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Getting to know the poor: Early Victorian fiction and social investigation

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Getting to know the poor: Early Victorian fiction and social investigation

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GETTING TO KNOW THE POOR: EARLY VICTORIAN FICTION
AND SOCIAL INVESTIGATION
by
Peter Malcolm Stokes
A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
in Partial Fulfilment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(ENGLISH)
August 2000
Copyright 2000 Peter Malcolm Stokes
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UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY PARK
LOS ANGELES. CALIFORNIA 90007
This dissertation, written by
P fe -r s & _ rJI. L T P lc E 5 ________
under the direction of h .A .% .__ Dissertation
Committee, and approved by all its members,
has been presented to and accepted by The
Graduate School, in partial fulfillment of re
quirements for the degree of
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
Dean of Graduate Studies
Date
ATION COMMITTEE D IS !
Chairperson
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To m y parents, Michael Stokes and Ann Stokes, w ith love
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A cknow ledgem ents
I w rote this dissertation under the generous and inspirational
joint direction of H ilary Schor and Jim Kincaid, who gave tim e and
energy far beyond the call of duty, and provided volum inous good-
hum ored criticism. E thank them heartily for their help and
encouragem ent. Philippa Levine also provided num erous invaluable
and welcome questions and criticisms. I enjoyed very much working
w ith all three.
This dissertation w as produced w ith the help of conversations
w ith, and support from, Paul Hansom , Ned Schantz, Michael Frisoli,
Valerie Kamo, Amab Chakladar, Elizabeth Archer, Mike Reynolds,
John Bruns, Kate Lonsdale, Elizabeth Bleicher, Anne Thorpe, Kris
Deffenbacher, Lawrence Driscoll, Reggie Flood, Sumangala
Bhattacharya, Frank Goodwin, M ark Henley, Harly Ramsey, Robert
Newsom, and many people at the Dickens Project.
I am very grateful for the interest and love shown by my family.
Michael and Ann Stokes even read the dissertation and com mented
on it. Alan and Kathleen Stokes did not, but are terrific anyway—and
I am not forgetting M andy, nor Jez, nor Edith, nor Granny. Dick and
M aureen Senecal have been extraordinarily generous. Chris H all and
Rich Robinson have been great friends to me for decades now.
Special thanks to N ikki Senecal for everything.
iii
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Table o f Contents
D edication ii
A cknow ledgem ents iii
Introduction: The C ondition of England 1
C hapter 1: Bentham, Dickens, and the Uses of the W orkhouse 12
C hapter 2: Evidence, Knowledge, and O ther Fictions 43
C hapter 3: The Figure of the Observer 99
C hapter 4: Bureaucracy and the Uncertainties of Investigation 155
Conclusion: Evidence and Rhetoric; Engels and Marx 211
Bibliography 242
iv
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Peter M. Stokes Hilary Schor
ABSTRACT
G etting to Know th e Poor: Early Victorian Fiction and Social Investigation
From the debate over the N ew Poor Laws of 1834, through the condition-of-
England novel and the extensive research of H enry M ayhew, pauper
m anagem ent w as a t the h eart of the making of V ictorian England. I argue
that novelists and other social critics of the early V ictorian period not
only interpreted the poor in a new way, but also directed their criticism
tow ards their ow n positions as observers and as bearers of knowledge. Rather
than see the w ork of novelists sim ply as heroic m oral indignation, or the
w ork of bureaucrats and political philosophers m erely as propaganda, an
absolute distinction often m aintained, I think w e can profitably regard these
w riters as a good deal less single-m inded, h i m y reading these w riters do not
pretend to offer reality unm ediated, but represent the poor as a point of
am biguity w here debates over the politics of social investigation can take
place. The industrial novels are not necessarily less sophisticated and self-
conscious than later experim ents in realist fiction, and even the m ost
bureaucratic form s o f w riting acknowledge the fictional basis of their
categorizations. W riters as diverse as Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell,
Thomas Carlyle, and H enry M ayhew not only interpret and invent the poor
in a new w ay, they also m ake available a critical inquiry into the assum ptions
th at allow them to see and construct the social in the first place. W hereas for
us the representation of the poor serves as a "reality check," the insight of the
early Victorians is th at the poor serve as the least m aterial and m ost
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malleable construction. The abstract figure of the poor has, for them and us, a
cultural significance that goes beyond that of a group of hum ans. For us it is
easy to believe that the V ictorians participated in the project of m aking the
poor a central concern a t the sam e tim e as they left them m arginalized and in
some ways oddly unrepresented. But more surprising for us is the
im pressive w it and vigor w ith w hich they protested this very project in
which they w ere engaged.
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Introduction: The C ondition o f England
W hat do w e m ean by a "condition-of-England novel"? All of
the term s for a particular set of early Victorian novels—the social
novel, the social-problem novel, the condition-of-England novel, the
industrial novel—load the dice of the interpretive game, suggesting
that the novels aim to represent directly, or even intervene in and
change, the social. W hen we place a w ork of fiction in one of these
categories, w e have already decided we know a lot about it: that it does
not deal in abstractions; that it is less complicated and self-conscious
than the experim ents in realism of later novels; that because less
com plicated, it is less good than those later novels. The m ost
sophisticated studies of the condition-of-England novel exam ine the
form as p art of a w ider discursive network of debates. But they still
allow the category itself (w ith all it implies about the ready visibility of
intentions and history in the novels) to rem ain relatively intact. In
The Industrial Reformation of English Fiction. C atherine Gallagher
suggests that the industrial novel disappeared w ith the em ergence of a
new "politics of culture," signaled in her narrative by the publication of
Felix H olt and C ulture and Anarchy. This is no m erely natural
evolution: for her the new em phasis on culture represented a retreat
from the political (here represented by the condition-of-England novel)
into m ore abstract issues of representation. Interestingly, she suggests
1
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that the industrial novels offer a desirable alternative to our ow n
retreat into the "politics of culture"; bu t even in questioning the value
of our later sophistication, this narrative still leaves in place the idea
that the earlier novels m ade a relatively naive attem pt at some kind of
direct engagem ent w ith the social. In this study I propose an
alternative story: that the social fiction of the early Victorian period is
already self-consciously abstract, and deploys the idea of a knowable,
m aterial social realm only as a useful fiction. We lose a sense of the
w orks' complexity and generative possibilities if we unim aginatively
assume that the early Victorians were incapable of recognizing the
social as a narrative construction. We m ight see the industrial novels
not as a rapidly outdated experim ent, bu t as the beginning of an
exploration of the politics of the abstract.
Rather than assum ing that the industrial novelists and their
contem poraries are foundationalist in their assum ptions—in other
w ords, that they claim or hope to make unm ediated contact w ith the
social—we m ight attem pt to p u t our ow n knowing, foundationalist
assum ptions in question. The idea of this study is not to overturn
altogether our beliefs about the early Victorians, but to trouble som e of
the term s through w hich w e understand the w ritings of the period. I
w ould like to suggest that the Victorians themselves questioned the
grounds of their knowledge in this way. While early Victorian
2
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writings, including the "industrial novels," can of course be read
sim ply as reactions to rapidly changing social conditions, they m ight be
read also as skeptical explorations of the ways in which these
conditions can be known in the first place. The condition-of-England
novel and the political commentaries and diatribes that surround it are
not so much readings of the social, as readings of the form s through
w hich we investigate, debate, and hence invent social knowledge.
My investigation of the condition-of-England novel begins w ith
w hat I will argue is the m ost pow erful image of society for the early
Victorian period w as the poor house, for the m ost im portant project of
social invention w as the problem of nam ing, knowing, and m anaging
the poor. The problem provided an occasion for a variety of new
forms: the condition-of-England novel of course, but also the
extravagantly detailed investigations of H enry Mayhew, the vast
reports of the Royal Commission of Inquiry, and a plethora of political
essays by such commentators as Thomas Carlyle, H arriet M artineau,
and William Cobbett. Focusing on the poor law debate allows m e to
read dialectically: in that analysis, rereading the condition-of-England
novel provides a means of seeing the w ider debate over pauper
m anagem ent in new ways, and techniques useful in dealing w ith the
novels find a corresponding complexity and production of uncertainty
in non-literary texts. Reading beyond literary texts yields the possibility
3
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that for the authors of those w orks, no less than for the novelists, the
construction of the poor is always a fiction. M ost criticism has focused
on these texts as vehicles for social control that present themselves as
encyclopedically full of authoritative facts. This is not all they offer. If
we assum e that their goal was com pleteness and definitiveness then it
is easy to read them either as dangerous or as comic failures. However,
if self-criticism is their goal, then they are interesting and provocative
successes, and their success lies in their insights into the form ation of
knowledge. To see connections between such texts and their novelistic
counterparts is not to suggest that the poor, bureaucracy, and the
industrial revolution were figm ents of the early Victorian
im agination. But it is to suggest that in their social and political
w ritings the early Victorians w ere highly self-critical, and
acknowledged that there was no position of absolute epistemological
security available to them. They can be read not as m oving from the
real to abstraction in their social and political thought, but as exploring
their ow n abstraction in an effort, doubtless, to m anage and control, but
also to know in new, unstable, and open ways.
How are w e to know how and w hat the Victorians thought
about the poor? For traditional critics1 , the apparent concern of such
novels w ith the social is an em barrassm ent. These critics often seem
uncom fortable w ith any association of literature w ith the social; for
4
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some the label "social novel" itself carries a stigm a, as it em phasizes
the parochially historical and political at the expense of m ore
fundam ental truths. Historians have not always offered m uch more
complex accounts of the relations between history and literature: E. P.
Thompson, for example, represents Dickens not as caught up in
ideology but as an heroic individual w riting against the m ean spirit of
his age. Subsequent critics of Thom pson's w ork, such as Joan Wallach
Scott, have questioned the usefulness of his hum anist claim to have
imm ersed his study in the experience of actual people, em phasizing
the m ediation of that experience through language,2 and the
im possibility of a universalizing account of history. But to some extent
w hile Scott points out and redresses Thom pson's failure particularly to
em phasize the category of gender, her m ethod in other ways is not
necessarily an advance from Thompson. Thom pson does, for all his
shortcom ings, read the past in search of ideas w ith w hich to inform
and criticize the present (counteracting, famously, the "enorm ous
condescension of posterity" fThe Making of the English W orking Class.
12]). Scott, m odest in her ow n claims to knowledge, seems unw illing
to assum e that the Victorians were capable of the sam e degree of self-
consciousness. I do not suggest, in an exaggeration of Scott's position,
that it is fruitless to claim any knowledge of the historical context of the
texts under consideration, nor, taking the position of traditional critics
5
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to an extrem e, that it w ould be m isguided to read them as responding
to rapidly changing social conditions. Instead, in this study I give the
Victorian texts m ore credit: I argue that they them selves refect the idea
of definitive explanation, and question the very basis of their ow n
reinvention of the social.
We m ight tu rn our critical gaze on the persistent critique that
sees the invention of the poor as a tool of m anagem ent, and draw
attention to the tautologies that govern such conclusions. The
assum ptions of historical studies that focus on the ideologies of
managem ent are not as dissim ilar as we m ight expect It is an
interesting irony that histories by two w riters who appear clearly to be
polar opposites, G ertrude Himmelfarb and Michel Foucault, should
each feature the sam e villain: Jeremy Bentham. An analysis of their
treatm ent of this pivotal figure in the study of poverty w ill help
indicate w hat understanding my study has to offer, hi both
H im m elfarb's The Idea of Poverty and Foucault's Discipline and
Punish. Bentham serves as a stable center around w hich Himmelfarb
and Foucault construct their critiques of managem ent. Himmelfarb
objects to Bentham as a particularly extrem e exam ple of a tendency to
view the poor as an undifferentiated mass rather than as com plex
individual characters. Himmelfarb sees him as "alien . . . to the spirit
of the tim e" in that he did not try to distinguish (as the N ew Poor Laws
6
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did) between, the deserving and undeserving poor, and in that his
efforts ran counter to those of the novelists, w hom she describes
unabashedly as "m oralizing" the poor. As opposed to Bentham, the
novelists "ascribe to the poor a m oral identity that m ade them, in this
respect at least, the peers of the rich" (521). Bentham, for Himmelfarb,
is rational and inhum an: in his plan for pauper m anagem ent, "each
feature . . . w hich m ight be thought illiberal or inhum an, was declared
to be em inently rational and enlightened" (82).
For Foucault, Bentham is not alien b u t central to the
"m oralizing" spirit of the time. In Foucault's analysis the distinction
betw een the m oralizing novelists and the inhum an Bentham does not
hold, because Bentham 's project precisely w as to m oralize, in the sense
that the point of the panopticon (an institution designed in the same
spirit as his plan for pauper m anagem ent) was to separate and
individualize inm ates and cause them to enforce m orality on
themselves: "The crowd — is abolished and replaced by a collection of
separated individualities"; "the inm ates should be caught up in a
pow er situation of w hich they them selves are the bearers" (201).
W hile Him m elfarb opposes the m orally responsible individual to the
im personality of institutional pow er, for Foucault the very idea of the
responsible individual is a mechanism o f pow er. But for both Foucault
and H im m elfarb, Bentham 's totalizing project m anipulates and
7
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controls absolutely. It seems highly im probable, adm ittedly, th at
anyone could argue that Bentham w as not interested in control, b u t it
is possible to see Bentham as divided against himself. Rather than
sim ply failing to be hum ane, Bentham him self perform s his ow n
version of Foucault's critique of the division betw een charitable,
hum ane responses and institutional incarceration, arguing that the
"hum ane" is in fact an unself-conscious system itself. He does not
m erely dism iss or im pose categories, he questions the usefulness of
categories that presuppose a free and rational individual subject.
Him m elfarb and Foucault use a m onolithic version of Bentham to
hold in place their readings of the period, but to substitute a self-critical
Bentham is to open up other possible narratives.
How, then, are we to read these texts as historically and
politically situated b u t not epistem ologically naive? I first envisioned
this project as an extension of the w ork o f Raymond W illiams, who
unlike earlier critics of the condition-of-England novel m easures them
according to the extent of w hat he sees as their conscious political
engagem ent. N ot desiring to see the novels or any texts as
transcending the historical situation w ithin w hich they w ere w ritten,
he puts them , in C ulture and Society, w ithin a w ider tradition of social
criticism and a developing ideology of political w ithdraw al. In praising
Gaskell over Disraeli, Williams chooses to attack D israeli's Sybil for its
8
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lack of political purpose: 'T h e novel w ould be fascinating if it w ere
only political" (97). He lam ents the ideology o r "general structure of
feeling" th at balances recognition o f evil w ith "fear of becoming
involved" (109). Like Gallagher, he sees Felix H olt especially as a
retreat from the political possibilities of earlier novels, less sanguine
though he m ay be about their pow er. For both critics, the idea that the
earlier industrial novels have political pow er rests partly on the
assum ptions that their pow er derives from their im m ersion in the
real, and th at self-consciousness w ould detract from their ideological
force. W here m y study departs from W illiams is in seeing the novels
as engaging in politics at the same tim e as they put the term s of that
engagem ent under exam ination. W illiam s characterizes the industrial
novel as "an interesting group of novels, w ritten at the m iddle of the
century, w hich not only provide som e of the m ost vivid descriptions
of life in an unsettled industrial society, but also illustrate certain
common assum ptions w ithin w hich the direct response w as being
undertaken" (87). But the novels w ere not necessarily trying to offer
up "vivid descriptions," they w ere in part, in m y view, exam ining
their ow n position and questioning the possibility that a "direct
response" could be undertaken at all. The readings offered by W illiams
and G allagher continue to be very im portant to my project; but w e too
can go further than m aking judgm ents as to the intentions and
9
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ideological force of texts. We can also inquire into our ow n m ethods
and m otives in constructing the texts as w e do.
W hat w e may be protecting, in im agining ourselves as having
progressed beyond the supposed lack of sophistication of the early
Victorians, is our ow n im m ersion in certain conventional w ays of
know ing the social that for them did not yet appear self-evidently
appropriate, and were m ore obviously open to question. The
representation of poverty and the poor tends to serve for us as a
"reality check," as a historical and social circumstance of enough
im port that skepticism over the possibility of engaging directly w ith the
social m ay w ell seem beside the point and self-indulgent. But the
insight of the early Victorians is that the poor serve as the least
m aterial and most malleable social construction. The figure of the
poor, an abstraction, has for them and us, a cultural significance that
goes beyond that of a group of hum ans. For us it is easy to believe that
the Victorians participated in the project of m aking the poor a central
concern at the same tim e as leaving them m arginalized and in some
ways oddly unrepresented. But m ore surprising for us is the
im pressive w it and vigor w ith w hich they protested this very project
in w hich they were engaged.
Conservative nostalgia for the Victorian period, of the sort p u t
to use by Himmelfarb and m any others, em phasizes the confident
10
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m oral outrage and self-disciplined, patrician hum anity of the period.
These Victorians serve as a refuge from the relativist judgm ents and
the im personal, bureaucratic m anagem ent or interference that
characterizes o ur evil m odernity. One w ay to counter this use of the
Victorians is to construct them instead as constantly self-questioning,
as offering a skeptical critique of their ow n judgm ents, even w hen
apparently at their m ost polemical and controlling. We can accept that
the early Victorian period w as m arked by the invention of a new, more
extensive bureaucracy, and of a corresponding discourse of social
protest that lam ented this fact. But the tw o sides of this debate together
invented a new and com plicated form of social know ledge, that we
would do w ell to recover.
N otes
1 Such as Kathleen Tillotson or Arnold Kettle; see note 1 in C hapter 3.
2 Scott also criticizes G areth Stedman Jones for his too literalist reading
of language: "he slips back into the notion that lan g u ag e' reflects a
'reality' external to it, rather than being constitutive of th at reality"
(Gender and the Politics of History. 57).
11
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Chapter 1: Bentham, D ickens, and the U ses o f the W orkhouse
The V ictorian w orkhouse has come to sym bolize on one hand
systematic, institutional cruelty inform ed by abstract economic
principles, and on the other the moral heroism of social critics who
saw through and indignantly protested this inhum ane dogm a. This is
another way of saying that the workhouse is strongly associated w ith
Jeremy Bentham and w ith Charles Dickens.1 To m aintain this polarity
between villainous theorist and heroic novelist, how ever, is to be
ungenerous to both parties. Both authors make available criticism s of
the position of outraged self-righteousness. Each may serve to
question the distinction between the hum ane and the institutional,
and even betw een free and incarcerated individual subjects.2
Some historical claims will pave the w ay for this more
complicated account. The Poor Law Am endm ent Act of 1834, the first
Act preceded by the large-scale investigations of a Royal Commission,
established a central authority supervising the Poor Laws. By
attem pting to m ake relief dependent on residence in the w orkhouse
the Act also aim ed to reinforce the distinction between the
"deserving" poor who w ere w illing to w ork and the "undeserving,"
work-shy poor. The Act was and is usually seen as m ore or less
B entham ite.3 Bentham had published his ow n outline of a plan for
workhouses entitled Pauper M anagem ent Im proved in 1798; it w as
12
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reprinted in 1802 and 1812, and there w ere plans to republish in the
years preceding the New Poor Law, b u t Bentham died in 1832/ By way
of protest against the Act, Dickens published O liver Tw ist (1837-9); he
continued his critique in O ur M utual Friend (1864-5). It is debatable
w hether the New Poor Law brought about any radical m aterial
changes,5 but it certainly served as a center of debate around which
questions of how to know and manage the poor could be raised. Since
Dickens is often seen as a pioneer of social fiction, and Bentham as a
doctrinaire social engineer, we m ight not expect them to be critical of
their ow n m ethods. But to read them otherw ise, as self-critical and
skeptical, is to see originating, at the same tim e as the invention of
large-scale state-sponsored social investigation and representation, an
awareness of the theoretical lim itations of contem porary attem pts to
understand and engage w ith the social.
In his am bitious plan, Bentham stipulated th at all the poor
w ould come under one central authority and th at relief w ould only be
granted on adm ittance to a workhouse—hence the need for its vast
scale (the system w ould eventually, he suggests, contain one m illion
people). G ertrude Himmelfarb describes the plan as "bizarre" (The
Idea of Poverty, ix), as a particularly egregious exam ple of a freakishly
controlling, anti-individualist attem pt to "de-m oralize" the poor—to
judge them as a group, rather than on an individual basis w ithin a
13
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m oral framework. She contrasts Bentham 's inhum anity to the
sensitivity of Dickens and other dissenting m oral w riters she sees as
defending the uniqueness and choice of die individual6. In this view
Dickens rejects altogether any institutional m anagem ent of the poor,
in favor of a more natural, personal and hum ane relationship
between the classes: everyone is to be judged and treated according to
their individual m erit. Bentham, though, refuses to acknowledge that
any case is different from any other, and ignores the relative m erits of
different individuals, treating everyone in the sam e economic
circumstances as an indistinct p art of a group. In insisting on the
necessity for rigorous categorization Bentham em phasizes the
irrelevance of personal relations and individual endeavors.
But Bentham him self offers a criticism in his plan of the
distinction between his rigorously system atic and institutional
approach and some more hum ane, natural, and individual way of
studying, and dealing w ith, the poor. He rejects the giving of private
charity as ineffectual, or even harm ful to "habits of industry," insofar
as it is not part of som e sweeping, institutional change. H e sees his
system as "true charity," the creation of an environm ent th at enables
and in fact compels the poor to be "deserving," som ething a system
th at relies on individual judgm ent cannot do. Bentham essentially
rejects the distinction betw een deserving and undeserving, since he
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sees character as socially produced. For Bentham the poor are already
shaped (or dam agingly unshaped) by the less controlled—less well-
m anaged—environm ent outside his system. Bentham 's p lan is to
organize every aspect of the lives of the poor, and thereby make
charity an institution, not just an arbitrary, unhelpful interference
w ith the labor m arket. Bentham sees his institution as nurturing and
controlling at the sam e time; he acknowledges no separation between
charitable sym pathy and the operations of the m arketplace, and no
insuperable barrier betw een private feelings and institutions.
A corollary of this constructivist argum ent could be to see w hat
Himmelfarb describes as Dickens's own "individualizing" m oral
standards, his "suprem e act of moral im agination" (487-8), as
systematic, an integral p art of the ideology of thrift, hard w ork, and
obedience that served his ow n class and insidiously underw rote his
w ork as m uch as it does Bentham 's more overtly controlling plan.
But this approach still presupposes that it is useful to view the
w ritings of Bentham and Dickens as stable and as self-confidently self-
interested; in this kind of interpretation the authors are both villains,
cynically or deludedly m anipulating and serving their readers. It is
more generous to allow th at they are troubled by concerns of their
ow n about the debates over social institutions and the question of how
the poor can be known. Like Bentham, Dickens in this alternative
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reading does not, despite his protests against the poor law s, establish
an absolute distinction betw een the institutional and the hum ane. In
his novels the institutional has only a shadow y presence as an
insubstantial sym bol th at can be woven into various and contradictory
narratives. The novels raise a doubt as to how far the social can be
grasped at all. Dickens makes available not only righteous indignation,
but also a critique of comfortable ways of seeing and understanding
institutions and their products and creators. For Bentham the idea of
the free w ill of the individual is a fiction, and the hum ane m ust be
institutional; for Dickens the social itself is fictional, and even the
workhouse can be w oven into plots of love as well as of suffering.
The w ork of each can be seen as questioning the assum ptions that
allow an engagem ent w ith social issues, and as provocatively attacking
self-righteous, knowing analyses of class relations and the poor.
Bentham and the Fiction of Judgm ent
Jeremy Bentham did not invent the w orkhouse or the poor.
Bentham does m aintain an allegiance to certain conventional m oral
judgm ents, and to a paternalist m odel of relations betw een the classes
and betw een the genders. He also, and at the sam e tim e, offers a
reworking of the criticism of the distinction betw een deserving and
undeserving poor. W hile he still uses the term and category "people
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of good character," his rem edy for w hat he sees as the current failure
to engineer people of good character is a w holesale change in the
environm ent that produces the poor. Bentham does not rely on
m oralizing: the poor w ill still have overseers w ho w ill assess them ,
b u t the assessm ent w ill m easure productivity. Bentham proposes an
institution that will provide opportunity and incentives, and in the
end make it m andatory and inevitable, for everyone to live up to the
standards set for the "deserving"—that they be industrious and thrifty.
The system Bentham proposes is in effect a separate and total society;
his notes state: "The w hole establishm ent applied to the several
different purposes of a poor house—an hospital—a house of
correction—a prison—a paw nbroking establishm ent—a bank for the
poor—an inn for the poor, &c. &c., w ithout prejudice to any, and
m uch to the advantage of many, of the objects in view" (W orks. Vffl:
385). This environm ent will im prison but also reform and nurture the
poor—for Bentham there is no contradiction, since the poor are
already less hum anely shaped and restricted by the environm ent
outside his system. Part of Bentham 's im agined reform ation of the
poor involves granting them access to institutions the m oneyed have,
like banks, that currently exclude them. His system is a dram atization
of the desire to shape the poor in the im age of the m iddle class.
Bentham w ill not allow details like disparities in w ealth to separate
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the classes. But this system atic, institutional solution to the problem s
of class division and the relief of poverty constitutes a critique of the
idea of an authentic, non-institutional sym pathy, and the idea of a
non-institutional, natural poor.
Bentham does not oppose charity per se. His creation of an
environm ent that enables and com pels the poor to be "deserving" will
replace "false charity, the enem y no less of comfort than of industry7
(430) w ith a "true charity" th at prom otes comforts as w ell as virtue
(and profits). Private charity does not, for Bentham, take place in a
special realm outside of the m arketplace, but interferes detrim entally
w ith the labor m arket. Bentham wishes to make charity an
institution—a business, in fact. His plan is of a centralized
organization of poor-houses run not by the governm ent b u t by a joint-
stock company (since this replaces the compulsion of the poor-rates
w ith the "freedom " to invest—"the contribution being transferred
from the unwilling to the w illing"—and the supposed m anagerial
advantages of private ow nership). He suggests, w ith typically limited
elan, th at the nam e of the com pany should be the "N ational Charity
Com pany" (369). For Bentham it is the market, especially in its ideals
of w ork and productivity, that is beyond reproach; he questions
(though he does not disregard altogether) other cultural formations.
The goal of his charity com pany is to bring all the poor into an ideal
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relation w ith w ork, and to m easure precisely and control that w ork.
As everyone's life is turned to account in this w ay, the need for
distinguishing betw een the crim inal and the law -abiding, or between
the unfortunate and the irresponsible, will disappear.
These distinctions are irrelevant in the context of Bentham 's
belief that to a great extent hum an nature is a construction, a product
of its social context. Similarly Bentham has no faith in the idea that
thrift and providence are organically part of the w orking class and can
be cultivated; he sees such qualities as created, or rendered
unnecessary, through carefully planned engineering. In his letter to
the editor of the A nnals of A griculture, in w hich he solicits
inform ation from each parish in order to provide figures for Pauper
M anagem ent Im proved (apparently, the first editor of the collected
works suggests, w ith little or no response, though of course this
probably m akes it easier to design a plan in detail), Bentham indicates
his lack of faith in the idea that the situation of the poor can be
improved by exhorting them to be thrifty:
Some are for doing everything by savings o u t of earnings;
bu t this w ill n o t do very well where there can be no
savings, still less w here there can be no ea rn in g s the
recipe is good for the provident. U nfortunately, the bulk
of labouring hands, especially the high paid ones, is
composed of the im provident. Providence may, by proper
facilities (for encouragem ent is scarcely necessary,) be
rendered more general; b u t m an m ust be new m ade,
before it can be m ade universal. (367)
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For Bentham , m oralizing rhetoric misses the point, since the
distinction betw een the m oral and im m oral depends on the fiction of
the free w ill of the subject. Bentham sees the poor as lim ited, if not
created, by their environm ent, and so he proposes to change
substantively th at environm ent. H is plan is to take one section of
hum anity, the poor, and make it new.
Bentham 's design w ill organize and regulate the behavior and
m otives of each individual, though for him this social engineering
appears neither "unnatural" nor inhum ane, since the behavior of the
poor already entirely depends on their surroundings. He structures
his w orkhouses in p art according to w hat he calls "Separation and
Aggregation" (372), a set of divisions based largely on capacity for
work, b u t also w ith health, morals and decency in mind. The desires
of the poor are im portant to the system, and Bentham considers them
infinitely controllable; his classifications assist in this control. He
insists on a separation, "for prevention of unsatisfiable desires,"
between those given "choicer fare" for some reason, and those given
the usual m inim al fare; "between sex and sex"; and between "the
indigenous and quasi-indigenous stock of the non-adult class" and
"the coming-and-going stock, who m ight excite hankerings after
em ancipation, by flattering pictures of the w orld a t large" (372). For
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their ow n good, Bentham w ants to lim it strictly the stories and desires
of his poor. The very last paragraph of the w ork dem ands "hi the
article of diet, no unsatisfied longings, no repinings:—nothing w ithin
knowledge that is not w ithin reach" (439). Bentham does not see this
as an interference w ith nature—on the contrary, since appetites for
"variety of diet" are anyway arbitrarily and artificially created, he
argues that nature provides for equal enjoym ent of insipid food by
those used only to such food. He closes the plan by saying that "in this
way all the efforts of art are but a vain struggle to pass the limits set to
enjoym ent by the hand of nature." His system , then, by this logic, is in
a sense natural. For Bentham there is no clear separation between the
institutional and the hum an or "natural," since for him the hum an is
constructed socially and institutionally.
Analyses such as this one of diet make Bentham a good, easy
target for critics such as Dickens, and later Himmelfarb and others.
But if w e dism iss Bentham's plan for its controlling aspects, we risk
overlooking a rigorous critique of m oral judgm ents of the poor.
Similarly w e can locate in the w ork an allegiance to paternal relations
betw een the poor and their m asters, and to the fam ilial m etaphor for
the organization of relations between the classes—bu t at the same
tim e som e of his suggestions trouble supposedly non-institutional
ideas of the family, and of the sym pathetic ties betw een "gentlem en"
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and the "authentic" poor. Bentham 's plan purports to enable a
stabilizing, or an im provem ent, of the family, offering a cure for the
"disease" of familial instability at the level of individual families and,
by extension, in the sphere of class relations. His poor-houses w ould
m ake particularly good use of bastards, who are usefully mobile (the
"absence of natural connexion m ight afford room for transferring
them , w ithout hardship, and in any num bers, to any proper
situation"). He m ight also discover w ays to im prove on m othering
techniques by taking the opportunity to p u t them to the test: in his
chapter on "Child-Nursing" he lists the "G reat advantages the
Com pany's infants w ould have, in com parison w ith those of private
families, even of the m ost opulent, m uch m ore of the in d ig e n t. . .
Best m ode of bringing up by hand, a particular field for experim ent"
(391). For Bentham the family, an institution like any other, has
arbitrary lim itations that can be w orked on. One im plication of this is
that if his plan openly embraces ideological control, then the family
differs from other institutions only in being less efficient.
Like the family, Bentham 's institution nurtures as m uch as it
controls. Bentham does not believe that it necessarily helps to be
punitive; for example w ith relation to unruly family m em bers,
im prisonm ent, he writes, offers only an "aggravation of the disease . . .
dom estic disorders are, as it were, w ithout rem edy" (419). The rem edy
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w ill be his poor-houses, or "industry-houses" as he calls them here,
w hich w ill also have the function of a "reformation-house" for "bad"
w ives or apprentices. Also they "m ight be little less useful in the
capacity of an asylum against dom estic tyranny." (In both cases, in
keeping w ith the conventional paternalism of the project, it is
apparently m ore im portant that wom en and children be under
protection and supervision, since they enter the poor-house and the
father, m aster, or husband remains at large.) These suggestions come
in the ninth chapter, titled "Domestic Morality Enforced" This
protectively subjugating m odel of dom estic order is extended later in
the chapter to cover the relations between enforcers of justice and
crim inals, and by extension m asters and the poor as a whole: "It is in
tru th but through w ant of wisdom , not by any law of nature, that the
disparity has rem ained hitherto so w ide betw een penal justice and
dom estic discipline. Good order is a condition not less necessary to the
delicacies of dom estic com fort, than to the utm ost severities of public
justice. The presence of the fostering hand is not less necessary to the
infant, of the feeding hand to the hungry . . . of the healing hand to the
sick . . . of the m inistering hand to the luxurious, than th at of the
avenging hand to the crim inal who is to be punished for his crimes"
(420). The hand suggested in this w ise and not unnatural connection
of dom estic and public order links all of society's w ants and needs
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together; all classes, and all divisions of each class, are catered to and
m ade equivalent in this familial vision. Bentham does no t construct
his workhouses only as punitive, bu t also, and inseparably, as
m inistering, healing, and nurturing. He em phasizes, "There is
nothing either in relief or correction, that should render them
incapable of being adm inistered—adm inistered to the pinnacle of
perfection—w ithin the com pass of the sam e w alls."
Bentham also does not consider his proposed w orkhouse
system deadeningly im personal; he represents his "separation and
aggregation" as enlivening. He is able to offer the same rhetoric of
deadliness in his criticism of w hat he sees as the lifeless current system
that w e m ight expect his detractors to use against him: "In the
arrangem ent of the proposed industry-house plan, special care is taken
that each distinct claim to extra comforts, w hether on the ground of
special merit, or past prosperity, or peculiarly afflictive infirmity, shall
be held up to notice, in the view of receiving, though it w ere at the
Com pany's expense, the indulgence com petent to it. The existing
poor-houses know of no such distinctions; they know of no such
claims. Everything lies prostrate upon the same dead and dreary level:
the virtuous and the vicious, the habitual beggar and the m an of
fallen fortunes, the healthy and the agonizing—all are confounded
together, in the poor-house as in the grave" (429). For Bentham the
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institutional and apparently im personal enables understanding and
gives life, w hile reliance on arbitrary, inconsistent, personal judgm ent
takes away meaning. Bentham suggests that categorization is
necessary to make sense of and create the poor as anything other than
an undifferentiated m ass, and th at such distinctions m ust be
deliberately m anufactured and applied; he m akes it very difficult to
take the position that distinctions are self-evident and applied through
a natural process.
Sometimes Bentham is so rigorous in his desire to totalize his
system that certain distinctions seem on the point of being erased.
U nder Bentham's system it will be impossible no t to be a productive
worker, and impossible to do anything that is not w ork. He offers
categorization not just as a w ay of apportioning benefits, b u t also as a
means of ascertaining and harnessing the w ork-potential of everyone
in the system (the frequent lists of the benefits of the system make it
clear that both are understood as in the interests of both the poor and
the overseers). But Bentham m ust define w ork broadly and
generously. This is how Bentham describes one of his central
principles, in note form and then in an excited flurry of rhetoric:
All-employing principle. Reasons—H ealth, am usem ent,
m orality, (i.e. preservation from vice and mischief,) as
well as economy. N ot one in a hundred is absolutely
incapable of all em ploym ent. Not the m otion of a
finger—not a step—not a w ink—not a w hisper—b u t
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m ight be turned to account in the w ay of profit in a
system of such a m agnitude.. . . A bed-ridden person if
he can see and converse, may be fit for inspection; or
though blind, if he can sit up in the bed, m ay knit, spin,
&c.&c. (382)
For Bentham w ork is not a self-evident category; his generous (even if
obsessive and controlling) definition suggests th at w hat is w ork
depends on the context, h i the right context everything is w ork. Once
again, since capacity and willingness to w ork are such im portant
elem ents in the assessm ent of the poor, Bentham m akes it difficult to
take up a stable position from which to judge.
Dickens and the Spectral W orkhouse
W here Bentham has been the villain in the w orkhouse debate,
Dickens has been the hero; bu t his ow n w ork challenges this story.
Dickens, like Bentham, m akes it difficult for a reader to take up a self-
satisfied position from w hich to read his fiction, poking fun at the idea
that novels of social protest offer the opportunity for self-righteous
indignation. The school at which Bradley H eadstone teaches in O ur
M utual Friend serves as a satire of earnest good intentions, and even
of the earlier O liver Twist. The school is "a place — pervaded by the
grimly ludicrous pretence that every pupil w as childish and innocent.
This pretence, m uch favoured by the lady-visitors, led to the ghastliest
absurdities/' One of these ghastly absurdities lies in the m oralizing
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narratives the children in the school are forced to read: "unw ieldy
young dredgers and hulking m udlarks w ere referred to the
experiences of Thomas Twopence, who, having resolved not to rob
(under circum stances of uncom m on atrocity) his particular friend and
benefactor, of eighteenpence, presently came into supernatural
possession of three and sixpence, and lived a shining light ever
afterw ards" (Our M utual Friend. 263). Readers of O liver Tw ist will
recall the unflinching innocence of Oliver and recognize his story in
the plot of Thomas Twopence: Oliver, having faced circum stances of
uncom m on atrocity, refuses to rob his benefactor or anyone else,
begging Bill Sikes to allow him to die instead, and lives a shining light
from first to last, eventually being providentially rew arded w ith a
place in a w ealthy family. Despite having been raised in a workhouse,
O liver speaks perfect Standard English at the age of nine. He is a
natural gentlem an, tem porarily displaced—unlike the aw kw ard, self-
conscious and "mechanical" teacher Bradley H eadstone in O ur M utual
Friend, w hose years of education have barely enabled him to rise out
of the w orking class.
One w ay to read this scene w ould be to em phasize the contrast
betw een this school and Dickens's own fiction. Dickens, in this
reading, in ridiculing the school and the stories, teachers and "lady-
visitors" associated w ith it, asserts his ow n difference as a m anly
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realist—an authentic social critic who does not cater to the squeam ish,
deluded tastes of "lady-visitors." Along these lines Dickens's
revisiting, in the later novel, of the workhouse, the emblem o f his
status as m oral crusader since the publication of O liver Twist, can be
read as an attem pt to signify and reinforce his own ongoing, solid and
grounded position as social critic—as opposed to those do-gooders
living in a fantasy w orld of "grim ly ludicrous pretence." But such
readings ignore the possibility of seeing Dickens as self-critical, as
aw are of the tem ptation to sustain self-protective fictions. The satire
of the school, described as a "tem ple of good intentions," can be seen as
a wholesale disavowal of "good intentions." The narrator addresses
critically, for example, the ideology of charity. He em phasizes the
im portance of the class differences between those who m anage the
school and take it upon themselves to m anage the students, and the
students themselves, whose "great Preparatory Establishm ent" has
been "the streets." So that the teachers may sustain their ow n fiction
that they are im parting an im portant education, the students'
attention is sustained through coercion—bored, inattentive students
have their faces "sm oothed"—and it is clear that the aims of the
school have m ore to do w ith the gratification of the teachers and
patrons than the students. The idea that this charity helps is a
convenient fiction, and leads to bad storytelling.
