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| How much can we discover about a historical period from a novel of the time? Martin Daunton examines Dickens' brilliant evocation of Victorian social conditions in Bleak House, and gives a historian's view of the story. |  Charles Dickens
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Charles Dickens was no stranger to the poverty and despair of London and other great cities in the first half of the 19th century. His own father's total incapacity for financial management had led him and his family to a debtors' prison - where the young Charles witnessed misery at very close quarters. (His feckless parent was eventually used by Dickens as the model for Mr Micawber in David Copperfield).
'Memories of the prison ... gave [Dickens] a deep sense of the miseries suffered by the poor.'
Memories of the prison, and of his later spell working as a young boy in a blacking factory, never left Dickens and gave him a deep sense of the miseries suffered by the poor. Oliver Twist (1838) portrayed the 'rookeries' of London, the crime-ridden areas from which Fagin and his gang preyed on their victims. Bleak House (1853), from which the extracts below are taken, similarly described life as lived in the seamier parts of London. Then in 1854, he published his vision of a northern industrial town in Hard Times.
Dickens was not alone in his fictional representation of the 'condition of England' - other examples include Benjamin Disraeli's Sibyl, or the Two Nations (1845), and Mrs Gaskell's Mary Barton (1848) and North and South (1855).
One interest of Bleak House lies in Dickens' vision of blockages, and the way they lead to stagnation, decay, and the poisoning of the social system both metaphorically and in reality. The novel tells the story of a legal case stuck for years in the Court of Chancery. A case that involves - note the name - Sir Leicester and Lady Dedlock. The property at the centre of the case decays in the course of the story into the horrific slum of Tom-all-Alone's, the home of Little Jo the crossing sweeper, who makes a miserable living by clearing a path across the filthy streets of London.
'People were dehumanised as "moral sewage" ...'
In the novel, Dickens weaves together the miseries endured by the inhabitants of Tom-all-Alone's, and the comforts enjoyed by the Dedlocks, showing how unfeeling actions lead to disaster for both rich and poor. The slum of Tom-all-Alone's becomes a person - Tom - with the same moral failings as the residents who live under his leaking roof.
People and place come together in the same vision, a common literary device in social reportage. People were dehumanised as 'moral sewage' who could, like real sewage, destroy and kill. The slum was personalised, bent on revenge like a depraved and corrupted individual.
After reading the report the novelist dreamed of putrefaction, and the images that this brought to his mind recur in his novels - images of blockages, decay, stickiness, which make the reader feel the texture of the city. Thus the reports and novels of the period used similar language to describe a particular and threatening physical feel of the city - also to point out its dangers, and to create a sense of crisis that would spur the government to action.
Here is the passage in Bleak House where Dickens introduces the reader to the slum, the home of Little Jo:
'Jo lives - that is to say, Jo has not yet died - in a ruinous place, known to the like of him by the name of Tom-all-Alone's. It is a black, dilapidated street, avoided by all decent people; where the crazy houses were seized upon, when their decay was far advanced, by some bold vagrants, who, after establishing their own possession, took to letting them out in lodgings.
'Now, these tumbling tenements contain, by night, a swarm of misery. As, on the ruined human wretch, vermin parasites appear, so, these ruined shelters have bred a crowd of foul existence that crawls in and out of gaps in walls and boards; and coils itself to sleep, in maggot numbers, where the rain drips in; and comes and goes, fetching and carrying fever, and sowing more evil in its every footprint than Lord Coddle, and Sir Thomas Doddle, and the Duke of Foddle, and all the fine gentlemen in office, down to Zoddle, shall set right in 500 years - though born expressly to do it.'
Later in the novel, Dickens imagines Tom as a person seeking his revenge as night falls:
'Even the winds are his messengers, and they serve him in these hours of darkness. There is not a drop of Tom's corrupted blood but propagates infection and contagion somewhere... There is not an atom of Tom's slime, not a cubic inch of any pestilential gas in which he lives, not one obscenity or degradation about him, not an ignorance, not a wickedness, not a brutality of his commiting, but shall work its retribution, through every order of society, up to the proudest of the proud, and to the highest of the high.
'Verily, what with tainting, plundering, and spoiling, Tom has his revenge. It is a moot point whether Tom-all-Alone's be uglier by day or by night; but on the argument that the more that is seen of it the more shocking it must be, and that no part of it left to the imagination is at all likely to be made so bad as the reality, day carries it. The day begins to break now; and in truth it might be better for the national glory even that the sun should sometimes set upon the British dominions, than that it should ever rise upon so vile a wonder as Tom.'
Again, the power of Dickens' language brings to life some aspects of Victorian society, but the historian would need to find some corroborating information before drawing too many conclusions about the role and the work of the missionaries of the British Empire.
We need to understand how any demand for action would have had to be converted into specific policies - and this requires a close analysis of political processes and ideologies. Dickens himself does not tell us what Lord Coddle and his colleagues should do. Indeed, any attempt to take power into their hands might simply have led to an outcry against their attack on the freedom of local authorities. Would the inhabitants of Tom's-all-Alone be much better off if it was simply swept away?
' ... Dickens satirised Mr Gradgrind and his demand for "facts".'
We also need to establish, as far as we can, hard facts about the social conditions that existed in Victorian London. The novels of Dickens, and many of the more apparently 'objective' accounts of Chadwick and other sanitary reformers, are representations - and as historians we should be fascinated with the ways in which society is represented and interpreted. But we also need to move beyond this to enquire into known trends in infant mortality, or patterns of employment.
In Hard Times, Dickens satirised Mr Gradgrind and his demand for 'facts'. As historians, we should attempt to combine an appreciation of the changing ways in which society was represented in different texts, with an understanding of the importance of Mr Gradgrind's 'facts'. We need to ask questions about the life expectancy of people who lived in industrial towns, the level of investment in sewers, and the number of orphans who, like Little Jo, had a short and unpleasant life on the streets of Victorian London.
It is only when we know the answers to some of these questions that we can consider ourselves to have an informed opinion, and to have the right to call ourselves historians.
Published on 成人快手 History: 2004-11-04
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