DICKENS AND POPULAR ENTERTAINMENT
PAUL SCHLICKE
Department of English,
University of Aberdeen
London
UNWIN HYMAN
Boston Sydney Wellington
-- vi --
Paul Schlicke, 1985, 1988
This book is copyright under the Berne Convention.
No reproduction without permission. All rights reserved.
Published by the Academic Division of
Unwin Hyman Ltd
15/17 Broadwick Street, London W1V 3FP, UK
Allen & Unwin, Inc.,
8 Winchester Place, Winchester, Mass. 01890, USA
Allen & Unwin (Australia) Ltd,
8 Napier Street, North Sydney, NSW 2060, Australia
Allen & Unwin (New Zealand) Ltd in association with the
Port Nicholson Press Ltd,
60 Cambridge Terrace, Wellington, New Zealand
First published in 1985.
First published in paperback 1988.
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Schlicke, Paul
Dickens and popular entertainment.
1. Fiction in English, Dickens, Charles, 1812-1870
Critical Studies
I. Title
823'.8
ISBN 0-04-445180-9
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Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Schlicke, Paul.
Dickens and popular entertainment / Paul Schlicke
p. cm.
Bibliography: p.
Includes index.
ISBN (invalid) 0-04-445180-6 (pbk.: alk. paper)
1. Dickens, Charles, 1812-1870 - Knowledge - Performing arts.
2. Dickens, Charles, 1812-1870 - Criticism and interpretation.
3. Performing arts in literature.
4. Performing arts - Great Britain - History - 19th century.
5. Great Britain - Popular culture - History - 19th century.
I. Title. [PR4592.P45S35 1988]
823'.8--dc19
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Typeset in 10 on 11 point Bembo and printed in Great Britain by
Billing & Sons Ltd., Worcester
-- vii --
CONTENTS
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Preface
---------- ix
List of Illustrations
---------- xi
References and Abbreviations
---------- xiii
CHAPTER 1
Introduction: Dickens and the Changing Patterns of Popular Entertainment
---------- 1
CHAPTER 2
Popular Entertainment and Childhood
---------- 14
CHAPTER 3
Nicholas Nickleby
The Novel as Popular Entertainment
---------- 33
CHAPTER 4
The Old Curiosity Shop
The Assessment of Popular Entertainment
---------- 87
CHAPTER 5
Hard Times
The Necessity of Popular Entertainment
---------- 137
CHAPTER 6
Popular Entertainment in Dickens's Journalism
---------- 190
CHAPTER 7
Dickens's Public Readings: the Abiding Commitment
---------- 226
Notes
---------- 249
Select Bibliography
---------- 277
Index
---------- 284
-- viii --
This book is dedicated to my mother,
Hilda Hinckley Schlicke,
who did not live to see it completed,
and to my wife,
Priscilla Adelaide Schlicke,
who never thought she would live to see
the day it was completed.
-- ix --
PREFACE
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From early childhood, when my father used to read A Christmas Carol aloud each year by the family fireside, I have been fascinated by Dickens as the greatest of all entertainers. My desire to account for this interest has evolved over many years into the present book, and the debts of gratitude which I have incurred along the way are many.
Dorothy Van Ghent's essay 'The Dickens world: a view from Todgers" first taught me how Dickens could be both funny and profound. Philip Collins's books, articles and editions have shown me how deeply Dickens's concerns were rooted in their time, and Professor Collins's scholarship has provided a model worthy of emulation.
Long-suffering friends and colleagues have provided assistance of a more personal kind. For their encouragement, patience, faith and practical advice I am particularly grateful to Joe Ging, Elizabeth Grice, Liz MacLachlan, Robin MacLachlan, David Malcolm, Andrew Sanders, Michael Slater, George Speaight and Kathleen Tillotson.
My thanks also go to colleagues and students at the University of Aberdeen, especially to Robin Gilmour and Cohn Milton, both of whom read early drafts of Chapters 4 and 5, and to Bob Lawson-Peebles, who read drafts of Chapters 1, 2, 3 and 6. Their constructive criticism has been challenging and helpful in more ways than I can say; the faults which remain are, of course, my own.
I am grateful to have had opportunities to test some of the ideas of the book in papers which I presented at the University of Kent, the University of Aberdeen, Wroxton College of Fairleigh Dickinson University, the University of Edinburgh, and the Aberdeen Literary Society.
For generous assistance with the research on which the book is based I wish to thank the librarians, archivists and staff of the following institutions: Aberdeen University Library, Aylesbury Central Library, Banbury Public Library, Birmingham Public Library, the Bodleian Library, the British Library, Buckingham
-- x --
Public Library, the Dickens House Museum, the Guildhall Library, the Guildhall Record Office, Madame Tussaud's, Margate Central Library, the Mary Evans Picture Gallery, the Museum of London, Preston Central Library, Robert Gordon's Institute of Technology Library and School of Librarianship, Shrewsbury Public Library, the Society for Theatre Research, the Theatre Museum, the Tyne and Wear County Council Museums, the Victoria and Albert Museum, and Warwick Central Library.
Research was undertaken with financial assistance from the University of Aberdeen Fund for Travel Allowances annually between 1976 and 1984. Illustrations were gathered with the aid of a grant from the Carnegie Trust for the Universities of Scotland. I am pleased to acknowledge this generous support.
Illustrations are reproduced with permission from the Aberdeen University Library, the Bodleian Library, the British Library, the Dickens House Museum, and the Guildhall Library. Details are given in the List of Illustrations. Quotations from the following volumes are made with permission of the Oxford University Press: The Speeches of Charles Dickens (1960) (ed.) K.J. Fielding; the Pilgrim edition of The Letters of Charles Dickens, Vols. 1 (1965) (eds.) M. House and G. Storey; Vol. 2 (1969) (eds.) M. House and G. Storey; Vol. 3 (1974) (eds.) M. House, G. Storey and K. Tillotson; Vol.4(1977) (ed.) K. Tillotson; Vol. 5(1981) (eds.) G. Storey and K. J. Fielding; the Clarendon edition of Oliver Twist (1966) (ed.) K. Tillotson; the Clarendon edition of The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1972) (ed.) M. Cardwell; the Clarendon edition of Dombey and Son (1974) (ed.) A. Horsman; the Clarendon edition of Little Dorrit (1979) (ed.) H. P. Sucksmith; the Clarendon edition of David Copperfield (1981) (ed.) N. Burgis; the Clarendon edition of Martin Chuzzlewit (1982) (ed.) M. Cardwell; Charles Dickens: The Public Readings (1975) (ed.) P. Collins.
Finally, I am grateful to my research assistant, Debbie Esson, and
to my typist, Barbara Rae, for help in the final stages of preparing the manuscript for the publisher.
University of Aberdeen November 1984
Note to the Second Impression
I have taken the opportunity of a new printing to correct a few misprints and minor errors, notably the date of the showman John Richardson's death.
University of Aberdeen February 1988
-- xi --
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
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page
2 'Hyde Park Fair held on the Day of Her Majesty, Queen
Victoria's
Coronation' (1838). John Johnson Collcction, Fairs
and Festivals, Box 1, Bodleian Library, Oxford.
11 'Animal Suffering' by Pierce Egan the Younger, from Paul
Pry, Oddities of London Life (London, 1838). British Library.
16 'Christopher's First Appearance in Public' by John Leech, from
Albert
Smith, The Struggles and Adventures of Christopher
Tadpole (London, 1848). Aberdeen University Library.
23 'Cricket' from William Clarke, The Boy's Own Book (London,
1859). Aberdeen University Library.
39 'Young Phil Joins a School of Crossing Sweepers' by Hab�t
Browne ('Phiz'), from Augustus Mayhew, Paved with Gold
(London, 1858). Aberdeen University Library.
51 'An Outside Stage' by Hab�t Browne ('Phiz'), from James
Grant, Sketches in London (London, 1838). Noble Collection,
Guildhall Library, City of London.
63 'Mr Macready as Rob Roy Macgregor' (1818), published by
G. Skelt. Author's private collection.
71 'St Cecilia's Day' by George Cruikshank, from Cruikshank's
Comic Almanack (London, 1837). Aberdeen University
Library.
81 'Theatrical Fun-Dinner' by George Cruikshank, from
Cruikshank's Comic Almanack (London, 1841). Aberdeen
University Library.
90 'Bartholomew Fair As It Was' (1840). Noble Collection,
Guildhall Library, City of London.
109 'Itinerant Showman's Wagon' (n.d.). John Johnson Collection,
Human Freaks, Box 2, Deformities Miscellaneous, Bodleian
Library, Oxford.
117 'Dancing Dogs' by 'Straightshanks' (1824). John Johnson
Collection, Animals on Show, Box 1, Bodleian Library, Oxford.
-- xii --
page
126 'Punch and Judy' by Robert Cruikshank, from George Smeeton,
Doings in London (London, 1825). Aberdeen University Library.
132 'Toby the Sapient Pig' (1818), from Daniel Lysons, Collectanea
(London, 1661-1840). British Library.
151 'The Battle of the Alma' (1854). Dickens House Museum.
160 'Cooke's Circus' (detail) (1835). A. D. Morice Collection, Aberdeen
University Library.
165 'Circus
Clown at Fair', from Henry Mayhew, London Labour and
the London Poor (London, 1861-2). Aberdeen University Library.
171 'Scamp's Original Travelling Company' by Theodore Lane, from
Pierce Egan, The Life of an Actor (London, 1825). Author's
private collection.
185 'Phil Wishes He Was Married' by Hab�t Browne ('Phiz'), from
Augustus Mayhew, Paved with Cold (London, 1858). Aberdeen
University Library.
194 'Peep Show' by Gavin Rymer (1834). Noble Collection, Guildhall
Library, City of London.
203 'Boxing Night: A Picture in the National Gallery' by George
Cruikshank, from Cruikshank's Comic Almanack (London, 1845).
Aberdeen University Library.
213 'Dancing in a Public House' by Robert Cruikshank, from George
Smeeton, Doings in London (London, 1825). Aberdeen
University Library.
224 'The
Trial-for-Murder Mania' by John Leech,
from Pictures of
Life and Character, Second Series (London, 1857). Aberdeen
University Library.
235 'Mr Mathews in the Various Characters He Assumes in His
Youthful Days' by W.H., from London Mathews (London, 1825).
British Library.
247 'Dickens Reading Sikes and Nancy' (1870). Dickens House
Museum.
-- xiii --
REFERENCES AND ABBREVIATIONS
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References to Dickens's novels are to the Clarendon Edition (Oxford, 1966- ) for Oliver Twist, Martin Chuzzlewit, Dombey and Son, David Copperfield, Little Dorrit and The Mystery of Edwin Drood, and to the New Oxford illustrated Dickens (London, 1947-58) for all other volumes. They are cited in the text by chapter number.
References to Dickens's periodicals are to the original bound editions. For attributions of articles in Household Words I have consulted Anne Lohrli, 'Household Words', a Weekly Journal 1850-59 Conducted by Charles Dickens: Table of Contents, List of Contributors and Their Contributions, Based on the 'Household Words' Office Book (Toronto, 1973), and for articles in All the Year Round I have consulted Ella Ann Oppenlander, 'Dickens' All the Year Round: descriptive index and contributors list', PhD thesis, University of Texas at Austin, 1978.
AYR All
the Year Round
BH Bleak
House
BM Bentley’s
Miscellany
BR Barnaby
Rudge
CB Christmas
Books, New Oxford Illustrated Dickens
CC A Christmas Carol, in CB
DC David Copperfield George Dolby,
Dolby Charles Dickens as I Knew Him (London, 1885)
DS Dombey and Son
Field Kate Field, Pen Photographs of Charles Dickens's Readings (1868), rev. edn (London, 1871)
Forster John Forster, The Life of Charles Dickens (1872-4),
ed. J. W. T. Ley (London, 1928)
-- xiv --
GE Great
Expectations
Grimaldi Memoirs of Joseph Grimaldi, ed. 'Boz' (London, 1838)
HT Hard Times
HW Household Words
Kent Charles Kent, Charles Dickens as a Reader (London, 1872)
LD Little Dorrit
Mathews Mrs [Anne] Mathews, Memoirs of Charles Mathews,
Comedian, 4 vols (London, 1838-9)
MC Martin
Chuzzlewit
MED The Mystery of Edwin Drood
MHC Master
Humphrey’s Clock
MP Miscellaneous Papers, ed. B. W. Matz, National Edition
(London, 1908)
NN Nicholas Nickleby
Nonesuch The Letters of Charles Dickens, ed. Walter Dexter,
Nonesuch Edition (London, 1938)
OCS The
Old Curiosity Shop
OMF Our
Mutual Friend
OT Oliver
Twist
PI Pictures from Italy, New Oxford illustrated Dickens
Pilgrim The Letters of Charles Dickens, ed. Madeline House,
Graham Storey et al., Pilgrim Edition (Oxford, 1965- )
PP The
Pickwick Papers
Readings Charles Dickens: The Public Readings, ed. Philip Collins
(Oxford, 1975)
RP Reprinted Pieces, New Oxford illustrated Dickens
SB Sketches by Boz, New Oxford illustrated Dickens
Speeches The Speeches of Charles Dickens, ed. Kenneth Fielding
(Oxford, 1960)
TTC A
Tale of Two Cities
UT The Uncommercial Traveller, New Oxford illustrated Dickens
VCH The Victoria History of the Counties of England (1900- )
-- 1 --
CHAPTER 1
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Introduction
Dickens and the Changing Patterns of Popular Entertainment
The fair in Hyde Park - which covered some fifty acres of ground - swarmed with an eager, busy crowd from morning until night. There were booths of all kinds and sizes, from Richardson's Theatre, which is always the largest, to the canvas residences of the giants, which are always the smallest; and exhibitions of all sorts, from tragedy to tumbling . . .
This part of the amusements of the people, on the occasion of the Coronation, is particularly worthy of notice, not only as being a very pleasant and agreeable scene, but as affording a strong and additional proof, if proof were necessary, that the many are at least as capable of decent enjoyment as the few. There were no thimble-rig men, who are plentiful at racecourses, as at Epsom, where only gold can be staked; no gambling tents, roulette tables, hazard booths, or dice shops. There was beer drinking, no doubt, such beer drinking as Hogarth has embodied in his happy, hearty picture, and there were faces as jovial as ever he could paint. These may be, and are, sore sights to the bleared eyes of bigotry and gloom, but to all right-thinking men who possess any sympathy with, or regard for, those whom fortune has placed beneath them, they will afford long and lasting ground of pleasurable recollection - first, that they should have occurred at all; and, secondly, that by their whole progress and result, at a time of general holiday and universal excitement, they should have yielded so unanswerable a refutation of the crude and narrow statements of those who, deducing their facts from the proceedings of the very worst members of society, let loose on the very worst opportunities, and under the most disadvantageous circumstances, would apply their inferences to the whole mass of the people.1
On 28 June 1838, England celebrated the coronation of its young
-- 2 --
Dickens visited the Coronation Fair held on 28 June 1838 and found it 'particularly worthy of notice' as proof that 'the many are at least as capable of decent enjoyment as the few'.
-- 3 --
queen, but not all eyes were on the pomp of the official ceremonies. Her Majesty's most famous novelist, breaking off a characteristically energetic holiday in Twickenham and interrupting work on two novels in progress (he was writing both Oliver Twist and Nicholas Nickleby at the time, as well as editing Bentley’s Miscellany), went instead to Hyde Park to witness the festivities of the common people. His brief account of the great fair, which lasted for nine days and 'attracted all the great exhibitions in the country with a whole army of minor showmen', appeared as the tailpiece to an article on the coronation in the Examiner.2 Although what Dickens wrote consists of no more than a few lines of unsigned journalism, the lines which I have quoted above reveal plainly the fervour of his convictions about popular entertainment. His delight in the fair is abundantly clear, and he is stout in his support of the ordinary men and women who participate in the national occasion. He writes as a fascinated observer, with a ready eye for absurdity (the residences of the giants are 'the smallest') and an obvious familiarity with his subject (the residences of the giants are 'always the smallest'). He recognizes the vulgarity of the scene but compares it favourably to more 'respectable' amusements and invokes the tradition of hearty English enjoyment, as recorded by Hogarth, as evidence of its time-honoured value. It is also apparent that he feels a distinct need to come to the defence of these popular celebrations. His attacks on the 'bleared eyes of bigotry and gloom' and his appeal to 'all right-thinking men' indicate the contentious nature of his subject and signal his readiness to enter the fray. In the early days of his career, at the very outset of the Victorian era, the amusements of the people were under attack from many directions, and Dickens, the great popular entertainer, was their champion.
His love of entertainment dated from childhood, and it was a lifelong commitment. From his schoolboy production of The Miller and His Men in a toy theatre, through the novels, amateur theatricals and public readings of his adulthood, Dickens devoted himself to providing entertainment for others. His friend and biographer John Forster noted a 'native capacity for humorous enjoyment' as one of his distinctive characteristics, and the eagerness with which he sought amusement is attested by the restless curiosity with which he wandered the streets of London, the avid frequency of his theatre-going, the urgent appeals to friends to join him in some new delight. His daughter Mamie wrote that, despite the delicacy and illness which afflicted Dickens as a youth, in his manhood sports were a 'passion' with him; he participated in bar-leaping, bowling and quoits, enjoyed cricket 'intensely' as a spectator, and organized field sports for local villagers in a meadow at the back of Gad's Hill Place.3
-- 4 --
The forms of entertainment which he enjoyed most were essentially popular. He responded with unashamed pleasure to the circus and the pantomime, to sensational melodrama and the Punch and Judy show. Such entertainment, as distinct from *litist culture which demanded education, wealth and social position, was broad-based in its appeal, inexpensive and widely available.4 As a journalist he watched it observantly; as a social reformer he applauded its benefits for the people; as a popular artist he shared its aims; and as a participant he wholeheartedly entered into the fun.
Entertainment was a subject Dickens wrote about often and, as we shall see in chapters which follow, it assumes central structural and thematic importance in three of his novels. More fundamentally, entertainment is linked inextricably with the nature of his art. His earliest fiction began in conscious imitation of popular literature of the day, and Pickwick became the publishing sensation of the nineteenth century. He was the most widely popular English writer since Shakespeare, and even as his artistry matured in depth and complexity he never abandoned the basic intention of providing his audience with amusement. His repeated advice to fellow-novelists was to take seriously the need to entertain readers; the avowed intention of his journalism was to transcend 'grim realities' by showing that 'in all familiar things . . . there is Romance enough, if we will find it out This declaration, like the command to his subeditor W. H. Wills 'KEEP HOUSEHOLD WORDS IMAGINATIVE!' - stressed the appeal to man's innate sense of wonder and curiosity which it is the entertainer's purpose to arouse.5 He made this appeal most directly when, in the final twelve years of his life, he turned largely away from fiction and journalism to appear in public as a reader of his work. Central to his role as an artist, integral with his social convictions, rooted in his deepest values, and a source of lifelong delight, popular entertainment reaches to the core of Dickens's life and work.
During the formative early years of his life, English popular entertainment was in a process of radical transformation. The old rural pastimes of the people, which had been benignly tolerated by the gentry as integral to a social stability based on traditional lifestyles, were increasingly eroded, and by the 1830s very little had emerged to take their place. The great urban fairs, having long since lost their commercial function, were susceptible to determined efforts to suppress them, and the greatest of them, Bartholomew Fair, was effectively put down by civic fiat in 1840. Rapid urbanization and population explosion eliminated open spaces which had formerly been used for leisure activities and gave the public house vital importance as a social centre. The rise of the factory system introduced a fundamental change in the conception of work, away
-- 5 --
from the variety of seasonal occupation to a regimented, mechanical system, even as the vast pool of cheap labour ensured that men, rather than machines, performed most of the tasks that were done. The hours and conditions of work were a source of seething discontent among the labouring poor, particularly in the industrial North, and legislative proposals for dealing with labour problems were put before Parliament year after year. There were a few gains: violent sports such as bull-baiting and cock-throwing had virtually disappeared by the 1820s, and the rise of railways in the 1830s made it increasingly possible for people to travel to permanent exhibitions and resort areas. Metropolitan exhibition-halls and minor theatres flourished, but not until after mid-century did music-halls, organized sports, public recreation facilities, Saturday half-holidays, and other possibilities for urban amusement arise. Most modern historians are convinced that the nadir of English popular culture was reached during the 1830s, the very time Dickens began writing about it.6
The decline of older forms of popular entertainment was only one aspect of the alteration of English society, which was entering a particularly dynamic phase in the 1830s. During these years England changed from a rural, agrarian-based economy to an urban, industrialized state, a shift most dramatically symbolized by the railway boom. Between the opening of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway in 1830 and the time Dickens was writing The Old Curiosity Shop in 1840, nearly 1,500 miles of track had been built in the United Kingdom and over 2,500 miles sanctioned, unavoidable evidence of the speed, power, size and disruption the new heavy industries were bringing.7 Commerce and industry became heavily capitalized as never before; parliamentary life was altered by the Reform Act of 1832, and there was a host of new social legislation, most notably the Factory Act of 1833 and the New Poor Law of 1834. Ferment in religion (the Oxford Movement), in politics (Chartism), in economics (Mill's Essays, not published until 1844, were written around 1830), in social philosophy and history (Carlyle wrote Sartor Resartus, The French Revolution and Chartism in this decade) indicates only some of the pressures during this era. By the time Victoria came to the throne in 1837, a revaluation of manners, morals, thought and feeling was in full flood.
Popular amusements were inevitably caught up in the general movement of change. In the long term, there was a decisive shift away from gregarious, participatory activities towards large-scale spectator entertainments such as music-hall and professional sport. The most striking instance of this trend, which historians have referred to as the 'commercialisation of leisure', is the circus.8 Philip Astley opened his circus at Westminster Bridge in 1769 with a
-- 6 --
modest show of horsemanship exercises, and during the nineteenth century his enterprise grew phenomenally in scope and grandeur, culminating late in the century under 'Lord' George Sanger's direction with extravaganzas such as Gulliver's Travels, which Sanger himself in all modesty described as
. . . the biggest thing ever attempted by any theatrical or circus manager before or since. In the big scene there were on the stage at the time three hundred girls, two hundred men, two hundred children, thirteen elephants, nine camels, and fifty-two horses, in addition to ostriches, emus, pelicans, deer of all kinds, kangaroos, Indian buffaloes, Brahmin bulls, and, to crown the picture, two living lions led by the collar and chain into the centre of the group.9
Jerry's dogs in The Old Curiosity Shop pale rather, in comparison. Sanger himself provides the archetypal example of the commercialization of entertainment, graduating from a boy's exhibition of six white mice to his later orchestration of massive productions like the one described above. Inspired by Astley's, other circuses sprang up, consisting initially of little more than a few routines on horseback. The shows gradually became more elaborate and various, but wild beast acts were included only from the late 1830s and elaborate feats of daring after mid-century. A few modest circuses soldiered on until the end of the century, but the trend, in circus, in music-hall and in sport, was towards size and expense, culminating in the birth of the mass-entertainment industry in the early years of the twentieth century.
Transition, then, was the keynote during Dickens's lifetime. His writing registers the decline of old patterns and the difficulty of establishing new ones. He is concerned with the replacement of traditional kinds of leisure activities by new forms and, more centrally, with changing attitudes to entertainment. He is staunch in his resistance to pressures antagonistic to amusement, but he is also warmly supportive of forces for improvement. For example, he was an intimate adviser at the Theatre Royal, Covent Garden, during its management by his friend William Charles Macready, who endeavoured to improve the environment of the theatre by banishing prostitutes from it, and to raise the level of performance by insisting on proper rehearsals. Dickens's association with Macready's celebrated 1838 production of King Lear had direct consequences for his fiction.10 He published articles in his journals circumstantially praising Madame Tussaud's waxwork museum for having become a 'national institution'; others noticing the worthy
-- 7 --
efforts- of musical clubs to provide 'an emollient for brutal tastes', extolling the benefits of opening Kew Gardens and the British Museum to the public, comparing the licentiousness and riot of ancient May Days with the exhilarating May Day 1851, when British industry made possible a structure more wonderful than the palace Aladdin raised with his lamp, the Crystal Palace in Hyde Park.11 Above all, his own career gives clear evidence of his positive response to trends of the day: he kept scrupulous watch on the financial value and audience appeal of his writings, and his decision to embark on the public readings which dominated his last years, under the management 9f a professional theatrical agency, represented a fulfilment of his earliest aspirations within the context of the emerging commercial circumstances.
But the fundamental point about Dickens's attitudes to popular entertainment, the fact which deeply colours his relationship to it, is that his attachment is rooted in the traditions of the past. There are two principal reasons why this is so. First, the values which he associates with entertainment have less to do with its increasing scale and commercialism than with the old communal patterns. For Dickens, entertainment was a locus for the spontaneity, selflessness and fellow-feeling which lay at the heart of his moral convictions. The human enjoyment by family and friends of shared amusements had meaning for him far above the aesthetic accomplishment of the professional entertainer impersonally exhibiting his skills before an anonymous audience. He was well aware of the vast difference in quality between entertainments, and both in his own work and in his response to that of others he strove determinedly for excellence. Nevertheless, it is abundantly clear from the evidence of his life and work that he found ample cause for delight in simple, lowly or even absurd entertainments; whether he laughed with or at the showmen, what mattered was that they provided amusement. In his writing he focused largely on the humble aspirations of individual showmen, earning their honest penny by bringing colour, novelty and amusement into people's lives; on the fraternal feelings of entertainment troupes, giving pleasure to themselves as they offered it to others; and especially on the needs of the solitary individual, struggling to alleviate the burdens of his or her life in imaginative release. Even when he deals with commercial entertainment, such as Crummles's strollers or Sleary's equestrians, Dickens concentrates less on the economic basis of their enterprises than on the feelings which motivate their work; he happily records the gusto and dedication with which they perform, he takes us offstage to glimpse the quality of their lives, and he singles out knots of spectators eager for gregarious pleasure. As a writer he cultivated a strong sense of
-- 8 --
personal relationship with his readers, and his public readings were motivated not only by the attraction of financial gain but also by the opportunity they provided for an even closer intimacy with his audience. His emphasis lay on participation, on carefree imprudence, on unaffected relaxation and release - age-old qualities of popular amusement, which were being substantially altered by the trend towards larger scale of organization, greater outlay in cost, and stricter attention to the clock.
The second and more compelling reason why Dickens favoured entertainments which reflected the older tradition was that his fascination was firmly established in his earliest childhood. His attachment to the first years of his life was the single greatest influence on his adult perspectives, and one quality of childhood which he particularly cherished was responsiveness to entertainment. That responsiveness was conditioned by innocence, awakened in wonder, and conducive to imagination. 'If we can only preserve ourselves from growing up, we shall never grow old,' he declared in Household Words, and his adult association of entertainment with childhood means that even when he contemplates the present or the future he is instinctively drawn to look back to childhood in order to explain and verify the authenticity of feelings aroused.12 The temptation of such an outlook is to nostalgia, but at best the link with childhood gives his conception of popular entertainment a vital simplicity, as he affirms the importance of refusing to outgrow the purity of the child's spontaneous delight.
In his thinking about entertainment children are often included; childlike attitudes are encouraged, and the forms of entertainment which he personally finds most attractive are those which he encountered as a boy. The connection in his mind between entertainment and childhood led him to consider love of amusement to be a natural human inclination, which he believed, on the basis of close observation, most people would follow with good-humour and good will. His novels are full of characters who gaily seek pleasure at the first opportunity, and of others who depend on scraps of enjoyment to eke out otherwise bleak existence. Conversely, characters who oppose amusement are portrayed as misguided at best, villainous at worst, and they are invariably incomplete and frustrated in their own lives. The instinctive desire for amusement is the axiom with which the first issue of Household Words opened, when he announced, as an avowed purpose of the new periodical he was launching, that he 'would tenderly cherish that light of Fancy which is inherent in the human breast' and which 'can never be extinguished'.13 It is also a central theme in Hard Times, where imaginative release into the realms of delight symbolized by the circus is seen
-- 9 --
as a human necessity, as basic as food and shelter. Denied healthy outlet for their sense of wonder, the children of Mr Gradgrind are blighted by his perverse philosophy. Dickens's point is emphatic, not merely that a better educational system would nurture happier children, but also that the attempt to root out every inclination which seeks to rise above Fact is to misunderstand human nature. Fancy is an inalienable attribute.
The stress on childhood and on the supreme value to be found in the life of the imagination is, as critics have often noted, Blakean, but it is also important to discriminate the strongly un-Blakean component of Dickens's conception of 'fancy'. Far from betokening a transcendence into some ideal state of contemplation, for Dickens fancy constituted the more mundane 'capacity of being easily pleased with what is meant to please us'.14 This disposition includes a response to literary invention, of course - his love of the Arabian Nights and of Robinson Crusoe is a frequently sounded chord, and his own great accomplishment is literary - but it is also an eager curiosity for the sights to be found in everyday life, and an active willingness to enjoy recreations, shows, plays and other humble forms of truly popular entertainment. For Dickens the celebration of fancy is intimate with participation in the enjoyments of the common man.
The grounding of Dickens's attachment to popular entertainment in traditional patterns and in childhood has inevitable consequences. It gives a passionate intensity to his commitment to the values of entertainment and makes the depiction of amusements an important vehicle for conveying his social and moral concerns. On the other hand, it gives a distinctly dated quality to the entertainers in his fiction; even within the social context of nineteenth-century England, they seem vestiges of a previous era. The strolling actors in Nicholas Nickleby and the itinerant showfolk in The Old Curiosity Shop are struggling to survive in a culture indifferent to them at best; the circus performers in Hard Times exist more as idealized alternatives to pernicious attitudes than as actual representatives of the Victorian business of entertainment. Dickens has less to tell us about the directions entertainment was to take after he wrote than about reasons why it is an activity vital to the individual and to society; but, if his writing on the subject has limited usefulness as prophecy, it nevertheless provides us with some of the most exuberant prose that even he ever wrote, and it leads us into some of his essential preoccupations.
He held his Convictions with tenacity and defended them with vigour because provision of entertainment for the people was highly controversial. Leisure had a diminishing place in the lives of a great many English men and women, and it had powerful enemies. The
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breakdown of small community relationships sharpened class differences and aroused the emerging middle classes to decry wholly lower-class amusements as vulgar licence. Increasingly earnest attitudes about the sanctity of work created suspicion of leisure of any sort, unnecessary to workers and costly to industrialists. Religion and recreation, so closely integrated throughout history, diverged sharply in the nineteenth century, competing for separate allegiance. Evangelical Christianity, dedicated single-mindedly to personal salvation, was a force inimical to worldly pleasures, and its spectacular rise in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century made it the most formidable of antagonists to traditional community recreations.15 The extreme wing of Evangelicalism was categorical in its denunciation of amusements, for no recreation could be innocent when idleness was seen as the occasion of evil. In the words of one prominent Sabbatarian leader:
Nothing is to be done which is merely for amusement or for gain. To saunter in the public walks where the gay and worldly scene necessarily unfits the mind for devotion - to read the public journal, or other works which are not religious, to read and to write letters upon business, or any other common topics - to pay idle visits - to engage in frivolous conversation at home or elsewhere. . . must be contrary to the Christian's duty of the Lord's-day. 16
Another went even further: 'Thousands have ascribed their religious declension, and subsequent ruin, to Sunday walks.'17 These attitudes underpinned the Sabbatarian movement, an exceptionally well-organized pressure group, which sought moral reform through legislation. By means of widespread publicity, petition campaigns, and parliamentary bills, principal Sabbatarian organizations made themselves a force to be reckoned with, promoting restrictions on Sunday of drinking-hours, trade, travel, rights of assembly, postal delivery, band concerts in public parks, and all other activity which they deemed Godless. Separate but also powerful were the temperance movement, seeking variously to shorten drinking-hours, provide alternative attractions to drink, or prohibit its consumption altogether; and animal protection societies, dedicated to stamping out blood sports and other cruelty to animals. All of these groups were overtly hostile to traditional popular amusements and vocal in their attempts to suppress them. Although they were predominantly middle-class in membership, and although their activities were widely attacked for class bias (since the lower classes depended more upon public facilities and had less free time than their betters), all
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'Animal Suffering' by Pierce Egan the Younger. The amusements of the people faced vigorous opposition, often more effective than that shown here.
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received varying degrees of support from elements within the working class, who saw reform movements as potential means of improving their lot. The potency of these enemies of popular entertainment can hardly be overestimated. As one eminent social historian points out: 'Much larger social groups were more directly affected by restrictions on recreation and by limitations on drinking hours than by early nineteenth-century legislation on factory hours or poor relief.'18
Dickens responded to the pressures against leisure with stalwart defence and stinging satire. In addition to such well-known set pieces in his fiction as the description of the maddening boredom of an English Sunday (LD, I, 3) and the address to the Brick Lane Branch of the United Grand Junction Ebenezer Temperance Association by the canting drunkard Mr Stiggins (PP, 33), he used his journalism as a forum for the support of amusements for the people. From the early Sunday under Three Heads, which he wrote in the spring of 1836, just as Pickwick was underway, to the late 'Great Drunkery Discovery' which he assisted his son Charley to prepare for All the Year Round in 1869, less than a year before he died, he counterattacked against specific attempts to restrict the pleasures of the poor. His convictions about popular entertainment are a function of his social conscience.
Finally, Dickens's role as a popular entertainer contributes significantly to the development of his art. His career as a creative writer began with works in which he sought to tap familiar formulas of the day for providing amusement. In Sketches by Boz and in three of his first four novels, all written before the end of 1840, he sketched a number of scenes set in places of entertainment; he made a desire for amusement a primary motivation for several principal characters; and he included many entertainers, both amateur and professional, among his casts of characters. At the same time, his driving ambition and the critical success of his early work led him to conceive novels which would contain far more than ingredients for idle diversion. In the rapid maturing of his genius, he sought to combine seriousness of content and artistry of design, without foresaking the original aim of entertaining his readers. The direction which this progress took was away from entertainment as a major subject of his work to a thematic use of imagination - the 'fancy' which he saw as integral with a love of entertainment - as a key principle of his later fiction. With the notable exception of Hard Times, written in 1854, in his later career Dickens largely transferred his treatment of the amusements of the people from his novels to his periodicals, and his public readings became the principal outlet for his purpose to entertain.
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The chapters which follow develop these approaches, moving between the social context and Dickens's art in an attempt to clarify the relationship between them. Chapter 2 focuses upon the importance of the child in Dickens's thinking about entertainment, and Chapters 3, 4 and 5 concentrate on the novels in which entertainers figure most prominently: Nicholas Nickleby, The Old Curiosity Shop and Hard Times. Chapter 6 deals with popular entertainment as it appears in Dickens's journalism, and Chapter 7 is concerned with the public readings. In his fiction, his journalism, his performances and his life, popular entertainment was of central importance. Recognition of that centrality is essential to an understanding of Dickens.
