In Our Time - Dickens

Episode Date: July 12, 2001

To celebrate Melvyn Bragg’s 27 years presenting In Our Time, five well-known fans of the programme have chosen their favourite episodes. The singer Joan Armatrading has selected the episode about Charles Dickens and recorded an introduction to it. (This introduction will be available on BBC Sounds and the In Our Time webpage shortly after the broadcast and will be longer than the version broadcast on Radio 4). Dickens is best known for the strength of his plots and the richness of his characters but he can also be regarded as a political writer. Some have seen him as a social reformer of great persuasiveness, as a man who sought through satire to expose the powerful and privileged, and whose scenes moved decision-makers to make better decisions. George Bernard Shaw said of Dickens’ novel Little Dorrit that it was “more seditious than Das Kapital”. Others argue that, although Dickens was a great caricaturist, he was really a conservative at heart. With Rosemary Ashton Professor of English at University College LondonMichael Slater Professor of Victorian Literature at Birkbeck College, University of London and editor of The Dent Uniform Edition of Dickens’ JournalismAnd John Bowen Senior Lecturer in English at the University of KeeleProducers: Jonathan Levi and Charlie TaylorThis programme was first broadcast in July 2001 and we share it now in memory of Michael Slater (1936-2025)Spanning history, religion, culture, science and philosophy, In Our Time from BBC Radio 4 is essential listening for the intellectually curious. In each episode, host Melvyn Bragg and expert guests explore the people, ideas, events and discoveries that have shaped our worldIn Our Time is a BBC Studios production

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio four. I hope you enjoy the programme. Hello, George Bernard Shaw said of Little Dorrit that it was, quote, more seditious than Das Capital, unquote. We all have images of Dickens,

the smog of course, the Dark Thames, Christmas gaiety, cobwebbed and corrupt bureaucracies, and innumerable characters, from Pickwick to Wackford Squares, from Fagin to Smyke to Mr. McCorber to Mr. Bumble, and the literary one with a wooden leg. But were these figures fictional agents for radical change? Were they the fictional agents for radical change that Bernard Shaw suggests? Or was Dickens a great caricaturist, but really a conservative at heart?

What kind of person was the man, Charles Dickens, and what is his social and political and literary legacy to our age? With me to discuss Dickens in his place in history are three pre-eminent literary scholars. Rosemary Ashton is Professor of English at University College London. Michael Slater is Professor of Victorian Literature at Berkbeck College, University of London, an editor of the Dent Uniform Edition of Dickens' Journalism. And John Bowen, Senior Lecture in English at the University of Kiel

and author of Other Dickens Pickwick to Chuzzlewit. Rosemary Ashton, can you just briefly give us a flavour of the times when Dickens started dry? What was London like? Well, London was a phenomenon. It was a spectacle. it was the largest capital in terms of population in the world. It was the capital of the greatest country in the world, the most advanced politically, industrially and economically.

And we might take perhaps the great exhibition of 1851 as the kind of face of this self-confident, progressive London, where we had the exhibition of the wealth and industry of all nations, everyone turning up and thinking how wonderful all this was. Great wealth. On the other hand, there's an underside. another side to the coin, which is the immense overcrowding slum dwellings, because London's population had doubled since the beginning of the century.

So by about 1850, you had tremendous overcrowding slums. You had the infant capitalism's booms and busts and periods of downturns in the economy. So there were workers who were working for starvation wages, but then they were thrown out of work and they starved even more. And so there was tremendous poverty, cholera outbreaks, sanitation problems, the infrastructure basically of London had not kept up with the tremendous moves that had been made by the advance in industrialism. So as we would regard it as a wildly exaggerated society in our terms? Yes, I think so. It was a period of such rapid change. I mean,

you might take the great exhibition as one sort of great visual example of London on show, but then the other part of London also on show. You might also take railways, the growth of the railways from the 1830 to the 1840s as a tremendous indication of the rapidity of change, which, of course, brings with it destruction of old ways and anxieties and fears, as well as a tremendous sense of going places and two senses. I mean, when foreigners, people from abroad came here, they were impressed by the wealthy energy and so on, but they were also impressed by the number of prostitutes on the street and the sight of the poor and the size of the poor population, aren't they?

