SOURCE: “The Triangle in Charles Dickens,” in Patriarchy and Incest from Shakespeare to Joyce, University Press of Florida, 1998, pp. 54-79.

[In the following excerpt, Ford traces events in Dickens' life that parallel a search for first love depicted in many of his works. She explains that Dickens' lifelong fascination with father/daughter relationships was explored in most of his novels, and that Dombey and Son is an especially significant work on this theme.]

The relationship between psychobiographical data and the recurrent father/daughter theme is particularly explicit for Charles Dickens (1812-70). The early trauma of his relegation to the blacking factory at the age of twelve, which entailed his own banishment from the oedipal circle at home,¹ occurred at the outset of a life punctuated by a series of unhappy or unsatisfactory relationships with women. Mollie Hardwick sums this up:

His strange, deep idealistic love for Mary Hogarth—the cause of years of haunting sorrow to him—his early passion for Maria Beadnell, the “Dora” who rejected her “David” and left a scar on his mind and whose deterioration in middle-age caused Dickens such cruel disillusion; and worst of all his terrible incompatibility with his wife. … All these were to culminate in that 13-year relationship with Ellen Ternan—a “disappointing partnership,” … for Ellen's youth could not bring back Dickens's own lost boyhood, and she was obviously never able to give him the ideal love he longed for, or to satisfy that feeling of “something wanting” in his life, which always haunted him.²

The circumstances of Mary Hogarth's death were indeed traumatic. Dickens attended one of his own plays, a satire on marriage, in the company of his wife and her sister, Mary, who later that evening suddenly became ill and died the next day aged eighteen. Dickens had become very attached to her as the third member of the triangle that formed the family of his early marriage and requested that he be buried next to her. In later life, when accused of having an affair with Ellen Ternan, he was outraged, protesting that he regarded her as one of his own daughters. Dickens was forty-five when he met the eighteen-year-old Nelly, who was one year younger than his daughter Mary. However, the historical evidence for an affair is substantial.³ The situation was compounded by the “unhappy first marriage of his younger daughter and the rejection of all acceptable suitors by the other.”⁴

The life of Charles Dickens offers an unusual number of examples of the search for that first love-object that is paralleled in so many of his works. His feeling of “something wanting” was also recorded by many other artists, including Henrik Ibsen and Joseph Conrad. Dickens seems to have accompanied his active writing career by a continual “acting out” of the father/daughter/suitor drama, in one form or another. He is also distinguished by his treatment of the theme in a number of early pieces, commented upon by Morton Zabel: “The stories may be said to define or isolate the germs and sources of his greater achievements.”⁵ Several short pieces from Sketches by Boz (1836) illustrate Zabel's point, and one of them includes a passage to delight Freudians.⁶

Another story, “The Misplaced Attachment of Mr. John Dounce,”⁷ sums up the transference of the father's attachment from the absent mother to a daughter or a daughter-substitute. This story preceded Pickwick Papers, and encompasses its central theme of the father's struggle to renounce the daughter and cope with the threatening alternatives of solitude or solace with an older woman. A sampling of these early stories makes clear Dickens's lifelong preoccupation with the father/daughter relationship. While the emphasis here will be on Pickwick Papers, David Copperfield, Bleak House, and Our Mutual Friend, other novels also reveal the pervasiveness of the theme throughout the Dickens canon.⁸

Dombey and Son (1848) is especially significant because it illustrates a less frequently depicted defense on the part of the father against the incest threat: his open hostility and rejection of the maturing daughter. Critics have long been aware of this: “The title kept a bigger secret than it disclosed.”⁹ The ambivalence inherent in the incest-theme is summed up: “In regard to Florence, the deepening of his resentment into hate is overtly linked with her transition from girl to young woman.”¹⁰ Herman documents this aspect of clinical cases: “A number of the seductive fathers who were not habitually violent became violent during their daughters' adolescence. Others, perhaps in order to avoid becoming violent and paranoid, completely withdrew from their daughter when they began showing sexual interest in boys their own age. They reacted to their daughters' emerging sexuality either with an attempt to establish total control or with total rejection” (117). Years prior to Dickens and Herman, Mary Shelley had graphically developed this aspect of the complex in Mathilda.

Although Dickens first planned the destruction of the suitor, Walter Gay, he later changed his mind (Butt and Tillotson, 98-99), an important alteration in terms of triangular resolution. This novel ends with the reconciliation of the father, daughter, and suitor—a suitor who has suffered a near-fatal exile by water.

Pickwick Papers (1837), Dickens's first novel, interweaves his earlier short story form with the picaresque novel he so admired in Smollett and Fielding. The interpolated tales are related to the main narrative through the father/daughter/suitor relationship. Ironically, in his introduction to the novel, Dickens apologized for the lack of a unifying theme: “I could perhaps wish now that these chapters were strung together on a stronger thread of general interest,”¹¹ evidently oblivious to the thread of oedipal configurations strung not only between chapters but linking chapters and interpolated tales. The seemingly artless and haphazard narrative structure conceals an intricate, interrelated series of incidents, each composed of father/daughter/son, or father/daughter/suitor—sometimes in combination. The novel depicts a series of lovely young women and Dickens himself suggested the connection between the writing of the novel and his personal life: “Having written for the most part in the society of a very dear young friend [Mary Hogarth] who is now no more, they are connected in the author's mind at once with the happiest period of his life, and with its saddest and most severe affliction.”¹² Perhaps it was this background that resulted in its juxtaposition of the interpolated tales against the many triangular configurations in the novel. Sylvia Bank Manning comments: “The brightness of the world of Pickwick Papers allows hardly a need for struggle against darker forces. This may be due at least in part to the compression and isolation of evil into the interpolated tales.”¹³

The interpolated tales deal with a variety of family configurations, one of the most explicit in terms of fathers and daughters being “In Which the Old Man Launches Forth Into His Favourite Theme, and Relates a Story About a Queer Client” (298). This tale shifts most of the action to the young husband's revenge on the father who has contributed to the destruction of his own daughter and her child by imprisoning him: “[F]rom that hour, he devoted himself to revenge her death and that of his child” (307). As this story is concluded, Mr. Pickwick leaves the room, and the narrative returns to his lighthearted adventures. The only evidence of the impact of this tale on Mr. Pickwick lies in his unobtrusively acting as a low-key, romantic father figure throughout the novel, bringing about a series of happy dénouements in father/suitor or father/son conflicts in contrast to the tragedy of the interpolated tales.

Pickwick's ambiguous role vacillates between leering older gentleman and benevolent father and is ironically suggested in Mr. Phunky's inquiry of the young Mr. Winkle: “‘Has his behavior, when females have been in the case, always been that of a man, who, having attained a pretty advanced period of life, content with his own occupations and amusements, treats them only as a father might his daughters?’ ‘Not the least doubt of it,’ replied Mr. Winkle, in the fulness of his heart. ‘That is—yes—oh yes—certainly’” (515). Mr. Winkle is obviously not at all certain and Pickwick assumes the seeming innocence of the benign father figure in explaining to Winkle his plan to “protect” Arabella:

“In affording you this interview the young lady has taken a natural, perhaps, but still a very imprudent step. If I am present at the meeting, a mutual friend, who is old enough to be the father of both parties, the voice of calumny can never be raised against her hereafter.”

