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‘Snoring for the Million’: Dickens the Sleep-watcher

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Sleep and the Novel

Abstract

This chapter examines the unruly presence of sleeping bodies in the writings of an author who liked to think of himself as a professional insomniac. Sleeping bodies are glimpsed everywhere in Dickens’s fiction, and his gaze is particularly captured by looked-at sleepers; he repeatedly invites us to contemplate the rich currents of symbolic meaning that flow between those who watch and those who sleep. Nowhere is his fascination with sleep-watching more obsessively exhibited than in Barnaby Rudge (1841), a novel in which the spectacle of sleep—especially the sleep of servants—is a persistent object of narrative comedy and visual mastery, but also perceptual uncertainty and political anxiety. Dickensian sleep, I suggest, harbours dormant political possibilities that lie beyond the mastery of his insomniac gaze.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    See, for example, The Old Curiosity Shop [1841], ed. Elizabeth M. Brennan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 309–10; Our Mutual Friend [1865], ed. Michael Cotsell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 214; Bleak House [1853], ed. Stephen Gill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 365. Further references to all three novels will be given parenthetically in the text.

  2. 2.

    Malcolm Andrews, Dickensian Laughter: Essays on Dickens and Humour (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 77.

  3. 3.

    Williams, The Politics of Sleep, x.

  4. 4.

    Cited in John Foster, The Life of Charles Dickens (London: Chapman and Hall, 1911), 2: 162.

  5. 5.

    Charles Dickens, ‘Lying Awake’ [1852], in Dickens’ Journalism, Volume Three: ‘Gone Astray’ and Other Papers from ‘Household Words’, 1851–59, ed. Michael Slater (London: Dent, 1998), 88–95 (89). Further references will be given parenthetically in the text.

  6. 6.

    Scrivner tellingly observes that the essay enacts a ‘fracturing of Cartesian unified subjectivity’ into ‘wakeful and sleepy binaries’. ‘That Sweet Secession’, 284.

  7. 7.

    Charles Dickens, ‘Night Walks’ [1860], in ‘The Uncommercial Traveller’ and Reprinted Pieces (London: Oxford University Press, 1958), 127–35 (127). Further references will be given parenthetically in the text. For a reading of ‘Lying Awake’ and ‘Night Walks’ in the context of a broader discussion of the phenomenon of nocturnal walking in Dickens’s life and works, see Matthew Beaumont, Nightwalking: A Nocturnal History of London. Chaucer to Dickens (London: Verso, 2015), 361–72, 397–99.

  8. 8.

    In ‘Dickens through Blanchot: The Nightmare Fascination of a World without Interiority’, in Dickens Refigured: Bodies, Desires and Other Histories, ed. John Schad (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996), 22–38, Timothy Clark approaches Dickensian insomnia via the phenomenology of Maurice Blanchot. See also Scrivner, Becoming Insomniac, 159–63, for a reading of Dickens’s ghost story ‘The Signal-Man’ (1866) as a representative text of Victorian sleeplessness, one in which the advent of ‘an industrialized, railway-riding society’ means that ‘a kind of insomniac vigilance is required of everyone to keep the whole system functioning properly’ (162).

  9. 9.

    Taylor Stoehr’s psychoanalytic study Dickens: The Dreamer’s Stance (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1965) reads the later novels ‘as if they were dreams’ (65) but has almost nothing to say about Dickensian sleep beyond a dismissive glance at the author’s interest in mesmerism (272–74). Harry Stone’s promisingly titled The Night Side of Dickens: Cannibalism, Passion, Necessity (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 1994) focuses on the variously dark and disturbing themes indicated in its subtitle; it has relatively little to say about sleep, insomnia and night-time in Dickens’s writings. Two of the only critics to address Dickensian sleep in sustained ways both focus their attention on Oliver Twist. Mary Anne Andrade, in ‘Wake into Dream’, The Dickensian 86, no. 1 (1990): 17–28, shows how an oscillation between states of sleep and wakefulness is crucial to the novel’s narrative structure, and notes that ‘Oliver undergoes too many levels of unconsciousness, semi-consciousness, and consciousness, for the reader to be able to distinguish one from the other’ (23). David McAllister, in ‘Subject to the Sceptre of Imagination: Sleep, Dreams, and Unconsciousness in Oliver Twist’, Dickens Studies Annual 38 (2007): 1–17, also focuses on the hero’s curious passivity and uncanny dreams, but concludes, rather misleadingly, that Dickens’s preoccupation with sleep begins and ends with that novel (‘never again would his fascination with these topics spill over into his fiction’ [15]).

