Charles Dickens is Funny

The Bleak Humor in Charles Dickens’s Bleak House

According to James R. Kincaid, Dickens said that “humorous invention was the easiest thing in the world for him and that he had constantly to restrain his preposterous sense of the ridiculous.” Kincaid also quotes John Forster as naming humor Dickens’s “leading quality,…his highest faculty” (“Copperfield” 313).  But in a different essay (“Laughter and Oliver Twist”) Kincaid raises the question of how a novel as dark as Oliver Twist can be so funny (63). The same question can certainly be asked in regards to Bleak House: how can “a savage look at England as a wasteland, suffering the moral plague spread by the Court of Chancery….” be so funny (Gold 208)?  And why should it be funny?  In what ways does the humor deepen the work?  In this essay I hope to explore some of the ways that Dickens employs humor to deepen Bleak House and increase its sense of darkness. These ways include: causing us to rethink our assumptions about dominant society and our attitudes toward “outsiders”; causing us to confront the darkness within ourselves; intensifying an ultimately serious or tragic issue; complicating the line between good and evil; and showing the tragedy of an unfeeling environment and the alienation of individuals within it who are trying to use their humor to survive. I want to note that because the critics I’ve cited were usually discussing Dickens novels that I haven’t read, there is a margin for error – I have found what I believe are parallels in the humor of Bleak House to the examples of humor they give in those novels, but it’s possible that I have mistakenly drawn comparisons where comparisons might not be appropriate.  Nevertheless, even if that has happened, I feel that the examples of humor I’ve chosen from Bleak House yield fascinating insights in their own right.

Dickens’s humor has been called subversive by many critics, and for good reason. In “The Sources of Dickens’s Comic Art: From American Notes to Martin Chuzzlewit,” J. Hillis Miller argues that Dickens’s comedy is in part his revenge on the world because of his outsider status as a boy and young man. Miller says, “The comic view is in one way like the perspective of the outcast. Both see the world from the outside, from the point of view of someone who is not part of what he sees, who is ignored or ‘overlooked’ by the world” (467). In his fiction, Dickens turns those who had previously disdained him into “a masquerade of innocuous puppets.  It was a revenge on the world….”.  Miller sees the darkness and terror of Oliver Twist transforming into the essence of the comedy of Dickens’s later novels (468).  Kincaid makes a similar point to Miller, saying that certain passages of particularly strident satire in Oliver Twist deserve special attention, because they reveal a sense of maliciousness that underlies the novel’s humor and that ultimately comprises a kind of “sadistic revenge” (64).  These are dark words for dark humor, but it is not hard to find a similar viciousness in the humor of Bleak House. In fact, we could almost see the omniscient narrator of Bleak House as a kind of lurking avenger for crimes committed by the dominant society against the outsider or underdog.  For example, the narrator’s characterization of Mr. Chadband, the “respected” minister is sarcastically savage: “For Chandband is rather a consuming vessel—the persecutors say a gorging vessel; and can wield such weapons of the flesh as a knife and fork, remarkably well” (234). On the next page Chadband is described as “not unlike a bear who has been taught to walk upright.”  We see this sharp savagery also in the omniscient narrator’s indictment of society for casting out Jo. As he describes Londoners going back to work where they will use their skills of reading and writing, he says that “Jo, and the other lower animals, get on in the unintelligible mess as they can.” Further down the page he compares Jo with a dog: “He and Jo listen to the music, probably with much the same amount of animal satisfaction…”, and further down still,  “But…how far above the human listener is the brute!” (199).  Dickens’s point here, of course, is not to condemn Jo, but to say in vicious terms that Jo has been victimized by a society that has relegated him to a position lower even than that of an animal. 

