Dickens and Social Ideas
“Dickens and Social Ideas”
Raymond Williams
In
Dickens 1970: Centenary Essays
Ed. Michael Slater
Marwa Sobhy
Dickens’s relations with some major ideas of his time:
Hard Times has been widely taken as a direct exposure of utilitarianism*. For example, Thomas Gradgrind is quite clearly a utilitarian. He is described as having an “unbending, utilitarian, matter-of-fact face” (Book I, Chapter XV). The emphasis on statistical inquiry and the reliance on “the strong dispassionate ground of reason and calculation” (Book I, Chapter XV) also makes the identification certain. The education he imposes on Tom and Louisa is very unlike the famous education of John Stuart Mill. Just as Louisa could say “I never had a child’s heart” (Book I, Chapter XV), Mill could also say “I never was a boy; never played at cricket; it is better to let Nature have her way”.
“If we isolate the system of thinking as the only object of attack, we have to observe…how many feelings Dickens had in common with the utilitarian reformers.” This would be a simplification of Hard Times. He shared with them an insistence on legal reform; precisely in Hard Times, where the presentation of the problems of divorce, and of the lack of a law which could help such poor men as Stephen Blackpool, is very much in this spirit. He shared contempt for the aristocracy and its social pretensions, sufficiently instanced in Hard Times by Mrs Sparsit and James Harthouse. He shared impatience with every kind of inherited muddle and neglect – and “muddle”, as Blackpool’s diagnosis of his condition, is characteristic.
What Dickens is refuting is not so much an idea as a whole social formation. The reliance on reason had been cleansing and liberating; but
* The main tenets of utilitarianism included the exposure of all institutions to the tests of rational utility, in the interest of the greatest happiness of the greatest number, and the possibility of objective ethics, in which the judgment of right and wrong actions would be dependent on calculation of the amount of pleasure or pain which those actions produce.
as an instrument of a class both reforming and aggressive, it became an alienation, in which the calculation of interest was separated from all other human impulses and ties. As in Bitzer, not thinking but rationalising, not applying but using an idea,
his only reasonable transaction in that commodity would have been to buy it for as little as he could possibly give…it having been clearly ascertained by philosophers that in this is comprised the whole duty of a man – not a part of man’s duty, but the whole.” (Book II, Chapter I)**
However, what “philosophers” had ascertained, or tried to ascertain, was an ethical basis. What was being applied, on the authority of the economists but more directly on the interest of a class, was a characteristic form of capitalist trade. The structure of Dickens’s handling of the idea is exact: not the analysable content of utilitarianism but the consequence of it.Utilitarianism in Dickens’s Hard Times is a central idea that has been taken in this essay for clarification; it shows the relation of utilitarianism to his practice as a novelist.
Raymond Williams
In
Dickens 1970: Centenary Essays
Ed. Michael Slater
Marwa Sobhy
Dickens’s relations with some major ideas of his time:
Hard Times has been widely taken as a direct exposure of utilitarianism*. For example, Thomas Gradgrind is quite clearly a utilitarian. He is described as having an “unbending, utilitarian, matter-of-fact face” (Book I, Chapter XV). The emphasis on statistical inquiry and the reliance on “the strong dispassionate ground of reason and calculation” (Book I, Chapter XV) also makes the identification certain. The education he imposes on Tom and Louisa is very unlike the famous education of John Stuart Mill. Just as Louisa could say “I never had a child’s heart” (Book I, Chapter XV), Mill could also say “I never was a boy; never played at cricket; it is better to let Nature have her way”.
“If we isolate the system of thinking as the only object of attack, we have to observe…how many feelings Dickens had in common with the utilitarian reformers.” This would be a simplification of Hard Times. He shared with them an insistence on legal reform; precisely in Hard Times, where the presentation of the problems of divorce, and of the lack of a law which could help such poor men as Stephen Blackpool, is very much in this spirit. He shared contempt for the aristocracy and its social pretensions, sufficiently instanced in Hard Times by Mrs Sparsit and James Harthouse. He shared impatience with every kind of inherited muddle and neglect – and “muddle”, as Blackpool’s diagnosis of his condition, is characteristic.
What Dickens is refuting is not so much an idea as a whole social formation. The reliance on reason had been cleansing and liberating; but
* The main tenets of utilitarianism included the exposure of all institutions to the tests of rational utility, in the interest of the greatest happiness of the greatest number, and the possibility of objective ethics, in which the judgment of right and wrong actions would be dependent on calculation of the amount of pleasure or pain which those actions produce.
as an instrument of a class both reforming and aggressive, it became an alienation, in which the calculation of interest was separated from all other human impulses and ties. As in Bitzer, not thinking but rationalising, not applying but using an idea,
his only reasonable transaction in that commodity would have been to buy it for as little as he could possibly give…it having been clearly ascertained by philosophers that in this is comprised the whole duty of a man – not a part of man’s duty, but the whole.” (Book II, Chapter I)**
However, what “philosophers” had ascertained, or tried to ascertain, was an ethical basis. What was being applied, on the authority of the economists but more directly on the interest of a class, was a characteristic form of capitalist trade. The structure of Dickens’s handling of the idea is exact: not the analysable content of utilitarianism but the consequence of it.Utilitarianism in Dickens’s Hard Times is a central idea that has been taken in this essay for clarification; it shows the relation of utilitarianism to his practice as a novelist.
posted by Happy-Go-Lucky @ 11:09 PM
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