Yes, absolutely. And no one more so than the political exiles who'd come after the 1848 revolutions in the other European capitals. London had stayed rock solid with another reason for self-congratulation, whereas all the other capitals of Europe had suffered revolutions in 1848. But they all failed eventually, and all the failed revolutionaries turned up in London and were astonished at the trading that went on up the Thames

when they arrived in their boats up the Thames. The amazing bustle, the noise, the wealth, the grand. of the West End, but also, yes, the prostitution, the slums, which were often cheap by jowl physically, geographically, with the smart areas. Sorry to Taxi for one more summary, but could you give us just a brief idea of the intellectual climate of the time? I suppose you could say that there had been a tremendous reform movement, and the major intellectual philosophy of the time, I suppose, political philosophy, was philosophical radicalism and utilitarianism in particular.

Jeremy Bentham, James Mill and his son, John Stuart Mill, who were the great beginners of this movement. They had been involved in the first reform movement earlier in the century, which brought about the First Great Reform Act of 1832 extension of the franchise, not to a wide number of the population, but certainly the abolition of Rottenboroughs, that kind of thing. They also were very concerned, particularly Bentham, in reform of the law, which was a megalosaurus, as Dickens might say, and did say in Bleak House, and needed reforming, education and so on. So they were the great progressives and radicals.

And so there was another reforming radical movement really based particularly in the person of Carlisle, Thomas Carlyle, who brought in a kind of romantic radicalism who said the utilitarians are fine in as much as they're concerned to improve matters, but they're wrong in as much as they ignore the life of the mind, the life of the imagination of the spirit. And so he comes in with his essays, particularly Signs of the Times and so on, the kind of great prophetic sweep, also radical, also very dismissive of ancient establishments,

the church, parliament, national palava, he called it, that kind of thing. So he comes in with a tremendous rhetoric of scorn for the establishment, but with a more sort of spiritual, imaginative programme really. He also, John Bowen, introduced the phrase, the condition of England, which became, and he was very influential, as I understand it, on all the novelists, or every novelist of the time, Carlisle, whose works we've been concisely introduced to by Rosemary. Which of Dickens' book should we look to you

to get a real sense of his view of the condition of England, and what condition did he find England in at that time? I think the two I'd speak about would be Bleak House, particularly in Little Dorrit. So that Dickens is interested in particular kinds of reform throughout his career, right from the beginning, saying a novel like Oliver Twist, he's very concerned there with the Benthamite or Utilitarian Poor Law, which he saw as just a very oppressive kind of regime for people.

And then later on in Nicholas Nickleby, he talks about the Yorkshire schools where children were abused and treated savagely. But by the time of the 1850s, when Dickens is in his 40s, those particular abuses start to become for him metaphors of the whole nature of what Victorian society is like, and even at times metaphors for what any human society might be like. So Bleakhouse, for example, The particular abuse that he's bothered by is the Court of Chancery.

He'd been involved in it himself, though these interminable law cases, they went on for generation upon generation, they cost tens of thousands of pounds in costs. And he takes that abuse, and there's a very strong anger directed against it, but then it stands as a symbol or a metaphor for the whole condition of society. So there's this amazingly large cast of characters, maybe 80 named characters, everybody from Joe the Crossing Sweeper, the abjectly poor child completely excluded from the whole society,

right up to Celeste Dedelock, who's the grandee of the, on his country estate, in Lincolnshire. And they're all united through the Court of Chancery, through a single action. We gradually see the connecting links between them. And that can then stand as a metaphor for the muddle, the incompetence, the parasitism that saturates that whole society. And you see why a later author say like Kafka is so interested in, in Dickens. It's a kind of Kafkaesque vision. And then later, little Dorrit, the other

one, again, this massive action, many different characters all across Europe. And he takes things from his own childhood, the fact his father was imprisoned. And that fact, the fact that in those years you could be imprisoned for debt and that could last forever, comes to be, again, a metaphor of figure

for so many lives. All those people in that novel are imprisoned, either literally or psychologically, from which they can't escape. And then from that, the circumacution office, which is this grand bureaucracy, that again wraps up all the different lives of the novel. This makes you smile there with the circumuncution office. It's fabulous, isn't it?