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The disavow al of knowingness extends beyond the criticism of
charity. In both novels the w orkhouse itself is actually an unstable
presence, one created in a num ber of conflicting w ays by different
narratives. If the w orkhouse can be seen as providing a sense of
purpose, rooting the fiction in a tangible social problem , it can also be
seen as an undoing of the fiction. Both novels can be understood as
being "about" the various narrative uses to w hich the w orkhouse can
be pu t—including, perhaps, as a mostly m ythic creation that can be
despised in order to protect com forting fictions of gentlem anliness and
charity. The strenuousness of the protest and debate over the
workhouse and the N ew Poor Law offers a welcome distraction from
any w ider concern w ith class relations, specifically w ith relations in
the workplace. But rather than sim ply argue that protests like that of
Dickens are happily reinforcing the problem s they claim to be solving,
it is possible to see him and others as investigating their ow n position
in the debate, and questioning the term s of that debate.
A lthough it is inviting in analyzing O liver Tw ist to em phasize
O liver's passivity, he does make a num ber of active choices that have
a bearing on the role of the workhouse in the novel. H e has a
genteelly childish, public-school kind of romance w ith his fellow
innocent little Dick. Their relationship is not unlike th at of the lawyer
room m ates in O ur M utual Friend. Eugene and M ortim er, as described
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by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (in Between M en. 161-179). In Sedgwick's
analysis, this kind of affectionate, non-physical relationship is specific
in this period to those of a privileged class, bu t the w orkhouse inm ates
O liver and Dick are a m odel of affection and propriety. This is how
they part: '"K iss m e/ said the child [Dick], clim bing up the low gate,
and flinging his arm s around O liver's neck. 'G ood-b'ye, dear! God bless
you!"' (Oliver Twist. 97). The narrator m entions here that O liver
never forgets Dick, and indeed at the m om ent w hen H arry and Rose
M aylie become engaged, almost at the end of the novel, he is suddenly
rem inded of his own loss. He weeps, and the narrator reflects: "It is a
w orld of disappointm ent; often to the hopes we m ost cherish, and
hopes that do our nature the greatest honour. Poor Dick w as dead!"
(465). It is w orth noting that this indicates a nostalgia for the tim e
w hen Oliver w as in the workhouse, which is apparently w here he
generated his m ost cherished hope. The workhouse has persecuted
the children, but it has also throw n them together and given them the
opportunity to play—Dick "had been [Oliver's] little friend and
playm ate. They had been beaten and starved, and sh u t up together,
m any and m any a tim e" (96). Just as Bentham 's w orkhouse can
nurture at the same tim e as it controls, here Dickens's w orkhouse
signifies in contradictory ways: it generates plots of violence b u t also of
love.
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One threat raised in O liver Tw ist is that O liver w ill be changed,
despite his gentlemanly nature, into a brute, through the accident of
his birth in a workhouse. The narrator assures us at one point that
Oliver "w as in a fair way of being reduced, for life, to a state of brutal
stupidity and sullenness by the ill-usage he had received" (72). But
there seem s little evidence of this elsewhere, and his relationship w ith
Dick, for one thing, suggests otherwise. The one occasion w hen Oliver
does actually become unruly, in feet dow nright violent, is w hen he is
m ost anxious to assert him self as separate from the workhouse and
the class it is designed to manage. W hen Noah Claypole identifies
Oliver w ith the institution in which he was raised by calling him
"W ork'us," and suggests that his m other was a prostitute, Oliver
shakes him by the throat and knocks him dow n w ith a punch. "His
breast heaved; his attitude w as erect; his eyes bright and vivid; his
whole person changed, as he stood glaring over the cowardly
torm entor who now lay crouching at his feet: and defied him w ith an
energy he had never known before. 'H e'll m urder me!' blubbered
Noah" (88). This is the nearest O liver gets to com m itting a capital
offense and fulfilling the destiny some of the board members at the
w orkhouse predict for him (that he will be hanged). Elsewhere it may
be a source of fear that O liver will change and end up terrorizing
people as Sikes does, but right here "his whole person change[sl," and
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he adm inisters a sound and manly beating on an upstart boy—as a
beadle m ight do. W here ill treatm ent horn the likes of Mr. Bumble
and confinem ent in the workhouse conspicuously fail to change
O liver's dem eanor, O liver's ow n disavow al of the w orkhouse and
identification w ith respectability succeeds.
For those who are on the side of good intentions, the m ost
disturbing mom ent in O liver's history is the m om ent he laughs out
loud a t Fagin—though for those on the side of good storytelling, this is
the m ost reassuring moment:
[Fagin] w ould tell them stories of robberies he had
com m itted in his younger days: mixed up w ith so m uch
that w as droll and curious, that Oliver could not help
laughing heartily, and showing that he was am used in
spite of all his better feelings. In short, the wily old Jew
had the boy in his toils . . . he was now slowly instilling
into his soul the poison which he had hoped w ould
blacken it, and change its hue for ever. (185)
W hen this is viewed alongside the suggestion in O ur M utual Friend
that m oralizing stories are so tedious they are better not told, there
seems to be som ething very irresponsible and antisocial about telling
stories at all. Stories, good ones at least, threaten otherw ise secure
identities and reorder experience in all sorts of uncom fortable ways.
This passage could be seen as a w arning that there is som ething
unwholesom e and anarchic in the activity of w riting and reading this
novel—that the novel m ay not do for us w hat our "better feelings"
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think it should. O liver does survive Fagin's stories, as w e m ight
expect, since earlier in the novel he indicates (quite properly) that he
w ants nothing to do w ith w riting. The naive Mr. Brownlow has
discussed the subject w ith Oliver, who has an instinct for w hat is
im portant to the class he w ants to join: '"W hat! W ouldn't you like to
be a book-w riter?' said the old gentleman. Oliver considered a little
while; and said at last, he should think it w ould be a m uch better thing
to be a bookseller" (145). The only model for a storyteller in the novel
is Fagin, and the last thing he w ould be interested in w ould be a
socially responsible critique of the workhouse.
If the w orkhouse is of slippery and uncertain status and
influence in O liver Twist, it is certainly not less so in O ur M utual
Friend. In his "Postscript" Dickens invites his readers, three decades
later, to sustain o r renew their concern, stating his belief th at "there
has been in England, since the days of the Stuarts, no law so
infam ously adm inistered, no law so often openly violated, no law
habitually so ill-supervised" (Our M utual Friend. 894) as the Poor Law.
Dickens takes care to criticize the adm inistration of the law and not
the law itself—as if to suggest, contrary to Bentham, th at personal
change rather than institutional change is all that is needed. But he
identifies his adversaries as "Circum locutional cham pions" and "my
friend Mr. Bounderby," as if he now feels com pelled to invent his own
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opposition in order to continue a debate that provides gratifying
outrage, o r to rem ind us of the status of his fiction as fiction at the
sam e tim e, apparently, as to assert its social relevance.
As if to em phasize that it has no fixed m eaning, the workhouse
is present in O ur Mutual Friend only insofar as stories are told about
it. Betty H igden is the character in the novel who is m ost obsessed
w ith the w orkhouse, and she is m ore terrified of it because she has
read w ritten accounts of it rather than lived in it. She explains her
horror by saying, "Do I never read in the new spapers . . . how the
w orn-out people that do come to that, get driven from pillar to post, a-
purpose to tire them o u t? Do I never read how they grow heartsick
of it and give it up, after having let themselves drop so low, and how
they after all die out for w ant of help?" (248). H igden's fear drives her
to m ore o r less the sam e death she describes here, but the fault lies not
in some direct, unm ediated way w ith the workhouse, b u t w ith the
story th at is told about it. Mr. Boffin makes a slightly different, but
also dam aging, narrative use of the workhouse; he uses it in a story
that justifies his m iserliness. Boffin tells his gentlem anly secretary
Rokesmith th a t he m odels him self on famous m isers (interpreting
their stories as exem plars rather them as m oralizing tales), and
concludes his speech w ith a dem and to keep expenses dow n, saying
"'Some of us w ill be dying in a workhouse n e x t' 'A s the persons you
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have cited / quietly remark[s] the Secretary, 'thought they w ould, if I
rem em ber, sir"' (535). But Rokesmith is not able to enforce his
"correct" interpretation.
There is no "actual" w orkhouse to pin dow n the validity of any
of these stories and offer a definite m eaning of itself. There is only
one character in the novel who has lived in the workhouse and that is
Sloppy, who w as raised there. The force of direct experience is m ade
w eak and confusing since Sloppy is so inarticulate, and also because
his narrative conflicts w ith the assum ptions of Higden and Boffin.
Like O liver Twist, Sloppy has been nam ed not by his unknown
parents bu t by officials in the w orkhouse. Also like Oliver, he appears
utterly unm arked by the w orkhouse, even though w hat terrifies both
H igden and Boffin about the w orkhouse is that it is supposed to taint
all who com e in contact w ith it. Sloppy him self actually serves as a
sign of virtue and w orth; w hen he stands on H igden's grave the
Reverend Frank M ilvey comments, "N ot a very poor grave . . . w hen
it has that hom ely figure on it. Richer, I think, than it could be m ade
by m ost of the sculpture in W estm inster Abbey!" (578).
Sloppy in som e respects m ight as well be in a workhouse when
he is w ith H igden—his constant turning of the mangle is rem iniscent
of the treadm ill. She operates as a kind of substitute workhouse,
taking in poor children for the parish, and Sloppy has certainly learnt
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that his relief is conditional—he constantly w ants to w ork, an d indeed
can for the m ost p art only express him self through turning his m angle
(he never articulates any story of his ow n about his tim e in the
w orkhouse). It is rather unnecessary and unsurprising th at M rs.
Boffin inform s Sloppy that he w ill be taken care of at h er hom e only
on the condition that he is always "industrious and deserving" (391).
That there should be a test of desert and industriousness (w hich is
w hat the workhouse was designed to be) is not in dispute, b u t here the
test has a hom ely rather than an institutional context. The w orkhouse
seem s to make an appearance even w here it is m ost repudiated; but it
is never substantial enough to provide a solid grounding for an
authentic language of social engagem ent.
Like Bentham 's plan for w orkhouses, then, these novels
construct the workhouse both as nurturing and restrictive—the
w orkhouse runs the gam ut from being a place of love to being a place
of terror. Bentham 's plan underm ines the idea that the w orkhouse is
an unnatural instrum ent of control by suggesting that the idea of a
natural relation between the poor and their m anagers is a fiction—and
in the process suggests the artificial, ideological nature of any
judgm ent and categorization of the poor. The novels draw attention
to the arbitrariness of the poor laws as a carter of debate, and invite a
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critical aw areness of the self-protective possibilities of narrative
constructions of the workhouse, and of social criticism m ore generally.
N otes
1 This is a sim plification, but there seems to be a broad, if highly
qualified, consensus that Dickens is on the side of hum anity w here the
Bentham ites often are not. This is m ost strenuously asserted by F. R.
Leavis, who describes Dickens in H ard Times as "unm istakably
possessed by a com prehensive vision, one in which the inhum anities
of Victorian civilization are seen as fostered and sanctioned by a hard
philosophy, the aggressive form ulation of an inhum ane spirit" (F. R.
and Q. D. Leavis, Dickens the Novelist. 188). George Orwell is
skeptical of Dickens's protest; "Dickens seems to have succeeded in
attacking everybody and antagonizing nobody. N aturally this makes
one w onder if after all there was som ething unreal in his attack on
society" (Collected Essays. Journalism, and Letters. 1: 415). But he still
reads him as peculiarly hum an and "strongly individual," concluding
w ith his rem ark that he sees Dickens's face as the "face of a m an who
is generously angry" (460). E. P. Thom pson uses Dickens as an
exam ple of a kind of hum anity ou t of place in his class and time:
"unless he had the knowledge and hum anity of Dickens or M ayhew,
the m iddle-class m an saw in every open palm the evidence of idleness
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and deceit" (The M aking of the English W orking Class, 266).
H um phrey H ouse, however, readily describes Dickens as a
Benthamite, b u t suggests that the reception of O liver Tw ist has
distorted his position. He suggests that Dickens "could follow the
Benthamite form ula for reform . . . w hen circumstances seem ed to
him to dem and i t His opposition to so many features of the Poor
Law of 1834 has diverted attention from the new m easures of
governm ent and adm inistration that he supported" (All in Due Time.
218-9). I w ould argue that Dickens's self-reflexive position on the Poor
Laws need not necessarily be seen as exceptional.
Steven M arcus, in Dickens From Pickwick to Dombev. describes
the early Victorian period as characterized by two schools, and suggests
that Dickens was of both: "U tilitarian liberalism and the m ovem ent of
reform which was identified w ith the activities stim ulated by the
M ethodist and Evangelical m ovem ents. Dickens him self, in an
expectedly unsystem atic w ay, held certain beliefs in common w ith
both schools b u t w as as a rule rather closer in spirit to the
Evangelicals" (59). M arcus's complex Dickens is still on the side of the
hum an w here the Bentham ites are not: "The w rong that Dickens
recognizes in w hat he attacks—the Benthamite ideology, legislation,
and adm inistration, and the w orkhouse adm inistration and attitude—
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lies sim ply, irredudbly, undeniably in its violation of hum anity, in its
offense against life" (59). We m ight understand Dickens's position as
less single-m inded even than the "expectedly unsystem atic" Dickens
M arcus posits.
Rosem ary Bodenheim er, in The Politics of Story in Victorian
Social Fiction, takes the distinction between Dickens and the
Benthamites further and cunningly reinvents O liver Twist, through a
reading of its use of the pastoral, as an even sharper attack "not only
on the local injustices of the workhouses and the courts b u t on the
determ inist ideology that framed the New Poor Law of 1834 in such a
way that the indigent w ould be conditioned out of their reliance on
the parish, or punitively 'reform ed' by the regulation of the union
workhouses" (120). Catherine Gallagher in The Industrial
Reformation of English Fiction chooses to see H ard Times (and N o rth
and South and other industrial novels of the 1850s) as "reflections on
their narrative m ethods" (150), a reading I w ould like to suggest m ight
be extended back horn the 1850s to the earlier novel of social protest,
O liver Twist.
2 The idea is to try to help make available readings, especially of
Bentham, different from the w idely accepted Foucauldian view —in
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p art by suggesting that there is value in Bentham 's rejection of the
idea of a pre-carceral subject
3 The chief architect of the Poor Law A m endm ent Act w as ultim ately
actually Edw in Chadwick, not Jeremy Bentham, bu t Bentham gets
credit for beginning the developm ent of the institutions and
languages of m anagem ent of the poor. The Poor Law Amendment
Act adm ittedly by no means followed Bentham 's plan to the letter. It
is interesting to note, in view of their supposedly opposite positions,
that w hile Dickens did resent Chadw ick's involvem ent w ith the Poor
Laws, they w ere ultim ately reconciled. S. E. Finer w rites, "Dickens still
continued to m istrust Chadwick's p art in Poor Law adm inistration
and it w as not till 1847 that he w as quite won oven b u t from that time
onw ards he becam e his m ost outspoken public cham pion" rrhg Life
and Times of Sir Edwin Chadwick, p. 239).
4 G ertrude Himmelfarb, The Idea of Poverty: England in the Early
Industrial Age. 83.
5 Anthony Brundage, for example, argues in The M aking of the New
Poor Law: the Politics of Inquiry. Enactment and Im plem entation that
the New Poor Law 's "purpose and result w ere to reorganize and
strengthen the pow er of the country's traditional leaders over their
localities" (182).
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6 C. F. Bahmueller, though less dism issive, argues passionately, in The
N ational C harity Company: Teremy Bentham 's Silent Revolution, that
Bentham tram pled system atically over the individual rights and
freedoms of paupers. Lea Campos Boralevi defends Bentham in
Bentham and the O ppressed, m aking a distinction between his
practical solutions and his ideals, and arguing that critics have
hitherto m istakenly understood his plans for ideals. She w rites, "On
the contrary, he thought that his plans were a remedy to an evil—i.e.
starvation—affecting a p art of the society, and not a good in itself"
(104). She also suggests that at the tim e his opposition came not from
those defending the rights of the poor but from those who opposed the
expense of offering any relief at all. Readers may well be skeptical of
Boralevi's requests for a "correct historical perspective" (103) that
recognizes Bentham 's "realistic consideration of the situation" (104),
b u t her insistence on the irrelevance to Bentham 's "practical" work of
pity and "m oral duty" (99) is helpful, as is her rem inder that
"Bentham did not believe in any natural right to property" (97). Janet
Semple, in Bentham 's Prison: A Study of the Panopticon Penitentiary.
argues ingeniously that "There is no necessary contradiction in
perceiving the panopticon both as a Utopia and as an instrum ent of
oppression" (300). Semple argues that Bentham 's plans "w ould have
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been a fram ework in w hich m en could m ake rational choices freed
from tem ptations" (322), b u t it seems possible to see Bentham as even
m ore of a constructivist.
Semple seems alive to the irony that Bentham is a villain both
for critics like Himmelfarb and for Foucault. D epending on the nature
of one's investm ent in Foucauldian analysis, the following response
from Semple w ill am use o r horrify: "Foucault described the
panopticon as a 'cruel ingenious cage,' a pitiless contraption designed
for control and subjugation. But Bentham 's vision w as of a beautiful
building, a stately pleasure dom e com parable to the Rotundas at
Ranelagh and Dublin, or the circus at Bath. There was, he insisted, no
reason why the panopticon should not be a cheerful place; a sketch of
it in his papers depicts a faerie palace, tinted in m uted shades of pink
and grey" (114).
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Chapter 2: Evidence, K now ledge, and O ther Fictions
That Bentham m akes available a rejection of the divisions
between institutional and hum ane responses to the poor, and erases
the distinction betw een the deserving and undeserving poor, does not
mean th at his project is not still m anagerial and controlling. If the
middle-class debaters of the Poor Laws agreed on one thing, it was that
poverty was natural, essential, and should not be abolished. For Edwin
Chadwick, a disciple of Bentham and one of the chief architects of the
New Poor Laws, poverty provides the necessary incentive for
productivity: "Banish poverty, you banish w ealth." Cobbett, one of the
Act's m ost prom inent opponents, argues that poverty m ust be
m aintained to keep society bonded together peacefully. In his Poor
M an's Friend he argues that "w ithout poverty, there could be no
charity and none of those feelings, those offices, those acts, and those
relationships, w hich are connected w ith charity, and w hich form a
considerable portion of the cement of civil society" (49). All the
debaters sought, openly, to protect the interests of various sections of
the middle-classes, and desired the poor to be m alleable, respectful,
productive, and docile. The debate is not over such goals, b u t over
how best to create such deserving poor. But the debaters also address
the possibility that in recreating the poor they are also recreating
themselves, as m anagers, observers, and know ers of the poor.
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The positions of m anager, observer, and know er, then, in the
w ritings surrounding the massive bureaucratic project of the Poor Law
Am endm ent Act and the Commission of Inquiry th at preceded it, are
not-yet-naturalized constructions. The w riters—w hether bureaucrats,
novelists, or other kinds of social critics—do not enter a terrain of
debate they see as clearly dem arcated and self-evident. They address
the assum ptions that allow them to create such a debate in the first
place. W riters such as Cobbett, Chadwick, and James Kay address
questions of w hat constitutes "evidence," enter into the complications
of the relations betw een observer and observed, and explore the ways
in w hich social realities are constituted rhetorically. The diatribes of
even so conservative a social theorist as Thomas Carlyle target not only
social problem s and institutions like the workhouse, bu t also the
positions and rhetoric of social criticism itself. This self-consciousness
extends to fictional interventions into social debate. We can see
Dickens and Bentham not just as political opponents bu t as sharing in
a project of m anagem ent that is also a project of self-criticism .
Similarly, w hile Benjamin Disraeli and Elizabeth Gaskell argue
explicitly against the logic of political economy propagated by
Chadwick, M artineau, and others, they do not m erely substitute their
ow n narratives as truth, but turn their attention to the underlying
fictional nature of social debate.
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Cobbett: Rhetoric, Interpretation and "Evidence"
Cobbett's Poor M an's Friend (also titled In Defense of the Rights
of those w ho do the Work and Fight the Battles) is both hot-bloodedly
polem ical and riddled w ith qualifications. Cobbett argues that the (old)
Poor Laws as then adm inistered are crim inal, and that the poor
therefore have a legal and moral right to take action against property in
order to provide for themselves—he argues, in other w ords, that it is
in the interests of property to be charitable. H e objects to the scientific
discourse of political economy that he fears is becoming
institutionalized; in response to various proposals for abolishing or
am ending the Poor Laws he w rites that he feels he has to make his
argum ent because:
there have been such m onstrous doctrines and projects
p u t forth by MALTHUS, by the EDINBURGH
REVIEWERS, by LAWYER SCARLETT, by LAWYER
NOLAN, by STURGES BOURNE, and by an innum erable
sw arm of persons who have been giving before the House
of Com mons w hat they call 'evidence.' (14)
He refuses to acknowledge the authority of these w riters, lawyers and
legislators, and is highly skeptical of their ability to produce an
em pirical study. H e does not, however, sim ply and com placently offer
his ow n narrative as irreproachable fact. He does regard it as a better
narrative, b u t is careful to show how it is gathered at second hand
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tinder specific local circumstances, rather than claim ing any direct
access to the truth. Here is his account of the state of the p o o r
N othing can be more common than to read, in the
new spapers, descriptions of the m ost horrible of the
sufferings of the Poor. . . h i short, they are represented as
being far worse fed and w orse lodged than the greater part
of the pigs. These statem ents of the newspapers m ay be
false, or, at least, only partially true; but, at a public
m eeting of ratepayers, at M anchester, on the 17th of
A ugust, Mr. BAXTER, the Chairm an said, that som e of
the POOR had been starved to death, and that tens of
thousands were upon the point of starving; and, at the
sam e m eeting, Mr. POTTER gave a detail, w hich show ed
that M r. BAXTER'S general description w as true. O ther
accounts, very nearly official, and, at any rate, being of
unquestionable authenticity, concur so fully w ith the
statem ents m ade at the M anchester M eeting, that it is
im possible not to believe, that a great num ber of
thousands of persons are now on the point of perishing
for w ant of food. (4)
The disarm ing phrase "very nearly official" is not necessarily calculated
to be utterly convincing, and even though Cobbett clearly prefers Baxter
and Potter to M althus and the others at whom he takes shots later in
the piece, his preference seems clearly and openly more based on his
judgm ent of their character than on their argum ents per se. Cobbett is
clearly prepared to be highly skeptical of m ost accounts: of "official
truth," and certainly of w ritten accounts in new spapers, even w here
they appear to support his argum ent.
Actually, though, Cobbett takes pains elsewhere to em phasize
th at his argum ent is not in fact about the "real" conditions of the poor,
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which perhaps helps explain w hy he is prepared to make such
qualifications to his ow n account of the "truth." Cobbett states from
the outset that his concern is less w ith the actual condition of the poor,
than w ith the language that is used to describe, define and create the
poor. It is a new language that he sees as the m ost appalling thing that
m odernity has brought w ith it, rather than, directly, any specific
m aterial conditions. The pam phlet opens:
1. Amongst all the new, the strange, the unnatural, the
m onstrous things that m ark the present times, or rather,
that have grow n out of the present system of governing
this country, there is, in my opinion, hardly anything
m ore m onstrous, or even so m onstrous, as the language
that is now become fashionable, relative to the condition
and the treatm ent of that part of the com m unity which
are usually denom inated the POOR. (3)
H e then feels obliged to offer a definition (as m any in this period did)
of the disputed w ord "poor." It is not poverty that is "m onstrous,"
then, bu t the new language that offers new definitions of poverty and
creates poverty anew. Cobbett m ay not dispose of the idea of facts
altogether, but he does add, after stating that m any thousands are
starving, that "even more horrid than these facts, is the cool and
unresentful language and m anner in which these facts are usually
spoken of." Cobbett asserts that death by starvation is a bad thing, or at
least that it is bad that "this has taken place, and is taking place, IN
ENGLAND" (4), b u t worse for him is the language used to describe, or
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create, the situation, he addresses—for exam ple he singles out,
presum ably w ith reference to M althus and his adherents, "the
blasphem ous slang of the day, 'checking the surplus population'" (47).
The problem of the conditions and treatm ent of the poor may be
a m oral one for Cobbett, b u t it is also, inseparably, a linguistic one. If he
seeks to ground his argum ent, he does so not on m aterial conditions
but on an idea of a traditional and fixed English law, and a stable,
shared language. In his later "Letter to Sir Robert Peel" he attacks "that
great and terrible innovation, the Poor law Bill," and states that despite
his apparent radicalism, "it has always been m y w ish, that the
institutions of England and her fundam ental laws should rem ain
unchanged" (4). Much of the Poor M an's Friend is taken up w ith close
readings of legal opinions on the rights of the poor. In order to ground
his opinion on these rights he also appeals to w hat he decides is a
universal in languages: "it is a saying as old as the hills, a saying in
every language in the w orld, that 'self-preservation' is the first law of
nature" (10). Cobbett is concerned less w ith proving that the new laws
w ill have m onstrous effects than w ith representing the rhetoric that
em bodies and accompanies the bill as unnatural. As w e have seen,
while he appeals to nature and to universals, Cobbett often
foregrounds his ow n process of draw ing conclusions, acknowledging
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the contingency of his sources and his ow n specific position as
interpreter.
Kay: The Indirectness o f O bservation
A supporter of the New Poor Laws, James Kay can also be seen as
addressing the question of w hat constitutes evidence, despite the fact
th at he m ight seem to be in a slightly different relation to poverty, as a
direct observer, in The Moral and Physical C ondition of the Working
Classes in M anchester. But we need not take Kay as betraying a naive
faith in science or as unquestioningly seeing the evidence of his own
eyes as unm ediated. Kay's wishes are not dissim ilar to Cobbett's—they
share the sam e nostalgia. H ere's Kay: "charity once extended an
invisible chain of sym pathy between the higher and low er ranks of
society, w hich has been destroyed by the luckless pseudo-philanthropy
of the law " (48-9). Unlike Cobbett, though, he sees the old laws as
having now caused a "disruption of the natural ties." Like Cobbett's,
his idea of charity is highly paternalist and self-consciously
ideological—he argues that the new law "assim ilates the m ethod of
distributing this legal charity to that by w hich a w ell-regulated private
bounty is adm inistered" (49). The new system w ill allow, he says,
"discrim ination" concerning "characters of individuals." He argues
that this (in his view) more personal charity should serve to "foster
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sym pathy/' generate gratitude, and reinforce the authority of the
governing—gaining the "acknowledged right to adm inister good
counsel" (50), particularly useful in view of the working-class habit of
com bination and disobedience.
Kay, like Cobbett, has a nostalgic fantasy of paternalist good
order, and, again like Cobbett, he raises questions about the grounds
that he argues on. As we have seen, he stresses the need for
discrim ination, and he opens the book w ith an appeal for, and
statem ent of, faith in knowledge and vigilance:
Self-knowledge, inculcated by the maxim of the ancient
philosopher, is a precept not less appropriate to societies
than to individuals, the physical and m oral evils by
which we are personally surrounded, m ay be m ore easily
avoided w hen we tire directly conscious of their existence.
(17)
But w e can also see Kay as offering reservations about observation and
study, w orries about the arbitrariness of categorization, and an
aw areness of the personal and political investm ent in creating and
establishing knowledge. H e advocates publishing statistical studies, but
his w orry about parliam entary committee reports is not only that they
are not accurate enough, b u t that "they frequently utterly fail in one
m ost im portant respect, nam ely—in convincing the public of the facts
they proclaim " (19). It is the ideological, propagandist aspect of
published reports that he sees as constituting their value. Kay sees
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knowledge as a political tool, and is highly aw are of its im plication in
ideology—frequently in this book he advocates greater num bers of
police and inspectors, and at the sam e tim e a vast increase in the
am ount of education foisted on the poor. Kay acknowledges no
separation betw een "scientific" investigation and m oralizing, and his
study contains plenty of sententious, even m elodram atic language, not
just som e apparently m ore im personal scientific discourse.
The hero and villain of Kay's narrative is disease, specifically
cholera. He sees cholera as a menace, bu t as such, and at the same time,
a useful instrum ent for educating people into cleanliness (moral and
physical) and ensuring that different parts of the com m unity recognize
their connections w ith each other. Kay represents the disease, in his
own image, as an educator and moralizer. The title of his work fThe
Moral and Physical Condition) indicates that he feels no need to try to
pretend to some kind of political and m oral disinterestedness in order
to present his scientific study—indeed such an idea w ould appear
preposterous, given the assum ption that bad m orals and bad
com munication between the classes are two m ajor sources of the
disease he is dealing w ith. Kay w rites disease into a narrative that is
frankly dram atic (even melodramatic) and sentim ental: he creates a
disease that knows no barriers, and
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threatens, w ith a stealthy step, to invade the sanctity of the
dom estic circle; w hich m ay be unconsciously conveyed
from those haunts of beggary w here it is rife, into the
m ost still and secluded retreat of refinem ent—whose
entrance, w ealth cannot absolutely bar, and luxury invites;
this is an event which, in the secret pang th at it awakens,
at the heart of all those who are bound to any others by
sym pathies w hich it may harshly rend, ensures that the
anxious attention of every order of society shall be
directed to that, in which social ills abound. (12)
The disease connects everyone quite intim ately. It is at one and the
sam e tim e a cunning seducer, aw akener of hidden charitable sym pathy,
and object of expert, professional study. The narrative of expert
testim ony is not separated at all from dram atic narrative.
Elsewhere Kay indicates in other ways that he is not absolutely
convinced of the possibility of an accurate study. Despite the fact that
he expresses a liking for statistics and includes him self several tables of
figures, he gives a disclaim er "The social body cannot be constructed
like a machine, on abstract principles w hich m erely include physical
m otion, and their num erical results in the production of w ealth. The
m utual relation of m en is not m erely dynam ical, nor can the
com position of their forces be subjected to a purely m athem atical
calculation" (63). Kay is modest about the accuracy of his ow n study,
and furtherm ore gives an indication that he is aw are of the fact that his
position as observer has a direct effect on the outcom e of the study: "as
the investigation w as prom pted equally by the dem ands of
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benevolence, of personal security, and of the general welfare, the
results may be esteem ed as accurate as the nature of the investigation
w ould perm it." Kay does not pass him self off as an im partial, detached
observer, bu t confesses his ow n im plication in the results of his study,
and the fact that he observes and w rites w ithin a certain fram ework of
desires and expectations.
Kay w rites in his introduction that he believes "public welfare
w ill be m ost pow erfully prom oted by every event, w hich exposes the
condition of the people to the gentry of England" (8). H e w rites that he
does not believe the rural gentry understand the poor from their brief
visits to the towns, suggests that the gentry are ignorant, and indicates
that "Too often it is in the interest of some to deceive them " (7). While
here he m ight seem to suggest that he can "expose" the condition of
the poor, w ith the naive im plication that he can offer an unm ediated
truth in his w ritings, he also indicates that he is aw are of how writings
are interested and can serve to m anipulate. These reservations are
directed at others, b u t w hen he complains of "exaggerated and
unscientific accounts . . . w hich have been lately revived w ith an
eagerness and haste equally unfriendly to taste and truth" (70), he
appears, even while m aintaining som e faith in science, to be conflating
"truth" and "taste," hinting at the equivocal status of truth, and the
w ay it is delim ited by the ideology of "taste." Elsewhere he gives w hat
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w e m ight take as indications that he is conscious both of the
boundaries of taste he cannot cross (and therefore of the w ay in w hich
his account is necessarily incomplete and contingent on the dem ands
of the context of its reception) and also of the titillation that it m ay
cause to suggest the possibility of crossing such boundaries.
We m ight see Kay as teasing the reader. He asserts at one point
that "in som e districts of the town exist evils so rem arkable as to
require m ore m inute description" (34), allow ing readers to believe that
it is the evils them selves that dem and descriptions, rather than
them selves. Despite his assertion that m inute detail is required,
how ever, Kay does sometimes trail off into a suggestive vagueness; in
describing the keeping of pigs in one house he says, coyly, that it is
accom panied "w ith other nuisances of the m ost revolting character"
(32)—presum ably a reference to pigshit, though the scene rem ains to
som e degree intriguingly unknowable. Elsewhere, Kay is more w illing
to cater to the voyeuristic, scatological pleasure that such descriptions
can offer. At one point he asserts, disingenuously, that he is
"unw illing to w eary the patience of the reader by extending such
disgusting details" (37), but goes on, nevertheless, to extend the details
to a description of "houses, frequently three stories high, the low est of
w hich stories is occasionally used as a receptacle of excremen titious
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m atter" In case it had escaped our attention, Kay italicizes the m ost
exciting detail.
Kay frequently em phasizes that the scenes he describes are secret
ones, norm ally kept hidden b u t about to be titillatingly revealed to the
read er "He whose duty it is to follow the steps of this m essenger of
death, m ust descend . . . and behold w ith alarm , in the hot-bed of
pestilence, ills that fester in secret, at the very heart of society" (7). Kay
does not attem pt to offer a language that pretends to be im personal and
free from rhetorical devices; w hen convenient he makes cholera a kind
of stock villain to the m iddle-class, who "like a thief walking in
darkness, m ight, he fears, pass his threshold secretly, and rifle the
casket as he sleeps" (7). Kay is quite open about the dynamics of the
relationship between the sym pathized-w ith but feared w orking class
and the rest of the tow n—he offers this simile: "The dense masses of
the habitations of the poor, w hich stretch out their arm s, as though to
grasp and enclose the dwellings of the noble and wealthy7 ' (11).
Imm ediately following the evocation of pigshit, Kay takes two
pages to create an extraordinary spectacle of an alm ost undifferentiated
mass of bodies and species. The two pages close w ith this bathetic
pseudo-justification: "These facts are m inutely related, because w e are
anxious to direct public attention to the advantages which w ould
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accrue, from w idening this portion of Long M illgate" (39). Part of the
description offered hare is of a court w hich
contained, besides a pig-stye—a tripe m anufactory in a low
cottage, which w as in a state of loathsom e filth. Portions
of anim al m atter w ere decaying in it, and one of the inner
rooms was converted into a kennel, and contained a litter
of puppies. In the court, on the opposite side, is a tan yard
w here skins are prepared w ithout bark in open pits, and
here also is a catgut manufactory. (39)
He goes on to say that nearby are another tannery and a burial ground
"used as a place for internm ent of paupers." We see here pigs, dogs,
cats, indeterm inate "anim al m atter," and paupers lum ped together in a
way that makes the hum an and anim al inhabitants more or less
equivalent. One w ay of reading this description w ould be to see Kay
suggesting that the hum an inhabitants are anim al in their savagery. It
w ould not be difficult to make much of the fact th at this area, and the
one described previously, are both know n by nicknames that refer to
British colonial outposts: "G ibraltar" and 'T ittle Ireland." At the same
tim e, however, we could see the scene as an illustration of the
confusion of a self-conscious observer facing his subject. The
complexity and the indeterm inacy of the scene seem to indicate, in this
reading, the difficulty and arbitrariness of creating distinctions and
categories to pin dow n w hat is being observed. As w e have seen, Kay
does not take the opportunity to draw any great conclusions from this
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particular scene. For all his em phasizing of morals and m oralizing,
Kay is not easily able to separate out the objects of his study from the
surroundings w hich contain and produce them: at one point he
chastises those w ho, he says, "attribute all the evils suffered by the poor
solely to their ignorance or moral deviations." One im plication of this
gray area w here distinctions appear arbitrary is that it is not necessarily
possible to m aintain a clear distinction between deserving and
undeserving poor—or even the unsettling possibility that the self-
definition of the observer relies on arbitrary categorizations of the
observed object.
Chadwick: The Politics of Knowing
Chadwick also gives a clear indication that any single observer is
caught up in particular circumstances and serves particular interests.
While Chadwick indicates a belief in "good statistics" ("The New Poor
Law," Ed. Rev. Jul. 1836,527) that can m easure a system accurately, at
the same time he is highly skeptical of the idea that personal judgm ent
is somehow m ore authentic and accurate than some m ore im personal
standard, hi his 1836 defense of the New Poor Laws in the Edinburgh
Review he is prepared to p u t in play certain idealizations of his own;
but he shows an aw areness of the fact that any ideological system relies
on certain key narratives, and accordingly attacks, or rew rites, a
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num ber of the nostalgic, idealizing narratives of his opponents,
sometimes adopting them for his ow n use. H e is him self, despite his
claims for accuracy in the use of "facts" and statistics, unabashedly
ideological. H e is quite open about the fact that the goal of the law is
not only to relieve poverty, but to protect property, and especially to
reform the workforce:
The chief objects of the statute of Elizabeth w ere to m ake
the able-bodied, who w ere indolent and turbulent,
conform to habits of industry. The effects of the law, as it
w as recently adm inistered throughout the country,—w ere
to render the industrious indolent, vicious and
turbulent—to endanger the safety of all property, and by
its unequal pressure, and by the tem ptation which it
afforded for peculation, to prom ote corruption and
generate anim osities betw een one p art of the com m unity
and another. (487)
In itself this is reasonably standard stuff, a kind of reversal of the
Cobbett argum ent, the only difference, apart from the greater em phasis
on w ork habits, being that Cobbett sees the new laws, not the old, as the
ones that encourage class divisions, crime and corruption. W hereas
Cobbett sees the English working class as already ideal, though,
Chadwick is m uch less sanguine. In fact he not only questions the
definition of poverty (arguing, as Burke and others had before, that the
poor are not those who are not wealthy, b u t those who lack the ability
to work), he also questions the idea that there is a deserving poor, and
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thus the very distinction betw een the deserving and undeserving poor.
