Dickens III

Abstract

Even in those novels where the economy of trade and the vocabulary of Medical Police are most emphatic, they do not assume absolute authority over life and narrative. Dickens regarded them as an agency of social reform which would not succeed without — and might sometimes even hinder — the benevolent influence of love and sympathy. The two agencies define themselves against each other. In Bleak House, we learn what true sympathy might be by observing the insufficiency of Medical Police. When Alan Woodcourt examines the body of Captain Hawdon, Dickens remarks on ‘the young surgeon’s professional interest in death, noticeable as being quite apart from his remarks on the deceased as an individual’ (p. 191). Woodcourt does not allow his scientific detachment to obscure the sympathy he feels for an unfortunate man; the two attitudes define and support each other. When Esther and Ada visit some poor brickmakers with Mrs Pardiggle, their instinctive compassion has a greater effect than her charity. She wields an improving book ‘as though it were a constable’s staff’, and takes the whole family into custody. ‘I mean into religious custody, of course; but she really did it as if she were an inexorable moral Policeman carrying them all off to a station-house’ (p. 158). Medical and moral policing have their uses, but they are not in themselves enough.KeywordsMedical PoliceGreat ExpectationYoung SurgeonAbsolute AuthorityTime BucketThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.