Abstract
This article examines disability in Dion Boucicault's adaptations Dot (1859) and The Colleen Bawn (1860), arguing that Boucicault uses disabled characters both to construct and to complicate the ideal communities formed in the plays’ conclusions. The article traces how Boucicault alters the representation of disability in his source texts, Dickens's The Cricket on the Hearth (1845) and Gerald Griffin's The Collegians (1829). It demonstrates that this is a vital aspect of Boucicault's revision of these texts’ constructions of the social body and that his revision of their disability plots has significant political implications.
Dion Boucicault had a gift for adaptation. Many of his most famous and successful plays were adaptations from novels, and there was no denying his ability to alter the plot and adjust the pacing of his source material so that it worked on stage. As the actor Joseph Jefferson put it, ‘[i]f he steals satin, he embroiders it with silk’. 1 Boucicault's skill may not have been in doubt, but the legitimacy of the practice certainly was; even the admiring Jefferson describes it in terms of theft, while contemporary critics invoked ideas of (il)legitimacy to snipe about the disputed ‘paternity’ of Boucicault's creations. 2 As critical fashions have changed, however, Boucicault's own insistence on the interdependence of artistic productions – his claim that ‘[o]riginality, speaking by the card, is a quality that never existed’ 3 – has come to align rather neatly with the scholarly trend for celebrating rather than deprecating intertextuality. The shift towards arguing that ‘adaptation and appropriation are fundamental to the practice, and, indeed, to the enjoyment, of literature’, 4 in Julie Sanders's words, has been notably pronounced in Victorian studies, for the simple reason that the nineteenth-century stage was dominated by adaptations from novels. It is fundamentally impossible to appreciate what Janice Norwood calls ‘the vitality of nineteenth-century drama’ without being open to the idea that adaptation is a creative practice rather than an imaginative failure. 5
This is especially true of approaching a playwright like Boucicault, whose skill as an adapter is central to his artistic achievement and popular success. In this article, I aim to demonstrate how attention to his adaptations as adaptations – that is, in relation to their novelistic source material – enriches and alters our reading of both the plays and the novels on which they draw, by examining Boucicault's revision of his source texts’ depiction of disability in Dot (1859) and The Colleen Bawn (1860). When we read these adaptations alongside the novels that inspired them, Dickens's The Cricket on the Hearth (1845) and Gerald Griffin's The Collegians (1829), we can see that Boucicault's re-imagining of their disabled characters and re-working of their disability plots is crucial to his revision of their politics in a wider sense. In The Colleen Bawn, Boucicault's proto-Nationalist re-invention of the Irish community Griffin constructs at the end of The Collegians depends on his re-imagining of the figure of the hunchback, Danny Mann, whose body is made to express ideas about the Irish nation which are diametrically opposite to those in Griffin's novel. Conversely, Dot's re-writing of Dickens's blind and intellectually disabled characters, Bertha Plummer and Tilly Slowboy, shows that stage melodrama can in some cases be more rather than less concerned with the social realities of disabled experience than the prose fiction that inspired it, and can offer a more broadly inclusive and less hierarchical vision of social harmony. Reading these plays alongside their source novels thus enables us to see that disability was vital to dramatists in this period as a vehicle for exploring questions of narrative and social justice – as I have argued elsewhere it was for novelists. 6
Standing at the beginning of Boucicault's middle and most successful period, these two plays are ideal test cases for considering mid-Victorian adaptive practice, and the multivalent relationship between novel and theatre in this period. 7 They are also particularly illuminating for a study of mid-Victorian representations of disability, because they illustrate three of the most prevalent character ‘types’ to which disabled characters largely conformed: the comic, the pathetic, and the villainous. These basic types are exemplified by Danny Mann in The Collegians and The Colleen, and by Bertha Plummer and Tilly Slowboy in Cricket and Dot, a trio who between them offer representations of three major kinds of disability – physical (Danny), sensory (Bertha) and cognitive (Tilly). Describing these characters as disabled is not, of course, self-evidently useful: Jennifer Esmail and Christopher Keep point out that ‘Victorians would not have grouped together, in their terminology, a blind person, a “mad” person, an “invalid”, [and] a “cripple” … in the one discursive category of “disability”’. 8 However, these characters are alike in that their deviation from an unstated but powerfully present norm is made the basis for their symbolic potency: they are all defined by negatively conceived difference, which seems to be the best working definition of disability as a social identity in the Victorian period. 9 Moreover, these pairs of texts also neatly capture both the major ways that disability was plotted in relation to fictional communities on the mid-Victorian page and stage, those of the scapegoat and the lynchpin. 10 In Cricket and Dot, the community which is re-formed and re-affirmed at the end of the story, after the upheavals and reorganisation of the melodramatic plot, is organised around disability, its virtue established by the inclusion of disabled characters who are used to embody the interdependence of all the community members. In direct contrast, The Collegians and The Colleen exile the hunchbacked Danny Mann from the narrative's final settlement, and use his disability to represent everything that must be purged from the reformed community. In other words, Danny is the scapegoat who must be cast out, while Bertha and Tilly are the lynchpins around whom the community must rally.