He gives this account of one attem pt to locate the deserving poor:
hi one large parish in the m etropolis, com prising forty
thousand inhabitants, it was determ ined by some
benevolent officers to m ake separate provision for the
paupers of deserving character, and give them appropriate
rooms and treatm ent. Com mencing w ith this intention
of finding the class of objects, they nevertheless could not
get more than seven cases out of about six hundred
paupers, for whom a separate apartm ent could properly be
assigned; and these w ere cases in which no prima facie
objection was perceptible, rather than cases w here the facts
sought were established. (495)
Doubtless a m ore determ ined group of officers could have found
deserving cases if they had really w anted to, but Chadwick does suggest
that belief in such a category is an act of faith. This accords w ith his
radical suggestion, following Bentham, that w hat is im portant is not so
m uch the individual characters of the poor, but the system, taken as a
w hole, that produces, shapes and sustains them. W hile this m ight be
seen as evidence of an even greater desire to control, it does
underm ine the basis of m oralizing, disciplining standards that certain
idealizations imply. Chadwick is even more daring in his rejection of
patronizing sym pathy for the elderly, and at this point explicitly
identifies literary models as m isleading narratives:
Age of itself, as being indicative of helplessness, is a
circumstance which engages the popular sym pathies, and
in the course of the adm inistration of relief, usually shuts
out all enquiries as to preceding desert. But — [t]he aged
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inm ates o f workhouses w ere not found to be, as a class,
such as poetry had represented them to be—the parents of
m eritorious and industrious labourers; but, w ith the
exception of the cases of helplessness arising from disease,
they were found, w henever they w ere examined, to be the
parents of the w orst p art of the population, of the felon,
the prostitute, the poacher, or the sm uggler, who have no
filial sym pathies, having deserved none, and who had by
m isconduct w orn out their welcome at every friendly
home. (495)
Chadwick is skeptical, certainly w here convenient, of received
narratives of how the poor behave, and indicates, as here, that certain
narratives exist m ore for the pleasure they afford the teller than for any
unm ediated relation they provide to the poor as they actually are.
Chadwick goes further w ith this argum ent, giving more
examples of w here judgm ents of character on an individual basis,
which elsewhere are considered the m ost authentic test, are in fact at
least as ideological as any explicitly ideological machinery.
Undercutting the notion pu t forward by Cobbett and others (with
reservations of their ow n, as w e have seen) that close local ties provide
the best judgm ent, Chadwick w rites that "Amongst other sources of
mischief, was the habit prevalent throughout the country of governing
the adm inistration of relief by notions of the character of the
applicants" (501). He backs this up by saying that even if such
judgm ents were relevant, those judging w ere bound up by
assum ptions relating to their political, religious beliefs and their class.
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He w rites as follows about the findings of the Poor Law
C om m issioners:
Even w here clergym en who w ere chairm en did not see all
the virtues in their ow n poor, and hateful vices in the
followers of the Dissenters, and w here the sm all
shopkeepers d id not testify to the superior virtues of their
ow n custom ers, all systems of relief upon the principle of
rew arding the virtuous were pronounced to be entire
failures. (501-2)
He goes on to quote the report of the Commissioners:
Character being m ade up of habits, and habits being made
up of sim ple acts (which we sometimes find it difficult to
determ ine on in our courts of law, even w ith all skilled
appliances), it is not surprising that persons in w ealthy or
superior stations, who have rarely the m eans of observing
or knowing the daily arts of the labouring classes, usually
fail of estim ating them , so as to adjudicate justly,
according to the estim ation of the claim ants. (502)
For Chadwick, here, virtues are in the eye of the beholder, and are in
any case irrelevant if a uniform , centralized system is to be adopted.
His argum ent is th at such a system judges m ore, not less, effectively for
being apparently im personal. He shows how individual judgm ents
and assessm ents, because they are apparently natural and instinctive,
can be m ore insidiously ideological than any centralized government
m achinery.
Chadwick attacks certain nationalist and nostalgic narratives in
order to justify the new laws, perhaps very conscious of how powerful
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and pervasive such narratives are. H e doesn't pull his punches: "One
ignorant cry set u p against the remedies w as, that they w ere
unprecedented; (how should they be otherwise?) and that being new
they w ere unconstitutional" (528). H is defense against the suggestion
that the law s are unconstitutional because they delegated pow er to the
Poor Law Com m issioners (the much decried "Somerset House
Trium virate") is that pow er is everyw here dissem inated am ongst
various low er authorities. Chadwick chooses to point out that pow er
can be seen as pervading all civil institutions: "as if the whole country
w ere not com posed of a m ultitude of subordinate and conflicting
legislatures! . . . as if the adm inistration had not habitually, alm ost in
every local act for an incorporation for adm inistering relief to the poor,
conferred the pow er of making rules and regulations!" (528). For
Chadwick, also, the notion that freedoms are being curtailed is again
one of rhetoric; m arket freedoms, especially the "freedom " to sell one's
labor, are w hat is im portant to him. Accordingly he is able to dism iss
rhetorically the old system: "To the agricultural labourers in the land of
pretended liberty, England, under this system of so called self-
governm ent, the whole country w as a prison" (522). To Chadwick
w riting and rhetorical skills are accordingly highly im portant,
representing a real authority. Rhetoric is the ground on w hich the
battle is fought, not social reality. His evidence that the sm aller
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parishes w ere mismanaged is brought to a climax by his reproduction
of a badly spelled letter of protest from one parish overseer—he follows
it by saying: "To talk of this as the self-governm ent characteristic, and
the glory of Englishmen, is despicable rant. To vaunt of it as superior
to the local governm ent of other nations in this respect is ignorant
im pertinence" (520). Good governm ent, he suggests, cannot coexist
w ith bad spelling, or any unskillful use of language.
Chadwick shows his ow n facility w ith language in turning a
nostalgic argum ent in favor of his reform ist plan. He uses more or less
the same idealized version of the English laborer that his opponents do
in order to describe w hat he represents as the injustices of the old
system. In setting up his objections he indicates his awareness that he
is using a well-worn trope: "The poor hard-w orking rate-payer, it has
been w ell described, rises early, and retires late to his rest; he works
hard, and he fares hard, to provide subsistence for his family." (523).
But his argum ent shows how ideological such 'good description' can be
as he turns this narrative to account against those who are supported
by the parish:
He w ould feed them better, bu t the prodigal m ust first be
fed. He w ould purchase w arm er clothing for them , but
the children of the prostitute m ust first be clo th ed .. . .
This unnatural course of exalting the hangers on in
condition above those on w hom they hang, is a process
w hich the labourers never perm it in adm inistering the
funds of their ow n clubs, and it w ould never have been
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perm itted if the w hole com m unity w ere enabled actually
to govern the funds themselves. (523)
Chadwick rhetorically overturns the idea that the old system was
natural and organized around the interests and desires of the w orking
class, showing that his ow n system can just as easily be represented in
exactly those term s. The foundation of the paternalist argum ent
against the poor laws, that it speaks w ith an intim ate know ledge of the
needs and w ants of the poor, is underm ined. Chadwick politicizes the
idea of personal judgm ent, questions the ability of paternalists to speak
for the poor, and questions, at tim es, the validity of the distinction
between deserving and undeserving poor. His rhetorical moves need
not be seen as an attem pt to pull the wool over the eyes of naive
readers; he seems, rather, to be intent on politicizing all the term s of
the debate over the poor laws, and poking fun at the knowingness w ith
which some may lay claim to certain narratives.
M artineau: The Rational as Fiction
H arriet M artineau indicates still m ore em phatically, in her Poor
Laws and Paupers Illustrated and Illustrations of Political Economy and
elsewhere, the ideological nature of narrative. D espite h er use of
narrative fiction, she carefully em phasizes the utilitarian, educational
(or propagandist), political context she wishes her narratives to be seen
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in. She opens the preface to Poor Laws and Paupers Illustrated by
em phasizing that she is interested in the political usefulness of her
stories:
As any utility w hich m ay be contem plated from the
following tales m ust be im paired by the supposition that
the woes and vices it displays are the offspring of an
uncontrolled im agination, I beg to state that all th at is
m ost melancholy in my story is strictly true. I have
unquestionable authority in the Reports of the Poor-law
Com missioners, and the testim ony of others w ho are
occupied in the adm inistration of parish affairs, for every
parochial abuse and every pauper encroachm ent here
exhibited, (i)
For M artineau good fiction should not pretend to be apolitical; the
"utility7 ' of these stories lies in supporting the m ove tow ards the Poor
Law Am endm ent Act. The stories are unabashedly, proudly, directed
at a particular institution, the Poor Laws: "The m ore clearly evils can be
referred to an institution, the m ore cheering are the expectations of
w hat m ay be affected by its am endm ent Let these rational hopes
console the readers as they have supported the w riter of this tale" (i)
M artineau chooses to de-em phasize as far as possible the distinction
betw een narrative fiction and poor-law reports, claim ing th at each can
be endow ed w ith the authority of official Com m issioners, and each can
be strictly true. However the corollary of the erasure of this distinction
is that poor-law reports are narrative fiction; that w hat the reports and
the Commissioners require in order to be successful, as Kay suggests, is
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to be convincing to the public—to offer a convincing, engaging
narrative. M artineau suggests that her fiction is rational, and at the
sam e tim e hints that the rational is a fiction—she hopes, a pow erful,
authoritative one.
Just as M artineau is concerned w ith the context in w hich her
stories are to be read (as she indicates w ith her concern to back, w ith
her skill in narrative, the Poor Law A m endm ent Act), so she insists on
historicizing and contextualizing certain institutions and values that
she w ishes to question. O n the one hand, in criticizing the current
"m ethods of public and private charity" in "The Moral of Many Fables"
(in Illustrations of Political Economy, vol. 9) she appears to insist on
transcendent, ahistorical values, not passing forms, as the key to
charity: "Thence arises the m oral of this dreary lesson, that virtue,
w hether beneficence or any other, does not consist in form al and
arbitrary practices, but in conform ity to vital principles" (63-4). O n the
other hand, this idea that form s can be em pty of such transcendent
content ("vital principles") allows her to relativize and challenge the
w orth of "charity," and to indicate that its value and m eaning cannot
sim ply be considered fixed. M artineau is quick to re-exam ine and upset
certain well-worn m etaphors that organize the defense of the old Poor
Laws; despite her focus on the fam ily in m uch of her w ritings she
argues that the plea for the right of each individual to subsistence
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provided by the state "is grounded on a false analogy betw een the state
and its members, and a parent and his fam ily" (70) (since the state
cannot control the size of its "family"). She rejects, also, the nostalgic
argum ent for charity that relies on an image of a successful p a s t
"alm sgiving is the m ode of charity appropriate to one state of society,
and the establishm ent of provident associations, and the
encouragem ent of em igration, and especially of education, are the
modes of charity appropriate to another state of society7 ' (65).
In questioning the practice of charity, M artineau also m anages to
question the self-definition of the provider. M artineau appears to
operate on the assum ption that givers can feel m ost themselves w hen
giving, since this is w hat distinguishes them so neatly from the
receivers. She proceeds to ruthlessly underm ine this fiction of
benevolent superiority:
alm sgiving has been made the first virtue to w hich infant
giving has been raised, and charity, in this sense, has been
m ade the test of moral sincerity and religious proficiency.
And w hat has all this done for society? The num ber of
the indigent has increased from day to day, and at a
perpetually increasing rate, till it has absorbed, in a legal
charity alone, nine m illions per annum of the
subsistence-fund, which is the clear right of the
independent labourer. (62)
M artineau redefines charity as evil and cruel, and therefore redefines
givers as evil: she refers to "the daily repeated, cruel injustice inflicted
by our m ethods of public and private charity" (63). She goes on: "If our
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practices are to be judged by their bruits, there are none, next to slavery,
for w hich w e need so m uch pardon as for o u r m ethods of charity.
There is no use in pleading our good intentions" (63). M artineau,
then, is not im pressed w ith the idea of sincerity, or the value of
intentions, w hich she takes to be m ystifications of the relationships
betw een the givers and receivers of charity, h i fact, she exposes charity
as one means by which the fictions of sincerity and of good intentions
can be kept in place. She suggests that people and their "intentions"
are historically contingent; that groups do not have som e function in
society that is in an absolute, unchangeable w ay theirs, b u t that they
inhabit a m anufactured role and an identity through a particular set of
learned ideological practices. Like Chadwick she sees the poor as made,
and she also sees those who m ake them as a t the sam e tim e
constructing them selves.
Carlyle: Observation as Storytelling
Carlyle appears somehow at the sam e tim e passionately to
denounce m odem society, and refuse to engage w ith it critically at all.
The second paragraph of Past and Present offers an eloquent
denunciation of "W orkhouses, Poor-law Prisons," or, as he m ost often
refers to them , "Bastilles." The Poor Laws are not a central concern of
the w ork, however; the Bastilles are generally sim ply listed as an
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example of unheroic fatuity alongside such issues as the C om Laws and
strikes. This second paragraph does not offer any detailed political
analysis, bu t creates the poor house in literary and religious term s via
Dante, w ith the narrator openly and unabashedly reading the desired
lesson into the spectacle of the w orkhouse. The character of "the
picturesque Tourist," w ho observes the workhouse inm ates, takes
advantage of the convenient silence of the inm ates and w rites their
thoughts for them:
They sat th e re in a kind of torpor, especially in a
silence, which w as very striking. In silence: for, alas, w hat
w ord was to be said? An Earth all lying around, crying,
Come and till m e, come and reap me;—yet here w e sit
enchanted!. . . they returned my glance w ith a glance that
seemed to say, "Do not look at us. We sit enchanted here,
we know not w hy. the Sun shines and the Earth calls;
and, by the governing Powers and Impotences of this
England, we are forbidden to obey. It is impossible, they
tell us!" There w as som ething that rem inded me of
D ante's Hell in the look of all this; and I rode sw iftly away.
(8)
The narrator can as easily invent the w ords of the inm ates as the w ords
of the Earth. Their w ords echo the narrator's earlier com m ent that "sit
there, pent up, as in a kind of horrid enchantm ent" (8). That this
fairytale account of the inm ates is given a specific historical location—
it is "the W orkhouse of St. Ives in H untingdonshire, on a bright day
last autum n"—only highlights the im portance of the storyteller over
the object described. The details of context don't m atter in the face of
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the schema of the observer, who wishes to see and present them not as
specific historical data that speak and have m eaning in and of
themselves, but as p art of his narrative of an illusory, magical
"enchantm ent," and as a D antean symbol of suffering.
Carlyle has little interest in "facts," b u t m uch in 'T act," which
for him lies not in external things that he observes, bu t in his
foundational assum ptions. For Carlyle, to concentrate on earthly,
social institutions is to overlook the divine, and the m utability and
arbitrariness of social institutions. He w rites, "the question is asked of
them ["man and his life and all his interests"], not, How do you agree
w ith Downing-street and accredited Semblance? but, How do you agree
w ith God's Universe and the actual Reality of things?" (30). In the
context of this belief Carlyle is prepared to concede that a detailed
analysis of the Poor Laws is som ewhat beside his point:
A Poor-law, any and every Poor-law, it may be observed, is
but a tem porary m easure; an anodyne, not a remedy: Rich
and Poor, w hen once the naked facts of their condition
have come into collision, cannot long subsist together on
a mere Poor-law. (8-9)
He does go on to say, "True enough:—and yet, hum an beings cannot be
left to die" (9), and does not suggest that anyone should w ithdraw from
politics. On the contrary, his message to the clergy is that "Original Sin
and such like are bad enough, I doubt not: but distilled Gin, dark
Ignorance, Stupidity, dark com-Law, Bastille and Com pany, w hat are
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they!" (242). But m uch unlike Lenin later, Carlyle m akes it d ear that
he does not feel obligated or qualified to answ er his ow n question,
"W hat is to be done — Editors are not here, forem ost of all, to say
How" (266). Carlyle sees the w ork of sotial criticism not as a problem
solving response to tangible, m aterial situations, but as an offering of
new stories to tell, new ways to see and therefore understand and shape
m aterial conditions. He sees his role as provoking suspidon of
"accredited Semblance," offering criticism of the narratives of political
economy and "Parliam entary eloquence" (19), and offering a new
narrative m ode to consider history in.
The narrative m ode Carlyle prefers is epic. Carlyle daim s to be
suspidous of other modes, espedally anything like the dram atic or
comic: "The tim e for levity, insincerity, and idle babble and play-acting,
in all kinds, is gone by; it is a serious, grave tim e" (209). His definition
of "epic" is a broad one, apparently denoting anything that conforms to
his notions of "H eroism " and 'T a c t" In predicting, in the "Horoscope"
section, the dow nfall of Captains of Industry (presum ably by
revolution) if they do not reform, he indicates that "fact" also is
opposed to the comic and dram atic in exhorting, "Awake, O nightm are
sleepers; awake, arise, or be forever fallen! This is not playhouse
poetry; it is sober fact" (269). Carlyle's ideas of "Fact" and epic lead him
to see the ideology of his age as tictive and arbitrary. He dismisses
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individualism and the dictates of capitalism as a story th at is told, w ith
no foundation in reality: "That any m an should o r can keep himself
apart horn m en, have 'no business' w ith them , except a cash-account
'business!' It is the silliest tale a distressed generation of m en ever took
to telling one another" (282). h i England's future, he suggests, justice
and reason w ill "again" be the guiding principles by w hich people (he
says "men") live, and goes on to say, "Their acted H istory w ill then
again be a Heroism; their w ritten History, w hat it once w as, an Epic"
(240).
But epic is still a story that is told (a deliberate b u t arbitrary
choice) and Carlyle, despite his modesty about his ow n role and his
adm iration and concern for "the practical," acknow ledges no neat
separation betw een language and action. Attacking the current, "false"
aristocracy, he complains:
We have U pper, speaking Classes, who indeed do 'speak'
as never m an spake before; the w ithered flim siness, the
godless baseness of whose Speech m ight of itself indicate
w hat kind of Doing and practical G overning w ent on
under it! For Speech is die gaseous elem ent out of w hich
m ost kinds of Practice and Performance, especially all
kinds of m oral Performance, condense them selves, and
take shape; as the one is, so will the other be. (209)
Practice is condensed out of speech, out of language and narrative; but
as w e've seen already, given his gloss on the St. Ives w orkhouse,
Carlyle recognizes th at interpretation of speech and narrative is a
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slippery business. Carlyle seems to adopt the position that there are
any num ber of different stories that can be used to organize our
understanding, and the stories we choose reflect our desires and
interests, a position he makes clear in discussing one of the central
concerns of Past and P resent history. O pening the "Horoscope"
section, Carlyle states that the past has been effaced—"The Past cannot
be seen" (239). He goes on to explain that the present sees the past in its
ow n term s:
For in truth, the eye sees in all things 'w hat it brought
w ith it the means of seeing.' A godless century, looking
back on centuries that were godly, produces portraitures
m ore m iraculous than any other. . . . Millions enchanted
in Bastille W orkhouses; Irish W idows proving their
relationship by typhus-fever: w hat w ould you have? It
w as ever so, or worse. (239)
This follows Carlyle's use of the medieval past, according to his
understanding of Jocelin's account, to criticize, not justify the present.
But even this "godly" account is equivocal in some ways. Carlyle is
content to adm it that his construction of the past is one that rests on
som ew hat flim sy evidence. His claims for his history are m odest; he
opens "The Ancient Monk" section by announcing:
We w ill, in this Second Portion of our Work, strive to
penetrate a little, by means of certain confused Papers,
printed and other, into a som ewhat remote Century; and
to look face to face on it, in hope of perhaps illustrating
our ow n poor Century thereby. (45)
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We can take his m odesty seriously; he adm its that he is constructing an
account from evidence that is confused (w hat historical evidence
w ouldn't be?) w ith a particular purpose in m ind. He acknowledges
that he is disposed to be generous in his account, dispensing w ith any
pretense of objectivity: he says Jocelin's "light is most feeble,
interm ittent, and requires the intensest kindest inspection; otherw ise it
w ill disclose m ere vacant haze" (49). Just as the poor house inm ates
are usefully silent, it is Jocelin's apparent lack of weight as an authority
that makes him appealing, and malleable and useful, to Carlyle in his
project to produce from him a description of a superior "life-m ethod."
He says of his source, "Jocelin is weak and garrulous, but he is hum an.
Through the thin w atery gossip of our Jocelin, we do get some glim pses
of that deep-buried Time; discern veritably, though in a fitful
interm ittent m anner, these antique figures and their life-m ethod, face
to facet" (54-5). The w eaker and more interm ittent the source, Carlyle
appears to suggest, the easier it is to construct a history that is
apparently im m ediate and authentic. H istory unenlivened by a
creative reader is "D ry Rubbish" (53). Evidence is much m ore a
concern of Carlyle's fictive, soulless historian "D ryasdust" than his
own; Carlyle prefers not to let evidence get in the w ay of a good story.
Despite his protests in favor of high seriousness and certainty,
and against insincerity and playacting, then, there seems to be a certain
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am ount of play in the w ay that Carlyle approaches history and social
problems. Alm ost as if to suggest that he is creating a fiction in order to
give him self the opportunity to argue self-righteously, Carlyle's nam ed
enemies are either broadly defined institutions (Bastilles, Com Laws,
"accredited Semblance") or fictional characters, such as the historian
D ryasdust, or the characters he chooses to contrast to his hero Oliver
Cromwell: "m y right honourable friend Sir Jabesh W indbag, Mr.
Fadng-both-w ays, Viscount M ealymouth, Earl of W indlestraw ” (221-2).
A pparently som ew hat confusingly, w hen Carlyle m entions the chief
architect of the Poor Law Amendment Act by nam e, it is to praise him
as a m an of action—in discussing education he refers to him as "the
assiduous, m uch-abused, and truly useful Mr. Chadwick" (276). Carlyle
seems to be able to offer this generous judgm ent through seeing
Chadwick in term s of his action, not of his theory, though the
distinction is left som ew hat m uddled. Carlyle chooses to argue, for
example, that the "alm ost stupid Man of Practice, pitted against some
light adroit Man of Theory, all equipt w ith clear logic" (160) will in fact
w in out, just a few pages after stressing the indivisibility of thought
and action: "A ction hangs, as it were, dissolved in Speech, in Thought
w hereof Speech is the shadow; and precipitates itself therefrom . The
kind of Speech in a m an betokens the kind of A ction you w ill get from
him " (153).
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Carlyle shows, in fiact, that he, and we, can see the same
individuals and institutions in radically different w ays, in creating
them through different narratives. We find, given the inconsistency
over Chadwick in Past and Present, and even m ore in Carlyle's earlier
essay "Chartism ," that the Poor Laws themselves can be seen either as
an exam ple of ruling class idiocy, or as the start of a new heroic move
tow ards action and leadership. Much of "Chartism " is devoted to
attacking the spirit of the New Poor Law, and suggesting that if better
leadership does not m aterialize, chaos and revolution w ill ensue. In
the "Laissez-Faire" section Carlyle w rites that "in the province of the
W orking Classes, Laissez-faire having passed its New Poor-Law, has
reached the suicidal point" (Selected W ritings 187). In the earlier "New
Poor Law" section, he em phasizes the anti-heroic nature of the law and
its creators: 'T o say to the poor. Ye shall eat the bread of affliction and
drink the w ater of affliction, and be very miserable w hile here, required
not so m uch a stretch of heroic faculty in any sense, as due toughness
of bow els" (162). O n the other hand, in this section he makes a point of
attacking protests that focus on the law. He attacks the old law as
worse, and agrees w ith the new law that "for the idle m an there is no
place in this England of ours" (164). But he goes further and suggests
that the protests have represented the New Poor Laws and Poor Law
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Com m issioners as m onstrous, in order to avoid questioning further
the relationship between rich and poor. H e states:
w ithal we are far from joining in the outcry raised against
these Poor Law Commissioners, as if they were tigers in
m en's shape; as if their Am endm ent Act were a
m onstrosity and horror, deserving instant abrogation.
They are not tigers; they are men filled w ith an idea of a
theory: their Amendment Act, heretical and dam nable as
a w hole truth, is orthodox, and laudable as a half-truth;
and was im peratively required to be p u t in practice. (164)
He goes on to weave the New Poor Laws into a narrative almost of
heroic leadership; he approves of the centralization of pow er the Act
im plies, and says, "W e will praise the New Poor-law, farther, as the
probable prelim inary of some general charge to be taken of the lowest
classes by the higher Let us welcome the New Poor-Law as the
harsh beginning of much, the harsh ending of much!" (166). Carlyle
can both m ake use of the m onstrous Bastilles and the New Poor Laws
in his self-righteous condemnation of parliam entary democracy, and
reflect on, criticize and reverse this very process of dem onization. The
object of Carlyle's diatribes and inquiries are not only institutions and
social problem s, b u t the position and m ethods of social criticism itself.
Disraeli: Rhetoric and the Im possibility of A uthenticity
D israeli's novel Sybil shares m uch w ith Carlyle's work. Both
have a lack of faith in the ability of "the People" to speak for
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them selves, and articulate for them a yearning and need for a pow erful
leader unencum bered by too m uch dem ocracy. D israeli's narrator also
professes a faith in the transcendent value of w ork (of different kinds
for each appropriate class), and has the eponym ous protagonist utter
the sam e m otto Carlyle uses: '"Q ui laborat, o ra t/ said Sybil w ith a
sm ile, 'is the privilege of the people'" (302). Disraeli also has a taste for
the heroic and epic, lending his idle-landow ning-class hero Egremont
the opportunity to be swashbucklingly active in fighting the cause of
"the People" as it is outlined in the novel. Furtherm ore Disraeli, like
Carlyle, suggests a slippery idea of w hat tru th m ight be, and of w hat is
at stake in any attem pt to w rite history or to represent the social. In the
"A dvertisem ent" at the beginning of his novel Disraeli states an
intention: he says "the subject w hich these volum es illustrate" is "the
C ondition of the People." He also indicates that his representation is
authentic, even if it m ight seem exaggerated: "he believes there is not
a trait in this w ork for w hich he has not the authority of his ow n
observation, or the authentic evidence w hich has been received by
Royal Com missions and Parliam entary Com m ittees" (i) He
im m ediately follows this, how ever, w ith a qualification of his account:
[W]hile he hopes he has alleged nothing w hich is not
true, he has found the absolute necessity of suppressing
m uch that is genuine. For so little do w e know of the
state of our ow n country that the air of im probability that
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the w hole tru th w ould inevitably throw over these pages,
m ight deter m any horn their perusal, (i)
D israeli prom ises to tell the truth, b u t not the w hole truth. Further,
his idea of who "the People" are, and of w hat constitutes authentic
observation, prove to be m ore com plex than the apparent naivete of
his prom ise indicates.
If Disraeli expected everything he w rote to be taken as truth (and
it w ould be uncharitable to think he did), he was sadly disappointed.
One contem porary reviewer, apparently unim pressed by the
"A dvertisem ent," w rites that "The aim has clearly been to draw , not a
true and serviceable picture, bu t a striking and affecting one." This is
w ritten concerning the "coarsest" bits of the book, those w here the poor
are described. This reviewer is no m ore im pressed w ith the veracity of
the historical accounts, or as he describes them , "historical rhapsodies .
. . of [a] mystical and paradoxical order." A nother reviewer, William
Thackeray, also comments sardonically on D israeli's "high flown
Young England m ystery" and "V enetian theory," and com plains that
there is not more contem porary satire of politics as in Coningsby. since
''W illiam IH is an old cock to shy at." Both reviewers w rite that a
depiction of the w orking class ought to be w ritten by som eone of that
class, though they stipulate that it should m eet certain standards of
good taste. But Disraeli is not necessarily oblivious of the objections
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possible from his contem poraries, and he indicates in the novel some
sim ilar aw areness of his ow n position, and even of the lim itations and
implications of his ow n attem pts to w rite history. H is narrative is not
a failed attem pt to pin dow n the truth and silence skeptics, but
som ething of an experim ent in representation of history, institutions
and social classes.
The history offered in Sybil (and the long third chapter offers a
history, w ith only brief references to the fictional Egrem onts, from
Henry VIII through W ellington's career as Prim e M inister) is w ritten
in terms of heroic individuals, though, like Carlyle, D israeli chooses to
celebrate obscure figures, as well as famous ones, as heroes. For
Disraeli it is im portant for these heroes not only to be m en of action,
but also that they know a lot and speak well. The w ar hero
W ellington, for example, is condemned because of his ignorance of
England—the narrator contrasts him w ith Lord Shaftesbury, whose
"STRENGTH LAY D M HIS KNOWLEDGE OF ENGLAND" (48). The
two major heroes of the narration are Edm und Burke, and the less
celebrated Lord Shelburne (Prime M inister 1782-3). A ppropriately
enough for a Disraeli novel, Shelburne, we are told, took an interest in
and excelled at both literature and politics. "H is knowledge was
extensive and even profound. He was a great linguist; he pursued both
literary and scientific investigations; his house w as frequented by men
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of letters" (41-2). We are told that he was an em inent (if n ot great)
speaker, and that he h ad to hand an am ount of inform ation "w ith
w hich the speeches of no statesm an of that age except M r Burke can
com pare" (42). We are also told that his "adm inistrative ability was
conspicuous," b u t this is m ore or less synonym ous in D israeli's
narration w ith being a good linguist and being know ledgeable. The
contribution of the even greater Burke w as "to revive som ething of the
pristine purity and high-toned energy of the old w hig connection" (38).
Disraeli waxes still m ore enthusiastic: "he restored the m oral existence
of the party. He taught them to recur to the ancient principles of their
connection, and suffused those principles w ith all the delusive
splendour of his im agination. He raised the tone of their public
discourse; he breathed a high spirit into their public acts" (38). For
Disraeli it is heroic to be nostalgic, and to speak in a "high" tone; he
regards tone as an essential part of politics and leadership. Rhetoric is
the m ost im portant tool of a hero; Burke is able to m ake the greatest
contribution because "he was a great w riter; as an orator he was
transcendent" (39). Rhetoric provides, or constitutes, pow er in his
analysis; once betrayed by his party Burke got revenge through his
w ords, and "placed his heel upon the neck of the ancient serpent" (39).
This em phasis on the im portance o f rhetoric in the definition of
the heroic and the m oral runs throughout the novel. The distinction
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that the alternative title of the novel introduced, The Two N ations, is
explained later to be 'T H E RICH AND THE POOR" (96), bu t it is also a
question of m anners: here is Stephen M orley, friend of W alter Gerard,
the w orking people's leader (who turns out to be descended from a
baron after all): "Two nations; between w hom there is no intercourse
and no sym pathy;. . . who are formed by a different breeding, are fed by
a different food, are ordered by different m anners, and are not
governed by the same laws" (96). The two nations are only the rich and
poor in a very specific sense; w hat the novel seem s to indicate is that
the division is not so m uch between capitalists and w orkers, but
between those who still cling to a nostalgic version of an organic,
"baronial" England, and those who are products of the industrial
revolution. Disraeli seems less interested in the poor than in "the
People," and on the side of the People are the originally-aristocratic
Gerard and Sybil, and the swashbuckling Egrem ont, and not, for
example, the industrial workers of Hellhouse Yard. The two sides are
distinguished no t by w ealth or class as such, bu t indeed by "breeding"
and "m anners," or principally, in other w ords, by the language they
speak. Those on the side of the People speak an artificially old-
fashioned standard English, whereas the decadent people of Hellhouse
Yard and London, who are unsym pathetic o r even hostile to Sybil, are
distinguished by their accents. The m ost villainous aristocrat in the
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novel, Egrem ont's older brother Lord M am ey, is distinguished also by
his liking for the rhetoric of M althus and the political economists;
unlike Egrem ont he never learns the archaic, form al style of the
People.
This difference in m anner of speech often outw eighs differences
in ideology and analysis of social problems. For exam ple Disraeli has
both Lord M am ey and Gerard comment on the "problem " of
population. M amey dism isses the concern of Mr. St. Lys that "We
have rem oved w om an from her sphere . . . by her introduction into
the m arket of labour [so] w hat we call dom estic life is a condition
impossible to be realized" by saying "w ith a stare of high-bred
im pertinence . . . w ithout directing his w ords to him , 'They may say
w hat they like, bu t it is all an affair of population'" (144). H e goes on to
say "N othing can p u t this country right bu t em igration on a great scale"
and explains how he is started on his own land by "declar[ing] w ar on
the cottage" (144-5). Gerard is different in that he is all in favor of
"dom estic life" and a traditional paternalist and patriarchal model of
family and nation, bu t he echoes the concern about population.
Com paring England w ith the Roman em pire, he exclaims: "W hat are
your invasions of the barbarous nations, your Goths and Visigoths,
your Lombards and H uns, to our Population Returns!" (175). This
elem ent of political theory Gerard is prepared to take on board; he
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explains that he has little faith in m ost "proposals or proposers — But I
have been persuaded of late that there is som ething going on in this
country of m ore efficacy7 ' (174). W hen it comes to population Gerard
does not just rely on nostalgia for feudal England, bu t actually
approxim ates the analysis of M amey, except that he has better m anners
and makes a portentous reference to the fall of Rome.
This is not the only com promise the defenders of the People
make w ith m odernity. A nother w ay in w hich M am ey is m arked as a
villain, as w e m ight expect, is his association w ith the Poor Law
Amendm ent Act. A fter behaving badly tow ards his wife and guests (by
talking a lot and being "chiefly dogm atical or argum entative"), M amey
finds som ething positive to say:
He eulogized the new poor law, w hich he declared w ould
be the salvation of the country, provided it w as 'carried
o u t' in the sp irit in which it w as developed in the M amey
Union; but then he w ould add that there w as no district
except their union in which it w as properly observed. (73)
Again, though, this is not necessarily represented as ideologically
appalling; M amey is unsym pathetic here largely because he is a self-
satisfied bully. The poor house itself is not represented at all; the
reference to it sim ply serves as a m arker for an aristocrat out of touch
with, and unsym pathetic to the poor. The factory ow ner Trafford, in
contrast, has "gentle blood in his veins, and old English feelings," and
is therefore on the side of the People, b u t in m any ways the
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organization of his m odel factory is as much along Bentham ite lines as
any union workhouse. Trafford's factory, which so im presses the
heroic Egremont, is designed as one large, high room. The narrator
outlines the "physical advantages" of this arrangem ent, b u t then
m akes clear the panopticon-like uses of the building:
But the m oral advantages resulting from superior
inspection and general observation are not less im portant:
the child works under the eye of the parent, the parent
under that of the superior workm an; the inspector or
employer at a glance can behold all. (225)
Trafford feels that his connection w ith his w orkers "should be
other ties than the paym ent and receipt of wages" (224), and he
certainly does make sure his control is quite extensive. As in
Bentham 's plan for poorhouses as outlined in Pauper M anagem ent
Im proved. Trafford m aximizes the "m oral condition" and productivity
of his workers through surveillance; as the narrator puts it, "Proxim ity
to the em ployer brings cleanliness and order, because it brings
observation and encouragem ent" (226). Also as in Bentham 's plan,
one aim is to m odel the poor in the form of the m iddle class by giving
them access to the sam e institutions—only here the em phasis is not on
banks b u t on houses w ith gardens and horticultural societies. This
som ewhat Benthamite arrangem ent is described by the narrator as "the
baronial principle reviving in a new form, and adapted to the softer
m anners and m ore ingenious circumstances of the tim es" (226). The
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difference between M am ey and Trafford lies in the fact th at Trafford
observes and controls the poor m ore rigorously, and in the fact that he
is not associated w ith the language of political economy or the new
poor law. Both are constituted in and by m odernity, b u t Trafford is
bound up in a rhetoric of nobility and nostalgia.
At the same tim e as advancing the Carlylean notion that w hat is
necessary is a "natural" aristocracy that will provide strong, wise
leadership for the People, the novel suggests to some extent the
arbitrariness of distinctions between different aristocracies. The battles
that close the novel offer up two pairs of leaders: Lord M am ey and
W alter Gerard, and "the Bishop," the leader of the w orkers from
Hellhouse Yard, and Egrem ont, the now-enlightened false aristocrat
who will m arry the "true" more dated aristocrat Sybil. Lord M amey
and Egremont are com pared and contrasted in these battle scenes by the
fact that both are responsible for sabrings: Lord M amey orders his
troops to sabre the crow d that has assembled w ith G erard, whereas the
chapter closes w ith Egrem ont heroically him self sabring a different set
of working-class characters and rescuing the endangered Sybil. Gerard
and the Bishop are also contrasted as "the real friend and cham pion of
the People" (489) and "the ruthless savage, who — had presum ed to
style him self the Liberator of the People" (491). These distinctions are
accompanied, how ever, by strong suggestions that they are stage-
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m anaged narrative productions. When Sybil is left alone, setting up
the attack by "a band of drunken ruffians" and Egrem ont's heroic
rescue, we are told, as if to em phasize that the scene is contrived, that
"the mob in her im m ediate neighbourhood dispersed as if by magic"
(490) w hen frightened by gunfire. The rescue itself is a melodramatic
tableau: "One ruffian had grasped the arm of Sybil, another had
clenched her garm ents, w hen an officer covered w ith d u st and gore,
sabre in hand, jum ped from the terrace, and hurried to the rescue"
(491). This conventionally improbable sw ashbuckling heroism is the
climax to the sam e novel that is preceded by the prom ise of "the
authority of . . . observation" and "the authentic evidence which has
been received by Royal Commissions and Parliam entary Committees."
The ends of the other leaders are equally openly artificially contrived:
the aristocrat in love w ith m odernity, M amey, is stoned to death;
Gerard is killed defending the People; and the Bishop's working-class
mob lacking in aristocratic leadership, the "H ell-cats," are
appropriately, and w ith heavy symbolism, consum ed in a hellish fire
of their own m aking.
But such dram atic mom ents are not the only m om ents where
the novel suggests its ow n artifice; even the scenes of poverty that do
seem to derive from "authentic evidence" are openly stage managed.
Two chapters concern the family of the w eaver W arner, who plays no
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other role in the plot of the book than to narrate the disappearance of
his class and be an object of Sybil's charity. A fter the narrator gives a
brief description of the room the family lives in, W arner essentially
addresses the reader in a long monologue, a "reverie" (152) that his
family ignores. Unlike the urban and industrial working-class
characters, he speaks standard English of the sam e artificially oratorical
kind as G erard and the other defenders of the People. W arner's wife is
saddled in this scene w ith representing the im m ediate cares of
m odernity w ith her unm anly com plaining; W arner, and then Sybil,
provide a nostalgic narrative and thesis about the decline of "H and-
Loom w eavers" and the People more generally. The details of the
children's lack of food and clothing is not really the focus of the
scene—after Sybil, then the vicar M r St. Lys and the disguised
Egrem ont enter, W arner's wife com plains of the lack of money and
m isquotes Sybil, and is considered w ild and irrelevant: "D uring this
ebullition, Mr. St. Lys had surveyed the apartm ent and recognised
Sybil. 'Sister,' he said w hen the wife of W arner had ceased, 'this is not
the first tim e w e have m et under the roof of sorrow .'" (158). When
Sybil helps she does so w ith food and clothing, b u t m ore em phasis is
pu t on a kind of m agical quality of cheerfulness she brings w ith her.
