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Aydelo Tte
Aydelo Tte
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The England of Marx and Mill as
Reflected in Fiction
'IT. A. Jackson, Charles Dickens, the Progress of a Radical (New York: International Pub-
lishers Co., I938).
42
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Marx and Mill in Fiction 43
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44 William 0. Aydelotte
II
Anyone who wants to discuss these novels of the i840's starts with a
great advantage because of the admirable study of them published by
Louis Fran~ois Cazamian forty-five years ago. There is no need to
retraverse the ground that he has so well covered, and instead of dealing
at length with his exposition, I should prefer to make a fresh start and
try to put the whole matter in a different way, suggesting a few
reformulations that seem important in the light of our present under-
standing of the period.
Even allowing for the individual differences that we find in any
group of artists, it seems fair to say that in general terms all four of
these novelists exhibit in their social opinions a common attitude. It is
really a double attitude, the two halves of which might appear incon-
sistent to a modern reader. On the one hand, they display a great
sympathy for and interest in the underprivileged, an indignant protest
against the treatment of the poor in modern society. On the other hand,
they show also a negative or conservative aspect which I shall describe
more fully in a moment.
The positive aspect, the element of social protest, need not detain us,
for it is the best-understood feature of this literature. It manifests itself,
of course, not in any restatement of economic theory, but in an emo-
tional attitude. The student who, following A. V. Dicey's argument,
seeks in this literature evidence 'of the impending change from indi-
vidualism to socialism will find slim pickings. The practical proposals
of these writers are amazingly tame in comparison with the vehe-
mence of their social criticism, and they were more generally on the
side of private philanthropy than of state action. Dickens' criticisms of
philanthropy relate more to method than to principle, and philanthropy
remained the solution he sought in his private life as well as in the
denouements of his novels-the benevolent man with a long purse who
rewards the virtuous. Dickens had a kind of horror of the state in all
its aspects, Parliament and bureaucracy alike, and it is hard to imagine
him wanting to entrust the welfare of the people of England to the
Circumlocution Office. Kingsley at the end of A/ton Locke proposes
Christian philanthropy as a substitute for discredited Chartism, and
Mrs. Gaskell seems to find her solution to the labor-management prob-
lem, not in acts of Parliament, but in charity and mutual sympathy.
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Marx and Mill in Fiction 45
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46 William 0. Aydelotte
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Marx and Mill in Fiction 47
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48 William 0. Aydelotte
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Marx and Mill in Fiction 49
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50 William 0. Aydelotte
by the upper classes toward the lower is for him, not the inevitable
product of sociological relationships, but simply a moral lapse. He con-
demns not the bourgeois class as a whole, which is what some modern
critics have tried to read into him, but rather the moral faults exhibited
by individuals.
Dickens, like the others, has a disposition to view things from the
upper-class angle. His lower-middle-class characters (he deals rela-
tively little with the proletariat) receive in general sympathetic treat-
ment, but they are seldom persons with whom the reader is tempted to
identify himself. They may be virtuous in the highest degree, "nature's
gentlemen," but they are also a little ridiculous-Miss La Creevy, New-
man Noggs, Mrs. Todgers, Captain Cuttle, and the whole gallery.
Dickens is friendly to them, but also condescending. His heroes and
heroines, by contrast, who play for the most part "straight" and not
comic roles, are almost invariably of gentle birth, above the general
line of social demarcation that he seems to make. Little Nell is socially
redeemed by having a rich relation, and Oliver Twist by being (like
Gerard in Sybil) a missing heir. Barnaby Rudge, though he gives his
name to the book, is not a hero in the usual sense, not a "young, walk-
ing gentleman." Even Pip, though he comes to despise some, not all, of
the values his education has given him, has nevertheless acquired these
values; they have become a part of him and help to make up the point
of view from which the story is told.
Contrary to what is sometimes asserted, Dickens was no equalitarian.
In The Chimes he satirizes those who expect the poor to know their
station. But that is exactly what he does expect himself, and this uncon-
scious demand of his may be illustrated by the fact that the "good" poor
in his novels always do know their stations: Mark Tapley, Mr. Peg-
gotty, Joe Gargery, and the others. Dickens, in other words, is not
opposed to the upper class as a class; he hopes not to destroy it but to
educate and reform it, to produce in it a change of heart. He preaches,
not against the upper class, but to it. He has no wish to equalize ranks;
in fact, he not only accepts the current distinctions but even seems to
welcome them. He is sympathetic to the poor, but his object is, as
Edmund Wilson well puts it, to make the poor real to the upper classes.
