Featured Download
Speak Like a CEO
This chapter describes ten helpful actions and behaviors that will bring you...
Content provided in partnership with
Dickensian Intemperance: Charity and Reform
Novel: A Forum on Fiction, Fall 2003 by Claybaugh, Amanda
Wildly popular in its own day, The Pickwick Papers (1836-37) is now best known for having inaugurated the Victorian novel. Written in the fallow period following the death of Sir Walter Scott, it entered a literary field divided into minor sub-genres and emerged as the model of what all novels should be. Before Pickwick, there were Irish novels, silver-spoon novels, and Newgate novels, among others.1 After Pickwick, and because of its example, novels tended to take a single form: often illustrated, often serialized, invariably realist, and almost always socially engaged. But Pickwick was, I want to suggest, inaugural in another sense as well. It was the first novel to think through the relation between realism and social reform.
- Most Popular Articles in Arts
- Art since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism
- Free-standing cardboard sculpture
- What makes a successful business person? Business people who are tops in ...
- Take advantage of local advertising: TV, newspaper or magazines? If your ...
- Tino Sehgal at the ICA
- More »
Our critical discussion of realism and reform tends to presume that the two worked toward the same ends, that the two were parallel discourses for engaging with the social. Generations of critics have argued that realism's expansion of the novelistic sphere of representation was continuous with reform's expansion of the social sphere of concern; in this account, the novel's attention to social problems quite literally helped to solve them. More recently, critics such as Mark Seltzer, D. A. Miller and Amy Kaplan have challenged this benign view by demonstrating that knowledge is a form of power; in this account, the realist novel, no less than the reformist investigation, uses representation as a form of social control. But what if realism and reform were not so neatly aligned? What if they were at odds with one another instead? These questions are prompted by a rather large and very heterogeneous set of novels, which begins with Pickwick and extends through Anne Bronte's Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848), Anthony Trollope's The Warden (1855), Nathaniel Hawthorne's Blithedale Romance (1852), George Eliot's Felix Holt (1866), and Herman Melville's Confidence Man (1857), to Henry James's Bostonians (1886) and William Dean Howells's Hazard of New Fortunes (1890) at the century's end. Clearly, these novels are not reformist; nor would it be accurate to categorize them as anti-reformist and nothing more. Rather, each of these novels emerges out of a struggle with reform. That is to say, each of these novels identifies certain representational practices as specific to reformist writing and then either drains these practices of their reformist content in order to appropriate them for the novel's own ends or estranges these practices in order to show their limitations and then to develop better ones in their stead. In the past few years, critics have argued that realism is best understood as having been shaped by its rivalry with competing modes. Mack Smith, for instance, puts realism in relation to ekphrasis, while Alison Byerly puts it in relation to the arts more generally. I would like to extend this line of argument by suggesting that the most important of these competitors is precisely that discourse with which realism has so long been aligned: the discourse of social reform.
I focus on Pickwick here in part because it is the first novel to compete with reformist writings in this way, but more importantly because my argument is most counter-intuitive with respect to Charles Dickens. Of all the nineteenth-century novelists, Dickens is the one we most often think of as a reformer. Indeed, we associate his novels with social abuses so thoroughly that the mere mention of the Chancery Courts conjures up Bleak House (1852-53) and of the Poor Laws, Oliver Twist (1837-39). And yet, our conception of Dickens as a reformer cannot account for the beginning of his career. For, in his earliest works, he is preoccupied not with reformist concerns but with questions of plotting-with plotting city life in Sketches by Boz (1834-36) and with plotting the serial novel in Pickwick. In grappling with these questions, Dickens recognized, as subsequent generations of critics would do, the possible parallels between his realist writings and the writings of reform. Despite a love of drinking that is everywhere evident, he turned to the most influential social movement in 1830s Britain, temperance reform, and adopted its characteristic narratives as his own. He took the stories told and retold by temperance reformers, the story of drunken decline and the story of conversion to sobriety, and borrowed them as part of his apprenticeship in plotting. In the process, he discovered what our own critical moment would be quick to note: that temperance reform served to justify industrial capitalism, that it served as a form of social control. But upon discovering this, Dickens did not simply reject the temperance narrative out of hand. Rather, he struggled against it and, in the process, developed the narrative form that would one day enable him to write reformist novels more in keeping with his political commitments.
Charity and Reform: Sketches by Boz
Sketches by Boz is divided into four sections, and the first of these, the "Seven Sketches from Our Parish," is a nostalgic tribute to a way of life that the narrator, like Dickens himself, will soon abandon. By the beginning of the second section, the narrator has already left the village for the city, and there Dickens will remain for the rest of his career. Boz is organized, then, around the opposition between rural and urban, between past and present, with the parish sketches serving to ground these oppositions. But the parish sketches are themselves internally divided by a less obvious distinction, the distinction between charity and social reform. And while this distinction may seem to be peripheral to Boz's concerns, I will argue that it shapes Dickens's attempts to represent modern city life.
