Bernard Schilling Rain of Years Great Expectatations

8/11/2019 Bernard Schilling Rain of Years Great Expectatations

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T H E R A I N O F Y E A R S


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Bernard N. Schilling


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University of Rochester Press

T H E R A I N O F Y E A R S

Great Expectations

and the World of Dickens

Bernard N. Schilling


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Copyright 2001 Bernard N. Schilling

All Rights Reserved. Except as permitted under current legislation, no part of thiswork may be photocopied, stored in a retrieval system, published, performed in pub-

lic, adapted, broadcast, transmitted, recorded or reproduced in any form or by anymeans, without prior permission of the copyright owner.

First published 2001by the University of Rochester Press

The University of Rochester Press is an imprint of Boydell & Brewer, Inc.668 Mount Hope Avenue, Rochester, NY 14620, USA

and of Boydell & Brewer, Ltd.P.O. Box 9,Woodbridge, Suffolk 1P12 3DF, UK

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Schilling, Bernard Nicholas.

The rain of years : Great expectations and the world of Dickens / by Bernard N.Schilling.

p. cm.ISBN 1-58046-100-X1. Dickens, Charles, 1812-1870. Great expectations. 2. Dickens, Charles,

1812-1870Themes, motives. I.Title.

PR4560 .S35 2001

823'.8dc21 2001034759

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication DataA catalogue record for this item is available from the British Library

Designed and typeset by George Joseph MaddenPrinted in the United States of America.This publication is printed on acid-free paper.

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For Louis Martz


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By the wilderness of casks that I had walked on long ago,

and on which the rain of years had fallen since

I made my way to the ruined garden.

Dickens, Great Expectations


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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Preface xi

Acknowledgements xiii

Introduction xv

Abbreviations xvii

1. Of Things Eternal 1

I. Night and Day 2

II.The River 10

III.The Tolling Bell 14

IV.The Wind and Rain 17

2. The Human Scene 25

I.The City 25

II. Money 34

III. London: Goal of Ambition 37

IV.The Country 40

V.The Journey 45

VI. Dark House 51

VII.The Staircase 58

3. Great Expectations 63

4. The Rain of Years 108

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For Dickens, his imagined world was the real one. So we may

read Great Expectations as a kind of poem, a number of whose recur-

ring images come together when, one night in London, Pip hears a

footstep on the staircase, while outside the river flows on, the wind

and rain continue, and church bells toll the hour. Coming late, in

1861, in the sequence of great novels, Great Expectations absorbs these

materials from Dickenss world, making the powerful staircase scenenot only the climax of this story, but a high point in the whole of

Dickenss creation. Great Expectations, driven by a lunatic and a crimi-

nal, seems at last regretful, in mourning for the story of folly,

betrayal, deluded hopes and doomed illusions it has to tell, as Pip is

indeed ashamed of what he must record.

Meanwhile the rain of years has fallen steadily upon thehuman scene, shaping events so that Pip and Estella are led back

inevitably once more to the ruined garden, never to part again. We

take this phrase as our own title, seeing it charged with a meaning that

makes the storys ending the only one possible.The rain of years then

compels, ensures, their last meeting, as it stands for accumulated

experience, all that has happened to make Pip and Estella different

from the way they were at their first encounter. It contains Pips ownstory as he tells itat once a confessional story and a record of his

emotional experience of fear, shame, and remorse.

At the end of his excellent survey of essays, articles, and

reviews on Great Expectations (Columbia: 2000), Nicolas Tredell

offers a seeming invitation. Since adding to the store of commentary

on Great Expectations is possible, permissible, and perhaps irre-sistiblethere shall never be a lack of critics compelled to pursue

this astonishing story

PREFACE

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Thus encouraged, we read this masterpiece not only for its

own sake, but as drawing toward itself themes and images from

Dickens preceding volumes, reaching fulfillment in one powerful,

climactic scene. Our reading becomes a meditation then on the worldas Dickens has imagined it.The passages chosen make up an antholo-

gy to increase the readers pleasure, as he hears the sound, the music

of Dickens throughout. For the rest, the general idiom is from the

common stock of Dickensian studies.

Our chosen title, The Rain of Years, will, we trust, seem apt to

the reader, as justifying the end decided upon by Dickens at last.

So once more, Great Expectations

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Acknowledgements use the words without whom, etc. So also,my thanks and praise to three indispensable women, Nancy Bolger, Susan

Schilling, and Kate Walsh, without whose patience, not to say heroic

labors, The Rain of Years would not have come into readable form.

Professor Vincent Nowlis, psychologist, offered valuable crit-

icism of the books structure. Professor Louis Martz read the

manuscript and gave me the benefit of his learning and critical judge-ment.The dedication records my gratitude and esteem.

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Bernard Schillings book is the culmination of a lifetimes

love of the works of Dickens. He has read the novels over and over

again, until he has virtually memorized their themes and images. As

a result, this final tribute creates the effect of having been written

spontaneously out of a huge store of Dickensian memories. The

main thrust of the book lies in the interpretation of Great

Expectations, but around the images and characters of this novel clus-ter echoes drawn from the whole range of Dickenss writings.

What is most impressive is the skill with which the work is

organized. Readers of the first part, Of Things Eternal, may at first

wonder what all these myriad examples of Darkness, the River, the

tolling Bell, and the wind and rain have to do with the novel that

stands first in the present books title, for only a few references toGreat Expectations are given. But none are really needed: gradually we

understand where we are headed. The same is true for the second

part of the book, The Human Scene, which extends the explo-

ration of themes and images through London, a baffling

complexity, a labyrinth, on to the theme of Money, the persistent

image of the prison, the Country, the Journey, and the dark houses

in many novels. Especially notable is the grim facade in Dombey andSon, which bears out the meaning of all these houses: the appear-

ance of a house suggests its role or influence in a given novel,as we

meet with habitations sympathetic, reassuring, peaceful, inviting,or

sinister, grimly brooding, menacing, corrupt or rotting with decay.

And finally, climatically, we come to the dominant image of the

staircase, which runs from beginning to end in Dickenss novels,

marking crucial moments in the action, as when Pip first ascends thestaircase to meet Miss Havisham, on to the moment when he hears

the footstep of Magwitch ascending to him.

INTRODUCTION

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Meanwhile, quietly, unobtrusively, these themes and images

are frequently linked together in scattered passages, as the books first

part concludes with a powerful quotation from Dombey and Son, where

rain, wind, darkness and the tolling bell are all brought together.Thusthe two opening parts, with their great range of allusions to Dickenss

novels, take their place as prologues, as preparations, for the main

event, where, as this books title suggests, the rain of years has

spread its influence upon much more than Miss Havishams ruined

garden.The rain of years has brought Pip from illusion to reality and

has made possible a movement toward redemption.

The long essay on Great Expectations emerges as a major con-

tribution to the vast body of commentary upon this novel, an essay

written with deep feeling, subtle apprehension, and elegant, elo-

quent style. Nowhere are these qualities better shown than in the

climactic meeting of Pip and Magwitch at the top of the staircase, a

passage where Schillings words appropriately blend with the words

of Dickenss: Nighttime, in the city of London, the river, wind andrain, the Bells of St. Pauls striking the hour, the sound upon the

staircaseDickens seems to draw together lines from the whole of

his created universe to make of this scene the highest manifestation

of his artistic capacity. Eternity comments upon the human scene,

collides with what is always there, as the narrator speaks of a heavy

veil driving over London as if in the East there were an Eternity of

cloud and wind.

Louis L. Martz

Sterling Professor of English Emeritus

Yale University

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ABBREVIATIONS

Titles of individual works are abbreviated as follows:

SB. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Sketches by Boz

PP . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Pickwick Papers

OT . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Oliver Twist

NN. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Nicholas Nickleby

OCS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Old Curiosity Shop

BR . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Barnaby Rudge

MC . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Martin ChuzzlewitDS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Dombey and Son

DC . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . David Copperfield

BH . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Bleak House

HT . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Hard Times

LD . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Little Dorritt

TTC . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Tale of Two Cities

GE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Great ExpectationsOMF . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Our Mutual Friend

ED . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Edwin Drood

Quotations are taken from the Oxford Illustrated Dickens. Longer pas-

sages are cited by chapter number.The many small units of word, phrase,

or sentence come out of every title in the sequence, from Sketches by Boz,through Pickwick, Oliver Twist and on to Edwin Drood.These lie everywhere

on the surface and are easily multiplied.

