The Columbia History of the British Novel

police work in particular is strictly separated from repressive -391- or incompetent agencies of social power. Dickens consistently idealized police figures like Bucket in Bleak House or the Night- Inspector in Our Mutual Friend, in marked contrast with his attitudes toward all other public officials, and he tended to see in the police the possibility of an organic authoritarianism.

The most important, most undiluted aspect of the bourgeois Dickens, however, is his attitude toward home and hearth. Dickens did more to affirm the middle-class separation of public and private spheres than any other Victorian novelist. He was instrumental in the widespread Victorian celebration of domesticity, having almost single-handedly rehabilitated and adapted the domestic novel to Victorian values. As an obituarist wrote: 'His sympathy with the affections of hearth and home knows no bounds, and it is within this sphere that I confess I know of no other writer-in poetry or prose, amongst ourselves or other nations-to compare with him.' Fraser's Magazine, in accounting for his tremendous popularity, found it to result, 'above all, because of his deep reverence for the household sanctities, his enthusiastic worship of the household gods.' Only within the home could Dickens seem to imagine a thoroughly genuine social grouping. Equally important, only within the home could religious values be fully sustained. In its defensive posture toward the outside world, the Dickensian insular family might be seen as the product of individualism, rather than an antidote to it. Nevertheless, the family flourishes in Dickens's novels as the chief site of intimacy and emotional redemption. One result of this apotheosis of home and hearth was Dickens's introduction of childhood as a central subject in English fiction. But the more significant consequence is his contribution to the cult of the domestic angel.

In the twentieth century, perhaps no other aspect of Dickens's work has drawn as much criticism as his portrayal of women. While Dickens's female portraiture does have its champions, and while it is important in any case to recognize Dickens as a man of his day-a man who actually began to transform himself when talk of the 'Woman Question' arose (Bella Wilfer in Our Mutual Friend looks forward to more assertive late-century heroines, and her «doll-house» marriage is presented with uncharacteristic irony) — nevertheless, it seems foolish to deny that Dickens's women were the most powerful Victorian expressions of the stereotypical 'angel in the house.' Without exception, his heroines are passively virtuous, devoid of sexuality, rapturously domestic, and infantilized. Even as children, Dickens's female characters have -392- irrepressible maternal instincts- Jenny Wren, Lizzie Hexam, Charley Neckett, and other female children in Dickens seem to have been born to mother their siblings-and often their fathers as well. But the most pronounced trait of these domestic angels is their affinity for the home. Rose Maylie, in Oliver Twist, of whom we are told that 'if ever angels be for God's good purposes enthroned in mortal forms, they may be, without impiety, supposed to abide in such as hers,' was 'made for Home, and fireside peace and happiness.' So angelic are these heroines that they often seem to have a special power over death, offering up to the hero their ability to mediate between himself and spiritual transcendence. Agnes Wickfield, perhaps the most idealized of all Dickens's women, serves as such an unearthly mediatrix for David Copperfield, who ends his narration by exclaiming: 'Oh Agnes, oh my soul, so may thy face be by me when I close my life indeed; so may I, when realities are melting from me like the shadows which I now dismiss, still find thee near me, pointing upward!' In some cases, heroines exert this power by presiding over the spiritual rebirth of male characters-as Florence Dombey does for her father, or as Lizzie Hexam does for Eugene Wrayburn in Our Mutual Friend.

When Dickens did create positive images of willful women, he usually relegated them to the lower class (Mrs. Bagnet in Bleak House, or Peggotty in David Copperfield) to complement his feminization of working-class men-an inversion of gender roles that helps normalize middle-class sexual standards. Dickens's oppressive idealization of women also included a tendency to differentiate severely between angelic women and female monsters. It does not take much for a woman to fall in Dickens, and the drop from angel to 'female dragon' (the epithet applied to Sally Brass in The Old Curiosity Shop) is a sharp and irreversible one. This opposition of angel to monster also generated Dickens's typically Victorian fascination with and fear of prostitutes (reflected most of all, perhaps, in his frenzied staging of the murder of Nancy from Oliver Twist as the climactic scene for his public readings). Given that he was an inveterate «streetwalker» himself (his characteristic restlessness carried him off routinely on twenty-mile tramps, often in the solitude of night), and that the self-dramatized recklessness that troubled his own love life so strongly parallels the waywardness he condemned in women, Dickens's punitive attitudes toward fallen women can be seen as an attempt to expurgate guilt over his own deepest desires. Perhaps no novel reveals the diabolical nature Dickens project-393- ed into women so much as A Tale of Two Cities, in which Madame Defarge and other nameless female insurrectionists embody what Dickens saw as the bloodthirsty irrationality of the French revolution. But all the novels conceive the feminine as a volatile essence in need of strict control, and Dickens is unforgiving when it comes to women who act on their sexuality-the fates of Little Em'ly and Edith Dombey have often struck readers as cases in which Dickens is particularly harsh.