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CHAPTER 2
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Popular Entertainment and Childhood
The values which Dickens associated with popular entertainment including spontaneity, freedom, fancy and release, as opposed to life-denying forces of hard-headedness and hard-heartedness - converged in the most important image in his art, that of the child. For Dickens, the child was being endowed with special capabilities of sensitivity, wonder and imagination, all of which found particularly congenial outlet in activities of play and amusement. Inheriting from Rousseau the conception of innocence as the natural state of childhood, Dickens was the first major novelist to place children at the centre of novels, and his achievement in doing so is one of his significant contributions to literature. In several works he focused his exploration of moral, social and psychological themes upon the image of the child, and in all of his fiction, as a number of critics have ably demonstrated, he makes a child's outlook integral to his artistic vision.1 The eager curiosity and receptiveness to novelty and energy; the fascination with imitation and its problematic relation with reality; the sense of absurdity, in which delight and terror are never far apart - each of these vital components of his genius has its roots in his conception of childhood, and each finds particularly full expression in his concern with entertainment. For its intimate relationship with childhood alone, popular entertainment assumes central importance for an understanding of Dickens's art, and it can help us to discriminate certain attitudes which reveal more about life during his own childhood than about later developments in English society.
Dickens's lifelong predilection was for those forms of entertainment which he first experienced as a child, and his love of the circus, theatre and pantomime is consonant with his attachment to the values and experiences of childhood. Several of his best-known occasional pieces - 'Our School', 'Nurse's Stories', 'Birthday Celebrations', 'A Christmas Tree', 'Dullborough Town' - are autobiographical recollections of his happiest childhood days. In these essays he dwells with loving detail upon the simple festivities of a family
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Christmas, the hopeful emotions of birthday parties, the excitement of bedtime stories. The fact that his childhood contained other, far less lighthearted events unquestionably made such moments all the more precious, and if memories of the tale of Captain Murderer and the dreadful mask at Christmas contain an edge of terror the softening distance of time transforms childish fear into delicious piquancy. Typical of the way in which Dickens integrates fear, sorrow or disaster into a complex evocation of childhood joys is his account of the white mice in 'Our School':
The boys trained the mice, much better than the masters trained the boys. We recall one white mouse, who lived in the cover of a Latin dictionary, who ran up ladders, drew Roman chariots, shouldered muskets, turned wheels, and even made a very creditable appearance on the stage as the Dog of Montargis. He might have achieved greater things, but for having the misfortune to mistake his way in a triumphal procession to the Capitol, when he fell into a deep inkstand, and was dyed black and drowned.2
The entertainment comes to an end in death and blighted hopes, but the star performer is only a mouse after all, and the performance confined to a schoolroom. By adopting a tone which purports to take seriously the prospects and ultimate fate of the mouse, Dickens simultaneously authenticates the genuine fascination of the boys even as he gently mocks the intensity of their commitment to so trivial an activity. The circumstantial precision of the description indicates the hold the episode retains on Dickens's memory, even as an adult, and the aside about schoolmasters lightly extends the application of the vignette beyond mere amusement.
Convinced equally of children's inherent disposition to enjoy, and of the beneficent effects of entertainment upon them, Dickens was eager to preserve childhood pleasures, both in the memory of his own past and in his concern for present and future children. He was indignant at the thought of anyone tampering, as George Cruikshank did in his 'Frauds on the Fairies', with the direct appeal of children's entertainment, and the core of his indictment of parental disciplinarians such as Murdstone, Gradgrind and Mrs Joe was that they left no room for a child's natural graces to flourish. Opportunity for play was essential for every child: 'Play they must and play they will, somewhere or other, under whatsoever circumstances of difficulty' (Speeches, p. 272). One thinks, in this context, of the young Dickens, wandering back to his lodgings from the blacking warehouse and being 'seduced more than once' into a
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'Christopher's First Appearance in Public' by John Leech. The values which Dickens associated with popular entertainment converged on the most important image in his art, that of the child.
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show-van on a street-corner where, in company 'with a very motley assemblage', he saw 'the Fat Pig, the Wild Indian, and the Little Lady': his use of the definite article in itemizing these wonders registers the particular impression they made upon his youthful fancy.3 Young David Copperfield, in similar circumstances, spends his moments of idleness away from Murdstone and Grinby's wandering across London Bridge to look over the balustrades at the sun shining on the water, or sitting down upon a bench by the river to watch coal-heavers dancing in an open space before a little public house (DC, 11). Such snatches of entertainment, Dickens makes clear, provide sustaining nourishment for the lonely, neglected child.
And because he perceived childhood as a state peculiarly responsive to the appeals of entertainment, he was eager to retain such attitudes in adulthood. His 1853 essay 'Where We Stopped Growing' is an explicit declaration of gratitude that he has not outgrown many of the pleasures he enjoyed as a child, but can still participate in them as an adult. This sentiment is echoed in his last complete novel, Our Mutual Friend, when Rumpty Wilfer, led out of his office and taken on a day's outing to Greenwich, allows his hair to be tousled like a little boy's and spends the afternoon building castles in air with 'the lovely woman'; he is so moved by the day's events that 'there was water in the foolish little fellow's eyes, but she kissed them dry' (OMF, I, 8). Particularly in his writings about Christmas, Dickens encouraged the sentiment that 'it is good to be children sometimes, and never better than at Christmas, when its mighty Founder was a child himself (CC, stave 3). This is the lesson which Scrooge must learn from the three spirits, and one which Bob Cratchit acts upon the moment he leaves the counting-house, when he 'went down a slide on Cornhill, twenty times, in honour of its being Christmas Eve, and then ran home to Camden Town, as hard as he could pelt, to play at blindman's buff (CC, stave 1). So, too, Mr Pickwick, sliding on the ice with his friends at Dingley Dell, keeps alive the Christmas spirit and remains eternally young at heart, even after he has been exposed to the shadows of the Fleet.
Dickens's advocacy of adult retention of the child's outlook is, of course, far from unequivocal; perhaps of all his 'holy innocents' only Mr Pickwick is accorded unqualified admiration by his creator, and the feckless Harold Skimpole stands as warning of the unprincipled selfishness to which childishness in adults is liable. Childlike indulgence is more often celebrated in Dickens's writing as holiday release, valuable precisely because it is a brief exception to the work, pain and responsibility of everyday existence. As we shall see, he defended leisure on Sunday because it gave respite from the toil of
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every other day of the week, and he championed Christmas as 'the only time . . . in the long calendar of the year, when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut up hearts freely' (CC, stave 1). Economic necessity and limited opportunities for entertainment and recreation meant that adults were less likely to be childlike than children were to become prematurely adult, and his fiction contains many poignant examples of children for whom life provides no amusement at all. His concern that adults cherish the joys of childhood was, in part, a plea that children should be enabled to do so.
As a consequence of his belief in the special attributes of the child, Dickens emphasizes the separation of its world from that of adults. This distance is signalled again and again in the novels: by the isolation of Oliver, David and Pip at crucial stages of their early lives; by the uncomprehending attitudes of Mr Dombey and Mr Gradgrind towards their children; by the secret retreat of Jenny Wren and Lizzie Hexam, far away from the dust-heaps and the river. His first-person narrators look back upon their younger days with keen awareness of how far they have travelled: David remarks of his boyhood reading that 'it is curious to me how I could ever have consoled myself under my small troubles (which were great troubles to me), by impersonating my favourite characters' (I, 4), and Pip thinks of the helpless folly with which he set out to 'do all the shining deeds of the young Knight of romance, and marry the Princess' (GE, 29). Reflecting on his own childhood as well, for all the intimacy of his recollections, Dickens was under no illusion that they were other than recollections. Some scenes had disappeared completely, like Our School, swallowed up by the railway: 'Locomotives now run smoothly over its ashes.' Others took on new meanings, or lost their old power, as he matured; but all were sealed in the irrevocable past, where they were fixed and static, incapable of change save through the distortions of memory. Thus, Nurse's stories remain 'unchanged' with the passage of time; the image of his youngest Christmas experiences stands 'ever unalterable'.4
The sense of distance has important consequences not only for his depictions of childhood, but also for his outlook on entertainment. The perceived gap between the child's instinctive delight and the more consciously reconstructed sense of enjoyment of adults locates a principal impetus for his convictions about entertainment in the past, and makes this concern essentially backward-looking. He is urgent for better leisure opportunities in the present, but the source of his fervour and the forms which he is predisposed to favour come overwhelmingly from his childhood. Dickens, as is well known, was no naive admirer of the past, but his feelings about his own past
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were notable more for tenacity than for flexibility. This makes him basically conservative about entertainment: his concern is less for innovations which may be possible in the altered circumstances of the future than for the traditions which were being eroded. Those traditions, having been first encountered in irretrievable childhood, take on for him the permanence of completed experience, to be treasured through memory in unchanging images. The contrast between past joys, sanctified by the associations of his earliest affections, and a less wonderful present, in which adult cares contaminate the purity of the child's response, adds an element of regret which flavours much of his writing about entertainment, and the idealization of childhood innocence inevitably creates a preference for simplicity and directness. In short, the conjunction of childhood and entertainment in Dickens's mind renders his writing liable not merely to deep conviction but also to nostalgia.
This is precisely the charge which Dickens's detractors over the years have levelled against him, and one which even some of his most thoughtful admirers have found in need of apology; that he was insufficiently engaged with the real culture and adult concerns of his time; that he substituted feeling for thought; and that his solution to the world's ills was a menu of Christmas pudding every day, in a Never-Never-Land populated - in Aldous Huxley's phrase - with gruesome old Peter Pans'.5 Dickens's contemporary George Henry Lewes found little in the novels 'for the reader of cultivated taste', only 'overflowing fun' which required thoughtful men to respond 'like children at a play', and this conception of Dickens as no more than a 'great entertainer' (as F. R. Leavis called him, before being converted to the ranks of the faithful) has remained for over a century the- popular image of the Inimitable.6 Dickens's entertainment, in this view of the matter, is unsuitable for adult attention, and Edmund Wilson's classic defence of Dickens merely sidesteps the objection by locating his achievement elsewhere. A whole generation of critics following Wilson has explored the dark insights of the unhappy artist divided against himself; but, as Denis Donoghue astutely observed in the centenary year of Dickens's death, to praise Dickens by setting aside the comedy and the entertainment is to 'take Dickens not as we find him but as we improve him'.7 While it is no doubt true that some of Dickens's journal writings about convivial amusements, particularly in the later Christmas stories, lack the artistic excellence of the great novels, it is also true that some of his most characteristic attitudes are found here; and, as it is the purpose of the present study to demonstrate, these attitudes are intimate with his stature. It seems to me possible to admire Dickens's positive achievements, his conscious artistry and
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his articulate convictions as well as his obsessions with the morbid and the irrational. To understand this writer who emerged out of the popular culture of the early nineteenth century it is essential to face squarely the entertainment in and of his work.
One of the most revealing writings in which Dickens looks directly at the amusements of his childhood is the 1860 sketch entitled 'Dullborough Town'. This essay was conceived as part of the series of personal reflections which he first published in All the Year Round and later collected in The Uncommercial Traveller, and it is among the best of several pieces in the series which draw upon his boyhood memories.8 Written in the full maturity of his prose style, on subjects of lifelong interest, and infused with an intimate personal tone, The Uncommercial Traveller achieves the highest standards of Dickens's journalism, and it had crucial importance in the gestation of the supreme achievement of his genius, Great Expectations, for it was while he was working on papers for The Uncommercial Traveller that he hit upon a notion which, he announced excitedly to Forster, 'so opens out before me that I can see the whole of a serial revolving on it, in a most singular and comic manner'. This, Forster reports, was 'the germ of Pip and Magwitch'.9 Certainly the mood and manner of the opening pages of that novel have the strongest affinities with The Uncommercial Traveller, and 'Dullborough Town' in particular, reminiscing from an adult's perspective with humour and pathos upon boyhood scenes in and around a country town, prefigures the posture of Pip's narrative.
The setting of 'Dullborough Town' is of the sort to which Dickens instinctively returns when thinking of boyhood. Like their creator, Oliver, Nicholas, David and Pip all grow up in small rural towns before making their way to London. Nicholas's birthplace, Dawlish, is located in Devonshire, and David's Blunderstone is in Suffolk, but Dickens thinks of them generically; as he says in The Uncommercial Traveller, 'Most of us come from Dullborough who come from a country town'. For five years of his boyhood Dickens himself lived near Rochester, and this town appears in his fiction sometimes under its own name and at other times under such aliases as Great Winglebury and Mudfog. The name Dullborough may have been suggested to him by its variant, 'Dulminster', which was portrayed in a sketch in Household Words in 1856 - although it is always possible, given Dickens's editorial methods, that this name, too, was his own invention. 'Early Days in Dulminster', written by a contributor unknown today save by his name, Browne, is, like 'Dullborough Town', cast as the reminiscence of an adult returning to the scenes of his childhood. Both articles set the remembered past around 1820, and their gaze includes subjects common to both -
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bygone coaching days, the state of the theatre, a child's awareness of politics. But Browne's essay is less coherent and vivid than Dickens's own, and lacks altogether the firm narrative control - of a child's view mediated by adult perception - which distinguishes 'Dullborough Town.
Through its setting, 'Dullborough Town' registers attitudes found as early in Dickens's work as the scenes of 'Our Parish' in Sketches by Boz, and as late as the streets of Cloisterham in The Mystery of Edwin Drood. But it also reflects the particular circumstances of Dickens's life in the months prior to its composition. In the aftermath of the breakdown of his marriage, Dickens plunged into a searching reassessment of his values and loyalties. He severed friendships, embarked upon the first of his public-reading tours, wound up Household Words and started a new periodical, All the Year Round, to take its place. He wrote a novel, A Tale of Two Cities, which questions the use of living, in a combination of self-disgust and self-pity. He soon moved permanently out of London and settled in rural Kent. By the spring of 1860, when he came to write 'Dullborough Town', in other words, a number of factors were converging which inclined him to look more favourably than ever on the amusements of his childhood: a dissatisfaction with his present life and a physical return to the place he had lived as a boy; a rejection of the metropolis, where he had spent most of his life from the age of 10, in favour of rural surroundings; and, with the purchase of Gad's Hill Place, a reaffirmation of his earliest imaginings. It was a house which he had first seen as a 'very queer small boy' living in Chatham, across the Medway from Rochester, and he had been told by his father that, if he worked hard, one day he might live there.10 With its associations of Falstaff and of his own youthful dreams, the place was the most vivid of reminders of the conjunction of past and present in his own life.
'Dullborough Town' is presented as the description of a grown man's first return to the scene among which my earliest days were passed'. In real life, of course, Dickens had visited Rochester many times after his childhood, but the fiction heightens the contrast between old and new impressions, and gives immediacy to the reawakening of youthful associations. The distance in time, between his last experience of the town and his present visit, is stressed from the outset by the juxtaposition of the stagecoach by which he left Dullborough and the railway train by which he returns. When he left, it was 'in the days when there were no railroads in the land', and he travelled in solitary self-importance; on return, his portmanteau stamped and himself ticketed, he is 'cavalierly shunted' back to the town. This opening sets the mood for the dominant emphasis in the
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sketch, on the discovery of change. He arrives full of 'tender remembrance' of the scenes of his youth, but soon finds that little remains as he knew it. The old playing-field is gone, swallowed up by the railway station; the coaching office, along with several houses on each side of it, has been knocked down to make way for a monstrous establishment for great rattling wagons; the theatre, largely converted to wine- and beer-vaults, is advertised To Let, 'and hopelessly so, for its old purposes'. There is a new Mechanics' Institute, but it is far from inspiring romantic associations: 'approached by an infirm step-ladder . . . it led a modest and retired existence up a stable-yard'. The one sight which he finds unaltered, the figure of the greengrocer, 'with his hands in his pockets and leaning his shoulder against the doorpost, as my childish eyes had seen him many a time is indifferent to the visitor's reappearance, and it is not until the end of the day, in a chance encounter with an old schoolfellow, that he finds anything in Dullborough which has changed for the better.
Otherwise, the town has deteriorated sadly. He is appalled by the desecration of loveliness caused by the coming of the railway.
The two beautiful hawthorn-trees, the hedge, the turf, and all those buttercups and daisies, had given place to the stoniest of jolting roads: while, beyond the Station, an ugly dark monster of a tunnel kept its jaws open, as if it had swallowed them and were ravenous for more destruction. (UT, pp. 116-l7)
The image is a child's fantasy of a mythical beast terrorizing the sacred homeland, but it expresses the actuality perceived by the adult, of a countryside made ugly in the pursuit of progress. Similarly, his recollection of the romantically named coach in which he rode, Timpson's Blue-Eyed Maid, contrasts starkly with 'No. 97', the severely utilitarian designation of the locomotive engine which brought him home; and the removal of the beautiful oval transparency in the coaching-office window by the proprietor of the wagon firm, Pickford, affects him as both a personal affront and a violation of principle: 'I felt that he had done me an injury, not to say an act of boyslaughter, in running over my childhood in this rough manner . . . Moreover, I felt that Pickford had no right to come rushing into Dullborough and deprive the town of a public picture.' The outrage is hyperbolically expressed, to show that the emotions originate with the child, but the adult's disappointment is genuine enough. Surveying with a 'heavy heart' the violated playground, the shut-up theatre and the dreary Mechanics' Institute, Dickens meditates upon the lost happiness of his childhood, and proceeds to generalize about entertainment. Inevitably from the perspective thus
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Dickens lamented the loss to 'progress' of open fields suitable for innocent recreation, and late in his life he sponsored field sports in the meadow behind Gad's Hill Place.
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established, a sense of sadness and of loss colours his reflections.
In dispiriting contrast to the present, what he remembers most specifically about his childhood are the variety and abundance of opportunity to find entertainment, and the intensity with which he responded to it all. Buildings and vehicles and people and events all fed his youthful imagination; play with schoolmates turned into romantic adventure; a game of cricket promised the glories of battlefield (although in the event polite decorum prevailed); the theatre enacted struggles of life and death within touching distance of his seat in the stage-box; books offered glamorous roles for boys and girls to imitate. But now, in place of the wonder, colour and excitement, which he found everywhere as a child, the prosaic reigns. Part of the problem, he is quick to realize, involves his own perception: the town seems 'shrunken' from its former grandeur; the Corn Exchange, which he once envisaged as 'the model on which the Genie of the Lamp built the palace for Aladdin', appears now 'a mean little brick heap'; the Indian sword-swallower, who thrilled him as a boy, from his present perspective seems unlikely to have been an Indian and unlikely to have swallowed the sword. This change in himself is, indeed, the concluding thought of the essay.
All my early readings and early imaginations dated from this place, and I took them away so full of innocent construction and guileless belief, and I brought them back so worn and torn, so much the wiser and so much the worse! (UT, p.126)
But the problem is not simply his own faulty memory and diminished capacity for enjoyment. More important is the town's 'dull and abortive' attitude to entertainment. In the theatre, the only attraction for a long time has been a panorama, billed, with 'leaden import', as 'pleasingly instructive'; in the Mechanics' Institute, lectures are acts of aggression, in which the audiences are 'knocked on the head' and 'stunned' with information. There, even the most innocent diversions are 'masked' as educational, as when the song 'Coming through the Rye' is introduced 'with some general remarks on wheat and clover'. The refusal to admit that leisure should include relief and diversion has inevitable consequences: no mechanics belong to the Mechanics' Institute, and it is 'steeped in debt to the chimney-pots'. Throughout Dullborough, Dickens objects,
I still noticed everywhere the prevalence, to an extraordinary degree, of this custom of putting the natural demand for amusement out of sight, as some untidy housekeepers put dust, and pretending that it was swept away. (UT, p.123)
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Recreation has been pushed aside by progress, and the picturesque replaced by the functional. And yet, because amusement is sought where it is to be found, the desire for entertainment continues to be catered to, albeit surreptitiously. As evidence, Dickens observes a tract in the Evangelical bookshop, in which the very denunciation of entertainment has the appeal of a stage performance.
Looking in at what is called in Dullborough 'the serious bookseller's', where, in my childhood, I had studied the faces of numbers of gentlemen depicted in rostrums with a gaslight on each side of them, and casting my eyes over the open pages of certain printed discourses there, I found a vast deal of aiming at jocosity and dramatic effect, even in them - yes, verily, even on the part of one very wrathful expounder who bitterly anathematised a poor little Circus. (UT, p. 123)
Here, in the 'rostrums with a gaslight', Dickens detects an overtly theatrical setting for a stirring harangue which, in its 'wrathful' tones of anathema, has the polarized morality of melodrama. Just as his imagination turns mundane railways and wagons into exciting monsters, so, too, he ekes entertainment out of its denial.
This still vital capacity to search out amusement even in inauspicious circumstances prevents 'Dullborough Town' from ever becoming dull or gloomy in its writing, even as Dickens laments the loss of childhood joy, and ensures that the contrast between past and present never degenerates into simple dichotomy. As he looks around Dullborough he recognizes that not everything has changed for the worse: despite the predilections of the Mechanics' Institute, a healthy interest in travel, biography and fiction is recorded in its library returns; his former companions Joe Specks and Lucy Green, though older, are prosperous and contented, and their children remind the visitor so much of the days gone by that 'it quite touched my foolish heart'. Moreover, as the phlegmatic greengrocer reminds him, the town has an independent life of its own, and does not exist exclusively in a sealed chamber of an absent son's memory. Other of Dickens's writings which contrast past and present confirm such complexity of response: in Dombey and Son Stagg's Gardens is destroyed by the railway, but a new, more prosperous community emerges; in Great Expectations Pip has a strong inclination to return at last to the forge, but his growth to true maturity cuts off that step as regressive; and in the 1851 sketch 'Our Watering Place' the mere survival of pleasures from the past, with no new sources of vitality, leaves the town in a semi-moribund condition.
At the same time, the detailed evocation of the past in 'Dull-
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borough Town', as in all of Dickens's best writing on childhood, makes it clear that even in remembrance the happiness was not unalloyed. As he says of his ride in Timpson's Blue-Eyed Maid, 'life [was] sloppier than I expected to find it'. The excitement of waiting on the lady who gave birth to four, or perhaps five, babies does not disguise the fact that all of them died, or that he 'disgusted' everyone present by refusing to contribute to a subscription on her behalf. At the cricket match, the excessive politeness of the competitors smacks of such adult hypocrisy that he dismisses them as 'sneaks'. In the theatre, there is an edge of delicious terror to the excitement, but also gross misapprehension, as in his childish discovery 'that the witches in Macbeth bore an awful resemblance to the Thanes and other proper inhabitants of Scotland; and that the good King Duncan couldn't rest in his grave, but was constantly coming out of it and calling himself somebody else'. Such ignorance is also evident in his conception of 'the Radicals' and in his credulity over the Indian sword-swallower. It is clear, then, that the past was no more perfect than the present is wholly deplorable.
Finally, the relation between childhood and age is harmonized, as it is in A Christmas Carol, David Copperfield and Great Expectations, by the mediating power of memory. As remembered scenes change shape before his eyes, the spectator realizes that distance has led to idealization: places and events were glamorous not because of intrinsic attractiveness, but because he made them so. With the loss of his own innocence some of the magic has gone, but his apprehension of the town has moved closer to reality. Far more important, his readjusted vision of the past makes him content with the present, putting him in a more charitable mood with the town, its inhabitants and himself. This is particularly true in the reunion with Joe Specks:
the mutual recollection of shared memories not only revivifies the past, but also gives it meaningful relation with the present; it reconciles them to what is lost for ever, and disposes both of them to renewed affection for one another. They are able to speak openly 'of our old selves as though our old selves were dead and gone, and indeed indeed they were'; at the same time Specks 'illuminated Dullborough with rays of interest that I wanted and should otherwise have missed in it, and linked its present with the past, in a highly agreeable chain'. The repetition ('indeed indeed') underlines the fervour of his newfound contentment, and the imagery of light suggests that a properly adjusted attitude to the past both brightens and clarifies his living experience of the entire span of his life. Like The Haunted Man, 'Dullborough Town' shows why Dickens believes it so important to 'keep my memory green
Consideration of these matters has taken us beyond strict concern
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for popular entertainment, but their prominence in this sketch is indicative of how integrally entertainment is tied to other subjects of major importance in Dickens's writing. The link between entertainment and childhood helps to locate a matrix of values basic to his vision, and the perceived distance between the child's experience and that of the adult provides one measure for his perception of the limitations of prevalent attitudes towards amusement. The presence of entertainment within the scope of memory is an indication of the intensity of its hold upon Dickens, and his conception of the sustaining power of the innocent enjoyments of childhood for the grown man is, like Wordsworth's overflow of powerful emotion recollected in tranquillity, a pillar of his thought. Dickens's imaginative return to the entertainment of his childhood is, in short, conducive to a great deal more than nostalgia.
Nevertheless, for all the beneficent influence of the past upon the present, and the potential influence for present children in their future, the conjunction of childhood and entertainment in Dickens's mind did encourage a disposition to look to the past for images of entertainment. 'Dullborough Town' is symptomatic of the tendency, which occurs everywhere in his work. In his journals, he chronicles origins and developments of particular forms of popular entertainment; he records with pleasure the survival of old amusements, and examines the evolution of entertainment for improvements as well as losses. Emphatically, he is aware of the contemporary state of entertainment: week by week, as we shall see below, his journals offer detailed accounts of theatres, parks, exhibitions, circuses, waxworks, street minstrels, and so on; many of the articles are prompted by current events affecting the provision of entertainment both in London and in the country at large. But the values which he associates with even the most innovative developments invariably are drawn from those which we have seen in 'Dullborough Town': release for imagination, escape from dull routine, encouragement to fellow-feeling, remembrance of past pleasures - in short, the traditional, communal, gregarious values which predate the entertainment of the Industrial Revolution, and which stand often in sharp conflict with the assumptions underlying the emergent commercial, disciplined, large-scale forms. Nowhere is this association with the past more apparent than in his major fictional renderings of popular entertainment. In Nicholas Nickleby the strolling actors form an extended family; faced with the widespread decline of the provincial theatre, they emigrate to America. In The Old Curiosity Shop the itinerant showmen are seen as colourful relics from the past, and their willingness to violate bonds of friendship for financial gain is seen as a betrayal of the very basis of
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their vocation. In Hard Times Sleary's circus is the repository of human fellowship, emotional security and imaginative vitality; the commercial underpinnings of its existence are nowhere in evidence. In each case, as we shall see in the chapters that follow, the image of entertainment as a form of human value is a source of artistic achievement within the novel, but the reliance upon past models inevitably places a definite limitation on that achievement.
In centring his valuation of popular entertainment in the past, Dickens shares a tendency with other major Victorian novelists. George Eliot, whose knowledge of the popular customs and folklore of her native Warwickshire was so extensive that she is routinely cited by local historians as an authority on the subject, devotes a large portion of her 4859 novel Adam Bede to the festivities surrounding Arthur Donnithorne's birthday celebration.11 The action is placed in 1799; the setting is a small rural community called Hayslope, and in the time of leisure between the hay and corn harvests people of all ranks gather for amusements which include races, challenges, speeches, prizes, food, drink and dancing, all in honour of the heir to the estate. The entertainment is conducted at the expense and under the patronage of the local gentry; the intermingling of ranks is delicately orchestrated; and the speeches by Mr Poyser and by Arthur vigorously defend the event as an emblem of the stable, hierarchical, rural community in which they live and work. In the course of the novel Arthur's seduction of Hetty radically undermines the relations between classes, and as a result the entertainment comes to be seen as a colourful vestige of an outmoded social structure. Here George Eliot uses an image of old forms of entertainment in order to portray the collapse of the social system on which it depended.
Hardy, likewise, in The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886), draws upon traditional modes of entertainment as part of his evidence for the tragic failure of his protagonist, Michael Henchard, to survive in a changing society. In the opening scene of the book Henchard arrives at a rural fair, which, with its 'peep-shows, toy-stands, waxworks, inspired monsters, disinterested medical men who travelled for the public good, thimble-riggers, nick-nack vendors, and readers of fate' (ch. 1), is a scene rife with superstition and deceit; and when, in a fit of drunken discontent, he sells his wife, the setting contributes to our sense of his act as a barbaric practice alien to modern civilization. Hardy sees old-fashioned entertainments as repositories of vitality as well as of vice, however, and it is a poignant moment when, late in the book, Henchard's public f�te is ruined by the elements. Situated in an open spot within ancient earthworks, offering age-old country sports such as greased poles, a greased pig
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and sack races, free of charge to all who care to come, Henchard's affair is unable to compete in the bad weather with Farfrae's more practical covered dancing pavilion, and the difference between their respective entertainments is a measure of the distance between the failed old man of giant passions and his successful but more limited modern antagonist.
In these novels George Eliot and Hardy, like Dickens, view the passing of traditional forms of entertainment with a complex vision, in which the sense of loss predominates. The birthday festivities in Adam Bede buttress the quasi-feudal authority of Arthur's irascible grandfather, but the spirited participation by the entire countryside provides a greater sense of human fellowship than is likely in the ominously named alternative from which Dinah comes, the industrial town Stoniton. The strong liquor and sharp dealing at Weydon-Priors incite Henchard to an unpardonable act, but the fair itself is the afternoon's holiday following an assembly in the morning for the sale of horses and sheep; as in Far from the Madding Crowd (1874), in which Oak seeks employment at a 'mop', or hiring fair, and Troy rides in the circus at a sheep fair, the occasion is an integral part of the rhythms of work and play within the seasonal activities of a rural area. The entertainment in these novels, that is to say, is deployed to symbolize an older social fabric, which is giving way to new conditions less congenial to the vital communal spirit and depth of feeling found in the central characters.
What these novelists do not give us, as Dickens does not, is an equally full depiction of the new types of entertainment which were emerging to cater to the changed conditions of modern, urban, industrial society. Even when Victorian authors portray a large, anonymous, commercially based entertainment such as the circus, the qualities which they choose to single out in it are its old-fashioned romance (as in the dashing Sergeant Troy's enactment of 'Turpin's Ride to York and the Death of Black Bess') or its humane idealism (Sleary's pronouncement that 'People mutht be amuthed'). That the developing alternative tradition of entertainment could lend itself to being seen as a microcosm of modern life is clear enough from twentieth-century examples. In the Scottish poet John Davidson's poem 'The Crystal Palace' (1908), for example, we find the following:
Contraption, - that's the bizarre, proper slang,
Eclectic word, for this portentous toy,
The flying machine, that gyrates stiffly, arms
A-kimbo, so to say, and baskets slung
From every elbow, skating in the air.
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Irreverent, we; but Tartars from Tibet
May deem Sir Hiram the Grandest Lama, deem
His volatile machinery best, and most
Magnific, rotary engine, meant
For penitence and prayer combined, whereby
Petitioner as well as orison
Are spun about in space: a solemn rite
Before the portal of that fane unique,
Victorian temple of commercialism,
Our very own eighth wonder of the world,
The Crystal Palace .
Colossal ugliness .
Tis nature's outcast .
They all pursue their purpose business-like
Resigned habitu�s on every hand .
Like savages bewitched .
Victims, and not companions, of delight.12
Or in D. H. Lawrence's Women in Love (1921) there is the architect Loerke, who is making 'a great frieze for a factory in Cologne':
It was a representation of a fair, with peasants and artizans in an orgy of enjoyment, drunk and absurd in their modern dress, whirling ridiculously in roundabouts, gaping at shows, kissing and staggering and rolling in knots, swinging in swing-boats, and firing down shooting galleries, a frenzy of chaotic motion.
Loerke explains his conception of the frieze to Gudrun:
'Art should interpret industry, as art once interpreted religion,' he said.
'But does your fair interpret industry?' she asked him.
'Certainly. What is man doing, when he is at a fair like this? He is fulfilling the counterpart of labour - the machine works him, instead of he the machine. He enjoys the mechanical motion, in his own body.'
'But is there nothing but work - mechanical work?' said Gudrun.
'Nothing but work!' he repeated, leaning forward, his eyes two darknesses, the needle-points of light. 'No, it is nothing but this, serving a machine, or enjoying the motion of a machine motion, that is all. You have never worked for hunger, or you would know what god governs us. (ch. 29)
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In these examples modern forms of entertainment are used as hateful images of what their authors saw as wrong in contemporary life; the anonymous, mechanical motion in both cases mirroring the essential quality of life in modern industrial society. More recently, Samuel Beckett in Waiting for Godot (1952), John Osborne in The Entertainer (1957) and Trevor Griffiths in Comedians (1975) have each looked to the now declining traditions of the music-hall - of all Victorian forms of popular entertainment, the one which led most directly into the mass-entertainment industry - for images with which to assess their conviction of the failure of modern civilization. But for me the most complex and haunting image of popular entertainment seen as a microcosm of modern society is to be found in Carol Reed's film of the Graham Greene story, The Third Man (1949), in which the great wheel at the funfair in Vienna is used as the climactic meeting-place for Holley Martins and Harry Lime. The image of the wheel superbly conveys the anonymous, uncontrollable quality of life as envisaged in the film - the characters are mere cogs in a gigantic machine, impersonally whirled about, with n~ effective volition of their own, and looking down far beneath them they can feel no sympathy for the people who appear as no more than tiny dots black flies - on the pavement below (Harry is involved in an adulterated penicillin racket). At the same time - and herein lies the superiority of the image to those cited above - the wheel is also a perfect image of the release, the excitement and the fun of entertainment at its best: Holley, with his boy's crush on Harry, joins him briefly once again in an exhilarating adventure, high above the earth, and yet safe in the knowledge that it is, after all, only a ride in an amusement park - much as Harry conceives his own money-making schemes. Third, the wheel, appearing in the narrative just at the moment before Harry, at the height of his success, is gunned down in a sewer, can hardly avoid carrying implications of the medieval trope of the Wheel of Fortune, which lifts Harry high above the rest of mankind, only to hurl him back down at last. In these complex ways, wholly integrated with one another and with the widest purposes of the film, the strategy of setting an episode of the plot in an amusement park releases symbolic meanings which brilliantly reflect Greene and Reed's vision of society. An image of entertainment, taken not from the old gregarious, communal tradition but from that of modern, commercial, impersonal leisure activity, serves as microcosm for the condition of man in modern civilization.
What I have been attempting to suggest by means of these twentieth-century examples is that the new pattern of entertainment which began to emerge during the Industrial Revolution is as open to complex artistic treatment as was the older tradition which was
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dying out. This new pattern embodied new forms and new values, and it also bore more relation than the older model to the kind of social system which was developing in the nineteenth century and has continued to grow in the twentieth. Such images were unquestionably available to Dickens: he knew perfectly well of the developing commercial basis of popular entertainment, its increasing size, expense, discipline, and organization; in the circus and the music-hall he had two major types immediately at hand. As a professional entertainer himself, in his various capacities as author, editor and public reader, he struck hard bargains for his own financial rewards, and from occasional remarks he made - for example, about the appeal of pantomime and the thrill of dangerous entertainment (see Chapter 6 below) - it is clear that he recognized ways in which the new modes of popular entertainment directly reflected the society in which it existed. Dickens chose to focus primarily on the declining tradition, and for the good reason that it represented for him values which he believed essential to humanity; but in thus limiting his range he offered what was more in the nature of an alternative to the society in which he lived than an integral part of it. Rooted in the past, this choice was for conservatism; for preservation rather than innovation. Seen as an alternative, the choice was for radicalism; for replacement rather than integration. Either way the choice was pessimistic, made in the realization that the values he defended were not in accord with the prevailing attitudes of the age. That his presentation of entertainment in his fiction could nevertheless generate the marvellous gusto and comedy for which it is known and loved is testimony to his affection for the delights of entertainment; and that, despite its limitations, his artistic treatment of popular entertainment could generate such range, complexity and insight affirms the breadth of his vision and the excellence of his artistry. For readers today, as in the past, Dickens remains the great entertainer, whose novels contain, among their riches, splendid depictions of popular entertainment.
