The Mystery of Charles Dickens

by A. N. Wilson

  Dickens had laid down his pen in the middle of composing David Copperfield, to join the crowd of 30,000 to witness this remarkable event. He had written two letters to The Times, protesting at the iniquity of public hanging. Convicted murderers, he suggested, should be kept from the public gaze and executed privately within the prison walls. (This reform was eventually brought to pass in 1868, nearly twenty years after he wrote the letters.) Douglas Jerrold, and his old radical friends of the 1840s, were appalled that Dickens now countenanced the idea of capital punishment, whether held in private or not. A part of Dickens, however, was at one with the crowds, the ‘thieves, low prostitutes and vagabonds’, fighting, whistling, joking brutally as the married murderers were brought out to the gallows. The Mannings were especially horrible people, who had murdered their lodger Patrick O’Connor. (‘I never liked him so I finished him off with the ripping chisel,’ Manning calmly told the jury. Maria, still evidently, to Dickens’s eye, a fanciable woman, even when dangling from a rope, had ranted from the dock in her foreign (Belgian) accent and interrupted the judge.)

  Dickens the moralist could write to The Times:

  The horrors of the gibbet and the crime which brought the wretched murderers to it faded in my mind before the atrocious bearing, looks and language of the assembled spectators. When I came upon the scene at midnight, the shrillness of the cries and howls that were raised from time to time, denoting that they came from a concourse of boys and girls already assembled in the best places made my blood run cold.32

  There is excitement pulsating through his denunciation. As a little boy, Dickens had loved it when his godfather Christopher Huffam walked with him through the streets of London at night. He had especially loved the crime-ridden area of Seven Dials – ‘Good Heaven! What wild visions of prodigies of wickedness, want, and beggary arose in my mind out of that place!’33

  He deplored official leniency to ruffians, and felt that police and magistrates were devoted to the ‘preserving of them as if they were Partridges’. [‘The Ruffian’, UT 30] Nor did Dickens believe that wicked people could be reformed or made better. There are good people and bad people, in Dickens’s world, as in his novels. The repentance of the sinner, of which the Bible speaks, or the heart-searching inner reform of heedless or bad people, such as we meet in the pages of the great Russian novels, does not play much role in Dickens’s fiction, with two big exceptions – the repentance of Scrooge, and the attempt made by Magwitch to put ‘good’ use to his fortune. No surprise then that, as far as he was concerned, criminals should not be rehabilitated. They should simply be punished.

  The generic Ruffian – honourable member for what is tenderly called the Rough Element – is either a Thief, or the companion of Thieves. When he infamously molests women coming out of chapel on Sunday evenings (for which I would have his back scarified often and deep) it is not only for the gratification of his pleasant instincts, but that there may be a confusion raised by which either he or his friends may profit, in the commission of highway robberies or in picking pockets. When he gets a police-constable down and kicks him helpless for life, it is because that constable once did his duty in bringing him to justice. When he rushes into the bar of a public-house and scoops an eye out of one of the company there, or bites his ear off, it is because the man he maims gives evidence against him. [‘The Ruffian’, UT 30]

  Such language, while professing to deplore violence, is itself extremely violent. It is penned by Quilp. It is designed, like the language of Wardle’s servant, the Fat Boy, in Pickwick Papers, to make the flesh creep.

  Dickens’s friend and (in some respects) mentor Thomas Carlyle, the dedicatee, in 1854, of Hard Times, had in March 1850 published his Latter-Day Pamphlet on ‘Model Prisons’. It was a diatribe against ‘this universal syllabub of philanthropic twaddle!’ Mrs Manning, in Carlyle’s eyes, had been ‘Not a heroic Judith, not a mother of the Gracchi now, but a hideous murderess, fit to be the mother of hyaenas!’34 Carlyle saw the reforming spirit of the nineteenth century as a substitute for the Christianity in which the governing class no longer truly believed the real law of the universe was ‘“Revenge”, my friends! Revenge and the natural hatred of scoundrels, and the ineradicable tendency to revancher oneself upon them, and pay them what they have merited; this is forevermore intrinsically a correct, and even a divine feeling in the mind of every man.’35 It was this ‘law’ which led Carlyle to believe that ‘By punishment, capital or other, by treadmilling and blind rigour, or by whitewashing and blind laxity, the extremely disagreeable offences of theft and murder must be kept down within limits.’36

