Penn State University Press

This essay considers the interest shared by William Hogarth and Charles Dickens in the idea of instrumentality in the art of realism. Taking his cue from eighteenth-century epistemological philosophy, Hogarth developed an idea of beauty and realism as insisting upon the need for human subjectivity or perspective. Naïve realism was a style that troubled both Hogarth and Dickens, and both men developed forms in which caricature, melodrama, and exaggeration are crucial to the development of verisimilitude. Considering the progress pieces and the writings of Hogarth as a preface to the style of Dickens, I argue that Nicholas Nickleby developed an extraordinary self-reflexivity. Both Nicholas and his uncle Ralph form part of a narrative study of the implications of filtering perception through the distorting lens of the individual.

"To be attentive to a thing, is to be more conscious of the perceptions which it occasions" (Condillac 30). So wrote Etienne Bonnot de Condillac in his Essay on the Origins of Human Knowledge (1746), a book which he saw as a supplement to John Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690) and which became an important contribution to the empirical tradition in Western philosophy. The objective of Condillac's book, which led to him being known as the "French Locke," was to address the moments in the work of his English predecessor where it is suggested that human understanding is made up of innate abilities as well as [End Page 59] experiences and sensory perceptions. Robert G. Weyant notes that "Condillac's [Essay] was the first of a series of works … in which the Abbé defended Locke's general position while he simultaneously moved to a more extreme sensationalist epistemology." Locke, Weyant adds, "may be accused of throwing innate ideas out of the front door while admitting innate processes at the rear" (vii, xi). In the radical revision of Condillac, however, nothing is "innate": "there are no ideas but such as are acquired; the first proceed immediately from the senses; the others are owing to experience, and increase in proportion as we become capable of reflecting" (Condillac 15). Condillac's ideas are a part of the Enlightenment tradition of making experience and perception the basis of all knowledge. In his Treatise of Human Nature (1739), David Hume noted famously that "we cannot go beyond experience; and any hypothesis, that pretends to discover the ultimate original qualities of human nature, ought at first to be rejected as presumptuous and chimerical" (xxi). Condillac underscores how part of the process of rejecting "innate," "ultimate," and "original" processes of knowledge involves placing more importance on our means of perception; the more attentive we are to something, the more we become aware of our ways of being attentive: "we are always conscious of the impressions made on the soul" (Condillac 31). According to Lissa Roberts, Condillac was an important figure in the rise of "instrumental-ism," a tradition that "involved replacing the 'external world' with 'human nature' as the epistemological and ontological starting point of scientific investigation" (252). Like other eighteenth-century philosophes Condillac believed that nothing gets inscribed on the mind without our being conscious of both its presence and its means of getting there.

The purpose of this essay is to suggest that an important way of looking at one of Dickens's most polemical novels, Nicholas Nickleby (1838–39), is to acknowledge that "to be attentive to a thing, is to be more conscious of the perceptions which it occasions"; and that, following the work of William Hogarth, the novel's commitment to making social problems clear involves a specific focus on those same problems as perceptions. Like much of Dickens's early fiction, Nicholas Nickleby betrays its indebtedness to the Hogarth school of representation. My aim is to situate the work of the artist and his follower within wider-arching, philosophical discussions of self-conscious realism. Of course, as with Hogarth, using the word "realism" in relation to Dickens is a precarious business. The custom of dismissing the mimetic qualities of his work has centered, usually, on its extravagant content and dates back to Dickens's earliest attempts at fiction. Thackeray, for instance, attacked Oliver Twist in 1839 on the basis that its gallery of criminals went beyond the credulity of any intelligent reader. "We recommend the admirer of such scenes," he wrote, "to obtain his knowledge at the fountain-head, and trust more to the people's description of themselves, than to … Dickens's startling, pleasing, unnatural caricatures" (407). Surprisingly, Thackeray seems not to subscribe—in this essay if nowhere else—to the Hogarthian view that caricature and exaggeration provide a way of exemplifying character, rather than existing as part of (or as a detriment [End Page 60] to) an aspiration towards absolute fidelity. In the commentary that accompanied Hogarth's engraving The Bench (1758), the artist wrote:

There are hardly any two things more essentially different than Character and Caracatura. Nevertheless they are usually confounded and mistaken for each other. … It has ever been allow'd that, when a Character is strongly marked in the living Face, it may be considered as an Index of the mind, to express which with any degree of justness in Painting, requires the utmost Efforts of a great Master.

