Dickensian Intemperance: Charity and Reform

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

In order to understand why Dickens might need the temperance narrative, we first must understand what he is trying, in Boz, to achieve. Nearly all of the sketches that make up Boz were first published independently, in a number of different magazines. It was only when Dickens was preparing them for their reissue in volume form that he arranged them in their present order. In doing so, Dickens imposed on the vagaries of biography and the contingencies of history an are of literary development, an are that we can trace in the section titles. After the "Seven Sketches from Our Parish," Boz moves to the city. The titles of the subsequent sections reduce the sketch form to its component parts, as if to demonstrate that the city requires new techniques of description ("Scenes"), characterization ("Characters"), and plotting ("Tales"). Critics have long recognized that Dickens's formal innovations emerged out of his efforts to represent the modern city. Raymond Williams argues, for instance, that the hidden connections revealed over the course of Dickens's plots reflect an urban experience of seeming randomness and underlying order (155), while Alexander Welsh attributes the thinness of Dickens's characters to an urban emphasis on surface rather than depth (10). I would like to extend this line of argument by focusing on that aspect of city life that most concerns Dickens in Boz, namely, the stark disparities of poverty and wealth.

That these disparities exist is something Dickens everywhere acknowledges; how they might be represented is the subject of "Meditations in Monmouthstreet," one of Boz's early city sketches. The narrator visits the second-hand clothing shops that line Monmouth Street in order to indulge in the pleasures of imagining the persons whom the cast-off pieces of clothing metonymically conjure up. Having done this for a while, the narrator then turns to the more difficult task of imagining the possible relations among the people he has invented. Where imagining the individual people required him to infer economic status, imagining the relations among them now requires him to account for economic difference. He experiments with two strategies for doing so, the first temporal, the second spatial. The temporal strategy is prompted by an array of suits, some that had been worn by boys and some, by men; some that were respectable; some, gay; and some, degraded. The narrator connects these suits to one another by imagining them all belonging to the same man at various moments in his life, as he moves from the loving superintendence of his mother's home through a life of increasing degradation and crime to an ignominious sentence of death. What connects all of these stages is the temperance narrative. The crucial turn in the young man's life comes when he falls under the wayward sway of new acquaintances and "swagger[s]" with them into "the public house" (100). From this, the rest surely follows. The narrator sketches in a few strokes the "bare and miserable room, destitute of furniture," the wife and children, "pale, hungry, and emaciated," and the man himself "cursing their lamentations, staggering to the tap-room, from whence he had just returned," and finally striking the wife who has followed him to plead for a little money with which to buy bread (101).