Albion (41 page)

The book illustrations of Cruikshank were perfectly equivalent to the early urban vision of Charles Dickens, too, with their fierce air of constriction and incarceration. There is a famous illustration of Fagin in the condemned cell at Newgate, of which Chesterton wrote that “it does not merely look like a picture of Fagin; it looks like a picture by Fagin.” There is something feverish about Cruikshank’s genius, peculiarly apt in a city itself often described as fevered. In later life Cruikshank often declared that he had been the principal begetter of Oliver Twist and his sad history, and it is possible that he did in fact conceive of an Hogarthian “progress” of the orphan from poverty and misery to wealth and happiness.

One critic wrote, in 1844, that anyone who wished to “estimate the genius of Mr. Dickens” should “read the essays by Charles Lamb and by Hazlitt, on the genius of Hogarth.” There is indeed a true and powerful affinity. Dickens was often described as “Hogarthian”; the novelist and the artist were believed to possess the same strident urban sensibility. The resemblance is not fortuitous. Dickens was a keen admirer of Hogarth’s work, and his imagination was partly trained by his absorption of Hogarth’s engravings. Hogarth’s depiction of
Gin Lane
helped to create Rowlandson’s
The Dram Shop
and Cruikshank’s
Gin Shop
, for example, but it was also the inspiration for an early essay by Dickens entitled “Gin-Shops”; the young novelist describes in vivid terms precisely the same spot which Hogarth had depicted eighty-seven years before. Just as Hogarth dwelled in loving detail upon the critical mass of crowds in
March to Finchley
and
Southwark Fair
, so Dickens exclaimed that “we revel in a crowd of any kind—a street ‘row’ is our delight.” Hogarth and Dickens were both preoccupied with gaols and asylums, as if they represented a true image of London; the third plate of
A Rake’s Progress
is best and most fully interpreted in the account of Mr. Pickwick’s incarceration in the Fleet Prison. But they were both entranced by fairs and street carnivals so that Hogarth’s
Southwark
Fair
is amplified by Dickens’s essay on “Greenwich Fair.” In their works the city becomes both prison and theatre, fairground and madhouse.
Oliver Twist
has as its subtitle “A Parish Boy’s Progress” in direct homage to Hogarth, while the more pathetic scenes of
Nicholas Nick
leby
were described by Forster as “like a piece by Hogarth, both ludicrous and terrible.” They both dwelled upon minute particulars. In Hogarth’s third plate of
Marriage-à-la-mode
, for example, a quack’s surgery is seen to contain a fish’s skeleton, a tripod, an odd shoe, a sword, a model of a human head, a top hat, pill boxes, and so on. Dickens describes the interior of the old curiosity shop as containing “suits of mail standing like ghosts in armour . . . fantastic carvings brought from monkish cloisters, rusty weapons of various kinds; distorted figures in china, and wood, and iron, and ivory; tapestry and strange furniture.” Both artists packed their work with strong detail, as if attempting to convey all the fragmentation and adventitious chaos of the urban world. It could even be argued that some of Dickens’s success and popularity sprang directly from the fact that he rendered Hogarth’s engravings legible and readable; he gave the artist’s vision a literary life.

The example of Charles Dickens will in any case confirm that the influence of Hogarth’s vision was not confined to artists. Just as Hogarth borrowed some of his satire from Pope—particularly from that visionary poem of London
The Dunciad
—so in turn Hogarth influenced Samuel Johnson. One of Johnson’s essays for
The Idler
is a direct commentary upon Hogarth’s print of Evening in the city. Yet the artist’s most formidable bequest was to those eighteenth-century novelists who shared his sense of the urban world. Hogarth and Samuel Richardson were on terms of familiar acquaintance, for example, and Richardson’s
Pamela
borrows directly from
A Harlot’s Progress
and
A Rake’s Progress
. Richardson’s
Apprentice’s Vade Mecum
wishes that “the ingenious Mr. Hogarth would finish the portrait.” Henry Fielding called Hogarth one of the most “useful Satyrists that any Age hath produced” and, in his preface to
Joseph Andrews
, praised “the ingenious Hogarth” for his ability “to express the affections of men on canvas . . . it is a much greater and nobler applause, that they appear to think.” In
Tom Jones
, also, Fielding interrupts his narration to exclaim, “O Hogarth! had I thy pencil!” Hogarth himself was not averse to borrowing from Fielding; his
Industry and Idleness
, which recorded the careers of industrious and idle apprentices, was clearly indebted to the novelist’s account of criminality in Jonathan Wild published four years earlier. There is here a consonance of attitude and taste which surely belongs to the broader history of the English imagination.

