Real Grotesques and Constructed Heroes
Sep. 3rd, 2005 10:20 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mtvessel20 Aug 2005
The Old Curiosity Shop - Charles Dickens - Penguin Classics, 2000
* * *
I am forever grateful to the actress Miriam Margoyles, who in her stage show Dickens' Women gave a pointer as to how to read Dickens without being put off by the grotesque characterisations and the sugary sentimentality lavished on his heroes and heroines, particularly the children. She describes Miss Mowcher, an extraordinary dwarf chiropodist who appears in David Copperfield and who (if memory serves) talks about cutting the nails of the Prince of Wales and preserving the trimmings for display to interested parties. Miss Mowcher may seem like a typical Dickens grotesque, but it turns out that she was based on a real woman who wrote to Dickens to complain about her depiction in the novel (as a result, when she appears later on she is utterly saintly and very boring). And that's the point. The "grotesques" in Dickens' novels are the real people, the characters he was writing from life, while the heroes and heroines are idealisations, personifications of how Victorian society thought people ought to be. This is why they are so nauseatingly prim and proper (a particular problem, as we shall see, with Little Nell). Whereas real people are odd, eccentric, funny, sometimes grotesque, and morally ambiguous, and Dickens clearly loved them. You can tell because when he writes a chapter featuring them, the energy and imagination of the writing spark off the page. By contrast, when the heroes and heroines are in play the writing is listless and conventional, using the clichés of melodrama to maintain the emotional interest of the reader. The heroes had to be there, of course, because his audience expected them. But it is the grotesques that are at the heart of Dickens' work.
So where did this idea of the "real" heroes and the false "grotesque" characters come from? Well, not from Dickens himself. Instead, I blame his illustrators. If you look at the sketches that accompany his stories, you will notice that there are two distinct styles used in drawing the characters. The features of the "grotesques" are detailed but distorted caricatures, not remotely realistic. The heroes and heroines are regular and in proportion but are ciphers, their faces mostly white space, with only a few lines to hinting at their features. The difference in style helps to perpetuate the myth that the heroes are real people and the grotesques are not, although it is the heroes who are lacking in detail. It would be interesting to publish an edition of Dickens' novels that didn't have the illustrations and see how this affected readers' perceptions.
So, to The Old Curiosity Shop. This is generally regarded by most critics to be second-rate Dickens, and like Crime and Punishment, can be accused of excessive emotionalism. This was certainly the view of Oscar Wilde who famously remarked that "one must have a heart of stone to read the death of Little Nell without laughing". Modern readers are inclined to concur and to look down on their Victorian equivalents as naive and sentimental for responding so strongly to the scene. But perhaps the Victorian public was being a bit more sophisticated than we give it credit for.
Firstly, it is not by any means the most sentimental thing in the book. That dubious honour must go to Nell's childhood friend Kit, a nauseating depiction of a good-hearted lad. He starts off as a grotesque but, like Miss Mowcher, develops into an idealisation. The depiction of the twee and bashful relationship that develops between him and the maid Barbara is truly toe-curling.
By contrast, Nell starts off as an idealisation and stays that way. Throughout the entire length of the book she never says or does anything that is not kind and good. This is of course utterly unrealistic, particularly as she is a girl on the cusp of puberty, and I think this lack of realism, the sense that she is constructed rather than found, is what alienates modern readers. But why are we so insistent that characters must be realistic? Why can't we have characters as allegory, as a model for the way things ought to be? If Little Nell were to curse and swear, throw temper tantrums and eventually abandon her grandfather to his fate (as her modern counterpart undoubtedly would), does this make her a better character or simply more interesting?
And it's not as if she isn't surrounded by interesting and memorable characters. When her grandfather reveals his dark secret, his confession is extraordinarily similar to a modern day documentary on the subject. His problems and the agonies of conflicted loyalty that they cause him ring psychologically true (though I'm still not sure why he addresses his granddaughter in biblical "thee and thou" mode - whether this is an attempt by Dickens to give his words additional depth and resonance, or was indeed how grandparents spoke to their grandchildren at the time that the novel is set, the effect is definitely stilted). Ironically, the accuracy and depth of the grandfather's character serves to heighten the lack of realism of Little Nell's.
