Dickens (Archive Episode)

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0:30It all starts with a subscription to bbc.com. Find out more at bbc.com slash unlimited. To celebrate Melvin Bragg's 27 years presenting In Our Time, some well-known fans of the programme have chosen their favourite episodes. Here's the singer Joan Armatrading. First of all, I'd just like to pay tribute to Melvin Bragg. Like John Nettles, he has that voice that really draws you in. I love how he has lots of knowledge And gives you lots of information But you never feel as if you're being lectured at And I always feel that when I listen to him Whatever programme he's doing I always feel as if I'm getting a proper education I've followed in our time for quite a number of years I can't tell you all the different episodes that I've listened to But I always feel as if I've had an education When I listen to them So he's going to be somebody who's going to be very, very missed.

1:27I love Charles Dickens. When I was younger, I read a lot of Charles Dickens novels. And my favourite of those is Hard Times. I love Hard Times. One of the reasons I love Hard Times is because of Mr. Gradgrime, who didn't want the pupils to look out of the window and dream. Little did he know that practically everything that we have in the world that we use came out of a dream. That's from people looking out of the window and thinking, oh, I wonder if I could fly, or thinking, I wonder what it would be like to build a car, or what it would be like if I made electric light. Whatever it is, that's come out of a dream.

2:05So I always look at Mr. Gradgrine and think, yeah, you didn't really know what you were talking about, although he was converted in the end, but I always think of Mr. Gradgrine in hard times, so that's one of my favourites. So for my chosen episode, it's Charles Dickens. Hello, George Bernard Shaw said of Little Dorrit that it was, quote, more seditious than das Kapital, 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.

2:39Bumble, and the literary one with the 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 and his place in history are three preeminent literary scholars. Rosemary Ashton is Professor of English at University College London. Michael Slater is Professor of Victorian Literature at Birkbeck College, University of London, and editor of the Dent Uniform Edition of Dickens Journalism.

3:15And John Bowen, Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Keele, and author of other Dickens, Pickwick to Chuzzlewit. Rosemary Ashton, can you just briefly give us a flavour of the times when Dickens started drawing? 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.

3:54Everyone turning up and thinking how wonderful all this was. Great wealth. On the other hand, there's 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.

4:32The infrastructure, basically, of London had not kept up with the tremendous moves that had been made by the advance in industrialism. I mean, when foreigners, people from abroad came here, they were impressed by the wealth, the 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, weren'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, was another reason for self-congratulation, whereas all the other capitals of Europe had suffered revolutions in 1848.

5:08but 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 grandeur 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 text you 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.

5:54Jeremy 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 rotten boroughs, 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.

6:29But they tended to base their philosophy on statistics, the greatest happiness of the greatest number was their great mantra. And so there was another reforming radical movement really based particularly in the person of Carlyle, 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, with a kind of great prophetic sweep, also radical, also very dismissive of ancient establishments, the church, parliament, national palaver, he called it, that kind of thing.

7:12So he comes in with a tremendous rhetoric of scorn for the establishment, but with a more sort of spiritual, imaginative programme, really. We could actually lease out the phrase national palaver for a BBC4 programme about politics, wouldn't we? You might. He also, thank you very much, Rosemary. 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' books should we look to to get a real sense of his view of the condition of England, and what condition did he find England in at that time?

7:53I think the two I'd speak about would be Bleak House, particularly, and Little Dorrit. So Dickens is interested in particular kinds of reform throughout his career, right from the beginning, say in 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.

8:35So Bleak House, 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.

9:11Right up to Sir Lester Deadlock, who's the grandee 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 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.

9:50and 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 or a 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 circumlocution office which is this grand bureaucracy that again wraps up all the different lives of the novel. It just makes you smile at the circumlocution 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 concision, but so by the time Dickens is in the period of the great novels, because, as you say, he started with Oliver Tess, which was very early, what is his view of the condition of England?

10:35Would 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.

11:14that 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 increasingly, 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. What was he saying just a year before he died? and I'm not reading this, it's somewhere in my notes, but let's try to remember it. My belief in the governing is infinitesimal. My belief in the governed is illimitable.

11:53Yes, so he always thought that... There's an allegiance to the life of the people, I think, and the possibilities of the creativity of ordinary life, and so much of the virtue of the novels are found in the ordinary and the humble. 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 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.

12:52Mr Plornish, who's a plasterer, 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 and is actually a kind of Scrooge-like villain and I would think that the Plornishes 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 Tiggins, 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.

13:57I mean, John has mentioned Joe, the crossing sweeper in Bleak House. He's a 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.

14:45I 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 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 it. 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.

15:25But at the time, we're told that he perhaps told his wife and Forster, 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 or 14. He was 12, I think, yes. But he told Forster that he was eight, I think. isn't that right? Anyway, he did it. He did it, yes, that's right. So what happened and why was it so important? Why did he keep it a secret? Well, I think he had a tremendous sense of shame about it, for one thing.

