Darwin used literary techniques to resolve this problem. Not only had he drafted versions of his argument twice before by the time he sat down to write Origin, but he was, in his youth, a deep reader of literature. His published version of Origin is full of the careful use of rhetoric to make his argument as persuasive as it could be. In his own way, Darwin is an accomplished literary writer.

The whole model for Origin is to harness the reader’s natural sense of wonder at Nature, and to redirect it to wonder at the hidden process Darwin had uncovered. It is not dogmatic, it carefully avoids inflammatory assertions about materialism, and it deals with dozens of anticipated objections. To express his idea of gradualism—that species are modified over geologically long time periods, through thousands of small changes—Darwin used a gradualist prose style.

The first important technique is personification. He talks of Nature as “she” and “her”. This helps the reader to concentrate on the claim being made about descent by modification through natural selection, and puts aside the looming question of an impersonal universe. Later on, Darwin had to stress that this was a metaphor, and that no intentional agency was implied, a confusion that still sometimes dogs his work today.

The most common structure for his paragraphs is to contrast the idea that all species were created, with the confusing facts thrown up by his research. Must we not wonder, Darwin asks, why these facts don’t fit the theory? He leads us to the conclusion, setting out facts, considering both sides, showing that there is one more piece of the puzzle we have to accept, even though it contradicts our instincts. The ultimate aim, as he writes, is to conquer the imagination with reason.

Many times, Darwin makes his case slowly, repetitively, using multiple adjectives and verbs, stressing similar points in different ways, so that what could be short, declarative sentences, written with what David Ogilvy called “the dogmatism of brevity”, become sensible, moderate paragraphs, that inveigle more than they denounce, shrugging at the inevitability of their conclusion more than insisting on the only true way to think, even though it is clear that, to Darwin, there is only one true way.

The main technique for his gradualism is called parallelism, the balancing of ideas. This is a classical way of writing, much used in the eighteenth century, especially by Johnson, but is also the basis of the poetry of the Bible, especially the Psalms. (More detail in the video.) Look at this paragraph, as an example:

It may metaphorically be said that natural selection is daily and hourly scrutinising, throughout the world, the slightest variations; rejecting those that are bad, preserving and adding up all that are good; silently and insensibly working, whenever and wherever opportunity offers, at the improvement of each organic being in relation to its organic and inorganic conditions of life. We see nothing of these slow changes in progress, until the hand of time has marked the long lapse of ages, and then so imperfect is our view into long-past geological ages that we see only that the forms of life are now different from what they formerly were.

You see the personification, as nature is scrutinising, working. You see the gradualism when he reiterates the point, emphasising first the choice between variations, then the fact that we can only see them in the geological record, but doing all this with sub-clauses and repetitions; he goes through the process: scrutinising, rejecting, preserving, adding up. And you see parallelism in the balancing of what is seen and unseen, and in the balancing of phrases like slow changes and long ages, and the antithesis of rejecting and preserving. All of this comes together so Darwin can persuade rather than exhort.

So deep do Darwin’s literary roots run, that he sometimes quotes the Bible. In one section, he bursts into a flurry of poetic writing:

How fleeting are the wishes and efforts of man! how short his time! and consequently how poor will his products be, compared with those accumulated by nature during whole geological periods.

This expresses a thought found in Ecclesiastes, and uses the parallelism of Ecclesiastes’ rhetoric.

For who knows what is good for man in life, all the days of his vain life which he passes like a shadow? Who can tell a man what will happen after him under the sun? (6:12)

One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh: but the earth abideth for ever. (1:4)

Darwin was not just a scientific theorist, but a literary writer, capable of drawing on reserves of literary knowledge to make Origin persuasive, not just polemical. The more gradually he expressed his idea, the less dangerous it could seem, even though its consequences were far-reaching and radical, as he knew and worried they would be.

To Mill, this is the paramount interest of philosophy and the primary aim of life. Human flourishing is the purpose of politics and the justification for liberty. Far from being a stuffy, unfeeling, hyper-rational utilitarian, Mill is a philosopher whose ideas are grounded insuperably in the spiritual, emotional, and intellectual development of every individual.

This is not just a philosophical ideal: Mill lived like this. Having been homeschooled by his father—reading Greek at 3, Latin at 8, logic, philosophy, and algebra from 12, with an intensive course in economics, and a massive ingestion of history throughout—Mill became one of the most nimble reasoners and expert logicians of his age; for the rest of his life, Mill sought knowledge, from the discoveries of physiology to the recapitulations of ancient history, Mill was always a deep reader and wide explorer of the mind. He taught his sisters, taking one of them so far in maths he told a friend she could have been best in her year at Cambridge had she been allowed to attend. He played the piano, and recited poetry. He studied botany and collected a large herbarium alongside his admirable library. He became the leading expert on French affairs and ideas in his generation. None of this was his main employment.

But, Mill was not always like this. Aged twenty, he had a breakdown, which he called a mental crisis. From his description, it sounds like depression, which cloaked him many times throughout his life.

Mill was raised a Benthamite, meaning he wanted rational reforms to the ancient, distorted, unjust political institutions of aristocratic Britain. Realising that his religious adherence to political reform wasn’t going make him happy was an unforeseen trap. Suddenly, having been raised to philosophical radicalism with the devotion of being raised to the church, Mill lost his faith.

He had nothing to live for. For months he carried on as if nothing had happened, wearing no trappings or suits of woe, but full of depression within. He was flat, empty, numb, dull. It was reading a set of memoirs that brought emotion back to Mill. From there he discovered Wordsworth, and Coleridge, and began to see that analytical habits alone wear down the feelings; a successful life requires both to be maintained. There were, he could see now, deeper springs of human character.

To be happy, these deeper springs required attention. That attention would also make him a better philosopher. Critiquing his former mentor, Mill said that “human nature and human life are wide subjects” and Bentham had “failed in drawing light from other minds.” Mill now became obsessed with many-sidedness, the German idea that we must see all of the world, learn from it all. It was through this many-sidedness that Mill became not just his generation’s pre-eminent logician and economist, but their polemicist for liberalism, their representative for women’s suffrage, and their advocate for democracy. He codified utilitarianism, argued for feminism, and justified liberalism for every subsequent generation.

All of this work came from Mill’s personality as much as from his intellectual ability. His life of constant personal development was the source of his ideas and the generation of his energy. In his archives, among the dozens and dozens of boxes of formal papers, letters, and works, are five botanical notebooks, full of lists of the species he found and identified. The attention he paid to the world was immense. Mill the botanist is part of Mill the libertarian. Mill the pianist is part of Mill the feminist. It takes all sides of life to see life truly, to argue for what life might become.

This is why the Autobiography, published after Mill’s death in 1873, is a bildungsroman, a genre of book associated with novels like Jane Eyre and David Copperfield, where the moral and emotional development of the character forms the substance of the plot, a story in which the protagonist matures and becomes reconciled to society. Mill wasn’t fitting his life to a genre, thus giving an inaccurate picture (though the Autobiography certainly wasn’t the whole story); Mill seriously believed in bildung, that the ideas you believe significantly affect the person you become, and that your life is a continual education, which you ought to take seriously. The compounding effects of what you do add up to determine who you are.

Men more frequently require to be reminded than informed, as Samuel Johnson said, and Mill’s notions of human flourishing and bildung form a lesson we will always benefit from revising.

My final “How to Read a Poem” salon is on 9th November, focussing on Elizabeth Bishop.

The other side of the harm principle

John Stuart Mill is remembered for the harm principle: we should be free to do what we like, so long as we don’t harm others. This idea is foundational to modern liberal thinking and still debated today. But what about the other side of the harm principle? What did Mill believe should happen when someone did cause physical harm to another person? Despite the fact that Mill was a kind and gentle person, who meets every canon of liberal tolerance—Parliamentary reform, women’s equality, concern for the poor, religious toleration, penal reform, the importance of education, an interest in some forms of socialism—he advocated for harsh criminal sentences in a manner that might surprise us.

Mill thought that for “offences, even of an atrocious kind, against the person” the penalty was often “ludicrously inadequate, as to be almost an encouragement to the crime.” He even thought flogging, though generally “most objectionable”, would be a suitable punishment for “crimes of brutality… especially against women.” For crimes of violence, Mill wanted “severe sentences.” Prisons were too comfortable, too easy to escape from. Transportation had become “almost a reward” before it was abolished. And in limited cases, Mill supported the death penalty. John Bright, the Liberal MP, wrote in his diary how “deplorable” this was for a liberal like Mill—“many will be shocked.”

As we shall see, though, Mill’s case for the gallows was entirely consistent with his principles, even if it’s not with what we expect of him.

Mill’s support for capital punishment

In April 1868, Mill spoke in the Commons on an amendment that would remove the death penalty from aggravated murder. This amendment was proposed by a group known as the philanthropists—a movement that had previously argued for the abolition of the slave trade, established children’s hospitals and orphanages, and campaigned to reform England’s penal code.

Normally, Mill would be on the philanthropist’s side. There was no group in public life he respected more. They worked with less “personal or class selfishness, than any other class of politicians whatever.” Mill remembered a time when people were hanged for stealing property worth forty shillings. It was the philanthropists who got that law changed, and others of “most revolting and most impolitic ferocity”.

But now was the time for their reforms to stop. Aggravated murder—murder with some additional evil: rape, robbery, premeditation, political motivation, racial or sexual motivation, the murder of a pregnant woman, and so on—was “the greatest crime known to the law”. Some of these criminals, Mill warned, show no remorse. Sometime there is “no hope that the culprit may even yet not be unworthy to live among mankind.” Sometimes the crime was not an “exception to his general character” but quite in keeping with it. These criminals could only be dealt with in one way: “solemnly to blot him out from the fellowship of mankind and from the catalogue of the living.”

How startling, to find in such a liberal person, the phrase, “the life of which he has proved himself to be unworthy.” These are the hard limits of Mill’s liberalism. Violent crime required strong deterrence, punishments that would approve themselves to the “moral sentiments of the community.”

Liberalism, death, and human feeling

Mill had no thirst for blood. His reasoning was rooted in compassion. The only alternative punishment, which could still act as a serious enough restraint, was life imprisonment with hard labour. Mill called this a “living tomb.”

What comparison can there really be, in point of severity, between consigning a man to the short pang of a rapid death, and immuring him in a living tomb…debarred from all pleasant sights and sounds, and cut off from all earthly hope

Considering most criminals will die not very much later, often with more suffering, Mill thought it probable that while the death penalty was “less cruel in actual fact than any punishment that we should think of substituting for it.”

Mill also saw value in the terrifying power the death penalty held on the imagination. In the future, he said, juries might shrink from finding criminals guilty, Home Secretaries might shirk their duty, out of a sense of horror at the punishment. If so, then the law should be reformed. Theft cases, under the old law, had become difficult to prosecute because people would perjure themselves rather than see a man hanged for such a minor crime. If that happened, though, Mill would see it as:

an enervation, an effeminacy, in the general mind of the country. For what else than effeminacy is it to be so much more shocked by taking a man’s life than by depriving him of all that makes life desirable or valuable?…

It is not human life only, not human life as such, that ought to be sacred to us, but human feelings. The human capacity of suffering is what we should cause to be respected, not the mere capacity of existing.

In our own time, the philosopher Derek Parfit has argued that all suffering should be avoided. Mill doesn’t go quite that far, but the question of human feeling is central to his argument, as it is to all of his work. As he wrote in Utilitarianism,

Few human creatures would consent to be changed into any of the lower animals… A being of higher faculties requires more to make him happy, is capable probably of more acute suffering, and is certainly accessible to it at more points… he can never really wish to sink into what he feels to be a lower grade of existence.

Mill didn’t think the death penalty was an affront to life, quite the opposite. “Does fining a criminal show want of respect for property, or imprisoning him, for personal freedom?” He thought England’s justice system more favourable to criminals than other countries. And he believed the harshness of the death penalty would make courts “more scrupulous.” Relaxing the punishment might reduce that scrupulousness, which would be a “great evil” to set against the potential errors of execution. And he conceded that the evidentiary standard ought to be raised.

Overall, Mill sees the death penalty as the least harmful option. He uses utilitarian principles, but with deep liberal concern for the quality of human life and the nature of suffering. That combination leads to his surprising conclusions. It is this ability to think, to apply principles to the reality of our times, that we should learn from Mill, more than any particular doctrine.

In 2012, the literary scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr. saw a manuscript for sale in an auction catalogue, from the collection of Dorothy Porter Wesley, which immediately pricked his interest. Wesley was a great librarian and bibliophile who had amassed one of the great collections of African-American literature. When she retired in 1973, Wesley had collected over 180,000 items. Her collection is one of the major wellsprings of the scholarship of African-American history that has flourished since the 1960s.

No wonder, then, that Gates was intrigued. Especially because some of the other notes in the auction catalogue suggested that the manuscript in question, written by Hannah Crafts, might be the first novel written by an enslaved woman, possibly the first American novel written by a black woman. No wonder, too, that Gates was astonished to find, after the auction, that he had been the only bidder.

In 2002, Gates edited and published The Bondwoman’s Narrative, a page-turning narrative about the life of a slave woman, the horrors she sees and suffers, and her escape to freedom. It is a brisk, bitter, unflinching account of the evils of slaveholding and the struggle for liberation, as well as a satire of contemporary life. Though I have had my stomach turned by the accounts of physical violence towards slaves in Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs, I was grimly astonished by the early hanging scene, which must rank as some of strongest testimony of evil written in the nineteenth century.

Now a new biography has been released, The Life and Times of Hannah Crafts by Gregg Hecimovich.

Crafts’ Dickensian craft

Crafts is a highly literary novelist. From the opening line, Dickens is unavoidable. Bleak House is everywhere. Many passages are clearly imitated, parodied, copied, or pastiched. Characters are adopted and adapted. The dynamics of their relationships are transposed from London aristocracy to Southern slaveholders. Even Mrs. Perkins and Mrs. Piper, the minor characters Dickens uses to control the flow of time at the inquest into Nemo’s death, appears in Crafts’ novel.

During a scene in The Bondwoman’s Narrative, when Hannah’s owners are discussing how he might secure a political appointment through his wife’s good looks, Mr. Wheeler says that Mrs. Perkins had achieved something similar for her husband.

“Mrs Perkins” retorted the lady scornfully “you don’t call her beautiful, I hope.”

“Rather good-looking, that is all, and nothing comparable with you. I was thinking, however, that as her good looks accomplished much, perhaps your beauty might do more.”

A gleam of intelligence flitted over her countenance, mingled I thought with an expression of slight  displeasure, and she inquired in a voice raised somewhat above the common key. “Is it possible that you wish me to do as Mrs Perkins did? Is it possible that you desire me to hang around some haughty official till I weary him with continual coming, that you ask me to weep before him, and kneel at his feet with importunities that will not be answered in the negative?—is it possible Mr Wheeler, I say—?”

So closely does Crafts stick to Dickens here that the woman Mrs. Wheeler is competing with for this new job is Mrs. Piper, who, in Bleak House, is Mrs. Perkins’ friend. At first appearance, Mrs. Perkins and Mrs. Piper have not been on speaking terms. A similar contention exists between Mrs. Wheeler and Mrs. Piper in Bondwoman.

In Bleak House, Mrs. Perkins and Mrs. Piper are used to link the inquest to the life in the court around the house where Nemo died. When Mrs. Piper gives evidence at the inquiry, her speech is reported indirectly. The narrator becomes her ventriloquist, which allows Dickens to continue his satirical reportage, brings pace to a large piece of narrative, and draws attention to important details indirectly. All this lets Mrs. Piper take her place in the panoply of Dickens’s vast novel without breaking the narrative flow. She also introduces several other minor characters. Her speech contains short sketches of Nemo, Jo, her husband, and her child. In this way, she not only adds pieces to Dickens’ mosaic of London, but inadvertently introduces a plot twist. She unknowingly reveals a link between Jo and Nemo that drives the mystery forward.

Similarly, in The Bondwoman’s Narrative, Mrs. Perkins and Mrs. Piper are reported indirectly, through other characters’ speech. They broaden the novel’s scope, satirising life in Washington D.C., but also satirising the Wheelers by juxtaposing them with Mrs. Perkins and Mrs. Piper. They are so mean spirited about them, but quite prepared to do what they did—to use Mrs. Wheeler’s looks to win Mr. Wheeler a job. Mrs. Wheeler’s unkind comments about Mrs. Perkins—you don’t call her beautiful I hope—make a small, but powerful, prolepsis for the scene that comes a few pages later when Mrs. Wheeler’s face powder turns her skin black. She is then bitter about the degrading way Mrs. Piper has spoken to her, barely aware of her own black servant who is in the room with her. Crafts doesn’t just use Mrs. Perkins and Piper to expose hypocrisy, lash vanity, and denounce racism: she sets up Mrs. Wheeler’s pride before her fall. All with the Dickensian use of a character so minor you might almost forget she was there.

