‘The Sultan Who Put His Head In The Pail Of Water’
In Hard Times (1854), young Louisa marries the crass, blustering mill-owner Bounderby, thirty years her senior, though she does not love him. Some years into the marriage, a handsome young gentleman called James Harthouse comes to Coketown (where the novel is set) to work for Louisa’s father, and Bounderby’s best friend, Thomas Gradgrind. Harthouse sees that Louisa is unhappy, and beautiful, and resolves upon seducing her. He nearly achieves this, although at the moment when he expects to consummate their adulterous relationship Louisa has second thoughts and runs away. In fact the developing relationship has been observed by sharp-eyed Mrs Sparsit, an elderly lady of good family who, in straitened circumstances, had taken the position of Bounderby’s housekeeper. She is supplanted in Bounderby’s house by Louisa, and moves into a flat in a bank that Bounderby owns in town. Mrs Sparsit resents Louisa, and is delighted to observe her developing relationship with Harthouse, planning on revealing her delinquency to Bounderby and ruining her. She also sees straight through Harthouse’s gentlemanly manners when first meeting him. This is how Dickens describes their initial encounter:
The visitor having strolled to the window, and being then engaged in looking carelessly out, was as unmoved by this impressive entry as man could possibly be. He stood whistling to himself with all imaginable coolness, with his hat still on, and a certain air of exhaustion upon him, in part arising from excessive summer, and in part from excessive gentility.
‘I believe, sir,’ quoth Mrs. Sparsit, ‘you wished to see me.’
‘I beg your pardon,’ he said, turning and removing his hat; ‘pray excuse me.’
‘Humph!’ thought Mrs. Sparsit, as she made a stately bend. ‘Five and thirty, good-looking, good figure, good teeth, good voice, good breeding, well-dressed, dark hair, bold eyes.’ All which Mrs. Sparsit observed in her womanly way — like the Sultan who put his head in the pail of water — merely in dipping down and coming up again.
‘Please to be seated, sir,’ said Mrs. Sparsit. [Hard Times, 2:1]
What does this reference to the Sultan who put his head in the pail of water mean? For a long time, Dickensians weren’t sure: the original Norton edition of Hard Times footnotes the passage with ‘Unidentified’. Then J E Svilpis [‘“The Sultan Who Put His Head in the Pail of Water”: a Possible Addison Allusion in Hard Times’, Dickens Quarterly 8 (1991), 177–8] argued that Dickens was alluding to an essay by Joseph Addison in The Spectator 94 (1711), a discussion of the theories of time of Malebranche and Addison. Kate Flint’s recent edition of the novel cites Svilpis’s article in her footnote to this passage:
Addison followed Locke in maintaining that our sense of time depends upon the succession of ideas in the mind and he offers an illustration from Turkish Tales (1708) in which an Egyptian Sultan, having once immersed himself in a tub of water, finds the whole occasion returns to him when he plunges into the sea on a much later occasion. [Hard Times, ed Kate Flint (Penguin 2003), 314]
But I don’t think this can be right. The point of Dickens’s allusion is not that Mrs Sparsit is reminded of something from her earlier life in this encounter, but that, dipping her head only for a moment, she sees a great many perceptive things. Here’s a story that fits better, from Sabine Baring-Gould’s novel Arminell: A Social Romance (1890):
1890 is too late for Dickens, but maybe he, and Baring-Gould, came across the reference in Byron, whose Giaour pauses in his pursuit for a moment, which he experiences as a great gulf of time.
Twas but an instant he restrained
That fiery barb so sternly reined;
’Twas but a moment that he stood,
Then sped as if by Death pursued;
But in that instant o’er his soul
Winters of Memory seemed to roll,
And gather in that drop of time
A life of pain, an age of crime.
