When Carlyle praises “wondrous Dualism” in Past and Present, he invokes a model for conceptualizing man's role in the world that held widespread, even hegemonic currency in mid-Victorian culture. The centrality of dualist discourse during the mid-Victorian period, thanks in part to Carlyle's translations of German literature and philosophy in the 1830s, cannot be overstated. Carlyle argues that dualism transhistorically frames all human activity: “In wondrous Dualism, then [in the year 1200] as now, lived nations of breathing men; alternating, in all ways, between Light and Dark; between joy and sorrow, between rest and toil” (50; bk. 2, ch. 1). The subject “man” – I use the masculine advisedly – endlessly oscillates between the opposing elements that constitute the universe. This, for Carlyle, is the position of all men. To be heroic, however, one must recognize and negotiate the most wondrous dualism of all, time and eternity: “this Earthly life, and its riches and possessions, and good and evil hap, are not intrinsically a reality at all, but are a shadow of realities eternal, infinite; that this Time-world, as an air-image, fearfully emblematic, plays and flickers in the grand still mirror of Eternity; and man's little Life has Duties that are great, that are alone great, and go up to Heaven and down to Hell” (72; bk. 2, ch. 6). Minor dualisms are subsumed in the opposition between “Time-world” and “Eternity,” and in the “mirror” of the latter, man discerns himself: his ultimate insignificance, yet the greatness of his “Duties.” Carlyle emphasizes that these duties demand the payment of obedience to one's temporal and eternal superiors – heroic ancestors, captains of industry, colonial governors, and God. Only then can heroic men once again be born, like the laboring Hercules or the humble Christ, from temporal-eternal intercourse.

In his “grand still mirror,” Carlyle reflects an image of man that serves, in various literary guises, as the ideal model for a certain mid-Victorian subject: aristocratic yet humble, self-reliant yet indebted, Christian, industrious, patriarchal, male. He is also eternal, in the sense that he recognizes his duty to eternal prerogatives and replicates the hierarchy of power he represents endlessly into the future. This eternal subject is certainly prescriptive, yet it is contradictory and “flickering” enough to remain ideologically useful – and contestable – in a range of political contexts that span the first two Reform Bills (1832–67). Like all discourses, temporal dualism includes contradictions, while the subjectivity it seems to produce effortlessly actually emerged in fits and starts, with successful adoption alternating with resistance and enforcement. In spite of Carlyle's desires, the eternal subject never smoothly conquered the globe, nor did it assert itself equally in very different racial, gendered, economic, and geographical contexts. Nevertheless, it was successful for precisely the same reasons: an ambivalent and incoherent system may present practical inefficiencies, but it is still applicable in more contexts than is a rigidly inflexible one. It is also important to note that over the course of the period 1832–1867, temporal dualism and eternal subjectivity gradually lost their efficacy and were replaced by immanent constructs of time and non-agential, structural models of subjectivity. Carlyle discerned this shift, and in his later writings he becomes increasingly frustrated and belligerent as the temporal model he had promoted for nearly forty years fails to correspond to the complex realities of subjectivity in the British empire.

In this essay, I examine the writings of Carlyle and Dickens to trace the uneven formation of the eternal subject, delineating its characteristics, its political implications, and the temporal dualism (time/eternity) that accompanies its representations. I argue two main points. First, temporality in general and temporal dualism in particular need to be recognized as potent ideological strategies for producing subjectivity. Discourses of dualism, especially temporal dualism, perform the cultural work of subjectification and the naturalization of a mid-Victorian subject custom-tailored to the politics of domestic and imperial paternalism. The very dualism of the temporal discourse makes such work possible, since this subject emerges precisely when it oscillates between the opposing sides. The fact that this is a dualist or dialectical logic, however, simultaneously exposes it to the possibility for deconstruction and resistance. My second point is that the eternal subject operates as a metonymy in Carlyle and Dickens, standing in equally for a series of father figures from paterfamilias to God. This metonymic logic attempts to construct women, the working classes, savages, and abject humanity in general as satellites of a universalized male power. Representations of the eternal subject support a paternalist politics that reaches from the drawing-room to heaven, enabling the ideologies of the separate spheres, working-class reform, and empire. Moreover, in addition to its vital role in the production of the eternal subject, the apparent contrasts facilitated by temporal dualism dovetail with the objectives of paternalist politics. Imperialism could be justified, for example, because savages were depicted as sadly bereft of contact with eternity. Imprisoned within materialist temporality, savages lived carpe diem, hand-to-mouth existences, manifest in the sloth and hypersexuality obsessively catalogued by European explorers. Ironically, then, imperialism offered freedom to savages because it made men of them, completed them, reconnected them to eternity.

My argument unfolds in two parts. The first examines Carlyle: his conception of temporal dualism in “Characteristics” (1831) and Sartor Resartus (1833–34), the necessary relation he makes between temporal dualism and the ideal subject, and the metonymic reiteration of paternalism in the context of class and empire in Past and Present (1843) and “Shooting Niagara: And After?” (1867). The second section analyzes Dickens to reveal the same schema at work in a different genre, suggesting the ubiquity of temporally-inflected paternalist discourse in the mid-Victorian period. The juxtaposition of Carlyle and Dickens is not an argument of influence, although influence certainly occurred;Footnote ¹ instead, it suggests the extent to which temporal dualism permeated diverse genres and replicated itself with nearly identical effects. Moreover, both Carlyle and Dickens were keenly aware of the potential ideological uses of literature. In the second section, I focus on Dombey and Son (1846–48), exploring the time/eternity structure of the novel and its valorization of Mr Dombey as paterfamilias. To consider the metonymic reiteration of class paternalism, I turn to Hard Times (1854). I finish with an analysis of Dickens's Household Words article, “The Noble Savage” (1853), in which temporal dualism becomes a strategy for maintaining empire. Here the progress narrative is invoked to argue that savages should be “civilised off the face of the earth” (143), a phrase Carlyle redeploys in “Shooting Niagara.” Throughout, I trace Carlyle and Dickens chronologically rather than thematically in order to stress discursive repetition over narrative continuity.