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CHAPTER 3
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Nicholas Nickleby
The Novel as
Popular Entertainment
Every good actor plays direct to every good author, and every writer of fiction, though he may not adopt the dramatic form, writes in effect for the stage.
Charles Dickens, speech to the Royal
General Theatrical Fund, 29 March 1858
(Speeches, p.262)
I
In the spring of 1838, shortly before the first number of Nicholas Nickleby was issued, Dickens had his publishers, Chapman and Hall, circulate a public statement concerning his new work. The 'proclamation' denounced the 'dishonest dullards' who had turned his previous fiction to their own profit by 'wretched imitations', and served warning against further plagiarism. From the earliest days of Pickwick's fame an entire industry derivative of Dickens's creations had sprung up, marketing illustrations, plays, songs and endless varieties of merchandise, in addition to printed adaptations of the novels. The speed and persistence of this proliferation testify to Dickens's popular appeal: not only could he command a huge readership for work produced under the imprint of his own publishers, but inferior imitations by hands other than his own had enormous selling power as well. There were, for example, at least seven stage versions of Pickwick produced before Dickens finished writing the final number, and it was claimed that penny-issue plagiarisms of Pickwick and of The Old Curiosity Shop sold in the region of 50,000 copies weekly. Unprotected by adequate copyright laws, Dickens was justifiably exasperated, both by the reworking of his own material over which he had no control, and by the profits which accrued not to himself but to those who had stolen his ideas. Mere
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protest, however, was inevitably no defence, and the Nickleby proclamation was utterly ineffectual in preventing further plagiarism of his works. As Louis James has shown, the hacks seized upon Nickleby the moment the first number appeared, and one of them, calling himself 'Bos', impudently issued a counter-proclamation.'
But if Dickens's pronouncement had no influence on those who were cashing in on his popularity it did give a clear indication of his conception of the kind of attraction he hoped his own work would have. In addition to attacking plagiarists, Dickens included a paragraph outlining his intentions in his forthcoming novel. In it he gave notice to the public
. . . that in our new work, as in our preceding one, it will be our aim to amuse, by providing a rapid succession of characters and incidents, and describing them as cheerfully and pleasantly as in us lies; that we have wandered into fresh fields and pastures new, to seek materials for the purpose; and that, in behalf of Nicholas Nickleby, we confidently hope to enlist their heartiest merriment, and their kindliest sympathies.2
Nicholas Nickleby was to be, in a word, entertainment. By filling his book with humour and pathos, he hoped to arouse 'merriment' and sympathies', and he proposed to amuse his readers by constructing a fast-moving plot full of striking incidents and a multiplicity of boldly delineated characters. This was a plan well tested by the novelists he admired most - Fielding, Smollett and Scott - and one in constant use in the popular theatre of his own day. It was also the basis of his own phenomenal success with Pickwick, and he had every reason to be sanguine that the formula would work again in Niekleby.
As far as it goes, this statement of intention in the Nickleby proclamation is an accurate enough description of the novel which followed, but it is fascinating primarily for what Dickens does not say. In trying to attract readers for a work not yet published - indeed, a work largely yet to be written - Dickens omits any suggestion of polemical intention. The social satire upon the Yorkshire schools, which constitutes the first and most famous section of the novel, is quaintly alluded to here as 'wander[ing] into fresh fields and pastures new'; and the moral imperatives which drive the plot and propel hero and villain to their respective fates receive no mention at all. Yet Dickens had gone to Yorkshire two months earlier for the specific purpose of gathering material which would give his novel an urgent sense of purpose.3 As a skilled journalist he identified an emotionally charged subject and rapidly collected the facts he needed to portray it
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in vivid detail; as a radical social critic he developed those facts into a ringing condemnation of a system of scandalous inhumanity. From its very inception Nickleby was, like Oliver Twist, a novel of crusading resolve. It was hardly simple entertainment.
The proclamation was not disingenuous, however; despite the horror and outrage directed at Dotheboys Hall, the portrait of Squeers and his household manifests the ebullience of Dickens's power to amuse. From the moment Squeers enters the novel in Chapter 4, Dickens's writing rises above bitter satire to rejoice in the transcendent lunacy of comic invention. There is more delight than indignation in the glimpse of Squeers inspecting the diluted milk of his hapless charges and crying, '"Here's richness!"'; in Mrs Squeers wiping her hands on a pupil's curly head to complete the ceremony of brimstone and treacle; in young Wackford sucking his fingers in an ecstasy of sated gluttony; and in Fanny pouring forth the unwittingly hilarious fury of a woman crossed in love, in her letter to the uncle of her betrayer. The reality of iniquity at Dotheboys Hall is emphatic, but simultaneously Dickens turns it into a fantasy peopled by outlandish ogres. Entertainment and moral conviction work together as comedy lifts the villainy into a sphere of ethical certainties, in which we can laugh heartily at the wickedness because we know it will be defeated. As in the melodrama which dominated the stage at the time, in Nickleby real problems are resolved in ideal solutions. Dickens's desire to make his fiction amusing was not a contradiction to the seriousness of his purpose; as we saw in the previous chapter, he was far from thinking entertainment a trivial matter, and to the end of his career it was an essential ingredient of his art. 'In Bleak House', he declared in the preface to that work, 'I have purposely dwelt upon the romantic side of familiar things'; in Great Expectations, he wrote to Forster, 'I have made the opening, I hope, in its general effect exceedingly droll'.4 Such statements show him gauging the appeal he intended his work to have for his prospective audience, and he reaffirmed the sentiments of the Nickleby proclamation when, in the week he finished writing the novel, he composed a preface to it. After devoting most of this preface to comment on the factual basis of Squeers and of the Cheeryble brothers, he concluded by expressing to his readers the hope that he had 'contributed to their amusement'.5
I have been stressing Dickens's announced intentions to make Nickleby entertaining because he himself did so, and because the wish to entertain motivates all his fiction. Moreover, this aim was a crucial factor in determining the sort of art he was later to create in the full maturity of his genius. Starting out as an entertainer himself, he gravitated naturally to the subject of popular entertainment when
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choosing material for his books. His earliest works, Sketches by Boz, Pickwick, Memoirs of Grimaldi, Nickleby and The Old Curiosity Shop all included entertainment as a major component of his subject-matter; readers of these volumes recognized that he was covering familiar territory, not only in the rambling tale of high jinks, which he inherited from the works of Combe, Surtees and Hook, but also in the scenes from the entertainment world, which formed a staple aspect of Pierce Egan's popularity. (Dickens was soon eager to dissociate his name from Egan's, and when he was writing Nickleby he asked Frederick Yates 'not to compare Nicholas to Tom and Jerry' in advertising the stage adaptation of the novel.)6 What was new about the entertainment in Dickens's work was not its use as subject-matter, but the quality of his writing, the vividness of the portrayals, and, increasingly, the insight into the subject. His desire to entertain never left him, but the function of entertainment in his fiction became more complex, and sometimes problematic, as his artistry matured. At first, in Sketches by Boz and in The Pickwick Papers, Dickens drew upon entertainment largely for its own sake, as a ready source of amusement; its presence took on new implications when, in Nicholas Nickleby, he tried to combine the cheerful delights of those earlier works with the social criticism of Oliver Twist; and in The Old Curiosity Shop he faced squarely the values which entertainment contained for his own art. Where entertainment was beguiling diversion in his earliest fiction, the buoyant vitality of Crummles lay athwart the official conclusions of Nickleby. But in The Old Curiosity Shop, after surveying the lot of the itinerant showmen along Nell's route to death and exorcizing the perversities of the Punch-and-Judy figure of Quilp, Dickens affirmed the life-enhancing possibilities of entertainment by making it the focus for the creative fancy of the novel's ultimate hero, Dick Swiveller. With The Old Curiosity Shop imagination supplanted entertainment to become the key source of value for Dickens, and the exploration of its necessity was to be a concern in all his later fiction.7
That his assessment in this novel satisfied his own creative needs is evident in the striking fact that the amusements which bulked so large in his work up to that point virtually disappear from his next five novels. In Barnaby Rudge, which ran serially immediately after The Old Curiosity Shop in Master Humphrey’s Clock, Dickens opens with a description of the Maypole, a country inn redolent of the traditions of Merrie England, but the young hero of the story, Joe Willett, finds that he must flee its moribund pleasures in order to make any life of his own, and his creator, too, bids farewell to the showfolk he portrayed with such affection in The Old Curiosity Shop. Thereafter, in the novels which follow, the occasional street per-
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former wanders by, Montague Tigg cultivates the acquaintance of an unsavoury man of the theatre named Mr Pip (MC, 28), Mr Toots spars with a pugilist who glories in the sobriquet of The Game Chicken (DS, 22), David Copperfield takes Peggotty to see a waxwork exhibition (DC, 33), and Mademoiselle Hortense goes for target practice to Trooper George's shooting gallery (BH, 24). The panoramic nature of Dickens's vision ensured that random entertainers and entertainments would inevitably appear as part of the cityscape of his novels, but it was not until he determined in 1854 to centre Hard Times on the pernicious effects of the denial of imagination that he once again found it appropriate to include entertainers on a large scale. Sleary's circus is a colourful representation of a major form of nineteenth-century popular entertainment, as Crummles's strolling players had been sixteen years earlier, but by this point in his career Dickens had so substantially developed the art of his fiction that the later entertainers take on symbolic weight as trustees of imaginative vitality to an extent quite beyond the possibilities of his earlier work. Sleary is thus finally less important as an entertainer than as a thematic figure within the structure of the novel; Crummles, lacking so coherent a function, owes his vitality far more to what he is than to what he represents. If we look to Dickens's later fiction for the highest sophistication of his artistry, it is to his earlier works that we must turn to discover how his concern with popular entertainment contributed to his development into the greatest English novelist.
II
Before turning to Nickleby we should remind ourselves just how central entertainment was to his first imaginative publications. Dickens's first published volume, Sketches by Boz, contains a high proportion of material devoted to entertainments, recreations and amusements, and the avowed aim throughout the work is to discover scenes which will provoke interest and delight. Composed initially as occasional pieces for magazines and newspapers, the sketches have the imaginative young journalist's characteristic lively observation and colourful detail, and from the outset Dickens thought of them as more than ephemeral diversion. His letters of the time reveal the commitment he invested in these essays, and years later he still recalled the 'fear and trembling' with which he dropped his 'first effusion' into the letterbox at the office of the Monthly Magazine.8 Publicly a single claim was all he cared to make for the miscellany before it appeared: it was to be 'entertaining'. This was
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his 'modest' description in an advertisement which he inserted in the Morning Chronicle six days before Sketches by Boz, First Series, was published on 8 February 1836 by John Macrone ('I really cannot do the tremendous in puffing myself,' he confided to his publisher).9 The collection sold well enough to warrant a second edition six months later and a second series within a year, but by this time its success was eclipsed by that of Pickwick, and Dickens 'decidedly underrated' the Sketches afterwards, according to Forster.10
As a whole Sketches by Boz is dedicated to the proposition that amusement is to be found abundantly in everyday life. To this end, Dickens takes his readers on visits to a wide variety of places of entertainment, including public gardens ('Vauxhall Gardens by Day', 'London Recreations'), the circus ('Astley's'), the tavern saloon ('Miss Evans and the Eagle') and the theatre ('Private Theatres', 'The Misplaced Attachment of Mr John Dounce', 'Making a Night of It'). He chronicles the pleasures of family gatherings ('A Christmas Dinner'), festive celebrations ('The New Year'), formal assemblies ('Public Dinners'), boat outings ('The River,' 'The Steam Excursion') and just pottering in one's garden ('London Recreations'). He shows the comical misadventures of personages who aspire to become entertainers themselves ('Private Theatres', 'The Mistaken Milliner', 'Mrs Joseph Porter'), and casts cheerful ridicule upon misanthropes who grumble against amusement ('Mr Minns and His Cousin', 'The Bloomsbury Christening'). Above all, his narrative voice celebrates the enjoyment to be found simply by keeping one's eyes open to the world about. 'What inexhaustible food for speculation do the streets of London afford!' he exclaims in 'Shops and Their Tenants', and the disposition to indulge in this feast spurs him on. Repeatedly throughout the sketches he draws attention to the fascination of the commonplace: 'It is very generally allowed that public conveyances afford an extensive field for amusement and observation' ('Omnibuses'); 'One of the most amusing places we know is the steam wharf of the London Bridge' ('The River'); 'The stranger who finds himself in "The Dials" for the first time . . . will see enough to keep his curiosity and attention awake for no inconsiderable time' ('Seven Dials').
And lest his interest appear merely frivolous Dickens leavened the volume with a few sketches which examined scenes decidedly not entertaining. These were tales of degradation, abandonment and death, and Dickens's letters show that he set great store by them. Two, 'A Visit to Newgate' and 'The Black Veil', were composed specifically for the first collected edition, and a third, 'The Drunkard's Death', was written with 'great pains' for the second series, to appear in the final position in the sequence, 'to finish the Volume with eclat'.11 Although privately he wrote to Catherine
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Dickens thought that amusement depended upon a disposition to respond positively to the wide variety of
amusing scenes to be found everywhere.
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Hogarth that visiting the prisons had supplied him with 'lots of anecdotes . . . some of them rather amusing', in the essays themselves he was explicit in rejecting amusement as an appropriate response.12
They [a group of adolescent prisoners] were evidently quite gratified at being thought worth the trouble of looking at; their idea appeared to be, that we had come to see Newgate as a grand affair, and that they were an indispensable part of the show; and every boy as he 'fell in' to the line, actually seemed as pleased and important as if he had done something excessively meritorious in getting there at all. We never looked upon a more disagreeable sight, because we never saw fourteen such hopeless creatures of neglect, before.
('A Visit to Newgate', SB, p. 207)
Like the majority of the sketches, the dark essays were based on observation and inspired by 'curiosity' (SB, pp. 198, 274), but in disclaiming entertainment they stand in sharp contrast to the dominant mood of the book, and serve thereby to discriminate the morally acceptable range of experience conducive to pleasure.
The mood of amusement in Sketches by Boz is controlled by the principle that the fascination of everyday scenes has only to be recognized to be enjoyed. Pleasure is thus dependent on the disposition of the beholder; whether he be participant, spectator or entertainer himself, a person's enjoyment arises from his own readiness to respond to the abundance and variety of stimuli available. From this perspective, nothing is more ridiculous and self-defeating than wilful taciturnity, and no characters in the stories are made to look more absurd than Augustus Minns and Nicodemus Dumps, whose steadfast refusals to countenance gaiety lead to their discomfort and our amusement. Conversely, the truest delight is to be gained by looking about in a spirit of cheerful speculation. Nowhere is this more evident than in 'Meditations on Monmouth Street', in which imagination magically transforms a somnolent scene, as Dickens conjures up a fanciful pantomime of living characters while staring at second-hand clothing hung up for sale. The source of interest was, he believed, inherent in the scenes themselves; as he said in the preface to the first series, Sketches by Boz consisted of 'little pictures of life and manners as they really are'. Certainly much of the appeal of the sketches resides in this evocation of reality; again and again Dickens's first readers praised his writing for the vividness and accuracy with which he animated familiar sights. As one early reviewer put it, 'His excellence appears to lie in describing just what
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everybody sees every day'.13 The air of reality depends crucially, of course, on the quality of Dickens's prose style and on his mediating presence as narrator in the sketches, genially guiding our attention to scenes of interest and pointing out colourful and amusing details. Modern commentators have insisted upon the artifice with which this impression of reality is created: Virgil Grillo, comparing Dickens to other sketch-writers of the 1830s, argues that Sketches by Boz is distinctive in the 'rhetorical relationship' which Dickens establishes with the reader in order to distil the 'essence' of a scene; Edward Costigan, persuasively demonstrating how conventions of contemporary theatre influence the shape of the sketches, proposes that Dickens offers 'a shared delight in the illusions that are part of reality'.14 The dynamic interrelation of spectator and spectacle means that the quality of the experience is to be found, as Wordsworth proclaimed in 'Tintern Abbey', in 'what they half create, / And what perceive'.
As a consequence of these attitudes it follows that in Sketches by Boz entertainment is seen as an integral part of everyday life. It offers an extension of the fascination found in more mundane activity, differing only in that it caters specifically to amusement, whereas the pleasure derived elsewhere is generally incidental to the purported rationale of buying, selling, or getting from one place to another. Observing people going to the circus, theatre or fair, and the people who do the entertaining in those places, Dickens finds bustle, noise and absurdity, just as in more workaday situations. What he does not see to any significant extent is entertainment divorced from or in conflict with the social patterns he presents. Far from being compartmentalized into snatched moments, remote from the mainstream of daily existence, entertainment in Sketches by Boz releases in concentrated form the spectacle inherent virtually everywhere. As in Sunday under Three Heads (written and published during the months between the appearance of the first and second series of Sketches) and in his later work, Sketches shows that Dickens is well aware that for most people, most of the time, leisure activity can take place only on the one day in the week free from work, or on a rare special outing:
visits to rural tea-gardens are Sunday treats; Greenwich Fair and the May Day parades occur annually; families choose the Easter or midsummer holidays to go to the circus. Likewise, he knows that many sources of entertainment are in a state of decay or actively threatened by hostile forces: Vauxhall Gardens has opened its gates by day in an attempt to recoup losses by extending its hours; May Day dancing is disappearing; and he himself has neglected to visit Greenwich Fair for years. But the emphasis falls elsewhere: Sunday tea-gardens are seen in relation to the daily pleasures of tending one's
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private garden; the opening of Vauxhall Gardens by day may tarnish the magic, but it opens new possibilities for witnessing balloon ascents; the decline of the sweeps' dancing is correlative to growing public awareness of the lack of romance in the life of the chimney sweep; crowds still flock to the circus and fair. Indeed, as John Butt and Kathleen Tillotson have shown, Dickens pointedly toned down overtly 'political' defence of recreation when he revised the sketches for volume publication.15 Entertainment in Sketches by Boz is not a beleaguered right in need of impassioned defence, but a pleasure among many to be observed and enjoyed.
Ready availability of amusement and the disposition to seek it out reappear in The Pickwick Papers, which Dickens began to write on 18 February 1836, just ten days after Sketches by Boz, first series, was published. In contrast to the collections of separate sketches, Pickwick is organized as a continuous story, but the episodic nature of the adventures - to say nothing of the interpolated tales - ensures that it has the random variety of entertainment which characterizes the previous work. In the opening pages Mr Pickwick's intention of 'extending his travels and consequently enlarging his sphere of observation' is announced (PP, 1), and the search for amusing novelty is at once established as the motive force behind the book's forward progress. In Chapter 2, Mr Pickwick and his companions set off for Rochester, and before they finally retire they have wandered to Bury St Edmunds, Ipswich, Bath, Bristol and Birmingham, with frequent intermediate stops along the way. To be sure, with the introduction of Sam Weller and the ensuing complications with Mrs Bardell, a more coherent, developing action emerges, and the dynamic interrelation of Mr Pickwick and Sam takes over as the centre of interest, but to the very end new scenes and new characters continue to appear, and the sheer abundance of spirited activity constitutes much of Pickwick's attraction.16
As every student of Dickens knows, the book originated in a proposal from the artist Robert Seymour to draw a series of Cockney sporting scenes, which were to be accompanied by letterpress. It was a format of tested popularity, devised to promote amusement by portraying the misadventures of unskilled sportsmen in a spirit of broad ridicule and boisterous comedy. The publishers Chapman and Hall agreed to take on the project and approached Dickens to supply the text. Before the scheme even included Dickens, that is, the decision had already been reached that both the subject-matter and the purpose of the projected work would be popular entertainment. The situation changed rapidly as Dickens objected that he was 'no great sportsman' (preface to the 1847 edition); Seymour killed himself; Habl�t Browne was hired to
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replace the illustrator in a role subordinate to Dickens and, above all, Dickens's conception of Mr Pickwick developed. Nevertheless, Dickens continued to fill the work with amusing adventures, and he publicly reaffirmed the purpose of providing his readers with entertainment. At the conclusion of the tenth number (December 1836) he inserted an announcement in which he referred to himself as 'Mr Pickwick's Stage-Manager' and likened his position as author to that of the great showman John Richardson, thanking his audience for their favour and promising to 'keep perpetually going on beginning again, until the end of the fair'. 'Muster' Richardson had for decades commanded the prime sites of English fairgrounds with his gaudy theatre-booth performances, and Dickens elsewhere described his show as 'the very centre and heart of the fair'.17 The comparison is a revealing indication of Dickens's notion of Pickwick as entertaining spectacle: vigorous fun rather than high art. By the time the book was finished he was taking his achievement more elegantly, invoking the precedent of 'some of the greatest novelists in the English language' to defend its variety of incidents, but even then he continued to claim entertainment as his guiding purpose: his object had been, he said, to present characters and incidents which were 'vivid . . . life-like and amusing' (preface to the 1837 edition).
The amusements in Pickwick are almost wholly participatory and convivial in nature, and underpin the book's gaiety. As in Sketches by Boz, formally constituted entertainment merges with a prevailing atmosphere of pleasure, and active engagement in pastimes predominates over passive spectating. Early in the book, for example, Mr Pickwick and his friends go to watch a display of military exercises, only to find themselves absurdly caught up in a bayonet charge, and leisurely admiration of the grand review quickly gives way to the broad farce of Mr Pickwick chasing his hat. Again, when the Pickwickians go with Mr Wardle to see the cricket match between AlI-Muggleton and Dingley Dell, they spend as much time eating, drinking and talking as they do observing the game, and it is an integral part of the occasion when the players from both sides gather with the spectators after the contest at the Blue Lion Inn for a banquet, complete with toasts, speeches, carousing, and cheerful camaraderie. Dickens presents the cricket less as a sporting engagement than as a communal ritual, in which traditional forms of gregarious interaction serve to affirm bonds of human fellowship. Mr Pickwick is not an anonymous spectator, impersonally witnessing the skills of professional players, but an active participant who shares fully in the sociable nature of the event. The emphasis is similar in two shooting episodes. These scenes, closer than any others in the book to Seymour's original intention, depict the laugh
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able incompetence of Mr Winkle and Mr Tupman as sportsmen, but they also serve to affirm the comradely affection of Mr Wardle and the Pickwickians. Mr Pickwick does not carry a gun - indeed, on the second expedition he is conveyed by Sam in a wheelbarrow - but he enjoys the recreation as fully as the others, cuts as ridiculous a figure, and enters as heartily into the spirit of the activity. Throughout their travels Mr Pickwick and his friends seek out the convivial pleasures for which English inns had been justly famous for centuries; they attend balls, parties and jovial gatherings wherever they go, and when other sources of amusement momentarily flag they engage strangers in conversation and story-telling. All of these shared delights lend support to the popular image of Dickens which links his name so intimately with the festive spirit of Christmas, for the good-natured Christmas celebrations at Dingley Dell epitomize the fun of this novel.
Participation is the key to enjoyment in Pickwick, and reciprocally professional entertainment, in the figure of Mr Jingle, steps out of its magically enclosed world into the lives of the characters. For this strolling player all the world truly is a stage, and he exploits his skills as an actor for any audience sufficiently gullible to be taken in by the roles he plays. From his first entrance Jingle's existence is histrionic posturing: he steps forward anonymously during Mr Pickwick's fracas with the cabman to alter the course of action in that scene; upon arrival in Rochester he changes costume with comically chaotic results; for his appearance in Eatanswill he assumes the new name of Charles Fitz-Marshall. He upstages Dr Slammer and Mr Tupman in courtship, has a flair for the strong curtain-line, and when challenged strikes attitudes which freeze a scene into comic tableau. His loquacious staccato is a perpetually diverting stage patter, derived, as Earle Davis has shown, from the one-man 'At Home' performances of Charles Matthew's the elder, which Dickens went to see 'whenever he played' for three or four years; Jingle himself gives the clue to his origins when he tells Dr Slammer that he is not to be found 'at home'.18 Jingle's translation of role-playing from the stage into the audience is a chief source of merriment in the novel, and Dickens had ample reason for his confidence that the character would make 'a decided hit'.19
Jingle never actually appears in a theatre at all in the course of the novel, and his talent for duplicity hardly requires professional qualifications. Like subsequent rascals in Dickens's fiction, he relies on native wit to outface any situation; there is a positive vitality in the gleeful impudence with which he cuts in on Dr Slammer, and the gulls he deceives are either so spoony (Mr Tupman) or self-important (the Nupkinses) that they richly deserve comic deflation.
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But because his unscrupulousness conflicts with Mr Pickwick's principled selflessness Dickens chastens the stroller in the end and consigns him to the Fleet Prison. This turnabout gives Dickens the opportunity to demonstrate once again the sunny benevolence of Mr Pickwick, who forgives Jingle and Job and finances their emigration to Demerara, but the punishment strikes a discordant note very. It contrasts sharply with the final appearance of the book's other principal deceivers, Dodson and Fogg, who exit basking in complacent unrepentance, cheerfully noting down the particulars of Mr Pickwick's denunciation of them in evidence for future legal chicanery. Mere morality is quite alien to their integrity, as it had seemed with Jingle. Furthermore, the sight of Jingle ill and penitent, humbled in his wrongdoing, suggests a 'real' person beneath the poses, quite contrary to the impression created by his previous activities, in which performance was all. This raises unsettling questions about the morality of acting, by implying that role-playing is not gesture but imposture. These are doubts which recur in acute form in Nickleby when Dickens sends Crummles, like Jingle, off to the New World without even, in the latter novel, the excuse that it is an act of justice.
On the other hand, the expulsion of Jingle is consistent with the happy idealism of Pickwick, in which pastimes are seen as the vehicle for human affection. Genuine entertainment, in this view, brooks no self-seeking or mercenary considerations; it arises out of shared pleasures and contentments, and must reject anyone who cynically plays upon man's need for amusement. Dickens stated in his preface to the original edition that it was his hope that Pickwick would be an inducement for the reader 'to think better of his fellow men and to look upon the brighter and more kindly side of human nature', and this is the lesson Jingle learns in the Fleet. Dickens's vision of entertainment in this book is decidedly old-fashioned; it looks back to an imaginary model of social harmony, in which the commingling of people of different age, sex and rank is fostered by leisure activity. As we saw in Chapter 1, Dickens cherished this model of pre-industrial traditions for the concord it represented, and here, in combination with the amiable innocence of Mr Pickwick and supported by the evocation of the rapidly disappearing exhilaration of coaching days, popular entertainment is celebrated as a vital and readily accessible tonic for the human spirit. Its joys were never to be so secure again.
Dickens's second novel, begun when he was barely halfway through the writing of Pickwick, was conceived in an altogether different spirit. Entertainers are decidedly thin on the ground in the squalid workhouse, and in the criminal underworld the 'indifferent'
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singers and 'remote' piano at the Three Cripples public house do nothing to soften the 'cunning, ferocity, and drunkenness' which prevail there (OT, 26). Oliver finds scant amusement in his young life until, perversely, the warmth of Fagin's den provides him with his first real companionship, and the Jew's impersonation for his pupils of an old gentleman fearful of thieves moves Oliver to tears of laughter. Innocent enjoyment, found in such lavish abundance in Sketches by Boz and The Pickwick Papers, is here restricted to the isolated havens of Mr Brownlow and the Maylies, and the utter polarity of the polite and criminal worlds has led Graham Greene to describe Dickens's vision in Oliver Twist as Manichaean.20 It forms no part of Dickens's concerns to present or explore the pastimes of curiosity-seekers in this novel, which is devoted instead to the satiric exposure of social evils and an affirmation of the 'principle of Good' surviving adverse circumstances.
Nevertheless, he is instinctively prepared to draw upon the conventions of popular entertainment and to exploit them for his own purposes in the book. In particular, as readers have long recognized, his intimate familiarity with the theatre of his day infuses his art at every level. The boldly contrasting scenes, exciting action, larger-than-life characters, and stylized speech and gesture are the very stuff of early nineteenth-century melodrama, and Dickens points directly to this influence when he invokes the precedent of theatrical usage in his famous image of streaky bacon, to defend the abrupt transitions of Oliver Twist.
It is the custom on the stage: in all good, murderous melodramas: to present the tragic and the comic scenes, in as regular alternation, as the layers of red and white in a side of streaky, well-cured bacon.
(OT, 17)
He goes on to urge that this is an aspect of the 'mimic life of the theatre', and his readiness to see popular forms as a mirror of the real world says much about the roots of his artistry. Striving ambitiously to create a work of urgent social import and high moral purpose, he turns to the amusements of the people for a vigorous, direct and accessible vehicle. Dickens's inspiration comes not from the elite culture of philosophical abstraction, classical education, and aesthetic theory, but from the living tradition of tavern song, pulpit oration, newspaper rhetoric, chapbook sensation, and circus, street and stage performance. He is the great artist who draws his sustenance from popular entertainment.21
Because he was prepared to draw on these sources for the form of Oliver Twist, it is the more striking that he neglected them as
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subject-matter, when they had figured to so great an extent in Sketches by Boz and Pickwick. The reason is near at hand, particularly if we take seriously - as I think we must Kathleen Tillotson's suggestion that Oliver Twist was the first of Dickens's novels to be conceived, although the second to be written.22 As the novel which had been gestating in his mind since at least 1833, when he was 21 Oliver Twist would have taken shape for him as the inaugural test of his powers as an aspiring artist; with a subject of importance and a timeless theme, and with a free hand on his material from the outset, he would attempt to follow in the footsteps of his revered Fielding and create a 'prose epic' (OT, 15; in BM edition only). Sketches by Boz and Pickwick both began as journalism; they were written to provide appealing diversion, and the inclusion of scenes of entertainment was entirely appropriate to this purpose. That they became something more was testimony to Dickens's talents as a writer, but their limited aim did not, he must have felt, give scope for him to work at full stretch. Oliver Twist was to be different, and one mark of Dickens's more ambitious plans for this novel was what it did not include. At the beginning of his career as a novelist, I am suggesting, there was a division in his mind between seriousness in fiction and the imprudence of entertainment. (Comedy, of course, was another matter, as was the right to seek amusement.) As we have already seen, this caused a minor ambiguity in Pickwick when he tried to fit Jingle into that book's moral framework; Dickens avoided such difficulty in Oliver Twist by the simple expedient of leaving entertainment scenes out.
III
Dickens's ambitions for Oliver Twist met with immediate success. The plagiarists and the theatres pounced upon it at once, and before -half of its serial parts had appeared the novel received considerable critical acclaim. In an otherwise grudging notice, which compared Dickens's fame to a skyrocket ('he has risen like a rocket, and he will come down like the stick'), Abraham Hayward wrote in the Quarterly Review for October 4837 that Oliver Twist showed 'much higher promise' than his previous work. Two months later George Henry Lewes, comparing Dickens's satire to that of Voltaire and Swift, called Oliver Twist 'a work pregnant with philosophy and feeh.ng'.23 But The Pickwick Papers was also being seen as more than a passing fancy; reviewers soon mentioned it in relation to the achievements of Cervantes, Fielding, Sterne, Smollett and Scott, and the prestigious Westminster Review saw Pickwick as evidence that 'the
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great and extensive popularity of Boz is the result, not of popular caprice, or of popular bad taste, but of great intrinsic powers of mind, from which we augur considerable future excellence'.24 Having thus been accorded stature as well as popularity for both his serious novel and his work of entertainment, Dickens moved to consolidate his fame by combining the two modes in his next novel, Nicholas Nickleby. To recapture the sense of purpose which had impelled the Poor Law satire of Oliver Twist he turned to the notorious evils of the Yorkshire schools, and to renew the amusement provided by the depiction of an entertainer an entire company of strolling players followed upon the figure of Mr Jingle.
The strategy for the new novel prospered. Sales for the serial instalments of Nickleby, at nearly 50,000 copies, were higher by some 10,000 than for the monthly numbers of Pickwick.25 Dotheboys Hall promptly entered English mythology as the archetypal bad school, and Crummles became an enduring favourite. Moreover, the decision to incorporate entertainment scenes was to prove of the utmost importance for the book's later critical fortunes. Nicholas Nickleby has worn less well than any other novel by Dickens, and modern critics, when they have bothered to look at Nickleby at all, have expressed grave reservations about many of the book's characters, its structure, and what have been seen as embarrassing lapses of tone. Such reputation as the book can be said to hold at present rests largely on its theatre figures. Writing in 1958, J. Hillis Miller called the scenes among the troupe of actors 'a critique of the way of life of all the characters' in the novel, and four years later Bernard Bergonzi modified this view of Crummles's company as a 'parody' of the main plot, arguing that 'the theatre represents the nearest equivalent to a central unifying metaphor that Nickleby has to offer'. More recently, in his influential introduction to the Penguin English Library edition of the novel (1978), Michael Slater, describing theatricality and role-playing as 'the living heart' of Nicholas Nickleby, has shown conclusively that, in addition to the Crummleses, 'nearly everyone else in this crowded book is playing a role'.26
Both in its own day and in ours, the essential theatricality of the novel has been demonstrated by its suitability for stage production. From as early as 1834, when J. B. Buckstone adapted 'The Bloomsbury Christening' for performance at the Adelphi Theatre, Dickens's writings were incessantly plundered for stageworthy characters and incidents, and Dickens customarily took a jaundiced view of the results.27 But with Edward Stirling's dramatization of Nickleby he was delighted. To the incredulity of Forster, who considered the play an 'indecent assault' on the novel, Dickens praised it, and wrote to its producer, Frederick Yates, disclaiming any
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objection to an adaptation 'so admirably done in every respect'. In fact, not quite every respect won his admiration; Mrs Keeley, who played Smike in the production, later recalled that her sentimental lines about 'the pretty harmless robins' had moved Dickens to exclaim 'Damn the robins; cut them out'. Despite the robins, the play was a decided success, running at the Adelphi for nearly a hundred nights, a considerable achievement at a time when most new theatrical pieces sank without trace after only a week or two and Stirling went on to write many further adaptations of Dickens's work, including a sequel to Nickleby entitled The Fortunes of Smike.28 Well over a century later, in 1980, David Edgar constructed a two-part, nine-hour dramatization of the same novel for the Royal Shakespeare Company. Many professional theatre critics and academic commentators were unenthusiastic about the production, but it met with rapturous applause from audiences in London and New York, and was recorded as the first major arts programme for Britain's newly opened fourth television channel. The audiences were certainly right: in its exuberance, variety, comedy and pathos, the play was an exhilarating theatrical experience. Stage performance validated aspects of the book at which modern readers cavil; in particular, Roger Rees fleshed out the title role to an extent hard to imagine from Nicholas's presence on the page, and David Threlfall made the sorry figure of Smike genuinely moving. Bernard Levin assessed the production correctly when he wrote in The Times for 8 July 1980 that
. . . not for many years has London's theatre seen anything so richly joyous, so immoderately rife with pleasure, drama, colour and entertainment, so life-enhancing, yea-saying, and fecund, so - in the one word which embraces all these and more – so Dickensian.29
But Nicholas Nickleby is theatrical in more than its potential for stage adaptation. In the text itself the conventions of the theatre permeate its form and characterization. Like Oliver Twist, Nickleby is organized on the 'streaky bacon' principle, with boldly contrasting scenes of comedy and sentiment. The main plot is a melodrama of heroes and villains, in which innocence is threatened, wickedness defeated and virtue rewarded. The action includes such stock playacting situations as the comic man eavesdropping on a secret conference, the helpless innocent recaptured by his oppressors, and, twice over, the brave young man interceding when he overhears the virtuous maiden's name impugned. Among the characters, Crummles's players are professionally engaged in the theatre, and
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their disposition to turn every opportunity into an excuse for acting reveals histrionic sensibility as their essential trait. When Mr Lenville undertakes to pull Nicholas's nose before the assembled company or when, with 'heart-rending' sobs, Mr Crummles personates the bride's father at Miss Petowker's wedding, the artifice of dramatic performance spills off the stage into private life, and the absurdity of their posturing serves their enjoyment, and ours.
