Dickens and Frith: Victorian Social Realism in Prose and Print

Realism, not Reality

One of the great problems with British nineteenth-century realism has been the

tendency to interpret it as an essentially mimetic movement – a movement which

simply recorded and reflected social reality in a timid and tangential way, rather than

offering an ideological statement concerning the contemporary situation. British

social realist painters, from Richard Redgrave through to the Graphic artists of the

1860s, Herkomer, Holl, and Fildes, have seemed anecdotal and even sentimental in

their representation of urban poverty in comparison with the socialist perspectives of

French artists such as Courbet and art critics such as Theophile Thore. To a lesser

extent, the same problem has bedevilled the nineteenth-century social realist novel:

the industrial novel of the 1840s and 1850s which examined the terrain and

inhabitants of the new manufacturing cities of the north – including Dickens’ own

Hard Times and Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton – have seemed rather pallid in

comparison with, for instance, Emile Zola’s Germinal (1885). As a result, it is

perhaps only recently that the way in which Victorian novelists structured, mediated,

and even subverted their own realist narratives has become a real focus of scholarly

attention.

Dickens, of course, has always sat rather uncomfortably in the realist category. He is

hardly a Henry Mayhew, whose London Labour and the London Poor (1851)

painstakingly researched and catalogued working-class social types, ranging from

costermongers and river finders to sellers of cough drops and live birds, in detailed,

observational prose. As many critics have recognised, the creator of characters such

as Quilp, Wackford Squeers, Miss Havisham, and the Boffins clearly drew on cultural

modes and traditions such as the grotesque, the picturesque, the fantastical, the fairy

tale, and the Gothic. However, genre painters such as William Powell Frith and other

members of the mid-century Clique, such as Augustus Egg and Alfred Elmore have

been open to much less critical analysis of this character. There has been a tendency

to accept at face value Firth’s own comments in his Autobiography and

Reminiscences (1887-8) which have presented his work as a fairly straightforward

process of recording, based on the use of ‘real-life’ models, often family and friends

and on careful research into backgrounds, scenery and accessories. Commentary on

Frith’s paintings – such as Christopher Wood’s lively 2006 biography – have tended

to focus on Frith’s research work for his paintings and his obsession with the use of

authentic details, leading unintentionally to a downplaying of the degree of inventive

construction in his representation of Victorian life and the urban scene. It might seem

facile to say that Frith’s paintings – like any other images – only mediate social reality

through cultural modes and iconographical codes, despite being apparently less

obviously ‘unrealistic’ than elements of Dicken’s novels. Mark Bill’s recent article

on Frith and Hogarth ( M. Bills, ‘’The line which separates character from caricature’:

Frith and the influence of Hogarth’ in M. Bills and V. Knight, eds., William Powell

Frith: Painting the Victorian Age, 2006) does a valuable service in establishing

parallels, between not only Frith and Hogarth, but also Frith and a caricaturist whom

he greatly admired, John Leech. In the biography which Frith wrote of Leech’s life,

he was careful to differentiate Leech’s work and his own from on the early

nineteenth-century caricature tradition of Rowlandson and George Cruikshank, as

Bills shows us. But we should not be deceived into thinking that Frith’s work is

therefore a mimetic reflection of social reality. It is as constructed as any caricature,

and as crafted as any Dickens novel.

Viewing and Reading: Social Construction

The constructedness – if I can use such a word – of Frith’s realist painting is apparent,

perhaps, in the focus on the act of seeing and being seen in some of his best known

canvases. Victorian culture, of course, was an intensely visual one, as the prevalence

of new visual and representational techniques and technologies suggests – ranging

from lithography and wood-engraving, to the diorama and the panaroma, the

spectroscope, magic lanterns, photography, and the planetarium; indeed, Frith himself

refers to a new visual toy when he commented on the genesis of his one of his great

crowd scenes, Derby Day (1858). He remarked that [quote] ‘the more I considered

the kaleidoscopic aspect of the crowd on Epsom Downs, the more firm became my

resolve to reproduce it’ [unquote] (Frith, 1: 272). But their enthusiasm to observe and

record and represent what they saw does not mean that Victorians were unaware of

the problematics of vision – or the related experience of being seen. After all, a

kaleidoscopic can turned to form a range of different patterns from the same

materials. It cannot be purely coincidence that Frith chose to record several social

gatherings in which seeing and being seen – and thus constructed and being

constructed - is a significant element.

In Ramsgate Sands, for instance, there are no less than four people carrying and/or

using telescopes, obviously to look out to sea. However, this is not an unpopulated

sea – we, the viewers of the painting, are situated in it, looking at the crowd on the

beach. Thus we, the viewers, are implicated in the painting. This is a technique

which Frith used more than once: the frankly twee pictures of servant girls of which

Sherry, Sir? (1853) is the best known example and At my window, Boulogne (1872)

make the artist or viewer part of the painting, the figure to which the appealing young

women address themselves. Frith clearly does not intend to make us uncomfortable

through these paintings – we as viewers are constructed as the social superiors and

often the gender opposite of these charming young women. But when this device was

utilised by his contemporary, Ford Madox Brown, in Take Your Son, Sir! (1851-6) – a

painting in which, it seems likely, a fallen woman holds out her baby to the viewer –

we are implicated in the painting as her seducer, a whiskered gentleman reflected in

the mirror behind.

Reading, too, is an activity highlighted in Frith’s canvases: just consider the number

of seaside visitors in Ramsgate Sands (1854), who are occupied in reading either

newspapers (mainly men) or novels (mainly women). We are encouraged not only to

be aware of ourselves as viewers viewing, but also to be engaged as readers reading

and interpreting Frith’s paintings. Frith saw himself as the heir to the eighteenth-

century narrative painter, Hogarth, and intended his audience to tell themselves a

story – or indeed many stories – to read his paintings, to construct their own

narratives. Frith liked a good story, as anyone who has read his autobiography can

testify. And his audience did, indeed, read his paintings. Jacob Bell, a friend and

patron, recorded visiting the Royal Academy to see Derby Day (which he had bought)

in 1858, and found:

… people three or four deep before the picture. Those in front had their faces

within three or four inches of the canvas. The nature of the picture requires a

close inspection to read, mark, learn and inwardly digest it; and from what I

have seen, I think it not unlikely that some of the readers will leave their mark

upon it, unless means be taken to keep them at a respectful distance (Frith, 1:

287-88).

Bell, with his Baconian allusion, was right: people were leaving their mark on it,

but not necessarily visibly. They were participating in the process of story-telling

begun by Frith himself. Frith employed a range of telling details in the traditional

Hogarthian fashion to construct a narrative; he also drew on more recent

Victorian fads for phrenology and physiognomy, as Mary Cowling and Caroline

Arscott point in William Powell Frith: Painting the Victorian Age, trying to

present characters whose faces and behaviour suggested their role in various tales

(M. Cowling, ‘Frith and his followers: painters and illustrators of London life’; C.

Arscott, ‘William Powell Frith’s The Railway Station: classification and the

crowd’ in M. Bills and V. Knight, eds’, op. cit.). In his autobiography, Frith

recorded proudly that he had ‘acquired – or think I have – a knowledge of the

character and disposition that certain features and expressions betray’, and he

records instances – including that of the model for The Crossing Sweeper, when

his analysis of criminal character proved successful (Frith 1: 296-98).

