“Political economy is a mere shadow unless it has a little human covering”
from “On Strike,” Charles Dickens’ Household Words
Wendy Simeone
English Department
Carver High School
Carver, MA
NEH Seminar 2004
To the people of ancient Athens, or of Florence or Siena in the twelfth and thirteenth
century, or of Norwich or York in the fifteenth century, their town was not a mere roof from
the wind and rain: it was a living personality, expressing and cherishing the instincts, tastes,
beliefs, and corporate pride of the citizens, widely and richly pictured.
J.L Hammond and Barbara Hammond, The Town Labourer 1760-1832, p. 37
Erect in Birmingham a great Educational Institution, properly educational; educational of the
feelings as well as of the reason; to which all orders of Birmingham men can contribute; in
which all orders of Birmingham men can meet; wherein all orders of Birmingham men are
represented; and you will erect a Temple of Concord here which will be a model edifice to
the whole of England.
From Charles Dickens’ Speech in Birmingham Town Hall, December 30, 1853
Introduction
It would be difficult to dispute the fact that Charles Dickens is the most influential
novelist of England’s industrial age. A prolific author, his oeuvre is characterised by an
unflagging sympathy for the ‘workpeople’ who populated the industrial towns and cities of
his age. Critics agree that the uncertain financial and emotional circumstances of his family
life nurtured this sympathy for the downtrodden masses. His novels, his personal letters, his
journalism, and his magazine, Household Words, provide students of the Industrial
Revolution a unique opportunity to learn about the Industrial Age of England as seen
through the eyes of a writer living and working in a period of social and economic flux. To
neglect Dickens’ non-fiction and to study his novels exclusively as social commentary will
result in an incomplete perspective of the impact he believed the Industrial Revolution had
on his age. The effects of this changing society are depicted in his novels, and numerous
relevant facts, many of them pictorial, can be found in essays and articles published in
Household Words, the magazine he initiated in 1850. Published by Bradbury and Evans
from 1850 through 1859, the journal was jointly owned by Dickens, who at first owned onehalf. In 1856 he bought out a portion of John Forster’s, increasing his percentage shares to
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nine sixteenths. Bradbury and Evans owned one-quarter; and W.H. Wills and John Forster
each owned one eighth of the magazine. As the majority shareholder, he was able to
maintain control of his creative vision for Household Words.
The magazine was “published” on the final day of each month, referred to as
“magazine day,” though it was actually available for purchase on the final Wednesday of
each month. A prolific writer, Dickens spent a minimum of two to four hours a day on his
writing, usually beginning at 9:00 A.M. and ending at 2:00 P.M. John Eckel, editor of John
Forster’s acclaimed bibliography about his famous friend, entitled A Bibliography of the
First Editions of the Writings of Charles Dickens and a Few Prices, acknowledged that one
problem directly related to Dickens’ prolific writing was that of discriminating non-fiction
written entirely by Dickens from that of contributing writers, as Dickens was accustomed to
editing freely and sometimes quite rigorously the work of others:
Kitton, aided by Charles Dickens, Jr. made heroic efforts to trace the work
actually done by the author. However, this was made a hardship because of Dickens’
habit of re-writing such articles as were unsuitable to his wishes, or to ‘edit’ them
until they were almost his in a literary sense. (viii)
Harry Stone, editor of The Uncollected Writings of Charles Dickens; Household
Words 1850- 1859, in compiling Dickens’ non-fiction writing from this decade, also
acknowledged the complexity of un-categorically excluding ownership by Dickens of other
writers’ articles he published in Household Words because his conception of his
responsibility as conductor of the magazine meant he “silently modified or contributed to
countless articles”(ix). Stone’s methods of discernment rely upon identifying passages in
articles that are in contrast with the rest of the article and sentences and portions that are
aligned with Dickens’ idiosyncratic style, his characteristic attitudes, and his heavy use of
allusion. Though he acknowledged that ‘we’ can only make informed guesses about the
extent of Dickens’ usurpation, these conjectures are based upon close scrutiny of available
evidence- extensive letter writing, payments, manuscripts, corrected proofs, and descriptions
by contemporaries. The most convincing evidence, Stone believed, was the internal:
allusions, imagery, structural patterns, division, ideas, diction, and syntax—all so easily
identifiable as Dickensian in style (editorial note). In the nine years of its publication,
Household Words contained articles written by Charles Dickens, W.H. Wills, his subeditor,
a diverse group of seasoned staff writers, a large group of fairly regular contributors—
Elizabeth Gaskell, for instance, and a sizeable group of ‘occasional’ writers (Elizabeth
Barrett Browning being one of these), who contributed to a lesser degree. A total of three
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hundred and fifty writers, and Dickens had a “hand,” often a heavy one, in the revision of
these writers’ contributions (15).
In the initial article, “A Preliminary Word,” which appeared in the March 30th, 1850
opening issue, Dickens shared with his readers his motivation for publishing Household
Words: The vision for the periodical had arisen from critically important experiences in his
life, most notably from his childhood reading and from a philosophy of publication forged
from his editorial power struggles with Richard Bentley, publisher of Miscellany. Dickens’
understanding of the role of editor clashed violently with Bentley’s, and he emerged from
the failed partnership with a clear vision of his own periodical:
We seek to bring into innumerable homes, from the stirring world around us,
the knowledge of many social wonders, good and evil, that are not calculated
to render any of us less ardently persevering in ourselves, less tolerant of one
another, less faithful in the progress of mankind, less thankful for the
privilege of living in this summer-dawn of time. No mere utilitarian spirit, no
iron binding of the mind to grim realities, will give a harsh tone to our
Household Words. In the bosoms of the young and old, of the well-to-do and
of the poor, we would tenderly cherish that light of Fancy which is inherent in
the human breast; which, according to its nurture, burns with an inspiring
flame, or sinks into a sullen glare, but which (or woe betide the day!) can
never be extinguished. (1)
The industrialised age (social wonders), the “stirring world around us,” was to be an
especial focus of his magazine, though not a vision that was entirely negative. There is an
invitation implicit in these words. Rather than binding minds to the facts and statistics of the
age, Dickens was inviting all of his fellow citizens to “cherish that light of Fancy which is
inherent in the human breast.” It had saved him in childhood; he would now deliver it to a
society that was in danger of losing its collective spirit. Fancy, that sacred treasure trove
cherished as a result of his literary studies, was to be privileged: the linguistic patterns of
Hard Times’ essential theme, anti-utilitarianism, nascent in the “iron binding of the mind to
grim realities” that introduced his readers to the founding spirit of his periodical. He also
posed a solution to his utilitarian age, a solution that can be detected in much of his fiction
and non-fiction writing:
To show to all, that in all familiar things, even in those which are repellent on
the surface, there is Romance enough, if we will find it out: to teach the hardest
workers at this whirling wheel of toil, that their lot is not necessarily a moody, brutal
fact, excluded from the sympathies and graces of imagination; to bring the greater
and the lesser in degree, together, upon that wide field, and mutually dispose them to
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a better acquaintance and a kinder understanding—is the main object of our
Household Words.(1)
His vision, a romantic one, was the collective imagination. His literary education
had saved him and, he believed, could also save these “hardest workers at the whirling
wheel of toil.” He envisioned the cultivation of the imagination (Fancy) as both liberator and
equalizer and aimed to offer a common solution as the antidote to the relentless, grinding
work borne from his society’s mechanical innovations. Household Words would bridge the
classes and provide all of England’s citizens the “graces of imagination.” Imagination, not
fact, would lift them out of themselves, enlarge their spirits and, by consequence, expand
their conceptions of themselves as members of the same ‘family.’ Household Words was to
be far more than fleeting amusement or distraction from the “whirling wheel of toil.”