Mr. Pickwick's eyes lightened with honest exultation at his own foresight, as he spoke thus. Mr. Winkle was touched by this little trait of his delicate respect for the young protégée of his friend, and took his hand with a feeling of regard, akin to veneration.

(591, 592)

But Pickwick's voyeuristic proclivities assert themselves as he and Winkle set out on the expedition and Mr. Pickwick “with many smiles and various other indications of great self-satisfaction” produces a dark lantern, and by climbing on the backs of Sam and Mr. Winkle, manages “to bring his spectacles just above the level of the coping” (594). As the men groan under his weight, Pickwick looks over the wall at Arabella and the gentle leers become less subtle: “I merely wished you to know, my dear, that I should not have allowed my young friend to see you in this clandestine way, if the situation in which you are placed, has left him any alternative; and lest the impropriety of this step should cause you any uneasiness, my love, it may be a satisfaction to you, to know that I am present. That's all, my dear” (595).

Pickwick's reassurances end abruptly when he is dropped to the ground and Sam speculates that “his heart must ha' been born five-and-twenty year arter his body, at least!” (595). Mr. Winkle's romantic interlude with Arabella is brought to an abrupt end by Mr. Pickwick's “false alarm” (597). This only serves as a delaying action, however, since ultimately Pickwick has to cope with the surprise announcement that Arabella has become Mrs. Winkle:

Mr. Pickwick returned no verbal response to this appeal; but he took off his spectacles in great haste, and seizing both the young lady's hands in his, kissed her a great number of times—perhaps a greater number than was absolutely necessary—and then, still retaining one of her hands, told Mr. Winkle he was an audacious young dog, and bade him get up.

(709)

Indicative of Pickwick's transition from possessiveness to renunciation, “he surveyed Arabella's face with a look of as much pride and exultation as if she had been his daughter” (709). He has managed to pull back from a potentially lecherous father to a benign one, but his ambivalence remains regarding the marriage: “Mind, I do not say I should have prevented it, if I had known that it was intended” (723). He still has doubts.

Pickwick then pleads with the elder Mr. Winkle to give his blessing to the union, thus hoping to neutralize the father/son rivalry. He is at first unsuccessful with this Dickensian Montague and tells Arabella, as he looks at her pretty face, “I am sure … he can have very little idea of the pleasure he denies himself” (791). But this is hardly incipient tragedy, since Pickwick offers himself as an alternate father to the couple and is amply rewarded when Arabella throws “her arms around his neck … kissing him affectionately” (792). Has Pickwick silently learned his lesson from the “Tale of the Queer Client”? Pickwick's contemporary, Wardle, reenters the picture to declare Pickwick's own unvoiced hopes regarding Arabella: “I had a great idea of marrying her myself one of these odd days” (807); Wardle's own daughters are the same age. And Pickwick is finally successful in reconciling the elder Winkle to the marriage of his son and Arabella, a reconciliation that culminates in Winkle's “Kiss me, my love. You are a very charming little daughter-in-law, after all!” (847).

Prompted by the secret marriage of young Winkle and her friend, Arabella, Wardle's daughter, Bella, tells her father of her sister Emily's wishes to marry Snodgrass, although Wardle had been urging another match. Wardle then sums up the father/daughter attachment that makes release to the suitor so poignantly painful: “Both my girls are pictures of their dear mother, and as I grow old I like to sit with only them by me; for their voices and looks carry me back to the happiest period of my life, and make me, for the moment, as young as I used to be then, though not quite so light-hearted” (808). Wardle is obdurate in his opposition to the match and the girls plot the elopement of Emily and Snodgrass in the event that her father remains “cruel” (815). However, he becomes reconciled to the match as the chapter ends.

Pickwick continues to act as an archetypal good father as he extends his matchmaking to Sam and Mary, influencing old Mr. Weller who “had been much struck with Mary's appearance, having; in fact, bestowed several very unfatherly winks upon her, already” (841). Again, the ambivalence and covert jealousy in the father/son/heroine triangle is apparent.

Mr. Pickwick's silent renunciation of the young women to their suitors comes full circle when he is “much troubled at first, by the numerous applications made to him by Mr. Snodgrass, Mr. Winkle, and Mr. Trundle, to act as god-father to their offspring; but he has become used to it now, and officiates as a matter of course” (855). This novel encompasses a number of real fathers (Wardle, Weller, Winkle), with Pickwick replacing each briefly as surrogate father for a daughter or for a suitor. Once Pickwick, as proxy, has accepted renunciation, the true fathers fall into line, accepting with good, though reluctant, grace their usurpation by the young suitors.

As counterpoint to the appealing young women characters, Pickwick's (and Dickens's?) disdain for older, motherly figures surfaces throughout the novel. As early illustrated in John Dounce's story, following the renunciation of daughters, Dickens's fathers are faced with the reluctant return to a disdained mother or mother-figure. This undercurrent of antipathy toward older women runs throughout the Dickens canon illustrated in the breach of promise suit brought against Pickwick by Mrs. Bardell, which serves as a leitmotif through most of the novel, even forcing Pickwick's imprisonment for a time. Unlike Dounce, who succumbs to an unhappy compromise with an older woman, Pickwick always feels deeply threatened by them: “The truth is, that the old lady's evidently increasing admiration, was Mr. Pickwick's principle [sic] inducement for going away. He thought of Mrs. Bardell; and every glance of the old lady's eyes threw him into a cold perspiration” (726).

Pickwick chooses isolation instead, mitigated by his function as godfather to innumerable little Snodgrasses, Winkles, Trundles, and Wellers. Since he has indeed played a “godlike” role in their lives, this is appropriate. His decision parallels that made by the Bagman's uncle: “He remained staunch to the great oath he had sworn to the beautiful young lady: refusing several eligible landladies on her account, and dying a bachelor at last” (746). It is not difficult to assume that this expressed antipathy for older women throughout his fiction stemmed in part from Dickens's lifelong bitterness regarding his mother's efforts to return him to work in the hated blacking factory after his father had rescued him from it.

Pickwick and presumably the other fathers in the novel accept what Erik Erikson later defined as the eighth stage of life: “Ego Integrity vs. Despair.”

Potency, performance, and adaptability decline, but if vigor of mind combines with the gift of responsible renunciation, some old people can envisage human problems in their entirety (which is what “integrity” means) and can represent to the coming generation a living example of the “closure” of a style of life. (emphasis mine)¹⁴

The correspondence with Dickens's final description of Pickwick is striking:

Mr. Pickwick is somewhat infirm now; but he retains all his former juvenility of spirit, and may still be frequently seen, contemplating the pictures in the Dulwich Gallery, or enjoying a walk about the pleasant neighbourhood on a fine day. He is known by all the poor people about, who never fail to take their hats off, as he passes, with great respect. The children idolise him, and so indeed does the whole neighbourhood. Every year, he repairs to a large family merry-making at Mr. Wardle's.

