NEW YORK -- As I listen to the news coming out of England after the recent wave of urban riots -- and as I read Robert Douglas-Fairhurst's compelling new biography of Charles Dickens, Becoming Dickens -- life and art seem to be echoing each other.
In the wake of the riots, British Prime Minister David Cameron has proposed reviving children's courts, urged harsh sentences and orange jumpsuits for convicts, and floated even more odious ideas. For example, convicts could be intentionally exposed to public harassment through cleanup assignments, and their families, who have not committed crimes, could be evicted from their state-subsidized housing. Cameron is also testing arrests for Facebook comments, the suspension of social networks, and more lethal power for police.
In Dickens' England, the judiciary was not independent, and newspapers were subject to state censorship. Kids (like Oliver Twist) were punished in ways designed to break them; poor people convicted of relatively minor offenses were transported to Australia, or given publicly humiliating forms of punishment; police had unchecked and violent power over the poor.
I am not endorsing leniency for looters and thugs; but we already know where the raft of punitive legislation that Cameron is proposing, and his efforts to exploit civil unrest to clamp down on civil liberties, would lead the country.
Likewise, we already know what an England without a social safety net -- where the poor have no hope and no mobility -- looks like. Public education barely existed for the "lower orders" 150 years ago, and university was a fantasy for them -- as it could well be again, with tuition fees set to triple under Cameron.
In Becoming Dickens, Douglas-Fairhurst, rejecting recent "poststructuralist" literary theory, reexamines Dickens and his England within their historical and political contexts. This approach yields valuable insights -- and not a moment too soon. Such "historicist" interpretations of Victorian London have also appeared recently in the fascinating current exhibit at the Wellcome Collection, "Dirt: The Filthy Reality of Everyday Life," and in Bill Bryson's new bestseller, At Home, which examines the social history surrounding a Victorian curate's manor.
The renewed interest in Victorian social history -- what people ate and wore, who worked for whom, etc., as opposed to the history of battles and "great men" -- may not be a coincidence. Western capitalist societies, especially the United Kingdom and the United States, are currently in the process of spooling time backward to the pre-Victorian era, for the benefit of a small group of elites that excludes the working and middle classes who benefited most from the Victorians' social, economic, and political reforms -- let alone the poor.
As a result, it has become urgent to remember that it was the later Victorians who recognized modernity's moral dimension, originating almost every kind of public reform that we now take for granted as the mark of a civilized society.
Early Victorian reality -- destitute street children, raging cholera epidemics, and mounds of uncollected "night soil" in the streets -- was a highly "privatized" reality. In the 1830's, as Douglas-Fairhust movingly demonstrates, boys and girls who came from economically vulnerable families could find themselves unschooled and working 18 hours a day in blacking factories, like the 12-year-old Dickens.
People who did not pay their creditors were sent -- with their families -- to debtors' prisons, as John Dickens, Charles' father, was for owing 40 pounds. Elderly people with no means of support died in rags in alleyways, while lower-middle-class families, with no unemployment insurance or welfare benefits, were perpetually in terror of illness or layoff, which would mean "ruin" and, possibly, being turned out into the street.
London in the 1830's was a city in which a third of women were servants and another third were prostitutes. A massive gap between the elites and everyone else ensured that the top echelons of literature, business, and politics were managed by the wealthy few, and that the talents that would emerge a generation later, in the wake of wider state-funded education, were suppressed. And this is more or less what all of England looked like without a social safety net.
In contrast, the later Victorians, from the 1850's-1880's, created major public works and public-welfare initiatives, including state-funded infirmary networks and compulsory primary education. They expanded a system of workhouses and poor relief for the destitute, built up municipal water and sewage systems, municipalized police forces, and oversaw public investment in landmarks that are still with us, such as the Thames Embankment and the Victoria and Albert Museum.
Likewise, with tens of thousands of street children entirely dependent for food on what they could scavenge or steal, the later Victorians established systems of orphanages. They commissioned the first epidemiological surveys to identify the source of cholera outbreaks -- which could wipe out half the population of a neighborhood in a matter of weeks -- and built new waterworks to stop the spread of the disease from the filthy Thames and tainted local pumps. They built the first major public hospitals at a time when home births and other home care spread contagion and death.
In today's advanced capitalist democracies, most citizens' obliviousness to this history serves elite interests; otherwise, many more people, if not most, would be screaming bloody murder at increasingly successful efforts to shrink the public sector.
