A Tale of Two Cities and Great Expectations (Oprah's Book Club) (126 page)

Depending on the context, the adjective “Dickensian” is sometimes used to refer to the Victorian era, or even more vaguely, to an old-timey past that was more warmhearted and communitarian than our own times. In a derogatory sense, it may imply a description that is either overly sentimental or extravagantly expressed. In social-critical terms, “Dickensian” sometimes indicates the abject condition of some group, as in the phrase “Dickensian poverty,” which relates to the critique of the living and working conditions of the poor that is a prominent part of Dickens’s novels. But “Dickensian” most often refers to his characteristic style: an acute perception exaggerated to comic effect. This effect often included giving life to inanimate objects and the reverse, mechanizing the animate. Dickens routinely employed this style in describing his characters’ physical appearance, especially his one-dimensional, minor characters, though he sometimes extended its use to houses and other objects, and to bureaucratic systems, such as the Circumlocution Office in
Little Dorrit
. Critics point out that a Dickensian character’s odd or eccentric behavior refers to a deeper lack in their nature; this, added to the fact that these characters are rarely depicted as transforming in any psychological detail, makes them, in narrative terms, “flat.” Examples abound in every Dickens novel: in
Bleak House
, Miss Flite, the crazy old woman who befriends Esther Summerson and is never absent from the court carrying her bag of nonsensical documents, while awaiting a favorable judgment of her case; the villainous Marquis of Evremonde, in
A Tale of Two Cities
, who has a face like a “fine mask . . . of a transparent paleness; every feature in it clearly defined; one set expression on it”—an expression of cruelty. (Appropriately, the château belonging to the Marquis has a similarly “stony” aspect.) The lawyer, Jaggers, in
Great Expectations
, has “bushy black eyebrows that wouldn’t lie down but stood up bristling,” and Pip always associates him with the smell of scented soap, with which the man has a habit of washing his hands after leaving the court, as well as his creaking boots. Mr. Wemmick is introduced as having a “square wooden face, whose expression seemed to have been imperfectly chipped out with a dull-edged chisel” and later is described as having “such a post-office of a mouth that he had a mechanical appearance of smiling.” Wemmick, as Jaggers’s chief clerk, must keep his knowledge close. But this businesslike manner conceals another side to his personality. Whereas Dickens’s early critics—using realism as a standard—found these kinds of fanciful association to detract from his greatness as a writer, most readers, then as now, consider the vividness and imaginativeness of these descriptions as his peculiar genius.

The Gothic was a popular late-eighteenth-century and Romantic literary form that united the characteristics of terror and romance. Fictions such as
The Castle of Otranto
by Horace Walpole (1764), and
The Mysteries of
Udolfo
by Ann Radcliffe (1794), established the genre. Elements of the gothic in literature survived well beyond Jane Austen’s parody,
Northanger Abbey
(1817). In the nineteenth century the gothic eventually developed into related genres such as sensation fiction and the detective novel, and a new form of the gothic emerged at the end of the century, with novels such as Robert Louis Stevenson’s
The
Strange Case of
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
(1886) and Bram Stoker’s
Dracula
(1897). Characteristically, gothic fictions employed the supernatural—ghosts, monsters of various sorts, such as vampires, werewolves, and other undead (Mary Shelley’s monster in
Frankenstein
is a notable example)—to evoke psychological and physical terror. Gothic atmospheres and settings include dungeons, castles, and cemeteries, and its stock plots involve innocent maidens imprisoned by villains, as well as madness and secrets, aristocratic decay, doubles, and hereditary curses.

Although the gothic is supplanted by realism for most of the nineteenth century, one does find these characteristics in Victorian fiction. Robert Mighall claims that Dickens’s novels are the best evidence to the persistence of the gothic during its putative Victorian hiatus. Arguably the most gothic of all of Dickens’s fictions is
A Tale of Two Cities
. Dr. Manette is imprisoned in the famous Bastille prison by secret means for his knowledge of an act of brutality. He is driven to madness by his solitary confinement, and even reverts to his traumatized state in moments of trouble and psychic pain. His buried curse, resurfaced, causes his son-in-law, Charles Darnay, to be re-imprisoned. Darnay tries to keep his aristocratic identity a secret from his wife but is persecuted for his lineage and his uncle’s sins by the vengeful revolutionary Madame Defarge. The cemeteries where Jerry Cruncher robs graves for bodies to sell to the surgeons are another gothic element, in which Dickens weaves the ironic moniker “Resurrection Man” with the Christian theme of sacrifice, personified in Sydney Carton’s final act.

