Dickens and the Marshalsea Prison

I

THE father of Charles Dickens’ father was head butler in the house of John Crewe (later Lord Crewe) of Crewe Hall, Member of Parliament for Chester; and his father’s mother was a servant in the house of Marquess Blandford of Grosvenor Square, who was Lord Chamberlain to the Household of George III. After her marriage, this grandmother became housekeeper at Crewe Hall; and it is assumed that it was through the patronage of her employer that her son John Dickens was given a clerkship in the Navy Pay Office.

John Dickens began at £70 a year and was in time increased to £350. But he had always had the tastes of a gentleman. He was an amiable fellow, with an elegant manner and a flowery vein of talk, who liked to entertain his friends and who could not help creating the impression of a way of life beyond his means. He was always in trouble over bills.

When Charles, who had been born (February 7, 1812) at Portsmouth and had spent most of his childhood out of London at Portsmouth, Portsea, and Chatham, who had had a chance to go to the theatre and to read the Arabian Nights and the eighteenth-century novelists and had been taught by a tutor from Oxford, came up to London at the age of nine to join his parents, who had been obliged to return there, he was shocked to find them, as a consequence of his father’s debts, now living in a little back garret in one of the poorest streets of Camden Town. On February 20, 1824, when Charles was twelve, John Dickens was arrested for debt and taken to the Marshalsea Prison, announcing, as he left the house: ‘The sun has set upon me forever!’ At home, the food began to run low; and they had to pawn the household belongings till all but two rooms were bare. Charles even had to carry his books, one by one, to the pawnshop.

It was presently decided that the boy should go to work at six shillings a week for a cousin who manufactured blacking; and through six months, in a rickety old house by the river, full of dirt and infested with rats, he pasted labels on blacking bottles, in the company of riverside boys, who called him ‘the little gentleman.’ He wanted terribly to go on with his schooling, and couldn’t grasp what had happened to him. The whole of the rest of the family moved into the Marshalsea with his father; and Charles, who had a lodging near them, went to the jail after work every evening and ate breakfast with them every morning. He was so ashamed of the situation that he would never allow his companion at the blacking warehouse, whose name was Bob Fagin, to go with him to the door of the prison, but would take leave of him and walk up the steps of a strange house and pretend to be going in. He had had a kind of nervous fits in his earlier childhood, and now they began to recur. One day at work he was seized with such an acute spasm that he had to lie down on some straw on the floor, and the boys who worked with him spent half the day applying blacking bottles of hot water to his side.

John Dickens inherited a legacy in May and got out of jail the twentyeighth, but he let Charles keep on working in the warehouse. The little boys did their pasting next to the window on account of the light, and people used to stop to look in at them, because they had become so quick and skillful at it. This was an added humiliation for Charles; and one day when John Dickens came there he wondered how his father could bear it. At last — perhaps, Dickens thought, as a result of what he had seen on this visit — John quarreled with Charles’s employer, and took the boy out of the warehouse and sent him to school.

These experiences produced in Charles Dickens a trauma from which he suffered all his life. It has been charged by some of Dickens’ critics that he indulged himself excessively in self-pity in connection with these hardships of his childhood; it has been pointed out that, after all, he had only worked in the blacking warehouse six months. But one must realize that during those months he was in a state of complete despair. For the adult in desperate straits, it is almost always possible to imagine, if not to contrive, some way out; for the child, from whom love and freedom have inexplicably been taken away, no relief or release can be projected. Dickens’ seizures in his blacking-bottle days were obviously neurotic symptoms; and the psychologists have lately been telling us that lasting depressions and terrors may be caused by such cuttings-short of the natural development of childhood. For an imaginative and active boy of twelve, six months of despair are quite enough. ‘No words can express,’ Dickens wrote of his first introduction to the warehouse in a document he gave to Forster, ‘the secret agony of my soul as I sunk into this companionship; compared these everyday associates with those of my happier childhood; and felt my early hopes of growing up to be a learned and distinguished man crushed in my breast. The deep remembrance of the sense I had of being utterly neglected and hopeless; of the shame I felt in my position; of the misery it was to my young heart to believe that, day by day, what I had learned, and thought, and delighted in, and raised my fancy and my emulation up by, was passing away from me, never to be brought back any more; cannot be written. My whole nature was so penetrated with the grief and humiliation of such considerations, that even now, famous and caressed and happy, I often forget in my dreams that I have a dear wife and children; even that I am a man; and wander desolately back to that time of my life.’