Nevertheless, Dickens is not purely on a search and destroy mission against the establishment, wielding humor as a weapon. Kincaid suggests that Dickens’s humor also has the important function of causing us to rethink many of our most rigid cultural assumptions, as well as warning us against the darkness in ourselves. Through the skillful use of humor, Dickens helps us to sympathize with the outsider, and thus question the social assumptions of the dominant society. We question our own motives and beliefs about what should and should not be laughed at (“Oliver” 69). One way that Dickens accomplishes this is to cause us to laugh at something, then a few beats later or a few pages later show us that what we laughed at was someone (or something) pitiable that deserved our sympathy.  Our own meanness is exposed so that there is a discomfort to our laughter (“Oliver” 65). Kincaid points out that sometimes a Dickens passage is funny right up until the last word, which then points us toward the tragedy of the situation. Dickens does this in the opening scene of Bleak House with the sentence, “Eighteen of Mr. Tangle’s learned friends, each armed with a little summary of eighteen hundred sheets, bob up like eighteen hammers in a piano-forte, make eighteen bows, and drop into their eighteen places of obscurity” (9). This is funny up until the last word, “obscurity,” which recalls to us that these men have no identity despite their best efforts, and thus are tragic. Something similar occurs further down the page when Mr. Tangle jumps in prematurely to correct the Chancellor, which is funny. But the Chancellor ignores him and Mr. Tangle is “crushed.” His error is funny, but the result that he is “crushed” is not. We are left not with contempt for the characters who are the butts of these jokes, but with a complex sense of uneasiness on their behalf.

According to Kincaid, another important approach Dickens uses is direct juxtaposition of a heartless society and its “easy jokes” with a tragic situation or the pain of an outcast, sometimes pushing this situation to the point of grotesqueness. Kincaid says that in these situations, humor is set directly against a more serious situation so that the circumstances are revealed really to be “unfeeling and monstrous heartlessness and the total effect of the scene is to underline…loneliness…” (“Copperfield” 318). Though I could think of no exact correlation in Bleak House to the example used by Kincaid from David Copperfield, nevertheless one particular scene is similar in the ways that it utilizes humor, and I think that it has the same effect. It is the scene in which Mrs. Snagsby arranges for Mr. Chadband to meet with Jo for his “improvement” (318). The “jollity” in this scene is not displayed by Mr. Chadband or Mrs. Snagsby who in fact are both overly austere; rather, the comedy is in Dickens’s tone as he ridicules their ignorant cruelty through caricature. The humor of these two characters is contrasted with two “victims” or outcasts in this scene (or three if one counts Guster):  Mr. Snagsby, who understands neither the poisonous suspicions of his wife, nor the “Nemo” mystery in which he has gotten himself entangled; and Jo, who “don’t know nothink” about much of anything.  Mr. Snagsby’s agony and Jo’s severe discomfort (and hunger) are juxtaposed with Mr. Chadband’s long, lugubrious, and hilarious sermonizing and Mrs. Snagsby’s outrageous and equally hilarious suspicions (that Jo is Mr. Snagsby’s son, and so on).  The effect of the scene is certainly to cause us to “enter much more fully into the world of the terrified and alienated individual” (Kincaid “Oliver” 66).  Dickens again undermines our assumptions and forces us beyond the complacent laughter behind which we have taken refuge. 

Dickens uses humor in other ways to question our assumptions about character; Kincaid argues that Dickens often subtly expands flat, comic situations or characters beyond the point we would expect, and involves them in serious issues, sometimes even culminating in a tragic event. The result is that laughter veers again toward darkness, and our assumptions about a character or situation are once again challenged (“Copperfield” 316). Citing Henri Bergson, Kincaid says that humor comes from a character’s rigid insistence on repeating some line or action without regard to reality. To be funny, the character must be unconscious about his or her behavior, and our sympathies must not be aroused too keenly, because emotional distance from the character is a necessary condition of laughter (“Copperfield” 317). Kincaid argues that Dickens’s comic characters often start out as outrageous caricatures that are easy to laugh at according to Bergsen’s rules, but later some of them “prove to be not unconscious, so their comedy is after all not so easy” (“Oliver” 69). They expand beyond the rigid boundaries of the “comic” and become progressively more real and self-conscious throughout the novel, often even including an “insistent note of seriousness and darkness” (“Copperfield” 324). 

