making together a man, or woman, or child, whom we know at a glance and recognize at a sound, as we do our own intimate friends.'
Dickens builds character from a repeated set of gestures, phrases, and metaphors. For example, whenever Mrs. Micawber enters the story of David Copperfield, she repeats, 'I will never desert Mr. Micawber.' Having a 'slit of a mouth' into which he posts his food, Wemmick in Great Expectations rarely appears without some reference to his 'post office' mouth; Mr. Gradgrind is always identified in Hard Times with the squareness of each of his physical attributes. This way of creating character led the novelist E. M. Forster to use Dickens to illustrate what he means by a flat, as opposed to a round, character. Such a reductive technique of characterization might seem to have little to offer by way of depth of insight, but this is not the case. In particular, as Dickens's fiction becomes more complex in the course of his career, the repeated tics that identify his characters come to represent emotional fixations and social distortions. Dickens's early fiction exults in its comic exaggeration of human peculiarities. In his later fiction that comedy becomes grotesque, as the distortions of caricature reflect failures of humanity in his increasingly dark social vision.
Bernard Shaw wrote that 'Dickens never regarded himself as a revolutionist, though he certainly was one.' Dickens's early novels often concern social abuses? the workhouses in which pauper children were confined in Oliver Twist, abusive and fraudulent schools in Nicholas Nickleby. As his career progressed, Dickens felt an increasing urgency about the social criticism his novels made. He gave Hard Times the subtitle For These Times and dedicated the book to Thomas Carlyle, indicating his ambition to write a work in the tradition of Carlyle's social indictment, 'Signs of the Times' (1829). In his middle novels Dickens's criticism of society becomes increasingly systemic, and he begins to use organizing metaphors to express his social vision. Bleak House, for example, concerns the failings of the legal system, but the obfuscation and self-interest of the law are symptomatic of a larger social ill, symbolized in the smothering fog whose description begins the novel.
Despite the bleakness of Dickens's view of society and the fierceness of his criticism of it, his novels always end with a sentimental assertion of the virtues of home and heart. Readers and critics alike in both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries often felt that this sentimentality blunted his social analysis: although Dickens tries to use fiction to stir the human heart and evoke humanitarian feelings, the domestic refuges of his novels never change the world outside. In more recent times, and in the wake of D. A. Miller's study of Victorian fiction, The Novel and the Police (1988), many critics now express no surprise about this narrowing of scope: according to Miller, cultural productions (such as the novel) that emanate from the heart of a bourgeois society inevitably reproduce the controlling mechanism that regulates that world as a whole, and the seemingly subversive social critique at the beginning of a Dickens novel will ultimately be contained within an idealized middle-class sitting room at its close. Such scholars throw into question the earlier view of this novelist as an energetic, if conflicted, critic of his age: Dickens is instead perceived as an unofficial spokesman of conservative ideologies. Yet there are certainly many different ways to think about unresolved tensions within Dickens's work, and the teeming pages of his fourteen novels and wide range of other writings offer endless inspiration.
The distinctive character of Dickens's fiction is so pronounced that critics often talk as if the individual worlds of all of his novels were continuous. In part Dickens's tendency to return repeatedly to the subjects that possessed his imagination supports this impression. One of those subjects is prisons. 'A Visit to Newgate' is his earliest piece on the topic, to which he returns many times, as in Great Expectations, Oliver Twist, Pickwick Papers, and Little Dorrit. Prison for Dickens is a particular social abuse; the most harrowing setting in which to contemplate criminality and guilt; a metaphor for the psychological captivity his characters create for themselves; and the system through which society enforces its discipline. Throughout his fiction key elements of Victorian society, such as the prison, take on multiple layers of significance;
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A VISIT TO NEWGATE / 123 9
in this way, as the critic J. Hillis Miller observes, Dickens's creative vision in part determines the Victorian spirit itself.
A Visit to Newgate1
'The force of habit' is a trite phrase in everybody's mouth; and it is not a little remarkable that those who use it most as applied to others, unconsciously afford in their own persons singular examples of the power which habit and custom exercise over the minds of men, and of the little reflection they are apt to bestow on subjects with which every day's experience has rendered them familiar. If Bedlam could be suddenly removed like another Aladdin's palace,2 and set down on the space now occupied by Newgate, scarcely one man out of a hundred, whose road to business every morning lies through Newgatestreet, or the Old Bailey,' would pass the building without bestowing a hasty glance on its small, grated windows, and a transient thought upon the condition of the unhappy beings immured in its dismal cells; and yet these same men, day by day, and hour by hour, pass and repass this gloomy depository of the guilt and misery of London, in one perpetual stream of life and bustle, utterly unmindful of the throng of wretched creatures pent up within it?nay, not even knowing, or if they do, not heeding, the fact, that as they pass one particular angle of the massive wall with a light laugh or a merry whistle, they stand within one yard of a fellow-creature, bound and helpless, whose hours are numbered, from whom the last feeble ray of hope has fled for ever, and whose miserable career will shortly terminate in a violent and shameful death. Contact with death even in its least terrible shape, is solemn and appalling. How much more awful is it to reflect on this near vicinity to the dying?to men in full health and vigour, in the flower of youth or the prime of life, with all their faculties and perceptions as acute and perfect as your own; but dying, nevertheless?dying as surely?with the hand of death imprinted upon them as indelibly?as if mortal disease had wasted their frames to shadows, and corruption had already begun!
It was with some such thoughts as these that we determined, not many weeks since, to visit the interior of Newgate?in an amateur capacity, of course; and, having carried our intention into effect, we proceed to lay its results before our readers, in the hope?founded more upon the nature of the subject, than on any presumptuous confidence in our own descriptive pow- ers?that this paper may not be found wholly devoid of interest. We have only to premise, that we do not intend to fatigue the reader with any statistical accounts of the prison; they will be found at length in numerous reports of numerous committees, and a variety of authorities of equal weight. We took no notes, made no memoranda, measured none of the yards, ascertained the exact number of inches in no particular room, are unable even to report of how many apartments the gaol is composed.
We saw the prison, and saw the prisoners; and what we did see, and what we thought, we will tell at once in our own way.
1. First published in Sketches by Boz (1836). New-his palace to Africa. 'Bedlam': a London hospital gate was London's main criminal prison. for the insane. 2. In Arabian Nights, an evil magician temporarily 3. London's criminal court. gets control of Aladdin's magic lamp and transports
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124 0 / CHARLES DICKENS
Having delivered our credentials to the servant who answered our knock at the door of the governor's4 house, we were ushered into the 'office;' a little room, on the right-hand side as you enter, with two windows looking into the Old Bailey: fitted up like an ordinary attorney's office, or merchant's countinghouse, with the usual
