Carefully Concealed Criticism:

Dickens as Social Commentary

by Adina Lopatin

Charles Dickens used the banner of literature to spread his social commentary to a wider audience. His magazine, Household Words, published from 1850-1859, was a socially motivated journal containing articles on science, politics, and history, using humor and literature to attract a broader public. Hard Times was released from April to August 1854, and was written as a story that could attract less socially interested readers. George Orwell wrote on Dickens' carefully concealed criticism:

In Oliver Twist, Hard Times, Bleak House, Little Dorrit, Dickens attacked English institutions with a ferocity that has never since been approached. Yet he managed to do it without making himself hated, and, more he has become a national institution himself. In its attitude towards Dickens, the English public has always been a little like the elephant which feels a blow with a walking-stick as delightful tickling. Dickens seems to have succeeded in attacking everybody and antagonizing nobody. [1]

Orwell commented on Dickens' paradoxical style. By peacefully assaulting English culture, Dickens managed to broadcast his criticisms to the mainstream. In Hard Times, Dickens presents a thinly veiled Manchester, which he calls Coketown, (from coke, a byproduct of coal used to produce heat for creating steel) fraught with the social inequities of industrial England.

The majority of Coketown is comprised of a large working class that Dickens' characters refer to as the "Hands." Dickens is quite obviously condemning English industrial capitalism for limiting the role of the lower classes to their value as a means of production. Without ideas, feelings, or human importance, the "Hands" are a commodity whose rises and falls with the cycles of the economy. By having his fact oriented utilitarian characters refer to the workers as "Hands," Dickens criticizes the English for accepting Adam Smith's Iron Laws, which reduce humans to commodities and diminish lives to their net economic value. The economist Robert Heilbroner writes: "The second great law of the system: the Law of Population."[2] To Adam Smith, laborers, like any other commodity, could be produced according to the demand. If wages were high, the number of workpeople would multiply; if wages fell, the numbers of the working class would decrease. In the world of Coketown, the "Hands" are a cog in the wheel of a large economic machine that denies human emotions.

Dickens sympathizes with the "Hands," but does not respect their efforts to unionize. Dickens portrays the United Aggregate Tribunal, Coketown's union, as an ignorant, rash mass, and its leader, Slackbridge, as a conniving, self-important scoundrel.

Judging him by Nature's evidence, [Slackbridge] was above the mass in very little but the stage on which he stood. In many great respects, he was essentially below them. He was not so honest, he was not so manly, he was not so good-humoured; he substitutes cunning for their simplicity, and passion for their safe solid sense. An ill-made, high shouldered man, with lowering brows, and his features crushed into a habitually sour expression, he contrasted most unfavorably, even in his mongrel dress, with the great body of hearers in their plain working clothes.

Dickens' portrayal of unions is tragic. In Hard Times, a power-crazed charlatan transforms essentially honest individuals into an angry mass that excommunicates, exiles, and, eventually brings about the death of an innocent man, just because he won't join their union. Stephen Blackpool, one of the very few likeable characters, refuses to join the union because he had promised his love, Rachael, to avoid trouble. Victimized by his honesty, love, and loyalty, Stephen Blackpool leaves Coketown and eventually falls to his death in a mineshaft. Blackpool's tragic death is the epitome of

C. Dickens' signature

Dickens' criticism of the denial of human feeling, especially to the working class, characteristic of Victorian society. The union plays an integral role in bringing about the death of the innocent Blackpool; Dickens blames unions for defeating the individual. Dickens finds it bizarre that fundamentally honest and good people ever relinquish their self-power to any leader.

Strange as it always is to consider any assembly in the act of submissively resigning itself to the dreariness of some complacent person, lord or commoner, whom three-fourths of it could, by no human means, raise out of the slough of inanity to their own intellectual level, it was particularly strange, and it was even particularly affecting, to see this crowd of earnest faces, whose honesty in the main no competent observer free from bias could doubt, so agitated by such a leader.

His astonishment at the forfeit of power to a commoner is his critique of socialism and unions, and his incredulity at the waiving of power to a lord is his critique of monarchy. Dickens criticizes not only the socialists, unions, and monarchs, but also the self satisfied nouveau riche.

Josiah Bounderby is his caricature of the Victorian self-made man. Bounderby's character is one of the elements of Hard Times that carries the novel away from literature and towards social commentary. Bounderby is a type, not a person. Because he so clearly and fully represents a sect of society, he serves more of a social purpose than a literary one. Constantly reminding all those around him of his abject beginnings, Bounderby always concludes with a celebration of himself and his ability to overcome destitution.

I hadn't a shoe to my foot. As to a stocking, I didn't know such a thing by name. I passed the day in a ditch, the night in a pigsty. That's the way I spent my tenth birthday. Not that a ditch was new to me, for I was born in a ditch. I was born with inflammation of the lungs, and of everything else, I believe, that was capable of inflammation. For years, ma'am, I was one of the most miserable little wretches ever seen. I was so sickly that I was always moaning and groaning. I was so ragged and dirty that you wouldn't have touched me with a pair of tongs. How I fought through it, I don't know. I was determined, I suppose. I have been a determined character in later life, and I suppose I was then. Here I am, anyhow, and nobody to thank for my being here but myself.