In the decades around 1800, a distinctly modern conception of temporality arose in western Europe.Footnote ² Far from being a unitary conception, however, modern temporality is distinct precisely because it generates a tremendous plurality of discourses. From 1770 to 1830, over 100 new compound words using “Zeit” entered the German language (Vincent 160), a quantitative indication of the qualitative efflorescence of temporality that accompanied Romanticism, especially the German Romanticism that so deeply influenced Carlyle. Moreover, each temporal discourse has ontological and political implications – for example, as Adrian Desmond has shown, the evolutionary theories of Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire and Lamarck emphasize bottom-up individuation and development (read: political radicalism). The dualism of time and eternity goes back to Plato at least, but the political, scientific, and cultural milieu of the mid-nineteenth century make Carlyle and Dickens's use of it quite singular. Their assumption that “eternity” is the dominant term in the time/eternity binary constructs temporal dualism as a top-down, hierarchical structure (read: paternalism). The hegemonic alignment of temporal dualism and paternalist social policies during the first half of the nineteenth century is no coincidence. Likewise, the obsolescence of paternalism, due to a range of factors including the Reform Bill (1832), the New Poor Law (1834), and the repeal of the Corn Laws (1849),Footnote ³ accompanies the emergence of a temporality functionally appropriate to the new political reality. With the rise of Benthamite reforms and bureaucratic government came what Foucault calls an “anatomo-chronological schema of behaviour” where “[t]ime penetrates the body and with it all the meticulous controls of power” (152). Complex transitions such as these require a focus on the interpenetration of temporal discourses and subjectification in specific historical periods, a relatively unexplored critical field probed by this essay.Footnote ⁴

I. Carlyle

“Characteristics” (1831) provides a synopsis of Carlyle's characteristic conceptual and argumentative mode. He begins with a series of dualisms, emphasizing the centrality of temporal dualism, and ends with a pessimistic description of the modern social condition and the heroic subject needed to rehabilitate it. The strong link between temporal dualism and subjectivity continues, mutatis mutandis, intact over Carlyle's career, although his notion of society and subjectivity becomes increasingly melancholic and reactionary after 1850, roughly coinciding with the decline of paternalism (this description also applies to Dickens). For Carlyle, the heroic man emerges in the movement between time and eternity, recognizing within his day-to-day struggles “an Immensity and an Eternity” (38). On the other hand, a man oblivious to his eternal relation and fixated solely on temporal and material concerns takes on the inferior status of “savage or even animal man” (51). “Hero” and “savage” provide the endpoints to a hierarchy that Carlyle continually employs to evaluate men in their relation to time and eternity. Carlyle applies temporal dualism as a rubric at home and abroad, forging a strong correlation between geographical proximity and eternal connection. The self and its immediate objects are more often imbued with eternity; distant savages frequently remain immured in temporality. This explains why Carlyle and Dickens privilege individual morality over working-class concerns in England and the latter over black emancipation in the Americas. They both imagine that eternity spreads concentrically across the globe from the “I” as initial position.

In “Characteristics,” Carlyle dubs the nineteenth century “the age of Metaphysics,” for “everywhere there is Dualism” (56). The ubiquity of metaphysics and dualism indicates the diseased state of modernity, since a healthy society is unified and unselfconscious. They remain, however, necessary evils, pharmakon foreshadowing convalescence. Carlyle views German metaphysics and idealism as particularly beneficial, a position reflected in his early promotion of German literature and his passing familiarity with Kant.Footnote ⁵ He proclaims that “in that wide-spreading, deep-whirling vortex of Kantism . . . a Faith in Religion has again become possible” (67). Faith is made possible by Kant because Carlyle associates him with temporal dualism and the transcendence of materiality. Schlegel, one of the eddies in the vortex of Kantism and the putative focus of the essay, “regards Space and Time as mere forms of man's mind, and without external existence or reality” (62). Time is a necessary condition for human subjectivity, but it gains significance only in its subordination to eternity: “If all things, to speak in the German dialect, are discerned by us, and exist for us, in an element of Time, and therefore of Mortality and Mutability; yet Time itself reposes on Eternity: the truly Great and Transcendental has its basis and substance in Eternity; stands revealed to us as Eternity in a vesture of Time” (65–66). Metaphysics, especially German metaphysics, enables Carlyle to emphasize the dire need for temporal dualism: without eternity, heroic subjectivities cannot transcend time and mortality. There is no greatness, no faith, and no hope of curing the malaise of modernity.

Carlyle stresses this point by contrasting modernity to a nonspecific utopian past, when “Loyalty still hallowed obedience, and made rule noble; there was still something to be loyal to: the Godlike stood embodied under many a symbol in men's interests and business; the Finite shadowed forth the Infinite; Eternity looked through Time” (58–59). The paternalist implications of Carlyle's temporal dualism now become clear, with loyalty, obedience, and rule anchored by the imposing interpenetrations of the final two clauses. And although his contemporaries live in an age when dualisms are awry and in need of metaphysicians, Carlyle assures them there is cause for hope. In addition to its troubles, modernity also brings with it an “increase of social resources” thanks to steam-driven transportation and a rapidly expanding English population. The prospects of empire herald a new era of heroism:

The “social resources” to which Carlyle refers denotes the millions of working-class poor in industrial England, yet it also suggests the millions in the “Blackhole of Calcutta” and elsewhere on the “untenanted” earth. The forced emigration of the former and the colonization of the latter would reestablish loyalty, obedience, and noble rule at a global level. His case for imperialism is reinforced by the logic of temporal dualism, which he invokes at the end of his essay: “Behind us, behind each one of us, lie Six Thousand Years of human effort, human conquest: before us is the boundless Time, with its as yet uncreated and unconquered Continents and Eldorados, which we, even we, have to conquer, to create; and from the bosom of Eternity there shine for us celestial guiding stars” (69). The Christian historical timeframe, with its teleological progression toward eternity, legitimates imperialism and underscores the importance and agency of “each one of us” as heroic subjects.

