6

Germinal: Peasants and literature in England, Russia, and France

we have all of us one human heart.

(Wordsworth, ‘The Old Cumberland Beggar’ (1797))

The poor become a subject of serious literature in the late 18th century. The Industrial Revolution and the French Revolution both victimized them and released them from feudal conditions, imprisoned them in factories and also gave them new opportunities for individual and collective betterment. The Industrial Revolution in many ways worsened living conditions, though factories also protected workers from the cold and provided a centralized space in which, as benevolent owners such as Robert Owen showed, they could be decently housed, fed, clothed, and generally looked after. The concentration of large numbers of former peasants in growing industrial towns increased their vulnerability to exploitation but also their educational opportunities – and their power to unite to defend their interests.

To those who wrote of impoverished rural people – such as Wordsworth in England, Hugo in France, Turgenev in Russia, Silone in Italy, Steinbeck in America – culture was not a monopoly of the rich, nor was poetic eloquence confined to the upper classes. The peasant origins of some writers, notably Clare and Shevchenko, argued respect for the voice of the poor. Their poetry is outspoken in its political aims: justice to the poor and provision for their needs; and implicitly, too, the need to give them representation in government. As the majority of the population, the poor were not indolent and useless, as often charged, but, if given a chance, capable of enterprise, invention, and achievement. In this positive view of the poor, 19th-century writers broke with medieval stereotypes and helped create a more enlightened view of the poor in the modern state. That peasants could be artists on a level comparable with the great well-born writers of their time, even aristocrats such as Ivan Turgenev, highlighted the gap between rich and poor, privilege and struggle, plenty and privation, idle comfort and toil. Writers who did not have to worry about making a living could choose whether or not to write about the poor – Austen did not, Turgenev did. Peasant writers had no need to search for a subject: they had infinite scope in the beauty and cruelty of the natural world of which they were a part, the privations and injustices they suffered, and the narrowness of their lives which they strove in their art to broaden and enrich, with political action often their goal.

In pre-1789 literature, winter marks a wide gulf between rich and poor: the poor must to struggle and suffer to survive while the rich can wait it out. For the rich more than the poor, literature and the arts are winter diversions. Shakespeare, in Love’s Labour’s Lost, recalls the afflictions of winter among those who, like the shepherd, the woodcutter, and the milkmaid, must continue to work outdoors:

When icicles hang by the wall,

And Dick the shepherd blows his nail

And Tom bears logs into the hall,

And milk comes frozen home in pail …

Coleridge, in ‘A Lay Sermon’ (1817), is dismayed at the sight of Dorset children in summer who still bear the effects of the hard winter, ‘each with its little shoulders up to its ears, and its chest pinched inward, the very habit and fixtures, as it were, that had been impressed on their frames by the former ill-fed, ill-clothed, and unfuelled winters’.¹ The poor who escape the ravages of winter suffer in other ways: overcrowded living conditions, hungry, ragged children, ignorance, poor sanitation and hygiene, unemployment, economic deprivation and debt – this is Walter Scott’s portrayal of Scotland in historical novels such as Rob Roy (1818), largely identical with poverty elsewhere, only worse. In such conditions, literacy and the arts could have little meaning. Scott brings out the debasement of Scottish poverty in such details as the use of a piece of split fir instead of a candle, a single broken glass drunk from by an entire family, or a hen-coop or broken tub for a chair. Scott’s concern for the poor was characteristic of the Romantic movement.² By the early 19th century, the poor had lost many of their traditional rights: laissez-faire political economy replaced the old ‘moral economy’: ‘The rich have become richer, and the poor have become poorer’, lamented Shelley in A Defence of Poetry (1821). The long war with France was followed by economic depression.³ In his Political Register and in Rural Rides (1830), on the south of England in the 1820s, the essayist William Cobbett describes his shock at the effects of inflation, unemployment, and malnutrition, the demoralization, dilapidation, and decay. There was much resentment against landowners, who squeezed the poor for taxes they were unable to pay: ‘The clock was gone; the brass kettle was gone; the pewter dishes were gone; the warming pan was gone; the Sunday-coat was gone! All was gone.’⁴ England, ‘this other Eden’, was often a hell for the poor. Economic crisis bred radicalism. In 1830–2, there were riots throughout England, protesting enclosures, poor wages, and the mechanization of labor – ‘th’ ruin of poor folk’ (Mary Barton, ch. 18) – particularly threshing machines, which put men out of work.

Wordsworth and the biblical spirit

To Wordsworth, the rise of industry and changes in late 18th-century rural society corrupted sacred principles: the rural poor, part of the landscape, were no less human for being poor.⁵ Yet whereas Blake saw religion as part of the problem of poverty, Wordsworth experienced religion as social inspiration and mitigator of poverty. Biblical principles were familiar in a society which still to a large extent treated the Bible as a blueprint for life.⁶ Wordsworth understood the need of the poor, too, to give, and not merely be objects of charity:⁷

… the poorest poor

Long for some moments in a weary life

When they can know and feel that they have been,

Themselves, the fathers and the dealers-out

Of some small blessings; have been kind to such

As needed kindness, for this single cause,

That we have all of us one human heart.

The poet’s sense of unity with suffering humankind continues in the long poem, Margaret or The Ruined Cottage, written around the same time as ‘The Old Cumberland Beggar’ (1797). The Ruined Cottage shows how a rural family slides inexorably to poverty, as war and famine take their toll, and there is no one to help.

There are many biblical echoes, for example to the passage from the Psalms (103: 16) depicting human life as brief as grass or a flower or a breath of wind. In time of trouble the rich become poor, and the poor suffer, die and are quickly forgotten, until ‘their place knew them not’:⁸

You may remember, now some ten years gone

Two blighting seasons when the fields were left

With half a harvest. – It pleased Heaven to add

A worse affliction in the plague of war,

A happy land was stricken to the heart.

A dearth was in the land. They were hard times,

A wanderer among the cottages

I with my pack of winter raiment, saw

What the poor suffered – Many of the rich

Sunk down as in a dream among the poor

And of the poor did many cease to be

And their place knew them not.

Wordsworth stresses the humanity of the poor: as in Scripture, they embody the divine image. The poet admires Margaret for her virtues and strength, her devotion to her family and her faith. As in the Aramaic prayer for the dead, the Kaddish, in which God is praised ‘above all blessing, song, praise, and consolation’, the story of Margaret teaches the profundity of life beyond human understanding: ‘consolation springs from sources far than deepest pain’. Wordsworth takes from the Bible, above all, a view of the poor as human beings in the eyes of God, revered for their dignity.⁹ He had himself been left relatively poor after the early death of his parents, when he was separated from his siblings. His sympathy was with those worse off than himself, and he sought fortitude in their stoicism. In poems such as ‘The Brothers’ and Michael, Wordsworth commemorates the rapidly disappearing independent small landowners in the north of England. When in 1802, he sent a copy of Lyrical Ballads to the renowned parliamentary reformer, Charles James Fox, he singled out these poems as examples of loss of independence, the ‘greatest curse’ in contemporary England.¹⁰ The two shepherds in ‘The Brothers’, orphaned of their mother, lead an isolated, precarious life, like their ancestors centuries past:

A sharp May storm

Will come with loads of January snow,

And in one night send twenty score of sheep

To feed the ravens…

Knit to their native soil, the shepherds are part of the landscape: ‘Like roebucks they went bounding o’er the hills;/ they played like two young ravens on the crags’. But they are ‘the last of their race’. Their father dies, the house, land, and flock are all sold: one brother goes to sea, hoping to make a fortune and regain the estate; the other dies in an accident. Similarly, Michael in the poem named for him is the end of the line in a way of life going back centuries. He is a shepherd in his eighties, helped by his son Luke. His wife spins wool and flax at home. Forced to sell, Michael sends his son to a wealthy kinsman, hoping his success will save the family estate. In the city, Luke is tempted to evil ways. In Michael, as in Wordsworth’s other poems, Nature is not a place of ugliness, horror, and wild beasts, but of God-given beauty, wisdom, and healing – in contrast with the industrialized city, its water and air polluted together with its morals.¹¹ Nature is a healing balm for Michael’s heartbreak: ‘Among the rocks/ He went, and still looked up upon the sun,/ And listened to the wind’. He hoped to build a sheep-fold for Luke’s inheritance but leaves the work unfinished when he dies.

Wordsworth knew the biblical laws of charity, for instance that a millstone must not be taken as pledge, and a cloak given as a pledge must be returned at dusk (Deuteronomy 24: 6, 10–13). In this spirit, Wordsworth wrote the ballad of ‘Alice Fell’ or ‘Poverty’ (1802):

… a little Girl I found,

Sitting behind the chaise, alone.

‘My cloak!’ No other word she spake,

But loud and bitterly she wept,

As if her innocent heart would break;

And down from off her seat she leapt.

‘What ails you, child?’ – she sobbed, ‘Look there!’

I saw it in the wheel entangled,

A weather-beaten rag as e’er

From any garden scare-crow dangled.¹²

This incident was based on an actual encounter with a little girl, recorded in the Grasmere Journal of Wordsworth’s sister, Dorothy, on February 16, 1802: ‘She had got up behind the chaise, and her cloak had been caught by the wheel, and was jammed in, and it hung there. She was crying after it. Poor thing.’ Wordsworth’s sensitivity to the poor recalls the biblical injunction that the solitary cloak of a poor man must be returned to him at night so that he can wrap himself in it against the cold.¹³ Dorothy Wordsworth, whose journals were a source for his poetry, was similarly compassionate, perhaps even more than Wordsworth responsive to the biblical exhortation to give to the poor.¹⁴ On May 4, 1802, at the time Wordsworth was writing ‘The Leech-Gatherer’ (also known as ‘Resolution and Independence’), Dorothy described in her journal an encounter with an half-starved, enraged, and grieving mother searching with her small children for the husband who has abandoned them. This woman was a child in Cockermouth when Dorothy and William lived there as children, in the 1770s.¹⁵ Scenes such as these fill Wordsworth’s poetry and mark him a radical. Inspired by the egalitarian spirit of the French Revolution, which he witnessed in 1792–3, Wordsworth understood that the poor, suffering more than the rich, know more about endurance and independence – an insight recurrent in the literature on the poor, in Dickens and Chekhov, Zola and Steinbeck. To Wordsworth, the rural poor, threatened by progress, were better off exposed to the health-giving properties of Nature than to the tender mercies of the state. Though the poet states that ‘I wish either to be considered as a Teacher, or as nothing’,¹⁶ the poor were in fact his own teachers. The character on which the poem ‘The Leech-Gatherer’ is based, for example, teaches the poet to value life for its own sake: ‘“A lonely place, a pond by which an old man was” – not stood, not sat, but was’, as he wrote to Sara Hutchinson on June 14, 1802.¹⁷ The rock-like fortitude of the leech-gatherer is ‘apt admonishment’, giving the poet strength to face his suicidal depression and overcome it:

I could have laughed myself to scorn to find

In that decrepit Man so firm a mind.

‘God’, said I, ‘be my help and stay secure;

I’ll think of the Leech-gatherer on the lonely moor.’

As we have seen, Wordsworth’s empathy with the poor was strikingly at odds with the history of English legislation on the poor, driven (as was legislation in other countries) more by fear of vagrancy, crime, and parasitism, than by Christian love and leading to rehabilitation. Poets embraced the poor; legislators made brooms to sweep the poor away. Whereas the New Poor Law of 1834 represents a failure of ideology and the nadir in the treatment of the poor, who were often made to feel like criminals, Victorian writers responding to the poor, especially Dickens, follow the biblical Wordsworth in his compassion, sharing the ‘one human heart’.

Wordsworth the radical

As Shakespeare did in the 1590s, Wordsworth wrote of the poor amid heated parliamentary debate over poor relief at a time of war and military crisis. His poetry sweeps away the parasitic image of the poor and restores a biblical spirit of sympathy. Unlike Cowper in The Task or Smith in The Wealth of Nations, Wordsworth never suggests in his poetry that the poor have chosen poverty, that beggars are parasites, or that begging is an unacceptable exercise of free will. It is, perhaps, no accident that two peaks of English poetry on the poor – King Lear and the Lyrical Ballads – are associated with major parliamentary legislation on the poor. The so-called Old Poor Law, the chief legislative achievement of the Elizabethan era, was in force until the much-reviled New Poor Act of 1834, a delayed but inevitable reaction to urban population growth and the increased costs of poor relief over the previous half-century. In the age of Wordsworth, the English poor could claim, ‘They ne’er cared for us yet’ – the charge of starving Romans in Coriolanus – that they were abandoned by their rulers – but not by their poets. Wordsworth was the leading Romantic poet of the poor, a poet of rural beggars and indigents, of protest and outrage, inspiring later English writers, including Clare, Dickens, and Orwell, who reacted strongly against the humiliation of the poor and demanded social justice.¹⁸ In his autobiographical poem, The Prelude, begun at a time of increasing poverty in England, Wordsworth describes his visit to France in 1792, when he passed a cold and hungry child on the road. To undo such injustice the Revolution was necessary, and at this moment he felt

That a benignant spirit was abroad

Which might not be withstood, that poverty

Abject as this would in a little time

Be found no more, that we should see the earth

Unthwarted in her wish to recompense

The meek, the lowly, patient child of toil …¹⁹

The French Revolution turned Wordsworth into a radical. Outraged by an anti-revolutionary sermon of 1791 by the Bishop of Llandaff arguing that the advantages of the rich over the poor were natural,²⁰ Wordsworth, then 23, wrote a reply (not published in his lifetime), declaring that ‘the extremes of poverty and riches have a necessary tendency to corrupt the human heart’; there was need for ‘a system of universal representation’ and ‘the suffrage of every individual’. Speaking as a poet, not in the name of Christianity, Wordsworth affirms the virtue of the poor.²¹ A society’s failure to reduce inequality justifies revolution such as that in France.²² Wordsworth was strongly aware, however, that war with France was economically disastrous to the poor. Between 1793 and 1813 prices doubled; there were food riots from 1795 to 1801.²³ The General Enclosures Act of 1801, limiting public land to which the poor had access, worsened their conditions. Wordsworth responded to this social distress and to its revolutionary potential: ‘the final years of the eighteenth century were a last desperate effort by the people to recompose the older moral economy as against the economy of the free market’.²⁴ Though the poor everywhere were badly housed and fed, the rural north of England, which Wordsworth knew best, was less vulnerable to extremes of poverty than the south. Northern industrial towns created jobs for the poor in the nearby countryside and kept wages up. Yet, wartime shortages led to increased claims for relief. Parishes were hard-pressed in the face of large-scale opposition by taxpayers. In 1795, the controversial Speenhamland poor relief system began, by which low wages were topped up by parish aid (with the weakness that some employers were now reluctant to pay a fair wage).

