Dickens was a lifelong critic of the iniquities of a social system that produced criminals and then punished them - his contempt being most succinctly summed up in Mr Bumble’s pronouncement in Oliver Twist that ‘The law is a ass’ and expressed at length in Bleak House, his great satire of the courts of chancery and their self-perpetuating property disputes. Elsewhere his fiction is full of prisons, judges, trials, lawyers, wills and lawsuits, focused on the City of London, where the system had its fulcrum: when he was a teenager, Dickens spent time working there as a solicitor’s clerk and considered a legal career. Not least because he was a superb public speaker, he might well have made a magnificent barrister had he pursued the idea.
Although he stood aside from the hang ’em-and-flog ’em tendency, he was far from soft on convicted criminals. He approved of hard labour in prisons and felt satisfaction at witnessing a ‘determined thief, swindler or vagrant, sweating profusely at the treadmill or the crank.’ In Chapter 32 of Great Expectations, Pip momentarily sounds like a Daily Mail columnist when he makes ironic reference to a period where ‘felons were not lodged and fed better than soldiers (to say nothing of paupers) and seldom set fire to their prisons with the excusable object of improving the flavour of their soup’. Once you had committed a criminal act, Dickens believed, you had to take responsibility for it, and incarceration was more about expiatory retribution and repentance than reform.
Yet Dickens also had a deep imaginative empathy with the criminal mind. In his earlier novels, he relished creating and inhabiting villains such as Quilp, Fagin, Bill Sikes and Uriah Heep, whose wickedness is caricatured and exploited for melodramatic effect, but he also understood how people were from childhood pushed or drawn into crime, in the face of heartless Poor Law institutions such as workhouses and appallingly inadequate housing, education, sanitation and moral guidance.
Magwitch is one such, as the story he tells of his life in Chapter 42 makes clear. Without parents, a home or schooling, he grows up ‘a ragged little creetur’, who ‘first became aware of myself, down in Essex, a thieving turnips for a living’ and whose teenage career of tramping, begging and stealing interspersed with odd jobs results in several prison sentences and earns him the reputation of being ‘a terrible hardened one’. His defence is ingenuous: ‘They always went on agen me about the Devil. But what the Devil was I to do? I must put something into my stomach mustn’t I?’
Magwitch falls prey to the wiles of Compeyson, a smooth public-school educated fraudster – ‘that man got me into such nets as made me his black slave’. When they are rumbled and come up for trial, the Judge feels that Compeyson, the well-spoken young gentleman with good character witnesses, has been led astray by the older Magwitch, whose prison record suggests that he is ‘hardened’, and Magwitch ends up with a sentence twice as long as Compeyson’s (despite having as his lawyer the marvel Jaggers, whose golden touch seems to have failed him on this occasion).
Far from being ‘hardened’, however, Magwitch fulfils the cliché of the soft and beating heart beneath the rough exterior. Flinching (understandably) at his uncouth manners and appearance, Pip succumbs to the common prejudice of suspecting him of worse crimes than he had actually committed (‘I shuddered at the thought that for anything I knew, his hand might be stained with blood’, Chapter 39). But although Magwitch can react like a ferocious wild animal when provoked, he is never a monster, and the only physical violence of which he is guilty is directed against Compeyson. His Christian name of Abel is significant too - a reference to the story in Genesis of the innocent shepherd who falls victim to the wrath of to his brother Cain.
In contrast, the novel contains two villains from Dickens’ earlier repertory. No exploration of their formative past is required, and no mercy is extended to them: both Compeyson and Orlick are simply bad lots, born nasty and motivated by revenge. (Orlick is another name with religious overtones, suggesting ‘Old Nick’, a demotic title for the devil.) Magwitch, on the other hand, is emphatically not vindictive. Showing gratitude towards the little boy he frightened in the churchyard becomes the great romance of his life, and his only desire, as an old man who knows that his time will soon be up, is to see Pip (whom he regards in a quasi-paternal light) for himself.
Miraculously, Dickens’ treatment of Magwitch doesn’t seem sentimental. This is partly because Magwitch never shows any penitence for what he has done – he feels, with a shrug that having been sucked into a vortex, he had no alternative - and partly because his extravagant gift to Pip is the gesture of someone deluded, if not mentally unhinged, by a fantasy. Facing death, he ponders ‘over the question whether he might have been a better man under better circumstances’ (Chapter 56), but he never whimpers or complains. He is a character with hard edges, and his warm-heartedness doesn’t extend beyond Pip. But Dickens obviously felt that someone who had served his time in Australia, worked hard and honestly, given away his wealth and shown a sincere determination nor to be ‘low’, is deserving of the reader’s compassion.
The trial in Chapter 56 dramatises this forcibly, demonstrating Dickens’ strongly held belief that there are two realms of law – the law of the land, a faulty, fallible and often corrupt system which cannot be relied on to deliver justice (in fact, from 1834, Magwitch would no longer have faced the death penalty for the ‘crime’ of returning); and the law of Christian morality, which is absolute. In Magwitch’s case, the law of the land does what it has to do in condemning him to death, but in prose of incomparably moving power, Dickens turns the court room into an eschatological scene in which we are reminded that God, not man, is the judge of whom we should be in awe:
The sun was striking in at the great windows of the court, through the glittering drops of rain upon the glass, and it made a broad shaft of light between the two and thirty [convicts] and the judge, linking both together, and perhaps reminding some among the audience, how both were passing on, with absolute equality, to the greater judgment that knoweth all things and cannot err. Rising for a moment, a distinct speck of face in this way of light, the prisoner {Magwitch] said, ‘My Lord, I have received my sentence of Death from the Almighty, but I bow to yours” and sat down again.
