Mudless: The Smallweed Family

(This is a late blog entry, Professor please be merciful!)

The Smallweeds are one of the dysfunctional groups of people that Dickens introduces us to. Through the eyes of the Dickensian narrator we are shown an image of people that, like most of London, have been swept under the rug and are living lives that closely resemble those of savages. The Smallweeds are an exceptionally dysfunctional and poor family. Their household is comprised of nothing but turmoil, with random acts of violence; a collision of everything negative in London, all under one roof.

One of the first scenes introduces us to Grandmother and Grandfather Smallweed; we are notified immediately that the grandmother is not dealing with a full deck, and the grandfather does not comprehend this, and “immediately throws the cushion at her…the effect of this jaculation is twofold” (pg. 259). It goes on to explain that not only did he inflict harm on the grandmother, but the exertion from his thrust of the pillow causes him to fall back into the chair himself, hinting that his violence towards his wife hurts him as much as it does her. It’s as if Dickens wanted to show the reader that the grandmother’s madness and the grandfather’s violence was in no way worse than one another, but when you put them together it made them both worse than they would be individually.

The children are no better; they are painted by Dickens to be seemingly oblivious to the conditions that surround them, engulfed in their own Smallweed world. The little girl Judy has never known the company of a doll, and has only played with other children a couple of times, both of which ended with her being alienated from them. It is described that it is “very doubtful whether Judy knows how to laugh” (pg.260) and she herself is described as seeming “like an animal of another species” (pg. 259). Another child, Bart, is essentially being taught by his grandfather to be a freeloader of sorts. As soon as Bart makes his entrance into the home he is greeted by his grandfather who asks him how dinner with his friend went, congratulating him for “dining at his expense” (pg. 261). Bart is encouraged to “live at [his friend’s] expense” as much as he can and to “take warning by his foolish example. That’s the use of such a friend. The only use you can put him to” (pg. 261). From a young age Bart is taught to manipulate people.

While this portrayal of the family is brief, it captures a bit of what Dickens was laying out for us, and also what he didn’t lay out. Nothing about this family is optimistic in the slightest, their neighborhood is “ill-favoured and ill-savoured” (pg. 257); and the family complement this. All of this, and yet the presence of mud is absent. All of mud’s characteristics, the darkness and depravity that have accompanied it throughout the entire book, are all there without mud as their harbinger. Most of the descriptions about the characters and the neighborhood that they reside in are corroborated by other descriptions of deplorable conditions in the book. The difference with the Smallweeds is that Dickens did not feel the need to show Mud in his description of the family, it was as if he was showing the reader that the family dynamic could founder in London without mud to accompany it. Somehow this family is special in a way, which is why their house is shown as being tucked away in a dark corner, away from everyone else. I believe that there may be some type of subtext implanted here; Dickens is trying to show the reader the true darkness, the true underbelly of London.