THE BLACK VEIL 📚: with Andrew Smith

This Halloween Dominic is joined by the inimitable Prof. Andrew Smith who guides us through Dickens' The Black Veil and his latest book Dickens and the Gothic (for Cambridge University Press)

Perhaps calling to mind Susan Hill’s The Woman In Black …  The Black Veil  begins with a young man sitting by the fire one winter’s night, with cosy thoughts of Christmas. Out of the corner of his eye the veiled figure of a lady dressed in mourning appears, standing motionless, with eyes fixed on him. 

As the story unfolds the man - a newly qualified doctor - is compelled to leave his cheerful parlour and head towards a derelict house in an isolated spot, to face whatever is waiting for him there …

Returning to the series to read excerpts from Dickens, Radcliffe, Walpole & Thackeray is the brilliant actress: Rebecca Tanwen

The 'harpsichord swirl' at the start of the Castle of Otranto reading has been used under license from EPIDEMIC SOUND. All other music and sound has been created by Dominic Gerrard

Original cover headshot of Dominic Gerrard © Jane Lloyd / Original cover headshot of Andrew Smith © Andrew Smith /  Original Dickens illustrations sourced from Michael John Goodman's incredible Charles Dickens Illustrated Gallery

Transcript

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SPEAKER_03 0:16

Hi everyone, happy Halloween. I think today's episode calls to mind Susan Hill's The Woman in Black. It starts with a young man sitting by the fire one winter's night with cozy thoughts of Christmas. Out of the corner of his eye, the veiled figure of a lady dressed in mourning appears, standing motionless with eyes fixed on him. As the story unfolds, the man, a newly qualified doctor, is compelled to leave his cheerful parlour and head towards a derelict house in an isolated spot to face whatever is waiting for him there. Dickens's The Black Veil, first published in 1836, is a striking story found in sketches by Boz. Written the same year as Pickwick, and even appearing to feature the character of the fat boy at the start, it carries the reader on a startling journey deep into the lives of the poor and vulnerable, and the harsh realities of a state ready to seize and punish them. Guiding us through the Black Veil and his latest book, Dickens and the Gothic for Cambridge University Press, is the inimitable Professor Andrew Smith, professor of 19th century English literature at the University of Sheffield, and co-director of the Center of the History of the Gothic with his colleague Professor Angela Wright. And, returning to the series to read excerpts from Dickens, Radcliffe, Walpole, and Thackeray is the brilliant actress Rebecca Tanwin. Andrew, hello. Welcome to Charles Dickens' Brain on Fire. Oh, thank you.

SPEAKER_02 1:59

Thank you for inviting me.

SPEAKER_03 2:00

Oh, it's fantastic to have you on. We're going to be talking about a very rare, at least I think it's a pretty rare, Dickens story, The Black Veil. Yes. And and then and then your latest book, Dickens and the Gothic. Thank you. As well. But starting with the Black Veil, what are the what are the first things that spring to mind when you when you think of this one?

SPEAKER_02 2:21

Well, the Black Veil is early. It's from sketches by Boz, it's 1836. What I think is interesting about it is it plays with a language of the Gothic, a Gothic kind of idiom, it's a Gothic story. And yet at the same time, it's clear that Dickens is trying to do something a bit different to the Gothic, as the Gothic was in this time. What he's doing is kind of moving the Gothic into an urban space in order to kind of think about the kinds of challenges which are represented within that kind of environment. And we have a narrator, a narrator is a doctor, and he's been sort of requested to go into this environment to meet somebody who has indicated that they will have a very ill, possibly this suggestion is possibly a dead body that they would like him to investigate with a suggestion that he might be able to bring the body back to life. And he, of course, is completely baffled by this and thinks that the request is slightly unusual and is concerned that the woman who has asked him to do this may well be unhinged. But he agrees to do it, he agrees to undertake the journey because of some kind of sympathy, but also out of some kind of curiosity as well. And when he goes into the area of Woolworth, it's a particularly desolate part of Woolworth, described as a very run-down place. He enters into a house which is quite sinister, and there he is presented with a body, and it is a dead body, and he sees in it the signs of strangulation, and his initial thoughts are this is a murdered body, and whether there are some kind of signs of life which might be possibly revived. Only to then find out the body is, of course, a person who has died and that they have been executed. And it is the the son of the woman and the body has been returned to her, and there isn't anything really that he can do other than exercise, I suppose, his feelings of compassion towards the mother and her loss. And strangely, it's out of that um compassion that his success in the world strangely seems to become assured from that. It is though he has done an act of kindness and that he is rewarded for his kindness. Um, but it is also an opportunity, I think, for Dickens to reflect on some of the social iniquities of the area itself. And it represents, I think, um, an attempt by Dickens to establish the Gothic on a new kind of footing. He's not writing all that later than, say, Anne Radcliffe and the late 18th century Gothic, which is largely about kind of foreign places and discussions of the landscape and all of those kinds of things, the sublime and the picturesque and all of that. And what Dickens is doing is really bringing the Gothic back home. He's resituating it within an urban space, but he's also wanting to articulate some kind of social reformist agenda in which it is about the reflection and the focus on the plight of the nameless woman and her feelings of loss. Yes.