This quartet of texts not only captures these prevalent narrative structures and character types, but also demonstrates the divergent political ends they could serve, since in both cases, Boucicault is able to adapt them to distinctively different political ends from those they advance in Dickens's and Griffin's texts. The charge that melodrama is in some sense an apolitical form, and that Boucicault was typical in having, as Richard Altick put it, ‘no social conscience to speak of’, 11 used to be a stock part of its dismissal. A close examination of Boucicault's plotting of disabled characters, however, makes it clear that he revised his source texts’ treatment of disability in a way that served decidedly political ends – in other words, to shape the audience's ideas about how the nation should imagine itself, how the family should be structured, how class distinctions should be preserved or dissolved, and more besides. I am not proposing that we imagine Boucicault as a politically committed writer: clearly, his politics were flexible, his priority what worked on stage and what was popular with audiences. But contemporary suspicions that, as Renata Kobetts Miller puts it, ‘the stage was a form of popular entertainment that was financially obligated to cater to the tastes of the working classes’, 12 does seem to have had a scintilla of truth to it. It is not that Boucicault was writing for a working-class audience more than for a middle-class one – on the contrary, The Colleen Bawn played at the Adelphi in the West End and was seen three times by Queen Victoria 13 – but that he seems to have assumed that his audience wanted his plays to affirm the value of the popular as opposed to the elite, and of the communal above the individual. His positioning and treatment of disabled characters are crucial to this aspect of his adaptations, and studying disabled characters in these plays, therefore, has important implications for how we read the politics of Boucicault's melodramas, more broadly.
Conversely, the genre in which Boucicault worked makes his disabled characters particularly appealing as objects of study. In an abstract sense, characters’ translation from page to stage is at its most problematic when it comes to their bodies, something that fictional characters on the page cannot have, and that actors portraying them on the stage must have. The translation seems especially fraught when it comes to melodrama, because the genre depends so heavily on what Carolyn Williams calls ‘the convention of physiognomic legibility’. 14 Incidental disability is simply unimaginable in melodrama: if all characters’ bodies express themselves and all bodily features are meaningful, then of course disability must have meaning. Just what it means, however, can be highly unstable, as becomes clear when we compare Griffin and Boucicault's representation of Danny Mann's injury – symbolic in both versions of the story, but quite differently so. Perhaps for this very reason, disability was irresistibly appealing to melodramatists, to such an extent that disability itself became associated, as Martha Stoddard Holmes argues, ‘with an expectation of melodrama’ – another reason why the translation of disabled characters in adaptations of novels for the stage is an intriguing proposition. 15 In a definition of melodrama that has been particularly influential to studies of the melodramatic novel, Peter Brooks argued that melodrama ‘works through the play of pure, exteriorized signs’; 16 this might lead us to expect that when melodramatically-inflected texts like The Collegians or The Cricket on the Hearth become fully-fledged stage melodramas, disability will function as ‘pure’ symbol, its metaphorical aspect amplified in adaptation. A close examination of Boucicault's actual practice, however, reveals that this is not so: he neither simplified nor amplified the symbolism of characters’ disabilities in the novels he adapted. Rather, he altered it, as part of his broader alteration of the texts’ social, national, and cultural politics.
The way Boucicault reimagines the texts’ disabled characters alters the nature of the social body that is re-constructed at the end of the plays and novels – subtly so in the case of Dot, and drastically in the case of The Colleen. In Dot, Boucicault shifts the emphasis of Dickens's narrative so as to stress the wider community's role in upholding the matrimonial and familial bonds celebrated in Cricket. He depicts that community as less hierarchical, more matriarchal, and more explicitly opposed to utilitarian and capitalist values. Moreover, by adjusting their characterisation, he integrates his disabled characters into this community so that they become vital members rather than objects of charity. In The Colleen, Boucicault completely alters The Collegian's vision of Ireland. In the novel, a dark tale of murder is made to symbolise the need for a wholesale reconstruction of Irish society; Boucicault transforms this into a domestic melodrama with a proto-nationalist conclusion. Re-imagining Griffin's disabled villain is vital to Boucicault's revision of the story's emphasis and significance, which substitutes emotional for social disorder, and makes the hunchbacked villain a disturbing double for the excessively feeling heroine rather than for his corrupt master. While they use disability markedly differently, the disability politics of both these plays are completely inseparable from their vision of nation and community, which in turn differ significantly from those of their source texts.
