Anuradha Mazumder
Introduction
As the negative impacts of rapid industrialisation on individuals, families and society came to the foreground of the Victorian consciousness, the major Victorian novelists like Dickens, Thackeray, Disraeli, Kingsley and Mrs. Gaskell became deeply concerned about the various burning social problems of their times. In their novels, they wrote extensively about issues related to the fast changing social structures, the emergence of new social classes, the changes in the English economy, and above all, the question of poverty. Dickens and Thackeray even formed a sense of special identity with their times. While they shared a common set of beliefs, ideas and prejudices with their reading public, they also identified themselves with their age and shared much of its “special climate of ideas and feelings, [and] a set of fundamental assumptions.[1] Dickens dealt with the social evils more than most other writers of the day.
Endowed with an acute ‘sense of the present’ and prompted by the contemporary sense of crisis, a few relatively less known novelists shared the literary landscape of the Victorian world along with their towering literary counterparts. They wrote fiction about and for the poor who were increasingly becoming the refuse of society. G.W.M Reynolds, the most significant novelist among them, had a dramatically different take on most of the contemporary issues.
While relating the social ills of the day, Reynolds provides an image of the poor that is radically different from the bourgeois representation of poverty in Dickens’s works. He differs from Dickens both in his perspectives and in techniques. In this article, I shall discuss the differences in the representations of poverty, a major social problem of the Victorian English society, in the novels of Dickens and Reynolds. Before I set out to do so, I should acknowledge that I am making a comparative study of two Victorian novelists who remain miles apart in terms of their literary merits and popularity. Reynolds neither possesses Dickens’s great gift of expression nor comes anywhere close to Dickens in terms of the literary merit of his novels.
Readership of Dickens and Reynolds
A close look at the reading public that Dickens and Reynolds wrote for is of utmost importance in understanding the kind of novels each of them wrote. Outside the Victorian middle class and the skilled working class lay two other classes — first, the aristocracy and the governing class with whom Dickens had no contact; and second, the pauperised masses of
Reynolds’s readers, on the other hand, were constituted primarily of the lower and working classes — a huge chunk of the early Victorian community far outside the precincts and considerations of Dickens. It was a people, to whom magazine proprietors until 1832 had not bothered to cater their service. The year 1832 saw the publication of three remarkably cheap weekly periodicals.[3] They became an instant success, showing a huge demand for cheap reading matter. With the passage of time, as reading became more and more an accomplishment, there emerged a large number of readers from among the people living an exceedingly drab life devoid of hope and the ordinary pleasures of life. They primarily sought entertainment instead of instruction from the reading materials. This lower class population of
With time, however, their literary taste began to undergo a perceptible change, and they started showing interest in tales relating to courts and aristocrats. The ‘penny dreadfuls,’ thus, gradually gave way to the weekly romance.[4] With a unique sense of empathy for and intimacy with the poor, Reynolds wrote his tales about the oppression of the poor for this new reading public.
Dickens as a Social Critic
Dickens’s compassion for the poor and the oppressed led him to attack vehemently the legal, social, political, economic and educational systems of the day. He did as much as any single person can do to discredit the workhouse, which was a “strange combination of the power to punish with the obligation to relieve.”[5] Thus, to overlook Dickens’s basic generosity of mind would be to distort his role as a social critic. Nevertheless, it is true that when it came to making constructive suggestions for social reform, in his novels, Dickens had nothing more to suggest than a change of heart on the part of the rich and the powerful for the general benefit of society. Therefore, one might ask if Dickens was anything more than a pious social critic and an armchair social reformer.
Dickens’s fundamental drawback as a social critic is very evident in his Hard Times. Even while acknowledging the symbolic and moral meaning of characters like Gradgrind and Bounderby, we cannot fail to see Dickens’s limitation as an ineffectual critic of the industrial scene. All industrialists were certainly not monsters like Bournderby, and all Trade Union leaders such demagogic frauds like Slackbridge. His Stephen Blackpool cannot be considered as the representative wage earner of the time battling for bread and right.
