Quote of the Day (Charles Dickens, on an Early Victorian Detective)

“Inspector Field is the bustling speaker. Inspector Field's eye is the roving eye that searches every corner of the cellar as he talks. Inspector Field's hand is the well-known hand that has collared half the people here, and motioned their brothers, sisters, fathers, mothers, male and female friends, inexorably to New South Wales. Yet Inspector Field stands in this den, the Sultan of the place. Every thief here cowers before him, like a schoolboy before his schoolmaster. All watch him, all answer when addressed, all laugh at his jokes, all seek to propitiate him. This cellar company alone—to say nothing of the crowd surrounding the entrance from the street above, and making the steps shine with eyes—is strong enough to murder us all, and willing enough to do it; but, let Inspector Field have a mind to pick out one thief here, and take him; let him produce that ghostly truncheon from his pocket, and say, with his business-air, 'My lad, I want you!' and all Rats' Castle shall be stricken with paralysis, and not a finger move against him, as he fits the handcuffs on!”—English novelist Charles Dickens (1812-1870), “On Duty With Inspector Field,” in Household Words, June 14, 1851, reprinted in The Dead Witness: A Connoisseur's Collection of Victorian Detective Stories, edited by Michael Sims (2012)

While editing the weekly magazine Household Words in the early 1850s, Charles Dickens sometimes published his own work—roughly 100 stories and articles in the first three years of its existence. Although much of this output reflected his longtime concerns—notably, housing, education, factory life—another aspect of urban poverty began to grip him: crime.

In particular, he became fascinated with London’s Metropolitan Police, established by Robert Peel in 1829. Thirteen years later, Charles Frederick Field became one of the first members of its Detective Department.

Chief Inspector Field would have appealed to Dickens for his plain-spoken manner, his rich fund of stories drawn from his work, and, through his disguises in pursuit of wrongdoers, his flair for the dramatic.

But, as the quote above indicates, Dickens also valued Field and his colleagues as stalwart bulwarks against the disorder that the novelist saw as increasingly threatening London. That sense had been further validated earlier in 1851 when Field apprehended Charles Gill, a would-be assassin of British Prime Minister Lord John Russell.

Upon retiring from the Detective Department at age 47 in 1852, Field set up shop as a private investigator, a trade he continued to ply for the next dozen years.

But even before he left the London police force, Field had left such an indelible impression that Dickens used him as the model for “Inspector Bucket” in the 1853 novel Bleak House—which, as noted in Claire Tomalin’s 2011 biography of the writer, is “a mystery story, a whodunnit, as well as an account of English society.”

The conventions of the mystery story—and especially of the police procedural—are so well established by now that it’s hard to imagine what it was like at its beginnings. But Dickens in effect set the prototype for Inspector Morse, Christopher Foyle, DCI Banks, Jane Tennison, and other British TV detectives with this metropolitan investigator as implacably determined to ferret out the truth as he was compassionate towards the victims of crime.

(Inspector Bucket also figures in the BBC mashup series Dickensian. I find it delicious that the Irish actor Stephen Rea—shown here in the role—played this pillar of Victorian England.)

This Day in Literary History (Charles Dickens, ‘Generously Angry’ Champion of the Underdog, Dies)

June 9, 1870—Charles Dickens, whose prolific career included forerunners of the modern crime novel, left a few mysteries of his own when he died at age 58 of a stroke at his country home Gad’s Hill Place, in Rochester, England, including:

*How did he intend to finish the novel on which he was working at the time of his death, The Mystery of Edwin Drood?

*Was he at home at the time of his fatal stroke?

*Why were his wishes for a simple burial disregarded?

The following is what we know—or don’t—about these questions:

*Drood: Unlike F. Scott Fitzgerald’s unfinished The Last Tycoon, Dickens left no notes for how his book might turn out. We only know, based on the number of installments, that he had reached the halfway mark of the novel. Writing in installments for magazine publishing helped him to adjust plots and characterizations by gauging ongoing reader reaction, but it also deprived us of knowing his final destination for what turned out to be his last book.

