Invisible Cities

"To carry out an idea[!]" repeated Miss La Creevy; "and that's the great convenience of living in a thoroughfare like the Strand. When I want a nose or an eye for any particular sitter, I have only to look out the window and wait till I get one."
Charles Dickens, Nicholas Nickleby

Perhaps nothing seems more natural than to speak of Dickens and cityscaping, or to do so in relation to what this volume calls the Victorian visual imagination. Few writers are so strongly associated with descriptive, graphic detail—or with that special urbanographic form we think of as Dickensian London. But what about Nicholas Nickleby? It is nearly a critical cliché to observe that this is not an urban novel, even though the main action takes place in and around London. It is not really a novel of place, either; aside from the large shifts of location to Yorkshire and Portsmouth, there is little temptation to "plot" the action against a map. For that matter, and in spite of Michael Steig's study Dickens and Phiz,^[2] I would argue that in the Dickensian corpus this does not qualify as a particularly graphic novel: it is not a source of famous descriptive set pieces, nor is it organized around either decisive moments of pictorial drama (like the mob scenes in Oliver Twist or Barnaby Rudge or A Tale of Two Cities ) or idylls of reconciliation (as in Bleak House or David Copperfield ). But the main point I want to emphasize is that these two qualities, these two lacks, are related. The relative invisibility of London in the novel is both cause and effect of its avoidance of a range of pictorial effects Dickens employed more extensively in other works produced at roughly the same time. It is not simply that the easiest means of suppressing London is suppressing the visual, or vice versa. The motives for that mutual suppression are linked in turn to the conception of Nicholas Nickleby as book and as character—to the

conception of Nicholas (if I can use this term) as an action, as a career, as a role.

To suggest what I have in mind, I turn to illustrations, always a sensitive register of the ways Dickens engages the contemporary visual imagination. I take that engagement for granted: rather than discuss the inevitably complex relation of image and text, I want to suggest something about the relation of both to the densely visual world of the city, and the relation of that density to Victorian conceptions of self. Consider two representations of the sort of urban scene we associate with many Dickens novels: George Cruikshank's drawing of "Oliver claimed by his Affectionate Friends," and Phiz's illustration, for Nicholas Nickleby, of "A sudden Recognition, unexpected on both Sides" (Fig. 70). There are clear parallels between the illustrations and the situations to which they refer. In these early novels, as later in Great Expectations, London stands for potential abductions; the jumble and confusion of the streets threatens to reclaim us from the hard-won security of domestic shelter—to take hold of us, to bring us down, or (to use a metaphor chosen with Magwitch in mind) to reach out its hands. In Nickleby, it is Smike who is most susceptible to this threat. Our hero—and this is one of the ways in which he fills that role—remains above and apart from the crowd, mediated for him figures like Newman Noggs, a "fallen" gentleman who by virtue of his descent can mingle with the heterogeneous confusion of the urban mass. To some extent that is Noggs's job; to some extent, it is a fate he has embraced, a vantage point from which he can extend a helping hand to his venerable, vulnerable friend. Phiz illustrates the relation in the scene where "Nicholas starts for Yorkshire" (Fig. 71), an image that in spite of its title really centers on Noggs. Nicholas here is bent and inert, his features nearly obscured, not so much in anticipation of his impending life at Dotheboys Hall as from the strained "position" he has been forced to occupy already in this first immersion in urban life. For him to fill the role of hero, a less chaotic setting is required, one represented by the structured paradigm of the theater, where under the grandiose tutelage of Vincent Crummles he learns to assume a "character" within a limited and highly conventionalized space. Two more illustrations delineate the distinction: "Nicholas Hints at the Probability of His Leaving the Company" (Fig. 72) and "Nicholas Congratulates Arthur Gride on His Wedding Morning." Both, in effect, place him onstage, for the private, domestic interior is as much a theatrical scene as the one set in a playhouse. Such images provide a literally graphic reminder that this is a novel concerned with the hero's position, the hero as position. What defines Nicholas as a character is less his

psyche than his role, his place in a stylized tableau of alternatives and possibilities.

I am arguing that Nickleby generally suppresses the urban setting and graphic technique we associate with other Dickens novels. The reason has to do with the character of the hero, with the risks he would incur if placed, or represented, in too direct or too prolonged contact with the physical realities of London life. Perhaps more than in any other Dickens novel, the city of Nickleby threatens the very possibility of character, a stable sense of self; it is a place where nothing is more difficult to establish or maintain than a secure identity, the ability to "position" oneself. The nature of the risk is suggested when Nicholas ventures into the streets to search for a "position" in the other sense of the word. He "mingle[s] with the crowd" on "one of the great public thoroughfares of London" as he wanders toward the General Agency Office. Dickens makes it clear that the journey would be dangerous for anyone less totally self-absorbed: "a man may lose a sense of his own importance when he is a mere unit among a busy throng, all utterly regardless of him."^[3] But Nicholas can resist "speculating on the situation and prospects of the people who surrounded him," just as he can remain skeptical of the agency's promise to supply "places and situations of all kinds." It is precisely his suspicion of such claims that will finally get him a job, following conversation with another uneasy reader of the agency ads:

"A great many opportunities here, sir!" he said, half-smiling as he motioned towards the window.

