'Shades of the prison-house begin to close/ Upon the growing boy': how Dickens's children are denied their youth

(source: getty images)

George Orwell wrote in 1940 that ‘no one’ had ‘written better about childhood’ or ‘shown the same power entering the child’s point of view’ than Charles Dickens. Dickens draws on Romantic, Wordsworthian conceptions of the child as an inchoately moral and edifying authority; the child is entwined with the divine – ‘heaven lies about us in our infancy’ (‘Intimations’ Ode, 1807). Socialisation and ageing are a process of ‘forgetting’, a corrupting, almost unremittingly tragic loss. However, where Wordsworth’s conception of childhood was a nascent philosophy, to Dickens it is a foundation upon which he can launch an inquiry into the process of children growing old before their time. Wordsworth’s bemoaned ‘inevitable yoke’ of age and social pressure is an urgent and material reality for Dickens, in a society where children as young as 3 were working in industry and the dawn of children’s philosophy (such as James Crichton-Browne’s study on ‘over-pressure’) couldn’t match the sufferings of children’s realities.

Dickens demonstrably cared deeply about children’s rights, serving as president of the Great Ormond Street Hospital for Sick Children (est 1852), publishing ‘From the Cradle to the Grave’ (1862) on illness in children, and writing A Child’s History of England (1852), dedicated, affectionately, to ‘my dear children’. His fictional children are unquestioningly benevolent, miraculously so, often, given their unconducive conditions, and forced to shoulder vastly disproportionate responsibilities. When Nell’s grandfather describes himself as the ‘child’ to Nell’s ‘grown person’, he articulates the inversion of roles which troubles Dickens’s novels. When Clennam speaks to Amy Dorrit – ‘’let me put you in a coach’, said Clennam, very nearly adding ‘my poor child’’ – he speaks to Dickens’s confused worlds which struggle to differentiate between adults and children.

But Dickens’s portrayal of childhood becomes increasingly dark and sinister. His earlier works are lighter, less threatening and less pervaded by menace than the later, dense, unremitting gloom of Bleak House (1852-3) and Little Dorrit (1857). Oliver Twist (1838) places cheerful hope in the eponymous protagonist’s power to transcend class boundaries  in ways which become both more challenging and painstaking to later characters Esther Summerson and Amy Dorrit. The orphaned Oliver is introduced via the ostensibly paradoxical impossibility that he might remain nameless: it is doubtful whether ‘the child could survive to bear a name at all’. Oliver is treated with the same negation as the ‘Marchioness’ in The Old Curiosity Shop (1840) – at Oliver’s birth there is ‘nobody by’, just as ‘nobody ever came to see [the Marchioness], nobody spoke of her, nobody cared for her’. Class-less in his blankets (‘even the haughtiest stranger’ couldn’t have ‘assign[ed] him his proper place in society’), once dressed Oliver is instantly sartorially-funneled into the workhouse class: ‘badged and ticketed’, seemingly irrevocably, by his ‘calico robes’.

But, both characters will ultimately override their seemingly preordained plights – upon marriage to Swiveller, the Marchioness will be transformed by capital and education: ‘good-looking, clever and good-humoured’. Although David Miller insists that Oliver’s movement from ‘institution to institution’ renders him merely an ‘empty signifier who merely demonstrates the proliferation of such institutions’, by the novel’s close, Dickens portrays Oliver’s orphanhood as an ultimately freeing state. It allows him to slide along the social spectrum; instead of being defined by institutions, he is presented with multiple options to redefine himself. Orphanhood becomes an increasingly gloomy prospect to Dickens: in Bleak House, Jo is introduced – even defined – by the very prospect of his mortality: ‘Jo lives — that is to say, Jo has not yet died – in a ruinous place’. Dickens claimed that ‘through little Oliver’ he sought to demonstrate ‘the principle of Good surviving through every adverse circumstance’ – and the same can be said for many of his child characters. His response to the 1843 second report of the children’s employment commission – which detailed ‘ferocious violence’, ‘abuse and oppression’ perpetrated towards children – was passionate: ‘I am so perfectly stricken down’. That same year, Ignorance and Want would appear in A Christmas Carol, ‘snarling’, ‘ragged’ and ‘wolfish’ – far from Amy Dorrit-like ‘good angels’, but ‘devils [...] monsters’. Dickens’s children will from hereon find it harder to shake off their unconducive environments and cruel treatment. 

The role-inversions chronic to Dickens’s children and their relationships to adults become serious social indictments. The Artful Dodger, equipped with ‘all the airs and manners of a man’ is the incarnation of a child behaving as an adult, a Wordsworthian ‘actor con[ning] another part’, but the Dodger is the foil to Amy’s subtly troubling status as an adult treated as a child. Harold Skimpole in Bleak House is another version again, an adult who is but ‘a perfect child’ – but far from ‘perfect’. He duplicitously exploits the attributes of a child to garner him immunity from responsibility: he has ‘no idea of time [... or] money’, and consistently eludes retribution, unlike the Dodger, who is sent to prison.