However, Frith remains aware of the problematics of reading characters and

constructing narratives from faces and appearances. As Caroline Arscott suggests

in her essay on The Railway Station, there was an inherent tension in using

generic categories to read individual faces and fortunes. An early historical

painting, The Old Woman Accused of Witchcraft (1848) had hinted at the

possibility of reading a situation in multiple ways: is the girl bewitched by the old

woman, complete with black cat? Or is her apparent illness the result of a secret

love for the handsome young forester? The justice of the peace is confronted with

a situation requiring him to interpret the evidence and read the story, just as the

viewer is. Similarly, Firth’s Diploma painting, The Sleeping Model (1853)

reminds his audience of the intractable and often irreductible character of the

individual subject: he spotted an orange-girl in the street who was ‘a rare type of

rustic beauty’ and decided to paint her. As a subject, however, she proved

‘obdurate’, first refusing to consent to be a model without the permission of her

priest and then failing to laugh and smile as he wished. Frith clearly wanted a

Nell Gwyn type; what he got a real person, a sober and modest young woman

who refused to conform to the stereotype and fell asleep while he was painting

her (Frith, 1. 248-49). In the painting, Firth ironically places a lay figure behind

the model: while the former is a generic substitute for the flesh-and-blood model

and lies there supinely to be manipulated as the artist wishes, the latter is an

individual who resists easy reading and representation by the artist, whose

apparent passivity is actually an active gesture of deconstruction.

This exposure of these almost postmodern techniques in Frith’s paintings can be

paralleled in Dickens’s text. Like Frith, he uses physical appearance, surroundings,

and clothing to construct and connote social identity and character – to such an extent,

indeed, that the clothes and environments and even dead bodies seem to take on a life

of their own, as John Carey notes in his famous analysis of Dickens, The Violent

Effigy (1973). Like many Victorian realists, he employs the voice of the omniscient

author, but he subverts as he asserts the realist narrative. Perhaps this is at its most

apparent in a novel such as Bleak House, where he alternates blatantly and almost

ironically between the first person narrative of Esther Summerson and a third person

narrative, inviting the reader to compare the two voices and consider the verbal

transvestite act which he is performing. Hillis Miller has argued convincingly in his

introduction to the novel that it is ‘a document about the interpretation of documents

… it raises questions about its own status as a text’, confessing that it is ‘fiction rather

than mimesis’ (J. Hillis Miller, introduction to 1971 Penguin Classics edition of Bleak

House).

Similarly in Edwin Drood, his last and unfinished novel, and frankly an astonishingly

accomplished narrative, we are made very conscious of the narrator marshalling us

through the tale, and of the instability of the reality constructed by the narrative.

Indeed, it opens with the villain of the piece, the opium addict John Jasper, trying to

read the scene before him as he wakes:

An ancient English Cathedral Tower? How can the ancient English Cathedral

tower be here! The well-known massive gray square tower of its old

Cathedral? How can that be here! There is no spike of rusty iron in the air,

between the eye and it, from any point of the real prospect. What is the spike

that intervenes, and who has set it up? Maybe it is set up by the Sultan’s

orders for the impaling of a horde of Turkish robbers, one by one. It is so, for

cymbals clash, and the Sultan goes by to his palace in long procession. Ten

thousands scimitars flash in the sunlight, and thrice ten thousands dancing-

girls strew flowers. Then follow white elephants caparisoned in countless

gorgeous colours, and infinite in number and attendants. Still the Cathedral

Tower rises in the background, and still no writhing figure is on the grim

spike. Stay! Is the spike so low a thing as the rusty spike on the top of an old

bedstead that has tumbled all awry? Some vague period of drowsy laughter

must be devoted to the consideration of this possibility … (The Mystery of

Edwin Drood, ch. 1).

Unable to decipher the scene before him, as he awakes in an East End opium den,

rather than his own bed in the provincial town of Cloisterham, where he is the

cathedral organist, Jasper instead reads what he sees through an oriental and exotic

tale, just as his creator – equally consciously – starts to construct a detective murder

mystery, inviting his readers to read the clues.

Just as Frith’s visual techniques for constructing reality and engaging his viewers

actively in the creative act of reading drew on contemporary visual technologies,

Dickens’s constructed - and indeed deconstructed - realities are at times startlingly

modern. Indeed, some are precursors of cinematic techniques – take, for instance, the

link in Bleak House when Dickens moves the narrative from the shop of the lower-

middle-class stationer, Snagsby, to the ‘house of state’ belonging to Mr Tulkinghorn,

lawyer for the aristocracy, following the aerial pathway of a bird:

The day is closing in and the gas is lighted, but is not yet fully effective, for it

is not quite dark. Mr Snagsby standing at his shop-door looking up a the

clouds, sees a crow, who is out late, skim westward over the leaden slice of

sky belonging to Cook’s court. The crow flies straight across Chancery Lane

and Lincoln’s Inn Garden, into Lincoln’s Inn Field. Here, in a large house

…. (Bleak House, Part 3, Ch. 10)

The very artifice of this linking device reminds us that Bleak House is a fiction – and

just that - in which characters , as Dickens confesses, ‘from opposite sides of great

gulfs, have, nevertheless, been very curiously brought together!’ (BH, Part 5, ch 16).

Dickens self-consciously subverts these continuity devices even as he employs them,

inviting us to contemplate the artificiality of the text: in Martin Chuzzlewit, he links

one chapter to another by commenting that the loud knocking at Mr Pecksniff’s door

in a Wiltshire village ‘bore no resemblance whatsoever to the noise of an American

railway train at full speed’ on which the hero, young Martin Chuzzlewit and his

companion, Mark Tapley, are travelling (Martin Chuzzlewit, ch. 21). This

simultaneously invites the reader to transform one noise into another as a segweg

between the two plotlines, while pointing out that there is no ‘real’ continuity between

these two chapters other than that created by the author.

Representation of Change: Constructing the Historical Context

Despite their reputations as author and artist of modern life, both Dickens and Frith

came to their best-known works through an historical path, and as such had a strong

interest in considering and imagining how the contemporary social scene grew out of

and contrasted with the British past. Their very story-telling techniques, indeed, drew

on eighteenth-century precedents: it is well known that Frith modelled some of his

most successful work on the narrative canvases of Hogarth, while Dicken’s early

novels often drew on the picaresque tradition of Smollett and Fielding, bringing

together a diverse range of social characters and situations through the travels and

adventures of a young man.

In the case of Frith, this interest in imagining and constructing a form of social history

is demonstrated through such as an early work as An English Merry-Making a

Hundred Years Ago (1847). Many Victorians, surrounded by the signs of industrial

change, looked back to the eighteenth-century rural past as an age of tranquillity,

social harmony, and political order, and Frith (it seems) was no exception. In this

extensive canvas, Frith constructs a nostalgic vision of social order. The church tower

and a steady oak tree – possibly the symbol of a Burkean organic political order –

dominate the cottages of the rural community. Social order is clearly rooted in

appropriate relations between the genders – symbolised in the dancing seen in the

background – and the family unit, represented by the group to the right of the picture.

Coming of Age in the Olden Time (1849), another big crowd scene, has a very similar

message. Representing a scene of Merrie Olde English social unity, it is the sort of

image which Peter Mandler has shown had great appeal in the 1840s, a troubled

decade of class conflict. It establishes both social order and appropriate interclass

interaction: indeed, it was begun in the year of European revolution, in the summer of

1848. (Firth 1.185). The young heir, accompanied by what appear to be his parents

and grandmother, stands on a staircase, elevated above the rest of the company, and

separated from them by the symbols of knighthood and status – the helmet, the scroll

proclaiming his coming of age, and the stone lions bearing shields. Below, a group of

tenants – arranged in family groups of mother and child, grandfather, parents and

grandchildren, and two sisters - look up admiringly; they include, Frith tells us, ‘an

old woman, who may have been the young lord’s nurse, [who] with clasped hands

invokes a blessing on him’ (Frith 1. 186). Retainers too are apparent, the falconer’s

boy with the dogs and the falcon, and the man with the badge of livery on his arm.

Beyond them – away from this epicentre of order – can be found other tenants,

celebrating in suitably riotous and lower class fashion, drinking and eating a roasted

oxen. There is a hint of social anarchy here, a suggestion that Frith’s visual

construction of past social order is under threat, but it is only a suggestion: authority is

still looming over them, in the form of the portcullis and the coat of arms above the

gate.

