PART II
5
It is not linen you’re wearing out,
But human creatures’ lives!
(Thomas Hood, ‘The Song of the Shirt’ (1843))
Ring out the feud of rich and poor
Ring in redress to all mankind …
(Tennyson, In Memoriam (1850))
From the time of Wordsworth and the Romantics, as industry spread, literature warmed to the growing plight of the poor, and became passionately engaged in the struggle for change, through legislation if not revolution. The Romantic movement attacked the Industrial Revolution for enslaving the poor, ruining their natural environment and, by making their life intolerable, justifying revolution. Romanticism, inspired by the French Revolution, stressed the truth of Nature, of individual human worth and social justice, regardless of social and hierarchical divisions. Wordsworth was a literary pioneer in putting the poor, the beggars, widows and orphaned children among whom he grew up in the Lake District, at the center of his poetry, not as objects of pity but as human beings. In many ways the poet took the biblical commandment to preserve the human dignity of the poor and adapted it to the industrial age of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. The Industrial Revolution was ‘catastrophic’ to the poor.1 The Romantics were haunted by the demon of capitalism, ‘the limitless and uninterrupted pursuit of more’.2 Wordsworth was among the first to write of the damage done by industry to the rural poor, destroying their local agricultural and cottage economy that had sustained them for centuries, ruining the English countryside and driving its inhabitants into a new kind of mass impoverishment in the cities. Tocqueville observed in 1833 the paradox that although England was ‘the Eden of modern civilisations’, one-sixth of its population lived on public charity.3
The Industrial Revolution and the French Revolution combined to stimulate political engagement among English poets. The poets of the Romantic age, including Blake, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Crabbe, Byron, Shelley, and Clare, as well as Continental poets such as Goethe, Heine, Hugo, and Shevchenko, were strongly sympathetic to the plight of the poor and aware of the deterioration of their conditions from the late 18th century.4 Continuous war in this period hurt the poor economically, both in the British isles and on the Continent. In Goethe’s epic poem, Hermann und Dorothea (1797), set during the French Revolutionary wars, the lovers of the title first meet in a crowd of people displaced and impoverished by the wars: Hermann falls in love with Dorothea, one of the refugees. Wordsworth, in Margaret or The Ruined Cottage (1797), describes the same period of upheaval, when tens of thousands of men were recruited to fight in the war against France, farms lacked manpower to function effectively, and their inhabitants became destitute.
Among the English Romantics, Byron was the only member of Parliament; and in February 1812, he made his maiden speech in the House of Lords in defense of the Nottingham weavers who had smashed the machinery that threatened them with unemployment.5 The workers, said Byron, deserved compassion and bread for their children, not punishment, which would drive them ‘into actual rebellion’.6 Like John Gay and Thomas Paine, Byron argued that the well-connected evaded the law, which chiefly oppressed the poor: ‘while the exalted offender can find means to baffle the law, new capital punishments must be devised, new snares of death must be spread for the wretched mechanic, who is famished into guilt’.7 Byron, always on the side of the underdog, put his sympathy for the weavers and outrage at greedy capitalists into a poem, ‘An Ode to the Framers of the Frame Bill’ (published March 2, 1812): ‘Men are more easily made than machinery – / Stockings fetch better prices than lives’.8
William Blake and the struggle for social justice
As urban poverty grew, Blake, a Londoner, put the evil of social injustice, and the corrosive effects of poverty, at the heart of his poetry. As in Rousseau, man may be born free but everywhere is in chains. Institutional Christianity is part of the problem, not the solution. The poet hears the dirty streets of London, and the Thames, proclaim its evil, the fear and woe of its inhabitants, their disease and weakness, the ‘chimney-sweeper’s cry’ and ‘youthful harlot’s curse’ (‘London’, 1791–2). To Blake, the social causes of poverty are clear: ‘Pity would be no more/ If we did not make somebody poor’ (‘The Human Abstract’, c. 1793).9 In an age of progress, famine could be eradicated, yet famine persists amid plenty, ruin amid prosperity: ‘Poverty is the Fool’s Rod.’ From the polluted hell of the city, the countryside with clean air and water, and fruitfulness, is still, in the late 18th century, in sight, in the rolling meadows and hills soon to become part of north London. Blake is the poet of Thomas Paine’s dissidence in Common Sense and The Rights of Man: governments, monarchies, and aristocrats are frauds and impositions on the poor, mad and stupid in wasting resources on palaces, courts, and wars, which could be better spent on welfare and education for the poor. Poverty undermines the state: ‘A dog starved at his master’s gate/ Predicts the ruin of the state’ (‘Auguries of Innocence’, c. 1803). To Blake, all things are interlinked: ‘Everything that lives/ Lives not alone, nor for itself’ (The Book of Thel, 1789–90); the fabric holding society together is justice, and that fabric is torn. In The Song of Los (1795), Blake cries out like a modern prophet against injustice.10 King and Priest wickedly call for famine and plague, to restrain, dismay, and thin the population. In Blake’s lifetime the cost of living roughly doubled while wages went up by about one-half; Parliament passed Acts for over 3,000 enclosures, and deprivation of rights to graze and collect fuel on public land often led to insolvency; most family wages were earned by women and children in factories: their working day was 15 hours, and they walked about 20 miles daily among the machines. In a conspiracy of Church and state, workers had no say in their wages, and there was no minimum wage:
Shall not the king call for famine from the heath,
Nor the priest for pestilence from the fen!
To restrain, to dismay, to thin
The inhabitants of mountain and plain –
In the day of full-feeding prosperity
And the night of delicious songs.
Shall not the counsellor throw his curb
Of poverty on the laborious
To fix the price of labour
To invent allegoric riches?
(The Song of Los, ‘Asia’, 9–18)
In Jerusalem (1804–7), Blake attacks the slavery and filth of English industry, which he saw blighting the lives of the young, near his home in Lambeth, making the ‘arts of life’ into the ‘arts of death’:
Endless their labour, with bitter food, void of sleep,
Though hungry they labour … wheel within wheel;
To perplex youth in their outgoings, & to bind to labours in Albion
Of day & night the myriads of eternity, that they may grind
And polish brass & iron hour after hour, laborious task!
Kept ignorant of its use, that they might spend the days of wisdom
In sorrowful drudgery, to obtain a scanty pittance of bread …
(ch. 3, 59: 30–1, 65: 21–6)
Blake at times seems to anticipate the revolutionary socialists of the 19th century: ‘I must create a system, or be enslav’d by another man’s’ (ibid., ch. 1, 10: 20).