So, again, to draw from that, I know I'm asking difficult things in a way of summary and concession, but so by the time Dickens is in the period of the great novels, because as you say, Saitre with Oliver Tess, which is very early, what is his view of the condition of being? Would you describe, if we can use a few words? Is he bitter? Is he sour? Is he fatalistic? He does get much darker, I think, in his vision. It's often said that the later novels are darker.

And he is very angry and bitter at the time. He's particularly angry with Parliament. I mean, in his early years, he worked as a parliamentary reporter, and I think that just gave him a distaste for parliamentary cant throughout his life. And you see that particularly strongly in the later novels. but there is a sense in which he's always, there's a kind of optimism that runs in Dickens, that he does get angry, but he's also astonished by the fact that there are these terrible abuses. It's amazing that so many things can go on in such a bad way and not change.

And so throughout that there is constantly a strong affirmation of certain kinds of values, particularly ethical values, although he thinks increasing, I think, it's difficult to believe in a political set of solutions. But there is a constant allegiance, I think, to popular life, to the lives of ordinary people and their pleasures. Michael Slater, in which we've heard, can you talk us through how in one of the novels Dickens best shows us the external life of the urban poor?

Well, I suppose it's a kind of embanky, embarrassment of riches, almost, but I think I'd take the novel that John's been talking about, and that is Little Dorrit, because in Little Dorrit, you have a community in a small yard called Bleeding Heart Yard, where the people are struggling to find work, Mr. Plornish, who's a plasterer, seems, he says all such things, as jobs seem to have gone underground and you can't find them. These are decent people struggling to make a living, small community. And Dickens is wonderful, I think, at showing the help that they give to each other, the solidarity. And he represents them as being very much exploited by the local landlord, Mr. Casby,

who's actually a very hypocritical figure pretending to be benevolent, I mean, and is actually a kind of Scrooge-like villain. And I would think that the plonishes and the other inhabitants of Bleeding Heart Yard are a good example in the novel in Little Dorrit of the urban poor, it's pretended by Tickin's, other than the melodramatic urban poor, if I can put it that way,

the prostitutes, the outcast children, etc., that are, you know, really at the bottom of the heap. I mean, John has mentioned Joe, the crossing sweeper in Bleak House. It's very interesting figure, actually, because he's quite unlike what crossing sweepers really were in Mayhew's wonderful London Labour and the London poor in 1851. He spends quite a lot of time describing crossing sweepers,

and they were rather cheerful lads who, you know, worked in gangs and made a living and had sort of... shared lodgings and so on, and were not at all the solitary figure, that pathetic figure that Joe is. But Dickens obviously wanted to make Joe, as John said, sort of representative of what he was always from Oliver Twist onwards. I mean, he was so concerned with, and that is what he once called, you know, the 30,000 or more children in London who are hunted and flogged and imprisoned. prison but never taught that he might so easily have become one of. I mean, this is what he's always worried about, or is always at the back of his mind, for any care that was taken of me, I might so easily have become a little robber or a little

vagabond, he says. I was going to ask you another question, but you've led to such a good question. Let's just briefly talk about this. He kept a secret, didn't he, in his time, which we all know that his father was sent to prison, that he was sent to a blacking factory, that he, resented this. But at the time he kept it, see, we're told that I can't remember which one of his book,

that he perhaps told his wife and Foster, that's all. I believe he told his wife, yes. So he carried this through. Can you just describe how important and powerful this part of his life where he was sent away, worked, what, 13, was he?