  Dickens sided with Carlyle over the treadmill question. Making prisoners walk on a treadmill was a punishment only abolished in Britain by the Prisons Act of 1898. Those such as Elizabeth Fry, John Stuart Mill and Jeremy Bentham who had wanted prisons to be a place of personal rehabilitation did not persuade him. He complained that ‘In an American state prison or house of correction, I found it difficult at first to persuade myself that I was really in a gaol: a place of ignominious punishment and endurance.’ [AN 3]

  Some English prisons, such as the one in Preston, had begun from the 1820s to follow the American pattern, opening workshops and teaching the prisoners useful skills. For Dickens, this muddled the essential purpose of a prison – to punish – with a spurious belief in human reformation. In his article ‘Pet Prisoners’ (1850) he deplored the decline in sheer punishment for its own sake, and its replacement with useful tasks: ‘Is it no part of the legitimate consideration of this important point of work, to discover what kind of work the people always filtering through the gaols of large towns – the pickpocket, the sturdy vagrant, the habitual drunkard, and the begging-letter impostor – like least, and to give them that work to do in preference to any other?’ He urged prison governors to impose work on the inmates that was ‘badged and degraded as belonging to gaols only, and never done elsewhere’. [SJ p. 407]

  By Carlyle’s standards, Dickens was a softy. The Scotch Sage opined:

  Dickens was a good little fellow, and one of the most cheery innocent natures he had ever encountered. But… his theory of life was entirely wrong. He thought men ought to be buttered up, and the world made soft and accommodating for them, and all sorts of fellows have turkey for their Christmas dinner. Commanding and controlling and punishing them he would give up without any misgivings in order to coax and soothe and delude them into doing right.37

  But this was the Dickens of A Christmas Carol, not the journalist who wrote the essay on ‘The Ruffian’. Dickens the Ruffian, Dickens the Quilp, was a much tougher nut to crack – tougher than Carlyle, for whereas Carlyle was a tormented agnostic but at heart a Calvinistic puritan ranter, Dickens the cheery innocent was everlastingly linked to someone who at heart was not so very easily distinguishable from the violent criminals he so freely denounced. The would-be gentleman Pip is the heir, not of crazy old middle-class Miss Havisham, but of Magwitch.

  ‘What were you brought up to be?’

  ‘A warmint, dear boy.’

  He answered quite seriously, and used the word as if it denoted some profession. [GE 40]

  Magwitch had been criminal ever since he was ‘a ragged little creetur as much to be pitied as ever I see (not that I looked in the glass, for there warn’t many insides of furnished houses known to me), I got the name of being hardened. “This is a terrible hardened one,” they says to prison wisitors, picking out me. “May be said to live in jails, this boy.”’ [GE 42]

  Like Dickens, Magwitch is contemptuous of these visitors, who have tried to put into his hands Tracts he could not read. The ‘cheery’ Dickens has made this man loveable, while the complicated and tormented Dickens has, by making him the benefactor of the snobbish Pip, skewed all his preconceptions – about class, money, love even. For, in a twist of the plot that is as improbable as it is mythopoeically brilliant, Magwitch had been the associate of Compeyson, the public-school con artist who had, all those years ago, jilted
Miss Havisham, broken her heart and started in train the whole emotional torment of the novel – Pip’s social ambitions and inevitably unsatisfied love of Estella, who has been drained of the capacity for love by Miss Havisham; Pip’s need for money to rise to a position that is all based on lies and illusion.

  Magwitch, therefore, remains a ‘warmint’. His one attempt at a good deed – to reward the little boy Pip for giving him that pork pie in the churchyard, by bestowing upon him a fortune made out of sheep-farming in Australia – does not really alter the fact that he is a warmint and always will be a warmint.

