It is so
horribly
easy to
imagine what a left-wing boys’ paper would be like, if it existed.
imagine what a left-wing boys’ paper would be like, if it existed.
Orwell
But every one of those minutes
seemed inordinately long to Bunter. They seemed to crawl by like tired snails.
Looking at the clock in Classroom No. 10 the fat Owl could hardly believe that only
fifteen minutes had passed. It seemed more like fifteen hours, if not fifteen days!
Other fellows were in extra French as well as Bunter. They did not matter. Bunter did!
(The Magnet)
After a terrible climb, hacking out handholds in the smooth ice every step of the way up.
Sergeant Lionheart Logan of the Mounties was now clinging like a human fly to the face
of an icy cliff, as smooth and treacherous as a giant pane of glass.
An Arctic blizzard, in all its fury, was buffeting his body, driving the blinding snow into
his face, seeking to tear his fingers loose from their handholds and dash him to death on
the jagged boulders which lay at the foot of the cliff a hundred feet below.
Crouching among those boulders were eleven villainous trappers who had done their best
to shoot down Lionheart and his companion, Constable Jim Rogers — until the blizzard
had blotted the two Mounties out of sight from below. (The Wizard)
The second extract gets you some distance with the story, the first takes a hundred words
to tell you that Bunter is in the detention class. Moreover, by not concentrating on school
stories (in point of numbers the school story slightly predominates in all these papers,
except the THRILLER and DETECTIVE WEEKLY), the WIZARD, HOTSPUR, etc. ,
have far greater opportunities for sensationalism. Merely looking at the cover illustrations
of the papers which I have on the table in front of me, here are some of the things I see.
On one a cowboy is clinging by his toes to the wing of an aeroplane in mid-air and
shooting down another aeroplane with his revolver. On another a Chinese is swimming
for his life down a sewer with a swarm of ravenous-looking rats swimming after him. On
another an engineer is lighting a stick of dynamite while a steel robot feels for him with
its claws. On another a man in airman’s costume is fighting barehanded against a rat
somewhat larger than a donkey. On another a nearly naked man of terrific muscular
development has just seized a lion by the tail and flung it thirty yards over the wall of an
arena, with the words, ‘Take back your blooming lion! ’ Clearly no school story can
compete with this kind of thing. From time to time the school buildings may catch fire or
the French master may turn out to be the head of an international anarchist gang, but in a
general way the interest must centre round cricket, school rivalries, practical jokes, etc.
There is not much room for bombs, death-rays, sub-machine guns, aeroplanes, mustangs,
octopuses, grizzly bears or gangsters.
Examination of a large number of these papers shows that, putting aside school stories,
the favourite subjects are Wild West, Frozen North, Foreign Fegion, crime (always from
the detective’s angle), the Great War (Air Force or Secret Service, not the infantry), the
Tarzan motif in varying forms, professional football, tropical exploration, historical
romance (Robin Hood, Cavaliers and Round-heads, etc. ) and scientific invention. The
Wild West still leads, at any rate as a setting, though the Red Indian seems to be fading
out. The one theme that is really new is the scientific one. Death-rays, Martians, invisible
men, robots, helicopters and interplanetary rockets figure largely: here and there there are
even far-off rumours of psychotherapy and ductless glands. Whereas the GEM and
MAGNET derive from Dickens and Kipling, the WIZARD, CHAMPION, MODEM
BOY, etc. , owe a great deal to H. G. Wells, who, rather than Jules Veme, is the father of
‘Scientifiction’. Naturally it is the magical Martian aspect of science that is most
exploited, but one or two papers include serious articles on scientific subjects, besides
quantities of informative snippets. (Examples: ‘A Kauri tree in Queensland, Australia, is
over 12,000 years old’; ‘Nearly 50,000 thunderstonns occur every day’; ‘Helium gas
costs £1 per 1000 cubic feet’; ‘There are over 500 varieties of spiders in Great Britain’;
‘London firemen use 14,000,000 gallons of water annually’, etc. , etc. ) There is a marked
advance in intellectual curiosity and, on the whole, in the demand made on the reader’s
attention. In practice the GEM and MAGNET and the post-war papers are read by much
the same public, but the mental age aimed at seems to have risen by a year or two years —
an improvement probably corresponding to the improvement in elementary education
since 1909.
The other thing that has emerged in the post-war boys’ papers, though not to anything
like the extent one would expect, is bully-worship and the cult of violence.
If one compares the GEM and MAGNET with a genuinely modern paper, the thing that
immediately strikes one is the absence of the leader-principle. There is no central
dominating character; instead there are fifteen or twenty characters, all more or less on an
equality, with whom readers of different types can identify. In the more modem papers
this is not usually the case. Instead of identifying with a schoolboy of more or less his
own age, the reader of the SKIPPER, HOTSPUR, etc. , is led to identify with a G-man,
with a Foreign Legionary, with some variant of Tarzan, with an air ace, a master spy, an
explorer, a pugilist — at any rate with some single all-powerful character who dominates
everyone about him and whose usual method of solving any problem is a sock on the jaw.
This character is intended as a superman, and as physical strength is the form of power
that boys can best understand, he is usually a sort of human gorilla; in the Tarzan type of
story he is sometimes actually a giant, eight or ten feet high. At the same time the scenes
of violence in nearly all these stories are remarkably harmless and unconvincing. There is
a great difference in tone between even the most bloodthirsty English paper and the
threepenny Yank Mags, FIGHT STORIES, ACTION STORIES, etc. (not strictly boys’
papers, but largely read by boys). In the Yank Mags you get real blood-lust, really gory
descriptions of the all-in, jump-on-his-testicles style fighting, written in a jargon that has
been perfected by people who brood end-lessly on violence. A paper like FIGHT
STORIES, for instance, would have very little appeal except to sadists and masochists.
You can see the comparative gentleness of the English civilization by the amateurish way
in which prize-fighting is always described in the boys’ weeklies. There is no specialized
vocabulary. Look at these four extracts, two English, two American;
When the gong sounded, both men were breathing heavily and each had great red marks
on his chest. Bill’s chin was bleeding, and Ben had a cut over his right eye.
Into their comers they sank, but when the gong clanged again they were up swiftly, and
they went like tigers at each other. (ROVER)
H= * *
He walked in stolidly and smashed a clublike right to my face. Blood spattered and I
went back on my heels, but surged in and ripped my right under the heart. Another right
smashed full on Ben’s already battered mouth, and, spitting out the fragments of a tooth,
he crashed a flailing left to my body. (FIGHT STORIES)
* * *
It was amazing to watch the Black Panther at work. His muscles rippled and slid under
his dark skin. There was all the power and grace of a giant cat in his swift and terrible
onslaught.