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ALTHOUGH DICKENS HAS NO DECLARED PLAN FOR THE WHOLE, it isclear that his fictional world overlaps the installments in which itwas written, just as he overlapped parts of any single work to bring it

into unity. With three phases of publicationserial, novel, and col-

lected worksthe flow of meaning is from single chapters, to

volumes, to the final whole. He thus connects the individual works

together and greatly enlarges their implications. Stock characters,incidents, situations, kinds of people are repeated to form an atmos-

phere, a fictional quality to which we give the name Dickensian.

Further, Dickens controls and orders his work by coinci-

dence, by the meeting of unlikely elements and connections from the

past, which becomes more effective as a unifying force than simple

probability. Dickens keeps the physical geography of his world rela-

tively small, the action tending to center upon two main localities,London and country. There emerges a present world, narrow and

intensified by minute description, easily grasped, as the world of a

given reader seems small in the same way and for the same reasons.

Movement is facile and constant, much journeying with Dickenss

beloved coach in restless use, much departing and arriving, greeting

and farewell, going back and forth between London and the country,

the whole accompanied by movements abstract or mental in the formof change within the characters, coming at last to resemble the human

experience of life as it is in fact lived.

Since Dickens tends to rely on certain materials proper to the

term Dickensian, an individual work like Great Expectations gains in

power when seen as typical of the whole and when read as the culmi-

nation of a characteristic repetitive process. Our choices among many

possibilities will be different as called for by concentration on a singlework, rather than by a general survey, but let us see what follows if we

pursue lines suggested by the phrases of things eternal and the

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human scene. Dickens then creates, from a base of the eternal, what

is ever there outside of time and distance from the life of man: the

order of Nature itself, the coming and end of day, the sun and moon,

the elements of wind, rain and mist, the river and the sea, whose per-manence contrasts with and comments upon the transient life of man

playing out its scene in this world. A link between them is the clock

or bell that strikes the hours as they pass, marking out the point to

which men have come in moving to their end, while the things that

never change appear and reappear, making the unstable life of man

seem weak and pitiable.

The human scene is then created by a master of physical envi-ronment, as Dickens shows against a constant backdrop the

appearance of man, his places of work and habitation, the city that

lures the young with its false expectations, the haven of the country,

journeys between them, and the society that results from human

activity inspired by ambition and illusion.

I. NIGHT AND DAY

Dawn, sunrise, morning; the noon and day; sunset and twi-

light; the moon, stars, darkness and the dead of night. Within this

everlasting sequence the life of man unfolds in varying shades of light

and darkness. All things steal away, says the narrator of Our MutualFriend, by night and by day, so quietly yielding to the attraction of the

lodestone rock of eternity

The coming of day has a long history in art, mythology, and lit-

erature: Homers rosy-fingered dawn and Shakespeares with russet

mantle clad, for instance. The new day is welcomed as a scene of

coming hope and energy, or lamented as the death of night, the end of

cool and silent peace and the joys of love, or an acceptance of the ter-rible burden of life, as in the tragic countenance of Dawn on the

Medici Tombs of Michelangelo.

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Dickens responds to the dawn in ways that lead him inex-

orably to see it as nearer to death than life.To be sure, he gives us the

bright sun, that brings back, not light alone, but new life, and hope,

and freshness to man(OT); the cheerful welcome of that punctu-al servant of all work, the sun (PP); the finest possible summer

morning that caresses Ruth and Tom Pinch, to create one of those

glad times that inspires the wish that everyone on earth were able to

be happy(MC); and in Edwin Drood, the brilliant morning that shines

on old Cloisterham, with rays of glorious light that penetrate into

the Cathedral, subdue its earthy odour, and preach the Resurrection

and the Life.But this new day is most joyously affirmed when Little Nell and

her grandfather steal away from the dark imprisonment of London:

It was the beginning of a day in June; the deep blue sky

unsullied by a cloud, and teeming with brilliant lightThe

old man and the child passed on through the glad silence,

elate with hope and pleasureevery object was bright and

fresh; nothing reminded them, otherwise than by contrast, of

the monotony and constraint they had left behind; church

towers and steeples, frowning and dark at other times, now

shone in the sun; each humble nook and corner rejoiced in

light; and the sky, dimmed only by excessive distance, shed

its placid smile on everything beneath. (OCS ch. 12)

Sometimes the sun would gladly shine, if not held eternyallyin eclipse, through a medium of smoked glass, as in Hard Times, its

beneficent intention frustrated by human agents, so that the sun could

rarely look into the closer regions of Coketown without engendering

more death than life. So does the eye of Heaven itself become an evil

eye, when incapable or sordid hands are interposed between it and the

things it looks upon to bless.(HT) Understandably then, the sun may

come forth slowly, the tardy day (OMF) reluctant to disclose whatmust be faced in the human scene, for let the day itself be ever so fair,

so full of brightness and promise, it may be compelled to show, as on

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the day of execution in Barnaby Rudge, in the midst of so much life,

and hope, and renewal of existencethe terrible instrument of

death. (BR) But by nature, the sun in its glorious impartiality (OMF)

is eternal, indifferent, as seen by the guilty Carker in Dombey and Son:it rose, tranquil and serene, unmoved by all the wrong and

wickedness on which its beams had shone since the beginning of the

worldAnd the narrator of Nicholas Nickleby, in his half-comic exu-

berance, assures us that

Notwithstanding all that has been said and sung to the con-

trary, there is no well-established case of morning havingeither deferred or hastened its approach by the term of an

hour or so for the mere gratification of a splenetic feeling

against some unoffending lover; the sun having, in the dis-

charge of his public dutyinvariably risen according to the

almanacks, and without suffering himself to be swayed by

any private considerations. (NNCh. 43)

Impartial though the sun must be, in Dickenss world its com-ing each day tells of sadness, colored once more by what it discloses

and the cold eastern glare resembles more the stare of the dead

than the renewal of life (OMF), the death of night, rather than the

birth of day. (OT) Dawn may seem the end of hope and joy, looking

like a dead face out of the sky in aA Tale of Two Cities. Here too it must

face the spectacle of Sydney Cartons squandered life as the narrative

laments sadly, sadly the sun rose; it rose upon no sadder sight than theman of good abilities and good emotions incapable of their fulfill-

ment, until he awakens one last day in the sombre morning

unconscious where he was only to face his coming death. (TTC) It is

in the dawn, too, that Esther Summerson comes to a burial ground

and, on the step at the gate, sees with a cry of pity and horror the

dead body of her mother. (BH)

But the day cometh, whether or no, (BH) and for little OliverTwist the sun may rise in all its splendid beauty; but the light only

served to show the boy his own lonesomeness and desolation (OT)

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At Dotheboys Hall, as the night wanes, a deep sigh is heard, telling

that another boy had awakened to the misery of another day and, as

morning took place of night, the smile gradually faded away, with the

friendly darkness which had given them birth. (NN) The day, cominglike a phantom in Bleak House, sends a warning streak before it of a

death-like hue (BH), and the more clearly it flames on high over the

prison of Little Dorrit, the more intensely it shows the prison spikes

and bars in contrast to the sunrise on rolling rivers, rich landscapes,

and great forests. On the last day of Clennams appointed week, when

the early-glowing sun came over the city, its long bright rays seemed

bars of the prison of this lower world. (LD)But Dickens reserves for Dombey and Son, the most sombre

and dignified of the earlier novels, a truly poignant rendering of this

theme of sorrowing day. The sun will shine fair and warm upon the

wedding day of Florence and Walter, but now it steals shivering to the

church that contains the dust of Paul and his mother:

Hovering feebly round the church, and looking in, dawnmoans and weeps for its short reign, and its tears trickle on

the window glass, and the trees against the church-wall bow

their heads, and wring their many hands in sympathy. Night,

growing pale before it, gradually fades out of the church, but

lingers in the vaults below, and sits upon the coffins. And

now comes bright day, burnishing the steeple-clock, and red-

dening the spire, and drying up the tears of dawn, and stifling

its complaining; and the scared dawn, following the night,

and chasing it from its last refuge, shrinks into the vaults

itself and hides, with a frightened face, among the dead, until

night returns, refreshed, to drive it out. (DS Ch.31)