Acting is not reserved for the professionals, however; in Nicholas Nickleby performance is a principal manifestation of character.30 Less innocently than the strolling players, Squeers and Ralph put up false fronts to the world for the advancement of their own selfish aims. An intention to deceive rather than to entertain motivates their behaviour, but it is role-playing nevertheless. Miss LaCreevy paints miniatures of people not as they are but as they would be; Mr Lillyvick thinks so entirely in terms of his occupation as a collector of water-rates that without his being aware of it the role becomes his sole identity. For these and other characters acting constitutes reality, and the modes of the theatre underpin their vitality. On the other hand, theatricality is also the source of the book's greatest weaknesses, the empty stereotype of hero and heroine, and the falsity of its resolution, but for large portions of the novel theatricality generates luxuriant comedy and contributes sparkling zest, as Dickens plays with the conventions he knew and loved so well. Years later, proposing a toast to Thackeray at a banquet of the Royal General Theatrical Fund, Dickens said that 'every writer of fiction, though he may not adopt the dramatic form, writes in effect for the stage' (Speeches, p.262). For better and for worse, Nicholas Nickleby is a novel written 'for the stage'.
The perspectives outlined in the previous paragraph have been admirably illuminated by Michael Slater in his Penguin introduction. His analysis sheds considerable light on the novel, and in stressing the importance of the theatre to Dickens's methods he points to the centre of excellence in Nicholas Nickleby. Role-playing is, however, a concept insufficient to account for what performance actually was in the early nineteenth-century theatre, and it does not go far enough in describing the place of the actors in Nickleby. The stage was not restricted to impersonation of characters in plays and, a quarter of a century before Stanislavsky was born, acting certainly did not consist of the identification of the player with his part. Rather, the actor gave a performance of his role, with stylized gesture and inflated rhetoric, in a theatre which was the setting for song, dance, acrobatics and elaborate stage effects as well as for dramatic presentation. A fair indication of what was to be found on the stage of the time is provided by Mr Crummles when he recalls his
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'An Outside Stage' by Phiz. Role-playing is a concept inadequate to the variety
of entertainment presented on the stage as Dickens knew it.
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first glimpse of the 'astonishing' woman who was to become Mrs Crummles:
. . . she stood upon her head on the butt-end of a spear, surrounded with blazing fireworks.
(NN, 25)
'Role-playing' is hardly the adequate term for a performance like this. It is spectacle, pure and simple, and Crummles is lost in admiration for the talent he beheld: "'Such grace, coupled with such dignity! I adored her from that moment."' This is nineteenth-century theatre, if not at its best, certainly at its most typical, and to understand properly what Dickens is doing with the strolling players in Nicholas Nickleby it is necessary to place the novel's theatricality where it belongs, in the context of popular entertainment.
IV
In the theatre as Dickens knew it, a play was virtually never presented on its own. Whether a full company was appearing in the elegance of a metropolitan Theatre Royal, or a few strollers were strutting and fretting in a humble barn, it was customary for an evening's programme to include two, or more usually three, principal attractions, and the performance of dramatic works constituted only a portion of the interest. Between the pieces, the actress who had represented the witch in Macbeth would step forward to sing the ballad of Rory O'More; the actor who had portrayed a murderous henchman in the melodrama would perform his celebrated jockey dance. The orchestra, in a small touring company consisting of no more than a handful of instruments, would provide music before, between and during the business on stage, and if there was a tumbler or a clown on hand he, too, would add his bit to the amusement. Within the plays, actors were liable on the least provocation - or none at all - to burst into song, brandish swords, or group for a dance. In the course of their acting they would strike the picturesque attitudes so memorably recorded in toy-theatre cutouts, and sometimes an entire play would consist of little more than a series of tableaux, with actors frozen in various statuesque poses. Costumes and settings, nearly always described as new, were invariably announced in the playbills, for the good reason that critics were known often to devote more attention to the scene-painting than to the acting. Stage machinery was called into use whenever possible, to make a ghost vanish into thin air or to effect pantomime transformations, and when all else failed there was blue fire to make a
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brilliant climax to the dreariest play. Nineteenth-century theatre thrived on spectacle and diversity, and the nature of an evening's provision is scarcely exaggerated by the programme arranged for Miss Snevellicci's bespeak: 'it included among other trifles, four pieces, divers songs, a few combats, and several dances' (NN, 24).
To be able to mount such theatrical fare, the first requirement of every actor and actress clearly had to be versatility. The range of skills expected was spelled out explicitly in Leman Thomas Rede's The Road to the Stage. This invaluable handbook, which was first published in 1827 and updated for a second edition in 1835, three years before Nickleby, contains an encyclopaedic wealth of information about the provincial theatre and detailed advice for the aspiring stroller. Besides explaining the general regulations for rehearsal, performance and benefits, and recommending the purchase of an extensive private wardrobe including stage costumes, wigs, feathers, weapons, and ornaments 'of all descriptions', Rede offers a list of 'the requisite accomplishments for an actor or actress'. Formal schooling is unnecessary, he observes, but a smattering of French is useful, and facility in dancing, fencing and singing is 'indispensable'. Knowledge of music, for example, is likely to be called upon at any time, because there is 'no line of drama in which it may not be requisite to sing. Iago, Falkland, Edgar, King Lear, and Incle, all vocalize . . .'31 With 'vocalizing so unexceptional a duty for a strolling player, it is no wonder that Mr Crummles is disappointed when Nicholas declines to perform 'a comic song on the pony's back' (NN, 30).
But even with a reluctant leading man the company as a whole is not lacking in the accomplishments deemed essential by Rede. They have a variety of dance routines on call; not only 'The Indian Savage and the Maiden', which Dickens describes in minute comic detail from beginning to end, but also a Highland Fling, a medley dance, and the 'skipping rope hornpipe' in which Mrs Crummles excelled at her latest benefit. The skipping-rope dance had been a speciality of the theatre clown Grimaldi, whose memoirs Dickens edited in February 1838, immediately before he began writing Nickleby.32 For music, the Crummleses provided comic songs as well as the orchestra, and Miss Bravassa sings the love songs. As for swordplay, when the two Master Crummleses engage
. . . a variety of fancy chops were administered on both sides; such as chops dealt with the left hand, and under the leg, and over the right shoulder, and over the left; and when the short sailor made a vigorous cut at the tall sailor's legs, which would have shaved them clean off if it had taken effect, the tall sailor
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jumped over the short sailor's sword, wherefore to balance the matter, and make it all fair, the tall sailor administered the same cut, and the short sailor jumped over his sword.
(NN, 22)
Rede had advised that grace was more important than skill in stage fighting; it is clear that Crummles's swordsmen possess more than the 'requisite' abilities.
Nicholas observes that the Infant Phenomenon 'always sustained one, and not uncommonly two or three, characters every night' (NN, 24); the star billing which she received was her special privilege as the manager's daughter, but in real life such frequency of appearance was nothing out of the ordinary. Rather more ambitious was the exploit of Mr W. H. Angel, the comic man of the actual Portsmouth company, who, for his benefit night on 16 April 1834, was billed - with understandably lavish use of exclamations - as personating sixteen characters and singing six comic songs in the course of the evening.33 This was exceptional even by nineteenth-century standards, but playbills were routinely long and crowded, and the demands on the players considerable. One old stager, looking back in 1880 to his experiences in the 1820s and 1830s with the Fishers on their circuit in Norfolk, recalled that whenever they were performing the leading players acted their parts on the stage, then 'as soon as the curtain was drawn, donned topcoats and went into the orchestra and played the entr'acte music'. We find a somewhat more subdued instance of doubling up in Great Expectations when Pip, attending Mr Wopsle's performance of Hamlet, observes that the recorder used on stage looks 'very like a little black flute that has just been played in the orchestra and handed out at the door' (GE, 31). David Fisher confirmed that from an early age he and his brothers were schooled in singing, dancing and fencing, and that they were equally ready to perform tragedy, comedy or melodrama. In addition, members of the company painted the stage scenery ('good enough for the approval of their patrons and supporters') and set the type and printed their own playbills.34 Apparently just about the only job they delegated was the distribution of the playbills, and even this they might better have done themselves, lest they find, as Miss Snevellicci did with the placarding for her bespeak, that 'a part were posted sideways and the remainder upside down' (NN, 24).
As part of his versatility, an actor had to master his part in a very substantial number of plays. Programmes changed rapidly, with new pieces sinking almost as fast as they were produced, and except for elaborate and expensive shows such as pantomimes it was unusual for a play to have a run of more than a few nights in succession. On any given evening, besides the divertissements there would be one
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principal piece, either dramatic, operatic or spectacular - and usually a combination of all three - then a shorter play, an interlude or selected scenes from a classic; and finally a farce to conclude the bill. Sometimes two full-length dramas and a song would be performed together, or a string of variety acts were substituted for the second play; but, except when a pantomime filled an entire programme, several distinct productions were normally mounted each night. A touring company performed the same plays in each town it visited, and standard favourites such as the Crummleses have in their repertoire were revived endlessly, but an actor could be responsible for scores of roles in a single season. His task of conning lines was made somewhat easier by the stereotyping of melodrama, which meant that each actor was type-cast, portraying the similar kinds of figure which recurred in play after play. As Mr Crummles says encouragingly to Nicholas, "'You can easily knock them off; one part helps the other so much"' (NN, 23). But an actor would usually personate more than one character every night, and his appearance on the stage in several guises is further reason to qualify the notion of acting as role-playing. Because he took so many parts, and acted them in the grandiloquent style of the age, an audience would be less aware of his immersion within roles than of the virtuosity with which he moved from one to the next. His role-playing was precisely playing, and it made him less an impersonator than an entertainer. The multiplicity of characters in which he appeared served to distance him from any one of them, and placed the emphasis squarely upon performance.
Variety was the principle on which each programme was arranged, and it was hardly less so within the individual plays. A single example can serve to epitomize the nature of dramatic production around the time of Nickleby. One of the many stage adaptations of Dickens's work was a piece entitled Pickwick; or, The Sayings and Doings of Sam Weller, which was performed a number of times between 18 December 1837 and 27 October 1838 in theatres along the Norwich circuit. It was cobbled together by a long-forgotten member of the Norwich company, one Frederic Coleman Nantz, and although the Ipswich reviewer at the time wrote that 'Boz would have been delighted' the play, like most theatrical fare of its day, is of nugatory merit as literature, and has long since vanished from the stage. Its value for the present discussion lies not in any dramatic distinction - for it has none - but in the obviousness of the stock formulas which Nantz uses to give the play audience appeal. Like much ephemeral work, it relies on topicality to impart novelty to stereotype. The play was first performed just after the final serial part of The Pickwick Papers appeared, and it takes advantage of local colour by highlighting scenes which Dickens places in Ipswich and
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transposing others to Essex. Settings are clearly considered important, for the play contains eighteen separate scenes and prints the location of each in bold capitals on the playbills. Nantz also stresses the attractiveness of the musical accompaniment, mentioning it immediately after the title on the bills, where it is represented as 'new' music. Two scenes are singled out for particular prominence: a dance, called the 'Pickwickian Quadrilles', and described as 'the poetry of motion'; and an episode of broad farce, based on Mr Pickwick's inadvertent intrusion into a lady's bedchamber, referred to here as the 'Scene of Night Caps'. Other attractions included the sleepwalking of the Fat Boy, Mr Pickwick's ride in the wheelbarrow, a recitation of Mrs Leo Hunter's 'Ode to an Expiring Frog', and specimens of the comic patter of Sam Weller and of Alfred Jingle.35 As drama, in short, Nantz's Pickwick was little more than a rapid trot through selected episodes from Dickens. As theatre, however, the play offered novelty, scenery, dancing, music, jokes and funny business. In doing so, it reflected contemporary conventions of the stage, and for us it exemplifies the extent to which essentially non-dramatic elements were integrated into nineteenth-century dramatic works. The precise mixture varied from play to play, but the basic recipe remained unchanged for many decades: popular entertainment was the staple ingredient of the theatre.
Spectacle and novelty were chief attractions. For much of the season that Stirling's Nicholas Nickleby was playing at the Adelphi, for example, it shared the bill with a giant, who engaged in mock battles with twelve ordinary mortals, and for the final performances of the season there were monkeys in the programme as well.36 With his combats, scenery and animals, Crummles was in the mainstream of theatrical practice. The violent broadsword fight between the manager's two sons provides our first glimpse of the stage business undertaken by the company, and when Nicholas is hired his initial duty is to introduce a 'real pump and two washing tubs' into the playbills to advertise the company's 'new and splendid scenery (NN, 22). The next day on the road to Portsmouth he learns that the pony drawing the phaeton is 'quite one of us', with credentials as illustrious as those of any other member of the troupe. 'His mother was on the stage,' Mr Crummles confides. 'She ate apple-pie at a circus for upwards of fourteen years . . . fired pistols, and went to bed in a nightcap; and, in short, took the low comedy entirely. His father was a dancer' (NN, 23). Sword fights (to say nothing of ghosts, witches and mad scenes) helped to make Shakespeare a staple of theatrical repertoire, and nautical plays were particularly admired in the aftermath of Nelson's famous sea-battles. Early in the century Sadler's Wells built a water-tank which covered the entire stage, the
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better to present elaborate marine spectacles, and even without a tank the provincial theatres frequently staged sea-sagas. Dickens introduces the two Master Crummleses dressed to the pigtail like real (stage) sailors, and in real (historical) life the most popular nautical drama of them all, Douglas Jerrold's Black-Eyed Susan, inevitably found its way to Portsmouth. Animals frequently drew larger audiences than mere human actors managed to do. Drury Lane, cavernously empty all too often when straight dramas were performed, was filled when Van Amburgh brought his lions and tigers to the theatre during the 183~9 season. Dog drama, popular ever since the eighteenth century, continued to be revived well past mid-century.37 Charley Bates offers a just assessment of the state of theatrical taste, if not of Sikes's dog Bullseye, when he remarks, "'He'd make his fortun on the stage that dog would, and rewive the drayma besides"' (OT, 39).
V
The theatre episode in Nickleby is set in Portsmouth, which was Dickens's birthplace. Forster records that Dickens visited the town while writing Nickleby, and presumably he passed through on his way to or from a holiday on the Isle of Wight in early September 1838, a few weeks before Crummles makes his first appearance in the novel. Scholars have speculated that, although the local theatre was closed at the time, Dickens was likely to have gone to look at it while he was there, and would have noticed old playbills pasted on the walls.38 He could, for example, have chosen the name of Mr Folair after seeing a bill announcing an actor named Billy Floyer, who played comic roles for many years in Portsmouth. Certainly there was ample material to feed Dickens's conception of the Crummleses in the activities of the actual Portsmouth theatre in the years before he wrote Nickleby, and in the presence there of one visiting company in particular. Bills survive today which document that Jean Davenport, 'the most celebrated juvenile actress of the day', performed in Portsmouth in March 1837. She and her parents have long been considered models for the Crummles family.39 Her mother was an actress, and her father, T. D. Davenport (1792-1851), who was well known in the 1830s and 1840s as an actor and manager, promoted his daughter's career up and down 'the British Isles, in Europe and in America. Jean Davenport (1829-1903) achieved success as a child actress and went on to become a renowned tragedienne, principally in the United States. Malcolm Morley has shown the likelihood that Dickens came across the Davenports at the Westminster Theatre in
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1832 and again in 1836 at the Richmond Theatre, Surrey, but they were prominent enough in the theatre world that he could hardly have been unaware of them.40 The puffing of a child prodigy by a fat and pompous father, as Davenport by all accounts was, offered Dickens suitable materials for his portraits of the Infant Phenomenon and Vincent Crummles.
In the novel the Crummleses produce Romeo and Juliet with Nicholas and Miss Snevellicci in the leads, and in fact Juliet was to become one of Jean Davenport's most celebrated roles. An anecdote connected with her performance in that play one night in Glasgow in 1846 shows the stuff the Davenports were made of, and is worth recounting at length not only for the amusement it affords, but also for the light it sheds on the nature of theatre entertainment at the time. The evening in question got off to a bad start when the energetic and eccentric Glasgow manager J. H. Alexander, who at 50 was not altogether suitable to personate the youthful lover, was greeted with derisive shouting from ?he gallery when he stepped on to the stage as Romeo. The uproar continued throughout the play and during the crypt scene became so great that, exasperated beyond discretion, he rose up from his supposed unconsciousness and returned abuse to the audience in good measure. It was Davenport's turn next.
. . . Miss Davenport came forward and sang. Mr Davenport, who was on the stage, applauded his daughter very warmly, and cried out 'Beautiful! Beautiful!' The plaudits bestowed by the public on the 'phenomenon' not being by her father considered worthy of his child's efforts; inspired by the example of his Manager, Mr Davenport now thought he would have his words with the audience, 'I wonder', he murmured audibly to the audience, 'she could sing at all after playing tragedy in the way she has done, and "Juliet" too!' The opportunity for his addressing the Public was not long in coming. Miss Davenport sang a ballad, and then danced with somebody the polka. 'Encore!' shouted the delighted gods. Now was the time for Mr Davenport's oratorical powers to assert themselves. 'Encore!' he exclaimed, stepping forward. 'I am astonished! I am shocked! You call for a repetition of the polka! Are you aware from whom you demand that dance? Do you not recognize the fact that Miss Davenport is a tragedy actress! That tonight she has sustained one of the heaviest tragedy parts-' ('Order', cried the gods, 'Go on'.) 'Sir', exclaimed the outraged parent, pointing at one unfortunate boy in the gallery, 'if you had done as much as she has done - yes, YOU, sir - permit me to remark,
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you would not have been able to move.' (Hisses) Mr Davenport looked round with indignant astonishment. 'These are sounds', continued the irate parent, 'which I am not accustomed to! I have travelled, allow me to inform you, and, as your journals of the universe have testified, all over Europe and America, with Miss Davenport, but have never before been treated in this way.' Mr Davenport then made an appeal to that justice which had ever, did ever, and would, he ventured to hope, continue to characterize the British public. He then bowed mechanically and retired, amid the jeering and uproar made by the scanty auditory of that eventful night.41
Even allowing for embellishment in the telling, the anecdote provides revealing illustration of theatrical manners and audience expectations. It gives a vivid impression of Davenport's strong personality, and of the fervour with which he sought to advance his daughter's career. If Davenport's belligerence seems remote from the genial Vincent Crummles, who never faces such overt opposition, still Dickens's character perpetually evinces a similar capacity for public self-exhibition and a disposition to orotund rhetoric in pursuit of family aggrandizement. The hostility of the Glasgow gallery to the performance of the play no doubt reflects above all the peculiar relationship between J. H. Alexander and his patrons, but the radically different response of the audience to successive portions of the programme also shows the enthusiasm with which non-dramatic entertainment was received, and it confirms the requirement of versatility in the player- even, as in this case, in one who aspired to serious dramatic representation. The incident suggests the extent to which actors played to their audiences, rather than more self-containedly entering into the personation of their roles, and it provides clear demonstration of the willingness of an audience to let its theatrical preferences be known. Patently, the performances on the stage on this particular night were an artistic shambles, and there can have been little joy among the players, but the gods undoubtedly obtained their fill of amusement.
It is distinctly possible that the Davenports sparked off Dickens's imagination when he was thinking about the theatre scenes in Nickleby, although to suppose that he himself acted under Davenport's direction, either at Portsmouth or at the Westminster Theatre in London several years earlier, is extremely hypothetical.42 More important, to claim a unique source for any of Dickens's fictional characters fundamentally misrepresents Dickens's creative methods. Particular observations, such as, perhaps, Billy Floyer's name, supplied him with details, but for all their idiosyncrasy his characters
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represent general human types, not specific living individuals. Flamboyant theatre managers abounded; Elliston, Bunn or Buckstone - to say nothing of the prickly Macready, to whom Nicholas Nickleby was dedicated - could equally well as Davenport have coloured Dickens's thoughts about Crummles, and ever since the original Infant Roscius, Master Betty, had created a sensation back in 1804 the stage had been littered with juvenile actors and actresses. Dickens mentions Master Betty in his 1835 story 'The Misplaced Attachment of Mr John Dounce' (SB, p.245), and in 1842 he wrote Forster a gleeful letter to say that he had seen Betty's son playing at the Margate Theatre.43 Leigh Hunt, himself often seen as the model for Harold Skimpole in Bleak House, had cited the proliferation of Infant Phenomena as early as 1805 when he mounted his influential attack on the vogue for Master Betty. In 1832, Gilbert � Beckett was complaining in Figaro in London about the glut of child actors, a few weeks after he had written a damning account of Mr and Mrs Davenport (but not of Jean, who was then only 3 years old) at the Westminster Theatre.44 No regular theatregoer in the early years of the nineteenth century was likely to have missed seeing at least one Infant Phenomenon.
If the Davenports did in fact provide Dickens's inspiration for Vincent and Ninetta Crummles, then, it was because he saw in them striking instances of the kind of entertainer to be found in the theatre of the day, not because he wanted to satirize them personally. Furthermore, if it is possible for him to have seen notices for Davenport and Floyer in Portsmouth bills, he is equally likely to have noticed other details to whet his appetite for sending Nicholas among players in the forthcoming adventure. The playbills from the mid-1830s announce that the Portsmouth theatre was open Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays during the season, with new programmes devised for every night and only a few plays ever repeated. Besides Shakespeare and such chestnuts as Douglas, Pizarro and A New Way to Pay Old Debts, the emphasis was firmly on spectacle, song and dance. Rob Roy, for example, which was staged on 18 December 1835, was performed as an operatic play with eleven songs; The Tower of Nesle; or, The Black Gondola was a historical drama with nine tableaux, presented on 8 February 1836. One of the few plays to appear more than once (on 12 February 1834 and 25 April 1836) was The Knight and the Wood Demon; or, The Clock Has Struck, which featured a chorus of wood-spirits, and 'Irish lilt and strathspey dance', and a giant chained to a rock. The demon himself arrived by a 'mystic appearance' and, for good measure, when he departed he vanished 'in a flame of fire'. Between the pieces, there was customarily a comic song by Mr Angel or Mr Floyer, as well as a
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dance by Miss Parker, the stage manager's daughter, who took her benefit performances alongside her mother, a leading actress in the company. Occasionally, imported attractions topped the bill. Barnet Burns, the New Zealand Chief, came in April 1836 to entertain with war whoops and other habits of the natives of that remote island. Like Crummles's African Knife Swallower, who 'looked and spoke remarkably like an Irishman' (NN, 48), his origins were of dubious authenticity, but to forestall objection the playbills reported that the New Zealander was 'born and educated in England but naturalized in that country, tattooed and appointed chief of a tribe'. A month later, 'Monseur' Javely Ravel, the 'principal dancer of Paris', visited Portsmouth and performed on the tightrope. He brought with him not one but two Infant Phenomena, his children, aged 7 and 4, who were also scheduled to dance on the rope. The billing for these wonders was well up to Crummles's standards. The Christmas pantomime, advertised for 'positively the last time' on 11 January 1836, was repeated nine days later and was still being staged in April. The evening of 10 February 1836 was billed as 'positively the last night of this season', but the theatre remained open regularly through to May.45
Dickens, based in London, assuredly would have been present at none of these performances, but the type of entertainment advertised was hardly unique to Portsmouth, and from his constant attendance at theatres wherever he went he would have had abundant information on which to base his portrait of the Crummleses, without knowing anything about the Portsmouth theatre in particular. Still, whether or not any of these playbills provided him with specific source materials, they offer a representative sampling of provincial theatrical fare at the time immediately before Dickens wrote Nickleby, and they emphasize the extent to which non-dramatic elements dominated the stage of his day.
VI
Not that entertainment of this kind was confined to the provinces or to the minor theatres in London. There was basic consonance between what appeared on the stages of the lesser theatres, of the fairground acting-booths and of the supposedly superior Patent theatres. In the novel, Mr Crummles's prize acquisition during his sojourn in Portsmouth - 'as much talent as was ever compressed into one young person's body' - is Miss Henrietta Petowker, of the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane - and of Mrs Kenwigs's sitting-room. Her celebrity at Drury Lane is not altogether exalted - she 'went on
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in the pantomime there - but her piece de r�sistance, 'The Blood Drinker's Burial', would not have been out of place there. Ostensibly committed to the preservation of England's dramatic heritage, Drury Lane and Covent Garden had by the first decades of the nineteenth century moved substantially in the direction of sensation and spectacle. Under the management of Alfred Bunn, who had control over both the premier metropolitan theatres in the mid-1830s, drama competed with opera, ballet, pantomime and extravaganza for a place on the bills; and, although divertissement was less common there than in the minors, lavish outlay on orchestra, scenery, costume and sheer scale of production dictated the emphasis on theatrical display. It was an age of inferior playwriting, great acting, and extraordinary staging. The notorious Licensing Act of 1737 had given Drury Lane and Covent Garden exclusive right to stage spoken drama, a privilege extended later in the eighteenth century to theatres outside London, but by the time Bulwer chaired his Select Committee on theatres in 1832 the distinction between 'legitimate' and 'illegitimate' drama had eroded beyond recognition. The law, in theory designed to ensure the purity of dramatic art, in fact forced the great majority of theatres to develop alternative forms of entertainment, which proved all too popular so far as serious drama was concerned. To compete for audiences the Patent theatres introduced programmes to rival the offerings at minor theatres; the minors responded by developing combinations of spoken drama and music. As historians of the theatre have shown, monopoly was a 'dead letter' for years before it was officially abolished in 1843, and theatricality ruled the day.46
Covent Garden and Drury Lane were hardly rural barns, however, and it is important not to conflate the vast differences between theatres. A few penniless strollers with motley costumes, shabby properties and a makeshift stage could not hope to muster entertainment on the same scale as the Patent houses, even if they had the talent to act well, which was not generally the case. The players in Nickleby are superior to this; Crummles is no idle vagabond but, as V. C. Clinton-Baddeley has shown, the manager of 'a respectable enterprise', with regular salaries, duties and rules.47 On the other hand, he lacks altogether the resources to mount a production remotely approaching in stagecraft the costly spectacles which were routinely presented in the big metropolitan theatres. Furthermore, there was fundamental dissimilarity in the degrees of seriousness with which various managers dealt with dramatic production. Macready confided to his diary how profoundly gratified he was when Dickens inscribed Nickleby to him, but he would have been incredulous had it been suggested to him that there was nothing to
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Dickens dedicated Nicholas Nickleby to the Eminent Tragedian, depicted
here in an attitude typical of nineteenth-century acting style.
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choose between Crummles and himself as artists.48 As manager of Covent Garden between 1837 and 1839, Macready studied playtexts meticulously and attempted to bring the theatre's whole range of capabilities to bear upon each work he produced, in order to realize its dramatic potential as fully as possible; whereas, at the Adelphi, Frederick Yates, and Benjamin Webster after him, concentrated their efforts on lurid melodrama and made their theatre a byword for blood-and-thunder sensationalism. Then, again, in the fairground booth theatres the emphasis fell so completely upon fights, deaths and ghosts that plays as dramatic presentations could scarcely be said to exist at all. Theatricality was the essence of stage production at all theatres, but the sophistication of its implementation and the ends to which it was used varied enormously.
That being said, there was great mobility between theatres. Edward Stirling, for instance, was connected with the Adelphi, Surrey, Marylebone, Strand and Olympic theatres in a short space of years; David Osbaldiston managed the Surrey, Covent Garden, Sadler's Wells, the City of London and the Victoria. Such lists could be multiplied endlessly. Famous actors customarily served their apprenticeships in provincial theatres, and once they were established they were frequently tempted to return to the provinces on tour. As visiting celebrities they enjoyed the right to a clear benefit after only a few days' acting with a local company, and they could make more money in this way than by working for an entire season in London. Moreover, and this is the more important point for understanding the nature of the players in Nickleby, there was an extremely close affinity between theatres and other venues of popular entertainment. Michael Baker, in his important study of the emergence of acting as an accepted professional occupation in England, has rightly said that in the nineteenth century 'distinctions between the performing arts were invariably hazy', and there is abundant evidence that individual performers moved freely between theatre, circus and fair.49 David Prince Miller, for example, who began his life as a showman in the 1820s in the same town in which Nicholas has his adventures with Crummles, was a stage-struck youth who ran away from his situation in a London barrister's office and found work bawling out enticements of a show booth to the crowds at Portsmouth fair. In common with many other performers of the era, including the great Romantic actor Edmund Kean, Miller got his start with the theatre-booth proprietor 'Muster' John Richardson. Kean, whose acting Coleridge compared to 'reading Shakespeare by flashes of lightning', became the most extravagantly admired actor in the history of the English theatre until drink and sexual scandals sent him to an early grave; Miller, after years of
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touring fairs throughout England and Scotland, for a while ran the Adelphi Theatre in Glasgow, went bankrupt, and became a penny showman again, conducting a magic booth at the fairgrounds. The careers of these two men could hardly contrast more sharply, but the underlying similarity emphasizes how pervasive the connections between fair and theatre were. The man who was first employer to them both was outspoken about the affinity. According to Pierce Egan, Richardson claimed to 'have seen more real talent exhibited at Feers than I ever saw at any of the licensed theatres', and always welcomed as 'one of us' any 'hactor' from Covent Garden or Drury Lane who came to see his show.50 Reciprocally, Drury Lane welcomed showmen to its ranks. As we have already seen, Van Amburgh exhibited his wild beasts there in 1838-9, and Andrew Ducrow, the most famous equestrian entertainer of the century, played to full houses when he took his stud to Drury Lane. Not that showmen were always so successful when they moved into theatres. 'Lord' George Sanger once converted a hall, which had previously been a charnel house, into a theatre with the intention of putting on a pantomime, but the show closed when it was discovered that the bodies had been left behind, under the very spot where Sanger had erected his stage.51
The great similarity, even identity, of the kinds of entertainment to be found in theatres, streets, tents and halls enabled many performers to shift from one venue to another with frequency and ease. The manager of a giant was as likely to place him on the stage of a theatre as to exhibit him on his own in a fair booth; a tumbler might go through his routine as the sole attraction of a one-man show or serve his turn as one in a series of performers appearing in a lengthy circus or theatre programme. Strolling players, when they did not have an engagement in a theatre, would hire a room in a public house and put on a show known as 'gagging'. One actor, speaking from personal experience, described the practice as follows:
Nothing is so common with actors who may be engaged in a large market-town at the close of a season, as, in the interregnum which generally occurs before the manager is ready to open the next theatre on the circuit, for the company to divide and start in little knots to the surrounding villages in order to enliven the rustic inhabitants with all kinds of entertainment. Dancing, spouting, posturing, magic-lanterns, dissolving views, and many other varieties of the means of amusing, are called into active requisition. A successful little tour is sometimes the result, but more frequently the affair is a miserable failure, and ends in debt and disgust.52
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We never see Crummles actually trying to earn money outside the theatre but, much to the discomfiture of Nicholas, he is not at all averse to showing his skills offstage for practice. When Nicholas is hurrying to catch the London coach he is intercepted by the manager, who clutches him 'in a close and violent embrace', crying ' "Farewell, my noble, my lion-hearted boy!"' Dickens laconically explains:
In fact, Mr Crummles, who could never lose any opportunity for professional display, had turned out for the express purpose of taking a public farewell of Nicholas; and to render it the more imposing, he was now, to that young gentleman's most profound annoyance, inflicting upon him a rapid succession of stage embraces, which, as everybody knows, are performed by the embracer's laying his or her chin on the shoulder of the object of affection, and looking over it. This Mr Crummles did in the highest style of melodrama, pouring forth at the same time all the most dismal forms of farewell he could think of, out of the stock pieces.
(NN, 30)
It is the unaffected heartiness with which Mr Crummles indulges in histrionic display which gives him his lovable charm. For all his vulgarity, the old ham is utterly without guile, and his evident enjoyment in his own performance contributes significantly to ours. He is taking leave of Nicholas in a professional capacity, and the presence of a knot of spectators, laughing appreciatively, underlines the nature of the incident as a public performance. The humour of scenes such as this derives from Dickens's joke that grandiloquent stage gesture accurately conveys real emotion, a joke which is improved by our clear awareness that the posturing is not false, only extravagantly inflated. Crummles is a showman through and through, and part of the authenticity with which he is portrayed centres on the fact that he does not confine his acting to the stage. This is a function of Dickens's characterization of him, but it is also a reflection of historical fact. Popular entertainment was not compartmentalized into wholly separate and distinct categories, but flowed easily into any location in which it was possible for an entertainer to provide amusement.
Above all, the versatile and eclectic nature of popular entertainment meant that people earning a living in ways which for us today would seem to have little in common were actually engaged in closely related activities. Cheap Jacks sang out lively patter and performed conjuring tricks in order to attract customers to buy their wares; travelling from fair to fair and setting up their stalls alongside the entertainment booths, they were themselves as much showmen
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as the exhibitors of freaks and the barkers at the fairground theatres.53 As we shall see when we come to Hard Times, circus performers had to count acting among their skills, because equestrian drama was a central feature of the nineteenth-century circus. Sleary produces plays as well as exhibiting animals, clowns and acrobats; and, just as the circus in Hard Times partakes of the theatre, so, too, the theatre in Nicholas Nickleby has explicit links with the circus and fair. Sleary and Crummles have far closer affinities than most modern commentators of Dickens have appreciated.
Once again, it is important not to conflate differences. There was a strong sense of hierarchy among showmen, who were distinguishable, for a start, by the mode of transportation they adopted. The man who drove a gig was clearly superior to the owner of a wagon or cart, and all of them were socially and financially above the wretch who depended upon his own feet to get from one place of entertainment to another. This mode of differentiation serves to date the period with which we are dealing; once cheap railway travel became widespread, the old patterns of itinerant entertainment were radically altered. Crummles's status, as an aristocrat among itinerants, is indicated by the phaeton which he drives. Actors generally were considered the elite of the profession. In a retrospective article on strolling players published in All the Year Round two years after Dickens's death, the distinction was made between the performers in acting-booths and all other fairground showmen; the actors constituted 'almost a distinct class'.54 At the same time, the common people in search of amusement were not concerned with any pecking order among entertainers, save when it made a difference to their own pockets. Anyone who came to town offering novelty and diversion was a showman. The stroller James Glass Bertram, who contributed articles on the circus to All the Year Round and, under the pseudonym of Peter Paterson, wrote a valuably circumstantial memoir which he dedicated to Dickens, is authoritative on this. '"The show-folk"', he stated, 'is the universal name given to all persons connected with exhibitions, no matter whether they are exhibitors of waxwork, shows of wild beasts, or theatrical booths.'55
Vincent Crummles fits into this category of entertainer. As the manager of a company of players who perform drama in a theatre, he is of course a member of the acting profession and must be considered as such. But he is also a showman, and to ignore this fact, as it has been customary for virtually every commentator on Nicholas Nickleby to do, is to misrepresent what Dickens is doing in the novel.56 It conceives of Crummles's activities too narrowly, and places greater stress on dramatic personation than is consonant with
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their actual activity in the novel. To recognize the place of the players of Nickleby in a context of popular entertainment has three major consequences. First, and most straightforwardly, it enables us to understand properly what they are, and how they relate not just to other characters in Dickens who are actors, but also to the whole gallery of entertainers who appear throughout his work. Second, as we shall proceed to see, it suggests thematic connections beyond role-playing, which link the Crummles episodes with other scenes and characters within the novel. In so loosely coherent a work as Nickleby any threads which help to provide unity should not be overlooked. Third, and perhaps most significantly, to see the players as showfolk gives precision in locating the source of their positive vitality. This in turn can help to explain why Nicholas, and his creator as well, feel decidedly uneasy about the Crummleses, and it clarifies a useful landmark in the course of Dickens's development as an artist who was also an entertainer himself.
