[In the following essay, Eriksen investigates Dickens's own views of art and his strongly visual writing style to illuminate the author's development of a more “modern” form of novel writing. Eriksen asserts that in Bleak House Dickens moves away from the Hogarth-inspired style of caricature and satire to a more symbolic form of imagery, a move paralleled by contemporary trends in the visual arts.]

In a letter to John Forster, his friend and biographer, Dickens commented upon the visual nature of his literary style: “When … I sit down to my book, some beneficent power shows it all to me and tempts me to be interested, and I don't invent it—really do not—but see it, and write it down.”¹ Dickens appears to be describing the inspiration of his literary pictorialism, that is, his frequent tendency to arrest his narratives and elaborate upon scenic visual details that create or suggest thematic, metaphoric, or narrative meanings. This tendency towards literary pictorialism has long been recognized as a salient characteristic of Dickens's art, and critics have made efforts to identify some of the influences that may have shaped this visual style.² Clearly Dickens always possessed an extremely sharp awareness of the details of physical settings. No doubt his training as a reporter sharpened these innate gifts for observation. But few critics, and these mostly in an indirect manner, have pointed out the probable influence of contemporary artistic practices upon his developing style—especially the methods of Victorian narrative painters.³

To grasp the importance of Victorian art upon Dickens's writing style, the student of Dickens gains a particular advantage by focusing first upon Bleak House, because it appears to represent the first full realization of Dickens's powers as an artist. In order to fully appreciate the initial impact of narrative paintings upon Bleak House, the critical reader must also recognize the unique character of its illustrations and their important connections with the text. It is also necessary to understand something of the character of Victorian painting and the special nature of Dickens's relationship to the art establishment that produced and defended such art. Recognizing the strong influence of Victorian narrative art upon Dickens's writing is important because it provides evidence of his development as an artist from what we perceive as “traditional” and toward the “modern” in English fiction.

Victorian narrative art, according to Raymond Lister, was an art that presented a story or an anecdote represented by people in more or less contemporary dress and surroundings.⁴ Without exception these works were painted with a high degree of representational realism. These narrative scenes were presented dramatically in that the audience was provided a tableau-like glimpse of an action with a suggested past and future. Usually these paintings presented a strong moral message and more often than not depicted situations that were highly sentimental and even pathetic. The arrangement of concrete details often produced a puzzle or a “problem picture” with the physical details or clues forcing the viewer to “read” the painting in order to understand its dramatic, emblematic, symbolic, or moral significance. But what most distinguishes these Victorian paintings is their “literary” quality or emphasis upon story telling. Stephen Sartin, for example, defined narrative painting by emphasizing the “narrative” quality of the genre:

Strictly speaking, a narrative painting is a contradiction in terms. Whilst a narrative consists of a succession of situations, a painting by its very nature is limited to one scene. A narrative painting therefore has to be composed in such a way that the viewer constructs the story, ranging from before to after the “moment” of the painting, from details before him. It is the active participation of the viewer that effectively distinguished narrative painting from all other genres. …⁵

The resemblance to certain tendencies in Pre-Raphaelite art is obvious, and the explosion of narrative genre painting in the 1850s and 1860s coincides with the advent and growing recognition of this group of painters. In fact, narrative painting may very well have been fostered in part by the Pre-Raphaelite dicta that anything in nature that stimulates us is a proper subject for art and that a contemporary subject need not be any less valuable than a subject taken from the past.⁶ The Pre-Raphaelites, who so quickly became a part of the Victorian art establishment, soon learned that the pictures of the grand classical tradition had little appeal or relevance to the contemporary industrialized world of the Victorians. The new patrons, wealthy manufacturers mostly, preferred subjects from contemporary life or from the sort of literature they knew and understood: Goldsmith, Cervantes, Smollett, Dickens. Thus narrative painting, popular in the hands of David Wilkie and William Mulready well before Dickens's time, had become by the 1850s and 1860s a central part of the exhibitions of the Royal Academy. In fact, the history of genre painting or the realistic treatment of scenes of everyday life, of which narrative painting is a sub-category, goes back well into the eighteenth century, at least to William Hogarth.

In any event, at this time almost every artist felt obligated to paint scenes from domestic life such as John Everett Millais's “Autumn Leaves” (1856), Abraham Solomon's “Waiting for the Verdict” (1859), Phillip Hermogenes Calderon's “Broken Vows” (1856), Augustus Egg's “Travelling Companions” (1862), R.B. Martineau's “The Last Day in the Old Home” (1862), Luke Fildes's “The Doctor” (1878), and William Powell Frith's “Salon d'Or, Homburg” (1871). This upsurge in artistic interest in domesticity also coincided with the height of the influence of the Victorian novel, as it did with the researches of Mayhew into the lives of the London poor. Moreover, these paintings became a part of popular Victorian culture through the possibility of cheap reproduction through the development of chromolithography and photoengraving. By the Victorian era, according to Graham Reynolds, “Copyright had, thanks to Hogarth, been placed on a satisfactory basis, reproductive engraving was on its highest level, and the sale of engraving rights could be a high part of a picture's yield.”⁷ Thus, through technology the mass marketing of graphic art as well as literary art placed cheap reproductions on the walls and cheap novels on the tables of most British homes.⁸