Wordsworth saw many of the rural poor forced by hunger off their land into factories, a crisis worsened by war with France after the Revolution. Alarmed by the effects on the poor of the war with France and the Industrial Revolution, he engraves them in his poetry as an indomitable part of the landscape, part of Nature; not a problem to be solved or a threat to be suppressed. Despite the war with France, there was widespread sympathy in England for the Revolution. Wordsworth’s poetry addresses popular concern at the time over the rising number of poor people. Much English literature in the 1790s was poetry of social protest.²⁵ Wordsworth, starting from Adventures on Salisbury Plain (1795), depicted the poor as evidence of social failure:

‘Tis a bad world, and hard is the world’s law;

Each prowls to strip his brother of his fleece …

This poem, based partly on Wordsworth’s observation of poverty during a walking tour across Salisbury Plain in 1793, was the most openly radical of all his poems, influenced by his recent stay in revolutionary France and Godwin’s Political Justice (1793). The narrator, the poet’s mouthpiece for the evils of English society and the desperate conditions of the poor, is a sailor driven by poverty to robbery and murder. He tells of the many who are homeless; the heartlessness of the rich and powerful; penal laws and enclosures; disgraceful public hospitals; and the effects of war with France, which Wordsworth was sure from the start ‘would be of long continuance, and productive of distress and misery beyond all possible calculation’ (‘Advertisement’ to Guilt and Sorrow). While living in the West Country (1795–7), Wordsworth abandoned his plan to become a mathematician. He chose poetry instead.²⁶ At this time, harvests were failing, and the war with France caused further privation. The price of staples – oats, bread, and potatoes – went up dangerously, as did costs of poor relief. At this time –

A time of trouble; shoals of artisans

Were from their daily labour turned away

To hang for bread on parish charity.

(The Ruined Cottage)

– Wordsworth chose to be a poet of the suffering poor, of social rejects such as the mad mother, the distraught sailor, Simon Lee, Goody Blake, Alice Fell, the old Cumberland beggar, forsaken women, convicts, vagrants, outcasts, and many others. This was a time not of ‘emotion recollected in tranquillity’ but of social inequity and anxiety. The poet’s letters and his sister Dorothy’s journal describe the wretched poverty and ignorance of the country people and their homes, not far different from those of savages. Dorothy gives vivid accounts of encounters with the poor: for example, a young widow who has also recently lost three of her children; a half-mad old beggar; a child beggar; a barefoot beggar-woman with a two-year child; a legless soldier; and, the basis of ‘The Leech-Gatherer’, an old beggar bent double who has lost most of his family and lives by gathering leeches (then used for medicinal purposes).

In 1798, as conditions worsened, the clergyman Thomas Malthus published Essay on Population, arguing that population increase meant an increase in hunger. In the same year, Wordsworth and Coleridge published Lyrical Ballads. Many poems in Lyrical Ballads depict the poor realistically, in direct English closer at times to prose than poetry. In ‘The Baker’s Cart’, a baker does not stop his cart outside a poor woman’s door – he knows she has no money to feed her children. ‘The Last of the Flock’, like ‘The Baker’s Cart’ based on an eyewitness incident, has for its narrator an impoverished man with ten children who, because he has a flock of sheep, is denied parish relief and forced to sell to buy bread. In ‘Goody Blake and Harry Gill’, an old woman, poorly clothed and fed, lives alone in her Dorsetshire cottage, unable to buy fuel to warm herself in winter: coal is dear for it must be imported ‘by wind and tide’. Plain poetry depicts her. Goody Blake works long hours in her cottage, earning little:

All day she spun in her poor dwelling,

And then her three hours’ work at night!

Alas! ‘twas hardly worth the telling,

It would not pay for candle-light.

Wordsworth admires the poor for their fortitude, their emotional honesty and plain-spokenness. In his 1800 Preface to Lyrical Ballads, he stresses that he chose to write about the rural poor, as they are more in touch with their feelings than the well-to-do, and more eloquent than the well-educated. Government, the poet observes scathingly in ‘The Old Cumberland Beggar’, regards the poor as a trouble to society to be swept trash-like into the workhouse or the grave; the poor were, in fact, a vital part of society, an incentive to goodness. Cockermouth, Wordsworth’s birthplace in the Lake District, had a workhouse which drew the poor from outlying rural areas. Wordsworth saw many poor solitary wanderers rousing charitable feelings among those who knew them.²⁷ The old Cumberland beggar is a familiar type in a rural world of small parishes:

Him from my childhood have I known, and then

He was so old, he seems not older now;

He travels on, a solitary man,

So helpless in appearance, that for him

The sauntering horseman-traveller does not throw

With careless hands his alms upon the ground,

But stops, that he may safely lodge the coin

Within the old man’s hat; nor quits him so,

But still when he has given the horse the rein

Towards the aged beggar turns a look,

Sidelong and half-reverted. She who tends

The toll gate, when in summer at her door

She turns her wheel, if on the road she sees

The aged beggar coming, quits her work,

And lifts the latch for him that he may pass.

The post-boy when his rattling wheels o’ertake

The aged beggar, in the woody lane,

Shouts to him from behind, and, if perchance

The old man does not change his course, the boy

Turns with less noisy wheels to the road-side,

And passes gently by, without a curse

Upon his lips, or anger at his heart.²⁸

Wordsworth is not celebrating sentimentally the life of the open road,²⁹ but responding to the divine in the impoverished individual. The small vital acts of charity and love, forming a unique bond between beggar and society, are undermined by legislation. Poor Law, in Wordsworth’s view, robbed the poor of dignity and the better-off of the chance to fulfill the biblical charitable ideal.³⁰

To Wordsworth, true charity lies in personal relations – not the workhouse or soup-kitchen.³¹ He was well-aware of the dark, dirty, crowded conditions of many workhouses, prison-like structures depicted by Crabbe in The Village (1783). Wordsworth defends the beggar against the charge of uselessness:

… deem not this Man useless – Statesmen! ye

Who are so restless in your wisdom, ye

Who have a broom still ready in your hands

To rid the world of nuisances; ye proud,

Heart-swoln, while in your pride ye contemplate

Your talents, power, or wisdom, deem him not

A burthen of the earth!

In his concern for the disruption and break-up of family life by industrialization, taxation, and inflation – ‘a rapid decay of the domestic affections among the lower orders of society’, as he described it in a letter of January 14, 1801, to the prominent Whig leader, Charles James Fox – Wordsworth anticipated Marx’s attack on factories and their owners for adding social alienation to the woes of the poor.³² Wordsworth also had much sympathy for the mentally and physically disabled. In a letter to John Wilson in 1802, he defended his poem ‘The Idiot Boy’ in Lyrical Ballads, which repulsed some readers. Common people did not have a ‘false delicacy’ toward such children, they were not disgusted and unwilling to look after them; they did not lack understanding and feeling. The rich could send their children to be cared for privately or in asylums; the poor could not do so and, having to keep these children at home (as the mother does in ‘The Idiot Boy’), learned to care for them and love them unreservedly.³³

Wordsworth, following Rousseau and Blake, emphasizes that children are individuals in their own right (including the poet himself in The Prelude); and the poet’s view of children (for example, in the poem ‘We are Seven’ and ‘Alice Fell’) is an implicit attack on child exploitation, universal at the time of the French Revolution. After Wordsworth and Blake, it was impossible for writers to ignore impoverished children as in the past: among these are De Quincey (Confessions of an English Opium Eater), Dickens (Oliver Twist), Hugo (Les Misérables), Dostoyevsky (Crime and Punishment), Zola (Germinal), and Steinbeck (The Grapes of Wrath).

Peasant-poets: Clare and Shevchenko

Wordsworth’s younger contemporaries, the Northumberland poet, John Clare, and the Ukrainian poet, Taras Shevchenko, represent a turning point after 1789, in the growing capacity of the poor to depict themselves in art. Apart from their background among the rural poor, what links Shevchenko to Clare, who lived on opposite sides of Europe and never heard of one another? Both poets knew poverty and the poor and gave the poor a voice as never before.³⁴ Shevchenko was born a serf under Tsarist Russian rule, in a feudal system which ended in 1861, three years before his death; Clare was born to a peasant family at the start of the Industrial Revolution. Their conditions differed. Shevchenko’s master recognized his artistic gift and sent him to art school in Moscow. Russia was a growing police state, deeply suspicious of non-Russian nationalism within its territory. In the mid-1840s, Shevchenko was accused of Ukrainian national subversion and sent to Siberia. Shevchenko and Clare share no grandiose vision of the past, nor do they call for violent revolution. Instead, they rage at injustice against the poor. Yet whereas Shevchenko is a poet of political protest, Clare might be described as a poet of ecological protest. Both attack wealthy landlords for their greed and heartless exploitation. Shevchenko and Clare represent a new, post-1789 egalitarianism: the poor are no different in sensitivity and intelligence from the rich. Given the opportunity, as Clare and Shevchenko were, the poor can achieve just as much as, if not more than, better-off writers. Literary genius can flower amid illiteracy and servitude (an idea implicit in the origin of Scripture among a nation of ex-slaves), and the daily life of the poor is a worthy subject for literature.

Clare was born into the rural world of late 18th-century northern England, in a community of no more than four or five dozen families. Everyone knew everyone else, and life was as it had always been: inexorable poverty, backbreaking work in the fields, malnutrition and disease, the furious winter cold. Clare describes the poor as particularly vulnerable to high infant mortality (he lost two of his siblings early on), and to winter, their ‘deadly foe’ (‘Impromptu on Winter’); and they die without help, a dog’s death (‘On a Lost Greyhound’). Clare, his publisher, John Taylor, observed in the introduction to his first book, Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery (1820), was ‘a young Peasant, a day-labourer in husbandry, who has no advantages of education beyond his class’.³⁵ No stoic, Clare was at times angry and bitter, with a sense that life’s exhausting hardships were cruel and inescapable. Though disadvantaged economically and educationally, Clare had the immense benefit of an unspoiled natural environment, the landscape of his childhood and his poetry. This was an Eden-like source of imaginative richness, a source of insight and joy.³⁶

Clare’s mother was illiterate, but his father had a library and valued literacy. Clare, a village farmboy, was schooled in a Dame school and a parish classroom. In hard times, he had to be taken out of school, despite his weak constitution, to help his father in the fields. Yet, the Bible was read at home, including the Book of Job and the Psalms.³⁷ Clare was strongly aware of social injustice, for example in the poem ‘Rich and Poor; Or Saint and Sinner’ (1821):

The rich man’s sins are under

The rose of wealth and station…

But the poor man’s sins are glaring

In the face of all ghostly warning.

Clare, a nature poet who lived by labor, mostly outdoors, worked as a shepherd and tended horses and cows, he threshed and ploughed and hoed, chopped wood and planted trees, gardened and weeded, burned lime and put up fences, and he even served as a live scarecrow. Clare was hurt by the ‘lawless law’ of the Enclosures Act (1801) which closed public land previously used by the people to keep livestock or to collect firewood. In the poem ‘Helpstone’, Clare protested the enclosures in his home town in Northamptonshire, the familiar landscape axed and closed off; and the sense of regret at the loss of a way of life is strong, too, in ‘The Fallen Elm’:

There came enclosure – ruin was its guide,

But freedom’s clapping hands enjoyed the sight

Though comfort’s cottage soon was thrust aside

And workhouse prisons raised up on the site.

In lines beginning, ‘Accursed Wealth!’, which Clare’s publisher removed from ‘Helpstone’, Clare attacks the rich for the injustice they do to the poor. In ‘The Moors’, again, the enclosures go against nature and natural law, and the poor are affected most:

On paths to freedom and to childhood dear

A board sticks up to notice ‘no road here’

And on the tree with ivy overhung

The hated sign by vulgar taste is hung

As though the very birds should learn to know

When they go there they must no further go,

Thus, with the poor, scared freedom bade good-bye

And much they feel it in the smothered sigh,

And birds and trees and flowers without a name

All sighed when lawless law’s enclosure came …

Clare’s dismay and bitterness at the maltreatment of the poor and the inequality between rich and poor is expressed in his long poem, The Parish, written in the 1820s:

… starving terror of the village brood

Who gleaned their scraps of fuel from the wood

When parish charity was vainly tried

Twas their last refuge – which is now denied.³⁸

Clare gives a voice to the poor laborers in their ‘half-thatched mouldering hovels of distress’ and to those in the workhouse, a freezing ruin, a ‘makeshift tent of misery’; and to the children of the poor, ‘ragged and starved and worked beyond our powers’.³⁹ He is in a long tradition going back to the Hebrew prophets, and including Shakespeare, Swift, and Wordsworth, of denouncing the rich for their deceit, hypocrisy, and oppression of the poor. Notably in The Parish, Clare speaks for the powerless poor in attacking parish officials and their oppressive administration. Clare condemns the bailiff who delights in the distress and despair of the poor, and the parish clerk who relishes his stocks and handcuffs and brands used to punish and humiliate the poor. The deceitful petty official is worse than the hanged thief. Eric Robinson describes Clare as a poet who has seen the poor oppressed, who had heard the poor rate being announced in church after the parson’s sermon and watched the parish clerk ‘… carrying the parish book from door to door/ Claiming fresh taxes from the needy poor’, or summoning the parish vestry to reassess the rate.⁴⁰

Shevchenko: voice of the poor

Shevchenko, Ukraine’s national poet, has for his main theme an impoverished Ukraine under the Russian yoke. In his long poem Katerina (1838), Shevchenko tells the sad story of a poor beautiful girl raped and abandoned by a Russian soldier, and reduced to begging by the wayside with her infant in her arms. This is the image of Ukraine. Shevchenko’s poetry, like that of other poets of defeated peoples, such as Macpherson or Mickiewicz, represents cultural victory after political defeat by an oppressive ‘Other’. Shevchenko wrote poetry to inflame national consciousness in Ukraine, by presenting Ukrainian impoverishment and degradation. In this way he aimed to promote unity and moral regeneration in the struggle for independence from Russia.⁴¹ His book of Ukrainian poems, The Kobzar, published in 1840, in effect declared Ukrainian independence. Kobzar is Ukrainian for ‘bard’, a singer of songs and stories in the vernacular, whom Shevchenko regarded as the key to national survival. The poet at times feared that his people would be enslaved forever, recalling a time when ‘we ruled ourselves,/ But will rule no more’. In one poem from the 1840s, the poet declares that Ukraine has suffered more than any other country, ‘Children crucify the mother,/ suck her blood like beer …’⁴² Shevchenko hates the cruel indifference of Ukrainian landlords and the elite – whom he scorns as the living dead – sinfully alienated from the nation.⁴³ He expresses hope of breaking the Russian chains to achieve Ukrainian liberty. The following lines date from 1845:

Join in love, break your chains,

don’t look in foreign lands

for things that heaven lacks.

