Les Standiford (6 page)

5.

D
uring a pre-performance tour of the Athenaeum the next afternoon, Dickens was introduced to Richard Cobden, the fiery orator, and the two exchanged compliments and ideas as they wound their way through the institution, and, according to Watkin, “diving into its cellars and mounting to its top, amid sundry jokes” about politics and politicians, including those at the expense of James Crossley, a rather stoutly built local who opposed Cobden fiercely.

One of the chief topics of discussion was Cobden's involvement in the national Anti–Corn Law League. Cobden, who had in 1839 spearheaded a similar local organization in Manchester, had been successful in organizing a national committee to unite all interests who sought to put an end to the tariffs protecting Britain's landed gentry. A former member of the Manchester Chamber of Commerce and one of the city's first aldermen, Cobden was elected to Parliament in 1841, and he quickly became one of the principal spokesmen against the vested interests propping up British grain prices and keeping the price of bread artificially high.

The severe depression of 1840–42, combined with a series of bad harvests, led to shortages and high prices that increased support among the general British population for Cobden's position. The group also picked up the backing of manufacturers, who feared that the duties that kept corn prices inflated would ultimately lead to stoppages by workmen seeking higher wages. Cobden crisscrossed the whole of England, speaking to increasingly growing audiences, and had become a national workingman's hero by the time he and Dickens met in Manchester.

Disraeli, who would join them on stage—and though a Tory and a conservative at heart—had endeared himself to liberals for his demands that the landed interests were obligated to protect the rights and livelihood of the poor. Thus, the popular trio—politician, novelist, and novelist-cum-politician—made the perfect cast for the Athenaeum's playbill. Cobden and Disraeli were perhaps more experienced as public speakers. (Taunted once by William Gladstone that he would probably die “by hanging or of some vile disease,” Disraeli retorted, “That would depend, sir, on whether I embraced your principles or your mistress.”) But despite his recent setbacks, Dickens's long-standing celebrity made him the undisputed star of the show.

I
t would have been difficult for Dickens to throw himself into his savior's role in Manchester that night in 1843—his marriage was troubled, his career tottering, his finances ready to collapse. With all that on his mind, could he truly put it aside and rally an audience on behalf of workingmen's access to ideas, and arts, and education? But these principles formed the very heart and soul of Dickens's own best work, and furthermore, he had once been one of those men on whose behalf he spoke.

At thirty-one, he was still developing as an artist, to be sure, but with the publication of
Sketches by Boz
(diffuse, but displaying the wide array of his social interests),
The Pickwick Papers
(episodic, but rich in character and comedy), and
Oliver Twist
(at times melodramatic, but nonetheless unified in power of theme), he had demonstrated the range and depth and dramatic facility that would build on the accomplishments of those who had come before him (Fielding, Defoe, Smollett, Richardson, and Scott), and which would make him, in the eyes of most present-day commentators, the first truly modern novelist, as well as the chief spokesman for his age.

In the latter regard, Dickens was well aware of the authority he had achieved as a spokesman and an artist. It may be difficult to appreciate such a status today, when celebrities are excoriated for expressing their political views during an awards ceremony—or during a phase of twentieth-century criticism proclaiming that novels are the subjective fancies of their respective authors and bear no practical relation to reality (if there even is such a thing as “reality”). “Art cannot rescue anybody from anything,” rings the last line of a well-known story by Gilbert Sorrentino.

But in Dickens's time, the notion of a narrator-author standing in the wings of a fictitious story, always ready to step forward and explain the actions and motives of a character or to deliver an exegesis on the nature of the world surrounding him, was completely acceptable. For one thing, in an age when education was less than universal and where relatively few attended university, it only stood to reason that an informed author who was at all serious about his craft might have something instructive to pass along about the workings of human nature and the laws that governed commerce. In Dickens's day, the novel was viewed not only as a source of entertainment but also very much as a potential source of information and enlightenment.

Furthermore, there existed in those times nothing like the network of governmental social services that a modern age takes for granted. Charitable enterprises for the poor and unfortunates of all types were run by churches and private organizations, many of which were guided by questionable motives and methods. Particularly galling to Dickens, who would “never, ever forget” his ignominious childhood, were the puritanical at heart, who demanded obeisance to their belief systems in return for a bowl of gruel. To Dickens, true charity was a matter of openhearted benevolence; to use the relief of poverty as a cudgel to beat a recipient into piousness was repellent and evil.

Dickens was no radical, and the theories of Marx and Engels (the latter's family owned a cotton mill in Manchester at the time of Dickens's appearance before the Athenaeum) went much too far for him. Dickens believed that a reasonable capitalistic society could be made to recognize its responsibility to all its citizens, and that it was the duty of those most fortunate to share a portion of their gain with those whose grasp had slipped while pulling at their bootstraps.

