Why We Need A New Dickens

...Dickens himself became acquainted with the poor as what today's social scientists would call a "participant observer...

...Instead of seeing the poor, as Malthus did, as some abstract, seething mass of "surplus population," Dickens saw them as individuals, engaging enough to merit novels of 700, 800, 900 pages...

...And that takes understanding...

...workers who'd prosper with a union...

...When it came to influence, Daniel Webster argued that Dickens had "done more to ameliorate the condition of the English poor than all the statesmen Great Britain had sent into Parliament" Even the conservative Matthew Cooper is an editor of The Washington Monthly...

...The villains of Hard Times aren't just bad apples, but overlords of a cruel factory system, dehumanizing in the monotony of its work...

...Dickens," shouted a carriage driver to Dickens's son, on the day of the novelist's funeral...

...Consider the way that Mr...

...The Dickens mantle demands a life outside the academy, exposed to the real world...

...We don't have the literature that will condemn their faults and recognize that these are people who can be helped...

...He'd jot down dozens of "sketches," detailed descriptions of just about anything he'd run into...

...But Dickens's immersion in street life made his novels richer...

...Talk about the unintended consequences of liberal reform...

...In his next book, Oliver Twist, and throughout the other novels he was to write until his death in 1870, Dickens stuck to the simple proposition that no class had a monopoly on smarts or morality or decency or humor...

...His pages brim with venal landlords, nasty bankers, and callous captains of industry...

...That kind of empathy stoked the era's major reform movements...

...After supper "the cloth was cleared, the hearth swept" In the Cratchits, like Oliver Twist or David Copperfield or Little Dorrit, respectable British middle-class readers found an ideal of themselves...

...Yes, it is dirty—it's nat'rally dirty, and it's nat'rally onwholesome," boasts the father...

...it doesn't come naturally...

...You rather want somebody to look after you, sir wen your judgement goes out a wistin'," Weller chirps...

...I don't mean the anesthesia of paying for yet another government program, but involvement...

...Martin Luther King put that same insight into action when Birmingham school children stared down firehoses and police dogs, leaving us with one of the most arresting image of the civil rights movement...

...Piggle happens by...

...Had Dickens's criticisms been heavy-handed, as Steven Marcus points out, middle-class readers wouldn't have touched his works...

...I don't know if there will be a single figure—be it a novelist or filmmaker or journalist—who can animate a nation's imagination the way Dickens did, or whether it may take a disparate group, or even an artistic movement...

...Obviously it wasn't just the reporting that made Dickens Dickens...

...Individuals disappoint...

...In three-four decades, the liberal progressive has not produced a single writer that itself respects and reads with interest...

...Economist conceded that Dickens fueled "the age's passion—we call it so designedly—which prevails to improve the condition of the working classes...

...The idea of Jacobin-style revolution haunted Dickens, who poured his fears into prose in A Tale of Two Cities...

...You've over-fed him, ma'am...

...I couldn't point to any book that explained how those kids could be such utter failures in school, unable at age 15 to write a single sentence, and still be as sharp and savvy and as alert as any kids I had known growing up in the New Jersey suburbs...

...If anything, there's a schism in his writing, dividing what you might call, for lack of better terms, the worthy poor from the unworthy— between those who merit our admiration and those who don't...

...His was a subtle and muscular vision that recognized (and condemned) the sins of impoverished individuals as well as the collective guilt of a society...

...The tragedies of Bleak House, one of his last and gloomiest books, are found in the systematic injustice of the courts...

...When not at work, he spent long days wandering the alleys of work-weary London...

...and if she says I didn't she's a Lie...

...Today, when many liberals still romanticize the poor, Dickens's ability to distinguish poverty from nobility is well worth remembering...

...The next Dickens needs to put us not in our Olivers' shoes, but in those of our own Artful Dodgers...

...But he rarely saw the individuals who were a mixture of good and bad...

...But they too were practically flawless...

...When a contemporary critic hailed Dickens's talent for making a "washerwoman as interesting as a duchess," it was a tribute not only to Dickens's wonderful prose, but to his new vision...

