by John Harvey
84 Girl coal-miner, illustration from the reports of the Children’s Employment Commission (Mines), 1842.
What made the strongest black impression on Engels was not ‘the blackened brick buildings of Lancashire’, or the housing at Long Millgate ‘all black, smoky, crumbling’, or the thickly crowded factories of Ashton-under-Lyne ‘belching forth black smoke from their chimneys’, but the coal-black stinking water he smelled with freshly reeling disgust in each industrial town he came to. Bradford ‘lies upon the banks of a small, coal-black, foul-smelling stream’. The Medlock, running through Manchester, is ‘coal black, stagnant and foul’. In Leeds the river Aire ‘flows into the city at one end clear and transparent, and flows out at the other end thick, black, and foul, smelling of all possible refuse’. The meaning of ‘all possible refuse’ is clarified when he comes to the fitly named river Irk. At the bottom of Long Millgate, he notes, ‘flows, or rather stagnates, the Irk, a narrow, coal-black, foul-smelling stream, full of debris and refuse’ with, on its bank, ‘the most disgusting, blackish-green, slime pools [which] give forth a stench unendurable’. The Irk is foul not just from the refuse of ‘the tanneries, bonemills, and gasworks’ upstream, but from ‘the contents of all the neighbouring sewers and privies’. Further from the rivers, the courts within the densely crammed housing are piled deep with ‘debris, refuse, filth and offal’, or with ash heaps (a Victorian euphemism), ‘the filth of which cannot be described’. It was no wonder that disease and sickness thrived, that bodies were malformed and life-expectancy minimal.22
The rubbish-and-excrement heaps, the sewage-choked waters, are the vile ‘other side’ of the century’s black coin. To move to London itself, when Henry Mayhew made his survey of London labour and the London poor, he found several degrees of black, to be set against the smart black clothes and households situated less than a mile away. Here it is not the factories, but the ships crowded into the London docks that have ‘tall chimneys vomiting clouds of black smoke’ – especially the coal-ships (10,000 came each year). These are the ships Turner painted by moonlight. The sails (of those that have them) are black, as are their once-gilded figureheads. The ‘coal-whippers’ who unload the coal, and whose negligible pay comes partly in alcohol, are bruised black sometimes from fighting (literally) for the work, and have black skin since they work stripped to the waist – the coal-dust sticking to their sweat – and black hair and whiskers (‘no matter what the original hue [in which] the coal-dust may be seen to glitter’).23
The coal-whippers do at least have employment – for the day. But in a poor lodging-house, where the chimney-piece is ‘black all the way with the smoke’, with roof-beams ‘of the same colour’, Mayhew finds the blacks of the unemployed. Sometimes the starving men and women wear clothes that long ago had been ‘once black’: an out-of-work painter tells Mayhew he once had ‘a beautiful suit of black’. Or their black is that colour to which other colours of clothes, and skin colours, come in time if they cannot be washed. Of an out-of-work carpet-maker, now a ‘vagrant’, he says, ‘his clothes, which were of fustian and corduroy, tied close to his body with pieces of string, were black and shiny with filth, which looked more like pitch than grease’. Apart from the carpet-maker (thrown out of work, presumably, by the power looms), I cite one among many eloquent, even heart-rending, portraits:
On the form at the end of the kitchen was one whose squalor and wretchedness produced a feeling approaching to awe. His eyes were sunk deep in his head, his cheeks were drawn in, and his nostrils pinched with evident want, while his dark stubbly beard gave a grimness to his appearance that was almost demoniac; and yet there was a patience in his look that was almost pitiable. His clothes were black and shiny at every fold with grease, and his coarse shirt was so brown with long wearing, that it was only with close inspection you could see that it had once been a checked one: on his feet he had a pair of lady’s side-laced boots, the toes of which had been cut off so that he might get them on. I never beheld so gaunt a picture of famine. To this day the figure of the man haunts me.24
The smart black world, then, of silk hats and black, japanned barouches may seem in a different universe from the world of the dirt-and-grease black destitute, and work-blackened families living in soot-blackened terraces by sewage-black waters. As William Blake put it, with appalling simplicity,
Some are born to sweet delight,
Some are born to endless night.25
