Le Chevalier C. Auguste Dupin and Mr Bucket: Mid – [605113]

Le Chevalier C. Auguste Dupin and Mr Bucket: Mid –
Nineteenth -Century Intimations of the Thought -Police

Maria -Ana Tupan
University of Bucharest, Romania

Abstract
The detective as a literar y character was co -fathered within a brief interval from each
other by Edgar Allan Poe and Charles Dickens, but Le Chevalier C. Auguste Dupin , who
appears in three stories of the former – "The Murders in the Rue Morgue " (1841), " The
Mystery of Marie Rogêt " (1842), and " The Purloined Letter " (1844) – and low -born,
illiterate Bucket, who wreaks havoc upon an ancient aristocratic family in Bleak House,
were hatched within nests of widely different socia l and cultural provenance. The
American boy treated to the long -established traditions of institutionalized education in
the Old World, and the English child worker, whose father was imprisoned for debt, were
a Victorian version of the Prince and Pauper pl ot. Our new -historicist approach to these
early samples of detective fiction seeks to throw light on the discursive negotiations
which may be invoked in an explanatory narrative of the polar representations of one
and the same professional class shortly a fter the creation of the metropolitan police.
[Keywords : Charles Dickens, Edgar Allan Poe, detective fiction, New Historicism, social
theory, biopolitics, interpellation, state and civil society]

Introduction
“Serre chaude”, one feels inclined to remark , while gazing through the huge glass wall
overlooking the Lawn out of the little room with scanty and outmoded furniture which
Poe once enjoyed as a student: [anonimizat], rectangular yard,
marked off by the columns of the neoclassic building and the smaller pillars distributed
on top of the enclosing fence, giving it an aspect of medieval ramparts. A space charted
by the theoretical habit of mind, aseptically secluded from the thoroughfare of the “men
on business”.
Poe’s sense of the immateriality of life, which Angela Carter (“The Cabinet of
Edgar Allan Poe”) is putting to the door of his mother being an actress, must have
increased through year s, with the illusory sights induced by drugs or by the two –
dimensional scenes acted out by fatal and capricious cards. The main contributor,
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10 Rupkatha J ournal on Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities 4.1, 2012

though, were probably his absorbing reading and daring anticipations in the wake of
sundry scientific theories impa rting on him, not certainty, but a dizzying sense of things
being permanently altered by their “ peering eyes” (“ Sonnet — To Science” ) . A
knowledge of recondite German philosophy was the source, not only of the Kant -Laplace
picture of the expanding/contra cting universe in Eureka, but also of the pragmatic
model of the operations of the mind, whose mechanics is analyzed with mathematical
precision in his detective stories. Johann Friedrich Herbart’s notions of Räsonnement
and Methode der Beziehungeni may h ave fed into the Poesque detective’s “ratiocination”,
which turns reality inside out like a glove: “de nier ce qui est, et d’expliquer ce qui n’est
pas”.ii
“The fourth wall” is the consecrated metaphor for realist writing, which conveys in
a more appropri ate way Dickens’s processing of the body of experience than the
symbolist “serre chaude” of analytical mental powers enabling Poe’s detective to retrieve
missing information. Dickens opens his fictional universe to his real life experience, from
the London low life he had known as a child to the Halls of Parliament, whose reporter
he became in later years. “ On Duty with Inspector Field” ushers the inmates of slums
whom he used to visit in the company of a real police officer into a creditable “story”,
whose protagonist seems to be twin -born with fictional detective Bucket of Bleak House .
In a century dominated by evolutionary theories, Dickens remained the
unredeemed skeptic. The atrocities of the French Revolution which linger in the reader’s
memory long after shutting A Tale of Two Cities had taught the far -seeing Victorian a
bitter truth about humanity’s capacity for regression even after glorious periods of
progress and spiritual enlightenment. The emergence of the rational and inquiring mind
out of the mists of medieval dogmatism in the dawn of modernity and the first scientific
revolution around 1700 had rendered highly improbable a reversion to fanaticism and
fundamentalism, and yet it had happened again. The revenants of ideological
totalitarianism h ad been grinning at his father’s generation out of the ruins of the
collapsed Republic of Reason. It would happen again in the twentieth century, spawned
with history’s horrors and art’s dystopic narratives.

