Fifty Orwell Essays

by George Orwell

1864-5), the good rich man comes back in full glory in the person of

  Boffin. Boffin is a proletarian by origin and only rich by inheritance,

  but he is the usual DEUS EX MACHINA, solving everybody's problems by

  showering money in all directions. He even 'trots', like the Cheerybles.

  In several ways OUR MUTUAL FRIEND is a return to the earlier manner, and

  not an unsuccessful return either. Dickens's thoughts seem to have come

  full circle. Once again, individual kindliness is the remedy for

  everything.

  One crying evil of his time that Dickens says very little about is child

  labour. There are plenty of pictures of suffering children in his books,

  but usually they are suffering in schools rather than in factories. The

  one detailed account of child labour that he gives is the description in

  DAVID COPPERFIELD of little David washing bottles in Murdstone & Grinby's

  warehouse. This, of course, is autobiography. Dickens himself, at the age

  of ten, had worked in Warren's blacking factory in the Strand, very much

  as he describes it here. It was a terribly bitter memory to him, partly

  because he felt the whole incident to be discreditable to his parents,

  and he even concealed it from his wife till long after they were married.

  Looking back on this period, he says in DAVID COPPERFIELD:

  It is a matter of some surprise to me, even now, that I can have been so

  easily thrown away at such an age. A child of excellent abilities and

  with strong powers of observation, quick, eager, delicate, and soon hurt

  bodily or mentally, it seems wonderful to me that nobody should have made

  any sign in my behalf. But none was made; and I became, at ten years old,

  a little labouring hind in the service of Murdstone & Grinby.

  And again, having described the rough boys among whom he worked:

  No words can express the secret agony of my soul as I sunk into this

  companionship...and felt my hopes of growing up to be a learned and

  distinguished man crushed in my bosom.

  Obviously it is not David Copperfield who is speaking, it is Dickens

  himself. He uses almost the same words in the autobiography that he began

  and abandoned a few months earlier. Of course Dickens is right in saying

  that a gifted child ought not to work ten hours a day pasting labels on

  bottles, but what he does not say is that NO child ought to be condemned

  to such a fate, and there is no reason for inferring that he thinks it.

  David escapes from the warehouse, but Mick Walker and Mealy Potatoes and

  the others are still there, and there is no sign that this troubles

  Dickens particularly. As usual, he displays no consciousness that the

  STRUCTURE of society can be changed. He despises politics, does not

  believe that any good can come out of Parliament--he had been a

  Parliamentary shorthand writer, which was no doubt a disillusioning

  experience--and he is slightly hostile to the most hopeful movement of

  his day, trade unionism. In HARD TIMES trade unionism is represented as

  something not much better than a racket, something that happens because

  employers are not sufficiently paternal. Stephen Blackpool's refusal to

  join the union is rather a virtue in Dickens's eyes. Also, as Mr. Jackson

  has pointed out, the apprentices' association in BARNABY RUDGE, to which

  Sim Tappertit belongs, is probably a hit at the illegal or barely legal

  unions of Dickens's own day, with their secret assemblies, passwords and

  so forth. Obviously he wants the workers to be decently treated, but

  there is no sign that he wants them to take their destiny into their own

  hands, least of all by open violence.

  As it happens, Dickens deals with revolution in the narrower sense in two

  novels, BARNABY RUDGE and A TALE OF TWO CITIES. In BARNABY RUDGE it is a

  case of rioting rather than revolution. The Gordon Riots of 1780, though

  they had religious bigotry as a pretext, seem to have been little more

  than a pointless outburst of looting. Dickens's attitude to this kind of

  thing is sufficiently indicated by the fact that his first idea was to

  make the ringleaders of the riots three lunatics escaped from an asylum.

