[In the following essay, Stewart analyzes the character of Jenny Wren; unlike most critics who either ignore or disparage her, Stewart considers the character central to the novel's symbolic meaning.]

‘You are talking about Me, good people,’ thought Miss Jenny, sitting in her golden bower, warming her feet. ‘I can't hear what you say, but I know your tricks and your manners!’

Miss Jenny is Fanny Cleaver, alias Jenny Wren, the crippled seamstress in Our Mutual Friend who fashions out of rags and refuse her miniature dresses for dolls and who, almost unheralded, moves gradually to the symbolic center of Dickens's last completed novel. Miss Jenny is not only the book's most brilliant idea, she marks the climax of that Dickensian tradition of fitful and harassed refuge in imagination sought by certain characters whom a spoiled world seems increasingly in danger of spoiling. It is a tradition of progressively minor, marginal people airing their fancies at a self-enforced distance from a society scarred everywhere by too unvisionary a dreariness, a line of declining confidence from Sam Weller in Pickwick Papers and Dick Swiveller in The Old Curiosity Shop through Mrs. Gamp in Martin Chuzzlewit to Wemmick in Great Expectations—and beyond, with some refurbished affirmation, to Jenny Wren. The tag phrase Dickens uses with formulaic frequency to announce Miss Wren is “the dolls' dressmaker.” For Jenny is a maker; she stitches, and binds, and seams, and in so doing tries to repair the chaos of her days. And she sings beautifully, and has had visions. One of the most profoundly moving characters ever brought forth from those inspired Dickensian marriages of gift and craft, Jenny Wren can be seen in her own creative making to act out such a union of vision and device. As in the case of Sam Weller especially, at the other end of the career, the artistic marvel of Jenny's conception is itself a large part of the significance toward which her whole being tends.¹ She is not only created by, she comes in fact to symbolize the Dickensian fancy at its most spacious and versatile.

It is only fair to admit that I am venturing an opinion here that has never been universally received. Jenny herself has been rather ill-received or mistreated by important critics (among the few who have dealt with her at all) from Henry James, who hated her, to Robert Garis, who, we will find, seems strangely to misjudge her. To see with James only that Jenny is “deformed, unhealthy, and unnatural” and then to dismiss her as a “little monster”² is to see next to nothing. Instead, I would like to proceed as if James's initial question about her had not been merely rhetorical. For it is much worth asking, and answering: “What do we get in return for accepting Miss Jenny Wren as a possible person?”³ The rewards appear to me enormous, and our epigraph should give us a start as soon as we give it context.

The metaphor of Jenny's “golden bower” is a far cry from idle analogy. Just before her unvoiced address in the epigraph, Jenny and Riah the Jew have met for the first time Miss Abbey Potterson, who has complimented Jenny on her exquisite blond hair, her “golden bower.” “‘Why, what lovely hair!’ cried Miss Abbey. ‘And enough to make wigs for all the dolls in the world’” (III,2).⁴ Already it is hinted that the materials of Jenny's artistry can be somehow self-supplied, here in one sense, later in another. “‘Call that a quantity?’ returned Miss Wren. ‘Poof! What do you say to the rest of it?’ As she spoke, she untied a band, and the golden stream fell over herself and over the chair, and flowed down to the ground.” In keeping with the idea that the raw matter of her craft can be furnished directly from her own person, the oddly overspecified “herself” in that last sentence (rather than the more likely “her”) underscores the reflexive nature of this self-containing embowerment. Jenny Wren is the Romantic motif of psychic haven physically bodied forth. It is a motif repeatedly used by Dickens both in Our Mutual Friend and before, but nowhere else is the symbol so intrinsic. Jenny Wren physically incorporates the retreat she has beaten from the world. She has sought a bower apart from “the weariness, the fever, and the fret” of society, and in searching she has become that bower. In her own proper person she is the Romantic idea she personifies, what Keats (once again, and in another place) called the “bower quiet for us” that art promises to maintain. Yet there is a caustic, an embittered side of her nature also caught in our brief epigraph, that defensive solipsism which forces upon “me” a capital “M,” twists “I” into italics,⁵ and thereby underlines Jenny's morbid privatism and paranoia. The war between such neurosis and her visionary access is the struggle I will be tracing through Our Mutual Friend. But it is important first to open out even more widely the context of that epigraph and to see the place of Jenny's “golden bower” in the larger development of Dickensian pastoralism.

It is a theme more often than not savagely ironic. Dickens's satire scores repeatedly against such loudly vaunted but fraudulent pastoral sympathies as Mrs. Skewton's “Arcadian” longings in Dombey and Son to live “entirely surrounded by cows” (D.S., 21), the bogus and parasitic romanticism of Harold Skimpole in Bleak House, who takes an aesthete's delight in the downfall of Richard Carstone, characterized by Skimpole as the “present shepherd, our pastoral Richard” (B.H., 37), or that final ostentation of sensibility in Little Dorrit when Mrs. Merdle sings mechanically of a lapsed Arcadia:

‘If we were in a more primitive state, if we lived under roofs of leaves, and kept cows and sheep and creatures, instead of banker's accounts (which would be delicious; my dear, I am pastoral to a degree, by nature), well and good. But we don't live under leaves, and keep cows and creatures.’

(L.D.,I,33)

Yet it is also in Little Dorrit that we meet the only heartily endorsed explicit pastoral in the novels. It is no sentimental idyl but a domestic comedy in one paragraph, describing a “little fiction in which Mrs. Plornish unspeakably rejoiced.” Her parlor boasts a painted wall mural representing an exterior view of “a counterfeit cottage” that becomes “a perfect pastoral to Mrs. Plornish, the Golden Age revived” (L.D.,II,13). The “little fiction” is here no destructive “counterfeit,” no lie, but a delightful game—and that “most wonderful deception” which is art itself.

Two novels later we come to another haven of fancy, a moated world of literally garrisoned imagination at Walworth Castle that is also a pastoral enclave. For Wemmick, in Great Expectations, fancy has sheared off from the daily run of his existence into a defensive privacy, an emotional schizophrenia that necessitates his rigorous quarantine of imagination. Only when he is safely within the confines of the Castle, far from Jaggers's London office, is Wemmick's fancy allowed to take root, and it flowers there amidst a thriving natural stronghold: “—At the back, there's a pig, and there are fowls and rabbits; then I knock together my own little frame, you see, and grow cucumbers; and you'll judge at supper what sort of salad I can raise” (G.E.,25). The Castle is “in point of provisions” a place of bounty and fruition, staunchly defended against siege by drawbridge and cannon. Wemmick is the sole architect of the miracle, the Prospero of this magic place: “I am my own engineer, and my own carpenter, and my own plumber, and my own gardener, and my own Jack of all Trades. … Well, it's a good thing, you know. It brushes the Newgate cobwebs away, and pleases the aged.” As this last admission shows, the Castle is not just art for art's sake; by means of it Wemmick has provided a blooming and delightful home for his aged parent, who recognizes it for the “pretty pleasure-ground” it is. The Castle also houses a “museum” that displays “among small specimens of china and glass, various neat trifles made by the proprietor of the museum, and some tobacco-stoppers carved by the Aged.” And finally, as we might have expected, this maker and connoisseur has even built in the middle of his pleasure-ground a “bower,” and an “ornamental lake, on whose margin the bower was raised.”