He volleyed blows with a bewildering speed for so huge a fellow. In a moment Ben was
simply blocking with his gloves as well as he could. Ben was really a past-master of
defence. He had many fine victories behind him. But the Negro’s rights and lefts crashed
through openings that hardly any other fighter could have found. (WIZARD)
* * *
Haymakers which packed the bludgeoning weight of forest monarchs crashing down
under the ax hurled into the bodies of the two heavies as they swapped punches. (FIGHT
STORIES)
Notice how much more knowledgeable the American extracts sound. They are written for
devotees of the prize-ring, the others are not. Also, it ought to be emphasized that on its
level the moral code of the English boys’ papers is a decent one. Crime and dishonesty
are never held up to admiration, there is none of the cynicism and corruption of the
American gangster story. The huge sale of the Ya nk Mags in England shows that there is
a demand for that kind of thing, but very few English writers seem able to produce it.
When hatred of Hitler became a major emotion in America, it was interesting to see how
promptly ‘anti-Fascism’ was adapted to pornographic purposes by the editors of the Yank
Mags. One magazine which I have in front of me is given up to a long, complete story,
‘When Hell Game to America’, in which the agents of a ‘blood-maddened European
dictator’ are trying to conquer the U. S. A. with death-rays and invisible aeroplanes. There
is the fra nk est appeal to sadism, scenes in which the Nazis tie bombs to women’s backs
and fling them off heights to watch them blown to pieces in mid-air, others in which they
tie naked girls together by their hair and prod them with knives to make them dance, etc. ,
etc. The editor comments solemnly on all this, and uses it as a plea for tightening up
restrictions against immigrants. On another page of the same paper: ‘LIVES OF THE
HOTCHA CHORUS GIRLS. Reveals all the intimate secrets and fascinating pastimes of
the famous Broadway Hotcha girls. NOTHING IS OMITTED. Price 10c. ’ ‘HOW TO
LOVE. 10c. ’ ‘FRENCH PHOTO RING. 25c. ’ ‘NAUGHTY NUDIES TRANSFERS.
From the outside of the glass you see a beautiful girl, innocently dressed. Turn it around
and look through the glass and oh! what a difference! Set of 3 transfers 25c. ,’ etc. , etc. ,
etc. There is nothing at all like this in any English paper likely to be read by boys. But the
process of Americanization is going on all the same. The American ideal, the ‘he-man’,
the ‘tough guy’, the gorilla who puts everything right by socking everybody on the jaw,
now figures in probably a majority of boys’ papers. In one serial now running in the
SKIPPER he is always portrayed ominously enough, swinging a rubber truncheon.
The development of the WIZARD, HOTSPUR, etc. , as against the earlier boys’ papers,
boils down to this: better technique, more scientific interest, more bloodshed, more
leader-worship. But, after all, it is the LACK of development that is the really striking
thing.
To begin with, there is no political development whatever. The world of the SKIPPER
and the CHAMPION is still the pre-1914 world of the MAGNET and the GEM. The
Wild West story, for instance, with its cattle-rustlers, lynch-law and other paraphernalia
belonging to the eighties, is a curiously archaic thing. It is worth noticing that in papers of
this type it is always taken for granted that adventures only happen at the ends of the
earth, in tropical forests, in Arctic wastes, in African deserts, on Western prairies, in
Chinese opium dens — everywhere in fact, except the places where things really DO
happen. That is a belief dating from thirty or forty years ago, when the new continents
were in process of being opened up. Nowadays, of course, if you really want adventure,
the place to look for it is in Europe. But apart from the picturesque side of the Great War,
contemporary history is carefully excluded. And except that Americans are now admired
instead of being laughed at, foreigners are exactly the same figures of fun that they
always were. If a Chinese character appears, he is still the sinister pigtailed opium-
smuggler of Sax Rohmer; no indication that things have been happening in China since
1912 — no indication that a war is going on there, for instance. If a Spaniard appears, he is
still a ‘dago’ or ‘greaser’ who rolls cigarettes and stabs people in the back; no indication
that things have been happening in Spain. Hitler and the Nazis have not yet appeared, or
are barely making their appearance. There will be plenty about them in a little while, but
it will be from a strictly patriotic angle (Britain versus Gennany), with the real meaning
of the struggle kept out of sight as much as possible. As for the Russian Revolution, it is
extremely difficult to find any reference to it in any of these papers. When Russia is
mentioned at all it is usually in an infonnation snippet (example: ‘There are 29,000
centenarians in the USSR. ’), and any reference to the Revolution is indirect and twenty
years out of date. In one story in the ROVER, for instance, somebody has a tame bear,
and as it is a Russian bear, it is nicknamed Trotsky — obviously an echo of the 1917-23
period and not of recent controversies. The clock has stopped at 1910. Britannia rules the
waves, and no one has heard of slumps, booms, unemployment, dictatorships, purges or
concentration camps.
And in social outlook there is hardly any advance. The snobbishness is somewhat less
open than in the GEM and MAGNET — that is the most one can possibly say. To begin
with, the school story, always partly dependent on snob-appeal, is by no means
eliminated. Every number of a boys’ paper includes at least one school story, these stories
slightly outnumbering the Wild Westerns. The very elaborate fantasy-life of the GEM
and MAGNET is not imitated and there is more emphasis on extraneous adventure, but
the social atmosphere (old grey stones) is much the same. When a new school is
introduced at the beginning of a story we are often told in just those words that ‘it was a
very posh school’. From time to time a story appears which is ostensibly directed
AGAINST snobbery. The scholarship-boy (cf. Tom Redwing in the MAGNET) makes
fairly frequent appearances, and what is essentially the same theme is sometimes
presented in this form: there is great rivalry between two schools, one of which considers
itself more ‘posh’ than the other, and there are fights, practical jokes, football matches,
etc. , always ending in the discomfiture of the snobs. If one glances very superficially at
some of these stories it is possible to imagine that a democratic spirit has crept into the
boys’ weeklies, but when one looks more closely one sees that they merely reflect the
bitter jealousies that exist within the white-collar class. Their real function is to allow the
boy who goes to a cheap private school (NOT a Council school) to feel that his school is
just as ‘posh’ in the sight of God as Winchester or Eton. The sentiment of school loyalty
(‘We’re better than the fellows down the road’), a thing almost unknown to the real
working class, is still kept up. As these stories are written by many different hands, they
do, of course, vary a good deal in tone. Some are reasonably free from snobbishness, in
others money and pedigree are exploited even more shamelessly than in the GEM and
MAGNET. In one that I came across an actual MAJORITY of the boys mentioned were
titled.
