AN INNOCENT ABROAD, A CARING FATHER AND AN OLD SPINSTER: Portrayal of age and ageing in Pickwick Papers
[ 3rd Instalment]
" 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)
