it was one which would be resuscitated

A poster in one of the comment threads at Whispering Gums wrote, "Mrs Jelleby in Bleak House is supposedly based on Caroline Chisholm," and as I read that sentence it occurred to me to wonder, "What do we mean when we say that a character is based on someone?" Then I thought, "Where did my question come from?" I didn't know, but I was remembering a passage in Ackroyd's Dickens biography in which the biographer quotes a letter from Dickens to Angela Burdett-Coutts. "I dream of Mrs Chisholm and her housekeeping ... The dirty faces of her children are my constant companions." "Familiar companions too," Ackroyd adds, "since this image of them was one which fully embodied his own disgust at the way certain philanthropists attended to distant causes while ignoring those closer to home, and of course it was one which would be resuscitated in the house of Mrs Jellyby in Bleak House, one of a number of scenes and episodes from this period, which, blocked from access into David Copperfield [Dickens was in the middle of Copperfield], found their way into Dickens's next novel. The day after he had seen Mrs Chisholm, for example, he was sent by his brother-in-law, Henry Austin, a Report on a General Scheme for Extra-Mural Sepulture, which contained harrowing detail on the state of city graveyards."

Why did he visit Caroline Chisholm? He was moved by the misery of poor Londoners, and Chisholm had come from Australia to promote her Family Colonisation Loan Society. What was the Family Colonisation Loan Society? A body that offered financial help to needy Britons who wanted to try their luck in the southern colonies, where they would not have to struggle against the same problems of overcrowding and class stigma that faced them in London. The idea was presented to his mind; he seized on it -- inspiration! -- every needy member of the Copperfield cast moves to Australia at the end of the book and Martha Endall the prostitute is rewarded for her migration with a suitable husband and a bush pastoral. "They was married," reports Mr Peggotty, "and they live fower hundred mile away from any voices but their own and the singing birds."'*

Conclusion? If we can say that Mrs Jellyby is based on Caroline Chisholm then we can say that the end of David Copperfield is, too. By which we mean that it is and it isn't, that the inspiration of her entered the brain of Dickens and reacted to things already there, that this sprouted out in various ways, and that Mrs Jellyby was one of those ways, and that the singing birds are another. That if she is Mrs Jellyby then she is also the singing birds, and the four hundred miles, and Mr Micawber becoming a magistrate in Port Middlebay -- and that she is the words on paper representing those things, and that she is the individual letters, and that she is the ink, the components of the ink, that some instance of her has been translated into ink-molecules and ink-atoms, that she is our learning of letters and our accomplishment of reading, which allows us to make sense of these letters, which is a communal sense, because everybody agrees that an e is an e and a p is a p and never anything else, and they have done so for a while, historically (and we can keep zooming in).

In Bleak House Dickens calls Mrs Jellyby's activities "telescopic philanthropy," meaning that they concentrated on matters far away and ignored matters up close, but he did not oppose Chisholm's ideas, or Chisholm's support of them. He was their champion and devotee. When he gave them to Mrs Jellyby he made them ridiculous by transposing them to Africa. (The idea of Europeans bothering themselves with Africans is hilarious to him in The Noble Savage, and he seems to have never changed his mind.) He seats her in a nest of paper, he makes her dress gape at the back, he jams her child's head through a set of stair railings. "We hope by this time next year to have from a hundred and fifty to two hundred healthy families cultivating coffee and educating the natives of Borrioboola-Gha, on the left bank of the Niger," says Mrs Jellyby. She goes on to give encouragement to "a loquacious young man called Mr. Quale" with "a project of his for teaching the coffee colonists to teach the natives to turn piano-forte legs and establish an export trade." And it is intriguing to see Dickens mock, here, and twist, the same thing that he praises so seriously elsewhere, the work done by ambitious migrant British.

