How does the category of the “animal” contribute to the Victorian novel? In the 1840s and 1850s, magazines offered endless short tales of “animal sagacity” that most commonly featured dogs, demonstrating the virtues of the species. An 1858 article in Household Words, “Old Dog Tray,” observes, “Alas! not a day will pass but we can descry human qualities in the brute, and brute qualities in the human being; and, alas again, how often we find a balance of love, fidelity, truth, generosity, on the side of the brute!”Footnote 1 In the 1850s and 1860s, the analogies between human and animal behavior upon which these tales depended became a resource to the growing fields of comparative ethology and evolutionary theory—Frances Power Cobbe would suggest in 1877 that dogs had “reflex morality.”Footnote 2 Meanwhile, novels from this period increasingly raised questions of the scientific, political, and aesthetic value of claims of resemblance among species. For Charles Dickens, whose work offered a capacious image of the London population, the question of who belongs in a family, a community, or a nation persistently turned to the status of animals. In his work, animal figures mark meditations on the conditions and limits of social inclusion.
The animals of Victorian fiction reinflect a particularly central claim in theories of the novel: that as the novel registered and sometimes resisted expanding political inclusion, the form also increasingly privileged “character” as instantiating exploration of an interior, psychic self.Footnote 3 This conception of the novel would imply that its picture of social life fails to accommodate or acknowledge life-forms beyond the human. And yet, although undisputedly anthropocentric, Victorian novels often placed humans in companionate or conflictual relations with animals. I argue that the importance a novel might accord to animals demonstrates not only the consolidation of individual interiority as the novel's central paradigm but also ambivalence toward it. After all, the rise of comparative cognition later in the nineteenth century implied that animal behavior was both unreflective and nonindividual. Charles Darwin in The Expression of Emotions in Men and Animals (1876) argued that in “Cases of the dog and the cat, there is every reason to believe that the gestures both of hostility and affection are innate or inherited; for they are almost identically the same in the different races of the species, and in all the individuals of the same race, both young and old.”Footnote 4 Despite Darwin's use of frequent, specific anecdotes, animal behavior and communication could only index a general mode of species-being. And whereas more recent work in animal studies has sometimes followed Jacques Derrida's call to recognize the “unsubstitutable singularity” of each animal, writers in the nineteenth century often invoked animals to think through more typical, collective, and specific modes of being.Footnote 5
For Dickens, to introduce animal characters is often to think through the role of communication in the constitution of community. This essay focuses on Dombey and Son (1846–47) and Hard Times (1854), arguing that they valorize animal communication to diminish the force of verbal critique of the social order. These novels, from different periods in Dickens's career and stylistically almost divergent, are tied together by several elements. First is their common theme of the damage done to vulnerable children by excessively forceful fathering. Related, and more overtly to the point of the realist novel's investment in individual human selfhood, is the eventual downfall of powerful men who maintain an inflated sense of their own capacities: Dombey, who claims to dominate land and sea through trade; Gradgrind, self-styled molder of children's minds; and Bounderby, whose aggressive narrative of idiopathic self-making bolsters his industrial wealth. These plots suggest the unworkability of the ideal of the self-representing, independently acting, rights-seizing individual that divides humans from other species. And finally, both novels grant importance to dogs in their communicative capacities. While Dickens suggests that inwardness and a capacity for symbolic representation are the markers of socially and politically recognizable personhood, paradoxically, he ends up underscoring the capacity for communicative gesture as a more inclusive criterion of belonging.
1. Forms of Animal Character
In examining the animals that attend the definition of personhood in Dickens's work, this essay intentionally looks to their minor, sentimental, sometimes comic, and especially allegorical role. Animals were granted a modicum of legal recognition by the 1835 Cruelty to Animals Act; likewise, animals began to function almost like characters in realist fiction, frequently appearing as pets or working companions.Footnote 6 They tend to appear in the service of the fuller protagonicity of their human masters, who, according to Alex Woloch's influential account of character systems, receive the benefits of a deep interiority that minor characters are denied—and, in the case of animal characters, might have been deemed incapable of in any case. Yet Ivan Kreilkamp argues that in Dickens's work, animal minorness works not so much to bolster human significance as to menace it. “To be a dog” is to represent “a precarious or threatened identity, an identity falling short of the standard of full-fledged novelistic character, and so one is always in danger of being forgotten.”Footnote 7 In other words, dogs are so constitutively minor as to erode the stability of human individuality—but what alternative, less individuated mode of being do dogs represent in the novel?
The function of animal characters illuminates the ontological dimensions sometimes found to be the basis of character. Catherine Gallagher argues that literary character calls attention to its overt fictionality, offering us an appealing image of type or “species”—of being general, disembodied, immaterial, and ideal (all categories that tend to be grouped on the human side of human-animal dichotomies). Gallagher's argument strikingly aligns both the being of character and the desires of the reader with a highly Cartesian version of humanism. Blakey Vermeule offers an alternative but also humanist account for how reading character reflects our literally specific desires, arguing that literary character serves an evolutionarily adaptive need by giving us an intensified version of what it always means to access a human other: implicitly, the reading of character seems to need to be not only adapted to the cognitive needs of the distinctively “human brain” on the reader's side but is decisively oriented toward other humans. In contrast, John Frow's suggestion that “character is not a substance but the literary … instance of an operation within a social assemblage” seems to have more obvious relevance to the possibility of animal characters. He argues that characters cohere according to the reader's inscription “into the terms of a particular formation of personhood. It is a moment of an apparatus for the mobilization of subjectivity within the terms of an ethical or legal or religious or civic mode of action and understanding.”Footnote 8 What makes a character, then, is contingent on the historical development of the category of the person. Moreover, from Frow's perspective, character also depends on the possibility of embodiment—another of the dimensions of personhood, one particularly relevant to the nineteenth century, when scientific accounts of physiology and species were actively rethinking what constituted human personhood.
Taken together, these perspectives would seem to raise a question of whether the imaginative process by which one “invests life in a fictional character,” who is after all ontologically nonhuman, relates to the process by which a human being grants consequence to animal experience—whether we might see both animals and literary characters as personifications and, therefore, as companion species.Footnote 9 For Gallagher, the “differential accessibility or knowability of character is only one feature inviting cathexis with ontological difference.” If an early worry about novels was that readers “imagined that to care for fictional personae was to mistake them for real persons,” a common criticism of animal-lovers is that they make the same mistake (a criticism some theorists, like Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari or Jacques Derrida, would seem to reinforce, whereas Donna Haraway, among others, dismisses it as not only epistemologically unadventurous but also misogynist, given the gendering of animal-love in our culture).Footnote 10 Animal studies sometimes warns against indulging attraction to animals as if it were disproportionate to what we can know about animal minds. Influential, if epistemologically conservative, perspectives in the field caution against projecting human values onto animals—to be wary about trespassing against animals’ difference even while it at the same time invites us to consider the validity of animals’ own experiences of their lives.
