"I am both a town traveler and a country traveler, and am always on
the road.
Figuratively speaking, I travel for the great house of Human
Interest Brothers,
and have rather a large connection in the fancy goods way. Literally
speaking,
I am always wandering here and there from my rooms in Covent-garden,
London-now about the city streets: now about the country by-roads-seeing
many little things, and some great things, which, because they interest
me, I
think may interest others."
-Charles Dickens
"His General Line of Business"
from The Uncommercial Traveler and Reprinted Pieces
Readers of Charles Dickens' journalism will recognize many of the author's themes as common to his novels. Certainly, Dickens addresses his fascination with the criminal underground, his sympathy for the poor, especially children, and his interest in the penal system in both his novels and his essays. The two genres allow the author to address these matters with different approaches, though with similar ends in mind.
Two key differences exist, however, between the author's novels and his journalism. First, humor, which is an essential element if many of Dickens' novels, is largely absent from his essays recommend specific medicine. However, as this paper will suggest, the author's reluctance to directly call for parliamentary action in his earlier works of fiction has been shed by the time he writes his last complete novel. The indirect approach of his early works is apparently a victim of Dickens' dissatisfaction with the pace of reform.
In an essay entitled "A Walk in a Workhouse," published May 25, 1850 in Household Words, Dickens describes his Sunday visit to a large metropolitan workhouse, much like the one in which Oliver Twist lived for some time. In this essay, the first similarity to his fiction the reader notes is Dickens' apparent scorn for clergy. For example, in a remark that reminds readers of The Old Curiosity Shop of Kit Nubbles' experience fetching his mother from Little Bethel, Dickens notes that the sermon delivered at the workhouse "might have been much better adapted to the comprehension and to the circumstances of the hearers" (Philip and Neuberg 106). Adopting the sharp humor that marks his fiction, Dickens says sarcastically of Little Bethel that it "might have been nearer, and might have been in a straighter road, though in that case the reverend gentleman who presided over its congregation would have lost his favorite allusion to the crooked ways by which it was approached, and which enabled him to liken it to Paradise itself, in contradistinction to the parish church and the broad thoroughfares leading thereunto" (The Old Curiosity Shop 389).
Briefly, such anticlerical sentiments also reappear later in Dickens' career in an essay called "City of London Churches," which was collected in The Uncommercial Traveler, a compilation of pieces published in 1861. This report, which describes the physical state of the city's places of worship, begins with the journalist's acknowledgment of a strong antipathy towards a specimen of clergy he calls the powerful preacher. After noting that as a boy he was vigorously washed and readied for church, Dickens writes that he was then "carried off highly charged with saponaceous electricity, to be steamed like a potato in the unventilated breath of the powerful Boanerges Boiler and his congregation, until what small mind I had, was quite steamed out of me" (The Uncommercial Traveler and Reprinted Pieces 83). Surely, Kit Nubbles, as he drags his mother from Little Bethel, confronts just such a preacher.
Documenting the lasting effects such weekly encounters had on the man, Dickens explains in "City of London Churches" that "through such means did it come to pass that I knew the powerful preacher from beginning to end, all over and all through, while I was very young, and that I left him behind at an early period of life" (The Uncommercial Traveler and Reprinted Pieces 84).
While Oliver Twist shows the workhouse primarily as it is experienced by Oliver, a short journalistic piece such as "A Walk in a Workhouse," permits Dickens to demonstrate the way children and adult men and women lived in these unpleasant institutions. Furthermore, where the novel's sarcasm and humor might lead the reader to believe Dickens saw nothing favorable about these institutions, the journalism suggests otherwise. For example, of the workhouse he visited that May Sunday in 1850, Dickens writes: "I saw many things to commend. It was very agreeable, recollecting that most infamous and atrocious enormity committed at Tooting" (Philip and Neuberg 109). Explaining this difference may be the fact that such a reasonable, open perspective is fitting for a serious essay but would have failed to advance his themes in fiction like Oliver Twist or to capture the emotional attention of his readers. While suggestions that improvements in workhouses have been made between the writing of Oliver Twist and the publication of this essay of the same period convincingly argues against such a supposition.
Among those characteristics of the 1850 workhouse applauded by Dickens were the robust looks of the children, the pleasant confidence of the members of the infant school, and the "cheerful and healthy aspect" of the girls' school (Philip and Neuberg 109).