...And, indeed, the Victorian (and New Deal) reforms that were, in part, inspired by Dickens focused on these able-to-help-themselves characters...

...Sowerberry...

...Fagin's problem is Fagin...

...In our century of failed revolutions, there's no more haunting or timely image than Dickens's Madame DeFarge, knitting by the guillotine...

...As a result, like so many working people of the time, the Dickens family floated in and out of debtors' prison (bringing their servant with them, as was the custom of the day...

...In the 12 years after he died, nearly four million copies of his books sold in Britain alone—an amazing feat even by Stephen King standards...

...As Dickens was spinning novels, the history of the working class in Manchester was being written by a German emigre named Friedrich Engels...

...There was—and still is—no writer who combines great talent and great popularity and who captures that bizarre marriage of sin and decency I saw in those tenement families...

...With his parents often imprisoned, describing what he saw there became a way of mastering a hostile world...

...It's not just their "conditions" that make them sympathetic—the fact that they're poor or that Bob Cratchit has a boss like Scrooge or that Tiny Tim needs crutches...

...While a new Dickens couldn't cure poverty, he could inspire personal commitment from the middle class...

...Dickens makes his readers want to help the deserving poor...

...more often than not he seems a good deal wiser than his master...

...Kids who'd be okay if child labor was abolished...

...And it's too much to expect all art to serve as social glue, binding each of us to the concerns of the less fortunate...

...Instead of promoting a specific alternative to the workhouse, he satirized it, appealing to his readers' Christian charity...

...The resulting bouquet of triumphs included everything from fewer working hours to free education and universal suffrage...

...Of course, it's not just our artists who've failed us, but our politicans too...

...We spy them when Mrs...

...But even as he skewered institutions, Dickens understood that the poor were often in the wrong themselves...

...Bumble—who runs the "progressive" workhouse—understands Oliver's revolt...

...There's more to Dickens, though, than misty-eyed sentiment...

...The Dickens character who most reflects our dilemma is the Artful Dodger, the young pickpocket who befriends Oliver Twist...

...Bumble terrorized Oliver for asking for a second helping of gruel, even affluent Englishmen knew how the orphan felt...

...The idea of poverty And when Dickens trained his guns, liberals weren't exempt...

...Today when politicians are retreating from helping the poor and growth offers no panacea, we need another Dickens to inspire each of us to help...

...One clear signal to Victorian readers was the Cratchits' white-glove cleanliness—a paramount virtue at a time when filth was almost always followed by disease...

...He saw his London...

...It limits Dickens's relevance today...

...Journals of the period are filled with accounts of chimney sweeps and factory hands captured by his work...

...No case-worker...

...He was the best-selling author in Victorian England, writing novels that became standard household items, as common as candles and brooms...

...And when they couldn't make out all the words, there were plenty of illustrations to help them along...

...In "The Pawnbroker's Shop," Dickens presented his comfortable readers with a prostitute: "the lowest of the low...

...What we don't have is the popular literature that will jar the affluent into caring about these less savory characters...

...Great art, as opposed to Brookings reports, can be the spur we need...

...Your father's death was a great loss to all of us—and we cabbies were in hopes that he would be doing something to help us...

...And that was a revolutionary accomplishment...

...No food stamps had Oliver...

...After writing in the mornings Dickens would take afternoon walks of ten miles or more that returned him to the streets that powered his prose...

...When a barrister picked up Dickens's work, he saw his servants and his slums...

...This was a revolutionary creed at a time when the affluent saw the poor as a mob—to be feared or appeased, perhaps, but definitely not to be considered as individuals...

...but good-guy capitalists pop up too...

...Easier lives beckon...

...Projects collapse...

...Bumble, who ran the infamous workhouse, carry lessons as old as the New Testament...

...Instead he sketched them...

...And the rich were scarcely alone in their class-bound vision...

...And a new biography of Dickens is getting prominent reviews, including front-page billing in The Washington Post Book World...

...He recognized that, just as the poor weren't all good, the rich weren't all bad...