Unfortunately, for the student of things Victorian, narrative painting, although it was the dominant form of Victorian art from about 1820 to 1860, has suffered since the nineteenth century from considerable neglect. Though evidence exists that interest has grown in recent years and though some narrative paintings, notably those of the Pre-Raphaelites, still are exhibited, most have been consigned to dusty oblivion in the basement storage areas of galleries.⁹ Not surprisingly, the neglect and the attacks upon Victorian art stem from some of the same critical principles that literary criticism has traditionally employed in its rejection of nineteenth-century literary conventions. Henry James's review of the Royal Academy Exhibition of 1878 illustrates, ironically and a trifle unfairly, not only the dominance of narrative art but the contrast between the creative principles of the Victorian artist and his own: “The artist must tell a story or preach a sermon; his picture must not be an image, but in some fashion or other, a lesson; not a reproduction of form and colour, but of life and experience.”¹⁰ A little later, in an essay titled “The Failure of the Nineteenth Century,” George Moore likened this emphasis upon the “subject” in British art to the spread of “the potato blight” and observed that “For the last hundred years painters seem to have lived in libraries rather than in studios.”¹¹ Another important key to the critical rejection of British narrative painting, without a parallel rejection of the Pre-Raphaelites, is found in Moore's comparison of works by Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Luke Fildes:

The Academicians cannot understand why, if we praise “Dante Seeing Beatrice in a Dream” we should vilify Mr. Fildes' “Doctor.” In both cases a story is told, in neither case is the execution excellent. Why then should one be a picture and the other no more than a bald illustration? The question is a vexed one, and the only conclusion that we can draw seems to be that sentimentality pollutes, the anecdote degrades, wit altogether ruins; only great thought may enter into art.¹²

Embodied in the attack by Moore, James, and others upon British narrative art and its parallel literary tradition are two simple critical principles that these and the majority of other later nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century critics and writers upheld—namely, that both art and literature must eschew sentimentality and embody the formal qualities that a Monet, a Matisse, a Flaubert, a James, or a Conrad would admire. In the face of such critical condemnation at that historical juncture, it is little wonder that Victorian narrative is just now enjoying some reawakening of critical interest.

This neglect by art critics is understandable, but that literary critics should also overlook the influence of genre art is puzzling, because Charles Dickens, indisputably the most popular writer of his time, was closely connected with the arts and artists of his age.¹³ In “Old Lamps for New Ones,” his first attack upon the Pre-Raphaelites, Dickens calls the roll of the greats in British art who would be displaced by the upstart Pre-Raphaelites: “Wilkie, Collins, Etty, Eastlake, Mulready, Lee, Webster, Herbert, Dyce, Cope, Leslie, Maclise, Turner, Stanfield, Landseer, Roberts, Danby, Creswick, and others who would have been renowned as great masters in any age or country. …”¹⁴ Dickens's listing, comprised without exception of narrative artists, is a fairly good and representative sampling of Royal Academy artists and the mainstream of British art and artistic values. Further, if the art that any man buys sheds some light on his artistic tastes, then Dickens's artistic holdings are significant indeed, for he owned works by six of these artists (Wilkie, Leslie, Maclise, Stanfield, Roberts, Webster) while his friend John Forster owned works by four others (Eastlake, Mulready, Turner, Landseer). All of these artists were members of the Royal Academy and all produced works that represented a commitment to realism. David Wilkie, for example, whose works represented the first nineteenth-century manifestation of genre or narrative painting, had insisted that “no picture could possess real merit unless it was a just representation of nature,”¹⁵ an artistic doctrine that few graphic artists or for that matter, writers of Dickens's time would have found unacceptable. Dickens also possessed paintings by a variety of other narrative artists. Primary among these were Augustus Egg, who drew upon the Pre-Raphaelite advocacy of domestic life as a subject of art; W.P. Frith, whose “Derby Day” (1858) created a rash of imitations; Daniel Maclise, a historical painter and, like Egg and Frith, a close friend of the writer; and lastly, Phillip Hermogenes Calderon, genre painter and leader of the St. Johns Wood Clique, a small group that produced a number of fine genre paintings that owed something to the Pre-Raphaelites.¹⁶ Dickens owned two of Calderon's paintings: “The Letter: a room in Hever Castle,” and “Hide and Seek: the companion.”

Dickens's many friendships with these and other artists is certainly well known and his correspondence with artists and illustrators is abundant and readily available. He was often a speaker at Royal Academy banquets, Artist Benevolent Fund dinners, and local Society of Art meetings.¹⁷ Usually with his artist friends as guides, he regularly viewed the annual exhibitions of the Royal Academy. Household Words and All the Year Round contain numerous articles either written or “conducted” by the author on artistic events and issues of the day. With activities and associations such as these, one would be very surprised if Dickens were not fully conversant with matters of art and artistic values.