But the two worlds – the two nations, Disraeli called them, and each had its own black – were at most a coal-fuelled rail journey apart. Economically they were connected directly. The best superfine black broadcloth and the many black silks and crapes were woven on power looms (dangerous to the hair of the poorly paid women tending them) driven by steam engines which were fuelled by coal-dust-blackened stokers in their stoke-holes, and dyed black in dye-blackened dye-shops by black-dye-blackened dyers. In the home the cast-iron clawfoot bath (dressed black on the outside, enamelled white on the inside), together with the cast-iron kitchen range and the cast-iron fireplace in the sitting room, had perhaps travelled for only half a day from the flame-topped blast furnaces where they were cast. That iron fireplace, and the chimney above, were kept clean by a soot-blackened sweep, and especially by his soot-crusted boy, who climbed with a brush to the top of the flue – ‘a little ugly, black, ragged figure, with bleared eyes and grinning white teeth’, as Charles Kingsley describes Tom in The Water-Babies (1862–3).26 In the winter that hearth had a hearty fire, burning coals ferried daily from the pits upcountry where they had been mined by malnourished minors. Round that fireplace the family sat, listening perhaps to a Dickens novel read aloud, while in another room the ‘boots’ – the bootboy – carefully applied blacking to the family’s footwear. The blacking itself came from close at hand, from warehouses like Warren’s in London, where, during the 1820s, it was mixed, bottled and labelled by the underpaid child labour of, among others, that same Charles Dickens who later provided both tears and laughter for heartwarming family readings.
Dickens preferred for his blacking days to be forgotten in his later success, when he posed for several portraits in the smartest of black coats – though he would also shock the black taste by dressing sometimes in a ‘flash’ style. The son of a poor naval clerk who was confined for a time to the debtors’ prison, and of a mother who had probably been in service and who said whenever she saw him ‘Hello, Charley, lend us a pound’, Dickens had more direct experience of the ‘two nations’ than most of the authors who sought to describe them; which makes more poignant the odd twist he gives to an idea that rightly had some currency then – the idea, the perception, that parts of England had become a hell on earth.
Hell in the past had been both terrifying and picturesque, with black demons forking sinners into undying fires. Early depictions – by Bosch, Bruegel and others – draw both on the sight of cities on fire, and also perhaps on the older style of industry as it looked in the later Middle Ages, in the arsenals of the emergent nation states, where in fire, smoke and smithy-scales bombards were forged (the ancestor of the cannon) and white-hot iron was hammered on many anvils into blades. The nineteenth century did not believe in this black and fiery hell, but it did recall the old pictures of it in describing the new landscape. When William Cobbett sees the blast furnaces of Sheffield he is both appalled and awed, but more awed than appalled:
It was dark before we reached Sheffield; so that we saw the iron furnaces in all the horrible splendour of their everlasting blaze . . . This Sheffield, and the land all about it, is one bed of iron and coal. They call it Black Sheffield, and black enough it is; but from this one town and its environs go nine-tenths of the knives that are used in the whole world.27
It is the fires of hell that are everlasting, and the foundry/hell equation is more explicit in Dickens. In The Old Curiosity Shop Nell sees a foundry, where
in this gloomy place, moving like demons among the flame and smoke, dimly and fitfully seen, flushe
d and tormented by the burning fires, and wielding great weapons, a faulty blow from any one of which must have crushed some workman’s skull, a number of men laboured like giants.
The scene is all black and red, with the works surrounded by an ‘interminable perspective of brick towers, never ceasing in their black vomit’. The industrial city of Coketown, in Dickens’s Hard Times, is ‘a town of unnatural red and black like the painted face of a savage’. The scene is again black and red when Nell sees the factories at night – ‘when the smoke was changed to fire; when . . . places, that had been dark vaults all day, now shone red-hot, with figures moving to and fro within their blazing jaws’. The giant jaws here must recall the image of Hellmouth.28
Like Cobbett, Dickens sees the new factories with a horrified exhilaration, and it is possible too that the spectacle of the blast furnaces fed the imagination of those who wished to depict hell itself. In John Martin’s painting of Satan’s new-built palace of Pandemonium, hell’s rivers of fire resemble molten iron, poured flaming into a succession of moulds (illus. 85). The demon palace itself has some resemblance to Charles Barry’s design for the Houses of Parliament – done over in the Babylonian style – especially since it stands on a brink like the Thames embankment, complete with Victorian-looking street lighting. The resemblance must be coincidental, since Barry’s design was produced only in 1836, and construction took many years, while the painting belongs to 1841; but Martin does at times show a remarkable gift of anticipation.