I. The Mechanics of the Mind
The dissipation o f mystery and logical deductions had been on the luminaries’
agenda. The explained supernatural and the solving of the puzzle were narrative
devices which, even in the newly risen supernatural fiction, worked as “impurities”
meant to cure medieval gothicis m.
Johann Friedrich Herbart’s predictions of a person’s states of mind through the
calculus of possible combinations of their sense impressions and memories had
provided a method of reading minds which would lead to the emergence of a new

11 Le Chevalier C. Auguste Dupin and Mr Bucket: Mid – Nineteenth -Century
Intimations of the Thought -Police

concept, that of “intersubjectivity”. The “robber’s knowledge of the loser’s knowledge of
the robber” in The Purloined Letter , used by Jacques Lacan to document his theory of
this concept iii, may be traced back to the speculative field of the new physiological
psychology , rooted in the associanistic psychology of Hartley and Hume, renamed
“anthropology” by Kant, and formalized by Herbart, whose mathematical psychology
spun off numerous research laboratories around mid -century. Poe’s access to Herbart
was probably mediated by the Scottish luminaries, especially by J.S. Mill, who had
found in the latter’s Wissenschaftliche Psychologie , published in 1825, support for his
positivistic philosophy of social life constituted by history and local traditions. The
argument is cast in intriguingly similar terms.
”He devolves upon his own world the responsibility of being in the right against
the dissentient worlds of other people; and it never troubles him that mere
accident has decided which of these numerous worlds is the object of his
reliance, and that the same causes which make him a Churchman in London,
would have made him a Buddhist or a Confucian in Pekin”. iv
According to Herbart, the psychological law which controls the clustering of
representations in the mind, the vacil lation and flow of psychological facts can be
retraced or retrieved ( Ergänzung ) through speculation over the associations which are
most likely to come to the fore through exposure to stimuli from the environment, while
driving the weaker ones into the unc onscious or making them sink into memory. There
are no such things as transcendental subject or freedom of will; the living conditions will
bear upon the I, falsifying it, rendering it impure (86). They are like the x and y axes in a
coordinate system (20) ; one can deduce someone else’s thought process from the
stimuli in the world ( der sinnliche Raum ).
Mill wonders that people should be troubled by the opinions of others when they
themselves, if they had been born in some other place on earth, would have been
completely distinct persons: an Anglican or a Buddhist …
Some three decades in advance, Herbart had put the question in the same terms:
by being born under different conditions, he could have become someone else: “Ein
ganz Anderer hätte werden könn en.”. He sets out to discover “on what basis is built the
consciousness of those who live in Peking or Orinooko, as well as of those who live next
to us”. And yet, he goes on, in self -mockery, although the I is merely an aggregate of
related representation s, permanently altered by the changing conditions of experience,
never complete, he has the impression of being known to himself, substantial and
consistent” (89).
Herbart dismisses thus the classical definition of identity as unity of subject and
object (the ‘I’ being its own object), but he makes up for this loss by pointing to the

