GOD SAVE THE PEOPLE
In the first half of this nineteenth century the British factory system
came to maturity; the capitalist class took charge of society, and
forced the working class into a condition of degradation hitherto
unknown upon this planet. The class struggle took definite
shape--Chartist agitations and suffrage reform bills and Corn Law
riots--and there arose in England a man of genius to tell about the
wrongs of the people from his own first-hand experience.
His father was a wretchedly paid government clerk, who had no
acquaintance with the birth control movement. Charles Dickens was one of
eight half-starved children, and went to work at the age of ten in a
filthy, ramshackle blacking factory. The cruelties he there experienced
stamped his soul for life, and helped to make the radical movement of
the English-speaking world.
Later on he got a chance to go to school, and became a court
stenographer and newspaper reporter, and saw the insides of ruling-class
rascality. He began writing humorous sketches which turned into the
“Pickwick Papers,” and so at the age of twenty-four he was carried up
into a golden cloud of glory. World fame and success were his for the
balance of his life; but he never entirely forgot the meaning of his
early days, and remained to some extent an apostle of the poor and
oppressed.
When I say that Dickens is radical propaganda, I do not mean merely that
he wrote novel after novel exposing the abuses of his time, the
cruelties of the poor laws, the horrors of the debtors’ prisons, the
delays and corruptions of the courts, the knaveries and imbecilities of
politics. I do not mean merely that he hated by instinct and ridiculed
all through his life, lawyers and judges and newspaper editors and
preachers and priests of capitalist prosperity. I mean something more
deep and more fundamental than that: I mean that the very selection of
his themes and of his characters, the whole environment and atmosphere
of his novels, is a piece of propaganda. For Dickens proceeds to force
into the aristocratic and exclusive realms of art the revolutionary
notion that the poor and degraded are equally as interesting as the rich
and respectable. We are invited, not merely to laugh at the antics of
illiterate and unrefined people, as in Shakespeare; we are invited to
enter into their hearts and minds, to put ourselves in their place and
actually live their experiences. As reward for so doing, we are offered
treasures of laughter and tears and thrills.
I don’t know how it is nowadays, but in my boyhood, which was some
twenty years after Dickens’ death, everybody read him--my rich
relatives, who read nothing else, and my poor relatives, broken-down
Southern aristocrats, who read nothing else except the life of Robert E.
Lee. And then in New York, the people I met in boarding-houses and
third-rate lodgings--all shuddered over Bill Sykes and wept over Paul
Dombey and laughed over Mr. Pickwick and Sam Weller.
Dickens was, and remained to the end, from the point of view of
leisure-class culture, a quite vulgar person. He took a naive delight in
his worldly triumphs, and counted the success of his books by sales and
money. He was a born actor, and loved to shine before the public;
devising dramatic readings of his works, and taking endless tours, both
in England and America, gathering great sums of money--though of course
not to be compared with the moving picture fortunes of our day. It was a
time when audiences liked to shed tears out loud, and Dickens liked to
join them; he has all the tremolo stops in his organ, and piles on
sentiment until we shudder. Fastidious and literary persons have now
made it fashionable to declare that Dickens is unreadable; but the
people have read him, and his sentiment as well as his humor are a part
of our racial heritage, and one of the fountain-heads of the Socialist
movement. His books are a five million word reiteration of the old
Chartist hymn--
When wilt thou save the people?
O God of mercy! when?
Not kings and lords, but nations!
Not thrones and crowns, but men!
Dickens himself was entirely instinctive in his class feelings; his mind
was a typical middle-class muddle, and his remedy for the ills he
pictured was kindness and poor law reform and charity bazaars--hanging
paper garlands about the neck of the tiger of capitalism. The British
masses needed time in which to find out how to bind and destroy this
beast; but the first service was to proclaim the fact that this
capitalist world is a world impossible for sensitive and decent human
beings to endure--a world in which justice has become the Circumlocution
Office, and truth has become Thomas Gradgrind, and Christianity has
become Mr. Pecksniff and Uriah Heep.