It is worth noting that although the “social wonders” contained within the ten years
of periodical publishing of Household Words are not referenced in a traditionally historic
manner, the information these articles contain corresponds to statistical and historically
descriptive accounts referenced by Louise Tilly and Joan Scott in Women, Work, and
Family. These journalistic accounts provide a picture of the effects of the Industrial Age in
Britain and, therefore, would be of interest both to teachers of history and literature. My
analysis of a vast array of these essays and articles confirms that Dickens admired the
inventive genius of his age and respectfully acknowledged the competing perspectives of the
industrial economy while being keenly aware of the price that would be paid and by whom.
That same contradiction visible in the text of Dickens’ non-fiction is inherent in
most of the literature on the Industrial Revolution: Why is the scientific perspective
generally more optimistic than the humanistic perspective? As a teacher of literature, I have
often contemplated the unique contributions of novelists whose social commentaries are the
very words their characters speak, the cold and bleak dwellings that fail to shelter them, the
laws that pluck the food from their mouths. The words spoken by Hard Times’ characters
are replete with condemnation of the mid-nineteenth century’s industrial age in which
Dickens lived and worked. At the end of the day, I wondered, how influential, if at all, are
these fictional social commentaries? Charles Dickens, in addition to being a prodigious
writer of fiction, was a prolific writer of non-fiction. I found myself curious about his
letters, essays, and articles. Would they, in fact, provide a more balanced account of the age
in which he lived? Would documents like these possibly provide a useful resource for
teachers to use with students, providing contemporary students important first-hand
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accounts of England’s industrial age? My research has convinced me that the non-fiction
content of Dickens’ magazine, Household Words, serves as an excellent primary source
document of the price of progress in nineteenth-century England. It provides the
opportunity to answer at least in part the seminar questions about Dickens.
1. What was Dickens’ view of the Industrial Revolution’s effects on women and
children?
2. Did he see the industrial revolution as a period of massive technological change and
rapid economic growth that had failed to improve the conditions of the working
classes despite its vast increases in productivity? If so, does he offer an alternative
social vision?
3. What is the relationship between literature and history, as concerns social theory,
effects, and solutions?
This project is organised in three main parts, as described below. For the purpose of this
phase of the project, I will be submitting a paper corresponding to the third portion of the
project.
1. An analysis of Dickens’ unique method of composition:
An analysis of Dickens’ process is possible due to the fact that six stages of his work on
Hard Times have been preserved. This portion of my project focuses on his Working Plans
or Memoranda (Mems as he referred to them), manuscript and proofs (textual notes), the
calendar which shows the correspondence between the two printed forms of 1854, samples
of the text as it appeared in Household Words, and the text as it was published in book form
by Bradbury and Evans. This analysis will allow for a thesis of production concerning
Dickens’ method of composition, a method useful both for use with student writers and in
literary studies. A complete analysis of this composing process as constricted by the space
demands of serialisation, will result in a working thesis about its architecture in general and
the impact of style, diction, character development, and ornamentation on theme.
2. An analysis of Dickens’ original letters, essays, and journalistic articles relating to
the subject matter of Hard Times and dating from the period 1850- 1854. The primary
area of concentration is 1853-54 as corresponds with the authorship of Hard Times:
Charles Dickens was a prolific writer of letters and essays, as well as novels. The subjects of
Hard Times— education, the nature of children, parent-children relationships, utilitarianism,
‘fancy,’ industrialisation, and the working poor— were first expressed in personal
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correspondence and in articles published in Household Words. This portion of the project
will provide an overview of Household Words, an analysis of the types of articles and
subject matter of their contents, conclusions about the periodicals’ relationship to Dickens’
fiction, and its historical value as a record of the time period.
3. An analysis of the subjects that Dickens was most concerned with at the time of
Hard Times’ serialisation:
It is my thesis that Dickens greatly admired the “progress” of the period of time in which he
lived but was clearly concerned about the price of progress, especially as paid for by the
working class and the paupers. Much of his social commentary illuminated the hegemony
inherent in the significant divide that separated the literate classes from the illiterate. This
social divide was symbolic of a personal schism: his idyllic “Chatham Days” in devastating
contrast with his London years of grimy toil and lost dreams. Read both alone and in
relation with much of his published non-fiction, the letters, essays, and articles analysed in
this paper expose to view his intensely personal solution to the social problems resulting
from The Industrial Revolution.
The governing intention of Household Words, then, was to expose his readers to
“social wonders” so that society might “tenderly cherish that light of Fancy which is
inherent in the human breast.” This was to be accomplished not by fact (the “iron binding of
the mind to grim realities”), but through ‘Fancy.’ The vicissitudes of his turbulent editorial
experience which had always been focused on a resurrection of his glorious “Chatham
Days,” precipitated a distinct vision of Household Words: . . . “a creature which isn’t the
Spectator[Addison’s periodical], and isn’t Isaac Bickerstaff, and isn’t anything of that kind:
but in which people will be perfectly willing to believe, and which is just as mysterious and
quaint enough to have a sort of charm for their imagination, while it will represent commonsense and humanity” (Stone 12). The essays and articles in H.T., as Dickens called it, would
be expressions of his philosophical solution, the expressions of the collective imagination
that inspired his childhood. Heavy editing and revision of others’ writing would ensure a
consistent vision. In support of my thesis, my paper will provide an interpretation of letters
of personal correspondence, an essay condemning censorship—“Frauds on the Fairies”, one
excerpted speech made by Dickens at Birmingham Town Hall, and two essays about the
Preston Strike, “Locked Out” and “On Strike.” These articles were published in Household
Words in a six- month period coinciding with the writing of the serialised edition of Hard
Times.
