Orphans and Republicans
Nord, Deborah Epstein
The Republican ascendancy has brought with it some remarkable conservative revisions of history and literature. Various politicians and scholars have encouraged us to think nostalgically about...
...The leading Republican champion of Victorianism is Gertrude Himmelfarb...
...Himmelfarb lauds the stigma associated with illegitimacy in the Victorian age, as if somehow it kept out-of-wedlock births to a minimum...
...Dickens simply got things wrong...
...In Himmelfarb's view, Dickens was a befuddled bleeding heart...
...In that novel, his chief targets were those he called the "philosophers," the social thinkers and engineers who celebrated self-interest as a justification for bashing the poor...
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...In a recent New York Times Op-Ed article, Himmelfarb advanced her cause by attacking the greatest critic of Victorian mores, Charles Dickens...
...The real-life Oliver Twists dwelled not in Dickensian hellholes but in benevolent, well-maintained, spiritually elevating institutions...
...As for the orphanages and children's homes, there certainly were some large private ventures (such as the famous Dr...
...Shame...
...In the Poor Law's workhouses and in the orphanages, the Victorians gave the poor what they truly needed—a roof, some food, honest work, and plenty of moral guidance...
...The logic behind the law was simple: make the workhouses as harsh and demeaning as possible so that the able-bodied, "deserving" poor would work as hard as they could to stay out of them...
...But the lack of adequate sanitation caused contagious diseases like cholera and typhus to spread in epidemic proportions...
...Chastity, cleanliness, and shame, she insists, were the reigning values in mid-nineteenth-century Britain, not the callousness and greed that Dickens described...
...And he delivered his satire far more cagily and imaginatively than Himmelfarb recognizes...
...Punish the good-for-nothings, went the argument, and the good-for-somethings would not be tempted into a lazy life at the public's expense...
...For Dickens was, above all, a critic and satirist of mentalities, not institutions...
...It is, for example, Fagin, the great underworld figure in the novel, who serves as Dickens's main mouthpiece for the principle that the greed of each will ultimately benefit the good of all...
...There are plenty of voices like hers on today's scene...
...Yes, the Victorians espoused it as an ideal, but untold thousands of women were forced to make their livings as prostitutes in London streets (and untold thousands of men, high-born and low, availed themselves of their services...
...168 • DISSENT...
...Various politicians and scholars have encouraged us to think nostalgically about the past...
...And even after some liberalizing efforts in the 1850s and 1860s, public provisioning of orphans ranged from austere to vicious...
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...Workhouse inmates performed hard and largely useless labor and were fed meager amounts of food...
...Cleanliness...
...The Victorians nobly sought to uplift the poor, notably with the passage of the 1834 Poor Law and with the construction of homes for orphans and wayward children...
...Himmelfarb, a modern-day philosopher, draws a eulogistic covering over laws and institutions that sought to starve poor people in order to discourage poverty...
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...It was the punitive attitude regarding poverty that Dickens pilloried in Oliver Twist...
...Then there's the 1834 Poor Law...
...But can she really want to bring back the stigmatizing SPRING • 1995 • 167 Right Turn of illegitimate children, the inevitable victims of the cult of shame, in order to chastise their ostensibly profligate mothers...
...But many smaller private enterprises housed children in appalling conditions...
...Chastity...
...When Dickens's Oliver asks for "more," he is not, in fact, in an orphanage at all, as Himmelfarb misreports, but in one of those workhouses, all too accurately described...
...Longing for a golden age before the welfare state, some of these commentators would like to take us back to Victorian Britain in search of enlightened models of social policy and personal morality...
...Himmelfarb confuses Victorian ideology with historical reality...
...Barnardo's) that kept their charges reasonably well fed and well clothed...
...Too many readers, she contends, have misread his novels (particularly Oliver Twist) as reliable renderings of the Victorian era...
...When Fagin preaches to his band of boy criminals about the thief's doctrine of selfishness, he sounds a great deal like the novel's Poor Law magistrates and like the political economists whom Dickens detested...
...And behind that logic lay the insidious and impractical assumption that a precise line could be drawn between the "deserving" and the "undeserving" poor—that the first group could always muster the wherewithal to lead independent lives, and that the second group (a sort of Victorian underclass) was of no use anyway...
...One of the law's chief aims was to discourage pauperism by requiring those who needed public support to live in workhouses...
...Yes, again as an ideal (although we can be sure that even a middle-class Victorian's standard of personal cleanliness would not be recognizable as a standard today...
...What we lack are voices with the moral clarity of Charles Dickens...
Vol. 42 • April 1995 • No. 2
