Biblical Allusion in Three Charles Dickens Condition-of-England Novels

Yuanyuan Zhu

DOCTORAL THESIS | Karlstad University Studies | 2021:21

Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences

English

DOCTORAL THESIS | Karlstad University Studies | 2021:21

Biblical Allusion in Three Charles Dickens Condition-of-England Novels

Yuanyuan Zhu

Print: Universitetstryckeriet, Karlstad 2021

Distribution:Karlstad University Faculty of Arts and Social SciencesDepartment of Language, Literature and Intercultural StudiesSE-651 88 Karlstad, Sweden+46 54 700 10 00

© The author

ISSN 1403-8099

urn:nbn:se:kau:diva-85597

Karlstad University Studies | 2021:21

DOCTORAL THESIS

Yuanyuan Zhu

Biblical Allusion in Three Charles Dickens Condition-of-England Novels

WWW.KAU.SE

ISBN 978-91-7867-226-4 (pdf)

ISBN 978-91-7867-216-5 (print)

i

Abstract

This study investigates how Charles Dickens employs biblical allusion

in three Condition-of-England novels: Bleak House (1852–53), Hard

Times (1854), and Little Dorrit (1855–57). Drawing on the concepts of

dialogism and stratification defined by M. M. Bakhtin and rhetorical

situation by Lloyd F. Bitzer, the study explores the common patterns of

biblical allusions in the opening numbers of the serialisation and those

used by the narrator, perverted characters, and morally good

characters. Central to the interpretation of biblical allusions in

Dickens’s novels is the implicit but intentional dialogue between the

biblical and fictive worlds, as well as the dialogic relation of both to the

Victorian socio-historical context. Complemented by the examination

of Dickens’s letters and journalism, the study demonstrates that

biblical allusions are used in straightforward and satirical ways that not

only portray characters, develop plots, and reveal themes, but also

build a moral framework for the fictive world and mediate the novels’

critique of wrongdoings by institutions and individuals so as to instruct

the reader about the need for social improvement and individual moral

actions.

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iii

Acknowledgements

The present dissertation could not have been completed without the

encouragement, guidance, and inspiration from my supervisors Åke

Bergvall and Anna Swärdh, whose dedicated and insightful comments

on the organisation and language of this dissertation have made it more

focused and readable than what I could have accomplished on my own.

Their humble and warm-hearted personalities and their solid expertise

have demonstrated to me what outstanding researchers and

supervisors are like. It has been my great honour and privilege to work

with both of them over the years. I am also grateful to Stuart Robertson

for being the reader of a preliminary draft at the final seminar. His

extensive knowledge of the Victorian period, his close reading of the

manuscript, and his pertinent comments greatly helped me proceed

with my work on the final revision. I would also like to thank Åke, Anna,

as well as Solveig Granath, Anna Linzie, Andreas Nyström, Andrea

Schalley, Marie Tåqvist, Maria Holmgren Troy, Elisabeth Wennö,

Michael Wherrity, Johan Wijkmark, and Peter Wikström for their

assistance with proofreading. Whatever flaws there are in the final text,

they are mine alone.

Many Swedish colleagues—present and former—at the

Department of Language, Literature and Intercultural Studies of

Karlstad University have provided input at work-in-progress seminars

or in other contexts. In addition to those already mentioned, I am

grateful for the help and support of Rose Bergvall, Helene Blomqvist,

Anna Forssberg, Magnus Ullén, and Sofia Wijkmark. Thanks also to my

fellow doctoral students Marinette Grimbeek, Alexander Kofod Jensen,

Sophia Fei Liu, Kari Løvaas, Sebastian Malinowski, Tim Roberts,

Fredrik Svensson, Marie Tåqvist, and Peter Wikström for your valuable

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comments and ideas on my project and for your companionship. And a

special word of thanks to my Chinese colleagues Sophia, Jianguo Tian,

Jian Wang, and Yi Zhang at the School of Foreign Studies of

Northwestern Polytechnical University for your support of my doctoral

studies, your encouragement, and your sharing of workload. I also wish

to express my gratitude to the Linnaeus-Palme program for offering me

the opportunities to co-teach with Swedish colleagues at KaU and NPU.

This experience greatly expanded my vision and eventually led me to

embark on the doctoral studies.

I would further like to thank the generous scholarship and funding

granted by the China Scholarship Council and the Fundamental

Research Funds for the Central Universities so that I was able to spend

a profitable year at the University of York. During this year I was

fortunate to have inspiring conversations about my project with Prof.

John Bowen, whose vast knowledge of Dickens opened my eyes to

understanding Dickens’s works.

Chapters 1 and 3, as well as the introduction, contain material

derived from “Social Critique and the Imagining of Perversion as Satire

in Hard Times,” published in the Nordic Journal of English Studies,

and here reused by the kind permission of the journal.

My parents have shown me great encouragement and unwavering

support throughout the years, for which I am forever indebted.

Finally, I would like to thank my dearly loved husband Ming Yan

without whom this would truly have been impossible. He has been

there throughout and endured my way of working, looking after our

son when I was away and being positive when, at times, I was not. I

need to thank Toby for his love and distractions, and for always

reminding me of the joys of reading. Now, it’s time to turn the page.

Yuanyuan Zhu

Xi’an, July 2021

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Contents

Abstract ................................................................................ i

Acknowledgements............................................................. iii

Note on Editions ................................................................ vii

Abbreviations .................................................................... vii

Introduction ......................................................................... 1

The Biographical and Socio-historical Context ..................................................... 5

Terms, Approaches and Examples ....................................................................... 8

Previous Scholarship ........................................................................................... 17

Chapter Outline ................................................................................................... 25

Chapter 1: Biblical Allusion in the Opening Numbers of the

Serialisation ...................................................................... 28

The Trope of Idolatry and the Opening Numbers of Bleak House .................... 30

Biblical Allusion and the Structural Design of Hard Times ............................... 43

Biblical Allusion in the Opening Numbers of Little Dorrit ................................. 55

Chapter 2: Biblical Allusion as Used by the Omniscient

Narrator ............................................................................ 70

Bleak House: The Indictment of Negligence through Biblical Allusion ............. 73

Tom-all-Alone’s: The Negligence of Social Duties ....................................................... 81

Krook’s Death as Poetic Justice ..................................................................................... 90

Little Dorrit: The Circumlocution Office as an Idolatrous Church .................... 94

The Barnacles as Vessels of Dishonour ...................................................................... 100

Mr. Merdle as an Idol .................................................................................................. 104

Bar’s Toadyism and Embrace of Idolatry................................................................... 111

Chapter 3: Biblical Allusion as Used by Perverted

Characters ........................................................................ 116

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Bureaucratic Institutions: Vholes, Epitome of Chancery’s Cannibalism .......... 118

Industry: Bounderby and Slackbridge, the Divisive Social Force ..................... 124

Religious Circles ................................................................................................ 131

The Negligent Ministration of Rev. Mr. Chadband ................................................... 132

The Missions of Mrs. Jellyby and Mrs. Pardiggle ...................................................... 141

The Hypocrisy of Mrs. General and Mr. Christopher Casby ................................... 149

The Guardianship of Miss Barbary and Mrs. Clennam ............................................ 153

Chapter 4: Biblical Allusion and Moral Goodness ............ 161

The Moral Goodness of Idealised Female Characters ....................................... 163

The Moral Goodness of Minor Characters ........................................................ 168

The Moral Goodness of Exemplary Protagonists .............................................. 176

Conclusion ........................................................................ 197

Works Cited ..................................................................... 204

Works by Dickens ............................................................................................. 204

Secondary Sources ............................................................................................ 205

Index ............................................................................... 220

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Note on Editions

Unless specified otherwise, all references to and quotations from

Dickens’s novels refer to the following editions:

Bleak House the Norton Critical Edition (1977)

Hard Times the Norton Critical Edition (2001)

Little Dorrit the Oxford World’s Classics Edition (2012)

Abbreviations

The following abbreviations are used in parenthetical references:

AYR All the Year Round

BH Bleak House

HT Hard Times

HW Household Words

LD Little Dorrit

Letters The Letters of Charles Dickens

Speeches The Speeches of Charles Dickens

1

Introduction

Charles Dickens’s Condition-of-England novels engaged with

contemporary social and political issues by exposing institutional

negligence of duty, bureaucratisation of government, social inequality,

educational problems, and the harsh industrial urban life facing the

lower classes. Due to his satirical descriptions of the Court of Chancery,

aristocracy, evangelical clergymen, female activists, and utilitarianists,

there were negative reactions during the serialisations of these novels.1

On different occasions he defended his artistic practice: in one letter to

Rev. Archer Gurney, he underscored that he regarded it his “duty” to

write about “salient public vices of his time” by “yoking [such writing

on public vices] to his pleasanter fancy” (Letters 8: 320). In a letter to

Rev. David Macrae, he added that “one of my most constant and most

earnest endeavours has been to exhibit in all my good people some faint

reflections of the teachings of our great Master […]. All my strongest

illustrations are derived from the New Testament: all my social abuses

are shown as departures from its spirit” (Letters 9: 556).2

Dickens’s proclamation highlights the importance he ascribed to

the teachings of the New Testament, whereas the declaration of his

duty in the first letter underscores his use of creative imagination to

expose “vices,” something he was both criticised and praised for by his

contemporary critics (Schor 66–67).3 Combining the information in

1 From Nonconformist and Evangelical standpoints, critics found Dickens’s novels offensive: Mrs. Oliphant criticised Dickens’s “attempt to bring odium on the pastors of the unprivileged sects” (qtd. in Walder, Religion 168). In the chapter “Dickens and Evangelicalism,” Norris Pope thoroughly explicates Dickens’s portrayal of evangelical characters and evangelical journalism’s criticism (13–41). 2 Dickens also responded to criticism from other social sectors: he responded to a Chancery Judge’s criticism in the preface to Bleak House; he justified the satire in Hard Times against Utilitarian political economists in his letter to Charles Knight (Letters 7: 492); he appealed to the reader’s “common experience” for his exaggerated portrayal of the Circumlocution Office and the Merdle speculation in the preface to Little Dorrit. 3 Critics, such as George Henry Lewes, Edmund Whipple and James Fitzjames Stephen, on the one hand admitted Dickens’s power of fancy and his ability to amuse the reader, but on the other hand, they were not ready to admit the novelist’s social engagement as “good,” and they held similar

2

these two letters, one can conclude that his critique of social ills had

been inspired by his reading of the Bible. The focus of this study will be

how Dickens’s seemingly “simplest” formula of “virtues and vices” is

channelled through the use of biblical allusion in these later social-

problem novels.

Like other Victorian novelists, Dickens alludes extensively to the

Bible (and sometimes to other Christian texts such as the Book of

Common Prayer or The Pilgrim’s Progress),4 yet what makes him

special is how he does it. The allusion is seldom simple: whether done

by a narrator or a character, it can be straightforward or ironic

(sometimes both in the same sentence) depending on the fictive

context, whether to comment, persuade, praise, move, or to mock (or

even to be mocked if used as dramatic irony). Throughout my study, an

allusion to the Bible is conceived both as a literary device that will

either characterise a person, relate a biblical theme to a novelistic

counterpart, or build a moral framework for the fictive world, and as a

rhetorical device that aims to persuade the reader to accept the

novelist’s views. Central to the interpretation of biblical allusions in

Dickens’s novels is the implicit but intentional dialogue between the

biblical and fictive worlds, as well as the dialogic relation of both to the

Victorian socio-historical context.5

Integrating the biblical allusions with the characters and events of

the plot not only gives the reader the pleasure of recognition but also

serves the novelist’s rhetorical and moral purpose to criticise or

endorse certain practices and ideas. The uses of biblical allusions in

depreciative views of Dickens’s imagination shown in these novels (Schor 66–67). For example, Stephen considered the novel’s “theory of life” is “not only false, but puerile” (475). In contrast, though David Masson did not like any moral lesson “through the medium of a novel,” he admired Dickens’s faculty to bring characters “in flesh and blood” (647); in addition, Masson thought that Dickens’s social novels of the 1850s offered the reader something “‘real,’ ‘earnest,’ and fantastic” (qtd in Schor 67). 4 Dickens’s allusions to the Bible and other Christian texts far outnumber allusions to Shakespeare and other literary authors (Litvack 33), which is also shown by scholarly works investigating allusions in different novels by Dickens, such as Stephen Gill’s article “Allusion in Bleak House: A Narrative Device” and Michael Wheeler’s chapter “Apocalypse in a Mechanical Age: Hard Times” in The Art of Allusion in Victorian Fiction, pp. 61–77. 5 I will return to the Bakhtinian resonances of these dialogues.

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these novels often function as a litmus test: the (mis-)use and/or

(mis-)appropriation of the Bible by a narrator or a character is often

used to indicate the novel’s attitude to the concerned party, as well as

to heighten the novel’s atmosphere, visualise a scene, or expand its

meaning. Each instance of the allusion to the Bible engages the reader’s

judgment through their efforts in recognition and interpretation.

Therefore, my analysis of biblical allusions in Dickens’s novels is based

on the assumption that Victorian readers and novelists have a shared

knowledge of the Bible, and the reader’s successful aesthetic

appreciation of an allusion involves an effective “exchange” and forges

“intimacy and community” between novelists and readers (Irwin,

“Aesthetics” 530). Such biblical literacy is the prerequisite for the

novelist to incorporate biblical allusions and stimulate the reader’s

participation in the process of interpretation. An “imagined

community” can be thought of as existing between authors and their

readers as well as between the readers themselves, to use Benedict

Anderson’s term (46).6 Such an imagined community exists because of

the cultural resonance realised by reading and sharing common

discourses.

The object of this study is biblical allusion in three of Dickens’s

Condition-of-England novels: Bleak House (1852–53), Hard Times

(1854), and Little Dorrit (1855–57). These later novels, while

considered “darker,” 7 have been acclaimed by twentieth-century

critics for their plot design, thematic richness, and analysis of

contemporary social issues. The novels published between 1852 and

1857 resonate with contemporary radical discourses, expressing an

often hostile criticism of class-based politics, evangelical

retributionism, and utilitarian optimism, which make them “go beyond

6 This term is used by Anderson in Imagined Communities to discuss the origins and spread of nationalism. It refers to the community that exists because readers can read the same newspaper and understand each other and share a common discourse due to the printing and circulation of the newspaper in modern society (25–35). 7 Dickens’s contemporary critics considered the later novels “darker” and “ambiguous” and favoured the earlier “breezy” and “optimistic” novels (Sanders, “Great Expectation” 423).

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a tidy ascription to a known political position” (Bowen 24–25). 8

Nevertheless, Dickens’s call for reforms and social improvement is

constrained by a Victorian social, political and religious context.9 As

Susan E. Colón notes, there is a “blend of idealist Christian hope and

realist devastation […] throughout [Dickens’s] oeuvre” (96). 10 His

warnings against social injustice are couched in apocalyptic and

prophetic voices, evocations of biblical teachings and “persistence of

semi-divine images of deliverance embodied in the idealized female

characters” (Walder, Religion 144).11

My investigation will contribute to the field by examining the

occurrence of biblical allusions and their common patterns in these

novels, showing how Dickens fictionalises social issues through biblical

allusion. The initial impulse behind the inquiry comes from a series of

questions about the role of biblical allusion in Dickens’s novels: who

alludes to the Bible, what biblical verse is evoked, how is such a biblical

allusion used, to what effect, and what are the common patterns? Of

these questions, the first two have been partly answered by earlier

scholarly works, while the last three propel my study. The study

emphasises that biblical allusion is a part of the novelist’s imaginative

design which activates the dialogic interactions between the fiction and

the Bible as well as between them and the socio-historical context. As

scholarship on biblical parables and imagery in fiction has shown,12

8 Dickens “was thought to be a radical by his contemporaries and thought himself one” (Bowen 24). For his radicalism and its generic tradition, also see Sally Ledger’s Dickens and the Popular Radical Imagination. Pope observes Dickens’s enduring radical anti-Sabbatarian position and his participation in the debate with Sabbatarianists over the working-class right to have recreation (50–76, 85). 9 Although Dickens’s novels are radical in nature, he should not be taken for a socialist or a Marxist, as G. B. Shaw and T. A. Jackson respectively claimed him to be (Schor 65). 10 Colón also notes that there is a progression from the early novels’ triumphant ideal to later ones’ realistic portrayal of social failures (96). 11 Walder’s examples are female protagonists in David Copperfield, Bleak House, Hard Times, and Little Dorrit. These novels are also what I select in the study, with the exception of David Copperfield with its autobiographical slant. David Copperfield is also regarded as being written in the transitional period between early period’s youthful optimism and later period’s mature and conscious artistry (Kincaid, “Darkness” 65). 12 Apart from the monographs reviewed below in “previous scholarship,” there is also Bornstein’s article on the images of hell in Hard Times (1971), Gribble’s articles on the Bible in Hard Times and Great Expectations (2004, 2008), and her book chapters on Dickens’s figurative style and religion (2016, 2018).

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the interpretations of fiction’s uses of the Bible are based on an

analogical reading of fiction and the Bible, drawing on biblical clues for

interpretation. I focus on biblical allusions in the early numbers of the

serialisation to explore their structural function in organizing

oppositional stances, and the use of biblical allusions at intra- and

extradiegetic narrative levels in terms of clues for plot development,

characterisation and manifestation of themes, as well as rhetorical

effects by appealing to the reader’s biblical familiarity so as to mediate

the novels’ themes of social criticism.

In addition to other scholarly works, I have drawn on the notes in

various editions and Dickens Companion Series. For Bleak House I

have made use of the Norton Critical Edition (1977) and the Oxford

World’s Classics Edition (1999) as well as the Penguin Classics Edition

(2003), for Hard Times the Norton Critical Edition (2001) and the

Penguin Classics Edition (2003), and for Little Dorrit the Oxford

World’s Classics Editions (1982 and 2012). I have also compared

sources of biblical allusions traced by these editions and will indicate

in notes and my analysis any difference in these sources. I have also

used Norton’s “Textual Notes” of Bleak House that observes textual

difference among different editions in my analysis of “j/J”

capitalisation in the word “judgment” between the early editions. Some

of the biblical allusions I discuss have not been noted by previous

scholars. In these cases, I provide representative biblical sources either

in the analysis or in a footnote.

The Biographical and Socio-historical Context

Mid-nineteenth century novels often borrowed book titles or the names

of characters or places from the Bible, giving the reader interpretative

clues. These allusions to the Bible activate a dialogue between the

fiction and the Bible’s authoritative text, adding layered voices to the

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fictive world and enriching the reading experience. In addition,

segments of biblical verses may appear in descriptions, comments, and

revelations of the characters’ perceptions: both narrators and

characters of different social classes and walks of life may allude to the

Bible or imitate its cadences at the extra- or intradiegetic levels and

thus guide the reader’s opinions at the rhetorical level. Such uses of the

Bible operated within a specific historical context initiated by the

sixteenth century Protestant Reformation: individuals were

encouraged to read and apply the Scriptures, an authority that used to

belong to the clergy.13 By the mid-eighteenth century, communal and

individual readings of the Bible together with Bunyan’s Christian

allegory The Pilgrim’s Progress and Milton’s Paradise Lost, had

become common in many families (Prickett, Introduction 313–14).14

By the nineteenth century, Bible readings had also become part of the

curriculum in grammar schools, effectively contributing to the drop in

illiteracy: the practice of family prayers, daily Bible study, and exegesis

in family circles, as well as various cross-references to the Bible in

tracts and marginalia of The Pilgrim’s Progress contributed to the

Bible-reading habits.15

Although the nineteenth century witnessed the process of

secularisation and the status of the Bible challenged by a number of

factors, including the Higher Criticism and the publication of Darwin’s

Origin of Species,16 this period is still considered “the golden age of

13 David Jasper elaborates on Martin Luther’s foundational doctrinal principle of Sola Scriptura, the Bible alone (25). Marianne Thormählen explains the influence of the authority of the Bible on individuals (514). 14 Stephen Prickett traces it to the literary influence of the seventeenth century biblical epics that popularised biblical drama, while noting its influence on commerce, aesthetics and philosophy (Introduction 314). 15 See Elisabeth Jay’s introduction to the nineteenth-century readers of the Bible, pp. 468–71; See also Michael Wheeler’s The Art of Allusion in Victorian Fiction on the Victorian readers’ biblical and literary knowledge, pp. 9–17. 16 In spite of the nineteenth-century crisis of faith and many intellectuals’ experience with loss of faith, its religiosity is reflected by both people’s attendance at religious services and intellectuals’ engagement with religious discussions. According to the 1851 religious census, an estimated 10.9 million out of the 17.9 million population of England and Wales attended the Sunday services including the morning, afternoon and evening services at either the Church of England or other Christian churches such as Nonconformist Church, Roman Catholic Church and “other bodies” (Pickering 391; Parliamentary Papers).

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church attendance” (Larson, Crisis 1). The Bible, being the root of

Victorian morality and regarded as the source of wisdom and artistic

inspiration, was still frequently referred to in Victorian fiction. 17

Therefore, based on the cultural common ground of scriptural reading,

a novelist’s allusive use of the Bible could still help cultivate a feeling of

intimacy and community with his or her readers, playing an important

role in the cultivation of morality in a stratified Victorian society.

There are several historical or contextual reasons for selecting the

three novels published between 1852 and 1857. On the one hand, the

1850s was a “bleak and melancholy” decade for both Dickens and

society at large, to use Barbara Hardy’s formulation (Creativity 10). In

1851, both Dickens’s father and his eight-month-old daughter passed

away, while his wife suffered mental stress and had to be taken to places

of retreat to recover. Personal losses were not alone in agitating the

novelist. The country was only slowly recovering from the agony of the

Hungry Forties, while the mismanagement of the Crimean War

exacerbated social pessimism. It is a period when Dickens’s anxiety

about the social ills is accentuated in his novels and his earlier

optimism decreases. As Dennis Walder puts it, his “faith [...] in

individual regeneration [...] is replaced by a pervasive awareness of

social evil” (Religion 144).18

On the other hand, the country’s pride was boosted by the Great

Exhibition of 1851 and by technological advances such as the electric

telegraph and the spread of a railway network. For Dickens personally,

by the early 1850s he was enjoying a national standing and was

“confident of his hold on the audience” when he “sought to enlarge the

scope of his intervention in public life” (Gill, Introduction vii). As one

nonconformist preacher put it, “There have been at work among us

17 Of literary and biblical allusions in Victorian fiction that Wheeler examines, biblical allusions take up the majority in his analysis. The same is true of Stephen C. Gill’s article “Allusion in Bleak House: A Narrative Device.” It is safe to say that literary allusions in Victorian novels are mainly the biblical ones. 18 Barbara Hardy quotes T. A. Jackson’s suggestion that Dickens’s later novels are pessimistic probably because of reactionary triumphs after 1850s (Moral 8).

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three great social agencies: the London City Mission; the novels of Mr.

Dickens; the cholera” (qtd. in Schor 64). At the same time, Dickens’s

social ambitions were also expressed through wide-ranging public

speeches and his weekly journal Household Words (1850–59), which

also serialised Hard Times. Nevertheless, Dickens’s particular

attention in these three novels seems to focus on the gloomy and

despairing social conditions facing the socially unprivileged working

class. He was not alone in exposing the social problems in Condition-

of-England novels but cooperated with other authors who shared

similar social visions, such as Mrs. Gaskell, whose Mary Barton (1848)

and North and South (1854–55) were also serialised in Household

Words. As M. M. Bakhtin argues, “throughout the entire development

of the novel, its intimate interaction (both peaceful and hostile) with

living rhetorical genres (journalistic, moral, philosophical and others)

has never ceased” (269). Dickens’s simultaneous or consecutive

writings of both fiction, correspondence, and journalism meant that

the social themes covered in the fiction often interact with his non-

fiction, both critiquing social issues and showing his social ambitions.19

As a complement to my study of Dickens’s novels, this interaction

provides me with the opportunity to compare Dickens’s use of biblical

allusion in these different genres.

Terms, Approaches and Examples

Since there is no ready-made definition of “biblical allusion” in the

OED, or any glossary or dictionary of literary terms, I will start with the

definition of the elusive term “allusion,”20 and then move on to the

19 As Hazel Mackenzie points out, digital archives of Dickens Journals Online, Charles Dickens Letters Project, and the online Pilgrim edition of Dickens’s letters allow scholars to search a much wider range of Dickens’s writings, leading to more nuanced observations of Dickens’s authorial identity as “changeable and sometimes contradictory” roles as correspondent, editor, journalist, and novelist (323–33). 20 Although the practice of allusion dates back to early human history, theoretical discussions on it came rather late. Influential theoretical insights are expressed either in journals or book chapters by,

9

working definitions of “biblical allusion” adopted by scholars studying

the uses of the Bible in literature, and finally arrive at my own

definition of the term. Most dictionaries and glossaries of terms define

“allusion” in terms of the notion of reference. The OED defines

“allusion” as “1. [a]n implied, indirect, or passing reference to a person

or thing; (in later use more widely) any reference to someone or

something.” 21 The second half of the definition encompasses the

possibility of explicit reference without stating it. Oxford Dictionary of

Literary Terms defines it in a literary context, noting the roles of both

writer and reader:

An indirect or passing reference to some event, person, place, or artistic work,

the nature and relevance of which is not explained by the writer but relies on the

reader’s familiarity with what is thus mentioned. The technique of allusion is an

economical means of calling upon the history or the literary tradition that author

and reader are assumed to share.

This definition mentions both a reader’s “familiarity” and the absence

of a writer’s explanation, as well as the precondition of understanding,

i.e., their shared history or literary tradition. M. H. Abrams extends the

meaning of allusion to include “explicit” references: “a brief reference,

explicit or indirect, to a person, place or event, or to another literary

work or passage” (8; my emphasis), which echoes what Carmela Perri

terms the allusion’s “overt” references (290).22

Most of these definitions are concerned with what Stephanie Ross

but not limited to, Ziva Ben-Porat (1976), Carmela Perri (1978), Michael Wheeler (1979), Stephanie Ross (1981), Robert Alter (1989), Göran Hermerén (1992), William Irwin (2001, 2002), and Gregory Machacek (2007). 21 Its definition is also similar to that given by the Literary Terms and Criticism, and the latter has its specific emphasis on the textual allusion: “a passing reference to a person, place or event beyond the obvious subject matter of a text, or a reference within a text to another literary work” (Peck 143). But neither of them highlights the possibility of “overt allusion” that Ben-Porat, Wheeler, Perri, Irwin and M. H. Abrams observe. Harold Bloom considers “equat[ing] allusion with direct, overt reference” as “incorrect but bound to establish itself” (qtd. in Wheeler 3); Wheeler refutes Bloom’s lack of distinction of the related terms (3–6). 22 Referring to Ben-Porat’s view that denies covertness as a necessity for allusion, Perri makes the point that an overt reference is still an allusion (290). Irwin expresses a similar view and highlights that allusions can “actually be overt” and “out in the open” rather than “hidden” (“What” 287).

10

calls internal or intrinsic features (60). 23 She therefore prescribes

some necessary conditions for an allusion to work: one artwork alludes

to another only if the artist (1) intended to refer to it, and (2)

incorporated into the artwork an indirect reference to another; only if

one has sufficient knowledge to catch the reference does the allusion

succeed (63, 65). Robert Alter further highlights the writer’s role: a

writer alludes when “recognizing the general necessity of making a

literary work by building on the foundations of antecedent literature,

deliberately [to] exploi[t] this predicament in explicitly activating an

earlier text as part of the new system of meaning and aesthetic value of

his own text” (116).24 The successful aesthetic appreciation of allusion,

in William Irwin’s words therefore involves both the author’s effort in

incorporation and production as well as the reader’s pleasure of

recognition, creating an effective “exchange” that produces the feeling

of “intimacy and community” (“Aesthetics” 530). Such an exchange,

furthermore, is made possible by its cultural situations and depends

“on a high degree of [shared] cultural literacy—an easy assumption in

traditional societies with fixed literary canons and a high capacity for

verbatim retention of texts” (Alter 119). I should again stress that my

study is particularly concerned with biblical literacy.

I now turn to definitions of “biblical allusion” used in scholarly

works. Introducing the use of the Bible in literature, Norman W. Jones

considers an allusion to the Bible “a quotation of a biblical phrase or

23 Ross refers to intrinsic and internal features as the “internalism,” in contrast to “intentionalism” (authorial intention) (60–63). Intentionalism and Internalism are two plausible ways to analyse allusions that both Ross and Hermerén found problematic (Ross 60–62; Hermerén 213, 217–18). They propose a combined approach, referred by Irwin as “the hybrid view” (“What” 289–90). Following Ross’s discussion of allusion, Irwin also establishes the authorial intention as “a necessary condition for allusion,” to differentiate “accidental associations” imposed by reader individualistically from allusion of authorial intent (“What” 287–90). 24 Meanwhile, there are also poststructuralists who diminish the status of the study of allusion while advocating other concepts like intertextuality (Machacek 522–25; Alter 112). As Alter and Machacek both point it out, allusion and intertextuality are two concepts. Allusion means an earlier author’s work is used purposefully by a later writer, whereas poststructuralists’ discourse on intertextuality does not take authorial intention into much account (Alter 112), and their approach seeks “all possible forms of textual interrelation, diachronic or synchronic,” in juxtaposition with a contemporaneous semiotic field made up of literary and nonliterary texts,” a typical approach adopted by new historicism and cultural studies (Machacek 524–25).

11

passage; the name of a biblical figure or place; a biblical symbol, image,

or plot; or a stylistic quality such as diction or syntax that is

characteristic of the Bible” (14). Studying the Bible in Dickens’s fiction,

Janet L. Larson considers biblical allusion a broad term encompassing

the reference, the direct quotation, the echo, the adapted text, the sub-

textual allusion and the structural allusion (Scripture 16). Similarly, in

her recent Dickens and the Bible, Jennifer Gribble studies Dickens’s

“intertextual engagement with the biblical grand narrative” (4). She

argues convincingly that biblical allusion forms “networks” that reveal

Dickens’s “biblical teleology”; these networks include “[n]ot only direct

allusions, but also verbal echoes, typology, parable, and biblical themes,

accompanied by a prophetic narrative voice proclaiming biblical

teaching and values” (4). In contrast to Larson and Gribble, Linda

Lewis, studying Dickens’s parables, adopts a narrower sense,

distinguishing biblical allusion from “quotation, direct address to the

narratee, anachronistic use of the grammar of the King James Bible [...

or the] parables spoken by Jesus” (19).25

My own working definition of biblical allusion synthesises the

above-mentioned ones by adopting Abrams’s and Perri’s inclusive

notion of allusion, Ross’s analysis of its working condition, and Irwin’s

elucidation of its aesthetic appreciation, as well as a list of categories

made by Jones, Larson and Gribble (but excluding Larson’s structural

allusion). A biblical allusion in this study is therefore a brief reference,

whether explicit (marked, unmarked, or “like” phrase) or indirect, to

the Bible or biblical religion, expressed through a wide spectrum of

formal signals, including biblical names of persons or places, biblical

symbols, parables, and themes or a stylistic quality characteristic of the

Bible. Such an allusion is intended by the author and relies on the

25 Meanwhile, there are also scholarly works that study a novelist or several novelists in relation to religion, where (biblical/Christian/religious) allusion is not defined but used synonymously and in exchange with “echo,” and “reference,” such as Dennis Walder’s Dickens and Religion (1981), Carolyn Oulton’s Literature and Religion in Mid-Victorian England: From Dickens to Eliot (2003), and Robert Butterworth’s Dickens, Religion and Society (2016).

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reader’s recognition of the biblical context, activating a meaning-

making process that intends to communicate with its contemporary

readers by stressing community and shared meaning, thereby

increasing the work’s cultural resonance, while realizing the work’s

didactic purpose to criticise or endorse certain ideas and practices by

providing what Elizabeth Jay terms a “moral framework” (Introduction

465).

To explore nuances of biblical allusions and their working as

literary devices in Dickens’s novels, I draw on terms set out by M. M.

Bakhtin in The Dialogic Imagination, particularly dialogism and

stratification; what Bakhtin says about “comic style” and the tension

between “parodic stylization” and “authorial word” also sheds light on

my interpretation of the ironic use of biblical allusions. Concerned with

the “internally dialogic quality of discourse” (269), Bakhtin focuses on

the constant interaction between meanings, which “have the potential

of conditioning others” (Holquist 426). The object that a word or

“utterance” is “directed toward” is already “charged with value,”

“entangled, [and] shot through with shared thoughts, points of view”

(Bakhtin 276). Therefore, when the word is directed towards its object,

it “enters a dialogically agitated and tension-filled environment of alien

words, value judgments and accents,” which “may crucially shape

discourse, may leave a trace in all its semantic layers, [and] may

complicate its expression and influence its entire stylistic profile”

(Bakhtin 276).

Though not treating the novel’s use of biblical allusion in

particular, Bakhtin does mention the “biblical style” (301, 307) as one

of the “strata and forms of literary language,” together with other forms

of speech that appropriate and organise heteroglossia (a multiplicity of

social voices) that is “both externally very vivid and at the same time

historically profound” (301). Stratification reveals a “differentiation of

ideological spheres” (Bakhtin 211) that creates social heteroglossia in a

novel composed of authorial speech, the speeches of narrators, inserted

13

genres, and the speech of characters (Bakhtin 263).26 He also observes

how the comic style functions through the interaction between the

“parodic stylization” of different strata and forms of language and the

“authorial word” embodying authorial intentions (Bakhtin 301): a

novelist either appropriates the average norm of language for a given

social group by “exaggerate[ing] […] one or another aspect of the

‘common language’” in order to “expos[e] its inadequacy” or “merg[e]

his own voice with the common view” (Bakhtin 302). Bakhtin uses

examples from Little Dorrit to explain how the comic style works: when

“diversity of voices and heteroglossia enter the novel and organize

themselves within it into a structured artistic system” (300–08), the

boundaries between authorial word and other speech types, languages

and belief systems are “deliberately flexible and ambiguous”; the comic

style is based on how the novelist appropriates the strata of common

language without “completely merging with them” (308).

What Bakhtin says of “parodic stylization” sheds light on the

dialogic function of biblical allusion in the novels under study: parody

is an “intentional” and “stylistic” hybrid “that nourishes itself on the

stratification of the literary language,” which is “dialogized” for two

languages and two styles “that are crossed [… and] relate to each other,”

forming a “dialogue between points of view” (76). When a biblical

allusion is used by a narrator or a character it is a stratified voice that

creates meaning by activating the Bible. A straightforward biblical

allusion, like the word directed towards the object, activates the

dialogic relationship between the invoked biblical language and the

language of the novel. The allusion is loaded with its own messages and

values from the Bible that interact with the novel’s messages and values.

If the biblical allusion is not straightforward but an ironical

appropriation of the biblical language, either by a narrator or a

26 According to Bakhtin, language is “stratified not only into linguistic dialects” but also into “languages that are socio-ideological: languages of social groups, ‘professional’ and ‘generic’ languages, languages of generations and so forth” (271–72).

14

character, it further complicates the expression in that the alluding text

may subvert the evoked text’s original meanings “by distorting their

form and changing its context” (Marx 13). 27 Therefore, the ironic

appropriation of biblical language comprises two layers of meaning:

the evoked biblical text not only contrasts with the language used in the

novel, revealing how it deviates from the Bible, but by doing so

implicitly judges the expressed values. The (mis-)uses and

(mis-)appropriations of the Bible indicate the characters’ closeness or

distance from the Bible’s teachings, differentiate their points of views,

and reflect their socio-ideological stances, as well as those of the

novelist.

Finally, the analysis of biblical allusion as a rhetorical device used

by the novelist to critique contemporary social problems is based on

the understanding of the “rhetorical situation” as defined by Lloyd F.

Bitzer. Constituents of the rhetorical situation will be examined to

understand the rhetoric at work in the biblical allusions studied here,

including exigence (an imperfect situation that can be improved with

the effort of the rhetor), audience (a person “to be constrained in

decision and action” and “mediator of the change which the discourse

functions to produce”), and constraints (which “can be brought to bear

upon the audience” in certain situations) (Bitzer 6–8). To understand

why Dickens resorts to biblical allusion in critiquing social ills, I will

expound how the novelist, as a rhetor, through the uses of biblical

allusion informs his contemporary readers of his stance on social issues

and persuades them to share his views.

To introduce Dickens’s intricate use of biblical allusion, an initial

example may be drawn from Little Dorrit. The scene involves the

narrator commenting on Mrs. Clennam, whose personality traits have

been influenced by a perverted understanding of religion:

27 Steven Marx’s Shakespeare and the Bible exploring Shakespeare’s allusions to the Bible mentions the function of ironic appropriations of the Bible. According to Marx, “[a]llusion works by hidden meanings, coded communication between author and reader. It requires the reader to be familiar with the absent evoked text and eager to participate in the active process of interpretation” (14).

15

Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors, was a prayer too poor in spirit for

her. Smite Thou my debtors, Lord, wither them, crush them; do Thou as I would

do, and Thou shalt have my worship: this was the impious tower of stone she

built up to scale Heaven. (LD 1.5.58)28

In these dense sentences an attentive reader can discover several

competing voices that indicate their different beliefs through the use of

biblical allusion. The first half of the second sentence is a mock prayer

in an archaic language style that mimics Mrs. Clennam’s voice,

revealing her perception of the relationship with her debtors: like the

vengeful God she worships she justifies her actions to smite, wither,

and crush, while also implying hidden interpersonal conflicts. Yet,

throughout the quotation the narrator satirises Mrs. Clennam’s

vengefulness by contrasting it with the corrective invocation of the

Lord’s Prayer (“Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors”),

thereby foreshadowing the novel’s theme of forgiveness. With a final

allusion to the Tower of Babel in Genesis 11.9, the narrator concludes

with an implied metaphorical judgment. Like the prideful builders of

the tower of Babel (soon to be demolished), Mrs. Clennam constructs

an “impious tower of stone” to “scale Heaven,” an allusion that not only

comments on the vanity and futility of her actions but also aligns her

with the vain mercantile ethos disclosed by the first chapter’s reference

to the tradesmen as “the builders of Babel” (LD 1.1.15). This brief

example suggests how a cluster of allusions to the Bible that are both

straight and satirical are used to reveal and judge human folly, as well

as to provide a connection to the novel’s plot development and thematic

concerns.

The characters’ particular uses of biblical allusions not only reveal

their oppositional views, but often indicate discourses that the novels

challenge. In Bakhtin’s words, language is “ideologically saturated” and

28 The parenthetical reference includes the abbreviated title of the novel followed by book, if the novel is so divided, chapter, and page(s).

16

shows a “world view” (271). He also points out how the interaction of

the “centripetal force” of “unitary language” is countered by the

centrifugal force of the “realities of heteroglossia” (270–71). Bakhtin’s

terms can help explain the dialogic socio-political views unfolded in

Dickens’s novels and how these views are mediated through the

language of biblical allusion. For example, Hard Times contrasts the

“model” student Bitzer with Sissy Jupe, an “impossible” student whose

biblical language is used to critique Thomas Gradgrind’s authoritative

and utilitarian indoctrination. When asked about the first principle of

Political Economy, Sissy answers: “To do unto others as I would that

they should do unto me,” alluding to one’s duty towards one’s

neighbour recorded in the Catechism of the Church of England (HT

1.9.46 and 46n). For his part, after sending his mother to the

workhouse, Bitzer only gives her “half a pound of tea a year” for the

following reasons:

first, because all gifts have an inevitable tendency to pauperise the recipient, and

secondly, because his only reasonable transaction in that commodity would have

been to buy it for as little as he could possibly give, and sell it for as much as he

could possibly get; it having been clearly ascertained by philosophers that in this

is comprised the whole duty of man—not a part of man’s duty, but the whole.

(HT 2.1.90)

To critique the absurdity of utilitarian philosophy, the narrator uses

Bitzer’s distorted understanding of “the whole duty of man” from

Ecclesiastes 12.13: “Fear God, and keep his commandments: for this is

the whole duty of man.” Reversing Sissy’s “translation” of Political

Economy into biblical terms, Bitzer interprets the biblical teaching in

economic terms, which reaches its climax towards the end of the novel.

When Gradgrind pleads for Bitzer to stop pursuing his son, Bitzer

refers to the headmaster’s own teaching: the whole social system is “a

question of self-interest. What you must always appeal to, is a person’s

self-interest. It’s your only hold. We are so constituted. I was brought

17

up in that catechism when I was very young, sir, as you are aware” (HT

3.8.214; my emphasis). The references to Gradgrind’s teaching as the

“catechism” and “only hold” echo Bitzer’s previous reference to “the

whole duty of man,” while it also contrasts with Sissy’s corrective

reference to the “do unto others” of the Catechism.29 Both Sissy’s and

Bitzer’s interpretations of Political Economy are mediated through

their understandings of the “catechism,” but while the former uses the

biblical teaching to resist Gradgrind’s philosophy, the latter absorbs

Gradgrind’s indoctrination and regards it as a substitute catechism.

This example shows that the meaning of an allusion is decided by its

user and context, and its effect is not necessarily local. When such

allusions are loaded with ideological views spanning the novel, they call

for the examination of the established social discourse.

Previous Scholarship

Dickens’s religious outlook has been a focus of debate for his

contemporaries and across time.30 His uses of the Bible have received

scholarly attention within the field of research since the later twentieth

century. In this part I review two categories of scholarly works in which

Dickens’s use of the Bible has been important: the first category

explores Dickens’s own religious belief by analysing passages related to

religion in his fiction and examining its intersection with other aspects,

such as the Victorian religious, moral, and social concerns; the second

category is about his novels’ particular structural and/or thematic

allusion in relation to the Bible. The scope of research of these two

29 Both of Sissy’s and Bitzer’s appearances are described insistently in juxtaposition: “Sissy, being at the corner of a row on the sunny side, came in for the beginning of a sunbeam, of which Bitzer, being at the corner of a row on the other side, a few rows in advance, caught the end” (HT 1.2.7). The seating of the two, separated by rows, with Sissy closer to the sunbeam, a metaphor for the light of truth, and Bitzer at its end, also calls for a dialogic analysis of them. 30 Modern scholars studying Dickens’s religious perspective have reviewed the situation. See Walder’s introduction to Dickens and Religion, especially pp. 1–6, Oulton’s chapter “Tradings in Religion,” especially pp. 19–24, and Butterworth’s chapter “Dickens’s Engagement with Religion,” pp. 1–25.

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categories of scholarly works may overlap, but their research objects,

methods, and subject matters are distinct and varied. The first category

often combines a context-based approach with textual analysis,

whereas the second uses mainly textual analysis.

Dickens’s professed belief in the New Testament together with

other textual evidence in his fiction, nonfiction and biography, have led

modern scholars to explore dimensions of his religious belief, even

though he has been accused of knowing little about theology and of

being prejudiced against dissenting churches and female

missionaries.31 Noting the lack of knowledge about Dickens’s religion,

Dennis Walder’s Dickens and Religion (1981) is a ground-breaking

study of the components and development of Dickens’s religious belief,

drawing on common features of religious views expressed in both

Dickens’s novels and his other writings. Since then, the subtlety of

Dickens’s religious perspective has been recognised. In line with

Walder, Andrew Sanders’s Charles Dickens Resurrectionist (1982)

explores Dickens’s Christian belief through a thematic study of death

and resurrection in five of the novels. Due to Sanders’s agenda of

demonstrating Dickens’s religious belief, the satirical uses of the Bible

in these novels give way to a more straightforward religious

interpretation. In Dickens, Christianity and The Life of Our Lord

(2009), Gary Colledge for his part studies how Dickens’s religious view

unfolds in The Life of Our Lord, the gospel stories written for his

children, showing the “consistency of [Dickens’s] Christian worldview”

(19) as well as elucidating related Victorian doctrinal disputes and

differences of religious groups.

In the same category, the following works examine Dickens’s use

of the Bible and his religion within a wider context. Carolyn Oulton’s

31 The English Catholic historian Lord Acton cynically commented on Dickens’s belief that “Nothing can be more indefinite than his religion, or more human” (qtd. in Walder, Religion 90). The list of criticism that Dickens had received for his religion could be made very long because of his satirical portrayal of religionists and because of his antagonism towards some religious movements, such as Sabbatarianism (Butterworth 1–2; Pope 13–20). Dickens’s seeming non-dogmatic Christian stance has been traced to the Romantic sense of Christianity (Walder, Religion 90–94).

19

Literature and Religion in Mid-Victorian England (2003) studies how

works of George Eliot, Dickens and Wilkie Collins address

contemporary religious issues, contrasting Dickens’s attitude to

evangelicalism with that of Collins’s. Robert Butterworth’s Dickens,

Religion and Society (2016) examines the intersection of Dickens’s

religion and Victorian society, trying to demonstrate that Dickens

“measures society and its institutions against Christian values” (40)

which he conceives “as the solution to all the problems of human

society” (201). I agree with Butterworth that social and individual ills

are measured against Christian values in these Condition-of-England

novels, but I cannot agree with him that “what may seem a political

attitude in Dickens should rather be seen as a religious one” (140). As

Jude V. Nixon puts it, Dickens’s social and religious views are

“inextricably and seamlessly intertwined,” aiming at the reduction of

suffering and relief of the poor (“Christology” 59). His satire of religious

hypocrisy is always situated in specific social situations and his critique

of social conditions is often done through the imaginative expressions

allusive to religious themes. However, his rhetorical uses of the

religious trope in novels about social problems should perhaps not be

taken for his personal religious attitude.

Following a similar line, Gribble explores theological dimensions

of Dickens’s novels or what she terms his “narrative theology” (Bible i).

Drawing on works by Bakhtin and Paul Ricoeur, 32 Gribble both

demonstrates Dickens’s “biblical teleology” by examining the

intersection between Dickens’s stories and biblical “master story”

(Bible 23) and analyses his engagement “in dialogue with the newly

emergent discourses of geology, paleontology, and cosmology” (Bible

114). Arguing that “it is a whole biblical narrative that structures his

novels,” Gribble shows how networks of biblical allusion establish a

32 In her study, Gribble employs Bakhtin’s terms of “responsible consciousness” and “dialogic principle,” and Ricoeur’s terms of “the ontological force of possibility,” “golden rule,” and “ethical presence”; according to her, the “commonality” of many of their ideas lies in “the importance of the Judeo-Christian narrative as the source of their ethical thinking” (Bible 30).

20

“biblically-derived vantage-point” that provides both “teleological

framework and ethical guidelines” as well as “a rich vein of story” (Bible

3–4).

As this brief survey of the first category of scholarly work on

Dickens’s use of the Bible shows, biblical references and themes in his

works are often used to decipher his faith and his attitude to issues

related to religion. George H. Ford summarises Dickens’s religious

belief: it is “Broad Church [...] and anti-Puritan, favoring a New

Testament temper (especially as in the gospel of St. Matthew) rather

than Old Testament (with some exceptions) rigidities” (Review 215).

Most of these scholars conclude that Dickens can be regarded as a

Christian author,33 though his novels are not religious in terms of their

primary goals, intentions or effects (Walder, Religion 15). Although

these scholarly works mention some of the biblical allusions in

Dickens’s novels, their particular focuses do not allow them to deal

adequately with the subject. My study does not primarily attempt to

add to our understanding of Dickens’s religious beliefs as such, though

by investigating Dickens’s satirical representation of religious

hypocrites my third chapter explores Dickens’s stance on religious

issues.

The second type of scholarly work has little biographical or

contextual concerns but concentrates more directly on the uses of the

Bible in Dickens’s novels. Michael Wheeler’s The Art of Allusion in

Victorian Fiction (1979) is the first systematic study of literary and

biblical allusion in Victorian fiction. One chapter focuses on how

Dickens in Hard Times exploits the “possibilities of eschatological

allusion and symbolism” of the Four Last Things to reveal social

problems caused by the industrialisation. In this work, Wheeler focuses

on allusions that are used as a “plot pointer or thematic pointer in the

33 Except for these monographs, research articles among others by David A. Ward (2000), Nixon (2016), and Christian Dickinson (2018) use biblical allusions in novels to analyse Dickens’s religious perspective, which will be further reviewed in the separate chapters where relevant.

21

adoptive text” (22). 34 The study stresses both the importance of

allusions in Victorian fiction and the familiarity of Victorian readers

with the use of mottos or key biblical verses (Wheeler 24), but Wheeler

does not explore the typological habits of mind reflected by such

practices, nor the structural functions of the allusions.

In contrast, Larson’s exhaustive study of biblical allusions in

Dickens’s novels, Dickens and the Broken Scripture (1985), does

mention structural allusion (16). Observing the role of allusions in “the

creation of new meanings” (Scripture 40), Larson borrows from

Bakhtin’s dialogism and Wolfgang Iser’s reader response theory to

analyse Dickens’s use of the Bible in five novels. She observes the

general tendency of Dickens’s biblical allusions in his later novels to

become unstable and satirical to critique social ills, arguing that

Dickens’s disillusion with the Bible is revealed by such instabilities,

which, in turn, reflect the general sentiment of the age. 35 Larson’s

purpose is to account for Dickens’s “contradictory attitudes [to the

Bible] and strategies [in these novels]” (Scripture 8). She thinks early

novels belong to an “unimaginative phase” when religious texts are

“repositories of clichés” and allusions “call upon the reader to do no

creative work” (Scripture 6); whereas later novels form a “far more

imaginatively engaged response to the Old and New Testaments”

(Scripture 3). She attempts to demonstrate that such changes to

satirical and unstable allusions reflect “a locus of hermeneutic

instability reflecting the times of religious anxiety in which Dickens

wrote” (Scripture 14).36 Using Bakhtin’s notion of a multi-languaged

34 Wheeler classifies allusions into four types according to their local functions: “gnomic allusions” express a message economically; “shorthand notations” suggest “typicality of character succinctly”; “the borrowed embellishments” show off an author’s profound knowledge; and textual allusions work “as a plot pointer or thematic pointer in the adoptive text” (20-23). The last type is considered as “the most interesting and important” (22). The classification tends to downplay the role of allusions, without considering the various diegetic levels where these allusions turn up. 35 Barry Qualls holds a similar view noting the change of Dickens’s novels from following the conventions of popular religious literature in The Old Curiosity Shop to the later novels’ reduction of supernatural existence in life but only in the imagination as “playing dead to avoid facing the demonic life around one” (85–86). 36 The instability, doubt and ambiguity can also be caused by the novelist’s diverse and creative uses of the Bible for his subject matters, which make them unavoidable. The coexistence of tension and

22

fictive world, Larson regards “sets of allusion” or biblical books as

subtexts in dialogue with one another (such as reading the Books of

Esther and Job in Esther’s narrative in Bleak House) or with other

nonreligious languages and world views in the novel (Scripture 34);

examining biblical allusions “in dialogue with their pressuring contexts

and with each other,” she observes their “multivocal, incompletely

merged, competing, sometimes contradictory” voices (Scripture 34).

Larson studies the patterns of “sets of allusions” which means that she

regards these sets of allusions as having “their own integrity” and

“allusive structures,” and they are dialogically embedded in the novels’

“formative tensions,” and may “not necessarily be interrelated

harmoniously in the novel’s ‘system’” (Scripture 35).37 Even as she

uses the Bible or theological books like The Pilgrim’s Progress as a

subtext to read Dickens’s novels, Larson tends to focus on protagonists

while dismissing biblical allusions about minor characters or related to

social discourses. My study does not examine the dialogic relation

between biblical allusions as Larson has done; instead, I explore how

each instance brings the biblical message to interact with the fictive

context, while also observing the dialogue of these allusions with social

discourses.