Nonmonstrous women who nevertheless fail to meet the angelic ideal often function as way stations for male desire: the pattern of male psychological development in the novels seems to be articulated through a progressive evolution in male romantic choices. Thus, David Copperfield's maturity leads him through a dangerous infatuation with the (falling) lower-class woman, Little Em'ly, and a mistaken passion for the inadequate housekeeper, Dora, before he finally settles on the angelic Agnes. Arthur Clennam's immature preferences for the spoiled Pet and the hysterical Flora can be understood as stages in his own psychological growth from the perspective of his later love for Little Dorrit. In this way, women temper the individualist desires of middle-class men only by being subsumed into male psychology.

Nevertheless, Dickens has left plenty of material for feminist readers to recuperate. Dickens's portraits of «neurotic» women-Esther Summerson, Miss Havisham, Bella Wilfer-are perceptive and evocative enough to provide sympathetic evidence of the effects of the Victorian gender system on women. They also sometimes show how certain women were able to transform the social possibilities available to them in empowering, if limited, ways. Moreover, the domestic virtues of his female characters correspond to the palpable kinds of cultural authority that middle-class Victorian women achieved. This authority extends beyond concrete vocational possibilities to what Nancy Armstrong has called an 'exclusive authority over domestic life, the emotions, taste, and morality,' that ultimately identified the feminine with cultural power itself. Dickens's respect for feminine authority in the realm of culture is reflected in his own response to criticism in the 1860s that his works had «masculinized» the novel by importing political polemics. The later novels maintain a much more sentimental relationship to political concerns than does the earlier work, and they contrast strikingly with Household Words in this respect. For similar reasons, Dickens sought to associate his novels with the more feminized literary -394- category of 'romance.' As he puts it in the preface to Bleak House: 'I have purposely dwelt upon the romantic side of familiar things.'

In addition to the specific compounds of intellectual and ideological content that I have so far cataloged, Dickens's ability to cut across readerly constituencies was driven by his remarkably intuitive identification with general Victorian tastes. Though his pride in his close relationship with his readers was perhaps overweening-he liked to speak of 'that particular relation (personally affectionate and like no other man's) which subsists between me and the public'-his interdependence with his audience's dominant interests and values was indeed extraordinary. It is important not to conflate this identification with a simple attempt to manipulate readers. Hippolyte Taine was not alone in his sense that Dickens's representativeness was a sincere one: 'Public opinion is [his] private opinion; [he] does not submit to it as an external constraint, but feels it inwardly as all inner persuasion.' Dickens's rapport with readers was certainly something he took pains never to endanger. His carefulness included, among other things, his scrupulosity about the sexual purity of his work. Though he mocked Podsnap in Our Mutual Friend-for whom the 'question about everything was, would it bring a blush to the cheek of a young person?' — there was a dose of Podsnappian prudery in Dickens himself. His carefulness with his readers also included a willingness to gratify popular tastes by ending his novels happily-in the case of Great Expectations, he actually revised the original ending in the direction of greater optimism, on the advice of Bulwer Lytton. But these measures were for the most part heartfelt, and expressive of his uncanny affinity for the subjects and attitudes that touched his readers' nerves.

The channels for feedback from his readers were opened in at least two concrete ways. One was the public readings, which allowed him to keep his finger directly on his audience's pulse. The other was his method of serial publication. In Pickwick, Dickens revived a system of publishing in monthly numbers that had been practiced sporadically in the eighteenth century but had since fallen out of favor. Dickens's revival of serial publication was made effective by advances in printing technology, by the integration of advertising with fiction, and by the growth