Then in Ukraine you will see

justice, power, liberty!⁴⁴

From childhood, Shevchenko was entranced by tales told by his grandfather about the peasant revolt of 1768. His poetry is full of vengeful hate toward Tsarist Russia, with prophetic warnings of a Day of Judgment to come. He attacks Russia for exploiting and degrading Ukrainians in the mines. There will be a Day of Judgment when the Ukrainian dead will rise and seek justice from their Russian tormentors who enslaved them,

… living men, chained, carrying gold from deep mines

down the greedy throat of tsardom …⁴⁵

Shevchenko had good reason to hate the autocratic Tsar Nicholas I, who personally exiled him to Siberia and ordered that the poet should not be allowed to write. In a poem written in 1858, after Shevchenko, broken in health, returned from exile, he attacks the tsar (who had died during his exile). He incites his countrymen to fight for freedom with sledge-hammers and axes.⁴⁶

Peasants in Russian literature

Sensitivity to the character and feelings of the peasantry connects Ukrainian and Russian literature. In Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov (1880), Dmitri dreams of a burned-out village in the snowbound Russian steppes where he was once stationed as a soldier. He sees a peasant woman holding a crying baby, its arms bare and blue from cold, the mother clearly starving. He asks his sleigh-driver, ‘why is the baby crying?’ again and again. The driver tells him: these women of the ravaged village are begging for bread. Dmitri is not satisfied with this answer. He cannot stop asking in his dream, with a force of senseless idealism and pity that would cure the world of its misery: Why are people poor? Why do they not feed the baby?⁴⁷

Russian literature in the 19th century, in its sympathy for the wretched and downtrodden, was an indirect critique of the totalitarian state that preserved a system of inequality between the wealthy aristocratic minority and the largely illiterate, impoverished masses: an estimated 80–90% of the population of Tsarist Russia were peasants. Tsarist Russia, the most impoverished of the European powers (though wealthiest in untapped natural resources), was slow to modernize and to harness the benefits of the Industrial Revolution. The French Revolution had alarmed Catherine the Great, who now directed her immense political gifts, which had previously been guided by Enlightenment philosophers such as Voltaire (who helped inspire the Revolution), to preserving Russian autocracy and suppressing potentially revolutionary dissent. A sign of conflict to come was the arrest of Alexander Radishchev for writing A Journey from St Petersburg to Moscow (1790), criticizing aspects of Russian autocracy and the feudal serf system, and suggesting that the serfs be gradually emancipated: Radishchev was sentenced to ten years in Siberia.

The sheer size of Russia impeded progress. Poverty was common, though not universal, among its peasantry and also in the cities, among many educated Russians. Gogol’s masterpiece, the novel Dead Souls (1842), is incomprehensible unless one grasps a basic fact about the Russian serf system: that serfs were no better than chattel and could be sold – in theory, even after their deaths, if they were still on the rolls – to buy a mortgage. In Anna Karenina (1874–6), Tolstoy uses Konstantin Levin as a mouthpiece for his guilt at being part of an island of wealth in a vast sea of poverty, somewhat like Ruskin in Unto this Last.⁴⁸ Levin is shocked that to the economist, Metrov, the Russian peasants exist purely in terms of capital, wages, and rent: yet, ‘for nine-tenths of Russia’s eighty millions wages meant no more than a bare subsistence, and capital did not exist except in the form of the most primitive tools’.⁴⁹ Most Russian peasants evidently did not live in extreme poverty, but compared with the industrialized West their lives were essentially unchanged since the Middle Ages.⁵⁰ Peasants were justifiably wary of educated Russians: ‘the traditional reason for educated Russians to involve themselves in village affairs was to exploit the peasantry in one way or another.’⁵¹ Responsible landowners were evidently rare. Lavretsky in Turgenev’s novel Home of the Gentry (1859) is determined to be a good proprietor – ‘so far as was in his power, he tried to ensure and stabilize the livelihood of his peasants’ – but for the most part, peasant obligations ‘far outweighed what they received in return’.⁵² Russian feudalism kept them trapped in a social hierarchy long after it vanished from Western Europe. Russian landowners, with a vast pool of free labor, were not dependent on the labor market. There was no radical reorganization of poor relief in Russia as was the case in the emerging secular European states after 1789. Internal criticism of the serf system was stifled: both the government and the Orthodox Church supported serfdom.

Educated Russians from Gogol to Chekhov tended to look to the West for direction. They applied to Russia the increasing Western concern for the poor as democracy, education, and enfranchisement spread in the 19th century. Russian progress could be justified by the example of Peter the Great, and by Westernizing elements among its ruling class; but such views were hazardous in an autocratic, repressive state, in which any call for change could be seen as a threat to the status quo, and punished.⁵³ Consequently, the liberal progressivism of Russian literature tended to be channeled into universalist social concerns rather than those more narrowly nationalistic, and potentially dangerous. Some Russian intellectuals were deeply troubled by the anomaly of a relatively liberal intelligentsia in a reactionary dictatorship, and by their consequent sense of impotence and superfluity, for like Hamlet they had lost ‘the name of action’. The leading Russian critic of the 19th century, Vissarion Belinsky, declared writers to be Russia’s social conscience. In the absence of political parties, they must expose with brutal honesty the realities of Russian life. Writers, not politicians, would achieve change, particularly the end of serfdom. This was the thrust of Belinsky’s famous letter to Gogol (1847), the mere reading of which was revolutionary: those caught reading this letter, including Dostoyevsky, were imprisoned and exiled; some were executed.

Following the lead of Western writers such as Hugo and Dickens, Russian writers, who were generally middle class or noblemen, wrote about poor people, whether serfs or the growing number of impoverished educated Russians in the cities. Some found in the peasantry the essence of Russian national identity: humility and simple faith, communal existence and attachment to the land. Even peasant illiteracy could be seen as a sign of a higher, more authentic wisdom. Illiteracy, being the norm, did not indicate lack of intelligence, initiative, and ability. Turgenev, Dostoyevsky, and Tolstoy depict peasants as teachers, a rich source of Russian insight and wisdom; in contrast, Chekhov, a doctor with many years’ experience treating peasants, emphasizes their squalor, drunkenness, fatalism, and resistance to progress.⁵⁴

The intense social conscience of Russian literature is often linked, not unjustifiably, with the 1917 Revolution; yet, most Russian writers – in common with writers in Western Europe – aimed not at political but social revolution, through legislative reform. In the West, though, there was a relatively free press. Dickens and Hugo, for example, could write about the poor of England and France without fear of harassment and arrest for doing so; Russian writers could not. In the 1840s, there was a ‘Condition of England’ genre of fiction, gravely critical of English society for its ‘two nations’ of rich and poor; at that time, Russian writers who even hinted at inequalities in Russia were in danger: Turgenev was put under house arrest, and Dostoyevsky underwent a mock execution and was sent to Siberia.

From under Gogol’s ‘Overcoat’

Dostoyevsky’s famous quip that all Russian literature comes from under Gogol’s story ‘The Overcoat’ (1842) alludes to the pressing social concerns in pre-Revolutionary Russian literature, the huge gap between rich and poor, aristocrats and peasants, literate government officials and the mostly illiterate common people as well as the arrogance and inflexibility of a bureaucracy which administered and effectively trapped most Russians in their status as serfs or peasants. ‘The Overcoat’, set in St. Petersburg, depicts a rigid hierarchy afflicting all Russia. A poor insignificant clerk living alone has one threadbare coat to help him survive the Russian winter. Scraping and saving for months, he finally earns enough to have a new coat made. The coat is stolen the first time he wears it. Shivering with cold, he goes to various officials for help. These officials, typically, see their positions as sinecures, not for the public good, and they frighten him with their arrogance, dismay him with their uselessness, and he sickens and dies in the cold. Then his ghost returns to terrify his former tormentors.

Dostoyevsky in his first novel, Poor Folk (1846), also set in St. Petersburg, responds to Gogol, both admiring its artistry and criticizing its alleged lack of realism.⁵⁵ Dostoyevsky, son of a landowning nobleman, was born in 1821 in a hospital for the poor administered by his father in Moscow. His earliest memories included the poverty, sickness, and death of its patients. No Russian novelist prior to Dostoyevsky in Poor Folk described poverty so graphically, though not as a critique of failings in Russian society and governance but as a story of lovers unable to marry as they are too poor. Makar Devushkin, an elderly, impoverished civil servant, humble and oppressed, lives in a crowded, dark, and filthy St. Petersburg slum. His room is a smoky, smelly, noisy kitchen behind a partition covered with washing. The only light in his life is his love for a young woman, Varenka, sheltered by her landlady out of ‘Christian charity’. Each is transformed by the other’s love. She stirs in him a dormant lust for life, and he buys her luxuries such as grapes and flowers which he cannot afford. The lovers light up the damp, filthy building, its broken stairs, greasy walls, abandoned furniture on landings, tubs of abandoned, putrid garbage, whole families in single rooms, in ceaseless poverty, debt, sickness, and death; and ‘a poor man is worth less than an old rag’.⁵⁶ The children, often hungry, sick, and anxious, suffer most; none is ever depicted at play, and there is no Dickensian sentiment or humor. In one scene, a child dies of scarlet fever; his sister stands motionless, finger in mouth, in shock; and in another scene, a starving child, fascinated by a hurdy-gurdy man on the street, ‘stared in wonderment as the German’s dolls danced; his own arms and legs were stiff with cold, he was shivering, and nibbling the end of one of his sleeves’.⁵⁷

Belinsky read Poor Folk in manuscript and declared it a masterpiece of ‘terrible truth’, of the injustice and humiliation which deformed Russian society – a criticism which may be implicit but is never made openly in the novel itself. The writer, like a latter-day prophet, had no choice in Belinsky’s view but to be social critic, never mind the consequences in an autocratic regime. For Dostoyevsky, Belinsky’s praise, though treasured, was the kiss of death: his association with Belinsky led to his arrest, the commuted execution, and four years in Siberia (1850–4). For the artist, however, the injustice was artistically fructifying: exile brought him into close contact with peasants for the first and only time in his life.⁵⁸ He describes his imprisonment in The House of the Dead (1860): the irons on his legs, the cold, filthy hut, with wooden bunks infested with fleas and cockroaches. Yet as a nobleman he had a relatively privileged position, though in chains.⁵⁹ Prison gave Dostoyevsky a unique opportunity to observe: he came to admire the humanity and religious fortitude of his fellow inmates and emerged from prison with new faith in the peasantry and the Russian Orthodox Church, convinced that the Russians were the only people with a universal mission.⁶⁰ Dmitri’s dream of the amelioration of Russian poverty in The Brothers Karamazov was Dostoyevsky’s dream, irrational but consistent with the spirit of the Bible.

Turgenev and the humanization of the Russian peasants

Turgenev, like his fellow nobleman, Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy, betrayed his class by writing sympathetically of peasants. His collection of stories, Sketches from a Hunter’s Album (1852), is quietly revolutionary in presenting an educated Russian nobleman, the narrator/author, in a non-exploitative relationship with peasants. To Turgenev, peasants are human beings above all:

The peasants appeared not as beasts of burden with crippled brains but as complex beings, intimate with the round of the seasons, suffering from their landlord’s brutality. In this way the author suggested all the horrors of serfdom, without any heavy underlining; he only gave an accurate, calm portrait of society.⁶¹

Hinting at the horrors of serfdom, Turgenev was a dangerous radical. Tsar Nicholas I personally put him under house arrest.⁶² As part of the serf-owning aristocracy, Turgenev had lived all his life among peasants, some of whom were practically family. He learned to love poetry from an old serf on his mother’s estate, who taught him to read and write Russian, and his home upbringing – his mother’s cruelty, his father’s philandering – made him critical of the Russian landowning class: ‘I acquired my early loathing of slavery and serfdom by observing the shameful environment in which I lived.’⁶³ Turgenev’s feelings were reinforced in his student days at St. Petersburg University, where the students tended to abhor serfdom. Turgenev freed one of his serfs and married her.

Turgenev’s stories on peasants in Sketches from a Hunter’s Album were mostly written outside Russia, between 1847 and 1851. The narrator is a hunter who can ‘drop in anywhere and everywhere’.⁶⁴ In Russia, the freedom to observe was too close to the freedom to criticize. Turgenev’s hunter does little hunting; he never kills anything, though some of his fellow landowners are so odious in their sadism and rapacity that the reader sometimes suspects he would like to do them in. His real, hidden prey is the unjust system of serfdom in Russia and its serf-owning nobility. The hunter is, in effect, a spy, a whistle-blower, a traitor to his class. His point of view gives an undercurrent of tension to stories that might otherwise seem neutral, even bland and inconsequential, descriptions of facts.

