Dickensian Intemperance: Charity and Reform

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

These distinctions will hold steady through Dickens's career. In Pickwick, reform will be represented by the people of Muggleston, who write one thousand petitions opposing plantation slavery abroad and another thousand supporting the factory system at home. More famously, reform will be represented in Bleak House by Mrs. Jellyby, whose "telescopic philanthropy" permits her to see "nothing nearer than Africa," certainly not the distress of her own family and the disorder in her own home (52). As with the Mugglestonites, Mrs. Jellyby's reformist labors are entirely mediated and textual. She dictates scores of letters in a single sitting and once mailed five thousand circulars in a single day, but all the writing she produces is, the narrator suggests, little more than waste paper. Set against these very problematic representatives of reform are two exemplars of charity, Mr. Pickwick and Mr. Jarndyce, each of whom is quick to respond to the suffering he encounters with "a useful something from his waistcoat pocket" (691). What the repeated opposition of charity and reform suggests is that reform, in Dickens's view, is both prone to overlook social problems near at hand and helpless to remedy those problems it does identify.

Or so Dickens's satire of reformers would suggest. But while he invariably ridicules the reformers he depicts, Dickens often acts much like a reformer himself. In his own novels, he, too, circulates representations of suffering among those who cannot see the suffering for themselves; he, too, substitutes mediating texts for direct and local acts of charity. Here is the first passage in which he does so:

That wretched woman with the infant in her arms, round whose meagre form the remnant of her own scanty shawl is carefully wrapped, has been attempting to sing some popular ballad, in the hope of wringing a few pence from the compassionate passer-by. A brutal laugh at her weak voice is all she has gained. The tears fall thick and fast down her own pale face; the child is cold and hungry, and its low half-stifled wailing adds to the misery of its wretched mother, as she moans aloud, and sinks despairingly down, on a cold damp doorstep.

Singing! How few of those who pass such a miserable creature as this, think of the anguish of heart, the sinking of soul and spirit, which the very effort of singing produces. Bitter mockery! Disease, neglect, and starvation, faintly articulating the words of the joyous ditty, that has enlivened your hours of feasting and merriment, God knows how often! (Boz 77)

This passage comes from "The Streets-Night," one of a pair of sketches that marks Boz's move from the parish to the city. With this move, the culture of charity comes to an end. For charity consists of concrete assistance offered face-to-face, and here no "passer-by" views the "wretched woman" with "compassion" and no one comes to her aid. The narrator recognizes that there is no possibility of reconstituting the parish on the anonymous city streets, and so he attempts to create a new kind of community to replace it. In order to do this, he must address those who have not seen the woman for themselves, and he can do so only through a mediating text. He offers us a few paragraphs because no one offered the "wretched woman" a "few pence," and he demands of us something more complex than "compassion." He demands, that is to say, something closer to reform.