He opposed violent confrontation to achieve these means, of course; but he well understood why desperate men would be driven to crime and violence. And he was severely critical of individuals and moneyed interests who sought to shirk their responsibilities to the poor. Legislation that oppressed the unfortunate (such as the Corn Laws and the imprisonment of debtors and the failure to properly regulate labor practices) were particular targets of his wrath—as were bureaucratic incompetency, the scarcity of public works and sanitation, and personal greed, gluttony, and indifference.

But Dickens was not a humorless reformer. The end he sought in all his zeal was a society in which the pleasures of life could be enjoyed by everyone: culture, entertainment, good food and drink, convivial fellowship, and a happy family. Were he alive to hear a man named Rodney King call out, “Why can't we all just get along?” the comment would have surely brought an approving nod and the Cockney-inflected phrase that Dickens was found of using: “Oh, law, yes.”

T
hus, though it may be true that Dickens had accepted his invitation to the Manchester Athenaeum because his sister Fanny had prevailed upon him to, everything in his philosophical makeup predisposed him to make that two-hundred-mile journey by rail from London. If England was at the world's forefront of industrial revolution—with the consolidation of small farms into large, and the mechanization of agriculture and steel production and textiles leading the way—then coal-fired Manchester was leading the charge.

From a population of 6,000 in 1685, the town—with its ready access to the shipping port of Liverpool and its proximity to coal deposits and rapidly flowing rivers providing power—had become the world's first modern industrial city, growing to 300,000 by 1830, and to more than 400,000 by the time that Dickens arrived. There were about 16 million residents in all of England at the time, and about 2 million living in London—a striking contrast to the United States, which had a comparable 17 million, but only 312,000 in its largest metropolis, New York City.

Prosperity for factory and mill and transportation interests had not come without cost, however. Owners lived like potentates, and a growing number of managerial workers were beginning to enjoy the relative ease of a middle class. But most of those who made the factories run were laborers, and they and their families lived in squalor.

In Manchester, Tocqueville wrote, “humanity attains its most complete development and its most brutish; here civilization works its miracles, and civilized man is turned back almost into a savage.” Most of the city's streets were unpaved, and its laborers' districts were “untraversed by common sewers,” leaving piles of excrement and trash for pedestrians to dodge. Many homes had dirt floors, lacked for windows and doors, and were described as “ill ventilated” and “unprovided with privies.” As a result, wrote the social activist James Kay in 1832, “the streets which are narrow, unpaved and worn into deep ruts, become the common receptacles of mud, refuse, and disgusting ordure.”

A decade later, just prior to Dickens's visit, Joseph Adshead's
Distress in Manchester
pointed out that things had only become worse: “[D]estitution in its most rigorous form prevails to an appalling extent in Manchester,” wrote Adshead, quoting a local doctor who said that “no inconsiderable portion of our fellow-creatures is living on food and in dwellings scarcely fit for brutes.”

Friedrich Engels, who, at the time of Dickens's visit, was gathering steam for the economic analysis upon which Karl Marx would base the 1848 publication of the
Manifesto of the Communist Party,
wrote a treatise that decried the cycles of boom and bust that only exacerbated such conditions, and turned laborers from whole human beings into “hands,” of which many were needed when demand for goods was high, and which would be discarded when business turned slow. Mechanization had turned men into one more statistical element in an equation of production, Marx and Engels would argue, putting an end to all paternal relationships between owners and workers left over from the feudal days, to leave “no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous ‘cash payment.'”

Conditions were so bad in Manchester, more than one modern labor economist has surmised, that had Engels come of age in some far more pleasant surroundings such as London,
The Communist Manifesto
might not have been written the way it was. Says analyst David McLellan, had Engels spent more time in that capital, “where manufacture was still dominated by artisans, he would have got a different picture.” Of course, Dickens, who had spent some time in the so-called patriarchal employ of a London “artisan,” might have begged to differ, but there is little disagreement with the fact that the Manchester of 1843 was a hellhole.

One out of every thirty-one people living in that city died each year, compared with a rate of one in forty-five for the country as a whole. Fifty-seven percent of children born to working-class parents died before they reached the age of five.

And the effects of the great depression of 1841–42 were still lingering, with as many as 3,000 people per day lining up at soup kitchens. A number of the city's 130 smoke-and gas-spewing mills had gone into bankruptcy with the downturn in business, and in late 1842 Engels wrote of “crowds of unemployed working men at every street corner, and many mills…still standing idle.”

The development of the power loom made earning a living particularly difficult on hand-weavers, whose wages—when they could still find work—had dropped by 60 percent between 1820 and 1840. As there were still about 100,000 of such craftsmen living and seeking work in the Manchester area, their desperation, according to one labor historian, “cast a pall over the entire period and over all the working classes.”(Interestingly, the desperation of the times led to the emigration of one such unemployed Scottish hand-weaver named Carnegie to the United States, where his son Andrew would become the chief industrialist of all time.)