Generations of critics have considered his depiction of these characters as utterly unconvincing, because, their depiction is highly conditioned by the author’s lack of an in-depth understanding of the industrial problems and social dynamics of his time. George Bernard Shaw, for example, argues that Slackbridge’s personality reveals Dickens’s ignorance of industrial trade unionism, and therefore, he holds that the depiction of the character of Slackbridge is completely unpersuasive. Shaw dismisses it as a mere figment of the middle class imagination, conditioned by the typical prejudices of that class.[6]
It is not surprising that even after Dickens’s visit to Preston, a textile manufacturing town in Lancashire, in January 1854, to gain a first hand knowledge of the bitterly contested strike which proved the endurance of the weavers’ unions, he “had no glimpse of the part to be played by Trade Unionism in bettering the conditions he deplored.”[7] R. D. Butterworth also criticizes Dickens’s lack of forethought regarding the role that the unions were later to play in improving the condition of industrial workers. He argues that unions were not to be the mere instruments of demagogues for creating division among workers and inciting civil strife, as Dickens naively portrays them to be.[8]
Dickens has been severely criticised for his deficient understanding of political economy as well. E. P. Whipple argues that Dickens was inclined to consider anything that offended his benevolent sentiments as untrue. Since he finds Dickens’s social satire as having its base on its author’s emotional response rather than on a pragmatic and rational approach to the ills of society, he regards it as thoroughly flawed and insincere. Whipple writes:
The great field for the contest between the head and the heart is the domain of political economy. The demonstrated laws of this science are often particularly offensive to many good men and good women, who wish well for their fellow – creatures, and who are pained by the obstacles which economic maxims present to their diffusive benevolence.[9]
Can we dismiss Dickens’s concern for the suffering of the poor in general as mere ‘diffusive benevolence?’ Since Dickens represents Gradgrind and Bounderby as dramatic monsters, is it fair to consider their shortcomings as not only insignificant but also as idiosyncratic in nature, and thereby undermine their social significance? The deficiencies in their characters are, indeed, rooted in the questionable ideologies they believed in — the system of Facts and Figures that Dickens so severely assails in the novel. These ideologies are what prevent them from being generous human beings. As a devout and committed Christian, Dickens believed that a merely pragmatic view of human relationships could rob humanity of its soul and overlook the undercurrents and subtleties in social situations. Hence, the plea of a man, who is as sensitive to the social evils of his time as Dickens, for a change of heart, should certainly be considered genuine and expected.
However, on the whole, his representation of the industrial scene is undeniably bourgeois. His limitations, too, are the result of a limited bourgeois outlook. There is nothing in Hard Times that even vaguely suggests the need to revolt against and overthrow the system to relieve the workers of their grinding poverty. If Bounderby and his system treat people merely as factory ‘hands,’ lifeless and mechanical, Slackbridge and the workers’ union, which could have been portrayed by the author as a serious alternative, is represented as being hardly any better. If the masters refuse to acknowledge the workers as fellow human beings, the union, too, following the example of the employers, does not regard the workers “as individuals and fellow men, but as members, or not, of the faction that makes up the union.”[10]
Dickens’s message in the novel seems to be that both the employers and the members of the workers’ union need to cultivate the time-honoured virtues of love, goodwill and justice, and understand each other better. He seems to believe that these principles will resolve the industrial crisis to the benefit of both the industrialists and the workers, ensuring a fundamental reform of society. Stephen, shunned by his employer as well as his fellow workers, dies with the wish that “aw th’ world may coom toogether more, and get a better unnerstan’in o’one another.”[11] Though Bounderby does not change, Gradgrind becomes a ‘better’ man only when he learns to make “his facts and figures subservient to Faith, Hope and Charity.”[12] As George Orwell points out in his 1939 essay on Hard Times, Dickens’s contention seems to be that capitalists ought to be kind, not that workers ought to rebel and fight tooth and nail for their rights.[13]
Thus, Dickens’s fundamental belief seems to be that the lasting health and happiness of society does not depend on the overthrow of the government that favours capitalistic enterprise, but on charitable human instincts. Domesticating the issue of poverty, and trying to legitimise bourgeois values at the same time that he fights against social injustices, he seems to appear in his novels as a spokesperson for the middle class. This is true of many of his other novels as well. In A Christmas Carol, after having undergone a change of heart, Scrooge comes across as one of the best examples of the charitable rich man that Dickens idolises.
