The Columbia History of the British Novel

mob scenes from Barnaby Rudge and A Tale of Two Cities pander to Victorian fears about the consequences of lower-class resistance to oppression.

The «Englishness» that Dickens was celebrated for having captured in his diverse portrait gallery (a reviewer recommended Sketches by Boz to foreign audiences as the best of guidebooks) also flattered middleclass interests, and consolidated middle-class values as national ones. The «Englishness» that Dickens did so much to define is usually considered to include, for example, the sincerity and honesty that are the hallmarks of Victorian middle-class ethics. (Dickens's novels relentlessly satirize the deceitfulness attributed to upper-class political and business figures, from the scheming of Ralph Nickleby to the pasteboard mask of Merdle in Little Dorrit.) It also included the pride in intelligent debunking and in the rejection of cant that characterized middle-class democratic self-consciousness. Other middle-class virtues that are funneled into Dickens's sense of «Englishness» include moral courage, personal independence and individuality, and an outspokenness about social justice. Most important, «Englishness» includes a sense of industriousness, enterprise, and individualist energy-tempered, of course, by the kindness and charity that Victorian culture identified with middle-class women. In this respect alone, Dickensian «Englishness» provides a place for women within a set of characteristics that tends to enshrine the middle-class male as the national norm.

'Englishness' also had its nationalistic implications. Dickens often stigmatized non-English cultures as lacking in «English» virtues like industry, sincerity, and healthy diversity. Thus, in American Notes he writes that the American people are 'all alike… There is no diversity of character,' and his descriptions of French, Italian, and American national psyches usually attribute to them large doses of deceitfulness or laziness or both. More disturbing, articles in Household Words often took a brutal attitude toward native peoples in the colonies, and Dickens's strong authoritarian responses to the Indian Mutiny of 1857 and the Jamaica Rebellion of 1865 betray an occasionally genocidal disposition. On the heels of the Indian Mutiny, he wrote to Angela BurdettCoutts: 'I should do my utmost to exterminate the Race upon whom the stain of the late cruelties rested… to blot it out of mankind and raze it off the face of the Earth.' Despite his general chauvinism about -388- the English, however, Dickens did support the antislavery movement, which was very strong in England during the early part of his career. One of the most severe indictments of Harold Skimpole in Bleak House is the cavalier attitude Skimpole takes toward American slaves, and American Notes includes a ringing diatribe against slavery.

But perhaps Dickens's most serious betrayal of populist sympathies is his deep commitment to an individualist ethos. The central plot of the novels is always the emergence of an orphaned hero or heroine out of privation into a recognizably middle-class circle of kindness and care. This standard Dickensian trajectory is launched with the rescue of Oliver Twist from Fagin's den of thieves and his restoration to his rightful middle-class identity. It continues in the rise of such characters as Kit Nubbles, Walter Gay, Esther Summerson, Little Dorrit, and Pip, however much their success stories are tempered by Dickens's moral cautions against ambition. While these transparent dramatizations of self-pity have often been attributed to Dickens's feelings of emotional abandonment during his blacking warehouse days, it seems more appropriate to place them as a symptomatic expression of Victorian middle-class individualism. J. Hillis Miller's now classic work has shown how Dickens's novels are fundamentally concerned with the development and strengthening of individual identity. If nothing else, the novels' consistent encouragement of readers to identify sympathetically with a «wronged» hero should qualify any tendencies to see Dickens solely as a novelist of brotherhood or of social guilt.

One formal consequence of Dickens's divided class loyalties is his novels' enigmatic use of doubles. His wholesomely enterprising heroes are always doubled by unscrupulously ambitious villains in ways that both acknowledge and obscure the clash of middle-class individualism with Christian pieties about brotherhood. These villainous doubles often desire the very same social goals-in some cases even the same woman-as does the hero (thus Uriah Heep envies David Copperfield his social favor, and sees himself as a rival for Agnes; Bradley Headstone in Our Mutual Friend competes with Wrayburn for Lizzie Hexam; and Orlick in Great Expectations aspires after Biddy, the woman who belatedly becomes an object of Pip's affections). They also conveniently carry out vengeance against characters who obstruct the ambitions of the hero (Orlick murders Pip's sister Mrs. Joe; Rigaud in Little Dorrit destroys Mrs. Clennam). Readers have disagreed about Dickens's intentions in this evidently self-conscious doubling-389- whether it is the effect of Dickens's bad conscience about the built-in hypocrisy of class society; whether it acknowledges moral ambiguities the better to reject them out of hand by scapegoating «evil» characters; or whether it provides some means of formulating coherent moral distinctions between the aggressive individualist and the virtuously «selfmade» man. In any case, the obscurity of this pattern of doubling seems to be one effect of Dickens's ambivalence about the conflicts between middle-class and populist thinking, and it is a striking case of his having made it possible for readers to discover their own disparate moral and ideological predilections in his work.

