Dickens
By Peter Ackroyd
Mandarin, 1994. 608 pp., $16.95 (pb)
Reviewed by Phil Shannon
Dickens was one heck of a writer. Only the rich and unfeeling do not cry with pity for the hard lot of his heroes, laugh at the pomposity of their "betters" or burn with indignation at the money-making society which squeezes the life out of its human fodder.
Ackroyd's biography compares the warm response of the "labouring poor" to Dickens' novels and the contempt or suspicion the wealthy had for him — "sullen socialism", sneered one critic, whilst one newspaper called him "dangerous", a friend of "the ruffian and the wanton, the rickburner and the felon".
Born in 1812, Dickens lived through the years of England's consolidation as the greatest industrial capitalist power. The human cost of building its power out of the lives of its working class appalled Dickens. Half of all funerals in London in the 1840s were of children under 10; this high rate of child mortality contributed to a life expectancy for the working class of 22 years.
In novels, journalism and charitable ventures, Dickens tackled the welfare ills of a society driven by profit — the dehumanising prisons and insane asylums, prostitution, deplorable housing and public health, the primitive sadism of what passed for education.
Dickens sympathised with workers who faced long hours of sweated labour or office drudgery (as Dickens himself did when young) and the resultant crippling theft of everything that should be joyous in life. The working poor who flocked to his public readings felt they had found someone who understood their travails and their hopes for something better, their desire to reclaim the "lost innocence" of childhood stolen by wage-slavery.
Dickens should be cherished for his humanity at a time when most others from the lower middle class did not give a hoot about their suffering fellow humans. There were limits, however, to Dickens' radicalism. He was a reformer, a political liberal who believed that a "change of heart" could solve society's ills. Tyrannical bosses like Ebeneezer Scrooge need only have their feelings roused by the spirits of Christmas Past, Present and To Come to become models of benevolence. And all those happy endings! The real world wasn't like that.
For Dickens, the working class, too, had to be purged of its bad attitudes. During a four-month weavers' strike in Preston, Dickens, though favourable to the workers' cause, blamed the "unnatural antagonism" of class conflict on "some designing and turbulent spirits" — agitators and unionists.
In his novel Hard Times, one such trouble-maker, Slackbridge, manipulates innocent and kind-hearted workers and victimises those who refuse to join the union. The novel's hero, Stephen Blackpool, wanders about the factories of Coketown/Manchester in a political haze unable to locate the source or solution of the factory town's woes — "'Tis a muddle", is his constant refrain. Dickens' liberal politics make it so.
Like all good liberals, Dickens distrusted the people taking matters into their own hands. As well as opposing unions, he opposed anti-colonial rebellions in India (1857) and Jamaica (1865). Despite praising the French Revolution as "a struggle for the overthrow of a system of oppression", in A Tale of Two Cities the people insurgent are a senseless, blood-crazed mob.
Dickens is a case of "Reformer Knows Best" — he wrote of "the State as a parent to its people" to guide them and society to a happy equilibrium. The more far-sighted capitalists did eventually support a welfare state — not so much out of Dickens' compassionate concern for the abused poor, but from fear of social disruption. Dickens was one of many middle-class reformers who alerted the capitalists to social threats from below and helped them to find ways to adjust to disruptive realities, to pay the social overheads of their class rule.
Dickens' art, however, wins out over his political philosophy and lessons in class collaboration. He pointed the finger squarely at the cigar-smoking, top-hat and tails capitalists for making life a misery. Although his early novels targeted individual employers, his later works like Hard Times and Bleak House contain an awareness of "the system" as the culprit. Dickens had sensed the deep structural causes of human unhappiness in the capitalist system. No wonder many of his better-off admirers now regarded Dickens as in "decline".
Throughout his writing career, Dickens' use of pathos and sentiment was a key ingredient in the success of his social critique and the popularity of his novels. It can still bring tears to the eye and a lump to the throat, but it has its down side, too. His sentimental portraits of an idealised and passive womanhood, and the family as a safe, private refuge from the horrors of industrial capitalism, were conservatising.
On the other hand, Dickens was also one of the world's greatest comic writers and satirists. His humour exposing middle-class snobbery, Christian hypocrisy, government bureaucracy and business greed still provides many a belly-laugh and enlightenment.
It is a pity that Ackroyd's biography does not measure up to the artistic heights of Dickens. It is too full of the inconsequential and inessential. It is Dickensian only in its length.
Marx and Dickens were contemporaries. One was an avowed revolutionary, the other not, but as Marx wrote to Engels, "Dickens issued to the world more political and social truths than have been uttered by all the professional politicians, publicists and moralists put together".
Dickens the artist is more than the sum of Dickens the political liberal, middle-class reformer and sentimentalist. His great open-heartedness and feeling for the poor, and the artistic command of his craft, ensure his novels a continuing relevance. Dickens is still necessary because the poor are still with us and the capitalist's heart is still hard.