Charles Dickens - Social Reformer. William Walter Crotch
excesses in political discontent. To him the schemes of social betterment were " too great for haste, too high for rivalry." In so far as this is a fault, it is so only because it is the excess of a great virtue. He was fearful lest the waves of democracy, through dashing too high and relentlessly upon the bulwarks of privilege, should recede the further for the effort. He believed that by the steadier flow would the ground be permanently gained. But he had faith in the final issue all the same. " In my sphere of action I have tried to understand the heavy social grievances of our time, and to help to set them right." That was no idle boast, but the one outstanding feature of his work was that in all his declarations of human equality he went to the very roots of social problems, and impressed the divine stamp upon the uppermost claims of democracy. " I have found even in evil things that soul of goodness which the Creator has put in them. Throughout my life I have been anxious to show that virtue may be found in the by-ways of the world, that it is not incompatible with poverty and even with rags."
Therein was he true to the traditions of the great reforming literary band, which had revolted against the narrow metropolitanism and aristocratic banalities of Pope.
Thomson had struck the first democratic note in " The Seasons " by reprehending the prevailing callousness to the sufferings of the poor. Crabbe had derided the proud pretensions of the arrogantly rich. Goldsmith had uttered his protest against the lordly theft of the people's common land, and warned the nation that " a bold peasantry, their country's pride, when once destroyed can never be supplied." Gray had chastised the insolence of those who disdained " the short and simple annals of the poor." Johnson had hurled forth with stinging emphasis his description of the miseries of the people of London and launched his satirical inquiry: " Has Heaven reserved in pity to the poor no pathless waste or undiscovered shore? " Blake in perfectly beauteous lyric song had revealed his own passionate pity for the oppressed. The great Northern ploughman-poet Burns had foretold the coming of human equality in simple verse which has since become an axiom of common speech. Coleridge, under the influence of that now forgotten poet William Lisle Bowes, had already heralded the time when " Liberty, the soul of life shall reign, shall throb in every pulse, shall flow thro' every vein." Whitman had told us " that amid the measureless grossness and the slag, enclosed and safe within its central heart, nestles the seed-perfection." Tennyson had declared that he had found ploughmen and shepherds, veritable " sons of God and kings of men in utter nobleness of mind." Carlyle was uttering his fierce diatribes against mistaken nobility. Ruskin was preaching a new doctrine of brotherhood in service. Robert Browning was writing poetry which " shows a heart blood-tinctured of a veined humanity." Lowell was penning his matchless songs of freedom, declaring that " the slave, where'er he cowers feels the soul within him climb." Mrs. Browning was plucking up " social fictions bloody rooted," and averring that " first and last are equal, saint and corpse and little child." And so one might proceed. Democracy was being deified in literature and art. The long-neglected were invited to claim their inheritance. The nobility of humble men was being taught, and Dickens came to the teaching with an enthusiastic regard for its truth. He endeavoured, by the might of his energies, as Professor Wilson (Christopher North) well said, "to transmute what was base into what is as precious as beaten gold." " I believe," said Dickens, " that Virtue shows quite as well in rags and patches as she does in purple and fine linen. I believe that she and every beautiful object in external nature claims some sympathy in the breast of the poorest man who breaks his scanty loaf of daily bread. I believe that she goes bare-footed as well as shod. I believe that she dwells rather oftener in alleys and by-ways than she does in courts and palaces." Here, again, his words ring true, when tested at the heart of social reform, for it is no question of present fitness which determines ultimately social and political changes. Fitness is only found in the exercise of disputed privileges. It is faith, that in all humanity there is the same nature, from which the realized fitness of the privileged class has been evoked, which is the prophecy that the same opportunity will produce the same fitness in all.
So that whilst Dickens was not the exponent of any particular theory of general constructive reform, whilst his teaching was limited to emphasizing the necessity for better sanitation and housing and education and denouncing the evils of landlordism, the poor law, the prison system, gambling, usury, war, slavery, child-labour, sweating, and other particular social defects, he yet became the prose-prophet of the cause of social reform itself, and the firm upholder of that which alone is the assurance of its ultimate success, namely, our equality in the primary and fundamental instincts of faith and love and duty. Only from such an equality can just political and social institutions rise and take shape.
CHAPTER III. THE INTERPRETER OF CHILDHOOD
There is one aspect, seen from which, the genius of Dickens stands pre-eminent in the whole realm of English literature. He is emphatically our greatest, in some respects our only, interpreter of childhood. More; he it was who first introduced children into fiction. His supreme triumph, in fact, lies in this: that, while his predecessors were driven almost to exclude children from their works, he wrote of them as freely, naturally, and convincingly, as of their elders.
To-day we are all familiar with children in fiction. We have almost a surfeit of books, in which they play a real part, even where they are not the central figures. Their bright fancies have lit up many a dull page of contemporary novels; their charm has held many a creaky story together. Often their psychology interests us long after we have surrendered their elders in boredom and despair. Some of the most vivid stories of our time have been written round the personalities of little children. Who has not cried over Baa, Baa Black Sheep, or laughed with Pett Ridge's Soil of the State? But, remember, till Dickens wrote, such stories were not dreamt of in the philosophy of the novelist. Strange as it seems, till the sun of his genius rose, childhood found practically no expression in English literature. The sketch of Arthur in King John, a few fragments of Sir Walter Scott; a chapter or so of Tristram Shandy and one or two incredible schoolgirls by Jane Austen — that is all we have of childhood in our literature till Dickens appeared. There has been since an extraordinary output of books, in which children are prominent, from Uncle Tom's Cabin to Little Lord Fauntleroy; from Alice in Wonderland to Peter Pan, and Tom Brown's School Bays. But, in those far-off unhappy days, the only work one can recall as being concerned much with children is that egregious libel upon them, Sandford and Merton. The psychology of the child was almost a closed book and the poorer classes were not only taboo, but anathema, in literature, the typical view of any attempt to depict their condition being that of the Quarterly Review, which objected, it will be remembered, in toto to Oliver Twist, with " its representations of the haunts, deeds, language and characters of the very dregs of the community; " an objection that gives us a tolerably good insight into the England that Dickens scourged and shamed, and lashed and laughed away, until it is no more. Dickens, in fact, re-discovered childhood for England, and as an interpreter of its thousand and one varying moods, its extraordinary intuitions, its swift and solemn confidences, its elusive reticences, its joys, and its sorrows, he stands, not merely supreme but almost alone, without a rival or a competitor, with only his pupils and his imitators in the whole of English Literature. While other novelists write of children as of exotics, and with an obvious strain and effort, catching only a few of their moods and presenting these to us as a triumph, Dickens's pages are crowded with all sorts and conditions of children, jostling each other and their elders, ranging from poor little Paul Dombey, with the premonition of death lying heavy upon his tender spirit, to the robustious Master Jack Dawson, alias " The Artful Dodger," facing the Bow Street magistrate — and the hulks and transportation — with unruffled impudence and unbroken front; from Little Nell, with ashen face lined by cares beyond her years, to the beautifully nonchalant Marchioness, playing " crib " in the damp kitchen. The veriest glimpse of a child through his magic spectacles is worth more than half a dozen completed studies from other pens. Only Meredith approaches him in his almost uncanny intuition into the strange world of boyhood, through which we have all travelled and which opens again to us only at a magician's touch. But Meredith's excursions into boyland are few and far between. Generally his juvenile leads are given a scene or two all to themselves. Dickens's boys and girls, on the other hand, come on and off the stage with the other characters and one is conscious that the master writes of them with no more effort than he does of the adults, whom they alternately dismay and delight. Dickens