The Collegians and The Colleen Bawn
Boucicault's The Colleen Bawn completely overhauls the plot of Gerald Griffin's novel The Collegians. As in The Collegians, Boucicault has his (anti-)hero Hardress Cregan, an impoverished Irish aristocrat, torn between his desire for a socially advantageous match to the heiress Anne Chute and his existing, secret marriage to the beautiful peasant girl, Eily O’Connor, the ‘Colleen Bawn’. As in Griffin's novel, Hardress's devoted, hunchbacked servant Danny Mann offers to put Eily out of the way so as to free Hardress from his mésalliance. At this point, however, the two narratives drastically diverge: in a moment of weakness, Griffin's Hardress gives Danny the secret signal to act, only to suffer agonies of guilt when Eily is found murdered, and to die of a broken heart while awaiting transportation, following Danny's betrayal. In stark contrast, Boucicault's Danny receives the signal only by mistake and does not succeed in killing Eily. She is instead rescued by her faithful admirer Myles-na-Coppaleen, pulled from the lake in the play's famous sensation scene, and then reunited with her penitent husband in the finale. As I shall suggest, this structure is similar to that in Boucicault's Dot: both uphold marriage and establish domestic felicity, in the context of a virtuous, inclusive community which is celebrated at the play's conclusion. While Boucicault's conclusion redeems Hardress, however, it still casts Danny into narrative oblivion, apparently unable to accommodate him in this otherwise all-inclusive vision of an ideal Ireland. In both novel and play, his crooked body is made a sign of an aberrance which cannot be allowed to persist; in both texts, he embodies the faults which must be purged from the reformed, re-ordered community. The nature of these faults, however, is completely different in the two versions, a difference which captures their contrasting vision of Irish society and of Ireland's future.
Written on the eve of Catholic Emancipation, Griffin's Collegians is, as Seamus Deane puts it, a ‘self-consciously … national novel in the form of Romantic melodrama’. 17 It stages a struggle for Ireland's future between the backward-looking, Byronic aristocrat Hardress Cregan, and the virtuous representative of the rising Catholic middle class, Kyrle Daly, expressed through their rivalry for the hand of Anne Chute. The obvious inference of the novel's structure and its resolution in Kyrle's favour is that Ireland must break with its romantic but violent past and move into the sunny uplands of enlightened modernity. As Dominick Tracy argues, however, there is a certain contradiction inherent in this programme of national renewal: ‘Paradoxically, for an Irish nation seeking recognition within the Union, much that distinguishes Ireland culturally – and therefore constitutes its national aspirations – would necessarily be discarded or distorted in this act of conformity’. 18 Perhaps this is why the novel seems hardly to will the changes it prescribes. Ending in execution and exile, with only a cursory description of the domestic happiness now established, the overall effect is more gloomy than triumphant. Yet if Griffin creates in Kryle a strikingly uncharismatic hero, he utterly precludes nostalgia for the past represented by Hardress and Eily, in whom contemporary readers would have recognised the real-life case of the peasant girl, Ellen Hanley, who was murdered at the behest of her upper-class husband, John Scanlan, in 1819. 19 The implication of basing a ‘national novel’ on this case is clear: violent oppression of the peasantry and disastrous domestic disorder is made representative of the state of Irish society, thereby shown to be in dire need of immediate and drastic reform.
One of the most striking alterations Griffin makes to his source material is to introduce disability into the story. In fictionalising Stephen Sullivan, the servant who murdered Ellen at his master's behest, Griffin makes the character a hunchback, situating Danny Mann in the tradition of gothic and melodramatic villains whose moral deviance is made visible in their distorted bodies. More than this, Griffin makes Danny's body legible, not in terms of generalised moral evil, but in terms of specific social disorder. As Hardress explains to Eily: When we were both children, that young fellow was my constant companion. Familiarity produced a feeling of equality, on which he presumed so far as to offer a rudeness to a little relative of mine, a Miss Chute, who was on a visit at my mother's. She complained to me, and my vengeance was summary. I met him at the head of the kitchen-stairs, and without even the ceremony of a single question, or preparatory speech, I seized him by the collar and hurled him with desperate force to the bottom of the flight. He was unable to rise as soon as I expected, and on examination it was discovered that an injury had been done to the spine, which, notwithstanding all the exertions that were employed to repair it, had its result in his present deformity.
