Victorian Visual Culture

In his 1842 travelogue American Notes for General Circulation, Chapter VII “Philadelphia and its Solitary Prison,” Dickens allocates the majority of his writing to intimately detailed and painfully personal descriptions of individual prisoners and their cells in a solitary confinement prison.

Beginning with a gentleman incarcerated for receiving stolen goods, Dickens notes how “he wore a paper hat of his own making, and was pleased to have it noticed and commanded.” The inmate “had very ingeniously manufactured a sort of Dutch clock from some disregarded odds and ends; and his vinegar-bottle served for the pendulum.” Upon seeing Dickens “interested in this contrivance, he looked up at it with a great deal of pride, and said that he had been thinking of improving it, and that he hoped the hammer and a little piece of broken glass beside it ‘would play music before long.’  He had extracted some colours from the yarn with which he worked, and painted a few poor figures on the wall.  One, of a female, over the door, he called ‘The Lady of the Lake.’”

After first endearing this man to his reader, Dickens then delivers a hearty blow when describing how the man “smiled” as he “looked at these contrivances to while away the time; but when I looked from them to him, I saw that his lip trembled, and could have counted the beating of his heart. I forget how it came about, but some allusion was made to his having a wife. He shook his head at the word, turned aside, and covered his face with his hands.”

In painting an image of such a crucially human yearning for dignity, comfort, art, and connection, Dickens does what he does best– he provides a face and a name to a subsection of people who suffer. His earlier attestation to the “cruel and wrong” institution of solitary confinement feels largely uncompelling. It reads very much like any other mid-Victorian political opinion article. What is central to and distinctive of Dickens’s political presence as an author of his time is his portrayal of personhood rather than an abstract gesture to the plight of “sufferers” and their “cries,” which is common in typical (often cheap) Victorian solicitations of pathos. He doesn’t lean solely on cliches like those seen in T. R. Grey’s additions to Nat Turner’s confession of a trembling “mother as she presses her infant darling to her bosom.” Granted, T. R. Grey is in a vastly different socio-political context and country than Dickens at the time of that line being written, but cliches hinging on images of vulnerable women aren’t uncommon to Victorian prose. In fact, as evidenced by drawings used to evoke sympathy for the plight of the Irish during their famine such as “Bridget O’Donnell and Children” and “Beggar Woman and Children,” both from the Illustrated London News dating to 1849 and 1843 respectively, there seems to be an iconized image of suffering mothers intentionally targeted to a London audience in order to evoke sympathy and perhaps promote the enacting of reform. Whatever the reason, these images fall short in ways Dickens’s descriptions do not. They attempt to appeal to the values of their audience, and in being an artistic and strategic ploy they remain artistic and strategic. Don’t get me wrong, Dickens takes some linguistic liberties to strategically endear and illicit sympathy for his subjects as well, but his descriptions of those personal details–like missing one’s wife so deeply one can’t put words to it, or crafting oneself a paper hat of which one is tremendously proud– which speak so loudly to a human hunger for dignity and connection hit harder and deeper, and in making so personal and deep a connection from subject to reader they are much less easy to sit with or pass off as symptoms of “great tragedy.”