The church, Blake writes in ‘The Little Vagabond’ (1791–2), is cold and forbidding beside the alehouse, ‘healthy and pleasant and warm’, a place of song and good cheer, where hungry and sick children are not beaten by their Dame. Perhaps the most degraded figure among the poor both in towns and in the countryside was the child chimney-sweep, often illegitimate or orphaned and apprenticed by the local parish, or sold by impoverished parents unable to feed him. To Blake, the chimney-sweeper child of Songs of Innocence (1789) and Songs of Experience (1794) – in the two poems entitled ‘The Chimney Sweeper’ – remains innocent even in the evil world which forces him to wear ‘clothes of death’ and to work toward ‘coffins of black’ in a dangerous, health-destroying profession. Most sweeps were dead by age 20.11
In 1795, Edmund Burke warned Parliament amid growing economic crisis that it was not its role to help the poor or meddle with the market. In this classic statement of conservatism, one of Burke’s last speeches (published as ‘Thoughts and Details on Scarcity’), Burke, a farmer, lamented the failed crops and cattle and sheep dying in summer drought and winter frost but reminded Parliament that scarcity was inevitable every few years. With the authority of Adam Smith’s influential The Wealth of Nations (1776) behind him, Burke, as we have seen, declared that the laws of commerce are those of nature and of God; regulation would only bring ‘equal want, equal wretchedness, equal beggary’. By this time, however, economic conditions were so bad that Parliament could not heed his warning that its most useful function was as an agent of restraint, a curb to panic, before the ‘invisible hand’ of natural regulation did its work.12 The Speenhamland poor relief system was put in place, leading to increasing numbers of workers dependent on charity as employers felt it unnecessary to pay a fair wage. At the end of 1796, in ‘Ode to the Departing Year’, Coleridge, living in the poverty-stricken West Country, addressed England as an accursed nation, doomed to defeat, caught in the paroxysms of famine and war-fever against tyrannous France:
Abandon’d of Heaven! Mad Avarice thy guide,
At cowardly distance, yet kindling with pride –
Mid thy herds and thy corn-fields secure thou hast stood,
And join’d the wild yelling of Famine and Blood!
The nations curse thee!
In 1798, conditions worsened and the clergyman Thomas Malthus published Essay on Population, whose argument that population increase meant an increase in hunger, was essentially correct in its time – in France, revolution would have been unlikely if not for rural overpopulation and mass hunger – but incorrect in the long term. In 1798 it was not self-evident that the Industrial Revolution could solve problems it created. The poor, rapidly increasing in numbers, were felt as an impossible burden on society, to be dealt with through population control and stringent legislation.13 Blake bitterly mocks Malthus in Vala, or The Four Zoas:
… when a man looks pale
With labour & abstinence, say he looks healthy & happy –
And when his children sicken, let them die. There are enough
Born, even too many, & our earth will be overrun
Without these arts.
(‘Night the Seventh’ 118–22)14
The New Poor Law of 1834
For centuries, legislation in England as elsewhere had lacked sympathy for the poor: it represented to a large extent the desire of the ruling class to manipulate the poor to its own convenience. By the early 19th century, industrialization, the rapidly built rail links between cities, population increase, overcrowding and urbanization, and the effects of prolonged war with France, made obsolete the old parish system of poor relief. How to deal with poverty spreading rapidly in growing cities? The government report leading to the New Poor Law of 1834 was the most thorough account of the poor ever written, with data covering about 10% of the English population.15 It was also one-sided in its critical view of the poor, and bitterly contested. The New Poor Law reacted to the explosion of cost of poor relief over the previous half-century, and consequent reductions in aid, and it overturned the traditional notion of the need to combat poverty.16 It came at a time when the poor were increasingly associated with the menace of social evils and vice, disease, deformity, and savagery as well as the radicalism associated with Chartism;17 they were dangerous parasites who must be humiliated and crushed.18 The New Poor Law was influenced by the ‘science’ of the newly emerging field of economics, influenced mostly by men such as Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, and David Ricardo whose knowledge of and sympathy with the lives of the poor were limited (and who were themselves comfortably off), and were not primarily concerned with the wellbeing of the poor. The poor rates were in fact never more than 2% of GNP and were ‘minuscule’ alongside military spending.19 The solution in Poor Law: to cut poor relief by 50% and extract maximum utility from the poor by making them work, in the hundreds of workhouses built in England for this purpose after 1834. A destitute man could no longer get poor relief unless he entered a workhouse and submitted to its rules: confiscation of private possessions, prison-like uniforms, silence during work and meals, deliberately unappetising food, separation of men and women – including husbands and wives – the lack of privacy, the restriction of visitors, poor medical care and hygiene, the vulnerability to constant humiliation. English writers, notably Dickens, responded with outrage to the New Poor Law and to its often-cruel implementation.20
Living in comparative wealth and comfort, many writers and thinkers were shocked at the conditions of the poor. In 1837, Thomas Carlyle warned that urgent reform was vital to prevent social breakdown: ‘all this cursed pluister of lies and misery is coming tumbling into incoherent ruin, and will grow a great deal more miserable than it ever was’.21 The Andover workhouse scandal in the 1840s exposed by the London Times, revealed the vulnerability of the poor to sadistic Poor Law officials, who in some cases starved the inmates to save money.
Hardy in The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886) recalls the period of economic crisis between the 1820s and 1840s, when extreme poverty was rife in England. A young destitute laborer, Michael Henchard, in a fit of drunken despair which he regrets for the rest of his life, sells his wife at a country fair. Twenty years later, Henchard reappears under a new name, a reformed citizen, a man of much capability, force of character, and wealth; and in a twist recalling Jean Valjean in Les Misérables, becomes mayor of Casterbridge (Dorchester). Hardy details the background to these events, in the years prior to the repeal of the Corn Laws (1846), when harvests were often bad, and the poor suffered most as prices were kept high. At this time, Hardy writes, agricultural methods had hardly changed since ancient times, for ‘the venerable seed-lip was still used for sowing as in the days of the Heptarchy’ (ch. 24). The weather decides life and death. To save the harvest, the whole town goes into the fields and works all night.
Hardy grew up in the 1840s and 1850s amid the hardships of the south of England, where all his novels are set, populated by the ill-fated poor.22 Dorset was ‘a county in which those who owned the land and those who worked it were hardly thought of as belonging to the same species’.23 Hardy’s mother, an orphan, charity child, and servant, had known hunger and want. Hardy’s fiction alludes to the punitive effects of the Poor Law Act of 1834 and the vulnerability of the poor, with a looming sense of fate, inexorable. As in the writings of Zola, Hardy’s contemporary, the poor are treated at times almost like animals, their value measured by their labor.24 One of the largest buildings in the Dorchester area was the workhouse. A shepherd whom Hardy knew as a young man starved to death, evidently ashamed to seek relief.25
By the mid-19th century the effects of the Industrial Revolution were disastrous for the poor. Legislative reform was in some ways disillusioning: it did not go far enough, and it did the poor harm. The Reform Act of 1832 shifted power from the aristocracy to the employers, concerned mainly with profit, not the workers’ health and welfare. England was spared the Continent-wide revolutions of 1848–9, but was clearly vulnerable to unrest stemming from the enormous gap between its wealth and the deteriorating conditions of its poor:26 their heavily polluted environment and poor sanitation, malnutrition, low life expectancy, high childhood mortality rates, inferior educational opportunities and life chances. London was a foggy disease-ridden ‘landscape of filth and destruction’, with open sewers and children dying of hunger.27 Dickens’ fictional Coketown in Hard Times (1854) exemplifies all that is wrong with industrial cities and capitalism: greed, heartlessness, and exploitation of the vulnerable poor; a tendency to see the poor not as people but as slave-like ‘operatives’ to be paid so much and worked so much, even unto death, and whose poverty is their own fault; the oppressive pollution, ugliness, and uniformity amid which they toil; and the sheer heart-breaking struggle of their lives. Factory owners resist reform, claiming that change would ‘ruin’ them.