"A great many people willing and anxious to be employed have seriously thought so very often, I dare say," replied the old man.

"Poor fellows, poor fellows!" (449)

What immediately bonds Nicholas and Charles Cheeryble is their common sympathy for such victims, which is also to say their common distance from the world that produces them. When Nicholas refers to the "wilderness of London," Charles vigorously approves the phrase. "'Wilderness! Yes it is, it is. Good! It is a wilderness,' said the old man with much animation." (450). Out of such fellowship Nicholas comes to find a position in but not of London—in the urban pastoral world of a "quiet, shady little square" (456) that for Tim Linkinwater offers a better view than any place in England. This is one of the rare urban settings in the novel that Dickens represents in detail, although his description (468–69) emphasizes the difference between this "desireable nook" and the rest of London. Yet even here, as on the Yorkshire coach, Nicholas is represented by Phiz with his face averted, as if he must com-

pulsively bury his nose in work. Even in this refuge one must exert an effort to keep the confusion of the city wholly at a distance, as Newman Noggs discovers when he tries to follow Madeline Bray's servant and ends up pursuing another instead. Lacking Nicholas's firm sense of self, or the anchoring force of habit suggested in Tim Linkinwater's name, he is lost in the urban maelstrom—a new man who can easily become no man, another casualty of the similarity of street figures and urban types.

The episode of the mistaken servant—we might call it the Bobster Bungle—suggests another important connection between the invisibility of London in this novel and the curious general avoidance of urban pictorial detail. For here, in exaggerated Cockney comedy, Dickens explores the perils of resemblance, and the uncertainties surrounding representation as such. I do not want to make too much of one mistake. Newman may have been simply inattentive, or drunk—confused by urban topography, urban motion, and that second servant. But these explanations remind us of the indistinguishability of street figures, the interchangeability of city lives. Cecilia Bobster parodically doubles for Madeline Bray: only child, mother dead, father a "ferocious Turk." In a sense, she suggests what Madeline might become outside the precarious shelter of her father's home, how easily she could be misrepresented, or mistaken—that is, taken for someone or something else. Even Noggs, who remembers Bobster by Lobster, in a sense dehumanizes her; certainly Gride would have treated her as a consumable delicacy. But Miss Bray herself, in her quasi-professional artistic enterprise, is producing consumer goods, practicing a commercial art. It is one more token of her desperate condition: replication of certain kinds seems suspect. As in the case of "the little miniature painter," it is an activity associated with the decline—or should I say reduction?—of art and the artist, representation too closely affiliated with the streets.

Perhaps, then, Mrs. Nickleby is not wholly foolish in attaching some sort of stigma to Miss La Creevy. The remarks I quoted as the epigraph to this section suggest the extent to which her portraits involve a dissolution of personage, a supposed representation of identity that in fact reconstitutes it from a collage of borrowed characteristics. As she explains to Kate, "What with bringing out eyes with all one's power, and keeping down noses with all one's force, and adding to heads, and taking away teeth altogether, you have no idea of the trouble one little miniature is" (114). What she calls "Character Portraits"—pictures that represent their subjects in a variety of fictitious roles—assume the total malleability of character, or its total lack of meaning, as if self were as

interchangeable as costume. No wonder her customers for this genre are "only clerks and that," urban nobodies who want to become urban somebodies, whose choice of roles is only between different grades of anonymity. In Nickleby, the visual—especially portraiture—seems déclassé, as if the proliferation of representational imagery could erode social and moral distinctions. Or perhaps Dickens is concerned by the proliferation of similarity itself, or simulacra—the proliferation of copying, of nonbiological reproduction. Things should not be made to seem too much alike. The only unqualified form of resemblance we encounter in the novel is the uncanny twinship of the Cherryble brothers, a replication so absolute as to suggest the conventions of religious art. Indeed, one of their roles is to transform a world of commercial replication into something higher and more ordered: they are not simply using money to make more money but are conducting business philanthropically so that even a countinghouse can take account of human character. With them Dickens asks whether a real city can be idealized, an ideal city made visible. What sort of figures might order the confusions of London? Is there a higher form of representation that can be in the city but not of it, a monument to the integrity of moral character that reorders the space in which real characters must live their lives?