Status Updates From The Violent Effigy: A Study...

When the Dickensian maiden does exhibit any consciousness of sex , it’s obligatory that it should strike her all of a quiver. Marrying a child is pleasurable; but marrying a frightened child, more so.

Believing this,the Victorian male would naturally want to marry a child,or a woman as childlike as possible.Little Dorrit is even child size:‘Arthur found that her diminutive figure,….gave her the appearance of being much younger than she was.A woman,probably of not less than 22, she might have been passed in the street for little more than half that age.’
Obv’ly a recommendation for those in search of 11yo brides.

Moreover, by describing as innocent and pure, heroines who are in reality dangerously retarded, he leaves us to infer that even normal sexuality is guilty or unclean. This seems to be what he believed, or wanted to be thought to believe.

Many Victorian girls, as we know, were so sheltered from the world that they had little conception of what marriage entailed until their wedding night. They were often revolted and terrified by the discovery. Florence and Little Dorrit are true to this tradition. What is disconcerting is that Dickens should plainly esteem it an ideal state of affairs.

A live sister would have been a serious enough rival to poor Mrs Dickens, especially as she could remain unsullied in Dickens’ eyes by the connubial embraces Catherine herself had to endure. But a dead one was utterly invincible. For ever young, and with her halo for ever untarnished, Mary nestled in Dickens’ heart while his wife grew older and more clumsy.

For the seventeenth century the angels were created all long before the first man, and immensely excelled man in power and intellect. They were not remotely like a dead child. In Paradise Lost they wear armour and hurl mountains about. The deterioration of the Angel is a further sign of Victorian religion ebbing into sentiment.

The assimilation of Nell to an Angel is meant literally, and this is another way in which the Dickensian dwarfs offer a debased religion to their customers. We are given to understand they actually become angels after death. This, too, would have seemed preposterous to Milton or Donne.

But having stuffed the novels with noble sentiment, he retained a troop of comics to punish and deride it.

Once we come to recognise this sinister doubleness or reversibility which lurks within even Dickens’ snuggest images of order and security, we shall find it easier to understand how the writer who craves for a bird bride in a shipshape home, is also the writer who needs to celebrate destruction and anarchy.

Indeed any child from a poor background in a dickens novel who finds itself suddenly washed and laundered has good reason to suspect that it’s days are numbered.

Dickens, who saw himself as the great prophet of cosy, domestic virtue, purveyor of improving literature to the middle classes, never seems to have quite reconciled himself to the fact that violence and destruction were the most powerful stimulants to his imagination.