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The personal correspondence reveals much about Dickens’ social disposition at the
time he began work on Hard Times. One essay condemns utilitarian censorship. Two of the
articles reveal an especial focus upon the Preston strike as related to Dickens’ beliefs about
children, education, the imagination, and class structure. Preston was, at that time, a textilemanufacturing town in Lancashire. In the summer of 1853, the weavers were denied a ten
percent raise, went on strike, were then locked out by management, and were thereby forced
to subsist on subscriptions collected from workers in other manufacturing towns. A cursory
analysis of the titles listed below reveals two articles published in response to the strike and
subsequent lockout; one of the articles, “On Strike”, was penned immediately following a
visit to the site. The other articles furnish evidence of Dickens’ continued interest in
children, the working class, industrial safety, and literacy.
Little Children, Nov. 26, 1853
Locked Out (On Preston), Dec. 10, 1853
Manchester Men at their Books, Dec. 17, 1853
Lancashire Witchcraft, February 4, 1854
On Strike, February 11, 1854
Fraud on the Fairies, Feb. 11, 1854
Ground in the Mill, April 22, 1854
Why Hard Times?
The fact that two essays about the Preston Strike were published in Household Words prior
to his writing the first page of Hard Times on January 23, 1854, supports the generally
accepted view that this strike and the ensuing Lock Out enacted by management was
influential in Dickens’ choice of settings for Hard Times, though he would later protest
against that assumption. Other motivating factors were his life-long interest in children
(especially the orphans of London and the under-aged children employed in the factories of
England); his passionate belief in literacy as a tool for improved lives and working
conditions, and his belief that imagination is essential to human growth and development.
It was economic self-interest, though, that inspired the creation of the serialised
narration that would eventually be named Hard Times. A letter to Angela Burdett Coutts,
his patron, on January 23, 1854, which followed a period of relative ‘rest’ and marked the
first day of work on the story, established a ‘secret’ agenda: “My purpose is among the
mighty secrets of the world at present; but there is such a fixed idea on the part of my
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printers and copartners in Household Words, that a story by me, continued from week to
week, would make some unheard of effect with it, that I am going to write one” (Storey Vol
7 ). The contents of essays published in Household Words between October of 1853 and
February of 1854 and of three letters—the first written in July, the second in September, and
the third the week before writing the first page of his serial—provide evidence that the
“secret” content of the proposed serial was a defence of Fancy.
One of these letters, in particular, exposes for view his defence of the imagination
and of intellectual freedom as especially relevant in an increasingly industrialised landscape.
Written to W.H. Wills and dated July 27, 1853, it reveals Dickens’ concern about “the iron
binding of the mind to grim realities” and the “mean utilitarian spirit” referenced in the
essay of introduction to Household Words. In this letter, Dickens confesses his intent to
write an article in response to George Cruikshank’s edited version of traditional fairy tales,
Hop o’ my Thumb and the Seven League Boots. Cruikshank, a celebrated illustrator, was the
most famous of Dickens’ illustrators and his friend. David Borowitz maintained that
Dickens wrote Oliver Twist with Cruikshank’s illustrations in mind. Cruikshank’s
embracing of the temperance movement “heart and soul”(Borowitz) had eventually cost him
his reputation as a humorist, though. His publication, Cruikshank’s Magazine, had failed
after two issues. His temperance also motivated him to produce a bowdlerized edition of
Hop o’ my Thumb and the Seven League Boots as a warning against alcohol, gambling, card
playing, and betting. Outraged, Dickens invoked Wordsworth in his defence of the
imagination and articulated a warning against utilitarian censorship: “I mean to protest most
strongly against alteration—for any purpose—of the beautiful little stories which are so
tenderly and humanly useful to us in these times when the world is too much with us early
and late.” This allusion to “The World Is Too Much with Us” is pertinent. As Wordsworth
was concerned about the modern world and contrasted nature with the excessive materiality
of the man-made world— “Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers; Little we see in
Nature that is ours;” Dickens’ analogy positions the imagination as nature, rich and fertile
and natural to ‘man,’ and the censoring of the imaginative nature of man as de-natured or
unnatural. As friendly as his relations with Cruikshank were, Dickens could brook no
interference with all he held sacred.
The article that resulted was published in the October 1, 1953 edition of Household
Words and was entitled, “Frauds on the Fairies.” It begins with an eloquent warning against
utilitarianism:
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In a utilitarian age, of all other times, it is a matter of grave importance that
Fairy tales should be respected. Our English red tape is too magnificently red ever to
be employed in the tying up of such trifles, but everyone who has considered the
subject knows full well that a nation without fancy, without some romance, never
did, never can, never will, hold a great place under the sun. The theatre, having done
its worst to destroy these admirable fictions— and having in a most exemplary
manner destroyed itself, its artists, and its audiences, in that perversion of its duty—
it becomes doubly important that the little books themselves, nurseries of fancies as
they are, should be preserved. (97)
It is classical Dickens style—the emphatic ‘play’ on “red,” the parallel structure,
analogy, and metaphor. Beneath the linguistic ‘play,’ however, is a stern denunciation of
censorship: “Whoesoever alters them to suit his own opinions, whatever they are, is guilty,
to our thinking, of an act of presumption, and appropriates to himself what does not belong
to him. We have lately observed, with pain, the intrusion of a Whole Hog of unwieldy
dimensions into the fairy flower garden.” The destruction of this allegorical garden: the
fertile landscape of imagination—is envisioned by Dickens as the basest of all violations.
The truncation of childhood idylls was a sore point. Dickens’ “Chatham days,” the period
of his life from age five through ten, were characterized by extensive reading of literature
(The Arabian Nights, The Tales of the Genii, Don Quixote, Gulliver’s Travels, Robinson
Crusoe, Gil Blas, The Vicar of Wakefield, Roderick Random, Humphry Clinker, Tom Jones)
that developed his own imaginative powers and were in sharp contrast to his subsequent life
in London (Stone 4):
He surrounded his early reading, as he surrounded his Chatham days in
general—his schooling, his walks with his sister Fanny, his Medway sailing with his
father, his trips to the local theatre—with a soft muted penumbra of golden glory. It
had been a time (or so he liked to remember it) of imagination, peace, security, and
innocent delight; it had been the pastoral age before the fall, before the abrupt
descent into the experience of London. Then all changed. (5)
Gone were the “reading as if for life” of “all that glorious host.” Gone were the
meadows, the walks, the river Medway. In their place were blacking warehouses, debtors’
prison, and working day in and day out: “He had become a ‘labouring hind’ in a blacking
warehouse; he had seen his father arrested for debt and his family imprisoned; he had
trudged like a ‘small Cain’ to and from work each dawn and each night, totally cut off from
family and friends” (5). The nurturing of his childhood imagination, he felt, was singularly
responsible for his ultimate survival and subsequent literary success. Herein resides the
burgeoning conceptualisation of the sacredness of the imagination to the human spirit so
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vehemently expressed through the utilitarian murdering of Louisa’s childhood fancies in
Hard Times. The fairy tale rises out of the primordial unconscious, providing mythic
sustenance: Wordsworth’s “Proteus rising from the sea.” This sustenance was responsible
for his surviving the bleak conditions of his London life. It was the foundation for his
success. Or, as Stone puts it, Dickens was “well aware that his early reading helped father
his later writing.” Thus, to Dickens, fairy tales, synonymous with childhood and “nurseries
of fancies as they are,” must remain sacrosanct. Dickens’ “Whole Hog of unwieldy
dimensions” intruding upon “the fairy flower garden,” is both allegory and parable. It is the
presumptuous, intrusive, grinding government of facts (the Whole Hog) and the individuals
who in personification of its ideologies would be its instruments, those who would trample
the fairy flower gardens of fancy so sacred to the foundations of childhood. The Whole Hog
next makes its appearance as Thomas Gradgrind in Hard Times, and again, as allegory, the
Hog is both utilitarian education and the ‘man’ who tramples the gardens of childhood,
grinding every speck of his children’s imaginative thoughts and soulful longings to dust.
