ABSTRACT
In the opening passages of The Pickwick Papers, published in 1836-37, Charles Dickens presents passenger transport in terms of widespread and alarming disarray: “Traveling was in a troubled state, and the minds of the coachmen were unsettled. Let them look abroad and contemplate scenes which were enacting around them. Stage-coaches were upsetting in all directions, horses were bolting, boats were overturning, and boilers were bursting.”1 While Dickens’s account does not explicitly name the recently wrought railway, it implies that a mysterious force was disrupting traditional means and deposing so-called natural sources of locomotion-that, indeed, a revolution was taking place. Prior to the development of the steam-powered locomotive that would inaugurate the transportation revolution, the stagecoach provided the primary mode of public land transportation in Britain.2 Traveling by coach was, moreover, a relatively exclusive practice largely reserved for the male upper classes; it was organized around the masculinized realm of horses, hostlers and English inns, suggestive of leisure, characterized by interaction among travelers and with the natural environment, and understood as the right to experience the world at one’s own whim and will. As such, the traveling tradition generated an abundance of narrative models-from the scientific travel journal, travel novel, adventure novel, to sporting fiction-that were crucial to the invention and promotion of its own mystique as an enterprise of masculine privilege. While women of the middle and upper classes certainly traveled as well during this period, they were required to have a suitable escort or an entire entourage and could not move about unattended without inviting scandal or disgrace.3 Before the institution of the railway, therefore, travel was largely the culturally imagined province of masculinity, founded on designations of entitlement, autonomy and agency, and emblematized by male members of the moneyed classes. By the mid-nineteenth century, innovations in transportation technology had radically altered the ways in which individuals understood and apprehended their world,4 where among all other icons of the Victorian period, the train signaled the
divide between the former age and the new. One of William Makepeace Thackeray’s characters evinces this point when he comments:
Here, where animals are the figurative retainers of the pre-industrial age, the diluvian reference subtly prognosticates future doom and assigns Christian value to this vision of the past, attesting to a reactionary impulse pervasive in Victorian culture. In the most simplified sense, many felt that the course of progressepitomized by the steam engine, or “iron horse”—endangered traditional distinctions of moral order between humanity and nature.6 Furthermore, not only was the transportation revolution emblematic of an ominous new breed of progress, but it was a wholly popular movement as well; it eventually gave all people the right to travel, regardless of gender and class, thereby disrupting traditional designations of autonomy and agency among social groups. As the advancing railway systematically accessed and claimed new territory, it not only threatened nature as it was conceived by the Victorians, but questioned and destabilized many naturalized categories. Travel, therefore, in the modern sense, as an activity that signaled volition but was no longer solely predicated on male privilege, occasioned a crisis of masculinity. It became a locus where naturalized conditions of gender and class were shown to be inherently precarious as they were increasingly challenged by evolving and rival configurations. This chapter explores the conflict between an idealized past and an indeterminate future within the context of the transportation revolution and reads travel as a site where emerging and receding ideologies of gender and class compete in two Dickens novels: The Pickwick Papers (1836-37) and Dombey and Son (1846-48). Written in the 1830s and 1840s, these works span the decades during which the Victorians were most radically sensing and adapting to the impact of the railway and take travel and transportation as their organizing motifs. What we see in these novels is that traveling as a traditional trope of masculine agency mobilizes the myth of a dependable and fixed version of masculinity at a time when-due to industrialism, new class mobility, and changing family structures-ideals of Victorian masculinity were being contested on multiple social and psychological fronts. The crisis of early Victorian masculinity involves a complex of discursive practices vying for dominance, a rivalry that is negotiated in part in Dickens as the tension between an assured vision of traveling, which implies the self-possessed agency of the individual, and what, after the advent of the railway, becomes the progressive but more ambivalent domain of modern transportation, which denotes
