Dickens’s Evocative Objects: A Tale of Two Lockets
Maria K. Bachman
Dickens Quarterly, Volume 33, Number 1, March 2016, pp. 38-54 (Article)
Published by Johns Hopkins University Press
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/dqt.2016.0007
For additional information about this article
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/612317
Accessed 19 Jun 2017 03:33 GMT
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Dickens’s Evocative Objects:
A Tale of Two Lockets
#
MARIA K. BACHMAN
Middle Tennessee State University
“The first question which should be asked in connection with an artist is
this: How does he regard objects?”
Hippolyte Taine, “Dickens As A Novelist”
O
ne only has to look at the odd assortment of diminutive objects
that occupied a privileged and permanent position on Charles
Dickens’s desk – a bronze figurine of two toads fighting a duel,
a porcelain monkey, a small sculpture of a smoking Turk, among several
others – to understand his personal attachment to things.1 In fact, in his
last will and testament, Dickens bequeathed to his sister-in-law Georgina
Hogarth, “his personal jewelry […] and all the little familiar objects from
my writing-table” (Letters 12: 730). Such evocative objects are not only a
testament to the ways in which particular artifacts can become imbued with
specific meanings, associations and memories, but also to the ways in which
objects can function as “companions in life experience.”2
The emergence and development of new materialisms and “thing theory”
over the past decade have brought new attention to what objects – their
myriad practical and symbolic functions – can tell us about the culture
and society of the Victorians.3 In his seminal essay, “Thing Theory,” Bill
Brown offered a new way of thinking about subject-object relations – “how
inanimate objects constitute human subjects, how they move them, how
they threaten them, how they facilitate or threaten their relation to other
subjects.”4 Following Brown’s notion of the “thing” as an intermediary
1 These cherished objects are housed permanently in the Charles Dickens Museum,
Doughty Street, London. (See www.dickensmuseum.com)
2 In a collection of autobiographical essays entitled Evocative Objects: Things We
Think With, Sherry Turkle explores the “intensity of our connections to the world of
things” (5).
3 See Jennifer Sauter (2012): 347–57.
4 According to Brown, objects are transparent in their functionality, while
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between subject and object, this essay is an investigation (or rather, the
beginnings of an investigation) into the entanglement of objects within
Dickensian social relations. As readers have noted, the pages of Dickens’s
novels overflow with stuff – curiosities, bric-à-brac, mementoes – and thus
offer scholars interested in exploring the material culture of the nineteenth
century a veritable treasure trove of things.5
Well before the advent of object studies, Dickens keenly understood the
complex and dynamic interrelationships between people and things. As
Hippolyte Taine observed in 1856, “An imagination so lucid and energetic
cannot but animate inanimate objects without an effort. It provokes in the
mind in which it works extraordinary emotions, and the author pours over
the objects which he figures to himself, something of the ever-welling passion
which overflows him” (340). Two years later, Walter Bagehot similarly noted
Dickens’s omnivorous and intense “sensibility to external objects” (393).6
When Mr. Wemmick advises Pip in Great Expectations to “get hold of
portable property” (201; ch. 24), we assume that the value he assigns to his
collection of brooches and mourning rings is solely monetary. Indeed, these
objects are “portable” because they can be easily exchanged for ready cash.
What most readers are apt to miss, however, is that the various possessions
and gifts of Wemmick’s departed clients are mementos and thus function as
material surrogates for his clients’ unnarrated histories. Each object tells a
story, but one that we are not necessarily privy to within the diegetic borders
of the novel. At the same time, these “curiosities” emphasize Wemmick’s
entangled social connections; indeed, he is described as being “quite laden
with remembrances of departed friends” (171; ch. 22). These reliquaries are
thus further invested with a value that derives from the enduring association
of individual histories. As Bruno Latour notes, things “circulate in our hands
and define our social bond by their very circulation” (89).
“things” confront us prompting both phenomenological attention and self-reflection in
a particular subject-object relation” (7). John Plotz (2008) and Elaine Freegood (2006)
offer useful starting points for thinking about the sociability of things – how objects
find their value and significance by means of circulation, moving from place to place
and hand to hand.
5 In 1856 Taine wrote: “Imagine a shop, no matter what shop, the most repulsive;
that of a marine-store dealer. Dickens sees the barometers, chronometers, telescopes,
compasses, charts, maps, sextants, speaking trumpets and so forth. He sees so many,
sees them so clearly, they are crowded and crammed, they replace each other so forcibly
in his brain, which they fill and litter” (343). First published in Revue des deux mondes,
“Charles Dickens: son talent and ses oevures,” was later included in Taine’s History of
English Literature.