Where working-class characters appear, it is usually either as comics (jokes about tramps,
convicts, etc. ), or as prize-fighters, acrobats, cowboys, professional footballers and
Foreign Legionaries — in other words, as adventurers. There is no facing of the facts
about working-class life, or, indeed, about WORKING life of any description. Very
occasionally one may come across a realistic description of, say, work in a coal-mine, but
in all probability it will only be there as the background of some lurid adventure. In any
case the central character is not likely to be a coal-miner. Nearly all the time the boy who
reads these papers — in nine cases out often a boy who is going to spend his life working
in a shop, in a factory or in some subordinate job in an office — is led to identify with
people in positions of command, above all with people who are never troubled by
shortage of money. The Lord Peter Wimsey figure, the seeming idiot who drawls and
wears a monocle but is always to the fore in moments of danger, turns up over and over
again. (This character is a great favourite in Secret Service stories. ) And, as usual, the
heroic characters all have to talk B. B. C. ; they may talk Scottish or Irish or American, but
no one in a star part is ever permitted to drop an aitch. Here it is worth comparing the
social atmosphere of the boys’ weeklies with that of the women’s weeklies, the
ORACLE, the FAMILY STAR, PEG’S PAPER, etc.
The women’s papers are aimed at an older public and are read for the most part by girls
who are working for a living. Consequently they are on the surface much more realistic.
It is taken for granted, for example, that nearly everyone has to live in a big town and
work at a more or less dull job. Sex, so far from being taboo, is THE subject. The short,
complete stories, the special feature of these papers, are generally of the ‘came the dawn’
type: the heroine narrowly escapes losing her ‘boy’ to a designing rival, or the ‘boy’ loses
his job and has to postpone marriage, but presently gets a better job. The changeling-
fantasy (a girl brought up in a poor home is ‘really’ the child of rich parents) is another
favourite. Where sensationalism comes in, usually in the serials, it arises out of the more
domestic type of crime, such as bigamy, forgery or sometimes murder; no Martians,
death-rays or international anarchist gangs. These papers are at any rate aiming at
credibility, and they have a link with real life in their correspondence columns, where
genuine problems are being discussed. Ruby M. Ayres’s column of advice in the
ORACLE, for instance, is extremely sensible and well written. And yet the world of the
ORACLE and PEG’S PAPER is a pure fantasy- world. It is the same fantasy all the time;
pretending to be richer than you are. The chief impression that one carries away from
almost every story in these papers is of a frightful, overwhelming ‘refinement’.
Ostensibly the characters are working-class people, but their habits, the interiors of their
houses, their clothes, their outlook and, above all, their speech arc entirely middle class.
They are all living at several pounds a week above their income. And needless to say, that
is just the impression that is intended. The idea is to give the bored factory-girl or worn-
out mother of five a dream-life in which she pictures herself — not actually as a duchess
(that convention has gone out) but as, say, the wife of a bank-manager. Not only is a five-
to-six-pound-a-week standard of life set up as the ideal, but it is tacitly assumed that that
is how working-class people really DO live. The major facts arc simply not faced. It is
admitted, for instance, that people sometimes lose their jobs; but then the dark clouds roll
away and they get better jobs instead. No mention of un-employment as something
pennanent and inevitable, no mention of the dole, no mention of trade unionism. No
suggestion anywhere that there can be anything wrong with the system AS A SYSTEM;
there arc only individual misfortunes, which are generally due to somebody’s wickedness
and can in any case be put right in the last chapter. Always the dark clouds roll away, the
kind employer raises Alfred’s wages, and there are jobs for everybody except the drunks.
It is still the world of the WIZARD and the GEM, except that there are orange-blossoms
instead of machine-guns.
The outlook inculcated by all these papers is that of a rather exceptionally stupid member
of the Navy League in the year 1910. Yes, it may be said, but what does it matter? And in
any case, what else do you expect?
Of course no one in his senses would want to turn the so-called penny dreadful into a
realistic novel or a Socialist tract. An adventure story must of its nature be more or less
remote from real life. But, as I have tried to make clear, the unreality of the WIZARD
and the GEM is not so artless as it looks. These papers exist because of a specialized
demand, because boys at certain ages find it necessary to read about Martians, death-rays,
grizzly bears and gangsters. They get what they are looking for, but they get it wrapped
up in the illusions which their future employers think suitable for them. To what extent
people draw their ideas from fiction is disputable. Personally I believe that most people
are influenced far more than they would care to admit by novels, serial stories, films and
so forth, and that from this point of view the worst books are often the most important,
because they are usually the ones that are read earliest in life. It is probable that many
people who would consider themselves extremely sophisticated and ‘advanced’ are
actually carrying through life an imaginative background which they acquired in
childhood from (for instance) Sapper and lan Hay. If that is so, the boys’ twopenny
weeklies are of the deepest importance. Here is the stuff that is read somewhere between
the ages of twelve and eighteen by a very large proportion, perhaps an actual majority, of
English boys, including many who will never read anything else except newspapers; and
along with it they are absorbing a set of beliefs which would be regarded as hopelessly
out of date in the Central Office of the Conservative Party. All the better because it is
done indirectly, there is being pumped into them the conviction that the major problems
of our time do not exist, that there is nothing wrong with LAISSEZ-FAIRE capitalism,
that foreigners are un-important comics and that the British Empire is a sort of charity-
concern which will last for ever. Considering who owns these papers, it is difficult to
believe that this is un-intentional. Of the twelve papers I have been discussing (i. e. twelve
including the THRILLER and DETECTIVE WEEKLY) seven are the property of the
Amalgamated Press, which is one of the biggest press-combines in the world and controls
more than a hundred different papers. The GEM and MAGNET, therefore, are closely
linked up with the DAILY TELEGRAPH and the FINANCIAL TIMES. This in itself
would be enough to rouse certain suspicions, even if it were not obvious that the stories
in the boys’ weeklies are politically vetted. So it appears that if you feel the need of a
fantasy-life in which you travel to Mars and fight lions bare -handed (and what boy
doesn’t? ), you can only have it by delivering yourself over, mentally, to people like Lord
Camrose. For there is no competition. Throughout the whole of this run of papers the
differences are negligible, and on this level no others exist. This raises the question, why
is there no such thing as a left-wing boys’ paper?
