Charles Dickens, the Writer Who Saw Lockdown Everywhere
Posted by Jim on December 26, 2020
For the novelist, imprisonment wasn’t just a stain on society; it was an aspect of the self.
December 24, 2020
In February of 1824, Charles Dickens watched in anguish as his father was arrested for debt and sent to the Marshalsea prison, just south of the Thames, in London. “I really believed at the time,” Dickens told his friend and biographer, John Forster, “that they had broken my heart.” Soon, Dickens’s mother and his younger siblings joined the father at Marshalsea, while a resentful Dickens earned money at a blacking factory, labelling pots of polish for shoes and boots. Although his father would be released within months, Dickens would never fully outrun the memory of his family’s incarceration. In her 2011 biography, Claire Tomalin notes that, in adulthood, Dickens became “an obsessive visitor of prisons.” In the autobiographical essay, “Night Walks,” he describes halting in the shadows of Newgate Prison, “touching its rough stone” and lingering “by that wicked little Debtors’ Door – shutting tighter than any other door one ever saw.” While touring America as a famous author, he made sure to go and see the prisons in Boston, New York, and Baltimore, among others.
Dickens’s obsession appeared in his first novel, “The Pickwick Papers,” and would continue to haunt his imagination through the years. In “Great Expectations,” the provincial hero Pip visits Newgate and thinks “how strange it was that I should be encompassed by all this taint of prison and crime . . . starting out like a stain that was faded but not gone; that, it should in this new way pervade my fortune and advancement.” Newgate isn’t just the setting of Pip’s queasy tour. It waits to enclose Fagin at the end of “Oliver Twist,” and, in “Barnaby Rudge,” the historical novel about the Gordon Riots of 1780, a mob breaks into the prison and burns it down. “A Tale of Two Cities” begins with the return of a Bastille prisoner to his family, and ends in La Force, where the French revolutionaries hold those condemned to die by guillotine. And “Little Dorrit,” which was serialized between 1855 and 1857, is set in the Marshalsea, an imagined return to the place where Dickens’s father was kept from him.
“Little Dorrit” is Dickens’s most harrowing prison novel, a plangent study of the costs of confinement. The Dorrits, like the Dickenses, are released when someone else pays their debts, but Dickens shows how Little Dorrit, who was born in the Marshalsea, has trouble distinguishing freedom from captivity. The Dorrits stamp their return to respectability with an ostentatious tour of Italy, but Little Dorrit can’t accept the truth of her liberty. She moves from one ornate lodging to the next, all passing before her vision as a procession of “unrealities.” She muses cynically on the similarities between prisoners and tourists: “They prowled about the churches and picture-galleries, much in the old, dreary, prison-yard manner.” From the balcony of her Venice apartment, she looks down over the dark water as if “it might run dry, and show her the prison again, and herself, and the old room, and the old inmates, and the old visitors: all lasting realities that had never changed.”2020 in Review
Flinging open a door, Dickens suggests, isn’t always enough to free someone. In fact, the prison is even more prevalent in his work as a metaphor than it is as a setting. Coketown, the fictional industrial locale of “Hard Times,” is a place “where Nature was as strongly bricked out as killing airs and gases were bricked in.” “A Tale of Two Cities” is packed with actual prisons, but even the novel’s bank, Tellson’s, is described as a dank oubliette. There are iron bars and a perpetual “dismal twilight,” and when a young man goes to work there, “they hid him somewhere till he was old.” Dickens, influenced by his days in the blacking factory, passionately exposed how employers entrap their workers, but he also sprinkled his prison-yard dust over his characters’ homes. In “Great Expectations,” Miss Havisham’s “dismal” dwelling, Satis House, has all the key features: “Some of the windows had been walled up; of those that remained, all the lower were rustily barred.”