The Jellyby family is a good example of this in Bleak House. At first we might get the impression that every member of the family, more or less, is meant to be seen as flatly comic. After the extraction of Peepy’s head from between the iron railings, it seems that his further incidents are likely to be mere harmless pratfalls. But shortly afterwards he falls down the stairs, and his “head recorded its passage with a bump on every stair—Richard afterwards said he counted seven, besides one for the landing…” (37). This kind of graphic detail accentuates the seriousness of the fall as well as the pain. And when shortly afterwards, Esther takes it upon herself to comfort him, we know that Peepy’s pain is conscious of itself, and is not something so straightforward as a simple laugh. More significantly, Caddy at first seems like a character who will appear on just a few pages as the butt of a joke or two. When we first see her, Esther says, “I suppose nobody ever was in such a state of ink” (38). Caddy is tattered and frayed and awkward, and we laugh. But just a few pages later, we learn that Caddy is a truly miserable girl who bursts into piteous tears and throws herself on Esther’s mercy (44).  Mr. Jellyby, in his status as “nonentity,” seems almost certain to retain a very flat and comical status. But later in the novel we end up with a situation like, “…poor Mr. Jellyby breaking away from the dining-table, and making rushes at the window, with the intention of throwing himself into the area, whenever he made any new attempt to understand his affairs,” i.e. his financial ruin (298). While this is presented in an exaggerated manner that we might interpret as comic, it is clearly tragic. David Gervais puts it well when he says that Dickens’s comedy “is all the time on the verge of becoming something else” (138). There is nothing funny about suicide, and we recognize Mr. Jellyby as a truly pathetic and worn down man. Even the union between the two comic families, the Jellybys and the Turveydrops, through the marriage of Caddy and Prince, results later in a sickly baby born with physical challenges. From all of these circumstances (and many others), one thing Dickens wants us to do is to draw the conclusion that Mrs. Jellyby’s lack of charity at home is not funny, and neither is Mr. Turveydrop’s “deportment” to the selfish exclusion of everyone else; these attitudes result in unfortunate consequences for the innocent. In a sense, the humor is almost always “pointing” at something to come, and is a way of fully getting our attention to show us an injustice or a black absurdity.  Dickens uses laughter “as a controlled artistic device to make more startling and effective the important and tragic implications later” (“Copperfield” Kincaid 324).  

Sometimes Dickens reaches from the comic into the tragic as a structural element in the arc of a chapter or scene. That is, a scene that starts off on a comic note ends in tragedy, and the tragedy is thereby accentuated. Dickens’s consciousness of his own plan can be seen in his own notes for David Copperfield when he says, “First chapter funny – Then on to Em’ly.” That chapter, as described by Kincaid, starts with a scene of wild comedy, which then leads into a kidnapping (“Copperfield” 315).  As David Gervais says, by the time of Bleak House, it was characteristic of Dickens to vent “anger, sorrow, and disgust” by beginning with the comic and then transforming it into the tragic (137).  Kincaid agrees that when Dickens’s humor precedes melodramatic or tragic scenes, the latter events are made more effective as a result of the contrast (315).  Chapter VIII of Bleak House, “Covering a Multitude of Sins” follows this pattern. In this chapter we meet Mrs. Pardiggle, who is comical at first in the way she asserts her superiority and knocks furniture over. She does seem sadistic and cruel as it is revealed that she takes her children’s money away from them, but here we can still laugh, as Dickens presents the situation to us in a comical manner. But the apparently comical chapter then turns very dark and tragic when Mrs. Pardiggle takes Esther and Ada to the brickmaker’s house. Mrs. Pardiggle’s total lack of empathy and understanding becomes harshly apparent as we encounter the squalid living conditions, Jenny’s black eye, the dying baby, and the brickmaker’s harsh (but realistic) words. The scene culminates in the baby’s death, and Mrs. Pardiggle’s cold hypocrisy is shown to be not funny, but monstrous. It would be hard to imagine a scene of more pathos than the death of a baby and the resulting pain of its mother. And so, “ultimately, humor is deceptive in Dickens; used not only for laughter, but as a foundation out of which serious and tragic incidents grow, and few ordinarily comic characters or situations are allowed to stay within the bounds of the purely entertaining” (“Copperfield” Kincaid 328).