When his mother, Mrs. Pegler, appears at the end and explains Bounderby's comfortable upbringing, his entire history is proven false

'Josiah in the gutter!' exclaimed Mrs. Pegler. 'No such a thing, sir. Never! For shame on you. My dear boy knows, and will give you to know, that though he come of humble parents, he come of parents that loved him as dear as thebestcould, and never thought it hardship on themselves to pinch a bit that he might write and cipher beautiful, and I've his books at home to show it!

Bounderby's lie demonstrates the extent to which a celebration of the nouveau riche pervaded Victorian England. As a result of the Industrial Revolution, it was becoming more fashionable to be a self-made man than to be an aristocrat. Bounderby speaks of the myth of social mobility created by the implementation of industrial capitalism:

There's not a Hand in this town, sir, man, woman, or child, but has one object in life. That object is to be fed on turtle soup and venison with a gold spoon. Now, they're not a-going-none of 'em- to be fed on turtle soup and venison with a gold spoon.

Charles Dickens again refers to the elasticity of social structure as an unreality:

This, again, was among the fictions of Coketown. Any capitalist there who had made sixty thousand pounds out of sixpence always professed to wonder why the sixty thousand nearest Hands didn't each make sixty thousand out of sixpence, and more or less reproaches each and every one of them for not accomplishing that little feat. What I did, you can do. Why don't you go out and do it?

Dickens alludes to the idea, based in Social Darwinism (link), that something inherently wrong with the poor people prevents them from changing their socioeconomic positions. This belief in inherent, biological superiority, which pervaded Victorian society, was especially attractive to the bourgeoisie, who used the alleged laziness and inferiority working classes as evidence of their own excellence. Dickens criticizes the conceited bourgeoisie for assuming their own preeminence over the supposedly inept lower class.

Dickens presents understanding between classes as a possible solution to the socioeconomic problem. His faith in the individual leads him to reject the "hard facts" approach of Friedrich Engels in favor of simple understanding. Though some people, like Bounderby and Slackbridge, are irreconcilable to understanding, others create the bond that Dickens believes can solve the poverty problem. A strong relationship between Louisa Gradgrind, Rachael and Blackpool epitomizes the alliance Dickens advocates between the middle and lower classes. When Louisa hears of the union's treatment of Blackpool, she overcomes her preconceived notion that the "Hands" are anything more than a commodity. "She had scarcely thought more of separating them into units than of separating the sea itself into component drops." She is aroused by Blackpool's exiling, and offers him

money for his escape. After Blackpool is accused of stealing, Louisa and Rachael ally together to exonerate him. The two become friends, and wait together for his return. Louisa comforts Rachael:

'Let us hope that tomorrow will bring something better, Rachael. Come into the air!' Her gentle hand adjusted Rachael's shawl upon her shining black hair in the usual manner of her wearing it, and they went out.

When Blackpool is finally found, dying at the bottom of a mineshaft, his last words are of wisdom:

But in our judgements, like as in our doin's, we mun bear and forebear. In my pain an' trouble, lookin' up yonder-wi' it shining on me-I ha' seen more clear, and ha' made it my dying prayer that aw' th' world may on'y coom toogether once more, an' get a better unnderstan'in o' one another, than when I were in't in my own weak seln.

Blackpool offers the vision of understanding that Dickens himself endorses. In a speech at Birmingham Town Hall in December 1853, Dickens articulates his own view of the significance of a strong understanding between employers and employees:

If there ever was a time when any one class could of itself do much for its own good, and for the welfare of society--which I greatly doubt--that time is unquestionably past. It is in the fusion of different classes,

without confusion; in the bringing together of employers and employed; in the creating of a better common understanding among those whose interests are identical, who depend upon each other, and who can never be in unnatural antagonism without deplorable results, that one of the chief principles of a Mechanics' Institution should consist. [3]

Dickens' ultimate solution relies on a faith in human nature to create a cross-class alliance. The intricate characters and personal stories of Hard Times demonstrate his rejection of such radical ideas as socialism and unionism in favor of simple understanding.

Picture Sources

A. http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/PRdickens.htm

B. 'Manchester': from George R. Catt, The Pictorial History of Manchester, n.d. (1843) from: http://www.lang.nagoya-u.ac.jp/~matsuoka/EG-Manchester-Alan.html

C. http://humwww.ucsc.edu/dickens/index.html

D.Wilkins, William Glyde and B. W. Matz. Charles Dickens in Caricature and Cartoon. Boston: The Bibliophile Society, 1924. No. 28. From: http://landow.stg.brown.edu/victorian/dickens/gallery/13.html

E. http://landow.stg.brown.edu/victorian/dickens/dickensov.html

F. http://www.lang.nagoya-u.ac.jp/~matsuoka/CD-HT.html

Footnotes

1. http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/PRdickens.htm

2. Robert L. Heilbroner, The Worldly Philosophers: The Lives, Times, & Ideas of the Great Economic Thinkers, Simon and Schuster, New York, 1953

3. The Speeches of Charles Dickens: A Complete Edition, ed. K. J. Fielding (England: Harvester/Wheatsheaf 1988)167. From: http://wwwsoc.nacsis.ac.jp/dickens/archive/ht/ht-ono.html#11