Crafts knew that, in Bleak House, Mrs. Perkins and Mrs. Piper gossip about a married mother who performs at local “Harmonic Meetings”. She is billed as a siren but her baby is smuggled in to be fed. The two women are content to dismiss this as hypocrisy: “a private station is better than public applause.” They thank heaven for their own respectability. This scene is mildly comic, a gentle satire on common morality. Crafts transfigures it into a scathing attack on the way that, in her world, private hypocrisy solicits public applause. Like the Dickensian characters, Mrs. Wheeler is scathing of others’ faults—but then hatefully appalled when those others are scathing of her same failings.

A novel with everything

This is only one example of Crafts’ abilities. Again and again, she plays off Bleak House to tell her own story of a corrupt society. The Bondwoman’s Narrative is an example of the fact that the only truly adequate response to a great novel is to rewrite it. Nor is Crafts merely Dickensian. As the scholar of African American literature Hollis Robbins wrote (in In Search of Hannah Crafts (2004)),

If a roomful of witty and well-read literary scholars wanted to concoct a readable text composed of the highlights of nineteenth-century literature, they might come up with something like The Bondwoman’s Narrative. It is an amalgamation of the era’s greatest hits — the mysterious old house; the portrait gallery; the questionable parentage subplot; the escape; the imprisonment; the carriage accident; the story of the jealous wife and the philandering husband; the cruel, lascivious slave trader; the heartbreaking sale of family members; the kindly old couple whose cottage provides refuge; the reunion of old friends after long years; the ghosts; the documents; the disguises; the injustices; the pranks; the satirical-political asides; the revenge; the achievement of freedom and some financial security; the final scene of domestic tranquility. Each chapter has an ironic epigraph, usually biblical, and is sprinkled with faux-erudite allusions to literary greats. In short, the novel has everything.

Finding the real Hannah Crafts

Crafts has been the subject of much scholarly inquiry. That we have her work at all is the result of much hard work. Without Dorothy Porter Wesley’s lifetime of dedicated collecting, who knows where Crafts’ book would be now. So dedicated was Wesley that for her first major assignment, cataloguing Howard University’s African-American history collection, she literally walked the stacks to find relevant books. Edward L. Lach Jr., writing in American National Biography, says that Wesley “was notorious for raiding attics as well as the occasional trash can for material of worth.” Finding the Dewey Decimal System inadequate for cataloguing African-American work, Wesley reformed it. So protective of her collection was she that, during student riots in the 1960s, she defended it herself, physically.

Once Henry Louis Gates Jr. had the manuscript, he spent many weeks trying to establish Crafts’ identity before The Bondwoman’s Narrative was published, compellingly recounted in the introduction. Robbins herself tried to uncover Crafts’ identity, having been the scholar who discovered that Crafts probably got her knowledge of Dickens from Frederick Douglass’s newspaper.

This long trail of work (which includes other scholars) has come to a head in the scholarly and readable biography The Life and Times of Hannah Crafts by Gregg Hecimovich.

Hecimovich reports that many scholars, himself included, initially found it unbelievable that this novel could have been written by a fugitive slave. Why should this be surprising? The human capacity for education is vast. We forget how malleable and enquiring our minds can be. Young Dickens was hardly well-educated by modern standards, yet he became the great literary voice of his day. Plenty of slaves were taught by kindly older women. Crafts was clearly an attentive and perceptive reader.

And, of course, she is who she seems to be. Her novel is deeply autobiographical, as Hecimovich’s careful book shows. His attentive scholarship is a great tribute to her abilities. Among its many wonders, The Bondwoman’s Narrative should remind us not to be astonished when people like Hannah Crafts write great novels, but to wonder at how strong the instinct to read and write can be, especially in children. Even among the great evil of the antebellum South, those instincts could not be destroyed.

I recommend Hecimovich to you all, but not, of course, as much as I recommend The Bondwoman’s Narrative.

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Finding Wonderland

Is Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland pure whimsy or does it mean something? Theories of all stripes have been imposed on Carroll’s story: Freudian, religious, Darwinian, psychological, biographical. Alice has variously been claimed as a repressed Freudian adventure into Carroll’s love of little girls, parodied as an allegory of religious history, claimed as a model of evolution, explained as being a novel about consciousness, and shown as a series of in-jokes, devised specifically for the first children he told the story to. All of these ideas are true to some degree, but the real answer is subtle and kaleidoscopic.

Some people believe that the value of a great book is its ability to wear so many interpretations. But that belief can lead us into idle speculation where a lot is said and only a little is learned. Instead, let’s look at what we know about Carroll and his book to understand how it works. (His real name was Dodgson, but I’ll use Carroll to keep it simple.) Carroll came of age in the great age of Victorian invention, and Alice reflects the great variations and unexpected innovations of its time.

Carroll was of a younger generation than many famous Victorian authors. Born in 1832, he is the next generation on from Dickens, Mill, and the Brontes. They were born in the Napoleonic era. Carroll was raised in a much more Victorian world. His early life was spent in isolation, living in his father’s remote parish, before he had four miserable years at boarding school. He matriculated at Oxford in 1851, the year of the Great Exhibition.

Carroll was a lover of games and gadgets. His uncle Skeffington had telescopes, microscopes, pocket measuring devices, cameras, which fascinated the young Carroll. In the same spirit he was enthralled by the Great Exhibition, calling it a “fairyland”. Perhaps he saw the bathtub you could rock to simulate the waves of the sea, or the machine that sent pictures along the telegraph system, or the alarm-clock bed that tipped you out if you didn’t wake up when the clock rang. There is something zany, something Wonderland-esque, about the Great Exhibition.

There was more than fanciful inventions like the Tempest Prognosticator—every turn in the exhibition brought you onto some new exotica, some new wonder: a royal Indian elephant, indoor trees, tableaus of stuffed animals, a tooth extractor. The Exhibition also has Smith’s comic electrical telegraph, a creepy-looking mask that moved through the use of electrical rods, creating all sorts of grotesque facial expressions.

This sense of wonderment and the uncanny is clearly transposed on Alice. It’s not a “Great Exhibition novel” but it is a story that reflects the great preponderance of ideas and innovations of its times. Carroll was an inveterate collector of gadgets, children’s games and puzzles, but he was also a collector of ideas.

Thus theories like “Alice is an evolution novel”—because Alice has to adapt all the time, constantly risks death, and emerges from the pond of life—are too narrow, overlooking the intersection of the biographical and psychological as well. The descent to Wonderland might remind us of Carroll’s religious views. He disagreed with the concept of eternal damnation, and whatever risks she runs Alice never finds hell down there, only absurdity. The theme of survival is as much religious as it is Darwinian. Unlike many other children’s stories, Carroll is denying the moral, evolutionary or theological.

Wonderland can be a dark place, reflecting the stream of strange and inexplicable thoughts that populate all minds to some degree. The little niches she encounters reflect the way Carroll described memory as full of odd corners and shelves. This is also a book about consciousness—worrisome streams of thought were something Carroll seemed familiar with.

Above all, though, it is a game. All the resizing of Alice via cakes, bottles, and mushrooms reflects his interest in telescopes and microscopes. The books are full of chess, cards, croquet, word play. Carroll’s interest in parallel and mirroring are everywhere—as is his interest in spiritualism, seen in episodes like the vanishing of the Cheshire Cat. Many passages that seem like nonsense are simply playing with logical ideas. Above all, it is parodic. Carroll’s poems qualify him as one of the best parodic writers in English. Parodies, of course, are games: closed systems of rearrangement.

When tropes of evolution, spiritualism, dreams, and religion are used, it is in the same spirit: idea chess. This is a game that plays with ideas in the air, not merely a roman a clef or an allegory. It has its own strange internal rules, like a game, not amenable to real world application or explanation. The game only works because of its self-imposed bizarre constrictions.

Still, it is a very weird game. And the weirdness leads to much of the theorising. As John Bayley wrote in the NYRB:

Carroll, like Kafka, is not only unique but concerned with the phenomena of our general being and consciousness, not with the escape back to childhood, or with the fantasy creation of a parachildhood.

The error here is the “not”. It’s both. And more. This is demonstrated by the ease with which the same idea can be persuasively argued by the biographical theorists. To Morton Cohen, Carroll’s biographer, Alice was Carroll, with his combination of sharp retorts, ineptitudes, confusions, and insensitivities. Suddenly we can see this is an escape, a biographical portrait, and an examination of consciousness. As in a game like chess, the longer we play, the more patterns we find.

More perceptively, Cohen writes about Carroll’s other writing, some three hundred items, which include a book about Euclid:

In Euclid and his Modern Rivals (1879), engagingly built as a four-act comedy and a Platonic dialogue enhanced by Dodgson’s trump card, his whimsy, he presented a forceful argument against all who had meddled with Euclid’s text. From that point on esoteric work followed esoteric work, virtually always embellished by his hallmark, that characteristic Dodgsonian wit; even a century later, when professional mathematicians see a reference to some of the examples that Dodgson used to illustrate his arguments—for instance ‘What the tortoise said to Achilles’ or ‘The barber-shop paradox’—they chuckle.

This all reinforces the basic point: Carroll’s primary mode is the game: he can play in seriousness or he can play in nonsense, drawing on ideas that were in the air. But it is a mistake to find too much of him or what he believed in this book. There’s a good deal of spiritualism, but Carroll didn’t take spiritualism seriously until the 1880s. We know he was interested in Darwin, but not really what he thought of evolution. His religious views are more certain but still a little ambiguous.

The only sure thing we can say is that Wonderland is a game: a dark game, maybe a nasty one in its undertones, but not one we should interpret too finely. That would be to miss the point completely. The game is played by its own rules. As Robert Douglas Fairhurst said, “Alice’s dream grows by feeding on itself.”

Here are the joining details for the Book Club this evening at 19.00 UK time, 14.00 EST

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We haven’t covered nineteenth century America yet, but after this the plan is to move to Shakespeare and English poetry from, roughly, Spenser to Milton. We’ll be pairing As You Like it with Hamlet, Twelfth Night with The Tempest, and Henry IV (I and II) with Anthony and Cleopatra. We’ll also read Donne, Herrick and so on. Probably we’ll work from an anthology. I’ll set out the details closer to the time. Since Shakespeare will be starting in December, Twelfth Night and The Tempest will be our first pairing.

Bleak House organises the plot around a court case because in the 1850s a court of law was one of the places where everyone, from all levels of society, could be brought together. When Nemo dies, a smaller court convenes—the coroner’s inquest, above a pub. Studying this scene, from chapter eleven, will show us how Dickens creates his characters, from the anonymous background figures through to central figures in the plot.

This coroner’s court, like Cooks’s Court where Nemo lived, is a microcosm, just like the Court of Chancery: this death is a small case within the large case of Jarndyce and Jarndyce, a microcosm within a microcosm. Jeremy Bentham had proposed a panopticon, a prison where everyone could see each other. In Bleak House the panopticon is covered in fog and smoke “which is the London ivy.”

Dickens used mystery plots to pull the ivy back and see everyone that lived underneath.

like a vampire’s wings

Death is everywhere in Bleak House. Dead letters, the dead of night, dead infants, Mrs. Jellyby’s daughter wishing she was dead, the Allegory on Mr. Tulkinghorn’s ceiling staring down as if it meant to cut intruders dead. The first death of the story comes in chapter eleven (Tom Jarndyce killed himself, but that was before the novel began).

Nemo, a law clerk, who lived above a rag and bottle shop in Cook’s Court, near Lincoln’s Inn Fields, the heart of legal London, is found dead by Mr. Tulkinghorn. This is narrated in the usual way, with dialogue and authorial voice adding information. The scene follows the action in “real time”.

“Does the man generally sleep like this?” inquired the lawyer in a low voice. “Hi! I don't know,” says Krook, shaking his head and lifting his eyebrows. “I know next to nothing of his habits except that he keeps himself very close.”

Thus whispering, they both go in together. As the light goes in, the great eyes in the shutters, darkening, seem to close. Not so the eyes upon the bed.

“God save us!” exclaims Mr. Tulkinghorn. “He is dead!” Krook drops the heavy hand he has taken up so suddenly that the arm swings over the bedside.

They look at one another for a moment.

“Send for some doctor! Call for Miss Flite up the stairs, sir. Here’s poison by the bed! Call out for Flite, will you?” says Krook, with his lean hands spread out above the body like a vampire’s wings.

All the usual methods of characterisation are used here: Krook is so physical, especially with that menacing final image. After Nemo’s body is examined by the doctor, the narrative voice moves away and pans round to Cook’s Court.

bare headed scouts come hurrying in

It takes a page or so to move swiftly through the drama of the death to the Coroner’s inquiry. You can see the scene shift. Mr. Tulkinghorn turns one way, the camera the other.

“Good night!” says Mr. Tulkinghorn, and goes home to Allegory and meditation.

By this time the news has got into the court. Groups of its inhabitants assemble to discuss the thing, and the outposts of the army of observation (principally boys) are pushed forward to Mr. Krook's window, which they closely invest.

The narrative moves out of the room, into the court, follows the policeman, the local wives, the boys and the beadle round the vicinity, and then pans into the inquiry room over a pub. It’s like the sweep of a camera making a long shot, catching people and their speech as it goes past.

Mrs. Perkins, who has not been for some weeks on speaking terms with Mrs. Piper in consequence for an unpleasantness originating in young Perkins’ having “fetched” young Piper “a crack,” renews her friendly intercourse on this auspicious occasion.

That’s free indirect style, where the narrator borrows the speech of the character (“in consequence for”) but with some additional reported speech, which may be Dickens mocking Mrs. Piper or Mrs. Piper being snooty about the way Mrs. Perkins.

This novel wants to look at the whole of society—but that’s too many characters. This wide lens allows Dickens to present many characters with various degrees of anonymity, to compress the action, set the context. First, we get the crowds, the atmosphere of a murder discovered. These characters are anonymous. Background.

People talk across the court out of the window, and bare headed scouts come hurrying in from Chancery Lane to know what’s the matter.

As much as anything else, they show time passing more rapidly. Then, “In the midst of this sensation the beadle arrives.” Now we have a type, like a pantomime character. He is known by the way other people react to him. To the crowd, he is a “ridiculous institution”; the policeman thinks him “an imbecile civilian.” Then he affects the other characters: “the tidings spread from mouth to mouth” when he goes inside. The beadle is like a line-drawn cartoon. The descriptions are almost like captions: “the feeble-minded beadle comes flitting about Chancery Lane with his summonses.”

Then at the inquest Mrs. Piper appears, one of the women discussing their children from earlier. The camera has settled on the key witness. Her brief, indirectly reported, speech is done in the narrative voice. No speech marks. No directly reported dialogue.

It’s not free indirect style—not the author’s voice with the implied thoughts of the character but closer to an imitation, impression or parody. The narrator is a ventriloquist for Mrs. Piper. This allows Dickens to continue the satirical reportage, brings pace to a large piece of narrative, and to draw attention to details indirectly. And it lets Mrs. Piper take her place in the panoply without breaking the narrative flow.

feariocious, wexed and worrited

Dickens creates several characters within Mrs. Piper’s speech.

First, Mrs. Piper, one of many minor characters in Dickens who come alive for a page through their idioms and idiosyncrasies. She reminds me of Grummer, the magistrate’s servant in Pickwick who refers to the judge as “Your Wash-up” instead of “Your Worship.” She becomes more than a passing semi-anonymous character. Unlike the beadle, she is not a type:—she has idiom.

Second, Mrs. Piper tells us more than anyone else so far about Nemo, who is accounted for as “feariocious” and who was “wexed and worrited” by Mrs. Piper’s children. These two characters are revealed together, thorough the interplay of what Mrs. Piper imagines and what she reveals. Her children used to bother Nemo. Mrs. Piper says you cannot expect the children to be angles “specially if of playful dispositions to be Methoozellers which you was not yourself.” Mrs. Piper dreams of Nemo taking an axe to the child’s skull, infuriated by their presence, but reveals that in reality he ran away from them.

Never however see the plaintive take a pick-axe or any other wepping far from it. Has seen him hurry away when run and called after as if not partial to children and never see him speak to neither child nor grown person at any time (excepting the boy that sweeps the crossing down the lane over the way round the corner which if he was here would tell you that he has been seen a-speaking to him frequent).

