Circle of Fire

Dickens' Vision and Style and the Popular Victorian Theater

William F. Axton

• Publisher: The University Press of Kentucky
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780813185736
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This study explores the theater actually known and frequented by Dickens in order to show in terms of concrete structural analysis of his novels the nature of the predominantly "dramatic" or "theatrical" quality of his genius. Author William F. Axton finds that the three principal dramatic modes or "voices" that were characteristically Victorian were burlesquerie, grotesquerie, and the melodramatic, and that the novelist's vision of the world around him was drawn from ways of seeing transformed from those elements in the popular playhouse of his day—as revealed in the structure and theme of Sketches by Boz, Pickwick Papers, Oliver Twist, and other novels.

The last half of the study analyzes representative passages from the novels to illustrate the way in which the principal modes of nineteenth-century theatrical style are transmuted into the three important "voices" of the novelist's prose style. The first two voices—the burlesque and the grotesque—are identified by their exploitation of the stylistic features of farce, extravaganza, and harlequinade, of incongruous likeness and deliberate confusion between realms. The melodramatic voice, on the other hand, seeks to exploit in prose the musically rhythmic and poetic resources of the theater for the purpose of atmosphere, moral commentary, and structural unity.

BOOK THREE

Dickens’ Theatrical Style

Chapter Seven

INTRODUCTORY

A BRIEF STOCK-TAKING may be in order at this point, if only because the argument advanced in these pages has at times taken us far afield from the playhouse, and a moment is called for in which to check bearings and fix location. Confident of the substantial truth to life of the mingled fantasy and realism of the popular theater of his time, Dickens sought to translate the frivolous idioms of the playhouse into imaginative prose fiction with a serious social purpose. His ultimate artistic intention lay in altering his readers’ vision of commonplace life from conventional literalism to imaginative vitality, and to this end he had recourse to many of the techniques of pantomime and burlesque with which his readers were already familiar.

Dickens’ belief in the theater’s relevance to life is based on his conception of the theatrum mundi, which Sketches by Boz and Pickwick Papers adumbrate. Overt theatrical materials in these two early works provided the novelist with an avenue of approach to the histrionism he found at the heart of middle-class attitudes and norms of conduct, and many theatrical echoes crop up in their texture. Pickwick Papers and Oliver Twist are characterized by the mingling of incompatible modes and by the tonal ambiguity that results from the introduction of rootless burlesque in unlikely contexts and from the serious uses to which the coarse, gestic style of pantomime and farce are put. Great Expectations follows the pattern of the earlier Dombey and Son in employing as pattern both for parallel and anachronism an earlier dramatic original belonging to folk culture, and, in the case of the Wopsle subplot, continues to exploit antic materials for serious thematic and structural purposes. In this, Dickens seems to have been imitating practices that in cruder form are to be found in the burlesque theater of his time.

Because Dickens appears really to have followed what Lewes calls an “hallucinative” method of composition in which “created images have the coercive force of realities,” he stood as an artist in a singlar relationship both to his creations and to his readers. He and his audiences were, in a sense, fellow spectators of images conjured up before them by a coercive imagination. This accounts for the delighted surprise he registered at the effects attained by public readings from his own work; and the same cause stands behind his revealing comment that his readings were “like writing a book in public.” His unique ability to “fancy or perceive relations in things not apparent generally” gave him the perspective of an innocent toward the familiar world, who sees commonplace people and things with the vivid coloration and grotesque clarity of a stranger in a playhouse. By this means he was able to estrange and so revivify his readers’ conventional sense of the relations between things. Furthermore, the novelist seems to have been as much an onlooker of these autonomous imaginings as his readers. This fact, as we shall see, profoundly influenced the nature of his art.

At the same time, the novelist was not timid in appropriating from the playhouse many of its stock comic types, as Pickwick Papers and Sketches by Boz so amply demonstrate; and Dickens’ habitual use of sudden and dramatic transitions between comic and pathetic scenes betrays a similarly theatrical place of origination. Many of his “humourous” characters suggest Dickens’ fondness for Ben Jonson, and his tendency to indulge in incidental stylistic “business”—word play, punning, comic literalism, and metaphorical gymnastics—are equally characteristic of much nineteenth-century dramatic practice in, for example, farce, burlesque, and extravaganza. Dickens’ fondness for the comedy of jargon, cant, technical terminology, occupational and professional diction, and inconsequential allusions, as in Captain Cuttle’s nautical vocabulary and his confusions between the Anglican prayer book and popular songs, for example, is a no less common feature of the cheap Victorian drama, although it might be found anywhere in Smollett, Sterne, or Walter Scott.

