THE PORTRAYALOFOLDER ADUTS IN THE WRITING S OF CHARLES DICKENS

 AN INNOCENT ABROAD, A CARING FATHER AND AN OLD SPINSTER: Portrayal of age and ageing in Pickwick Papers

[ 3rd Instalment]

                                                                  

The focus of this final instalment commences with a brief look at some of the lesser characters and what we can learn from the wider age assumptions and presumptions in late Georgian and early Victorian England, which might have influenced Dickens the young adult writer. 

MR WARDLE - an elderly country yeoman

It would be unfair to look at this caring father and brother of Rachel as a lessor older character given, not only just the fact he is an elderly country yeoman and owner of Manor Farm at Dingly Dell but his portrayal is of interest to us. Dickens, of Wardle, writes that he is "energetic and generous", plus we especially note that he alongside Mr Perker his lawyer and Mr Pickwick challenges the duplicitous con artist Alfred Jingle at the White Heart Inn. The narrative implies, as well as provides evidence for, a fatherly paternalistic approach to Rachel, but perhaps within a critical parent ego state! Also, one must ask: is there ageism here?

" you, Rachel, at a time of life when you ought to know better, what do you mean running away with a vagabond, disgracing your family, and making yourself misurable. Get on your bonnet and come back- your 50 if you're an hour and when the humane Mr Pickwick asks the landlady to bring her a glass of water he passionatly exclaims " A GLASS of water....Bring a bucket, and throw it all over her..It'll do her good and she richly deservs it"!

Wardle perhaps clearly reflects again Dickens's imaginary idealized old age. One of contentment, generosity, relative wealth and living within a loving family there in Camalot. Dingly Dell was Gads Hill and Mr Wardle and Dickens projecting himself in later life. It would be fair to say, however, that he also portrayed old age throughout his novels in the context of poverty, hardship, criminality, sexual deviancy and degeneracy as the following illustrates. 

DOBSON AND FOGG 

Whilst waiting in the law offices of these two reprobates with Sam, they overhear clerks talking about the underhand practices that exist in what Dickens describes as a "dingy house" located on the edges of Cornhill. He describes them in the following terms. Of Fogg as an "elderly, pimply-faced,vegetable-diet sort of man". Dobson fares a little better " plump, portly, stern and loud". It is probable that Dickens as a teenager had, as a court reporter, witnessed sharp and dishonest lawyers and never throughout his life had a favourable opinion of the law or those that practised it. We can only speculate why he portrayed Dodson and Fogg as "elderly" in the context of moral corruption, but there is a general consensus that he was reflecting his direct experience. Donald Hawes references that a decade following the publication of Pickwick  " Dickens noted with satisfaction that 'legal reforms have pared the claws of Messrs Dobson and Fogg'.

THE OLD MAN'S TALE [ "The Queer Client" ] 

This brief story is one of the Interpolated Tales and immediately follows the chapter about Dobson and Fogg picking up the theme of unscrupulous law firms. A group of clerks are chatting about their law chambers in a pub and a customer ( the old man) overhears them and recounts the story of George Heyling (the strange client). It, along with all the Tales inserted into the Pickwick narrative allows Dickens to dramatically contrast characterization and settings which is a well known literary technique to explore ideas, themes, and for Dickens, social issues. The contrast between the silliness and comedy of the Pickwickians and this story of revenge, horror and a debtors prison is an example of this young author demonstrating, early in his career, how to give his caricatures depth. It is no accident that the prison is the Marshalsea where his own father had been imprisoned. 

The prisoner George Heyling has recently inherited from his father a fortune allowing him to be released from prison, but he has suffered greatly throughout his young/mid-adulthood. Destitution and poverty led to the direct loss of his wife and young child. He discovers that both his father and father in law were wealthy and had done nothing to support his family. He seeks revenge, which is at the heart of the Tale as he sees himself as the "victim of a ruthless, unforgiving old man". Heyling allows his child brother in law to drown and financially ruin his father in law.

