Crocodile Tears and Beaver-Hat Hearts: Weeping, Authenticity, and Emotional Edification in Dickens's Early Fiction

Charles dickens's fiction suggests that tears need not be hidden and can even be therapeutic. In Great Expectations (1860–61), published at the height of the author's fame, Pip whistles nonchalantly as he leaves Joe and Biddy to travel to London, only to weep as soon as he is out of sight of his home. He reflects, "we need never be ashamed of our tears, for they are rain upon the blinding dust of earth, overlying our hard hearts. I was better after I had cried, than before—more sorry, more aware of my own ingratitude, more gentle" (160). Dickens's earlier fiction prepares extensive foundations for this assertion of the didactic value of bodily fluids, moving far beyond the standard dichotomy of taboo tears and shows of sentiment to portray tears and their release in surprisingly sophisticated and scientific ways. Anthony Trollope, Dickens's rival, famously derided him as "Mr Popular Sentiment" (200), mocking the "make 'em laugh, make 'em cry" manipulation he perceived at work in Dickens's early novels.¹ The most extensive accounts of crying in and about Dickens's early fiction relate to the 1840s Christmas Books and The Old Curiosity Shop (1840–41). Little Nell comforts her grandfather when he cries (see fig. 1), and, in the 1840s, grown men reported weeping copiously over her early death.² Later, her death was met with laughter or revulsion. Algernon Charles Swinburne found the character of Nell wholly unnatural—not angelic but "a monster as inhuman as a baby with two heads" (183).³ Recent readings of these texts have formed part of a broader reassessment of a particularly intricate area of the

Fig 1.

George Cattermole, Little Nell as Comforter.

history of emotion: Victorian sentimentality.⁴ This forum essay focuses on two other novels, Oliver Twist (1837–39) and Dombey and Son (1846–48), which have yet to receive such extensive treatment in reassessments of sentiment and emotion. Their publication dates, at the beginning and end of Dickens's early novel-writing period, respectively, allow us to place these new readings of weeping scenes in the context of the author's evolving negotiation of complex theories about the emotional body, some of which did not emerge in physiological and psychological writings until several decades later.

Dickens's early fictional writings, from Sketches to Dombey, periodically present "fly on the wall" views of domestic scenes in which alleged masculine virtues, such as pride, stoicism, and resilience, are re-presented as cold, inhumane, and even inhuman. Mr. Bumble, the parish beadle in Oliver Twist, evidently considers himself a manly stoic and is proud of his immunity to his wife's "paroxysm of tears":

[T]ears were not the things to find their way to Mr. Bumble's soul; his heart was waterproof. Like washable beaver hats that improve with rain, his nerves were rendered stouter and more vigorous, by showers of tears, which, being tokens of weakness, and so as tacit admissions of his own power, pleased and exalted him.

(296)

This beaver-hat heart not only blocks appeals to sympathy but actively repels them. When his wife attempts to soften him with a counterfeit display of emotion, crying "crocodile tears" (51),⁵ she only strengthens his resolve. She had "tried the tears, because they were less troublesome than a manual assault; but she was quite prepared to make a trial of the latter mode," finding that her initial strategy is ridiculed (297).

By the time Dickens began Dombey and Son, he had six children under the age of nine, and weeping had become a feature of his family life. Mr. Dombey runs his business on logic and efficiency, applying the same principles to his family life. In the opening pages of the novel, his wife dies after giving birth to a son. Anticipating her death, Dombey senses that "he would be very sorry, and that he would find something gone from among his plate and furniture, and other household possessions, which … could not be...