Birth of Modern Europe (H Band)

[London's Culture up to the 1830's][Demoralization of London]

[Charles Dickens' view of London's laisee-faire policy]

Charles Dickens' View of

London's laisee-faire policy

By: Alberto F. Monegro

aaaaaaCharles Dickens' manifested in Hard Times contempt for his contemporary government of London in the Victorian Age. He considered them idle when addressing the economic and psychological detriment Industry imposed on the working class. The workers were exploited with monotonous work, lived in slums, and were stereotyped as unintelligent. Through analogies in Hard Times, Charles Dickens' conveyed that the horrendous conditions of the working class was partly due to Parliament's indifference to pass effective reforms. Their laisse-faire policies was the factors for which parliament was to blame for London's poverty, not the workers themselves.

aaaaaaThroughout Hard Times, Charles Dickens' delves in exposing Parliament's economic cognition of class, which lies as the driving force of the Laisse-fair policies. Parliament believed that artificial control on the economy would upset the natural balances from which sprung industrial prosperity. In other words, the labor market's wages and conditions; Industries monopolies, prices, and exploitations were naturally dictated and essential for economic growth. The Economist newspaper clearly resonated this argument in an article of 1848: "Suffering and evil are nature's admonitions; they cannot be got rid of; and the impatient attempts of benevolence to banish them from the world by legislation...have always been more productive of evil than good." Charles Dickens' marks this attitude of idleness in James Harthouse of who he commented, "it were much better for the age in which he [Mr. Harthouse] lived that he and the legion [demonic parliament] of whom he was one was designedly bad than indifferent and purposeless. It is the drifting icebergs, setting with any current anywhere, that wreck the ships (pg. 180)." Charles Dickens' counteracted laisee-faire economists, as Jeremy Bentham, accusing Parliament for inaction to solve the shame in London's poverty. Dickens implied in the passage that better would be for parliament to at least try to take action than not to do anything about the recurring problems of London.

aaaaaaAlthough London was one of the wealthiest cities in the world of it's time, the problems in relation to the working class were innumerable. Among the worker's problems included inappropriate housing, exploitation, hunger, death from diseases, lack of proper education, and crime. Conditions were exacerbating since the population of London boomed from 960,000 in 1801 to 2,400,000 in 1831, and continued expanding. Overcrowding in unsanitary slums aroused periodic outbreaks of cholera and other epidemics; "Some 50,000 people were buried each year (pg. 83). In addition, Charles Dickens adds that industrialists exhausted the worker's health of mind and body. These unfortunate workers were little better off than slaves: they had to rise an hour before dawn to hastily have their breakfast, worked until their forty minute break at eight o'clock, continued working till their 1hour break at noon, and were immured to work up to 9 o'clock with the exception of a twenty minute tea brake. Of this injustice Charles Dickens spoke of in the fictional town of Choketown in Hard Times:

Their [workers] wearisome heads went up and down at the same rate, in hot weather and cold, wet weather and dry, fair weather and foul. The measured motion of their shadows on the walls was the substitute Coketown had to show for the shadows of rustling woods; while, for the summer hum of insects, it could offer, all the year round, from the dawn of Monday to the night of Saturday, the whirr of shafts and wheels (pg 116)."

aaaaaaPrivate institutions and some government commissions sprung in vain to plead reform from Parliament. The management of reforms was deliberately unpractical and disorganized so that nothing was carried out. It took more than forty years for local government reforms of 1835 and administrative legislation as the Public helath Act of 1848 to take effect. About 250 local Acts of Parliament had been passed with 10,000 commissioners excersising authority and yet London was, as Dickens termed, a "muddle.(321 victorian city)" The core of London's deterioration was partially the administration of London's laisee-faire government.

aaaaaaUnder the pressure of bold writers as Charles Dickens' and Friedrich Engels, the 1848 Commissions Report, the Sanitary Reports of the Poor Law Commissioner, the Children's Employment Commision Report of 1842, and Henry Mayhem's writings on London's labor, Parliament was coerced out of shame to pass a few acts in the 19th century. However, they were geared as political strategies between the political parties and not as effective means for solving social problems. The Acts served as a tactic for the conservative party, made up of mostly aristocratic landowners, to appeal to the working classes for popularity over the dominant liberal industrialist party. They passed the Factory Act of of 1833, forbidding the exploitation of children under 9 years, most commonly overburdened in textile mills and coal mines; and the Ten Hours Act of 1847 to limit the work hours of all children and women in all industrial companies. Although seemingly philanthropic, behind the execution of the Acts of the conservative party lay the incentive to undermine the eminence of industry and revive agricultural commerce so as to benefit their own landowning members. Since mostly all was politics, Charles Dickens' considered them useless.