That is Jo, the crossing-sweeper. Mrs. Piper is not just a comic diversion,—she is a plot twist.

This is sophisticated stuff. Dickens not only makes his cameos tell as strongly as his major parts, but he reveals one character indirectly through the waffling, elongated evidence of another. It would be easy to simply have Mr. Tulkinghorn find this out in conversation with Krook. To have this woman give a long speech means we get the effect of the inquest, where you have to work out what is Mrs. Piper’s diversion and what is the real evidence.

It also means we understand Nemo as only someone like that could be understood: such a private person could only really be discovered through neighbourly gossip. Mrs. Piper is the sort of person who would notice Nemo and Nemo is the sort of person who can only be discovered through people like Mrs. Piper’s nosiness.

chiefly in parentheses

There are two other characters in Mrs. Piper’s speech, who Dickens creates with only a sub-clause each.

Mrs. Piper lives in the court (which her husband is a cabinet-maker), and it has long been well beknown among the neighbours (counting from the day next but one before the half-baptizing of Alexander James Piper aged eighteen months and four days old on accounts of not being expected to live such was the sufferings gentlemen of that child in his gums) as the plaintive—so Mrs. Piper insists on calling the deceased—was reported to have sold himself.

The husband is hardly known, but the boy gets a fuller description. It seems, from what she says, that Alexander James is not dead, but he might have been. Mrs. Piper’s complaint is given as a sort of comic obituary. The full name, the “half-baptising”, the detail of the gums, all add up to a parody of the sort of memorial you might find engraved on a plaque in a church, or a simple obituary. And the word gentleman, which lightly mocks her way of deferring to the court but also formalises her language, as people do when someone dies.

Dickens wrote a brief biography of that child, and he did it in the idiom of Mrs. Piper because her way of talking is itself a telling part of the boy’s life. We know him more clearly by being able to hear his mother talking about the sufferings of that child in his gums. You can hear Mrs. Piper saying about him—within his hearing—all the time.

As Dickens says, “Mrs. Piper has a good deal to say, chiefly in parentheses and without punctuation, but not much to tell.” But of course she did have one thing to tell about Jo, and without all that parenthesis, she wouldn’t be able to tell them anything at all. If Mrs. Piper wasn’t the sort of woman who gave long parentheses about the day her son was half-baptised, she also wouldn’t be the sort of woman who could say, in parenthesis, that Nemo knew the road sweeper,—and he turns out to be a crucial hinge for the whole plot of Bleak House…

I wrote about semi-conductors for The Critic.

Last week I wrote about late bloomers and Alfred Hitchcock. There are still some guest posts to come and I will bring up one or two things from the archives soon also as there as so many new readers.

The book club schedule is at the bottom of the post at this link. The next meeting is 10th September, 19.00 UK time. We are reading The Annotated Alice.

On Thursday 7th September, I am running an InterIntellect salon. It is the first in a series of three salons, called ‘How to Read a Poem’.

The Lady of Shalott

Today I am going to show you how Romanticism was transmogrified into Victorianism through Tennyson’s poem The Lady of Shalott. First, the poem is a re-working of Keats, especially To Autumn. Second, it represents the ideal of an artist, described by Mill in 1833, himself inspired by Wordsworth. Finally, the poem became an archetype of femininity that captured the Victorian imagination.

The Lady of Shalott remains popular today. Dana Gioia sent me Canadian singer Loreena McKennitt’s setting of the poem in Celtic folk style. These two videos of the song have over one-hundred-thousand views each. Dana pointed out this comment from one of those videos:

Taught the poem in my class. Nobody cared. Showed them this video. Everybody crying and learning the song by heart.

The Lady of Shalott can still capture our imaginations, too. As J.S. Mill wrote in his review of the poem, “Every line suggests so much more than it says, that much may be left unsaid.”

Contents

1. Elaine of Astolat

2. A metaphor for art

3. Tennyson and Keats: autumnal poetry

4. The angel in the house

Elaine of Astolat

First, a brief word on sources. The Lady of Shalott is a retelling of the Arthurian myth of Elaine and Lacelot. Elaine is the daughter of Bernard, the lord of Astolat (or, in the Italian sources, Escalot.) Bernard organizes a tournament, which Arthur and his knights attend. Lancelot stays with Bernard before the tournament and Elaine falls in love with him. Elaine gives him her token, which he can only wear in disguise—if Queen Guinevere sees him with another woman’s token, there will be hell to pay. And, of course, Guinevere is married to Arthur. Oh what a tangled web we weave! (You can see that soap opera plots have long lineage.)

So, Lancelot goes to the tournament wearing Elaine’s token, using her brother’s shield, so as to be in disguise. He wins—defeating Arthur’s knights—but is injured and has to be carried back to Bernard’s house. Elaine nurses him to health. When he recovers, Elaine declares her love for him. Lancelot, of course, loves Guinevere. Lancelot tells Elaine he will give a thousand pounds to her and her heirs when she finds another knight to marry. Elaine was distraught and fainted. Ten days later, she died of heartbreak, having eaten nothing, and was sent down the river, clutching a lily, to Camelot—with a letter that told her story. Lancelot is appalled, and pays for a rich burial.

As well as The Lady of Shalott, Tennyson wrote this story in the Idylls as ‘Elaine and Lancelot.’ There are some lovely passages in that poem, such as Lancelot’s explanation to Guinevere of what he told Elaine:

I told her that her love
Was but the flash of youth, would darken down
To rise hereafter in a stiller flame
Toward one more worthy of her

But it was the original poem that endured, with its mythic qualities, and its ability to hold several interpretations. ‘Elaine and Lancelot’ is Arthurian narrative. The Lady of Shalott is a symbol of the age.

A metaphor for art

One classic reading of this poem is that the lady is a metaphor for the artist. Poets and other artists, by necessity, are shut off from life. They do not experience the world directly. Christopher Ricks points out that the mirror is there so the lady can see the tapestry she is weaving—her view in it of the outside world is incidental. And ultimately being able to see the world destroys her and her art.

This idea was not just the Romantic image of an artists in a garret. In an 1833 essay, John Stuart Mill wrote,

Great poets are often proverbially ignorant of life. What they know has come by observation of themselves: they have found within them one, highly, delicate and sensitive specimen of human nature, on which the laws of emotion are written in large characters

To create this sort of real poetry—which Mill distinguishes from narrative, description, and eloquence—the poet must work in some sort of isolation. Poetry is “the natural fruit of solitude and meditation.” Mill said,

Poetry is feeling confessing itself to itself in moments of solitude, and embodying itself in symbols which are the nearest possible representations of the feeling in the exact shape in which it exists in the poet’s mind.

Harold Bloom could have written that (I would bet the farm on the fact that he was strongly influenced by Mill’s essay).

This is all very Wordsworth (a major influence on Mill) and you can see how The Lady of Shalott became archetypal of this sort of poet and art. She is a symbol of the isolated artists. Tennyson himself preferred to live in “solitude and meditation”. In this reading, the delicate art of poetry is shattered—the artist’s mirror cracks—when you become too much a part of the world.

This image recurs later on in George Eliot’s 1859 novel Adam Bede:

With a single drop of ink for a mirror, the Egyptian sorcerer undertakes to reveal to any chance comer far-reaching visions of the past. This is what I undertake to do for you, reader. With this drop of ink at the end of my pen, I will show you the roomy workshop of Mr. Jonathan Burge, carpenter and builder, in the village of Hayslope, as it appeared on the eighteenth of June, in the year of our Lord 1799.

But let us descend to the world of real things, as Eliot does. There is more to say about Tennyson. His poem is more than a metaphor for art. As the lady of Shalott floated through the nineteenth century she became more and more a symbol of idealised femininity. In this, she was quite different from the biggest contemporary influence on Tennyson, John Keats.

Keats and Tennyson: autumnal poetry

Reviewing Tennyson’s Poems 1842—the perennial seller that built his audience, and brought him fame—Lockhart said Tennyson was, “a new prodigy of genius, another and brighter star of that galaxy or milky way of poetry of which the lamented Keats was the harbinger.” That was how some people use to write their book reviews. Still, he’s got the basic point right. Tennyson was Keatsian.

Felix Grendon noted many similarities of technique. Like Keats, Tennyson repeats words like bell, dew, moon, silver, gold, moss, nest, oak, thicket, grot, bee, and sunbeam. Keats is known for his compound words: “sweet-lipp’d ladies”, “hemlock-breeding moistures”, “dew-dabbled poppies”, and so on. Tennyson uses these too: “light-glooming brow”, “sudden-curved frown”.

More specifically, we can compare The Lady of Shallot to Keats’s ode To Autumn. Both are set in harvest time. Keats’s poem has “vines that round the thatch-eves run”. Tennyson’s isle is “inrail’d/With a rose-fence, and overtrail’d/With roses.” In both, the reaper walks the fields. The reaper is more implied in Keats, where the goddess Autumn is found on “on a half-reap’d furrow” or in a “winnowing wind.” Haunting images, but subtle.

In Tennyson’s third stanza, the message is much clearer:

Underneath the bearded barley,
The reaper, reaping late and early,
Hears her ever chanting cheerly,
Like an angel, singing clearly,
O’er the stream of Camelot.

That’s the stream she will float away on at the end of the poem, dead of heartbreak. The reaper, become metaphor, will put an end to her song. The refrain of the stream becomes more and more deathly. This is not just beautiful description; these are, as Mill said, “not mere pictures, but states of emotion, embodied in sensuous imagery.”

There are many other aspects of Keats that Tennyson transforms. Keats asks,

Where are the songs of spring? Ay, Where are they?
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too

That is what the lady sings, the music of autumn. There’s a stream in Keats, too:

And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep
Steady thy laden head across a brook

That describes the goddess Autumn as a hanging bough over a brook, a gleaner being someone who goes into the field and collects whatever remains after the reaper has done their work. Their hair was often full of wheat from their work. The idea of the stream running toward death, of a song that turns to (or resists) winter, recurs in Keats’ final stanza.

While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,
And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;
Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
Among the river sallows, borne aloft
Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;

Death is everywhere implied, but the picture is of “warm days” that “will never cease.” Tennyson, as he always does, brings death to the front of the frame. Lancelot arrives in “blue unclouded weather” but once the lady looks out and breaks the mirror, bringing the curse upon herself, the weather changes.

In the stormy east-wind straining,
The pale yellow woods were waning,
The broad stream in his banks complaining,
Heavily the low sky raining
Over tower’d Camelot;

And so the lady gets in the boat to carry her away “chanting her deathsong”. “A longdrawn carol, mournful, holy,’ She chanted loudly, chanted lowly.” This is like Keats’s “wailful choir”. His poem, too, ends with a second chorus, of bleating lambs, singing hedge-crickets,—“and now with treble soft/The red-breast whistles.” Keats allowed you to wallow in the autumnal beauty, knowing what would come, but not dwelling on it. Tennyson makes a steady drum beat of death.

To Autumn is a contrast to La Belle Dame Sans Merci, a post-harvest poem, in which “The sedge has withered from the lake,/And no birds sing.” In that poem, a faery woman seduces the knight and traps him with all the other princes and knights she has seduced. (The reaper calls the Lady of Shalott a “fairy”.)

At the end of The Lady of Shalott a group comes out of Camelot to see the dead woman, “Knight, minstrel, abbot, squire, and guest”—a clear contrast to the prisoners of La Belle Dame.

I saw pale kings and princes too,
       Pale warriors, death-pale were they all;
They cried—“La Belle Dame sans Merci
       Thee hath in thrall!”

Both Keats and Tennyson talk about the progress of the seasons as a symbol for the way love leads on to death. Keats wallows in the present, Tennyson in the future. Keats resists death: Tennyson anticipates it from the first stanza, with the stream running to Camelot.

In Keats’s vision, the knight is the tragic figure. In Tennyson, it is the lady. Once he has broken her heart, Lancelot leaves the poem. La Belle Dame is a Circe. Tennyson’s lady is a Penelope. Tennyson has swapped the Romantic interest in powerful witchy women for isolated idealised maidens.

The angel in the house

In The Lady of Shalott Tennyson created what Jennifer Gribble called “an emblematic lady of romantic heritage.” The lady is an emblem both of the Arthurian world, but also of something in the Victorian mood. This poem had such an impact because it caught a symbol of the past and of the present.

The pre-Raphaelites painted the lady of Shalott again and again and again. Their mediaeval fantasy was perfectly captured in her melancholy, her mystery, and her wide-eyed docile femininity. Gribble points out that the lady recurs throughout Victorian fiction: Dorothea trapped in her boudoir, Miss Havisham in her wedding feast. From Charlotte Bronte to Henry James the Victorian heroine is so often imbowered like the Lady of Shalott. Think of Esther in Bleak House or The Portrait of a Lady.

This was a broader part of Victorian culture. Think of the angel in the house. Think of the way that Victorian woman could be influential and intellectual—but in private. They were excluded from the public sphere. And if they broke the rules, the mirror cracked from side to side. The first Married Women’s Property Act wasn’t passed until 1870.

This happened in America, too, but in a much more distorted manner. James W. Hood has shown how antebellum plantation patriarchs in the Southern USA misread Tennyson’s early poems about women to make them correspond with their own ideas of female obedience. Tennyson’s subtlety was stripped away. They took what they wanted, what accorded with their ideas. In his early poem Isabel, Tennyson idealises his character, who is probably a portrait of his mother, as “pure” and “perfect”. But she also has “fortitude” and “intellect”. When Isabel was imitated in the antebellum South they kept the pure and they dropped the fortitude.

The moon recurs throughout The Lady of Shalott—but only for her. Lancelot stands in the sun, the lady is seen by moonlight: classic masculine/feminine imagery. This is not Jane Eyre, escaping under the watchful eye of the goddess of virginity to grasp her autonomy. The lady of Shalott was killed by her unrequited love for Lancelot. There is no sense that she can recover. Without the love of Lancelot, life is unavailable to her. She is all purity, no fortitude. The metaphor of the delicate artists all too easily becomes an image of the helpless female.

Reviewing Tennyson’s Poems, Chiefly Lyrical in 1830, Arthur Henry Hallam compared Tennyson to Shelley and Keats, saying of the great romantics: “they lived in a world of images; for the most important and extensive portion of their life consisted in those emotions which are immediately conversant with sensation.” This is the idea that a poem should not be true to nature, as M.H. Abrams said, but true to itself. That leads us to the interpretation that the lady represents the artist. But the sensation that Tennyson captured was not just that of Arthurian legend, nor just a metaphor for art, but of the idealised lady of Victorian England.

Tennyson transformed romanticism into Victorianism and (perhaps inadvertently) gave his century an archetype of women that was debated and reworked for several decades. Mill said that, to make his poems symbolic of spiritual truth, rather than just full of sensuous feelings, Tennyson “must cultivate, and with no half devotion, philosophy as well as poetry.” But Tennyson’s sensuous poem captured the Victorian imagination as much as any philosophy.

I reviewed a reissued Rose Macaulay book They Went to Portugal for Prospect’s summer issue. What I haven’t written about for some time is homeschool. That’s because my wife now has a blog about that subject,—and she actually does the homeschooling. So if you’re interested, head over there. It’s really quite good.

Book club

The Tennyson book club is on 10th August, 19.00 UK time. We are discussing the Morte d’Arthur and the final book of Idylls of the King, ‘The Passing of Arthur’, in which Tennyson expanded and altered the original. I’ll also have something to say about The Lady of Shallott. You should also read ‘The Epic’ the short poem that frames the Morte d’Arthur.

Introduction

In anticipation of our forthcoming Tennyson book club, this is the first essay I shall write about the great Laureate. The next one will be about Tennyson and Victorian medievalism. There is a lot of good modern criticism about Tennyson’s career, his sales figures, and his circle. Today I’m going to summarise some of that research to give a picture of Tennyson’s fame. We’re going to see how exactly he became the most famous Victorian poet. As you’ll discover, it takes more than just writing great poetry.

This essay is for paid subscribers. The first few paragraphs are free to see but after that there is a paywall.

Tennyson’s fame

Tennysonians in 1842

“Every body admires Tennyson now, but to admire him fifteen years ago or so, was to be a Tennysonian.” So said one reviewer in 1859, on the publication of the first four books of Idylls of the King (‘Enid’, ‘Vivien’, ‘Elaine’, and ‘Guinevere’.) Tennyson’s breakthrough year is traditionally supposed to be 1850, when he published In Memoriam and became Poet Laureate. But the Tennysonians had been enthusiastic since at least 1842, when he published Poems in two volumes. And they weren’t such a small band as the reviewer above makes them seem. The 1842 book became a word of mouth success, steadily establishing Tennyson as a major poet, who sold more books than he or his publisher expected.