It's worth noticing that he never has his migrants educate "the natives" of Australia. I don't think he mentions the indigenous Australians at all. Even The Noble Savage never mentions them, although it mentions the natives of Africa and North America. The key quality of Martha's bush idyll is the distance it puts between her and any human voice besides her own and that of her husband. This bushland is uninhabited. The needy were being posted off to purest terra nullius, which was not a country at all, but an imaginary area conjured up by a law, in other words, a fantasy.**

For the creation of Mrs Jellyby and her household Dickens only needed to take a tiny part of Chisholm, an impression. And I was thinking about all of this in the light of my notion of Dickens as a deep-sea fish, or large object, extruding things that look like characters, and "agitating" them, as E.M. Forster says, in the way that a deep-sea fish jiggles its tempting light. I was in the shower thinking about this when the word interface came into my head. "Ah," I thought. "That was what the dirty faces of the Chisholm children became." They were an interface through which he could translate the ideas inside him into a sign-language that could be understood by the outside world. "Part of him has taken on this shape, which is not the shape of Caroline Chisholm, but wears her face like a mask. Somewhere Mrs Jellyby splits open, as the false human beings in horror movies split open, and the alien inside reveals itself through the split, a creature connected to the mother ship, which is Charles Dickens, sitting at his desk (dead), somewhere this hive-mind, extending one part of itself into Mrs Jellyby, as if she is a finger puppet."

Interface, that's what her household was, handed to Dickens gratis (by this supreme migration agent, who, in this one instance, was migrated into, by a writer who took her for terra nullius as well, and went there to make a habitation) and one part of Dickens' brilliance is this alertness to interfaces, this seeing of them everywhere, perceiving everything that might give him an opportunity to extrude his own personality, even those pictures of battle scenes at sea that I've referred to before,*** which do not have the character of actual prints but the personality of Charles Dickens.

She was a flesh version of the mechanical device that allows a person with a disability to pick up a spoon, or travel down the street -- to act upon the outside world, and make the world take notice in some way (the spoon lifts, the air parts) -- and these fleshy devices are not given to us with a clear purpose (as a wheelchair is) but must be constantly detected and identified for what they are, and tried and rejected. And so a writer is a person who identifies one kind of disability (the gap between the human interior and the outer world) and searches for ways to overcome it, or bridge it, or struggles to find a way through, knowing (because they are very wise) that it is not possible and that their struggles are in vain, like most things. And now I'm looking for some way to describe this writer as a cyborg, without metal parts, but with alien technology introduced to the basic system to achieve a specific effect. The alien technology in this case being another person.








* She is possibly living in the kind of environment that Henry Lawson describes here:

Bush all around – bush with no horizon, for the country is flat. No ranges in the distance. The bush consists of stunted, rotten native apple-trees. No undergrowth. Nothing to relieve the eye save the darker green of a few she-oaks which are sighing above the narrow, almost waterless creek. Nineteen miles to the nearest sign of civilisation – a shanty on the main road.

...

All days are much the same for her; but on Sunday afternoon she dresses herself, tidies the children, smartens up baby, and goes for a lonely walk along the bush-track, pushing an old perambulator in front of her. She does this every Sunday. She takes as much care to make herself and the children look smart as she would if she were going to do the block in the city. There is nothing to see, however, and not a soul to meet. You might walk for twenty miles along this track without being able to fix a point in your mind, unless you are a bushman. This is because of the everlasting, maddening sameness of the stunted trees – that monotony which makes a man long to break away and travel as far as trains can go, and sail as far as ship can sail – and farther.

Henry Lawson: The Drover's Wife

** Tolkein liked fantasy countries to be governed by believable and solid lifelike laws, so it is reasonable to assume that Terra Nullius, rooted in law, was a country in the epic high fantasy mode and that the migrants (some of them prostitutes from Urania Cottage, the refuge co-founded by Dickens in partnership with Burdett-Coutts) were performing the same voyage taken by Frodo at the end of The Return of the King, but in reverse.

***

The walls were ornamented with three or four old coloured prints in black frames, each print representing a naval engagement, with a couple of men-of-war banging away at each other most vigorously, while another vessel or two were blowing up in the distance, and the foreground presented a miscellaneous collection of broken masts and blue legs sticking up out of the water.

Sketches by Boz

felt the earth tremble

Following on from the previous post.

Krook died of spontaneous combustion and George Henry Lewes laughed. Everything I draw on is real, Dickens insisted angrily. My facts are verifiable and true.

We may therefore conclude that none of Captain Franklin's men ate one another, in spite of the evidence given to John Rae by the Inuit, and in spite of the analysis of three scientists, who, at the end of the twentieth century, wrote a formal report detailing the marks of metal knives on the recovered bones.

The cut marks, which ranged in length from 2 to 27 mm, were easily distinguished from animal tooth marks by their sharper borders, narrower width, and wider spacing ... In contrast to cuts made by stone tools, the observed cuts, examined under a scanning electron microscope, exhibited features characteristic of cuts made by metal blades, namely straight edges

...

