Dickens's Villains: Melodrama, Character, Popular Culture (review)

Juliet John begins her book with an arresting paradox: although villains in Dickens's work, such as Blandois/Rigaud in Little Dorrit (1857) or John Jasper in The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870), have often been dismissed by critics as "melodramatic" and "stagy" (1), the same critics have often praised Dickens's "complex understanding of deviant psychology" (1), embodied in precisely the same characters. This insight launches an ambitious exploration of Dickens's oeuvre, which aims to change in fundamental ways our sense of its underlying aesthetic, psychological, and political assumptions. For John, the fact that Dickens's villains are simultaneously melodramatic and complexly "inward" means that we need to revise our belief that psychological complexity and inwardness are necessarily virtues. Indeed, she argues, the opposite is the case: "In Dickens's works, 'psychology' is synonymous with deviance [...] because Dickens was instinctively opposed to the privileging of an individuated psyche which was becoming so crucial an element of the nineteenth-century understanding of selfhood and society" (3). For John, this "anti- intellectualism" (6) is a virtue and not a vice.

Dickens's Villains thus makes a bold claim—that all, or almost all, critics of Dickens have for the past half-century or so been barking up the wrong tree, with the consequence that "The potential radicalism of Dickens's melodramatic aesthetics [...] has largely eluded academics whose critical practices have remained steeped in the very intellectual elitism [...] which Dickens was trying to subvert" (15). What many critics have thought were virtues in Dickens's novels—complexity of character, subtle grasp of psychological processes—are, for John, precisely what he was dedicated to destroying or subverting: "literary criticism of character [...] has internalized the very high cultural values that Dickens was strongly against" (8).

It is welcome to have an historically grounded study of character in Dickens that raises in a vivid way these central questions about the interpretation of his work. Characterisation has been a rather neglected topic in Dickens criticism over recent years; this is a surprising omission when one considers how important the creation of memorable characters has been to his reputation and continuing popular standing. It is particularly pleasing to have a study that takes seriously the influence of popular culture and theatre on Dickens's work, and that seeks to define what is distinctive about their aesthetic principles. The first part of John's book is concerned with the theatrical context, particularly that of popular melodrama; the second, longer section explores the influence of Newgate fiction, dandyism, and Byronism on Dickens's portrayal of villains, and a final chapter deals with the depiction of "sincerely deviant" (199) women in the fiction, such as Miss Wade in Little Dorrit, Lady Dedlock in Bleak House (1853), and Edith Dombey in Dombey and Son (1848).

In this ambitious and interesting work, John accords Dickens's early writing as much importance as the later novels, and emphasizes the continuities rather than differences between the two. She offers an important and sympathetic new account of Barnaby Rudge (1841) and an insightful discussion of the significance of Blandois/Rigaud in Little Dorrit. Unfortunately, John does not discuss such important villains as Quilp in The Old Curiosity Shop (1841) and Seth Pecksniff in Martin Chuzzlewit (1844), describing—almost dismissing—them as "comic and pantomimic, rather than melodramatic" (11). Although it is true that Pecksniff is hilariously funny, he is also sexually threatening and, in his attempted seduction of Mary Graham, genuinely dangerous, as is Quilp in his pursuit of Little Nell. In both these characters, it is the disturbing mix of melodramatic and comic elements in their villainy that creates much of their haunting fictional power.

At times, the book underplays Dickens's complexity in its wish to overturn our customary views about his work. It seems too strong a claim, for example, to describe Dickens's characters as "largely modelled...