H ere is the reaction of the baby to hen "H er glance w as sweeter even
than her rem edy; the infant stared at her w ith his large blue eyes; for an
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instant astonished, and then he sm iled" (156). Again the narration
indicates that the substance of this scene is not m aterial conditions, but
the preservation and prom otion of a particular kind of nostalgic
discourse of charitable nobility and the idealized English laborer.
W arner does not appear again in the novel, and the m om ent is pivotal
only because Sybil and Egremont m eet again here. The scene is
im portant for its rhetoric, and sym bolically to indicate the sym pathies
of Sybil and Egremont, but the narrative indicates that it is not a realist
invitation to view the unm ediated spectacle of poverty. W ith its
soliloquy, the device of Egrem ont's disguise, and the em phasis on
som ewhat artificial dialogue this scene draw s attention to its ow n
staginess and artifice. The novel is not so much about the observations
and "authentic evidence" that the author promises, but about the
interpretation of such evidence, and the uses to which it can be put.
Gaskell: Interpretation as Creation
GaskelTs N orth and South also concerns itself w ith the
interpretation of poverty, em phasizing not only that judgm ent is
formed through the practices and expectations of a particular
interpretive com m unity, b u t also that the process of interpretation
changes, or even creates, its ow n object (and the subject). The novel
sets up a num ber of different and initially competing class and gender
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specific discourses, and show s how different individuals are able to
grow to read and tolerate other positions. M argaret Hale, com ing from
the rural South of England, m ust learn how to understand and
appreciate the industrial N orth. She can do so only by entering into
and influencing p art of the com m unity—she finds the "hum an
interest" (113) of the working-class Nicholas and Bessy H iggins, and
their family, once know n and interpreted, does not rem ain unchanged.
Similarly, after a series of m isreadings or intransigently inflexible
readings, M argaret H ale and Thornton, the hum anitarian and the
political econom ist businessm an, and Higgins and Thornton, the
w orker and the m aster, learn to adopt a conciliatory position and read
each other w ithout hostility. There is little that is natural about
interpretation in the novel; interpretations are learned and produced
as a result of specific contexts and particular needs and desires. Even
w here there is resolution there is not necessarily a sense that the truth
has been found.1
Left out of the final reconciliation am ongst these characters of
different backgrounds and com peting discourses is Boucher, the
w eaker-willed working-class m an who becomes violent, alienating
both sides of the Union dispute, and ultim ately commits suicide. To
some extent Boucher is set up as the undeserving poor to H iggins's
deserving, w illing, steadfast English laborer, and to some extent this
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difference is represented as inherent and im m ediately readable. After
m eeting Higgins, M r H ale and M argaret discuss this difference:
"T h ere's granite in all these northern people, papa, is there not?'
'There w as none in poor Boucher, I'm afraid; none in his w ife either.'
'I should guess from their tones that they had Irish blood in them '"
(384). Boucher is m arked, then, as irredeem ably Irish and different.
From the first tim e he is introduced w e are told he is not p art of the
com m unity of readers and interpreters; w hen M argaret enters the
Higgins hom e w here Boucher is first seen com plaining, she m akes eye
contact w ith everyone b u t him: "It w as only John Boucher that took no
notice w hatever who came in and who w ent out" (206). Later during
the riot outside T hornton's home M argaret is once again apparently
able to read Boucher, w hile he is again unseeing: "there is Boucher. I
know his face, though he is livid w ith rage" (231). Through
recognizing Boucher, M argaret is able to understand all the rioters
(unlike Thornton a t this stage, who is calm b u t ignorant: '"W ho is
Boucher?' asked M r Thornton coolly" (231)). H ere is w hat, and how,
M argaret sees w hen she opens the windows:
M any in the crow d w ere m ere boys; cruel and
thoughtless,—cruel because they were thoughtless; some
were m en, g au n t as wolves, and m ad for prey. She knew
how it was; they w ere like Boucher,—w ith starving
children at hom e—relying on ultim ate success in their
efforts to get higher wages, and enraged beyond m easure
at discovering th at Irishm en w ere to be brought in to rob
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their little ones of bread. M argaret knew it all; she read it
in Boucher's face, forlornly desperate and livid w ith rage.
(233)
Just by looking at and recognizing one face M argaret is able to know a
w hole section of the working-class and their w orries, grievances and
m otivations. She does not just see the rioters as unthinking anim als;
she can see how Boucher and the others read their ow n situation.
O n the other hand the novel, w ith its num erous
m isunderstandings and changes of m ind, has already cautioned against
knowingness. M argaret, w hile she has been set up as a skilled
interpreter, has not been an entirely reliable one (she has just sent
Thornton outside on the basis of her understanding of the crow d, and
then im m ediately doubted this decision, for example), h i this episode
as elsew here M argaret does not just stay at a distance and observe, but
becomes instrum ental (and not as she anticipates) in the narrative that
unfolds. She rushes out to shield Thornton from the crow d, a heroic
and defiant act, though again it is not clear if she has read the situation
correctly: "If she thought her sex w ould be a protection — she was
w rong" (234). H er act ends the riot in an unforeseen w ay, after she is
h it by a pebble and Thornton scolds the crowd, though again the precise
m otives of the crowd are left am biguous: "the retrograde m ovem ent
tow ards the gate had begun—as unreasoningly, perhaps as blindly, as
the sim ultaneous anger. Or, perhaps, the idea of the approach of the
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soldiers, and the sight of that pale, upturned face" (235). This latter
sentence has no m ain verb, adding to the sense of confusion—not just
on the p art of the crowd, b u t also on the part of the observing narrator.
Despite the fact that M argaret has done her best to learn to interpret the
crow d and she intervenes bravely, the scene is resolved chaotically,
unpredictably and unreadably. Despite her confidence in reading w hat
she sees in front of her w hen she opens the window, the scene does not
unfold theatrically in front of her passive observation, b u t involves
her, confuses her and lays her low. Nobody in the scene is fully
conscious of w hat is going on and nobody can rem ain detached from it,
w hich indicates the novel's sense of w hat it means to try and interpret
society.
The fact that the interpreter is not separate from, b u t helps
create, the interpreted is suggested further in the progress of Higgins
and Boucher. As we have seen Boucher is sometimes read as
irredudbly different from Higgins, and Higgins ends up a changed bu t
resilient p art of the resolution of the novel, w hile the w eaker Boucher
commits suicide. But the story of Higgins is in many w ays a delayed
version of the story of Boucher. Boucher becomes increasingly
desperate, inarticulate and enraged; after the riot and the ensuing
recrim inations Bessy tells M argaret the story of how Boucher, losing
his self-control, sobs and strikes Higgins: "H e were in such a trem ble
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w i' spent passion, I could n a' bear to look at him . . . at one tim e I
thought he w ere sobbing. But when father said h e's give him up to
police, he gave a great cry, and struck father on th ' face w i' his closed
fist" (260). Higgins him self has already started drinking before this, but
he has his ow n greatest loss of self-control soon after this scene w hen
Bessy dies: "throw ing his body half across the table, he shook it and
every other piece of furniture in the room, w ith his violent sobs" (281).
Higgins, reduced now , like Boucher, to inarticulate sobs, attem pts to
leave to go to drink; M argaret prevents him , at the risk of violence:
"H e had shaken off M ary w ith violence; he looked ready to strike
M argaret" (282). H iggins, like Boucher weighed dow n w ith his
inability to care for his family, is becoming Boucher—he is becoming
w ild and insensible: "w ild gleams came across the stupidity of his eyes"
(281). W hereas M argaret w as absent from Boucher's striking of
Higgins, here she is able to intervene, however. She brings him hom e
to her father, who brings out "by his ow n refinem ent and
courteousness of m anner, all the latent courtesy in the other" (288).
Though he m ay have "latent courtesy," he is changed through his
change of surroundings. In the context of Mr H ale's study Higgins is
recreated as a debater of politics and theology. A t one point in this
scene Higgins em phasizes his difference from Boucher, w ho w ould not
suffer in silence, b u t h e is answered by M argaret: '"Y ou forget!' said
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M argaret. 'I d o n 't know m uch of Boucher; bu t the only tim e I saw him
it was not his ow n sufferings he spoke of, bu t those of his sick wife—
his little children'" (295). The difference betw een H iggins and Boucher,
and by extension betw een the deserving and undeserving poor, is in
this novel represented as an arbitrary, m anufactured distinction.
There is in both Sybil and N orth and South, then, an em phasis
on the theatricality of each novel's representations of the social.
Despite the claims that each author makes to a realism grounded in
fact, their em phasis on their ow n stagings of conflicts and resolutions
in the novels constitutes a critique of that project. Each novel offers a
dram a in which certain characters and classes are either divided or
brought into unity or dialogue, w ithout attem pting to pass off such
alliances and differences as m ore substantial than other fictional effects.
The novels do not shy aw ay from political com m entary, certainly, but
their politics rem ain provisional, the novels m aking clear the
possibility that their choice of narrative direction expresses a set of
wishes and opportunities, rather than authoritative certainties. They
are politically optim istic, bu t this does not m ean th at they are
representationally naive. Such scenes as that of Egrem ont's fined sabre-
brandishing heroism , and M argaret H ale's protection of Thornton and
reading of Boucher, predict the moments in later fictional experim ents
when all that is solid m elts into air. If w e are to see, say, attention to
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the staging of politics in George Eliot's later representations of
parliam entary politics and speech-making in Felix Holt as an
unprecedented self-conscious analysis of the lim itations of the form of
the condition-of-England novel,2 then this w ould seem to have more
to do w ith our own investm ent in reading the later novels as a
progression over earlier w orks than w ith the novels them selves.
W hile readings of subsequent novels that engage in som e way w ith the
pow er and problem s of social realism—in the next chapter, I consider
Little D orrit. Shirley, and Felix H olt—offer further elaborations on the
place of the fictions of knowledge of the social, we m ight im agine them
not as reactions to earlier industrial novels so m uch as continued
workings o u t of insights and techniques they m ade available.
Specifically, the industrial novels already m ake clear that the social can
only ever be known through fiction, and present social conditions not
as fam iliar solidity but as re-inventable artifice.
N otes
1 H ilary Schor, in Scheherezade in the M arketplace, points out of
M argaret H ale that "M uch of her tim e w ith Thornton is spent defining
their term s: they cannot agree as to w hat they consider a 'gentlem an/
w hat the role of a 'm aster' is, how he is to treat his 'h an d s'" (127).
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W ith regard to resolutions, G allagher argues that Gaskell
"creates the im pression of coherence" through the association of the
m arriage plot w ith the industrial conflict, so that "the very
conventional resolution of the novel's love plot appears to be a partial
solution to industrial social problem s" (170). She goes on to suggest,
however, that "the novel provides a running ironic com m entary on its
official ideas" (171). Schor, in com m enting on this position of
G allagher's, chooses to read G askell's novel as even more conscious of
the "partialness of its own solutions" (226), and argues that the novel
"believes in conflictual m odels" (150) rather than seeking neat
resolutions. I suggest here some further ways in which the novel can
be read as conscious of its own artifice, in particular its em phasis on the
theatricality of its action. I also suggest that it sets up certain
oppositions—in particular, that between the deserving Higgins and the
unruly Boucher—only to provide the critical tools to dism antle them .
2 Gallagher suggests, for example, that Sybil and W alter Gerard
"rep resen t. . . ahistorical values," and therefore "considered as
novelistic characters, they have always seem ed som ew hat ridiculous"
("The Industrial Reformation o f English Fiction. 212). On the other
hand she credits Eliot w ith "exposing the contradictions w ithin the
realism w hich she espoused m ore explicitly and intelligently than any
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other Victorian novelist" (218). It is not far-fetched to describe
D israeli's fictional creations as ludicrous and Eliot's as the m ost
intelligent. But to refrain from m aking such judgm ents of the
individual novelists, and to see the ludicrousness (like G askell's partial
solutions) as p art of a design, opens up the possibility of seeing
D israeli's novel as produced w ithin a culture that w as already capable
of articulating consciously the lim itations of the condition-of-England
novel and of social description m ore generally.
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C hapter 3: The Figure of the O bserver
Shirley is only som etim es regarded as an industrial novel, Felix
H olt is considered to m ark the end of the Condition of England novel,
and Little D orrit does not commonly feature in such discussions at all.
These novels are not apparently as focused on issues of pauper
managem ent or factory conditions as, say, Sybil or O liver Twist: but
such social questions are nevertheless key elem ents of these novels.
O ne of the central though unrepresented revelations of Shirley is the
knowledge Robert Moore gains by visiting the urban poor of
Birmingham; the poor house features notably in Little D orrit's
narrative of the carceral. These three novels go further than the
Condition of England novels (as they are usually understood1 ) are able
to go: they provide the opportunity to ask the question of who
investigates and how they do it. The observers of these novels are
variously women, children, and displaced Frenchmen, as well as
aimless gentlemen. They provide comic and satiric accounts of the
situatedness of observers, and make available also a critique of the
distinction between the perspectives of heroic individuals and
bureaucratic institutions. The novels, accordingly, do not so much
offer social theories or a set of social observations as they provide
critical considerations of the usefulness of a variety of different ways in
w hich knowledge of the social is formed.
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In her book The Industrial Reformation of English Fiction,
Gallagher argues that Felix H olt m arked the end of the industrial
novel, because of its increased self-consciousness about representation.
For Gallagher, Felix H olt em phasizes the sign as representation, giving
up w hat she term s a "facts-values continuity," and thereby giving up
ground from which to criticize, and "empt[ying] out a certain kind of
realism " (265). This she links to the w ork of historians w ho suggest
that at this point in the nineteenth century the m anufacturing class felt
com pelled to devalue the economic and social goals of industrial
capitalism and adopt the values of the gentry, thereby m aking the anti
industrial Condition of England debate outdated and redundant (266-7).
It seems possible to tell a different (though not necessarily m ore
accurate) story here. Corrigan and Sayer in their account of the early
Victorian period in The G reat Arch stress not so m uch how it can be
viewed as extraordinary and revolutionary, but how m uch it can be
view ed as part of a continuous developm ent they see as ongoing and
dating from the M iddle Ages. Similarly w here G allagher suggests that
in the realist fiction of the latter p art of the nineteenth century "a
certain optim ism and naivete have disappeared" (266), w e m ight also
choose to believe that the optim ism and naivete w ere not there to
begin w ith; that the Condition of England novels had already "em ptied
out" their realism and been self-conscious about representation. W hile
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it m ay be th at Eliot's novel w orks in the service of a politics of
disengagem ent, ending w ith a retreat from specific social issues into
^historical concerns w ith hum an nature, Felix H olt, like Shirley and
Little D orrit. provides a broad critique of rhetorical, ideological
strategies that turns critical attention tow ards the figure of the observer
and social critic. The novel does not necessarily m ark a m om ent of
retreat into abstraction, for a concern of the earlier novels of social
inquiry has already been that social conditions and especially the poor
are at the sam e tim e central and oddly unrepresented, except as a
singular, m onadic figure. The novels them selves offer such figures but
do not pass them off w holeheartedly as definitive; rather, they criticize
the process of representation and m anagem ent that they are engaged
in.
Little D orrit and the lim itations of the free individual
The poor law debate and the m ore general discussion of the
politics of know ledge form ation make available an exploration of the
relationship betw een individuals and institutions. If the state and its
institutions are m ore o r less consciously created fictions, then each
individual is bound up in some w ay in the creation and perpetuation
of those institutions—the idea of the individual being itself,
presum ably, a function of those institutions. But the institutions are
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malleable, and do no t necessarily have the ability to restrict its
members and participants to one possible role. Little D orrit suggests
ways in w hich institutions, specifically here the bureaucracy
represented in the Circum locution Office, and also the M arshalsea
prison, can be painfully and irreversibly restrictive and deadening. But
we can see in Little D orrit also the suggestion th at a position w ithin the
institution can be less circumscribed and carceral than the position of a
subject intent on being separate horn institutions. As in Bentham 's
plan for pauper m anagem ent, the possibility is raised that there is no
pre-carceral subject anyway. And as in the earlier O liver Twist, the
poor house is represented not just as lim iting, categorizing and
controlling, bu t gets som e positive press. Old N andy, father of Mrs.
Plom ish who resides in her urban cottage in Bleeding H eart Yard,
treats the poor house alm ost as an extension of his family. Although
the unsentim entality of the workhouse supervisors is m ade
conventionally clear ("He said nothing about his birthday, or they
m ight have kept him in; for such old m en should not be bom " (416)),
the poor house, like the Plom ish cottage, is still a potentially pastoral
scene: "he w as, and resolved to remain, one of those little old m en in a
grove of little old m en w ith a com m unity of flavour7 ' (414).
O f course O ld N andy7 s resolve to rem ain in his grove is
produced by the dem ands of his position, and the im poverished
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position of the Plom ishes. But to ignore this com forting spin on the
poor house and p ity N andy his position could be to im itate the
patronizing sym pathy of Mr Dorrit: "It appeared to him am azing that
he could hold up his head at all, poor creature. 'In the W orkhouse, sir,
the Union; no privacy, no visitors, no station, no respect, no speciality.
Most deplorable!'" (416). But "speciality," the sense of being constituted
an individual w ithin, but in spite of, his institution, is destructive for
M r D orrit, who pities the workhouse inm ate in a ruse to m aintain his
ow n sense of being higher up in a hierarchy—"M r D orrit was in the
habit of receiving this old m an as if the old m an held of him in
vassalage under some feudal tenure" (415). His disgust at and pity for
the Union serves to help him deny the strictures that he operates
w ithin him self, and this is arguably not an uncom m on mechanism in
those of us conventionally horrified by the poor house.
In The Novel and the Police. D. A. M iller suggests pithily,
adapting the analysis of Foucault to his reading of Dickens, that the
"institutional netw ork fabricates the very subjects who then require its
discipline" (218). In his cunningly self-reflexive analysis readers, like
certain individual characters are only "assum ing the effect of difference
which thus continues to operate" (220)—we set ourselves against
discipline by adopting its voice ourselves. M iller suggests that such
play is likely to continue as long as it "rem ains profitable: not just to
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the subject w hom the play allows to establish his subjectivity', b u t also
to the social order w hich, playing on the play, establishes his
subjection" (220). M iller, proposing another reading of the idea of
Macherey and Eagleton that texts inevitably lay bare their ow n
incoherences, suggests that such "incoherences" represent not a
"'failure' of intention on the p art of the text [but] a positively
advantageous strategy" (66). But this strategy is not necessarily
im plem ented entirely w ith the intention of policing and containing.
Miller ends his book w ith an interpretation of David C opperfield's
determ ination to keep w orking silently w hile suffering as being m ade
up of "the different voices of the police" (220), but w e m ight choose to
pay m ore attention to M iller's perception of play rather than of police.
Not all the voices of Dickens's fiction need be those of the police, after
all, and the play produces things other than policing, h i Little D orrit
we can see, if w e w ant, various strategies for establishing or avoiding
the establishing of subjectivities, and various readings of institutions
both drearily defeatist and comically parodic. h i this variety of
understanding w e see in Dickens and this period, if we choose to, a
determ ination to find alternatives to, o r at least a critical response to,
policed individuation. Dickens can be read as m uch as a proponent of
irresponsibility as as an enforcer of law and of work.
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In Little D orrit A rthur Clennam follows the pattern M iller
posits, as he seeks to find some ground to stand on that w ill somehow
be authentic and beyond the influence of im personal institutions, but
constantly finds that the personal and the institutional are bound up
together. H e cannot escape institutional narratives. Clennam appears
m uch of the tim e to be in a state of paralysis, unable to find anything
specific to do, in spite of his professed opposition to the
Circum locution Office and its motto, "How not to do it." W hen
w alking to the M eagles' house (where he w ill find desire bu t not much
of a narrative, in initiating an alm ost im m ediately abortive romance
plot w ith M innie Meagles) he is in a state of some existential
uncertainty: "the subject seldom absent from his m ind [was] the
question, w hat he w as to do henceforth in life" (231). The
Circum locution Office is accordingly not really a problem for Clennam,
since it provides him w ith a narrative to follow. In spite of Doyce's
w arnings that the story will not have a satisfying ending, he is so
desperate for a story th at a shaggy dog w ill do, and he attem pts to
negotiate the Office on behalf of his partner. The Circum locution
Office serves as a useful but arbitrary adversary, convenient to extend
Clennam 's sense of having a purpose.
Clennam is in some ways closely aligned w ith his rival in that
already-doom ed romance plot, H enry Gowan. Gowan also struggles
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listlessly to spin, or just adopt, a narrative th at w ill give him som e
sense of an independent identity. But from the perspective of a
narrator w ho putatively wishes to uphold clear distinctions betw een
good and bad, Gowan is different and irresponsible because he refuses
to m ake such distinctions, and is accordingly a hopelessly incom petent
social investigator. Here is the narrator on Gowan w hen he is first
introduced at the Meagles':
It appeared — that everybody w hom this Gowan knew
w as either more or less of an ass, o r m ore or less of a
knave; but was, notw ithstanding, the m ost lovable, the
m ost engaging, the sim plest, truest, kindest, dearest, best
fellow that ever lived The effect of this discovery
happened to be, that while he seem ed to be scrupulously
finding good in m ost men, he did in reality lower it w here
it w as, and set it up where it was not; b u t that was the only
disagreeable o r dangerous feature. (248-9)
Gowan rejects the kind of gentlem anly "instincts" that Clennam
attem pts to adhere to, and accordingly ignores the conventional
distinction between "good" and "bad" that a gentlem an w ould make.
Gowan is correspondingly disagreeable and dangerous, and his
subversiveness is m ade clear later in his creative use of the villain
Blandois (a.k.a. Rigaud): "He found a pleasure in declaring that a
courtier w ith the refined m anners of Blandois ought to rise to the
greatest distinction in any polished country. He found a pleasure in
setting up Blandois as a type of elegance, and m aking him a satire upon
others w ho piqued themselves on personal graces" (541-2). G owan's
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pleasure is in b o n g an author, a satirist, m aking comic use of the
elem ents at his disposal, picking aw ay at norm ative standards.
But w hile Gowan can appear dangerous, he can also appear
reducible to certain dependencies and class affiliations, and in this he is
m ore aligned w ith Clennam . W hen Clennam visits Mrs. G ow an's
home, Gowan is an indifferent w ould-be outsider w hose position
nevertheless is defined in relation to (even if in opposition to) the
objects of his satirical wit: "H aving as suprem e a contem pt for the class
that had throw n him off as the class that had no t taken him on, he had
no personal disquiet in anything that passed" (362). Gowan is not
interested here in active dissent. Clennam in this instance is more
capably critical of the discourse of the assem bled Stiltstalkings and
Barnacles, but like Gowan he has difficulty asserting his own
independence. Clennam sees how his com pany fabricates a period and
a class in order to establish their own difference and superiority. They
m aintain a feudal sense of their relation to the poor, or, rather, the rest
of the country: "It w as only clear that the question w as all about John
Barnacle, A ugustus Stiltstalking, W illiam Barnacle and Tudor
Stiltstalking, Tom, Dick or H arry Barnacle or Stiltstalking, because
there was nobody else but m ob" (362). Clennam , unlike Gowan
handcuffed by good m anners, can only dissent through silence: "he
said nothing on the p art of mob, bethinking him self that mob was used
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to it" (362). Lord Lancaster Stiltstalking, the "noble Refrigerator,"
doggedly m aintains his outdated b u t self-serving certainties about the
mob, content to address extrem ely outdated versions of society: "In the
course of a couple of hours the noble Refrigerator, at no tim e less than
a hundred years behind the period, got about five centuries in arrears,
and delivered solem n political oracles appropriate to that epoch" (362-
3). But Clennam can offer no argum ent, and offers no updated
language w ith w hich to com bat this drawing-room conspiracy. He has
to stay as aloof as Gowan, and both are apparently pow erless or
unw illing to try and turn the class prejudices of the Barnacles on their
heads.
Clennam is painfully aw are of the limits of his (and anyone's)
ability to be conscious of and articulate the social forces he is bound up
w ithin, despite his faith in his ow n "gentlem anliness" and his ability
to recognize it elsewhere. In w alking to his m other's house during his
dealings w ith the Circum locution Office in the com pany of other
"Convicts who were under sentence to be broken alive on that wheel,"
Clennam has a sense of b o n g confined by dealings beyond just the
Office:
As he w ent along, upon a dreary night, the dun streets by
w hich he w ent, seem ed all depositories of oppressive
secrets. The deserted counting-houses, w ith their secrets
of books and papers locked up in chests and safes; the
banking-houses, w ith their secrets of strong room s and
L 0 8
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wells, the keys of which w ere in a very few pockets and a
very few secret breasts; the secrets of all the dispersed
grinders in the vast m ill, am ong whom there w ere
doubtless plunderers, forgers, and trust-betrayers of m any
sorts, whom the light of any day that daw ned m ight
reveal; he could have fancied that these things, in hiding,
im parted a heaviness to the air. (596-7)
Clennam is alienated and excluded from the business going on in these
houses, bu t the business is in any event no more than his ow n
projection. The night is dreary because he is, the buildings only "seem"
to be full of secrets, and it is only his fancy that these secrets "im part a
heaviness" or have any agency or m eaning at all. The unity of all these
secret-keepers in one "vast m ill" is a paranoid projection into a picture
filled w ith gaps and anxieties, and also the extant but inaccessible keys
and solutions to m ysteries. Clennam is a reader who knows he has no
definitive interpretive tools, bu t believes anyway that "any day" a vast
conspiracy is about to be brought to light.
The lim itations and pitfalls of Clennam 's investigative approach
are dram atized m ost spectacularly in his speculation in M erdle and his
subsequent incarceration in the M arshalsea. The narrator represents
Merdle as a plague, and the influence of the plague is m ore or less
universal: "that the contagion, w hen it has once m ade head, will spare
no pursuit or condition, bu t w ill lay hold on people in the soundest
health, and become developed in the m ost unlikely constitutions: is a
fact as firm ly established by experience as that we hum an creatures
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breathe an atm osphere" (627). No individual (except Doyce, of whom
more later) is im pervious to the "contagion" of M erdle; in fact M erdle
is a condition of life, breathed in by everyone. M erdle, in this respect,
stands in for ideology; M r D orrit is right, in these term s, to say that "M r
M erdle is the m an of the time. The name of M erdle is the nam e of the
age" (537). M erdle the physical person, however, is som ew hat
abstracted from the phenom enon that surrounds him . A t the center of
the M erdle scandal, ultim ately, is the m undane, local fact of a corpse,
which seems to proclaim its class origins: "the body of a heavily-m ade
man, w ith an obtuse head, and coarse, mean, common features" (771).
M erdle is taciturn throughout the novel; this silence m akes him all the
easier to interpret and celebrate. The snobbish story that he has failed
because he has risen to a class in which he does not belong circulates
only after his death—it is only then that his stem butler finally speaks
and says, "M r M erdle never was the gentlem an" (774). But the "fact" of
the body does not put an end to the circulation of stories about M erdle.
The lesson the "public m ind" reads into the suicide is a com fortingly
irresponsible lesson against work: "See, they said, w hat you brought
yourself to by w ork, w ork, work!" (775). The idea of M erdie's genius
does not disappear; Ferdinand Barnacle, who befriends Clennam , refers
to M erdle still as "A consum m ate rascal of course . . . b u t rem arkably
clever!" (806).
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The m an w ho eventually comes closest to the "com plaint" of M r
M erdle is not Clennam , despite his apparent w ish to seek ou t the true
nature of society. Clennam the social investigator is just one m ore
dupe, m ade m ore vulnerable to ideology by his insistence on trying to
discover or establish an "authentic" self. The m an M erdle addresses
his suicide note to is not so determ ined: the not-otherw ise-nam ed
Physician. Physician has a knack for inspiring confidences, and is the
only character who seems to be able to produce a change in the
discourse of Society (which in the novel m eans the Barnacles and their
allies): "Physician's little dinners always presented people in their least
conventional lights" (768). W hen he is introduced we find that p art of
his appeal lies in the same unw illingness to m ake distinctions that
Gowan displays: "M any wonderful things did he see and hear, and
much irreconcilable m oral contradiction did he pass his life am ong; yet
his equality of com passion was no more disturbed than the Divine
M aster's of all heeding w as" (768). Despite his spiritual transcendence,
the narrator tells us that he is rooted in the "real": "W here he w as,
som ething real w as" (768). But he is also, w e discover, "a great reader
of all kinds of literature (and never at all apologetic for that weakness)"
(771). M iller's David Copperfield finds the novel (the one he is w riting,
in his case) a place of refuge, yet "m ore than anything else, this secret
refuge is responsible for forming David into the liberal subject" (215). If
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Physician is constituted as liberal subject by his experience as a reader,
he does at least avoid being stuck in one genre of narrative—he is not
stuck in ironic m ode like Gowan, and is not intent on finding the
heroic narrative Clennam seeks. If he is close to the "real," he also has
m ore than one story of the real available. The nameless Physician's
"weakness" is in some ways his strength. He likes "all kinds" of
narrative, and this does not allow him to step outside of ideology to a
definitive perspective on reality, but it does allow him to be mobile.
He is relatively uninterpellated, we m ight say.
In any case Physician is a conduit for new stories and new points
of view —people speak differently to him , and speak of different things
to him. He cannot see M erdle's com plaint directly, but M erdle chooses
to tell him first. The som ewhat im personal, nam eless Physician is the
origin of nothing very much; the changes he inspires seem to be a
result of others' perception of him, not his own actions as such. He is
given credit for being a critical reader, and therefore inspires others to
reappraise them selves critically. W here other characters, in search of a
stable, authentic self, seem doom ed to repeat themselves and find
them selves hem m ed in and immobile, Physician produces, or at least
elicits, change. Clennam, for example, deeds w ith the Circum locution
Office after Doyce has already done so abortively, and Clennam also
follows M r D orrit into the M arshalsea. Amy D orrit then dresses up in
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rags in order to be able to repeat the scene she w as in w ith her father.
Physician, at the m argins of the novel, helps people recognize the
lim its of their roles, dism antle them selves, and look for other
costumes to wear.
Doyce has only one costum e, and we are to understand that it is
no fake. The narrator tells us, on Clennam inspecting the books, that
"everything was in its genuine w orking dress, and in a certain honest
rugged order" (311). Doyce is one of the few characters who seem
im m une to the institutions that infuse everyone else; his books are
contrasted here, to em phasize the point, to the records of the
Circum locution Office, which are "far less serviceable, as being m eant
to be far less intelligible" (311). Doyce is the independent hero
Clennam aspires to be. It will be honest, rugged Doyce's work, not self-
sacrificing Amy D orrit's good fortune, that Clennam will latch on to at
the end of the novel in going "dow n into a m odest life of usefulness
and happiness" (895). Doyce is an idealized character, who is entirely
transparent and readable, and em bodies the idea of extra-institutional
truth: "A composed and unobtrusive self-sustainm ent was noticeable
in Daniel Doyce—a calm knowledge that w hat was true m ust rem ain
true, in spite of all the Barnacles in the family ocean . . . which had a
kind of greatness in it, though not of the official quality" (234-5). But
even if Doyce is associated w ith truth, he is not associated w ith the
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"real" as Physician is. There is som ething spectral and insubstantial
about Doyce and his w ork. The factory he owns, and its lighting, call to
C lennam 's m ind a "child's old picture-book, w here sim ilar rays were
the w itness of Abel's m urder" (312-3). The sense that the scene is an
illustration rather than a brute feet persists in that the w orkers have no
bodies, but are m erely "patient figures at work" (313). Doyce's factory is
at once busy, fulfilling and fictional: "The whole had at once a fanciful
and practical air in Clennam 's eyes" (313). Doyce finds success,
eventually, on the continent, w here inventiveness and w ork like his
are profitable. The feet that these qualities can only be successful abroad
is a criticism of England, but then it is interesting that there is no way
to incorporate Doyce into m odem England at the end of the novel, as if
to suggest that the idea of a transparently honest, sim ple hard worker
can no longer be sustained in that context.
Doyce is left outside not because he is not English enough,
w hatever that m ight m ean, but because he fails to acknowledge any
role in the national institutions that surround him and constitute him.
The very partner Doyce needs to acknowledge and thereby make
m eaningful his skill and legibility is infected by M erdle; it turns out
that bureaucracy and speculation after all inhere w ithin the firm,
despite the feet that the firm defines itself against them . Clennam, who
w ants to be Doyce, and who for the sake of argum ent is here
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interchangeable w ith Doyce, is horrified at the idea th at the
Circum locution Office is no t a woe im posed from above, b u t a p art of
the com m unity, constituted and constituting from w ithin. Ferdinand
Barnacle, belying in his lucidity the Barnacle reputation for
obfuscation, explains the state of the case to Clennam . Clennam takes
the lack of interest in the invention to be just on the p art of the Office.
H ere is p art of the conversation. Barnacle first:
"[N]obody w ants to know of the invention, and nobody
cares tw opence-halfpenny about it."
"Nobody at the Office, that is to say?"
"N or out of it. Everybody is ready to dislike and
ridicule any invention. You have no idea how m any
people w ant to be left alone. You have no idea how the
Genius of the country (overlook the Parliam entary nature
of the phrase, and d o n 't be bored by it) tends to being left
alone. Believe me, M r Clennam ," said the sprightly
young Barnacle in his pleasantest m anner, "our place is
not a wicked G iant to be charged at full tilt; but only a
w indm ill show ing you, as it grinds immense quantities of
chaff, which way the country w ind blows."
"If I could believe that," said Clennam, "it w ould be
a dism al prospect for all of us."
"Oh! D on't say so!" returned Ferdinand, "It's all
right. We m ust have hum bug, we all like hum bug, we
couldn't get on w ithout hum bug." (805)
This brilliant Barnacle is w inning partly because of the self-
consciousness of his language—he draw s attention to his ow n
Parliam entariness, and m akes sure he is entertaining. But he also
offers an alternative to C lennam 's defeatism . W ith the w indm ill
allusion to Don Quixote Ferdinand Barnacle indicates his com mitm ent
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to com edy and parody, and his skepticism tow ards the doom ed
heroism of the Romantic quest for self-validation and authenticity.
For Ferdinand it is a m istake to understand institutions as m onsters,
w hen the institutions are the product of their interpreters anyway—
they show w hich w ay the w ind blows, w e m ust have them , w e all like
them , even if we show (and deny) it by treating them as m onstrous
enem ies. Ferdinand Barnacle, w hose nam e puts him squarely w ithin
the Circum locution Office bureaucracy, is in m any ways less disciplined
than the resolute outsider Clennam .
Cheerfulness in itself is not a recipe for revolutionary change.
But the idea that a parodic attitude to hum bug m ight prove useful is
m ore optim istic than the attitude Clennam appears to take, that only
one, already determ ined narrative is appropriate in each situation.
Clennam sometim es appears uncom fortably close to his nem esis,
Rigaud, w ho also considers him self a gentlem an, even in the face of
C lennam 's insults and the "instinctive" revulsion m any characters
(and anim als) feel tow ards him . Rigaud argues convincingly enough,
w hen he addresses Clennam in the M arshalsea (after the failure of
M erdle and therefore Doyce and Clennam ), so as to suggest that he and
Clennam are not, after all, so unlike each other: "I sell anything that
com m ands a price. How do your lawyers live, your politicians, your
intriguers, your men of the Exchange? How do you live? How do you
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come here? Have you sold no friend? Lady of mine! I rather think,
yes" (818). Clennam appears to accept R igaud's assertion that "W ords,
sir, never influence the course of the cards, or the course of the dice."
Rigaud says he "also play[s] a game, and w ords are w ithout pow er over
it" (814). H is determ ination that the rules be fixed m atches Clennam 's
ow n resolution th at his position not be altered. Amy D orrit, by
contrast, attem pts to avoid the entrapping logic of exchange, regarding
her m oney as unblessed and useless unless it enables com panionship
w ith Clennam . She tries to p u t her heart, self-effacingly, w ith
C lennam 's, begging him to understand money differently: 'T ray , pray,
pray, I beg you and im plore you w ith all my grieving heart, my
friend—dear!—take all I have, and make it a Blessing to me!" (828).
But Clennam will not reverse the earlier role he has of charity-giver.
He claims to be in the thrall of the absolute pow er of the M arshalsea,
w hile she is now absolutely outside of it (despite her eagerness to relive
her M arshalsea childhood w ith him). Suddenly he uses the m yth of
the M arshalsea to exclude Amy, and to em phasize her unfitness for
rew riting narratives. He asserts: "This is now a tainted place, and I well
know the taint of it clings to me. You belong to m uch brighter and
better scenes" (829). But for Amy now the outside is not necessarily
"brighter and better;" being outside the M arshalsea m eans isolation
and deprivation. Once again it is n o t clear th at the institution is the
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m ost restrictive environm ent; and again C lennam 's "gentlem anliness"
and his belief in the necessity of being a self-m ade m an are com plitit
w ith the m yth of the autonom ous pow er of institutions.
The separation between C lennam 's gentlem anly sodal-
investigator perspective and Amy D orrit's different experience of the
social is m ade clear earlier the narrator tells us "This history m ust
sometimes see w ith Little D orrit's eyes" (208). Amy first sees Clennam,
in his room that looks "dim m er than it w as in Little D orrit's eyes"
(208), because she has just come from the "beauty, ugliness, fair country
gardens, and foul street gutters" of Covent Garden. W hether her
vision is distorted or not is not m ade clear in the passage; earlier in the
same paragraph we have been told that "Little D orrit looked into a dim
room," at w hich point it is not clear if this dim ness is from a
narratorial perspective or hers. The reader is not left w ith a single
reliable perspective, for Clennam 's also is subject to criticism in this
chapter. He is more-or-less adm onished ("A slight shade of distress fell
upon her" (209), w hich is as close as Amy gets to anger) in this scene for
repeatedly calling Amy a child. But w hen he leaves Amy and Maggie
alone, at Am y's insistence, he repeats this habitual mechanism: "So
dim inutive she looked, so fragile and defenceless against the bleak
dam p w eather . . that he felt, in his com passion, and in his habit of
considering a child apart from the rest of the rough w orld, as if he
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w ould have been, glad to take her up in his arm s and carry her to her
journey's end" (215). Clennam leaves them out of "delicacy" and
respect for their privacy, but, we are told, "H e had no suspicion that
they ran any risk of being houseless until m orning; had no idea of the
truth until long, long afterw ards" (215-6). Clennam later learns the
truth; but for the tim e being at least w hat Amy and Maggie experience
while w andering the streets at night is invisible to him. Amy's status
as an adult is also im m ediately obvious to the presum ably fallen
woman who accosts Maggie and Amy—although from a distance she
perceives Amy to be a child, when Amy shows her face she recoils:
"Why, my God! . . . you're a woman!" (218). This too is som ething that
Clennam does not choose to see at this point, a perspective apparently
only available to a wom an on the streets.