While Frith’s historical crowd scenes tend to stress social order and hierarchy –

perhaps in contrast with the current age - Dickens’ ones focus much more on the signs

of change and upheaval, which he figures as the precursors of the socially mobile and

diverse society of the Victorians. Dickens’ contemporary social vision had an

historical perspective, but one in which the overturning of social order was the

prevalent theme. Barnaby Rudge (1841), his first historical novel, described the

Gordon Riots of 1780, while A Tale of Two Cities (1859) focused on the French

Revolution. In both novels, Dickens accepted the necessity and desirability of social

change, and validates the rebellion of the son against the father – the French ancien

regime is shown as corrupt and vicious, while Barnaby Rudge is littered with bad

fathers: John Willett, who does not accept that his son Joe is now grown up; Barnaby

Rudge, senior, a murderer and highwayman, and the aristocratic villain Sir John

Chester, who rejects his virtuous son Edward’s match with Emma Haredale and is

secretly the father of the sinister and violent ostler, Hugh. Nevertheless, Dickens was

no revolutionary: he clearly feared the consequences of comprehensive

democratization, representing the French revolutionary crowd as randomly cruel and

suggesting that Revolution could lead to the breaching of appropriate gender

boundaries through the figure of the sinister and blood-thirsty Mme Desfarges. The

fear of total loss of social identity is key to the very middle-class vision of Dickens’s

historical novels: the substitution of Sydney Carton for Charles Darnley suggests how

– in such contexts of social upheaval – identity can be lost, and it is equally

significant that the locksmith Gabriel Varden, the industrious labour aristocrat of

Barnaby Rudge, plays such an important role in trying to contain the riots, by refusing

to pick the locks of Newgate prison. For Barnaby Rudge ends with the restoration of

social order, but a middle-class one instead of a traditional aristocratic one – the

Maypole Inn is rebuilt and run by the petit-bourgeois couple, Joe Willetts and his wife

Dolly. Dolly is, of course, Dolly Varden, the Dickensian heroine depicted several

times by Frith. In the book accompanying this exhibition, David Trotter reads her

coquettish behaviour in the paintings as a sign of ‘social vanguardism’ rather than

sexual forwardness, and suggests that Frith ‘understood, and painted, the profound

affinity Dickens felt with social aspiration at its most unapologetic’ (D. Trotter,

‘Dickens and Frith’, in M. Bills and V. Knight, ed., op. cit.). Both Dickens and Frith

at bottom sympathised with – as well as fearing – social mobility and diversity. And

this informs their perception and representation of their contemporary social situation.

Viewing Society, Validating Diversity: Interaction and Marginality

It is a commonplace of Victorian realism – both textual and visual – that it constructs

and represents a broad social range, cataloguing classes through the detail such as

clothes and physical appearance, manners and speech, lifestyles and locations. This is

certainly something which both Dickens and Frith are credited with doing, but in the

light of the central argument of this paper, a more interesting point of comparison

between them is their perception of the instability and fragility of the social system –

of the mobility, complexity, diversity and flexibility of Victorian society – of the

failure of class categorisation, as it were. They realise that the social system is

unstable, they also realise that their own construction of it is similarly fragile.

One of the strengths of both Dickens’ and Frith’s social anthropologies is their ability

to both recognise and create interaction and interconnection, as well as to catalogue

the accepted and promoted social distinctions between classes. Some of these

interactions between classes end in disaster – take Steerforth’s seduction of Little

Emily in David Copperfield (1850) - but others are more hopeful. In Our Mutual

Friend (1864-65) for instance, Dickens presents one of the few successful interclass

marriages in Victorian fiction – between the working class Lizzie Hexham and the

aristocratic Eugene Wrayburn. Lizzie also attracts a second suitor outside her own

class, the aspiring lower middle-class schoolmaster Bradley Headstone. In Dombey

and Son (1848) similarly, the wealthy but idiotic Mr Toots, a gentleman by birth,

marries Florence Dombey’s maid, Susan Nipper. Some links are metaphoric rather

than literal: in Dombey and Son, Dickens uses the matching pairs of the Hon Mrs

Skewton and her daughter Edith Granger, and Good Mrs Brown and her daughter

Alice Marwood to illustrate how both mothers market their daughters for personal

profit in two different social classes. Dickens is not convinced that different social

classes are so different, or that the social categories are so categorical.

Frith, too, suggests the unexpected interconnections and parallels between classes. In

Derby Day (1858), a lower middle class clerk has been the dupe of the thimble

riggers, and a young farmer is about to follow him. Meanwhile, on the right of the

painting, a carriage of aristocratic young women attended by men of their own rank

and a second coach with a family group including a widow, are flanked by a coachful

of young men accompanied by decidedly less respectable women and a carriage

containing a young roué and his disaffected mistress. Many commentators have

stressed the distinctions which Frith makes between these parties which demarcate the

elite and the disreputable, but I would like to draw attention to the details which link

them: for instance, the similar appearance and pose of the widow’s elder son, sporting

binoculars, and the roué, the frieze of parasols which syncopates across the canvas,

the red, white and yellow shades of fabric which link the surly kept woman and the

high society ladies. The gaze also plays a key role in establishing covert links –

despite the fact that the race taking place is nominally the spectacle on view, it is clear

that seeing and being seen is the real focus of the event. The thimble-riggers eye up

their dupe, while the young farmer considers his chances; the mistress refuses to look

at the gypsy woman, but the roué contemplates the gypsy child; a crowd of

ragamuffins watch the acrobats, while the boy acrobat turns from his father’s gaze and

looks with longing at the lobster and pie laid out for the aristocratic party.

Both Dickens and Frith, too, have a fascination with - and a sympathy for - those on

the margins of society, who do not meet the normative standards of class, gender,

race. Dickens’s more fantastical, unusual and grotesque characters – such as Miss

Flite in Bleak House or Captain Cuttle in Dombey and Son – often evoke affection,

although evidently others – such as Quilp in The Old Curiosity Shop (1840-41) and

Uriah Heep in David Copperfield are essentially repellent. Perhaps most evidently of

all, Dickens represents travelling entertainers – threatres and circuses – positively,

seeing them as a source of live-enhancing fantasy and imagination, despite the

mutability and patent sensationalism of their social identities. In Hard Times (1854),

the sympathetic Sissy Jupe – who acts as the heart of the heartless Gradgrind family –

hails from the circus, a company of ‘remarkable gentleness and childishness’, loving

and honest despite the artificiality of their stage roles and offering relief from the

sober industrial world of fact and work. As the circus manager, Mr Sleary says ‘

People must be amuthed … they can’t alwath be a working , nor yet they can’t

alwayth be a learning’ (Hard Times, ch 6). Similarly in Nicholas Nickleby (1838-39),

the Crummles and their acting company are at once very artificial and flimsy in terms

of their social identities – they are, after all, play-actors - but also genuinely

compassionate and sympathetic to Nicholas and Smike. Mr Crummles is a man who

‘could never lose the opportunity for professional display’ (ch. 31), but the infant

phenomenon, Ninetta Crummles, really represents the artificiality of the company: she

is in fact aged 15 but is said to be only 10. Everyone in the company is constructed,

behaves, and is read through existing genres and narratives. The circus and the

theatre stand for Dickens for imagination and fantasy, the chance to role-play (he was

a keen amateur actor, of course): the margins of society in Dicken’s novels, however,

also remind us that even those whose social identity seems more certain and grounded

are also actors in the social drama, characters conjured up by the author and readers.