This measured acknowledgment that all is not wrong in the workhouse contrasts with the way Dickens introduces Twist's workhouse experience. If this he writes that the "parish authorities magnanimously and humanely resolved that Oliver should be 'farmed', or, in other words, that he should be dispatched to a branch-workhouse some three miles off, where twenty or thirty other juvenile offenders against the poor-laws rolled about the floor all day, without the inconvenience of too much food or too much clothing, under the parental supervision of an elderly female who received the culprits at and for the consideration of sevenpence-halfpenny per small head per week" (Oliver Twist 48). The tone of this workhouse description here is, of course, notably different than the essay. It is humorous, and allows for no possibility that Oliver may benefit from the time spent there.
The conclusion of "A Walk in the Workhouse" seems to argue for moderate reform in the system, whereas the account of Oliver Twist appears to demand nothing less than the elimination of the workhouse system. Describing the pleading face of a workhouse child at the end of the 1850 essay, Dickens said it sought only "a little more liberty - and a little more bread" (Philip and Neuberg 112).
In Our Mutual Friend, Dickens makes it clear he believes the poor are repulsed by the prospect of life in a workhouse and, in some instances, prefer death to residence there. Specifically, Mrs. Betty Higden, a woman who is the perfect picture of the struggling poor, tells John Rokesmith how she loathes the workhouses and works hard to stay away from them. "With a shiver of repugnance" she tells Rokesmith that Sloppy was brought up in a workhouse. She adds, speaking passionately, "kill me sooner than take me there. Throw this pretty child under cart horses' feet and a loaded wagon, sooner than take him there..." (Our Mutual Friend 199).
The author here also takes the unusual step of calling for workhouse reform in the midst of this passage. Addressing Britain's "Lords and Gentlemen and Honourable Boards," he first suggests that those who would hail the "British independence of Mrs. Higden are engaging in cant" (Our Mutual Friend 199). After Betty describes the dispiriting effect of the workhouse on its inhabitants, Dickens asks the nation's leaders whether it is impossible "by any stretch of legislative wisdom to set these perverse people right in their logic" (Our Mutual Friend 200). Finally after Mrs. Higden has asked for the strength to hide or die in a hole rather than be taken to a workhouse, the author asks these same Lords and Gentlemen and Honourable Boards if they should "at any odd time" consider how the workhouse system prompts these thoughts in the honest poor" (Our Mutual Friend 200).
In "Wapping Workhouse," an essay collected in The Uncommercial Traveler series, which was published four years before Our Mutual Friend, Dickens offers ample evidence why Mrs. Higden's sentiments are not misguided. Directly addressing the disillusionment Betty cites in workhouse inmates, Dickens suggests it can be seen in one who simply makes a visit to such an establishment. In fact, he relates the profound effect such a visit had on him. "In ten minutes I had ceased to believe in such fables of a golden time as youth, the prime of life, or a hale old age. In ten minutes, all the lights of womankind seemed to have been blown out, and expiring snuffs" (The Uncommercial Traveler and Reprinted Pieces 25).
As in Our Mutual Friend, Dickens makes the case in this essay for improvements. After visiting the foul wards where the sick were kept, a loft which housed the idiotic and imbecile, an area reserved for young mothers and infants, and another for the "refractories," he suggests collecting more taxes from certain of his fellow citizens in order to pay for better workhouse conditions. After noting that the citizens of some parishes pay "poor rates" only marginally greater than those in less affluent parishes, he writes: "It is only through the equalization of Poor Rates that what is left undone in this wise can be done" (The Uncommercial Traveler and Reprinted Pieces 27).
Much as he calls upon the Lords and Gentlemen and Honourable Boards in Our Mutual Friend, Dickens the journalist questions whether Britian's elite have done right by those so poor as to have found themselves in the workhouse. Comparing the poor conditions in which a British woman of more than 90 years must live to that of a similarly aged woman in Boston who "would have been individually addressed, would have been tended in her own room and would have had her life gently assimilated to a comfortable life out of doors," Dickens asks: "When Britain first, at Heaven's command, arose, with a great deal of allegorical confusion from out of the azure main, did her guardian angels positively forbid" that the British woman not be afforded the same comfort as her American counterpart? (The Uncommercial Traveler and Reprinted Pieces 26-7).
As is the case with the author's treatment of workhouses, Dickens' broader, evenhanded discussion of prisons in his journalism differs from the bleak picture of penal institutions he crafts in fiction such as Oliver Twist and The Old Curiosity Shop. However, both genres show Dickens is a firm believer in harsh prison life for those members of society he finds to be irredeemably bad. In The Old Curiosity Shop and Oliver Twist, two characters, Kit Nubbles and Fagin respectively, spend time in prison. Their prison experiences and the different sympathies Dickens has for them are seemingly related. For example, the turnkey tending to Kit explains to the young man that he is "lodged, like some few others in the jail, apart from the masses of prisoners; because he was not supposed to be utterly depraved and irreclaimable, and had never occupied apartments in that mansion before" (The Old Curiosity Shop 557). It seems, by this remark, that prison divisions, according to Dickens, are made along the same lines he believes exist between inherently good individuals, like Kit, and the essentially bad, such as Fagin.