At first glance such an idea merely makes one slightly sick.
It is so horribly easy to
imagine what a left-wing boys’ paper would be like, if it existed. I remember in 1920 or
1921 some optimistic person handing round Communist tracts among a crowd of public-
school boys. The tract I received was of the question-and-answer kind:
Q,. ‘Can a Boy Communist be a Boy Scout, Comrade? ’ A. ‘No, Comrade. ’ Q,. ‘Why,
Comrade? ’ A. ‘Because, Comrade, a Boy Scout must salute the Union Jack, which is the
symbol of tyranny and oppression,’ etc. , etc.
Now suppose that at this moment somebody started a left-wing paper deliberately aimed
at boys of twelve or fourteen. I do not suggest that the whole of its contents would be
exactly like the tract I have quoted above, but does anyone doubt that they would be
SOMETHING like it? Inevitably such a paper would either consist of dreary up-lift or it
would be under Communist influence and given over to adulation of Soviet Russia; in
either case no normal boy would ever look at it. Highbrow literature apart, the whole of
the existing left-wing Press, in so far as it is at all vigorously ‘left’, is one long tract. The
one Socialist paper in England which could live a week on its merits AS A PAPER is the
DAILY HERALD: and how much Socialism is there in the DAILY HERALD? At this
moment, therefore, a paper with a ‘left’ slant and at the same time likely to have an
appeal to ordinary boys in their teens is something almost beyond hoping for.
But it does not follow that it is impossible. There is no clear reason why every adventure
story should necessarily be mixed up with snobbishness and gutter patriotism. For, after
all, the stories in the HOTSPUR and the MODERN BOY are not Conservative tracts;
they are merely adventure stories with a Conservative bias. It is fairly easy to imagine the
process being reversed. It is possible, for instance, to imagine a paper as thrilling and
lively as the HOTSPUR, but with subject-matter and ‘ideology’ a little more up to date. It
is even possible (though this raises other difficulties) to imagine a women’s paper at the
same literary level as the ORACLE, dealing in approximately the same kind of story, but
taking rather more account of the realities of working-class life. Such things have been
done before, though not in England. In the last years of the Spanish monarchy there was a
large output in Spain of left-wing novelettes, some of them evidently of anarchist origin.
Unfortunately at the time when they were appearing I did not see their social
significance, and I lost the collection of them that I had, but no doubt copies would still
be procurable. In get-up and style of story they were very similar to the English
fourpcnny novelette, except that their inspiration was ‘left’. If, for instance, a story
described police pursuing anarchists through the mountains, it would be from the point of
view of the anarchist and not of the police. An example nearer to hand is the Soviet film
CHAPAIEV, which has been shown a number of times in London. Technically, by the
standards of the time when it was made, CHAPAIEV is a first-rate film, but mentally, in
spite of the unfamiliar Russian background, it is not so very remote from Hollywood. The
one thing that lifts it out of the ordinary is the remarkable perfonnance by the actor who
takes the part of the White officer (the fat one) — a performance which looks very like an
inspired piece of gagging. Otherwise the atmosphere is familiar. All the usual
paraphernalia is there — heroic fight against odds, escape at the last moment, shots of
galloping horses, love interest, comic relief. The film is in fact a fairly ordinary one,
except that its tendency is ‘left’. In a Hollywood film of the Russian Civil War the
Whites would probably be angels and the Reds demons. In the Russian version the Reds
are angels and the Whites demons. That is also a lie, but, taking the long view, it is a less
pernicious lie than the other.
Here several difficult problems present themselves. Their general nature is obvious
enough, and I do not want to discuss them. I am merely pointing to the fact that, in
England, popular imaginative literature is a field that left-wing thought has never begun
to enter. ALL fiction from the novels in the mushroom libraries downwards is censored
in the interests of the ruling class. And boys’ fiction above all, the blood-and-thunder
stuff which nearly every boy devours at some time or other, is sodden in the worst
illusions of 1910. The fact is only unimportant if one believes that what is read in
childhood leaves no impression behind. Lord Camrose and his colleagues evidently
believe nothing of the kind, and, after all, Lord Camrose ought to know.
CHARLES DICKENS (1940)
I
Dickens is one of those writers who are well worth stealing. Even the burial of his body
in Westminster Abbey was a species of theft, if you come to think of it.
When Chesterton wrote his introductions to the Everyman Edition of Dickens’s works, it
seemed quite natural to him to credit Dickens with his own highly individual brand of
medievalism, and more recently a Marxist writer, Mr. T. A. Jackson, has made spirited
efforts to turn Dickens into a blood-thirsty revolutionary. The Marxist claims him as
‘almost’ a Marxist, the Catholic claims him as ‘almost’ a Catholic, and both claim him as
a champion of the proletariat (or ‘the poor’, as Chesterton would have put it). On the
other hand, Nadezhda Krupskaya, in her little book on Lenin, relates that towards the end
of his life Lenin went to see a dramatized version of THE CRICKET ON THE HEARTH,
and found Dickens’s ‘middle-class sentimentality’ so intolerable that he walked out in the
middle of a scene.
Taking ‘middle-class’ to mean what Krupskaya might be expected to mean by it, this was
probably a truer judgement than those of Chesterton and Jackson. But it is worth noticing
that the dislike of Dickens implied in this remark is something unusual. Plenty of people
have found him unreadable, but very few seem to have felt any hostility towards the
general spirit of his work. Some years later Mr. Bechhofer Roberts published a full-
length attack on Dickens in the form of a novel (THIS SIDE IDOLATRY), but it was a
merely personal attack, concerned for the most part with Dickens’s treatment of his wife.
It dealt with incidents which not one in a thousand of Dickens’s readers would ever hear
about, and which no more invalidates his work than the second-best bed invalidates
HAMLET. All that the book really demonstrated was that a writer’s literary personality
has little or nothing to do with his private character. It is quite possible that in private life
Dickens was just the kind of insensitive egoist that Mr. Bechhofer Roberts makes him
appear. But in his published work there is implied a personality quite different from this,
a personality which has won him far more friends than enemies. It might well have been
otherwise, for even if Dickens was a bourgeois, he was certainly a subversive writer, a
radical, one might truthfully say a rebel. Everyone who has read widely in his work has
felt this. Gissing, for instance, the best of the writers on Dickens, was anything but a
radical himself, and he disapproved of this strain in Dickens and wished it were not there,
but it never occurred to him to deny it. In OLIVER TWIST, HARD TIMES, BLEAK
HOUSE, LITTLE DORRIT, Dickens attacked English institutions with a ferocity that has
never since been approached. Yet he managed to do it without making himself hated,
and, more than this, the very people he attacked have swallowed him so completely that
he has become a national institution himself. In its attitude towards Dickens the English
public has always been a little like the elephant which feels a blow with a walking-stick
as a delightful tickling. Before I was ten years old I was having Dickens ladled down my
throat by schoolmasters in whom even at that age I could see a strong resemblance to Mr.