  Hence – while professing on the one hand to believe in humane reforms, of schools and sewers and workhouses – Dickens’s Carlylean belief in prison punishment at its best when it was most useless. In the case of juveniles, he was prepared to believe in the possibility of reform. He had praised the justice system of Massachusetts, whereby a young offender would be sent to a home and be taught a trade, rather than languishing in a common gaol. A similar motive guided him to rescue young girls from a life of crime and train them in Urania Cottage to be brides in Australia.

  Although it is customary to speak of Dickens’s reforming instincts, and of his charitable endeavours, it is hard to think of any writer who would have been less sympathetic to twenty-first-century ideas of human rights, or of welfare handed out by the state.

  After a reading of A Christmas Carol in Sheffield in 1855, he made the pledge ‘that to the earnestness of my aim and desire to do right by my readers, and to leave our imaginative and popular literature more closely associated than I found it at once with the private homes and public rights of the English people, I shall ever be faithful – to my death – in the principles which have won your approval’.38

  The English people, note. In Bleak House he despised Mrs Jellyby for her ‘telescopic philanthropy’, and her desire to help poor Africans, while neglecting her own children at home. (When her mission to Africa fails, she takes up the cause of feminism.) In 1865 there was a rebellion of the peasant workers in the planting district of Morant Bay, Jamaica. Twenty white people were killed and the courthouse was burned to the ground. A white clergyman is said to have had his tongue cut out. A black Member of the Assembly, Charles Price, was ripped open and his entrails torn out. The governor of Jamaica, Edward John Eyre, responded with the utmost severity. Over the next month more than 600 people were killed and 1,000 leaf-hut dwellings destroyed. Liberal opinion in England believed that Eyre had gone much too far, and figures such as Herbert Spencer and John Stuart Mill protested.

  There was a robust response from the likes of Tennyson and Carlyle, and Dickens sided with them. ‘The Jamaica insurrection is another hopeful piece of business,’ he wrote.

  That platform sympathy with the black – or the Native or the Devil – afar off, and that platform indifference to our own countrymen at enormous odds in the midst of bloodshed and savagery, makes me stark wild. Only the other day, there was a meeting of jawbones of asses at Manchester to censure the Jamaica Governor for his manner of putting down the insurrection! So we are badgered about New Zealanders and Hottentots as if they were identical with men in clean shirts at Camberwell and were to be bound by pen and ink accordingly… But for the blacks in Jamaica being over-impatient and before their time, the whites might have been exterminated without a previous hint or suspicion that there was anything amiss. Laissez aller, and Britons never, never, never!39

  The words make a twenty-first-century reader blush. It would be an incomplete picture of Dickens if we did not quote them. Nor can we say by way of mitigation that he lived in that alien world, the nineteenth century, since there were voices – highly articulate voices – raised in protest against Governor Eyre. The racism and insularity are of a piece with Dickens’s belief that charity not only belongs and begins at home: it is a matter of individual kindness, individual virtue. Our obligation to relieve suffering when it is on our doorsteps is an absolute one. To worry about the plight of those miles from home is to be in danger of numbing our own capacity for charity, just as expecting the state to relieve the suffering of the poor can blind us to our own personal duty to do so.

  Wordsworth’s ‘The Old Cumberland Beggar’, composed 1797, published 1800, anticipates much of what Dickens stood for. The Beggar wanders the Cumberland countryside, scarcely lifting his eyes from the ground, in search of scraps and provender, and apparently relating neither to his outward surroundings nor to other people.

  But 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.

  In the poem Wordsworth dreads the Beggar being ‘rescued’ and institutionalized in some workhouse or place of protection for the poor:

  May never HOUSE, misnamed of INDUSTRY,

  Make him a captive!

  The beggar at large, Wordsworth believes, provides a social function. Even among the very poor, he finds people not merely to help him materially, but to become capable of sympathy themselves. By traipsing from door to door, the ‘useless’ beggar:

  keeps alive

  The kindly mood in hearts which lapse of years,

  And that half-wisdom half-experience gives,

  Make slow to feel, and by sure steps resign

  To selfishness and cold oblivious cares.