“Characteristics” closes with a couplet from Goethe that also serves as epigraph to Sartor Resartus: “My inheritance how wide and fair!/Time is my fair seed-field, of Time I'm heir.” The repetition signals a continuation of interest in time, subjectivity, and the imperialism implied in a “wide and fair” inheritance. Sartor makes more explicit the “high Platonic Mysticism” of Carlyle, set forth in his insistence that matter exists only as an emblem of the spiritual (124–28; bk. 1, ch. 10–11). Like “Characteristics,” it asserts the fundamental importance of temporal dualism: “the Heavens and the Earth” are merely “the Time-vesture of the Eternal” (129; bk. 1, ch. 11). Although Teufelsdröckh (Carlyle's alter ego) publishes a “refutation of Hegel” (90; bk. 1, ch. 3), Sartor continues a Hegelian impulse to transcend dualisms in the service of a spiritual teleology. In addition to these themes, however, are three variations on them that inform my consideration of Dickens: the role of literature in imperialism, children as ideal subjects, and each (childlike) individual as metonymy for all forms of paternalism. Scholars have most often read the apotheosis of the work – the “EVERLASTING YEA” – as a depiction of self-annihilation.Footnote ⁶ In fact, the EVERLASTING YEA affirms the eternal fulfillment of the self, not its abrogation: “On the roaring billows of Time, thou art not engulfed, but borne aloft into the azure of Eternity . . . [t]his is the EVERLASTING YEA, wherein all contradiction is solved” (205; bk. 2, ch. 9). Like a child's relation to its father, the everlasting subject subordinates itself to eternity and Godhead. As Carlyle repeatedly makes clear, one achieves freedom only though obedience. This logic applies equally to self, society, and empire.

Literature acts as a potent vehicle for disseminating paternalism, especially in an imperial context. Teufelsdröckh conflates intellectual and imperial speculation, describing the adventurer of ideas “planting new standards, founding new habitable colonies” (85; bk. 1, ch. 1). His editor remarks that “Books, like invisible scouts, permeate the whole habitable globe, and Timbuctoo itself is not safe from British Literature.” Perhaps, he muses, a copy of Teufelsdröckh's philosophy will find a “mysterious basket-bearing Stranger” and “gently force even him to disclose himself; to claim openly a son, in whom any father may feel pride?” (138–39; bk. 2, ch. 1). Literature spreads like an army of fathers, forcing mysterious others to disclose themselves and enter the family. Similarly, Heuschrecke distributes Teufelsdröckh's biographical materials in the expectation they will flow through England to America, Hindostan, and New Holland, “finally [to] conquer [a] great part of this terrestrial Planet!” (131; bk. 1, ch. 11). Teufelsdröckh's biography functions as a divinely sanctioned allegory, aggressively (super)imposing its subjective history on the various histories of the colonized. For literature to proliferate, it must be seminal, subsuming otherness beneath the banner of “Universal History” by “planting new standards” in “barren domestic soil.” Carlyle characterizes paternalism as textual and sexual reproduction, diffusing “already-budding germs of a nobler Era” (85, 133; bk. 1, ch. 1, 11).

The insistent metaphors of “seed-fields” and “germs” reflect the important role of children in the symbolic landscape of Sartor because their connotations fall so readily in line with Carlyle's conception of politics and temporality. A child presages a nobler future but does so with a natural obedience to the father and the past he represents (Teufelsdröckh's biography is universal in part because his “unknown Father” [133; bk. 2, ch. 1] stands for all fathers and God). They therefore embody the idyllic present, the “happy season” of childhood associated with Romantic reminiscence (139–40; bk. 2, ch. 2). Carlyle also naturalizes children as culturally universal, the games they play in Germany “differing apparently by mere superficial shades from those of other countries.” Carlyle assigns all children the same games because these “games” are crucial performances in the universal reproduction of a paternalist and patriarchal system: “In gregarious sports of skill or strength, the Boy trains himself to Coöperation, for war or peace, as governor or governed: the little Maid again, provident of her domestic destiny, takes with preference to Dolls” (140). The figure of the child effectively predestines the future as a perpetuation of the same through its logical association with the father, its apparent universal applicability, and its differentiation of the sexes into public and private, or imperial and domestic, spheres.

Certain children, such as Oliver Twist and young Gneschen in Sartor, emerge as unique, singular individuals. Their individuality masks the fact that as discursive figures they are all the same, performing identical games for identical purposes. Nevertheless, as “individuals” they direct attention toward the self and its duties, and this scrutiny opens new, internal Eldorados prone to being conquered and made subject. Carlyle presents the illusion of the discrete individual in order to grant the possibility of agency and labor, but, paradoxically, each one gains this freedom by subjecting itself to the great chain of paternalism. His idealism asserts “that this so solid-seeming World, after all, were but an air-image, our ME the only reality,” yet the “divine ME [is] cast hither, like a light-particle, down from Heaven” (117, 128; bk. 1, ch. 8, 11). The individual projects the temporal world and absorbs the infinite divine, and in this sense the “mysterious ME” stands “in the conflux of Eternities” (123–24; bk. 1, ch. 10). The individual becomes a vassal and vessel of eternal directives, always extending its range: “what I Do is my Kingdom,” reflecting my “sovereign right of Peace and War against the Time-Prince (Zeitfürst), or Devil, and all his Dominions” (159; bk. 2, ch. 4). The ideal individual transcends temporality by conquering the subjective realm, then the domestic, then the imperial, always in childlike servility to the eternal Father. This conqueror is the hero, the central figure in Carlyle's conception of hero-worship, which organizes all humanity under the rubric of paternalism. Teufelsdröckh quickly stifles the objection of rebellious children and other “Fools! Were your Superiors worthy to govern, and you worthy to obey, reverence for them were even your only possible freedom” (230; bk. 3, ch. 5). In other words, one becomes an individual only by becoming a subject.

