The Dynamics of Description

Abstract

Anyone who has ever seen David Lean’s wonderful film of Oliver Twist, with its warrens and winding narrow streets through which urchins run like rats in the dark, has to know that no clear and simple Christian rhetoric can dispel that image of a confused and confusing world. There is a rhetoric of description, as critics from Charles Lamb, who talked about the ‘dumb rhetoric of the scenery’, to Robert Garis, who, describing Mrs Jellyby’s house in Bleak House, concluded that ‘every detail is a judgement’ understood.² Even when we encounter what might appear to be simple, straightforward description of person or place, because of Dickens’s style of reportage, we can be fairly sure that it will begin to shade off immediately into something else: rhetorical admonition to social action or consciousness, or an invitation to escape into a world of fantasy.

Even in describing so palpable a thing as the slums of London, Dickens repeatedly insists upon the labyrinthine, maze-like confusion of the streets, courts and buildings, emphasising that quality of the district which makes its buildings seem indistinct as specific dwelling places and yet at the same time suggestive of dens and dungeons. The tottering and deserted hovels in which Fagin successively establishes his headquarters are all identical; they have no distinctive structure other than that, in almost surrealistic fashion, they are all single rooms reached by endless flights of stairs.¹