The Tragedy of Richard Carstone

What will you be for Halloween this year? Can one ask that in a Christian publication? It probably depends on your generation and geography, to be honest.  I must confess a certain nostalgia for Halloween. Not the current Halloween that the New York Times recently termed a “mutation from humble holiday to retail monstrosity,” now the second-biggest shopping holiday only to Christmas. Nor the current Halloween, the turn to increasingly dark, creepy, ghoulish, and macabre. My nostalgia is for the Halloween of yesteryear (I warned you it was nostalgia, after all!), the Halloween of cute kids figuring out what costume they would wear, neighbors dropping candy in pillowcases or plastic pumpkins, and a neighborhood festival of cuteness that died down in time for an early bedtime.

What I miss is the Halloween of little ones putting on costumes: “I’ll be a doctor. He’ll be a fireman. She’ll be a trapeze artist….” My memories are of children often picking costumes based on the careers they might someday pursue when they grow up. At least some of us with children of our own have also experienced the whipsaw effect of the costumes. One day it is a doctor, the next a circus performer, the next a policeman, the next a scientist….  “Sweetie, it’s October 29. Halloween is almost here, and we have to make the costume. It’s time to pick.”

What is cute and endearing among children—and even a necessary life stage—becomes decidedly less so, however, as the years go on. When the search for a vocation becomes that of taking on and putting off masks and costumes, the nostalgia of Halloween gives way to a problematic tendency, the inability to settle down into not just a job, but a vocation, a track for a life’s work that will develop, something worth 40–60 hours per week.

It is easy to view this as a 21^st century problem, with our uber-specialized economy that requires ever more training before being qualified leaving young adults uniquely paralyzed in vocational choice, yet the problem predates us. Dickens’ novel Bleak House locates the problem at least as early as the industrial age, as England shifted from a more agrarian society to one of national industry and organization.

As has often been noted, Bleak House may be, in the end, a step on the way to Dickens inventing the detective story, as Chesterton claims. As equally often noted, Bleak House is not simply set against the backdrop of the need for Chancery reform, but it is a call for Chancery reform, as the vocation of law has “gone bad” in the English Chancery system. Nonetheless, Dickens had—and used—plenty of space to allow his narrative to wander through the many subplots enveloped by the slow-rolling, leeching case of Jarndyce and Jarndyce. Among them is the disaster of Richard Carstone.

Richard, a ward of John Jarndyce and one of the potential heirs of the Jarndyce fortune, faces the stipulation that he may only marry his love Ada if he first chooses a profession. What seems simple enough, and a reasonable request for any father or guardian to make, becomes anything but. Richard puts on and takes off vocational callings as often as the young child suggests and then replaces Halloween costumes. He begins with medicine and does well enough, but he lacks drive and diligence, and before long he has shifted to law. Again, he might have done well enough, but restlessness strikes, and he attempts life as a soldier. And so on it goes.

Dickens locates Richard’s vocational wanderings in his lack of decision, his lack of drive towards any particular option. Chapter 13 begins: “We held many consultations about what Richard was to be; first without Mr. Jarndyce, as he had requested, and afterwards with him; but it was a long time before we seemed to make progress. Richard said he was ready for anything.” (p.196)*

The tragedy of Richard Carstone is that he had everything he needed to become great, both IQ and EQ. Esther observes in chapter 17:

Richard…with his quick abilities, his good spirits, his good temper, his gaiety and freshness, was always delightful. But, though I liked him more and more, the better I knew him, I still felt more and more how much it was to be regretted that he had been educated in no habits of application and concentration. The system which had addressed him in exactly the same manner as it had addressed hundreds of other boys, all varying in character and capacity, had enabled him to dash through his tasks, always with fair credit, and often with distinction; but in a fitful, dazzling way that had confirmed his reliance on those very qualities in himself, which it had been most desirable to direct and train.  They were great qualities, without which no high place can be meritoriously won; but, like fire and water, though excellent servants, they were very bad masters.  If they had been under Richard’s direction, they would have been his friends; but, Richard being under their direction, they became his enemies. (p.265)

Yet, Richard simply cannot and also will not decide:

When Mr. Jarndyce advised him to try and decide within himself, whether his old preference for the sea was an ordinary boyish inclination, or a strong impulse, Richard answered, Well, he really had tried very often, and he couldn’t make it out. (p.197)

Mr. Jarndyce took great pains to talk with him, seriously, and to put it to his good sense not to deceive himself in so important a matter. Richard was a little grave after these interviews; but invariably told Ada and me ‘that it was all right,’ and then began to ask about something else. (p.198)

John Jarndyce seems to speak for Dickens when noting that the hope of inherited riches had magnified a preexisting tendency in Richard:

“How much of this indecision of character,” Mr. Jarndyce said to me, “is chargeable on that incomprehensible heap of uncertainty and procrastination on which he has been thrown from his birth, I don’t pretend to say; but that Chancery, among its other sins, is responsible for some of it, I can plainly see. It has engendered or confirmed in him a habit of putting off—and trusting to this, that and the other chance, without knowing what chance—and dismissing everything as unsettled, uncertain, and confused.” (p.197)

“Nature or nurture?” John Jarndyce wonders.

Richard’s refrain shows up in chapter 17, a continuation of the subplot about Richard’s vocation. He has received his performance review (so to speak) from his attempt at medicine, delivered to Esther via Mrs. Badger:

He is of such a very easy disposition, that probably he would never think it worth while to mention how he really feels; but, he feels languid about the profession. He has not that positive interest in it which makes it his vocation. If he has any decided impression in reference to it, I should say it was that it is a tiresome pursuit. Now, this is not promising. (p.267)

In conversation with Esther, Richard gives his version of his attitude towards medicine as a vocation, one that turns out to be his attitude towards any vocation: “It’s rather jog-trotty and humdrum. But it’ll do as well as anything else.” (p.269)

Much error in life is actually a good idea or instinct simply slightly twisted. So it is with Richard’s indecision, a close cousin to contentment. To be ready to do anything and to be content at it is a biblical ideal. Richard’s answer might appear as that type of contentment, except for Dickens’ word choice. Languid.

Richard Carstone was content to wander through life, never really settling with devotion upon a particular vocation, even though he had all the tools. The tragedy that develops by the end of Bleak House is that Richard, who could have been so much, has, instead of making his own way, defaulted in the end to the hope that he can simply inherit a large sum of money, making his vocational choice unnecessary.

The hope is ephemeral, of course. The only ones who ever gain from Jarndyce and Jarndyce turn out to be the lawyers, and Richard dies of tuberculosis, sick and emaciated, a shell of the man he had once been, leaving behind a pregnant Ada whom he had secretly wed. Dickens locates the tragedy of Richard Carstone mainly in Chancery, but also very much in Richard, himself.

In Bleak House Dickens also provides the counterpoint to Richard Carstone, the character of Allan Woodcourt, the doctor whom Esther marries near the end of the novel. Mrs. Badger herself provides it immediately after her critique of Richard, an obvious foil:

Young men, like Mr. Allan Woodcourt, who take to [medicine] from a strong interest in all that it can do, will find some reward in it through a great deal of work for a very little money, and through years of considerable endurance and disappointment. (p.267)

Woodcourt ends the novel flourishing, married to Esther, living together in “the happiest of happy,” raising two daughters. Esther writes:

We are not rich in the bank, but we have always prospered, and we have quite enough. I never walk out with my husband, but I hear the people bless him. I never go into a house of any degree, but I hear his praises, or see them in grateful eyes. I never lie down at night, but I know that in the course of the day he has alleviated pain, and soothed some fellow-creature in the time of need. I know that from the beds of those who were past recovery, thanks have often, often gone up, in the last hour, for his patient ministration. Is this not to be rich? (p.988)

Again, Chancery may be the chief target of Dickens’ societal critique, but Richard Carstone is one of the chief means by which Dickens achieves that critique, especially when Richard’s tragedy is juxtaposed with Allan Woodcourt and Esther’s happiness.

Richard Carstone may have died at the end of Bleak House, but he is alive and well today. The number one question I hear out of young adults (and not only young adults) today is, “But I don’t know what I want to do!” We instinctively want a vocation, not just a job, not just a career, but a vocation: a calling in life, part of bringing order to chaos, part of bringing the kingdom of God to bear in the world.