And no wonder. The Poems of 1842 is the book with some of his most enduring work: ‘Mariana’, ‘The Lotos Eaters’, ‘Ulysses’, ‘Locksley Hall’, ‘Sir Galahad’, ‘Break, Break, Break’ and, of course, ‘The Lady of Shalott’. So many of these poems have been quoted by later poets, memorised by schoolchildren, referenced in films. They are so often the poems people name when they enthuse about Tennyson.

Sensational print runs: from five hundred to five thousand

Tennyson’s first collections, a decade earlier, had smaller print runs of a few hundred copies. The 1842 collection started with a run of eight hundred. Then word spread. Print runs increased in size. In 1848, two years before In Memoriam and the Laureateship, a run of three thousand copies was made. Another run of the same size was made in 1850. In 1853 there was a print run of five thousand copies. When the first run sold five hundred copies in a few months, Tennyson and his publisher Moxton thought it was “sensational.” Imagine how they felt when they started print runs in the thousands.

To capitalise on this growing following, Moxton started making more decorative editions, a relatively new idea. The new decorative edition was advertised under the title ‘Books for Presents.’ (You can find many more details on this topic in Tennyson and Mid-Victorian Publishing by Jim Cheshire, a splendid piece of research based on close study of archival resources.)

All this was helped by the success of The Princess in 1847. But sales of the 1842 collection were consistently higher than those of The Princess, Maud, or In Memoriam. Those later poems made more splash, with an initial spike in sales, but the market that was formed for the young poet’s work show Tennyson was truly a poet of the common reader, who built his reputation from the steady sales of an exceptional book by a relatively unknown poet. It was through the 1842 collection that he built the audience who surged to read In Memoriam, Idylls of the King, and Enoch Arden. By the 1860s he was selling books the way they used to do in the Romantic period. The poetry boom was back. And it was Tennysonian.

The aloof genius stoops to sell

The gathering fame of 1842 didn’t quite come out of nowhere, though. Responding to a hostile critic in 1834, Tennyson had said he would rather sit quietly in the garden than sully himself with the great world of literature. Taking his cue from the Romantics who inspired him as a young writer, he professed that popularity was vulgar and genius was for posterity.

That’s what he professed, but not quite what he practised. You don’t become as famous and respected as Charles Dickens,—and Tennyson was eventually that famous,—by sitting quietly in your garden and disdaining to grubby your hands with the literary world. The 1820s had seen the rise of the literary annual, a new popular medium of anthologies of poems, stories, engravings, and essays. The mass market for literature was opening up. The financial crash of 1825 led to the failure of some of Romanticism’s prestigious publishing houses. The elite expensive market was broadening its audience and cheapening its product.

Writers loved to scorn these annuals—while publishing their work in them. And why not? In 1824 Literary Souvenir sold six thousand copies in two weeks. In 1825 it sold fifteen thousand. And the money could be good. Walter Scott got £500 for something he published like this in 1829. His high-minded dislike of the magazines had a price. Tennyson was the same. He said such publications involved neither honour nor profit: they were run by aristocrats who saved the big money for the big names.

Still, he published in them.

He was most active in the 1830s and continued publishing there until 1851. Suddenly we can see that the steady accumulation of his fame after 1842 had been in motion for a lot longer, thanks to Tennyson submitting to the indignities of these annuals. (For more details on the annuals, see Tennyson and Victorian Periodicals by Kathryn Ledbetter.)

Audience segmentation in the 1830s

The annuals were popular with young women. Victoria bought them as Christmas presents in 1837. Engravings were usually of young ladies, to encourage the audience to identify themselves with the product. This was the new audience for poetry and the annuals were well-targeted for them. Any modern marketing expert would do the same. At Cambridge, Tennyson idealised Wordsworth writing for a select group of admirers. But the old ideal of an aloof genius was giving way to the grubbing reality of the nineteenth century market.

The annuals were also a boon for common readers. They promoted the short story form, made a market for engravings, published women authors, and developed a new publishing economy that would be so critical to the literature of the nineteenth century. Readers were getting a greater variety of affordable material.

It wasn’t Tennyson who caught on to this trend though. While he was biting his nails about the risk of popularity, his friend Arthur Hallam was submitting his work for him, as Sylvia Plath later did for Ted Hughes.

What price fame?

You can see then that while Tennyson benefited in terms of sales, he was also creating the conditions for his own fame, which he felt ambivalent about to say the least. Byron had been famous for his indulgent, improper behaviour; Tennyson was going to be the celebrity of Victorian probity and tradition. But that didn’t allow him to live a quiet life.

After In Memoriam was published, his first confessional work, the market for Tennysoniana opened up: biography, pictures, gossip. He got fan mail asking for autographs and letters from lowly, hopeful editors asking for poems.

When he lived in Twickenham in the early 1850s, he was bombarded with unwanted visitors and told the Brownings he wished he could “escape the dirty hands of his worshippers.” An 1860 article about routes to walk along the south coast to see the homes and haunts of poets ended by recommending Freshwater, where Tennyson lived on the Isle of Wight, as it was a “most neglected corner.” The fact that Tennyson lived there was printed in guide books to the island. We don’t know how many people turned up,—Tennyson had moved beyond the railway,—but he wasn’t quite vegetating alone in his garden away from the busy literary world. Things got so bad he built a new home in Sussex and spent his summers there after 1869.

After 1860 there was a rash of “Tennyson At Home” articles, reprinted and rehashed into the 1890s. Private letters were plundered for gossip. “Tennyson at Home: Drinking, Smoking, and Reading His Own Poetry” was written after a letter from a visiting author was shown to a “literary lady” who scurried off and printed the not-very-scurrilous story. An irritation, no doubt, but a contribution to the poet’s fame—and sales. He seems to have collaborated, at least tacitly, with one such article. (For details, see ‘At Home With Tennyson’, by Charlotte Boyce, in Victorian Celebrity Culture and Tennyson’s Circle.)

Life had changed. There was no possibility to be a remote genius. The market for poetry was back and it was closely bound up with Tennyson’s biography. Alfred Austin once said that Tennyson’s fame increased as the quality of his poetry declined. As a Tennysonian, I feel bound to say that that’s not quite true, but his career certainly owed a lot to both the poems and the publicity of the 1842 volume.

Published at the end of his life, these lines were written in the 1830s, before the fame, but prescient of it and its consequences.

What is true at last will tell:
Few at first will place thee well;
Some too low would have thee shine,
Some too high — no fault of thine —
Hold thine own, and work thy will!

First, here is the reading schedule we are following with dates for book club meetings. I’ll provide longer essays about all of these topics.

• 10th August, 19.00 UK time. Tennyson. Morte d’Arthur. This is a reasonably short poem about the death of King Arthur. We will also discuss the final book of Idylls of the King, ‘The Passing of Arthur’, in which Tennyson expanded and altered the original. Do read others like ‘Locksley Hall’, ‘The Dying Swan’, ‘Marianna’, and ‘Ulysses’.

• 10th September, 19.00 UK time. The Annotated Alice. You may want to supplement with some Edward Lear.

• 21st September, 19.00 UK time. Christine Rossetti. A Birthday. And ‘Goblin Market.’

• 22nd October, 19.00 UK time. J.S. Mill, Autobiography.

General comments
This list is highly selective, a little erratic, and chauvinistically English/British. If I recommend everything it becomes unhelpful. I want this to be something you can scan and find interesting places to supplement your reading. I chose shorter books and the sort of books the general reader might enjoy, while adding some stretch and breadth. It’s also a little biased by my taste. I don’t find Elizabeth Gaskell very readable so she’s not on the list. Doesn’t mean you shouldn’t read her. Sarah Harkness would tell me to read Mrs Oliphant. (It’s on my list!) I am also largely confined to the Victorian period, not earlier C19th, again for selection purposes.

Here is a very good syllabus of nine novels that you may prefer. This is a good alternative syllabus to mine but similar in some regards. The Victorian Web also has many useful pages.

For non-English/British writing, some of the obvious choices are Fathers and Sons, Moby Dick, Harriet Jacobs, Frederick Douglass, Anna Karenina, Crime and Punishment (though I find it dull), Flaubert, Balzac, Chekhov, Baudelaire, Emily Dickinson, Emerson, Gogol, Hawthorne, Thoreau, Jules Verne, Little Women, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Whitman.

Fiction
I have tried to make a list that focuses first on the major realistic writers and then on the more “genre” writing. The nineteenth century is very rich in stories of ghosts, murder, fantasy, vampires, crime. Hardy and Kipling aren’t here but they are good too. There’s also a wealth of children’s writing I haven’t listed. Anyway, hopefully it gives you some ideas…

• Silas Marner. A novella by George Eliot that uses a fairy-tale type story to explore the way technology was changing society and religion, praised for its extraordinary realism. (My essay here.)

  • Other George Eliot novels—Middlemarch is obviously the big one, the peak of realism. The Mill on the Floss is underrated. ‘Poor, poor Maggie!’, Penelope Fitzgerald used to say when she taught that book.

• Wuthering Heights. One of the great novels, good to read after Jane Eyre and Elizabeth Gaskell.

• Barchester Towers. Many people’s favourite Victorian novel, this is a charming, entertaining story about the very fraught issue of high politics among the High and Low Anglicans. Part of a series of six novels. My wife loved this book. Do read The Warden with it.

  • The Way We Live Now is a huge and wonderful novel, equal to Dickens and Eliot in its outraged interrogation of moral corruption in public life.

• Dracula, Bram Stoker.

• Sheridan Le Fanu, esp. Carmilla, the first woman vampire?

• The Beetle, initially sold more than Stoker. I have this in a book called Victorian Villanies collected by Graham Greene, which is a good collection.

  • This is a good essay about Greene’s obsession with Victorian detective fiction. I can’t agree with him about Fergus Hume though, very slow stuff.

• Sherlock Holmes—all of them!

  • The Rivals of Sherlock Holmes is a good way to read around other detective writers from the 1890s. Crime on Her Mind does the same thing for women detectives and goes beyond England in the nineteenth century.

• The Aspern Papers, Henry James’ fictional account of a biographer trying to get hold of Shelley’s letters. Edge of your seat stuff.

• The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde. Gothic inspired, a real page-turner.

  • Wilde’s Fairy Tales are also splendid. And like everyone else he wrote crime fiction, and very good too. Lord Arthur Savile's Crime and Other Stories.

• The Time Machine, H.G. Wells.

  • Read also E.M. Forster The Machine Stops, a later response to Wells.

Non-fiction
I have stayed away from biography because I write about it so much elsewhere. Darwin is the only “long” book here. Other than Darwin, people like Florence Nightingale and Mary Seacole are good to know about. And the Tractarians. (Useful background for Trollope.)

• On Heroes, Carlyle is an absolutely inescapable influence on the nineteenth century and these lectures from 1841 are one of the period’s central ideas—how remarkable individuals make history. I wrote about Carlyle here and about his influence on David Copperfield.

• Chartism is another of Carlyle’s essential short books about a crucial Victorian idea.

  • For the brave—Sartor Resartus, Carlyle’s sprawling, bustling novel that made such a splash in the 1830s when it appeared and was praised as a work of genius by everyone. Now forgotten by all but scholars. Hard work (I never finished it.)

• The Natural History of German Life, George Eliot’s essay is to nineteenth century literary criticism what Wordsworth’s preface to the Lyrical Ballads was to Romanticism.

• Seven Lamps of Architecture, John Ruskin. A long essay that represents some of the main ideas behind the Gothic revival: inspired later writers and artists like William Morris.

• Studies in the History of the Renaissance, Walter Pater. A foundational text for aestheticism and the “art’s for art’s sake” of Oscar Wilde et al. Inspired Yeats.

• The Subjection of Women, J.S. Mill. A short intense polemic arguing for sexual equality. Written with Harriet Taylor. Everyone says read On Liberty (and you should) but this is just as important and less recommended.

• The Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels.

• On the Origin of Species, Darwin, possibly no other nineteenth century book had so much influence, other than Marx and Engels…

Poetry
The Poetry Foundation has a good overview of the period and authors. Here are some specific recommendations. The Oxford Book of Victorian Verse and the Oxford Book of English Verse and both good for dipping around in. The book club earlier discussed Gerard Manley Hopkins.

• Emily Bronte is just so outstanding.

• Charlotte Mew, who I am glad to say is back in print. Key poems are ‘The Farmer’s Bride’, ‘Madeline in Church’.

• Robert Browning’s dramatic monologues are considered important innovations but I find him heavy work.

• Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Sonnets for the Portuguese.

• Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s poetry is a good supplement to his sister Christina and an introduction to the pre-Raphaelite movement.

• Some of the famous poems from the period:

  • Say not the struggle nought availeth

  • The Ballad of Reading Gaol

  • Sohrab and Rustum

  • Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, Fitzgerald translation

Summary

This is the paid subscribers’ essay about Elizabeth Gaskell’s, Life of Charlotte Brontë. Gaskell was commissioned to write this biography because of the culture war-style commentary on Brontë’s character that raged in the 1850s. Modern critics focus on the way Gaskell elided and omitted material about Brontë’s sexual life, and on Gaskell’s focus on the domestic side of Brontë’s life. These criticisms are misguided—that’s how you win a Victorian culture war!

In fact, Gaskell’s book is about how Brontë’s remarkable talent developed in the obscure and strange conditions of her life. It has not been properly appreciated that Gaskell shows us how Charlotte Brontë became a great novelist. The biography is a study of talent. When we account for the fact that this book is a study of talent, and Gaskell and Brontë’s Christianity, we can see its merits more clearly,—and see that if Gaskell’s hadn’t won the culture war, she wouldn’t have been able to focus on Brontë’s development as a writer as much.

The fact that a gang of ahistorical, myopic critics later misread her book is hardly Gaskell’s fault.

Contents

1. Victorian culture wars

2. The real focus of the book

3. Genius or talent?

4. Branwell’s “talents misused”

5. Small Group Theory

6. Bookmaking out of the remains of the dead

7. Conclusion

“It is possible that it would have been better to have described only good and pleasant people, doing only good and pleasant things (in which case they could hardly have written at any time): all I say is, that never, I believe, did women, possessed of such wonderful gifts, exercise them with a fuller feeling of responsibility for their use.”

Elizabeth Gaskell, Life of Charlotte Brontë

Victorian culture wars

When Charlotte Brontë died in 1855 her reputation was up for grabs. Jane Eyre had been praised by many as a startling work of innovation: a novel about the moral development of a woman with a deep understanding of her consciousness was a new thing in literature.

Many, though, found it “coarse”, “unwomanly”, and “unchristian”. That was big talk for the 1840s. And this matters. There was a crucial link between the personal and the professional for women writers.

As Nell Stevens said,

The idea that Brontë was, in the words of one article, “a filthy minx” seems to us irrelevant now (if luridly exciting). But if people don’t read your books because they think you’re a whore, that is not exciting at all.

This affected Victorian men too. Dickens did himself no favours by leaving his wife.

People speculated freely on Brontë’s personality. Who could have written such a book other than a woman who had “long forfeited the society of her own sex”? Matthew Arnold called Jane Eyre, “a hideous, undelightful, convulsed, constricted novel… one of the most utterly disagreeable books I’ve ever read.” He attributed this to the fact that “the writer’s mind contains nothing but hunger, rebellion and rage.” You almost expect, Donald Trump style, to find the word “Sad” at the end of that little outburst.

The Quarterly Review said,

We do not hesitate to say that the tone of mind and thought which has overthrown authority and violated every code human and divine abroad, and fostered Chartism and rebellion at home, is the same which has also written Jane Eyre.

Imagine thinking that the person who wrote Jane Eyre must have violated every code human and divine. If you enjoy the culture wars, you might also be interested in Victorian periodicals…

Both her remarkable talent, and her bothered and beleaguered reputation meant that a biography was in order when Brontë died. And so Elizabeth Gaskell, novelist and friend, was called in. Her Life of Charlotte Brontë became a classic in its own right. Inevitably, it also became part of the literary culture wars, in its time and ours.

I want to show you that these culture wars issues, while important, are a distraction. It’s time to re-think this excellent book and see it for what it really is: a prescient study of how talent develops in unusual circumstances. Elizabeth Gaskell won the culture war of the 1850s and by doing so she put the focus where it belongs:—on the development of great talent in Charlotte Brontë and her sisters.

