by A. N. Wilson
This speech was delivered to the Metropolitan Sanitary Association only a week or so after the opening of the Great Exhibition of 1851, and less than a year after one of the worst outbreaks of cholera in London. Dickens said that:
Searching Sanitary Reform must precede all other social remedies [cheers], and that even Education and Religion can do nothing where they are most needed, until the way is paved for their ministrations by Cleanliness and Decency. [Hear, hear]… What avails it to send a Missionary to me, a miserable man or woman living in a foetid Court where every sense bestowed upon me for my delight becomes a torment, and every minute of my life is new mire added to the heap under which I lie degraded… I am so surrounded by material filth that my Soul cannot rise to the contemplation of an immaterial existence! Or if I be a miserable child, born and nurtured in the same wretched place, and tempted, in these better times, to the Ragged School, what can the few hours’ teaching I get there do for me against the noxious, constant, ever-renewed lesson of my whole existence. [Hear, hear] But give me my first glimpse of Heaven through a little of its light and air – give me water – help me to be clean – lighten this heavy atmosphere in which my spirit droops and I become an indifferent and callous creature that you see me – gently and kindly take the body of my dead relation out of the small room, where I grow to be so familiar with the awful change that even its sanctity is lost to me – and, Teacher, then I’ll hear, you know how willingly, of Him whose thoughts were so much with the Poor, and who had compassion for all Human Sorrow. [Applause]21
While himself keenly involved with a number of philanthropic schemes, Dickens was distrustful of philanthropy, and in his novels the do-gooders are generally seen as absurd, if not positively malign – Mrs Jellyby comes to mind, neglecting her own children in favour of supposed philanthropic interest in far-away Africa; while in the last novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, the loud-voiced philanthropist Honeythunder is a figure from whom the beneficiaries of his charity cannot get away too soon.
Philanthropists who added religion to the mixture were especially uncongenial. He despised the fancy dress of the Anglo-Catholics working in docklands in the 1850s. Equally, the mouthy interferences of the evangelicals into the harmless lives of the rest of us were objects of some of his best satire. ‘The Great Baby’, an article that appeared in Household Words, was by way of being a manifesto.
When Dickens began work as a parliamentary reporter in 1832, he would have noted that a Committee was set up in July of that year, issuing a report a month later on ‘the Laws and Practices relating to the Observance of the Lord’s Day’. The 300 pages of evidence assembled by this parliamentary report showed ‘a systematic and widely-spread violation of the Lord’s Day’. Nineteen out of the thirty members of the Committee were evangelicals. Their aim was to suppress Sunday trading, travelling and recreation, including the opening of public houses and tea gardens. The evangelical lobby was a powerful one. When the Queen and her family travelled south from Scotland on a Sunday train in 1848, they slipped out of Euston Station as unobtrusively as they could, aware of what damage it would do them in the eyes of many opinion-formers if they were seen desecrating the Lord’s Day. For the rest of his life, Dickens never missed an opportunity to attack the Lord’s Day Observance Society and the po-faced, self-advertising Christians who saw it as their function in society to prevent other people enjoying themselves. He supported the National Sunday League, a largely working-class movement started in the 1830s by radicals to permit, for example, the opening of the British Museum on a Sunday, or the performance of Sunday open-air concerts. Arthur Clennam, returning from twenty years as a merchant in China, sits in a coffee shop and hears the bells of London’s churches calling the faithful to worship. ‘“Heaven forgive me”, said he, “and those who trained me. How I have hated this day!”’ [LD I 3]
Boz had opined in ‘London Recreations’, ‘Whatever be the class, or whatever the recreation, so long as it does not render a man absurd himself, or offensive to others, we hope it will never be interfered with, either by a misdirected feeling of propriety on the one hand, or detestable cant on the other.’22 (This quotation appears in the original Evening Chronicle ‘London Recreations’, 17 March 1835, but was omitted from the later Sketches by Boz version.) One of the most magnificent of these attacks was ‘The Great Baby’.