an enervating lack of individual control. By exploiting and enhancing cultural valuations of both pre-industrial and modern travel, Dickens allows for the free play of these competing discourses of masculinity, so that symbolic adversaries, such as the horse and the train, work to unsettle and reassign traditional designations of gender and class. In the case of Mr. Pickwick and friends, their glorified journey by horse-drawn coach mobilizes the fantasy of absolute masculine agency in a tractable and knowable natural environment. Yet the narrative simultaneously disputes the legitimacy of this aim by presenting agents who are not only ambiguously classed, but who are impotent in the face of seemingly natural forces, such as horses and women, that Dickens renders as disturbingly Other. Then in Dombey and Son, Dickens articulates the corruptions of capitalist power as a gendered extreme, in which the railway, as a figure of aggressive male agency, finds an analogy in the tyrannical Mr. Dombey and communicates uneasiness over the contrived dispositions of masculinity in the market and in the domestic sphere. However, by locating masculinity’s destructive nemesis within the domestic realm, Dickens certainly critiques the verity of traditional gender ideology more so than he vindicates it in the final vision of Dombey’s domestic accord. Through representations of travel in both novels, Dickens identifies masculinity in the early-Victorian industrial context as being an anxious, uncertain, and ambivalent form. Furthermore, although he underwrites the Victorians’ belief in the redemptive values of woman and the home for masculinity, he also insidiously accredits the attenuation of masculine agency to the Victorian males’ proximity to the feminine in the domestic sphere. While on the surface these narratives seem to consolidate and promote a reliable version of masculinity, the overall effect is one in which Dickens evinces more profoundly the uncertainties and inconsistencies that compose not only Victorian masculinity, but gender, class, and domestic ideologies themselves. Amid the tumult of the transportation revolution, Dickens advances travel as a given and easy expression of manly affirmation only to disrupt it, thereby exposing the fractures within traditional ideals of manhood as they were increasingly compromised and confused by the effects of industrialism and modernization. Recent studies of masculinity in the nineteenth century show that owing to alterations in Britain’s social and economic organization and their imbricated consequences-such as the rapid rise of industry and technology and the subsequent separation of work and home, changes in the structure of the family and roles of men and women, and the growth of the middle classes and the intensification of the attendant cult of domesticity-definitions of manliness required collateral revision, and the early-Victorian masculine ideal was besieged by contradictions.7 As Britain’s economic system transformed from agrarian to industrial, it was possible for individuals to obtain financial independence without necessarily owning property, and the work ethic of the growing mercantile and entrepreneurial classes stood in contrast to the seemingly irresponsible excesses of
the upper classes. Concomitantly, the heavy influence of evangelicalism promulgated doctrines of Christian manliness, whereby a man’s kingdom was his domicile, rather than, as might be with the gentry, the open field.8 Moreover, according to the increasingly prominent cult of domesticity, men were to provide for their families and set good examples as capable and dependable husbands and fathers, yet in many ways, the equally influential ideals of masculinity within bourgeois capitalism ran counter to these more domestic versions. As John Tosh argues, capitalism emphasized individual gain and competitiveness over the ideologies of selflessness that were required to support and protect the home and superintend the family.9 Furthermore, while domestic ideology serviced the needs of men by affording a haven from the corruption of the marketplace, the home was now sanctioned as a woman’s domain, a realm in which the man’s moral authority was becoming progressively eclipsed.10 For the Victorians, manliness was characterized by what was perceived to be an instinctual male drive-an abundance of natural energy common to all men that could either be harnessed into productive labor or indulged in dissipation.11 In the case of the middle classes, the ideal man was figured as efficiently directing this insatiable male drive, thereby separating himself from the imagined self-indulgent lassitude of the aristocrats and the lustful abandon of the working classes and securing the social prerogatives of the bourgeoisie. This ideology required a balance between competing discourses of normative masculinity that were bounded by two equally destructive extremes: an excess of discipline on one hand, and the utter absence of control on the other, both of which-by way of either physical frigidity or dissolution, psychic sterility or madness-possessed the power to emasculate. As Andrew Dowling notes, “Self-discipline, earnestness, control, and restraint were thus the key terms in Victorian moral discourse; terms that were constantly defined in relation to images of excess, dissipation, chaos, and ungoverned desires.”12 Underneath a surface of composure, competence, and affirmation, therefore, the various discourses of middle-class masculinity were often inconsistent, changeable, and mutually exclusive as they struggled for ascendancy within industrial and domestic contexts. As historians and critics point out, although we can never conceive of masculinity in any historical period as a static, reliable construction, the dramatic social, economic, and cultural changes of the early-nineteenth century fractured and problematized what was fabled to be a uniform and knowable ontology, a process that, by the end of the century, would generate a true crisis of masculinity. Class Conflict and the Cult of the Horse Because travel in the 1830s and 1840s was a concept that was still heavily informed by tradition but was being radically restructured by innovation, we can locate and trace conflicting ideologies of early-Victorian masculinity in the