The location of the cut marks is also consistent with defleshing

This may have been true at the time the Inuit spoke to John Rae, and it may have been true at the end of the twentieth century, but it was not true when Dickens wrote his article for Household Words. These things change over time, they change in response to written opinion, and they change from one moment to the next. In Dombey and Son, one character is killed by the monstrous apparition of a train.

He heard a shout—another—saw the face change from its vindictive passion to a faint sickness and terror—felt the earth tremble—knew in a moment that the rush was come — uttered a shriek—looked round—saw the red eyes, bleared and dim, in the daylight, close upon him—was beaten down, caught up, and whirled away upon a jagged mill, that spun him round and round, and struck him limb from limb, and licked his stream of life up with its fiery heat, and cast his mutilated fragments in the air.

In Dickens, Peter Ackroyd notes that trains at that early stage of rail travel would not have been moving at more than twenty-five miles per hour, or about forty kilometres. This is the speed Australians are advised to slow down to when we drive past schools, so that children, when we hit them, will be more likely to survive, bouncing softly off our bonnets rather than flying across the road and having their heads shattered against the passing buses.

So human beings in the past were excessively fragmentable. Today they are more resilient. The speed that would not kill a child today would, in the past, have struck an adult man limb from limb. We may furthermore speculate that over time, if literature permits, human beings will become progressively less fragile, until, at some currently unforeseeable stage, they become completely impervious to harm. We will look to fiction for proof. Is not Superman both "The Man of Steel" and "The Man of Tomorrow"? Did we not conclude last week that Agnes Wickfield, a character who never ages or undergoes physical change, belongs in a science fiction novel? It does not seem unreasonable to assume that she, a woman of science-fiction imperviousness, a woman "of Tomorrow," shares the qualities of Superman. In short, Agnes comes from Krypton.

And we may pity Carker, as he gets struck limb from limb, for the answer to his problem lies only a small, small way into the future, in the very next book in fact.* Superman is more powerful than a locomotive. Agnes likewise must be more powerful than a locomotive. She could have saved Carker armed with nothing more than her own bare hands. His tragedy is that Dickens wrote her a few years too late.







*Anyone who doubts the ability of Dickens characters to travel independently outside their books should consider the case of Miss Julia Mills, who was so badly wounded by "a misplaced affection" in David Copperfield that she moved to the seaside town where Dickens took his holidays and read the entire romance section of the library.

(See the Reprinted Pieces for proof.)

the story / stops, everything

In her essay My Odd Shelf, Anne Fadiman writes about the collection of books she owns on the subject of polar exploration: "sixty-four books ... so charged with sentiment that they might as well be smudged with seal blubber and soaked with spray from the Weddell Sea." Her favourite explorers are the ones who failed. "Not coincidentally, they were also all British." In 1854, the Scotsman John Rae, who had been in the Arctic, searching for evidence that would reveal the fate of Captain John Franklin's efforts to uncover a passageway through the ice (the Captain's ships set off in 1845 and from that frozen whale-road never returned), sent a report back to Britain, saying that he had held conversations with the local people, who told him that the dying members of the expedition had resorted to cannibalism.

Charles Dickens was so livid at the news that he wrote an article about it for the journal that he was then editing, Household Words. In his Dickens biography, Peter Ackroyd calls this "one of his stranger essays of the period ... It is so strange an article, in fact, that it throws more light upon his own excitable and anxious state of mind than upon the ostensible subject of his concern." First Dickens says that Rae's Inuit were lying ("the wild tales of a herd of savages"), then he says that they probably killed the explorers themselves, then he insists that it is impossible, utterly impossible, that handpicked British gentlemen would eat one another, even in extremity.

Also, and as the citadel of the position, that the better educated the man, the better disciplined the habits, more reflective and religious the tone of thought, the more gigantically improbable the "last resource" becomes.

To prove his point, he describes real life accounts of shipwrecked men who resisted cannibalism, he discusses the hero of Byron's Don Juan, who refused even to eat a dead spaniel, and he draws the reader's attention to Sinbad the Sailor of the Arabian Nights. The Arabian Nights stories had been favourites of his since childhood.