The notion of redemption and revenge, in an age where the status of older adults was linked to wealth, success, and benevolence to others, is a theme picked up later. It is also worth mentioning that in the context of The Pickwick Papers, Dickens may well have been reflecting the standard late Georgian ( and certainly later the Victorian) view which either romanticized and admired older people or considered them the objects of ridicule and contempt. Nothing changes. What is reasonable to assume, however, is that for Dickens as a young adult his perception and attitude to age and ageing was moulded by his early life experiences as a child/ teenager, his career in journalism and his personality ( remember he was always the dramatist whether when writing or treading the boards)! Was Dickens a revengeful person? He was certainly passionate, and arguably, reflected these qualities which he poured into his novels and plays throughout his life. I found the Queer Client the most fascinating of chapters for these reasons. 

      

DR SLAMMER: MRS BUDGER

It is worth looking at these two portrayals together given their position and role in the Pickwick story. Dr Slammer is described in such a way that more than tells us he was in his later years. Dickens does not state his age but describes him as balding, an army man who is jealous when he sees Mrs Budger, " a little old widow" dancing with whom he mistakingly takes as Mr Winkle. It is suggested that Dickens modelled him on the second husband of an aunt. The erasability, aggressiveness and jealousy together with his physical appearance, taken together with the portrayal of  Mrs Budger could be seen as comic cruelty, which, at its heart, is a mocking caricature of old age. Arguably, however, taking a more generous view, it was Jingle that set up both Mrs Budger and Dr Slammer and it was his cruelty that Dickens was emphasising. Possible, but in my view not probable

DANIEL GRUMMER - the Ipswich "peace officer" 

How does Dickens describe this officer who arrests the Pickwickians for breaching the peace?   Elderly, bottle-nosed, with a hoarse voice and a "wandering eye." Flattering again and a bit of a job's worth. A "wandering eye" eh?

GABRIEL GRUB -  [ An prototype of Scrooge ]

Featured in one of the Interlpolated Tales ( The Story of the Goblins who stole a Sexton ) Dickens introduces this " ill-conditioned, cross-grained and surly" character. It is Christmas Eve and he has a dream about Goblins. He wakes up and with miraculous self-awareness, realising that his past behaviour has been shameful. After ten years aimlessly wandering around he " returns as a 'ragged', contented, rheumatic old man. When discussing  A Christmas Carol in a future blog we will pick up on the notion of later life redemption of a cruel and inhumane past leading to a personality change and hence contentment.  Age redemption, punishment and contentment come together in this story. 

 OTHER WALK-ON PARTS - OLD, MIDDLE-AGED OR, OF UNCERTAIN AGE

Mr Nupkins ( Mayor of Ipswich) was written as somewhat ill-educated and Mr Jinks his clerk ( who was, in fact, Nupkin's legal adviser)  "pale, sharp-nosed, half-fed, shabbily clad clerk of middle age" and portrayed as timid. Most people from the  TV/film adaptations of The Christmas Carol will be familiar with the downtrodden and much-abused Bob Cratchit and even in Pickwick Papers, Dickens's first serialised novel, he was already showing some sympathy, even fondest for most of the 104  clerks featuring in his collected works, though many were portrayed as pretty grim. 

The notion of "middle age" is of interest to us at two levels. Firstly, whilst Jinks is readily seen by readers as a "clerk" and hence a low-paid and low-status office worker, he had had sufficient legal experience to be advising the ageing, ignorant and henpecked Nupkins who remits all punishments of the Pickwickians to " protect himself from shameful revelations."  Secondly, if we accept that during the Victorian era the term was radically transformed from "the prime of life" into one of uncertainty and anxiety for individuals of pending decline and deficit, we might need to reflect on the career aspirations of middle-aged clerks!  Kay Heath, professor of English at the State University, Virginia in her brilliant book Ageing By The Book, posits that whilst Dickens wrote generally of older male adults in sympathetic terms (contrasted to that of middle-aged women), the "assault on masculinity began in midlife." Rank and property and wealth were the hallmarks of success and status, not chronological age. Pickwick was written in the mid-1830s but it was in the late 1840s and 50's that ageing and midlife- was a preoccupation in his novels reflecting Dickens own personal circumstances ( physically and mentally). 

Moving on from Jinks, a brief look at another clerk who is portrayed as "elderly and sleek" with some status in the practice of Mr, Serjeant Stubbins, namely Mr Mallard. He is positively portrayed and viewed as an impressive secretary. 