In addition to On Heroes and Hero-Worship, a series of lectures Carlyle presented in 1840 and published in 1841, Past and Present (1843) offers his definitive position on hero-worship and its domestic applications. Carlyle contrasts the utopic medieval past with the present state of society and government, which precipitously approaches chaos. He sympathetically draws attention to the plight of the industrial poor; however, idle aristocrats, and especially working-class movements, provide no solutions to class inequalities (nor does the middle-class, obsessed as it is with bureaucracy). Whereas the idle aristocracy can become an “Aristocracy of Talent,” Carlyle never intends the “Governed Class” to govern anything. Inequality and hierarchy are necessary, just improperly established at present. Like the savages in “Characteristics,” workers are social resources desiring exploitation: “Behold us here, so many thousands, millions, and increasing at the rate of fifty every hour. We are right willing and able to work; and on the Planet Earth is plenty of work and wages for a million times as many. We ask, If you mean to lead us towards work; to try to lead us” (23; bk. 1, ch. 3). These leaders are heroes, “Captains of Industry,” who will guide everyone from troubled times to eternity.

Heroic men trace a sequence from “Paterfamilias to Dominus Rex” (94; bk. 2, ch. 10). Each ideal subjectivity serves as a metonymy on multiple stages, from micro- to macroscopic, and each one conquers, subdues, governs, and subjects. Disorder is his “eternal enemy,” and he finds it even in the most minute: “The thistle that grows in thy path, dig it out, that a blade of useful grass, a drop of nourishing milk, may grow there instead” (201; bk. 3, ch. 12). The paterfamilias must cultivate his garden, his home, himself, for “the Highest God dwells visible in that mystic unfathomable Visibility, which calls itself ‘I’ on the Earth” (126; bk. 2, ch. 16). Every mundane task connects one to God and eternity. Laborare est Orare; labor is worship. The idle, disconnected from God, must be forced to labor, and for the paterfamilias this initially means self-discipline. Hero-worship begins “by being ourselves of heroic mind . . . [Reform] must begin at home. Once well at home, how will it radiate outwards, irrepressible” (39; bk. 1, ch. 6). Writing to Jane Welsh in 1826, Carlyle explains that his family “simply admit[s] that I am [master of the house], and act upon this conviction” (qtd. in Morrow 35). He expects Welsh, his future wife, to act likewise. Women are part of the barren landscape that men must make labor, make (re)productive, turn from thistle to “drop of nourishing milk.” Women must be guided toward their “domestic destiny,” and this presents a central task for the paterfamilias.

Once the well-ordered home is established, the hero casts his gaze on the homeland. For Carlyle in 1843, the most disturbing sign of social disorder was the rise of democracy, indicated by the recent extension of the franchise and ongoing Chartist agitation. His proposed method for combating democracy offers “freedom” as a diffuse program of discipline and control. The new democratic reality poses a problem but also a unique opportunity for totalized paternalism:

Even democracy can serve paternalist interests, Carlyle suggests, because the illusion of freedom affords the ruling class a cunning method of social control. A government of heroes can exploit the advent of democracy by granting rights and freedoms in the form of sanitary regulations, factory-bills, and time-bills (261; bk. 4, ch. 3). If government intervenes in a subtle, regulatory fashion, it will effectively control the labor of emerging social resources and produce prodigal sons on a massive scale. These sons will enrich the home of the paterfamilias by building cities and conquering waste worlds – making Carlyle's domestic critique an allegory for imperialism.

Dominus Rex writes the Epic of England “in huge characters on the face of this Planet, – sea-moles, cotton-trades, railways, fleets and cities, Indian Empires, Americas, New-Hollands; legible throughout the Solar System!” The logic of dialectical temporal dualism leads inevitably to imperialism as a stage in the totalization of eternal sovereignty – thus the “Eternal Melodies” inform the Epic of England (162; bk. 3, ch. 5). God sanctions empire; attacks on empire are attacks on God. This explains why, twenty-four years after publishing Past and Present, Carlyle continues to defend imperialism in one of his most vituperative and scathing essays, “Shooting Niagara: And After?” In it he responds to the controversy surrounding the 1865 uprising of blacks on Jamaica, an uprising which the governor, Edward Eyre, viciously suppressed by killing 439 blacks and “coloreds,” flogging 600 men and women, and burning over 1000 homes. Carlyle and Dickens opposed the Jamaica Committee led by J. S. Mill and Charles Darwin, which sought to remove and prosecute Eyre.Footnote ⁷ Accordingly, in “Shooting Niagara,” Carlyle blasts “rabid Nigger-Philanthropists” and eternalizes “Martial Law” as “coeval with Human Society, from its first beginnings to its ultimate end” (12). In a fantasy consonant with bio-politics – where “the soul is the prison of the body” (Foucault 30) – Carlyle admits that he “often wishes the entire Population could be thoroughly drilled; into coöperative movement, into individual behaviour, correct, precise, and at once habitual and orderly as mathematics, in all or in very many points” (40). Eternally sustained and infinitely applied, martial law (the law of the father) organizes, pacifies, and subjects on individual and collective levels.

Carlyle's fantasy reveals paradoxical shifts in his conceptualization of subjectivity, from one grounded in the primacy of renunciation and labor to one advocating disciplinary bio-politics. He imagines power as diffuse and structural, a recognition glimpsed in his 1843 promotion of “cunninger methods” of social control. But he simultaneously insists on individual agency, and these contradictory elements create a discursive rupture in Carlyle's logic. In the Eyre controversy, for instance, Carlyle continues to defend the lone hero, Governor Eyre, obscuring the extent to which the ruling structure in Jamaica was diffuse and ramified. Thus, when bringing accusations before the House of Commons in 1866, Mill names thirteen culprits in addition to Eyre and also implicates the numerous men under their command (Wiener 2781–82). The reactionary violence was the result of a network of authority figures, and Carlyle's blinkered exultation of Eyre appears partial – in both senses of the word – beside Mill's serial deluge. Likewise, the complexity of the resistance movement is obscured by Carlyle's figural “Quashee Nigger.” In providing testimony against Eyre in 1868, Walter Rea, a seaman, describes his party's patrol of Stoney Gut, Jamaica: “We went into the village; a female fired a pistol off and hit nobody, she was afterwards captured; there was no other resistance” (2786). This nameless woman, who acts against the imperatives of eternal and disciplinary subjectivities, serves as an alternative figure, representing the aporia of Carlyle's discourse and the network of subjectivities eluding paternalism.