In Dickens, the sun declining, not the rising sun, clothes itself

in colors of red and gold. Sometimes the sunset forms a radiant cen-

tre over the whole length and breadth of the tranquil firmament (LD);or on a calm and silent evening, the sky may be radiant with the soft-

ened glory of sunset, as a deep repose comes to the earth. (BR) More

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often it is the rosy evening(OMF) coming with the wrathful sunset

(LD) that glances out of a red mist(DS); the sun goes down in a red,

green, gold glory.(LD) Its last rays make a path of golden light as

Jonas Chuzzlewit enters the fatal wood (MC) and the close of day seemsominous. As for the pitiable wanderers of The Old Curiosity Shop:

Now the sky was dark and lowering, save where the glory

of the departing sun piled up masses of gold and burning

fire, decaying embers of which gleamed here and there

through the black veil, and shone redly down upon the

earth. (OCS Ch. 29)

But the temptation to see blood in this color of red is, alas,

too much for the Dickens of traditional melodrama. As Rogue

Riderhood watches the moving boat, the sun went down and the

landscape was dyed red.And then the red had the appearance of fad-

ing out of it and mounting up to Heaven, as we say blood, guiltily

shed, does.(OMF)The last red glow of day yields to the moon and stars which in

their turn light up and seem to comment upon the human scene

below.The moon is bright and full of dashing energy as its journey is

a counterpart of Tom Pinchs coach ride from the country to London.

(MC) It shines with a mild radiance on Lucie Manette and her father,

the night before her marriage. But as Lucie embraces the old man, the

moon grows sad: the moonlight which is always sad, as the light ofthe sun itself isas the light called human life isat its coming and

its going.(TTC)The moons everlasting peace shines on the dead bod-

ies of the brothers Dorrit through half-closed lattice blinds into the

solemn room where the stumblings and wanderings of a life had so

lately ended.(LD) The moon is charged with messages, and when it

shines brilliantly a solitude and stillness seem to proceed from her,

that influence even crowded places full of life.(BH) The moon has attimes an air of mercy and sympathy for evils it need not endure. As

the idiot Barnaby lies in prison, the moon appears in gentle glory:

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The face of Heaven shone bright and merciful. He raised his

head; gazed upward at the quiet sky, which seemed to smile

upon the earth in sadness, as if the night, more thoughtful

than the day, looked down in sorrow on the sufferings andevil deeds of men; and felt its peace sink deep into his

heart. (BR Ch. 73)

But the moon has the power actively to join one life to

another, as do the stars. Dr. Manette in prison is tormented by the

moon to think of her shining upon what I had lost. (TTC) The

moons light brings into the prison what is longed for without; it

joins the prisoners life to the world, binding him to other men andthe possibilities of his own life. So also the stars for Little Dorrit,

away and forlorn in Venice. Equidistant from all, the stars join those

otherwise separated, bring to her scenes from the past, remember-

ing her night on the streets with little Maggy. (LD) As the sun fell

she would watch these glories expire; and thenwould raise her

eyes to the shining stars. (LD) Like the moon again, the stars seem

alert to participate in mens affairs or to express hidden meanings.As Tulkinghorn and Lady Dedlock cannot relax their vigilance on

each other the stars watch them both through the opened window.

(BH). But for the narrator of Edwin Drood, the stars contain a final

secret as yet unknown:

But Mr. Grewgious, seeing nothing therehis gaze wan-

dered from the windows to the stars, as if he would have readin them something that was hidden from him. Many of us

would if we could; but none of us so much as know our let-

ters in the stars yetor seem likely to do it, in this state of

existenceand few languages can be read until their alpha-

bets are mastered. (Ch.17)

The original narrator of The Old Curiosity Shopbegins by con-

fessing that he prefers to walk at night, so that I seldom go out untilafter dark, life being preferable when not so fully revealed as in the

light of day. But in Dickenss typical scene, the night is the time of

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release for human action, although it may be objected that with so

much mist, fog, rain, and finally darkness, people cannot see very well

in Dickenss world.

The London of Oliver Twist is in almost continual darkness,the sinister gloom intensified by gaslight to enhance the atmos-

phere of crime and evil. On a cold dark night, Ralph Nickleby

steals out of the city creeping from the house and slinking off like

a thief. (NN) Nells grandfather too steals away into the night, leav-

ing the child alone in the dark and silent house, or after their

wanderings have begun, to pass the wakeful hours in helpless ter-

ror of the dark. (OCS)Barnaby Rudge is steeped in darkness, partly because eigh-

teenth-century London was so poorly lighted. The Gordon riots are

at their worst in darkness and on the night of the original crime it

had been darker than ever before or since. (BR) The passage describ-

ing how darkness rests upon Tom-All-Alones has become famous

(BH) and in A Tale of Two Cities most of the major scenes are set at

night. As the darkness here is inseparable from the novels themes ofdeath and life, prison and freedom, so does it both influence and

portray the moods and feeling of human beings. At night the crimi-

nal struggles not against but toward his crime (OMF) and the guilty

Jonas is afraid of the eye of Night: of wakeful, watchful, silent, and

attentive Night which at last creeps over him until it was black

night within him and without. (MC)

But night does not alone make mad the guilty. In the church-yard of Cloisterham, the dark encourages superstition and the fear of

ghosts. (ED) It surrounds both the unquiet spirit of Edith Granger on

the night before her bridal (DS) and the innocent but anxious heart of

Florence as she creeps back upstairs in the dismal house, while the

secrecy and silence of her own proceedings made the night secret,

silent, and oppressive. (DS)Thus if our subject were Dickens and the

Shadows we might find the darkness spreading itself out over a widerange of meaning to suggest ignorance or uncertainty, gloom and anx-

ious foreboding, hostility, danger, and accusing guilt.

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Great Expectations plays out the powerful theme on darkness,

as the opening scene begins just before evening. After the tense anx-

ieties of Christmas Eve, Pip says, I went upstairs in the dark,

thinking of the sinister prison ship and the crime he was soon tocommit.The night is spent in sleepless terror, anticipating his crime

and its terrible punishment.

The pursuit and capture of the convicts takes place in darkness,

which is inseparable from the storys moral condition from the outset:

crime, escape from crime and its consequences, uncertainty, mystery,

confused and blurred vision. Darkness comes as Pip and Joe join the

searching party to find the convicts, and Pip feels the shudder of thedying day in every blade of grass. As the prisoners finally are put on

board the prison ship, Magwitch disappears off the side of the ship in

darkness, as he will reappear to Pips vision in the darkness of Chapter

39.Thus Pips expectations begin and end in the dead of night.

Not until Chapter 8 does the action come in the full light of

day, as Pip sets out for Satis House at 10 a.m. But all is dark within;

Pip notices that the passages were all dark. Miss Havisham takes upa candle and we went through more passages and up a staircase, and

still it was all dark

On his second visit to Satis House, Pip first meets Jaggers on

his way up the dark staircase to Miss Havishams room. He is ushered

to the room opposite that is also dark as the daylight was completely

excluded. Thus nowhere in the house itself does it seem other than

night, no matter what time it is. A heavy darkness broods. Pipreturns at night from his second visit, and as he nears home the sky is

black. Pips life now seems spent half at night, but what happens in the

light of day? Only things that strengthen the illusory expectations

that come out of Satis House, that is: out of the night.And finally, on

the staircase, what was begun at night in Satis House is exposed in all

its falsity in the dead of night.

But, more powerfully, Jaggers makes his revelation of Pipsexpectations at night.They go to Joes house and into the state par-

lour where a single candle is the only light. Jaggers peers into the

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darkness at Joe and me.The revelation comes in darkness then, in the

obscure light of a candle, the same as the only light there is in Satis

House, standing for the same mystery, confusion, and moral error that

ruin Pips life. He goes up to his room feeling it very sorrowful andstrange that this first night of my bright fortunes should be the loneli-

est I had every known.

But throughout Pips anguished confusion, the dark gloom of

Satis House prevails. It is at once the grave of Miss Havishams illusions,

and as well the birthplace of Pips expectations. Miss Havishams illu-

sions end in darkness and night, and the illusions of Pip are born in that

same darkness and night. In his boyhood Pip goes up the staircase inSatis House many times, up into the dark to find the past which has set-

tled upon the house and Miss Havishams life within it. In Chapter 38,

Pip stands again on the staircase and watches Miss Havisham ascend it

into the perpetual darkness of her past.

