Saluting John Wemmick

For weeks now, I’ve been intending to write today’s post as a companion to the post of November 23, 2010, in which I salute one of my favorite comic characters from the Dickens cornucopia of great comic characters. But I just reread “Saluting Captain Cuttle” and have amazed myself at – please allow me a slight, immodest indulgence – how well I did in writing it. Truly to write a parallel piece, I would again today have to seek for the right poietic frame of mind and hope for it to appear. Were I in fact in the right poietic frame of mind, I would phrase it this way: I would say that I must needs call upon the Muses and humbly take whatever boon they decide to grant me. Indeed, I believe I have used the word “poietic” instead of “creative” in order to encourage their generosity.

Alas, I am only in a slightly elevated blogging frame of mind, and will simply have to do my workmanlike best. But salute John Wemmick I must, so here we go!

First of all, there are two Mr. Wemmicks; that is, Mr. Wemmick has two sides or aspects to him. “Walworth is one place, and this office is another,” he says when Pip asks him for personal advice. John Wemmick, clerk of the law office of Mr. Jaggers, adopts his employer’s legal morality and sees clients as neither good nor evil but merely as defendants who deserve the strongest case that can be made in court and then receive either favorable or unfavorable verdicts. He scolds potential witnesses for even suggesting that they might bend the truth but cares not at all whether what they say straightforwardly be truth or lie so long as it is defensible in itself and beneficial to the client’s case. He visits former clients in prison, not apparently in the enactment of Christian virtue, but rather in hopes of receiving small presentations of “portable property” from the condemned. He wears several rings obtained in this way and one cameo brooch. He admires the casts of the death masks of two former clients whose faces have been distorted as a result of hanging, smiling on the sculptures as if they were tokens of departed friends. He tells Pip he would be better to throw his money off a bridge than give it to a friend in need because at least then he would know where it had gone.

Why he befriends Pip, we are not told. But clearly even the office Wemmick sees that Pip, in spite of his failings, has potential. It might be that he can sense that Pip has a heart for his fellow man, especially the downtrodden. (Perhaps he has heard in some way of little Pip’s kindness to the convict among the graves one Christmas morning several years ago. But that would be a coincidence, and Dickens never indulges in coincidences, does he?) Whatever the reason, befriend Pip he does, and asks him to dine with him at his home in Walworth.

On their way to the Walworth home, office John Wemmick begins to fade, and smiles begin to show on Wemmick’s odd face that appear warmer than the smiles directed toward the death heads. He talks about ways in which he can assist Pip in giving financial aid to his friend anonymously. When they arrive at the Walworth home, Wemmick delights in showing Pip how to lower the drawbridge that crosses the small ditch that surrounds the property, a ditch that could be leapt easily with a single step. Pip notices crenellations on the house and a cannon on a tower. Walworth Wemmick has fully arrived and gives Pip a tour of his “castle garden.” Before they go inside, Wemmick asks Pip if he has any objection to an Aged Parent. Pip of course saying he has none, they step in to find the Aged Parent stoking the fire. John addresses him as “Aged Parent” and “Aged P.” Walworth Wemmick’s delight begins to mount as five o’clock approaches, at which time he climbs the tower and fires the cannon. The Aged P cries out exultingly, “He’s fired! I heerd him!” I don’t know if there is a more hilarious, eccentric, or beautiful portrait of love in all of Dickens’s works than this of a hard-nosed law clerk who leaves the office behind him and builds a castle in the suburbs just so he can fire a cannon and give his deaf father the joy of hearing something once a day.

John Wemmick has a wooden face. His mouth is so straight and stiff, Dickens constantly makes references to its being a “post-office,” by which I suppose he means a mail slot. When I read about Wemmick, I try to think of the little door on the mailbox that allows you to put letters in without being able to reach your hand in to take any out, but I usually end up departing from the author’s metaphor and picturing Wemmick as a nutcracker. He has a lady caller named Miss Skiffins (perfect name) who also has a wooden face. One imagines the couple someday begetting a whole mantleful of little nutcrackers. Before they are married, John makes repeated slow and deliberate attempts to put his arm around Miss Skiffins’s waist, each attempt thwarted by Miss Skiffins's removing his arm, equally slowly and deliberately, and placing it on the table. I’ve given too much away already, so I won’t tell you how John delivers his wedding invitation to Pip, but it is priceless.

John Wemmick, I, too, had a job I tried (but usually failed) to leave behind each night. I don’t have a castle, but I have a few castles in the air, and on every one, I fire a cannon to salute you!