Interestingly, Linda Lewis conceives her work Dickens, His

Parables, and His Reader (2011) as a rebuttal against Larson’s reading,

which to Lewis deconstructs Dickens’s faith. 38 Lewis draws on the

consensus reached by previous studies about Dickens’s role as a

Christian author and a “moral teacher” (2) who communicates in his

novels with his “ideal” reader (19). Borrowing Peter Rabinowitz’s

contrariness of Dickens, including his pessimism, hope, desperation, and delight, have been noted by critics across time (Colón 94–96). 37 In Larson’s application of Iser’s reader response theory and Bakhtin’s dialogism to interpret biblical allusion, she has excluded the novelist’s intention. But the novelist may not systematically refer to one to two biblical books as subtexts, and instability is unavoidable in that case. 38 Linda Lewis is not alone to refute Larson’s view. Colón points out that “[t]o characterize Dickens’s theology as altogether unstable is as much of a mistake as to characterize it as thoroughly orthodox” (96). Mary Lenard also refutes Larson’s view on Little Dorrit as subversion of its New Testament subtexts (342–45).

23

concepts of “narrative audience” and “authorial audience,” Lewis

investigates how the reader might collaborate with the novelist by

“estimating the probable response of Dickens’s ideal reader” (24). Each

of Lewis’s chapters engages with a parable or biblical theme and

explores its connection with one or two novels and themes, such as the

Sermon on the Mount in Dombey and Son, Bleak House and Little

Dorrit, and the Parable of the Good Servant in Our Mutual Friend.

However, Lewis’s extension of the analysis beyond parables to broader

biblical themes such as resurrection, judgment, and forgiveness, is

criticised by Emily Walker Heady (326). 39 Such digression from

parables to other biblical tropes is probably due to Dickens’s diverse

uses of the Bible in his novels and also due to a discursive use of the

word “parable” in literary criticism, as Susan Colón points out (19–

20).40 In addition, Lewis’s focus on Dickens as a Christian moralist

tends to dismiss Dickens’s radical political views expressed in his

social-problem novels; her use of parables to interpret these novels’

moral instruction also limits her discussions because their

appropriations of the Bible are not always neat or systematic and her

approach tends to soften discrepancies.

Similar to Lewis’s chapter on Our Mutual Friend, Susan Colón’s

chapter on the same novel in Victorian Parables (2012) analyses its

“stewardship parables,” but Colón’s overall theoretical basis is

different. 41 Colón’s work explores what she calls “extrabiblical

parables” (15) in several Victorian novels within the wider context of

“contemporaneous theological, ecclesiological, ethical, and aesthetic

39 Heady owes Lewis’s digression to “fuzziness in Dickens’s own theology, which makes opportunistic use of biblical concepts without accepting the orthodox positions with which they are typically associated” (326). 40 There are also research articles that explore the use of the Bible in one novel (see note 12), or that examine Dickens’s use of one biblical allusion in diverse writings, such as Terry W. Thompson’s article “The Writing on the Wall: Belshazzar in the Fiction of Charles Dickens” (2019). 41 Colón’s reading is based on Paul Ricoeur’s theory on “the parables’ narrativity—on the tension that is made out of the reversal of plot,” such as the prodigal son welcomed by the father he has scorned (15). Meanwhile, Colón is sensitive to the literary critics’ “too broad” use of “parable” to refer to any literary work with a “quality of a religious or moral nature” or the theologians’ use of the term in a “too narrow” sense (20)

24

norms and conflicts” (20). She highlights that parable is a “narrative

strategy” that involves the “reversal of plot,” “subversion of norms,”

and moral confrontation, staging a gap between everyday human

experience and a gesture of extravagance that points to human limit-

experience” (Colón 15–16).42 In response to the tension in Dickens as

both a realistic social critic and anti-realistic myth-maker, “two

opposite things” existing in his work “simultaneously,” 43 Colón

conceptualises parable as “an answer to the otherwise irreconcilable

tension of the realist social critic’s pessimism at the condition of the

world and the believer’s transcendent hope in ultimate redemption”

(94). The way Colón interprets the juxtaposition of Christian hope with

the “realist” “devastation” in Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend (96–97)44

attempts to dispel the doubt raised by critics like Larson: “human

experience is [… about] imagining extraordinary and extravagant

responses to the ordinary failures of individuals and societies” (97).45

As the second category of scholarly works shows, critics tend to

combine the novels’ theme(s) with one or several biblical theme(s),

book(s) or parable(s) to interpret the biblical language, theme and

theological meanings in Dickens’s novels, a method that also informs

the present study. But their methods also mean that biblical allusions

not related to those themes, books or parables are not discussed.

Meanwhile, many questions remain to be answered: what are the

common patterns behind the biblical allusions, how are they used to

develop plot, portray characters and manifest themes, and in what

rhetorical ways are they used to criticise contemporary social problems?

42 Colón theorises the reader’s role in reading parable as a narrative strategy, for it is “performative” and “perlocutionary,” and awaits the readers’ “embodied response” (15). Therefore, reading parables in literature not only “involves the reader in a process of discerning and reacting to the gap” but also requires the reader to be “attuned to the conventions of [the works’] specific historical moments” (16). 43 Colón reviews the views of several critics on such tension in Dickens, including Bert Hornbeck, G. K. Chesterton, and Larson etc. (94–95). 44 By juxtaposing the tension, Colón also withholds intuitive judgment on whether hope and idealism or despair and realism prevail Dickens’s novels for they cannot be “quantified” (97). 45 According Colón, such juxtaposition captures the “New Testament parables about the kingdom of God,” which are also about a “present reality and a future hope” (115).

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Chapter Outline

Throughout the chapters of the study, I investigate what roles biblical

allusions play in structuring the narrative in terms of characterisation,

plot development, and thematic revelation, and how these biblical

allusions are employed to address contemporary social issues. Chapter

1 considers the structural role that biblical allusions play in the opening

numbers of the serialisation, especially the symbolic descriptions of

settings and oppositional stances between characters and institutions.

In these opening numbers, Dickens’s criticism of the Court of Chancery

in Bleak House and of utilitarian educational theories in Hard Times

set up these novels’ moral stance in opposition to idolatrous practices,

while his criticism of a vain commercial ethos in Little Dorrit takes the

form of allusions to the Tower of Babel and the Apocalypse, as well as

to the biblical dichotomy of light and darkness. In the opening numbers

of all three novels, Dickens makes use of Victorian typological habits of

mind as he draws on biblical symbols in constructing dichotomies that

not only outline themes and prefigure the trajectories of his

protagonists but also problematise oppositional ideological views,

inviting his readers to explore the hidden meanings indicated by

biblical allusions.

Chapter 2 concentrates on the biblical allusions used by the

omniscient narrator in Bleak House and Little Dorrit, exploring how

the allusions satirise institutional abuse of power and express the

urgent need for reform. In Bleak House, the narrator satirically

appropriates the Bible to describe the burial services and deathbed

scenes of the poor to reveal the educational, sanitary, and spiritual

problems they face. Echoing Dickens’s similar views on domestic

charity as expressed in letters and journalism, the biblical allusions

highlight the societal negligence. In addition, the narrator in Bleak

House also indicts institutional ills by alluding to the Apocalypse,

26

expressing messages of poetic justice and judgment on these ills. Little

Dorrit exposes institutional ills as the narrator criticises the money

worship of the mercantile class using the trope of idolatry, describing

the institutions as a false church by appropriating the Bible in a satirical

way to reveal their parasitic nature and absurd power structure.

The use of the Bible by perverted characters is the focus of chapter

3. Analysing the biblical allusions used by the characters themselves as

well as in the descriptions of them, the chapter explores the

connections between their perverted rhetoric and social ills. Individual

characters, such as Vholes in Bleak House, Josiah Bounderby and

Slackbridge in Hard Times, become tropes for destructive social forces

through their perverted use of the Bible, while their interactions reveal

how individuals may collude with corrupt institutions. A perverted use

of the Bible occurs most conspicuously with Rev. Chadband, Mrs.

Pardiggle, and Mrs. Jellyby in Bleak House, while the perversion of Mrs.

General and Mr. Christopher Casby in Little Dorrit describes their

hypocrisy. Finally, the perverted religious beliefs of the guardian

characters, Miss Barbary in Bleak House and Mrs. Clennam in Little

Dorrit comment both on the problems of guardianship as such and the

dangers of a partial reading of the Bible.

Chapter 4 explores the representation of characters’ exemplary

deeds and moral goodness through the use of biblical allusions. The

analysis in the chapter is divided into three categories: first, idealised

female characters whose religious belief provides them with the inner

strength to cope with their difficulties; second, minor characters

portrayed in biblical terms, whose moral goodness is either idealised or

presented with their weaknesses and experience of failures; third,

exemplary protagonists whose moral goodness is often described

through straightforward allusions to the Bible that praise their

worthiness. A characteristic feature of Dickens’s morally good

characters is that in contrast to the more vocal (if morally dubious)

religious figures in his novels, they are mostly reticent about their

27

spiritual engagement. Their embodied moral goodness and exemplary

deeds both serve as foils to perverted characters and failing institutions,

and fulfil the novels’ didactic purpose to teach the reader through

examples about commitment to work and true compassion for each

other.

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Chapter 1: Biblical Allusion in the Opening Numbers of the Serialisation

This chapter will analyse the biblical allusions and biblical themes in

the opening issues of Bleak House, Hard Times and Little Dorrit and

show how they are used either straightforwardly or ironically to

establish the moral framework for the social critique explored in the

plotlines and themes of each novel. In Bleak House and Hard Times,

Dickens resorts to the trope of religious idolatry to portray the

institution of Chancery and Gradgrind’s philosophy. Miss Flite’s

apocalyptic vision and her imprisonment of pet birds, as well as the

narrator’s mention of the East Wind contribute to establishing a moral

foundation in Bleak House. Similarly, the moral framework in Hard

Times is established through the use of biblical allusions, indicated by

the novel’s three subheadings of “Sowing,” “Reaping,” and “Garnering,”

which, in addition to the Parable of the Good Samaritan, allude to

several agricultural Parables, including the Parable of the Sower and

Reaper, the Parable of Tare and Wheat, and the Parable of the Tree and

its Fruit. 1 Finally, the opening numbers of Little Dorrit’s serial

announce Dickens’s critique of money worship and the dangers of a

perverted rhetoric through the use of biblical allusions. In George

Ford’s words, Dickens’s social criticism has “acquired a New Testament

aura of considerable importance to its status” (Dickens 109).

Since the writing of Dombey and Son, Dickens formed the habit of

jotting down suggestions for his writing guidance known as his working

memoranda, including notes of his plans for each novel’s plots, themes,

characters’ names and the division of each part (Ford and Monod ,

1 John Drew quotes a paragraph that includes an allusion to the Parable of Sower and Reaper from an excerpt serialised in All the Year Round vol. 2: 93 (Drew 144), but Drew does not mention its source in chapter 15 of A Tale of Two Cities.

29

“Note” 777). Each of the three novels under consideration were

serialised either in Dickens’s weekly magazine Household Words

(Hard Times) or in separate monthly instalments (Bleak House and

Little Dorrit). Dickens’s careful calculation of word limits and number

of pages of each weekly serial of Hard Times gives a glimpse of his

particular concern about the novel’s narrative design. 2 It can be

inferred that the content of the novel, including the first serial version,

is a product of the novelist’s careful design, both to channel his creative

drive3 and for marketing purposes since Household Word’s printers

requested that he contribute a serialised novel to boost the magazine’s

“sagging sales” (Kaplan and Monod 223). The first issue of a new serial

which usually comprises the first four chapters (three chapters for

Hard Times) is therefore very important in setting the background,

introducing the characters and laying the foundation for the

plotlines—or showing instabilities, to use James Phelan’s term (212)—

because they stimulate the reader’s engagement in interpreting and

evaluating the narrative.

The opening numbers can be seen as the novelist’s construction of

“types” that foreshadow and prefigure certain aspects of the novels, or

put differently, “types” that the novel will fulfil.4 For Victorian sages

such as Carlyle, “everything possesse[s] significant meaning if only one

kn[ows] how to discover it” (Landow 118). My analysis attempts to

show that Dickens’s creation of the opening numbers in each of these

novels makes use of the Victorian typological habits of mind and draws

on biblical symbols in order to create types that he then uses for the

2 See “Dickens’ Working Plans” for Hard Times, p. 226. 3 On 21 February 1851, in a letter to Mary Boyle, Dickens described the urge to create a new novel as “the first shadow of a new story hovering in a ghostly way about me”; he also described to John Forster how he is “think[ing] of a new story, and as it begins to grow, [it is] such a torment of a desire”; and he wrote to F. M. Evans on 26 September 1851 about his hope to “get to [his] work (writing Bleak House)” (Ford and Monod, “Letters” 885–86). 4 I am borrowing the term from George P. Landow’s study of biblical typology in Victorian literature. Landow defines biblical typology as “a Christian form of scriptural interpretation that claims to discover divinely intended anticipations of Christ and His dispensation in the laws, events, and people of the Old Testament” (3).

30

rest of the novel.5 As Berry Qualls observes regarding the emblems and

symbols in Victorian fiction, the system of symbolical signification

follows both the tradition of seventeenth-century religious writing,

represented by Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress and Francis Quarles’s

Emblems: Divine and Moral, and the Romantics’ “revisioning of those

inherited ideas and forms” (xi).6 The types and symbols in Dickens’s

novels rely on biblical patterns or are based on revision of types in the

emblematic, allegorical or melodramatic traditions. Similar to the Old

Testament types interpreted as “prefigures” of Christ, symbolic figures

and themes in the opening numbers can be read typologically as

prefigures of the coming “pattern” in the novel, which Dickens takes so

much effort to weave.

The Trope of Idolatry and the Opening Numbers of Bleak

House

Bleak House is considered “the greatest of [Dickens’s] social novels,”

the most powerful expression of “the Social Gospel” which was

“primarily concerned with relieving the condition of the poor and

outcast” (Walder, Religion 141, 153). The novelist realises this goal

through a combination of creative expressions using rhetorical

techniques, biblical allusion being one of them and also the most

extensively used of literary allusions. In the following section I will

show that right from the beginning of the novel Dickens represents the

destructive social forces in Bleak House through the biblical concept of

idolatry.

5 Landow shows how Victorians transfer “habits of mind derived from interpreting the Bible” to “contemporary politics, literary characterization [...] and other areas of thought apparently far distant from theological studies” (15). 6 Qualls refers to Bulwer Lytton’s summary of the “striking character” of the art of his time in the nineteenth century as the combination of “an interior symbolical signification with obvious popular interest in character and incident” (qtd. in Qualls xi). Rigaud’s typological and melodramatic features accord with this observation.

31

The novel opens with imaginative descriptions of the atmosphere

and scenes both within and outside the Court of Chancery on a

November afternoon in London after the Michaelmas Term. The first

chapter’s description of the fog permeating everywhere takes on a

metaphorical and symbolic meaning, noted by several scholars. Yet as

Paula Keatley points out, most of them “have yet to fully inspect the

analogy most frequently and explicitly invoked” in the text between the

Chancery and a church (77). The opening paragraph alludes to the

Flood described in Genesis 6–8, combined with a reference to

prehistoric animals: “much mud in the streets, as if the waters had but

newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful

to meet a Megalosaurus [...] waddling like an elephantine lizard up

Holborn Hill” (BH 1.5). 7 The Chancery is described as “the most

pestilent of hoary sinners,” and the Lord Chancellor is referred to as

sitting “at the very heart of the fog” (BH 1.6). The raw humidity of the

receding waters, it seems, is what causes the “fog everywhere” around

the Court and in London, where the air is the “rawest,” its fog “densest,”

and its streets “muddiest” (BH 1.5–6). Nicola Bradbury points out that

the waters “might be either those of the Creation or the Flood: forming

or reforming the world” (1012). Janet L. Larson refers to these allusions

as a “Genesis mythology” with a Joban subtext of suffering which she

believes (unconvincingly in my opinion) reflects Dickens’s mid-career

crisis (Scripture 136). Of greater relevance is G. K. Chesterton’s

observation that the delineation of the Chancery fog involves the novel

as a whole: “In this Bleak House beginning we have the feeling that it

is not only a beginning; we have the feeling that the author sees the

conclusion and the whole. The beginning is alpha and omega: the

beginning and the end” (942). Jennifer Gribble, more recently, adds

7 Apart from references to the receding waters, the expression “the face of the earth” occurs five times in Genesis 6–8, and another three times with slight variations, such as in 8.13: “And it came to pass in the six hundredth and first year, in the first month, the first day of the month, the waters were dried up from off the earth: and Noah removed the covering of the ark, and looked, and, behold, the face of the ground was dry.”

32

that allusions to the biblical narratives of the Flood and God’s Creation

of creatures at the novel’s outset “bear on a satiric representation of the

nation’s bureaucratic life” (Bible 114).8 In line with Chesterton and

Gribble I would contend that the combined formula of the Flood (God’s

tool for purging sins) and the Chancery’s central role as the “most

pestilent” of sinners anachronistically merge the biblical accounts of

the Fall and the Flood with the fictional Victorian Chancery’s

procrastination in order to express the novelist’s social critique.

Previous scholarship has commented on these biblical resonances.

Gribble considers the High Court of Chancery as “the overarching

metaphor” enacting the biblical narrative of human kind’s original sin

(Bible 113), while Keatley notes the identification of the Chancery with

a church, pointing out its location in the Temple area of London, the

use of the “rites and rituals of organized religion,” and the references

to those in the legal field as “priests,” lawyers as “shepherds,” and

outsiders as “laity” (77). The omniscient narrator’s portrayal of the

Lord Chancellor and the Chancery certainly denote the message of an

idol sitting in a cathedral-like building:

On such an afternoon, if ever, the Lord High Chancellor ought to be sitting here—

as here he is—with a foggy glory round his head, softly fenced in with crimson

cloth and curtains, addressed by a large advocate [...] Well may the court be dim,

with wasting candles here and there well may the fog hang heavy in it, as if it

would never get out; well may the stained glass windows lose their colour, and

admit no light of day into the place. (BH 1.6)

Here the “foggy glory round [the Chancellor’s] head” is a substitute for

a halo; while his “crimson cloth and curtains,” candles and glass show

both his pre-eminence and the Chancery being a “false church” which

admits “no light of day,” as is also noted by Bradbury, Linda Lewis and

Keatley.9 Lewis associates the vocabulary with a false church (125–26).

8 Gribble also considers how these allusions form dialogues with “the newly emergent discourses of geology, paleontology, and cosmology” (Bible 114–18). 9 Unlike these critics, Timothy Curran considers these as symbols of medievalism and references to

33

Bradbury thinks the “dim halo” links it to the “Temple” motifs (1013),

while Keatley sees a “distinctly Catholic overtone” (81). 10 Lewis’s

reading seems to be focused on only the omniscient narrator’s

devastating judgment and does not distinguish the different

perspectives in the omniscient narrative, and neither does she fully

discuss the consistently apocalyptic tone in several suitors’ speeches

reported by the omniscient narrator. Referring to William Axton,

Karen Jahn notes the novel’s equation of “[Divine] ‘judgment and

extinction; Providence and determinism’” (369). Gribble briefly

summarises the replacement of religion by the rule of law, and the

deification of the Lord Chancellor and property, which is made “the

measure of all things” in Victorian England (“Compound” 205).

I would add that it is through the speeches and perspectives of

several minor characters, in particular Miss Flite’s in the opening

numbers (but reinforced by several other characters in later parts of the

novel), that the message about Chancery’s idolatry is brought into

sharper focus. It is the juxtaposition of Miss Flite’s perception of the

Lord Chancellor with its biblical analogue that contributes to the

novel’s condemnation of the corruptive force of the Chancery. Miss

Flite is first introduced by the omniscient narrator: “Standing on a seat

at the side of the hall, the better to peer into the curtained sanctuary, is

a little mad old woman in a squeezed bonnet, who is always in court,

from its sitting to its rising, and always expecting some

incomprehensible judgment to be given in her favour” (BH 1.7). The

narrator’s comment that her placement is “the better to peer into the

curtained sanctuary” underscores Miss Flite’s perspective. Naming the

Chancellor’s seat a “curtained sanctuary,” and referring to the fact that

the sacred in Anglo-Catholic belief, which suggests Dickens’s “inner sympathy with Catholic aesthetics and ritual despite his public pronouncements” (446). Curran also notes the connection between political rule and ecclesiastical administration. His reading emphasises the novel’s invocation of the sacred symbols in relation to Catholic theological issues such as Eucharistic presence and transubstantiation, but not how they are related to the novel’s theme or social critique. See Curran, pp. 446, 451–53. 10 Larson contrasts these words with Habakkuk 2.6, 9 and 12 and sees similar cadences like the “woes” of the prophet (Scripture 137).

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“the raised platform on which the Chancellor sat had curtains on three

sides” (7; note 9), is an allusion to the Old Testament Tabernacle

described in Exodus 26.1, in which curtains are used to separate the

Holy of Holiest from the rest of the movable tent. Though the narrator

has mentioned the Chancellor’s “cloth and curtains,” it is through Miss

Flite’s mystified perspective that its religious connotations are further

explicated. In Miss Flite’s eyes, the Chancellor being separated by

curtains means that he is as unapproachable to her as is the Ark of the

Covenant, containing God’s law in the form of the Ten Commandments,

to ordinary Jewish people. To this straightforward analogy between the

sacredness of the powers that be (supposedly representing the divine

power) can be added the narrator’s twist that the Chancellor’s seat,

which normally would not draw attention to itself, becomes identified

with the Mercy seat in Exodus 26.33-34 (indicating the presence of God

in the most holy place) that covers the Ark of the Covenant, an ironic

allusion since there is no mercy to be found in the Chancery. And the

irony is magnified when another unnamed suitor in the Chancellor’s

court calls out “My Lord” to the Chancellor, who ignores him. The

vocative, sounding like a prayer, ironically foregrounds the

Chancellor’s misuse of power. This ruined man whose incessant

appearance at court has made him a laughing stock, is referred to as

“the man from Shropshire” and turns out to be Mr. Gridley, a person

who later in the novel resorts to Miss Flite’s indictment of Chancery.

Thus, readers are invited to see that the opening chapters in Bleak

House use biblical allusions to introduce the novel’s subject of social

critique and to establish the conflicts between the institutions and the

concerned parties, such as the struggle between the Chancery and its

suitors.

Through the ironic allusion to the Chancellor being seated at the

Mercy seat within the “curtained sanctuary,” Dickens portrays him as

an idol whose contagious and corrupt nature is revealed through the

gradual destruction that he inflicts on ruined suitors such as Miss Flite,

35

Mr. Gridley, Tom Jarndyce and Richard Carstone. The importance of

this biblical trope of the Chancellor as an idol is reinforced when Miss

Flite later in the novel confuses the court’s judgment with that of God.

Being a functional character, she appears both in the omniscient

narrative and Esther’s first-person narrative, in which she brings

Esther and other wards to visit her rented flat located above the shop

of Krook, her landlord. She also allows Esther to know in retrospect

where Nemo, Esther’s biological father, lives and dies. Allusions to the

Book of Revelation in Miss Flite’s speeches serve to strike a prophetic

and apocalyptic tone in the novel.11 During her first brief encounter

with Esther, Ada and Richard outside the court, she foregrounds the

word “judgment” by mentioning it four times, twice capitalised (thus

associated with the divine) and twice not: “I expect a judgment. Shortly.

On the Day of Judgment. I have discovered that the sixth seal

mentioned in the Revelations is the Great Seal. It has been open a long

time!” (BH 3.34).12 Both the Norton Critical Edition and Oxford World

Classics Edition provide Revelation 6.12–17 as sources, as does Shatto’s

The Companion to Bleak House. In addition, Shatto explains that “The

sixth seal is equated with the Great Seal of England, which is kept by

the Lord Chancellor. The Great Seal bears a likeness of the sovereign

and is used to authenticate important documents issued in the name of

the sovereign” (52).13

11 Andrew Sanders in the entry “Bible” of The Oxford Companion to Charles Dickens also notices Dickens’s use of both direct and indirect reference to the apocalyptic visions of the Book of Revelation throughout Bleak House (40). Scholars like Welsh and Butterworth also mention Miss Flite’s reference to the Day of Judgment and the sixth seal, without distinguishing the significance of different forms of j/Judgment in different editions. They do not specify how biblical allusions are made or used. 12 According to the “Textual Notes” (Ford and Monod 815, 820) in the Norton Critical Edition, there are variations of the word “judgment” in Esther’s report of Miss Flite’s speeches in different editions of Bleak House. In one place she says, “Krook, I am much depressed; my cause is on again, and I think I’m nearer Judgment than I ever was” (BH 5.52). Note 52.21 explains “Judgment” in this quotation: “CP1: judgment corr. to Judgment [as in MS] C-CD: judgment” (Ford and Monod , “Textual Notes” 820), which means that the small letter “j” is corrected to a capital in accordance with Dickens’s manuscript [MS]. The word is not capitalised in the Cheap Edition [C] and Charles Dickens Edition [CD], perhaps because the editors did not want reader to interpret the word “judgment” beyond its legal meaning or possibly wanted the reader to regard it as a pun instead of an allusion. Similarly, Keatley notes another case of the capitalised word “Will” in Jarndyce’s telling Esther about the suitcase which has “clear Christian overtones” (77). Therefore, a capitalised word, having both secular and religious meanings, is a pun as well as an allusion. 13 Except for Gribble’s examination of it in the Old Testament apocalyptic imagery (“Compound” 202), Shatto is the only critic to adequately interpret the significance of Miss Flite’s allusion.

36

What Miss Flite longs for is a judgment from the Chancellor that

would put a seal on her lawsuit. However, through the use of the capital

J in Judgment readers are directed towards the apocalyptic Judgment

of God. According to Revelations 6.12–17, the opening of the sixth seal

is followed by earthquakes, fallen stars and other disasters as signs of

“the wrath” and punishment of God. Miss Flite’s juxtapositions and

confusion of the two kinds of judgment and two kinds of seals create an

ambiguity in the meaning of “j/Judgment” that does not indicate her

growing madness as much as her clear-eyed understanding of the

Chancellor’s immense power in procrastinating: the Chancery’s

judgment will not come until the end of the world. However, there is

more to it. As with the straight/ironic interpretations at play in the

allusions to the Tabernacle, her allusion to the judgment of evil in

Revelation again adds an ironic twist since that final judgment might

be interpreted as the implied fate of the Chancery itself. Miss Flite’s

longing for J/justice brings out the novelist’s invitation to his readers

to determine its meaning and reflect on the obligation and privileges of

the public institutions such as the Chancery to execute legal justice. The

novelist’s recourse to the Christian discourse of Judgment to criticise

the ills of Chancery highlights the conflict between the Chancery and

its victimised suitors, which is the main social criticism in the first

instalment.

What is disheartening to the reader is that it is revealed later in the

novel that Miss Flite’s harsh treatment of her pet birds imitates the

Chancellor’s way of judging: her sanity being impaired by the

procrastinated legal process of the Chancery, she in turn encages these

birds, giving them strange names and promising to set them free after

her suit is settled: “Hope, Joy, Youth, Peace, Rest, Life, Dust, Ashes,

Waste, Want, Ruin, Despair, Madness, Death, Cunning, Folly, Words,

Wigs, Rags, Sheepskin, Plunder, Precedent, Jargon, Gammon, and

Spinach” (BH 14.180). These names are antonyms referring to the

happiness or misfortune in life, or words associated with the court, or

37

words related to food, reflecting analogically how her life has been

affected by the suit. 14 They also cast a meaningful light on the

significance of Miss Flite’s own name. The Oxford English Dictionary

lists two nineteenth-century meanings to “flite”: 1. a. “Contention,

strife, a dispute; also, abuse, an abusive speech”; b. A contest, struggle;

2. A scolding-match.” These meanings clearly explain Miss Flite’s

persistent appearance at the court as the Chancery’s suitor and accuser.

In addition, the last meaning of “scolding-match” further associates

Miss Flite with another suitor, Mr. Gridley, who tends to scold. As J. H.

Miller observes, “characters, scenes, themes and metaphors return in

proliferating semblances. Each character serves as an emblem of other

similar characters” (Victorian 183). While Q. D. Leavis observes that

the name suggests the longing for escape from imprisonment like birds’

“flight” from cages (130), I would add that it suggests both Miss Flite’s

determination to strive for the resolution of the case and an escapist

attitude suggested by its homophonic name “Flight.”

In addition, the novelist’s appropriation of the encaged soul may

also suggest Miss Flite’s strife with the Chancery. The juxtaposition of

the emblem of a caged soul, its scriptural paraphrase and poetic lines

in Francis Quarles’s Emblems, as is quoted by Qualls in the analysis of

Little Nell’s imprisoned soul (90–91), shows that Dickens probably

borrowed the idea of caged birds from the emblematic tradition of the

imprisoned soul in his portrayal of Miss Flite’s mental imprisonment

by the Chancery.15 Nevertheless, in the poetic lines following Quarles’s

emblem, “[m]y soul is like a bird, my flesh the cage” (297), we see the

difference between the emblematist’s frustration with the flesh as his

prison and his soul encaged like a bird and Miss Flite’s longing for

justice which becomes her pet birds’ prison. The scriptural verse

14 J. H. Miller classifies these birds’ names in to three categories, including Chancery’s victims of Hope and Joy etc., Chancery’s effects of Dust and Ashes etc., and Chancery’s instruments or tools of Folly, Words, and Wigs etc. (Victorian 189). 15 Q. D. Leavis also notes that the bird is “an ancient symbol for the soul” (130). But she does not refer to Francis Quarles’s work. Alexander Welsh also observes Miss Flite’s “fixed” and “emblematic role” without explicating any emblem (122).

38

following the emblem in Quarles’s work, which reads “Bring my soul

out of prison, that I may praise thy name” (297), further underlines the

impossibility for Miss Flite to reconcile herself with the case and start

her life anew. In the parallel between the encaged birds and Miss Flite’s

imprisoned mind, she is portrayed as a destructive force not

sympathizing with her birds, therefore being grotesque rather than

pitiable.

Quarles’s Emblem on Psalms 142.7 (297)

As Miss Flite’s landlord Krook puts it, her birds are “all cooped up

together, by [his] noble and learned brother [i.e., the Chancellor]” (BH

14.180). The comment indicates that Miss Flite follows the Chancellor’s

way of playing God in her treatment of her birds, a mental escape she

has envisioned in order to cope with the incomprehensible corrupt

force of the Chancery. The death of her encaged birds also foreshadows

the doom of those mentally imprisoned and ruined suitors, including

39

Tom Jarndyce, Miss Flite, Mr. Gridley and Richard Carstone. Miss

Flite’s replacement of the dead ones with live ones shows that she does

not see through either the hopeless trap or her misplaced hope for

justice at the Chancery. The irony is that in encaging her birds, she

mimics the Chancery’s procrastination, making her both a victim and a

victimiser. This double bind is also echoed by Richard’s desperate

reliance on the resolution of the Jarndyce Case, which leads to his poor

judgment, his inability to settle on a vocation and his victimizing of,

and estrangement from Jarndyce. The novel’s message is simple:

individuals who get caught up in social wrong doings cannot remain

unaffected, but reproduce the same social ills. The one positive foil to

this destructive pattern is Jarndyce’s more sensible attitude to the

Chancery: absolute insulation from its influence contains the damage.

Since Esther is the one reporting the scenes of Miss Flite’s

apocalyptic vision and encaging her birds, it is through her mention of

Miss Flite’s biblical allusions that the Chancery’s playing God is made

clear. Through Esther’s biblical interpretation of Miss Flite’s allusive

speech the novel in turn highlights the theme of social injustice within

the legal system. As David Paroissien observes, Esther’s confession

about her difficulties in writing her “portion of” narrative at the

beginning of her narration and her “silent way of noticing” these events

encourage readers “to respond with the spirit of curiosity emphatically

and conspicuously built into the narrative,” thus engaging “readerly

attentiveness” (“Subdued” 290, 292). The ambiguity of Miss Flite’s

words makes her enigmatic, yet the outburst of apocalyptic allusions in

the opening chapters by a half-crazy and half-prophetic woman even

more strongly manifests the novelist’s indictment of the evil force in

Chancery.

Another indication of authorial agency in structuring the novel in

biblical terms is seen on ten sheets of paper with Dickens’s tentative

titles, in which “The East Wind” appears three times (Ford and Monod,

“Note” 773–75). On these sheets are also written its variants, such as

40

“The Wind That Blows” and “where The Wind howled,” together with

other tentative titles, including “Tom-All-Alone’s,” “The Ruined House,”

“The Solitary House,” and “Bleak House” (773–75). These possible

titles can be classified into two groups: the destructive force of the east

wind as the cause of ruin, and its consequences seen in ruined houses

such as Tom-all-Alone’s. Eventually, in the working memoranda for the

first two instalments, only two titles remain, placed in juxtaposition,

namely “Bleak House” and “the east wind,” with the latter in square

brackets showing the novelist’s hesitancy about the title and his

favouring of “Bleak House”; then in the plans for the second instalment,

the two titles are put in complete juxtaposition, but only “Bleak House”

is left from the third instalment on (Dickens, “Plans” 778-79), a title

that refers both to the name of Jarndyce’s house and metaphorically to

a bleak world put under pressure by various corrupt forces (and

thereby incorporating aspects of the rejected alternative title). Due to

its prominence in the novelist’s initial design, scholars have suggested

different interpretations of the East Wind. F. S. Schwarzbach explains

it as a reference to the geographical context of London city in the 1850s;

the local east wind up the Thames estuary “could bring with it the

smells and pollution of London’s East End” (BH 6.61n). 16 Though

Schwarzbach’s interpretation is echoed by the unhygienic conditions

exposed in Bleak House, it falls short of the novel’s metaphorical

dimensions. The East Wind is also associated with Jarndyce’s troubled

emotions in the novel, becoming an idiosyncratic expression for his

need for a retreat to the Growlery, one of the rooms in Bleak House, to

regulate his feelings. To interpret Jarndyce’s emotions, M. J. Crump

discusses the relation between English melancholy and the East Wind,

though he mentions that the expression is “proverbial” (47), its source

16 The note in the Norton Critical Edition, referring to Schwarzbach’s “A Note on Bleak House: John Jarndyce and the East Wind” discusses the significance of this meteorological phenomenon in the novel. Schwarzbach then associated the East Wind with the Orient and explains Dickens’s opinion on China and Oriental culture (82–84), which I think is not strongly argued.

41

is neither given nor traced. 17 Larson, however, traces it to the

proverbial expression of the destructive and withering wind described

in the Book of Job in the Old Testament (Scripture 131). Though

Larson’s mentioning of it is very brief, the biblical source is significant

in that in the novel the meaning of the east wind goes beyond its

meteorological or psychological dimensions, carrying an ethical

dimension. Actually, the four winds all appear in the Bible and the east

wind appears most frequently (nineteen times) in the Old Testament,

followed by the south wind (seven times), the north wind (four times),

and the west wind (once). A common characteristics of these biblical

references to the east wind is that it is strong and destructive, always

used as God’s tool for showing power and divine intervention. To give

three examples: in Exodus 10.13, the east wind is God’s tool to bring

signs as a warning to Egypt: “Moses stretched forth his rod over the

land of Egypt, and the Lord brought an east wind upon the land all that

day, and all that night; and when it was morning, the east wind brought

the locusts.” In Exodus 14.21, the east wind is used to make way for the

Israelites: the east wind “made the sea dry land and the waters divided.”

In Jonah 4.8, the east wind is God’s means of teaching Jonah the lesson

of his mercy towards the people of Nineveh: “when the sun did arise,

that God prepared a vehement east wind [to dry the gourd in whose

shadow Jonah sat]; and the sun beat upon the head of Jonah.”18 As

these examples show, the east wind is a symbol for God’s power and

intervention in various events.

Similarly the wind takes on a symbolic meaning throughout Bleak

House to indicate various judgments. The significance of the novelist’s

prior conception of the title as “The East Wind” lies not only in its

association with Jarndyce’s reaction under the influence of either social

17 In “Dickens’s Use of the East Wind: A Further Note,” Crump discusses it in relation to The Spectator’s use of “the Easterly Wind” and English melancholy. See Crump in Dickens Studies Newsletter 6(1978), pp. 46–47. 18 More examples can be found in Genesis 41.23–27, Job 15.2, 27, 21, and 38.24, Psalms 48.7 and 78.26, Isaiah 27.8, Jeremiah 18.17, Ezekiel 17.10, 19.12 and 27.26, and Hosea 12.1 and 13.15.

42

ills or individual malaises, but also in Esther’s recognition of Jarndyce’s

complaints. It is Esther who reports on Jarndyce’s retreat to the

Growlery and mentions the easterly wind. On the one hand, Esther is

realistic in that she is aware of the individual’s limited power to change

society, as is noted by Carolyn Oulton (176). Nevertheless, her

acquisition of a realistic attitude has been influenced by Jarndyce, and

mainly through her successful interpretation of the East Wind in

Jarndyce’s discourse. On the other hand, both Jarndyce and Esther

demonstrate how individual charities can help alleviate the sufferings

within their immediate circles, such as Jarndyce’s guardianship over

Esther, Ada and Richard, the arrangements for Charley and Miss Flite,

and Esther’s help with Cathy and sympathy with Jo and the

brickmaker’s wife Jenny, to mention just a few. Esther’s mentioning of

the east wind becomes symbolic in that it draws the reader’s attention

to the novelist’s critique of ethical and moral issues. Expressions such

as “the wind is in the east,” “the east wind,” or “it’s easterly” are used to

indicate her understanding of and sensitivity to wrongdoings. In

addition, the east wind is mentioned when moral judgments are

formed. These judgments include Mrs. Jellyby’s negligence of her

maternal duty and its consequence for her neglected children, Miss

Flite’s ruined life due to the Chancery’s postponed judgment, Mr.

Quale’s mistreatment of Charity school children, Skimpole’s

unsympathetic reaction to Coavinse’s arrest, as well as his quarrel with

the owner of some borrowed armchairs. In this way, all of Esther’s

criticism against social ills is implied by Jarndyce’s complaints about

“the East wind” running throughout the novel.19 In addition, Esther’s

virtue and diligence is made a counterforce to such a wind: “there could

be no East wind where Somebody [i.e., Esther] was; they said that

wherever Dame Durden [i.e., Esther] went, there was sunshine and

summer air” (BH 30.378). This counterforce is emphasised by Esther’s

19 To sort out all the passages related to the East wind, I searched both “east wind,” “in the east,” and “easterly.”

43

family name “Summerson,” with its homophone “summer sun.” She

functions as an ideal female and a positive force in the novel. The

significance of the allusions connected to Esther will be further

discussed in the part about the protagonists’ verbal allusions in chapter

4.

Biblical Allusion and the Structural Design of Hard Times

Hard Times also shows the novelist’s use of biblical allusion at a

structural level, seen particularly in biblical subtitles added to the one-

volume 1854 edition of the novel and the use of agricultural Parables

and the Parable of the Good Samaritan. Judging it “a completely

serious work of art,” having “all the strength of his genius,” and being

“a moral fable,” F. R. Leavis asserts the significance of this novel among

Dickens’s oeuvre by exploring its “flexibility” of “a richly poetic art of

word” (227), including the complex use of irony, satire, symbolism,

characterisation and drama. 20 But Leavis leaves out the rhetorical

device of biblical allusion that contributes to making it “a moral fable.”

Its permeation with “religious allusions” was first mentioned by George

Bornstein, who mainly discussed the imagery of the mis-cultivated field

and corrupted garden, and only touched upon the parable of the sower

briefly. Pointing out the lack of attention to the “numerous biblical

allusions” in Hard Times, Michael Wheeler asserts that these biblical

allusions have “important function in relation to Dickens’s symbolism”

(11). He further relates the Four Last Things of eschatology, i.e., death,

judgment, heaven and hell to the novel, connecting the hellish portrait

of landscape with the dismal condition of Louisa’s inner being (62–67).

Other scholarship on the relation between Dickens and religion or

Dickens’s use of biblical allusions and parables has left out Hard Times,

20 See F. R. Leavis’s analysis of these stylistic aspects in the chapter “Hard Times: An Analytic Note” of The Great Tradition, especially pages 230–39.

44

except for articles by Åke Bergvall (“Homiletics” and “Rhetoric”),

Gribble (“Samaritan”), and Jude V. Nixon (“Christology”). Nixon’s

analysis partly touches on the Easter narrative around Stephen

Blackpool’s death.21 Interpreting Hard Times as a sermon based on

biblical texts associated with a particular Sunday in the church year

that stress the dichotomy of God and Mammon (“Homiletics”),

Bergvall further examines the novel’s parabolic techniques and

discourses at narrative, interpretive and pragmatic levels (“Rhetoric”).

Gribble instead argues that the Parable of the Good Samaritan “alone”

“is adequate in “provid[ing] interpretative clues to the plot and

characterization, setting and symbolism of Hard Times” (“Samaritan”

428).22 Gribble is right in her judgment that Dickens is “awar[e] of the

parable’s power to illumine moral questions and ethical dilemmas”

(“Samaritan” 433), but she misses other parables. In this part I will

therefore analyse several parables alluded to in the narrative. Before

getting to that, however, I will first show that the first two instalments

make use of biblical allusions to map the major themes of the novel and

to generate “instabilities,” to borrow Phelan’s term (212), about

characters and their relationships, in order to make the readers come

back for more.

When Hard Times was published in serial form in Dickens’s

weekly magazine Household Words between 1 April and 12 August of

1854, it did not have the distinctive subheadings of “Sowing,” “Reaping,”

and “Garnering,” or chapter titles like “The One Thing Needful,”

“Murdering the Innocent,” and “Another Thing Needful,” which are

directly traceable to the Bible. 23 However, the idea of dividing the

21 Nixon’s article is mainly about Dickens’s view of Christ in the context of religious debate between different religious sectarians in the mid-nineteenth century. The part on the Easter discourse on Stephen Blackpool’s death is part of the examples given in the article to reveal Dickens’s Christology (“Christology” 77–78). 22 Gribble demonstrates how the parable is appropriated in various ways and by various characters. Except for her analysis of the plot and characterisation, setting and symbolism, she uses the Parable of the Good Samaritan as a string to put together a discussion on the moral message. See Gribble, “Samaritan.” But the analysis of characters such as Mrs. Sparsit and James Harthouse is not very relevant to the analysis of the parable. 23 “Sow” and “reap” as a pair occurs twenty-five times throughout both the Old and the New

45

novel into three books and of giving these chapter titles was not an

afterthought but had been part of the genesis of the work. Already in

the working memoranda of the first instalment, Dickens entertains the

suggestion to “republish the novel in 3 books” with the subheadings of

“Sowing,” “Reaping,” and “Garnering” (“Plans” 229). Forster

commented in the Examiner that the newly added divisions “into three

parts [...] help to give additional sharpness to the outline of the story”

(301). As Kate Flint puts it, the titles of the book “establish from the

start the biblical allusiveness with which Dickens underpins his

messages in Hard Times” (303n). 24 Flint also traces “Sowing” to

Galatians 6.7: “Be not deceived; God is not mocked: for whatsoever a

man soweth, that shall he also reap” (303n). The first two instalments

highlight what has been sown by Gradgrind, mainly by suppressing the

young, but what will be reaped remains to be seen.

The three chapters of the first instalment caricatures Mr.

Gradgrind as a worshipper of “Facts.” Dickens establishes the

dichotomy between fancy and fact through the satirical use of biblical

allusions in the chapter titles, which adds a sense of right and wrong

and serves as a shortcut for the establishment of the novel’s moral

framework. Dickens’s contemporary readers could easily identify the

chapter title of “The One Thing Needful” as the biblical allusion to the

Martha and Mary episode in Luke 10.40–42, where Jesus preaches the

importance of the spiritual above the mundane. The biblical “one thing

Testaments in the King James Version, where they are used both literally and metaphorically. Kate Flint traces its origin in Galatians 6.7 (303n). Other biblical verses containing this pair include Job 4.8, Psalms 126.5, Proverbs 22.8, Jeremiah 12.13, Hosea 8.7, and Galatians 6.8, etc. “Garner” appears four times in the King James Version, all used as a noun, meaning barn. If “garner” is replaced by “gather,” there are altogether five places where “sow,” “reap” and “gather” appear in one verse, including Leviticus 25.11, Mathew 6.26, 25.24 and 25.26, and John 4.36, as are traced by Åke Bergvall (“Homiletics” 109–11). 24 Dickens writes for the old and young, the rich and the poor as he professes in “A Preliminary Word” (HW 1: 1–2). In spite of the fact that in 1839 only 27% unskilled workers were literate, and in 1850, 8 million people were illiterate, “the Dickens reading audience is assumed to have been clerks, educators, bureaucrats, clergymen, manufacturers, lawyers, merchants, and other functionaries of the ‘nation of shopkeepers’” (Lewis 3). The analysis of Dickens’s Victorian readership shows the likelihood that it could pick up the biblical allusions. See p. 37 in The Nineteenth-Century Church and English Society [Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995], and The Church of England in the Mid-Nineteenth Century: A Social Geography [London: The Historical Association, 1980], as are referred to in note 6 of Bergvall’s article “The Homiletics of Hard Times.”

46

needful” for Mary means the “call to purity of heart focussing on the

Word of God with undivided attention,” as Matthew Henry commented

(qtd. in Jeffrey 577), whereas “one thing needful” for headmaster

Gradgrind is attention to worldly things, as represented by his

obsession with facts. The chapter, containing a speech by Gradgrind

before his pupils, shows variations of the word “Fact,” repeated eight

times. According to Gradgrind, “we want nothing but Facts” (HT 1.1.1).

The capitalised word highlights its pivotal role in Gradgrind’s life and

shows that his focus on “Facts” has become his surrogate religion and

philosophy of life. The title of the chapter “The One Thing Needful,”

therefore, highlights Gradgrind’s reversal of biblical teaching and

functions as a satire on the Utilitarian philosophy of Gradgrind who is

both a preacher of “Facts” and a loyal implementer in his own life and

work. His prostration before it is emphasised not only by the reiteration

of its name, but the internalisation of its influence is seen in his

alienating and objectified physical features, like his “square forefinger,”

his “square wall of forehead,” his “wide, thin and hard” mouth, his

“inflexible, dry and dictatorial” voice and his “bristled” hair (HT 1.1.1).

Everything related to him reinforces that “the one thing needful” is

nothing but “Facts.” Thomas Gradgrind’s indoctrination of “Facts” in

the young is portrayed as an authoritarian voice suppressing other

voices, especially those of Sissy Jupe and his children.

The next chapter, “Murdering the Innocent,” follows up the satire

by reminding the reader of the despot Herod’s killing of the children in

Bethlehem (Matt. 2.16), thereby exemplifying the dire effect of

Gradgrind’s implementation of his philosophy on his young pupils,

including his own children Louisa and Tom. His stifling of Louisa’s and

Tom’s innate curiosity outside the circus suggests how the natural

feelings are “murdered,” which paves the way for their later failures.

Fact is made an idol for Gradgrind. The narrator’s parody of such

rhetoric with the ejaculation of “Fact forbid!” further shows idolatry

47

(HT 1.3.11). 25 Gradgrind not only suppresses the imagination and

sentiments of his own children and other young students, his

philosophy is shown to be as deadly as Herod’s command through its

destruction of the fancy, innocence and sentiments of the Coketown

children. As a result of this indoctrination, Coketown becomes “sacred

to fact” (HT 1.5.21). The following mimicking of the utilitarian creed

shows the narrator’s satire in his description of the fact-soaked

situation in Coketown:

Fact, fact, fact, everywhere in the material aspect of town; fact, fact, fact,

everywhere in the immaterial [...] everything was fact between the lying-in

hospital and cemetery, and what you couldn’t state in figures, or show to be

purchasable in the cheapest market and saleable in the dearest, was not, and

never should be, world without end, Amen. (HT 1.5.21)

Here the trinity of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost in “Gloria”

in the Book of Common Prayer is distorted to the trinity of fact (1.5.21n).

Such mimicking highlights the absurdity of its rhetoric that reduces

complex human experiences to the only legitimate goal of maximizing

economic gains.26 Its source text is used as a moral compass to both

reveal the perversion and judge on it. The narrator once again resorts

to satire to show that according to Gradgrind’s philosophy, “the Good

Samaritan was a Bad Economist” (HT 2.12.162). Nothing that is not of

immediate material satisfaction, or possible to be put in figures or

tables, can be appreciated by Gradgrind.

Gradgrind’s “deliberate inversion of the Gospel,” as Bergvall puts

it (“Homiletics” 121), leads to the painful realisation indicated by the

first chapter’s title in book 3, “Another Thing Needful.” It is here that

the novel’s overall allusion to Christ’s saying that one will reap what

one sows plays out within the Gradgrind household, in effect fulfilling

25 Anne Hiebert Alton also notes the idolatry of fact (78). 26 In Poetic Justice: The Literary Imagination and Public Life, Martha Nussbaum studies how Dickens attacks utilitarianism through the novel’s address of the four elements of utilitarianism: commensurability, aggregation, maximizing, and exogenous preferences.

48

the implied threat of the allusion to Herod killing the innocents set up

in chapter 2 of book 1, “Murdering the Innocent.” Gradgrind reaps the

painful crop of his own children’s deterioration: Louisa suffers from a

failed marriage based on material gains and almost elopes, while Tom

steals from Bounderby and frames an innocent worker, Stephen

Blackpool, ending his life in atonement before dying in a foreign land.

Meanwhile, the “probability and consistency” of Dickens’s satirical

portrayal of Gradgrind’s classroom in the first instalment has been

challenged by both Dickens’s contemporaries and modern critics. A

reviewer in The Westminster Review asserted that teaching practice in

reality involved learning “passages of our finest poets [...] by heart” and

was nothing like the Gradgrind school; therefore, they denied Dickens’s

suggestion that Gradgrind’s practice was representative “in almost

every school in the kingdom” (Sinnett 332).27 But according to the

well-known Victorian textbook editor J. M. M’Culloch, it was both the

way of learning (rote learning) and the materials (not adapted to

children’s capacity) used that were in need of change. Rote learning of

parliamentary speeches, Shakespeare’s works, and sentimental poetry

were part of the regular curriculum at the time and M’Culloch

considered much of it beyond children’s capacity. 28 As M’Culloch

pointed out in the preface to A Series of Lessons, the problem of

education at the time was “to burden the memory of the pupil with

‘rules’ and ‘Extracts’ utterly unsuited to his capacity” (325).

Over one hundred years later, K. J. Fielding also considered the

satire of the Gradgrind’s school in the first instalment as having

sacrificed “probability and consistency” in order to make “a striking

first instalment” (276). However, as grotesque and firm as Gradgrind

is in physical features and convictions, both this and the hyperbolic

27 According to Sinnet, the middle-class figures such as the Gradgrinds, Mr. Bounderby and Mrs. Sparsits are considered “odd” and Dickens’s style of portraying them as “quaint,” in contrast to the “simplest and least cultivated” characters such as Stephen, Rachel, Sissy, and the Sleary circus (332). 28 A Series of Lessons by M’Culloch were very popular textbooks since the first publication in 1831. The materials were selected to stimulate curiosity and to cultivate both the morals and mental culture, as was claimed in the preface (M’Culloch 325–26).

49

discussions on the horse wallpaper, the flower carpet, and the

occupation of Sissy’s father in the first instalment serve to introduce

the novel’s emphasis on sentiments and imagination, as Philip Collins

shows (335). The discourse of Idolatry would prompt the Victorian

readers to immediately pass moral judgment on its practicer, and

naturally leads up to the themes of sowing and reaping connected with

the major characters. In addition, Gradgrind’s repeated emphasis on

Facts not only explains his later use of statistics to persuade Louisa to

marry Bounderby, but also sets him up for a fall and his later change of

heart.29 In addition, the striking effect in the first instalment, i.e., the

use of allusions to biblical idolatry in connection to the topical issues of

education and cultivation of fancy, which Dickens’s Household Words

strives to achieve among its readers and thus sums up the novelist’s

prescription for an individual’s relief in an industrial and mechanical

age. The biblical allusions in the first chapters are echoed by other

biblical parables in the latter part of the novel, mainly on issues related

to industrialism.

