Joyce and Dickens, Especially Martin Chuzzlewit

Abstract

That Joyce's work frequently shows an awareness of Charles Dickens's has long been recognized. Joyce himself told Samuel Beckett that "a Joyce fan could also be a Dickens fan." In the Padua essays discovered by Louis Berrone, Joyce positioned himself in opposition to what was then the widespread critical disparagement of Dickens's work, admiring his "creative fury," especially in imagining such vivid characters as the Mrs. Gamp of Martin Chuzzlewit. He also showed a familiarity with Dickens's seldom-read Pictures From Italy, which includes a passage notably similar to the opening of "Circe." This essay considers A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man in light of Dickens's two autobiographical novels, David Copperfield and Great Expectations. It proposes that the opening chapters of the former, at the time by far the best-known kunstleroman in English literature, established a narrative pattern of traumas inflicted and then revisited and reconsidered in memory, repeated in A Portrait, and that the latter, in beginning not with the protagonist's documented birth ("I Am Born") but with his first memories, is followed in Joyce's book: "Once upon a time" turns out to be not the words of someone about to tell us a story but the words heard by someone being told a story. Rather unexpectedly, the Dickens work most in evidence, particularly in Finnegans Wake, is Martin Chuzzlewit. As J. S. Atherton found, FW I.2, especially in its sarcastic account of Earwicker's origins, often draws on the language of that novel's shabby-genteel characters. The hostile American "payrodicule" reporter of FW I.3, assaulting the embattled HCE as a "lion" in his "teargarten," echoes the American orator of Martin Chuzzlewit who wants to lynch the Irish "Liberator" Daniel O'Connell for the crime of supporting the liberation of America's slaves. Most strikingly, the language of Mrs. Gamp, the character singled out in Joyce's Padua essay, which often anticipates the language of Finnegans Wake, is, in fact, loaded with neologisms ("Prooshious" for "Prussian," "widdered" for "widowed") that will later show up in that book. As a midwife disquietingly in partnership with the undertaking business, Mrs. Gamp also forecasts a theme which will run through Joyce's work, from "The Sisters" to the washerwomen of Finnegans Wake, including the "Frauenzimmer" of "Proteus," with their "gamp" umbrella and their (supposed) midwife's bag holding a "misbirth … hushed in ruddy wool."