Habit in the English Novel, 1850-1900

Lived Environments, Practices of the Self

S. O'Toole

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9781137349392
• eBook ISBN:
  9781137349408
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Literature

This book offers new perspectives on the concept of habit in the nineteenth-century novel, delineating the complex, changing significance of the term and exploring the ways in which its meanings play out in a range of narratives, from Dickens to James.

Part I

Generative Habits

1

The Sensing Self: Dickens and the Space of Habit

That Dickens was a great genius and is permanently among the classics is certain. But the genius was that of a great entertainer, and he had for the most part no profounder responsibility as a creative artist than this description suggests. […] The adult mind doesn’t as a rule find in Dickens a challenge to an unusual and sustained seriousness.

F.R. Leavis, The Great Tradition (1948)¹

By the standards of one kind of novel, which in England has been emphasized as the great tradition, Dickens’s faults – what are seen as his faults – are so many and so central as to produce embarrassment.

Raymond Williams, The English Novel from Dickens to Lawrence (1970)²

From the 1830s onwards both individual critics and the institutions of criticism have had to find some way of accounting for Dickens’s fiction – if only to dismiss it, or deplore or deny its importance. Indeed, a study of the critical reception of Dickens’s work could also serve as a case study of the main trends in novel criticism and the study of narrative in the last 170 years.

Lyn Pykett, Charles Dickens (2002)³

Critics have long associated literary character with psychological interiority. Henry James’s celebrated ‘dramas of consciousness’ elevated inward psychological action over external happenings and events at the turn of the twentieth century, and the theory of fiction that he advanced in his many reviews and essays helped make this shift seem as natural and intuitive as it was decisive.⁴ James’s distinction between successfully drawn characters and mere ‘figures’ – that is, between living, breathing creations and more two-dimensional, wooden things, ‘pictures rather than persons’ – would famously be elaborated by E.M. Forster in his description of the difference between ‘round’ and ‘flat’ characters in Aspects of the Novel (1927).⁵ Indeed, the dominance of the Jamesian view of the novel as a psychologically penetrating and fundamentally inwrought aesthetic form shaped a century of appreciation and critique – from the appearance of still-resonant New Critical canons such as F.R. Leavis’s The Great Tradition to seminal accounts of the development of the form such as Ian Watt’s The Rise of the Novel (1957) – in ways that contemporary criticism is still accounting for, and is still in need of addressing. For the critical ascendancy of the Jamesian ‘psychological turn’ has also, in significant ways, prevented a longer view of the mutual development of the novel and of what came to count as ‘psychological,’ including the multiple, overlapping, and sometimes competing theories of mental life explored by nineteenth-century novelists and psychologists alike; indeed, the assumed link between literary character and inward psychological action does not even account fully for James’s own fictional practices, as we will see in Chapter 4.

In this chapter, I examine Charles Dickens’s delineation of character through eccentric habits of behavior, a practice that has not fared particularly well within this longstanding critical framework. For Dickens, an effective story depended upon the repetition of the grotesque but comical detail – in part, we are told, because it helped readers of his serial fiction keep track of the many characters that populate his works, or, worse, because Dickens ‘is utterly deficient in the faculty of reasoning,’ as one contemporary reviewer put it.⁶ No small amount of critical condescension accompanies this view, including the pervasive belief that a Dickens novel would be one of the last places to go in search of psychological insight, his characters being little more than humorous, memorable bundles of unthinking habit. In Leavis’s influential formulation, which is in some measure a justification for his notorious exclusion of Dickens from The Great Tradition, the author is entertaining, certainly, but not ‘a challenge to an unusual and sustained seriousness,’ at least not to the ‘adult mind.’⁷