12 Rupkatha J ournal on Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities 4.1, 2012

reliability of the I -Thou relationship. The ‘I’ may find confirmation in the progress of
thought in someone else’s mind, especially of one affined. The empirical I is
permanen tly becoming, but its negation, or “non -Ich”, realised as progress of thought
(Gang des Denkens – 131) or cluster of representations associated with a priori necessity,
is constituted as an absolute I, in which the principle of Being and Thinking are fused
(111). It is objects given in common that give rise to the same thought in different
subjects.
The detective solves the enigma in The Purloined Letter , because he taps the
robber’s Räsonnement. By predicting someone else’s train of thoughts, the subjec t
allows himself to be modified by another. M is not N, yet M=N (130). The represented
(the robber’s thoughts) becomes the representing (representing the Minister in the
detective’s mind). In the process of Räsonnement, the Object is Another as Subject: th e
Object of the Detective’s puzzling is not what he thinks of the robber, but what he
thinks.
Poe engaged twice in the experimental test of Herbart’s theory of the way the
mind works: when he tried to predict reader response (“Poetic Principle”), and whe n he
created the detective as literary character.
In the image -maker, says Herbart, there are no things but only representations
(149). The way things are combined in a representation ( Zusammenfassung in ein
Vorstellen) is only known to those who possess the code which charters physical space
as a shared world.
In Murders in Rue Morgue , the narrator and detective Dupin withdraw from the
busy day life, going out for a walk at night, or reading and commenting their favourite
book. They are kindred spirits, whose affinities reach the point where they can read each
other’s minds. Chevalier Dupin explains to the narrator how he had managed to track
the chain of his thoughts, whose outlets were apparently disconnected: Chantily – Orion
– Dr. Nicol – Epicurus – stereotomy – the street stones – the fruiterer . Each signified
becomes a signifier of some other meaning. Which are, then, the signifieds which keep
sliding under signifiers, the key -words in the story, based, apparently, on a political
murder? v
The wom en’s name is only slightly modified: L’Espanaye, instead of Lespanan.
They live in an imaginary street, whose name, however, could be used in its literal sense
in the Paris of 1789 -94, which had itself become a “morgue”. This is a street branching
off from a real one, Richelieu, in the St. Roch (Roch -elle?) Faubourg. The two
protagonists are taking a stroll in the neighbourhood of Palais Royal, built for Richelieu,
but serving as the residence of the princes d’Orleans. One of them, Louis Philip, was a
membe r of the Jacobin Club. This palace is associated with Theatre de Varieté, his red
eminence having indeed become a figure of grotesque masquerade in the days of the

13 Le Chevalier C. Auguste Dupin and Mr Bucket: Mid – Nineteenth -Century
Intimations of the Thought -Police

Revolution, when his mummified head was severed and exposed by a duke of Bretagne,
whose dep utation to the National Convention founded the first Jacobin Club. The
Huguenot sailor may be carrying with him the wrath of his ancestors besieged by
Richelieu at La Rochelle. The two women are surprised while arranging some letters in
an iron chest by an ourang -outang brought over from Indonesia by the sailor, which
had got out of his control. Close by is found a great amount of Napoleons recently
drawn from the bank, the two elements being easy to combine in the Saint -Domingue –
slaves -support plot. The ca st of witnesses includes name -sakes of some famous figures
of the Revolution, such as Pierre Moreau, the man who got the keys of the Bastille from
the people, and Vidocq, the chief of the secret police under Napoleon. Andrea Goulet
makes a list of the name s the same papers called Napoleon on hearing the news of his
escape from his Elbe prison: monster, tiger, tyrant …
Poe will have been familiar with the representation of Napoleon’s soldiers who
invaded Germany as a sort of “cannibals’ progress”vi in a bo ok republished by William
Cobbett in Philadelphia. The man from Corsica supported by the Jacobins to take over
the power is compared to an inarticulate beast. As well as Frankenstein’s creature, the
agent of a senseless act of insane cruelty cannot be assi milated by the empire of
mankind. The sailor had brought it from Asia, and the speakers of seven European
nations, called upon to decode its “speech”, react to it as to an absolute enigma,
excluded from the world’s rational and linguistic order.