Harry Marten summarizes that "Hogarth's [technique] is that of a strong spotlight on reality, which seems to brighten some natural qualities while casting others into mysterious shadows. The effect is nearly always an intensification of believability rather than a reduction of it in the treatment of character" (Marten, 1976, 293).

Dickens's revealing preface for the 1841 edition of Oliver Twist defends the style more than the content of the novel in a way that echoes Hogarth's ideas on the value of caricature:

But I had never met (except in HOGARTH) with the miserable reality. It appeared to me that to draw a knot of such associates of crime as really do exist, to paint them in all their deformity, in all their wretchedness, in all the squalid poverty of their lives; to shew them as they really are, for ever skulking uneasily through the dirtiest paths of life, with the great, black, ghastly gallows closing up their prospect, turn them where they may; it appeared to me that to do this, would be to attempt something which was greatly needed and which would be a service to society. And therefore I did it as best I could.

(liv)

We know that Dickens was a great admirer of Hogarth. At Gad's Hill, for instance, he had no fewer than 48 prints by the artist hanging on his walls. He saw, according to Michael Slater, "through Hogarthian spectacles" (Slater, 2011, 111) and he believed, as he himself put it, that "Hogarth had many meanings which have not grown obsolete in a century" (John Forster, qtd. in Davis 131). As Malcolm Andrews notes, "Hogarth was his great ideological model, as uncompromising social realist, moral propagandist, and satirist" (2008, 97). The Parish Boy's Progress is an obvious tribute to the artist's cycle prints, which include A Harlot's Progress (1731, 1732) and A Rake's Progress (1735), and in a later preface to Oliver Twist Dickens noted how Hogarth had "compromise[d not] a hair's breadth" (lvi) in his gritty portrayals of contemporary life. Despite the fact that his references to the artist are centered on accuracy of content, which is a subject we will return to, the preface's attention to method suggests that the mode of representing reality is as important, if not more so, than the result. Dickens's [End Page 61] focus is on his own acts of representation: the author will show; he will attempt; he will do his best. Truth in relation to narrative, it seems, describes a method, or a tool, not a result or a product. In accordance with what Hogarth inscribed about The Bench, the preface to Oliver Twist suggests that Dickens's critics had missed the point when they insisted that his characters were "unreal"; they failed to notice how, since Hogarth, caricature was a process designed to make the best, in terms of verisimilitude, of the marks and features that promised to indicate character in an emphatic way; they failed to recognize the instrumentalism of the Hogarthian method employed by Dickens—a method in which caricature represented a negotiation of the filter of the artist's interpretation.

Of course, one of Hogarth's central contributions to the theory and practice of art was, in spite of the dedication to caricature, an insistence on the "empiricist approach to perception" (Woodfield i). In the introduction to The Analysis of Beauty (1753), he complained of his fellow artists that

little or no time has been given for the perfecting of the ideas they ought to have by having thus espoused and adopted their first notions from nothing but imitations. Becoming too often as bigotted to their faults, as their beauties, they at length, in a manner, totally neglect, or at least disregard the works of nature, merely because they do not tally with what their minds are so strongly prepossess'd with.

(4)

Hogarth's frustration was caused by what he called "connoisseurs"—artists like Joshua Reynolds whose work seemed to have little sense of representation as interpretation. Condillac had the same enemy; as Roberts suggests, "Natural man's nemesis was none other than his most extraordinary specimen: the genius who was so revered that other came to study his words rather than his deeds" (255). Indeed, Hogarth's language betrays how he drew on the instrumentalism of men like Condillac; The Analysis of Beauty insists upon "truth" as an aspiration dependent upon the pains of the artist (or the savant) who is intent on arranging his subject in a certain way. What Hogarth disliked was the kind of selective "overem-phasis"—"biggotry" as he called it—which insisted on things being represented exactly as perceived by an artist whose selections were assumed to be faithful. Like Condillac, Hogarth insisted that "truth to nature" required the shaping influence of the interpreter.

Central to this instrumentalist argument in Hogarth is the insistence upon the altering effect of perspective. The Analysis of Beauty recognizes what Elizabeth Deeds Ermarth describes:

We cannot approach discrete objects directly; perception of them is always cluttered by the inescapable presence of the spectator. Something is forever intruding between the object and our grasp—atmosphere, point of [End Page 62] view, distance, angle—so that our knowledge, always distanced from direct apprehension, is always mediate rather than immediate.

