No Plots for Old Men

Abstract

Collected in Sketches by Boz (1836), Charles Dickens’s melancholy story “Scotlandyard” chronicles “the advance of civilization” and “improvement” of the eponymous locale after the erection of a new bridge across the Thames in 1832 (88). White tablecloths appear at the neighborhood eating place, the fruit pie maker acquires the genteel moniker “pastrycook,” and the “loud song and the joyous shout” of the coal heavers no longer shakes the roof of the public house (89). Alongside this improvement in manners materialize more visible signs of progress: the boot-maker adds a first floor to his business, a jeweler sets up shop, and the once conservative tailor hires a coterie of uniformed assistants. Yet near the end of this sketch appears the figure of an old man: “Amidst all this change, and restlessness, and innovation, there remains but one old man. . . . Misery and want are depicted in his countenance; his form is bent by age, his head is gray with length of trial, but there he sits from day to day, brooding over the past; and thither he will continue to drag his feeble limbs, until his eyes have closed upon Scotland-yard, and upon the world together” (89–90). Set against the background of Scotland-yard’s bustle, the anonymous old man is Dickens’s way of representing that which has been left behind by the youthful narrative of development that modernizes the world around him. The old man endures alongside this meaningful development, asserting his own stubborn existence as proof that he is not only the excess of modernity but also that which exceeds it. Most critics assume that the developmental plots of modernity are primarily concerned with the maturation of youth. In what Franco Moretti identifies as a central means of understanding the “bewitching and risky process” of modernity, the bildungsroman relates the story of a youth who passes into adulthood amidst great struggle, eventually reintegrating into the society from which he or she has been alienated (5). In the English bildungsroman, “Youth acts as a sort of symbolic concentrate of the uncertainties and tensions of an entire cultural system,” and so it must be overcome in the process of achieving a stable maturity (Moretti 185).1 Reaching a very different conclusion, Patricia Meyer Spacks nevertheless claims that for Victorian novelists like Dickens “the adolescent . . . becomes a version of the self,” a point of “predominant wistful identification” (195). For Spacks the problem is that overcoming the dangers of adolescent aggression and sexual energy merely results in “[t]he necessity, the discipline, the sorrow of maturity” (217). Providing different accounts of the progression from youth to maturity, Moretti and