Edward Woodward as Chevalier Dupin
II. “Power of Mind over Mind”
What to Herbart appeared as loss of one’s own sense of identity through
participation in the order of intersubjectivity, Jeremy Bentham had taken years
speculating upon as his proleptic version of the “will to power”. The object of his
strenuous meditation was launched in 1798 as Proposal for a New and Less Expensive

14 Rupkatha J ournal on Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities 4.1, 2012

mode of Employing and Reforming Convicts , advertised as the universal solutio n to all
social ills: “Morals reformed – health preserved – industry invigorated, instruction
diffused – public burthens lightened – Economy seated, as it were, upon a rock – the
gordian knot of the Poor -Laws are not cut, but untied – all by a simple idea in
Architecture!" vii.
The architecture of his prison honoured its name,
that of “Panopticon”, but, unlike Herbart’s mutual
knowledge of interacting subjects, Bentham entrusted the
power of the gaze solely to the social category charged
with the “surv eying and punishment”viii of social
transgressors: The prisoners in their cells, occupying the
circumference —The officers in the centre.
Passported for literary history as the acclaimer of
Bentham, J. S. Mill was actually very far from backing up an
agend a of the individual’s annihilation at the hands of
society’s policing system. In Chaptter II of his essay “On
Liberty”, he drastically limits the encroachment of social control on individual liberties to
forms of persuasion:
”The maxims are, first, that th e individual is not accountable to society for his
actions, in so far as these concern the interests of no person but himself. Advice,
instruction, persuasion, and avoidance by other people if thought necessary by
them for their own good, are the only meas ures by which society can justifiably
express its dislike or disapprobation of his conduct” (86).
Mill was arguing along lines previously drawn by William Cobbett, editor of
Poliitical Register , which had helped turn the political philosophy of the lumina ries into
English practice.
As well as Cobbett, Charles Dickens was involved in the press release of
parliamentary debates. His image of the mind, as it was theorised by the new
psychology, was the yield of observation and experience, as we may conclude f rom the
perfect analogy one can establish, for instance, between the real detective
Field, whom he accompanied on his night rounds, and subsequently reported on (”On
Duty with Inspector Field”), and fictional detective, Bucket.
According to Paul Begg and Keith Skinner , who searched the Scotland Yard files,
Dickens also referred to Field as "Inspector Wield" .ix The inspector was not just Fate
incarnated, who delighted in administering punishments and rewards, but a wielder, an
engineer of the soul, whose word was a command that brought a new man into
existence with the force of a pointed finger. Inspector Field had ” a habit of emphasising

15 Le Chevalier C. Auguste Dupin and Mr Bucket: Mid – Nineteenth -Century
Intimations of the Thought -Police

his conversation by the air of a corpulent fore -finger”x, similar to Mr Gradgrind’s in the
almost contemporary Hard Ti mes, whose ”square forefingers emphasized his
observations”. Such a fundamentalist habit of mind, whose discourse is reduced to
”nothing but” and ”the one thing needful”, could not, however, in the backdrop of the
Enlightenment, assume other forms than th ose selected by Mill out of the semantic area
of persuasion.

II.1. From War of Manoeuvre to War of Position.
It seems odd that, writing from prison xi, Antonio Gramsci is still speaking in
terms of the East -West pol arity in reference to the coercive character of the State, but
such is the power of cultural stereotypes. The
eastern society is a political one, he thinks, in
which power belongs to a restricted oligarchy,
while the mass of citizens are subject to the
repressive actions of the state apparatus. By
contrast, in the West, the State has evolved
towards a civil society in which institutions have
taken over the initiative of channelling
individual energies in the wake of the public
good. The state’s frontal att ack on the citizen,
the war of manoeuvre, has yielded to the
”educative and formative role of the State”.
”In the East the State was everything,
civil society was primordial and
gelatinous; in the West, there was a
proper relation between State and civil
society, and when the State trembled a
sturdy structure of civil society was at
once revealed. The State was only an
outer ditch, behind which there stood a
powerful system of fortresses and
earthworks: more or less numerous from one State to the next, it goes without
saying —but this precisely necessitated an accurate reconnaissance of each
individual country” (494).
Cultural hegemony is passing from the aristocracy to the middle class in the novels
of Thackeray, Dickens or The Brontës, but with little improvement in the way of a more
civilized ”civil society”. The crisis of the family goes hand in hand with an intellectual and
An instructor, a clergyman and a slee py policeman
have joined hands and three institutions to get
some order into the heads of the ”panelled -in”
convicts in the picture on the left.
(foucaultschool.jpeg , cla.purdue.edu)