And worked in a blacking factory as a poor, outcast, 13 and 40. He's 12, I think, yes. But he told Forster that he was eight. I think, isn't that right? Anyway, he did it. Let's go cracking. He did it, yes, that's right.

So what happened? And why was it so important? Why did you keep it a secret? Well, I think he had a tremendous sense of shame about it, for one thing. And he, but I think it was so painful that he couldn't sort of go public with it directly. He wrote about it from Oliver Twist onwards in all sorts of, you know, fictional ways. and the figure of the neglected and the abused child is right at the centre of his fiction

from Oliver Twist right through to Little Dorrett. So let's just get it straight. At 12, the father goes into Adetis Prison, he gets sent to a blacking factory to work at the bottom of the heap in atrocious circumstances. And take a story on a bit and then will you try to tell me what you think it gave him as a writer? Yes, well, he was known at the Blacking Factory

as the young gentleman. I think the thing that he resented most, obviously, I mean he says later, he said, well, in David Copperfield, which is the novel, which in which David suffers almost exactly the same fate as Dickens had done, and is a tremendously sensitive child. But David Copperfield actually says, for Dickens, I think, there is no exaggerating the awfulness of this experience to a sensitive child. And that's the clue to Dickens. He was extremely sensitive to having been taken out of his own.

school, that was one of the things. There was no further education for this clever boy. Taken out of school, dumped on this heap, rejected by his parents, he thought, and he resented them forever after, for doing this. And they did reject him, actually. Yes, until he became famous when they started

to get money from him. And he resorted to some fairly, I mean, this was very strong for him. He resorted to some fairly vicious things like putting adverts in newspapers to say, please do not take bills of exchange from a man called John Dickens, who I repudiators. I mean, I'm slightly exaggerating, but basically he resented his parents and he resented

this loss of opportunity for... He says that no words can express the secret agony of my soul, he says, when I was a child, and all this happened to me. And yet, that is what words express. Now, I'm just going to try to turn this inside out if we possibly can. Let's take that and assume that everybody listening has got a good view of Dickens, and we need to go into the characters we know about many, many of them. Can we talk about out of that, what can we describe as Dickens' ideas about the society around him and what impact did he try to have on the society around him through his novels and through his journalism, through those ideas? So let's take, first of all, his idea about injustice, about the poor. Start with you, Michael. What were his main

ideas and how did he drive them through? Well, his main ideas, I think, think were that above all the poor should be given decent homes, should be given decent education, should be given all the opportunities for, I mean, what we would now call the quality of opportunity, I suppose. And in all his writing, both in his journalism and in his novels, there's a sort of complete continuity here, I think, between the journalism and the novels. His great core, were sanitation, better homes and so on for the poor, education. And he was always coming down very heavily on the fact that the state only intervened in poor people's lives at the point where they'd gone wrong, become criminal, and then they were punished and put in prison and so forth.

Now, how radical were his ideas about the poor at the time? And I'll ask you, John, how effective they are. Rosemary, how radical were the ideas that Michael's outlined? Fairly radical. He took a... I don't want to say too much about this because it's a programme on Dickens, but he did take a lot of his ideas. I think it's agreed on all hands from Carlisle,

who was the first to use this kind of scornful language about Parliament doing nothing and the church doing nothing and all the establishments, really, all the institutions of the establishment, really failing human beings, particularly human beings at the bottom of the pile. And I think that Dickens, married his own experience that we've talked about,

his own feelings of being almost at the bottom of the heap himself and having to claw his way out and up. He married that with a kind of Carlisleian sense, which he could put his great rhetoric to, just as Carlisle did, kind of Carlisleian sense of tremendous injustice and the need to stir people up and do something. So he was really making for, he was trying to get the middle classes, both in his journalism and through the novels,

through doing it imaginatively, fixing people, individuals in people's minds, trying to get the middle classes to stir their stumps and do something. How effective was it, John Byrne? How effective was his fiction in this regard? It's interesting, that. I mean, in some ways, just picking up what Rosemary was saying,

he's a radical. He clearly thinks himself as a radical. He writes for radical publications, particularly in the early years. But then you get a novel like Oliver Twist, which is an attack on the new Paul Law. And it's both praised in Tory journals and it's also extracted in working class

radical publications because in one way he is a natural ally of the Benhamite radicals but he's creating a kind of independent position for himself that's different from both. He is. The great success, perhaps the most obvious one, is Nicholas Nickleby.