Thomas Nagel's essay “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” (1974) argues against the possibility that humans can think their way into the lives of creatures that have different neurophysical and cognitive structures: animal consciousness is a fact of nature “we cannot possibly conceive.”Footnote 11 This situation maps onto the condition of literary characters insofar as, the material architecture of characters being textual rather than human, they must be said to be deep constructs of their material being in such a way as to block any notion that a “fullness of being” or “ontological plenty” lies behind their textual presence.Footnote 12 Still, Nagel writes, “The fact that we cannot expect ever to accommodate in our language a detailed description of … bat phenomenology should not lead us to dismiss as meaningless the claim that bats … have experiences fully comparable in richness of detail to our own.” His invocation of phenomenology is provocative. Georges Bataille, for instance, claims that animals’ experience is immanent to its milieu, “like water in water,” unknowing but material in a material world; this claim, in fact, strongly resonates with Frow's notion that character is a never fully self-aware entity (a character does not typically know she is one) that emerges, immanently, from within a textual surround.
Specific literary forms shape the way animal characters, in particular, function. Animals often play a figurative or allegorical role that is especially at odds with granting animals an interiority akin to what novels often ascribe to human protagonists. For Woloch, realism is structured by a fierce “tension between allegory and reference,” where the former mode confirms that minor characters are in the service of a social hierarchy reinforced by the inherently hierarchic structure of allegory as a form.Footnote 13 Historically, allegory has externalized and made public the virtues and vices of the human soul—the private inward states that come to constitute the novel's terrain. Gordon Teskey describes allegory as the violent capture of “a living body [that] has been confined to an alien structure of meaning, one in which [that body] has been reduced to performing the function of signs in a system of signs.”Footnote 14 And from an animal studies point of view, this figurative mode tracks the meaning of animal lives and bodies to an exclusively human-centered conception of mental experience, while gravitating toward a generic and abstracted understanding of the given figure. Nonetheless, figurative uses of animals within realism need not be necessarily understood as serving a blinkered anthropocentrism. Teskey suggests that it might be possible for represented bodies to resist their total capture, lending allegory an agonistic and unsettled quality. Moreover, Heather Keenleyside defends figurative language, especially personification, as a literary means of depicting animals, claiming that the device constitutes an animating “response to the motions of another” that reflects common, mutually responsive creaturely embodiment.Footnote 15
This essay, focusing on the dogs of Dickens's Dombey and Son and Hard Times, recognizes the hierarchical and anthropocentric structure of allegory: Dickens uses dogs to allegorize the centrality of a capacity for communication and representation to a seemingly exclusionary definition of the person. However, even as a version of allegory that reinforces human privileges remains the primary narrative form associated with animals within realism, I will argue that Dickens uses allegory to explore mutual responsiveness as an alternative to the liberal-humanist interiority that structures influential theories of the realist novel. The sentimental or comic register of these allegories further underscores the limitations of this framework. Speaking back against allegorical capture, Dickens imagines a mode of communication that uncouples agency from individual consciousness. If allegory means literally a “speaking otherwise,” he is interested in how animal voices speak otherwise than in human language—how they resonate and solicit response.
I will thus pay particular attention to the significance accorded to the capacity to vocalize and to represent in symbolic language—Teskey's system of signs—itself, generally taken in the nineteenth century to be a capacity exclusive to human persons.Footnote 16 The exclusion of animals from human community on the basis of their inability to talk can be traced to Aristotle's conception of man as a “political animal”:
[M]an is the only animal whom [nature] has endowed with the gift of speech. And whereas mere voice is but an indication of pleasure or pain, and is therefore found in other animals (for their nature attains to the perception of pleasure and pain and the intimation of them to one another, and no further), the power of speech is intended to set forth the expedient and inexpedient, and therefore likewise the just and unjust. And it is a characteristic of man that he alone has any sense of good and evil, of just and unjust, and the like, and the association of living beings who have this sense makes a family and a state.
For Aristotle, only those capable of speaking can be members of the political community; conversely, reserving the capacity for “linguistic agency” as exclusively human has historically constituted grounds for excluding animals—not only dubiously capable of intentional action in legal terms but unable to verbally represent their own interests in the public sphere.Footnote 17 Tobias Menely points out that the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century framework of sensibility privileged being sensitive to sensations and feelings, rather than rationality and the making of linguistic meaning, as markers of a creature's political significance. This framework's emphasis on “a communicativity that begins in the passivity of the passions and stands always in excess of conventional meaning” makes humans and animals more alike than different: both make vocal as well as gestural and sonic expressions to communicate their experiences.Footnote 18 However, as animals began to gain legal recognition in the nineteenth century, animal advocates increasingly stressed that other species could not communicate in order to highlight their vulnerability at human hands. Their capacity for suffering, rather than communication, became more important—a more privative understanding of animal existence. Although these activists typically drew on anecdotes of animals’ inherent moral wisdom to elicit concern, they also persistently used an exclusively human notion of voice, and of communication as purely linguistic, as the ontological basis of a rigid human-animal binary in order to justify animal protection, emphasizing human political and social agency by citing animals’ lack thereof.
For instance, Louis Gompertz, activist and founder of the Royal Society for the Protection of Animals, characterized the objects of his concern as “dumb animals” or “dumb creation” in order to stress the need for humans to vocalize the politically relevant needs of nonhuman animals, while an animal advocacy periodical of the 1830s entitled The Voice of Humanity implemented just this strategy. Menely points out that “[e]ven in recent studies intent on recovering the cultural history of nonhumans, their silence remains axiomatic.”Footnote 19 For Cora Diamond, much like for Gompertz in the nineteenth century, “our hearing the moral appeal of an animal is our hearing it speak—as it were—the language of our fellow human beings”; moral attunement is not just an act of translation but a strategically anthropocentric speaking-on-behalf.Footnote 20 But other influential thinkers in animal studies worry about animals’ speechlessness because it seems to authorize not protection but rather a strong formulation of humans’ economic and political authority over animals’ bodies; Jacques Derrida's influential “The Animal That Therefore I Am,” for example, centers on this concern.Footnote 21 Still, if our culture has often silenced animals, their lack of words should not necessarily be deemed a deficiency, because it hardly means that animals cannot communicate.Footnote 22 An 1852 article in Household Words insists as much: “Why do we call them dumb? For they are not so.” Not only does the writer suggest that animals communicate in ways humans are unable to perceive, but
There is evidently a common understanding, among all creatures, of certain primitive sounds. The cry of alarm, of pain, of rage, and the sounds of conciliation and calming, pitying and caressing, are, more or less, understood by nearly the whole living family of the earth. The use and perception of minute and elaborate gradations and inflections can alone constitute a language; and we are in no position to deny that other creatures possess something of this kind besides ourselves.Footnote 23
Communicativity unites all living creatures, rather than authorizing a divide that reserves linguistic agency—as a shorthand for agency tout court—for humans.
Dickens often suggests that inwardness and a capacity for symbolic representation are the markers of personhood, and he advocates this idea in allegorical form, which would seem to reinforce that privilege. At the same time, however, he ends up emphasizing an animal capacity for the communicative gesture and environmental responsiveness as a more inclusive criterion of belonging, bespeaking a fascination with, in Menely's words, “the passionate expressivity and vulnerability of finite being [as] the first condition of common life.”Footnote 24 From this perspective, a dog's expressive bark becomes more effective and affecting than human speech. In both Dombey and Son and Hard Times, Dickens undermines the protagonists’ inflated, hypermasculine sense of their own individual power, arriving at a more distributive concept of action and self-constitution in part through the idea of species, where action looks less like reflectively chosen interventions made in a world conceived as separate from and often inimical to the self, and more like responsiveness.Footnote 25 Allegorizing canine vocality, then, makes novelistic interiority look at once less central and more aspirational than it has been taken to be.