Even for SINBAD the Sailor, buried alive, the story-teller found it easier to provide some natural sustenance, in the shape of so many loaves of bread and so much water, let down into the pit with each of the other people buried alive after him (whom he killed with a bone, for he was not nice), than to invent this dismal expedient.

It was not in his childhood reading, it went against his childhood reading, it went against goodness, it was unthinkable, he could not, and would not, think it.

Because they ARE dead. therefore we care about this ... Because no Franklin can come back, to write the honest story of their woes and resignation ... Because they lie scattered on those wastes of snow, and are as defenceless against the remembrance of coming generations, as against the elements into which they are resolving, and the winter winds that alone can waft them home, now, impalpable air; therefore cherish them gently, even in the breasts of children.

Throughout the length of the biography Ackroyd draws attention to the automatic sympathy Dickens felt for lost children and forlorn people. His fiction is full of orphaned or unprotected figures, Little Nell, Oliver Twist, Paul Dombey, David Copperfield, Pip. He left a trail of them like breadcrumbs (and a trail of breadcrumbs leads, but where?). He showed sympathy, says Ackroyd, for people who had failed at that Victorian thing, "the Battle of Life." The failure and lostness of the explorers was very large, and it does not seem surprising that he should want to protect them once he perceives that they are "defenceless." They are as dead as Nell. Dead explorers answer something in Fadiman too, a yearning for spectacles of noble failure. And they answer something in the poet Elizabeth Bradfield, who wrote a book of poems about polar explorations, called Approaching Ice. "Who else," she asks one of the explorers rhetorically, "has breathed air this clear, crystals of it / hardening briefly in your lungs?" "[I]f only the unsullied / could be discovered," she adds in a different poem. Here there is a longing for purity, or magic nullity, and for an extreme, and for a kind of collaboration with that extreme.

... if only, once found,
it could speak its own nobility and let us
empathize.

The writers wanted the polar landscape so profoundly that it seems reasonable to assume that it was, in fact, their creation, and that the explorers who thought they were walking or sailing into an iced-over part of the world were instead walking into the brains of writers. Of course Dickens was conspiring with Fadiman and Bradfield without knowing it, and all three of them were conspiring with other writers who have summoned up the same idea. Jules Verne, for example, wrote a book about an explorer who went to the North Pole and discovered a volcano, and a book about another explorer who went to the South Pole and discovered a sphinx. The Canadian poet David Solway published a book called Franklin's Passage which contains the lines, "when the story / stops, everything / stops." Wilkie Collins, the author of The Woman in White, collaborated with Dickens on a play called The Frozen Deep. Dickens appeared in the play himself, filling the role of Richard Wardour, an explorer who is rescued just in time to perish in the arms of his sweetheart, Clara Burnham. By the end of the run Clara was being played by a woman named Ellen Ternan, with whom Dickens fell in love. She was the passion of his later life, a dramatic catalyst, who, much younger than he, never ruined herself for him by aging as the other women he had loved had aged. He never treated her as he treated unhappy Maria Beadnell in Little Dorrit. "Here was the young and pretty actress who somehow provoked in Dickens all the longings he had once attached to to others like Christina Weller," wrote Peter Ackroyd. So the ice gave him the virgin he had pursued in his fiction. Their long affair was likely unconsummated, Ackroyd suggests. "[I]f only the unsullied / could be discovered." Ternan's real tears dripped into the beard of the dying Richard Wardour, transmitting ideas to Dickens: " ... new ideas for a story have come into my head as I lay on the ground, with surprising force and brilliancy." "And he has died," finished Collins when he turned the play into a novel, "in the moment of victory. Not one of us here but may live to envy his glorious death."

For the Dickens family it was a disaster, and his wife Catherine, scattered on interior wastes of snow, wept as if soaked with spray from the Weddell Sea.







Dickens' article was called The Lost Arctic Voyagers and you can read most of it at The Victorian Web. Don Juan is here. Look to the Second Canto for the shipwreck. Actually he eats half of one of the spaniel's forepaws, but he eats it reluctantly. The point is that he doesn't eat a human.

'T was not to be expected that he should,
Even in extremity of their disaster,
Dine with them on his pastor and his master.

Elizabeth Bradfield? Here. Jules Verne's volcano book was called Voyages et aventures du capitaine Hatteras, and his sphinx book, Le Sphinx des glaces. Then there was a third book about a group of Americans who wanted to buy the North Pole so that they could mine it for coal. That book was called Sans dessus dessous. The text of Wilkie Collins' novel is available at Project Gutenberg.