Then there are the villains, who are as vivid, nasty and un-PC as any in literature. Chief among them is Daniel Quilp, an unpleasant, lustful, energetic and vengeful dwarf who plots elaborate Greek-style revenge on anyone who even makes a jocular remark against him. Quite why he takes against Nell and Kit is never made entirely clear - perhaps he shares modern readers' distaste for their implausible niceness. Sadly it is not possible to cheer him on in his machinations against them because he really is nasty; Mrs Quilp is a frighteningly plausible sketch of a battered wife, who dares not oppose her husband but desperately hopes that he will be undone. Then there is the unctuous Sampson Brass, a hilarious portrait of a lawyer who trims his sails to whatever the prevailing wind might be (the irony of his first name has just struck me) and his extraordinary mannish sister Sally, a humourless but strong-minded woman of business who has the character that her brother lacks. Finally there is the drunken rake Dick Swiveller, another one of those interesting morally ambivalent characters who works both for and against the heroes, like Mr Panks in Little Dorrit.
So how about the plotting? Well, here the detractors of this novel have definitely got a point. Not, in fact, in the scenes leading up to the death of Little Nell, which both in theme and description cleverly hint at what is about to occur. The movement from the hellish Black Country with its pounding hammers and blazing furnaces to the peaceful vicarage with its graveyard, the various people that Nell meets who sicken and die, the mentions of Nell's own weakness and paleness, all subtly prepare the reader for the inevitable end. The big problem, I think, is that there is too great a gap between Little Nell's penultimate scene and her final one, as Dickens resolves the Kit / Daniel Quilp plot.
And the lack of connection between the story strands is the novel's greatest weakness. It is caused by Dickens throwing away what could have been one of the novel's great strengths, which is its title. I fully expected the shop to be a major feature, almost a character in itself, or at least a metaphor for the novel's other concerns. A shop full of random things, bits of people's lives up for sale, is a fascinating idea. But Dickens disposes of it in less than a hundred pages, as Daniel Quilp forces Nell and her grandfather out onto their picaresque perils of Pauline journey, leaving Kit and all the other major characters behind. Although Dickens has Quilp rather implausibly seek them out, there is very little overlap between the two sets of characters thereafter, and while the showmen, waxworks proprietor, teachers and foundrymen that Nell encounters on her journey are interesting little vignettes, they feel like filler. Meanwhile, Kit and the villains have very little to do and as a result the middle of the book sags horribly. Things tighten up towards the end but, as we have seen, the necessity to tie off two isolated stories weakens the lead up to the big climax (it doesn't help that by Dickens' standards the comeuppance for Daniel Quilp is relatively uninteresting). So yes, this is not Dickens' best novel and I can't say that I enjoyed it as much as some of the others of his that I have read. But it is the structure of the novel, and not its sentimentality, that really lets it down.
The Old Curiosity Shop - Charles Dickens - Penguin Classics, 2000
* * *
I am forever grateful to the actress Miriam Margoyles, who in her stage show Dickens' Women gave a pointer as to how to read Dickens without being put off by the grotesque characterisations and the sugary sentimentality lavished on his heroes and heroines, particularly the children. She describes Miss Mowcher, an extraordinary dwarf chiropodist who appears in David Copperfield and who (if memory serves) talks about cutting the nails of the Prince of Wales and preserving the trimmings for display to interested parties. Miss Mowcher may seem like a typical Dickens grotesque, but it turns out that she was based on a real woman who wrote to Dickens to complain about her depiction in the novel (as a result, when she appears later on she is utterly saintly and very boring). And that's the point. The "grotesques" in Dickens' novels are the real people, the characters he was writing from life, while the heroes and heroines are idealisations, personifications of how Victorian society thought people ought to be. This is why they are so nauseatingly prim and proper (a particular problem, as we shall see, with Little Nell). Whereas real people are odd, eccentric, funny, sometimes grotesque, and morally ambiguous, and Dickens clearly loved them. You can tell because when he writes a chapter featuring them, the energy and imagination of the writing spark off the page. By contrast, when the heroes and heroines are in play the writing is listless and conventional, using the clichés of melodrama to maintain the emotional interest of the reader. The heroes had to be there, of course, because his audience expected them. But it is the grotesques that are at the heart of Dickens' work.
So where did this idea of the "real" heroes and the false "grotesque" characters come from? Well, not from Dickens himself. Instead, I blame his illustrators. If you look at the sketches that accompany his stories, you will notice that there are two distinct styles used in drawing the characters. The features of the "grotesques" are detailed but distorted caricatures, not remotely realistic. The heroes and heroines are regular and in proportion but are ciphers, their faces mostly white space, with only a few lines to hinting at their features. The difference in style helps to perpetuate the myth that the heroes are real people and the grotesques are not, although it is the heroes who are lacking in detail. It would be interesting to publish an edition of Dickens' novels that didn't have the illustrations and see how this affected readers' perceptions.