Several parables are important in the novel: the Parable of the

Sower and the Parable of the Tree and its Fruit are used to represent

Dickens’s critique of excessive emphasis on rationality seen at the

Gradgrind School. These parables, signalled by the subtitles, in line

with the chronological plot development at the Gradgrinds, are used to

denote the cause-and-effect relationship seen in Mr. Gradgrind’s

sowing of Facts in the young while suppressing their imagination and

sentiments, leading to their failures in emotional life or committing

crimes and to the Gradgrind family reaping the consequences. In

addition to these two parables, the Parable of the Good Samaritan is

also used in various ways to reveal the suffering of the industrial

workers, manifest through Stephen Blackpool, as well as the lack of

brotherhood among the workers and the industrialists’ lack of

29 See Philip Collins’s “Horses, Flowers, and the Department of Practical Art,” pp. 333–36.

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empathy.30

The Parable of the Sower, recorded in Mark 8.4–15, Matthew 13.1–

13, and Luke 4.1–20, is used by Jesus to explain to his disciples the

different responses to the Gospel: a sower sows his seeds

indiscriminately: some fall on the side of the road, some on rocky or

thorny places and some on good soil, i.e., some people reject the Gospel

while in others it bears rich fruit. In Hard Times, this Parable is used

ironically by the novelist in that a corrupt seed/Gospel is absorbed and

assimilated by the bad soils (Louisa, Tom and Bitzer), while Sissy

Jupe’s good soil is the only one to resist it, and is thereby able to

flourish. Louisa fails to discern her own emotional needs, misplaces her

tender feelings in the indulgence of her brother Tom the whelp, and is

almost lured to elope with James Harthouse; Tom, believing the Gospel

of self-interest, grows to be self-centred, running up debts and

committing theft; and Bitzer, the model utilitarian student, uses the

“fundamental principle of the Gradgrind philosophy” to send his

mother to the workhouse and reject his teacher’s request to give up

pursuing Tom: “My schooling was paid for; it was a bargain; and when

I came away, the bargain ended” (HT 3.8.214). Sissy’s failure of

improvement in Gradgrind’s school provides her with immunity from

the corrupt force of Gradgrind’s indoctrination. The Parable of the Tree

and its Fruit is also invoked in that Gradgrind is not only a sower of

seeds, but his children and model students are fruits growing on his

tree, and their failures only reveal their failed origin. In addition to the

use of the Parables, the criticism of Gradgrind’s authoritarianism is

also made through Sissy’s and Bitzer’s views on the “catechism,” which

I have analysed in the introduction. In addition, Sissy’s good work,

eventually recognised by the Gradgrinds, highlights what is missing in

Mr. Gradgrind’s doctrines, a realisation which dawns on Mrs.

30 Jennifer Gribble’s excellent article “Why Good Samaritan Was a Bad Economist: Dickens’ Parable for Hard Times” mentions the Sower’s Parable, without explicating it. Gribble’s article on this Parable is revealing on how a parabolic reading of fiction can be carried out.

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Gradgrind before her death even as she lacks the knowledge to name it:

“there is something—not an Ology at all—that your father has missed,

or forgotten, Louisa. I don’t know what it is. I have often sat with Sissy

near me, and thought about it. I shall never get its name now” (HT

2.9.152).

When Dickens presents a pivotal idea, it is often expressed through

a biblical allusion. To give just one example: Dickens’s idea on what

childhood should be like, unattainable for Louisa and “millions of

innocent creatures,” is expressed by the narrator as a biblical echo:

The dreams of childhood—its airy fables; its graceful, beautiful, humane,

impossible adornments of the world beyond: so good to be believed in once, so

good to be remembered when outgrown, for then the least among them rises to

the stature of a great Charity in the heart, suffering the little children to come

into the midst of it, and to keep with their pure hands a garden in the stony ways

of this world, wherein it were better for all the children of Adam that they should

oftener sun themselves, simple and trustful, and not worldly-wise—what had she

to do with these? (HT 2.9.149–50)

The passage is permeated with allusions to Mark 10.14–15, about Jesus

bidding the little children to come to him to be blessed, highlighting the

cultivation of “Charity in the heart” through the nurture of imagination

about “the world beyond” that can sustain in “the stony ways of this

world.” This is of course in stark contrast to Louisa’s withered and

hardened heart. In addition, the narrator in the same paragraph mixes

the image of an Idol with the Parable of the Tree and its Fruit to further

showcase the problem with Gradgrind’s philosophy,

first coming upon Reason through the tender light of Fancy, [Louisa] had seen it

a beneficent god, deferring to gods as great as itself; not a grim Idol, cruel and

cold, with its victims bound hand to foot, and its big dumb shape set up with a

sightless stare, never to be moved by anything. (HT 2.9.150)

Dickens suggests that the innate ability to fancy can illuminate the

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ability to reason, while, if unrestrained, reason can suppress and kill

fancy. Unchecked, reason is “a sightless stare,” an oxymoron explaining

the last metaphor in the paragraph:

[Louisa’s] remembrances of home and childhood, were remembrances of the

drying up of every spring and fountain in her young heart as it gushed out. The

golden waters were not there. They were flowing for the fertilisation of the land

where grapes are gathered from thorns, and figs from thistles. (HT 2.9.150)

The agricultural metaphors, echoing the basic parable of sowing and

reaping, are means of passing judgment on the futility of such an

upbringing, and the narrator’s rhetoric combines oxymoron, satire and

appropriation of Jesus’s warning against false prophets in Matthew

7.16: “Do men gather grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles?” Where

George Bornstein suggests that it is Louisa who sees “both her home

and herself as a wasteland, a decayed field” (165), I would contend that

the focalisation of the last sentence is beyond Louisa in that it sees

through Gradgrind’s philosophy, imitates his perverted logic and

passes judgment on its falsehood through appropriation of Jesus’s

warning. The perversion of the message highlights the damage that

Gradgrind’s school does to the intellect and mentality of the young:

instead of “grapes and figs” it yields only “thorns and thistles.” The

implied message is hammered home by a line omitted from the

narrator’s reference to Matthew 7.16 which I think Dickens may

reasonably have assumed his readers would remember: “Ye shall know

them by their fruits.” Here we see how the novelist combines several

parables to express a social critique through biblical allusion that he set

up already in the first instalment.

There is a link between the educational issues and larger social

concerns in the narrator’s speculation on Gradgrind’s mental activity

at the end of the second book: “He sat writing in the room with the

deadly-statistical clock, proving something no doubt—probably, in the

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main, that the Good Samaritan was a Bad Economist” (HT 2.12.162).

The narrator imitates Gradgrind’s logic by perverting the Parable in

order to condemn the Good Samaritan’s offer of help to a robbed

stranger as uneconomical, a utilitarian mentality followed by both

Gradgrind and Bounderby, an ironic reading of the Gospel that

explains why the industrialists and “dustmen” of the country (MPs) do

not want to be bothered by improving the conditions for the lower

classes.

The alliance of Gradgrind and Bounderby is shown to be based on

their shared belief in utilitarianism, for both designed to produce docile

and productive citizens, whether pupils or workers. Gradgrind’s

utilitarian and fact-based school provides training to students, who in

turn are intended to serve Bounderby, just as Louisa, Tom, and Bitzer

do. Gradgrind and Bounderby also have their treatment of their

spouses in common. Mrs. Gradgrind is subdued and has an invisible

and feeble existence, unable to form any firm opinion on anything.

Louisa’s transformation into Mrs. Bounderby is shown to be an

instrument to fulfil her father’s, her husband’s, and even her brother’s

wishes, at the cost of disregarding her own needs. And the separation

of Louisa and Bounderby also indicates the futility and barrenness of a

union based on such utilitarian philosophy. What is more, both Mrs.

Gradgrind and Mrs. Bounderby are connected to the trope of idolatry.

Gradgrind is portrayed as being sincere in his adherence to the idolatry

of “Facts.” His provision for Sissy’s education is acknowledged as a kind

service, in spite of the fact that he hopes that Sissy’s being left alone by

her father may serve as a warning to Louisa of danger of “a vulgar

curiosity” represented by the Sleary Circus (HT 1.6.30). It takes

Louisa’s collapse at his feet after challenging him about her education,

confessing facts about her dead marriage and her being tempted by

Harthouse to trigger Mr. Gradgrind’s reflection about his failures. Mr.

Gradgrind is an “example of good intentions gone wrong” (Alton 76).

Dickens makes the readers feel more sympathy towards Gradgrind

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than towards the incorrigible Bounderby, probably owing to his

sincerity in what he does. The final exposure of Tom’s crime gives the

old man a most heavy blow. His trust in Facts and Reason is completely

shattered as he leans on Sissy to dispel Harthouse from Coketown,

comfort Louisa, and help Tom escape. Sleary, another character

associated with fancy (and thus with Sissy), by helping Tom flee the

country serves to reverse Gradgrind’s understanding of the Parable of

the Good Samaritan: “making his facts and figures subservient to Faith,

Hope, and Charity; and no longer trying to grind that Heavenly trio in

his dusty little mills?” (HT 3.9.221). In contrast, Bounderby repetitively

affirms a false narrative about his upbringing in order to make himself

an Idol worthy of others’ esteem and submission. The expression

“brazen Bounderby” as a pun not only reveals his shamelessness but

also relates him to the “golden calf.” His frustration due to Louisa’s

negligence and his assertive and self-centred utterances reveal his

vanity and falsely-held esteem: “There are ladies [...] who next to

worship the ground I walk on” (HT 3.3.182). Bounderby is thus

portrayed as blasphemous and beyond cure. In addition, Bounderby

also plays with the Parable of the Sower in his communication with

Stephen Blackpool about the latter’s possibility to divorce his drunken

wife. He condemns Stephen as, “you go about, sowing it and raising

crops. That’s the business of your life, my friend” (HT 2.5.116; original

emphasis), which shows no sympathy with Stephen’s problems or his

misery. In the end, the exposure of his lie about his depraved

upbringing serves to disgrace him, showing how convergence of

Parables contributes to portraying him as a liar who sows bad seeds

and reaps bad fruit.

These biblical allusions in the novel’s book and chapter titles,

together with Gradgrind’s false gospel running through the narrative,

serve to reveal the cause-and-effect relation between a wrongheaded

belief in “Facts” and its consequences. And these titles, at the structural

level, serve to express the novelist’s satire on the deification of Facts

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and utilitarianism both in education and in the general ethos of his time.

Biblical Allusion in the Opening Numbers of Little Dorrit

To simply say that Little Dorrit is loaded with biblical allusions and

references to various religious practices does not do justice to its use of

these allusions as a literary device. Lionel Trilling considers the novel

“an imagination under the dominion of a great articulated idea, a moral

idea which tends to find its full development in a religious experience”

(589). This “religious experience” points to the novel’s metaphysical

aspects, and is closely related to the use of biblical themes throughout

the novel, themes that create a moral framework established through

the use of biblical allusions in the opening numbers.

Scholars have interpreted the biblical themes in this novel in

different ways: Dennis Walder sees a dichotomy between the

“imprisoning darkness” represented by Mrs. Clennam’s Old Testament

ethos and “the redemptive light of love” by Little Dorrit’s New

Testament liberating spirit (Introduction vii; Religion 171). Walder

regards the novel as Dickens’s provision of “a religious ‘answer’” to

“life’s painful mysteries” due to the novelist’s “deepening sense of the

inadequacy of secular morality in the face of contemporary social and

political confusion” (Introduction xiii, vii).31 Larson, identifying many

biblical allusions in Little Dorrit, explores the rival subtexts of the

Books of Ecclesiastes and Revelation; Larson regards Amy Dorrit as an

apocalyptic figure, but thinks her living Gospel fails to regenerate a

“new heaven and a new earth” or counteract the social ills in the novel

(Scripture 241). Similar to Larson’s parallel reading of the novel, but

with other biblical subtexts, Mary Lenard makes use of Pauline letters

31 Walder’s work Dickens and Religion aims to explore Dickens’s religious belief. His research is based on the hypothesis that a novelist’s religion is best reflected in the literary works he writes. Therefore, his conclusion involves two aspects, including both the fictional expressions in relation to religion and the realistic implications of these religious expressions for the novelist.

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to demonstrate Amy Dorrit’s moral and ethical roles in order to refute

Larson’s argument on the inefficacy of Amy’s Gospel. However, as they

extensively make use of biblical passages that are not actually

mentioned or alluded to in the novel, Larson’s and Lenard’s readings

will not be further discussed here. Of the other scholars investigating

the biblical themes in the novel, Linda Lewis analyses the language

related to debt and analyses the theme of indebtedness and argues that

Dickens aims to instruct his reader about forgiveness (153–83). 32

Mark Knight explores the issue of human responsibility via the

theological concept of providence (179–92), while Sylvia Manning

briefly mentions the “Christian ideology implicit in the tale”: the good

(Amy Dorrit) shall be rewarded, the mighty (Mr. Merdle) shall be cast

down, and the lame (Mrs. Clennam) shall walk, the blind (Arthur

Clennam) shall see, and the prodigal daughter (Tattycoram) shall

return (127). While these studies provide abundant evidence of

Dickens’s use of biblical allusion, they do not treat it as a structural tool

set up at the novel’s beginning, nor do they regard biblical allusion as

making use of typology for characterisation and manifestation of

themes.

Similar to the previous two novels, Little Dorrit is also a work

based on a careful and serious planning. Its preliminary idea started

from January or February of 1855;33 in March Dickens acknowledges

his planning and note-taking of a new novel;34 in May he several times

describes his “restlessness” while writing the opening numbers, 35

32 Lewis holds that Dickens uses the biblical allusions, especially the parables, for “the Victorian reader’s religious instruction” (19–20), with which I only partly agree because the novel’s instruction goes beyond the religious dimension. It is true that the moral framework, especially individual good work, is in accordance to the Christian teaching. However, I think Lewis has underestimated Dickens’s social agenda and restricted Dickens’s rhetorical use of the biblical allusions to religious teaching. 33 Forster sets the time of a preliminary idea to January of 1855 (Letters 7: 555n), while Trey Philpotts traces the preliminary planning to “at least 3–4 February,” when Dickens wrote to a correspondent about “motes of new books” were turning up in his mind (Companion 1). 34 In his letter to Wilkie Collins, Dickens wrote: “I have been writing and planning and making notes over an immense number of little bits of paper” (Letters 7: 555). 35 He mentioned his restlessness to Miss Burdett Coutts on 8 May 1855 and did it again on May 24 while writing the first number (Letters 7: 613–14, 629). He also described writing the first chapter of “a new, long, twenty-number Green book” to Mrs. Watson on 21 May 1855, in which he described his restless walking in his room and tearing his hair and talking to himself in the third person voice: “How

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which is proof of the hard design work that he undertakes.36 It takes

him four months to complete the first two numbers, during which time

he decides to make “[Amy] Dorrit very strong in the story” and to

“overwhel[m] that family with wealth” (Letters 7: 701) and sets up the

contrast between Amy Dorrit’s diminutive physique and her strong

personality and the contrastive circumstances indicated by the titles

“Poverty” and “Riches.”

Harvey Peter Sucksmith notes Dickens’s “great difficulty at first in

organizing his extremely heterogeneous material into a coherent

whole,” attributing this difficulty to a “false start” that is overcome only

when Dickens realises that “a whole interconnected scheme of things,

not one person, was responsible for the condition” (Introduction x–

xi).37 Dickens’s awareness of the whole interconnectedness of those

social problems is expressed much earlier in Bleak House and Hard

Times: the former examining the ills within the legal system that Little

Dorrit further probes through the Circumlocution Office; the latter

revealing the interconnectedness of utilitarianism-based education

and an industrialism unrestrained by ethical and social responsibilities.

Upon the completion of the two-year serialisation of Little Dorrit,

Dickens writes in the preface about the completed weaving of “the

pattern” (LD 7) and invites his reader’s re-evaluation of the novel as a

whole. I would suggest that Dickens’s “restlessness” is caused by the

can you be such an erratic, wayward, unsettled, capricious, incomprehensible Beast? I am ashamed of you!” (Letters 7: 26–27). 36 It took him longer to write the opening numbers, which probably spanned from May to August. The second number was not mentioned until 19 August 1855. By 23 September number two was sent to Wills for reading (Letters 7: 708), so it is safe to say the first two numbers took four months from May to September of 1855. By 16 September 1855, he was more at ease because in the letter to Mrs. Watson, he mentioned his “getting on pretty well—have done the first two numbers” and his “getting to work on number three.” The fourth number was supposed to be finished on 31 December 1855 (Letters 7: 773). Numbers three and four take him about slightly more than three months from late September to the end of December 1855. As Butt and Tillotson observe, Dickens is “never four or five numbers before the first” serial’s publication and “by the middle of the novel he was rarely more than one number ahead of his readers” (14), which means he keeps approximately the same pace once the initial planning is done and the designs for characters and plots fall to their respective places. In addition, before the publication of the first serial in December, he also changes the novel’s title from Nobody’s Fault to Little Dorrit and he sets on the idea of dividing the novel into two books of “Poverty” and “Riches” at the end of October (Letters 7: 729). 37 According to Sucksmith, the “false start” is indicated by Dickens’s working notes when it mentions the “man who comfortably charges everything on Providence” (Introduction x).

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difficulty of weaving all those threads into a pattern from the beginning,

threads that structurally highlight the novel’s instabilities, to use

Phelan’s term again (212), so that the finished pattern connects the

ending to the beginning. What Dickens asserts in the postscript to Our

Mutual Friend, that he is fully aware of the “finer threads to the whole

pattern” which is “always before the eyes of story-weaver at his loom”

(798) can reflect his confidence in his control of story-telling. In the

same postscript, Dickens highlights the point that to turn an

“unsuspected” incident to “a pleasant and useful account at last, [i]s at

once the most interesting and the most difficult part of [his] design”

(798). In this part, I will show that biblical allusion also helps the

novelist achieve the goal of good design.

Unlike the description of Mr. Gradgrind’s deification of Facts or

the portrayal of the Chancellor as an idol in the opening serials of Hard

Times and Bleak House, Little Dorrit does not make idolatry a distinct

trope in the opening numbers, though it eventually turns up in the

middle of the novel through Mr. Merdle and his followers and at the

idolatrous institution of the Circumlocution Office. Instead, it is the

biblical vices of pride and vanity suggested by the Tower of Babel at the

beginning of the first chapter, and the references to the apocalypse at

its end, that generalise and prefigure the novel’s critique of vanity and

mercantile ethos, of forces that imprison, of mistaking seeming for

being, and of a false rhetoric that seeks to exempt one from taking

responsibilities. In addition, I read the villain Rigaud as a “devil

incarnate” who prefigures various villainies in the novel, while the

analogy between men and fireflies’ mimicking a “better order of being”

foreshadows the novel’s good examples.38 My analysis will also show

that the theme of perversion is echoed by the connections between

38 Amy’s exemplary role is foreshadowed in different ways. The jailer’s daughter is considered as Amy Dorrit’s prefigure in the first chapter (Walder, Introduction vii). Both grow up in prisons but not confined by them, and both are angelic in their different circumstances. Larson notes the allusive connections between Amy and Christ on the cover-design for wrappers of monthly parts: Amy coming out the prison door with light coming from behind, an image echoing Jesus’s knock on the door of the heart (Scripture 262).

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material wealth and spiritual poverty, and between material

deprivation and spiritual riches. The dialectic pairing of concepts such

as light and darkness, freedom and imprisonment, or power and

inefficacy are constantly subverted in order to provoke readerly

attention and interpretation.

The critique of the mercantile ethos is indicated on the novel’s first

page by a list of traders from all over the world, congregating at the

Marseilles harbour, addressed as “descendants from all the builders of

Babel” (LD 1.1.15). Introducing the Tower of Babel connects the biblical

theme of vanity with commercial activities that might end with nothing.

The list of traders doing business prefigures the mercenary impulse

encountered in the rest of novel: Mrs. Clennam’s secret possession of

Amy Dorrit’s inheritance, Mr. Merdle’s embrace of idolatry and forgery,

Casby’s benign but false image and the concealment of his identity. In

particular, the Circumlocution Office fulfils the typology set up by the

symbol of vanity denoted by this biblical reference.

The omniscient narrator’s depiction of the Marseilles’ setting in

the first chapter, furthermore, transforms and perverts the biblical

concepts of a redeeming light into the grotesque stares of sunlight:

“Marseilles lay burning in the sun [...] A blazing sun upon a fierce

August day [...] Everything in Marseilles, and about Marseilles, had

stared at the fervid sky, and been stared at in return, until a staring

habit had become universal there” (LD 1.1.15). These stares of light

form a dialectical connection with the imprisoning darkness, causing a

pervasive atmosphere of hostility. As with Bleak House’s foggy setting,

Little Dorrit’s emphasis upon a hostile setting under a burning sun is

one of the “crucial and active factors” of composition, as Michael Steig

notes without specifying how they work (225).39 Juliet John also notes

Dickens’s emphasis on the word “stare,” suggesting that the novel’s

“world and its inhabitants have become dehumanized” (Villains 112–

39 Steig notices the developments with the illustrations, including the heavy use of contextual allegorical details and large number of dark plates in Bleak House and Little Dorrit (226).

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13). The word “stare” highlights the obtrusiveness and perversion of

light. Through the repetitive use in the first chapter of “stare” (twelve

times), “staring” (eight times), and “glare” (twice), the oppressive

power of the sunlight is highlighted. In addition, the darkness in

Marseilles’ prison becomes symbolic of human vices, summed up by

the presence of Rigaud (to which we shall return below), a dark force

that rejects the light. As the narrator reports, “there was a villainous

prison. In one of its chambers, so repulsive a place that even the

obtrusive stare blinked at it, and left it to such refuse of reflected light”

(LD 1.1.16). Here the stare of light is personified, repulsed by the prison

and choosing to leave it. The passage can be read as a perversion of the

message of Matthew 5.45: “for he maketh his sun to rise on the evil, and

on the good,” as well as of John 1.9: “That was the true Light, which

lighteth every man that cometh into the world.” The rejection of light

is further echoed by ordinary people’s physical need of coolness in the

dark: “Blinds, shutters, curtains, awnings, were all closed to keep out

the stare” (LD 1.1.16). This passage, as noted by Rodney Stenning

Edgecombe (Review 1099),40 echoes John 1.5: “And the light shineth

in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not,” with the light

metaphorically referring to Christ, symbol for redemption and

salvation, and darkness to “error and sin” of the “degenerate world”

(Matthew Henry Commentary). Meanwhile, the stares go two ways: not

only the powerful and recurring stare from the sky to the earth, but also

the stare of earthly beings towards the sky showing their lack of

understanding about the nature of the stares from above, which further

echoes John 1.5.

The omniscient narrator imbues the novel with an atmosphere of

confrontation and mystery through the repetition of “stare” with its

synonyms and derivatives, pointing out not only the uncontrollability

40 Rodney Stenning Edgecombe’s review of The Companion to Little Dorrrit points out the biblical allusions missed by Trey Philpotts, including John 1.5 about light and darkness. Quoting John 1.5, Edgecombe by error puts John 1.4 instead.

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and arbitrariness of living, but also the “hush” of the final reckoning,

echoed by an allusion to the Revelation at the end of the first chapter:

The wide stare stared itself out for one while; the sun went down in a red, green,

golden glory; the stars came out in the heavens, and the fire-flies mimicked them

in the lower air, as men may feebly imitate the goodness of a better order of

beings; the long dusty roads and the interminable plains were in repose—and so

deep a hush was on the sea, that it scarcely whispered of the time when it shall

give up its dead. (LD 1.1.28)

Describing the setting of the Marseilles’ blazing sun, the scene

establishes the analogy of fireflies “in the lower air mimick[ing]” the

stars “in the heavens,” leading to the conclusion that men “may feebly

imitate the goodness of a better order of beings” (LD 1.1.28). This

analogy of fireflies and men prefigures Amy Dorrit’s strength in her

imitation of the heavenly Christ. In the midst of the paragraph’s

descriptions of “glory,” “repose,” and “hush,” the abruptness of the last

sentence’s allusion to the Day of Judgment is jarring: “so deep a hush

was on the sea, that it scarcely whispered of the time when it shall give

up its dead” (LD 1.1.28). This surprising biblical reference is created by

a deep, indecipherable “hush” that foreshadows the misfortune that

can befall suddenly. The combination of the biblical allusion and the

analogy shows not only the feebleness of human beings, but also their

potential greatness in their attempt to be better. Diminutive and

obscure as the fireflies are in the lower air, Amy Dorrit will be shown

as the fulfilled antitype, “the Paraclete in the female form,” to borrow

Trilling’s expression; Daniel Doyce’s modesty and self-dismissal is

another example shown as imitating the “better order of beings” (LD

1.1.28), as Trilling also observes (589–90).

The opening number’s symbolic use of the biblical dialectic of light

and darkness not only helps create suspense but also paves way for the

theme of imprisonment. Looking back at its beginning, readers will

find that the phrase “prison taint [i]s on everything” (LD 1.1.16) is

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echoed throughout the novel, seen in recurring words such as “jail,”

“jailer,” “jail-birds,” “prisoner,” “imprisoned,” and “prison.” The

atmosphere in the opening numbers, whether at the Marseilles port

and its prison, the quarantine “prison” in London, or the Clennams’

house, is in John’s words, “repressed, claustrophobic, a dramatization

of the dialectical relationship which can exist between violence and

repression” (Villains 113). Correspondingly, the imprisoned people

include not only the “jail-birds” John Baptist and Rigaud, but also some

who outwardly live in freedom: Mrs. Clennam is imprisoned and

paralysed by her judgment on, and retaliation of others’ sins, Arthur

Clennam by a lack of genuine knowledge of love and acceptance, Miss

Wade by her bitterness about Gowan’s desertion, and Tattycoram by

her frustration with her awkward situation at the Meagleses.41

In addition, the first chapter associates the darkness with an

imprisoning force, and highlights the metaphysical meaning of

darkness in relation to death:

The imprisoned air, the imprisoned light, the imprisoned damps, the imprisoned

men, were all deteriorated by confinement. [...] Like a well, like a vault, like a

tomb, the prison had no knowledge of the brightness outside; and would have

kept its polluted atmosphere intact. (LD 1.1.17–18)

The comparison of the prison to a tomb strengthens its symbolic

association with death. This description can be applied both literally

and metaphorically to the characters mentioned above. Each kind of

mental imprisonment implies deterioration and a certain degree of

death which the imprisoned try to repress and obliterate.

Within the first chapter the incomprehensibility of those stares is

immediately echoed by the incomprehensibility of human vices

predominantly represented by Rigaud’s retelling of his past

experiences. The contrast between a perverted light and its rejection by

41 Trilling also highlights the connection between characters and the theme of imprisonment (580–81).

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darkness is important because Dickens conceives the “jail-bird” Rigaud

as the embodiment of dark forces. His villainies, not only, in John’s

formulation, “personify the horror of a world where surfaces are

dislocated from human depths” (Villains 113),42 but he specifically

prefigures many other human vices in the novel. Critics have pointed

out the melodramatic vein of Rigaud’s characterisation: John observes

Dickens’s reliance on him to create a sensational effect and refers to

Rigaud as “flagrantly inauthentic, a cannibalistic performer” who

embodies the “horror of a hollow universe” (Villains 103, 186), while

Trey Philpotts regards Rigaud as “driven by ambition, jealousy, or

anger” until the final judgment is passed on him (Companion 34).

Rigaud is not only analogically compared to Cain, guilty of fratricide:

“Cain might have looked as lonely and avoided” (LD 1.11.131), but the

title of the chapter “Let Loose,” as is observed by Philpotts (Companion

163), is an allusion to Revelation 20.7–8, making Rigaud a devil

incarnate: “And when the thousand years are expired, Satan shall be

loosed out of his prison, And shall go out to deceive the nations.” In

addition, the Inn keeper’s wife points out his evil nature: “there are

people who must be dealt with as enemies of the human race [...] who

must be crushed like savage beasts and cleared out of the way. [...T]his

man [...] is one of them” (LD 1.11.134). 43 As we shall see, Rigaud

specifically prefigures other characters and institutions in the novel in

that his villainous rhetoric exposes their perverted logic.

Rigaud’s speech in the first chapter is worth noting for it reveals

his cannibalistic and greedy nature, paving the way for his epigraph of

Cain in the chapter “Let Loose,” and foreshadowing other villainies in

42 John also considers Rigaud “pre-empt[ing] the stark ‘realities’ of modernism and deconstruction” (Villains 113). Walder thinks Rigaud reminds readers of Dickens’s belief in absolute evil (Religion 182). Similarly, Oulton considers Rigaud as “irredeemable” and “akin to a devil,” affirming Dickens’s belief in damnation (107). In addition, James R. Kincaid views Rigaud as not only “devilish” and evil but also as “a caution against thinking that a human character might be shaded, nuanced, [and] complex” (“Blessings” 27), reaffirming the belief in absolute evil. In addition, John does consider Rigaud as prefiguring a social environment: “Dickens’s actor-villains prefigure and condemn a social and aesthetic environment in which the individual lacks emotion and signification is divorced from significance” (Villains 77). 43 Kincaid refers to this quotation as well in the analysis of Rigaud’s evil nature (“Blessings” 27).

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the novel. Rigaud’s mention of his stay “at the Cross of Gold,” a fictional

name ironically connecting riches (Gold) with the religious symbol of

the Cross not only hints at the mercenary incentive for his staying there,

but also forms part of his rationalisation that he is “kept” there by

Monsieur Henri Barronneau (LD 1.1.24). The report on Monsieur

Barronneau’s death being “without any [i.e., Rigaud’s] aid” further

implicates him as a potential murderer. This suspicion is intensified by

Rigaud’s defence of the clash with his new wife (the late Monsieur

Barronneau’s widow): “When a wife’s relations interpose against a

husband [Rigaud] who is a gentleman, who is proud, and who must

govern, the consequences are inimical to peace” (LD 1.1.25). The

rhetoric, in Philpotts’s words, hides “his murderous impulses as

defence of his honor” (Companion 37). Rigaud exempts him from the

guilt of killing Madame Rigaud by blaming the intrusion of the outer

force upon the deceased: “An evil star occasioned Madame Rigaud to

advert to her relations”; Rigaud refers to her relations’ accusation of

her death as “malice” that “pervert[s]” incidents: “Such is the train of

incidents which malice has perverted into my endeavouring to force

from Madame Rigaud a relinquishment of her right; and, on her

persistence in a refusal to make the concession I required, struggling

with her—assassinating her!” (LD 1.1.26). The rhetoric used, by which

he turns the facts upside down, reveals his murderous scheme:

provoking her rage in order to make her fall off the cliff.

Dickens exposes Rigaud’s perverted rhetoric that covers up his

wrongdoing in order to rationalise his motive for mercenary gains,

highlighting not only his shameless rationalisation and claim of

innocence but also his role as a tempter who considers himself “better

suited to her than her former husband” (LD 1.1.25). The narrator

further reveals Rigaud’s reliance on a false appearance to disguise his

evil nature and mislead others: “He had a certain air of being a

handsome man—which he was not; and a certain air of being a well-

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bred man—which he was not” (LD 1.1.25).44 The narrator’s comment

on Rigaud prefigures the theme of seeming versus being that will be

revealed by other hypocritical characters, such as Mrs. General, Mr.

Casby and the Gowans. The exposure of Rigaud’s villainous rhetoric in

the first chapter foreshadows the critique of other characters’ similar

rhetoric of concealing their egoistic aims in altruistic terms, such as

Mrs. Clennam’s proclaimed role of punishing sins and restoring justice,

Miss Wade’s sheltering Tattycoram to torment her, Mr. Merdle’s

seeking of medical advice to disguise his guilt of forgery, Mrs. General’s

cultivation of Mr. Dorrit’s daughters to enrich herself, and Casby’s

disguise of his mercenary incentives by a benign appearance. Similarly,

the Circumlocution Office’s persistence on “How not to do it” follows

Rigaud’s rhetoric by creating red tape and a hierarchy of its own to

disguise its wrongs. Such recurring rhetoric, seen for example in the

satirical portrayal of the aristocratic Barnacles in the Circumlocution

Office, is part of Dickens’s critique of contemporary institutions in

general, and the Treasury Office in particular, as Philpotts argues

(“Trevelyan” 283–84, 298). I shall return to this topic in the next

chapter, which examines how the narrator uses biblical allusions to

critique such negligence of institutional responsibility.

Rigaud’s example illustrates various institutional and individual

failures, and his rhetoric of self-exemption suggests the mechanism of

these failures. Refuting the charge of assassination, Rigaud directs the

reader’s attention to the prevalence of mercenary incentive in different

walks of life: “When your lawyers, your politicians, your intriguers,

your men of the Exchange, fall ill, and have not scraped money together,

they become poor” (LD 1.1.24; original emphasis). His speech reflects

the practice of “scrap[ing] money,” or to use Edgecombe’s expressions

“idolatry of gold” and “gold religion” (“Washington Irving” 229, 231),

as were also observed by Dickens’s contemporaries. Rigaud’s rhetoric

44 John also notes the novelist’s use of Rigaud as a parody of the middle classes so as to mock their focus on manners and values (Villains 186).

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reflects the fear of poverty widely held by many characters in the novel,

including not only those of High Society like the Merdles, the Gowans,

and Mrs. General, but also those at the Marshalsea and the Bleeding

Heart Yard. Thus, the mercenary incentive is shown to be a “universal”

evil, even worse than the pursuit of vanity signalled by the biblical

allusion to the Tower of Babel.45 Reversing the message of 1 Timothy

6.10, “For the love of money is the root of all evil,”46 Bar sums up Mr.

Merdle’s status as “one of the greatest converters of the root of all evil

into the root of all good” (LD 1.21.254).47 In addition, Rigaud’s speech

partly overlaps with the novelist’s critique of social ills, complicating

the problem of individual crime, institutional acquittal of

responsibilities, and the idolatry of gold.48 As Miller observes, Rigaud

is instrumental in showing “the link between gentility and criminality

or diabolism” (as cited in John, Villains 162). Such an observation also

applies to Mr. Merdle.49

The colour of Rigaud’s face before his sentence reveals his fear, a

natural feeling felt by someone with a bad conscience:

There is no sort of whiteness in all the hues under the sun, at all like the

whiteness of Monsieur Rigaud’s face as it was then. Neither is there any

expression of the human countenance at all like that expression, in every little

line of which the frightened heart is seen to beat. Both are conventionally

compared with death; but the difference is the whole deep gulf between the

struggle done, and the fight at its most desperate extremity. (LD 1.1.27)

However, his acquittal is first withheld from the reader, and only later

revealed in the chapter “Let Loose.” Such a result farcically shows the

45 Paradoxically, the pursuit of wealth in the mid-nineteenth century is also echoed by Dickens and his pride of the novels’ success reflected by the sales of monthly instalments and his direct address of it in the novels’ prefaces. 46 Both Philpotts (Companion 260) and Walder (“Notes” 842) trace this allusion to 1 Timothy 6.10. 47 Edgecombe’s article “Washington Irving, The ‘Almighty Dollar’ and Little Dorrit” explores how the mid-nineteenth century authors responded to the sweeping power of wealth. The idolatry of gold is a common rhetorical device borrowed from the Exodus 32.1–5 (“Washington Irving” 229). 48 Edgecombe explores the mid-nineteenth century’s craving for wealth and he uses “idolatry of gold” and “religion of gold” in his article (“Washington Irving” 229). 49 Lewis also observes the common criminality between Rigaud and Merdle (160).

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limits of earthly justice given by an institution that misuses its power,

inviting the reader to reflect on justice, punishment and retribution.50

Rigaud’s getting away from punishment reflects the administrative

departments’ prevalent way of muddling along, foreshadowing the

Circumlocution Office’s work ethic of “HOW NOT TO DO IT.”

A glimpse of Rigaud’s departure from the prison cell before

receiving his sentence recalls a biblical scene describing the sentence

that Jesus faced: “As [Cavalletto] yet stood clasping the grate with both

hands, an uproar broke upon his hearing; yells, shrieks, oaths, threats,

execrations, all comprehended in it, though (as in a storm) nothing but

a raging swell of sound distinctly heard” (LD 1.1.28). Before Rigaud

goes out, the jailer informs him about the crowd’s hostility: “you might

depart in so many pieces that it would be difficult to get you together

again. There’s a crowd, Monsieur Rigaud, and it doesn’t love you” (LD

1.1.27). Dickens transforms the multitudes’ antagonistic attitude

towards Jesus to a crowd’s hostility to Rigaud.51 The biblical scene is

echoed in that in both scenes robbers are set free, Rigaud being

analogically made a Barabbas. The difference is that Barabbas was set

free by the multitude, whereas Rigaud is released without charge by the

authorities. The crowd scene, nevertheless, is not narrated directly but

reported through Cavalletto, who has a biblical nickname, John Baptist.

However, unlike his biblical counterpart who heralds the coming of

Christ, John Baptist Cavalletto pronounces Rigaud as an “[a]ccursed

assassin!” (LD 2.22.664).52

50 Through Rigaud’s acquittal, Dickens presents different views on retribution. Rigaud makes his second appearance in an inn called Day Break after he is let loose. The Swiss churchman’s discussion with the landlady about his (mis-)fortune is worth noting. Upon hearing the landlady’s comment about his good fortune of being let loose, the Swiss churchman highlights that “it may have been his unfortunate destiny. He may have been the child of circumstances. It is always possible that he had, and has, good in him if one did but know how to find it out” (LD 1.11.133). According to Walder, it represents the philosophical philanthropist’s view that “resisting punishment” can be “retribution” (“Notes” 838). Rigaud’s death caused by the collapsing house of the Clennams’ is the final retribution on him. 51 The similarity of the scenes has not been noted by previous scholars. Gospels of Matthew 27.16–17, 20–21, 26, Mark 15.7, 11 and 15, Luke 23.18, and John 18.40 record this, which highlight the multitude’s cry. 52 Linda Lewis notes the biblical allusive name of John Baptist. But Lewis’s chapter on Little Dorrit explores the theme of indebtedness and this biblical name is made a note without further interpretation

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The metaphysical interpretations of the “road” at the end of the

first chapter are echoed immediately by the title in the next chapter:

“Fellow Travellers.” It may seem inconspicuous at first glance, but it is

the only title that is used twice in the novel: once here about Arthur

Clennam’s and the Meagleses’ travel, and once again in chapter 1 of

book 2 about the travel of the Dorrits. Apart from creating a

symmetrical and analogical connection between the travels in the two

books, it highlights the pilgrimage that each character will have to go

through, as the last sentence of the first chapter spells out the

metaphorical meaning of “travel”: “through [the hot night] the caravan

of the morning, all dispersed, went their appointed ways. And thus [...]

move all we restless travellers through the pilgrimage of life” (LD

1.2.41).53 In “The Number Plans” for Little Dorrit, Dickens reminds

himself that people “meet and part as travellers do, and the future

connexion between them in the story, not to be shewn to the reader but

to be worked out as in life. Try this uncertainty and this not-putting of

them together, as a new means of interest. Indicate and carry through

this intention” (807). This note also explains the mysterious allusion at

the end of the first chapter. Since the novelist intends to leave it

uncertain, readers have to return to the mysteries of one’s travel in life

in hindsight. Sylvia Manning sees the novel’s postponed revelation of

mysteries, such as of Mrs. Clennam’s concealment of the codicil, as a

trope and a theme in the novel: “the entire novel may be

circumlocution,” and the “Circumlocution Office becomes an

(unintended) figure of the novel itself” (145–46). I also want to add that

it echoes the “mysteries” of characters’ journey intended by Dickens.

Such an imitation of circumlocution as well as its postponed ending

intensifies his social criticism.

The quoted paragraph at the end of the first chapter with its

(267 N9). 53 Dickens uses the metaphor of journey elsewhere, such as in the quotation from A Christmas Carol, in which Scrooge’s poor nephew asks him “to think of people below them as if they really were fellow-passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys” (12).

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allusion to Revelation further complicates the meaning of “stare,”

activating the correlation between what is seen and what happens, and

calling for an in-depth understanding of the seeming circumstances.

The last sentence can be interpreted as the novelist’s attempt to

generalise: “the long dusty roads and the interminable plains” (LD

1.1.28) invite metaphorical understanding about the travail and

journey of life. Trilling highlights Dickens’s power of generalisation:

“The imagination of Little Dorrit is marked not so much by its powers

of particularization as by its powers of generalization and abstraction”

(589). In spite of the contemporary criticism54 about Little Dorrit’s

irresolute and postponed ending that goes against “novelistic form” as

Manning observes (142–43), it does reflect that Dickens arouses

readers’ intense expectation for a complete pattern, in spite of different

perceptions about the content of the pattern.

The novel’s “pattern” is half veiled and half presented as Amy

Dorrit does not make her entry in the first serial except for an obscure

appearance at Mrs. Clennam’s room. As Dickens intends the meeting

of characters on their respective journeys to resemble that in reality, he

intends his reader to know the main characters as if encountering them

in life. The opening numbers of the serial do not seem to give a clear

account at the beginning on which character is the hero. The theme of

life’s journey later is mainly revealed through the main character

Arthur Clennam, whose stringent upbringing leaves dark memories of

his childhood. His eventual growth and maturity reflect the result of

the combat of conflicting philosophies loaded with biblical references,

which will be further treated in chapter 3 on distorted religion and

protagonists’ obstruction.

54 E. B. Hanley was angry about the postponed revelation of the mysteries in Little Dorrit: before the last numbers were published, he criticised the novel’s weakness of bringing all the mysterious threads to an end and considered it “so aimless a work” (qtd. in Manning 142 as is also noted by Jewusiak 279). Dickens was also criticised by James Fitzjames Stephen in Saturday Review about the lack of design for Little Dorrit (Manning 142–43). George Gissing criticised its “futile” mysteries (qtd. in Jewusiak

279). In contrast, Jacob Jewusiak links the novel’s creation of suspense and the reader’s waiting for the disclosure of story to the experience of suspense in financial speculation (284–85).

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Chapter 2: Biblical Allusion as Used by the Omniscient Narrator

This chapter focuses on how the omniscient narrator in Bleak House

and Little Dorrit expresses social visions of these novels mainly

through a satirical use of biblical allusions but also with a few non-

ironic uses of the Bible. Dickens’s novels published between 1852 and

1857 are what Tillotson calls “novels-with-a-purpose,” and they have a

distinct “introspective” and analytical attitude towards society (123–

31).1 While individual villains (Mr. Vholes, Rev. Mr. Chadband, Mrs.

Pardiggle, and Mrs. Jellyby) are exposed in Bleak House, the social

critique is focused on the negligence at the governmental and

institutional level (the Court of Chancery and philanthropists’

organisations such as the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in

Foreign Parts). As Malcolm Andrews notes, Dickens’s reference to

Parliament as the “Great Dust Heap down at Westminster” anticipates

the institutional images in novels published in the 1850s (117).

Although Bleak House does not treat the Parliamentary reforms

directly, Dickens’s use of apocalyptic language indicates his

dissatisfaction with the legal reforms. 2 Biblical allusion thereby

becomes one of the literary methods to “typify in a dramatic [mode]”

the social criticism in these novels (Williams 218–19). Dickens showed

not only a general disillusion with the government but also the fear of

Britain on the verge of revolution around the time of writing the

1 Kathleen Tillotson observes that the novels published between the 1840s and 1850s with the purpose to reform the society can be regarded as “delayed fruits of Reform,” which keep them from being “mere entertainment” (123–24). Raymond Williams interprets reform as “regeneration,” and “desired alteration of a general condition” (215–16). 2 Dickens’s accusation of Chancery’s procrastination and negligence of duty echoed earlier protests made in The Times. On 24 December 1850, The Times published protests: “If a house be seen in a peculiarly dilapidated condition, the beholder at once exclaims, ‘Surely that property must be in Chancery;’ and the exclamation very correctly expresses the popular opinion as to the effect of legal proceedings generally upon all property which unluckily becomes the subject of litigation in any shape” (qtd. in Butt and Tillotson, 183).

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opening numbers of Little Dorrit. 3 In Little Dorrit he attacks

particularly the mid-century Treasury Office, the centre of the English

bureaucratic system, referred to by the North British Review as “the

supreme and controlling department of the Executive” (qtd. in

Philpotts, “Trevelyan” 284), whose delay and red tape hindered

sanitation reform, especially the implementation of new measures of

sewage disposal, as well as exacerbating miseries of soldiers at the front

during the Crimea War (Philpotts, “Trevelyan” 289–98). Little Dorrit

not only exposes the idolatrous tendencies in its fictional department

and business world but also suggests collusion between them under the

influence of a mercantile ethos.

As the analysis in my previous chapter on the opening instalments

of Bleak House, Hard Times and Little Dorrit shows, Dickens employs

the trope of idolatry to critique the failures of both the Court system

and the utilitarianism and laissez-faire underpinnings of industry and

education. To put it another way, Dickens associates various targets of

his criticism with religious deviations such as idolatry, false hierarchies

or heretical mind-sets, a device that he repeats in these novels to

express his social visions. Alexander Welsh observes that Dickens

amends the world by satirizing its social wrongs (xv),4 while Sally

Ledger argues that Dickens proposes a “more structural social and

political critique” and “a more thoroughgoing critique” in Bleak House

and Little Dorrit (199). But while Dickens resorts to various familiar

biblical imageries and symbols to satirise the institutional abuse of

power, including the biblical image of the idol and the trope of idolatry,

such appeal to administrative reform should not be understood as

endangering the status quo. As Tillotson notes, no matter how socially

critical these novels are, they are “part of the instinctive barricade

3 In Dickens’s letter to Austen Henry Layard, the radical M.P., well-known archeologist and founder of the extra-parliamentary Administrative Reform Association, Dickens expresses the urgency for Parliamentary Reform with reference to the similarity between discontent in the UK and that in France before the first French revolution (Letters 7: 587, n3). 4 Welsh’s exploration of the satire in Bleak House is structurally based on a parallel drawn between the novel and King Lear (102–21).

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against revolution” (123).

As the general introduction to Literature and the Bible puts it,

“there are clearly differences between those writers who privilege

faithfulness to the original and those who use an episode or quotation

from Scripture as inspiration for something quite different”

(Carruthers et al. xxi). Dickens obviously belongs to the second group.

Janet L. Larson notes the satire of the governing powers through the

use of religious imagery and biblical allusion in Little Dorrit (Scripture

197–99), but due to her scheme of relating these allusions to one

subtext only, that is, the book of Ecclesiastes, she admits that her

reading is done “selectively” (Scripture 197). As this chapter will show,

Dickens’s use of biblical imagery and allusion is not limited to a single

book in the Bible but operates more in line with Jude V. Nixon’s

description of how biblical allusion works: Victorian literature “lift[s]

out” their sacred texts, mainly including the Bible, the Articles, the

lectionary, Tracts for the Times, and The Pilgrim’s Progress from their

context, and “reinscribe[s]” and “reinterpret[s]” them so that these

sacred texts “perform a quite different role and are assigned a

differential value” (Introduction 10).

As stated, this chapter deals mainly with satirical allusions as used

by the omniscient narrator. The invoked biblical language thereby

functions as a “stratified” voice, to use Bakhtin’s term (271), a voice that

both interacts with the messages and values of the narrative and

highlights their deviation from the Bible. The ways biblical allusions

are used in the fiction help generalise the social critique and thereby

pass moral judgment on the culprits both within and without the fictive

world. In my analysis, I also examine some of the instances when

Dickens uses biblical allusions in letters, speeches and journal articles,

thereby showing how a similar biblical background connects his social

views with his fiction. Finally, while this chapter focuses on the

narrator’s use of biblical allusions, the themes touched on are also

found in the characters’ speeches, which my next chapter will examine.

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Bleak House:

The Indictment of Negligence through Biblical Allusion

In Bleak House, Dickens portrays the infectious nature of an inefficient

and corrupt bureaucracy that causes suffering and death for the socially

disadvantaged. The deaths of Tom Jarndyce, Nemo, Jo, Krook, Mr.

Gridley, as well as Richard, are all closely related to “the valley of the

shadow of law” (BH 32.391). The allusion to “the valley of the shadow

of death” in Psalms 23.4 reflects the devastating consequences of the

negligence of the Court of Chancery (as well as that of charity

organisations). As John Ruskin observed, the nine deaths in Bleak

House link “the spiritual and sanitary problems” to “a pervasive study

of decay and death” (qtd. in Sanders, Resurrectionist 131). The first

section of this chapter will demonstrate how Dickens’s social critique is

manifested through the narrator’s satirical appropriation of biblical

references at several death scenes.

The title of the chapter “Our Dear Brother” is derived from St Paul’s

declaration in 1 Corinthians 15 as used in the Anglican Burial Service:

“Forasmuch as it hath pleased Almighty God of his great mercy to take

unto himself the soul of our dear brother here departed, as we therefore

commit his body to the ground.”5 The chapter title is satirically echoed

by Nemo’s burial:

our dear brother here departed, to a hemmed-in churchyard, pestiferous and

obscene, whence malignant diseases are communicated to the bodies of our dear

brothers and sisters who have not departed; while our dear brothers and sisters

who hang about official backstairs—would to heaven they had departed!—are

very complacent and agreeable. Into a beastly scrap of ground which a Turk

would reject as a savage abomination, and a Caffre would shudder at, they bring

5 It is noted by Susan Shatto (103). Ledger also analyses the passage’s “parodic echoing of the book of Corinthians” and considers it as provoking “a plea for sanitary reform” (197–98).

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our dear brother here departed, to receive Christian burial.

[...]—with every villainy of life in action close on death, and every poisonous

element of death in action close on life—here, they lower our dear brother down

a foot or two: here, sow him in corruption, to be raised in corruption: an avenging

ghost at many a sick-bedside: a shameful testimony to future ages, how

civilisation and barbarism walked this boastful island together. (BH 11.137;

original emphasis)

The narrator’s parody of the burial service addresses both the deceased

as “our dear brother” and those living and probably attending Nemo’s

and others’ burial services as “our dear brothers and sisters.” The

identical ways of addressing them highlight that the living will

eventually arrive at the same destination as the dead. In addition, the

declaration of St Paul in 1 Corinthians 15.42 that what “is sown in

corruption” will be “raised in incorruption,” read at every Anglican

burial service, is transformed by the narrator into “raised in corruption.”

According to Christian Dickinson, this does not refer to Nemo’s

corruption but is “the result of the distance the Church places between

itself and those in need of its aid” (357). Dennis Walder observes that

“the blasphemy is a compound of practical incompetence and

unconcern in a society which permits interment in an overstocked and

disease-ridden graveyard” (Religion 158). This appropriation of biblical

verses is intended to strike strong feelings into the reading public and

force them to slow down and reflect on the ethical dimension of Nemo’s

so-called “Christian burial.”6

The omniscient narrator uses Nemo’s death to highlight the

problems with sanitation and the precarious relation between different

social classes. As Carolyn Oulton interprets the reason behind Dickens’s

primary concern with sanitation, it is “partly because he believed that

physical deprivation contribute[s] to irreligiousness” and before

6 See Stephen Gill’s explanation of the problem of burial ground in “Explanatory Notes,” pp. 924–25. David Paroissien sees similarities between Dickens’s treatment of Jo’s and Nemo’s death, including selection of “similar material, infusing familiar things with a blend of satire and comedy heightened by diction drawn from Shakespeare, the Bible, The Book of Common Prayer, slang, colloquialism, and nonsense” (“Subdued” 293–94).

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religious instruction is given, the poor must not live in such conditions

(179). Such a view, as Gerald Parsons notes, is contrary to the

mainstream Christian social views of the early Victorian period that

“social harmony was to be maintained simply by a patient endurance of

present inequality on the part of the poor” (qtd. in Butterworth 59). As

the social issues of the 1850s rose to prominence, they caught the

attention of different social sectors.7 Dickens’s appeal to a domestic

ideal echoes Christian Socialist Frederick Denison Maurice’s view of the

important role of the family and the nation (Butterworth 92), and his

criticism of the exploitation of the poor also echoes the views of Charles

Kingsley, as my analysis in this chapter will show. However, I disagree

with Robert D. Butterworth’s view that “[w]hat may seem a political

attitude in Dickens should rather be seen as a religious one” (140).