Creakle, and one knows without needing to be told that lawyers delight in Sergeant
Buzfuz and that LITTLE DORRIT is a favourite in the Home Office. Dickens seems to
have succeeded in attacking everybody and antagonizing nobody. Naturally this makes
one wonder whether after all there was something unreal in his attack upon society.
Where exactly does he stand, socially, morally, and politically? As usual, one can define
his position more easily if one starts by deciding what he was NOT.
In the first place he was NOT, as Messrs. Chesterton and Jackson seem to imply, a
‘proletarian’ writer. To begin with, he does not write about the proletariat, in which he
merely resembles the overwhelming majority of novelists, past and present. If you look
for the working classes in fiction, and especially English fiction, all you find is a hole.
This statement needs qualifying, perhaps. For reasons that are easy enough to see, the
agricultural labourer (in England a proletarian) gets a fairly good showing in fiction, and
a great deal has been written about criminals, derelicts and, more recently, the working-
class intelligentsia. But the ordinary town proletariat, the people who make the wheels go
round, have always been ignored by novelists. When they do find their way between the
covers of a book, it is nearly always as objects of pity or as comic relief. The central
action of Dickens’s stories almost invariably takes place in middle-class surroundings. If
one examines his novels in detail one finds that his real subject-matter is the London
commercial bourgeoisie and their hangers-on — lawyers, clerks, tradesmen, innkeepers,
small craftsmen, and servants. He has no portrait of an agricultural worker, and only one
(Stephen Blackpool in HARD TIMES) of an industrial worker. The Plomishes in
LITTLE DORRIT are probably his best picture of a working-class family — the
Peggottys, for instance, hardly belong to the working class — but on the whole he is not
successful with this type of character. If you ask any ordinary reader which of Dickens’s
proletarian characters he can remember, the three he is almost certain to mention are Bill
Sykes, Sam Weller, and Mrs. Gamp. A burglar, a valet, and a drunken midwife — not
exactly a representative cross-section of the English working class.
Secondly, in the ordinarily accepted sense of the word, Dickens is not a ‘revolutionary’
writer. But his position here needs some defining.
Whatever else Dickens may have been, he was not a hole-and-comer soul-saver, the kind
of well-meaning idiot who thinks that the world will be perfect if you amend a few
bylaws and abolish a few anomalies. It is worth comparing him with Charles Reade, for
instance. Reade was a much better-informed man than Dickens, and in some ways more
public-spirited. He really hated the abuses he could understand, he showed them up in a
series of novels which for all their absurdity are extremely readable, and he probably
helped to alter public opinion on a few minor but important points. But it was quite
beyond him to grasp that, given the existing form of society, certain evils CANNOT be
remedied. Fasten upon this or that minor abuse, expose it, drag it into the open, bring it
before a British jury, and all will be well that is how he sees it. Dickens at any rate never
imagined that you can cure pimples by cutting them off. In every page of his work one
can see a consciousness that society is wrong somewhere at the root. It is when one asks
‘Which root? ’ that one begins to grasp his position.
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. He attacks the law,
parliamentary government, the educational system and so forth, without ever clearly
suggesting what he would put in their places. Of course it is not necessarily the business
of a novelist, or a satirist, to make constructive suggestions, but the point is that
Dickens’s attitude is at bottom not even DEStructive. There is no clear sign that he wants
the existing order to be overthrown, or that he believes it would make very much
difference if it WERE overthrown. For in reality 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, for instance,
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. Of course one can draw this inference for
oneself, and one can draw it again from the remarks about Bounderby’s will at the end of
HARD TIMES, and indeed from the whole of Dickens’s work one can infer the evil of
LAISSEZ-FAIRE capitalism; but Dickens makes no such inference himself. It is said that
Macaulay refused to review HARD TIMES because he disapproved of its ‘sullen
Socialism’. Obviously Macaulay 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. Bounder by 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. This character
belongs especially to Dickens’s early optimistic period. 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. Of course he is a pure dream figure, much further from real life than, say,
Squeers or Micawber. 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. Nevertheless this character runs like a connecting thread through
most of the earlier books. Pickwick, the Cheerybles, old Chuzzlewit, Scrooge — it is the
same figure over and over again, the good rich man, handing out guineas. Dickens does
however show signs of development here. In the books of the middle period the good rich
man fades out to some extent. There is no one who plays this part in A TALE OF TWO
CITIES, nor in GREAT EXPECTATIONS— GREAT EXPECTATIONS is, in fact,
definitely an attack on patronage — and in HARD TIMES it is only very doubtfully
played by Gradgrind after his refonnation. The character reappears in a rather different
form as Meagles in LITTLE DORRIT and John Jarndyce in BLEAK HOUSE — one
might perhaps add Betsy Trotwood in DAVID COPPERFIELD. But in these books the
good rich man has dwindled from a ‘merchant’ to a RENTIER. This is significant. A
RENTIER is part of the possessing class, he can and, almost without knowing it, does
make other people work for him, but he has very little direct power. Unlike Scrooge or
the Cheerybles, he cannot put everything right by raising everybody’s wages. The
seeming inference from the rather despondent books that Dickens wrote in the fifties is
that by that time he had grasped the helplessness of well-meaning individuals in a corrupt
society. Nevertheless in the last completed novel, OUR MUTUAL FRIEND (published
1 864-5), the good rich man comes back in full glory in the person of Boffin. Boffin is a
proletarian by origin and only rich by inheritance, but he is the usual DEUS EX
MACHINA, solving everybody’s problems by showering money in all directions. He
even ‘trots’, like the Cheerybles. In several ways OUR MUTUAL FRIEND is a return to
the earlier manner, and not an unsuccessful return either. Dickens’s thoughts seem to
have come full circle. Once again, individual kindliness is the remedy for everything.