Of uncertain age is the prosecuting attorney in the trial of Bardell v's Pickwick Serjeant Buzfuz. Though being a barrister "of the highest rank", Dickens writes of him as being fat, redfaced, histrionic with a "volubility of speech". We can only assume that he was over 50 and hence falls into our older adult category. His comic portrayal arguably includes sexual innuendo ( Mr Pickwick's menu) of which Dickens was to become a literary master. 

Mr Winkle Senior is the owner of a wharf and is described as a "little old gentleman in a snuff-coloured suit, with a head and face the precise counterpart of his son", who is generally considered as apart from Pickwick himself the " most amusing and prominent of the Pickwickians". Winkle Snr is clearly a successful businessman, hard-headed some would say, and Dickens not surprisingly has him beguiled and won over by Arabella Allen's "tender and affectionate nature". The marriage without his consent is forgiven! 

Mrs Colonel Wugsby is featured in the Bath scene and plays cards with Pickwick and Dickens makes the point that she is one of several older women "of an ancient and whist-like appearance". She is also portrayed as being more interested in her daughter's potential to marry into money than in somebody who may well be wealthy but with little likelihood of "relinquishing the purse strings". She comes across as most disagreeable. 

What is with Dickens and women generally and older women in particular? It is important to view his portrayals in the context of both late Georgian and Victorian attitudes, but also in his life course experiences. His beliefs about women in many ways reflected attitudes typical at the time he was writing Pickwick; but, by the mid-1800s, the emergence of medical narratives about ageing as a disease became increasingly influential, with its legacy prevalent even today. Dickens' attitudes would obviously have been influenced by his childhood and teenage experiences of older women ( and those he perceived as old). In addition, we need to take into account, again and again, his personality and emotional make-up, not just of the 1830s when he was a young and newly married adult, but into his mid and later years, too. The writer at the age of 24 is not the same as the writer his 50s. The Dickens of the latter age bracket increasingly resented old age and its implications.

Mrs Wugsby is both ancient and female - double jeopardy! 

An even more disagreeable older female character is Mrs Raddle, sister of Mrs Clubbins and landlady of Bob Sawyer. She is a bully and a brute especially of her husband saying "Don't talk to me, don't, you brute, for fear I should be provoked to forget my sex and strike you" 

These older "minor characters" have been given little attention in the context of literary gerontology and writing old age, but they provide us with an understanding of ageing during the 19th Century howbeit through a single author, who would become the greatest celebrity of his time. Pickwick reflected his inexperience as a writer and his youthfulness "remembering his boyhood" and the colliding of two eras - Georgian and Victorian. It is time to explore further how the depictions we have highlighted above evidence the dualism then taking place.

 18TH, 19TH CENTURY DISCOURSES ON OLD AGE 

Dickens was born in 1812, the Georgian era, and Victora came to the throne in 1837 on the death of William 1V, but the passing of monarchs and the crowning of their successors is a somewhat artificial construct to reflect cultural and social transitions.  We might well accept that in general terms Cruikshank's statement that the 1700s was "very cruel to the sick, the poor, the madmen and domestic animals" and " men of cultured taste of this period were often brutish in their sport and loutish in their humours." * Dickens upbringing was at a time where chronological age was less important but life expectancy, as always, reflected social standing and position determined by wealth or poverty. In addition, where you were in the family, the neighbourhood and community reflected one's gravitas, and therefore one's subtle and pervasive influence invariably across society. This would become increasingly important during the early  Victorian England period where the self-made "new men" of industry and innovation ascended with their puritanical and patriarchal values. But their own ageing would increasingly become a source of personal anxiety, fear and loss of power and control in a tightly ordered society.

It is necessary to stress that, being of the lower middle class, one was never far away from poverty and the fragility of the status which one was either trying to aspire or hold on to. The wider changes across Europe, namely industrialisation, urbanisation and population growth helped and promoted by better transportation, changes to the labour market and the increasing professionalization of medicine and the de-skilling of workers to the emergence of large-scale and mechanised production. Dickens is of course well-known for his position on many of the "evils" (as well as opportunities) of this transition. His boyhood was within Portsmouth and Rochester as well as of course London, but in his later novels, he would draw on the experiences of America, France and Italy, which we will see in future blogs his perceptions and age-related commentary. 