  He was dissuaded from this, but the principal figure of the book is in

  fact a village idiot. In the chapters dealing with the riots Dickens

  shows a most profound horror of mob violence. He delights in describing

  scenes in which the 'dregs' of the population behave with atrocious

  bestiality. These chapters are of great psychological interest, because

  they show how deeply he had brooded on this subject. The things he

  describes can only have come out of his imagination, for no riots on

  anything like the same scale had happened in his lifetime. Here is one of

  his descriptions, for instance:

  If Bedlam gates had been flung open wide, there would not have issued

  forth such maniacs as the frenzy of that night had made. There were men

  there who danced and trampled on the beds of flowers as though they trod

  down human enemies, and wrenched them from their stalks, like savages who

  twisted human necks. There were men who cast their lighted torches in the

  air, and suffered them to fall upon their heads and faces, blistering the

  skin with deep unseemly burns. There were men who rushed up to the fire,

  and paddled in it with their hands as if in water; and others who were

  restrained by force from plunging in, to gratify their deadly longing. On

  the skull of one drunken lad--not twenty, by his looks--who lay upon

  the ground with a bottle to his mouth, the lead from the roof came

  streaming down in a shower of liquid fire, white hot, melting his head

  like wax...But of all the howling throng not one learnt mercy from, or

  sickened at, these sights; nor was the fierce, besotted, senseless rage

  of one man glutted.

  You might almost think you were reading a description of 'Red' Spain by a

  partisan of General Franco. One ought, of course, to remember that when

  Dickens was writing, the London 'mob' still existed. (Nowadays there is

  no mob, only a flock.) Low wages and the growth and shift of population

  had brought into existence a huge, dangerous slum-proletariat, and until

  the early middle of the nineteenth century there was hardly such a thing

  as a police force. When the brickbats began to fly there was nothing

  between shuttering your windows and ordering the troops to open fire. In

  A TALE OF TWO CITIES he is dealing with a revolution which was really

  about something, and Dickens's attitude is different, but not entirely

  different. As a matter of fact, A TALE OF TWO CITIES is a book which

  tends to leave a false impression behind, especially after a lapse of

  time.

  The one thing that everyone who has read A TALE OF TWO CITIES remembers

  is the Reign of Terror. The whole book is dominated by the

  guillotine--tumbrils thundering to and fro, bloody knives, heads

  bouncing into the basket, and sinister old women knitting as they watch.

  Actually these scenes only occupy a few chapters, but they are written

  with terrible intensity, and the rest of the book is rather slow going.

  But A TALE OF TWO CITIES is not a companion volume to THE SCARLET

  PIMPERNEL.
Dickens sees clearly enough that the French Revolution was

  bound to happen and that many of the people who were executed deserved

  what they got. If, he says, you behave as the French aristocracy had

  behaved, vengeance will follow. He repeats this over and over again. We

  are constantly being reminded that while 'my lord' is lolling in bed,

  with four liveried footmen serving his chocolate and the peasants

  starving outside, somewhere in the forest a tree is growing which will

  presently be sawn into planks for the platform of the guillotine, etc.,

  etc., etc. The inevitability of the Terror, given its causes, is

  insisted upon in the clearest terms:

  It was too much the way...to talk of this terrible Revolution as if it

  were the only harvest ever known under the skies that had not been

  sown--as if nothing had ever been done, or omitted to be done, that had

  led to it--as if observers of the wretched millions in France, and of

  the misused and perverted resources that should have made them

  prosperous, had not seen it inevitably coming, years before, and had not

  in plain terms recorded what they saw.

  And again:

  All the devouring and insatiate monsters imagined since imagination could

  record itself, are fused in the one realization, Guillotine. And yet

  there is not in France, with its rich variety of soil and climate, a

  blade, a leaf, a root, a spring, a peppercorn, which will grow to

  maturity under conditions more certain than those that have produced this

  horror. Crush humanity out of shape once more, under similar hammers, and

  it will twist itself into the same tortured forms.

  In other words, the French aristocracy had dug their own graves. But

  there is no perception here of what is now called historic necessity.

