Bleak House
(1853)Charles Dickens
Esther SummersonJoBucket
The DedlocksMr. ChadbandMrs. Jellyby Richard Carstone
The Woman in White
(1860)Wilkie Collins
Anne CatherickMarian Halcombe
Sir Percival GlydeCount FoscoFrederick Fairlie
The Way We Live Now
(1875)Anthony Trollope
Paul MontagueMr. BrehgertJohn Crumb
Augustus MelmotteMarie MelmotteSir Felix Carbury Dolly Longestaffe Georgiana Longestaffe Lord Nidderdale
Dorothea’s socially unacceptable marriages and her lack of achievements in order to recognise that, in its domestic and circumscribed way, her character is indeed no less saintly than Theresa’s must have been: “Her finely-touched spirit had its fine issues, even though they were not widely visible. Her full nature spent itself in channels which had no great name on the earth. But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life and rest in unvisited tombs.”
Lines that may be stretched to define a whole conception of the noveclass="underline" an artistic medium to help us understand and appreciate the value of every hidden life that rests in an unvisited tomb. “If art does not enlarge men’s sympathies, it does nothing morally,” knew George Eliot.
In Zadie Smith’s White Teeth (2000), we meet Samad, a middle-aged Bangladeshi employed as a waiter in an Indian restaurant in London. He is treated roughly by his superiors, works until three in the morning and has to wait upon coarse customers who magnanimously reward him with fifteen-pence tips. Samad dreams of somehow recovering his dignity, of escaping the material and psychological consequences of his status. He longs to alert others to the riches that lie buried within him, unsuspected by patrons who barely look up when he takes their orders (“Go Bye Ello Sag, please” and “Chicken Jail Fret See wiv Chips, fanks”). He imagines wearing a sign around his neck, a white placard that would read, in letters large enough for the whole world to see:
I AM NOT A WAITER. I HAVE BEEN A STUDENT, A SCIEN-TIST,A SOLDIER, MY WIFE IS CALLED ALSANA, WE LIVE IN EAST LONDON BUT WE WOULD LIKE TO MOVE NORTH.I AM A MUSLIM BUT ALLAH HAS FORSAKEN ME OR I HAVE FORSAKEN ALLAH, I’M NOT SURE. I HAVE A FRIEND— ARCHIE—AND OTHERS. I AM FORTY-NINE BUT WOMEN STILL TURN IN THE STREET. SOMETIMES.
He never does acquire such a placard, but he gets the next best thing: a novelist who supplies him with a voice. The entire novel in which Samad appears is in a sense a giant placard that will help to make it just that much harder for its readers ever again to order Chicken Jail Fret See in such a casually indifferent, casually dehumanizing manner.
The best novels expand and extend our sympathies. Taken together, they may in fact stand as one long procession of signs that tell the world:
I AM NOT JUST A WAITER, A DIVORCEE, AN ADULTERER, A THIEF, AN UNEDUCATED MAN, A PECULIAR CHILD, A MURDERER, A CONVICT, A FAILURE AT SCHOOL OR A SHY PERSON WITH NOTHING TO SAY FOR HERSELF.
3.
Paintings, too, can challenge society’s normal understanding of who or what matters.
Jean-Baptiste Chardin painted his Meal for a Convalescent in circa 1738. A modestly dressed woman stands in a sparsely furnished room, peeling an egg for a sick person we cannot see. It is an ordinary moment in the life of an ordinary person. Why paint such a thing? For much of Chardin’s career, critics persisted in asking that question. It irked them that this gifted artist devoted all his attention to loaves of bread, broken plates, knives and forks, apples and pears and working- or lower-middle-class characters going about their business in humble kitchens and living rooms.
These were certainly not the sorts of subjects that a great artist was supposed to paint, according to the canons laid down by the French Academy of Fine Arts. Upon the academy’s founding by Louis XIV, in 1648, its officers had ranked the different pictorial genres in a hierarchy of importance. At the very top was history painting, with its canvases expressing the nobility of ancient Greece and Rome or illustrating biblical morality tales. Second came portraiture, especially of kings and queens. Third was landscape, distantly followed by what was dismissively described as “genre painting,” depicting scenes from the domestic lives of commoners. This artistic hierarchy corresponded directly with the social hierarchy of the world beyond the artists’ studios, where a king sitting on a horse and surveying his estates was deemed naturally superior to a plainly dressed woman peeling an egg.
Jean-Baptiste Chardin, Meal for a Convalescent, c. 1738
But within Chardin’s art lies an implicit subversion of any vision of life that could dismiss as valueless a woman’s domestic labours or even a piece of old pottery catching the afternoon sun (“Chardin has taught us that a pear can be as full of life as a woman, that a jug is as beautiful as a precious stone,” observed Marcel Proust).
The history of painting provides Chardin with a tiny coterie of fellow spirits, and us with a handful of great correctives to our customary notions of importance. One of the more notable, for our purposes, was the Welsh painter Thomas Jones, who worked in Italy, first in Rome and then in Naples, between 1776 and 1783. It was in Naples, in early April 1782, that Jones completed what may be two of the finest oils on paper in the whole of Western art, Rooftops, Naples (which hangs in the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford) and Buildings in Naples (in the National Museum of Wales, Cardiff).
The views captured by Jones remain a familiar feature of many Mediterranean cities and towns, where houses are pressed together along narrow streets and give out onto the naked flanks of neighbouring buildings. On a warm afternoon, the streets tend to be quiet and the windows half shuttered. One may glimpse the outline of a woman moving inside a sitting room or the dark mass of a man asleep on a bed. Occasionally one may hear the cry of a child or the rustle made by an old woman as she hangs laundry on a terrace with a rusting handrail.
Jones shows us how the intense southern light falls on walls of chipped and weathered stucco, bringing out every indentation and fracture, the painted surface evoking the passage of time as effectively as the rough, worn hands of a fisherman. Soon April will give way to May, and then the blank, dead heat of summer to furious winter storms, which themselves, after an apparent eternity, will once again cede their place to tentative spring sunshine. Jones’s stone and stucco are close kin to clay and plaster and to the fragments of pitted rock that stud so many Mediterranean hillsides. The confusion of buildings in these works affords us an impression of a town in which a multiplicity of lives is unfolding in every window—lives no less complicated than those portrayed in the great novels, lives of passion and boredom, playfulness and despair.
Thomas Jones, Rooftops, Naples, 1782
How seldom do we notice rooftops; how easily are our eyes drawn instead to the more flamboyant attractions of a Roman temple or Renaissance church. But Jones has held up the ignored scene for our contemplation and rendered its latent beauty visible, so that never again will southern rooftops count for nothing in our understanding of happiness.
The nineteenth-century Dane Christen Købke was another who strove, through his painting, to subvert conventional notions of what should be considered valuable. Between 1832 and 1838, he tirelessly explored the suburbs, streets and gardens of his native Copenhagen. He painted a couple of cows ruminating in a field on a summer afternoon, and caught two men and their wives disembarking from a small sailing boat on the shore of a lake. (It is evening, but darkness seems in no hurry to settle over the land; an echo of daylight hovers for an apparent eternity in the vast sky, presaging a gentle night on which windows may be left open, and a lucky few will sleep outside on blankets spread across the grass.) He reproduced the view from the roof of Frederiksborg Castle, looking out onto a neat patchwork of fields, gardens and farms, an image of an ordered community content to enjoy the snatched pleasures of daily life.