202 KNOWING DICKENS
After 1850 Dickens began to consider cases of voluntary self-isolation,
surrounding them with images of horror and disgust. Mrs. Clennam hardens
the arteries of change by choosing to live in rigid immobility. Miss Havisham
allows her house to rot around her; spiders crawl on the remains of her
ancient wedding cake as she broods on her unhealed wound. Because of her
perverse but human connection with Estella, she is allowed some sympathy.
Shortly before completing Great Expectations in the summer of 1861, Dick-
ens visited the hermit John Lucas, who had secluded himself on his fam-
ily estate in Hertfordshire. An intelligent man who suffered from paranoia,
Lucas neglected himself and the estate, slept in rags on cinders and soot in his
kitchen, and managed to keep people coming around by distributing coins to
passing tramps and children. Dickens mentioned the visit in a letter to Arthur
Helps: “If he were to faint one night, he would probably be devoured by the
Rats who swarm in that den of his,—I should not have stood so coolly at
the bars, if I had known of their being so near” (9.430–31). The rat-infested
warehouse of Warren’s Blacking, seen in this image through prison-like bars,
was always just a little too near.
That year Dickens devoted the Christmas number of All the Year Round,
Tom Tiddler’s Ground, to the evils of a hermit existence; the rats had done their
work on his imagination. His frame story for the number was a fictional-
ized version of his visit to Lucas in which his stand-in, called the Traveller,
interrogates the hermit Mr. Mopes. The Traveller has no shred of sympathy
or curiosity to spare for the hermit. Mopes is filthy, lazy, vain, diseased, and
unnatural; his neglect of the property has made him a universal nuisance, and
the unused beds in the house are seething with rats. “I would put the thing
on the treadmill,” says the Traveller, echoing the praise in “Pet Prisoners” of
the treadmill as an exemplary punishment (CS 419). The hermit is associated
with every bad image in Dickens’s repertoire: “A compound of Newgate,
Bedlam, a Debtor’s Prison in the worst time, a chimney-sweep, a mudlark,
and the Noble Savage!” (426). The moral is simple: “we must arise and wash
our faces and do our gregarious work and act and re-act on one another,
leaving only the idiot and the palsied to sit blinking in the corner” (430).
Dickens’s inset story for the number, “Picking up Miss Kimmeens,” is
about a young girl left alone in a schoolhouse for the day; after a few hours
of “unnatural solitude” her mind turns nasty and sour, but she has sense
enough to spring out of her chair and rush out of the house. Both frame and
story reveal Dickens in his most stupid frame of mind, devoid of wit, nuance,
sympathy, self-understanding, or anything except a willful desire to crush the
image of rat-infested solitude out of existence. The vehemence of this mood
might be connected to changes attending his separation from Catherine.
After 1859, the letters show a drop-off in dinners, theatricals, and other signs