So the dead of night is inseparable from the meaning of Great

Expectations, from crime.And if dawn marks the beginning of his crim-

inal destiny, in his theft on behalf of Magwitch and his betrayal of Joe,what is set in motion at dawn comes to fruition at night, as Great

Expectations unfolds in darkness.

The fugitives from justice are pursued at night, the sunless

gloom of Satis House casts a fatal shadow on Pips expectations, the

murderous hatred of Orlick seeks revenge at night, and at last the fatal

step of Magwitch is heard upon the stairs, as all the bells of London

toll the eleventh hour and the point of no return.

II.THE RIVER

The river too has a long history of various literary and artistic

uses available to Dickens, and he fastens upon it from the beginning,so charged with meaning that the river becomes one of the chief

devices whereby his creation is made to seem like a continuous whole.

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Before the river enlarges into its eternal function, it is an actual

stream, usually the Thames, flowing in a particular time, drawing out

of the world through which it passes the lowest, most abandoned ele-

ments, lined with sinister, decaying houses, a scene of poverty, filthand crime, odious and discolored with industrial waste as in Hard

Times, a source of money as in Our Mutual Friend, and always the mys-

terious bearer of a message yet to be understood.

Esther Summerson tells of its effect upon Inspector Bucket

and herself as they go in search of her mother:

He gazed into the profound black pit of water, with a facethat made my heart die within me. The river had a fearful

look, so overcast and secret, creeping away so fast between

the low flat lines of shore; so heavy with indistinct and

awful shapes, both of substance and shadow; so deathlike

and mysterious. (BHch. 57)

The rivers continuous presence makes it available as thescene of idyllic nature away from the city, as in Pickwick Papers where

the Medway glistens and sparkles in the sun, and it is by the river

that David and Dora take their Sunday walks together. (DC) By the

river, too, Edwin Drood and Rosa talk over their strange problems

(ED) and Mr. Grewgious has an outing with Rosa as the river looks

out on the gaiety of unspoiled nature. In Our Mutual Friend, Dickens

seems intent on exhausting all the possible uses of the river, findingit also a great serene mirror, which might have reproduced all it

had ever reflected between those placid banks, and brought nothing

to the light save what was peaceful, pastoral, and blooming. (OMF)

A river is also the means whereby young Martin Chuzzlewit jour-

neys to the end of his illusions in the paradise that is in fact a

worthless swamp. (MC) It serves the narrator of Little Dorrit as a fig-

ure for men in prison who are the turbid living river that flowedthrough it and flowed on (LD), while inA Tale of Two Cities the river

becomes all things in their course: The water of the fountain ran,

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the swift river ran, the day ran into evening, so much life in the city

ran into death according to ruleall things ran their course.

The river runs its course indeedcomes out of the past,

flows now as life in the present, and disappears into the future. Itmay sustain life or destroy it, may act as a means to those wishing to

leave the world, to join it before their time as it goes its way lead-

ing out of time into eternity, out of life into death. Whether the

Thames or the Seine, no matter, as the desperate Carker finds in

Paris where the turbid river held its swift course undisturbed,

between two brawling streams of life and motion. (DS) For Little

Nell, walking unseen along the bank of an evening, the river con-soles in drawing her spirit away from the shore, the scene of trial

and suffering, while the river itself goes on serene, independent,

unchanging. This quality of steady continuity seems to comment

upon its opposite in the human scene:

Within view was the peaceful river and the ferry-boat, to

moralise to all the inmates, saying:Young or old, passionateor tranquil, chafing or content, you, thus runs the current

always. Let the heart swell into what discord it will, thus

plays the rippling water on the prow of the ferry-boat ever

the same tune. Year after year, so much allowance for the

drifting of the boat, so many miles an hour the flowing of

the stream, here the rushes, there the lilies, nothing uncer-

tain or unquiet, upon this road that steadily runs away; whileyou, upon your flowing road of time, are so capricious and

distracted. (LD Ch. 16)

By its very nature, the river seems to act as an invitation to

death. In Dickens this fatal attraction is already clear in Sketches by

Boz. Nancy of Oliver Twist dies first by water in her imagination and

poor Martha in David Copperfieldsees the river as the natural com-pany of such as I amit goes awayit goes away, like my life, to

a great sea, that is always troubledand I feel that I must go with

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it. The narrator of Little Dorrit asks, as if rhetorically, who has not

thought for a moment, sometimesthat it might be better to flow

away monotonously, like the river, and to compound for its insen-

sibility to happiness with its insensibility to pain? For the weariedpilgrim on lifes journey, like ancient Betty Higden, the tender

river whispers the romantic concept of easeful death, of solace at

last in the arms of a friend: Come to me, come to me! When the

cruel shame and terror you have so long fled from, most beset

you, come to meMy breast is softer than the pauper-nurses;

death in my arms is peacefuller than among the pauper-wards.

Come to me!(OMF)A knowledge that it is the final destiny of every river to reach

the sea governs the brief existence of Paul Dombey. He would lie

awake at night and think:

How the long streets were dotted with lamps, and how the

peaceful stars were shining overhead. His fancy had a strange

tendency to wander to the river, which he knew was flowingthrough the great city; and now he thought how black it was,

and how deep it would look, reflecting the hosts of stars

and more than all, how steadily it rolled away to meet the

sea. (DS Ch. 16)

For Dickens, the rivers movement remains a constant pres-

ence until at last it joins the broad vast sea(OCS), stretches away tothe great ocean, Death(OMF), or seems already heaving with a rest-

less knowledge of its approach towards the sea. (ED) To Sydney

Carton, the swift tide, so deep and certain, is like a congenial friend

in the morning stillness.(TTC) In a tender scene, Mr. Meagles takes

from his breast a handful of roses, bends down upon the shore and

lays them on the flowing stream: the flowers, pale and unreal in

the moonlight, floated away upon the river, and thus do greaterthings that once were in our breasts, and near our hearts, flow from

us to the eternal seas.(LD)

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III.THE TOLLING BELL

Dickenss powers of visual recreation are justly celebrated,

but there is a sound to be heard throughout his world that comes tous with equal effect. It is the sound, often carried further by the wind,

of bells striking the hour. In Dickenss work no one is ever far beyond

the reach of the sound of passing time, and, therefore, of the move-

ment toward death.The clocks strike at decisive moments, their hands

like the moving finger and their message one of tolling, of mourning

for what is gone.The whole of Edwin Drood, for example, as far as it

goes, depends heavily on the cathedral clocks punctuation of time,most of the action taking place within its range.The hour strikes with

particular solemnity as one after another goes up the postern stair

with renewed sense of mystery. (ED)

But it is the great, the deep, the heavy bell of St. Pauls that

sounds with such power as to govern the very life of the city. As

Master Humphrey, in Master Humphrey from his Clock-side in the

Chimney-Corner, puts back into the clock-case the pages from whichhe has been reading, the clock points just to twelve, and there came

toward us upon the wind the voice of the deep and distant bell of St.

Pauls as it struck the hour of midnight. He wonders at its machin-

ery and as he goes to see the clock, marking how it regulated the

progress of the life around, the fancy came upon me that this was

Londons Heart, and that when it should cease to beat, the City

would be no more.This bell forms a brotherhood of all who hear it, gives a sum-

mons to human unity and obligation, as telling of time it also tells of

eternity. One thinks of this union created by the sense of time as com-

mon to all men, as in Bleak House. Bucket and Esther ask after Lady

Dedlock in the house of the poor family where she had rested. But

they cannot tell what time that might have been, having neither

watches nor clocks to know the time by, showing that they are poorand socially outcast from the normal process of life, because they can-

not tell the point to which their lives have come in the endless round.

