Abstract
This chapter reads Gaynor Arnold’s Girl in a Blue Dress (2008) which cannibalises Charles Dickens’ biography to facilitate its discussion of topics including gender and sexuality. Arnold seeks to emulate the accomplishments of the Victorian author (communion) but she is also eager to put forward revisionist ideologies that differentiate and individuate her from her literary ancestor (identity-formation). These conflicting motivations of incorporation are manifest in what I call an ‘aggressive ambivalence’ towards Dickens, especially in his portrayal as a cannibal in the novel. Although Arnold’s use of Dickens raises certain ethical issues, the writer succeeds in simultaneously appropriating the influence of Dickens and creating her own intriguing and redemptive fictions that centre on the theme of cannibalism.
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- 1.
Charles Darwin is the subject of Roger McDonald’s Mr. Darwin’s Shooter (1998), John Darnton’s The Darwin Conspiracy (2005), Sean Hoade’s Darwin’s Dreams (2010) and appears in Lynne Truss’s Tennyson’s Gift (1996) and Liz Jesen’s Ark Baby (1997), Lewis Carroll is revisited in Katie Roiphe’s Still She Haunts Me (2001) and Benjamin Melanie’s Alice I Have Been (2009), Arthur Conan Doyle turns detective in Julian Barnes’ Booker-nominated Arthur & George (2005); Thomas Hardy is reincarnated in Howard Jacobson’s Peeping Tom (1984) and Emma Tennant’s Tess (1993), Henry James appears in Tennant’s Felony: The Private History of The Aspern Papers (2002), David Lodge’s Author, Author (2004) and Colm Tóibín’s The Master (2004), Alfred Tennyson appears in Lynne Truss’s Tennyson’s Gift and Adam Foulds’s The Quickening Maze (2009) and Oscar Wilde is the narrator of Peter Ackroyd’s The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde (1983). The neo-Victorian focus on nineteenth-century men reflects a certain level of conservatism, perhaps a symptom of the limitation of the neo-Victorian genre —it has not fully utilised the opportunity to explore nineteenth-century social patterns and norms but is to a large extent working within the tradition.
- 2.
According to Jay Clayton (2003), Dickens has one of the largest Web presences of any literary figure’ (4).
- 3.
The main protagonist in The Quincunx, John Huffam, ‘not only bore Dickens’ own middle name but was, like Dickens, born on 7th February 1812’ (Onega 1993: 231). Palliser’s character is thus an oblique and playful version of his literary ancestor, even if the references to Dickens’ names and birthday may not be immediately evident to casual readers. In these subtle homages, Palliser is either deliberately flaunting his knowledge or intentionally appealing to readers who are ‘in the know’. Finally, by writing a character who shares important biographical details with Charles Dickens, Palliser may also in a sense be creating a version of the Victorian author.
- 4.
Contemporary interest in a Victorian literary man’s married life is also seen in the stage adaptations of John Ruskin’s marriage. According to Sharon Aronofsky Weltman in ‘Victorians on Broadway at the Present Time: John Ruskin’s Life on Stage’, the opera Modern Painters (1995) and the play The Countess (1999) offer ‘a feminist reading of Victorian culture, and blame a patriarchal Ruskin for the failure of his marriage’ (79). Apart from Dickens and Ternan, other Victorian men and their relationships with women also receive attention today; these include Thomas Hardy and Tryphena Sparks and Anthony Trollope and Kate Field (Sutherland 1988: 22).
- 5.
William J. Palmer’s The Detective and Mr. Dickens (1990), Jeff Rackham’s The Rag & Bone Shop (2002) and Dan Simmons’s Drood (2009) all feature Ellen Ternan .
- 6.
Ellen Ternan is not mentioned in the first biography of Dickens, The Life of Charles Dickens (1878), written by John Forster . Beginning with Edgar Johnson’s Dickens: His Tragedy and Triumph (1953), subsequent biographies have tended to include her.
- 7.