Dickens' description of Fagin's short stay in prison one can confidently suggest represents the portion of the prison from which the turnkey says Kit is spared. Fagin's prison is decidedly hell-like -dark and reached by descent. To reach his holding cell for the hours prior to his execution, Fagin must walk "through a paved room under the court," suggesting the travel of the damned. This notion is enhanced when Dickens describes Fagin crossing "a gloomy passage lightly by a few dim lamps, into the interior of the prison" (Oliver Twist 468).
Of course, what makes it most clear Fagin is being kept in a portion of the prison other than that in which Kit is housed is Fagin's reception by his fellow prisoners. "They assailed him with opprobrious names, and screeched and hissed," Dickens notes (Oliver Twist 468).
Despite such frightful imagery, Dickens is not incapable of making an academic, disinterested examination of prisons in his journalistic essays. In "A Visit to Newgate," describing a prison so imposing it became a permanent element of London culture, Dickens calls the foreboding institution a "gloomy depository of the guilt and misery of London." He proceeds with a typical rhetorical enthusiasm to describe the contrast in situation enforced by the walls of Newgate which separate good citizens and those dying within the prison (Philip and Neuberg 36).
Aiming to convey the feeling of Newgate rather than a catalog of the prison's specifics, Dickens notes he took an approach which would avoid tiring his reader with statistical accounts of the jail.
"A Visit to Newgate" describes, much as in Oliver Twist, "the tortuous and intricate windings" of the prison and the countless turnkeys and guards who secure the institution. And, as suggested by Oliver Twist and The Old Curiosity Shop, this essay illustrates for the reader the way in which prisoners are separated, suggesting Dickens' own conviction that the world is comprised of good people and some, unfortunately, irreclaimably bad, from whom the good must be protected. Likewise, as he treated the visit of Mrs. Nubbles and family to their beloved imprisoned Kit, his essay recounts several scenes of visitation.
Referring to a girl seen visiting her imprisoned mother, Dickens makes a point which is common to his novels and his journalism and which he would argue, necessitates the likes of Newgate. First, the comments show the author's ardent concern for children who, through unfortunate circumstances, are found in such pitiable settings. "The girl belonged to a class -unhappily but too expensive- the very existence of which should make men's hearts bleed." Despite such sympathy, Dickens understands that at a certain point such creatures are unreachable and require institutions which can house them. "They have entered at once upon the stern realities and miseries of life, and to their better nature it is almost hopeless to appeal in after-times, by any of the references which will awaken, if it be only for a moment, some good feeling in ordinary bosoms, however corrupt they may have become" (Philip and Neuberg 59).
Briefly, supporting the suggestion that prisons segregated their worst inmates and treated them to less pleasant circumstances, Dickens points out that in a "dismal passage," one finds "three or four dark cells for the accommodation of refractory prisoners" (Philip and Neuberg 61). The use of the word "refractory" is important to note, suggesting as it does one who is resistant to treatment or cure. He finds an example of this sort of prisoner in fourteen young lads in the Newgate school of whom he writes: "We never looked upon a more disagreeable sight, because we never saw fourteen such hopeless creatures of neglect before." Philip and Neuberg note, as if the point is not yet clear enough, that in the original edition of this essay, Dickens called the boys "hopeless and irreclaimable wretches" (Philip and Neuberg 62).
Shortly thereafter, Dickens explains that "prisoners of the more respectable class are confined" in an area distinct from their irredeemable brethren (Philip and Neuberg 62).
"A Visit to Newgate" includes a lengthy consideration of a condemned man's final hours which echoes the fictional depiction of Fagin's last moments in Oliver Twist. For example, in the essay, Dickens writes that the prisoner has "neglected in his feverish restlessness the timely warnings of his spiritual counselor" (Philip and Neuberg 67). Similarly, Fagin drove away "venerable men of his own persuasion" with curses, Dickens notes (Oliver Twist 469).
There is an additional similarity between the two condemned men. In "A Visit to Newgate," Dickens allows the "deep bell of St. Paul's" to signify the diminishing number of hours remaining in the condemned man's life (Philip and Neuberg 67). Likewise in Oliver Twist, Fagin is affected by the work of the clock. "The boom of every iron bell came laden with the one, deep, hollow sound- Death," Dickens writes (Oliver Twist 469).
