SotA Anthology 2015-16
Dickens’s great eccentrics
or is there more to them than that?
ENGL389: Dickens is a module that gives students the opportunity to study
the influential Charles Dickens in some detail. Dr Melissa Raines picked out
graduating BA English student Gail Aubrey’s work on Mr F.’s Aunt and Mr Dick.
Through Mr F.’s Aunt and Mr Dick, in Little
Dorrit and David Copperfield respectively,
Charles Dickens uses eccentric behaviour
to mask the efforts of complex, mentally
vulnerable characters who, in their struggle
to mediate their disordered world, are more
centrally involved in the novel’s themes than
their comedic buffoonery suggests. In David
Copperfield, a narrative preoccupied with
the remembrance of and re-telling of a past
by a narrator who struggles to acknowledge
aspects of his unhappy childhood years,
Mr Dick, similarly disturbed by his history,
cannot confront his troubled past and
devises means of keeping trauma at a safe
distance. Whilst this ensures his sanity, his
inability to face his experience necessarily
deprives and diminishes his true self. The
story of Little Dorrit, set against the shadow
of images of both public and private
confinement, explores the extent to which it
is possible for individuals to break free from
such constraints. Whilst Dickens imposes
upon Mr F.’s Aunt the mental limitations of
her condition, he nonetheless endows her
with a voice capable of freely articulating
her own and the novel’s central concerns,
not least love and the tension between the
past and progress.
Whilst neither Mr F.’s Aunt nor Mr Dick
are inflicted with the ‘dreadful visitation’
of ‘raving madness’ that Dickens (1972)
observed in American asylums, each suffers
mental vulnerability. Mr Dick, though he
considers himself a simpleton, might be
more accurately diagnosed with obsessive
‘monomania’,
whilst
the
apparently
irrational outbursts of Mr F.’s Aunt appear
typical of senile dementia (Pedlar, 2006).
Certainly both have unconventional modes
of behaviour which, were it not for the care
of Flora Finching and Betsey Trotwood, are
likely to have rendered them vulnerable
to incarceration in ‘some private-asylum
place’. Writing at a time of increasing public
awareness of the plight of the afflicted,
Dickens, through his friendship with,
amongst others, John Forster, Secretary
to the Lunacy Commission, knew enough
of asylums to voice concern about Mr
Dick being ‘sent [...] away’ and ‘shut up for
life’. Dickens’s focus on his vulnerability
to incarceration necessarily invites social
and moral consideration of the care of the
afflicted. Whilst both Betsey Trotwood and
Flora Finching are, expressly and implicitly,
commended as beneficent carers, there is
a sense in which each of their charges is
confined and diminished by their carer. Mr
F.’s Aunt, ‘triumphantly’ showcased by Flora
as ‘the legacy’, is deprived of the dignity
of her own name and quietly escorted
from company when her pronouncements
become too uncomfortable. Despite
Betsey’s best intentions and repeated
declarations that he is not ‘half so eccentric
as a good many people’, Mr Dick is,
nonetheless, infantilised by a carer who
repeatedly relishes her unique status:
‘Nobody knows what that man’s mind is,
except myself’; that no one gains a better
understanding of him during the course of
the narrative signals his enduring isolation.
Whilst she proclaims Mr Dick’s wisdom
and rejoices in his successful mediation of
Annie and Dr Strong, it is telling that only the
intervention of David and Traddles enables
Mr Dick to finally find a distraction from
‘Memorial’ writing. Through his observation
of carers and others, not least those who
‘ill-used’ Mr Dick and the young who tease
Mr F.’s Aunt as she sits on the steps of the
Marshalsea, Dickens reminds the reader