George Silverman's Explanation Book

Getting out of the Cellar Is Not the Same as Getting Rid of the Cellar

George Silverman's Explanation is one of the later works by Charles Dickens, dating from 1868, i.e. even after Dickens had completed his last major novel Our Mutual Friend. Like in his masterpieces David Copperfield or Great Expectations, but also like in minor stories such as Hunted Down, Dickens employs a first-person narrator, the eponymous George Silverman, who leads the reader through decisive stations in his life in his attempt to give an "explanation" of himself. At the beginning, we are left to marvel as to the aim of that "explanation" but the more and more we read, the clearer it becomes that George Silverman intends to exonerate himself from any imputations of selfishness that may be laid on his doorstep.

Mr. Silverman has difficulty in beginning his account of himself, and he actually needs three approaches in order to start out on his enterprise of giving his "explanation".

"It happened in this wise'

But, looking at those words, and comparing them with my former opening, I find they are the self-same words repeated. This is the more surprising to me, because I employ them in quite a new connection. For indeed I declare that my intention was to discard the commencement I first had in my thoughts, and to give the preference to another of an entirely different nature, dating my explanation from an anterior period of my life. I will make a third trial, without erasing this second failure, protesting that it is not my design to conceal any of my infirmities, whether they be of head or heart."

This his second attempt at beginning his story shows that when starting to write down his explanation, he has suddenly realized that it is necessary to go back into an earlier period of his life in order to make his actions understandable. One can say that the initial problems Silverman has to pen down his account reflect the subjectivity of any account whatsoever and show the account not only as influenced and distorted by the point of view and the motives a narrator may have but also by the choice he makes from things to report. This is probably why Silverman, on second thoughts, starts his explanation at the very beginning of his biography by sharing sombre childhood memories of having been brought up in a damp and insalubrious cellar in Preston, and when he thinks of his mother, this comes to his mind:

"Mother had the gripe and clutch of poverty upon her face, upon her figure, and not least of all upon her voice. Her sharp and highpitched words were squeezed out of her, as by the compression of bony fingers on a leathern bag; and she had a way of rolling her eyes about and about the cellar, as she scolded, that was gaunt and hungry."

He apparently rarely has the opportunity to leave this cellar-hole, and it is with a pang that he notices his mother scolding him for being a "worldly little devil", just because he is hungry and thirsty and feels cold - and, with the honesty of a child, voices these needs. One might say that his mother's careless and bitter words cause a trauma in him and make him doubt of his own right to look after his own interests. In fact, his mother's reaction and maybe also the death of his parents and little George's initial lack of affection by it make him have a bad conscience and consider any urge to look after himself and to feel, let alone voice, his individual needs as signs of his own utter depravity:

"I have written that the sky stared sorrowfully at me. Therein have I anticipated the answer. I knew that all these things looked sorrowfully at me; that they seemed to sigh or whisper, not without pity for me, 'Alas! poor worldly little devil!'

There were two or three rats at the bottom of one of the smaller pits of broken staircase when I craned over and looked in. They were scuffling for some prey that was there; and, when they started and hid themselves close together in the dark, I thought of the old life (it had grown old already) in the cellar.

How not to be this worldly little devil? how not to have a repugnance towards myself as I had towards the rats? I hid in a corner of one of the smaller chambers, frightened at myself, and crying (it was the first time I had ever cried for any cause not purely physical), and I tried to think about it."

George's adolescence is marked by his withdrawal from everybody he cares for - on the grounds of not wanting to harm them - and by his willingness to be duped by the religious hypocrite Hawkyard. For a while he suspects Hawkyard of foul play but then he brushes away this thought as a sign of his own meanness and rushes into writing an exoneration of the vile crook.

His own diligence and hard work at school result in his being given a scholarship and later starting a modest university career. Nevertheless, all his time during school and university is marked by George's inability - or unwillingness - to establish closer human ties with those around him, as the following passage makes clear:

"I can see others in the sunlight; I can see our boats' crews and our athletic young men on the glistening water, or speckled with the moving lights of sunlit leaves; but I myself am always in the shadow looking on. Not unsympathetically, God forbid! But looking on alone, much as I looked at Sylvia from the shadows of the ruined house, or looked at the red gleam shining through the farmer's windows, and listened to the fall of dancing feet, when all the ruin was dark that night in the quadrangle."

