Dickensian Intemperance: Charity and Reform

1 Bulwer Lytton was the first to make this observation, in his England and the English (1833). Franco Moretti argues that Dickens's genius as an urban writer comes from connecting, for the first time, the respective domains of the silver spoon and the Newgate novels, the West and the East Ends.

2 See Englander on the history and provisions of the New Poor Law.

3 See Brantlinger for a fuller discussion of this transformation.

4 It is here that the differences between an enacted and a represented reform become most visible, and it is here that reformist representations most clearly distinguish themselves from other nineteenth-century forms of detail management (such as Pre-Raphaelitism or debates about inductive and deductive reasoning). We can choose whether to give money to a woman whom we see, and we can choose whether to feel compassion for a woman whom we read about, but we cannot choose whether to understand that this single woman stands in for all the others like her. For if we fail to understand this, then we have failed to read the passage properly. In this way, the passage works on us, whether we consent to it or not, by bringing us into the proper cognitive state-and the goals of reform are thereby achieved. J. Hillis Miller's claims for the performative nature of realism are most useful here, I think, in accounting for the particular case of reformist representation.

5 The word "imagined" registers my debt to Benedict Anderson. Following Walter Benjamin, Anderson observes that a specific conception of simultaneity is the hallmark of modernity. Our modern sense of "'homogenous, empty time'" is articulated through the word "meanwhile," a word which, as novels teach us, links events that would otherwise be entirely unrelated. This "meanwhile" moves from the fictional to the real, Anderson suggests, through the ritual of reading the newspaper. We read every day of events that are linked only by the accident of simultaneity, and in doing so we imagine the community of all other readers who are daily doing the same (25-26). The Sketches by Boz, which first appeared in newspapers, suggest that the imagining of simultaneity may be more palpable, the imagining of community more profound, when what is simultaneous with one's own life is suffering elsewhere in one's nation-when, for instance, we realize that the songs we ourselves sing in our "hours of feasting and merriment " are at the same moment being sung by one enduring "disease, neglect, and starvation."

6 Here my argument about charity and reform comes closest to Robbing's brilliant argument about philanthropy. Robbins, too, argues that Dickens seeks to delimit a sphere of concern, but where it is the size of this sphere that will be of interest to me, he is more interested in the intensity of the concern.

See Crowley and Alfano.

8 Fred Kaplan suggests that the inclusion of this already-written tale might have occasioned Dickens some guilt. It was "The Stroller's Tale" that heightened Robert Seymour's discontent with the illustrating he had been hired to do-the dying of a drunken clown being far removed from the sporting scenes he had originally proposed-and ultimately precipitated his suicide.