Generalisations are marred by imposition, time lags and different national paths to economic development and social change (see Cole and Edwards in Patricia Thane's The Long History of Old Age). Pickwick in many ways demonstrates the beginning of that transition, which will so exercise Dickens in his later writings. His first novel arguably can be seen as focused on the rural whereby the agricultural sector was shrinking as young adults left to take up employment in towns and cities. Three years after Dickens' birth, Thomas Jefferson in writing to John Vaughn, which is quoted in Antony and Sally Samson's the Oxford Book of Ages, wrote:

Nothing is more incumbent on the old than to know when they shall get out of the way and relinquish to younger successors the honours they can no longer earn, and the duties they can no longer perform

The precarious nature of middle and old age, the subsequent growth that led to the Poor Law and public relief, which will be picked up in our exploration of Oliver Twist, is probably no more evident than in the growth of the workhouses of mid and late 19th Century England. Pickwick was indeed fortunate to have his 'personal carer' during his later life, which gave him access to material and emotional support. The question for us is whether older adults living in poverty were considered less deserving over time and increasingly unable to appropriate resources due to their loss of status in society. 

Arguably there was never a so-called 'golden age' for older adults in pre-industrialisation and urbanisation; it simply did not exist. But, that being said, there were gains for older adults from the emerging middle-classes during this period. The characters in Pickwick evidence this. Patricia Thane argues that "the social and economic realities of growing old in the 19th Century were diverse and changing, but the common thread was the precariousness of peoples' existence and, most probably, their preference for independence, and thus the continued importance of income from work'". Nevertheless, the workhouse population increased between the mid and late 19th Century for both men and women. By 1901, almost 10% of English men and 6% of women 75+ were in London workhouses. These themes are reflected throughout Dickens' novels, as we shall see. 

CONCLUDING REFLECTIONS

Despite Dickens' youthful idealisation of Samuel Pickwick, the Camelot of Dingly Dell and the adventures of the Pickwickians and those with whom they came into contact show the dualistic vision of age and ageing. Why was Pickwick Papers so popular and became Britain's first real publishing phenomenon? We know that it inspired Pickwick products, literary imitations and plagiarism, as well as state adaptations. It was obviously humorous and light-hearted; but, for us, it reflected stereotypes of positive ageing of Dickens' own making, but also a level of gerontophobia on the cusp of seismic changes, economically and socially, whereby older adults, in particular, found themselves by and large in a precarious position. For the majority, social exclusion, dependency and poverty were never far away. 

 PART TWO OF THE PORTRAYAL OF OLDER ADULTS IN THE WRITINGS OF CHARLES DICKENS WILL COMMENCE WITH DICKENS' SECOND NOVEL, OLIVER TWIST (INSTALLMENT 1)

THE PORTRAYAL OF OLDER ADULTS IN THE WRITINGS OF CHARLES DICKENS [PART TWO]

 AN INNOCENT ABROAD, A CARING FATHER and an OLD SPINSTER: Portrayals of age and ageing in Pickwick Papers. [ 2nd Instalment]

Alfred Noyes raises the interesting question as to whether Dickens discovered "his model for Pickwick in his own "David Copperfield" years "encountering that twinkling kindness" commenting that in every novel he wrote there is a representative of a "tender-hearted and somewhat rotund figure". That being the case it would appear that Dickens never quite outgrew the fantasy. An emotional Gad's Hillian needs to inspire to such, namely to turn the fantasy into a reality. It is however pure speculation to conclude that the developing character of Pickwick in the early chapter is" a subject of good-natured mirth" mirrors that of Dicken's own development given where he was in his life course.

John Lucas's 1970 study provides some valuable insights. Lucas reflecting on Auden believes that " at all time substituting Dickens for Pickwick" gets us to the soul of Pickwick. He further argues that the fiction of Pickwick is both prescriptive - what life should be and reality. The youthful Dickens is reaching out, whilst understandably, managing the tension inherent in the original intention of the writing commission, but also in his own maturation, being a fool, entertainer and social truth-teller. As a young adult, it is, or was, a familiar journey for many of us! But if he, in his creation of the internal and external ageing benevolent Pickwick, was rather fanciful and projecting a future self-image of his own ageing ( which I find hard to accept) the well-fed, wealthy and philanthropic, that idyllic portrayal was brutally shattered by the anti-Semitic depiction of a shrivelled ageing child abuser in his next novel. The Pickwick in the Fleet prison is not the same bumbling ageing buffoon losing his way in a hotel and finding himself in the wrong bedroom of a single lady in an earlier episode. But perhaps it was. The Pickwick Dickens created is at one with the aspirational personality of a writer projected thirty years on. 