From the first of the stories, ‘Khor and Kalinych’ (1847), Turgenev is fascinated with the serfs as people. The hunter is openly fond of them, refers to them by name, and forgets they are serfs. As Wordsworth reveres peasants in the Lake District as teachers, Turgenev finds wisdom among serfs. This might seem a romantic idealization, but it was based on Turgenev’s experiences and observations as a child of a serf-owning mother, and who himself owned at one time 450 serfs in seven villages. For its human sympathy and detail, and its subtle subversion of a stratified Tsarist society, ‘Khor and Kalinych’ deserves close attention. This might be the first time a writer ever took the trouble to compare two peasants in detail, simply out of interest! There is pleasure in the contrast: Khor the practical realist and administrator, Kalinych the dreamer; Khor sees through his master and knows how to deal with the authorities, to make his life comfortable, whereas Kalinych, who worships his master, just manages to get by. In a wealth of detail, the narrator reveals his affection and admiration for the two men. Behind all this is the angry question: how can a society allow such individuals to be owned?

Though some peasants prosper, like Khor and Kalinych and the ones in ‘Singers’, most are poor and downtrodden. The bad conditions of the serfs and the arbitrary cruelty of their owners and bailiffs are recurrent in Sketches from a Hunter’s Album. In ‘Bailiff’ (1847), another early story set in contemporary Russia, a rich landowner, Arkady Pavlych, exploits his serfs to lead a luxurious lifestyle. The hunter, though a fellow nobleman, detests Arkady and is loath to take up his invitation to visit. He does not openly blame Arkady for his cruelty but declares in a rare hyperbole that he would rather have a leg amputated than hear the sound of his voice. Criticism of the serf system is clear between the lines, as is the broader indictment of Russia and its institutional injustices. Arkady boasts of treating his serfs fairly; in fact, he abuses them and ignores their needs. Their sole use to him is as a source of rent. When his cook is injured in an accident, he is indifferent to the poor man’s pain but anxiously examines his hands to make sure he can still cook. He punishes his servant for forgetting to warm the wine for breakfast. Singing peasants fall silent at the sight of him. Arkady lets Sofron, his bailiff, send young men off to the army when their families cannot pay the rent; as army service in the time of the autocratic Nicholas I was for 25 years, such partings were often forever. Arkady’s bailiff bleeds the peasants white: ‘The peasants all around are owing him money. They work for him like they were in bondage to him.’⁶⁵ Yet, Arkady views the bailiff as ‘a good chap, une forte tête, statesman-like!’⁶⁶ One peasant, Antip, falls to his knees at the sight of Arkady: all three of his sons have been forcibly recruited; his cow has been taken, and his wife beaten. Arkady responds by accusing Antip of rebellion, and only the hunter’s presence saves Antip from a beating. Fearing Arkady’s arbitrary behavior, his serfs lavish unctuous praise on him as though he were a little tsar: ‘you’ve most surely allowed light to shine into the life of our little village by your visit and you’ve given us pleasure to last the rest of our days!’⁶⁷ Many of Arkady’s serfs are lean, hungry, and despondent. He, in contrast, lives a life of luxury and conspicuous consumption. When the hunter joins him for a lavish English breakfast, Arkady wears silk trousers, velvet jacket, a fez, and Chinese slippers.⁶⁸ The hunter prefers the peasants for company.

Other landowners are equally cruel and selfish, arbitrary and unjust. In ‘Chertopkhnaov and Nedopyuskin’ (1849), a landowner takes it into his head to build a church with his own hands. When the cupola falls down three times, he accuses the old women in the village of witchcraft and has them beaten. ‘Two Landowners’ tells of a master who beats his serfs, confiscates their fields, and packs off to the army young men from families who do not pay rent. The peasants live in horrible cramped huts. Their water supply is poor. In ‘Singers’ (1850), too, the water of the peasants is like ‘liquid mud’; their infant mortality is high; even the tavern keeper, Nikolay Ivanych, who is better off than most of the villagers, has lost many children. In ‘Loner’ (1848), a peasant deep in debt and with a starving family, goes into a forest on a stormy night to chop wood. He is caught by a forester, tied up and taken to the forester’s cottage where the hunter has taken shelter. The forester’s little girl watches as the poacher, at the end of his tether, abuses the owner as a ‘bloody bloodsucker’ and her father for his cruelty. The hunter offers to pay to free the man, and in the end, the forester, astonished and moved by the peasant’s desperation, lets him go. In ‘Raspberry Water’ (1848), Vlas, another serf drowning in debt, weeps at the memory of going to Moscow to ask his absentee master to reduce his rent. He is cruelly driven away. Another unfortunate in ‘Raspberry Water’ is Stepushka, practically a non-person, presumably a former servant living rough on a disused estate, now neither man nor servant, but shrunken with hunger, his coat patched and with no hat, sleeping in summer in a store room, in winter in a hayloft, and scavenging for food all his days.

The objective detail and compassion in Turgenev recalls the peasants in paintings by Cézanne or Van Gogh. The peasants are equal to their masters – at times, superior to them – as living, feeling, thinking creatures. In ‘Meeting’ (1850), the hunter spies a servant girl, Akulina, uneducated but deeply sensitive and loving, waiting in the woods for Victor, her feckless lover, also a servant, who has made her pregnant and is leaving for St. Petersburg with his master. Akulina is a woman of ripe beauty, humble devotion, and futile hope. She clutches a bunch of wild flowers, violets, marigolds, forget-me-nots, tansies, cornflowers, she has picked for her lover. Victor, though, is through with her and cold to her cries: ‘Why should I deserve this?’ he asks her, deaf to her entreaty, ‘what’s going to happen to me?’ Their child’s fate is to be given away ‘to someone who doesn’t love her’.⁶⁹ Victor’s lorgnette dangles from his neck, an emblem of foppish irresponsibility and indifference – perhaps in imitation of his master. He has ruined Akulina’s life and does not care. The flowers drop from his hands, he vanishes from her life. The hunter, unseen, feels the girl’s futile passion. He picks the flowers up after she is gone and keeps them: they ‘remain with me to this day’.⁷⁰

‘Singers’ portrays the rich Russian folk peasant culture of music and story-telling. Yakov, or Yashka the ‘Turk’, as his mother was a captured Turkish girl, works in a local paper factory but is ‘a man of sensibility and passion’,⁷¹ with a fine voice. This common man expresses the Russian soul no less authentically and movingly than Pushkin: ‘in every sound his voice made there breathed something familiar as our birthright and so vast no eye could encompass it, just as if the Russian steppe were being unrolled before us, stretching away into an endless distance’.⁷² ‘Living Relic’ (1874) tells of Lukeria, most beautiful of maid servants. The hunter happens across her cottage and finds her dying in bed. She is not 30 but was crippled in a fall shortly before she was to be married several years previously. She knew the hunter as a young man: ‘I used to lead the dancing at your mother’s’; he at 16 was secretly in love with her. Lukeria has kept her simple stoical faith and her empathy for others. She resigns herself to her fate and to death: ‘[God] sent me a cross to carry, which means he loves me.’⁷³ Lukeria takes pleasure in small things, in the sounds of mice, the smells of flowers. She sings and has visions and dreams which engross and entertain her. When the hunter remarks on her patience, she replies: ‘Now Simon Stilites’ patience was really great: he spent thirty years on a pillar!’⁷⁴ In a state of mystic ecstasy, she dreams of Jesus announcing that she is his bride, chosen to lead the songs in paradise. Her imagination is filled with poetry and her approaching death.⁷⁵ A tall woman, stern and severe, appears to her in a dream:

‘I am your death.’ I should’ve been frightened, but instead I was happy as a child, I swear to God I was! And this woman, my death, said to me: ‘I am sorry for you, Lukeria, but I cannot take you with me. Farewell!’⁷⁶

In his novel, Fathers and Sons (1862), written after he left Russia for Western Europe, Turgenev raises the perennial Russian question: what is to be done? As in the West, education, science, and progress are answers given by Bazarov, the novel’s central character, through which social problems can ultimately be solved. But how to apply science to the immediate problems of the newly freed Russian peasants, who need land to survive on, and a tolerable tax burden to escape debt? Bazarov as student of science and medicine is a nihilist in his refusal to accept anything at face value. Instead, he repudiates everything, convinced of the need to tear down existing social and psychological structures, to start anew. This violent revolutionary Bakunin-like stance has little practical value amid the miserable reality of life, exemplified by the family estate of Bazarov’s friend, Arkady. He sees the ragged peasants with their miserable nags, their thin, sickly cattle, as a vision of endless unbearable winter: ‘“No,” thought Arkady, “there is no prosperity here, no sign of contentment or hard work. It just can’t go on like this: this must all be transformed … but how are we to do it, how should we begin?”’⁷⁷

So great is his pessimism that Arkady comes to hate the peasants for their intractable poverty: if all peasants were given tidy cottages they would be ungrateful. The reality of emancipation for most serfs was the transfer of one form of servitude and exploitation to another: from the arbitrary landowner to the rationalizing government. These Russians and their children were left with growing resentment at unjust land distribution and consequent debt, with the added woes of taxation and conscription, as their numbers grew. Poverty was at the root of the 1917 revolution.

Chekhov and the Russian peasants after emancipation

Dissatisfaction with the effects of the emancipation of the serfs is reiterated by Chekhov in the generation after Turgenev. Grandson of a serf, Chekhov was a model of Russian upward social mobility; yet his depiction of the peasantry, in the stories ‘My Wife’ (1892) and ‘Peasants’ (1897), and in Uncle Vanya (1897), makes clear that the emancipation of the serfs in 1861 was no solution: the economy remained weak and the peasant farms unproductive.⁷⁸ By the time of Uncle Vanya, Russia’s peasant population had grown from about 50 million in 1861 to about 80 million.⁷⁹ Chekhov worked five years as a doctor among the peasants and knew them well: ‘He was struck by the general physical decrepitude of the peasants, their filth, ignorance, and drunkenness.’⁸⁰ In 1892, Chekhov, inspired by the example of Tolstoy, helped organize famine relief in the Nizhny-Novgorod and Voronezh districts. This experience is alluded to in the stories and in Uncle Vanya: ‘There was an epidemic … typhus … People stretched out in rows in the huts … Filth, stench, smoke everywhere, calves lying on the floor among the sick … young pigs too’.⁸¹ ‘My Wife’ opens with a letter, similar to the kind Chekhov wrote at the time, to Asorin, a well-to-do landowner, begging for help for the peasants:

There are three or four families living in one hut, which adds up to at least fifteen of either sex, not counting small children … there’s no food, they’re starving, and there’s a mass epidemic of spotted or famine fever. Literally everyone is ill.⁸²

Asorin, however, is self-absorbed and indifferent, concerned mainly with his unhappy marriage; his wife, who occupies the ground floor of their house, regards him with fear and disdain, as a barbaric misanthrope. So estranged is he from her that he is unaware that she has been organizing famine relief downstairs. She does not even bother to tell him, knowing that help from him will come too slowly and inadequately, and too late – if at all. And indeed, he does not know why he should help the victims: ‘I don’t even know them, do I? I don’t understand them, I’ve never seen them and I don’t like them.’⁸³ Philanthropy among the gentry is degraded (as it often is) by being organized in the form of social events. Asorin seeks the help of Bragin, who cares even less about providing meaningful aid. To Bragin, the peasants are an irritant and criminals if they steal food in desperation to feed their families. While the peasants die of hunger, Bragin treats Asorin to an obscenely sumptuous meal, recalling similarly callous scenes in Germinal, Fontamara, and elsewhere:⁸⁴

For the cold dish, white sucking-pig with horse-radish and sour cream was served; then a rich, boiling-hot cabbage soup with pork and buckwheat gruel, from which the steam rose in a column … Pie was served and then (with long intervals for imbibing fruit liqueurs) we had pigeon stew, a kind of fried giblets, roast sucking-pig, duck, partridge, cauliflower, fruit dumplings, curds and whey, jelly – and pancakes and jam to round it all off.⁸⁵

In his stories, Chekhov draws on the poverty he saw as a provincial doctor. Ward 6 (1892) tells of the impoverishment of Ivan Gromov, a one-time student at St. Petersburg University from a well-to-do family with a generous allowance and no idea what poverty is. Then disaster strikes: his father is arrested for forgery and embezzlement and dies in prison; his brother and mother die too, and Ivan is reduced to living on bread and water. He manages to find work as a bailiff, but loses his mind and is confined in the local hospital where conditions are dire: unsanitary, overcrowded, poorly equipped, with an incompetent, dishonest staff, infested with cockroaches, bedbugs, and lice. The hospital should be closed but the local people, unwilling to pay for a good hospital, claim that it is perfectly adequate for the poor.

In ‘Peasants’ (1897), Chekhov describes a typical late 19th-century Russian village: hunger, high infant mortality, poor water supply, the river being about a mile from the village; poor hygiene, slops being thrown into the street; inadequate medical care; illiteracy and superstition; debt and drunkenness.⁸⁶ Nicholas, a waiter in Moscow from age 11, falls ill and loses his job. He, his wife Olga, and their ten-year-old daughter, Sasha, go back to his native village, where his family, about a dozen malnourished people, are crammed into a one-room hut, a fly-infested, windowless, smoky hovel with an earth floor, eating black bread among cockroaches, with frequent drunkenness and wife-beating. The overcrowding means that it is almost impossible to get a good night’s sleep. Marya, Nicholas’s sister-in-law, has had 13 pregnancies and lost seven; she is terrified of her husband’s drunken rages, when he beats her. She has never been to the local town. The peasants are disorganized and incompetent. A fire breaks out in the village and most of the houses, built of wood, burn down. The local council uses its power not to provide services and improve lives but to rob the peasants. The Russian Orthodox Church has no visible charitable role. The story has the sober detail of a medical report as Chekhov distills his experience of the peasants at the end of the story. As in Zola’s Germinal, the peasants live like animals, and worse – they are crooked, filthy, and drunk, and terrible to live with, but they are also suffering human beings:⁸⁷

There was nothing in their lives which did not provide some excuse: killing work which made bodies ache all over at night, hard winters, poor harvests, overcrowding, without any help and nowhere to find it. The richer and stronger cannot help, since they themselves are coarse, dishonest and drunk, using the same foul language. The most insignificant little clerk or official treats peasants like tramps, even talking down to elders and churchwardens, as though this is their right. And after all, could one expect help or a good example from the mercenary, greedy, dissolute, lazy people who come to the village now and then just to insult, fleece and intimidate the peasants?