Dickens also uses humor to interesting (and dark) effect when he blurs the lines between good and evil through comic means. Kincaid says that one way he does this is by injecting “playfulness” into a villain’s role, “that makes the horror of his subject both more ghastly and more supportable.” The villain is “neither totally repulsive nor totally funny, but something of both.” Some of these villains display “a fancy which eludes the furthest extension of logic, and it is precisely this flight from the confines of rationality which is usually a trait of funny characters, not villains” (324). This may be why readers from the nineteenth century all the way up to present times have experienced some confusion about how to “take” Harold Skimpole. No doubt Skimpole’s relentless pursuit of his own cracked and irresponsible logic is often very funny, and it would be hard at first not to become confused over whether he is a dastardly villain or a harmless comic character as he launches into his long, complicated speeches with their hilarious flights of fancy.  Nevertheless, Kincaid points out that Dickens tends to abruptly recall us from this kind of fantasy or fancy in the middle of a sentence or a page, reminding us that there is something dark beneath (“Copperfield” 326). For example, Child becomes a key word in Skimpole’s characterization, and as it’s thrown often into the narrative we soon learn to regard it with some degree of suspicion (Fogle 9). Often as we begin to get lost in one of Skimpole’s eccentric flights, his (or Jarndyce’s) refrain of his being a “child” will be repeated, reminding us to distrust him. Certainly once he has betrayed Jo’s location, and the worldly-wise Mr. Bucket reveals him for what he is, we’ve learned better. And if we’re still in any doubt at the end of the novel, his ungrateful pronouncement that Mr. Jarndyce is “selfish” seals our opinion of him. Gervais, calling Skimpole a “weaver of language,” points out that the more complicated the outside of a Dickens character, the more corrupt that character may be on the inside (139). Indeed, Skimpole is a perfect example of a Dickens villain who leaves us uncertain when to laugh and when to be chilled, though ultimately we realize that what lies beneath is thoroughly rotten.

Though Kincaid’s claim that the outrageous humor of a character like Skimpole makes him more “supportable” or believable might seem strange at first, Brian Rosenberg points out that Dickens’s characters “re-create the difficulty and indecision with which we apprehend people more than they do the actual contours of the people themselves” (147). Thus, Skimpole is not at all a mimetic representation like we might find in a George Eliot novel, but he is a fairly true portrait of how we might react in real life to such a malevolent charmer: first liking him and finding him funny, then feeling suspicious, then dismissing our suspicions, yet eventually realizing that we’ve been had. Surely this deception, this comic “unknowability” of what intentions lie behind others’ actions, is a dark and sadly funny glimpse of the human condition.

I’ve dwelt a long time on Skimpole because he is so memorable, and so ambiguous. But the other great comic “villain” of Bleak House, Grandfather Smallweed, should also be mentioned. It’s hard to know where to even begin or end discussing the Smallweeds’ comedy.  Though there is never any doubt of Grandfather Smallweed’s status as a despicable, sadistic, greedy character, we can see some of the tendency toward “flights of fancy” in his extraordinarily colorful insults toward Mrs. Smallweed – brimstone chatterer, brimstone beast, brimstone scorpion, brimstone poll-parrot, chattering clattering broomstick witch, and so forth – along with his habit of throwing a cushion at her.  In this sense, the comedy associated with Grandfather Smallweed is particularly challenging for the reader.  We recognize his actions as cruel, but laugh anyway.  And though he is thoroughly mean, he is contradictorily imparted with a funny vulnerability, his tendency to slip down in his chair so that he has to be “shaken up” by Judy, and we get something pathetic (and funny) like this: “Grandfather Smallweed has been gradually sliding down in his chair since his last adjustment, and is now a bundle of clothes, with a voice in it calling for Judy” (268). There is in fact a touch of pathos to the Smallweeds, and this perhaps points up another aspect of the sadness in Dickens’s humor.  Kincaid quotes Dorothy Van Ghent as saying that a great deal of Dickens’s humor develops from a situation of noncommunication in which “speech is speech to nobody and where human encounter is mere collision.”  Van Ghent says that Dickens’s humor often suggests “a world of isolated integers, terrifyingly alone and unrelated” (“Copperfield” 315).  In fact, much of the Smallweeds’ humor comes from this loneliness and isolation. Grandmother Smallweed, in her second childhood, chimes up irrelevantly with her lines about money, unable to understand or communicate with anyone around her. Grandfather Smallweed’s insults, despite their vehemence, do not reach her in any way that she can rationally comprehend.  Judy clearly cares nothing about her grandfather – her help to him comes not out of any abiding love, but out of long, isolated habit. And the younger Smallweeds, because of their sour and isolated upbringing, were unable to interact and communicate with other children normally.  Though we may be laughing our heads off rather than thinking consciously about the pathos in this situation, the sadness is nevertheless there, lurking just under the surface.  Dickens very directly establishes that tone in the first paragraph in which he introduces the Smallweed family and their dwelling, which is in “a little narrow street, always solitary, shady, and sad, closely bricked in on all sides like a tomb…”  (257). 

