Dickensian Intemperance: Charity and Reform

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

What is required by this passage, and what is required by reformist representation more generally, is a specific way of thinking about the poor. It is this that Elizabeth Gaskell attempts to produce when she urges her readers to pity the plight of the working class and Harriet Beecher Stowe, when she exhorts her readers to "feel right" about the suffering of the slaves. The work that Gaskell and Beecher are trying to do is, I want to emphasize, as much cognitive as affective. It involves, first of all, our recognition that any particular instance is not an isolated instance, but rather part of a general phenomenon; the narrator prompts this realization when he moves from the single "wretched woman" to the category of all "such miserable creatures."4 And it involves as well our acknowledgment that the existence of such phenomena entails certain responsibilities for those who remain unaffected by them. In this passage as in Gaskell and Stowe, the precise terms of responsibility might seem remarkably inadequate to the suffering described: "thinking" of a woman's "anguish of heart" as she tries and fails to secure food for herself and her child will do little to save either of them from starvation. But the content of this responsibility is less important than its structure. The obligations of charity had been discharged through a familiar, indeed time-honored, network of relations: the Old Lady helps the poor of her parish, whom she sees in church every Sunday bowing their thanks from the side aisle. The responsibilities entailed by reform, however, establish a new network of relations among persons who are not yet identified-and who may never be known to each another. Where charity expects that we will feel compassion for the single "wretched woman" standing before us, reform calls upon us to encompass in our minds all "miserable creatures," whether we ever see them or not. In this way, reform brings each of us, in turn, into an imagined relation with all of the urban poor.5

This network of imagined relations is capable of infinite expansion, as Bruce Robbins has shown, and Dickens, having left the parish, finds himself potentially implicated in the sufferings of the entire world. It is in this context that we can best understand his satire of "telescopic philanthropy." His dismissal of anti-slavery activism, like his mockery of any interest in an Africa he renames "Booriboola-Gha," attempts to delimit the scope of concern somewhere between the parish and the world.6 Such delimiting can further a racist or imperialist agenda, but this is not its primary intention. Indeed, the reformist speaker in Boz is critiqued not only for his focus on "other shores," but also for the ease with which he slides from one cant phrase to another ("mercy in hearts-arms in hands") on his way to justifying the "extermination" of the natives. More deliberate and more enduring is another consequence of this delimiting: the consolidation of the nation. As Mary Poovey has demonstrated, social reform and the British nation constituted one another reciprocally. Reformist impulses were limited by national boundaries, but these boundaries were at the same time made real by the reformist activity within them; reformist writings "therefore promised full membership in a whole (and held out the image of that whole) to a part identified as needing both discipline and care" (8). The dangers of this are clear. But Dickens's satire of reform reminds us that limiting our sphere of concern to the nation may be what makes it possible for us to care for others at all.