Yet, if the sense of complexity and unpredictability associated with ‘round’ or ‘deep’ character has often been found to be lacking in Dickens’s fiction, his characters cannot be ignored. In Lyn Pykett’s perceptive estimation, they must be accounted for, if only to be explained away or otherwise dismissed. Attributing the many, seemingly objective causes for ‘embarrassment’ in Dickens’s fiction to ‘the standards of one kind of novel’ and ‘what are seen as his faults,’ Raymond Williams suggests that there are other standards by which to read and assess Dickens’s fiction. After a look at the critical tradition through which Dickens’s characterization has primarily been received, what Pykett calls the ‘Dickens industry,’ this chapter finds that Dickens indeed gives us significant psychological insight into his characters – perhaps even more into what it means to ‘be’ or ‘have’ a character in modernity – but that his methods of characterization depend on less conventional assumptions about what counts as ‘psychological,’ and operate according to a less conventional set of principles and priorities. It is through precisely what seems to be a concern with surfaces that Dickens explores the constantly shifting ground of modern individual identity and our halting, discontinuous attempts to make sense of it. In this view, habits just look like ‘caricature’ in Dickens, but they actually offer something quite different: not the sense of psychological interiority that modern readers have come to expect but the dynamic and often volatile interactions and adaptations of characters caught in their typical motions and constantly changing environments. As Virginia Woolf wrote in a fascinating 1925 essay on Dickens: ‘Subtlety and complexity are all there if you know where to look for them, if we can get over the surprise of finding them – as seems to us, who have another convention in these matters – in the wrong places.’⁸

How does our view of Dickens’s fiction change if we take seriously his emphasis on what seems to us to be exteriority – that is, the eccentricities of characters interacting with their habitual social and physical environments, what I am calling the ‘space of habit’? What if we read habits in Dickens as indicative of a phenomenology of lived practice and commitments and not (or not only) in relation to a metaphysics of voluntarity and psychological ‘depth’? To answer these questions, and to create a bridge from the Victorian perspectives and theoretical considerations discussed in the Introduction to the readings of later novelists such as Eliot, Meredith, and James, for whom Dickens was inevitably a transfer station, I aim to offer a different approach to Dickens and the psychology of habit. One reason why Dickens’s psychological realism goes undetected is that, while readers have come to understand the ‘psychological’ as something fundamentally interior, Dickens focuses so intently on exterior psychic space and the effects of habitual perception on ‘character’ – both what constitutes it and what makes up an individual. It is telling here, too, I think, that many repetitive habitual activities in the novels also serve as images for novel-writing – scavenging, hoarding, recycling, forging, remembering, collecting, running on at the mouth. Even more so, then, the need arises to take them seriously. Indeed, as we will see, Dickens’s thematization of habit also reveals an enabling, creative relation with his own past and a more nuanced view of the human mind than has been acknowledged to date.

Rethinking ‘character’: the critical tradition

Given his enormous popular appeal, it is perhaps not surprising that Dickens figures prominently in both James’s and Forster’s theories of fiction, and, indeed, in Leavis’s and other New Critical accounts that so conspicuously and anxiously sought to marginalize and contain him. In a scathing 1865 review of Our Mutual Friend in The Nation, for example, James finds little in Dickens’s characters but ‘a movement lifeless, forced, mechanical. […] It is hardly too much to say that every character here put before us is a mere bundle of eccentricities, animated by no principle of nature whatever.’⁹ Forster also finds Dickens’s characters to be lacking in depth but is perhaps more aware of the need to question the psychological model of ‘depth’ itself – both for apprehending Dickens’s characters and for explaining readers’ experiences of them. It is no mistake that Forster’s very first fictional illustration of a flat character, one who can be summed up by a single idea and in a single sentence, is a Dickens character.¹⁰ In fact, Dickens appears throughout Forster’s study as an author who achieves his effects by ‘cataloguing’ details and ‘whisking the page over irritably.’¹¹ Yet Forster suggests that there is more to Dickens’s characterization than mere cataloguing and visualizing when he notes that flat characters have a different kind of appeal and make a different kind of critical demand:

One great advantage of flat characters is that they are easily recognized whenever they come in – recognized by the reader’s emotional eye, not by the visual eye, which merely notes the recurrence of a proper name. […] It is a convenience for an author when he can strike with his full force at once, and flat characters are very useful to him, since they never need reintroducing, never run away, have not to be watched for full development, and provide their own atmosphere – little luminous disks of a pre-arranged size, pushed hither and thither like counters across the void or between the stars; most satisfactory.¹²