controversies over modern transportation. In many ways, the transportation revolution was truly insurgent, for it had a democratizing effect on the population and eventually allowed individuals of both sexes and all social classes to travel to the same place simultaneously. Gladstone’s Railway Act, passed in 1844, required all railway companies to provide third-class coaches running each way on each line at least once daily at the rate of one penny per mile, a mode of travel known as the “Parliamentary train.”13 G.E. Mingay notes that consequently, “the numbers of working-class passengers rose dramatically as the railways realized the enormous size of this untapped market and provided more facilities.”14 While the Duke of Wellington initially objected to the railroad simply because it would allow the under classes to “move about,”15 resistance on the behalf of the gentry to the physical freedom of other populations was imbued with apprehension as well regarding the new social mobility of the thriving bourgeoisie. In the face of modernization, the aristocracy felt that their traditional way of life was being attacked on all sides-from the apportioning of their legislative dominion with the Reform Bill of 1832, their diminishing wealth in a expanding industrial and commercial market, to the growing political and economic influence of the moneyed professional and middle classes. The development and establishment of the railway verified yet another assault on their cultural authority, for it extended to an entire population the right to travel. However, the upper classes still superintended the symbolic economy of social prestige, which was localized in part in the pursuit of leisure and sport, and more specifically, in equestrian culture and equitation. Much of the early controversy over the modernization of travel, therefore, coalesced around two weighty and allied cultural icons: the gentleman and the horse. Administering knowledge about horse handling that ranged from the practical draught horse to the aristocratic thoroughbred, British equestrianism maintained traditions integral to England’s national identity, where at home or in the colonies, superior horsemanship and the excellence of English horses corroborated the magnificence of empire.16 Therefore, as steam-powered transport gained ascendancy during the 1830s, it not only imperiled the coaching industry, but as the impassioned debates that occurred throughout the century over the future of equestrianism confirm, challenged the very foundations of masculinity upon which the selfhood of the Victorian gentleman was constructed. Indeed, many horsemen maintained that skill with horses was a congenital trait, for as Philip G. Hamerton states in 1874:
Deeply embedded in the protests of the socially elite landowners and sportsmen who comprised the equestrian fraternity was a growing anxiety over the shifting terrain of masculinity. This concern was based in part upon the increasing economic strength of the middle-class man, whose ignorance of horses signified a patent unsuitability and who threatened not merely to despoil the venerable lineage of attitudes and customs that defined the Victorian gentleman, but to depose outright the social authority of the pedigreed male. Skilled equitation marked a rite of passage for qualified males, and the symbolic values that preserved what were seen as the inborn dignity and physical grandeur of the horse were readily transferred to horsemen to verify the rightfulness of their masculine supremacy. For instance, Hamerton shows the conceptual link in Victorian culture between the horse and occasions of male power by anthropomorphizing the horse, disclosing as well that human beings’ perception of the animal’s innate nobility is ultimately contingent upon its desire to serve man:
Oddly enough, this inviolable alliance between man and horse was not made the less sacred by the exercise of overt domination. Indeed, man’s primacy was managed through an incontrovertible rhetoric of natural law, for as Hamerton ascertains, “If there is anything in the world of nature that seems clear, morally, it is, that man has an authentic right to require reasonable service from the horse.”19 The relationship between a gentleman and his horse operated paradoxically through a claim of reciprocal affinity, as well as a vocabulary of difference, to reify, aggrandize, and rationalize imperiled constructions of masculinity. The conventions of mastery and domination inscribed into the traditions of equestrianism identify it as an activity appropriate to concretizing definitions of manhood. For example, in 1837, W.B. Adams emphasizes the thrill of horseback riding as a specifically masculine pursuit, revealing the eroticized rhetoric of male dominance that lay at the core of equestrian culture:
