Valerie Purton is Reader in Victorian Literature at Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge.

Dickens and the Sentimental Tradition

Fielding, Richardson, Sterne, Goldsmith, Sheridan, Lamb

By Valerie Purton

Wimbledon Publishing Company

Copyright © 2012 Valerie Purton
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-85728-418-1

Contents

Acknowledgements, ix,
A Note on the Text, xi,
Introduction, xiii,
Chapter 1 Dickens and the Sentimentalist Tradition, 1,
Chapter 2 Sentimentalism and its Discontents in the Eighteenth-Century Novel: Fielding, Richardson and Sterne, 19,
Chapter 3 Sentimentalism and its Discontents in Eighteenth-Century Drama: Goldsmith and Sheridan, 45,
Chapter 4 Dickens and Nineteenth-Century Drama, 69,
Chapter 5 The Early Novels and The Vicar of Wakefield, 91,
Chapter 6 The Later Novels, 121,
Conclusion The Afterlife of Sentimentalism, 151,
Notes, 161,
Bibliography, 179,
Index, 185,

CHAPTER 1

DICKENS AND THE SENTIMENTALIST TRADITION

The literary and cultural history of eighteenth-century sentimentalism is a relatively familiar story. Less often identified is a trait of sentimentalism evident in English literature at least since the medieval mystery plays. When in the Chester Cycle, Isaac, thinking himself about to be killed at God’s command by his father Abraham, says ‘Father, tell my mother for nothing’ (that is, ‘Don’t let my mother know!’). The combination of pathos and humour is instantly recognisable. Even more so are the blandishments lavished by the shepherds on the Christ child in the Second Shepherds’ Play in the Wakefield Cycle: ‘Lo, he laughs, my sweeting!’ ‘Hail, little tiny mop! … little day star’. This suggests the ‘folk’ side of the sentimental mode. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, however, it becomes part of the vocabulary of high culture. The family reunion scene in Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale, reported, not acted out, is an early configuration of Dickens’s Dombey family of jealous father, persecuted mother, ill-fated son and cruelly rejected daughter. Father and daughter are reunited after the death of the son and the (apparent) death of the mother and an onlooker tells the audience: ‘their joy waded in tears. There was casting up of eyes, holding up of hands, with countenance of such distraction … [they] did – I would fain say bleed tears; for I’m sure my heart wept blood. Who was most marble there, changed colour; some swooned, all sorrowed’ (V.ii.50, 96–7). Shakespeare here exploits the power and persuasiveness of the sentimental effect long before he could turn for support to a popular philosophical system that proclaimed the basic goodness of the human heart. The public expression of emotion, the consciously tableauesque qualities, the stress upon sentimental expression as aesthetically pleasing (the onlooker talks of ‘One of the prettiest touches’, line 89) – these are all traits of much later sentimentalism. In Thomas Otway’s Venice Preserved (1682), Belvidera’s power over her father anticipates very precisely in action and in metaphor Florence Dombey’s final victory:

Fall at his feet, cling to his reverent knees,
Speak to him with thine eyes, and with thy tears
Melt his hard heart, and wake dead nature in him,
Crush him in thy arms and torture him with thy softness. (IV.iv.532–5)3

A full history of literary sentimentalism would reveal many such instances and would entail both cultural and psychological analysis. It is beyond the remit of this narrower study of Dickens, where the conventional place to begin is with the seventeenth-century reaction against Calvinism and its belief in ‘fallen man’, led in Great Britain by the Earl of Shaftesbury and by Scottish philosophers such as Adam Smith. Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) is a seminal text, propounding the belief in man’s natural goodness and in the beneficial link between innate, spontaneous feeling and the ability to make moral reflections. The early eighteenth-century dramas of Richard Steele and Steele’s work with Joseph Addison on the Tatler and the Spectator all communicated an optimistic belief in the ultimate triumph of sensibility and the supreme importance of human sympathy. Dickens assimilated this early eighteenth-century tradition in his reading – but he also enjoyed the more complex late eighteenth-century reworkings of the tradition in the plays of Oliver Goldsmith and Richard Brinsley Sheridan.