It has been observed that Laurence Sterne is heavily indebted to Hogarth’s
The Analysis of Beauty
—Corporal Trim’s flourish with his stick copies the artist’s “serpentine line of beauty”—and Sterne’s sermon upon “Felix’s Behaviour Towards Paul” serves as a commentary upon Hogarth’s
Paul Before Felix
. Tobias Smollett invokes Hogarth in his principal novels. “It would take the pencil of Hogarth,” he wrote in
Roderick Random
, “to express the astonishment and concern of Strap”; an expression in
Humphry Clinker
“would be no bad subject for a pencil like that of the incomparable Hogarth, if any such ever appear again, in these times of dullness and degeneracy.” In the context of this admiration, then, it may be appropriate to consider the novel as a specifically London form.

CHAPTER 41

Some Eminent Novelists

Prose fiction
, which is believed to be of Graeco-Roman origin in the centuries before Christ, is ancient and ubiquitous. The Anglo-Saxons translated
Apollonius of Tyre
into Old English prose, which can properly claim to be the first novel in the vernacular. But if it can be argued that a broad tradition of popular fiction began with the work of Defoe and Richardson, Smollett and Fielding, then the springs or sources of its inspiration are most likely to be found in the circumstances of eighteenth-century London. The city was the centre of novelty and of change, of social mobility and of sociable excitement; most eighteenth-century novels are set in London or send their characters spinning in that direction, as if they were being drawn ineluctably by a “vortex” or a “lodestone.” The conditions of the novels of Smollett or of Fielding are populous and multifarious, with characters led by chance or exigency into one another’s company. The symbolic power of the capital was, therefore, immense. It was itself one giant novel.

Eighteenth-century fiction is hybrid and various, part realistic and part allegorical, combining heroism and farce in equal measure; it conflates epic with romance, and even includes critical theory. The tone is never constant, and the instability of the narrative mimics the fluidity of the action. At the time of the city’s greatest expansion, the novel is endlessly prolific. It has no boundaries of form or genre, mingling fact and fiction indiscriminately; in that sense, too, it reflects the nature of the city. Masquerades are to be found in Richardson’s
Pamela
, in Fielding’s
Amelia
and
Tom Jones
, in Fanny Burney’s Cecilia, in Smollett’s Peregrine Pickle, in Defoe’s Roxana, and in a score of other fictions.
¹
Upon these occasions a “strange medley” of persons in disguise disport themselves; this is the condition of the city, and also the nature of the novel. Masquerades represent the shifting crowd, an unnatural assembly in every sense which in
Cecilia
includes men dressed as “Spaniards, chimney sweepers, Turks, watchmen, conjurors and old women”; these are of course the inhabitants of the city itself who are here portrayed in caricature as if in homage to the
genius loci
. The fear of enforced touch, and of contagion, is also evident in the descriptions of untidy or unnatural couplings: “a Devil and a Quaker, a Turk and female Rope-dancer, Judge and
Indian
Queen, and Friars of several Orders with
Fanatick Preachers
, all pair’d.” There is a suggestion here of sexual licence underlying the incoherence and arbitrariness of the proceedings; the city itself is portrayed in eighteenth-century fiction as the haven for lusts natural or unnatural. As Addison remarked, “the secret history of a carnival would make a collection of very diverting novels.”