We can find that vocation, dig in and settle in, or we can settle for putting on and taking off masks, blowing through the world as a leaf in the fall wind. The goal, even the Christian calling, is a vocation, not just a job, a calling into which we can pour ourselves for the good of the world. In the world as God initially created it, we would each find that calling and pursue it with all that we are, working out our God-given gifts and purposes before him in the world he has made.

Of course, in a fallen world, it is never so simple.

Early on, many do need to work through a period of discernment, even a period involving trial and error, what can become a series of vocational attempts, sometimes even vocational failures. Young adults, often coming from an educational environment not entirely dissimilar from Richard Carstone’s, may need a few years, sometimes even a decade or more, to settle into a trajectory. Many college graduates intern in law, only to find they do not enjoy the work. Many others begin in medicine, only to find that they do not like seeing blood. An initial phase of trial and error is not simply acceptable, but often essential. Yet, a phase should not become a lifetime, the tragedy of Richard Carstone, one who was content never to move beyond the search, therefore never becoming what he could have been.

Yet again, in a fallen world, many do try. They do not settle passively to remain as children. They search and long for direction. And yet, they find themselves still stuck, not contentedly without vocational direction, yet nonetheless still lamenting, “But I don’t know what I want to do. That remains the problem!” The man or woman who has not been able to fully discern a vocational calling is not always to be blamed. Only some are Richard Carstone. Others have truly tried, and yet they have not been able to become Mr. Woodcourt; they have never quite found “the thing.”

Here, the cousin to Richard Carstone’s languid approach returns: contentedness. While in the good, good, good…very good world God created, all would be able to discern a vocation, one that would give that reward Mrs. Badger promised, in this life that reward will always be partial. Some will search and never land. In that, however, we can still choose contentment and respond with the willingness to work with all our heart at the work set before us.

Richard Carstone’s response to not finding a vocational calling was to do “good enough,” not as well as he could. He could have said, “Well, this is as good as any, so let me give it all I have got.” Instead, he did just enough to not be let go. Paul in Colossians 3 suggests the opposite, a working with all we have, even if the thing set before us may not have been our ideal: “Whatever you do, work heartily, as for the Lord and not for men, knowing that from the Lord you will receive the inheritance as your reward. You are serving the Lord Christ.” (Col. 3:23-24)

And yet again in a fallen world, many find themselves not simply having multiple jobs in a lifetime, but multiple careers. Here, we must remember that vocation and industry are not synonyms. Most workers in a modern economy will work in multiple industries in their lifetime, not simply multiple jobs. Vocation is the broader term, career the narrower. We must begin to think about the type of work we do, whatever the industry—the work of building teams, equipping people, understanding customers, tailoring analytics—a vocation becomes a set of skills and activities that can be applied across many different fields of economic, or non-economic, endeavor.

Through all of these, there must be development and direction. The job and career switching of one’s twenties has to give way to a building towards expertise and specialized skill. Even selfishly, income and career direction demand this at some level. Approximately two million bachelor’s degrees are awarded in the United States each year. It is only wise to move beyond the place where any of those two million recently minted college graduates could easily replace us. Much more, though, for the sake of God and our world, for the sake of whom we can be, we should strive to develop who we are, to pick a field and go further in it, developing our giftings so we can bless the broader world, that for our work “thanks would have gone up” from those whom we have blessed.

We want a vocation. Some are Mr. Woodcourt, those who both find and pursue a vocation with passion, one that fits them and makes them both happy and a blessing to the world. Some never quite do. It is no tragedy not to have found it, other than the tragedy of the Fall in general. Yet it is a tragedy to respond as Richard, simply spinning round and wasting time and hoping for riches to materialize. Far better to take whatever direction we can find, even if discerned dimly and imperfectly, even if only a proximate match for our desires, and to pour ourselves into it, “knowing that from the Lord [we] will receive the inheritance as [our] reward.”

*All page references for Bleak House are from the Penguin Classics edition (Penguin Books, New York, NY: 1996)