And now the haunch of mutton vapour-bath, having received a gamey infusion, and a last few touches of sweets and coffee, was quite ready and the bathers came.… Bald bathers folded their arms and talked to Mr. Podsnap.… sleek whiskered bathers … lunged at Mrs. Podsnap and retreated; prowling bathers went about looking into ornamental boxes and bowls.… bathers of the gentler sex sat silently comparing ivory shoulders.
By the time the reader has reached the naked shoulders, the bath has been superseded by the bathers themselves. Early in the book, Mrs. Podsnap is compared to a rocking horse: “Quantity of bone, neck and nostrils like a rocking horse.” Over a hundred pages later, she is seen in the act of “rocking.” Metaphor is metamorphosis, and the changes are so swift that everywhere you look, people and things are shuddering as if the world won’t sit still to be named.
Dickens also creates movement between the animate and the inanimate. The inanimate often looks human, and people often look like objects. When Fascination Fledgeby tries to gain entrance to a house, the reader is told that “he pulled the house’s nose again and pulled and pulled … until a human nose appeared in the doorway.” The metaphorical nose is followed by a literal nose, and the comic tension it creates undermines the status of both, making the “real” nose appear alien and disembodied, as if it were floating alone in the dark space of the doorway. The two “noses” are confused through similarity and proximity in a form of contagious magic — the stuff of animism. But Dickens’s animism isn’t truly magical. His nose doesn’t disguise itself and run around St. Petersburg assuming dangerous social pretentions, as Gogol’s does. It just hangs there. What does happen is that the seemingly stable boundaries between the man and the door are confounded. The ordinary world of houses and doors and door knockers and human bodies is not fixed. The lines of perception float.
Living in this world means instability, means being part of a shuddering dance of words that refuses easy definition. By tracing a single minor character, we can begin to understand how literal and metaphorical meanings play themselves out in the book and enfeeble conventional boundaries. From the descriptions of Silas Wegg, the reader is led through a maze of connections that find their way to the heart of the book’s obsession with the body and its abstract associate: the self. Wegg, a shady street vendor, is often called just “the wooden gentleman.” One of many characters in Dickens who has lost a limb, Wegg “seems to have taken to his wooden leg naturally.” Silas suffers from what might be called creeping wood syndrome: the material of a dead limb is encroaching on his entire body, but this syndrome isn’t limited to Wegg. He exists within a lavishly developed network of wood metaphors that splinter in all directions. Wood links him to the city in general, which the narrator calls a great “sawpit,” blinding and choking its citizens, to “sawdust”—which links him to all dust — the overwhelming real and metaphorical presence in the novel. Dust mounds loom on the horizon — shapeless hills of valuable waste. Boffin, the “Golden Dustman,” digs through dust mounds for objects not yet reduced to unintelligible particles. Silas Wegg seems to attract waste. The corner where he sells his wares is both chaotic and dirty: “… shelterless fragments of straw and paper got up revolving there, when the main street was peace; and the water cart as if it were drunk or short-sighted came blundering and jolting around it, making it muddy when all else was clean.” Boffin’s dead master, Harmon Senior, miser and dust mogul, made an empire from dust. Dust is good business, and it turns a profit, but it is still garbage, a fact which links Wegg to urban pollution in general, as well as to the corruption of the city’s prominent “lords and gentlemen and honourable boards,” who are accused of “dust shovelling” and “cinder raking” and producing a “mountain of pretentious failure.” The route from Wegg to leg to wood to sawpit to dust to pollution, to paper, money, and city government is surprisingly direct. And each link in this metaphorical chain produces more associations, equally rich and simultaneous, which find their way back to the human body and how to articulate it.
As it turns out, the wooden gentleman has stayed in touch with his amputated limb and goes calling on it. Walking through the door of Mr. Venus’s gloomy shop of bones, Wegg inquires:
‘And how have I been going on, this long time, Mr. Venus?’
‘Very bad,’ says Mr. Venus uncompromisingly.
‘What am I still at home?’ asks Wegg, with an air of surprise.
‘Always at home.’
The “I” here is the bone, and Wegg’s linguistic contortion is both hilarious and profound. To arrive at this “I,” he must in fact turn himself inside out and adopt the third person as the first, but the comedy is also logical. At what point does the part cease to be I? Where is the threshold between the “I” and the “not-I”? Mr. Venus, who registers no surprise at Wegg’s pronominal misuse, is an articulator of bones, a man who makes his living piecing together death waste. Therefore, it also comes as no surprise to the reader to discover that Mr. Venus has “dusty hair.”
The absurdity of Wegg’s wandering “I” returns when John Harmon tries to reconstruct the events that led up to his near death by drowning. This passage not only makes explicit the naming difficulty announced by Wegg but revives in new form the wood metaphors associated with Wegg, metaphors that have only an impoverished meaning when read in isolation. The comedy of Wegg’s amputation becomes the image of an axe felling a tree and annihilation of the self:
‘I was trodden upon and fallen over. I heard a noise of blows, and thought it was a woodcutter cutting down a tree. I could not have said that my name was John Harmon — I could not have thought it — I didn’t know it — but when I heard the blows, I thought of the woodcutter and his axe, and had some dead idea that I was lying in a forest.’
Reading Wegg is like reading the novel in miniature — a plunge into a pool of language in which narrative and metaphor mingle and meaning accumulates until it overflows. As a model, Wegg’s character suggests, first, that there is a relation between bodies going to pieces and the disintegration and pollution of London in general, and, second, that this erosion, both corporeal and environmental, is somehow connected to dislocations in language.
2 The Framework of Society
Good order depends entirely on the correctness of language.
— Confucius
Naming people and things is fraught with difficulty in this novel. Dickens wills us back to the dawn of first questions, to what it means to call the world by name. Identification is Mr. Venus’s business, and it’s not a simple one. His murky shop brings to mind the novel’s initial images of obscurity. Wegg looks into “the dark shop window” and sees only “a muddle of objects vaguely resembling pieces of leather and dry stick, but among which nothing is resolvable into anything distinct.” Venus, however, is undaunted. “I’ve gone on improving myself,” he says, “until both by sight and by name, I’m perfect.” Dickens insists on the double meaning of articulation by making Mr. Venus an encyclopedist of the dead, a comic version of the Enlightenment man classifying decay. Wegg is given a verbal tour of the shop by its owner:
‘A wice. Tools. Bones, warious. Skulls warious. Preserved Indian baby. African ditto … human warious. Cats. Articulated English baby. Dogs. Ducks. Glass eyes, warious. Mummied bird. Oh dear me that the general panoramic view.’ Having so held and waved the candle as all these heterogeneous objects seemed to come forward obediently when they were named and then retire again.