By the very next novel we have arrived at Boffin's Bower in Jenny Wren's own book. The haven of Mr. and Mrs. Boffin is a domestic compromise between her taste for fashion and his for comfort, so that as Mr. Boffin himself explains, “we have at once, Sociability (I should go melancholy mad without Mrs. Boffin), Fashion, and Comfort” (I,5). Their Bower, of course, is as artificial as Acrasia's in The Faerie Queene, but there is no attempt to seduce us, in any sense, with the illusion. Everything is blatantly “art,” and the sympathetic imagination is needed in large doses to make of the “flowery carpet” a terrain of lush “vegetation,” a “flowery bed” (I,5). Just as in Wemmick's sanctuary, the art here finds compensation in edible provisions, and “while the flowery land displayed such hollow ornamentation as stuffed birds and waxen fruits under glass shades, there were, in the territory where vegetation ceased, compensatory shelves on which the best part of a large pie and likewise of a cold joint were plainly discernible among other solids” (I,5). The novel's next chapter opens on a description of a tavern called the Six Jolly Fellowship-Porters, the bar of which is, once again, just such a fusion of art and natural bounty, containing “cordial-bottles radiant with fictitious grapes in bunches” and all manner of delectables. Dickens tells us in so many words that the tavern is a “haven” of human warmth and enjoyment “divided from the rough world,” indeed a place of “enchanting delusion” (I,6). The convivial joys of the tavern come straight from the Pickwickian world, and have had previous incarnations in The Maypole Inn of Barnaby Rudge and the Blue Dragon of Martin Chuzzlewit. Yet the ideas of refuge and “enchanting delusion” are new, an index to the darkening world outside the tavern. The enchantment of Pickwick is now just that, a spell, an illusion, still delightful but less safe and lasting.

It is no accident that Boffin's Bower and the Fellowship-Porters come back to back in Our Mutual Friend. They are both havens from an unsympathetic world, and the parallel is worked out in quiet detail. The Bower is itself “fitted and furnished more like a luxurious amateur tap-room than anything else,” and when we adjourn to the professional tap-room in the next chapter, here is what we are told:

The wood forming the chimney-pieces, beams, partitions, floors, and doors, of the Six Jolly Fellowship-Porters, seemed in its old age fraught with confused memories of its youth. In many places it had become gnarled and riven, according to the manner of old trees; knots started out of it; and here and there it seemed to twist itself into some likeness of boughs.

The bar is itself a bower, a natural hideaway.

Not without reason was it often asserted by the regular frequenters of the Porters, that when the light shone full upon the grain of certain panels, and particularly upon an old corner cupboard of walnut-wood in the bar, you might trace little forests there, and tiny trees like the parent-tree, in full umbrageous leaf.

(I,6)

It is also hardly accidental that these two versions of imaginative haven should come together in this particular novel, for in ways that have never been fully noticed Our Mutual Friend is Dickens's finest study of imagination, its outlets and repressions. Finally, it can be no coincidence—but rather a rounding out of Dickens's bower motif by a sort of concentric symbolism—that we have recently left Jenny Wren in the inner sanctum of this very bar: the lame artist surrounded by the golden bower of her hair within the enchanted bower of the tavern itself. Miss Abbey Potterson is in fact the proprietor of the Six Jolly Fellowship-Porters, and at her first meeting with Jenny she began by offering the child, just before we entered the scene, a draught of that most pastoral-sounding beverage, “shrub” (III,2).

To appreciate the widest import of Jenny's golden embowerment, we must return now to her first scene and follow her troubled passage through the awesome sprawl and mass of this remarkable book. In the deadening constriction of its atmospheres and the symbolic completeness of their delineation, Our Mutual Friend is Dickens's most modern novel, The Waste Land of his career as Johnson has put it.⁶ Dickens has even anticipated Eliot with a specific image in connection with Jenny Wren. The famous symbol in Prufrock for the torpor and insensibility of modern life—the evening “spread out against the sky / Like a patient etherised upon a table”—is much like the description of Jenny's neighborhood in London as it is first approached by Charley Hexam and Bradley Headstone. In a world where the escape motive is so widespread, even the personified city seeks release, appearing “with a deadly kind of repose on it, more as though it had taken laudanum than fallen into a natural rest” (II,1). London itself in this bleak sector seems narcotized upon the landscape, and in the very center of such spiritual desolation Jenny must fight off the inertia of her own crippled body and the enervation that attends everything about her—in order simply to live. On the next page, Bradley and Charley arrive at her lodgings and are taken aback by this “child—a dwarf—a girl—a something.” Miss Abbey will later ask, “Child, or woman?” and Riah's reply will be, “Child in years, … Woman in self-reliance and trial” (III,2).

For her two first visitors the matter is less certain. Before Bradley and Charley even discover her occupation, however, they cannot help realizing her rare skill: “The dexterity of her nimble fingers was remarkable” (II,1). Here I think we are being asked to link Jenny's skill, in the abstract, to that of the other precise craftsman in the novel, Mr. Venus. Silas Wegg is, of course, in his mangled readings from Gibbon and his extemporaneous balladeering, the “literary man” as con-artist, the sham poetizer of Our Mutual Friend, a one-legged charlatan of art whose own body is partly artificial. The true imaginative man, the true dreamer and romantic in the novel, the passionate lover and, if not a conventional artist, then a most accomplished artisan, is Mr. Venus. He takes an artist's pride in his work, but his beloved Pleasant Riderhood will have nothing to do with the “exquisite neatness” of his craftmanship, even though he has just sent “a Beauty—a perfect Beauty—to a school of art” (I,7). Venus is no troubadour; he loves like one and pines like one, languishing in true courtly fashion, and he even has the perfect name for one, but he does not articulate exactly like a poet does, piecing and shaping words into an organic whole. Mr. Venus is, rather, an “Articulator of human bones” (I,7). This is what has become in Dickens of the articulating imagination. It is the symbolic decline and fall of poetry, and only Jenny's verbal wit seems to have survived the ruin.