SPEAKER_03 5:32

It's an incredibly powerful story, I feel, as well. But what I love is the start, there's actually little bits of humour, and I even see with with the doctor's little boy that he employs right at the start. He belongs in Pickwick, doesn't he? In fact, he's a bit like the fat boy in Pickwick, his little servant. And I like the touch at the very start. The doctor it starts off in his cheerful parlour with a really good fire and a thick green curtain, and he dozes off on a hand. He feels a hand on his shoulder and he thinks it's his fiancee Rose.

SPEAKER_01 6:02

There was a hand upon his shoulder, but it was neither soft nor tiny, its owner being a corpulent, round-headed boy, who was let out by the parish to carry medicines and messages. As there was no demand for the medicine, however, and no necessity for the messages, he usually occupied his unemployed hours, averaging fourteen a day, in abstracting peppermint drops, taking animal nourishment, and going to sleep.

SPEAKER_03 6:27

And then the appearance of this woman, this veiled woman.

SPEAKER_02 6:31

Yes.

SPEAKER_03 6:31

And then suddenly this boy is kind of sent away. That comedy is gone, and we're into something very different. I I think you're right.

SPEAKER_02 6:38

And I think there's something interesting about possible connections with Pickwick, which is, as you say, it's only a year later the Pickwick Papers is beginning to be published. And there is something about the Pickwick Papers which also has comic moments which then rub up against slightly more sinister moments. Um the Black Veil does sort of play around with kind of something which is leisured and safe above all that his is a world which is kind of safe, and it's safe because it's sequestered from the kind of world that the woman herself inhabits. And in a Pickwick papers, we do have the sort of the picturesque uh kind of world that we is elaborated there, but it's also a world which is associated with possible fun, pleasure, comedy, and then we have the interpolated stories in a pickwick papers, and they're often much darker. They're they're often ghost stories or the kinds of reflections on people's rather tragic senses of loss, and they seem to stand as a a counterpoint to the humour. Uh, and I think that sort of sense of comedy and darkness is is there in the Black Veil. And I think it probably was something which was preying on his mind as he's kind of thinking about Bigwick papers and and the sorts of ways in which to elaborate a new sort of form of storytelling.

SPEAKER_03 7:51

Yeah. And the appearance of this woman, I mean, I'm sure we're supposed to think of her possibly as a ghost, aren't we? Yeah. She doesn't reply immediately and she's standing there suddenly in the doorway and she comes in.

SPEAKER_01 8:05

She stood perfectly erect. Her figure was drawn up to its full height, and though the surgeon felt that the eyes beneath the veil were fixed on him, she stood perfectly motionless and evinced by no gesture whatever, the slightest consciousness of his having turned towards her. Do you wish to consult me? he inquired.

SPEAKER_03 8:27

And there's even a line about her just inclining her head to answer. Which reminds me of the phantom at the end of a Christmas carol with Scrooge.

SPEAKER_01 8:34

She slightly inclined her head in a token of acquiescence.

SPEAKER_03 8:38

But but it made me wonder, with it with a gothic story, whether something is supernatural or totally normal is kind of irrelevant, isn't it? Because the Gothic experience is, I suppose, that fear and anxiety that thrills through you.

SPEAKER_02 8:56

Yes, you're right, it is that fear element. And I think he has that idea of the black veil from Anne Radcliffe from The Mysteries of Adolfo, where the veil appears in a couple of places, but the the the really important place where it appears is when Emily, Emily Saint Aubert, the the heroine, is um confronted with this veil that she sees, um, which seems to be in front of um a kind of a it's a kind of like a doorway, it's it's a kind of a window that's inside a house, and she opens it.