In Adams’s discussion and throughout most equestrian literature, the bodily and psychological sensations of mastering the horse are shown to be physically gratifying. Moreover, the articulation of such pleasures is erotically coded and functions to delineate male sexual desire, reinforcing what the Victorians acknowledged as the hallowed ground of true gentlemanly entitlement. Yet, given the shifting gender relations within domesticity as well as the demands of a competitive work environment in the early-Victorian period, it was this very species of masculine license that was in question, at least among the growing middle classes. In other words, under the emerging dictates of early-industrial masculinity, men were expected to implement discipline and restraint, rather than to exercise their freedom and celebrate their libidinous nature. While in the last quarter of the century Hamerton laments that “good horsemanship is becoming rarer and rarer,”21 it is apparent as well that for many early witnesses of the advancing railway among the aristocracy, the fear was not merely that its expansion would scar the pastoral beauty of England, but that the substitution of the horse with the train as a primary means of transportation would diminish traditional customs of manliness and desecrate its practices and privileges, questioning the authority and prerogative inscribed into the constructions of the gentleman. As expressed by Thackeray in his comment on the railway age, much of the agitation over modern transportation sought to establish a moral difference between natural forms of travel and unnatural methods-between, for example, the stagecoach and the steam engine, the horse and the train. The debates over the expanding railway reveal that conservative reactions to modernization consistently relied upon nature to emphasize the evils of modern life, where the horse, with its anthropomorphic traits of beauty, nobility, and grace, became a powerful rhetorical figure upon which to displace anxieties about the course of modern progress. Therefore, as efforts toward industrial and technological advancement proceeded triumphantly, the horse emerged as an accessible and evocative signifier of the losses, crimes, and crises of humanity, in which the sin of modernization in the cultural imagination was nature, both human and animal, deformed by the preferences of the amoral, industrial, economic machine. For Dickens and the Victorians then, the horse’s body as a natural commodity overseen by men and appropriated for the demands of travel and transport in a growing industrial and urban landscape provided a convenient site upon which not only to validate man’s relationship to nature, but, more problematically, to interrogate both the fixity and fluidity of naturalized categories, such as those of gender and class. Pickwick’s Progress When Dickens began writing The Pickwick Papers in 1836, the railway was fairly well established in the north and, by the end of the decade, would gradually
supplant the coach as the primary mode of long-distance travel along lines that traversed the country.22 As David Parker remarks about the period, “Railways were in existence, developing, and threatening to replace many of the functions of the horse.”23 Therefore, at a time when anxiety surrounding the advancing railway was undoubtedly amplified and the traditional symbolic values of the horse were already at risk, Dickens antedated the novel to take place in 1827, so that the steam engine, the animal’s iconographic nemesis, is essentially absent from the text. The virtual negation of the railway in The Pickwick Papers serves a crucial function: writing in an environment of exhilarating and alarming technological change that would forever alter the nature of travel as a distinctly upper-class and primarily male advantage, Dickens creates an anachronistic hero whose potentially threatening, “unmanly” characteristics are projected into the safe territories of a bygone time. The heading of chapter 8, for example, alludes only tangentially to the new travel technology, claiming the chapter to be “Strongly Illustrative of the Position, That the Course of True Love is Not a Railway” (PP, 109). Playing off of Shakespeare’s words, “The course of true love never did run smooth,” in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, this heading suggests that the hapless romantic foibles of these adventurers will in no way resemble the forceful, unyielding, and impassive resolve that the advancing railway signified in many early representations. In contrast to the dangerously masculinized manifestations of industry, therefore, Dickens’s narrative is seemingly innocuous: feminized, natural or organic in form, the journeys of the Pickwickians, according to Michael Cotsell, are “ramblingly circular, digressive, at the impulse of curiosity, whim, and chance.”24 Thus confronted by the ominous determination