(33–34)

Ermarth succeeds in showing how the insistence on the "presence of the spectator" became fundamental to literary realism in the nineteenth century. Far from eliding the perceiver as much as possible, which would become the preoccupation of both French naturalism and scientific objectivity, "realism" insisted upon a new emphasis on the aesthetic and epistemic value of perspective. Ermarth adds:

When quattrocento painters began to use the single vanishing point to organize their pictures, they made their chief formal principle the point of view of a single, fixed spectator: a graphic illustration long before Descartes of that primacy of individual experience over received truths that characterizes realism.

(4–5)

What makes the work of Hogarth "realistic" by these standards is its careful use of perspective, which denies the possibility of an objective view because it provides visual markers of a subjective viewing position. Despite his chaotic and fantastic elements, Hogarth was a master of metered angles, lines as visual cues, and vanishing points. In the 1785 Biographical Anecdotes of William Hogarth, for example, John Nichols recalls how the artist "boasted that he could draw a Serjeant with his pike, going into an alehouse, and his dog following him, with only three strokes" (fig. 1) (63).

Fig 1. "A Serjeant, with his pike, going into an alehouse, and his dog following him, with only three strokes."
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Fig 1.

"A Serjeant, with his pike, going into an alehouse, and his dog following him, with only three strokes."

[End Page 63]

The anecdote is a whimsical one yet it captures something of the importance with which Hogarth viewed the process of "reducing the forms of people and things to an easily memorable system of lines" (Bindman 30). In The Analysis of Beauty, he admitted that his system involved "retaining in my mind lineally such objects as fitted my purpose," and he added that "a gradual lessening is a kind of varying that gives beauty" (Hogarth 17). Beauty is one objective, realism another. Figure 1 insists upon a subjective viewing position: it would be impossible to reduce forms to simple lines like these without an implicit acknowledgment of the viewer's position, a position that results in only a bare amount of detail being perceptible. Hogarth's three lines, laid out with trigonometrical simplicity, embody the artist's dedication to a form of realism that coalesced with the instrumentalism described by Condillac.

On the cover illustration of The Analysis of Beauty (fig. 2), Hogarth represents what he calls "composed variety." "Variety uncomposed … without design," he said, "is confusion and deformity" (16–17). We see the serpentine line of beauty inside a pyramid; this captures something of the "gradual lessening" of perspective that comes from a triangular shape and that is necessary to portray "nature" in a way that is determined by perspective:

The pyramid diminishing from its basis to its point … [is a] beautiful form. So also objects that only seem to do so, though in fact they do not, have equal beauty: thus perspective views, and particularly those of buildings, are always pleasing to the eye.

(16–17)

The larger ship in the foreground of figure 3 is not as interesting or as beautiful, Hogarth says, as the smaller ship in the background. The big ship follows line A which does not create the impression of a vanishing point. The little ship, however, follows trajectory B leading to vanishing point C. This is more beautiful and truer to life because it organizes the subject into a series of visual cues (invisible lines) that guide the eye. What is clear from The Analysis of Beauty is that Hogarth insisted upon artistic arrangement or interpretation as necessary to communicating the interlinking abstractions of truth and beauty. For a picture to be beautiful it had to be true to life and, in order for it to be so, it required a careful arrangement and the philosophical self-awareness that comes from an instrumentalist position. This was not the eighteenth-century equivalent of taking a photograph: the artist had to review each detail for himself, and he had to arrange every line and every shade in such a way that it formed part of a linear journey (a progress) that acknowledged the democratizing influence of subjective perception.

Hence, while the foreground of images such as Gin Lane (1751) (fig. 4) is packed with details, leading "the eye on a wanton kind of chace" (Hogarth 25), their backgrounds offer a careful study of perspective. Notice the straight, carefully-executed angles in most of Gin Lane's buildings and how all visual cues lead us to the point [End Page 64]

Fig 2. William Hogarth, The Analysis of Beauty.
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Fig 2.

William Hogarth, The Analysis of Beauty.

of the undertaker's coffin sign. The Four Stages of Cruelty (1751) (fig. 5) includes The Reward of Cruelty in which the corpse of Nero gets dissected in a theater full of medical students. What makes it an effective picture, by the Hogarthian standards of "composed variety," is its use of symmetry and a diminishing composition. All its lines lead to the horizontal center of the image—a point that corresponds with the implied position of the observer. Perspective is also established by the fact [End Page 65]

Fig 3. Hogarth's ships, showing the importance of trajectory and perspective.
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Fig 3.

Hogarth's ships, showing the importance of trajectory and perspective.

Fig 4. William Hogarth, Gin Lane.
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Fig 4.

William Hogarth, Gin Lane.

