by Fred Kaplan
Soon after returning to England, he entered the public debate on another variation on human misery, the working conditions for women and children in the coal-mining industry. Interested in the issue for some time, in 1841 he had promised to write an article on it for the Edinburgh Review. In America, he had visited the model factories in Lowell, Massachusetts, impressed by the enlightened paternalism that provided housing, education, libraries, attractive working conditions, and cheerful dignity to the workers, all of whom were women. They worked willingly, combining a due sense of their position in the class structure with a sincere appreciation of what advantages this system provided. In writing about them, he anticipated the anxieties of those who feared that the Lowell experiment would undermine the distinction between classes. He simply denied that it would, hinting at his own ambivalence about class, though not so strongly that his identification with proper class distinctions was not absolutely clear.
There was no need for any ambivalence in his public statement, a long letter published in the Morning Chronicle on July 25, 1842, under the signature “B,” about the brutal mistreatment of children and women in the largely Tory-owned collieries. Mining and factory conditions in Britain seemed to him worse than any working conditions he had seen in America other than those imposed on slaves. An ardent evangelical, Lord Ashley, who became the seventh Earl of Shaftesbury, later described Dickens as one who did the work of the Lord, being of the evangelical party without knowing it. Ashley had introduced into the House of Lords a bill, which had already passed the House of Commons, on mines and collieries. It would banish women and children under thirteen from the mines, institute safety regulations, and improve working conditions. Dickens did his best to influence favorable consideration. With Swiftean reversals, parodic exaggerations, and sardonic irony, he dissected and dismissed the arguments against the bill.28 An altered but still effective version of it passed.
His satisfaction at the passage of even the watered-down bill may have been greater than Ashley’s, who resented the Duke of Wellington’s congratulating him on what he felt to be a disappointment. The experience probably encouraged Dickens to think that he could advance reform through direct engagement with political and social issues. The possibility that he might run for office or be offered an appointment to administer some aspect of social reform had occurred to him. But the dominance of Tory administrations discouraged him from responding, in 1841, to the Liberal electors of Reading, Talfourd’s constituency, and then to the Glasgow electors in the spring of 1844. Initially flattered, he realized that the cost of a contested election and the loss of income from writing would be too great. “Why wasn’t I born with a golden ladle in my mouth as well as a pen …?” Without an independent income, he could not afford political office. With a growing family, he needed more, rather than less, money. He had little to no savings, partly the result, the thrifty Lord Jeffrey chidingly insisted, of living beyond his means and his needs, even to the extent of having to arrange through Thomas Mitton in July 1843 a private loan to get him through some shortfall of income and unexpectedly heavy expenses.29
A government appointment, though, might speak to both his desire to engage himself actively in social reform and his need for additional income. The prospect of being appointed a police magistrate appealed to him. He wanted to put to practical use the combination of mercy and wisdom in the service of fairness for which his novels had been praised. He would be the good magistrate, like Henry Fielding, sternly but charitably fair, the opposite side of the coin of the vicious Mr. Fang in Oliver Twist. He still maintained his nonactive enrollment as a law student at Gray’s Inn with the notion that it might afford him some extra consideration for such a position. Although “the Jails and byplaces of London” were old sights to him, he was “more than ever amazed at the Ignorance and Misery that prevail.” He “would never rest from practically shewing all classes how important it has become to educate, on bold and comprehensive principles, the Dangerous Members of Society.” It was more realistic, though, to hope that in a Whig government his friends might provide him with administrative responsibility for educational reform, a subject that he had revealed strong opinions on in the depiction of Dotheboys Hall in Nicholas Nickleby.