Despite the common ground that Dickens and Christian Socialists share,

such as their rejection of a laissez-faire economic system and an earlier

Christian characterisation of the patient endurance by the poor of their

own poverty and inequality, it should not be concluded that Dickens’s

attitude in these novels is primarily religious since his efforts largely

concern this world. As my analysis attempts to show, his use of religious

allusions and religious discourse is rhetorical, appealing to the reader’s

sympathies for the poor in order to effect social improvement.

Neglected as Nemo is by his “brothers and sisters,” the narrator in

one touching scene reveals Jo as a true friend who regards Nemo as a

“dear brother.” Jo, an illiterate orphan from Tom-all-Alone’s, is later

infected with a deadly disease probably contracted at the graveyard

where he sweeps the ground. As a rejected witness for the inquest, Jo

tells Tulkinghorn about Nemo’s kindness to him. The conversation is

reported by the narrator in indirect speech, except for one repeated

sentence, which highlights Jo’s sharing of human compassion in spite

of the “depravity” that others see in him: “‘He was wery good to me,’

7 Robert D. Butterworth notes the “affinity” of social opinions held by “political campaigners, clergy and writers,” such as the views about sanitary reform by the 1850s (58).

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says the boy, wiping his eyes with his wretched sleeve. ‘Wen I see him

a-layin’ so stritched out just now, I wished he could have heerd me tell

him so. He wos wery good to me, he wos!’” (BH 11.135). Jo’s uneducated

and accented expression of his genuine feeling for a lost friend suggests

that even the most underprivileged member of the society shares

feelings in common with others and deserves a better treatment.8 At

the end of the chapter on Nemo’s death, Jo turns up again at the gate of

the burial ground to sweep where the man has been buried. It is then

that the narrator’s tone changes to a beseeching and archaic one, to ask

and to interpret the reason for the coming of “a slouching figure” (BH

11.137) to the burial ground:

Jo, is it thou? Well, well! Though a rejected witness, who “can’t exactly say”

what will be done to him [i.e., Nemo] in greater hands than men’s, thou art not

quite in outer darkness. There is something like a distant ray of light in thy

muttered reason for this:

“He wos wery good to me, he wos!” (BH 11.138)

The narrator uses the apostrophe addressing Jo in an archaic voice,

which forces the reader to slow down and interpret its speaker and the

meaning. The change of pronoun referring to “the slouching figure”

from “it” to “thou” in the passage shows the narrator’s voice to be

sincere, trustworthy and “prayerfully,” to use Valentine Cunningham’s

word (“Goodness” 111), as if evaluating Jo’s condition from an impartial

but more sympathetic perspective.9

The narrator’s sincerity is reinforced by a biblical allusion in the

same passage, “[Thou] ‘can’t exactly say’ what will be done to him in

greater hands than men’s,” which echoes David’s preference for falling

into the hand of the Lord instead of into that of man: “I am in a great

8 Karen Jahn notes Jo’s being moved by others’ kindness, such as that of Captain Hawdon, of Esther, and of Snagsby, and Jahn makes a similar observation about Dickens’s point that “the most miserable of men could be saved” (375). Jahn does not refer to Jo’s speech or the archaic tone to make the point. 9 The direct address also captures John O. Jordan’s attention and he reads it as a blend of voice of both Nemo’s ghost and heterodiegetic narrator (33–34).

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strait: let me fall now into the hand of Lord; for very great are his

mercies: but let me not fall into the hand of man” (1 Chron. 21.13). The

biblical context, highlighting God’s mercies in opposition to men’s

cruelty, indicates the narrator’s compassion for him. This perspective

contrasts sharply with the judgment given by Miss Flite, Krook and Mrs.

Piper that Nemo has “sold himself” “to the Enemy” (BH 5.55; 10.124;

11.133). The archaic style of the narrator’s description of Nemo as “a

deserted infant” (BH 11.131),10 as if addressed by a bemoaning father,

could be seen as an echo of the biblical cadence, revealing the novelist’s

sympathy for both Nemo and Jo.

Jo’s innate conscience, however coarse, is earnest and, according

to the narrator, saves him from the “outer darkness,” a reference to the

eternal punishment, traced by Walder and Shatto to Matthew 22.13.11

So while Paroissien is partially right that Jo’s death “concludes a life in

utter darkness” (“Subdued” 293), he omits these textual details that

reveal how the narrator insistently associates Jo with an innate ability

to feel, receive from and then give back to others. The narrator’s attitude

towards Nemo echoes Esther’s observation of the friendship between

the brickmaker’s wife Jenny and her poor friend Liz:

I thought it very touching to see these two women, coarse and shabby and beaten,

so united; to see what they could be to one another; to see how they felt for one

another; how the heart of each to each was softened by the hard trials of their

lives. I think the best side of such people is almost hidden from us. What the poor

are to the poor is little known, excepting to themselves and God. (BH 8.101)

Through the description of these poor people’s friendship, Dickens

further pushes his reader to reflect on the harsh life they have endured,

which serves his agenda of social improvements. Unlike the use of burial

10 Jay comments on Dickens’s identification with the deserted orphan figure (Heart 148). 11 Matthew 8.12 has a similar phrase: “But the children of the kingdom shall be cast out into outer darkness: there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth.” The “outer darkness” is explained by Bengel’s Gnomen as “Whatever is without the kingdom of God is outer: for the kingdom of God is light, and the kingdom of light. That darkness will envelope not only the eye, but also the mind, with the grossest obscurity” (Bible Hub).

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scenes in religious novels to achieve “graveyard moralizing” (Jay, Heart

156), Dickens’s treatment of the death scene reminds the reader that no

one escapes death, but his ultimate goal is not spiritual salvation. In

spite of Elizabeth Jay’s criticism of Dickens’s “sentimental and

perverted use of the death-bed tradition” (Heart 163), 12 Dickens

appropriates the biblical verses as well as religious narratives with the

aim to improve the conditions of the poor.13

In addition, the satirical appropriation of the scriptural words in

the burial service and descriptions of the hellish conditions of the poor

are Dickens’s imaginative expressions of ideas stated more

straightforwardly in a speech delivered on 10 May 1851 at the first

anniversary dinner of the Metropolitan Sanitary Association, ten

months before the first serial of Bleak House:

I can honestly declare in the conviction that Searching Sanitary Reform must

precede all other social remedies [cheers], and that even Education and Religion

can do nothing where they are most needed, until the way is paved for their

ministrations by Cleanliness and Decency. [hear.] [...] What avails it to send a

Missionary to me, a miserable man or woman living in a foetid Court where every

sense bestowed upon me for my delight becomes a torment, and every minute of

my life is new mire added to the heap under which I lie degraded? To what natural

feeling within me is he to address himself? [...] It is a remembrance of distortion

and decay, scrofula and fever? Would he address himself to my hopes of

immortality? I am so surrounded by material filth that my Soul cannot rise to the

contemplation of an immaterial existence! [...] But, give me my first glimpse of

Heaven through a little of its light and air—give me water—help me to be clean—

12 Evangelical critics of the mid-nineteenth century criticised his appeal to the sentiment in the death scene and referred to it as “morbid sensationalism” (Jay, Heart 162). F. W. Robertson and Ruskin considered Dickens to cater to the reader’s admiration for melancholy and to “teach weak writers to look to death as a marketable commodity” (Jay, Heart 162–63). 13 Such an aim is in accordance with Dickens’s belief in the educability of the poor, as is expressed in his article “The Short-Timers” in Uncommercial Traveller: “if the State would begin its work and duty at the beginning, and would with the strong hand take those children out of the street, while they are yet children, wisely train them, it would make them a part of England’s glory, not its shame—of England’s strength, not its weakness—would raise good soldiers and sailors, and good citizens, and many great men, out of the seeds of its criminal population” (qtd. in Butterworth 60). The quotation expresses the confidence that these socially disadvantaged children can be transformed into “a part of England’s glory” and “strength,” while asserting that it is the state’s duty to educate and train them to become worthy citizens. At the same time, Bleak House does not suggest the strong correlation between poverty and crime expressed in the article.

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lighten this heavy atmosphere in which my spirit droops and I become the

indifferent and callous creature that you see me [...] and, Teacher, then I’ll hear,

you know how willingly, of Him whose thoughts were so much with the Poor, and

who had compassion for all human sorrow! [Applause.] (Speeches 129; original

emphasis)

Alluding to Jesus’s compassion for the poor, Dickens voices concern for

miserable men and women in order to demonstrate the urgent need for

improving the sanitary conditions. By addressing sanitary jobs as

“ministrations” 14 and capitalizing “cleanliness” and “decency,” he

allegorises the spiritual dimension of sanitation, prioritizing sanitary

improvement over other “social remedies” such as provisions for

Education and Religion. As the applause in square brackets indicates,

his speech was well received by its audience. Such a reference to Jesus’s

teaching about the poor in Dickens’s public speech is echoed by the

omniscient narrator’s more satirical voice: while the public speech

alludes to the Bible in a more affirmative way, Bleak House employs a

satirical voice to expose the negligence.

In Bleak House, the narrator’s sympathies for the poor culminate

with Jo’s unfinished Lord’s Prayer at his death. Instead of repeating the

whole of the Lord’s Prayer as encouraged by Allan Woodcourt, Jo only

repeats the first two lines, dying before finishing it:

“OUR FATHER.”

“Our Father!—yes, that’s wery good, sir.”

“WHICH ART IN HEAVEN.”

“Art in Heaven—is the light a comin, sir?”

“It is close at hand. HALLOWED BE THY NAME!”

“Hallowed be—thy——”

The light is come upon the dark benighted way. Dead!

Dead, your Majesty. Dead, my lords and gentlemen. Dead, Right Reverends

and Wrong Reverends of every order. Dead, men and women, born with

heavenly compassion in your hearts. And dying thus around us every day. (BH

14 Chapter 4 will discuss the religious dimension of the word “ministrations.”

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46.572)

The narrator indicates both his sympathy towards Jo in that the light

finally shines upon him, and his rage that Jo’s life in this world is spent

in misery. Oulton points out the narrator’s anger towards those he holds

responsible for Jo’s death (181), a kind of “collective cruelty” to borrow

Welsh’s words (xvi). The repetition of the word “dead” can be read as a

modifier of “Majesty,” “lords” as well as ordinary “men and women,”

thus adding to the effect of moral indictment of their cold conscience.

Critics disagree about the use of the Lord’s Prayer at Jo’s death, but

they agree that it is all about Jo himself. Karen Jahn suggests that the

scene “melodramatically present[s]” Jo’s conversion, highlighting “the

redeeming power” of Christianity (375); Oulton thinks that the

unfinished Lord’s Prayer raises doubt about the “possibility of salvation

for those who die unprepared” (153); Welsh thinks the instruction of the

Lord’s Prayer “signif[ies] his accommodation to a common faith” (105);

and Jay notes that Jo’s death is “eased by the new-found access to the

Word” (Introduction 465). I, however, would contend that the novel

does not aim to give an affirmative delineation of Jo’s spiritual salvation

at all, in spite of the narrator’s compassionate acknowledgement of Jo’s

uncultivated but genuine conscience. As Ledger observes, Jo’s drawing

of his last breath is “poignant and sharply discomfiting” (203). I think

the more unsettling the scene is, the more accusations are accumulated

against those authorities that the narrator addresses when Jo is dead.

The unfinished part of the Lord’s Prayer immediately following the

quotation reads: “Hallowed by thy name. Thy kingdom come. Thy will

be done in earth, as it is in heaven” (Matt. 6.9–10). As Jo Carruthers et

al. argue convincingly, the incomplete Lord’s Prayer serves to “remin[d]

us how far the fictional world of Chancery is from the biblical ideal of

the Kingdom as a place where the will of God is manifest on earth as it

is in heaven” (xv).15 Jo’s death scene is about “Jo’s humanity,” a hard

15 The introduction to Literature and the Bible: A Reader demonstrates an excellent interpretation of

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fact that “Dickens forces upon the reader” (Ledger 202). Here the

narrator turns away from the scene and uses the apostrophe to report

Jo’s death. The narrator not only appeals to the compassions of those in

power, such as “Your Majesty,” lords, gentlemen, and reverends who

make decisions, but also of ordinary readers addressed as “men and

women,” which shows that Jo’s deathbed scene is instrumental in

revealing the moral direction of the narrative, as well as highlighting the

narrator’s call for taking a moral responsibility for other people like Jo.

As Paroissien points out, the death scenes of Nemo and Jo create

“emotional and mental effects” that are “conscious-raising and

aesthetically appealing” (“Subdued” 292), while Dickinson observes

that Nemo’s burial is “a symbol of the national corruption that caused

it” (358). My analysis in the next part explores how the narrator

expresses accusations of negligence involving different institutions.

Tom-all-Alone’s: The Negligence of Social Duties

In this part, I analyse how the narrator in Bleak House attributes the

plight of the poor to the negligence of duties by officials, charity groups

and religious denominations as well as by Parliament. Showing the

worthiness of the poor through the descriptions of their mutual care and

friendship, the narrator blames their plight on the privileged who fail to

improve the hygienic conditions at Jo’s slum Tom-all-Alone’s and evade

responsibilities to look after the homeless:

As, on the ruined human wretch, vermin parasites appear, so these ruined

shelters have bred a crowd of foul existence that crawls in and out of gaps in walls

and boards; and coils itself to sleep, in maggot numbers, where the rain drips in;

Jo’s incomplete repeating of the Lord’s Prayer following Woodcourt, at his death bed. As is shown in the nine sections of reading this episode, many aspects in relation to the Lord’s Prayer are explored, including the significance of where the Prayer is cut off, the Victorian theologian’s sermon on the Lord’s Prayer, other characters’ uses of it in Bleak House, the trope of light and darkness in relation to the Prayer, and its connection with the Parable of Good Samaritan etc. See Carruthers et. al., pp. xiv–xxi.

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and comes and goes, fetching and carrying fever and sowing more evil in its every

footprint than Lord Coodle, and Sir Thomas Doodle, and the Duke of Foodle, and

all the fine gentlemen in office, down to Zoodle, shall set right in five hundred

years—though born expressly to do it. (BH 16.197; my emphasis)

These depictions of Tom-all-Alone’s, while not alluding to specific

biblical texts, paint a picture of hell drawn from the Bible. The narrator

uses the technique of ambiguity to depict unhygienic conditions at the

slum and to reveal the degradation of human existence. Trevor Blount

considers the description “a parallel between their lice-ridden bodies

and the way they infest the decaying houses ‘in maggot numbers’”

(340), while Jahn identifies it as “a beast, stronger than all

governments,” highlighting its power of spreading filth (374). I think

by using a semicolon before the verb phrase “coils itself to sleep, in

maggot numbers,” the novelist asks the reader to refer backwards to

the subject, “a crowd of foul existence.” It is hard to distinguish whether

the subject refers to foul slummers, parasites, or both. The human

degradation is thus vividly shown through a technique of ambiguity

that portrays the slum as a breeding ground of evil. The quoted

sentence not only shows the contrast between the poverty-stricken

slummers and “the fine gentlemen in office,” but also puts the blame of

Tom-all-Alone’s hellish conditions on the negligence of aristocrats

from “Coodle” to “Zoodle” as well as on fine gentlemen in office. It

blames the political establishment for permitting the conditions in

slums like Tom-all-Alone’s, while aiming to move the middle-class

readers to sympathise with Jo and then take action.16

Dickens considered Tom-all-Alone’s as the title of the novel before

deciding on Bleak House, suggesting how important issues related to

the slums were to him. Allusions to hell in connection with Tom-all-

Alone’s recur in the novels: “Branching from this street and its heaps of

ruins, are other streets and courts so infamous that Mr. Snagsby sickens

16 According to Jahn, if the middle classes do not take proper action to improve the sanitary conditions at the slums, what is bred by such deterioration will “end any progress” (374).

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in body and mind, and feels as if he were going, every moment deeper

down into the infernal gulf” (BH 22.277).17 In addition, the narrator

juxtaposes the allusion to hell with a description of the Christ child,

filtered through Mr. Snagsby’s perspective when his lantern is turned

on an infant lying in the arms of its mother: “Mr. Snagsby is strangely

reminded of another infant, encircled with light, that he has seen in

pictures” (BH 22.279).18 His observations on Tom-all-Alone’s infernal

state and his imaginative association of the child with Christ tellingly

reveal his feelings of sympathy and empathy for the poor, thus

triggering the reader’s ethical response to the urgent need for social

improvements.

Another of the narrator’s juxtapositions is between the privileged

aristocrats and the underprivileged like Jo, expressed through the

Parable of Dives and Lazarus:19

What connexion can there be, between the place in Lincolnshire, the house in

town, the Mercury in powder, and the whereabout of Jo the outlaw with the

broom, who had that distant ray of light upon him when he swept the churchyard-

step? What connexion can there have been between many people in the

innumerable histories of this world, who, from opposite sides of great gulfs, have,

nevertheless, been very curiously brought together! (BH 16.197)

The allusion highlights the lack of personalised bond between the rich

and the poor, while also implying the interconnection between people

of different social spheres and social strata. The passage suggests the

importance of Jo as a functional character as well. On the one hand,

linking the narrative about Nemo’s death with the disclosure of Lady

Dedlock’s visit at the graveyard and eventually their previous relations

17 Shatto notes that “heaps of ruin” and “the infernal gulf” are references to hell, and she traces the imagery of Snagsby’s visit to the slum to the depiction of the hellish condition in The Aeneid (181). 18 This allusion to Christ child is also noted by Jordan (139). 19 It alludes to Luke 16.19–31 is noted in passing by Gill (“Note” 927). The Norton Critical Edition, however, does not identify this biblical allusion. Neither does Shatto’s Companion, which on the other hand notes Carlyle’s influence in the expression of the connection between the poor and rich. The poor “claim relationship by conveying to us in a fatal brotherly way their disease and mortality” (qtd in Shatto 141).

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as lovers, Jo connects the omniscient narrator’s record of the depraving

conditions in slums with Esther’s narrative about meeting him and

rendering him some help. On the other hand, Jo is like a touchstone

serving to reveal the degrees of individual kindness, such as Mr.

Snagsby’s half a crown as his “usual panacea for an immense variety of

afflictions” (BH 22.281), Jenny and Liz’s “a few half pence,” showing

their apology for not being able to receive him for fear of their husbands’

violence and Esther and Charlie’s kindness of “not to leave the boy to

die” (thereby infecting them with the disease). Jo also serves to reveal

the dilemma that social aid is not available, something individual

charity cannot alleviate. The biblical allusion to the great gulf is

therefore used to express the chasm between the rich, living in opulence,

and the poor, living in outright destitution. It also implies the need to

restore a personalised bond between them. The reversal of fortunes in

the afterlife in this parable thus serves as a reminder to the rich about

their obligation to the poor who deserve better treatment.20

In addition to blaming the aristocrats for their negligence, the

narrator insistently satirises overseas missionary work. A scene in the

chapter “Tom-all-Alone’s” critiques such negligence of domestic need

for charity work. Through the contrast between the magnificence of the

edifice of a charity organisation and the slummer Jo’s admiration for it,

an ironic effect is created. The scene is set when Jo takes his breakfast

“on the door-step of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in

Foreign Parts” (BH 16.198). The contrast between the society’s

proposed aim and their rejection of Jo highlights such indifference to

the spiritual and physical well-being of those at its “door step.” The

omniscient narrator comments satirically that Jo “has no idea, poor

wretch, of the spiritual destitution of a coral reef in the Pacific, or what

it costs to look up the precious souls among the cocoa-nuts and bread-

20 Not referring to the language features in the quotation, Karen asserts the tone of narrator as “a Christian prophet” and considers the question as “exhort[ing]” readers to “accept the imaginative sympathy of the Providential vision” (375).

85

fruit” (BH 16.199). It is more than hinted by the narrator that foreigners’

“souls” are more “precious” than the “spiritual destitution” of the

English poor, which echoes Dickens’s opinion that charity should begin

at home. The scene reinforces the criticism of the failure of charity work

within England.

Through Woodcourt’s reflections on the sharp contrast between

Jo’s condition of being neglected and the fast-developing world, the

narrator underscores the uneven development of domestic society and

the negligence of the domestic poor among charity organisations: “As

Allan Woodcourt and Jo proceed along the streets, where the high

church spires and the distances are so near and clear [… Allan]

considers, ‘that in the heart of a civilised world this creature in human

form should be more difficult to dispose of than an unowned dog’” (BH

47.560). No matter if the distance between the “high church spires” and

Jo is small or not, Jo is alienated by a “civilised world” that consigns

him to oblivion. Comments such as these exemplify Dickens’s relentless

exposure of the ugliest side of a seemingly expanding and prosperous

society, seen not only in his fiction but also when he on 9 July 1852

wrote to the Rev. Henry Christopherson after the latter had protested

about the scene of Jo on the steps of headquarters of the Society for the

Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts:

If you think the balance between the home mission and the foreign mission justly

held in the present time—I do not. [...] I am decidedly of opinion that the two

works, the home and the foreign, are not conducted with an equal hand; and that

the home claim is by far the stronger and the more pressing of the two. Indeed I

have very grave doubts whether a great commercial country, holding

communication with all parts of the world, can better Christianise the benighted

portions of it than by the bestowal of its wealth and energy on the making of good

Christians at home, and on the utter removal of neglected and untaught

childhood from its streets, before it wanders elsewhere. (Letters 6: 707)

Dickens here complains about the insensible expenditure of money

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abroad while the living conditions of the English poor are not improved.

As far as he was concerned, charity should begin at home. 21 His

criticism of the telescopic philanthropists’ African Project can be seen

in his opposition to the British government’s support of the Niger

Expedition. In 1848, he published an article that called for a stop to it:

“Believe it, African Civilisation, Church of England Missionary, and all

other Missionary Societies! The work at home must be completed

thoroughly, or there is no hope abroad. To your tents, O Israel! But see

they are your own tents!” (qtd. in Butt and Tillotson 195). He also

suspected the misuse of funds in institutionalised philanthropy. As

stated in an 1850 article written by W. B. Jerrold and W. H. Wills that

he had published in Household Words, many of the “regular charities”

operate for “the payment of large salaries to their officers and managers”

instead of for the “excellent objects pretended in them” (qtd. in Shatto

84). The idea of prioritizing the domestic charity work that explains the

caricatured portrayal of “telescopic philanthropists” in his work will be

further explored in chapter 3.

Similarly, through the use of biblical tropes the narrator also

satirises religious groups for their lack of care for the domestic poor. At

the end of the chapter “Moving on,” which centres on the homeless Jo,

the “great Cross” of St. Paul’s forms a contrast to its biblical equivalent:

He sits, munching and gnawing, and looking up at the great Cross on the summit

of St. Paul’s Cathedral, glittering above a red and violet-tinted cloud of smoke.

From the boy’s face one might suppose that sacred emblem to be, in his eyes, the

crowning confusion of the great, confused city; so golden, so high up, so far out of

his reach. (BH 19.243–44)

Here the cross seen through Jo’s perspective is “great,” “golden,” “high

21 Dickens was active in charity work. He not only responded to others’ requests for contributions to charitable organisations, making at least forty-three donations to benevolent and provident funds, he also took initiative in planning and launching charity activities: he founded the Urania Cottage for fallen women in Lime Grove, London in the late 1840s; he supported thirteen hospitals and sanatoriums through speeches, charitable readings and subscriptions (Shatto 84).

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up,” and “far out of his reach.” His distance from “that sacred emblem”

associated with St. Paul’s, the pride of the Established Church,

highlights its negligence of the domestic poor. There is also the implied

narrative juxtaposition between the gilded cross and that on which

Christ suffered and died, reminding the reader that the Anglican

Church’s neglect of the homeless is partly the cause of Jo’s eventual

death, just as the secular and religious authorities contributed to the

death of Christ. The contrast between the gilded appearance of the

emblem and its humble origin in the Gospels thus exposes the disparity

between outward form and inner substance, which helps explain the

narrator’s comment about Jo’s “crowning confusion of the great,

confused city” (BH 19.243). It is true that Dickens uses the Established

Church “as a symbol of Christianity,” as Butterworth argues, but while

Bleak House might be seen “against a background of religious concepts

and the teachings of Jesus,” and as evidence that “the brotherhood of

man and other central ideas of Christianity remain at the centre of the

author’s concern” (60–61), those biblical concepts are contrasted with

the corrupt ways in which they are implemented by individuals of

Christian denominations (as my next chapter will show). The

connection between Jo’s ignorant understandings of his existence and

the cross on top of St. Paul’s Cathedral is filtered through the narrator’s

satirical perspective, which resorts to “Biblical words and Christianised

moral imperatives” (Cunningham, “Goodness” 109), in order to accuse

religious groups of their social negligence. I will further analyse the

representation in the novel of individual complicity with institutional

negligence in the next chapter on lawyer Vholes and Rev. Mr. Chadband.

The omniscient narrator also suggests the connection between Jo’s

neglected state and the civil servants’ evasion of duties. When Liz, one

of the brickmakers’ wives, is looking for help for Jo, “[o]ne official sent

her to another, and the other sent her back again to the first, and so

backward and forward; until it appeared to me as if both must have been

appointed for their skill in evading their duties, instead of performing

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them” (BH 31.382). Through not indicating what particular officials

evade their duties by turning Liz down, the narrator hints that

governance in general may be held responsible for Jo’s tragic life.

Without specifying any public offices, the narrator blames the

Parliament for its inaction. The question of what to do with the squalor

found at Tom-all-Alone’s is met not with action but “[m]uch mighty

speech-making [...] both in and out of Parliament” (BH 46.551). As the

narrator comments, “there is but one thing perfectly clear, to wit, that

Tom only may and can, or shall and will, be reclaimed according to

somebody’s theory but nobody’s practice” (BH 46.553). In the next

paragraph, the narrator dispenses with his customary satirical mode

when he resorts to a biblical voice to warn about the impending danger:

“Verily, what with tainting, plundering, and spoiling, Tom has his

revenge” (BH 46.553). As Stephen Gill notes, the word “verily” serves to

remind the reader of Jesus’s teaching, such as in Matthew 6.16: “Verily,

I say unto you, they have their reward” and these words “carry prophetic

certainty,” which, therefore, makes the “denunciation” carry an

authoritative voice from God (“Allusion” 153). Referring to Tom’s

revenge, Gill notes a second allusion, to Romans 12.19: “Vengeance is

mine; I will repay, saith the Lord” (“Allusion” 153). But I disagree when

Gill deems the function of such allusions to be “much smaller, akin to

simple rhetorical heightening” (“Allusion” 152). That is to ignore

Dickens’s overarching use of the Bible, whether straight or ironic, to

focus his social critique, manifested through the accusations about

negligence seen at several levels of a society, whether governmental and

institutional (Parliament, the Chancery, and philanthropists’

organisations such as Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in

Foreign Parts) or individual (Mr. Vholes, Rev. Mr. Chadband, Mrs.

Pardiggle, and Mrs. Jellyby).22

22 Cf. the scholarly examination of Mid-Victorian governance. Examining six Victorian cities’ diversified ways of local governance, Asa Briggs’s Victorian Cities discusses allocation of governmental functions between local and national government (40–42, 53). Similarly, Lauren M. E. Goodlad’s Victorian Literature and the Victorian State: Character and Governance in a Liberal Society also

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While the negligence spreads from the top to the bottom of society,

the revenge, in the form of pollutants and diseases, expands its

influence from the individual to society at large. As Oulton observes,

“[i]n this novel [...] retribution is enacted at a national level, as disease

spreads through Tom-all-Alone’s to all levels of society” (178). And if we

go beyond Dickens’s novel, a similar rhetoric of prophetic warning

against impending danger is also seen in Kingsley’s pamphlet Cheap

Clothes and Nasty (1850), in which the maltreatment of tailors leads to

the spreading of their diseases through infected clothes made for the

higher classes.23 As applied to Bleak House, Welsh puts it well: “That

infectious disease can attack individuals across class lines is the novel’s

principal symbol not just of medical or political failure but of the

connectedness that behooves compassion, awareness of a common

humanity, and reform of our ways” (105). Such connection of different

social classes is underscored through both the descriptions of Jo’s state

of living and the criticism of institutional negligence.

The criticism of negligence reaches its climax in the chapter “Jo’s

Will”:

He is not one of Mrs. Pardiggle’s Tockahoopo Indians; he is not one of Mrs.

Jellyby’s lambs, being wholly unconnected with Borrioboola-Gha; he is not

softened by distance and unfamiliarity; he is not a genuine foreign-grown savage;

he is the ordinary home-made article. [...] Homely filth begrimes him, homely

parasites devour him, homely sores are in him, homely rags are on him: native

ignorance, the growth of English soil and climate, sinks his immortal nature

lower than the beasts that perish. (BH 47.564)

The use of the anaphora of “he is not” highlights the possible

philanthropist excuses for turning Jo down; its juxtaposition with “he

is the ordinary home-made article” shows that Jo’s misery has

mentions Mid-Victorian lack of centralised bureaucracy (xii), and the Victorians’ self-government by individuals, institutions, and local governments (4–8, 27–31, 84, 91–92, 112–13). 23 Cunningham also notices Kingsley’s point that “capitalism is cannibalistic” expressed in this pamphlet without mentioning its warning of spreading disease across classes (“Goodness” 113).

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everything to do with his fellow countrymen. This passage is Dickens’s

“retaliation” in response to Rev. Christopherson’s criticism of his

portrayal of philanthropists’ overseas missions (Letters 6: 707n). In the

quoted passage, the derivatives of the word “home,” such as “home-

made” and “homely” and its synonym “native,” foreground that Jo, a

representative of slummers, is an alienated, degraded and neglected

fellow British citizen. Meanwhile, the judgment of Jo as “neither of the

beasts nor of humanity” actually resembles the perspective held by

evangelical figures like the Chadbands in Bleak House, as Oulton

observes (179). Jo, a representative of the poor in Tom-all-Alone’s,

manifesting the helpless circumstances of the neglected, serves to

generalise the novel’s theme of negligence.

To sum up my arguments in this section, the satirical use of biblical

allusions about Nemo and Jo helps bring into sharper focus the novel’s

theme of social criticism by directing the reader’s attention to the

contemporary sanitary conditions and the domestic need for charity

and education. Through the deaths of Nemo and Jo, the responsibility

for the poor is not only passed on to characters, organisations and

institutions in the novel, but also to Dickens’s readers. Focusing on the

character of Krook, the next part will analyse the biblical allusions used

by the narrator to warn against corruption and the consequences of

negligence.

Krook’s Death as Poetic Justice

In my first chapter, I argued that in order to satirise negligence, the

opening serial of Bleak House portrays the Chancellor and the

Chancery through the trope of idolatry. In this part, I would add that

the social critique of the novel is also realised through the symbolic

death of Krook, the Chancellor’s namesake: the narrator’s allusions to

the Apocalypse in his comments on Krook’s spontaneous combustion

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represent poetic justice by foreshadowing the ultimate judgment on all

negligent authorities.24 Taken together, the repulsive smell of Krook’s

horrible death, the “perplexed and troublous valley of the shadow of

the law” of the legal office (BH 32.391), and the contaminated air and

the muddy streets of London indicate a corrupt society.

Describing the night scene at Lincoln’s Inn, where the Court is

located next to Krook’s Shop, the narrator establishes the apocalyptic

references in the first sentence of the chapter “The Appointed Time”:25

“It is night in Lincoln’s Inn—perplexed and troublous valley of the

shadow of the law, where suitors generally find but little day” (BH

32.391). The “perplexed and troublous valley of the shadow of the law”

alludes to “the valley of the shadow of death” in Psalms 23.24,26 thereby

foreshadowing the deaths of both Krook and the legal suitors. The

allusion is strengthened by the use of several rhetorical devices, “the

shadow of the law” being both a synecdoche for the whole legal

institution and a metaphor, with its dark shadow referring to the court’s

injustice. The sentence “suitors generally find but little day” helps form

contrast between shadow (injustice and deaths) and day (justice) and

highlights the devastation that the court inflicts on its suitors, which

also echoes the description of the Chancery in the first chapter that

“admit[s] no light of day into its place” (BH 1.6), foregrounding the

absence of justice. Gill considers it “completely appropriate” to relate

this legal valley to the shadow of death due to the ruin it has caused to

its suitors; he also notes how the psalmist’s hope in God and

fearlessness of evil is ironically appropriated by the novelist to highlight

the connection between the law and the dark forces (“Allusion” 150).

This allusion can be extended to describe the sense of deadliness

described in the other parts of the novel. Already in the first chapter,

24 This symbolism is also explored by J. H. Miller (“Bleak House” 74–87). 25 The Norton Critical Edition identifies that the title “The Appointed Time” alludes to Job 7.1: “Is there not an appointed time to man upon earth?” (BH 32.391n); Larson notes more allusions to Job 7 and 20 (Scripture 142–51). 26 It is noted by most editions.

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“[s]moke [...] making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big

as full-grown snowflakes—gone into mourning, one might imagine, for

the death of the sun” (BH 1.5). As Jennifer Gribble notes, there is a pun

on “mourning” meaning both morning and mourning because of the

“death of the sun,” which therefore, has “more sinister implications”

(“Compound” 201). Here the “black drizzle,” “mourning,” and “death”

not only describe the polluted air in London but give an ominous sense

echoed by several actual deaths, of which Krook’s self-combustion is

only one. Significantly, before his death Krook’s shop is infested by

“laggard mist,” “tainting sort of weather,” and the atmosphere is “damp

cold” (BH 32.393–94), while the falling soot “smears, like black fat” in

the room above (BH 32.398). And within Krook’s room, due to his

spontaneous combustion, “there is a smoldering suffocating vapour”

and a “dark greasy coating on the walls and ceiling” (BH 32.402).

The biblical allusion to eternal death in the narrator’s comment on

Krook’s spontaneous combustion makes it a symbolic message of doom

for all unjust authorities in the novel:

The Lord Chancellor of that Court [i.e., Krook], true to his title in his last act,

has died the death of all Lord Chancellors in all Courts, and of all authorities in

all places under all names soever, where false pretences are made, and where

injustice is done. Call the death by any name Your Highness will, attribute it to

whom you will, or say it might have been prevented how you will, it is the same

death eternally—inborn, inbred, engendered in the corrupted humours of the

vicious body itself, and that only—Spontaneous Combustion, and none other of

all the deaths that can be died. (BH 32.403)

Just as Miss Flite nicknames Krook “Lord Chancellor” and “Lord

Chancellor’s cousin,” the narrator’s description of the deceased as “The

Lord Chancellor of that Court” in the beginning of the quoted passage

urges the reader to connect Krook with his namesake in the Court of

Chancery, making them interchangeable. As J. H. Miller observes, each

character “is to be understood in terms of his reference to others like

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him”; the “similarity or causality” between these characters or things

pave the way to analogous reading (Victorian 182–3). In Gribble’s

words, readers are “required to engage with the process of analogical

thinking” (“Compound” 197). As with the ambiguity of “Judgment” in

Miss Flite’s speech, there is ambiguity in the omniscient narrator’s

comment about whose death it is. The recurring technique of ambiguity

in Bleak House makes the text yield more meanings and directs the

narrator’s comment to move from particulars to more generalised social

critique.27 As Ledger puts it, Krook’s death is “a symbolic displacement

of the novel’s desire to see Chancery blown up” (199). Nevertheless,

Krook analogically refers to the difference between his mercy and the

Chancellor’s cruelty: “I deal in cat-skins among other general matters,

and hers was offered to me. It’s a very fine skin, as you may see, but I

didn’t have it stripped off! That warn’t like Chancery practice though”

(BH 5.51).

The metaphorical implication of how the suitors are “skinned off”

by the Chancellor is later epitomised by Vholes in his attorneyship with

Richard. But before that, it is also echoed by “the valley of the shadow”

of death in the chapter about Krook’s death. The internal fire both in

Krook’s body and analogically in the corrupt institutional body of

Chancery can therefore be seen as poetic justice pronounced “eternally”

on “corrupted humours of the vicious body” (BH 32.403). The

Chancery’s vices also become symbolic of failures in other institutions.

Gribble traces the origin of establishing Chancery to the purpose of

dispensing equity and defending the property rights of those

emblematic biblical figures known as the widow and the orphan, and

shows that Victorian England becomes a “vast Bleak House, a decaying

property housing a dysfunctional human family” (“Compound” 205).

27 According to Jacob Korg, symbolic potential of Bleak House “seems to have originated in Dickens’s strong feelings about the particulars which served as his symbols” (Introduction 10). And critics like Robert E. Garis and J. H. Miller resort to “the suggestive poetic symbolism” to describe the elusive implications in the Chancery’s injustices, Tom-all-Alone’s poverty, Jo’s infection and “telescopic” philanthropists’ folly (Korg, Introduction 10–11).

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Through the Chancery’s failures Dickens achieves a generalisation of his

social critique. The suggestion of punishment through Krook’s

spontaneous combustion may seem brief and insignificant in

comparison to the sympathies for the poor conveyed in the novel and

its accusations of various kinds of negligence expressed through

abundant biblical allusions. Yet this allusion to the Apocalypse of the

“vicious bodies” dying “the same death eternally” is a straightforward

expression of poetic justice in the novel (BH 32.403). Despite its

succinctness and its indirectness, it asserts the narrator’s expectation of

the ultimate judgment on all negligent authorities.

Little Dorrit:

The Circumlocution Office as an Idolatrous Church

Before Little Dorrit was serialised from 30 November 1855 to 31 May

1857, concern over the urgency of administrative reform was triggered

by the mismanagement of the Crimean War.28 After John McNeill and

Colonel A. M. Tulloch issued a report criticizing the Commissariat as

well as its leaders in Crimea, the Chelsea Board, consisting of officers,

decided that nobody was responsible (Philpotts, “Trevelyan” 295).

Their conclusion has an obvious bearing on Little Dorrit’s original title:

Nobody’s Fault. In a letter written on 1 March 1855 that fully expresses

his disillusion with the government, Dickens commented that the

“representative Government is a miserable failure” (qtd. in Slater 421).

His anger about the government’s blindness and negligence is in Little

Dorrit satirically transformed into an outrageous fictional department,

the Circumlocution Office. Critics have different views about which

political leader or department the fictional Office alludes to: Trey

28 After having been to the Crimea and observed the incompetent conduct of the War, Austen Henry Layard, the radical M.P., demanded the replacement of the aristocratic command; in May 1855, Layard helped found the extra-parliamentary Administrative Reform Association, which is the only political movement in which Dickens participated (Slater 389–90).

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Philpotts argues that the descriptions of the Circumlocution Office is

based on the contemporary prototype of the Treasury Office and the

portrayal of Lord Decimus Tite Barnacle alludes to Sir Charles

Trevelyan, the assistant secretary of the Treasury (“Trevelyan” 283),29

whereas Michael Slater, in line with Harvey Peter Sucksmith, briefly

comments that the portrayal of Tite Barnacle targets at Prime Minister

Lord Palmerston (409). However, I would argue that Dickens’s satiric

targets are not primarily specific politicians or institutions, but the

establishment in general, a critique he had already expressed in articles

published in Household Word, such as “The Royal Rotten Row

Commission” published in 1850, as well as in other satiric and polemic

articles published in 1855.30

Dickens’s satire against the nepotism and misconduct of the Civil

Service is often, as Gribble notes, derived from the Bible (Bible 161).

While Bleak House critiques the negligence of the Chancery through

the portrayal of its devastating consequences felt by the poor, Little

Dorrit exposes the governing class’s cronyism and parasitic tendencies

that breed governmental inefficiency and become oblivious to the

danger of speculative activities, worship of money, and administrative

failures. In this section I examine how the narrator in Little Dorrit uses

the trope of idolatry to satirise bureaucratic misconduct and society’s

indulgence in speculative activities. Moreover, I also explore how the

officials and aristocrats collude with each other in their negligence

while pursuing personal gains. I argue that the narrator’s satirical use

of biblical allusions not only appeals to the reader’s familiarity with the

29 Noting the similarities among Dickens’s descriptions of the Circumlocution Office and respective references to the Treasury Office by the North British Review and a mid-Victorian leader as “the supreme and controlling department of the Executive” and at “the heart of our whole administrative system,” Philpotts points out that the Circumlocution Office alludes to the Treasury Office for its central position and control over other departments (“Trevelyan” 283–84). He also compares similarities between the way Tite Barnacle dismisses Arthur Clennam’s request and the way Trevelyan relieves the Treasury Office and the Commissariat department of the Crimean War from responsibility (“Trevelyan” 294–95). 30 “The Royal Rotten Row Commission” satirises the Commissioners of the Treasury by describing how they postpone their duties and attend trivial things in histrionic and inefficient ways (Haly and Wills, HW 1: 274–76). See Slater, pp. 389–95, on Dickens’s attack on governing bodies in eleven articles published between February and August 1855.

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Bible, but also creates a comic effect. In this way the novelist tries to

instruct the reader to form critical opinions about public matters.31

To critique the negligence, the Circumlocution Office is portrayed

as a blasphemous and idolatrous church. Referred to as “the most

important Department under government,” the Circumlocution Office

is first mentioned in chapter 10 of the third instalment, “Containing the

Whole Science of Government,” with its “sublime principle” of “HOW

NOT TO DO IT” satirically highlighted in capital letters (LD 1.10.112 and

113).32 Referring to it as “the Church Department” as well (LD 1.34.401),

the omniscient narrator resorts to religious terminology such as

“dogma,” “temple,” “priest,” and “acolytes” to describe its

organisational structure, thereby likening it to a false and idolatrous

church. This strategy is a continuation of the delineation of Chancery as

a church-like building and its presiding Lord Chancellor as an idol in

Bleak House:

Such a nursery of statesmen had the department become in virtue of a long career

of this nature, that several solemn lords had attained the reputation of being quite

unearthly prodigies of business, solely from having practised, How not to do it,

as the head of the Circumlocution Office. As to the minor priests and acolytes of

that temple, the result of all this was that they stood divided into two classes, and,

down to the junior messenger, either believed in the Circumlocution Office as a

heaven-born institution, that had an absolute right to do whatever it liked; or

took refuge in total infidelity, and considered it a flagrant nuisance. (LD 1.10.115;

my emphasis)

Nicknamed the “nursery of statesmen,” the Circumlocution Office is

compared to a religious “temple”; its officers are described

hierarchically with its head officers as “prodigies” and other officers as

31 Sambudha Sen notes the criticism of highbrow quarterly press (such as the Westminster Review) on Dickens’s critical representation of political and social issues in his later fiction; Sen thinks that such criticism also reflects the mid-nineteenth century novelists’ potential to form public opinions as a public instructor (963, 966). 32 Number three was published on 31 January 1856. Dickens in the letter to Sir Edwin Landseer discloses that the coming number three will dishearten “office-seekers” because of his depiction of it (Letters 8: 18, note 6 and 7).

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“minor priests” and “acolytes of that temple.” The expression

“unearthly prodigies” highlights the blasphemous nature of their

negligence of duty. Such vocabularies form a shortcut to exposing its

heretical nature, which further shapes the moral judgment on the

department. Here the heads of the Circumlocution Office can rise to be

“solemn lords” and “statesmen” by attaining “the reputation of being

quite unearthly prodigies of business” (LD 1.10.115). Dickens seems to

build a connection between the officer’s mastery of the principle of

“How not to do it” and their future promotion. As is made clear in the

quotation, the subordinates are described in relation to religious belief:

they “either believed in the Circumlocution Office as a heaven-born

institution” or “took refuge in total infidelity” (LD 1.10.115), which

shows that the Office is split within. However, the narrator does not tell

the reader which officers are infidels, a silence possibly indicating their

humble position and minute influence in the administration.

The connection between idolatry and false religion goes back to the

Old Testament distinction between the true worship of God conducted

at the Temple in Jerusalem and the worship of idols (i.e., false gods)

introduced from neighbouring kingdoms, 33 a connection Dickens

makes explicit by references not only to the “church” but also to the

“temple.” Similar to the Chancellor in his “curtained sanctuary,” the

narrator reaffirms the Circumlocution Office’s association with heresy

through the way Barnacle, a lower member, observes its hierarchy:

“With which instruction to number two, this sparkling young Barnacle

took a fresh handful of papers from numbers one and three, and carried

them into the sanctuary to offer to the presiding Idols of the

Circumlocution Office” (LD 1.10.124; my emphasis). It reveals the

misrule of the Circumlocution Office in making various kinds of

decisions for various people. Its bad practice of jobbery and red-tapism

are directly spelt out by the narrator:

33 See, for example, Ezekiel 14.4 and 23.49.

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It was this spirit of national efficiency in the Circumlocution Office that had

gradually led to its having something to do with everything. Mechanicians,

natural philosophers, soldiers, sailors, [...] jobbing people, jobbed people, people

who couldn’t get rewarded for merit, and people who couldn’t get punished for

demerit, were all indiscriminately tucked up under the foolscap paper of the

Circumlocution Office. (LD 1.10.113–14)

As the quotation shows, by satirically referring to its “national

efficiency,” the narrator satirises its governance by pointing out its

abuse of power.

The narrator continues the satirical use of biblical allusions by

giving the Circumlocution Office the nickname “Legion,” emphasizing

its misuse of the dominant status in making many important decisions

for other offices and highlighting its bad influence: “all the business of

the country went through the Circumlocution Office, except the

business that never came out of it; and its name was Legion” (LD

1.10.114; original emphasis). According to the OED, the first meaning

of “legion” is related to an army, such as “A body of infantry in the

Roman army;” and “(a part of) an army,” while its second and third

meanings are defined as:

2. A vast host or multitude (of person or thing) frequently of angels or spirits,

dating with reminiscence of Matthew 26: 53 (Thinkest thou that I cannot now

pray to my Father, and he shall presently give me more than twelve legions of

angels?). 3. With allusion to the biblical episode (at Mark 5: 9) of the man

possessed by a multitude of demons.

As is shown, the third meaning follows from the second. While Dickens

sometimes uses the second meaning, his portrayal of evil characters

resorts to the third, such as Vholes in Bleak House to be examined in

chapter 3.34 The capitalised name “Legion” and the syntax allude to

34 It needs stressing how often Dickens uses this biblical reference: three times in Bleak House, once in Hard Times, and seven times in Little Dorrit. Dickens also associates James Harthouse in Hard Times with the demonic. To present Harthouse as one of the “indifferent and purposeless” and

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Mark 5.9, as both Walder (“Notes” 837) and Trey Philpotts

(Companion 140) note: “And he [Jesus] asked him [a man possessed

by an unclean spirit], What is thy name? And he answered, saying, My

name is Legion: for we are many.” The nickname of “legion” describes

the Circumlocution Office as a collective of evil spirits that possess

whoever passes through the Office. Just as the demonic is a perverted

mirror image of the angelic (as seen in the OED definitions), the

Circumlocution Office, in Mark Knight’s words, is a “negative parody

of divine providence” (184).35 The Office’s prevailing bad influence is

thereby summed up in biblical terms related to evil spirits associated

with the devil. This biblical allusion on the one hand makes the Office

appear like a unified evil character, but the word “Legion” at the same

time stresses the great number of separate cases that goes through the

Office. The biblical meaning of the word “Legion” is also expressed in

the passage about the Barnacles who attend the wedding of Edmund

Sparkler, Mr. Merdle’s stepson. In the words of the narrator, “It was

necessarily but a sprinkling of any class of Barnacles that attended the

marriage, for there were not two score in all, and what is that

subtracted from Legion!” (LD 1.34.404).36 Here Legion both refers to

the large number of the Barnacles, and brings out their evil nature.

The narrator also manifests the Circumlocution Office’s opposite

view, couched in the language of evil spirits: “Sometimes, angry spirits

attacked the Circumlocution Office. Sometimes, parliamentary

questions were asked about it, and even parliamentary motions made

or threatened about it, by demagogues so low and ignorant as to hold

that, the real recipe of government was, How to do it” (LD 1.10.114). The

“designedly bad” people, the narrator uses biblical phrases strongly connected with the devil, again referring to him as belonging to the “legion”: “Publicly and privately, it were much better for the age in which [James Harthouse] lived, that he and the legion of whom he was one were designedly bad, than indifferent and purposeless” (HT 2.8.136). 35 Dickens’s depictions of demonic forces have been observed by other critics as well. The description of Coketown through images of fire, ashes and corrupt landscape as the city of Hell in Hard Times has been noted by Bornstein (167–68), and Wheeler further identifies it with descriptions of Louisa’s mentality (62–9). Hollington also analyses the idea of hell in Hard Times and Bleak House and regards it as observing the Miltonic tradition. 36 Walder traces it to Luke 8.30 (“Notes” 845), whereas Philpotts does not note it.

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quotation shows how the Officers subvert the omniscient narrator’s

judgment of them by rebuttal, turning the truth upside-down: the

righteous and the responsible ones are referred to as “low and ignorant”

and as “angry spirits” and “demagogues,” whose criticism and

suggestions are signs of the “total infidelity” of those who attempt to

reform it. The quotation reminds the reader of Mr. Meagles’s bantering

reference to Daniel Doyce, the genuine engineer and inventor, as “a

public offender” (LD 1.10.126), which echoes the Office’s similar

obfuscation about right and wrong. The public Officer’s comment also

resembles that of Rigaud, who dismissively refers to the accusations

against him as “malice,” a rhetoric of perversion to disguise one’s

villainy (LD 1.1.26). Meanwhile, these words show that the Office does

envision its relation with its opponents in spiritual terms. Actually,

Doyce is, to use Jonathan Smith’s words, the “social antidote” and

“antithesis” to the Barnacles because he tries to “turn his ingenuity to

his country’s service” in spite of the fact that his effort is not recognised

there (342). Before returning to the influence of the Circumlocution

Office on individuals, I will first analyse how the narrator draws on the

biblical trope of vessels to satirise the Barnacles, a family that dominate

the Circumlocution Office.

The Barnacles as Vessels of Dishonour

The metaphor of the Barnacles as “vessels” in the sentence “Behold the

vessels coming into port!” is important in that the word bears several

meanings in the context (LD 2.12.548). According to the OED, the third

meaning is defined as “figurative (chiefly in or after Biblical use). a. Said

of a person regarded as having the containing capacity or function of a

vessel. Frequently const. of (a condition, quality, etc.).” The meaning is

exemplified by Wycliffe’s use of the word “vessels” in 2 Timothy 2.20–

21, also adopted by the King James Version:

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But in a great house there are not only vessels of gold and of silver, but also of

wood and of earth; and some to honour, and some to dishonour. If a man

therefore purge himself from these, he shall be a vessel unto honour, sanctified,

and meet for the master's use, and prepared unto every good work.

The Barnacles are portrayed as vessels of honour in terms of social

status, but are also exposed as vessels of dishonour for not doing their

duties. The oblique biblical allusion shows Dickens’s scepticism about

officers who become “more careful of their official dignity than their

social responsibility,” to use Malcolm Andrews’s words (101). In

addition, the fourth meaning of vessels, according to the OED, refers to

“Any structure designed to float upon and traverse the water for the

carriage of persons or goods.” Its metaphorical use in “vessels coming

into port” manifests the narrator’s conception of how jobbery works: the

businessman is compared to a port and the officers are likened to

vessels reaching it, thereby implying the self-seeking and commercial

nature of their meeting because a port is where “charges may be levied

under statute or by prescription on boats making use of the facilities”

(OED “port” 1a).