Unlike his novels, which, until David Copperfield, merely describe the prisons to which characters are sent, Dickens' journalism expresses a firm opinion in matters of penal theory. Notably, in "Pet Prisoners," an 1850 Household Words essay which appeared after prison reforms had made those institutions much different than they appeared in early novels like Oliver Twist, Dickens took sides in the heated debate over the "separate system" and the "silent system" (Philip and Neuberg 70). Letters indicate he supported the latter, but "Pet Prisoners" offers his objections to the former.
The separate system confined prisoners in individual cells for a period of 18 months, taught the convicts trades and provided moral and religious training. The silent system grouped prisoners together prevented them from communicating.
Dickens' initial objection to the separate system was that under it, prisoners live better than paupers. He compares the diet of prisoners to the eating habits of individuals at a workhouse and finds the former better fed. The author also questions whether the time and financial resources spent instructing prisoners ought rather be allocated to "the unskilled and neglected outside the prison walls" (Philip and Neuberg 70).
Dickens, in "Pet Prisoners," asks whether the admirable goal of the separate system- to avoid the prisoners recognizing one another after their sentences have been served- outweighs the concerns noted above. He argues, as well, that prisoners will surely be sufficiently ingenious to find a means of communicating with one another.
Dickens takes advantage of David Copperfield to similarly criticize the separate system and to express his doubt concerning its ability to prevent prisoners from communicating with one another. As a guest of their former schoolmaster, Mr. Creakle, David and Tom Traddles embark on an investigation of the separate system. While at the prison, the author returns to his old saw that prisoners are better off than the least of those who have managed to remain free. "I said aside, to Traddles, that I wondered whether it occurred to anybody, that there was a striking contrast between these plentiful repasts of choice quality, and the dinners, not to say of paupers, but of soldiers, sailors, labourers, the great bulk of the honest, working community; of whom not one man in five hundred ever dined half so well" (David Copperfield 805).
He notes also that his suspicions that prisoners in "the system" were able to communicate with each other was eventually proven correct. The narrator explains that he was struck as he toured the facility "that there was a strong probability of the prisoners knowing a good deal about each other, and of their carrying on a pretty complete system of intercourse." With that sort of sarcasm he rarely introduced in his essays, he continues: "This, at the time I write, has been proved, I believe, to be the case; but as it would have been flat blasphemy against the system to have hinted such a doubt then, I looked out for the penitence as diligently as I could" (David Copperfield 806).
For one as fascinated by lowlifes as he is, Dickens is notably congenial towards police officers, in both his fiction and his journalism. He has this to say, for example, of the officer who takes Kit in on the theft charge: "This functionary, being of course well used to such scenes, looking upon all kinds of robbery from petty larceny up to housebreaking or ventures on the highway as matters in the regular course of business and regarding the perpetrators in the light of so many customers coming to be served at the wholesale and retail shop of criminal law where he stood behind the counter... took Kit into custody with a decent indifference" (The Old Curiosity Shop 546).
Philip and Neuberg tell their readers that Dickens' belief that the world is inhabited by some incurably bad characters and his "innate love of order" prompted the author to identify "in the battle of wits between society and its outcasts with authority" (Philip and Neuberg 43).
When the prison guard admonishes Kit and his visitors, including his mother, not to waste limited visiting time by crying, Dickens sympathetically explains his reasoning. "The man was not naturally cruel or hard-hearted," Dickens writes. "He had come to look upon felony as a kind of disorder like the scarlet fever or erysipelas, some people had it- some hadn't- just as it might be" (The Old Curiosity Shop 559).
It is reasonable to suggest that these sentiments about officers of the law arise from the numerous visits he made to members of that community and the journalistic reports he filed about such excursions. "On Duty With Inspector Field" Is one such account. Inspector Field, Dickens calls the "guardian genius of the British museum," and uses the clever museum metaphor to describe the treasures he will spend the evening watching. They include "Elgin marbles," "cat-faced Egyptian giants, with their hands upon their knees," and a "mummy" (Philip and Neuberg 28).
The essay describes the Inspector's perambulatory tour and his encounters with numerous known criminals. They are shown to be reasonably treated at his hands. More than that, Fields is shown to make a contribution sizable enough to purchase coffee for a group of mostly Irish poor whom he finds huddled inside a dark outhouse. This charity is surely above and beyond Fields' stated duty and its recounting by Dickens does much to persuade the reader to adopt the author's sentiments about police officer.