Dickens seems to adopt an ostrich-like attitude towards a problem as widespread as poverty, by believing that private charity on the part of the rich was enough to eradicate it. By sharing the crumbs of their opulence, the rich my appease the paupers and regain their peace of mind. Scrooge becomes the ideal embodiment of the spirit of Christian charity when he learns to be generous. In an act of generosity, he sends a turkey to the struggling family of Bob Cratchit on Christmas Eve anonymously. He even raises Bob’s salary the next day, thus becoming “as good a friend, as good a master, and as good a man, as the good old city knew.”[14]
Dickens viewed the society of his time with the eyes of a social reformer besides that of an author. As an individual, taking up the cause of the weaker sections of society, he argued for the rights of women, protection of children, and help for the paupers. However, when it came to the fictional representations of social problems, the voice that observes, analyses and comments is an essentially middleclass voice. In an essay on the Victorian novel, Martin Day discusses how the bourgeoisie rules the world of both Oliver Twist and A Christmas Carol. The plots of these novels are built around bourgeois characters, the financial and domestic fortunes are centred around the bourgeois lifestyle, adherence to the bourgeois ideology is seen as the best means to happiness, and a bourgeois background is presented as a symbol of comfort and safety, ensuring a general sense of wellbeing. According to Day, Dickens appears to share the Victorian spirit of reform, which aimed not at overthrowing the bourgeois capitalistic system but at humanizing it to the benefit of the whole society.[15]
Reynolds as a Social Critic
Writing almost at the same time as Dickens, Reynolds remained a far cry from Dickens. He had no faith in the Benthamite and Malthusian principles that largely shaped the New Poor Law of 1834 which intended to discipline and punish the paupers by subjecting them to the rigours of the work house. However, he did not believe along with Dickens that individual Christian charity would eradicate poverty. Deeply aware of the ills of the capitalistic social system, and the magnitude of the menace of poverty throughout
As a militant Chartist, he severely debunked the capitalistic system that he held responsible for the existence of the poor. Making a radical campaign for parliamentary reform of the inequities that remained after the Reform Act of 1832, the Chartists demanded the extension of the franchise, annual general elections, and the secret ballot. They also demanded the abolition of the requirement that members of parliament be property owners. Reynolds actively participated in Chartist politics and agitations, which demanded the redressal of the wrongs done to the poor through political means. A political resolution of social and economic problems meant not a plea for humanising the existing system but a demand for a change of government. Reynolds believed that this change could be brought about only through a rebellion by the poor.
Before such a change is brought about, the consciousness of the lower classes had to be raised. As in his non-fictional writings such as Reynolds’s Weekly Miscellany and Reynolds’s Political Instructor, in his fictional writings too, Reynolds represents poverty not as an unfortunate yet natural condition, but as one artificially created and sustained by an exploitative socio-economic system. He wanted the pauperised masses to understand how such a system served the interests of a privileged few who seemed to believe with Thomas Robert Malthus, the renowned and notorious economist, that the poor had no right or reason to be at bountiful nature’s feast because Mother Nature’s table was already full.
Therefore, he depicts poverty as so brutal and heinous a state that it acts as a stimulant to rebellion for the poor. Unlike the honest and orderly Dickensian poor, Reynolds’s poor are the fearful and criminal gravediggers, wife-beaters, and murderers who frequent the
Reynolds’s treatment of poverty in the novel is very unconventional. He deals neither with the deserving poor, nor with the indolent, improvident and undeserving poor. Most of his sub-plots and stories in this novel depict the poverty of the degraded, dangerous and brutalised poor constituted of criminals like Bill Bolter, Cranky Jem and the Resurrection Man. The scenes of low-life are interspersed with commentaries, ‘histories’ facts and figures, footnotes citing the reports of parliamentary commissions, all of which point to the attempt of the author to convey something like reality, and therefore, his genuine social conscience.