One day - he has already become a tutor at the university - he is offered a rectorate by the mother of one of his former students, a Lady Fareway, who has - as her son tells Silverman, and as the reader soon learns - quite a hand for doing business. She offers Silverman a rectorate with a yearly income of 200 £ and at the same time talks him into doing private secretary work for her and teaching her daughter Adelina, a young woman of high intellect. Silverman, in order not to seem worldly, accepts these modest terms and … he falls in love with Adelina. Of course, being the man he is, he considers himself as infinitely below Adelina and her family, but instead of just relinquishing his young disciple, he sees to it that Adelina and his other student, Mr. Granville, fall in love with each other. Eventually, Silverman weds them without Lady Fareway's assent or even her knowledge.

When he tells his benefactress about the wedding, the Lady flies into a fury and accuses him of having performed the wedding for worldly reasons, being bribed into it by a scheming Mr. Granville. She makes him resign the rectorate and also tries to give him a bad name in the country, but even though there are hard times before him, Adelina and her husband stand by him and eventually more and more people realize that such worldly behaviour would be out of character with George Silverman.

George Silverman's Explanation is one of Dickens's last completed works, and it quite fascinated me, although the story seems straightforward and hardly original at first sight. If you look closely, though, you will probably find that it is one of Dickens's finest psychological achievements in that it uses the first-person perspective in order to give us insight into a deeply flawed and tormented character. I hold that Silverman is flawed despite his readiness to sacrifice his own happiness for that of the people around him, because his relations with his surroundings are out of balance and unhealthy. His wish to prove himself disinterested and altruistic to the core - it is this wish that also makes him write down his "explanation" and which might remind us that we have anything but a completely reliable narrator in George Silverman - causes him to stand in the wings and watch the comédie humaine as a benevolent bystander rather than be part of it. Is it diffidence, or already cowardice and the dread of really caring and being cared for that makes him shy away from all more intimate human bonds? His reference to the rats and to the sky looking down in sorrow on him betray a deep lack of self-love and may argue for a less favourable view on Silverman. The use of an emotionally unbalanced and therefore unrealiable first-person narrator links George Silverman to Miss Wade's "History of a Self-Tormentor" from Little Dorrit, which gives us another instance of a deeply flawed human being; only in Miss Wade's case, her lack of self-love has led her to torment others as much as herself - even though both Miss Wade and George Silverman live the lives of recluses.

Although the story is dark and serious in tone, there are instances of Dickens's tendency to use larger-than-life characters, in this case the pompous hypocrite Hawkyard, who is even more annoying than Pecksniff or Uncle Pumblechook. And yet, owing to the restrictions of a short story, Dickens does not allow his fancy to run exuberantly free but links even Hawkyard to the main theme of the story - making this self-serving hypocrite the opposite of George Silverman. Just look at these grandiloquent words of self-praise and compare them to George Silverman's lack of self-love:

"'[…] Behave well, and I'll put you to school; O, yes! I'll put you to school, though I'm not obligated to do it. I am a servant of the Lord, George; and I have been a good servant to him, I have, these five-and-thirty years. The Lord has had a good servant in me, and he knows it.'"

What is more, George Silverman's Explanation can also be read as a disguised explanation of Dickens himself. Although hardly a man to forget his own interests over the feelings of other people, Dickens might probably have considered himself a paragon of self-denial when he gave up his idea of openly replacing his wife Catherine with the young actress Ellen Ternan and decided, instead, to keep his relations with the latter in the dark, one of Victorians' unmentioned room-filling elephants. What makes me believe this, is that Silverman on the one hand denies himself the gratification of his wish to become Adelina's husband but on the other hand actively provides her with a husband of his own choice, somebody whose spirit has been shaped in a way to resemble Silverman's own. This way Silverman can derive vicarious pleasure from the budding love between Adelina and Granville - something I find quite creepy, to be honest. Apart from that, the references to the damp Preston cellar, and George's difficulty not so much in getting out of the cellar but in getting the cellar out of himself, may address a childhood trauma of Dickens's himself, i.e. the time when he was forced to do menial work in a factory.

Be that as it may, George Silverman's Explanation may be a short story and dwindle into nothingness next to Dickens's impressive novels, but it is definitely a source of interest and bewilderment, being rather dark a tale.