20
Griffin depicts the novel's other peasant characters as similarly unreformable. They are either picturesque but utterly impotent, like doomed Eily and handsome, rejected Myles, or grotesque, like Danny's ‘whiskey-drinking virago’ of a sister, Fighting Poll, 25 or the ludicrously misshapen Lowry Looby, in whose mis-proportioned body nature seems to have ‘laid the foundation of a giant, but … been compelled to terminate her undertaking with the dimensions of a dwarf’. 26 Looby is the character we might expect to provide a virtuous contrast to Danny, in being the servant of the novel's true hero, Kyrle Daly, and thus potentially the embodiment of the peasant of the future, as Kyrle represents a more modern kind of master. 27 In fact, as Seamus Deane convincingly argues, Looby is represented as fundamentally like Danny, in that his body reveals his essential, irredeemable inadequacy as a modern man: ‘Both men are physically, psychologically, socially, and economically retarded. … Neither has undergone civic emancipation. Nor can they’. 28 In this context, Danny's disability makes him typical rather than aberrant, the worst expression of the society which has formed him rather than an exception to its rules. Hardress's attempts to cast him off – which ultimately result in Danny's betrayal – thus appear as hypocritical and deservedly futile attempts on the part of a worthless landlord class to separate itself from the debased peasantry upon which it depends and which it has produced. Griffin's Hardress and Danny can never, finally, be separated, not even when they reject each other. In perhaps the most touching moment Griffin allows him, Danny predicts that he will be scapegoated for his master's crimes, imagining that he will be ‘branded as an informer … in the ballad which was to immortalize the guilt and penitence of Hardress and his own treachery’. 29
Boucicault's adaptation of the narrative comes close to realising Danny's worst fears. The Colleen Bawn does indeed diminish Hardress's guilt, and allows him to end happily, granting him a second chance at marriage with Eily. However, it firmly avoids depicting Danny ‘as an informer’, giving us instead a Danny who betrays Hardress's secret only by accident, and whose relationship with Hardress is rooted in sentiment. In fact, it is by changing this relationship that Boucicault turns Griffin's dark indictment of Irish society into a domestic melodrama in which love conquers all. In this version, Danny is quite unambiguously motivated by love for Hardress, and Hardress's original act of violence is itself a matter of unrestrained feeling, rather than the expression of class consciousness:
Hardress, who is that with you?
Only Danny Mann, my boatman.
That fellow is like your shadow.
Is it a cripple like me, that would be the shadow of an illegant gentleman like Mr Hardress Cregan?
Well, I mean that he never leaves your side.
And he never shall leave me. Ten years ago he was a fine boy – we were foster brothers and playmates – in a moment of passion, while we were struggling, I flung him from the gap rock into the reeks below, and thus he was maimed for life.
Arrah! Whist aroon! Wouldn’t I die for yez? Didn’t the same mother foster us? Why, wouldn’t ye brake my back if it plazed ye, and welkim! Oh, Masther Kyrle, if ye’d seen him nursing’ me for months, and cryin’ over me, and keenin’! Sin’ that time, sir, my body's been crimpin’ up smaller and smaller every year, but my heart is getting’ bigger for him every day. 30
Putting this exchange near the beginning of the opening scene establishes love between the two men as central to the story, and prepares us for Danny's resentment of Hardress's new love, Eily. Where Danny acts as Hardress's second self in The Collegians, his murderous actions expressing Hardress's own worst impulses, here it is made plain that it is not Hardress who wants Eily dead, but Danny, and that he does so because he feels for his master so excessively. Where Griffin's Danny sullenly declares, ‘He doesn’t feel for me, an’ I won’t feel for him’, 31 Boucicault's Danny never disavows his passionate sympathy for Hardress: ‘Why can’t I suffer for yez, masther dear? Wouldn’t I swally every tear in your body, and every bit of bad luck in your life, and then wid a stone round my neck, sink myself and your sorrows in the bottom of the lower lake’. 32 When Danny speaks in this way, he sounds more than a little like Eily herself, who makes similarly reckless pronouncements: ‘I’ll go as a servant in your mother's house – I’ll work for the smile ye’ll give me in passing, and I’ll be happy, if ye’ll only let me stand outside and hear your voice’. 33 It is this very likeness in their positions that Danny invokes when Eily sets a limit on what she is willing to do for Hardress, and which inspires his murderous rage: ‘Have you, a woman, less love for him than I, that you wouldn’t give him what he wants of you, even if he broke your heart as he broke my back, both in a moment of passion? … I loved him, and I forgave him that’. 34