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In its constant manifestations the clock strikes with varied

effect at many a different hour. At the stroke of five, Newman Noggs

comes to call on the Nickleby ladies. (NN) As Kit Nubbles watches near

the window of Little Nells room the church steeples proclaimedeleven at night, (OCS) and the embittered Dombey sits in his shadowy

corner so long, that the church clocks struck the hour three times

before he moved that night. (DS) Little David Copperfield sitting alone

in his bedroom, on many a wintry hour hears the church-clock strike,

and on his return to Canterbury in his mature years, the bells sound

from the Cathedral towers and tell him sorrowfully of change in

everything, reverberations like motes upon the deep of Time (DC).A splendid clock upon the staircase warns Mr. Tulkinghorn

Dont go home, as its sharp, clear bell strikes three-quarters after

seven. (BH) As Rachael starts up just in time at night to prevent the

suicide of Stephens wife, the wind brings to the window a sound

from the church clock, They listened, and it struck three. (HT) The

night spent by Little Dorrit and Maggy on the streets of London is

chill and dark as they hear the clocks strike half-past one, and at lastthe hour of five sounds from the steeples, giving hope that dawn is

near. (LD) And Lizzie Hexam waits out the night for her father with

a womans patience and her own purpose as the clock strikes two,

three, and four in the morning. (OMF)

But it is the hour of twelve which sounds forth with pro-

foundest meaning, a theme announced as early as Sketches by Boz,

wherein, as the first stroke of twelve peals from neighboring church-es, there is something awful in the soundwe measure mans life by

years, and it is a solemn knell that warns us we have passed another

of the landmarks, which stand between us and the grave. (SB) Simply

that it is twelve has significance as an ending, as inA Tale of Two Cities

in Dr. Manettes interpolated story. The man harnessed to a cart is

released one day at noon, and he dies sobbing twelve times, once for

every stroke of the bell. Sydney Carton himself walks to and frowhile the clocks strike the numbers he will never hear again: Nine

gone forever, ten gone forever, eleven gone forever, twelve coming

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on to pass away.(TTC) More ominous is the sound of the Cathedral

clock striking twelve in the ear of Edith Dombey as she awaits the

approach of Carker room by room.(DS) For David Copperfield, life

itself has begun at midnight with the first of many cries. He was bornon a Friday, at twelve oclock at night. It was remarked that the

clock began to strike, and I began to cry simultaneously.(DC) But no

matter what the hour, the striking clock and the sounding bell are

funereal reminders of death, and as they toll the hours, the preced-

ing stillness becomes ever more intense and all seems more

mysterious and quiet than before.(BH) In Oliver Twist, as Nancy waits

under the eye of her hidden observer, the heavy bell of St. Paulstolled for the death of another day. Midnight had come upon the

crowded city.(OT) Oliver himself seems to hear a bell tolling as he

fears the death of Rose Maylie, and for the doomed Fagin, the

church-clock may not tell of life and coming day but only of

despair: The boom of every iron bell came laden with the one, deep,

hollow soundDeath.What availed the noise and bustle of cheerful

morning? It was another form of knell, with mockery added to thewarning.(OT)

It is left for the villainous usurer in Nicholas Nickleby to give

bitter expression to this universal theme:

The sound of a deep bell came along the wind. One. Lie

on! cried the usurer, with your iron tongue! Ring merrily

for births that make expectants writhe, and for marriagesthat are made in hell, and toll ruefully for the dead whose

shoes are worn already! Call men to prayers who are godly

because not found out, and ring chimes for the coming in of

every year that brings this cursed world nearer to its end. No

bell or book for me! Throw me on a dunghill, and let me rot

there, to infect the air!

And as he shakes his fist at the sky above him, the rain and hailpatter against the window glass, while the crazy casement rattled

with the wind. (NNCh. 62)

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IV.THE WIND AND RAIN

As Dickens repeatedly calls in the sound of passing time to

dramatize his human scene, so does he greatly intensify the climacticmoments in his world by setting them amid the forces of Nature,

especially to the accompaniment of the most familiar things that never

change: the wind and rain. Nature is the one that remains, while the

many change and pass, as Dickens pauses in the human action to note

what the eternal is doing.

To be sure, Dickens is not above a melodramatic use of the

weather to underline certain actions. In Barnaby Rudge we areunmoved by the obvious melodrama of:

The demons of wrath and despair have striven to emulatethose who ride the whirlwind and direct the storm; andman, lashed into madness with the roaring winds and boilingwaters, has become for the time as wild and merciless as theelements themselves. (BR Ch. 2)

This is not Dickenss reliance on Nature at its best, wherein

the elements speak from a higher security to comment on the weak

transitoriness of things human, at times like a Greek chorus reveal-

ing what has been and is, then prophetic or foreboding. They are at

once mockery and lament, in that they only go on assured of tomor-

row. In the immediate action, they seem agents of the hostility of life

to the weak, the poor, and the suffering, for whom they chill thebody and depress the soul, continuing as always, and indifferent to

their human consequences.

As the action unfolds, Dickens may employ the elements not

only to correspond to mood or to suit the needs of given events, but

to become characters performing roles, themselves the true protago-

nists of the novel.Thus the celebrated presence in Bleak House of fog

and mud, mist and rain.Dickenss mud, created from two of the four elements, earth

and water, is more charged than the mud of Balzacs Paris, for exam-

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ple, which is only a stain on ones boots that need never touch a man

or affect himif he has money enough to avoid it. Of Mr. Bounderby,

we hear he is a commercial wonder more admirable than Venus, who

had risen out of the mud instead of the sea. (HT) Mud seems to formquickly and mysteriously, so that one cannot say what it had been

doing or where it had come from, save in response to the falling rain,

when it seemed to collect in a moment, as a crowd will, and in five

minutes to have splashed all the sons and daughters of Adam. (LD) In

Bleak House, the mud joins with a fearful mist to share profound mean-

ings of the opening scene, a mist that will hang over the marshes at the

start of Great Expectations, that early on near Quilps castle in a low,marshy spot had filled every nook and corner with a thick dense

cloud. (OCS) Mist obscures the beginning of A Tale of Two Cities, a

steaming mist in all the hollows, and it had roamed in its forlornness

up the hill, like an evil spirit, seeking rest and finding none. (TTC)

Because of the fog, the gas is lighted early in Bleak House, displaying a

haggard and unwilling look, the whole effect extending beyond the

physical cloud obscuring vision, to a condition of the human spirit, ameans of separation, incoherence, disorder.

Dickenss multiple uses of the wind are suggested by the epi-

thets applied to it at various times:The wind blows steadily on, rolling

Mr. Pickwicks hat sportively on the ground before it, playing a kind

of mockery of death over the solitary body of Quilp (OCS), boister-

ously driving back Gabriel Varden in defiance of all his energy (BR),

serving Mr. Jarndyce as a term to judge the state of affairs, even show-ing dismay at Skimpoles cheat of Esther and Richard Carstone (BH),

sawing and whirling up the sawdust in Our Mutual Friend, until at last

in Edwin Drood, rising with the increasing intensity of the action:

All through the night the wind blows, and abates not. But

early in the morning, when there is barely enough light in the

east to dim the stars, it begins to lull. From that time, with

occasional wild charges, like a wounded monster dying, it

drops and sinks; and at full daylight it is dead. (ED Ch. 14)

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In its many employments, we hear the angry, the vexed, the

surly, the grating wind; the moaning wind; the light, the gentle,

sometimes even the impartial wind. As it blows furiously outside,

the wind may serve to comfort those who are within and securefrom its power (PPBagmans Story). It afflicts poor Oliver Twist as

he makes his way on foot to London and spends the night under a

hayrick: He felt frightened at first; for the wind moaned dismally

over the empty fields; and he was cold and hungry (OT) A sinis-

ter, ghostly quality may be heard as the wind seems to diminish with

the coming of night:

As it grew dusk, the wind fell; its distant moanings were

more low and mournful; and, as it came creeping up the

road, rattling covertly among the dry brambles on either

hand, it seemed like some great phantom for whom the way

was narrow, whose garments rustled as it stalked along. By

degrees it lulled and died away(OCS ch. 70)

The wind may seem fierce and aggressive, as in Little Dorritwhen it rushes round a churchyard, as if it had a mind to blow the

dead citizens out of their graves. Its power may reduce the stature of

man, as in Our Mutual Friend; the wild disorder reigning up there

made the pitiful little tumults in the streets of no account.The wind

may even speak in cruel mockery directly to pitiable man, as when

Lizzie Hexam seems to hear the voice of her dead father:

Father, was that you calling me?The wind sweeps jeering-

ly over Father, whips him with the frayed ends of his dress

and his jagged hair, tries to turn him where he lies stark on

his back, and force his face towards the rising sun, that he

may be shamed the more. A lull, and the wind is secret and

prying with him; lifts and lets fall a rag; hides palpitating

under another rag; runs nimbly through his hair and beard.