(855)

In the years following Pickwick Papers, Dickens created many variations on the father/daughter theme and about thirteen years later wrote David Copperfield, which he declared to be his most autobiographical novel. As such, it is a rewarding hunting ground for variations on the father/daughter/suitor configuration as a version of the oedipal triangle. Like Pericles, David participates in a series of triangles—in most of them as the suitor set off against an unusually symbiotic father and daughter. The Edenic garden figures prominently throughout the novel and first occurs as the background for David's earliest oedipal confrontation. Born after his father's death, he had for a number of years been his mother's sole charge, but he is now displaced by a new and hostile father due to his mother's remarriage to a stern man who functions more as a father to them both. The transfer takes place in the garden and constitutes a graphic displacement of the oedipal configuration onto a father-surrogate:

a coach drove up to the garden-gate, and he went out to receive the visitor. My mother followed him. I was timidly following her, when she turned round at the parlour-door, … and taking me in her embrace as she had been used to do, whispered me to love my new father and be obedient to him. She did this hurriedly and secretly, as if it were wrong, but tenderly, and, putting out her hand behind her, held mine in it, until we came near to where he was standing in the garden, where she let mine go, and drew hers through his arm.¹⁵

David's oedipal battle with his stepfather is fought out with all of the anger and rage that in a primary triangle would have been repressed, or at least subdued, and David is exiled from his home at an early age. With his idealized and submissive mother helpless in the hands of the Murdstones, David is banished by a “bad” father and mother as Dickens himself felt he had been when, under the pressure of the family's straitened circumstances, he was sent at the age of twelve to work in the blacking factory. And even after his father had succeeded in withdrawing him from this hated situation, his mother recommended that he be sent back, resulting in a bitterness from which he never recovered: “I never afterwards forgot, I never shall forget, that my mother was warm for my being sent back” (Johnson, 659). In his view, she evidently preferred remaining with his father while exiling her son.

Some years later, in his first adult role as member of the triangle, he is invited to move into the home of Mr. Wickfield and his daughter Agnes based on the father's plea that it will make things “wholesome” for all of them (238). Agnes and her father have also lived to themselves for many years due to her mother's death at the time of her birth. As with Shakespeare's plots, most of Dickens's fathers and daughters are bereft of the third member of the family who might have prevented their isolation from becoming a problem. Mr. Wickfield is a heavy wine drinker and the strength of his attachment for his daughter has distinctly incestuous overtones (225).

A parallel father/daughter pair appears at the same time: Dr. Strong who is sixty-two and his young wife, Annie, who is twenty and is mistaken by David for the doctor's daughter. “It was very pleasant to see the Doctor with his pretty young wife. He had a fatherly, benignant way of showing his fondness for her which seemed in itself to express a good man. I often saw them walking in the garden where the peaches were” (244). Annie's young suitor had been banished to India through the combined efforts of the two fathers. David attends Dr. Strong's school, but lives with Agnes and her father although he does not become a suitor for Agnes until a number of years later.

In the intervening time, David functions as suitor in the triangle with Mr. Spenlow and his daughter Dora, who becomes his first wife. David, who works in a legal office with Mr. Spenlow (a widower), is brought home just as Dora has returned from her stint away at school in Paris to be reunited with her father. Seemingly unaware that Dora represents exactly the same childlike qualities his deceased mother had displayed, he falls in love with her immediately and totally: “I loved Dora Spenlow to distraction” (394). After dinner, as one of their dinner companions discusses gardening, David's attention is diverted since he “was wandering in a garden of Eden all the while, with Dora” (396).

The following morning David has his first encounter with her alone in the garden. David never sees Dora and her father together in this garden, and Mr. Spenlow has taken the precaution of bringing David's old enemy, Miss Murdstone, into the household as a “protector,” effecting a déjà vu for David. Dora protests to David, “Who wants a protector?” (399), and in her innocence, would only see this woman as a protector against the suitor, rather than against her own father; Miss Murdstone is prepared to be both. Eventually, the couple become engaged, agreeing to keep it a secret from Dora's father and shift their meetings to the public garden.

Ultimately, David is confronted by an outraged Mr. Spenlow and Miss Murdstone, who has turned David's letters to Dora over to her father. Since Miss Murdstone had complied in her brother's appropriation of David's mother and David's subsequent ejection, he is faced with the repetition of his confrontation with Murdstone over his mother, for whom Dora is a childlike replica. But this time David does not back down; he refuses to take back the letters, and Mr. Spenlow, on his way home to confront Dora with the evidence, dies suddenly and inexplicably, thus imposing an ineradicable burden of guilt on both young people. Although the marriage eventually takes place, Dora, presumably deprived of the opportunity of working through her attachment to her father in a natural way, succumbs swiftly to this burden of remorse and also dies.

David, once again solitary, eventually returns to Agnes and her father. Since he and Agnes had long ago fostered a brother/sister relationship, that incest-barrier must now be broken down before the marriage can take place. The garden functions again in this resolution of the triangle. David finds on his return that Mr. Wickfield has given up his drinking. That the incest threat is held in abeyance is symbolized by the displacement of the garden which serves to remove the father from the house: “When I returned, Mr. Wickfield had come home from a garden he had, a couple of miles or so out of town, where he now employed himself almost every day. … We sat down to dinner … and he seemed but the shadow of his handsome picture on the wall” (835). Renunciation has taken its toll.

Following dinner, Mr. Wickfield reiterates his sense of guilt over bygone days: “My part in them … has much matter for regret—for deep regret, and deep contrition. … But I would not cancel it, if it were in my power” (835). He then refers to his love for his daughter as a “diseased love” (836) and relates that his wife had died soon after Agnes's birth because of her grief over her father's failure to forgive her marriage. The cycle has been perpetuated; fixated daughters do not make successful transitions to suitors.

This seemingly endless chain of nonrelinquishing fathers is broken with David's happy marriage to Agnes following the defeat of the “bad” suitor, Uriah Heap. And in a singular case in Dickens's novels, the fixated father simply disappears. The wedding takes place, but there is no further mention of Mr. Wickfield in the novel. The wedding guests consist of two couples: in one of these we find the only suitor in the novel to whom the daughter has been willingly relinquished (Traddles and Sophie); this daughter, however, ends up providing a home for her sisters—her father's other daughters, removing them from her father's house. The only other couple at the wedding are Dr. Strong and Annie—the father who had never relinquished.

In this novel, a tempest functions in the final resolution of another triangle in which David had served as friend to Emily and her uncle. In a violent storm at sea, the good suitor (Ham) attempts to save the life of the bad suitor (Steerforth), who has already seduced and abandoned Emily, who was Ham's fiancée. Both suitors drown in the chapter titled “Tempest.” But Dickens has reversed Shakespeare's tempest, since the destruction of the two suitors results in the return of the daughter Emily to her surrogate father—her uncle (790). The father/uncle retains the daughter/niece and they live out their lives in exile in the American colonies, with Emily repeatedly refusing any suitors.

Dickens had, in fact, been prevented from marrying an early and intensely loved young lady by the girl's father, and in the person of David the artist/creator, he reverses this unhappy situation and wins the daughter from two successive fathers, killing off the first one and simply removing the second one from the narrative.