SPEAKER_01 9:33

Emily hastily entered the chamber and went towards the pitcher, which appeared to be enclosed in a frame of uncommon size that hung in a dark part of the room. She paused again, and then, with a timid hand, lifted the veil, but instantly let it fall, perceiving that what it had concealed was no pitcher, and before she could leave the chamber, she dropped senseless to the floor.

SPEAKER_02 9:59

What she sees and makes it faint is seemingly a body, sort of a kind of a corpse, a skeletal corpse. And her first thinking is that this is the body of somebody who has been murdered, and that she's in a place of danger in Adolfo that is a place of mystery and murder. But the thing is she's misread it, it's not a corpse at all. It is actually a wax work. Uh it's uh a memento mori, it's a classic kind of mento mori that you you know see in churches now from that period, and that's what it is. It's meant to inspire a kind of reflection on death and dying and and um in in a way encourage a kind of pathos of thinking about death and dying instead of being an object of horror. So she sort of misreads it, but nevertheless, the fear is very real. Um, and in some respects, uh, she is right to be frightened in adulthoe, because it is a place of danger. She may well have misread this particular moment, but the wider picture is much more threatening. So, yes, the fear is is real and legitimate, even if the moment itself seems to um be a kind of bogus moment of the gothic.

SPEAKER_03 11:08

Yes, and it's interesting, you know, you're talking about we're talking about the veil all the time, aren't we? But it's interesting how in this story, you know, the the doctor after the visit from the woman that night, he has a very disturbed night's sleep where it says something like, he's unable to banish the black veil from his disturbed mind.

SPEAKER_01 11:25

Again and again, through the long, dull course of a sleepless night, he was unable to banish the black veil from his disturbed imagination.

SPEAKER_03 11:35

And then at the conclusion of the story, and for the rest of his life, he has a positive association always with the black veil, in spite of you know, the horror of the corpse on the bed, which I think is really interesting. I feel like sort of Dickens takes everything so much further and opens up so much more possibility, perhaps, in it than other writers have done before him.

SPEAKER_02 11:56

Yes, I I I I think that's true. It's the the movement around the forms in the story, as you say, there is a kind of comedy, then there is a darkness, and then there is almost a settlement between the two where that there is something kind of redemptive, and the reflection is on him, on his charitable acts, on his goodness, and how he is in a way rewarded for that. He's rewarded because of his sense of compassion. And you mention you know things like a Christmas Carol and so on, and that's a similar kind of narrative arc of taking somebody out of a gothic gloom, the isolation of Scrooge's world, and trying to transform him into something else. And in some ways, what I think Dickens is trying to do is assert the Gothic in order to dispel it, and that those people who are able to move beyond the Gothic and are not trapped by it or held back are in a way rewarded because of their capacity to be able to see the world in a different kind of way, that it's not full of gothic gloom and mystery, that actually there are ways in which we can see the streets and see the people who live in it and engage with them in a thoughtful and considered way. So I think he sets up the Gothic as a kind of hurdle that you need to surmount. And our doctor does that.

SPEAKER_03 13:13

Yeah, that's interesting. It's interesting you used the term dispel because it immediately makes me think of your book, which I've absolutely loved, by the way. Um even as a non-academic, as a layman, it was really engaging and really interesting. Fog occurs obviously so much in Dickens, but you apply the fog so much in that. Could you talk to us a little bit about the sort of gothic fog or the function of the fog there?

SPEAKER_02 13:34

Yes, the the fogginess of things. It's it's true. I I think we see it very clearly, of course, in two obvious places. One is Bleak House, of course, which begins with the fog. And Dickens is trying to get us to think about fogs as being metaphorical fogs because it is chanced, it is the law courts which have generated the fog because they're not interested in solving um legal cases, they're interested in obscuring the truth, and therefore the fog is part of that sense of something obscure, so that you can't see things clearly and you're simply lost in these law cases which are designed to financially exhaust the people who are involved in them. But you find it in a Christmas carol as well. It's interesting at the beginning of it, it is about the foggy streets, it is about Scrooge looking out of his window and seeing the buildings just across the road from him as if they weren't quite real. They're described as phantoms themselves.

SPEAKER_01 14:25

The houses opposite were mere phantoms.

