by PAUL STREET
Recently I was slightly surprised to hear an old Marxist friend and Bernie Sanders fan declare her “unqualified love” for Charles Dickens. I’m no great fan of the anti-communist snitch George Orwell, but the future author of 1984 got it right on the famous and much-adored 19th Century British novelist in a 1940 essay that properly ridiculed the then Popular Front-ist Communist Party of Great Britain’s (CPBG)’s attempt to claim Dickens as a proletarian and revolutionary writer. Along with the fact that the early industrial proletariat was almost completely absent from Dickens’s work, the partial exception being Hard Times, Orwell noted, the main thing contradicting the CPBG’s attempted cultural appropriation (yes, I actually just used that phrase) of Dickens was that he never blamed capitalism the system or calls for a different order to replace the class rule of the bourgeoisie. The closest thing Dickens could advance in the way of a solution for the downtrodden victims of capitalism he portrayed was the occasional intervention of kind, morally decent and humane bourgeois. There’s no revolution, no collective rebellion even of the people against class rule in Dickens, just brilliant mockery and caricature of the moral pretense and falseness of the masters combined with sympathetic portrayals of considerate privileged folks who take pity on the victims:
“The truth is that Dickens’s criticism of society is almost exclusively moral. Hence the utter lack of any constructive suggestion anywhere in his work….There is no clear sign that he wants the existing order to be overthrown, or that he believes it would make much difference if it were overthrown…His target is not so much society as ‘human nature’. It would be difficult to point anywhere in his books to a passage suggesting that the economic system is wrong as a system. Nowhere…does he make any attack on private enterprise or private property. Even in a book like Our Mutual Friend, which turns on the power of corpses to interfere with living people by means of idiotic wills, it does not occur to him to suggest that individuals ought not to have this irresponsible power. …Macaulay refused to review Hard Times because he disapproved of its ‘sullen Socialism.’ …Macaulay [was] is here using the word ‘Socialism’ in the same sense in which, twenty years ago, a vegetarian meal or a Cubist picture used to be referred to as ‘Bolshevism.’ There is not a line in the book that can properly be called Socialistic; indeed, its tendency if anything is pro-capitalist, because its whole moral is that capitalists ought to be kind, not that workers ought to be rebellious. Bounderby is a bullying windbag and Gradgrind has been morally blinded, but if they were better men, the system would work well enough, that, all through, is the implication. And so far as social criticism goes, one can never extract much more from Dickens than this, unless one deliberately reads meanings into him. His whole ‘message’ is one that at first glance looks like an enormous platitude: If men would behave decently the world would be decent…Naturally this calls for a few characters who are in positions of authority and who do behave decently. Hence that recurrent Dickens figure, the good rich man…He is usually a ‘merchant’ (we are not necessarily told what merchandise he deals in), and he is always a superhumanly kind-hearted old gentleman who ‘trots’ to and fro, raising his employees’ wages, patting children on the head, getting debtors out of jail and in general, acting the fairy godmother. …Even Dickens must have reflected occasionally that anyone who was so anxious to give his money away would never have acquired it in the first place. Mr. Pickwick, for instance, had ‘been in the city’, but it is difficult to imagine him making a fortune there…Pickwick, the Cheerybles, old Chuzzlewit, Scrooge — it is the same figure over and over again, the good rich man, handing out guineas… the usual deus ex machina, solving everybody’s problems by showering money in all direction… individual kindliness is the remedy for everything.”[1]
In Scrooge’s case, the bad Victorian oppressor becomes a good and decent employer. A magical visit from Christmas ghosts performs a glorious moral transubstantiation that changes the capitalist from miserly exploiter to benevolent patron.
Orwell might have mentioned Mr. Bounderby and the Maylies, the compassionate London bourgeois who step in to rescue the young workhouse waif Oliver Twist. As the great and forgotten Marxist literary critic Arnold Kettle pointed out in the first volume of his masterful Introduction to the English Novel, the novel named after that famous Dickens character follows a “debased” plot because Dickens is “working within” a “moral framework…in which the only standards are the sanctity of property and complacent respectability.” Thus, on one hand, Kettle notes, Dickens’ Oliver Twist painted an unforgettable picture of class disparity recognized the world over:
“When [Oliver] he walks up to the master of the workhouse and asks for more gruel, issues are at stake which make the [aristocratic] world of Jane Austen tremble. We care, we are involved, not because it is Oliver…but because every starved orphan in the world, everyone who is poor and oppressed and hungry is involved, and the master of the workhouse is not anyone in particular but an agent of an oppressive system everywhere. And that is why millions of people all over the world (including many who have never read a page of Dickens) can tell you what happened in Olivers’ workhouse….”
On the other hand, Kettle noted, Oliver Twist loses its power after its opening chapters’ depiction of class oppression because of “Dickens’ conscious view of life,” stuck within the killing confines of capitalist property relations and bourgeois morality. The divide in Dickens is not between classes but between moral good and moral bad, with “the oppressed …divided (though the working of the plot) between the good and deserving poor who help Oliver win his rights [to a bourgeois inheritance of which he has been cheated! – PS] and the bad and criminal poor who…must be eliminated. It is a conception which makes a mockery of the opening chapters of the book, where poverty has been revealed to us in a light which makes the facile terms of good and bad irrelevant” (emphasis added).
Dickens’ contemporary Karl Marx followed a different path, as suggested in his preface to the original edition of Das Kapital:
“To prevent possible misunderstanding, a word. I paint the capitalist and landlord in no sense couleur de rose. But here individuals are dealt with only insofar as they are the personifications of economic categories, embodiments of particular class relations and class interests. My standpoint…can less than any other make the individual responsible for relations whose creature he socially remains, however much he may subjectively raise himself above them.”
The last part of that passage sounds like a conscious reference to Dickens, whose writings Marx and his family appreciated. Marx’s statement is not a determinist repudiation of human agency, but part of his call for proletarian revolution to end capitalism, something that required collective organization and political action from the bottom up rather than mere occasional individual kindliness from the top or middle down. Marx didn’t care whether or not Scrooge became a decent man or whether or not kindly bourgeois men helped cheated orphans get their bourgeois inheritance – or whether the subjugated masses of “outcast London” wanted to help such orphans re-enter the world of privilege. He cared about analyzing the nature and workings of the exploitative, soulless, and amoral profits system that oppressed the working-class, divided society into rich and poor, poisoned the Earth, and perverted the broader society and culture with the soulless contagion of pecuniary selfishness – the system that:
“has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous ‘cash payment’. …has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation…has resolved personal worth into exchange value…has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honoured and looked up to with reverent awe… has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage labourers… has reduced the family relation to a mere money relation.”
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