As a parodist rather than a parasite, in contrast to Wegg's mercenary versifying, Jenny breaks into her own “impromptu rhyme” after realizing that Charley and Bradley have come to see Lizzie, not her:

“You one two three,
My com-pa-nie,
And don't mind me. …”

(II,1)

And later, accompanied by a “prodigiously knowing” glance at Lizzie when Eugene visits:

“Who comes here?
A Grenadier.
What does he want?
A pot of beer.”

This is satire by irrelevance, and she baits Bradley Headstone with another form of it, a stretch of nonsensical alliterative prose-poetry she calls “a game of forfeits,” when he first tries to guess her occupation: “I love my love with a B because she's Beautiful; I hate my love with a B because she is Brazen; I took her to the sign of the Blue Boar, and I treated her with Bonnets; her name's Bouncer, and she lives in Bedlam.—Now, what do I make with my straw?” (II,1). Language like this lives on the edge of its own Bedlam, but under Jenny's control it becomes both the ironist's defense against insanity and a weapon against dullness.

Jenny can tamper playfully with vocables, as in “Lizzie-Mizzie-Wizzie” (II,2), or she can defiantly turn a cliché against its wielder, as when her father whines out “Circumstances over which had no control” and Jenny converts his empty nouns into punitive verbs: “I'll circumstance you and control you too” (II,2). Or there is the time when Eugene tries to extort information about Lizzie's whereabouts, and Jenny retorts with a pun: “And of course it's on the subject of a doll's dress—or address—whichever you like” (III,10). But nothing places Jenny more conclusively in the line of Dickens's verbal satirists than her variation on the famous “Wellerism” formula: “Let me see, said the blind man” (II,2). In Pickwick Papers Sam Weller often uses such comic asides (“as the man said when …”) partially to confront, partially to avert and control a grimmer reality, but Jenny's variant also seems to carry her back to a probable source for Sam's own habit, in an expression of that earlier manservant Sancho Panza who was so much admired by Dickens: “So for Heaven's sake, let me have the estate, and then we'll see, as one blind man said to the other” (Don Quixote, Part I, Ch. 50). Of necessity, however, Miss Wren's ironies are far more defensive than Sancho's or Sam's. When it works, her sardonic wit curtains her from the world, and an entire career in satiric wariness is summed up when, after a harsh dismissal of her drunken father, Dickens shows us Jenny “laughing satirically to hide that she had been crying” (III,10).

Like Dickens himself, Jenny Wren is also a tireless coiner of names, ironic and otherwise. Fledgeby becomes “Little Eyes,” Riah “Fairy Godmother,” and even “Jenny Wren” is her own idea. The girl who identifies herself late in the novel as one of those “Professors who live on our taste and invention” (IV,9) has in fact invented her own name. So we learn soon after meeting her: “Her real name was Fanny Cleaver; but she had long ago chosen to bestow upon herself the appellation of Miss Jenny Wren” (II,2). She thus offers the perfect foil for the lassitude and slack acceptance of Eugene Wrayburn, who, on the very next page of the novel, answers her query, “Mr. Eugene Wrayburn, ain't it?” with “So I am told.” The Oxford Companion to English Literature leaves much unsaid when it explains its entry “Jenny Wren” simply as the “business name” of Fanny Cleaver. Surely it must deserve space on the roster of allegorical names in Dickens, for she has tried to enroll it there herself. A “jenny” is a female bird in general; the wren is a bird noted for warbling, and we know that Jenny has a lovely voice; the two together, as the OED tells us, form the “popular, and especially nursery name for the wren … sometimes regarded in nursery lore as the wife, bride, or sweetheart of Robin Redbreast,” and we know that Jenny waits patiently for the clumsy sweetheart who will one day come courting. The girl who hates children for the fun they have made of her, and yet who has devoted her life to dressing dolls for children, here borrows from the literature of childhood for her own rechristening. Her art and her imagination, by which she has been baptized anew, seem to elevate her beyond her own sad prejudices. With more application and no less conviction, the dolls' dressmaker might well join nurse Gamp in the neat self-assuring formula: “Jenny Wren is my name, and Jenny Wren my nature.” Fanny Cleaver has bestowed upon herself a liberating pseudonym, a nom de plumage whose assonant lift is meant to carry her fancy above the sordidness of her cares and labors; it is no “business” matter at all, but for Miss Wren a matter of life instead of death. Gnawed at and severely flawed by experience, deprived, coarsened, Jenny has never been numbed. She has spirit still, and she must go vigilantly in order to levitate it against the fatal drag of a world from which all élan has long since been evacuated.

At the end of Jenny's first chapter, the first in Book II, an odd coincidence comes to light. Lizzie explains that she met the poor girl by “chance at first, as it seemed, Charley. But I think it must have been more than chance.” Jenny turns out to be the granddaughter of “the terrible drunken old man” on one of the bills in the old Hexam cottage, those notices of drowned people who became the ghoulish inventory of Gaffer Hexam's trade. We first learn of these obituary posters in the scene where Eugene looks in through the window and sees Lizzie “weeping by the rising and falling of the fire,” with the pictures of the drowned men on the walls “starting out and receding by turns” (I,13). As a descendant of one man among these oscillating firelit forms, Jenny seems to have come up from Lizzie's past with all the fanciful powers (and more, as we will see) once associated with the Hexam hearth and with fire-gazing there, the very activity debated by brother and sister later in the chapter where we learn about Jenny's heritage. Like Louisa Gradgrind “reading” her fire in the “Never Wonder” chapter of Hard Times (I,8), and pitted also against an insensitive brother, Lizzie Hexam was once able to envision past, present, and future in the dance of her coal blaze. It is typical of Charley that he now wants to cast off the moral and emotional burden of this memory: “‘You are such a dreamer,’ said the boy, with his former petulance. ‘It was all very well when we sat before the fire—when we looked into the hollow down by the flare—but we are looking into the real world now’” (II,1). Later in the chapter he explains to Bradley that “I used to call the fire at home her books, for she was always full of fancies—sometimes quite wise fancies, considering—when she sat looking at it.”