SPEAKER_02 14:28

And then, of course, he meets Marley, and then Marley sort of points out to him the presence of these phantoms of the street who are who are lost in the street in some ways, lost in the fog, because they're unable to help people um through charitable acts. And these are now benign phantoms who would like to help, but they've left it too late, and that's their sort of tragedy.

SPEAKER_01 14:48

The misery with them all was clearly they sought to interfere for good in human matters and had lost the power forever. Whether these creatures faded into mist or mist enshrouded them, he could not tell.

SPEAKER_02 15:04

But then when um Scrooge wakes up on Christmas morning, um he sees the streets in a very different way. He sees them as clear, they're described as clear streets, everything is sharply into focus.

SPEAKER_01 15:16

Running to the window he opened it and put out his head. No fog, no mist. Clear, bright, jovial, stirring, cold, cold, piping for the blood to dance to, golden sunlight, heavenly sky, sweet, fresh air, merry bells. Oh glorious, glorious.

SPEAKER_02 15:41

He can see things differently now. The point is that his redemption means that he's cast off this gothic gloom which has created a kind of mental fog where he can't see people for who they really are, and he can't kind of see and engage with feelings of empathy and compassion. So that's all been dispelled now, and he's able to see things much more clearly and be part of a a wider world which he is able to see and recognize and therefore participate in.

SPEAKER_03 16:07

Yeah. And if a person is in a gothic condition, it is a place of what you call gothic entrapment in some form, is that right? Your book is divided into the the prisons, the histories, and the ghosts. Those are your three headings, but the prisons is a very striking one at the very beginning.

SPEAKER_02 16:22

Yes, that's right. I I uh in a way, sort of prisons feel like the obvious kind of sort of sense of where you find the imprisoned and their their inability to kind of um be part of a wider world. But I think Dickens doesn't do it in in such an obviously kind of literal way. He's interested in the mentality of prisoners as well. That the incarceration that we find isn't just a physical incarceration, often a psychological incarceration, the sense that the person has ended up in prison either because there's some kind of injustice which has put them there, and therefore we progressively see some kind of deterioration that takes place within them, in which they too become kind of lost as they turn upon themselves, or they are in prisons because of some act that they have done, but the act that has prompted them to be put into prison itself becomes the thing which defines their gothic incarceration. So there's a sort of psychological sense of being lost. I think the two clearest examples would be Fagan in the Death Cell, where he's reflecting in a in a very kind of lost world about what's got him there and all of the people that he's actually um provided evidence on, who themselves would have ended up in a cell that he is now in, and his sense of being haunted by them.

SPEAKER_01 17:39

He began to think of all the men he had known who had died upon the scaffold, some of them through his means. They rose up in such quick succession that he could hardly count them. He had seen some of them die, and had joked too because they died with prayers upon their lips. With what a rattling noise the drop went down, and how suddenly they changed, from strong, vigorous men to dangling heaps of clothes.

SPEAKER_02 18:08

And I think another interesting example is when Dickens goes to America and he gives the count of solitary confinement in Philadelphia, and he imagines what that would be like, and how somebody on their own would be almost so lonely that they would generate a version of themselves. But this version of themselves that they find in their cell is something which comes to haunt them and therefore terrify them. So it becomes a kind of self-reflection, a terrified self-reflection.

SPEAKER_01 18:38

Slowly he begins to feel that the white walls of the cell have something dreadful in them, that their colour is horrible, that their smooth surface chills his blood, that there is one hateful corner which torments him. Every morning when he wakes, he hides his head beneath the coverlet and shudders to see the ghastly ceiling looking down upon him. The blessed light of day itself peeps in, an ugly phantom face through the unchangeable crevice which is his prison window. Now it is every night the lurking place of a ghost, a shadow, a silent something horrible to see. But whether bird or beast or muffled human shape, he cannot tell.

SPEAKER_02 19:25

It becomes the case that somebody might have been incarcerated for so long that in the end um they're unable to fully cast off mental effects of being in prison. And I think that's something that he's concerned about, that the prison becomes something which becomes incorporated within the minds of the prisoners themselves, so that they're unable to return to society in any kind of clear way. And we can think about it in Little Dorrit, I think that's kind of the clearest one, where you know, w when when uh Mr. Dorrit is if finally released, i in a sense it doesn't really matter. You can go to Venice, but you're just seeing the prison everywhere. Um so the prison becomes a kind of mental space for Dickens as much as a physical one. When he writes about the American prison, he he actually has an account where he says, Well, this person was released, and actually all the person does is then run straight back to the prison because they simply can't cope with the idea of being in an outside world. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 20:29

And also in your book, you reference Amy Dorrit as she goes about with the shadow of the Marshall Sea always imposing on her mind. So she'll go in a carriage and she'll always imagine that she's about to approach the iron gates there of the prison again. Yes, I think that's sort of fascinating. It makes me sort of wonder: is that Dickens himself? Is Amy kind of Dickens' double there in in literary form?