Just three years after completing David Copperfield with its happy conclusion for the hero and at least one heroine, Dickens published what is regarded by most critics as his darkest novel, Bleak House (1853). In Bleak House, however, good and evil are so intricately interwoven that Esther's comment, “The fog is very dense indeed!”¹⁶ becomes a metaphorical statement for the world of the novel. In this story, Dickens, through the device of the double narrator, creates the illusion of giving the reader all the information, when there are really significant gaps. Crucial judgments can only be made by a skeptical reader willing to see irony where none seems intended. The novel contains three central father/daughter/suitor configurations: Lord and Lady Dedlock and her dead suitor, Captain Hawdon; John Jarndyce/Ada/Richard; and John Jarndyce/Alan Woodcourt/Esther Summerson.

The oedipal triangle that revolves around Lady Dedlock as both daughter and mother is almost classic in its simplicity, entailing both a “good” and a “bad” surrogate father—Dedlock, her husband, and Tulkinghorn, his lawyer. The unfortunate suitor is, of course, Esther's father, Captain Hawdon, who ends his life as the nameless one, Nemo the law-copier. But “he had been young, hopeful, and handsome” (312), and we know from Lady Dedlock's reaction to his death that he had also been loved. At the time of his death, he was living in abject poverty and using opium, and the question remains unanswered as to the possibility of his working as law-copier having to do with information which he was seeking regarding the Jarndyce estate. Bucket informs Snagsby after Hawdon's death that “there seems to be a doubt whether this dead person wasn't entitled to a little property, and whether this female hasn't been up to some games respecting that property” (319). Hawdon was forty-five at the time of his death (159). George Rouncewell feels a great loyalty to Captain Hawdon, and it is only when he is blackmailed that he consents to give a handwriting sample to Tulkinghorn.

Esther, the product of the out-of-wedlock union between Lady Dedlock and Hawdon, had been raised by her mother's sister, who had never told the mother that her child had survived. Lady Dedlock is viewed by others as more like Lord Dedlock's daughter than his wife: “Though my Lord is a little aged for my Lady, says Madame the hostess of the Golden Ape, and though he might be her amiable father, one can see at a glance that they love each other” (169). Lady Dedlock is separated from the suitor to whom she had once been engaged, is married to a “good” father-surrogate, and persecuted by a “bad” father-surrogate. In terms of the oedipal configuration, Tulkinghorn can be viewed as pursuing the truth of the daughter's sexual transgression with the suitor and ultimately destroying her. His views on marriage are made explicit: “My experience teaches me, Lady Dedlock, that most of the people I know would do far better to leave marriage alone. It is at the bottom of three fourths of their troubles. So I thought when Sir Leicester married, and so I always have thought since” (587).

While Tulkinghorn is ruthless in his pursuit of Lady Dedlock's secret, following the divulgence of her past, Sir Leicester has only compassion: “Therefore I desire to say, and call you all to witness … that I am on unaltered terms with Lady Dedlock. That I assert no cause whatever of complaint against her, that I have ever had the strongest affection for her, and that I retain it undiminished” (796). Ultimately, Dedlock's compassion cannot save his Lady from destruction by the irate Tulkinghorn, who is also destroyed in the process.

In Bleak House, Dickens presents a galaxy of fathers, good and bad (including those parodies: Skimpole, Turveydrop, and Smallweed), but the daughter-figures, Esther and Ada, are quietly pursued by one of the most unobtrusive surrogate fathers in all literature, John Jarndyce. The recurrent motif of “Jarndyce and Jarndyce” suggests the two aspects of his character: the Jarndyce seen through Esther's eyes and the Jarndyce that can only be pieced together from scattered hints. There is a further doubling in this novel in the concept of “suitor,” for it serves both in its legal and in its romantic connotations—pointing up the inextricable ties between love and material interests. Richard is both a suitor in Chancery and a suitor for Ada's hand in marriage. John, although ostensibly neither one, is in reality both. In order to assess his function in the novel, these two aspects of Jarndyce as father and suitor are inextricably linked and prove mutually enlightening. The narrator alludes to the double role: “Westminster Hall itself is a shady solitude where nightingales might sing, and a tenderer class of suitors than is usually found there, walk” (270).

Critical discourse has almost unanimously accepted John Jarndyce on the basis of Esther's assessment. George Gissing, still respected as an important Dickensian, commented: “In John Jarndyce I can detect no vulgarity; he appears to me compact of good sense, honour, and gentle feeling … Impossible not to like and respect Mr. Jarndyce.”¹⁷ Among the more skeptical was George Bernard Shaw who said, “Jarndyce, a violently good man, keeps on doing generous things, yet ends by practicing a heartlessly cruel and indelicate deception on Esther Summerson for the sake of giving her a pleasantly melodramatic surprise.”¹⁸

There has been little critical questioning of the function of John Jarndyce in his economic world in spite of the fact that John's predecessor in Bleak House, then called “The Peaks” (111), was Tom Jarndyce, who “in despair blew his brains out at a coffee-house in Chancery Lane” (20). The narrator raises the central question: “How many people out of the suit Jarndyce and Jarndyce has stretched forth its unwholesome hand to spoil and corrupt would be a very wide question” and “no man's nature has been made better by it” (21).

Although no participants have received money in the case which has dragged on for years in Chancery, John Jarndyce's expenditures are substantial. When Mr. Kenge makes John's offer to educate Esther, the costs in the case are “from six-ty to seven-ty thousand pounds!” (36), and at the time of Richard's death, the entire estate has been wiped out in court costs. Nevertheless, John Jarndyce maintains a large house with gardens and servants (107), supports Miss Flite (211), Skimpole, and presumably his wife and twelve children (83, 602, 605, 606), educates Esther from the time she is fourteen until she comes to live with him at twenty, at which time he also supports Ada and Richard. He maintains quarters in London to which they all repair at frequent intervals, and he also takes them on extensive visits to Boythorn's country place. John ultimately hires Charley as maid to Esther and provides support for the two children she has been caring for (345).

John, who has totally corrupted Skimpole (a physician manqué), says at one point: “He is in a child's sleep by this time, I suppose; it's time I should take my craftier head to my more worldly pillow” (95, emphasis mine). Esther prefers not to interpret the unexplained incongruities in her guardian's associations: “Any seeming inconsistencies in Mr. Skimpole or in Mrs. Jellyby I could not be able to reconcile, having so little experience or practical knowledge” (95). Esther is fully capable of comprehending the hypocrisy in both these individuals, but refuses to question their relationship to her guardian.

Esther's special naiveté seems to suit John perfectly, since when she tells him that she is not clever, “He did not seem at all disappointed; quite the contrary. He told me with a smile all over his face, that he knew me very well indeed and that I was quite clever enough for him” (112). My reading of John is that he would indeed be grateful for a “housekeeper” who was not clever—at least not clever enough to wonder where the housekeeping money was coming from. Another questionable aspect of John's financial affairs is his association with the “philanthropists”; Dickens's attitude toward them is well known, but Kenge reports to Esther: “Mr. Jarndyce, who is desirous to aid any work that is considered likely to be a good work and who is much sought after by philanthropists, has, I believe, a very high opinion of Mrs. Jellyby” (50). But it is obvious throughout the novel that this high opinion is not shared by her creator—nor by Esther herself. Consequently, this association not only raises doubts about Jarndyce, but again raises the question of the source of his income—one possibility is usury. Although Humphrey House does not group Jarndyce with Dickens's other usurious characters, he delineates this novelist's position:

Beneath his hatred of people like Ralph Nickleby, Gride and Quilp is the ancient moral feeling that usury is wrong because it enables people to make money without having to work for it, and that the power conferred by money earned in this way is the more hateful for its illegitimacy. Dickens was very careful, even when he was detaching his benevolent rich men from the immediate economic struggle, to insist that they had, at least in the past, worked for what they spent so generously.¹⁹

But it is virtually impossible to detach John Jarndyce from the immediate economic struggle since that is what the novel is all about and the notorious case carries his name—twice. There is never any indication in Bleak House that John Jarndyce at any time, past or present, has worked to earn the money he is so generously spending. In fact, when he inherited Bleak House itself, it was in a state of decay and had to be repaired and renovated. He also eventually helps set Woodcourt up in practice and buys another Bleak House, fully furnished, for the newlyweds.

