Selected Short Fiction (4 page)

Dickens's fascination with interior mental processes emerges strikingly in the short writings. The extended description of the thoughts of the criminal ‘spending his last night on earth' which enters Boz's mind in ‘A Visit to Newgate' anticipates the macabre vignettes in ‘Lying Awake', a description moving, in its insomniac narrator's words, by ‘association of ideas' through a ‘train of thoughts as I lay awake'. In this remarkable piece, as Harry Stone has pointed out,
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Dickens experiments with techniques similar to those of the modem interior monologue; his experiments become even more daring as the Uncommercial Traveller fuses fragments of a popular song with his recollections of boyhood reading and his current reactions to a rough crossing of the English Channel in ‘The Calais Night-Mail':

The subject of such pieces is not only the impressions of their narrator but the twists and turnings of his mind as these impressions are formed.

Moreover, Dickens's experiments with first-person narrative as a tool for revealing mental processes were by no means confined to his impressionistic sketches, and the virtuoso pieces grouped under the heading of ‘Dramatic Monologues' contain some of his most fascinating explorations of the inner sources of human nature. Dickens's skill at creating characters is proverbial; some, like Scrooge, have made their way into the dictionary. As readers have noted with some dismay, however, the outstanding characters in Dickens's novels often seem to dwarf their surroundings. Virginia Woolf's acid comment that ‘Dickens made his books blaze up, not by tightening the plot or sharpening the wit, but by throwing another handful of people upon the fire‘
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contains some truth. G. K. Chesterton observed more charitably, ‘the units of Dickens, the primary elements, are not the stories, but the characters who affect the stories - or, more often still, the characters who do not affect the stories'.
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Chesterton's remark is overstated; individuals as diverse as Pip in Great
Expectations
and Pecksniff in
Martin Chuzzlewit
have a strong effect on the plots of the novels in which they appear. Nevertheless, it is difficult to deny the fundamental role of characterization in Dickens's art, and many of the people whom Dickens creates possess astonishing vocal powers. Characters like Mrs Gamp in
Martin Chuzzlewit
and Flora Finching in
Little
Dorrit exist largely in terms of what they say. Curiously enough, Flora and Mrs Gamp often seem to talk not to their ostensible listeners but to themselves, and their absorption in their own words appears, in less extreme form, in other figures in Dickens's novels. George H. Ford has commented, in a discussion of
David Copperfield,
‘There are times when Dickens's characters do not seem to be talking to each other but
at
each other, like people at parties in America, especially at crowded cocktail parties, where conversation is made up of a cacophony of non-intersecting soliloquies, each speaker isolated and alone.'
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In the monologues which comprise the third major category of Dickens's short fiction, this sense of isolated soliloquy is intensified. Plot recedes into the background, other characters disappear into the wings, leaving a solitary obsessive conversationalist of the type contained in Dickens's novels.

In marked contrast to the observant personality who presides over the impressionistic sketches, narrators like Doctor Marigold and the ‘blighted public character' of ‘His Brown-Paper Parcel' are unique individuals. Unlike the first-person speakers in uncanny pieces such as ‘The Signalman' and ‘A Confession Found in a Prison in the Time of Charles the Second', these narrators are not simply vehicles for revealing some abnormal or unnatural event. Rather, they are preoccupied with bringing their distinctive existences into general view. Mrs Lirriper, the widowed keeper of a London boarding house, introduces herself in her second monologue in a passage that briefly rivals the free associations of Joyce's Molly Bloom:

Whether their words flow glibly like Doctor Marigold's or stumble hesitantly like George Silverman‘s, their utterances reveal the texture of their minds. We see not only the daily events of their lives, but also their unconscious foibles and faults. The affectations and self-interestedness of the incomparable waiter in
Somebody's Luggage
are minor weaknesses, but those of his irrepressible younger counterpart in the railroad refreshment room at Mugby Junction verge upon juvenile delinquency. The Boy at Mugby thoroughly enjoys preying upon society, and he revels in his chosen occupation as ‘a most highly delicious lark'. He depicts his exploits with such gusto, nevertheless, that it is impossible to deny him the kind of sympathy which Dickens himself must have felt when he signed a letter to his friend Thomas Beard ‘The Boy (at Mugby)'. In such pieces, Dickens approaches the problem of conflicting evaluations of a speaker's words explored by his contemporary Robert Browning in some of his best poems, and he encourages ‘the tension between sympathy and moral judgement' which Robert Langbaum has described as the hallmark of the dramatic monologue.
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Like a comic version of the duke in Browning's ‘My Last Duchess', the Boy at Mugby possesses, in Langbaum's terms, a ‘hard core of character fiercely loyal to itself';
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he displays his outrageous attitude with such unfaltering confidence that a reader hesitates to condemn him as he deserves. Other narrators of these monologues by Dickens are not so zestfully reprehensible. Mrs Lirriper's wandering thoughts, minor jealousies, and uneducated errors are a far cry from the Boy's high-spirited determination to ‘Keep the Public Down'. Whatever response Dickens's speakers ultimately elicit, however, their words reveal their own fanciful and idiosyncratic perspective on their audience's everyday world.

