CHARLES DICKENS
Charles Dickens is much loved for his great contribution to classic English literature.
He was the quintessential Victorian author. His epic stories, vivid characters and
exhaustive depiction of contemporary life are
unforgettable.
His own story is one of rags to riches. He was born in
Portsmouth in 1812. The good fortune of being sent to
school at the age of nine was short-lived because his
father, inspiration for the character of Mr Micawber in
'David Copperfield', was imprisoned for bad debt. The
entire family, apart from Charles, was sent to
Marshalsea along with their patriarch. Charles was
sent to work in Warren's blacking factory and endured
appalling conditions as well as loneliness and despair.
After three years he was returned to school, but the
experience was never forgotten and became
fictionalised in two of his better-known novels 'David
Copperfield' and 'Great Expectations'.
Like many others, he began his literary career as a journalist. As well as a huge list of
novels he published autobiography and several edited weekly periodicals, he also wrote
travel books and administered charitable organisations. He was also a theatre enthusiast,
wrote plays and performed before Queen Victoria in 1851. His energy was
inexhaustible and he spent much time abroad - for example lecturing against slavery in
the United States and touring Italy.
He died in 1870. He is buried at Westminster Abbey.
VICTORIAN TIMES AND POVERTY
1. Population increase
The nineteenth century saw a huge growth in the
population of Great Britain.
The reason for this increase is not altogether clear. Various
ideas have been put forward; larger families; more children surviving infancy,
immigration, especially large numbers of immigrants coming from Ireland fleeing the
potato famine and the unemployment situation in their own country.
By the end of the century there were three times more people living in Great Britain
than at the beginning.
2. Growth of the cities
Although the population of the country as a whole was rising at an unprecedented rate,
that of the towns and cities was increasing by leaps and bounds. This was due to the
effects of the industrial revolution; people were flocking into the towns and cities in
search of employment. For some it was also the call of the unknown, adventure and a
better way of life.
3. The search for employment
Therefore all these factors – population explosion, immigration both foreign and
domestic – added up and resulted in a scramble for any job available.
Large numbers of both skilled and unskilled people were looking for work, so wages
were low, barely above subsistence level. If work dried up, or was seasonal, men were
laid off, and because they had hardly enough to live on when they were in work, they
had no savings to fall back on.
4. Child labour
Children were expected to help towards the family budget. They often worked long
hours in dangerous jobs and in difficult situations for a very little wage.
For example, there were the climbing boys employed by the chimney sweeps; the little
children who could scramble under
machinery to retrieve cotton bobbins;
boys and girls working down the coal
mines, crawling through tunnels too
narrow and low to take an adult. Some
children worked as errand boys, crossing
sweepers, shoe blacks, and they sold
matches, flowers and other cheap goods.
5. The
housing shortage
Low wages and the scramble for jobs meant that people needed to live near to where
work was available. Time taken walking to and from work would extend an already
long day beyond endurance.
Consequently available housing became scarce and therefore expensive, resulting in
extremely overcrowded conditions.
All these problems were magnified in London where the population grew at a record
rate. Large houses were turned into flats and tenements and the landlords who owned
them, were not concerned about the upkeep or the condition of these dwellings.
“… In big, once handsome houses, thirty or more people of all ages may inhabit a
single room,’
6. Overcrowding
Many people could not afford the rents that were being charged and
so they rented out space in their room to one or two lodgers who
paid between twopence and fourpence a day.
Great wealth and extreme poverty lived side by side because the
tenements, slums, rookeries were only a stones throw from the
large elegant houses of the rich.
7. Poor sanitary conditions
Henry Mayhew was an investigative journalist who wrote a series of articles for the
Morning Chronicle about the way the poor of London lived and worked.
In an article published on 24th September 1849 he described a London Street with a
tidal ditch running through it, into which drains and sewers emptied. The ditch
contained the only water the people in the street had to drink, and it was ‘the colour of
strong green tea’, in fact it was ‘more like watery mud than muddy water’.
8. Homeless children
Obviously these conditions affected children as well
as adults.
There were children living with their families in these
desperate situations but there were also numerous,
homeless, destitute children living on the streets of
London.
Many children were turned out of home and left to fend for themselves at an early age
and many more ran away because of ill treatment.
In her book The Victorian town child, Pamela Horn writes:
‘In 1848 Lord Ashley referred to more than thirty thousand 'naked, filthy, roaming
lawless and deserted children, in and around the metropolis'
9. Children and crime
Many destitute children lived by stealing, and to the respectable Victorians they must
have seemed a very real threat to society. Something had to be done about them to
preserve law and order.
Many people thought that education was the answer and Ragged schools were started to
meet the need. However there were dissenting voices against this.
10.Society's attitude towards the poor
It does appear that many people and various agencies were
becoming aware of the problem, but the sheer scale of it must have
seemed overwhelming.
One of the difficulties in dealing with it were contemporary
attitudes:
‘the poor were improvident, they wasted any money they had on drink and gambling’;
‘God had put people in their place in life and this must not be interfered with because
the life after death was more important’
Orphans, Abandonment, Self-Pity, and Fairy-Tale Plotting
For more than a half century, students of Dickens have emphasized the crucial
importance of the traumatic period in his life when his parents suddenly removed him
from school and their middle-class, more-or-less genteel environment, made him live
apart from the family, and forced him to work at Warren's Shoeblacking factory and
warehouse. As Walter Allen points out, this experience had crucial influence on (1) the
writer's emphasis upon orphans and abandoned children, (2) the self-pity that permeates
many of his works, and (3) their fairy-tale plots:
The blacking factory episode does not account for Dickens's genius, but it does, I
believe, explain some of the forms his genius took, and it throws light on much that is
otherwise baffling both in his art and his life. It explains why we so often find at the
centre of his novels the figure of the lost, persecuted, or helpless child: Oliver Twist,
Little Nell, David, Paul Dombey or Pip. And the reason why their rescue, when there is
a rescue, so often has the appearance of a fairy-story ending.
The secret memory of the blacking warehouse explains a great deal in Dickens's life and
fiction. It partially explains why, in the midst of his success with Pickwick, he should
begin a fairy tale of the workhouse child, Oliver Twist. It explains the vein of self-pity
that crops up again and again in the novels, and particularly the childlike sentiment that
if he had died or turned bad, it would have served the grown-ups right.
