Dickens, Family, Authorship

Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Kinship and Creativity

Lynn Cain

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351944410
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Drawing on a wide range of Dickens's writings, including all of his novels and a selection of his letters, journalism, and shorter fiction, Dickens, Family, Authorship provides a provocative account of the evolution of an author from whose psychological honesty and imaginative generosity emerged precocious fictional portents of Freudian and post-Freudian theory. The decade 1843-1853 was pivotal in Dickens's career. A phase of feverish activity on both personal and professional fronts, it included the irrevocable souring of his relations with his parents, the peripatetic residence in continental Europe, and a massive proliferation of writing and editing activities including the aborted autobiography. It was a period of astounding creativity which consolidated Dickens's authorial and financial stature. It was also one tainted by loss: the deaths of his father, sister and daughter, and the alarming desertion of his early facility for composition. Lynn Cain's substantial study of the four novels produced during this turbulent decade - Martin Chuzzlewit, Dombey and Son, David Copperfield and Bleak House - traces the evolution of Dickens's creative imagination to discover in the modulating fictional representation of family relationships a paradigm for his authorial development. Closely argued readings demonstrate a reorientation from a patriarchal to a maternal dynamic which signals a radical shift in Dickens's creative technique. Interweaving critical analysis of the four novels with biography and the linguistic and psychoanalytic writings of modern theorists, especially Kristeva and Lacan, Lynn Cain explores the connection between Dickens's susceptibility to depression during this period and his increasingly self-conscious exploitation of his own mental states in his fiction.

Chapter 1

Martin Chuzzlewit

Towards the end of March 1844, Dickens wrote to his friend, T.J. Thompson, that ‘the greater part of my observation of Parents and children has shewn selfishness in the first, almost invariably’ (Letters IV: 89). This bitter observation was part of a sympathetic response to Thompson’s gloomy marriage prospects due to Christiana Weller’s father withholding his consent to the match, and in the event Dickens was instrumental in resolving the situation amicably. But it is hard to ignore the personal element in the comment which carries echoes of the author’s lasting resentment at his childhood deprivations caused by his father’s financial irresponsibility. Equally, it almost certainly hinted at Dickens’s exasperation with his father’s continuing prodigality which in increasing his own escalating debts would shortly cause the author and his growing family temporarily to quit Devonshire Terrace for Italy where they could live more cheaply. Coming only a few months before the completion of Martin Chuzzlewit, the relatively poor sales of which exacerbated Dickens’s financial worries, the observation provides a caustic commentary on a novel whose declared subject is ‘Selfishness’ but whose deeper concerns cluster around the issue of authorship, especially in its associations with paternity, money and the ownership of language.

Dickens’s claim in the Preface to the 1850 Cheap Edition, that Selfishness is the ‘main object’ of Martin Chuzzlewit, has often been felt to be unsatisfactory. Kathleen Tillotson has wondered whether a reader lacking preface or biography would recognize Selfishness as the novel’s theme (1956: 161), while Gabriel Pearson has declared that Dickens’s assertion of Selfishness as the unifying theme of the novel ‘looks like the merest afterthought: it so outrageously fails to unify itself at all’ (1976: 59).¹ Although many critics have subsequently concurred with Monroe Engel’s view that money is more particularly the central organizing concern of the novel (1959: 103), it has to be said that the novel’s symbolic economy represents love of money as being inextricably interfused with love of self. This is encapsulated by Dickens’s variation on the familiar passage from 1 Timothy 6.10 – ‘Love of money is the root of all evil’: ‘Self; grasping, eager, narrow-ranging, over-reaching self … was the root of the vile tree’ (52/679). Love of self and love of money consequently coalesce into a single ‘curse’ which taints humanity in general and the Chuzzlewit men in particular. This conflation of selfishness and money is reinforced by the genealogical opening chapter which initiates an arboreal symbolic system that links the ‘vile tree’ of Self and the Biblical money-tree of evil with the Chuzzlewit family tree throughout the novel. Prefiguring the squabbling Smallweeds in Bleak House, whose hereditary cupidity is figured as a stunted family tree (21/308), the selfish, money-obsessed male Chuzzlewits are characterized by dispute: ‘No one branch of the Chuzzlewit tree had ever been known to agree with another’ (4/49). Fathers, sons and brothers are locked in unremitting battle to gain ‘the top of the tree’ (12/166, 44/579).²