O’er him who loves, or hates, or fears,
Such moment pours the grief of years [Byron, The Giaour, 257–66]
‘Lord Byron told Mr. Murray that he took this idea from one of the Arabian tales — that in which the Sultan puts his head into a butt of water, and, though it remains there for only two or three minutes, he imagines that he lives many years during that time.’ —[Memoir of John Murray, 1:219].
That’s what Dickens means: Mrs Sparsit only dips her head for a moment, but in that time she takes in as much detail about Harthouse as if she had been studying him for a very long time.
++++
Edit: I was curious where Byron found this story so looked a little more, and discovered it was — in Addison’s Spectator 94! So Svilpis was right after all. What wrongfooted me, not having access to Svilpis’s original article, was Kate Flint’s summary of it, which mangles the point. So this whole elaborate blog ends up circling back round, and proving only that Professor Flint made a mistake in her footnote. Hardly a point worth elaborating at such length, but there you go. Here’s Addison’s original text, which, clearly, both Byron and Dickens read:
There is a famous passage in the Alcoran, which looks as if Mahomet had been possessed of the notion we are now speaking of. It is there said that the Angel Gabriel took Mahomet out of his bed one morning to give him a sight of all things in the seven heavens, in paradise, and in hell, which the prophet took a distinct view of; and, after having held ninety thousand conferences with God, was brought back again to his bed. All this, says the Alcoran, was transacted in so small a space of time, that Mahomet at his return found his bed still warm, and took up an earthen pitcher, which was thrown down at the very instant that the Angel Gabriel carried him away, before the water was all spilt.
There is a very pretty story in the Turkish Tales, which relates to this passage of that famous impostor, and bears some affinity to the subject we are now upon. A sultan of Egypt, who was an infidel, used to laugh at this circumstance in Mahomet’s life, as what was altogether impossible and absurd: but conversing one day with a great doctor in the law, who had the gift of working miracles, the doctor told him he would quickly convince him of the truth of this passage in the history of Mahomet, if he would consent to do what he should desire of him. Upon this the sultan was directed to place himself by a huge tub of water, which he did accordingly; and as he stood by the tub amidst a circle of his great men, the holy man bade him plunge his head into the water and draw it up again. The king accordingly thrust his head into the water, and at the same time found himself at the foot of a mountain on the sea-shore. The king immediately began to rage against his doctor for this piece of treachery and witchcraft; but at length, knowing it was in vain to be angry, he set himself to think on proper methods for getting a livelihood in this strange country. Accordingly he applied himself to some people whom he saw at work in a neighbouring wood: these people conducted him to a town that stood at a little distance from the wood, where, after some adventures, he married a woman of great beauty and fortune. He lived with this woman so long that he had by her seven sons and seven daughters. He was afterwards reduced to great want, and forced to think of plying in the streets as a porter for his livelihood. One day as he was walking alone by the sea-side, being seized with many melancholy reflections upon his former and his present state of life, which had raised a fit of devotion in him, he threw off his clothes with a design to wash himself, according to the custom of the Mahometans, before he said his prayers.
After his first plunge into the sea, he no sooner raised his head above the water but he found himself standing by the side of the tub, with the great men of his court about him, and the holy man at his side. He immediately upbraided his teacher for having sent him on such a course of adventures, and betrayed him into so long a state of misery and servitude; but was wonderfully surprised when he heard that the state he talked of was only a dream and delusion; that he had not stirred from the place where he then stood; and that he had only dipped his head into the water, and immediately taken it out again.
The Mahometan doctor took this occasion of instructing the sultan that nothing was impossible with God; and that He, with whom a thousand years are but as one day, can, if He pleases, make a single day — nay, a single moment — appear to any of His creatures as a thousand years.
Indeed, tracking this down in full makes me wonder if Dickens wasn’t thinking of this, and its last paragraph in particular, as he wrote A Christmas Carol, where many days are concertina’d into one night: ‘“It’s Christmas Day!” said Scrooge to himself. “I haven’t missed it. The Spirits have done it all in one night. They can do anything they like. Of course they can. Of course they can.”’