The real focus of the book

We talk now as if creative non-fiction is a decidedly modern genre. But Gaskell got there back in 1857. This is a most novelistic biography, right from its opening line, “The Leeds and Skipton railway runs along a deep valley of the Aire; a slow and sluggish stream, compared to the neighbouring river of Wharfe.” From there, Gaskell moves slowly towards her heroine’s parsonage, placing her vividly in the changing world of the industrial north. Unlike the sleepy cathedral towns of the south, Gaskell says, this is a place of transformation.

Gaskell does this because without knowing “the peculiar forms of population and society amidst which her earliest years were passed”, we cannot understand Brontë’s life and mind. Though her aim is to take sides in the culture war about Brontë’s “unwomanly” writing, Gaskell is concerned to show how Brontë emerged from this strange place as a literary talent. Imagine if someone had taken the trouble to do the same for Jane Austen!

Gaskell’s intent is often overlooked. Critics have focussed on issues of feminism and sexuality, on the extent of Gaskell’s honesty, and on the ideas of genius she supposedly falls prey to. Often Gaskell is criticised: she excluded vital information for reasons of personal bias, she distorted Charlotte into an image of respectable femininity, she didn’t focus enough on the novels. And so on.

As a defence of Brontë against her critics, however, Gaskell does a very good job. Yes, she portrays a feminised picture of Brontë, but that allows her to focus on the way Brontë developed her talent. The paradox is that by throwing cold water over the culture war issue, she makes room for us to watch Brontë develop. Ironically, the people who critique Gaskell think that her portrait of Brontë as dutiful, good at housework, obedient daughter and so on, distracts from Brontë as a writer.

Gaskell’s point is that the two are inseparable. Without the strange conditions of her life, Charlotte Brontë would have been a very different writer.

Genius or talent?

The Cambridge Guide to Elizabeth Gaskell notes that “genius” appears sixteen times in the book, that Gaskell is keen to show early signs of the sisters’ genius, and that she is wary of the Romantic idea of genius as leading to excess. It would have been a typical Victorian caution to worry that a genius would also be more liable to “coarse”, “unwomanly” behaviour. So Gaskell ties the idea of genius to the idea of duty. This is what modern critics react against so sharply.

The critical reaction is summed up in this quote from Deidre D’albertis,

[Gaskell] did more than any other single text to create a myth of martyred feminine creativity that continues to dominate our vision of the lonely woman artist as a heroic genius set apart by aesthetic integrity, intellectual detachment, and physical disease.

Gaskell believed in doing good work in the world, as she often shows Charlotte doing. Rather than praising Brontë’s weak health, she shows us the extraordinary circumstances in which Brontë had to live. And it worked. The Saturday Review said,

… as a woman Charlotte Brontë was in every way remarkable. She clung to duty with a most unselfish completeness and an utter abnegation of all that makes a woman’s life happy.

Remember, Gaskell is defending Brontë against allegations that she is “unchristian” and “unwomanly”. Until she deals with that, the culture wars drown out more serious issues.

When Gaskell discusses the fact that being a woman writer has to co-exist with being a domestic presence, she links genius and duty through the idea of God. Noting that there is a lot to do as both houseworker and writer, Gaskell says,

…she must not shrink from the extra responsibility implied by the very fact of her possessing such talents. She must not hide her gift in a napkin; it was meant for the use and service of others. In an humble and faithful spirit must she labour to do what is not impossible, or God would not have set her to do it.” [My emphasis.]

She must not hide her gift in a napkin. Gaskell does not want us to merely accept Brontë as the little woman or the martyred artist. Life as a woman writer is hard, she says. So be it. God gave you these talents and it would be wrong not to use them. That’s exactly the message of Jane Eyre. We are dealing with two very religious women, both from dissenting or dissenting-adjacent backgrounds. This is a central tenet of their religion. You must do the work God sent you to do.

In the context of the time, this isn’t exactly meek and mild stuff. Brontë’s own feminism was utterly Christian. Look how the line She must not hide her gift in a napkin has a biblical echo of the famous line in the gospel of Matthew,

Neither do men light a candle, and put it under a bushel, but on a candlestick; and it giveth light unto all that are in the house. Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works, and glorify your Father which is in heaven.

Gaskell shows Brontë letting her light shine before men that they might see her good works, both as a respectable Christian and as a woman writer bucking convention. If we forget the Christian aspect of both the culture wars and these women’s feminism, we will fail to see this book in its proper context.

The Guide notes this allusion to the parable of the talents, but takes this idea no further. In fact, talent is the core word of this book, not genius.

Branwell’s “talents misused”

To highlight this point in narrative terms, Gaskell constantly contrasts the duty of Brontë to the indulgence of her brother Branwell.

Patrick Branwell, their only brother, was a boy of remarkable promise, and, in some ways, of extraordinary precocity of talent. 

Ah, Patrick. Novel readers everywhere will know how cautionary it is to be “a boy of remarkable promise.”

As we will see below, the girls are presented as a fractious group, nurturing each other’s talents in a literary culture, while working independently also. Branwell is separate from that and his aloof, undisciplined arrogance serves as a moral warning.

The father, ignorant of many failings in moral conduct, did proud homage to the great gifts of his son; for Branwell’s talents were readily and willingly brought out for the entertainment of others. Popular admiration was sweet to him. And this led to his presence being sought at “arvills” and all the great village gatherings, for the Yorkshiremen have a keen relish for intellect; and it likewise procured him the undesirable distinction of having his company recommended by the landlord of the Black Bull to any chance traveller who might happen to feel solitary or dull over his liquor.  “Do you want some one to help you with your bottle, sir?  If you do, I’ll send up for Patrick.”

Branwell does not work, he entertains. He was “fully conscious” of his brilliance, but, Gaskell warns, his “strong love of pleasure and irregular habits” prevented any success. Again and again, while the girls work, Branwell dreams of London, parties, fame,—we never see him apply himself. All the dreary governess work and domestic duties are a burden to the girls, but they provide plots and material. They write their novels from this stuff of life. What does Branwell have? Great expectations that are never fulfilled.

The sisters’ more demure, dutiful,—more Christian,—approach to their talents was much more productive. Gaskell does not praise wild, Romantic, excessive genius. She sees clearly what it takes to nurture talent, to let you light shine before men that they might see your good works. The portrait of a dutiful Christian woman is not a distraction from Charlotte’s talent. Rather, it is integral to it.

Small Group Theory

The first half of the Life of Charlotte Brontë documents the incredible closeness of the three sisters and the way that they work at their talents. Far from disguising Charlotte’s ambitions or intellectual life, it is on full display, most notably in the letters that Gaskell quotes. Here she is writing about going to study French abroad.

Papa will, perhaps, think it a wild and ambitious scheme; but who ever rose in the world without ambition? When he left Ireland to go to Cambridge University, he was as ambitious as I am now. I want us all to get on.  I know we have talents, and I want them to be turned to account.

Several things are evident here. Charlotte’s huge ambition. The influence of her family. And the fact that she knows she has talents. The domestic Charlotte never smothers the intellectual, ambitious Charlotte. Gaskell shows us both, plain for all to see.

Gaskell documents the way the sisters read together, put on plays, compared their work, went out walking on the moors and talked. They educated themselves into being writers as a small intensive group. This is what modern sociologists call small group theory. The Brontës are what Michael Farrell would call a collaborative circle. They guard themselves against outside influence, competitively nurture each other’s talents. Farrell notes that these circles have shared goals, a common vision, and a set of assumptions about their discipline. In the evenings, after their work was done, the group swung into action.

It was the household custom among these girls to sew till nine o’clock at night. At that hour, Miss Branwell generally went to bed, and her nieces’ duties for the day were accounted done.  They put away their work, and began to pace the room backwards and forwards, up and down,—as often with the candles extinguished, for economy’s sake, as not,—their figures glancing into the fire-light, and out into the shadow, perpetually. At this time, they talked over past cares and troubles; they planned for the future, and consulted each other as to their plans. In after years this was the time for discussing together the plots of their novels. 

The whole culture of the house, its religion, its bookishness, the intensity of their artistic interests, the fact that Charlotte could discover Emily’s astonishing poetry,—just knowing that all three sisters were writing,—Gaskell’s book is suffused with this, and it makes the whole thing a description of the ways in which they took their lives and turned them into art.

Bookmaking out of the remains of the dead

The other criticism Gaskell receives is from the anti-biographers. (Brontë was criticised for this as well.)

Charlotte Brontë wasn’t always as popular as she is now. In the later decades of the nineteenth century, she was seen as second-rate, compared to the intellectual novelists like George Eliot. The problem was that she was fundamentally an autobiographically novelist. As Leslie Stephen—Virginia Woolf’s father and the first editor of the Dictionary of National Biography—put it, her novels were merely “the study of her life.”

The critics continued to carp, saying she lacked technique. Leavis left her out of the Great Tradition. (Pah! Phooey to Leavis…) Feminist critics have since argued that you can be a great novelist without prioritising unity and rationality. Hardly a shocking thought, but literary criticism is often wary of stating the obvious: no-one can ever put Jane Eyre down once they start reading it, and it expresses something large and powerful and emotional and religious and psychological. How many other novels achieve that?

Hence, Gaskell did less damage than she is accused of. Highbrows were always hostile to Brontë. It’s wrong to blame Gaskell for the sexist, aesthetically narrow reaction Brontë received. She was working within that culture to get Brontë a better reputation.

The anti-biographical school was out against Elizabeth Gaskell too. John Blackwood wrote in 1857, of Gaskell, “I detest this bookmaking out of the remains of the dead.” Interestingly, Gaskell came to feel something similar, hoping there would be no biography of her. Lucasta Miller, in her splendid book The Brontë Myth—which I highly recommend to you all—critiques Gaskell for focussing too much on Brontë’s life, and not enough on the work. The myth that Gaskell set in motion, she says, became hugely dominant, especially in the twentieth century with TV and Hollywood and tourism, which detracts from the work.

Conclusion

But readers didn’t need Gaskell’s analysis of Jane Eyre. It’s typical for modern biographers to give an account of each book by their subject. Gaskell did something far more interesting—she explained how Charlotte Brontë arrived out of nowhere to become a great novelist. Would a dozen pages discussing Jane Eyre really have changed the reception of the biography and Brontë’s reputation?

Yes, Gaskell hid Brontë’s sexual passion for a married man. Yes, she focussed on the domestic, obedient, suffering, semi-Romantic side of Brontë’s character. But by doing that, she was leading contemporary readers to appreciate the ways in which Brontë’s decidedly Christian life was compatible with her radical writing. To include the other material would have been to distract from Brontë as a writer.

Gaskell was trying to show the truth in the only way that was acceptable to her audience. This is not just a feminist issue: when Froude wrote the Life of Carlyle he kept Carlyle’s impotence secret. The Victorians simply didn’t put certain things into print. We may be familiar with this problem ourselves…

As the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography says, “The biography was a monumental success, moderating negative judgements about Charlotte’s unwomanly writing and establishing a mythology about the Brontës’ lives for over a century.”

We may not like the mythology,—but it was an important first step in winning the culture wars.

The Dickens Chronological Reading Club has reached Bleak House, the great English novel. I will never forget the first time I read the opening page of this book. The skulking atmosphere; the brisk, contorted prose; the perpetual sense of someone lurking. People often talk about the second paragraph, with all the fog. I was gripped from the first. A megalosaurus on Holborn Hill. Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. This is London, but not as we know it. We are in a semi-real world, a place where it seems as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth. Dickens writes on the edge of fantasy.

When Bleak House appeared, critics disliked it. So dark, suddenly. So gloomy. Where was the Dickens of old? The rolling, rollicking Hogarthian Dickens? But this new dark mode became Dickens’ most enduring legacy—he is the novelist of London’s fog, grime, squalor, and despair. Bleak House, of course, is about more than fog. It sometimes feels like it is trying to be about everything. Smallpox, the courts, aristocracy, murder, economics, altruism, secrecy, blackmail, homelessness, marriage, patriarchy, class, money, power. There are decaying law courts, weird and mysterious houses, cluttered shops, haunted mansions, an old lady who keeps birds, and a crooked shopkeeper who spontaneously combusts. People are constantly investigating and being investigated. And the names! Skimpole, Krook, Bucket, Tulkinghorn.

Still, the usual criticisms do apply, such as that Dickens was sexist—partly a reaction against Jane Eyre. More damningly for literary scholars, he was not a novelist of ideas, not like George Eliot. Bleak House is a part of a supposedly anti-utilitarian, anti-economic outlook, which would peak in his next novel, Hard Times. When he’s not seen as unphilosophical or inconsistent or shallow, Dickens is put in Carlyle’s tribe, believing economics was “the dismal science,” opposed to laissez faire industrialisation and selfishness.

I think that is wrong. Not only was Dickens more of a novelist of ideas than he seems, he was more of a utilitarian, too. Today I’m going to show you that Bleak House is more utilitarian than it seems and use Raymond Williams’ 1970 essay ‘Dickens and Social Ideas’ to outline six ways of using ideas in fiction—and that will show us how Dickens uses idea.

Why this matters

As I wrote in my essay on the role of the humanities in progress, imagination breaks the path that reason follows and Plato’s separation of analytic and narrative thinking is too strict. We are everywhere surrounded by ideas in the fiction we consume.

The social criticism of Charles Dickens was worth as much as all the nineteenth century’s poverty data. Statistics alone cannot make you feel the truth of what it is like to be in jail, school, or an orphanage. Think too about the role of Harriet Beecher Stowe in the debate about slavery and the way it affected the whole of society. More prosaically, it’s absurd the extent to which The West Wing preoccupied (preoccupies?) the imaginations of a whole generation of political types. That is not a good thing, but it is undeniably real.

Art is the closest thing to life. I don’t like this silly little instance of what amounts to quite a big truth, but many people will think more about politics and power when they watch Succession than at any other time. We all know that ideas in fiction matter when we say that children’s books and television should have girls as well as boys in prominent roles. But beyond that, the important role that ideas play in our fiction seems to fade away. Explicating the different ways ideas work in fiction, specifically Dickens, will hopefully demonstrate the way that fiction of all sorts is part of the ongoing battle of ideas in society, for better for worse.

Dickens the utilitarian?

Based on the usual reading of Hard Times and other books, the idea that Dickens could be considered a Benthamite seems laughable. The counterpoint to this goes all the way back to Dickens’ own time. In ‘“Bleak House,” Political Economy,’ Kathleen Blake quotes Dickens’ contemporary Sir Henry Maine:

Dickens, who spent his early manhood among the politicians of 1832 trained in Bentham’s school, hardly ever wrote a novel without attacking an abuse. The procedures of the Court of Chancery and of the Ecclesiastical Courts, the delays of the Public Offices, the costliness of divorce, the state of the dwellings of the poor, and the condition of the cheap schools in the North of England, furnished him with… the true moral of a series of fictions

Seen like this, Dickens was remarkably aligned to and perhaps sympathetic with Bentham’s sort of radical utilitarianism. And Bleak House is more sympathetic to the ideas of economists than we might think. Think of Skimpole, chastised for being uneconomical, and the emphasis Dickens puts again and again on the value of pleasure or happiness. Legal reform, impatience with history-worship that blocked rational improvement, and a dislike of social pretension, are all concerns he shares with utilitarians.

He was also connected to J.S. Mill: they both wrote for the Morning Chronicle. So we can start to see Dickens as part of the radical tradition leading back to Bentham. He might even be more like Mill in feminist terms. Gender inequality was most essential to the aristocracy, where property and title could only go to sons. As Blake says,

Dickens doesn’t show this subordination stopping with the upper class. Likewise Mill associates gender tyranny with royal and aristocratic tyranny but also shows it extending down the social hierarchy. This is a feminist line of thought not typically looked for in Dickens, but he is closer to the political economists than we might expect.

What about Esther? Was she submissive, concerned with her looks because of Victorian patriarchy, or was she an independent minded Benthamite?

Bentham himself declares the interest for the self of other people's good regard. As I read the last page of the novel, Esther has won love and a capital-letter, twice-repeated sense of Me.

Blake shows that the utilitarian idea of a panopticon, a radically transparent prison system, is crucial to the idea of Chancery in the novel.

Chancery is as far as possible from panoptical. It is at the heart of the fog, to the nth degree inefficient, uneconomical, uncomprehensive in view, closed to inspection, monopolistic, and self-serving at the expense of those it serves.

It is difficult to fit Dickens into an easy pro- or anti-utilitarian frame.