Dickens' affinity for officers of the law is not limited to the police officers of London and the jailers of Newgate, however. Rather, he takes a keen interest as well in the Thames police- those who patrol the river watching for the various water crimes- as well. As a journalist, he employs a method similar to that described in "On Duty With Inspector Field" to familiarize himself with the water-borne men of the law. In "Down With the Tide," published in Household Words, Dickens takes to a Thames police galley with an officer he calls Peacoat. In this essay, he describes how the Thames police labor to thwart "Tier-rangers" who steal the valuables of snoring shippers and their mates, "Lumpers" who steal goods from steamers they were hired to unload, "Truckers" who pose as sellers of goods to ships' crews in order to board a vessel, without suspicion and rob it, and finally, the "Dredgermen," who steal from undecked barges and other craft (Philip and Neuberg 51-2).
Several years after writing "Down With the Tide," Dickens uses his familiarity with this milieu to great effect in Our Mutual Friend, as he describes the river underworld inhabited by Gaffer Hexam and Rogue Riderhood. In fact, this novel opens in the precise location "between Southwark Bridge, which is of iron, and London Bridge, which is of stone," in which the journalist took his river excursion with Peacoat (Our Mutual Friend 1). The beginning of this novel shows Dickens comfortably and confidently creating a convincing image of Gaffer and his daughter Lizzie as they patiently wait for the river to bring them their livelihood.
Great Expectations, which precedes Our Mutual Friend by a short time, also shows the author writing about the battle between the law and those who would break it upon the river. Late in this novel, Pip attempts to board a steamer with his mysterious benefactor, known as Provis. Dickens' description of their wait on the river for a steamer heading to a foreign nation demonstrates clearly how familiar the author's journalism has made him with the ways of the river. Alerting the reader to his escape plan, the narrator says: "The tide beginning to run down at nine, and being with us until three, we intended still to creep on after it had turned, and row against it until dark. We should then be well in those long reaches below Gravesend, between Kent and Essex, where the river is broad and solitary, where the waterside inhabitants are very few, and where lone public houses are scattered here and there" (David Copperfield 445). In writing such as this, where the details provide the crucial element of verisimilitude, the reader sees the valuable contributions Dickens' journalistic efforts make to his novels.
Dickens' notable sympathy for the police is also evident in Great Expectations when a representative of the Thames police professionally conducts the apprehension of Abel Magwitch, previously known as Provis. The author describes his efforts with admiration. "Without giving any audible directions to his crew, he ran out of the galley aboard of us. They had pulled one sudden stroke ahead, had got their oars in, had run athwart us, and were holding on to our gunwale, before we know what they were doing," he writes (Great Expectations 454).
And, like Kit Nubbles' guards in prison, this river-going policeman is kind and treats his charges better than one might expect. He readily gives Pip permission to change Magwitch's wet clothes and "further gave me leave to accompany the prisoner to London" (Great Expectations 456). This is another clear example that Dickens' familiarity with police of all kinds informs his depiction of their ilk in his fiction.
Similarities such as these show that comparing essays by Charles Dickens to his fiction helps the reader see the author not in a new light, but in a more illuminating one. It is clear, for example, that he used both genres to argue for improved treatment of the poor, while simultaneously demonstrating a sharp interest in those for whom crime affords an opportunity to avoid poverty; in works of both types he followed the poor in and out of the workhouse and criminals in and out of prison.
While the subjects and themes are similar, Dickens typically reserves certain traits of style for one genre or the other. For example, humor is a common feature of his novels, while it rarely is used in his essays. This latter division is curiously blurred, however, by the time he writes Our Mutual Friend, in which he uses an intrusive authorial voice to plead for workhouse reform.
Taken together, Dickens' journalism and fiction show him to be a man
fully capable of enlisting either form for the service of his cause, whether
it be political reform or entertainment.
Works Consulted
Dickens, Charles. David Copperfield. London: Everyman, 1993.
Dickens, Charles. Great Expectations. London: Penguin Books, 1985.
Dickens, Charles. The Old Curiosity Shop. London: Penguin Books, 1985.
Dickens, Charles. Oliver Twist. London: Penguin Books, 1985.
Dickens, Charles. Our Mutual Friend. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989.
Dickens, Charles. The Uncommercial Traveler and Reprinted Pieces. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987. Nearly 40 essays by Dickens originally collected in 1861 and subsequently expanded.
Philip, Neil and Victor Neuberg. Charles Dickens A December Vision and Other Thoughtful Writings. New York: The Continuum Publishing Co., 1987. A helpful collection of 10 essays by Dickens with accompanying explanations by the authors. Essays are followed by relevant passages from Dickens' novels.
Tryon, W.S. Parnassus Corner A Life of James T. Fields Publisher to the Victorians. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1963. Includes brief references to Dickens, particularly his American speaking tours. Not useful with respect to his journalism.
Michael Dube (c)
