Dickensian Intemperance: Charity and Reform

The great body of the prison population appeared to be Mivins, and Smangle, and the parson, and the butcher, and the leg, over and over, and over again. There were the same squalor, the same turmoil and noise, the same general characteristics, in every corner; in the best and worst alike. The whole place seemed restless and troubled; and the people were crowding and flitting to and fro, like the shadows in an uneasy dream. (737)

What this passage attempts to dramatize is the making of a synecdoche, the process by which Mivins and Smangle, the disreputable men with whom Pickwick first shared a cell, are transformed into the representatives of the "great body of the prison population." Such synecdoches are central to reformist representation, which relies on one "wretched woman" to stand in for all. Here, however, the process somehow gets stuck and the synecdoche is left unfinished, with both the "population" and its representatives visible at the same time. What impedes the process is the absence of narrative. Dickens refuses to emplot his prisoners on, for instance, the downward path of the temperance tale because he refuses to make a story of individual failure out of a general experience of suffering. In this way, he leaves the prisoners quite literally with nowhere to go. They can do nothing but "flit to and fro," "over and over, and over again." And Pickwick himself decides that he has "seen enough" and will henceforth confine himself to his own cell.

In doing so, Pickwick relinquishes any responsibility for the debtors he does not know. Their plight continues to trouble Dickens, however, and he will later claim that his concern for them bore fruit. Dickens returned to Pickwick ten years after it was finished, in order to write a new preface for the Cheap Edition of 1847. Taking this occasion to reflect on the changes that had occurred in the past decade, for his country as well as his career, he records that "important social improvements have taken place about us" since Pickwick's first edition (46). Dickens does not explicitly identify Pickwick as a reformist text, but the "improvements" he mentions in the second preface all follow directly from the events of Pickwick's plot. Pickwick had been harassed by a pair of almost comically rapacious lawyers, but now, Dickens reports, lawyerly "claws" have been pared by legal reforms; more importantly, the laws concerning debt have been altered, and "the Fleet Prison pulled down!" (46). Neatly pairing the abuses described and the reforms achieved, Dickens projects more such pairings into the future. He concludes with the hope that every future volume of the Cheap Edition might be matched with a new preface celebrating "the extermination of some wrong or abuse" that had been "set forth" within the volume itself (46). All of this is unsurprising, for Dickens the Reformer is a figure we know well, but it is worth noting that he lays claim to this status only by fiat and only retroactively. More importantly, it is worth recalling, as Sketches by Boz and The Pickwick Papers prompt us to do, that his own reformist writings emerge only through a recognition of reform's limitations and a struggle to develop his own forms.