He never understood how his father could have abandoned him to such a situation. ‘I know my father,’ he once told Forster, ‘to be as kind-hearted and generous a man as ever lived in the world. Everything that I can remember of his conduct to his wife, or children, or friends, in sickness or affliction is beyond all praise. By me, as a sick child, he has watched night and day, unweariedly and patiently, many nights and days. He never undertook any business, charge or trust that he did not zealously, conscientiously, punctually, honorably discharge. His industry has always been untiring. He was proud of me, in his way, and had a great admiration of [my] comic singing. But, in the case of his temper, and the straitness of his means, he appeared to have lost utterly at this time the idea of educating me at all, and to have utterly put from him the notion that I had any claim upon him, in that regard, whatever.’ And he never forgave his mother for having wanted to keep him working in the warehouse even after his father had decided to take him out. ‘I never afterwards forgot,’he wrote of her attitude at this time. ‘I never shall forget, I never can forget.'

Of those months he had never been able to bring himself to speak till, just before conceiving David Copperfield, he wrote the fragment of autobiography he sent to Forster; and, even after he had incorporated this material in an altered form in the novel, his wife and children were never to learn about the realities of Dickens’ own childhood till they read about it in Forster’s Life after his death. But the work of Dickens’ whole career was an attempt to digest these early shocks and hardships — to explain them to himself, to justify himself in relation to them, to give an intelligible and tolerable picture of a world in which such things could take place.

Behind the misfortune which had humiliated Charles was the misfortune which had humiliated his father. John Dickens was a good and affectionate man, who had done the best he was able within the limits of his personality and who had not deserved to be broken. And behind these undeserved misfortunes were sources of humiliation perhaps more disturbing still. The father of Charles Dickens’ mother, also a £350-a-year clerk in the Navy Pay Office, with the title of Conductor of Money, had systematically, by returning false balances, embezzled funds to the amount of £5689 3s. 3d. over a period of seven years, and, when the fraud was discovered, had fled. And the background of domestic service was for an Englishman of the nineteenth century probably felt as more disgraceful than embezzlement. Certainly the facts about Dickens’ ancestry were kept hidden by Dickens himself and have, so far as I know, only been fully revealed in the memoir by Miss Gladys Storey, based on interviews with Mrs. Perugini, Dickens’ last surviving daughter, which was published in England last summer.

But all these circumstances are worth knowing and bearing in mind, because they help us to understand what Dickens was trying to say. Dickens was less given to false moral attitudes or to fear of conventional opinion than most of the great Victorians; but just as through the offices of his friends and admirers his personal life has been screened from the public, even up to our own day, as would have been thought to be uncalled-for and ridiculous in the case of a Keats or Byron of the earlier nineteenth century, so the meaning of Dickens’ work has been obscured by that element of the conventional which Dickens never quite outgrew. It is necessary to see him as a man in order to appreciate him as an artist — to exorcise the spell which has bewitched him into a stuffy piece of household furniture and to give him his proper rank as the poet of that portièred and upholstered world who saw clearest through the coverings and the curtains.

II

If one approaches his first novel, Pickwick Papers, with these facts of Dickens’ biography in mind, one is struck by certain features of the book which one may not have noticed before.