  Dickens sees that the results are inevitable, given the causes, but he

  thinks that the causes might have been avoided. The Revolution is

  something that happens because centuries of oppression have made the

  French peasantry sub-human. If the wicked nobleman could somehow have

  turned over a new leaf, like Scrooge, there would have been no

  Revolution, no JACQUERIE, no guillotine--and so much the better. This is

  the opposite of the 'revolutionary' attitude. From the 'revolutionary'

  point of view the class-struggle is the main source of progress, and

  therefore the nobleman who robs the peasant and goads him to revolt is

  playing a necessary part, just as much as the Jacobin who guillotines the

  nobleman. Dickens never writes anywhere a line that can be interpreted as

  meaning this. Revolution as he sees it is merely a monster that is

  begotten by tyranny and always ends by devouring its own instruments. In

  Sydney Carton's vision at the foot of the guillotine, he foresees Defarge

  and the other leading spirits of the Terror all perishing under the same

  knife--which, in fact, was approximately what happened.

  And Dickens is very sure that revolution is a monster. That is why

  everyone remembers the revolutionary scenes in A TALE OF TWO CITIES; they

  have the quality of nightmare, and it is Dickens's own nightmare. Again

  and again he insists upon the meaningless horrors of revolution--the

  mass-butcheries, the injustice, the ever-present terror of spies, the

  frightful blood-lust of the mob. The descriptions of the Paris mob--the

  description, for instance, of the crowd of murderers struggling round the

  grindstone to sharpen their weapons before butchering the prisoners in

  the September massacres--outdo anything in BARNABY RUDGE. The

  revolutionaries appear to him simply as degraded savages--in fact, as

  lunatics. He broods over their frenzies with a curious imaginative

  intensity. He describes them dancing the 'Carmagnole', for instance:

  There could not be fewer than five hundred people, and they were dancing

  like five thousand demons...They danced to the popular Revolution song,

  keeping a ferocious time that was like a gnashing of teeth in unison...

  They advanced, retreated, struck at one another's hands, clutched at one

  another's heads, spun round alone, caught one another, and spun around in

  pairs, until many of them dropped...Suddenly they stopped again, paused,

  struck out the time afresh, forming into lines the width of the public

  way, and, with their heads low down and their hands high up, swooped

  screaming off. No fight could have been half so terrible as this dance.

  It was so emphatically a fallen sport--a something, once innocent,

  delivered over to all devilry.

  He even credits some of these wretches with a taste for guillotining

  children. The passage I have abridged above ought to be read in full. It

  and others like it show how deep was Dickens's horror of revolutionary

  hysteria. Notice, for instance that touch, 'with their heads low down and

  their hands high up', etc., and the evil vision it conveys. Madame

  Defarge is a truly dreadful figure, certainly Dickens's most successful

  attempt at a MALIGNANT character. Defarge and others are simply 'the new

  oppressors who have risen in the destruction of the old', the

  revolutionary courts are presided over by 'the lowest, cruellest and

  worst populace', and so on and so forth. All the way through Dickens

  insists upon the nightmare insecurity of a revolutionary period, and in

  this he shows a great deal of prescience. 'A law of the suspected, which

  struck away all security for liberty or life, and delivered over any good

  and innocent person to any bad and guilty one; prisons gorged with people

  who had committed no offence, and could obtain no hearing'--it would

  apply pretty accurately to several countries today.

  The apologists of any revolution generally try to minimize its horrors;

  Dickens's impulse is to exaggerate them--and from a historical point of

  view he has certainly exaggerated. Even the Reign of Terror was a much

  smaller thing than he makes it appear. Though he quotes no figures, he

  gives the impression of a frenzied massacre lasting for years, whereas in

  reality the whole of the Terror, so far as the number of deaths goes, was

  a joke compared with one of Napoleon's battles. But the bloody knives and

  the tumbrils rolling to and fro create in his mind a special sinister

  vision which he has succeeded in passing on to generations of readers.

  Thanks to Dickens, the very word 'tumbril' has a murderous sound; one

  forgets that a tumbril is only a sort of farm-cart. To this day, to the

  average Englishman, the French Revolution means no more than a pyramid of

  severed heads. It is a strange thing that Dickens, much more in sympathy

  with the ideas of the Revolution than most Englishmen of his time, should

  have played a part in creating this impression.

