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- [00:00]
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- [00:47]
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- [01:17]
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- [02:13]
Melvyn Bragg / Host
To celebrate Melvyn Bragg's 27 years presenting in our time some well Known fans of the program have chosen their favorite episodes. Here's the singer Joan Armor Trading.
- [02:23]
Joan Armatrading
First of all, I'd just like to pay tribute to Melvin Bragg. Like John Nettles, he has that voice that really draws you in. I love how he has lots of knowledge and gives you lots of information, but you never feel as if you're being lectured at. And I always feel that when I listen to him, whatever program he's doing, I always feel as if I'm getting like a pull. Proper education. I've followed in our time for quite a number of years. I can't tell you all the different episodes that I've listened to, but I always feel as if I've had an education when I listen to them. So he's going to be somebody who's going to be very, very missed. I love Charles Dickens. When I was younger, I read a lot of Charles Dickens novels, and my favorite of those is Hard Times. I love Hard Times. One of the reasons I love Hard Times is because of Mr. Gradgrind, who didn't want the pupils to look out of the window and dream. Little did he know that practically everything that we have in the world that we use came out of a dream. That's from people looking out of the window and thinking, oh, I wonder if I could fly, or thinking, I wonder what it would be like to build a car, or what it would be like if I made electric light, or whatever it is that's come out of a dream. So I always look at Mr. Gradgrind and think, yeah, you didn't really know what you were talking about, although he was converted in the end. But I always think of Mr. Grad in hard Times. So that's one of my favorites. So for my chosen episode, it's Charles Dickens.
- [03:56]
Melvyn Bragg / Moderator
Hello, George. Bernard Shaw said of Little Dorrit that it was, quote, more seditious than Das Kapital. We all have images of Dickens, the Smog, of course, the dark Thames Christmas gaiety, cobwebbed and corrupt bureaucracies, and innumerable characters from Pickwick to Wackford Squeers, from Fagin to Smike to Mr. McCorber to Mr. Bumble, and the literary one with the wooden leg. But were these figures fictional agents for radical change? Were they the fictional angel of a radical change that Bernard Shaw suggests? Or was Dickens a great caricaturist, but really a conservative at heart? What kind of person was the man Charles Dickens, and what is his social and political and literary legacy to our age? With me to Discuss Dickens and his place in history are three preeminent literary scholars. Rosemary Ashton is Professor of English at University College, London. Michael Slater is Professor of Victorian Literature at Birkbeck College, University of London, and editor of the Dent Uniform edition of Dickens Journalism. And John Byrne, Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Kiel and author of other Dickens Pickwick to Chuzzlewit. Rosemary Ashton, can you just briefly give us a flavour of the times when Dickens started writing? What was London like?
- [05:04]
Melvyn Bragg / Host
Well, London was a phenomenon, it was a spectacle. It was the largest capital in terms of population in the world. It was the capital of the greatest country in the world, the most advanced politically, industrially and economically. And we might take perhaps the great exhibition of 1851 as the kind of face of this self confident, progressive London, where we had the exhibition of the wealth and industry of all nations, everyone turning up and thinking how wonderful all this was and great wealth. On the other hand, there's an underside, there's another side to the coin, which is the immense overcrowding slum dwellings. Because London's population had doubled since the beginning of the century. So by about 1850 you had tremendous overcrowding slums, you had the infant capitalism's booms and busts and periods of downturns in the economy. So there were workers who were working for starvation wages, but then they were thrown out of work and they starved even more. And so there was tremendous poverty, cholera outbreaks, sanitation problems. The infrastructure basically of London had not kept up with the tremendous moves that had been made by the advance in industrialism.
- [06:16]
Melvyn Bragg / Moderator
I mean, when foreigners, people from abroad, came here, they were impressed by the wealth, the energy and so on, but they were also impressed by the number of prostitutes on the street and the sight of the poor and the size of the poor population.
- [06:27]
Melvyn Bragg / Host
Yes, absolutely. And no one more so than the political exiles who'd come after the 1848 revolutions in the other European capitals. London had stayed rock solid, was another reason for self congratulation. Whereas all the other capitals of Europe had suffered revolutions in 1848. But they all failed eventually. And all the failed revolutionaries turned up in London and were astonished at the trading that went on up the Thames when they arrived in their boats up the Thames, the amazing bustle, the noise, the wealth, the grandeur of the West End, but also, yes, the prostitution, the slums, which were often cheek by jowl, physically, geographically, with the smart areas.
- [07:08]
Melvyn Bragg / Moderator
Sorry to tax you for one more summary, but could you give us just a brief idea of the intellectual climate of the time?