6 More recently, Freegood commented: “in the myriad of things that stack up in
piles of overstocked paragraphs, Dickens seems to be trying to name all things, and to
leave no thing lying around unconnected” (103).
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While there is general agreement among critics that Oliver Twist is a
novel of evocative power, there has been scant scholarly attention to the
evocative object that is at its very center – the locket.7 Though lockets date
back to the Renaissance,8 it was not until the mid-nineteenth century when
the popularity of lockets for both men and women surged.9 Traditionally, a
locket contained another object – a cherished keepsake such as a tiny picture
or daguerreotype, a love note, fabric remnants, and, in the case of mourning
lockets, a lock of hair or the ashes of a deceased person. Lockets were often
inscribed with the owner’s name or initials and could be worn as a pendant
in full view or under clothing (as was the custom with men).10 Significantly,
just as every locket contained its own private narrative or held the deepest
secrets of the heart, so too does the locket at the heart of Oliver Twist hold
some of the novel’s deepest secrets and untold stories.
The novel’s central plot hinges (pun intended) on a locket that Oliver’s
mother had in her possession when she died in the workhouse in the serial’s
first installment. The locket, which contained two locks of hair and a gold
wedding ring, had been given to her by her married lover, Edwin Leeford, as
a symbol of his love and commitment to her. Despite the workhouse nurse’s
promise to the dying woman to safeguard the locket, Mrs. Thingummy
(aka Old Sally) steals the locket and pawns it. Years later, Old Sally makes a
cryptic deathbed confession to the workhouse matron, Mrs. Corney, who
subsequently pries a tattered pawnbroker’s duplicate from the woman’s dead
hand. Thinking opportunistically that “something might one day come of
it,” Mrs. Corney “redeem[s] the pledge” (313; bk. 3, ch. 1). Twelve years
later, Mrs. Corney (now Mrs. Bumble) sells the locket to Oliver’s nefarious
half-brother, Monks, who then throws it into a rushing river torrent where
it is presumably lost forever. Interestingly, this is the only moment in the
narrative where the object and its contents are brought to the fore and briefly
7 Readers have instead been captivated (as was Oliver) by the mysterious portrait
in Mr. Brownlow’s drawing room.
8 Elizabeth I in fact created her own self-serving fashion trend by presenting
jewel-encrusted lockets containing a tiny portrait of herself as gifts to her loyal subjects
(Auble 47–48).
9 After the birth of their first child in 1840, Prince Albert gave Queen Victoria
a bracelet with a heart-shaped locket containing a tiny lock of the baby’s hair and
inscribed with the date of birth. With each additional child, Albert presented her with
another colored enameled locket. Moreover, according her granddaughter, Princess
Marie Louise, Victoria wore lockets containing mementoes of various family members
on their birthdays (Hibbert 397).
10 Little documented evidence regarding the history of lockets exists. For a brief
overview of the locket as mourning jewelry, see Lutz (2015); for mourning rituals, see
Waters (2011).
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presented to the reader.11 However, even in George Cruikshank’s illustration
of this scene, “The Evidence Destroyed,” the locket is lost from view (and
from repossession) as Monks points deviously down a trap door into the
turbid torrent (Fig. 1). Otherwise, despite the fact that the locket is widely
circulated, its precise whereabouts, possessors, and contents remain secreted
throughout the novel.
Figure 1
11 In her essay on the literary pawnshop’s role in the transfer of secondhand items,
Elizabeth Womack notes that in Oliver Twist, the pawned locket “hang[s] in suspended
circulation” throughout the novel “as does the identity of [the] illegitimate, orphaned
child, Oliver” (452).
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As I began thinking about the complex and behind-the-scenes secret
history of the locket, I could not help but recall the central question of
Bleak House: “what connexion can there be […] between many people in
the innumerable histories of this world, who, from opposite sides of great
gulfs, have, nonetheless, been very curiously brought together!” (256; ch.
