Will the real Miss Green stand up please?

Is it possible to have a named character in a novel without the reader having any clear idea who that character is? It sounds unlikely but this is just what Charles Dickens does in chapter fourteen of Nicholas Nickleby, Having the Misfortune to treat of none but Common People, is necessarily of a Mean and Vulgar character.

This describes the party held by Mr and Mrs Kenwigs to celebrate their eighth wedding anniversary. ‘The party was admirably selected’ says Dickens and proceeds to describe the guests, who include three nameless characters:
(i) the young lady who had made Mrs Kenwigs’ dress, and who – it was the most convenient thing in the world – living in the two-pair back, gave up her bed to the baby, and got a little girl to watch it,
(ii) a sister of Mrs Kenswigs’s, who was quite a beauty, and
(iii) an elderly lady from the back parlour who was very fat and turned of sixty.

When the VIP guest, Mrs Kenwigs’s uncle, the water rate collector, Lillyvick arrives, Mrs Kenwigs introduces him to one of the guests as Miss Green but the narrator does not make it obvious which of the three lady guests Mrs Kenwigs is introducing.

Or so I thought. But I now realise that the readers are expected to solve the problem themselves. Mrs Kenwigs does introduce Lillyvick to ‘lady from downstairs’ before introducing Miss Green and therefore this  cannot be Miss Green. The ‘lady from downstairs’must be the fat sixty year old who occupies the back parlour, the back parlour being the ground floor flat at the back of the house.

The two-pair back where the dressmaking lady lives is the equivalent flat two flights of stairs up, on the second floor. As the Kenwigs occupy both rooms on the first floor, the dressmaker must be upstairs relative to them. She therefore has to be Miss Green.

What rules out Mrs Kenwigs’ beautiful sister? The fact that no further lady is introduced to Lillyvick (other than Miss Petowker of the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, whom he eventually marries). She is not introduced at all. You would not introduce your sister to your uncle.

Dickens’ readers had to work hard and pay attention even in an avowedly popular work. Are today’s popular authors equally demanding or would publishers insist that what Dickens does here takes ‘show not tell’ to ridiculous lengths?

Note to American readers: the first floor means the floor one up from street level, what the Italians call the piano nobile; this is definitely the best floor in a London terraced house and a fit home for the Kenwigs, who are clearly the social aristocracy of this particular group of lodgers.

ginger wigged slaves

I was delighted this afternoon to find the third edition of Robert Tyrrell's text of Plautus's Boastful Soldier, the Miles Gloriosus, in one of the bookshops in Tunbridge Wells. I was actually on the lookout for Cicero speeches but no matter. The bookseller only wanted 50 pence for it. What a bargain! The best things in life are free or else clearly cost very little.

Tyrell observes on page xix that the actors in Roman Comedy wore wigs: old men appear in white wigs, young men in black wigs, and slaves in red wigs. Is this the origin of the gingerism that is so prevalent in today's world? In case you are wondering what gingerism is (you may well be as I have just made the word up) let me explain that gingerism is prejudice against red-haired people and it is on the rise: for example only the other day the deputy leader of one of our great political parties disparaged an opponent as a ginger rodent, and then in the face of howls of protest made a hasty apology. Personally I have always found gingers very easy to get on with and not at all servile. But then slaves in comedy are mischievous rather than servile and this does conform to the ginger archetype (if there is such a thing).