[End Page 66]

Fig 5. William Hogarth, The Reward of Cruelty.
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Fig 5.

William Hogarth, The Reward of Cruelty.

that one figure, to the left, meets the eye of the viewer. He points to a criminal's flayed remains and, in so simple an act, makes a complex point about pointing. This character points at a skeleton (which also happens to be pointing) in an image which points, itself, towards a moral lesson about the escalation of rakish behavior. Meaning arrives, in this instance, through the trajectory-imposing perspective of the interpreter. Pointing creates a line, effectively, between the pointer and the pointed at; it also creates a kind of diminishing form because it places the object at a distance from the eye. Like the metered angles of the well-pointed walls of Gin Lane, the lines and visual cues of The Reward of Cruelty all stress the perspective that Hogarth considered fundamental to a truthful representation. [End Page 67]

Hogarth's work is unrealistic, nonetheless, in the sense that perspective is imposed rather than found. This is neither a fault nor an accident. In The Reward of Cruelty no character has his back to the viewer, which signals how subjects are arranged in a way that privileges perception over verisimilitude. We also see a fantastic cauldron bubbling away in the bottom left-hand corner. This would surely be more at home in a painting by Henry Fuseli or a book of fairy tales than in a piece of realist propaganda. Indeed, the eye of Hogarth is realistic and carefully ordered yet the things that fall within the scope of its "visual" power are often pure invention. Harry Marten observes that

objects are often given a rich symbolic dimension by Hogarth. The snarling chandelier in Enthusiasm Delineated [1761], for example, is a clearly symbolic reflection of evangelistic madness; the animated gloves which are shaking hands in Industry and Idleness [1747] symbolize the good which is bred of hard labour; the resemblance of the dead goose to Mary Hackabout in Plate 1 of A Harlot's Progress suggests symbolically the fact that awaits such a young innocent in London.

(1976, 159–60)

Rather than compromising the "truth-to-nature" aspects of Hogarth's designs such elements of fancy complement his sense that the eye of the beholder is a necessary part of representing truth in art. Speaking of Hogarth's contemporary, the Swedish naturalist Carolus Linnaeus, Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison suggest he did not

strive for the self-effacement of latter-day scientists; nineteenth-century botanists would find his pronouncements too pontifical for the "self-abnegation" they demanded of themselves. He, in turn, would have dismissed as irresponsible the suggestion that scientific facts should be conveyed without the mediation of the scientist and ridiculed as absurd the notion that the kind of scientific knowledge most worth seeking was that which depended least on the personal traits of the seeker.

(59)

Similarly, the naturalists of the nineteenth century would have dismissed Hogarth's cauldron as "pontifical" and he, in turn, would have dismissed as irresponsible their suggestion that the subject ought to be conveyed without the mediation of the artist whose job it was to impose direction and purpose. The cauldron, like the admonitory pointing, is a heavy piece of symbolism designed to be the organizing principle of the piece's message; like a caricature it is not designed to be taken literally but as a signal of artistic intention. Indeed, Hogarth's art is all about guides: lines, grotesque caricatures, overt and unsubtle metaphors all testify to the artist's belief that art acts as an usher to a truth in which the discretions of the perceiver ought to be instrumental. [End Page 68]

________

According to Ermarth, "the rationalizing consensus of realism depends, in fiction, on the presence of the narrator" (40). In Dickens's early works, omniscient narrators seek a central figure through whom the details of the story can be given perspective. According to Paul B. Davis, "Both [Hogarth and Dickens] describe life as an apparently linear journey in an essentially human world" (133); Mr. Pickwick, Oliver Twist, Nicholas Nickleby, and Little Nell are all characters who go on literal and figurative journeys, setting out on pilgrimages, indeed, like Bunyan's Christian. As Ian Watt noted about the style of Daniel Defoe, the focus on an individual's journey offers "an assertion of the primacy of individual experience in the novel as Descartes's cogito ergo sum was in philosophy" (15). What I argue is that this focus on a central character allows the novel to assert the primacy of the perceiver's experience, and this, in turn, engages with the instrumentalist ideas that had emerged in the philosophy of men like Condillac and the art of men like Hogarth. The central character, a staple of the novel form, insists upon a perception of narrative events channelled through the filter of human intellection. In Dickens, this approach offers the writing a means of exploring the kinds of epistemological questions that sensationalist philosophy and the empirical tradition threw up.