...Typical was the one about his uncle's Soho barber, a man who, playing Monday-morning quarterback, recounted how he would have guided Napoleon's troops at Waterloo...

...It takes a little more than stenography, and a lot of something called imagination, to spin a 900-page novel...

...And how did my wife get that black eye...

...The working classes responded by deluging Dickens with invitations to speak before their guilds...

...His father, John Dickens, tried to give his children a life of parlours and singing lessons on the paycheck of a navy clerk...

...He's no victim of society...

...Today it's hard to think of the book's cruel overseers as being progressive...

...Coming soon: Disney's Oliver Twist...

...They captured not only turmoil and toil, but character...

...To write Hard Times, for instance, he traveled to the north to cover a workers' strike...

...by Matthew Cooper Christmas is always the busy season for Dickens, but this year there's more going on than usual...

...And what they saw was folly...

...When Mr...

...Weller still seems in control when Pickwick checks into an inn...

...It's the family's own nobility that lends the story such power, remake after remake...

...The workhouse that Dickens took on in Oliver Twist was one of the most prominent liberal programs of his day...

...An't my place dirty...

...As Gertrude Himmelfarb explains in The Idea of Poverty, this was a time when servants were invisible, even to their masters...

...Oliver goes to Levittown...

...When I worked in a Big Brothers program in New York City, I remember noticing that there was no novel or film that got at the downright weird complexities of those tenements I visited on 102nd Street...

...But I'm certain those Dickenslike qualities will not be had by some writer-inresidence strolling the hallowed halls of Haverford...

...There was no film that I could tell my friends about that captured the complexity of those mothers I would meet who'd blow much of their money on VCRs and HBO, but who were also selfless when it came to helping their kids...

...He tapped the well-springs of protectiveness that cultures can be made to feel for the young...

...Eventually his family earned its freedom and Dickens became a law clerk, allowing him to tame "the savagery of stenography," as he put it, and later become a reporter...

...dirty, unbonneted, flaunting and slovenly!' In his "Visit to Newgate," he took them inside a prison that housed children...

...Dickens gives us not only Oliver Twist but Fagin, the criminal ringleader who pressgangs Oliver into service...

...He understood that the capitalist society was rife with institutions that kept the poor down...

...He not only fails to remain invisible...

...by the end, he's in court, trying to sweettalk a magistrate into pardoning him...

...Public health care won't improve unless talented doctors and nurses want to choose Harlems over Humanas, at least for a few years...

...His heroes and heroines don't whine, don't curse, and even though they're raised in the company of foul-mouthed, cockney villains, they speak the King's English...

...Meanwhile, a first in Unworthiness might go to the brickmakers of Bleak House, who seem like something out of a documentary on battered wives...

...A street-walking man Where to find one...

...After Pickwick stumbles into the wrong bedroom, only to be kicked out by a very unhappy woman, it's Weller who rescues him and guides him to his room...

...They knew, too, that they had an obligation to help...

...Dickens understood that there were good and bad individuals within every class...

...Fourteen terrible little faces we never beheld.—There was not one redeeming feature among them—not a glance of honesty—not a wink expressive of anything but the gallows and the hulks, in the whole collection ." This kind of firsthand experience became central to Dickens's fiction...

...He made his readers see them that way too...

...We need a new Dickens...

...The laissez-faire liberalism that Dickens deplored is light-years away from today's social welfare state...

...He's engaging to be sure...

...perhaps a journalist...

...My guess is that it can only be someone who has seen poverty up close...

...By 1822, when Charles was ten, debt's constant tug forced his family to yank him out of school and place him in a factory pasting labels on pots of shoe polish...

...We never understand or care about him the way we care about Oliver...

...Enlightened" Victorians saw themselves...

...But today, when so much fiction is either mired in minimalist ennui or panting with the lifestyles of the rich and promiscuous, we need someone who can animate our social concern...

...Is there any relevance in this today...

...When he first signs on as Pickwick's valet, the negotiations turn into a "Who's-on-first...