Six ways of using ideas in a novel

What makes all of this difficult to see is that Dickens is more concerned with the consequences of an idea, rather than the idea itself. Thus, he does not have to be a coherent, systematic thinker for ideas to be a major part of his work. He is writing about social movements and conditions downstream of the philosophical formulations. He is concerned, as Raymond Williams says, not with an idea, but with the system that uses the idea.

Whether he is or is not a utilitarian is therefore almost the wrong question, certainly a boring and not very useful aesthetic criteria. (Yes, F.R. Leavis was wrong.) (Also, why Quentin Skinner isn’t an essential part of Eng. Lit. reading lists, I’ll never know.)

Raymond Williams’ essay ‘Dickens and Social Ideas’ is good at delineating the different ways in which ideas are expressed through Dickens’ fiction. Williams sets criteria for the way ideas are used in novels.

First, as stories that are propaganda for an idea, which often appeared in nineteenth century magazines. In this mode, ideas are plainly stated in partisan terms. The novels sermonises and proselytises. Williams lists The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropist in this category and some late H.G. Wells.

Second, novels that want to persuade us with ideas that are embodied not expressed. These novels are organised around, or directed by, an idea. Think D.H. Lawrence or War and Peace. The third sort is when ideas are discussed or debated in the novel, such as Aldous Huxley. (Think G.B. Shaw, too.)

Fourth, Williams makes the important point that when a novel uses familiar ideas, they go unnoticed—

Jane Austen, for example, is full of ideas, for the most part directly and plainly expressed, but most of them are so taken for granted as common standards or conventions… that they operate, as ideas, more passively than actively, although the final weight of the ideas in the fiction is no less.

It is in this way that Sally Rooney is a novelist of ideas, though she doesn’t always get recognised as such by the highbrows.

Fifth, ideas can be embodied as characters: the characters embody principles and the action tests those principles. He gives Anna Karenina as an example. Sixth, are the Kafka and Joyce types, where the ideas are “dissolved” in the world of the novel, so strongly is the world of the novel informed by these ideas it becomes almost a free-standing reality. (Williams doesn’t say this, but this must be the category of much fantasy writing.)

These are not especially stable categories. For example, Dinah in Adam Bede is a propagandist character in a more-or-less embodied novel.

Dickens, novelist of ideas

So, how do ideas work in Dickens?1 No arguments or Austen-style conventions are present. But the other four types—propaganda, embodiment, character, and free-standing reality are all there. (I recently wrote for subscribers about the way Carlyle’s idea of the hero is present in David Copperfield. Many of Williams’s categories are identifiable: the propaganda of Aunt Betsie, the embodiment of David, the discussion by Agnes.)

Dickens’ propaganda is widely known (and terribly dull). More pertinent are embodied ideas. Not just in Hard Times, but Little Dorrit, Great Expectations and Dombey, ideas are essential to the aim and structure of the novel. Obviously, too, many characters represent ideas: Pecksniff, Micawber, Skimpole. Williams distinguishes these sorts of characters who are “individual realities” that represent a “meaning or emphasis” in life, from the more literal examples of organised ideas in a character: Gradgrind, Dombey, Merdle. And of course, the dissolved ideas, the free-standing worlds are everywhere: Tulkinghorn, the Clenhams, Miss Havisham.

Because Dickens is concerned with inhumanity, pretensions, and deformity, his characters are often grotesques. As Williams says, Dickens works more finely than anyone else the tension between orthodox ideas “and the tearing, dislocating, haunting experience” the ideas were meant to control. The more fantastic, in all senses, a novel is, the easier it can be for the pantomime to distract us from the use of ideas.

Creative disturbance

Williams sees Dickens not as inconsistent but disturbed. It is this disturbance which is the creative source of his work. He writes about ideas and systems, but is interested in them as they are expressed in tensions, experiences, things he could actually show and understand, things he could organise and make sense of. He is not an abstract thinker. He likes to place and describe. He makes a world of mud, fog, shadow, pale light and darkness visible, a world of semi-mythical people, who might almost be mistaken for the creatures splattered with mire at the start. Welcome, then, to Bleak House, a world of ideas, or as Williams calls it, an obscuring and shadow filled world.

What obscuring, shadow-filled worlds are manipulating your ideas?

Jane Eyre is the first example of a Bildungsroman in English that is about a woman. A Bildungsroman is a novel of coming of age, the novel of maturity. Central to Jane’s personal development is her feminist beliefs that women should enjoy more autonomy, their lives should be about more than darning socks and stirring puddings. But Jane Eyre is more than this, it is not just feminist but a Christian, feminist, Bildungsroman.

The essential element of this novel is contrast and balance. It is about the tension of duty and freedom, Christianity and feminism, self and other. Jane wants to be accommodated within the system, not to reject it. The Dictionary of National Biography says this:

By emphasizing the importance of a balance between reason and passion in Jane's journey towards social and spiritual maturity, Charlotte Brontë created a Bildungsroman focused not only on the individual's negotiation of the external world but on the well-being of one's interior life. The reader is apprised of Jane's internal world through the use of biblical, literary, and pictorial allusion, through fairy tale, dream, and myth.

Some critics have denied or downplayed the role of religion in this novel, no doubt influenced by the fact that Elizabeth Gaskell overplayed the meek obedience of Charlotte Brontë, disguising her sexual life. But in our quest to restore passion to Bronte and her novel, it is a mistake to exclude what one critic called

the way Brontë blends feminism and Christianity such that women of faith like Jane Eyre, and Charlotte herself at times, are not disempowered but find strength to obey God even if it means going against social and literary norms and conventional morality.

This struggle begins right at the start of the novel. Think of the scene when she spoke to the apothecary about how she was not prepared to leave a rich cruel house for a poor one, Jane reflects, “I was not heroic enough to purchase liberty at the price of caste.” When she tells her aunt the truth, that she is a nasty deceitful woman, Jane says, “my soul began to expand, to exult, with the strangest sense of freedom, of triumph.”

Throughout the novel, Jane is presented with examples of religious men—some clergy, some not—and has to choose which of them she respects as genuine Christians. What critics don’t take seriously enough is that it is St. John,—that cold, creepy, patriarch who gets the final line:

The last letter I received from him drew from my eyes human tears, and yet filled my heart with divine joy: he anticipated his sure reward, his incorruptible crown. I know that a stranger’s hand will write to me next, to say that the good and faithful servant has been called at length into the joy of his Lord. And why weep for this? No fear of death will darken St. John’s last hour: his mind will be unclouded, his heart will be undaunted, his hope will be sure, his faith steadfast. His own words are a pledge of this—

“My Master,” he says, “has forewarned me. Daily He announces more distinctly,—‘Surely I come quickly!’ and hourly I more eagerly respond,—‘Amen; even so come, Lord Jesus!’”

People have been discovering the secret repudiation of religion in Jane Eyre ever since it was published. This is a classic sort of too-clever-to-be-clever criticism. Brontë wrote this is a preface, addressing these claims

I would suggest to such doubters certain obvious distinctions; I would remind them of certain simple truths. Conventionality is not morality. Self-righteousness is not religion. To attack the first is not to assail the last. To pluck the mask from the face of the Pharisee, is not to lift an impious hand to the Crown of Thorns.

Brontë was from an evangelical, Anglican family; her father was a priest, and she and her sisters held a strong faith. Evangelical methodism was present in Charlotte’s home through her mother and then her aunt. Though inspired by evangelical theology, the Bronte family was liberal, reading was encouraged, as was political discussion, they were allowed to play cards and perform plays. This is not austere Calvinism or joyless puritanism.

The essence of evangelism is the direct knowledge of God, the revelation of God to the individual. Painted a few years after Jane Eyre was published, Holman Hunt’s Light of the World, depicts Christ based on a verse from Revelations: “Behold I stand at the door and knock; if any man hear my voice, and open the door, I will come in to him, and will sup with him, and he with me.” Here is Christ made flesh to man. Here is the basis of conversion, another core tenet of the evangelical.

The importance of evangelism is that although women remain second class citizens, subject to the hierarchy of men, in their relationship with God they can step out of the hierarchy. They can hear the voice and open the door. Again and again Jane displays that, like Hamlet, she has that within which passeth show. The outer form of religion is shown to be false, in her aunt, and most damningly in Brocklehurst. These people have got got the tune of the time and outward habit of encounter. Jane, on the other hand, has genuine inner religion.

This contrast means Jane can challenge outward authority: she is unwilling to accept their social and moral control over her. As Emily Griesinger, whose paper I am relying on for this essay, writes:

The assurance of being saved and the experience of being intimately in touch with God became an important source of independence and power for Victorian women willing to challenge traditional religious authority and eventually social and political authority as well.

Jane’s conversion then is not in accordance with the adult who put on a show of religion, but with those who have undeniable inner faith and goodness, who are directly connected to God. The most important of them, as well as St. John, is Helen Burns, one of the great characters of English fiction. Although Brontë praises St. John at the end, he is Calvinist and she, and Jane Eyre, are not.

Helen is a martyr who preaches acceptance, codified in Johnson’s novella Rasselas, which she is reading. Jane does not entirely accept what Helen tells her, but she absorbs her lessons about God’s grace. Her story from now on is a religious one, in which she has to balance the need to confront injustice, as she did with her cousins, and remain true to her faith.

Hence, when she discovers Rochester is married she tells him she will not marry him. They can only be married as equals before God. Rochester tempts her away from her love for God. “My future husband was becoming to me my whole world; and, more than the world: almost my hope of heaven…I could not, in those days, see God for his creature: of whom I had made an idol.” Jane here is referencing the first commandment: “You shall not make for yourselves an idol.”

And so, inspired by her dream of the moon, the virgin goddess Diana, she leaves Thornfield, and takes her own path, eventually turning up at St. John’s door, in a manner reminiscent of the Holman Hunt picture above.

St. John is her final challenge—another idol, who would impose himself in front of her God. Sounding like Carlyle, Jane says of St. John

All men of talent, whether they be men of feeling or not; whether they be zealots, or aspirants, or despots — provided only they be sincere — have their sublime moments: when they subdue and rule. I felt veneration for St. John — veneration so strong that its impetus thrust me at once to the point I had so long shunned. I was tempted to cease struggling with him — to rush down the torrent of his will into the gulf of his existence, and there to lose my own.

This is explicitly Christian feminism: St. John, like Rochester, is threatening to control her access to God—and Jane cannot accept that. As Griesinger says,

If a “Christian feminist bildungsroman” traces the development of an autonomous spiritual “self “ against the social, psychological, and religious constraints of patriarchy, then in this section, Jane constructs an authentic, personal faith in direct opposition to the patriarchal authority of St. John Rivers, who seeks to impose what he believes is God’s will on her life. Jane’s response to St. John is radically feminist, Protestant, and biblical. She is willing to submit to Gods will, but she must determine that will for herself: “I sincerely, deeply, fervently longed to do what was right; and only that. ‘Shew me—she me the path!’ I entreated of Heaven.”

So Jane asserts her independence by appealing directly to Heaven. She becomes an autonomous women by becoming an autonomous Christian. Griesinger says this is

a remarkable (for Bronte’s day) assertion of women’s spiritual authority and an equally memorable rejection of the idea predominant among Victorians, and still dominant in many conservative evangelical churches, that women must always be “under” the spiritual authority of men.

This is why the woman who stood on the ramparts of Thornfield crying feminism can go back and marry Rochester. When she hears Rochester calling out, Jane interprets that as God’s doing. She marries him when she is able to maintain her independence before God. As she says, “God did not give me my life to throw away.”

Hazlitt was angry about the clanging way novelists added information that was “new to him” but old to his characters. The problem when a novelist “informs you that the quality eat fish with silver forks” is not just that it’s clunky technique, but that it prioritises the surface. The quality don’t spend their time thinking I am eating fish with a silver fork. What then are they thinking? What about the use of art to help us understand the situations of others? Forget it, says Hazlitt:

a young linen-draper or attorney’s-clerk from the country, who had gained a thirty-thousand pound prize in the lottery and wished to set up for a fine gentleman, might learn from these Novels what hotel to put up at, what watering place to go to, what hatter, hosier, tailor, shoemaker, friseur to employ, what part of the town he should be seen in, what theatre he might frequent; but how to behave, speak, look, feel, and think in his new and more aspiring character he would not find the most distant hint in the gross caricatures or flimsy sketches of the most mechanical and shallow of all schools. It is really as if, in lieu of our royal and fashionable “Society of Authors,” a deputation of tailors, cooks, lacqueys, had taken possession of Parnassus, and had appointed some Abigail out of place perpetual Secretary.

The novel, says Hazlitt, has been co-opted into the circus of fashion. “Authors at present would be thought gentlemen, as gentlemen have a fancy to turn authors.” What counted was not hard work and ability, but being clever in a shallow sense. “The smart improvisatori turns out the most wearisome of interminable writers... At a moment’s warning he can supply something that is worth nothing, and in ten times the space he can spin out ten times the quantity of the same poor trash.”

These fashionable novels are what Jane Eyre refers to when she describes her cousin Georgina, who has told her everything about being in London, as talking a whole volume of a fashionable novel. It’s also the image of novelists that Dickens was working against in David Copperfield, which is why he makes David work so hard. Rather than being fashionable fops, writers had to become bourgeois artists.

Hazlitt contrasts this sorry trend with Restoration theatre, who presented upper-class people in a real way, not just by describing their silverware.

It would seem that the race of these is over, or that our modern scribes have not had access to them on a proper footing — that is, not for their talents or conversation, but as mountebanks or political drudges.

The word that caught my eye here is talent. We know from his essay The Indian Jugglers, that Hazlitt thinks of talent as “the capacity of doing any thing that depends on application and industry, such as writing a criticism, making a speech, studying the law.” That is, a talent is an ability that can be worked at to produce something valuable. It is not genius, but it is not commonplace. Talent requires practice; genius, inspiration. “Talent differs from genius, as voluntary differs from involuntary power.”

But greatness is not dependent on talent or genius. Doing work that changes the world and lasts into history is what makes greatness. “A great chess-player is not a great man, for he leaves the world as he found it. No act terminating in itself constitutes greatness.” Hazlitt believes that greatness is difficult to find in the professions, in the navy, or in chemistry—but, he acknowledges that “it is in the nature of greatness to propagate an idea of itself, as wave impels wave, circle without circle. It is a contradiction in terms for a coxcomb to be a great man. A really great man has always an idea of something greater than himself.”

The word talent occurs frequently in Copperfield, mostly in connection with Mr. Micawber, whose wife is convinced has talent that is unrecognised by the world. What Mr. and Mrs. Micawber don’t realise is that talent, per Hazlitt, requires “application and industry.” David Copperfield stands in contrast to Mr. Micawber as being industrious. What is missing from this new image of talent is Hazlitt’s notion of inspired genius. That Romantic ideal is represented in Steerforth—who comes to a sorry moral ending, a warning to the industrious nineteenth century not to rely on native ability alone.

Copperfield is not a romantic genius—he is a man of talent and application, based on Carlyle’s idea of the hero and a man-of-letters. Dickens reacted to Hazlitt’s complaint about dandyish novelists, but he took Carlyle as his inspiration for what should replace them. The romantic ideal of individual genius and talent was giving way to a more Victorian idea of hard work and hero worship: the inspired genius was becoming the self-made man. Hazlitt wrote about dandy novelists in 1827; Carlyle set out his hero theory in 1840; in 1849 Copperfield embodied Carlyle’s ideal; in 1859, Samuel Smiles popularised the concept of self help.

The notion of greatness and genius, whether an individual inspiration or something to worship, had faded into a prescription for achievement. From lofty ideals to practical advice. From poetry that sets its face against the world to respectable self-betterment.

The video outlines the ideas which are given below in (much) more detail, with quotes from a range of critics, to introduce the spectrum of responses to this remarkable novel. As far as I know, there is no detailed scholarly work that traces the detail of Carlyle’s idea in Copperfield. If anyone knows of any such work, I would be grateful to know about it. To unlock the full video and essay, subscribe now.

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The next book club will be about Mrs. Gaskell’s biography of Charlotte Brontë, a suitable follow-on from Copperfield. We will meet in mid-July, date tbc—suggestions welcome in the comments. Gaskell is our primary focus, but I also strongly recommend The Brontë Myth by Lucasta Miller. And of course, re-reading Jane Eyre, one of the all time great novels. As I said to someone who questioned Emily’s talents recently, the Brontës are five-star geniuses and I won’t hear another word about it.

Contents

1. Introduction. Is David Copperfield the most Victorian of nineteenth century novels?

2. Copperfield as Dickens’s autobiography, the relationship between Dickens’ life and David Copperfield to see how autobiographical the novel was.