This was Dickens’ agenda, his “secret:” it was the very vision of anti-utilitarianism— an
opposition to the doctrine that the useful is the good—that he was to bring to the writing of
the serialised narration that would become Hard Times.
The December 6th edition of Household Words included the first of the Preston
articles. Attributed to James Lowe, “Locked Out” is a landscape portrait of industrial
oppression. The article is logically introduced with the geographical and industrial facts of
its social reality: it is situated in the northwest on the banks of the Ribble River, 15 miles
from the river’s mouth. Noting that the vast majority of regional factories were contained
within the town itself, he posited that this fact “exercises a powerful influence over the state
of the labour market.” A feeling of isolation arose from this centralised configuration, he
explained, and people living but a short distance were spoken about as “foreigners.” (This
appears to be an inference that their insularity brings with it a dependence upon these
wages). Lowe explained to his readers (presumed to be cosmopolitan and far removed from
the economic facts of industrialised labour) the source of the strike. In 1847 masters had
taken ten percent from wages as a solution to bad trading, promising to compensate them
when times improved. Having failed in this promise, a promise they subsequently denied,
the Stockport operatives, acting upon Napoleon’s principle of combining forces, “combined
successfully to force the ten per cent from their masters, and the Preston operatives aided
them with funds.” Fearful that Preston workers would employ the same tactics, Preston
masters themselves “combined to oppose the attempt, and eventually ‘locked out’ their
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operatives”(347). Disembarking at the train station, and walking in the direction of Preston’s
centre, the narrator observed that the atmosphere was surprisingly “clear” rather than “thick
and smoky.” An “intelligent Prestonian” explained “there are fifty tall chimneys cold and
smokeless,” a reference to the strike and subsequent lock-out. The narrator was then led to
“The Marsh,” and described it as being “at once the Agora and the Academe of the place:”
Here, if report speaks truly, do the industrial Chloes of Preston listen to
amorous pleadings of their swains; here modern Arachnes (far excelling Minerva in
their spinning, whatever may be said of their wisdom) cast skillful webs about the
hearts of their devoted admirers; here, too, do the mob-orators appear in times of
trouble and contention, to excite, with their highly spiced eloquence, the thoughtless
crowd; over whom they exercise such pernicious sway. When we arrive the place is
covered with an immense multitude of children at play. (345)
In applying Harry Stone’s theory and methods to ascertain evidence of Dickens’
hand in this composition, it is plausible that much of the above passage is his: in particular,
the pronounced mythological allusion, the syntax, and the attitude. The elevation of
working class female youths to mythological figures support Dickens’ insistence that each
one of us, despite class status, is complex and more substantive than flesh. There is longing
here. There is promise. There is eloquence. Dickens’ subsequently authored image of the
mob’s orator, Hard Times’ Slackbridge, likewise articulates the spirit of hope and
brotherhood borne from mutual oppression: “Oh my friends and fellow countrymen, the
downtrodden operatives of Coketown, oh my fellow brothers and fellow workmen and
fellow citizens and fellow men”(Dickens 185). The most provocative sentence, though, is
the final one. Children at play? Whatever can he mean in light of his previous description?
From the perspective of the modern day reader, the presence of children would indicate they
had accompanied their parents, the striking adults. But ‘Lowe’ tells us, “Children, indeed:
the extreme youth of the majority is remarkable. Mere lads in barragon jackets, and lasses
considerably under twenty, pattering about in their neat little clogs (a distinguishing mark of
the factory lass), form an overpowering proportion of the operative population.” As the
reader of these words, we should probe this rhetoric uttered upon The Marsh, and speculate
about the audience. What should be mere “children at play” are actually “industrial Chloes”
and “modern Arachnes;” the work of industrialisation having pre-empted both play and
education, as it had also done to Charles Dickens.
The facts that follow are historically interesting and provide the type of anecdotal
context necessary for the coherent industrial narrative (constructed through complexity
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rather than a compilation of statistics) that Maxine Berg calls for in The Age of
Manufactures1700-1820:
But we need to know much more about the extent to which there were
‘women’s technologies’, and the extent to which there was a ‘gender bias’ in
technological development. We need to know too about the behaviour of women
workers in family and community work settings. (283)
According to ‘Lowe’, young people, females in particular, played an important part
in the socio-economic structure of this community. At least two-thirds of Preston’s factory
‘Hands’were under-aged, the parents either in charge of the home, the mother perhaps
taking in washing, the father performing a handicraft out of doors. In fact, marrying a
widow with five or six daughters was a fortunate way to keep oneself from factory
employment and, in Lowe’s estimation, an unnatural reversal of the natural order of things:
. . . “it is no uncommon thing to ask a young girl what her father is doing, and to receive for
reply:-- ‘Oh, he joost stops at home. There’s foive on us to keep un atween us.’ ” Maxine
Berg’s research supports Lowe’s: “The expansion of the eighteenth–century textile and
metal industries depended on the recruitment of huge quantities of cheap female and child
labor” (282). This information also corresponds to Joan Scott’s and Louise Tilly’s historical
narratives about Manchester, Preston and Stockton: “In Manchester . . . in 1852, . . . 76% of
all 14-year-old girls and 61% of all boys of that age were employed in mills. In addition to
children, young women formed the bulk of factory workers. In Stockport . . . 40% of all
workers under 30 were female, while females accounted for 20% of all those in their
20s”(Tilly and Scott 83). Tilly and Scott’s confirmation of 76% enables the reader of
“Locked Out” to imagine the narrator’s (Lowe’s/Dickens’) conflicted emotions. His
description reveals contradictory emotions: respect for the inventive genius that created the
complex machinery “alive and busy” before him, yet dismay that these same machines were
run by under-aged ‘hands’ (lads in barragon jackets/lasses in factory clogs) who are
illiterate:
This strange revolution in the natural order of things has been effected by the
mighty power of steam. It has its bright side, but it also has its dark side.
