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Dickensian Intemperance: Charity and Reform
Novel: A Forum on Fiction, Fall 2003 by Claybaugh, Amanda
Still, these material benefits came at considerable psychic costs. Gagnier argues that working-class writers often felt oppressed by the distance between the subjectivities they were adopting and the real conditions of their own lives. This distance troubled Dickens as well. In "Monmouth-street," he suggests the ways in which the temperance narrative serves to make sense of an array of social and economic changes. Poverty, disease, crime, imprisonment, and death can all be described as the effects of drinking, while health, happiness, prosperity, and salvation can be described as the effects of sobriety. In this way, the bewildering and often brutal changes brought about by industrialization and urbanization were organized around, and simplified through, the story of an individual drunkard's progress from the sufferings caused by drinking to the rewards achieved by abstinence. In Pickwick, Dickens makes this point more powerfully by parodying temperance narratives and showing them to be absurd. Here is one that the society's secretary summarizes:
Walker, tailor, wife, and two children. When in better circumstances, owns to having been in the constant habit of drinking ale, and beer.... Is now out of work and penniless; thinks it must be the porter (cheers) or the loss of the use of his right hand; is not certain which, but thinks it very likely that, if he had drank nothing but water all his life, his fellow work-man would never have stuck a rusty needle in him, and thereby occasioned his accident (tremendous cheering). (547)
H. Walker is followed by Betsy Martin, who attributes the fact that she was born with one eye to her mother's drinking of bottled stout; she has joined the temperance society in the hope that abstaining from drink will cause a second eye to grow. Then comes one-legged Thomas Burton, who found that his wooden legs wore out quickly when he bought them second hand and drank gin and water; now that he buys new wooden legs, they last twice as long, a difference he attributes to having given up gin. What makes these stories comic, is, of course, their false account of causation, but false causation is, as Dickens emphasizes, more than just a joke. Here, the problem is the substitution of false causes for true ones (porter for a workplace injury), while in "Gin-shops," the problem had been the inversion of cause and effect (poverty and drinking). In both cases, however, the temperance narrative misrepresents the very phenomena it is intended to address.
This misrepresentation is all the more disappointing because what drew Dickens to temperance reform is precisely the representational license it seems to convey. On the one hand, reform justifies an attention to what had hitherto been unseen. "Gin-shops" makes this claim directly. Because the slums "can hardly be imagined" and are only rarely seen (Boz 217), reformers are permitted, indeed, compelled, to circulate representations of what would otherwise go unperceived. In Pickwick, too, reform serves as a conduit for realist detail. Just as it was "The Stroller's Tale" that first introduced the topic of poverty in Pickwick, so it is the temperance meeting that first brings poverty into Pickwicks main plot: a prosperous procession of established landowners, successful professional men, and well-tended servants is interrupted by the poor people described in the temperance secretary's report. On the other hand, the temperance narrative confines perception, and thus representation, within the limits of its own ideology. Reformers see, as Dickens points out in "Gin-shops," the narrow circumstances of drinking but not the broader conditions of poverty. Pushed to the periphery of the temperance narrative are troubling social facts, and Dickens attempts, in Pickwick as well as "Gin-Shops," to bring these facts back into view. H. Walker is "out of work and penniless," Thomas Burton, too, is "out of employ now" (547), and Betsy Martin is only slightly better off, a widow struggling to support her child by "charring and washing" (546). Their poverty has outlasted their drunkenness, and Dickens, in drawing attention to the suffering that persists even in sobriety, implicitly condemns the temperance narrative for imposing on experience what can only be a false conclusion.