The Sentimentalist Tradition: Eighteenth-Century Drama

Allardyce Nicoll, in his six volume A History of English Drama from 1660–1900, tracked sentimentalist rhetoric back as far as Restoration drama, finding the plays of Colley Cibber ‘a mixture of the flagrantly indecent and of the moralistically sentimental’, while Thomas Otway in Venice Preserved and in The Orphan brought (as has been shown) ‘true pathos and sentiment to the stage’ (I: 263). Nicoll makes other points relevant to Dickens. Early sentimental drama, he reveals, was ‘fundamentally opposed to the cynical aristocratic existence of former times. From its inception the middle classes were intimately associated with the development of the type’ (II: 181). In discussing later eighteenth-century sentimental drama Nicoll turns to the key element: the audience. Audiences, he says, showed both ‘excessive sensibility’ and ‘extreme political emotions’ (III: 15, 17) He also usefully identifies another key feature of sentimental writing: its self-contradiction. (I shall explore this later in relation to the ‘double-voiced discourse’ of Sterne, Goldsmith and Sheridan.) Frederick Reynolds, he says, ‘mingles manners, sentimentalism and satire’ (III: 132); George Colman the Elder satirised the sentimental school but himself wrote sentimentally at times (III: 140). The link with melodrama is soon established: Thomas Morton’s Speed the Plough (1800) is described as a ‘sentimental, melodramatic comedy’ (III: 143). Sentimentalism, Nicoll concludes, ‘can be both sincere and hypocritical; it can be both radical and conservative’ (III: 109). It is, in short, a literary sub-genre rather than a single politically identifiable position.

Nicoll narrates the triumph of sentimentalism in the late eighteenth century: ‘The whole of the dramatic literature of this time is influenced, directly or indirectly, by sentimentalism’ (III: 109) and suggests that three strands of ‘sentimentalism’ emerged as the theatre moved towards the nineteenth century. These were: Colley Cibber’s genteel comedy (the particular target of Goldsmith); the mawkishly pathetic theatre of Richard Cumberland; and the more revolutionary humanitarian drama of Elizabeth Inchbald and Thomas Holcroft (III: 108–10, 124). It is the last-named which Nicoll identifies as inspiring the Romantic poets, though for students of Dickens it is perhaps the Cumberland link which seems the most germane. A rather different, though related, account is given by Charles Whibley in his notes to a volume of William Hazlitt’s essays. Whibley supplies an amazingly succinct guide to the whole eighteenth-century sentimentalist tradition, moving from Alexander Pope to Jane Austen in five sentences:

Sense, sentiment, sensibility were favourite terms in the eighteenth century. Hazlitt (Round Table, p. 44) notes that in Pope’s Essay on Criticism ‘there are no less than half a score couplets rhyming to the word “sense”. The period witnessed the development of Reid’s philosophy of “common sense”. There are numerous thrusts at the play of fulsome sentiment in Sheridan’s School for Scandal. Mackenzie’s Man of Feeling and Goethe’s Sorrows of Werther illustrate the extremes that may be touched by sentimentality. Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility marks the impress of an expiring fashion.

Whibley’s view that sentimentalism ‘expired’ at the beginning of the nineteenth century is contradicted by Mario Praz’s belief in The Hero in Eclipse in Victorian Fiction (1956), that this is where it began. The present study aims to link what are obviously conceived here as two separate traditions – ‘sentiment’ as on the one hand, rational and on the other, pathetic – in order to reveal the contradictions inherited by Dickens and his contemporaries, which complicated their own vocabulary and the nature of their achievements.

The Sentimental Tradition: Etymologicaland Functionalist Approaches

A popular approach often used in discussing sentimentalism is the etymological, which tracks the semantic shift of ‘sensibility’ and ‘sentiment’ from the eighteenth to the nineteenth centuries. I shall briefly sum up what is relevant in this etymological approach but will then turn to a second, more original approach developed by Wolfgang Herrlinger (1987).