3. Dickens' attitude to democracy is of a piece with this. Although the
reforms he occasionally demanded could be accomplished only by
act of Parliament, his final position seems to have been to give Parlia-
ment up as hopeless, to reject it as a possible agency of reform. This
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Marx and Mill in Fiction 51
III
We come now to the explanation. All that has been said so far goes
to show that the radical interpretation of these authors is wrong, that
we can in no way describe them as being in the vanguard of revo-
lution. Neither collectivism nor democracy has any particular appeal
for them. Yet, since we are looking for attitudes rather than theories,
we may claim to find in them an attitude that is logically not uncon-
nected with the development of collectivism later. Although they fore-
see little of the functions the state was to assume toward the end of the
century, they do show a new appreciation of social problems and a
more vigorous concern about the condition of the people, the kind of
concern that was part of the basis of an increased assumption of respon-
sibility by the state in the generations that followed.
We do not on the other hand find in them attitudes that could be
said to lead logically to any sympathy with democracy. The drift is
nonequalitarian, and what little they have to say about democracy is
either unfavorable or at best unenthusiastic. This is the puzzle. Why did
these novelists, with their intense social concern, and living in an age
when democratic liberalism was on the offensive, tend so strongly to
the opposed point of view?
Part of the answer might be found in a closer analysis of the times.
Democracy, even if it seemed the creed of the future, had still only a
limited application in the 1840's. Universal suffrage was still far ahead,
the working classes had almost no political power and were not to
become any kind of a force in Parliament for another fifty years. What
social reform there was, even when it came through Parliament, was
from the top down, strictly benevolent and philanthropic. It is plausible
to argue, then, that these writers simply took their cue from the time,
and did not think of democracy as a serious possibility for practical
politics. By this argument it would be anachronistic to regard them as
making a choice between democracy and philanthropy, for democracy
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52 William 0. Aydelotte
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Marx and Mill in Fiction 53
further why these writers imitated one attitude and not another. To
point out a resemblance is not to offer an explanation. And it would be
hard to fit these writers, who were none of them (except Kingsley in a
minor way) aristocrats, into the pattern of opportunistic Tory land-
owners, needling the Whig factory magnates for the sake of political
advantage, or to see them as inheritors of the aristocratic tradition of
feudal benevolence.
The difficulty in any interpretation of literature in the light of the
times in which it was written is the simplistic assumption that litera-
ture takes its character from something we vaguely refer to as the
"spirit of the age." This assumption is a fallacious short cut which
closes the road to accurate analysis. Literature is, of course, affected by
the age in which it is written, and it also affects the age. But the rela-
tionship is involved, and different in the case of each author. Nor, so
far as we can speak of such a thing as the character of an age, does
literature necessarily follow it. More often it is in rebellion: Gide defines
the raison d'&tre of the writer as being at odds with his times. And
these writers in particular seem to stand out against whatever we can
name as the major trend of their era. They flew in the face of the gen-
erally accepted economic doctrine, and their deeper and more under-
lying ideas seem more allied to romanticism and opposed to the most
noticeable intellectual current of the age, which was more rationalistic
and scientific.
A different explanation of the archaism and class prejudice of these
authors might be sought in the very fact that they were writers. An
attractive hypothesis could be set up to the effect that there is inevitably
a conflict between an artist and any mass movement. Although he may
reject the values of the society he lives in, the artist yet hesitates to join
a large general movement against this society. The highly personal
nature of his work makes him an individualist, sensitive to his own
laws of development; he is unwilling therefore to take part in a popu-
lar movement in which his own individuality is in danger of being lost.