II. Dickens

In Dickens's DOMBEY AND Son, young Paul Dombey maintains a singular – “individual” and “special” – relation to time and eternity. The novel opens eight-and-forty minutes into the life of the “old-fashioned” boy, with personified Time hovering over the baby's basket, scythe in hand. Paul passes from babyhood to childhood “[b]eneath the watching and attentive eyes of Time” (107; ch. 8) and achieves his narrative apotheosis when, at death's door, he learns that time flows like a river into the sea of eternity. This platitude, as a prominent motif of the novel suggests, is “what the waves were always saying,” which suggests a simple, immutable truth drowned out by modernity. The narrative of Paul's life reacquaints the reader with this message by idealizing the boy as a touching instance of contact with eternity (his novelized death reportedly “flung [the] nation into mourning”).Footnote ⁸ Paul's plot also reveals a paradoxical conception of temporality that underpins much of Dickens's fiction: time intersects eternity and is often interchangeable with it. Time and eternity are separate but inseparable and can be perceived only dialectically, through narrative.Footnote ⁹

Paul delineates the temporal dualism that pervades the novel's themes and structure. Although the boy dies one-quarter of the way through the novel, he continues to haunt its conceptual horizon, persisting as a kind of ghostly moral impetus for his sister, Florence, who is nourished on his absent, albeit “present[,] consciousness” (354; ch. 23). Paradoxically, he is both alive and dead, inside and outside of time. Florence assumes her brother's ethical mantle to finish what he could not: the reintegration of the Dombey family, annihilated by his premature death. With her frequent testaments of filial love, Florence functions as a mediator between generations, genders, and the time/eternity gap. The two children, Paul and Florence, are made to perform the role of the “good” mid-Victorian subject, a subject who behaves like a dutiful child, synthesizing – and synchronizing – the patriarchal family.

What emerges as the central feature in the temporal structure of Dombey and Son is not time or eternity but the relentless oscillation between them. As my opening examples suggest, Dickens's primary mediators between time and eternity are children. If everyone must realize his duty to eternity, children become useful symbols for this realization since they are readily associated with dutifulness and obedience. This implies that all mid-Victorian subjects should behave as dutiful children to their superiors, an implication that falls neatly in line with paternalist politics. Following Wordsworth and Blake, among others, Dickens portrays children as inherently open and good – as long as they are not corrupted by society, as Fagin corrupts the Artful Dodger in Oliver Twist. Thus, the figure of the child works nicely to shore up the mid-Victorian subject, who precariously straddles a temporality defined by the economic and political upheavals of modernity and an eternity Dickens associates with metaphysical stasis and stability. Dickens continues to deploy Carlyle's temporal dualism to critique capitalism, using the figure of the child as a potent means to obviate the ruthless reciprocity of capitalism that so appalled them both.

This critique is facilitated by children – good children – who sublate time into eternity through acts of giving, reconciliation, and mediation. Paul brings to his family a spiritual gift that transcends the close-fisted reciprocity of capitalism, thereby acting as a foil to his close-fisted father. The child epitomizes a particular kind of subject – open, giving, loving, f(am)ilial –whom Dickens exalts throughout his oeuvre. If what Nancy Armstrong argues in How Novels Think – that “the history of the novel and the history of the modern subject are, quite literally, one and the same” (3) – is true, it becomes necessary to delineate the specific techniques novels employ to produce the modern subject or, more modestly, the mid-Victorian one. In Dombey and Son, subjectification occurs to the extent that one transcends concrete existence by bringing the eternal into relevant contact with that existence – in other words, temporal dualism becomes the foundation of the subject. As Carlyle explains, “wherein thou even now standest, here or nowhere is thy Ideal” (Sartor Resartus 207; bk. 2, ch. 9). Rather than standing apart from temporal concerns, eternity inheres in them. The division between time and eternity breaks down, and eternity, too, becomes subjective.Footnote ¹⁰ In Dickens, the temporal absorption of eternity frequently centers on the figure of the child because children possess the passivity and malleability required for such absorption. In Dombey and Son, Paul is particularly attuned to the eternal. As Jerome Buckley puts it, “no adult can contrive or decree the release from time that the child habitually enjoys” (137). Carlyle suggests that since the soul of the child has only recently left eternity (in order to be born into time), children remain empathically attached to eternity. Temporality may even disorient them: “The young spirit has awakened out of Eternity, and knows not what we mean by Time” (Sartor Resartus 139; bk. 2, ch. 2).Footnote ¹¹ Of course, the interpenetration of the child, eternity, and hope for the future is widespread in the Victorian period and especially in Dickens.Footnote ¹² But how does this interpenetration produce the mid-Victorian subject, if we define that subject as imperatively male and patriarchal?