One crying evil of his time that Dickens says very little about is child labour. There are
plenty of pictures of suffering children in his books, but usually they are suffering in
schools rather than in factories. The one detailed account of child labour that he gives is
the description in DAVID COPPERFIELD of little David washing bottles in Murdstone
& Grinby’s warehouse. This, of course, is autobiography. Dickens himself, at the age of
ten, had worked in Warren’s blacking factory in the Strand, very much as he describes it
here. It was a terribly bitter memory to him, partly because he felt the whole incident to
be discreditable to his parents, and he even concealed it from his wife till long after they
were married. Looking back on this period, he says in DAVID COPPERFIELD:
It is a matter of some surprise to me, even now, that I can have been so easily thrown
away at such an age. A child of excellent abilities and with strong powers of observation,
quick, eager, delicate, and soon hurt bodily or mentally, it seems wonderful to me that
nobody should have made any sign in my behalf. But none was made; and I became, at
ten years old, a little labouring hind in the service of Murdstone & Grinby.
And again, having described the rough boys among whom he worked:
No words can express the secret agony of my soul as I su nk into this companionship. . .
and felt my hopes of growing up to be a learned and distinguished man crushed in my
bosom.
Obviously it is not David Copperfield who is speaking, it is Dickens himself. He uses
almost the same words in the autobiography that he began and abandoned a few months
earlier. Of course Dickens is right in saying that a gifted child ought not to work ten
hours a day pasting labels on bottles, but what he does not say is that NO child ought to
be condemned to such a fate, and there is no reason for inferring that he thinks it. David
escapes from the warehouse, but Mick Walker and Mealy Potatoes and the others are still
there, and there is no sign that this troubles Dickens particularly. As usual, he displays no
consciousness that the STRUCTURE of society can be changed. He despises politics,
does not believe that any good can come out of Parliament — he had been a Parliamentary
shorthand writer, which was no doubt a disillusioning experience — and he is slightly
hostile to the most hopeful movement of his day, trade unionism. In HARD TIMES trade
unionism is represented as something not much better than a racket, something that
happens because employers are not sufficiently paternal. Stephen Blackpool’s refusal to
join the union is rather a virtue in Dickens’s eyes. Also, as Mr. Jackson has pointed out,
the apprentices’ association in BARNABY RUDGE, to which Sim Tappertit belongs, is
probably a hit at the illegal or barely legal unions of Dickens’s own day, with their secret
assemblies, passwords and so forth. Obviously he wants the workers to be decently
treated, but there is no sign that he wants them to take their destiny into their own hands,
least of all by open violence.
As it happens, Dickens deals with revolution in the narrower sense in two novels,
BARNABY RUDGE and A TALE OF TWO CITIES. In BARNABY RUDGE it is a
case of rioting rather than revolution. The Gordon Riots of 1780, though they had
religious bigotry as a pretext, seem to have been little more than a pointless outburst of
looting. Dickens’s attitude to this kind of thing is sufficiently indicated by the fact that his
first idea was to make the ringleaders of the riots three lunatics escaped from an asylum.
He was dissuaded from this, but the principal figure of the book is in fact a village idiot.
In the chapters dealing with the riots Dickens shows a most profound horror of mob
violence. He delights in describing scenes in which the ‘dregs’ of the population behave
with atrocious bestiality. These chapters are of great psychological interest, because they
show how deeply he had brooded on this subject. The things he describes can only have
come out of his imagination, for no riots on anything like the same scale had happened in
his lifetime. Here is one of his descriptions, for instance:
If Bedlam gates had been flung open wide, there would not have issued forth such
maniacs as the frenzy of that night had made. There were men there who danced and
trampled on the beds of flowers as though they trod down human enemies, and wrenched
them from their stalks, like savages who twisted human necks. There were men who cast
their lighted torches in the air, and suffered them to fall upon their heads and faces,
blistering the skin with deep unseemly burns. There were men who rushed up to the lire,
and paddled in it with their hands as if in water; and others who were restrained by force
from plunging in, to gratify their deadly longing. On the skull of one drunken lad — not
twenty, by his looks — who lay upon the ground with a bottle to his mouth, the lead from
the roof came streaming down in a shower of liquid lire, white hot, melting his head like
wax. . . But of all the howling throng not one learnt mercy from, or sickened at, these
sights; nor was the fierce, besotted, senseless rage of one man glutted.
You might almost think you were reading a description of ‘Red’ Spain by a partisan of
General Franco. One ought, of course, to remember that when Dickens was writing, the
London ‘mob’ still existed. (Nowadays there is no mob, only a flock. ) Low wages and the
growth and shift of population had brought into existence a huge, dangerous slum-
proletariat, and until the early middle of the nineteenth century there was hardly such a
thing as a police force. When the brickbats began to fly there was nothing between
shuttering your windows and ordering the troops to open fire. In A TALE OF TWO
CITIES he is dealing with a revolution which was really about something, and Dickens’s
attitude is different, but not entirely different. As a matter of fact, A TALE OF TWO
CITIES is a book which tends to leave a false impression behind, especially after a lapse
of time.
The one thing that everyone who has read A TALE OF TWO CITIES remembers is the
Reign of Terror. The whole book is dominated by the guillotine — tumbrils thundering to
and fro, bloody knives, heads bouncing into the basket, and sinister old women knitting
as they watch. Actually these scenes only occupy a few chapters, but they are written
with terrible intensity, and the rest of the book is rather slow going. But A TALE OF
TWO CITIES is not a companion volume to THE SCARLET PIMPERNEL. Dickens
sees clearly enough that the French Revolution was bound to happen and that many of the
people who were executed deserved what they got. If, he says, you behave as the French
aristocracy had behaved, vengeance will follow. He repeats this over and over again. We
are constantly being reminded that while ‘my lord’ is lolling in bed, with four liveried
footmen serving his chocolate and the peasants starving outside, somewhere in the forest
a tree is growing which will presently be sawn into planks for the platform of the
guillotine, etc. , etc. , etc. The inevitability of the Terror, given its causes, is insisted upon
in the clearest terms:
It was too much the way.
seemed inordinately long to Bunter. They seemed to crawl by like tired snails.
Looking at the clock in Classroom No. 10 the fat Owl could hardly believe that only
fifteen minutes had passed. It seemed more like fifteen hours, if not fifteen days!
Other fellows were in extra French as well as Bunter. They did not matter. Bunter did!
(The Magnet)
After a terrible climb, hacking out handholds in the smooth ice every step of the way up.
Sergeant Lionheart Logan of the Mounties was now clinging like a human fly to the face
of an icy cliff, as smooth and treacherous as a giant pane of glass.