Here the subject has been set for Dickens. He was supposed to provide some sort of text for a series of comic sporting plates by Seymour — something in the vein of Surtees’ Jorrocks. As soon, however, as Dickens’ scheme gives him a chance to get away from the sporting plates and to indulge his own preoccupations, the work takes a different turn.

There are in Pickwick Papers, especially in the early part, a whole set of interpolated short stories which make a contrast with the narrative proper. These stories are mostly pretty bad and deserve from the literary point of view no more attention than they usually get; but, even allowing here also for an element of the conventional and popular, the still-thriving school of Gothic horror, we are surprised to find rising to the surface already the themes which were to dominate the later work.

The first of these stories in Pickwick deals with the death of a pantomime clown, reduced to the direst misery through drink, who, in the delirium of his fever, thinks that the wife whom he has been beating wants to kill him. In the second story, a worthless husband beats his wife and sets an example of bad conduct to his son; the boy commits a robbery, gets caught and convicted — in prison remains obdurate to his mother’s attempts to soften his sullen heart; she dies, he repents, it is too late; he is transported, returns after seventeen years and finds no one to love or greet him; he stumbles at last upon his father, now a sodden old man in the workhouse; a scene of hatred and violence ensues: the father, filled with terror, strikes the son across the face with a stick, the son seizes the father by the throat, and the old man bursts a blood vessel and falls dead. The third story is a document by a madman, which, like the delirium of the dying clown, gives Dickens an opportunity to exploit that vein of hysterical fancy which was to find fuller scope in Barnaby Rudge and which was there to figure for him the life of the imagination itself. The narrator has lived in the knowledge that he was to be the victim of hereditary insanity. At last he feels that he is going mad, but at the same time he inherits money: men fawn upon him and praise him now, but he secretly rejoices in the sense that he is not one of them, that he is fooling them. He marries a girl, who loves another but who has been sold to him by her father and brothers; seeing his wife languish away and coming to understand the situation, fearing also lest she may hand on the family curse, he tries to kill her in her sleep with a razor; she wakes up but dies of the shock. When one of her brothers comes to reproach him, the madman throws him down and chokes him; runs amuck and is finally caught.

But it is in ‘The Old Man’s Tale About the Queer Client’ (Chapter XXI) that Dickens’ obsessions appear most plainly. Here at the threshold of Dickens’ work we are confronted with the Marshalsea Prison. A prisoner for debt, a ‘healthy, strong-made man, who could have borne almost any fatigue of active exertion,’ wastes away in his confinement and sees his wife and child die of grief and want. He swears to revenge their deaths on the man who has put him there. We have another long passage of delirium, at the end of which the prisoner comes to, to learn that he has inherited his father’s money. At a seaside resort where he has been living, he sees a man drowning one evening; the father of the drowning man stands by and begs the ex-prisoner to save his son. But when the wronged man recognizes his father-in-law, the man who sent him to prison and who allowed his own daughter and grandson to die, he retaliates by letting the boy drown; then, not content with this, he buys up at ‘treble and quadruple their nominal value’ a number of loans which have been made to the old man; these loans have been arranged on the understanding that they are renewable up to a certain date, but the wronged man, taking advantage of the fact that the agreement has never been put on paper, proceeds to call them in at a time when his father-in-law has ‘sustained many losses’; the old man is dispossessed of all his property and finally runs away in order to escape prison, but his persecutor tracks him down to a ‘wretched lodging’ — note well: ‘ in Camden Town ‘ — and there finally reveals himself and announces his implacable intention of sending his persecutor to jail. The old man falls dead from shock, and the revenger disappears.