of the iron horse, Dickens’s men falter and abjure, receding into the enervating embrace of male fantasy and blurring critical gender distinctions. The Pickwick Papers follows the course of the inimitable Mr. Pickwick as he travels the countryside by coach and is gradually inducted into the patriarchal order-a passage that begins with his unqualified ineptitude and ends with his eventual ability to perform a relatively competent version of manliness. Mr. Pickwick’s unsuitability as a conventional hero arises primarily from his nebulous class status; just as his travels are heartily endorsed by the all-male Pickwick Club, he has obviously accrued wealth and gained social standing among his peers, yet given his nescient demeanor, exactly how Mr. Pickwick achieved such emblems of authority and rank remains wholly inexplicable. Throughout the novel, Mr. Pickwick’s jolly candor functions to obfuscate the potentially exploitative material conditions that underwrite his mysterious affluence. After all, as introduced by the narrator, Mr. Pickwick literally materializes in the narrative out of nowhere, as if both newly born and fully grown: “Mr. Samuel Pickwick burst like another sun from his slumbers; threw open his chamber window, and looked out upon the world beneath” (PP, 7-8). It is only in the final chapter, when he has already acquired the trappings of patriarchal authority, that Pickwick confesses: “Nearly the whole of my previous life” was “devoted to business and the pursuit of wealth”
(PP, 872). Because equestrianism represents an apex of social stature in Victorian culture, Dickens initially expresses Mr. Pickwick’s class inadequacies in terms of his inability to handle horses: at the outset of his journey, Mr. Pickwick is perplexed by the social phenomenon of equestrianism and the phenomenon is shown to be perplexing. Dickens explores and elucidates the vagaries of horse culture to inform the reader of Mr. Pickwick’s lack of sophistication, and, by extension, to communicate apprehension over the irresolution of masculinity within the context of dramatic social mobility and an expanding industrial economy. The most immediate and apparent example of Mr. Pickwick’s unmanly ignorance occurs when he affably asks of his cab driver, “How old is that horse, my friend?” The cabby, intuiting the ingenuousness of his fare, slyly replies that the horse is 42, and encouraged by Mr. Pickwick’s incredulous inquiries, declares that he drives the horse for “two or three veeks” at a time, “on account of his veakness”:
This exchange is laughable owing to Mr. Pickwick’s guilelessness and the sincerity with which he transcribes these “facts.” However, the imaginative denaturing of the horse in this anecdote, which envisions an animal so dependent upon the system that oppresses him that he collapses without it, elicits a more uncomfortable response regarding both man’s treatment of animals and the conditions of the urban working classes. Bound securely into a man-made contraption, the horse has been buried alive, so to speak, by the mechanisms of society and technology. In words made ironic because they are delivered by a laboring cabby, who in his telling arrogates command by assuming the authoritative plural pronoun “we,” the horse seemingly lives to work and works to live: “he can’t help it.” Furthermore, the ease with which Mr. Pickwick accepts this information regarding “the tenacity of life in horses, under trying circumstances” reveals that amid the “unnatural” pressures of an urbanized environment, humans, even persons as ostensibly kindhearted as Mr. Pickwick, can readily adapt their relations to animals and other humans to best fit their own needs. The primary purpose of this comical interaction with the cabby is to establish Mr. Pickwick’s lack of horse sense. In addition, however, the pained image of the beleaguered cab horse, which will become a common sentimental trope in Victorian literature, not only exposes the flipside of a nation’s prosperity, offering
subtle resistance to the pragmatic operations of utilitarianism, but predicts rough terrain for traditional constructions of virile manhood in an increasingly industrial environment. In a certain sense, Mr. Pickwick’s emasculating naiveté within the urban industrial setting corresponds metonymically with the collapse of the cab horse’s formerly “noble” symbolic economy to function as a sign of foreboding. Here, the blithe degradation of both man and beast suggests that, under the strain of modernization, the very disposition of stalwart masculinity is at risk. In another sense, however, the masculine abomination implied by the hero’s picked “wick” is made all the more portentous by way of his active, self-seeking, and disarming mobility. Thus, while Mr. Pickwick’s ignorance is a comic effect meant largely to denigrate his masculinity, it also allows this anomalous new man to promote himself and prosper. Although as proclaimed by the novel’s narrator, Mr. Pickwick’s rambles are designed to yield “the inestimable benefits which must inevitably result from carrying the speculations of that learned man into a wider field, from extending his travels, and consequently enlarging his sphere of observation; to the advancement of knowledge, and