Anny Sadrin has claimed that not until Bleak House is the cash nexus ‘perceived with Carlylean bitterness’ to be the sole link between relatives (1994: 23), but domestic relations in Martin Chuzzlewit are of precisely that nature.³ This largely inter-generational strife is foregrounded in the colloquialism ‘feathering the nest’ which is used by Anthony Chuzzlewit to Pecksniff as they discuss Jonas and Merry’s marriage exclusively in terms of their own financial benefit (11/164). If taken literally, the trope should indicate the soft lining of the nest provided by the parent birds for the greater comfort and protection of their tender young nestlings, creating the sort of emotional response evinced by George Eliot’s description of Silas Marner’s cottage: ‘The stone hut was made a soft nest for her, lined with downy patience’ (1994: I, 14/158). Eliot’s use of the image works in precisely the opposite way to Dickens’s in Martin Chuzzlewit, since it reinforces the shift from the economic to the emotional through Eppie’s role as loving replacement for Silas’s lost hoard of gold. Dickens, by contrast, reveals the extent to which the benign nurturing aspect of the home has been utterly annihilated by the paternal financial imperative through his exploitation of the colloquial meaning of the phrase: to enrich oneself. At a stroke, he demonstrates the befoulment of the nest-home by selfish, avaricious fathers eager to sacrifice their children to Mammon.

Dickens’s employment of this colloquialism exemplifies the system of ornithological imagery which works effectively alongside the arborial imagery to indicate how cupidity has ousted love from the relationship between fathers and sons. Martin’s family are ‘but birds of one feather’, related both to Tigg’s commercial ‘birds of prey’ and to the dollar-crazy American Eagle: they are all money-hungry ‘vultures’ and ‘kites’ preying on the carcasses of their kin. Cannibalism is the sine qua non of consumption in its coalescence of both economic and alimentary senses, and James E. Marlow has argued that ‘the themes of orality, predation, and the translation of human flesh into economic gain—all metaphoric cannibalism—dominate [Dickens’s] fiction’ after 1859 (1983: 655). But this again perpetuates the myth that only the later novels reveal Dickens’s disgust at Victorian capitalism and the destructive effects of financial imperatives on father-son relations. On the contrary, Marlow’s statement applies equally to Martin Chuzzlewit which uses cannibalism to explore how far humans are prepared to go in their financial exploitation of each other, especially their own kin. Just as Scadder is an American ‘bird of prey’ (21/303), so Tigg’s fraudulent company is representative of many English counterparts, financial and domestic. Shortly before Jonas joins the Anglo-Bengalee, Tigg recommends him ‘for all our sakes to take particular care of [his] digestion’, advice as gruesome in this context as it is illustrative, and he confirms the link between business and family through a variant on the patriarchal trope: ‘We companies are all birds of prey: mere birds of prey. The only question is, whether in serving our own turn, we can serve yours too; whether in double-lining our own nest, we can put a single lining into yours’ (27/380–381). Tigg’s echo of Anthony’s use of the colloquialism establishes a linguistic connection between the two which prefigures Tigg’s eventual substitution for Anthony as Jonas’s patricidal victim. In fact, the Chuzzlewits are, almost without exception, ‘vultures’ and ‘kites’ preying on their kin, and causing old Martin to ‘[take] refuge in secret places … [and live] … the life of one who is hunted’ (3/38). At Pecksniff’s family council, Mr George’s reference to ‘vultures’ fits perfectly into this symbolic economy, and the aptly-named Pecksniff himself later describes his family as ‘vultures, and other animals of the feathered tribe [assembled] round their prey; their prey; to rifle and despoil; gorging their voracious maws, and staining their offensive beaks, with every description of carnivorous enjoyment’ (52/687). Sadrin’s overview of Dickens’s early novels as cosy reminiscences of ‘ancestral values, fireside lives, household words’ (23) is clearly inappropriate to the money-grubbing, Oedipal warring of Martin Chuzzlewit.