As Cameron and other Western conservatives intensify their efforts to clear a path to the past, it is important to bear in mind that there is nothing novel or innovative about the absence of a welfare state and the privatization of basic services. We have been there already -- indeed, much of what is now being dismantled in Britain was built in the Victorian era because of appalling social conditions for most people. If today's conservative political forces remain in power, the dark, dangerous, and ignorant past is where England -- and other Western countries -- risks returning.
Naomi Wolf is a political activist and social critic whose most recent book is Give Me Liberty: A Handbook for American Revolutionaries.
Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2011.
www.project-syndicate.org
Or misplaced expectations?
Dickens observed and communicated. Brunel observed, understood and thus built better. Do not invest hope in someone who can do none of these things. To make improvements it is necessary absorb what is being indicated. Not seek to impose existing belief upon that data.
Your article is revealing and informative in a way that is lacking in so much of what passes for punditry. In the words(paraphrased) of Oliver Twist, "Please, Ms. Wolfe. May we have some more."
He'll be hard pressed to rebuild the dark satanic mills, they're in China & India now. And I suppose there's always begging for our returning wounded veterans. And children? well you do know the age of consent was 12 back then?
Parliamentary democracy won't change things, all we are voting on is the colour of the rosette. Which Eton educated posh boy gets to govern , this year. In Cameron's future there isn't much hope for me is there ? An educated member of the working class, disabled veteran & former army officer.
I'd better get ready for selling boxes of matches , while wearing me campaign medals & tugging me forelock for tourists and me social betters.
As for me, I`m going to organise my new business: `Keeping It Real Tours of Portsmouth`. I cannot let anyone in on my business plan at the moment, though. Sorry.
Well, welcome to the modern American Republican vision.
Of course, we have much, much better garbage dumps from which to mine, compared to the gleanings of pickers working the early-industrial-age dumps Dickens portrays in 'Our Mutual Friend.' Should keep generations of us employed. Should also solve the pesky Social Security problem for many--given the toxic nature of our contemporary landfills.......
Oh man, you commonwealth types really are something else.
A proud "commonwealth type".
1. Didn't appear at all intimidated by the experience rather the opposite. They were fairly aggressive and completely beyond the control of the harassed 40 year old social worker who was 'looking after them'.
2. Appear to be subject to public harassment. You'd have to be fairly hard to harass a group of 20-30 young adult males.
Cameron is, like Thatcher before, a Manchester Liberal with a blue button.
When I hear the verbage coming from the political right in this country, I am both appalled and astonished at the lack of basic knowledge of socio/economic systems throughout history.
We seem to be rapidly hurtling toward the Victorian era once again, as the politicians do the bidding of the corporate elite, while the rest of us are being herded off to serfdom.
Nothing will serve the interests of the powerful more than massive die-offs and manufactured indentured servitude. Positive change won't come from the top, it will come from a billion Dickenses, striving souls who turn the tide one drop at a time.
We must take charge of educating ourselves and one another, creating small, necessity-based industry we control, buying and trading whatever we can from one another, keeping and building our resources with our communities. Grow food, even if it's a tomato pot on your fire escape. Buy real estate if you can afford it -- they don't call it real for nothing. Starve them out. Get on your serfboard and catch / be the wave of cooperation and creation, or get used to brutality and despair. I'd rather go down fighting (peacefully -- which is incredibly challenging [violence is as much laziness as malice; desperation is compelling]) than be obliterated without trying.
We're lacking a viable narrative. We *know* we "must stop this," but *how*??? Armed revolt? Mayhem? Or something else entirely, not destructive? And then what? What does good government look like? How much do we need, how just can we make it? Can we learn cooperation at the personal, local, national and global level? We *must* use our imaginations first and see the way(s) to a positive reality. Dream it, do it, or die.
"Above this race of men stands an immense and tutelary power, which takes upon itself alone to secure their gratifications and to watch over their fate. That power is absolute, minute, regular, provident, and mild. It would be like the authority of a parent if, like that authority, its object was to prepare men for manhood; but it seeks, on the contrary, to keep them in perpetual childhood: it is well content that the people should rejoice, provided they think of nothing but rejoicing. For their happiness such a government willingly labors, but it chooses to be the sole agent and the only arbiter of that happiness; it provides for their security, foresees and supplies their necessities, facilitates their pleasures, manages their principal concerns, directs their industry, regulates the descent of property, and subdivides their inheritances: what remains, but to spare them all the care of thinking and all the trouble of living?"