Boucicault's script brings the utterly selfless, even self-annihilating love Eily bears Hardress dangerously close to Danny's murderous devotion, but Eily's feelings have to be reclaimed if her marriage to Hardress is ultimately to be upheld as the basis of a happy ending. This can be achieved only through scapegoating Danny in such a way that their likeness can be disavowed, all the virtue of devoted love claimed by Eily, and all its latent violence and amorality attributed to him. This is where Danny's disability becomes essential: it differentiates him from Eily, so that one character can emerge as the beautiful, virtuous, typical peasant, a picturesque element of the national tableau with which we are left, and the other cast out as an aberrant, damaged, undesirable throwback, excluded from the social settlement of the play's ending. Both these characters have loved Hardress with a passion that is fundamentally anti-social, but Eily allows herself to be corrected by her community, persuaded by her faithful friends Myles and Father Tom not to destroy her marriage certificate and thus collude in Hardress's proposed attempt at bigamy. She is accordingly awarded a place in the final, emphatically communal celebration of what turns out to be Anne Chute's wedding to Kyrle Daly (Anne's true love all along, in this version) and re-affirmation of her own marriage to Hardress. Danny, by contrast, is absent from the final scene, his place at Hardress's side now filled by Eily, whose beautiful body makes her the fitting match for an ‘illigant gentleman’ that Danny, by his own account, could never be. 35
As Deirdre McFeely points out, ‘[t]he reconciliation at the end of the play is founded on a cross-class acknowledgement of an Irishness shared by peasant and ascendancy’, 36 with Hardress's abandonment of his former class consciousness marked by his new acceptance of Eily's brogue, previously an unwelcome sign of her peasant origins. However, what Christopher Morash calls the ‘delicate balancing act’ called for by the ‘conciliatory endings’ of Irish plays in this period 37 is achieved by giving this ‘Irishness’ a strongly effective focus. The harmony that is established at the end of The Colleen involves not political reform or the redistribution of land or wealth, but the community's affirmation of marital and familial bonds, expressed by Mrs Cregan's new readiness to call herself Eily's mother, and Anne's declaration they are all her ‘friends’. 38 By reorganising the narrative to stress disordered feelings rather than disordered social relationships, Boucicault was able to make his vision of a national identity which dissolves class difference as palatable to a Unionist audience as to a Nationalist one. 39 This affective focus necessitates Danny Mann's exclusion from the final scene, and shapes the symbolism of that exclusion: with his banishment, the dangers of excessive feeling are exorcised. We are left with the socially sanctioned passion that Eily feels for her Hardress, and which he finally insists that he returns, now freed from taint. Where Danny's execution in Griffin's text is replete with pessimistic implications regarding the peasantry's place in the reformed Ireland of the future, Danny's off-stage death in Colleen enables Boucicault to close on an otherwise all-inclusive tableau of domestic and national harmony, Danny's disability here rendering him not representative, but usefully expendable.
The Cricket on the Hearth and Dot
In comparison with other adaptations Boucicault wrote around the same time, the most striking thing about Dot may be how closely Boucicault's script sticks to the narrative outlines of Dickens's novella. Where The Octoroon (1859) and The Colleen Bawn have entirely different endings from their source novels, 40 Boucicault did not drop or alter any major events in The Cricket on the Hearth, and even kept some of the most memorable lines of dialogue: ‘It is my sight restored. It is my sight!’ and ‘Don’t love me yet’ both make it straight from Dickens's novella to Boucicault's adaptation. 41 One possible explanation for this is that Dickens had deliberately written Cricket with an eye to adaptation, and there was thus no need to overhaul its plotting to make it work on stage; Jacky Bratton convincingly argues that Dickens had learned from the huge success of adaptations of his previous Christmas books, and when it came to Cricket, ‘brought together the dramaturg and the theatrical company of his choice and, very obviously, he wrote for them’. 42 Even more than the two earlier Christmas books (A Christmas Carol [1843] and The Chimes [1844]), Dickens's Cricket seems designed for theatrical adaptation: there is a small cast of characters, the action is set in a few places (mostly vividly described interiors), and the difficulty of distinguishing between reality and illusion – a major theme of the text – is explored in a way which often seems more obviously suited to the stage than a page.
The novella's main action concerns John Peerybingle, a kind-hearted but slow-witted carrier, and his much younger wife Dot. The villainous toy-merchant Tackleton encourages John to suspect Dot of having a love affair with a mysterious stranger who arrives in their midst, and constantly suggests that a dark reality lurks behind the Peerybingles’ appearance of happiness. This troubling idea is mirrored in the novella's subplot concerning Blind Bertha, a pathetic figure who lives with her father, the toymaker Caleb. With benevolent intentions, Caleb has deceived Bertha into believing that they live prosperously rather than in dire poverty and that Tackleton, their grasping skinflint of an employer, is really their kind benefactor. It is a plot line that clearly lends itself to staging: having a character describe what is not really there to another character has the effect of drawing our attention to the artifice of the theatre and the audience's own suspension of disbelief. 43 Perhaps for this very reason, Boucicault sticks closely to Dickens’s plotting: he, too, has Bertha fall in love with the Tackleton of her father's creation, suffer terribly upon learning what Caleb has done, and then forgive him upon recognising his worthy motives, right before the mysterious stranger reveals his identity as her long-lost brother, Edward, finally back from the sea and just in time to save his sweetheart May Fielding from marriage to Tackleton.