The answer hinges on the fact that Dickens selects children as his primary interlocutors between time and eternity. Without Paul, Dickens's temporal dualism would remain irreconcilably partitioned, thereby blocking the emergence of a redemptive, mediating subject. In addition to making eternity the telos of human development, the boy links past to future because he ultimately provides the nepotistic continuity Mr Dombey desires for his firm and his family. As the products of their parents, children are associated with reproduction – heterosexual reproduction and also the repetition of existing economic and social conditions. In No Future, Lee Edelman uses the term “reproductive futurity” to describe the conception of children as necessary links to the future. The child is related to a certain discourse of temporality that insists on the future as a prerequisite for politics: “we are no more able to conceive of a politics without a fantasy of the future than we are able to conceive of a future without the figure of the Child” (11).Footnote ¹³ Thus we find, at the end of Dombey and Son, Paul reborn as the son of Walter and Florence, no longer sickly but sprightly. The second Paul represents futurity and the reconciliation of the family, turning even Mr Dombey into a doting grandfather. The future family (and family business) will be reproduced according to new, better principles; like a phoenix, Mrs Toots predicts, “another Dombey and Son will rise triumphant!” (946; ch. 62). A glance at Wuthering Heights (1847) suggests how widespread this narrative structure was at mid-century: at the end of Brontë's novel, Hareton and Catherine fille neutralize the transgressions of Heathcliff and Catherine by reintegrating the Linton and Earnshaw families. Nelly's long narrative of aggression and lust subsides into a tale of domesticity in the second generation: “The red firelight glowed on their two bonny heads, and revealed their faces, animated with the eager interest of children” (322; vol. 2, ch. 19). One cannot be “eager” or glean “interest” – in both psychological and economic senses of the word – without the future that children bring. The figure of the child is used to create the political landscape of the future in its own image: dutiful, (re)productive, and concerned to stabilize middle-class families and family firms.

Paul Dombey has seen the future, and it is an eternal series of Dombey and Sons. The Dickensian child in general champions the passing on of names and firms and ensures their perpetuation into the future through the logic of (heterosexual) reproduction. Thus, by means of its temporality, the child authenticates a particular mode of subjectivity by making the future an economic and bodily “investment in the rigid sameness of identity” (Edelman 21). Even female children work to support this patriarchal legacy. Florence, initially expelled from the family, reenters the familial economy once Mr Dombey realizes her “worth.” This reintegration begins in Chapter 59, “Retribution,” when Florence finally returns to her forlorn father:

“Unchanged” Florence embodies stasis, love, and turn-the-other-cheek forgiveness. She maintains the link to the eternal initiated by her brother, understanding that Paul and her mother, although “in the far off land,” preserve “some love and commiseration for her: and some knowledge of her as she went her way upon the earth” (354; ch. 23). Thus, when Florence approaches Mr Dombey as a divine agent, he realizes the extent of his failures: the immorality of imagining his son as a mere pawn and his “unnatural” rejection of Florence as a “piece of base coin that couldn't be invested – a bad Boy” (13; ch. 1). Emblemizing the reestablishment of his family, Mr Dombey kisses Florence and says, “Oh my God, forgive me, for I need it very much!” Mr Dombey learns to put Florence, that “base coin,” back into currency – presumably as a “good Boy” – through giving, forgiving, and reconciliation.

The Dombey familial economy finds its mandate in the larger, divine family associated with the eternal/aneconomic tendencies of the novel. At one point, the narrator looks forward to the day when “[M]en, delayed no more by stumbling-blocks of their own making, which are but specks of dust upon the path between them and eternity, would then apply themselves, like creatures of one common origin, owning one duty to the Father of one family, and tending to one common end, to make the world a better place!” (702; ch. 47). Several strands of Dickens's economy – time, eternity, and family – come together in this passage. The “duty” everyone owns – and owes – to the “Father” is an economic and temporal obligation, as the multiple denotations of “duty” reveal: proper submission to a superior, a contracted service, a tax due. The presence of the Father, who begins or begets, anchors one's duty in the past and also points forward to a teleological “common end.” The relation to the Father is also metonymic, since each man finds his fulfillment in the Father and each family is a part of the divine “one family.” By placing the Father and his “one family” in the remote past of “one common origin,” Dickens's passage naturalizes “duty” and “family,” and by metonymically linking man's “family” to the divine one, it sanctions the paternalist, familial organization of society.

Dickens elaborates the argument for social paternalism more extensively in Hard Times: For These Times. This is Dickens's most direct contribution to the Condition of England genre, a constellation of novels that considered the emerging class dualism – Disraeli's “Two Nations” – that Carlyle was among the first to delineate in the late 1830s. Significantly, it is also the only novel Dickens dedicated to Carlyle. Like other Condition of England novels, Dickens advances paternalism as the solution to class conflict, and he does so by foregrounding the importance of temporal dualism: workers, hopelessly embroiled in materialist temporality, must reconnect to eternity and God. For Dickens, this can be achieved only through the intervention of captains of industry, who will lovingly (like a father) reconcile class interests and engage in the subjectification of an otherwise amorphous and dangerous mob of workers. The mob itself, blindly expressing its interests through labor unions and violent agitation, aggressively pursues betterment that can be gained only by submitting to the masters and the church. In Hard Times, the working class of Coketown focuses entirely on material needs when actually it lacks the spiritual connection associated with temporal dualism and hierarchy.

Temporal dualism structures our understanding of all the major groups of the novel, the well-known fact/fancy dualism overlapping the time/eternity one. M'Choakumchild and the Utilitarians, Bounderby and the master class, Blackpool and the working class: all live bereft of contact with eternity. Only the childlike circus maintains such contact through vivid fancy and strong familial ties, providing an ideal model for the other groups. Bounderby ironically informs the aptly-named circus folk, Childers and Kidderminster, that “we are the kind of people who know the value of time, and you are the kind of people who don't know the value of time” (39; bk. 1, ch. 6). Bounderby fails to understand, however, that a myopic concern for the value of time ignores more important, eternal values, such as the maintenance of the family. Bounderby is vilified for abandoning his mother. His marriage to Louisa fails as a direct result of her fact-driven, Gradgrindian education. Similarly, Blackpool's family lies in ruins because of his alcoholic wife. The working class in particular faces familial disintegration because it lives exposed to the temporal acceleration of modernity: “In the hardest working part of Coketown . . . which had come into existence piecemeal, every piece in a violent hurry for some one man's purpose, [lived the whole] unnatural family, shouldering, and trampling, and pressing one another to death” (83; bk. 1, ch. 10). More animals than men, the workers exist in the “hardest working part,” the materialist cage of Coketown. These are, quite literally, hard times.