When you enter one of these vast workshops, you see a world of complex machinery
alive and busy; every wheel illustrating the dominion of the human intellect; yet it is
a mournful subject of reflection, but it is nevertheless an undoubted fact, that ninetenths of the human beings tending and controlling the wondrous creature, are so
ignorant they cannot read and write, while more than one-half are destitute of either
accomplishment. Indeed, it is no uncommon thing to find an overlooker, a man in
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authority, and exercising proportionate influence over his fellow work-men, who can
neither read a newspaper, nor sign his own name. (346)
How heartbreakingly ironic that the “complex machinery alive and busy” is more vibrant,
more pulsing than the humans who tend and work it. Although he acknowledges the awesome
power of steam and, therefore, by inference credits the power of human invention, it is a fact that
these illiterate humans who are “tending and controlling the wondrous creature,” are no more in
control of their destinies as were those who tended Shelly’s Frankenstein. In this moment in time,
then—the time of industry, an onlooker’s visit to a factory site, causes him to utter a warning cry
about the price of progress. Obviously struck by the significance of the scene, ‘Lowe’ reports to the
literate consumer of his magazine (presumably Londoners) that although Sunday schools teach
some of these Prestonians to read, writing is not thought of as a Christian activity. Emphasising the
“fearful significance” of an overlooker’s control of his workpeople who can neither read
newspapers nor sign their names, he cites one of the Preston masters in support of the critical
relationship between literacy and working conditions:
. . . and when we come to reflect upon the way in which authority works upon an
uncultivated mind, we shall not wonder at the testimony of one of the clearest-headed
masters in Preston, when he says that he has found that the cleverest workman (that is to
say, clever in every respect, his work, his reading, and his writing) is always the greatest
agitator. Comparative ability and shrewdness on the one side, ignorance, youth, and
ambition on the other: what must not be the inevitable result? (346)
Reflecting upon what he has heard and seen on The Marsh, the reporter walked in the
direction of his article’s conclusion with a detailed description of a strike meeting that “thirty years
ago would have been a criminal offence.” A colourful depiction of the orators is rendered: Gruntle,
“an old stager”; Cowler, “the chosen of the people”; and Swindle, “a lean and hungry Cassius, the
very example of an agitator”; O’Brigger, “oily-tongued, and with a brogue,” who complains about
being maligned for being an Irishman. Cowler, the crowd’s favourite, has been accused of
“fostering agitation, and gaining advantage from the strike.” The narrator/observer imitates the
cadence of his protest:
The editor of the London Thunderer had been abusing him. Well! Here was a thing!
Twenty years ago such a thing was never thought of as that a working man should be
noticed by a London paper. But the editor had not been very courteous; he had called him ‘a
fool,’ because he said that it was a shame for the wives of the cotton lords to wear silks and
satins, whilst the factory lasses were forced to be contented with plain cotton. Was he a fool
for that? (‘Noa! Noa!’ Great excitement among the lasses, and exclamations of ‘Eh!
Lord!’). (346)
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It is obvious that Cowler’s ego has been gratified by this attention paid him in the London
Thunderer. He, a mere working man, has been noticed by the press. His name is in print. This
notoriety, sustenance for his ego, certainly motivates not Cowler alone, but all of his fellow
workers who have felt diminished by the industrialised landscape. These workers, or at least the
orators who speak for them, are swept up in their struggle against the owners. What are they
fighting for? Is there any way to overturn anything of significance in this landscape of ironic
reversals where childhood is subverted to abundant working capital for a privileged few? It is
ultimately an uneven contest: a tug of war gripped on one end of the rope by strong and sinewy
working ‘Hands’, on the other by the superior strength of venture capital. As Dickens wrote in
Hard Times shortly after the publication of this article in Household Words,
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 housand nearest
Hands didn’t each make sixty thousand pounds out of sixpence, and more or less
reproached them every one for not accomplishing the little feat. What I did you can do.
Why don’t you go and do it? (122)
Could any other synecdoche be more poignantly ironic than that which Dickens utilizes?
What, indeed, is the likelihood that these illiterate human beings, reduced to one part of themselves,
work done only by Hand, could ever overturn the hegemonic conditions established by these
owners? Indeed. Why did they not go? Why did they not see this locking of the labour house door
against them as liberation? Perhaps at least one answer to this last question can be found in Lowe’s
introductory description of Preston’s insularity, a landscape physically changed and economically
ruptured initially by The Enclosure Acts of the mid-eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and
later by the inventions that made possible the mechanization of labour, creating a demand for
labourers who had been displaced by this legislation. They were now dependent upon the ‘effects’
of this changed landscape.
Walking “sadly” away from The Marsh, Lowe and his guide, presumed to be the clearestheaded of the masters, reach a “locked-up and smokeless factory” where they are greeted by young
girls who, rather than singing the light-hearted songs of youth, are instead selling strike songs
called Ten Per Cent Songs; the first one sung for the price of ten cents is “A New Song, on the
Preston Strike.” More irony. Clearly distraught about an economic system that has the power to
reduce bright humanity to such a cycle of misery: illiteracy, hunger, prostitution; the narrator has
effectively invited his readers to consider the pathos of the industrialised age:
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Again we sally out into the dingy streets, and find that the evening is closing in over them.
More knots of ‘lads and lasses’ idling about the corners, more bands of singers, solitary
famine-stricken faces, too, plead mutely for bread, and even worse expedients are evidently
resorted to for the purpose of keeping body and soul together . . .(348)
At the end of this day in Preston, the modern day reader has seen through Lowe’s eyes (and,
I believe, Dickens’ fervent imagination) the devastating effects of The Industrial Revolution on the
youth—the lads and lasses “idling about the corners” and selling strike song performances rather
than preparing school lessons and playing childish games. What price progress? It is certain in his
mind that the cost of this “complex machinery” is paid for by the vulnerability of the illiterate
factory workers: “Ignorance of the most deplorable kind is at the root of all this sort of strife and
demoralizing misery”(348). The scene as a whole is one of ironic juxtaposition. This particular
industrialised landscape is as distorted as an image in a fun house mirror. Nothing appears as it
should: fathers sit at home idle while their illiterate offspring go out to support them through ironbinding labour; these ‘lads and lasses’ in barragon jackets and clogs suddenly ‘lock’d out,’ may
now ‘frolic’ on The Marsh: they are aimless, without support, lacking supervision, deprived of the
proper education, living lives that are completely lacking in ‘Fancy.’ And the synecdochic ‘Hands’
who speak to them and for them, are heard only by their fellow labourers on The Marsh. This
scene is also mimicked in Hard Times; the orator is Slackbridge, and his name speaks for itself:
“Oh, my friends, the down-trodden operatives of Coketown! Oh, my friends and fellowcountrymen, the slaves of an iron-handed and a grinding despotism! Oh, my friends and
fellow-sufferers, and fellow-workmen, and fellow-men. I tell you that the hour has
comewhen we must rally round one another as One united power, and crumble into dust the
oppressors that too long have battened upon the plunder of our families, upon the sweat of
our brows, upon the labour of our hands, upon the strength of our sinews, upon the Godgiven glorious rights of Humanity, and upon the holy and eternal privileges of
Brotherhood.” (141)
It is inflated impotency, this oratory. Neither Slack/bridge’s nor any other operative’s
rhetoric would carry them across this significant divide. As Dickens was to emphasize in “On
Strike”, his article about the Preston Strike, only a mutual recognition of their interdependence
would save both management and labour, and, therefore, all of England.