As most students of Dickens are well aware, there has been little hesitation on the part of critics to attribute certain qualities of Dickens's visual style to the influence of William Hogarth, the eighteenth-century caricaturist and painter, whose works were well known and loved by the novelist.¹⁸ It is possible that this focus upon Hogarth has resulted in the neglect of probably far stronger contemporary narrative influences, especially in Dickens's later works, for what can be genuinely identified as “Hogarthian” in Dickens's style diminishes significantly as Dickens comes to maturity as an artist. In any event, by the time Dickens wrote Bleak House, which probably represents the peak of his stylistic if not architectonic development as an artist, the emphasis upon the Hogarthian comic grotesque caricature is much diminished and the visual narrative domestic scenes in Dickens have shifted from comedic and satirical purposes to emblematic or symbolic ones. The earlier emphasis upon people has diminished in favor of a much stronger emphasis on objects and background. Lastly, there is a subtlety and seriousness in these later narrative scenes that is quite unlike that of Hogarth.

The general critical attitude that Dickens's views of art were tasteless and ill-formed has been yet another cause for overlooking the influence of these paintings.¹⁹ Dickens did indeed make some rather pedestrian assessments of art in his Pictures in Italy (1846), but his reputation as an artistic Philistine stemmed substantially from his attacks upon the Pre-Raphaelites on the occasion of the Royal Academy Exhibition of 1850. In Dickens's “Old Lamps for New Ones,” published in May of that year, he attacked the failure of the Pre-Raphaelites or “Pre-Perspective Brotherhood” as he termed them, to aspire to create beauty, authentic realism, and morally uplifting subject matter.²⁰ Not unexpected demands from a Victorian. Nor was Dickens alone in his judgment. The Art Journal, official organ of the Victorian art establishment, also condemned John Everett Millais's “Christ in the House of His Parents” in terms just as disparaging as those employed by Dickens.²¹ That modern critics should tend to dismiss Dickens's views on art as misguided and tasteless, when these views simply coincided in most cases with those of the leading writers and artists of his time, suggests a certain lack of understanding and perspective.²² But, more importantly, it has been yet another reason for our failure to recognize the close resemblance between the subject matter and the techniques of contemporary English narrative art and the literary techniques of Dickens, techniques which reach full development in Bleak House.

Just what is meant by Dickens's “visual narrative technique” is not especially difficult to define. The term refers to his tendency to create set scenes, pictures, or tableaus in which objects or people are arranged or blent so as to create montages or images that can be “read” like the arrangements of similar details in narrative paintings. By the term “read” is meant the encouragement by the author or painter for the viewer or reader to infer, from the carefully arranged details, thematic and symbolic meanings, future consequences and past events, and moral significances. That narrative painting should resemble literature in this way is not surprising for, as Raymond Lister argues:

The narrative picture's main raison d'etre is anecdote; it is, in fact, visual literature, and many of its themes were derived from literary sources. It is perhaps not surprising that the period loosely coincided with the working life of one of the greatest of all novelists, Charles Dickens (1812-1870). Dickens' works contained many instances of the kind of symbolism found in contemporary painting. …²³

Taylor Stoehr also recognized this tendency toward the pictorial: “The method involves halting in time, a freezing of the scene to allow ‘photographic accuracy’ in the representation of life-going-on. This is exactly comparable to the timeless quality of present tense narrative in Bleak House, with its immediacy and detachment, and its impassive camera-eye narrator.”²⁴

The novel is indeed interesting in that it contains a large number of scenes constructed on a basis similar to that used by narrative artists, but it is also important to realize that Bleak House was written during the height of Dickens's controversy with the Pre-Raphaelites, when he was especially conscious of artistic issues. Written during the peak of his creative powers as an artist, the novel fulfills superbly the terms of its preface where Dickens identifies this novel as one where he “purposely dwelt upon the romantic side of familiar things.”²⁵ The technique involves more than what Robert Newsom describes as the holding of the familiar or the “topical and true to life” in a kind of tension with the romantic or fanciful.²⁶ The novelist, rather, is signalling to his readers his intention of stressing physical details in set scenes so that they might convey emblematic and symbolic meanings with a new power and intensity and, further, that these scenes are to be unified throughout the novel. Like the narrative painter, Dickens promises to create assemblages of concrete images whose meanings are non-discursive and represent a poetry of external things.