SPEAKER_02 20:51

Yeah, never casting off the Marshallsea, the the sense of always being dogged with that. I I I think there is that that case. And of course it's there in William Dorrit as well, you know, um his his sort of breakdown shortly before his death is he starts to refer to himself as being a prisoner, that he he just can't escape it in some ways. It has a permanent sort of grip on him. Um I think the kids is interested in that about the the way in which people are sort of, I suppose metaphorically kind of trapped within communities. I think of somebody like Bill Sykes, you know, the the sense that Bill Sykes, after the the murder of Nancy, tries to escape and then he's kind of brought back because he just can't get away. There's a sort of some prompting of a guilty conscience which kind of makes him go back, but he's effectively executed, effectively hung in the place where he's committed out the murder itself, and it's um the idea that you you can't quite escape these sorts of places, that they do have a purchase on you. But also I think it's interesting with Sykes that Sykes is at that moment not beyond redemption. Um the curious thing is when he tries to escape, he finds himself um helping, trying to put out a a fire in a in a building and does sort of heroic things in in in all of that. But it's all too late. Um It he can't be fully redeemed, but it's the his guilty conscience kicks in at that point, I think, and takes him back to where where the scene of the crime has taken place, because he knows that there is some unfinished business there for him.

SPEAKER_03 22:30

Yes, it's great, isn't it? And of course, you cite that amazing moment where he imagines he's being pursued by some ghostly form of Nancy that's kind of lumbering after him. Yes. And when he takes a dis makes a decision to kind of run at it and confront it as he's turned around to do that, it's now behind him again. So it's ever in pursuit, which is an amazingly powerful.

SPEAKER_02 22:54

It is the inescapability. I think he reuses it a bit in the American notes when up in solitary confinement, when um he thinks about a prisoner having their kind of double in the corner of the room, and then you go and stand there to force it out, and then it goes and sits on your bed, and then you go and sit on the bed, and then it goes back into and it's constantly there, kind of haunting you in some ways. You can't chase it away, and it's also following you about.

SPEAKER_03 23:16

A great quote, which I love that you wrote, which is uh which really jumped out was secrets which are kept secret keep the Gothic at bay. Yes. And another phrase, another phrase which I'd never come across before is the Walpolean Gothic, The Sins of the Fathers. That's another interesting thing which you linked to a tale of two cities.

SPEAKER_02 23:36

Yes. Uh that's Walpole's sort of m moral behind the Castle of Atranto is thinking about really sort of thinking about aristocratic dynasties is what he has in mind there, and illegitimate um aristocratic dynasties and people trying to shore up their power base in in some ways. And I suppose in in A Tale of Two Cities you have a kind of interesting story which is partly about, I suppose, the aristocracy under threat um in France, but you also get the attempt to try to redeem yourself through good works in some ways, the doubling that kind of takes place within the story, the the the idea that one might sort of do something which is transformative, but there is of course the terrible story of Dr. Manette in all of that, you know, that he is kind of the trapped kind of figure associated with the incarceration, associated with the inability really to cast off the past. That's what Whoopa has in mind. In he does it through a sort of soup supernatural kind of agency where we see ancestral portraits sighing and stepping out of paintings and walking along corridors, and a sense that these are the disappointed ghosts of the past who want their authority and their descendants in a way legitimately put where they should be, which is back in control of this particular dynasty.

SPEAKER_01 25:02

At that instant, the portrait of his grandfather, which hung over the bench where they had been sitting, uttered a deep sigh and heaved its breast. Isabella, whose back was turned to the pitcher, saw not the motion, nor knew whence the sound came, but started and said, Hark, my lord, what sound is that? And at the same time made towards the door. Manfred, distracted between the flight of Isabella, who had now reached the stairs, and yet unable to keep his eyes from the pitcher, which began to move, had, however, advanced some steps after her, still looking backwards on the portrait, when he saw it quit its panel and descend on the floor with a grave and melancholy air.