Indeed, "primacy of individual experience" is what shapes the early works of Dickens. Nicholas Nickleby is, in the words of Marten, "a novel which succeeds in a distinctly Hogarthian manner" (1974, 153). Its hero is a "go-getter" (Parker 159) who sets out on a journey and who comes into contact with a shifting panorama of scenes and characters that are given order by the perspective of his observations and experiences. When he first sees the boys he is to "teach" at Dotheboys Hall, he perceives

pale and haggard faces, lank and bony fingers, children with the countenances of old men, deformities with irons upon their limbs, boys of stunted growth, and others whose long meagre legs would hardly bear their stooping bodies, all crowded on the view together; there were the bleared eye, the hare-lip, the crooked foot, and every ugliness or distortion that told of unnatural aversion conceived by parents for their offspring, or of young lives which, from the earliest dawn of infancy, had been one horrible endurance of cruelty and neglect. There were little faces which should have been handsome, darkened with the scowl of sullen, dogged suffering; there was childhood with the light of its eye quenched, its beauty gone, and its helplessness alone remaining; there were vicious-faced boys, brooding, with leaden eyes, like malefactors in a jail; and there were young creatures on whom the sins of their frail parents had descended, weeping even for the mercenary nurses they had known, and lonesome even in their loneliness.

(82–83)1 [End Page 69]

Nicholas is introduced to a scene that he sets about analyzing with a powerful and seemingly veridical gaze. The repetition of "there was …" and "there were …" creates a sense of horror piling on horror in hysterical excess and is reminiscent of Hogarth's progress pieces. Again in the words of Malcolm Andrews, "the tableau-esque format of the narrative, the attention to telling small details, and the over-arching didactic agenda all derive from Hogarth and from Hogarth's descendants in that graphic tradition" (107).1 Yet in Nicholas Nickleby's out-line of Dotheboys Hall, horror, excess, and probable exaggeration do nothing to lessen the hard-hitting realism of the description. Notice the corporeal aspects of Nicholas's attentions: he sees hare lips, deformed spines, crooked feet, hereditary diseases, and—like the viewers of Hogarth's cycle prints—we are encouraged to make sad deductions from such marks. We know from the prefaces that Dickens wrote for the novel, as well as from Philip Collins's and Michael Slater's research into the author's interest in William Shaw and Yorkshire schools (Collins 98–112; Slater 1982), that the first stages of the novel were meant to "[call] public attention to the system" of northern schooling (xlii):

We hear sometimes of an action of damages against the unqualified medical practitioner, who has deformed a broken limb in pretending to heal it. But, what about the hundreds of thousands of minds that have been deformed for ever by the incapable pettifoggers who have pretended to form them.

(xliv)

As with Hogarth's progress pieces, the world that Dickens wanted to shed light on was a chaotic one; realism, for him (as for Hogarth) was all about exposing disorder; yet the means of doing so was anything but disordered: Nicholas Nickleby filters some of its scenes through the perspective of a single perceiver, a character obsessed, it seems, with corporeal marks which, like Hogarth's lines, organize the polemics of the scene.

Amanpal Garcha, observes that

Nicholas's melodramatic goodness protects and insulates him from precisely the forces that Dickens's descriptive style depicts and embodies: the ever-moving, at times aggressively enervating and destructive, forces of the capitalist market which transforms the bodies and psyches of the classes they touch and which Dickens experienced first hand in his early journalistic career that produced his "incontinent" style. … Nicholas, like Kate and Madeline, appears wholly detached from and alien to the "world of bewildering diversity" that Dickens represents around him.

(150–51)

When Inspector Bucket searches for Lady Dedlock in Bleak House he is described as mounting "a high tower in his mind and look[ing] out far and wide" (696). [End Page 70] Nicholas, however, enjoys no such detachment. Indeed, both the novel and Dickens's subsequent preface make it clear that the hero must shape and distort the very picture he is in charge of relaying. He proves Condillac's view that "to be attentive to a thing, is to be more conscious of the perceptions which it occasions." In the preface Dickens noted:

"If Nicholas be not always found to be blameless or agreeable, he is not always intended to appear so. He is a young man of an impetuous temper and of little or no experience; and I saw no reason why such a hero should be lifted out of nature."

(xlvii-xlviii)

In Oliver Twist it seems as though the parish boy is lifted out of nature; he has the "melodramatic goodness" described by Garcha, and this is what seems to protect him from the murky world he travels through. The comments made in the preface to Nicholas Nickleby, however, suggest that the older, more impulsive hero must get his hands dirty if his characterization is to be in any way instructive.

