Charles Dickens was regarded as one of the most widely-read authors of his generation, and the "Conscience of the Nation", even during his own lifetime. However, how were working-class Victorians influenced by Dickens' novels?
The Victorian era saw a significant rise in literacy in Great Britain.1, 2 At the beginning of the nineteenth century, literacy was not seen as politically neutral.
Religious literature ... was everywhere in nineteenth-century England.
Tracts were flung from carriage windows; they were passed out at railway
stations; they turned up in army camps and in naval vessels anchored in
the roads, and in jails and lodging-houses and hospitals and workhouses
... [t]hey were a ubiquitous part of the social landscape.
Simply by making the printed word more available, the religious literature
societies stimulated the spread of literacy.3
However, "[t]he common people ... were quick to realize that the sugar-coating
of religious and moral counsel concealed a massive dose of social
sedation."4
Workers rights groups such as the Chartists encouraged their members to
acquire information both through meetings and discussion groups, and by
reading. The Chartists themselves published newspapers such as the
Labourer and the Northern Star5,
and created adult education programs and public libraries run by
Chartist volunteers.6
There were similar institutions in all the coal regions, many
of them established by mine owners with the frank intention of
making their workers sober, pious, and productive.7
Around 1850, nineteen of the fifty-four collieries in Northumberland
and Durham had some kind of library or reading room.8
The libraries were also common in Welsh collieries. "Welsh
nonconformity, Sunday schools, choral societies, temperance
movements, and eisteddfodau9 all championed education and especially
self-education."10
For those who could not read, oral reading of news reports was
institutionalized in the form of the ‘penny reading’, in 1854.
Public readings were first employed by Samuel Taylor, "a clayworker
who became secretary of the Hanley Mechanics’ Institute and
part-proprietor of the Staffordshire Sentinel."11
His first public readings were of dispatches to the London
Times, on the Crimean War.
The first ‘war readings’ attracted 8,000 to 10,000 people. … Within
months other towns in the Potteries12
had adopted them, and a report in the Times broadcast the
movement over the entire country. Between October 1857 and April 1858
nine Staffordshire towns were staging penny readings for overflow
crowds, with a total admission of 60,000 to 70,000 – this in a
district with a population of 100,000.13
The spread of adult literacy in the mid-nineteenth century helped
foster “a shared literary culture in which books were practically
treated as public property, before public libraries reached most of
the country.”14 Even as the
nineteenth century waned and penny reading began to die out, the
reading of a story or poem at social gatherings remained common.
[W]omen held parties where they sewed clothing for the poor
while one of them read aloud.15
... Of course, Dickens made them laugh, cry, and demand encores,
but they rarely borrowed his works from the parish library.16
However, this increase in literacy among the working class did not
make its members more economically mobile or more politically aware.
If anything, the idea of literacy as a shared experience, tended to
make conspicuous, those who might be motivated to take their learning
further.
None of their children had learned to read before they went to school,
and then only under compulsion ... Those whose children had not done
well in examinations would never believe that the success of others
was due to merit. The successful ones were spoken of as "favourites"
and disliked.17
On what level did members of the Victorian working class appreciate
the novels of Charles Dickens? There is no way to evaluate how
working-class readers (or listeners) interpreted Dickens' works,
other than by inference. Dickens' characters were certainly evocative:
Most working people had to struggle with the art of recording their
lives, and they cited Dickens, more than anyone else, as the man
who got it right. They attended a school out of Nicholas Nickleby,
or one like Dr. Blimber's Academy. ... Their first employer was Wackford
Squeers ("Dickens did not exaggerate"). They worked alongside
Micawber in the mines ("I knew men like him in the pit").18
And how we all loved it, and eventually, when we got to
"Little Em'ly", how we all cried together at poor old Peggotty's
distress! The tears united us, deep in misery as we were
ourselves. Dickens was a fairy musician to us, filling our
minds with a sweeter strain than the constant cry of hunger,
or the howling wind which often, taking advantage of the
empty grate, penetrated into the room.19, 20
Dickens sometimes put words in his characters' mouths, that pointed out the
hypocrisy of the religious:
Is my daughter a-washin? Yes, she is a-washin. Look at the water.
