Abstract
Dickens was constantly examining the relation between the outward and visible and the inward and spiritual. For him, more than for most writers, the visible signs are reliable and speak a truer language of the essence of character, at least for those who know how to read them, than the character’s words or actions. All artists, if they consider their art at all, must ponder the relation between appearance and reality; and much great literature, particularly, is concerned with appearances that are illusory or deceptive. But there is a sense in which Dickens’s art is like the painter’s in its declared faith in the visible as the true. Dickens had learned the painter’s lesson that Browning’s Lippo Lippi stands by, ‘the value and significance of flesh’. Against the Prior’s orders, ‘Paint the soul, never mind the legs and arms!’ Lippo argues that the painter’s business is to ‘Make his flesh liker and his soul more like’, and at the same time. The painter’s philosophy is everywhere present in Dickens’s novels.
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Notes
See Hugh Witemeyer, George Eliot and the Visual Arts (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1979) p. 4.
Sylvère Monod, in Dickens the Novelist (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1968) p. 176, notes that Dickens seems to have found the matched wickedness and ugliness of his latest villain congenial: As far as monstrosity is concerned, Quilp goes beyond Ralph. His deformity, ugliness, fiendish jocularity, cynical sadism, and brutality make him a much more colorful figure than Ralph. It is as though the systematic malice which in both cases becomes the mainspring of the plot had appeared a more acceptable and convincing characteristic to Dickens in an individual whose physique was symmetrically anomalous and repulsive.
Henry Fothergill Chorley, review of Bleak House in the Athenaeum, 17 Sep 1853;
repr. in Dickens: The Critical Heritage, ed. Philip Collins (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1971) p. 277.
See Fred Kaplan, Dickens and Mesmerism: The Hidden Springs of Fiction (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1975) pp. 13ff.
Catalogue of the Library of Charles Dickens from Gadshill, ed. J. H. Stonehouse (London: Piccadilly Fountain Press, 1935) p. 42.
John Elliotson, Human Physiology, 5th edn (London: Longman, 1840) p. 374.
As this description has not reached the standard biographies of Dickens, it is worth reproducing here. Combe saw Dickens at a soirée in the Glasgow Athenaeum on 28 December 1847, when Dickens was in the chair. There is perhaps a note of pique in his description, quoted from Charles Gibbon, The Life of George Combe, 2 vols (London: Macmillan, 1878) II, 242. I never had seen Charles Dickens before. He came half-an-hour late, and the audience was impatient; but he was rapturously received. He is rather under the middle size, well made but not muscular. His head also is rather under the average in size; pretty fairly balanced, but the anterior lobe is not one of commanding dimensions, nor are his moral organs above an average in height. His superiority lies in his temperament, which is nervous bilious. He looks intense, but his natural language or expression partakes of the severity of the base of the brain, not sensual, but hard. His head and manifestations gave me the impression of his being a clever but not a great-minded man.
See Gordon S. Haight, ‘George Eliot’s Bastards’, in George Eliot: Centenary Essays, ed. Gordon S. Haight and Rosemary VanArsdel (London: Macmillan, 1982) p. 4;
and Winifred Gérin, Charlotte Brontë: The Evolution of a Genius (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967) pp. 576–8.
Anon, The Phrenologist’s Daughter (London: Hope, 1854) p. 10.
George Combe, The Constitution of Man, 5th edn (Edinburgh: John Anderson, Jr., 1835) p. 48.
David E. Sloane argues that Dickens may have been influenced by Combe’s system — ‘Phrenology and Hard Times: A Source for Bitzer’, Dickens Studies Newsletter, 5:1 (Mar 1974) 9–12.
John Elliotson, ‘The Cerebral Development of the Murderers Hocker and Connor’, The Zoist, II (1845) 121ff. The Zoist was a journal devoted to phrenology and mesmerism, and conducted by Elliotson. In this article he explained that he had visited Hocker in the condemned cell several times: ‘My object was to observe his appearance, as I am fond of doing with persons in all remarkable situations’ (p. 127). He evidently shared Dickens’s taste. In an earlier article in the same journal Elliotson quoted Dickens — ‘(pardon me the vanity of saying my friend Charles Dickens)’ — as an authority on criminal physiognomy and phrenology: The Zoist, I (1844) 49–50. The two often exchanged ideas and information on the subject. See Pilgrim Letters, III, 440.
