Gospel & Universe 🪐 At The Wild & Fog
🛠 IN PROGRESS 🚜
A Misty Maze, But Not Without a Plan
Chapter Overview - Literary & Historical Context
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Chapter Overview
On this page I outline the way Dickens’ Bleak House (1852-3) fits into my larger argument about science, religion, and agnosticism. I set up a timeline, from Pope’s 18th century Deist concept of God and nature, to Dickens’ early 19th century mix of science, religion, and early liberalism, to Forster’s early 20th century mix of secularism, agnosticism, mysticism, and late liberalism.
On numerous occasions I use the image Dickens gives us at the start of Bleak House: a megalosaurus waddling up Holborn hill in central London. This image represents the outdated lumbering aspect of English Law (and more specifically The Chancery), yet it also suggests a break in the timeline which explains our reality. This timeline stretches from Sumer, Babylon, and Athens to Classical, Medieval, and Renaissance Rome, and from there to the Enlightenment and Modernism. I’ll focus on the later part, from the Enlightenment, where intellectuals and writers still by and large believed in specific doctrinal notions of the soul and God, to the Modern Period, where science and existentialism break the old timeline and make these theological doctrines harder to hold onto.
In making this argument I want to stress that religion isn't equal to doctrinal belief. From an agnostic perspective, modern science loosens the hold of doctrine — whether this doctrine be theological or positivist. An agnostic perspective thus allows for a wide exploration of religion's core, which I take to be connection to soul, deity, nature, and/or universe. To connect to nature and universe, it helps to understand them as deeply and ruthlessly as possible, and not merely make conjectures about them. In this sense, it's because of science, rather than despite it, that spiritual and mystical exploration is as valid as ever.
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In the next section, Pope: A Mighty Maze, I focus on the 18th century Deist perspective of Alexander Pope, who believes that God dominates over the wild aspects of nature. In What the Dickens and the succeeding chapters I’ll examine the subtle way that Dickens omits this cosmic optimism. Instead, he suggests that religion be stripped of its grand otherworldy claims, that it face the claims of science, and that it embrace the human virtues of fairness, compassion, and charity.
The title of this chapter, At the Wild and Fog, derives from the contrast between the visions of Pope and Dickens. For Pope, Nature is a “wild, where weeds and flowers promiscuous shoot,” yet it’s a wild controlled by God’s Plan, as puzzling and invisible as that Plan may be. Bleak House presents an even more puzzling and ambiguous notion of this Plan, quite likely as a result of recent studies in geology, palaeontology, primatology, philology, and the natural sciences. A fog now covers the landscape, even in the most advanced city on Earth, London. And here is where the image of Dickens’ megalosaurus is striking: in the second sentence of the novel, in the middle of the quasi-mythic, quasi-existential fog of early 19th century London, a dinosaur waddles up Holborn hill.
What Pope sees in terms of God’s Plan, Dickens sees in terms of science and quasi-religious imagery. He describes London in terms of post-Deist, pre-Naturalist, man-shrinking vistas of cosmology, which include cosmic dust, stars, Creation, the Fall, and floods (Love Amid the Fog). Adjacent to this type of language lies several interconnected fields of science (God Among the Scientists) — specifically the persistent hammer of geology (Hutton’s Hammer), the geological fault lines that describe Sir Leicester’s fears of the cracking of the class system (Sir Leicester’s Apocalypse), the quasi-scientific description of ghosts (Spooky Energies), as well as the half-human monkeys of primatology (Jardine’s Monkeys). Dickens’ language and symbolism aren’t made confident by his use of science, but rather intriguingly ambiguous. This I think is largely because scientific ideas weren’t yet fully developed and therefore couldn’t provide him with a more solid base. To Dickens, the base seems like the geology of Hutton, with faults and tectonic shifts that are both invisible and unpredictable.
In Darwin’s God I argue that it would take Darwin’s theory and his secular language before popular writers could assume a steady scientific base beneath their feet, and before they could write about the origin of life without referring to religion. Written at the earlier end of the decade of the 1850s, Bleak House contains a strange penetration of scientific language and symbolism. And at times Dickens seems to be mocking science as much as he is using it to replace zealotry and superstition.