SPEAKER_02 25:45

I think Dickens has that sort of sense in mind of the continuation of the past in some respects, but also wants to, I think, kind of mark out where a newness comes in. I'm thinking of Bleak House. There's that great chapter in Bleak House, which just sort of focuses on the ancestral portraits of the deadlocks, and it's just really about the sun going down, and as the sun goes down, one by one the portraits are put into shadow. And he's sort of showing one by one they're effectively switched off, they're consigned to the past. Even whilst, of course, there is the ancestral secret about what has happened to Lady Deadlock and all of that, and around Esther Summerson and what she might represent. But in the political terms, the Deadlocks find themselves in an unfortunate situation in which they have a housekeeper, Mrs. Rouncewell, whose son is an industrialist and is more wealthy than they are. Um and it is something about the aristocracy coming to the end, really, and about what replaces them, which is really sort of Dickens' interest, I suppose, in the new industries, the new wealth, the new class systems which are generated out of the demise of the aristocracy, even whilst they they linger in some ways.

SPEAKER_03 26:57

Yes. I I love with Mrs. Rousewell, I love the idea though that the that Chesney Wald is such has is such an illustrious place with the deadlocks that they have many ghosts because they are a mark of honour that your family seat is old enough to be haunted, which is which is a nice touch, isn't it? Yes.

SPEAKER_02 27:15

Um there is something about about old money and new money, which I think Dickens is interested in in some ways. And yeah, um you see it, I suppose, in hard times where there is a kind of I suppose a sustained critique of new money and new towns, and they're looking at the relationship between schools, factory systems, and the bank, and and it kind of brings them all together as an interrelated system which is depersonalizing in many respects and has no kind of value to it. So that somebody like Bitza, who is described if you could bleed, he would bleed white, and simply just has a fact-based understanding of the world. He is a model pupil because you want somebody who is unthinking, who can then work in the factory system, who can then generate the wealth that can go into the banks. They're all kind of friends, the people who run these processes, these schemes. And Dickens, I think, does have in mind there that new money seems to represent something about the the new kinds of changes in society, but they bring with them certain problems as well. Um, you can think of something like uh a December vision, which is a sort of Christmas ghost story, but it's uh about the spirit of the industrial economy and about how it destroys everybody that it touches and everybody looks at, and that nobody does anything about it, and that's why it's capable of just carrying on. So it's Mrs. Roundswell's son's world, I think, which is criticized in a December vision, and that everybody just nihilistically says, Well, there's nothing we can do about it, it'll last my time, we just have to let it go. And Dickens sort of sees there's something monstrous in that the refusal to intervene, the refusal to participate in something which might be reformist, which could lead to a transformation of the system. Um, again, it's that sort of sense I think that the gothic is something which renders you almost passive and nihilistic and incapable of reaching out for other people. Whereas those people who seem to be immersed in a gothic world like Scrooge or like our doctor in The Black Vale, they stand outside of it once they're capable of helping other people, once they kind of develop that kind of compassion. And nihilism, I think, for Dickens is the corrosive kind of emotional experience which suggests that you have incorporated within you some kind of gothic mentality where you sort of refuse to act.

SPEAKER_03 30:01

Yes. Talking of the doctor again in the black veil, I mean it's interesting, you it almost suggests that characters have to have a decision to make, don't they? They have to pass through a kind of gothic situation terror, possibly challenge, to come out the other side. Because I know that when the doctor goes to visit the woman, he has a moment of kind of wanting to turn back.

SPEAKER_02 30:22

Yes.

SPEAKER_03 30:22

As he as he approaches Woolworth and sees all the poverty and you know, the sallow children and everything, and sees it through to the end. Yes, he's got to overcome that.