A glance at Dickens's number plans provides further evidence that he is attempting something new in Bleak House. Most readers will recall that Dickens's first partial use of number plans begins with Martin Chuzzlewit (1844) and, as Dickens himself reveals in the preface to the first edition, he “endeavored in the progress of this Tale, to resist the temptation of the current Monthly Number, and to keep a steadier eye upon the general purpose and design.”²⁷ The memoranda and number plans for Martin Chuzzlewit concern only parts IV and VI but in subsequent novels are fairly complete. For the most part, according to John Butt, they seem to summarize the contents, rough out the directions, and give emphasis to the salient points of each chapter, although, as Butt points out, it is difficult if not impossible to be fully certain of their purposes.²⁸ Nevertheless, a glance at the Bleak House memoranda and number plans shows that they differ in at least one important way from the earlier ones.²⁹ Usually on the right hand or number plan side of the sheet are found statements or phrases containing the word “picture,” such as “Open country house picture,” “Closing picture on the bridge,” “Inn Picture,” “Night Picture,” “Chesney Wold Picture.” In none of the earlier memoranda or plans does Dickens make use of the term “Picture” or any synonymous term with the sole exception of the number plan for chapter forty-six of David Copperfield. Here he used the term “Prospect” in connection with a description of the sea, but nowhere else. In contrast, the Bleak House plans abound with references to physical details that refer to richly elaborated pictures of the narrative type described earlier. For chapter twelve we find “Country House—clear, cold day,” and in the text itself a fully developed narrative description with appropriate details to be “read.” Similarly, in the following number plans at least seventeen references such as these, many underlined once, twice, or thrice, are developed into carefully structured narrative scenes in the novel. None of the novels that precede Bleak House, except Dombey and Son on one occasion in chapter forty-nine, have such references to pictures that are later developed into “narrative scenes.” Further, none of the preceding number plans have so many other kinds of references, often giving emphasis, that are also developed into narrative scenes. The number plans for the novels that follow do possess an abundance of these references that first appear in Bleak House. For example, Hard Times (1854), the novel published after Bleak House, has five references to “pictures” while Little Dorrit (1857) has eight.

Further evidence exists that Dickens is consciously experimenting with the techniques of the narrative artists. Bleak House is unique in two other ways: it is the first novel to have illustrations without people and it is the first novel to have more than one “dark” illustration—in fact, it has ten. The illustrator created these dark plates by first making fine machine-ruled lines through the etching ground and then later applying the acid and stopping-out processes. In this manner an infinite range of tones could be produced. The dark plates in Bleak House strongly emphasize physical surroundings and atmosphere and in only four do characters appear. Even in these four cases the figures are by contrast to the physical surroundings quite diminished. This emphasis harmonizes perfectly with Dickens's increased tendency in Bleak House to construct narrative scenes with such emphasis upon physical details. In the case of both illustrations and narrative scenes the emphasis upon things rather than people is paramount. Although some critics have argued that these illustrations represent a falling off in quality from those of earlier novels, it seems that Dickens must have encouraged and approved this trend, for they closely approximated the effects of the new stylistic emphases attempted in the novel.³⁰ Dickens seems far more conscious of creating these verbal narrative pictures in Bleak House than he is in the earlier novels. Although these narrative pictures do appear earlier, they do so much less frequently; there is less careful attention to “readable” details, and they are not constructed as part of a total “visual” pattern or fabric.

Bleak House contains many illustrative scenes, but one of the more significant is found in the middle of chapter six, “Quite at Home,” where Esther and Mr. Jarndyce are observing Ada and Richard, and could easily serve as a verbal study or fore-sketch of a typical narrative painting:

The room in which they were, communicating with that in which he stood, was only lighted by the fire. Ada sat at the piano; Richard stood beside her, bending down. Upon the wall, their shadows blended together, surrounded by strange forms, not without a ghostly motion caught from the unsteady fire, though reflecting from motionless objects. Ada touched the notes so softly, and sang so low, that the wind, sighing away to the distant hills, was as audible as the music. The mystery of the future, and the little clue afforded to it by the voice of the present, seemed expressed in the whole picture.³¹

In appropriate narrative manner, Dickens has arranged each of the physical details so they serve as images of the uncertainties, the linked fates, and the tragic futures of Ada and Richard. The blending of their shadows on the wall “surrounded by strange forms” is one of a series of clues somewhat more subtle than those in most popular narrative “problem” pictures. The reader is expected to puzzle out the meaning of the scene in terms of the present and the future, as Esther's response leads us to do. A glance at Dickens's number plans for this and other parts of Bleak House reveals his careful attention to foreshadowing, careful inclusion of physical details, and the subtle initiation of narrative threads.³² For example, in the number plan for Part One, chapter three, “Telescopic Philanthropy,” which immediately precedes “Quite at Home,” we find the notation “The Two wards, the subjects of the unhappy story of Jarndyce and Jarndyce. Richard Carstone. Ada.” In the left-hand memoranda sheet for Part Three, we find the notation “Richard and Ada—love. Yes, slightly.” Dickens in this manner, throughout the novel, keeps track of prominent narrative threads. The scene with Ada and Richard at the fire is the embodiment in visual terms of just such a pattern. The scene itself, and the number plan which precedes it, hints not only at the linkage between the fates of Ada and Richard, but also provides the reader with one of the first hints of the sad moral consequences of Chancery upon the couple. The moral suggestiveness of the scene is intensified by its placement immediately after the reader's introduction to Harold Skimpole and his doctrine of non-commitment. In fact, the more we reflect upon it, the more clearly we recognize how fully it hints at not only several of the major thematic strands but the major image patterns as well. Images of fog, shadow, and darkness, with all that these suggest of obscurity, deception, entanglement, and uncertainty, abound in Bleak House and require no documentation here. In no other novel does atmosphere connect so significantly with technique and theme.