It became an explicit concern in September 1843, when, for the first time, he visited, with Clarkson Stanfield, one of the newly established church-run slum schools, on Field Lane, almost adjacent to Fagin’s house in Oliver Twist. They were called “ragged” schools, because they were “exclusively for children raggedly clothed.… My heart so sinks within me when I go into these scenes, that I almost lose the hope of ever seeing them changed.” Supported primarily by the teachers themselves, whose “moral courage … is worthy of the apostles,” the school was “held in three most wretched rooms on the first floor of a rotten house.” The children were ignorant, diseased, and streetwise, the teachers badly trained if not incompetent, the school building a foul slum.30 Remembering his own childhood vulnerability and neglect, he saw a chance to exert his energy on behalf of reform in an area in which he felt especially qualified.
Convinced that the first and most important line of protection against the criminality of adults was the education of children of both sexes, he warmly supported the ragged-school movement. And he suddenly found himself with the unusual opportunity of helping in a well-financed private effort. In 1838, Dickens had been introduced, on her initiative, to Angela Burdett Coutts, sole heir to her maternal grandfather’s immense banking fortune, probably through Edward Marjoribanks, a partner in Coutts and Company, where Dickens had opened a small checking account. Dickens was sufficiently famous as a writer for Majoribanks to take notice of his patronage and to extend him special courtesies, including social overtures. Curious to meet the young novelist, the shy, tall, angular, badly complexioned Miss Coutts, two years younger than Dickens and reputedly the richest woman in England, invited him to her mansion in Piccadilly numbers of times. He finally had dinner with her in July 1839. By the end of the year, he described himself, with self-serving exaggeration, as “on terms of intimacy with Miss Coutts, and the other partners.”31 From America, he brought back presents for the heiress and her closest friend, the opinionated, domineering Hannah Meredith, who had been her governess and who remained her lifelong live-in companion. Miss Coutts combined evangelical ardor for strict Church of England sectarian good works with shyness, insecurity, loneliness, immense fear of being exploited, and a coolness of temperament that kept her always on the distant side of warmth. She was the insecure child of a hysterically invalided mother and an arrogant, wealthy father, Francis Burdett, the radical political leader of the 1820s, who turned sharply conservative and whom she worshiped even the more when he had allowed her to become his private secretary.
Whom Miss Coutts would marry was a topic of ceaseless gossip and ambition during the decades of her spinsterhood. Her idealization of her father directed her toward older men, particularly the Duke of Wellington, her neighbor in Piccadilly, whose advanced age of seventy-seven did not prevent her falling in love with him in 1846. Her interest in Dickens and his in her seem never to have been amorous. Though he was an inveterate flirt, she was not to be flirted with. He was to develop “a most perfect affection and respect for her.” Years later he described his feeling for her “as always the love of a brother,” though the relationship seems to have had little of the playful warmth of his idealized fictional brother-sister relationships, with their unselfconscious edge of incestuousness. She was to rely on his energy, idealism, and enthusiasm for assistance in channeling some of her money into charitable projects, both individual and institutional. With an eye toward his children’s future, he was to accept her godmotherly patronage of his eldest son, edging his remarks to her with the hint of the possibility of her doing even more for him and his family. It was always a delicate balancing act, between independence and dependency, between service for others and self-service. By the summer of 1843, she was relying on him for ad
vice on petitions, and he had become “a faithful steward of [her] bounty.”32 His balked aspiration to be an active instrument of social reform could be fulfilled through making Miss Coutts dependent on his assistance. As long as he dealt with her tactfully, with respect for her limitations, without presuming on their relationship, and with due deference to Miss Meredith (who became Mrs. William Brown in 1844), he would have the chance to see some of his favorite projects supported.