- [07:15]
Melvyn Bragg / Host
I suppose you could say that there had been a tremendous reform movement. And the major intellectual philosophy of the time, I suppose political philosophy, was philosophical radicalism and utilitarianism. In particular, Jeremy Bentham, James Mill and his son, John Stuart Mill, who were the great beginners of this movement. They had been involved in the first reform movement earlier in the century. Which brought about the first. First great Reform act of 1832. Extension of the franchise, not to a wide number of the population, but certainly the abolition of rotten boroughs, that kind of thing. They also were very concerned, particularly Bentham, in reform of the law, which was a megalosaurus, as Dickens might say, and did say in Bleak House, and needed reforming education and so on. So they were the great progressives and radicals. But they tended to base their philosophy on statistics. The greatest happiness of the greatest number was their great mantra. And so there was another reforming radical movement, really based particularly in the person of Carlyle, Thomas Carlyle, who brought in a kind of romantic radicalism. Who said the utilitarians are fine in as much as they're concerned to improve matters, but they're wrong in as much as they ignore the life of the mind, the life of the imagination of the spirit. And so he comes in with his essays, particularly Signs of the Times and so on. The kind of great prophetic sweep, also radical, also very dismissive of ancient establishments, the church, Parliament. National palaver, he called it, that kind of thing. So he comes in with a tremendous rhetoric of scorn for the establishment. But with a more sort of spiritual, imaginative program, really.
- [08:57]
Melvyn Bragg / Moderator
We could actually lease out the phrase national palaver for a BBC4 program about politics. He also. Thank you very much, Rosemary. He also, John Bowen introduced the phrase the condition of England, which became. And he was very influential, as I understand it, on all the novelists or every novelist of the time. Carlyle, whose works we've been concisely introduced to by Rosemary. Which of Dickens book should we look to to get a real sense of his view of the condition of England? And what condition did he find England in at that time?
- [09:28]
John Byrne
I think the two I'd speak about would be Bleak House, particularly, and Little Dorrit. So that Dickens is interested in particular kinds of reform throughout his career, right from the beginning, say, in a novel like Oliver Twist. He's very concerned there with the Benthamite or utilitarian Poor Law, which he saw as just a very oppressive kind of regime for people. And then later on, in Nicholas Nickleby, he talks about the Yorkshire schools where children were abused and treated savagely. But by the time of the 1850s, when Dickens is in his 40s, those particular abuses start to become for him metaphors of the whole nature of what Victorian society is like, and even, at times, metaphors for what any human society might be like. So Bleak House, for example, the particular abuse that he's bothered by is the Court of Chancery. He'd been involved in it himself, though these interminable law cases, they went on for generation upon generation.
- [10:21]
Melvyn Bragg / Moderator
They.
- [10:22]
John Byrne
They cost tens of thousands of pounds in costs. And he takes that abuse and there's a very strong anger directed against it. But then it stands as a symbol or a metaphor for the whole condition of society. So there's this amazingly large cast of characters, maybe 80 named characters, everybody from Joe the Crossing Sweeper, the abjectly poor child completely excluded from the whole society, right up to Sir Leicester Dedlock, who's the grandee of the. On his country estate in Lincolnshire. And they're all united through the Court of Chancery, through a single action. We gradually see the connecting links between them, and that can then stand as a metaphor for the muddle, the incompetence, the parasitism that saturates that whole society. And you see why a later author, say, like Kafka, is so interested in Dickens. It's a kind of Kafkaesque vision. And then later, Little Dorrit, the other one again, this massive action, many different characters all across Europe, and he takes things from his own childhood. The fact his father was imprisoned and that fact, the fact that in those years you could be imprisoned for debt and that could last forever, comes to be again a metaphor or figure for so many lives. All those people in that novel are imprisoned, either literally or psychologically, from which they can't escape. And then from that, the Circumlocution Office, which is this grand bureaucracy that again wraps up all the different lives of.
- [11:50]
Melvyn Bragg / Moderator
The novel, just makes you smile with Circumlocution Office.
- [11:53]
John Byrne
Fabulous, isn't it?
- [11:55]
Melvyn Bragg / Moderator
So, again, to draw from that, I know I'm asking difficult things in a way of summary and concision, but. So by the time Dickens is in the period of the great novels, because, as you say, started with Oliver Test, which was very early, what is his view of the condition of England? Would you describe, if we can use a few words, is he bitter? Is he sour? Is he fatalistic?
- [12:17]
John Byrne
He does get much darker, I think, in his vision. It's often said that the later novels are darker and he is very angry and bitter at the time. He's Particularly angry with Parliament. In his early years he worked as a parliamentary reporter and I think that just gave him a distaste for parliamentary cant throughout his life. And you see that particularly strongly in the later novels. But there is a sense in which he's always. There's a kind of optimism that runs in Dickens that he does get angry, but he's also astonished by the fact that there are these terrible abuses, that it's amazing that so many things can go on in such a bad way and not change. And so throughout that there is constantly a strong affirmation of certain kinds of values, particularly ethical values, although he thinks increasingly, I think it's difficult to believe in a political set of solutions. But there is a constant allegiance, I think, to popular life, to the lives of ordinary people and their pleasures.