16). That question serves as a useful provocation to think about the potential
actions, uses and links that might be latent in objects generally, and in the
locket of Oliver Twist more particularly. Long before the birth of twentyfirst century network science, Dickens intuited that everyone – despite the
“great gulfs of space, time, or social status” – is connected in some way or
another (Miller 206–07). As he remarked to John Forster, “The world [is] so
much smaller than we thought it; we [are] all so connected by fate without
knowing it” (76). Indeed, Dickens’s labyrinthine plots are distinguished by a
multitudinous cast of diverse characters whose fates almost always, however
improbably, intersect. While the densely-plotted Bleak House represents
Dickens’s most sophisticated exploration of the small world theory of
interconnectivity, Oliver Twist represents, as Neil Forsyth argues, Dickens’s
first attempt as a novelist to construct a complex, rather than episodic plot
(151–65), and his first foray into representing the complexity and often
invisibility of networked social experience.
I am here concerned with the narrative linkages – or rather, entanglements12 – between various characters and Agnes Fleming’s locket, and the
multilayered meanings (material and affective) that characters assign to
and derive from that object. Thus, in a kind of mid-Victorian two degrees
of separation, the locket as an object of mutual acquaintance (or more
accurately, mutual interest) links a heterogeneous assemblage of characters
in an intranarrative network of social relations – some of those connections
are voluntary, some coercive, some opportunistic, some subversive and
some retributive. Relatedly, I am particularly interested in the stories, often
hidden or obscured (or “unnarrated”) of that particular material relic and
the persons with whom it was at any point associated.
Evocative, which means to bring strong images, memories or feelings to
mind, is derived from the Latin evocare, meaning to “summon forth” or “call
out.” Evocative objects, according to Christopher Bollas, are “potential forms
of transformation” in that they have an integrity of their own – an affective
and effective capacity to call up thoughts, feelings, and actions (4, 50–59).
Indeed, the evocative object that exists both at the center and the periphery
of the narrative evokes intricate chains of association. I thus consider the
material imaginary of Oliver Twist – the way in which the novel invites us
to imagine a physical object (in this case, the locket and its contents) in an
12 I borrow Ian Hodder’s term “entanglement” to emphasize how such social links
may be “very localized, partial, [or] marginal” (105).
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active role that enables, impacts and reveals various character’s motivations
and shapes their social relations. The evocative capacities of the locket are
manifold: it is an object of love and broken promises (as a gift from Edwin
Leeford to Agnes); an object of mourning and memory (as a keepsake or
memento intended for Oliver); and an object that seems to promise financial
gain and security (for Mrs. Corney, Old Sally, and Monks). At the same
time, the locket serves as a narrative palimpsest, offering, albeit briefly and
incompletely, traces of other stories that exist just beneath and beyond the
text’s margins. While these stories are, for the most part, unnarrated within
the diegetic borders of the text, they are not necessarily inenarrable. That is,
the “unnarratable” in Oliver Twist refers to those stories connected to the
possessors of the locket that cannot be fully or accurately retold. These stories
are nonetheless revealed, or rather called forth, through the materialities that
are co-constructed between object, people, and events.13
Agnes’s “story”
We at last learn in the final pages of the novel the story – or rather stories –
of Agnes Fleming’s locket. Monks (now identified as Oliver’s half-brother)
recounts the “penitent confession” that his father, Edwin Leeford, made
in a letter to Agnes Fleming, who was expecting their child. In the letter,
Leeford claimed that a “‘secret mystery […] prevented him from marrying
just then’” (432; bk. 3, ch. 13).
He told her [Agnes] all he had meant to do to hide her shame, if he had
lived, and prayed her, if he died, not to curse his memory, or think the
consequences of their sin would be visited on her or their young child;
for all the guilt was his. He reminded her of the day he had given her the
little locket and the ring with her christian name engraved upon it. […].
and prayed her yet to keep it, wear it next to her heart. (432)
Agnes, of course, never received that letter since it was intercepted by Monks
and his mother as Leeford lay dying. Thus, in the aftermath of her seduction
and apparent abandonment – “‘she had gone on trusting patiently to him
13 Gerald Prince suggests that elements of the storyworld that fall below the
threshold of narrativity are “unnarratable”; such events are either left implicit or
suppressed in the narration. The unnarratable thus “comprises everything that according
to a given narrative can not be narrated or is not worth narrating” (1). While the various
locket narratives of Oliver Twist are not necessarily essential to causal sequence or
narrative progression, it is perhaps more appropriate to describe such textual phenomena
as “perinarratable” as they exist on the periphery of the storyworld as secret histories or
behind-the-scenes micronarratives.
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until she trusted too far, and lost what none could ever give her back’”
(432) – we should wonder why Agnes would maintain possession of an
object that could only serve to remind her of her own naiveté and shame.14
After all, she could have turned the locket and its contents into ready cash
and thus avoided both the workhouse and an untimely death. As old Sally
points out, it would have “‘saved her life’” (196; bk. 2, ch. 2).