...After all, one of the main characters in his first lengthy work of fiction, the serial Pickwick Papers, is Sam Weller, a servant...

...But America today is in at least one way like the England of the 1830s: most of us see the underclass as a seething, abstract mob...

...Queen Victoria hailed his humanizing influence on the nation and his "strongest sympathy with the poorer classes" As for the poor themselves, they not only saw Dickens as their champion, they read him...

...He was no sit-in-the-study author...

...There's a Bill Murray remake of A Christmas Carol (playing the perfect eighties Scrooge—a TV exec too busy to do lunch with his ghost) and, for the truly sturdy, a two-part, six-hour film of Little Dorrit...

...The servant's introduction in the serial's fourth issue sent sales surging...

...This left behind an underclass that seemed short on lovable Cratchits and long on pregnant teens, drug addicts, and gang members...

...This is the story of America through the 1950s: the New Deal and rising prosperity catapult the "worthy" poor into the middle class...

...routine that sounds like Weller is hiring Pickwick...

...Under the pseudonym "Boz," he churned out copy about vulgar vendors, ragged children, raging arguments...

...And we've had five dirty and onwholesome children, as is all dead infants, and so much the better for them...

...This strict division between the worthy and the unworthy poor is more than an aesthetic flaw...

...A second key to Dickens's success is his choice of the symbol of the good child, in Oliver Twist or Little Dorrit or David Copperfield...

...It belongs to the writer who can make us care not only about our Tiny Tims but our Artful Dodgers, too...

...You've raised a artificial soul and spirit in him, ma'am, unbecoming a person in his condition .' " The humor of the scene helps carry its meaning...

...Meat, ma'am, meat,' replied Bumble, with stern emphasis...

...It's meat ' " 'What?' exclaimed Mrs...

...When Oliver meekly seeks a double dose of gruel, we see unbridled cruelty...

...But he's a sidedish...

...To be sure, his supporting cast could include people like the Peggottys in David Copperfield who were not so well spoken...

...We won't really become a kinder, gentler nation unless our leaders know something that's true about those on the bottom...

...If Dickens feared revolution, he didn't fall into the opposite trap of forgetting why mobs charged the barricades...

...A product of the streets himself, Dickens saw no romance in revolution...

...A list of writers in our time shows that liberal progressivism was a matter of indifference to every writer of large mind—Proust, Joyce, Lawrence, Eliot, Mann, Kafka, Yeats" The absence of such a writer may have been a marginal loss in the middle of this century, when the politics of the time were liberal even if the great novelists were not or when poverty seemed like it could be erased simply through economic expansion and a few social reforms...

...The Cratchits were "darned and brushed" before the Christmas feast...

...But the Poor Law of 1834 was considered a great liberal victory, one that would segregate the indebted poor and prevent them from dragging their fiscally responsible neighbors into the red...

...By challenging these institutions, he made the lawyer or factory owner see that they shared responsibility...

...But what's been missing from the articles I've read about these works is the recognition of Dickens's central accomplishment: he prodded (and entertained) millions of readers into caring about the poor...

...One indication of his influence lies in numbers...

...It's not the proletariat who overthrew Scrooge, but his conscience...

...But working with or for the poor requires inspiration...

...After all, the sprawling squalor of Victorian Bi itain has gone the way of the workhouse...

...Why, I giv' it her...

...In 1945 Lionel Trilling lamented that no writer in his day had done what many of the leading Victorian writers had done—combine great literature and social concern...

...At the time, reporting mostly meant taking shorthand, but Dickens was so talented an editor called him "the most rapid, the most accurate, and the most trustworthy reporter then engaged on the London press" His star rising, Dickens didn't leave the poor behind...

...The first thing we see him do is take Oliver drinking...

...He was one of them...

...Winning hands down in the Worthy Category, family division, are the Christmas Carol's Cratchits...

...It was not without reason, then, that Dostoevski called Dickens "the great Christian ." Characters like Oliver Twist and Mr...

...The stenographer's eye and the novelist's mind gave Dickens the ability—virtually unprecedented— to make the poor seem real...