VII
In the plot of Nickleby, the players are distinctly isolated from most of the other characters. Like Squeers, Crummles gives Nicholas employment in a setting remote from London, but when Squeers comes to the metropolis he interacts with many personages in the book's cast, whereas Crummles is seen in London by Nicholas alone. Besides Smike, the only character from outside their immediate circle of companions and patrons to encounter the Crummleses is Mr Lillyvick; Miss Petowker, Mr Snittle Timberry and the African Swallower are all fellow-professionals. The actors have no contact whatever with either the book's villains or its good characters, and thus stand outside the central moral framework. In Oliver Twist the isolation of the criminal underworld from Brownlow and the Maylies, with only the hero moving between them, is a method of enforcing that novel's moral polarities, but in Nickleby the interaction between Ralph, Squeers, Hawk and Gride on the one hand and the Nicklebys and Cheerybles on the other establishes a different method of moral coding, from which the Crummleses are removed. Alternatively, in Hard Times Sleary's circus is a grouping alien to the Coketown dignitaries, but their isolation is presented as an appalling absence from the lives of the main characters. In Nickleby the hero meets the players and moves on, without significantly advancing the central action, such as it is, of the novel.
The actors are not, however, the only entertainers to appear in Nickleby. In the course of the novel Dickens provides glimpses of a
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variety of street people whose business is amusement. In Westminster, outside the office of Mr Gregs bury, MP, 'all the livelong day there is a grinding of organs and clashing and clanging of little boxes of music' (NN, 16) - fit accompaniment, Dickens makes clear, for the shabby legislators who reside there. Elsewhere, there are a ballad-singer, whom Nicholas notices as he is returning to London from Portsmouth (NN, 32), and, in Clerkenwell, Punch and Judy showmen and stilt-dancers, whose fascinations detain the delivery boy charged with conveying the hat of Tim Linkinwater's sister to the house of the Cheerybles (NN, 37). Golden Square, home of Ralph Nickleby, is a quarter full of lodging-houses for musical foreigners. In contrast to the tight-fisted miser, who plots his secret villainies in this precinct, other residents go about their activities openly and noisily:
. . . the notes of pianos and harps float in the evening time round the head of the mournful statue, the guardian genius of a little wilderness of shrubs, in the centre of the square. On a summer's night, windows are thrown open, and groups of swarthy mustachioed men are seen by the passer-by lounging at the casements and smoking fearfully. Sounds of gruff voices practising vocal music invade the evening's silence; and the fumes of choice tobacco scent the air. There, snuff and cigars, and German pipes and flutes, and violins and violoncellos, divide the supremacy between them. It is the region of song and smoke. Street bands are on their mettle in Golden Square; and itinerant glee-singers quaver involuntarily as they raise their voices within its boundaries.
(NN, 2)
Dickens makes no suggestion that the music is anything other than cacophony, and the inappropriateness of such a place for business serves as an implicit gloss on Ralph's character. The musicians are inoffensive in themselves, but no respectable gentleman would reside here.
Other entertainment is mentioned in conversation by the book's characters, and the very casualness of their references indicates that showfolk and exhibitions are entirely familiar to them. Mrs Nickleby, for example, at one point recalls that shortly before Nicholas was born she was startled by an Italian image-boy in Stratford, who gave her such a fright that '"it was quite a mercy . . . that my son didn't turn out to be a Shakespeare, and what a dreadful thing that would have been!"' (NN, 27). Elsewhere she mentions the Thirsty (i.e., Fasting) Woman of Tutbury, the Cock Lane Ghost, and the pig-faced lady (NN, 49). All of these were famous curiosities long since exposed as fraudulent: around the time Dickens was born Mrs Ann Moore of Tutbury attracted attention for her extended
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fasts, which were discovered to have been secretly broken to keep her alive; the Cock Lane Ghost was an eighteenth-century sensation mentioned by Boswell, in which mysterious rappings were found to emanate not from a spirit but from the 11-year-old daughter of the house's owner; the pig-faced lady was a common fairground exhibit, created by shaving a bear, tying it upright in a chair and dressing it in women's clothing.57 By sprinkling Mrs Nickleby's speech with references to bizarre exhibitions Dickens extends the mixture of historical fact and complete invention which constitutes her sublimely inane chatter. Miss LaCreevy once compares Mrs Nickleby to a high-wire acrobat because of her 'grand and mysterious' manner (NN, 31); Lord Verisopht at first supposes Kate is a waxwork model, so perfect is her beauty (NN, 19); and Squeers, after being apprehended by the police for his part in Ralph's machinations, curses Peg Sliderskew, "'who I wish was dead and buried, and resurrected and dissected and hung upon wires in a anatomical museum, before I'd had anything to do with her"' (NN, 60).
Moreover, Dickens as narrator invokes entertainment on a number of occasions in comparisons to describe people and places in the novel. The house in which Noggs and the Kenwigses live is said to be so crowded that 'it would have been beyond the power of a calculating boy' to discover where a vacant room could be found (NN, 14); that is, the problem was too difficult for a child whose arithmetical abilities were so great that he was exhibited as a curiosity. Michael Slater suggests that Dickens may have had in mind George Parker Bidder (180~78), a mathematically precocious child who was exhibited as 'the calculating phenomenon', but the allusion need not have been so specific; dogs, horses, pigs and humans of 'sagacious' prowess had been on show as curiosities from at least the early eighteenth century.58 Again, the Wititterlys' establishment in Cadogan Place is compared to a freak-show exhibit; being neither quite fashionable nor altogether unfashionable, Cadogan Place is 'like the ligament which unites the Siamese twins[;1 it contains something of the life and essence of two distinct bodies, and yet belongs to neither' (NN, 21). The joined twins Eng and Chang were exhibited at the Egyptian Hall in London in 1829.59 When the police wield their truncheons to keep order at the meeting of the United Metropolitan Improved Hot Muffin and Crumpet Baking and Punctual Delivery Company, their procedure is compared to 'that ingenious actor Mr Punch, whose brilliant example, both in the fashion of his weapons and their use, this branch of the executive occasionally follows' (NN, 2). And when Squeers leaps about in ecstasy, thinking the plot to abduct Smike from Nicholas will succeed, his gyrations are spoken of as a 'war dance' (NN, 45) -
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Dickens's early works depict London as a place teeming with street entertainment. Note the hill for an Infant
Phenomenon in the upper right-hand corner of Cruikshank's engraving.
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which in this novel can only refer to the behaviour of stage warriors, such as the Indian Savage depicted by Mr Folair in his balletic pas de deux with the Infant Phenomenon. None of these references to popular entertainment is developed beyond a passing allusion, and they do not lead to an exploration of the condition of showmen in the book's social context, as Dickens was to do in his next novel, The Old Curiosity Shop. They do, however, serve to keep entertainment before us as a frame of reference, and taken together they carry the strong implication that London is a place teeming with entertainers, as he had shown it to be in Sketches by Boz.
The one place of entertainment besides the theatre over which Dickens lingers in Nicholas Nickleby is the race meeting visited by Hawk and Verisopht: it is at a gaming-booth at the racecourse that the quarrel occurs which boils over that night in town, and in the ensuing duel the young lord loses his life. Dickens depicts the setting as a place where penny showmen congregate, which was historically accurate.60 Before 1840 courses were not enclosed, and admittance was free; the organizers' costs were defrayed in part by ground rents charged for the numerous booths for food, drink, gambling and exhibitions, which were inextricable components of any race meeting. Newmarket was unusual in that its organizers sought to keep its clientele exclusive, but most meetings were open to anyone who cared to come. With the introduction of Arabian horses in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, racing had evolved into a highly popular arid widely attended spectator sport, but with the wide variety of entertainments available in the booths many amusement-seekers came to the courses who had no interest in the horses at all.
Traditionally race meetings were seen as occasions for the encouragement of social cohesion: frequented by aristocrat and common labourer alike, the racecourse was a place where classes could mingle freely. Pierce Egan, authoritative on this as on so much sport in early nineteenth-century England, considered the turf, along with pugilism, an activity which brought out the best in the English character: to him it was a splendid manifestation of the happy, lively yet peaceable disposition of honest Englishmen. In The Pilgrims of the Thames (1837) Egan introduces a figure named Charles Turf, Esq., who praises King William IV for his keen interest in racing and explains that "'from having obtained a thorough knowledge of the people - mixing with them - participating in their habits - and hearing their opinions on the laws and government, in propria persona"', the king had gained "'a thorough knowledge of the feelings of his people"'. His companion, Frank Flourish, responds that from such knowledge in a sovereign flow better government, truer liberty and '"greater portion of happiness enjoyed by all ranks
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of society"'.61 Such a view was intensely conservative: it depended on traditional notions of rank, patronage and example-setting; on the desire to preserve old customs and old values; and on a belief that the social function of the holiday atmosphere, rather than economic considerations, was the heart of horse racing.
In Nickleby Dickens challenged central axioms of this traditionalist ideal, and in the view of modern social historians he was correct in his assessment. Sport, like so much else in English society at this time, was being radically altered, to a great extent by the coming of the railway. In the course of a few years race meetings changed from almost wholly local occasions to truly national events. The railway enabled owners to move their horses quickly and comfortably to meetings far removed from their stables, and it brought spectators as well from much greater distances. But even without this transformation there was much in the old view which was open to disagreement. Patrons of both high and low rank were present, for example, but, as Dickens shows, there was not much interchange over class barriers, and certainly very little which survived beyond the race day itself. A sign of the gap between ranks is Ralph's taunt that Noggs, now a tippling clerk of no account, once kept horses of his own (NN, 2). Race meetings were of dubious respectability: in his study of the social history of the turf Wray Vamplew has concluded that there is 'no hard evidence' that the middle classes came in any numbers to the races at this period, and certainly it is hard to imagine the brothers Cheeryble in attendance here.62 Instead, as Dickens shows, the grounds were visited by aristocrats, country fellows and gipsies. Hawk, patron of the ring and debaucher of the foolishly wealthy, does not mingle with the lower ranks, and any example-setting by him is entirely pernicious: in an earlier episode his contemptuous behaviour leads to a thrashing by Nicholas, which is promptly celebrated in a ballad circulated 'all over town' (NN, 38), and in the present scene his defiance of Verisopht leads to drunkenness, death and disgrace. For the humble as well, the recreation at the racecourse is far from innocent: Dickens points out the dishonest gaming-tables and the thimble-rig man intent on gulling the unwary. In so far as such a scene is a vestige of the old order, the sooner it is gone the better.
On the other hand, Dickens is not entirely dismissive in his view of Hampton. With its juggler, ventriloquist and band, it is also a picturesque scene, full of colour and animation, and he finds 'a drop of comfort' in the presence of children there.
It is a pleasant thing to see that the sun has been there; to know that the air and light are on them every day; to feel that they are
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children, and lead children's lives; that if their pillows be damp, it is with the dews of Heaven, and not with tears: that the limbs of their girls are free, and that they are not crippled by distortions, imposing an unnatural and horrible penance upon their sex; that their lives are spent, from day to day, at least among the waving trees, and not in the midst of dreadful engines which make young children old before they know what childhood is, and give them the exhaustion and infirmity of age, without, like age, the privilege to die. God send that old nursery tales were true, and gipsies stole such children by the Score!
(NN, 50)
This is a view which Dickens repeats in his next novel, when the sanctimonious Monflathers accuses Nell of 'wickedness' for finding employment in the waxwork rather than assisting in the manufactures of the country (OCS, 31). In fact, as Dickens makes clear, Nell's position with Mrs Jarley affords her comforts greater than she is ever to enjoy again, until her grandfather's gambling mania forces her to flee once more. The gambling, dishonesty and violence of the racing episode in Nickleby make it emphatic that any choice to seek real pleasure here is an act of desperation. It is a scene of too much vice and corruption to provide healthy relaxation and release.
The races at Hampton stand in stark contrast to the innocent and happy entertainments in Portsmouth, and, combined with the passing references to exhibitions and showfolk which we have noted above, they establish a wider context of amusements in the novel than the Crummleses alone provide. This context is, however, too random and undeveloped to be called a unifying pattern, and it is far removed from the central organizing symbols of the fog and the prison which distinguish later novels. It also lacks the comprehensiveness of the circus imagery in Hard Times, which, as we shall see in Chapter 5, permeates that novel in systematic complexity. Forster praised Nickleby for having a 'better laid design' than its predecessors, but the plot is in fact no more than loosely episodic, and occasional recent claims to find close thematic counterpoint between adventures have been unconvincing.63 Of all Dickens's novels Nicholas Nickleby is closest in structure to the works of Smollett, combining seriousness and entertainment in broadly contrasting episodes: the hero travels north to a scene of cruelty and confinement on his first journey, and after an interlude in London he takes a second journey in the opposite direction to the south, where he finds expansiveness and generosity. The isolation of the Portsmouth scenes is diminished by the presence of other instances of popular entertainment, which add colour and liveliness, and give the novel somewhat greater coherence that it would have without this wider
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frame of reference. But the achievement of Nicholas Nickleby does not reside in its unity, and the context of amusements serves principally to extend and clarify our understanding of the nature of the theatre episodes in the novel.
VIII
Dickens introduces Crummles into the novel in emphatically favourable terms. After his unhappy experiences with Squeers and Ralph, Nicholas sets off with Smike to make a new start, and the buoyancy of his hopes is explicitly signalled by a change in the weather. It was cold and foggy in London as they left, but once they are headed for Portsmouth the conditions improve:
. . . although a dense vapour still enveloped the city they had left, as if the very breath of its busy people hung over their schemes of gain and profit and found greater attraction there than in the quiet region above, in the open country it was clear and fair . . . A broad, fine, honest sun lighted up the green pastures and dimpled water, with the semblance of summer, while it left the travellers all the invigorating freshness of that early time of year. The ground seemed elastic under their feet; the sheep-bells were music to their ears; and exhilarated by exercise, and stimulated by hope, they pushed onward with the strength of lions.
(NN, 22)
Here, as so often in the novel, Dickens uses in all seriousness precisely the same theatrical hyperbole which appears so preposterously inflated when spoken by the actors: where Crummles's farewell of Nicholas as 'my lion-hearted boy' is presented satirically as a stage clich�, here the 'strength of lions' is offered as a genuine compliment. Critics complain that such writing is empty theatrical rhetoric which exposes Dickens's lack of control in this novel, and no doubt Nicholas Nickleby is less finely honed that later works. But it is also possible to argue that Dickens's serious use of such language works in just the opposite way, as a means of reinforcing the honest attitudes of the players. Nickleby does not achieve the stylistic excellence of Dickens's maturity, but the rhetoric of the stage has its own positive functions, both in the mouths of the book's actors and in the voice of the narrator.
After this auspicious start, Nicholas and Smike reach the inn outside Portsmouth where they meet Vincent Crummles. The manager cordially invites Nicholas to share a bowl of punch and tactfully
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offers him gainful employment. The entertainer's business is to provide pleasure, and Crummles's generosity to Nicholas contrasts sharply with his treatment by Squeers. It is interesting to observe that Nicholas does not actively seek Out the actors; when he meets Mr Crummles he has no intention of taking to the stage, or even of going to see a play. Instead, just as Nell comes into contact with Short and Jarley, so Nicholas gravitates with seeming inevitability into the protection of the showfolk. Again like Nell, Nicholas appears to have a natural affinity with the entertainers: he quickly adapts to their lifestyle and becomes himself a principal attraction of the show. In this regard Nell and Nicholas differ from Mr Pickwick and from the narrator in Sketches by Boz, both of whom eagerly look for ways to indulge their curiosity; instead, Nicholas and Nell passively allow themselves to be looked after by the showfolk. Crummles recognizes Nicholas's suitability for inclusion in the ranks of the players from the first moment he sees him, and when Nicholas announces his intention of departing the manager dispassionately judges the signs of impatience as a superior display of acting.
'Dear me, dear me,' said Mr Crummles, looking wistfully towards the point at which he had just disappeared; 'if he only acted like that, what a deal of money he'd draw!'
(NN, 30)
The notion that Nicholas belongs 'naturally' among the players takes us to the heart of their significance in Nickleby. Nicholas is promptly accepted by the members of the company as one of themselves, and although professional jealousy generates rivalry from Lenville and Folair the tension is released comically, and Crummles speaks truly when he says, '"We were a very happy little company . . . You and I never had a word"' (NN, 48). Nicholas works diligently, cons his lines readily, and when he writes the play commissioned by the manager it is a decided hit. He wins applause for his performance on the stage, and he is equally adept at dealing with his theatrical companions outside working-hours. Although he is indignant at Lenville's impertinence of offering to pull his nose, Nicholas enacts a scenario of his own when he defies the tragedian before the assembled company and knocks him down. His bow to the spectators after the confrontation shows clearly his consciousness that the action has been a performance. He is never more one of them than in this episode.
'Natural' acting was a key term in theatre criticism from long before the nineteenth century, and the players in Nickleby take great satisfaction in the lifelikeness of their productions. We see an
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example of this when Nicholas describes the principal role in the new melodrama to Mr Lenville.
'You are troubled with remorse till the last act, and then you make up your mind to destroy yourself. But just as you are raising the pistol to your head, a clock strikes - ten.'
'I see', cried Mr Lenville. 'Very good'.
'You pause', said Nicholas; 'you recollect to have heard a clock strike ten in your infancy. The pistol falls from your hand - you are overcome - you burst into tears, and become a virtuous and exemplary character for ever afterwards.'
'Capital!' said Mr Lenville: 'that's a sure card, a sure card. Get the curtain down with a touch of nature like that, and it'll be a triumphant success.'
(NN, 24)
The basic implausibility of the scenes which the actors consider true to life is, as Michael Slater suggests, the source of hilarity, but the joke has point as well.64 Just as Dickens's methods of comic characterization attribute essential significance to external appearance, so, too, acting practice of the age was based on the audience's acceptance of gesture as a true expression of inner disposition. Rede's Road to the Stage contains a lengthy section devoted to laying down precise rules by which the passions are to be represented. For example:
Fear, violent and sudden, opens the eyes and mouth very wide, draws down the eyebrows, gives the countenance an air of wildness, draws back the elbows parallel with the sides, lifts up the open hand (the fingers together) to the height of the breast, so that the palms face the dreadful object, as shields opposed to it . . . Death is exhibited by violent distortion, groaning, gasping for breath, stretching the body, raising it, and then letting it fall; dying in a chair, as is often practised in some characters, is very unnatural, and has little or no effect.65
And so on, and on. The underlying assumption of such prescriptions is that stereotyped expression creates an objective manifestation of human emotion. The acting was considered natural because it was an imitation of agreed exterior signs of feelings.66 It is easy for us today to ridicule the large gestures and stilted poses, but Edmund Kean, who carefully preconceived each movement he made on the stage, dazzled the best dramatic critics of the age. Great acting was one of the triumphs of the nineteenth-century theatre, and it is well to remind ourselves frequently that Nicholas Nickleby was dedicated td
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the foremost player of the day. Dickens's satire is directed not merely at bad acting, but at acting which abuses the foundations upon which the performing style of the age was built. He was not to challenge these preconceptions seriously until Great Expectations, in which Pip learns through hard experience that he must move beyond categorizing people by their exteriors. Magwitch, Miss Havisham and Trabb's boy all enter the novel as exuberantly 'Dickensian' characters, identified by boldly conceived outward signs, but their appearances belie their true natures, and Pip must look beneath surfaces to see them properly. Great Expectations is a joyously theatrical book which radically undermines the theatrical conception of character.
In Nickleby these assumptions are still intact, and it is only their abuse which is ridiculed. The acting of the Crummleses is of a sort that Partridge in Tom Jones would have approved. In that novel, so beloved by Dickens, Tom, having been to see Garrick as Hamlet, asks his companion which of the players he liked best.
To this he answered, with some appearance of indignation at the question, 'the king without doubt.' 'Indeed, Mr Partridge', says Mrs Miller, 'you are not of the same opinion with the town; for they are all agreed, that Hamlet is acted by the best player who was ever on the stage.' 'He the best player!' cried Partridge, with a contemptuous sneer. 'Why I could act as well as he myself. I am sure if I had seen a ghost, I should have looked in the very same manner, and done just as he did. And then, to be sure, in that scene, as you called it, between him and his mother, where you told me he acted so fine, why Lord help me, any man, that is any good man, that had had such a mother, would have done exactly the same. I know that you are only joking with me; but indeed, madam, though I was never at a play in London, yet I have seen acting before in the country; and the King for my money; he speaks all his words distinctly, half as loud again as the other. - Anybody may see he is an actor.'
(Tom Jones, bk 16, ch. 5)
Through Fielding's irony, Partridge's remarks on Garrick and the king offer a radically different view of what was 'natural' on the stage, and they are worth noting here because in Nickleby Dickens considers this alternative conception of acting as well as the theory of performance as imitation. Because nineteenth-century acting in general was so stylized and rule-bound, there was a clear opportunity for acting which could be thought of as instinctive and untutored to find favour, and it was an opportunity which the promoters of child
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prodigies
exploited. When Master Betty created a sensation in London in 1804-5 he was
hailed as the re-embodiment of Garrick. The novelty of his youth was thought by
those who were seriously impressed with him to be less important than his
innate genius, which could only express itself more fully as he grew older.67
The appeal of the Infant Roscius grew out of the attitudes towards childhood
given currency by Rousseau, a point of view deeply congenial to Dickens and one
which, as we have seen, coloured his approach to popular entertainment to a
very considerable degree. The craze for Master Betty lasted only a single
season, several years before Dickens was born, but the youth eked out a career
in the provinces living off his earlier reputation, and the vogue for Infant
Phenomena continued unabated for decades. Whatever the particular influence on
Dickens's imagination Jean Davenport may or may not have had, it was from this
wider context of the celebration of childhood that his own Phenomenon emerged.
Once again, as towards the pretence of 'natural' acting by Mr Lenville,
Dickens's attitude is one of amused ridicule. Vincent Crummles promoted his
daughter as a genuine child prodigy, but we see enough of her behaviour
offstage to recognize that she is a very ordinary child.
The phenomenon was rather a troublesome
companion, for first the right sandal came down, and then the left, and these
mischances being repaired, one leg of the little white trousers was discovered
to be longer than the other; besides these accidents, the green parasol was
dropped down an iron grating, and only fished up again, with great difficulty
and by dint of much exertion. (NN, 24)
Although
the puffing by her father and the jealousy of Mr Folair create a smokescreen,
it is clear enough that the talents of Ninetta Crummles fall well short of the
phenomenal. Her childishness is innate, but her genius is the fond invention of
her father.
Dickens's marvellously comic portrayals
of the actors in Nickleby, then, not merely satirize the individual foibles of
theatrical types, but also probe the excesses of two major contemporary
theories of acting. From neither perspective does he accept uncritically the
notion that their performances are 'natural', but the term is still pertinent
to them, because beneath the posturing they are figures of instinctive warmth,
generosity and kindness. Nicholas has an affinity with them not because of the
way they act, but because of what they arc. They represent the positive side of
the old values which Dickens viewed with the most limited favour in the
racecourse episode. Their company, like many of the declining circuit system,
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was a family enterprise, and Dickens focuses on their mutual affection and self-support, rather than upon the commercial basis of their activity. Whereas the big metropolitan theatres required large capital investment to support their hundreds of employees and to create the costly spectacle with which they attracted audiences, a small touring company was only a remove above the old-fashioned solitary showman travelling the countryside with his wife and children. Some provincial managers built and owned the theatres in which their companies performed, but Crummles's concern is more modest than this, for he merely leases the Portsmouth theatre for the duration of his visit there. Although he is dependent upon hard-won patronage, he makes a sufficient living to be able to afford passage across the Atlantic. Self-sufficient, loving, and taking great pleasure in the amusement they provide, the Crummleses are truly fit companions for the hero of a novel by Dickens. Their values of family loyalty and respect for tradition are precisely those which Nicholas affirms at the end of the novel, when he returns to the country home which had been his father's before him. His friendship with the players is consonant with his fondest hopes.
IX
Nevertheless, Nicholas is decidedly uneasy about his connection with the players. Immediately upon meeting Crummles he adopts a pseudonym, and although respectable aspirants to the stage often disguised their identity (T. D. Davenport, for example, had been plain Thomas Donald before he became an actor) the frequency of the practice in no way lessens Nicholas's individual determination to prevent his involvement with the theatre from becoming known. Once having joined the company he decides to 'postpone reflection' lest he find himself unable to square his position with his self-esteem (NN, 23), and writing to Noggs from Portsmouth he makes 'no mention' of his employment with the actors (NN, 29). When Mr Lenville and Mr Folair call upon him in his room the morning after he arrives, Nicholas considers their social visit an intrusion and congratulates himself when he has 'got rid of' them (NN, 24). He adopts an attitude of condescending superiority to the players' innocent pretensions, and on more than one occasion laughs outright at their notions of impressive deportment. On hearing from Noggs that he is needed in London, Nicholas chastises himself for 'fooling' in Portsmouth for so long, and he salves his conscience by telling himself that he had remained 'for the best and sorely against my will' (NN, 30). Even after he has been long removed from the
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Dickens created much comedy by means of the proposition that role-playing spilled off the stage into nonprofessional areas of life.
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players and has fleetingly rediscovered them on the eve of their emigration, Nicholas prefers 'the cool air and twilight out of doors' to the 'hot and glaring theatre' (NN, 48). Nicholas may be a congenial member of the company so far as Crummles is concerned, but in his own eyes his gambit on the stage is decidedly compromising.
There are several explanations why Nicholas feels ill at ease. Most simply, it is a matter of inexperience. He has no previous knowledge of the theatre and is uncertain what to expect as each new duty confronts him. His ignorance of theatrical activities means that he must be told at each point what is going on about him, and this is hard on his self-esteem, but it is a valuable narrative strategy which enables Dickens easily to introduce information as to why stage combatants must differ in size, what a bespeak is, how a play can be quickly written, and why Mr Lenville issues his challenge. Nicholas is also wary on account of his earlier adventure at Dotheboys Hall. Having misunderstood Fanny Squeers's advances and carelessly responded to Tilda Price's charms, he is on his guard afterwards, lest he compromise himself again. Like Fanny, Miss Snevellicci makes a play for Nicholas, and she has the gaiety and good looks which Fanny so conspicuously lacks. Nicholas is attracted to the actress, and with coaxing he enters into cheerful companionship with her, but he firmly rejects any serious flirtation.
A more considerable motive for Nicholas's sense of distance from the actors is his class-consciousness.68 Requiring no recognized educational training for their activity, and providing no obviously utilitarian function in society, actors were traditionally treated as outcasts, and an actress was widely held to be little more than a prostitute. Macready's diaries are full of lamentations over the lack of social esteem which he can command, and the status of the actor at this time is tellingly signalled by the incident in Pickwick in which Dr Slammer refuses to duel with Jingle upon learning that his antagonist is a lowly stroller. In an age when massive economic expansion was transforming the basis of individual wealth and creating fortunes for men of lowly origins, social respectability was an acutely live issue for the Victorians, and one which their novelists pondered deeply. Class is a particularly prominent concern in Nickleby, moving as it does between Cadogan Place and the City, Golden Square and the East End. Throughout the novel Nicholas is concerned to maintain his dignity as the son of a gentleman, and he has more than a touch of snobbery to him. Unlike Hard Times, in which Sleary's moral integrity accords to him a position of superiority over the more conventionally respectable citizens of Coketown, and unlike Great Expectations, in which class is an issue subjected to radically searching analysis, class in Nicholas Nickleby is largely a matter of unconsidered
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prejudice against the idle aristocrat, the social climber - and the strolling player. Neither Nicholas nor Dickens gives Crummles full credit for the excellence of his personal qualities, and it is a disturbing limitation of this novel that a lack of polite airs should be held against the manager. It is a measure of the rapidity with which Dickens's vision matured during the first years of his career that such careless acceptance of class conventions was never to be repeated in his fiction again.
On the other hand, Nicholas had reason besides mere snobbery for wishing to leave Crummles behind. When he prepares to depart for London, Nicholas chides himself for having 'dallied too long' in Portsmouth (NN, 30), and from what we have already seen of the characteristics of nineteenth-century theatre it is clear that this charge of triviality has substance. With the playtext treated as a vehicle for stagecraft and coherent production sacrificed for stunning effects, it was commonplace for observers to speak of the decline of the drama. Various causes were proposed: theatre licensing was too strict, or not strict enough; playwrights were neglectful of great models, or unduly reliant upon them. All commentators were agreed, however, that the theatre had a lamentable tendency to be turned into an exhibition-hall for idle amusement.69 Mr Curdle, the 'very profound and most original thinker' canvassed by Nicholas and Miss Snevellicci for her bespeak, expresses the opinion of the age when he simpers, '"The drama is gone, perfectly gone"' (NN, 24). Despite its currency, such a view is misleading, because, as Michael Booth rightly insists, it places too narrow an emphasis on plays as dramatic literature, and fails to register that the theatre was generating 'a visual excitement, a mechanical ingenuity, and a sense of theatrical effect not known on the English stage before or since'.70 On the other hand, Crummles is portrayed as one of the lesser lights of the theatre, and although an evening spent in the presence of his players would- have been uproarious fun it would not have inspired much conviction of the ennobling characteristics of dramatic art.
The situation of the drama was not one to foster careful playwritmg. Nicholas is hired to pillage French plays and adapt them to the special circumstances of Crummles's company, and in fact authors like Fitzball, Moncrieff and � Beckett churned out stageable hack work at a prodigious rate by this method. Playwrights of higher aspiration constructed inert imitations of classical tragedy, like Talfourd, or untheatrical closet drama, like Browning, but the hopes of contemporary critics for drama of lasting merit went unfulfilled. The frustrations for the intelligent actor were considerable, and are neatly symbolized by the antagonism between the 'eminent
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tragedian' Macready and the theatrical entrepreneur Bunn. Macready wished to realize on stage the full glory of English drama, whereas Bunn wanted to fill his houses with paying customers. When they worked together at Drury Lane in 1836 the tensions ran high, and one evening, humiliated at being cast in a truncated version of Richard III, Macready physically assaulted the manager backstage. This act of tragic desperation promptly collapsed into farce as Macready, still clad in the hump for his stage role as Richard accused the manager of ruining him, while Bunn, crying 'Murder!', grasped the actor's little finger between his teeth until rescue arrived.71 Even off the stage, drama gave way to extravagant gesture when actors were involved. Mr Lenville's marvellously absurd altercation with Nicholas was not without precedent in real life.
A further aspect of the 'decline of the drama' was the changing composition of audiences who attended the theatre. The concentration of population in rapidly expanding urban centres created a new pool of potential spectators, cut off from their rural, participatory amusements and eager for relief from the squalor of the cities. Although the Portsmouth theatre depended to an unusual extent on patronage from the officers of the army and navy (because of the large military presence there), the community at large more than doubled in population between 1801, when the census recorded 33,226 people living Am Portsmouth and Portsea, and 1851, when the figure was 72,096.72 At the same time, sharpening class antagonisms led to a decline in theatre patronage by the upper classes, and the grudging attitude of the respectable Mr Curdle, who short-changes Miss Snevellicci by sixpence when she is canvassing for her bespeak, is an accurate reflection of the loss of moneyed support which was putting theatres in parlous financial situations throughout the period.
There were a number of reasons in the late 1830s, then, for misgivings about the state of the theatre, and Dickens touches on them in accounting for his hero's lack of wholehearted commitment to the Crummleses. Nevertheless, these explanations are inadequate when placed beside the reality of the players as they actually appear in the novel. The drama may very well have been in decline, but Crummles emphatically is not. He successfully adapts to conditions of the day, and unlike Jingle and Codlin he makes a good living; he drives a phaeton, pays his players, and offers Nicholas financial incentives to remain with the company. Although he reserves pride of place for his own family, he exudes confidence in the abilities of all his players, and he takes frank delight in the entertainment which they create. It is a sign of his contentment and of his confidence for the future that, in our last view of the players before they sail to the
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New World, we learn that Mrs Crummles is expecting another child.
But despite the positive virtues of the players and their ability to maintain themselves by working as entertainers Dickens deports Crummles out of England before the novel is ended. It is true that the search for new horizons in America was a frequent - and frequently prosperous - venture by English actors. It is also true that T. D. Davenport sailed with his wife and daughter in the steamer Sirius from Cork twelve months before Crummles made his final appearance in Nicholas Nickleby. I have not traced any notice in the theatrical press announcing Davenport's departure, and one later account of his career claims that he left suddenly, without premeditation, on learning of a berth available in the ship he took, but it is altogether possible that a puff such as the ones Crummles shows Nicholas did in fact give Dickens the idea of sending his strollers abroad, to wind up this portion of the story.73
Reasons do not make good excuses, however, and in the structure of the novel Crummles's departure signifies his dismissal. In so loosely organized a book as Nicholas Nickleby one must not make too much of this, but the fact remains that in the end the players are inappropriately rejected. They have generosity and honesty which contrast boldly with the characteristics of the book's villains, and when they are compared to the characters whom Nicholas actually does espouse the players' virtues become the more evident. Both the Cheerybles and the Crummleses work in the world without being corrupted by it; both show kindness to Nicholas and give him employment. But, as every reader of the novel knows, the Cheerybles are empty ciphers, cloyingly sentimentalized and utterly unbelievable. The Crummleses, with their petty vanities, harmless jealousies, and uncritical indulgence in histrionic excess, have a complexity and depth of characterization altogether lacking in the Cheerybles.
Moreover, in the zest, humour and imagination which are manifest not simply in their acting but in their lifestyle as entertainers, they have positive attributes which the Cheerybles - and Nicholas sorely lack. In her brilliant analysis of David Copperfield, Q. D. Leavis says of Mr Micawber that he is 'witness to a pre-Victorian enjoyment of living that Dickens indignantly saw being destroyed by the Murdstones and the Littimers;' and she goes on to propose that with his 'contempt for the morrow, faith in the future and enjoyment of the present' he has essential attributes of the creative mind.74 The same claim can, and should, be made for Mr Crummles. His vulgar creativity, although far inferior to Dickens's own, taps the same roots which nurture Dickens's imagination. Crummles
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has the priceless imprudence which is the healthy antidote to a vacuous heroine and a too-earnest hero.75 Nicholas could hardly be expected to marry Miss Snevellicci and remain an actor for ever, but he could emphatically do with a bit more of the robust, outgoing good-nature and carefree indulgence in pleasure which characterize the players.