- [13:17]
Melvyn Bragg / Moderator
What was he said just a year before he died? And I'm not reading this. It's a big summary of my notes, but just try to remember it. My belief in the governing is infinitesimal. My belief in the governed is illimitable. Yes. So he always thought that there's an.
- [13:31]
John Byrne
Allegiance to the life of the people, I think, and the possibilities of the creativity of ordinary life. And so much of the virtue of the novel, of the novels are found in the ordinary and the humble.
- [13:44]
Melvyn Bragg / Moderator
Michael Slater, in which we've heard. Can you talk us through how, in one of the novels, Dickens best shows us the external life of the urban poor?
- [13:58]
Michael Slater
Well, I suppose it's a kind of embarrassment of riches almost, but I think I'd take the novel that John's been talking about, and that is Little Dorrit, because in Little Dorrit you have a community in a small yard called Bleeding Heart Yard, where the people are struggling to find work. Mr. Plornish, who's a plasterer, seems he says all such things as jobs seem to have gone underground and he can't find them. These are decent people struggling to make a living, small community. And Dickens is wonderful, I think, at showing the help that they give to each other, the solidarity. And he represents them as being very much exploited by the local landlord, Mr. Casby, who's actually a very hypocritical figure pretending to be benevolent, I mean, and is actually a kind of Scrooge like villain. And I would think that the Plornishes and the other inhabitants of Bleeding Heart Yard are a good example in the novel, in Little Dorrit, of the urban poor as presented by Dickens, other than the melodramatic urban poor, if I can put it that way, the prostitutes, the outcast children, etc. That are, you know, really at the bottom of the heap. I mean, John has mentioned Joe, the crossing sweeper in Bleak House. He's a very interesting figure, actually, because he's quite unlike what crossing sweepers really were in Mayhew's wonderful London Labour and the London poor in 1851. He spends quite a lot of time describing crossing sweepers, and they were rather cheerful lads who, you know, worked in gangs and made a living and had sort of shared lodgings and so on, and were not at all the solitary figure, that pathetic figure that Joe is. But Dickens obviously wanted to make Joe, as John said, sort of representative of what he was always. From Oliver Twist onwards, I mean, he was so concerned with. And that is what he once called, you know, the 30,000 or more children in London who are. Who are hunted and flogged and imprisoned, but never taught that he might so easily have become one of the. I mean, this is what he's always worried about, is always at the back of his mind, for any care that was taken of me, I might so easily have become a little robber or a little vagabond.
- [16:45]
Melvyn Bragg / Moderator
He says, I was going to ask you another question, but you've led to such a good question. Let's just briefly talk this. He kept a secret, didn't he, in his time, which we now all know, that his father was sent to prison, that he was sent to a black ink factory, that he resented this, but at the time he kept. We're told that. I can't remember which one of you. That he perhaps told his wife and foster.
- [17:09]
Michael Slater
That's all I believe he told his wife.
- [17:11]
Melvyn Bragg / Moderator
Yes. So he carried this through. Can you just describe how important and powerful this part of his life where he was sent away? Worked 13, was it, and worked in a blacking factory as a poor outcast. 13 or 14, he was 12, I think.
- [17:27]
Melvyn Bragg / Host
Yes, but he told Forster that he was 8, I think, isn't that right?
- [17:31]
Melvyn Bragg / Moderator
Anyway, he did it. Let's go. So what happened and why was it so important? Why did he keep it a secret?
- [17:36]
Michael Slater
Well, I think he had a tremendous sense of shame about it, for one thing, but I think it was so painful that he couldn't sort of go public with it directly. He wrote about it from Oliver Twist onwards in all sorts of fictional ways, and the figure of the neglected and the abused child is right at the centre of his fiction, from Oliver Twist right through to Little Dorrit. And then, I think, for very interesting reasons, it changes from Great expectation from Tale of Two Cities onwards. But I think it was.
- [18:12]
Melvyn Bragg / Moderator
That's a tantalizing statement. Can we stick the sealed.
- [18:18]
Michael Slater
The thing was that, I mean Dickens was so ambivalent, wasn't he about class? I mean he also wanted to be thought a gentleman like Pip. Yes, it's like Pip. And this extraordinary thing, you know about his father's crest which was stamped on all his china at Gadshill Place. The Maltese lion holding a cross in its Dexter Pawn. Dickens says it was my father's crest. I mean I don't myself care about such things. However, you know, we use it. And he had absolutely no right to it. He never, unlike Shakespeare, he never applied for nobility. There's no sign that he was actually related to the Dickens's of Dorset or whoever they were but. And it was like his attitude to Queen Victoria. I mean I'm going to go back.
- [19:03]
Melvyn Bragg / Moderator
To his Charlotte for a second. Rosemary. What power do you think that gave him as a social observer as well as a writer? So let's just get it straight. At 12 the father goes into a debtors prison, he gets sent to a black ink factory to work at the bottom of the heap in atrocious circumstances and take the story on a bit. And then will you try to tell me what you think it gave him as a writer?
