Charles Dickens
“[t]he present splendid brotherhood of fiction-writers in
England whose graphic and eloquent pages have issued to the world more
political and social truths than have been uttered by all the professional
politicians, publicists and moralists put together”.
Karl Marx
“Dickens is a beloved figure, first of all, because of the
deep sympathy in his novels for those mistreated and oppressed by official,
respectable society, especially children. It is difficult to think of another
writer who conveyed such sympathy in significant fiction, with the possible
exception of Leo Tolstoy, the great Russian novelist. Dickens, of course,
enjoyed the “advantage” of having suffered poverty and abuse as a child,
including during his stint, at 12 years old, working ten-hour days at a blacking
(boot polish) factory while his father was locked up in a debtors’ prison.”
David Walsh
“ In the little world in which children have their existence
whosoever brings them up, there is nothing so finely perceived and so finely
felt as injustice. It may be only small injustice that the child can be exposed
to, but the child is small, its world is small, and its rocking horse stands as
many hands high, according to scale, as a big-boned Irish hunter. Within
myself, I had sustained, from my babyhood, a perpetual conflict with injustice.
”
Charles Dickens, Great Expectations
I would be lying if I said I celebrate Christmas. It is a
time to eat and relax and probably write, as this article written on Christmas
day, testifies. I tend to observe Christmas, and one of my few traditions is to
spend Christmas with Charles Dickens.
Specifically A Christmas Carol. First, I read the book for
the first time this Christmas, and second, I listened to this excellent
audiobook by Hugh Grant. Grant is a much-underrated actor, and this audiobook
is superbly narrated.
Everyone knows the story inside out. First published as a
novella by Chapman & Hall on Dec. 19 1843. Dickens was not the only social
commentator at the time of writing a Christmas Carol. Karl Marx, a great
admirer of Dickens, walked the same London streets for over 20 years. Marx, Engels and Dickens were horrified by and
wrote about the squalor produced by the Industrial Revolution. Engel's famous
work captured the poverty and squalor in England.[1]
There is, of course, a world of difference between Marx, Engels
and Dickens. However, you would not glean that from numerous radical organisations
that want to claim Dickens as a radical socialist and champion of the working class.
As the Stalinist Nick Matthews writes, “It would be nice to think, too, that
Marx’s use of the metaphor of the spectre that begins The Communist Manifesto,
“A spectre is haunting Europe…” so soon after those in A Christmas Carol, is
more than coincidental.”[2]
This may well be correct, but the writer George Orwell
understood Dicken’s class position much better. He wrote, “Dickens had grown up
near enough to poverty to be terrified of it, and despite his generosity of
mind, he is not free from the special prejudices of the shabby-genteel. It is
usual to claim him as a ‘popular’ writer, a champion of the ‘oppressed masses’.
So he is, so long as he thinks of them as oppressed, but there are two things
that condition his attitude. In the first place, he is a south-of-England man
and a Cockney at that, and therefore out of touch with the bulk of the real
oppressed masses, the industrial and agricultural labourers.
It is interesting to see how Chesterton, another Cockney,
always presents Dickens as the spokesman of ‘the poor’ without showing much
awareness of who ‘the poor’ really are. To Chesterton, ‘the poor’ means small
shopkeepers and servants. Sam Weller, he says, ‘is the great symbol in English
literature of the populace peculiar to England’, and Sam Weller is a valet! The
other point is that Dickens's early experiences have given him a horror of
proletarian roughness. He shows this unmistakably whenever he writes of the
very poorest of the poor, the slum-dwellers. His descriptions of the London
slums are always full of undisguised repulsion: “The ways were foul and narrow;
the shops and houses wretched; and people half naked, drunken, slipshod and
ugly. Alleys and archways, like so many cesspools, disgorged their offences of
smell, dirt, and life upon the straggling streets, and the whole quarter reeked
with crime, and filth, and misery, etc., etc.”[3]
While Vladimir Lenin hated Dickens, Marx liked him and wrote
“ “[t]he present splendid brotherhood of fiction-writers in England whose
graphic and eloquent pages have issued to the world more political and social
truths than have been uttered by all the professional politicians, publicists
and moralists put together”.
To close, as Paul Bond wrote, “ It is In the 154 years since
the death of the author, none of the central contradictions of the existing
social order have been resolved. The exploitation so vividly portrayed in
Dickens’s works continues to be a feature of everyday life over vast swathes of
the planet, from Africa to Asia and Latin America. Yet, even in those countries
where grinding poverty was ameliorated in some measure through the struggles of
the working class and the establishment of the welfare state introduced under
the shadow of the Russian Revolution, there is a serious risk of a return to
the Dickensian nightmare.”[4]
[1] Condition of the Working Class in England Written:
September 1844 to March 1845 www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/condition-working-class-england.pdf
[2]
A Christmas Carol and the Communist Manifesto- https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/f/christmas-carol-and-communist-manifesto
[3]
George Orwell-Charles Dickens-orwell.ru/library/reviews/dickens/english
[4]
Today’s social divide and the Charles Dickens bicentenary-https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2012/02/dick-f23.html