In addition, Dickens consistently portrays the workers avoiding their religious duties, a negligence which exacerbates – even causes – their problems. The workers are “babies . . . walking against time toward the infinite world” – yet, as babies, they walk unwittingly and without the religious guidance of the “eighteen denominations” of Coketown (64; bk. 1, ch. 8). A “perplexing mystery” of the city is “Who belonged to the eighteen denominations? Because, whoever did, the labouring people did not. It was very strange to walk through the streets on a Sunday morning, and note how few of them [were on their way to church]” (30; bk. 1, ch. 5). Dickens likely had in mind the religious census of 1851, which charted the expansion of non-Anglican denominations (hence the eighteen of Coketown) and revealed that a large portion of the working class did not attend church. The census seemed to confirm that the working class, fixated by the “violent hurry” of industrial modernity, was becoming increasingly oblivious to the reality of temporal dualism.Footnote ¹⁴ Yet the workers could be reattached to eternity only through the intervention of a higher power, since the prospect of an infantile and animalistic working class transcending its own miserable conditions appeared ludicrous.

Slackbridge, the opportunistic union leader, acts as a higher power in the sense that he coordinates and mobilizes the interests of a voiceless mass of workers. But he leads in the wrong direction, cultivating rebellion rather than mediation and submission. Like other Condition of England novels, Hard Times casts the agitation of labor unions in an unfavorable light. When Slackbridge proposes to rend “the galling yoke of tyrants” (329; bk. 3, ch. 4), he disregards the Carlylean axiom that “Man, little as he may suppose it, is necessitated to obey superiors” (Past and Present 241; bk. 4, ch. 1). Bounderby is an inept superior and should be removed, but “oppression by your Mock-Superiors well shaken off, the grand problem yet remains to solve: That of finding government by your Real-Superiors!” (Past and Present 218–19; bk. 3, ch. 13). Government by the working class itself is unthinkable; government by Bounderby or Slackbridge would be a mockery. Blackpool, one of the few upright, individuated workers in the novel, sees right through Slackbridge, arguing that the orator makes no impact on temporal events: “Put that clock aboard a ship an ‘pack it off to Norfolk Island, an’ the time will go on just the same. So ‘tis wi’ Slackbridge every bit” (199; bk. 2, ch. 5). Blackpool discerns that time(s) will remain the same unless something extra-temporal intercedes. Consequently, he admonishes Bounderby to treat his workers like humans with “souls to weary and souls to hope” rather than “reg'latin ‘em as if they was figures in a soom, or machines” (200), for souls have contact with eternity, whereas machines are wholly within hard times. In other words, a good master must behave like a good father. Gradgrind eventually learns this lesson, providing the model for a “Real-Superior” when he realizes that his children are not soulless machines. The good father distinguishes his children as unique individuals, just as good government distinguishes each worker from the mass. Louisa's visit to Blackpool enlightens her on this point: “for the first time in her life she was face to face with anything like individuality in connexion with [the Coketown Hands] . . . [S]he had scarcely thought more of separating them into units, than of separating the sea itself into its component drops” (209; bk. 2, ch. 6). But separation – subjectification – becomes a moral and political imperative. Together, paternalism and subjectification provide Dickens's solution to the Condition of England question.

If paternalism, subjectification, and temporal dualism make the family and society cohere by ameliorating domestic and class conflict, they also underwrite the imperial project. The argument here is metonymic: workers in Coketown present the same problems and require the same solutions as savages around the world.Footnote ¹⁵ In the well-known “key-note” description of Coketown – “a town of unnatural red and black like the painted face of a savage” – details of the industrial city blur seamlessly into jungle imagery, with “interminable serpents of smoke” and elephantine pistons implying that characteristics of Coketown apply equally to Manchester, South America, Africa, and India (28; bk. 1, ch. 5). The domestic flow of commodities from Coketown to affluent London could just as well describe the imperial flow from periphery to metropole: “These attributes of Coketown were in the main inseparable from the work by which it was sustained; against them were to be set off, comforts of life which found their way all over the world, and elegancies of life which made, we will not ask how much of the fine lady, who could scarcely bear to hear the place mentioned” (28–29). Temporal dualism makes the conflation of worker and savage possible, since it casts them both into a stasis beyond the progress narrative. The urban jungle of Coketown is “inhabited by people equally like one another, who all went in and out at the same hours . . . to do the same work, and to whom every day was the same as yesterday and to-morrow, and every year the counterpart of the last and the next” (28). Represented as undifferentiated and inert, workers and savages are discursively relegated to the non-teleological realm Anne McClintock calls “anachronistic space”: “Within this trope, the agency of women, the colonized and the industrial working class are disavowed and projected onto anachronistic space: prehistoric, atavistic and irrational, inherently out of place in the historical time of modernity” (40). McClintock implies that anachronistic space was employed as a strategy for controlling the aforementioned groups, but in fact the trope delineates a problem – what should be done with potentially dangerous masses of people completely ignorant of their duty to progress and eternity? – without prescribing a solution. Carlyle and Dickens isolate the problem and offer a solution in the form of subjectifying the masses and reattaching them to eternity. If their solution could not be effected – and they allowed that it could be in the case of women and the working class – the only alternative was force, even to the point of annihilation.