Frith’s paintings may seem to offer less exaggerated portraits of those of the margins

of society. But the more you contemplate his images, the more substantial the role of

the marginal members of society comes to seem, the more the tangential and

fantastical seems to challenge the central social milieu of the painting, destabilising

the apparent classifications of social identity. Of Ramsgate Sands (1854), for

example, one fellow artist remarked that it as ‘’like Greenwich fair without the fun’’

(Frith, 1. 246), a criticism which rightly draws attention to the range of marginal and

unusual social types depicted. They include, for instance, a man and a boy blocking

the way of a respectable old couple in an attempt to sell donkey rides, and a

brigandish Italian – dressed in the steeple-hat and with the red kerchief described by

Dickens himself in Pictures from Italy (1846) - who appears to be trying to sell white

mice to a woman in white. Interestingly, there is also a band of blackface minstrels

dancing and singing beneath that symbol of imperial identity, the union jack: as

blackface minstrels could be either white or black under their paint, and they often

performed in drag too, they represent social identities which are both changeable and

unclassifiable in terms of both race and gender. In addition, a salesman of tombolas is

ignored very obviously by a widow accompanied by a group of little girls: the toy

seems curiously reminiscent of the figure of the widow, suggesting perhaps the

wobbliness of her social status. In the background an empty Punch and Judy box

stands, suggesting that the characters on the beach have substituted for the drama of

the booth, and an entertainer coaxes a hare into playing on a tambourine. In his

autobiography, Frith recalled that this entertainer’s act involved a diverse range of

animals whose ‘natural instincts had been so fairly extinguished as to allow of an

appearance of armed neutrality, if not of friendship, to exist among them’ (Frith 1.

249-50). The same degree of conformity to acquired social convention and prickly

toleration of other species appears among the diverse and often bizarre occupants of

Ramsgate Sands. They are, indeed, performing animals in a menagerie.

Equally, Derby Day is stuffed with the marginal and even the criminal elements of

society, many with fragile and assumed social identities clearly fracturing before the

viewer’s eyes. The boy acrobat at the centre forgets his role in the face of his real

hunger; a drummer forestalls a pickpicket pretending to view the act; but most of all,

the left side of the painting is largely occupied by the card-sharpers and thimble-

riggers. The thimble-rigging party were based on a group of fraudsters who nearly

fleeced Frith himself, and include ‘a clerical-looking personage’ who was in fact a

confederate (Frith 1. 271) and what Christopher Woods suggests is a working man

posing as a country squire, also part of the gang (William Powell Frith: A Painter and

his World, 2006, 60). So for every character whose social identity is apparently clear,

there is another of a more ambiguous kind.

These common aspects of Dickens’s and Frith’s social realism – the emphasis on the

act of constructing and reading representations of social life, and the accompanying

exposure of the fragility, artificiality and instability of social identities and categories,

symptomatic of an age of violent change, can be pursued through three case-studies of

common themes in their works. These case-studies show that both Dickens and Frith

were sophisticated in their readings of both the social structures and institutions of

their society – were they really the sure and stable pillars of social order which they

seem? - and their own representations of these structures, which often seem to

deconstruct themselves before our very eyes.

Engineering Change: The Railway in Dickens and Frith

In constructing their representations of modernity, both Dickens and Frith saw the

railway as an agent of social interaction and change. Both, too, were ambiguous

about it; for Dickens, the train was the contemporary equivalent of the French

Revolution, something which he both applauded and feared. Frith is less alarmed by

the speed and destructiveness of industrial and urban change, but he too stresses the

complexity and mobility of contemporary society created by it – and the instability of

the social identities within that new society.

Dickens had early shown his fearful fascination with the railway in Martin Chuzzlewit

(1843-44), when the eponymous hero encounters a democratic crowd of Americans

during his transatlantic adventures. The train on which he travels represented for the

author a new oppressive social power – property – ‘for steel and iron are of infinitely

greater account, in this commonwealth, than flesh and blood’. The railway represents

the curious ambiguity of an apparently classless and liberty-loving people who favour

still favour social division and slavery based on property-ownership. Martin and his

companion Mark Tapley are unable to have a private conversation on the train

without a clearly lower class and unpolished American butting in without invitation.

Subsequently, they are lectured by American passengers -who describe themselves in

the language of the railtrack as ‘intelligent and locomotive citizens’ - on the customs

of their own Queen. While the exposure of the English visitors to all classes of men

illustrates American democratic manners, the train itself is also socially and sexually

segregated: ‘There were three great caravans or cars attached. The ladies’ car, the

gentlemen’s car, and the car for negroes: the latter painted black as an appropriate

compliment to its company’ (Martin Chuzzlewit, ch. 21). Class classification and

deconstruction are in tension. The engine of change and the carriages of class

distinction are indeed coupled, to adopt a railway metaphor.

However, it is Dombey and Son which can be seen as Dicken’s real railway novel. In

this novel, the metaphor of the sea, constantly overheard by the dying Paul Dombey

and representing eternity, is in tension with the image of the railway, standing for the

changes, the diversity and the complexity of new modern life created by

industrialisation and urbanisation. The train’s role in transforming society is

memorably symbolised in the description of Stagg’s Gardens:

The first shock of a great earthquake had, just at that period, rent the whole

neighbourhood to its centre. Traces of its course were visible on every side.

Houses were knocked down; streets broken through and stopped; deep pits

and trenches dug in the ground; enormous heaps of earth and clay thrown up

…. Here , a chaos of carts, overthrown and jumbled together … ; there,

confused treasures of iron soaked and rusted in something that had accidently

become a pond. Everywhere were bridges that led nowhere; throroughfares

which were wholly impassable; Babel towers of chimneys …; temporary

wooden houses and their enclosures …; carcases of ragged tenements, and

fragments of unfinished walls and arches, and piles of scraffolding, and

wildernesses of bricks … Hot springs and fiery eruptions, the usual

attendants upon earthquakes, lent their contributions of confusion to the scene

… In short, the yet unfinished and unopened Railroad was in progress; and,

from the very core of this dire disorder, trailed smoothly away, upon its

mighty course of civilisation and improvement (Dombey and Son, ch. 6).

Dickens is clearly ambivalent in this passage, and there is an ironic note in his

description of the railway as a vehicle of ‘civilisation and improvement’. However,

when the novel next returns to Stagg’s Gardens, all is changed apparently for the

better and bears the imprint of the railroad:

Where old rotten summer-houses once had stood, palaces now reared their

heads, and granite columns of great girth opened a vista to the railway world

beyond. The miserable waste ground … was swallowed up and gone; and in

its frowsy stead were tiers of warehouses, crammed with rich goods and

costly merchandise. The old by-streets now swarmed with passengers and

vehicles of all kind … Bridges that had led to nothing, led to villas, gardens,

churches, healthy public walks. The carcasses of houses, and the beginnings

of new thoroughfares, had started off upon the line at steam’s own speed, and

shot away into the country in a monster train ….There were railway patterns

in its drapers’ shops, and railway journals in the windows of its newsmen.

There were railway hotels, office-houses, lodging-houses, boarding-houses;

railway plans, maps, views and wrappers … railway hackney-coaches and

cabstands … railway streets and buildings … There was even railway time

observed in clocks, as if the sun itself had given in. To and from the heart of

this great change, all day and night, throbbing currents rushed and returned

incessantly like its life’s blood. Crowds of people and mountains of goods …

produced a fermentation in the place that was always in action (Dombey and

Son, ch. 15).

Social interactions are forwarded by the railway through its ability to bring together

‘crowds of people’: it is at the railway station that Mr Dombey, the upper middle class

businessman, again encounters the boilerman Mr Toddles, the husband of Polly

Toddles, Paul’s wetnurse. This encounter undermines all his strenuous attempts to

maintain class divisions and distinctions in his necessary relationship with the

Toddles (Polly had been forbidden to see her family whilst nursing Paul and had been

discharged for taking the baby and his sister Florence on a visit to the family home).