Miss Havisham, “the strangest lady that [Pip] has ever seen,” and her Satis House—both in states of moral as well as material decay—are the most obvious gothic elements in
Great Expectations
. Arrested in time, all the white bridal objects have become “faded and yellow,” including the bride within the bridal dress, who reminds Pip of both a skeleton and a waxwork figure he once saw. “Now wax-work and skeleton seemed to have dark eyes that moved and looked at me,” he recounts upon meeting the weird recluse for the first time. All natural light is shut out of Satis House, its garden “overgrown and rank,” the wedding feast moldering upon the dining table.

The secrecy of Pip’s benefactor; the “nameless shadow” that dogs Pip’s memory whenever he is in Estella’s presence; the revenge that Miss Havisham intends to wreak upon mankind through Estella; Pip’s sense that he is “taint[ed]” by prison and crime—all these details are Victorian echoes of the gothic. But Dickens also creates a little gothic parody in Wemmick’s “castle” in Walworth, with its assortment of ingenious devices and odd architectural adornments, such as the drawbridge and “the queerest gothic windows [. . .] and a gothic door almost too small to get in at,” as well as in Wemmick’s penchant for collecting mourning rings and other paraphernalia from dead criminals.

The popular 1860s novels of sensation and detection successfully adapted gothic themes. Dickens’s friend and collaborator, Wilkie Collins, as well as another prolific sensation novelist, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, both relied on gothic tropes, as did the American writer, Edgar Allan Poe. The gothic as a literary phenomenon is pre-Victorian in its origins yet has a more than ghostly Victorian existence: the gothic continues to be modified, parodied, and reinvented even into our twenty-first-century culture.

Domestic service was the most common source of employment for women and girls during the nineteenth century. By the mid- to late-Victorian years, about a third of all women employed worked as domestic servants. According to the 1851 census, 13.3 percent of employed men and women were in domestic service, and this number increased as the middle classes grew wealthier. By 1881 this number had risen to nearly 16 percent. Young girls generally entered service by the time they were twelve or thirteen.

Victorian servant life depended a great deal on the size and wealth of the house in which a servant was employed. The number of domestics in a household defined a servant’s duties, which in turn defined their status in the house. Three servants staffed a typical middle-class home—a cook, a housemaid, and either a nurse or parlor maid, depending on the ages of the family’s children. Servants worked long hours and had strict rules about behavior applied to their employment, often including being denied visitors. Their duties included everything from cooking and cleaning, washing and ironing, carrying coal and tending to the fires that heat the home, hauling water upstairs and waste back downstairs, ordering supplies from tradespeople, and keeping track of accounts, child care, and chaperoning. Without refrigeration, even daily meals required frequent marketing, baking, and preserving, and in homes heated by coal fire, and without indoor plumbing, heavy items such as water and fuel were carried by women servants.

The heaviest manual labor was done by a maid-of-all-work, who might be the only servant in the home of a tradesperson or a skilled worker. Her day might last as long as seventeen hours, arising before the family to start the fire and not retiring until the family did. Her bed was often a simple pallet on the floor of the basement kitchen, where she labored most of her day. At the other end of the scale, a country estate or wealthy town house would keep a large staff, with a strict hierarchy that mirrored that of their masters’ society. In these homes, servants were divided into “upper” and “under” servants. The principal staff were the butler, the housekeeper, and the head cook. The second rank of servants included footmen, assistant cooks, ladies’ maids, parlor, nursery, and housemaids. Depending on the size and type of grounds, other servants that might be employed included additional maids for the kitchen, scullery, and dairy, and laundresses and boot-boys; grooms, gardeners, watchmen, coachmen, and carpenters also might be hired, though as outdoor staff they would typically report to the landowner’s agent. The butler and housekeeper divided responsibility of under servants according to gender. The mistress gave orders directly to the head cook, who was also responsible for the supplies and staples. The butler’s duties included serving the wine, as well as securing the wine cellar and the silver and plate. Personal attendance and the maintenance of the ladies’ and gentlemen’s clothing were the duties of the gentlemen’s valets and ladies’ maids. These positions were much less demanding than a scullery maid’s, yet they nevertheless required skills in hairdressing and dressmaking and they were not exempt from more physically demanding (and distasteful) tasks—sweeping, building fires, and carrying slops.

