In the mid-19th Century, the 3-volume novel, which only the rich could afford, gave way to weekly and monthly magazines for the growing middle class in England, a middle class made possible by the industrial revolution.
Charles Dickens owned a couple of magazines in his day, "Household Words" and "All the Year Round." Serialized stories were a regular feature, as they had been in newspapers earlier. The stories were released as books after the series had run.
Dickens, like other Victorian writers, was sensitive to the Victorian taste for sentimentality, sensation, surprises, coincidences, reversals, and melodrama. Thus, many of their stories dealt with mysterious crimes that are at last explained, criminals who are at last punished, and family secrets at last revealed. "Sensation" fiction, like "Gothic" fiction, stirred up emotions with sentimental portraits of virtue, victims, and villains, featuring characters with names like Miss Fairly and Mr. Heartright.
"Oliver Twist" (1837) presents a whole community of criminals, including Fagin the gang leader and Bill Sikes, a pro burglar. Dickens' re-enactment of Sikes' brutal murder of Nancy in his public readings caused a sensation with his energetic realism. But Dickens did not really have a strong interest in police work, pretty much ignoring the Bow Street Runners, a security force formed in the late 18th Century, and the more recently formed "metropolitan police force" called "the bobbies", begun by the passing of Sir Robert Peel's Metro Police Act of 1829, which led to Scotland Yard's investigative department in 1842.
In "Martin Chuzzlewit" (1844), Dickens attempts a detective plot, sort of. Through most of the story, Dickens leads us to believe that Jonas Chuzzlewit murdered his father. He behaves guiltily, is being blackmailed, and has access to poison. We expect -- as good Victorians -- an exposure of the villain and his getting his just desserts. But Dickens pulls a fast one and reveals that the father died of a broken heart when he realized Jonas intended to poison him. Jonas is still guilty -- but he did not kill his father.
In the 1840s, Dickens took a boyish interest in England's policemen and wrote police 'anecdotes' for Household Words. These sketches respected cops and emphasized observation, deductive reasoning, and detection techniques. Dickens, the former Parliamentary journalist and court reporter (discouraged by the miscarriage of justice there), had begun to hang out at police stations for stories (and maybe for his safety as he walked restlessly through London at night).
Dickens came to realize that readers were becoming more interested in police than in convict-heroes like Vidocq. The growing middle class, it seems, had turned its support toward the police, wanting personal protection and the preservation of an ordered and stratified society.
In "Barnaby Rudge", serialized in 1841, he had the plot revolve loosely around a crime. As noted in the previous posting, Poe studied the first two installments and figure out the end, to Dickens' great consternation ("He must be the very devil!" Dickens exclaimed). Poe criticized the novel for not focusing on the murder itself as the main driving force of the plot. But Dickens hadn't yet learned to tightly control his plots to a pre-determined outcome. His stories wandered and followed multiple dramas like soap operas do. And Dickens never wrote a tale solely to solve a crime -- not even "Our Mutual Friend", his last full novel, which begins with the discovery of a dead body in the Thames, or "Drood," with the mysterious disappearance of Edwin. Even with Dickens' sympathetic portrayal of cops in his magazine anecdotes, police are absent from "Drood".
However, in "Bleak House" (1853), Dickens may have created the first police detective hero, Inspector Bucket of the Detective Force, who solves a murder mystery after an innocent suspect has been arrested based on circumstantial evidence. Bucket comes across as efficient and authoritative. He quietly goes about his business until he reveals the solution in the presence of all concerned who have been gathered to hear it. This 'clearing up' chapter sets a precedent for all drawing-room mysteries to follow.
Bucket is almost surely inspired by a real London detective, Charles Frederick Field, who he profiled in a Household Words sketch two years earlier in 1851, "On Duty with Inspector Field". Dickens, already given to long walks in the city by night, goes on a walk-around with Field into some of the most gritty parts of town where the detective confronts tough customers with equal toughness and some humor.
Another item of note in "Bleak House" is the way Bucket's beloved wife fearlessly assists him, who finds a pad of paper on which threatening notes are written and who follows a suspect to a lake and sees the person throw the murder weapon into the water, which Bucket later recovers. So here is a precedent for the husband-wife partnerships evident later in Dash Hammett's "The Thin Man" and Christie's Tommy and Tuppence stories.
So: Bucket is calm, confident, tenacious, and proud to be a policeman. He is a thick-set man of tact and sensitivity dressed in respectable clothes, not unlike PD James' Adam Dalgliesh. Bucket makes a big impression on the Victorians, who pride themselves on their efficiency, organization, neatness, and good taste. It is, after all, an age of Empire and order.
But it is important to say that Bleak House is not a detective story. Once the murder is cleared up, there are many pages devoted to pleasant descriptions of family events. Like in his other books, the most important question concerns the parentage of the heroine.
Finally, Drood.
Dickens had adapted stories of murders and criminal trials for articles in his magazines in the 1850s, and in his second visit to America in 1868 he made a special trip to a murder scene at Harvard where a professor had killed a rival and disposed of the body in a lab furnace. When he returned to England, Dickens began "Drood".
Dickens died in the middle of it. It was to be 12 installments in "All The Year Round" beginning in April 1870. Three parts appeared before Dickens' death in June 1870. Three more were published after his death. So we know that Drood is half-finished, not even close to the end. The cover design has limited value as evidence of Dickens' intentions; he often changed his mind in the course of drafting.
Four attempts to end it appeared before the end of 1870, and a stage play purporting to finish it appeared in 1871. Dickens' friend, Wilkie Collins, also known for his mystery writing, was asked to complete it. He refused.
Many others have tried, or at least offered explanations. The unfinished mystery is still one of literature's great mysteries.
Was Ed murdered? If so, by whom? How? Where's the body? Was he kidnapped? Did he run away? Why? Where? Is the perp really Jasper, as many suppose? Is it actually obvious, and Dickens' intention was not to write a whodunnit but to explore the great mystery of the human heart, namely Jasper's? And who is Dick Datchery, that curious (disguised?) figure who spies on Jasper? And what about that opium lady?
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