The ageing Pickwick says of his two-year pilgrimage, and of his life generally, that he has no regrets and Chapter Twenty Nine in which the Pickwick Club is finally dissolved and " everything concluded to the satisfaction of everybody"  reveals much about the youthful ( even Disneyish ) Dickens own age assumptions. Here we see both a life-course continuum, but at the same time, a life-course where old age is disconnected from previous experiences, namely "pleasant recollections" in his so-called declining years of infirmity. It is speculation to generally define decline as increased infirmity or frailty, but in reading the closing paragraphs and sentence which has Sam Weller as a live-in carer " attended by the faithful Sam, between whom and his master there exists a steady and reciprocal attachment, which nothing but death will terminate"  reflects the general 19th Century view of the role of families in caring for their ageing kin as they become increasingly dependent and older people negotiating their care. Nothing changes.

Samuel Pickwick is a stereotype based on both reality and perhaps Dickens view of his own later years as an "old man", which in chronological years he didn't make. Here we ought to point out that Dickens in his later middle age hated the notion of becoming old!   He reflected the youthful unconscious view that with age and life chances you can become, and deserve to become, through hard work and the pursuit of wealth, comfortable and independent and perhaps loved. Dickens lower-middle-class mid-life course ( despite his wealth) was influenced by his precarious childhood and young adulthood experiences, but we need to recall that the success of The Pickwick Papers demonstrated a very young man on the up, becoming famous and financially more secure. Pickwick, as Lucas has said, was " a beautiful dream of what might be". However, it was a dream Dickens, the writer, could invent and control: that dream for the man was less certain. Pickwick was an angel in gaiters but he was also the Cheeryble brothers of Nicholas Nickleby; Mr Lorry in A Tale of Two Cities, and keeping Noyles in mind " my guardian," one of the most loveable of all, in Bleak House.

Pickwick-Weller

To understand Samuel Pickwick we need to understand the portrayal of his youthful guardian, protector and servant Sam Weller. Through his quick wit, he took Pickwick from being a 'tedious pedant' to a stereotypical kind-hearted ageing employer who created for himself, Weller and his ex maid, another Camelot. Notwithstanding the commercial necessity to address the falling sales and meandering chaotic storyline, Sam Weller is important in the context of age portrayal. Despite the incongruity of Pickwick being at one a successful businessman, he was also portrayed as vulnerable, and that vulnerability was linked to his chronological age. The notion of old age and vulnerability is a perverse dynamic associated with us even today by charities and politicians to secure funding, brand recognition or popularity, not to say votes at the next election.! Sam Weller enshrines the notion of youth and streetwise experience set alongside ageing and foolishness and, as some commentators have remarked, his character and portrayal became central and important to the very book itself. Both Pickwick and Weller, as was Dickens himself, were, in fact, comic caricatures, but it was in the figure of Pickwick and his creator we glimpse their emotional vulnerability and insecurity, their thirst for recognition and validation, and perhaps even, their inner demons. 

The juxtaposition of Weller and Pickwick - the older situational, the younger streetwise wit - provided for Dickens, (and again remember his relative youth), a creative narrative of tension that sparks, smooths, reassures and ultimately transcends that which is fearful - the stuff of utopian happy endings of which this young ambitious writer, who was already known from his journalism and Sketches of Boz and in the words of Michael Robb "brazen social climber" was mastering. The "most genial and lovable of elderly gentlemen" being conned by Alfred Jingle but rescued and protected by the youthful Sam and able in time - a Victorian to show Jingle a generosity of spirit - Victorian self-indulgence of superiority" writes H.C Dent. Clearly prevalent in late Georgian England! Dent is useful again in helping us position Pickwick 

....he is a dear! Definitly one of the older generation, yet not too old to enter the spirit, and now and then actively, into fun and frolic:by reason of his age and his unobrusive yet definite leadership of his party he is looked up to and respected by all; but chiefly, by reason of his kindness, his benevolent charm and his childlike simplicity, he is beloved *

No wonder Dickens at twenty-four created his own later life through him. The image is fatuous. Dent rightly says that essentially there is only one character Pickwick-Weller, for there is a symbolic relationship that exists. Readers were interested in Sam Weller. They were amused by Sam Weller and wanted him to take control of the ageing and subsequent 4th Age Pickwick who deserves to be protected and cared for. He was above all, deserving! Dickens duly obliged both 19th Century readers and himself and, as hinted at earlier, Sam Weller became his Home Carer and had Pickwick been of lesser financial means no doubt have used the Council's Direct Payment scheme to commission Sam to be his Personal Assistant.