2. Animal Sounds in London
Dickensian London is full of animals—especially dogs, from Bill Sykes's loyal Bullseye in Oliver Twist (1837–39) to Florence's unruly Diogenes in Dombey and Son to Dora's irritating Jip in David Copperfield (1849–50). Dickens's work shows a persistent and far from comic concern with the many animals that coexist with humans in city life, often as chattel owned by human masters.Footnote 26 In Dombey and Son, when the young Florence gets lost in London, it is due to chaos ensuing after the escape of a mad bull from Smithfield Market—the infamous, enormous meat market Dickens depicted in Oliver Twist and would criticize as inhumane in the pages of Household Words in 1851. Hablot Knight Browne's illustration of this scene even adds to the fray an excited dog not mentioned by Dickens, stressing all the more how the lives of humans and animals intermingle in the complexity of urban life.Footnote 27 In Bleak House (1852–53), Dickens's famous opening depicts “dogs, indistinguishable in mire,” evoking an intimately enmeshed but anonymous, difficult existence in a London where even the boundary between the organic and inorganic is indistinct.Footnote 28 But to conceive city life as deriving its sense of community from what seems a paradoxically indeterminate state of determinacy, trapped in a mire that obscures distinction, suggests Dickens's countervailing investment in the process of individuation that would require becoming a figure against the ground of seething muck—require becoming a character.
In Bleak House, the question of who counts as a character, self, and member of the community centers on the allegorical figure of Jo, whose double is the dog lurking in a doorway in Browne's frontispiece to the novel. Just as the stray and working dogs that constituted a major feature of city life feature in Bleak House, Jo is dogged in more senses than one—hounded by authorities striving to exclude him from the lit circle of social recognition and persistent in his efforts to survive at the boundary. Dickens invokes dogs when considering Jo's interiority as a way of marking his status as less a character than a textual function—an allegory for the flawed network of which he is a part. In passages that consider Jo in relation to dogs, Dickens foregrounds his status as a “creature.” The term “creature,” as Julia Reinhard Lupton has written in another context, “marks the radical separation of creation and Creator … or … between anyone or anything that is produced or controlled by an agent, author, master, or tyrant.”Footnote 29 Jo is a creature of the system that he stands for, a system his abjection makes him unable to conceptualize. Portraying him as a creature, Dickens emphasizes that his status is at once metonymic and allegorical; although subjectivity is the standard to which he is held, it is a condition to which he cannot fully attain, in part due to his narrative function.
The use of sound is key to the question of belonging prompted by Jo's creatureliness in Bleak House. Jo's ability to comprehend and use sound and voice is a crucial index of his marginality. When the narrator meets Jo in the street, we are told,
A band of music comes and plays. Jo listens to it. So does a dog—a drover's dog, waiting for his master outside a butcher's shop, and evidently thinking about those sheep he has had upon his mind for some hours and is happily rid of. He seems perplexed respecting three or four, can't remember where he left them, looks up and down the street as half expecting to see them astray, suddenly pricks up his ears and remembers all about it. A thoroughly vagabond dog, accustomed to low company and public-houses; a terrific dog to sheep, ready at a whistle to scamper over their backs and tear out mouthfuls of their wool; but an educated, improved, developed dog who has been taught his duties and knows how to discharge them. He and Jo listen to the music, probably with much the same amount of animal satisfaction; likewise as to awakened association, aspiration, or regret, melancholy or joyful reference to things beyond the senses, they are probably upon a par. But, otherwise, how far above the human listener is the brute!
Turn that dog's descendants wild, like Jo, and in a very few years they will so degenerate that they will lose even their bark—but not their bite.Footnote 30
This dog appears to have a subjective response to music that renders it coherent, thanks to his master's training, but Jo lacks a comparable inwardness. Whereas the dog is depicted as being able to think in terms of a symbolic reason that elevates his instincts, Jo's lack of subjectivity cannot even be conjured directly. The passage reverses how we usually think about the challenges of representing nonhuman minds and emphasizes how Jo is excluded from the category of the human. While this dog seems capable of inward and vocal representation—emphasized in that second short paragraph by his capacity to bark—Jo is not. Still, throughout the novel Jo utters inarticulate but crucially canny phrases—perhaps these are his barks—that underscore his innocent vulnerability. Even if initially it seems that only those who have an inward capacity for symbolic reflection and a verbal capacity for self-representation count, Dickens's stress on the impact and pathos of communicative gestures like Jo's suggests otherwise.
In depicting multispecies London as a soundscape, Dickens seems to follow Gompertz, who notes “the unceasing sound of the lash in our streets” as a signal of ubiquitous and unending animal abuse that goes too often unheard.Footnote 31 Perhaps his depictions of London life emphasize sound because, as sound theorist Steven Connor explains, “the value of sound, and of an intensified awareness of it, is … a sense of being in the middle of the world”—for those who want to claim our human-animal affinities and responsibilities, sound (unbounded, nonhierarchical, yet impermanent) becomes an important sensory resource.Footnote 32 Indeed, Hannah Velten introduces her Beastly London: A History of Animals in the City with an intentional echo of Gompertz that reinstates animal sounds, describing the “soundtrack” of Victorian London's streets as “a cacophony of man-made noise, neighing, barking, mooing, bleating, quacking, braying, hissing, oinking, roaring, screeching, clucking, tweeting, trumpeting, meowing, snarling, squeaking, and snuffling.”Footnote 33 Yet if animal studies has had rather less to say than we might expect about animal voice, recent work in posthumanism and new materialism, interested in interspecies and transmaterial relations of many kinds, makes sound a crucial register of “being in the middle,” of the interdependence of bodies as against the finitude and hubris of humanist subjectivity. Jane Bennett, for instance, valorizes “the complicated web of dissonant connections between bodies,” invoking sound to call attention to the value of recognizing “human participation in a shared, vital” world that is often strange to us.Footnote 34 As we have already seen, however, Dickens hardly presents a dissonant and utterly de-individuated version of interspecies urban entanglement in a uniformly positive light. His figures seem to desire to become characters—to become more individual, more decisively and distinctively human, or at least to occupy a more stable human-adjacent role.
Dickens's fiction, indeed, registers the nineteenth-century ascendancy of the pet dog—more clearly individuated, and far more comical, minor members of the human community. An 1858 essay in Household Words notes, “[T]he social position of the Dog improves. Part of this improved tone and treatment must be set to the growth of religion and civilization; part, unquestionably, to the virtues and good qualities of the Dog himself, which always come out more conspicuously under kindness; part to fashion, which has petted him and given him a seat in her carriage … ; and lastly, not a little (fanciful as such a notion may seem) to Sir Edwin Landseer and other painters.”Footnote 35 Paintings like Landseer's Dignity and Impudence (1839) anthropomorphically emphasized dogs’ individuality even as they rendered their characters allegorical and granted them expressions that suggested a “preternatural consciousness of moral duty.”Footnote 36 Notably, another writer termed Dickens “the Landseer of fiction” in an 1863 book about the novelist's dog characters.Footnote 37 Getting animals out of the streets, into the private home, and firmly installing them in allegories of domestic life would suggest their silencing.Footnote 38 Yet Dickens's more character-like dogs in Dombey and Son and Hard Times do—and say—more to complicate their allegorical service to humanist virtues and human-centered communities than their anthropomorphic status as pets and performers would imply.
