Les Standiford (7 page)

T
he city to which Dickens had come was in many ways the apotheosis, then, of all that he abhorred. He had made a brief visit in 1838, while he was beginning work on
Nicholas Nickleby
—“his purpose to see the interior of a cotton mill, I fancy with reference to some of his publications,” wrote fellow novelist Harrison Ainsworth in a letter of introduction for Dickens. And what Dickens found in those factories had an indelible effect: “What I have seen [in Manchester] has disgusted and astonished me beyond all measure.”

Still, he felt a great affinity for those who struggled on behalf of the downtrodden, and he had developed a number of friends among the locals in Manchester, including his first schoolmaster at Chatam, the Reverend William Giles. For that reason, he contended that despite conditions in the city, “I never came to Manchester without expecting pleasure, and I never left it without taking pleasure away,” though one might wonder if he expected to take any away on this night.

Disraeli up there at the podium, the rising star, while he sat contemplating fortunes on the wane. His sales a fifth of what they had once been. His publishers ready to dock his salary. The critics turned shortsighted and vicious.

And this audience before him, expecting what? Wisdom? Comfort? Salvation? Good Lord, it seemed he could not keep himself afloat. What had he to offer all them?

But Disraeli had finished, and now it was Dickens's time.

A
fter a hearty introduction and welcome that would surely have done something to boost his spirits, Dickens began his speech with a reminder of his faith in the power of reason, praising the occasion of their gathering in a venue “where we have no more knowledge of party difficulties, or public animosities between side and side…than if we were a public meeting in the commonwealth of Utopia.” And he followed by reiterating the credo that would guide him in his art and in his public life: “I take it, that it is not of greater importance to all of us than it is to every man who has learned to know that he has an interest in the moral and social elevation, the harmless relaxation, the peace, happiness, and improvement, of the community at large.”

Of Manchester and the Athenaeum on behalf of which he spoke, Dickens said, “It well becomes…this little world of labour, that…she should have a splendid temple sacred to the education and improvement of a large class of those who, in their various useful stations, assist in the production of our wealth.”

And he went on to add a bit of the poet's touch in service of his point, with a gesture to the grand hall about them, “I think it is grand to know, that, while her factories re-echo with the clanking of stupendous engines, and the whirl and rattle of machinery, the immortal mechanism of God's own hand, the mind, is not forgotten in the din and uproar, but is lodged and tended in a palace of its own.”

He then turned to the circumstances that had brought him to the city. He reminded his audience that “the Athenaeum was projected at a time when commerce was in a vigorous and flourishing condition, and when those classes of society to which it particularly addresses itself were fully employed, and in the receipt of regular incomes.”

He was speaking, however, at a time when unemployment in the mills hovered between 15 and 20 percent, and wages had dropped a similar percentage over the past ten years. “A season of depression almost without a parallel ensued,” he told his audience, “and large numbers of young men…suddenly found their occupation gone and themselves reduced to very straitened and penurious circumstances.”

The downturn had led the Athenaeum—with its library of 6,000 volumes; classes for the study of languages, elocution, and music; exercise facilities; and regular programs of lectures and debate—to accumulate a debt of more than 3,000 pounds, Dickens told the audience; but the number of citizens willing to contribute a mere sixpence weekly for all the benefits had more than doubled in recent months, he said, and if more in the audience were willing to join, the amount of even that modest subscription would be reduced.

With that behind him, he launched into the meat of his address. There were a few “dead-and-gone” objections that had traditionally been raised against the formation of such institutions as the Athenaeum, he said, and their philosophy could be summed up in one short sentence: “How often have we heard from a large class of men wise in their generation, who would really seem to be born and bred for no other purpose than to pass into currency counterfeit and mischievous scraps of wisdom…that ‘a little learning is a dangerous thing.'”

Dickens paused for emphasis, then went on. “Why, a little hanging was considered a very dangerous thing, according to the same authorities, with this difference, that, because a little hanging was dangerous, we had a great deal of it; and, because a little learning was dangerous, we were to have none at all.”

We can imagine the roar of approval that those words brought from his audience. The lines carry the same pungency that had elevated the
Sketches,
and the observations of
Pickwick
's Sam Weller, and the bite that kept
Oliver Twist
from collapsing under the weight of its convictions.

Warming to his theme, Dickens continued, “I should be glad to hear such people's estimate of the comparative danger of ‘a little learning' and a vast amount of ignorance; I should be glad to know which they consider the most prolific parent of misery and crime.” At this point he turned personal. “I should be glad to assist them in their calculations,” he said of those who found learning a luxury, foreshadowing one of the plot devices of a certain novel-to-come, “by carrying them into certain gaols and nightly refuges I know of, where my own heart dies within me, when I see thousands of immortal creatures condemned…by years of this most wicked axiom.”

He proclaimed his belief that with the pursuit and accumulation of knowledge, man had the capacity to change himself and his lot in life. With learning, said Dickens, a man “acquires for himself that property of soul which has in all times upheld struggling men of every degree.” The more a man learns, Dickens said, “the better, gentler, kinder man he must become. When he knows how much great minds have suffered for the truth in every age and time…he will become more tolerant of other men's belief in all matters, and will incline more leniently to their sentiments when they chance to differ from his own.”

He closed with the assertion to his Athenaeum audience that “long after your institution, and others of the same nature, have crumbled into dust, the noble harvest of the seed sown in them will shine out brightly in the wisdom, the mercy, and the forbearance of another race.” It was a speech that would have taken no more than ten or twelve minutes to deliver in its entirety, and yet in it, Dickens conveyed the essence of his most passionate beliefs: championing education, decrying ignorance and those who sought to perpetuate it, and thereby affirming a belief in the possibility of an individual's capability for self-determination that fuels debate among social theorists to this day.