Smell it! That's wot we drinks. How do you like it, and what do you think
of gin, instead! An't my place dirty? Yes, it is dirty — it's nat'rally
dirty, and it's nat'rally onwholesome; and we've had five dirty and
onwholesome children, as is all dead infants, and so much the better
for them, and for us besides. Have I read the little book wot you left?
No, I an't read the little book wot you left. There an't nobody here as
knows how to read it; and if there wos, it wouldn't be suitable to me.
It's a book fit for a babby, and I'm not a babby. If you was to leave me
a doll, I shouldn't nuss it.21
Dickens’ reputation as a progressive who supported social change, was
also ubiquitous, and rarely questioned:
The other villagers found their political vision not in Marx, but in
the humane radicalism of Charles Dickens, who was probably the most
popular author in the community.22
However, without a broad exposure to all Dickens’ writings, including his
topical pieces in
Household Words23, 24 and
All Year ‘Round,
it is unlikely that most workers of Victorian England ever noticed that
Dickens' "humane radicalism" was at odds with other utterances that
showed a preoccupation with injustices to the middle and upper
classes25; a distaste for
foreigners; a profound distaste for the “popish” Catholics (whom he blamed
for the Inquisition); and a strong desire to protect the status quo from
groups like the Chartists.26
All we know is that Dickens was clearly beloved by readers from all
classes, for his stories, and for the idea of his radicalism. This
admiration was not undeserved: Dickens' mastery of prose is undeniable,
and even if "The Conscience of the Nation" never campaigned openly against
injustices to the underprivileged, he did hold them up for observation:
itself an act of revolution.
1
Statements about the rise in literacy in Victorian England, as measured
by a person's ability to sign a name on a marriage contract or will, are
ubiquitous in histories of Victorian England. However, the collection of
statistics based on signatures on marriage licenses and wills is faulty for
two reasons: not only is the act of signing a name not really "writing"
(since their signature may be the only word the person knows how to write),
but restricting statistics to only marriage licenses and wills does not
account for the majority of working-class people, who engaged in "common law"
marriage and who did not bother with wills because they had few assets.
Moreover, these statistics do nothing to help determine how many people in
Victorian England actually knew how to read. "During the first half of the
century most children from the working class left school after two or three
years." Although an unknown number of people were taught to read informally,
"the gross incompetence of most teachers, the brevity and irregularity of
attendance, the fact that large numbers of children went to school only on
Sunday — warns us against too roseate a view. In 1836, of 2,000
thirteen- and fourteen-year-old children in Manchester Sunday schools, 53
percent could not read." Worse, after leaving school, "a great many former
pupils, who once could read in a fashion, lost the ability either through
disuse or through imperfect learning in the first place." See Altick, Richard
D. "The English Common Reader: A Social History of the Mass Reading Public,
1800-1900" (2nd Ed.), Ohio State University Press, Columbus, OH, 1957,
pp. 166-172.
2
One of the things that discouraged reading at home was a lack of light
inside the dwellings of the poor. The window tax (1696-1851) taxed
dwellings according to the number of windows they possessed. "Even an
aperture only a foot square was considered a window. ... Not without
reason did Dickens remark that the window tax ... was an even more
formidable obstacle to the people's reading than the so-called 'taxes
on knowledge' — the duties on newspapers, advertisements, and
paper." Op. cit., p.92.
3
Op. cit., p. 103.
4
Op. cit., p. 105.
5
Rose, Jonathan, “The Intellectual Life of the British Working
Classes,” Yale University Press, New Haven, 2001, p. 36.
6
Ibid.