3. Literary influence, the literary influences of Jane Eyre as an “autobiographical novel” and the use of the present tense.

4. David Copperfield as Carlylean hero, a discussion of the way Carlyle’s theory of the heroic is encoded in the novel, demonstrating the influence of Samuel Johnson on the novel and showing that Agnes is the lynchpin of this idea.

If you are interested in reading more about David Copperfield, do look at the essays on Rachel’s blog, All the (Dickensian) Year, written by Rachel, Boze, and members of the Dickens Chronological Reading Club.

Introduction

Is David Copperfield the most Victorian of nineteenth century novels? It has so many essential elements of Victorianism. The self-made man, the angel in the house, the spinster aunt, the anxious marital secret, the nasty brutish step-father, sexual hypocrisy, ruined innocence, labouring children, class division, class hatred, snobbish hypocrisy, the rising to dominance of the middle-class, apple-faced ruralism, nostalgia for the pre-steam engine age, commerce and trade, country lawyers with scheming clerks, silly wives with little dogs, wicked servants, humble servants, financial ruin, emigration, financial recovery, port towns, London, loyal daughters, good Christian men, mental health problems and unsympathetic relatives, eccentricity, a sensible submissive wife with a wise heart, the rich dissolute friend who brings evil to beautiful women, closed societies who scorn the weak, mercy and charity, anonymous city life, indignation, consternation, poetic justice, sentimentality, and the ever present influence of Thomas Carlyle.

Copperfield is Dickens’s last book that is predominantly comic: after 1850, Carlyle’s influence on Dickens turns him into a darker, more pessimistic writer, something which made Bleak House and Little Dorritt less popular with the critics. This is the last time we see the Dickens of high-days and holidays, whose view of life is essentially optimistic and beneficent, before social evils crowd his work like an irremovable smell. After Copperfield, Dickens is always attacking something, often bitterly. Carlyle’s influence on Copperfield is more optimistic: it makes this a novel of the heroic man-of-letters and the rising Victorian middle-class that casts off the Byronic idea of a Romantic hero.

These ideas are set in the opening line, Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life… Life, here, has two meanings. First, the actual life Copperfield lives. This is directly related to our lives: we might all want to become the hero of our own lives. But life also meant biography, such as in Forster’s Life of Dickens. David Copperfield is a fictional autobiography. 

In this fictional autobiography, Dickens uses the material of his own life and the ideas of his literary hero Thomas Carlyle, to present the story of a development of a neglected child into a hero as a man-of-letters.

Paid subscribers get access to the full video, the rest of the detailed notes, can come to the Book Club meetings, and receive occasional additional essays. You can also join the conversation over at the discussion thread.

Copperfield as Dickens’s autobiography

Letters written to his friend John Forster show the various names Dickens went through while he was “revolving a new work” at the beginning of 1849—various elements of this new work become evident. It is especially notable that Mag reappeared a decade later in another Bildungsroman, Great Expectations.

Mag’s Diversions, Being the History of Mr. Thomas May the Younger of Blunderstone House

Mr. David Mag the Younger of Copperfield House

Mr. David Copperfield the Younger and his great-aunt Margaret

The Copperfield Disclosures

The Copperfield Records

The Last Living Speech and Confession of David Copperfield Junior

The Copperfield Survey of the World as it Rolled

The Last Will and Testament of Mr. David Copperfield

Copperfield, Complete

The real title is more complicated, but unambiguously autobiographical—

The Personal History, Adventures, Experience, and Observation of David Copperfield the Younger of Blunderstone Rookery (which He never meant to be Published on any Account)

Forster replied that David Copperfield had reversed the initials of Charles Dickens. “Why else should I so obstinately have kept to that name when once it turned up?” the unruffled author replied. He was quite intentionally writing an autobiographical novel, a mirror of himself.

Shortly before he wrote Copperfield, Dickens began writing an autobiography, which he never finished or published. When Dickens died, Forster wrote quoted several long sections from the autobiography, revealing the now well-known details about Dickens’ childhood and showing that David Copperfield was very much a story about Dickens own childhood. This autobiographical fragment “led to the larger design in which it became absorbed.”

Dickens’ never got over his childhood. The warehouse where David works is almost identical to the blacking factory Dickens was sent to work in as a child. John Carey says,

The weeks in the blacking warehouse permanently wounded Dickens’ mind, and helped make him a great novelist. His whole nature was, as he put it, penetrated with ‘grief and humiliation’... Dilapidated buildings, riverside waste land, and counting-houses haunt his fiction. They were the components of his childhood nightmare as described in his autobiography and repeated, almost verbatim, in the account of David Copperfield’s experience at Murdstone and Grindby’s.

[The Violent Effigy, pp. 148-149]

His father’s impecuniosity was responsible for that experience, and Mr Micawber’s famous pronouncement about happiness being a question of living within your means was a direct quote from Dickens’s father. Throughout Copperfield, Dickens is reworking his own life into a novel. Even Dora is based on an early romance. As one recent PhD dissertation says,

Through fiction, Dickens tied together all of the major, disparate sections of his life into one cohesive narrative. In this way, his hardship and abandonment in childhood, his experiences of courtship, his struggles as a young professional, and his ultimate triumph as an author all come together as parts of the single journey that made Copperfield into a hero.

[David Copperfield: Victorian Hero by James A. Hamby, p. 84]

What is most notable about David Copperfield is that he escapes his childhood. The lasting pain that Dickens' felt is absent from the novel, which instead becomes the embodiment of a new idea from the 1840s, the hero as a man-of-letters.

Literary influence

There were professional, literary reasons to write an autobiography and then an autobiographical novel. In 1847, Jane Eyre was published, a novel that was called an autobiography and was written in the first person. Dickens was startled by the competition: he claimed not to have read it (and often he simply did not read women novelists) but its influence is all over his work, especially Bleak House. Dickens will have disliked this novel because it challenged the patriarchy. As Lisa Jadwin says,

Fictional portraits like Rosa Dartle and Miss Wade reveal Dickens’s conviction that an acute intellect leads a woman either to destroy men or to “agitate,” to “step out of her domestic path... to seek influence in the civilised world,” as he suggests in his 1851 anti-feminist diatribe “Sucking Pigs.”

In ‘Sucking Pigs’ Dickens wrote,

Beloved one, does your sex seek influence in the civilised world? Surely it possesses influence therein to no mean extent, and has possessed it since the civilised world was… Should we love our Julia better, if she were a Member of Parliament, a Parochial Guardian, a High Sheriff, a Grand Juror, or a woman distinguished for her able conduct in the chair? Do we not, on the contrary, rather seek in the society of our Julia, a haven of refuge from Members of Parliament, Parochial Guardians, High Sheriffs, Grand Jurors, and able chairmen? Is not the home-voice of our Julia as the song of a bird, after considerable bow-wow-ing out of doors?

Not only is this attitude clear in the way Dora and Agnes are written—Agnes is the angel in the house—it is a reaction against Jane Eyre and novels like it. This anti-feminist position got stronger in Bleak House, causing J.S. Mill to detest the novel. 

Dickens will have been shaken by the fact that Jane Eyre, along with Vanity Fair, was greeted by critics as part of a new generation of novelists, an implicit challenge to his dominant position. [Cambridge Companion, pp. 99-100] First person narratives became a significant part of Dickens’ work in Copperfield and then Bleak House after Jane Eyre appeared as a rival. 

The influence of Jane Eyre is present is a technical way, too. The use of the present tense. John Mullan details Dickens’ use of the present tense in highly readable, entertaining, and learned book The Artful Dickens. The first novel to have a sustained use of present and past tense together was Dombey, written just before Copperfield. Dickens has flicked into present tense before, briefly; now it became technique.

Jane Eyre is famous for its use of the present tense to dramatise moments of narrative intensity.

Sweet-briar and southernwood, jasmine, pink, and rose have long been yielding their evening sacrifice of incense: this new scent is neither of shrub nor flower; it is—I know it well—it is Mr. Rochester's cigar. I look round and I listen. I see trees laden with ripening fruit. I hear a nightingale warbling in a wood half a mile off; no moving form is visible, no coming step audible; but that perfume increases: I must flee. I make for the wicket leading to the shrubbery, and I see Mr. Rochester entering. I step aside into the ivy recess; he will not stay long: he will soon return whence he came, and if I sit still he will never see me.

The present tense here makes it as if the smell has revived the memory, as if she lives it again. This is how Dickens uses the present tense in Copperfield to discover, as Mullan says, “that the distant past is still present to him.” He also uses the present tense to condense time, as in the accounts of his childhood and the time before his wedding.

Using the present tense like this is a significant invention in narrative technique. Dickens’ nest novel, Bleak House, is the most significant example, being divided between past and present chapter by chapter. These experiments influenced the modernists decades later, with Bleak House often cited. Though Dickens denied it, he learned at least some of this technique from Charlotte Bronte.

David Copperfield as Carlylean Hero

As in many other areas, when defining a hero Dickens drew on Carlyle. Caroline Fox, Victorian diarist, wrote in 1841 that Dickens:

…is carrying out Carlyle’s work more emphatically than any; he forces the sympathies of all into unwonted channels, and teaches us that Punch and Judy men, beggar children, and daft old men are also of our species, and are not, more than ourselves, removed from the sphere of the heroic.1

[Critical Heritage, pp. 6-7]

First, let’s look at what Carlyle meant by heroic; then, we shall see how the idea of the heroic is presented in David Copperfield. 

Carlyle delivered a series of lectures called On Heroes, Hero Worship and the Heroic in History  in London in 1840, nine years before David Copperfield began serialisation.  Rather than the selfish ideal of heroes of Bryonic legend, Carlyle admired the heroes who made their nations great. For Carlyle, the hero as a man-of-letters was someone who spoke the truth to readers, be they poet or journalist. 

[The] Man-of-Letters Hero must be regarded as our most important modern person. He, such as he may be, is the soul of all. What he teaches, the whole world will do and make. The world’s manner of dealing with him is the most significant feature of the world’s general position

Carlyle thought the man-of-letters was a very modern hero, because “Writing is the most miraculous of all things man has devised… Books still accomplish miracles… They persuade men.” [On Heroes, p. 138]

Carlyle’s example is Samuel Johnson, “one of our great English souls...a giant invincible soul; a true man’s.” [pp. 153, 154] Carlyle praised Johnson’s “Rude, stubborn self-help” and said he was “An original man;—not a secondhand, borrowing or begging man.” [p. 154] He praises Johnson’s sincerity, his attachment to truth and fact, and his obedience to a higher order (i.e. God). 

This is a very Victorian idea. Michael K. Goldberg says,

Though Carlyle’s intensity was his own, his sentiments were widely shared by his fellow Victorians who, said Edmund Gosse, turned admiration “from a virtue into a religion, and called it Hero Worship.” One factor behind Victorian Hero Worship was the Romantic rediscovery of enthusiasm. In the neoclassical period [i.e. C18th] it had been applied as a term of ridicule to religious zealots who felt themselves literally en-theos, possessed by god or having God within them.2 Romantic theory and sensibility converted enthusiasm from an intellectually ludicrous delusion into a sign of emotional depth and power. The characteristic “romantic passions” thus came to include enthusiasm or unfettered admiration, which, according to Ruskin, mean “primarily all the forms of Hero Worship.”

Carlyle was concerned to reestablish the idea—which he thought was in decline in the industrial age—that great achievements were made by individuals. Worshipping heroes would lead to feats of originality. This is echoed when David goes to London, and he is inspired to live up to the examples of his heroes,

What an amazing place London was to me when I saw it in the distance, and how I believed all the adventures of all my favourite heroes to be constantly enacting and re-enacting there, and how I vaguely made it out in my own mind to be fuller of wonders and wickedness than all the cities of the earth, I need not stop here to relate.

The idea of the self-made hero would later morph into Samuel Smiles’ book Self-Help—David’s “steady application” to his work is the virtue Smiles most praised. Hard work is the foundation of David’s success. Mr. Micawber is supposed to be a man of talent who never finds the right opportunity; his indulgence and lack of application are a contrast to David’s frugality and persistent application. In a very Victorian way, David does not dwell on his past but turns it to good use. Mr. Dick is another, more compassionate contrast, to David in this regard. As Irène Simon said,

While Mr Dick’s memory is blocked because his mind has given way under suffering, David did not submit for long to the dreadful life of the warehouse, but escaped through ‘[his] own act’ (Ch. 12, p. 228) and can now integrate this experience into his life. Compared with David, Mr Dick figures the passive versus the active response to traumatic experience: his reaction is a regression into childhood, a temptation against which David is not always proof, but which as a narrator he resists successfully. As Aunt Betsey tells him: ‘It’s in vain, Trot, to recall the past, unless it works some influence upon the present’ (Ch. 23, p. 407). This is further brought home to David when Mr Wickfield realizes how wrong he has been to indulge in fond memories (Ch. 39, p. 642)

[Irène Simon, David Copperfield: A Künstlerroman?]

The shade of Johnson, the heroic man of letters, is ever present in Copperfield, notably in David’s work as a Parliamentary reporter, one of Johnson’s early jobs as a London writer, and in the Dictionary being compiled by David’s headmaster Doctor Strong, a task Copperfield is later employed to help with. Doctor Strong is a similar age when Copperfield meets him to the age of Johnson when he met Boswell. Both have poor eyesight, live in a Cathedral town, are of shabby appearance.

When Carlyle describes the new modern sort of hero, the man-of-letters, he describes a figure “in his squalid garret, in his rusty coat.” [On Heroes, p. 133] This is the description of Strong:

Doctor Strong looked almost as rusty, to my thinking, as the tall iron rails and gates outside the house; and almost as stiff and heavy as the great stone urns that flanked them, and were set up, on the top of the red-brick wall, at regular distances all round the court, like sublimated skittles, for Time to play at. He was in his library (I mean Doctor Strong was), with his clothes not particularly well brushed, and his hair not particularly well combed; his knee-smalls unbraced; his long black gaiters unbuttoned; and his shoes yawning like two caverns on the hearth-rug. Turning upon me a lustreless eye, that reminded me of a long-forgotten blind old horse who once used to crop the grass, and tumble over the graves, in Blunderstone churchyard, he said he was glad to see me: and then he gave me his hand; which I didn’t know what to do with, as it did nothing for itself.

Dickens had recently read Forster’s Life of Goldsmith in which Johnson featured. Joseph Rosenblum has noted the way Dickens’ probably drew the description of Strong from Forster’s description of Johnson (which in turn relies on Boswell). Note the use of the word “rusty” and the handshake. Forster writes, following Boswell, of Johnson’s “rusty brown morning suit” and “the knees of his breeches hanging loose.” There is also an awkward handshake. “Johnson suddenly roared across the table, ‘Give me your hand; I have taken a liking to you.’” As Rosenblum said, “The conjunction as well as the similarity of detail suggest some conscious or unconscious borrowing.” [DOCTOR STRONG AND DOCTOR JOHNSON REVISITED, Joseph Rosenblum]

Johnson is described by Carlyle in contrast to Goethe as not finding the truth but as having “fought bravely, and fell.” It is this fighting to find truth that Carlyle admires as heroic and which Dickens has made the foundation of his novel. A further contrast of David’s discipline is made with the dissolute and indulgent Steerforth, who dies tragically like the poet Shelley, an almost too-literal metaphor for the replacement of Romantic inspiration with Victorian hard-work.

Julia Saville has said, of eccentricity as an early Victorian preoccupation, that “Through his sincerity a middle-class man of character could distinguish himself from rivals such as the aristocracy or, at an international level, the French.” [Eccentricity as Englishness in David Copperfield]

This was the time when J.S. Mill would say that “the mere example of nonconformity, the mere refusal to bend the knee to custom, is itself a service.” To be sincerely yourself, was part of creating the English culture of liberality. Mr. Dick represents this ideal, so does Betsy. But the ideal of the middle-class liberal individual, who is good, that comes from David.

Agnes, whose name means “holy” or “pure”, tells David, in high Carlyle manner: “Your growing reputation and success enlarge your power of doing good.” Writing is not done for mere entertainment or fashion—something Hazlitt complained about when reviewing Vivian Grey in 1827. For Carlyle, writing is foundational to democracy, to doing good. “Whoever can speak, speaking now to the whole nation, becomes a power, a branch of government, with inalienable weight in law-making, in all acts of authority.” It is this spirit that animates all the novels that come after Copperfield and which are darker, more insistent, more preaching about social problems.

Agnes is described as the “real heroine” in Dickens’s notes for the novel and we can see David’s heroic development being to work hard and become worthy of the ideal she sets. We may not like this ideal as it is expressed in her passive, dormant femininity—but we shouldn’t mistake this, as many critics, including Orwell, do for an artistic failure, but a moral one, to the extent we can separate the two.