Dombey, who in Dickens’s significant phrase ‘habitually looked over the vulgar herd,

not at them’, is disconcerted by this social interaction with his inferior, and offended

when he realises that this ‘coarse churl’ is wearing a crape ribbon in his cap, in

mourning for Dombey’s own son. Ironically, while Dombey is so keen to preserve

class distinctions in the case of his inferiors, his own social aspirations are forwarded

by the railway – it takes him, with his friend Major Bagstock, to Leamington Spa,

where he encounters the Mrs Skewton, cousin of Lord Feenix, and makes a match

with her daughter Edith Granger. Major Bagstock, the match-maker who effects the

introduction between the middle-class Dombey and these aristocratic ladies, is

himself compared to ‘another engine’, as he follows Dombey, ‘blowing and panting’.

But there is always a sinister side to this social interaction and mobility, as the

frightening description of Stagg’s Garden in a state of ‘dire disorder’ suggests. As the

train carries Dombey towards his second marriage, he reflects on the death of his son:

The very speed at which the train was whirled along mocked the swift course

of the young life which had been borne away so steadily and so inexorably to

its foredoomed end. The power that forced itself upon its iron way- its own –

defiant of all paths and roads, piercing through the heart of every obstacle,

and dragging living creatures of all classes, ages, and degrees behind it, was a

type of the triumphant monster, Death (Dombey and Son, ch. 20).

The railway in Dombey and Son is an agent of social transformation and change, even

upward social mobility and of democracy, but this can be the democracy of Death, the

great social leveller. The train emerges later in the novel as an engine (literally) of

violent social levelling – in chapter 55, the ruined Carker, discarded by Edith and

pursued by Dombey, attempts a flight by adopting a variety of means of transport,

coach, boat, and finally train. ‘The whole hurried vision of his journey’ flashes before

him as he arrives at a country station, and he finds himself unable to work out which

day it is. The waiter in the hotel sympathises, describing rail travel as ‘very

confusing, Sir … gentlemen frequently say so’. Ultimately the train offers the

denouement to the plot: Carker watches several trains pass in the night, viewing them

as giants and fiery devils, before he himself is mown by one in an episode which

parallels the equally symbolic deaths of the corrupt financier Lopez in Trollope’s The

Prime Minister (1875) and the fallen woman, Anna Karenina (1873-77) in Tolstoy’s

novel of that name. The social climber or experimentalist is, ironically, the victim of

the symbol of change.

Frith, too, saw the railway as both a symbol of the speed and social character of

modernity, and a key agent in social interaction and change and democratic levelling.

Like Dickens, although to a lesser extent, he registers an ambiguous response,

showing anxiety as well as enthusiasm for social change and mobility. He is, after all,

the man who accepted a commission to paint The Marriage of the Prince of Wales

(1863) – a massive assertion of traditional social and political order – while declaring

himself a rampant Republican. In The Railway Station (1862), he uses the railway

platform as a stage on which to assemble a range of social classes, ages, and genders.

In the centre, we find an upper middle class family – Frith’s own, in fact – engaged in

seeing off the sons of the family to school. The mother and father figures perform

their appropriate gender roles effectively, Frith dominating the group as a dignified

paterfamilias and encouraging his elder son to restrain his emotions and maintain a

stiff upper class lip, while Isabelle Frith kisses a younger son, with her daughter

looking on sympathetically and looking after the youngest child. Nearby, an

aristocratic party say their farewells to a newly married couple: the bride embraces

her sisters, while the groom gives instructions to a servant about the luggage. Social

contrasts and distinctions are established with other groups – the lower middle class

family who are hurrying to catch the train and colliding with the luggage trolley offer

a contrast to the Frith family group, the wife’s bright red cloak contrasting with the

more refined and varied tones of Mrs Frith’s outfit. The bridal party, predominantly

dressed in white, contrast with the sober black colours of the group to the right: a

white-collar criminal arrested as he tries to board the train.

But the groups are not just in contrast with each other, they are in parallel too. Frith

stresses interconnection and interaction as well as distinction and difference: on the

far left, a huntsman prepares his dogs to travel in a separate carriage, and a middle-

class lady discovers that the same fate awaits her lapdog. The bridal party and the

group surrounding the criminal are also linked – by the beige coat of the criminal and

the peach dress of the bride, not to mention the compositional repetition of a figure of

three (the two sisters and the bride and the two detectives and the criminal). Fallen

flowers signify the bride’s passage into married life, while a fallen case symbolises

the criminal’s failure to escape with the proceeds of his crime. In the background,

Frith’s friend and associate Flatow engages – like Dombey, but less reluctantly – in a

conversation with an engine driver. The interconnectness of things and the

unexpected parallels between diverse social groups and individuals is suggested in the

repetition of girders and gas lights and the interlacing ironwork of the railway station

itself.

Family Facades: For Better, for Worse

Dickens and Frith, similarly, represent the Victorian family unit ambiguously, both

constructing and deconstructing it simultaneously. In both the canvases which we

will examine here, Frith seems to have represented both appropriate social order

within the Victorian family, and the instability and tensions within it.

Happy Returns of the Day (1856) is a picture rooted in Frith’s own family life and all

the more disturbing for it. As Jane Sellars points out in the book accompanying this

exhibition, ‘in creating this image Frith was publicly reinforcing his commitment to

family life, when in reality this was not the case’ (J. Sellars, ‘Frith’s women: William

Powell Frith and the female model’ in M. Bills and V. Knight, eds., op. cit.). This

was the very year in which his mistress, Mary Alford, gave birth to their first child.

At first glance, though, the picture constructs an image of happy Victorian family life:

the birthday girl sits surrounding by a flowery garland and her siblings, with

appropriately gendered spaces – to the right sit the boys, father, and grandfather. The

grandfather, engaged in the appropriately male activity of perusing the public sphere

through the newspaper (remember which sex reads newspapers and which sex reads

novels in Ramsgate Sands) is presented with a glass by a female grandchild. To the

left, the mother, grandmother, female friends/sisters focus on the birthday child,

attended by a maid loaded with presents. The drinking of alcohol is notably muted at

this end of the table. How deliberately gendered these spaces is apparent from

viewing the sketch for the painting, where the figure of the grandmother

(appropriately being offered a sweetmeat rather than alcohol) occupies the space

allocated to the grandfather in the final painting, so that the sketch as Sellars points

out ‘is dominated by the women rather than the men’. The patterned carpet, paintings

with rich gild frames, and shiny new furniture indicate the prosperous middle-class

family.

Obviously our knowledge of the reality of Frith’s private life makes his decision to

paint a picture of a family in which he, his wife Isabelle, and several of their children

were models for the figures a decidedly ambiguous one. However, even without this

knowledge the picture seems disturbing and in tension with the Victorian ideal of

family life. The birthday girl seems overwhelmed and anxious; while the

paterfamilias looks away from the family unit towards the grandfather, who seems

similarly abstracted from the scene. For the connoisseur of Frith’s work, the

newspaper is not always an unproblematic vehicle of information: one thinks of the

copy of Bell’s Life which appears at the feet of the gambler in the third canvas of The

Road to Ruin and the newspaper in which the clergyman’s wife reads the news of

financial ruin in The Race for Wealth. In both cases, the appearance of a newspaper

in a domestic context is a symbol of impending family collapse. The prominence of

apples on the table, too, is not very promising: Frith’s friend and a fellow member of

the Clique, Augustus Egg, was to exhibit two years later a canvas entitled Past and

Present in which an apple signified the sexual infidelity which destroyed a marriage.

Another family image reinforces this sense of instability and deception at the heart of

the solid Victorian family structure. For Better, - For Worse (1881) was painted at

the time of Frith’s second marriage to his long-term mistress. The church in the

background is based on Christ Church, Lancaster Gate, in the Paddington area in

which Frith himself lived. The spatial and chronological proximity of the theme of

the painting to Frith’s own life in itself injects a tension into the painting – his

marriage in the same year represented at once an acceptance and a subversion of the

Victorian idealisation of marriage. But the painting itself is ambivalent in its

celebration of the wedding. The church and the solid middle-class home of the bride

dominates the background, and the figures of her parents, siblings, and bridesmaids

suggest a proper and satisfactory union, the inclusion of other elements subverts and

deconstruct it. The working class couple, with two children, watch with envious and

drawn faces, suggesting the possibility of financial crisis which awaits less affluent

families. The shoes cast after the couple do not seem to have touched either them or

the carriage (a tradition which is supposed to bring good luck) and most of them are

red, an ominous colour, as red shoes in fairy tales may suggest to the viewer. The

bridegroom raises his hat to the party on the balcony, but seems to exchange a

significant look with the bridesmaid, perhaps suggesting a latent or secret attraction.

