Lecture 18- The Dickensian Worldview

Hello student, I'm Professor Smita Jha and I'm here today to discuss the Dickensian worldview with a special reference to Victorian age. We all know that Charles Dickens is one of the most important novelists of this age. So what is the worldview from the point of view of Dickens we should take note of. So the industrial revolution which began in Europe in the late 18th century and early 19th century quickly spread to England. The late 19th century and early 20th century brought substantial industrial growth in England. Many Britishers left small towns to work in factories. By 1860 a large portion of the British population lived in urban areas and one-third of the nation's income came from manufacturing. English had grown into an industrial capitalist society by then. In this type of society the class division is between the factory owner and the worker. The workers make goods in return for wages. They do not own these goods. The goods are sold to the market at a profit. Hence even to get the goods made by them the workers have to spend money. The system robs the workers of any agency in the process of production. Dickens has studied at Wellington House Academy London from 1824 to 1827 and then at Mr. Dosh in his school in 1827. From 1827 to 1828 he was a law office clerk. Later he worked as a shorthand reporter at Doctor's Commons. He also wrote for True Sun, Mirror of Parliament and the Morning Chronicle. In the 1840s Dickens has started the weekly periodical Master Humphrey's Clock and edited the London Daily News. Dickens' career as a writer of fiction started in 1833 when his short stories and essays appeared in periodicals. His sketches by Boz and the Pickwick Papers were published in 1836. The Pickwick Papers were stories about a group of odd individuals and their travels. Dickens' novels first appeared in monthly installments including Oliver Twist, Nicholas Nickleby and The Old Curiosity Shop. His letter works include David Copperfield where Dickens used his own experiences of work in a factory, Bleak House, A Tale of Two Cities set in the years of the French Revolution and Great Expectations. From the 1840s Dickens spent much time travelling and campaigning against many of the social evils of his time. He also wrote pamphlets, plays and letters. In the 1850s Dickens became the founding editor of Household Worlds and its successor all the year round. Dickens' second novel Oliver Twist tells the story of the orphan Oliver set against the underside of the London criminal world. Published in monthly parts in Bentley's Miss Laney the novel was illustrated by George Crickskank. In this novel Dickens departed from the merry world of Pickwick Papers and targeted the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834. Dickens was severely criticised for introducing criminals and prostitutes in Oliver Twist to which he replied I saw no reason when I wrote this book why the very drags of life so long as there is speech did not offend the ear should not serve the purpose of moral at least as well as its fraught and cream. Dickens often changed his focus adopted different visual points and used frames that transformed the appearance of viewed objects. Dickens' aesthetics encompassed care for detail and the contrasting effects of the bird's eye views. Dickens also played with clever optical effects to intrigue and occasionally mislead his reader. Edmondson focuses on how Dickens's use of bird's eye views enables him to devise novel and intense modes of being. His reimagining of the city through the remote city escape or urban skyline testifies to a heightened awareness of the deeply troubled self. The remotely perceived urban reality both grants the subject the illusion of control and freedom and exposes him to a nightmarish and confusing shock. In Barnby Rudge, Dickens places Gabriel Varden in an interesting state of in-betweenness. Varden is returning to London after a visit to Maypole. Engagement with the city first from a distance then at close quarters induces a bewildering sense of belonging and non-belonging which Dickens transforms into an original index of personality. Opposite to this in the old curiosity shop Nell and her grandfather successfully end up imposing their alternative reality of the remote city escape by gradually distancing themselves from the city. Thus Dickens's characters either retreat to their inner escapes or remain suspended in between their expectation and experience of the city. Dickens's writing starts with de-centering the viewer, removing his sense of mastery and all his certainties. In his work looking at the world is a reflexive act which involves being looked at in return. It shows the difficulty of ever reaching what there is to be seen, the non-empirically visible and which is nevertheless what attracts an attempt to describe. In both the viewer is no longer the mastermind. In some of Dickens's texts of the 1840s sight impairment and its resulting lack of prospects in the blind character with the capacity to grasp the essence of truth and reach epiphanic vision. This Dickensian dialectic of the landscape and inscape is similarly acknowledged by authors as Wilkie Collins in Poor Miss Finch, Andre Geid in La Symphony Pastoral and Charlie Chaplin in City Lights. Dickens also makes multi-dimensional use of paradox of the