The implication is that Magwitch has found salvation, and he dies reconciled and smiling, happy in the illusion that Pip has inherited his fortune.
This is a simple tale, rooted in New Testament morality. Far more complex - and illustrative of Dickens’ mature genius - is the ambiguity surrounding the lawyer Jaggers and his clerk Wemmick. In the words of the critic John Lucas, ‘the two men are highly disturbing creations’: what are we meant to think of them, whose side are they on, are they good or bad men? Those are questions which the novel never completely answers.
What they embody is the hypocrisy which Dickens saw at the heart of the legal system. For Jaggers, good and bad, right and wrong don’t enter the equation.’ He knows the law is a game and he acts entirely in accordance with its rules – that’s his job, that’s what he is paid for. For a fee, he will turn murder into manslaughter, lies into truth. He will not become emotionally involved, he suppresses any personal opinion, and like Pontius Pilate, he constantly washes his hands of responsibility. Jaggers’ absorption in his role is complete, twenty-four hours a day: even the furnishings in his bachelor apartments in Gerrard Street have ‘an official look’, and his bookcase is full of titles relating to ‘evidence, criminal law, criminals, biography, trials, acts of parliament and such things.’ Even out of court, he doesn’t talk to people so much as cross-examine them forensically. He is, as Wemmick puts it in Chapter 24, predatory: ‘a man-trap … Suddenly – click – you’re caught.
Wemmick’s dissociation, in contrast, is schizophrenic. He plays the game for the duration of the working day only, his role being to adopt a superficially friendly attitude to the clients and thereby ensure that they pay their bills. In Chapter 32, Wemmick takes Pip on a tour of the prisoners in Newgate, where in lieu of cash, Wemmick accepts in payment what he calls ‘portable property’, coolly negotiating the receipt of two pigeons from a client of Jaggers who is about to be executed.
They shook hands again, and as we walked away Wemmick said to me ‘A Coiner [forger], a very good workman. The Recorder’s report is made to-day, and he is sure to be executed on Monday. Still, you see, as far as it goes, a pair of pigeons are portable property, all the same.’
But as he walks home, Wemmick’s ‘square wooden face’ and ‘post-office smile’ softens, and he gradually turns back into a charming, kindly, regular sort of chap who looks after his Aged P, courts the prim Miss Skiffins and tends the garden of a cosy crenellated cottage complete with flagstaff, cannon and drawbridge which both suggests the familiar proverb that ‘An Englishman’s home is his castle’ and also symbolizes the (Walworth) wall that he has built around himself. Here the portable property has become a little parlour collection of curiosities which Wemmick proudly shows Pip as though the objects were nothing more gruesome than the seashells of a beachcomber. Wemmick is ultimately a delightful character – in his Walworth guise, he is extremely kind to Pip and sensitive to his predicament, and by allowing him a happy ending with Miss Skiffins, Dickens indicates that we are right to be charmed by him. But in his ability to live by two moral codes, is he not alarmingly reminiscent of that concentration camp official who sent Jews to the gas chambers in the morning and spent the evening playing Schubert on the piano?
What is most chilling about Jaggers and working-hours Wemmick – and what fascinates Dickens about them - is their refusal to acknowledge the difference between innocence or guilt, or to invest any moral element into their professional dealings with crime, even if life and death are at stake. Acting on behalf of their clients and winning a case, for a fee, is the bedrock of their ethics. Jaggers doesn’t lie – he merely observes the letter of the law, and within that frame, he is prepared to manipulate the facts, use false witnesses and argue that black is white. His private view of the truth is neither here nor there, and he is at pains to shut his ears to any attempt to expose them to it. This is brilliantly dramatised in the scene in Chapter 20, when he crosses the street in Little Britain only to be accosted by some defendants who are on the verge of letting slip incriminating facts that he doesn’t want to hear:
‘We thought, Mr Jaggers – ’ one of the men began, pulling off his hat.
‘That’s what I told you not to do!’ said Mr Jaggers. ‘You thought! I think for you, that’s enough for you. If I want you, I know where to find you. I don’t want you to find me. Now I won’t have it. I won’t hear a word.’ …
But Dickens springs a surprise in Chapter 51, where in Jaggers’ chambers, the masks threaten to become unstuck. In front of Jaggers, Pip blurts out that Wemmick has ‘a pleasant home’ where he indulges in ‘innocent cheerful playful ways’ – a revelation that discombobulates both Jaggers and Wemmick, making them tetchy with each other – and Jaggers ‘puts the imaginary case’ that someone (in fact, himself) has acted with disinterested compassion on behalf of the child Estella. Suddenly, Jaggers is in danger of revealing what he really thinks and feels: ‘Put the case that pretty nigh all the children he saw in his daily business life, he had reason to look upon as so much spawn, to develop into the fish that were to come to his net – to be prosecuted, defended, forsworn, made orphans, be-devilled somehow.’
Some critics have felt that this strikes a false note, but others find it brilliantly tantalising. Jaggers is still only ‘putting the case’ and makes ‘no admissions’. The mask may slip, but it does not fall: he never directly admits that this is what he has done. Yet the sense that the dam holding back whatever inner self he possesses is on the verge of being breached, releasing a deep and thoughtful compassion is electrifying – one of the most psychologically subtle and powerful moments in the novel.
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