16:06But 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 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 Dorrit. And then I think for very interesting reasons it changes from Tale of Two Cities onwards. But I think it was... That's a tantalising statement. Can we speak? The thing was that... I mean, Dickens was so ambivalent, wasn't he, about class? I mean, he also wanted to be thought a gentleman. Like Pip? Yes, it's like Pippen, this extraordinary thing, you know, about his father's crest, which was stamped on all his china at Gadshill Place.

17:01The Maltese lion holding a cross in its dexter pawn, Dickens says, it was my father's crest. I mean, I don't myself care about such things. However, you know, we use it. And he had absolutely no right to it. He never, unlike Shakespeare, he never applied for nobility. There's no sign that he was actually related to the Dickenses of Dorset or whoever they were. But, and it was like his attitude to Queen Victoria. I mean, I'm going to go back to his charter for a second. Rosemary, what power do you think that gave him as a social observer as well as a writer? So let's just get it straight. At 12, the father goes into a debtor's prison.

17:39He gets sent to a blacking factory to work at the bottom of the heap in atrocious circumstances. and take the 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, well, in David Copperfield, which is the novel 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 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 yes until he became famous when they started trying to get money from him And he resorted to some fairly, I mean, this was very strong for him.

18:45He 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 repudiate. I mean, I'm slightly exaggerating. But basically, he resented his parents and he resented this loss of opportunity. The interesting thing is 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. I mean, novel after novel, that is what he's... John Byrne, can you bring us... Can you comment in on this? That's right. I mean, just pick up what Michael said.

19:18In a way, it's like a kind of crypt or a wound that he carries with him through all his life, this kind of buried secret that you see, as soon as you know it, you see it everywhere in his work. You know, Joe Gardery in Great Expectations goes to London and the first thing he wants to see is Warren's Blacking Warehouse. It's the great site of London, right? Now, Dickens knows what the joke is. His friend Forster will know it. Nobody else does. And we do. And the kind of mixture of comedy and pathos there, by the way he's working through that experience. But throughout his life, I think, he just has the sense of always thinking, and this is so rare, I think, for a major novelist, what it's like to be on the other side, to be wholly socially excluded, completely outside the world of meaning and of sense of being one of the abject poor and completely rejected.

20:07And, of course, that does, as Rosemary said, fuel this great anger, particularly against his mother, where he says, you know, I never can forget that she was warm for my being sent back. Sent back to Blacking's factory. Yeah, and I think at that point, first of all, they're in the rat-infested warehouse on the banks of the Thames. But then they move to Collin Garden, where he's in a window and he can be seen, and it's that sense of a kind of public humiliation of being one of the poor labouring hinds on which this great spectacle of the Victorian city was built. And he knows what it's like to be there.

20:39And he carries that with him through all the fiction, I think. Do you think that keeping it secret helped the power of it? Yes, I do. Why?

20:50Well, because partly from the evidence of the text, I think, it just is so powerful when you see it. But it also enables it to be transmuted, to be changed, to be transformed into different things. So Barnaby Rudge, which is a novel about the riots in 1780, the Gordon riots, there's a big house that gets burnt down at the end. It's called The Warren, right? Now that's an amazing transformation of that anger against the building that imprisoned him. It turns into a gothic mansion that he just takes enormous pleasure in writing one of his great scenic descriptions of its destruction. So as long as it's a secret, it can appear in displaced forms.

21:28So he writes the autobiography, but then he never publishes it.

21:58It all starts with a subscription to BBC.com. Find out more at BBC.com slash unlimited. 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 needn't 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.

22:42Start with you, Michael. What were his main ideas and how did he drive them through? Well, his main ideas, I 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 equality 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 causes 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.

23:43And he was very... He returned again and again to the idea of the state as a sort of negligent mother, as it were, a negligent parent. I can't actually remember who it was who said that Dickens' idea of society, his vision of society, of what was wrong with it, was that it was like a family with the wrong members in control. And given Dickens' views of mothers and fathers, this tells you quite a lot. Well, in fact, all authority figures, I mean, mothers, fathers, parents, schoolteachers, anybody in authority, right up to Parliament, of course. Now, how radical were his ideas about the poor at the time?

24:22I mean, I want to ask you, John, how effective they are. But, 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, and 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.

25:04He 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.

25:42He clearly thinks of 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 poor 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 Benthamite 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. Let's stick with Oliver Twist for a moment because that gives us the double thing very well, I think, the radical and the conservative.

26:20Because Oliver Twist is kind of miraculously middle class throughout and it's a 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 in Oliver Twist for a moment? Sure. 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 heir. But it's not quite as smug as that summary would make you think.

26:58And he does that in two ways, I think. Firstly, the whole weight of 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 Cruickshank makes for it, which is a smog-a-pojoie 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.