In chapter thirteen, “Esther's Narrative,” Dickens returns to the Ada and Richard scene and closes the chapter with it. At this point, Dickens has shaped his narrative in accordance with his memoranda so the reader is aware of Ada and Richard's growing attachment. He is also continuing and modifying the image patterns that clarify and amplify the foreshadowing purposes of the picture:

The door stood open, and we both followed them with our eyes, as they passed down the adjoining room on which the sun was shining, and out at its farther end. Richard with his head bent, and her hand drawn through his arm, was talking to her very earnestly; and she looked up in his face, listening, and seemed to see nothing else. So young, so beautiful, so full of hope and promise, they went on lightly through the sunlight, as their own happy thoughts might then be traversing the years to come, and making them all years of brightness. So they passed away into the shadow, and were gone. It was only a burst of light that had been so radiant. The room darkened as they went out, and the sun was clouded over.

(pp. 180-81)

Dickens has given us another narrative picture fashioned of physical details that hint at the future. The light and dark imagery is created this time not from flickering firelight reflecting off motionless objects but from patches of light and shadow created by a declining sun. Dickens's audience was expected to “read” the scene just as the viewer of the narrative painting was expected to do.

The above scene cannot be found in the original manuscript of Bleak House.³³ Dickens, of course, must have added it some time before the parts were printed. We know that Dickens sometimes sent unfinished parts to the printer with the intention of adding matter later and that he set aside certain days for the printer during which he added or deleted material as seemed appropriate.³⁴ The fact that Dickens added this scene, an obvious modulation of the earlier narrative picture, points up the importance of the visual technique that this thread embodies.

Further emphasis to this scene and the earlier one is given by a reference to both in chapter seventeen:

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; it was but a very little while since he had watched them passing down the room in which the sun was shining, and away into the shade. …

(p. 234)

This scene and the ones already mentioned form one of the many visual patterns so important to this novel. Dickens, more in this novel than any earlier ones, is consciously attempting to arrange the concrete elements of such visual scenes so that the entire novel gains a unity of detail that creates, augments, and carries forward his thematic and non-discursive meanings. The technique of the contemporary narrative painter would be more helpful in accomplishing these ends than would the graphic techniques of the eighteenth-century caricaturists.

In these narrative scenes Dickens is concerned most often with the non-discursive meanings conveyed or suggested by the accretion of physical details rather than the behavior of the human figures within them. A fine example of this, and one that builds upon the three scenes already discussed, appears in chapter forty, “National and Domestic,” where the images of fire, sunset, and shadow are used in another variation to convey the eloquent meanings in external things:

But the fire of the sun is dying. Even now the floor is dusky, and shadows slowly mounts the walls, bringing the Dedlocks down like age and death. And now, upon my Lady's picture over the great chimney-piece, a weird shade falls from some old tree, that turns it pale, and flutters it, and looks as if a great arm held a veil or hood, watching an opportunity to draw it over her. Higher and darker rises the shadow on the wall—now a red gloom on the ceiling—now the fire is out.

(p. 564)

Titled “Sunset in the long Drawing-Room at Chesney Wold,” this scene is a special illustration in that it is one of the nine “dark plates,” as they have been termed, and one of the six that contain only natural or architectural details and no human figures. The emblematic details are particularly interesting. A shadow is slowly creeping up the left hand wall and covering the portrait of Lady Dedlock hanging there among the portraits of Dedlock ancestors. Through the doorway in the background we see a portion of the marriage bed that is about to be disgraced by Tulkinghorn's revelation of Lady Dedlock's past. About the room are other objects such as her shawl hanging on a chair, her fan on the floor, a statue of a woman and child—all details which when “read” establish meaning in the manner of the narrative painting.

Although it seems that Dickens owes a greater debt to contemporary narrative painting than to the older tradition of caricature represented by Hogarth, to deny some degree of influence is impossible. For example, the scene in chapter fifty, “Perspective,” showing Richard at the end of his wasted life might have been lifted directly from one of the later stages of Hogarth's “Rake's Progress”:

I found Richard thin and languid, slovenly in his dress, abstracted in his manner, forcing his spirits now and then, and at other intervals relapsing into a dull thoughtfulness. About his large bright eyes that used to be so merry, there was a wanness and a restlessness that changed them altogether. I cannot use the expression that he looked old. There is a ruin of youth which is not like age; and into such a ruin Richard's youth and youthful beauty had all fallen away.

(p. 822)

Scenes like this seem to confirm, as Raymond Lister suggests, that Hogarth's portrayals of “The Rake,” “Marriage a la Mode,” “Gin Lane,” and so forth did suggest similar if more decorous scenes to Victorian narrative painters in spite of the fact that Hogarth's influence upon British painting as represented by the Royal Academy was much diminished by the early nineteenth century.³⁵ His tendency toward caricature and grotesques, which persisted to some degree among book illustrators, was considered inappropriate for serious art. This was an issue of some importance in Dickens's relationship with Hablôt Browne.

The contrast between Hogarth's older method of creating caricature and comic grotesques for satirical purpose and Hablôt Browne's new style in Bleak House is revealed vividly in chapter thirty-seven where we see Richard in decline and in the clutches of Lawyer Vholes:

I shall never forget those two seated side by side in the lantern's light; Richard, all flush and fire and laughter, with the reins in his hand; Mr. Vholes, quite still, black-gloved, and buttoned up, looking at him as if he were looking at his prey and charming it. I have before me the whole picture of the warm dark night, the summer lightning, the dusty track of road closed in by hedgerows and high trees, the gaunt pale horse with his ears pricked up, and the driving away at speed to Jarndyce and Jarndyce.

(p. 535)

Here, as in the earlier description, we have a visual presentation of a stage in Richard's decline, but one that differs from a Hogarthian depiction of corresponding human decline in that there is no trace of caricature or satire. Vholes' grotesqueness has as its purpose not the comedic but the mythic. Moreover, Dickens is using this scene, as he does with so many other narrative scenes, as a culminating visual summary of previous events. But, of course, it is more than this because it also amplifies and augments further moral, mythic, and symbolic meanings established earlier as well as provides clues to further events.

Dickens's sentimentality certainly had its counterpart in Victorian narrative painting. The narrative painting, according to Lister, often “balanced precariously between good and bad taste, miraculously keeping just to the right side. …”³⁶ Dickens's sense of balance was equally precarious at times, as the narrative scene in chapter fifty-five, “Flight,” in which George Rouncewell is visited by his mother, amply reveals. In fact, the following verbal painting has sufficient pathos for several paintings:

Approaching the cell, they find the door opening and a warder in the act of coming out. The old girl promptly makes a sign of entreaty to him to say nothing; assenting, with a nod, he suffers them to enter as he shuts the door.

So George, who is writing at his table, supposing himself to be alone, does not raise his eyes, but remains absorbed. The old housekeeper looks at him, and those wandering hands of hers are quite enough for Mrs. Bagnet's confirmation; even if she could see the mother and the son together, knowing what she knows, and doubt their relationship.

Not a rustle of the housekeeper's dress, not a gesture, not a word betrays her. She stands looking at him as he writes on, all unconscious, and only her fluttering hands give utterance to her emotions. But they are very eloquent; very, very eloquent. Mrs. Bagnet understands them. They speak of gratitude, of joy, of grief, of hope; of inextinguishable affection, cherished with no return since this stalwart man was a stripling; of a better son loved less, and this son loved so fondly and proudly; and they speak in such touching language, that Mrs. Bagnet's eyes brim up with tears, and they run glistening down her sun-browned face.

“George Rouncewell! O, my dear child, turn and look at me!”

The trooper starts up, clasps his mother round the neck, and falls down on his knees before her. Whether in a late repentance, whether in the first association that comes back upon him, he puts his hands together as a child does when it says its prayers, and raising them towards her breast, bows down his head and cries.

(pp. 748-749)

The modern reader may feel a bit uncomfortable with such a heavy dose of sentiment, but the Victorian reader would have been moved to tears. That the graphic counterparts of such scenes were extraordinarily popular in England and, in fact, dominated Royal Academy Exhibitions during the middle of the nineteenth century, certainly helps us to better understand the Victorian mind and the sources of Dickens's widespread appeal.

The majority of these narrative scenes in Bleak House offer much more than sentiment. For example, they may establish tone at the beginnings of chapters as does the scene in chapter twenty-two depicting Allegory in Tulkinghorn's chambers. They may also serve as closing scenes that by their combinations of physical details serve as summaries of Dickens's emblematic or thematic meanings as does the picture at the close of chapter forty-one that reveals the tormented Lady Dedlock pacing her room or the closing scene for chapter nineteen showing Jo the crossing sweeper gnawing at his lunch while the golden cross atop St. Paul's glitters above the smoke of the City. They may also serve as points of convergence for the many symbolic strands that give structure to Bleak House as does the picture of the bleak mausoleum that closes chapter fifty-six, “Down in Lincolnshire.” All of these scenes serve important and various purposes in Bleak House and incorporate the techniques of Dickens's contemporaries—the narrative painters—whose methods helped Dickens create a masterful novel which purposely dwelt “upon the romantic side of familiar things.”