In the meantime, the same theme has been getting under way in the main current of the comic novel. Mr. Pickwick has been framed by Dodson and Fogg, and very soon — another wronged man — he will land in the debtors’ prison, where a good many of the other characters will join him and where the whole book will deepen with a new dimension of seriousness. The hilarity of the scene in court, in which Mr. Pickwick is convicted of trifling with Mrs. Bardell’s affections — a scene openly borrowed from Jorrocks but wonderfully transformed by Dickens, and as brilliant as the story of the fiendish revenge on the fiendish father-in-law is bathetic — may disguise from the reader the significance which this episode had for Dickens. Here Dickens is one of the greatest of humorists: it is a laughter which is never vulgar but which discloses the vulgarity of the revered — a laughter of ecstasy that rises like the phoenix from the cinders to which the dismal denizens of tribunals and lawyers’ offices have tried to reduce decent human beings. It represents, like the laughter of Aristophanes, a real escape from human institutions.

I shall make no attempt to discuss at length the humor of the early Dickens. This is the aspect of his work that is best known, the only aspect that some people know. In praise of Dickens’ humor, there is hardly anything new to say. The point I want to make is that the humor of Dickens is quite different from such humor as that of Aristophanes in being unable to inhabit an empyrean of blithe intellectual play, of charming fancies and biting good sense. Dickens’ laughter is an exhilaration which already shows a trace of the hysterical. It leaps free of the prison of life; but gloom and soreness must always drag it down. Before he has finished with Mr. Pickwick and even while he is getting him out of jail and preparing to unite the lovers, the prison will close in again on Dickens. While he is still on the last installments of Pickwick, he will begin writing Oliver Twist — the story of a disinherited boy consigned to a workhouse which is a jail and getting away only to fall into the hands of a gang of burglars, pickpockets, and prostitutes.

And now we must identify the attitudes with which Dickens’ origins and his early experience had caused him to meet mankind. The ideal of Pickwick Papers is a kindly retired business man, piloted through a tough and treacherous world by a shrewd servant of watchful fidelity, who perfectly knows his place: Mr. Pickwick and Sam Weller. But this picture, though real enough to its creator, soon gives way to the figure of a parentless and helpless child — a figure of which the pathos will itself be eclipsed by the horror of the last night in the condemned cell of a betrayer to the gallows of others, and by the horror of a brute who clubs his girl to death and hangs himself in trying to escape.

III

Edmund Yates described Dickens’ expression as ‘blunt’ and ‘pleasant,’ but ‘rather defiant.’

For the man of spirit whose childhood has been crushed by the cruelty of organized society, one of two attitudes is natural: that of the criminal or that of the rebel. Charles Dickens, in imagination, was to play the rôle of both, and to put into them, up to his very death, all that was most sincere in his passion.

His interest in prisons and prisoners is evident from the very beginning. In his first book, Sketches by Boz, he tells how he used to gaze at Newgate with ‘mingled feelings of awe and respect’; and he sketches an imaginary picture of a condemned man’s last night alive, which he is soon to elaborate in Oliver Twist. Almost the only passage in American Notes which shows an impulse on Dickens’ part to enter into the minds and feelings of the people of the country in which he is traveling is the account of the imagined effects of a sentence of solitary confinement in a Philadelphia jail. Later Dickens found this American system imitated in the jail at Lausanne; and he was gratified when it was finally abandoned as the result of—what proved his insight — the prisoners’ going insane. He visited prisons wherever he went; and he wrote a great deal about executions. One of the vividest things in Pictures from Italy is a description of a guillotining; and one of the most impressive episodes in Barnaby Rudge is the narration — developed on such a scale — of the hanging of the leaders of the riots. In 1846, Dickens wrote letters to the press in protest against capital punishment for murderers, on the ground, among others, that this created sympathy for the culprits; in 1849, after attending some executions in London with Forster, he started by writing to The Times an agitation which had the effect of getting public hangings abolished. Even in 1867, in the course of his second visit to America, ‘I have been tempted out,’Dickens wrote Forster, ‘at three in the morning to visit one of the large police stationhouses, and was so fascinated by the study of a horrible photograph-book of thieves’ portraits that I couldn’t put it down.’