blind person's body. On the one hand it is metaphorically represented as at once a tomb-like reality and an open book. The character's physical blindness is what accounts, although melodramatically, for her sensitiveness and acuteness of perception. If the initial focus of Dickensian prospects was on sight, John O. Jordan has argued that hearing is no less central to a better appreciation of Dickens's alertness to the world around him. After recording Dickens's genuine interest in the rather eccentric theory of sound advanced by his friend, the mathematician Charles Babbage, Jordan comes to insightful conclusions about the novelist's aesthetics in the 1840s. Jordan engages in a fascinating taxonomy of sonic elements, including human speech and voice, more often than not a startling dissociated from the body. In The Old Curiosity Shop, a particularly noisy novel, arguably in the process Jordan establishes within the broad range of Dickens's imagination, his auditory imagination and his subtle, varied use of strategies such as metonymy. Thus, Jordan suggests, Master Humphrey's mansion can be constructed as a kind of preter natural sound storage space, as well as bewildering replication of the structure of human hearing. Jordan's study of sound escape in The Old Curiosity Shop leads him to the fascinating conclusion that narrative omniscience should be seen as a form not only of visual power, but also of hearing power. In his 2002 book, The High Price of Materialism, psychologist Tim Kasser seeks to understand the relationship between the good life and materialism through the following questions. What happens to our well-being when our desires and goals to attain wealth and accumulate possessions become prominent? What happens to the quality of our lives when we value materialism? These pressing 21st century questions are not so different from the questions that Charles Dickens struggled with as he attempted to define authentic happiness. The good life in a period dominated, according to Christopher Herbert, by a capitalist cult of money-getting. Dickens engages in a sharp critique of materialism in his novels. Even a surface reading of his novels will reveal as much. What remains fascinating, however, is the degree to which Dickens counters the illusory appeal of material success with a theorization of the good life, what Greek philosophers called eudaimonia. In three of his most overtly economic novels, Dombey and Son, Little Dorrit, and Our Mutual Friend, Dickens flatly rejects a materialistic approach to happiness, privileging instead a life that focuses on meaningful relationship and non-alienating work. Through this vision of good life, Dickens champions a process-oriented internal mode of satisfaction as a powerful antidote to the false materialism of a silver-plated age. This vision locates Dickens, the social critic, as a figure who looks both backward and forward, for it looks back to a virtuous model of happiness that precedes the new consumerist ethos of the 18th century and also anticipates the positive psychology of Seligman, who establishes three possible paths to happiness. First, the pleasant life, second, the good life, and the third, meaningful life. Dickens concludes that the pleasant life, fuelled by materialistic concern, is the least likely to result in a continuing and sustained happiness because it is determined by external factors. Whereas, the good and meaningful life lies within the agency of even the most powerless characters, the Florence Dombey's, Emmy Dorrit's, and Jenny Ren's of the world. In Dickens's early novel David Copperfield, the perennial debtor Mr. McAvoy defines happiness in distinctly materialistic terms. Annual income 20 pounds, annual expenditure 19, and 6 result happiness. Annual income 20 pounds, annual expenditure 20 pounds, ought, and 6 result misery. This definition of happiness mirrors the concept of hedonic well-being. What psychological researcher A. S. Waterman, S. J. Swartz, and R. Conti characterize as the positive effects that accompany getting or having the material objects and action opportunities one wishes to purchase or to experience. This formulation took centre stage following the materialist philosophy and new consumerist ethos of the 18th century. The key to happiness was located outside of the individual. It was bound up with one's relationship to an external object, money. This notion reflects the dominant ethos that Frederick Engels had already noticed in 1845. Engels wrote, quote, the middle classes in England have become the slaves of the money they worship. They really believe that all human beings and indeed all living things and inanimate objects have a real existence only if they make money or help to make it. Their sole happiness is derived from gaining a quick profit. They feel pain only if they suffer a financial loss. For Deakins, as Audrey Zafi notes, in The Affective Life of the Average Man, Macabre's comment is symptomatic of a society gone astray. A society to which money is so crucial that a confusion between money and happiness as in the imagined substitution of one indispensable substance for another might sometimes understandably occur. In the fictional world of Deakins's novels, the simple hedonic wisdom of the debtor Mr. Macabre is indeed presented as mistaken. While Deakins seems to agree with the idea that