In his adaptation, Boucicault much earlier reveals the stranger's true identity as Edward (now Ned) Plummer and Dot's knowledge of it, so that we are never in any doubt as to her motives, an alteration which The Atheneaum's review praised as ‘proof that he perfectly understands the difference between drama and novel composition’. 44 Interestingly, contemporary reviewers seem generally to have seen Boucicault's adaptation as freewheeling in comparison with existing versions: according to The Times, for example, Boucicault ‘adopts a totally different principle’ to ‘his predecessors’, ‘following or deviating from the book, as dramatic expediency may suggest’ and thus producing ‘to a great extent, a new piece’. 45 If we compare Boucicault's version to the officially approved adaptation by Albert Smith – written for the Keeleys’ company at the Lyceum, with Dickens's sanction and involvement – we can see that Boucicault does offer a distinctly different version of Dickens's story and characters. By making the tone much more robustly comic, transforming Dickens's gentle Dot into a caustically funny, assertive matriarch, and altering our sense of where power lies in the community that is re-established at the end, Boucicault changes the politics of Dickens's Cricket quite considerably, and he does this largely through rewriting the parts of Bertha Plummer and Tilly Slowboy. Reimagining the story's disabled characters turns out to be crucial to Boucicault's broader revision of Dickens's text.
Dickens's Cricket is like A Christmas Carol and The Chimes in upholding the right of working-class families and communities to eat, drink and be merry, but its villain is a generically miserly cynic, rather than being explicitly associated with a particular political programme or ideology. Where Scrooge practically quotes Malthus in A Christmas Carol, and Trotty Veck is discouraged by explicitly Malthusian ideas in The Chimes, Cricket's Tackleton does not bring political economy or even class politics into the text in any overt way. Jacky Bratton persuasively argues that The Chimes was such a hit on stage in working-class theatres precisely because it lent itself to radical readings and adaptations, at a time when ‘fear of censorship and a sense of their audiences’ aspirations made theatre managers very chary of direct social comment’. 46 Whether because of these adaptations in particular or because he was becoming more generally anxious about Chartism, Dickens seems to have decided to make his next Christmas Book more politically reticent. As I will show, Boucicault's adaptation subtly but significantly adjusts this aspect of Cricket, through its treatment of disability.
In Dickens's Cricket, ‘Blind Bertha’ is an utterly vulnerable, completely credulous character, whose blindness makes her impervious to the physical, moral and emotional realities that surround her. Ostensibly, she is integrated into the novella's happy ending, with Caleb's confession occurring in the same scene in which Edward Plummer's identity is revealed and John Peerybingle realises his wife's innocence. She thus partakes in the general re-establishment of order in the community, and explicitly reassures us that she is perfectly content, even that her blindness has lost its tragic resonance as a result of her new insight: ‘It is my sight restored. It is my sight!’ 47 Yet Dickens's arrangement of the last scene seems to confirm our uncomfortable sense that there is something irreconcilable about Bertha, that the conflicts raised by her storyline cannot be resolved with the rest of the plot. She is the only one of the novella's characters who is excluded from the closing dance and unpartnered in the celebrations, conveying a sense that she remains on the margin of the re-established community. Tackleton makes no attempt to pair up with her, for all that he repents of his former attitude: ‘I blush to think how easily I might have bound you and your daughter to me, and what a miserable idiot I was when I took her for one!’ 48
Tackleton's words point us to the real injury that Bertha has suffered in being deceived by the person she most trusted, and being led to falling in love with a man who does not exist. Her father has not simply made her unhappy, he has made a fool of her – and in becoming the (improbable) dupe of her father's lies, she has equally been a dupe of the novella's unlikely plot. However, I think Elizabeth Gitter is wrong to argue on this account that Dickens ‘invites his sighted readers to laugh at the spectacle of her ridiculous behaviour, to participate in the sadistic pleasures of teasing the blind’. 49 Rather, the text draws our attention to the wrong done to Bertha: there is a real force in her despairing cry, ‘tortured, as it seemed, almost beyond endurance, “why did you ever do this?”’ 50 For all the indulgence granted Caleb and the forgiveness he is ultimately offered, Julia Miele Rodas is surely right to read this scene as an indictment of Caleb's lies: ‘No one, the writer seems to imply, can be justified in narrating the world for another human creature, in creating fictions by which others are called upon to live’. 51
The novella's meditations on truth and fiction, and specifically on the ethics of melodrama as a form, are intimately related to its representation of blindness, as mediated through Bertha and Caleb's relationship. Rodas's phrasing calls to mind Caleb's status as a story-teller within a story: it seems to me that Caleb is specifically aligned with the author of this story, this self-declared ‘fairy-tale of home’, a point rammed home by the narrator's repeated comments on Caleb's work as a creator of miniature homes and their occupants. Dickens has Caleb himself lament his desire for perfectly convincing representations of domestic felicity: ‘that's the worst of my calling, I’m always deluding myself, and swindling myself’. 52 His comment might seem comically hyperbolic, given that he is only wishing that his dolls’ houses had real staircases and doors 53 – but it has a disturbing resonance with this story's ‘calling’ to prove the reality of the blissful marriage and contented home of Dot and John, and that no darkness lies behind their apparent happiness, as cynical Tackleton assumes. This is a story in which what seems to be true is true in all cases but Bertha's, and in which characters’ outward appearances perfectly express themselves. Mean Tackleton is ill-favoured, ‘with a twist in his dry face and a screw in his body’; 54 honest, slow-witted John is ‘a sturdy figure of a man’; 55 genial Dot is ‘fair’, ‘little’ and ‘dumpling shape[d]’. 56 When it comes to all these characters, we can trust the signs of their bodies, exemplifying Juliet John's argument that ‘“Ostention” in character is a fundamental means by which Dickens imitates the popular theatre's externality’. 57 Yet in Caleb's workshop, the expressive bodies of the dolls are quite explicitly said to be unnatural, their makers having ‘far improved upon Nature, who is often froward and perverse; for they, not resting on such arbitrary marks as satin, cotton-print, and bits of rag, had superadded striking personal differences which allowed of no mistake’. 58 The ‘striking personal differences’ of Dickens's characters have thus far been entirely reliable as a guide to their narrative role and moral selves; but in this disturbing bit of meta-commentary, Caleb the storyteller seems to mislead by creating dolls the way Dickens creates his characters, just as he lies to his daughter when he tells her a ‘fairy-tale of home’. Bertha's plot role as Caleb's dupe has the effect of casting blindness as entirely disempowering and disabling, but it also draws our attention to a formal problem, forcing us to question the proper limits of fantasy and make-believe, and the truthfulness of melodrama itself.