I'll seek with Oliver Twist for a moment because that gives us the double thing very well, I think, the radical and the conservative, because Oliver Twist is kind of miraculously middle class throughout and it's the triumph of that ethos in a way. I'm using this in metaphorical as well as a class sense, and yet in the poor law he's attacking, which is something which is an incubus on the working class.

So can we just develop those two ideas and Oliver Twist for a moment? I mean, Oliver Twist is interesting because he is, you know, completely marginal and rejected at the beginning, but it turns out that miraculously he speaks in very nice English throughout the book and that he turns out to be middle class and the air. but it's not quite as smug as that summary would make you think.

And he does that in two ways, I think. Firstly, the whole way to the latter half of the novel moves from Oliver to Nancy, who's the prostitute, who really is, in a way even more so than Oliver, someone who's at the bottom of the heap. And so much of our energy as readers is into understanding Nancy's plight, and she becomes one of his most interesting women characters.

And then at the end, there is this kind of scene in which Oliver, gets restored to the happy middle class family. But he complains about the final illustration that Crookshank makes for it, which is a smug of bourgeois scene, and insists that instead a scene of mourning is placed there in which Oliver stands in front of his mother's tombstone in the church. So he doesn't give you the absolutely smug, contented bourgeois ending,

but one in which there's a scene of mourning for the woman who has been so heavily punished by the poor law. And that's often the case of what he does in the fiction. You do get the satisfactions of middle-class domesticity, but you also get the figure who's outside that. I think on the question of sanitation also, I mean, one of the reasons why Joe, the crossing sweeper, is such an abject figure is he lives in this slum,

and he catches smallpox, which might stand for any of the cholera epidemics which were occurring and so on. And so he really is at the bottom of the heap. And sanitation was one of the things which, rather belatedly, the government began to get to grips with thanks to Dickens, Carlisle Mayhew, but Dickens is in there very much. Briefly, do you think that his views on the political state that he found himself in, his views on its infinite corrupt abilities he saw it,

do you think that this attack on it was an effective as a social and political idea at the time? The others might know more about this than I do, but I don't think so. I think it was really more on the social front that his tremendous pictures of distress and so on, did have bear some fruit. Politically, it's much more difficult. And in any case, he was, as we slightly touched on, part radical, part conservative.

He wasn't as radical as Karl Marx, for example. He didn't want to, he feared, like all the British novelists, really, writing about the condition of England, Mrs. Gaskell and Kingsley and others, disraeli. He feared the mob. He feared revolution just as much as he was excited by it and excited by writing about it or imagining it. But he didn't really want it to happen in England.

He didn't really want the Revolution of the Masses. he still, you know, he wasn't a Democrat in that sense, nor indeed was he an advocate of women's rights, which some few people, including John Stuart Mill, who's very much vilified by him for being part of the, you know, pig philosophy, as Carlisle calls it, of utilitarianism, but John Stuart Mill was the great flag waiver for emancipation of women. Dickens wasn't, I think that's fairly clear. John Byrne, what you are? Well, I think that's right. What he often does, very interestingly, I think, is turn it round back to the reader.

So the bit when Joe, the crossing sweeper dies, he says, dead, my reverence and wrong reverence of every description, and dying thus around us every day. Or in hard times, he says, dear reader, it rests with you and me, whether these things will be or not. So there's a moment where he kind of breaks the picture, as it were, and throws open the kind of ethical and political responsibility to the reader. And there's a kind of radical opening there to a possible future that's different from the one that he so savagely has depicted there. Chesterton said that Dickens was not against any institution so much as a certain kind of expression on the human face.

