This post is contributed by Eleanor C. Faulkner, PhD student in the department of English and Drama at Queen Mary University, London.

Our culture has inherited unsavoury dental practitioners. These include those pilloried by Charlie Chaplin’s silent film ‘Laughing Gas’ (1914), the films Marathon Man (1976) and Little Shop of Horrors (1986) and more recently, David Walliams’s children’s tale The Demon Dentist (2013). In Chaplin’s performance, a foolish assistant disguises himself as a dentist and borrows the authority to playfully wield a tooth extractor and seduce a female patient by pinching her nose. As Miguel Claveria remarks, Chaplin articulates through comedy ‘the mistrust we feel [..] which is caused by the lack of knowledge and professional baggage of a dentist’ (7). In part, this baggage is created by the nineteenth-century perpetuation of untrustworthy dental figures, and Chaplin’s portrayal expands on the same bewildering assistant also represented by Charles Dickens. By examining Dickens’s ties to Victorian dentistry we can distinguish a common thread of thought between past and present lives, where visits to the dentist’s office did – and quite often do – strike fear into the ‘coward conscience’ (Dickens 161).

Much like today, in the nineteenth century, dentists were regarded with suspicion and often demonised as gruesome or unpleasant figures. Memories of persistent toothaches, tooth extractions and nerve cauterisations without pain relief haunted the cultural memory – the first anaesthetic being only selectively administered as a treatment from 1846. [1] In Dickens’s lifetime however, nothing could prevent any self-assured individual from fashioning themselves as a dentist or dental assistant, provided they did not use the title of ‘surgeon-dentist’ without reasonable medical accreditation. While significant reforms reshaped the profession, steered by scientific momentum in the latter half of the nineteenth-century, many untrained and unlicensed dental workers were not fully disqualified until the Dentist’s Act of 1921. This unprecedented law put an end to unregulated practice, but before this time dentistry was rigorously pursued by both unskilled and scientific-minded candidates alike. Charlatan ‘tooth-pullers’ extracted teeth in public performances, and blacksmiths and barbers could scrape away necrotic dentine, but it was ‘not uncommon to pull out one’s own teeth’ as well (Jones 22). The more recognisable dental clinician also emerged in the 1850’s. These individuals were often educated by the Royal College of Surgeons and nurtured within metropolitan coteries, such as the Odontological Society of Great Britain. Despite these refinements however, dentistry never lost touch with its unsettling history – and arguably never has.

Dickens endured toothache throughout his life and likely developed periodontal (gum) disease, which caused the loss of several teeth (Cambridge 124). As a result, he wore partial dentures but found them difficult to wear comfortably. Dickens’s speech was later slurred during his American reading tour of 1867-8 and he wrote frequently in frustration to his esteemed friend and surgeon-dentist, Samuel Cartwright Jr. Although Dickens admired his own dentist, perhaps unsurprisingly, teeth are often allied with mischief and suffering in his works as menacing props. In Dombey and Son (1846) the villainous James Carker flaunts ‘two unbroken rows of glistening teeth, whose regularity and whiteness were quite distressing. […] there was something in it like the snarl of a cat’ (Dickens 144). Dickens alerts his readers to Carker’s predatory nature through a repetitive dental synecdoche – the using of Carker’s alarming teeth to stand for his whole identity – in a grotesque display of his manipulative personality. Dickens’s Christmas novella ‘The Haunted Man and the Ghost’s Bargain’ (1848) also serio-comically depicts a toothless baby called ‘Moloch’ as a fretful child-tyrant who overburdens her older sibling, reflecting the idol of child sacrifice who shares this name. Although humorously vilified, Moloch’s teeth allude to a greater menace since she is neglected and given dangerous items to soothe her gums with, including a knife handle and a poker. A dark dental thematic even haunts Dickens’s commercial context in Our Mutual Friend (1865) and when selling a canary Mr Venus accidentally gives away his loose tooth in a handful of coins. He explains that ‘it dropped into the till, I suppose. They drop into everything’ (Dickens 81). Venus’s tooth becomes a component of the exchange as an unpleasant bodily currency, recalling the role that human teeth played in consumer culture as articles stolen from morgues and battlefields, and sold at a high price for the manufacture of dentures.