With this idea of reading a coal fire as if it were a book, Dickens has returned through ten major novels to his own private archetype for imagination, the furnace fire in The Old Curiosity Shop—back, perhaps, even to the Romantic locus classicus in Coleridge's “Frost at Midnight,” where a mere piece of soot, or “film,” lingering after a hearth fire is felt to perform, like the midnight frost, its own “secret ministry”:

                                                                                … the thin blue flame
Lies on my low-burnt fire, and quivers not;
Only the film, which fluttered on the grate,
Still flutters there, the sole unquiet thing.
Methinks its motion in this hush of nature
Gives it dim sympathies with me who live,
Making it a companionable form,
Whose puny flaps and freaks the idling Spirit
By its own moods interprets. …

(13-21)

Certainly the foundryman who gives Little Nell a warm place to lie down amid the volcanic industrial landscape of The Old Curiosity Shop “interprets” the momentous fire he stokes as a “companionable form”: “It has been alive as long as I have. … We talk and think together all night long” (O.C.S., 44). As the fire is personified, it emerges as a sort of genius loci in the center of this industrial hell. Amid the hammering engines whose very power it supplies, the foundryman's fire becomes, so to speak, a deus inter machinas, a protean and enduring force, the prime mover and special providence of the furnace-tender's affections and fancies. Here is his astonishing confession of faith:

‘It's like a book to me,’ he said—‘the only book I ever learned to read; and many an old story it tells me. It's music, for I should know its voice among a thousand, and there are other voices in the roar. It has pictures too. You don't know how many strange faces and different scenes I trace in the red-hot coals. It's my memory, that fire, and shows me all my life.’

(O.C.S.,44)

This fire myth assumes many shapes on the way to Our Mutual Friend. Paul Dombey, an “old-fashioned” creature of imagination like Jenny Wren who is often seen “cogitating and looking for explanation in the fire” (D.S.,8), treats the fire “like a book” in an almost voodooistic way, “studying Mrs. Pipchin, and the cat, and the fire, night after night, as if they were a book of necromancy, in three volumes” (D.S.,8). Characters as different as the idiot Barnaby Rudge (B.R.,17) and the novelist David Copperfield (D.C.,8,59) are addicted to fire-gazing, but when Charley explains Lizzie's firelight as a “library,” the “mechanical” schoolmaster Bradley Headstone is triggered into a brief self-condemning outburst: “I don't like that!” (II,1). The fire motif itself will finally seem to take revenge on Bradley, as Jenny in a way predicts when she compares him, not without demonic overtones, to “a lot of gunpowder among lighted lucifer matches” (II,11). After Bradley's smouldering passions have erupted in criminal violence, alone, on his last night alive, he will find himself locked in a kind of creeping rigor mortis “before the fire, as if it were a charmed flame that was turning him old” (IV,15). It is as if, just before his death, Bradley were himself transformed into a dying fire, his face “turning whiter and whiter as if it were being overspread with ashes.” We cannot be surprised that such a man should hate fire-gazing, nor that Jenny, on the other hand, should be quite enchanted by the custom. Here she is with Lizzie:

‘Look in the fire, as I like to hear you tell how you used to do when you lived in that dreary old house that had once been a windmill. Look in the—what was its name when you told fortunes with your brother … ?’

‘The hollow down by the flare?’

‘Ah! That's the name! …’

(II,11)

Miss Wren knows only too well the inevitable fissuring of vision from the daily blankness of routine, and she is instinctively sympathetic to anyone's effort at uniting the real and the ideal. She herself cannot. She must always fluctuate between the remembered beauties of her innocent imagination and the sullied bondage of experience. Yet her energy is so intense that it has brought her a glimpse, for a time only, but sublime, of a departed dream more glorious than any of the fire-conjured “pictures of what is past” in Lizzie's “hollow down by the flare” (I,3). For Jenny Wren has had a revelation.

In this connection, the most interesting comment J. Hillis Miller has made about Dickens he made not in his long and well-known book on the novels,⁷ but indirectly, in a lecture on George Eliot to a Comparative Literature Colloquium at Yale on March 4, 1971. He suggested on that occasion how the history of nineteenth-century fiction can be seen in part as the history of its internalization for individual characters of that Romantic experience previously restricted to the extraordinary imagination of the gifted poet. To document such a history for Dickens's novels in particular would surely call for a final chapter on the transcendental visions of Jenny Wren and their collapse into the narcotic escapism of John Jasper in the next and last novel. At one point soon after her first appearance, revealing by her own imitative drone that ear for phrase which Dickens has shared with her, Jenny asks: “I wonder how it happens that when I am work, work, working here, all alone in the summer-time, I smell flowers” (II,2). (Notice the difference in effect between the comma punctuation of “work, work, working” here and the accelerating hyphenation of the phrase “skip-skip-skipping,” used by Jenny in the previous chapter to describe the games of other children.) Eugene Wrayburn “was growing weary of the person of the house” and “suggested languidly” that “As a common-place individual, I should say … that you smell flowers because you do smell flowers.” But Jenny's response makes it clear that hers was not at all a commonplace question:

‘No, I don't … this is not a flowery neighborhood. It's anything but that. And yet, as I sit at work, I smell miles of flowers. I smell roses till I think I see the rose-leaves lying in heaps, bushels, on the floor. I smell fallen leaves till I put down my hand—so—and expect to make them rustle. I smell the white and the pink May in the hedges, and all sorts of flowers that I never was among. For I have seen very few flowers indeed, in my life.’

There are no gardens, no “bower,” except in her own imagination, as Lizzie realizes. “‘Pleasant fancies to have, Jenny dear!’ said her friend: with a glance towards Eugene as if she would have asked him whether they were given the child in compensation for her losses.” Jenny also tells of the delightful birds she hears at such times: “‘Oh!’ cried the little creature, holding out her hand and looking upward, ‘how they sing!’” And as Jenny continues, her face becomes overspread with a look “quite inspired and beautiful.”

Now comes the unfolding of her childhood dream of heaven, the lost but still sponsoring vision to which she seems to owe her recurring pastoral “fancies”:

‘I dare say my birds sing better than other birds, and my flowers smell better than other flowers. For when I was a little child,’ in a tone as though it were ages ago, ‘the children that I used to see early in the morning were very different from any others that I ever saw. They were not like me: they were not chilled, anxious, ragged, or beaten; they were never in pain. They were not like the children of the neighbours; they never made me tremble all over, by setting up shrill noises, and they never mocked me. Such numbers of them, too! All in white dresses, and with something shining on the borders, and on their heads, that I have never been able to imitate with my work, though I know it so well. They used to come down in long bright slanting rows, and say all together, “Who is this in pain?” When I told them who it was, they answered, “Come and play with us!” When I said, “I never play! I can't play!” they swept about me and took me up, and made me light. Then it was all delicious ease and rest till they laid me down, and said all together, “Have patience, and we will come again.” Whenever they came back, I used to know they were coming before I saw the long bright rows, by hearing them ask, all together a long way off, “Who is this in pain?” And I used to cry out, “Oh, my blessed children, it's poor me! Have pity on me! Take me up and make me light!”’