Michael Slater, would you take that on? I think, as always, Chesterton is the most marvellous of Dickens' critics. And I think he's there talking about, I mean, what John's saying, that Dickens is concerned with, as it were, reforming the individual, changing the hearts and minds of people, changing us from the bad scrooge to the good scrooge. John says it's our responsibility, the reader's responsibility to go out and do something. And then that's right, that's right. I mean, I think this was why Virginia Wool, for instance, didn't care for novels like Dickens's novels,

because when you finish them, she says, you feel you've got to write a check for some society or rush out and do some good, and this wasn't what art should be about and so on. But Dickens is very much wanting you to rush out and do something like the industrialist who gave all his, I think it was after reading Christmas Carol and he gave his staff boxing day off

or something like that. And even Carlisle himself rushed out and improvised the Christmas dinner because he was so inspired by the invited people because he was so inspired by Dickens by the Christmas Carol which did have this enormous impact. Are we time for a digression? Will you get us anywhere in terms of Dickens' views on society to talk about his portrayal of women, Rosemary?

I think it might well do. I mean, like all his characters, he's got huge cast of women characters as well as male characters, but I suppose you can roughly divide the women figures into maybe three. There are the comic grotesques. Some of them are demonic and some of them are benign,

but they're comic grotes like simpering spinsters and eccentric aunts and cold stepmothers, those kinds of figures. Then there are the quite interesting array of a rather dominant, powerful women, often transgressive sexually in some way, Lady Deadlock in Bleak House, who is the mother, this is the mystery of the story of Esther Somerson,

but not by her husband, Sir Lester. And so she, now the thing about that is she's very powerful and Dickens enjoys imagining her. But in the end, she has to be, well, she has to die. I mean, she basically dies of shame because it's too hot to handle in some way. And there are some strong women like that who somehow are in the,

they're given their moment, and then in the end the plot shuts them down because they're a danger to society. And then, of course, the third lot are the saints, the domestic angels in the house, Esther Somerson in Deke House, with her household keys jangling at her belt, and Florence Dombie, for example,

and Little Dorrit. These are the sort of rather perfect girls who are constantly knocked about physically or mentally by cruel fathers or cruel husbands or cruel guardians. but who are examples of Christian humility, they turn the other cheek, and they're amazingly self-sacrificing, but in the end they are rewarded with what domestic happiness,

the keys at the belt forever, you know, and so there is a kind of, I mean, there isn't room, I think, I mean, the others may think me wrong, but there isn't room really for real women. In Dombian son, he tells the story, as there is me said, of the rejected daughter, and of the middle-class, woman Edith, who has no option but to put herself on the marriage market in order socially to survive, where she's paraded, she says, like a horse at the fair and so on. And those middle

novels, right through to Little Dorrit, which are very much women-centered, even David Copperfield as well, I think. Dickens really does seem to me, whatever his sort of public beliefs and official beliefs about the role of women to be really sensitively exploring the dilemma of the woman, yes, especially the middle class woman, I think, in

Victorian society. Dora in David Copperfield, for instance, is presented as somebody who is really betrayed by her education. She's made a little plaything, as it were, and then expected to marry and become a competent housekeeper suddenly overnight. And

she asks David Plainly, one point why he doesn't marry Agnes instead of her, because Agnes, of course, is wonderful with the housekeeping keys and the cookery books and so forth. And there's an enormous, I mean, as it happens, I suppose, with great artists, tremendous imaginative sympathy towards these women in the novels. Well, I'm afraid that's all we have time for. Thank you very much to Michael Slater, Rosemary Ash and John Bowen, and thank you very much for listening. We hope you've enjoyed this Radio 4 podcast. You can find hundreds of other programs about history, science and philosophy at BBC.com.com.uk forward slash radio four.