The same contradictions underwrite Dickens's exceptional scrupulosity about the nonmercenary motives of his lovers, a characteristic that introduces a significant new shade of moral purity into British fiction. In Little Dorrit, for example, Arthur Clennam will not marry Little Dorrit, even after they confess their long-standing love, simply because of the accident of her rise in fortune. It is only when her inheritance is lost that the wedding can take place. Throughout the novels, Dickens displays an anxiety to separate economic and romantic motives. In the work of Austen, Scott, Trollope, Gaskell, and many other British novelists, conjunctions of love and spectacular upward mobility are represented as possible and even highly desirable. But with rare exceptions, Dickens's endings uneasily subdue the prospect of financial or social blessings-even though such blessings in some form never fail to accompany romance. The goal of Dickens's characters becomes a modest domestic happiness and a self-sufficiency gained through personal effort. Dickens's discomfort with problems of selfinterest and disinterest is reflected in many other ways, including his fascination with hypocritical characters like Pecksniff in Martin Chuzzlewit and Uriah Heep in David Copperfield, and his stiff-necked reaction to accusations in the American press that his own campaign for an international copyright law was hypocritically self-interested.

Another formal strategy that helps to suppress the moral conflicts of the novels is Dickens's use of subplots-both comic and sensational-that diffuse the apparent moral meaning of his central action. The central plot of Great Expectations, for instance, condemns the desire to vindicate one's social exclusion by creating respectable surrogates-a dark form of patronage dramatized by Magwitch's creation of Pip as a gentleman and by Miss Havisham's creation of Estella as femme fatale. But this condemnation is oddly reversed in Pip's peripheral act of personal -390- redemption. To make up for his sins of ambition, Pip clandestinely arranges for Herbert Pocket to gain his dreamed-of place in a large commercial firm. The connection between Pip's generosity and his selfvindication is made so clearly that when Herbert joyfully announces his success to Pip, unaware that Pip is his secret benefactor, Pip cries 'tears of triumph.' This kind of thematic diffusion ultimately works to set the moral experience of the protagonist apart-as an apparently unrepeatable, nonformulaic instance of spiritual grace-even as it seems to articulate clear moral imperatives.

To some extent, Dickens's ideological vacillations are reflected in his fuzzy, often ambiguous ideas about politics. His political philosophy, vague as it may have been, revolved around his belief that government should make itself the servant of public opinion. Lawmakers, he argued in an 1870 speech, should obey 'the spirit of their times' and act as 'the mere servants of the people.' These sentiments seek a middle ground between Victorian political theorists who advocated principles of governmental interference and those who advocated governmental restraint. Dickens and many others in the Victorian mainstream favored a political order that would feature limited but nevertheless strong governance, and his hybrid formulation relied on the notion that government could mold itself-much as he apparently did himself-as an organic expression of the common will. Alexander Welsh explains that Dickens saw 'the action of public opinion [as] at once democratic and authoritarian: by some unspecified process the people must 'force' the government to 'coerce' themselves.' In one form or another, this kind of faith in 'public opinion' as a more effective motor of government than either the franchise or complete centralization was widely shared in Victorian culture-by writers as diverse as Spencer, Mill, Carlyle, Ruskin, and George Eliot. For Dickens, such faith underlay his vicious satires of political authority and especially his contempt for Parliament, which he saw as unresponsive to public opinion. But it also underlay his bitter hatred of mobs, his opposition to further extension of the franchise, and his belief in the strict punishment of criminals. It lies at the root of his disillusion with American democracy, his revulsion from what he saw as the excesses of unhierarchical American liberties. Most tellingly, it feeds his remarkable respect for the military and the police. Throughout the novels, Dickens imagines the executive branch of government as a direct expression of the «public» desire for order, and