In the theatre, the narrator's voice is lost; this meta-commentary on Bertha's characterisation therefore disappears, and Boucicault chooses not to develop the idea of Caleb's culpability. Instead, he gives us an altogether less pathetic Bertha, a character whose exclusion from the marriage plot seems less significant than her participation in a joyous family reunion. This is one effect of Boucicault's decision to significantly increase Ned's prominence in the narrative: the opening scene after the prologue foregrounds his absence, while the second stresses his love for May and reveals to the audience that he has returned in disguise, so we can wait with pleasant anticipation for his discovery. In this version, it is no small thing for Bertha to have her brother restored to her: what the Plummer family regain in Ned becomes a significant dramatic focus. By having Caleb's admission of deceit immediately follow Bertha's confession of love for Tackleton – where Dickens allots them separate tearful scenes – Boucicault shrinks their significance, while the sentimental reunion with Edward is significantly expanded. In this version, Bertha is allowed to have her own, separate moment of recognition, something entirely missing from Dickens's reunion scene, and the script emphasises the emotional charge of their first embrace:
My brother, my little brother.
Her little brother! Ho! Ho!
(smiling) Get away, you've had enough. Hush. (Leads Bertha to Edward. She seeks for him—as though still a child— Dot raises her hand to his shoulder.)
(with a cry of joy) Ah! I had forgotten. (embrace). 59
Boucicault does make pathetic capital out of Bertha's blindness here by having her grope for her brother's shoulder at the wrong height. Yet this moment of simultaneous surprise and recognition, of restoration and loss, would be all too familiar to sighted audience members who had welcomed back a son or brother from sea (or military service, or emigration, or itinerant labour), only to find them taller and older than they remembered. Bertha's gesture is quintessentially melodramatic in externalising an emotional but shared experience, and thus positions her as a typical, rather than exceptional, melodramatic subject. Boucicault strengthens this effect by making Bertha less completely helpless and vulnerable than she is in Dickens's text, both more perceptive and more capable. The moment when she is the only one to recognise her brother's tread is drawn out and given emphasis by Ned's aside – ‘[h]er heart sees plainer than the old man's eyes’ – while her musical abilities are foregrounded, her harp characterised as a kind of prosthesis: ‘It says … “give me tongue and I will give you eyes”’. 60
Bertha's re-positioning is consistent with Boucicault's treatment of Dickens's other disabled character, Tilly Slowboy, the Peerybingles’ nursemaid. Dickens's Tilly seems designed to offer a reassuring picture of ‘idiocy’ to offset the troubling mis-categorising of Bertha: Tilly is depicted as intellectually disabled, but her cognitive difference leads only to comical, harmless mistakes, and her main function is to reinforce the idea that innocence is more reliable than cynicism. By naïvely repeating what she does not understand, Tilly several times expresses the truth of the situation, most significantly when she accidentally reveals to Tackleton that Bertha is in love with him. 61 As in this example, Tilly's plot role is occasionally pathetic – revealing the sad truth of Bertha's unrequited love; emphasising Dot's misery at John's suspicions – but her own words and behaviour are consistently comic. She is effectively Bertha's opposite in generating laughter rather than tears, and in the fact that her disability is not treated as a pure metaphor but connected to social reality: ‘Tilly had been bred by public charity, a foundling; which word, though only differing from fondling by one vowel's length, is very different in meaning, and expresses quite another thing’. 62 The suggestion seems to be that Tilly's impairments are the result of early mistreatment – an idea Dickens developed in his portrayal of Maggy in Little Dorrit (1857) – and that her inclusion in the warm Peerybingle household indicates that household's virtue.