The emphasis here is overtly on male familial relationships and these are foregrounded in the Chuzzlewit mode of childrearing, which is seemingly conducted solely by men, themselves riddled with selfishness and cupidity. The family patriarch, old Martin has by his own admission corrupted others:

I have so corrupted and changed the nature of all those who have ever attended on me, by breeding avaricious plots and hopes within them; I have engendered such domestic strife and discord, by tarrying even with members of my own family; I have been such a lighted torch in peaceful homes, kindling up all the bad gases and vapours in their moral atmosphere, which, but for me, might have proved harmless to the end … (3/38)

In particular, he has nurtured his grandson’s selfishness by raising him ‘from childhood with great expectations’ of future wealth (6/83). Consequently, young Martin’s ‘frank and generous’ nature has been so corrupted by his grandfather that their relationship has dwindled to a mere financial transaction: ‘fair exchange—a barter—and no more’ (33/452; 14/209). The word ‘expectation’ appears several times in the novel. In addition to young Martin’s ‘expectations’ (6/83), Diggory Chuzzlewit ‘entertained great expectations’ of his ‘uncle’, the pawnbroker (1/4); Jonas is raised to ‘expectation of … great business’ on his father’s death (51/669); Tigg hovers at old Martin’s keyhole at the Blue Dragon in ‘expectation’ of a loan (4/45); and old Martin, baiting the trap for Pecksniff, requests the latter to attach himself to the old man ‘by ties of Interest and Expectation’ (10/137). Since, by contrast, Mary has ‘no expectation’ of inheritance from old Martin (3/38), each use of the word confirms the centrality of money in relationships between male Chuzzlewits.

The phrase ‘great expectations’ will of course be developed throughout Dickens’s fiction as a sign of the moral corruption implicit in bequeathed money. As young Martin and Jonas are here warped by the promise of future wealth, so Richard Carstone will be destroyed morally and physically by his expectations of the ‘family curse’ of Jarndyce and Jarndyce and Henry Gowan rendered immoral by his lifelong expectation of family support. It is as though the expectation of inherited wealth carries within itself the seeds of a terrible debilitation tantamount to emasculation for these vulnerable young men. Pip’s dilemma in Great Expectations is located precisely in this malaise, and many elements of the later novel appear in Martin Chuzzlewit. In terms of characterization, Mark Tapley can be seen as a prototype Joe Gargery; Anthony Chuzzlewit’s pride in Jonas prefigures Abel Magwitch’s proprietorial attitude to Pip; and Chuffey’s physical and aural infirmities blend with Anthony’s aged childishness to create a grim anticipation of the Aged P. In addition, Mrs Joe’s ‘Tickler’ first appears as one of Chollop’s weapons, while a Mr Pip is one of Tigg’s cronies. But most of the similarities between the two novels cluster around Pip himself. Pip’s name, being palindromic, can be reversed without distortion, so that it images linguistically Pip’s ability to be always Pip, whether Magwitch is turning him upside down physically in the graveyard or socially later in the novel. Similarly Montague Tigg, in his reincarnation as Tigg Montague, is ‘turned and twisted upside down and inside out’ in his social elevation but remains ‘the same, Satanic, gallant, military Tigg … notwithstanding’ (27/370).

Following Chuzzlewit’s thematics, Great Expectations will also express anxiety about father-son relations. The later novel magnificently develops the theme of the cannibalization of children, to the extent that John Carey has remarked that Pip has difficulty keeping himself out of the stomachs of other characters (1973: 24). Furthermore its references to Hamlet and George Barnwell,⁴ which underline the patricidal dynamic, are anticipated in Chuzzlewit (4/45, 9/125). Pip’s overwhelming sense of guilt also develops the earlier novel’s theme of original sin, a Dickensian preoccupation which continues through to Edwin Drood. The first chapter of this last novel ends with the capitalized words ‘WHEN THE WICKED MAN—’, a passage from Ezekiel 18: 27 in which God asserts that the son shall not bear the iniquity of the father, nor the father of the son. Martin Chuzzlewit, however, portrays the full horror of filial entrapment within the inexorable machinery of inherited sin. In the case of both the novel and Dickens’s own relations with his father, this anxiety is played out through the medium of money.