Mr Tracy Tupman and Rachael Wardle

Turning to Tracy Tupman, fellow traveller and member of the Pickwick Club he provides Dickens with some memorable situational comic scenes. Tupman's quest and passion as a middle-aged bachelor seeking to seduce women generally, and Mr Wardle's spinster sister Rachael specifically who is clearly older than Pickwick himself. Pickwick considers Tupman as "older and fatter" than himself. J.W.T Ley reckons that the row between the two of them is " the most painful in the book". In addition, he feels there is "nothing known of him to support the suggestion that he was merely a lascivious old man bent on ogling expectation" but Tupman's behaviour could indeed be considered as " a too susceptible old buck"  but the question that remains for us is whether Dickens was presenting age-inappropriate behaviour that is eventually exposed by and through the betrayal of Jingle. The ageing "old man" who sees himself as the perpetual stag is a familiar picture often accompanied by the younger adult's label " dirty old man".  On the other hand was Tracy, as Ley contends, simply a shy and self-conscious middle-aged man " in love with love than to be in love"? The ending is telling. Tupman retires to Richmond being esteemed and admired by ' elderly single ladies' 

It is the notion of an older man in his fifties falling in love with a so-called silly, giddy woman, in her fifties, is so humorous because somehow, it is age-inappropriate. At one level, as Ley points out, what's the problem here and why is it deemed so funny, even comic?  Age stereotypes existed in the 1830s as they do today, especially in the context of later life sex, intimacy and wellbeing. The reaction of Rachael Wardle to the shooting incident involving Tupman arguably evidences that she loved him - or did it? The reaction of her nieces says something else perhaps - "they laughed afresh". Rachael's subsequent humiliation and Tupman's subsequent relinquishment of constantly proposing to ladies would appear to suggest Dickens sided with the nieces! If we reflect on the cumulative accounts within the book, namely Pickwick-Bardle; Isabella Wardle-Trundle; Emily Wardle-Snodgrass, to say nothing of the slapstick scene of the middle-aged lady in the Double bed. However, we have here a young author's debut novel, certainly not lacking in sexual interest and innuendo, indeed throughout his adult life he never shied away from vulgarity, innuendo, winks and nods. For me, there is certain cruelty (or is it satire?) in Dickens' portrayal of Rachael and Tracy. It is worth referencing Alex Waugh's scathing opinion, but I do so in the context, yet again, of Dickens young adulthood and maturation process, a newly married family man and novelist with so much to learn and years of his life course ahead of him. 

An old woman was (to Dickens) always ridiculous. He could never have written of Miss Harriet, as Maunpassant did, with tenderness. There is no suspicion of pity for Jingle's victims, no recognition of the fact that while the discomfiture of Mr Nupkins is intrinsically funny, the expolitation of Miss Wardle's faded feeling is definitly not. Dickens could never have written well of love...his cruelty to women is of the kind that is impossible to the man who has been happy by them. I doubt Dickens ever was. * 

A life event is worth mentioning at this juncture, though it might be an exaggeration to call it a life transition. Much has been written about Dickens infatuation with Maria Beadnell and in no way to minimise one's first love, she became the focus of his "passionate admiration" to quote Peter Ackroyd. It is however instructive to reflect on Dicken's autobiographical novel David Copperfield and the portrayal of the relationship between Copperfield and Dora Spenlow to gain insight from Dickens himself about his thoughts and feelings related to Beadnell. The important lesson is not so much that she rejected him but that Dickens saw his own "unworthiness" in the eyes of the Beadnell parents. He was simply of a lower social order and even after three years of trying, could not make himself acceptable to them. Writers on Dickens who have taken a psychological perspective, stress how this rejection emotionally put him in touch with the pain, fear and devastation of female abandonment, and here we have to say, older females?  The rejection was in fact that of the parents. Maria was only fifteen months older than he was and can not on its own terms be seen as evidence that he related to age and being older, with rejection or even betrayal leading to lifelong repression, suppression and misogyny. What is less arguable perhaps is that Dickens never really did gain maturity with regard to personal relationships, male, female, young or old, hence why he created idealistic character archetypes.

