THE PORTRAYAL OF OLDER ADULTS IN CHARLES DICKENS'S THIRD NOVEL (1838-1839)
A RUINED GENTLEMAN, A CRUEL SCHOOLMASTER, A MELODRAMATIC THESPIAN, A RUTHLESS MONEYLENDER AND A KINDLY OLD CLERK (1)
PART ONE: INTRODUCTION AND CONTEXT
If Oliver Twist exposed the scandals of workhouses, child exploitation, crime and fractured family relationships, Nicholas Nickleby highlighted the commodification of relatives, contract fraud, Yorkshire schools and class differences. If the character of Fagin dominated the former, then Wackford Squeers and uncle Ralf Nickleby did the latter. All three were older adults.
Nicholas is nineteen years old, but when published in book form the two volumes cover only twelve months of his life (2). It is not a "full-scale biography nor even a family saga" (3). It is considered by Stanley Friedman as " melodramatic in presenting extremes of behaviour, language and situation and including features such as confrontations of defiant adversaries, highly emotional requests, a stolen child, a purloined will and extraordinary coincidences that imply supernatural intervention." (4) He goes on to point out that Dickens strongly refuted the claim that certain characters were exaggerated, be that Squeers or even the Cheeryble brothers who he claimed were drawn from real life. (5)
The older characters however do reflect extremes of the 'good, bad and ugly' which will be explored in due course. Dickens, according to Karen Chase in the Victorians and Old Age makes an important point when considering Dickens's sentimentality that he was "no more sentimental towards the young and the aged, and though he prefers the intense vitality more typical of youth, he inclines towards the perspectival distance and comprehensive gaze which age affords"(6). She goes on to add that " the aged in Dickens carry a 'steaky bacon' of mixed traits, usually seen as marks of their accounters with fate, chance and other characters" (7). It will be interesting later to view the Cheeryble brothers in this context.
It would be fair to say that on its serialization ( monthly parts between March 1838 - September 1839) Dickens received mixed reviews. Later biographers and literary critics such as George Gissing and G.K. Chesterton were complementary. The Charles Dickens Page Website( which is brilliant by the way) referenced Peter Ackroyd's opinion that is " perhaps the funniest novel in the English language" (8) - he really should get out more!
The very insightful Dr Jacqeline Banergee, Associate Editor of The Victorian Web writes ".... Dickens's third novel has always been a favourite with the public" (9). Paul Schicke, General Editor of The Oxford Readers Companion to Dickens and author of the Nicholas Nickleby Chapter writes that the novel "did not establish itself as a special favourite either with the general reader or with critics" (10). It has always been considered one of Dickens's minor works. When I first read it many years ago I actually quite enjoyed it, - the debate over!
That said and in the context of our journey to understanding how and why he portrayed older characters as he did. I am reminded that at the time of reading Ralf Nickleby and the Squeers, villains all. Dickens's representation of Charles and Ned Cheerbyble, along with Pickwick and Fagin took me on my quest to see if Dickens was in his young adulthood gerontophobic and whether as he himself grew older his characterizations of age and ageing changed. (11)
Ralf Nickleby's first visit to his
poor relations by Phiz ( Hablot K Browne).
Wackford Squeers by Harry Furness (1910)
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Continuing with our context, it is necessary to take a look at what personally was happening to Dickens whilst he was writing Nickleby. He had just completed Pickwick (1837), finishing off Oliver Twist and by his own account was struggling, saying of Nickleby - "it does not go well." Schlicke points out that whilst he never missed a publisher's deadline he was travelling around the country, researching Yorkshire schools, going on holiday and the races finally completing the novel in late September 1839. In addition, he moved from Doughty Street and still mourning the loss of his sister-in-law Mary Hogarth. He had now four serials on the go including Barnaby Rudge and The Old Curiosity Shop. In addition, we need to factor in his workaholic tendency. The commissions were flowing, he was managing different publishers, dealing yet again with fatherhood and Catherine's difficult confinement(s) and writing numerous letters ( he wrote during his lifetime some 14,000. No wonder he needed a holiday during this time. Avoiding psychobabble it would not be helpful to explore the psychological condition of Dickens at this time. What we can do, however, is acknowledge his workaholic, impulsiveness, obsessions, temperament and physical and mental health. It is doubtful he was particularly exercised about growing older at this time. Death and dying however were and remained constant themes and preoccupations (?) He was particularly interested in medical developments and typical of Victorians "preoccupied with his health" ( 12 ) and "was subject to bouts of depression at various times during his life" (13 ). We can only speculate whether, whilst he was struggling to get to grips with writing Nickleby, and all this was going on, it shaped and determined how and why he depicted his older characters as he did. My view is that it is too early to call, but what is not, is that regardless of his energetic youthfulness he would be reflecting the usual attitudes of the society in which he lived, the experience he had of older adults, domestically, and as a journalist, he was now a highly successful novelist. His increasing fame and wealth opened doors that as a child he could only dream of ( which he did), but those doors, and hence opportunities, would impact his lifestyle, life course, physical and mental health, preoccupations and sense of self and his novels.
