Charles Dickens - Social Reformer. William Walter Crotch
should open; others who had timed their arrival with greater nicety were coming up now and passing in with damp whitey-brown paper bags from the grocers, loaves of bread, lumps of butter, eggs, milk, and the like. The shabbiness of these attendants upon shabbiness, the poverty of these insolvent waiters upon insolvency was a sight to see. Such threadbare coats and trousers, such fusty gowns and shawls, such squashed hats and bonnets, such boots and shoes, such umbrellas and walking-sticks were never seen in Rag Fair. All of them were the cast-off clothes of other men and women — were made of patches and pieces of other people's individuality and had no sartorial existence of their own proper. Their walk was the walk of a race apart. They had a peculiar way of doggedly slinking round the corner as if they were eternally going to the pawnbrokers; when they coughed, they coughed like people accustomed to be forgotten on doorsteps and in draughty passages, waiting for answers to letters in faded ink which gave the recipients of those manuscripts great mental disturbance and no satisfaction. As they eyed the stranger in passing, they eyed him with borrowing eyes — hungry, sharp, speculative as to his softness, if they were accredited to him and the likelihood of his standing something handsome. Mendicity on commission stooped in their high shoulders, shambled in their unsteady legs, buttoned and pinned and darned and dragged their clothes, frayed their button-holes, leaked out their fingers in dirty little ends of tape, and issued from their mouths in alcoholic breathings." That is a wonderful photograph, the negative of which he developed, in his boyish wanderings in and out and about the prison.
But besides the external view of the prison, it was the life inside which arrested the observation and impressed the brain of the boy; and this we have presented in a series of word-pictures of moving realism. All the Marshalsea scenes in David Copperfield and Little Dorrit are obviously straight out of actual experience, and it is impossible to overrate their value as an influence upon the wider question of prison reform with which Dickens in after life became associated. Take as example the well-known scene in David Copperfield, where a petition is drawn up praying for the abolition of imprisonment.
As a matter of fact, Dickens, whilst his parents languished in gaol, did witness the preparation of such a petition, although it differs slightly from the Copperfield scene, and his description of that incident is worth recording because he says, " It illustrates to me my early interest in observing people." This is how his narrative runs: " When I went to the Marshal sea of a night I was always delighted to hear from my mother that she knew about the histories of the different debtors in the prison; and when I heard of this approaching ceremony (the signing of the petition) I was so anxious to see them all come in . . . that I got leave of absence on purpose, and established myself in a corner, near the petition. It was stretched out, I recollect, on a great ironing-board, under the window, which in another part of the room made a bedstead at night. The internal regulations of the place — for cleanliness and order, and for the government of a common room in the ale-house, where hot water and some means of cooking and a good fire were provided for all who paid a very small subscription — were excellently administered by a governing committee of debtors, of which my father was chairman for the time being. As many of the principal officers of this body as could be got into the small room without filling it up supported him in front of the petition; and my old friend. Captain Porter (who had washed himself to do honour to so solemn an occasion), stationed himself close to it to read it to all who were unacquainted with its contents. The door was then thrown open, and they began to come in, in a long file; several waiting on the landing outside, while one entered, affixed his signature and went out. " To everybody in succession Captain Porter said, ' Would you like to hear it read? ' If he weakly showed the least disposition to hear it, Captain Porter, in a loud, sonorous voice, gave him every word of it. I remember a certain luscious roll to such words as ' Majesty,' ' gracious Majesty,' ' your gracious Majesty's unfortunate subjects,' ' your Majesty's well-known munificence ' — as if the words were something real in his mouth and delicious to taste; my poor father meanwhile listening with a little of an author's vanity and contemplating (not severely) the spikes on the opposite wall. Whatever was comical in this scene, and whatever was pathetic, I sincerely believed I perceived in my corner, whether I demonstrated or not, quite as well as I should perceive it now. I made out my little character and story for every man who put his name to the sheet of paper. I might be able to do that now more truly; not more earnestly, or with a closer interest. Their different peculiarities of dress, of face, of gait, of manner, were written indelibly upon my memory. I would rather have seen it than the best play ever played; and I thought about it afterwards over the pots of paste-blacking often and often. When I looked with my mind's eye into the Fleet prison during Mr. Pickwick's incarceration, I wonder whether half a dozen men were wanting from the Marshalsea crowd that came filing in again to the sound of Captain Porter's voice! "
Similarly, it says something for the clear mental balance of the novelist that in the years that followed he could look back at that grim and squalid institution, recall all the agony of soul which his association and that of his family, with it, meant for him, and yet think kindly of it in its human aspects. " Nor am I so much ashamed of the place as might be supposed. People are not bad because they come here. I have known numbers of good, persevering, honest people come there through misfortune. They are almost all kind-hearted to one another, and it would be ungrateful indeed in me to forget that I have had many quite comfortable hours there . . . that I have been taught there, and have worked there, and have slept soundly there. I think it would be almost cowardly and cruel not to have some little attachment for it after all this." So speaks Amy Dorrit, and so thought Charles Dickens. It did at least teach him the one great truth he so insistently expounded: that it is the poor who are most generous and helpful to the poor; and that they who have experienced the pain of poverty, alone can justly comprehend its pangs.
Happily the time arrived when this veritable Odyssey of indigence and misfortune could be brought to a close. As a result of a change of fortune, the Dickens family were able to leave the Marshalsea, and by and by the boy was taken from the blacking warehouse and sent again to school. The lark that had been beating its little self against the relentless bars of its cage was released, and soared away to a rarer and purer air.
But those days of sorrow and misery for "a certain ill-clad, ill-fed child " were not in vain. It was not, in the case of Dickens, merely that he learnt in suffering what he afterwards taught in prose. The influence was deeper than that. In his narratives he does not describe poverty and pain as a thing apart: he lays bare himself. It is his own broken child-heart which one sees — the picture of his own childish tragedy.
Forster realized that quite clearly, for he says, "... with the very poor and the unprosperous, out of whose sufferings and strugglings and the virtues, as well as the vices born of them, his not the least splendid successes were wrought, his childish experiences had made him actually one. They were not his clients whose cause he pleaded with such pathos and humour, and on whose side he got the laughter and the tears of all the world, but in some sort his very self." And they remained " his very self " until the end. In Russell Lowell's fine lines —
" He to his heart, with large embrace, had taken
The universal sorrow of mankind."
He had the supreme gift of fruitful sympathy, but his work was more than the outcome of it. From story after story there issued brilliant flashes of lurid realism; vivid pictures of the poverty he himself had known and the misery he had himself endured. And because of those early experiences of bitterness he was able to render luminous large tracts of human existence, which to the mass of the middle and upper classes of his time lay hidden under the very weight and ugliness of their collective evils. As George Gissing observed, he loved to play the advocate and the friend to those with whom nature and man have dealt most cruelly. Upon a Smike (Nicholas Nickleby) or a Maggy (Little Dorrit), and, he might have added, Poor Jo (Bleak House), he lavished his tenderness, simply because they were hapless creatures from whom even ordinarily kind people would turn with involuntary dislike. " Maggy is a starved and diseased idiot, a very child of the London gutter, moping and mowing to signify her pleasures or her pains. Dickens gives her, for protector, the brave and large-hearted child of the Marshalsea, whose own sufferings have taught her to be compassionate to those who suffer still more. Maggy is to be rescued from filth and cold and hunger; is to be made as happy as her nature will allow. It is nobly done, and undoubtedly