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Dickensian Intemperance: Charity and Reform
Novel: A Forum on Fiction, Fall 2003 by Claybaugh, Amanda
Indeed, the picaresque is capacious enough to take in its rival, the nine interpolated tales that serve, I want to argue, as the model of what Pickwick itself will become. For the tales stand out, brief and self-sufficient, in Pickwick's wandering from part to part and from place to place, standing as models in miniature for the kind of narrative discipline that Dickens was trying to bring to Pickwick as a whole. That the main plot is interrupted by them less and less often as it goes along can be explained as an effect of Pickwick having become less episodic, but this is only another way of saying that Dickens has managed to establish within the main plot itself structures of progression and culmination like those that structure the tales. The tales also broaden the domain of what Pickwick can represent. For the intrusion of these tales underscores the fact that the Pickwick picaresque, with all its freedom and joy, depends on the repression of troubling social facts; the tales may be Gothic in mode, but the specific topics they take up (crime, poverty, madness, disease) herald Dickens's growing commitment to realism. Just as the tales become less frequent, so their subject matter becomes less distressing, and for the same reason: the proto-realism of the tales' content, like the disciplined structure of their form, are gradually transferred from the tales to the main plot itself.
The crucial vector of this transfer is the temperance narrative. Temperance reform enters Pickwick's main plot through the rivalry between Sam Weller's father and the Rev. Mr. Stiggins. Another con artist of the Dismal Jemmy variety, Stiggins is identified in the introductory list of characters as "the red-nosed 'deputy shepherd'" (66), a description that records both the rhetoric of his self-proclaimed piety and the physical signs of his barely concealed love of drink. Toby Weller has married a widow who owns a public house, and he is dismayed to find her succumbing to the influence of temperance reform. In a neat inversion of the stories that temperance reform tells about rescue from drink, Toby tries, throughout the novel, to save his wife from Stiggins's influence and thus to restore peace to his public-house home. The climax of Toby's efforts comes when he arranges for two friends to ply Stiggins with rum and water and then send him on to the temperance meeting he has been invited to address.
This meeting is what the nineteenth century would have called an "experience meeting." Experience meetings belonged to the third wave of British temperance reform; they followed the free licensing movement of the 1820s, which sought to make alcohol less desirable by making it more readily available, and the anti-spirits movement of the 1820s and 1830s, which sought to end the consumption of gin. In the 1830s, a third movement, the teetotal movement, emerged and radicalized temperance reform in two ways. Where anti-spirits had limited its attacks to gin and whisky, teetotalism prohibited all forms of alcohol; and where prior temperance reformers had directed their energies to preventing the sober from becoming drunkards and to controlling the damage that drunkards could do, teetotalism sought to reclaim drunkards to a life of sobriety.10 As a result, teetotalism challenged middle-class dominance of temperance reform in part by proscribing specifically middle-class drinks, but more importantly by transforming the temperance meeting into a forum in which working-class men and women could narrate their own experiences with drink. These "experience meetings" were organized around the recitation of stories that took their structure from the Puritan tradition of personal witness: reformed drunkards would recount the sufferings they had endured because of their drinking, the moment of their conversion to sobriety, and the rewards that had come with abstinence. And their listeners, persuaded by these stories to sign the temperance pledge, would then go on to recount the stories of their own rescue in the hopes of saving other drunkards in turn.11