Norris Pope makes the valid point that Dickens, always animated with contempt for Select Committees in the House of Commons, had not bothered, before he wrote ‘The Great Baby’, to realize that, at this particular juncture, the Committee was attempting to limit, or even eliminate, parts of the Wilson-Patten Sunday Beer Act of 1854, which laid restrictions on Sunday opening hours in public houses.23 He was writing an attack in 1855 on the attitudes that had been expressed in the 1853–4 parliamentary inquiry into Sunday drinking: the Committee he was attacking was in fact trying to modify the 1853–4 position. Many readers would understandably think that Dickens should have done his homework. Fair enough. And this would certainly have been true, were he still a parliamentary reporter or gathering evidence for a committee of public inquiry. What he was doing, however, even in his journalism, was creating that poetic drama Leavis spoke of, that imaginative take on the world, which centralized the freedom of the good working classes to make moral choices.
‘The Great Baby’ remains the most sublime rebuke to those parliamentarians and the ‘Monomaniacs’ (that is, the evangelical Christians) who ‘have no other Idea of the People than a big-headed Baby, now to be flattered and now to be scolded, now to be sung to and now to be denounced to Old Boguey, now to be kissed and now to be whipped, but always to be kept in long clothes, and never under any circumstance to feel its legs and go about of itself’.24
My favourite paragraph is a long apostrophe to the Reverend Temple Pharisee, rector of Camel-cum-Needle’s-Eye, who has stepped out of his carriage to the Committee Door to give evidence about the shameful way in which working-class people enjoy themselves.
As I stand in the pulpit, I can actually see the people, through the side windows of the building (when the heat of the weather renders it necessary to have them open), walking. I have, on some occasions, heard them laughing. Whistling has reached my curate’s ears (he is an industrious and well-meaning young man); but I cannot say I have heard it myself. – Is your church well frequented? No. I have no reason to complain of the Pew-portion of my flock who are eminently respectable; but, the Free Seats are comparatively deserted: which is the more emphatically deplorable, as there are not many of them. – Is there a Railway near the church? I regret to state that there is, and I hear the rush of trains, even while I am preaching. – Do you mean to say they do not slacken speed for your preaching? Not in the least. – Is there anything else near the church, to which you would call the Committee’s attention? At the distance of a mile and a half and three rods (for my clerk has measured it by my direction), there is a common public house with tea-gardens, called The Glimpse of Green. In fine weather these gardens are filled with people on a Sunday evening. Frightful scenes take place there. Pipes are smoked; liquors mixed with hot water are drunk; shrimps are eaten; cockles are consumed; tea is swilled; ginger beer is loudly exploded. Young women with their young men; young men with their young women; married people with their children; baskets, bundles, little chaises, wicker-work perambulators, every species of low abomination, is to be observed there. As the evening closes in, they all come straggling home together through the fields; and the vague sounds of merry conversation which then strike upon the ear, even at the further end of my dining-room (eight-and-thirty feet by twenty-seven), are most distressing.25
It is one of Dickens’s most impassioned journalistic pieces. ‘Shrimps are eaten’ is perhaps its most brilliant phrase. It establishes that the true purpose of the Lord’s Day Observance Society and similar busybodies is the desire of the middle and upper classes, those who have large dining rooms, to limit and control the lives of the virtuous poor. Dick
ens took issue with the prison chaplain – ‘the Reverend Single Swallow’ – who claimed that drink was something that led to crime. He pointed out, which was surely a rather strong point, that drunks and criminals were unlikely to be restrained by closing pubs on Sundays – merely the harmless majority inconvenienced. In Dickens’s pantomime vision of the world, it was easy, and necessary, to insist upon the incorrigibility of murderers, serious felons and the like. As easy as hissing and booing when the villain came onstage amid a puff of green smoke in the panto. (‘Sloggins, when in solitary confinement, informed me, every morning for eight months, always with tears in his eyes, and uniformly at five minutes past eleven o’clock that he attributed his imprisonment to his having partaken of rum and water at a licensed house of entertainment called (I use his own words) the Wiry Tarrier.’26)