Just as Dickens’s despicable characters edge into comedy or pathos, good comic characters can edge into darkness. As Richard Barickman says, “comedy that comprehends so much of Dickens’ thematic material must often…edge pain and brutality and risk its own transformation into a different mode.” Thus we have a comic character like Boythorn who we know to be good because of his gentleness toward animals and toward Esther, but who still sets mantraps and mines for Jarndyce’s men (141). Esther sums up the contradiction nicely when she says of Boythorn, “To hear him say all this with unimaginable energy, one might have thought him the angriest of mankind.  To see him at the very same time, looking at the bird now perched upon his thumb, and softly smoothing its feathers with his forefinger, one might have thought him the gentlest” (109).  We might say something similar of Miss Flite who, though driven slightly mad by Jarndyce and Jarndyce, is clearly meant overall to be a good comic character. Nevertheless, there is something sinister in the way that she keeps her symbolically named birds in cages to be released on the “day of judgment,” and the way that she acts as a harbinger of evil tidings in the narrative. Kincaid quotes Humphry House as saying that Dickens’s “gregarious and hearty happiness” represents “a revulsion from the abysses of evil, a strenuous and ardent wish to achieve happiness, rather than the realization of it” (“Copperfield” 316). This seems a good description of some of Dickens’s good comic characters, who are undoubtedly hearty and gregarious, but who nevertheless allow us to see “the abysses of evil” just below the surface.

Dickens’s settings and descriptions in Bleak House also have this characteristic of darkness lurking underneath. In fact, much of this darkness is not even so much below the surface as on the surface. Dickens could not have put the word “bleak” in the very title of his novel by accident. Barickman says that the famous opening of the novel depicts people engaged in “an unremitting struggle” with the environment as they tend to slip into the state of being objects themselves (133). What is maybe more surprising is that, yet again, this darkness is infused with humor. Priscilla Gibson points out “the unrestrained play of personal, obtrusive humor” over the opening passages of the novel despite its depressed mood, and the humor is in no small part related to Dickens’s strange animism of the environment (284). Gibson says that one of the purposes of this humorous animism is to prepare readers for his metaphor of Chancery (as fog) enveloping England (285). But further, it evokes an atmosphere which is actually alive, and which breeds evil, as Dickens speaks of  “…the fog, the rain’s language at Chesney Wold, the starved houses in dispute, the self-propagating mud, speaking portraits of the Dedlocks, the ‘dimly-blinking’ lamps of Lincoln’s Inn, the hypnotically drawing lord chancellor’s mace, the pointing Roman on Mr. Tulkinghorn’s ceiling, the stonily staring houses and sulky street lamps on Dedlock Street” (289). The upshot is that the strangely vital environment works in a way that is often funny (or at least odd) and menacing at the same time. Barickman points out that “it is the blurring of that rationalist’s distinction between inner and outer, mind and body, them and me, that provokes much of the terror in the novel’s world, as the object world leaps into life… (132).  Not unlike many of Dickens’s characters, his settings are humorous and nightmarish at the same time, often transforming before our eyes in much the same way that we watch Mrs. Pardiggle transform from a harmless comic caricature into an unfeeling monster.