(ch. 9)

Chekhov is one of the first writers to confront the environmental damage both suffered and caused by the poor. In Uncle Vanya (1897), he describes how the impoverished peasants, not being provided with good roads and railroads, with schools and employment, burn the forests down as part of a desperate struggle

as when a sick man, starving, chilled to the bone, in order to save what’s left of his life, to protect his children, will instinctively, unconsciously, grab hold of anything that will satisfy his hunger or warm him, and in so doing destroy everything, without a thought for tomorrow.⁸⁸

In the later story, ‘In the Ravine’ (1900), Chekhov takes further the theme of environmental destruction as a form of suicide; the poor, who have the least say in policy, are most vulnerable to the diseases brought by industrial pollution.

The Cherry Orchard (1903) portrays the comic stagnation and decay of mismanaged Russian estates, where the more educated, however well-meaning, are the least practical. The student Trofimov claims that as they normally do not work they are incapable of work; they delude themselves if they think they are doing anything useful. Capable peasants such as Lopakhin might succeed – but success does not necessarily bring happiness. The insensitivity of the educated class toward the trials of the common people is a flagrant social sore, Trofimov declares, for they insult their servants, treat the peasants like animals, they pretend to be wise philosophers but know and do nothing of any value, and they allow their workers to go hungry and to live in terrible overcrowded conditions.

Chekhov’s ‘My Wife’, Ward 6, ‘Peasants’, Uncle Vanya, ‘In the Ravine’, and The Cherry Orchard are part of a chain of Russian literature starting with Gogol, exposing the failure of Russian institutions to deal with the immense and growing problems of inequality in the empire. Serfdom could not survive in a state struggling to modernize and to catch up with the industrialized West. When the serfs were freed in 1861, the state had no organized plan for integrating them into the empire. (In America, there was a similar failure after its slaves were freed in 1863.) Russian writers were far more Westernized than the rest of Russia and tended to follow Western literature, particularly Dickens, in seeing life from the viewpoint of the poor. Russian literature, created in the shadow of censorship of brutal autocratic rule, could not be openly revolutionary in any political sense but it made clear that the common people were living, thinking, feeling people capable of revolution. Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment (1865–6), written in the years after the freeing of the serfs, has no clear-cut political criticism, but it makes the point that a suffering individual, Raskolnikov, pushed far enough by his conditions over the threshold of sanity, is capable not just of murder but of the ideological justification of murder. Russian literature reacts with outrage both at the serf system and the consequences of freeing the serfs; and it depicts the impoverished urban proletariat that ultimately proved crucial in the overthrow of the Tsarist regime.

Poverty and the French peasantry

In the century after the French Revolution, conditions of the French poor became increasingly a matter of public concern, including major writers such as Victor Hugo and Émile Zola. The Revolution took peasants – by far the majority of French men and women – and made them citizens; it gave the common people power over their destiny as never before. Yet poverty, both rural and urban, persisted, especially in Paris. In the pre-Revolution disette (dearth) of 1788, crops failed in much of France while prices rose and hunger spread in a bitterly cold winter, affecting large numbers in Paris, with a population of about half a million. The Revolution worsened conditions of the poor. As in England in the 1530s, the destruction of the French Church in the 1790s forced poor relief onto the state. The Revolution exposed the full reliance of the poor when it wiped out many of the traditional sources for helping them.⁸⁹ Almost-constant war from 1792 to 1815 created further hardship. State responsibility for welfare remained after 1805, when the Church, now subservient to the government, was reinstated by Napoleon. Napoleon, mindful of the critical role of the hungry Parisian masses in the Revolution, was receptive to the plight of the poor: he restored soup kitchens (soups économiques), tried to ease the indebtedness of the poor, and improved the hospitals in Paris. Yet, the wars he fought impoverished France, and the British blockade created scarcity of food and raw materials; prices soared. The defeated Grande Armée, much wounded in body and spirit, returned to France an army of beggars.⁹⁰ Paris, overcrowded, fetid, and diseased, was no better than before the Revolution. The mystique of Napoleon and the French army, the distracting grandiose building projects, the efforts of the secret police, the suppression of press freedom, could not disguise the failures of the Revolution.⁹¹ Stendhal, in The Red and the Black (1830), portrays the renewed stratification of French society after 1815, the revival of aristocratic privilege and status at the expense of the peasantry. Intelligent young peasants such as Julien Sorel are inwardly outraged at the betrayal of Revolutionary ideals. Julien’s hero is Napoleon, for creating a meritocracy in France, allowing the low born such as himself, with talent and willingness to work and learn, to succeed. To someone with Julien’s ability and ambition, the Restoration is a disaster.

This sense of betrayal is central in French literature from Balzac to Zola: in France, as in other industrializing countries, conditions of the poor deteriorated as towns grew.⁹² Poor relief, stinting and uneven, was provided amid administrative chaos, functional confusion, and institutional inertia.⁹³ After 1848, extreme poverty – hunger (Ancien Régime alimentaire) above all – could be substantially alleviated, not as a result of government policy but through improved food production and diet, transport and distribution.⁹⁴ Outrage at poverty fills Hugo’s Les Misérables (1862) and Zola’s Germinal (1885). Both novels climax with the explosive power of the angry mob: in Les Misérables on the barricades in the 1832 revolution; in Germinal during a miner’s strike. Both indict France and the Revolution for failing to live up to the ideal of egalité. The main victims of ideological failure in France are peasants and former peasants such as Jean Valjean and Bonnemort.

Hugo’s Les Misérables (1862)

Hugo, son of one of Napoleon’s generals, was troubled and torn by the contrast between the lofty social ideals of the Revolution and the disillusionment that followed the French defeat in 1815. In Les Misérables, set between 1795 and 1832, the dismal lives of the poor are an indictment of French revolutionary ideals. Hugo presents a complex portrait of the relationship between poverty and crime, the innocent man jailed and the guilty one free to do harm, the saintly whore and the demonic policeman, the heroic sublimity of self-sacrifice and the odium of depravity, the virtuous common people and the vile traitorous destructive mob (La foule est traître au people). The story of Jean Valjean prior to his theft and imprisonment was not untypical of many French peasants at the time of the Revolution, whom the historian Taine compared to a man about to drown: impoverished and with a large family whom he cannot feed, illiterate, indebted, hungry, abandoned by society and by the Church. France in the late 18th century had a swelling population with only occasional employment, with large numbers of beggars and vagabonds terrorizing the countryside, or threatening to do so. ‘The charitable foundations of the Church had largely disappeared or their resources had been diverted to add to the revenues of more influential if less needy sections of Society.’⁹⁵ The Revolution promised bread, yet Hugo’s story starts with a man hungry for bread who steals a loaf of bread and is imprisoned for 19 years, ‘one of the damned of civilization, looking accusingly at Heaven’.⁹⁶ Was such injustice the purpose of the Revolution?

Hugo’s novel, published over 70 years after the Revolution, keeps alive the Revolutionary dream of social justice. The chief ally of the poor in the early part of the novel is Bishop Myriel of Digne (‘Bienvenu’), ironically a royalist with deep suspicion of the Revolution, its terror, violence, and atheism. In his devotion to Christian charity, the ‘peasant bishop’ (un pauvre evêque paysan), cares nothing for the luxury and grandeur of his office and exchanges his palace for the spartan local hospital. Devoted to the poorest, those who are cold and hungry, he gives about 10% of his income – the biblical tithe – to help prisoners and their families. In a sermon preached in the Digne cathedral, c. 1810, he affirms charity as the essence of Christianity. He reminds the congregation that many peasants live in huts with only a door and a window or two, sometimes none, to save the tax on doors and windows, and exhorts them: Mes fréres, ayez pitié.

Consider the fate of poor families, old women and young children, living in those hovels, the fevers and other maladies! God gives air to mankind and the law sells it. I do not assail the law but I give thanks to God. In Isère, in Var, and in the upper and lower Alps the peasants do not even possess barrows but carry the dung on their backs. They have no candles but burn twigs and lengths of rope steeped in resin. That is what happens throughout the highlands of Dauphiné. They make bread every six months, baking it over a fire of dried dung. In winter they break the loaves with a hatchet and soak the bread for twenty-four hours before it can be eaten. My brothers, be merciful. Consider the sufferings of those around you.⁹⁷

The bishop’s outlook on the vital role of religion, even in a state governed by atheist principles, is defined in a scene in which a senator challenges his faith, conceding the need for religion only for the poor:

I am not in love with your Jesus, who went about preaching renunciation and self-sacrifice – a miser’s advice to beggars … We give [the poor] myths to feed on, fairy-tales – the soul, immortality, Paradise, the stars … And they swallow it. They butter their dry bread with it. The man who has nothing else has God. It’s better than nothing and I’ve no objection, but for myself I stick to realism. God is for the masses.

To which the bishop replies with the gentle barb that the senator’s philosophy is well and good for the rich, who, having everything they wish, can afford to be irresponsible: ‘But you are a good-hearted man, you do not grudge the masses their belief in God, any more than you grudge them their goose stuffed with chestnuts while you have your turkey and truffles.’⁹⁸

Another defining moment in the bishop’s life occurs when he is called to give the last rites to a dying revolutionary. He goes reluctantly, but finds, to his astonishment, a man as idealistic in politics as he is in religion, and as devoted to France. The revolutionary, a former member of the Revolutionary Convention, is an atheist who ‘voted for the overthrow of a tyrant – that is to say, for an end to the prostitution of women, the enslavement of men, the dark night of the child’.⁹⁹ As a revolutionary, he has no regrets; what he did was for a better France and a better world. So moved is the bishop by the dying man’s credo that instead of giving the blessing, he seeks a blessing himself, and receives it with the man’s final breath. This powerful moment fuses compassion and revolution, religious fervor and secular idealism, Christianity and the Republic.

Like other writers of the 1789–1914 period, such as Wordsworth, Turgenev, and Tolstoy, Hugo finds hope in the peasantry, whose unlimited potential is represented by Jean Valjean. Valjean’s childhood seems a dead end: his father killed in a fall, his mother dead of milk-fever. His life is limited later by his devoted support of his widowed sister and her seven children, as pruner, harvester, cattleman, and casual laborer. Then, in a time of hunger, he commits his crime and is jailed.¹⁰⁰ The family dependent on him breaks up and vanishes, and he never sees them again. The French Penal Code keeps him in prison throughout the Napoleonic era: five years for the theft, and 14 additional years for three failed escape attempts. There are times, Hugo writes, when the Penal Code wrecks lives; it consigns good men to moral death, social darkness, drowning in a sea of despair, their lives wasted;¹⁰¹ the prisoner is no longer Jean Valjean but no. 24601. Illiterate on entry, Valjean learns to read in jail by age 40. Freed in 1815 as defeated France emerges from the Napoleonic wars, he is hardened and embittered, socially ostracized by his ‘criminal’ record, and a step from becoming a real criminal. A hammer-blow series of seven consecutive questions marks the process by which Valjean changes from an illiterate peasant into a highly articulate thinking man.

Was he the only one at fault in this fateful business? Was it not a serious matter that a man willing to work should have been without work and without food? And, admitting the offence, had not the punishment been ferocious and outrageous? Was not the law more at fault in the penalty it inflicted than he had been in the crime he committed? Had not the scales of justice been over-weighted on the side of expiation? And did not this weighting of the scales, far from effacing the crime, produce a quite different result, namely, a reversal of the situation, substituting for the original crime the crime of oppression, making the criminal a victim and the law his debtor, transferring justice to the side of him who had offended against it? Did not the penalty, aggravated by his attempts to escape, become in the end a sort of assault by the stronger on the weaker, a crime committed by society against the individual and repeated daily for nineteen years?¹⁰²

This passage marks a moment in European society when the viewpoint of the poor, and the causes of crime, entered the literary and political mainstream.¹⁰³ The seven questions have the force of Valjean’s guilty verdict against society. He condemns society to his hatred: ‘to improve his mind was to fortify his hatred’.¹⁰⁴ Like a modern Job, a virtuous man brought down, he judges providence harshly. His brutalizing experiences bring out his animal nature: he is like a caged wolf, un bête feroce, taciturn, unsmiling; oppressed by great weight of civilization, he has never wept. He emerges from prison a criminal, with a savage, obsessive desire for revenge; soon he will be back in prison, for life. Hugo asks: can he be saved? Is there is a core of indestructible goodness in him? Given shelter by chance by the Bishop of Digne, he steals silver cutlery, is caught by dragoons and brought back. In this moment, the bishop restores Jean to freedom and sets him free inwardly, enabling him to choose a life of goodness. He pretends that he has given Jean the silver as a gift, as the prisoner claims, and adds to this his candlesticks, whispering in his ear that with this chance for freedom and a new life Jean must repay him by doing good in the world. Hugo’s idea of a real social revolution is a mixture of Christian love and capitalist initiative leading to social progress. Within a few years, Valjean becomes a French Robert Owen, owner of a highly successful and enlightened factory, whose success is built on enlightened compassion: his chief aim is not to make money, though he does that too, but to employ workers fairly and respectfully. Hugo has faith in the human capacity for self-creation: an illiterate jailbird in irons becomes a cultured, enlightened factory owner, fabulously wealthy, the mayor of his town; a criminal mind consumed by rage against the world learns humility and faith, in a life of devotion to the well-being of the poor. An uncommon story, perhaps, but possible. Balzac tells a similar story in The Country Doctor; Dickens, too, in Great Expectations, and Hardy in The Mayor of Casterbridge.