The important point here is that there is an unnamed usurer in the background throughout the novel, and the blackest note in this black novel may well be that the usurer is the ostensibly “good” man. The authentically good men in the novel are the most obvious victims, namely Richard Carstone and George Rouncewell, not to mention the dead Captain Hawdon. Although such reprehensible characters as Vholes, Tulkinghorn, and Smallweed are openly and avariciously involved in lending money, the real culprit is “Smallweed's friend in the city” (308) who “is not to be depended on” and although George speculates that his name begins with a D—this may stand for Devil as described by Dickens, in an early description of white-collar crime:

For howsoever bad the devil can be in fustian or smockfrock (and he can be very bad in both), he is a more designing, callous, and intolerable devil when he sticks a pin in his shirt-front, calls himself a gentleman, backs a card or colour, plays a game or so of billiards, and knows a little about bills and promissory notes than in any other form he wears.

(373)

There are veiled references throughout the novel to possible links between John and the shadier characters. Esther observes: “It was Mr. Rook. He seemed unable to detach himself from Mr. Jarndyce. If he had been linked to him, he could hardly have attended him more closely” (213). And again: “During the whole of our inspection … he kept close to Mr. Jarndyce and sometimes detained him under one pretence or other until we had passed on, as if he were tormented by an inclination to enter upon some secret subject which he could not make up his mind to approach” (214). But Guppy, who has tracked down Esther's resemblance to Lady Dedlock and reports to Tulkinghorn, also pays an allowance to Miss Flite and her rent to Krook (291). The relationship between Vholes and John is also suspect, as is pointed up by Esther's observations:

A more complete contrast than my guardian and Mr. Vholes I suppose there could not be. I found them looking at one another across the table, the one so open and the other so close, the one so broad and upright and the other so narrow and stooping, the one giving out what he had to say in such a rich ringing voice and the other keeping it in such a cold-blooded, gasping, fish-like manner that I thought I never had seen two people so unmatched.

(620)

But in this novel, Dickens uses Esther herself to point out the inherent fallacies in the appearance/reality dichotomy when she is externally disfigured by smallpox. While the function of Jarndyce as Chancery suitor is heavily veiled (Richard has accused Esther of being “blind,” 531), his role as father/suitor for the surrogate daughter, Ada, is not much more explicit. Although John's marriage proposal is made to Esther, there is evidence that she has been educated and prepared to come to Bleak House as “mother” to Ada. Esther's highly controlled preparation is begun at the death of her godmother when she is told, “the scheme of your pursuits has been arranged in exact accordance with the wishes of your guardian, Mr. Jarndyce” (40). When she is twenty, an official letter secures her services as “an elgble compn” for “a Ward of the Ct,” who is, of course, Ada, then seventeen. Although Ada has never seen her cousin John, her mother had told her “of the noble generosity of his character, which she has said was to be trusted above all earthly things; and Ada trusted it” (58). It is perhaps not irrelevant that shortly before this comment, Esther had been telling the Jellyby children the story of Little Red Riding Hood (55), another story of misplaced trust.

Upon their first arrival, John greets the girls warmly with “Ada, my love, Esther, my dear,” and Esther describes him:

The gentleman who said these words in a clear, bright, hospitable voice had one of his arms round Ada's waist and the other round mine, and kissed us both in a fatherly way, and bore us across the hall into a ruddy little room, all in a glow with a blazing fire. Here he kissed us again, and opening his arms, made us sit down side by side on a sofa ready drawn out near the hearth.

(78)

Esther estimates his age as “nearer sixty than fifty,” and Ada is described by Skimpole: “She is like the morning … with that golden hair, those blue eyes, and that fresh bloom on her cheek, she is like the summer morning” and during this adulation, Esther notices Mr. Jarndyce “standing near us, with his hands behind him, and an attentive smile on his face” (87).

Esther makes perhaps her first mistake as she concludes that John hopes for an eventual match between Richard and Ada, and also surmises that John might really be her father (96). But John himself hints at the ambiguities in the relationship: “I hear of a good little orphan girl without a protector, and I take it into my head to be that protector. She grows up, and more than justifies my good opinion, and I remain her guardian and her friend. What is there in all this?” (109). What is there indeed? It is significant that Esther is shortly being called by a variety of “mother” names: “This was the beginning of my being called Old Woman, and Little Old Woman, and Cobweb, and Mrs. Shipton, and Mother Hubbard, and Dame Durden, and so many names of that sort that my own name soon became quite lost among them” (112, emphasis mine).

After Richard has abandoned medicine and decided to try his hand at the law, Ada and John discuss it in an intimate scene recorded by Esther. John repeatedly calls Ada “my love,” and she talks to him “with her hand upon his shoulder, where she had put it in bidding him good night” (246). Both declare their affection and faith in Richard to be undiminished, and then Ada places both hands on John's shoulders:

“I think,” said my guardian, thoughtfully regarding her, “I think it must be somewhere written that the virtues of the mothers shall occasionally be visited on the children, as well as the sins of the father. Good night, my rosebud. Good night, little woman. Pleasant slumbers! Happy dreams!”

This was the first time I ever saw him follow Ada with his eyes with something of a shadow on their benevolent expression. I well remembered the look with which he had contemplated her and Richard when she was singing in the firelight … but his glance was changed, and even the silent look of confidence in me which now followed it once more was not quite so hopeful and untroubled as it had originally been.

(247)

Following this encounter, Esther is “low-spirited,” and cannot sleep, but is not sure why. She comes upon John, also sleepless, worn and weary, and when she inquires whether he is troubled, he replies that it is nothing she “would readily understand” (248). He then tells her of her aunt's request that he care for her if anything should happen, and Esther calls him “the guardian who is a father to her!”: “At the word father, I saw his former trouble come into his face. He subdued it as before, and it was gone in an instant; but it had been there and it had come so swiftly upon my words that I felt as if they had given him a shock” (250).

The ambiguities in John's reaction to “father” are never fully explained and can only be speculated upon. Perhaps John really is Ada's father; her mother had spoken of him with tears in her eyes, and we are given no information regarding Ada's background. When Richard loses interest in the law and is about to embark for Ireland and an army career, John intervenes and insists the engagement be broken off, much to Richard's consternation (349). Although the narrator never comments directly on Jarndyce, Richard gets Vholes to admit that his own (Richard's) financial interests are not identical to John's (560).