external goods are indifferent to be preferred, materialism is not in fact the path to happiness. Instead, Deakins promotes the tradition of the good life, especially in his economic novel. According to psychologist Richard M. Ryan and his colleagues, eudaimonic conceptions of happiness focus on the content of one's life and the processes involved in living well, whereas hedonic conception of well-being focus on a specific outcome, namely the attainment of positive effect and the absence of pain. As manifested in 21st century psychological approaches, the eudaimonic concept of happiness is not associated with the material world but instead with virtue or one's act of making the right choices. The key difference from hedonic well-being, according to Edward, Deakey and Ryan, is that eudaimonia concerns how one lives one's life rather than well-being outcome per se. Happiness in this formulation is about process, not product. Deakins examines the relationship between happiness and materialism carefully in the economically preoccupied Dombey and Son. And this novel reveals a rejection of the hedonic model of happiness as well as an endorsement of the eudaimonic concept. Commodity-driven happiness characterized by unrestrained consumption is shown in this novel to be illusory. When Edith tours Mr. Dombey's home before the wedding, for example, it is clear that wealth will not provide happiness. Deakins depicts this scene as slowly and thoughtfully did Edith wander alone through the mansion of which she was so soon to be the lady. And little heed took she of all the elegance and splendour it began to display. The incongruity between such a situation and happiness is emphasized by all-seeing Deakinsian narrator whose voice breaks in lamenting, Oh, Edith, it were well to die, indeed, at such a time, better and happier far, perhaps to die so, Edith, than to live on to the end. Reliance on an external source for happiness is problematic for Mr. Dombey as well, notwithstanding his secure financial position at the beginning of the novel. After Edith elopes with Cracker, Dombey feels the negative effects of replying on the world and its opinions for one's happiness, for the withdrawal of approval can just as easily become a source of misery. The narrator mentions what the world thinks of him, how it looks at him, what it sees in him, and what it says this is the haunting demon of his mind. Happiness eludes Dombey at this point in the novel, because it is dependent upon other people's mind, which he cannot always control. At this moment of isolation, when Mr. Dombey and the world are along together, he realizes that money and the status that it brings cannot buy happiness. In this respect, Dombey senior appears to closely anticipate the hypothesis of Richard Ryan and colleagues, published in 2008 articles in the Journal of Happiness Studies. As per Ryan et al., the more directly one aims to maximize pleasure and avoid pain, the more likely one is to produce instead a life bereft of depth, meaning, and community. Prescriptions based on maximizing pleasure are too often associated with dead-end routes to wellness, such as selfishness, materialism, objectified sexuality, and ecological destructiveness. In the novel, Deakins narrates this route step by step, as David W. Toyce notes in his study of domesticity. In the novel, Dombey's prideful and obsessive devotion to his wealth only leads, in this Victorian novel, to his downfall, the destruction of his business, the collapse of his health, and the loss of everything that is meaningful to him. In Dombey and Son, Deakins contrasts his patriarch's ineffectual pathway to happiness with a second and more sustaining framework. The second model, represented by the innocent Florence Dombey and her inexhaustible sea of love, shows a route to happiness that is achieved, in part, by disengaging from the material world. For example, on Florence's wedding day, she thinks only of personal relationship and not of economic factors. The book depicts the scene where she walks with Walter as riches are uncovering in shops, jewels, gold, silver, flash, in the goldsmith's sunny windows. But they go on lovingly together, lost to everything around, thinking of no other riches and no prouder home than they have now in one another. Florence's detachment from the materialism of London society is emphasised, too, by her immediate journey by sea where she is quite literally unmoved from the material world that connects her to her father's house. As she sits with her new husband Walter, she experiences an overload of emotions and exclaims, Oh Walter, dearest love, I am so happy. This outpouring of feeling is not just for love of him, but also because of a vast connectedness with humanity. The narrator states that the voices in the waves are always whispering to Florence in their ceaseless murmuring of love, of love eternal and illimitable, not bounded by the confines of this world or by the end of time, but ranging still beyond the sea, beyond the sky, to the invisible country far away. Unlike the material world, which traps Mr. Dombey in his unhappiness, the boundless sea unleashes a great wave of happiness within Deakins's heroine. The economy of sentiment proves in his instance to be richer than the economy of money, for it involves a way of living that is focused on what is intrinsically