When he saw the conditions at the Field Lane school, he immediately advised her that “I deem it an experiment most worthy of your charitable hand.” He was at her service, and he had little difficulty persuading her to respond favorably to the advertisement for subscriptions placed by the Field Lane committee in The Times. He had no success, though, in getting government support. Increasingly identified with educational and social reformers like Dr. James Kay-Shuttleworth and Dr. Southwood Smith, Dickens found himself subordinating personal preferences for political advantages, uneasily submitting to boring personalities and lengthy tedium in the service of reform. The whirl of ideas and principles among competing groups sometimes frustrated progress. Sectarian religious positions were more important to most institutional reformers than substantive progress. The Ragged School Union, formed to advance the schools in the growing movement, was essentially evangelical in spirit, drawing support from dissenters and from the low church. Pious Anglicans like Miss Coutts were suspicious and doctrinally disapproving. But Dickens was convinced that the imposition into the ragged-school classroom of religious doctrine, let alone religious sectarianism, had a damaging effect on the children. The teaching already seemed weak, narrow, and unimaginative, like the heavy respectability of Bradley Headstone’s lugubrious school of the “ghastliest absurdities” in Our Mutual Friend, which Charley Hexam attends after going to a ragged school in “a miserable loft in an unsavoury yard.” It should not be further weighed down by religious dogma, Dickens felt, especially “any system of Education, based exclusively upon the principles of the Established Church.”33
During the next few years, he advocated support for the ragged schools, among other things writing a strong letter to the Daily News in early February 1846. Educated children were likely to become socially productive citizens. His exposure to hardened adult criminals had convinced him that criminality was progressively self-determinative. The best antidote to criminal irreversibility was to catch the criminal in formation, in childhood, before poverty, disease, and ignorance had transformed the malleable child into the hardened malefactor. Universal education was essential, for all classes, from an early age, and the ragged schools seemed to him a start. The movement gradually provided industrial training (including, ironically, the Ragged School Shoeblack Society) and encouraged emigration to the colonies, both of which he approved of. Aware, though, of the inadequacies of the Field Lane and other ragged schools, eager to show what he himself could do and what could be done, he proposed to Kay-Shuttleworth “an experimental Normal Ragged School,” based on a system of his own devising in which “the boys would not be wearied to death, and driven away, by long Pulpit discourses.… They might be amused, instructed, and in some sort reformed,” and “we should have some data to go upon.”34 Unfortunately, he could not find adequate support for the plan.
In the spring of 1846 Miss Coutts suggested a project that struck a responsive chord with Dickens. There existed little interest in suppressing, let alone eliminating, the numerous London brothels, frequented mainly by the upper middle class, the leisure class, and foreigners, that specialized in male and female prostitution across a wide range of sexual interests. But the eyesore of widespread street solicitation at all hours, with pimps operating as openly as their employees, weighed heavily on the religious and middle-class conscience and on the nervous susceptibility of a culture that needed to define itself as moral. From the window of her mansion in Piccadilly, Miss Coutts could see prostitutes at work. From his childhood on, Dickens had noticed what he had a predilection for not avoiding, the exploited victims of a repressive culture in which chance often determined opportunity and social destiny. Prostitutes were a type of criminal. If they were intercepted at a young enough age they too could have their evil destiny averted. That they were women, often quite young, made the prospect of reformation even better. For he believed, and dramatized in his sketches and through Nancy in Oliver Twist, that “there is much more Good in Women than in Men, however Ragged they are,” though “people are apt to think otherwise, because the outward degradation of a woman strikes them more forcibly than any amount of hideousness in a man.”35 Miss Coutts’s idea was to create an “asylum” for “fallen women” whose purpose would be to help them renounce prostitution. For the plan to work, though, two questions had to be answered. What were they to become in a positive sense and how could the change be effected? During the next ten years, Dickens devoted considerable time and effort searching for the answers.