While Dickens’ vision of the universe is deeply influenced by science, he still sees fundamental things like justice and morality in terms of religious concepts, as in God & the Devil at the Inns of Court, where we find a doddering Lord Chancellor and a devilish Tulkinghorn. We also see religion in the mocking deification of Lady Dedlock and in the praise of Ester & Jarndyce (Angels Fallen and Angelic), as well as in the contrast between the doomed Chesney Wold and the light-filled Bleak House (Two Houses Divided).
By and large Dickens strips religion of its outdated ceremony, zeal, fervour, and cant. He then clothes it with the richer vestments of love, understanding, and compassion — none of which are encouraged by the day’s fossilized institutions of law, justice, or religion. Again, these fossilized institutions are incarnated in the strange image of the megalosaurus, who rises from the dust of Time as a puzzle amid the dust and fog of London. Dickens makes his points against fossilized religion in Snagsby, whose simple, admirable compassion and whose common sense contrasts with the mindless evangelism of his wife, Chadband, Mrs. Jellyby, and Mrs. Pardiggle (The Far-Sighted Curse). A similar point is made by Skimpole, whose airy philosophizings and simple-mindedness make him less an idiot savant than just a plain idiot. Skimpole is almost as useless to the common good as the self-important aristocrats and assorted dandies and hangers-on (The Uselessness of Some). The exception to Dickens’ excoriation of the self-praising and opportunistic elite is his depiction of Woodhouse’s compassion, Jarndyce’s decency, and Sir Leicester’s gentlemanly virtue (A Secular Redemption). These characters make it clear that Dickens isn’t against legal, religious, or class systems per se, just against the abuses these allow to those of low character.
This final point leads into my discussion of A Passage to India, where a liberal, secularized take on religious values surfaces in a clearly agnostic form (A Passage to Forster). Forster depicts a dual vision of reality: he shows us a cosmos at once indifferent and full of mystical possibility (From London to the Marabar Caves), and he shows us a world divided by nation and culture yet united by understanding, friendship, and mysticism (Only Connect). In Forster’s humanistic, liberal, agnostic world, one can give or take specific religious ideas, yet one ought to give love and freedom, both individually and collectively.
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The Literary and Historical Context
In At the Wild & Fog I look at the origins of agnosticism amid the rise of liberal society in mid-19th Century England — before and after the publication of Dickens’ Bleak House in 1852-3. The novel came out around the time when the reform laws of 1832, 1867, and 1884 were expanding the voting franchise, and around the time when the proofs of astronomy, geology, paleontology, evolution, archaeology, and philology were starting to come together, forming a scientific timeline that was at odds with the traditional biblical timeline.
The 14 years from 1859 to 1872 are central to agnosticism for at least three reasons: 1. Darwin articulated the mechanics of evolution (1859), 2. Darwin’s champion Huxley defined the term agnosticism (1869), and 3. the decipherment of Gilgamesh threw into demonstrable doubt the centrality and the timeline of the Bible (1872). While philosophers and writers had previously challenged the biblical account of human origins, from around 1872 onward the case for the scientific timeline of human existence was demonstrably stronger than the case for the traditional religious timeline. For many, science began to replace religion by supplying an evidence-based account of how humans got to be who they are. Not that science explained everything — and not that it has to this day. Only that it displaced the notion that the Earth was created in 4004 BC by a Creator who mysteriously got others to ghost-write a book all about the details.
For Dickens in 1852-3, however, this evolutionary and philological perspective was yet to be published. Dickens’ historical moment, combined with his honesty, doesn't allow him to arrive at any sort of complete and coherent religious or scientific vision of life. Rather, he arrives at a vision which is more foggy and ambiguous. Or, to use a word that Dickens and Forster use repeatedly in Bleak House and A Passage to India (1824), he arrives at a more muddled vision.
As I will argue in a later chapter, The Fiction of Doubt, the ambiguous, muddled vision of Dickens and Forster anticipates that of Salman Rushdie’s character Dr. Aadam Aziz in Midnight’s Children (1981). Aziz gets his name and occupation from Forster’s Dr. Aziz, who is the victim of British prejudice in A Passage to India. Rushdie’s Aziz returns to Kashmir in 1915 after having his religious certainties battered by his European studies in medicine. In attempting to pray the way he used to, Aziz is “knocked forever into that middle place, unable to worship a God in whose existence he could not wholly disbelieve.” While Rushdie won’t be a large part of this chapter, his first five novels are in some ways a postmodern continuation of the agnostic vision we find in Forster’s A Passage to India.