The picturesque organ grinder with his monkey is also a worrying detail – monkeys in

art frequently represent the subversion of traditional social norms. Meanwhile, the

dog, a potential symbol of fidelity, seems disinterested in the proceedings.

Dickens, too, shared Frith’s sense of the instability and fragility of the Victorian

domestic ideal, and represents marriages and family life ambiguously. It is certainly

true that he is one of the foremost propagandists of the age for bourgeois domesticity

– and a particular promoter of the role of the Angel in the House. The presentation of

Esther Summerson in Bleak House as the model of middle-class domestic

womanhood, the perfect house-keeper and future wife, is only rivalled in its capacity

to provoke nausea by the portrayal of Bella Wilfer in Our Mutual Friend, a rebellious

and self-seeking young woman who is transformed, not entirely convincingly, into a

Victorian Stepford Wife. Happy marriages form part of the conclusion of the more

complex later novels but also the more picaresque earlier ones: David Copperfield

marries Agnes Wickfield, Nicholas Nickleby marries Madeline Bray, and Martin

Chuzzlewit the younger marries his sweetheart Mary Graham. Affectionate siblings

in Dickens’s novels include the charitable Cheeryble twins and Nicholas and Kate

Nickleby in Nicholas Nickleby, Tom and Ruth Pinch in Martin Chuzzlewit, and

Florence and Paul Dombey in Dombey and Son. The transforming and purifying

power of the family hearth is a constant feature of Dicken’s novels: in A Christmas

Carol (1843) consider the role of the Fezziwig family party and the Cratchit

Christmas dinner in reforming Scrooge, whose change of heart is signified by his

attendance at his nephew’s Christmas gathering.

However, despite these pictures of the happy families, Dickens’s most convincing and

memorable portrayals of domestic life are of dysfunctional families. Unlike Frith,

whose childhood had been a relatively uncomplicated and apparently happy one,

Dickens’ experience of family financial instability, his sense of his father’s and

mother’s failure to perform their protective and nurturing roles fully, and his deeply

ingrained memories of working in a blacking factory and visiting his father in a

debtor’s prison, shaped his representation of the Victorian family. For every happy

family in the style of Bob Cratchit’s, there is the terrible childhood of David

Copperfield – whose stepfather proves to be a disciplinary tyrant – Arthur Clemitt,

whose mother is a Puritanic killjoy, and most famously of all, the orphaned Oliver

Twist. David, like Dickens, is a child worker; as too is Little Dorrit, whose father,

like Dickens’s, is an imprisoned debtor. The Micawbers in David Copperfield are an

affectionate and amusing family, but their financial instability endangers their family

life, and while Pip in Great Expectations (1851) has a model father figure in Joe

Gammidge, his own sister is a domestic nag. Indeed, dire warnings are issued by

Dickens to women who forget their domestic role: in Bleak House, there are savage

and funny portraits of Mrs Jellyby, who devotes too much time to her charity work

and neglects her family, and Mrs Pardiggle, who forces her family to share in her

philanthrophic endeavours. Siblings, too, come under attack: Dickens had bailed out

some of his own in his time, and was not disposed to idealise this relationship. Little

Dorrit’s siblings are selfish and self-centred, while in Martin Chuzzlewit, Charity

Pecksniff shows no sign of her name in her treatment of her sister Mercy. Indeed, the

Pecksniff family pretence of being an affectionate unit is one of the great hypocritical

performances of Mr Pecksniff’s life.

Marriages in Dickens’s novels are often far from the Victorian ideal: David

Copperfield’s marriage to an apparent Angel in the House – Dora – proves a big

mistake as she is unable to manage the household or its finances, and he is only saved

from it by her death in childbirth and the fortunate substitution by Dickens of a more

successful Angel, Agnes Wickham. It is difficult to avoid linking the depiction of

David’s first marriage to Dickens’s own marriage to Kate Hogarth, whom - he felt -

failed to keep the Dickens household in the perfect order which he required to

continue his work as an author. Like Frith, Dickens too had a mistress, the actress

Ellen Ternan, offering an ironical perspective on his celebration of the domestic ideal.

But Dickens was hardest of all on the power of mercenary motives to undermine

marriages. In Bleak House, the marriage of Ada and Richard is destroyed by his

obsession with winning the case of Jarndyce v. Jarndyce, and Scrooge’s chance of

marriage in A Christmas Carol had long ago been sacrificed to his greedy

materialism. Marriages of convenience and ambition are as frequent as those of

affection: Mr Dombey marries Edith for motives of pride – valuing her social rank

and impressive appearance – while in Our Mutual Friend, an ageing bachelor and

spinster make a match, each believing erroneously that the other is in possession of a

fortune. Mr Mantalini in Nicholas Nickleby exploits his much older wife, who

eventually comes to her senses and breaks with him, and Aunt Betsey Trotwood in

David Copperfield is also the victim of a marriage to a man who bleeds her of money.

The most effective pictures in Dicken’s novels are thus of unhappy families, in

particular those in which the father has failed to perform his role: the Dombeys, where

Mr Dombey has to be abandoned by his wife and come to financial ruin before he

realises the value of the love of his daughter Florence; the Gradgrinds in Hard Times,

where Mr Gradgrind destroys his children through his merciless system of education;

and the Dorrits, where the self-centred father of the family feeds on his daughter’s

loyalty and life.

Financial Frauds: Keeping Bad Companies

While both Frith and Dickens offer a destabilising critique of the façade of the

Victorian family, institutions do not escape their observation either. If the family is a

façade, so too are other social structures which were seen to organise Victorian life.

Both artist and author show how these institutions are constructed, but also the

essential insubstantiality of them. In fact, the real institutions turn out to be as flimsy

as their fictional representations in words and paint.

One of the most interesting aspects of Dicken’s critiques of major institutions – the

Chancery in Bleak House or commercial companies in Martin Chuzzlewit and Little

Dorrit – is how remarkably little he really tells us about their operations and how

deceptive is the closure offered by the texts. When the judgement in Jarndyce v.

Jarndyce is given, it proves to mean nothing – or at least, nothing but anguish for

those who have looked for justice - as there is no longer any inheritance to be

inherited. Similarly, the collapse of commercial companies causes widespread

distress in Dickens’s novels, but deaths of the principal fraudsters does not feel like a

just punishment, as they do not seem to have any real existence other than the social

and commercial one which has already vanished with the crash.

This is apparent in the early novel, Martin Chuzzlewit. Tigg Montague, the creator of

the fraudulent Anglo-Bengalee Disinterested Loan and Life Assurance Company, has

conjured the appearance of an established and prosperous business through ‘newly

plastered, newly painted, newly papered, newly countered’ offices, and the

employment of an impressive porter who is ‘grave with the imaginary cares of office’,

despite the whole company being ‘a light-hearted little fiction’ (Martin Chuzzlewit,

ch. 27). Tigg Montague himself is an optical illusion, a mere reflection in a mirror:

this is apparent when we first encounter him as a parasite, as he is then known

Montague Tigg rather than Tigg Montague, and he solicits loans, rather than offers

them. Montague does explain his business practices to his dupe Jonas Chuzzlewit,

but otherwise the workings of the firm are concealed, as they are mainly carried out

by Nadgett who is ‘born to be a secret’ and keeps all his activities to himself.