These extraordinary monologues are often bypassed in critical examinations of Dickens because of the unusual circumstances under which most of them were written. Except for ‘George Silverman's Explanation', all the ones included in this selection appeared in the extra Christmas numbers of
All the Year Round.
These special publications, which Dickens began with
Household Words,
were initially simple affairs; the number for 1850, in which ‘A Christmas Tree' appeared, is merely a regular issue whose contents deal with the subject of Christmas. Subsequently, however, the Christmas number became a separate and increasingly elaborate publication, and Dickens gradually hit upon a scheme, which Scheherazade might well have envied, for enclosing contributions by other authors within his own words. His procedure was to outline a principal narrative which formed usually, but not always, the first and last chapters of the Christmas number; this framing narrative gave some excuse for interpolated pieces from other contributors and occasionally from Dickens himself. By 1862, this basic format had become well established, and
Somebody's Luggage,
the Christmas number for this year, playfully pokes fun at Dickens's contributors and his own activities as editor of
All the Year Round;
as he wrote to Wilkie Collins, it was designed as ‘a comic defiance of the difficulty of a Xmas No., with an unexpected end to it'.

The difficulties which Dickens experienced in producing his Christmas numbers still plague those who wish to evaluate his contributions; they are usually reprinted out of their original contexts in editions of Dickens's collected works, where they sometimes seem oddly constructed and mysterious. Consequently, the selections reprinted here are presented as self-contained portions of larger works. They consist of the framework and one of the two pieces which Dickens introduced into
Somebody's Luggage
as well as the frameworks of
Mrs Lirriper's Lodgings, Mrs Lirriper's Legacy,
and
Doctor Marigold's Prescriptions.
‘Main Line. The Boy at Mugby' is one of his additions at the end of the major narrative of
Mugby Junction
(his other added piece, ‘No. 1 Branch Line. The Signalman‘, is included under ‘Tales of the Supernatural'). In these dazzling contributions, Dickens triumphed over the annual challenges of the Christmas number.

Moreover, Dickens's work in this genre was not confined solely to the Christmas season. Near the end of his career, in a characterization created before his second visit for initial publication in America, he used the form, even more skilfully, for George Silverman's hauntingly equivocal explanation.The repeated efforts of this narrator not to be ‘worldly' have led only to misunderstanding and injustice, and his monologue is a last, despairing effort to explain his own altruistic intentions. At the same time, his remarks and behaviour suggest that he is neurotic, unsocial and self-centred. He is selfishly oblivious to the feelings of the women whose friendship and love he rejects; he is condoning a serious deception when he voluntarily relinquishes his claim to the inheritance appropriated by his self-proclaimed guardian - but this does not disturb him. As in Browning's ‘Andrea del Sarto', where the speaker attributes his problems both to his own loving sacrifice and the failure of others to understand him, we see what George Silverman believes and also what he manifests about himself.

His self-portrait at the farmhouse near the ruined Hoghton Towers, as he observes a youthful birthday celebration which he has refused to attend, illustrates these two facets of his personality:

On first glance, this series of imagined pictures merely demonstrates Silverman's growing diffidence and his willingness to sacrifice his own happiness to protect those for whom he cares, but, on second glance, the words of his description reveal disturbing connotations. The young girl whom he admires, and avoids because he tells himself that she might catch the fever of which his parents died, would hardly have felt easy if she could have seen him' gliding out from behind the ghostly statue', peeping at her birthday festivities from the darkened ruin, and furtively creeping up the stairs to his bed. Had the farmer who scolds him for not being sociable literally been able to read the boy's heart, he undoubtedly would have wondered why George Silverman did not discuss his fear of contamination openly, or at least find a brighter alternative to the party than Hoghton Towers after dark. Silverman himself considers the episode a significant one, and he uses it as an analogy for the later life which he recalls at college:

The thought of himself as ‘always in the shadow looking on' indicates the angle from which he gathers his impressions of life. Like a
voyeur,
he shrinks from involvement yet maintains that he intends no harm.

Ultimately, however, the conflicting evaluations evoked by this monologue are juxtaposed so subtly that they cannot be definitively resolved. Silverman presents his view of his life persuasively, and final judgement of his personality remains in doubt; awareness of his limitations is balanced by compassion for his dilemma. In this work, Dickens has presented one of his favourite and generally admirable situations - that of self-sacrificing renunciation
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- but