Despite the fact that Mr. Brownlow describes Agnes as a “guileless girl”
who finds in Leeford her first “true, ardent, and only passion,” that she
continues to wear the locket close to her heart does not fully support a
romantic “story” of her undying love and devotion to Leeford. Rather, Agnes’s
refusal to give up possession of the locket and thus sever her connection
to Leeford offers a more complex, but ultimately unnarrated story of this
unmarried mother. While Agnes was ignorant of the fact that Leeford was
married, the text suggests that she knew he had fallen ill and died.15 Left
on her own – ostensibly a “fallen” woman – to care for their love-child, the
locket and the ring are the only evidence by which she can claim what she
believes to be her rightful position as a widow (or breach of promise victim)
and thus assure her child’s legitimacy. (Throughout most of the nineteenth
century, damages for breach of promise – including bigamous promises –
could be awarded against the estates of dead defendants).16 The locket thus
contains a story that speaks to her own fortitude (her steadfast refusal to be
a passive victim) and her desire for justice for her unborn child. If Agnes had
sold the locket and the ring, she would not have had any means of proving
Leeford’s paternity as well as his intentions toward her. Thus, at her life’s
own peril,17 it is entirely possible that the locket is the only “thing” by which
14 To return to the opening scene of the novel, when the workhouse doctor observes
that the dead woman has no wedding ring, he concludes matter-of-factly that she must
be a victim of “‘the old story’” (5; bk. 1, ch. 1).
15 When Mr. Brownlow calls in the two “palsied women” from the workhouse as
eye-witnesses to Mrs. Bumble’s theft, they also report that Oliver’s mother may have
been searching for Edwin Leeford’s grave when she fell ill: “‘[Old Sally] told us often,
long ago, that the young mother had told her that, feeling she should never get over it,
she was on her way, at the time that she was taken ill, to die near the grave of the father
of the child’” (436; bk. 3, ch. 13).
16 A breach of promise suit occurs in The Pickwick Papers as well as in an early
sketch, “The Boarding House.” See Lettmaier (38 n.87). On bigamous breach of promise
suits, see also Randall Craig, Promising Language: Betrothal in Victorian Law and Fiction
(Albany: State U of New York P, 2000), 92, and Ginger Frost, Promises Broken: Courtship,
Class, and Gender in Victorian England (Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 1995).
17 “‘She wanted clothes to keep her warm, and food to eat; but she had kept it
safe, and had it in her bosom. It was gold I tell you’” (196; bk. 2, ch. 2). Significantly,
Agnes did not come to the workhouse of her own volition. She was brought there after
being “found lying in the street”; apparently, “she had walked some distance, for her
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she will be able to hold Leeford and his estate accountable.
Old Sally’s “story”
Throughout the novel we also have been privy to – though not fully cognizant
of – the other stories that are enclosed within the locket. Though we are
briefly introduced to Mrs. Thingummy (later known as “Old Sally”) in
chapter one, few details are disclosed about the pauper nurse other than her
frequent “applications” to a green bottle.18 Despite her seemingly peripheral
and inconsequential status, Old Sally’s actions are arguably what set the
events of the novel in motion, though we do not learn of her connection
to the locket until chapter 24. Even then, the locket is first alluded to, but
not mentioned specifically, when Old Sally makes her deathbed confession
to Mrs. Corney.
‘Now listen to me!’ said the dying woman […] ‘In this very room – in
this very bed – I once nursed a pretty young creetur’, that was brought
into the house with her feet cut and bruised with walking, and all soiled
with dust and blood. She gave birth to a boy, and died. […] I robbed
her, so I did! She wasn’t cold – I tell you she wasn’t cold, when I stole it!’
(196; bk. 2, ch. 2)
Significantly, Old Sally’s theft of the unnamed object is not an impulsive
act. When the “pretty young creetur” first showed her the gold around her
neck, Old Sally admits to immediately stealing “it in her heart.” Suffering
from a guilty conscience many years later, she laments, “‘the child’s death,
perhaps, is on me!’” (196). Despite her contrition, it is unlikely that this is
the only time that she has stolen during her long tenure at the workhouse.
Though we later find out that Old Sally had pawned the locket for ready
cash, we should wonder why she has remained a “pauper inmate” all these
years. After all, if the rich gold could have saved Agnes’s life, it most certainly
should have sprung Old Sally out of the workhouse, if, of course, she had
wanted to leave.