Boucicault revises Dickens's text to bring Tilly to the fore: she is the second character to speak in the first scene, and, in a neat piece of mirroring, second from last to speak at the end, raising a laugh with her oft-repeated interjection to remember the baby. 63 Boucicault enlarges the comic business that Dickens has already given Tilly – having her mix up the kettle and the baby, bumping into things, and so on – and, as the review in The Times makes clear, her role would have been still more prominent on stage than it is in the script, since Ned Plummer's teasing was used to provide ‘an exhibition of comic terror constantly taking place in the background’. 64 Boucicault's script not only brings Tilly forward, but also significantly shifts the emphasis by giving her funny lines: ‘Tackleton: Hello, I say, what's this—there's some mistake here. Tilly: Ess there be! And you made it. (all laugh)’. 65 Boucicault both enlarges and revises her role, so that Tilly is no longer solely the butt of jokes, but also their author. She is allowed, for example, to make a series of jokes about weddings – that she wants the wedding cake, not the wedding, 66 that she will pocket Tackleton's wedding ring rather than throw it on the fire (as she is told to do in Dickens's text and here) because ‘I might want it for myself’, and that if no one else will have Tackleton, ‘I’ll marry him’. 67
As in these instances, Boucicault's literal-minded Tilly often chips in to deflate potentially sentimental moments, putting her in the role Christine Gledhill identifies as typical of melodramas’ ‘supporting, sardonically class-aware characters, who pull the idealized emotions of the central protagonists back into a social circuit’. 68 As befits a character with a clear role to play, Tilly's place in her ‘social circuit’ seems entirely secure: where Dickens's Tilly is in a state of ‘constant astonishment at finding herself so kindly treated’, 69 Boucicault's Tilly seems quite at home in the Peerybingle household. In the novella, Tilly is an abjectly grateful recipient of Dot's charity; in the play, she is a humorous side-kick and comic echo. Tilly's funny retorts to sentimental remarks align her with her assertive, occasionally caustic mistress, who not only speaks sharply to Tilly herself, but also to May, John and above all to Tackleton, whom she threatens at one point to have thrown out of the window. 70 The line is taken straight from Cricket – but in Dickens's version, it is John who utters this threat. 71 This re-allocation from John to Dot neatly captures Boucicault's transformation of Dickens's character, with her ‘nestling and agreeable’ ways, 72 into a sharp-tongued, self-possessed matriarch, who is far less easily embarrassed than the men around her. Boucicault's Dot is, for instance, notably frank about the sexual side of marriage, countering Tackleton's bloodless suggestion that marriage is like a toy, with love only the ‘gilt and paint’ that ‘comes off with a little handling’ by pointing to her baby and declaring: ‘That ain’t no toy – handlin’ won't rub that out. Well that's like love after marriage’. 73
In this context, Tilly's broad jokes about weddings serve to make her seem at home in a community headed by straight-talking women. Dickens's narrator draws attention to Tilly's inclusion and gives it a sentimental basis, assuring us that everyone ‘was in a state of perfect rapture … inclusive of Miss Slowboy, who wept copiously for joy’; 74 in contrast, Boucicault's Tilly seems to take part in the final celebration as a matter of course and on equal terms with the other characters, as Bertha does. Caleb, John, May, and of course Dot herself all make jokes at Tackleton's expense, so Tilly's crowd-pleasing one-liners in the last scene are of a piece with other characters’ behaviour, and fit the much more authoritative role generally given to women here.
May's transformation into a character who has a significant speaking part, capable of talking back to Tackleton, contributes to this re-adjustment of the power dynamics of the narrative. Tellingly, it is Tackleton's attitude to Bertha that forms the basis of her humorous rebuke:
He could save a decent living if he had only himself to support. Why don’t he send the girl to the Asylum?
So he would but he is deformed.
Poor man.
Deformed! I never noticed it.
Look again and you will see that his heart is all up in his breast instead of being in his pockets. 75
This exchange develops the suggestion made throughout Dickens's Cricket that a character's moral worth and a community's moral health can be judged from its attitude to disability, but it also significantly modifies the terms on which disabled characters are included in that community. The implication of May's joke is that Tackleton's point of view is so warped by the avarice that he sees a father's love for his daughter as a deformity, but her figure of speech actually makes disability the natural condition. It also draws our attention to the play's wider use of disability as metaphor, something which, as David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder argue, often precludes its treatment as ‘an experience of social or political dimensions’. 76 In this exchange, Boucicault gestures towards exactly this experience: May's remark implicitly damns the poverty wages that would force someone to send a blind relative ‘to the Asylum’, and also the utilitarian approach that would cast this as the right course of action. By picking up on Dickens's glancing reference to the ‘public charity’ on which Tilly had to rely as a child, and drawing Bertha, Tackleton, and their vexed relationship into the orbit of debates around dependency and communal responsibility, Boucicault re-connects the affective and the political, putting the anti-Malthusian, radical politics of A Christmas Carol and (especially) The Chimes back into this less overtly political Christmas story.