In order to maintain social realism in his novels, Reynolds adopts some interesting techniques. His favourite means is that of authorial commentary — the device of temporarily stopping the linear flow of the narrative to make room for his political and social comments. In the eighteenth chapter of The Mysteries of London, Reynolds describes to the last detail the inhuman living condition of the poor in
The wealthy classes of society are far too ready to reproach the miserable poor for things which are really misfortunes and not faults. The habit of whole families sleeping together in one room destroys all sense of shame in the daughters: and what guardian then remains for their virtue?[16]
Another favourite ploy of Reynolds, which serves as interludes of social realism in the midst of a series of the most outlandish episodes, is the incorporation of first person low-life narratives (‘histories’) into the fabric of the main narrative. Though Reynolds does not insist upon the literal truth of these ‘histories,’ he often sets them upon the rest of the work and inserts an occasional reference to some well-known event or situation.
One such example is the account of the Resurrection Man (a body-snatcher called Tidkins) of his gradual deterioration from a regular Sunday School attendant to a leader of the criminal life in
I could not see any advantage in being good. I could not find out any inducement to be honest…. The Legislature thinks that if it does not make the most grinding laws to keep down the poor, the poor will rise up against the rich and commit the most unheard of atrocities. In fact the rich are prepared to believe any infamy which is imputed to the poor.[17]
Reynolds had no intention of glossing over the vices of the poor. He was aware that poverty was not always undeserved, and that all criminals were not victims of society. Therefore, when it comes to talking about criminality as a direct product of social injustice, Reynolds makes use of the narrative voice of Tidkins instead of his own. This does not mean that he disclaims the facticity of the first person narratives; rather, he uses them as “firsthand documents attesting to truths stranger than fiction.”[18] If he still chooses to represent the poor as brutal, it is perhaps because he wants to drive home the message that in a society that treats poverty as vice, and considers vice as the cause of poverty, the poor has no option but to be vicious. However, by the same token, he wants the pauperised sections of society to experience their wretchedness fully, so that, the picture of the misery of their situation acts as a deterrent and as a stimulus to rebellion against the establishment. Sentimentalising the poor as deserving and decent would tame and domesticate the problem of poverty and relegate it to the category of romance.
Even in his other novels Reynolds experiments with interesting techniques that underline his marked departure from the general trend of novels by the ‘major’ Victorian novelists of his day. For instance, in Joseph Wilmot: or, The Memoirs of a Man-Servant, he makes use of Joseph, a man-servant engaged in domestic service in upper class residences, as the controlling narrative voice. Enjoying the authorial prerogative of selecting, including and excluding details, Joseph, in his autobiography, portrays the life of the aristocracy often as vain and hollow, and as on the verge of utter financial ruin and oblivion. Very freely, he expresses his opinions on the habits of the high and mighty. As the subtitle suggests, the poor man, the social ‘other,’ replaces the upper middle class author (presupposed to be one of the bourgeois opinion-makers) and looks at high life and its excesses, while his own situation as a domestic servant is highly insecure and temporary.
Ultimately, Reynolds disappoints us in the novel by turning it into a romantic tale of Joseph’s journey from pauperhood to Peerage of England. At the end of the novel, as the mysterious parentage of Joseph comes to light, the man-servant is revealed to be no servant at all but the future Earl of Eccleston. According to Himmelfarb, what distinguishes The Mysteries of London, “from others of its kind is … its politics.”[19] Himmelfarb’s observation on The Mysteries of London is applicable to Joseph Wilmot as well. The system of social control that operates through literature customarily assigns the poor to the periphery of society, and places the bourgeoisie at the centre so that the bourgeoisie can perform the functions of observation, analysis and control.[20] In Joseph Wilmot, Reynolds challenges this presumption by reversing the traditional roles of the observer and the observed. As narrator, the poor servant exercises a power and agency that he cannot hope to enjoy in real life, because, he is not socially at par with the rich and the powerful.