ON HIS RETURN FROM AMERICA IN JUNE 1842, THE SUNBURNED AUthor flew into the long-sought and warmly open arms of friends and family. England never seemed more familial. From Liverpool, he and Catherine had the delight of a surprise arrival one day earlier than expected. They stunned Macready and Forster. He scooped the excited, even bewildered, children into his arms, kissing them through the bars of the house gate, so eager was he to reestablish intimacy. The five-year-old Charley went into brief nervous convulsions from being “too glad.” Attended by Dr. Elliotson, he recovered quickly. On the last day of the month, they moved back into Devonshire Terrace, where Dickens made it a practice to sit on a new rocking chair that he had brought from America, a symbol of his domesticity, and to sing comic songs “to a wondering and delighted audience” of admiring children. He warmly thanked Mrs. Macready, whom they never could thank “enough in all our lives,” for looking after the children. Within days, the old intimacies and routines were resumed with all his friends. George Cruikshank came home from the elaborate dinner in Greenwich that Forster had organized to celebrate Dickens’ return in Dickens’ carriage, standing on his head, so drunk that “he was last seen, taking Gin with a Waterman.” To a large group of celebratory diners Dickens good-humoredly hinted that the “great pleasure of going to America” was “the pleasure of coming back.”36
Coming back was soon accompanied by the challenge of having to be at work again. He had been away from his desk for over six months, and he had committed himself to write two books, against which he had received a substantial advance to pay the cost of his travels and the maintenance of his family. Fortunately, he had the assistance of the lengthy letters he had written to Forster for the purpose of helping with his travel book. Having lied consistently to his hosts about his intentions, he now had the unenviable task of revealing his disingenuousness. The more sustained challenge, the novel on “English Life and Manners” in twenty monthly parts, would have to wait until American Notes had been written. Before starting, he wrote and had printed a circular addressed to “British Authors and Journals” stating that he would no longer negotiate with American publishers to provide them with early proofs of any of his writings. Since he was paid a small sum for the advance proofs, he intended this to be a statement that he would renounce any profit at all rather than cooperate with a system that denied him a reasonable return. The “American Sketches” that were “shaping themselves” in his head and the introductory chapter that he had written by the middle of July were preceded by this statement of principle and intention, reflecting his preoccupation with the local issue of most importance to him. He urged his colleagues to do the same. His feelings about American materialism and immorality were additionally exacerbated by the appearance on August 11, 1842, in the New York Evening Tatler, edited by Walt Whitman, of a forged letter that Dickens had purportedly written on July 15, which harshly denounced American manners. Though he raged bitterly against the forgery, its main points, ironically, were sufficiently close to his to be both an effective caricature and an anticipation of
American Notes and the American section of Martin Chuzzlewit, as if it prefigured and even helped to shape what was to come.
To his surprise, Forster and Macready found the first chapter of American Notes tactless and counterproductive, “preparing the reader for a much greater amount of slaughter than he will meet with.” Dickens’ anger at the forged letter had become the subtext of an explicit attack. Reluctantly, he agreed to omit it. By the end of July, before going to Broadstairs, despite taking time to write his lengthy letter on the minds and collieries bill, he had finished the first four chapters. In the glittering sunshine, writing chapters six and seven, he found his ironic title, American Notes for General Circulation. While writing the account of Laura Bridgman, he took on “a new protege … a wretched deaf and dumb boy whom I found upon the sands the other day, half dead.…” Pleased by Forster’s delight with the first volume, “working, tooth and nail,” he had done the description of Niagara by the middle of September, the penultimate chapter on slavery by the end of the first week of October, and finished in ample time for an October 19 publication. By the beginning of November, pirated editions were being sold in New York, Boston, and Philadelphia.
In both England and America the book had a mixed, lukewarm reception. Neutral readers found it persistently dull. To American nationalists, it seemed another stage in the war between English superciliousness and American naturalness. To some British critics, it was inferior to previous accounts of American culture, an overpersonalized view with a touch of sanctimoniousness that said too much about the author and too little about the United States. Some of his English friends, like Macready, who thought the book mean-spirited, wished that he had not written it. To his New England friends, the Dickensian combination of humor, severity, and idealism were admirably and effectively used to denounce slavery and materialism. To radical abolitionists, the main targets were well chosen, the tone appropriately condemnatory though insufficiently serious.37 Some critics, though, were distressed by Dickens the novelist pretending to be Dickens the social analyst, grafting his fictional talents onto alien soil. With a strong belief in his own moral stance and intellectual powers, but with a weak historical perspective, Dickens presented personal responses as if they were general truths, as if his evocative powers as a novelist allowed him to read and dissect a culture in intellectual terms.