The Use of Dickens in Popular Fiction: ‘Spirited’ by Julie Cohen
By Deborah Siddoway
The ‘making of fiction is an inseparable part of his being.’ So said Peter Ackroyd of Dickens in his 1990 biography of the inimitable author. [1] And as we now commemorate the life of Dickens in the 150th year since his death, fiction has increasingly appropriated both the man himself and his work for its own ends.
Such is the enduring appeal of the works of Dickens, that they have become, in many ways, a device for contemporary gothic novelists to anchor the temporal setting of their narratives firmly within the nineteenth century. Spirited, published in July 2020 by bestselling author Julie Cohen, is one such novel. Described as a ‘tender and haunting tale’, the novel explores race, gender, faith and love through the protagonist, Viola, whose emerging talent for spirit photography means she somehow captures the ‘ghost’ of a dead child in one of her photographs. As we know, Dickens always did have a liking for a good ghost story, and Spirited not only references Dickens’s works in the context of the characters’ day-to-day lives—for example, the characters Jonah and Pavan are contemporary readers of Dickens’s novels—it also includes an extract from one of Dickens’s letters.
Spirited opens in April 1858, with a marriage made in the midst of mourning, as Viola weds Jonah, her childhood friend recently returned from India, following the death of her father. The narrative alternates between Jonah and Viola’s married life in Dorset in 1858, with flashbacks to Jonah’s life before his return to England, when the reader is taken back to his time in India, and introduced to Pavan, a young Indian trying to find a way forward in a country in the midst of turmoil. It is at this moment that the works of Dickens are first used as a prop to cement Pavan and Jonah’s friendship and developing attraction to one other in its nineteenth-century context. In Pavan’s home we find ‘carefully hoarded’ Dickens novels, as the two characters discuss the relative merits of Oliver Twist and David Copperfield with an immediacy that reminds the reader of Dickens’s contemporaneousness with the setting of the novel. The reference to Dickens is used to give a perception of time and place, evoking a sense of the past for the modern reader while setting the narrative in a nineteenth-century present. When I asked her why she had chosen these two particular novels, Cohen commented that both Oliver and David were ‘displaced protagonists’ who ‘find success and family in unusual ways’: something to which both Jonah and Pavan would relate. [2]
Indeed, there are some striking parallels between Cohen’s themes and characters and Dickens’s own. Both Jonah and Viola, like Oliver Twist and David Copperfield, confront the reality of parental loss as they attempt to make a new life together. Cohen, like Dickens before her, is able to explore through her characters the vulnerability of orphanhood, particularly for the women and children of the nineteenth century, who were—as Dickens reminds us with menacing undertones—‘left to the tender mercies of church wardens and overseers’. [3] In the work of both authors, orphanhood does not only inform the choices that each of the characters make, it limits the choices that are available to them, and often leads to disastrous personal decisions. Jonah chooses to marry Viola driven by a sense of responsibility and principle, knowing that there was no one else to look after her, but also as a way of recreating the family they have both lost. In this way, Jonah is like David, seeking the security and comfort of a family life that he has been denied, yet failing to look beyond the urgent need to fill the void of being orphaned. David’s marriage to Dora was incapable of bringing him the happiness and fulfilment he craved. Jonah’s marriage to Viola would suffer the same fate. Just as David’s marriage to Dora loses its sheen, becoming ‘like a strain of sorrowful music faintly heard in the night’, Viola and Jonah’s marriage becomes ‘grey and thin and cold’.
Another Dickensian theme that Cohen explores is the allure of the waters of the Thames for those in turmoil. As Jonah, ‘riddled with grief and inadequacy’ flees in an attempt to escape his self-loathing and despair, he locks himself away in a room above a pub, drinking away the thoughts that plague him as he fights to resist ‘the lure of the bridge, of the Thames below.’ It is a hauntingly familiar Dickensian tableau, as well as an oft-deployed Victorian trope. Dickens devoted a whole chapter to the allure of the Thames in David Copperfield. [4] When David and Mr Peggotty find a wretched Martha by the ‘polluted stream’ she cries ‘I can’t keep away from it. I can’t forget it. It haunts me day and night. It’s the only thing in all the world that I am fit for, or that’s’ fit for me. Oh, the dreadful river!’ Martha’s despair echoes the words of Nancy in chapter 46 of Oliver Twist:
‘Look before you lady. Look at that dark water. How many times do you read of such as I who spring into the tide, and leave no living thing, to care for, or bewail them. It may be years hence, or it may be only months, but I shall come to that at last.’