* Dent. H.C The Life and Characters of Charles Dickens. Odhams Press Ltd. Ch 3 ( date unknown) p129

**Waugh Alex. In Noyes A " A Pickwick Portrait Gallery. Chapman & Hall p102

In the next instalment (3) I look at the depictions of the lesser characters and the age and ageing social-political context of  Pickwick

 

  

THE PORTRAYAL OF OLDER ADULTS IN THE WRITINGS OF CHARLES DICKENS [ PARTONE]

 AN INNOCENT ABROAD, A CARING FATHER and an OLD SPINSTER: Portrayals of age and ageing in Pickwick Papers.

[1st Instalment] 

In the early hours of Tuesday 21st April 1836 Robert Seymore, a popular and well-known artist who having convinced publishers Chapman and Hall to print a series of Cockney Sporting engravings, accompanied by a narrative by another, shot himself in the head.

The previous evening he had met for the first time the young Charles Dickens who had been commissioned to write the text and his wife Catherine at their Furnival lodgings to discuss the author's concerns about Seymore's illustrations of "The Strollers Tale" which Dickens had found "not to his liking". 

It has been argued by many of Dicken's biographers that this was a social rather than a business meeting, but the fact that Mt Chapman and Mr Hall were also expected to attend ( however they were absent) seems to suggest something more than a Sunday evening dinner party. Dickens had via his invitation detailed the corrections he wanted to make to a particular illustration. Whether Seymour readily and warmly agreed on the alterations without "demure" may be less a reflection of "cordial" agreement than his mental health and hence compliance. Nevertheless, he had worked on the illustration late into Monday night then took his own life. The project continued however with the now-famous Phiz ( to match Boz)- Hablot Knight Browne and the start of a very long and on occasions stormy association with Dickens. The question has, not surprisingly arisen as to whether it was Dickens or the deceased artist who created the entirely guileless older adult Samuel Pickwick. 

Firstly Dickens gave the character, if not the form; hence he can and did claim to the "tender-hearted creation. This collaboration, however, brief should not detract from the synergy that created the character, but it was Dickens and him alone who gave the illustration heart, soul and breath. It was Dickens who depicted a semi-retired businessman of means who was, without doubt, an older adult, and some would argue an old man!  Secondly, the "social significance" of this, Dickens first major comedy at the dawn of the Victorian era provides us with the social and political context in which the newly married twenty-four-year-old novelist's life course progressed. In addition, the character of Pickwick cannot be viewed in isolation from those characters that surrounded him - the key members of the Club- and those whom he met, nor the adventures they and especially Pickwick experienced.

What perhaps strikes us today is how far the youthful Dickens freed from the illustrative constraints of the hapless Seymore and even Phiz, structured a curate's egg of a fable and for the reader then as now " a very bumpy and fragmented experience" featuring a cast of ageing actors including many of the principal characters! It is perhaps the positioning of these middle-aged, even "elderly" personages against the backdrop of Dickens "comic wit, joke an anecdotal" that creates again ( as it did in the Sketches of Boz) an unease and uncomfortableness over his early depictions of age and ageing. The wonderful novelist George Gissing says " stout men of ripe middle age behaving like hilarious schoolboys" Sounds like a night out of middle-aged "boys"  in my local! 

INTRODUCING THE PRINCIPAL CAST THAT MATTER

Samuel Pickwick of course, variously described as an old man

Mr Tracy Upman " a middle-aged bachelor who loves the ladies but is not gifted in the art of seduction"; 

Tony Wheller, father of the inimitable Sam Weller whom Bransly Williams considers " a fine old English gentleman in nature..a great fat old humorist - rough, unlettered, comic old coachman"; 