His interest in the fate of prisoners thus went a good deal further than simple memories of the debtors’ prison or notes of a court reporter. He identified himself readily with the thief, and even more readily with the murderer. The man of powerful will who finds himself set against society must, if he cannot upset society or if his impulse to do so is blocked, feel an impulse to commit what society considers the greatest crime against itself. With the antisocial heroes of Dostoevsky, it is always murder or rape; with Dickens, it is almost always murder. His obsession with murderers is attested by his topical pieces for House-hold Words; by his remarkable letter to Forster on the performance of the French actor Lemaître in a play in which he impersonated a murderer; by his expedition, on his second visit to America, to the Cambridge Medical School for the purpose of going over the ground where Professor Webster had committed a murder in his laboratory and continued to meet his courses with parts of the body under the lid of his lecture table. In Dickens’ novels this theme recurs, with a probing of the psychology of the murderer which becomes ever more subtle and intimate; and here the crime and flight of Jonas Chuzzlewit already show a striking development beyond the cruder crime and flight of Sikes. The fantasies and fears of Jonas are really, as Taine remarked, the picture of a mind on the edge of insanity. What is valid and impressive in this episode is the insight into the consciousness of a man who has put himself outside human fellowship — when Jonas, after the murder, is ‘not only fearful for himself but of himself’ and half expects, when he returns to his bedroom, to find himself asleep in the bed.

At times the two themes — the criminal and the rebel — are combined in a peculiar way. Barnaby Rudge — which from the point of view of Dickens’ comedy and character-drawing is the least satisfactory of his early books — is, up to Martin Chuzzlewit, the most interesting from the point of view of his deeper artistic intentions. It is the only one of these earlier novels which is not more or less picaresque and correspondingly more or less of an improvisation (though there is a certain amount of organization discernible in that other sombre work, Oliver Twist); it is the only one which Dickens had been planning and reflecting on for a long time before he wrote it: it is first mentioned in 1837, but was not written till 1841. Its immediate predecessor, The Old Curiosity Shop, had been simply an impromptu yarn spun out — when he found that the original scheme of Master Humphrey’s Clock was not going over with his readers — from what was to have been merely the beginning of a short story; but Barnaby Rudge was a deliberate attempt to give expression to the emotions and ideas that possessed him.

The ostensible subject of the novel is the anti-Catholic insurrection known as the ‘Gordon riots’ which took place in London in 1780. But what is obviously in Dickens’ mind is the Chartist agitation for universal suffrage and working-class representation in Parliament which, as a result of the industrial depression, came to a crisis in 1840. In Manchester the cotton mills were idle, and the streets were full of threatening unemployed. In the summer of 1840 there was a strike of the whole North of England, which the authorities found it possible to put down only by firing into the working-class crowds; this was followed the next year by a brickmakers’ strike, which ended in bloody riots. Now the immediate occasion for the Gordon riots had been a protest against a bill which was to remove from the English Catholics such penalties and disabilities as the sentence of life imprisonment for priests who should educate children as Catholics and the disqualifications of Catholics from inheriting property; but the real causes behind the demonstration have always remained rather obscure. It seems to indicate a public indignation stronger than it is possible to account for by mere anti-Catholic feeling that churches and houses should have been burnt wholesale, all the prisons of London broken open, and even the Bank of England attacked, and that the authorities should for several days have done so little to restrain the rioters; and it has been supposed that public impatience at the prolongation of the American war, with a general desire to get rid of George III, if not of the monarchy itself, must have contributed to the fury behind the uprising.