In his more recent biography of Dickens, Michael Slater (2009) carefully avoids the issue of a romantic relationship between Dickens and Ternan. Writing about the time after Dickens’ separation from Catherine, Slater notes that ‘Dickens continued to make the best of his world in all respects. Whatever modus vivendi he has established with Nelly in particular, and with the Ternan family in general’ (458).
- 8.
Wilkie Collins is the third narrator in Jeff Rackham’s The Rag & Bone Shop. Collins is also the narrator of William J. Palmer’s The Detective and Mr. Dickens and The Highwayman and Mr. Dickens as well as Dan Simmons’s Drood, all of which also use Dickens prominently. Interestingly, in contemporary revisitations of the Victorian author, very few writers, if any, have taken on the task of writing as Dickens. Instead, they either employ an omniscient narrator or tell the story through one of the people from his life. Perhaps this is because, as a character in Graham Greene’s Travels With My Aunt (1999 [1969]) remarks, ‘to my mind it was in the Victorian age that English poetry and fiction reached its highest level. If I had been able to write myself […] I would have modelled myself on one of the minor Victorians (for the giants are inimitable)’ (141).
- 9.
The name ‘Dorothea Gibson’ is reminiscent of ‘Dorothea Brooke’ in George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871–1872) and both women are nicknamed ‘Dodo’. Perhaps more significantly, by using Eliot’s Dorothea as a model for Catherine Dickens, Arnold is suggesting that Dickens is like the dry-as-dust and oppressive Casaubon.
- 10.
Lillian Nayder’s The Other Dickens: A Life of Catherine Hogarth (2011), which was published three years after Arnold’s Girl in a Blue Dress, also centres on Mrs. Dickens’ subjectivity. According to Nayder, her aim is to recapture ‘Catherine Dickens’ voice as well as [acknowledge] her silences’ (18). However, as the book title suggests, the reinscription of the wife’s story depends on the husband’s (hence the ‘Other’ Dickens) and no doubt the biography is meant to attract a readership interested in the Victorian author. (This is telling if compared to David Williams Hodder’s Mr. George Eliot : A Biography of George Henry Lewes (1983), a title explicitly designed to show that the wife is the more famous of the two.) One reviewer has argued that Nayder’s biography of Catherine Dickens ‘breaks new ground in Victorian Studies by making Catherine, Charles Dickens’ wife, the centre of a work that reconfigures the Dickens story’ (Rodensky 2011) but Arnold’s Girl in a Blue Dress is in many ways its precursor.
- 11.
Arnold writes, ‘The marriage of Charles Dickens was the inspiration for this book’ (‘Afterword’). She also points out that she has ‘struck out in new directions where the biographical material is sparse, speculative, or open to doubt’, but maintains that she has tried ‘to keep true to the essential natures of the two main protagonists’ (ibid.).
- 12.
This technique is also used by Peter Carey in Jack Maggs (1997). In that novel, Tobias Oates, Dickens’ fictional stand-in, has written a successful novel entitled Captain Crumley, which is reminiscent of Pickwick Papers (1836–1837).
- 13.
Texts that do ‘write back’ to Dickens’ novels include Kathy Acker’s Great Expectations (1982), Peter Carey’s Jack Maggs and Lloyd Jones’s Mister Pip (2006), which are responses to Great Expectations . The cross-generic influence of Dickens can be seen in the Batman film The Dark Knight Rises (2012), which uses A Tale of Two Cities as an intertext (Wickman 2012). There is a constellation of novels that take inspiration from the unfinished The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870), such as Leon Garfield’s The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1980), Charles Forsyte’s The Decoding of Edwin Drood (1980), Carlo Fruttero and Franco Lucentini’s The D Case (1995), Jean-Pierre Ohl’s Mr. Dick or The Tenth Book (2008), Dan Simmons’ Drood (2009) and Matthew Pearl’s The Last Dickens (2009). In the article ‘Unending Dickens: Droodian Absences’ (2011), Joachim Frenk discusses how Drood and The Last Dickens ‘address contemporary debates and concerns in their striving to offer acceptable and/or marketable endings’ (133). In Mr. Dick or The Tenth Book, a character’s description of his relationship with Dickens echoes neo-Victorian novelists’ reaction to their literary predecessors in general: ‘I had always known, that the only way to get anywhere was to write my own book, and close the circle. To make use of him, and at the same time root him out of myself as one might remove an organ, drown him in the formaldehyde of a book. Force him out of my body, like a virus. But how? My whole being was infected’ (144, emphasis original). This passage encapsulates the sense of helpless ambivalence one suffers when possessed by a literary influence—Dickens is compared to both an organ and a virus. It also betrays the character’s cannibalism of Dickens—the Victorian author is inside his body.