Industry and the transformation of the lives of the poor
After 1850, the effects of the Industrial Revolution and liberalism began to change the life of the working class for the better. Reform ensured that industrialization and urbanization did not lead to revolution. The growth in literacy and the spread of democracy and enfranchisement in the Reform Acts of 1832 and 1867 gave the poor a limited voice in Parliament, and an increasing voice in 19th-century English fiction.28 Workers’ conditions were now central in political debate and social awareness, exemplified in Disraeli’s description, in his novel Sybil (1847), of the rich and the poor in England as inhabitants of different planets, bred differently, fed with different food, and governed by different laws – ‘two nations’ ignorant of each other, ruled by the same queen.29
Dickens published Hard Times in 1854. The Industrial Revolution together with improvements in sanitation, hygiene, and medicine, were then on the verge of transforming public health universally and vastly improving general living standards.30 Dickens famously satirized ‘Facts, sir; nothing but Facts’ in Hard Times, yet statistics could and did give unanswerable arguments for social reform.31 The facts presented by Edwin Chadwick to Parliament in his Report on the Sanitary Conditions of the Labouring Population of Great Britain (1842) had led to the first Public Health Act (1848). The Victorians were concerned with poverty as never before in literature or legislation. Poverty in England was a burning issue, more than at any time previously, in any country. Literature served to compensate somewhat for the lack of representation of the poor in government – and for failings in Poor Law. The ‘Condition of the Poor’ became a literary genre. Much Victorian literature on the poor is not specifically Christian. It tends to be committed to secular progress and reform and is, at times, deeply critical of Christian society for not doing more to help the poor. Yet its sympathy for the poor is close to traditional Christianity and the Hebrew Bible, which had abiding influence, especially among the working masses, even as the Church declined.
Novelists not only caught the reformist spirit of the age; they also saw that the lives of the poor offered previously unrecognized artistic possibilities: for example, a workhouse child fallen among thieves in Dickens’ Oliver Twist; a union leader in Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton; a political radical in George Eliot’s Felix Holt, the Radical; a day laborer who becomes mayor in Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge; a terrorist plotting mayhem in Conrad’s The Secret Agent – these are largely new types in English fiction. These works suggest to an unprecedented extent the insight, sensitivity, and ability among the poor. Driven far enough by injustice, they could bring revolution; given good conditions, they could change their lives, and the life of the country. Dickens exposed the extent of urban poverty, especially in London, while Hardy’s world is that of the rural poor, particularly in Dorsetshire, in the south. Other Victorian English novelists, too, including George Eliot and Elizabeth Gaskell, wrote with feeling and insight of the English poor, with faith in education, enlightenment, science, and progress, to limit, if not completely eliminate, poverty. Gaskell in particular had more direct observation of the lives of the poor than practically any other 19th-century novelist: she was also able to capture their dialects (helped by her husband, a scholar of dialect), allowing the reader to hear the distinct sound of their voices. The extraordinary group of women novelists pointed the way to general improvement in women’s education and rights, changing society as a whole for the better.32
George Eliot
George Eliot’s novels are set against the transformation of rural England between the publication of Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads in 1798 and the Reform Bill of 1832: Adam Bede (1858), in 1799, in a world of poor but dignified common people, as yet largely untouched by industry; Silas Marner (1861), a few years later, in the Napoleonic wars, when high prices and extravagant consumption temporarily benefited the poor;33 The Mill on the Floss (1860) after the ‘glorious wartime’, in a small English town whose inhabitants are mostly blind to the enormous forces of change about to engulf them. Both Felix Holt, The Radical (1866) and Middlemarch (1871–2) have at their heart the First Reform Act of 1832. Felix Holt, a watchmaker in a small English town, hopes for radical reform through enfranchisement: ‘I want the working men to have power’, but true power, he believes, lies in ‘men’s passions, feelings, desires’, above all in public opinion as to what is right and wrong (ch. 30). As the acrimonious debates raged, leading to the Second Reform Act of 1867, George Eliot surveyed the turbulent post-1815 period, which she remembered as a child, the studious daughter of the manager of the Arbury Hall estate, Nuneaton, Warwickshire, where the owner, Sir Roger Newdigate, had given her access to the manor library: this education straddling the classes deepened her understanding and sympathy both for the English working class and the enlightened aristocracy. She recalled how unemployment spread, worsened by the effects of the Enclosure Act of 1801, the rise of industry (though the new industrial towns also created new employment opportunities, together with new forms of exploitation), and the return of about 400,000 demobilized soldiers from the war with France glutting the labor pool. Deflationary governmental policies favoring industry roused the anger of farmers who suffered from depressed agricultural prices: ‘prices had fallen, poor-rates had risen, rent and tithe were not enough’ (ch. 3).34 Most English men and women still had no representation in Parliament. The cry of the American colonists 3,000 miles distant a half-century previously – ‘no taxation without representation’ – applied to millions in England, including large numbers living within 300 meters of Whitehall: one of the many with no protection in Parliament was Charles Dickens, in 1822 a child laborer by Hungerford Stairs, a stone’s throw from Downing Street.35 Widespread riots resulted in 1830–2, directed at objects associated with the persecution of the poor: threshing machines (which reduced the need for labor), tithe barns, workhouses, hay ricks, even livestock. One of these riots, witnessed in 1832 by George Eliot, then 13, at Nuneaton, was the basis for her account of the riot (‘blind outrages of this mad crowd’) in Felix Holt (ch. 33).36 The country gentry have little concern how the poor live. In Middlemarch, Mr. Brooke, Dorothea’s uncle, tries to dissuade her on financial grounds from marrying Will Ladislaw, cousin of her recently deceased husband, Casaubon: ‘you don’t know what it is to live on seven hundred pounds a-year, and have no carriage, and go amongst people who don’t know who you are’ (ch. 86). Even a century later, most people in England would have felt themselves fortunate to be earning 700 pounds a year.37
Dickens and the poor
Dickens, the outstanding campaigner for the poor in Western literature, made his name at a low point in the public image of the poor, starting in the 1830s. This was a time of Continent-wide economic uncertainty.38 The New Poor Law of 1834 left a lasting brand on Dickens’ fiction. Though he accepted the distinction between the deserving and the undeserving poor, the rich in his view willfully underestimated the number of the deserving poor and the extent of their poverty. Dickens’ poor are sometimes wicked but they are never poor because of laziness or lack of thrift but because of misfortune. In 1834, Dickens was a parliamentary reporter and, having experienced poverty as a child, was distressed by the lack of concern for the poor in the debates on the New Poor Law. Sketches by Boz (1834–5) responds to the New Poor Law in its satiric portrait of ‘The Ladies Societies’ in which teaching the charity children Bible and prayers takes precedence over compassion and effective aid for them. Oliver Twist (1837–8), though set prior to the New Poor Law, attacks the treatment of the poor as England became increasingly industrialized.39 Dickens sidesteps the awkward fact that the cost of supporting the poor in England under the Old Poor Law had risen several times over since the late 18th century but makes the valid point that the workhouse remained as mixed, disorderly, squalid, and miserable as in Crabbe’s day, and particularly unhealthy for children. No distinction was made between classes of paupers. Children were thrust into a world of able-bodied unemployed, abandoned women, vagrant thieves, the infirm, the traumatized, prostitutes, lunatics, crying babies, the aged, and the dying. Oliver Twist opens in the workhouse, with the mother’s death, the infant’s loss of identity, the prison-like clothes, the arbitrary naming as Oliver Twist:
Now that he was enveloped in the old calico robes which had grown yellow
in the same service, he was badged and ticketed, and fell into his place at once – a parish child – the orphan of a workhouse – the humble, half-starved drudge – to be cuffed and buffeted though the world – despised by all, and pitied by none.
