; Momaday, N. Scott Long Revolution, The see Williams, Raymond London, 8, 41, 61, 68, 69, 71, 71, 81, 83, 85, 87, 88, 96, 135, 154 Lord Jim, see Conrad, Joseph Lowell, Massachusetts, 69, 70, 72, 90, 96 Lucas, John, 17–18, 44 “Engels, Mrs. Gaskell, and Manchester,” 17–18 The Literature of Change, 165n10 Macready, W. C., 58 mammoth newspapers, 50 Manchester, 12, 13, 15, 17, 18, 23, 25, 36, 41, 72, 131, 152, 154 Mann, Thomas, 3 Mansfield Park, see Austen, Jane

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Marcus, Steven, 90, 92, 93, 107, 146, 169n30, 171n54 on authority in Martin Chuzzlewit, 92–94 on Todgers’s, 90–91 Dickens From Pickwick to Dombey, 169n30 Marlow (in Conrad), 16, 127, 128 Marshall, David, Celebrity and Power, 169n28 Marrakesh, 60, 64, 67 Martin, Robert Bernard, 164n3 Martin Chuzzelwit, see Dickens, Charles Mary Barton, see Gaskell, Elizabeth Martineau, Harriet, 30, 50, 59–60, 67, 102, 104 How to Study Manners and Morals, 59–60, 169n36 Society in America, 59 Martineau, James, 30, 31 Marx, Karl, 18, 19, 39, 93, 94, 102 marxism, 2 mass reading public, 53–54 Matthews, Cornelius, 51 Meckier, Jerome, Innocent Abroad: Charles Dickens’s American Engagements, 170n47 Melodrama, 25, 29–32 melting pot, 101 Melzer, Gerhard, “At the Edge of Silence: Mystery in the Work of Elias Canetti,” 170n45 Mesick, Jane Louise, The English Traveller in America 1783–1835, 171n47 Michael Armstrong, The Factory Boy, 164n1 Middlemarch, see George Eliot Miller, J. Hillis, 170n47, 172n65 Milton, John, 98 Moll Flanders, 8, 71, 72 Momaday, N. Scott, 65 The Man Made of Words, 170n41

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Monod, Sylvere, 80, 166n2, 170n46, 171n57 Morris, William, 102 Mrs. Dalloway, 4 le mot juste, 60 Mulvey, Christopher, Anglo-American Landscapes: A Study of Nineteenth Century AngloAmerican Travel Literature, 166n4, 169n34, 171n47, 171n48, 171n50, 174n77 negative capability, 60 Nevins, Allen, The Evening Post: A Century of Journalism, 167n14, 167n15, 168n17 New Criticism, 1, 3, 4 New World, 49, 52, 53 Nicholas Nickleby, see Dickens, Charles Nietszche, Friedrich, Human, All Too Human, 164n8 North and South, see Gaskell, Elizabeth Novels of the Eighteen Forties, see Tillotson, Kathleen oral culture, 65 old criticism, 1, 3 Paradise Lost, 86 Parker, Charlie, 86 Parker, David, “Dickens and America,” 172n66 Parrott, Thomas Marc, 164n3 Pearson, Gabriel, see Dickens and the Twentieth Century Phiz, 85, 98, 172n63 Picasso, Pablo, 133–134, 138, 176n21 Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, 138, 176n21 “Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote,” see Borges, Jorge Luis Poovey, Mary, Making a Social Body, 166n22

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Poulet, Georges, 21–2, 39 “Phenomenology of Reading,” 165n12 Price, Martin, Dickens: A Collection of Critical Essays, 172n61, 173n68, 175n15, 178n9 Pride and Prejudice, see Austen, Jane primogeniture/entail, 11–12, 113, 114, 115, 116, 120, 147, 149 Ralegh, Sir Walter, 93 reading, theories of, 6, 20, 23 see also Iser, Wolfgang; Ricoeur, Paul realism, 5, 8, 132, 133–134, 140, 152, 155 Recchio, Thomas, 165n5 religion, 4, 5–6, 8, 18, see also Gaskell, Elizabeth; Kahn, Paul H.; Lawrence, D.H.; Mary Barton; Steiner, George Ricoeur, Paul, 4, 110, 145–161, 178n4 on configuration, 146, 151 and Iser, Wolfgang, 151 and Kermode, Frank, 145–161 on prefiguration, 146 on the reader’s expectation of closure, 152 on refiguration, 146, 148 Oneself as Another, 178n5 Time and Narrative, 4, 145–161, 164n6, 177n1, 178n3 Rubin, William, “The Genesis of Les Demoiselles d’Avignon,” 176n3 Ruskin, John, 102, 145 St. Clair, William, The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period, 168n20 Sargent, Robert B., “Anglo-American Encounter: William Cullen Bryant, Dickens, and Others,” 168n16 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 147 Sayers, Dorothy, 151 Schickel, Richard, 57