This is a good example of the way in which Dickens the Reformer, Dickens the Campaigner went into operation. You would look in vain for the detail of accurate political criticism of the actual, day-to-day Victorian scene in his works. His article ‘Red Tape’, for example, was attacking the Window Tax, after it had been abolished in 1851. Those tasked with the actual reform of the Civil Service in 1853 were more scathing in their criticisms of the existing system than Dickens was in Little Dorrit; and he can be shown in that novel to criticize those Tite Barnacles who in reality had either left the scene or were on the run; likewise, the workhouse system he attacked in Oliver Twist had been reformed three years before he wrote the book. The social abuses we meet in his novels are, for the most part, not evils that he wants abolished, so much as newly abolished evils that he is glad to see the back of. Yet how brilliant was Humphry House when he said that novel has ‘the private emotional quality of a bad dream’.27 If we treat the novels as pieces of political polemic, we can ask such questions as when, precisely, they are supposed to be taking place, and point to individual alterations in the procedures of the Court of Chancery, or Poor Law Reform, or Sanitation, or railway-building as evidence of Dickensian anachronisms. The novels, however, do not work on that level. Whether or when or how he got the details right, or wrong, his way of presenting the failing institutions and the failures of Charity was empathetic, imaginative, rather than forensic. Like the Christ of Mark’s Gospel, he looks about him in anger at their hardness of heart. That still packs a powerful punch, even after the particular abuses or horrors anatomized – debtors’ gaols or workhouses – have gone away. If you have seen the world through Dickens’s eyes, parliaments or indeed any self-congratulatory democratic or elected body will seem like a national dustyard, inhabited by national dustmen. And, today, dustwomen.
Systems, whether political or religious, can never in the Dickens world respond to the central truth about life, which is personal, and only disabled by individuals – that is, as Mr Sleary says in Hard Times: ‘there ith a love in the world, not all Thelf-interetht after all, but thomething very different’. [HT III 8] In the mind of Thomas Gradgrind, ‘Facts alone are wanted in life.’ [HT I 1] Gradgrind, who pursued a relentless, Benthamite, Utilitarian view of life – the way of life that John Stuart Mill was reared to by his monstrous father and which caused him, as he tells us in his Autobiography, mental and spiritual collapse when he had just grown up – comes to realize that none of the facts he has been bludgeoning into the heads of his pupils are actually true. The materialism, the ingrained belief in self-interest as the rule of the universe, the view of life that Samuel Smiles made into a bestselling guide to how to get on in life, and which Darwin mythologized into the science of how life itself came into being, is all – all based on an illusion. Gradgrind the Benthamite philosopher-schoolmaster and Bounderby the selfish banker are, like Scrooge and Dombey before his conversion, like Merdle in his hour of despair, worshippers of the false Victorian gods of Mammon, Competition, Survival of the Fittest. It is Sleary, the manager of a third-rate circus, who shines out as the fable unfolds, not as a great mystic or sage, but as a man who has discovered the one thing needful. Such figures are dotted about the Dickens universe: Mr Brownlow and, funnily enough, Nancy herself in most of her manifestations, Gabriel Varden, Captain Cuttle and Old Sol, Betty Higden, Canon Crisparkle, Newman Noggs, Joe Gargery… they are simply decent people, and their response to life – namely, that love is stronger than self-interest – is a recognition not of how things ought to be, but of how things are. Dickens is often described as sentimental, and that is because he is. In this, however, the belief that doing the decent and kindly thing is not merely our duty, but the way to a sane and happy life, is something he holds to be a simple truth. It is a Pelagian belief, of almost universal appeal and application.