Concealment attends too Tigg Montague’s downfall – his murder by Jonas is both

described and yet not described. A ‘shadowy veil’ falls on him as he walks towards

his death, exhibiting an inability to ‘read the lesson’ which the beautiful country

evening around him conveys. Entering ‘a close, thick, shadowy wood’, he is ‘Never

more beheld by mortal eye or heard by mortal ear’ (Martin Chuzzlewit, ch. 47). He

vanishes from the text forthwith.

By the time Dickens wrote Little Dorrit, he had perfected the art of representing and

yet not representing the financial fraudster and his practices. However, this is not the

only example of such an opaque representation in the book: the Circumlocation Office

offers a public version of the private finance company at work. The Circumlocation

Office, as ‘everyone knows without being told’, says Dickens, has perfected the

practice of ‘How not to do it’, despite having ‘something to do with everything’. It is,

in fact, a fraud upon the public, being ‘a politico-diplomatic hocus pocus of

machinery, for the assistance of the nobs in keeping off the snobs’ (Little Dorrit, Part

1, ch 10). And like any fraudulent financial company, it brings financial ruin,

consigning Mr Dorrit to the Marshalsea as a debtor and refusing to give a patent to

Daniel Doyce the inventor for a valuable improvement. The Office appears busy,

producing documents and memoranda, but conceals everything – or rather, nothing as

nothing is the real content of its business.

This character of insubstantiality is apparent, too, in the business of Mr Merdle, the

financier, who is a man of ‘prodigious enterprise’ although it is never clear what his

enterprises are, just that they result in ruin for a multitude of people. While his wife

Mrs Merdle is a ‘capital bosom to hang jewels on’ and displays her husband’s

ostentatious wealth, Mr Merdle himself is a sort of visual and verbal vacuum: his

speeches are very short or paraphrased, and he becomes ‘of no account in the stream

of people’ at the social events held in his house (Part 1, ch. 22). Dickens tells us that

‘The master-mind of the age … had as little as possible to say for itself and great

difficulty in saying it’ (Part 2, ch. 23). When he fails to attend a dinner party at his

own house, his absence is hardly an absence at all, since he has no real presence – he

‘left a Banquo’s chair at the table; but, if he had been there, he would have merely

made the difference of a Banquo in it, and was consequently no loss’ . He suffers

from a ‘deep-seated recondite’ disease, which spreads an infection to those about him

– the craze for investment in his schemes is seen by Dickens as an epidemic, but it

turns out that his illness is in fact a crime – ‘Simply, Forgery and Robbery’ (Part II,

ch. 25), and it is no surprise that the physician who confirms his death by suicide (an

event which we do not see) first announces the news to a lawyer. Mr Merdle’s

schemes and prosperity are all social appearance, and indeed there is no real man or

money behind them. This impression is confirmed by Dickens’s representation of the

High Society figures around him by their professions – Physician, the Bar, the Bishop

– rather than their names. This leads us to question the authenticity and stability of

these social identities, and simultaneously to perceive that they are socially

constructed fictions.

Frith, too, shared Dickens’s unease about financial investment crazes and this is

reflected in his two Hogarthian series which modernised Marriage a la Mode and The

Rake’s Progress by offering a moral narrative through a series of images. The first,

The Road to Ruin of 1878, depicted a young gentleman’s disastrous career as a

gambler, which ends with his suicide. Although the message seems to be a piece of

conventional moral didacticism, Mark Bills has pointed out that, in a letter of 1889,

Frith explained that the images were inspired by an ‘established hypocrisy’: a body of

laws which allowed rich young men to gamble at Ascot and Epsom, but punished

lower-class lads who ‘bet for shillings’ in London’s streets and parks. This suggests

that a series which seems to be a straightforward sermon on the evils of gambling,

actually had an element of social subversion and attacked the legal system rather than

the delinquent individual. As such it can be placed alongside Bleak House, in which

Dickens places the blame for Richard Carstone’s decline – not so much on his

unfortunate gamble on the outcome of the Jarndyce case – as on the Chancery court

which conducts it. Frith reinforces conventional Victorian morality on gambling, but

also offers an ironic perspective on the double standards adopted by Victorian society

towards this vice.

Frith’s second series of this kind was The Race for Wealth (1882), which addressed

the Dickensian topic of the fraudulent financier and the ‘common passion for

speculation’, but again offered a wider social critique. Like Dickens in Little Dorrit,

Frith sees such bubble companies in terms of their widest ramifications, hence his

description of the central figure as a spider with a murderous web (Firth, 2.141) The

first scene shows the financier in his offices, which are spacious and well-furnished

like those of Montague Tigg: creating the appearance of entrepreneurial and social

prosperity is imperative for this pretender, as the second scene, which shows him

receiving guests in his sumptuous town house, also demonstrates. This ‘handsome

drawing room’ was in fact Frith’s own, but he found that his attempts to find an actual

setting for the spider’s offices was a vain one, as his ‘stockbroking friends’ objected

strongly to offering their offices as a model – this perhaps demonstates how important

the fitting and fixtures of such offices were in implying probity and profit. But both

the social and business webs woven by the spider are flimsy ones: the piece of ore

handled by the clergyman in the first scene does not, Frith tells us in his

autobiography, hail from the mines depicted on the maps, despite their appearance of

offering scientific proof. Meanwhile, the art work in the second image - which

should connote money and culture - suggests the possibility that the spider is a fraud.

Frith points us to the girl who ‘shows by her smothered laughter that she appreciates

the vulgar ignorance of the connoisseur, whose art terms are ludicrously misapplied’.

(Firth, 2. 142).

The third scene shows the clergyman’s family in a more modest but prosperous home

receiving the news of the financial collapse of the company in which he has invested.

The busts of classical sages on top of the cupboard in the background offer an ironical

apercu on the lack of prudence exhibited by the ruined vicar: Frith does not exempt

the victim entirely from his own greedy participation in the fraudulent speculation.

The fourth scene, meanwhile, shows the trial of the spider, at which the clergyman is

giving evidence. However, the apparently straightforward moral of the tale is

subverted, as Mark Bills has pointed out. He quotes Frith’s own comment in his

autobiography that:

… in the comic paper called Fun, the admirable artist of that journal, Mr

Sullivan, laid hold of my puppets, and made them play a different game. He

represented the clergyman as ruined, it is is true; but he declined to punish the

swindler, who rolls along a street in his carriage accompanied by his vulgar

wife without the least display of sympathy for the poor parson, who is

reduced to sweeping a crossing over which the carriage has just passed. I do

not dispute the probability of my friend Sullivan’s version, for I know

instances of it … (Frith 2.144).

This is an interesting passage, and not only because it demonstrates how

contemporary audiences responded to, participated in, and adapted Firth’s narratives,

joining in the act of viewing and reading. On first glance, Frith appears to present the

legal process positively in this fourth image from the series – unlike Dicken’s

representation of the Chancery courts in Bleak House. Accordingly, while financial

acquaintances were unwilling to assist him in depicting company offices, judicial and

legal friends happily modelled for him (Firth, 2.145). However, it seems that the

reservations he suggests in his comments on Sullivan’s rewriting of his narrative are

hinted at even within the canvas. One of the spider’s creditors contemplates him in

the dock through opera-glasses, suggesting that – in its own fashion – the court is a

theatrical spectacle in its own right. The last figure seen viewing an exhibit through

glasses is the female visitor receiving the fallacious art criticism of the financier in the

second scene of the series. There is surely a hint here of the artificiality of the

supposed court of justice.