(ch. 1)40
Dickens directs his satire at the workhouse, its treachery and deception toward its wards, its criminalization of them from birth. Not yet a year old, Oliver is already a ‘juvenile offender’ in ‘care’ of adult offenders, genuine offenders who get away with it; and he is sent from one workhouse to another, ‘where twenty or thirty other juvenile offenders against the poor-laws, rolled about the floor all day, without the inconvenience of too much food or too much clothing’ (ch. 2).41
Dickens emphasizes the corruption of parish officials, who rob the children of most of the weekly stipend allocated for their care. The poor are an object of suspicion, resentment, and fear, and often treated as able-bodied layabouts who must be made to work. As hundreds of workhouses were being built in England, Dickens satirizes the jaundiced view of the poor as scroungers, living idly on public funds in the comfortable workhouse. Irony is Dickens’ weapon of choice in exposing un-Christian lack of feeling for the poor: ‘What could the boy be crying for?’ The charity of the ‘very sage, deep, philosophical men’ who administer the Poor Law is, in their own view, too generous, and they set out to discourage the poor from seeking parish relief by separating married couples and feeding the inmates on an inadequate diet.42 The Beadle, Mr. Bumble, sums up his philosophy: ‘The great principle of out-of-door relief is, to give the paupers exactly what they don’t want; and then they get tired of coming’ (ch. 23). Deprivation of food, love, and family attachments in the New Poor Law evidently called up in Dickens memories of his childhood misery, so that his own experience merged with the fate of the poor, nationally: ‘it is possible to see why the New Poor Law provoked in Dickens angry memories of his own deprivation, of his own separation from his family, and his own obsessive comparison of the need for food with the need for love’.43
Nor did Dickens exaggerate the tendency of welfare to break up families, which continued in England well into the 20th century.44 The workhouse, Dickens emphasizes, was a Christian institution and, as represented by officials such as Bumble, an indictment of Christianity: ‘I hope you say your prayers every night, and pray for the people who feed you, and take care of you – like a Christian’ (ch. 2).45 As a celebrity with a huge international readership, Dickens probably did more for worthy charities than any other 19th-century public figure; yet his hatred of organized charity is evident throughout his fiction, particularly in Oliver Twist. Immersed in Christian hypocrisy, Oliver is deprived of Christian education: ‘It would have been very like a Christian, and a marvellously good Christian, too, if Oliver had prayed for the people who fed and took care of him. But he hadn’t, because nobody had taught him’ (ch. 2). There is irony in the fact that Oliver is better off in the care of Fagin, a caricature of a wicked Jew, than in the tender mercies of parish officials. The reality of Christian ‘charity’ is, by implication, more miserly than the stereotype of the Jew! In the workhouse, assigned the ‘blessings’ of the ‘useful trade’ of picking oakum, Oliver is sent back to a large ward ‘where, on a rough, hard bed, he sobbed himself to sleep. What a noble illustration of the tender laws of England! They let the paupers go to sleep!’ (ch. 2). Fagin, in contrast with workhouse representatives of Christian charity, has pity on the pale, exhausted boy and does not trouble his rest (end ch. 19).
There is no comparable tenderness to children among parish officials. Everything by Dickens on poverty, in Oliver Twist and onwards, can be read as commentary on Wordsworth, ‘we have all of us one human heart’ (‘The Old Cumberland Beggar’). The suffering of children is at the heart of Dickens’ next novel, Nicholas Nickleby (1838–9), in the episodes at Dotheboys Hall (ch. 8), based on the notorious ‘Yorkshire schools’, run like a prison by the sadistic Wackford Squeers. The school is an ‘incipient Hell’, a breeding ground of ugly misfits and vicious criminals, with its starving, stunted, tormented, hopeless geriatric children with no childhood.
In A Christmas Carol (1843), the Spirit of Christmas Present shows Scrooge a pair of starving children: Ignorance and Want. Scrooge asks, ‘Have they no refuge or resource?’ (ch. 3). The Spirit replies with Scrooge’s own cruel words: ‘Are there no prisons? Are there no workhouses?’46 Scrooge is haunted, too, by words spoken at the start of the story by his impoverished nephew and overworked clerk, Bob Cratchit: many would rather die than go to the workhouse, to which Scrooge gives the Malthusian reply, ‘they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population’; when the Spirit of Christmas Present rouses Scrooge’s compassion by showing him Bob Cratchit’s neglected family and the crippled child, Tiny Tim, and Scrooge realizes to his horror that the child might die, the Spirit returns to him his own cruel words: let him die, ‘and decrease the surplus population’.47 Dickens’ view of Poor Law, even if it kept the poor alive, was of a vile beast breathing threatenings and slaughters.
The ‘care’ provided by institutions might, nevertheless, have advantages over the lives of the poor abandoned in the cities. Bleak House (1852–3) depicts the living conditions of the London poor in the early Victorian age. Tom-all-Alone’s (ch. xvi) is a black, dilapidated street with dangerously unsafe, evil, and pestilential buildings inhabited by the poorest of the poor, including Jo, the child street-sweeper, who has no family: ‘As on the human wretch parasites appear, so these ruined shelters have bred a crowd of foul existence that crawls in and out of gaps in walls and boards; and coils itself to sleep, in maggot numbers, where the rain drips in.’ Like most of the poor, Jo is illiterate and, in an extraordinary passage (even for Dickens), Dickens momentarily enters Jo’s perspective, shifting into the first person, as a being with sufficient intelligence to know that his fate is no better than that of a dumb animal. Dickens imagines himself as Jo, with the implicit added horror of what his own fate might have been if not for the power of his literacy, displayed in this very passage, in which the words themselves seem to be shaped and assembled like a diamond-bright affirmation of his own humanity, nearly robbed from him in the blacking factory, when he was Jo’s age.
To shuffle through the streets, unfamiliar with the shapes, and in utter darkness as to the meaning, of those mysterious symbols, so abundant over the shops, and at the corners of streets, and in the windows! To see people read, and to see people write, and to see the postmen deliver letters, and not to have the least idea of all that language – to be, to every scrap of it, stone blind and dumb! It must be very puzzling to see the good company going to the churches on Sundays, with their books in their hands, and to think (for perhaps Jo does think at odd times) what does it all mean, and if it means anything to anybody, how comes it that it means nothing to me? To be hustled, and jostled, and moved on; and really to feel that it would appear to be perfectly true that I have no business here, or there, or anywhere; and yet to be perplexed by the consideration that I am here somehow, too, and everybody overlooked me until I became the creature that I am! It must be a strange state, not merely to be told that I am scarcely human […] but to feel it of my own knowledge all my life! To see the horses, dogs and cattle go by me and to know that in ignorance I belong to them and not to the superior beings in my shape, whose delicacy I offend!