In spite of the fact that Esther and John have established a relationship in which she sees him as a father while he seems to see her as Ada's mother, immediately following her disclosure that she is Lady Dedlock's daughter, he proposes marriage, saying he “has long had something in his thoughts” (614). He proposes by letter and, among other things, exerts subtle pressure by telling her “to remember that I owed him nothing” (616). Esther's reaction is gratitude—and tears:

Still I cried very much, not only in the fullness of my heart after reading the letter, not only in the strangeness of the prospect—for it was strange though I had expected the contents—but as if something for which there was no name or distinct idea were indefinitely lost to me. I was very happy, very thankful, very hopeful; but I cried very much.

(617)

But it is Esther's revelation of her parentage that precipitates the proposal. Are financial considerations operative here? Significantly, after two weeks have elapsed without John's mentioning the proposal, Esther feels compelled to accept, but decides not to tell Ada (619).

Woodcourt returns, the hero of a shipwreck (survivor of a tempest), but still poor, and in response to Esther's request, agrees to befriend and help Richard. Although the actions taken by John at this point seem on the surface to be altruistic, they also are highly manipulative. Since Esther has been going into London each day to care for Caddy, he suggests that they all move to London and that Woodcourt be called in on the case. This not only leaves John and Ada together a great deal of the time; it also throws Esther and Woodcourt together. Even after John has been informed of the secret marriage between Richard and Ada, he takes no positive step toward the marriage he has proposed for himself, and Esther is puzzled by his procrastination:

The letter had made no difference between us except that the seat by his side had come to be mine; it made none now. He turned his old bright fatherly look upon me, laid his hand on my hand in his old way, and said again, “She will succeed my dear. Nevertheless, Bleak House is thinning fast, O little woman!”

I was sorry presently that this was all we said about that. I was rather disappointed. I feared I might not quite have been all I had meant to be since the letter and the answer.

(704)

While John's proposal had been precipitated by Esther's disclosure of her parentage, John is obviously in no hurry to conclude the arrangements, and there are several possible reasons. Ada has just turned twenty-one and Richard is in bad shape, emotionally and physically. Is John playing a waiting game, and if so, what is he waiting for? Richard is already heavily in debt and Ada's funds have been eaten away. Following Lady Dedlock's death, John resumes his manipulation of events as he brings Mrs. Woodcourt into the house during Esther's illness. After her recovery from smallpox, he tells Esther of his decision to remain in London: “I have a scheme to develop, little woman. I propose to remain here, perhaps for six months, perhaps for a longer time—as it may be. Quite to settle here for a while, in short.” This, of course, means that he must sustain the expense of two households. Esther realizes that he is happy at the prospect of leaving Bleak House, and he reminds her: “It is a long way from Ada, my dear, and Ada stands much in need of you.” When Esther commends him for his usual consideration of herself and Ada, John comes as close as anyone in the novel to an accurate appraisal of his situation:

Not so disinterested either, my dear, if you mean to extol me for that virtue, since if you were generally on the road, you could be seldom with me. And besides, I wish to hear as much and as often of Ada as I can in this condition of estrangement from poor Rick. Not of her alone, but of him too, poor fellow.

(815, 816, emphasis mine)

Obviously hearing more of “poor Rick” is an afterthought. Lady Dedlock, during her previous introduction to Ada, had observed to John: “You will lose the disinterested part of your Don Quixote character … if you only redress the wrongs of beauty like this” (267, emphasis mine). But the real question is whether John was ever disinterested—the evidence seems to indicate that he was not. If John is following the pattern of the destructive father, he is doing so in a subtle manner. If he is behind the usury in the novel, he is also indirectly contributing to Richard's slow deterioration. The nature of the responsibility involved here is voiced by Skimpole: “If it is blameable in Skimpole to take the note, it is blameable in Bucket to offer the note—much more blameable in Bucket to offer the note, because he is the knowing man” (832). A short time before, Skimpole had defined Richard's relationship to himself: “Parallel case, exactly!” (829). When Esther, years later, looking into the published diary left by Skimpole (the sometime artist), reads the judgment, “Jarndyce, in common with most other men I have known, is the incarnation of selfishness,” she refrains from comment (833). Is this in fact, authorial comment? Only Richard and Skimpole, the two dependent borrowers in the novel, are unequivocally condemnatory of John Jarndyce.

John's machinations with regard to Woodcourt and Esther (which so incensed Shaw) continue and his failure to meet Esther results in Woodcourt's opportunity to make his own proposal. It is regretfully declined by Esther because of her prior commitment: “I learned in a moment that what I had thought was pity and compassion was devoted, generous, faithful love. Oh, too late to know it now, too late, too late. That was the first ungrateful thought I had. Too late” (835). She goes to bed in the dark to avoid the sight of her own tears.

The lack of urgency on John's part in the matter of the marriage, plus Esther's statement that “He had never altered his old manner” (839) strongly suggests a lack of sexual interest on John's part. He also continues to use those no-names, “Dame Durden” and “Dame Trot,” with which he had denied her identity as a woman from the time she took over the housekeeping keys. And it is finally Esther who pushes toward the fulfillment of the marriage letter, setting the date on which John shall become “more enviable than any other man in the world” (840), set for a month hence.

John's excuse for not acting is that he has had only Rick on his mind (840), but immediately following the setting of the wedding date, Smallweed and Bucket appear with a newly discovered will (which had been partially burned), which reduces John's financial interest while increasing Richard's and Ada's (845). The will is to be read “next term,” that is, the following month. Esther begins her wedding preparations with constraint: “I did it all so quietly because I was not quite free from my old apprehension that Ada would be rather sorry and because my guardian was so quiet himself” (855). The relationship between the two “suitor” roles is made clear as Esther relates: “I understood that my marriage would not take place until after the term-time we had been told to look forward to” (856). Material interests are paramount.

Suddenly invited by her guardian to go into Yorkshire to approve Woodcourt's house, Esther is overcome with sobs but (as Shaw reminds us) is allowed to go through the night without being told that John is about to set her free. This indicates either a total unawareness of her feelings or a veiled sadism. When John finally tells her that she is to be Woodcourt's wife in a new Bleak House, he says, “I am your guardian and your father now. Rest confidently here” (859).

It is perhaps important that for John, father and guardian are two distinct things; when he takes Ada in to live with him following Richard's death, he insists that she no longer call him “cousin,” but “guardian” (878). Esther says, “He was her guardian henceforth, and the boy's; and he had an old association with the name. So she called him guardian, and has called him guardian ever since. The children know him by no other name. I say the children; I have two little daughters” (878).

The reader is easily seduced into seeing John's yielding up of Esther as a selfless renunciation, until it is noted that he ends up in possession of Ada and her child by Richard, who has died after the collapse of the suit. Although Richard succumbs finally to declaring John a “good” man on his deathbed, Esther unwittingly is perhaps closer to the truth: “My guardian, the picture of a good man” (871). As Richard is dying, Esther observes John's responses without passing judgment when John says to him:

“And you will come there too, I hope, Rick. I am a solitary man now, you know, and it will be a charity to come to me. A charity to come to me, my love!” he repeated to Ada as he gently passed his hand over her golden hair and put a lock of it to his lips. (I think he vowed within himself to cherish her if she were left alone.)

