L I T E R A T U R E

England”). Even t he gu l f bet ween s ani t y and madness is narrowed: “are not the sane and the insane equal at night as the sane lie dreaming? Are not all of us outside this hospital, who dream, more or less in the condition of those inside it, every night of our lives? Are we not nightly persuaded, as they daily are, that we associate preposterously with kings and queens, emperors and empresses, and notabilities of all sorts?” (“Night Walks”).

I n “A P l e a f o r To t a l A b s t i n e n c e ” , D i c ke n s describes a teetotal procession, but shifts the emphasis to the poor overloaded horses on which the company rode. In this tongue-in-cheek piece, the last in the series (Alexander helpfully highlights the significant time lapse between the final pieces and the earliest), Dickens decides to engage in “a little fair trying of Tee-Totalism by its own tests”. The result being that, while many in the parade did not misuse their horses by overloading them, “ Tee - Tot a l mathematic s demonstrate t hat t he less includes the greater; that the guilty include the innocent, the blind the seeing, the deaf the hearing, the dumb the speaking, the drunken the sober”. His conclusion is to call for “Total Abstinence from Horseflesh through the whole length and breadth of the scale”. If there was a way to play the role of devil’s advocate, Dickens could always find it.

The editors of the two-volume Oxford edition of Nicholas Nickleby – Elizabeth James and Joel J. Brattin with, again, Alexander – want to supply readers with all the available knowledge about the work. And indeed these excellent scholarly editions offer all the information one could possibly want, from maps to carefully analysed proof corrections, with illustrations, thought-provoking essays and comprehensive explanatory notes. These volumes are now the definitive texts of these works, taking account of previous editions such as The Uncommercial Traveller edited by Daniel Tyler (2015) and Paul Schlicke’s edition of Nicholas Nickleby (1990) – both Oxford World’s Classics editions – and Michael Slater’s Penguin edition of Nicholas Nickleby (1978). The accompanying material for the Oxford Nicholas

Nickleby is contained in a separate volume, which makes for cumbersome railway reading, as the novel and appendix (in the first volume) come to a hefty 857 pages. It is worth it, however, to have access to the depth of information about this novel and the excellent glossary, from which, as discussed earlier this year in the TLS (May 3, 2024), there is much fun to be had in both editions. Missing out on the word Zooks (“an exclamation of surprise”) would be a great shame.

For Dickens knowledge mattered a great deal. And combating Ignorance and his sister Want was seen as fundamental to retaining our humanity. His most impassioned writing was reserved for describing the effects of these two sins on children. In A Christmas Carol they are described as “Yellow, meagre, ragged, scowling, wolfish; but prostrate, too, in their humility. Where graceful youth should have filled their features out, and touched them with its freshest tints, a stale and shrivelled hand, like that of age, had pinched, and twisted them, and pulled them into shreds”. In Nicholas Nickleby (first published 1838–9), the inmates at Dotheboys Hall are described similarly:

Pale and haggard faces, lank and bony figures, children with the countenances of old men, deformities with irons upon their limbs, boys of stunted growth, and others whose long meagre legs would hardly bear their stooping bodies, all crowded on the view together; there were the bleared eye, the hare-lip, the crooked foot, and every ugliness or distortion that told of unnatural aversion conceived by parents for their offspring, or of young lives which, from the earliest dawn of infancy, had been one horrible endurance of cruelty and neglect. There were little faces which should have been handsome, darkened with the scowl of sullen dogged suffering; there was childhood with the light of its eye quenched, its beauty gone, and its helplessness alone remaining; there were vicious-faced boys brooding, with leaden eyes, like malefactors i n a j a i l ; and there were young c re ature s on whom the sins of their frail parents had descended,

Betrayed by man

A Polish critique of industrial-era capitalism

PIOTR GWIAZDA

THE HOMELESS STEFAN ŻEROMSKI Translated by Stephanie Kraft

315pp. Paul Dry. $24.95.

The Homeless (1899), by the Polish writer Stefan Żeromski (1864–1925), takes place at the end of the nineteenth century, primarily in Poland (then under foreign rule), with episodes in France and Switzerland. As the main characters move through different settings they are shown from different angles, in disconnected vignettes, as if they were puzzles to be assembled by the reader. The novel bears the hallmarks of realist fiction, but Żeromski also experiments with various levels of exposition and introspection, anticipating the next century’s more fluid modes of storytelling.

The prot agoni s t , Tomasz Judym, i s a young physician committed to social reform. He has revolutionary ideas of progress, “fantasies, hypotheses, plans and vivid dreams” about improving the living and working conditions of the poor – in large part because he comes from that background. Judym’s humanitarianism puts him at odds with the medical establishment in Warsaw. At a social gathering organized by a distinguished doctor, he accuses his colleagues of caring only for the wealthy. Later, as an assistant doctor in the provincial spa town of Cisy,

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he gets into a scuffle with a local administrator over the latter’s unethical treatment of the peasant population. Judym is a heroic, inspiring figure – a man of pure conscience. But his sense of social inferiority leads him to alternate constantly between quixotic fervour and bitter self-loathing.