When Mrs. Bumble later comes into possession of the locket – (after she
has redeemed the tattered pawn ticket she pried from the dead hand of Old
Sally) – she surmises part of Old Sally’s “story”:
shoes were worn to pieces” (5; bk.1, ch.1). Her self-sacrificing actions may be compared
with those of Nancy, who also pays the ultimate price to “save” Oliver’s life.
18 Mrs. Thingummy is in attendance when Agnes Fleming (whose identity is not
revealed for another fifty chapters) gives birth to Oliver and dies shortly thereafter.
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‘I judge that she had kept the trinket, for some time, in the hope of
turning it to better account; and then pawned it; and had saved or scraped
together money to pay the pawnbroker’s interest year by year, and prevent
its running out, so that if anything came of it, it could still be redeemed.
Nothing had come of it; and, as I tell you, she died with the scrap of paper,
all worn and tattered, in her hand.’ (313; bk. 3, ch. 1)
Had Old Sally not paid interest on the gold locket each year to avoid
forfeiture, it would have likely been sold or disposed of by the pawnbroker.19
The story here that is never fully disclosed is that Fagin is not the only
purveyor of stolen goods in the novel.20 Indeed, stealing from corpses may
likely have been a source of Old Sally’s crude “livelihood” throughout her
workhouse tenure. According to Simon Fowler, the workhouse nurses were
an unpaid labor force. They were selected from among the pauper inmates
primarily on the basis of their being “able bodied.” They lacked medical
training, attended patients without supervision, and generally had a “fatal
weakness for alcohol.”21 Workhouses, as Dickens illustrates throughout the
novel, were riddled with corruption, and larceny and embezzlement were
commonplace. Because Old Sally operated unobserved – recall that Mrs.
Corney, the workhouse matron, is adamant in not wanting to be bothered
about anything, particularly pauper deaths – Old Sally would have been
free to supplement her nonexistent income using whatever means possible.
For example, as the attending nurse in the workhouse, she had ready access
to alcohol, the only available medicine for the sick and dying, and thus
would have been free to “compensate” herself accordingly (hence the green
bottle). She also had access to the personal possessions of the workhouse
inmates, which she may have justified as appropriate payment for her
“services.” Despite their general state of destitution, many paupers arrived
19 Money was loaned against a portion of the pledged object’s value – generally
from two-thirds to three-quarters of the object’s resale worth. Old Sally likely would
have had to pay a minimum of fifteen percent interest per year (Macrae 1861).
20 In yet another unnarrated “object” story, we can turn to chapter 9, where Fagin
gleefully takes inventory of his hidden treasures while Oliver presumably sleeps. Though
his “little property” – the gang’s pickpocketing spoils – includes an assortment of gold
and diamond watches, along with several “rings, brooches, bracelets, and other articles
of jewelry” (68–69; bk I; ch. 9), there is one small “trinket” in particular that occupies
Fagin’s attention. This object is not named, but it bears a “minute inscription” over
which Fagin “pores […] long and earnestly,” unable to decipher. Notably, he reflects
that some stories, particularly those “awkward stories” belonging to the dead, may never
come to light.
21 Significantly, pauper nurses “kept the wages bill low, which appealed to the
guardians and ratepayers, but the care they offered was often worse than useless and in
many cases endangered their patients’ lives” (Fowler 135).
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at the workhouse clinging to various personal items. Upon admission,
however, they would have been forced to relinquish their clothing and any
other personal effects.22 Thus, stealing the personal possessions of deceased
workhouse inmates and pawning those items for cash loans was likely how
Old Sally would have been able to continue paying interest on the locket. (It
is also possible that she was able to buy back the locket each year and then
turn around and pawn it again). Moreover, such an enterprise – easy access
to readily pledgeable objects – would have been a disincentive for Old Sally
to leave the workhouse. Just as we are reminded several times throughout
the novel that the undertaker, Mr. Sowerberry, is able to “make his fortune”
from the steady business provided by the workhouse, so too was Old Sally
likely to profit from the surfeit of pauper deaths.23
Mrs. Bumble’s “story”
The secret histories of the locket extend beyond those of Agnes and Old
Sally. Mrs. Bumble’s possession of the locket casts in relief a story of moral
corruption that implicitly links her to both Fagin and Old Sally as a receiver
and purveyor of stolen goods. Indeed, in light of this connection we might be
inclined to wonder how and where Mrs. Corney obtained the silver teaspoons,
sugar tongs and milk-pots, along with all the furniture that Mr. Bumble
inventories during their “courtship.” While these domestic accoutrements
may be legitimate possessions from her first marriage, it is entirely possible
that some of these objects, not unlike Wemmick’s portable property, have
been acquired under suspicious or unlawful conditions. Resembling other
villains of the novel, Mrs. Bumble operates on unscrupulous instincts and
pure opportunism. Fast forward to chapter 38 and to a clandestine meeting
in which the mysterious Monks seeks information from Mrs. Bumble about
“‘the hag that nursed [Oliver Twist’s] mother’” (303; bk. 2, ch. 14). After
bargaining over the value of this as-yet undisclosed secret, Monks reluctantly
22 In fact, Fowler notes, it was not unusual for individuals to smuggle other items
in or on their bodies in hopes that they would not be searched too thoroughly (42, 57).