*Dickens’ whereabouts on the day before his death: In her judicious 2011 biography, Charles Dickens, Claire Tomalin reviewed the recollections of his beloved daughter, sister-in-law, and a local doctor called to Gad’s Hill. His careful concealment of involvement with his much younger mistress, Ellen (Nelly) Ternan, led Tomalin to offer an alternative scenario for the day of his stroke, one that she admitted was “a wild and improbable story, but not an entirely impossible one”—i.e., that, instead of suffering his stroke at home, Dickens collapsed at the home of Nelly, who—to preserve her lover’s reputation and her own—got him, with some help, into a hackney cab, where he was conveyed back to his own home.

*Burial: Dickens’ will specified that he wished to be “buried in an inexpensive, unostentatious, and strictly private manner; that no public announcement be made of the time or place of my burial; that at the utmost not more than three plain mourning coaches be employed; and that those who attend my funeral wear no scarf, cloak, black bow, long hat-band, or other such revolting absurdity.” That is hardly what occurred. In the end, his remains were brought to the Valhalla of English literati: Poet’s Corner in Westminster Abbey. In a very revealing article this past February in Smithsonian Magazine, Leon Litvack disclosed that this circumvention of Dickens’ wishes was engineered by his friend and eventual biographer, John Forster, and the dean of Westminster, Arthur Penrhyn Stanley, both of whom stood to gain by creating an unstoppable groundswell of public opinion on behalf of this move.

(Incidentally, the involvement of Nelly Ternan in this closing chapter of Dickens’ story remains as murky as much else: At the final services, Dickens’ estranged wife Catherine was excluded; accounts of those present note that 14 mourners were in attendance. Many, but not all, were specifically named. It is possible that Nelly was the unnamed attendee.)

It is natural that Dickens, a spellbinding storyteller given to astonishing plot twists, left a few in his own life. But I could not write this post without considering his larger legacy.

Dickens pioneered so much in the writing and marketing of modern fiction, but his influence on the crime novel receives less attention than it should. From Oliver Twist to The Mystery of Edwin Drood, he continually turned his attention to its significant presence in Victorian England. 

Just as masters of the genre have discovered in the past century, such subjects offers unique and abundant opportunities to consider both twisted individual psychology and larger social pathologies. In other words, the forces of injustice create the preconditions for crime, its exploiters and victims.

In contemporary America, where the police are increasingly regarded as abusers of power, it may come as a shock that Dickens sees the London police force as a bulwark of the moral order. The Dickens novel I was assigned in a college Victorian Literature course, Bleak House, even creates one of the first detectives in fiction: Inspector Bucket.  

A post from the Web site “Read Great Literature” offers the presence of this character as a reason to love this novel, noting his resemblance to my favorite TV sleuth, Peter Falk’s Lieutenant Columbo: his humble nature, his dogged pursuit of clues, and even a beloved wife!

Above all, Dickens recognized that crime, like injustice, left untold victims in its wake, and it needed to be countered not just with the highly rational faculties of Edgar Allan Poe’s Auguste Dupin or Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, but with a fearless commitment to truth and a stout heart. That type of person would be a champion of the underdog like Dickens himself, as summarized by George Orwell:

“In the case of Dickens I see a face that is not quite the face of Dickens's photographs, though it resembles it. It is the face of a man of about forty, with a small beard and a high colour. He is laughing, with a touch of anger in his laughter, but no triumph, no malignity. It is the face of a man who is always fighting against something, but who fights in the open and is not frightened, the face of a man who is generously angry — in other words, of a nineteenth-century liberal, a free intelligence, a type hated with equal hatred by all the smelly little orthodoxies which are now contending for our souls.”

Quote of the Day (Charles Dickens, on Whispering)

“One disagreeable result of whispering is that it seems to evoke an atmosphere of silence, haunted by the ghosts of sound—strange cracks and tickings, the rustling of garments that have no substance in them, and the tread of dreadful feet that would leave no mark on the sea-sand or the winter snow.”— English novelist Charles Dickens (1812-1870), Bleak House (1853)

Quote of the Day (Charles Dickens, on London’s ‘Implacable November’ Fog)

“Implacable November weather….Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snow-flakes — gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun….

“Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city. Fog on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights. Fog creeping into the cabooses of collier-brigs; fog lying out on the yards, and hovering in the rigging of great ships; fog drooping on the gunwales of barges and small boats. Fog in the eyes and throats of ancient Greenwich pensioners, wheezing by the firesides of their wards; fog in the stem and bowl of the afternoon pipe of the wrathful skipper, down in his close cabin; fog cruelly pinching the toes and fingers of his shivering little ’prentice boy on deck. Chance people on the bridges peeping over the parapets into a nether sky of fog, with fog all round them, as if they were up in a balloon, and hanging in the misty clouds.”— Charles Dickens, Bleak House (1853)

Quote of the Day (Wilkie Collins, on the “Woman in White”)

“There, as if it had that moment sprung out of the earth or dropped from the heaven—stood the figure of a solitary Woman, dressed from head to foot in white garments…All I could discern distinctly by the moonlight, was a colourless, youthful face, meager and sharp to look at, about the cheeks and chin; large, grave, wistfully-attentive eyes; nervous, uncertain lips; and light hair of a pale, brownish-yellow hue.”—English novelist and playwright Wilkie Collins (1824-1889), The Woman in White (1860)

Read over that quote again. In its pathos and, especially, rising dramatic tension, it’s not hard to think that it comes from one of Charles Dickens’ later novels.

In some ways, in fact, we can think of Wilkie Collins—Dickens’ junior by 12 years—as the writer who, on the written page as well as in private life, pushed to a logical conclusion everything his longtime great friend and mentor did in these years.

The Woman in White, though not Collins’ first novel, was his first major success. The thriller began U.S. serialization in Harper’s Weekly on this date in 1859, one day before it was set to do so in the author’s native Britain, in the Dickens-edited magazine All the Year Round.

(What an extraordinary amount of thrilling literature that readers received in that single issue of the latter: not only the first installment of Collins’ book, but the last of Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities.)

What did I mean about Collins pushing “to a logical conclusion” everything Dickens did? Well, consider some of the ways that The Woman in White resembled, then diverged from, Dickens’ Bleak House (1853):

* Bleak House split between an omniscient, third-person narrator and a first-person one; Woman in White features five first-person narrators.

* Bleak House concerns itself with the maddening vagaries of the law; Woman was written by someone who broke off legal training after his father’s death allowed him to pursue what he really loved--writing. The latter book’s narrators were meant, in effect, to sound like witnesses at a trial.

* Bleak House, with its Inspector Bucket, might be thought of as the first detective novel; Woman might be considered the first novel narrated (at least in part) by an individual who functions as the “detective” of the plot by unlocking a mystery. Collins is generally regarded as the master of the Victorian “sensation novel”—a genre in which the commonplace facts of life collide with subject matter bound to shock the mores of the time: substance abuse, sexual transgressions, and insanity. That genre also further developed the beginnings of the modern detective story pioneered by Edgar Allan Poe.

* Bleak House spawned three adaptations for the BBC; Woman was spun off as a stage play in the 1870s (written by Collins himself), twice for the “Beeb,” then turned into a musical composed by Andrew Lloyd Webber.

I should also point out a few other ways in which the lives and/or works of Dickens and Collins reflected, in sometimes odd ways, on each other:

* Bleak House and Woman deal with secrets; their authors had their own, of a sexual nature. Dickens left his wife of two decades for Ellen Ternan, a young actress he met while taking part in Collins’ The Frozen Deep; for years, Collins maintained two separate households with two different women—a set of irregular relationships that increasingly alienated him from Dickens.

* Dickens’ daughter Katie married Collins’ sickly brother Charlie.

* By the end of the 1860s, Collins had become addicted to laudanum, and his novel The Moonstone would explore opium and laudanum addiction; addiction to opium would also prove a key plot element of Dickens’ unfinished 1870 novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood (which Collins, it was discovered years later, privately criticized as a product of an exhausted man).

I started The Woman in White a few weeks ago before being forced to put it down because of other projects. I’ve begrudged every minute I’ve spent away from the book since.

The first thing a modern reader notices about it is that it’s long—more than 600 pages in the edition I own. The quote above hints at why it bulks up so much, but also why it’s been adapted so much to the stage, screen and television—much like Dickens, Collins’ frequent collaborator in theatrical ventures.

Can you imagine what an editor like Gordon Lish—who made the minimalist Raymond Carver howl over his excisions—would do with this passage? Forget about three adjectival phrases to a noun, as Collins resorts to here, or two, or even one such phrase—poor Collins would be reduced to nouns and verbs!

But the effect of all of this verbiage is unforgettable—cinematic, really, in a way that the setting—a moonlit Hampstead heath—by itself couldn’t totally convey. Long after you’ll close the book, you’ll not soon put out of your mind, if ever, the image of the solitary, sad title character.