This obscurity, at any rate, allowed Dickens to handle the whole episode in an equivocal way. On the surface he reprobates Lord George Gordon and the rioters for their fanatical or brutal intolerance; but implicitly he is exploiting to the limit certain legitimate grievances of the people: the neglect of the lower classes by a cynical eighteenth-century aristocracy, and especially the penal laws which made innumerable minor offenses punishable by death. The really important theme of the book — as Dickens shows in his preface, when he is discussing one of the actual occurrences on which he based his story — is the hanging under the Shoplifting Act of a woman who has been dropped by her aristocratic lover and who has forged notes to provide for her child. This theme lies concealed but exerts its force from beginning to end of the book. And as Pickwick, from the moment when it really gets under way, heads by instinct and, as it were, unconsciously straight for the Fleet prison, so Barnaby Rudge is directed deliberately and systematically toward Newgate, where, as in Pickwick again, a number of characters will be brought together; and the principal climax of the story will be the orgiastic burning of Newgate. This incident not only has nothing to do with the climax of the plot, it goes in spirit quite against the attitude toward the riots which Dickens has begun by announcing. The satisfaction he obviously feels in demolishing the sinister old prison, which, rebuilt, had oppressed him as a child, completely obliterates the effect of his right-minded references to ‘those shameful tumults,’ which ‘reflect indelible disgrace upon the time in which they occurred, and all who had act or part in them.’ In the end, the rioters are shot down and their supposed instigators hanged; but here Dickens’ parti pris plainly emerges: ‘Those who suffered as rioters were, for the most part, the weakest, meanest and most miserable among them.’ The son of the woman hanged for stealing, who has been one of the most violent of the mob and whose fashionable father will do nothing to save him, goes to the scaffold with courage and dignity, cursing his father and ’that black tree, of which I am the ripened fruit.’

Dickens has here, under the stimulus of the Chartist agitation, tried to give his own emotions an outlet through an historical novel of insurrection; but the historical episode, the contemporary moral, and the author’s emotional pattern do not always coincide very well. Indeed, perhaps the best thing in the book is the creation that most runs away with the general scheme that Dickens has attempted. Dennis the hangman, although too macabre to be one of Dickens’ most popular characters, is really one of his best comic inventions, and has more interesting symbolic implications than Barnaby Rudge himself. Dennis is a professional executioner, who has taken an active part in the revolt, apparently from simple motives of sadism. Because he knows that the hangman is unpopular, he has made an effort to keep his identity a secret; but he has found this rather difficult to do, because he sincerely loves his profession and cannot restrain himself from talking about it. When the mob invades Newgate, knowing the prison so well, he directs the liberation of the prisoners; but in the end he slips away to the condemned cells, locks them against the mob and stands guard over the clamoring inmates, banging them over the knuckles when they stick their hands out over the doors. The condemned are his vested interest, which he cannot allow the rebels to touch. But the momentum of the mob forces the issue, breaks through and turns the criminals loose. When we next encounter Dennis, he is a stool pigeon, turning in his former companions to the police. But he is unable to buy immunity in this way; and he is finally hanged himself. Thus Dennis has a complex value: he is primarily a sadist who likes to kill; yet he figures as a violator as well as a protector of prisons. In his role of insurgent, he attacks authority; in his role of hangman, makes it odious. Either way he represents on Dickens’ part a blow at those institutions which Dickens is pretending to endorse. There is not, except in a minor way, any other symbol of authority in the book.

