Mr F’s Aunt: A Laughing Matter

Abstract

M R F'S A UNT: A LA U G H IN G M A T TER GEORGE WING University of Calgary I n Little Dorrit there is a scene in London set about 1836. In a house off the Gray's Inn Road, a formidable assembly eat a substantial dinner while not too far away an inarticulate plasterer and his family, the Plornishes, are near the point of starvation. Patriarchal Casby is presiding over the dinner of soup, fish, mutton, steak, and apple pie; present at his table is Pancks, who in working hours harasses Plornish and the other wretched of Bleeding Heart Yard much as an earlier Newman Noggs (whom Pancks resembles in essential goodness and fortuitous servitude) hunts debtors in similar slums of London in Nicholas Nickleby. A bitter novel of human greed? Undoubtedly. Present also is Flora who represents Dickens's caricatural vengeance on Maria Beadnell, who turned him down when he was a young reporter and whom he met many years later, fat and fatuous, under much the same circumstances as Arthur Clennam, who is also present at the Casby dinner, has just met again Flora, coincidentally plump, garrulous, and pathetically girlish. A novel of sour sexual relationships? Yes. Present also is Flora's legacy (from her deceased husband, Mr Pinching), in the shape of an old woman, grotesquely comic - exceptional even in Dickens's range of old women - who has the acronymic title of Mr F's Aunt. Between the fried soles and the mutton Mr F's Aunt inconsequentially announces: "When we lived at Henley, Barnes's gander was stole by tinkers.''1 A novel in which "pessimism and hatred disallow comedy"?2 Not so un­ doubtedly. Humour is difficult to determine and analyse in terms of literary criticism. If we are polymathic enough we can get into psychology, social history, anthropological linguistics, and tribal behaviourisms and kill a joke stone dead. Laughter is being intellectualized and made sombre in the academic world. We notice, in a fascinating essay, that Mr F's Aunt is, as we shall see in more detail shortly, only grudgingly allowed to be "in part a humorous character"; her statement is "poison" and "she is nearly pure symbol.''3 In many parts of the English-speaking world her remark would not be considered funny. In many parts of England, which holds Mr Finching's legacy in fee, it would not nowadays be considered funny. Nor would an earlier description, in the novel, of the street in which Casby's house is situated: "[the street] had set off from that thoroughfare [Gray's Inn Road] with the intention of running at one heat down into the valley, and up again to the top of Pentonville Hill; but... English Studies in Ca n ad a, h i, 2, Summer 1977 208 had run itself out of breath in twenty yards and had stood still ever since ... it remained there for many years, looking with a baulked countenance at the wilderness patched with unfruitful gardens and pimpled with eruptive summer-houses, that it had meant to run over in no time" (p 144). We may well find a poisonous symbol here - the scene could intimate corruption of big business, the inefficiency of the Circumlocution Office, the maladministration of the Marshalsea and Dickens's bad marriage - and perhaps the sorry socio­ political consequences of the Gordon Riots of 1780. I quote this passage, however, as a contrast to Mr F's Aunt's statement. The comic images (if not pure symbols, and if comedy is not disallowed) in the Casby street passage achieve their essential comedy from hyperbolic invention, a dash of satire, and a fierce, child-like fancy - among other things. The humour of the Henley gander is different and I should like to come to that later. Humour is universal. Sartre, not really celebrated for his jests, said at the age of seventy: "You must keep in the laughter. You must put: 'An accompaniment of laughter.'"4 Humour is universal but its consistency, its chemistry, its architecture of hilarity are not. Both Alan Wilde and J.R. Kincaid, whom I have briefly quoted above, are not only very able scholars...