While, pace Humphrey House (1942: 58) and Grahame Smith (1968), money is not the main theme of Dickens’s fiction, it is always prominent. It is not, however, always desirable. Although like Austen, Dickens expresses an authorial affirmation of new middle-class affluence if respectably and humanely acquired as against the tarnished glamour of old money, Dickensian businessmen, entrepreneurs and mill-owners who obsessively pursue wealth are resolutely malign. Hence the benign characterization of Rouncewell the ironmaster in Bleak House as opposed to Hard Times’s exploitative Bounderby. But Rouncewell the self-made industrial tycoon is not seriously offered as a professional role model to Dickens’s heroes any more than are the Cheerybles. Indeed it could be argued that the Dickensian hero’s role is to fail in his attempts to achieve great wealth, as the grim results of Martin’s trip to Eden, Pip’s ‘great expectations’ and Arthur Clennam’s financial speculations suggest. In Dickens, to aim at financial success is almost certainly to be denied it. Only the modest and unassuming – like the redeemed young Martin – are worthy of such a gift, such a burden. No Dickens hero would dream of boasting, like Austen’s Captain Wentworth in Persuasion, ‘how fast I made money’.

Nevertheless, the need to make money was an imperative throughout Dickens’s working life. He had driven himself hard since the first appearance of Pickwick in 1836 and by 1841 he was feeling exhausted and demoralized. Ironically, like one of his own characters, the harder he laboured, the more he seemed to fall into debt. His very success seemed to work against him, as a letter to Thomas Mitton in August of that year reveals:

I remembered that Scott failed in the sale of his very best works, and never recovered his old circulation (though he wrote fifty times better than at first) because he never left off. I thought how I had spoilt the novel sale… by my great success, and how my great success was, in a manner, spoiling itself, by being run to death and deluging the town with every description of trash and rot … I am doing what every other successful man has done. I am making myself too cheap. (Letters II: 365)

Dickens’s sense of making himself ‘too cheap’ reinforced his conviction that virtually everyone was making more money out of Charles Dickens than Charles Dickens. This was certainly the case with American publishers in the absence of an international copyright law, and Dickens was undoubtedly right and brave to publicize the need for such legislation during the 1842 American tour. In addition, Robert L. Patten’s meticulous reconstruction of Dickens’s dealings with his publishers has revealed both the staggering extent of his debts in the period leading up to the writing of Chuzzlewit and his deep sense of exploitation by, successively, Bentley and Chapman and Hall. His contractual arrangements with the latter firm in particular seem to recapitulate the fury and frustration at his father’s ruthless capitalization on his success at this time, and in a letter written during the composition of Chuzzlewit, he articulates this in language strongly reminiscent of the ornithological imagery of the novel: ‘He and all of them, look upon me as a something to be plucked and torn to pieces for their advantage. They have no idea of, and no care for, my existence in any other light’ (Letters III: 575). It is little wonder that Chuzzlewit’s cannibalistic domestic relations are governed by money-grubbing fathers devoid of paternal tenderness for their sons.

Dickens’s vengeful response to this paternalistic financial stranglehold on his career is clearly manifest in the grim characterization of Jonas Chuzzlewit. Not only has Jonas been raised by his father, he seems to have been spontaneously generated by him, for the novel makes no mention of his mother: like Dombey’s mother and first wife, she was presumably merely the vehicle for the delivery of the ‘Son’ and heir into the family business.⁵ Anthony’s own indoctrination in the Chuzzlewit evil has turned him into a monster of paternity who deliberately warps the morality of his only son: ‘I taught him. I trained him. This is the heir of my bringing-up. Sly, cunning, and covetous, he’ll not squander my money. I worked for this; I hoped for this; it has been the great end and aim of my life’ (11/156–7).⁶ Under Anthony’s tutelage, Jonas becomes a ‘greedy expectant’ (24/333) who regards his father merely as ‘a certain amount of personal estate, which … ought to be secured in that particular description of iron safe which is commonly called a coffin, and banked in the grave’ (8/106). This attitude encapsulates the way in which patricide and money coalesce in the novel; doubtless Anthony would have entertained similar sentiments toward his male parent before replacing him in the long line of fathers and sons which is ‘the old-established firm of Anthony Chuzzlewit and Son’. Like Dombey, he too would have ‘risen, as his father had before him, in the course of life and death’ from son to patriarch (DS 1/2). Thus are the sins of the father visited upon the son; those of the son upon the father.

For this reason, Dickens goes to some lengths to defend his characterization of Jonas in the Preface to the 1850 edition of Chuzzlewit:

I conceive that the sordid coarseness and brutality of Jonas would be unnatural, if there had been nothing in his early education, and in the precept and ex...