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Dickensian Intemperance: Charity and Reform
Novel: A Forum on Fiction, Fall 2003 by Claybaugh, Amanda
What he does see, when his vision clears at last, is the con man Arthur Jingle and Jingle's servant, Job Trotter. The two have appeared from time to time, first befriending the Pickwickians, then duping them, then eluding Pickwick and Sam Weller's efforts to exact revenge. Such recurrent encounters are typical of the picaresque, whose protagonists often meet their opponents again and again. And indeed, Jingle accounts for his imprisonment so elliptically-"deserved it all," he says (690)-that he might as well be referring to deceptions imposed as to debts run up; his presence in the Fleet, that is to say, might as well be connected to the conventions of the picaresque as to the realities of poverty. These picaresque conventions are significant because they create a kind of traveling community, a parish-like world in which charity is still possible. And it is for this reason that Jingle and Job are the only debtors whom Pickwick assists, the only ones to receive "something from his waist-coat pocket" (691). The circumstances of poverty are always overwhelming, as Dickens is finding and temperance reformers have long known, but Jingle offers a nostalgic strategy for delimiting poverty's depiction. Where temperance reform attends only to what fits into a particular narrative-drunken suffering, sober reward-the charitable picaresque attends only to what belongs to a particular character. Because everything is done to help Jingle and Job, nothing need be done to help anyone else. In Jingle, then, we can see the origins of a character like Little Dorrit, whose presence in and immunity to the degraded world of the Marshalsea Prison ensure that we can sympathize with some debtors without being overwhelmed by sympathy for all. We can see, too, the origins of the strategy by which Dickens, in his later city novels, will transform the unfathomable city into a knowable community.
Jingle's reappearance in the Fleet restores to Pickwick an untamable picaresque freedom, a freedom from the false conclusions characteristic of reform. For in helping Jingle, Pickwick displays a generosity in forgetting the past that is matched by his willingness to remain uncertain about the future. He repays Jingle's debts and arranges for him to be hired by a firm in the West Indies, but the effects of these actions are left unknown. Jingle promises to live a more provident and honorable life, but such a promise is not a condition of Pickwick's assistance, nor is it entirely believed. Pickwick comforts himself with the knowledge that "true benevolence" does not presume to be so "long-sighted" as to know what endings it will achieve (843). Even in Pickwick's epilogue, some uncertainty still lingers. Jingle has become, the narrator tells us, a "worthy member of society," but he insists on remaining in the West Indies, refusing to risk what might happen if he were ever to return to the sites of his "old haunts and temptations" (898).
This ending is satisfying with respect to Jingle and Job, but it is unsatisfying with respect to the other debtors whose existence the novel takes pains to record. Dickens has prepared us for this dissatisfaction. For while the first encounter with extreme poverty prompts Pickwick to a charitable response, the second encounter allows Dickens to demonstrate the necessity, but also the difficulty, of reform. This second encounter comes when Pickwick resolves to embark on a tour of the prison's courtyard. He walks past the screaming children, the lounging men, and the harassed and dirty women who congregate in the courtyard, but he is soon paralyzed by the illusion that these people have all blurred into one:
