Reading Style In Dickens

Robert Alter, “Reading Style In Dickens” in Philosophy and Literature 20.1 (1996) 130-137.

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A grey dusty withered evening in London city has not a hopeful aspect. The closed warehouses and offices have an air of death about them, and the national dread of colour has an air of mourning. The towers and steeples of the many house-encompassed churches, dark and dingy as the sky that seems descending on them, are no relief to the general gloom; a sun-dial on a church-wall has the look, in its useless black shade of having failed in its business enterprise and stopped payment for ever; melancholy waifs and strays of housekeepers and porters sweep melancholy waifs and strays of papers and pins into the kennels, and other more melancholy waifs and strays explore them, searching and stooping and poling for anything to sell. The set of humanity outward from the City is as a set of prisoners departing from jail, and dismal Newgate seems quite as fit a stronghold for the mighty Lord Mayor as his own state-dwelling.

This is the sort of passage in Dickens that rewards repeated readings, for on rereading--optimally, rereading out loud--one comes to a fuller perception of how all the verbal elements cohere in an integrated vision of the city. The evening sky is covered with clouds; the indication that they are "dingy" suggests dirt and pollution (in fact, a grave problem in an overcrowded London where at any given moment hundreds of thousands of soft-coal fires were burning). When Dickens does not use actual anaphora, he nevertheless usually enforces a unity of thematic perspective by lining up a whole set of overlapping, nearly synonymous attributes in his descriptions. The sequence "grey dusty withered" leads quickly to "death," semantically echoed in "air of mourning" and "black shade," visually reinforced by "dark and dingy," with the integrated effect of the whole underlined phonetically by the alliteration: dusty-death-dark-dingy-descending-departing-dismal. There [End Page 133] are four different elaborated metaphors here that manage to hang together effectively: first death, then bankruptcy, then the swept away refuse as strays and waifs, then imprisonment. What rereading leads me to see is how remarkably all four resonate with the larger vision of the novel. The repetition of melancholy waifs and strays sweeping out melancholy waifs and strays of refuse to be picked through by human counterparts takes up the novel's recurrent sense of all economic activity as an unending chain of scavenging, wealth extracted from garbage. (The fact that the street-people are "poling" through the refuse takes us directly back to the opening scene of the novel, in which Gaffer Hexam poles the Thames in search of human bodies and whatever wealth they may carry.) Marxists may happily find here an image of alienated labor, Foucauldians, an image of the carceral self; what is clear is that Dickens's vision of capitalist society at the height of the Industrial Revolution is unable to accommodate the idea of productive labor in all the new distortions of human relations, imagining instead only an endless dirty paper-chase, filthy lucre extracted from filth.

As I ponder the deployment of metaphors, what emerges as the center of the passage, both spatially and figuratively, is the fantastically witty representation of the bankrupt sundial. It cannot indicate time, of course, because the sky is covered with dingy clouds; the metaphor of bankruptcy has a metonymic trigger because the sundial stands in the middle of the financial district, the City of London. Its location on a church-wall, realistically plausible, may suggest the futility or irrelevance of religion in this dead urban world of finance. The characteristic trait of the later Dickens is that the fantastication leads to grim visionary perception, metaphor carrying him to unanticipated depths. For a sundial that has "stopped payment forever" is a forlorn, now useless, index of time in a world hopelessly cut off from nature, where it seems as though the sun will never shine again. The passage, I notice on a third or fourth reading, proceeds through intensification, culminating in the image of the bankrupt sundial. It begins with the studied formality of an understatement: "A grey dusty withered evening . . . has not a hopeful aspect." Then the buildings have "an air of death." The sundial trapped in black shade intimates the possibility of the death of the sun itself. As a reader, I keep the apocalyptic broodings fostered by this imagery very much in mind when I encounter this related cityscape, just two chapters on: [End Page 134]