- [19:26]
Melvyn Bragg / Host
Yes, well he was known at the blacking factory as the young gentleman. I think the thing that he resented most obviously, I mean he says later he said well in David Copperfield which is the novel in which David suffers almost exactly the same fate as Dickens had done and is a tremendously sensitive child. But David Copperfield actually says for Dickens, I think there is no exaggerating the awfulness of this experience to a sensitive child. And that's, that's the clue to Dickens. He was extremely sensitive to having been taken out of school. That was one of the things he. There was no further education for this clever boy taken out of school, dumped on this heap, rejected by his parents he thought. And he resented them forever after for doing this and taking.
- [20:11]
Melvyn Bragg / Moderator
They did reject him actually.
- [20:12]
Melvyn Bragg / Host
Yes, until he became famous when they started tried to get money from him and he resorted to some crazy fairly. I mean this was very strong for him. He resorted to some fairly vicious things like putting adverts in newspapers to say I please do not take bills of exchange from a man called John Dickens who I repudiate, I mean that I'm slightly exaggerating. But basically he resented his parents and he resented this loss of opportunity for.
- [20:36]
Michael Slater
He Says that no words can express the secret agony of my soul. He says, when I was a child and all this happened to me. And yet that is what words express. I mean, in novel after novel, that is what he's.
- [20:49]
Melvyn Bragg / Moderator
John Byrne, can you bring us, can you comment in on this?
- [20:52]
John Byrne
That's right. I mean, just pick up what Michael said. In a way, it's like a kind of crypt or a wound that he carries with him through all his life. This kind of buried secret that you see. As soon as you know it, you see it everywhere in his work. You know, Joe Gardry in Great Expectations goes to London and the first thing he wants to see is Warren's blacking warehouse. It's the great site of the London right now. Dickens knows what the joke is. His friend Forster will know it. Nobody else does. And we do. And the kind of mixture of comedy and pathos there by that backstage, by the way he's working through that experience. But throughout his life, I think he just has the sense of always thinking. And this is so rare, I think, for a major novelist what it's like to be on the other side, to be wholly socially excluded, completely outside the world of meaning and of sense of being one of the abject poor and completely rejected. And of course that does, as Rosemary said, fuel this great anger, particularly against his mother where he says, you know, I never can forget that she was warm for my being sent back.
- [21:51]
Melvyn Bragg / Moderator
Sent back to the blacking factory.
- [21:53]
John Byrne
Yeah. And I think at that point, first of all, they're in the rat infested warehouse on the banks of the Thames. But then they move to Covent Garden where he's in a window and he can be seen. And it's that sense of a kind of public humiliation, of being one of the poor laboring hinds on which this great spectacle of the Victorian city was built. And he knows what it's like to be there and he carries that with him through all the fiction, I think.
- [22:17]
Melvyn Bragg / Moderator
Do you think that keeping it secret helped the power of it?
- [22:21]
John Byrne
Yes, I do. Well, because partly from the evidence of the text, I think it just is so powerful when you see it, but it also enables it to be transmuted, to be changed, to be transformed into different things. So Barnaby Rudge, which is a novel about the riots in 1780, the Gordon Riots, there's a big house that gets burnt down at the end. It's called the Warren. Now that's an amazing transformation of that anger against the building that imprisoned him. It turns into a Gothic mansion that he just takes enormous pleasure in writing one of his great scenic descriptions, descriptions of its destruction. So as long as it's a secret, it can appear in displaced forms. So he writes the autobiography, but then he never publishes it.
- [23:11]
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- [23:40]
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- [24:10]
Melvyn Bragg / Host
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- [24:25]
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- [25:04]
Melvyn Bragg / Moderator
Now I'm just going to try to turn this inside out if we possibly can. Let's take that and assume that everybody listening has got a good view of Dickens and we needn't go into the characters we know about many, many of them. Can we talk about out of that? What can we describe as Dickens? Ideas about the society around him. And what impact did he try to have on the society around him through his novels and through his journalism, through those ideas. So let's take, first of all, his idea about injustice, about the poor. Start with you, Michael. What were his main ideas and how did he drive them through?
- [25:43]
Michael Slater
Well, his main ideas, I think, were that above all, the poor should be given decent homes, should be given decent education, should be given all the opportunities for, I mean, what we would now call equality of opportunity, I suppose.
- [26:00]
Melvyn Bragg / Moderator
And.
- [26:03]
Michael Slater
In all his writing, both in his journalism and in his novels, as a sort of complete continuity here, I think, between the journalism and the novels, his great causes were sanitation, better homes and so on for the poor, education. And he was always coming down very heavily on the fact that the state only intervened in poor people's lives at the point where they'd gone wrong, become criminal, and then they were punished and put in prison and so forth. And he was very. He returned again and again to the idea of the state as a sort of negligent mother, as it were, a negligent parent. I can't actually remember who it was who said that. Dickens idea of society, his vision of society, of what was wrong with it, was that it was like a family with the wrong members in control. And given Dickens views of mothers and fathers, this tells you quite a lot.