23 “‘You’ll make your fortune, Mr. Sowerberry,’ said the beadle, as he thrust his
thumb and forefinger into the proffered snuff-box of the undertaker, which was an
ingenious little model of a patent coffin. ‘I say you’ll make your fortune, Mr. Sowerberry,’
repeated Mr. Bumble, tapping the undertaker on the shoulder, in a friendly manner,
with his cane” (28; bk. 1, ch. 4). Pauper deaths were not just profitable for undertakers
such as Mr. Sowerberry, but also became a lucrative secret trade for the workhouse
“guardians” as well. Under the Anatomy Act in 1832, workhouse masters could serve
as legal executors for unclaimed corpses – destitute inmates – and sell those bodies to
anatomists for medical dissection (See Wood 3; Hurren 6).
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agrees to pay a smug Mrs. Bumble the sum of twenty-five pounds just to
hear her story (311; bk. 2, ch. 14).
Mrs. Bumble then proceeds to recount Old Sally’s confession of robbing
Oliver’s mother. Believing that she would eventually come to profit from
the pawnbroker’s duplicate that she pried from Old Sally’s dead hand, Mrs.
Bumble redeems the pledge. We finally learn, albeit twelve years later, that
the “rich gold” belonging to Oliver’s mother (still unnamed at this point
in the novel) was “a little gold locket” containing two locks of hair and a
plain gold wedding-ring with the name “Agnes” inscribed on the inside and
a blank for the surname.
‘There,’ replied [Mrs. Bumble]. And, as if glad to be relieved of it, she
hastily threw upon the table a small kid bag scarcely large enough for a
French watch, which Monks pouncing upon, tore open with trembling
hands. […] ‘And this is all?’ said Monks, after a close and eager scrutiny
of the contents of the little packet. ‘All,’ replied [Mrs. Bumble]. […] ‘I
know nothing of the story beyond what I can guess at, […] and I want
to know nothing, for it’s safer not. (313–14; bk. 3, ch. 1)
Mrs. Bumble’s claim to know “nothing” about Agnes Fleming’s “story”
is, without question, disingenuous. We know from Old Sally’s deathbed
confession that the locket is the key to Oliver’s identity. This is information
that Monks of course knows, but Mrs. Bumble pretends not to know. Her
unlawful possession of the locket for some twelve years is certainly one
of the more unpardonable acts of villainy in the novel. Consider, as Old
Sally’s inconvenienced confessee, Mrs. Bumble unhesitatingly abdicates a
fundamental moral responsibility to right Old Sally’s wrong and return the
locket to Oliver. After all, the locket is seemingly the only piece of evidence
linking Oliver to his name and estate. Mrs. Bumble then compounds
Old Sally’s crime by secretly holding the locket in her possession. Her
unwillingness to come forward, unless she stands to profit, is perhaps the
most damaging, yet most occluded example of the criminal negligence
that pervades the novel. Just as Old Sally did not heed the desperate pleas
of a dying mother to “‘take pity upon a lonely desolate child, abandoned’”
to this “‘troubled world’” (197; bk. 2, ch. 2), so too does Mrs. Bumble
unhesitatingly abdicate her responsibility to rescue Oliver from a life of
obscurity and privation.24
24 Interestingly, Mr. Brownlow accuses Mr. Bumble of not simply being complicit
in his wife’s criminal activities, but serving as the “mastermind” behind her dastardly
deeds: “‘You were present on the occasion of the destruction of these trinkets, and,
indeed are the more guilty of the two in the eyes of the law, for the law supposes that
your wife acts under your direction’” (436; bk. 3, ch. 13).