  10. 10.

    J. E. Cosnett, ‘Charles Dickens: Observer of Sleep and Its Disorders’, Sleep 15, no. 3 (1992): 264–67.

  11. 11.

    Charles Dickens, The Pickwick Papers [1837], ed. James Kinsey (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 46–52. Further references will be given parenthetically in the text.

  12. 12.

    Charles Dickens, ‘Snoring for the Million’ [1842], in Dickens’ Journalism, Volume Two: The Amusements of the People and Other Papers: Reports, Essays and Reviews, 1834–51, ed. Michael Slater (London: Dent, 1996), 51–55 (55).

  13. 13.

    See Fred Kaplan, Dickens and Mesmerism: The Hidden Springs of Fiction (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975) for a book-length study of Dickens and mesmerism. Steven Connor, ‘All I Believed is True: Dickens Under the Influence’, 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century 10 (2010): 1–19, provides a searching and incisive account of the subject.

  14. 14.

    The pioneering analysis of father–son relations in the novel is in chapter 3 of Steven Marcus, Dickens: From Pickwick to Dombey (London: Chatto, 1965). See also Dianne F. Sadoff, ‘The Dead Father: Barnaby Rudge, David Copperfield, and Great Expectations’, Papers on Language and Literature 18 (1982): 36–57 and Kim Ian Michasiw, ‘Barnaby Rudge: The Since of the Fathers’, ELH 56 (1989): 571–92.

  15. 15.

    Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities [1859], ed. Andrew Sanders (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 282.

  16. 16.

    Andrews, Dickensian Laughter, 106.

  17. 17.

    Charles Dickens, Barnaby Rudge: A Tale of the Riots of ’Eighty [1841], ed. Clive Hurst (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 406. Further references will be given parenthetically in the text.

  18. 18.

    John Carey, The Violent Effigy: A Study of Dickens’ Imagination (London: Faber, 1973), 13.

  19. 19.

    Northrop Frye, ‘Dickens and the Comedy of Humours’, in The Stubborn Structure: Essays on Criticism and Society (New York: Routledge, 1980), 218–40 (235).

  20. 20.

    Paul Stigant and Peter Widdowson read Barnaby Rudge against the backdrop not only of the Chartist campaigns of the 1830s but also ‘the agitation to secure the Reform Bill, including in 1831 the great urban riots of Bristol, the bitter trade union conflicts of 1833 and 1834, the campaign from 1830 to 1836 to establish a free and radical press, the struggle to inaugurate some measure of Factory reform, the numerous local campaigns against the creation of the New Police, and finally after 1836 the battles, particularly in Lancashire and the West Riding, against the implementation of the New Poor Law’. ‘Barnaby Rudge—A Historical Novel?’ Literature and History 2 (1975): 2–44 (27).

  21. 21.

    Sigmund Freud, ‘A Metapsychological Supplement to the Theory of Dreams’, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. James Strachey (London: The Hogarth Press, 1957), 14:219–35 (234).

  22. 22.

    Forster, The Life of Charles Dickens, 220–21.

  23. 23.

    James R. Kincaid, Dickens and the Rhetoric of Laughter (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), 107.

  24. 24.

    Clark, ‘Dickens through Blanchot’, 37 n.28.

  25. 25.

    Freud, ‘A Metapsychological Supplement to the Theory of Dreams’, 222.

  26. 26.

    Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist, or The Parish Boy’s Progress [1838], ed. Kathleen Tillotson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 230–31.

  27. 27.

    Charles Dickens, Dombey and Son [1848], ed. Alan Horsman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 643–44. Further references will be given parenthetically in the text.

  28. 28.

    Connor, ‘Dickens Under the Influence’, 16; emphasis in original.

