Performing Business, Training Ghosts: Transcoding Nickleby

In August, 1860, Dickens writes to a friend:

My mother, who was also left to me when my father died (I never had anything left to me but relations), is in the strangest state of mind from senile decay; and the impossibility of getting her to understand what is the matter, combined with the desire to be got up in sables like a female Hamlet, illumines the dreary scene with a ghastly absurdity that is the chief relief I can find in it. ¹

A passage about domestic irritability and high tragedy, about inheritance of wealth and obligation, about desire and forbidden desires in families and fictions; about Shakespeare and Dickens, parent and child, darkness and death; the costuming of revenge in the apparition of a figure which implicates and undoes theatricality and domesticity, tragedy and comedy, sexuality and madness; which is male and female, mother and son, author and character; a spectacle of horror and despair, the melancholy site of a grotesque, black laughter. In November, Dickens reports that his mother is “much better than I supposed” as “the instant she saw me, she plucked up a spirit, and asked for a pound.” ² The next five lines of the letter have been removed by Georgina Hogarth, Dickens’s sister-in-law, executor and first editor of the letters. Plucking up spirit and money in writing and excision; the strangest state of mind, and the impossibility of getting him to understand what is the matter; family business.

I

Nancy Armstrong in her Desire and Domestic Fiction has argued that a profound shift occurs in the history of the novel in the course of the nineteenth century, a change that grants an unprecedented centrality to the figure of the domestic woman. Through the elaboration of a set of norms and fictional understandings of desire and the self, a deeply de-politicized conception of middle-class life emerges. Novels, particularly from the 1830s, she argues, enclose political conflict within the domestic sphere and detach the household from politics to provide the “complement and antidote to it.” The household thus becomes “the ‘counter-image’ of the modern marketplace, an apolitical realm of culture within the culture as a whole.” ³ I want to try to revise that account by looking at the work of Dickens, in particular the novel Nicholas Nickleby. At first, Nickleby seems a useful illustration of the main lines of Armstrong’s argument. It values the domestic virtues to excess, and its central characters move through difficulties and dangers to a happy resolution of multiple marriages and return to the family home. Women in the book are valued for their virtue, domesticity and silence, devalued for interference and excessive talk. Against male aristocratic immorality, the virtues of the industrious, home-loving bourgeoisie are victorious.

Yet such an account abstracts the domestic issues both from the dense economic and political forces within which Dickens embeds them and the specific fictional form and strengths of the novel. Characters are constantly impelled by economic motives in the book, but Dickens is not concerned simply with the depiction of a multiplicity of human agents whose economic situation and motives are constantly in play; he also attempts to depict economic forces that are not reducible to individual intentions. Families in the book—the Mantalinis, the Cheerybles, the Crummleses, the Squeerses, the Nicklebys—are also family businesses, where the claims of the domestic and economic are intimately bound together. They have the force of institutions—a school, a mercantile house, an acting troupe—which extend and transform the social relations both of their members and those for and upon whom they work. Much of the comedy stems from this, as in the mixture of domestic affection and economic self-interest in Vincent Crummles’s fostering of the Infant Phenomenon or the older Wackford’s feeding of the younger, but the serious point is made too: that the family is not, cannot be, free of economic determinants, or the violence and conflict of the wider society. Indeed the family often provides a particular focus for such conflict, tragically in the brutalization and death of Smike...