The narrator combines biblical allusion with an analogy about the

relation between the ruined country and its selfish statesman. The head

officer’s purpose for private gain is manifested clearly in the chapter “A

Shoal of Barnacles” of the last number of the first book:

this great statesman [i.e., Lord Decimus Tite Barnacle] was always yet to be told

that it behoved the Pilot of the ship to do anything but prosper in the private loaf

and fish trade ashore, the crew being able, by dint of hard pumping, to keep the

ship above water without him. On this sublime discovery, in the great art How

not to do it, Lord Decimus had long sustained the highest glory of the Barnacle

family; and let any ill-advised member of either House but try How to do it, by

bringing in a Bill to do it, that Bill was as good as dead and buried when Lord

Decimus Tite Barnacle rose up in his place, and solemnly said, soaring into

indignant majesty as the Circumlocution cheering soared around him, that he

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was yet to be told, My Lords, that it behoved him as the Minister of this free

country, to set bounds to the philanthropy, to cramp the charity, to fetter the

public spirit, to contract the enterprise, to damp the independent self-reliance,

of its people. (LD 1.34.402; my emphasis)

The narrator critiques the misrule of Lord Decimus Tite Barnacle, the

head of the Circumlocution Office, who neglects public responsibilities

and cares only for his private gain. The analogy of the relation of pilot

and ship to that of statesman and country shows how he endangers the

country. The satire is also expressed through the description of his goal

“to prosper in the private loaf and fish trade ashore,” an allusion to

Matthew 14.15–21, as is also observed by Walder (“Notes” 845). Tite

Barnacle’s purely “private” concern is contrasted with Christ’s miracle

of feeding the multitude with loaves and fishes as “an act of public

beneficence” (Butterworth 118). That the precarious condition of the

national ship solely depends on the crew’s effort of “hard pumping”

further exposes its top leader’s blindness to existing problems. The

parallel verbs of deliberate sabotage, including “to set bound,” “to

cramp,” “to fetter,” “to contract,” and “to damp,” further condemn the

misrule of Tite Barnacle. Descriptions like these easily extend Dickens’s

critique to his contemporary politicians such as Trevelyan and

Palmerston, whom his journalistic articles published in 1855 also

attack.37 This associative reading with contemporary political figures is

also justified by what Dickens says in the preface to Little Dorrit where

he refers to the “common experience of an Englishman” to defend his

exaggerated description of the aristocratic Barnacles and the

Circumlocution Office (7).

To manifest the detriment of nepotism and jobbery, the narrator

describes the Barnacles as parasitic. Similar to Tite Barnacle’s careless

37 Dickens’s article “Cheap Patriotism” criticises Sir Charles Trevelyan whose practice of favouritism to arrange jobs for his own family and connections is similar to that of the Barnacles (HW 11: 433–35; Philpotts, “Trevelyan” 295, 286–87). His scathing attacks on the Prime Minister Palmerston and his government’s mismanagement of the Crimean War are seen in three articles published under the title of “The Thousand and One Humbug” on 21, 28 April, and 5 May 1855 (Slater 389–90).

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attitude towards the fate of the national ship, the lesser Barnacles are

shown to be clinging parasitically to the national ship without any

concern for the prospect of the sinking ship:

That what the Barnacles had to do, was to stick on to the national ship as long as

they could. That to trim the ship, lighten the ship, clean the ship, would be to

knock them off; that they could but be knocked off once; and that if the ship went

down with them yet sticking to it, that was the ship’s look out, and not theirs. (LD

1.10.128)

The young Barnacles’ sticking to the national ship echoes the marine

barnacles’ ability to ‘‘attach themselves tenaciously to solid objects, and

to reproduce rapidly, especially where they were not wanted” (Smith

334). The narrator comments that the maintenance of the national ship,

i.e., administrative reforms, endangers the existence of the Barnacles.

The narrator’s metaphorical exposure of the Barnacles as parasites

echoes the contemporary radical discourse that critiques idle

aristocracy. 38 By classifying the Barnacles into negative types and

representing the problems facing society, Dickens passes moral

judgment explicitly on the aristocracy even as he risks simplifying and

exaggerating the corruption, as his defence against the contemporary

criticism shows. Meanwhile, the descriptions of aristocratic power

structures increase the novelist’s intimacy with the middle-class

readership even as he can “trap, surprise,” frustrate, and “gratify” their

literary appetite, to use William Myers’s words (79).39

In addition to the narrator’s descriptions of the aristocratic leaders’

ineptitude， the narrator also appropriates the biblical narrative in

order to mock whoever fawns on these leaders. The narrator makes an

ironic allusion to Matthew 22.2–3,40 when stating that the Barnacles

38 William Myers’s book chapter analyses the radicalism of Little Dorrit (77–104). Sen’s article further examines Dickens’s inheritance of the radical heritage in Bleak House and Little Dorrit (945–70). Ledger’s monograph systematically discusses the radical tradition and its influence. Ledger also analyses popular radicalism in Bleak House and Little Dorrit (193–232). 39 Myers analyses Dickens’s ways to disconcert the bourgeois readers “morally and politically” (78-83). 40 Philpotts traces it to Matthew 22.2–3 and Luke 14.7–11 (Companion 327); Walder traces it to Matthew 22.2–14 (“Notes” 845).

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are “bidden to the feast” of Pet Meagles’s wedding. The king in Jesus’s

parable asks ordinary people from the street to attend his son’s

wedding feast after being annoyed by honourable guests’ refusal to be

there. In the novel there is a reversal of the relationship between

banquet host and his guests: it is the middle-class Meagleses who invite

the upper-class Barnacles. Unlike the king in the parable inviting

ordinary people to attend the feast, Mr. Meagles is “anxious” to think

about “the mingling of Daniel [a family friend and plebeian engineer]

with official Barnacleism” (LD 1.34.398). Moreover, Mr. Meagles fawns

on Barnacles, on which the narrator ironically comments that “very

high and very large family might shed as much lustre on the marriage,

as so dim an event was capable of receiving” (LD 1.34.397). Both the

narrator’s use of the parable and the ironic comment on Mr. Meagles’s

servile attitude aim to critique the embrace of the upper classes as

patrons by the middle classes. In addition to satirizing the Meagleses,

the narrator satirises Mrs. Gowan’s proposal to add more Barnacles to

the guest list instead of the lower-class Meagleses, her in-laws.41 Just

as Dickens says in his letter to Forster, “Society, the Circumlocution

Office, and Mr. Gowan, are of course three parts of one idea and design”

(Letters 8: 79). Members of high society, the institution and their

admirers on the margins depend on each other to safeguard the

legitimacy of their privileges and pride, which Dickens exposes and

attacks. Focusing on Mr. Merdle, the next part analyses how the

narrator portrays him as an idol and critiques the mercantile ethos that

obscures people’s judgment.

Mr. Merdle as an Idol

According to Walder, the portrayal of Mr. Merdle in Little Dorrit is

based on two contemporary figures: one is George Hudson, “Railway

King” who made a fortune in the speculation in the railways and lost it

soon afterwards; the other, generally considered as the original of Mr.

Merdle, is John Sadleir, MP and a director at the Tipperary Bank, who

41 Myers also makes an interesting observation that Mrs. Gowan imposes her roles as an aristocrat in the relation with the Meagleses’ middle-class family (88–89).

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led many investors to lose money when the bank collapsed (“Notes”

830). The portrayal of Mr. Merdle reflects the general mercantile ethos

at the time as Dickens explains in the novel’s preface: “If I might make

so bold as to defend that extravagant conception, Mr. Merdle, I would

hint that it originated after the Railroad-share epoch, in the times of a

certain Irish bank and of one or two other equally laudable enterprises”

(7). Dickens again resorts to the trope of idolatry, delineating Mr.

Merdle as an idol at the centre of money worship. 42 The narrator

highlights his “uneasy expressions about his coat-cuffs as if they were

in his confidence, and had reasons for being anxious to hide his hands”

(LD 1.21.251), which may suggest his attempt to disguise his

fraudulence. Unlike Rigaul who is an open and active perpetrator of

evildoings, Mr. Merdle is portrayed as passive and occasionally uneasy.

Nevertheless, he is also shown to be manipulative in his business and

bureaucratic practices in that he marries Mrs. Merdle for her “capital

bosom to hang jewels upon” (LD 1.21.250). He presents himself as a

“man of prodigious enterprise,” being in Parliament, the City, and

entitled “Chairman of this, Trustee of that, [and] President of the other”

(LD 1.21.250). Perceived with awe by others, his fakery is finally

revealed when he becomes possessed by some evil spirit and self-

destructs. However, the trope of demonic possession (to which I shall

return below) is not as central to the novel as the institutional idolatry

signaled at the start of Bleak House; it is not resolved even as the whole

system represented by the Circumlocution Office continues in its way.

The Merdle episode in Little Dorrit is only one example of the many

Mammonist expressions, and like the Circumlocution Office it does not

turn up in the opening numbers. Dickens seems to suggest two lessons:

one is that since the institutional ill is beyond cure the only solution is

to stay away from it, and the other is that an individual fakery may

resonate in those around and eventually bring destruction to them all.

42 The narrator also alludes to Greek mythology by referring to Mr. Merdle as “a Midas without the ears” (LD 1.21.250).

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In Little Dorrit, the narrator uses a composite of biblical allusions

to show Mr. Merdle at the centre of an idolatry of gold. Bar, a member

of the legal system, regards Mr. Merdle as “one of the greatest

converters of the root of all evil into the root of all good” (LD 1.21.254).

The ironic adaptation of money as “the root of all evil” (1 Tim. 6.10) into

money as “the root of all good” shows the obsession of the members of

the high “Society” with Mr. Merdle’s fame and wealth; in turn Mr.

Merdle also “intimate[s]” the Society as “the apple of his eye” (LD

1.21.254), endorsing his status as patron. The narrator’s subversion of

the biblical teaching also shows how Merdle embraces others’ idolatry

of him. The danger of blind idol worship is emphasised when the

narrator provides a new interpretation of the parable of the camel and

the needle’s eye: “though nobody knew with the least precision what Mr.

Merdle’s business was, except that it was to coin money [...] and [...] it

was the last new polite reading of the parable of the camel and the

needle’s eye to accept without inquiry” (LD 1.33.392).43 The narrator

indicts the mercantile ethos with its lack of inquiry, blind worship of

money, and failed speculations.

The narrator portrays Mr. Merdle as the object of worship and his

worshippers as followers in the dark:

The famous name of Merdle became, every day, more famous in the land. Nobody

knew that the Merdle of such high renown had ever done any good to any one [...];

nobody knew that he had any capacity or utterance of any sort in him, which had

ever thrown, for any creature, the feeblest farthing-candle ray of light on any path

of duty or diversion, pain or pleasure, toil or rest, fact or fancy, among the

multiplicity of paths in the labyrinth trodden by the sons of Adam; nobody had

the smallest reason for supposing the clay of which this object of worship was

made, to be other than the commonest clay, with as clogged a wick smouldering

inside of it as ever kept an image of humanity from tumbling to pieces. All people

knew (or thought they knew) that he had made himself immensely rich; and, for

that reason alone, prostrated themselves before him, more degradedly and less

43 Ben Parker interprets the novel’s scarce disclosure of Mr. Merdle’s financial crimes, and considers it “mirroring of the unaccountability of capitalist profit” (144).

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excusably than the darkest savage creeps out of his hole in the ground to

propitiate, in some log or reptile, the Deity of his benighted soul. (LD 2.12.545–

46)

Alluding to Daniel 2.31–35, as Walder identifies (“Notes” 848),44 the

narrator satirises the object of worship made with “the commonest clay”

in the “image of humanity,” before foretelling Merdle’s suicide: it

“tumbl[es] to pieces” (LD 2.12.545). Meanwhile, the narrator shows

such follies by describing the worshippers as “benighted” and

comparing them to the “darkest” savages prostrating themselves “more

degradedly and less excusably” before their man-made deity.

Following the exposure of Merdle, the narrator describes that the

officers at the Circumlocution Office are “high priests” and “officiators”

who serve the idolatry of him:

the high priests of this worship had the man before them as a protest against their

meanness. The multitude worshipped on trust [...] but the officiators at the altar

had the man habitually in their view. They sat at his feasts, and he sat at theirs.

There was a spectre always attendant on him, saying to these high priests, “[…]

You are the levers of the Circumlocution Office.” (LD 2.12.546)

By stressing the officers’ collusion, the narrator shows that it takes a

group effort to create a false idol. In the chapter “Mr. Merdle’s

Complaint,” the narrator has already shown how the allegorically

named authoritative figures or “magnates,” such as Admiralty, Bishop,

Treasury and Bar, collaborate to make Mr. Merdle an idol: Admiralty

regards him as “a wonderful man,” and Bishop considers him “disposed

to maintain the best interest of Society” (LD 1.12.252), while Treasury

refers to Merdle as one of England’s “world-famed capitalists and

merchant-princes” (LD 1.12.254). Therefore, Mr. Merdle’s uneasiness

with his coat-cuff and hands also expresses his desperation in such an

idolatrous system. It seems that the “magnates” collude to create such

an idol in order to mystify their own existence and disguise their

44 While Philpotts traces its source to Tennyson’s poem “The Palace of Art” (1832): “Not for this/ Was common clay ta’en from the common earth/ Moulded by God, and tempered with the tears/ Of angels to the perfect shape of man” (Companion 402), I think Walder’s biblical source is more relevant since Daniel 2.31–35 is about the great image broken to pieces.

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negligence in the offices.

The narrator uses Mr. Dorrit’s prostration before Merdle as a

particular example to show how an investor is misled into idolatry,

which in turn exacerbates the consequences of money worship. When

Mr. Dorrit pays a visit to the office of his daughter’s father-in-law, the

narrator comments: “Merdle! O ye sun, moon, and stars, the great man!

The rich man, who had in a manner revised the New Testament, and

already entered into the kingdom of Heaven” (LD 2.16.601). Here two

biblical passages are conflated, as Philpotts (Companion 429) and

Walder (“Notes” 850) note: the juxtaposition of sun, moon and stars

alludes to Psalms 148.2, in which every creature and every heavenly

body praises God; the second half of the quotation alludes to Christ’s

parable of the camel and the needle’s eye that I analysed above, about

the danger of being rich (Matt. 19.16–24). The narrator has of course

turned the parables inside out. The difficulty of the rich man’s entry into

the kingdom of heaven is changed into the rich man’s buying his way

there. The biblical references are appropriated to satirise the

speculators’ endorsement of this new religion of money and their

misplaced trust in wealth and appearance with the deification of Mr.

Merdle.

The establishment of Mr. Merdle as an idol is reinforced when the

narrator immediately afterwards reports that “[a]s he went up the stairs,

people were already posted on the lower stairs, that his shadow might

fall upon them when he came down. So were the sick brought out and

laid in the track of the Apostle—who had not got into the good society,

and had not made the money” (LD 2.16.602; original emphasis). This

allusion to Acts 5.15, where Peter’s shadow brings healing to the sick,

expresses the novelist’s sarcastic comments on the idolatry and vanity

of the mercantile trend pursued by Merdle’s disciples. Mr. Dorrit too is

overwhelmed by the commotion and becomes convinced by Mr.

Merdle’s “worshippers” to invest his wealth with this “commercial

Colossus” (LD 2.12.548). Mr. Dorrit’s idolatry is evident as he

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“descend[s] the staircase, seeing the worshippers on the steps, and

feeling that the light of Mr. Merdle shone by reflection in himself” (LD

2.16.605). With this glorifying of the legendary businessman, Mr. Dorrit

makes his way to the centre of banking, “the golden Street of the

Lombards” (LD 2.16.605). As Knight observes, Mr. Dorrit highlights the

misplaced belief in a deified person: placing Mr. Merdle at the very

epicentre of society gives it a mock providential impression that reveals

the inability of political economy “to replace providence” (182).

As a contrast to this ironic portrayal of Mr. Merdle’s deified status,

the narrator drops a hint that his devious actions may be due to his

transaction with evil spirits or the devil himself: “Mr. Merdle looked a

little common, and rather as if, in the course of his vast transactions, he

had accidentally made an interchange of heads with some inferior spirit”

(LD 1.33.392). The narrator returns to Mr. Merdle’s demonic

possession before his suicide by alluding to several passages in the

Gospels that help contextualise his moral failure: “the famous Mr.

Merdle, in going down the street, appear to leap, and waltz, and gyrate,

as if he were possessed by several Devils” (LD 2.24.688).45 Mr. Merdle’s

possession reflects his imprisoned condition due to his deception of

others as well as the illusion created by others’ worship of him. The

escape from it means the exposure of his true nature, which he can ill

afford. His inability to reconcile himself to the truth pushes him towards

his demise. The narrator blames those idolizing Merdle and deluding

the multitude: “Every partaker of his magnificent feasts would be seen

to have been a sharer in the plunder of innumerable homes; every

servile worshipper of riches who had helped to set him on his pedestal,

would have done better to worship the Devil point-blank” (LD 2.25.696).

The narrator’s comment once again highlights the collusion between

Merdle, High Society, and his worshippers. The narrator’s ironic

allusion to Matthew 2, as noted by Walder (“Notes” 852), manifests Mr.

45 The Bible records the devil’s possession of people in many verses, such as Matthew 9.32–33, 12.22, 15.22–28, and 17.14–18, Mark 5.1–20 and 7.25–30, and Luke 4.33–37, 8.26–35, and 11.14–26.

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Merdle’s role as a deceitful culprit: “he, the shining wonder, the new

constellation to be followed by the wise men bringing gifts, until it

stopped over certain carrion at the bottom of a bath and disappeared—

was simply the greatest Forger and the greatest Thief that ever cheated

the gallows” (LD 2.25.696). The allusion refers to Merdle as a “shining

wonder,” the star that leads the wise men to Jesus, except that he

misleads investors to misspend their money in futile speculation. Again,

the novel uses biblical allusions in a double-edged fashion, both to

satirise idolatry shown through the ironical misappropriation of biblical

message, and to use the biblical message as a moral compass in the

criticism of social ills.

Meanwhile, the narrator’s description of Physician alludes to

Jesus’s compassion for both the just and unjust:

Physician was a composed man, who performed neither on his own trumpet, nor

on the trumpets of other people. [...] [Y]et his equality of compassion was no more

disturbed than the Divine Master’s of all healing was. He went, like the rain,

among the just and unjust, doing all the good he could, and neither proclaiming

it in the synagogues nor at the corner of streets. (LD 2.25.688–89)

In this passage, two references to Christ’s Sermon on the Mount in

Matthew 6.2 and 5.44–45 are made.46 The narrator’s reference to the

Divine Master’s power of healing in comparison to the falling of rain on

both the just and unjust, point to the fact that Merdle refrains from

taking the step to confront his problem of fraud. Such juxtaposition of

satirical appropriations of biblical verses describing follies of Merdle

idolatry and straightforward allusions to Jesus’s healing power

highlights the “dialogue between points of view,” in Bakhtin’s words

(76), which underscores the danger and vanity of idolatry and

speculation in contrast to the physician’s compassion symbolic of the

“Divine Master’s” forgiveness.

46 Both Walder (“Notes” 852) and Philpotts (Companion 454) trace these sources.

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Bar’s Toadyism and Embrace of Idolatry

In the previous part of the chapter, I mentioned the narrator’s satirical

description of the Circumlocution Office’s principle of “HOW NOT TO

DO IT” (LD 1.10.113; original emphasis). I also want to add that the

Office’s adoption of the principle is described as infecting other

departments and the narrator gauges such influence by describing one

lawyer, Bar. In this part I analyse the narrator’s portrayal of Bar whose

toadyism is expressed through a blasphemous discourse of idolatry that

pitches his scheme of advancement in religious terms. When Mr.

Merdle entertains the Barnacles in order to secure a post for his almost

imbecile stepson Edmund Sparkler, Bar’s excessive fawning on the

Barnacles and other high-ranking officials is expressed in a religious

vocabulary, seen, for example, when he asks Ferdinand Barnacle about

the seating arrangement at dinner: “If you don’t know [about seating],

how can I know? You are in the innermost sanctuary of the temple; I am

one of the admiring concourse on the plain without” (LD 2.12.548,

original emphasis). Bar’s allusions to idolatry reflect the hierarchy of

the governing circles in terms of a false church.

The hierarchical nature of this false church is also emphasised

through the character “Bishop.” The satire of Bar’s fawning on Bishop

is revealed through the contrast between Bishop’s innocent appearance

and his worldly speech. Bishop’s studied meekness is highlighted,

having ‘‘no idea that there was anything significant in the occasion’’ and

being ‘‘so surprisingly innocent!’’ (LD 2.12.549). Similarly, ‘‘Worldly

affairs were too much for him; he couldn’t make them out at all’’ (LD

2.12.552). Through Bishop’s comment on the union of Fanny Dorrit and

Edmund Sparkler, his “earthly view” is shown:

He said it was indeed highly important to Society that one in the trying situation

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of unexpectedly finding himself invested with a power for good or for evil in

Society, should become, as it were, merged in the superior power of a more

legitimate and more gigantic growth, the influence of which (as in the case of our

friend at whose board we sat) was habitually exercised in harmony with the best

interests of Society. Thus, instead of two rival and contending flames, a larger and

a lesser, each burning with a lurid and uncertain glare, we had a blended and a

softened light whose genial ray diffused an equable warmth throughout the land.

Bishop seemed to like his own way of putting the case very much, and rather dwelt

upon it; Bar, meanwhile (not to throw away a jury-man), making a show of

sitting at his feet and feeding on his precepts. (LD 2.12.555, my emphasis)

The narrator’s report is a terse comment on Bishop assuming a Christ-

like role, emphasised by Bar’s idolatry at the end. The richness of

Bishop’s metaphors of “flames,” “glare,” “light,” and “ray” to describe

the importance of marrying into money ironically betrays his worldly

knowledge about society. The scene with Bar sitting at Bishop’s feet and

“feeding on his precepts,” alludes to Matthew 15.21–28, where a

Canaanite woman is pleading to Jesus for the salvation of her daughter.

Where her analogy about a dog eating crumbs fallen from the master’s

table shows her faith in Christ, in the context of the novel, the same

metaphor comes to stand for the idolatry shown by the lower echelons

of the governing circles.47 Bar’s self-abasement and cultivation of the

others’ sense of complacency are shown to be selfish and schematic in

that he chooses his own career advancement over any public

responsibilities. Meanwhile, the narrator mocks Bar’s toadyism with

Lord Decimus and refers to it as “a master stroke” leading Bar to

successive promotions and eventually to the office of Attorney-General

(2.12.551).

A similar trope of idolatry is used briefly in Dickens’s article “The

Toady Tree” published on 26 May 1855 in Household Words.48 In this

47 The allusion has not been noted or discussed by other scholars. 48 Dickens traces the problem in his article “The Toady Tree” published on 26 May 1855, around the time when he first designed the novel. He writes: “it is the fault of the over-cultivation of the great

Toady Tree; the tree of many branches, which grows to an immense height in England, and which overshadows all the land” (HW 11: 385). Several articles in Household Words anticipate the themes in Little Dorrit. See Butt, pp. 1–10; Ledger, pp. 216–19; and Slater, pp. 389–95.

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article, Dickens humorously portrays several Britons who acknowledge

the problem with toadyism but cannot help subscribing to it. Take the

fictional character of Hobbes, for example: Hobbes claims that the

system must “be totally changed. [...] We must not put our trust in mere

idols” (HW 11: 386), but at the same time he cannot help practising

Toadyism. Dickens also expresses a similar opinion that administrative

offices should be reformed and not be held by the aristocracy alone: “no

privileged class should have an inheritance in the administration of the

public affairs” (HW 11: 385).

The narrator’s use of allusion to Matthew 15.21–28 to satirise Bar’s

toadyism and Bishop’s worldly precepts is important in that the

description of a dog begging food at his master’s feet visualises both

Bar’s debasement and his feeding on Bishop’s precepts. The novelist’s

appropriation of the biblical scene contributes to a graphic description

of their relationship, creating a comic effect in a way similar to that of

graphic satire popular since the enlightenment.49 In addition, it also

serves as a thematic pointer because Bishop’s “precepts” about the

power of wealth to draw wealth are observed by the aristocracy through

marriage union and occupation of public posts, which Dickens

persistently attacks in both Bleak House and Little Dorrit. Similarly, the

depiction of the Barnacles’ clinging to offices expresses the critique of

hereditary patronage. 50 Mrs. Barnacle is introduced as Mrs. Tite

Barnacle née Stiltstalking. The inclusion of ‘‘née Stiltstalking’’ flaunts

the family alliances. These aristocrats are dispersed not only over all the

offices but all over the country:

49 Sambudha Sen notes that caricaturist George Cruikshank’s graphic satire had been “absorbed into the language of radicalism” (956), and he adds that Dickens “had internalized for the novel form a mode of representation that had developed […] in the relatively ‘lower’ realm of graphic satire” (957). Quoting Charles Baudelaire’s research on caricaturists, Sen also notes graphic satire’s “profusion of allusive and allegorical detail,” which makes the experience of viewing them akin to the experience of reading them” (958). 50 Smith’s article uses the Victorian writings on seaside life to explain the significance of naming the aristocracy as the Barnacles. Smith writes: “The ability of barnacles to attach themselves tenaciously to solid objects, and to reproduce rapidly, especially where they were not wanted, was well known to denizens of an island nation and thus easily exploited” (334). See, Smith, pp. 334–40.

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It was agreed that the country (another word for the Barnacles and Stiltstalkings)

wanted preserving, but how it came to want preserving was not so clear. It was

only clear that the question was all about John Barnacle, Augustus Stiltstalking,

William Barnacle and Tudor Stiltstalking, Tom, Dick, or Harry Barnacle or

Stiltstalking, because there was nobody else but mob. (LD 1.26.314; original

parenthesis)

Here the narrator parodies the aristocrats’ mind-set about “preserving”

the country through their occupying office posts and excluding other

people. It also mimics the aristocrats’ prejudice against common people,

disparaged as “mob.” The invention of the names used by the

aristocracy, traced by Ledger to the “popular tradition of radical satire”

(195), criticises the privileged group’s claim to power through

inheritance. The juxtaposition of “Tom, Dick, or Harry,” i.e., “any

average men, taken at random; ordinary people generally; anyone at all”

(OED “Tom” P1b), with the Barnacles or Stiltstalkings undercuts their

assumed high pedigrees. These names remind readers of the

aristocratic “-oodles” in Bleak House. Similarly, in Bleak House,

Dickens’s social critique extends to the ineffectualness of the governing

class through the parody of its members as a misled cult, influenced by

dandyism and insouciance. However, the aristocracy’s claim to names

as their rationalisation for hereditary patronage and inheritance of

public offices exposes them as illegitimate heirs.51

This chapter has examined the narrator’s use of biblical allusions

in Bleak House and Little Dorrit, a use that contributes to the novelist’s

critique of a set of social ills. As the analysis shows, the narrator uses

biblical allusions mainly in satirical ways, either through an ironic

appropriation of biblical verses, Anglican services, biblical cadences or

51 Dickens has been criticised for his exaggerated writing on the aristocracy. C. P. Snow shows that by the time Little Dorrit was published there were few aristocrats in such public offices and the examination to select public officers was implemented (140–45). But the phenomenon of jobbery and misrule did exist as it always does, which I think rationalises Dickens’s imagination because fiction is not history. Fiction is not about accuracy in historical actuality but about an ideal to strive for, which is also the reason Dickens’s portrayal of misrule in Little Dorrit still finds its resonance among modern readers.

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scenes that reveal the urgent need for charity and that rebuke the

authorities’ negligence of duties. In addition, the narrator parodies and

reproduces a discourse of power steeped in idolatrous terms. The

narrator also occasionally uses biblical allusions straightforwardly,

especially those related to the Lord’s Prayer, eternal judgment and

divine compassion, to both appeal to the reader’s moral judgment and

to solicit reflections on the social issues in order to promote social

reform. As an extension of the narrator’s often satirical use of biblical

allusions, the next chapter will focus on the perverted use of biblical

allusions by the characters within the fiction, a literary strategy Dickens

uses to satirise the values they embody.

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Chapter 3: Biblical Allusion as Used by Perverted Characters

After having analysed the use of biblical allusions in the opening

numbers of the three novels and their more general use by the narrator,

it is now time to turn to the characters within the novels. In this chapter,

I investigate biblical allusions uttered by perverted characters,

functioning as satirical theme pointers against social ills. The

“eccentricities” (etymologically “off-center” features) of these

characters, exhibited in their peculiar language, dress and feeling

(Pickrel 86), were criticised for flatness and lack of interiority by some

of Dickens’s contemporaries, including George Eliot. 1 However, as

David Paroissien argues, Dickens’s genius as a novelist rests with his

unique, individualised characters and their characterisation through

“theatrical components” such as “voice, gesture, and movement”

(“Characterization” 77). Subdivided by Michael Hollington into

“terrible grotesques” and “playful grotesques” (265), Dickens himself

referred to these characters as “grotesque and wild but not impossible”

(qtd. in Hollington, “Grotesque” 264).2

In this chapter, I apply the term “perversion” to villainous

characters who are targets of the novelist’s critique. I adopt the earlier

usage of the word “perversion” as defined by the OED:

1 George Eliot criticised characters’ lack of psychological depth in Dickens’s novels, suggesting that Dickens encouraged the “fallacy that high morality and refined sentiment can grow out of harsh social relations, ignorance and want” (qtd. in Bowen 18–19). Similarly, G. H. Lewes considered Dickens’s characters to be “frogs whose brains have been taken out”; Henry James’s view on the interdependence of characters and plots highlights some of Dickens’s characters who do not advance the plot as “excrescences” (Paroissien, “Characterization” 80–81). As Paroissien argues, “round” and “flat” categories should be seen as a novelist’s method and do not necessarily mean inferiority in artistry (“Characterization” 81). 2 Dickens’s contemporaries used the word “grotesque” to describe central features of his work and he also “embraced it with enthusiasm” (Hollington, “Grotesque” 264). In Dickens and the Grotesque, Michael Hollington explores how Dickens’s aesthetic of grotesque is applied throughout his career to achieve satiric purposes.

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1a. The action of perverting or condition of being perverted; the action of turning

aside from what is true or right; the diversion of something from its original and

proper course, state, or meaning; corruption, distortion; (Theology) change from

Christian belief or truthfulness to non-Christian belief or falsity (opposed to

conversion: see conversion n. 8).3

In these pessimistic novels of social criticism Dickens often depicts

individual villains beyond cure. By appropriating the Bible in perverted

ways, these characters reveal their own flaws. By exploring their

perverted rhetoric (both through their own words and the narrator’s

comments), this chapter will show that it is largely their use of biblical

allusions that defines them. These characters under study are found in

bureaucratic institutions, such as Vholes, the lawyer, in Bleak House,

in industry, such as Josiah Bounderby, the industrialist, and

Slackbridge, the union orator, in Hard Times, or in religious circles,

such as Rev. Mr. Chadband, Mrs. Jellyby, and Mrs. Pardiggle in Bleak

House, or Mrs. General and Mr. Casby in Little Dorrit. In the last

category, I will also examine two guardian characters, Miss Barbary in

Bleak House and Mrs. Clennam in Little Dorrit, who read the Bible in

partial or biased ways in order to justify their retributivist beliefs. I

argue that the perverted use of the Bible by these characters not only

helps portray their personality traits but also reflects their embodied

values as individual epitomes of social ills. Their perverted speeches are

these novels’ satirical representation of social problems seen among

the rapidly expanding middle classes, especially in bureaucratic,

industrious, and religious circles. These characters’ verbal allusions to

the Bible activate a two-way dialogic relationship: the appropriations

of the Bible invoke the alluded passages or scenes in the Bible, while

the invoked biblical verses show how perverted characters’ speeches

are, and pass judgment on their embodied values and social ills as well.

3 The earliest usage of this meaning is traced to the late fourteenth century and examples in the OED show its active usage until the twentieth century. This meaning precedes, by three hundred years, its present more widely used meaning of “1b sexual behaviour or preference that is different from the norm.”

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Bureaucratic Institutions:

Vholes, Epitome of Chancery’s Cannibalism

In Bleak House, besides the portrayal of the Chancery neglecting its

duties, the interaction between the attorney Vholes and his client

Richard Carstone serves as a particular example of ill practices in the

legal profession. My analysis in this part examines how Vholes’s

perverted use of biblical allusions attests to his impudence and

manifests how individuals may manipulate speeches to deceive others

for private gain. Vholes, like the Chancery he embodies, profits from

lawsuits: the longer the cases are procrastinated, the larger his profits.4

In order to refute a real Chancery Judge, who describes such practices

as “a trivial blemish or so in its rate of progress,” Dickens not only

quotes him (BH Preface 3), but also lets Vholes repeat the “prejudice”

that he and his profession have received in order to satirise legal

professionals: “Our plain course, however, under good report and evil

report, and all kinds of prejudice (we are the victims of prejudice), is to

have everything openly carried on” (BH 60.720). This impudent

allusion to St Paul’s words in Philippians 4.8, (“whatsoever things are

of good report; if there be any virtue, and if there be any praise, think

on these things”),5 sums up Vholes’s perverted justification for his

work as a representative of the legal profession.

The portrayal of Vholes is made from two conflicting perspectives,

prompting the reader to judge which one should be trusted. Vholes is

mentioned briefly in the preface to Bleak House, but does not appear

in person until chapter 37, “Jarndyce and Jarndyce,” in which his

attorneyship for Richard is introduced. He is described by Skimpole in

4 Douglas Hamer traces the history of the court of Chancery, its function, procedure, and inherent defects (342–45). He notes that the satire against the Chancery’s practice in relation to the Day of Judgment dates back to the Middle Ages (346). 5 The allusion was noted by Stephen Gill (“Notes” 942).

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front of Esther and Ada as a “[f]riend and legal adviser”: “if you want

common sense, responsibility, and respectability, all united—if you

want an exemplary man—Vholes is the man” (BH 37.469; original

emphasis). It echoes Vholes’s summary of his own traits of

responsibility and respectability: “I am a widower with three

daughters—Emma, Jane, and Caroline—and my desire is so to

discharge the duties of life as to leave them a good name” (BH 37.470).

Skimpole’s claim about Vholes being responsible and respectable, in

short an exemplary man, invites the reader’s evaluation because Esther

thinks Richard could “scarcely have found a worse friend” than

Skimpole because of his “airy dispensing with all principle and purpose”

and his “looseness and putting-off of everything” (BH 37.460). The

narrator’s half-joking and half-satirical comment on what Vholes does

gives away the falsity of this seeming respectability: “He is making hay

of the grass which is flesh, for his three daughters. And his father is

dependent on him in the Vale of Taunton” (BH 39.482). Ford and

Monod trace its biblical source to 1 Peter 1.24, “For all flesh is as grass”

(BH 39.482n), while Gill considers it as blending the biblical source of

“flesh as grass” that withers and falls away with the proverbial

expression “make hay while the sun shines” (“Notes” 936). Either way,

“making hay of flesh” foregrounds Vholes’s use of human beings for his

own gain, while highlighting the cannibalism hiding behind his

professed responsibility for his daughters and his father.6 Similar to

Charles Kingsley’s exposure of the exploitation within the tailor

industry in his article “Cheap Clothes and Nasty” (1850), Dickens

reveals a similar exploitation within the legal profession in Bleak

House. Dickens’s representation of Vholes echoes Kingsley’s metaphor:

“Man eating man, eaten by man, in every variety of degree and method!

6 Referring to Vholes’s manner of removing his black gloves like “skinning his hands” and his unfeeling attitude, Juliet John regards Vholes as “the most cannibalistic of all Dickens’s involuted individuals” (Villains 168). But John does not pay special attention to Vholes’s speech. Harry Stone, exploring cannibalistic overtones of Dickens’s major and minor characters, also notes that Vholes is portrayed figuratively as eating man, which shows Dickens’s interest in portraying cannibalism. See the first section on cannibalism in Stone’s The Night Side of Dickens: Cannibalism, Passion, Necessity.

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Why does not some enthusiastic political economist write an epic on

‘The Consecration of Cannibalism’?” (n. pag.). Both consider political

economy to be an expression of the potential cruelty of capitalism.

If Miss Flite is portrayed as a representative victim of the legal

system, Vholes represents the system itself. Together they reveal how

the damage is done. Miss Flite wishes that the court’s judgment “will

dissolve the spell upon [her]” (BH 35.441). She reports how suitors like

her father, brother, sister, and Gridley are under the spell of the

Chancery’s legal process, drawn like moths to the flames, but the

tragedy is that despite seeing the “signs” beginning in Richard and

foretelling his future of being “drawn to ruin” (BH 35.441), Miss Flite

herself cannot escape the destiny: “dreadful attraction in the place […]

You can’t leave it. And you must expect” (BH 35.440; original

emphasis).

For his part, Vholes is likened by the narrator to a cat entrapping

a mouse. He brags about his sense of duty in altruistic terms that

disguise his cannibalism:

Mr. Vholes, after glancing at the official cat who is patiently watching a mouse’s

hole, fixes his charmed gaze again on his young client, and proceeds in his

buttoned-up half-audible voice as if there were an unclean spirit in him that will

neither come out nor speak out:

“[…] I should hope you gentlemen of the army may find many means of

amusing yourselves [...]. If you had asked me what I was to do, during the

vacation, I could have answered you more readily. I am to attend to your

interests. I am to be found here day by day, attending to your interests. That is

my duty, Mr. C; [...] This desk is your rock, sir!” (BH 35.485; original emphasis)

In addition to underlining the novel’s critique of the legal profession by

dramatizing Vholes as a cannibalistic predator, the narrator alludes to

Luke 4.36 by likening him to an “unclean spirit.”7 In counterbalance to

7 Ford and Monod trace the “unclean spirit” to the “Baptism” service in the Anglican Church tradition (BH 35.485n), whereas Gill traces it to Luke 4.36 (“Notes” 936), which I adopt. The identification is central to Dickens’s depiction of Vholes, but since I will return to the topic at greater length below, I will not expand on it here.

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this allusion, Vholes himself ends the passage by perverting Jesus’s

Parable of the House on the Rock in Matthew 7.24–25:8 “This desk is

your rock, sir!” Whereas Jesus encouraged his disciples to place their

lives on a solid foundation, Vholes invites Richard to place his trust in

the solid foundation of his desk, a metonymy for his legal work. By

substituting his work for the biblical rock of wisdom, Vholes, through

a misleading and blasphemous rhetoric, convinces Richard, in

desperate need for hope, of his trustworthiness. Vholes’s perversion of

the truth thus leads to further misjudgment: Richard regards Vholes as

“the embodiment of the suit” and John Jarndyce as “embodied

antagonist and oppressor” (BH 39.486 and 489). Through a

juxtaposition of narratorial biblical allusions and those of Vholes

himself, Dickens instructs the reader about the danger of a false

rhetoric that manipulates language in order to disguise selfish

intention behind seemingly altruistic deeds.

Vholes’s rhetoric on his commitment is equally blasphemous: “I

shall devote my leisure to studying your interests more and more

closely. And to making arrangements for moving heaven and earth

(including, of course, the Chancellor)” (BH 39.488). In truth, he does

study the interests very carefully, but only to fill his own purse. Alluding

to Moses’s warning of the consequence of Israelites’ rebellion against

God in Deuteronomy 4.26, “I call heaven and earth to witness against

you,” Vholes blows his own trumpet and highlights his ability to move

others and change their opinion. The narrator also shows that his

altruistic claim of professionalism is endorsed by others in the law

business: Nicknamed “Conversation Kenge,” Mr. Kenge acknowledges

that “Now you cannot afford—I would say, the social system cannot

afford—to lose an order of men like Mr. Vholes. Diligent, persevering,

steady, acute in business” (BH 39.483).9 Dickens uses both Vholes’s

8 Ford and Monod trace it to Matthew 7.24–25 (BH 35.485n), whereas it is not identified by Gill in the Oxford World’s Classics Edition. 9 Ford and Monod trace these adjectives to Romans 12.11 and Proverbs 22.29 (BH 39.483n). Other editions do not note the allusion.

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and Kenge’s speeches to explain how professionals exploit a discourse

of professional ethics while collaborating to conceal their craftiness.

Vholes’s claim to do his “professional duty” disguises his true

identity as a devil incarnate, connecting him to the idolatry trope and

the sinister role that the Chancery plays. There are of course counter-

narratives. Vholes’s parasitic and cruel nature is observed by the first-

person narrator Esther, who notes that instead of “human passion or

emotion,” there was “something of the Vampire in him” (BH 60.720).

Both the omniscient narrator and Esther’s first-person narrative

associate Vholes with the motif of death, as Gill also notes (“Allusion”

147–48). Alluding to the “Burial of the Dead” in The Book of Common

Prayer, Vholes’s “hollow desk” (the very desk Vholes himself regards as

his rock, as shown above) is described as making “a sound as if ashes

were falling on ashes, and dust on dust” (BH 39.486n). Similarly,

Richard’s eventual demise is foreshadowed by Esther’s narratorial

vision that describes “a man” riding “the gaunt pale horse” (BH 37.471),

an allusion to St John’s vision of the pale horse of “Death” in Revelation

6.8, as is also noted by Gill (“Allusion” 148). In addition, Richard’s

demise is also foreseen by Guppy and Weevle, the lower class of the

Chancery legions, who echo the trope of fire-induced ashes: “there is

combustion going on there! It’s not a case of Spontaneous, but it’s

smouldering combustion it is” (BH 39.489).

In his “Working Plans” for the twelfth monthly instalment Dickens

highlights Vholes’s role as a type of a group: “The respectability of the

Vholes legion. Make man-eating unlawful, and you starve the Vholeses”

(790; my emphasis). As we shall see, Dickens here alludes to the trope

of Vholes as an “unclean spirit” mentioned above. “The Vholes legion”

and “the Vholeses” do not refer to Vholes’s daughters or father,

although he uses them as the excuse, but to solicitors in the legal field

whose “man-eating” business is protected by law. It shows that Dickens

has a “cannibalistic” plan for Vholes and he echoes Kingsley verbally

(“Man eating man, eaten by man”). In addition, “[t]he Vholes legion”

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alludes to Mark 5.9 and refers to the name given to a group of evil

spirits, highlighting the large number of solicitors “possessed by a

multitude of demons” (OED “legion” 3), while “demons” in their case

refer to the excessive desire for private gain. The significance of

Dickens’s portrayal of Vholes lies in the exposure of wrongdoing in the

name of dignity, work ethic and duty towards one’s family. It is one of

the social ills that Dickens attacks in Bleak House:

In a word, Mr. Vholes, with his three daughters and his father in the Vale of

Taunton, is continually doing duty, like a piece of timber, to shore up some

decayed foundation that has become a pitfall and a nuisance. And with a great

many people in a great many instances, the question is never one of a change

from wrong to right (which is quite an extraneous consideration), but is always

one of injury or advantage to that eminently respectable legion, Vholes. (BH

39.483-84).

By alluding to the demonic feature shared by the group, Vholes’s role

of supporting the “decayed foundation” (once again a brief but pointed

allusion to the Parable of the House of the Rock) is a clear indictment

of the dependent relationship between a member of a system and the

system itself. Biblical allusion as a rhetorical device is used to make

Vholes a type for his likes in the law business. The vice of Vholes’s

battening on the clients is also observed by J. H. Miller as a

“generalizing role,” a “synecdoche” that “each character, scene, or

situation stands for innumerable other examples of a given type”

(Victorian 179–80).

I will next turn to another group of perverted characters, namely

men of industry in Hard Times. They are portrayed as

misappropriating the Bible, distorting facts and disguising their own

wrongdoings even as they are endangering the development of

industrial society.

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Industry:

Bounderby and Slackbridge, the Divisive Social Force

In this part, I analyse biblical allusions associated with two characters

in Hard Times, Josiah Bounderby and Slackbridge. The perverted

rhetoric of Bounderby, industrialist and banker, is shown to amass

power for himself while wronging others. The union agitator

Slackbridge, in speeches filled with biblical allusions, manipulates the

industrial “hands” to ostracise Stephen Blackpool, Dickens’s idealised

worker. Both of them serve to reveal Dickens’s understanding of the

causes behind the problems plaguing the industrial north, including the

industrialists’ lack of social responsibility and the unions’ manipulative

and divisive role, together leading to a lack of mutual understanding

and a widening of the class divide.

Bounderby’s distorted depiction of himself destroys the

fundamental relationships with other human beings. With a rhetoric

based on perversion of facts, he concocts a rags-to-riches narrative to

justify both his self-worship and his lack of compassion for the miseries

of others, such as Sissy’s loss of her father, or Blackpool’s marriage

problem and exclusion by the other workers. When Blackpool refuses to

tell on other workers in the union, Bounderby cannot understand his

faithfulness to those who repudiate him: “you are one of those chaps

who have always got a grievance. And you go about sowing it and raising

crops. That’s the business of your life, my friend” (HT 2.6.116; original

emphasis). His allusion to the Parable of Reaping and Sowing is doubly

ironic since this is Dickens’s overarching biblical allusion for Hard

Times (indicated by its three subheadings “Sowing,” “Reaping,” and

“Garnering”). Bounderby warns Blackpool of the consequence of not

reporting to him about the union without realizing that the same

parable may be used to judge his fabricated life history. His conception

of the working classes’ appeal for improvement is repetitively expressed

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through his imagining of their longing “to be fed on turtle soup and

venison, with a gold spoon,” which he regards to be “the popular vices”

(HT 1.11.57 and 61). He demonstrates the vices of “cash-nexus,” which,

as Juliet John points out, is the only way he “admits connections to

others, or to the past, through power relations by which he is dominant”

(Mass 170). His capitalist rhetoric is based on his distorted perception

of reality: he regards the coke-induced smoke as “meat and drink” and

“the healthiest thing in the world in all respects, and particularly for the

lungs” regardless of the harm of pollution; he considers mill workers’

jobs as “the pleasantest,” “the lightest,” and “the best-paid” jobs, and

sees no need for improvement (HT 2.2.97–98). Through Bounderby’s

perverted rhetoric, the impudence and cruelty of his capitalism is

foregrounded.

Bounderby also suggests that he deserves to be worshipped, as

expressed when his self-esteem is threatened by the break-up of his

marriage. To vent his anger at being forsaken by Louisa, he complains

to her father, Mr. Gradgrind:

You know my origin; and you know that for a good many years of my life I didn’t

want a shoeing-horn, in consequence of not having a shoe. Yet you may believe

or not, as you think proper, that there are ladies—born ladies—belonging to

families—Families!—who next to worship the ground I walk on. (HT 3.3.182)

His repetition of the old rhetoric in this context reveals its absurdity,

and his bragging about being worshipped by other ladies further

exposes him as a self-made idol. Consequently, the eventual revelation

of Bounderby’s “wicked imagination,” as his mother refers to it (HT

3.5.195), exposes him as the true scoundrel. As “the Bully of humility,”

he, as the narrator comments, “built his windy reputation upon lies”

(HT 3.5.196). However, his sudden and lonely death on a Coketown

street, surrounded by “Bounderby Hall” and “Bounderby Buildings,”

stresses both his state of isolation and the limit of his commercial

success, which in Thomas Carlyle’s words reveal the “sum-total of

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wretchedness to a man” (qtd. in Tillotson 212).

Bounderby’s repetitions of those fabricated miseries, or “facts” as

he claims, echo Gradgrind’s deification of Facts. Each, as Rosemarie

Bodenheimer argues, employs a middle-class rhetoric as “an

instrument of domination” as it “misses the life experience of the poor

or of its own children” (190), yet the difference between Gradgrind and

Bounderby is reflected in their different degrees of perversion.

Gradgrind’s deifying “Facts” does not deprive him of all sentiments: “Mr.

Gradgrind, though hard enough, was by no means so rough a man as

Mr. Bounderby. His character was not unkind” (HT 1.5.24). His

reflections on his children’s failures and his observation of Sissy’s role

in the family make it possible for Mr. Gradgrind to be transformed from

a fallen to a rehabilitated state, “making his facts and figures

subservient to Faith, Hope, and Charity” (HT 3.9.221). The narrator’s

reference to 1 Corinthians 13.1–13 evokes “free will and the human

capacity for transformation and redemption” (Çelikkol 547),

highlighting Gradgrind’s change from prejudice against fancy to

embrace of the Christian sentiments. Both Gradgrind and his children,

the main candidates for the novel’s overarching sowing and reaping

allusion, are portrayed as the victims of a false teaching practice and

belief, subject to both punishment and improvement. By contrast,

Bounderby remains the same without reflections or change until his

lonely death, a death which in contrast to Blackpool’s dignified funeral

procession serves as a judgment on his extreme form of capitalism.10 In

Bounderby the socially greater is made the lesser in the end, which is

another way of realizing Dickens’s journalistic goal as set out in

Household Words, the journal where Hard Times was published as a

serial to “bridge the greater and the lesser in degree” (HW 1: 1). For the

same reason, workers like Blackpool and Rachael are insistently made

10 That Dickens does not consider all industrialists equally corrupt is seen in his portrayal of Mr. Rouncewell in Bleak House. The rise of Rouncewell’s social status as the MP, his dignity and insight about the industry and human relationship far outshine that of Bounderby. As John notes, Mr. Rouncewell “believes in empowerment for all rather than power for himself” (Mass 170).

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the greater with either a spiritual transcendence or a vision to see

beyond miseries, which my next chapter will discuss. Now I turn to

another character in Hard Times—union orator Slackbridge.

Slackbridge is portrayed as a crafty union agitator, which reflects

Dickens’s conception of his role as a divisive social force between

employers and workers. Slackbridge considers Stephen Blackpool, who

refuses to join the union, a threat. To remove the common sympathy

that workers feel for Blackpool and to focus their anger on him,

Slackbridge uses both biblical and historical analogies: “he who sold his

birthright for a mess of pottage existed, and Judas Iscariot existed, and

Castlereagh existed, and this man exists!” (HT 2.4.108). Equating

Blackpool with betrayers like Esau and Judas in the Bible, as well as to

Castlereagh, the politician who suppressed open air meetings and

caused severe casualties, Blackpool is depicted as a “traitor” to the

union and consequently expelled.

After Bounderby mistakenly announces that Stephen Blackpool is

the thief who robbed his bank, Slackbridge again uses biblical tropes in

order to disassociate himself from Blackpool:

Oh, my prostrate friends, with the galling yoke of tyrants on your necks and the

iron foot of despotism treading down your fallen forms into the dust of the earth,

upon which right glad would your oppressors be to see you creeping on your

bellies all the days of your lives, like the serpent in the garden—oh, my brothers,

and shall I as a man not add, my sisters too, what do you say, now, of Stephen

Blackpool, with a slight stoop in his shoulders and about five foot seven in height,

as set forth in this degrading and disgusting document, this blighting bill, this

pernicious placard, this abominable advertisement; and with what majesty of

denouncement will you crush the viper, who would bring this stain and shame

upon the God-like race that happily has cast him out for ever! (HT 3.4.185; my

emphasis, except for “now,” which is italicized in the original)

Slackbridge twists the biblical verses, combining the curses in Genesis

3 on Adam (“In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread”) with that on

the serpent (“upon thy belly shalt thou go”) and applies both to the

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enemies, including Blackpool, who are likened to serpents “creeping on

[their] bellies” (HT 3.4.185). When Slackbridge wants to show

sympathy with the workers, they are elevated in status to be Adam’s

toiling sons who can also be “God-like”; when he wants to get rid of one

of them, they are referred to as serpents and vipers. He also uses

metaphors and hyperbole (“tyrants,” “oppressors,” “galling yoke,” “iron

foot” and “fallen forms”) to instigate tension between the workers and

their employers. He even alludes to the prophecy of the coming Saviour,

who “hast broken the yoke of his burden and the staff of his shoulder,

the rod of his oppressor” (Isa. 9.4). Not only does this allusion give

weight to the union’s function, but it elevates Slackbridge himself,

thereby offering a further example of implied idolatry. Slackbridge’s

rhetoric is thus charged with danger and cunning, redirecting the

workers’ antagonism towards the “tyrants” and “oppressors” to the

relationship between workers and Blackpool. Through instigation,

flattery and contortion, Slackbridge achieves the manipulation of the

workers’ opinion and he is thus the real deceiving serpent in this drama.

