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.
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