- 14.
For example, the cannibal-like Quilp in The Old Curiosity Shop (1840–1841), the cannibalistic mobs in Barnaby Rudge (1841) and A Tale of Two Cities (1859), the all-consuming Chancery law suit in Bleak House (1852–1853), Magwitch’s threat to eat Pip’s cheeks in Great Expectations (1860–1861) and the corpse-fishing business described in Our Mutual Friend (1864–1865).
- 15.
In Peter Carey’s Jack Maggs , which returns to both Great Expectations and ‘the life of Dickens or the life of Dickens as a (biographical) text’ (Mukherjee 2005: 117), Tobias Oates (Dickens’ stand-in in the novel) is also portrayed as a cannibal figure. In the book, the Victorian author undertakes a type of metaphorical cannibalism by using the stories of his social inferiors to advance his writing career. In particular, he treats Jack Maggs (Magwich from Great Expectations) cannibalistically, as shown in scenes when he mesmerises the ex-convict. Jack Maggs describes the process: ‘Whatever it is called, it is a terrible thing, Sir, for a man to feel his insides all exposed to public view’ (46). In another scene, Oates ‘memorised the hard shine to Jack Maggs’s skin as it cleaved closed to the bones of his cheek and jaw. He would use those bones, perhaps tomorrow. On the following day he would return for those deeper, more painful items which must still be cut free from the softer tissue of Jack Maggs’s memory’ (178).
- 16.
See Ian Watt’s ‘Oral Dickens’ (1974), in which ‘the richness and variety of his [Dickens’] treatment of food and drink’ (165) is discussed.
- 17.
This echoes Dickens’ own portrayal of females in his fiction. According to Stone (1994), ‘Dickens seems to have had a penchant for edible young females’ (224).
- 18.
The pie shop setting is probably a reference to the penny dreadful The String of Pearls (1846–1847), in which the character Mrs. Lovett bakes human flesh into pies.
- 19.
Unless otherwise noted, all emphases in the quotations from Girl in a Blue Dress appear originally in the book.
- 20.
The name Dorothea recalls David’s childish wife, Dora, in Dickens’ most autobiographical novel David Copperfield (1849–1850). Arnold’s choice of ‘Dorothea’ for Dickens’ wife can be viewed as a knowing reference to the Victorian author’s work, in which Dora, who fails to bring happiness to her husband, is punished by death. Significantly, when the couple are quarrelling in David Copperfield , Dora calls David ‘Blue Beard’ (qtd. in Stone 1994: 121), which Dorothea also uses to refer to Alfred in Girl in a Blue Dress.
- 21.
The dodo bird is famous for having been fearless of people, and as a result, the species was hunted to extinction relatively soon after being discovered by European settlers. As the quintessential easy prey, the choice of this nickname for Dickens’ wife must be considered deliberate.
- 22.
Arnold’s comparison of Alfred to the Big Bad Wolf echoes the description of Mr. Brocklehurst in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847): ‘What a face he had…. What a great nose! And what a mouth! And what large prominent teeth!’ (30) Discussing this particular passage, Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar (2000 [1979]) note, ‘Jane Eyre exclaims, recollecting that terror of the adult male animal which must have wrung the heart of every female child in a period when all men were defined as “beasts”’ (233).
- 23.