At the opening of Little Dorrit, Amy is 22, but repeatedly infantilised throughout the novel, almost obsessively described in diminutive terms: ‘little’, ‘tiny’, ‘flit[ting]’. Chapter 7 relates her upbringing, but troublingly, she only becomes more ‘timid’ with age, never receiving any transposition into self-assured adulthood. Even her name, ‘child of the Marshalsea’, does not change, to the point of paradox: ‘the child of the Marshalsea began her womanly life’. She is a performative piece in the prison’s familial-inflected constitution, and her name becomes almost comical in its nomenclatural impropriety: ‘the child of the Marshalsea, at twenty-two’. The adjective ‘little’, after all, constitutes half her namesake – and even at the novel’s close, her ‘old’ friend condescendingly watches her ‘write her little name as a bride’. Her nurturing, parental behaviours are held in contradistinction to her slightness and childishness – she gets ‘her sister and brother into day schools by desultory starts’, finds dancing lessons for her sister, and maintains the myth of the family’s civility outside the Marshalsea. Like the Artful Dodger then, Amy is denied her childhood, shuttled into inverted roles and withheld lineal development – hardly a surprise in the Dickensian world where erratic adults behave as children (Skimpole, Quilp, Mr Dorrit). However there is a burlesque levity to the Dodger’s street-wise cheerfulness (and indeed, Oliver Twist was immensely popular on stage, with over 50 productions in Britain and America by 1850) which is at loggerheads with Amy’s constant self-abnegating behaviour and her unacknowledged care for the family. 

Because Dickens’s portrayal of Amy Dorrit vacillates between the naive child and the responsible adult, it is apt that her treatment of her father is aptly dichotomous. In chapter 35 she considers it ‘hard’ that her father ‘should have to pay in life and money both’, and upon his reversal of fortune, she becomes both desperately anxious and hopeful: ‘I shall see him as my poor mother saw him so long ago, oh my dear, my dear!’.  Her cheer at the news is barely cheer, flattened as it is by her incarcerated sense of abiding oppression: the closest she can get to cheerfulness is in an outward-looking, tentative maternal instinct to recreate a fragmented family. Even when free of the Marshalsea, she is unable to enjoy the same unconscious sanguinity of Oliver Twist’s ending, ‘pure, earnest, joyful reality’, which, itself, was self-admittedly unrealistic – ‘as if by magic’. Amy Dorrit receives no such absolute conclusivity, plagued unremittingly by ‘echoes’ of her past’. 

Rod Mengham claims that Amy Dorrit does not spring from any Wordsworthian ‘proximity to nature’, but instead from the ‘paradoxical environment of the urban gaol’ – and indeed Dickens’s children are deeply shaped by their environments. Amy’s inability to enjoy her newfound freedom is the more extreme, starker version even than Esther’s persistent, irremediable self-consciousness and self-deprecation in Bleak House, upon which the novel ends: ‘they can very well do without much beauty in me, even supposing –’. John Kucich insists that Esther is the ‘most complexly, ambiguously self-effacing character in the Dickens canon’, but arguably this description better suits Amy Dorrit. The threatening forces precluding Amy’s comfort and ease, rendering her immobile to the changing social and economic landscape around her, are far from the material threats faced by other Dickensian children – Nell fleeing from the material enemy that is Quilp, and Esther actively seeking Lady Dedlock. Amy is instead shackled by the Marshalsea, the institution to which she feels an irresistible tug. Clennam considers her all the more ‘beautiful’ and ‘bright’ for the residual tarnish of the prison about her (the ‘speck’) – his wonder at her incongruous vestigial goodness is all the more celebrated for its so pervasively unconducive foundation.

Upon death, Nell is a true Wordsworthian child, a ‘creature fresh from the hand of God’; and Jo in Bleak House is the same, dying in prayer: ‘art in heaven – is the light a-comin sir?’. Amy for her part, is Wordsworthian, in that, quite literally, ‘shades of the prison house begin to close /Upon [her]’, but the Marshalsea is the institutional, dampening atmosphere saturating Little Dorrit to which the elemental atmospheres of Bleak House (fog) and Oliver Twist (mud) are less pervasive and less inescapable. Despite Oscar Wilde’s famous jibe (that one must have ‘a heart of stone’ not ‘to laugh’ at Nell’s death), Dickens does not just exploit his child characters for the sake of their mawkish frailty and creation of rheumy-eyed sentimentality, but presents their suffering with reformist aims.

In his Household Words he wrote that it was ‘impossible, thank god! To quench the summer in a child’s heart’; but things changed from between the blithe innocence of Oliver Twist’s excursions and Little Dorrit’s composition (perhaps his daughter Dora’s death in 1851). The ‘summer’ in Amy’s ‘heart’ is overshadowed by the unquenchable infiltrative power of the prison. Dickens toys with the same conceptions of childhood that Ernest Dowson would articulate in his 1889 essay on ‘the Cult of the Child’, examining just how ‘natural’ and ‘wonderful[ly] charming’ children could be treated with such cruelty. Dickensian children are celebrated for their benevolence in adversity, but mourned for their need to ‘con the part’ of the authoritative figures, acting as self-abnegating ‘father of the man’.

Sally Shuttleworth claims that Dickens expedited philosophy on children’s development, that his was the first ‘really developed study of over-pressure’. Certainly, Dickens rearticulates Romantic celebrations of the superior childish imagination, examining the effects of children trammelled into unsuitably, implausibly crucial duties and responsibilities. Psychologist James Sully would later write ‘Genius and Precocity in the Nineteenth Century’ which would explore the death from ‘old age’ in infancy – but Dickens explores this forty years in advance, imagining children whose actions and tragically necessary worldliness bely their numerical age. As Eagleton pointed out, to utilitarians, functionality was incommensurate with morality, so Victorian conceptions of children were confused to the point of redundancy – they could not decide whether children were devils or angels, so decided they should be absent, ‘seen and not heard’ – or, as Lionel Trilling describes Amy Dorrit, abnegated and negated: she is ‘the negation of the social will’.