There were no strikes in the fictional fabric of Hard Times, in part because Dickens had
assured Elizabeth Gaskell in April of 1854 that he would not write of them in his serialised novel as
she believed it would detract from her strike scenes in North and South, a novel which was to be
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published in Household Words (Kaplan & Monod 282). In January 1854, though, Dickens had
visited Preston to view the strike for himself. This was a strike much written about and was
regarded as “a test case of the power of the trade unions, which after having declined in influence
during the 1830’s had made a remarkable recovery in the 1850’s”(287). The Preston struggle for
improved wages lasted eight months, the strike efforts collapsing in April. “By May 1 the Times
reported with satisfaction that 7,700 strikers had returned to their looms”(287).
Fred Kaplan and Sylvere Monod, the editors of Norton’s Critical Edition of Hard Times,
included many valuable and provocative primary source documents in their 2001 edition, not the
least of which is a reprint of the Annual Register, May 1854. In this report, the summary of the
Preston Workers’ Strike and Management’s Lock Out is punctuated by an astute observation about
this unfair contest:
But this contest between capital and labour never, save under very exceptional
circumstances, can terminate in favour of the latter. The capitalist loses his gains, and some
of his principal; he knows, too, that if he yields he is but postponing the loss of both for a
short term, when it will come upon him with accumulated ruin; he therefore holds on in
diminished splendour—in anxiety, perhaps, but free from physical suffering. With the daylabourer it is different; his misery is instant and personal, and destitution is heaped upon
him in his wife, his children, in everyone who approaches him. The contest can terminate
but one way. (290)
There is no way to reconcile the unevenness of this contest. This Preston rebellion was
clearly hopeless from the start. Was it a loss in every sense, though? Lowe had already seen for
himself, and the resulting article, most certainly, had been closely read, edited, and most likely
revised (quite extensively) by Dickens. In February, Dickens went to Preston to see the conflict for
himself. “On Strike” was published in the February 11th, 1854 edition of Household Words. The
structure of this article is clever. Dickens framed the narrative through an introductory conversation
between himself and a persona he refers to as “Mr. Snapper”, a fellow passenger riding the train to
Preston. It is established early in the ‘conversation’ (perhaps, more accurately, ‘verbal deflection’),
that while ‘Mr.Snapper’ represents the views of Management (many of whom are his friends, or so
he tells the narrator), the speaking persona, in contrast, refuses to position himself as diametrically
opposed to either position:
“I am glad to hear it,” said Mr. Snapper. “But a friend to the Strike, I
believe?”
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“Not at all,” said I. Mr. Snapper’s rising opinion of me fell again, and he gave
me to understand that a man must either be a friend to the Masters or a friend
to the Hands.(296)
The narrator goes on to make it quite clear that there are only losers in frays such as
these. When pressed about his beliefs, he tells Mr. Snapper,
“ I believe that into the relations between employers and employed, as into all
the relations of this life, there must enter something of feeling and sentiment;
something of mutual explanation, forbearance, and consideration; something
which is not to be found in Mr. McCulloch’s dictionary, and is not exactly
stateable in figures; otherwise those relations are wrong and rotten at the core
and will never bear sound fruit.”(296)
J.M. McCulloch was a clergyman, a schoolmaster, and a writer who published a ‘system’ of
education. Kaplan’s and Monod’s editorial notes on J.M. McCullough underscore the idea that if
McCulloch were inspirational in Dickens’ conceptualisation of anti-utilitarianism, this was most
likely due to his educational philosophy, expressed in the Preface to his A Series of Lessons: “that
the readings he had selected were designed to ‘enrich the mind with the knowledge of useful and
interesting facts’ ”(325). There has been much speculation about the extent to which the antiutilitarian message of Hard Times was an articulation in opposition to McCulloch’s views, but
complete accord that this anti-utilitarian protest resounds in complex ways throughout the text of
Hard Times. It permeated the domain of Thomas Gradgrind whose choice of educational system,
taught by Mr. M.Choakumchild, eventually annihilated two of his own children, Louisa and Tom:
“You are to be in all things regulated and governed,” said the gentleman, “by fact. We hope
to have before long, a board of fact, composed of commissioners of fact, who will force the
people to be a people of fact, and of nothing but fact. You must discard the word Fancy
altogether.” (16)
It also spilled into the utilitarian environs of Mr.Josiah Bounderby, a “wealthy banker,
merchant, manufacturer, and what not,” who was “as near being Mr. Gradgrind’s bosom friend, as
a man perfectly devoid of sentiment can approach that spiritual relationship towards another man
perfectly devoid of sentiment”(23). “Fact” permeated the landscape of Hard Times as insidiously as
Dickens believed it had altered the landscape of his society. Views like McCulloch’s and even his
friend, George Cruikshank’s, who had lost his sense of humour, were antithetical to his sacred
“Chatham” vision: the cultivation of ‘Imagination’ as the redemption for all of the social classes.
But these utilitarian views were innocuous in comparison to the views of class as a caste system
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that subverted for the vast majority all opportunities for self-actualisation. Dickens knew his was a
narrow escape that had only been accomplished because he had gained the advantages of a literary
education. Class stereotypes and lost imagination were sensitive subjects for this narrator. On the
train to Preston, ‘Mr. Snapper’ had retorted, “You know very little of the improvident and
unreasoning habits of the common people, I see.” Yes, of course, Mr. Snapper is a convenient
mechanism, a suitable framing device, a mouthpiece enabling Dickens to give voice to his political
views: “Yet I know something of those people, too,” he replied. Snapper did not know he was
talking to a “labouring hind” who had worked in a “blacking warehouse.”