(II,2)

In the tread and build of this soliloquy, from the tentative “I dare say” through the transfiguring conjunctive rise of “swept about me and took me up, and made me light” to its plaintive, partial re-sounding at the end, this is magnificent writing, a brilliantly inflected prose whose repetitions are spell-binding and incantatory, with no smirch of sentimentality. So powerfully Blakean, it is a breath-taking Romantic vision that also becomes Dickens's own “Intimations Ode.” Jenny is indeed inland far from her immortal sea, but she has tried to keep safe her imagination of angels, and their long bright slanting rows offer a “fountain-light” (to echo Wordsworth once again) by which, in the arid, blackened wastes of London, her desolation is sometimes bathed, her griefs quenched. When Jenny realizes that Lizzie is heading for trouble with Eugene, she even tries to delegate her fancy as a kind of spiritual support: “Oh my blessed children, come back in the long bright slanting rows, and come for her, not me. She wants help more than I, my blessed children!” (II,11).

Real children mocked Jenny with “shrill noises,” so her fancy comforted her with the blessed unison of cherubs. The initial glory and the dream have gone, but at times Jenny smells flowers and hears a chorus of songbirds. And she has almost achieved what she has dreamed in her own person, despite the bad back and queer legs, for Jenny Wren has named herself a songbird—developing an eye as “bright and watchful as the bird's whose name she had taken” (II,11)—and has grown herself a bower. Her initial vision was not of the world, or for it; it could not be willed or sustained. It came and went as a blessing, a recompense, but it was a divine and ultimately inaccessible beauty which she has “never been able to imitate” in her dolls' dresses. The vision cannot be accommodated, and her art must always remain a partially unsatisfactory mediation between what is ordinary, even wretched in her life and those surprising splendors of her epiphany.

The latter are short-lived indeed. During her recitation, Jenny's “late ecstatic look returned, and she became quite beautiful” (II,2), yet all too soon, after the return of her drunken father, she reverts to a pitiful and largely pitiless cripple, a victim and yet a victimizer:

As they went on with their supper, Lizzie tried to bring her round to that prettier and better state. But the charm was broken. The person of the house was the person of a house full of sordid shames and cares, with an upper room in which that abased figure was infecting even innocent sleep with sensual brutality and degradation. The dolls' dressmaker had become a little quaint shrew; of the world, worldly; of the earth, earthy.

(II,2)

This is the recurring tragedy of Jenny's life: that fancy is an unreliable refuge from drudgery, that what is beautiful in her life must inevitably evaporate, the lovely lapsing away into what is mean and demeaning, and that at such times all glory is of the imagination, unimaginable. Robert Garis's uneasiness here is hard to fathom. After quoting the above passage, he objects strenuously that Jenny is “an impressive human being able to choose her own moods and her own expressions.”⁸ This is just what Dickens has told us she is not able to do, her paradisal vision not a matter of choosing, but a descent of grace. Garis insists that “Jenny Wren is not a ‘shrew’, quaint, little or otherwise; there is no significant perspective in the novel from which her feelings can be accused of being ‘worldly’ or ‘earthly’. …” Take her or leave her, Jenny Wren can only be what Dickens tells us about her, and the question-begging circularity of Garis's argument is typical of the backhanded compliments he pays Dickens throughout his book. When he complains that the passage in question is “symptomatic of the whole novel in that it almost knowingly disgraces its possibilities,”⁹ he is missing the large point about Jenny Wren that she is her own worst enemy, that her greatest grief is her own knowing disgrace of finer possibilities.

Jenny's “shrewishness” is kept perfectly in character by Dickens because it is always shrewd, and her insistence that she is the one and only “person of the house” is a just retaliation against her father's abdicated humanity. Her relation with Mr. Dolls is indeed a vexing one, but no less so for Jenny than for us. She seems driven by adversity almost beyond guilt. There is no doubt about her callous humiliation of Mr. Dolls, and yet there is no way to decide precedence in his debauchery, the unforgivable on his part or the unforgiving on hers. The “dire reversal of the places of parent and child” (II,2) is simply the given of their lives. Dickens, too, is at least as hard on Mr. Dolls as his daughter is. The old man's drunken approach to insentience is complete at his death, and the balanced repetitions of Dickens's prose fix the terrible parallel for us when we are told that “in the midst of the dolls with no speculation in their eyes, lay Mr. Dolls with no speculation in his” (IV,9). With Mr. Dolls reduced to a state no better than that of his namesakes, those wax effigies of human life, a pattern is completed that began in the previous chapter with an intriguing parallel between Jenny herself and one of her dolls. There we heard Miss Wren “trolling in a small sweet voice a mournful little song, which might have been the song of the doll she was dressing, bemoaning the brittleness and meltability of wax …” (IV,8). And we may even recall at this point one of the earliest descriptions of Jenny, in which she seemed to be “articulated” like one of her own dolls: “As if her eyes and her chin worked together on the same wires” (II,1). A less obtrusive balance of syntax and sense in “a small sweet voice a mournful little song” performs a quieter service than in the description of Mr. Dolls. The strange mirroring in this sentence begins mildly when Jenny's song is said to be as “little” as the “small” voice that sings it—and then slides into a curious instance of Dickensian animism enacting here a kind of ingrown allegory by which art bewails its own perishability. In her dual role as artist, Jenny is both a singer and, as Riah put it earlier with his own symmetrical phrasing, “a little dressmaker for little people” (II,5), and the reciprocal littleness now of singer (or voice) and song is matched here again by a second (if indirect) identification between maker and made. Meaning folds over itself once more as the artifact inherits the natural anxiety of the artist and laments the mutability (or “meltability”) of its own medium.

Even before his death, Mr. Dolls was blessed with no more speculation than one of his daughter's lifeless dolls, and yet there is a mysterious side of things in this novel where a doll herself (and I use the personifying pronoun advisedly) can indulge in as much speculation about death and ends as anyone in the book. Through a psychic atmosphere thick with such violent imaginative extremes, between slumps of torpor and the reaches of certain miraculous vitalities, the dolls' dressmaker must steer her fancy, must pilot her life. Small wonder that her “betterness” is constantly imperilled. By her earliest raptures Jenny Wren was literally transported, lifted out of her life, borne free. Later came her birds and miles of flowers. Short of this grace, far below it, with her fancy all but chafed away to a cutting edge in satire, falls her defensive wit; yet her imagination, worn thin and harsh, has still managed to hold on, and even her acidity is tonic. What alone deadens is that final phase of her bitterness when even the “better look” is effaced and forgotten, the cruel victory of the everyday that grounds all memories of her transport and grinds them to a halt, like one of her own dreamed birds struck down.