A typical trajectory for a young servant girl from a rural village would begin with a low-paid position in a nearby village. She would stay at that job until she had gained experience, and perhaps savings to buy better clothes, to make her suitable for a town job. Eventually she might be promoted from housemaid to nursemaid to lady’s maid. (Victorian employers preferred to hire country girls: they not only considered them healthier but also less apt to gossip because they knew no one in the community. Servants, of course, were privy to much that went on in the house.) An unlikely trajectory is that of the character Sam Weller, the manservant of Mr. Pickwick in
The Pickwick Papers
, Dickens’s first novel. Sam advances from “boots” (boot-cleaning) to valet.

Dickens held solidly middle-class attitudes toward the servant-master relationship that were shared by even the most liberal, reform-minded Victorian middle-class people, all of whom would have employed servants. Dickens’s views regarding the loyalty of the servant class to its employers find their way into several of his novels. Sam’s loyalty to Mr. Pickwick is rewarded at the end of the novel; he marries and retires from service but still lives near enough to Pickwick to look after him. Florence Dombey, in
Dombey and Son
, has a faithful servant, Susan Nipper, who also ends up comfortably married. Readers from all strata of the society enjoyed Dickens’s servant characters. Besides Sam Weller’s huge hit, the humorous Mrs. Sarah (Sairey) Gamp, the slovenly drunken nurse from
Martin Chuzzlewit
, who is given to philosophizing on life and death and constantly quoting an imaginary friend named Mrs. Harris, later became one of the most popular of Dickens’s public readings. In
A Tale of Two Cities
, Miss Pross is the loyal servant character. The narrator describes her bond to Lucie as making her a “willing slave.” Indeed, fidelity partly defines the Englishness of many of Dickens’s servant characters.

In
Great Expectations
, the representation of the relations between master and servant are more complicated, and, hence, much less idealized, than in many of Dickens’s earlier fictions. This complexity arises, first, as a result of Pip’s education and upward mobility, and second, due to the air of secrecy in the novel. Had Pip stayed in his old life of blacksmithing, he might well have married good-natured Biddy, who comes to work as live-in help for Joe and Mrs. Gargary after the latter’s assault and consequent paralysis. But, symbolic of his status as a gentleman, Pip requires a manservant. So, he says with a degree of self-irony, he “started a boy in boots—top boots—in bondage and slavery to whom it might have been said I passed my days.” Pip suggests that, because he’s young and inexperienced in the role of master, he creates a bit of “a monster” in Pepper (whom he dubs the “Avenger”), his servant at Barnard’s Inn. After the expense of purchasing the boy’s livery, Pip confides to the reader that he “had to find him a little to do and a great deal to eat; and with both of those horrible requirements he haunted my existence.” On another occasion, he puts the irony of the power reversal in ever starker terms: “A better proof of the severity of my bondage to that taskmaster [the Avenger] could scarcely be afforded, than the degrading shifts to which I was constantly driven to find him employment.”

In addition to the ways class mobility complicates the master-servant relationship in
Great Expectations
, the numerous secrets that characters in the novel are keeping also give rise to complex depictions of those uneasy power relations. The grown-up Estella, returning to visit Miss Havisham, is told to come without her maid because the reclusive old woman has a “sensitive horror of being talked of by such people,” as Estella explains to Pip. Similarly, Mr. Jagger, the lawyer, also is extremely cautious in his hiring of servants. (Recall that he keeps a bust of an infamous criminal—hanged for killing his master.) When Pip and his friends are invited to dinner at the lawyer’s house, he lets them in, and throughout dinner, Pip notices, “he kept everything under his own hand, and distributed everything himself,” using a dumbwaiter near his seat at table, that is, he employs no butler. In fact, Jagger’s housekeeper is the only servant who appears. Wemmick describes her as resembling “a wild beast tamed,” which, as the novel eventually discloses, has to do with Jagger’s knowledge of her secret history.

Though Dickens’s late fictions do not abandon entirely the faithful servant figure, (the Boffins in
Our Mutual Friend
come immediately to mind), in
Great Expectations
, and through Pip’s first-person narration, Dickens unfailingly treats servants with disdain and even aversion. Pip’s attitude, alongside his acknowledged guilt for deserting Joe and his revulsion of Magwich, forms the novel’s complexly realized exploration of class antagonism as well as its critique of class snobbery.