What is most notable, however, in Dickens’s depiction of the industrial hell, is that for him the working men are the demons, while the machines they tend suffer like the damned. Passing other workshops, Nell had noticed that ‘strange engines spun and writhed like tortured creatures; clanking their iron chains, shrieking in their rapid whirl . . . as though in torment unendurable’. And in Hard Times, Dickens recurs to the image of ‘the piston of the steam-engine [working] monotonously up and down, like the head of an elephant in a state of melancholy madness’.29 Of this odd reversal, where men who often suffered from dangerous machinery become demons who torment machines into madness, we might say that, like Disraeli’s comparison of coal-miners to Africans, it shows the great divide, or gulf, between the author and the workers who move his sympathy (even if Dickens had, briefly, known the working life). Part of the distance we could perhaps call ‘cultural’, for, with all their toil, pain and deprivation, the communities of third-generation factory workers might well have seemed brutalized and worse to the educated world in which Dickens now moved. Disraeli had been appalled not only by the working conditions of young girls in the mines, but also by the violence of these girls’ language (‘oaths that men might shudder at, issue from lips born to breathe words of sweetness’). Nor could an author, in the nineteenth century, allow a character to speak violent, obscene, blasphemous slang (though this had been possible, two centuries earlier, for Shakespeare and – even more – Ben Jonson).
85 John Martin, Pandemonium, 1841, oil on canvas.
Apart from the gulf that might be called cultural, there were the politics. Nell’s night vision of the industrial town includes a description of other men, who had been thrown out of work by the machines, being ‘maddened’ by the ‘frightful cries’ of their leaders, and urged on to ‘errands of terror and destruction’ – that is, machine-breaking. Though Dickens had radical sympathies, he also shared the public alarm at the destruction that might ensue both when the unemployed banded together, and also when the employed joined together in ‘combinations’. His novel Hard Times is filled with indignant sympathy for the ‘good’ working man, Stephen Blackpool, and with suspicious hostility for the local trade union, which Blackpool refuses to join. Like others in the nineteenth century, Dickens feared England could easily suffer a revolution, such as had occurred in France and elsewhere, and he also believed, as Engels came to believe, that in England the revolution could begin in the factories.
Actually Dickens’s picture of revolution is, in a sense, not greatly different from his picture of industry, since he believed that revolution also would be a hell on earth. The revolutionaries would mainly be innocents, goaded into action by intolerable wrongs, but the revolutionary process would turn them into demons. The novel he wrote immediately after The Old Curiosity Shop was Barnaby Rudge, in which his description of the eighteenth century’s Gordon Riots becomes a picture of revolution in England. ‘The more the fire crackled and raged, the wilder and more cruel the men grew; as though moving in that element they became fiends, and changed their earthly nature for the qualities that give delight in hell.’ The imagery of hell, fiends and blackness recurs through the novel: the rioters, ‘a legion of devils’, advance ‘like an army of devils’ with ‘demon heads and savage eyes’ to ply ‘demon labours’, while one among them is ‘a Lucifer among the devils’. When, later in life, Dickens came to describe the French Revolution itself, he recurred (with a less gross emphasis) to the imagery of hell, saying of a revolutionary crowd gathering round the guillotine, ‘there could not be fewer than five hundred people, and they were dancing like five thousand demons . . . No fight could have been half so terrible as this dance . . . a something, once innocent, delivered over to all devilry’.30
It should be said that in Dickens’s later fiction his attitude to industry becomes more complex and objective. The foundry in Bleak House is a place of wonder, with
a great perplexity of iron . . . mountains of it broken up, and rusty in its age; distant furnaces of it glowing and bubbling in its youth; bright fireworks of it showering about under the blows of the steam-hammer; red-hot iron, white-hot iron, cold-black iron; an iron taste, an iron smell, and a Babel of iron sounds.
