Abstract
Early Victorians generally agreed that the northern industrial city of the 1830s and 1840s — Leeds, Bradford, Birmingham, and especially Manchester — was a phenomenon of modernity, “the type of a new power on the earth,” as the London People’s Journal exclaimed in 1847.1 The pressing question concerning this new city was whether the mysterious and powerful processes at work in and on it were constructive or destructive. Such was the implicit topic, for example, at an October 1843 meeting of literary luminaries at the just-completed Free Trade Hall, Manchester, with speeches by Richard Cobden and Benjamin Disraeli among others, several thousand in the audience, and Charles Dickens presiding. The purpose of the occasion’s “brilliant assemblage of beauty and fashion” was the raising of funds for the Athenaeum, a philanthropic and educational organization conceived by Cobden and others in 1835 as the middle-class counterpart to the fashionable Royal Manchester Institution and the working-class Mechanics Institution, but struggling by 1842 with lackluster membership and attendance as well as a heavy mortgage on its recently completed headquarters.2 Class conciliation was the common goal of all three of these organizations: in the words of the Mechanics Institution’s Annual Report for 1836, though it and the Athenaeum each “has its separate sphere of action, the interests of both will ever be promoted by the mutual cooperation and friendly intercourse which the Directors trust will always subsist between the two Institutions.”3
[I]f I knew where there was such a knight of faith, I would make a pilgrimage to him on foot, for this prodigy interests me absolutely…. [O]ne might suppose that he was a clerk who had lost his soul in an intricate system of book-keeping…. [H]e is not a poet, and I have sought in vain to detect in him the poetic incommensurability. Toward evening he walks home, and his gait is as indefatigable as that of the postman.
Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling (1843)
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
Quoted in Asa Briggs, Victorian Cities, rev. edn (1970; Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 93. The People’s Journal, appearing from 1847 to 1851, was also known as Howitt’s Journal of Literature and Popular Progress.
See J. F. C. Harrison and Dorothy Thompson, Bibliography of the Chartist Movement, 1837–1976 (Sussex: Harvester Press, 1978), 116.
For accounts of the Athenaeum soirée, see PL 3: 581–2 n.4; Speeches of Charles Dickens, ed. K. J. Fielding (Oxford: Clarendon Press), 44 n.4; Briggs, Victorian Cities, 93–95; Benjamin Disraeli Letters, ed. J. A. W. Gunn et al. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1982-), 4: 108–9 nn.1–3.
For accounts of the public lecture in early Victorian Manchester, see Martin Hewitt, “Ralph Waldo Emerson, George Dawson, and the Control of the Lecture Platform in Mid-Nineteenth Century Manchester,” Nineteenth-Century Prose 25.2 (Fall 1998): 1–23,
as well as Howard M. Wach, “Culture and the Middle Classes: Popular Knowledge in Industrial Manchester,” Journal of British Studies 27 (1988): 375–404.
Adam Smith, The Nature and Cause of the Wealth of Nations, ed. R. H. Campbell and A. S. Skinner (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), 781–2.
For a historical summary of the concepts of division of labor and alienation, see Dietrich Rueschemeyer, Power and the Division of Labor (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1986), 1–14.
See David Simpson, Romanticism, Nationalism and the Revolt against Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 52, 57–9.
Byron, Selected Letters and Journals, ed. Leslie A. Marchand (Cambridge: Belknap-Harvard University Press, 1982), 167.
There is no clear evidence for Dickens’s knowledge of Sartor Resartus until chapter 37 of The Uncommercial Traveller, the series of essays which first appeared in All the Year Round in 1860. See Michael Goldberg, Cariyle and Dickens (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1972), 20–3.
For the literary origins of British critique, see Raymond Williams, Culture and Society (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), 271 and passim;
Perry Anderson, Arguments within English Marxism (London: New Left Books, 1980), 158–60.
For the distinction between British and German discourses, the latter’s debt to Protestantism, and the rehabilitation of German thought in Britain between 1815 and 1830, see Simpson, Romanticism, Nationalism and the Revolt against Theory, 100–2 and passim, as well as his introduction to Simpson, ed., The Origins of Modern Critical Thought: German Aesthetic and Literary Criticism from Lessing to Hegel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 4–9.
Friedrich Schiller, Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man (1795), trans. E. M. Wilkinson and L. A. Willoughby (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967), 33–5.
G. W. F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Mind, trans. J. B. Baillie (New York: Harper & Row, 1967), 238.