Throughout the novel, indeed, Nicholas shows an impetuosity of temper which involves him in the scenes he is observing, and these interactions lend the novel some of its more melodramatic and powerful characteristics. Despite his reactions being justified more often than not, his anger—"the wrath of Nicholas" (374)—becomes legendary as the story develops. After theatrically knocking down Mr. Lenville, the tragedian from the company of Mr. Crummles, he says, "be careful … to ascertain your rival's temper" in the future (350). Nicholas's uncle does ascertain the young man's temper; after his niece has reproached him for allowing her to be the subject of an unwelcome seduction plot involving Sir Mulberry Hawk and Lord Verisopht, she meets Ralph's gaze "proudly and firmly" and with a "flashing eye," which prompts the old man to acknowledge "there is some of that boy's blood in you, I see" (341). Miss La Creevy warns Newman Noggs that Nicholas's reaction to Kate's mistreatment will prove anything but temperate:

"Heart alive! … He will do something desperate, Mr Noggs, if you tell him at once. … Depend upon it, … if you are not very careful in breaking out the truth to him, he will do some violence upon his uncle or one of these men that will bring some terrible calamity upon his own head, and grief and sorrow to us all."

(374)

Miss La Creevy's attempt to pacify the wrath of Nicholas fails when the protagonist manages to overhear uncomplimentary references to his sister by Hawk in a public house. Nicholas "fire[s] at once," "burn[s] hot with rage" (381); and deals Hawk several weeks' convalescence in a scene worthy of any stage melodrama.

As with the volcanic passions of Jane Eyre, Nicholas's reactions are a means through which a scene is given a perspective that acknowledges—and makes [End Page 71] artful use of—the imperfections of human perception. As in Brontë's novel, a flawed perspective leads to a self-analytical narration. For example, on the day that Smike is returned to the schoolroom and is about to be beaten by Squeers, Nicholas finally explodes in a scene that signals the hero's frustrations. In the build-up to that scene, Dickens draws out all the similarities between Smike and the other boys at Dotheboys. Like them, he is half-dead and emaciated:

Nicholas hardly dared to look out of the window; but he did so, and the very first object that met his eyes was the wretched Smike: so bedabbled with mud and rain and worn and wild, that, but for his garments being such as no scarecrow was ever seen to wear, he might have been doubtful, even then, of his identity. … With hands trembling with delight, Squeers unloosened the cord; and Smike, to all appearance more dead than alive, was brought into the house and securely locked up in a cellar until such time as Mr Squeers should deem it expedient to operate upon him, in presence of the assembled school.

(140–41)

Smike embodies the sort of unjust reality that Dickens sought to expose in schools like Dotheboys Hall. In a letter to Anna Maria Hall, dated December 1838, he explained how he came up with the idea of Smike:

There is an old Church near the school [Shaw's Academy], and the first grave-stone I stumbled upon on that dreary winter afternoon was placed above the grave of a boy, eighteen long years old, who had died—suddenly, the inscription said; I suppose his heart broke—the Camel falls down 'suddenly' when they heap the last load upon his back—died at that wretched place. I think his ghost put Smike into my head, upon the spot.

(1: 482)

Dickens wished to flesh out the story of George Ashton Taylor, for such was the boy's name (Slater 1982, xxiv), and to use his fiction as a means of telling the realities of the boy's short life. Rather than attempting to provide a detached, photographic view of the details of the scene, he imposes an overtly fictional element in the pantomimic trouncing of Squeers:

Squeers caught [Smike] firmly in his grip; one desperate cut had fallen on his body—he was wincing from the lash and uttering a scream of pain—it was raised again, and again about to fall—when Nicholas Nickleby suddenly starting up, cried "Stop!" in a voice that made the rafters ring. …

"Sit down, beggar!" screamed Squeers, almost beside himself with rage, and seizing Smike as he spoke.

"Wretch," rejoined Nicholas, fiercely, "touch him at your peril! I will not stand by, and see it done. My blood is up, and I have the strength of ten such [End Page 72] men as you. Look to yourself, for by Heaven I will not spare you, if you drive me on!"

"Stand back," cried Squeers, brandishing his weapon.

"I have a long series of insults to avenge," said Nicholas, flushed with passion; "and my indignation is aggravated by the dastardly cruelties practised on helpless infancy in this foul den. Have a care; for if you do raise the devil within me, the consequences shall fall heavily upon your own head!"