His comparisons now are less with hell than with Babel and Babylon. In the ironmaster’s office ‘there is iron-dust on everything; and the smoke is seen through the windows rolling heavily out of the tall chimneys to mingle with the smoke from a vaporous Babylon of other chimneys’. But though the office and the view are dark-to-black, the tone here is light, since Dickens likes this ironmaster, who has on his table ‘pieces of iron, purposely broken to be tested’. The ironmaster is not an ogre, though Dickens also depicted monstrous bosses, like Mr Bounderby in Hard Times. The protagonist of the late novel Little Dorrit becomes, and enjoys being, the accountant of an engineering works. His ‘little counting-house’ is
at the end of a long low workshop, filled with benches . . . and straps and wheels; which, when they were in gear with the steam-engine, went tearing round as though they had a suicidal mission to grind the business to dust and tear the factory to pieces.
The apparent frantic destructiveness is accommodated, however, and industrial relations in this factory are harmonious – even though those working at the benches are ‘swarthy’ (black) with iron-filings. For this is dancing iron (‘The patient figures at work were swarthy with the filings of iron and steel that danced on every bench and bubbled up through every chink in the planking’). The picture still has strong blacks and a deep and ominous chiaroscuro. The rays of light striking down from a trapdoor through the dusty dimness of the workshop remind Clennam (the accountant) of the rays from angry clouds which, in old biblical pictures, were ‘the witnesses of Abel’s murder’.31
If Dickens’s attitude to the factory itself is more positive in Little Dorrit, this is partly because his thought, by this stage, has moved from dark workshops to the darkness of black-suited finance. The good factory fails, and both machinists and accountant are thrown out of work, when the novel’s great, ignoble symbolic financier, ‘Mr Merdle’ (Dickens liked to betray his knowledge of French), is exposed in his fraudulence, and kills himself.
TRYING TO SEE the nineteenth century whole, one may wonder what is the relation between the smart blacks the century loved to wear, and the factory blacks, and sad blacks, of its mechanical innovations. It is easy to draw specious connections, and it is sometimes said that the nineteenth century wore black because black was good
protective colouring in the new coal- and soot-black world. The difficulty here is that while this principle may work for railway locomotives, it does not work for clothes, since black cloth shows up the dirt. But also men wore white – in their shirts – and women wore a great deal of white, both in the smoky cities and also when waiting in railway stations, which they would not have done if their main goal in dressing had been protection from the falling soot. So if black clothes were thought helpful in some smoky places, still one cannot say the black fashion was determined by the smoke.
Those working manually in factories and mines would unavoidably be blackened by their work. But if those administering industry wore black – the mechanical inventors, the ironmasters and mill-owners – this was for other reasons also, which relate in part to the black of the Christian church. Thomas Newcomen, who invented the first working steam engine, was a Baptist lay preacher. James Watt, who made crucial improvements to steam power, was the son of Presbyterians, both of whom were ardent Covenanters. William Murdoch, who was employed by Watt, and himself invented the oscillating steam engine – and also designed a steam-powered gun – was again raised in the Kirk. Ranging further afield in time and place, Henry Merrell (1816–1883), who developed steam power in Georgia in the 1840s and later in Arkansas (in the 1850s), and who was also a major in the Confederate army, was an ardent evangelical in the Second Great Awakening and an influential elder in the Presbyterian Church of Arkansas. This association – of mechanical invention with severe strains of Protestantism – has much to do with the emphasis on mathematics and the natural sciences (as against Greek and Latin) in Presbyterian schools and in the dissenting academies (which were noted also for their well-equipped laboratories). The history is intricate, and must take account of various migrant communities (such as Scottish Presbyterians in Pennsylvania), but in sum, the reason why many of those who were most active in the Industrial Revolution wear black in their portraits – in the eighteenth century as well as the nineteenth – is neither because black was smart, nor because they worked with black materials, but in fact because black was regularly worn in their Christian denomination.