aaaaaaLegislative control on industry was far less a product of advanced economic thinking besides laisse-faire, than of national conscience shocked at the conditions of the poor disclosed by Charles Dickens; the majority of parliament still justified their indifference with the popular ideas of utilitarianism. To Charles Dickens, this utilitarianism was the repulsive principle that the government's duty was to look for the economic interest of the community at large, independent of generosity, compassion, or tolerance. It judged everything according to usefulness, and the interest of the workers was far less important than the economic wealth of London and "progress." Dickens accosted this philosophy ever since his first chapter, the one thing needful, where he sets the scene mocking the speech of an utilitarian teacher: "Now what I want is facts...facts alone are wanted in life." Parliament's facts were simply that industry was soaring Parliament, for instance, didn't show any apparent interest in the escalating conditions of working class slums. Their haughty attitude towards the lower class was satirically depicted by Mr. Bounbendy in Hard Times when he said, "there is certainly no reason in looking with interest at a parcel of vagabonds [lower class](27)." They didn't feel compassion, for instance, for the 20,000 homeless in 1820 (pg 65), and the workers living in the cheap and insipid slums that mining industries built to have close labor. Therefore, in 1844 parliament saw no reason why they should fund institutions as the Society for Improving the Conditions of the Labouring Classes, which aimed at improving housing conditions. Parliament's laisse-faire policies promoted London's endless social contrasts between the rich and the poor.

aaaaaaThe housing policies provided strong evidence of the arrogance of Parliament during the Victorian age. Because of their laisse-fair principles, their housing policies were ineffective. Their resulting effect was to disillusion millions of workers from socially climbing out of the pit of slums. The government may have convinced themselves that ill-structured hovels provided cheap homes for poor workers, but it's psychological effect was much more harmful; slums snatched the workers integrity and made their life conditions shameful to the society. Their housing policies as that of London Building Acts pretentiously required standards of the construction for tenements to be descent and consequently more costly. But the acts might as well not have been implemented because they didn't monitor private businesses who skillfully evaded the law's uneconomical intents. Although Dickens didn't make much emphasis on housing in Hard Times, he did write of this housing injustice in Dombey and Son as the "disorderly crop of beginnings of mean houses, rising out of the rubbish, as if they had been unskillfully sown there.(346)" Some architects, for instance, managed to build packed cheap tenements in spite of government expenses, by building in the cheapest land in London, utilizing the minimal cost of materials that marker permitted, and not building any paved streets. .338,345. The London Building Acts didn't take command in preventing the formation of slums, and by attempting to increase the costs of construction either favored tenements for middle class people or encouraged capitalists to build the cheapest tenements to gain substantial profit.

aaaaaaHousing policies, in relation to parliament's industrially biased laisse-faire policies, favored the interest of the Railroad Companies that were responsible for the formation of city slums. Many slums originated as they spatially modeled the city to form the innumerable dead-ends and backwaters. The conditions of slums exacerbated each time parliament granted a railroad company the permission to clear slums in exchange for profitable expenses. Parliament didn't recognize the repercussions, thinking that by demolish slums in the pretext that they strengthened business as well as solved the housing problem. They expected for the workers to live in the suburbs or to easily merge with the surrounding area. However, the effects were further overcrowding in other overcrowded districts and an increase in homeless families.

aaaaaaCharles Dickens detested parliament's narrow-mindedness to use laisse-faire policies to approach the problems of the working class, none of which they bothered to grasp. In fact, their laisse-faire principles were truly biased to the growth of Industry, at the expense of the workers. And most of the acts that were passed in an attempt to help the working class, were either so ineffective that no reform was enacted or was driven by political tactics. Charles Dickens' argued that concerns for the poor were not a matter of simple utilitarian "calculations," and couldn't be effectively addressed through a haughty prejudice against the poor. But rather as Louisa, in Hard Times, he urged parliament to observe the "circus," meaning the poor. Charles Dickens believed that in a London full of wealth and business, there was no reason for poverty to exist; but it was nevertheless present because the capitalistic administration of parliament allowed the rich steal the fruits of the poor's labor. His main solution to alliviate poverty was to reform parliament by ridding it of its laisse-faire policies.