Charles Dickens and his influence on English morals.

 

Charles Dickens

Charles Dickens was 25 years old when Queen Victoria ascended to the throne in 1837. There's no doubt that many of us are aware of grinding Victorian poverty because of the books of Charles Dickens and that Dickens, has had a profound influence on English morals and values. To this day, we can recognise Dickensian English types like Seth Pecksniff and John Podsnap. But Dickens had his critics and some critics thought that Dickens was excessively sentimental and lacked intellectual rigour and depth.

George Orwell wrote a very good essay on Dickens and was clear that Dickens was not a socialist or revolutionary and neither was he on the side of the mob or trade unionists. He was more concerned with moral improvement rather than political reform. His heroes are not social reformers but ordinary people who make a simple commitment to decency. Orwell says that his general attitude was that it is "Useless to change institutions without a change of heart..." Orwell argued that Dickens must have been aware that many of the problems in society were caused by the structural inequalities caused by Britain's social class system and capitalism but he really fails to address this. Dickens always seems to resort to introducing the benevolent capitalist-type like the Cheeryble brothers, who come to the rescue or the wealthy John Jarndyce, whose main goal in life is to do good for others. Nevertheless, Dickens was a social critic and satirist and many of his books attack such things as the workhouse, the legal system, bureaucracy and the system of education in Britain.

John Ruskin seems to have been greatly impressed with 'Hard Times', one of Dickens's shorter novels. Among other things, this novel is an attack on 'Utilitarianism' and its ideology as represented by the schoolmaster Thomas Gradgrind who is morally blind and only interested in facts. I think Hard Times is probably the only Dickens novel that really addresses the issue of the class struggle but it's clear that Dickens, is on the side of Stephen Blackpool, who is shunned by his fellow workers because he refuses to join the union. Bitzer, who is a former pupil of Gradgrind's school of rationalist education, works in Josiah Bounderby's bank and spies on his fellow workers. He's a kind of prototype early Thatcherite. Mrs Sparsit, who is originally from an aristocratic background but has fallen on hard times, is now Bounderby's housekeeper. She's s only a simple widow woman but like Margaret Thatcher, she believes that the labouring classes must be conquered.

'Bleak House' is considered a 'Condition -of- England novel and I think Dickens' novel 'Our Mutual Friend', is also another good novel. John Ruskin coined the term 'illth' which was the underside of wealth. It refers to the damage that change leaves in its wake - the human cost of so-called progress. Dickens's novels show what statistics miss or disguise and what life was actually like for many millions of English people living in the most prosperous and advanced economy in the world. In Dickens's day it was paradise for 30,000 and hell for 30 million.