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Much of the larger context of this chapter lies in the general notion that skepticism, empiricism, agnosticism, and existentialism develop out of historical circumstances. This can be seen in Dickens’ Bleak House, which lies between the Middle Ages on one side and Modernism on the other. That is, it lies between the doctrine of the Medieval priest on one side and and the charitable, secularized vision of the liberal democrat on the other. There is, of course, a great deal of dissent, protestation, and free-thinking in between these widely-spaced poles, and even at the poles, there was always a great deal of diversity. It’s therefore difficult to say more specifically that Dickens lies between the Enlightenment and the late Victorian period, although I suggest this when I situate him between the Deism of Pope and the agnosticism of Forster. Perhaps it’s best to expand the timeline and say that he borrows from the philosophies of Greece and Rome: he retains vestiges of the stoic belief in Nature & universal mind, while at the same time he confronts the rational objections of the skeptic and the epicurean.
I attempted a similar type of historical contextualization in Locke’s Double Key. There I argued that philosophy and the historical moment were interconnected: the empirical model of the mind developed by John Locke at the end of the 17th century goes hand in hand with his liberal politics, which were possible after the Glorious Revolution (whereas Hobbes’ authoritarian dog-eat-dog version of politics made sense during the previous violent decades). Locke’s empirical model explains the way the human mind works, and his political model explains the way the social fabric might allow such a liberated mind to operate freely in relation to other members of society.
In terms of religion, however, Locke was still deeply influenced by traditional Christianity. There was, as of yet, no documented scientific alternative: while the scientific method was well-established, next to nothing was known about evolution, Assyriology, or genetics. In this sense Locke was like James Hutton, who in his ground-breaking work in geology, Theory of the Earth (1788), instinctively sided with religious doctrine whenever his scientific theory seemed to question traditional belief. This instinctive — or rather conditioned — response changes in the latter half of the 19th century, when the theories of Hutton, Lamarck, and Cuvier come together with natural selection and the decipherment of cuneiform (and the subsequent study of Assyriology).
The megalosaurus in Bleak House is helpful here: it signals both the fossilized old systems and a harbinger of the new liberal, rational, scientific systems which will eventually make sense of the dinosaur’s appearance.
In 1852-3 Dickens couldn’t know about Darwin’s theory of 1859, yet he could know about Hutton’s 1795 study of geology, Lamarck’s 1809 study of zoology, Cuvier’s 1813 study of dinosaurs and paleontology, and Jardine’s 1833 study of monkeys. Because he wrote Bleak House a hundred years before our understanding of evolution and genetics, the key components of the scientific explanation was still to come. In 1852-3 the average Christian wasn’t completely free to contemplate the idea that humans are animals who share a great deal with other animals, at least, not without constantly being reminded — by scholars like Jardine — that humans were spiritually superior to apes. And yet, like monkeys, we’re products of our senses, and we rely on habit and exploration.
Darwin’s timeline is devastating — and yet also inspiring — in this context: it argues, and to a large degree proves, that our physical bodies didn’t come from a magical birth out of dust or clay, but rather from a slow, grinding process of hundreds of thousands of years of mutations, in which time we struggled to lift ourselves from water and dust, from fore-limbs and mere survival to think about our place in the vastness of Nature, awe-struck at the nearly impossible process that got us to scratch a stylus in clay, build libraries and temples, and look out into the universe with a Hubble telescope and wonder why.
Like monkeys, we’re specks in a greater totality, although we’re more fortunate (and at times less fortunate) than monkeys in that we can radically change our environment and we can ponder what it all means. In Bleak House, Dickens sees grandfather Smallweed in terms of a monkey, and looks down on him as if he were no better than a greedy, run-down machine. Dickens can’t understand the place of humans in the scheme of animals, and yet he mirrors an initial and muddled sort of understanding. Likewise, Dickens jokes about Professor Dingo’s persistent little hammer of geology, chipping away at the structures of society. Yet behind his use of primatology and geology lies a very big challenge, one that only becomes more clear once the timelines of these two disciplines come together in the theory of evolution.