“In fact, Mr.______,” I had so nearly called him Snapper! “I doubt the existence at this
present time of many faults that are merely class faults. I am disposed to think that whatever
faults you may find to exist, in your own neighbourhood for instance, among the hands, you
will find tolerably equal in amount among the masters also, and even in the classes above
the masters. They will be modified by circumstances, and they will be the less excusable
among the better-educated, but they will be pretty fairly distributed. I have a strong
expectation that we shall live to see the conventional adjectives now apparently inseparable
from the phrases working people and lower orders, gradually fall into complete disuse for
this reason.” (296)
A naïve view, some would say. His visit to Preston solidified this view. Arriving at 4:00 to
view the “cold smokeless factory chimneys” (298), the narrator engages in a thorough investigation
of the evidence: he reads strike placards, listens to a “new song of the Preston Strike,” studies the
Balance Sheets of the receipts and expenditures for the fourteenth and twenty-third weeks of the
strike, listens to political remonstrances and a report from the Elton District, and attends a Sunday
morning Delegates Meeting that, fittingly, took place in a cockpit, “which in the better times of our
land, belonged to Lord Derby for the purpose of the intellectual recreation implied by its name”
(302). Dickens was never one to miss an irony. Nor one to resist inferring that this present set of
circumstances indicated a lack of social evolution. And certainly not one to neglect a striking
contrast. In the end, he was terribly impressed by the striking workers:
Perhaps the world could not afford a more remarkable contrast than between the deliberate
collected manner of these men proceeding with their business, and the clash and hurry of
the engines among which their lives are passed. Their astonishing fortitude and
perseverance, their high sense of honour among themselves; the extent to which they are
impressed with the responsibility that is upon them of setting a careful example, and
keeping their order out of any harm and loss of reputation; the noble readiness to help one
another, of which most medical practitioners and working clergymen can give so many
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affecting examples; could scarcely ever be plainer to an ordinary observer of human nature
than in this cockpit. (304)
This description of solidarity in a ‘cockpit’ supports Lowe’s observations in “Locked Out”
of the cooperative nobility displayed by the workers despite their lowly station and in defiance of
the inevitable. Dickens’ visit is educational, but it does not change the fundamental view of the
strike he had expressed to ‘Mr. Snapper’ on the train down to Preston. It was a waste, he felt: a
waste of time and energy, of wages and productivity. The ironically motionless industrial landscape
supports his view: Mr. Hollins’s Sovreign Mill, a “beautiful mill, containing a large amount of
valuable machinery, to which some recent ingenious improvements have been added” (306), has
been built to accommodate 400 employees but is now nearly empty. This is, according to the
narrator, a “waste of wealth that seeks to be employed”(306). The workers are restless, desperate,
hungry. The factory is ready. Both sides remain intractable. Dickens is his most eloquent in the
sincerity of his sorrow about this “deplorable calamity”:
But, at this pass, anger is of no use, starving out is of no use—for what will that do, five
years hence, but overshadow all the mills in England with the growth of a bitter
remembrance— political economy is a mere skeleton unless it has a little human covering
and filling out, a little human bloom upon it, and a little warmth in it.(306)
Taken as a whole, this sentiment—that “political economy is a mere skeleton unless it has a
little human covering”—is the spirit that infuses Hard Times; it is the landscape of Hard Times’
soul and accounts for its mimetic title, Coketown, and the “hardness” of its composition: all
hardscape—red bricks impervious to the longings of those who live in its heavy, solid houses, of
those who walk its dusty, grime-caked streets, and who diminish their lives as ‘Hands’ in its dark,
piston-driven factories owned by those who would obliterate the yearnings of the human spirit:
But the sun itself, however beneficent generally, was less kind to Coketown than hard frost,
and rarely looked intently into any of its closer regions without engendering more death
than life. So does the eye of Heaven itself become an evil eye, when incapable or sordid
hands are interposed between it and the things it looks upon to bless. (117)
The most significant word above is “hands.” To know Dickens’ characteristic style is to see
the significance and the intent carried by the small case ‘h.’ From a hermeneutic perspective, a
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concordant analysis of Dickens’ writing would reveal the repeated use of Hands, as synecdoche, to
emphasize a political fact about labour. The word is most often personified by its capitalization
and is always associated with the working class. It is significant, then, what Dickens has done with
this word in the passage above. The “incapable” or “sordid” hands are certainly not the labourers
but are, instead, the tyrannically greedy manufacturers and owners who literally keep Heaven’s
“eye,” her sun, from shining her divine blessings upon the downtrodden residents of Coketown.
Dickens has not so much levelled class distinctions as he has subverted and overturned them with
this linguistic move. Suddenly, the lowly workers, blocked from what they rightfully deserveHeaven’s blessings, are elevated to a higher, more noble stature than the truly base ‘hands’ (the
owners’) who interfere with the natural order of things. As those whom Heaven would bless, the
labourers are, through Dickens’ subversion, superior to those whose greed negates their God-given
rights.
This is the fictional articulation of Dickens’ political view of social and economic class
distinctions. It is aligned with the idealistic commentary to Mr. Snapper when he predicts that the
phrase “working people” and “lower orders” will eventually fall into “disuse.” It is an apocalyptic
vision that goes beyond Wordsworth’s warning about the price of materialism in “The World Is
Too Much with Us” to suggest a lost vision of a ‘divinely ordered’ fraternity. Crystallized as failed
vision in Hard Times, it is the poignant image of factory ‘Hand’ Stephen Blackpool’s symbolic
utterance of the vast distance between men and heaven. Stephen was made his tribe’s archetypal
scapegoat; innocent yet driven away by false accusation, he has ‘fallen’ to his certain death in The
Old Hell Shaft (a defunct mining shaft). It is always when it is too late that we see the error of our
ways, and it is in this moment, finally, that Stephen’s divided community becomes as one: “At
length the signal was given, and all the ring leaned forward.” His broken body, lifted up from the
old mining pit (Hell on Earth), has been laid gently on the ground. At such times when all has
shattered, there is room for startlingly clear insights, and he understands his fate and everything that
led to it: “If Mr. Bounderby had ever know’d me at aw—he would’n ha tak’n offence wi’ me. He
would’n ha’ suspect’n me.” Having procured Gradgrind’s daughter Louisa’s promise to clear his
name of wrongdoing, Stephen returns his attention to the star that “ha shined upon” him as he lay
dying in the The Old Hell Shaft: “Often as I coom to myseln, and found it shinin’ on me down
there in my trouble, I thowt it were the star as guided to Our Saviour’s home. I awmust think it be
the very star!” In an eerily transcendent ‘crossing over’, the litter with which the rescuers carry
him becomes Stephen’s funeral bower. The “star” that guides him to his eternal home is a
transcendent symbol that class divisions and all other man-made distinctions sever us from both
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the ‘truth’ of our divine rights and our responsibilities to one another. The impulse to teach this
truth permeates both Dickens’ fiction and his non-fiction.