Intimate Strangers: The Culture of Celebrity, 169n31 The Secret Sharer, see Conrad, Joseph “self-made authority,” 92–93, 107, 146–147, 148, 149, 154–155, 156, 158, 160 The Sense of an Ending, see Kermode, Frank Shelley, Mary, 108, 109, 117, 118, 119–128, 148–149 Frankenstein, 8, 108, 117, 119–128, 141, 148–149, 150 Adam and Eve and, 120, 121, 123 beauty in, 126 the body in, 124, 126 evil in, 121 incest in, 121–122, 123–124 and Kafka, 123 love and, 120, 122, 126–127 Mrs. Saville, 119–120, 128 multiple narrators in, 124–125, 149 narrative authority in, 125, 128, 148 and the perpetual self, 121–124 shame in, 123, 128 sisters in, 120 Shelley, Percy, 125 Shelston, Alan, 28–29, 34, 36–37, 166n17 John Barton as hero, 28 religion and Mary Barton, 34–35 Sicher, Efraim, Rereading the City, Rereading Dickens, 170n47, 171n49 Sidney, Sir Philip, 160 Sketches by Boz, see Dickens, Charles Slater, Michael, Dickens on America and the Americans, 169n25, 170n47 Smith, Adam, 52 Society in America, see Martineau, Harriet Standard English, 32, 130, 131, 143, 158

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Steiner, George, 1, 3, 4, 5, 158 Tolstoy or Dostoevsky: A Study in the Old Criticism, 1, 163n1 Stephen, Leslie, 1, 2 English Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century, 163n3 Sterne, Laurence, 20 Stevens, David, “Dickens in Eden,” 170n47 structure of feeling, see Williams, Raymond Sutherland, J. A.,Victorian Novelists and Publishers, 169n26 Sybil, see Disraeli, Benjamin symbols, symbolism, the symbolic, 109, 115, 128, 129–130, 133, 137, 140–141, 152, 155 Taine, Hyppolyte, The History of English Literature, 165n16 Tambling, Jeremy, Lost in the American City: Dickens, James, and Kafka, 169n33, 170n47, 173n74 Tartuffe, 86 Taylor, Jenny Bourne, The Cambridge Companion to Wilkie Collins, 175n17 “Thanatopsis,” 46 Thompson, E.P., The Making of the English Working Class, 5 Thoreau, Henry David, 74, 75, 171 on swamps, 74–75 “Walking,” 171n53 Tillich, Paul, 109, 117, 119, 158 Tillotson, Kathleen, 14, 31, 37–38 Novels of the Eighteen-Forties, 14, 37, 165n7 Time and Narrative, see Ricoeur, Paul Tindall, William York, The Literary Symbol, 175n8 Titian, 140 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 111, 114, 147 Democracy in America, 174n4 Tolstoy, Leo, 3, 77–78, 79, 81, 94, 95 Anna Karenina, 77–78, 80, 81, 82, 94, 171n55

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and narrative authority, 78, 94 and Tolstoy’s views on art, 80 War and Peace, 175n13 travel and travel literature, 7, 42, 44, 47, 58, 59, 60, 62, 64, 170–171n47, 171n48, 171n50 Trollope, Anthony, 169n35 Trollope, Frances, Michael Armstrong, the Factory Boy, 164n6, 169n35 Typhoon, see Conrad, Joseph Unitarianism (and Mary Barton), see Gaskell, Elizabeth Van Ghent, Dorothy, 79–80, 86–87, 95, 98, 129, 155, 171n56, 175n15, 178n9 Verisimilitude, 32, 129, 131, 133, 139, 152 Voices of Marrakesh, The, see Canetti, Elias War and Peace, see Tolstoy, Leo Webb, Igor, From Custom to Capital, 163n2 Welsh, Alexander, 43, 44, 155, 170n63 The City of Dickens, 36, 172n63 From Copyright to Copperfield, 167n5 Wheedon, Alexis, Victorian Publishing, 168n24 Whitehead, Colson, The Colossus of New York, 173n73 Whitman, Walt, 46 Wilde, Oscar, 169n35 Wilkins, W.G., Charles Dickens in America, 170n47 Williams, Esther, 57 Williams, Raymond, 2, 23, 24, 26, 28, 36, 163n5 Culture and Society, 25, 163n5, 163n15 The Long Revolution, 163n4

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Williams, Raymond—Continued on Mary Barton, 23–29, 36 structure of feeling, 24–25, 28, 31 The Woman in White, 176n17 Woolf, Virginia, 3, 12, 39, 133 Wordsworth, William, 86, 125, 157, 178n11 “Westminster Bridge,” 86 Wright, Edgar, 15, 165n8

Mrs. Gaskell: The Basis for Reassessment, 165n8 Yeast, see Kingsley, Charles Zeno of Elea, 150 Zlotnick, Susan, 29–30 Women, Writing, and the Industrial Revolution, 166n18

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