- [27:08]
Melvyn Bragg / Host
All authority figures, mothers, fathers, parents, school teachers, anybody in authority, right up to Parliament, of course.
- [27:15]
Melvyn Bragg / Moderator
Now, how radical were his ideas about the poor at the time? And I want to ask you, John, how effective they are. But, Rosemary, how radical were the ideas that Michael's outlined?
- [27:24]
Melvyn Bragg / Host
Fairly radical. He took. I don't want to say too much about this because it's a program on Dickens, but he did take a lot of his ideas. I think it's agreed on all hands from Carlyle, who was the first to use this kind of scornful language about Parliament doing nothing and the church doing nothing, and all the establishments, really, all the institutions of the establishment really failing human beings, particularly human beings at the bottom of the pile. And I think that Dickens married his own experience that we've talked about, his own feelings of being almost at the bottom of the heap himself and having to claw his way out and up. He married that with a kind of Carlylean sense which he could put his great rhetoric to, just as Carlyle did, kind of Carlylean sense of tremendous injustice and the need to stir people up and do something. So he was really making for. He was trying to get the middle classes, both in his journalism and through the novels, through doing it imaginatively. Fixing people, individuals in people's minds. Trying to get the middle classes to stir their stumps and do something.
- [28:28]
Melvyn Bragg / Moderator
How effective was his John Burne? How effective was his fiction in this regard?
- [28:33]
John Byrne
It's interesting that. I mean, in some ways, just picking up what Rosemary was saying. He's a radical. He clearly thinks of himself as a radical. He writes for radical publications, particularly in the early years. But then you get a novel like Oliver Twist, which is an attack on the new poor law. And it's both praised in Tory journals. And it's also extracted in working class radical publications. Because in one way, he is a natural ally of the Benthamite radicals. But he's creating a kind of independent position for himself that's different from both. He is the great success, perhaps the most obvious one, is Nicholas Nickleby.
- [29:11]
Melvyn Bragg / Moderator
Now, let's stick with Oliver Twist for a moment. Because that gives us the double thing very well, I think, the radical and the conservative. Because Oliver Twist is kind of miraculously middle class throughout. And so the triumph of that ethos in a way. I'm using this in metaphorical as well as a class sense. And yet the poor law he's attacking, which is something which is incubus on the working class. So can we just develop those two ideas in Oliver Twist for a moment?
- [29:32]
John Byrne
Sure. I mean, Oliver Twist is interesting because he is completely marginal and rejected at the beginning. But it turns out that miraculously, he speaks in very nice English throughout the book. And that he turns out to be middle class and the heir. But it's not quite as smug as that summary would make you think. And he does that in two ways, I think. Firstly, the whole weight of the latter half of the novel moves from Oliver to Nancy, who's the prostitute, who really is, in a way even more so than Oliver, someone who's at the bottom of the heap. And so much of our energy as readers is into understanding Nancy's plight. And she becomes one of his most interesting women characters. And then at the end, there is this kind of scene in which Oliver gets restored to the happy middle class family. But he complains about the final illustration that Cruikshank makes for it, which is a smuggle, bourgeois scene. And insists that instead a scene of mourning is placed there in which Oliver stands in front of his mother's tombstone in the church. So he doesn't give you the absolutely smug, contented bourgeois ending, but one in which there's a scene of mourning for the woman who has been so heavily punished by the pool law. And that's often the case of what he does in the fiction. You do get the satisfactions of middle class domesticity, but you also get the figure who's outside that.
- [30:59]
Melvyn Bragg / Moderator
Just to answer this question, just to nail it. And then I'll move on to other issues, I'm afraid. Was this effective? Did he affect the people who then legislated and changed the law? Did he affect the people who worked in these institutions and so on? Just briskly, John, do you think?
- [31:16]
John Byrne
Well, I think Nicholas Nickleby is a massive attack on the Yorkshire schools which abused children. And that clearly had major changes. It didn't wholly eliminate them, but it certainly made a dramatic difference, I think.
- [31:26]
Melvyn Bragg / Host
On the question of sanitation also. I mean, one of the reasons why I drew the crossing sweeper is such an abject figure. He lives in this slum and he catches smallpox, which might stand for any of the cholera epidemics which were occurring, and so on. And so he really is at the bottom of the heap. And sanitation was one of the things which, rather belatedly, the government began to get to grips with, thanks to Dickens, Carlisle Mayhew. But Dickens is in there very much.
- [31:51]
Melvyn Bragg / Moderator
In terms of his views on democracy and politics. As I understand it, going to America was big, was very important for him. He was in a republic. He was in actually a great number of people from this country feel when they. I have felt over the centuries when they. The last couple of centuries, when they've gone to America now, does that sense of democracy, let's stick with that word, inform the books and the journalism in ways that again affected the opinion of people around the place.
