Abstract
This chapter discusses Charles Dickens’s reading on the topic of addiction along with his depiction of addictive habits. Colman shows how Dickens’s reading of Robert Macnish’s Anatomy of Drunkenness would have allowed him access to the sort of thinking about addictive consumption arrived at by Romantics such as Thomas De Quincey. Dickens’s own portrayal of addictive consumers, moreover, relates to those Romantic precedents: Dickens, like De Quincey, links addictive pursuit of possibility with repetitive, investigative orientation toward possibility. The result of such narrative-emphasis on repetitive investigation of the possible in Bleak House, this chapter shows, is an early example of the detective genre.
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Notes
- 1.
The parallel between Isa Whitney’s addictive, destructive experiments and Holmes’s drug use is suggested when Watson finds Holmes in the same opium den Whitney visits, whereupon Holmes alludes to his own cocaine habit.
- 2.
Thomas Schmid has noted the connection between isolated scientific pursuit and the isolation of addiction in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Earlier than Shelley, Benjamin Rush compared the consumption of Prometheus’s liver to alcoholism’s assault on the liver (Rush 8), and the destruction through excessive desire in either case resonates with the lonely desolation of Shelley’s “modern Prometheus.”
- 3.
Dickens regularly drank alcohol to assist his own literary efforts. Fred Kaplan writes, “On reading days, at seven in the morning he had fresh cream and two tablespoons of rum … at three a pint of champagne. Five minutes before his performance he had an egg beaten into a glass of sherry” (525–526).
- 4.
Deidre Lynch compares the enjoyment of Dickensian character to that of a cigarette, noting a promotional project in which cigarettes were sold with portraits of Dickens characters. She describes the “collaboration between the collectible character and the cigarette—a luxury import that, through its addictiveness, at last becomes a daily necessity” (19).
- 5.
My reading of Bleak House has benefited from recent work that considers the novel in terms of its social network and as a text detailing creative investigation—including studies by John McBratney, Caroline Levine, and Brooke Taylor. McBratney argues that Bleak House’s investigators discover social interconnection (59), Levine that network theory can shed light on this interconnection (517), and Taylor that the knowledge gained in this narrated world is very much imaginative (172). A reading of Bleak House in terms of addiction might weave those three readings together, positing its socially embedded consumption habits as methods for imaginative, productive, narrative-creating knowledge.
- 6.
I use the phrase “intense consumers” here to characterize those who regularly consume addictive substances but who may not be strictly termed “addicts.” Gail Turley Houston notes that Esther “navigates between the Scylla and Charybdis of the consuming and consumed self in a novel that represents both appetitive self-centeredness and negation of appetite” (124). Addiction’s pleasures and the need to discipline addiction (due to its dangers) surround much of the drama of this novel. The navigation of a world rich with out-of-control pursuit of pleasure has been noticed by others writing about Dickens; Dirk den Hartog has argued in Dickens and Romantic Psychology that Dickens and other Victorian novelists “involve themselves in the conflict of Romantically legitimated freedom and traditionally authorized restraint” (7).
- 7.
“Chancery—fog—madness: this is another theme,” observes Nabokov in his lecture on the novel (68).
- 8.
John Ruskin found such a place to be a rather imprisoning, mechanical labyrinth. Addressing workers in the 28th letter of his Fors Clavigera, he describes the
pound or labyrinth which the Greeks supposed to have been built by Daedalus, to enclose the bestial nature, engrafted on humanity. The Man with the Bull’s head. The Greek Daedalus is the power of mechanical as opposed to imaginative art; and this is the kind of architecture which Greeks and Florentines alike represent him as providing for human beasts. Could anything more precisely represent the general look of your architecture now? (394).
- 9.
For more on Dickens’s connection of science with culture, see Adelene Buckland’s “‘The Poetry of Science’: Charles Dickens, Geology, and Visual and Material Culture in Victorian London,” in Victorian Literature and Culture 35.2 (2007): 679–694.
- 10.
See, for more on this, Ackroyd, Dickens 662.
- 11.
Alexander Welsh writes that Skimpole has “a profound awareness of the interdependency of human society” (Dickens Redressed 96); Skimpole shows us how the knowing addict, always approaching something other, something outside and never fully internalized in a satiating way, can manipulate this interdependency quite successfully.
- 12.
Welsh has observed Skimpole to be a kind of binding sympathetic force, “very much a part of Esther’s first acquaintance with her guardian” (Dickens Redressed 92).
- 13.
John Jordan has written in Supposing Bleak House that Esther’s own patterning extends throughout the novel, producing a narrative that both reflects and re-enacts. He notes “the structure of repetition that characterizes Esther’s narrative,” which means that by “retelling it, she is in effect re-experiencing it as she writes, and this re-experience has the potential to shed new light, for her as well as for the reader, on events that have already happened” (4–5).
- 14.
See also Daniel Hack’s “‘Sublimation Strange’”: Allegory and Authority in Bleak House.” Hack describes the novel’s take on spontaneous combustion as a rejection of science’s authority (see especially 134–135).
- 15.
A number of works by the nineteenth century’s novelists include scenes of alcoholics bursting into flames. Melville in Redburn, Gogol in Dead Souls, and Verne in Un capitaine de quinze ans all illustrated such an occurrence. For an overview, see Jan Bondeson’s Cabinet of Medical Curiosities (18–19).
- 16.
And as a professional, Woodcourt is all the more used to approaching his strange world through repetitions: Mary Poovey describes how repetition constitutes nineteenth-century professionalization, articulated through “domains that mirror each other even as their practitioners proclaim the esoterica of specialization” (4).
- 17.
Sympathetic narrative and disease intertwine here, through an uncanny strangeness wherein outside and inside join bodily. As Julia Epstein writes in Altered Conditions, “Human bodies are ‘carriers’ not only of pathogens but also of stories that explain our lives” (19).
- 18.
Dickens himself had sought to understand vexing problems of justice in an age when crime was known in terms of habit (1869 saw the passing of the Habitual Criminals Act). Addiction may have become a property of Victorian investigation after De Quincey, but it also came to characterize Victorian criminality, especially through the figures of the uncontrollable alcoholic or the opium-eater.
- 19.
“For a city like London,” writes Raymond Williams in The Country and the City, “could not easily be described in a rhetorical gesture of repressive uniformity. On the contrary, its miscellaneity, its crowded variety, its randomness of movement, were the most apparent things about it” (153–154).
- 20.
The slyly repetitious Uriah Heep in David Copperfield is no addict, but he, like Skimpole, seeks to control others by mastering linguistic patterning that alludes to some exalted mysterious power. He insists in spite of his ambition, “I’m a very umble person … I am well aware that I am the umblest person going … I am much too umble” (250).
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Colman, A. (2019). Bleak House’s Addictive Detective-Work. In: Drugs and the Addiction Aesthetic in Nineteenth-Century Literature. Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-01590-9_5
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