Dickens as child laborer
Though Dickens exaggerated in his portrait of the workhouse – ‘paupers did not starve within the workhouse’48 – he wrote with emotional conviction. To Dickens, the workhouse meant the loss of love, depersonalization, persecution, and fear – his own experience as a child worker. The caricature is based on truth: Oliver and the other children are rake-thin; the ‘carers’ who make their lives a torment, in contrast (as Cruikshank’s drawings show), are fat: Bumble the Beadle, the Master who doles out the gruel, the entire parish board. Like many other 19th-century writers who probed the lower depths of existence, Dickens came from a middle-class home. His early years were spent in relative comfort. However, in 1822, his father was imprisoned for debt. To earn money for the family, Dickens was sent to work, aged ten, in a basement factory by the Thames, pasting labels on bottles. The suddenness of this fall from relative security and comfort was a shock from which he never recovered and whose effects are felt throughout his fiction, for example Mr. Trent’s loss of his shop and flight with his granddaughter Nell into a life of poverty in The Old Curiosity Shop (1840), and William Dorrit’s imprisonment for debt in the Marshalsea prison in Little Dorrit (1855–7). The poor in Dickens have debt pointed like a pistol at their heads; money in the hands of the rich is an instrument of power and cruelty.
David Copperfield (1849–50) contains a largely autobiographical account of Dickens’ time in the blacking factory. David is ‘thrown away’, aged ten, by his step-father, Murdstone, after his mother’s death.49 His job, done with other similarly unfortunate children, is to work in the dark rat-infested basement factory by the Thames owned by Murdstone and Grinby. From morning until 8:00 at night he does nothing but examine and clean empty bottles of wine and spirits and prepare them for reuse. Dickens expresses no opposition in principle to child labor. Yet, the secret agony of his abandonment by family to a life of toil, is articulated through David Copperfield. Repeatedly he states that he cannot express the full grief and shame of this time, which lasted for a few months, though to the child it might have seemed forever. What is new in fiction is the point of view of the child, alone and exploited, and the author’s recognition that the ‘slow agony of my youth’, as he calls it (ch. 11), lay behind much of his creativity, and is the force behind his sympathy for the poor, especially children, in his fiction.50 The implicit indictment of English society in David Copperfield for its neglect and maltreatment of children is underlined by the fact that by 1850, when the novel was published, Britain was producing half the world’s coal and iron, profiting from about two-thirds of all shipping, and involved in one-third of all trade. Yet, this wealth also expanded literacy and the book trade; economic confidence steadied the British reading public to confront its social failings, helping to drive public opinion and legislative reform.
The continent-wide revolutions of 1848–9 enhanced the sense of threat allegedly posed by the discontented poor. Though by now it was clear that Dickens’ social criticism harmed his reputation, he continued to explore the ‘Condition of England question’. In Hard Times (1854), he exposed the heartless systematization and regimentation by which Poor Law was administered, and in Our Mutual Friend (1864–5) attacked the Poor Law again. Like many other paupers, the aged Betty Higden refuses to live off the parish. She sews her burial money into her clothes to avoid the ignominy of a pauper’s burial. The river of death was preferable to the shame and terror of the poorhouse: ‘My breast is softer than the pauper-nurse’s; death in my arms is peacefuller than among the pauper-wards. Come to me!’51
Marx and revolution
From Oliver Twist to Felix Holt, bridging the two reform acts of 1832 and 1867, English fiction became a powerful instrument and reflection of unprecedented social, political, and educational change.52 This literature generally aimed for change within the existing system. Even when most outraged by injustice against the poor, Dickens did not call for the overthrow of the government. Thomas Carlyle, who coined the expression ‘condition of England’ in Past and Present (1843), warned that reform was needed to stop laissez-faire policies and neglect of the poor from triggering revolution.53 Karl Marx, a younger contemporary of Dickens, was mostly concerned with the same social problems as Dickens and Carlyle, at the same time and place, and with similar outrage, particularly against child labor.54 Marx, while acknowledging that England was unusual in having taken large-scale political measures against pauperism, shared with many writers and thinkers of his time revulsion at the 1834 New Poor Law. In 1844, he attributed this legislation to a mistaken parliamentary view that ‘pauperism is a misfortune which is the workers’ own fault, and which for that reason is not to be prevented, as a calamity, but is rather to be suppressed, to be punished, as a crime … [England] administers only that pauperism which is desperate enough to be captured and locked up’.55 The comparison between the workhouse and the prison was not exaggerated: the two were comparable in appearance and regime. Yet the worker’s home was often worse than the workhouse or prison: it resembled a cave, mortuary, and sewer, from which he could be thrown out if he did not pay the rent.56 To Marx, Poor Law generally was the further imprisonment of the innocent poor by the powerful: justice, science, and nature dictated that the victims – the workers – would ultimately rebel and gain freedom.
Marx’s view of the poor was built on an irony: since the Middle Ages, Christian Europe had betrayed the virtuous biblical image of the poor in Poor Law legislation which degraded the poor; Marx totally rejected religion – but in his socialist ideology he preserved the high biblical valuation of the poor and the low biblical valuation of the rich. Unlike the ‘Condition of England’ novelists, Marx was convinced that revolution, not legislative reform, would end the suffering of the workers. The doctrine of scientific inevitability in social relations can be seen as a fiction more fantastic than anything dreamed up by the 19th-century novelists; yet the passion driving this idea is unmistakeable. Marx’s rage and bitter sarcasm against employers – the hated capitalists – is most powerful where the victims are children.57 In page after devastating page of Capital, in the chapter on ‘The Working Day’, Marx attacks child labor in England: in agriculture, in the millinery, lace, pottery, baking, blacksmith, and wallpaper trades, in the foul business of making matches, in the spinning mills, and in steel and iron, among others. Other countries, including Germany, the United States, France, and Austria, are no better. Like a biblical prophet scourging those who hurt the defenseless widow and orphan, Marx condemns the factory owners: cannibal-like they devour the workers. In imagery recalling the opening diatribe in the book of Isaiah, Marx describes capitalism as ‘soiled with mire from top to toe, and oozing blood from every pore’.58 There is an element of conventional anti-Semitism in Marx’s hatred of capitalism as ‘Jewish’. Amid devastating statistics on child labor in England, Marx quotes from the court scene in Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice in which Shylock, the archetypal capitalist, insists on his pound of flesh:
‘My deeds upon my head! I crave the law,/ The penalty and forfeit of my bond.’ … The factory owners claimed, and secured the delight, not only of making children of 8 toil without a break from 2 to 8.30 p.m., but also of making them go without food during this period. ‘… Ay, his breast; So says the bond.’59
