Abstract
Dickens’s detestation of the cult of the Noble Savage is nowhere seen to better effect than when he puts such sentimental vapourings into the mouths of his most affected, worldly characters. Mrs Merdle (‘young and fresh from the hand of her maid’, not from the hand of Nature) and the rancid, rouged Mrs Skewton, in Dombey & Son (‘Nature intended me for an Arcadian. I am thrown away in Society. Cows are my passion…’) represent the ultimate in artifice. It is they who affect to protest most strongly about the corrupting influence of civilisation, and invoke Arcadianism and Noble Savagery. The cult could hardly be more effectively discredited.
We know [Society] is hollow and conventional and worldly and very shocking, but unless we are Savages in the Tropical seas (I should have been charmed to be one myself — most delightful life and perfect climate I am told), we must consult it. … A more primitive state of society would be delicious to me. There used to be a poem when I learnt lessons, something about Lo the poor Indian whose something mind! If a few thousand persons moving in Society, could only go and be Indians, I would put my name down directly; but as, moving in Society, we can’t be Indians, unfortunately…
LD,I,xx,239, 242–3
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
Hugh Cunningham, The Children of the Poor: Representations of Childhood since the Seventeenth Century (Blackwell, 1991), p. 104.
Ibid., pp. 104, 106.
Charles Dickens, ‘A December Vision’, Household Words, 14 December 1850.
Mayhew, quoted in Peter Ackroyd, Dickens (Sinclair-Stevenson,1990), p. 92.
Edward Tylor, Primitive Culture: Researches into the Development of Mythology, Philosophy, Religion, Art & Culture (John Murray, 1871), p. 27.
Ibid., p. 38.
Trevethan Spicer, Masculine Education: An Address (1855), p. 3.
David Grylls, Guardians and Angels: Parents and Children in Nineteenth-century Literature (Faber, 1978), pp. 52–3.
F. J. H. Darton, Children’s Books in England: Five Centuries of Social Life (2nd ed., Cambridge University Press, 1958), pp. 148–9.
L. Davidoff and C. Hall, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780–1850 (Hutchinson, 1987), p. 176: hereafter abbreviated to Davidoff and Hall.
Ibid., p. 26. The authors are quoting from Q. D. Leavis’s introduction to the Penguin edition of Jane Eyre.
Paul Schlicke, Dickens and Popular Entertainment (Allen & Unwin, 1985). His discussion of the decline of Bartholomew Fair is on pp. 89–96.
E. P. Thomson, The Making of the English Working Class (Penguin, 1968), p. 62.
Ibid., pp. 63–4.
Charles Lamb to S. T. Coleridge, 23 October 1802: The Letters of Charles Lamb, edited by E. V. Lucas (Dent & Methuen, 1935), I, 326.
Charlotte Yonge, ‘Children’s Literature of the Last Century’, Macmillan’s Magazine, vol. 20 (1869), p. 237.
R. H. Hutton, ‘The Worship of Children’, Spectator, 6 November 1869, pp. 1298–300.
Copyright information
© 1994 Malcolm Andrews
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Andrews, M. (1994). The Savage, the Child and the Caves of Ignorance. In: Dickens and the Grown-Up Child. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230377998_3
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230377998_3
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-39143-1
Online ISBN: 978-0-230-37799-8
eBook Packages: Palgrave Literature & Performing Arts CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)