  If you hate violence and don't believe in politics, the only remedy

  remaining is education. Perhaps society is past praying for, but there is

  always hope for the individual human being, if you can catch him young

  enough. This belief partly accounts for Dickens's preoccupation with

  childhood.

  No one, at any rate no English writer, has written better about childhood

  than Dickens. In spite of all the knowledge that has accumulated since,


  in spite of the fact that children are now comparatively sanely treated,

  no novelist has shown the same power of entering into the child's point

  of view. I must have been about nine years old when I first read DAVID

  COPPERFIELD. The mental atmosphere of the opening chapters was so

  immediately intelligible to me that I vaguely imagined they had been

  written BY A CHILD. And yet when one re-reads the book as an adult and

  sees the Murdstones, for instance, dwindle from gigantic figures of doom

  into semi-comic monsters, these passages lose nothing. Dickens has been

  able to stand both inside and outside the child's mind, in such a way

  that the same scene can be wild burlesque or sinister reality, according

  to the age at which one reads it. Look, for instance, at the scene in

  which David Copperfield is unjustly suspected of eating the mutton chops;

  or the scene in which Pip, in GREAT EXPECTATIONS, coming back from Miss

  Havisham's house and finding himself completely unable to describe what

  he has seen, takes refuge in a series of outrageous lies--which, of

  course, are eagerly believed. All the isolation of childhood is there.

  And how accurately he has recorded the mechanisms of the child's mind,

  its visualizing tendency, its sensitiveness to certain kinds of

  impression. Pip relates how in his childhood his ideas about his dead

  parents were derived from their tombstones:

  The shape of the letters on my father's, gave me an odd idea that he was

  a square, stout, dark man, with curly black hair. From the character and

  turn of the inscription, 'ALSO GEORGIANA, WIFE OF THE ABOVE', I drew a

  childish conclusion that my mother was freckled and sickly. To five

  little stone lozenges, each about a foot and a half long, which were

  arranged in a neat row beside their grave, and were sacred to the memory

  of five little brothers of mine...I am indebted for a belief I

  religiously entertained that they had all been born on their backs with

  their hands in their trouser-pockets, and had never taken them out in

  this state of existence.

  There is a similar passage in DAVID COPPERFIELD. After biting Mr.

  Murdstone's hand, David is sent away to school and obliged to wear on his

  back a placard saying, 'Take care of him. He bites.' He looks at the door

  in the playground where the boys have carved their names, and from the

  appearance of each name he seems to know in just what tone of voice the

  boy will read out the placard:

  There was one boy--a certain J. Steerforth--who cut his name very deep

  and very often, who, I conceived, would read it in a rather strong voice,

  and afterwards pull my hair. There was another boy, one Tommy Traddles,

  who I dreaded would make game of it, and pretend to be dreadfully

  frightened of me. There was a third, George Demple, who I fancied would

  sing it.

  When I read this passage as a child, it seemed to me that those were

  exactly the pictures that those particular names would call up. The

  reason, of course, is the sound-associations of the words

  (Demple--'temple'; Traddles--probably 'skedaddle'). But how many people,

  before Dickens, had ever noticed such things? A sympathetic attitude

  towards children was a much rarer thing in Dickens's day than it is now.

  The early nineteenth century was not a good time to be a child. In

  Dickens's youth children were still being 'solemnly tried at a criminal

  bar, where they were held up to be seen', and it was not so long since

  boys of thirteen had been hanged for petty theft. The doctrine of

  'breaking the child's spirit' was in full vigour, and THE FAIRCHILD

  FAMILY was a standard book for children till late into the century. This

  evil book is now issued in pretty-pretty expurgated editions, but it is

  well worth reading in the original version. It gives one some idea of

  the lengths to which child-discipline was sometimes carried. Mr.

  Fairchild, for instance, when he catches his children quarrelling, first