Crayford's voice was heard in the silence.

"The loss is ours," he said. "The gain is his. He has won the greatest of all conquests—the conquest of himself. And he has died in the moment of victory. Not one of us here but may live to envy his glorious death."

The distant report of a gun came from the ship in the offing, and signaled the return to England and to home.

then lost patience and swore at her, disgusted

The thing about Penne Hackforth-Jones is that she doesn't acknowledge a difference between Baynton's life and the events in Baynton's fiction. The first part of that life (born obscurely and illegitimately, Baynton lived lonely in the bush during her first marriage while her husband rode away to find work elsewhere or gambled at track meetings) is mostly negative space and mystery, the second part is positive space and recorded detail, viz, her book of short stories being published, interviews with newspapers, a friendship with the editor of the Bulletin, houses in England and Australia, her photograph in the London Daily News, her patriotic behaviour during World War I, and so on. The contrast between positive and negative, invisibility and visibility, could have been the theme that shaped the book (the subtitle paves the way: Between Two Worlds), but Hackforth-Jones prefers a clean, smooth, even surface spread over everything: she won't let the negative space be. She fills it with information lifted from the stories; she goes at her subject's life like a handyman with a tub of polyfilla. She writes --

She was frightened when she tried to separate the cows from their calves and had to be forced to do it. Alex [her first husband] first laughed and then lost patience and swore at her, disgusted. When she finally had forced the animal to do as she wanted and came back white-faced and trembling with the stick he had given her to brandish still in her hand, she wondered if he too would run if she tried the same on him.

-- then endnotes it to one of Baynton's short stories, The Chosen Vessel. "This story was used to reconstruct Barbara's early married life." The relevant part of the story reads:

It was he [the protagonist's husband] who forced her to run and meet the advancing cow, brandishing a stick, and uttering threatening words till the enemy turned and ran. "That's the way!" the man said, laughing at her white face. In many things he was worse than the cow, and she wondered if the same rule would apply to the man, but she was not one to provoke skirmishes even with the cow.

But no recognition of the difference between fiction and fact, an absence of the note that would remind us there is no reason to believe that the thought Baynton gives to her character should be given to her as well,* and no discussion of Baynton's debt to Gothic literature, or the similarity between the husband in this story and the standard Gothic villain who traps the heroine so that he can gloat over her. In the biographer's eye the husband and the villain become indistinguishable, the author and the heroine are the same person, and the precocious little boy in the unpublished short story Drought Driven is precisely Barbara Baynton's son at the age of five. Hackforth-Jones shows the same faith in Baynton that Robert Burton shows in the Bible when he advises his readers to treat their melancholy with wine in accordance with Proverbs 31:6, as if the Holy Book is only incidentally a spiritual guide and more importantly a health manual. ""Give wine to them that are in sorrow,"" he writes, "or as Paul bid Timothy drink wine for his stomach's sake, for concoction, health, or some such honest occasion." In the mind of Hackforth-Jones, Chosen Vessel and Drought Driven cease to be stories; instead they are transformed into diary entries with the names changed a little; they are not literature; they are news reports in disguise.







* Compare this, for example, to Peter Ackroyd's long Dickens biography. Ackroyd acknowledges that certain events in the author's life might have turned up again in his fiction, but he does not draw absolute conclusions with the insouciance of Hackforth-Jones. She treats uncertainty with repulsion; he treats it like an invitation to an unanswerable mystery. He will say that "such and such seems to be the case" or "we may speculate that ..." For example, "There is another small echo, too, perhaps in the importance which in his fiction Dickens imparts to someone helping a small boy with his homework -- Paul Dombey is helped by his older sister, and Anges helps the young David Copperfield. Can we see in these two consonant pictures an image of Dickens' older sister Fanny helping him?"

So the idea is introduced but not taken for granted. In place of Hackforth-Jones' conflations, Ackroyd writes: "But such derivations have to be taken very cautiously -- there is no doubt that on many occasions Dickens used certain salient characteristics of the people whom he met or knew, but there are very few instances when he simply transcribed what he had seen and heard onto the page. The novelist's art is not of that kind. Dickens perceived a striking characteristic, or mood, or piece of behaviour, and then in his imagination proceeded to elaborate upon it until the "character" bears only a passing resemblance to the real person."