Occupying the bottom rung of a hierarchy that ranked the children of the British government, savages provide the limit-case for benevolent paternalism. Carlyle and Dickens saw democracy and eternity as “trickle-down” processes; hence the problem of subjectifying the English working class took precedence over the needs of colonized Africans and West-Indian blacks. In the early 1850s, Carlyle and Dickens satirized attempts to improve the lives of savages at the expense of domestic progress. Dickens introduced “Telescopic Philanthropy” and Mrs Jellyby in 1852, scorning her obsession with “the natives of Borrioboola-Gha, on the left bank of the Niger” since it made her neglect domestic duties and jeopardized her femininity: “Mrs Jellyby had very good hair, but was too much occupied with her African duties to brush it” (Bleak House 35; ch. 4). Jellyby's telescopic philanthropy is foolish because she extends the telescope to its furthest extent before scrutinizing the intermediate levels: the first focus should be oneself, then the home, then the white slums of Manchester, and only then should Borrioboola-Gha come into view. Carlyle makes the same point in “Occasional Discourse on the Negro Question” (1849).Footnote ¹⁶ He ridicules the “Sluggard-and-Scoundrel Protection Society” and notes that while West-Indian Negroes are “very happy,” “many thousands of [British Whites are] very sore put to it, at this time, not to live ‘well’ or as a man should, in any sense temporal or spiritual, but to live at all” (349–50). Carlyle severs white Europe from savage (Carib) West Indies by casting the latter into anachronistic space, claiming that “till the white European first saw [the islands], they were as if not yet created,” producing nothing but “jungle, savagery, poison-reptiles and swamp-malaria.” Three centuries later, black agricultural laborers (uniformly referred to as “Quashee”) hold no conception of time beyond the fleeting enjoyment of eating “pumpkins” (watermelons). His paternalism loses all trace of the loving father: “If Quashee will not honestly aid in bringing-out those sugars, cinnamons and nobler products of the West-Indian Islands, for the benefit of all mankind, then I say neither will the [Eternal] Powers permit Quashee to continue growing pumpkins there for his own lazy benefit; but will shear him out.” In temporal and spatial hinterlands, benevolent paternalism carries a “beneficent whip” to assert its “Eternal” prerogatives (374–76).

Carlyle believes that West Indian blacks, despite their essential inferiority, can be interpellated with eternal values and the ideology of temporal dualism if (stern) paternalism intervenes.Footnote ¹⁷ They are therefore potential subjects of the British empire. But paternalism breaks down as a viable policy when confronted by savages utterly removed from the progress narrative. According to Carlyle, “The black African, alone of wild men, can live among men civilised. While all manner of Caribs and others pine into annihilation in presence of the pale faces, he contrives to continue” (358). In “The Noble Savage” (1853), Dickens taxonomizes this exception even further when he names the “Ojibbeway,” “Bushmen,” and “Zulu Kaffirs” as too absurd, disgusting, and dangerous to deserve anything other than annihilation. He notes with approval that the savage “passes away before an immeasurably better and higher power than ever ran wild in any earthly woods, and the world will be all the better when his place knows him no more.” The ambiguous “higher power” suggests an exponential association of father-figures: God, the British empire, “a WILLIAM SHAKSPEARE or an ISAAC NEWTON” and the literary and scientific discourses they metonymically represent all witnessing, condoning, or causing the obsolescence of savages. Dickens mobilizes such a vast apparatus of power behind the destruction of savages because the innocuous and ridiculous groups of savages he describes pose a real threat to civilization. He detects vestigial traces of savagery alarmingly close to home, in the Irish House of Commons and the Théâtre Français in Paris (148). The head and tail-end of a hierarchy are still connected, however remotely, and savages threaten the imperial body with disease and disorder.

To maintain the coherence of the mid-Victorian subject and the structure of paternalism on which it is based, the diseased limb of savagery requires incapacitation or even amputation. Dickens remarks, “I call a savage a something highly desirable to be civilised off the face of the earth” (143). Carlyle echoes this sentiment in “Shooting Niagara,” predicting that the recently emancipated American blacks are “likely to be ‘improved off the face of the earth’ in a generation or two!” (7).Footnote ¹⁸ He advances a repressive, genocidal agenda because the horizontal spread of democratic equality signaled by American emancipation appears to threaten the vertical structure (hierarchy, paternalism, heroism, temporal dualism) he spent a lifetime constructing. The millenarian tone of the “shooting Niagara” metaphor is particularly effective because it relies on temporal dualism, with historical flow rapidly approaching an infinite leap (of judgment and destruction). If democracy and savagery spread, civilization will shoot the Falls, and in that (second) Fall, the future will be chaotic and beyond redemption. “Swarmery” and “nomadism” will replace the discrete heroic individual. “Quashee Nigger” will be equal to “Socrates or Shakspeare; Judas Iscariot to Jesus Christ.” In such an environment, how could philosophical, literary, religious, domestic, or imperial fathers continue to exist? It seemed to Carlyle that they could not – thus he demands that servantship, “like all solid contracts between men (like wedlock itself, which was once nomadic enough, temporary enough!) must become a contract of permanency” (4–6). The volatility of the temporary and temporality are subject to (“a contract of”) the reactionary stasis of permanency and the eternal.

In response to an array of anxieties, a segment of the mid-Victorian literary community took a desperate interest in making paternalism permanent and the subject eternal. Yet the evident desperation of Carlyle and Dickens, especially in their later works, signals the futility of their enterprise. By looking askance at the Irish and French, Dickens reveals that the remoteness of savagery is a hygienic fantasy. Eternal subjects emerge alongside the constant threat of what might be called descendental subjects, making porous the distinction between ideal and abject. Indeed, Dickens's anxiety suggests the easy dialectical slippage of temporal dualism: savage materiality, like Hegel's slave, frequently appropriates the determining position of the binary. Certain subjects and temporalities – those Carlyle and Dickens attempt to ignore, reform, control, or destroy – resist the stratification of vertical hierarchies. They reverse, ramify, pluralize, swarm, and infect. As Carlyle notes, they are nomadic, transgressing the boundaries installed by discourses. Even the figure of the child, so central to Dickens's project, eludes his intended rôle. By the end of the century, Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure (Reference Hardy1895) subverts the Dickensian child altogether when the appropriately named Father Time kills his siblings and himself. A perverse inversion of Paul Dombey, Father Time is a boy “of a sort unknown in the last generation . . . the beginning of the coming universal wish not to live” (337; pt. 6, ch. 2). Father Time marks an alternative Victorian version of children and time, one much more nihilistic than we typically find in Dickens – indeed, Hardy rejects the solace of (the future) eternity that predicates Dickens's temporal dualism. Together, the subjects of Britain and the subjects of fiction come to disobey the strictures of their fathers.