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that real world in crooked mercantile transactions, can also be presented as a Romantic
merchant. The parrot's cry punctuates the pretence as well as the conversation of a figure
who in some ways seems to combine the characteristics of both Mrs Skewton and Edith.
When one considers these figures, and others, like Miss Havisham in Great Expecta
tions, and Dora in David Copperfield and Flora in Little Dorrit, we see throughout Dickens's
novels a line of dangerously destructive Romantic ladies. They are not all the same case,
of course. But as I have suggested Mrs Merdle is skewed and Mrs Skewton is merdled:
both use Romanticism as a mask to hide heartless acquisitiveness under the sentimental
clichés of Romanticism. Were Society not such a demanding monster, Mrs Merdle leads us
to believe, she too would be Romantically inclined, willingly generous (as she would like
to be) and as imaginatively responsive as we all are by nature. The parrot knows better.
What Mrs Merdle really means by Society is capitalist merde, dirt, shit, mud, the filth,
which in late Dickens (remember Our Mutual Friend) is money, and spiritual, and probably,
physical death. The Romantic rhetoric, the sentimental gesture is a disguise -- the tribute
that Vice pays to Virtue, which Oscar Wilde defined as hypocrisy, the tribute that
materialism pays to the reputed spiritual character of Romanticism and Romantic poetry.
Miss Havisham is a different case, although here too we have Romanticism portrayed
as a destructively vengeful reaction to a spoilt illusion, and the illusions of the spoilt. Here
the Romantic reaction -- of stopping the clocks, closing the curtains to keep out daylight,
not clearing the wedding table, nor removing the wedding garments, and bringing up a
young girl to take revenge on the male sex -- to Romantic hopes and their disappointment
is a shrivelled mean gesture and a denial of the spirit. In several ways Pip, as well as
Estella, falls a victim to this particular "Romantic" response to egotistical trauma.
As the case of Pip reminds us, it is not only women in Dickens who fall victims to
Romantic illusion. Pip himself falls badly, seeing himself as the chosen hero of a Romantic
fairy tale, a real Romance in fact, with his destiny designed to bring him a glorious end
by a rich fairy-godmother. It all collapses when he discovers that his unknown benefactor
is a possessive criminal, by whom Pip had first been terrified on the marshes. Pip's destiny
really does begin with an act of coerced and guilty generosity amongst the mud. That
mud again; that ambiguously Romantic mud.
Bleak House opens equally famously amongst the mud - November and legal mud
and murk -- and that novel too contains many notable victims of Romanticism: Richard
Carswell, and Mr Jarndyce's brother, Tom, Lady Deadlock, and many others. Indeed, one
could claim that in one way or another every character in the book is damaged or
threatened by the murky quest represented by the infamous Jarndyce and Jarndyce Chancery
suit. Bleak House also presents us with a male equivalent to Mrs Merdle and Mrs Skewton
in Harold Skimpole, who uses the Romantic cult of the child, particularly in the form of
the innocently naive adult, as a means of screwing and skimpoling his friends and any other
honest, upright, unromantic, plain, trusting folk he should meet.