His general prose style is everywhere studded with superlatives and hyperbole. No doubt this tendency toward a loosely theatrical heightening and stylization has its source in Dickens’ exuberant vision of the world around him, but its counterpart in the playhouse ought to be noted in passing. The novelist’s narrative techniques in many cases bear an odor of the boards about them, notably his penchant for scene-setting in the opening installments, as in the brilliant first chapter of Bleak House, for truncating dialogue until it approaches scenario, and for ending episodes upon a tableau. His exploitation of leitmotif to define and maintain characterization, a common theatrical device, is so well known that it hardly bears repetition, although it should be mentioned that this technique is equally to be found in many eighteenth-century novels. Dickens’ habit of lapsing into blank verse at moments of great emotional intensity is a stylistic feature that the novelist himself noticed and deplored: “I cannot help it, when I am very much in earnest” (XXXIX, 459). And he was equally addicted to other melodramatic devices, chiefly those violations of narrative credibility by apostrophe, invocation, direct address, soliloquy, and incidental aside for which critics have so roundly condemned him, as well as for those frequent passages of sheer melodramatic writing in which language, gesture, and sentiment seem to have been transplanted directly from the stage of a cheap theater.

Although Dickens’ habit of intervening in the narrative in his own voice has been the subject of much adverse critical comment, it has not received sufficiently careful attention to discriminate between different forms of these violations of credibility. To make some discriminations in this matter in the light of Lewes’ theory of the hallucinative character of Dickens’ imagination may tell us something about the peculiar nature of the novelist’s relationship to his narrative, on one hand, and to his readers on the other.

The most frequently cited kind of intervention by Dickens is that direct address of the reader—or rather, of the reading public generally—which usually occurs at the conclusion of some turn of plot which particularly arouses the novelist’s emotional involvement, as in that famous passage in Bleak House that concludes the death scene of Little Jo, the crossing sweeper: “The light is come upon the dark benighted way. Dead! Dead, your Majesty. Dead, my lords and gentlemen. Dead, Right Reverends and Wrong Reverends of every order. Dead, men and women, born with Heavenly compassion in your hearts. And dying thus around us every day” (XXIII, 236). This is stylistically typical of such addresses: vaguely Biblical or at least “pulpit” diction, parallel syntactical construction, truncated sentence structure, sarcastic word play—“Right Reverends and Wrong Reverends”—a decorously solemn mood, and an accusatory tone. The passage is tightly if implicitly organized around its order of address, which in this case follows the political hierarchy of queen, parliament, church, and citizenry.

Addresses such as this do indeed violate the narrative surface of Dickens’ novels and break the tacit understanding between author and reader inherent in fiction. Still, there are reasons to suppose that the novelist consciously and deliberately chose to abrogate his contract with his public at places like this. The claims of a higher reality outside the framework of this fiction may have prompted the author so to break in upon his narrative in order to indicate how events of his plot correspond to an external situation in the real world. What Dickens may be doing in such passages is purposefully altering his reader’s relationship to the narrative by blurring the line between reality and its representation in fiction. If Jo’s death scene appeared to Dickens in the guise of an hallucination with all the “coercive force of reality,” he may have wished to use this means of projecting that extra-fictional reality to his audience. He may have wanted, in short, to make this point of tangency between two orders of reality impinge on his reader with the same intensity it had for him. Moreover, a technique like this profoundly alters the relationship between reader and writer. Now both stand together on terms quite different from those normally found between an anonymous author and his equally faceless audience, for a personal contact has been created quite outside the framework of the narrative.