Valjean is in some ways fortunate. He has physical and mental fortitude, intelligence, determination and enterprise; yet he is part of a post-Revolutionary world of generally unrelenting poverty. Hunger was daily for most French people.¹⁰⁵ Paris was a magnet for the poor. In Les Misérables, Hugo describes a typical poor family in Paris in the 1820s, of Gribier the grave-digger:

The grave-digger’s home was like all dwellings of the needy, a place of sparse and congested squalor. A packing-case, or it may have been a coffin, was used as a cupboard, a pail held the water-supply, a straw mattress served as a bed, and the floor took the place of table and chairs. Seated in a corner on a worn strip of carpet was a thin-faced woman surrounded by a huddle of children.¹⁰⁶

Hugo recreates Paris in panoramic literary form, as the image of the fruits and contradictions of capitalism, and the cost to the poor: in its palaces and slums, luxury and grime, fashion and crime, fabulous wealth glittering among the wretched of the earth, top-hatted bankers and starving gamins, writers and beggars, high art and disease, flâneurs and cripples, tree-lined boulevards and Vomissement confus de l’énorme Paris,¹⁰⁷ ladies of fashion and ladies of the night, the Grands Boulevards and the Butte des Moulins, the Palais-Royal and Les Halles, streets of wealth and streets of revolution, Bourse and Rive Gauche, buildings with shopkeepers at street level, aristocrats on the second floor, and the poor in the attic, arrondissements of education and arrondissements of debauchery, the triumphal blare of success and the clarion of revolution. All this is background to Hugo’s story, particularly the countless ragged, unwashed child vagabonds in Paris, its streets an education in human misery and resourcefulness. His portrait of Cosette, in common with Dickens’ children, provoked public outrage that children in modern France could be so abused and distressed. Cosette’s mother, Fantine, abandoned by her lover, forced into prostitution,¹⁰⁸ in despair and ignorance gives Cosette over to the wicked Thénardier husband and wife who blackmail her and enslave the little girl.¹⁰⁹ Cosette, thin and pale with fear, bruised and dressed in rags, lives in a doorless closet amid junk, dust, and cobwebs under the stairs, her bed a worn mattress with straw coming out of the seams and a torn blanket. The Thénardiers, escaping their creditors to Paris, descend into a life of petty crime. The husband is a man of intelligence and imagination, resource and daring, a master of disguise and with many useful contacts in the underworld. Yet as a criminal he is a failure, and wickedness brings him no reward. The family lives in a freezing slum, the children starve and go barefoot. Thénardier becomes an unexpected mouthpiece for the poor:

They say we’ll just spend it on drink, that we’re all sots and loafers. And what about them? Where did they spring from, for God’s sake? Thieves, that’s what they were, otherwise they’d never had got rich … we’re our own thermometers, we don’t need to consult the newspaper to know how cold it is.¹¹⁰

The injustice done to the poor in enlightened France is compounded by the waste of resources which could be better spent in fighting poverty. Amid unconscionable public spending, the poor die of hunger (les pauvres meurent de faim). As in London, social problems grew in Paris as the population grew, with many unemployed, beggars, thieves, and prostitutes.¹¹¹ The cholera epidemic in 1832 was followed by improved sanitation, with piped water. As in England, there was heightened public awareness of the poor, and of links between poverty and crime, in studies such as Alexander Parent-Duchâtelet’s De la Prostitution dans la Ville de Paris (1838), the police chief Honore-Antoine Frégier’s Des Classes Dangereuses de la Population dans les Grandes Villes (1840) and, more influentially, in Eugène Sue’s bestselling novel, Les Mystéres de Paris (1841–2), which gave a voice to the Paris poor, particularly the children abandoned by their parents: poverty was a cancer fed by the law and social repression, change was possible only outside the law.

Les Misérables, published 20 years after Les Mystéres de Paris, came on the wave of reformist sympathy during the Third Empire, at the moment when economic conditions improved and hunger was finally conquerable in France and elsewhere. It led to ‘a sudden surge of official interest in penal legislation, the industrial exploitation of women, the care of orphans, and the education of the poor’.¹¹² Yet, the rise of urban populations, especially in Paris, increased vulnerability to disease, especially tuberculosis and cholera, which killed tens of thousands. As Hugo wrote Les Misérables, Baron Haussmann destroyed the slums of Paris and built the grand sewers, transforming the city. The sewers appear in their macabre, at times nauseating, magnificence at the climax of the novel, as the setting for Javert’s final pursuit of Jean Valjean. Yet, Paris remained a city of poverty even as conditions improved. The poor were squeezed into the outskirts, creating a ring round the wealthy urban core. In 1860, as Hugo completed Les Misérables, about a quarter of young Frenchmen were rejected for military service as medically unfit; beggars abounded, and the old were often treated as parasites; as late as 1914, as in 1820, most French people left little, if anything, of value on their deaths.¹¹³

Zola’s Germinal (1885)

Zola’s novel of the French miners, Germinal, is set in the 1860s, during the Second Empire, over three decades after the end of Les Misérables, but suggests that, as in England, industrialization worsened the conditions of the common people. The novel’s stark realism derives from Zola’s visit to Anzin, a mining town in the Nord region, in 1884 during a strike. He found 10,000 miners employed in 19 pits, in ‘a dark, squalid village of prisoners’.¹¹⁴ Like Orwell 50 years later, Zola went down into the pits with the men, with the damned, he felt, into hell. The novel opens in the black of night in the countryside of northern France, its air and water polluted by industry. A young man, Étienne Lantier, unemployed, hungry, freezing cold, in a night so dark he cannot see his feet, trudges aimlessly, hoping for shelter and work: he has just lost his job as a mechanic in Lille. Darkness is not just in the mines but in the blinkered minds at ease with poverty and injustice. The mine is a creation of human evil, of the greed of the rich, a vicious beast or voracious monster destroying the environment and consuming human sacrifices, a ‘crouching, greedy god to whom they all offered up their flesh’.¹¹⁵

In Germinal, Zola repeatedly contrasts two families: the Maheus, a mining family, and the Grégoires, a shareholding family, who live within walking distance of each other, near the mines, but are worlds apart. The Maheu grandfather, Bonnemort, has been a miner for a half-century, since age seven.¹¹⁶ He dreams futilely that he will not be cheated of a fair pension by the company that has exploited him all his life, though convinced that ‘things had never worked properly, and never would’.¹¹⁷ On his broken body the damage done by industry is inscribed; in his persistent cough and spitting, injustice is heard. The entire family is crammed cattle-like in a small building: Bonnemort, his son and daughter-in-law and their seven children. Apart from the beds, the only furniture is a table, two chairs, a wardrobe, and a cuckoo clock. A cooking pot doubles as a washbasin. All get up to go to work at 4:00 am. No sooner are they up than the mother, La Maheude, is anxious at not making ends meet as they have no food left, they cannot live on 11 francs a week and they owe Maigrat, the local shopkeeper, 60 francs.¹¹⁸ Meanwhile, the Grégoires and their 18-year-old daughter, Cécile, sleep in their fine house barely two kilometers away: they have a garden, servants, comfort, and leisure, all paid for by an annual income of 40,000 francs from shares in the mines. Cécile is a notable beneficiary of the miners’ labor, for she, as a much-loved solitary late child, is indulged in every whim, and has horses and carriages and the latest Parisian fashions. When she first appears in the novel, she is in bed, a sleeping princess. By the time she gets up, the Maheus have toiled four hours in the mines.

The miners’ poverty shadows even the July fair, the Ducasse, at Montsou, with its dancing and drinking and summertime good cheer. The joys of these people are desolate and miserable, with threats of worse to come in winter.¹¹⁹ The Maheus cannot remember the last time they had such a ‘feast’ for lunch – soup and a bit of beef. At the fair, there is mostly lukewarm beer and cheap sex. On the crowded low-ceilinged dance floor of the Bon-Joyeux, decorated with paper flowers, there are three musicians, four oil lamps, and barrels of beer; even the children are gorged with beer; some are drunk. There are few old people – the rest devoured by the pit. A storm threatens, and young men and women snatch their pleasures in the fields, to beget a new deprived generation. The talk, even when drowned in alcohol, is all of privation, struggle, and injustice: the fear of being laid off, of children marrying and no longer contributing to the family finances, of the need to raise a workmen’s fund in order to strike. The fair ends early as the miners must get up at four the next morning, but Étienne is given the last word: alcohol and sex are nothing compared to justice, by knocking the bourgeoisie down (balayer les bourgeois).

Étienne, his compassion and anger roused, leads an unsuccessful strike.¹²⁰ His half-baked socialist ideas and naive belief in an ‘enchanted society of the future [l’avenir enchanté de son rêve social]’ briefly catch the imagination of the miners, and he stirs them from resignation to protest; but he cannot feed them, and they slowly starve. Zola contrasts them with the well-fed mine officials and their families who live on site, in a typically obscene sumptuous meal eaten during the strike. Hennebeau, the Company manager, stuffs himself with sausage, scrambled eggs, truffles, fresh trout, roast partridge, fine wine, Russian salad, crayfish and, for dessert, apple charlotte with meringue, pineapple, grapes and pears, and coffee, and between mouthfuls declares that the workers – who cannot afford bread – have developed a ‘taste for luxury [des goûts de luxe]’.¹²¹ The ‘hunger’ of the well-fed guests is an ironic comment on the different meanings of hunger to the bourgeoisie and the workers: Cécile, in particular, is described as never well-enough fed. The ‘idle luxury’ of the workers – a familiar charge against the poor – is a joke among themselves, though some are not laughing. Madame Hennebeau, the manager’s adulterous wife, believes the propaganda against the miners; she doubts that the workers are badly off and is indignant at their alleged ingratitude: ‘Weren’t they extraordinarily lucky people, to be housed, heated, and cared for by the Company?’¹²² Hennebeau, starved for love, envies the miners, some of whom, degraded though they are, are happier than he is.¹²³

Zola underscores the vast difference between the lives of stockholders and their families and the miners and their families in his descriptions of two teenaged girls: Cécile Grégoire, an only child, protected from the suffering around her; her doting parents indulging every whim, giving her the finest food, a bedroom fit for royalty, walls covered with blue silk, white lacquered furniture with blue borders, the latest Parisian fashions, private tutoring and piano lessons, new carriages and horses; while Catherine Maheu is worked like a horse, slaving half-starved a half-mile down a mine in temperatures soaring at times to 60 degrees Celsius, ‘stark naked and reduced to the pitiful level of a scavenger scrabbling for a livelihood in the mud of the gutter, she struggled painfully along, her buttocks smeared with sweat and grime, wallowing belly-deep in the mire, pushing along on all fours, like a horse hitched to a cab’.¹²⁴

Germinal is not all from the workers’ viewpoint. Zola presents a set of uncontrollable economic conditions in which no one can be totally blamed. Following other novelists who depict industrialists sympathetically, such as Charlotte Brontë in Shirley, Elizabeth Gaskell in North and South, and Hugo in Les Misérables, Zola portrays Deneulin, a private mine owner, fair-minded and honest, knowledgeable and reliable, who risks all he has in his mine and eventually goes bankrupt.¹²⁵ He does not have an easy life: his wife has died leaving him with two daughters to raise. They, however, know what pressure he is under and take good care of the household finances: they mend their dresses again and again rather than spend much-needed cash. Deneulin is a hands-on employer who knows his workers personally and speaks frankly to them: ‘I’ve got to make a living in the first place, if I’m going to pay you a living wage.’¹²⁶ Yet he also gives the broader internationally interlinked economic picture, of over-extension and speculation, over-production and slump, concluding by admitting the justice of the workers’ case: ‘the workers are right to say that we are making them pay our bills [l’ouvrier a raison de dire qu’il paie les pots cassés]’.¹²⁷

To the Russian revolutionary exile, Souvaine, influenced by Bakunin, justice can be achieved only by an earth bathed in blood and purified by fire: ‘Set fire to every town and city, cut the populace to shreds, raze everything to the ground, and when there’s nothing left of this whole, vile world, maybe a better one will grow up in its place.’¹²⁸ The starving miners, reduced to an animal existence, resort to violence: their wives attack the bourgeoise ladies, and Bonnemort strangles the pampered Cécile. Maigrat, a sexual predator, dies trying to escape a murderous mob, then his corpse is castrated by the women, his victims.¹²⁹ The gendarmes arrive and Maheu is killed. The safety valves in the mine are opened, the cables are cut. Finally, Souvarine, his gift for destruction honed by the cruel and despotic Tsarist rule, and the sight of his lover, also a revolutionary, hanged in public, risks his life to make the mine collapse, to kill the ‘evil beast’.

Germinal is driven by a powerful hope of revolutionary justice and equality. The miners would no longer live underground like enslaved dumb brutes or machines, deaf and blind to the world, but would wake and spring up like seeds from slumber in the soil, ‘they would grow up to be real men, an army of men fighting to restore justice [une armée d’hommes qui rêtabliraient la justice]. Hadn’t all citizens been equal since the Revolution?’¹³⁰

The hope of a brighter future continues until the end, with echoes of the 1789 Revolution, as the full meaning of ‘Germinal’ comes to light – the revolutionary spring: the hungry mob exploding like the mine itself, a great destructive force of nature, the ragged women with their babies, the cry for bread and justice, the sound of the Marseillaise, the orgiastic cries for vengeance, the looting and assaults, the violence against traitors, the outnumbered gendarmes firing unwillingly, for self-protection; even the image of the guillotine in the Terror – though the miners are defeated and forced to go back to work. La Maheude, in particular, is unbroken in her faith in justice. Armed with new self-knowledge and set on a revolutionary career, Étienne imagines his comrades germinating underground, a new Germinal, pushing upward. This vision of an army of workers bringing vengeful revolution proved false in France and Western Europe, but was prophetic in Russia and among the Eastern European Jews.

Notes

1 Coleridge (1972: 207).

2 Scott’s depiction of the poor is strikingly at odds with Smith’s idea of an ‘invisible hand’, as described in The Theory of Moral Sentiments (IV i 10), providing the poor with the ‘necessaries of life’. Scott is closer to the reality of Scottish indigence, particularly in rural areas and the Highlands where sympathy for revolt was widespread, while Smith writes from the perspective of 18th-century Glasgow, where economic union with England seemed the rational way forward. Yet Smith was well-aware of the dire poverty in Scotland. In The Wealth of Nations (I viii), he points out that nine in ten children born in the Scottish Highlands died, largely because their parents were too poor to look after them properly.