SPEAKER_01 30:33

The appearance of the place through which he walked in the morning was not calculated to raise the spirits of the young surgeon. Striking off from the high road, his way lay across a marshy common, through irregular lanes, with here and there a ruinous and dismantled cottage fast falling to pieces with decay and neglect. A stunted tree or a pool of stagnant water skirted the path. Occasionally a filthy-looking woman would make her appearance from the door of a dirty house, to empty the contents of some cooking utensil into the gutter in front, or to scream after a little slip-shod girl who had contrived to stagger a few yards from the door under the weight of a sallow infant almost as big as herself. After plodding wearily through mud and mire, the young man at length arrived before the house. It was a small, low building, one story above the ground, with even a more desolate and unpromising exterior than any he had yet passed. An old yellow curtain was closely drawn across the window upstairs, and the parlour shutters were closed but not fastened. It stood at an angle of a narrow lane. There was no other habitation in sight. When we say that the surgeon hesitated and walked a few paces beyond the house before he could prevail upon himself to lift the knocker, we say nothing that need raise a smile upon the face of the boldest reader. The police of London were a very different body in that day. The isolated position of the suburbs, when the rage for building had not yet begun to connect them with the main body of the city and its environs, rendered many of them, and this in particular, a place of resort for the worst and most depraved characters. Even the streets in the gayest parts of London were imperfectly lighted at the time. And such places as these were left entirely to the mercy of the moon and stars.

SPEAKER_03 32:46

It's he says that he's been murdered, and the whole thing is described uh I think as as brutal. So it's it's a very powerful indictment against capital punishment, isn't it? In an age where probably quite a lot of people thought, well, it's fair enough to to execute. And that's that's a really um powerful moment, I think.

SPEAKER_00 33:09

This man has been murdered. That I call God to witness he has, said the woman passionately. Pitilessly, inhumanly murdered.

SPEAKER_01 33:19

By whom? said the surgeon, seizing the woman by the arm. Look at the butcher's marks, and then ask me, she replied. The surgeon turned his face towards the bed, and bent over the body, which now lay full in the light of the window. The throat was swollen, and a vivid mark encircled it. The truth flashed suddenly upon him. This is one of the men who were hanged this morning, he exclaimed, turning away with a shudder. It is, replied the woman, with a cold, unmeaning stare. Who was he? inquired the surgeon. My son, rejoined the woman, and fell senseless at his feet.

SPEAKER_02 33:58

It is a very powerful moment, and of course it's also indicated that there was somebody with him when this supposed crime happened who got a much lighter kind of set off. And therefore it also feels slightly random that he's been treated like this, whereas other people haven't. Dickens is uh unusual on capital punishment because he people who uh wanted to abolish the capital punishment thought that they could enlist him to their cause. Actually, it turned out that Dickens in the end was opposed to public executions. He wasn't necessarily opposed to executions which were done within prisons and done privately. This is partly because of the extraordinary spectacle of public executions during this period where you would routinely have crowds of 40,000, 50,000 people appearing, and he Dickens went to several executions and kind of witnessed the appalling behaviour of the crowd at these moments. But also, he had a slightly unusual take on this, in which he thought there's something about the media processes which could almost encourage somebody who is emotionally and psychologically susceptible to seek the kind of post-mortem fame that being executed as a famous criminal could grant you. So it's a strange sort of sense that he didn't like public executions for that reason, because they worked psychologically on potentially susceptible people, but also because of the social spectacle that they provided themselves of the the the drunkenness and and and all of that, the the sense of the the cheering on the enjoyment of watching a person being killed. And um, you know, Thackeray's um famous essay on going to see a man hanged also addresses that.

SPEAKER_01 35:55

I must confess, then, that the sight has left on my mind an extraordinary feeling of terror and shame. It seems to me that I have been abetting an act of frightful wickedness and violence, performed by a set of men against one of their fellows, and I pray God that it may soon be out of the power of any man in England to witness such a hideous and degrading sight. I came away down Snow Hill that morning with a disgust for murder, but it was for a murder I saw done. As we made our way through the immense crowd, we came upon two little girls of eleven and twelve years. One of them was crying bitterly and begged for heaven's sake that someone would lead her from that horrid place. This was done, and the children were carried into a place of safety. And I may be permitted for my part to declare that for the last fourteen days, so salutary has the impression of the butchery been upon me, I have had the man's face continually before my eyes. That I can see Mr. Ketch at this moment, with an easy air taking the rope from his pocket, that I feel myself ashamed and degraded at the brutal curiosity which took me to that brutal sight.

SPEAKER_02 37:14

I think there's something about public executions that Dickens found notably distasteful, but seeing them partly as a sort of media occasion that he found distasteful as well. Um strangely he wasn't object to it as a form of punishment, he just objected to public executions because of what that seemed to entail.

SPEAKER_03 37:35

It makes that moment in the story even more powerful than when when the marks around the neck are referred to as butcher's marks, not the hand of justice, you know. Yes.