Other kinds of authorial interruptions have the same general effect of altering the reader’s relationship to the narrative and to the novelist. The apostrophe directed to one of the characters—or to the air, as it were—seems to owe its existence equally to Dickens’ hallucinative method of creation, in which, for lack of a better term, the novelist appears to be as much a witness to events as the reader. When Jo the crossing sweeper appears at the gate of the wretched cemetery where his only friend, Nemo (né Captain Hawdon), lies buried, this passage occurs: “Jo, is it thou? Well, well! Though a rejected witness, who ‘can’t exactly say’ what will be done to him in greater hands than man’s, thou are not quite in outer darkness. There is something like a distant ray of light in thy muttered reason for this: ‘He wos wery good to me, he wos’ ” (XXII, 172). Here again the characteristic features of Dickens’ style in such passages are evident: the religious solemnity arising out of quasi-Biblical diction, rhetorical self-consciousness, and an informing structural principle in the word play on the legal and theological senses of “witness.” But there is much more as well. In this case, Dickens stands forward himself as a witness of this brief episode and directs a sotto-voce apostrophe to the character, as if the novelist were a participant in the narrative by virtue of his position within this scene—presumably standing in the shadows near the cemetery gate, where he is surprised to see the urchin and to overhear his muttered words. The note of astonishment contained in the opening rhetorical question, together with its musing answer—“Jo, is it thou? Well, well!”—urge the reader to alter his perspective toward the narrative and to step within its framework, there to share a spectatorial position with the narrator that is peculiarly intimate and extra-fictional. Or to put the matter another way, author and reader come to occupy an audience-like standpoint from which to view together an affecting tableau arranged at one side of the stage, as it were, while a big scene is being struck in the darkness. A profound alteration in point of view—considered here in both the technical and general senses of that term—has been accomplished in this brief episode.

Dickens employs two other highly wrought rhetorical devices either borrowed from the playhouse or calculated to simulate theatrical or dramatic effects, the invocation and the oracular annunciation, both of which violate narrative credibility for the purpose of altering the reader’s perspective toward the fictional surface, either by investing events with a quasi-religious grandeur or by engaging a dimension of mythic or supernatural order. The following invocation to night occurs near the end of the episode in Bleak House which recounts the death and burial of Nemo. I have taken the liberty of casting the passage in loose blank verse lines:

Such a blank-verse rhythm, together with the mannered rhetorical trappings of parallelism, repeated imperatives, and elevated diction, give to this and similar passages in Dickens’ works a formal, incantatory flavor reminiscent of Elizabethan drama. It communicates a heavy solemnity of tone which is clearly an instance of scene-setting designed to create awe and horror of the place so depicted. The novelist quite deliberately draws back the curtain to reveal a scene of degradation and decay about which he feels strongly; and within this invocation of the elements are found both an apostrophe to the inhabitants of the nearby houses and a direct address of the reader by the scene itself. The compact between writer and reader that defines the reader’s attitude toward the truth-status of the narrative and the kind and degree of relationship between himself and the novelist is here broken in three different ways; but all three are premised on the commanding reality of the scene as it presents itself to the author’s imagination and on his sense of sharing with the reader the situation of a witness.

The oracular annunciation, on the other hand, although it generally shares with the invocation a tonal dignity and solemnity that is religious in feeling, differs from it by virtue of the fact that the prophetic utterance suggests the presence in the narrative of some divine, supernal, or at any rate superhuman power ordering events according to the “ways of Providence, of which all art is but a little imitation.” In Dickens’ hands the oracular announcement does not serve to evoke any suspense. Indeed, its aim is exactly opposite, for prophecy in these novels acts rather to assure the reader of the fulfillment of some anticipated eventuality and to urge him to read the intervening pages with the special point of view of one assured of a foregone conclusion. Nor was such a device a frivolous or merely novelistic matter for Dickens, to whom the “coincidences, resemblances, and surprises of life” were a simple fact of observation and gave evidence of this world’s ultimate government by a darkly obscure providential hand working behind everyday events.

Dickens’ conception of the relationship between external event and indwelling order is ordinarily illustrated by the example of Bleak House, in which two alternating narrative points of view share the burden of telling the story. In the first of these, that detached, omniscient, third-person point of view which opens the novel with its celebrated description of London’s November mud and fog, the dominant present and progressive present tenses stress the undifferentiated and disorderly surfaces of things and events. Esther Summerson’s first-person, deeply involved point of view in her portion of the narrative, written in the past tense from a position in time long after the events have transpired and their consequences known, rather implies a perspective which sees the order and justice immanent in human affairs, as evidenced by the novel’s final revelation of the complex scheme of interrelationships which tie its characters together and by the rough sort of poetic justice that is dealt out to each of them. In short, the manipulation in point of view which marks Bleak House’s narrative also embodies and expresses Dickens’ own conclusions concerning the relationship between phenomena and meaning in real life.