3. Barking in Dombey and Son
In Dombey and Son, the furry Diogenes bounds into the character system with a loud, ebullient, undignified galumph. Although the young Florence Dombey adopts him, he is “unlike a lady's dog as dog might be; and … presented an appearance sufficiently unpromising, as he gave short yelps out of one side of his mouth, and overbalancing himself by the intensity of every one of those efforts, tumbled down into the straw, and then sprung panting up again, putting out his tongue.”Footnote 39 He is a minor, rather silly, decidedly sentimental figure in a long multiplot novel that tells the story of two children left behind with an intimidating, wealthy father after their mother's death. The dog appears only sporadically, punctuating narratives of human anguish, yet he tells us a great deal about the Dickensian family and the fruitfulness Dickens accords relationships of dependence. Moreover, Diogenes’ voice—which expresses a fidelity that surpasses understanding—is one of the many marginal, inhuman voices that resound throughout the novel, diminishing human self-importance and emphasizing a shared world.
Victorian pet-lovers deemphasized human control over soulless beasts, instead linking their animals to a sentimental view of family affection and moral piety. Yet Diogenes is not simply a presence that would confirm a very idealized picture of domestic life. Even as he offers a model of moral love, his role is far from harmonious, which allows Dickens to subtly register anger and hostility toward the family. Mr. Dombey believes he has power over nature—the contingencies of the seas, the women he possesses, the grandeur of his house, the vulnerabilities of his children's little bodies. Florence's contrasting relationship with Diogenes suggests the importance of “dwelling with others bodies,” nurturing mutual dependency.Footnote 40
Diogenes enters the novel when little Paul is leaving the Blimbers's school, a cramming institution for young boys. Intuiting that he is dying, Paul decides “to conciliate a great hoarse shaggy dog, chained up at the back of the house, who had previously been the terror of his life” (209). Given the fixation on all things classical at the Blimbers's, Diogenes, “who had never in his life received a friend into his confidence, before Paul” (228), takes his name from Diogenes the Cynic, the philosopher who lived in the public marketplace and claimed that happiness could be found by meeting only one's natural needs. His extreme commitment to simplicity was a subject of fascination for several Victorian painters—including Landseer, who figured Diogenes in his milieu as a gathering of dogs in a painting exhibited the same year that Dickens concluded the serialization of Dombey.Footnote 41 Hounding the populace for its dishonesty and corruption and refusing to live by convention, Diogenes was called “dog,” or kyon in Ancient Greek, from which the name “cynic” derives. He was called “dog,” the philosopher reportedly explained, “Because I fawn upon those who give me anything, and bark at those who give me nothing, and bite the rogues.”Footnote 42 Dickens draws on the philosopher's critique of the fascinations of wealth and abuses of power in his depiction of the dog. The fact that the Blimbers keep him tied up at the edge of their establishment is one more hint of their corruption, whereas the children transform Diogenes into a sentimental pet. By the nineteenth century dogs had attained a particularly childlike status in the middle-class family because they could be cared for not as laborers but for love alone, “without reference to economic value.”Footnote 43 This is one of the reasons Mr. Dombey fails to value Florence—he has not detached emotional value from economic value, which he disbelieves a girl could produce, and thus he refuses her dependency.
Meanwhile, the pet dog gives the child a sort of proxy child or dependent of her own. Monica Flegel notes that while Victorian children were “called upon to be ‘pets,’” they “also had to learn to be masters and mistresses, with too close an association with the domestic pet spelling disaster for the child's eventual transition into proper, authoritative adulthood.”Footnote 44 This idea emphasizes that the Victorian home was a place of discipline, where power was harshly exercised and internalized. Yet a human learning to train an animal companion doesn't necessarily require an authority so intense as to spell domination.Footnote 45 Crucially, Florence is an inept dog handler. When Paul's schoolfellow Toots presents her with the dog after Paul's death, she says, “‘Come, then, Di! Dear Di! Make friends with your new mistress. Let us love each other, Di!’ […] fondling his shaggy head. And Di, the rough and gruff, as if his hairy hide were pervious to the tear that dropped upon it, and his dog's heart melted as it fell, put his nose up to her face, and swore fidelity” (280). She captivates Diogenes magically and instantly, without active effort. Thus she receives his permanent dependency and devotion, both of which her brother had supplied before.
The pet offers all the faithfulness to Florence that she would give to her father if only he would let her, with the child in the position of the animal. In the Victorian period dogs were famous for a fidelity more profound than what humans could expect from one another. The essay “Old Dog Tray” sums up these tales, declaring, “Legion are the stories of those feeling creatures who have moped for some short while after those they loved had passed away, and then lay down quietly in a corner and died”; another essay, from 1855, observes, “Alas! not a day will pass but we can descry human qualities in the brute, and brute qualities in the human being; and, alas again, how often we find a balance of love, fidelity, truth, generosity, on the side of the brute!”Footnote 46 Alice Kuzniar claims that the “extravagantly intense value” of the pet dog from the nineteenth century onward “marks it as compensatory for an original loss.” Her explanation of this idea illuminates Florence's situation extremely well: “To own a pet means refusing to give up the lost object…. The dog … is a reasonably efficient substitute, who always exists in the immediate present in its companionship, love, and capacity for affection.”Footnote 47 This presentness is much like the timelessness of the young child. Florence adopts Diogenes in remembrance of her brother; loving the dog is a way of loving what her brother loved and mourning his passing while refusing to let his actions die out of the world. And yet the presence of Diogenes is also a reminder of death that Florence underlines every time she says his name: “Di, di,” she calls him, speaking a phrase that sounds a lot like a fatal injunction, maybe the wish for her own death, for her removal from the family line rather than integration into it.
As long as she is associated with the pet, Florence is marked off as external to the family both in the present and the future. Florence allies herself with others when her father is unavailable, and in that sense she complicates her fidelity to the ordinary family. With her servant and her dog, she seems to create an interspecies version of what queer theorists might call a chosen family, “founded on neither marriage nor blood.”Footnote 48 Katherine Bond Stockton observes that relationships with pet dogs are a prevalent trope in literature of the “queer child” because the dog offers the child a way of “confounding her parents and her future,” while delaying realizations that would disrupt the domestic order.Footnote 49 For Florence, loving Diogenes—an importantly unladylike attachment—allows Florence to defer her recognition of her ultimate conflict with her father and exist in a kind of static, perennial childhood, staving off the need for a break from her father while also suggesting that the break has already occurred. Unsurprising, then, that the text features not only the competition between Diogenes and Dombey but another between Diogenes and Walter, Florence's suitor. Once Walter becomes Florence's betrothed, Diogenes begins to disappear from the text. “[C]hoosing an animal as … a companion and non-reproductive … pleasures over sanctioned, reproductive sex,” Flegel argues, “ensures an end to the fantasy of oneself carrying endlessly into the future through one's progeny and inheritors, a fantasy implicitly linked to the continuation of one's race, class, nation, and species.”Footnote 50 Marriage and reproduction appear at odds with dog love.