Such a dramatic presentation of the union agitator stems from

Dickens’s belief that strikes should “play no role in the improvement of

England,” as Dennis G. Paz also notes (149). This view has incurred a

great deal of criticism,11 although Dickens is not alone in making a

union orator a tyrant in fiction.12 Withholding Blackpool’s reason for

not joining the union except for his promise to Rachael, the narrator

highlights Blackpool’s own choice in so doing. Through Slackbridge’s

“absurd comic panache of oratory,” to use Nicolas Coles’s words (165),

Dickens imitates mob oratory, through which he achieves two points:

one is to reveal how rhetoric may (mis-)lead its audience; the other to

cast suspicion over the divisive force that the unions may exert.

11 Critics appreciative of the novel find the character Slackbridge problematic: Shaw, for example, considers him as “a mere figment of the middle-class imagination” and “a real failure” (362). F. R. Leavis notes Dickens’s lack of notion about the role to be played by the union (245). Nicolas Coles refers to Slackbridge as a major flaw (165). 12 The portrayal of Slackbridge conforms to the tradition of union tyranny (Coles 164). See also Coles’s comparison of Slackbridge with the orator in Mary Barton (179n).

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Here I want to add a short detour to two of Dickens’s articles, “On

Strike” and “Railway Strikes,” since they add to a better understanding

of the biblical allusions in Slackbridge’s speech. The contrast between

the use of biblical allusions to portray union leaders in Dickens’s non-

fiction and in his novel further shows how biblical allusions related to

perverted characters in Hard Times help Dickens fictionalise the

separatist force and express his humanistic view on factory issues. “On

Strike,” published in Household Words one and a half months before

the first instalment of Hard Times, is about Dickens’s visit to Preston in

February 1854. Critics have observed both the relevance and differences

between the two works in the portrayal of workers, unions, and leaders.

In Hard Times, Dickens inverts the honesty and earnestness shown by

both workers and their union leaders in the Preston strike. The contrast

between union leaders and workers in “On Strike” and their

counterparts in Hard Times manifests how the novelist’s depiction of

Slackbridge’s perverted rhetoric implicates his view on the separatist

role that unions might play.

In “On Strike” Dickens quotes the letter addressed to the operatives

by the committee of the Preston strike. The letter, thick with biblical

allusions, invokes the “great Architect” and “impartial God” to change

the situation to “establish a new and improved system,” so that the

“divine precept” (2 Thess. 3.10) is enforced and “Those who will not

work, shall not eat” (HW 8: 555). However, unlike their fictive

counterpart Slackbridge, the strikers’ committee in “On Strike” is

presented as eloquent and earnest without cunning. In spite of the

heroism and eloquence shown by the Preston strikers’ leaders, Dickens

regards both the workers’ strike and employers’ lock-out as “deplorable”

as he dislikes the waste and unemployment caused by a strike which

brings factory production to a halt (HW 8: 558). Dickens speaks more

explicitly in “On Strike” of the need for improving the situation of the

working class and the understanding between employees and their

employers so that there is “something of feeling and sentiment;

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something of mutual explanation, forbearance, and consideration”

between them (HW 8: 553). This is the same message that Blackpool

calls for before his death:

in our judgments, like as in our doins, we mun bear and forbear. In my pain an

trouble, lookin up yonder,—wi’ it shinin’ on me—I ha’ seen more clear, and ha’

made it my dyin prayer that aw th’ world may on’y coom toogether more, an get

a better unnerstan’in o’one another, than when I were in’t my own weak seln. (HT

3.6.204)

The emphasis on mutual understanding expressed through Blackpool’s

dying prayer helps explain the unworthy images of Slackbridge and

Bounderby and justifies Dickens’s scepticism regarding unions and his

contempt for uncompassionate employers.

Dickens also directly expresses the concern about the striking

workers’ lack of in-depth thinking over the strikes in an earlier article,

“Railway Strikes,” which echoes Slackbridge’s rhetoric used to alienate

and oppress Stephen by portraying the strike organisers as scheming

and misleading. The article regards the union organisers as “deputy

thinkers” who “are not always the most judicious order of intellects”

and who “are not the best workmen” and “sometimes, not workmen at

all, but designing persons, who have for their own base purposes,

immeshed the workmen in a system of tyranny and oppression” (HW

2: 362). However, although Slackbridge in Hard Times is presented as

a cunning orator with a slippery message, it does not alter the

narrator’s sympathy with the workers, whose urgent need for better

living and improved working conditions are foregrounded. In a direct

address to the reader the narrator warns of the consequences if the

working classes are not treated properly:

Utilitarian economists, skeletons of schoolmasters, Commissioners of Fact,

genteel and used-up infidels, gabblers of many little dog’s-eared creeds, the

poor you will have always with you. [...] when romance is utterly driven out

of their souls, and they and a bare existence stand face to face, Reality will

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take a wolfish turn, and make an end of you! (HT 2.6.124–5)

The potential collaboration between “utilitarian economists” and

“skeletons of schoolmasters” is suggested through this direct address.

It is obvious that “they” include workers like Stephen whereas the

middle-classes are cast in a specific role and addressed as “you,” i.e.,

the implied readers of Dickens’s novel. Thus, the distance between the

narrator and the socially privileged readers is narrowed as he attempts

to warn them of the consequences if working conditions do not improve.

At the end of the novel, the narrator addresses the readers again, “Dear

reader! It rests with you and me, whether, in our two fields of action,

similar things shall be or not. Let them be! We shall sit with lighter

bosoms on the hearth, to see the ashes of our fires turn gray and cold”

(HT 3.9.222). It is clear that the novel aims to motivate the readers to

take some action in the real world to increase cross-class

understanding. The contrast between the portrayal of employers and

workers in Dickens’s novel and non-fiction reveals how the novelist

imagines the characters of Bounderby and Slackbridge. It is through

their perverted use of the Bible that the novel exposes the industrialists’

unkind treatment of workers and expresses the novelist’s scepticism of

the unions’ divisive forces.

Religious Circles

In this section, I deal with the perverted use of biblical allusions by

characters belonging to religious and charity groups, as well as from

middle-class families, including Rev. Mr. Chadband, philanthropist

Mrs. Pardiggle, and overseas missionary Mrs. Jellyby in Bleak House,

but also Mrs. General and Mr. Casby in Little Dorrit. I also include

biblical allusions related to guardian characters, including Esther’s god

mother Miss Barbary and Arthur’s mother, Mrs. Clennam, in Little

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Dorrit. These characters in Bleak House are neither essential to the

novel’s detective storylines about Esther’s parentage, Krook’s papers

or Tulkinghorn’s death, nor are they of primary importance to the

novel’s main critique of the Chancery, and the same is true of Mrs.

General and Mr. Casby in Little Dorrit: they appear in what M. E.

Grenander calls “circumstantial episodes” (302). However, their

perverted speeches and behaviours not only serve to portray their

personality traits, but are also closely related to the novelist’s critique

of diverse problems present in an expanding and polarised capitalist

society. Similar to Vholes’s bragging about his sense of duty and

responsibility, these minor characters, although not as vicious as

Vholes, manifest various forms of hypocrisy disguised as religiosity,

devotion to one’s profession, or good manners and appearance. These

types of hypocrisy can be read analogically as the novelist’s critical

comments on contemporary problems, such as poverty, charity work

and British imperialism. Through the use of both explicit and implicit

biblical allusions, the hypocrisy is exposed either as a means of

dominating others, especially the poor, or for private gain, connected

to the novels’ critique of bureaucratic negligence and abuse of power.

The Negligent Ministration of Rev. Mr. Chadband

The following section analyses how Dickens portrays Chadband’s

missionary activities by way of his obsessive demand for food in

conjunction with his seemingly prophetic and eloquent, if ultimately,

empty speeches. It will also highlight the similarity to the institutional

“mighty speeches” about “somebody’s theory but nobody’s practice”

made in Parliament (BH 46.553). The descriptions of Chadband

express not only Dickens’s criticism of individual use of religion and

missionary work as a form of social suppression, but also his critique

of institutional negligence. While “attached to no particular

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denomination,” Mr. Chadband states that his calling is “in the ministry”

(BH 19.234). He “is much given to describe himself, both verbally and

in writing, as a vessel,” a metaphorical description further expanded

upon by the narrator as “a consuming vessel—the persecutors say a

gorging vessel; and can wield such weapons of the flesh as a knife and

fork, remarkably well” (BH 19.234). Susan Shatto traces the word

“vessel” to Acts 9.15 about St Paul being a chosen vessel unto God,

noting that the word owes its Victorian currency to its use by dissenting

ministers (157). Similar to the Barnacles referred to as “vessels”

analysed in chapter 2 above, the narrator’s ironic application of

“chosen vessel” (Acts 9.15) or vessel of honour for good work (2 Tim.

2.20–21) to the uses of “consuming” and “gorging” undercuts its

spiritual meaning by silently alluding to another biblical text,

Philippians 3.17, “the enemies of the cross of Christ […] whose God is

their belly,” thereby highlighting the contrast between their

honourable status and dishonourable misuse of power. On the other

hand, “vessel” is also a pun on another semantic meaning: that of a

steamship depending on lubricating oil to function properly.

Chadband is described as “having train oil in his system” and he is

“becoming a kind of considerable Oil Mills” (BH 19.235 and 237), a

reference I will return to later in this section. In addition, the narrator’s

description of Chadband alludes to 2 Corinthians 10.3–4: “For though

we walk in the flesh, we do not war after the flesh: (For the weapons of

our warfare are not carnal, but mighty through God to the pulling

down of strong holds).” Just as with the vessel used for gorging, the

narrator again turns the biblical quotation upside down by

highlighting Chadband’s carnality rather than his spirituality.

Through the characterisation of Chadband, Dickens comments on

problems with missionary work. In spite of the narrator’s statement

that “Mr. Chadband is attached to no particular denomination,” critics

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have tried to pinpoint his affiliations.13 Chadband’s frequent visits to

the Snagsbys, his empty talk and “extempore preaching and prayer,”

to use Pope’s words (131), do indicate an evangelical zeal.14 Dennis

Walder observes that Dickens is not explicit about what religious

groups he attacks, which may be understood as the novelist’s

discretion not to “lay the blame on any specific party, sect, or church,

preferring the implication that nobody can escape responsibility”

(Religion 153), a view shared by Emma Mason, who considers

Chadband “a typical Dickensian clergyman,” symbolic of the “indolent

temporizing” shown as “the rotten core” of church, like Bunyan’s

“Formalist and Hypocrisy, having ‘nothing so very remarkable to say

on the greatest of subjects’” (“Bunyan” 157). While Dickens in his non-

fiction acknowledges the usefulness of Evangelical missionary

activities in reaching the lower part of the social stratum, 15 his

fictional representations of missionaries focus single-mindedly on

negative and questionable practices, thereby provoking strong

reactions from some of his contemporaries.16 However, Chadband’s

case is different from professional missionary agents in that he reaches

out to the Snagsbys, who are better off than him. His use of the Bible

can be seen in the deceitful blessing that he offers the Snagsbys while

plotting to profit from them:

May this house live upon the fatness of the land; may corn and wine be plentiful

13 Norris Pope observes that Chadband has been portrayed as “an evangelical,” “probably a nonconformist” (128), which is agreed by most critics, including David A. Ward, Carolyn Oulton, Shatto, Gary Colledge, and Christian Dickinson. However, Paula Keatley argues that Chadband and Miss Barbary represent the Evangelical strain within the Church of England and she reads Bleak House as the novelist’s favouring of liberal Protestantism over the Established Church (80). 14 Evangelical members of the London City Mission and other home missionary agencies were actively involved in house-to-house visitations and services since the Established Church could not fully cater to the spiritual need of the urban population (Pope 108–115, 127–37, 143–51). It should also be noted that the Anglican-Catholics (High Churchmen) were devoted to missions and motivated a succession of charitable missions. See Knight and Mason, p. 113. 15 In his article “The Noble Savage,” Dickens acknowledges the use of missionary activities; it should also be noted that his view is expressed from a racist perspective (HW 7: 337–39). 16 J. S. Mill criticised Dickens’s caricature of Mrs. Jellyby and considered Dickens as “ridicul[ing] rights of women” (Letters 6: 825n). See other contemporary criticism made, for example, by Mrs. Oliphant, in Pope pp. 13–20 and Walder, Religion, p. 168. It should also be noted that Dickens’s protests against religious circles paying lip service lasted throughout his writing career. See Colledge, God, pp. 144–45.

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therein; may it grow, may it thrive, may it prosper, may it advance, may it

proceed, may it press forward! But, my friends, have we partaken of anything

else? We have. My friends, of what else have we partaken? Of spiritual profit?

Yes. (BH 19.242)

Ford and Monod note that Chadband alludes to Isaac’s blessing of

Jacob in Genesis 27.28 (BH 19.242n): “Therefore God give thee of the

dew of heaven, and the fatness of the earth, and plenty of corn and

wine.” Jacob, pretending to be his elder brother Esau, cheats Isaac in

order to receive the blessing intended for the eldest son, whereas in the

novel it is the giver of the blessing, Chadband, who feeds himself while

others have to make do with “spiritual profit.”

Chadband’s false rhetoric has a detrimental influence on those

around him. Mrs. Snagsby regards him as an “Apostle” (BH 19.236),

learning from him to use religious terminology to judge others. When

she is offended by Jo’s yawn while listening to Chadband’s talk, she

“indignantly expresses her belief that [Jo] is a limb of the arch-fiend”

(BH 19.243). Likewise, Mrs. Rachael shows a similar religiosity,

believing the deceased Miss Barbary to be “among the Seraphim’” (BH

3.22). Dickens’s humorous creation of such speeches reveals not only

the shallowness of a religiosity void of true belief, but also that like

attracts like: Mrs. Rachael is later married to Mr. Chadband. In

addition, Chadband’s oratory is shown to be dangerous in that it

manipulates the audience to take him for a prophet: “‘I hear a voice,’

says Chadband; ‘is it a still small voice, my friends? I fear not, though

I fain would hope so’” (BH 25.320). As both Ford and Monod (BH

25.320n) and Shatto (191) point out, this speech alludes to 1 Kings

19.12, where God speaks to the prophet Elijah in a “small voice.”

Chadband’s biblical allusion tellingly equates him with a prophet

hearing a secret. Insinuating that Mr. Snagsby has fathered and then

abandoned Jo, Mr. Chadband in a similar way alludes to Isaiah 48.4

and Zechariah 7.12 to make Mr. Snagsby “a determined enemy to

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virtue, with a forehead of brass and a heart of adamant” (BH 25.321).17

Chadband is here portrayed as a rumour monger that forces Mr.

Snagsby to join the pack that drives Jo away.

Chadband’s judgment of Jo through speeches filled with perverted

allusions reflect on the religious circles’ evasion of responsibilities to

the poor. Alluding to Psalms 84.10 and 120.5 as Ford and Monod note,

Chadband refers to Jo as “a Gentile and a Heathen, a dweller in the

tents of Tom-all-Alone’s” (BH 25.320 and 320n). Similarly, the reason

for Jo’s being “devoid of parents, devoid of relations, devoid of flocks

and herds” is “because he is devoid of the light” and it is “the ray of

rays, the sun of suns, the moon of moons, the star of stars. It is the light

of Terewth [sic]” (BH 25.320–21). However, Chadband’s perverted

eloquence does not work on Jo:

“Mr. Chadbands he wos a prayin wunst at Mr. Sangsby’s and I heerd him, but

he sounded as if he wos a speakin’ to his-self, and not to me. He prayed a lot,

but I couldn’t make out nothink on it. Different times, there wos other genlmen

come down Tom-all-Alone’s a prayin, but they all mostly sed as the t’other wuns

prayed wrong, and all mostly sounded to be a talking to theirselves, or a passing

blame on the t’others, and not a talkin to us. We never knowd nothink. I never

knowd what it wos all about.” (BH 47.571; original emphasis)

Jo’s language may be coarse and uneducated but his understanding is

sharp, revealing the absurdity of the speech-making by Chadband and

“other genlmen,” addressed as “they” to the poor identified as “we.” As

Bleak House shows, the living conditions for the poor (whether at

Tom-all-Alone’s, orphanage-farm, Tooting, and even at Bell Yard) is

described as downgrading and deprived. That Jo, driven away,

perceives “the great cross on the summit of St. Paul’s Cathedral,” and

feels “confusion of the great, confused city—so golden, so high up, so

far out of his reach” (BH 19.243-44), reflects the poor people’s state of

alienation, manifesting Chadband’s logic that the poor are “devoid of

17 Both Ford and Monod (BH 25.321n) and Shatto (191) note it.

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the light” of “Terewth” (BH 25.320–21). Chadband’s treatment of Jo is

shown as a dodging of responsibilities presented as “self-aggrandizing,”

to borrow Paula Keatley’s description (80), for, just like the fictional

authorities’ negligence of their duties, Chadband does not offer any

practical help.

Dickens’s caricaturised descriptions of Chadband’s attitude

towards Jo expose a contemporary retributivist opinion that makes

poverty a personal failing, couched in religious terms as sin. Chadband

refers to sin as both the reason and result of Jo’s misery: “do you cool

yourself in that stream now, my young friend [Jo]? No. Why do you

not cool yourself in that stream now? Because you are in a state of

darkness, because you are in a state of obscurity, because you are in a

state of sinfulness, because you are in a state of bondage” (BH 19.243).

This opinion is similar to Rev. Thomas Gisborne’s view of the

operatives as “marked by idleness, selfishness, extravagance and

brutish intemperance” and “very commonly deserving of the severest

reprehension” (qtd. in Butterworth 26). The butt of Dickens’s satire,

echoed in these views, was the founding principles of the New Poor

Law,18 which were oblivious of the needs of the poor by making social

relief more inaccessible.19 Chadband’s perverted use of the Bible not

only exposes the lack of a personalised bond between him and Jo, in

spite of his claim to have the calling “in the ministry” (BH 19.234), but

also expresses the novelist’s critique of the lack of charity relief. The

novel argues against such religiously coloured view by showing that it

is not sin that makes people poor but lack of proper attention.

To manifest his hypocrisy, Chadband uses similar notions of

sinfulness, but this time to rationalise his selfish cravings for

18 There were two principles: the first was “less eligibility” (conditions within should be made worse than the worst outside it), the second was “workhouse test” (relief should only be available in the workhouse) (Morris 683). Pam Morris also notes resemblances of workhouse to Panopticon that inspects and disciplines the inmates, which resembles centralised state power. See Morris, p. 683–84. 19 The implementation of the New Poor Law was a response to the perceived threat of the pauper mass regarded as “an aggregate,” “a problem,” and “a source of social disease” (Morris 683). See Morris, p. 679, 681–85, 688, and note 1.

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“refreshment”: “Do we need refreshment then, my friends? We do. And

why do we need refreshment, my friends? Because we are but mortal,

because we are but sinful, because we are but of the earth” (BH 19.237).

The hypocrisy lies in Chadband’s use of human sinfulness to

simultaneously batter Jo by explaining away his suffering and making

allowance for his own benefit. The discrepancies between his

preaching of spiritual profit while seeking private gain, and his

indulgence at the Snagsbys’ dinner party, as well as his coldness to

those in need reveal his cruelty and selfishness. As George Eliot put it,

Chadband is “stringent on [others’] predestination, but latitudinarian

on [his own] fasting” (qtd. in Walder, Religion 166). To sum up, where

Shatto comments that Mr. Chadband’s biblical phrases and images are

used for “stylistic imitations” (191), I would rather argue that Dickens

consistently lets Chadband employ biblical allusions in perverted ways

to portray his carnality and false belief disguised in seemingly spiritual

terms, and to bring into sharper focus such views on the treatment of

the poor. In relation to their original meanings, Chadband’s scriptural

appropriations form a “stratified” voice, to use Bakhtin’s term (271),

that deviates from the Bible: the invoked biblical texts speak with their

own authoritative voice, forming a dialogic relation with his perverted

words and values, prodding the reader to reflect on such deviations

and judging the embodied values.

Before going on to examine Dickens’s critique of missionary work,

I will end this section by exploring the larger social context for

Chadband’s embodied values. The narrator compares his grand but

empty rhetoric to that of parliament: “It happens that Mr. Chadband

has a pulpit habit of [...] fatly arguing his points [...] which [...] serves

the purpose of parliamentary cheering and gets Mr. Chadband’s steam

up” (BH 25.320). The expression “steam up” ties in with the meaning

of “vessel” as a mechanic system, as he is described as “a large yellow

man with a fat smile and a general appearance of having a good deal of

train oil in his system” (BH 19.235). These descriptions create an

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analogous satire against Parliament: Chadband’s use of his pulpit to

satisfy his need for “fat” implicates the similarly irresponsible practices

within the bureaucratic system. This analogous reading is supported

by the comment on the emptiness of parliamentary debates:

Much mighty speech-making there has been, both in and out of Parliament,

concerning Tom, and much wrathful disputation how Tom shall be got right. [...]

In the midst of which dust and noise, there is but one thing perfectly clear, to

wit, that Tom only may and can, or shall and will, be reclaimed according to

somebody’s theory but nobody’s practice. And in the hopeful meantime, Tom

goes to perdition head foremost in his old determined spirit. (BH 46.551, 553)

The narrator’s comment shows the emptiness of Parliamentary

speeches that address poverty and slums. The last sentence mimics the

retributive rhetoric on the “perdition” of slums designed to exempt

Parliament from responsibility. Through “mighty speech-making,”

Parliament foregoes its obligations to Tom-all-Alone’s, just as

Chadband evades his duty to Jo.

Finally, it should be noted that Chadband’s disregard for Jo is both

similar to and different from the imperialist disregard for the

“barbarous” natives in the process of British colonial expansion. Here

we encounter Dickens’s dialogue with the era’s views on race and

empire. Although the portrayal of Jo does not invoke race explicitly,20

the way he is alienated in Chadband’s rhetoric shows a similar

oppositional relationship. Chadband regards Jo as the other just as

imperialists regard the natives: the former uses it to exempt his

missionary duty from dealing with Jo’s material need; the latter take it

as the excuse to “civilize” the natives.21 Caroline Oulton observes that

the “evangelical figures in Bleak House regard Jo and his likes as

subhuman and so miss the significance of their degradation” (179).

20 James Buzard also discusses the discourse on race and degeneration in both Bleak House and Dickens’s fiction and non-fiction. See, pp. 519–24. 21 The Victorian attitude to race evolved along with expansion of the empire. The views of the British racial superiority and the inferiority of the racially different “savages” both stimulated interest in civilising them and predestined the failure of the mission (David 88–89).

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Oulton’s observation echoes Henry Mayhew’s Victorian description of

the domestic poor in London Labour and the London Poor: “there

are—socially, morally, and perhaps even physically considered—but

two distinct and broadly marked races, viz., the wonderers and the

settlers—the vagabond and the citizen—the nomadic and the civilized

tribes” (qtd. in Buzard 519). 22 Chadband’s exploitation of Jo is

justified by his subhuman state, just as Mayhew describes the domestic

poor in imperialist terms, making them other by comparing them to

“Nomads” and describing their physiological features in racial terms

as having “high cheek-bones and protruding jaws” in contrast to the

civilised “settlers” (qtd. in Douglas-Fairhurst, Introduction n. pag.).23

Mayhew’s juxtaposition of the London’s poor with the civilised settlers

is expressed through a discourse on the unchristian savagery and

barbarism of another race:

the moral and religious state of these men is a foul disgrace to us, laughing to

scorn our zeal for the ‘propagation of the gospel in foreign parts,’ and making

our many societies for the civilization of savages on the other side of the globe

appear like ‘delusion, a mockery, and a snare,’ when we have so many people

sunk in the lowest depths of barbarism round about our very homes. (qtd. in

Buzard 519)

James Buzard thinks that Mayhew shows an inconsistency typical of

much Victorian discourse on race when he addresses poverty:

sometimes the poor were considered “responsible for their nomadic,

anti-civilizing, and frequently outlaw tendencies”; sometimes “settler”

readers were considered to “bear ultimate responsibility” (519).

Obviously, Chadband represents the first option, while the novel elicits

22 Buzard quotes from the Dover 1968 edition. The quoted passage was not included in the Oxford World’s Classics Edition (a selected edition published in 2010), edited by Robert Douglas-Fairhurst. According to Mayhew, there were also disparaging views among the poor. As Mayhew puts it, “Those who have not witnessed this pride of class among even the most degraded, can form no adequate idea of the arrogance with which the skilled man, no matter how base the art, looks upon the unskilled” and they referred to themselves as “haristocracy [sic] of the streets” (n. pag.). 23 The quoted passage only appears in Douglas-Fairhurst’s introduction to the Oxford World’s Classics Edition. Douglas-Fairhurst considers Mayhew’s racial comment in the first edition’s preface to be “strange” (n. pag.), maintaining that Mayhew’s work did not support racial theory.

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a reader response in line with the second.

The Missions of Mrs. Jellyby and Mrs. Pardiggle

In this section, I argue that biblical allusions related to Mrs. Jellyby and

Mrs. Pardiggle can be read as Dickens’s critique of both domestic

charity work and overseas missionary work during the time of

imperialist expansion. Unlike Chadband’s perverted rhetoric and

misappropriations of the Bible, Mrs. Jellyby does not speak much,

except about Borrioboola-Gha, a fictional African colony. She is mainly

portrayed in Esther’s narrative that records Esther’s and Ada’s visits at

her house and Caddy Jellyby’s talk to them in private. Mrs. Jellyby’s

strong aversion to household duties is obvious from the disorderliness

of her house. As I will show in this section, this domestic disarray

becomes part of an implied biblical allusion that makes her African

project represent the novel’s critique of imperial expansion at the cost

of improvement for the domestic poor.

Dickens’s creation of Mrs. Jellyby in Bleak House provoked a

strong reaction from Victorian religious activists and feminists, while

G. K. Chesterton thought the passages “show Dickens at his best in his

old and more familiar satiric manner” (944). Mrs. Jellyby’s telescopic

philanthropy has often been noted by scholars, who variously identify

her possible religious denomination and the significance of her

aversion to domestic life: Miller considers her one of “irresponsible do-

gooders” and highlights her “generalizing role” (Victorian 179–80),

while David A. Ward, noting the similarity between her “all-consuming

project and the Niger Expedition,” believes that she reflects “Dickens’s

anxiety about the inroads” made by Dissent in Victorian society (209–

10). 24 Oulton deems Mrs. Jellyby “evangelical” (71), whereas Gary

24 The Niger Expedition of 1841 was meant to spread the Gospel and suppress the slave trade, which was supported by Exeter Hall. Dickens’s article “The Niger Expedition” expressed strong aversion to it. See Ward, pp. 210–11.

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Colledge first takes her for either an Evangelical or a Dissenter

(Christianity 144), but later considers her “perhaps an Anglican

Evangelical” (God 9). Critics also relate her African project to those

launched by Exeter Hall: John Butt and Kathleen Tillotson,

commenting on the novel’s message that overseas missionaries are

futile, note that the figure of “Exeter Hall” on the cover design wears a

fool’s-cap (195), while Pope thinks the satire against foolish missionary

and colonial enthusiasm is related to missionary Christianity in general

and not “solely to evangelicals,” in spite of Phiz’s signposting on the

cover design (128). Most scholars agree that Mrs. Jellyby’s failure as a

mother and a wife symbolises institutional failings, 25 while Holly

Furneaux argues that Mrs. Jellyby, an “affect alien” and “(feminist)

killjoy,” offers “an alternative value system to that of modern capitalism

which posits financial success, marriage, and reproduction as goals

essential to happiness”; her disconnect from her family can be seen as

a reaction both to the emotional burdens that a wife’s role imposes and

to the domestic and feminine ideal (374–75).26 I would add that Mrs.

Jellyby’s failed domestic duty as mother and wife also gestures towards

the novelist’s analogous critique of the negligence of domestic charity

due to the expansion of British imperialism, defined by the OED as

“protect[ing] trade and investments, and of uniting separate and

distinct parts of the British Empire for the purposes of defence,

commerce, communication, etc.” (“imperialism 2a”).

Dickens offers Mrs. Jellyby’s home as an analogy for the nation, its

disorder pointing to the administration’s negligence of the domestic

poor, while overseas missionary activities are embodied in her

dictatorial writing and imagination about “a hundred and fifty to two

hundred healthy families cultivating coffee and educating the natives

of Borrioboola-Gha, on the left bank of the Niger,” of which she is

“more confident of success every day” (BH 4.38). The irony is that the

25 See, for example, Walder, Religion, p. 153 and Oulton p. 183. 26 Furneax is also aware that her reading may not be “Dickens-endorsed reading” (376).

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colony’s prospective prosperity is based on Mrs. Jellyby’s wish for

“healthy families,” whereas her own home in England, as we shall see,

is left in disarray and her children are “in a devil of a state,” as Richard

Carstone comments (BH 6.61), which analogically echoes the miseries

of the country’s poor, such as Jo and people in Tom-all-Alone’s.

The novel exposes Mrs. Jellyby’s hypocrisy by showing that her

seemingly altruistic wishes for the natives disguise a commercial goal:

she “held a discussion with Mr. Quale; of which the subject seemed to

be […] the Brotherhood of Humanity,” but it is really about coffee: he

has “a great deal to say for himself about Africa, and a project of his for

teaching the coffee colonists to teach the natives to […] establish an

export trade” (BH 4.41). Their “philanthropic” work involves Mrs.

Jellyby being in charge of the teaching of cultivation and Mr. Quale of

exportation and sale. To highlight such hypocrisy, the philanthropists’

effort is reduced to sending off “five thousand circulars,” while nothing

authentic about either natives or coffee plantations is expressed, except

“the King of Borrioboola wanting to sell everybody—who survived the

climate—for Rum” (BH 67.768). Similarly, when Mr. Quale observes

the “matrimonial alliance of Mrs. Jellyby with Mr. Jellyby,” his

comment on “the union of mind and matter” (BH 4.41) shows that he

is blind to the unhappiness in this marriage. The philanthropists’

abstract thinking and lack of authentic feelings are thus shown to be

delusional. Meanwhile, the enthusiasm for such philanthropy is

infectious: Mr. Quale is “swallowed up in admiration of Mrs. Jellyby,

[…] the absorbing object of his devotion” (BH 15.183). The absurd

ending and lack of authenticity about missionary activities accord with

the novelist’s agenda to represent overseas mission as illusory.

The descriptions of Mrs. Jellyby’s relationship with her family and

overseas project show that her devotion to the latter is due to the

deprivation of her genuine affection for the former. Being irresponsive

to her maternal and wifely duties, Mrs. Jellyby remains disengaged

when Peepy is lost and brought back by a policeman or when her

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daughter Caddy is engaged. As Caddy angrily says to Esther and Ada,

she is “only pen and ink” and “a mere drudge” to her mother (BH 14.169,

23.295), and she “won’t be a slave all [her] life” (BH 14.167). Mrs.

Jellyby is preoccupied with her letter writing, considering herself

“happily […] engaged” with no time to worry about Mr. Jellyby’s

looming bankruptcy (BH 23.295). After becoming bankrupt, Mr.

Jellyby is described as a “shorn lamb,” being “humble and meek” (BH

30.369), an allusion to Isaiah 53.7 not previously noted: “He was

oppressed and he was afflicted, yet he opened not his mouth; he is

brought as a lamb to the slaughter, and as a sheep before her shearers

is dumb, so he opened not his mouth.” Mr. Jellyby sums up his misery

and exhorts his daughter before her marriage: “Never have a Mission,

my dear child” (BH 30.374). The portrayal of Mr. Jellyby as a victim

reinforces Mrs. Jellyby’s role as an oppressor and exploiter, being blind

to the needs of her family. Her preoccupation with philanthropic work

is an “emotional strategy” so as to maintain her serene temper

(Furneaux 375). To maintain serenity, she has to be distracted and

entertain “distant contemplation” over the colony (BH 23.297). To

replace her emotional vacuum, Mrs. Jellyby refers to her public duties

as “a favourite child” (BH 23.297), which she considers to be her

“remedy”: “I have so much to think of, in connexion with Borrioboola-

Gha, and it is so necessary I should concentrate myself, that there is my

remedy, you see” (BH 23.296). The OED defines “remedy” as “A means

of counteracting a source of misery or difficulty, in early use especially

sin, evil, or a vice; a means of relieving a bad situation or avoiding a

problem.” Mrs. Jellyby’s missionary work and her “sympathy for the

destinies of human race” is her means of escapism to avoid problems

at home, just like the official rhetoric of altruism is used to justify

British imperialism while neglecting the domestic needs.

My analysis in the previous paragraphs of Mrs. Jellyby’s failing

role can be summed up by what I take to be Dickens’s overarching if

implied allusion to 1 Timothy 3.5: “For if a man know not how to rule

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his own house, how shall he take care of the church of God?” This

allusion highlights the relationship between outward philanthropy and

domestic duty in Mrs. Jellyby’s home as well as in the nation, where the

imperialist expansion is used as an excuse for neglecting the domestic

duties towards the poor. Mrs. Jellyby’s dependence on Borrioboola-

Gha as her “remedy” corresponds to the empire’s dependence on its

overseas colonies to provide resources to sustain its advancement.

What Elaine Freedgood observes of the expansion of British colonies in

the nineteenth century, particularly those in India, is also true of the

novel: “the primary mission [is] raising a cash crop,” while the mission

to improve the natives is “something of an afterthought,” a “moral

justification for colonizing and settlement, […] a screen for domestic

exigency” such as exporting and employing population (384). Mrs.

Jellyby regards herself as “a business example” for Caddy (BH 23.296).

Complaining about her daughter’s lack of charity and sympathy for the

natives, she maintains a moral superiority that is analogous to the

imperialists’ sense of cultural and national supremacy based on

production of goods, agricultural produce, and development of

transportation, a supremacy serving as a justification for subjugating

and “civilizing” racially different people. 27 As Freedgood puts it,

“empire in its guise as a ‘civilizing mission’” assumes a dependence on

the material gains (384). Another implied biblical allusion about Mrs.

Jellyby—a continuation of St Paul’s criticism of religious hypocrisy—is

relevant: “if any provide not for his own, and specially for those of his

own house, he hath denied the faith, and is worse than an infidel” (1

Tim. 5.8). What Esther tells Mr. Jarndyce sums up the issue: “‘We

thought that, perhaps,’ said I, hesitating, ‘it is right to begin with the

obligations of home, sir; and that, perhaps, while those are overlooked

and neglected, no other duties can possibly be substituted for them”

27 Deirdre David’s chapter “Empire, Race, and the Victorian Novel” traces the reason for British supremacy and phenomenal success to “racial superiority,” which further reinforces such ideology of racial superiority (84).

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(BH 6.61).

In contrast to Mrs. Jellyby’s faraway mission in Africa, Mrs.

Pardiggle’s philanthropy is domestic, as she is “serving” the poor,

especially destitute brickmakers. Even before Mrs. Pardiggle’s

appearance in the novel, Esther’s observation to Jarndyce about the

changing (East) wind indicts the kind of charity work done by Mrs.

Pardiggle; Jarndyce responds by contrasting people such as Mrs.

Pardiggle with genuine charity: “there were two classes of charitable

people: one, the people who did a little and made a great deal of noise;

the other, the people who did a great deal and made no noise at all” (BH

8.93). It is through the portrayal of Mrs. Pardiggle, especially her

heavy-handed religious rhetoric, that the novel investigates how

religious charitable work should and should not be conducted.

The narrator not only shows that the mission work Mrs. Pardiggle

does with her young family’s participation is another form of vanity,

but also visualises the “iron barrier” between her kind of

philanthropism and the poor (BH 8.99). Unlike the evangelical Mrs.

Jellyby, Mrs. Pardiggle is high-church, naming her five sons after the

Anglican-Catholic saints Egbert, Oswald, Francis, Felix and Alfred.28

She is portrayed as an arrogant and unsympathetic person who forces

her sons to donate their pocket money to charity work. Her sons’

reluctance to donate indicate her domineering attitude at home: being

“almost as powerful a correspondent as Mrs. Jellyby” and claiming to

be “a woman of business” (BH 8.93 and 96), Mrs. Pardiggle is

“demonstrative” and “commanding,” leading both her children and her

husband to contribute their donation of “mite” “under [her] direction”

(BH 8.95).

The title of the chapter “Covering a Multitude of Sins,” with its

satirical allusion to 1 Peter 4.8: (“And above all things have fervent

28 I therefore disagree with Pope, who thinks it is impossible for Mrs. Jellyby to form a friendship with Mrs. Pardiggle if the latter was from the High Church, and therefore considers Mrs. Pardiggle an evangelical philanthropist in spite of the Anglo-Catholic names given to her children (134–35).

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charity among yourselves: for charity shall cover the multitude of

sins”)29 reveals Mrs. Pardiggle’s religiosity to be “fervent” but without

true compassion for others. Being one of those “most distinguished for

this rapacious benevolence,” she is “military in her manners” and “not

conciliatory” in whatever she does (BH 8.93, 96, and 100). Her claim

to prominence shows her self-laudatory traits:

I am aware that [my character] is so prominent as to be discoverable

immediately [...] Well! I freely admit, I am a woman of business. I love hard

work; I enjoy hard work. The excitement does me good. I am so accustomed and

inured to hard work that I don’t know what fatigue is. (BH 8.96)

What matters to her is “prominence,” “business,” “hard work,” and

“excitement.” The brickmakers’ antagonism, which to her is proof of

her hard work in what she considers their dirty and smelly quarters, is

really an indictment of a “rapacious benevolence” that boasts its moral

superiority and self-righteousness (BH 8.93). The “good book” that

Mrs. Pardiggle forces the brickmakers to read is compared to “a

constable’s staff,” while analogically, she is herself compared to an

“inexorable moral Policeman” trying to take her wards “into religious

custody” (BH 8.99). The way she treats the brickmakers once again

reflects not only the general bias that the poor are sinners deserving

their impoverished life, but also how they have been abused by the

historically rooted “evangelical belief in poverty as divinely ordained”

(Oulton 123). This scene illustrates Dickens’s “greatest complaint

against evangelicals: first invading the family’s privacy and then

berating them for circumstances beyond their control” (Oulton 186). In

spite of Bleak House’s restriction of “his direct reflection of

contemporary religion to minor characters,” his depictions of them are

both distinct and topical, as Tillotson observes (126).30

29 Both Ford and Monod (BH 8.85n) and Shatto (79) note the allusion. 30 Dickens’s strong aversion to the domineering attitude held by religious people was also acknowledged as a malpractice by the Religious Tract Society since it warned its members against “dictatorial prying spirit, obtrusive, overbearing manner, or a condescending, patronizing tone” (qtd.

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In addition, the narrator attacks the philanthropists’ use of the

story of the widow’s mite to force the poor to donate. Esther’s narration

of a visit by Mrs. Pardiggle, Mr. Quale, and Mr. Gusher reveals how the

biblical allusion is misused by Mr. Gusher:

when Mr. Gusher spoke for an hour and a half on the subject to a meeting,

including two charity schools of small boys and girls, who were specially

reminded of the widow’s mite, and requested to come forward with halfpence

and be acceptable sacrifices; I think the wind was in the east for three whole

weeks. (BH 15.183)

The practice of requesting the children of the poor to donate to

philanthropist causes is shown to be abusive and coercive. Esther’s

reference to the east wind passes immediate judgment on it, reflecting

Dickens’s antagonism towards a rhetoric that uses the Bible to exploit

the poor. In his article “Two Views of a Cheap Theatre” about his

experience of attending a service at the Britannia Theatre, he

acknowledges that “these Sunday meetings in Theatres are good things,

I do not doubt. Nor do I doubt that they will work lower and lower down

in the social scale”;31 however, he goes on to advise its preachers “not

to disparage” theatres or “the intelligence of their hearers” in preaching;

not to be too grave and try not to work against people’s natural desire

to be amused; and try to stick to the New Testament and recount it to

the “fellow-creatures” (AYR 2: 420–21). It is also in this article that

Dickens explicitly advises the preacher to use “fellow-creatures”

instead of “fellow-sinners” to address the audience, for the latter

implicates a “spiritual vanity” (AYR 2: 419–20). His advice to the

preachers echoes his fictional portrayal of the philanthropists’

in Pope 133). 31 This article was published as the third number of The Uncommercial Traveller serialised in Dickens’s All the Year Round in 1860. It was retitled “Two Views of a Cheap Theatre” when published in later collected editions. Dickens compares the audience at the evening Sunday service with that of the previous night’s theatre performance, noting the Sunday service has not attracted the audience of the lowest social status who attended the previous day’s performance (AYR 2: 420), which echoes his call to acknowledge people’s need for amusement.

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hypocritical rhetoric and caricatured religiosity.

The Hypocrisy of Mrs. General and Mr. Christopher Casby

In his exposure of hypocrisy (almost always tied to a moral vacuum),

Dickens also criticises the middle-class pursuit of status and wealth at

the cost of building moral character. He uses allusions to the Bible and

religious practices to portray the hypocrisy of Mrs. Pardiggle in Bleak

House, or Mrs. General and Christopher Casby in Little Dorrit. I want

to show in this section that his ironic portrayal of the latter two

characters is based on the biblical dichotomies of seeming/being, or

outer appearance/inner substance, seen in verses such as Matthew

23.25: “Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye make

clean the outside of the cup and of the platter, but within they are full

of extortion and excess.”32 The satirical portrayal of Mrs. General also

resonates with the novelist’s criticism against characters with a pro-

Catholic stance, revealing an antagonism towards the revival of Anglo-

Catholic ritualism.33

Not much has been written on Mrs. General,34 or Christopher

Casby.35 The novel stresses Mrs. General’s familiarity with the clergy

and religious terminology: she is introduced as “the daughter of a

clerical dignitary in a cathedral town” and her marriage is witnessed

by “the cathedral town society” (LD 2.2.442). Alluding to 1 Timothy

6.7,36 she refers to her late husband’s legacy as a “quantity of dust and

32 More examples can be found in Matthew 23.27–28, and Luke 11.39 etc. 33 The High Church around the mid-nineteenth century promoted pro-Catholic ritualism through the Oxford Movement known as Tractarianism, which eventually developed into Anglo-Catholicism. One of the Oxford Movement leaders John Henry Newman later converted to Catholicism, causing controversy at the time. 34 Gissing, Shaw, or Chesterton, for instance, have not written anything about Mrs. General, which Vereen M. Bell has also noted (177), and neither have Butt and Tillotson, Oulton, or Colledge. Trilling (587) and Showalter (21) have only touched very briefly on Mrs. General. 35 Butt and Tillotson mention the hypocrisy of Casby once (224), whereas Trilling notes that Casby is typical of Dickens’s gentlemen who live to grip and grind (586). Doris Alexander refers to Casby as “one of the most absurd pretenders of Little Dorrit” (125). 36 This is taken from the service for the Burial of the Dead in the Book of Common Prayer, as is noted by Walder (846).

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ashes” that is “deposited at the bankers”; she finds the burial service

untrue in its statement that the deceased “take nothing away with him”

because her late husband has left her with little to live on (LD 2.2.443).

In addition, the narrator highlights her connection with the clergy: her

decision to teach the proprieties is “warmly applauded” by her “clerical

and commissariat” connections (LD 2.2.443). Referred to as “a prodigy

of piety, learning, virtue, and gentility” by “one venerable archdeacon,”

Mrs. General moved him “even [to] shed tears in recording his

testimony to her perfections […] though he had never had the honour

and moral gratification of setting eyes on Mrs. General in all his life”

(LD 2.2.443). The contradiction between the archdeacon’s

affirmations of her “piety” and “virtue” and his not knowing her in

person underscores the novel’s emphasis of Mrs. General’s surface

appearance even as it expresses an antagonism against the clergy in

general.

Comparing Mrs. General’s alliterative formula of “[p]apa,

potatoes, poultry, prunes, and prism” to train young women to form

pretty lips to a prayer (LD 2.5.469), 37 the novel shows that her

pedagogy of lip-formation is idolatrous in nature, detrimental to good

deeds and character building. When disappointed by Mr. Dorrit’s

inability to propose to her due to his failing health, Mrs. General tries

to remain calm by telling “her polite beads, Papa, Potatoes, Poultry,

Prunes, and Prism” and goes through “that infallible performance” to

“finish her rosary” (LD 2.19.631). The narrator’s anti-Catholic stance

is seen in the reference to the rosary with its beads. Mrs. General

strives to make “everything […] surface and varnish and show without

substance” (LD 2.7.496), and her own surface is formed “to such

perfection that it hid[es] whatever [is] below it (if anything)” (LD

37 The formula of “prunes-and-prisms” is not Dickens’s invention. According to the OED, it first appeared in 1846 in People’s Journal: “We will give them [sc. ladies] a recipe for a pretty expression of the mouth—let them place it as if they were going to say prunes.” The second example given to the entry “prunes-and-prisms” in the OED is from Little Dorrit, which shows that the novel enhances its extended meaning of affected mannerisms and superficial accomplishments.

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2.7.496 and 498).38 The parenthetical “(if anything)” highlights the

emptiness of her moral and emotional life, justifying the narrator’s

metonymic reference to her types as “the Prunes and Prism school”

(LD 2.7.501),39 similar to his designation of Mrs. Merdle as “Bosom”

since her whole existence is summed up by the outward display of

jewellery.

The portrayal of Christopher Casby also resorts to the biblical

dichotomy of seeming and being, which the novel uses to generalise

the critique of appearance over substance and accessories over inner

quality. The narrator underscores Casby’s seemingly kind appearance

and shows what his money-making depends on: because of his

appearance, he used to be the secret “town-agent to Lord Decimus Tite

Barnacle” (LD 1.13.154). To manifest his hypocrisy, the narrator

describes his ownership of Bleeding Heart Yard, his disguise of the

ownership, and his greed for both profit and a good name. Casby hires

Pancks to collect rents, instructing him to “squeeze” tenants, and he

himself pretends to be “supremely benignant,” for which the tenants

at Bleeding Heart Yard nickname him “the Last of Patriarchs”—

allusive to the last of Old Testament fathers of the Jewish race, i.e.,

Noah (“Notes” 838). Meanwhile, the narrator points out that the

tenants yet have “motes and specks of suspicion” about Casby being “a

crafty imposter” (LD 1.13.154). The biblical allusion to the “mote” from

Matthew 7.5 (“Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own

eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy

brother’s eye.”) implies pretentious benignity and hypocrisy.40 Close

38 Martineau’s complaint of Dickens’s article on women’s position and the rejection of her pro-Catholic article by editors of Household Words aroused some controversies. Martineau said that Dickens “prescribes the function of Women, viz. to dress well and look pretty, as an adornment to the homes of men” (qtd in Drew 126). Fielding and Anne Smith’s article clarified the point that Dickens did not write any article on women as suggested by Martineau (407), proving Martineau’s accusation of the novelist’s sexist view groundless. In addition, Dickens’s satirical portrayal of Mrs. General clarifies the issue of this prejudiced view about women’s appearance and their acquiring accomplishments in order to attract the other sex. 39 Dickens commented on middle-class women’s imitation of the aristocratic class in a letter to Macready, “a poor fringe on the mantle of the upper” (qtd. in Bell 181). 40 Alexander considers James Spedding, against whom Dickens had a grudge, to be the prototype of Casby (121–26).

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to the novel’s end, Pancks reveals to the tenants both Casby’s identity

as “the Proprietor” and “Grubber” (LD 2.32.782) and Casby’s “golden

rule”: “Keep thou always at [squeezing tenants]. Let him keep always

at it. Keep we or do we keep always at it. Keep ye or do ye or you keep

always at it. Let them keep always at it” (LD 2.32.784).41 In Mary

Lenard’s words, Casby is revealed to be “a perversion of the New

Testament” (347). His pretentious practices, including his “mound of

meekness,” “lump of love” and his being a “smiler,” are similar to Mrs.

General’s pedagogy: both are involved in cultivating the surface while

being deceptive and gainful, once again revealing the novel’s theme of

the responsibility of the individual in social wrongdoings.

The narrator also mocks the folly of perverting the religious

meaning of the cardinal virtues (“prudence, temperance, fortitude, and

justice”)42 into bodily parts:

in the Royal Academy some evil old ruffian of a Dog-dealer will annually be

found embodying all the cardinal virtues, on account of his eyelashes, or his chin,

or his legs (thereby planting thorns of confusion in the breasts of the more

observant students of nature), so, in the great social Exhibition, accessories are

often accepted in lieu of the internal character. (LD 1.13.154–55)

Such demonstration is similar to both Casby’s and Mrs. General’s

cultivation of surface. The narrator’s mentioning of “Dog-dealer” in the

Royal Academy hyperbolically caricaturises such embodied values that

mistake appearance for substance. In addition to their function as

“comic relief,” the characters of Mrs. General and Mr. Casby

thematically represent “one of Dickens’s most mature and enlightened

moral observations” (Bell 177–78), and help generalise the novel’s

41 Bell observed that from Hard Times onwards Dickens analyses more systematically the governing class and the ascending middle class as causes of social inequality (178). 42 As The Oxford Dictionary of Christian Church and the OED define “cardinal virtues,” the chief church fathers, e.g. St Ambrose, St Augustine, and St Thomas Aquinas, took over this classification from “natural virtues” in scholastic philosophy of Plato and Aristotle, as distinguished from the ‘theological’ virtues of faith, hope, and charity. “Some modern writers include these, and speak of ‘seven’ cardinal virtues; hence the ‘seven cardinal sins’” (OED “virtues” 2a.)

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critique of its time, especially the middle-class ethos that equates

appearance of good breeding with virtue and weighs refined

appearance over moral character.

The Guardianship of Miss Barbary and Mrs. Clennam

In this section I focus on guardian characters with beliefs that are

perverted because of a rigid application of misconceived philosophy or

a biased reading of the Bible, including Miss Barbary in Bleak House

and Mrs. Clennam in Little Dorrit. Through the lens of biblical

allusions used by and about these characters, I analyse how the novels

satirise such misguided practices as part of a didactic message about

guardianship. Connected to the discussion in my first chapter on how

the first instalments used biblical allusions to highlight the main issues

dealt with in each of the three novels of social criticism, the dangers

facing the protagonists in their spiritual and emotional journey to

maturity are revealed through the perverted beliefs of the protagonists’

guardians, who assume “quasi-patriarchal authority over the family”

(Oulton 100). 43 Miss Barbary, Esther Summerson’s aunt and

godmother, raises Esther and preaches the doctrines of human

depravity and atonement, while Mrs. Clennam, Arthur Clennam’s

adoptive mother, similarly practises a stern form of religious belief that

evokes God’s punishment.

As Jennifer Gribble explains, biblical “debates between ‘law’ and

‘Gospel’ are staged to dramatic and thematic effect” in both Bleak

House and Little Dorrit and contribute to their “typological and

thematic connections and continuities” (“Religion” 591). This debate

plays out in the guardians’ use of the Bible to suppress the young

protagonists, Esther Summerson in Bleak House and Arthur Clennam

43 Oulton’s observations are about the first-person narrators subjected to evangelical influence, such as Esther Summerson and David Copperfield (100). It is also true of Arthur Clennam, but he is not a first-person narrator even though the narrative is often filtered through his perspective.

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in Little Dorrit, a suppression caused by a legalistic belief that children

have to expiate for their parents’ offences.44 To overcome the impact

of such beliefs Esther embraces love and diligent work, and Arthur

opens his heart to Amy Dorrit’s light and love. In both these novels

certain types of biblical verses are used by the guardians in connection

with unrevealed secrets and hidden misfortunes. These secrets include

the love affair of Esther’s biological parents, Miss Barbary’s separation

from her lover, the forced separation of Arthur Clennam’s biological

parents and Mr. Clennam’s exile, as well as Mrs. Clennam’s secret

possession of Amy Dorrit’s inheritance.45 Esther eventually finds out

about her biological parents, but Arthur remains in the dark.