IV

The formula of Barnaby Rudge is more or less reproduced in the other two novels of Dickens that deal with revolutionary subjects — which, though they belong to later periods of Dickens’ work, it is appropriate to consider here. In Hard Times (1854), he manages in much the same way to deal sympathetically with the working-class protest against intolerable industrial conditions at the same time that he lets himself out from supporting the trade-union movement. In order to be able to do this, he is obliged to resort to a special and rather implausible device. Stephen Blackpool, the honest old textile worker, who is made to argue the cause of the workers before the vulgar manufacturer Bounderby, refuses to join the union because he has promised the woman he loves that he will do nothing to get himself into trouble. He thus finds himself in the singular position of being both a victim of the blacklist and a scab. The trade-union leadership is represented only — although with a comic fidelity, recognizable even today, to a certain type of labor organizer — by an unscrupulous spellbinder whose single aim is to get hold of the workers’ pennies. Old Stephen, wandering away to look for a job somewhere else, falls into a disused coalpit which has already cost the lives of many miners, and thus becomes a martyr simultaneously to the employers and to the trade-union movement. In A Tale of Two Cities (1859), the moral of history is not juggled as it is in Barnaby Rudge; but the conflict is made to seem of less immediate reality by locating it out of England. The French people, in Dickens’ picture, have been given ample provocation for breaking loose in the French Revolution; but, once in revolt, they are vandals and fiends. The vengeful Madame Defarge is a creature whom — as Dickens implies — one would not find in England, and she is worsted by an Englishwoman. The immediate motive behind A Tale of Two Cities is no doubt, as has been suggested and as is intimated at the beginning of the last chapter, the English fear of the Second Empire after Napoleon III’s Italian campaign of 1859: Dickens’ impulse to write the book closely followed Orsini’s attempt to assassinate Napoleon III in the January of ‘58. But there is in this book as in the other two — though less angrily expressed — a threat. If the British upper classes, Dickens seems to say, will not provide for the health and the education of the people, they will fall victims to the brutal mob — which Dickens both sympathizes with and fears.

Through all his early period, Dickens thinks of himself as a middle-class man, a respectable member of society. Sam Weller, for all his frankness, knows his place; Kit in The Old Curiosity Shop is a model of deference toward his betters that even becomes a little disgusting. When Dickens first visited America, in 1842, he seems to have had hopes of finding there something in the nature of that classless society which the foreign ‘fellow travelers’ of yesterday went to seek in the Soviet Union; but, for reasons both bad and good, Dickens was driven back by what he did find into the attitude of an English gentleman, who resented the American lack of ceremony, was annoyed by the American publicity, and was pretty well put to rout by the discomfort, the poverty, and the tobacco juice which he had braved on his trip to the West. Maladjusted to the hierarchy at home, he did not fit in in America even so well as he did in England: some of the Americans patronized him, and others were much too familiar.

The attitude — here seen at its most favorable to us — produced by the standards of home checking his sympathy with American innovations is indicated by the passage in American Notes in which he discusses the factory girls of Lowell. These girls have pianos in their boardinghouses and subscribe to circulating libraries, and they publish a periodical. ‘How very preposterous!’ the author imagines the English reader exclaiming. ‘These things are above their station.’ But what is their station? asks Dickens. ‘It is their station to work,’ he answers. ‘And they do work. . . . For myself, I know no station in which, the occupation of today cheerfully done and the occupation of tomorrow cheerfully looked to, any one of these pursuits is not most humanizing and laudable. I know no station which is rendered more endurable to the person in it, or more safe to the person out of it, by having ignorance for its associate. I know no station which has a right to monopolize the means of mutual instruction, improvement and rational entertainment; or which has even continued to be a station very long after seeking to do so.’ But he remarks that ‘it is pleasant to find that many of [the] Tales [in the library] are of the Mills, and of those who work in them; that they inculcate habits of self-denial and contentment, and teach good doctrines of enlarged benevolence.’ Nicholas Nickleby throughout is the story of the efforts of Nicholas and his sister to vindicate their position as gentlefolk.

But there is also another reason why these political novels of Dickens are unclear and unsatisfactory. Fundamentally, he was not interested in politics. As a reporter, he had seen a good deal of Parliament, and he had formed a contemptuous opinion of it which was never to change to the end of his life. The Eatanswill elections in Pickwick remain the type of political activity for Dickens; the seating of Mr. Veneering in Parliament in the last of his finished novels is hardly different. The point of view is stated satirically in Chapter XII of Bleak House, in which a governing-class group at a country house are made to discuss the fate of the country in terms of the political activities of Lord Coodle, Sir Thomas Doodle, the Duke of Foodle, the Right Honorable William Buffy, M.P., with his associates and opponents Cuffy, Duffy, Fuffy, and so forth, while their constituents are regarded merely as ‘a certain large number of supernumeraries, who are to be occasionally addressed, and relied upon for shouts and choruses, as on the theatrical stage.’ A little later (September 30, 1855), he expresses himself explicitly in the course of a letter to Forster: ' I really am serious in thinking — and I have given as painful consideration to the subject as a man with children to live and suffer after him can honestly give to it — that representative government is become altogether a failure with us, that the English gentilities and subserviences render the people unfit for it, and that the whole thing has broken down since that great seventeenth century time, and has no hope in it.’