We have to believe Dickens when he tells us that for Jenny Wren there can be no willed maneuvers of renewal. Yet as the prison house closes about her, she must keep guard against a complete walling-up of the apertures to wonder, and Jenny has been able to stake out a limited opening upon transcendence in her unlikely haven on the roof of Pubsey and Co. There we find Jenny and Lizzie seated reading “against no more romantic object than a blackened chimney-stock” (II,5). There are no magnificent “miles of flowers” now, but only a “few boxes of humble flowers.” As Riah and Fledgeby join them, Jenny will become the prophet of her own divine vision, with the unimaginative Fledgeby excommunicate from the fold of true believers. Dickens is implicitly participating here in that scaling and codification of fancy suggested by his eminent fellow Victorian John Ruskin, who saw the “pathetic fallacy” as the result of a temperament “borne away, or over-clouded, or over-dazzled by emotion,” and who knew that this “is a more or less noble state, according to the force of the emotion which has induced it.”¹⁰ No one could have agreed with Ruskin more completely than did Dickens that “it is no credit to a man that he is not morbid or inaccurate in his perceptions, when he has no strength of feeling to warp them; and it is in general a sign of higher capacity and stand in the ranks of being, that the emotions should be strong enough to vanquish, partly, the intellect, and make it believe what they choose.”¹¹ Fledgeby is a man, as it were, monstrously unwarped, falling at the lower end of Ruskin's fourfold ranking as “the man who perceives rightly, because he does not feel.” Jenny Wren is the closest Dickens ever comes to the polar fourth stage. Beyond the first and second orders of poets, Jenny is one of those creatures who “see in a sort untruly, because what they see is inconceivably above them. This last is the usual condition of prophetic inspiration.”¹² For this twain in Dickens there is no convergence: Fledgeby is conducted to Jenny's rooftop sanctuary by Riah, “who might have been the leader in some pilgrimage of devotional ascent to a prophet's tomb,” but Fledgeby is not at all “troubled by any such weak imagining” (II,5).

Jenny soon explains her latest “pleasant fancy”—how, above the closeness and clamor of the city, “you see the clouds rushing on above the narrow streets, not minding them, and you see the golden arrows pointing at the mountains in the sky from which the wind comes, and you feel as if you were dead.” Grammar and definition in the participial phrase “not minding them” are beautifully loosened, as if set free—the normal tethers of reference, both lexical and syntactic, here disengaged. The verb “minding” registers as either (or both) “mindful of” and “troubled by,” and, complicated by its ambiguous referent, makes for an unusual tri-valent syntax. What or who is “not minding” what? The clouds pay no attention to the streets; neither, therefore, are they troubled by them. And the claustral streets, of course, pay heaven no mind. “You” too are with the clouds, neither worrying over nor even noticing the despoiled place you have climbed free of. When asked by Fledgeby what it feels like “when you are dead,” this is Jenny's reply: “‘Oh, so tranquil!’ cried the little creature, smiling. ‘Oh, so peaceful and so thankful!’” The adjective “thankful” answers in near echo to “tranquil” (as restated by “peaceful”) in the way that Jenny's profound sense of gratitude follows upon her achieved and private sanctity, a condition of the spirit which she goes on to explain in a serene conjunctive series: “And you hear the people who are alive, crying, and working, and calling to one another down in the close dark streets, and you seem to pity them so! And such a chain has fallen from you, and such a strange good sorrowful happiness comes upon you!” Our interest, in the last clause, is drawn by an incremental rhythm through the unpunctuated chain of prenominal adjectives to the strange good paradox at its end, that “sorrowful happiness” which marks Jenny's attempt to wrest elation from the slavish levellings of melancholy. We have recently noted how the doubled adjectives in “small sweet voice” and “mournful little song” helped imply the quiet paralled Dickens had in mind, and here again his habit of multiplied adjectives is turned to special account. As always in his style, Dickens refuses to rest easy in the habitual, pressing it constantly for new yields. His fondness for the pre-nominal loading of modifiers can even be impressed, as we are about to see, into imitative service.¹³

To pick up the text where I left off, it is important to realize that the “sorrowful happiness” which Jenny recommends when “you feel as if you were dead,” this crucial phase of her escape artistry, is in fact subjunctive, an “as if” hypothesis. This has nothing in common with Little Nell's actual death-wishes in The Old Curiosity Shop. Like any romantic, Jenny simply dreams of a finer time, remembered or foreseen. Once again, though, her dreaming seems to approach achievement, for she herself appears to Riah like a vision, “the face of the little creature looking down out of a Glory of her long bright radiant hair, and musically repeating to him, like a vision: ‘Come up and be dead! Come up and be dead!’” Here the mimetically elongated phrase “long bright radiant hair,” describing what is often her bower, here her Glory, seems to echo—to be “musically repeating”—the adjectival cadence of her divine children's “long bright slanting rows,” just as Jenny herself approximates in her own person at such moments, “like a vision,” the best she has imagined. Mantled in the radiance of her golden hair, Jenny stands revealed as the type or emblem of the miracle only she has witnessed, and that almost far-fetched conditional metaphor of the “prophet's tomb” (to which Riah “might have been” leading Fledgeby) is now doubly actualized. Jenny's vision is not “prophetic” only; her rooftop vantage does in fact become a kind of “tomb,” from which we are invited by Jenny, shrouded in the raiment of her Glory, to “Come up and be dead!” Little Nell never knew anything like this. Closely neighbored by the paradox of “sorrowful happiness,” the predication “be dead” is all the more clearly an exonerating oxymoron, reminding us that we are now in the presence not of suicidal surrender but of vivifying transcendence, not of death and non-being, but of rebirth.

Jenny's gift for commuting between life and death in no way blinds her to the final reality of the latter. Justifying to Riah her inability “to hire a lot of stupid undertaker's things” for her father's funeral, she says that it would seem “as if I was trying to smuggle 'em out of this world with him, when of course I must break down in the attempt, and bring 'em all back again. As it is, there'll be nothing to bring back but me, and that's quite consistent, for I shan't be brought back some day!” (IV,9). In terms not too distantly cousined to her own transcendental vocabulary, this is the inexorable “consistency” of life's track toward dying: that you can come up and be dead as often as you like, but that one day body will catch up with soul, and then no one, not even yourself, will be able to bring you down and back. Such terms seem deliberately to recur at the book's spiritual nadir, and again they set a terminus. After two false starts and pointless backtrackings, Bradley Headstone, followed by Riderhood, passes onto the wooden bridge in the direction of the locks where the two men will soon be found dead. It is Bradley's last aimless setting-out in the novel, and there is a proleptic irony in Riderhood's “The Weir's there, and you have to come back, you know” (IV,15). Jenny would of course know better; there is a day for all of us when we do not come back. Riderhood has once before “gone down” into the Thames, into death, and his spirit brought nothing back from that descent. It was his last chance. Having already encountered Jenny on the rooftop, Fascination Fledgeby says to her at their second meeting, “Instead of coming up and being dead, let's come out and look alive” (IV,8). By such reminders along the way, it would seem, we are conditioned to hear a final distorted echo of Jenny's invitation in Headstone's death summons to Riderhood. “I'll hold you living, and I'll hold you dead,” he promises, and his last words in the novel are “Come down!” (IV,15). Come down and die, he says, for death is our long-sought mutual friend, and for us there will be only death, not the luxury of “being dead.” Death cannot be outfaced or deflected. And only by a miracle of imagination like Jenny's can it be understood, unburdened of its terror, returned into the cycle of the living.