The im possibility of finding a disinterested perspective, and the
difficulty of escaping a system of thought, is further illustrated through
a sub-plot of the novel th at tangentially relates to the poor house.
Tattyco ram, has come from the Foundling H ospital, m aking her, we
can say, a good m odel of the individualized product of an institution.
Mr Meagles tells Clennam that "she w as called in the Institution,
H arriet Beadle—an arbitrary name, of course," as if there w as any other
kind. He goes on to make the custom ary excoriation of the w orkhouse
figure:
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As to Beadle, that I needn't say w as w holly ou t of the
question. If there is anything that is not to be tolerated on
any term s, anything that is a type of Jack-in-office
insolence and absurdity, anything that represents in coats,
waistcoats, and big sticks our English holding on by
nonsense after everyone has found it out, it is a beadle.
(57)
As usual the w orkhouse serves as the focus of a lot of verbiage. But if
H arriet Beadle escapes the m ark of English bureaucracy and
com placency to become Tattycoram, this does not m ean that she cannot
associate that nam e w ith another kind of hierarchy and restriction.
Tattycoram is after all in an inferior position to M innie Meagles in her
household, and only comes to feel com fortable w ith the Meagles after
M innie has left. Miss W ade, the "self-torm entor" who enables
Tatty coram 's flight from the Meagles (and Tattycoram 's subsequent
subservient incarceration w ith her), w rites that she sees in Tattycoram
"m uch of the rising against swollen patronage and selfishness, calling
them selves kindness, protection, benevolence, and other fine nam es,
which I have described as inherent in m y nature" (734). The "self
torm entor" cannot see the possibility that selfishness and kindness, or
patronage and protection, may exist together in the sam e place. She
insists on looking everywhere for selfishness and m anipulation, and of
course succeeds w ithout difficulty. The Meagles have a sim ilar
problem , unable to see how their protection and patronage could be
interpreted as anything other than pure kindness. In Miss W ade's
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w riting the novel again m akes available another voice and another
perspective. But her relentless determ ination to be independent and
subject to no m anipulation w hatsoever does not m ake her free, since
she sees m anipulation everyw here; in fact this determ ination leads her
to the "dull, confined room" (725) w here Clennam finds her.
Tattycoram can find no w ay out of paternalist o r paranoid system s of
thought into liberty. She is stuck, despite her w illfulness and angry
spontaneity, in abstraction; her only choices, apparently, are two
different kinds of incarcerating rationality.
Shirley. Romance, and the Real
Like Little Dorrit. Shirley can also be read as very much
concerned w ith the lim itations of interpretation, and w ith the
abstractness of any knowledge of the social. The novel opens w ith a
claim for solidity—the suggestion that though it w ill be set in the past,
it w ill be nothing like a romance. We are offered not "sentim ent, and
poetry, and reverie," or "passion, and stim ulus, and m elodram a," but
som ething "real, cool, and solid" (5). To our relief it "is not positively
affirm ed that [we] shall not have a taste of the exciting tow ards the
m iddle and close of the meal." But we move, in any case, not to gritty
realism bu t directly to the com edy and satire of the three curates. It is
not easy, it turns out (not unexpectedly), to discern w here the "real" is
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supposed to be. Similarly the end of the novel consists of a
disingenuous plea for an orderly, "straight'' reading: "The story is told.
I think I now see the judicious reader putting on his spectacles to look
for the m oral I only say, God speed him in the quest!" (646). We
have already seen how this gendered reader will respond as suits
him —Caroline points out how texts m ake available any reading that is
useful to the reader, saying of a biblical passage that Joe Scott glosses as
"Let the woman learn in silence, w ith all subjection": "It w ould be
possible, I doubt not, w ith a little ingenuity, to give the passage quite a
contrary turn; to make it say, 'Let the w om an speak out w henever she
sees fit to make an objection" (328-30). The novel repeatedly offers
analyses and interpretations only to show how far they serve the
interests of the interpreter.
The satire of the curates is a case in point. All three are subject to
satire for their excesses in eating and drinking, though in the first
episode Malone comes off best because he is the only one brave enough
to join Mr Helstone in defending Robert M oore's m ill. But in other
circumstances Sweeting comes off best because of his social skills and
w illingness to help out w ith domestic arrangem ents; w here Shirley
and Caroline rather than H elstone apply judgm ent the oafish Malone
and especially the snobbish Donne, expelled by Shirley from her estate,
come off w orst. A t the end of the novel M alone comes off w orst,
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how ever, his sin and fate (titiUatingly) held back from us, w hile
D onne's fundraising skills are em phasized. Joe Scott show s in any case
that the boot can always be on the other foot. His ow n speech is
m arked in the text, through spelling, as different, b u t he show s how
Southerners and Standard English can receive the sam e treatm ent, and
satirizes self-congratulatory "civility." Here is Joe:
We alius speak our m inds I' this country; and then young
parsons and grand folk fro' London is shocked a t w er
' incivility,’ and we like weel enow to gi'e 'em surm nat to
be shocked at, 'cause it's sport to us to w atch 'em turn up
the w hites o ' their een, and spreed ou t their bits o ' hands,
like as they're flayed w i' bogards, and then to hear 'em say,
nipping off their w ords short, like—'Dear! dear! W het
seveges! How very corse!' (59)
Further, the narrator show s how certain conventional objects of satire,
nam ely old m aids and dull women, can be given a m ore sym pathetic
and generous reading. For the narrator dull wom en are created not
bom , and the standards that allow them to appear comic are gendered,
highly self-serving and protective. The narrator has this to say about
women who plot to w in husbands:
The brothers of these girls are every one in business or in
professions; they have som ething to do: their sisters have
no earthly em ploym ent, b u t household w ork and sewing;
no earthly pleasure, but an unprofitable visiting; and no
hope, in all their life to come, of anything better. This
stagnant state of things makes them decline in health:
they are never w ell, and their m inds and view s shrink to
w ondrous narrow ness. The great w ish—the sole aim of
every one of them is to be m arried, b u t the m ajority w ill
never m arry: they w ill die as they now liv e .. . .The
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gentlem en tu rn them into ridicule: they d o n 't w ant them ;
they hold them very cheap: they say—I have heard them
say it w ith sneering laughs m any a tim e—the
m atrim onial m arket is overstocked. . . . Could m en live
so them selves? (391)
These w om en are starved of narrative possibilities, and satire here is
further cruelty, not liberating play. The narrator argues that satire has
its limits again in defending Miss Ainley, since it ignores the possibility
th at her conventional m anners im ply unconventional self-sacrifice:
She w as religious—a professor of religion—w hat some
w ould call "a saint," and she referred to religion often in
sanctioned phrase—in phrase which those who possess a
perception of the ridiculous, w ithout ow ning the pow er of
exactly testing and truly judging character, w ould certainly
have esteem ed a proper subject for satire: a m atter for
m im icry and laughter. They w ould have been hugely
m istaken for their pains. Sincerity is never ludicrous; it is
always respectable. (182)
But for all this offering of alternative, differently sym pathetic
narratives, the suggestion that "exactly testing and truly judging" is
possible is never left unchallenged for long. Certainly it is impossible
to be a judicious reader w here anything very dram atic is involved;
when there is a fight betw een Moore and the "O perative class," as has
been enthusiastically desired by many parties, w e are rem inded that "It
is difficult to be tolerant—difficult to be just—in such m om ents" (344).
Such m om ents of irresponsibility are the m ost exciting and attractive—
we are told, breathlessly, of Caroline and Shirley, the onlookers: "they
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could not have fainted; they could not have taken their eyes from the
dim , terrible scene—from the m ass of cloud, of sm oke—the m usket-
lightning—for the w orld" (345). Shirley takes pains to em phasize
before this fight that any idealist, pious notion of justice is m isplaced in
reading this fight—"These are not the days of chivalry: it is not a tilt at
a tournam ent we are going to behold, but a struggle about money, and
food, and life" (342). This does not necessarily suggest that their view is
unrom anticized (Bodenheimer argues that it has the opposite effect of
further rom anticizing "the w orld of men, m arkets and m ilitia" (The
Politics of Story. 46)). The com parison can serve to make the scene a
m ore com pelling fiction even than a chivalric battle—m ore
com pelling because m ore complicated and less accessible to m oralizing
interpretation.
Despite any prom ises of unrom antic reality, then, the novel does
not necessarily allow the distinction between reality and fiction, or
between utilitarianism and poetry, to rem ain untroubled. The
narrator, describing H iram Yorke early in the novel, ponders the
attitudes of poets and their detractors:
As Mr. Yorke did not possess poetic im agination him self,
he considered it a m ost superfluous quality in others . . . a
quiet poet—w hatever force struggled, w hatever fire
glowed, in his breast—if he could not have played the
m an in the counting-house, or the tradesm an in the Piece
H all, m ight have lived despised, and died scorned, under
the eyes of H iram Yorke. (48)
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The poet is no m ore forgiving:
The tru e poet is not one w hit to be pitied, and he is ap t to
laugh in his sleeve, when any m isguided sym pathizer
w hines over his wrongs. Even w hen utilitarians sit in
judgm ent on him , and pronounce him and his art
useless, he hears the sentence w ith such a hard derision,
such a broad, deep, com prehensive, and merciless
contem pt of the unhappy Pharisees who pronounce it,
that he is rather to be chidden than condoled w ith. (49)
The two sides, w e find, have a self-satisfied certainty of their difference,
bu t in each case the distinction is self-serving, providing a comfortable
suggestion for poet and utilitarian of the rightness of their position and
their own grasp of w hat is real. N either comes off very w ell—each is
rather to be chidden than sym pathized w ith. It is fitting, then, that the
novel offers the hard-nosed suggestion that m oney lies beneath and
underm ines any rom ance, justice or chivalry. Caroline sees her
rom antic disadvantage to Shirley thus: "My Robert! I w ish I could
justly call him mine: bu t I am poverty and incapacity; Shirley is w ealth
and pow er" (260). On the other hand m oney itself is a fiction, and the
possession or lack of it only has m eaning in the context of other
fictions. The narrator tells us, in inform ing us of C aroline's love-sick
condition, th at "M any that w ant food and clothing have cheerier lives
and brighter prospects than she had; m any, harassed by poverty, are in
a strait less afflictive" (243). But the outcom e of her hopes to be
m arried to Robert M oore depends, even after the m oral lesson of his
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rejection by Shirley and the recommencement of his intim acy w ith
Caroline, upon the outcom e of the w ar w ith France and the state of the
m arket in textiles. The m oral lesson is m ore or less irrelevant—or,
alternatively, the m arket is irrelevant, history and economics
conveniently following the rom antic plot. Shirley after all frustrates
her uncle by claim ing that it is W ellington whom she loves, and later
it turns out that she does indeed love a m an who supposedly has the
leadership qualities of W ellington, despite his French background. His
brother predicts th at Louis M oore w ill be "universally esteem ed,
considered, consulted, depended upon" (644). The parallel between the
rom antic and political plots could be taken as further indication of the
tenuousness of the resolution of each.
Robert M oore him self insists, w hen it suits him , that the moral
and economic are inseparable, and is a resolute constructivist in
theorizing the behavior of the poor—w hen he uses "the poor" to mean
himself, at least. He says: "Poverty is necessarily selfish, contracted,
grovelling, anxious" (72). But he makes his distinction clear: "W hen I
speak of poverty, I do not so much m ean the natural, habitual poverty
of the w orking-m an, as the em barrassed penury of the . . . straitened,
care-w orn tradesm an" (72). Still, his idea of w hat is natural am ong the
poor is in some w ays heretical. He is skeptical of the idea that charity
w ill alter the relations between the classes. He explains w hy it is not
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natural for the poor to be grateful for charity (not just, as several
w riters do, that charity is bad for the poor): "I suppose, were all things
ordered aright, they ought not to be in a position to need that
hum iliating relief, and this they feel: w e should feel it were w e so
placed" (291). H e goes on to explain that the poor are not incapable of
unity, organization and independent reaction: "the disaffected here are
in correspondence w ith the disaffected elsewhere: Nottingham is one
of their headquarters, M anchester another, Birmingham a third. The
subalterns receive orders from their chiefs; they are in a good state of
discipline: no blow is struck w ithout m ature deliberation" (291). While
the native Yorke is praised for being "fatherly" (49) to the poor, the
foreigner Moore considers the poor m ature and independent. He sees
the poor here not as a natural, obvious category, but as an organized
and structured force. Later, as we w ill see, his idea of the urban poor is
to be revised, and his knowledge of them altered, bu t this sense of the
poor as organized m ilitary opponent, w hich lends Robert Moore an air
of dashing defiance, is not necessarily subm erged altogether.
Shirley also is interested in this m artial position, though at
tim es she follows Caroline Helstone7 s attack on the idea that the poor
should be considered a separate class at all. While Caroline's uncle
applauds Robert Moore for his refusal to "truckle to the mob," Caroline
insists not that he should "truckle," b u t th at the category be rethought:
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"I cannot help thinking it unjust to include all poor w orking people
under the general and insulting nam e of 'th e m ob'" (93). Shirley later
shares this concern w ith the individual over class; in attacking Yorke
she tells him: "All ridiculous, irrational crying up of one class ! . all
how ling dow n of another class . . all exacting injustice to individuals .
. . is really sickening to me; all arraying of ranks against ranks, all party
hatreds . . . I w ash my hands o f ' (368). But at other times the
availability of the ideas of the "m ob" and of class opposition come in
useful to Shirley, though in a rather more seductively heroic form
than serves the Stiltstalkings in Little D orrit. Earlier Shirley insists she
w ill defend her property: "If once the poor gather and rise in the form
of the mob, I shall turn against them as an aristocrat: if they bully me, I
m ust defy; if they attack, I m ust resist,—and I will" (267). She is
prepared, in a pinch, to drop sentim ental, individualizing, charitable
feelings, if the poor take it upon themselves to take pow er
At present I am no patrician, nor do I regard the poor
around me as plebeians; b u t if once they violently w rong
me or m ine, and then presum e to dictate to us, I shall
quite forget pity for their w retchedness and respect for
their poverty, in scorn of their ignorance and w rath a t
their insolence. (267)
This is the kind of fighting talk that excites Shirley—Caroline rem arks,
"Shirley—how your eyes flash!" (267). She tempers her eagerness for
battle by saying, "W hat I w ant to do is prevent m ischief' (267), and goes
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on to explain th at the resentm ent of th e poor is grounded in suffering,
and that she w ill be starting a charitable fund. But this sense of
responsibility has none of the pow er of the possibility of conflict. Just
as H elstone, M alone and Robert Moore are resolute and enthusiastic
w hen it comes to conflict, so is Shirley, as C aptain Keeldar.2 W hen the
church m arches, H elstone and Shirley K eeldar both realize they w ant
an enem y to battle with:
N ot on com bat bent, nor of foemen in search, was this
priest-led and woman-officered com pany: yet their music
played m artial tunes, and—to judge by the eyes and
carriage of some, Miss Keeldar, for instance—these sounds
awoke, if not a m artial, yet a longing spirit. (302)
The goal of the novel is as much to provide enem ies and battle as to
suggest w ays in w hich harm ony can be produced. Someone like the
unem ployed m ill-worker-cum -gardener Farren provides a good
exam ple of the respectful, deserving, readily dom esticated,
individualized poor, but Robert M oore's enem y, the well-organized
dissident poor, seems no less desirable or indispensable. Shirley needs
a mob to be an aristocrat just as W ellington needs a Napoleon to be
W ellington.
Robert Moore discovers that he cannot always be a W ellington
on his proposal of m arriage being rejected by Shirley. He leaves the
field, disappearing from die parish, after this event, which is absent
from th e novel except in M oore's account of it, given to Yorke on his
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return. Also m issing is the other transform ative m om ent th at M oore
speaks of in this scene, his observation of the urban poor of
Birm ingham (which he nam ed earlier as a headquarters of w orking-
class m ilitancy) and London. At a tim e w hen Moore feels m ost
uncom fortable, the poor serve a new function in providing a new
sense of his own position. He claims his tim e w ith the poor is a tim e
spent w ith "reality," even if this reality rem ains largely unrepresented
here:
W hile I was in Birmingham, I looked a little into reality,
considered closely, and at their source, the causes of the
present troubles of this country; I did the same in London.
— I saw some, w ith naturally elevated tendencies and
good feelings, kept dow n am ongst sordid privations and
harassing griefs. I saw m any originally low, and to whom
lack of education left scarcely anything b u t animal wants,
disappointed in these w ants, ahungered, athirst, and
desperate as famished animals: I saw w hat taught my
brain a lesson, and filled m y breast w ith fresh feelings.
(542)
"Reality" and the "source" of the nation's troubles lie in the cities
south of the Yorkshire parishes in w hich the story takes place. Moore
represents this as a hum bling experience, like his refused proposal, but
it invests him w ith renewed m artial vigor. It is not clear that the
experience of "reality" has any great practical effect on his conduct—he
follows up his conversion story w ith an insistence to Yorke th at he has
lost nothing of his w arlike propensities:
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I have no intention to profess m ore softness or sentim ent
than I have hitherto professed; m utiny and am bition I
regard as I have always regarded them: I should resist a
riotous mob just as heretofore: I should open on the scent
of a runaw ay ringleader as eagerly as ever, and run him
dow n as relentlessly, and follow him up to condign
punishm ent as rigorously; b u t I should do it now chiefly
for the sake and die security of those he m isled. (542)
The resisting, punishing and hunting is now to be done in a more
m agnanim ous spirit than before. Moore makes no bones about the
paternalist interrelation of caring and pow er, and he does not pretend
that his sym pathetic observations alter his economic position and his
relation in production to his employees. His encounter w ith "reality"
is a useful strategy for him—he places his faith in the unrepresented
urban poor, since the rural poverty that he nostalgically refers to earlier
as "the natural, habitual poverty of the w orking m an" (72) is rapidly
disappearing. Accordingly his would-be assassin, the "half-crazed
w eaver" and "m ad leveller" (635) escapes punishm ent because he is
doom ed anyway—he drinks, and "the poor soul die[s] of delirium
trem ens a year after the attem pt on Moore" (635). W eavers and
levellers need no longer be an issue. A dopting the position of social
theorist is a tactic that allows Robert to be purposeful again.
The novel offers a figure we could take as a satire, however, of
the social-investigator, m anagerial role in w hich Robert Moore has
found renewed self-confidence, in the form of the young boy, M artin
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Yorke. Im m ediately following his conversation about the reality of the
urban poor Robert is shot, and convalesces under the supervision of
Mrs. Yorke, so M artin finds him self w ith the opportunity of
experim enting on Caroline, and of w eaving a plot by w hich Caroline
can visit Moore. M artin plays w ith Caroline, telling her at first that
Robert is to die: "it struck him that it m ight be am using to m ake an
experim ent" (570). We are told that 'lie w as beginning to have a great
relish for discovering secrets" (571). M artin has a degree of compassion
for Caroline, and helps her; leading her out of the forest outside the
Yorke's home in w hich she is lost, w e are told "while he railed at her
for helplessness, he perfectly liked to feel him self of use" (571). For
M artin the study of Caroline and the attem pt to organize her provides
a sense of purpose and place. From helping her m eet Robert he gains a
sense of being an adventurer: "In the gallery [outside Robert's room]
he w as as elate as a king: he had never been engaged in an adventure
he liked so well; for no adventure had ever invested him w ith so
m uch im portance, o r inspired him w ith so m uch interest" (581).
M artin finds that in taking up the role of experim enter and organizer
he is able to find a sense of position and of power. H e has m anipulated
the situation he has found him self in, in order to give him self a
function, to "feel him self of use."
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A t this point Robert seems little different from M artin, except
that he is less able, and they engage in a pow er struggle despite the
difference in age. The two joust verbally, Robert feeling the need to call
M artin "an evil cross between an imp and a page" (580), and
"hem pseed" (584), M artin retaliating by refusing to say who he has
brought, and by issuing commands to his senior, Robert. Robert finds
again th at his position of assum ed authority and superiority is not a
stable one, and he finds him self in the position not of a knowledgeable
m aster b u t of a child. Robert, speaking to Caroline, refers to him self as
"unm anned" (584), uncom fortable in his new -found passivity and
pow erlessness. The role of knowing m aster and fem inized o r childlike
invalid are not as far apart as he w ould like them to be. Robert w ill go
on to recover from this reversal, and the novel appears, to som e extent,
to end w ith a trium phal vision of a united England, the Frenchness of
the M oores finally overlooked in their union w ith the now -deferent
Shirley and Caroline. This union coincides w ith the trium ph over
N apoleon and the end of economic depression. But at the last moment
we are rem inded of the fictiveness of all this harm ony. The last page of
the novel em phasizes the nostalgia of the plot, despite the prom ise of
gritty reality, w ith the story, told by the narrator's housekeeper, of the
last fairy seen in the parish before the dom inance of the m ill m ade
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itself felt. The "Something real, cool and solid" (5) and the nostalgic
romance turn out to be one and the same.
Felix Holt, politics, and language
In some ways w hile Little D orrit and Shirley m ight not seem
m uch like Condition of England novels, because the representation of
poverty and social conditions in general can seem peripheral to their
design; in other w ays this makes them typical of and continuous with
other social problem novels of die period, which as we have seen do
not necessarily offer secure ground from which to view the social
anyway. To return to the more specific issue of the poor laws, Felix
H olt w as published in 1866 when the poor laws were of interest more
as a m atter of who w as to bear fiscal responsibility than as a question of
how to reconstitute the poor as in the 1830s and 1840s. But the novel is
set in the early 1830s, and while m uch of the plot of Felix H olt is
concerned w ith the Reform Act of 1832 and its im m ediate afterm ath
(and presum ably therefore also indirectly the Second Reform Act), the
poor laws are also a point of reference for this new incarnation of
democracy, and the new political discourses associated w ith it. The
am bivalently nostalgic "A uthor's Introduction" to the novel includes
"a braw ny and many-breeding pauperism " am ongst evils now passed,
along w ith "pocket-boroughs" (75). The narrator associates pauperism
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w ith the earliest glimmerings of w hat is later referred to as a "dim
political consciousness" (128) in describing the parish-bound pastoral
w orld that existed (supposedly) before the period of reform:
Mail or stage coach for [the shepherd] belonged to that
distant system of things called 'G over'm ent', which,
w hatever it m ight be, w as no business of his, any more
than the m ost outlying nebula o r the coal-sacks of the
southern hem isphere: his solar system w as the parish; the
m aster's tem per and the casualties of lam bing-tim e w ere
his regions of storms. H e cut his bread and bacon w ith his
pocket-knife, and felt no bitterness except in the m atter of
pauper labourers and the bad luck that sent contrarious
seasons and the sheep-rot. (76)
Paupers here are a source of only local bitterness, and are apparently
p art of w hat appears to be the natural landscape—the hedgerow s of the
area are described here as "the liberal hom es of unm arketable beauty"
(76-7), as if to em phasize the separateness of this place from commerce
and the m odem , and to em phasize that it can no longer be seen in the
sam e w ay, innocent of politics and the m arket.
This w orld is also a time innocent of categorization, w hen the
illiteracy of the poor guaranteed their freedom horn political strife:
they w ere saved from the excesses of Protestantism by not
know ing how to read, and by the absence of handloom s
and m ines to be the pioneers of Dissent: they w ere kept
safely in the via media of indifference, and could have
registered themselves in the census by a big black m ark as
mem bers of the church of England. (77)
The census, like the Reform Act and the New Poor Laws, forces the
population to categorize itself, and insists on the official establishm ent
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of facts. This Act, by rem inding citizens that they can be differentiated,
causes the bitterness in Treby Magna to increase beyond nature and
paupers: after the Catholic Em ancipation Bill, w e are told,
Treby Magna, w hich had lived quietly through the great
earthquakes of the French Revolution and the
Napoleonic w ars, w hich had rem ained unm oved by the
Rights o f Man , and saw little in M r Cobbett's Weekly
Register except that he held eccentric views about
potatoes, began at last to know the higher pains of a dim
political consciousness. (128)
The law serves to rem ind people of their religion and their difference,
just as the Reform Act seems to increase dram atically the im portance
of their party political stance. The law enables the "excesses of
Protestantism ," and it enables the production of factions even w here it
is not clear w hat real differences exist: "Tory, W hig and Radical did not
perhaps become m uch clearer in their definition of each other; bu t the
nam es seemed to acquire so strong a stam p of honour or infam y, that
definitions w ould only have weakened the im pression" (128). W here
Paine and Cobbett have fallen on deaf ears, the rhetoric of
parliam entary democracy has been m ore pervasive and produced
substantive divisions m ore easily, the narrator suggests, because this
rhetoric appears to have no fixed and clear content.
If the poor laws claimed to be based on fact (through the
investigations, or propaganda, of the Royal Com mission), this novel
questions any such prem ise. Facts are unstable entities in this novel,
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though as in Carlyle the m ore abstract notion of T ruth rem ains. There
is suspicion, particularly, of facts established through governm ental
institutions. The arbitrary line for voters created by the Reform Act is a
cause for some skepticism in the novel, since voters can be created by
landlords anyway, and the list of voters is determ ined only after legal
w rangling on each side. The m ost notable questioning of the
possibility of establishing facts takes place at Felix H olt's trial. The
w orldly Christian, an expert on self-interest, in assessing Jerm yn sees
law as a means of personal advancement: "These law yers are the
fellows for getting on in the w orld w ith the least expense of civility.
W ith this cursed conjuring secret of theirs called Law, they think
everybody's frightened at them " (310). The conjuring secret produces
narratives and decisions in spite of w hat is represented by the narrator
as a natural antipathy to coherent, grounded narratives in hum ans:
"M an cannot be defined as an evidence-giving anim al" (563). The
narrator appears to believe only in the strength of certain narratives,
not in the possibility of an im partial account, even of the sim plest
kind—at the end of the trial, we are told: "Even the bare discernm ent
of facts, much more their arrangem ent w ith a view to inferences, m ust
carry a bias: hum an im partiality, w hether judicial or not, can hardly
escape being more or less loaded" (574).
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Felix H olt himself, of course, is said to have, according to the
m inister Lyon, "a singular directness and sim plicity of speech" (482).
But if hum an im partiality is always illusory, there is som e pow er to
H arold Transom e's response that "the question is not one of
m isrepresentation, bu t of adjusting fact, so as to raise it to the pow er of
evidence" (482)—we can read the novel as repeatedly satirizing an
obsession w ith rhetorical strategies, and yet also repeatedly suggesting
that there is no escape from rhetoric. 'T ru th " left to fend for itself is
unapproachable and boring; Mrs. Transome sets an appropriate tone in
her youth, when, we are told, "She always thought that the dangerous
French w riters were w icked, and that her reading of them w as a sin; but
m any sinful things were highly agreeable to her, and m any things
which she did not doubt to be good and true were dull and
meaningless" (105). The narrator is disarm ingly honest in her own
response to the m inister Lyon, who w ith his rigorous scruples and
biblical language in som e w ay represents Truth and duty. The narrator
adm its, tactfully, that Lyon is pedantic, ineffectual and energetically
dull, w hen he tries to persuade Harold of the disadvantages of a secret
ballot:
If a cynical sprite w ere present, riding on one of the m otes
in that dusty room , he m ay have made him self m erry at
the illusions of the little m inister who brought so m uch
conscience to bear on the production of so slight an effect.
I confess to sm iling myself, being sceptical as to the effect
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of ardent appeals and nice distinctions on gentlem en who
are got u p, both inside and out, as candidates in the style
of the period. (276)
Im m ediately afterw ards the narrator checks herself and returns to a
m ore seemly and conventional piety: "I never sm iled at M r Lyon's
trustful energy w ithout falling to penitence and veneration
im m ediately after" (276). But the narrator acknowledges the possibility
of a comic or ironic view at the same tim e as suggesting the im portance
of "veneration" for Truth, how ever fragile.
Even before the dram atic trial scene there are several occasions
in the novel on w hich speech-m aking is of central im portance, and at
which being interesting is of m ore im portance than being an
em bodim ent of T ruth. At the hustings, where Lingon, H arold's uncle,
and Lyon support the candidacy of H arold Transome, "the one w hose
attem pt m et the m ost em phatic resistance was Rufus Lyon" (293).
Lingon, on the other hand, is welcomed for his one-liners and
willingness to be comic—and his brief and succinct reference to the
im portant issues: he tells the crow d, "m ind w hat you'll hear
[Transome] say; h e'll go in for m aking everything right—Poor-laws and
charities and church—he w ants to reform 'em all" (296). The narrator
acknowledges w hat an unstable, contingent text a speech is anyway
(and suggests that this is w hat makes speeches potentially interesting at
all):
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But, perhaps, the m om ent of m ost diffusive pleasure
from public speaking is that in which the speech ceases
and the audience can turn to com m enting on it. The one
speech, sometimes uttered under great responsibility as to
missiles and other consequences, has given a text to
tw enty speakers who are under no responsibility. (297)
We m ight take the lack of interest in Lyon and the enthusiasm for the
wisecracking Parson as a satire on the political process and the capacity
of crow ds for political thought. On the other hand, though, if this is
the case then the crowd is in good company. The Parson w ith the taste
for hunting is one of the more sym pathetic characters in the novel, to
judge by the response of Esther Lyon, part of whose conversion by Holt
to his version of working-class values involves liking the talk of this
sam e Parson: "W ith an odd contrariety to her form er niceties she liked
his rough attire and careless frank speech; they were som ething not
point device that seem ed to connect the life of Transom e C ourt w ith
that rougher, commoner w orld w here her hom e had been" (526).
The harshest, m ost unapologetic satire is reserved not for Lyon
or Lingon b u t for the professional lawyers, election agents and
politicians who attem pt to m anipulate the post-reform system . As in
Little D orrit. "parliam entary" is synonym ous w ith distasteful bluster.
The narrator tells us, referring to despised-by-all law yer and "treater"
Johnson, that "The nom ination-day was a great epoch of successful
trickery, or, to speak in a more parliam entary m anner, of w ar-
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stratagem , on the p art of skilful agents" (391). Im m ediately following
this account of Johnson's underhandedness comes an account of an
exchange of public speeches by an anonym ous C hartist, who calls for
"universal suffrage, and annual parliam ents, and the vote by ballot,
and electoral districts" (397), and Felix Holt, who calls for "som ething
else before that" (398), a "ruling belief in society about w hat is wrong,
w hat is honourable and w hat is sham eful" (401), ending w ith a direct
attack on Johnson—which m uch of the audience takes to be the "cream
of the speech" (403). We are not given the conclusion of the speech, as
the plot then follows one brief listener, Christian. C hristian enjoys the
joke, as w ell he m ight, given his earlier barbed exchange w ith Scales in
which he plays trivially and comically w ith the nam e of his colleague
and rival for attention, Scales. Verbal skill is som ething Felix
disavow s, and yet the only way to avoid it altogether w ould be to
rem ain silent. H arold, we are told, "w as quick at new languages, and
still quicker a t translating other m en's generalities into his own special
and im m ediate purposes" (269), whereas im m ediately afterw ards H olt
objects to rhetorical skill—he tells H arold, "give m e a handful of
generalities and analogies, and I'll undertake to justify Burke and Hare,
and prove them benefactors of their species" (275). But H olt eventually
chooses to speak, and is "accessible to the pleasure of being listened to"
(400).
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We m ight still take H olt as representing the voice of w isdom ,
even if his response to the specific program of the C hartist speaker is a
highly abstract notion of right and w rong—w isdom and parliam entary
politics presum ably being incom patible. But his speech is not even
given in full, and w hat success he has as an orator is dependent largely
on his appearance. The guarantee of his authority lies in his shape and
in his expression:
The effect of his figure in relief against the stone
background w as unlike that of the previous speaker. He
w as considerably taller, his head and neck were more
m assive, and the expression of his m outh and eyes was
som ething very different from the m ere acuteness and
rather hard-lipped antagonism of the trades-union man.
Felix H olt's face had the look of the habitual m editative
abstraction from objects of m ere personal vanity or desire,
w hich is the peculiar stam p of culture, and makes a very
rough-cut face w orthy to be called 'th e hum an face
divine'. Even lions and dogs know a distinction between
m en's glances; and doubtless those Duffield men, in the
expectation w ith which they looked up at Felix, were
unconsciously influenced by the grandeur of his full yet
firm m outh, and the calm clearness of his grey eyes. (398)
The indications th at H olt is the opposite of Johnson and superior to the
C hartist are alm ost all non-verbal—his rhetoric itself is alm ost
unim portant, as is suggested by the fact that the incomplete speech
soon ceases to be the object of interest to the story. W hat is im portant
is th at Felix's appearance is easily read—anim als and Duffield men (the
distinction here is left unclear) respond to the truth that H olt exudes
"culture" and tru th non-verbally. The novel despairs of offering an
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account of the T ruth that som ehow lies beyond the m odem rhetoric of
parliam entary politics and reform; Truth can only be offered
m etaphorically in the attractive firm ness of H olt's m outh and the
w inning dearness of his eyes. The novel resolves, after all, w ith
Esther's consum m ation of her desire for H olt, and his abandoning, or
at least com prom ising, the m isogyny of his earlier position that
women are "a curse" (212), rather than w ith the achievem ent by Esther
or Felix of some w ider political goal. But if this is the case, and Truth
lies after all in appearance. H olt is uncom fortably dose to Lyon, who
also pursues truth ardently but constantly runs the risk of being read as
ridiculous, risible and dull, and is unthinkable as an object of desire (he
has m arried, after all, only after his wife has begun to think of herself
as dead). Truth is both Felix H olt and Rufus Lyon, and can be either
central and pow erful o r m arginal and absurd.
The novel condudes, partly, w ith the dram atic rejection by
Esther of the possibility of becoming an aristocrat, and her acting on her
preference for Felix and his belief that "there's some dignity for a m an
[and a wom an, presum ably] other than changing his station" (557)—the
key to dealing w ith dass difference is not to abide by the rules of dass.
But the novel does end w ith a satisfactory yet utterly artifidal retaining
of the status quo. The "true" aristocrat, Esther, stays w ith the bom -
leader Felix who w ants to w ork w ith his hands, and the illegitim ate
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H arold Durfey-Transome and Mrs. Transome, whose ancestors bought
the right to be aristocrats, rem ain aristocrats w ith the blessing of Esther.
Mrs. Transome is reconciled to her son, having been all along a kind of
symbol of m isery and impotence, exiled by her son from any authority.
Felix, in the speech m entioned above, states his wish that he could lead
properly the kind of person who "knows so little that he perhaps
thinks God m ade the poor-laws, and if anybody said the pattern of the
workhouse w as laid dow n in the Testament, he w ouldn't be able to
contradict them " (402), indicating a desire that things that seem natural
and perm anent be p u t into play and m ade subject to debate and
construction. The class position of the Transomes has certainly been
put into play through the taking away of their legal rights to their
possessions—quite possibly, as Gallagher suggests, w inning them all
the m ore sym pathy, but in any case the em phasis is on social
conditions as artifice.
The p ast and the nation are as m uch artificial constructions as
social conditions. The novel has allowed at tim es that politics can be
reformed, bu t also looks elsewhere than to politics, law and national
adm inistration for optim ism , h i speaking o f the earlier Reform period
again from the point of view of the 1860s, the narrator states that:
Crying abuses—'bloated paupers', 'bloated pluralists', and
other corruptions hindering m en from being w ise and
happy—had to be fought against and slain. Such a tim e is
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a tim e of hope. A fterwards, w hen the corpses of those
m onsters have been held up to the public w onder and
abhorrence, and yet w isdom and happiness do not follow,
b u t rather a more abundant breeding of the foolish and
unhappy, comes a tim e of doubt and despondency. (271)
Paupers and other things, apparently, provided the convenient and
attractive belief that reform, of a parliam entary kind, could effect
change. But the novel closes w ith a deliberate choosing of a (Active)
local rootedness, and the end, apparently, of aspirations to attain
parliam entary pow er. For the new spapers, the question of the nation
has been of central im portance, though available to any political
reading. H arold's recently acquired foreignness is an election issue:
The North Loamshire Herald w itnessed w ith a grief and
disgust certain to be shared by all persons who were
actuated by wholesome British feeling, an example of
defection in the inheritor of a fam ily nam e w hich in
tim es past had been associated w ith attachm ent to right
principle, and w ith the m aintenance of our constitution
in Church and State; and pointed to it as an additional
proof that m en who had passed any large portion of their
lives beyond the lim its of o u r favoured country, usually
contracted not only a laxity of feeling tow ards . . . religion
itself — bu t also a levity of disposition, inducing them to
tam per w ith those institutions by w hich alone G reat
Britain had risen to her pre-em inence am ong the nations.
(195)
O f course the liberal Duffield Watchman sees his foreignness as a
casting off of "the cram ping w orn-out shell of hereditary bias and class
interest" (195), b u t the disagreem ent only em phasizes that the nation is
used only as a convenient rhetorical tool- The solution of the novel
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appears to be a local resolution of discord, a faith in local and small-
scale attem pts to reform . Lingon, the parish priest, is redeem ed partly
because of his old-fashionedness, his connection to a traditional
landed-aristocratic lifestyle and ignorance of m odem politics. But the
idea of a connection to the land is not over-em phasized—H arold
rem ains in place despite his association not just w ith illegitim acy but
w ith the O riental. The novel looks to the local and specific rather than
the national, and yet at the sam e tim e appears to look to the grand
ahistorical hope of a change in hum an nature rather than to organized
reform. The novel can be read as arguing against the grain in looking
to the parish as the center of political life, while the tendency of the
poor laws, and of other legislation of the early Victorian period, was to
form larger adm inistrative units (the union of parishes) and
centralized m anagem ent. O n the other hand in the am bivalence and
abstraction of the solution it leaves us w ith in Felix and Esther, the
novel appears very m uch in line w ith the institutions of the period.
At the end of the novel the m arried Felix and Esther leave the parish
of Treby M agna, apparently having found a role for them selves, but it
is a role that leaves specific social issues of the tim e behind. On the
other hand, though, this m arks Felix H olt less as the m om ent of a
retreat from w hat w as previously a social-political engagem ent and
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m ore as a politically pessim istic version of the sam e uncertainties that
inform ed earlier versions of the Condition of England novel.