I would like to suggest further that Diogenes’ voice shows how well expressiveness without words serves nondominative relationships, because he speaks where human characters, often rendered mute, cannot. In his first appearance in the novel, Diogenes is described as “hoarse” from meaningless barking no one hears, but soon his voice becomes much more expressive. The chapter in which Diogenes is brought to Florence also features her first serious rebuff by her father, which suggests a rivalry between the two that centers on verbal and nonverbal communication. We are told, “Diogenes the man did not speak plainer to Alexander the Great than Diogenes the dog spoke to Florence. He subscribed to the offer of his little mistress cheerfully, and devoted himself to her service” (282). The ancient tale is that when Alexander invited Diogenes to “Ask of me any boon you like,” the philosopher retorted, “Stand out of my light.”Footnote 51 Whereas the philosopher rejected showy authority, the pet dog clearly communicates his service to one who never engages in shows of power. Two pages later, Florence calls to her father, “Papa! Papa! Speak to me, dear Papa!”—but “He started at her voice, and leaped up from his seat. She was close before him with extended arms, but he fell back” (284). So Florence returns upstairs to her pet, falling on him: “Oh Di! Oh dear Di! Love me for his sake!” (286). Thanks to Diogenes’ wordless pledge, Florence accepts him as her companion, sibling, and child. Whereas the girl and her pet immediately have easy communication and intimacy, the failure of love between her father and herself is marked by silence.
Diogenes also “speaks” in a different way. Later in the novel, Diogenes “comes straightway at Mr Toots's legs, and tumbles over himself in the desperation with which he makes at him, like a very dog of Montargis. But he is checked by his sweet mistress.” Florence gently chides him, saying, “Down, Di, down. Don't you remember who first made us friends, Di? For shame!” Then the narrator voices the dog's own thoughts: “Oh! Well may Di lay his loving cheek against her hand, and run off, and run back, and run round her, barking, and run headlong at anybody coming by, to show his devotion. Mr Toots would run headlong at anybody, too” (627). That “Oh!” seems meant to represent Diogenes’ inward response to Florence's caution. Dickens uses human language—although, perhaps importantly, it is an expressive sound rather than a word—to ventriloquize the dog's experiences in a passage that suggests there is little difference between the human Toots and the faithful hound, both of them equally dogged in their dedication to their mistress.
Here Dickens also connects Florence's pet to a famous canine stage role in which a dog heroically and vocally fights for justice for his murdered master. The Dog of Montargis was a popular melodrama, originally French but performed in Covent Garden in 1814 and elsewhere throughout the nineteenth century. The story, as recounted in Edward Jesse's Anecdotes of Dogs (1846), is the fourteenth-century legend of a nobleman assassinated by a jealous subordinate.Footnote 52 The nobleman's dog, famous for his devotion to his master, witnesses the murder and successfully brings suspicion on the murderer. In one version, the king orders the accused man to a duel with the dog, in which the dog ultimately triumphs.Footnote 53 The English stage version calls more attention to communication. A mute young man is falsely accused of the murder, and because he cannot advocate for himself, only the dog's knowledge can save him; the dog ultimately brings down not the murderer himself but his more sinister accomplice and demonstrates fidelity to the dead master as well as a commitment to the mute servant. Through this companionate act of devotion, the dog makes himself heard and “compel[s] acknowledgment.”Footnote 54 In comparing Diogenes to the dog of Montargis, Dickens might seem merely to register the insistent quality of his faithful bark. After all, he attacks Toots, very far from the blackguard murderer taken down in the melodrama. Nonetheless, Diogenes resembles the dog of Montargis in the sense that he comes to the aid of a person incapable of self-defense—Florence, unable to speak in anger or accusation except through him.
The ability to speak, or not speak, is central to The Dog of Montargis. But The Dog of Montargis makes the point that animals’ lack of words hardly prevents them from communicating. Although animals are often attributed a kind of mute gaze associated with their vulnerability at human hands, the dog does not suffer in silence. He is an active, vocal agent who gets retribution for his own abuse as well as the murder of his human companion. From this perspective, the dog's expressive bark becomes a voice that demands attention. In Dombey and Son, the dog is far more communicative than many of the humans in the novel, whose verbal communications tend to go awry, like Toots, damaged by his overbearing education, who has “a voice so deep, and a manner so sheepish, that if a lamb had roared it couldn't have been more surprising” (169).Footnote 55 Not speaking is also a problem. As in The Dog of Montargis, the inability to speak highlights subservience. Florence is sometimes described as “mute” in relation to her father, resonating with the figure the dog defends in the melodrama: their relationship is often represented in terms of hearing, listening, and the failure to speak. When Florence is a child at her mother's bedside, we are told “a pair of creaking boots and a very loud ticking watch, embodied her idea of a father” (13). As their relationship deteriorates, Florence admits, “I don't often hear papa speak” (95) and tells Walter as he prepares to set sail, “Papa … will—will recover from his grief, and—and speak more freely to me one day, perhaps; and if he should, I will tell him how much I wish to see you back again, and ask him to recall you for my sake” (296). Here, her own broken speech indicates her hesitancy. And she is mute in facing him. When she sits with him in his study after his marriage, we are told she does not realize “That when she looked towards him, in the obscure dark corner, her speaking eyes, more earnest and pathetic in their voiceless speech than all the orators of all the world, and impeaching him more nearly in their mute address, met his, and did not know it!” (546–47). Although far from inexpressive, a mute address (as in The Dog of Montargis) cannot overcome the practices of those in power. By invoking classical speeches, this passage resembles the one that compares the speech of Diogenes the dog to the words of Diogenes the philosopher, but Dombey is impervious to the fluency of ancient rhetoric. No wonder, since for Dombey, Florence's voice, whether speaking or singing the songs she sang to little Paul, metaphorically represents the threat she poses to his dominance: “He almost felt as if she watched and distrusted him. As if she held the clue to something secret in his breast, of the nature of which he was hardly informed himself. As if she had an innate knowledge of one jarring and discordant string within him, and her very breath could sound it” (42). Dombey fears that expressive sound will diminish his power; his anxiety that Florence can forcibly extract expression from him demonstrates his investment in his own towering, silent self-control.