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The Other Tale of A Locket
While Dickens was writing Oliver Twist, his young sister-in-law Mary
Hogarth died suddenly and quite unexpectedly on 7 May 1837. Her death
so traumatized Dickens that he was compelled to suspend work on both
Oliver Twist and The Pickwick Papers, a failure to meet submission deadlines
that occurred only once in his career. In place of the installment for number
six in June 1837, the following announcement appeared:
Since the appearance of the last Number of this Work the Editor has had
to mourn the sudden death of a very dear young relative to whom he was
most affectionately attached, and whose society had been, for a long time,
the chief solace of his labours. He has been compelled to seek a short
interval of rest and quiet.
The next Number – the first of our Second Volume – will be conducted
by him, as usual, and the Adventures of Oliver Twist will then be
continued.’ (Letters 1: 267; emphasis added)
Dickens grieved terribly for Mary. He apparently dreamt of her every night
for months following her death and recounted to her mother, Mrs. George
Hogarth, how Mary would often appear to him:
sometimes as a spirit, sometimes as a living creature, never with any of the
bitterness of my real sorrow, but always with a kind of quiet happiness,
which became so pleasant to me that I never lay down at night without a
hope of the vision coming back in one shape or other. (Letters 3: 483–84).
In addition to these visions, Dickens also found some measure of solace
in a ring he had removed from Mary’s dead hand and in a locket that he
had originally given to her. In fact, he turned this piece of jewelry into a
mourning locket containing a lock of Mary’s hair (Slater 85).25 That he wore
25 The locket is listed in the auction catalog, The Dickens Collection of Books,
Manuscripts and Relics Formed by the Late Dr. R.T. Jupp of London (New York: Anderson
Galleries, 1922) as item number “489. MOSS AGATE AND SILVER LOCKET,
inscribed “1837 M. S. H.” With hair of Miss Mary Scott Hogarth. Given to her by
Charles Dickens in 1837, and kept by him after her death the same year. The locket
includes the following certificate of authenticity from Georgina Hogarth:
“I certify that this Moss Agate and Silver Locket was given by Charles
Dickens to my sister Mary Scott Hogarth in 1837, and that from that time
it was always worn by her until her death 7th May 1837, and that Charles
Dickens always had it in his possession after that and until the time of his
death 9th June 1870, and that the hair in it is that of my sister Mary Hogarth.”
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these memorial relics for the rest of his life provides a telling glimpse into
the extent of his obsession26 and reminds us of the inseparability of thought
and feeling in our relationship to things (Turkle 5). Indeed, Dickens also
kept Mary’s clothes and continually expressed a desire to be buried with her
in the same grave. According to Michael Slater, Dickens “clung pathetically
to everything that had been hers” (85).
In his diary Dickens described Mary as “sympathizing with all my
thoughts and feelings more than anyone I knew ever did or will” (quoted in
Slater 82) and almost five years after her death, Dickens felt her influence as
“that spirit which directs my life, and through a heavy sorrow has pointed
upwards with unchanging finger for more than four years past” (Letters 3: 35).
Biographers and critics have always been hard-pressed to fully account for the
intensity of Dickens’s feelings for Mary and for the depth and duration of his
grief.27 Though Dickens described Mary as “the dear girl whom I loved, after
my wife, more deeply and fervently than anyone on earth” (Letters 1: 260),
Slater notes that Dickens’s affection for Mary was far more “intense” than
anything he had felt for his wife, Catherine (78). Edgar Johnson similarly
remarks, “It is impossible to exaggerate the significance of this early love
and early sorrow for Dickens. His devotion to Mary was an emotion unique
in his entire life, not only more enduring and unchanging than any other,
but one that touched his being in a way no other did” (1: 203–04).28 By
Dickens’s own admission, he was obsessed with the memory of Mary: “she
is so much in my thoughts at all times (especially when I am successful,
and have prospered in anything) that the recollection of her is an essential
part of my being, and is as inseparable from my existence as the beating of
my heart is” (Letters 3: 484). Moreover, many critics and readers have long
speculated that Dickens enshrined the memory of Mary in such angelic
female characters such as Rose Maylie, Little Nell and Florence Dombey.
Ultimately, however, the precise nature of Dickens’s relationship with Mary,
much like the locket itself, remains a secreted, and thus incomplete story.