  Experience, the distracting business of being alive, makes Scrooges of all of us, Wordsworth almost says. The presence of an actual beggar, making actual demands on the sympathy of all who see him, keeps something alive, throughout the human community, which any number of charities or Poor Laws would not be able to provide. This, broadly, is the ‘message’ of Dickens’s novels, as of his charitable endeavours. But much had happened to Britain since Wordsworth was a young man. The population had not merely exploded. It had become urban. One solitary old man, wandering from village to village in Cumberland in the late 1790s, might well have performed the morally and socially uplifting role ascribed to him by the poet. By the time Wordsworth died as Poet Laureate in 1850, however, the indigent poor had swollen in number. Betty Higden in Our Mutual Friend kept alive the Wordsworthian tradition – her individual acts of kindness to Sloppy and neighbours is allied to a dread of being taken to the workhouse. But how realistic was it to believe that the social ills of society could be cured by:

  that best portion of a good man’s life,

  His little, nameless, unremembered acts

  Of kindness and of love.40

  Wordsworth’s Member of Parliament, John Curwen, said in 1826, ‘I once thought Great Britain could produce [enough] corn for itself, but I now think otherwise.’41 The corn and other foodstuffs that were now, in post-Napoleonic times, being imported to Britain would, without the imposition of tariffs, have been cheaper than those produced by British farmers. The government was caught in the dilemma: reduce, or abolish, the tariffs, and let the poor eat – and thereby threaten the farmers and landowners with a potentially disastrous reduction in income. This was the debate that would culminate in the abolition of the Corn Laws in the mid-1840s.

  Humphry House, writing in the high and palmy days of the foundation of the welfare state and the discovery of the advantages of a social democratic political system, is scornful of Betty Higden. He finds it ‘hard to see any genuine tragedy’ in the figure of a destitute old woman refusing help, for fear that she will be institutionalized. Her rejection of charity is, for House, merely ‘stupid’.42 Seventy years after House formed these lofty judgements, Betty Higden’s cussedness has a more heroic tinge.

  For the twenty-first-century reader, regardless of their political persuasions – if any – the question is: how can sympathy, benevolence, the great Dickensian spirit of Christmas be converted into action, either in Dickens’s country or in ours? Wordsworth prayed in 1800 that the Cumberland Beggar would never be made captive in a workhouse. The draconian, Malthusian New Poor Law of 1834, howev
er, was trying to address a question which demanded more than the occasional Christmas turkey being taken to a delighted Bob Cratchit and Tiny Tim. The population had grown, and expert opinion, in and out of government, agreed with the Reverend Thomas Malthus’s view that there was only a fixed amount of food available at any one time: therefore when the population grew, the poor were in trouble. Malthusian economics, moreover, taught that the more the wages of the poor were subsidized, the less money there would be: there being, in this wrong-headed view of things, only a fixed amount of money to pay wages or subsidies.

  Plainly, the cost of subsidizing low wage-earners and paying for the indigent poor had rocketed. Poor Law administration in 1750 had been £619,000; in 1818 it was £8 million, more than thirteen shillings per head of the population of England and Wales.43 It was a problem that had to be addressed, in those days when not only was there a fixed Malthusian mindset at the heart of the executive, but there was also no political will for an income tax or any other sort of tax to fund a welfare system. Indeed, such a concept lay long in the political future, and one has to think oneself back, before such ideas took root, in order to understand the concepts and problems with which early- to mid-nineteenth-century Europeans were grappling. We know that from the late nineteenth century onwards, the concept of state welfare was developed by the Liberal Party. David Lloyd George, as chancellor of the exchequer, introduced the notion of an old-age pension paid for by national insurance, and the Independent Labour Party was waiting in the wings, and growing in popularity with its ideas, which scarcely existed in the time when Wordsworth was middle-aged and old, Dickens young and middle-aged.