In fact, even for an omniscient narrator, what happens within Dombey's mind remains communicable only at a distance in a way that animal studies might help us understand. While some fiction attempts to depict the experience of being an animal, Dickens is not a particularly adventurous imaginer of animals’ inward lives, and he typically uses hypothetical language to describe the inward states of animals, making it clear, as in Thomas Nagel's work, that we cannot know or represent in human language what a nonhuman animal experiences or thinks. Perhaps Dickens would even say that animals don't exactly think at all. We are often told what an animal figure seems to think or feel. That “Oh!” on Diogenes’ behalf was an exception to this tendency. For a much more typical instance, toward the end of the novel, Carker's parrot rattles its cage “as if it knew its master's danger” (719; my emphasis). Dickens flags that whatever thoughts he attributes to an animal are a human narrator's extrapolation or projection. Perhaps surprisingly, then, Dickens uses this strategy when he represents Dombey's thoughts. We cannot know for sure what's happening in Dombey's mind, much like Nagel's bat.Footnote 56 The narrator wonders, “[W]hat were his thoughts the meanwhile? … Had he begun to feel her disregarded claims, and did they touch him home at last, and waken him to some sense of his cruel injustice? There are yielding moments in the lives of the sternest and harshest men…. The sight of her in her beauty … may have struck out some such moments even in his pride of life…. Some simple eloquence distinctly heard, though only uttered in her eyes … may have arrested them” (547; emphasis original). All this is speculative.Footnote 57 And when he does speak, especially as the novel goes on, it is not depicted through direct quotation. The indirect reporting of his speech makes him seem all the more forbidding and inaccessible. This way of narrating his thoughts and speech not only makes him more animal-like but reflects a check on the narrator's own fluent powers.
If human language is associated with domination and silence with being dominated, nonverbal expressiveness allows for a more equal relationship. Thus it is significant that Dombey's ultimate repentance toward Florence is barely articulated. The suicidal Dombey has holed up in the house, which Dickens specifies the rats have fled, almost becoming an animal himself, living on the scraps of food brought to him, speaking to no one. This is a far cry from the beginning of the novel, in which Dombey indulged fantasies of controlling nature: in chapter 1, “[T]he earth was made for Dombey and Son to trade in, and the sun and moon were made to give them light. Rivers and seas were formed to float their ships; rainbows gave them promise of fair weather; winds blew for or against their enterprises; stars and planets circled in their orbits, to preserve inviolate a system of which they were the centre” (12). Now nature has begun to reclaim both Dombey and his house. At last, however, his animal existence “was arrested by a cry—a wild, loud, piercing, loving, rapturous cry—and he only saw his own reflection in the glass, and at his knees, his daughter!” (910). He says almost nothing. He is least dominating when using language least; meanwhile, Florence's approach to her father is represented by a sound rather than a word. The relative wordlessness of this reunion again underlines the value of expression that is not symbolic language. To put it slightly differently, this reconciliation appears all the more expressively complete because it requires so little speech. Animalizing Dombey, and deemphasizing the power of speech, becomes a way for Dickens to insist on humility and connection.
There might be something deeply ironic about a powerfully articulate, nine-hundred-page novel that favors processes and experiences that are best when they require fewest words. But the novel doesn't silence itself. The loudest inhuman voice might be the narrator's own. We usually, and reasonably, think of a narrator as a human consciousness, but in many ways Dickens's third-person narrators are not quite human in their ability to shift scales of analysis and especially to occupy highly distanced viewpoints. If literary characters might be understood as companion species—other lives we dwell with—because they are not real, a narrator might be understood even more this way. This admittedly somewhat fanciful claim might be illuminated by connecting some of the narrator's most distinctive gestures to the impulses of the barking dog. This narrator often directly addresses its characters. Representing his writing as if it were speech, Dickens gives his narrator instincts and urges that seem more animal than deity. For instance, when Diogenes barks at Carker, the narrator praises Diogenes directly: “Well spoken, Di, so near your mistress! Another, and another with your head up, your eyes flashing, and your vexed mouth worrying itself, for want of him! Another, as he picks his way along! you have a good scent, Di,—cats, boy, cats!” (349). Here the narrator presents his words as if they were spoken directly to the dog, and to us as if we were the dog. His abundant expressivity not only suggests his freedom from the kinds of constraints that mute Florence, but his agitation presents his voice as an expression of defensiveness the dog shares.
The narrator also shows a reflexive faithfulness to Florence not unlike what Diogenes himself demonstrates. Think of passages like these, full of a barking repetition: “Awake, unkind father! Awake now, sullen man! The time is flitting by; the hour is coming with an angry treat. Awake! … Awake, doomed man, while she is near! The time is flitting by; the hour is coming with an angry tread; its foot is in the house. Awake!” (660). Or back to the scene of reconciliation, after Dombey sees Florence's reflection in the mirror, the narrator shouts, “Look at her! Look here!” (910). “Look at her!” and “Look here!” seem less a report of Dombey's mental language than the narrator's attempt to “train” him or modify his behavior. The narrator is not a domineering master; indeed, most of the narrator's injunctions to Dombey (like Florence's to Diogenes) go unheeded. After portraying this kind of urgency, defensiveness, and enthusiasm as a kind of canine devotion, the narrator protects his own authority from seeming all too controlling and controlled.
4. Speaking for the Crowd in Hard Times
Hard Times builds on the canine vocality of Dombey and Son to highlight the political and formal consequences of attunement to voice. This short novel has numerous agendas that converge in their critique of the excessive individualism which feeds a rationalized politics. While critical of the way two very different radical political practices, utilitarianism and Chartism, envision collective political life, Dickens appears persistently concerned with efficacy of speech as a way of constituting both the self and the social. The glibness of Gradgrind's approach to utilitarian education underlines its failures of imagination relative to Sissy Jupe's tentative, half-articulate storytelling, and the excessive eloquence of Chartist rhetoric reflects what Dickens portrays as the movement's vulnerability to the narcissistic charisma of its individual leaders, who whip up a false sense of collectivity. Moreover, Hard Times concludes with an allegory that valorizes animal communication to diminish the force of verbal critique of the social order.
The novel's resistance to a rationalized politics culminates in a tale of dog sociability when the circus-master Sleary tells the story of how Signor Jupe's trained dog, Merrylegs, found his way back to the circus by “speaking” with a national network of other dogs. This story functions as a crucial allegory within a novel that is itself compressed, fabular, and allegorical. As Sleary describes Merrylegs's surprising feat to the defeated “utilitarian” Gradgrind, society should privilege an unnamed set of values as mysterious as the “wayth of the dog.”Footnote 58 The ringleader's admiration for canine “ways” constitutes an importantly tacit account of political representation that remains ambivalent about the value of eloquence even while the story and indeed the novel itself depend on this value. The modes of communication attributed to dogs—language-like but nonverbal, intuitive yet rational, individual yet collective—capture the paradox of political representation for Dickens. The idea that Dickens downplays the efficacy of critical discourse does more than confirm Patrick Brantlinger's argument that “Dickens's most consistent social theory has to do with the limitations of social theories.”Footnote 59 Hard Times finds personhood best indexed by inarticulacy, even while a capacity for self-representation remains the governing framework by which persons count for the polity.