He had scarcely spoken, when Squeers, in a violent outbreak of wrath, and with a cry like the howl of a wild beast, spat upon him, and struck him a blow across the face with his instrument of torture, which raised up a bar of livid flesh as it was inflicted. Smarting with the agony of the blow, and concentrating into that one moment all his feelings of rage, scorn, and indignation, Nicholas sprang upon him, wrested the weapon from his hand, and pinning him by the throat, beat the ruffian till he roared for mercy.

(142–44)

The scene offers the kind of melodramatic justice that an "objective" standard of perception would rightly be suspicious of. This is not the work of a narrator who practices the detachment of a latter-day scientist but a self-conscious interpreter whose angry sense of the truth leads the representation into self-conscious caricature. This is an art aware of its own artistry, determined to speak a form of truth by filtering perception through an exaggerated subjectivity.

The novel's keen awareness of perspective also allows Dickens to question, in literary form, the strategies that eighteenth-century philosophes like Condillac considered in nonfiction and Hogarth explored through visual media: namely the means and the strengths and weaknesses through which interpretation is made. From the outset of Nicholas Nickleby Ralph appears to wrestle with Nicholas for the central position in the novel: "From what I have said of this young gentleman," Dickens writes about the villain, "and the natural admiration the reader will immediately conceive of his character, it may perhaps be inferred that he is to be the hero of the work" (5). Ralph is actually offered as an alternative viewpoint from which the events might be interpreted; although our sympathy is never with him in the same way that it is with the villain of the more epistemologically complex Frankenstein (1818), never does Ralph appear in the text without the narrator making a reference to his antithetical position towards his nephew's ways of interpreting the world. "Pooh!" says Ralph at one point, "there is no such thing [as a broken heart]. I can understand a man's dying of a broken neck, or suffering from a broken arm, or a broken head, or a broken leg, or a broken nose; but a broken heart!—nonsense, it's the cant of the day" (22). Ralph's own heart "lay rusting in its cell, beating only as a piece of cunning mechanism, and yielding not one throb of hope, or fear, or love, or [End Page 73] care, for any living thing" (114). His coolness is a far cry from the passions of his nephew:

Ralph would have walked into any poverty-stricken debtor's house, and pointed him out to a bailiff, though in attendance upon a young child's deathbed, without the smallest concern, because it would have been a matter quite in the ordinary course of business, and the man would have been an offender against his only code of morality.

(224–25)

Although the villain's "only code of morality" is business and speculation, he has much in common with the kind of detached objectivity that was the opposite of his nephew's reagent nature. Like a scientist, Ralph has a "cold glistening eye" (211) and he is "no common observer" (454).

In a conversation with Mrs. Nickleby, Ralph's assistant, Newman Noggs, suggests that his master seeks to have complete mastery over him, including over his thoughts:

"I think of a great many things. Nobody can prevent that."

"O yes, I understand you, Mr Noggs," said Mrs Nickleby. "Our thoughts are free, of course. Everybody's thoughts are their own, clearly."

"They wouldn't be, if some people had their way," muttered Newman.

"Well, no more they would, Mr Noggs, and that's very true," rejoined Mrs Nickleby. "Some people are sure to be such - how's your master?"

(121)

The dialogue's transition, from the Orwellian suggestion that those in power seek to read the thoughts of others, to a question about Ralph's well-being, signals that Noggs's master seeks absolute knowledge over others, that he searches for the kind of objectivity enjoyed, seemingly, by Mr. Bucket in the "high tower of his mind." Yet Noggs is a good indication of Ralph's inability to overcome the limits of subjectivity, especially when the clerk has an imaginary pugilistic encounter with his master:

As the usurer turned for consolation to his books and papers, a performance was going on outside his office-door, which would have occasioned him no small surprise, if he could by any means have become acquainted with it.

Newman Noggs was the sole actor. He stood at a little distance from the door, with his face towards it; and with the sleeves of his coat turned back at the wrists, was occupied in bestowing the most vigorous, scientific, and straightforward blows upon empty air. … [In Noggs's] imagination [he] was thrashing to within an inch of his life, his body's most active employer, Mr Ralph Nickleby.

(344) [End Page 74]

The scene is a pantomimic reminder of the beating of Squeers. A caricature worthy of one of Hogarth's engravings, Noggs's grotesqueness tells a truth sounder than any of Ralph's "uncommon" observations. Whereas Ralph would love to read the mind of his clerk, the episode quoted above suggests that there are limits to the power of his "cold glistening eye."