  29. 29.

    See Kaplan, Dickens and Mesmerism, 65.

  30. 30.

    William Hazlitt, ‘On Dreams’, in The Selected Writings of William Hazlitt, ed. Duncan Wu (London: Pickering and Chatto, 1998), 15–21 (20).

  31. 31.

    Steinberg, ‘Picasso’s Sleepwatchers’, 102. On the subject of the sleep-watcher’s unnatural appetites, Harry Stone includes, in his exhaustive discussion of cannibalism in Dickens, the scene in The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870) where the choirmaster and opium addict John Jasper steals into Edwin’s sleeping quarters and watches his slumbering form ‘with a fixed and deep attention’. Charles Dickens, The Mystery of Edwin Drood [1870], ed. Margaret Cardwell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), 36. Jasper’s sleep-watching gaze is described by Stone as ‘half-motherly, half-cannibalistic’. The Night Side of Dickens, 254.

  32. 32.

    Charles Dickens, David Copperfield [1850], ed. Nina Burgis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).

  33. 33.

    McAllister, ‘Subject to the Sceptre of Imagination’, 5.

  34. 34.

    See Marcel Mauss, ‘Techniques of the Body’ [1934], in Incorporations, ed. Jonathan Crary and Sanford Kwinter (New York: Urzone, 1992), 455–77. For some sceptical remarks on Mauss and sleep, see Wallace, Scanning the Hypnoglyph, 97–98.

  35. 35.

    See Thomas Stone, ‘Sleep’, Household Words, 8 February 1851.

  36. 36.

    For a shrewdly cautionary discussion of sleep and servants, see Stephen Thomson, ‘Ancillary Narratives: Maids, Sleepwalking, and Agency in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture’, Textual Practice 29, no. 1 (2015): 91–110. Focusing on the figure of the sleepwalking maid across a range of nineteenth-century literary, cultural and medical texts, Thomson argues against a too-easy dialectical recuperation of the servant’s subjectivity that would make ‘even the most abject non-agent into a hero of an epos of subversive energy’ (94).

  37. 37.

    Stigant and Widdowson, ‘Barnaby Rudge—A Historical Novel?’ 17.

  38. 38.

    Eric Lindstrom, ‘“Dog Sleep”: Creaturely Exposure in De Quincey and Wordsworth’, Criticism 55, no. 3 (2013): 391–421, provides a valuable exploration of the ways in which the trope of sleep is deployed, in the work of Dickens’s literary predecessors, to negotiate the undecidable relations between human and animal. It is significant, in this regard, to recall that the exponent of ‘dog sleep’ in Barnaby Rudge is the locksmith Gabriel Varden (35)—that is, a professional guardian of secure barriers between inside and outside, self and other.

  39. 39.

    This chaotic deprivatization of sleep in Barnaby Rudge runs counter to the ‘story of privatization’ that Tom Crook reads in the history of Victorian sleeping space in ‘Norms, Forms and Beds: Spatializing Sleep in Victorian Britain’, Body & Society 14, no. 4 (2008): 15–35 (32). Crook’s broadly Foucauldian discussion focuses on the Victorian bedroom as a ‘bio-sociological problem space’ (34) and on the regulation, disciplining and individuation of the sleeping body in nineteenth-century medical discourse, domestic arrangements and institutional architecture.

  40. 40.

    Michasiw, ‘Barnaby Rudge: The Since of the Fathers’, 582.

  41. 41.

    Dickens’s emphasis on the anarchic qualities of sleep among the poor and dispossessed might be understood as a glimpse of the flipside of the elaborate codes of ‘sleep-civility’—the shared practices of hospitality that were designed to procure comfortable, good quality sleep—that developed in fashionable circles in the eighteenth century. See Handley, Sleep in Early Modern England, 155–76.

  42. 42.

    Steinberg, ‘Picasso’s Sleepwatchers’, 99.

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  1. Department of English and Creative Writing, Lancaster University, Lancaster, UK

    Michael Greaney

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Greaney, M. (2018). ‘Snoring for the Million’: Dickens the Sleep-watcher. In: Sleep and the Novel. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-75253-2_3

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