16 Rupkatha J ournal on Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities 4.1, 2012

moral one. Orphaned at an early age, the majority protagonists are exposed, in school or
at work, to repressive methods of their socialization as ”collective man”. Sir Leicester, the
degenerate descendant of an aristocratic family, whose decay started significantly at the
time of the Civil War, is going down in the world, while the pulley of changing hegemony
is bringing up the ”iron man”, a cog in the machinery of highly organized and
standardised industrial production. A change for a more democratic arrangement ? No;
the Rouncewell party of skilled workers impose conditions on pretenders to their families
as strict, althou gh of a different sort, as the aristocratic cast of old. Sir Leicester’s
complaints about the collapse of ”the whole framework of society”, with ”wat -tylerish”
subverters obliterating the landmarks, and opening the floodgates” are symptoms of his
realisati on that a whole way of life was vanishing. Tulkinghorn, the family lawyer, has
become too passive and inefficient to cater for his master’s personal needs, while Bucket,
from the Detective Department, will not allow anybody to escape what Gramsci calls “ the
standardisation of thought and action” and the ”tendency to conformism in the
contemporary world”. He expects Sir Leicester to behave properly in no less degree than
a commoner like Snagsby. Commoners are everywhere now – in Parliament, in the
administ ration, in the powerful industrial mechanism – and they either have no idea of
Chesny Wo[r]ld, or have left it behind and stepped over to the other side of the
barricade.
Bucket is not dealing with individual human beings but with stereotypes. He is
straighjacketing people into a cast of social types whose common feature is compliance
with the LAW, in whose name he comes to them. He is not serving Leicester but telling
him what to do, and even what he is capable of, and what he should remember. He is
trying to impose on him states or acts which lie outside the Baronet’s control:
"Now, Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet," Mr. Bucket begins, standing over him with
one hand spread out on the library -table and the forefinger of the other in
impressive us e, "it's my duty to prepare you for a train of circumstances that may,
and I go so far as to say that will, give you a shock. But Sir Leicester Dedlock,
Baronet, you are a gentleman, and I know what a gentleman is and
what a gentleman is capable of. A gen tleman can bear a shock when it must
come, boldly and steadily. A gentleman can make up his mind to stand up against
almost any blow. Why, take yourself, Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet. If there's a
blow to be inflicted on you, you naturally think of your family. You ask yourself,
how would all the ancestors of yours, away to Julius Caesar – not to go beyond
him at present – have borne that blow; you remember scores of
them that would have borne it well; and you bear it well on their accounts, and to
maint ain the family credit. That's the way you argue, and that's the way you act,
Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet" . xii

17 Le Chevalier C. August e Dupin and Mr Bucket: Mid – Nineteenth -Century
Intimations of the Thought -Police

In counterdistinction to Gramsci’s unjustified optimism about the capacity of the
law and of the new forces of production to heal contradictio ns, Dickens saw in the Law
which Bucket was defending “with his forefinger” the headquarters of the modern
bureaucratic society, an anticipation of Kafka’s Castle. The various solutions tried on by
citizens, from Gridley’s articulated protest to Jarndyce’s secret “Growlery” and Skimpole’s
“Can’t”, are as many pathetic failures of the individual in their unequal confrontations
with the System.