Mr Wardle " a stout old gentleman " but perhaps of uncertain years as according to some Dickensian scholars ( actual or in their own minds) "old" in this instance was used colloquially and affectionately rather than meaning old in chronological age, Wardle, therefore, may well be under 50 years. Other commentators however have seen him as the "elderly country gentleman" and owner of Dingley Dell. [In later instalments of this series of blogs, I will pick up on the issue of Victorian notions of middle age which had significant relevance personally for Dickens]. Miss Wardle is herself labelled by her brother as " you're fifty if you're an hour" - she thus joins the cast members. But let Dickens reclaim Dickens from the experts who in Chapter Four (PP) introduces the reader to the " few moments in a man's existence, when he experiences so much ludicrous distress, or meets with so little charitable commiserations, as when he is in pursuit of his own hat" The hat belongs to Pickwick; the wheel of the barouche that stops its flight, that of a stout Wardle - of uncertain age but certainly ripe! Seymore's illustration gives little away. Does Wardle's age actually matter? The imagery of text and illustration with the constant use of the prefix "old" the portrayal of the whole Wardle clan and even the spirit of the Wardle's at Christmas, together with how subsequent film adaptations he, for our purposes I include and hence consider, not least because he can be viewed as a positive image of ageing.  

Mrs Bardle however presents, on the balance of probabilities, outside our terms of reference  and was used by Dickens to demonstrate a point rather than a character

Mssrs Dobson and Fogg Attorneys who represented Mrs Bardle are well and truly in our cohort. Fogg "was an elderly, pimply-faced, vegetable diet sort of man" and his partner though less certain perhaps " a plump, portly, stern-looking man with a low voice". The reason I have included him is related to the association of "elderly and portliness" in the context of the character's symbiotic relationship within a comic framework tens to be a little beyond ripe middle age as far as the Dobson character is concerned

Turning to the detail of these individuals and exploring the storylines where chronological age appears to be employed to so-called comic effect, or where the case of the younger and nefarious character, Alfred Jingle, who makes a living out of women, but according to some writers such as Alec Waugh " In Jingle more than anywhere else is his (Dickens) dislike of women, in particular, his cruelty to older women is underlined". In our exploration of Dickens approach to age and ageing can we tentatively tease out his motivation ( mindset?) to his characterizations and identify particular age-related storylines that appear to relate to his "attitudes, values and forms" and that of 19th Century attitudes to age and ageing?  Professor Barbara Hardy helpfully explores Dicken's moral concerns which informed Pickwick and gives to Samuel Pickwick's portrayal of society and the individual "it's unique quality". It is a pastoral novel underpinned by symbolism drawn from Dicken's earlier life course and events ( childhood and early adulthood) thus framing his definition of a good life, and arguably I would along with Hardy argue, through his maturation governed by simplicity and an unconsciously side-stepping of social and psychological complications.  Did Dickens actually ever grow up and find his own ageing comfortable? The ageing characters, so central to this his first "novel" are portrayals without any thought to 19th Century views on ageing, being old and its sociological positioning either generally or specifically as a burgeoning middle class. Pickwick Papers is part fable and again Hardy is right to caution to reading too much into its " mythical renderings" REmmber Dickens was in his twenties portraying ageing and age through that lens, a young writer cutting his teeth on an important, howbeit fairly mundane commissioning from a publishing house. The novel's strengths, as Hardy states are comic. Let us remember that Dickens was throughout his early years and throughout his whole life course an entertainer. Pickwick and old age is for laughs and he used both the grotesque and satire. Jingle portrayed as a comic rogue and Pickwick a comic fool living in a Victorian Camelot and it is important to acknowledge Hardy's insight that this young author exploits the disconnect between the Inset tales and the main narrative in Pickwick Papers - namely misery and celebration of plenty. 

Was age therefore a coincidence? We are reminded of the iconic Workhouse scene of Oliver Twist pleading with the Master "for more" gruel. I will return to this in a later instalment in Part Two when considering Dicken's second novel. 

Pickwick embodies the nieve view of a successful man who has accumulated sufficient wealth to be free of day to day survival. He is an image of who Dickens wants to be surrounded by friends, in an idyllic world of pastoral and rural England. It is interesting to note what many have noted that "there is at least one representative of the Pickwick family in almost every story Dickens wrote, and they are all tender-hearted and somewhat rotund figures"  Dickens was always searching for utopia but probably more importantly a resolution of the conflict of being an entertainer and a truth-teller but if Dickens in his creation of the internal and external ageing benevolent Pickwick was rather fanciful and projecting a future self-image he also had within him, Fagin.

To be continued: 2nd Instalment: Pickwick Papers.