In the final analysis, the rejection of Crummles is consonant with his isolation from the rest of the book. It is likely, as many critics have suggested, that Dickens had no thought of introducing the players when he began writing this serial novel; certainly they do not appear in the wrapper illustration. Nicholas Nickleby gives the strong impression that Dickens has not integrated Crummles more fully into the book because he had not altogether decided what to do with him. This impression is reinforced by the fact that one of the central issues to which he turned his attention in his next novel was precisely what entertainers and entertainment had to do with the sort of novel he wanted to write. The very lack of systematic thematic function for the players allows Dickens to present them in abundant detail, with a clear eye on their limitations as well as on their virtues. It gives them a historical accuracy and a fictional complexity considerably greater than is to be found in the picture of Sleary's circus, in which thematic purpose simplifies and idealizes the raw materials on which those entertainers are based. In Nicholas Nickleby the actors do not contribute significantly to an overall design, but they stand out in a glorious fragment, conceived in love and portrayed in zestful vitality.
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CHAPTER 4
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
The Old Curiosity Shop
The Assessment of
Popular Entertainment
The Saints are endeavouring to put down that ancient City Festival, Bartholomew Fair . . . To what a state would some morbid philosophers reduce the people of England, once merry England . . . It affords, once a year, harmless recreation for the people, and promotes mirth and good humour. Are the poor and industrious classes never to smile?
Press cutting dated 28 June 18401
I
In July 1840, just one year after the publication of Chapter 48 of Nicholas Nickleby, in which Nicholas bade a final farewell to the strolling player Vincent Crummles, Dickens once more sent the protagonist of one of his stories among a group of showfolk. Chapter 16 of The Old Curiosity Shop introduces a new series of adventures with entertainment figures and sets the tone for the most important presentation of popular entertainment in all of Dickens's fiction. Little Nell, fleeing with her grandfather from their home in London and heading she knows not whither, stumbles upon the puppet-exhibitors Codlin and Short among the gravestones of a country churchyard, and for the next few days she travels in company with the Punch and Judy men, meeting a variety of itinerant showfolk along the way. For Nell the entertainers constitute both a refuge and a threat; and, unable to find lasting security either with Codlin or subsequently with Mrs Jarley, she moves on to her inexorable doom. Popular entertainment in The Old Curiosity Shop is thus presented in a context of flight, oppression and death, as Dickens surveys the decline of traditional rural amusements which he cherished.
As subject-matter alone, scenes and characters from the enter-
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tainment world fill the novel with curiosities and make it an invaluable document about the state of popular amusements of the day. Dickens offers visits to a country race meeting and to a metropolitan circus, and he assembles a representative sampling of kinds of entertainer who were to be found in early nineteenth-century England: vignettes of itinerant showmen, including stilt-walkers, performing dogs, conjurors, freaks, exhibitors and various hangers-on; and fuller sketches of Punch and Judy operators and of a travelling waxworks proprietor. Besides their value as social history, these characters enter Dickens's gallery of vivid personalities in their own right, and they function also on the level of plot, variously offering Nell succour, spurring her on her way, and assisting in her escape and rescue. Each of the novel's three central characters is conceived partly in relation to the entertainment world: most obviously Swiveller, whose constant quotation from song and stage and equally frequent transformation of his circumstances into the stuff of blood-and-thunder melodrama make him, a mere enthusiast rather than professional showman, the most entertaining character in the book; but also Quilp, whose folklore origins and affinities with Punch generate much of the complex significance of his character, and Nell, whom Dickens conceived from the outset in juxtaposition to the 'crowd of uncongenial and ancient things'.2
Dickens draws on these entertainment materials in developing the themes of The Old Curiosity Shop: the precariousness of the showmen's lives emphasizes Nell's plight and contributes to the general concern with the passing of old ways; the financial sharpness of some of them forms part of Dickens's indictment of commercial and economic attitudes; their practices and self-assessments are central to the novel's themes of art and artistry; and the structural deployment of these figures, particularly Swiveller, dramatizes the joyful and life-affirming potential of the creative imagination.
Begun in haste, The Old Curiosity Shop retains rough edges which detract from its ultimate achievement as a work of art. As Forster recorded many years later, Dickens wrote it 'with less consciousness of design on his part than I can remember in any other instance throughout his career'.3 The awkward shift from first- to third-person narration at the end of Chapter 3 and the under emphasis of Richard Swiveller, the character who ultimately carries the weight of the book's positive resolution, are obvious instances of artistic blemish. Additionally, The Old Curiosity Shop is the furthest removed of all Dickens's novels from directly mimetic expression. Dickens deliberately blurs precision of time and place, idealizes his heroine, and creates a fantastic ogre for his villain. Fairy-tale motifs,
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non-realistic details, and a mythic conception of plot and character distance the book from verisimilitude and lift it into an imaginary realm all its own.
The Old Curiosity Shop is nevertheless a highly topical work, one in which Dickens can be seen responding with a sense of urgency to pressing issues of the moment. Topicality is manifest in Nell's glimpse at the torments of the 'Hungry Forties' in Chapter 45, when she passes through the great industrial town, but it is most pervasive in the book's treatment of popular entertainment. The year 1840 was critical in the history of the amusements of the people and was seen as such by observers at the time. The Old Curiosity Shop, universally loved or hated as the story of Little Nell, is also the work in which Dickens most fully assesses the condition of England's entertainment and its meaning for his own art as a popular entertainer. In the pages which follow we shall examine the importance of this subject in Dickens's novel, looking in turn at Nell, Quilp and Swiveller, as well as at the showfolk themselves. First, however, we must step back to consider an event which occurred in the summer of 1840, of great moment in the history of English popular entertainment.
II
In the heart of the City of London, in Smithfield, every September from time out of memory great crowds had gathered for a hugely popular annual festivity. Bartholomew Fair, of ancient origin, protected by royal charter, frequented by the foremost showmen of the land, and enjoyed by the humble and the noble alike, was the most notable single instance in England of the living traditions of popular entertainment. Stilt-walkers, jugglers, gingerbread-sellers and exhibitors of freaks made fortunes competing for pennies with the big menageries and theatre booths, and the noise, bustle and confusion had long been thought to epitomize the very nature of the amusements of the people. Celebrated for centuries by the fun-lover and denounced for at least as long by the moralist, Bartholomew Fair seemed an institution of eternal fixity, as secure as the months of the year and the days of the week.4
Then, on 7 July 1840, four days before Dickens published the chapter which introduced entertainers into The Old Curiosity Shop, the Court of Common Council of the Corporation of the City of London issued a proclamation which stated
That the booths for the exhibition of plays, interludes, panto-
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The suppression of Bartholomew Fair was the single most important blow against popular entertainment in the whole of the nineteenth century It happened in 1840, the year in which Dickens was writing The Old Curiosity Shop.
The Old Curiosity Shop
mimes, and all other theatrical representations be henceforth excluded from the fair.5
Technically this was no more than one clause in a routine updating of regulations concerning ordinary activities which came under the jurisdiction of the City. The legal status of the fair was unaltered. The civic authorities were fully aware, however, that their action was tantamount to utter suppression, and they acted with that express purpose. There is no evidence to indicate how quickly or in what detail Dickens became aware of this enactment, but it is inconceivable that he was long ignorant of the result, which effectively brought to an inglorious end the most famous of all English fairs.
Bartholomew Fair had been founded in the twelfth century by the monk Rahere, and granted a royal charter by Henry I in 1133 From its very inception, entertainment was a principal attraction of the fair, and its commercial function had virtually ceased by at least 1671, when the City first considered suppression. The fair's reputation as a scene of debauchery and vulgar amusement was already well established by the time Jonson wrote his play about it in 1614, but in the eighteenth century the foremost actors of the land performed in its theatre booths. Gentry, even royalty, frequented Bartholomew Fair in its heyday, between the Restoration and the middle of the eighteenth century. Throughout these years loud calls were made for its suppression, but it took half a century of official action, of riots and deaths to restrict its duration from a fortnight to three days. By the end of the eighteenth century respectable visitors had abandoned the fair to the lower classes, but it remained a lucrative field for showmen. George Daniel offers the following list of receipts for 1828:
Wombwell's menagerie, ｣1700;
Atkin's ditto, ｣1000; Richardson's theatre ｣1200;
the price of admission to each being sixpence. Morgan's menagerie ｣150;
admission 3d. Balls ｣80; Ballard ｣89;
Keyes ｣20; Frazer ｣26; Pike ｣40;
Pig-faced Lady ｣150; Corder's head ｣100;
Chinese Jugglers ｣50; Fat boy and girl ｣140;
Salamander ｣30; diorama Navarin ｣60;
Scotch giant ｣21. The admission to the last twelve
shows varied from 2d to 1/2d.6
With earnings of this magnitude available, it is no wonder that showmen flocked to Smithfield each September. Daniel's list indicates something of the variety of attractions of the fair, and makes clear just how large the crowds must have been for exhibitors to collect so much money for such low admittance fees. Bartholomew Fair was
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truly popular, both in its wide appeal and in the type of audience which came.
Despite its size and longevity, however, the fair was in serious decline by the 1830s. In 1831 the theatrical showman John Richardson lost ｣50 and Wombwell's menagerie only made expenses; in 1838 the number of shows plunged from eighteen to ten. One cause of decline was the great social upheaval in the nation at large, and the City Solicitor, concluding his report on the fair to the Market Committee in 1840, took a high moral view of the situation pointing complacently to the March of Progress:
. . . and when we consider the improved condition and conduct of the working classes in the Metropolis, and reflect upon the irrefragable proofs continually before us, that the humbler orders are fast changing their habits, and substituting country excursions by rail roads and steam boats, and other innocent recreations, for the vicious amusements of the description which prevailed in Bartholomew Fair, it is perhaps not too much to conclude that it is unnecessary for the Corporation to apply to Parliament to abate the nuisance.7
No doubt the country's burgeoning wealth and increasing social mobility were improving the manners of some sections of the community, but this was hardly the whole story. The simple fact is that the Corporation systematically raised tolls and ground-fees throughout the preceding decade, until it was financially impossible for the showmen to make a profit at Bartholomew Fair. In 1831 the City charged Wombwell ｣120 to set up his wild-beast show at the fair, and there were reports that year of the authorities refusing to let grounds for shows. In 1832 no booths or shows were allowed in any outlying avenues, and in 1838 the dues for standings at the fair were doubled; although City Collectors were unable to make the showmen pay the new rates that year, at the next fair the doubled charges were enforced. The exhibitors' difficulties were plaintively summarized in May of 1840 in a memorial from Nelson Lee and John Johnson, who had purchased Richardson's theatre after the great showman died in 1836. They observed:
That from a regulation at the first Bartholomew Fair they became proprietors an advance was made from ｣25 to ｣35, each year following it had been raised to the enormous sum of ｣70.
That your memorialists thereby find their interest so materially injured that they feel bound in justice to themselves and
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families to approach you gentlemen with their humble memorial.
That your memorialists relying upon custom from time immemorial and having obeyed the law to its very letter having ventured to risk such an outlay as must by the present arrangement prove a heavy and ruinous loss. . .8
This plea, although based on appeals to human decency, family obligation, financial responsibility and the sanction of longstanding precedent, fell upon deaf ears, and by the time it was presented their cause was already lost. In 1830 the City had purchased toll rights for the fair from Lord Kensington, thus removing legal obstacles to suppression. On 18 October 1839, in response to a petition from the London City Mission urging suppression of Bartholomew Fair, the Market Committee ordered Charles Pearson, the City Solicitor, to look into the powers of the Corporation regarding the fair. His report, submitted on l9 June 1840, noted the difficulty in applying to Parliament to revoke an ancient royal charter, but proposed the simple expedient of circumscribing the fair t~ its original object trade - and banning the use of the fairgrounds for show-booths. Since all trading purposes of the fair had long since vanished, this proposal was, as the Solicitor noted, 'equivalent to its entire suppression'. The Market Committee gratefully acknowledged Mr Pearson's services, and forwarded his report to Common Council for approval, pausing long enough in the process to dismiss Johnson and Lee's memorial. On 7 July, Common Council accepted the report, and published new orders for the fair, containing the fatal clause excluding theatrical representations. Swings, roundabouts and other machinery were also banned, and the result was immediate and conclusive. That year only three wild-beast shows were exhibited at the fair, along with the toy- and gingerbread-stalls, and in 1842 even the menageries were excluded. Although it limped on until 1855, from 1840 Bartholomew Fair was effectively dead.
After fair-time that year, on 16 October the Common Council noted a communication from the Commissioner of the City Police, reporting with 'the greatest satisfaction' the 'tranquil character which pervaded St Bartholomew's Fair from the proclamation to its close'; like the City Solicitor, he attributed the peacefulness to 'the cheering influence of moral improvement in the sentiments and character of the people'.9 Newspaper reports concerning the fair were more mundane in what they pointed to as the source of tranquillity.
. . . The fact is, the fair is virtually defunct, leaving thousands
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of mourners inconsolable for its premature and untimely end; the Law has overtaken Old Bartlemy, and, though as robust and wickedly inclined as ever, the veteran vagabond has been duly strangled by the 'Civic Functionary' and (ah! ingrate body!) by the order of the Corporation.10
Other reports echoed the conviction that Bartholomew Fair was dead, killed by civic action, and they questioned the wisdom of its suppression.
Bartholomew Fair having fallen into a bad odour during the last few years . . . it has been voted a public nuisance . . . the general opinion is it will never be held again . . . It is a question of sound policy, however, whether, when the inhabitants of the metropolis are deprived of their amusements in one quarter, they ought not to be provided with something of an amusing and instructive kind in a more convenient locality.11
Expressions of regret, although certainly not unanimous, were widespread.
We wish the Corporation had made arrangements to hold the fair on some other spot. 'Tis a pity the amusements of the people should be altogether crushed.12
What these press reports make clear is that there was considerable public awareness at the time of an irrevocable end to Bartholomew Fair. The newspaper accounts are obituaries, and they are emphatic in attributing the cause of death to the policies of the civic authorities.
The suppression of Bartholomew Fair was the single most devastating blow to popular entertainment in the whole of the nineteenth century. Other fairs died, and some grew healthier; old sports and recreations declined, and new ones took their places; but Bartholomew Fair had symbolic value far beyond its role as a famous annual festival. As the press reports just quoted suggest, Old Bartlemy was seen to be representative of the traditional right of the English people to leisure amusements, and its suppression thus struck at something fundamental, not only for the showmen whose occupations were threatened, but also for the common people who enjoyed the shows. If there was any one moment in Dickens's lifetime when the state of popular entertainment called for immediate concern, it was the summer of 1840, the very months during which he was composing the scenes with travelling showmen in The Old Curiosity Shop.
Dickens's novel is not about Bartholomew Fair, but it is con-
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cerned centrally with the collapsing state of popular entertainment symbolized by the termination of this great event. The showfolk with whom Nell comes into contact are precisely the sort who would include Bartholomew Fair as the prime venue on their tours about the country, and the precarious fortunes of Dickens's fictional figures accurately reflect the lot of the itinerant entertainer in England at this critical time.
"'Many's the hard day's walking in rain and mud, and with never a penny earned,"' Short tells the Single Gentleman (OCS, 37), and all of the entertainers whom Nell meets are hard pressed to make a living. Their legal position was no better: the Punch show is run out of town on one occasion, when it is deemed 'a libel on the beadle' (OCS, 17). Mrs Jarley, with a more extensive exhibition and a more comfortable lifestyle, considers herself far superior to mere puppet operators, but the combined blandishments of Slum the poet, Little Nell and Mrs Jarley herself are incapable of securing paying customers for the waxworks, and the hollowness, of Mrs Jarley's social pretensions is exposed when the self-righteous schoolmistress, Miss Monflathers, threatens to have her put in the stocks (OCS, 31). Beset by figures of authority, financially insecure, and turning against one another in their struggle for survival, Dickens's entertainers eke out an existence on the fringes of society.
None of Dickens's characters visits Smithfield at fair-time; indeed, it is never mentioned in the novel. Dickens wrote the chapter which sent Nell out of London more than two months before the date of the fair, and by September he had reached the point in the book's composition at which Nell's association with Mrs Jarley - the last of the entertainers she meets - is rapidly nearing its end. It would have required radical restructuring of the plot for Dickens to have brought Nell to Smithfield instead of to the rural race meeting and, of the characters who remain in London, Quilp and Swiveller have other occupations and Kit goes to the circus, not to the fair. Furthermore, none of Dickens's letters written during these months in 1840 refers to Bartholomew Fair, and when the time came he was far away in Broadstairs on holiday with his family.
Bartholomew Fair is thus neither an overt topic in The Old Curiosity Shop nor a demonstrable influence upon Dickens's novel. Nevertheless, the suppression of this famous ancient festival is deeply symptomatic of the situation of popular entertainment at the time he was writing. The demise of the foremost gathering-place in England for itinerant performers and the greatest annual festivity for the common people in London adds poignant dimension to the nostalgic tone of the novel and gives the utmost timeliness to its themes.
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Popular entertainment in The Old Curiosity Shop was a matter of urgent significance.
III
Dickens's fourth novel was conceived as the story of Nell, a young girl who lives with her grandfather in a shop filled with antiques, and he designed it for publication in the periodical which he had just begun, Master Humphrey’s Clock. Early in the composition of Clock materials and before a word had been published, Dickens wrote to Forster to express his conviction that he had hit upon a striking idea. 'I think of lengthening Humphrey, finishing the description of the society and closing with the little child-story, which is SURE to be effective, especially after the old man's quiet way.'13 Most commentators have assumed this to be a reference to the opening sketch of Nell, but Malcolm Andrews has persuasively argued that 'the little child-story' is rather 'A Confession Found in a Prison in the Time of Charles the Second', a brief tale which Dickens placed immediately prior to Chapter 1 of The Old Curiosity Shop in Master Humphrey’s Clock.14 Recounting the murder of a 4-year-old boy, the 'Confession' contrasts boldly in tone with the Clock society and thus fulfils Dickens's desire for material 'effective . . . after the old man's quiet way'. But, whether or not the child in the letter is Nell, there can be no question but that her story took strong hold on Dickens's imagination and quickly subsumed his plans for the Clock as a miscellany.
From the very outset, Dickens thought of Nell in relation to curiosities, animate and inanimate, which surround her. His conception depended primarily on contrast, the juxtaposition of starkly opposed images. The opening episode is constructed, as Robert Patten has demonstrated, on a series of oppositions, between beauty and ugliness, innocence and evil, female and male, youth and age, health and decrepitude, day and night, warmth and cold.15 Master Humphrey, an observer of life, who, as he informs us in the story's opening sentences, wanders the streets by night 'speculating on the characters and occupations of those who fill the streets' in a manner typical of Dickens's curiosity-seeking narrators, meets a lost child and leads her home. Nell's purity and loveliness are highlighted by the gloomy setting to which Master Humphrey restores her, and he reacts to what he sees with considerable disquiet. But both Nell and her grandfather are surprised at this; both staunchly deny that Nell is in an alien environment, and they assure their visitor of the deep love they share for one another. Both of them have implicit faith that Nell
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belongs in the shop with the old man, who insists to Master Humphrey that '"she is the one object of my care"'. Nell is presented, in short, in a complex image of connectedness and separation; the shop setting is integral to her presence, and yet she is sharply differentiated from it.
The final paragraph of the chapter recounts Master Humphrey's troubled recollection of Nell alone in the shop.
But, all that night, waking or in my sleep, the same thoughts recurred, and the same images retained possession of my brain. I had, ever before me, the old dark murky rooms - the gaunt suits of mail with their ghostly silent air - the faces all awry, grinning from wood and stone - the dust, and rust, and worm that lives in wood - and alone in the midst of all this lumber and decay and ugly age, the beautiful child in her gentle slumber, smiling through her light and sunny dreams.
(OCS, 1)
What Dickens emphasizes here, and what the accompanying illustrations portray, is that Nell is to be seen not in isolation, but in intimate connection with the grotesque objects about her. The vividness of Dickens's image of Nell in this scene goes some way to suggest why her story so attracted him, and when he came to excise Clock materials from the text in preparation for the publication of The Old Curiosity Shop in volume form he found room near the end of Chapter 1 to interpolate a paragraph which meditates on the source of impact.16
We are so much in the habit of allowing impressions to be made upon us by external objects, which should be produced by reflection alone, but which, without such visible aids, often escape us, that I am not sure I should hive been so thoroughly possessed by this one subject, but for the heaps of fantastic things I had seen huddled together in the curiosity-dealer's warehouse. These, crowding on my mind, in connection with the child, and gathering round her, as it were, brought her condition palpably before me. I had her image, without any effort of imagination surrounded and beset by everything that was foreign to its nature, and farthest removed from the sympathies of her sex and age. If these helps to my fancy had all been wanting, and I had been forced to imagine her in a common chamber, with nothing unusual or uncouth in its appearance, it is very probable that I should have been less impressed with her strange and solitary state. As it was, she seemed to exist in a kind of allegory; and, having these shapes about her, claimed my
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interest so strongly that (as I have already remarked) I could not dismiss her from my recollection, do what I would. (OCS, 1)
Dickens directs his focus in this paragraph, as throughout the chapter, principally upon Nell, and he subordinates the curiosities as 'visual aids' to his interest in her. But he is equally clear that without these aids his narrator, Master Humphrey, would have been 'less impressed' with her. Although 'foreign to her nature', the grotesque objects around Nell arouse his interest in 'her strange and solitary state' and provide an essential component in the total image. Nell is in, but not of, the curiosities.
Dickens's correspondence concerning the two illustrations which accompany number 4 of Master Humphrey’s Clock, in which Nell's story first appeared, further clarifies his idea. Both engravings depict Nell in the shop, and Dickens took his customary scrupulous care to ensure that his illustrators would realize his intentions. The initial design of neither drawing satisfied him, and he returned both to the artists for retouching. To Ebeneezer Landells, who engraved the headpiece, he wrote, 'I was more than doubtful of the child's face, and the subject is one of the last importance to the work'.17 And to Samuel Williams, illustrator of 'The Child in her Gentle Slumber he explained more fully:
The object being to show the child in the midst of a crowd of uncongenial and ancient things, Mr Dickens scarcely feels the very pretty drawing inclosed, as carrying out his idea: the room being to all appearances an exceedingly comfortable one pair, and the sleeper being in a very enviable condition. If the composition would admit of a few grim, ugly articles seen through a doorway beyond, for instance, and giving a notion of great gloom outside the little room and surrounding the chamber, it would be much better. The figure in the bed is not sufficiently childish, and would perhaps look better without a cap, and with the hair floating over the pillow. The last paragraph of the paper (which perhaps Mr Williams has) expresses Mr Dickens's idea better than he can convey it in any other words.18
Dickens's instructions to his illustrators insist that the contrast between Nell and her setting is his overriding concern. The child's face must be youthful and innocent, an effect achieved in the finished headpiece illustration by the placing of Nell upright in the full glow of candlelight, while the two old men are stooping beside her, Master Humphrey obscured in shadow and the grandfather's back to us. Nell's face is the clear and bright centre of the drawing, sur-
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rounded by a clutter of ungainly objects and thrown into relief by the darkened door behind the figures. Similarly, Williams's reworked engraving of Nell asleep casts a strong light upon her face and pillow, and fills her room with grotesque and darkened objects. In both engravings the juxtaposition of the young girl and the gloomy surroundings provides the central impact of each scene just as the introductory chapter places its major emphasis on this contrast.
The inextricable link between Nell and the shop provides the keynote for the popular entertainments theme of The Old Curiosity Shop. We are not yet in the world of the showfolk, but from the outset we are very definitely in the realm of early nineteenth-century amusements. Dickens describes the shop as
. . . one of those receptacles for old and curious things which seem to crouch in odd corners of this town, and to hide their musty treasures from the public eye in jealousy and distrust. There were suits of mail standing like ghosts in armour, here and there; fantastic carvings brought from monkish cloisters; rusty weapons of various kinds; distorted figures in china, and wood, and iron, and ivory; tapestry, and strange furniture that might have been designed in dreams.
(OCS, 1)
What this description makes evident is that Nell's home is hardly distinguishable from a museum. There is no suggestion that any more customers ever come to browse through Nell's grandfather's collection than visit Sol Gills's nautical instruments shop in Dombey and Son, and financial ruin would have been all too probable even without his gambling losses, but the shop is nevertheless a picturesque example of a kind of popular entertainment which was widespread in its day. It is the repository of a shabby collection of miscellaneous antiques, incoherently arranged and haphazardly exhibited, and indefinite as to whether its objects are available for sale or solely for display. We are made aware from the very outset that Nell lives in an exhibition-room.
From the early eighteenth century, exhibitions of every sort, including collections of random paraphernalia such as Nell's grandfather's, attracted wide interest in England and played a not unimportant role in amusing and educating the public. Newspapers were regularly full of advertisements celebrating the latest wonders on show, and several major collections of exhibition-bills from the period have survived to suggest the extent and variety of this form of amusement. Curiosity, as Dickens proposes in the book's title, was a key source of attraction to exhibitions in an age which saw massive expansion and discovery but which lacked photography to dis-
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seminate visual evidence of new and old wonders. The exhibitions offered an incredible variety of objects for display, ranging from antiquities to modern inventions, from shells and stuffed animals to waxworks, paintings, stained glass and paper statuary. They were large or small, itinerant or permanently settled, exclusive or open to all, and there were many of them. In eighteenth-century London, Don Saltero opened his coffee-house with a huge and various collection of miscellaneous curiosities on display; in early nineteenth-century Portsea, an enterprising showman advertised his exhibition consisting exclusively of a plank covered with barnacles, which had been washed ashore in a recent storm.19 The shop of Mr Venus, the bone-articulator in Our Mutual Friend, is a later, specialized example of the same continuing phenomenon.
Although extravagant puffing was invariable in advertisements for the shows, the actual contents were frequently exceedingly modest both in quality and in quantity. As Richard Altick has suggested, The Old Curiosity Shop is a seedy descendant of the elegant cabinets which were the hobby of a number of eighteenth-century gentlemen.20 Altick has lavishly documented the genealogy of London exhibitions and shown how fine - and not so fine - collections all too frequently degenerated into dusty junk shops. Exhibitions were ubiquitous in London, but all save a few were financially precarious, disappearing nearly as rapidly as they appeared. Quilp's first action, on taking possession of the shop, is to have all its lumber hauled away, and such brutal dispersal was the common fate of exhibitions far more pretentious than that of Nell's grandfather.
As a place of amusement, even though it 'hides its musty treasures from the public eye', the shop is a wholly appropriate setting for several of the people we meet there. Nell's grandfather is described as 'wonderfully suited to the place . . . nothing . . . looked older or more worn than he' (OCS, 1). For Nell, of course, the old man is her chief companion and care in the world, but for Master Humphrey and for us as readers he appears initially as the shop's foremost curiosity. Master Humphrey invites us to view Nell's grandfather as not so much a human personality as an old, dilapidated and mysterious object, at one with the shop he inhabits.21 As the story proceeds, he develops into a more substantial character, but to the very end he remains a bizarre contrast to Nell, a constant reminder of the shop which they have left behind, and throughout their travels the old man's constant fear is that he may literally be turned into an object on exhibition, by being incarcerated in a madhouse. In fact, Bedlam had closed its doors to the idly curious as far previously as 1770, but physical restraint, which so terrifies the old man, was still customary procedure at the time Dickens was writing in 1840.22
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Other characters who appear in the shop in the book's opening pages participate even more conspicuously in the entertainment world. Kit, the shop's only constant visitor, is introduced in the opening scene in the immediately recognizable role of clown. Master Humphrey describes him as 'a shock-headed shambling awkward lad with an uncommonly wide mouth, very red cheeks, a turned-up nose, and certainly the most comical expression of face I ever saw' (OCS, 1). And he concludes his description by reporting that Kit was 'the comedy of the child's life'. Dickens evidently changed his mind almost at once about the boy's function in the story, for Kit soon sheds his near-idiocy and becomes Nell's faithful but largely ineffectual champion. In later chapters he is noteworthy not for Grimaldi-like antics but for cheerful, honest and earnest devotion to duty. At the same time, however, the book's illustrations retain the image of Kit as clown to the very end, and not only he but also the entire Nubbles family are invariably pictured as the grotesque figures of the opening presentation.
The next two chapters introduce Swiveller, devotee of song and stage, and Quilp, freak-show creature let loose. Swiveller reveals himself from the moment of his first appearance as a raffish swell, wholly immersed in the low-life culture of the metropolis, with his catalogue of curious observations, his whistles and snatches from song, his stage whispers and melodramatically inflated rhetoric. Dickens clearly projected much of his own fascination with humble amusements into Swiveller and he expressed great satisfaction with Forster's immediate approval. 'I mean to make much of him,' Dickens confided.23 Quilp's presence is striking even before he says or does anything, on account of his wildly grotesque appearance. Kit later calls him '"a uglier dwarf than can be seen anywheres for a penny"' (OCS, 6), and Quilp's affinity with monstrosities offered for exhibition is clear from Dickens's first words describing him, 'so low in stature as to be quite a dwarf, though his head and face were large enough for the body of a giant' (OCS, 3). By the time Master Humphrey excuses himself from the duties of narration at the end of Chapter 3, a clear and varied context of popular entertainment has been established. No actual showmen appear until Chapter 16, after Nell has fled to the countryside, and the shop is not an arena for professional performance; but the setting and the characters in it have firm roots in traditional amusements of the people. Nell is conceived in this context, and it is a natural transition from the shop and its visitors to her later meetings with showfolk and to her employment in the waxwork.
When she flees from London, a considerable portion of her journey places her in direct contact with professional entertainers. Her
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position among them parallels that in the shop: she is simultaneously part of the scene and apart from it. Nell helps the puppet men to repair their damaged properties and readily accepts their invitation to travel together. At the races, despite the bustle and the distinct lack of gentility of the crowds, she 'felt it an escape from the town and drew her breath more freely' (OCS, 19). This welcome relief from her troubles is short-lived, however, and, discouraged by her inability to beg successfully, frightened by the bold pledges of friendship from Codlin and Short, and urgently warned away by the handsome 'lady' in the carriage, Nell flees again. With Mrs Jarley, Nell feels 'joy of hearing that they were to go forward in the caravan' (OCS, 26), and she soon becomes herself the principal attraction at the waxwork. Even under the kindly wing of Mrs Jarley, however, Nell has nightmares which mingle waxen effigies with Quilp; she is ostracized from society - not merely scorned by the absurdly snobbish Monflathers, but able to witness the true affection of the Edwards sisters only 'at a little distance' - and she is forced once again to flee because her new income only serves to subsidize her grandfather's manic gambling. In these ways the complexity of Nell's relation to the entertainment world persists after she has left the shop.
Three key aspects of Dickens's presentation of Nell's adventures among the showfolk require detailed attention. First, we must consider the relationship of these episodes to historical time and place. As she is leaving London, Nell compares herself to Christian in The Pilgrim's Progress (OCS, 15), an explicit indication that Dickens thinks of her flight as a spiritual journey. He refrains from assigning an explicit date or location to her travels, and there is a distinct aura of dream landscape when Nell passes through fire and over water. Details abound, however, to suggest that as he wrote Dickens had a clear route in mind for Nell, and the topical urgency of his entertainment themes is just one of several factors which prevent the story from rising to a level of abstraction outside temporal and spatial considerations. Recognizing the nature of the show-figures Dickens presents can help to clarify the dynamics of this tension. Second, we must discuss the authenticity of these characters as historical types. All of the entertainers in The Old Curiosity Shop represent figures familiar in village squares, city streets, and fairgrounds up and down England in the early nineteenth century. By considering them in relation to their prototypes we can simultaneously clarify the value of Dickens's sketches as social history and appreciate more fully their significance within the structure of the novel. Third, we must examine the thematic function of these entertainers. Because Dickens conceived of Nell in conjunction with curiosities, the showfolk play
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an integral part in his development of the book's main interests, just as her plight adds dimension to our understanding of them.
IV
Dickens purposely leaves nameless the locations of Nell's adventures with the showfolk, but there is strong evidence that he had the Midlands between London and Wolverhampton in mind while he was writing this section of the novel. In a letter to Forster he commented on the terrifying industrial town which appears in Chapter 45, after Nell has left Mrs Jarley: 'You will recognise a description of the road we travelled between Birmingham and Wolverhampton: but I had conceived it so well in my mind that the execution doesn't please me quite as well as I expected.'24 In itself, this remark would not require Nell to have crossed the intervening territory between London and Birmingham, since the unspecified nature of her route freed Dickens to invent a wholly fictional landscape drawn from diverse settings, but the consensus among Dickensian topographers favours this part of England for Nell's route. Dickens and Habl�t Browne visited the Midlands on a holiday tour a year and a half before the writing began, taking in both the industrial Black Country and the rural countryside around the Welsh border, including the village of Tong, which is generally thought to be Nell's final resting-place.
In a 1924 article in the Dickensian, Walter Dexter assembled the conclusions of all previous proponents of an itinerary for Little Nell, and he offered a detailed table incorporating his own views. A year later, in The England of Dickens, the indefatigable Dexter wrote in considerably more detail defending a precise route for Nell through the Midlands: from London through Uxbridge, to Aylesbury (where she meets Codlin and Short), Buckingham (site of the Jolly Sandboys), Banbury (the racetrack), Warmington (the school), Warwick (where Mrs Jarley sets up her waxwork), then on to Birmingham, Wolverhampton and Tong.25 To tie Dickens's fictional geography so rigidly to actual locations involves highly suspect critical assumptions, and because Dickens so consistently avoids giving place-names during Nell's journey one must demur from the specificity of Dexter's route. Nevertheless, there is considerable plausibility in the more limited contention that Dickens had in mind a Midlands setting as a source for the symbolic landscape which he pictured in the novel, and it is worth looking to the area for evidence of early nineteenth-century popular local entertainments which may have suggested characters and events to him.
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That fact-finding could have been the motive for Dickens's expedition to the Midlands in 1838 is altogether possible, because, as we saw in Chapter 3, in January of the same year he had gone with Browne to Yorkshire to investigate the schools there for background to Nicholas Nickleby. His second bachelor holiday with Browne occurred nine months later, in late October and early November. Dickens's diary entries for the trip are cryptic, primarily recording expenses, and his letter to his wife written during the trip offers only brief reactions to Kenilworth and Warwick castles, to the squalor of the Black Country, and to a night at the theatre.26 But the impressions were characteristically lasting, and they found direct expression eight years later in Dombey and Son, in the episodes containing Mr Dombey's trips to Kenilworth and Warwick while courting Edith Granger. That Dickens was familiar with the Midlands by the time he wrote The Old Curiosity Shop is indisputable: he had been to Birmingham on reporting duties for the Morning Chronicle in 1834; he had sent Mr Pickwick from Bristol to Birmingham, and he had visited there again in April of 1840 when the first number of Master Humphrey’s Clock appeared, observing his habit of being absent from London on the dates of first publication of his works.27
Dickens's direct knowledge of the area thus predates the composition of The Old Curiosity Shop by several years, and the story's action is set back in time. The internal dating of the book is clear and consistent, and, as in Pickwick, the fictional seasons correspond closely to the time when the various episodes first appeared serially. Thus Nell leaves London in June, and number 13, in which this action occurs, was published on 27 June 1840; it is autumn when she arrives at her final destination, and 31 October when number 31 appeared; and 30 January 1841 for number 44, in which she dies, in mid-winter. But the historical year in which these seasons occur is nowhere nearly so specific. Dickens is as indefinite about date as he is about place in this novel, and, as Angus Easson has shown, he seems even as he was writing to have pushed back the chronology of the book's events from near-contemporaneity to about a decade earlier. Noting a reference to Her Majesty's attorneys in Chapter 13, Easson observes:
This dates the story at this point after the accession of Queen Victoria in 1837. However, Dickens progressively pushed back the supposed date of events; by [Chapter 331 he is stressing Bevis Marks as 'once the residence of Mr Sampson Brass' and says 'in the days of its occupation by Sampson Brass'. In Chapter 63, reference is made to His Majesty, either George IV or William IV since Lord Byron is dead (Chapter 29), which gives us a date
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after 1824. By the end of the tale Kit has children six and seven years old, so that events are placed at least that time back after 1841 (i.e. 1835-6).28
Such vagueness about dating within a work is not unusual for Dickens at any time in his career, but scattered references such as those noted by Easson make it certain that a period between the 1820s and the mid-1830s was in Dickens's mind when he imagined the action of The Old Curiosity Shop.