‘It seemth to prethent two thingth to a perthon, don’t it, Thquire?’ said Mr Sleary, musing as he looked down into the depths of his brandy and water: ‘one, that there ith a love in the world, not all Thelf-interetht after all, but thomething very different; t’other, that it hath a way of ith own of calculating or not calculating, whith thomehow or another ith at leatht ath hard to give a name to, ath the wayth of the dogth ith!’ [HT III 8]
Louisa Gradgrind had already made the same point to her father when she said, ‘“All that I know is, your philosophy and your teaching will not save me.”’ [HT II 12] We return to the conversion of Scrooge each year at Christmas because we share this Credo, or want to do so. We believe Dombey, who has learned love and gentleness, is not merely nicer but truer than the calculating businessman whom we meet in the first chapter of the novel. To discover, therefore, that Charles Dickens himself was not benign, not loving, not full to the brim with the milk of human kindness is therefore more disturbing than if the biographers had made similar discoveries about, let us say, Wagner or Rodin, or some of the other giants of the nineteenth century, where the impact of their vision does not, at first sight anyway, appear to require the acceptance of the unconquerable power of love.
This was thrown into even sharper relief when Dickens took to the road, and to the railroad, and to the ocean liner, and began his series of public readings.
The writer T. C. de Leon, who heard him in America, recorded:
There are some far better readers; there are many more exact mimics; there are thousands of better actors; but the electric genius of the man fuses all into a magnetic amalgam that once touched cannot be let go until the battery stops working. There is something indescribable; a subtle essence of sympathy that can only be felt, not described, that puts him en rapport with the most antagonistic spirits and makes them his, while the spell is upon them.28
The effect, especially when the Carol was read, was to draw the ineluctable connection between the man and the work. It was to suggest, overwhelmingly, that Dickens, who made perfect charity so attractive in his work and so moving in his public readings, was himself an embodiment of perfect charity. It was only with partial irony that the New York Herald referred to his return to America, to do the reading tour, as the Second Coming.29
Dickens the passionate reformer, the benevolent promoter of Christmas, was also obsessively orderly – neat and tidy to the border of mania, controlling, in his fantasy-life a detective strolling the streets. It should surprise no one, therefore, that, while he abhorred cruelty and tried to rescue the virtuous poor, he also had few qualms about punishing wrongdoers. In Great Expectations, set in the early decades of the nineteenth century, the lawyer’s clerk took Pip on a visit to Newgate Gaol, and Pip/Dickens is able to remark to the reader:
At that time jails were much neglected, and the period of exaggerated reaction consequent on all public wrongdoing – and which is always its heaviest and longest punishment – was still far off. So, felons were not lodged and fed better than soldiers (to say nothing of paupers), and seldom set fire to their prisons with the excusable object of improving the flavour of their soup. [GE 32]
Clearly, Pip speaks here with the voice of Dickens the journalist. There is nothing in the structure of the paragraph to suggest that Dickens distances himself, or his reader
s, in any way from this sentiment. To us, it seems as unsympathetic as Mr Bounderby’s opinion that his workers expected to be ‘set up in a coach and six, and to be fed on turtle soup and venison, with a gold spoon’. [HT I 11] One might accuse the Dickens who argued for prison reform in the 1840s, and for the abolition of capital punishment, and the Dickens who twenty years later defended the death penalty and called for harsher prisons, as a man who followed the familiar pattern of becoming more reactionary with age. The more probable explanation, however, is that Dickens, who had an imaginatively morbid fascination with violent crime and its punishment, and also had a tender heart, subscribed to both views at once. He wanted reform, of the more brutal prisons and of such monstrous phenomena as public executions; and he wanted punishment for the wicked. That is why he was a novelist and not an economist or a politician. G. M. Young was right to point out that Dickens was ‘equally ready to denounce on the grounds of humanity all who left things alone, and on the grounds of liberty all who tried to make them better’.30
In his remarkable essay ‘Lying Awake’, Dickens’s mind filled with images of violence and death. The Paris Morgue ‘comes back again at the head of a procession of ghost stories’. He remembered the joint hanging of Frederick and Maria Manning in 1849, outside Horsemonger Lane Gaol, and the ‘two forms dangling on the top of the entrance gateway – the man’s limp, loose suit of clothes as if the man had gone out of them; the woman’s, a fine shape, so elaborately corseted and artfully dressed, that it was quite unchanged in its trim appearance as it slowly swung from side to side’.31