3 On the post-1815 economic context of Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss, Felix Holt, the Radical, and Middlemarch, see pp. 100–101.

4 Cobbett (2001: xi). Chekhov (in ‘Peasants’) and Carlo Levi, similarly, describe tax collectors in Russia and Italy respectively entering homes of the poor (behavior prohibited in the Hebrew Bible) and taking necessities as tax. On Levi, see p. 214 note 12.

5 On Wordsworth, see pp. 116–23.

6 On familiar biblical texts relating to the poor, see pp. 29–30.

7 Other writers, too, including Dickens and George Eliot, were influenced by Wordsworth in their admiration for the fortitude of the poor. See p. 100ff.

8 On this and similar biblical allusions in literature on poverty, see pp. 35–9.

9 In his play The Excursion (1814), Wordsworth, though regarded by this time as one of the greatest poets in English, expresses humility and joy at the dignified expressiveness of the anonymous Wanderer: ‘How precious, when in riper days I learned/ To weigh with care his words, and to rejoice/ In the plain presence of his dignity!’

10 Wordsworth (1984: 42).

11 The changed view of landscape as represented by the Romantic movement might be illustrated by comparing the terror and despair aroused by the Alps in Livy’s account of Hannibal’s crossing with Wordsworth’s sense of the awesome beauty of the same landscape in The Prelude. The Romantics discovered the splendor of the bleak and the wild, perhaps partly in recognition that the environment as a whole was under threat.

12 On ballads depicting the poor, some of which may have influenced Wordsworth in poems such as ‘Alice Fell’, see Lees (1998: 160ff.). Coleridge, with a similarly troubled childhood, shared with Wordsworth a sensitivity toward suffering children (e.g. Coleridge 1975: 206–7). See pp. 115, 11–18.

13 See Deuteronomy (24: 12–13). The coat as symbol of societal attitudes to the poor is central in Gogol’s story ‘The Overcoat’ (1842). See pp. 128–9.

14 See Deuteronomy (14: 28–15: 11). On biblical poor law, see pp. 29–30.

15 Rousseau, in Reveries of the Solitary Walker (1786–8), includes occasional observations of poor children in Paris, not to call for social change but to illustrate how charitable acts changed his mood, for ‘In extreme poverty, a little makes one rich’ (Rousseau 2011: 99). Writers after 1789, including Blake and Wordsworth, tended to see poor children (as Marx did) as a justification for social change and revolution.

16 Quoted in Barker (2007: 92).

17 Ibid., 69.

18 On the poor in the poetry of Wordsworth and Clare, see pp. 116–25.

19 Wordsworth, The Prelude, 1850 version (IX 519–24). The 1805 version has slight variations.

20 On the anti-revolutionary sermon of Richard Watson, Bishop of Llandaff and Wordsworth’s unpublished reply, see Gill (1989: 71–3). William Blake, similarly outraged at the bishop’s attempt to justify social inequity, called him ‘State trickster’ and ‘Presumptuous Murderer’ (Keynes 1957: 384). Even so, the bishop later recommended (as did Thomas Paine) that responsibility for the poor should shift from the local parishes to the central government and be paid for through a national tax, an idea that became the basis for the welfare state (Soloway 1969: 82).

21 On the elevated view of the poor in Christian Scripture, see pp. 33–5.

22 Though sympathetic to the ideals of the French Revolution, Wordsworth was appalled by its violence, some of which he observed personally; in The Prelude, he expresses admiration for the arch-conservative, Edmund Burke.

23 On the economic downturn and its effects on the poor during the Napoleonic wars, see Marshall (1982: 80) and Lees (1998: 80–1). Higher prices during the Napoleonic wars benefited the rural gentry, before the post-war slump, George Eliot observes in Silas Marner (1860). See pp. 100–1. In the poem ‘Eighteen Hundred and Eleven’, Anna Letitia Barbauld describes the economic cost of war – Famine, Disease, Rapine: ‘… where the Soldier gleans the scant supply,/ The helpless peasant but retires to die …’.

24 Thompson (2013: 73).

25 See Gill (1989: 98). On poverty in England during the Napoleonic wars and after, see Hilton (1998: ch. 3). On Wordsworth and poverty, see Harrison (1994), Benis (2001), and Simpson (2009).

26 For Wordsworth’s account of life in the West Country in the 1790s, see The Prelude, Book X. For a contemporary account of poverty in Somersetshire, see Eden (1797: II 643–51).

27 The solitary familiar rural beggar as object of communal care in Wordsworth may be contrasted with the hordes of beggars and vagrants in cities such as Paris, London, St. Petersburg, and Istanbul. In its plea for non-interference, and literal laissez-faire (‘let him pass’), Wordsworth’s ‘The Old Cumberland Beggar’ echoes classical economists such as Adam Smith: the economists warned against governments telling people how to use their capital; the poets warned against governments telling people how to live their lives. A similar idea appears in schnorrer jokes. See the following note and p. 33.

28 On the perception of the needs of the giver in 19th-century Evangelical England, see Hilton (1988: 102ff.). Wordsworth’s view that the poor fulfill a valuable role in eliciting charitable impulses brings the poet unexpectedly into comparison with the Yiddish schnorrer (beggar) jokes, of which Freud was so fond. In these jokes, the schnorrer is superior to the rich as an essential source of opportunity to give charity and thus win a place in the World to Come. For an example, see p. 33.

29 See for example, Stevenson’s poem, ‘The Vagabond’: ‘Wealth I ask not, hope nor love,/ Nor a friend to know me;/ All I ask, the heavens above/ And the road below me.’

30 Wordsworth’s insistence that the beggar is better off free than in the workhouse prison is close to one of the arguments against poor relief: that charity corrupted ‘the independent nature of the poor’ (Fowler 2008: 17). Compare Adam Smith’s observation in Theory of Moral Sentiments (IV i 10), quoted on p. 83, that the beggar, in his fleeting moments of security, is richer than a king.

31 For a similarly high valuation of the poor as individuals, each of whom has a story, see Goldsmith’s The Deserted Village. See p. 82.

32 Wordsworth (1984: 41–2).

33 Ibid., 53–4. The notion expressed by Wordsworth that the poor have more feeling for their children than the rich appears in the Talmud (Mo’ed Katan 24b), in a discussion of the age at which lamentation should be made when a child dies.

34 Other English poets with humble rural origins include Stephen Duck (1705–56) and Robert Bloomfield (1766–1823); Clare, however, has a unique status as an outstanding poet of nature, of rural life and childhood, and also of protest against enclosures.

35 Clare (1984: xviii).

36 On the rich folk culture of Clare’s childhood world, see Bate (2003).

37 On Clare’s extensive reading, see Robinson’s introduction to Clare (1983: xiii–xv); for his biblical reading, see ibid., 5.

38 Clare, The Parish (1985: 84; lines 2106–9). Also see Clare (1984: 490n). Shelley, too, alludes to the deteriorating situation of the English poor in the poem ‘England in 1819’: ‘A people starved and stabbed in th’ untilled fields’. Shelley sought an end to superstitious faiths in gods and monarchs, dividing humanity. His credo, Prometheus Unbound (1819), is a call for liberty and equality: ‘The loathsome mask has fallen, the man remains/ Sceptreless, free, uncircumscribed, but man/ Equal, unclassed, tribeless, and nationless,/ Exempt from awe, worship, degree, the king/ Over himself; just, gentle, wise: but man …’ (III iv 193–7).

39 Clare, The Parish (1985: 31, 76; lines 20, 1792), ‘The Workhouse Orphan’ (ibid., 93n).

40 Ibid., 19. The quote in the passage is from Clare’s The Parish (lines 1282–3). In contrast to Clare’s heartbreak by the enclosures, Jane Austen expresses no clear opposition and as the daughter of a landowning clergyman benefited from parliamentary legislation designed mainly for the advantage of the landowning classes, though there is conventional Christian sympathy for the poor in her novels, for example in charitable visits made by some of her characters (e.g. Fanny Price, Emma Woodhouse). On the class difference between Austen and Clare, see the Introduction, this volume, p. 14.

41 On Shevchenko in the context of Ukrainian nationalism and national poetry generally, see Aberbach (2015).

42 Ibid., 254.

43 Compare Clare’s attacks on the English rich in ‘Helpstone’ (‘Accursed Wealth’). Whereas Clare’s penalty for being outspoken was censorship, Shevchenko’s was exile.

44 Aberbach (2015: 254).

45 Ibid., 262.

46 Ibid.

47 Dmitri’s dream occurs in Book 9, Chapter 8 of The Brothers Karamazov. On poverty and the Russian literary imagination, see Herman (2001). Joseph Conrad recalls Dostoyevsky in his description of the absurdity of a child’s feeling for a starving, tormented horse and its driver, in the novel The Secret Agent (1907). Stevie, an impoverished, mentally disabled boy, is overcome by the realization that it is ‘a bad world for poor people’ and, in the longing to comfort them (as he was comforted when distressed as a child), conceives ‘a bizarre longing to take them to bed with him … To be taken into a bed of compassion was the supreme remedy’ (ch. 8).

48 On Ruskin’s view of the immorality of luxury in the presence of poverty, and the suggestion that this view is hypocritical, see p. 14. For the contrary view, of Adam Smith, see p. 83. Guilt toward the peasants was common among the aristocratic Russian writers; Chekhov, grandson of a serf, tended to be more critical of the peasants.

49 Anna Karenina Part 7, Chapter 3 (Tolstoy 1968: 711).

50 On conditions of the Russian peasantry under Tsarist rule, see Moon (2006). The historian W. Bruce Lincoln (1981: 507) sums up the position of the Russian peasants at the time of their emancipation in 1861: ‘The country’s fifty-two million peasants knew only the most primitive agricultural techniques at the time of their emancipation. They knew next to nothing about sanitation, public health, or personal hygiene. They lived in a world peopled by demons, ghosts, elves, and other spectral creatures, whose interventions were used to explain bad luck, good fortune, prosperity, life, and death. Almost none of them was literate, and therefore they were effectively cut off from the country in which they lived. Newspapers, the only means of communication available in the nineteenth-century, could have no impact upon them, nor could they be instructed by them. In the entire Russian Empire, not more than 350,000 out of a total population of 75,000,000 were attending any sort of school at the time of Alexander II’s accession [1855].’

51 Lieven (1994: 18).

52 Turgenev (1987: 202), Moon (2006: 372).

53 Dostoyevsky, in Winter Notes on Summer Impressions (1863), attacks police spying in France, though the Russian secret police, being an instrument of an authoritarian regime, was far more dangerous, as he well knew from experience.

54 On Chekhov’s opinion of the peasants, see p. 134.

55 Of ‘The Overcoat’, Dostoyevsky writes in Poor Folk, ‘it’s simply not true to life, because a clerk of that kind could never exist’ (1988: 68).

56 Ibid., 75.

57 Ibid., 50–1, 100. On a visit to London in 1862, Dostoyevsky was horrified by the Haymarket, thronging with prostitutes, including little girls being sold by their mothers. One girl caught his eye, barefoot, ragged, dirty, bruised, and hungry: ‘She continually shook her dishevelled head from side to side as if debating something with herself, spread out her little hands and gesticulated, suddenly crossed them and pressed them to her chest. I turned and gave her a sixpence. She grabbed the silver coin, then wildly, with frightened astonishment, looked me in the eyes and suddenly ran away as fast as she could as if afraid I’d take the money back’ (in Freeborn 2003: 53). On the influence of Dickens on Dostoyevsky, see p. 128. Dostoyevsky’s observations on children anticipate the post-World War II clinical work of John Bowlby and his colleagues on the effects of trauma on children.

58 Dostoyevsky first experienced charity as an essential part of everyday life as a political prisoner in Siberia in 1850. As a nobleman, he had little idea of this side of Russian life. He never forgot the little girl who, seeing him in chains, rushed up to him: ‘take a copeck in the name of Christ’. He recounts this incident at the end of Chapter 1 of House of the Dead (1862). He recalled that even the convicts gave, whatever they could, to the Church collection; and this made them feel human, the equals of free men: ‘I’m somebody, too … Everyone’s equal before God’ (Part 2, ch. 5; 1985: 275). The benefit to the giver, a central principle of Judaeo-Christian charity – in Jewish tradition, charity is an obligation, even for the poorest – is described also by Wordsworth in ‘The Old Cumberland Beggar’. See pp. 151–2.

59 ‘To know what Russian prisons and Russian police and justice really are’, wrote Alexander Herzen in his autobiography, ‘one must be a peasant’ (1983: 189).

60 On Dostoyevsky’s imprisonment and its effects on him and his writing, see Frank (1983). Carlo Levi’s Christ Stopped at Eboli shares with Dostoyevsky’s House of the Dead the educative effects of imprisonment of an upper-class writer among peasants. Neither writer knew much about the peasantry prior to their arrest, in each case for political offenses. Each emerged from prison with much knowledge of and respect for working people. On Levi, see pp. 205–8.

61 Troyat (1989: 33–4).

62 Tolstoy, too, experienced the danger of telling the truth in Tsarist Russia: during the famine of 1891 he wrote articles attacking the Russian intelligentsia for their indifference to the plight of millions of peasants, of whom hundreds of thousands were dying. He led the relief efforts, using his own money and prestige to set up hundreds of soup kitchens. As a result, Tolstoy was condemned and censored, ‘branded as the Antichrist … inciting the peasants to revolt’, and threatened with arrest and exile (Bartlett 2010: 338). On Chekhov’s role as a doctor during this famine, see p. 134.

63 Ibid., 4–5. Turgenev’s story ‘Punim and Baburin’ is a fictional account of these early memories.

64 Turgenev (1990: 235). Translations from Turgenev’s Sketches From a Hunter’s Album are from Freeborn’s translation (1990).