- [32:24]
Michael Slater
Michael Slater it's very difficult talking about Dickens as a Democrat. I think that America was a tremendous shock to him when he said after he'd been there a little while, this is not the republic of my imagination. And when he found that there was this great sort of aristocracy of wealth, as it were. And of course, he was also, like all European travelers to America, shocked by the institution of slavery. But he, although he remained, I think, very staunchly anti aristocratic, he never became Republican. And that thing that you alluded to earlier on where he said that his faith in the people, at the end of the. Towards the end of his life, he made this speech in which he said he was going to now deliver himself of his political credo because people were always asking him what he believed. And that's when he said that his faith in the people, governing with a small P for people, was infinitesimal. And his faith in the people with a capital P governed was illimitable, but that in itself is rather ambiguous. And I think this is one of the things where I don't know if Rosemary would agree with me, but I think where he actually does differ from Carlisle. Carlisle believed in the strong ruler, you know, the. The. The man who Cromwell. And although Dickens also gives Cromwell an extremely good press in his Child's History of England, which otherwise gives very bad press to all the rulers, I don't think that he really went for Carlyle's idea of the strong man. The strong man.
- [34:09]
Melvyn Bragg / Moderator
Maybe there isn't much percentage because there's a great deal to talk about. But briefly, do you think that his views on the political state that he found himself in, his views on its infinite corruptibility as he saw it, do you think that this attack on it was effective as a social and political idea at the time?
- [34:28]
Melvyn Bragg / Host
The others might know more about this than I do, but I don't think so. I think it was really more on the social front that he. That his tremendous pictures of distress and so on actually did bear some fruit. Politically, it's much more difficult. And in any case, he was, as we slightly touched on, part radical, part conservative. He wasn't as radical as Karl Marx, for example. He didn't want to. He feared, like all the British novelists really, writing about the condition of England, Mrs. Gaskell and Kingsley and others, Disraeli. He feared the mob. He feared revolution just as much as he was excited by it and excited by writing about it or imagining it. But he didn't really want it to happen in England. He didn't really want the revolution of the masses. He still, you know, he wasn't a democrat in that sense, nor indeed was he an advocate of women's rights, which some few people, including John Stuart Mill, who's very much vilified by him for being part of the, you know, pig philosophy, as Carlyle calls it, of utilitarianism. But John Stuart Mill was the great flag waiver for Emancipation of Women. Dickens wasn't. I think that's fairly clear.
- [35:27]
Melvyn Bragg / Moderator
John Byrne, what's your.
- [35:28]
John Byrne
Well, I think that's right. What he often does, very interestingly, I think, is. Is turn it round back to the reader. So the bit where Joe the crossing sweeper dies, he says, dead by reverence and wrong reverence of every description. And dying thus around us every day or in hard times, he says, dear reader, it rests with you and me whether these things will be or not. So there's a moment where he Kind of breaks the picture, as it were, and throws open the kind of ethical and political responsibility to the reader. And there's a kind of radical opening there to possible future that's different from the one that he so savagely has depicted there.
- [36:02]
Melvyn Bragg / Moderator
Chesterton said that Dickens was not against any institution so much as a certain kind of expression on the human face. Michael Slater, would you take that on?
- [36:10]
Michael Slater
I think, as always, Chesterton is the most marvellous of Dickens critics. And I think he's there talking about, I mean, what John's saying that Dickens is concerned with, as it were, reforming the individual, changing the hearts and minds of people, changing us from the bad screws.
- [36:29]
Melvyn Bragg / Moderator
John says it's our responsibility, the reader's responsibility to go out and do something and then.
- [36:33]
Michael Slater
That's right, that's right. I mean, I think this was why Virginia Woolf, for instance, didn't care for novels like Dickens's novels, because when you finish them, she says, you. You feel you've got to write a check for some society or rush out and do some, do some good, and this wasn't what art should be about and so on. But Dickens is very much wanting you to rush out and do something. Like the industrialist who gave all his, I think it was after reading A Christmas Carol and he gave his staff Boxing Day off or something like that. And even Carlisle himself rushed out and improvised the Christmas dinner because he was so inspired by, and invited people, because he was so inspired by Dickens, by the Christmas Carol, which did have this enormous impact. But that he had any impact politically, I think, isn't would be very hard to prove, you know, that any law was changed as a result of Dickens. Certainly the new poor law, which he was still attacking in his last completed novel, Our Mutual Friend, was as strongly enforced as ever.
- [37:35]
Melvyn Bragg / Moderator
Are we time for a digression? Will you get us anywhere in terms of Dickens views on society to talk about his portrayal of women? Rosemary?
