"Muttered thunder": A Miltonism in Little Dorrit and The Mystery of Edwin Drood

According to Peter Ackroyd, Dickens conceived of his literary vocation in Miltonic terms, seeing "the novelist's role as something like that of the nineteenth-century scientist–to make clear, by general laws of force and energy, the ways of God to men" (466).¹ But while individual critics and editors have noted Dickens's allusions to Milton's poetry throughout his works, it is a matter of some surprise to note that the extent of Dickens's engagement with Milton has yet to be the subject of sustained critical attention. Of the useful studies of that tricky idea of "influence" (and which each problematize "influence" to greater or lesser degrees), there are books on Dickens and Shakespeare, on Dickens and the sentimental tradition, and Dickens and the romantics, but little work on Dickens's Milton, all the more surprising given the wealth of interest in Dickens and religion.²

Some of the stakes of such an oversight have been usefully investigated in an article in Dickens Quarterly on the naming of Great Expectations (1860–61), where Jerome Meckier notes the fact that the title was derived in part from Milton's Paradise Lost (1667).³ There, Adam comes to understand "Why our great expectation should be call'd / The seed of Woman" (12.378–79). By recognizing that Dickens is "pluralising" Milton's "expectation," Meckier argues that he sought to "enlarge […] Pip's capacity for self-deception" (250). As Meckier notes, Miltonic echoes are also present throughout the text of Great Expectations, most notably at the end of the first book, concluding with the image, "the world lay spread before me," (158; bk. 1, ch. 19) echoing the final lines of Paradise Lost:

The World was all before them, where to chooseThir place of rest, and Providence thir guide:They hand in hand with wandring steps and slow,Through Eden took thir solitarie way.

(12.646–70)

There is an irony, of course, in Pip's allusion, and also in the recollection of this same passage in the final paragraph of Great Expectations, where Pip takes Estella by her hand and leaves the "old garden" of their past (480; bk. 1, ch. 20), stepping out into an uncertain future.⁴ Meckier shows how noting the Miltonic allusion helps to better unpack some of the key passages and themes of Dickens's novel. In a similar vein, the present note concerns another allusion to Paradise Lost in Dickens's corpus which has hitherto been missed by his critics.

That Dickens was fascinated by the image of "great expectations" thwarted or perverted, where the postlapsarian journey out of Eden and into the unknown becomes ironized, can be seen by the reuse of this same image drawn from Paradise Lost in The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870). In chapter eight, "Daggers Drawn," Jasper reacts to his nephew's own great expectations:

"Look at him," cries Jasper, stretching out his hand admiringly and tenderly, though rallyingly too. "See where he lounges so easily, Mr. Neville! The world is all before him where to choose. A life of stirring work and interest, a life of change and excitement, a life of domestic ease and love! Look at him!"

(58; ch. 8)

As in Great Expectations, this passage mobilizes irony, since the reader may already have their suspicions that none of this lies before Edwin: indeed, he will shortly split from Rosa, thereafter going missing, presumed dead. Moreover, if we assume Jasper's role in the crime (with this passage coming in the course of a combustible meeting where Edwin and Neville almost come to blows, and which Jasper will later use as evidence that the latter has played some role in his nephew's disappearance), then the observant reader may also suspect that Jasper's comment here is knowingly ironic. It seems likely that Jasper has already determined that this Miltonic promise is not one which Edwin will get to realize. Nor indeed, is this the only allusion to Milton that Dickens makes in the course of Edwin Drood. In chapter...