II.2. Interpellation
Not more than Dickens did Louis Althusser trust in the possibility envisaged by
Gramsci for t he individual to act “in and against the State”. i.e. to try and reform it from
within. In his essay, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes towards an
Investigation)” (1972), Althusser defines ideology, not as the space of free confrontation
of ideas, but as a system of relationships which ensure the assimilation of the individual
into the power structure.
The impersonal -rhetorical questions in the opening of ”On Duty with Inspector
Field”xiii suggest that the destitute of London whom Fiel d is policing at night time are as
indifferent and alien to him as the samples displayed at the British Museum.
“HOW goes the night? […] Anything doing here to -night? […]
Inspector Field is, to -night, the guardian genius of the British Museum. He is
bring ing his shrewd eye to bear on every corner of its solitary galleries, before he
reports 'all right.' Suspicious of the Elgin marbles, and not to be done by cat –
faced Egyptian giants with their hands upon their knees, Inspector Field,
sagacious, vigilant, l amp in hand, throwing monstrous shadows on the walls and
ceilings, passes through the spacious rooms. If a mummy trembled in an atom of
its dusty covering, Inspector Field would say, 'Come out of that, Tom Green. I
know you!'”
All he will know or care abo ut is what the citizen should think and do. Whereas
the object of his investigation is to him like a lump of clay to be shaped according to his
desire, his body is surrounded in the public eye by an aura of anxiety. What the citizen
experiences in the dete ctive officer’s presence is an unaccountable mix of fear and
confusion.
In like manner, Bucket intimidates civilians with his “ghostly manner of
appearing”; on being told his profession, Snagsby feels “a strong tendency in his clump
of hair to stand on en d”.

18 Rupkatha J ournal on Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities 4.1, 2012

Bucket uses all possible means of persuasion in order to get Snagsby’s assistance
as informer: flattery, intimidation, appeal to values supposed to be universally accepted,
suppression of his scruples of conscience. He presumes to be the one to know b etter
than Snagsby who that man is and what he believes in. The commandments of his
deontic code are passed off for Snagby’s own. With an unfailing instinct of the
operations of the mind, Bucket deploys a master crescendo of persuasive strategy to the
point where he makes things look as if he were serving Snagsby’s interests, not the other
way round:
"Don't you be afraid of hurting the boy," he says. "You won't do that. It's all right
as far as the boy's concerned. We shall only bring him here to ask him a question
or so I want to put to him, and he'll be paid for his trouble and sent away again.
It'll be a good job for him. I promise you, as a man, that you shall see the boy
sent away all right. Don't you be afraid of hurting him; you an't going to do that. "
"Very well, Mr. Tulkinghorn!" cries Mr. Snagsby cheerfully. And reassured, "Since
that's the c ase–"
"Yes! And lookee here, Mr. Snagsby," resumes Bucket, taking him aside by the
arm, tapping him familiarly on the breast, and speaking in a confidential t one.
"You're a man of the world, you know, and a man of business, and a man of sense.
That's what YOU are."
"I am sure I am much obliged to you for your good opinion," returns the stationer
with his cough of modesty, "but –"
"That's what YOU are, you know ," says Bucket. "Now, it an't necessary to say to a
man like you, engaged in your business, which is a business of trust and requires
a person to be wide awake and have his senses about him and his head screwed
on tight (I had an uncle in your business onc e)–it an't necessary to say to a man
like you that it's the best and wisest way to keep little matters like this quiet.
Don't you see? Quiet!"
"Certainly, certainly," returns the other.
"I don't mind telling YOU," says Bucket with an engaging appearance of
frankness, "that as far as I can understand it, there seems to be a doubt whether
this dead person wasn't entitled to a little property, and whether this female
hasn't been up to some games respecting that property, don't you see?"
"Oh!" says Mr. Snagsb y, but not appearing to see quite distinctly.
"Now, what YOU want," pursues Bucket, again tapping Mr. Snagsby on the breast
in a comfortable and soothing manner, "is that every person should have their
rights according to justice. That's what YOU want."