Dickens had lifted himself up from penniless wretch to become the leading literary practitioner of his day; Andrew Carnegie would carry a version of the by-one's-own-bootstraps gospel to America, remaking himself from bobbin boy into steel titan and richest man on earth—then building 3,000 free libraries so that others could presumably follow in his path. In this view, and with the application of his knowledge, reason, and innate decency, mankind had everything needed to make a just and happy world.

6.

I
f it is true that Dickens never left Manchester without bearing pleasure away, he could not have conceived of the gift that this 1843 visit to what had been called “the chimney of the world” would provide him. Yet it was in the hours after his speech at the Athenaeum, as he walked alone through the city's darkened streets with his mind churning, that the idea came upon him for a new work, one that would one day be called the best-known work of fiction in the language.

Dickens obviously had practical reasons for seeking inspiration: there was the matter of his debt to Chapman and Hall, and his marked decline in sales. But he also felt a deep desire to prove his critics wrong and an equal urgency to prove to himself as well as his public that he had not lost his touch.

There were more positive factors at work as well. He assured his audience at the close of his speech that night that he would long carry with him the pleasure of seeing the response that his remarks had brought—all those bright eyes and beaming faces looking up at him. And he also acknowledged that his audience was counting on him: he would not “easily forget this scene, the pleasing tasks your favour has devolved on me.”

As his letters to his friend Forster record, he also carried other memories with him as he walked the streets that night. Shortly before the trip to Manchester, he had taken a tour of a so-called ragged school in London, in the company of Baroness Angela Burdett Coutts, philanthropist and heiress to a banking fortune. He had gone to the Field Lane School in Saffron Hill, perhaps the sorriest neighborhood in London, as research for
Martin Chuzzlewit,
hoping the visit would help him in efforts to shine a light on the wretched conditions of the country's workers and also strengthen his resolve to bring a “Sledge-hammer” down upon the rampant abuses of child labor. But
Chuzzlewit
was no longer looking like an effective vehicle with which to bring widespread attention to anything.

However, his visit to the Field Lane School—one of a number of free public schools for poor children—brought him face to face with a collection of young boys and girls who were the embodiment, in Dickens's words, of “profound ignorance and perfect barbarism.” Most of these “students” were illiterate, all were filthy and shabbily dressed (thus the epithet “ragged”), and many resorted to thievery or prostitution in order to live.

Dickens, who entered the school in a gleaming pair of white trousers and brightly shined boots, was met by howls of derision, and a companion, Clarkson Stanfield, was so overwhelmed by the stench of the place that he fled the scene at once. But despite what he described as “a sickening atmosphere, in the midst of taint and dirt and pestilence: with all the deadly sins let loose, howling and shrieking at the doors,” Dickens remained, doggedly asking question after question until the children finally began to sense compassion in this alien creature and actually began to talk with him.

What he beheld at the Saffron Hill school was bad enough—he told Miss Burdett Coutts that “in all the strange and dreadful things I have seen in London and elsewhere,” seldom had he witnessed “anything so shocking as the dire neglect of soul and body exhibited in these children.” But the truth is that in the England of Dickens's day, barely one child in three in the entire population attended school, and in London there were estimated to be as many as 100,000 poor children—5 percent of the city's population—who had not so much as darkened the door of any school, “ragged” or otherwise.

His shock and dismay led Miss Burdett Coutts to pledge funds on the spot for washrooms at the Field Lane School, and also for the rental of more-commodious, well-ventilated classrooms. But Dickens well knew that they were trying to douse an inferno with a teacup. “Side by side with Crime, Disease, and Misery in England,” he would write disconsolately, “Ignorance is always brooding, and is always certain to be found.”

W
ith such thoughts, and the vision of his rapt Manchester audience, crowding his mind, Dickens strode about the drizzling streets of Manchester, debating the proper course of action. Indeed, a lesser individual might have packed it all in and fled to blessed anonymity on the Continent, where he would have found sufficient work writing travel pieces to keep a cottage heated and bread on the table while he wrote books that would be “good for” an ungrateful public, whether they liked them or not. He would not have been the first artist, or the last, to suspect that he deserved a better audience.

But Dickens was not just good at what he did; he was the very best of his time, a man whose powers had at one point delighted 100,000 of his countrymen each week. Was he really going to walk away from all that at the age of thirty-one?

What actually happened that night was extraordinary. As his letters to Forster would make clear, Dickens began to take stock of himself in a way that any accomplished and acclaimed writer would find extremely difficult, much less the most famous writer of his time. And yet he forced himself to confront hard truths. Perhaps it was not “them”—the jealous critics and the fickle readers—in whom the fault lay. Perhaps he had let his disappointment with America in particular and with human nature in general overwhelm his powers of storytelling and characterization in his recent work—perhaps he had simply taken it for granted that an adoring public would sit still for whatever he offered it.

Perhaps he could still get a point across and write a book of which he could be rightfully proud. Most important, perhaps there was a way to do so without browbeating or scolding, or mounting a soapbox. Perhaps he could get them without their knowing they were got. If he could only find the way.

And so, as he walked the streets that night, a new story began to form. His nightly walks continued, even after his return from Manchester to London, his mind still whirling…

…until bit by bit his tale took shape, and, as his friend Forster put it, with “a strange mastery it seized him.” He wept over it, laughed, and then wept again, as bits and pieces swam up before him, including the vision of two children named Ignorance and Want, those “wretched, abject, frightful, hideous, miserable” creatures who would, with Tiny Tim and Bob Cratchit and Scrooge and Marley and all the rest, stamp themselves on Dickens's imagination, and that of the world, forever.