Then in a rush, it cruelly taunts him. Father, was that you

calling me? (OMFBook I, Ch. 14)

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Like the moon and stars, the wind as constant element every-

where may serve to unite in thought and feeling those separated by

distance, or to combine long periods of time; as Florence Dombey

thinks often of the absent Walter when the night was gloomy, and thewind was blowing round the house. For Esther Summerson at dawn,

the prospect at Bleak House gradually revealed itself and disclosed

the scene over which the wind had wandered in the dark, like my

memory over my life, the same low wind that murmurs through the

long drawing-room at Chesney Wold or through the strong mass of

ivy holding to a high red wall(BH)

But it is Dickenss own favorite David Copperfield where thewinds presence is constant, its sound and influence heard steadily

throughout. At the very beginning of Davids life the evening wind

makes a great disturbance, so that the elm trees in the garden bend

toward one another like giants who were whispering secretsThe

wind over the sea is like enchantment on Davids visits to the

Peggotys. It is heard at Dr. Strongs house and while Dora is still alive.

Again, it unites those separated by life, and seems to accuse the mis-taken little Emily in her guilt, when I hear the wind blowing at night,

I feel as if it was passing angrily from seeing him and uncle, and was

going up to God against me. But the night comes when this perpetu-

al wind rises to a fearful intensity, and before returning to calm it has

killed Steerforth, and Ham, who has died in his attempt at rescue. In

time the wind seems to deepen the sense of loss and abandonment

that overcomes David, The wind, though it was low, had a solemnsound, and crept around the deserted house with a whispered wailing

that was very mournful. As David nears the end of his recollections,

the wind remains a restless memory, and as he wanders abroad with

his undisciplined heart, he mourns for the wandering remnants of

the simple home, where I had heard the night wind blowing when I

was a child, the wind preserving, in spite of all that life could do

against it, all that was most natural and genuine in Davids life.Meanwhile, from dawn through the day and into the night,

there falls a steady rain. As Little Nell and her companion are

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befriended by boatmen, it was no sooner light than it began to rain

heavilyAt noon it poured down more hopelessly and heavily than

ever and as the boat lands, the wanderers pass into a crowded street,

standing in the pouring rain, as strange, bewildered, and confused, asif they had lived a thousand years before, and were raised from the

dead and placed there by a miracle. (OCS) At times the rain joins the

earthly scene to create a prospect of unrelieved desolation, Nature

itself seeming to have adopted the form of water:

The day was dawning from a patch of watery light in the

east, and sullen clouds came driving up before it, fromwhich the rain descended in a thick, wet mist. It streamed

from every twig and bramble in the hedge; made little gul-

lies in the path; ran down a hundred channels in the road;

and punched innumerable holes into the face of every pond

and gutter. It fell with an oozy, slushy sound among the

grass; and made a muddy channel of every furrow in the

ploughed fields. No living creature was anywhere to be

seen.The prospect could hardly have been more desolate if

animated nature had been dissolved in water, and poured

down upon the earth again in that form. (MCCh. 13)

The rain is established early as a protagonist in Bleak House,

and the vases on the stone terrace in the foreground catch the rain all

day; and the heavy drops fall, drip, drip, drip, upon the broad flagged

pavement, called from old time, the Ghosts Walk, all night.As if in acircle of the Inferno, the rain descends here as a punishment, or per-

haps as a summary, a commentary, a prophecy? The persistence of rain

continues into Hard Times, where Gradgrind sits writing in the room

with the deadly statistical clock while the rain was pouring down

like a deluge It seems to warn Louisa against a guilty love when

Hartshorne asks where they are to meet. Louisa thought there was

another listener among the trees. It was only rain, beginning to fallfast, in heavy drops. As Louisa flees by train, shadowed by Mrs.

Sparsit, the tremendous rain occasioned infinite confusion, when the

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train stopped at its destination. The rain seems constant as a back-

ground for the hopeless love of Stephen and Rachael; their unhappy

lives are obscured in a cloud, and as Stephen emerges from the hot

mill, the waste yard with its litter of old iron, coal and ashes seemsshrouded in a veil of mist and rain and he wanders, haggard and

worn, in the cold, wet streets of Coketown. As the rain too, like,

moon, stars, and wind, is sometimes impartial, falling alike among the

just and unjust, so also a prisoner may hear in the rain a means of unity

among separated parts of his life. Arthur Clennam watches out the

night listening to the fall of rain on the yard pavement, thinking of its

softer fall upon the country earth.(LD)As the night itself releases the imagination of Dickens, so does

the rain declare its most powerful relationship to the vicissitudes of

the passing human scene at night. As the river in darkness is most

heavily charged with suggestions of its mystery, its terrible implaca-

bility, its indifference and continuous energy, so does the rain achieve

its meaning in the silence and loneliness of night.When Little Nells

grandfather steals her savings, she rises from her bed in the dark whilethe rain beat fast and furiously without, and ran down in plashing

streams from the thatched roof. (OCS) At the critical moment of deci-

sion for Arthur Clennam against love for Pet Meagles, The rain fell

heavily on the roof, and pattered on the ground, and dripped among

the evergreens, and the leafless branches of the trees. In Martin

Chuzzlewit, the rain is tapping at urgently as if beseeching to be shel-

tered from the dismal night.And at last, in its silent eternity, the rain seems properly to

have the last word upon death. The rain is falling heavily after the

death of Barkis, as David Copperfield dreads to continue his narra-

tive (DC), while it keeps the tone of mourning after the burial of

Anthony Chuzzlewit:

The gates were closed; the night was dark and wet, the rain

fell silently, among the stagnant weeds and nettles. One

new mound was there which had not been there last night.

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Time, burrowing like a mole below the ground, had

marked his track by throwing up another heap of earth. And

that was all. (MCCh. 19)

But wind and rain assume their fullest role when joined togeth-

er among things eternal.They seem to threaten, to overwhelm human

weakness, to depress or taint the spirit of man.They act to stimulate

memories and they bring together once more disparate parts of life, as

David Copperfield reflects on the old man in search of Little Emily:

Rarely did that hour of the evening come, rarely did I wakeat night, rarely did I look up at the moon, or stars, or watch

the falling rain, or hear the wind, but I thought of his solitary

figure toiling on, poor pilgrim(DCCh. 32)

The wind and rain intensify a sense of melancholy decay, of

the helpless inertness of things forgotten or abandoned to degenera-

tion, like the desolate coaches in the Story of the Bagmans Uncle(PP), or the ruins described in Bleak House: they had become dilapi-

dated, the wind whistled through the cracked walls, the rain fell

through the broken roof, the weeds choked the passage to the rotting

door.(BH) In turn, these constant forces release a sense of death, of

ghostly presences in the night:

Howls the shrill wind round Chesney Wold; the sharp rainbeats, the windows rattle, and the chimneys growl. Mists

hide in the avenues, veil the points of view, and move in

funeral-wise across the rising grounds. On all the house

there is a cold, blank smell, like the smell of a little church,

through something dryer; suggesting that the dead and

buried Dedlocks walk there, in the long nights, and leave the

flavour of their graves behind them. (BH

Ch. 29)

As with so many of his essential materials, Dickens had

employed the wind and rain from his earliest compositions, and

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Sketches by Boz tells of the melancholy prospect before the solitary

London policeman, as he turns to avoid the gust of wind and rain

which drives against him at the street corner (SB) Even the gayeties

of Pickwick are not spared these intrusive elements and invariably abook as sombre asA Tale of Two Cities records the rain beating wildly at

the Marquis door while uneasy rushes of wind went through the

halland passed lamenting up the stairs, and shook the curtains of

the bed where the last Marquis had slept.

More powerfully still the wind and rain come back at inter-

vals in Dombey and Son to increase the solemnity of this ominous

work. In a dark and ugly room, old Mrs. Brown sat listening to thewind and rain and Florence waits hour after hour in the dead of

night for the return of Edith, the silence gradually deepening and

rarely broken save by a rush of wind or sweep of rain, as Florence,

in tears, looks up at the hurry in the sky, so different from the repose

below, and yet so tranquil and solitary. For Dombey himself, the

wind and rain, being from eternity, know the past and future; they

seem to speak for the power of conscience and retributive justice,foretelling the guilty ones future remorse and self-accusation as he

repulses Florence from his door: The rain that falls upon the roof;

the wind that mourns outside the door; may have foreknowledge in

their melancholy sound. Let him remember it in that room, years to

come! Finally, in a passage that draws together wind, rain, night, and

the tolling hour, Florence, longing for union with her father, sits

alone in her unhappy love:

It was a wet night; and the melancholy rain fell pattering and

dropping with a wearied sound. A sluggish wind was blow-

ing, and went moaning round the house, as if it were in pain

or grief. A shrill noise quivered through the trees.While she

sat weeping, it grew late, and dreary midnight tolled out

from the steeplesThere was nothing in the dropping of the

rain, the moaning of the wind; the shuddering of the trees,

the striding of the solemn clocks, that shook this one

thought, or diminished its interest. (DS ch. 18)

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IF THINGS ETERNAL ARE MADE UP OF ESSENTIAL ELEMENTS that repeatthemselves in Dickenss creation, so is the human scene composedof familiar things that rarely change save on the surface or in detail.