Records survive for these years which document an extensive and diverse array of circuses, waxworks, dwarfs, giants, stilt-walkers and other entertainers who performed along Nell's proposed route. In Birmingham, the largest town in the region, visiting showmen included: Monsieur L. Jacques, a seven-foot-four-inch giant from France, in 1823; a French-speaking doll in 1824; the Industrious Fleas of Signor Bertolletto in 1837; and the Gnome-Fly Hervio Nano in 1838. Stilt-dancers appeared regularly on circus bills. During a slow theatrical season in 1817, R. W. Elliston, then manager of the Theatre Royal, Birmingham, advertised a Bohemian Giant and attracted a huge house, then stepped on to the stage himself to lament that the giant had deceived him and never appeared, but that the rock he was billed to lift was there on the stage for all to see.29 Vuffin, the proprietor of freaks in The Old Curiosity Shop, clearly was not alone in his discontent with giants for ruining the trade (OCS, 19).
In Aylesbury on 17 April 1826 a man named Courtney spent a day walking backwards over a quarter-mile patch of ground until he had completed forty miles; on l9 June 1832 there was donkey racing, a bonfire and other 'nonsense' to celebrate the passing of the Reform Bill.30 Aylesbury churchyard, which Walter Dexter proposes as Nell's meeting-place with Codlin and Short, was notorious as a ground for rough sports and thus a plausible site for Punch to be found. Clement Shorter, supported by other local historians, writes of it:
Tradition tells of a time when Aylesbury churchyard, now so carefully railed off from the footpaths, was the scene of cockfighting, card-playing, and other Hogarthian exploits, and when soldiers were flogged there on occasion. Even up to the beginning of the nineteenth century the elections were held there, and the rival candidates addressed their constituents from the tombstones.31
Aylesbury was known as a gathering-place for gipsies and, although racing was never very popular there, in the nearby village
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of Marlow a two-day race meeting was revived in 1837, and run annually until 1847. Also in Great Marlow, the famous 'Muster' Richardson was buried in 1836 next to his beloved spotted boy, whom he exhibited twenty-five years previously.32
In Buckingham there was a room above a coach house which was used as an occasional theatre by strolling players, and darts, dominoes and the ancient pastime of shove-ha'penny were popular tavern games there.33 Banbury was a prosperous market-town, with as many as nine fairs and two great markets annually from 1797 to 1836; after the latter date, the newly reformed corporation abolished tolls and changed the days of fairs. The Holy Thursday Fair, which was the great holiday fair, held on Ascension Thursday, achieved local notoriety in 1827 when a smallpox epidemic, in which seventy-three people died between June and September, broke out at a sideshow, and by 1837 for the first time there were no amusements of any kind at this fair. B. S. Trinder, writing about Banbury Fair in the nineteenth century, describes its popularity as follows:
In 1832 it was reported that there had never been a greater number of people in the town than there were for the fair, and throughout the 1840s and 1850s Banbury was so crowded on fair days that it was difficult to move in the streets, and many shopkeepers had to board up their windows to avoid having them broken by the crush of humanity on the pavements. . . Many 'cheap Johns' came to sell their wares at Banbury fair. The chief trade was in novelties of various kinds, toys, pictures, and printed songs . . . Another popular trade was in patent medicines . . . Other traders offered to measure the force of punches with a machine or to take heights for a penny . . . The most impressive feature of the fair was the vast array of amusements erected throughout the town centre.
Racing was also held in Banbury; the first recorded races took place in 1729, and there was a one-day racing programme held in July in the early 1840s.34 (Number 17 of Master Humphrey’s Clock, in which Nell goes to the races, was published on 25 July 1840.)
Warwickshire is George Eliot country, and nineteenth-century historians of local folklore and recreations invariably cite 'Mrs Cross' as a prime authority. Arthur Donnithorne's birthday games in Adam Bede, as we noted in Chapter 2, provide a vivid account of a village festival at the turn of the century. The Mill on the Floss, Felix Holt and Middlemarch are all set in Warwickshire in the era of the first Reform Bill (1832), and contain abundant glimpses of leisure pursuits, superstitions and popular activities. Hiring fairs at
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Michaelmas, or 'mops', were annual scenes of festivity, at which farm servants of both sexes festooned their clothes with some ornament indicating the type of service they wished to undertake, and from 1610 until 1853 an 'Olympick Games' was held at Dover's Hill, with wrestling, leaping, pitching the bar and hammer, handling the pike, walking on hands, leapfrog, dancing, horse-racing, handball and hare-hunting. These games were finally suppressed in 1853 because of 'disorderly behaviour'. There was a tradition of giants in the area (the town of Bromsgrove was named for the resting-place of the giant Breme - 'Breme's Grave' - and other warlike giants lived, according to legend, at Birmingham, Kinver, Dudley, Halestown and elsewhere). Warwick was famous for its racing: three-day race meetings in both spring and autumn were well established by 1834. Undoubtedly the most memorable single event in Warwick entertainment annals was the lion-baiting staged by Wombwell, England's foremost wild-beast proprietor of the day, on Tuesday, 26 July 1825. William Hone, with considerable expression of disgust, gives a lengthy, circumstantial report of the baiting in his Every Day Book, recording how three dogs, followed by another three, attacked an extremely docile lion named Nero, and how a second bout was held within the week, in which a more ferocious lion, Wallace, was likewise beset by six dogs.35 The lion-baiting was the most spectacular instance of violent sports such as cock-fighting, bull-running, bull-baiting, badger-baiting and the like, all of which flourished during the eighteenth century in the area we are considering, but which were slowly dying out in the 1820s, and occurred only in isolated instances thereafter.
What is clear from this brief survey, which is no more than a representative sampling of surviving evidence, is that, however prominently a Midlands setting may have figured in Dickens's mind when he wrote about the showfolk in The Old Curiosity Shop, no particular events there for which records have survived can be identified as likely sources. It is possible that he was aware of certain appropriate facts, such as the notoriety of the Aylesbury churchyard or the early-summer date of the Banbury races (although this was only a one-day meeting, whereas the spring and autumn races at Warwick extended over three days, as in The Old Curiosity Shop). But no legitimate claim can be sustained for the exclusive derivation of his fictional events from specifically local activities. Race meetings and churchyard romps were common all over England, and none of the details of Dickens's descriptions localizes his meetings to the extent that only one distinct source is possible. With the single exception of the lion-baiting, which does not gain notice in the novel, all of the activities traced are simply local instances of extremely widespread
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English customs. Blood sports, fairs, tavern games, and races can be documented from medieval times up to the period we are dealing with anywhere in England that records of public pastimes exist. These kinds of popular entertainment (with regional variations, to be sure) were general phenomena, and Dickens could perfectly easily have observed a show in one place and translated it to a quite different setting without in the least stretching the plausibility of his fiction.
Furthermore, as Short remarks to the Single Gentleman, penny showmen earned their livings by moving from one public gathering to the next, often covering a large part of England in a single season.
'It's our reg'lar summer circuit is the West, master, said Short; 'that's where it is. We takes the East of London in the spring and winter, and the West of England in the summertime.'
(OCS, 37)
Short's claim can be verified by consulting the memoirs of actual entertainers of the day. 'Lord' George Sanger, who became one of the foremost celebrities in his profession, and whose career conveniently overlaps with Dickens's, boasted late in life that
There is not, I believe, a town or village of over one hundred inhabitants in this United Kingdom I have not at some time or other visited. So, too, abroad. With the exception of Russia, I have carried my tents into every European country.36
Sanger was exceptional, both in the length of his life and in the size of show which his later prosperity enabled him to present, but the experience of tramping from one fair to the next, from market to racecourse, never hesitating to perform wherever a group of people was to be found, often singing for supper, is a mode of life circumstantially recorded not only by Sanger but also by other itinerants as various as David Prince Miller (penny showman and later strolling player and theatre manager), Billy Purvis (clown), William Green (cheap Jack) and Joe Smith (waxwork proprietor). Because the showmen were itinerant, it follows that the same performances and performers would be found in entirely different settings; not only were the types of entertainment similar throughout the country, but also the individual entertainers themselves were the same. Like the Single Gentleman, Dickens would have been able to meet showmen in London who had travelled widely in the countryside.
It is thus possible - indeed, it seems extremely likely - that
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Traditional types of entertainment were taken up and down the country by individual itinerant showmen, most of whom had only a single attraction to offer.
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Dickens based his notion of the countryside in The Old Curiosity Shop on a Midlands route such as that proposed by Dexter, and at the same time, without the least impropriety, he sketched the originals of some, or all, of his showmen without himself taking one step outside the environs of London. There was ample opportunity for anyone interested in common forms of entertainment to indulge his enthusiasm in London, and an act he saw one day in Hyde Park or at Bartholomew Fair could be seen at other times in towns and villages up and down the country. In the era we are considering, the 1820s and 1830s, most entertainments were, and had been for centuries, itinerant, and concentrated together in any given place at fair or festival times. The showmen of The Old Curiosity Shop reflect this state of affairs, and are representative not of local characters, found only in a single, particular setting, but of the humble entertainers who travelled throughout the country.
Because they roamed up and down the country putting on their shows, and because the shows themselves were traditional, dating back for decades, centuries, even millennia, entertainers in this mould were singularly appropriate for Dickens's purposes in The Old Curiosity Shop. Their mobility enabled him to range far beyond the Midlands in selecting images suitable for the novel. The changelessness of their acts and exhibits allowed him to draw without inconsistency on memories from his own childhood (he was 8 years old in 1820) at the same time as he responded to events which were occurring even while he wrote, notably the suppression of Bartholomew Fair. Oxymoron was inherent in the nature of these entertainers: colourful figures as individuals, they were also embodiments of age-old types. Of high profile as lone, distinctive characters, they merged into the generality of the traditional patterns they perpetuated. Timely and timeless, specific and universal, the itinerant showfolk were precisely the kind of figures to further Dickens's aims in his topical novel about eternal concerns.
V
The types of entertainer Dickens chose to include in The Old Curiosity Shop have firm grounding in historical reality. All of them were engaged in amusements which were traditional and well known throughout England, and as such they provide a vivid picture. The accuracy of detail with which they are presented gives these figures considerable value as social document, and thus, even as they contribute to the immediate concerns of Dickens's fiction, they also demonstrate his journalistic skills at their best. These skills led
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Walter Bagehot to praise Dickens as a 'special correspondent for posterity', and in the description of the itinerant showfolk in The Old Curiosity Shop he has left a record of great interest.37
Specific sources have been proposed for some of these characters, such as a Punch and Judy show watched by an old man with a little girl, which Dickens is supposed to have encountered in Windsor Park, and the waxwork-exhibitor Madame Tussaud, who toured England for more than a quarter of a century before setting up a permanent show at the Bazaar, Baker Street, Portman Square, a short walk from Dickens's home, after 1839, at Devonshire Terrace.38 But, while it is possible that such persons influenced his conception of the entertainers in the novel and provided him with memorable details, the types of figure he drew were too familiar to require particular sources, and in any case, as we saw with the allegation of Jean Davenport's role in Nicholas Nickleby, Dickens's fictional methods rarely depended slavishly on single individual sources. The showfolk in The Old Curiosity Shop represent individualized types of character, not specific originals.
Dickens first introduces the Punch and Judy showmen, Codlin and Short. A team of two was customary for Punch shows; one man handled the puppets from inside the booth while the outside man held the audience's attention - which Codlin does by playing panpipes - and collected the money. Whereas modern Punch booths generally sport red and white striped cloth, Dickens's puppeteers decorate their booth with checked drapery, which early nineteenth-century illustrations invariably corroborate. Dickens itemizes the puppets in the show, including a live dog for Toby, who has graduated from playing opposite Punch to dancing for Jerry. Although all the cast were puppets in most shows, historians have traced the use of actual dogs in a few instances, and, as we saw in Chapter 3, movement between different kinds of show was a frequent occurrence in this era..39 Codlin is reported also to have tried his hand elsewhere, appearing formerly in fairground theatre booths in the role of a ghost (OCS, 16).
Next to appear are Grinder's lot.
Mr Grinder's company, familiarly termed a lot, consisted of a young gentleman and a young lady on stilts, and Mr Grinder himself, who used his natural legs for pedestrian purposes and carried at his back a drum. The public costumes of the young people was of the Highland kind, but the night being damp and cold, the young gentleman wore over his kilt a man's pea jacket reaching to his ankles, and a glazed hat; the young lady too was muffled in an old cloth pelisse and had a handkerchief tied about
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her head. Their Scotch bonnets, ornamented with plumes of jet black feathers Mr Grinder carried on his instrument. (OCS, 17)
Contemporary illustrations, notably those dated 1831, 1833 and 1841 in George Scharf's sketchbook, depict young stilt dancers in a variety of colourful costumes, with a musical accompanist, in open streets. Circus bills confirm that stilts often appeared in the ring; Mayhew interviewed the manager of one stilt-dancing team who worked in fairs and pleasure gardens. Like Grinder, the man himself was not a performer, but trained his wife and daughters and arranged their bookings - as many as eighteen performances in a single day. An indication of the height of the stilts, which make the performers look like 'gaunt giants' to Nell, comes from the artist Henrietta Ward, who recalled that 'Men on stilts, wearing Pierrot's and Harlequin's costumes, came and peeped into windows of the drawing room in Fitzroy Square'.40
Also sporting elegant costumes are another of the groups Nell meets, the dancing dogs belonging to the showman named Jerry. Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century illustrations confirm that dogs performed in elaborate dress: an illustration dated 1753, for example, shows a troupe of dogs attired for a formal ball, while another from 1824 depicts a dog dressed as an admiral, dancing in a village street while another dog jumps through a hoop. They performed a variety of tricks. Bob, purported author of his own autobiography, The Dog of Knowledge (1801), which was exceedingly popular all through the nineteenth century, being reprinted in 1805, 1815, 1848, 1885 and 1891, claimed that he danced in a Harlequin's jacket, fenced with a stick and did gymnastics.41 Aficionados of canine acts were disparaging of 'those straggling dancing dogs still occasionally seen in the streets', and Dickens observes that one new member of Jerry's company was 'not quite certain of his duty' (OCS, 18).Jerry's way of dealing with such a dog is to withhold food and, although nineteenth-century animal-trainers generally claimed to use kindness and encouragement rather than whips and deprivation, Philip Astley is reputed to have claimed that his equine performers acted better than humans 'because mine know if they don't indeed work like horses, I give them no corn - whereas, if your performers do, or do not, walk over the course, they have their prog just the same'.42
The other principal entertainer to be described in The Old Curiosity Shop is Mrs Jarley, the waxwork proprietor. Dickens satirizes her as 'the delight of the Nobility and Gentry and the peculiar pet of the Royal Family' (OCS, 27), undoubtedly glancing in this remark at Madame Tussaud, the most famous of all waxwork-exhibitors, whose memoirs, published in 1838, revealed that she had lived as a
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young woman at Versailles in the French court before the Revolution. Madame Tussaud's advertising routinely boasted of Royal Patronage after 1834 when Princess Augusta, sister of George IV, visited the waxwork at Brighton Town Hall. Like many entertainers of the day, including Madame Tussaud, Mrs Jarley sought to stimulate trade by announcing imminent closure of her show and then extending her stay 'by popular demand'.43 She also employed the services of the poet Slum to sing the wonders of her exhibition. The sort of competition Slum faced can be illustrated by the following verse from an advertisement for Simmons's waxwork in Holborn around 1832.
To Holborn we trotted away,
And got for our pains well requited,
'Twere crowded as much as a play,
And yet ev'ry one seem'd delighted!
Six rooms filled with figures you'll see,
All crowded in groups, such a many,
But it seems such a wonder to see
That they show the whole lot for a penny.
Rumpti, etc.44
On the day Nell joins Mrs Jarley she catches a glimpse of Quilp, and at night when she sleeps in the caravan she has nightmares of being 'hemmed in by a legion of Quilps' (OCS, 27). This detail is consonant with her terror of the dwarf, and of considerable thematic importance to the novel. It is thus fascinating to discover that such a response to living among wax effigies was not merely an invention of Dickens's imagination. One exhibitor, Joe Smith, who began his career with waxworks at Barnet Fair in 1840, the very year of The Old Curiosity Shop, left circumstantial memoirs of his life as a showman, in which he recalled:
I look back even now with a shudder to think of my first night in the show, and of many following nights. I knew perfectly well that the figures were all made up, but when I saw their faces gleam in the moonlight which came through the tent, just sufficient for me to see them, they all looked to be living and staring directly at me. I felt sure they were living ghosts. The distant howling of the dogs about the fair made me think they were groaning. I shut my eyes while I undressed, because I dared not look towards them. When I got into bed the first night, I trembled dreadfully, and groaned quite unintentionally. My aunt thought I was ill. She came out to me and saw
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by my trembling that it was only fright. She made me get up and go round and touch all the faces of the figures, to assure me that they were only wax.45
These examples illustrate the authenticity of detail with which Dickens portrayed his showfolk in The Old Curiosity Shop. In addition, Codlin, Jerry, Vuffin and the rest share a number of characteristics which make them representative not only of specific types but also of a class. All of them are independent itinerant entertainers, operating on a small scale and offering amusements long tested by time. Each is proprietor of a single, unelaborate attraction, which provides employment for himself alone or at most for himself in partnership with one or two others. Codlin and Short work in tandem; Grinder's 'lot' consists of two young stilt-walkers accompanied by himself on the drum; Vuffin exhibits two freaks; Jerry has a team of dogs; and Sweet William performs conjuring tricks on his own. All of them thus operate on a scale smaller than even the smallest company of strolling actors or the tiniest circus. The shows are no bigger than what they can carry on their backs or, in the case of Grinder's stilt-walkers, no bigger than can carry them on their way. Practical considerations kept their establishments small. As one showman observed:
You cannot have more in your show than you can carry in your van; or maybe you have two or more vans, but the same holds good. In our case, we had a van and a cart which carried the tent and other fixtures.
This same entertainer commented wryly upon an Act of Parliament which forbade the use of do-carts; in consequence the wives now had to pull the vans instead.46 Lacking vans, Dickens's entertainers depend on their own feet for transportation, and without fixed exhibition-centres of their own they travel from place to place performing wherever customers can be attracted. Although they routinely congregated at fairs and race meetings, where they could take advantage of the crowds assembled at such places, each of them travelled and exhibited independently. Rivalry, as evidenced in Short's early start from the Jolly Sandboys, was inevitable in such circumstances, and countless instances are recorded in showmen's memoirs of deception, chicanery, puffing and violence to gain precedence. One famous instance can serve to epitomize the rest. On this occasion the menagerie-owner Wombwell, racing his counterpart Atkins to Bartholomew Fair, undertook a forced march from Newcastle, and during the journey his elephant died. Atkins accord-
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ingly advertised his show as the one with 'the only live elephant in the fair'; the enterprising Wombwell promptly set out a banner proclaiming 'the only dead elephant in the fair', which proved the greater attraction.47
Among Dickens's itinerant showfolk Mrs Jarley, with her elegant wagon and more extensive exhibition, is in some ways a ease apart. Certainly she considers herself superior to the other entertainers, as she indicates by her horrified reaction to Nell's innocent question whether she knows Codlin and Short.
'Know 'em child!' cried the lady of the caravan in a sort of shriek. 'Know them! But you're young and inexperienced, and that's your excuse for asking sich a question. Do I look as if I know'd 'em, does the caravan look as if it know'd 'em?'
(OCS, 26)
She admits that she has gone to the races, but strictly in a private capacity as a spectator, and not as an exhibitor herself; whereas the others trudged on foot to the racetrack in order to earn their livelihood, she rode in a gig, on an 'expedition of pleasure', with no thought of 'any matters of business or profit'.
'"There is none of your open-air wagrancy at Jarley's,"' she insists (OCS, 27), and Dickens uses the book's plot to separate Mrs Jarley from the other showfolk. She has a legitimate claim to higher status. Her exhibition includes some hundred life-sized human figures, which require several vans for transportation, in addition to her own travelling caravan. Besides her companion, George, she has two regular assistants to help with the unloading of vans and the decorating of the hall, and she is in a financial position to hire both Nell and her grandfather, and to pay for the services of an advertising agent, the poet Slum. Her exhibition bills boast that she is patronized by Royalty, Nobility and Gentry, and, however improbable clientele of such rank may be, it is certain that she has a show which far surpasses in size and expense anything the other itinerant showmen have to offer. Alone among them she can claim to present 'rational amusement', a show which meets the customary nineteenth-century requirement for entertainment which not only pleases but also instructs. The educational component is versatile, to say the least, since a single effigy can serve as Mary Queen of Scots or Lord Byron, as Grimaldi the clown or Mr Lindley Murray composing his English grammar, but the appeals to realism, morality and history give Mrs Jarley's exhibition a substance far beyond the knockabout fun of Punch and Judy.
Yet Mrs Jarley has much in common with the other entertainers. Although she exhibits in halls or assembly-rooms, she, too, lacks a
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permanent base and travels about the country in search of customers. Her exhibition is larger, but it is no more diverse in kind: a single type of attraction is all she boasts. Even with her assistants, her show remains simple in comparison to the more elaborate organization required for a theatrical company or a circus. At 6d admittance price the waxwork is more expensive to see than the street-shows at which a hat is passed for pennies but still far less than entertainment catering to more exclusive clientele. Jarley's waxwork, like the open-air shows, is essentially popular entertainment.
All of the shows on offer in The Old Curiosity Shop have their roots in the distant past. Conjury, performing animals, and curiosity about human freaks all date from antiquity. Wax effigies and portraits were associated with funeral ceremonies in Egypt, Greece and Rome, and during the Middle Ages they were used in necromancy and in adoration of saints. For centuries wax models of English monarchs were included in royal funeral processions and then put on display in Westminster Abbey, where their dilapidated condition and the greed of the vergers who touted them like vulgar showmen were a national scandal. Waxwork exhibits at Bartholomew Fair are recorded from the seventeenth century, and during the eighteenth century wax models were shown for anatomical instruction, as artistic portraiture, and in miscellaneous exhibits.48
Stilt dancing has been traced back to the Middle Ages. Joseph Strutt relates it to ladder dancing and cites a source from the reign of Henry III; William Hone cites a 1440 manuscript from Norwich, which describes Shrovetide mummers, including some who 'walked on high stilts, with wings at their backs, as cranes'; one of Henry Mayhew's informants recalled family teams who danced on stilts to the accompaniment of a barrel organ in streets, fairs and pleasure gardens early in the nineteenth century.49
Canine acts, which still appear in circuses today, are recorded in early seventeenth-century England, and their heyday was the eighteenth century. Dogs undertook a variety of roles, ranging from the mere savagery of the beasts used in baiting bears, bulls and tigers, to the exhibitions of so-called learned dogs, who performed with numbers, letters of the alphabet, and playing-cards, enacting feats of purported intelligence at fairs and in drawing-rooms. Canine drama filled theatres well into the nineteenth century. There were two distinct classes of performing dog, those highly trained for the theatre and circus where they earned fortunes, and the less polished performers of the streets and fairgrounds capable of earning only pennies.50 Jerry's dancing dogs in The Old Curiosity Shop clearly belong to the latter category.
Scholars disagree whether the Punch show is primarily Italian or
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Highly trained dogs earned fortunes in the circus and theatre for their owners, hut straggling street
performances were far from lucrative.
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English in origin. In sixteenth-century Naples a commedia dell'arte character named Pulcinella flourished both as played by a living actor with a mask and as a puppet. He first appeared in England as a marionette called Punch during the Restoration, and glove puppets blossomed in the first decades of the nineteenth century.51 Swiveller does not exactly clarify the problem of origin with his remark (cancelled in manuscript) that '"Punch is about the best thing, in the way of a national stage- after the ballet at the Italian Opera House"', but Dickens treats Punch as a native phenomenon, naming his puppet-men Harris (known as Short, or Trotters) and Codlin, and including such wholly English characters as Judy and Toby.52 As a marionette Punch had been confined largely to halls and fairgrounds, owing to the bulk and complexity of this kind of puppetry, but as a glove puppet, with both the entire cast and the booth readily portable, he took to the streets, setting up anywhere a crowd could be assembled. Codlin and Short perform in an empty barn, on the streets, at the races, and in front of the Single Gentleman's window, and their practice reflects the habit of all Punch and Judy men of the day, who are pictured in contemporary illustrations performing indoors and out, daytime or night.
Large, even fabulous sums were available to the most fortunate of popular entertainers. Frederick Reynolds, writing in 1826, recollected a dog troupe at Sadler's Wells in the 1780s which cleared ｣7,000 for Wroughton, the manager. There were fourteen dogs in all, and they performed a military drama, led by their star canine, Moustache, 'in his little uniform, military boots, with smart musket and helmet, cheering and inspiring his fellow soldiers, to follow him up scaling ladders, and storm the fort'.53 Madame Tussaud was in a financial position to pay ｣300 in 1840 for the coronation robes of George IV (to which Dudley Costello, writing in Household Words in 1854, took particular aversion); in a six-week visit to the Lowther Arcade, Strand, in 1834, she paid ｣7 10s per week for her space and took a total of ｣202 in receipts.54 And the great 'Muster' Richardson was reported to have left ｣20,000 at his death in 1836, a fortune earned entirely from his fairground theatre booth.55
Less exceptionally, comfortable earnings were possible for street and fair performers. John Payne Collier, compiler in 1828 of the first published text of a Punch and Judy drama, estimated that a pair of exhibitors at that time could earn around thirty shillings a day between them, by giving ten performances and collecting two to four shillings for each. This figure is corroborated by the puppeteer Henry Mayhew interviewed, who claimed to have earned around five pounds a week all through the year when he started in 1825.56 Two other of Mayhew's informants said that even better income
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was usual for the early 1830s. One reported that at that time stilt-vaulters (performers on exceptionally tall stilts) could earn three to four pounds in a single afternoon; another referred to race meetings as particularly lucrative, normally bringing in three pounds a day at Epsom and once seven pounds from a single carriage there, although his usual earnings at this time were fifty shillings a week.57
These figures disguise the fact that, far from performing all the time, itinerant showfolk spent long hours travelling from one site to another. And when the country suffered a severe economic depression between the late 1830s and the early 1840s income fell accordingly. Dickens presents an altogether less sanguine picture, and his showman Vuffin, the proprietor of a giant and a little lady without arms and legs, is loquacious about the problems. He attributes their causes to an oversupply of curiosities.
'Once make a giant common and giants will never draw again. Look at wooden legs. If there was only one man with a wooden leg what a property he'd be!'
'So he would!' observed the landlord and Short both together. 'That's very true. '
'Instead of which', pursued Mr Vuffin, 'if you was to advertise Shakespeare played entirely by wooden legs, it's my belief you wouldn't draw a sixpence.'
(OCS, 19)
Vuffin's gloomy outlook, if not his reasoning, is confirmed by historical evidence. We have already considered the financial decline of Bartholomew Fair in the 1830s; by the 1850s Mayhew recorded that Punch was attracting only five shillings a day, stilts twenty-five shillings a week, and the Italian dog-trainer he interviewed was a lonely and pathetic figure, earning 'de tree shilling - sometime de couple - sometime not nothing' for twenty, thirty, even forty performances in a day. Sick, hungry and dirty, this old man, who started work around 1840 with ten dogs, had now only three, was often unable to work, and then liable to stoning by street urchins.58
Even Astley's, the prosperous metropolitan circus, which Kit and Barbara visit in Chapter 39, was going through Hard Times. Despite the fillip of a visit by Queen Victoria and Prince Albert on 20 May 1840, Andrew Ducrow, the proprietor and star, was ill with asthma; his wife was pregnant; and 'La Petite Ducrow', his 11-year-old niece, was killed in a household accident. These woes depleted the ranks of performers, and attendances fell off. Worst of all, a few months after Dickens completed The Old Curiosity Shop, for the third time in its history Astley's suffered a disastrous fire.59 On 8 June 1841 the entire amphitheatre burned to the ground, a fate all too
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common for every venue of entertainment in that era: the Theatres Royal both at Covent Garden and at Drury Lane had burned down earlier in the century, and in 1845 the booth theatre of Johnson and Nelson Lee, late Richardson's, was destroyed by fire. Whatever the pretension or prosperity of an amusement enterprise, such a fate was in more senses than one a great leveller.
Nell does not visit Astley's, the only stationary show in The Old Curiosity Shop, and in stark contrast to the presentation of all the other showfolk in the novel, who appear principally when they are not performing, the actors at Astley's are seen only in the ring, their private lives being entirely withheld. Because of this, the visit to Astley's is the sole detachable entertainment episode in the novel, and its separateness from the lives of the chief characters increases the feeling of holiday in the chapter.
VI
The novel does not give us more than a few glimpses of these entertainments in action, but takes us instead behind the scenes and portrays the showmen off duty, talking about their trade, preparing for exhibition, and coping with their daily tasks of eating, drinking, sleeping and moving on. Dickens's picture is affectionate, lingering with warm humour over their speech and mannerisms, not blinking their very real failings, but finding in them the genuine dignity of imperfect human beings coping with the business of being alive, and according to them the ultimate compliment of artistic seriousness, presenting them in vivid, historically accurate detail. He finds them on the lower fringes of society, poor, ignorant and shabby, but he recognizes the humanity of their cheerful conviviality; even the misanthropic Codlin, tempered for us as he is by Short's easy sociability, seems to have more relish than bitterness in his taciturnity, and the scene at the Jolly Sandboys, in particular, invites us to respond positively to these figures.
Dickens's assessment of them, which radiates into the larger concerns of the book and accords with the historical evidence, is that these showmen are the remnants of a dwindling breed. Dickens is fascinated, and he is charitable, but the overwhelming impression of his depiction is of impending collapse. All of these figures live on the edge of poverty, with no real prospect of improvement. Our first view of the puppet-men is - as significantly for them as for Nell - in a graveyard, where Punch 'seemed to be pointing with the tip of his cap to a most flourishing epitaph, and to be chuckling over it with all his heart' (OCS, 16). Dickens is at pains to tie Codlin and Short to
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the character of their puppet Short 'seemed to have Unconsciously imbibed something of his hero's character', and Codlin had a look 'perhaps inseparable from his occupation as well'. Talking to Short after a performance, the spectators are 'unable to separate him from the master-mind of Punch', and Codlin is seen a little later inside the booth looking out, 'presenting his head and face in the proscenium of the stage, and exhibiting an expression of countenance not often seen there'. We are never granted a look at a performance in progress, but we next find Punch 'utterly devoid of spine, all slack and drooping in a dark box, with his legs doubled up round his neck, and not one of his social qualities remaining' (OCS, 17). This association of Punch and his exhibitors with graveyards and coffins sets the tone for the entire episode with the showmen, and contributes to the book's overall mood of poverty and decay, which is summed up in the final sentence: 'Such are the changes which a few years bring about, and so do things pass away, like a tale that is told'
(OCS, 73).
Closely linked to this sense of passing is the nostalgia which pervades The Old Curiosity Shop. Nell flees from the mouldering shop in the hope of finding 'a return of the simple pleasures they had once enjoyed' (OCS, 12), and throughout the book she is repeatedly associated with old men, old buildings and old values. It is significant in this regard that her brother, who is devoid of any sense of veneration, is described as 'young' Trent, whereas Christopher Nubbles, several years Fred's junior, is generally referred to as 'old' Kit. Among the showmen, traditional forms of entertainment command their allegiance, and sitting by the fireside of the Jolly Sandboys after supper Vuffin regales the assembled travellers with reminiscence of his mentor, old Maunders.
'Why I remember the time when old Maunders as had three-and-twenty wans - I remember the time when old Maunders had in his cottage in Spa Fields in the winter-time, when the season was over, eight male and female dwarfs setting down to dinner every day, who was waited on by eight old giants in green coats, red smalls, blue cotton stockings, and high-lows . . . '
(OCS, 19)
Such leisurely recollection 'beguiled' the time for the showmen, and reminds us, as well as them, of the days gone by.
The showmen respond to their difficulties with keen awareness of economic necessity. As James Kincaid has pointed out, they are ruled by a 'cash nexus' which debases them and their calling.60 Codlin and Short are eager to betray Nell and her grandfather in the
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hope of financial reward, and their tactic of attempting to reassure her with pledges of undying - but false - friendship is a sorry perversion of the moral value which the novel places in highest regard. Jerry withholds food from the old leader of his troupe of dogs because the unfortunate creature 'lost a halfpenny today'. Most ominously, Vuffin hints darkly about the fate of a giant who was bad for business.
'There was one giant - a black 'un - as left his carawan some years ago and took to carrying coach-bills about London, making himself as cheap as crossing-sweepers. He died. I make no insinuation against anybody in particular,' said Mr Vuffin, looking solemnly round, 'but he was ruining the trade; - and hedied.'
(OCS, 19)
Such an overriding concern with monetary gain links the showmen thematically with the book's villains, Quilp, Brass and Fred, each of whom is motivated largely by greed. The ultimate social consequence of the money ethic is made emphatic immediately after Nell leaves the last of the showfolk behind for ever, in the lurid vision of industrial debasement as a living hell (OCS, 44-5).
Mrs Jarley is different. There is more than a hint of magic about her: Nell finds it 'an unfathomable mystery' to discover 'by what kind of gymnastic exercise the lady of the caravan ever contrived to get into' her sleeping-berth, and the very caravan blunders on 'as if it too had been drinking strong beer and was drowsy' (OCS, 27). Despite the emphasis on her weaknesses of the flesh, Mrs Jarley is seen invariably in a humorous light, a perspective which J. B. Priestley has admirably defined as 'tender mockery, as found in a loving family'.61 Jarley's limitations (such as her insistence that she has been unable to sleep a wink on a night when her snoring has kept Nell awake) are treated throughout not as vices but as engaging vanities and foibles, and her kindness, generosity and tolerance give her a moral stature of a wholly different order from that of the other show people. Her first action is to feed Nell, and she next offers her a job, allows her to keep the gratuities she receives, and is genuinely grieved when Nell and her grandfather disappear. In a book which places the highest premium on faithful loyalty to others, her true friendship for Nell is a very positive virtue. Mrs Jarley is of a superior status to the other itinerants whom Nell meets, but her respectability is nevertheless anything but secure. There are more urchins than royalty in evidence among those her show attracts, and like Codlin and Short she is liable to legal harassment under the vagrancy laws. Although the threat to have her put in the stocks is mere bluster from
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the ridiculous Monflathers (who also calls Nell 'wicked' for being a waxwork child instead of assisting in her country's manufactures), there is sufficient basis in the schoolmistress's prejudice to move the amiable Jarley to tears, and all Slum's poetry and even a personal visit from Nell to the school are unable to turn more than a portion of the pupils into paying customers. Mrs Jarley is philosophical about her tribulations, however, and she is quickly able to laugh at Miss Monflathers's threats. Perhaps the most emphatic indication that Dickens intends affirmation in his portrait of Jarley is our final glimpse of her, on her wedding day. In a novel in which the principal characters are frantically driving each other to destruction, and in marked contrast to the graveyard setting for Punch, Mrs Jarley is last seen celebrating her marriage to the faithful George, refusing money from the Single Gentleman for her kindness to Nell, and happily jolting away in the caravan to spend her honeymoon 'in a country excursion' (OCS, 47).