Indeed, throughout the novel Ralph constantly seeks to remove human variables from his means of perception yet repeatedly fails to do so. Smike represents, as noted, a fictional appropriation of a reality Dickens had himself experienced in a Yorkshire churchyard. David Parker observes that he young man continues in this role of artistically-rendered "truth" when he becomes a ghostly "other"—a "dark and melancholy shadow" that haunts Ralph in the closing stages of the text (162).2 Ralph's former clerk Mr. Brooker tracks down the villain in a scene that would be at home in a Gothic novel:

Ralph, usually as quick-sighted as any man, did not observe that he was followed by a shambling figure, which at one time stole behind him with noiseless footsteps, at another crept a few spaces before him, and at another glided by his side; at all times regarding him with an eye so keen and a look so eager and attentive, that it was more like the expression of an intrusive face in some powerful picture or strongly marked dream, than the scrutiny of a most interested and anxious observer.

(525)

The scene is an indication of how Ralph's way of thinking has prevented him from seeing the full picture. Scheming abstractly, he does not notice the incubus pursuing him, much like when he cannot see that he was having a pugilistic encounter with Noggs. Dickens continues: "The sky had been lowering dark for some time and the commencement of a violent storm of rain drove Ralph for shelter to a tree" (525). There, Brooker speaks the usurer's name:

Astonished for the moment, Ralph fell back a couple of paces and surveyed him from head to foot. … He looked again, and the face and person seemed gradually to grow less strange, to change as he looked, to subside and soften into lineaments that were familiar, until at last they resolved themselves, as if by some strange optical illusion, into those of one whom he had known for many years, and forgotten and lost sight of for nearly as many more.

(525)

The characterization of Brooker envisages the moment of reunion that will never take place between Ralph and Smike. The meeting of the villain and his old clerk looks forward to the encounter between Esther Summerson and Lady Dedlock and refers back to Frankenstein, where the protagonist is pursued [End Page 75] by the secrets of his past creation and the living embodiment of his failed materialism.

Shortly after this encounter Ralph loses £10,000. He also begins to feel himself haunted: "What is this," he says, "that hangs over me, and I cannot shake off? … what rest have I, constantly haunted by his heavy shadow of—I know not what—which is its worst character!" (703). The usurer is now a long way from the "born genius" that his acquaintance Arthur Gride describes him as (565). Weakened by his newly-perceived ignorance, he begins to feel persecuted: "they all watch me, now" (703). Such forebodings culminate in the brilliant chapter where he prepares himself for suicide:

The night was dark and a cold wind blew, driving the clouds furiously and fast before it. There was one black gloomy mass that seemed to follow him: not hurrying in the wind with the others, but lingering sullenly behind, and gliding darkly and stealthily on. He often looked back at this, and, more than once, stopped to let it pass over, but, somehow, when he went forward again, it was still behind him, coming mournfully and slowly up, like a shadowy funeral train.

(735)

Ralph is overtaken by "some fellows full of drink," including a "weazen, humpbacked man" who begins to dance:

He was a grotesque fantastic figure, and the few bystanders laughed. Ralph himself was moved to mirth, and echoed the laugh of one who stood near and who looked round in his face. When they had passed on, and he was left alone again, he resumed his speculation with a new kind of interest; for he recollected that the last person who had seen the suicide alive, had left him very merry, and he remembered how strange he and the others had thought that, at the time.

(735)

This is the only time Ralph genuinely laughs in the novel; it is a carnivalesque moment—an overt injection of the literary in the scene that underscores the villain's more material failures of speculation.

The downfall of Ralph forms part of a plan the novel has for questioning how any given reality can be relied upon when it does not have a sense of the organizing, perspective-giving principle of the interpreter. Like Condillac and Hogarth, Dickens appears to believe that "to be attentive to a thing" involves a specific interest in the same thing as a perception rather than a given or an actual truth. This is why the realities of the Yorkshire schools create a reaction when they come into contact with the central character: Nicholas's central position, like the lines of a Hogarth composition, [End Page 76] gives those scenes a meaning and perspective that stresses the subjectivity of perception. Finally, the characterization of Ralph illustrates how the instrumentalism of human perception is part of the mechanism through which art is central to the truth.

Andrew Mangham

Andrew Mangham is Associate Professor of Victorian Literature and Culture at the University of Reading (UK). His most recent book is Dickens's Forensic Realism: Truth, Bodies, Evidence (2016).

NOTES

1. Andrews is writing about Sketches by Boz here; he sees this style as typical in the early works of Dickens.

2. John Bowen writes, "the most disturbing haunting of the book is Ralph's by Smike, not a dead father who haunts his son [as in Hamlet], but a living son who haunts his father" (120, 125).

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