Dickensian Intemperance: Charity and Reform

Novel: A Forum on Fiction, Fall 2003 by Claybaugh, Amanda

That the differences between charity and social reform are of interest to Dickens is demonstrated on Boz's first page. In the first of the parish sketches, the narrator imagines a poor man with a large family, whose debts are increasing, whose wife is growing ill, whose children are suffering from hunger. "What can he do?" the narrator asks; "To whom is he to apply for relief? To private charity? To benevolent individuals? Certainly not-there is his parish" (17). For centuries, the parish had administered the poor relief to which all Englishmen and -women had a customary right, but the narrator's questions do not refer to this ancient arrangement. They refer instead to the recent passage of the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834, which sought to standardize and rationalize an array of ad hoc local practices by specifying the terms on which a parish could give poor relief. Workhouses were built in those parishes that did not yet have them, while existing workhouses were reorganized according to severe disciplines. Only when paupers suffered more than the hardest-pressed of workers, argued the Benthamite proponents of poor law reform, would labor be a more appealing choice than idleness.2 Dickens's objections to the New Poor Law are well known, and he would protest it most famously in Oliver Twist, which details the suffering inflicted by the work-house regime. In Boz, however, it is not the poor law itself that concerns Dickens so much as the era of social reform that this law ushered in. The poor law is significant here only as the most obvious instance of a reform that, the narrator's indignant questions imply, will sever the customary ties of obligation and entitlement and thereby dissolve communities that had long been knit together by the generosity of "benevolent individuals" and their acts of "private charity."

The rest of the parish sketches will devote themselves to anatomizing the differences between this superceded charity and this emergent reform. Dickens's intentions here are more speculative than polemical, and it is for this reason that he abandons the inflammatory subject of the New Poor Law and instead creates mildly comic figures to personify both charity and reform. Charity is represented by the so-called Old Lady, whose "name always heads the list of any benevolent subscriptions," who donates twenty pounds toward the purchase of a new church organ and makes annual gifts of coal and soup to the parish poor (27). The alternative to charity is represented by the famous London reformer invited to the parish to speak. And speak he does, of "green isles-other shores-vast Atlantic-bosom of the deep-Christian charity-blood and extermination -mercy in hearts-arms in hands-altars and homes-household gods" (57). That the representative of reform should be an orator, rather than a poor law authority, marks the contemporary shift from an early period of utilitarian reform, under the control of an administrative elite, to the more popular reform that would characterize the rest of the nineteenth century.3 The opposition between the orator and the Old Lady demonstrates that Dickens distinguishes reform from charity on two grounds. Reform concerns itself with what is far away ("other shores-vast Atlantic"), while charity attends to what is near at hand; and charity involves the direct provision of concrete aid (twenty pounds, coal and soup), while reform works more indirectly, through the mediations of speeches and other texts.