Many fictions present a journey towards the city as a colourful pilgrimage—the most celebrated example being that of Tom Jones—and in a similar spirit novelists such as Fielding and Defoe relish disorder and mutability. Just as the “low” can be disguised as their betters at a masquerade, so in eighteenth-century fiction servants and masters often find their roles reversed; Pamela is transformed from a chambermaid into a lady, even if her gentility is somewhat theatrical. But then this is also the condition of the city, where servants were chastised in pamphlets and tracts for dressing up as their employers and imitating their manners. The novel was often criticised, in oblique terms, for the size and nature of its audience. There is no doubt that the vogue for fiction helped to create a “reading public” but the moralists observed that fiction had become the especial delight of women, tradespeople and servants. The appeal to women is perhaps exemplified by the plethora of titles devoted to heroines—Pamela, Amelia, Cecilia—where the Anglo-Saxon and medieval tradition of female saints’ lives is continued in another guise.

Despite the complaints of moralists, however, fiction was far from being simply an entertainment or diversion for servants and tradespeople; it acted, on the contrary, as an instruction manual or “pattern book.” The fictions of the eighteenth century were on one level designed to “describe manners, paint characters, and try to correct the public.” It was advertised that
Pamela
was “published in order to cultivate the principles of virtue and religion in the minds of the youth of both sexes; a narrative which has its foundation in truth.” Novels, however, were concerned with practice as well as principle. They were manuals of etiquette and guides to polite society. It is no simple coincidence, therefore, that “they depict more often than not attempts to acquire status (or wealth and power) through isolated and individual virtue and action rather than by inheritance or through corporate involvement.”
²
So the elements of pantomime and masquerade also hold the slivers and glimmerings of individualism; just as the city is the true arena for the human striving after profit or power, so the novel celebrates individual and practical exertion.

It is striking and significant that Daniel Defoe, for example, should select as the subject of his fictions solitary and generally fearful individuals. Robinson Crusoe, who has variously been described as the representative of “economic man” and the Protestant conscience, has become a key figure of the English imagination; in that context, his earnest practicality and hesitant spirituality, as well as his position in “the middle state, or what might be called the upper station of low life,” are at least as important as the variety of his “strange surprizing adventures.” He was as isolated upon his desert island as in any London garret.

Daniel Defoe was born in Cripplegate, in 1660, the son of a tallow chandler; he shared that shopkeeper parentage with William Blake, whose father was a hosier, and Defoe can best be seen in the light of a broad tradition of London dissent. It is an honourable and old tradition, which has continued into the present century. He attended a Dissenting academy in Newington Green before taking up the trade of hosiery. He was never a successful businessman, however, and soon adopted the role of journalist and pamphleteer in the cause of William of Orange and the Whigs; the new king had invaded England in 1688, turning out the Catholic James II in the process, and reinstated a Protestant dispensation. Yet Defoe was not successful as a creature of party politics; he was constantly imperiled by bankruptcy and the threat of prison. As one of his most recent biographers has suggested, he had turned “from a conventional city merchant into a lonely, hunted and secretive outsider.”
³
He had experienced all the splendours and disasters of the city, in other words, and out of that confusion created the rapid and avaricious careers of Roxana and Moll Flanders. Yet he did not turn to fiction until he had exhausted his influence as a journalist; he did not believe his novels to be a substitute for, but rather an extension of, his reportorial and polemical work. He wrote discourses on family life and on trade; he wrote stories about pirates and thieves and murderers; he composed political as well as economic treatises; he wrote biographies of Peter the Great and Charles XII of Sweden; he finished a history of the Church of Scotland and a history of the devil; he issued a great many pamphlets and wrote down many accounts of London “marvels” such as hauntings and healings. Like many London writers, he tried his hand at anything.

It is important, also, to note that the novels sprang out of this prodigal inheritance and that they were conceived from Defoe’s confusion of fact and fiction.
Robinson Crusoe
was advertised as a true history “Written by Himself,” with Defoe’s name absent from the frontispiece. A Journal of the Plague
Year
is nothing of the kind, but a rich concoction of true report and fictive imagining, while
A Tour of the Whole Island of Great Britain
was written from Newington Green. If fact proves to be fiction, then Defoe’s fiction has often been granted a factual status. The adventures of Robinson Crusoe were taken to be literal truth, while in more recent years Moll Flanders has been identified as Moll King or Mary Godstone. Yet all of these characterisations and attributions are beside the point. In the eighteenth-century city Daniel Defoe discovered the poetry of fact, and in that combination of the marvellous and the real he found his true subject. It is a token once more of that hybrid art which London seems to nurture; in an unstable and fluid society, where all may walk in disguise, there is no value to be found in generic identity and stability. It could be said that Defoe’s fiction is a simulacrum of his journalism, but in truth there need be no distinction. This may be profoundly unsettling for the more solemn critics, who wish to find in “the English novel” some intrinsic virtue or some reliable touchstone of excellence, but it is true to the mixed and various nature of the English imagination.

