Gospel & Universe 🪐 At The Wild & Fog

What the Dickens

Pope’s poetry reflects a Grand Cosmic Order, while Dickens’ sprawling fiction suggests a more existential reality — one in which religious ideals of compassion and love confront a universe that seems largely indifferent, even brutal. Pope presents us with a universe controlled by a Greater Order, and this Order is reflected in his finely-crafted couplets, which balance opposites within a clear and focused point. For instance, in explaining how God creates unity from chaos, Pope mimics the union of opposites in his rhythm and rhyme, as well as in his opposing notions of fighting and softening: “Passions, like elements, though born to fight, / Yet, mix'd and soften'd, in his work unite.” Dickens, on the other hand, writes sprawling and sometimes disturbing prose, the meanings of which are often ambiguous. While Dickens’ points about social justice are crystal clear, and while his characters are recognizably three-dimensional, his larger philosophical points often start from solid or realistic positions yet end up in the air. Instead of making grand claims about Divine Order, he hints that Nature may have some other plan in mind.

Dickens’ uncertainty in Bleak House might be seen as proto-agnostic in that he uses science and critical thinking to question large civilizational systems which are outdated. He argues for a re-think, a new critical evaluation, so that civilization can winnow away the chaff and yet keep the kernels — which are justice, fairness and love. The novel lies in the middle — one might even say in the muddle — between the old truths of Scriptural Revelation and Deism on one side and the revelations of evolutionary science on the other. In some ways Bleak House also anticipates the secular production of meaning characteristic of 20th century existentialism. It refuses to de-tangle the angst and frustration of life by insisting on grand theological ideas, but instead finds consolation in the exercise of critical thought and the implementation of humane values. In this, he anticipates Forster, who brings up the possibility of secular Order and mystical Truth only to suggest that everything just comes back to a muddle.

🦖🦕

While Pope’s style and vision are marked by balanced antithesis, those of Dickens are marked by far-reaching ambiguity. In his Essay, Pope sees the world as “A wild, where weeds and flowers promiscuous shoot,” and yet he also sees an Order behind this wilderness: “in erring reason’s spite, / One truth is clear, whatever is, is right.” In Bleak House, Dickens also depicts the chaos and beauty of the world, yet his depictions are tinged on every side with uncertainty and ambiguity. The closer one looks, the less they appear to be tinged, and the more they appear to be soaked to the core.

In the second paragraph of Bleak House, Dickens suggests that our lives are perhaps products of chance, and that we live in a sort of fog. Among the muddy, smokey streets of central London, he points to “Chance people on the bridges peeping over the parapets into a nether sky of fog, with fog all round them, as if they were up in a balloon and hanging in the misty clouds.” The fog is primarily that of the Inns of Court he satirizes, yet it indicates something else as well. For in the first paragraph of the novel he introduced the monstrous figure of a Megalosaurus. The novel thus anticipates — and perhaps the whole work is knocked off centre by — a geological and paleontological timeline which is at odds with the biblical timeline he otherwise references, and which has been a staple of European thought for over 1500 years.

Through the fog and the smoke and the mud comes Megalosaurus, waddling up Holborn Hill:

LONDON Michaelmas Term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets, as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn-hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snow-flakes—gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers. Foot passengers, jostling one another’s umbrellas, in a general infection of ill-temper, and losing their foot-hold at street-corners, where tens of thousands of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since the day broke (if the day ever broke), adding new deposits to the crust upon crust of mud, sticking at those points tenaciously to the pavement, and accumulating at compound interest.

Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping, and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city. Fog on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights. Fog creeping into the cabooses of collier-brigs; fog lying out on the yards, and hovering in the rigging of great ships; fog drooping on the gunwales of barges and small boats. Fog in the eyes and throats of ancient Greenwich pensioners, wheezing by the firesides of their wards; fog in the stem and bowl of the afternoon pipe of the wrathful skipper, down in his close cabin; fog cruelly pinching the toes and fingers of his shivering little ‘prentice boy on deck. Chance people on the bridges peeping over the parapets into a nether sky of fog, with fog all round them, as if they were up in a balloon, and hanging in the misty clouds.

The timing of the image of Megalosaurus, “waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn-hill,” is telling, and not just because it appears in the first paragraph of the novel. In the early 19th century the timeline of geology and palaeontology was just beginning to become clear, although the greater evolutionary direction was still mysterious. Given the novelty of the idea of a dinosaur (recently discovered, one might say, among geology’s deposits of crust upon crust of mud), it’s not surprising that Dickens would use this strange new beast to catch the reader’s attention in the opening paragraph. While he doesn’t return to this image later in the novel, Dickens makes great use of it nevertheless: it serves to introduce and to symbolize the ancient fossilized institutions he eyes for reformation: Chancery & Law; politics & the class system.