worthwhile to human beings. As the novel reaches its close, Deakins dramatically illustrates the permanency of this kind of happiness as opposed to the fragile pleasure built within an economy of money, which can fall victim to bankruptcy. In the end, the house of Dombey and son lies empty, while his worldly riches vanish, Florence does not change. Deakins writes that at the end of nothing is left about the house but scattered leaves of catalogues, litres, scraps of straw and hay, and a battery of pewter pots behind the hall door. The house is a ruin and the rats fly from it. For Mr. Dombey, happiness cannot be achieved by participating in the global marketplace, but instead by finally connecting with his daughter. According to Seligman, how important money is to you, more than money itself, influences your happiness. Materialism seems to be counterproductive at all levels of real income. People who value money more than other goals are less satisfied with their income and with their lives as a whole, although precisely why is a mystery. Deakins fiction gives us a similar conclusion. This can also be observed in Deakins's novel, Little Dorrit, which has an especially familiar ring for 21st century readers. In this now familiar saga of investment gone wrong, Deakins returns to the exploration of the delicate relationship between money, happiness and human relationships. And once again, good life prevails as the only viable source of authentic or lasting happiness. Amit Dorrit embodies the good and virtuous life in the face of vast external changes of circumstance. This novel suggests that happiness is not in fact about changing the external world, but instead about looking within for satisfaction. The streets are still roaring with the noisy and eager and the arrogant and the forward and the vain. But Arthur and Little Dorrit walk through this unescaped reciprocal human relationship underscored by the image of Emmy and Arthur hand in hand take over and stand up against the din of the competitive materialistic world. Like so many of Deakins's other novels, happiness is not about material comfort at all, although he never lets readers forget what lack of comfort feels like, but rather about personal development and deep human connections. Deakins again explores the idea that true happiness must originate from within. In his last completed novel, Our Mutual Friend, in this novel, the Veneerians embody the values of materialism through their ridiculous consumption. Deakins mercilessly exposes the shallowness of this worldview. It is clear from the moment these characters are introduced that a single-minded quest for material possession results in an absurdly disconnected life. Mr. and Mrs. Veneering are introduced as brand new people in a brand new house in a brand new quarter of London. Everything about the Veneering was a speck and a span new. All their furniture was new, all their friends were new, all their servants were new, their plate was new, their carriage was new, their harness was new, their horses were new, their pictures were new, they themselves were new. The reliance on money rather than personal relationship is shown when the Veneerians close friends. The Lamblers are found out to be penniless. Readers learn that near the end of the novel, this will also be the fate of Veneering. Unlike the redeemed bankrupt Mr. Dombey, these characters do not have the good fortune of knowing a loving Florence, whose economy of sentiment would allow them a sustaining happiness. Thus, according to Deakins, happiness does not arise through the acquisition of wealth or good. Instead, it lies within an economy of sentiment, in the individual's ability to connect emotionally with those that he or she encounters within the vast sea of humanity. Importantly, this is a happiness that is potentially available to anyone. Deakins also characterizes the work of writing and the work of reading as a shared experience of warmth and earnestness that forges the human bonds which have the potential to lay the ground for sustaining happiness. Dombey and son, Little Dorrit and our mutual friend, show the cruelty of the marketplace and the suffering that it can cause. At the same time, they show the way to survive and triumph over the dehumanization of external circumstances. Charles Deakins possessed throughout his life a simple, sincere and above all practical faith, uninterested in matters of doctrine and petty sectarian squabble. He passionately believed that the task of the church as a body and its members was to leave out the example of Christ. This was especially the case with regard to social justice and the plight of the poor. Christianity for him was not about ritual or formal religious observance, but a matter of individual conscience and attitude of heart which manifested itself in actions rather than words. The author's personal beliefs were rooted in the teaching of New Testament in general and in the four gospels in particular. This devotion to an altruist religion that professed love for the humankind enriched the work of Deakins who continuously worked for the upliftment of the poor and gave voice to those unheard in the industrial capitalist England of his era. With this, I conclude the present discussion on the Deakinsian worldview. Let us meet in another lecture with another point of view. Thank you.