7
Is it surprising that the coal mine owners, who wanted employees
who were docile and productive, would allow such adult education
and libraries in their mines? Not really. The coal mine owners had
their own libraries that had newspapers and politically innocuous
reading materials and religious tracts. The Chartist libraries,
however, were quite different; in fact, these libraries eventually
made the employees more politically aware. As such, they aided
Chartists such as W. P. Roberts, who led an attack on the coal
mine owners' cottage system and tommy shops (company housing and
company stores). For further information about W. P. Roberts, the
coal mining industry and the Chartists, and Dickens'
Household Words interview with a coal miner, see:
.
http://www.esthermlederberg.com/EImages/Extracurricular/Cloth/Coal Manufacture.html
.
8
Altick, Richard D. "The English Common Reader: A Social History of the Mass
Reading Public, 1800-1900" (2nd Ed.), Ohio State University Press,
Columbus, OH, 1957, pp. 106-107
9
Rose, Jonathan, “The Intellectual Life of the British Working
Classes,” Yale University Press, New Haven, 2001, p. 238.
10
An annual competitive festival of Welsh poets and musicians.
11
Op cit., p. 238.
12
Samuel Taylor, "Literary and Musical Entertainment for the People",
Transactions of the National Association for the Promotion of
Social Science (1858):644.
13
Six towns – Tunstall, Burslem, Hanley, Stoke, Fenton, Longton
– which now comprise Stoke on Trent, Staffordshire.
14
Samuel Taylor, "Literary and Musical Entertainment for the People",
Transactions of the National Association for the Promotion of
Social Science (1858):645.
15
Rose, Jonathan, “The Intellectual Life of the British Working
Classes,” Yale University Press, New Haven, 2001, p. 60.
16
This also enabled those who were still illiterate to participate
without stigma.
17
Rose, Jonathan, “The Intellectual Life of the British Working
Classes,” Yale University Press, New Haven, 2001, p. 85.
18
Ibid.
19
Op cit., p. 112.
20
Acorn, One of the Multitude, 28-35.
21
Dickens, Bleak House, Chapter VIII.
22
The plight of Little Em'ly so captured the imagination of
playwrights that she became the central character in four
of the plays adapted from "David Copperfield" ("Born with
a Caul", by George Almar, 1850; "David Copperfield", by John
Brougham, 1851; "The Deal Boatman", by F. C. Burnand, 1863;
and "Little Em'ly", by Andrew Halliday, 1870).
(Halliday also co-authored a fourth "Extra Volume" to Henry
Mayhew's "London Labour and the London Poor" in 1861, with
Mayhew, Bracebridge Hemyng, and John Binny.)
Each play managed to correct the injustice done to Em'ly in
the novel, one of them ("The Deal Boatman") by making Em'ly
the long-lost daughter of a gentleman! (This solution entirely
eliminates the 'problem' of Em'ly's lower-class membership, her
'station in life'.)
23
Rose, Jonathan, “The Intellectual Life of the British Working
Classes,” Yale University Press, New Haven, 2001, p. 10.
24
In Altick, Richard D., "The English Common Reader: A Social History of the
Mass Reading Public, 1800-1900"(2nd Ed.), Ohio State University Press,
Columbus, OH, 1957, p. 347, it is stated that "Household Words was
primarily a middle-class paper, with little appeal to the average working-class
reader." Given the illiteracy of a great many people in the working class, this
is unsurprising.
25
The major characters of Dickens' novels to whom injustices
apply are generally middle- or upper-class people who would
normally have expected to be insulated from such injustices.
For example, Oliver ("Oliver Twist"), the illegitimate child
of upper-class parents, is born in a workhouse, endures
terrible hardship as a child laborer, and after fleeing to
London is forced into a "buzzing academy" of child pickpockets
and thieves. He is ultimately rescued (through a series of
amazing coincidences) first by an old friend of his
father's, and then by a woman who turns out to be his late
mother's sister. David ("David Copperfield"), whose father was
a gentleman, is put to work at his step-father's bottling
factory at the age of 10, but escapes to his Aunt in Dover.