Within this curious mode of conducting a narrative, moreover, Dickens was at some pains from time to time to introduce prophecy into his portion of the story. In a passage that provides a transition from the Dedlock family, moribund at their country seat, to the chief representative of the Dedlock’s neglect, Jo, the crossing sweeper, there appears the following oracular announcement: “What connexion can there be, between the place in Lincolnshire, the house in town, the Mercury in powder, and the whereabout of Jo the outlaw with the broom, who had that distant ray of light upon him when he swept the churchyard-step? What connexion can there have been between many people in the innumerable histories of this world, who, from opposite sides of great gulfs, have, nevertheless, been very curiously brought together!” (XXII, 249). Making this connection between the two worlds of rich and poor, mansion and slum, the ruling classes and those abandoned by the ruling classes, is of course the main theme of the novel; and this transitional paragraph is thus a prefiguration of the whole. Indeed, the pages immediately following recount the visit to the place of Nemo’s burial of a mysterious woman, who, as it turns out, is Lady Dedlock. Her involvement with Nemo, or Captain Hawdon, is the cornerstone of all the subsequent events of the main plot of Bleak House, culminating in her death upon those same churchyard-steps and the extinction of the Dedlock family many chapters later. The passage in question occurs in Chapter XVI (the last chapter of the fifth monthly installment, for July, 1852), which marks the exact end of the first quarter of the narrative, during which Lady Dedlock’s inexplicable interest in Nemo and dark connection to Esther Summerson have been strongly hinted at. This prophetic utterance, then, should not so much arouse suspense and mystery as confirm earlier implications and suggestions and by that token urge the reader to adjust his attitude toward forthcoming events accordingly. It asks the reader, in short, to unravel the web of interrelationships among the novel’s personages knowing that their foreordained connections will be revealed and that all, high and low alike, will be found at last deeply involved in the fortunes of the others. Dickens’ prophetic intervention in his part of the narrative is meant to make the events of the novel participate in a stream of tendency which the writer finds operative in the real world outside. It urges the reader to take up an attitude toward the novel which corresponds to that of the novelist himself toward life. In any case, it asks that the reader alter his perspective toward the fiction in a profound and fundamental way, so that he comes to look at events with a share of that omniscience enjoyed by the novelist.

The perhaps more usual form of prophecy in Dickens’ works—that which anticipates the immediate death of a pathetic or villainous figure—confirms the conclusions drawn above. The death scene of Little Nell in The Old Curiosity Shop, of Paul Dombey and Carker in Dombey and Son, of Jo and Gridley in Bleak House, and a host of others, all contain some annunciation of this sort, designed not so much to create suspense or to milk the last drop of pathos as to confirm in an almost ritual manner an already existing belief of the reader, and by so doing to grant the episode a measure of religious solemnity. Ultimately, these announcements constitute a means of invoking superhuman inevitability within the narrative similar to that occasioned by the oracular passage from Bleak House quoted above. A certain supernal mechanism of fatality invests the episode with a power that seems independent of the author’s control, with the result that he and the reader stand apart together as fellow witnesses of a meaningful consummation. At the same time their ties to theatrical practice are obvious, for they act much like the chord sounded at some pathetic or melodramatic moment by the orchestra in the pit of an early Victorian playhouse to signal, say, the last moments of the heroine as she sinks upon her death bed.

A particularly striking instance of this sort occurs near the end of Dombey and Son, when Carker flies from Dijon only to expire under the wheels of an onrushing locomotive. An entire chapter, the fifty-fifth, is given over to this episode, making of it a kind of set-piece; and the whole is devoted to chronicling the inevitability of his death, in spite of all Carker’s efforts to evade that fate. The chapter is everywhere invested with mannered language and rhetoric designed to create an aura of awful religious dignity surrounding its horrific events. When the annunciation comes—“Death was on him. He was marked off from the living world, and going down into his grave” (XIX, 390)—it appears immediately before the terrible event of his death. It functions only to confirm ritually the presence of a sublime fatality directing Carker’s last moments which the entire chapter has been at great pains to establish and define. But these earlier tokens existed only in the form of hallucinations, the result of Carker’s disturbed psychological state; now, in Dickens’ utterance, the reader is asked to understand that the manager’s imminent demise has b...