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology, ed. C. J. Arthur (New York: International, 1970), 68–9, 77–8.
E.g., “Men are the producers of their conceptions, ideas, etc., — real, active men, as they are conditioned by a definite development of their productive forces and of the intercourse corresponding to these, up to its furthest forms” (German Ideology 47). For a description of Marx’s ambiguity on the category of “real activity,” and an argument for the division of labor as “the connecting link” between early “anthropological” and later “abstract” Marxisms, see Paul Ricoeur, Lectures on Ideology and Utopia (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 83 and ch. 5 passim,
Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling (1843), ed. and trans. Walter Lowrie (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), 49–51;
Either/Or (1843), 2 vols, ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), 1: 290.
J. Hillis Miller, “The Fiction of Realism: Sketches by Boz, Oliver Twist and Cruikshank’s Illustrations,” in Charles Dickens and George Cruikshank, ed. Ada A. Nisbet (Los Angeles: William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, 1971), 31.
Philip Collins, Dickens and Crime (London: Macmillan, 1962), 33.
“A Visit to Newgate” (February 1836), “Our Next-Door Neighbors” (March 1836), “Meditations in Monmouth-Street” (Sept. 1836), “Scotland-yard” (October 1836), “Doctors’ Commons” (October 1836), rpr. in Sketches by Boz (London: Chapman and Hall, 1837–9), rpr. in S at 248, 66, 101, 90, 115. Robert L. Patten argues that the Sketches’ preoccupation with death, exemplified by “Meditations in Monmouth-Street,” is more a matter of the flâneur’s own bachelor detachment from “life or wife” than the downward spiral of any social phenomenon. Patten, George Cruikshank: His Life, Times, and Art, 2 vols (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1992, 1996), 2: 39.
Kathryn Chittick, Dickens and the 1830s (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 49.
The three versions, the third a combination and revision of the previous two, are: (1) “Some Account of an Omnibus Cad,” Bell’s Life in London and Sporting Chronicle (1 November 1835) (superseded beginning and ending rpr. in Virgil Grillo, Charles Dickens’ Sketches by Boz: Ends in the Beginning [Boulder: Colorado Associated University Press, 1974], 104,
and John Butt and Kathleen Tillotson, Dickens at Work [London: Methuen, 1957], 54, respectively);
(2) “Hackney-Cabs, and their Drivers,” Carlton Chronicle (17 September 1836): 170, rpr. in Duane DeVries, Dickens’ Apprentice Years: the Making of a Novelist (New York: Harvester/Barnes and Noble, 1976), Appendix B, 164–6; and (3) “The Last Cab-Driver, and the First Omnibus Cad,” Sketches by Boz (London: Macrone, 1836), rpr. with minor changes in Chapman and Hall’s Part 7 (May 1838), and in S 170–81.
Compare, for example, David Hume, A Treatise on Human Nature, ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), 618;
Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, ed. D. D. Raphael and A. L. Macfie (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), 9–16;
G. W. F. Hegel, “The Spirit of Christianity,” trans. T. M. Knox, in Early Theological Writings, ed. Richard Kroner (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1971), 246–7; and George Eliot, “The Natural History of German Life,” Essays 128.
D. A. Miller, The Novel and the Police (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 59.
Jonathan Arac, Commissioned Spirits: the Shaping of Social Motion in Dickens, Cariyle, Melville, and Hawthorne, rev. edn (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), 22–3, 87, 121 and passim,
See Roman Jakobson, “Two Aspects of Language and Two Types of Linguistic Disturbances” (1956), in Language and Literature, ed. Krystyna Pomorska and Stephen Rudy (Cambridge: Belknap-Harvard University Press, 1987), 95–114.
Perker is referring to Reports of Cases in the Court of King’s Bench, 1817–1834, ed. R. V. Barnewell (London, 1836), and Sam to The History of George Barnwell, or the London Merchant, a melodrama first produced in 1731. See The Pickwick Papers, ed. Robert L. Patten (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972), 937 n.14, 938 n.15.
See J. Hillis Miller, “Sam Weller’s Valentine,” in Literature and the Marketplace: Nineteenth-Century British Publishing and Reading Practices, ed. John O. Jordan and Robert L. Patten (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 114–16.
On the modern state’s monopoly on force, see Max Weber, “Politics as a Vocation” (1919), in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, trans. and ed. H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (New York: Oxford University Press, 1946), 78,
and Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: the Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage, 1979). On Dickens’s and Thackeray’s objections to public execution arising from the Courvoisier case of 1840, see Collins, Dickens and Crime, 224–6.
Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, trans. Martin Mulligan, ed. Dirk J. Strunk (New York: International, 1964), 136;
see also Jeff Nunokawa, The Afterlife of Property: Domestic Security and the Victorian Novel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 32–3.
Karl Marx, Capital, Volume One, trans. Ben Fowkes (Harmondsworth: Penguin/New Left Books, 1976), 172.
For literary form as “veiled revelation” of the kinds of conclusions to which sociology aspires, see Pierre Bourdieu, “The Structure of Sentimental Education,” trans. Claude DuVerlie, in The Field of Cultural Production, ed. and intro. Randal Johnson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 158–9.
For Pickwick’s status as such, see N. N. Feltes, Modes of Production of Victorian Novels (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 15–16.
Chittick, Dickens and the 1830s, 64; see also Alexander Welsh, “Waverley, Pickwick and Don Quixote,” Nineteenth Century Fiction 22 (1967–8): 19–30. On the novel’s larger patterns of disruption and reversal, see Patten’s introduction to the 1972 Penguin edition, 28–9.
Athenaeum 2 January 1828, quoted in John Sutherland, Victorian Novelists and Publishers (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), 12; see also DP 50.
On Bell’s Life, see Butt and Tillotson, Dickens at Work, 41 n.3. Ackroyd states that Dickens’s payment for the “Scenes and Characters” series was more than his Chronicle salary, but does not give the amount; nor does Johnson. See Peter Ackroyd, Dickens: a Life (London: Sinclair-Stevenson, 1990), 169;
Edgar Johnson, Charles Dickens: His Tragedy and Triumph, 2 vols (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1952), I, 103.
DP 51; Richard D. Altick, The English Common Reader (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957), 335, 333.
John Forster, The Life of Charles Dickens, ed. A. J. Hoppé, 2 vols (London: J. M. Dent, 1966), 1: 25, 2: 179.
René Girard, Violence and the Sacred, trans. Patrick Gregory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977), 81;
see also Michiel Heyns, Expulsion and the Nineteenth-Century Novel: the Scapegoat in English Realist Fiction (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), ch. 2.
Other reviews also called him “the Cruikshank of writers,” “our modern Hogarth.” See David Paroissien, Oliver Twist: an Annotated Bibliography (New York: Garland, 1986), 100–1, 104. On the details of the collaboration and friendship between Dickens and Cruikshank during the composition of Oliver Twist, as well as the emerging artistic and personal differences between the two, see Patten, George Cruikshank, 2: 36–7, 50–94.
Chittick, Dickens and the 1830s, 80; see also Philip Collins, ed., Dickens: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1971), 52.
On the sudden transformation of Nancy and its negative implications for Tillotson’s own thesis concerning any “long incubation” of the work, see Dickens’s letter of 3 November expressing his “hope to do great things with Nancy[,] [i]f I can only work out the idea I have formed of her, and of the female [Rose Maylie] who is to contrast with her,” PL 1: 328, as discussed in Burton M. Wheeler, “The Text and Plan of Oliver Twist,” Dickens Studies Annual 12 (1983): 41–61, 44.
For Nancy’s primordial status for Dickens, see Hilary Schor, Dickens and the Daughter of the House (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 21–31; for the broader cultural significance of the atoning female body, see also
Elisabeth Bronfen, Over Her Dead Body: Death, Femininity and the Aesthetic (New York: Routledge, 1992).
See generally Boyd Hilton, The Age of Atonement: the Influence of Evangelicalism on Social and Economic Thought, 1795–1865 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988).
W. H. Auden, “Dingley Dell and the Fleet,” in The Dyer’s Hand and Other Essays (New York: Random House, 1962), 424–6.
On this passage, see also Dennis Walder, Dickens and Religion (London: Allen & Unwin, 1981), 26.
George Orwell, Dickens, Dali and Others (New York: Reynal and Hitchcock, 1946), 53.
Copyright information
© 2005 David Payne
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Payne, D. (2005). The Cockney and the Prostitute: Dickens from Sketches by Boz to Oliver Twist. In: The Reenchantment of Nineteenth-Century Fiction. Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230512566_2
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230512566_2
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-52467-9
Online ISBN: 978-0-230-51256-6
eBook Packages: Palgrave Literature & Performing Arts CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)