Apprehended by ‘the reader’s emotional eye’ and supplying ‘their own atmosphere,’ flat characters are useful in this formulation in that they redouble the reader’s own emotional responses and combine and repeatedly interact within the novel’s various characterological environments and constellations. They themselves might not be ‘deep,’ but their cumulative ‘force’ on the reader’s attention and their function across the entire span of the narrative nonetheless create a feeling of roundness: ‘Nearly every one [of Dickens’s characters] can be summed up in a sentence, and yet there is this wonderful feeling of human depth.’¹³ To see Dickens’s characters as merely flat, Forster seems to intimate, is to miss a large part of what happens when we read: the active participation of the reader’s imagination and the ‘rounding’ tendency of that emotional investment. Indeed, Forster leaves the door tantalizingly ajar in admitting the ‘case’ against Dickens is a complicated one, exposing the limits of his own theory’s key terms in the process: ‘Those who dislike Dickens have an excellent case. He ought to be bad. He is actually one of our big writers, and his immense success with types suggests that there may be more in flatness than the severer critics admit.’¹⁴ The substance of that something ‘more’ is the subject of the present chapter: ‘flatness’ is more complicated in Dickens, in part, because ‘habit’ was more complicated for him – not merely a repetitive action or behavior pattern but a productive and sometimes variable affective relation between character and exterior space, to use Forster’s word, an ‘atmosphere.’

In some important ways, the twentieth-century case against Dickens consolidated and systematized a view of his characterization that had already been circulating in the nineteenth century. James’s influential view that Dickens was ‘a great observer and a great humorist’ but ‘nothing of a philosopher’ had been reverberating in contemporary reviews by many others, among them George Henry Lewes, George Eliot, and Walter Bagehot.¹⁵ Lewes, for instance, in a long retrospective essay in the Fortnightly Review in 1872, less than two years after the novelist’s death, writes that despite the immense popularity of Dickens’s ‘overflowing fun’ and ‘vividness of imagination,’ his characters remained fatally flawed: ‘In vain critical reflection showed these figures to be merely masks, – not characters, but personified characteristics, caricatures and distortions of human nature, – the vividness of their presentation triumphed over reflection.’¹⁶ George Eliot voiced both skepticism and concern about what she called Dickens’s ‘false psychology’ and the wider implications of his enormous popularity: namely, the dangerous promotion of a thoroughly naive sentimentalism about the poor that she saw advancing a politics of reform without first laying the requisite foundation for the disenfranchised to participate.¹⁷ Walter Bagehot, in a perceptive 1858 essay in the National Review, acknowledged the ‘peculiar power’ and ‘bizarrerie’ of Dickens’s ‘genius’ – his ‘marvellous power of observation’ and seemingly endless ‘store of human detail’ – but notes, more critically, ‘[h]e sees people in the street, doing certain things, talking in a certain way, and his fancy petrifies them in the act. He goes on fancying hundreds of reduplications of that act and that speech; he frames an existence in which there is nothing else but that aspect which attracted his attention.’¹⁸ For these influential contemporary critics, then, Dickens fails because he does not delve profoundly or with enough complexity into the depths of the human psyche – the reality of interiority, as they saw it.

How could a writer so overtly concerned with external traits and actions be anything other than a ‘superficial’ novelist – an entertainer but no philosopher or psychologist? Since the New Critics and their heirs took hold of and consolidated James’s interiorizing theory of the novel, the critical debates about Dickens’s methods of characterization have indeed ranged widely but generally support the view that he disregarded psychological interiority. The collections of tics, habits, and eccentricities that identify his characters have been cited as evidence that Dickens conceived of essentially fixed and unchanging individual identity, and as proof that his fictional world is an amusing but ultimately rather shallow under...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction: An Embedded History
• Part I Generative Habits
• Part II Patterns of Consciousness
• Coda: The Grain and the Heap, or the Afterlife of Habit
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index