Dickens uses the Megalosaurus to satirize all the outdated, lumbering, fossilized structures of secular civilization, yet the antediluvian figure waddling up Holborn Hill also suggests a secondary and far more disturbing philosophical notion: the Grand Biblical Scheme of Things has been shifting and crumbling, decade by decade. Behind his more obvious attack on the stereotypical stupidities of religious zealotry, Dickens hints that the scientific vision of existence is replacing religion in its widest and most powerful aspects and functions. In this sense, the dinosaur becomes a more ambiguous, yet equally disturbing, version of the black chestnut-tree root that Sartre sees in Nausea. In that 1938 novel, the nature of the black root has no connection to human nature. It may as well be a slithering lizard from outer space, rising from the startled subconscious like the snake of old. In Dickens the alienating repercussions of Megalosaurus are as yet unknown, although the dinosaur does seem to be out of place, absurd, and disquieting in an existential sort of way.

The dinosaur is a shocking, powerful figure, seemingly out of place and time. Yet in terms of intellectual history it’s very much in its proper place: the 1600s broke the lines of thinking that purported to explain how the planets and stars rotate around the earth. The universe, God’s Plan in Space, was once circumscribed, circling amid the Heavens, circling around the all-important Earth. But after Copernicus, Brahe, Kepler, and Galileo, the lines extended outward, with no end in sight. In the late 18th and early 19th centuries geology and palaeontology did much the same thing to the old biblical timeline: in 1788 Hutton showed that the Earth is far, far older than the biblical 4004 BC, and in 1813 Cuvier showed that completely different types of animals existed long, long before the dawn of human civilization. The evolutionary and philological insights of the 1850s-1870s were equally profound, yet in addition they subsumed the older astronomical understanding and the fairly recent geological and paleontological understanding. Later Victorian intellectuals — that is, those who lived after the 1870s — knew that the world wasn’t at the centre of the universe, that it wasn’t created in 4004 BC, that there was a mechanism which propelled life through the millennia, and that its key scripture, the Bible, was not as accurate or original as Christians were led to believe. In 1852 and 1853, the years Dickens wrote Bleak House, the Christian beliefs in Creation and a Holy Scripture were about to be shaken.

🦖🦕

Unlike Pope, the further Dickens expands his vision of time and space, the more uncertain the universe becomes. The image of the Megalosaurus throws this in our face, yet Dickens works this large-frame uncertainty in elsewhere: in the second paragraph of Chapter 2 he introduces his reader to the world of London fashion, yet instead of contextualizing it within the geography of Paris or New York, he sees it in terms of the universe:

It is not a large world. Relatively even to this world of ours, which has its limits too (as your Highness shall find when you have made the tour of it and are come to the brink of the void beyond), it is a very little speck.

There is much good in it; there are many good and true people in it; it has its appointed place. But the evil of it is that it is a world wrapped up in too much jeweller's cotton and fine wool, and cannot hear the rushing of the larger worlds, and cannot see them as they circle round the sun. It is a deadened world, and its growth is sometimes unhealthy for want of air.

What has the brink of the void beyond to do with the fashion of Lady Dedlock and her imminent departure for Paris? Nothing, at least to those wrapped up “in too much jeweller’s cotton and fine wool.” Yet everything, to those who have made the tour of intellectual history, who see that the world is “a very little speck,” and who hear “the rushing worlds […] as they circle round the sun.” In his Essay, Pope tells us, “Know then thyself, presume not God to scan, / The proper study of mankind is Man.” The problem with this advice is that it assumes God has not only set the world in motion, but that He has given it a greater meaning within a Great Chain of Being. Dickens focuses on humanity, as per Pope’s suggestion, yet he also suggests that man occupies an uncertain place in an even greater uncertainty. For want of a true understanding of it, we call this greater uncertainty the universe. In the middle of the 19th century it was starting to become clear that instead of being composed of heavenly circles, a Chain of Being, and angelic divinities (as Christians like Dante had supposed), outer space is just as likely to be controlled by gigantic monsters, lumbering through the eons of space like Megalosaurus through the streets of London.

Or, the universe may be controlled by neither of these. Perhaps the closest we’ll ever come to Eternal Truth is that the universe is controlled by the laws of Nature, which are as inscrutable and as ancient as Time itself.

Que savons-nous?

🦖

Time’s Little Gallery

Yes, star-crossed in pleasure, the stream flows on by / Yes, as we're sated in leisure, we watch it fly, yes / And time waits for no one, and it won't wait for me

Time, he's waiting in the wings / He speaks of senseless things / His script is you and me, boy / Time, he flexes like a whore / Falls wanking to the floor / His trick is you and me, boy

🦖🦕

Next: Love Amid the Fog

Back to Top

Table of Contents - Annotated Contents - Layout - Core Beliefs