Heir Conditioning: Dickens Planning Ahead

Abstract

Heir Conditioning:Dickens Planning Ahead Robert Tracy (bio) The "purposive" man is always trying to secure a spurious delusive immortality for his acts by pushing his interest in them forward into time: […] by pushing always forward into the future, he strives to secure an immortality. John Maynard Keynes, "Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren." "Everything is some kind of plot, man." Thomas Pyncheon, Gravity's Rainbow. How to end The Pickwick Papers after serial publication in 20 monthly installments (Apr. 1836 – Nov. 1837) "was as little known to [Dickens] as to any of his readers" (Forster 88).1Not until Dombey and Son (1846–48) did he begin preparing careful working plans for each new novel. Before Dombey, how did Dickens end earlier novels without an exit strategy? How would he finally clarify mysterious events that readers had been speculating about for 19 months? His solution was to invent a will, imposing eccentric conditions an heir must meet to inherit, explaining retroactively a story's many mysteries in its final installments. Reporting disputed will cases at Doctors' Commons made him familiar with eccentric bequests: his "POSTSCRIPT in lieu of Preface" for Our Mutual Friend in 1865 tells readers that "[T]here are hundreds of Will Cases […] far more remarkable than that fancied in this book," in the archives at Doctors' [End Page 44] Commons. An eccentric will, invented after serial publication began, provides an exit strategy for Oliver Twist, Nicholas Nickleby and The Old Curiosity Shop. Dickens's imagined testators think like novelists. They write wills that control heirs as novelists control fictional characters. He prepared working plans for every novel after Dombey, but continued introducing wills to explain the mysteries he had invented. Dickens's 1837 preface to Pickwick explains what he learned about serial publication. A novel's "general design" should be "simple enough" to survive "this detached and desultory form of publication." Each number should be "complete in itself," but "form one tolerably harmonious whole." While Pickwick had not been "artfully interwoven or ingeniously complicated," prefaces to later novels emphasize their woven design or pattern – terms Dickens preferred to plot (Little Dorrit, 1857 Preface). Forster met Dickens at Christmas 1836; he soon began urging him to decide how a novel would end before beginning publication. "I was responsible for [the] tragic ending" of The Old Curiosity Shop, he declares, and quotes Dickens's thanks for "your most valued suggestion, to keep my thoughts upon the ending of the tale." Dickens "had not thought of killing [Little Nell], when, about half-way through [publication], I asked him to consider whether it did not necessarily belong even to his own conception, after taking so mere a child through such a tragedy of sorrow, to lift her also out of the commonplace of ordinary happy endings, […] All that I meant he seized at once, and never turned aside from it again" (Forster 150–51). Oliver Twist (Bentley's Miscellany, Feb. 1837–Apr. 1839) begins with Oliver's birth in a workhouse, "badged and ticketed, […] a parish child […] humble half-starved drudge." His mother's death, immediately after giving birth, leaves him without identity and caste: "[I]t would have been hard for the haughtiest stranger to have fixed his station in society" (Oliver Twist I: ch. 1, Feb. 1837, italics mine). Dickens's reference to "station in society" hints that Oliver may not be a typical workhouse child. His language, moral instincts and Cruikshank's illustrations emphasize his difference from Fagin's boys: their "'looks convict 'em when they get into trouble, and I lose 'em all. With this boy, properly managed, […] I could do what I couldn't with twenty of them'" (Twist IX: ch. 19, Dec. 1837). Bentley's readers were well into Oliver Twist before Dickens decided that a will, imposing specific conditions on an heir, could be revealed to explain "More Mysteries Than One" in the final installment: Monks's identity and Fagin's attempts to make Oliver a criminal. Not until the twelfth installment (Bk. II, chap. 26, Mar. 1838), when "a mysterious character," enters, would readers encounter Monks and learn he has already been conspiring with Fagin to involve Oliver in a robbery. Writing to...