So, to The Old Curiosity Shop. This is generally regarded by most critics to be second-rate Dickens, and like Crime and Punishment, can be accused of excessive emotionalism. This was certainly the view of Oscar Wilde who famously remarked that "one must have a heart of stone to read the death of Little Nell without laughing". Modern readers are inclined to concur and to look down on their Victorian equivalents as naive and sentimental for responding so strongly to the scene. But perhaps the Victorian public was being a bit more sophisticated than we give it credit for.
Firstly, it is not by any means the most sentimental thing in the book. That dubious honour must go to Nell's childhood friend Kit, a nauseating depiction of a good-hearted lad. He starts off as a grotesque but, like Miss Mowcher, develops into an idealisation. The depiction of the twee and bashful relationship that develops between him and the maid Barbara is truly toe-curling.
By contrast, Nell starts off as an idealisation and stays that way. Throughout the entire length of the book she never says or does anything that is not kind and good. This is of course utterly unrealistic, particularly as she is a girl on the cusp of puberty, and I think this lack of realism, the sense that she is constructed rather than found, is what alienates modern readers. But why are we so insistent that characters must be realistic? Why can't we have characters as allegory, as a model for the way things ought to be? If Little Nell were to curse and swear, throw temper tantrums and eventually abandon her grandfather to his fate (as her modern counterpart undoubtedly would), does this make her a better character or simply more interesting?
And it's not as if she isn't surrounded by interesting and memorable characters. When her grandfather reveals his dark secret, his confession is extraordinarily similar to a modern day documentary on the subject. His problems and the agonies of conflicted loyalty that they cause him ring psychologically true (though I'm still not sure why he addresses his granddaughter in biblical "thee and thou" mode - whether this is an attempt by Dickens to give his words additional depth and resonance, or was indeed how grandparents spoke to their grandchildren at the time that the novel is set, the effect is definitely stilted). Ironically, the accuracy and depth of the grandfather's character serves to heighten the lack of realism of Little Nell's.
Then there are the villains, who are as vivid, nasty and un-PC as any in literature. Chief among them is Daniel Quilp, an unpleasant, lustful, energetic and vengeful dwarf who plots elaborate Greek-style revenge on anyone who even makes a jocular remark against him. Quite why he takes against Nell and Kit is never made entirely clear - perhaps he shares modern readers' distaste for their implausible niceness. Sadly it is not possible to cheer him on in his machinations against them because he really is nasty; Mrs Quilp is a frighteningly plausible sketch of a battered wife, who dares not oppose her husband but desperately hopes that he will be undone. Then there is the unctuous Sampson Brass, a hilarious portrait of a lawyer who trims his sails to whatever the prevailing wind might be (the irony of his first name has just struck me) and his extraordinary mannish sister Sally, a humourless but strong-minded woman of business who has the character that her brother lacks. Finally there is the drunken rake Dick Swiveller, another one of those interesting morally ambivalent characters who works both for and against the heroes, like Mr Panks in Little Dorrit.
So how about the plotting? Well, here the detractors of this novel have definitely got a point. Not, in fact, in the scenes leading up to the death of Little Nell, which both in theme and description cleverly hint at what is about to occur. The movement from the hellish Black Country with its pounding hammers and blazing furnaces to the peaceful vicarage with its graveyard, the various people that Nell meets who sicken and die, the mentions of Nell's own weakness and paleness, all subtly prepare the reader for the inevitable end. The big problem, I think, is that there is too great a gap between Little Nell's penultimate scene and her final one, as Dickens resolves the Kit / Daniel Quilp plot.
And the lack of connection between the story strands is the novel's greatest weakness. It is caused by Dickens throwing away what could have been one of the novel's great strengths, which is its title. I fully expected the shop to be a major feature, almost a character in itself, or at least a metaphor for the novel's other concerns. A shop full of random things, bits of people's lives up for sale, is a fascinating idea. But Dickens disposes of it in less than a hundred pages, as Daniel Quilp forces Nell and her grandfather out onto their picaresque perils of Pauline journey, leaving Kit and all the other major characters behind. Although Dickens has Quilp rather implausibly seek them out, there is very little overlap between the two sets of characters thereafter, and while the showmen, waxworks proprietor, teachers and foundrymen that Nell encounters on her journey are interesting little vignettes, they feel like filler. Meanwhile, Kit and the villains have very little to do and as a result the middle of the book sags horribly. Things tighten up towards the end but, as we have seen, the necessity to tie off two isolated stories weakens the lead up to the big climax (it doesn't help that by Dickens' standards the comeuppance for Daniel Quilp is relatively uninteresting). So yes, this is not Dickens' best novel and I can't say that I enjoyed it as much as some of the others of his that I have read. But it is the structure of the novel, and not its sentimentality, that really lets it down.