Judym’s moral counterpart, and in many ways his soulmate, is Joanna Podborska, a governess for an aristocratic family in Cisy. She is self-educated, intelligent and sensible, if prone to melancholy musings. She reads progressive writers (calling Ibsen “the immortal truthteller”), supports women’s emancipation and shares Judym’s commitment to social amelioration. Interestingly, the reader doesn’t get a full picture of her until almost halfway through the novel, in the tour de force chapter “Confidential”, which consists entirely of entries from her diary (based on Żeromski’s own diary, though Podborska is modelled after his wife). The two characters’ attraction to each other, in no small part due to their shared altruism, seems inevitable. The author traces the joyful stirrings of discovered passion before the romance is tested by an unexpected separation and Judym’s impulsive nonconformity. Ironically, the very prospect of personal happiness clarifies to the doctor his life’s mission.

The story of Judym and Podborska throws into sharp relief the novel’s critique of industrial-era capitalism. Żeromski paints a dramatic picture of the social disparities at play: the rich with their comfortable lifestyles and the perennially exploited masses, in urban and rural areas alike. In a naturalist vein he

TLS

Piotr Gwiazda teaches at the University of Pittsburgh. He is the translator of Dear Beloved Humans: Selected poems by Grzegorz Wróblewski, 2023

weeping even for the mercenary nurses they had known, and lonesome even in their loneliness. This is Dickens at his best. Some might want to call it a typical Dickensian pity party – a world in which Tiny Tims tug at our heartstrings while we drink from the punch bowl of class-conscious guilt. But what he absolutely refused to do was to let his readers get away with being mindlessly naive or unaware of hard truths. And the destruction of childhood’s precious innocence, “the light of its eye quenched”, is the crime Dickens can be said to have railed against the most. His own childhood was blighted by his abandonment at the age of twelve, when he was taken out of school and sent to work in Warren’s Blacking Factory. Like the investigative journalist he was, the adult Dickens can be seen wandering along “the streets of a city where every stone seemed to call to me, as I walked along, ‘Turn this way, man, and see what waits to be done!’”. Called to action by what he sees and feels, Dickens asks us to do the same. As he explains in “A Small Star in the East”, “Any one who will reverse that route, may retrace my steps”.

The problem with these critical editions is the price. At £190 for each, they are out of reach for most academics and postgraduates, who are the target readership. The expectation must be that university libraries will pay these prices, and this comes with all sorts of access implications (although the ebook is for sale at £102.91). The other title published in this series, Sketches by Boz (2020) is currently on the OUP website for £222.50. These new Oxford editions are the successors to the Clarendon Dickens, which began publishing critical editions in the 1960s. The 1993 Clarendon edition of Great Expectations is currently on the website for £385, though second-hand copies can be found. The scholarship in these editions is without fault, but the cost should make us grateful for the Broadview Press critical editions of some of Dickens’s novels, which, though not as extensive as the OUP editions, are still authoritative, clearly informative and (this is no small thing) affordably priced. n offers detailed, pages-long descriptions of industrial sites (a cigar factory and a steel mill in Warsaw, a coalmine and a zinc-smelting facility in Silesia) to highlight the unsanitary conditions endured by the workers. Even his depictions of nature, almost lyrical in their intensity, make a philosophical point: “The earth does not give up its labor and its wealth without a struggle. Simple and indifferent as a child, it learns betrayal from man”. This novel was written more than 100 years ago, but its focus on economic inequality makes it abundantly relevant to today’s world. This is its first appearance in English. As Stephanie Kraft states in a concluding note to her expert translation, Żeromski raises provocative questions about healthcare as a human right, the limits of sympathy and solidarity, and the extent to which background shapes behaviour. His answers are “often oblique, sometimes cryptic, never trite”.

The novel’s title, too, is ambiguous. The word “homeless” refers primarily to the disadvantaged, seen in countless episodes. Here, for example, is a heartbreaking scene early in the novel, when Judym revisits the Warsaw slum he grew up in: “These children running around this stuffy alley, enclosed by huge bare walls, reminded him, without his knowing why, of squirrels shut into a cage. With their lively movements and constant jumping, they needed open space, trees, grass, water.” The title also represents the Polish nation, with all its social and cultural divisions (Poland would not regain independence until 1918). But the main characters are themselves tragically “homeless”: Judym because he thinks he doesn’t deserve a home in the face of widespread misery, Podborska because she is denied the chance at domestic life for which she yearns. These meanings are fur ther explored in Boris Dralyuk and Jennifer Croft’s helpful introduction, which provides the hi s tor i c a l context for thi s powerful, moving, kaleidoscopic novel. n

OCTOBER 25, 2024