As anyone in quarantine can tell you, a metaphoric prison needs a metaphoric prisoner. Dickens understood the ease with which we can become locked inside our own lives, whether through habit, circumstance, injustice, or the ever-tightening circuit of our obsessions. Several of his most memorable characters are in some way arrested. Miss Havisham, unable to forget being jilted at the altar, idles in her ruined mansion. (On meeting Pip, she asks: “You are not afraid of a woman who has never seen the sun since you were born?”) Then there’s Mrs. Clennam, from “Little Dorrit,” who, sitting in the standard-issue Gothic gloom, constantly broods on the past. Of these people, whose plight might seem familiar to us, Dickens writes: “To stop the clock of busy existence, at the hour when we were personally sequestered from it; to suppose mankind stricken motionless, when we were brought to a stand-still [. . .] is the mental unhealthiness of almost all recluses.”VIDEO FROM THE NEW YORKERYo-Yo Ma and Emanuel Ax Discuss the Optimism in Beethoven’s Work
For Dickens, imprisonment wasn’t just a stain on society; it was an aspect of the self. His flamboyant character names suggest that personality itself is a kind of cage. There is the unyielding Mr. Gradgrind, the foolish Mr. Bumble, and the miserly “Scrooge,” whose name is drawn from “screw” and “gouge,” both alluding to ruthless financial practices. Scrooge, who is “grasping” in his pursuit of money, is trapped by his own fixations—“secret and self-contained, and solitary as an oyster”—and Dickens makes clear that we all share something of his padlocked heart. Early in “A Tale of Two Cities,” he meditates on how distant and unknowable we are to one another. He imagines a “great city” at night, but instead of touring its prisons he asks us to consider that “every one of those darkly clustered houses encloses its own secret; that every room in every one of them encloses its own secret; that every beating heart in the hundreds of thousands of breasts there, is, in some of its imaginings, a secret to the heart nearest it!”
Dickens’s plots often depend on these secrets, which are variously withheld, traded, and revealed as the stories unfold. But they provide more than melodrama. The Dickensian secret, shut fast inside his characters’ chests, emphasizes our inherent separation from one another. There are, he proposes, always high walls between us.
This claustrophobic vision of selfhood is mirrored in Dickens’s broader social commentary. Although he wrote in the Victorian age, which saw the rise of advanced networks of communication and, via new railways, the improved circulation of people and goods, Dickens understood how the grand modernizing drive produced new kinds of imprisonment. Industrialization captured swaths of the population in repetitive factory work. The widening of London roads displaced the poor. Many of them lived in cramped, plagued slums like those in “Bleak House,” where “nothing is to be seen but the crazy houses, shut up and silent.”
All around him, Dickens saw sequestered lives, despite the liberating myth of progress. He placed much of the blame on the state, whose institutions, he felt, stifled citizens with bureaucracy. “Bleak House” is again a fine example, as it satirizes a legal system that pins people beneath its sluggish machinery. The novel’s central lawsuit, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, has lasted for decades, and potential beneficiaries are born and die before it is resolved in the Court of Chancery. Old Miss Flite, who believes that she has a stake in the case, keeps birds caged in her room, to be released when judgment finally comes. She refers to both the birds and the claimants of Jarndyce when she says: “Their lives, poor silly things, are so short in comparison with Chancery proceedings that, one by one, the whole collection has died over and over again. I doubt, do you know, whether one of these, though they are all young, will live to be free!” Such confinements cause a sickness both spiritual and literal; multiple characters contract an unnamed contagion resembling smallpox. In Dickens’s choked society, only disease circulates freely.
In 2019, a trove of letters from Edward Dutton Cook, a confidant of Dickens’s wife, Catherine, made the news. In one of the letters, Cook contends that Dickens resented Catherine for losing her looks, and that “he even tried to shut her up in a lunatic asylum, poor thing!” It had long been known that Dickens was an unkind husband, even a cruel one, but the letters recast the author as a sinister would-be jailer. How could the man who dramatized so many injustices of his era—the atrocious conditions of workers, the marriage market’s harm to women’s lives, the moral hypocrisy of the establishment—be so brutal in his relationships? He was clearly attuned to the terrors of imprisonment. In an early nonfiction sketch, “A Visit to Newgate,” Dickens tenderly imagines the dream of a prisoner condemned to die the next morning. “The night is dark and cold,” he writes, “the gates have been left open, and in an instant he is in the street, flying from the scene of imprisonment like the wind.”
There’s an echo of the author himself in these lines. On the page, Dickens accessed empathy in a way he couldn’t in life. Writing fiction liberated him financially, but it also offered him an escape from the prison of his personality. He became, in the production of his works, hundreds of people. And yet, just like Little Dorrit, his imagination spent its liberty by continually flying back inside the penitentiary walls. If Dickens’s ghost is now in handcuffs, the novels themselves, for the expansiveness and seriousness of their moral vision, can be cleared of their author’s crimes. The best art is the wiliest of escape artists. Mysteriously forging its own keys, it frees itself, and flies.