19 Le Chevalier C. Auguste Dupin and Mr Bucket: Mid – Nineteenth -Centu ry
Intimations of the Thought -Police

"To be sure," returns Mr. Snagsby with a nod.
"On account of which, and at the same time to oblige a –do you call it, in your
business, customer or client? I forget how my uncle used to call it."
"Why, I generally say customer myself," replies Mr. Snagsby.
"You're right!" returns Mr. Bucket, shaking hands with him quite affectionately. " –
On account of which, and at the same time to oblige a real good customer, you
mean to go down with me, in confidence, to Tom -all-Alone's and to keep the
whole thing quiet ever afterwards and never mention it to any one. That's about
your intentions, if I understand you?"
"You are right, sir. You are right," says Mr. Snagsby.
"Then here's your hat," returns his new friend, quite as intimate with it as if he had
made it; "a nd if you're ready, I am" (Ch. XXII).

II.3. Collective Man
The incident which brings Mr. Bucket onto the stage of Bleak House is the death
of Lady Leicester’s former lover, whose life among the social dregs of Tom -all-Alone
deserves no other name than N emo – Nobody. Neither Captain Howdon nor anybody
falling under the power of a Law which “makes business with itself” remains pilot of his
life’s ship. In “On Duty with Inspector Field”, the officers’ “harrowing” of the underworld
of filth, disease and crim e has the eerie effect of animating the dust to which human
beings have been reduced:
Wheresoever Mr. Rogers turns the flaming eye, there is a spectral figure rising,
unshrouded, from a grave of rags. Who is the landlord here? – I am, Mr. Field!
says a bun dle of ribs and parchment against the wall, scratching itself. – Will you
spend this money fairly, in the morning, to buy coffee for 'em all? – Yes, sir, I will! –
O he'll do it, sir, he'll do it fair. He's honest! cry the spectres. And with thanks and
Good Night sink into their graves again.
The distressing show of the complete demise of the individual will is conveyed
through the use of an emphatic, incremental “all”: “All watch him, all answer when
addressed, all laugh at his jokes, all seek to propitia te him”
Out of the nothingness predicted by the dead sun in Bleak House , or by its total
absence in Inspector Field’s nightly spree, the way out is only open to converts and
instruments in the enforcement of the Law:

20 Rupkatha J ournal on Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities 4.1, 2012

“A sharp, smiling youth, the wit of th e kitchen, interposes. He an't musical to –
night, sir. I've been giving him a moral lecture; I've been a talking to him about his
latter end, you see. A good many of these are my pupils, sir. This here young man
(smoothing down the hair of one near him, rea ding a Sunday paper) is a pupil of
mine. I'm a teaching of him to read, sir. He's a promising cove, sir. He's a smith, he
is, and gets his living by the sweat of the brow, sir. So do I, myself, sir.”
This “wit of the kitchen”, cowering before Inspector Fi eld “like a schoolboy before
his schoolmaster”, as well as plebeian Bucket, born of Dickens’s recollections of early
childhood in a London not much different from the fictional slums of Tom -all-Alone,
were casting on the walls of a Benthamite prison -world the menacing shadow of the
future Inquisitor O’Brien in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty -Four.
Chevalier Dupin, hatched by a mind schooled in Jefferson’s establishment of
Johnsonian refinement and mixed scientific -philological concerns, was sending a
messa ge of mental and social distinction to a young state founded on political
philosophy rather than the hypothetical social contract of primitive necessity. By
contrast, Dickens seems to have been shown the future by some Sybil prophesying the
totalitarian e mpires which policed the mind and engineered the soul in the twentieth
century.

