Revising Codes: Education, Empathy and the Case for Bradley Headstone

An experienced reader of Dickens might be forgiven for taking Bradley Headstone as just another instance of the vicious Dickensian teacher. Headstone begins well enough in Our Mutual Friend, serving as an eminently “decent” mentor to Charley Hexam after Lizzie spirits the boy away to school (217; bk. 2, ch. 1). Thereafter, he becomes obsessed with Lizzie, stalks his rival Eugene Wrayburn, and generally spends the novel weltering in blood. When Lizzie rejects his proposal of marriage, he brings “his clenched hand down upon the [coping] with a force that laid the knuckles raw and bleeding” (398; bk. 2, ch. 15). For the next several chapters, the narrator says, he “buffet[s] with opposing waves to gain the bloody shore,” inciting himself to murder with a “perverse pleasure akin to that which a sick man sometimes has in irritating a wound” (546; bk. 3, ch. 11). As he inches closer to attacking Eugene, he begins getting violent nosebleeds and tells Rogue Riderhood, “I can’t keep it back. It has happened twice – three times – four times – I don’t know how many times – since last night. I taste it, smell it, see it, it chokes me, and then it breaks out like this” (638; bk. 4, ch. 1). So savagely does he then beat Eugene that, even in the dark, Lizzie can trace “the drops and smears” of blood to the water’s edge; meantime, Headstone returns to the lock and slashes his own hand so that he can shake the incriminating blood onto Rogue’s clothes (699; bk. 4, ch. 6). Headstone is a terrible man, and the only one of the novel’s villains whom Dickens invites us to take wholly seriously. He has none of Rogue’s caricaturish flourishes nor Silas Wegg’s comic touches. He appalls because of the unremitting intensity of his character and the inexorability of his violence. Very few of Dickens’s characters – Bill Sykes, Madame Defarge, perhaps John Jasper – menace so entirely as the schoolmaster.

Yet Headstone is not just another incarnation of Dickens’s familiar type, and for a simple reason: despite his obvious faults and murderous narrative arc, Our Mutual Friend never actually suggests that he is a bad teacher. He is not, like Wackford Squeers or Mr. Creakle, deliberately cruel to his pupils. He is not incompetent like Mr. Wopsle’s great-aunt, ludicrously pedantic like Mr. M’Choakumchild, or misguided like Dr. Blimber. In one instance, before meeting Lizzie, he does object to Charley’s observation that his sister is full of those “fancies” that she reads in the fire (231; bk. 2, ch. 1). But Charley excels under Headstone’s instruction, earning his certificate and hatching prudent designs to marry a respectable schoolmistress – the very path, Headstone tells Lizzie, he ought to have taken himself. Even in Book 3, Headstone’s reputation stands high enough that, at Mortimer Lightwood’s suggestion, John Rokesmith hires him to teach Sloppy. We eventually see Headstone in his own classroom, too, when Rogue tracks him there and quizzes the students about “the diwisions of water” and what can be fished up from a river (794; bk. 4, ch. 15). Headstone has by then attacked Eugene and learned that he survived, so that even as he teaches he cannot stop reliving the assault, imagining “doing the deed and doing it better,” and sometimes lapsing into vacant fits before his students (709; bk. 4, ch. 7). Still, the students pass Rogue’s catechism with flying colors, and they retain affection enough for Headstone that they seem “in alarm for him” when they notice the “slouching man of forbidding appearance standing in the midst of the school” (792; bk. 4, ch. 15). Professionally speaking, Headstone seems the equal of Dickens’s best teachers – of Mr. Mell, Dr. Strong, or the Misses Donny. In another novel, this hard-working pauper lad-made-good might be the protagonist, or at least a positive minor character; if not an Oliver Twist or David Copperfield, then at least a Tommy Traddles. Instead, he is an emotional and moral abyss, nearly inhuman...