As with Diogenes, Merrylegs functions as an index of a domestic, sentimental vision at odds with the real constitution of the family, as when Sissy Jupe relates the story of how her father became angry with the dog when he began to struggle in his career as a clown. She relates,
Father, soon after they came home from performing, told Merrylegs to jump up on the backs of the two chairs and stand across them—which is one of his tricks. He looked at father, and didn't do it at once. Everything of father's had gone wrong that night, and he hadn't pleased the public at all. He cried out that the very dog knew he was failing, and had no compassion on him. Then he beat the dog, and I was frightened, and said, “Father, father, Pray don't hurt the creature who is so fond of you! O Heaven forgive you, father, stop!” And he stopped, and the dog was bloody, and father lay down crying on the floor with the dog in his arms, and the dog licked his face. (63)
Here the dog offers wise forgiveness in the face of the excessive exercise of human domination. By emphasizing the momentary gap between the human master's demands and the performance of the “highly trained animal”—a phrase Dickens repeats twice in the novel, along with the also-repeated phrase “learned dog” (279)—Dickens seems, as in Dombey and Son, to reject an overly domineering picture of animal training.Footnote 60 Dickens emphasizes Signor Jupe's ineffectuality at this moment despite his clear success at dog-training in the past. Here he hints that human-animal intimacies somewhat diminish human privilege. Merrylegs, meanwhile, demonstrates the persistence of memory and fidelity that his master lacks as he gropes for power as a last resort.
Many critics have pointed out that the purity of values associated with the circus do not constitute an adequate answer to the questions the novel implicitly and explicitly poses of how to organize a just polity. Still, Merrylegs is not merely an agent of pure love—rather, he demonstrates discursive practices that have political implications. As a part of the novel's deflation of human authority, Dickens portrays the dog as not just a presence but also a voice in a novel concerned with who speaks and in what kind of community. The dog's allegorical function extends beyond the family and toward the polity; although Merrylegs confirms primary affective relations experienced domestically between individuals, he also speaks as a “public dog”—the synecdochal index of the crowd—an unbounded and unmanaged yet distinctively English population.Footnote 61
Notably, three years after the novel's publication, a parody appeared in the magazine Our Miscellany, featuring Merrylegs more prominently than in the novel itself. Its author, responding to what he considered the “striking want of poetical justice” in the original novel, achieves a more melodramatic dénouement through the elevation of the dog as an agent of communication and revenge. In “Hard Times (Refinished),” a supernaturally agile Merrylegs leads a mob to hunt down and destroy Bounderby for his murder of Sissy Jupe's father. Evoking the feats of canine actors on the Victorian stage, not to mention the dog of Montargis, this Merrylegs seeks revenge by leaping in at a window sixteen stories off the ground to force the industrialist into the gears of his own machines. Tamara Ketabgian notes of this parody that it manages to highlight the strangely vital and vocal machinery. Even more than the hisses and screeches of the punishing machines, however, Merrylegs in this version loudly pursues his quarry; the text is full of lines like “‘Bow! wow! wow! G-r-r-r-r-r-r!’; or ‘G-r-r-o-o-o-o-w! Yap!’; or ‘Bow-ow-ow-o-o-o-o-o-w! Yap!’” that make the dog the primary interlocutor for the shifty Bounderby as he attempts and fails to evade justice.Footnote 62 By granting this minor canine character revenge on the major figure of excessive individualism, the parody exaggerates what is present if more subdued in Dickens: emphasis on a vocality that demands our attention.
To circle back to how Sleary describes Merrylegs's return to the circus after years of itinerancy: according to Sleary, the dog's reappearance “made me think whether that dog hadn't gone to another dog and said, ‘You don't happen to know a perthon of the name of Thleary, do you?’” In Sleary's allegory, Merrylegs becomes a member of a mobile, national dog-crowd that constitutes a discursive community, and this community collaborates to identify a “person.” To grant Merrylegs membership in a community for Sleary is to imagine him as engaged in a network of communication. But it is a different model of communication from the one the minimally articulate Sleary feels himself to be caught up in. As Sleary puts it, “[I]t hath a way of ith own of calculating or not calculating, whith thomehow or another ith at leath ath hard to give a name to, ath the wayth of the dog ith!” (282). “The ways of the dog” indexes ambivalence about the value of explicitness that the story itself depends on. If the novel ends with an allegory of community based on transparency of communication, it also calls attention to how the allegory is voiced. Gradgrind responds with silence, whereas Sleary marvels at his own volubility, which has a curious eloquence that benefits from the emphasis intoxication brings to his disability. Here the novel seems to erase its own demands for explicitness, exemplarity, or any aggrandized account of human communicative and cognitive capacities. Perhaps the novel appears to be, as James Eli Adams writes (in another canine context), “constantly trying to write itself into silence,” as if the most inclusive politics are those that cannot be quite articulated as a consciously held or rationally considered political stance.Footnote 63 Be like the dogs, Sleary implies, who have a transparent, national yet intimate, and inarticulate community without fully knowing it. If ventriloquizing or attributing a meaning to the dog's mode of communication would appear to undercut the importance of animal sounds, Dickens's insistence on the sonic dimensions of Sleary's own speech when he articulates this fantasy matter deeply.
Beryl Gray points out that it is not Sleary but Gradgrind who terms this mode of representation “instinctive” when he remarks that dogs’ instinct “is surprising” (281). From her perspective, the point of the parable is “that imaginations should be free to acknowledge and marvel at those things that are beyond the calculable.”Footnote 64 Yet Sleary's highly anthropomorphic emphasis on discourse in the canine world, burnished by his own hampered eloquence, also suggests the more pragmatic view that communication and political recognition are linked. Merrylegs's “ways” capture the value Dickens accords to both the inarticulable and to inarticulacy. Thus Gradgrind's introduction of the term “instinct” feels like an intruding gloss on the story, but that only underlines the parable's suspicion of a reflective or explicit framework, an implication that is consistent with nineteenth-century attitudes toward instinct. As Kathleen Frederickson has argued, Victorians invoked “instinct” as a supplement to “reason and deliberation,” an “anti-experiential epistemology” that “does not permit the consciousness that produces the reasonable, consistent self that could ground liberal political philosophy.” Frederickson observes that wage-workers, such as those with whom this novel is concerned, tended to be depicted as performing “what were agreed to be unnatural activities while being a primitive, class-marked instinctive type at the core.”Footnote 65 From this perspective we would expect the novel's worker characters to be the most marked as instinctive, and yet, throughout the novel, “instinct” is associated instead with privileged modes of only quasiverbal efforts toward communication—Stephen instinctively choosing political reticence, but also Louisa “instinctively” addressing Rachael (156), and Mr. Gradgrind self-defeatingly contemplating his own capacity for an instinctive response to his daughter's crisis (211). By coupling instinct with communication, Dickens emphasizes the expressive rather than representational aspect of an instinctive giving voice, evacuating its subjective dimension. To invoke an “instinctive” mode of discourse is to imply that the communication has no reflectively authorized semiotic content, but rather emerges as if automatically from an individual creature's species-being. Dickens seems to most valorize that speech which is least effective at representing any particular individual's inward experience and instead produces relation.