It was a foggy day in London, and the fog was heavy and dark. Animate London, with smarting eyes and irritated lungs, was blinking, wheezing, and choking; inanimate London was a sooty spectre, divided in purpose between being visible and invisible, and so being wholly neither. Gas-lights flared in the shops with a haggard and unblest air, as knowing themselves to be night-creatures that had no business under the sun; while the sun itself, when it was for a few moments dimly indicated through circling eddies of fog, showed as if it had gone out, and were collapsing flat and cold. Even in the surrounding country it was a foggy day, but there the fog was grey, whereas in London it was, at about the boundary line, dark yellow, and a little within it brown, and then browner, and then browner, until at the heart of the City--which call Saint Mary Axe--it was rusty-black. From any point of the high ridge of land northward, it might have been discerned that the loftiest buildings made an occasional struggle to get their heads above the foggy sea, and especially that the great dome of Saint Paul's seemed to die hard; but that was not perceivable at their feet, where the whole metropolis was a heap of vapour charged with the muffled sound of wheels and enfolding a gigantic catarrh.

Dickens's prose is thematically organized in a virtually musical sense, and so the first sentence enunciates the fog-theme, tells us this is going to be a set-piece on fog: "It was a foggy day in London, and the fog was heavy and dark." Again there is a precisely observed realistic matrix for Dickens's metaphoric fantastication. Although the word "smog" had not yet been invented, that is clearly what Dickens is describing, as the narrator's panoramic view moves inward through concentric circles from the still unpolluted fog in the countryside to the yellow-tinged fog near the city limits to the poisonous brown and reddish black smog of the metropolitan center that looks like modern Los Angeles on a very bad day. (A tiny bonus of repeated readings is to notice how the rust in "rusty black" is associatively triggered by the near-to-hand iron tool in "Saint Mary Axe.") As so often in late Dickens, these niceties of realistic observation are transformed into phantasmagoric vision by the play of metaphor, and for me as a reader, pondering the ramifications of metaphor helps me see what the passage and the novel are all about.

As in the previous passage, an apocalyptic image lies at the heart of the description--the sun swathed in fog that "showed as if it had gone out, and were collapsing flat and cold." This strikes me as a grimmer evocation of the extinguishing of the sun than the nervous jocularity of the bankrupt-sundial image: what follows the "as if" is a chilling sense of [End Page 135] light dying in the universe. The idea of the collapsed sun is coordinated with three interrelated metaphors, two of which have a physiological basis: choking, drowning, and ghosts. The last of these three provides folkloric definition for the first two since a ghost is an intermediate being between the living and the dead, and choking or drowning is a transitional state between life and death. In this connection, rereading helps one feel the etymological weight with which Dickens often uses words. To be "animate" is to possess an anima, a spirit, while the inanimate is devoid of spirit; and Dickens works the ambiguities of connection and correspondence between these two ostensibly opposed categories. Fog-enshrouded London, like a ghost, cannot make up its mind whether to be visible or not; and the "haggard" air of the gas-lamps lit by day, coupled as it is with "unblest" and "night-creatures," activates the folk-etymological connection between "haggard" and "hag."

The metaphoric imagination of the mature Dickens is powerfully integrative--often, I suspect, intuitively rather than intentionally--and one sees that power working here in the image of the city drowning in fog (lofty Saint Paul's the last to go), which of course carries forward the images of death by drowning that run through the novel from the first sombre scene on the Thames till the watery death of Rogue Riderhood and Bradley Headstone near the end. Asphyxiation, in turn, is a kind of inner drowning, and Dickens's representation of what thick smog really does to eyes and throat and lungs gives his overarching motif of drowning a physiological immediacy. If style, as I have proposed, is the air we breathe in the constructed world of the novel, the Dickensian procedure of using chains of overlapping terms makes the breathing here labored: "Animate London, with smarting eyes and irritated lungs, was blinking, wheezing, and choking." Dickens continues to assume these respiratory difficulties as he goes on to evoke the spectral gas-lamps, the collapsed sun, the chromatic gradations of smog, and the drowning city, and they resurface in the brilliant summarizing metaphor with which the passage concludes: "the whole metropolis was a heap of vapour charged with the muffled sound of wheels and enfolding a gigantic catarrh." That final revelatory image, saved for the last word of the paragraph, illustrates the almost coercive force of metaphoric imagination, combining in a single term disease, difficulty of breathing, rheumy fluids, bleariness, messiness--all that the industrial age has made of London in Dickens's eyes.

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