Notes
i Johann Friedrich Herbart, Psychologie als Wisenschaft, neu gegrundet auf Erfahrung, Metaphysik
und Mathematik ( Königsberg: August Wilhelm Unzer, 1824), p. 129.

ii Edgar Allan Poe, The Works of Edgar Allan Poe , Volume 1 of the Raven Edition. Planet PDF, p.
279. http://history -world.org/The_Works_of_Edgar_Allan_Poe_T.pdf

iii Jacques Lacan , Seminar on ' The Purloined Letter ', p. 64.
http://www.mediafire.com/?kunyjmlz5 4y

iv J.S. Mill, ”On Liberty”. Ch. II, p. 86 http://socserv.mcmaster.ca/~econ/ugcm/3ll3/mill/liberty.pdf

v See Andrea Goulet, ”Legacies of the Rue Morgue”. Modern Language Quarterly . March 2007
68(1): 87-110; doi:10.1215/00267929 -2006 -025

vi The Cannib als' progress ; or The dreadful horrors of French invasion : as displayed by the
Republican officers and soldiers, in their perfidy, rapacity, ferociousness, and brutality, exercise d
towards the innocent inhabitants of Germany . Translated from the German. By Anthony Aufrer,
Esq. (London: Wright, Cadel and others. Republished at Northampton, by William Butler, 1798,
and at Philadelphia, by William Cobbett in 1819)

21 Le Chevalier C. Auguste Dupin and Mr Bucket: Mid – Nineteenth -Century
Intimations of the Thought -Police

vii Jeremy Bentham, Panopticon Letters , 1787, unpublished manuscript, University College Lond on
Library. Quoted in Robin Evans, “Bentham's Panopticon. An Incident in the Social History of
Architecture”, Architectural Association Quarterly , 3, no.2, Oxford/New York, April -July 1971, p.
22.

viii Michel Foucault, Surveiller et Punir (1975).
http:/ /www.adeppi.be/fichiers/publications/Surveiller%20et%20punir.pdf

ix Paul Begg and Keith Skinner, The Scotland Yard Files: 150 Years of the C.I.D. (London: Headline,
1992), p. 43.

x Begg and Skinner, 43.

xi Selections from the Prison Notebooks of An tonio Gramsci, ed. and trans. Quintin Hoare and
Geoffrey Nowell Smith (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1971).

xii Charles Dickens, Bleak House , ch LIV. http://www.dickens -literature.com/Bleak_House/54.html

xiii Charles Dickens, “On Duty with Inspector Field”. www. readbookonline .net/readOnLine /2525 /

Maria -Ana Tupan is full professor at the University of Bucharest, Romania, where she
teaches courses in the history of British literature and in applied literary theory. She had
her doctoral degree in 1991 with a thesis in Shakespeare studies. She was affiliate d with
Penn State University as a Senior Fulbright Grantee in 1994 -5. She is a m ember of the
Writers Union . She got a wards from the Writers’ Union and Romanian literary reviews.
She has published widely in the fields of literary history and theory, compar ative
literature, genre theory, discourse analysis, and cultural studies. Some of her books are
A Discourse Analyst's Charles Dickens (București: Editura Semne '94, 1999) , Discursul
modernist (București: Editura Cartea Românească, 2000) , Discursul postmod ern
(București: Editura Cartea Românească, 2002) , British Literature. An Overview (București:
Editura Universității din București, 2005) , The New Literary History (București: Editura
Universității din București, 2006) , Genre and Postmodernism (Bucuresti: E ditura
Universitatii din Bucuresti, 2008) , Modernismul si psihologia. Încercare de epistemologie
literara. Modernism and Psychology. An Inquiry into the Epistemology of Literary
Modernism (Bucuresti: Editura Academiei Române, 2009) , Literary Discourses of the New
Physics . With an Introduction by Marin Cilea (Bucuresti: Editura Universitatii din
Bucuresti, 2010) , Teoria si practica literaturii la inceput de mileniu . (Bucurest i: Editura
Contemporanul, 2011)

22 Rupkatha J ournal on Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities 4.1, 2012