These are of man rather than of Nature, where even the bells and

clocks marking time are only a convenience for men to determine

their present relationship to what always is. The protagonist in

Dickens tends to move between two places, one good, one evil, as inthe Paris and London of A Tale of Two Cities. In Great Expectations, Pip

must survive the clashing influences of Joes wholesome forge and the

dark rottenness of Satis House.That mansion has the effect of quick-

ening the heros fatal desire for wealth and social place, of fixing until

it is too late the illusions certain to be lost.

This dualism of place leads us immediately to London and

country with their manifold associations; to the journeys, the unceas-ing movements to and fro that give such life and variety to Dickenss

action; to the houses, seen from without and within, that tell us what

the life and character of their inhabitants must be, given the sur-

roundings in which they pass their lives.

I.THE CITY

Any comment upon the human scene in Dickens must have

London for its center.There is no need to make yet another attempt

to seize the essence of Dickenss London, but we shall be content with

a survey of its attributes as they accumulate so as to sustain the action

that Dickens builds upon them from Sketches by Boz through GreatExpectations to the end of his creation. The qualities of London that

establish and maintain themselves throughout may derive from, sum-

25

2 The Human Scene


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marize or comment upon, but not correspond in detail to the actual,

contemporary London of Dickens own experience.

London too is seen then from morning till night, in light and

darkness, fog and sunshine, the typical Dickensian impressions beingreviewed already in Sketches by Boz. At dawn

There is an air of cold, solitary desolation about the noiseless

streets which we are accustomed to see thronged at other

times by a busy, eager crowd, and over the quiet, closely-shut

buildings, which throughout the day are swarming with life

and bustle, that is very impressive. (SB, Scenes, Ch. 1)

Gradually London comes alive, and by noon all is animated by

a huge concourse of people.The streets remain as at dawn, but peo-

ple make them live with movement and activity as they go about their

work and move to their destinations.

As the vast activity of London comes to the end of a typical

day, an air of gloom descends, as of death and mourning, while theset of humanity outward from the City, is as a set of prisoners depart-

ing from jail (OMF), Dickens again making the favored comparison of

life to a prison. But night remains the most revealing time, and

the streets of London, to be beheld in the very height of

their glory, should be seen on a dark, dull, murky winters

night, when there is just enough damp gently stealingdown to make the pavement greasywhen the heavy lazy

mist, which hangs over every object, makes the gas-lamps

look brighter, and the brilliantly-lighted shops more splen-

did, from the contrast they present to the darkness

around. (SB Scenes, Ch. 2)

Given the vast, inexhaustible, and bewildering complexity of

London, the city cannot be grasped in any single view, or as having apattern, by any one individual. So Dickens wisely refrains from pre-

senting London save in its parts, seeing it in districts composed of

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streets, alleys, courts, and neighborhoods, which added one to another

as required by the novels in their progression, unite to form a single

presence of immense energy and meaning for the whole of his creation.

One is first aware of the city through its noise as one comesfrom without, like Joe Willet on leaving home, pushing on vigorously

until the noise of London sounded in his ears (BR) As Nicholas

Nickleby returns from his theatrical phase, he finds himself amid hur-

rying streams of people while vehicles of all shapes and makes,

mingled up together in one moving mass, like running water, lent

their ceaseless roar to swell the noise and tumult. (NN)

The effect of an overwhelming mass of sound released by atypical London activity stuns and dismays the tiny soul of Oliver

Twist, as he is led by Bill Sikes into the bewilderment of a market

morning. Noise and traffic increase as they approach the city until it

swells into a roar, a tumult of discordant sounds that filled Oliver

Twist with amazement, as they turn into Smithfield:

Countrymen, butchers, drovers, hawkers, boys, thieves,idlers, and vagabonds of every low grade, were mingled

together in a mass; the whistling of drovers, the barking of

dogs, the bellowing and plunging of oxen, the bleating of

sheep, the grunting and squeaking of pigs, the cries of hawk-

ers, the shouts, oaths, and quarrelling on all sides; the

ringing of bells and roar of voices, that issued from every

public house; the crowding, pushing, driving, beating,

whooping, and yelling; the hideous and discordant din that

resounded from every corner of the market; and the

unwashed, unshaven, squalid, and dirty figures constantly

running to and fro, and bursting in and out of the throng;

rendered it a stunning and bewildering scene, which quite

confounded the senses. (OTCh. 21)

Lest the review that follows seem to make of Dickenss imag-ined city a spectacle of unrelieved grimness and ugliness, we should

note the occasional havens of idyllic repose that London may provide.

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We hear of Lant Street in the Borough, a kind of happy valley, a desir-

able region of soothing dullness where a man might remove himself

from the turbulent world. (PP) One may find peace in the City Square

as well, a quiet, little-frequented, retired spot, favourable to melan-choly and contemplation, where it is so quiet that you can almost hear

the ticking of your own watch when you stop to cool in its refreshing

atmosphere. (NN) And the little nook called Staple Inn seems bent in

its feeble way on creating a pastoral illusion amid the London scene:

It is one of those nooks, the turning into which out of the

clashing street, imparts to the relieved pedestrian the sensa-tion of having put cotton in his ears, and velvet soles on his

boots. It is one of those nooks where a few smoky sparrows

twitter in smoky trees, as though they called to one another,

Let us play at country, and where a few feet of garden-

mould and a few yards of gravel enable them to do that

refreshing violence to their tiny understandings. (ED Ch. 11)

But the prevailing tone does not express itself in these littlecorners of happy peace.The London of Dickens steadily returns to

solemn, forbidding streets lined by dismal houses, to squalid courts

and alleys, to decaying tenements beside the river, to the rotting

slum of Tom-All-Alones and the baffling view from Todgerss defy-

ing all human solution. In search of Miss Wade in Little Dorrit, two

friends look for her in one of the parasite streets; long, regular,

narrow, dull, and gloomy; like a brick and mortar funeral. Theyhave explored great streets of melancholy stateliness where

wildernesses of corner housesfrowned upon the twilight. In

Bleak House, rows of great mansions stare at one another across the

street, until some appear

to have been slowly stared into stone, rather than originally

built in that material. It is a street of such dismal grandeur,

so determined not to condescend to liveliness, that the doors

and windows hold a gloomy state of their own in black paint

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and dust, and the echoing mews behind have a dry and mas-

sive appearance, as if they were reserved to stable the stone

chargers of noble statues. (BHCh. 48)

Forbidding, death-like solemnity gives way to misery and

squalor that call up the full resources of Dickenss power of visual

description. We are led down streets and alleys, in the last degree

narrow, crowded and dismal, the abode of filthy, impoverished

wretchedness, lined with damp, rotten houses, lodgings where it

would be hard to tell which needed pity most, those who let or

those who came to take (OCS) In Oliver Twist, a dirty and miser-able street is described with a pervasive sense of rottenness, a note

that Dickens cannot surrender and one that strikes again in the

putrid air of Satis House:

A great many of the tenements had shop-fronts; but these

were fast closed, and mouldering awaySome houses

which had become insecure from age and decay, were pre-vented from falling into the street, by huge beams of wood

reared against the walls, and firmly planted in the road;

but even these crazy dens seemed to have been selected as

the nightly haunts of some houseless wretches, for many of

the rough boards which supplied the place of door and

window, were wrenched from their positions, to afford an

aperture wide enough for the passage of a human body.

The kennel was stagnant and filthy. The very rats, which

here and there lay putrefying in its rottenness, were

hideous with famine. (OTCh. 5)

As one approaches the river, this impression grows of decaying

ruin inhabited by the raff and refuse of the river, the streets again lined

by tottering house-fronts with crazy wooden galleries to the rear, every

imaginable sign of desolation and neglectevery repulsive lineamentof poverty, every loathsome indication of filth, rot, and garbage pollut-

ing the environment of the roughest and poorest of waterside people.