Barickman further points out that what is different about Dickens’s comedy from the new comedy of Austen, Eliot and James “is the absence of any hope that the energies celebrated can flow into a regenerated community”; the setting and action tends to return again and again to the more squalid conditions of London and away from the more idyllic (and less poisonous) settings (142). It is an unpredictable and strangely menacing world that Dickens’s characters must live in and contend with; they are in a struggle for survival “against all the nameless social forces that have made [their] spirit[s] and environment so wretched,” and they have to use their humor in that struggle (Barickman 136).  Kincaid touches on this when he suggests that the Dodger in Oliver Twist reveals that he consciously uses his humor as a way to survive (“Oliver” 69). And Barickman argues that Dickens’s comic (and even noncomic) characters form isolated, bizarre enclaves that are unique to each character, and which help them to humorously assert self-identity against rigid nineteenth century social boundaries and moral codes (134). What is humorous about this is the way that these eccentrics “thwart and burlesque mechanistic social forms with ostentatious routines that have the unmistakable mark of individuality” (135).  Sometimes characters seem aware of their own eccentric humor and the way that they must use it to defend or assert themselves; sometimes they are “unconscious” and are only funny to us in their struggle. In any case, examples abound in Bleak House.  In fact, nearly every character in the novel could be mentioned as fitting the description. Barickman cites Phil Squod sidling along the wall creating “Phil’s mark,” and even Vholes with his idiosyncratic tendencies (135). Also fitting the pattern are the Badgers, with their arrangement of mutually admiring Mrs. Badger’s previous husbands; John Jarndyce in Bleak House with his “Growlery”; the Turveydrops at the dancing school; Krook and others at the Rag and Bottle shop; the Jellybys in their topsy-turvy household; the Smallweeds, in their tomb-like home; and even Harold Skimpole, when we finally get a glimpse of his tatty abode.  Barickman’s argument is a somewhat optimistic one: “The late novels expose shrewdly, relentlessly, even cynically the disaster that modern urban culture can be, but they still relish the dodges that keep a surprising number of people…alive, responsive, and unreasonably happy” (138). But despite the glee, we nevertheless perhaps glimpse an ultimate futility in their efforts, because we know they’re going against such dark odds. At the opposite extreme from all of these comic individualists are “the Coodles and Doodles of Bleak House…who have all gained a protective anonymity by allowing the self to be submerged in the most mechanistic of social functions”; no matter how funny the Coodles and Doodles are, they have still lapsed into being nothing but Coodles and Doodles (Barickman 131).

Perhaps it can be said that “no comedy is free of some threat” (Barickman 143).  There is certainly no doubt that these two elements go together in Dickens, and that his comedy and pathos often work together for the same purpose (Gervais 136). Working together, they cause the reader to participate more fully “in the vital action of the novel, which is at once more complete and much more intense” (Kincaid “Oliver” 69).  More importantly, they cause the reader to rethink assumptions, and confront darkness inside and outside the self.  Perhaps one of the most efficient representatives in Bleak House of the tragedy in Dickens’s comedy is the very little counsel with the terrific bass voice from the opening scene of the novel: “Leaving [his] address (delivered like a sepulchral message) ringing in the rafters of the roof, the very little counsel drops, and the fog knows him no more. Everybody looks for him. Nobody can see him” (10).  And as this little counsel drops into obscurity in the comedy of human failure to communicate, we see just how poignant Dickens’s humor can be.    

 

 

Works Cited

Barickman, Richard.  “The Comedy of Survival in Dickens’ Novels.”  NOVEL: A Forum

on Fiction 11.2 (Winter 1978): 128-143. 

Dickens, Charles.  Bleak House.  Ed. George Ford and Sylvere Monod.  New York:

Norton, 1977. 

Fogle, Stephen F.  “Skimpole Once More.”  Nineteenth-Century Fiction 7.1 (Jun., 1952):

1-18.

Gervais, David.  “Dickens’s Comic Speech: Inventing the Self.”  The Yearbook of

English Studies, Vol. 25, Non-Standard Englishes and the New Media Special Number (1995): 128-140. 

Gibson, Priscilla.  “Dickens’s Uses of Animism.”  Nineteenth-Century Fiction 7.4 (Mar.

1953): 283-291.

Gold, Joseph.  “Charles Dickens and Today’s Reader.”  The English Journal 58.2 (Feb.

1969): 205-211. 

Kincaid, James R. “Dickens’s Subversive Humor: David Copperfield.”  Nineteenth-

Century Fiction 22.4 (Mar. 1968): 313-329. 

--.  “Laughter and ‘Oliver Twist.’”  PMLA 83.1 (Mar. 1968): 63-70. 

Miller, J. Hillis.  “The Sources of Dickens’s Comic Art: From American Notes to Martin

Chuzzlewit.”  Nineteenth-Century Fiction: The Charles Dickens Centennial 24.4 (Mar. 1970): 467-476.

Rosenberg, Brian.  “Character and Contradiction in Dickens.” Nineteenth-Century

Literature 47.2 (Sep., 1992): 145-163.