Charles Dickens, Crime Writer

"The Dickensian Aspect"

Here in mean alleys and dim shops, shadowed and shamed by the police, mankind is still driving its dark trade in heroes.

G.K. Chesterton, “Charles Dickens”

The first half of The Pickwick Papers is an infrequently amusing slog. Samuel Pickwick and the members of his club travel around Merrie England getting into comic misadventures. The joke—that their self-important buffoonery is written in a grand epic style, as if Pickwick was a brave and sagacious hero—wears out quick.

And then something changes. Pickwick acquires a servant, Sam Weller, who’s as practical as Pickwick is full of fancy. When Pickwick is sued by a widow who believes he proposed marriage to her (another mixup), the courts decide in the widow’s favor. Pickwick refuses to pay the damages on principle, and is ordered into debtor’s prison. Inside, he finds human misery and deprivation, which he salves with money as best he can. Pickwick is freed only when the widow herself is bankrupted by her lawyers. By then, the tone of the book (it’s barely a novel) has shifted. Pickwick is no longer a deluded old fool; he’s Quixotic, an honest person full of companionship and goodwill, unable to bear a grudge.

What’s amazing about Pickwick is how much better it gets as it hews closer to crime fiction. The caprice of the courts, the squalor of prison—these social realist elements would become synonymous with Dickens. The Wire had its journalist characters sardonically refer to any story about urban neglect as touching on “The Dickensian Aspect.” Dickens found his voice in the middle of Pickwick by focusing on crime, and in turn, that voice would influence crime fiction to come.

Realism is a fraught concept in art, but as A.N. Wilson argues in The Mystery of Charles Dickens, Dickens’s grotesque characters and comic fools somehow skew closer to reality than many of his contemporaries’ more “realistic” depictions. Dickens, Wilson argues, was the only author of his era who knew firsthand the horrors of debtors prison and child labor: he “not merely looked over into the abyss. He had lived in it.”

Though Dickens aspired to gentility and became a well-known public figure, he was haunted by his spendthrift father’s stint in the Marshalsea debtors prison, and his own time as a child working in Warren’s Blacking, affixing labels to bottles of shoe polish. A recurring in-joke in Pickwick is the praise for his former employer’s competitors: shoes shined with a rival brand have “a polish which would have struck envy to the soul of the amiable Mr. Warren.” Writers often know less than they should, but most know how to hold a grudge.

As much as Dickens’s writing was informed by the socials ills of his past, he was equally inspired by the goings-on of his era—famously, the rise of the police detective. The first group of criminal investigators appeared in London in 1842. Dickens made friends with several of these detectives, accompanying them on the nineteenth century equivalent of ride-alongs. In articles published in his journal Household Words, he praised the men who used their knowledge of the city and of human nature to apprehend cutpurses, break up rings of thieves, and solve baffling murders. (These qualities, and the working class background of the detectives, were similar to the novelist’s own.) In Bleak House, Dickens would write an intrepid detective of his own, Inspector Bucket, who helps suss out the truth and hunt down persons of interest.

The popularity of the novel as an art form (and the mystery novel in particular) coincided with the public infatuation with detection. As Kate Summerscale writes in “The Prince of Sleuths,” “Amid the uncertainties of the mid-19^th century, a detective offered science, conviction, stories that could organize chaos. He turned brutal crimes—the vestiges of the beast in man—into intellectual puzzles.” Summerscale’s book The Suspicions of Mister Whicher covers a scandalous child murder case from the Victorian era: Jack Whicher was a detective whom Dickens knew and had interviewed.

Yet Dickens’s enthusiasm for the science of detection would become more equivocal. In Bleak House Inspector Bucket doesn’t solve anything—in spite of his skills, he succeeds in finding most people only when they’re dead or dying. As Olivia Rutigliano wrote in a piece for LitHub, Bucket “does more harm than good, for all his jolliness and assurances of helpfulness.” As much as Dickens celebrated the detective, his work includes skepticism of their efficacy, of the ability of the forensic sciences to unravel all mysteries. Just as the workhouse and the prison were dehumanizing, so could the justice system grind down people in the same way. His fiction reflected that.

Bleak House is a focus of Robert Douglas-Fairhurst’s The Turning Point, a biography and social history of the year 1851, when Dickens began planning out the novel. 1851 was the year Dickens’s father died, as well as one of his children; a year when he bought a house, and put on a play to support a guild for authors; a year when he worked to create a reform school that would teach young girls (many former prostitutes) the skills needed to become colonial wives in Australia. In the novel, the heavy industrial fog which settles on London, turning into the confusion which hangs about the chancery court as the decades-long court case of Jarndyce and Jarndyce grinds along, speaks to anxieties the country itself was going through. Douglas-Fairhurst reads Bleak House as a novel about the collision of Victorian cruelty with the equally cruel drive for modernization. Superstition or science? Much of Dickens, and much of crime fiction, is about this collision.

Despite praising kindness and good fellowship in his novels, and despite his own charitable endeavors, Charles Dickens could be savagely wrongheaded, a bastard far beyond the ideology of his times. He saw nothing wrong with the Jamaican governor’s brutal suppression of revolt in 1865, which resulted in the deaths of over 400 people. Dickens’s own treatment of his wife amounts to a willful erasure (or rewriting) of a relationship that produced ten children. He accused her of negligence and cruelty to their children, and in a particularly brutal stroke, attempt to have her committed to a mental hospital. This coincides with his infatuation with a much younger actress, Nelly Ternan. Claire Tomalin’s The Invisible Woman argues that Dickens and Ternan’s relationship could very well have included children together, though the evidence of this is scant.

What Tomalin’s and Wilson’s biographies convey is a man with a public image who, near the end of his life, was attempting to be two people, using false names to visit Ternan in the house he bought for her, scheming to bring her on his second tour of America if scandal could be avoided. His last unfinished novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, is of a man similarly divided, respectable and well thought of, but secretly capable of dark actions. Wilson writes, “Only a sick soul, or a divided self — however one describes it — could have created these books.”

There’s no single parent of the modern mystery, which owes something to Poe, Conan Doyle, Christie and Sayers, Hammett and Chandler, as well as Dickens’s peer and protégé Wilkie Collins. These are only the English language progenitors—an early collection of China’s Judge Bao stories date from the late sixteenth century. A puzzling crime, a celebrated detective, an examination of society, and a glimpse into the human capacity for evil—without all of these influences, the genre wouldn’t be what it is.

But Dickens’s shadow hovers over all these threads. His hardscrabble childhood and advocacy for the poor, his infatuation with detectives and disillusion with the justice system, and the doubleness in his own public and private lives, contribute to how we think of the crime novel, as inseparable from “The Dickensian Aspect.” From Pickwick on, Dickens’s fiction would be informed by crime, and crime fiction by Dickens.

Bibliography

A.N. Wilson, The Mystery of Charles Dickens

G.K. Chesterton, Charles Dickens

Charles Dickens, The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club

Bleak House

Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, The Turning Point: A Year That Changed Charles Dickens and the World

Olivia Rutigliano, “On Charles Dickens’s Devious, Hypocritical “Nice Guy” Cop”

Kate Summerscale, The Suspicions of Mister Whicher

“The Prince of Sleuths.”

Claire Tomalin. Charles Dickens A Life.

The Invisible Woman: The Story of Nelly Ternan and Charles Dickens