The comparison of Alfred to Bluebeard , again, echoes Jane Eyre. In Chapter 11 of Brontë’s novel, the third floor of Thornfield Hall is described with ‘two rows of small black doors, all shut, like a corridor in some Bluebeard’s castle’ (111). In her Bluebeard Gothic : Jane Eyre and Its Progeny (2010), Heta Pyrhönen even reads Jane Eyre and its subsequent adaptations, some of which are neo-Victorian novels, as ‘Bluebeard’ tales. Of relevance to this book is the use of fairytales in neo-Victorian works to articulate oppressed female subjectivity, as indicated by the use of ‘Red Riding Hood’ and ‘Bluebeard ’ in Girl in a Blue Dress. Angela Carter’s story ‘The Bloody Chamber’, which recreates late nineteenth-century France, is also a retelling of the Bluebeard story. Commenting on it, Helen Simpson (2006 [1995]) highlights an homage to an earlier cannibal figure: ‘The story is set in a castle on sea-grit Mont St. Michel in fin-de-siècle France, with more than a nod to Sade’s cannibal Minski and his lake-surrounded castle with its torture chamber and captive virgins’ (xii–xiii). More recently, A.S. Byatt’s The Children’s Book (2009) also features a Bluebeard-like figure, the potter Benedict Fludd (Llewellyn 2010: 142).
- 24.
The name ‘Alice’ reminds one of the young heroine in Carroll’s Alice stories.
- 25.
In Jack Maggs (1997), Peter Carey touches upon the incestuous relationship between Tobias Oates (the Dickens character) and his sister-in-law, a relationship that results in a pregnancy.
- 26.
This description of ‘sweetness’ coalesces with John Forster’s evaluation of Mary Hogarth: ‘by sweetness of nature even more than grace of person she had made herself the ideal of his [Dickens’] life ’ (qtd. in Bowen 1956: 79).
- 27.
In her discussion of Dickens in association with the story of Captain Murderer, Hilary M. Schor (1999) believes that in Dickens’ novels one sees ‘a similar machinery for the entrapment and consumption of gullible girls’ (1).
- 28.
Marina Warner (1994) points out the connection between pregnancy and cannibalism : ‘[T]he threat of being eaten stands for the dread of being immured, confined. (It is interesting that the word ‘confinement’ is used for the late stages of pregnancy.)’ (260).
- 29.
Other writers also present Georgina Hogarth as a kind of wife to Dickens. Jeff Rackham uses a similar idea in The Rag & Bone Shop. In that book, Georgina is portrayed as a deluded woman, who imagines herself in love with Dickens, ‘No one knew how devoted I was to him—or he to me. Our love was silent, unspoken, but no less tangible’ (152). Later, she takes her obsession a step further and begins referring to Dickens as ‘my husband’ (272, 277, 279). This characterisation of the relationship between Dickens and Georgina may even be evident in Dickens’ own work. George Orwell (1946) says that in David Copperfield , ‘even Dora is killed off to make way for Agnes. If you like, you can read Dora as Dickens’ wife and Agnes as his sister-in-law’ (54). Michael Slater in Dickens and Women (1983) also suggests that Dora was a stand-in for Catherine Dickens: ‘Was he, perhaps, teasingly reminding Catherine of this situation years later when he makes Dora reproach her “Doady” (David Copperfield) who is working phenomenally long hours in order to make himself sufficiently solvent to marry her?’ (104) The fact that Mrs. Dickens is Dorothea in Girl in a Blue Dress seems to invite a similar reading: that Dodo is Dora and will be replaced by Sissy (Agnes).
- 30.
Alfred’s moulding of the young Wilhelmina is reminiscent of Lewis Carroll’s treatment of his child heroine. According to Lisa Coar (2012), ‘Carroll wants to experiment with Alice’s body, mould her into what he pleases’ (57).
- 31.
Georgina Hogarth died unmarried and, although Ellen Ternan later married George Wharton Robinson, she and her sisters kept her relationship with Dickens a secret. See Claire Tomalin’s The Invisible Woman: The Story of Nelly Ternan and Charles Dickens (1990).
- 32.
This echoes what Kate Perugini (née Dickens) says of her father: ‘My father was a wicked man - a very wicked man’ (qtd. in Schor 1999: 1).
- 33.