Not only was Charles Dickens a gifted writer of both fiction and non-fiction and a tireless
campaigner for social welfare, but he was also an individual whose guiding spirit compelled him to
articulate a solution to the problems of the industrialised age. Whereas his vision asks us to see that
we are all equal—at least from a metaphysical perspective, his pragmatic solution, chained
necessarily to earthly realities, involved the finest impulses of education. Reading had raised him
up, had sustained him in the absence of other necessities; had redeemed him. The Literary
Imagination, he fervently believed, was a catalyst for social change. Not a utilitarian education
blinded to anything but facts, and, therefore, blinded to ‘Everything,’ but rather an education that
privileged Fancy. Without “Proteus rising from the sea”(Wordsworth); education is reduced to
grinding facts. Not that he would have discounted reason. In the conclusion to “On Strike”, in fact,
he recommends mediation of the Preston Strike and Lock Out in the interests of the common good.
There must be men, he reasons, who are capable of mediating this dispute, of inviting both sides to
consider choosing reason and the common good over brute will, stubborn refusal, and greed. He
“entreated” both sides to consider that there must be “men in England, above suspicion, to whom
they might refer the matters in dispute” (307). What did it matter, he reasoned, who was right when
in the end all would lose: “And from the ever-widening circle of their decay, what drop in the
social ocean shall be free!” (307).
This concern for public welfare was an abiding characteristic of Dickens’ work. On
December 30, 1853, he had delivered a speech at the Birmingham Town Hall in which he had also
issued an egalitarian appeal. It was an articulation about public welfare that would later be
repeated in the conclusion of “On Strike.” It offered a solution to the widening class divide
precipitated by the industrialised economy. In his speech, he calls for
. . .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 . . .(Reprinted in Norton Critical Edition of Hard
Times 278)
He had been campaigning for working men’s education and had suggested they serve on the
committee of the Birmingham Institute, “an organization concerned with improving working men’s
education”(Kaplan and Monod 278). The sentiments expressed in this speech would eventually
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find their way to the articles analysed within this paper, “Locked Out” and “On Strike”, and would
also be articulated in Hard Times. On this day, he appealed in person to the citizens of Birmingham
to consider the critical role education plays in human relations:
In this world a great deal of the bitterness among us arises from an imperfect understanding
of one another. Erect in Birmingham a great Educational Institution, properly educational;
educational of the feelings as well as of the reason; to which all orders of Birmingham men
can contribute; in which all orders of Birmingham men can meet; wherein all orders of
Birmingham men are faithfully represented; and you will erect a Temple of Concord here
which will be a model edifice to the whole of England. (278)
Women are conspicuous in their absence here, but that is another paper. What is clear in
this entreaty is the call to action to install within his society an inclusive model of education, one
that elevates both the mind and spirit, and constructs a Temple of Concord, a harmonious blending
that is the classical vision of true democracy. These same classical values are expressed in the first
of the introductory citations to this research paper. Barbara and John Hammonds’ articulation of
the ideal town in The Town Labourer as “a living personality, expressing and cherishing the
instincts, tastes, beliefs, and corporate pride of the citizens, widely and richly pictured” corresponds
to Dickens’ “fusion of interests.” The Hammonds’ vision of the ideal town was derived from their
shared belief that the “social system produced by The Industrial Revolution” was a “spirit of
complacent pessimism” that had resulted in the ‘two nations’ of which Disraeli had spoken. The
Hammonds asked their fellow citizens to consider that
Unity is only possible in a society which pursues a common aim, in which all
men and women have a recognized and equal share. Such an aim must have
some relation to human qualities and human needs. This age had taken for its
aim the accumulation of economic power, and its guiding philosophy was a
dividing force, because it regarded men and women not as citizens but as
servants of that power. (Preface to The Town Labourer)
The greatest rupture of his own life, caused by his family’s move to London and its
subsequent financial doom, was responsible for the governing spirit of Charles Dickens’ oeuvre.
The loss of his childhood idylls, his “Chatham Days,” would be the muse that compelled him to
share his visions and, yes, to offer a solution—the collective imagination and the “one” spirit as the
foundation of an ideal society. Because he had experienced in his “Chatham Days” what the
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Hammonds describe as a harmonious community that is a “living personality,” only to lose it to the
blacking warehouse and debtors’ prison, he sought a corrective for the lack of ethical cohesion in
the society of his day. Though it was a radical reconfiguration, a redistribution of wealth, and
“complacent pessimism” that had fragmented his society; as a novelist and social commentator, it is
logical that Dickens’ search for solutions would be a search for the heart, mind, and collective spirit
of humanity. New alignments would spring from the recognition that we are not truly separate from
our fellow human beings. As circumscribed and contained within our own flesh as we logically feel
ourselves to be; the truth is that in our humanity we are inextricably connected. What one of us
loses, we all lose. When one of us perishes, we all perish. This message reverberates in Dickens’
fiction and is a dominant presence in his non-fiction. The Industrial Revolution’s preoccupation
with ‘hard facts’ had precipitated a schism, a widening divide. A return to Fancy and an “education
of the feelings as well as the reason” was envisioned as a solution to the ills of the Age of Industry.
It would be the cultivation of the Imagination and the nurturing of Emotion that would make
possible the egalitarian society he believed was possible. Dickens invites us to contemplate not
only the wide gap between human-made law and divine law, but to face the fact that the
communities we build must be founded upon the truth that we are interdependent in all things. In
his own words: “And from the ever-widening circle of their decay, what drop in the social ocean
shall be free!” Buddha also understood human life in this way, as an image of a glittering net that
unfolds across the universe and contains within it the many gleaming jewels that we are.
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Acknowledgements:
My friend Nancy, a gifted English teacher, in an intimate moment shared the truth that
reading had saved her life. She had spent a significant portion of her youth in an orphanage:
reading was her solace; books her friends and family. Without reading, she would have been
lost. This fact—that reading saved her life—she shares with Charles Dickens and with many
others of us, I am sure. This experience has provided the opportunity to explore the critical
importance of Fancy and Reading, both personally and as a teacher of literature whose main
goal is to connect students to their bright, shining humanity through reading.
So thank you National Endowment of the Humanities, for this wonderful opportunity
not only to discover the intricacies of the relationship between Charles Dickens’ reading life
and his political views, but also to see the modern industrialised landscape through new eyes.
Thank you, Gerard, for inviting me. This was an extraordinary educational
experience. The scholarship, the discussions, and the trips you planned with Haydon Luke,
provided a rare opportunity to explore deeply a subject of rich significance. Coalbrookdale,
The Iron Bridge, and Caphouse Colliery are personal markers of a radical shift in perception,
forever changing the way I see the landscape.
Thank you, seminar colleagues (friends), for the engaging personal and professional
conversations. I learned something precious from each of you and about each of you.
And thank you, John, for reading and editing my paper. Thank you for your insights.
Thank you, most of all, for revealing Blake’s apocalyptic vision and all that it means here on
Earth.
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