Eric Erämetsä, in A Study of the Word ‘Sentimental’ (1951) shows how the word meant for Shaftesbury simply ‘the moral reflections of the cultivated man.’ The heart was in the early eighteenth century constructed as the seat both of judgement and of right feeling. Lord Kames, says Erämetsä, made the natural next step: ‘Every thought is prompted by passion and is termed sentiment’ and it is presumably in this sense that Richardson’s Clarissa refers to ‘such expressions of duty as my heart overflowed with’. Thus the shift from thought to feeling was slight and hardly noticed during the eighteenth century – seemingly too slight to merit a different term. In 1762, Goldsmith is still using ‘sentiment’ in the older way: in The Citizen of the World, he condemns the man who ‘separates sensual and sentimental enjoyments, seeking happiness from the Mind alone’. By the end of the century, however, ‘sentiment’ had expanded to mean both the ‘moral reflections’ of Shaftesbury and the ’emotional susceptibility’ of Sterne. Both meanings continued well into the nineteenth century, though the ideas behind them were increasingly conceived as being directly in opposition to each other.

Wolfgang Herrlinger, examining eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literary sentimentalism in the 1980s, strikes out in a different direction, arguing that ‘mere studies in the history of words cannot lead us much further on their own’ and proposing instead that ‘one will get further through working out of concepts and themes like benevolence, pity, melancholy or even self-denial‘. Herrlinger usefully sums up what he takes to be the common characteristics of the eighteenth-century sentimental novel and the Victorian novel. Although he ignores drama and seems also to ignore Sterne and Fielding, his list still provides a useful schema:

One can point to a whole row of common elements shared by the sentimental novel and the Victorian novel: in both the heroes often burst into tears, in both, the figure of the guardian appears repeatedly, someone who has the task of protecting a parentless lost child from the dangers around them, in both the virtuous heroes are regenerated in a pastoral setting, in both the heroes find happiness in reading, in both the virtuous heroes are repeatedly overcome by a feeling of melancholy, in both pity, benevolence and self-denial are regarded as genuine virtues, both have heroines and heroes who place intuition ahead of logical operating reason as a source of knowledge. (2)

Isobel Armstrong had adopted a similarly functional approach to ‘The Role and the Treatment of Emotion in Victorian Criticism of Poetry’ (1977). What she says of Victorian poetry can equally well be applied to Victorian prose and to Dickens’s approach to his task as a novelist. Armstrong begins by looking at the Victorians in terms of ‘the emotions they liked and the emotions they did not like’ arguing that they ‘needed to see emotion as the fundamental of poetic experience for poet and reader alike. And yet they had a powerful distrust of emotion’. She goes on to examine the results of this ‘divided feeling about emotion’ in terms of Victorian expressive theory. John Stuart Mill’s enormously influential essays on poetry in the Monthly Repository contain the uncompromising dictum that ‘[t]he object of poetry is confessedly to act upon the emotions’. Science ‘addresses itself to the belief ‘, poetry ‘to the feelings’. George Henry Lewes followed Mill’s lead in the British and Foreign Review ten years later, by arguing that ‘thoughts do and must abound in all good poetry, but they are not there for their own sake, but for the sake of a feeling … Thought for thought’s sake is science – thought for feeling’s sake, and feeling for feeling’s sake, are poetry.’