In Bleak House, Miss Barbary tells her sister, Esther’s mother,

that her daughter is dead to keep the birth of Esther a secret. Raising

Esther in seclusion, Miss Barbary is never able to overcome the

bitterness of her voluntary sacrifice. Under the influence of her

deliberately partial understanding of the Bible, she passes judgment

on what she considers sinful in others, in particular the “disgrace” of

Esther’s illegitimate birth: “Your mother […] is your disgrace, and you

were hers” (BH 3.19). In spite of Esther’s love for Miss Barbary, the

latter is nevertheless portrayed as a stern and harsh believer in God’s

wrath and vengeance, as is shown in her speech: “For yourself,

unfortunate girl, orphaned and degraded from the first of these evil

anniversaries, pray daily that the sins of others be not visited upon

your head, according to what is written” (BH 3.19), a reference to

Numbers 14.18 and Exodus 20.5.46 As Janet L. Larson observes, “Aunt

Barbary ha[s] taken upon herself to carry out jealous Jahweh’s

visitation upon Little Esther” (“Battle” 153), but it is her personal

44 The protagonist of David Copperfield must face a similar upbringing. 45 Other main actions that have happened in Bleak House and Little Dorrit before the novels start include the Jarndyce Case and Mr. Dorrit’s imprisonment. Q. D. Leavis notes this and its similarity with classical tragedies (126–27). 46 The Norton Critical Edition traces it to Numbers 14.18 and the Oxford World’s Classics Edition, following Shatto’s Companion, traces it to Exodus 20.5. The choice of source depends on the editor’s different emphasis of God’s character.

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bitterness that is hidden behind her talk of God’s vengeance and

Esther’s sinfulness.

Miss Barbary’s distorted religion is shown through scenes of her

and Esther’s Bible-reading, considered by Elisabeth Jay as “high

drama” (Introduction 465) and by Larson as a “battle of biblical books”

(“Battle” 131). In these scenes, she and Esther read biblical verses to

each other: while Esther’s readings relate to forgiveness, Miss Barbary,

under the influence of what Larson terms “misguided religious zeal”

(“Battle” 146), clings to verses on judgment. The most dramatic of

these battles is when Esther’s reading from John 8.7 about Jesus

bidding the accusers of the adulterous woman to cast the first stone is

met by Miss Barbary’s “crying out, in an awful voice”: “Watch ye

therefore! lest coming suddenly he find you sleeping. And what I say

unto you, I say unto all, Watch! [Mark 13.35–37]” (BH 3.21).47 Miss

Barbary’s outcry triggers a paralytic stroke that eventually leads to her

death, indicating that her perverted beliefs are detrimental both

spiritually and physically. 48 As Larson notes, her clasp is like a

“shattered idol” being stricken and “the visitation upon her self-

serving bibliolatry com[ing] down” (“Battle” 137). However, in spite of

Miss Barbary’s stern and distorted view of a vengeful God, her

prescriptions for Esther to work diligently and to be submissive and

self-denying have been obeyed, leading Esther onto the “path of duty”

(BH 35.443), and sustaining her work and life in Bleak House even

when she is disfigured by the illness. Guided by a different set of

biblical references, Esther escapes from under her aunt’s shadow as

she grows into maturity. The suspense created in the first instalment

thus initiates the protagonist’s embattled life journey, making her

47 Both the Norton Critical Edition and Oxford World’s Classics Edition trace to the same source. 48 Elizabeth Jay thinks that Dickens through the portrayal of Miss Barbary reveals the society’s “anti-Christian nature of such a habit of mind” that judges rather than forgives the fallen woman and illegitimate child (Heart 58). Jay considers Miss Barbary’s death as “counterpointed” with Jo’s death who “finds his death eased by his new-found access to the Word” and the words of the Lord’s Prayer in particular; without unravelling the signification of the biblical references, Jay thinks it “baffling” to do so (Introduction 465).

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story conform to the Bildungsroman expected by Victorian readers.49

In Little Dorrit Mrs. Clennam uses a “retributive Old Testament

ethic” (Walder, Introduction xv) to express her hatred and to suppress

her longings for love. As the marriage was arranged without her

knowing that her new husband already has an infant son, Arthur, born

out of wedlock, Mrs. Clennam exiles her husband and keeps Arthur as

her own. She regards Arthur’s mother as the cause of her misfortune

for “sin[ning] grievously against the Lord” (LD 2.31.773). Her “severity

against sin” determines her attitude (LD 2.31.774). Referring to herself

as “a servant and a minister,” she sees herself as “an instrument” for

the “appointed suffering” of others (LD 2.30.758–59). Therefore, when

Arthur’s biological mother falls at her feet begging for mercy, Mrs.

Clennam alludes to God’s punishment on the enemies of his people in

Hebrews 1.13:50 “it [was] my enemy that became my footstool” (LD

2.30.759; original emphasis). Portrayed as unforgiving and revengeful,

she is imprisoned by her determination to punish those “delivered” to

her even at the price of confining herself to a wheelchair as a sign of

self-banishment. 51 However, Jeremiah Flintwich recognises the

motive behind her self-confinement as a “humble and sinful” servant

of religion: “call yourselves whatever humble names you will, I call you

a female Lucifer in appetite for power!” (LD 2.30.764–65).

Her guardianship of Arthur is awkward: on the one hand, she

rejects him and takes him for “the son of [her] enemy” (LD 2.31.772),

and, on the other, she “once half-hoped” that he “might” love her,

indicating her yearning for her adoptive son’s love and respect. Her

lack of forgiveness tortures and restrains her from accepting young

Arthur’s affection, equating his attempts “to soften [her] with his

49 Emma Mason’s article on Bunyan’s legacy in the Victorians suggests a similar view that the Victorian readers consumed pilgrimage narratives in huge numbers. Mason attributes it to the Victorians’ search for truth of individual subjectivity through reading (“Bunyan” 151). 50 Several biblical verses are about putting enemies under one’s feet, such as 1 Kings 5.3, Mark 12.36, and Luke 20.43 etc. 51 Mark Knight thinks that the character of Mrs. Clennam provides a Calvinistic model of providence that “all things are divinely ordained” (185), a belief the novel questions.

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mother’s ways that hardened [her]” (LD 2.31.773). Misrepresenting St

Paul’s words in 2 Corinthians 10.3: “For though we walk in the flesh,

we do not war after the flesh,” Mrs. Clennam suppresses her longings

for love, regarding it as “the corrupt affections of the flesh war” (LD

2.31.773). Like Miss Barbary, Mrs. Clennam believes that “the

transgressions of the parents are visited on their offspring,” which to

her means that Arthur has to “work out his release in bondage and

hardship” (LD 2.31.773).52

The difference between Esther and Arthur is that in her narrative

Esther is more submissive to the religious discourse whereas Arthur is

repulsed by Mrs. Clennam’s expression of faith. As James R. Kincaid

explains, Arthur’s memories of his childhood reveal “the statements of

cruelty, the record of repression and frustration” (Rhetoric 204). The

omniscient narrator describes the child Arthur’s psychological

condition when reading a “tract” (LD 1.2.43). He was

scared out of his senses by a horrible tract [...] why he was going to Perdition?—

a piece of curiosity that he really [...] was not in a condition to satisfy—and which,

for the further attraction of his infant mind, had a parenthesis in every other line

with some such hiccupping reference as 2 Ep. Thess. c. iii, v. 6 & 7. (LD 1.2.43)53

This is the only time in the novel when a full reference to a biblical verse

is provided.54 Whether the biblical reference is given by the young

Arthur, which is unlikely since he was little at the time, or from the

adult Arthur’s “liberated perspective” (Kincaid, Rhetoric 204), or

should be interpreted as the narrator’s comment, the message remains

ironical. The verse warns the Christians in Thessaloniki against

52 In attributing hereditary guilt to a child, both Miss Barbary and Mrs. Clennam have been criticised for their stern religious views, whether seen as low-church Anglican (Jay, Heart 27) or Calvinist (Knight 187; Richard Barickman, Susan MacDonald, and Myra Stard, as qtd. in Oulton 100). 53 Jay points out that this quotation from 2 Thessalonians 3.6–7 also informs of Mrs. Clennam’s “judgmental separatism” that “ye withdraw yourselves from every brother that walketh disorderly,” but omits the teaching of verse 15 (Jay finds the source to 11 probably by error) that “Yet count him not as an enemy, but admonish him as a brother.” (Introduction 468) 54 Its mention of “horrible tract” rings a dislike of “Tractarianism” or Oxford Movement of the time when numerous tracts were produced.

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disorderly behaviour, but can only be interpreted as an ominous threat

by a young child. The choice of biblical quotation underscores why

Arthur thinks he has “no more real knowledge of the beneficent history

of the New Testament than if he had been bred among idolaters. There

was a legion of Sundays, all days of unserviceable bitterness and

mortification, slowly passing before him” (LD 1.2.43), which indicates

Dickens’s distaste of teaching children dogmas and using the Bible as

“an instrument” and “a weapon” to oppress them (Jay, Introduction

470).

The descriptions of Arthur’s reluctance to visit Mrs. Clennam

upon his return from Marseilles also reveal a distorted state of mind

caused by her use of the Bible to justify her own jealousy and

revengefulness. The ringing of the church bells is heard by Arthur as

both a summoning—“Come to church, Come to church, Come to

church!”—and as a trigger for his speculation of people’s reply: “They

won’t come, they won’t come, they won’t come!” (LD 1.3.42–3; original

emphasis).55 The repetitions and the emphasis given by the use of

italics suggest Arthur’s rebellion. In his memory, Sundays are “dreary,”

“sleepy,” and “resentful” days with “two meals of indigestible sermon”

and with Mrs. Clennam sitting “all day behind a bible [...] as if it [w]ere

a fortification against sweetness of temper, natural affection, and

gentle intercourse” (LD 1.3.43). As the “bible” in lower case indicates,

Arthur does not regard it as a sacred book, a state of mind almost

certainly due to Mrs. Clennam. When he does visit her, Mrs. Clennam’s

nightly readings from a mysterious book with curses for her enemies

echo Arthur’s youthful remembrance, made clear just a few pages

before, of her sitting “behind a bible—bound [...] with one dinted

ornament [...] and a wrathful sprinkling of red upon the edges of the

leaves” (LD 1.3.43). What is clear is that biblical references underline

55 According to Walder, passages describing London’s sullen Sundays also reveal Dickens’s opposition to the Sabbatarianism regarded as “a kind of idolatry” because of its restriction of entertainment for working class (Religion 177–78).

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the severity and partiality of her religion and her alleged role as an

implementer of divine justice. Phiz’s illustration of the meeting of Mrs.

Clennam with Arthur highlights a painting above Mrs. Clennam’s head

that underscores her reading of wrathful passages: alluding to Joshua

10.12–13, the painting is about God’s order for the sun and moon to

stand still so that Joshua’s army can take revenge on the Amorites

(Walder, Religion 188).

But the novel does not stop by identifying Mrs. Clennam’s stern

faith with an avenging Old Testament God, but in line with Dickens’s

pronouncements about other idolatrous characters, the description of

her being “sheathed in brass” like an “Egyptian sculpture” (LD 1.4.49

and 1.5.59), as Walder argues convincingly, identifies her religion as

“pagan idolatry” (Religion 188). The narrator laments Mrs. Clennam’s

“mystical religion”:

Great need had the rigid woman of her mystical religion, veiled in gloom and

darkness, with lightnings of cursing, vengeance, and destruction, flashing

through the sable clouds. Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors, was a

prayer too poor in spirit for her. Smite Thou my debtors, Lord, wither them,

crush them; do Thou as I would do, and Thou shalt have my worship: this was

the impious tower of stone she built up to scale Heaven. (LD 1.5.58)

The narrator’s evocation of the Lord’s Prayer (“Forgive us our debts as

we forgive our debtors”) is set up as a corrective to the “gloom and

darkness” of Mrs. Clennam’s inclination to “crush” and “smite.” The

last sentence again brings up the vanity of the tower of Babel, echoing

Arthur’s impression of his parents’ “weigh[ing], measure[ing] and

pric[ing] everything” in life (LD 1.2.34). Connecting her dark

religiosity with a merchant’s idolatry of gold, the novel exposes her

theft of Amy Dorrit’s inheritance.

To conclude, Miss Barbary and Mrs. Clennam reading or arguing

about the Bible may reflect the general concern felt at the time about

the harm done by a partial or biased reading of the Scriptures (Jay,

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Introduction 469). However, while Dickens agrees with those concerns,

he at the same time uses another biblical trope as a corrective: that is

Little Dorrit’s reaffirmation of the New Testament’s liberating force

even with her knowledge of Mrs. Clennam’s vengeance, self-

justification and self-judgment, which my next chapter will further

expound.

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Chapter 4: Biblical Allusion and Moral Goodness

The previous chapter may have given the impression that Dickens’s use

of biblical allusions and of Christianity in general is almost always

ironic. Some contemporaries, such as Rev. David Macrae, seemed to

come to that conclusion. He considered Dickens’s “representations of

Christianity [as] gravely defective,” complaining that the author did not

provide “any specimens of earnest Christianity to show that Christian

profession may be marked and yet sincere” (qtd. in Letters 9: 557n).

However, serving as foils to the proud characters with their perverted

beliefs and lack of authentic compassion, Dickens’s idealised

characters are often portrayed as embodiments of Christian teachings

on benevolence and charity, expressed as true compassion for others.

They demonstrate what Valentine Cunningham terms “absenteeism,”

which means that they embody the teaching of Christ without going to

church or talking about their faith (“Dickens” 258). Nevertheless, the

three novels do portray personal engagement with the Christian faith

through private prayers, use of a prayer book or a Catechism, and

through interactions with others using verbal references to the Bible.

These (often female) characters at the same time demonstrate a deep

commitment to their work at home managing the house and doing

“emotional labor” (Danahay 201) by providing support for their family,

or (if males) fulfilling public duties at professional places. These types

of commitment, termed the “Gospel of Work” by Thomas Carlyle and

explored by other Victorian philosophers (Danahay 197),1 confirm and

demonstrate the spiritual value of good works to the reader. Meanwhile,

there are also morally good characters who are not idealised, and

biblical allusions may be used to reveal their weaknesses and show the

1 As Patrick Fessenbecker notes, doing a meaningful secular work is considered important for individuals and for society as a whole during the Victorian era (n. pag.).

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complexity of their moral goodness.

Contemporary critics such as George Eliot complained about the

lack of psychological growth in Dickens’s morally good characters

(Bowen 18–19). Admittedly, lots of minor characters are “flat” without

changing much, but the main protagonists in these novels of social

criticism do grow.2 However, whether flat or round, these characters

(whether idealised or not) are made the moral centre of each novel,

realizing an educational function that contrasts with hypocritical

characters and malfunctioning institutions. What Dickens says in reply

to Macrae’s criticism quoted above indicates the intent of his writing:

With a deep sense of my great responsibility always upon me when I exercise my

art, one of my most constant and most earnest endeavours has been to exhibit in

all my good people some faint reflections of the teachings of our great Master,

and unostentatiously to lead the reader up to those teachings as the great source

of all moral goodness. All my strongest illustrations are derived from the New

Testament: all my social abuses are shown as departures from its spirit; all my

good people are humble, charitable, faithful, and forgiving. (Letters 9: 557)3

Here Dickens maintains the Christian source of his characters’ moral

goodness, a stance that is in accordance with The Life of Our Lord, the

instruction about the Christian faith written for his own children:

REMEMBER!—It is christianity TO DO GOOD always—even to those who do

evil to us. It is christianity to love our neighbour as ourself [sic], and to do to all

men as we would have them Do to us. It is christianity to be gentle, merciful, and

forgiving, and to keep those qualities quiet in our own hearts, and never make a

boast of them, or of our prayers or of our love of God, but always to shew that we

love Him by humbly trying to do right in everything. (124, 127; original emphasis)

For Dickens moral goodness requires action, and good personal traits

2 Schweizer notes characters’ growth, formation and even transformation of their character (141–46). 3 This quoted letter has captured a number of scholars’ attention to the Christian origin of his stories: for example, Gary Colledge considers it revealing “Dickens’s Christian convictions and the intent of his writing” (Christianity 146); noting the stories’ Christian origin, Lisa-Marie Teubler highlights the word “unostentatiously” and explains why “ostentatious” rhetoric does not “fare well” (44).

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should manifest themselves without ostentation both in one’s solitude

and in one’s interactions with others. In this chapter I focus on the use

of biblical allusions shown through both main protagonists and minor

characters whose embodied moral goodness is portrayed in relation to

the teaching of Christ, including Esther Summerson, John Jarndyce,

Allan Woodcourt, Mrs. Blinder, Charley Neckett and George

Rouncewell in Bleak House; Sissy Jupe, Sleary, Stephen Blackpool and

Rachael in Hard Times; and Amy Dorrit, Arthur Clennam, Mr. Meagles

and Pancks in Little Dorrit. In my analysis I divide these characters

into three categories, namely idealised female characters, male

characters who are good but not always idealised, and exemplary

protagonists.

The Moral Goodness of Idealised Female Characters

I start by analysing idealised female characters—including Esther

Summerson, Sissy Jupe and Amy Dorrit—showing their engagement

with Christian belief in fulfilling household and familial duties.

Dickens shows Esther’s resolutions to do her duty, Sissy’s resistance to

Utilitarian teaching, and Amy’s inspiration to serve others by narrating

their personal engagement with religious faith. Through their spiritual

intimacy and occasional evocations of God as “Father” and “Heavenly

Father,” or through their rare references to the Bible, these characters

are portrayed as embodying Christian values such as industry,

discipline, charity and courage. Showing an inner strength, they resist

the corruption of perverted philosophies or beliefs.

Esther’s “path of duty” towards moral maturity serves to

counterbalance her obscure birth and her disappointment with

disfigurement. When Miss Barbary’s retributive Old Testament

discourse focuses on Esther’s tainted birth, she also gives the

admonishment that “[s]ubmission, self-denial, diligent work, are the

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preparations for a life begun with such a shadow on it. You are different

from other children, Esther, because you were not born, like them, in

common sinfulness and wrath. You are set apart” (BH 3.19). Meant to

hurt Esther’s self-esteem, Miss Barbary’s words become an

unintended prophecy of Esther’s resistance and determination to be

“set apart” for good work: she reveals to the reader that she would

“repair the fault I had been born with (of which I confusedly felt guilty

and yet innocent), and would strive as I grew up to be industrious,

contented, and kindhearted, and to do some good to some one, and

win some love to myself” (BH 3.20). In addition, her gratitude since

childhood to various generous offers is expressed through a prayerful

language to God the “Father”: “It was so tender in them to care so much

for me; it was so gracious in that Father who had not forgotten me, to

have made my orphan way so smooth and easy, and to have inclined

so many youthful natures towards me; that I could hardly bear it” (BH

3.27). In her deadly illness and after the discovery of Lady Dedlock as

her mother, she reviews her resolutions in a life rooted in her faith in

God as the “Heavenly Father”:

I saw very well how many things had worked together, for my welfare; [...] I

knew I was as innocent of my birth as a queen of hers; and that before my

Heavenly Father I should not be punished for birth, nor a queen rewarded for

it. [...] I renewed my resolutions, and prayed to be strengthened in them;

pouring out my heart for myself, and for my unhappy mother, and feeling that

the darkness of the morning was passing away. (BH 36.454–55)

Comparing her birth to that of the “queen,” she has overcome the

shame associated with it. There is a conspicuous allusion to her biblical

namesake in the Book of Esther, who similarly overcame the shadow

of a Jewish birth in a Persian context, becoming a Queen before risking

her life and reversing the genocide of the Jewish people.4 Dickens

4 Scholars have noted the biblical source of Esther’s name and its significance. Janet L. Larson analyses her identification with her namesake Jewish Queen Esther, while noting the Joban subtext in her narrative (138–50).

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seems to suggest that setbacks can be blessings in disguise leading to

maturity. Andrew Sanders considers this as a forceful expression of the

sense of rebirth and purposefulness that Esther experiences

(Resurrectionist 162).

Similarly, Sissy Jupe unconsciously resists indoctrination at

Gradgrind’s school by using a quotation from the Bible to answer the

question of Mr. M‘Choakumchild, teacher at Gradgrind’s school. When

asked about the first principle of Political Economy, Sissy answers with

the Golden Rule: “To do unto others as I would that they should do

unto me,” a reference to Jesus’s words in Luke 6.31 and Matthew 7.12

but for Sissy more likely known from the Catechism of the Church of

England (HT 1.9.46 and 46n). 5 Sissy’s answer is judged by

M‘Choakumchild to be “absurd,” and Gradgrind considers it proof that

she needs an “infinite grinding at the mill of knowledge” (HT 1.9.46).

What Bakhtin says about the ‘[o]ppositions between individuals [being]

only surface upheavals of the untamed elements in social heteroglossia’

(326) is also true here. These characters represent opposing values:

holding his own values as the norm, education for Gradgrind means a

process of indoctrination, and he therefore disregards Sissy’s

knowledge of kindness. To use Bakhtin’s terms, Gradgrind’s

metaphorical use of “grinding” manifests the “centralizing and

unifying influence” of his “ideological norm,” while Sissy’s values are

“decentralizing” and “centrifugal” (67, 272–73).6 On a deeper lever

Gradgrind’s metaphor also connects to the novel’s overarching biblical

allusion since the “grinding of the mill” is what happens to the grain

after sowing, harvesting and garnering, and the novel is of course

5 Sissy’s answer is part of what the Catechism of the Church of England answer to the question “What is thy duty towards thy Neighbour?” See also the discussion of the second example in my introduction where Sissy’s reference to the Catechism and Bitzer’s are analysed. 6 Bakhtin uses these terms to discuss generic and stylistic differences between poetry and novel (270–75). As Michael Holquist puts it, the “rulers and the high poetic genres of any era exercise a centripetal—a homogenizing and hierachicizing [sic.]—influence; the centrifugal (decrowning, dispersing) forces of the clown, mimic and rogue create alternative ‘degraded’ genres down below” and the novel is a “de-normatizing and therefore centrifugal force” (425). Likewise, these terms can explain the dialogic relation between Gradgrind’s and Sissy’s embodied values.

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centred on the “grinding” suffered by Gradgrind’s own children,

Louisa in particular.7 Sissy’s feeling “ashamed” at providing wrong

answers at school and her admiration of Louisa’s knowledge show that

she is not herself aware of her resistance to Gradgrind’s teaching (HT

1.9.47), but her common sense and human compassion are

incompatible with the rampant utilitarianism taught at Gradgrind’s

school.

Neither is Sissy “asking, over and over again” about letters from

her father understandable to Mr. and Mrs. Gradgrind, who regard such

hopes as baseless and “fantastic” (HT 1.9.51). Like Esther’s

determination to do her duty, Sissy is determined to stick to the hope

that her father will come back, because he asked her to buy “nine oils.”8

During the years of his absence, Sissy keeps the bottle of oils in hope

of giving him a massage when he returns (HT 1.6.35), which may also

be seen as an allusion to the Parable of the Ten Virgins in Matthew

25.1–13, of whom five wise ones have brought oil for their lamps,

awaiting to carry torches for the bridegroom. This allusion underlines

Sissy’s wisdom and readiness to serve others.

Unlike Esther’s and Sissy’s relatively brief encounters with

perverted beliefs, Amy Dorrit shows an innate goodness untainted by a

lengthy stay at the Marshalsea debtors’ prison. Esther and Amy are at

the margins of society due to illegitimacy and imprisonment

respectively, but they demonstrate exemplary inner strength and moral

goodness in their conflicts with perverted values, aligning Dickens’s

novels with Victorian didactic fiction. 9 In order to foreground the

power of Amy’s “internal character” in contrast to those who prioritise

“accessories” in “the great social Exhibition” (LD 1.13.155), she is “a

7 And there is of course the additional resonance of Coketown being a mill town: in a single phrase Dickens manages to equate both the industrial and educational mills, judging them both against the biblical message of “you sow what you reap.” 8 According to Margaret Simpson, “Nine oil” is a veterinary medicine used by circus performers for treating their bruises (89–90). 9 Anthony Mandal discusses morality demonstrated by heroines in moral-domestic evangelical fiction (266–67).

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slender child in body” (LD 1.32.381) and deprived of most, if not all,

advantages of birth. But she will be portrayed as “a strong heroine in

soul” (LD 1.32.381). Born and raised at Marshalsea, Amy’s support of

her father is based on a thorough understanding of the corruptive force

of “the living grave” (LD 1.20.235). Yet she carries hope for the future,

though it is scarcely uttered. The narrator describes how she is

“inspired” to be something different:

What her pitiful look saw, at that early time, in her father, in her sister, in her

brother, in the jail; how much, or how little of the wretched truth it pleased God

to make visible to her […]. It is enough that she was inspired to be something

which was not what the rest were, and to be that something, different and

laborious, for the sake of the rest. […] Shall we speak of the inspiration of a poet

or a priest, and not of the heart impelled by love and self-devotion to the lowliest

work in the lowliest way of life! (LD 1.7.82)

Similar to Esther’s prayer to be strengthened in her resolutions, Amy’s

determination to be “set apart” in her love and devotion to her father

also indicates a divine origin. She merely “drudge[s] on” and makes it

her duty as “the head of the fallen family” (LD 1.7.82). Later when the

Dorrits become wealthy, life in High Society does not affect Amy. She

shows a penetrating perception when she compares the condition of

the better-off and leisurely English people travelling in a foreign town

to “a superior sort of Marshalsea” (LD 2.7.503). As Jennifer Gribble

puts it, Amy is “conceived in terms of the Sermon on the Mount’s

Beatitudes,” which not only opposes Mrs. Clennam’s Old Testament

vengefulness but also her “Gospel of Mammonism” (“Religion” 594).

The narrator hints at the source of Amy’s strength and wisdom by

giving one glimpse of her spare time when she was waiting for her

father’s return so she could serve his dinner: the moment Mr. Dorrit

was back, Amy “put her little prayer-book in her pocket—had she been

praying for pity on all prisoners and captives!” (LD 1.19.229). It reveals

her reading to be from the Litany in the Book of Common Prayer

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(Walder, “Notes” 841). The exclamation mark in the quotation

highlights the marvel of the discovery. Amy’s reading the prayer-book

is not exceptional in that many self-made readers during the Victorian

era read it together with the Bible and Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s

Progress.10 Such a scene may therefore create an intimate resonance

with Victorian readers.

The inner strengths gained by Esther, Sissy and Amy through such

engagement draw on a value system familiar to Victorian readers, to

whom these female characters demonstrate how to transcend

mundane realities, maintain hope, and fulfil one’s duties. These

females are idealised, portrayed morally strong, and made more like

“saints than women, by-passing human sexuality in favour of divine

grace,” to borrow Stephen Prickett’s words (Origins 225).

The Moral Goodness of Minor Characters

In this part, I focus on the moral goodness of minor characters, most of

them male but also including “Charley,” the nickname given to

Charlotte Neckett. Part of Dickens’s power as a novelist lies with his

depictions of goodness in ordinary people, whose virtues and strengths

resonate with his readers. In Bleak House, the moral goodness of

several minor characters is idealised, including that of Charley and

General George, whose virtues are acknowledged in biblical terms. In

contrast, the goodness of minor male characters in Little Dorrit,

including Mr. Meagles and Pancks, is portrayed together with their

weaknesses and experience of failures, and the same is true for its

protagonist Arthur Clennam, whose complex moral goodness we shall

return to in the next section of the chapter.

The altruistic deeds and mutual sympathy of these minor male

10 Referring to Richard Altick’s study of English reading patterns, Elisabeth Jay points out that around the early and mid-Victorian period many self-made readers read the cultural and literary heritage formed by the Bible and Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress at the time (Introduction 468).

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characters in Bleak House are praised as angelic deeds, which lead to

mutual help and reciprocal relations. Dickens conceives the

compassionate treatment of each other by the poor as especially

precious. As Mr. Neckett gives his eldest daughter Charlotte the

nickname “Charley” (BH 15.188), he probably expects her to be as

tough and responsible as a man. After her mother’s early death,

Charley’s tenacity and industry are exemplary, becoming “a wonder”

and “the talk of the yard” (BH 15.190). Charley’s compassion is not only

for her siblings but also for the homeless orphan Jo. Dickens shows her

ability to empathise with Jo by imagining his misery happening to her

loved ones: “Tom might have been [like Jo …], if Emma and me had

died after father” (BH 31.379). Without knowing that Jo’s disease is

contagious, Charley and Esther become infected after bringing him to

Bleak House. Charley, in her illness, is described as “patient,”

“uncomplaining,” and with “a gentle fortitude,” considered by Esther

as an example and a “lesson” (BH 31.389). During Esther’s illness,

Charley is described like an angel “sent into the world” to “minister to

the weak and sick” (BH 35.433).

Charley tells Esther that she reads New Testament stories for her

father:

At those times Charley would speak to me of what she had read to her father as

well as she could, to comfort him; of that young man carried out to be buried,

who was the only son of his mother and she was a widow; of the ruler’s daughter

raised up by the gracious hand upon her bed of death. And Charley told me that

when her father died, she had kneeled down and prayed in her first sorrow that

he likewise might be raised up, and given back to his poor children; and that if

she should never get better, and should die too, she thought it likely that it might

come into Tom’s [Charley’s younger brother] mind to offer the same prayer for

her. Then would I show Tom how these people of old days had been brought

back to life on earth, only that we might know our hope to be restored to Heaven!

(BH 31.389)

These stories from Luke 7.12 and Matthew 9.25–26 are mainly about

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the resurrection of the dead through Jesus’s healing power. 11 Such

professed reliance on one’s resurrection and entrance to Heaven is

typical of Victorian deathbed conventions.12 The scene also shows how

biblical stories are taught by word of mouth and applied when the

poor’s illnesses are not recoverable, which appeals to the reader’s

compassion. Through the portrayal of Charley’s virtue, Dickens sets up

an example for the reader. As Cunningham observes, “respectable

Victorian fiction is happiest with the virtuous and educable poor, the

honest labourer [...], who will prove worthy candidates for the role of

Christ in the Carpenter’s Shop” (“Goodness” 111). Dickens’s portrayal

makes the point that even the most deprived people can be taught if

given good guidance, once again strengthening the point of social

improvement for the poor.

Similarly, while General George regards himself as a prodigal son

(“If I ever get to Heaven, it won’t be for being a good son to a widowed

mother” [BH 55.655]), he turns out to be another Good Samaritan in

disguise. After George runs away from his mother and brother to join

the army, his military career is not successful. And then he starts

“George's Shooting Gallery, &c.” by taking loans from the Smallweeds,

but he does not prosper, further distancing himself from his family.

However, his denial of being a “good” son underscores his love for his

mother, Mrs. Rouncewell, and shows both his guilty feelings and low

self-esteem. Dickens again uses the prototype of the Prodigal Son to

show Mrs. Rouncewell’s love as she embraces her reclaimed son. When

she sees George again, her emotions “are eloquent,” speaking “of a

better son [George’s brother] loved less, and this son loved so fondly

and so proudly” (BH 55.657). The portrayal of George evokes another

11 These allusions are noted by the Norton Critical Edition (BH 31.389n) and the Oxford World’s Classics Edition (933). 12 Dickens noted words of his sister Fanny, also known as Mrs. Henry Burnett, a few weeks before her death recorded in his letter to John Forster on 5 July 1848: “It was hard to die at such a time of life [at 37], but she had no alarm whatever in the prospect of the change; felt sure we should meet again in a better world; […] She said she was quite calm and happy, relied upon the mediation of Christ, and had no terror at all” (Letters 6: 362–63).

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biblical prototype, the Good Samaritan, which shares with the Prodigal

Son the low status of its protagonist: George demonstrates himself a

worthy friend to the homeless and helps out those in need. When he

sees the lame and disfigured Phil Squad “shouldering” his way against

a wall on the street, he sympathetically takes him for a veteran

wounded in the wars, addressing Phil “comrade” and hiring him to

work at the Shooting Gallery (BH 26.328). Phil is overwhelmed by

George’s kindness and is inspired to work for him heart and soul,

addressing him “commander” and “guv’ner” (BH 26.325). Similarly,

he shelters Gridley, who spends his last days at the Shooting Gallery

hiding from detective Bucket, as well as Jo during his last days after

Miss Flite deems George a person to “help [Jo] out” (BH 47.561). As

these examples show, George’s compassion and service to others make

him a worthy “servant” (BH 47.562) to others like his mother at

Chesney Wold, deserving her love and pride.

Little Dorrit is sporadically filled with brief descriptions of minor

characters who do good deeds, such as Maggie’s grandmother’s nurture

of a mentally ill Maggie, or Fredrick Dorrit’s tutorship of Arthur’s

mother. This subsection, however, shall concentrate on two supporting

characters with explicit biblical allusions, Mr. Meagles and Pancks.

Unlike Bleak House’s altruistic minor characters, they are portrayed as

more complex and having weaknesses to overcome. Their moral

goodness while being real is portrayed in a more reserved way.

Consequently, they are not directly praised, while their weaknesses,

such as Mr. Meagles’s fawning and Pancks’s speculation, are mocked

through biblical allusions.

Mr. Meagles is among the few morally good characters not under

the malign influence of imprisonment or speculation in Little Dorrit,

having a happy family and living in the pastoral cottage-residence of

Twickenham. His family adopts a foundling, Tattycoram, and Mr.

Meagles is exceptionally generous to receive her again after she runs

away. He is correct in his dealings with the Circumlocution Office for

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Daniel Doyce’s patent and establishing the partnership between Doyce

and Arthur; he reaches out to Doyce to help Arthur when the latter is

imprisoned at Marshalsea. At the same time, however, through

Arthur’s use of a biblical allusion to the Parable of the Mustard Seed

and the narrator’s satirical comment, readers learn about Mr.

Meagles’s exaggerated admiration for the aristocratic Barnacles.

Sensing acutely Mr. Meagles’s attention to Young Barnacle at his

house, Arthur Clennam uses the allusion to the Mustard Seed to give a

negative comment on Mr. Meagles’s weakness:

Clennam could not help speculating, […] whether there might be in the breast of

this honest, affectionate, and cordial Mr. Meagles, any microscopic portion of

the mustard-seed that had sprung up into the great tree of the Circumlocution

Office. […] His curious sense of a general superiority to Daniel Doyce, which

seemed to be founded, not so much on anything in Doyce’s personal character,

as on the mere fact of his being an originator and a man out of the beaten track

of other men, suggested the idea. (LD 1.16.200)

As Dennis Walder explains, the Parable of the Mustard Seed in

Matthew 13.31–32 compares “the kingdom of heaven to a grain of

mustard seed, the least that becomes the greatest” (“Notes” 840). The

ironic association of Mr. Meagles’s mustard seed with the great but

idolatrous tree of the Circumlocution Office highlights Mr. Meagles’s

fawning on the higher class.

Arthur’s biblical allusion is followed up by the narrator who

stresses both Mr. Meagles’s intense interest in the Young Barnacle’s

relation to other aristocrats and his focus on “the full flavor of the

[aristocratic] genealogical tree” (LD 1.17.209). The narrator also mocks

his “peculiarity”:

Mr. Meagles seemed to feel that this small spice of Barnacle imparted to his table

the flavor of the whole family tree. In its presence, his frank, fine, genuine

qualities paled; he was not so easy, he was not so natural, he was striving after

something that did not belong to him, he was not himself. (LD 1.17.213)

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The last sentence points out the problem with such aspiration. The

reference to the Barnacles as “the whole family tree” echoes Arthur’s

use of the Parable of the Mustard-seed and the “great tree.” At Pet’s

marriage dinner, Mr. Meagles also gives priority to the Barnacles.

Stanley Tick thinks Mr. Meagles’s bows to the Barnacles at Pet’s

wedding “simply do not influence his behavior” and his condescension

to Doyce is “Dickens’s sense of whimsicality” (95–96).13 It is true that

Mr. Meagles is mostly honest in what he does, but the novel also makes

clear that fawning, whether intentional or not, is his weakness. The

episode expresses Dickens’s strong aversion to the fawning of the lower

classes to the higher ones, echoing the novel’s critique of the similar

fawning of the lower official echelon (Bar) to the higher one (Barnacles

and Bishop) discussed in chapter 2. One of Dickens’s notes in his Book

of Memoranda describes such practices and reveals how he

fictionalises Mr. Meagles as one of the good characters under its spell:

“Sensible men enough, agreeable men enough, […] but the moment

begin to circle round My Lord and to shine with a borrowed light from

His Lordship, Heaven and Earth how mean and subservient!” (qtd. in

Philpotts, Companion 226).

Unlike Mr. Jarndyce’s clear separation in the Growlery between

good and bad tempers, the Meagleses’ goodness is shown as expedient

and self-contented but not as selfless as other altruistic deeds in

Dickens’s novels. Like Jarndyce who uses the East Wind to express

anger and make moral judgments, Mr. Meagles also uses a set of

peculiar expressions. He refers to Mrs. Meagles and himself as

“practical people,” and then repeats the word “practical” six times in a

few paragraphs (LD 1.2.31), explaining its meaning with the example of

his adoption of Tattycoram. When Mr. and Mrs. Meagles take their

13 Tick notes critics’ charges against Mr. Meagles for spoiling Pet, being “indifferent parents to Tattycoram,” showing “indiscriminate awe for highborn families,” and “condescending to Daniel Doyce,” which Tick refutes one by one (89–96).

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daughter Pet to see the foundlings’ performance at church, Mrs.

Meagles cries: “I saw all those children ranged tier above tier, and

appealing from the father none of them has ever known on earth, to the

greater father of us all in Heaven,” which to Mr. Meagles is “practical

in Mother” (LD 1.2.31). Mr. Meagles then practises charity by adopting

one of the foundlings as Pet’s maid. “Practical” thus becomes a

euphemism for the family’s good deeds, which, according to Tick,

shows their modesty while creating comic effects (89). The nickname

“Tattycoram” given to the adopted girl underscores both their

philanthropic deed and the girl’s humble birth. Mr. Meagles also

frequently reminds her to “count five-and twenty” to control her

temper. The expression “count five-and twenty” intends to remind her

of the Sunday teaching about the Fifth Commandment of Exodus 20.12

to “honor thy father and thy mother” (LD 1.16.202), another example

of the Meagleses’ peculiar expressions. But the discrepancy between

the implicit commandment to honour one’s parents and Tattycoram’s

status as a maid triggers her resentment, though she finally realises the

Meagleses’ kind intentions for her, comparing it with Miss Wade’s

more selfish control. The ways Mr. and Mrs. Meagles address each

other in higher case “Mother” and “Father” while addressing God with

a lower case comparative expression “greater father of us all” (LD

1.2.31), showcases the priority they give to the family. To sum up, their

being “practical” and giving sympathy to others is different from Bleak

House’s simple and selfless kindness, such as Mrs. Blinder’s altruistic

cancellation of orphans’ rent or George’s help with Jo and Gridley. The

Meagleses’ kindness, in spite of their slight condescension towards

Tattycoram or Doyce, while authentic, is portrayed in a more realistic

way, showing the closeness of human goodness and weakness.

Pancks is another morally good character with weaknesses, and

this section will compare his moral goodness to the kindness and

simplicity of the Plornishes, tenants at Bleeding Heart Yard, whose rent

he collects. Pancks candidly admits that he likes business and has an

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“inclination to get money,” for it is “the Whole Duty of Man in a

commercial country” (LD 1.13.166), an appropriation, as Walder notes,

of Ecclesiastes 12.13: “Fear God, and keep his commandments: for this

is the whole duty of man” (“Notes” 839). But in spite of Pancks’s

peculiar behaviour of snorting and puffing “like a little laboring steam-

engine” (LD 1.13.154), he is not portrayed as a perverted character, but,

as Mark Knight observes, as an agent who does things actively for both

himself and others (189). Acting like a fortune teller he investigates the

inheritance of the Dorrits, leading the family to wealth and freedom

from Marshalsea, but he also exerts negative influence on Arthur in

that he lures him to “invest” with Merdle, leading to Arthur’s losses and

imprisonment.

Though not prosperous, the Plornishes are Good Samaritans by

allowing their customers to buy in their grocery store on credit. They

also look after Mrs. Plornish’s father Old Nandy, who used to stay at

the Workhouse. The Workhouse is nicknamed “the Good Samaritan of

his district” (LD 1.31.363) in satirical contrast to the kind deeds of the

worthy Plornishes. However, Mr. Plornish is too simple-minded to

understand the relationship between Pancks, who collects rents, and

Christopher Casby, for whom Pancks works, moving between him and

the lower-class Bleeding Hearts. Pancks knows Casby’s true face

because of the exceptionally high twenty per cent interest rate he sets

for the intended loans. Casby’s “business-like way” makes Pancks

disillusioned, expressed by a vague allusion to the relationship between

Laban and Jacob in Genesis 30.25–43 not before noted: he would

become Casby’s “grubber for the next seven years at half wages and

double grind” (LD 1.35.408). He ironically reveals Casby’s hypocrisy to

Arthur, describing him as an “old boiling-over Christian” for his

seemingly “[n]oble,” “[g]enerous,” “[c]onfiding,” and “[p]hilanthropic”

appearance (LD 1.35.407). Pancks becomes the righteous avenger of

Casby’s hypocrisy by cutting his long white silken locks and broad-

brimmed hat. Exposing the “golden rule” of the “benevolent Patriarch

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of Casby” that he is “[p]aid to squeeze” tenants and tenants “must

squeeze to pay,” Pancks discloses that it has been his “duty” to “squeeze”

tenants and “keep always at it” (LD 2.32.779 and 784). Pancks’s

punishment of Casby subverts his economic dominance, revealing it to

be “the shabbiest of all the lots” (LD 2.32.783). Such exposure of

Casby’s true face both gives the novel a comic stroke and works as

poetic justice on hypocrisy and evil disguised as seeming benevolence.

Pancks and the Bleeding Hearts are both taken advantage of by Casby,

but the Bleeding Hearts would not have known it without Pancks’s

exposure. Without the insiders’ revelation of the source of Merdle’s

wealth and their risky speculation, they become infected with

speculation fever. The obscurity about Merdle’s wealth and its source

contrasts with Pancks’s straightforward revelation of Casby’s

wrongdoings.

To sum this section up, the moral goodness of minor characters in

Little Dorrit is presented in tandem with their weaknesses, showing the

depth and boundary of these characters’ moral choices as well as their

limited perceptions. The biblical allusions related to these minor

characters are therefore used to underscore characters’ complexities,

changes, and growth.

The Moral Goodness of Exemplary Protagonists

This final section will focus on exemplary protagonists whose moral

deeds are highlighted by their biblical resonances, and who serve as

foils to the failures of other individuals or institutions by showing

compassion and charity towards the poor and the weak. As Emma

Mason puts it, “it was not secularisation that the Victorians had to

confront, but their own inability to put into practice the array of

doctrines to which they variously subscribed” (“Religion” 324). The

exemplary protagonists demonstrate to the reader how individual

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practices of belief in mundane everyday life lead to moral actions that

eventually benefit both others and the individuals themselves.

The way Esther and Ada show compassion and grief for the

brickmakers’ loss of another infant becomes a foil to philanthropist

Mrs. Pardiggle. Although Esther and Ada are from a social class

different from that of Jenny and Liz, all of them have something in

common: virtues of feeling and understanding that work to reinforce

each other. 14 Though Esther says, “the best side of such people is

almost hidden from us” (BH 8.101), she has already revealed to the

reader her understanding of other classes. Esther, in particular,

demonstrates domestic values. Seeing that the baby is dead, Ada,

“sinking on her knees beside it,” cries with “[s]uch compassion, such

gentleness […] [as she] put her hand upon the mother’s” (BH 8.100).

Her act of compassion can be seen as a response to the Pauline

admonishment to “weep with them that weep” from Romans 12.15. The

following actions and words of comfort show their empathy with the

mother’s loss:

Presently I took the light burden from her lap; did what I could to make the

baby’s rest the prettier and gentler; laid it on a shelf, and covered it with my own

handkerchief. We tried to comfort the mother, and we whispered to her what

Our Saviour said of children. She answered nothing, but sat weeping—weeping

very much. (BH 8.100)15

The allusion to Jesus’s love for children expresses condolence for the

brickmakers’ loss of their baby and comfort for the bereaved mother,

showing Esther’s and Ada’s sensitivity (Colledge, God 11). In the same

14 Dominic Rainsford’s article on moral philosophy in Our Mutual Friend also discusses virtues of understanding and feeling as “something closer to the ideal of philosophical intuitionism” (289). In addition, Rainsford also notes the possible influence of Christian socialist F. D. Maurice on Dickens, especially Maurice’s attempt to create a connection between religious belief and social betterment (274–76, 285–86). In addition, he notes the dialectic relation between Utilitarianism and Philosophical Intuitionism (287). Regarding characters as embodiment of philosophical stances, Rainsford’s view is also identical with Bakhtin’s concept of heteroglossia that characters represent stratified voices of a society. 15 The Norton Critical Edition traces its source to Mark 10.14 and the Oxford World’s Classics edition to Matthew 19.14. What is in common is Jesus asks the little children to come unto him.

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room, Esther observes “the grace of sympathy” shown by Liz, Jenny’s

friend, as she shares her sorrow, moving Esther to reflect on the

significance of such solidarity among the poor (BH 8.101).16 In these

contexts, Dickens particularly favours biblical verses related to

children,17 expressing his sympathy by comparisons to an infant, such

as the reference to Nemo as a “deserted infant” (BH 11.131). In his

fiction, these allusions to Jesus’s love for children are used not only to

appeal to readers’ sympathy but to move them to improve the lot of the

poor.

Portrayed as a Good Samaritan in his relation with Jenny and Jo,

Allan Woodcourt is another exemplary character in Bleak House

whose moral goodness contrasts with the charity organisations’ lack of

relief for the poor. As a doctor he not only provides medical relief but

also ministers to the poor’s spiritual need by “offer[ing] an explanation

of the basic tenets of religion” (Oulton 181). The narrator shows his

ability to develop good relationships with the poor: “with much

solicitude and compassion” he tries to ease Miss Flite’s nervousness

after her neighbour Nemo’s death by talking “cheerfully” to her and

giving her medical advice (BH 14.178-79). The narrator highlights the

contrast of different attitudes towards the poor:

A habit in him of speaking to the poor and of avoiding patronage or

condescension, or childishness (which is the favourite device, many people

deeming it quite a subtlety to talk to them like little spelling books), has put him

on good terms with the [brickmaker’s wife Jenny] easily. (BH 46.554)

The quotation spells out the problems with the treatment of the poor,

especially any patronizing and condescending practices. Woodcourt’s

16 Also see chapter 2 on Jo’s friendship with Nemo. 17 He used them in his letters to friends who had lost their children. To comfort his friend Mark Lemon on the loss of an infant child, Dickens wrote: “We are deeply sorry to receive the mournful intelligence of your calamity. But we know you will both have found comfort in that blessed belief, from which the sacred figure with the child upon His knee is, in all stages of our lives, inseparable, for of such is the kingdom of God!” (Letters 6: 275). A similar example is seen in the letter to Mrs. Winter on 13 June 1855 (Letters 7: 648).

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example of being on “good terms” with them showcases the

importance of establishing a personalised bond between the charity

and the poor. At the scene, the narrator further demonstrates

Woodcourt’s good example of treating the wounded Jenny. Meeting

Jenny on the muddy footway at Tom-all-Alone’s, Woodcourt, like the

Good Samaritan, not only treats her bruised forehead but talks to her

as an equal (BH 46.554–55). 18 Through the allusion to the Good

Samaritan the novel praises Woodcourt’s benevolence, but also

highlights Jenny’s response. Though both injured and in need of

money, she declines his monetary offer and just has her bruise treated.

Such descriptions also suggest that it is necessary to keep self-reliance

and self-esteem rather than dependence on charity relief.

The narrator furthers the critique of a lack of social relief for the

diseased, revealing Woodcourt’s thoughts:

As Allan Woodcourt and Jo proceed along the streets, where the high church

spires and the distances are so near and clear […] Allan revolves in his mind how

and where he shall bestow his companion. “It surely is a strange fact,” he

considers, “that in the heart of a civilised world this creature in human form

should be more difficult to dispose of than an unowned dog.” But it is none the

less a fact because of its strangeness, and the difficulty remains. (BH 47.560)

Even as Woodcourt realises how Jo has been abandoned by the

“Christian” world represented by the “high church spires,” his teaching

and reading of the Lord’s Prayer at Jo’s death bed becomes a statement

of genuine belief.19

Woodcourt accepts Esther’s entreaty to be a friend to Richard “as

a sacred trust” (BH 51.607), which can be understood as a sign of his

admiration for Esther, or shows his professional commitment to

rendering service to Richard. He serves both Richard’s physical and

spiritual needs, in stark contrast to Harold Skimpole’s and Vholes’s

18 Linda Lewis also notes Allan’s role as a Good Samaritan (123). 19 See also chapter 2 on reading the Lord’s Prayer before his death.

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interest in Richard’s money. Esther sees him as “a guardian angel” as

he restores Richard’s relationship with others and inspires a hope to

“begin the world” (BH 65.761 and 763), a Christian notion of

resurrection.20 He is also the character who appears most frequently

at the death scenes in the novel, ministering to both Jo and Richard,

as well as to Esther’s father Captain Hawdon (Nemo) and her mother

Lady Dedlock. Woodcourt’s commitment to work and his compassion

for the poor demonstrate his trustworthy professionalism that rewards

him with a good name and a sense of profound satisfaction. The

expression “patient ministration” (BH 67.769) underscores the

emotional and spiritual dimensions of his work. According to the OED,

the first meaning of “ministration” is defined as: “a. The action or an

act of ministering, tending, or serving; the rendering of service, aid,

care, or attention; b. The exercise of a public office or official function;

an instance of this; c. The action or an act of ministering in religious

matters; service as a priest or minister.” As Lauren M. E. Goodlad

observes, Dickens’s “idealization of the doctor-as-hero” shows how he

conceptualises pastorship in a “moral, religious, and familial way”; in

his novels Dickens speaks for the poor about their “demands for

committed pastorship” as well as the need for community and “bonds

between upper and lower ranks” (20). To sum up, the novel portrays

Woodcourt as an ideal doctor who not only treats patients’ illnesses

but also cares for their spiritual well-being, and rewards him with a

marriage to Esther and Jarndyce’s generous gift of his country home,

Bleak House.

Now I turn to Jarndyce, a benign father character who protects his

wards from the ills of the Chancery (though he cannot stop Richard

from entering the law business). His determined separation from the

Jarndyce and Jarndyce Case, analogous to his use of the Growlery to

separate his bad temper from the good one, shows his sensitivity about

20 Andrew Sanders explores it in Charles Dickens Resurrectionist (154–56).

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social and temperamental contaminations. Jarndyce’s compassion for

others stands as an implicit rebuke to the institutions that Dickens is

criticizing. In my first chapter, I analysed his references to the “East

Wind,” indicating his judgment on and criticism of hypocrisy and

unethical deeds. Now I want to explore the novel’s design of him as an

exemplary wise man whose use of biblical allusions enhances his

benevolent (if not divine) image.