See Krista Lysack’s Come Buy, Come Buy: Shopping and the Culture of Consumption in Victorian Women’s Writing (2008) for a discussion of nineteenth-century consumer culture, focusing particularly on the woman shopper.
- 34.
For more about Dickens and his public readings, see Malcolm Andrews’s Charles Dickens and His Performing Selves (2006).
- 35.
‘Sans hair, sans teeth, sans eyes, sans everything’ is a reference to Shakespeare’s ‘Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything’, from As You Like It (Act II, Scene VII, Line 166). Arnold is echoing a hallmark of Victorian writing, which often appropriated Shakespearean quotations and allusions. As Gail Marshall (2005) argues, Shakespeare ‘has his most significant incarnation in the Victorian period in the works of those other writers whom he has influenced’ (1). Dickens himself, like many other writers of the period, also frequently alluded to the bard. In The Everyman History of English Literature (1985), Peter Conrad talks about Dickens’ incorporation of Shakespeare in Oliver Twist (186). Commenting on Little Dorrit (1855–1857), Claire Tomalin (2011) also writes, ‘Dickens knew his Shakespeare , and was no more tied to realism than Shakespeare’ (260).
- 36.
Dickens commented on his cannibalistic family: ‘I am amazed and confounded by the audacity of his [his father’s] ingratitude. He, and all of them, look upon me as a something to be plucked and torn to pieces for their advantage. They have no idea of, and no care for, my existence in any other light. My soul sickens at the thought of them’ (qtd. in Tomalin 2011: 146).
- 37.
As mentioned in fn. 8, neo-Victorian novels which revisit Dickens’ life often employ Wilkie Collins as the focalised narrator. If there is a woman narrator, she is likely to be Georgina Hogarth or Ellen Ternan. Exemplary is Jeff Rackham’s The Rag & Bone Shop, which uses the trio—Collins, Hogarth and Ternan—as speakers.
- 38.
This situation has been somewhat remedied with the publication of Girl in a Blue Dress and a new biography of Catherine Dickens. See fn. 10.
- 39.
This remark is probably inspired by Dickens’ own description of his marriage: ‘a page in my life which once had writing on it, has become absolutely blank, and it is not in my power to pretend that it has a solitary word upon it’ (qtd. in Birch 2011: 28).
- 40.
In real life, Queen Victoria sent a commiserating telegram to Catherine Dickens upon Dickens’ death, either because she did not know about the couple’s estrangement or she preferred to follow propriety.
- 41.
In real life, Dickens left The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870) unfinished and it is this novel that several neo-Victorian novelists rework. See fn. 15.
- 42.
Alfred’s ghostly appearance reminds one of the visitations of the author George Withermore in Henry James’ story ‘The Real Right Thing’ (1899). However, while the spirit of Withermore discourages his biographer from his task, Alfred here encourages Dodo to complete his unfinished novel.
- 43.
Catherine Dickens was well-read, but there was no evidence that she aspired to write fiction, although she authored a cookery book, What Shall We Have for Dinner? Satisfactorily Answered by Numerous Bills of Fare for from Two to Eighteen Persons (1852).
- 44.
The predominance of the supernatural in neo-Victorian fiction is also analysed in the publication of Tatiana Kontou’s Spiritualism and Women’s Writing: From the Fin de Siècle to the Neo-Victorian (2009) and Rosario Arias and Patricia Pulham’s edited volume Haunting and Spectrality in Neo-Victorian Fiction (2010).
- 45.
This is reminiscent of what Mamie Dickens says: ‘It is a glorious inheritance to have such blood flowing in one’s veins’ (qtd. in Schor 1999: 2).
- 46.
Sensational is the key. There are other periods in Dickens’ life that we know little of and could lend themselves to successful fictionalisation. According to Claire Tomalin (2011), the period when Dickens was employed as an office clerk in Gray’s Inn is ‘the least documented time in his life’ (35). If the subject matter is not sensational or melodramatic enough it does not, perhaps, inspire sufficient interest.
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Ho, TM. (2019). Dickens: The Cannibal Cannibalised. In: Neo-Victorian Cannibalism. Palgrave Pivot, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-02559-5_3
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