65 Turgenev (1990: 154). In ‘Raspberry Water’ (1848), too, Turgenev writes of the hopeless debt of the peasants and the owners’ indifference. (An earlier treatment of this theme is Maria Edgeworth’s novel, The Absentee [1812], attacking Irish landlords who use agents to run their estates; in some cases, as in Turgenev, the tenants are maltreated and impoverished, and they hate and fear the agents.) Turgenev’s ‘Bailiff’ was written at the same time as Belinsky’s ‘Letter to Gogol’ (1847), with its plea for justice in Russian social and political life, and both men were in the Silesian spa town of Salzbrunn in 1847. Though the story was written in May and June of 1847, ‘the final place and date Turgenev gave to it (Salzbrunn, in Silesia, July 1847) was his way of acknowledging agreement with the sentiments expressed by Belinsky’ (Freeborn, in Turgenev 1990: 8).

66 Ibid., 144.

67 Ibid., 147.

68 The extravagance of landowners amid the suffering of their serfs is a repeated theme in Turgenev’s stories. In ‘Hamlet of the Shchigrovsky District’ (1849), a landowner spends 15,000 roubles a year on wine alone. Many wealthy Russians had little awareness of or sensitivity to the conditions of the poor. Tolstoy in ‘The Death of Ivan Ilyich’ (1884) describes 1880 as ‘the hardest year of Ivan Ilyich’s life’: as a well-to-do public prosecutor earning 3,500 roubles annually – a fortune to a peasant – he feels ‘the most monstrous and cruellest injustice’ that he is not promoted and earning 5,000 roubles (ch. 3). Comparable attitudes are found elsewhere in Russian literature (see p. 199 note 34) and in Western European literature (see p. 199 note 34) and in Western European literature (see pp. 101, 111 note 37).

69 Turgenev (1990: 272, 273).

70 Ibid., 274. Akulina’s flowers, like those of Makar in Dostoyevsky’s Poor Folk, bring to mind B. Traven on lovers’ gifts in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1930): ‘The gold that a beautiful and elegant woman wears on her finger, or a king in his crown, has been in strange company and washed in blood as often as in soap and water. A chaplet of flowers, a wreath of the leaves of a tree has a nobler origin, and though gold may be more durable this advantage is merely relative’ (end ch. 9).

71 Turgenev (1990: 236).

72 Ibid., 245–6. Compare the marvellous voice of Margaret, the factory girl in Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton (ch. 4). Gaskell observes with admiration the growing interest in science among the laborers, who included amateur mathematicians, botanists, and entomologists. In Russia, however, some landowners were so enriched by the serf system that they were able to create their own orchestras and theaters as well as academies for training serf musicians and performers. Russian ballet and opera originated in stately homes (Figes 2002: 38f.).

73 Turgenev (1990: 360).

74 Ibid., 365.

75 In the story ‘Death’, Turgenev gives many other examples of the general stoicism toward death among the peasants. As they are familiar with death they are not afraid of death. This stoicism characterizes peasants in other literatures too, as described for example by Crabbe and Wordsworth in England or Carlo Levi in Italy. Crabbe’s The Borough (1810) includes the story of Ellen Orford, a blind old woman in the poorhouse who has lost all her children in a series of devastating blows, but concludes, ‘I love mankind and call my God my Friend’ (Letter XX). In contrast, in Hugo’s Les Misérables, Jean Valjean’s lack of stoicism in the face of starvation brings about his transformation from peasant to convict to enlightened capitalist.

76 Turgenev (1990: 365).

77 Turgenev (1965: 83).

78 On conditions of the Russian peasants, see Bushkovitch (2012: 216ff.): in the pre-1914 period, about half the land was still owned by noble families (ibid., 219), and infant mortality was about one in four (Hobsbawm 1994: 193).

79 See Figes (2002: 258).

80 Troyat (1987: 59). On Chekhov’s career as a doctor among the peasants, see ibid., 159–60. On Chekhov’s early story, ‘A Beggar’ (1887), as an affirmation of the traditional values of love and charity in the rehabilitation of the poor, see p. 89 note 42

81 Chekhov (1999: 4).

82 Chekhov (1988: 120).

83 Ibid., 136.

84 For examples of the rich gorging themselves in sight of the hungry, see pp. 143, 204. Yet, Asorin, in ‘My Wife’, is depicted struggling with his own nature and is not wholly unsympathetic, anticipating Chekhov’s feeling for the economic and emotional problems of Russian landowners in his great plays.

85 Ibid., 154, 155.

86 On the controversy triggered by ‘Peasants’, see Figes (2002: 255f.). Chekhov describes peasant conditions with clinical exactitude. There were villages close to Moscow where 60% of infants died in their first year and the poor discharged from hospital died for lack of aftercare (ibid., 257).

87 Deneulin, the mine owner in Germinal ruined by a strike and a violent attack by miners on his mine, concludes: ‘Doubtless they were brutes, but they were illiterate, starving brutes’ (Zola 1998: 327).

88 Chekhov (1999: 48). See p. 194; also compare Wordsworth’s attack on the Industrial Revolution as an ecological disaster, in The Excursion (1814), pp. 18–67.

89 On the effects of the destruction of the French Church on the poor, see Schama (1989: 852). Ideological opposition to the Church began with the French Enlightenment, led by Voltaire (1694–1778). In Candide (1758), Voltaire questions ‘Christian kindness’. When Candide, an aristocrat, loses everything and seeks alms from well-to-do Dutch Christians, they warn him that if he continues to beg he will be sent to a reformatory to learn how to work for his daily bread (ch. 3). It is James, the un-christened, yet charitable Anabaptist who helps Candide. James disputes the faith of Pangloss, Candide’s tutor, that all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds: men, he sadly concludes, ‘were not born wolves, yet they have become wolves’ (ch. 4).

90 On French poverty in the Napoleonic era, see Horne (2005: 92f.). On the rise of indigence and vagrancy as a result of war, see p. 76.

91 Despite the hardships of the poor in 19th-century France, the poor in England were evidently worse off. Hobsbawm writes that in comparison with England, France, which was slower to industrialize, enjoyed ‘stability and relative comfort’ (1962: 70). On Paris in literature, see Milne (2014).

92 See Braudel (1994: 394). In Stendhal’s The Red and the Black (1830), set after the Bourbon Restoration, Julien Sorel, son of a peasant, uses his trial for attempted murder to declare publicly his fanatic revolutionary sympathies, the true core of his character; and he warns the court against using his crime de passion as a pretext for further betraying the meritocratic principles of the French Revolution and blocking the low born from seeking education and positions of authority in France.

93 So chaotic was French poor relief, that ‘even the harshness of the English Poor Law was often praised by comparison’ (Tombs 1996: 178).

94 Schama (1989: 306, 852) contrasts poverty in France before and after the Revolution; see pp. 89 note 49, 150 note 89. The Republic’s success in eliminating famine, though poverty and hunger remained widespread, became a propaganda tool against the old regime, when Ancien Régime alimentaire was common. In revolutionary Russia, similarly, the Soviet regime prided itself in at least providing bread for the masses, unlike the Tsarist government, though in fact famine in the USSR in the 1930s, particularly in Ukraine, was far worse than any famine under Tsarist rule. Hugo’s view of the scandal of French poverty is not far from that of Marx, in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852): Marx rejected the claim that the peasants had benefited from Revolutionary France which, instead, had laid ‘the legal foundation of their enslavement and their poverty’ (Marx 1973: 241).

95 Cobban (1977: 49). In England, too, the Church was unable to cope with the increasing numbers of poor people in the late 18th century. See p. 82ff.

96 Hugo (1983: 98).

97 Ibid., 29.

98 Ibid., 44–6.

99 Ibid., 53.

100 In connection with Jean Valjean’s crime, Hugo cites a statistic that in London hunger was the direct cause of four out of five robberies (Hugo 1983: 96). His story, Claude Gueux (1834), is a precursor of Les Misérables in its account of a good man who steals when hungry, is caught and, provoked by a Javert-like jailer, commits murder and is hanged. The story was sent by the publisher to all the deputies in the French Parliament.

101 Dostoyevsky, visiting France in 1862, the year of the publication of Les Misérables, concluded (a case of the kettle calling the pot black, in view of his own imprisonment in Siberia) that so-called ‘equality before the law’ in France was a ‘personal insult’ to every Frenchman (2008: 66).

102 Hugo (1983: 96–7).

103 On Thomas Paine’s observation in The Rights of Man (1792), that most of those executed for crimes were poor, see p. 109 note 7.

104 Hugo (1983: 98).

105 ‘Years of malnutrition, in a lifetime dominated by the struggle for food, shaped the behavior and attitudes of the poor. Poverty might be accepted with resignation for as long as it appeared to be inevitable, and death often with apathy, but the fear of famine provoked panic. The hungry abandoned the fields, and went around the countryside begging’ (Price 1981: 200).

106 Hugo (1983: 482–3).

107 ‘… the casual vomit of gigantic Paris’ (‘Le Vin des Chiffonnieres’, c. 1843) (Baudelaire 1986: 206). Elsewhere in his poetry, Baudelaire describes the hostility of the poor to the world (‘Les Sept Vieillards’, 1859) and their ultimate comfort, death, as ‘patrie antique’ (‘La Mort des Pauvres’, c. 1852) (ibid., 178, 236).

108 Compare Elizabeth Gaskell’s portrait of a Manchester prostitute, c. 1840, in Mary Barton (1848), written amid a steep rise in prostitution in England. Gaskell makes no moral judgment but emphasizes the circumstances: the woman is starving and threatened with eviction for not paying the rent, it is a cold winter, and her child is sick, ‘So I went out into the street one January night’ (ch. 14).

109 In 1866, the first shelter for poor and pregnant women and single mothers was established by the Catholic Church (Gildea 2008: 367).

110 Hugo (1983: 647, 683). For a similar attack on the rich by a villainous character, in Mendele’s The Beggar-Book, see Aberbach (2018: 109).

111 The population of Paris increased from 547,000 in 1801 to 1,539,000 in 1856 (Gildea 2008: 79).

112 Robb (1997: 381).

113 See Price (1981: 206, 209–10, 239).

114 Brown (1996: 529). For a fuller biographical account of Zola, see Mitterand (1999–2002). On the French miners and growing organization of workers prior to World War I, see Gildea (2008: 317ff.). On social legislation (mostly inadequate) and charities dealing with problems of the poor by the Third Republic, see Zeldin (1979: 301ff.; 1981: 251ff.).

115 Zola (1998: 14). The mine is monster, evil beast, and greedy god, devouring human flesh (15, 132, 380). Souvarine tries to kill it (456), but at the end of the book the monster is still alive, ‘swallowing down its ration of human flesh’ (514). Zola uses similar imagery to describe the markets in Paris in Le Ventre de Paris. On Germinal in the context of the environmental damage done by industry, see Chapter 9, this volume.

116 Throughout the period 1789–1939, child labor was the norm, though decreasing. For example, Jane Wilson, in Gaskell’s Mary Barton (ch. 10), mentions that she began working in a factory at age five; and David Copperfield works in the blacking factory at age ten.

117 Zola (1998: 286).

118 American truck systems similar to that in Germinal, by which workers are defrauded of their earnings by their employers, are exposed by Steinbeck in The Grapes of Wrath. See p. 210.

119 See Auerbach (1974: ch. 19). Auerbach observes the failure of 19th-century German literature to produce realistic fiction describing the lives of the poor – there is no German Balzac or Zola; he attributes this to the late consolidation of the German state, with unification only in 1871, and a consequent lack of a political and cultural center. Auerbach’s observation might be relevant to the fact that Brecht and Weill’s The Threepenny Opera, though with clear application to Weimar Germany, actually follows the plot of John Gay’s 1728 play, set amid the London underworld.

120 Napoleon III, though an autocrat, had legalized strikes: see Magraw (1983).

121 Zola (1998: 207). For similar cruelly lavish meals of the rich in proximity to the hungry poor, see Chekhov’s story, ‘My Wife’ and Silone’s novel, Fontamara. See pp. 134, 204. In Gaskell’s North and South (1855), the wife of a mill-owner expresses unfairly critical views on the workers similar to those of Madame Hennebeau in Germinal. In Dickens’ Hard Times (1854), the view that workers seek luxuries is satirized in the person of Bounderby, a wealthy manufacturer who ignores the sufferings of his employees and cruelly pretends that what they want is ‘a coach and six, and to be fed on turtle soup and venison, with a gold spoon’ (Book 1, ch. 11). Among many markers of the vast divide between rich and poor is the detailed comparative descriptions of furniture: in Germinal, for example, the Maheus have a few pieces of cheap furniture (with hardly room for more), garish prints on the wall, and a cuckoo clock (eventually pawned), whereas the Hennebeaus have Flemish tapestries, antique cabinets, Henri II armchairs, gold and silk portières, Louis XIV chairs, a 15th-century contador, a 17th-century Italian cabinet, oriental carpets with rich pile, expensive silverware, and a large copper chandelier.

122 Zola (1998: 210), ‘… est-ce qu’ils n’etaient pas très heureux? Des gens loges, chaufeés, soignés aux frais de la Compagnie!’ (Germinal IV i).

123 In Chekhov’s story, ‘My Wife’ (1894), similarly, a wealthy woman envies the starving women she tries to help during a famine as they are not married to her odious husband. See p. 11.

124 Zola (1998: 308).

125 Many manufacturers in 19th-century literature, such as Carson in Mary Barton or Bounderby in Hard Times, have their roots among the working class, but this does not necessarily enhance their sympathy for and understanding of the workers.

126 Zola (1998: 300). Similar concern is expressed by a sympathetic employer in Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath (ch. 22): ‘I don’t know how you men can feed a family on what you get now.’

127 Zola (1998: 82, 207, 208).

128 Ibid., 142.

129 In his portrait in Germinal of the sexual predator, Maigrat, Zola alludes to the particular vulnerability of impoverished women, a theme elsewhere in the Rougon-Macquart novels (e.g. in Nana, on prostitution, and Au Bonheur des Dames [1883], an exposé of the exploitation of women in the Parisian department stores).

130 Zola (1998: 166–7).