An Arctic blizzard, in all its fury, was buffeting his body, driving the blinding snow into
his face, seeking to tear his fingers loose from their handholds and dash him to death on
the jagged boulders which lay at the foot of the cliff a hundred feet below.
Crouching among those boulders were eleven villainous trappers who had done their best
to shoot down Lionheart and his companion, Constable Jim Rogers — until the blizzard
had blotted the two Mounties out of sight from below. (The Wizard)
The second extract gets you some distance with the story, the first takes a hundred words
to tell you that Bunter is in the detention class. Moreover, by not concentrating on school
stories (in point of numbers the school story slightly predominates in all these papers,
except the THRILLER and DETECTIVE WEEKLY), the WIZARD, HOTSPUR, etc. ,
have far greater opportunities for sensationalism. Merely looking at the cover illustrations
of the papers which I have on the table in front of me, here are some of the things I see.
On one a cowboy is clinging by his toes to the wing of an aeroplane in mid-air and
shooting down another aeroplane with his revolver. On another a Chinese is swimming
for his life down a sewer with a swarm of ravenous-looking rats swimming after him. On
another an engineer is lighting a stick of dynamite while a steel robot feels for him with
its claws. On another a man in airman’s costume is fighting barehanded against a rat
somewhat larger than a donkey. On another a nearly naked man of terrific muscular
development has just seized a lion by the tail and flung it thirty yards over the wall of an
arena, with the words, ‘Take back your blooming lion! ’ Clearly no school story can
compete with this kind of thing. From time to time the school buildings may catch fire or
the French master may turn out to be the head of an international anarchist gang, but in a
general way the interest must centre round cricket, school rivalries, practical jokes, etc.
There is not much room for bombs, death-rays, sub-machine guns, aeroplanes, mustangs,
octopuses, grizzly bears or gangsters.
Examination of a large number of these papers shows that, putting aside school stories,
the favourite subjects are Wild West, Frozen North, Foreign Fegion, crime (always from
the detective’s angle), the Great War (Air Force or Secret Service, not the infantry), the
Tarzan motif in varying forms, professional football, tropical exploration, historical
romance (Robin Hood, Cavaliers and Round-heads, etc. ) and scientific invention. The
Wild West still leads, at any rate as a setting, though the Red Indian seems to be fading
out. The one theme that is really new is the scientific one. Death-rays, Martians, invisible
men, robots, helicopters and interplanetary rockets figure largely: here and there there are
even far-off rumours of psychotherapy and ductless glands. Whereas the GEM and
MAGNET derive from Dickens and Kipling, the WIZARD, CHAMPION, MODEM
BOY, etc. , owe a great deal to H. G. Wells, who, rather than Jules Veme, is the father of
‘Scientifiction’. Naturally it is the magical Martian aspect of science that is most
exploited, but one or two papers include serious articles on scientific subjects, besides
quantities of informative snippets. (Examples: ‘A Kauri tree in Queensland, Australia, is
over 12,000 years old’; ‘Nearly 50,000 thunderstonns occur every day’; ‘Helium gas
costs £1 per 1000 cubic feet’; ‘There are over 500 varieties of spiders in Great Britain’;
‘London firemen use 14,000,000 gallons of water annually’, etc. , etc. ) There is a marked
advance in intellectual curiosity and, on the whole, in the demand made on the reader’s
attention. In practice the GEM and MAGNET and the post-war papers are read by much
the same public, but the mental age aimed at seems to have risen by a year or two years —
an improvement probably corresponding to the improvement in elementary education
since 1909.
The other thing that has emerged in the post-war boys’ papers, though not to anything
like the extent one would expect, is bully-worship and the cult of violence.
If one compares the GEM and MAGNET with a genuinely modern paper, the thing that
immediately strikes one is the absence of the leader-principle. There is no central
dominating character; instead there are fifteen or twenty characters, all more or less on an
equality, with whom readers of different types can identify. In the more modem papers
this is not usually the case. Instead of identifying with a schoolboy of more or less his
own age, the reader of the SKIPPER, HOTSPUR, etc. , is led to identify with a G-man,
with a Foreign Legionary, with some variant of Tarzan, with an air ace, a master spy, an
explorer, a pugilist — at any rate with some single all-powerful character who dominates
everyone about him and whose usual method of solving any problem is a sock on the jaw.
This character is intended as a superman, and as physical strength is the form of power
that boys can best understand, he is usually a sort of human gorilla; in the Tarzan type of
story he is sometimes actually a giant, eight or ten feet high. At the same time the scenes
of violence in nearly all these stories are remarkably harmless and unconvincing. There is
a great difference in tone between even the most bloodthirsty English paper and the
threepenny Yank Mags, FIGHT STORIES, ACTION STORIES, etc. (not strictly boys’
papers, but largely read by boys). In the Yank Mags you get real blood-lust, really gory
descriptions of the all-in, jump-on-his-testicles style fighting, written in a jargon that has
been perfected by people who brood end-lessly on violence. A paper like FIGHT
STORIES, for instance, would have very little appeal except to sadists and masochists.
You can see the comparative gentleness of the English civilization by the amateurish way
in which prize-fighting is always described in the boys’ weeklies. There is no specialized
vocabulary. Look at these four extracts, two English, two American;
When the gong sounded, both men were breathing heavily and each had great red marks
on his chest. Bill’s chin was bleeding, and Ben had a cut over his right eye.
Into their comers they sank, but when the gong clanged again they were up swiftly, and
they went like tigers at each other. (ROVER)
H= * *
He walked in stolidly and smashed a clublike right to my face. Blood spattered and I
went back on my heels, but surged in and ripped my right under the heart. Another right
smashed full on Ben’s already battered mouth, and, spitting out the fragments of a tooth,
he crashed a flailing left to my body. (FIGHT STORIES)
* * *
It was amazing to watch the Black Panther at work. His muscles rippled and slid under
his dark skin. There was all the power and grace of a giant cat in his swift and terrible
onslaught.
He volleyed blows with a bewildering speed for so huge a fellow. In a moment Ben was
simply blocking with his gloves as well as he could. Ben was really a past-master of
defence. He had many fine victories behind him. But the Negro’s rights and lefts crashed
through openings that hardly any other fighter could have found. (WIZARD)
* * *
Haymakers which packed the bludgeoning weight of forest monarchs crashing down
under the ax hurled into the bodies of the two heavies as they swapped punches. (FIGHT
STORIES)
Notice how much more knowledgeable the American extracts sound. They are written for
devotees of the prize-ring, the others are not. Also, it ought to be emphasized that on its
level the moral code of the English boys’ papers is a decent one. Crime and dishonesty
are never held up to admiration, there is none of the cynicism and corruption of the
American gangster story. The huge sale of the Ya nk Mags in England shows that there is
a demand for that kind of thing, but very few English writers seem able to produce it.