Why is all this seemingly random context important? Basically, in his portrayal of older adults, we glimpse not just his developing literary genius but just how complex he was and the genesis of a young man's perspective. In a tweet to me from the wonderful Dr Cindy Surghrue, Director of the Dickens Museum, she writes "As the saying goes, 'age doesn't come itself' and Dickens certainly did not relish the ageing process ( does anyone?). While he has the perspective of a young man in his early novels, this shifts in later works" (08.02.23) This is the very journey we are on.
HOW DID VICTORIAN SOCIETY SHAPE AND REINFORCE NEGATIVE ATTITUDES TO AGEING?
What is our benchmark? Drawing on our earlier discussions of Pickwick and Oliver Twist (14) a useful starting point for me is to explore today's current discourse on ageing. The Centre for Ageing Better recently published "An Old Age Problem?" (2020) (15) Their Report identifies seven factors (P5)
- Ageing equals - physical and cognitive decline and ill health
- Becoming old is not a lifelong process
- Conflation with older adults and attitudes shape those around them
- Older adults are characterised as frail, vulnerable and dependent
- An ageing society means more vulnerable and dependent people - a burden
- Ageing posited as a source of inter-generational conflict
- Active ageing and anti ageing re-enforce the idea of ageing as a decline
Did the late 18th - early-mid 19th Centuries reflect any or all of these factors, and had Dickens at the time of writing already assimilated or rejected any of these? He was, even as a young adult an avid reader of medical texts, understanding the consequences of cholera, scarlet fever and typhoid. In addition, he would by the1830s be aware of new medical procedures and as Nicholas Cambridge writes become a "fervent miasmalist."(16) As a journalist he kept informed throughout his life of all matters related to health both personal and public and it would be another decade or so before the medicalization of ageing took hold on how Victorians viewed ageing. Interestingly Dickens had a medical chest and "liked the idea of being a doctor" (17). Indeed the characters of Ben Allen and Bob Sawyer in Pickwick were students of medicine. The portrayal of the memorable Sairy Gamp in Martin Chuzzelwit ( Dickens 6th novel) is telling and will be picked up in a later blog as to why he described her "as a dissolute, sloppy and generally drunk nurse" (18) The question is was it a representation of nursing generally and/or of old age in particular? He suffered from OCD (19) and I have written elsewhere about Dickens and cohesive control (20)
Victorians viewed ageing in the context of being either "good" or "bad", the former independent and productive and the latter anything from feckless to frail. Does all this lead us to conclude that Dickens predominantly viewed getting older as equalling decline, dependency and sickness? For example, set against the dominant discourses of today any intergenerational conflict was related more to inter-family dynamics and interestingly, the power, influence and agency of many older characters portrayed in Dickens's writing were in this context.
Of the Victorian shaping and reinforcement of negative age and ageing attitudes, set against the seven identified by the Centre for Ageing Better, arguably they existed during Dickens's childhood and certainly young adulthood. Had Dickens internalized them generally and personally? If he had, do his portrayals in Nicholas Nickleby evidence this?
REFERENCES:
1. The Dicken's Collection: Nicholas Nickleby Vol. 1+2 " Meet the Characters (p 8 -9) G.E. Fabbri Ltd ( 2004)
2. Friedman. S. Chapter 21 in a Companion to Charles Dickens' Ed. David Paroissien. Wiley-Blackman (2011)
3. Ibid p319
4. Ibid p319
5. Ibid p 319
6. Chase K "The Victorians and Old Age". Chapter 1 " Faces and Spaces. Locating Age in Dickens World (p14). OUP (2009)
7 Ibid p12
8. Quoted in The Charles Dickens Page referencing Schlicke. 1999. p 408 in Peter Ackroyd's Dickens which he considered "perhaps the funniest novel in the English Language (1990) (p 262)
9. Eastman. M. See previous Blogs in this series Pickwick Papers and Oliver Twist www.CooperativeMervUnleashed.blogspot.com
10. Banerjee. J. Dr "Self -Presentation and Self-realization in Nicholas Nickleby. The Victorian Web ( 2021)
11. Schlike. P (p 4160 OUP (2000) - PB edition)
12. Cambridge. N. Bleak Health: The Medical History of Charles Dickens and his Family ( EER 2022)
13. Ibid p76
14 Eastman M. "The Portrayal of Older Adults" postedCooperativeMervUnleashed.blogspot.com (2022-3)
15.CFAB. An Ageing Problem? How Society Shapes and Re-enforcing Negative Attitudes to Ageing. (Nov 2020)
16. Ibid p 6
17. Cambridge N. (p15)
18. Ibid p21
19. Ibid p 51
20 Eastman.M " Coercive Control and Domestic Violence" blog Cooperative merv Unleashed.blogspot.com
PART TWO will focus on the Cast of " Older Adults"
