Losing patience with the poor
John Mortimer
THE AMUSEMENT OF THE PEOPLE AND OTHER PAPERS: DICKENS' JOURNALISM, VOLUME II, 1834-51 edited by Michael Slater Dent, £25, pp. 408 his collection of Dickens' journalism covers his life from the age of 22 to nearly 40. During these years Queen Victoria came to the throne, Marx met Engels, Europe was in a turmoil of revolution, Dostoevsky was sentenced to penal servi- tude in Siberia and someone invented the Christmas card. Dickens got married, fathered nine children, wrote The Pickwick Papers, Oliver Twist, Bamaby Rudge, Martin Chuzzlewit, Dombey and Son, A Christmas Carol and David Coppetfield, visited Ameri- ca, performed endless amateur theatricals and started Urania Cottage, a home for fallen women. With time on his hands he also wrote innumerable sketches, stories, polemics and articles on subjects from pantomime to the penal system. Dickens' journalism, of which this is the admirably edited and annotated second volume, con- tains some shocks for those who would respect him as the voice of liberal human- ism, the eloquent denouncer of a society infected by hypocrisy, cruelty and greed. The unqualified admirer of Dickens' pro- gressive attitudes may find too much knowledge uncomfortable. . We have, of course, grown used to the idea that the warm-hearted admirer of family life and the lover of children was the Dickens who nailed up the door leading to his wife's bedroom, despatched a son to the colonies and protested vehemently that there was no truth in the rumours about his love for Ellen Ternan. We did, however, cling to the belief that his ideas on penal matters would be sensible, humane, accept- able and the direct opposite of any Opinions which might be held by Mr Michael Howard. I have to say we are in for a few shocks. When Scrooge is approached by the portly gentlemen to help the poor at Christmas he asks, 'Are there no prisons?' and, 'Is the treadmill still turning nicely?' We laugh at Scrooge, confident that we have joined the author in hatred and mock- ery of such barbaric institutions, until we discover that Dickens was quite in favour of the treadmill as a punishment for those unfortunate prisoners who broke the regu- lations and dared to speak to each other during periods of association. Far from mocking the demonstrably fallacious theory that 'prison works', he recommended its use for a class of offender he found most heinous — those who wrote begging letters inviting him to send them money. When an abusive and perhaps drunk young girl shouted at him in the street, he went to great lengths to have her arrested and hauled up before the magistrate, even hav- ing looked up the particular statute under which she might be prosecuted. When the officer in charge of the case said, 'Surely you don't want her sent to prison, do you, sir?' Dickens grimly answered, 'Why else do you think I've taken the trouble to come down here?' He felt he was being treated more objectionably than the prisoner, who was merely fined ten shillings.
Although he was always against public executions, abolished in his lifetime, his opposition to the death penalty became somewhat wobbly towards the end of his life. Was there any sense in which Dickens was not only the generous, open-hearted nephew in A Christmas Carol but Ebenezer Scrooge himself?
Well, of course he was, or he couldn't have written Scrooge as such a huge and comic character. Dickens knew exactly what it felt like to lose patience with the poor, particularly when they wrote begging letters. He knew how discouraging it was to help fallen women and send them to start a new life in Australia, only to have them fall again as soon as they met a sailor on the voyage out. But he was always capable of acts of great and secret generosity, and when he found the authorities guilty of a real horror he could mount the most splen- did journalistic offensive, with all his guns of comic irony blazing.
His prime target was the ghastly Mr Drouet, who ran a pauper baby farm, or home for poor children. Under the title 'Mr Paradise of Tooting' Dickens wrote that Mr Drouet
was not exactly the golden farmer he was supposed to be [Drouet had earned high praise from the Surrey coroner when a large number of his charges, for some reason, died]. He has a habit of putting four cholera patients in one bed. He has a weakness in respect of leaving the sick to take care of themselves, surrounded by every offensive, indecent and barbarous circumstance that can aggravate the horrors of their condition and increase the dangers of infection.
When an indictment was sought against Drouet his ingenious barrister argued suc- cessfully that there was no evidence of which particular act caused the children's death. Dickens didn't let up on Drouet nor did he forget him. One of the false book spines he devised for his study at Gadshill bore the title Drouet's Fanning Vols 1-5.
Nor was he less outraged by the behaviour of Baron Pratt, who had to sen- tence a ten-year-old child ('peeping over the dock') for stealing a purse. The confu- sion and brutality with which the aptly named judge approached the problem of juvenile crime have their echo among politicians today. At first Baron Pratt was of a mind to have the child flogged, but when the clerk told him this was beyond his powers, he decided that the boy had better be transported beyond the seas for ten years, a sentence he thought would never be carried into effect. The next morning he came to a different conclusion and sen- tenced the small villain in the dock to two years' imprisonment, assuring him that if he behaved he might be out in a year. The baron was, said Dickens, 'a truly British judge'.
Whatever his credentials as do-gooder there is no doubt that Dickens was a tower- ing genius, our greatest novelist and in love with jokes. He almost forgives the begging letter-writer who, having lost his horse, asks Dickens to be so good as 'to leave out a donkey for me' that he might pick it up when he happened to be in the area. He's at his best describing what was the spring- board for his great dramatic scenes, the Victorian melodrama. You can read him revelling in the show in the New Cut, Lambeth where the patrons in the pit brought their sleeping babies, drank from stone bottles and ate cold fried soles throughout the performance. There he sees a play concerning 'May Morning, so called because of her bright eyes and merry laugh', a peasant girl who 'undergoes every calamity of human existence in a Muslim gown with blue tucks', and a certain Captain Ellmore, the 'supposed son' of a melancholic baronet, the captain being known as the 'Child of Mystery and Man of Crime'.
Nothing changes very much and Dickens had to compare the claims of the imagina- tive against the demands of the New Tech- nology. Perhaps, he said, a boy should spend all his leisure hours studying cog- wheels and cranks in Regent Street Polytechnic, but nothing can root out our love for dramatic entertainment. The peo- ple, he said, deserve to be amused. A great writer could have no higher ambition.
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