Dickens and the Angels

J .M. CAMERON Dickens and the Angels I 'Do be an angel and fetch my spectacles I slippers I newspaper ...' This is a characteristic use of 'angel' in modern demotic English. It trails wisps of meaning from the theological past of the term: the work ofan angel seems a work of supererogation (Fido isn't an angel if he brings the newspaper in his mouth, nor is the newsboy who delivers the paper), a free manifestation of goodness, not constrained or dutiful, and what is thus free is celestial, not earthly, or, if earthly, reminds us of the celestial. She (it is :ommonly 'she: though the nineteenth-century angel is often repre5ented as epicene) may be'A Creature not too bright or good I For human ~ature's daily food' and 'A Traveller betwixt life and death.' And yet she is 'a Spirit still, and bright I With something of angelic light: We are also reminded by our locution of what is traditionally one of the functions of :he angels: they are messengers, fetchers and carriers of the heavenly courts. The great clouds of glory that once accompanied the idea of the angels lave in such a locution been lost; this is why I spoke of wisps of meaning. [he concept has been domesticated. This seems to have happened after :he seventeenth century, perhaps after the Restoration (in England). .ruton's angels are an inlmense problem in themselves.The fallen among hem display grandeur and heroism, and they delight in their 'intellectual Jeing, I Those thoughts that wander through eternity: (Paradise Lost, II, 47-8), and these qualities can be traced back to Christian and Jewish :peculation about the nature of the angels, as well as to classical mythol- ,gy - Hercules, Prometheus, Mulciber (the celestial architect). But the mfallen angels are relatively uninteresting; they prose and declaim, and .uffer under the inlmense disadvantage of being the allies of omnipoence . They even go into quasi-anatomical detail in discussing the quasiexuality of angels and they blush as they do so, and although the 'Iushing goes with their sensible appearance, not their real nature, it eems that being a spirit involves having a very subtle kind of body, a ind of undetectable and unenclosable gas. At any rate my belief is that 'aradise Lost is, for these and many other reasons, a stage on the journey Jwards the domestication and degradation of the angels. With Pope the ngels have become theatrical properties. They are necessary parts of the·icture of cosmic order he gives us in the Essay on Man - they rule the UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY, VOLUME 50, NUMBER 2, WINTER 19Bo11 0042-o247/81/0100-0159S01.solo Cl UNfVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS 160 I.M. CAMERON spheres (Essay on Man, Epistle I) - but since no one in Pope's day any longer takes this picture seriously, as an account of how things are, angels have in effect been given the same ontological status as the dragon or the phoenix. And yet, and yet ... the Bible and the Book of Common Prayer, never, surely, more closely studied by the general reader than in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, are full of angels, in various settings and in various imaginative guises. One of the books to be found in any house, palatial or humble, that possessed any books at all, was The Pilgrim's Progress, and it contained some of the last genuine angels in English letters: Apollyon, a fallen angel, and those who sounded their trumpets on the other side of the river. Again, Shakespeare was widely read and had recovered from the period of neglect, embarrassment, and misunder-j standing in which neoclassical criticism seemed for a time to have plunged him; romanticism was a great victory for Shakespeare. And aJ notion of the angels as splendid and powerful beings who playa necesI sary part in the economy of earth and heaven is alive in his work. After: the exit of the Ghost Hamlet cries out: '0 all you host of heaven!' - an appeal to the celestial armies to witness and perhaps to aid. Again: 'Angels and ministers of grace, defend us!' And in the soliloquy on the nature of...