DICKENS AND SOCIETY
Throughout his career, Dickens protested the abuse of children and the
corruption of individual feelings. His portrayal of the destructiveness
of society's institutions and values becomes more insistent and savage
in his later novels. In his early, hopeful novels, the problems of his
protagonists, who are often orphaned or abandoned as children, are
solved by the benevolence of good men; the charitable nature of the
Cheeryble Brothers in Nicholas Nickleby is indicated by their
name, and David Copperfield is rescued from the Murdstones' clutches by
Aunt Betsey. But Dickens lost faith in the ability of individuals to
remedy the unjust treatment of individuals; he perceived that
injustice, indifference, and cruelty were pervasive and incorporated
into society's institutions.
Because of Dickens's moral outrage and his attacks on
society's institutions and values, later critics, who were often
Marxists, hailed him variously as subversive, rebellious, and even
revolutionary. They did not necessarily claim that Dickens was aware of
the subversion or revolutionary thrust of his novels. George Bernard
Shaw compared Marx and Dickens thus: "The difference between Marx and
Dickens was that Marx knew he was a revolutionist whilst Dickens had
not the faintest suspicion of that part of his calling." There was good
reason for contrasting the two men; Marx fled to London in 1849, died
there in 1883, and was also a writer. Thus, the two men were observing
the same society and class structure; both were subject to similar
social conditions and pressures. Furthermore, Barnaby Rudge and
A Tale of Two Cities both are set in revolutionary
times, identify some of the abuses that sparked the outbreaks, and
describe the violent, chaotic behavior of the mobs.
George Orwell, in 1946, viewed Dickens's
"rebelliousness" from a different perspective:
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 than this, the very people he
attacked have welcomed him so completely that he has become a national
institution himself.
It is true that Dickens's readership remained loyal to him, despite his
savage attacks on society and his forcing his wife of twenty-some years
to leave their marriage and their home (remember that Dickens was
perceived as the upholder of the sacred domestic hearth and the
family). One reason that he retained his popularity may be that Dickens
had no agenda or systematic program, as Marx did, to tear down society
and replace it with a new structure. Some critics have wondered whether
Dickens was really attacking human nature and not society. Granted,
Dickens did repeatedly reject the assumptions that class was more
important than common humanity or that rank was superior to virtue:
I believe that virtue shows quite as well in
rags and palaces as she does in purple and fine linen.... I believe
that she goes barefoot as well as shod. I believe that she dwells
rather oftener in alleys and by-ways than she does in courts and
palaces...
Nonetheless, Dickens still accepted the existing class structure and
distinctions: "Differences of wealth, of rank, of intellect, we know
there must be, and we respect them."
His attacks on society were based on traditional moral
beliefs and humanism rather than on social or political theories and
programs. He urged a secular ideal of human brotherhood. Fraser's
Magazine, in its obituary of Dickens, noted this aspect of
Dickens's beliefs: "He spent no thought on religious doctrines or
religious reforms, but regarded the Sermon on the Mount as good
teaching, had a regard for the village church and churchyard, and
quarrelled with nothing but intolerance." Writing of Dickens's belief
in domestic life as the source of happiness and the alternative to
social evil, Angus Wilson added, "Even more vital to Dickens was the
idea of pure love as the means of redemption of flawed, weak, or sinful
men. Neither of these beliefs can properly take the weight that he
imposed on them..."
Moreover, his contemporaries saw him as a member of and the spokesman
for a particular class; a reviewer for Blackwood's in 1855
noted:
We cannot
but express our conviction that it is to the fact that he represents a
class that he owes his speedy elevation to the top of the wave of
popular favour. He is a man of very liberal sentiments–an assailer of
constituted wrongs and authorities–one of the advocates in the plea of
Poor versus Rich, to the progress of which he has lent no small aid in
his day. But he is, notwithstanding, perhaps more distinctly than any
other author of his time, a class writer, the historian and
representative of one circle in the many ranks in our social scale.
Despite their descents into the lowest class, and their occasional
flights into the less familiar ground of fashion, it is the air and
breath of middle-class respectability which fills the books of Mr.
Dickens.
Unlike Thackeray, Dickens was not seen as quite or fully a gentleman.
Thackeray's province was, as W.C. Roscoe described it, "the
debatableble land between the aristocracy and the middle classes";
Dickens showed the efforts of the lower strata of the middle class to
rise from being tradesmen and upper servants into the respectable
middle classes. Thackeray wrote that "an English gentleman knows as
much about the people of Lapland or California as he does of the
aborigines of the Seven Dials or the natives of Wapping." Dickens, of
course, knew, and wrote with sympathy and understanding, about the
classes who lived in such neighborhoods as Seven Dials and Wapping.
Furthermore, Dickens was accused of being unable to describe a
gentleman. G. K. Chesterton explained that this accusation really meant
that Dickens could not describe a gentleman as
gentlemen feel a gentleman. They mean that he could not take that
atmosphere easily, accept it as the normal atmosphere, or describe that
world from the inside... Dickens did not describe gentleman in the way
that gentlemen describe gentlemen... He described them... from the
outside, as he described any other oddity or special trade.
DISCUSSION OF GREAT EXPECTATIONS
November 6, 2005
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