Looking to Dickens’s periodicals and sketches, All the Year Round records that ‘it may be taken, as a rule, that all dentists are cheerful, and that all dentists’ servants are dismal. The truth, which the master disguises, the servant reveals’ (“Small-Beer Chronicles” 400). This sketch acknowledges that nineteenth-century dentistry possessed two faces, one was accommodating and professional at first glance and the other was gloomy and curiously omniscient, epitomised by the dentist’s servant. This ‘dismal’ character can be understood as a precursor to the contemporary dental assistant, and provided an important inspiration for Dickens’s journalistic imagination.  In 1860, Dickens first illuminated this figure in ‘Arcadian London’, published as a component of The Uncommercial Traveller. Dickens’s choice to focus on the less-visible and untrained dentist’s servant emphasises the status of nineteenth-century dentistry as a dangerously accessible career, removed from the confines of medical professionalism, confidentiality, and social status. This strategy also protected the credibility of the revered surgeon-dentists, such as Cartwright, from Dickens’s ‘tone of uneasy mockery to know all about the human hive’ and everyday experience (Maxwell 292). Dickens’s narrator is at first bemused by this figure:

‘The Dentist’s servant. Is that man no mystery to us, no type of invisible power? The tremendous individual knows (who else does?) what is done with the extracted teeth; he knows what goes on in the little room where something is always being washed or filed; he knows what warm spicy infusion is put into the comfortable tumbler from which we rinse our wounded mouth’ (161).

The omniscient servant is an ‘invisible power’ because he is liberated from the professional title and esteem of his employer yet remains intimately charged with the inner secrets of the dental profession. Indeed, Dickens’s narrator complains that ‘he knows all the statistics of my teeth and gums, my double teeth, my single teeth, my stopped teeth, and my sound’ (Dickens 161). The servant is not only permitted to investigate a patient’s vulnerable mouth, but must consume their personal dental statistics with an all-knowing authority. The narrator later admits that during his ‘Arcadian rest’ in London – the quiet autumn after the end of the social season –  ‘I am fearless of him as of a harmless, powerless creature in a Scotch cap who adores a young lady in a voluminous crinoline’ (Dickens 161). This additional description only emphasises the servant as an ominous dental figure however, since the man’s potent professional responsibility is supplanted for Dickens’s comical portrait of a guileless man in love. In quiet London with little business, the dentist’s servant is merely an ordinary man, but like any unlicensed or untrained dental worker, he retains a privileged and undeserved insight into the exposed body. Acknowledging the cultural inability to comfortably absorb figures of dentistry, Dickens perpetuates the untrustworthy dental practitioner and nods to the wider unprofessionalism infringing on the emerging dental profession.

Notes

Works Cited

Cambridge, Nicholas. “Bleak Health”. The Dickensian, vol. 114, 2016, p. 117-133.

Claveria, Miguel Alberto Zapata. “Fear of the Dentist Portrayed in Cinema”. Revista Odontológica Mexicana, vol. 20, no. 1, 2016, p. 6-7.

Dental Phobia UK. “Are you Afraid of the Dentist?”, https://www.dentalphobia.co.uk/. Accessed 10 Nov, 2020.

Dickens, Charles. Dombey and Son. 1848. OUP, 1982.

_, Our Mutual Friend. 1865. OUP, 2008.

_, The Uncommercial Traveller. 1860. OUP, 2015.

Jones, Colin. The Smile Revolution in Eighteenth-Century Paris. Oxford University Press, 2014.

Maxwell, Richard. “Dickens’s Omniscience”. ELH, vol. 46, no. 2, 1979, p. 290-313.

“Small-Beer Chronicles”. All the Year Round, vol. 8, no. 199, 1863, p. 396-400.