Marx’s ideology blinds him to realities which Victorian fiction accepts. Novelists share Marx’s passion for social justice and his sympathy for the workers, but they also at times extend this sympathy to factory owners: Dickens, for example, in Hard Times; Elizabeth Gaskell in North and South, Charlotte Brontë in Shirley, or Hugo in Les Misérables and Zola in Germinal. Marx stands out in total lack of compromise. In Capital, he never describes a factory owner in a positive light. There is no embrace of capitalism and labor, as in the climactic scene of Mary Barton, or a softening of heartless, Fact-driven capitalist enterprise, as in Hard Times. In Marx’s theory, capitalism is absolutely evil though in practice, he admitted fleetingly and not without sarcasm in Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, capitalism had its benefits: ‘Everything which the political economist takes from you in life and in humanity, he replaces for you in money and in wealth.’60 As Lazarus is superior to Dives in the Gospels, humanity to Marx is greater than money; capitalist greed shows ‘contempt of man’.61 His theory is therefore inscribed in stone: there is eternal enmity between ‘capitalist exploiters’ and workers; capitalists are motivated mainly by greed and the exploitative urge; the workers must take charge of production and destroy their exploiters before they are worked to death. Had English working conditions continued to deteriorate after 1850, Marx’s assumption that revolution was imminent might have proven correct. The failed 1848 revolutions were followed by an age of unprecedented economic growth. Marx’s ideas appealed mainly to impoverished countries. In successful capitalist countries, economic success and legislative reform in the latter half of the 19th century, not socialist government, improved the life of the working class.62
Aspiration in the Victorian novel
Victorian fiction, unprecedentedly realistic in its portrayal of the poor, is essentially optimistic, with good reason. By the end of the Victorian era, workers’ conditions were far better than at its start, and improvements continued in the interwar period.63 Even Hardy, for all his fatalistic pessimism, suggests limited hope in his novels. His characters, with their various disabilities and entrapments, also possess intelligence and initiative to adapt. Hardy’s own life and career were proof of new opportunities to the lowly born, through education and government policy, to overcome or escape the anxieties of the old rural way of life. Even a boozy feckless migrant laborer such as Michael Henchard at the start of The Mayor of Casterbridge – a type that Poor Law was designed to persecute and crush – can become a respected leader. Among the poor in the bleak setting of industrial and rural Victorian England, aspiration was far more plausible than in the past. The great surge of wealth palpable in the powerful roar of industry, in the noisome water and air of the cities with the ever-presence of sickness and death, as a glittering empire spread globally, was felt everywhere in England in some form, even a terrifying distended churchyard, freezing and mist-shrouded on the remote south coast, in earshot of the convict-boats, depicted by Dickens in the opening of Great Expectations (1860–1). Dickens links an orphan child’s awareness of the overwhelming presence of death with criminality, the paradoxical, as-yet-unrecognized origin of his hopes in life. Pip’s position on death is comically surreal as he stands beside his five brothers, buried in a row, entertaining the belief that ‘they had all been born on their backs with their hands in their trousers-pockets’ (ch. 1). In the same churchyard, the escaped convict, Magwitch, is hiding, and Pip helps him in his ‘universal struggle’. Transported as a criminal, Magwitch makes his fortune as a sheep-farmer overseas. In Magwitch, ultimately Pip’s benefactor, Dickens struck a blow against popular conceptions of criminality enshrined in Poor Law, with a view of crime not as inherent or hereditary, and blameworthy, but as circumstantial and susceptible to reform; and the criminal deserving of sympathy and help. The child, as in Jesus’ parables, is the source of wisdom.
Hugo in Les Misérables makes much the same point at the same time, in characters such as the ex-convict, Jean Valjean and the prostitute, Fantine. Far from being inherently wicked and deserving of punishment, they are victims of poverty and potentially capable of doing much good for society. The same is true of Dostoyevsky’s Raskolnikov, in Crime and Punishment (1865), published three years after Les Misérables. Raskolnikov’s murder of the miserly old moneylender is indeed a crime deserving of punishment, which in the end he welcomes – but highly unlikely if he and his family were not desperately poor and vulnerable, driving him to a state of temporary madness. These works reflect a growing sociological understanding of crime as an inevitable consequence of poverty and injustice, and the punishment of the poor a form of crime. Henry Mayhew, in London Labour and the London Poor (III 429), compares the homeless and unemployed to manure scattered over the fields, to produce a plentiful yield – of crime!
* * * *
The unprecedented sympathy for the poor among 19th-century English middle-class novelists reflects awareness that, as science and technology grew, far more could be done than previously to reduce inequality. Their sympathy with the poor was at odds with popular and legislative perceptions of the poor as a menace, to be blamed and suppressed. The authority of Victorian writers was not confined to England: in particular, Dickens’ views on the poor spread wherever he was translated and read, particularly Russia where he was seen practically as ‘Russian’. In the long term, fiction such as Oliver Twist and David Copperfield proved a strong, enduring influence on public opinion and government policy.
In much 19th-century literature, as seen in the next chapter, conditions of the poor became a major literary concern: in France, writers such as Hugo and Zola were critics of social injustice agitating for legislative change; in Russia, too, the literary mainstream – including Dostoyevsky, Gogol, Turgenev, and others – spoke passionately for the poor, though they themselves came mostly from the landed nobility. This literature on the poor, particularly the rural peasantry, represents a major turning point in cultural history: a germinal, when the lives of the poor are no longer written on cigarette paper but in widely read and influential novels, poems, and plays.
Notes
1 Thompson (2013: 217).
2 Hobsbawm (1962: 306).
3 Tocqueville (1997: 17).
4 On the decline in the conditions of the rural poor from the time of Thomas Gray in the mid-18th century, see pp. 82, 93–4.
5 In The Age of Bronze (1823), Byron attacked the Corn Laws and satirized the landowners who, dominating the legislature, passed the laws to protect their profits, with no concern for the poor who suffered as a result. For descriptions of workers attacking factories in early 19th-century England, see Charlotte Brontë’s Shirley, Kingsley’s Alton Locke, Dickens’ Barnaby Rudge, and George Eliot’s Felix Holt, the Radical. Several weeks after Byron’s speech, on March 11, 1812, the prime minister, Spencer Perceval, was assassinated: feeling against the government was so strong that there was widespread approval of this murder, and the Luddites in particular acclaimed the assassin as a hero.
6 See Marchand (1957: 319).
7 Ibid., 320–1. Thomas Paine, in The Rights of Man (1792: pt. 2, ch. 5), makes a similar point, asking, ‘Why is it, that scarcely any are executed but the poor?’ On this and parallel texts, see pp. 79, 86 note 10. John Clare attacks English law in ‘Rich and Poor; Or Saint and Sinner’ (1821). See p. 124.
8 Compare Heine’s poem on the striking Silesian weavers, ‘Die Schlesischen Weber’ (1840), with its threefold curse against a useless God, the heartless ‘king of the rich’ (der könig der Reichen), and Germany herself, false, corrupt, and shamed: ‘Old Germany, we are weaving your shroud’ (Altdeutschen, wir weben dein Leichentuch).
9 A criticism of Adam Smith, the leading economist of the 18th century (some would say, thereafter as well), is that he does not give sufficient attention to the fact that free trade can impoverish as well as enrich; his picture of the helpless poor exciting pity, in Theory of Moral Sentiments, is typical of what Blake abhorred in relations between the classes.