In placing Jonah at risk to the call of the waters of the Thames, Cohen subverts the Dickensian theme. For Dickens, suicide by drowning was for the fallen woman. In Spirited we have a man in crisis. But the echoes of the Dickensian legacy can still be seen in the siren call of the river. Was this deliberate? As David Lodge reminds us in The Art of Fiction, ‘all texts are woven from the tissues of other texts, whether their authors know it or not.’ [5] Cohen confirmed that she read only nineteenth century novels as she wrote Spirited, including Hard Times. Her Dickensian influences are certainly there to be found.
The author’s decision to include in her novel an extract of a letter from Dickens to Angela Burdett-Coutts of 4 October 1857 is where her use of intertextuality becomes more deliberate. In this letter, Dickens writes of the uprising in India and expresses sentiments of a racist, even genocidal nature. When I asked why she had chosen to do so, Cohen commented she specifically chose this letter because of Dickens’s racist views towards Indians, and that setting this letter against Pavan’s deeply held love for the work of Dickens was intended as ‘a comment on the complexities and limits of colonialism’.
In the novel, there is no context given to explain Dickens’s words, and the letter appears to reflect Jonah and Pavan’s fates as they confront the violence of the uprising in India. There is no denying that the letter is one that is deeply troubling to modern day Dickens enthusiasts, and it also seems problematic to drop an extract from a nineteenth-century letter into a work of modern fiction without providing any of the contextual framework in which the letter was written. Does a contemporary author have any obligation at all to explain? Regardless of the answer to this question, the use of the letter serves a number of purposes. It imparts information, it sets the background to the events that follow in the novel, and it uses a contemporaneous viewpoint on colonialism to contextualise Jonah’s conflict of duties to his English fiancé and his Indian love.
The letter appears at a pivotal moment in the novel, with Jonah confessing his love for Pavan ‘with his wife kneeling before him’, an image reflecting yet another Dickensian tableau from David Copperfield, that of Annie on her knees before Dr Strong, her husband. Here, however, the Dickensian theme is subverted once again, because rather than seeking restoration of marital harmony, Jonah seeks to unburden himself of his guilt, telling his wife ‘the story he had told no one before… the moment he met Pavan, until the day that death came to Delhi’. It is here that the extract from Dickens’s letter interrupts the narrative, concluding with his vitriolic desire to ‘exterminate the Race upon whom the stain of the late cruelties rested’ and ‘raze it off the face of the earth’. With these words echoing in the reader’s mind, Cohen takes her narrative back to 10 May 1857, with Jonah sat in a church in Delhi, reflecting on his duty to Viola, and his duty to Pavan, knowing the two to be in conflict.
With this tension comes something more troubling for Jonah, a recognition that he and Pavan could never be social equals in either of their cultures, allowing Cohen to further develop her exploration of the intrinsic cultural discordances of colonialism that she centred with the use of Dickens’s letter. It also allows Cohen to use letter-writing as a way of imparting information as she continues her narrative. Although Jonah contemplates sending a letter of his own to Viola explaining that while he loves her as a sister, he cannot marry her, it is to Pavan that he writes. In this letter he acknowledges the ‘barriers and difficulties’ that exist between them but expresses a willingness to make great sacrifices in order to surmount them. As he despatches his letter to Pavan, a scent of burning pervades the air and Jonah is warned that a ‘rabble of sepoys have come into the city from Meerut and are killing every Christian they see’.
In the chaos that follows, heedless of the peril they are in, Pavan and Jonah search for each other and desperately try to find safety together from the violence and atrocities of the uprising. Jonah’s confession to Viola of what happened in India concludes with Pavan lying on the floor, red blood blossoming on the white clothing that she wore. Once more, the image is layered with Dickensian undertones, red blood saturating pure white, just as Nancy, blinded with blood that rained down from a deep gash on her forehead, holds up a white handkerchief in her folded hands.
In her discussions with me, Cohen commented that while Great Expectations was her favourite Dickens novel and may have suited Spirited better as an allusion, she was constrained from using it, as it had not been written at the time in which her novel was set. Nonetheless, the themes and images of both Oliver Twist and David Copperfield that can be found in Spirited are deployed to great effect, evoking an authentic sense of the nineteenth century while also reflecting the concerns of the modern reader.
[1] Ackroyd, Peter, Dickens. Sinclair-Stevenson, 1990, p. 89. [2] I am grateful to Julie Cohen for answering my queries through the medium of both Twitter and email correspondence. [3] Dickens, Charles, Oliver Twist. edited by Fred Kaplan, W.W. Norton, 1993, p. 19. [4] Chapter 47 of David Copperfield is entitled ‘The River’. [5] Lodge, David, The Art of Fiction. Vintage: 2011, p 98.