Defoe loved sensation and adventure, excessive delight and character in violent action. The energy and motion of London fill his sentences with their rapid and impersonal beat, their digressions and divagations; all the fever and fearfulness of Roxana’s life, for example, can be sensed in the restless and repetitious cadences of her autobiographical narrative. The speed and acceleration of the London streets are visible in Moll Flanders’s quick way of explaining herself—“for the next time I try’d it at
White-Chappel
just by the corner of
Petty-Coat-Lane
, where the Coaches stand that go out to
Stratford
and
Bow
and that Side of the Country; and another time at the
Flying Horse
, without
Bishops-gate
, where the
Chester
coaches then lay.” The language of the streets emerges, too, in Moll’s strong phrases. “So there was her mouth stopped. . . . That’s by the way.” There is a wonderful scene in Newgate between Moll and a condemned woman. “Well
says I
, and are you thus easy? ay, says she, I can’t help myself, what signifies being sad? If I am hang’d there’s an End of me, and away she turn’d Dancing . . .” Here is farther confirmation of the foreign belief that the English disdained death as a cheat or a thing of no moment, but it is also a tribute to Defoe’s remarkable fluency. In recent years his tone has become a matter of debate. Is he being ironic at his characters’ expense, or does he expect the reader fully to sympathise with their respective fates? A similar question has been raised about his style, which has been praised as a triumph of literary artifice and condemned as artless and prolix. Yet these considerations need not apply, especially within the new form of prose fiction which confounds distinctions of every kind. Defoe was an instinctive and prolific writer who effortlessly combined all the materials that were closest to hand without any attempt to discriminate between them. In this context it is perhaps worth noting that “Defoe’s prose contains a higher percentage of words of Anglo-Saxon origin than that of any other well-known English writer except Bunyan.”
⁴
The old language emerged naturally, almost instinctively.

The metaphor of London as a stage also came spontaneously to Defoe, so that Moll Flanders may declare that “generally I took up new Figures, and contriv’d to appear in new Shapes every time I went abroad”; in particular, “I dress’d myself like a Beggar Woman, in the coarsest and most despicable Rags I could get.” Defoe himself dressed in strange shapes, and was for a long period a paid political spy in the service of Robert Harley; like Moll herself, he was consigned to Newgate Prison, which was “an Emblem of Hell itself, and a kind of an Entrance into it.” So he was always drawn to the condition of the confined and the desperate, and the birth of individual character in English fiction can confidently be ascribed to the condition of London itself. As Moll Flanders observes while living in the Mint, a poor area of Southwark, “I saw nothing but Misery and Starving was before me.” These are the afflictions which haunt Robinson Crusoe and Roxana, albeit in different guises. The general plot of Defoe’s fictions, which include the “true” histories of the criminals Jack Sheppard and Jonathan Wild, is of a provincial’s journey to London; it is also a pilgrimage towards sexuality and crime, with the imminent threat of the gaol and the gallows.

Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year, published in 1722, is itself a tabulation of fears. London “might well be said to be all in tears,” and Defoe’s frequent image of the city as a human body takes on a piteous aspect. It exudes “steams and fumes” so that its streets reproduce “the Breath . . . the Sweat . . . the Stench of the Sores of the sick persons.” In this world of steam and suffering the inhabitants of the city run mad, “raving and distracted,” with others “frighted into idiotism, and foolish distractions, some into despair and Lunacy, others into melancholy madness.” The
Journal
is in fact itself a narrative of melancholy madness, that condition to which the English were most prone. If London resembled an asylum, however, it was also compared to a prison with every house its own gaol since “here were just so many prisons in the town as there were Houses shut up.” Many people, naked and delirious, ran through the streets screaming or plunged into the Thames while others grew “stupid with the insupportable sorrow.”