Though we see no one at all mourning the joint death of Headstone and Riderhood, Jenny herself is deeply moved by the frightful passing of her father. Her understatement records anything but indifference: “‘I must have a very short cry, godmother, before I cheer up for good,’ said the little creature, coming in. ‘Because after all a child is a child, you know’” (IV,9). That last tautological catch phrase is in fact, by Jenny's own eccentric definition, a poignant ambiguity. She has always referred to her father as her bad “child,” and a child is a child, however prodigal. But Jenny is herself a child, and may be admitting here to her own vulnerability: I have tried to put away childish things, like dependency, like tears, but after all a daughter is a daughter. In the wake of pain, however, there must be restoration, and Jenny later tells Riah that at the height of her mourning, “while I was weeping at my poor boy's grave,” she had the inspiration to model clothes for a doll after the clergyman's surplice. The energies of her own craft have in a sense “brought her back” from the grave this time, reclaimed her spirit, as she turns the ceremony of chill finality into one of warmth and continuity. For her clergyman doll will not be found presiding at funerals, but rather “uniting two of my young friends in matrimony” (IV,9). When dressing herself in mourning, Jenny eased her grief by imagining what her future sweetheart would think if he were there to see her fine clothes, and once more, at graveside, death has been replaced by human union in Miss Wren's fancy. This imaginative conversion takes place one last time in the novel's next chapter, “The Dolls' Dressmaker Discovers a Word.” There language moves past mere communication into a sacramental communion, as Jenny manages to understand the one word, “Wife,” that may retrieve Eugene from the edge of death where he is muttering it repeatedly. I think Dickens wants us to consider the word “Wife” here as a solitary expression of the ultimate Word, a creative sign that defines one person in terms of another and brings about that true “mutuality” which alone might redeem society. By discovering the “Word,” and thus bringing Lizzie and Eugene together, Jenny has once again, through her unique powers, transformed mortality into matrimony, Eugene's deathbed into a marriage altar. And when the wedding service is read, a text “so rarely associated with the shadow of death,” it is only fitting that Jenny should be in attendance, and that she should at last freely give way to her feelings: “The dolls' dressmaker, with her hands before her face, wept in her golden bower” (IV,11).

There is still more to notice about her time as Eugene's nurse. After he has been brutally beaten by Headstone, Jenny is called in at his own request to attend Eugene in his feverish coma. She is “all softened compassion now” (IV,10), and she watches over him as tirelessly as she was once to him tiring. It comes about that “through this close watching (if through no secret sympathy or power) the little creature attained an understanding of him that Lightwood did not possess.” Here Dickens's strategic parenthesis is his thesis. Jenny does have a “secret power” that brings her once again into contact with that other world on whose border Eugene is now wandering, “as if she were an interpreter between this sentient world and the insensible man” (IV,10). Her nimbleness and agility, the “natural lightness and delicacy of touch, which had become very refined by practice in her miniature work”—these very skills of her imaginative craft now give her an “absolute certainty of doing right” in dressing wounds, easing ligatures, and adjusting bedclothes. The practical dexterity of Dickens's most visionary character, previously used to approximate those heavenly glimpses in her worldly art, now makes of Jenny Wren the perfect nurse. This is the ministering imagination in its finest hour, and it suggests an important parallel with Lizzie, who was only able to save Eugene from the river four chapters earlier through a skill similarly “refined by practice” in her old life with her father: “A sure touch of her old practised hand, a sure step of her old practised foot, a sure light balance of her body, and she was in the boat” (IV,6). The past itself has been salvaged for good ends, as Jenny had hoped in another context when asking Riah to “Change Is into Was and Was into Is, and keep them so” (III,2). The thrust of Jenny's visionary energy is like a lone cantilever stabbing into the free space of imagination; nothing meets it to complete a span, yet there are converging pressures that brace it at the point of departure, reinforcements that gird it at its human base. The deliberate parallel with Lizzie's saving skills is one of these.

“If there is a word in the dictionary under any letter from A to Z that I abominate, it is energy.” Eugene went on record with this statement in the novel's third chapter, but now the dolls' dressmaker, described at one point as “rigid from head to foot with energy” (IV, 9), has helped rehabilitate Eugene, by a kind of psychic osmosis, for a new life of “purpose and energy” (IV, 11). Eugene originally summons Jenny, however, for another and more astounding sort of osmosis, a transference of fancy by which he hopes to bring Jenny's visionary solace into the orbit of his own stricken and fevered brain. When Jenny first arrives, Eugene asks if she has seen “the children,” and, puzzled at first, Jenny finally replies with “that better look” upon her, rehearsing for us her visionary history and its gradual domestication into the pastoral:

‘You mean my long bright slanting rows of children, who used to bring me ease and rest? You mean the children who used to take me up, and make me light?’

Eugene smiled, ‘Yes.’

‘I have not seen them since I saw you. I never see them now, but I am hardly ever in pain now.’

‘It was a pretty fancy,’ said Eugene.

‘But I have heard my birds sing,’ cried the little creature, ‘and I have smelt my flowers. Yes, indeed I have! And both were most beautiful and most Divine!’

‘Stay and help to nurse me,’ said Eugene, quietly. ‘I should like you to have the fancy here, before I die.’

(IV,10)

The imagination meets its apotheosis through an act of mercy, in one of the most perfect and moving scenes Dickens ever wrote. It is as if Jenny's “most Divine” visions will help guarantee heaven for Eugene; the limited artist of imagination must now aid in imagining the limitless, and this is her great ministration. Jenny has a doll called Mrs. (not Miss) Truth which she has used with Bradley Headstone as a kind of lie-detector or moral touchstone (II,11), but the highest Truth she has envisioned she has never been able to dress her dolls in, never been able to marry with the world. Only now in her own person, selflessly and feelingly, can she become that accommodation which she could not willfully achieve in her art. Just as she became herself “like a vision” on the rooftop in singing out her invitation to come up and be dead, so now she is again her transcendent fancies given flesh within the golden bower of her hair, a personification at Eugene's side of her own dream of heaven, the very vision of her vision.

