The Mystery of Charles Dickens by A. N. Wilson

Author:A. N. Wilson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Atlantic Books

Clearly, Pip speaks here with the voice of Dickens the journalist. There is nothing in the structure of the paragraph to suggest that Dickens distances himself, or his readers, in any way from this sentiment. To us, it seems as unsympathetic as Mr Bounderby’s opinion that his workers expected to be ‘set up in a coach and six, and to be fed on turtle soup and venison, with a gold spoon’. [HT I 11] One might accuse the Dickens who argued for prison reform in the 1840s, and for the abolition of capital punishment, and the Dickens who twenty years later defended the death penalty and called for harsher prisons, as a man who followed the familiar pattern of becoming more reactionary with age. The more probable explanation, however, is that Dickens, who had an imaginatively morbid fascination with violent crime and its punishment, and also had a tender heart, subscribed to both views at once. He wanted reform, of the more brutal prisons and of such monstrous phenomena as public executions; and he wanted punishment for the wicked. That is why he was a novelist and not an economist or a politician. G. M. Young was right to point out that Dickens was ‘equally ready to denounce on the grounds of humanity all who left things alone, and on the grounds of liberty all who tried to make them better’.30

In his remarkable essay ‘Lying Awake’, Dickens’s mind filled with images of violence and death. The Paris Morgue ‘comes back again at the head of a procession of ghost stories’. He remembered the joint hanging of Frederick and Maria Manning in 1849, outside Horsemonger Lane Gaol, and the ‘two forms dangling on the top of the entrance gateway – the man’s limp, loose suit of clothes as if the man had gone out of them; the woman’s, a fine shape, so elaborately corseted and artfully dressed, that it was quite unchanged in its trim appearance as it slowly swung from side to side’.31

Dickens had laid down his pen in the middle of composing David Copperfield, to join the crowd of 30,000 to witness this remarkable event. He had written two letters to The Times, protesting at the iniquity of public hanging. Convicted murderers, he suggested, should be kept from the public gaze and executed privately within the prison walls. (This reform was eventually brought to pass in 1868, nearly twenty years after he wrote the letters.) Douglas Jerrold, and his old radical friends of the 1840s, were appalled that Dickens now countenanced the idea of capital punishment, whether held in private or not. A part of Dickens, however, was at one with the crowds, the ‘thieves, low prostitutes and vagabonds’, fighting, whistling, joking brutally as the married murderers were brought out to the gallows. The Mannings were especially horrible people, who had murdered their lodger Patrick O’Connor. (‘I never liked him so I finished him off with the ripping chisel,’ Manning calmly told the jury. Maria, still evidently, to Dickens’s

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.