(872)

As Richard realizes that he has been a dreamer, John says, “What am I but another dreamer, Rick?” (872). During the meeting in the park at Chesney Wold, when Lady Dedlock first met the girls and John there, she inquired about Richard, “Is the young gentleman disposed of whom you wrote to Sir Leicester?” John replies, “I hope so” (267). Poor Richard is permanently “disposed of” by the end of the novel.

After the birth of Ada's fatherless baby, John says to her: “When you and my boy are strong enough to do it, come and take possession of your home” (emphasis mine), and we are told that this surrogate “to Ada and her pretty boy … is the fondest father” (878). There is never the slightest hint that Esther sees Ada's fate as less than satisfactory, but we are never told how Ada feels. Esther's continued reluctance to tell Ada of her commitment to marry John is never explained. Dorothy Van Ghent responded to Edmund Wilson's observations that Dickens generally failed to “get the good and bad together in one character,” with the comment: “[I]n Dickens's nervous world, one simplex is superimposed upon or is continuous with another, and together they form the complex of good-in-evil or of evil-in-good.”²⁰

Although many critics join Esther in her misreading of John Jarndyce, he may be Dickens's consummate achievement of “the complex of good-in-evil or of evil-in-good.” He is the father who has either destroyed the suitor or passively complied in that destruction and then retained the daughter, not by the overtly violent means of an Antiochus, but by the subtle means of a victim of the irrational world of Chancery. John himself has pointed to his own duplicity: “Ah, Dame Trot, Dame Trot … what shall we find reasonable in Jarndyce and Jarndyce! Unreason and injustice at the top, unreason and injustice at the bottom, unreason and injustice from beginning to end—if it ever had an end—how should poor Rick, always hovering near it, pluck reason out of it?” (816). The novel ends with a domestic situation that provides a classic example of what Herman dubbed “covert incest,” with a dilution of the theme in the involvement of surrogates.

If Bleak House obliquely reflects the blackness of King Lear or Othello, Our Mutual Friend (1865) is Dickens's Tempest. But it also contains variations on the father/daughter theme that suggest comparison with Pericles. The novel opens with Lizzie Hexam and her father, Gaffer, “On the Look Out” for bodies in the river. In spite of the horror of the work her father forces her to do, Lizzie has a genuine tenderness for him. Lizzie's father does not survive, however, either to protect her from suitors, or to give her up to one, and Lizzie becomes the haunted prey of those bitter rivals, Bradley Headstone and Eugene Wayburn, a rivalry that ends violently in the destruction of one suitor and the near-destruction of the other. The father of another subordinate father/daughter pair is likewise destroyed in the same drama, Pleasant's father, Rogue Riderhood, engaged in the same unsavory calling as Gaffer Hexam. Pleasant's suitor, Mr. Venus, is engaged in the even more bizarre occupation of “Preserver of Animals and Birds,” and “Articulator of Human Bones.” But in this case it is not the father who stands in the way of the match, but the daughter herself who protests: “I do not wish … to regard myself, nor yet to be regarded, in that boney light.”²¹

Jenny Wren, the doll's dressmaker, and her incurably alcoholic father are one of Dickens's more famous reversed parent/child pairs. Jenny, small and crippled, is vitriolic in her assessment of this human wreck: “He's enough to break his mother's heart, is this boy … I wish I had never brought him up. He'd be sharper than a serpent's tooth, if he wasn't as dull as ditch water. Look at him. There's a pretty object for a parent's eyes!” (595). But Jenny also has a “good” father in Riah, her “second father” (881), and is eventually married to her suitor, Sloppy.

A more complex father/daughter/suitor configuration occurs with the Podsnaps and their surrogates, the Lammles, the latter of whom come close to the Pandar/Bawd of Pericles. Certainly one of the most flagrantly bitter marriages in literature, the Lammles are mutually disillusioned to find that neither one has any money when each was counting on the other having a great deal. The conspiracy by the Lammles to recoup their losses by pairing Miss Podsnap with one of the least prepossessing suitors ever created, Fascination Fledgeby, fails.

The central oedipal configuration in the novel consists of Bella Wilfer, her father, and John Harmon. But the enactment of the oedipal plot is temporarily transferred to surrogate parents, the Boffins, with Mr. Boffin in the Prospero role. There is one important difference between the two sets of parents, however, since Bella's true mother is in effect “absent,” as one of Dickens's humorous/obnoxious mother-wives. Like Dora's mother in Freud's case history, she has been discredited and obliterated as a person with any power. Consequently, her husband has developed an unusually close relationship with his daughter, “a girl of about nineteen, with an exceedingly pretty figure and face, but with an impatient and petulant expression both in her face and in her shoulders” (77). The father/daughter/suitor triangle is set up almost immediately, since unbeknown to the Wilfers, the new boarder is really Rokesmith/Handford/Harmon—the young man thought drowned, who had been designated Bella's suitor by his father's will: “A dark gentleman. Thirty at the utmost. An expressive, one might say handsome face. A very bad manner. In the last degree constrained, reserved, diffident, troubled” (81).

Since Bella's family is very poor, she goes to live with the Boffins who have inherited the supposedly dead Harmon's wealth, while the living Harmon is unwittingly hired as Boffin's secretary. Bella's transference to the Boffins represents her father's initial renunciation, since the implicit hope is that she will find a wealthy suitor. It is also significant that the Boffins represent one of the few instances in Dickens of a happily married, older couple, whose compatibility has been maintained through compromise.

Mrs Boffin, as I've mentioned, is a highflyer at Fashion; at present I'm not. I don't go higher than comfort, and comfort of the sort that I'm equal to the enjoyment of. … So Mrs Boffin, she keeps up her part of the room, in her way; I keep up my part of the room in mine. In consequence of which we have at once, Sociability (I should go melancholy mad without Mrs Boffin), Fashion and Comfort.

(100)

Since Bella has been deprived of her marriage to the wealthy John Harmon by his supposed drowning, the Boffins seek to make restitution by bringing her to live with them “to brisk her up, and brisk her about, and give her a change” (153). The suitor thus becomes a factor in the households of both fathers, and the daughter moves back and forth between the worlds of genteel poverty and inherited wealth. It is this aspect of the situation that leads to the transformation of Boffin into a Prospero, a reading that throws a light on much of the confusion over that character's seemingly incongruous change of heart. James Kincaid summed up the consensus: “Nearly all critics have felt either that Boffin ought not to have changed or that, once changed, he should have stayed changed.”²²

Bella is a very mercenary young lady, and although she really loves John, she feels she cannot allow herself the luxury of marrying a poor man and Boffin sets out to show her the absurdity of her position by carrying it to extremes:

“But I think it's very creditable in you, at your age, to be so well up with the pace of the world, and to know what to go in for. You are right. Go in for money, my love. Money's the article. You'll make money of your good looks, and of the money Mrs Boffin and me will have the pleasure of settling upon you, and you'll live and die rich. That's the state to live and die in!” said Mr Boffin, in an unctuous manner. “R—r—rich!”

(526)

In a marvelous travesty of Don Quixote, Boffin reads only the lives of misers: “Bella very clearly noticed, that, as he pursued the acquisition of those dismal records with the ardour of Don Quixote for his books of chivalry, he began to spend his money with a more sparing hand” (529).