When Mr. Sloppy first meets Miss Wren at the end of the novel, it is an “event, not grand, but deemed in the house a special one” (IV,16). Her luxuriant blond hair accidentally tumbles down about her shoulders, and when Sloppy marvels, Jenny for the first time drops the defensive and often belligerent periphrasis “my back's bad, and my legs are queer” to admit point-blank, “I am lame.” But when Sloppy sees her use her crutch-stick and tells her “that you hardly want it at all,” Jenny is obviously touched. A rare thing has happened—a spontaneous exchange of friendship has, without recourse to her visions, brought “that better look upon her.” When Jenny next explains to Sloppy the supposedly yet unsolved mystery of “Him, Him, Him” who is coming to court her, Sloppy breaks into such uncontrolled, raucous glee that Jenny finds it irresistible: “At the sight of him laughing in that absurd way, the dolls' dressmaker laughed very heartily indeed. So they both laughed, till they were tired.” For the first time in Our Mutual Friend Jenny Wren laughs out loud in unembittered, uninhibited good spirits, and the result is a good weariness this time, not ennui or exhaustion. I believe we are encouraged to see the advent of Mr. Sloppy as the Coming of Him, and to notice how imaginatively well-matched he and Miss Wren really are. Not only is Sloppy an artisan like herself, an accomplished cabinet-maker who also appreciates the fine arts and will consider himself “better paid with a song than with any money” (IV,16) for the work he plans to do on Jenny's crutch, but he will also be able to entertain Jenny in return. For Sloppy's imagination has found play in impersonation, one of the comic novelist's own favorite forms of articulation. As Betty Higden told us early in the novel, “You mightn't think it, but Sloppy is a beautiful reader of a newspaper. He do the Police in different voices” (I,11). Abetting one's suspicions about T. S. Eliot's debt to Dickens and his own “Unreal City” in Our Mutual Friend, the recently published drafts of The Waste Land unveil “He do the Police in Different Voices” as the joint title of the original two-part format.¹⁴ Like Fresca in a canceled portion of “The Fire Sermon” (and here it is of course only I and not Eliot in turn who is alluding), Jenny Wren's “style is quite her own.”¹⁵ “Not quite an adult, and still less a child, / By fate misbred,” Miss Wren too might have been “in other time or place” a “lazy laughing Jenny.” When the happy laughter Sloppy brings to the close of her story begins to redress fate's imbalance in genuine emotional terms, we leave Our Mutual Friend on the eve of a great victory for the theme of imagination in Dickens.

Betty Higden, who praised Sloppy's newspaper recitations, is of course another figure for this theme in the novel. Although there is “abundant place for gentler fancies … in her untutored mind” (III,8), when faced with the vastness of the river Betty hears only a suicidal beckoning, “the tender river whispering to many like herself, ‘Come to me, come to me! … death in my arms is peacefuller than among the pauper-wards. Come to me!’” (III,8). This is death, and it is very different from the transcendence of Jenny's invitation to “Come up and be dead!” Betty finds peace in Lizzie Hexam's arms in the famous death scene at the end of the chapter from which I have been quoting, but Jenny's imagination is much stronger than Betty's “gentler fancies,” and she does not have to die. To borrow Dickens's last words about Betty Higden, Jenny's paradisal visions alone “lifted her as high as heaven.” When we first met Jenny, she taunted Bradley Headstone with that “game of forfeits.” Life for her has been such a game, but she has managed by imagination to cheat destiny, to forfeit as little as possible and to keep much intact. Through the help of her intermittent refuge in fancy, those therapeutic visions for her crippled days, she has, by the time of Sloppy's arrival, almost won the game. The honest, the authentic imagination in Dickens suffices and fulfills. After all the waverings, the prevarications, the foul violations of experience, some remarkable “pleasant fancies” have seen Jenny Wren through, safe within her “golden bower,” to a relief and a leniency.

Notes

1. In Steven Marcus's recent return to Pickwick Papers there is no retraction whatever about Sam as a “great poet and impressario of the language,” indeed “one brilliantly split off, deflected, and reorganized segment” of Dickens himself. See “Language into Structure: Pickwick Revisited,” Daedalus, 101 (Winter, 1972), 183. This new essay by Marcus is a distinguished homecoming and succeeds in going one better his own pioneering study of the novel in Dickens: From Pickwick to Dombey (New York: Basic Books, 1965).

2. James's review of Our Mutual Friend in The Nation, 21 December 1865; rpt. in Dickens: The Critical Heritage, ed. Philip Collins (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1971), p. 471.

3. James, p. 470.

4. All quotations are from the New Oxford Illustrated Dickens (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1948-1958), but references in parentheses follow standard practice with Dickens by pointing simply to chapter and, where applicable, to book, in order to make location easier in the many widely available editions. The following abbreviations are used for novels cited other than Our Mutual Friend: O.C.S. for The Old Curiosity Shop, B.R. for Barnaby Rudge, D.S. for Dombey and Son, D.C. for David Copperfield, B.H. for Bleak House, L.D. for Little Dorrit, and G.E. for Great Expectations.

5. To adapt to the present case a pocket of latter-day Dickensian word play from Vladimir Nabokov's Transparent Things (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1972), one might say that the italicized “characters” here (both Jenny herself and the pronoun that proclaims her, as Nabokov distinguishes between “personae” and “signs”) are protectively self-“inclined” (see p. 92).

6. Edgar Johnson, Charles Dickens: His Tragedy and Triumph, II (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1952), 1043.

7. Miller, Charles Dickens: The World of His Novels (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1958).

8. Garis, The Dickens Theatre: A Reassessment of the Novels (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), p. 252.

9. Ibid.

10. Ruskin, “The Pathetic Fallacy” from Modern Painters, III (1856); rpt. in The Literary Criticism of John Ruskin, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Anchor Books, 1965), pp. 65-66.

11. Ruskin, p. 66.

12. Ruskin, p. 67.

13. The most histrionic use of frontal adjectives in these mimetic jam-ups certainly comes in the thudding bravura of Lady Tippins's description, with her “immense obtuse drab oblong face, like a face in a tablespoon” (I,2).

14. T. S. Eliot. The Waste Land: A Facsimile and Transcript of the Original Drafts Including the Annotations of Ezra Pound, ed. Valerie Eliot (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971). Calling her father a “swipey old child,” Jenny says at one point that he is “fit for nothing but to be preserved in the liquor that destroys him” (III,10), conjuring up an image of the preserved and bottled “children” in Mr. Venus's shop, those “hydrocephalic” babies (III,14). To die by “water on the brain” is no inapplicable end in a symbolic drama many of whose cast, from the title character John Harmon on down, are threatened with or succumb to “Death by Water,” including Gaffer Hexam, Rogue Riderhood, Bradley Headstone, and Eugene Wrayburn. Surely the section of Eliot's poem bearing this title does not resist such associations, and there is that especially curious mention of an “infant hydrocephalous” in a passage Eliot himself subsequently struck from the “Death by Water” manuscript (p. 75).

15. Eliot, p. 27. All the brief quotations here are from this page of the manuscript.