N otes
‘The way in w hich the critics credited w ith identifying the Condition of
England novel define their topic suggests an anxiety over the reading
of fiction and the social, and in m any cases a desire to m aintain a
separation between the two. Louis Francois Cazamian , who is credited
w ith originating the term s "social novel" in The Social N ovel in
England 1830-1850. inserts some modesty into his inquiry. In his
introduction he w rites that "All [his] procedures are followed w ithout
systematic logic or rigorous o rd er rigor in such m atters is liable to be a
m atter of form only." But he appears more knowing in his claim that
''W hen Dickens and Kingsley revealed the extent of the social distress
about them, and inspired com passion for the sufferers, they w ere
providing their readers w ith actual experience, and inform ing their
social consciousness w ith the feeling it had hitherto lacked" (6). For
him Dickens and Kingsley "reveal" the actual (though he concedes that
a complete historical know ledge is beyond him: "it is im possible to
produce exact doscum entary evidence of a book's m oral and em otional
im pact" (293)). Even w here a social novel does not seem so real as
Dickens it can make available knowledge of actual conditions:
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"D israeli's picture of agricultural and industrial poverty w as highly
externalized and unlifelike, b u t nevertheless extrem ely accurate" (292).
It is difficult to see the basis on which Cazamian judges D israeli's
representation "accurate." Cazam ian claims not only the ability to
judge the accuracy of such representations, but also access to the
intention of these revealing novels, in anticipating later objections to
his term: "in one sense, every novel w ith hum an custom s is a 'social
novel.' But the term is used here in a more restricted sense: by social
w e mean 'novel w ith a social thesis,': a novel w hich aims a t directly
influencing hum an relations" (7-8).
A rnold Kettle later objects to Cazam ian's term "social novel": "It
is a bad description, w hether one uses the term strictly or loosely, for,
strictly speaking, all novels are social novels; w hile if the w ord is used
loosely as a rough equivalent of the tw entieth-century 'socially
conscious/ then the problem of w hat to do w ith Dickens im m ediately
arises. For Dickens's novels are no less 'socially-conscious/ no less
'engaged,' no less insistently contemporary— m orally, politically,
colloquially— than those of the w riters we are here concerned w ith"
("The Early Victorian Social-Problem Novel," in From Dickens to
Hardy, ed. Boris Ford, 169). Kettle makes Dickens distinct, though, as a
m atter of quality— Dickens's novels are better (than the novels he deals
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w ith here, especially those by Disraeli, Kingsley, and Gaskell), he
explains, because they are not "bound by the heading. Condition of
England question . . . there is nothing thin, nothing theoretic or abstract
about them " (170). K ettle's standard appears to be concreteness—for
him, m easured by a lack of theoretical, political engagem ent. He sees as
dangerous any tendency to "see a living complex of forces and people
as a 'problem '" (170). O f the sodal-problem novels he covers, he
praises especially M ary Barton, as the m ost "accurate and hum ane
picture of working-class life in a large industrial tow n in the forties"
(179). This different standard of the concretely real seem s again rather
elusive— for Kettle or anyone else to arrive at the conclusion that
Gaskell's portrayal is the "m ost accurate" requires a certain absence of
m odesty about the lim itations of one's historical know ledge.
K ettle's hierarchical evaluation of the degree of non-abstract
engagem ent of the social-problem novelists echoes Kathleen
Tillotson's slightly earlier analysis in Novels of the Eighteen-Forties.
For Tillotson, as for Kettle, the strength of M ary Barton is that it is a
product of social problem s but transcends those problem s: "The same
social conditions, and som ething of the same anxiety about them,
Disraeli and Kingsley in having no axe to grind. A w ider im partiality.
bu t M rs. Gaskell differs from
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a tenderer hum anity, and it may be a greater artistic integrity, raise this
novel beyond the conditions and problem s that gave rise to it" (202). It
is a stigm a, Tillotson and Kettle suggest, to be a social novel in
Cazam ian's sense (aim ing at directly influencing hum an relations).
Tillotson in praising M ary Barton takes it out of the category: "It w ould
be better then to rem ove from M ary Barton the old tag of 'novel-w ith-
a-purpose/ im plying social, extra-artistic purpose. It was, indeed, more
perhaps than any other of the time, a novel w ith a social effect; but
Mrs. Gaskell w rote, then as always, not w ith her eye on the effect, but as
one possessed w ith and drenched w ith her subject" (222). Tillotson
regards Gaskell as dealing w ith the real, but as distinct from
docum entary; to be "accurate" in an inartistic form is unacceptable.
Gaskell, for Tillotson, is a product of history but has the special vision
of an artist (and especially of a female artist, in Tillotson's view more
likely to be tenderly hum an) that allows her to present history w ith
"artistic integrity"— m eaning w ithout a political purpose, it seems.
Tillotson in exonerating Gaskell from the charge of extra-literary
purposes still has to lay a knowing claim to her priorities and
intentions. She also has to argue that the novel transcends
contem porary Condition of England questions, and does not
(consciously) engage in political debate.
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For Raymond W illiams the extent of political engagem ent is the
standard by w hich he evaluates w hat he calls the industrial novels.
But still it is the kind and degree of their engagem ent w ith the real that
sets these novels apart. He describes the industrial novels as "an
interesting group of novels, w ritten at the m iddle of the century, w hich
not only provide som e of the m ost vivid descriptions of life in an
unsettled industrial society, but also illustrate certain common
assum ptions w ithin which the direct response w as undertaken" (87).
W illiams is interested in the industrial novels as political
interventions, or at least as products of ideological currents. In praising
Gaskell over Disraeli, he chooses to attack Disraeli for his lack of
political purpose in w riting Sybil: "The novel w ould be fascinating if it
were only political" (Culture and Society. 97). Williams does not see
the novels as transcending the historical situation w ithin w hich they
were w ritten; he puts them w ithin a w ider tradition of social criticism
and a larger developing ideology of w ithdraw al. He laments the
"general structure of feeling" that balances recognition of evil w ith
"fear of becom ing involved" (109). Like Gallagher, he sees Felix H olt as
representing a retreat from the political possibilities of the earlier
industrial novels. For both, however, the idea of the peculiar pow er of
the earlier industrial novels, w here they have it, rests partly on the
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assum ption th at they do not self-consciously explore the lim itations of
representation and "accurate" observation. For W illiams Dickens is
not a heroic reform er—he sees him as equally against reform and
exploitation, regarding both as elem ents of "Industrialism "—b u t his
objections have a fam iliar ring to them. He com plains that "H ard
Tim es is an analysis of Industrialism , rather than experience of it" (93).
Gallagher, as Rosem ary Bodenheimer puts it, releases the
industrial novels from the "test of 'realism '" (The Politics of Story in
Victorian Social Fiction. 7). Both Gallagher and Bodenheim er accept
the selections of Tillotson, Kettle, and W illiams for inclusion in the
category "industrial novel." Gallagher, who sees "no reason to
dispute" these selections, w rites of the industrial novelists th at "Even
as they probe the contested assum ptions of their m edium , they try to
insist that their fictions are unm ediated presentations of social reality"
(The Industrial Reform ation o f English Fiction, xii). For Bodenheimer,
w ho refers to m uch the sam e sources, the industrial novel is "work
distinguished by its focus on specific social problem s raised during the
process of industrialization" (The Politics of Story. 4). Sophisticated as
both studies are, it seems odd not to question a category and selections
based on w hat appears to be a slightly lim ited sense (in Tillotson,
Kettle, and even W illiams) o f the relations betw een experience,
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politics, and representation; it is not necessary to accept that any text
can be "accurate," m aking the realities of social conditions readily
available.
2 Bodenheimer, w ho contrasts the paternalism she sees in this novel to
the (for her) m ore critical and radical N orth and South, appears
som ew hat dism issive of this role as "charm ing bravado" (48) on the
part of Shirley, since, she argues, this posturing is never backed up by
any unconventional taking of power. But it is not entirely necessary to
believe only that "The self-consciousness of her play-acting at
m asculinity is itself a recognition that wom en do not com mand power
in the public realm " (49), since it seems equally possible to em phasize
the im portance and pow er of Shirley's unself-conscious desire to adopt
the role of m ilitary leader.
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Chapter 4: Bureaucracy and the U ncertainties o f Investigation
If the novelists of this bureaucratic period drew critical attention
to the position of the social investigator, so, m ore surprisingly, did the
investigators them selves. This includes not only M ayhew, but the
authors of the bureaucratic docum ents connected w ith the New Poor
Laws, the Poor Law Report of 1834 and the A nnual Reports of the Poor
Law Com m issioners. We m ight imagine that the inventive, radical
individual investigator M ayhew m ight offer a solution to the
befuddled situation of the investigator Clennam of Little Dorrit. and
correspondingly that the bureaucrats would offer all of the predictable
m anipulation that we m ight expect from the Circum locution Office.
But this w ould say more, perhaps, about the w ay that w e read the
relations betw een the individual and institutions than the docum ents
themselves. That Dickens him self offers no such clear-cut opposition
suggests that we m ight read otherwise. Rather than im agining we
know w hat these docum ents say and do because of their situatedness,
we can em phasize the w ays in which this situatedness does not curtail
their willingness to confess the fictional basis of their ow n governing
assum ptions.
In London Labour and the London Poor M ayhew often appears
anxious to differentiate him self from official, governm ental collection
or creation of inform ation, poking fun at "Parliam entary" language
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and rem inding us in his Preface that his is a "blue book7 ' that is
"undertaken by a private individual." But he still claim s to have
w ritten a "blue book," and in this respect he aligns him self w ith the
governm ent. H e is also not above proposing legislation and regulation
himself; it is in the contort of his own proposal for strictly supervised
and highly regulated "poor m en's m arkets" that he rails against
governm ental crim inalization of the poor: 'T o pass an Act declaring
50.000 individuals rogues and vagabonds, w ould be to dll our prisons
or our w orkhouses w ith m en who w ould w illingly earn their own
living" (Vol. I I 4). M ayhew 's view is generous bu t still regulatory; he
both rails against the governm ent and attem pts to show how its
authority can be used benevolently.
This claim both to be expert in governing, and separate and
different from governm ent bureaucracy, is one th at the governm ent
itself also appears to make. The seven-volume Poor Law Report of
1834, published as a prelude to the Poor Law Am endm ent Act, was a
groundbreakingly large state-sponsored study. H istorians have already
suggested that w hile the New Poor Laws m ay to som e degree have
ushered in a new kind of politics, they did not necessarily m ark an
enorm ously significant new break either in class relations (Brundage)
or in the centralization of the state (Corrigan and Sayer argue that this
period of reform s m arked one stage in a process that began centuries
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before). This is not to suggest that they are not of great interest, but that
they are w orth studying for their m ethodology and the fictions they
launch. The Royal Commission of Inquiry, an agent of Parliam ent,
represents itself in the Report as outside the state: as a pressure group
bringing its influence to bear on those at the center of power. The
Royal Com mission seems anxious to distance itself from self-interested
bureaucracy and "Parliam entary" language, and represents itself as an
enemy of the am biguity and lack of direction that it perceives,
apparently, in all earlier legislation. The adm inistration of the Act of
Settlement, for example, is described w ith particular venom and desire
for clarity: "N ever w as such im portant legislation effected by means of
exceptions, qualification, and hints, and seldom have any laws been so
pertinaceously adhered to after the principal, and in som e cases only,
reasons for their introduction had ceased" (The Poor Law Report of
1834 ed. S. G. & E. O. A. Checkland 243).
The Report is of course distinguishable from MayheW's w ork by
its political function as a justification of Poor Law legislation. The
Report appears to be different in form in that it is so program m atically
directed—the Commissioners are charged w ith arguing for a solution
and cannot, as M ayhew sometimes can, throw up their hands in the
face of problem s they identify. Similarly the first A nnual Report is
m uch concerned w ith creating a picture of busy im provem ent and
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practical reform , in keeping w ith its function to assert the success of the
new Act—b u t m uch of the Report indicates frustration at the m iring of
the Com mission in the circulation of a great deal of paperw ork. These
three docum ents are in m any w ays sim ilar, in the fact that they
position them selves rhetorically outside of the m ainstream
institutions of governm ent, b u t also in th at they each lay bare their
ow n construction. Each of the m onum ental w orks acknowledges the
lim itations of sources taken individually, and adm its the im possibility
of completeness. All the authors offer accounts of the theoretical or
practical difficulties of a project that struggles under a deluge of texts
and inform ation. All face and adm it sim ilar problem s of locating w hat
is "representative" am idst all the facts they establish. W hile it is
possible to see each w ork as effacing the position of the social
investigator as interested interpreter, at various tim es in each case the
investigators draw attention to their ow n positions as active, laboring
constructors of knowledge.
M ayhew and the Lim itations of Science
I suspect I am not the first reader to see the com edy in Mayhew/s
expressed concern for his reader in the final section of Volume I of
London Labour and the London Poor, w hen he deals w ith Irishwom en
as a w hole "to avoid burthening the reader w ith an excess of
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subdivisions" (I: 457). It is difficult to im agine a reader of Mayhew
feeling entirely unburdened by subdivisions. The author seems no less
burdened, as he indicates earlier "the m eans resorted to in order to
'pick up a c ru st/ as the people call it, in the public thoroughfares (and
such in m any instances it literally is,) are so m ultifarious that the m ind
is long baffled in its attem pts to reduce them to scientific order or
classification" (L 3). W hile confessing a tem porary bafflem ent Mayhew
appears at the sam e tim e to assert some direct and exclusive access to
reality in the m idst of all this classification—after all he indicates, in
parentheses, his know ledge of how the apparently innocent "crust"
m etaphor is often m ade literal in the experience of the objects of his
study. But even in foregrounding his classifications and his experience
M ayhew is usually careful to insert some m odesty—he em erges from
his bafflem ent to say that "it w ould appear, how ever, that the street
people m ay be all arranged under six distinct genera" (I: 3). It "appears"
so, and they "m ay," bu t not "should" or "m ust" be arranged in that
way. After listing the subcategories of the first genus of street people,
Mayhew again is careful to be sweeping yet cautious in his claims:
"These, so far as my experience goes, exhaust the w hole class of street-
sellers, and they appear to constitute nearly three-fourths of the entire
num ber of individuals obtaining a subsistence in the streets of
London" (L 3) (em phasis mine). He takes refuge in the om niscient
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passive, w hile adm itting his ow n involvem ent. M ayhew's accoimt is
from the beginning am bitious yet provisional, couched often in a
language of uncertainty.
M ayhew opens his vast w ork w ith categories borrow ed horn
other authorities, as if to indicate his intent to w ork w ithin the
discourse of other scientists. Q uoting from "Dr. Pritchard . . . author of
the 'N atural H istory of M an'" he claims that m ankind can be divided
up in term s of three different types of head (M ayhew reduces it to two
himself), and quoting from "Dr. A ndrew Smith, who has recently
m ade extensive observations in South Africa," he claims "that each
civilized o r settled tribe has generally some w andering horde
interm ingled w ith, and in a m easure preying upon, it" (1:1). This
analysis m ay suggest m ore of a w ish than a firm conclusion, however;
the very first sentence of the w ork suggests, but no t entirely
confidently, that there may be natural and perm anent distinctions
between the different types he adopts: "Of the thousand millions of
hum an beings th at are said to constitute the population of the entire
globe, there are—socially, morally, and perhaps even physically
considered—but tw o distinct and broadly m arked races, viz., the
w anderers and the settlers" (1:1). If this opening does constitute a w ish
that the nature of the object of study be clear, and organize itself
im m ediately into fitting categories, it is a w ish that quickly becomes
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disappointed. The w ork continually em phasizes the im portance of
knowledge, b u t also the imperfections and tenuousness of knowledge,
and the process w hereby it is established. Volume II insists, in the
introduction, on the "im port of the facts already collected" (Hr 1), but
also quickly makes clear, for example, that "all statistics in this w ork
[are] an approxim ation to the tru th rather than a definite and accurate
result" (II: 2).
M ayhew pays homage to scientists, and prom otes his project as
science—he offers his classification as being along the sam e lines as
that of Linnaeus, prom ising to "enunciate, for the first tim e, the
natural history, as it w ere, of the industry and idleness of G reat Britain
in the nineteenth century" (IV: 4). But he also suggests often that
science is interpretation, and that the claim to science does not in itself
represent a claim to truth. The recurrent concern that analysis and
facts are always based on less-than-w atertight observations and
assum ptions is m ost thoroughly addressed in the introduction to the
later Book IV of the series, in which Mayhew feels com pelled to offer
extensive further com m ents on the still unresolved problem s of the
arbitrariness of categorization, and the textual establishm ent and use of
facts. M ayhew does em phasize here the utility of his labor, w riting that
he w ants to "contribute some new facts" that w ill "m ake us look w ith
more pity and less anger7 ' on those who cannot resist the tem ptations
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of vice and crime. H e offers his w ork as solid and useful, not as
ephem eral speculation. His labors are "given to the w orld w ith an
earnest desire to better the condition of the w retched social outcasts of
whom I have now to treat, and to contribute, if possible, m y m ite of
good tow ards the common weal" (IV: 1). He describes his more
im m ediate aim as "the attainm ent of the truth," but indicates that this
position begs m ore questions than it answers:
By the truth, I w ish it to be understood, I m ean som ething
m ore than the bare facts. Facts, according to m y ideas, are
m erely the elem ents of truths, and not the truths
themselves; of all m atters there are none so utterly useless
by themselves as your mere m atters of fact. A fact, so long
as it rem ains an isolated fact, is a dull, dead, uninform ed
thing; no object nor event by itself can possibly give us any
knowledge, w e m ust compare it w ith som e other, even to
distinguish it — A fact m ust be assim ilated w ith, or
discrim inated from, some other feet or facts, in order to be
raised to the dignity of a truth, and m ade to convey the
least knowledge to the mind. (IV: 1)
For M ayhew at this point facts are not truths or lies, b u t are
meaningless before they are interpreted and arranged. They only
signify w hen they are differentiated from and p u t in relation to each
other. They are acted on; they d o n 't speak for themselves: he describes
uncontextualized raw data here as "the m um m ery of statistics," and
calls statistics on their ow n mere "m ental lum ber." H is conclusion is
that all analysis is theoretical, and therefore tendentious: "To give the
least m ental value to facts, therefore, we m ust generalize them . . . if
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theory m ay occasionally teach us w rong, facts w ithout theory or
generalization cannot possibly teach us at all" (IV: 2). Shortly
afterw ards he describes classification as difficult b u t necessary,
adm itting that "classification is no less dangerous than it is im portant
to science" (IV: 4). N othing can be discerned w ithout distinctions being
asserted; bu t such distinctions are the products of interpretation and
invention, not self-evident and concretely verifiable.1
This is not to say that Mayhew w rites off his ow n account as
"biased" and abstract. As w e have seen, he states his w ish that his
"new facts" w ill make his readers look at the w orld differently. In the
Preface to the w ork Mayhew acknowledges that his w ork m ay not be
taken as entirely authoritative: "the traveller in the undiscovered
country of the poor m ust, like Bruce, until his stories are corroborated
by after investigators, be content to lie under the im putation of telling
such tales, as travellers are generally supposed to delight in" (I: xv).
But M ayhew does argue that his account is based on "personal
observation of the places, and direct com m union w ith the individuals"
(I: xv). Even if the reliability of personal observations m ay be suspect,
M ayhew argues that the assum ption, in the absence of evidence, that
the poor are especially unreliable witnesses, is as dubious as it is
ungenerous: "the people have been m ostly found to be astonishingly
correct in their statem ents . . . Those persons w ho, from an ignorance
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of the sim plicity of the honest poor, m ight be inclined to think
otherw ise, have, in order to be convinced of the justice of the above
rem arks, only to consult the details given in the present volum e" (L
xv-xvi). Even if w hat he is presenting is a new set of undefinitive
stories, they are new stories th at can reshape the w ay in w hich his
readers have learned to read the poor. In describing his project he says
that "W ithin the last two years some thousands of the hum bler classes
m ust have been seen and visited w ith the especial view of noticing
their condition and learning their histories," suggesting perhaps that
the history of these people can be learned sim ply by observing them,
but also that their ow n storytellings, their ow n perspectives, are
im portant—he prom ises "the history of a people, from the lips of the
people themselves" (I: xvi). The prom ise of the poor's own w ords is
not necessarily a prom ise of authenticity, or a definitively authoritative
account. But it is a prom ise of a perspective that is new and different—
Mayhew starts this preface by listing the ways in which "It is believed
that the book is curious" (I: xv). Mayhew may not be able to offer an
entirely definitive account, b u t he does prom ise fresh perspectives, and
m akes claims for their value.
The fact that his account does not pretend to be entirely
definitive, and does not pretend to be an entirely im personal
assessm ent of the "truth," has certain strengths, especially as a response
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to m ore officially created knowledge. The passive voice of the finding,
seeing, visiting and believing in the above quotations m ight suggest,
adm ittedly, that M ayhew is attem pting to disguise his ow n
involvement, bu t this is not always the case. After all he addresses, as
we have seen, the question of how his choices of categorization and
m ethodology construct the project, and he is also careful to em phasize
the personal nature of his experiences and observations. H e stresses, as
one of the ways in w hich it is "curious," that the book is "the first
commission of inquiry into the state of the people, undertaken by a
private individual" (I: xv). The value of this is that he is no t a
governm ent institution, even if his work m ight look som ething like
the report of one—he adds that the book is "the first 'blue book' ever
published in tw openny num bers" (I: xv). He announces his book as
m aking available know ledge that official commissions of inquiry have
not produced, and therefore making available the possibility of m uch
needed new discourse on the population of the nation: "It is curious,
moreover, as supplying inform ation concerning a large body of
persons, of w hom the public had less knowledge than of the m ost
distant tribes of the earth—the population returns not even
num bering them am ong the inhabitants of the kingdom " (I: xv). If
M ayhew cannot guarantee absolutely the truth of his account, he does
claim some freedom from institutional aims and expectations, and
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therefore som e superiority to institutional reports. H is announced
intent, at the close of his preface, is "to give the rich a m ore intim ate
knowledge of the sufferings, and the frequent heroism under those
sufferings, of the poor," and to "bestir" the pow erful to "im prove the
condition" of the poor, which is "to say the very least, a national
disgrace to us" (I: xvi). Mayhew at once offers the stories told by the
people and prom ises his own stories of their heroism , stories which
cannot m anifest themselves, and have no official or instituted outlet.
They are not there until they are presented by him . In presenting them
he states a concern w ith "truth" and science, but also a political aim of
creating know ledge to generate sym pathy and reform . H is new
creation of the poor, ideally, is to allow his readers to see the poor
differently (or just see them at all), and thereby m ake social reformers
of these readers—in reinventing the poor, in other w ords, he seeks to
enable his readers to reinvent themselves through re-reading the poor.
Early in Book II Mayhew suggests that the culture of each class is
a construction that is environm entally produced, not innately given.
He uses this position as a basis for dem anding sym pathy even where
people appear to fail the test of respectability, in this case through
"ignorance":
To revile the street-people is stark folly. Their ignorance
is no dem erit to them, even as it is no m erit to us to know
the little that we do. If we really w ish the people better, let
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us, I say again, do for them, w hat others have done for us,
and w ithout w hich (hum iliating as it m ay be to our pride)
we should m ost assuredly have been as they are. (II: 4)
M ayhew indicates that given the sam e environm ent, the poor w ould
become the respectable (and vice versa). Correspondingly he offers
various suggestions for educating and recreating the poor in the image
of their "betters." H e makes the com parison explicit in describing the
costers' am usem ents:
My ow n experience w ith this neglected class goes to prove,
that if w e w ould really lift them out of the m oral m ire in
w hich they are wallowing, the first step m ust be to
provide them w ith wholesome am usem ents. The
m isfortune, how ever, is, that w hen we seek to elevate the
character of the people, we give them such m ere dry
abstract truths and dogmas to digest, that the uneducated
m ind turns w ith abhorrence from them . We forget how
we ourselves were originally w on by our em otions to the
consideration of such subjects. (I: 42)
This section seems to make explicit the idea that an exam ination of the
poor is also an exam ination of the construction of the observers and
judges of the poor: the passage suggests that self-exploration is
necessary in order to make possible an understanding of the poor.
Even after putting forw ard the notion that the "street-people" are a
separate tribe, M ayhew often sets about dem olishing certain
assum ptions that m ight underpin the idea not only that the condition
of the poor is natural, but also that readers are already familiar w ith it.
He is suspicious of the idea that the poor are, for exam ple, dishonest:
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"Those w ho are unacquainted w ith the character of the people m ay feel
inclined to doubt the trustw orthiness of the class" (I: 32). H e is also
skeptical of the idea that the poor are lazy, som etim es because he
argues that everyone is lazy ('T here is a cant abroad at the present day,
that there is a special pleasure in industry" (II: 5», and sometimes
because he regards paupers as a product of a larger economic necessity:
"able-bodied paupers are paupers sim ply because they cannot obtain
w ork" (II: 242). The flip side of his qualifications of his ow n theories
and observations is a suspicion of any knowingness about the poor on
the p art of others.
The structure of the book, and its divisions into m yriad
subsections, m ay not be designed to contain and control the accounts it
contains so m uch as to allow num erous positions and discourses to sit
together in disunity. Christopher Herbert in C ulture and Anomie
suggests, for one, that M ayhew becomes m ore tolerant and more an
advocate for the poor as the w ork goes on, and shows how Mayhew can
be read as creating the poor as an organized and functional community.
This seems to m e very interesting and valuable, bu t it seems also
possible to see M ayhew as not changing (as consistently inconsistent)
over the course of the work.2 After all M ayhew repeats some of his
opening m aterial about the poor as a separate tribe, and adds some
about the idle poor as "hum an parasites" at the beginning of the later
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Book IV (IV: 31,3). W e m ight choose to see M ayhew as at every stage
less than, definite—as offering a series of accounts and stories that make
available several often contradictory positions, so th at it is not
necessarily clear how to separate the effects of different parts of the
w ork.
If the poor are recreated here, they are recreated provisionally
and in several ways. The inclusion of a num ber of different voices
enables the juxtaposition of a variety of discourses and positions: the
Irish, for exam ple, are at different moments objects of scorn as the m ost
"degraded" part of the population, and righteous critics of the
godlessness of the English (1:106). M ayhew also uses several frames of
reference. Sometimes his field is literary. He attem pts to show "from
the elder dram atists" the traditional place of the costermongers by
quoting Shakespeare's reference to them (I: 8) and saying they are
"legitim ate descendants]" of the bard's contem poraries. He goes on to
add references from Jonson, Ford, Beaumont and Fletcher, Dr. Johnson
and Burton. The textual evidence is offered w ith the same kind of
w eight as th at of "personal experience" in justifying the costermongers
as w orthy objects of study and sym pathy. In w riting of the
im probability of a pauper rising out of his class M ayhew enters into
dialogue w ith Crabbe, whom he describes as "in all questions of
borough and parish life — an authority" ( I t 251). Crabbe's workhouse
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boy Dick M onday dies Sir Richard M onday, and Mayhew feels bound to
respond: "this is a flight on the wings of poetical license; certainly not
impossible, and that is all w hich can be said for its likelihood" (II: 251).
That M ayhew feels bound to include this at all shows an interesting
sense that he is bound to respond to textual constructions of paupers—
that he is not sim ply producing facts whose significance will be clear,
but that he is entering into a discourse already loaded w ith cultural
assum ptions.
M ayhew tries to place his versions of the poor w ithin literary
discourse just as he attem pts to insert him self into and revise
"parliam entary" discourse. In his Preface he refers to London as "the
first city in the w orld," a propagandist phrase he puts in quotation
m arks, at the sam e tim e as em phasizing that he considers it a "national
disgrace" (I: xvi). h i em phasizing the trade of the "street-people" at the
beginning of volum e H he echoes his earlier parodic, sarcastic tone:
H owever unsatisfactory it m ay be to the aristocratic pride
of the w ealthy commercial classes, it cannot be denied that
a very im portant elem ent of the trade of this vast
capital—this m arvellous centre of the commerce of the
w orld—I cite the stereotype phrases of civic eloquence, for
they are at least truths—it is still undeniable, I say, that a
large proportion of the commerce of the capital of G reat
Britain is in the hands of the Street-Folk. (II: 3)
Later in this volum e he places a formal passage about die necessity of
sewers in quotation m arks, bu t it turns out that the passage is not a
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direct quotation from anyw here, bu t his ow n slightly irreverent
im itation—"I give the sp irit of the pream ble of several Acts of
Parliam ent" (Hr 180). The w ork m ay break out of prose and offer
num erous tables and statistics, b u t it caters to a fascination w ith
language. One of the attractions of the "nom adic" peoples, the
beginning of the w ork tells us, is that "such w andering hordes have
frequently a different language from the m ore civilized portion of the
com m unity, and that adopted w ith the intent of concealing their
designs and exploits from them " (I: 2). The early pages of the account
of the costermongers contain several terms left for the tim e being
unexplained, until eventually M ayhew ends the tease and gives a
glossary of terms and explains the "root of the costerm onger to n g u e__
to give the w ords spelt backw ard, or rather pronounced rudely
backward—for in my present chapter the language has, I believe, been
reduced to orthography for the first tim e" (1:23). The language, as
M ayhew explains it, has been invented for tactical reasons, for keeping
trade m atters secret. He criticizes it, saying it "is not very rem arkable
for originality of construction [and] it possesses no hum our" (I: 23). But
it is secret, and in offering up this language M ayhew appears to break
dow n the secrecy of the costers, to offer special access to their
com m unications, and to offer u p som e of their inner w orkings.
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It is interesting, though, that in m aking available the pleasure of
uncovering secrets, M ayhew w ould criticize the coster language for its
lack of w it. M ayhew's ow n prom ise is to offer new stories and new
perspectives, and it is in the enjoym ent of stories and the capacity for
varied accounts that M ayhew appears to see m uch o f the potential of
the poor he observes. W hile as we have seen M ayhew is skeptical of
the idea that w ork can naturally attract the poor, he does see their
attention to stories as indicating their w orth. He includes, for example,
a section on "The Literature of Costerm ongers," w riting, allow ing us to
be patronizing perhaps, that "It may appear anom alous to speak of the
literature of an uneducated body, but even the costerm ongers have
their tastes for books" (I: 25). He adds, putting praise in the m outh of
another as if in order to provide independent confirm ation, that "One
intelligent man considered that the spirit of curiosity m anifested by
costerm ongers, as regards the inform ation or excitem ent derived from
hearing stories read, augured well for the im provability of the class" (I:
25). The language m ay be patronizing, bu t the context is M ayhew's
conviction that the educated and uneducated are not essentially
different: "We have seen the brutified state in w hich [the
costermonger] is allow ed to rem ain, though possessing the same
faculties and susceptibilities as ourselves—the sam e pow er to perceive
and adm ire the forms of tru th , beauty, and goodness, as even the very
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highest in the state" (I: 25). He also offers the poor as the source of
different and significant readings of certain institutions, h i this same
passage he gives the account of an "inform ant" of the responses of the
costers to certain stories. To a passage in w hich the police intercede and
"speedily [restore] order" when com batants "[seem] as if they were
tearing each other to pieces, to the w ild roar of a chorus of profane
sw earing" (I: 25), the costers exclaim their hatred of the police,
shouting, for exam ple, "I wish I'd been there to have had a shy at the
eslops [police]" (I: 25). This "m isreading" (and M ayhew doesn't call it
this, adding no com m ent of his own) is an instructive one, though,
and the antagonism to the police is one M ayhew often takes seriously.
At the beginning of Book H he indicates that the police serve the
interests of the class of shopkeepers against a "proscribed class,"
com plaining that the costers "are bandied about a t the will of a police-
officer. They m ust 'm ove on' and not obstruct a thoroughfare which
may be cram m ed and blocked w ith the carriages of the w ealthy until to
cross the road on foot is a danger" (II: 3). M ayhew 's determ ination to
take seriously the accounts "from the lips of the people them selves" (I:
xv), how ever m anipulative his account m ight be, allow s him to offer
various readings of society that go against the grain.
M ayhew does not always suggest that the w ords of the people are
authoritative even w here they are im portant, h i introducing his
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section "O f the Street-Irish" Mayhew w rites, as if able to cover
everything, that since "the Irish street-sellers are both a num erous and
peculiar class of people [it] behoves me, for the due com pleteness of
this w ork, to say a few w ords upon their num bers, earnings, condition,
and m ode of life" (1:104). But elsewhere he is not so confident of the
idea that his w ork can be complete. In offering stories of pauper street-
sweepers, for example, he w rites that: "In giving the above and the
following statem ents I have endeavoured to elicit the feelings of the
several paupers whom I conversed w ith. Poor, ignorant, o r prejudiced
men m ay easily be mistaken in their opinions, or in w hat they may
consider their 'facts/ but if a clear exposition of their sentim ents be
obtained, it is a guide to the truth" (II: 245). M ayhew is on shaky
ground here and seems aw are of it; he can offer his attem pts to "elicit
feelings" as a guide to truth, but he offers little o r no hope of latching
on to tru th itself. In reaching his conclusion he is som ew hat guarded:
"It seems indeed, from all I could leam on the subject, th at pauper
street-work, even at the best, is unw illing and slovenly w ork" (II: 245).
He makes no claim here to complete or absolute knowledge. In
offering "feelings" rather than statistics concerning num bers and
earnings, it becomes particularly clear th at M ayhew can hope to offer
no more than a series of stories. But M ayhew seems to em brace this
problem o f representation, oscillating betw een the positions of scientist
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and w riter of fiction, no t necessarily conceding the authority or
authenticity of either.
In describing the ""Uneducated State of Costerm ongers" M ayhew
offers one presum ably egregiously ignorant response to his questions
(though it is not necessarily devoid of w it in fact, ending 'Jesus C h rist.
. . O ur Redeemer? I only w ish I could redeem m y Sunday togs from
m y uncle's" [I: 22]). H e prefaces the response w ith a caution, that the
statem ent "is no more to be taken as representing the ignorance of the
class generally, than are the clear and discrim inating accounts I
received from intelligent costerm ongers to be taken as representing the
intelligence of the body" ( t 22). M ayhew tells us that he "tested" the
ignorance of the costers "in several instances," but is reduced to
presenting adm ittedly unrepresentative statem ents in order to
com municate his findings. M ayhew can offer the exceptionally
"intelligent" and "ignorant," bu t now here in his selection of cases can
he offer the representative. He even goes back slightly on his prom ise
to provide "unvarnished language," offering this coster's opinions
only "alm ost verbatim , om itting oaths and slang" (I: 22). But
particularly im portant is his indication that it is all he can do to offer
one pow erful (because exceptional) account—which we can take as an
adm ission that he relies on the possibilities of storytelling, not on
"com pleteness." For anthologists of M ayhew this has been em inently
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d ear, the narrative of the m arginal bu t horrifying and fascinating
ratcatchers having m ore charm for them (and us, presum ably), for
©cample, than M ayhew's tables or his considerations of m ethodology.
As w e have already seen, Mayhew does refer to literary forebears, and
in his stories he seems to be staking a d aim to the m ethods, lim itations
and possibly transform ative powers of w riters of fiction as w ell as of
sdentists, insofar as he acknowledges the distinction.
The Poor Law Report of 1834 and the Im possibility of Com pleteness
W hile M ayhew suspiciously represents the governm ent
sometim es as a tyranny, he also often calls for benevolent regulation
and governance. In the second paragraph of Volume II of his w ork
M ayhew indicates his im patience w ith governm ent figures: "the
G overnm ent returns never have given us, and probably never zoill
give us, any correct inform ation respecting [the population of Street-
TradersJ" ( I I 1). Soon afterw ards he indicates how futile and ignorant it
w ould be to legislate against street-trading: "To pass an Act dedaring
50,000 individuals rogues and vagabonds, w ould be to fill our prisons
or our w orkhouses w ith m en who w ould w illingly earn their ow n
living" (4). H e goes on to suggest that the governm ent is only
presently seen as interfering and hostile by this d a ss of people—"m en
who have no know ledge of the governm ent of the country b u t as an
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arm ed despotism , preventing their earning their living, and who hate
all law, because it is m ade to appear to them m erely as an organised
tyranny" (5). But he does so in the context of a proposition to set up
highly regulated "poor m en's m arkets," w hich w ould charge a sm all
toll; there w ould even (in spite of Dickens's cutting satire of the beadle
in O liver Twist) be a "keeper or beadle of each m arket" (4). The
m arkets w ould in part be run by w orking people themselves, but the
object w ould be the regulation and "im provem ent in the character of
the London H awkers" (4). This is the passage in which Mayhew asserts
that it is "stark folly" to "revile the street-people." Mayhew represents
him self here as a benevolent legislator, as opposed to an ignorant
bureaucrat.
The Poor Law Report, also representing itself as a new and
benevolent legislator, concludes by indicating that the current problem
is one of bad adm inistration, not of the Poor Laws themselves: "We
have now recom mended to Your Majesty the m easures by which we
hope th at the enorm ous evils resulting from the present
m aladm inistration of the Poor Laws m ay be gradually rem edied" fThe
Poor Law Report of 1834.496). The Royal Com mission of Inquiry
seems anxious to distance itself from self-interested bureaucracy, and
even from "parliam entary" language. In describing rural em ployers,
the Report draw s attention to its own directness and simplicity: "To
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avoid circumlocution, w e w ill use the w ord 'farm ers' as
com prehending [this] class of persons" (as opposed to the w ords
"im m ediate em ployers of labour in the country") (R eport 144). The
Commission, further, represents itself as an enem y of the am biguity
and lack of direction that it perceives, apparently, in all earlier
legislation—for exam ple the R eport states that "The legal pow ers of an
open vestry are subject to the doubt and obscurity w hich seem to be
particularly attendant on our Poor Law legislation" (190). Like
M ayhew, the Commission is not above mocking the language of the
legislature: in quoting a provision directly from an earlier Act of 1818,
the R eport says that the act adds the sentence "in its usual spirit of
qualification" (198).