Dickens’ Megalosaurus in the fog intimates a Modern scientific timeline, one informed by recent discoveries in geology and paleontology — and before that, Copernican astronomy and Newtonian physics. Unlike the Medieval or literal timeline of the Bible, this new scientific timeline will accommodate Darwin’s evolution of 1859 and Huxley’s agnosticism of the 1860s. What I find particularly interesting, from the point of view of agnosticism, is that Dickens’ critique of antiquated institutions — symbolized by the lumbering megalosaurus — is often seen in terms of antiquated religion. He includes some of the idealism and beauty of religion, yet he also attacks its weaknesses satirically. By mocking the religious zealotry of Jellyby and Pardiggle, and by depicting cruel laws and societal practices in religious terms, he suggests that the religious institutions and understandings of his day are also in need of an overhaul. While Dickens wasn’t agnostic per se, he does to religion what Brian Moore does in Black Robe (1985), a novel about a French Jesuit in the wilds of 17th century Quebec: he strips religion of its dogma and metaphysical superstructure, whittling it down to simple values such as equality, inclusion, reasonableness, and charity. Dickens casts doubt on the doctrines, pretensions, and Grand Metaphysical Truths, and replaces these with a simple command: act like Jesus by loving your neighbour.
This secular form of love and compassion of course is part of a larger political movement, which will eventually take English power from the domain of aristocratic and wealthy white males to a society in which everyone can play an equal part. The wildness and ferocity of nature — Pope’s wild, where weeds and flowers promiscuous shoot — isn’t in the surrounding fields as much as it’s in the systems and institutions of society: at the climactic moment of the novel, when the devilish lawyer Tulkinghorn is shot, Dickens refers to “the great wilderness of London” and “this stranger’s wilderness of London” (Ch. 48: Closing In). Tulkinghorn stands for everything that’s wrong with the legal system, the political system, uncaring attitudes, and the complicity of these with the aristocracy, represented by Sir Leicester. The taming of this wild lies in stripping Tulkinghorn and Sir Leicester of power and in advancing the more positive complexities of civilization. Progress, that eminently Victorian word, lies not so much in scientific or technological advance, but in stripping away inefficient and outdated modes of operating, so that justice and love can come to the fore. Dickens wants to recalibrate and redirect outmoded aspects of law, hierarchy, and religion, which are represented in the novel by the Chancery & Tulkinghorn (law), Sir Leicester, Lady Dedlock, & their hangers-on (the class system), and Mrs. Snagsby, Jellyby, Pardiggle, & Chadband (religion).
Dickens’ solution isn’t to jettison the great structures of law, society, and religion, but rather to refine them, to free them from fixity, cant, dogmatism, elitism, and inefficiency. In this sense, he operates like a liberal or an agnostic: he respects the systems he wants to change, rather than hanging onto them for dear life (like a religious fundamentalist) or rejecting them completely (like a positivist atheist or a political revolutionary). It’s perhaps for this reason that the woman who shoots Tulkinghorn isn’t a heroine, but a nightmare fragment of anger slipped over to London from the anarchy of 1793. She does everyone a service by eliminating the devilish Tulkinghorn, but Dickens disapproves of the way she does it. It’s also for this reason that Dickens doesn’t condemn Sir Leicester. Instead, he does his best to make us think of Sir Leicester’s nobility less in terms of aristocracy and more in terms of steadfast love.
In Bleak House Dickens starts his attack on illiberal systems and mindsets with the image of Megalosaurus waddling up a foggy street in central London. This image of a dinosaur in the fog initially appears to be an odd one, yet it makes sense in that it represents outdated or fossilized institutions and mentalities — those that stifle innovation, clamp down on reason, and treat people with disdain and disrespect. By loosening the hold of privilege and fossilized institutions — also represented in Bleak House by Sir Leicester’s pathetic love of his own privilege and by the Chancery suit of Jarndyce & Jarndyce that Sir Leicester admires — society can move toward the individual and societal freedoms we later find in Mill’s On Liberty (1859) and in the democratic reforms of 1867, 1884, 1918, and 1928. In this sense, Bleak House demonstrates that in many ways Dickens was in synchrony with the progressive direction of 19th century England.
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Next: Pope: A Mighty Maze
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