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