Arthur Hallam (not discussed by Armstrong) had gone much further in his 1831 Englishman’s Magazine essay, in which he prescribed an absolute division between reflective and expressive poetry in his famous formulation: ‘It is not true …that the highest species of poetry is the reflective … Whenever the mind of the artist suffers itself to be occupied during its periods of creation, by any other predominant motive than the desire of beauty, the result is false in art’ (35). Hallam thus dethrones the intellect in favour of the imagination and recommends an absolute separation of the two. Using vocabulary Dickens later adopts, he talks of ‘the powerful tendency of the imagination to a life of immediate sympathy with the external universe’; of ‘the sacred ideas of our nature, the idea of good, the idea of perfection, the idea of truth’; he sees as the greatest danger the sinking of the mind ‘to the level of a mere notion in the understanding’ (37). The mind, the understanding, are significantly less important to Hallam than the imagination then. A recent critic, Jason R. Rudy, describes him as a radical figure who allows ‘the brain to take a passive role while sensory experience plays out howsomever it may in the human body’. Hallam declares that it might well be ‘morally impossible’ to ‘attain the author’s point of vision’, but that ‘it is never physically impossible, because nature has placed in man the simple elements, of which art is the sublimation’ (39). Dickens was of course, not an aesthete in any sense; nor was he a theorist of prose, let alone of poetry. However, he did adapt the ‘reflection versus sensation’ distinction in his own work into the rival rhetorics of sentiment, designed to bypass the brain, and humour or wit, designed to stimulate it. He reinvented the eighteenth-century sentimentalist tradition, via Hallam and Mill’s post-Romantic expressive theory, into the favourite nineteenth-century formulation of head versus heart. Such terms were usually capitalised. Against sentimentalism were arraigned industrialisation, science, mechanisation, in all their power: it is this polarised system that he develops as he energetically separates his ‘feeling’ characters such as Nicholas Nickleby, or Sissy Jupe in Hard Times, from those who think and reflect (or, in the Dickens’s rhetoric, plot, plan and scheme), such as Hard Times‘s Thomas Gradgrind or Nicholas’s uncle and adversary, Ralph Nickleby. Dickens’s binary rhetoric thus followed Hallam’s in cordoning off imagination and sympathy from the hardness of the industrial world.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774)

The early nineteenth-century literary treatment of the passions owes a great deal to the indirect influence on succeeding European literature of that pivotal sentimental/Romantic text, Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther. The direct influence of this semi-autobiographical epistolary novel must, as he knew no German, have come to Dickens via translations and adaptations. One, called simply Werther, is included in Elizabeth Inchbald’s Farces, which he read and relished as a child and acted in as an adult. He may very well have seen a parody of Werther in 1822, starring his favourite Charles Mathews, in a double bill with a farce by Charles Lamb. He may also have seen his friend Macready in the role.

Goldsmith and Sheridan slipped easily between the erotic and the spiritual, using identical registers for scenes of seduction and scenes of conversion. In mid-Victorian literature, however, the hero is obliged to construct his passion for the heroine as ‘pure’, that is, non-physical. Any trace of physical passion is assumed to be destructive of the sentimental value system. The beginning of the divide may be found in Werther, in which the young hero is attracted to Charlotte’s goodness but also feels a strong physical attraction. Goethe shows rival discourses at work as Werther’s vocabulary of feeling becomes disordered:

How my heart beats when by accident I touch her finger, or my feet meet hers under the table; I draw back as from a flame; but a secret force impels me forward again, and I become disordered. Her innocent, pure heart never knows what an agony these little familiarities inflict upon me. Sometimes when we are talking she lays her hand upon mine and in the eagerness of conversation comes closer to me, and her divine breath comes to my lips – I feel as if lightning had struck me, and I could sink into the earth. And yet, Wilhelm, with all this heavenly confidence – if I should ever dare – you understand. No! My heart is not so depraved! It is weak, weak enough – but is that not a kind of depravity? She is sacred to me. All passion is subdued in her presence; I do not know what I feel when I am near her. It is as if my soul beat in every nerve of my body.

Physical passion is not yet in itself taboo, but the beginnings of its eventual Victorian condemnation are evident: ‘My heart is not so depraved! It is weak, weak enough – but is not that a kind of depravity?’ The heart, which during the Enlightenment had been seen as the seat of moral judgement, here becomes the regulator of sexual desire. The introduction of ‘soul’, a deeply unstable word, adds to the emotional and rhetorical confusion: ‘It is as if my soul beat in every nerve of my body.’ Eventually rhetoric and metaphor both break down and Werther kisses the forbidden lips – and dies.

(Continues…)Excerpted from Dickens and the Sentimental Tradition by Valerie Purton. Copyright © 2012 Valerie Purton. Excerpted by permission of Wimbledon Publishing Company.
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