The novel underscores Jarndyce’s magnanimity: to give just a few

examples, he entrusts his lawyers to give money to Miss Flite every

week, without being known as the giver; he provides for Charley and

her siblings; he helps Charley and Esther to shelter Jo; he stays on

reasonably good terms with the philanthropists, answering their fund-

raising letters in spite of their questionable charity work; and he

receives Ada and her child after Richard’s death. In addition, Jarndyce

is watchful and acts like a guard(ian), being alert to threats to his

people: he urges Richard to separate from Ada until he learns to take

responsibility. And though Jarndyce tolerates Skimpole’s childishness

at Bleak House, he discourages Skimpole from abusing Richard’s

depleted money, even if Skimpole accuses him of being “the

Incarnation of Selfishness” (BH 61.729). As Linda Lewis sums it up,

Jarndyce is “an example of the ideal Christian man” (123). Other critics

also interpret Jarndyce’s motivation and ethical stance in religious and

theological terms.21 I want to add that Jarndyce’s compassion has not

only a religious resonance but an almost divine feature. What the

narrator says about the doctor’s service to Mr. Merdle in Little Dorrit

21 Several critics explore Jarndyce’s theological stances and religious motivation: for example, Jennifer Gribble states that Jarndyce fulfils of “the commandment to ‘watch and ‘pray’” and acknowledges “[t]he parable images that define his Bleak House, the lamps burning and the welcoming house kept in good order,” and “his living in readiness” (“Compound” 209–10); David A. Ward considers him embodying Broad Church Anglicanism as Allan Woodcourt and Boythorn do, which “play a vital role in Esther Summerson’s development—with an ideal” in it, which is “liberal in its theology, keenly sensitive to the social imperatives of the Gospel, and nostalgic for a vision of rural communal life” (214). Paula Keatley, referring to Barry Quall’s observation of characters’ concern over the inheritance in Bleak House, regards both Jarndyce’s and Esther’s turning their backs entirely on the inheritance of the Jarndyce and Jarndyce Case as a better seeking of “an inheritance incorruptible, undefiled and that fadeth not” (80).

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is also true of Jarndyce:

Many wonderful things did [the doctor] see and hear, and much irreconcileable

moral contradiction did he pass his life among; yet his equality of compassion

was no more disturbed than the Divine Master’s of all healing was. He went, like

the rain, among the just and unjust, doing all the good he could and neither

proclaiming it in the synagogues nor at the corners of streets. (LD 2.25.688-89)

The quoted passage alludes to Matthew 5.44–45 about God’s mercy to

both the evil and the good, as well as to the warning in Matthew 6.2

about boastful almsgiving.22 The subject of the first sentence in the

quotation can be replaced by Jarndyce and still be true. In addition to

his pivotal role in plot development, I think his main role in the novel

is to demonstrate, through action, an individual’s moral goodness

rooted in Christian teaching, in contrast to institutional failure in

taking responsibility.

A further example of Jarndyce’s depiction as a benevolent father

figure verging on the divine can be found in his marriage proposal to

Esther. The episode echoes the biblical account of God’s test of

Abraham’s faith in Genesis.23 God asks Abraham to offer his only son

“for a burnt offering” in order to know whether he fears Him (Gen.

22.2–12). When Abraham shows that he is willing to sacrifice Isaac,

the angel of God instead provides a ram for the sacrifice. The test over,

God then blesses Abraham and his descendants. In the novel, Jarndyce

can be seen as acting in a similar way. He asks for Esther’s hand in

earnest, but she is then given freedom to choose as he blesses her and

her future family. And like Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice Isaac as

a burnt offering, Esther burns the dried remains of the flowers given

by Woodcourt, in an act that is symbolic of her sacrifice of past

romantic feelings (BH 44.538). Esther’s response gives Jarndyce not

22 Trey Philpotts traces the source to Matthew 5.44–45 and 6.2 (Companion 454); Walder traces it to Matthew 5.45 and 6.2 and 5 (“Notes” 852). 23 This analogy between Esther and Jardyce and Abraham and God has not been noted before.

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only “surprises” but also “great reward” because he knows her

willingness to sacrifice her love “to a sense of duty and affection” for

him “so completely, so entirely, so religiously” (BH 64.753 and 752).

However, this knowledge suffices, and Jarndyce does not accept

Esther’s sacrifice. To reward both Esther and Woodcourt, Jarndyce

gives up Esther as his fiancé, gives their marriage his blessings and

makes a gift of a country home also named “Bleak House.” The episode

highlights both Jarndyce’s exceptional magnanimity and the

importance of a good marriage as a reward for characters’ moral

goodness.

Unlike the omniscient narrator’s satirical use of biblical allusions

in Bleak House, Jarndyce’s allusions to the Bible express his opinions

in an earnest way. Referred to as “preaching,” Jarndyce’s suggestions

to Richard to lead an “active life,” to “[t]rust in nothing but in

Providence and [one’s] own efforts,” and “[n]ever separate the two”

(BH 14.162 and 161), manifest his own motto in life. Alluding to

Matthew 7.16, he laments Richard’s unrealistic expectation for the

Case: “He no more gathers grapes from thorns, or figs from thistles,

than older men did, in old times” (BH 60.715). 24 Unlike the

omniscient narrator’s ironic appropriation of Matthew 7.16 in Hard

Times (2.9.150), which comments on Louisa’s wasteful state of mind

(the golden waters gushing out of the fountain of Louisa’s young heart

“were flowing for the fertilization of the land where grapes are gathered

from thorns, and figs from thistles”), Jarndyce’s use of the same verse

shows the earnest pity he feels for Richard.

Like Woodcourt, Jarndyce interacts with the poor, being inspired

by their altruistic deeds. The episode about his visit together with Ada,

Skimpole, and Esther to Mrs. Blinder, landlady at Bell Yard, includes

several biblical allusions about compassion. Mrs. Blinder has cancelled

the rent of the debt collector Neckett’s three orphans, repeating his last

24 This allusion has been noted in most editions.

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words to her about the solidarity of Christian fellowship: “‘Mrs. Blinder,

whatever my calling may have been, I see a Angel sitting in this room

last night along with my child, and I trust her to Our Father!’” (BH

15.190). Mrs. Blinder’s simple words about the compassion for these

orphans move Mr. Jarndyce, who in turn refers to Jesus’s praise in

Matthew 25.40 of those who help the helpless: “It is enough that the

time will come when this good woman will find that it was much, and

that forasmuch as she did it unto the least of these—! […] could she

possibly continue this?” (BH 15.190; original emphasis).25 Elsewhere

Dickens writes to a Miss Burdett Coutts about a poor landlady who

would not turn two poor tenants out when they could not pay their rent:

“the goodness of the poor towards the poor [...] stands out so

beautifully” (Letters 7: 61). In the novel, Dickens does not need

Jarndyce to complete the second half of the quotation that says “ye

have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it

unto me [i.e., Christ]” (Matt. 25.40) since he is confident that the

readers would have filled it in.

In addition, Jarndyce’s question “can she possibly continue this?”

suggests a concern about the thirteen-year-old Charley’s taking on

parental duty to provide for her siblings. At the same time, the question

can also be understood as asking himself, his companions and even the

reader about the sustainability of Mrs. Blinder’s altruistic deeds. Both

interpretations highlight the individual responsibility in doing charity

work, implicitly rebuking the lack of social relief for orphans. Both

Charley’s industry and Mrs. Blinder’s altruistic cancellation of rents

inspire Mr. Jarndyce to do something good as well: he makes Charley

Esther’s maid, sends her brother Tom to school, and has Mrs. Blinder

look after her youngest sibling Emma.

In Hard Times, moral goodness lies in socially “lesser” characters,

such as the workers Stephen Blackpool and Rachael, Sleary the Circus

25 Lewis notes this allusion in her analysis of Jarndyce as a Christian ideal.

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manager and Sissy Jupe, in contrast to the higher-class Thomas

Gradgrind and Josiah Bounderby. Stephen’s own use of biblical

allusions, which I will return to, happens when he is dying. Before that,

he is a man of few words, life to him being “alwus a muddle” that he

“never get[s] beyond” (HT 1.10.54). He has endured a 19-year

matrimony in which his nameless wife deserts him and degrades

herself through alcoholism and (most likely) prostitution. Stephen is

kept from divorcing his wife, while his true love Rachael waits all those

years for him: a gender-switching allusion to the Old Testament

Rachael, whom Jacob, already married to Leah, had to work and wait

for seven long years.26

Stephen is first introduced by the narrator as “a man of perfect

integrity” (HT 1.10.52), in contrast to the industrial looms:

A special contrast, as every man was in the forest of looms where Stephen worked,

to the crashing, smashing, tearing piece of mechanism at which he laboured. […]

Set anywhere, side by side, the work of God and the work of man; and the former,

even though it be a troop of Hands of very small account, will gain in dignity

from the comparison. (HT 1.11.56).

The contrast is not only between Stephen and his looms, but also

between “man” in general and the “forest” of machines, and more

specifically, between “the work of God” represented by Stephen and

“the work of man” represented by the “mechanism” of materialistic

principles. In the Bible, the “work of God” is associated with wonder

(Job 33.29, Ps. 40.5, 66.3), hope (Ps. 78.7), and belief (John 6.29),

whereas “the work of man” refers to the making of idols (Isa. 37.19) or

something whose quality will be revealed and judged (1 Cor. 3.13).27 By

establishing this biblical dichotomy, the narrator paves way for the call

to change hostile working conditions facing workers.

Stephen’s spiritual and transcendental experience before his death

26 The allusion to Rachael is also noted by John R. Reed (21). 27 These allusions have not been noted by other scholars.

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in the Hell Shaft, an open pit he has accidentally fallen into, is used by

the novelist as a call for social reform. After Stephen’s expulsion from

Coketown he discovers that he has been falsely accused of robbery by

Gradgrind’s son Tom, the “whelp,” who has actually stolen the money

from Bounderby’s safe. Lying in the pit, symbolic of the industrial

wasteland, he experiences a kind of spiritual transcendence as he

forgets his own muddle and instead recalls that of others.

Remembering Rachael’s sister having died of pollution, he sees the

urgency for improving working people’s sanitary conditions. Seeing the

star “shinin’ on [him] down there in [his] trouble,” he remembers the

public petition and the workers pleading with the lawmakers “not to let

their work be murder to ‘em’”; he also makes his “dying prayer that aw

th’ world may on’y coom toogether more, an get a better unnerstan’in

o’one another, than when I were in’t my own weak seln”; finally he

takes the shining star for “the star as guided to Our Saviour’s home”

(HT 3.6.203–04). When he dies, the narrator underscores that the

“star ha[s] shown him where to find the God of the poor; and through

humility, and sorrow, and forgiveness, he ha[s] gone to his Redeemer’s

rest” (HT 3.6.204). Stephen’s role as a martyr resonates with his

biblical namesake, who was stoned to death as the first Christian

martyr. Becoming a victim of industrial malice, his death is

“instrumental” (Reed 21) in that he becomes the novelist’s mouthpiece

for improving both cross-class understanding and workers’ living and

working conditions.

The actions of Stephen’s moral beacon Rachael, the one that has

most profound influence on him, is based on the Beatitudes, part of the

Sermon on the Mount:

Blessed are the poor in spirit: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are

they that mourn: for they shall be comforted. Blessed are the meek: for they

shall inherit the earth. Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after

righteousness: for they shall be filled. Blessed are the merciful: for they shall

obtain mercy. Blessed are the pure in heart: for they shall see God. Blessed are

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the peacemakers: for they shall be called the children of God. Blessed are they

which are persecuted for righteousness’ sake: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

Blessed are ye, when men shall revile you, and persecute you, and shall say all

manner of evil against you falsely, for my sake. Rejoice, and be exceeding glad:

for great is your reward in heaven: for so persecuted they the prophets which

were before you. (Matt. 5.3–12)

Because of Rachael, Stephen changes from being sullen and miserable

to forgiving, and can therefore, like his biblical namesake, be counted

among the “persecuted.” Rachael tends his drunken and wounded wife

before his expulsion from Coketown. In order to justify her actions,

Rachael describes the woman as “wondering and lost, […] Wounded

too, and bruised” (HT 1.13.66), a possible allusion to Ezekiel 34.2–4

about God’s reprimanding the shepherds (i.e., the leaders of Israel) for

failing to look after their flocks: “The diseased have ye not

strengthened, neither have ye healed that which was sick, neither have

ye bound up that which was broken, neither have ye brought again that

which was driven away, neither have ye sought that which was lost.” In

the use of the word “bruised” there is an additional implied reference

to Isaiah 42.3, a verse that stresses God’s compassion: “A bruised reed

shall he not break, and the smoking flax shall he not quench.” The

allusive reading underscores Rachael’s selflessness and heart of

compassion. Then, adopting an archaic style, she uses an almost

verbatim quotation of John 8.7 of what Jesus said to the Pharisees

about the need to forgive the adulterous woman: “Thou know who said,

‘Let him who is without sin among you, cast the first stone at her!’

There have been plenty to do that. Thou art not the man to cast the last

stone, Stephen, when she is brought so low” (HT 1.13.66). Finally, if

not for Rachael’s prompt prevention, Stephen would have acquiesced

to his wife taking poison. Praising Rachael’s selfless compassion and

adopting the archaic style as well, Stephen laments his guilty

conscience: “Thou’rt an Angel; it may be, thou hast saved my soul alive”

(HT 1.13.70), which indicates both Rachael’s influence and Stephen’s

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change of heart.

Rachael’s help with Stephen’s wife does not end with Stephen’s

death. The novel again alludes to the Parable of Good Samaritan to

portray her altruistic deeds. Towards the end of the novel the narrator

reports that after “a long illness,” Rachael continues to support

Stephen’s wife. When the latter comes to her, “begging,” and “crying,”

Rachael remains “sweet-tempered and serene, and even cheerful” in

helping her out (HT 3.9.221). The biblical allusions used to portray

both Stephen and Rachael are thus tied to their biblical namesakes, but

are also anchored in the teachings of Christ. Through their use of

biblical allusions, the novel highlights the workers’ moral integrity and

compassion. As Janet L. Larson explains, their endurance of a hard life

and their emotional serenity and contentment resonate with the

“culture’s most cherished treasury of sacred stories” (Scripture 8). In

addition, these biblical allusions are intended to both unsettle and

trigger the indignation of middle-class readers about workers’ miseries,

to arouse a sympathy leading to social reforms. While seemingly minor,

these characters have the important function of embodying a more

positive interpretation of the biblical saying we reap what we sow, thus

becoming a foil for the rake’s progress suffered by the novel’s main

characters, Tom in particular.

In contrast to Stephen and Rachael, Sleary, the circus manager,

and Sissy Jupe do not themselves refer to the Bible (except for Sissy’s

crucial citation of the Golden Rule discussed above), but are

nevertheless embodiments of sentiments such as understanding and

support, steadfastness and trustworthiness that resonate with what is

professed and practised by Rachael and Stephen. Sleary’s power lies in

a combination of resolute action and succinct if cryptic expressions;

his lisping both amuses the readers and helps Dickens avoid being

preachy. In a crisis, Sleary and Sissy are the people to rely on. Offering

to hide Gradgrind’s guilty son Tom in return for Gradgrind’s kindness

to Sissy, Sleary paraphrases the Catechism on one’s duty (similar to

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Sissy’s answer to M‘Choakumchild’s question on Political Economy):

“The Thquire thtood by you, Thethilia, and I’ll thtand by the Thquire”

(HT 3.8.215). Being a “philosophical antithesis to Gradgrind’s

utilitarian educational thesis,” Sleary tells the simple truth through his

idiosyncratic lisping (Fowler 107). Thus, we see the novel’s internal

stratification of embodied values (i.e., Catechism vs. Political Economy)

as seen in the dialogical juxtaposition of the perverted rhetoric of

Gradgrind and Bounderby with the earnest and plain voices of Sissy

and Sleary. Similarly helpful, Sissy persuades Harthouse to leave

Coketown, accompanies Rachael to find Stephen, and helps the

Gradgrinds recover from the damage caused by their false belief.

Without drawing attention to the Bible, they live the life it teaches.

In Little Dorrit, a number of characters show a moral integrity

rooted in the teaching of the Bible, though, again, they are mostly

reticent about it. Similar to Mr. Bucket’s praise of Esther in Bleak

House as “a pattern” (BH 59.704), the first chapter of Little Dorrit

foretells Amy as an “imitat[ion of] the goodness of a better order of

beings” (LD 1.1.28). Amy’s resolutions to be “head of the fallen family”

and to be devoted to her father invert the biological father-daughter

relation into a psychological mother-child relation. Recognised by

John Chivery’s mother as “a constant slave” to her dependents (LD

1.22.260), Amy lives in solitude, doing her duty and without many

interactions with others, not even with her siblings, her father or

Maggie. She does not beat her own drum, and her goodness is revealed

by other characters. Highlighting her role “as an active ‘teacher’ of New

Testament themes” (Lenard 350), Mr. Meagles reminds Tattycoram of

Amy’s doing her duty and that “[h]er young life has been one of active

resignation, goodness, and noble service” (LD 2.33.793). Amy

manifests a mental and spiritual power that sees beyond the despairing

surroundings, trying to understand her father’s past and to have hope

for the future, similar to Stephen Blackpool’s inspirational experience

in the Hell Shaft. Though it does not exempt her from the

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disappointments and hardships of living in the debtor’s prison, she

does not feel these negative feelings for herself but for her father.

Amy’s sorrow is due to the knowledge that imprisonment has eroded

her father’s will, obliterated his memories of the beautiful nature, and

also deprived her of the chance to know his better person before

imprisonment. Remembering her father’s misfortune sustains her

compassion for him.

The novel portrays Amy as a redemptive figure, whose power of

devotion and love saves her father and Arthur emotionally in their

respective imprisonment at Marshalsea; the forgiveness she gives Mrs.

Clennam also partly redeems the latter. Though the novel’s overall

narrative structure is based on the contrast between Amy’s “liberating

New Testament spirit” and Mrs. Clennam’s “imprisoning Old

Testament ethos” (Walder, Religion 171), biblical allusions about

Amy’s redemptive role do not appear explicitly until Mrs. Clennam

kneels before her, asking for forgiveness for withholding the codicil

that regulates what Amy is entitled to. At Mrs. Clennam’s kneeling,

Amy implores her:

Be guided, only by the healer of the sick, the raiser of the dead, the friend of all

who were afflicted and forlorn, the patient Master who shed tears of compassion

for our infirmities. We cannot but be right if we put all the rest away, and do

everything in remembrance of Him. There is no vengeance and no infliction of

suffering in His life, I am sure. There can be no confusion in following Him, and

seeking for no other footsteps, I am certain. (LD 2.31.774; my emphasis)

This allusion to the actions of “the patient Master” in relation to the

sick and the dead reveals the source of Amy’s spiritual empowerment,

and explains the reason why she remains untainted by either poverty

at Marshalsea or riches in High Society, the metaphorical prison.

Dickens’s “continuing if muted hope in the true faith which can bring

light to man in his imprisoned state” is exemplified by Amy (Walder,

Religion 180). In a novel of social criticism named after her, and with

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two books entitled “Poverty” and “Riches,” the narrative places her at

its moral centre. Throughout the main part of the novel, Dickens uses

visual metaphors about light and darkness to depict both the “divine

origin of the love and forgiveness” and the “imprisoning darkness” of

the fallen spiritual conditions (Walder, Introduction vii; Religion

180).28 The references to the character and mission of Jesus in the

quotation intend to remind not only Mrs. Clennam of the importance

of following good examples, but challenge the reader to engage in

“addressing the moral and ethical concerns of this world” (Lenard 351–

52). 29 I also note that in contrast to the plural forms of idolatry

criticised in the novel, the stress in the quotation is on following “only”

Christ.

After the forgiveness scene, the narrator describes a peaceful scene

of sunset in biblical terms:

The beauties of the sunset had not faded from the long light films of cloud that

lay at peace in the horizon. From a radiant centre, over the whole length and

breadth of the tranquil firmament, great shoots of light streamed among the

early stars, like signs of the blessed later covenant of peace and hope that

changed the crown of thorns into a glory. (LD 2.31.775)

Combining the natural imagery of light rays with the Christian imagery

of “the crown of thorns”30 that is transformed to “a glory,” the novelist

highlights the power of forgiveness. The description of the afterglow of

the sunset and its rays, in the words of Dickens in one of his letters,

“acts as an emblem of divine Grace” (Letters 8: 313n),31 highlighting

28 Walder traces Dickens’s depiction of man’s condition of being “housed in a gloomy prison shut off from the light which but dimly penetrates to him” to “Romantic [and] neo-Platonic” tradition (Religion 179–180). 29 Mary Lenard notes the importance that Dickens attaches to both “life” and “lesson” of Jesus Christ in the New Testament. In this quotation Amy both mentions life and lesson, Lenard considers it revealing Amy’s role as a teacher. See, pp. 340–41 and 350–51. 30 The crown of thorns is a Christian symbol for humility and passion. See Matthew 27.29, Mark 15.17, and John 19.2 and 5. 31 Its resemblance to Wordsworth’s The Excursion was first noted by Alan Hill in Wordsworth’s “Grand Design” (1986) (Letters 8: 313n). George Yeats notes the change of novel’s metaphorical description of air. When Amy forgives Mrs. Clennam, it “offers a fresh vista” (351–352), which supports the view that Amy “has a cleansing influence on whatever she touches” (Yeats 332).

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“the divine agency of Amy Dorrit’s love and mercy” (Walder, Religion

183). As an ideal character, Amy exemplifies selfless and long-suffering

love.

At the end of the novel, the marriage scene is described with the

sunlight “shining on [Amy and Arthur newly married] through the

painted figure of Our Saviour on the window” (LD 2.34.804);

afterwards, they go “quietly down into the roaring streets, inseparable

and blessed […] pass[ing] along in sunshine and in shade” (LD

2.34.806). Contrasting the “stare” of blazing light from above at the

beginning of the novel, the sunshine has its intensity ameliorated and

its undecipherable message removed. With “Our Saviour” positioned

between the light outside and the people inside, the scene alludes

obliquely to 1 Timothy 2.5 about Jesus being the mediator between God

and men.32 The scene also analogically reveals Amy as a mediator and

supporter for both her father and Arthur in their respective physical

and psychological imprisonment. Her persevering endurance makes it

possible for them to regain freedom. Amy’s musing over the spikes and

bars on the prison window reveals the hard trial she goes through:

“[t]he spikes had never looked so sharp and cruel, nor the bars so heavy,

nor the prison space so gloomy and contracted” (LD 1.19.235). The

pattern on the prison window has finally been replaced by the pattern

of Jesus on the church window, in the process making Amy herself a

pattern to be emulated.

In contrast to Amy’s strong character, based on her religious faith,

Arthur, while earnest and persistent is sometimes uncertain and

sentimental. His lack of confidence, including his uncertainty about

Amy’s love for him, is caused by a severe and perverted religious

upbringing, analysed in the third chapter in connection with Mrs.

Clennam. The narrator sums it up:

32 Walder also notes the visual metaphor that “express[es] the divine origin of the love and forgiveness which has brought about their modest consummation” (Religion 180).

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he was a man who had deep-rooted in his nature, a belief in all the gentle and

good things his life had been without. Bred in meanness and hard dealing, this

had rescued him to be a man of honorable mind and open hand. Bred in

coldness and severity, this had rescued him to have a warm and sympathetic

heart. Bred in a creed too darkly audacious to pursue, through its process of

reversing the making of man in the image of his Creator to the making of his

Creator in the image of an erring man, this had rescued him to judge not, and in

humility to be merciful, and have hope and charity. (LD 1.13.170)

The quotation shows Arthur’s resistance to the perverted beliefs held

by Mrs. Clennam, who reverses Genesis 1.26 to make “his Creator in

the image of an erring man.” As Carolyn Oulton observes, Arthur’s

belief in honour and compassion highlights an intrinsic moral

goodness that counters Mrs. Clennam’s insistence on his innate

corruption (108). Yet, in spite of these personal traits, Arthur has “no

will” to “put into action” because he thinks that the “lights” of “[w]ill,

purpose, [and] hope” are “extinguished” in him (LD 1.2.34). Reversing

God’s promise in Isaiah 42.3 that a “bruised reed shall he not break,”

Arthur comments ironically on his repressed upbringing: “Trained by

main force; broken, not bent; heavily ironed with an object on which I

was never consulted and which was never mine” (LD 1.2.34). The

comment underscores his reflexive understanding of the inefficacy of

such upbringing, yet the quotation also reveals how his understanding

of life is filtered through a religious lens. Meanwhile, he is not idealised

but shown to be an erring man tempted by monetary gains, not for

himself but for his business partner Daniel Doyce, whose money he

loses in Merdle’s speculation. Arthur can extricate himself from Mrs.

Clennam’s incarcerating power through his exposure to Amy’s

liberating light of truth, thereby making a spiritual journey from a

suffocating kind of religion towards the liberating light of another, and

in the process teaching the reader about the spiritual power of a

transformed inner self.

Arthur is portrayed as a man of spiritual meditation as he reflects

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on the meaning of his life: “the flowing of the stream, here the rushes,

there the lilies, nothing uncertain or unquiet, upon this road that

steadily runs away; while you, upon your flowing road of time, are so

capricious and distracted” (LD 1.16.197). His address to himself in free

direct speech reveals to the reader how he applies a self-reflexive

perspective to explore his path in life. Arthur also reflects on the river’s

“insensibility to happiness and […] pain” (LD 1.16.205), indicating an

acute sense of pain. His meditation is both similar to and different

from Amy’s musing over the prison spikes: both are introspective and

try to seek spiritual meanings in life, but Amy’s is rooted in her

religious belief and empowers her, whereas Arthur’s reveals his lack of

confidence and inner strength.33 Having experienced the ills of the

Barnacles in the Circumlocution Office, Arthur develops an aversion to

the institution and its people, as discussed in the section on the

Mustard Seed.

Arthur is also portrayed as having a strong sense of responsibility,

in spite of making wrong business decisions, triggered by his father’s

ambiguous words “D.N.F.” (do not forget) before his death. It leads to

both his suspicion of his family’s wrongdoing and the subsequent

confrontation with Mrs. Clennam when he suspects the Clennams are

taking away the money of the Dorrits. His sense of responsibility is also

reflected by his atonement in following Pancks to “invest” with Mr.

Merdle. He comments with irony on his own craving for monetary

speculation with an allusion to Mathew 15.14: “Blind leaders of the

blind, Pancks! Blind leaders of the blind! But Doyce, Doyce, Doyce; my

injured partner!” (LD 2.26.698). Not thinking of his own loss, he tries

to exonerate Doyce: “what can I do for my partner, how can I best make

reparation to him?” (LD 2.26.700). Doyce makes clear his “prejudice”

against “speculating,” but Arthur cannot resist the temptation and

33 Mason regards “psychologized individuals” in the nineteenth century fiction as the legacy of Bunyan’s “intensely introspective and self-conscious characters” in The Pilgrim’s Progress (“Bunyan” 154–55).

195

chooses to ignore their mutual agreement not to speculate.

Remembering Doyce as the “honest, self-helpful, [and] indefatigable

old man,” he decides to reap what he has sown and to “clear his partner

morally, to the fullest extent, and publicly and unreservedly to declare

that he Arthur Clennam, of that Firm, had of his own sole act […]

embarked its resources in the swindles that had lately perished, was

the only real atonement within his power” (LD 2.26.697 and 701). His

confession echoes the title of the chapter “Reaping the Whirlwind,”

which in turn alludes to Hosea 8.7: “For they have sown the wind, and

they shall reap the whirlwind” (Walder, “Notes” 852). Arthur’s taking

the sole responsibility and accepting his imprisonment at Marshalsea

highlight his atonement for his business failure, thereby making him

“stan[d] out against the [commercial] trend of the society”

(Butterworth 66).

How Arthur is set free from the debtor’s prison and resumes his

partnership with Doyce echoes the account of the Parable of the Lost

Son in Luke 15.11–32, as Lewis also notes (178). Apart from being the

punishment of a debtor, Arthur’s imprisonment symbolises his

repentance and taking his due responsibility. Referring to Sallie

McFague’s comment on the Parable of the Lost Son’s “radicalness of

love, faith, and hope,” Lewis highlights Doyce’s being a symbol of God’s

boundless love (178–79). Through the episode of Arthur’s

imprisonment and experience of forgiveness through Doyce, both

become educational examples for the reader to learn about the danger

of speculation, the importance of repentance and of taking one’s

responsibility, as well as of the need to forgive.

In this chapter, I have analysed Dickens’s use of biblical allusions

to describe the moral goodness of both minor characters and major

protagonists: moral goodness can be shown through engagement of

idealised female characters with their religious faith or the more

secular interaction of less exemplary males and minor characters, as

well as through the deeds of exemplary protagonists. While some of

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these biblical allusions are explicit and some implicit, they all point to

Christian teachings as the root of novels’ moral goodness, realizing the

novels’ didactic purpose to teach the reader through exemplary deeds.

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Conclusion

My analysis of biblical allusions in three Condition-of-England novels

published in the 1850s has shown that Dickens focuses both on the

message and the manner of expressing it. As he exhorted Henry Morley

in 1852, “it is not enough to see a thing and go home and describe it,

but that the necessity is, forever upon us of patiently considering how

to describe it, so as to give it some fanciful attraction or some new air”

(Letters 6: 790–91). Focusing on biblical allusions in these novels has

allowed me to observe his ways of creating three-way conversations

between these novels, the Bible and the socio-historical context.

Dickens uses the Bible both in straightforward and satirical ways to

mediate his social criticism and to instruct the reader about the need

for social improvement and individual moral actions: appealing to his

readers’ familiarity with the Bible, he engages them in imagining

contemporary issues through a fiction that continually taps into

biblical tropes even as it criticises the misuse of religion.

The teachings of the Bible provide these novels with a moral

foundation from which to critique social perversions and individual ills.

The satirical portrayal of individuals and authorities as idols and

wrongdoers who abuse their power and deceive others is designed to

arouse the reader’s indignation, echoing the radical discourses that

strove to reform Victorian society. However, I have regarded these

often satirical messages as revealing Dickens’s political and social

commitment rather than, as Robert Butterworth argues (140), a

religious stance. Straightforward biblical allusions and satirical ones

echo biblical dichotomies such as light vs. darkness, goodness vs. evil,

and seeming vs. being, providing the novelist with tools to channel the

longings of the poor for improved social conditions. At the same time,

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while Janet L. Larson argues that Dickens’s “steady increase in ironic

biblical allusions” in his later novels reflects “religious anxiety”

(Scripture 6, 14), my analysis has shown that the allusions provide a

stable moral centre based on biblical teachings. Even when the narrator

or the characters misappropriate the biblical texts, the Bible remains a

corrective voice that both underscores and judges such

misappropriations.

As literary and rhetorical devices, Dickens uses biblical allusions

to portray characters and outline themes, but most of all to create a

moral framework for the fictive world by appealing to the reader’s

familiarity with the Bible. He alludes to the Bible when selecting book

and chapter headings, as well as when choosing character names. Such

allusions activate a reader’s analogical interpretation. His more

straightforward use of biblical allusions offers the reassurance of

conventional values, whereas he often exposes and satirises social ills

through the narrator’s and characters’ misappropriations of the Bible.

To challenge the bias against the poor, he underscores their dignity,

kindness and compassion for each other through simple, non-ironic

allusions to the Bible, often contrasted with a biting satirical use of the

Bible to judge the indulgence and negligence shown by institutions and

High Society. To cultivate the reader’s sympathy for the poor, he spares

no efforts in revealing abuses even if this means offending religious and

social groups.

Dividing the analytical chapters according to the different uses of

biblical allusions has allowed me to observe common patterns in these

novels. In the first chapter, I showed how biblical symbols set out in the

opening numbers of the serialisation are used to construct dichotomies

that prefigure tensions between values embodied in characters and

institutions. Such dichotomies combined with the biblical trope of

idolatry in the opening numbers were shown to create a platform from

which to critique social problems, a platform conditioned by Victorian

typological habits of mind that activate biblical source texts in the

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readers’ understanding and reception of symbolic meanings in fiction.

In the second chapter, I showed how the narrator satirically

appropriates the Bible (and the Book of Common Prayer) to describe

the social neglect of the poor, the evasion of responsibilities by the

bureaucracy, and the heretical mind-sets held by officials, issues

closely related to the novels’ critique of institutional negligence of

responsibilities found in Bleak House and Little Dorrit. Victorian

conventions such as deathbed scenes and burial services are

furthermore repurposed in the novels to expose social problems in a

call for sanitation reforms and domestic charity.

The third chapter showed how biblical allusions are used as a

means of satirizing characters whose perverted values and practices are

closely linked to the novels’ indictment of institutional ills. The

misappropriations of the Bible by perverted characters, such as Vholes

in the legal system, Bounderby and Slackbridge in industry, and people

in religious circles, illustrate their distorted understanding of

themselves and their profession, as well as of those suffering from their

treatment.

The analysis in the fourth chapter of the idealised characters’ more

straightforward use of biblical allusions to persuade, comfort, and

encourage each other, showed their goodness to be the moral centre in

these novels. The analysis demonstrated the power of their religious

engagement, which in turn reflect the extent to which moral action in

Victorian England was rooted in religious belief.

The dialogical reading of biblical allusions and the socio-historical

context revealed that Dickens incorporates stratified voices that

combine a simultaneous satirical and non-satirical use of the Bible.

Biblical source texts expose deviations from the Bible’s teaching made

by institutions and individuals and pass judgment on their

wrongdoings, thereby appealing to the reader’s indignation and

sympathy for the victims of such wrongs. The examination of Dickens’s

letters and journalism also complemented the findings of my study in

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that the uses of biblical allusions in both fiction and journalistic articles

reveal how Dickens’s imaginative energy had been channelled through

the Bible to problematise social issues and express his personal stance.

My analysis has shown that among biblical allusions, the religious

trope of idolatry is employed most frequently. In the opening

instalments of Bleak House, the Court of Chancery is presented as a

false church with its Chancellor an idol that plays God even as he ruins

the suitors’ lives. Similarly, in the opening instalments of Hard Times,

Gradgrind’s idolatrous deification of Facts is what harms his students

and his own children. To stress the urgency for social reform, these

novels thus express their stances in religious terms by associating

institutional negligence and individual wrongdoings with the trope of

idolatry. Similarly, critiquing the mismanagement of the

Circumlocution Office in Little Dorrit, Dickens portrays it as an

idolatrous organisation, while Mr. Merdle is presented as an idol,

misleading his worshippers. Some of the other characters are also

satirised for their idolatrous practices, including Mrs. General and Mrs.

Clennam in Little Dorrit, and Slackbridge and Bounderby in Hard

Times. In addition, the governing circles embrace the discourse of

idolatry and toadyism to achieve either career advancement or a sense

of complacency. As the study has shown, wrongdoings in institutions

and individuals are often described as idolatrous practices.

In my study more attention has been given to the novels’ portrayal,

through biblical allusions, of minor characters than in previous studies.

In addition to minor characters like Jo, Vholes, Rigaud, Mr. Meagles,

and Pancks analysed by other scholars, I have looked at Miss Flite,

Charley Neckett, and General George in Bleak House, Slackbridge,

Rachael, Bitzer, and Sleary in Hard Times, the Barnacles, Bar, Mrs.

General, and Mr. Casby in Little Dorrit. These characters, whether

perverted or good, illustrate the novelist’s use of the Bible as a means

of offering moral instruction to the reader in an unostentatious way.

Studying biblical allusions related to minor characters has also allowed

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me to explore Dickens’s use of puns combined with biblical allusion. I

analysed such combined rhetorical uses in words such as “judgment”

(alluding to the Judgment of God in Miss Flite’s speeches), “vessel(s)”

(alluding to 2 Timothy 2.20–21 in descriptions of the Barnacles and

Rev. Mr. Chadband), and “legion” (alluding to Mark 5.9 in descriptions

about the Circumlocution Office, Vholes and his likes, and Harthouse).

In these cases, the puns connected to the biblical source texts serve to

highlight deviations, including the Court’s procrastination, the

dishonourable behaviour of vessels like the Barnacles and Chadband,

and the evil nature shown by the above-mentioned institutions and

individuals. The analysis shows that these allusions and puns call for

an analogous reading of these novels and the Bible.

Such readings of characters and their biblical equivalents also

allowed me to examine biblical allusions that have not been recognised

previously. In Bleak House, for example, I have identified biblical

allusions to Isaiah 53.7 in the description of Mr. Jellyby as a “shorn

lamb” that is “humble and meek” (BH 23.369), while the Chancellor’s

seat as a “curtained sanctuary” is an implied comparison with the

Mercy seat in Exodus 26: 33–34. In Hard Times, the narrator

introduces the worker Stephen Blackpool as “the work of God,” in

contrast with “the work of man” referring to “the forest of looms” (HT

1.11.56), while in the Bible “the work of God” is associated with wonder,

hope, and belief (Job 33.29, Ps 40.5, 66.3, 78.7) and “the work of man”

is either related to idol-making (Isa. 37.19) or awaits judgment (1 Cor.

3.13). In Little Dorrit, there is a vague allusion to the relationship

between Laban and Jacob in Genesis 30.25–43 in the descriptions of

the forced work Pancks has to endure “for the next seven years at half

wages and double grind” (LD 1.35.408).

More significant than the individual examples mentioned above

are three scenes that the study has shown to allude to the Bible. Esther’s

consent to Jarndyce’s proposal by burning her cherished dried flowers,

symbolic of her affection for Woodcourt, is an allusion to Abraham’s

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sacrifice of Isaac in Genesis 22. Similarly, Bar’s fawning on Bishop,

“sitting at [Bishop’s] feet and feeding on his precepts” (LD 2.12.555),

alludes to the Canaanite woman’s reply to Christ in Matthew 15.21-28

about a dog eating crumbs fallen from the master’s table. Finally, the

crowd scene when Rigaud awaits his sentence and is later set free

alludes to the setting free of Barabbas in Matthew 27.16–17. The last

two scenes with their graphic allusions to the Bible achieve a satirical

and comic effect in their criticism of Bar, Rigaud, and the authorities in

general. Such graphic satire is an area that can be further explored in

future research.

By using biblical allusions to describe institutional negligence,

society’s mercantile ethos, individual wrongdoings as well as

exemplary deeds, Dickens’s novels appeal to his reader’s familiarity

with the Bible in order to underscore the importance of both individual

and communal actions, such as sanitation reform, cross-class

understanding, and domestic charity. Dickens took an instrumental

view of the “powers and purposes of Fiction” in a letter to an American

friend who urged him to put his fiction to more practical uses. Dickens

replied:

I think it possible that I may have considered the powers and purposes of Fiction,

a little longer and a little more anxiously and attentively, than your lady friend.

To interest and affect the general mind in behalf of anything that is clearly

wrong—to stimulate and rouse the public soul to a compassionate or indignant

feeling that it must not be—without obtruding any pet theory of cause or cure,

and so throwing off allies as they spring up—I believe to be one of Fiction's

highest uses. And this is the use to which I try to turn it. (Letters 7: 405; original

emphasis)

Pointing out a novelist’s mission to write about “anything” that “is

clearly wrong,” he also underscored the power of affecting “the public

soul” so as to arouse strong compassion and feeling without describing

specific causes of problems or endorsing particular solutions. In his

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novels, Dickens dealt with individual and social vices in general

without allying himself to any particular political or religious group,

and his use of biblical allusion is similarly instrumental. He uses it to

inform the reading public about what “must not be” while also

appealing to their compassion. His life-long commitment to fiction and

engagement in social improvement testify to his devotion to his career

and his belief in the “powers and purposes of Fiction” to effect change.

204

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Index

Alexander, Doris, 149, 151

Alter, Robert, 10

Alton, Anne Hiebert, 47, 53

Anderson, Benedict, 3

Andrews, Malcolm, 70, 101

Bakhtin, M. M., i, 8, 12–13, 16,

72, 110, 138, 165

Bell, Vereen M., 149, 151, 152

Bergvall, Åke, 44, 45, 47

Bible, 2–5, 5, 6, 13, 15, 88, 96,

198, 199, 200, 201, 202

Genesis, 15, 31, 127, 135, 175,

182, 193, 201, 202

Exodus, 34, 41, 66, 154, 174,

201

Leviticus, 45

Numbers, 154

Deuteronomy, 121

Joshua, 159

1 Kings, 135, 156

1 Chronicles, 77

Esther, 164

Job, 22, 31, 41, 45, 91, 185,

201

Psalms, 38, 41, 45, 73, 91,

108, 136, 201

Proverbs, 45, 121

Ecclesiastes, 16, 55, 72, 175

Isaiah, 41, 135, 144, 185, 187,

193, 201

Jeremiah, 41, 45

Ezekiel, 41, 187

Daniel, 107

Hosea, 41, 45

Hosea, 195

Jonah, 41

Habakkuk, 33

Zechariah, 135

Matthew, 45, 46, 50, 52, 60,

67, 77, 80, 88, 98, 108,

109, 110, 112, 121, 149, 151,

165, 166, 169, 172, 177, 182,

183, 184, 187, 202

Mark, 50, 51, 67, 98, 99, 109,

123, 155, 177, 191, 201

Luke, 45, 50, 67, 83, 99, 109,

120, 149, 156, 165, 169, 195

John, 45, 60, 67, 155, 185,

187, 191

Acts, 108, 133

Romans, 88, 121, 177

1 Corinthians, 73, 74, 126,

185, 201

Galatians, 45

Philippians, 118, 133

2 Thessalonians, 129, 157

1 Timothy, 66, 106, 144, 145,

149, 192

2 Timothy, 100, 201

Hebrews, 156

1 Peter, 119, 146

Revelation, 35, 36, 63, 122

221

Bitzer, Lloyd F., i, 14

Bleak House, 30

Ada, 35, 119, 141, 177, 181,

183

Allan Woodcourt, 79, 85,

178–80

Chancellor, 31–36, 38, 90–

94

Charley Neckett, 168–70, 184

Charlotte Neckett. See

Charley Neckett under

Bleak House

East Wind, 39–42

Esther Summerson, 35, 39,

42, 43, 84, 119, 122, 146,

153–55

General George, 168, 170,

171, 174

George Rouncewell. See

General George

Jo, 75–77, 79–81, 82–85, 89,

90, 136–40

John Jarndyce, 39–42, 42,

180–84

Lady Dedlock, 83, 164, 180

Miss Flite, 33–39

Mr. Snagsby, 83, 84

Mrs Rouncewell, 170

Mrs. Blinder, 174, 183, 184

Mrs. Jellyby, 141–46

Mrs. Pardiggle, 88, 141, 146–

48

Mrs. Rachael, 135, also see

the Chadbands under

Bleak House

Mrs. Rouncewell, 170

Mrs. Snagsby, 135

Nemo, 75–77, 81, 83, 90, 178

Rev. Mr. Chadband, 88, 132–

41

Richard Carstone, 73, 118,

119, 120–22, 143, 179, 180,

183

the Chadbands, 90

Vholes, 118–23, 132

Blount, Trevor, 82

Bodenheimer, Rosemarie, 126

Bornstein, George, 4, 43, 52, 99

Bowen, John, 4, 116, 162

Bradbury, Nicola, 31, 32, 33

Briggs, Asa, 88

Butt, John, 57, 70, 86, 142, 149

Butterworth, Robert D., 18, 19,

75, 78, 87, 102, 137, 195, 197

Buzard, James, 139, 140

Carruthers, Jo, 72, 80, 81

Çelikkol, Ayşe, 126

Chesterton, G. K., 24, 31, 32,

141

Coles, Nicolas, 128

Colledge, Gary, 18, 134, 142,

149, 162, 177

Collins, Philip, 49

Colón, Susan E., 4, 22, 23, 24

Crump, M. J., 40, 41

Cunningham, Valentine, 76, 87,

89, 161, 170

Curran, Timothy, 32, 33

Danahay, Martin, 161

David, Deirdre, 139, 145

222

Dickens, Charles

“Dickens’ Working Plans [for

Bleak House]”, 40, 122

“Dickens’ Working Plans [for

Hard Times]”, 45

“The Number Plans [for

Little Dorrit]”, 68

A Christmas Carol, 68

All the Year Round

“Two Views of a Cheap

Theatre”, 148

Bleak House. See Bleak

House

Hard Times. See Hard Times

Household Words, 44

“A Preliminary Word”, 56

“Cheap Patriotism”, 102

“On Strike”, 129

“Railway Strike”, 129, 130

“The Noble Savage”, 134

“The Toady Tree”, 112

On Strike”, 129

Little Dorrit. See Little

Dorrit

Postscript to Our Mutual

Friend, 58

The Letters of Charles

Dickens, 1, 56, 57, 71, 85,

90, 96, 104, 134, 161, 162,

170, 178, 184, 191, 197, 202

The Life of Our Lord, 18, 162

The Speeches of Charles

Dickens, 79

Dickinson, Christian, 20, 74,

81, 134

Douglas-Fairhurst, Robert, 140

Drew, John M. L., 28, 151

Edgecombe, Rodney Stenning,

60, 65, 66

Fessenbecker, Patrick, 161

Fielding, K. J., 48, 151

Flint, Kate, 45

Ford, George H., 20, 28, 29, 35,

119, 120, 121, 135, 136, 147

Forster, John, 29, 45, 56, 104,

170

Fowler, Roger, 189

Freedgood, Elaine, 145

Furneau, Holly, 142, 144

Gill, Stephen C., 2, 7, 74, 83,

88, 91, 118, 119, 120, 122

Goodlad, Lauren M. E., 88, 180

Grenander, M. E., 132

Gribble, Jennifer, 4, 11, 19, 31,

32, 33, 35, 44, 50, 92, 93, 95,

153, 167, 181

Haly, William Taylor, 95

Hamer, Douglas, 118

Hard Times, 43

Bitzer, 16–17

Josiah Bounderby, 48, 49,

52–54, 124, 127, 130, 131,

189

Louisa Gradgrind, 43, 46, 48,

49–54, 50, 51, 166, 183

Rachael, 184–89

Sissy Jupe, 16–17, 50, 51, 53,

126, 165–66, 168, 188, 189

Slackbridge, 127–31

Sleary, 54, 184, 188, 189

Stephen Blackpool, 44, 49,

54, 124, 126–28, 127, 184–

223

90, 201

Thomas Gradgrind, 16, 45–

55, 126, 165, 166, 200

Tom Gradgrind, 46, 48, 50,

54, 186, 188

Hardy, Barbara, 7

Heady, Emily Walker, 23

Henry, Matthew, 46, 60

Hermerén, Göran, 10

Hollington, Michael, 99, 116

Holquist, Michael, 12, 165

Irwin, William, 3, 9, 10, 11

Jahn, Karen, 33, 76, 80, 82

Jasper, David, 6

Jay, Elisabeth, 12, 77, 78, 80,

155, 157, 158, 159, 168

Jeffrey, David Lyle, 46

Jewusiak, Jacob, 69

John, Juliet, 59, 62, 63, 65, 66,

119, 125, 126

Jones, Norman W., 10, 11

Jordan, John O., 76, 83

Kaplan, Fred, 29

Keatley, Paula, 31, 32, 33, 35,

134, 137, 181

Kincaid, James R., 4, 63, 157

Kingsley, Charles, 75, 89, 119,

122

Knight, Mark, 56, 99, 109, 156,

157, 175

Korg, Jacob, 93

Landow, George P., 29, 30

Larson, Janet L., 11, 21, 22, 24,

31, 33, 41, 55, 58, 72, 91, 154,

155, 164, 188, 198

Larson, Timothy, 7

Leavis, F. R., 43, 128

Leavis, Q. D., 37, 154

Ledger, Sally, 71, 73, 80, 81, 93,

103, 114

Lenard, Mary, 22, 55, 152, 189,

191

Lewis, Linda, 11, 22, 23, 32, 45,

56, 66, 67, 179, 181, 184, 195

Little Dorrit

Amy Dorrit, 55, 56, 61, 69,

154, 166–68, 189–94

Arthur Clennam, 62, 69, 153,

156–59, 193–95

Bar, 111–13, 202

Cavalletto. See John Baptist

Cavalletto under Little

Dorrit

Christopher Casby, 65, 149,

151–53, 152, 175, 176

John Baptist Cavalletto, 62,

67

Mr. Dorrit, 108–9, 150

Mr. Merdle, 104–10

Mrs. Clennam, 153, 156–60,

190–94

Mrs. General, 65, 149–51, 152

Mrs. Gowan, 104

Mrs. Merdle, 105, 151

Pancks, 151, 168, 171, 174–76,

194, 201

Rigaud, 60, 61–67, 100, 202

224

the Barnacles, 100–104, 111,

113, 114, 172–73

the Plornishes, 174–76

Litvack, Leon, 2

M’Culloch, J. M., 48

Machacek, Gregory, 10

Mackenzie, Hazel, 8

Mandal, Anthony, 166

Manning, Sylvia, 56, 68, 69

Marx, Steven, 14

Mason, Emma, 134, 156, 176,

194

Masson, David, 2

Mayhew, Henry, 140

Miller, J. H., 37, 66, 91, 92, 123,

141

Monod, Sylvère, 28, 29, 35, 39,

119, 120, 121, 135, 136, 147

Morris, Pam, 137

Myers, William, 103, 104

Nixon, Jude V., 19, 20, 44, 72

Nussbaum, Martha, 47

OED, 8, 9, 98, 100, 101, 116,

117, 142, 144, 150, 152, 180

Oulton, Carolyn W. de la L., 42,

63, 74, 80, 89, 90, 134, 140,

141, 147, 149, 153, 157, 178,

193

Parker, Ben, 106

Parliamentary Papers, 6

Paroissien, David, 39, 74, 77,

81, 116

Paz, Dennis G., 128

Perri, Carmela, 9, 11

Phelan, James, 29, 44, 58

Philpotts, Trey, 56, 63, 64, 65,

66, 71, 94, 95, 99, 102, 103,

107, 108, 110, 173, 182

Pickering, W. S. F., 6

Pickrel, Paul, 116

Pope, Norris, 1, 4, 18, 134, 142,

146, 148

Prickett, Stephen, 6, 168

Qualls, Barry V., 21, 30, 37

Quarles, Francis, 30, 37, 38

Rainsford, Dominic, 177

Reed, John R., 185, 186

Ross, Stephanie, 9, 10, 11

Sanders, Andrew, 3, 18, 35, 73,

165, 180

Schor, Hilary, 1, 2, 4, 8

Schwarzbach, F. S., 40

Schweizer, Florian, 162

Sen, Sambudha, 96, 113

Shatto, Susan, 35, 77, 83, 86,

133, 134, 135, 136, 138, 147,

154

Showalter, Elaine, 149

Simpson, Margaret, 166

Sinnett, Jane, 48

Slater, Michael, 94, 95, 102

Smith, Anne, 151

Smith, Jonathan, 100, 103, 113

Snow, C. P., 114

225

Steig, Michael, 59

Stephen, James Fitzjames, 1, 2,

69

Stone, Harry, 119

Sucksmith, Harvey Peter, 57, 95

Thompson, Terry W., 23

Thormählen, Marianne, 6

Tick, Stanley, 173, 174

Tillotson, Kathleen, 57, 70, 71,

86, 126, 142, 147, 149

Trilling, Lionel, 55, 61, 62, 69,

149

Walder, Dennis, 1, 4, 18, 55, 58,

63, 66, 67, 74, 77, 99, 102,

103, 104, 107, 108, 109, 110,

134, 138, 149, 156, 158, 159,

168, 172, 175, 182, 190, 191,

192, 195

Ward, David A., 20, 134, 141,

181

Welsh, Alexander, 71, 80, 89

Wheeler, Michael, 7, 9, 20, 21,

43, 99

Williams, Raymond, 70

Wills, W. H., 57, 86, 95

Yeats, George, 191

Biblical Allusion in Three Charles Dickens Condition-of-England Novels

Charles Dickens believes in the powers and purposes of fiction to affect the reader. In three novels published in the 1850s, Bleak House (1852–53), Hard Times (1854), and Little Dorrit (1855–57), he makes use of the reader’s familiarity with the Bible so as to engage them in imagining contemporary social conditions. This study investigates the common patterns of biblical allusions in these three Condition-of-England novels. Central to the interpretation of biblical allusions in these novels is the dialogic relation between the biblical and fictive worlds, as well as of both to the Victorian socio-historical context. The study demonstrates that biblical allusions are used in straightforward and satirical ways that not only portray characters, develop plots, and reveal themes, but also build a moral framework for the fictive world and mediate the novels’ critique of wrongdoings by institutions and individuals so as to instruct the reader about the need for social improvement and individual moral actions.

DOCTORAL THESIS | Karlstad University Studies | 2021:21

ISSN 1403-8099

ISBN 978-91-7867-226-4 (pdf)

ISBN 978-91-7867-216-5 (print)