But Boffin's attachment to Bella is also made quite clear, and his feigned ill treatment of John parallels that of Simonides toward Pericles and Prospero toward Ferdinand. While ostensibly serving another purpose, it gives the father a chance to vent his very real hostility toward the prospective suitor. Mrs. Boffin tells Bella: “He is so much attached to you, whatever he says, that your own father has not a truer interest in you and can hardly like you better than he does” (527). But in the interests of showing Bella the true nature of greed by exaggerating it, Boffin allows himself to assume the role of father-as-pander: “Give me a kiss, my dear child, in saying Good Night, and let me confirm what my old lady tells you. I am very fond of you, my dear, and I am entirely of your mind, and you and I will take care that you shall be rich. These good looks of yours … are worth money, and you shall make money of 'em” (527).

But Bella begins to have misgivings, and outraged by Boffin's treatment of John, abandons her false, mercenary goals, and marries for love, following which John acknowledges his true identity and inheritance—“Harmony” is restored. One other aspect of the father/daughter/suitor theme in Our Mutual Friend is worth noting—Bella's wedding. This too is unusual, both for Dickens and for fiction in general. It serves to emphasize the romantic possibilities in the renunciation by the father in favor of the suitor.

On the morning of the secret wedding, Bella and her father have a sentimental breakfast together before departing “aboard an early steamboat for Greenwich” (731). The awful mother is left out of the wedding entirely—only father, daughter, and suitor are present, and the transference is symbolized in the dinner which follows:

But, the marriage dinner was the crowning success, for what had the bride and bridegroom plotted to do, but to have and to hold that dinner in the very room of the very hotel where Pa and the lovely woman had once dined together! Bella sat between Pa and John, and divided her attentions pretty equally, but felt it necessary … to remind Pa that she was his lovely woman no longer.

“I am well aware of it, my dear,” returned the cherub, “and I resign you willingly.”

“Willingly, sir? You ought to be brokenhearted.”

“So I should be, my dear, if I thought that I was going to lose you.”

“But you know you are not; don't you, poor dear Pa? … Look here, Pa!” Bella put her finger on her own lip, and then on Pa's, and then on her own lip again, and then on her husband's. “Now we are a partnership of three, dear Pa.”

(734-35)

Although Bella is in the same relative position as Cordelia, her father is no Lear and manages to view his renunciation to her suitor from a positive vantage point. While the wedding involves only Bella, John, and her real father, a later dénouement with the surrogate parents vindicates Boffin's duplicity. There is also a brief reference to the potential jealousy on the part of the mother toward the usurping daughter: “‘From the first, you was always a special favourite of Noddy's,’ said Mrs Boffin, shaking her head. ‘O you were! And if I had been inclined to be jealous, I don't know what I mightn't have done to you. But as I wasn't—why, my beauty,’ with a hearty laugh and an embrace, ‘I made you a special favourite of my own too’” (843-44).

The pairing-off that marks the end of this novel is a skewed variation on Shakespeare's late comedies. The romantic father/daughter/suitor threesome gathered for the wedding dinner excludes the mother whose “absence” presumably has intensified Wilfer's attachment to his daughter and made his renunciation more dramatic. But Dickens saw fit to temporarily remove the triangle to a set of surrogate parents, the Boffins, thus defusing some of the intensity that might have occurred within the primary triangle. Boffin has emulated Pickwick in facilitating the father's renunciation.

Since I maintain that Dickens's final, unfinished novel suggests a return to fatherly retention, it is worth noting a short piece of fiction which marks the transition between Our Mutual Friend and the unfinished Mystery of Edwin Drood. “George Silverman's Explanation” (1868) treats the same theme as the two novels but reverts stylistically to the early stories and the interpolated tales.²³

The tale involves surrogates in the persons of the tutor, George, and his pupil, Adelina. George, a clergyman, falls deeply in love with his young wealthy pupil, who has been placed in his charge by her mother. Although she reciprocates his love, he painfully matches her with another young pupil. The incestuous implications, due to the age difference and the fact that her mother entrusted her to his care, can be inferred. Silverman carries renunciation to a painful extreme by performing the wedding ceremony himself. At the age of sixty (he was thirty at the time of the renunciation), he pens his “explanation.” The story condenses the theme of fatherly renunciation—a theme that Dickens was to reverse in Edwin Drood.

Dickens paralleled Shakespeare in the creation of multiple variations on the father/daughter/suitor theme. Steven Marcus characterizes Dickens's imagination as “preeminently Shakespearean,”²⁴ borne out by Dickens's appraisal of a performance of King Lear: “From his rash denunciation of the gentle daughter who can only love him and be silent, to his falling dead beside her, unbound from the rack of this tough world, a more affecting, truthful, and tremendous picture never surely was presented on the stage.”²⁵ While Dickens has seen fit to avoid repetition of Lear's “rash” actions in his fiction, he profoundly understood them.

Notes

1. Johnson, [Edgar.] Charles Dickens: His Tragedy and Triumph,[2 vols. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1952] 1:32.

2. Hardwick, [Mollie.] “Born under Aquarius,” [Dickensian 62 (1966)] 90.

3. Tomalin, [Claire.] The Invisible Woman: The Story of Nelly Ternan and Charles Dickens, [New York: Knopf, 1991.]

4. Adrian, [Arthur A.] “Dickens and Inverted Parenthood,” [Dickensian 67 (1971)] 11.

5. Zabel, [Morton Dauwen, ed.] Introduction to Charles Dickens' Best Stories, [Garden City, N.Y.: Hanover House, 1959,] 13.

6. In “The Mistaken Milliner. A Tale of Ambition,” the narrator explains: “Now, ‘coming out,’ either in acting, or singing, or society, or facetiousness, or anything else, is all very well, and remarkably pleasant to the individual principally concerned, if he or she can but manage to come out with a burst, and being out to keep out, and not go in again; but it does unfortunately happen that both consummations are extremely difficult to accomplish, and that the difficulties of getting out at all in the first instance, and if you surmount them, of keeping out in the second, are pretty much on a par, and no slight ones either—and so Miss Amelia Martin shortly discovered” ([Dickens, Charles. Sketches by Boz] 254).

7. Dickens, Charles. Sketches by Boz, [1833–36. London: Oxford University Press, 1957,] 244-49.

8. Nicholas Nickleby (1839) treats the theme in the oblique terms of uncles and doubles and resolution lies in the punishment of the father figures: suicide for Ralph and murder for Gride, and in the marriages of the daughter-figures to appropriate suitors. In The Old Curiosity Shop (1841) [Middlesex, England: Penguin, 1971] the sinister, sexual aspects of Quilp and the innocence of Nell, who finally escapes into death, have been extensively commented upon. Of Barnaby Rudge (1841) one critic has observed of Gabriel: “He obviously wants Dolly for himself; he is well-intentioned, but, for all that, a tyrant” (Kincaid, Dickens and the Rhetoric of Laughter, [Oxford, England: Clarendon, 1971] 123). Many other novels present classic variations on the theme: Hard Times (1854), Little Dorrit (1857), and Great Expectations (1861).

9. Butt, [John] and [Kathleen] Tillotson. Dickens at Work, [Fairlawn, N.J.: Essential, 1958,] 92.

10. Miller, Ian. “The Dickens Dramas: Mr. Dombey,” in Dickens Centennial Essays, ed. Nisbet and Nevius, 161. [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971.]

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