Originally ‘couvert de cheveux pour peu que le sujet soit chevelu’ — Franz Joseph Gall, Sur les fonctions du cerveau, 6 vols (Paris, 1825) v, 297.
Johan Kaspar Lavater, Essays on Physiognomy, Designed to Promote the Knowledge and the Love of Mankind, tr. Henry Hunter, 5 vols (London: John Murray, 1789–98).
Ibid., I, 20. Fuseli announced his acceptance of Lavater’s thesis in his laudatory Preface.
For Blake’s use of Lavater, see Anne K. Mellor, ‘Physiognomy, Phrenology, and Blake’s Visionary Heads’, in Blake in his Time, ed. Robert N. Essick and Donald Pierce (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978) pp. 53–74.
Interview with The World, 26 Dec 1877. Quoted in Miriam Allott, Novelists on the Novel (New York: Columbia University Press, 1959) p. 283.
Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White (1860), Marian Halcombe’s journal entry for 15 June.
See the suggestive note on train oil, a kind of whale oil, in George Ford’s and Sylvère Monod’s edition of Bleak House (New York: W. W. Norton, 1977) p. 235.
‘Why Shave?’, Household Words, 13 Aug 1853, p. 560. The article was not by Dickens but by Henry Morley and William Henry Wills. See Anne Lohrli, ‘Dickens on Beards’, Dickens Studies Newsletter, 11:1 (Mar 1980) 16–17.
William Powell Frith, My Autobiography and Reminiscences, 2 vols (London: Richard Bentley, 1887) II, 100.
William Powell Frith, John Leech: His Life and Work, 2 vols (London: Richard Bentley, 1891) II, 221.
See the interesting article by Elisabeth Gitter, ‘The Power of Women’s Hair in the Victorian Imagination’, PMLA, 99:5 (Oct 1984) 936–54. Among Dickens’s women, she singles out Alice Marwood, Lucie Manette and Jenny Wren as characters whose hair has special sexual or spiritual and redemptive powers.
Some of these recurrent kinds of hair have been noticed by T. Kent Brumleigh in his article ‘Autoplagiarism’, Dickensian, 39 (1943) 169ff.
Ian Watt, ‘Oral Dickens’, Dickens Studies Annual, III (1974) 175.
See James Pope Hennessy, Anthony Trollope (London: Jonathan Cape, 1971) p. 329.
See Damian Grant, ‘Roderick Random: Language as Projectile’, in Smollett: Author of the First Distinction, ed. Alan Bold (London: Vision Press, 1982) p. 132.
John Carey has explored this aspect of Dickens’s imagination in The Violent Effigy: A Study of Dickens’s Imagination (London: Faber and Faber, 1973) pp. 89–90.
Ibid., p. 89.
The Conference of Monsieur Le Brun … upon Expressions, General and Particular, tr. J. Smith (London, 1701) p. 2. Le Brun’s highly influential treatise of 1698 was further developed in Sir Charles Bell’s The Anatomy and Philosophy of Expression (1845), which Dickens owned.
See Ian Ousby, ‘Language and Gesture in Great Expectations’, Modern Language Review, 72 (1977) 784–93.
Kate Perugini, ‘Charles Dickens, as a Lover of Art and Artists, by his younger daughter’, The Magazine of Art, n.s., I (1903) 164.
For a treatment of extreme contrast as an aesthetic principle in Dickens’s early work, see Juliet McMaster, ‘Mimesis as Subject in Nicholas Nickleby’, Dalhousie Review, 63:4 (Winter 1983–4) 626–42.
Judith Flynn has explored the significance of the name of Cloisterham in ‘“Fugitive and Cloistered Virtue”: Innocence and Evil in Edwin Drood’, English Studies in Canada, 9:3 (Sep 1983) 312–25.
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© 1987 Juliet McMaster
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McMaster, J. (1987). The Value and Significance of Flesh. In: Dickens the Designer. Macmillan Studies in Victorian Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-06933-0_1
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