the diffusion of learning” (PP, 2), the commencement of this empirical and academic aim by the mild-mannered, often bumbling Pickwick and his three equally ineffectual companions, Mr. Snodgrass, Mr. Tupman, and Mr. Winkle, generates the novel’s comedic tone. However, while the haphazard follies of the Pickwick Club augment the text’s rollicking pace, lending to the sense of the piece as simply a good-natured romp, these forays work additionally as foils to ideologies of class and gender that upheld the early nineteenth-century social order. The leisure pursuits of this touring male club necessarily imply the class privilege and social distinction that come with being gentlemen. Yet as evidenced by the interaction between the Pickwickians and their surrounding environment, we quickly learn that such tokens of rank are exactly what they have still to obtain. By unleashing the anomalous agency of Mr. Pickwick and friends, Dickens thus highlights the ambiguities, contradictions, and tensions insinuated by the growing moneyed classes in the early Victorian period, where social prerogative was becoming not so much a matter of inherited condition as of material acquisition.25 Mutable Genre, Gender, and Class As Mr. Pickwick’s initial encounter with the cabby implies, the cult of the horse is fundamental to The Pickwick Papers, where hostlers, stage-coaches, and English inns punctuate and promote the plot. However, while on the one hand, horses and travel seem to establish firmly the novel’s genre as belonging to the travel and sporting tradition, on the other hand, these are just the elements that cause it to digress from any single, conventional narrative form. Since Dickens, as an aspiring young author, was just emerging from the lower social ranks, he was utterly unschooled in the complex rituals of equestrian culture and unable to mimic
a form adequately that was so heavily laden with aristocratic assumptions. Therefore, the vicissitudes of Dickens’s own class standing inform the novel’s formal misgivings, and in a certain sense, the generic uncertainty of The Pickwick Papers reflects the conditions and anxieties of class mutability in the industrial context that so troubled the formations of early-Victorian masculinity. In February of 1836, when he had just turned 24, Dickens was commissioned by Chapman and Hall to write “a monthly something” that would be “illustrative of manners and life in the Country”26 to accompany a sequence of sporting plates rendered by Robert Seymour. Although attractive in terms of providing a steady wage, such an assignment would not necessarily secure recognition for a young writer anxious to have his work seriously acknowledged. As Robert L. Patten points out, “While comic plates with letterpress were eminently commercial in the 1830s, credit and cash most often went to the illustrator, not the author, who usually took his direction from plates already designed.”27 Steven Marcus speculates that “as a young journalist and writer of popular sketches of London life,” Dickens did not want to be identified with this type of “hackwork.”28 Moreover, the conventions of what was termed the “cockney sporting genre” posed a problem for Dickens. In the popular tradition of “Nimrod” and R.S. Surtees,29 these satirical prose pieces characteristically featured rogues or inept individuals of the lower and middling classes participating indecorously in outdoor activities normally reserved for the elite, such as riding to hounds and hunting game. As Parker typifies its manner, tone, and function, “In its dealings with horses and horsiness, the Cockney sporting genre, graphic and textual, pandered to the frame of mind allowing us to scoff at those who have not yet mastered skills we just have.”30 This style of writing required that the author be neither roguish nor inept, but rather, familiar with the tenor of country life and certainly skilled at hunting and handling horses. Dickens did not possess such emblems of class distinction, for according to Parker, “We know … that no member of John Dickens’s family would have been able to indulge in country sports …, and that the only form of locomotion regularly practised in the family was walking.”31 Despite these aesthetic and logistical dilemmas, Dickens agreed to the project and soon secured control over the content of The Pickwick Papers when Seymour dramatically committed suicide, having completed only four plates for the first number and three for the second.32 Perhaps in part because Dickens did not initially govern the focus of the piece and was then unexpectedly granted principal command, his resulting work represents a generic anomaly in its competing desires and warring impulses: resembling both a picaresque romance and a travel account, it nonetheless involves the character development and sustained narrative cohesion more suggestive of a sentimental drama. It is primarily comic but includes sincere pathos. And, while it follows a general plot, the work remains immensely and insistently digressive. When it first appeared in monthly form-as “a magazine consisting of one article”—critics were uncertain how to classify the publication, and to the present day, some scholars dispute that it even qualifies as a novel.33