The agents of the state represent them selves as outside the state,
as a pressure group bringing its influence to bear on those at the center
of pow er. Their utopian idea of legislation is one that makes itself
invisible, that produces a context in which "natural" laws apply and
w hose wishes can be m ade directly and unam biguously available. The
Com m issioners represent their proposals no t as positive suggestions
for change, b u t as the rem oval of unnecessary im pedim ents to natural
laws:
It w ill be observed that the m easures w hich w e have
suggested are intended to produce rather negative than
positive effects; rather to rem ove the debasing influences
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to w hich a large portion of the labouring population is
now subject, than to afford new m eans of prosperity and
virtue. (496)
They suggest that the way to achieve the "general diffusion of right
principles and habits" is not through "economic arrangem ents and
regulations" but through "the influence of a m oral and religious
education" (496). They close the Report by suggesting that their aim is
not to rem edy the "problem " of the poor bu t to pave the w ay for a
solution:
[W]e have ventured these few rem arks only for the
purpose of recording our conviction, that as soon as a
good adm inistration of the Poor Laws shall have rendered
further im provem ent im possible, the m ost im portant
duty of the Legislature is to take m easures to prom ote the
religious and m oral education of the labouring classes.
(497)
The New Poor Laws are not the real business of governm ent, they just
make that business possible. The new proposals w ill not artificially
m anufacture a new ly imagined situation, they w ill sim ply rem edy "the
present m aladm inistration of the Poor Laws" (496). This effacement of
the new proposals, their representation as a m ere corrective designed
to restore order rather than as a political im position of a new system, is
combined w ith som e effacement of the Com m issioners' role as authors
and as interpreters. But this self-effacement—this effort to assert that
the evidence collected on the problem speaks for itself, and that the
Report is sim ply a common-sense practical response to a problem that
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is fixed, clear and available to only one correct interpretation—is not
consistent; the confident rhetoric of common sense sits alongside
uneasy and em battled reflections on problems of evidence and of
interpretation.3
The very existence of the R eport is an indication that the
m eaning of the collected evidence does not speak for itself b u t m ust be
explained. But the Report, so sanguine as it may be about the prospect
of clear, practical adm inistration, goes so far as to give an account of its
ow n history that em phasizes the frustrating im m ersion of the
Commissioners in texts, and in the practical difficulties of a
bureaucratic project. The R eport opens w ith a series of explanations of
the difficulties which the Royal Commission encountered, leading to
the tardiness and incom plete printing of their docum ent. They explain
how difficult it was to find Assistant Commissioners, how through
"different accidents" some of them dropped out and certain districts
w ere not visited, and how m uch labor was put into producing
instructions for the A ssistant Commissioners and w ritten questions for
each parish; "So m uch tim e w as taken up in the preparation of
questions and instructions, and in the appointm ent of A ssistant
Commissioners, that few of them proceeded on their m ission before
the m iddle of 1832" (68). The appointm ent of Assistant
«
Commissioners, we are inform ed, was "a task by no m eans easy, as the
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office w as one requiring no ordinary qualifications, necessarily
involving a great sacrifice of tim e and labour, likely to be followed by
m uch hostility, and accom panied by no rem uneration" (68). The
Com missioners begin their w ork w ith an account of problem s w ith
personnel, and the problem s of the physical handling of such a bulk of
paperw ork that "any use of it in m anuscript [is] extremely fatiguing,
and the complete use im possible" (69-70). The Commissioners account
for its lateness: "the vast bulk of the m anuscripts, and the degree in
w hich the Parliam entary printers were engaged by other m atters, so
prolonged the printing that not one fifth of it had been executed before
the end of the session" (71). They also explain straight aw ay that the
docum ent they have prepared is necessarily faulty, the printing still not
being finished:
We have been forced, therefore, to take it as it was
furnished to us week by week, using the proof sheets,
unpaged and unindexed. And this is one of our apologies
for the defects of this Report, and for the omissions and
occasional false references which, w ith all our care, m ust,
we fear, be found in it. (71)
The opening paragraph of the R eport proffers the w ork as opinions
based on a full inquiry: "We . . . hum bly certify to Your Majesty . . . our
proceedings in the execution of Your M ajesty's Commission, and the
opinions which they have led us to form " (67). W hat im m ediately
follows is an account of the proceedings that combines self-
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congratulation w ith a num ber of apologies for frankly-adm itted
shortcom ings—the Com m issioners undercut the authority o f their
report at the same tim e as claim ing it.
As w ell as practical difficulties, moreover, the R eport
acknowledges some m ethodological problems: "All evidence is
necessarily subject to error, from the ignorance, forgetfulness, or
m isrepresentation of the witnesses, and necessarily tinged by their
opinions and prejudices" (71). This is in the context of the suggestion
that the size of the report is its strength, however, m aking up for any
unreliability: that "m agnitude gives the principal value to o u r inquiry"
(71). In fact the final claim of the initial "Statement of Proceedings" is
the self-congratulatory pronouncem ent that the R eport is "the m ost
extensive, and at the sam e tim e the m ost consistent, body of evidence
that w as ever brought to bear on a single subject" (72). But this is
followed, bathetically, by an apology for the fact that the R eport has
been unable to furnish precise footnotes: "as the Appendix, ow ing to
the obstacles w hich w e have already stated, is still incom plete, and
m uch of it unpaged, m any of our references are unavoidably left
blank7 ' (72). The concentration on the appendices also offers problem s
for the authority of the m ain body of the Report itself, w hich of course
makes use only of extracts; in explaining the com plete appendices the
Com m issioners state th at "not m uch could be saved in length w ithout
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incurring the risk o f occasional suppression or m isrepresentation" (69).
The R eport puts a high prem ium on quantity of evidence, but
com pleteness is adm ittedly never attainable— despite its long lists of
quotations the R eport is sometimes reduced to vague, unsupported
assertions such as th at "It is unnecessary to m ultiply quotations, all of
which w ould be to the sam e effect" (148). Despite all the satisfying
quantity of evidence, the R eport still does rely on its interpretation of
particular cases and quotations.
Certain stories, then, are offered as pow erful exemplars—stories
that function to m aintain certain ideas of w hat is natural and
unnatural. Despite the insistence that the strength of the Report is its
bulk of evidence, the dystopian story of the parish of Cholesbury, for
example, is posited as the future of the current "abuses" of the system
and the consequences of rising poor rates. The story is of a rise of the
poor rates in that parish to levels that m eant they could no longer be
levied, "the landlords having given up their rents, the farm ers their
tenancies, and the clergym an his glebe and tithes" (141). The parish
having been abandoned, "the benevolent Rector recom m ends that the
whole of the land should be divided am ong the able-bodied paupers"
(141), who w ould be able to support themselves, if not the "aged and
im potent." The Com m issioners add, confessing the particularity of
their exam ple, that their "evidence exhibits no other instance of the
183
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abandonm ent of a p a rish /' but assert that there are others feeling the
effects of "the pressure of the poor-rate" (141). This unique case of
paupers taking over the land and driving o u t their landlords is
represented as a key to understanding the crisis: though it does not
depict the state of things, it can act as a prediction. After offering some
quotations to support their idea of the pressure of the poor-rate driving
out landow ners, the Com m issioners explain:
We have m ade these quotations for the purpose of
draw ing attention not so much to the im m ediate evils
which die landow ners of the pauperized districts are
undergoing as to the more extensive and irrem ediable
mischiefs of w hich these are the forerunners. It appears to
us that any parish in which the pressure of the poor-rates
has com pelled the abandonm ent of a single farm is in
im m inent danger of undergoing the ruin w hich has
already befallen Cholesbury. (144)
This reading of the evidence is self-confessedly interpretive—it
"appears" to the Commissioners that Cholesbury represents a pattern,
unique as it m ay be. The story returns again, serving as "proof" in
another context, w hen the Report explains the need for a central
commission—p art of the problem , the argum ent goes, is that it is
difficult to find com petent managers w illing to take on the burden of
adm inistration. The landow ners are m ore inclined to abandon their
property "than encounter the annoyance of having to contend against
the system. The property of the w hole parish of Cholesbury w as
abandoned to pauperism , apparently w ithout a struggle" (406). The
184
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pow er of evidence rests, it turns out, on its pow er as story, and not just
on its accum ulated mass.
This m ultiple use of the story of a unique parish sits oddly w ith
the claim in the section on the principles of the new legislation that
"The bane of all pauper legislation has been the legislating for extrem e
cases" (376-7). This claim is followed by the suggestion that no system
of rules can be nor should attem pt to be perfect in providing for special
cases:
Every exception, every violation of the general rule to
m eet a real case of unusual hardship, lets in a w hole class
of fraudulent cases by w hich th at rule in tim e m ust be
destroyed. W here cases of real hardship occur, the rem edy
m ust be applied by individual charity, a virtue for which
no system of com pulsory relief can be or ought to be a
substitute. (377)
On the other hand, the following page contains the claim that through
the "self-acting test" of the workhouse, "the line between those who do
and those who do not need relief is draw n, and draw n perfectly" (378).
It is as if there is a necessity to offer utopian rhetoric in describing the
new legislation, b u t a com pulsion also to assert the lim itations of
legislation. The R eport is caught betw een various rhetorics—a
debunking of the rhetoric of private charity and liberal well
m eaningness sits alongside pieties about the value of charity; a utopian
picture of w hat legislation can make possible co-exists w ith a cynicism
over the w orkings of governm ent bureaucracy. The R eport is arguably
185
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not so m uch a production and justification of one position as a
negotiation am ongst several contending positions.
Sometimes the commissioners appear to claim to be outside of
the realm of rhetoric altogether, h i the section of the w ork w e m ight
expect to be m ost polemical, the suggestions as to the principles and
details of the proposed new legislation, the Commissioners reaffirm
their determ ination to be directly connected to the concrete, real, and
definitively non-abstract:
Considering the extensive benefits to be anticipated from
the adoption of m easures founded on principles already
tried and found beneficial, and w arned at every p art of the
inquiry by the failure of previous legislation, w e shall, in
the suggestion of specific rem edies, endeavour not to
depart from the firm ground of actual experience. (375)
The Com missioners are m odest enough to represent the attem pt as an
"endeavour" rather than assum ing success. But connection to reality is
the criterion for judging the value of w itnesses, as the Com missioners
suggest during the argum ent for establishing a central board of control:
"the m ost practical witnesses concur . . . in representing the voluntary
adoption of detailed regulations hopeless" (416). On the other hand the
Com missioners have adm itted already in their introduction that any
witness is liable to have their own "pre-possessions," and their ow n
connection to these "practically engaged" witnesses is through w ritten
accounts.
186
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O n certain occasions the Com missioners are som ew hat more
forthcom ing about their grounds of contestation being rhetorical rather
than "practical." One of the objections of the Commissioners to the
pow er of local m anagem ent in the absence of central m anagem ent is
the use by local vested interests of a false analogy, and they devote
some space to the debunking of that analogy. The commissioners state
that "Persons engaged in trade have represented the m anagem ent of
parochial affairs to be analogous to the m anagem ent of a bankrupt's
estate by creditors" (405), in that no particular interest outw eighs the
general and causes m ism anagem ent. The com missioners point out the
trickery of this representation, objecting that the "m anagem ent by
overseers, that is, by two or three persons, is treated as a m anagem ent
by the people of the 'people's ow n affairs,' and an 'attention to their
ow n interests,' m eaning the affairs and interests of some hundreds or
thousands of other persons" (405). Elsewhere the battle is over the
meanings of particular words; in defending the "less eligibility
principle" whereby relief is to be m ade less attractive them any work,
the Commissioners pre-em pt any accusations of cruelty by redefining
the idea of "irksom eness" as ordinary lab o r "All labour is irksome to
those who are unaccustom ed to labour; and w hat is generally m eant by
the expression 'rendering the pauper's situation irksom e,' is rendering
it laborious" (338). The Commission also adopts the com plaint that
187
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Chadwick m akes elsew here that the w ord "poor" has been rendered
dangerously am biguous, and that there is a difference betw een
"indigence," w hich the Commission describes as "the state of a person
unable to labour," and the "natural" state of poverty, defined here as
"the state of one who, in order to claim a m ere subsistence, is forced to
have recourse to labour" (334) (Chadwick is, of course, one of the
signatories of the Report, as a Commissioner).
W hile the struggle against the old adm inistration of the poor
laws is partly a struggle for redefinition, then, the Com m issioners
object to the tendency of local authorities to produce their ow n varied
readings of legal texts. Giving a common-sense reading of a 1697 act
that dealt w ith the relative powers of overseers and justices, the
Com m issioners com plain in an exasperated tone that "though this
seems to be the natural interpretation of the 3 Will. And M ary, c. 11, a
different construction was applied to it" (205). The Com m issioners are
w eary of interpretive legal games, claim ing to have the "real
m eanings," and "natural interpretations." Earlier in this ran t over
justices the Com missioners offer the following diatribe, after quoting a
section of the law:
If the fram ers of the act had intended to make in the law
the enorm ous change which these few w ords 'b u t by the
authority under the hand of one justice' effected . . . it can
scarcely be supposed that they w ould have introduced an
enactm ent of such im portance by w ay of exception at the
188
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end of a clause, or prefixed it to so irrelevant a pream ble.
The real m eaning of these w ords seems to have been the
same as that of die sim ilar w ords in the 43 Elizabeth. (204)
Perhaps understandably given the unm anageably large appendices, the
Com m issioners are im patient here w ith text and w ith interpretation.
The Com missioners im agine their proposed central authority not as
additional bureaucracy, but as a check on texts and m ultiple
interpretations, and a prom otion of the direct execution of the will of
the legislature. Their explanation makes explicit their utopian aim of
clarity:
The instances presented to us throughout the present
inquiry of the defeat of form er legislation by unforeseen
obstacles, and often by an adm inistration directly at
variance w ith the plainly expressed w ill of the Legislature,
have forced us to distrust the operation of the clearest
enactm ents, and even to apprehend unforeseen mischiefs
from them , unless an especial agency be appointed and
em pow ered to superintend and control their execution.
(398)
The new central board is to enable the Legislature to evade the pitfalls
of texts and interpretation altogether, and to act as a direct agent of the
w ill of the lawm akers. At their m ost im perative, then, the
commissioners acknowledge that texts cannot be pinned dow n and
cannot exercise force on their ow n w ithout an agency set up to control
the process of interpretation.
This concession that the text of the law w ill be subject to all
kinds of m anipulation if not under some outside direct control jars
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w ith the claim that the proposed legislation is based on a general
consensus of opinion and formed on the basis of the ideas of the
people, h i offering conditions of relief w hereby the "m endicant and
vagrant" are to be "disarm [ed] of their w eapon—the plea of im pending
starvation" (paupers are thereby refigured as assailants rather than
victims) the Commission speaks on behalf of "the public," who are
"w arranted in imposing such conditions" as are considered beneficial
to the individual or to "the country at large" (335). As well as "the
public" the Com missioners invoke, for exam ple, "the common
sentim ents of m ankind" (334). More specifically, the Commissioners
list the various occupations of their inform ants, aligning the authoring
of their R eport w ith a broad selection of social classes:
It is derived from m any thousand w itnesses of every rank
and of every profession and em ploym ent, members of
two Houses of Parliam ent, clergym en, country gentlem en,
m agistrates, farm ers, m anufacturers, shopkeepers,
artisans, and peasants, differing in every conceivable
degree in education, habits, and interests, and agreeing
only in their practical experience as to the m atters in
question. (72)
The Com missioners favor "the m ost practical w itnesses" elsewhere,
but here the very lack of distinction among the witnesses seems to be
the source of the authority of the Report. The Com missioners
com plain elsewhere also about the special interests of various groups,
and indicate, as w e have seen, th at no individual piece of evidence can
190
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in itself be taken as reliable. The faith of the Com m issioners in the
"labouring classes," for example, is highly selective and tactical. We are
told that where parish vestry or board members
w ere distinguished by strictness in the adm inistration of
relief, these m em bers w ere generally persons who had
them selves risen from the labouring classes; it appeared
that the principle w hich we have set forth for the
adm inistration of the poor's ra te s is generally adopted
by the labouring classes themselves, as die only safe
principle for the governm ent of their friendly societies.
(340)
The authority of the "labouring classes" is useful w here it coincides
w ith the will of the Commissioners; on other occasions the instincts of
these classes are no t to be trusted.
The Com missioners, then, appear to engage in an attem pt to
bring order out of chaos, to distill a m ultitude of texts into one voice,
and into a practical course of action. But though som etim es they seem
to efface them selves as authors and as interpreters, at other tim es they
draw attention to their ow n position as interpreters and active,
laboring constructors of knowledge. The R eport appears different from
M ayhew's w ork in that it is so program m atically directed—the
Commissioners are charged w ith producing a solution and cannot, as
Mayhew sometim es can, throw up their hands in the face of problem s
they identify. But the docum ents are in m any w ays sim ilar, in their
distrust of bureaucracy and "Parliam entary" language, and in the fact
L 9 1
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th at they position them selves rhetorically outside of the m ainstream
institutions of governm ent. Like London Labour and the London
Poor, the R eport does lay bare its ow n construction, especially in the
account of the physical difficulties of production of a w ork that
involves struggling under a deluge of texts—and in the
acknowledgem ent of the lim itations of sources taken individually, and
the adm ission of the im possibility of com pleteness. The docum ent is
distinguishable by its political function as a justification of Poor Law
legislation, but it still falls in a spectrum of texts of the period which
question the authority of social investigation at the sam e tim e as
conducting it.
The Annual Reports of the Poor Law Com m issioner and the Fiction of
Progress
Like the Poor Law Report, the first Annual Report of the Poor
Law Commissioners for England and Wales (1835) m aintains an
optim istic, even trium phal tone while at the sam e tim e as
com plaining of the em battled position of the authors. The three Poor
Law Commissioners (none of them the same as the nine Royal
Commissioners who authored the 1834 Poor Law Report! both suggest
som e problem s of w ritten communications, and fill the sizable volume
w ith w ritten m aterial that constitutes their appendices and their
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evidence4 . Both works are attem pts in part to create a standard of
evidence—to assert that a particular collection of docum ents is
sufficient to provide grounds for claiming authority. But both also
adm it some uncertainty as to the solidity of that claim , and indicate an
awareness of the situatedness of the collectors of evidence, and their
ow n participation in an active process of collection and creation. The
A nnual Report, as the record of the activity of the Poor Law
Commission, is also m uch concerned w ith creating a sense of concrete
change, and of producing a picture of busy im provem ent and practical
reform; bu t the tenor of m uch of the report is frustration at the actions
of the Com mission consisting largely of the production of a great deal
of paperw ork.
In the first paragraph of their report the Com m issioners
em phasize the fact that their task is of a new kind, and prom ise a full
explanation, though not w ith an entire confidence that the effects of
their actions are identifiable:
We consider that the extent and novelty of the pow ers
created by the Legislature, and confided to us by his
M ajesty, and the peculiar character and im portance of the
interests w hich w e have been called upon to superintend,
dem and from us a full exposition of the m easures w e
have adopted; of the reasons for adopting them ; and, as far
as they can be ascertained, of the effects they have
produced. (1)
193
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The first m easures the Commissioners describe are attem pts to remove
the confusion o f the parishes:
We w ere . . . inform ed, that in extensive districts great
confusion and uncertainty prevailed, arising from an
im pression that not only had the adm inistration of relief
been subjected to our general superintendence and
control, bu t that the whole of the im m ediate and direct
m anagem ent had devolved upon us. (1)
The response of the Commissioners is the circulating of docum ents—
the publishing of a circular letter "in all the daily papers" (2), and the
sending out of copies of the Act "w ith an explanatory analysis of its
various provisions in the form of a copious index" (3). The story of
m isunderstandings continues, however, and the num ber of texts
produced by the Central Board and the parishes m ultiplies—the
Com missioners explain how they sent out "a set of queries" (3), and
also that "N otw ithstanding these com m unications, w hich w e believe
had the effect of preventing much disorder . . . we found that a
conception had been extensively propagated am ongst the overseers in
the rural parishes — that by the operation of the Poor Law
A m endm ent Act they w ere entirely released from the control of the
m agistrates" (3). The response is another circular letter—bu t the
Com m issioners com plain that "As a consequence of these proceedings,
we w ere im m ediately led into a widely-extended correspondence, in
answ er to solicitations from all parts of the country for m ore detailed
194
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explanations of the law, and of its application to the peculiar cases of
parishes, an d even of individuals" (5). The Com m ission of Inquiry
entertains the fantasy that bureaucracy m ight be dispensed w ith and
the direct w ill of the legislature enforced, and also that distinctions
m ight becom e self-evident. Still, the Poor Law Com missioners tell a
tale of involuntary entrapm ent in a system of paperw ork generation:
"A pplications . . . from m agistrates, from parochial officers, from rate
payers, as w ell as from paupers, collectively o r individually, have from
that period continued to increase. They now form a considerable
portion of the business of the departm ent, and of the dem ands upon
our attention" (5).
Their story continues w ith an account of the unreliability of the
inform ation th at the reforms were to be based on. The previous
Report of 1834, for all its bulk, is now to be superseded: though "more
extensive than any preceding, yet those investigations did not extend
directly or specifically to more than about 3.000 ou t of the 15,635
parishes or places separately relieving their ow n paupers" (6). The
Com m issioners' m ission is to go fu rth er "w e are aw are that it was the
opinion entertained by the Board that, for the purpose of the practical
application of the new Law, a renewed and m ore detailed inquiry w as
requisite" (6). But for all the new im m ersion of the new report in
practical application, the difficulties of investigation and the
195
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unreliability of sources are still a pow erful concern. In responding to
the questions from local parishes, the Commissioners com plain that
"how ever particular w ere the statem ents of the evils requiring
correction, how trustw orthy soever m ight be the applicants, w e seldom
could feel assured that som e m aterial circumstances w ere not
inadvertently overlooked and om itted in the statem ents transm itted to
us" (6). The account of the response to the set of questions distributed
is even m ore chastened, the inform ation gleaned being deem ed
inadequate as a basis for action:
We found that those answers w ere extremely defective;
and that at the best they w ould only yield general
indications w ith respect to the actual condition of any
parish or district. Even w here we could entertain no
reasonable doubt of the com pleteness of the inform ation
as to the general condition of a parish, obtainable by the
old means, we could seldom feel assured of the adequacy
of the local agency for carrying into execution any general
and com plete change of system we m ight require. (6)
The Com missioners give an im pression of a desire to sim plify and
control, bu t also to create a disconnection from unruly parishes that do
not understand their will. The story continues w ith an account of yet
another circular, prom pted by the difficulties of answ ering queries and
"the occurrence of some cases of precipitate and violent change made
by some of the overseers on their ow n responsibility" (7).
The process of inquiring, and of adm inistrating, is depicted not
as routine and fam iliar, b u t as strange, awkward and unw ieldy. Testily
196
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fending off possible criticism, th e Commissioners w rite: "w e m ay . . .
allude to the fact, that, as w e had no precedent for our guidance, the
departm ent being entirely new , every arrangem ent w as required to be
m ade de novo, and on the exigency" (5). The gathering or creation of
inform ation is represented as a frustrating, inexact business, yet the
possession of inform ation is still som etim es used as a basis for a
counter-attack on opponents of the legislation. This report describes
the investigations of the earlier Com m ission of Inquiry as incom plete
but "fully adequate to the purposes of legislation" (6)—apparently a
rather arbitrary judgm ent On the politically explosive m atter of the
separation of the sexes, the Com m issioners protest, offering a quotation
from a report attacking their opponents by way of defense of their
position:
We cite the following passage from a Report of Mr.
Hawley, as illustrative of the scenes not unfrequently
presented to our Assistant-Com missioners. These scenes
exhibit the cruelties and various evils which w ould be
incurred and m aintained by yielding to the opinions of
those ill-inform ed persons, w ho, w ithout inquiring,
declaim against that separation of paupers in different
houses or in different apartm ents, required in the
w orkhouse regulations, w hich forms the only m eans of
preventing such evils. (35)
The im portant thing, it appears, is to inquire. Even if the inquiries
have their lim itations, they can still act as a basis for authoritative
opinion. O r does authoritative opinion serve as the basis for inquiry?
197
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The Com missioners end by reaffirm ing their belief in the pow er of the
legislation despite their various difficulties and com plaints, offering
w hat is m ore a statem ent of faith than a claim to dispassionate
accuracy:
In concluding this, our First Annual Report, w e beg to
assure your Lordship that our labours are sustained by an
entire conviction that the Act, in every m ain provision,
w ill fulfil the beneficent intentions of the Legislature, and
w ill conduce to elevate the moral and social condition of
the labouring classes, and prom ote the w elfare of all. (66)
The First Report, after all, to declare success m ust see into the future.
The Act is still som ething of an unrealized utopian project—
much of the correspondence they describe has attem pted to make sure
that already existing system s stay in place until the Com missioners can
effect change. But they produce documents that prom ise m uch in the
w ay of controlled and uniform action. A great deal of space in
A ppendix A, which gives the docum ents issued, is filled w ith blanks of
standardized forms that are to be used by the Boards of Guardians—
especially relating to accounts, as well as, for exam ple, a register of
births and deaths (135), a "pauper description book" (137), and a letter
w ith blanks for dates, nam es and am ounts indicating a resolution for
raising or borrow ing m oney for the purpose of "the em igration of poor
persons" (94). The A nnual R eport not only provides tables of statistics,
it also provides the prom ise of m any more tables of statistics to come.
198
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In the face of the problem s they have had w ith m iscom m unication and
obstinate m isinterpretation th e Com m issioners create docum ents for
the Boards w ith as little room for variation as possible.
But there is som ething ironic in this attem pt at orderliness in
the context not only of the Com m issioners' ow n story of their
frustrating im m ersion in texts, but also of the spraw l of the A nnual
R eport itself. The second Appendix consists of the reports of each of
the A ssistant Com m issioners, w hich vary enorm ously in their length
(from under three to 35 pages) and content. W hat is im portant appears
to be the accum ulation of stories about the success of the Poor Law
Am endm ent Act—w hether their form be hard statistics or personal
statem ents does not seem to m atter as long as they are present in fairly
copious quantities. It does not seem to m atter either w hat the scope or
referent of the statistics is, as long as they indicate the success of the Act
in som e way. N ot all the A ssistant Commissioners provide
supplem ental m aterial, b u t those who do make available a w ide
variety of statem ents and statistics relating to details of individual
parishes and parish unions. Despite the tables of expenditures and
w orkhouse occupancy, the evidence does not always appear to be an
im personal construction—m uch of it is anecdotal, consisting of direct
quotations from interview ed parish officials. Mr. G ulson's report, for
example, offers as a supplem ent the answers of individuals in parishes
199
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in the Faringdon union to a set of five questions concerning savings
and pauper habits under the new system, the first one beginning
cautiously "Is it your opinion th a t ?" (198). The answers are of
course generally positive tow ards the new system , but are also
frequently phrased w ith m odesty and qualification, for example
beginning "I am of opinion," "We consider," or "It appears" (202-3),
and w ith som e refusals to answ er "I think it has not been long enough
in operation to enable me to form a correct opinion" (202). But the
accum ulation of cautious optim ism is satisfying enough for the
purposes of indicating a widespread faith in the Act if not a thoroughly
grounded, undeniable proof of its effectiveness, and this statem ent of
faith seems to be the function of the Report.
The first A nnual Report closes w ith a table show ing the num ber
of parish unions form ed by each Assistant Com m issioner, and then
some plans of w orkhouses, w ith perspective draw ings, as if to
em phasize the solidity of the achievements of the Commission.
Shaded draw ings of institutional buildings suggest the w eight of literal
construction, and the plans w ith their careful organization of
bedrooms by category of pauper as well as room s, for example, for
searches, laundry, coals, a piggery and the dead (412) add to the sense of
m inute and m onum ental organization (and rigorous control). For
Francis H ead, an A ssistant Commissioner, the plan itself is not
200
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sufficient—to supplem ent his draw ing he adds in his notes the
philosophy governing the details of dim ensions th at he lays out:
Both plans are founded on the principle, that, in the
construction of a Rural W orkhouse, the height of the
room s, the thickness of the walls, &c., &c., should not
exceed the dim ensions of the cottage of the honest, hard
w orking, independent labourer; w ell built, substantial
rooms being a luxury, as attractive to the pauper as food
and raim ent. (415)
The Bentham ite plan also advertises its ow n effectiveness as a place for
supervision; H ead notes for the reader: "N.B.—The Bow W indow, E,
over the Gateway, com m ands a view of the w hole establishm ent"
(415). The plans are representations of a practically functioning
em bodim ent of the New Poor Laws—p art of a story of visible, definite
change. But they are only a prom ise of such change; after all they are
plans for workhouses that do not yet exist.
The second A nnual R eport (1836) places a great deal of em phasis
on the institution of the w orkhouse as an indispensable tool w ithin
the new system . The Com missioners state:
Every day's experience confirmed us in the opinion, that
the principles w hich the Legislature sought to bring into
operation by m eans of the Poor Law A m endm ent Act
could never be generally and effectively introduced
w ithout the aid of Boards of G uardians and their
subordinate officers, and the sanction of w ell-regulated
workhouses; and it w as evident to us, that no beneficial
result w ould be obtained by our issuing rules and
regulations for parishes in w hich there existed no
adequate pow er for carrying them into effect. (2)
201
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I
I
The w orkhouse provides a com forting narrative for the
Commissioners, and not fust because it stands as a substantial symbol
of their m aterial effect on adm inistration—any faults in the
functioning of the system of poor relief can be blam ed on its absence, or
on the absence of a reasonable degree of control before its introduction.
The Com missioners provide a specific example of w here a w orkhouse
fails to function because it is brought into a previously m ism anaged
context:
The attem pt to introduce classification and discipline in
the disorderly w orkhouse at Heckingham, in Suffolk, (in
w hich a large num ber of paupers had been congregated
under the im perfect arrangem ents of a Local Act,) was
followed by setting fire to the workhouse, about one
fourth of w hich was actually consumed. (4)
The Commissioners take care to blame the Local Act for creating an
intractable poor, and also distinguish carefully betw een the current
"disorderly" w orkhouse and their ow n idea of the disciplined
workhouse. They go on to explain that since the surroundings of the
workhouse are pleasant in com parison to those the rural poor are
accustomed to, "it is only m ainly through the effect produced by the
classification w hich is necessary to be observed in a w orkhouse, and to
that degree of order and restraint which our rules enforce, th at the
workhouse principle is rendered really effective" (5). The A n n u al
Report guarantees the "effectiveness" of the w orkhouse, b u t m anages
202
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to postpone the tim e w hen it can be expected to be universally effective
by holding the previous conditioning of paupers responsible for their
current state, w here it is considered disappointing.
The second A nnual Report shifts the question of investigation
and perception to consider how the Act itself is perceived. Despite the
fact that the "proof" of the effectiveness of the legislation m ight seem
to lie as m uch in faithful optim ism as in a som ew hat haphazard
collection of evidence, the Commissioners castigate those who do not
have access to such resources: "It is through ignorance and
m isapprehension as to the real nature of the change which is taking
place, that doubts and distrust as to its tendency are found to prevail in
some instances" (29). O n the other hand the Com missioners do not
necessarily claim unassailable authority; their m eans of arguing their
case is by offering the w ords of others whom they represent as reliable
and close to "reality." The Commissioners w rite, "That the public is
rapidly acquiring a correct view of the change w hich has taken place
among the labouring classes, we think w e shall be able to dem onstrate;
and for this purpose w e shall extract from some of the num erous
letters w hich have been addressed to our A ssistant Commissioners,
passages w hich w ill carry w ith them a w eight of authority w hich no
statem ent of ours could equally im part" (30). The letters they offer here
are attributed to parishioners of various sections of the m iddle class,
203
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including farm ers, G uardians, a Reverend, a publican, and a grocer
(described further as "a very respectable man")- The Commissioners
offer other voices to confirm their ow n—rather than claim ing the
authority of their ow n discourse, they offer the w ords of those whose
character is "respectable" and "practical." They conclude this offering
of letters saying, "W e trust that the foregoing extracts of letters —
w ritten by persons who have the best m eans of form ing an accurate
judgm ent, will have fully shown that the new law has already
produced a very beneficial change on the labouring classes" (35). The
evidence of the letters adds to their argum ent, bu t at the same tim e this
deferral to those w ith "the best means of form ing an accurate
judgm ent" rem inds us of the distance betw een the Commissioners and
their parishes, and rem inds us also that their proof consists of such
w ritten accounts and depends on the notion that certain witnesses
have the right character to produce w ritten accounts w ith the
appropriate w eight of authority. The Com missioners paradoxically
claim their authority by ventriloquizing so as to speak from a position
they do not occupy, but which they describe as closest to reality. Just as
the 1834 Poor Law Report distanced itself from the workings of
governm ent bureaucracy, so the second A nnual R eport distances itself
from ruling-class perspectives. A nother exam ple of this is their
response to com plaints about the w orkhouse diet: "Com plaints of the
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insufficiency of the allowances of food in the w orkhouses have
occasionally been m ade by persons of the higher classes, b u t they have
seldom sprung from the pauper inm ates, habituated to scanty cottage
fare" (5). The failure to grasp the w orkings of the w orkhouse system ,
the A nnual R eport here suggests, results horn a failure to im agine the
situation and habits of the pauper.
These efforts to situate authority elsew here seem aw kw ard
alongside the representation of the Com m issioners' situation as
beleaguered reform ers battling against deep-seated local interests and
already engrained bad habits. The A nnual Report has in fact already
em phasized the construction of the beliefs of the public by interest,
prejudice and fear before it calls the respectable as witnesses. The
Com missioners begin the A nnual R eport em phasizing the opposition
of the general population to the change of the current system :
It w ould not be expected that an Act w hich so m aterially
disturbed the distribution of as large a stun of m oney as
£7,000,000 per annum , w hich of necessity changed the
source from which a large portion of the inhabitants of
the country derived their custom ary m eans of subsistence,
and w hich in so doing opposed itself not only to the
interests, the prejudices, and the fears of a large portion of
the population, but pressed hardly on the sincere though
m istaken notions of charity, w hich w ere established in the
breasts of others, could possibly be carried into effect
w ithout difficulty and resistance. Your Lordship,
therefore, w ill learn w ithout surprise, that the pow ers of
the Act, and our means of carrying it into operation, have
been p u t to the proof by every m eans w hich ingenuity
could devise. (3)
205
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This passage seems to suggest that the "correct" ideology of pauper
m anagem ent is m ore or less the preserve of the Com m issioners, who
m ust do battle w ith the entrenched positions of the public from their
institutional center. The public here are to be distrusted even w here
well-m eaning; there is some inconsistency in the Com m issioners'
representations of the Act as an expression of common sense, and as a
necessarily im posed expression of the inform ed rationed thought of
experts. Expertise is both here the property of only a privileged few
inquirers collecting data a t a central point, and also later of a w hole
class of peripheral, "respectable" observers "close to reality."
The passage also reinforces the sense that the Com m issioners are
involved in the practicalities and tactics of overcoming opposition to
their will—that they are a kind of special interest group pursuing their
battle against other interests. The second A nnual R eport keeps up the
distinction between itself and the pow er of Parliam ent, and negotiates
the relationship som etim es rather testily. The Com missioners
com plain that some lim itations on the pow er of the Poor Law
Guardians are "beyond [their] control" and lobby for a "Bill w hich was
proposed to remove some of the difficulties which im pede [their]
proceedings" (14). The Commissioners also com plain of the extra
responsibility they now have of docum enting poor-rate returns, a
206
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responsibility that before belonged to the Commons. N ot able perhaps,
given their desire to prom ote work-habits, to com plain of w ork, the
Commissioners com plain of the cost: "We notice this, no t as objecting
to the labour w hich it has im posed upon us, but for the purpose of
pointing out to your Lordship that it has brought a considerable and
unforeseen expense upon the departm ent" (28). The Com m issioners
them selves are caught up in institutional restrictions—they do not
pretend to be outside or above the workings of governm ent, even as
they em phasize that they are not at its center. In fact they represent
their ow n position in an inconsistent, contradictory w ay, suggesting
their connectedness and their isolation, and their functions as
originators of correct principles and action, and as an expression of
w ider interests and desires.
The later A nnual Reports tend to include shorter letters, and
begin to avoid the problem s of positioning them selves sim ply through
not addressing them any m ore in the same detail—taking them as
given, perhaps, even if not as resolved. They also continue the tactic of
constant optim ism and faith in the project. The second A n n u al
Report, for example, states in 1835 that the Com missioners 'lo o k
forw ard w ith m uch confidence to the orderly and efficient w orking of
the system of union and parochial accounts as now established" (26).
The first Annual Report of the Poor Law Board, under a slightly
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m odified bureaucratic structure, m aintains exactly the sam e optim ism
about the new system of accounts that it announces: "The Board have
reason to believe, that as the present form s come to be better
understood, the objections to them w ill disappear" (7). No m atter w hat
the problem s in im plem entation and revisions, the Com m issioners or
the Board represent the Poor Law as in the process of becoming ideal—
the second A nnual R eport ends w ith the Com missioners "expressing
[theirl confidence, not only in the perm anent character of the
im provem ents herein described, b u t th at such im provem ent w ill be
progressive, so long as correct principles of poor-law adm inistration
continue to be enforced" (43). On the other hand the ideal is not
represented as uncontested, and the basis of their confidence, their
knowledge, is never represented as absolutely pure and beyond
question.
N otes
1 hi her vigorous defense of Mayhew, Anne H um phreys suggests that
"by the w ord fact the Victorian social investigator had a som ew hat
different understanding than do we," and goes on to explain th at
"Frequently included in statistical reports w ere descriptions of places
and people, descriptions that we now think are m ore subjective than
m ere num bers, b u t th at m any Victorian social investigators (including
208
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M ayhew for the m ost part) considered as unbiased as their numerical
tallies" (H enry M ayhew. 84). Many of us do not now think descriptions
"m ore subjective" than statistics, and w e can read M ayhew as
considering neither "unbiased." But H um phreys's balanced reading,
and her suggestion that "M ayhew recognized m any of the problems
inherent in w hat he w as doing" (165), are nevertheless very helpful.
2 Christopher H erbert w rites "The increasing flow of M ayhew's
sym pathy tow ard his often disreputable and even crim inal inform ants,
and his increasingly harsh indictm ent of the cruelties and hypocrisies
of his ow n native sphere of the population, are after all the plainest
things of all in this book" (Culture and Anomie 231). H erbert's reading
takes little to be self-evident, and he makes available complex and
generous w ays of seeing Mayhew. He argues, for example, that "Michel
Foucault and his disciples are apt to take for granted that close
sociological study is a form of 'surveillance' and a w ay of exercising
hegemonic social pow er; Mayhew turns this argum ent around, and
portrays exhaustively close observation of the exploited poor as the one
w ay of redeem ing them from their w retched limbo of unreality" (227-
8).