26 Writing to Mrs. Hogarth on 26 October 1837, Dickens thanked her for a lock
of Mary’s hair, adding that since her death, he had “never had her ring off [his] fingers
by day or night, except for an instant at a time, to wash his hands.” Significantly, “Lost
Love” is the title of the chapter in which Johnson discusses the impact that Mary
Hogarth’s death had on Dickens (Letters 1: 323; Johnson 1: 195–204).
27 Writing to Forster on 7 May 1848, Dickens notes how the memory of Mary’s
death was still ever present: “This day eleven years, poor dear Mary died” (Letters 5:
299).
28 Peter Akroyd also speculates, “there must have been other forces at work which
compounded his misery” (226).
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What connexion can there be?
Though Oliver Twist, as noted earlier, was Dickens’s first novelistic attempt
at a complex, rather than episodic plot, he hinted in a March 1838 letter
that “nobody can have heard what I mean to do with the different characters
[…] inasmuch as at present, I don’t quite know myself ” (Letters 1: 388).
This claim occurs when Oliver Twist was well into a year of serial publication
and nine months after the death of Mary Hogarth. In fact, the previous
month’s installment (February 1838) included chapter 24 of the novel where
the first hint of a locket is introduced into the narrative. This is where Old
Sally reports having a conversation with Oliver’s mother years earlier, with
reference to “rich gold,” but no explicit mention of a locket. The existence
of the locket, however, is not brought to the reader’s attention until chapter
38 (which appears in the August 1838 installment of the novel), and just
two months after Dickens declared to Richard Bentley, “I have planned the
tale to the close” (Letters 1: 413).
Following Burton Wheeler’s claim that Dickens was not fully in command
of the design of the novel in the early installments of Oliver Twist (that is,
he did not really know where he was going with the plot), I think it is not
at all farfetched to conclude that the trauma of Mary Hogarth’s sudden
death and Dickens’s memorializing of her in the mourning locket that he
wore every day had a remarkable influence on the composition of the novel
(41–61).29 If we consider how objects are imbued with a kind of affective
and aesthetic energy, we can better understand how Dickens’s entanglement
with these material surrogates for Mary Hogarth impacted – or rather,
summoned forth – the direction and flow of the narrative. Turkle has
suggested that objects function as companions to our emotional lives. We
feel through them, they bring up memories and they connect us with both
our relatives and with ourselves: “We often feel at one with our objects” (9).
Second, material objects often become unconscious catalysts of thought.
Like Wemmick’s reliquaries, which are “laden with remembrances,” Mary
Hogarth’s locket served not only as a “companion to emotion” for Dickens,
but also as a “provocation to thought.” Thus, unlike the typical Dickensian
plot that relies invariably on coincidence, it is really no coincidence that
Dickens introduces a locket into the narrative just months after his young
sister-in-law’s death. According to Bollas, we are unconsciously shaped by
our use of and engagement with evocative objects: “Objects leave an imprint
in our unconscious that is partly the property of the thing-itself and mostly
29 Robert Douglas-Fairhurst also notes that it was not until months after Mary
Hogarth’s death that the “main shape” of Oliver Twist began to emerge (270). In fact,
it was not until Dombey and Son (1846–48) that Dickens began creating working notes
and plot outlines for the weekly or monthly installments of his novels.
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the result of the meaning within our individual self ” (83). Significantly, the
fictional locket is a gift from a married man to a young woman to whom
he was deeply attached, just as the married author himself had given such
a sentimental and personalized gift to his young sister-in-law. And just as
the locket from Edwin Leeford to Agnes Fleming symbolized their secret
love, so too did the gift from Dickens to Mary Hogarth suggest a romantic
connection that could never be fully or openly acknowledged. Indeed, as
Michael Kearns has argued, for Dickens “the heart remains a mysterious
entity; it is linked by association to elements of the phenomenal world and
exercises its power through this link” (159).30
Building on the premise that the object world has long played a vibrant
and vital role in the Dickensian literary imagination, “A Tale of Two Lockets”
takes as its focus the dynamic and mutual constitutiveness of characters
and things in Oliver Twist. More specifically, this essay foregrounds the
entanglement of objects and subjects in webs of social relations and, in doing
so, recovers the myriad hidden stories that things (as narrative artifacts)
can reveal, reconstruct and retell. Ultimately, this essay is a provocation
for scholars (and not just so-called “thing theorists”) to further explore the
richness and complexity of the evocative objects that influence, whether
affectively, intellectually, or materially the literary lives and real lives of all
things Dickensian.
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