10 On the social background to The Song of Los, see Bronowski (1972: 97–9).
11 On sweeps, see Jackson (2014: ch. 9). The horror of being a sweep is conveyed by Dickens in Oliver Twist (1837–9), when the parish nearly apprentices the nine-year-old Oliver to a sweep who clearly intends to work him to death. Parliamentary laws protecting sweeps were often ignored: as late as 1862 a group of five boys was employed to sweep the 900 chimneys of the Houses of Parliament, in contravention of laws which Parliament had passed! (Jackson 2014: 220).
12 On Adam Smith and the influence of laissez-faire economics, see pp. 83–4.
13 David Ricardo, the leading English economist of the early 19th century, opposed spending on the poor as he opposed all forms of public spending, fearing this would encourage excessive population growth and force more expenditure at the public expense (King 2013).
14 Blake’s condemnation of Malthus is echoed in Marx who in 1865 wrote that the Essay on Population is ‘a libel on the human race’ (Meek 1957: 18), a view shared by Dickens. The character of Mr. Micawber in David Copperfield is a living challenge to Malthusianism: ‘He is the personification of unthrift; he goes on begetting children for whom he cannot provide; he refuses to toe the misery-line; he accepts charitable loans that he cannot possibly hope to repay; he finally has to emigrate on someone else’s money; yet Dickens loves him beyond words’ (House 1969: 84). On Dickens, see p. 98ff. William Cobbett, in the 1832 Appendix to Rural Rides, expresses disdain for Malthusians, ‘constantly at work preaching content to the hungry and naked. To be sure, they themselves, however, are not content to be hungry and naked’.
15 On the government report that led to the New Poor Law of 1834, see Fraser (2009). The image of the poor changed as statistical urban studies showed that environmental factors, not the alleged moral dereliction of the poor, were the chief causes of poverty (see Fraser 2009: 78–9; also Williams 1987: ch. 5; Lees 1998: ch. 7; Jackson 2014).
16 The stories of Harriet Martineau, a disciple of Thomas Malthus, in Poor Laws and Paupers (1832–4) written at the time of the fierce debates leading to the New Poor Law of 1834, convey more the burdens of the rate-payers as the rates increased than the struggles of the poor to survive. The ‘honest poor’, writes Martineau, work ever harder for ever-decreasing wages while their unscrupulous neighbors simply ask and get what they want from the parish (ibid., The Parish, 55, 114, 122–3).
17 Chartism: a working-class movement which began in reaction to worsening factory conditions in the 1830s and the New Poor Law of 1834. In 1837 the London Working Men’s Association published a People’s Charter calling for votes for every man at 21, the ballot, no property qualifications for members of Parliament, payment for MPs, equal constituencies, and annual Parliaments; though Chartism failed in its period of greatest activism in the late 1830s and 1840s, all its demands, except the last, later became parliamentary law. In Gaskell’s Mary Barton (1848), John Barton is a Chartist leader. See p. 190.
18 See Lees (1998: 113f.). Even champions of the poor, such as Gaskell and Zola, suggest that the poor are at times guilty of improvidence, and their suffering did not always rouse compassion. Victorian evangelical moralism ‘half-welcomed epidemics as the natural desert of workers who had crowded into towns in the hope of higher wages’ (Hilton 2006: 588). On the more positive revaluation of the urban poor in the period 1860–90, see Lees (1998: ch. 7).
19 Mokyr (2009: 440, 444–5).
20 On the effects of the New Poor Law, see Hilton (2006: 588ff.). In the 1830s, when England went through its worst depression of the 19th century, and the poor were most vulnerable, spending on poor relief dropped by 35% (ibid., 596). Yet, the impression of comparative harshness of the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834 is somewhat exaggerated as the previous Poor Act was in many ways equally harsh, if not more so, and hostility toward the poor was greatest during the Napoleonic wars 20 or 30 years previously (ibid., 596–7). By the 1840s, the unprecedented wealth and imperial power of Great Britain reached the point where the nation was capable of being shocked and of responding with effective legislative action, leading to substantial social change.
21 Quoted by Brantlinger (1977: 12–13).
22 In an article on ‘The Dorsetshire Labourer’ (1883), Hardy observed that the Industrial Revolution made the plight of the poor worse, though the effects of industry on the landscape of southern England were less apparent than in the north.
23 Tomalin (2006: 11). A similar sense of the separate worlds of those who worked the land and those who owned it is conveyed in literature of other countries, for example by Turgenev in Sketches of a Huntsman, Zola in Germinal, Silone in Fontamara, and Steinbeck in The Grapes of Wrath.
24 On the depiction of people as animals in Zola’s Germinal (1885), see p. 191.
25 On industrial growth and the Great Depression in late 19th-century rural England, see Kramer (1991) and Turner in Floud and Johnson (2004: 141–3). As in the north, the poor tended to be harmed by farming and industrial change before it brought them benefit. In Tess of the D’Urbervilles, threshing machines destroy an entire way of life, and farmers are reduced to cutting swedes as a last resort for survival.
26 On effects of environmental degradation on the poor from the time of the Industrial Revolution as reflected in literature, see Chapter 9.
27 Ackroyd (1993: 406). On the extraordinary improvements in public health in 19th-century London, when its population rose from one to six million, see Jackson (2014).
28 On changes in English society brought about by parliamentary reform, and reflected in its culture, see Cannadine (2017). Illustrating the growing literacy among the working class, and a growing market for Condition of England novels, is the fact that in 1839, the Chartist Northern Star had a weekly circulation of over 60,000 (Hobsbawm 1962: 157).
29 Though a simplification in the sense that England was not as divided as its writers described it (see Cannadine 2017: 207), Disraeli’s observation in Sybil (Book II, Chapter 5) of the gulf between rich and poor in Victorian England may be applied more generally, for the extremes of wealth and poverty ‘exist in the world as a whole and constitute one of its gravest problems’ (Blake 1969: 213).
30 Until the time of Dickens, knowledge of sanitation and hygiene was little better than in the biblical age. Queen Victoria’s husband, Albert, was a victim of poor sanitation: rich and poor alike shared the consequences of ignorance. On Dr. John Snow’s pamphlet during the cholera epidemic in London in 1849, see p. 187. On the history of sanitary reform in London, see Jackson (2014).
31 Dickens’ polarization of Fancy and Fact, heart and head, compassion and calculation, in Hard Times, might have been influenced in part by Gaskell’s Mary Barton, particularly the moral summing-up by the old Manchester laborer, Job Legh: ‘them that is strong in any of God’s gifts is meant to help the weak – be hanged to the facts!’ (ch. 37).
32 On the importance of women’s education in the fight against poverty, see p. 6.
33 In the years 1793–1815, British exports expanded at a rate of 3.8% per annum, more than any time before or after (May 1995: 51).
34 It is estimated that the cost of poor relief rose from about two million pounds in 1784 to seven million pounds in 1832, over ten shillings per head of the population, which had risen from about ten million to 15 million during this period. See May (1995: 135) and Fraser (2009: 50). In fact, seven million pounds was less than 2% of the GNP (May 1995: 136), but there was much resistance to this increase in a population unaccustomed to income tax, which began only in 1799. Resistance to the increased parish rates and difficulty in payment are frequently noted in the sketches of Harriet Martineau in Poor Laws and Paupers (1832–4).