SPEAKER_02 37:45

Yes, and and there is that case, you know, it's it's an argument that that other people make. Um, you know in a in a different context, um, Kant um argued that executions were good things because it shows the state articulating a kind of clear moral vision, whereas Nietzsche's response was that's not what you're seeing, what you're actually just seeing is is state brutality, that this isn't the state functioning in a kind of clear moral way. You actually sort of see it murdering someone, and I think Dickens has much in common with that view that this is state murder, it's not a tidy execution, it doesn't have to be done like this.

SPEAKER_03 38:24

Yes. Gosh. Well, I have a very scholarly question for you, Andrew. At what point did you find yourself wanting to immerse yourself in Dickens and then connecting it to the Gothic? Wha w how far back does this run for you as a as a as a thing?

SPEAKER_02 38:42

Well, it it's it's run for me for a a very long time, and one of the problems I've always been confronted with when thinking about Dickens and the Gothic, and thinking about writing on Dickens and the Gothic, is that I had in the past had plans to write a much longer book about Dickens and the Gothic. But I found that that was a problem because the thing is with Dickens is that sometimes where the Gothic is just feels very obvious. It feels as though it is in those dark spaces, it is in that labyrinthine version of London, it is in those kind of strange, monstrous forms of people like Quilp and so on. And it feels as though if you're going to point at that and sort of say, Well, that's all rather gothic, it feels a bit obvious. And I think the frustrating thing I found for Dickens is that the gothics seem to be everywhere and nowhere with him, really. So you just sort of end up kind of asserting that, well, it's all quite gothic because of the gloom and the sense of wanting to address some of social tensions that he saw during the period, but you can't do it with any sort of obvious focus. And what I liked about doing this, which is in a series which does short books, 30,000 word books, was the opportunity to write something which I think had a clearer critical focus, specifically around social reform, and specifically thinking about how the Gothic blocks social reform. So it was it was really great for me that this sort of series appeared because I I had 30,000 words I could do with that. Whereas I think otherwise, as I said, I think it just becomes a bit diffuse, it becomes a bit too sort of convention spotting in Dickens and um and difficult to pin down, other than you end up saying things which feel slightly obvious.

SPEAKER_03 40:30

But I think something I I struck from reading your book is is just the idea of blindness, really. And that's that brings us back to the fog, which is a very, very useful sort of tool for for creating the objects and and not seeing, just not seeing, and it being very present and impacting your life or the life of a society around you, but you're just not aware of it. Yes, I th I think you're right.

SPEAKER_02 40:52

I think there is something that there is something there about seeing the world and seeing it with clarity and understanding it with clarity. You can see that in the signalman to a degree, you know. His ghost story is about somebody who has visions, but he's not sure what the visions really mean. And a lot of uh the signalman is structured in a way where it is about sight, you know, it's somebody in a railway cutting, and the narrator is shouting down to the man, and the man is shouting up, and their lines of sight become confused, and then it's about somebody putting their hands over their arm over their eyes in one of the visions, and again, it's about not looking, it's about a kind of blindness. There's interestingly a moment where Dickens writes about blindness, um, where he goes to visit a blind school when he goes to America, and he's struck by it has a compassionate regime and so on, and then he kind of sees an image of blindness that he finds quite disturbing, which is of a youngish girl who's wearing um a kind of a green ribbon around her blind eyes, and she's holding a doll which has a green ribbon around its blind eyes, and this sort of sense of something which is echoing something else is for him, I think, quite sort of disturbing. That it there seems as though there's that there's nothing escapable, you can't escape it. It's like she can't escape her blindness, and the blindness is transferred to a doll, which sort of represents the inability to kind of escape from it. And he's haunted a bit by that moment. And I think it is because blindness and seeing the world clearly are things which kind of prey on his mind in some ways.

SPEAKER_03 42:35

Yes, and everything you just said has also made me connect the idea that you can have a kind of gothic blindness, as I think you describe it, which is um unintentional, where you're just unaware, and then you can have the one which is totally intentional, like that gesture in the signal with the sleeve across the eyes and the hand just is because you don't want because the it represents the image of someone that doesn't want to see their train cut down a signalman, essentially, isn't it?

SPEAKER_02 43:00

Yes.

SPEAKER_03 43:01

Oh, Andrew, thank you so much. You've been a fantastic sport for you. Thank you. I wish you all the very best, and I and I and I hope um listeners, you can now purchase Dickens and the Gothic from Cambridge University Press uh in all forms.

SPEAKER_02 43:13

Thank you very much.