In her adventures with Mrs Jarley, Nell is rapidly established as the 'chief attraction' of the waxwork show, and her position there epitomizes her relation in general to the other entertainment elements of The Old Curiosity Shop. When she meets Mrs Jarley, Nell and her grandfather are wandering aimlessly, tired and fearful in an environment wholly new to them. As Mrs Jarley observes, Nell looks 'out of her element' at the racecourse, and she is hardly any less bewildered by the caravan and its contents; in her innocence, Nell has at first no idea what waxworks are (OCS, 27). Once befriended by Jarley, however, Nell fits comfortably into her new surroundings, learning the lore and patter of the entertainer and becoming herself 'an important item of the curiosities', indeed, 'quite a sensation' when she rides in the waxworks parade (OCS, 28). But, however extraordinary she seems to others in such a setting, Nell herself is soon quite at home; she feels 'no cause of anxiety in connection with the wax-work' (OCS, 29). All of her terrors arise from external threats: the menace of Quilp and the criminal irresponsibility of her grandfather. When she discovers the old man's plot to rob Mrs Jarley, Nell's security in the waxwork is shattered, and she is forced once more to take flight, an action which is simultaneously a sacred mission - Dickens describes her at this moment as an 'angel messenger' - and a source of unmitigated woe once away from the caravan she is seen 'bursting into tears’ (OCS, 42).
Nell's situation in the company of Mrs Jarley is thus both special and typical. The caravan offers her a unique haven, and she feels more inner comfort at the waxworks than anywhere else we see her, save the shop and the village where she dies. It is by far the most
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congenial encounter Nell experiences with the entertainment world, but it is a typical adventure in that she is at once part of the environment and apart from it. Just as Master Humphrey reacts to the incongruous juxtaposition of a lovely young girl and the musty lumber of the shop, so, too, Dickens emphasizes the bizarre contrasts between her and her surroundings. Nell is an alien creature in the world of show business, but her presence in it both complements and contrasts with Dickens's vision of the fading vitality of early nineteenth-century entertainment.
It is through Nell's travels that we make acquaintance with all of the itinerant showfolk, and through her perspective that we view their activities. Dickens's presentation of Nell is thus firmly tied to his sketches of these characters, and an understanding of his aims in the novel depends, in significant measure, on our response to the popular entertainment in it. The Old Curiosity Shop is about the inability of an innocent young girl to survive in a cruel world. We saw in Chapter 2 the premium Dickens places on childhood, and the integral association he makes between the qualities of childhood and the values of entertainment. The poignancy of Nell's fate depends crucially on her tender years. Throughout the book she is 'Little' Nell, 'the child' - 'fine girl of her age, but small', remarks Swiveller (OCS, 7) - and her youth is a constant reminder of her need for love, help and support, a need which goes largely unfulfilled. Dickens places a child in a context of entertainment and demonstrates that she does not find adequate refuge there. It is a story of betrayal - a betrayal by the very force which should be the mainstay of one who is, in the words of the epitaph Dickens had carved on the gravestone of his beloved sister-in-law Mary Hogarth, 'young, beautiful, and good'.62 Dickens's indictment of popular entertainment in this novel is its failure to provide the healing graces which ought by right to be among her chief supports.
VII
Nell is betrayed by the entertainers to whom she turns for help in her flight from the villainous Quilp. Codlin and Short, like Quilp, pledge disinterested affection for her but act from motives of mercenary greed. Mrs Jarley, sincere in her concern for Nell, tries to succour her, but the waxwork is incapable of protecting Nell first from horrible visions of Quilp, then from the Quilpine figure of her grandfather sneaking into her bedroom by night. In the shop Nell has nightmares of 'ugly faces that were frowning over her and trying to peer into her room' and of her grandfather's blood 'creeping,
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creeping, on the ground to her own bedroom door' (OCS, 9). These terrors are realized when she sees not his blood but the old man himself 'creeping along the floor' to rob her of the money she has earned from Mrs Jarley. Quilp is the threat which drives Nell to her premature death, and Quilp, she finds, resides in the world of popular entertainment.
He is the most extraordinary curiosity in The Old Curiosity Shop. Dickens introduces him as a freak worthy of exhibition and routinely refers to him as 'the dwarf'. Quilp is associated with a veritable menagerie of exotic animals: in the course of the story he is called 'shrimp', 'rat', 'hawk', 'monkey', 'lion', 'snake', 'ferret', 'salamander', 'mole', 'fly', 'weazle', 'lynx', 'hedgehog', 'bull', and 'toad'; he himself adds to this list by abusing others variously as 'crocodile', 'minx', 'parrot', 'worm', 'jade', 'rhinoceros', 'tortoise', 'rat', 'bird', 'pigeon', 'monkey' and, most frequently, 'dog'. Dogs are the animal with which he is systematically linked, usually of the ferocious rather than dancing variety, but his gleeful taunting of the chained dog in Chapter 21 is a scene straight from Mr Punch's fight with Toby. Additionally, his one affectionate impulse, the 'strange and mutual liking' he shares with Tom Scott, is for a boy who spends most of the time standing on his head, a skill which ultimately gives Tom 'extraordinary success' before 'overflowing audiences' as a professional tumbler (OCS, 73), but which also serves succinctly to indicate the unnatural and inverted basis of their friendship.
Much critical attention has been devoted to Quilp in recent years, and a number of sources in popular culture have been proposed for his character: an actual dwarf named Prior who lived in Bath, the evil dwarf and devil of folklore and the comic devil of the English stage, a fairy tale called 'The Yellow Dwarf', the father of Joseph Grimaldi, and Punch.63 Of these possible sources, Punch is by far the most rewarding to consider, not only because numerous parallels can be drawn between transcriptions of nineteenth-century Punch and Judy shows and the character and activities of Quilp, but also because parallels within the book itself between Quilp and the Punch exhibitors in the story can be shown to generate purposeful resonance.64 Like Punch, Quilp is little, ugly, violent and frenetically mirthful; like Punch, he delights in surprise, pops up unexpectedly, feigns death, torments his wife, fights with a dog, and hurls verbal and physical abuse at everyone in sight. These and other similarities have been discussed by Rachel Bennett, who amply demonstrates that 'although Quilp does not hold the stage as much as Punch he affects the lives of most of the characters by his machinations. His spirit of Punch-like activity also reaches far.' This is admirable, but when she argues that Quilp provides 'Dickens's main opposition to
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'
Punch and Judy' by Robert Cruikshank. The gleeful violence of Punch underpins Dickens's conception of Quilp and generates resonance well beyond the scenes including entertainers in The Old Curiosity Shop.
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the death-directed world' and 'confers invulnerability' to life's calamities and afflictions one must disagree entirely.65 Dickens uses the image of Punch not as he finds him, but for his own artistic purposes in The Old Curiosity Shop, and in his hands Punch is transformed from the immortal hero of the street performers into an agent of evil and death.
In the puppet play of Punch and Judy, Punch represents the extravagant wish-fulfilment of total humour, in which no obstacle can overcome the self-sufficiency of the hero. He demands unbridled personal freedom and cheerfully dismisses one subordinate figure after another, including the devil.66 To achieve this stature, Punch alone is permitted sympathetic identification from the audience; only he appears all through the episodic performance, and no moral stricture offered by the other characters can stand up to his carefree cynicism. Structurally, then, Punch is the wholly dominant emotional core of the play, and the audience can indulge in the anarchic holiday which his activities represent, secure in the knowledge that all of the puppets will pop up gain for the next performance.
Imbibing many of the qualities of Punch, Quilp assuredly provides readers of The Old Curiosity Shop with the entertainment of a great comic character. He is less the figure of mechanical rigidity which Bergson saw in puppet-like activity than a potent emblem of the aggressive self-gratification which Freud diagnosed as the root of jokes.67 For all the emphasis on his physicality, in descriptive detail, animal imagery and overt sexuality, Quilp is amazingly free from normal physical limitations which beset ordinary mortals and every other character in The Old Curiosity Shop. He stays up all night without getting tired, smokes and drinks without getting lightheaded, eats indigestible foods without getting sick, and seems capable of popping up at any time and any place. His special status is wish-fulfilment of the most extravagant kind. He torments his wife and mother-in-law, humiliates his enemies, goes off to live by himself and sleep in a hammock, watches his own funeral preparations, bites his fingernails - which are dirty - scratches his head, sticks out his tongue, makes faces, shouts, sings, makes love to whomever he pleases, and hits whomever he hates.
Additionally, the association of his character with the traditional puppet hero (who in his turn has historical kinship with the Vice figure of medieval morality plays, with Harlequin, with the Fool and with Falstaff) colours our attitude to him and prepares us to find his actions comically entertaining.68 The demotion of a human figure to the level of a puppet makes him an object of ridicule and simultaneously creates an interplay of fantasy with reality in which the need
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for motivation and responsibility are qualified by a puppet's obsessive action and a puppet's harmless violence: Punch hits people because it is his nature to do so, and Judy is back on stage exchanging blows with him the next time the curtain rises. Quilp's delight in himself and in his jokes, surprises and schemes is infectious, so that ridicule is tempered with enjoyment. He is not only comic object but also comedian, an entertainer with a wharf full of tricks on display. Dickens invites us to participate in Quilp's enjoyment by describing him frequently in ironically decorous language. Thus Quilp is a 'gentleman' who torments his wife for her 'comfort', an 'agreeable figure' who sneaks up on Nell out of 'delicacy'. His habitual cheating at cards is a 'humorous habit', and he brandishes his poker 'amiably'.
But, for all these vital qualities and for all the narrative invitations for us to take delight in him, Quilp, unlike Punch, exists in a narrative structure which insistently condemns him. Instead of fighting the devil, Quilp becomes himself diabolical, in a pervasive imagery pattern which links him with Satan. He strives to seduce Nell, rob her grandfather, imprison Kit and humiliate nearly everyone else in the book; but, unlike the hero of the puppet show, Quilp is not the sole focus of interest, and the reader is made to feel the threat which Quilp's destructiveness poses to the vitality of the other characters, who, however far removed from literary realism, have only single lives within the story. Furthermore, as James Kincaid points out, Quilp's independence gradually proves to be 'self-imposed isolation', retreat and regression; as he cuts himself off from all human contact, his cheerful pranks turn into maniacal assaults on a wooden figurehead, and by locking the gate and extinguishing the light in his final moments he effectively prevents his own rescue.69 The inquest verdict of suicide fittingly concludes his career.
By transforming Punch into a villain, Dickens establishes a context in The Old Curiosity Shop for exploring the underside of the popular amusement of the day. Quilp is a compelling image of entertainment as utter licence. He is Dickens's fantasy on the holiday spirit of pleasure-seeking propelled to frenzied extremes of freedom and aggression. Merriment causes him not merely to laugh, sing and dance, but to howl, stamp his feet, roll about, and chop the ground with his knife 'in an ecstasy' (OCS, 13). Dickens is explicit that Quilp's antics are not simply odd characteristics but performances with spectators in mind. For those spectators within the book, however, Quilp offers not amusement but cause for dismay. The only audience he seeks to please is himself alone. Far from promoting fellow-feeling, amusement for Quilp is entirely self-serving He takes advantage of his ugliness by making faces at everyone from his mother-in-law to the chained dog; his mere threat to grimace at
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Jacob Nubbles freezes that young gentleman 'into a silent horror' (OCS, 21). He takes malevolent delight in startling people and has a savage streak of ridicule, which frequently turns to violence. His idea of a joke is to cause discomfort to others, whether by denying Mrs Jiniwin access to the case-bottle while they are playing cards, pouring boiling rum down the throat of Sampson Brass, or beating Tom Scott with a poker. For him holiday release is a defiance of all restraint. Quilp rejects law, custom, decency, propriety, responsibility and even physical necessity in his raging demand to do whatever he wants, whenever he wants. The anarchic nature of Quilp's sort of freedom is contrasted with Nell's flight to peace, Swiveller's creative fancy and Kit's release from prison.
Freedom for Quilp means oppression for others, and his licence is ultimately destructive to himself as well as to Nell. And because Punch appears in The Old Curiosity Shop not only in his adapted image as Quilp, but also in his own right as the puppet of Codlin and Short, a parallel is created through which the implications of the one extend over to the other. Punch's character informs basic components of Dickens's conception of Quilp, as we have just seen; reciprocally, Quilp pervades the scenes with Codlin and Short.
In her terror of Quilp, Nell flees from the curiosity shop with her grandfather, only to find herself soon in the presence of Quilp's other self, Punch. She does not recognize Punch as Quilp at once, cheerfully volunteering to sew Judy's dress for the puppeteers, but it is only a matter of hours before Punch becomes as threatening to her as Quilp, and she flees at her first opportunity. Her action gains coherence of meaning when we recognize the interrelation of Quilp and Punch.
Punch, as we would expect, appears fully in character, ugly, cheerful and mocking -just like Quilp. We have noted already that from the outset he is associated with death, sitting gaily on a tombstone when Nell first sees him. In addition, he is as domineering as Quilp, subjecting his companions, the puppeteers Codlin and Short, to his own comfort. Dickens makes explicit that Codlin's monetary profit from the puppet show makes him as fully Punch's slave as Brass, for similar motives, is Quilp's creature.
And here Mr Codlin's false position in society and the effect it wrought upon his wounded spirit, were strongly illustrated; for whereas he had been last night accosted by Mr Punch as 'master' and had by inference left the audience to understand that he maintained that individual for his own luxurious entertainment and delight, here he was, now, painfully walking beneath the burden of that same Punch's temple, and bearing it boldly upon
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his shoulders on a sultry day and along a dusty road. (OCS, 17)
Punch displays his power not only on the stage, where he beats all his relations and acquaintance and at last kills the devil; he maintains his supremacy even when he is crumpled in a dark box, forcing the puppet-man to carry him on his back.
For Nell, however, there is little to choose between Punch, Codlin and Short. Because Dickens gives the puppeteers characteristics of the puppet, their words and actions towards her combine to form a single, identifiable threat. Codlin and Short view the company of Nell and her grandfather as an opportunity for their own profit and resolve to hold them hostage until searchers appear. To keep Nell unsuspicious, they each make profuse offers of eternal - and false friendship. Codlin and Short thus become a threat to Nell in their desire to limit her liberty for their personal gain, and the child becomes frightened and flees from them. Nell suspects but does not know the exact nature of their scheme, and the lack of precision to her fears ties her entire encounter with the puppet-men into one frightening experience, in which Punch's jaunty derision of the graveyard, his domination of Codlin and Short, and their offers of friendship loom together as motivation for her flight. Punch and his men are not Quilp, but to Nell their threat is certainly Quilpine: the mockery, power, and professions of personal admiration which instil fears in her make the puppet show a second manifestation of the very things from which Nell is fleeing in Quilp. In this sense, Quilp is as much present to Nell in the puppet form of Punch as he is in his dwarfish form back in London. Mrs Jarley is emphatic that her entertainment is far removed from Punch, but Nell soon finds the terror of Quilp in the waxwork as well. The waxen effigies take on the aspect of Quilp to her, and her grandfather's gambling endows him, too, with Quilpine threat.70 For Nell within the world of the showfolk the dwarf is palpable nightmare, and the horrifying discovery of this evil in her only friend and helpmate, her grandfather, proves fatal to her now solitary flight. From this moment (OCS, 30) Nell's strength fails until she collapses and dies.
Conceived in popular entertainment and manifest to Nell among the entertainers, Quilp's nature is nevertheless antithetical to the values of entertainment. At a time when the amusements of the people were under great pressure, Dickens chose not only to compose a threnody for a dying culture but also, through the indirection of a fantasy figure, to expose qualities of that culture which ought not to survive. When Quilp drowns Dickens offers a final glimpse of the 'blazing ruin' of his body, his hair and clothes which 'fluttered idly in the night wind'. Emphatically, this is an image of
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the mocker mocked, presented in stark contrast not only to Nell's peaceful passing but also to Quilp's own earlier supposed death. When he was alive Quilp took perverse delight in watching his own funeral preparations; as a corpse, he has lost that pleasure for ever and is himself subjected to the ultimate 'mockery of death' (OCS, 67).
This death is the deserved fate of a malign individual personage. It is the opposite of vitality. It is also Dickens's exorcism of poisons which he diagnosed in popular entertainment. In the hardness of their lot, the entertainers in The Old Curiosity Shop take greater interest in their own comforts than in the pleasure for others on which their very existence is predicated. Their financial straits incite them to place undue emphasis on gain, and to promote companionship on only a limited and superficial level, since rivalry determines their actions with regard to one another. These negations of the proper spirit of entertainment, which make it impossible for Nell to remain for long among the showfolk, are embodied in extreme form as the greed, selfishness and malice of Quilp. By projecting these vices on to a villain Dickens made it possible to touch them only lightly as characteristics of the entertainers themselves, who are portrayed instead with affection, charity and sorrow.
VIII
Having explored the unpropitious state of entertainment and having condensed its worst excesses into an extraordinary comic villain, Dickens offers in contrast and counterpoint a joyous image of the next stage beyond entertainment, in the career of Richard Swiveller. Through this character he shows the creative and humanly beneficial power of a willingness to respond positively to the essential core of entertainment, its capacity to stimulate fancy.71 Swiveller is the thematic alternative to the destructiveness elsewhere in The Old Curiosity Shop, and a transition figure in the development of Dickens's fiction. After this novel entertainers were to figure far less than they had done previously, while the necessity for fancy and the strength of character it is capable of bestowing became increasingly important.
Dick Swiveller enters the novel as a drunken wastrel, fond of melodramatic gesture and endlessly adapting snatches of Tom Moore and other songwriters popular at the time.72 He never gives over his love of melodrama and song, but in the course of the story his moral stature grows considerably; he rescues a hungry waif from harsh servitude, helps to secure Kit's release from prison, and instigates the exposure of Quilp and Brass. Unlike Nell, Swiveller is
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Dick Swiveller, whose every observation serves to stimulate his fancy, attempts to encourage 'bliss and concord' between Fred and his grandfather by telling them about a pig he saw 'with a straw in his mouth' (OCS, 2).
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unafraid of Quilp or the Brasses - indeed, he is fascinated by all three. He is able to stand up to Quilp in a direct fight and to find positive enjoyment in entertainment too boisterous for Nell. His early adventures with Sophy and Nell are conceived, produced and acted single-handedly by him as elaborate stage romances, and the entirely theatrical nature of his attentions to Nell prevents us from ever thinking of him as a serious danger to her. Under the tutelage of Sampson and Sally Brass, Swiveller learns the pitfalls of carelessness, even as his idle search for amusement in their office leads him to befriend their persecuted servant. Since she lacks a name, he gives her a title, and because she responds to this extravagant re-creation of herself the Marchioness changes in fact from a passive victim into an active heroine capable of saving Swivelier's life and of setting the forces of justice in motion. Their romance is a low-life version of Keats's description of Adam's dream: by dint of imagination, reality is transformed to match the idea. Swiveller wakes to find it true, and he and the Marchioness live happily ever after, as is only right. Their transformation affirms more emphatically than any other moment in Dickens's work the potency of healthy imaginative life in however humble a condition.
Swiveller's entrance into The Old Curiosity Shop (OCS, 2) seems hardly suitable for the ultimate hero of the story. The 'profligate' accomplice of young Trent in an errand of extortion, Dick looks so shabby and speaks so affectedly that he bores and irritates his listeners, and his effort to charm Fred's grandfather is a total failure. He is at first a minor character whose affectations expose him to ridicule, and in some ways he remains a subsidiary and satirized figure throughout the story. His poetical quotations and fanciful observations never disappear; his carelessness leads to foolish complicity in Fred's plot against Nell and Quilp's against Kit; his susceptibility to 'sunshine' makes him a tool in Quilp's hands. Swiveller appears in the book far less often than either Nell or Quilp, and he wholly lacks either her moral purity or the dwarf's active villainy. For these reasons he appears an unlikely candidate for prominence in the novel's resolution. But Swiveller's flights of fancy provide an alternative to Nell's search for pastoral calm and Quilp's isolation; he alone is able to survive in an evil world.
The primary use to which he puts his fancy is the entertainment of himself and others. In his eagerness to share the pleasures to which he responds so abundantly, he differs fundamentally from other entertainers in the book. He tries to inject merriment into his conference with Fred after their failure to get money at the shop; he sits beside the dour Sally Brass when Punch plays outside the office, and he sends Kit a daily mug of beer in prison.
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The decisive moment in his career occurs in Chapter 57, in which he discovers Sally's tiny housemaid spying on him and confronts her with a series of questions. When her answers kindle his curiosity and imagination, he offers her a glass of beer and entertains her with conversation and card-games. The situation is humble enough - a ne'er-do-well clerk drinking beer with a hungry servant-girl in the cellar of a disreputable law-office - but Dickens and Dick conduct the scene with such delicacy and fancy that it transcends its dull circumstances, and for a few fairy-tale moments the little girl becomes the Marchioness and Dick her romantic hero, until the time arrives when they must lock up for the night and send Dick home to bed. Although extravagant scenes and characters fill The Old Curiosity Shop, and Dick himself is full of wild fantasies, this encounter is, in Dick's own words, 'a most inscrutable and unmitigated staggerer' (OCS, 58).
The scene arises from Dick's search for entertainment. And so often in his hours at the office, Swiveller is alone and bored, and 'for the better preservation of his cheerfulness' and 'to prevent his faculties from rusting' he tries to amuse himself with cards, playing cribbage with a dummy, 'for twenty, thirty, or sometimes even fifty thousand pounds a side, besides many hazardous bets to a considerable amount' (OCS, 57). When he distinguishes an eye at the keyhole, he changes his method of passing the time by welcoming the eye's diminutive owner, asking her questions, eating and drinking with her, and playing cards with her instead of by himself. For further amusement he assumes the manner of a theatrical bandit, 'handing the tankard to himself with great humility, receiving it haughtily, drinking from it thirstily, and smacking his lips fiercely' (OCS, 58). When such demonstrations alarm the little girl, Dick 'discharges his brigand manner', converses cheerfully and recites poetry. The whole episode begins as no more than an effort to find enjoyment on a dull evening, yet it is magical from the start.
There is much need for all the distraction Dick's enterprise can provide, for the circumstances are humble and depressing. Swiveller we know to be an impoverished clerk, and the Marchioness has been introduced as a timid slavey mercilessly harassed by Sally. Dickens offers plentiful detail to ensure our recognition of the lowliness of the scene, particularly emphasizing the privations of the Marchioness: her remarkable thinness, her ignorance, her terror and her loneliness - her only 'company' comes from spying through the keyhole. She has a 'very little' fire, and the cellar floor is 'damp' and 'sloppy'; the food they eat is no more than bread, beef and beer, and the stakes of their gambling are a couple of sixpences. There is nothing in the facts of their situation to arouse enthusiastic delight.
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Such humble circumstances are customary fare for Swiveller, whose imagination has found frequent employment in efforts to infuse dullness with colour and interest, and whose fancies have ranged from silliness to the transformation of harsh reality: the entertainment of self-dramatization, as romantic lover to Sophy, as epic hero chiding his Fate, or as managing partner in the House of Brass; the pleasure of grandiose description, of his single room as 'apartments' or of his social acquaintance as 'Glorious Apollers'; the poetry of exotic comparison, seeing Sally as a 'dragon' and a 'mermaid'; the accommodation to practical necessity, by rooming above a tobacco-shop for want of a snuff-box, by philosophizing on the glories of potatoes with the skins left on, and by pretending that his bedstead disappears during the daytime. In every instance, either the object before him or he himself appears in a new light, brightening ordinary existence and turning it into something novel and vivid.
In the scene before us, something more happens. Dick not only imparts imaginative colour but actually alters reality, turning the underfed servant into a marchioness and himself into an actual romantic hero.
Swiveller rescues a friendless orphan, ignorant not simply of the world outside the office but even of her name, age and parentage, and transforms her into a heroine capable of saving his life. In the days that follow 'his friendly entertainment, Dick falls into a dire fever, and the Marchioness runs away from Sally to nurse him back to health. As a direct result of Dick's encounter with the Marchioness, his life is saved, her oppression is ended, Kit is released from prison, the villainy of Brass and Quilp is overthrown, and Swiveller finds that 'there had been a young lady saving up for him after all' (OCS, 73).
In contrast to Quilp's malice, which destroys life, and to Nell's flight, which transcends it, Swiveller's determination to welcome every experience, to dramatize every incident and to regard all his activities with comic detachment leads to creativity, growth and love. Dick Swiveller emerges in a world full of fear and destruction as a positive force for life, and the comic poet inherits the earth. It is but a short step from this to see Swiveller as Dickens's affirmation of a central pillar of his own artistry. Critics have pointed out similarities in personality and in name between Dick and his creator, but the vital resemblance is between them as artists. Swiveller's imagination, like Dickens's, is rooted in observation, in recognition of surprising connections, and in love of language. Above all, it is rooted in love of popular entertainment. Swiveller's positive orientation towards entertainment, his disposition to seek stimulus for his fancy in all things, and his consequent awareness of distinctions
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and interrelations between fact and fantasy make his romance with the Marchioness credible and help the reader to find the way through the dynamic concoction of reality and invention that is The Old Curiosity Shop. By implication, he, stands for a perspective on life which offers genuine possibility of survival and happiness in our own world. With the Marchioness, Dick brings to the tragic world of Little Nell an affirmation of hope and joy, as Dickens through the novel itself brings to a society which was crushing ways of life which he cherished an art which showed that, in his hands at least, popular entertainment still had great vitality.
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CHAPTER 5
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Hard Times
The Necessity of
Popular Entertainment
I entertain a weak idea that the English people are as hard-worked as any people upon whom the sun shines. I acknowledge to this ridiculous idiosyncrasy, as a reason why I would give them a little more play. (HT, I, 10)
I
The Old Curiosity Shop was the culmination of one major phase of Dickens's art. With this novel he paid homage to a passing generation of entertainers and celebrated the joy to be found by the individual who opens himself to the capacity for wonder; in terms of his own artistic development he reached a bolder conception of the creative possibilities of the imagination and its capability of breathing life-sustaining value into the most humble ingredients. Having faced as well the darker recesses of the entertainment world, his affirmations carried the more conviction and gave him the confidence to move, in his subsequent novels, to more ambitious explorations of man and society. The thoroughness of Dickens's analysis in The Old Curiosity Shop of the nature and condition of entertainment in the England of his day freed him to move on from that subject as a major focus of his art, and for the next thirteen years showfolk receded to the periphery of his novels. We catch glimpses of the occasional entertainer in his later work - the street juggler who passes with poignant incongruity outside Mr Dombey's house when its windows are shrouded in mourning for the death of Paul (DS, 18); the tavern singing of Little Swills, who serves with shrill hilarity as chorus to the inquest on Nemo in Bleak House (BH, 11) but not until 1854 and Hard Times did Dickens again place entertainers at the centre of one of his novels. At the same time, the
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avowed purpose of writing fiction which would offer laughter and diversion to his readers was never abandoned, however much other aims entered into his later work. Similarly, the entertainment-seeking perspective evident from the outset of his career - the disposition to respond actively to the most trivial detail which came under his notice, the open-eyed curiosity eager to find amusement wherever he looked remained with Dickens throughout his life, and gained a new kind of importance as the synthesizing power of his vision matured. Entertainment continued to be fundamental to Dickens's art, even when it was not his overt subject.
Dickens's novels up to Dombey and Son are emphatically pre-industrial in their settings. They depict a society in which traditional forms of gregarious, participatory recreation still constitute the principal outlet for people seeking entertainment. One portion of The Old Curiosity Shop, it is true, takes Nell into the factory towns of the Black Country, but this episode is a nightmare vision of a world gone berserk, and the 'real' world in which she lives and dies is pastoral. The London portions of the book are dominated by Quilp, who is an old-fashioned miser, not a modern capitalist. Dickens's early fiction shows traditional forms of entertainment declining, hedged in on every side by uncongenial circumstances. The dying clown in Pickwick is ruined by his own habitual drunkenness, but Dismal Jemmy, who tells his tale, points out that pantomime actors generally die early or else 'by unnaturally taxing their bodily energies, lose, prematurely, those physical powers on which alone they can depend for subsistence' (PP, 3). The cheerful puppet-man, Short, chats convivially with his fellow-entertainers at the Jolly Sandboys in the evening, but he is up betimes the next morning to sneak out ahead of the dancing dogs and the conjuror, to glean pennies before the others have a chance to do so (OCS, 19). The self-abasement which the charming Miss Snevellicci is constrained to undergo in order to raise an audience for her bespeak is representative of the financial straits which were closing provincial theatres up and down the country, and her manager is not long afterwards sent packing to the New World.
But if entertainers are seen in retreat in Dickens's early fiction, from the time of Dombey and Son (1846-8) they are presented as being ostracized from society altogether. Although historically they had always existed on the fringes, legally denominated 'rogues and vagabonds' from the days of Elizabeth, Dickens initially treated them as welcome guests, exuberantly interacting with other characters in the books and finding eager audiences among some, at least, of the fictive population.1 His own delight in their endeavours to amuse led him to deal generously with them, and to
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present their impudence, venality or lack of ability as part of the fun. Dickens's middle and late fiction, however, betrays a growing pessimism about the possibilities of finding a place for entertainment in the new social fabric. Hard Times is the single novel of Dickens's given an industrial setting, but other novels of his maturity, notably Bleak House, Little Dorrit and Our Mutual Friend, also envisage a contemporary urban environment fundamentally antagonistic to the very notion of carefree amusement for its inhabitants, and even those later novels which are set back in time find no congenial outlet for leisure activities.
In Dombey and Son we hear of a giant, a dwarf and a conjuror, objects of dread to Paul's schoolmate Tozer, whose uncle takes him to see them with a 'pretence of kindness', not for any amusement -,they might provide but as raw materials for a test in classical allusions (DS, 14). In Little Dorrit Arthur Clennam visits Tite Barnacle in a 'hideous little street' where 'Punch's shows used to lean against the dead wall in Mews Street while their proprietors were dining elsewhere' (LD, I, 10). In Our Mutual Friend the little fair in the village to which Lizzie Hexam flees is a 'vicious spectacle', consisting of a Fat Lady, Learned Pig, some 'despairing gingerbread that had been vainly trying to dispose of itself all over the country', and a peep-show 'which had originally started with the Battle of Waterloo, and had since made it every other battle of later date by altering the Duke of Wellington's nose' (OMF, IV, 6). And in Dickens's last, unfinished novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, the Christmas entertainments in Cloisterham are no better: there is a waxwork 'on the premises of the bankrupt livery-stable keeper up the lane' and a 'new grand comic Christmas pantomime' advertised by a portrait of the clown, 'quite as large as life and almost as miserable' (MED, 14). In each of these instances the entertainment is leaden, associated with decay, death, and traditions which have been drained of vitality. It offers scant means of livelihood to its purveyors and even less possibility of amusement to its patrons. Forms which had once sustained gaiety and wonder have become so degraded that no light of fancy can now find nourishment from them. Perhaps the most distressing example of the brutalization of popular entertainment to be found in Dickens's fiction occurs as metaphor in Great Expectations. Pip's horror at discovering that his benefactor is Magwitch (whose formal education was imparted to him by a travelling giant) is increased by the convict's disposition to survey Pip's gentlemanly accomplishments complacently, 'with the air of an Exhibitor' (GE, 40, 42). Entertainment has come to be associated with exploitation, not amusement.
Pip's hopes suffer a catastrophic blow with the arrival of his
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'Exhibitor', and his progress is mirrored by the career of Mr Wopsle, who finds his own Great Expectations greeted with derision. Mr Wopsle's venture in the title role of Hamlet is the most gloriously comic episode in all of Dickens, but our delight is largely at the aspiring actor's expense, and the derisory nature of the production which seals his doom indicates Dickens's sense of the general level of far too much of the entertainment available at the time he was writing. But if the lot of the entertainer struggling to secure respect (and a living) was precarious, the situation for those looking to find relief and amusement was equally unpromising. Symptomatic of Dickens's sense, late in his career, of the possibilities for the innocent entertainment of the common man is his picture of the Six Jolly Fellowship Porters in Our Mutual Friend. The boisterous high jinks at the inns of Pickwick have given way here to more sedate pleasures, scrupulously supervised by the Porters' mistress, Abbey Potterson. The attractions of the Porters are genuine, with its 'polite beer-pulls that made low bows when customers were served with beer', its 'comfortable fireside', 'delectable drinks' and 'cloth everlastingly laid'. But to keep these comforts secure the strictest regimentation must be imposed. Customers are allowed only as much drink as Abbey sees fit, and they are firmly instructed when it is time for them to leave. Closing-time is a 'ceremony of review and dismissal', and the cost of maintaining the good name of the house is indicated by the banishment of Gaffer; on account of his association with Riderhood, despite Lizzie's plea that it is the only place she knows he is safe. Dickens humorously hints at the quasi-religious authority of the proprietress by noting that some waterside types suppose her related to the Abbey at Westminster, and he links her with the novel's education themes by referring to her as a 'schoolmistress' - far more benign in her instruction than the murderous Bradley, but no more permissive than he with her 'pupils' (OMF, I, 6).
Throughout the nineteenth century the public house, both in town and in country, was for many the sole available place of amusement, a social centre offering warmth, companionship, and often music and theatrical entertainment; but, as its critics were quick to point out, it was also an exclusively male preserve, which kept a man from his family, encroached on his already limited time and money, and invited drunkenness. Abbey Potterson rigorously strives to eliminate these known evils from the establishment, and the appealing vitality of the Six Jolly Fellowship Porters is suggested from the outset by its crazy appearance; bizarre architecture is invariably a source of delight to Dickens, and the Porters is one of the most eccentric buildings he ever described. Its function as a
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sanctuary is clear from the pastoral associations it evokes:
Not without reason was it often asserted by the regular frequenters of the Porters, that when the light shone full upon the grain of certain panels, and particularly upon an old corner cupboard of walnut-wood in the bar, you might trace little forests there, and tiny trees like the parent tree, in. full umbrageous leaf. (OMF, I, 6)
As a verdant retreat from the dust-heaps and riverside violence, the Porters is a 'haven . . . divided from the rough world'. It is an isolated refuge rather than a palace of delight, and its limited but invaluable pleasures are sanctified by links with the past. In its 'old age fraught with confused memories of its youth', it is in a 'state of second childhood', hearkening back to less parlous times when leisure hours could be more carefree and less painstakingly guarded.
The scope for amusement at the Six Jolly Fellowship Porters is severely constrained: its place is cramped; it