- [37:44]
Melvyn Bragg / Host
I think it might. Well do. I mean, like all his characters, he's got huge cast of women characters as well as male characters. But I suppose you can roughly divide the women figures into maybe three that are the comic grotesques. Some of them are demonic and some of them are benign, but they're comic grotesques, like simpering spinsters and eccentric aunts and cold stepmothers, those kinds of figures. Then there are the quite interesting array of rather dominant, powerful women, often transgressive sexually in some way, like Lady Dedlock in Bleak House, who is the mother. This is the mystery of the story of Esther Summerson but not by her husband, Sir Leicester. And so she. Now, the thing about that is she's very powerful and Dickens enjoys imagining her, but in the end she has to be. Well, she has to die. I mean, she basically dies of shame because, you know, it's too hot to handle in some way. And there are some strong women like that who somehow are, are in the. They give, they're given their moment and then in the end the plot shuts them down because they're a danger to society. And then of course, the third lot are the saints, the domestic angels in the house. Esther Summerson in Dick House with her household keys jangling at her belt, and Florence Dombey for example, and Little Dorrit. These are the sort of rather perfect girls who are constantly knocked about physically or mentally by cruel fathers or cruel husbands or cruel guardians, but who are examples of Christian humility. They turn the other cheek and they're amazingly self sacrificing. But in the end they are rewarded with what? Domestic happiness. The keys at the belt.
- [39:27]
John Byrne
Forever.
- [39:28]
Melvyn Bragg / Host
And so there is a kind of. I mean, there isn't room, I think the others may think me wrong, but there isn't room really for real women much.
- [39:38]
Melvyn Bragg / Moderator
But is this, is it women which draws from Dickens the most powerful of his New Testamental ideas, do you think? John Bowman? And secondly, I was quite interested that out of the. You left Nancy out of that. Who to me is the most. That's fine. Who's the most powerful woman in Dickens? So could you address those two points? Sure.
- [39:57]
John Byrne
I mean, I think Dickens and women, he often does fall into these caricatures and stereotypes, but then he can also break them as well. So if you think of a character like Mrs. Gamp or Mrs. Nickleby, they have this extraordinary kind of linguistic creativity. Dickens is so generous in giving his linguistic skills and his rhetorical skills to his characters. And so they break free from the character, from the kind of stereotypes into this extraordinary surreal characterization and linguistic creativity. I mean, they're kind of Falstaffian, they got that kind of scale. There is a big shift, I think, that Michael's, I think was probably the first of point out in Middle and later Dickens, where so much of the virtue of the novels is given to young women characters, particularly Esther Summerson in Bleak House and Little Dorrit herself. And at the end of that novel, the kind of Christianity that Dickens is very hostile to is the evangelical, punitive, damning kind of vision of Christianity. And at the end of that novel, in Mrs. Clennam, who's kind of imprisoned herself. Throughout the novel, this cruel mother encounters Amy Dorrit in the prison. And her kind of faith, which is cruel and vindictive, is met by Amy almost in a fairly straightforward way, preaching the gospel of forgiveness and charity and love to her. And that in many ways is the emotional climax of that book. And you see that particularly in in Dickens later novels, giving a kind of Christian coloring, particularly say Sidney Carton's death at the end of Tale of Two Cities. And that's often borne by the young women characters. But the interesting thing about his women is he doesn't just concentrate on young women. Whereas, say, Jane Austen, for example, is very interested in middle class women in their late teens and early twenties. Dickens. The great creative bits, I think where he's really inspired are with a working class. She's a nurse and drinks too heavily, is Mrs. Gamp. It's figures like that that really draw him out.
- [42:05]
Melvyn Bragg / Host
It's also, I mean, Melvin, you wanted to talk about Nancy and I think that that's right. He's also.
- [42:09]
Melvyn Bragg / Moderator
Well, in the book, you can read the book without knowing she's a prostitute. You can think she's the battered wife. And yet Dickens said and wrote that she was a prostitute, but the times were too hot for him to portray her as a prostitute. And she's undoubtedly portrayed with tremendous sympathy.
- [42:23]
Melvyn Bragg / Host
Yes, that's right. She is really the gangster's mole, but it can't quite be said. But what he does with her, and even more with. I mean, I'm rude about Esther Summerson with her keys at the belt and so on, but even with Esther too, what he does with some of these young women is he shows their neediness, their emotional neediness, and he shows them. He understands, as it were, the guilt of the victim. Florence Dombey, who's rejected by her father, feels that kind of burden of guilt that. Why? Why does my father not love me? No, it's almost like the kind of battered wife syndrome or something of that kind that we talk about now. He is aware of that Esther Summerson also feels guilty.
- [42:58]
Michael Slater
Or Edith, for instance, in. In Dombey, I think Dombey and Son is the. Despite the title, is the great novel in which it turns out to be Dombey and Daughter after all, in which you've had right up to the. To Martin Chuzzlewit and these wonderful grotesques, as John has been talking about, with their wonderful language and so on. Mrs. Nickleby is another example, I think. But in Dombey and Son he tells the story, as Rosemary said of the rejected daughter and of the middle class woman, Edith, who has no option but to put herself on the marriage market in order socially to survive, where she's paraded, she says, like a horse at the fair and so on. And. And those middle novels right through to Little Dorrit, which are very much women centered. Even David Copperfield as well. I think Dickens really does seem to me, whatever his sort of public beliefs and official beliefs about the role of women, to be really sensitively exploring the dilemma of the woman. Yes, especially the middle class woman, I think, in Victorian society. Dora, in David Copperfield, for instance, is presented as somebody who is really betrayed by her education. She's made, you know, she's made a little plaything, as it were, then expected to marry and become a competent housekeeper suddenly overnight. And she asks David plainly at one point why he doesn't marry Agnes instead of her. Because Agnes, of course, is wonderful with the housekeeper keeping keys and the cookery books and so forth. And there's an enormous, I mean, as happens, I suppose, with great artists, tremendous imaginative sympathy towards these women in the novels.