The last scene of the series shows the spider as an inmate of the Millbank prison,

taking exercise with other prisoners in the prison yard, in a scene reminiscent of

Dore’s famous plate in London: A Pilgrimage (1872). This final scene shows how

Frith creates in the spider a painterly parallel to Dickens’ Mr Merdle, as another

verbal and visual vacuum. The spider’s hollow centre is revealed progressively

through the five canvases. In the first scene, he is the central figure: the viewer’s eye

is drawn to him by a pathway of carpet from the foreground and he is framed by the

ornate doorway. The social and commercial identity of the spider, established by his

clothes, his prosperous environment and his engagement in conversations, is apparent

in the first two paintings, although in the second scene – like Mr Merdle – he is

displaced from the centre of social activity somewhat by his wife. In the third scene,

he is displaced in favour of his victims, and is represented only through the letter and

newspaper which communicate the collapse of his fraudulent company. In the fourth

image, he is now a small silent figure in the very margins of the picture: the

foreground is dominated by a prosecution lawyer taking evidence from the clergyman,

who is the outstanding figure in the background. In the final painting of the series, his

social identity is totally effaced – he wears the regular fustian suit of a prisoner with

the revealing arrow, and marches in a ‘monotonous tramp’ in a circle of other

identically-dressed inmates. Indeed, it is not entirely easy to pick him out. Frith, who

researched the prison thoroughly, recorded in his autobiography that, during the first

nine months of their imprisonment, prisoners were ‘condemned to dead silence’ and

that the prescribed distance at which they walked was designed to prevent the

‘possibility of communication’. (Frith, 2.146). The spider, like Mr Merdle, has been

revealed as a visual and verbal vaccum – almost impossible to distinguish from his

fellows and unable to speak, his social identity has been deconstructed into

nothingness. Despite the apparent moral ending of the tale, the viewer is left with an

uneasy sense that the punishment is not a real punishment, as the criminal has

somehow ceased to exist.

Social Realism in the City: Diversity in Dickens and W. P. Frith

Representing Diversity in the City, Annual Colloquium of the SFEVE, University of

Cergy-Pontoise

Dr Rosemary Mitchell, Director of the Leeds Centre for Victorian Studies and

Associate Principal in History, Department of Humanities, Leeds Trinity University

College, Leeds (email: r.mitchell@leedstrinity.ac.uk)

1. Introduction

- Realism, not Reality

- Viewing and Reading: Social Construction

- Representation of Change: The Historical Context

- Viewing Victorian Society: Interaction and Marginality

2. Case Studies

- Engineering Change: The Railway in Dickens and Frith

- Family Facades: For Better, for Worse

- Financial Frauds: Keeping Bad Companies

Viewing and Reading: Social Construction

1. William Powell Frith: The Sleeping Model, 1853

Frith recognises the problems of ‘reading’ and ‘writing’ a narrative: his subject

refuses to be characterised as a modern-day Nell Gwyn …

2. In a London opium-den, John Jasper tries to read the situation and dreams up an

oriental tale under the influence of his addiction:

An ancient English Cathedral Tower? How can the ancient English Cathedral tower be here! The well-known massive gray square tower of its old Cathedral? How can that be here! There is no spike of rusty iron in the air, between the eye and it, from any point of the real prospect. What is the spike that intervenes, and who has set it up? Maybe it is set up by the Sultan’s orders for the impaling of a horde of Turkish robbers, one by one. It is so, for cymbals clash, and the Sultan goes by to his palace in long procession. Ten thousands scimitars flash in the sunlight, and thrice ten thousands dancing-girls strew flowers. Then follow white elephants caparisoned in countless gorgeous colours, and infinite in number and attendants. Still the Cathedral Tower rises in the background, and still no writhing figure is on the grim spike. Stay! Is the spike so low a thing as the rusty spike on the top of an old bedstead that has tumbled all awry? Some vague period of drowsy laughter must be devoted to the consideration of this possibility … (The Mystery of Edwin Drood, ch. 1).

3. Dickens makes a cinematic transition between one plot and another, one part

of London and another, which exposes the artificiality of his realist text:

The day is closing in and the gas is lighted, but is not yet fully effective, for it is not quite dark. Mr Snagsby standing at his shop-door looking up a the clouds, sees a crow, who is out late, skim westward over the leaden slice of sky belonging to Cook’s court. The crow flies straight across Chancery Lane and Lincoln’s Inn Garden, into Lincoln’s Inn Field. Here, in a large house …. (Bleak House, Part 3, Ch. 10)

Representation of Change: The Historical Context

William Powell Frith: Coming of Age in the Olden Time, 1849

Frith attempts to construct a representation of class order and harmony in an idealised

English past. But he is not entirely successful.

Viewing Society: Interaction and Marginality

William Powell Frith: Derby Day, 1858

Frith’s depiction can be seen to suggest interaction and connection between classes,

rather than differences and distinctions. Note also the profusion of ‘marginal’ social

figures – such as acrobats and thimble-riggers – whose disguises suggest the

flimsiness of social identities and of ‘realistic’ social representation.

William Powell Frith: Ramsgate Sands, 1854

Viewing and reading are at a premium in this seaside scene. Note, too, the ‘marginal’

social characters again. This time they include blackface musicians and an Italian

seller of mice and other small mammals.

Engineering Change: The Railway in Dickens and Frith

1. Dickens finds the railway both constructive and destructive of social organisation

and order. At first:

The first shock of a great earthquake had, just at that period, rent the whole neighbourhood to its centre. Traces of its course were visible on every side. Houses were knocked down; streets broken through and stopped; deep pits and trenches dug in the ground; enormous heaps of earth and clay thrown up …. Here , a chaos of carts, overthrown and jumbled together … ; there, confused treasures of iron soaked and rusted in something that had accidently become a pond. Everywhere were bridges that led nowhere; throroughfares which were wholly impassable; Babel towers of chimneys …; temporary wooden houses and their enclosures …; carcases of ragged tenements, and fragments of unfinished walls and arches, and piles of scraffolding, and wildernesses of bricks … Hot springs and fiery eruptions, the usual attendants upon earthquakes, lent their contributions of confusion to the scene … In short, the yet unfinished and unopened Railroad was in progress; and, from the very core of this dire disorder, trailed smoothly away, upon its mighty course of civilisation and improvement (Dombey and Son, ch. 6).

But later:

Where old rotten summer-houses once had stood, palaces now reared their heads, and granite columns of great girth opened a vista to the railway world beyond. The miserable waste ground … was swallowed up and gone; and in its frowsy stead were tiers of warehouses, crammed with rich goods and costly merchandise. The old by-streets now swarmed with passengers and

vehicles of all kind … Bridges that had led to nothing, led to villas, gardens, churches, healthy public walks. The carcasses of houses, and the beginnings of new thoroughfares, had started off upon the line at steam’s own speed, and shot away into the country in a monster train ….There were railway patterns in its drapers’ shops, and railway journals in the windows of its newsmen. There were railway hotels, office-houses, lodging-houses, boarding-houses; railway plans, maps, views and wrappers … railway hackney-coaches and cabstands … railway streets and buildings … There was even railway time observed in clocks, as if the sun itself had given in. To and from the heart of this great change, all day and night, throbbing currents rushed and returned incessantly like its life’s blood. Crowds of people and mountains of goods … produced a fermentation in the place that was always in action (Dombey and Son, ch. 15.).

Family Facades: For Better, For Worse

John Leech’s illustration shows a Christmas family party in the Fezziwig household in A Christmas Carol (1843). Dickens’s representation of families, however, is at its most convincing with dysfunctional families.

Financial Frauds: Keeping Bad Companies

A contemporary cartoonist re-writes the ending of The Race for Wealth, perhaps in a

more ‘realistic’ way.

… in the comic paper called Fun, the admirable artist of that journal, Mr Sullivan, laid hold of my puppets, and made them play a different game. He represented the clergyman as ruined, it is is true; but he declined to punish the swindler, who rolls along a street in his carriage accompanied by his vulgar wife without the least display of sympathy for the poor parson, who is reduced to sweeping a crossing over which the carriage has just passed. I do not dispute the probability of my friend Sullivan’s version, for I know instances of it … (William Powell Frith, My Autobiography and Reminiscences, 1887, 2.144).