The other children in the bottling factory are from the
lower class, and the injustices to which they are subjected
are downplayed for that reason.
In both novels, the difficulties these major characters endure,
are worse because they are people who were born into a
higher class than the others in their situation, and thus such
injustices should never have applied to them. It is sad that
Oliver's young pickpocket companions who are from the lower class
have adapted to the injustices of their way of life.
26
Chartism was viewed as a direct challenge to the power of the
state. In order to influence and divert the Chartists, different
sub-groups of the Chartists were favoured:
Each rival Chartist group advocated a specific social reform, in
place of political reform. The view was expressed that educational
institutions should replace organized religion, museums used to
educate and control "the labouring multitude".
.
http://www.chartists.net/Knowledge-Chartists.htm, September 29, 2009
The Chartists were very active in 1840s through the 1850s. At
that time, there was great fear of the 1848 Revolution that was
sweeping the continent, and that Chartism could evolve into such
a revolutionary force in England.
Under Prince Albert's suggestion, a Central Working Classes Committee
[CWCC] was established in 1850 during the Great Exposition, due to the
embarassment of the Great Exposition not having any representatives of
the working classes. The Great Exposition could divert support for any
political action by the Chartists.
The CWCC members included Chartists, Charles Dickens, and Samuel
Wilberforce (a member of the Clapham sect arguing for the establishment
of what later became known as colonialism, in place of the Atlantic slave
trade). The CWCC was distinguished by its extreme conservatism, on one
hand, and the radicalism of its support for Chartism. Thus, it was too
radical to be recognized by the Royal Commission. Dickens abandoned
fighting for justice for the working classes and instead proposed the
dissolution of the CWCC!
.
Jeffrey A. Auerbach, Peter H. Hoffenberg, Eds., Britain, the Empire,
and the World at the Great Exhibition of 1851.
Ashgate Publishing Limited, Hampshire, 2008, p. 36.
In fact, in the "Address of the German Democratic Communists of Brussels
To Mr. Feargus O'Connor", by Marx/Engels, published in the Chartist "The
Northern Star" (July 25, 1846) attacked bourgeois such as Charles Dickens
for advocating non-resistance in lieu of political class struggle.
.
Marx-Engels, "Collected Works", Vol. 6, Preface
Hence, many critics have viewed "Barnaby Rudge" as expressing Charles
Dickens' counter-revolutionary attack upon the Chartists.
.
McCalman, Iain, "Controlling the Riots: Dickens, Barnaby Rudge and Romantic Revolution",
in History Vol. 84, Issue 275, pp. 458-476, 16 December 2002.
.
The Chartists were very concerned about the labor
conditions, especially in the mines. The Chartists
were also quite well aware that women and children
worked under terrible conditions in the mines, and
that this was even made public by the the Mining Commission
Reports of 1840 and 1842, including sketches of the
working women and children. It is pointed out that at
a function held in London in 1842 Dickens was informed
by Southwood Smith (a Unitarian minister known for his
devotional writings, which qualified him to be appointed
as the chief commissioner in the Infant Labour Commission
of 1840 and also recognized as the Medical Adviser to the
Poor Law Commission of 1837-1839), of the conditions of
young children workers in the mines and factories.
.
We know that Dickens, as The Conscience Of The Nation, was
quite concerned about issues of justice, but given a
choice between being a wealthy Conscience Of The Nation or
backing up the Chartists, perhaps the reader knows of
any literary work concerned with the justice of women and
children working in the mines or factories. The only
thing that Dickens seems to be primarily concerned with
was the justice of copyright protection for his books.
.
See "Mr. and Mrs. Charles Dickens Entertain at Home" by
Helen Cox
Pergamon Press, Great Britain, 1970 LC: 71-125985, p. 106.
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