Some critics think the question of David’s development as a writer is neglected and the real point of the book is for him to marry Agnes. That’s wrong. Irène Simon shows very clearly in ‘David Copperfield: A Künstlerroman?’ the way David becomes capable of seeing his past with a detached artist’s eye—the climax moment is when he see Steerforth on the beach.

The true aim of the book, when seen in Carlye’s heroic terms is for David to become the sort of artist and person who is worth of Agnes—to enlarge his power of doing good. Critics who focus on one or the other of personal vs professional development miss the crucial point: David becomes a true hero as man-of-letters, and a true gentleman, when he becomes worth of Agnes, whose character represents a moral ideal.

Agnes’ injunction for “doing good” mirrors what David had felt on his journey abroad, when he was “almost hoping that some better change was possible within me.” This is Wordsworthian—finding an inner vision among Nature—but it will only come about through hard-work and virtuous intentions. This is Wordsworth as understood in the context of Carlyle.

Importantly, this is a marginal episode. Dickens takes his cue from Carlyle that it is better to worship the heroic acts of our fellow man than to describe the beauties of Nature. “How much more he who sings, who says, or in any way brings home to our heart the noble doings, feelings, darings and endurances of a brother man! He has verily touched our hearts as with a live coal from the altar. Perhaps there is no worship more authentic.”

It is worth noting that the name Doctor Strong is apposite for a Johnsonian figure. Boswell says,

In all respects he was of great stature. His contemporaries called him a colossus, the literary Goliath, the Giant, the great Cham of literature, a tremendous companion. His frame was majestic; he strode when he walked, and his physical strength and courage were heroic. His mode of speaking was ‘very impressive,’ his utterance ‘deliberate and strong.’ 

Copperfield becomes Boswell to Strong’s Johnson as part of his journey towards heroic status as a man-of-letters. This is very much in tune with Dickens’ personality as a literary hero worshipper. Branwen Bailey Pratt says: “John Forster (who once in all seriousness addressed Carlyle as “My Prophet”) records that Carlyle was a hero to Dickens, and hero and hero -worshipper they continued.” [‘Carlyle and Dickens: Heroes and Hero-Worshippers’]

The voice of Carlyle is directly present in the novel, in the figure of Betsy Trotwood, who constantly exhorts David to “fight bravely” in Carlyle’s words, and not be a secondhand, borrowing or begging man:

I wanted to see how you would come out of the trial, Trot; and you came out nobly—persevering, self-reliant, self-denying!

***

On our way back, my aunt informed me how she confidently trusted that the life I was now to lead would make me firm and self-reliant

***

‘Trot,’ said my aunt at last, when she had finished her tea, and carefully smoothed down her dress, and wiped her lips—‘you needn’t go, Barkis!—Trot, have you got to be firm and self-reliant?’

This is in contrast to the way “firmness” is defined in the character of the bullying, domineering, wickedness of Murdstone:

‘Oh, it’s very well to say you wonder, Edward!’ cried my mother, ‘and it’s very well for you to talk about firmness, but you wouldn’t like it yourself.’

Firmness, I may observe, was the grand quality on which both Mr. and Miss Murdstone took their stand. However I might have expressed my comprehension of it at that time, if I had been called upon, I nevertheless did clearly comprehend in my own way, that it was another name for tyranny; and for a certain gloomy, arrogant, devil’s humour, that was in them both.

Murdstone’s firmness seeks to control and dominate; Besty Trotwood’s to establish David as independent and self-sufficient. One is demonic, the other heroic. When David has left-school and is still trying to decide on his choice of life, Besty tells him

‘But what I want you to be, Trot,’ resumed my aunt, ‘—I don’t mean physically, but morally; you are very well physically—is, a firm fellow. A fine firm fellow, with a will of your own. With resolution,’ said my aunt, shaking her cap at me, and clenching her hand. ‘With determination. With character, Trot—with strength of character that is not to be influenced, except on good reason, by anybody, or by anything. That’s what I want you to be. That’s what your father and mother might both have been, Heaven knows, and been the better for it.’

I intimated that I hoped I should be what she described.

‘That you may begin, in a small way, to have a reliance upon yourself, and to act for yourself,’ said my aunt…

This is what David, a cipher for Dickens, accomplishes, and it encodes the idea of the heroic that Dickens learned from his own hero, Thomas Carlyle.

In 1832, John Stuart Mill wrote an impassioned letter to the Monthly Repository. Mill was a lifelong autodidact and original thinker, who believed strongly that education could be improved, and later wrote his Autobiography to record his unusual homeschooling and encourage others to raise their aspirations.

That which has been known a thousand years may be new truth to you or me. There are born into the world every day several hundred thousand human beings, to whom all truth whatever is new truth. What is it to him who was born yesterday, that somebody who was born fifty years ago knew something? The question is, how he is to know it. There is one way; and nobody has ever hit upon more than one—by discovery.

The world is full of school children who have committed something to memory but don’t understand it. Real understanding means thinking or experiencing truth for yourself. We all know the feeling of finally understanding something we had only known as a fact before.

whosoever, to the extent of his opportunity, gets at his convictions by his own faculties, and not by reliance on any other person whatever—that man, in proportion as his conclusions have truth in them, is an original thinker, and is, as much as anybody ever was, a man of genius

You might not find “hidden truths” following this advice—there may be none left, you might miss them—but this is the method that makes someone understand the world in an original way. Genius doesn’t just create, it appreciates.

Without genius, a work of genius may be felt, but it cannot possibly be understood.

Even if we knew everything it was possible to know, there will always be a difference between someone who takes the world on trust and someone who thinks independently.

it will still remain to distinguish the man who knows from the man who takes upon trust—the man who can feel and understand truth, from the man who merely assents to it, the active from the merely passive mind.

For this reason, Mill was against learning by rote. That wasn’t how the Greeks did things. They trained the young to have “an intellect fitted to seek truth for itself.” This was why Mill opposed the cramming system of education. And he said something very relevant to modern debates.

Those who dislike what is taught, mostly—if I may trust my own experience—dislike it not for being cram, but for being other people’s cram, and not theirs. Were they the teachers, they would teach different doctrines, but they would teach them as doctrines, not as subjects for impartial inquiry.

Instead, Mill wanted to teach logic and metaphysics, perhaps ancient languages, to provide “a lesson of logical classification and analysis.” This would raise the level of civilisation. Cram rather than logic is why “ten centuries of England or France cannot produce as many illustrious names as the hundred and fifty years of little Greece.”

He ended with a familiar exhortation.

As the memory is trained by remembering, so is the reasoning power by reasoning; the imaginative by imagining; the analytic by analysing; the inventive by finding out. Let the education of the mind consist in calling out and exercising these faculties; never trouble yourself about giving knowledge—train the mind—keep it supplied with materials, and knowledge will come of itself. Let all cram be ruthlessly discarded.

Perhaps in the age of AI, we will be forced to discard rote learning and start to teach children how to discover the truth of the world for themselves.

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The next book club is 14th May 19.00 UK time where we will be discussing David Copperfield and thinking about the intersection of fiction and autobiography. Subscribe now if you want to join us and you’ll get access to the Hopkins’ materials as well. Leave requests for future book club books in the comments so people can respond and upvote them.

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Contents

1. Brief background on Hopkins

2. Inscape, instress, sprung rhythm

3. Close reading of ‘The Windhover’

4. Influence on Heaney

5. Influence on Bishop

6. Slides

   

Brief background on Hopkins

Mid-Victorian, middle-class, Anglican family with artistic interests. Hopkins first wanted to be a painter and obeyed Ruskin’s injunction to pay close attention to nature. At Oxford he wrote journals where he developed his poetic ideas and language. Oxford was also where he became Catholic, to his family’s disappointment.

Following Wordsworth, he walked the Swiss mountains, before becoming a Jesuit, which involved a series of dedicated spiritual exercises. For eight years, Hopkins wrote no poetry. When he did write again, it was very much as a Jesuit. This short article gives a good explanation of the way the Jesuit spiritual exercises are seen in Hopkins’ verse.

Gerard Manley Hopkins Jesuit Poet, Hugh Kelly

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‘The Windhover’ was written in 1877, when Hopkins was in his mid-thirites and weary of labourious theological study. This is how Norman White describes the poetic burst Hopkins experienced in the spring of that year (my emphasis).

In spring 1877, although he found 'going over moral theology over and over again and in a hurry is the most wearisome work' and was so tired that he was 'good for nothing' (Hopkins, Further Letters, 143), he rejoiced in the first primroses, and wrote 'The Starlight Night' and 'God's Grandeur' for his mother's birthday. These started the great series of lyrical sonnets, which include 'The Lantern out of Doors', 'As Kingfishers Catch Fire', 'The Sea and the Skylark', 'Spring', 'The Caged Skylark', 'In the Valley of the Elwy', 'The Windhover' (his favourite poem of that year), 'Pied Beauty', and 'Hurrahing in Harvest’.

Many of these poems from 1877 celebrate Hopkins's joyful observations of nature. Sometimes he is at his poetic best, as in the octave of 'The Windhover', where the medley of sound-devices, the personal excitement of the narrator, and the imitation of the bird's intense hovering are simultaneously perfect…

Inscape, instress, sprung rhythm

To read Hopkins, you must be familiar with three ideas: inscape, instress, and sprung rhythm. These are the definitions from A Poet’s Glossary by Edward Hirsch.

Inscape. The “individually-distinctive” form, the complex of characteristics that gives each thing its uniqueness, its oneness.

Instress. The natural force, the energy of being, ultimately divine, which holds all things together.

Sprung rhythm. Sprung rhythm counts by scanning accents not syllables… Hopkins objected to the way that in most post-Renaissance English poetry a stressed syllable is accompanied by a uniform number of unstressed ones.

Close reading of ‘The Windhover’

I caught this morning morning’s minion, king-
dom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding
Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding
High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing
In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing,
As a skate's heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding
Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding
Stirred for a bird, — the achieve of, the mastery of the thing!

Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here
Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion
Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!

No wonder of it: shéer plód makes plough down sillion
Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,
Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermilion.

An inscape sonnet

The first thing to note is that this is a sonnet. Fourteen lines, split into octave and sestet. Sonnets are praise poems that interrogate and question a situation. Between the octave and sestet is traditionally a volta, literally a turn. A change in the argument or perspective. In this sonnet, the octet describes the bird: the first four lines talk about him being suspended in motion, the second four about him gliding. After the turn, Hopkins is more philosophical. The description becomes a response to what happened and a realisation that the instress which animates the windhover, animates the rest of the world.

Hopkins’ descriptions are not just literal exactitude. They constitute metaphor: metaphor means “carrying beyond” and so Hopkins is trying to describe things in a way that carries beyond the literal to reveal the inscape. Hopkins believed poets were able to discover the intrinsic qualities of the world, the inner nature of things, and express them through poetry. Everything in the world has an inscape, a distinct identity, and everything selves, or enacts that identity, humans most of all. People are able to discover the inscape of other parts of the world and thus discover what animates it, which is called instress—the divine energy that animates matter. Things are holy by being individual because God made them in that way and so being a poet is a way of becoming closer to God.

So this sonnet aims to describe the essence, the intrinsic nature of the bird and in doing so pay homage to its uniqueness and thus to God.

Commentary and glossary

I caught this morning morning’s minion, king-
dom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding
Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding
High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing
In his ecstasy!

Look at the repetition of “m”, “in”, “d”, “aw”, “r”, “s”, the way “striding” half-rhymes with “high” and “wing” and “king” and “riding” and “rolling”, the rhyme of “air” and “there”, and so on. The -ing suffix gets played on with “riding” and “rolling then “striding” and “wimpling”. This concatenation of sounds has several functions.

• Intensity. You must be careful to read or speak this correctly: this creates a build up of feeling similar to the way music works through patterns of repetition.

• Exactitude. If Hopkins is going to capture the windhover’s inscape he must be exact, and that means being persnickety about the meaning but also about the feeling.

• Tension. Repetition creates forward pace but also slows you down to catch the exact sounds without turning into a tongue twister. That tension is inherent to what is being described…

Literally, the bird is caught on the wind—the rolling steady air—and this is his expression, his selving. He flies by being caught. (This paradox is similar to Wordsworth’s “Nuns fret not” sonnet.)

morning’s minion — minion means favourite or servant, so the tension is established right away. The bird is compelled to fly in the morning but finds joy in this compulsion.

daylight’s dauphin — dauphin is a prince, emphasising the exalted nature of performing your natural function.

dapple-dawn-drawn — i.e. the bird is drawn or compelled by the dapple-dawn. Inscape is always changing, hence dapple-dawn. The variety of the world is part of its grandeur. See: Pied Beauty

rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing — rung is a falconry term, which means making a ring, i.e. moving in circles. The windhover is turning a widening gyre on the current. Wimpling means rippled but plays on wimple, a nun’s headgear. Through constraints we find freedom and God.

then off, off forth on swing,
As a skate’s heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding
Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding
Stirred for a bird, — the achieve of, the mastery of the thing!

The birds breaks out and swoops, compared to a skater on the ice making a “bow-bend”. This quatrain is dense because Hopkins concatenates sounds with figurative language that must be figured out. The use of “hurl” is the sort of thing Heaney would do: the etymology of hurl implies, as well as dash and force, “roar, bluster”, which imitates the wind the bird is breaking free of.

Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here
Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion
Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!

No wonder of it: shéer plód makes plough down sillion
Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,
Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermilion.

This is the volta. The bird is now “thee”. Hopkin’s insights create an intense reaction—my heart in hiding—and so he address the windhover directly, as if praying.

Buckle — the windhover buckles the way something breaks under pressure, as he gets out of the grip of the wind. But when something buckles in a fire it is forged, hence the moment of insight “the fire that breaks from thee then.” 

Chevalier—a knight riding a horse, the way the bird rode the wind. The windhover’s inscape has shown him Christ, the chevalier, just as the bird was the lord of the morning.

This quality is now seen in other more mundane places. “Sillion” comes from the French sillon meaning a strip of furrowed land. As the farmer and horse plod with their plough, the furrowed lands shines as it is exposed. When fire embers fall and break (or “gall”) they flare up brightly.

The poem is a metaphor for the spirit of Christ seen in the clash of the soul against the world. The bird holds its flight against the wind, a paradox which resolves when it breaks free and Hopkins has a flash of insight into the bird the way an ember flares up. Christ lies behind the glory of the world in this way. As he wrote in God’s Grandeur: “The world is charged with the grandeur of God./It will flame out, like shining from shook foil.”

Influence on Heaney

In his Conversation with Karl Miller Heaney said:

For a poet, the one invaluable thing about a Catholic upbringing  is the sense of the universe you’re given, the sense of a light-filled, Dantesque, shimmering order of being.

This shared view of the world with Hopkins perhaps made Heaney more receptive to his influence. He described Hopkins’ language as “high voltage” and said,

The result of reading Hopkins was the desire to write… the bumpy alliterating music, the repeating sounds and ricocheting consonants typical of Hopkins’ verse.

A poem like ‘Oysters” reflects Heaney’s  unease with writing poetry during a time of political trouble that he is privileged enough not to have to involve himself with. This reflects Hopkins’ unease with writing poetry when he ought to have been devoting himself to God. As the imagery of The Windhover reveals the instress of God and becomes ultimately religious, the imagery of Oysters reveals the privilege in Heaney’s enjoyment of Oysters and becomes ultimately political.

Influence on Elizabeth Bishop

This line is from Hopkins’ 1864 diary: “Moonlight hanging or dropping on treetops like blue cobwebs.” (Some of his best writing is in the note-books. We know Seamus Heaney read them, he mentions it in an interview.) Elizabeth Bishop took Hopkins seriously and seems to have absorbed this line in particular. See these lines from ‘The Moose’

Moonlight as we enter
the New Brunswick woods,
hairy, scratchy, splintery;
moonlight and mist
caught in them like lamb's wool
on bushes in a pasture.

While Heaney was influenced by the “high voltage” of Hopkins’ language, Bishop seems to have taken a sense of sympathy from him. Bishop’s writing is often descriptive, with little overt philosophy, but through her detailed and questioning descriptions, she creates sympathy. ‘The Moose’ starts with a bus journey and other people’s gossipy, irritating, comic behaviour—it moves from a superior perspective to a sympathetic one. The same is true in ‘Filling Station’. Bishop describes in order to understand. This is the heart of Hopkins’ technique.

Slides

Gmh Book Club

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