Web Site Terms of Use
What were Dickens' views about the social effects consequent upon Capitalism, the Industrial Revolution, and the financial foundations of slavery in funding Capitalism and the Industrial Revolution?
All these claims are based upon what Dickens himself wrote, not once but several times.
Slavery allowed the accumulation of capital and the creation of markets for English goods in Africa, the New World, Europe, Asia and the Baltic/Russia. Simultaneously, laws established that the Colonial outposts were only to be sources of raw products, and manufacturing and refining was to take place only in England. African slaves and European indentured servants were used as the labour force in colonial outposts. This lopsided development concentrated manufacturing in England with its exaggerated specialization of machinery: the Industrial Revolution. Machinery was based upon the steam-engine (in mines, cloth manufacture, ceramics, etc), fueled by coal. Machines were constructed of steel and iron (coal mines, iron mines).
Raw unprocessed goods produced in the colonial possessions took up more bulk than if processed or refined at sites in the colonial possessions (about 20% extra volume). Due to the artificially increased volume of the raw materials, a consequence of their not being refined, the number of ships required was artificially increased as well. This increased shipping force allowed England to have the first standing Navy in modern times.
The costs of transporting slaves from Africa (primarily) to the New World to work at agricultural "factories" and mines, especially in view of competition from France and Islamic countries in the Middle East/Africa (Swahili coast), was reduced by leaving the slaves where they were in Africa (in situ). Instead, the population in Africa was enslaved: Colonialism. By outlawing slavery the Capitalist/Industrial-Revolutionary transformation of competitors (France and the Moslem Middle East) was hampered or even prevented.
The effort to outlaw slavery (Abolitionism) thus was not only the foundation of Colonialism, but prevented the development of Capitalism and the Industrial-Revolution of competitors (sometimes referred to as 'under-development'). Aboltionism 1 was spearheaded by Wilberforce and Stephens, of the Clapham sect of Evangelists. Abolitionism also became an ideology supported by the religious public, divorced of its primary political objective: colonialism and competition. 2
The work force required in England was forced off the land, into the new factories, exploited so intensely that the work force was referred to as "Yorkshire slaves”. As this process progressed, major industries were created:
The labour force, concentrated in industrial centers, living in cheap, inadequate, unhealthy housing, beset by industrial diseases, and diseases caused by bad housing (Cholera, Typhus, etc.) and without education: they protested! 3
What view of the above history, concerning social justice, did Dickens profess? As one of Dickens' apologists said, Dickens was more concerned for the poor living in England, than he was for the slaves throughout the English empire. What did Dickens write about the issues that the unprivileged people of England were concerned about and protested against? Reader: feel free to find out what Dickens wrote about these major concerns!
"In Dickens, that born writer, there is to be found—as
though in a convex mirror—a lively and fascinating
picture of the Victorian age both in its overt tastes and
its latent impulses. The Swiss professor, Friedrich Brie,
in applying the term Biedermeier7
to England, found the essential requisites of this bourgeois
type in Dickens. 'His bourgeois-humanitarian instincts
protect him from all tendency towards the supernatural,
the marvellous, the revoultionary, from all exaltation of
passion.' Goodness and quiet happiness are his ideals, as
is made clear from the story of David Copperfield, the virtuous
bourgeois youth who, through privations and harsh experiences,
finds at last his own quiet harbour of refuge. The contrasting
character, James Steerforth, the fascinating, untrammelled
aristocrat, capricious, arrogant, seducer of women, is as
it were the symbol of the Romantic poet in the guise in
which he appeared in England, in Byron particularly, and
with a few allusions to Shelly as well (his death in a
shipwreck during a storm). This pair of opposites is
equivalent, in the language of Dickens, to Carlyle's
'Close your Byron, open your Goethe'. ["The Hero in Eclipse in Victorian Fiction",
by Mario Praz, Oxford UP, 1956, p. 127.]
Put simply, Dickens could not deal with sexual issues.
Dickens could not deal with social, political issues.
1 The Abolitionists opposed the Atlantic slave trade, but never the slave trade in the Indian Ocean nor the internal slave trade of Africa. Return
2 "Like many members of the middle class, Dickens took the side of the [American] South (Civil War)." See "Dickens and Empire", by Grace Moore, 2004, Ashgate Publishing Co., p. 168. Return
3 Dickens was originally a member of the Central Committee of the Working classes for the Great Exhibition (May 1, 1851). This committee was a reactionary group established in 1850 to prevent an uprising of the lower orders - there were fears of revolution, as revolutions were occurring throughout Europe in 1848). Ibid., pp. 26, 27 (Grace Moore is considered by some to be a major Dickens apologist). Return
4 England was becoming polarized into a nation of the wealthy or the poor. Dickens was concerned, but his novels and other written works "manifest a fear of and at times even a contempt for the urban poor, particularly when they are combined en masse, whether as Chartists, rioters, or trade unionists. Ibid., pp. 30, 31. Chartists created libraries for the working man. Return
5 "Dickens is unquestionably sympathetic towards the inhabitants who subsist in the 'noise and dirt and vapour of the great manufacturing town, reeking with misery and hungry wretchedness, [which] hemmed them in on every side, and seemed to shut out hope, and render escape impossible', yet he also reinforces the otherness of the 'Men, women children, wan in their looks, ragged in attire' by referring to them as 'wild' and 'savage'.... suggesting that the poor were a 'race' apart...". Ibid. p. 31. Return
6 Dickens favoured the universal-staircase (the Oliver Twists were no longer a concern of Dickens). Return
7 The term Biedermeier comes from the pseudonym Gottlieb Biedermaier, used by the country doctor Adolf Kussmaul and the lawyer Ludwig Eichrodt in poems, printed in the Munich Fliegende Blatter (Flying Sheets), parodying the poems of the Biedermeier era as depoliticized and petit-bourgeois. Biedermeier, name applied, at first in a joking spirit, to a period of European culture and a style of furniture, decoration, and art originating in Germany during the period between Napoleon's defeat and the 1848 revolution and especially popular there and in Austria. It is believed to have been named for the worthy, bourgeois-minded "Papa Biedermeier," a humorous character featured in a series of verses by Ludwig Eichrodt, published in Fliegende Blatter. The Biedermeier period found expression in comfortable, homelike furnishings, simple in design and inexpensive in material, fitting the requirements of the German people in a time of little wealth following the Napoleonic Wars. Biedermeier refers to work in the fields of literature, music (for example, "Die Fledermaus"), the visual arts and interior design; the style corresponds to the Regency style in England, Federalist style in the United States and to the French Empire style. Return
© Copyright 2006 - 2018
The Esther M. Zimmer Lederberg Trust
Web Site Terms of Use