3 U rsula H enriques, for example, suggests that the Report is propaganda
disguised as fact. She w rites in the context of a useful analysis of the
209
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significance of the New Poor Laws th at "as historians have noticed, the
Com missioners had m ade up their m inds upon the drift of the
proposals long before all the inform ation had been gathered or the
report w ritten," and that "The Royal Com m ission Report differed from
the reports of the preceding parliam entary Select Committees chiefly in
its greater length, deeper analysis and its air of self-confidence" (Before
the W elfare State 26). That the facts were produced w ith the proposals
in m ind seems highly probable, but the Report need not be read as
entirely self-confident, and w e m ight learn from understanding it as
self-critical.
T h e introductory letter to the Home Secretary is 66 pages long;
appendix A, the docum ents issued by the central board, is 99 pages long.
The volum e has 415 pages in total.
210
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Conclusion: Evidence and Rhetoric; Engels and Marx
Engels and the Blue Books
Even if the reports of the Royal Com missioners can be seen as
m iddle-class propaganda m asquerading as fact, Friedrich Engels for one
found it helpful to see them differently. Engels in the Preface to The
Condition of the W orking Class in England declares his belief that the
Blue Books help make England the ideal object of study for a social
(and socialist) investigator: "O nly in England is adequate m aterial
available for an exhaustive enquiry into the condition of the
proletariat. Only in England do we have at our disposal a large num ber
of official reports on various aspects of the lives of the w orkers" (3).
His assum ption is that England is the only place w here adequate
knowledge of the proletariat can be found, and that such knowledge is
"necessary if one is to sweep aw ay the sentim ental fantasies about the
w orkers w hich lie behind so m any argum ents for and against socialist
doctrines" (3). Engels and the Royal Commission deal w ith m any of
the same issues surrounding the discourse and practices of
investigation. Engels too offers occasional certainties tem pered by
som e m ethodological skepticism and m odest adm issions of
lim itations, h i this Preface Engels offers tw o authenticating standards
of evidence: "My ow n observations have been supplem ented by
studying authentic printed sources o f inform ation concerning the
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condition of the proletariat. This book is based upon w hat I have seen
and heard for myself and also upon w hat I have read" (3-4). Books are
not enough for him , he suggests in his dedication addressed to the
w orking classes: "I w anted m ore than a m ere abstract know ledge of my
subject" (7). But this book is filled w ith questions as to w hat concrete
knowledge could possibly be, and in relying on two standards of
evidence Engels suggests the unreliability both of the w ritten and of the
directly observed. Like the Royal Commission, Engels argues a case
and is unafraid to claim authority; but his w ork is like the reports also
in that it shies away from claiming that it is complete and
irreproachable. Engels, like the Commissioners, acknowledges the
constructedness of his work.
In his dedication, Engels's com plaint about the blue books is not
that they are biased o r inaccurate but that they are unreadable. He
suggests that the "volum inous reports are dam ned to everlasting
slum ber am ong heaps of w aste paper on the shelves of the Home
office," and that until his intervention ("they have left it to a
foreigner") the m iddle classes have not even "done so m uch as to
com pile a single readable book from those rotting blue-books" (8).
Engels both claims to have the support of authentic evidence, and
dism isses the necessity for absolute accuracy, rejecting the significance
of the "trifling m istakes" (4) that he acknowledges critics w ill be able to
212
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find. H e challenges "the English m iddle classes to prove—w ith
evidence as authentic as [his] own—that Pie is] w rong in any single fact
of m ajor im portance that is of real significance" (4) to his conclusions.
Engels stakes his place as another investigator of the sam e status and
authority as the Commissioners—and more readable. H is strategy is in
part to turn the w ords of the English m iddle classes against themselves;
his project is less to provide a counter-study w ith new , m ore authentic
facts than to show that the studies undertaken by the m iddle classes
already serve to indict th a n . In his "Great Towns" chapter he w rites in
a disarm ingly gleeful aside on quoting a middle-class new spaper, "I
enjoy m aking m y opponents provide me w ith evidence" (82).
This use of the w ords of the m iddle classes against their authors
is not restricted to quotations from social studies. Engels also uses the
language of the legal institution against the governing, p utting the
m iddle classes in the dock and accusing them o f "social m urder" (109
and passim). h i doing so he claims to meet the standards of
authoritative proof set by the institutions of governm ent themselves:
"I shall have proved my point if I can produce evidence concerning the
deaths of workers from such unimpeachable sources as official
docum ents. Parliam entary papers and Governm ent reports" (109). As
Engels points out, the difference in his trial is th at he is concerned w ith
assigning blame to a system and a class rather than to an individual:
213
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"A t first sight it does not appear to be m urder at all, because
responsibility for the death of the victim cannot be pinned on any
individual assailan t.. . . But it is m urder all the sam e" (109). Engels is
unim pressed w ith the efforts of the bourgeoisie to adjust the system
that m urders, and he is dism issive of any claim that such tinkering
m ight lessen their guilt. Responding to the M etropolitan Buildings
Act he w rites, "The m iddle classes pride them selves upon measures
which barely touch the fringe of the problem , w hich in no way
approach the root of the m atter, and even fail to satisfy the m inim um
requirem ents of any self-respecting health authority" (124). The story
of reform , for Engels, is a fiction that protects the m iddle class rather
than helping those whose condition it purports to alleviate. As long as
the m iddle class is middle-class, in fact, it cannot solve a problem of
which it is a constituent part: "The bourgeoisie have no desire to
surrender their pow ers, and—so long as they are blinded by their
m iddle-class prejudices—they are powerless to set m atters right" (123).
As M arcus points out (Engels 239) Engels contradicts him self in this
passage, suggesting both that certain incidents of death are rarely
reported, and that the m iddle class reads about them every day. But the
suggestion th at the m iddle class both see and do not see m ay not
sim ply indicate confusion and "childish sim plicity";1 Engels suggests
214
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that the evidence is already there b u t that it is available as readily to
self-protective as to accusatory readings.
Engels further turns the focus of social investigation around on
its exponents in m aking the m oral and physical condition of the
m iddle classes a central concern of his study—taking rhetorical
advantage of his position as foreigner and outsider. H e w rites in his
penultim ate chapter, pointedly analyzing not the w orkers b u t their
m asters, "I have never seen so dem oralised a social class as the English
m iddle classes" (311). Like Bentham, Engels sees individuals as socially
constructed, if not virtually incarcerated, even w here they m ay appear
to be free agents outside of institutions. His tone is alm ost pitying
when after suggesting that the workers "are relatively free from
prejudice and from the restrictions im posed by inherited principles and
hidebound opinions" (141), he goes on to explain that "The members
of the bourgeoisie are im prisoned by the class prejudices and principles
w hich have been ruthlessly drum m ed into them since childhood.
N othing can be done about people of this sort" (141). Engels expresses
outrage at the idea that the blue books will not alter w hat he sees as a
profoundly ingrained unw illingness to acknowledge w hat is disturbing
or inconvenient—he predicts that in response to the detailing of
conditions in lace m anufacturing, "O ur English m iddle classes w ill lay
aside the reports of the G overnm ent Commission w ithout turning a
215
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hair, and w ill continue to allow their w ives and daughters to deck
themselves out w ith lace as before. Is not the serene complacency of
the English bourgeoisie som ething to m arvel at?" (219). But he does
not necessarily regard the m iddle classes as blam ew orthy because they
fail to be im partial; for Engels their crime is their lack of interest, not
their lack of disinterestedness. Engels takes pride in explaining his
own em otionally charged response to his investigation: "I have now
described the factory system as fully as space perm its. I have been as
im partial as it is possible to be in the light of the heroic trium phs of the
middle classes over the defenceless workers. It is impossible to be
indifferent w hen contem plating these trium phs. In such
circumstances indifference would indeed be a crim e" (207).
Engels suggests that indifference is built in to the ways in which
the m iddle class sees, and the m etaphor and practice of seeing is a
concern throughout the book. W hen Erst accusing the m iddle class of
the m ore specific crim e of m urder, Engels states that the crime m ay not
appear to be m urder "at first sight" (109). But for Engels the "first sight"
of the m iddle classes is always inadequate, and for the m ost part they
do not "see" in the sense he advocates at all. Part of his moral critique
of the m iddle classes consists of assigning a m oral im perative to
curiosity: the desire to see w hat is not in open sight, h i describing
M anchester Engels m entions that "the w orst of the slum s have been
216
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hidden from the public gaze. If, how ever, anyone has sufficient
curiosity to leave his road and go along one of the m any alleys w hich
lead to the courts, he w ill come across pigs and filth every tw enty
paces" (63). For the m ost part, though, according to Engels, they are
constitutionally incapable of such interest: 'T or, after all, this is the
bourgeoisie, and as such is naturally blind to the facts of the situation"
(149). Once again this is not a m atter of conscious choice on the p art of
the members of the m iddle class; "naturally," that is, given their
systemic construction, they do not w ant to and cannot easily perceive
in w ays that contradict their ow n interest. The fact that his ow n sight
cannot penetrate to an unassailable truth does not escape Engels.
Despite em phasis elsewhere on "facts w hich cannot be disputed"
(335), Engels frequently stresses the im portance of the em otive effect
that the sights he describes have (or ought to have) on the viewer.
Rather than attem pt to make available an im personal account, he
chooses to suggest w hat visceral responses to the sights he describes
should be. His rhetorical choice is to eschew claims of disengagem ent.
He w rites of the inhabitants of the city th at "The m ore that Londoners
are packed into a tiny space, the m ore repulsive and disgraceful
becomes the brutal indifference w ith w hich they ignore their
neighbours and selfishly concentrate upon their private affairs" (31).
But he goes on to add, distinguishing his observer persona from those
217
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locals, that "Class w arfare is so open and shameless that it has to be
seen to be believed. The observer of such an appalling state of affairs
m ust shudder at the consequences of such feverish activity and can
only m arvel that so crazy a social and economic structure should
survive at all" (31). Engels insists here that the city can only be
understood through physical experience. After opening his chapter on
the "great towns" w ith a description of w hat is im pressive about
London, he undercuts this picture w ith an account of the bodily
experience of an investigator:
It is only later that the traveller appreciates the hum an
suffering w hich has m ade all this possible. He can only
realise the price that has been paid for all this
magnificence after he has tram ped the pavem ents of the
m ain streets of London for some days and has tired
him self out by jostling his w ay through the crow ds and by
dodging the endless stream of coaches and carts w hich fill
the streets. (30)
Initially, at least, the "hum an suffering" appears to be that of "the
traveller." The narrator suggests that the sight of London itself is not
enough—that sight can provide only a bourgeois-propagandist view;
actual participation and concom itant discomfort is required to see the
city anew. The "traveller" here acts as a model of a curious observer,
not content w ith the view from a distance.
But the more m aterial this narration becomes, the m ore
im personal it becomes also. In the first paragraph of this chapter
218
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Engels does once use the first person—in order to describe the
im pressiveness of "the commercial capital of the w orld": "I know
nothing m ore im posing than the view one obtains of the river w hen
sailing from the sea up to London Bridge" (30). The first person quickly
becomes a general third person, which then becomes the generic and
suffering "traveller" as the description of London's unpleasantness
begins. The narrator then offers, in a pushy way, an even m ore
im personal, universalizing assessment: "The restless and noisy activity
of the crow ded streets is highly distasteful, and it is surely abhorrent to
hum an nature itself" (30). The m ore intim ate the experience, the more
vague and insubstantial the subject of the experience. At this point
Engels m ight appear to suggest that bodily responses are authoritative
and generalizable, w here visual perception is unreliably specific to a
particular ideological construction. But we could also see him as
highlighting the determ ining influence of the position of the observer
in the construction of the observed. He is not just stripping aw ay a
facade to reveal a truth; he is instead, or also, dem onstrating that it
requires a deliberate rhetorical m aneuver to m ake such a distinction
effective.
The uncertainty of the position of the narrator— -especially the
rendering of the experience of a w itness, "the traveller," in the third
person—and this sense th at "hum an nature" is separate from and
219
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anathem a to the urban landscape continues throughout Engels's
explorations of the tow ns. The abstracted, w ould-be objective third
person construction co-exists w ith subjective suggestions of discom fort
and bew ilderm ent. H ere is part of his account of M anchester:
Turning left from the m ain street w hich is still Long
M illgate, the visitor can easily lose his way. H e w anders
aim lessly from one court to another. He turns one com er
after another through innum erable narrow dirty
alleyways and passages, and in only a few m inutes he has
lost all sense of direction and does not know which w ay to
turn. (61)
The distinction betw een the experience of "the visitor" and that of the
inhabitants o f this area is m ade dear: "There are stagnant pools instead
of gutters and the stench alone is so overpow ering that no hum an
being, even partially civilised, w ould find it bearable to live in such a
district" (61). In the sam e paragraph, though, the narrator returns to
the first person—at the same tim e to daim an unusual degree of
knowledge, and also to adm it the lim its of th at knowledge, hi
describing a district that he suggests is m ost filthy because m ost
seduded and invisible, he w rites, "I thought I knew this district well,
but even I w ould never have found it had not the railw ay viaduct
made a break into the slum s at this point" (61). Engels em phasizes at
the sam e tim e his ow n special efforts, and their continuing inadequacy
if the aim is exhaustive study. He continues w ith w hat could be seen
as a m etaphorical suggestion of the need to get im m ersed in d irt to
220
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know best, and o f the uncertainty even of know ledge obtained that
way: "I could no t see the pavement, b u t from tim e to tim e, I felt it w as
there because m y feet scraped it" (61).
A t the end, Engels seems forthright in his claim s to knowledge.
The conclusion opens w ith a restatem ent of his claim s to authority: "I
have now described the condition of the w orkers in England from my
ow n observations during a stay of twenty-one m onths in the country
and from official and other authentic reports" (332). A fter predicting
economic crises and revolution Engels claims, "These are all
conclusions that can be draw n w ith absolute certainty. They are based
upon facts which cannot be disputed—facts of history and facts of
hum an nature" (335). On the other hand Engels soon afterw ards, in
the final paragraph of the work, intimates that his account is part of a
larger, ongoing project that is as yet incomplete, and grants that his
conclusions may no t yet be fully backed up: "If w e have not advanced
enough proof to justify the conclusions that w e have draw n we hope to
have another opportunity of showing that these conclusions follow
inevitably from an exam ination of the history of England" (336).
Engels opens his Preface, after all, w ith the suggestion of a grander
plan: "This book w as originally designed to form p art of a more
com prehensive w ork on English social history" (3), though he soon
adm its the im possibility of any com prehensiveness even on the
221
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sm aller scale he chooses: of one district near M anchester he w rites,
"This book w ould never be finished if I w ere to describe in detail every
p art of this district7 ' (71). h i the Postscript of 1846 Engels continues to
take the line that he w ill add more proof as tim e goes on, but also
com plains about the necessity to produce still m ore facts. Again
explaining that readability was m ore his aim them exhaustive
docum entation, he writes, "So that the book should not be too long
and too dull I restricted my references to official documents, im partial
authors and publications issued in the interest of political parties
whose views I opposed. By doing this I hoped that no one would
question certain descriptive passages not based upon personal
observation" (337). Engels goes on to com plain of, or perhaps to
congratulate, m odem readers and their skepticism:
It is difficult in these days to convince people by
argum ents even if they are based on excellent authorities.
M odem readers—tired of being told to believe som ething
sim ply because it has been believed by previous
generations—are of a highly sceptical fram e of mind.
They can be convinced only by striking facts which can be
proved up to the hilt. (337)
Since he has already adm itted that his facts can never be exhaustive,
and that if they could they w ould be unreadable, this m ight be an
adm ission of a position of theoretical disablem ent. The same
skepticism tow ards rhetoric and the evidence of the senses that enables
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Engels to question one set of assum ptions provides tools th at can be
turned against his own.
Engels's stated objective, though, is as m uch to attack the
discourse w ith which the m iddle-classes constitute the poor as it is to
find facts. H e w rites in the 1846 postscript, "I w as anxious to prove
conclusively that the w orking classes w ere completely in the right and
that there could be no shadow of a doubt as to the justice of their cause.
I was determ ined that the fine phrases of the m iddle classes should be
exposed and pilloried as they deserved to be" (338). His proof and the
pillorying of the phrases of the m iddle classes am ount to m ore or less
the same thing. He argues that the suffering he posits is already
available to the view of anyone seriously interested. Engels w rites
contem ptuously that "It is astonishing that there is not a single
adequate account of the condition of the w orking classes, although for
heaven knows how many years the m iddle classes have been
enquiring into this problem and tinkering w ith it" (26). He is careful to
align him self w ith sources that already exist: in his section on
M anchester he claims: "I have already show n that Dr. Kay's recorded
im pressions of these districts tallied exactly w ith m y own," and adds, "I
w ill add only a passage from a book by N assau Senior, who is a Liberal
and a fanatical opponent of all independent trade unions. H is views
are highly esteem ed and recognised as authoritative by the great
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m anufacturers" (75). Engels also sees his position as vindicated by the
blue books, w here he claims the facts are hidden in plain sight; in
chastising contem porary A ndrew U re for his claims of w orker w ell
being supported by "quoting isolated extracts wrenched out of their
context" he indicates how they are open to such abuse: "I m ust
em phasize that the Factories Enquiry Com m ission's Report consists of
three thick folio volumes and the well-fed English m iddle classes
w ould never think of ploughing right through them " (190).
But Engels also is careful to rew rite m any of the stories of the
poor. His accounts of the Irish fall into a fam iliar chauvinistic
narrative of a corrupting invasion of im m igrants: "The Irish have . . .
brought w ith them filth and intem perance" (105). Yet he also
implicates the English m iddle classes in this construction: "Society
treats [the Irishman] in such a w ay th at it is virtually impossible for
him to avoid becoming a drunkard. Society neglects the Irish and
allows them to sink into a state bordering upon savagery. How can
society com plain w hen the Irishm an does, in fact, become a habitual
drunkard?" (106-7). In analyzing factory accidents, Engels also latches
onto the m ove of assigning blam e to individual w orkers. Objecting to
the Factory Report assigning "culpable tem erity" to the w orkers, he
states, baldly, that "fe. short, it is the factory ow ner who is always at
fault, w hatever m ay be the cause of these accidents" (187). Engels
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repeatedly em phasizes how unhelpful it is to understand the actions of
the workers in term s of individual choice and individual blame:
A class w hich can only buy a very few—and those the
m ost sensual—pleasures in return for the hardest labour/
can hardly be criticised for blindly indulging in those
pleasures to w ild excess. The workers form a class whose
education has been grossly neglected and whose welfare is
threatened by all sorts of m ishaps. They know nothing of
security. W hy on earth should they be provident in any
way? Why should they lead 'respectable' lives and think
of some future happiness instead of indulging in some
im m ediate pleasure w hich happens to come their way?"
(144-5)
At the same tim e Engels contextualizes the term s and values of
providence and respectability and their opposites that make such
disparaging judgm ents available. He goes on to w rite that for a worker
to be excessively deprived makes it "just as natural that he w ill turn
into a criminal—as inevitably as w ater turns into steam at boiling
point" (145).
Alongside this counter-assertion of w hat is "natural" behavior
Engels offers alternative idealizations and erotidzation of the poor.
Following a pattern sim ilar to the idealization elsew here of the
upstanding independent English laborer, Engels eroticizes the
rebellious w orker "We have seen that the only w ay in which the
worker can retain his self-respect is by fighting against the w ay of life
imposed upon him . It is natural, therefore, that it is w hen he is taking
action against his oppressors that the English w orker is seen a t his best.
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It is then th at he appears to the fullest advantage—m anly, noble and
attractive" (242). Conversely Engels portrays the w orkers as anim al not
when they fail to conform to standards of obedience and hard work, but
w hen they do conform: "The workers retain their hum anity only so
long as they cherish a burning fury against the property-ow ning classes.
They become anim als as soon as they subm it patiently to their yoke,
and try to drag out a bearable existence under it w ithout attem pting to
break free" (129). Engels unabashedly puts his heart w ith working men
and deplores and refects the habits, language and w orld-view of the
m iddle classes. His dedication to "The W orking Classes" (addressed in
fact only to "w orking men") represents the w orking classes as the
bearers of authenticity, the knowers of the real:
I forsook the com pany and the dinner-parties, the port-
wine and cham pagne of the middle-classes, and devoted
my leisure hours alm ost exclusively to the intercourse
w ith plain W orking Men; I am both glad and proud to
have done so. G lad, because thus I w as induced to spend
m any a happy hour in obtaining a knowledge of the
realities of life—m any an hour, w hich else w ould have
been w asted in fashionable talk and tiresom e etiquette. (7)
But the fact th at Engels likes working m en does not m ean he claims to
write as one. W hen he says, for example, of the O ld Town of
M anchester that "Everything in this district that arouses our disgust
and just indignation is of relatively recent origin," it is not absolutely
clear who the "our" refers to. Engels in his representation of his
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position as that of "the visitor" or "the traveller" em phasizes as m uch
his position as outsider as his claim to inside knowledge—and the
w orking classes are anyway as often represented in this w ork as
ignorant (and deliberately kept so) as they are as bearers of the truth.
As striking as the differences in Engels's political position m ight
be from other social investigators and social critics, in other w ords,
Engels's w ork is Just as noticeable for its sim ilarities in rhetorical
difficulties and strategies. Alongside his claim s to accuracy,
authenticity and authority Engels adm its the incom pleteness of his
account and suggests the aw kw ard theoretical position of the observer
who claims to be able to represent the truth. Beyond exclaiming
occasionally that w hat he observes "beggars all description" (34) or that
the practices he encounters are "of so bestial a nature that no w ords
exist in a m odem civilised tongue to describe them " (38), Engels does
not consistently pretend to have access to a discourse that renders
transparent the condition of the w orkers w ho are his subject. Indeed
he acknowledges his disconnection from his subject, and its m ediation
through discourse even when his investigative w ork is "first-hand"
and not m erely quotation—this distinction not being entirely clear, as
it turns out, anyw ay. A t the sam e tim e Engels offers the m ost explicitly
theorized w ays, am ong contem porary social investigators, in w hich
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observer and observed are united w ithin the same system of
signification.
Marx and Creative Q uotation
In the Preface to the first edition of his later elaboration of
Engels's work, Capital (1867), Marx, like Engels, explains that England is
the "locus classicus" of capitalist relations of production, and also
em phasizes the value of the English Blue Books. In attacking German
complacency in the face of w retched social statistics from England, he
w rites:
We should be appalled at our ow n circumstances if, as in
England, our governm ents and parliam ents periodically
appointed com m issions of inquiry into economic
conditions; if these com m issions w ere arm ed w ith the
same plenary powers to get at the truth; if it w ere possible
to find for this purpose m en as com petent, as free from
partisanship and respect of persons as are England's
factory inspectors, her m edical reporters on public health,
her commissions of enquiry into the exploitation of
w om en and children, into conditions of housing and
nourishm ent, and so on. (91)
M arx praises the English bureaucrats copiously, and he goes on, in this
preface, to refer to "the Blue Book published w ithin the last few weeks"
which he claims "declare[s] in plain language that in Germ any, in
France, in short in all the civilised states of the European C ontinent, a
radical change in the existing relations between capital and labour is as
evident as in England" (92-3). M arx explains that this declaration
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represents an exam ple of "the foreboding that the present society is no
solid crystal, bu t an organism capable of change, and constantly engaged
in a process of change" (93). The Blue Books in this preface stand for
truth and even for a kind of revolutionary ardor. Like Engels, Marx
enjoys turning the w ords of his opponents against them , and pointing
out the ways in w hich the authorities he addresses can be read as
"M arxist." But M arx's m ethods of critical reading, and the modes in
which he w rites, vary widely. Despite his claims here, on behalf of the
commissions, to an access to the truth, he parodies and ridicules
authorities as often as he uses them to substantiate his claims.
M arx em phasizes the importance of the literary m odes and
qualities of his ow n and other writings. Concerned, as Engels is, w ith
accessibility, he suggests that "Beginnings are always difficult in all
sciences" (89), but that he has taken care to be as clear as is possible on a
subject that has previously received only superficial attention. He
w rites that "W ith the exception of the section on the form of value,
therefore, this volum e cannot stand accused on the score of difficulty. I
assum e, of course, a reader who is w illing to learn som ething new and
therefore to think for him self' (90). h i his "Postface" to the second
edition (1873), M arx's first concerns are style and clarity—he indicates
his regret that he does not have more tim e to rew rite (95). But he also
responds to his critics w ith characteristic feistiness: "The m ealy-
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m outhed babblers of G erm an vulgar economics grum bled about the
style of m y book. No one can feel the literary shortcom ings of Capital
m ore strongly than I myself. Yet I w ill quote in this connection one
English and one Russian notice, for the benefit and enjoym ent of these
gentlem en and their public" (99n2). The reviews praise his "certain
peculiar charm ," "unusual liveliness" and readability in contrast w ith
other w riters of economic literature. A pparently M arx and Engels both
aim for a w ide and appreciative readership, w hich the Blue Books that
they m ake so m uch use of cannot claim. For them the radical potential
of a w ork lies as m uch in the circumstances of its reception as in its
content—or, indeed, its reception constitutes its content. Marx w rites
also: "The appreciation which Das Kapital rapidly gained in w ide circles
of the German working class is the best rew ard for m y labours" (95).
Marx endeavors, accordingly, to make available a new reception
of economic texts, interpreting (rewriting) them so as to em phasize
their rhetorical strategies, h i w riting on the relation of m en to
m achines, for example, he em phasizes the different rhetorical choices
he m akes, and em phasizes the artifice of the literature of political
econom y:
The sim ple and by no means new fact that m achinery sets
the w orkers free from their m eans of subsistence is
expressed in economic language by saying that m achinery
sets free means of subsistence for the w orkers, or converts
those m eans of subsistence into capital w ith w hich to
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em ploy them . Everything, as you see, depends on the w ay
things are put. (566)
O f course M arx is not above asserting his ow n claim s to truth; he
continues this analysis later by saying, "The real facts, w hich are
travestied by the optim ism of the econom ists, are these: the w orkers,
w hen driven o u t of the workshop by the m achinery, are throw n onto
the labour-m arket" (567). But the pow er of his claims rests largely on
his eagerness to show that the "real facts" constructed by political
economy rest on outw orn and unhelpful stories, h i his chapter on
"The Secret of Prim itive Accum ulation," M arx suggests that the story
that capital w as originally accum ulated by the diligent, intelligent and
frugal (as opposed to the lazy poor) "plays approxim ately the same role
in political economy as original sin does in theology" (873). Ridiculing
this "insipid childishness," M arx protests that "as soon as the question
of property is at stake, it becomes a sacred duty to proclaim the
standpoint of the nursery tale as the one thing fit for all age-groups and
all stages of developm ent" (874). It is im portant for Marx to show how
political econom ists can be understood no t as scientists, grounded in
facts and natural laws, but as producers of stories and rhetoric, living in
a fantasy w orld of powerful yet abstract and fabricated ideals.
The ideals or ideology w ithin w hich political economists w ork
do not arise from nowhere. Marx claims the ideals (and their
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proponents) arise from the relations of production—th at they are
produced by the social and m aterial position of those w ho produce
them. Marx explains how interested the science of political economy
is, and in doing so he em phasizes how pedestrianly unim aginative it
can be. While Marx m ay claim to lay bare the essence of relations, he
does so by rendering the fam iliar and apparently solid m ysterious and
intangible. Forms and appearances, and not sim ply m aterial
substances, are the object of M arx's study: "ordinary economic treatises .
. . in their crude obsession w ith the m aterial side, ignore all differences
of form " (683). He ridicules the pretense of economists to hard
scientific knowledge: "The degree to which economists are m isled by
the fetishism attached to the w orld of commodities . . . is show n,
am ong other things, by the dull and tedious dispute over the part
played by nature in the form ation of exchange v a lu e .. . . So far no
chem ist has ever discovered exchange value either in a pearl o r a
diam ond" (176-7). Finding the essence of relations requires not closer
inspection, b u t an enlivening of the m etaphors of political economy,
and the invention of new narratives and new ways of perceiving.
Marx chastises Enlightenm ent thinkers for their ready willingness to
resolve am biguities rather than adm it to the lim itations of their
knowledge and open u p questions: responding to their claim that
money is at once "m ere sym bols" and "the arbitrary product of hum an
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reflection," he lam ents dism issively, '"This w as the kind of explanation
favoured by the eighteenth century; in this w ay the Enlightenm ent
endeavoured, at least tem porarily, to remove the appearance of
strangeness from the m ysterious shapes assum ed by hum an relations
whose origins they w ere unable to decipher" (186).
For Marx, as for Engels, the bourgeoisie are not generally able to
"see" and understand in the w ay he envisages. The evidence of the
senses he takes (when convenient) to be conditioned and unreliable.
He writes, for example, that the "exchange between capital and labour
at first presents itself to our perceptions in exactly the sam e w ay as the
sale and purchase of all other com modities" because labour's difference
from all other com modities "is som ething w hich falls outside the
frame of reference of everyday consciousness" (681). Marx suggests that
dialectical m aterialism is the only true science, of course, and offers it
as stable ground from w hich to view; the dem and to understand w hat
appears to be real as theatrical production can also im ply a Platonic
location of the real beyond appearances (Marx w rites: "The forms of
appearance are reproduced directly and spontaneously, as current and
usual modes of thought; the essential relation m ust first be discovered
by science" (682), and "a scientific analysis of com petition is possible
only if w e can grasp the inner nature of capital, ju st as the apparent
m otions of the heavenly bodies are intelligible only to som eone who is
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acquainted w ith their real m otions, w hich are not perceptible to the
senses" (433)). But M arx's claim to die authority of em pirical science
can be seen as one of m any argum entative strategies; he moves
brusquely horn outraged heavy sarcasm to economic form ulae to
playful parody to narrative accounts of w orking conditions, w ith a
m ultitude of literary references and sim iles throw n in. W here it is
tactically useful he credits even governm ent institutions such as royal
commissions w ith scientific findings—as in his Preface—desp ite his
suspicion of evidence and observation, especially as m anaged by the
bourgeoisie.
Marx regards "the bourgeoisie" as a position, not as a set of
individuals: "individuals are dealt w ith here only in so far as they are
the personifications of economic categories, the bearer of particular
dass-relations and interests" (92)—which makes his description of the
commissioners as "com petent" men "free from partisanship" all the
more clearly a tactical departure. Marx stresses frequently, of course,
that the concept of the independent individual is a politically useful
fiction; he points o u t that "political econom ists are fond of Robinson
Crusoe stories" (169). A t one point in quoting two economists Marx
introduces them as the ventriloquist's dum m ies of com modities:
"Now listen how these com modities speak through the m outh of the
economist" (177). For M arx, commodities and capital (them selves "not
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things, bu t [social relations] betw een persons w hich is m ediated
through things" (932)), not individual capitalists, are agents w ith
personality and desire. The com modity is a "bom leveller and cynic"
(179); the capitalist "is only capital personified. His soul is the soul of
capital" (342). Prices are "wooing glances cast at m oney by
com modities" (205). The actions of individuals and classes are stage
productions, scripted for them by the logic of the m arket. The
transform ation of com m odity from com m odity-form to money-form
and back again, w rites Marx, using the dram a m etaphor, "im plies four
denouements and three dramatis personae" (206). M arx's commodity-
ow ners "think like Faust" (180) in putting deeds before thought; his
Capital answers the m oral indignation of w orkers and factory
inspectors w ith the w ords of Shylock: "I crave the law , / The penalty
and forfeit of my bond" (399). A play is being perform ed, w hether the
actors acknowledge it or not.
Marx provides a denouement of his ow n in the final chapter of
volum e one of Capital. His argum ent is plotted so as to allow for a
decisive unm asking of the villain at the end; the climax lays bare guilty
secrets and vindicates the hero. The chapter addresses the history of
colonization, w ith the conceit that w hat is to be revealed is not the
condition of the colonies but "the secret discovered in the New World
by the political economy of the O ld W orld" (940). W hile at hom e "the
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sm ug deceitfulness of the political econom ist can turn this relation
[between capital and labour] of absolute dependence into a free contract
betw een buyer and seller . . . in the colonies this beautiful illusion is
tom aside" (935). W hile setting up his ow n trium phant ending, M arx
mocks the narrative that he describes the capitalists as acting out. The
capitalists' difficulty, he explains (quoting E. G. W akefield, a colonial
theorist) has been that the w orkers in the colonies stop being w orkers
and become landow ners and com petitors. Marx crows, "H orror of
horrors! The excellent capitalist has im ported bodily from Europe,
w ith his ow n good money, his own competitors! The end of the w orld
has come!" (936). Marx describes the narrative that the capitalist lives
out in W akefield's scheme as a "m elodram a" (938), brought to a
satisfying end through the artificial pricing of land (ignoring,
expediently, the law of supply and dem and). Taking this bad story,
Marx reads in it his ow n better story—that this changing of the rules in
the colonies show s w hat lies at the heart of capitalism , nam ely, as he
states in his closing w ords, "the annihilation of that private property
w hich rests on the labour of the individual himself; in other w ords,
the expropriation of the w orker" (940). Political economy and the
capitalist change from troubled heroes to villains, and the m elodram a
is rew ritten, for the present, as tragedy.
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M arx's rew ritings strip aw ay the self-protective possibilities of
m any of the narratives he addresses. He ridicules, for exam ple,
political econom y's representation of the sphere of circulation as "a
very Eden of the innate rights of m an . . . the exclusive realm of
Freedom , Equality, Property and Bentham" (280). Speaking in "the
voice of the w orker" (342), he mocks the capitalist for his sense of his
ow n goodness: "You m ay be a m odel citizen, perhaps a mem ber of the
R.S.P.CA., and you may be in the odour of sanctity as well; bu t the
thing you represent w hen you come face to face w ith me has no heart
in its breast" (343). Part of his assault on self-righteousness is to point
out the uses of the distinctions betw een institutions held in revulsion,
and those considered natural or acceptable. One target is slavery; Marx
describes satirically, following details of exploitation, "M r Glass-
C apital" reeling home drunkenly singing "Britons never, never shall
be slaves" (375n). A nother related instance in which Marx aligns
m iddle-class reform ers w ith their bugbears is his use of the workhouse.
M arx, after declaim ing in the chapter "The W orking Day" w ith
reference to overw ork and the pool of available labor: "For slave trade,
read labour-m arket, for Kentucky and Virginia, Ireland and the
agricultural districts of England, Scotland and W ales" (378), goes on to
describe the "traffic in hum an flesh" (379) desired by the Poor Law
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Com m issioners who suggested m oving the "surplus population" to be
"used up" by m anufacturers (378).
M arx does protest the w orkhouse conventionally, suggesting
that the increase of deaths by starvation in London "proves beyond
doubt the grow ing horror in which the w orkers hold the slavery of the
workhouse, th at place of punishm ent for poverty" (808). In a note to
this statem ent, however, Marx points ou t th at Adam Smith still used
the w ord "w orkhouse" to m ean "m anufactory7 ' (808n). Earlier in "The
W orking Day" M arx quotes from eighteenth-century sources the
position that the ideal workhouse should be a "House of Terror," in
w hich occupants will work for twelve hours a day. Marx points out
that capitalists complained of the reduction of the working day to
tw elve hours for children, and dism isses the distinction between
factory and workhouse:
The 'H ouse of Terror7 for paupers, only dream ed of by the
capitalist mind in 1770, was brought into being a few years
later in the shape of a gigantic 'w orkhouse' for the
industrial w orker himself. It w as called the factory. And
this tim e the ideal was a pale shadow com pared w ith the
reality. (389)
Marx enlists other w riters to his aid: he asks, "Was Fourier w rong
w hen he called factories 'm itigated jails'?" (553), and he quotes T he
Tim es. The press is also called on to back Marx in his criticism of the
self-protectiveness of attacks on slavery: he quotes the Daily Telegraph
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com plaint that "W e declaim against the V irginian and C arolinian
cotton-planters" and not the "slow sacrifice of hum anity" (353-4)
connected w ith the lace trade. Extending his collapsing of w orkhouse
and factory to encompass all the cotton districts, Marx quotes T he
T im es's description of the representative of the cotton m anufacturers
as w anting to "keep half a m illion of the labouring class confined in a
great m oral w orkhouse against their w ill" (722). Using his opponents
against each other, Marx m anages to show that this part of his critique
has already been made.
Marx and Engels are not necessarily so different, after all, from
the other w riters covered in this study. We can read them all as
having related inconsistencies, questions, and critical insights
pertaining to the issues surrounding the problem of how to locate and
represent the social and the real. For all of them, essayists and
novelists, w e can make the case that their engagem ent is an
engagem ent w ith rhetoric that does not pass itself off as direct access to
the real. N ot all of them w rite and rew rite the stories of the social to
the sam e effect as Marx and Engels. But part of the strength of their
approach is that they show, through creative quotation and
interpretation (and w hat quotation and interpretation is not creation?),
how the stories they wish to tell are already being told. Texts do not
represent them selves, they m ust be represented; both Engels and M arx
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see revolutionary potential in Blue Books if they are given the right
kind of circulation and reception, and are happy to consider The Times
and even political econom ists their allies and backers on points w here
they are able to use them to their ow n advantage. Both M arx and
Engels indicate concern w ith the availability of their ow n w ork, as if to
suggest that it is in its reception, and not its presum ed essence, that
their w ork has transform ative potential. The effect of their
reinvigorating readings of earlier and contem porary narratives is to
m ake available the sam e potential in these other works. The aim of
this study has been to reinvent this reinvention: not just to see in
them a political critique like that of Marx and Engels, but also to see
their critique of political criticism itself.
N otes
1 M arcus's reading, nevertheless, is generous and helpful. For him the
suggestions that Engels makes about the inadequacy of language (see
182) constitute a refusal to dom esticate horror, and force the reader to
confront reality—we m ay be less confident about any reader's (or
w riter's) ability to confront reality. Also M arcus suggests th at "It
requires little perspicacity to see in [Engels's] tw o-sided form ulations a
refraction of Engels' am bivalence tow ard his family and father" (245),
w hen we m ight argue that such perspicacity is inventiveness, n o t a
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discerning of w hat is "in" the text. But M arcus outlines eloquently
ways in w hich Engels imagines new kinds of consciousness and
activity, and is prepared to give Engels a lot of credit for "analytical self-
consciousness" (118) and a novelistic ability to "discover realities in
discrepant appearances" (204).
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Creator Stokes, Peter Malcolm (author)

Core Title Getting to know the poor: Early Victorian fiction and social investigation

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Advisor Schor, Hilary (committee chair), Kincaid, James R. (committee member), Levine, Philippa (committee member)

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