Or, when he does join it, it will be with ambivalent loyalties, perhaps
just to cover his own failures and frustrations. Furthermore, and this
may help to explain the matter of insistence on class distinctions, artists
and intellectuals are in general very sensitive to questions of status,
especially their own. Their material rewards are not large, they are
highly conscious of their own individuality-and all this makes them
preoccupied with the issue. of status in their writings (it is a principal
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54 William 0. Aydelotte
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Marx and Mill in Fiction 55
tion, we can admit that Mr. Wilson's stress on the trau
ences of Dickens' childhood seems reasonable, for we kn
sources that Dickens was unhappily conscious of these e
his life and was searching for some means of counterba
This much is generally agreed, and indeed critics have h
on the troubles of Dickens' youth-the domestic-service
his grandparents, his father's financial ruin and arrest f
brief experience as a member of the working class in W
establishment-that these matters have become hackneye
doubt of the enormous impact of these experiences on Dickens; the
only question is their meaning for him. But this meaning is clear. The
significance of these experiences for Dickens was unquestionably that
they involved humiliation, loss of status. Dickens' experience of pov-
erty, whatever else it did for him, gave him a horror of it, a determina-
tion to escape from being poor or losing status himself.
This basic insecurity is quite apparent in his frantic attempts to
compensate for these earlier experiences during his years of artistic
production. It comes out, for example, in his exceptional efforts to con-
ceal his background. The truth about his grandparents was kept a
strict secret and was first revealed only in i939. He kept hidden even
from members of his family that the Murdstone and Grimby episode
in David Copperfield had been a personal experience of his own. In the
same novel, which is semiautobiographical, he makes significant altera-
tions and substitutions in the events of his own life: thus, as one illus-
tration, his father, John Dickens, becomes Mr. Micawber, still some-
what disreputable, but now happily no blood relation of the hero.
Along the same line, Dickens attempted to build himself up as a man
of position: sending his son to Eton; adding field after field to the
Gad's Hill estate; affecting an excessive dandyism of dress and a con-
spicuously lavish standard of living; undertaking a hazardous second
trip to America to increase his already ample fortune. He shows a kind
of self-dramatization (not unconnected probably with his passion for
amateur theatricals), which sometimes emerges naively in his corre-
spondence: at the time of his separation from his wife he wrote that he
could not have been more generous if she had been a woman of high
birth and he a gentleman of fortune.
The pattern emerges clearly. Whatever else we may find in Dickens,
we also find a preoccupation with his own position, his status, which
colors everything he does. A large part of the error of the radical inter-
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56 William 0. Aydelotte
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Marx and Mill in Fiction 57
and decency he displayed in the plans that he drew up for that ill-
starred experiment, Miss Burdett-Coutts' Home for Fallen Women.
We have not time to explore further the relations between these two
strands in Dickens, his reformism and his drive for status, which seem
so closely and so interestingly interwoven. The object of this paper is
not so much to attempt any full interpretation of Dickens, which would
be impossible in this brief scope, but rather to suggest by using him as
an example the kind of information that the historian may extract
from literature. What the historian can find, in a word, is a more inti-
mate glimpse into the factors behind the formation of opinion; he can
get a grasp of the influences bearing upon the attitude of one man,
which may be suggestive for the entire period. Such an approach may
take the historian more directly to the causes of events, the ideas in the
minds of men, and may help to emancipate him from the psychological
naivete which since the days of Adam Smith has been the bane of
economic history.
How far patterns of this kind could be set up for other novelists or
other figures of the period is a difficult question to answer. We may
not generalize from the individual to the group, especially when the
individual concerned has so many special quirks as Dickens. Yet one
might not unreasonably anticipate that patterns like this would occur
fairly frequently in the Victorian age, when on the one hand status
mattered, and on the other hand class boundaries were fluid enough
so that status could be successfully pursued or so that there was danger
of losing it. The case of Dickens is suggestive, and it is amusing to con-
sider whether anything like it could be worked out for others. Disraeli
seems a possibility; and Eric Russell Bentley has suggested how a
similar line of criticism might be applied to Carlyle. Ranging more
widely, a trend of thought of the kind here suggested might throw
light on certain puzzling facts of modern English social history: why
it is that conservative movements tend to draw their ideology, their
formative ideas, from homines novi; or why "feudal benevolence" and
noblesse oblige were in nineteenth-century England most enthusias-
tically expounded and practiced by those who were in origin conspicu-
ously not noble or feudal. The role played by benevolence as a label of
status offers interesting possibilities for criticism.
But these are speculations, attempts to suggest wider implications
that this line of argument might have. All I have tried to show here
is the kind of information the historian can get out of literature, the
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58 William 0. Aydelotte
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