In his novels, from beginning to end, Dickens is always making the same point: that to the English governing classes the people they govern are not real. It is one of the great purposes of Dickens to show you these human actualities which figure for Parliament and political economy as strategical counters and statistics; which can as a rule appear only even in histories in a generalized and idealized form. What does a workhouse under the Poor Laws look like? What does it feel like, taste like, smell like? How does the holder of a post in the government look? How does he talk, what does he talk about, how will he treat you? What is the aspect of the British middle class at each of the various points of its progress? What are the good ones like and what are the bad ones like? How do they affect you, not merely to meet at dinner, but to travel with, to work under, to live with? All these things Dickens is able to tell us. To leave the world this kind of record has been one of the most valuable functions of the modern novel and drama. Few have done it with any range at all wide, and none has surpassed Dickens.

No doubt this concrete way of looking at society may have serious limitations. Dickens was sometimes actually stupid about politics. His lack of interest in political tactics led him, it has sometimes been claimed, to mistake the value of the legislation he criticizes. Mr. T. A. Jackson has pointed out a characteristic example of Dickens’ inattention to politics in his report of his first visit to America.

Visiting Washington in 1842, Dickens registers an impression of Congress similar to his impressions of Parliament: ‘ I may be of a cold and insensible temperament, amounting to iciness, in such matters.’ And he indulges in one of his gushings of sentiment over ‘an aged, gray-haired man, a lasting honor to the land that gave him birth, who has done good service to his country, as his forefathers did, and who will be remembered scores upon scores of years after the worms bred in its corruption are so many grains of dust — it was but a week since this old man had stood for days upon his trial before this very body, charged with having dared to assert the infamy of that traffic which has for its accursed merchandise men and women, and their unborn children.’ Now this aged gray-haired man, Mr. Jackson reminds us, was none other than John Quincy Adams, who, so far from being on his trial was actually on the verge of winning in his long fight against a House resolution which had excluded petitions against slavery and who was deliberately provoking his opponents for purposes of propaganda. Dickens did not know that the antislavery cause, so far from being hopeless, was taking its first step toward victory. (So on his second visit to America — when, however, he was ill and exhausted — his interest in the impeachment of Andrew Johnson seems to have been limited to ‘a misgiving lest the great excitement . . . will damage our receipts’ from his readings.) Yet his picture of the United States in 1842, at a period of brave boastings and often squalid realities, has a unique and permanent value.

Macaulay complained that Dickens did not understand the Manchester school of utilitarian economics which he criticizes in Hard Times. But Dickens’ criticism does not pretend to be theoretical: all he is undertaking to do is to tell us how believers in utilitarianism behave and how their families are likely to fare. His picture is strikingly corroborated by the autobiography of John Stuart Mill, who was brought up at the fountainhead of the Manchester school, in the shadow of Bentham himself. In Mill, choked with learning from his childhood, intellectually overtrained on the logical side of the mind, and falling into illogical despair when the lack began to make itself felt of the elements his education had neglected, the tragic moral of the system of Gradgrind is pointed as emphatically as by anything in Dickens.

This very distrust of politics, however, is a part of the rebellious aspect of Dickens. Dickens is almost invariably against institutions: in spite of his personal acquiescence to Church and State, in spite of the lip service he occasionally pays them, whenever he comes to deal with Parliament and its laws, the courts and the public officials, the creeds of Protestant dissenters and of Church of England alike, he makes them either ridiculous or cruel, or both at the same time.

(To be concluded)