- [44:42]
Melvyn Bragg / Moderator
Very briefly, can I ask you. This is a terrible, terrible segue, but never mind, we've got a short time left. One of the great women in his life was Britannia, that unfortunate female he wrote, trussed up like a chicken in red tape. Did this vision of Britannia, was that a vision that drove his fiction in any way, do you think, briefly, Rosemary, to start with?
- [45:01]
Melvyn Bragg / Host
I don't know that certainly.
- [45:02]
Melvyn Bragg / Moderator
Well, on to John.
- [45:03]
Melvyn Bragg / Host
Yes, move on.
- [45:05]
John Byrne
He's more cosmopolitan than he's often presented. I think he spends a lot of time living in France in the 1850s and he says at one point, I should have been born a Frenchman. He says.
- [45:15]
Melvyn Bragg / Moderator
I wish we'd have got time to unravel that.
- [45:19]
John Byrne
So I mean, he certainly, in a way it's not Britannia. I think in many ways it's London is his great photography of his imagination, really. That seems to be Dickens home and where he's so saturated. He knows relatively little really about the rest of England.
- [45:34]
Michael Slater
I think if you counted up the number of times he makes a comic allusion to Rule Britannia throughout his. It's always brought in for a laugh, for a joke. And I think Britannia by and large is a comic figure for him.
- [45:45]
Melvyn Bragg / Moderator
But again, this ambivalence, isn't it? Because this, this talking about this unfortunate female, he obviously has passionate passions for every part of it. I mean, he can't write about even the worst parts of it, like Wackford Squeers without a Strange sort of identification and even affection.
- [46:03]
Michael Slater
Well, I think this phrase that he used, attraction of repulsion, that you could be both attracted and repelled by something at the same time as he was when he was a child by the slums of London. He just loved it if he could be taken for a walk near these terribly dangerous places like St. Giles and so on. And he uses this phrase, attraction of repulsion, I think, and that is, you know, what he had to. Such things as even the Circumlocution Office and the Court of Chancery and the hideous bureaucratic muddles, the riots and so on. All these things stimulated and attracted his imagination at the same time that he was condemning them.
- [46:42]
Melvyn Bragg / Host
Yeah, so you could say that. I mean, his love of country and of London underlies his attack on the abuses.
- [46:49]
Melvyn Bragg / Moderator
Well, I'm afraid that's all we have time for. Thank you very much to Michael Slater, Rosemary and John Bowen. And thank you very much for listening.
- [46:55]
Melvyn Bragg / Host
This episode of In Our Time with Melvyn Bragg was produced by Jonathan Levi and Charlie Taylor and was first broadcast in July 2001. I'm Phillipe Sands and from BBC Radio 4 and the History podcast. This is the Arrest.
- [47:10]
Joan Armatrading
A race against time to apprehend a seemingly untouchable man.
- [47:15]
John Byrne
He had filed a flight plan until it was 6:30 in the morning.
- [47:19]
Melvyn Bragg / Host
A former dictator accused of crimes against humanity. And I found Laura there and she says, they killed dad.
- [47:28]
Michael Slater
We cannot go in history having been.
- [47:31]
Melvyn Bragg / Moderator
Those who abandoned the Spanish victims.
- [47:34]
Melvyn Bragg / Host
And there is General Pinochet sitting in his bed and shooting striped pajamas. Oh my God. It really is him. The Arrest.
- [47:42]
Joan Armatrading
Listen. First on BBC Sounds.
- [47:51]
Walton Goggins (GoDaddy Ad)
Reggie. I just sold my car online. Let's go, Grandpa. Wait, you did?
- [47:56]
Melvyn Bragg / Moderator
Yep.
- [47:56]
Walton Goggins (GoDaddy Ad)
On Carvana. Just put in the license plate, answered a few questions, got an offer in minutes. Easier than setting up that new digital picture frame.
- [48:04]
Michael Slater
You don't say.
- [48:05]
Walton Goggins (GoDaddy Ad)
Yeah, they're even picking it up tomorrow. Talk about fast.
- [48:08]
Michael Slater
Wow. Way to go.
- [48:10]
Walton Goggins (GoDaddy Ad)
So about that picture frame. Ah, forget about it. Until Carvana makes one, I'm not interested.
- [48:15]
Melvyn Bragg / Host
Car selling made easy on Carvana. Pickup fees may apply.