35 When David Copperfield was first published in 1849–50, there was a society in England for the prevention of cruelty to animals, but nothing comparable for children. There was also not a single hospital for children, the first, at Great Ormond Street, to be established, with Dickens’ enthusiastic support, in 1852.
36 Victorian novelists recoil at violence to achieve reform, even when violence is a direct response to oppression. In Kingsley’s Alton Locke (1850), the Chartist tailor Alton Locke is jailed for three years after being involved in a riot, and is converted afterwards to Christian Socialism. Dickens, in Barnaby Rudge (1851), depicts a worker’s riot as the expression of a mindless mob. In contrast, Karl Marx, completing Capital (1867) at the time of the publication of Felix Holt, saw workers’ riots not as mindless violence but as their natural opposition internationally to exploitation and privation, leading inevitably to revolution.
37 In 1800 the vast majority in England earned less than 50 pounds a year (Hobsbawm 1962: 54); while among the rich in the novels of Jane Austen and Balzac, Piketty (2014: 413), observes, ‘With only 5–10 times the average, one barely survives’.
38 On Dickens’ fiction in the context of the growing awareness of poverty in the early industrial age, see Himmelfarb (1984).
39 On Oliver Twist as an expression of the Benthamite reformist culture of the 1830s, see Brantlinger (1977: 44ff.).
40 At the time Oliver Twist was written, in the late 1830s, hundreds of workhouses were built (Digby 1982: 16). The last one closed after World War II.
41 On the strict workhouse restrictions and regulations, see Lees (1998: 147ff.).
42 Dickens’ mockery of Malthusian, Utilitarian policies recurs in Dombey and Son (1846–8: ch. 57): Mrs. Miff, the pew-opener in the church where Mr. Dombey is married, exclaims to the more liberal Mr. Sownds, the Beadle, that she ‘can never understand what business your common folks have to be married’. To which Mr. Sownds replies, ‘We must marry ‘em, Ma’am, and keep the country going’.
43 Ackroyd (1993: 232).
44 In The Road to Wigan Pier (1937: ch. 5), George Orwell describes the ‘cruel and evil’ Means Test of the 1930s when, despite the Depression, working-class living conditions were far better than in Dickens’ time. The Church in Orwell’s time seems to have improved only insofar as it was less intrusive than in the past. Much Church authority was destroyed in World War I, as the Church on all sides had encouraged the slaughter ‘in God’s name’.
45 Dickens’ use of Scripture is notable for its irony. See for example his allusion in Hard Times, to Deuteronomy (15: 11) as quoted in the Gospels: ‘Utilitarian economists, skeletons of schoolmasters, Commissioners of Fact, genteel and used-up infidels, gabblers of many little dog’s-eared creeds, the poor you will have always with you’ (Book 2, ch. 6). On this biblical passage in the context of the general Scriptural view of the poor, see p. 30. Christian values in Dickens tend to be associated with the individual, not the religion. For example, in Hard Times, Sissy Jupe’s natural goodheartedness is not specifically Christian but is brought out in the classroom when she replies – incorrectly – to the question, What is Political Economy? with the Golden Rule: ‘To do unto others as I would that they should do unto me’ (Book 2, ch. 9). Through Sissy Jupe, Dickens mocks the utilitarian system of education based on cold facts, divorced from feeling and morality, Christian or otherwise: in school in Coketown, the children are asked to reckon the proportion of people who starve to death in the streets annually relative to the total population, when ‘only’ 25 starve, to which Sissy Jupe replies, rightly, that ‘it must be just as hard upon those who were starved, whether the others were a million, or a million million’ (ibid.).
46 The allegorical representations in A Christmas Carol of Ignorance and Want reappear in Les Misérables as foster-mothers of crime (Hugo 1983: 621).
47 On other literary responses to Malthus, see pp. 96–7, 121, 186.
48 Digby (1982: 17).
49 On child labor in English factories, see Fraser (2009: ch. 1). As a critic of social injustice, Dickens was influential in Russia, particularly on Dostoyevsky (Lary 1973). On Russian writers on poverty, see pp. 126–36. Child exploitation in Russian factories is not evident in Russian literature at the time of David Copperfield, as Russian industry at the time lagged behind Western Europe. By the late 19th century, when Russia began to catch up, exploited and suffering children in factories enter Russian literature, notable in The Brothers Karamazov (1880, Book 6, Chapter 3). Dmitri is a mouthpiece for the author in declaring that there must be no more torturing of children, for what children need is sunshine, play, good education, and love. On this passage, see p. 126. A remarkable Russian story about an exploited, beaten child is Chekhov’s ‘Little Jack’ (1886), told in the words of a child of nine who has lost his parents and been apprenticed to a cruel shoemaker.
50 Somewhat similarly, Thomas de Quincey, in Confessions of an English Opium Eater (1821), describes the London poor most immediately as background to his personal development – but not, as in Dickens, as a social scandal requiring urgent reform.
51 Our Mutual Friend (Book I, Chapter 8). Dickens sums up his view of the Poor Law definitively in the Postscript to Our Mutual Friend: ‘I believe there has been in England, since the days of the Stuarts, no law so often infamously administered, no law so often openly violated, no law habitually so ill-supervised.’ Destitution and hunger often led to despair, writes the poet, A.J. Munby, in his diary of July 1864 (1972: 199): in St. James’ Park, facing the prime minister’s residence in Downing Street, dozens of people lay on the ground, exhausted and sick, with nowhere to go: ‘it was Dante and Virgil gazing on the damned’. Next to Parliament, under the arches of Westminster Bridge, men and women slept at night, the writer W.H. Davies recalled (1911: 84, 85) after his rescue from this life. See p. 178.
52 On English literature and politics during the Reform era, 1832–67, see Brantlinger (1977).
53 On Carlyle’s fears for revolution, see p. 98.
54 On Marx and his literary contemporaries, see Aberbach (2018a).
55 Marx (1994: 103, 104).
56 Marx (1964: 148–9).
57 As editor of the Rheinische Zeitung, Marx published parts of what became Engels’ critique of English industrialism in The Condition of the English Working Class in 1844 (first published in German in 1845), which highlights the cruelties of child labor, the facts that over half of working-class children did not reach the age of five, and that within a few years virtually all the survivors were working in factories: ‘It is unpardonable to take children from school and the fresh air, in order to exploit them for the benefit of the manufacturers [um sie zum Vorteil der Herren Fabrikanten auszubeuten]’ (in Marcus 1974: 217). Thompson concludes in his survey of child labor in England in The Making of the English Working Class (1967) that the exploitation of children, especially during the period 1780–1840, ‘was one of the most shameful events in our history’ (2013: 384).
58 Marx (1934: 555, 843).
59 Ibid., 293–4.
60 Marx (1964: 150).
61 Ibid., 156.
62 Marx’s theories, somewhat like Scripture, have greatest influence in conditions of poverty. When poverty is overcome, it seems that both divinely ordained biblical love of the poor and atheist revolutionary socialism tend to diminish.
63 See Eichengreen (2004). A sign of improvement in living conditions, as seen in Chapter 8, was the increasing interest in the poor among writers, such as Jack London and George Orwell, who chose to live among the poor in order to understand how they lived.