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(OT) In David Copperfield, the unhappy Martha is followed down to the

waters edge and seems herself a part of the rivers decaying refuse:

Slimy gaps and causeways, winding among old woodenpiles, with a sickly substance clinging to the latter, like

green hair, and the rags of last years handbills offering

rewards for drowned men fluttering above high-water

mark, led down through the ooze and slush to the ebb tide.

There was a story that one of the pits dug for the dead in

the time of the Great Plague was hereabout; and a blighting

influence seemed to have proceeded from it over the whole

place. Or else it looked as if it had gradually decomposed

into that nightmare condition, out of the overflowings of

the polluted stream. (DCCh. 47)

These evocations of London in its most sordid aspect are rarely

offered for their own sakes, despite the fearful intensity of the narra-

tors language, clearly determined to spare us nothing of an odious

reality. The human relevance and cost, the effect upon the unhappycreatures who pass their lives here is the final message of these scenes,

most powerfully realized in the relentless exposure of Tom-All-

Alones.When Mr. Snagsby passes along the middle of this villainous

street, undrained, unventilated, deep in black mud and corrupt water,

he encounters such smells and sights that he, who has lived in London

all his life, can scarce believe his senses. (BH) In this infernal region Jo

lives, or has not died, amid the crazy houses again turned into lodg-ings destined to fall one by one in a crash and a cloud of dust:

As, on the ruined human wretch, vermin parasites appear,

so, these ruined shelters have bred a crowd of foul existence

that crawls in and out of gaps in walls and boards; and coils

itself to sleep, in maggot numbers, where the rain drips in;

and comes and goes, fetching and carrying fever, and sowing

more evil in its every footprint than. . .all the fine gentlemen

in officeshall set right in five hundred yearsthough born

expressly to do it. (BHCh. 16)

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But of the single parts made vivid in Dickenss London, none

is more heavily charged with meaning than what may be seen by look-

ing out from Todgerss, the boarding house frequented by the

Pecksniff family in Martin Chuzzlewit. Dickens has portrayed it withsuch typical energy that serious readings of the whole of his creation

may start from a celebrated description that confirms the primacy in

his imagination of the city and world as a maze or labyrinth. London

is viewed throughout as a place of bewildering variety and contradic-

tion, where life and death went hand in hand; wealth and poverty

stood side by side; repletion and starvation laid them down together.

(NN) As Florence Dombey hurries away to the city, she is carriedonward in a stream of life that flows indifferently, past marts and

mansions, churches, market-places, wealth, poverty, good, and evil,

like the broad river side by side with it.

As Oliver Twist gazes with a melancholy face out of Fagins den,

he can see nothing but a confused and crowded mass of house-tops,

blackened chimneys, and gable-ends, not unlike the blackened forest

of chimneys beheld by Arthur Clennam from his mothers house (LD).The forest suggests another favored comparison of the city as wilder-

ness, and we meet repeatedly this wilderness upon wilderness (MC);

this strangers wilderness of London (BH); and in Our Mutual Friend, a

wilderness of smoke and brick; and in Little Dorrit, the wilderness of

masts on the river, and the wilderness of steeples on the shore. . . .

Within Todgerss itself, one might be lost in a maze of bedrooms and in

the neighborhood a stranger would lose himself in those deviousmazes and become resigned to frustration, for Todgerss was in a

labyrinth, whereof the mystery was known but to a chosen few. (MC)

But this is only the most famous of Dickenss many uses of this

comparison. Also obvious are the intricate mazes and labyrinths of

streets and courts, of mens abodes, of public ways and shops, of alleys

and back ways, and in the Coketown of Hard Times, a labyrinth of nar-

row courts upon courtsWithin houses we move through a maze ofrooms, a labyrinth of passages and during the alterations on Dombeys

house, Florence and Susan Nipper are amazed that there was a

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labyrinth of scaffolding raised all around the housethe staircase was

a labyrinth of posts and planks like the outside of the house The

business affairs of the firm Dombey and Son have become a great

labyrinth of which only James Carker himself holds the clue.The termmay also apply to ones thoughts, to the incoherent discourse of Flora

Finching, to the howling labyrinths of sentences among which Lord

Decimus Tite Barnacle moves with rapid ease. (LD) The world and life

itself invite the comparison, for one who like Frederick Dorrit has lost

his way, or for Mr. Merdle himself, who has done no good nor shed any

light among the multiplicity of paths in the labyrinth trodden by the

sons of Adam (LD) Depending on its application in these varieduses, the labyrinth may seem benevolent, neutral, or hostile to the

affairs of men, but is left without solution, unlike the original myth of

Theseus. And London itself once more remains intricate, a baffling

complexity where people wander and lose their way, like Tom Pinch,

and in trying to find it again he lost it more and more. (MC)

If Dickens sees everywhere in the world signs of confusion

bewildering to individual men, he is also unable from beginning toend of his creation to escape the sense of imprisonment, of seeing

human beings confined, trapped, encircled in their houses, their

cities, their institutions, their very condition as men. Like Miltons

Hell, imprisonment is a state of mind, an inner spiritual condition, as

well as a physical restraint. By analogy, any ruling passion or obsession

is a form of imprisonment in confining one to a narrower scope, lim-

iting possible action and setting narrower bounds to experience. Weknow of Dickenss personal obsession with places of confinement, so

that throughout his travels in England, Europe, and America he made

his way to the prison in each new town of his experience.

In Dickens there are not only physical structures that are pris-

ons in the literal sensethat show in graphic detail the means of

confinement in their stone walls, barred windows, locked doors and

gates that end all chance of escapebut we get also a sense of hard,metallic coldness in the spikes and iron bolts that carry the mood of

abandoned hope amid a hostile silence so oppressive to the human

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spirit.The prison taint descends early in Pickwick even, and comes on

with particular force in Barnaby Rudge, David Copperfield, andA Tale of

Two Cities, recalling the depression, the listless manner, the idle pur-

poselessness and sense of abandonment, the lives of broken menwasted by solitude and disuse of human faculty as their countenances

are worn down by the bitter waters of captivity. (TTC)

If the prison reference lies everywhere on the surface in

Dickens. It dominates Little Dorrit, and will make itself felt through-

out the whole of Great Expectations.The Marshalsea Prison for debtors,

smugglers, and defaulters unable to pay their fines, is an oblong bar-

racks of squalid houses, back to back, environed by a narrow pavedyard, hemmed in by high walls duly spiked at top. Wherever the

novels action may lead, the characters are never far from the effect of

prison, a theme established in the opening chapter, set in Rigauds

place of confinement in France:

A prison taint was on everything there.The imprisoned air,

the imprisoned light, the imprisoned damps, the imprisonedmen, were all deteriorated by confinement. As the captive

men were faded and haggard, so the iron was rusty, the stone

was slimy, the wood was rotten, the air was faint, the light

was dim. Like a well, like a vault, like a tomb, the prison had

no knowledge of the brightness outside; and would have kept

its polluted atmosphere intact, in one of the spice islands of

the Indian ocean. (LD Ch. 1)

While the Marshalsea may give a sense of peace and quiet, of

freedom from intrusion or pursuit, while it may encourage a charitable

kindness of heart among its inmates, its lasting effect is to contaminate,

to devitalize and corrupt the spirit.Tip Dorrit becomes a victim of its

rank flavour so that he seems to take the prison walls with him into his

futile existence, selfish, insensitive, ungrateful in shameless exploitation

of his sisters love. It renders incurable the hypocrisy of William Dorrit,Father of the Marshalsea, in his monstrous, self-deceived gentility, and

fixes him past any ransom in his role of a captive with the jail-rot upon

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him, and the impurity of his prison worn into the grain of his soul

Mrs. Clennam, before Miss Havisham, makes her own condition like

that of Dorrit, for he withers away in his prison; I wither away in

mine The effect on Arthur Clennam at last is shattering as the shad-ow of the wall descends upon him; he feels an overpowering sense of

being stifled until the yearning to be beyond the blind blank wall, made

him feel as if he must go mad with the ardour of the desire.

No one of the comparisons central to the work of Dickens is

more pervasive than this, or has a more telling effect on his reading of

the world. It is found everywhere, applying half comically to Miss

Murdstones world, to her hard steel purse where her keys were keptin her own little gaol all day (DC), or to a four-post be

Documents

Bernard Schilling Rain of Years Great Expectatations