Conclusion
Dickens is a literary giant, one of the greatest novelists of all time. Reynolds, on the other hand, is a mediocre teller of tales. However, both had something in common — both were genuinely concerned about the ills of the Victorian society, and in their novels, both made strong critiques of these ills. The fundamental difference between their critiques lies in the fact that each of them chose to perform their function as social critics from their own dissimilar standpoints. While Dickens revolted in horror from the excesses of the poorest of the poor, Reynolds portrayed their degradation and brutality to the grossest detail to drive home to his lower class readers the need to overthrow the system that perpetrated poverty and privileged the very men who thrived on poverty.
Despite the fact that he spent a number of his early years in an atmosphere of abject poverty, Dickens criticises society as an ‘insider,’ as one who had enough faith in the system to make a plea for its change for the better. Though coming from a comfortable middle class family, Reynolds, on the other hand, does not just assail the social, economic, and political system of the time. Instead, he strikes at the fundamental attitude of his age towards the poor. He was not entirely free of the temptation to please his audience. In fact, at various stages in his novels, a number of issues make us question whether his popularity often came in the way of his radicalism as a novelist, or some of it at least may have come as a result of his agreeable way with his reading public. Nevertheless, for all their racy, sensational and romantic elements, Reynolds’s novels have a consistent undercurrent of political commentary and radical social criticism that obtain for him the status of a sincere social commentator and a visionary social critic.
Notes and References
[1] Walter Allen, The English Novel (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991), 131.
[2] Dickens, however, never uses the term ‘deserving.’
[3] Chamber’s Journal was the most expensive periodical among them, costing a penny-and-a-half, while the cost of the other two was just a penny each.
[4] For more details on the ‘penny dreadfuls’ and the Weekly Romance, see Margaret Dalziel, Popular Fiction 100 Years Ago: An Unexpected Tract of Literary History (London: Cohen and West, 1957), 16-17 and 21-34.
[5] Sidney Webb and Beatrice Webb, English Poor Law History, Part I: The Old Poor Law (London: Frank Cass, 1963), 460.
[6] See George Bernard Shaw, Introduction to Hard Times (London: Waverly, 1912). As given in Fred Kaplan and Sylvere Monod, ed., Hard Times – A Norton Critical Edition (
[7] F. R. Leavis, The Great Tradition (London: Chatto and Windus, 1948), 246.
[8] R. D. Butterworth, “Dickens the Novelist: The Preston Strike and Hard Times,” Dickensian 88 (Summer 1992): 91-102, as given in Kaplan and Monod, ed., Hard Times- A Norton Critical Edition, 312-324.
[9] E. P. Whipple, “On the Economic Fallacies of Hard Times,” The Atlantic Monthly (1877), as given in Kaplan and Monod, ed., Hard Times - A Norton Critical Edition, 347-351.
[10] Butterworth, “Dickens the Novelist: The Preston Strike and Hard Times,” Dickensian 88, as given in Kaplan and Monod, ed., Hard Times- A Norton Critical Edition, 322.
[11] Kaplan and Monod, ed., Hard Times - A Norton Critical Edition, 204.
[12] Ibid., 221.
[13] www. whitewolf.
[14] Charles Dickens, “A Christmas Carol,” The Great Novels of Charles Dickens (London: Magpie Books, 1992), 543.
[15] For more details, see Martin S. Day, “The Victorian Novel,” History of English Literature 1837 to the Present (New York: Doubleday & Company, 1964), 169-234.
[16] G. W. M. Reynolds, The Mysteries of
[17] Ibid., 114.
[18] Gertrude Himmelfarb, The Idea of Poverty (London: Faber and Faber, 1985), 438.
[19] Ibid., 442.
[20] For more details on the idea of social control through literature, see Sajni Mukherji, “The Two Marthas: legal and philanthropic Panopticism,” Reading the Nineteenth Century, ed. Sheila Lahiri Choudhury (Calcutta: Papyrus, 1996), 60.