If Dickens's literary imagination resembles that of the Victorian narrative artist, recognizing Dickens's link helps to place him in the mainstream of Victorian artistic thinking and helps to mitigate the claim that he had little grasp of artistic values. More important, our recognition of the influence gives us a better insight into Dickens's methods for we can better understand how Dickens, as Mario Praz points out, “achieves his effects by a bewildering accumulation of significant details, presenting a tightly packed, swarming, vibrant whole.”³⁷ Further, we gain a better understanding of Dickens's symbolic method, especially the way in which Dickens implants his emblematic details and symbols within arranged groupings of physical details. Most students of Dickens are well aware of Dickens's use of such larger symbolic structures as the Chauncery fog, Tom-all-Alone's, or Chesney Wold. But the smaller, subtler elements of physical setting, gesture, spatial composition, and so forth, often function symbolically or emblematically just as they do in the visual art of the narrative painter. By recognizing this quality, we are also reminded, more generally, how interrelated all aspects of a culture, both high and low, can be in the hands of a great writer. Finally, it can be argued that this emphasis upon significant physical detail represents an effort by Dickens to move towards something we would term the “open” element of the modern novel.³⁸ Dickens is discovering, albeit incompletely, “that visual forms—lines, colors, proportions, etc.—are,” as Suzanne Langer suggests,

… just as capable of articulation, i.e., of complex combinations, as words. But the laws that govern this sort of articulation are altogether different from the laws of syntax that govern language. The most radical difference is that visual forms are not discursive. They do not present their constituents successively, but simultaneously, so the relations that determine a visual structure are grasped in one act of vision.³⁹

Yet in the “discursive” portions of his narrative, Dickens is attempting to hold on to the traditional values and forms. This may help to explain a good portion of the adverse critical reactions to his later works and Dickens's obsessive interest in theatrical readings at the end of his life. By dramatizing what he had attempted earlier to depict verbally, he was able to achieve a power of visual effect that went beyond the illustrator, the narrative painter, or his own verbal scenes. Dickens's style was always “visual,” but the nature of the “visuality” changes. In this sort of theater he could “paint a scene” more effectively than any illustrator and become involved more intensely than he could in the novels. Thus, it is not surprising that film-makers, whose fundamental techniques are anticipated in Dickens's visual style, have learned so much from this great Victorian artist.⁴⁰

Notes

1. Charles Dickens, The Life of Charles Dickens by John Forster, Vol. II (Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott Company, 1911), p. 305.

2. J.R. Harvey, Victorian Novelists and Their Illustrators (New York: New York University Press), 1971, p. 158-159. See also William Axton, Circle of Fire (Lexington: Univ. of Kentucky Press, 1966), pp. 139-162.

3. See Mario Praz, The Hero in Eclipse in Victorian Fiction, trans. Angus Davidson (London: Oxford University Press, 1956), p. 28; Michael Steig, “Dickens, Hablôt Browne, and the Tradition of English Caricature,” Criticism, II (Summer 1969), p. 227; J.R. Harvey, Victorian Novelists and Their Illustrators (New York: New York University Press, 1971), p. 165.

4. Raymond Lister, Victorian Narrative Painting (New York: Clarkson N. Potter, Inc., 1966), pp. 9-10.

5. Stephen Sartin, A Dictionary of British Narrative Painters (The Tithe House, Leigh-on Sea, England: F. Lewis, Publishers, Ltd., 1978), p. 5.

6. See John L. Tupper, “The Subject in Art, Nos. I, II,” The Germ, No. 1, 2 (Jan., Mar. 1850), pp. 11-18, 118-125. See also Dante Gabriel Rossetti, “Hand and Soul” I, pp. 23-33; and John Orchard, “A Dialogue on Art” 4, pp. 146-167. According to Graham Reynolds, the salient points of Pre-Raphaelite art were “the contemporary scene, situations charged with frustrated passion, such as that of severed lovers or forsaken women; in technique a bright key of colour and the sharp focus of their rendering of natural objects.” Victorian Painting (New York: The Macmillan Co., Ltd., 1967), p. 65.

7. Graham Reynolds, pp. 112-113.

8. Mary Clive's The Day of Reckoning (London: Macmillan and Company, Ltd., 1964), pp. 5-10, 55-60, provides an interesting account of the effects upon her own, and by extension, other dwellers within the middle and upper middle-class Victorian home, childhood perceptions of these “best-selling” reproductions.

9. The best general account of Victorian art may be found in A. Paul Oppe's “Art,” Early Victorian England, G.M. Young, ed. II (London: Oxford University Press, 1934), pp. 102-176. Other useful, recent books are Graham Reynolds, Victorian Painting (New York: Macmillan Co., 1966); Jeremy Maas, Victorian Painters (New York: B.P. Putnam's Sons, 1969); Raymond Lister, Victorian Narrative Painting (New York: Clarkson N. Potter, Inc., 1966); Stephen Sartin, A Dictionary of British Narrative Art (The Tithe House, Leigh-on-Sea, England: F. Lewis, 1978); Roy Strong, And when did you last see your father?, The Victorian Painter and British History (London: Thames and Hudson, 1978); William Gaunt, The Restless Century: Painting in Britain 1800-1900 (London: Phaidon Press Ltd., 1972).

10. Henry James, “The Royal Academy 1878,” The Painter's Eye, ed. John L. Sweeney (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1956), p. 168.

11. George Moore, “The Failure of the Nineteenth Century,” Modern Painting, New Edition (London: The Walter Scott Publishing Co., Ltd., 1906), pp. 48-52.