Thus when Sleary imagines the dog as an active, vocal agent, a public dog whose exercise of voice provides a portable model of communal belonging, his valorization of the modes of communication at work in the dog community speaks back to the novel's direct representation of political speech, whereby Dickens offers a deep skepticism toward the political deployment of eloquence. Christopher Vanden Bossche characterizes the primary tensions in the Chartist struggle for political recognition as the question of whether the Chartist collective wielded physical force—both as workers and as, potentially, machine-breakers or protesters—or moral force.Footnote 66 Yet for Dickens in this novel, rhetorical force seems a primary concern insofar as the worker Stephen Blackpool is marginalized within his own working community in part for when and how he chooses to speak. Criticism has tended to characterize Stephen as an artistic failure. Dickens compares Stephen with the charlatan organizer Slackbridge, who initially draws the narrator's ire largely for his articulacy—notable especially given the Chartists’ hope of gaining parliamentary representation that would allow elected members to speak for the working classes. After opening a chapter with the speaker's address to “the down-trodden operatives of Coketown” (136), Dickens writes, “the orator, perched on a stage, delivered himself of this and what other froth and fume he had in him. He had declaimed himself into a violent heat, and was as hoarse as he was hot.” The narrator notes with disgust, “[I]t was particularly strange, and it was even particularly affecting, to see this crowd of earnest faces, whose honesty in the main no competent observer free from bias could doubt, so agitated by such a leader” (137). What appears especially problematic to Dickens—that Slackbridge “substituted cunning for their simplicity, and passion for their safe solid sense” (137)—is not only the possibility of a crowd that leaves no mental room for individual exercises of judgment, but also the way this excessively forceful individual uses his capacity for smooth speech to stand apart from the crowd. Such demagoguery, for Dickens, threatens to be the answer to a troubling question Thomas Carlyle imagined revolting workers posing: “O, if the accursed invisible Nightmare, that is crushing the life of us and ours, would take a shape … any shape that we could see?” The only alternative they might find, Carlyle suggests, is violence. Daniel Stout, commenting on this passage, points out that these workers seek to “personify” their condition to give it “the handhold of a meaningful sense of individual agency.”Footnote 67 Yet Dickens's concern resonates at least as much with Carlyle's criticism of Chartism's opponents in Parliament when he described the MP as a “master of tongue-fence to National Palaver,” strongly implying that speech is pointlessly self-aggrandizing rather than instrumental to political action.Footnote 68 In both cases, rhetorically savvy speech is individuating, but at the expense of meaningful change in the political recognition of working people.
In contrast, when Stephen is called upon to defend himself against Slackbridge, he very hesitatingly says in dialect, “I'd liefer you'd hearn the truth concernin myseln, fro my lips than fro onny other man's, though I never cud'n speak afore so monny, wi'out bein moydert and muddled” (139–40). “It's all a muddle,” Stephen frequently remarks, emphasizing the limits of his ability to articulate his inchoate political analysis. If what we want from Stephen is a dynamic exploration of a worker's consciousness, Dickens may well fail us. But his emphasis on Stephen's expressive efforts offers a different direction. According to Kreilkamp, the novel borrows the immediacy of oral speech to validate its social intervention, “tap[ping] into the power and charisma of Chartist speech forms while draining those forms of their troubling political content.” He observes that the narrator of Hard Times imagines his own writing as voicing that creates an intimate public: “‘Dear reader!’ the novel concludes, shifting into a mimicry of vocal address.”Footnote 69 I would argue that, beyond illuminating Dickens's relatively conservative desire to deflate working-class claims for political enfranchisement or his negotiations with the status of print culture, this aspect of the novel underlines the centrality of a kind of expressivity as the basis of what we usually see as his rather disappointing politics.Footnote 70 To play with a formulation of Adams's, Dickens moves from political mistrust of speech to “a more comprehensive and radical skepticism concerning the authority of language” that becomes, also, skepticism about the kinds of subjectivity on which liberal politics was built.Footnote 71
5. Conclusion
We might think, finally, of the other inhuman voices in these novels. In Dombey and Son the Dombey offices are “within hearing of Bow Bells, when their clashing voices were not drowned by the uproar in the streets” (46); the Blimber house is “drowned in the tintinnabulation of the [dinner] gong” (176); and the Dombey house during Florence's solitary phase there is filled with “softened sounds and laggard air” (315). John M. Picker notes that this is “a novel dominated by and absorbed with the effects and intelligibility of sounds and voices.”Footnote 72 We are not only asked to see but also to hear London, from sizzling sausages in the Captain's frying-pan to ticking clocks (all too audible in the pressured environments of Dombey's house and Blimber's school but gently muffled in Sol Gills's instrument shop) to the shriek of the terrifyingly animal-like steam engine. Not all of these voices are natural, pleasant, or flattering to the human self-image. Think for instance of the railway, which has taken on a life of its own. Rather than attribute its frighteningly lively power to the machinations of human investors indifferent to the pace of life on a humane scale, Dickens zoomorphizes the train. Every object is vibrantly expressive—nothing is merely passive, merely an inert thing, to be bought or sold like a dog's collar. The novel's most expressive voice of all belongs to the waves, heard first of all by little Paul but later by nearly every character. Paul wants to know “what the waves are always saying”—a desire for mastery perhaps connected to his father's sense that “rivers and seas” are at his disposal—but their content is never revealed. Yet by suggesting that the waves are “always saying” something (227), Paul implies that their process of making meaning will never be complete. Perhaps their meaning is their resounding sound itself.
Hard Times features the resonant voices of the machines, described as vibrantly anguished “melancholy-mad elephants” (71)—but also the vocal public world where mingle together “the whooping of boys, the barking of dogs, the rumbling of wheels, the steps and voices of passengers, the shrill street cries, the clogs upon the pavement when it was their hour for going by, the shutting-up of shop-shutters” (123). Although these soundscapes are not only animal but more broadly resound with inhuman voices, for Dickens it is, above all, the signifying effects of animal voices that diminish the privilege associated with being a human individual. He imagines us “finite, uncomprehending, and forlorn in an alien universe” rather than its “centre,”Footnote 73 and if too often forlorn, still not without recourse for seeking a response.
Yet Dickens's emphasis on vocality, even as it redistributes political attention, raises an unanswered question of how a polis can represent the interests of those who cannot use language symbolically, a question pressed in political discourse of the twentieth century, for instance, by Hannah Arendt in On Revolution, and more recently and specifically in regard to animal citizenship by Will Kymlicka and Sue Donaldson as well as by the new materialists. Even if humans, in Bennett's words, “learn to hear or enhance our receptivity for ‘propositions’ not expressed in words,” translating auditory sensations into the requirements of representational politics leads—at least for Dickens—away from the direction adopted by the discourses of animal and human rights, which, construing the subject as disembodied and abstracted, deemphasized animals’ semiotic capacities.Footnote 74
Moreover, Dickens's emphasis on voice informs the status of the animal as allegorical figure rather than individual character, not only in the highly allegorical Hard Times, so figurative perhaps because it so celebrates the figure-making function of the human imagination, but also in the more loosely structured and more conventionally realist Dombey. Critics have objected to this dimension of Hard Times at least since Margaret Oliphant, who complained that its “fiction breaks down when it is […] compelled to prove and to substantiate a theory.”Footnote 75 Yet for Dickens, allegory unexpectedly leads away from merely reinforcing or reinventing human interiority—for instance, the capacity to wonder. Although this is a part of the tale, his emphasis on vocality also imagines the public sphere as shared affective space, reenvisioning political participation more horizontally. Representing canine voices, then, allows Dickens to explore alternatives to the realist novel's purported commitment to the individual human mind—even through the allegorical mode that would seem to confirm it.