12. George Moore, “Our Academicians,” Modern Painting (London: The Walter Scott Publishing Co., Ltd., 1906), p. 123.

13. Graham Reynolds, “Charles Dickens and the World of Art,” Apollo, 91 (June 1970), 422-429.

14. “Old Lamps for New Ones,” Household Words, I (1850), p. 265.

15. Dictionary of National Biography, ed. Leslie Stephen and Sidney Lee (London: Oxford University Press, 1937-1938), Vol. 21, p. 255.

16. Catalogue of His Pictures and Objects of Art sold by Messrs. Christie, Manson & Woods, July 9, 1870, edited by J.H. Stonehouse (London: Picadilly Fountain Press, 1935), p. 127.

17. See K.J. Fielding, ed., The Speeches of Charles Dickens (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1960).

18. Harry P. Marten, “The Visual Imagination of Dickens and Hogarth: Structure and Scene,” Studies in the Novel, 6 (Summer 1974), 145-164. Among the many who have seen this connection are George Gissing, Charles Dickens: A Critical Study (New York: Dodd, Mead and Co., 1912), pp. 33-34; G.K. Chesterton, Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens (London: J.M. Dent and Sons, Ltd., 1911), p. 42; F.R. Leavis, “Dombey and Son,” The Sewanee Review, LXX, I (January-March 1962), p. 196; John Forster, The Life of Charles Dickens, II (Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott Company, 1911), p. 47.

19. Dickens's chief biographer maintains that “his standards in painting were a bluff insistence on the facts of human anatomy and visual perspective, and a feeling of what facial expressions were ‘natural to certain passions.’” Edgar Johnson, Charles Dickens: His Tragedy and Triumph, I (Boston: Little Brown and Co., 1952), p. 561. Johnson argues a bit later that “… in general the grandeur and nobility he saw was less the flowering of glory in color or composition than a response to sentiment and the story subject matter of a picture” (p. 562). Johnson's dismissal of Dickens's attitudes were similar to those held by the Royal Academy of Art and the British public; Mario Praz refers to Dickens's “obvious lack of taste and culture” (p. 164); Graham Reynolds termed Dickens's attacks upon the Pre-Raphaelites “wildly ignorant” (p. 60). Humphrey House felt that Dickens's “powers of appreciation of any art were probably more limited and his taste more set and conventional than those of any man of comparable creative genius.” The Dickens World (London: Oxford University Press, 1941), p. 129.

20. Charles Dickens, “Old Lamps for New Ones,” Household Words, I (1850), 265.

21. Anon. “The Royal Academy Exhibition,” The Art Journal (1850), p. 175.

22. Roy Strong, And when did you last see your father? The Victorian Painter and British History (London: Thames and Hudson, 1978), p. 74-75.

23. Raymond Lister, p. 15.

24. Taylor Stoehr, Dickens: The Dreamer's Stance (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1965), p. 60.

25. Charles Dickens, “Preface,” Bleak House (London: Oxford University Press, 1966), p. XIV.

26. Robert Newsom, Dickens on the Romantic Side of Familiar Things: ‘Bleak House’ and the Novel Tradition (New York: Cornell University Press, 1977), pp. 7-9.

27. Charles Dickens, “Preface to the First Edition,” Martin Chuzzlewit (Bloomsbury: The Nonesuch Press, 1937), IX.

28. John Butt and Kathleen Tillotson, Dickens at Work (Fairlawn, New Jersey: Essential Books, Inc., 1958), p. 27.

29. See H.P. Sucksmith, “Dickens at Work on Bleak House: A Critical Examination of His Memoranda and Number Plans,” Renaissance and Modern Studies, 9 (1965), 47-85.

30. F.R. Leavis and Q.D. Leavis, Dickens the Novelist (London: Chatto & Windus, 1970), pp. 359-361.

31. Charles Dickens, Bleak House (London: Oxford University Press, 1966), p. 72. Further page references will be given parenthetically in the text.

32. See H.P. Sucksmith, “Dickens at Work on Bleak House: A Critical Examination of His Memoranda and Number Plans.”

33. Bleak House MS, Forster Bequest, Victoria and Albert Museum Library, BHM p. 631. Vol. IIB, p. 295.

34. Letters, ii, 70. The Letters of Charles Dickens, ed. Walter Dexter (London: Nonesuch Press, 1938), II, p. 70.

35. Lister, p. 13.

36. Lister, p. 13.

37. Mario Praz, p. 179.

38. See Devra Braun Rosenberg, “Contrasting Pictorial Representations of Time: The Dual Narration of Bleak House,” Victorian Newsletter, 51 (Spring 1977), pp. 10-16. Rosenberg argues that the pictorial element may represent the “closed element” and an effort to retain traditional values. I would argue the reverse. It is here that Dickens is working with the “open element” and most resembles the modern novelist.

39. Suzanne Langer, Philosophy in a New Key (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1960), p. 93.

40. See A.L. Zambrano, Dickens and Film (New York: Gordon Press, Inc., 1977), esp. Chapter II, “Narrative Art and Practice in Dickens and Twentieth Century Cinema.”