When hatred of Hitler became a major emotion in America, it was interesting to see how
promptly ‘anti-Fascism’ was adapted to pornographic purposes by the editors of the Yank
Mags. One magazine which I have in front of me is given up to a long, complete story,
‘When Hell Game to America’, in which the agents of a ‘blood-maddened European
dictator’ are trying to conquer the U. S. A. with death-rays and invisible aeroplanes. There
is the fra nk est appeal to sadism, scenes in which the Nazis tie bombs to women’s backs
and fling them off heights to watch them blown to pieces in mid-air, others in which they
tie naked girls together by their hair and prod them with knives to make them dance, etc. ,
etc. The editor comments solemnly on all this, and uses it as a plea for tightening up
restrictions against immigrants. On another page of the same paper: ‘LIVES OF THE
HOTCHA CHORUS GIRLS. Reveals all the intimate secrets and fascinating pastimes of
the famous Broadway Hotcha girls. NOTHING IS OMITTED. Price 10c. ’ ‘HOW TO
LOVE. 10c. ’ ‘FRENCH PHOTO RING. 25c. ’ ‘NAUGHTY NUDIES TRANSFERS.
From the outside of the glass you see a beautiful girl, innocently dressed. Turn it around
and look through the glass and oh! what a difference! Set of 3 transfers 25c. ,’ etc. , etc. ,
etc. There is nothing at all like this in any English paper likely to be read by boys. But the
process of Americanization is going on all the same. The American ideal, the ‘he-man’,
the ‘tough guy’, the gorilla who puts everything right by socking everybody on the jaw,
now figures in probably a majority of boys’ papers. In one serial now running in the
SKIPPER he is always portrayed ominously enough, swinging a rubber truncheon.
The development of the WIZARD, HOTSPUR, etc. , as against the earlier boys’ papers,
boils down to this: better technique, more scientific interest, more bloodshed, more
leader-worship. But, after all, it is the LACK of development that is the really striking
thing.
To begin with, there is no political development whatever. The world of the SKIPPER
and the CHAMPION is still the pre-1914 world of the MAGNET and the GEM. The
Wild West story, for instance, with its cattle-rustlers, lynch-law and other paraphernalia
belonging to the eighties, is a curiously archaic thing. It is worth noticing that in papers of
this type it is always taken for granted that adventures only happen at the ends of the
earth, in tropical forests, in Arctic wastes, in African deserts, on Western prairies, in
Chinese opium dens — everywhere in fact, except the places where things really DO
happen. That is a belief dating from thirty or forty years ago, when the new continents
were in process of being opened up. Nowadays, of course, if you really want adventure,
the place to look for it is in Europe. But apart from the picturesque side of the Great War,
contemporary history is carefully excluded. And except that Americans are now admired
instead of being laughed at, foreigners are exactly the same figures of fun that they
always were. If a Chinese character appears, he is still the sinister pigtailed opium-
smuggler of Sax Rohmer; no indication that things have been happening in China since
1912 — no indication that a war is going on there, for instance. If a Spaniard appears, he is
still a ‘dago’ or ‘greaser’ who rolls cigarettes and stabs people in the back; no indication
that things have been happening in Spain. Hitler and the Nazis have not yet appeared, or
are barely making their appearance. There will be plenty about them in a little while, but
it will be from a strictly patriotic angle (Britain versus Gennany), with the real meaning
of the struggle kept out of sight as much as possible. As for the Russian Revolution, it is
extremely difficult to find any reference to it in any of these papers. When Russia is
mentioned at all it is usually in an infonnation snippet (example: ‘There are 29,000
centenarians in the USSR. ’), and any reference to the Revolution is indirect and twenty
years out of date. In one story in the ROVER, for instance, somebody has a tame bear,
and as it is a Russian bear, it is nicknamed Trotsky — obviously an echo of the 1917-23
period and not of recent controversies. The clock has stopped at 1910. Britannia rules the
waves, and no one has heard of slumps, booms, unemployment, dictatorships, purges or
concentration camps.
And in social outlook there is hardly any advance. The snobbishness is somewhat less
open than in the GEM and MAGNET — that is the most one can possibly say. To begin
with, the school story, always partly dependent on snob-appeal, is by no means
eliminated. Every number of a boys’ paper includes at least one school story, these stories
slightly outnumbering the Wild Westerns. The very elaborate fantasy-life of the GEM
and MAGNET is not imitated and there is more emphasis on extraneous adventure, but
the social atmosphere (old grey stones) is much the same. When a new school is
introduced at the beginning of a story we are often told in just those words that ‘it was a
very posh school’. From time to time a story appears which is ostensibly directed
AGAINST snobbery. The scholarship-boy (cf. Tom Redwing in the MAGNET) makes
fairly frequent appearances, and what is essentially the same theme is sometimes
presented in this form: there is great rivalry between two schools, one of which considers
itself more ‘posh’ than the other, and there are fights, practical jokes, football matches,
etc. , always ending in the discomfiture of the snobs. If one glances very superficially at
some of these stories it is possible to imagine that a democratic spirit has crept into the
boys’ weeklies, but when one looks more closely one sees that they merely reflect the
bitter jealousies that exist within the white-collar class. Their real function is to allow the
boy who goes to a cheap private school (NOT a Council school) to feel that his school is
just as ‘posh’ in the sight of God as Winchester or Eton. The sentiment of school loyalty
(‘We’re better than the fellows down the road’), a thing almost unknown to the real
working class, is still kept up. As these stories are written by many different hands, they
do, of course, vary a good deal in tone. Some are reasonably free from snobbishness, in
others money and pedigree are exploited even more shamelessly than in the GEM and
MAGNET. In one that I came across an actual MAJORITY of the boys mentioned were
titled.
Where working-class characters appear, it is usually either as comics (jokes about tramps,
convicts, etc. ), or as prize-fighters, acrobats, cowboys, professional footballers and
Foreign Legionaries — in other words, as adventurers. There is no facing of the facts
about working-class life, or, indeed, about WORKING life of any description. Very
occasionally one may come across a realistic description of, say, work in a coal-mine, but
in all probability it will only be there as the background of some lurid adventure. In any
case the central character is not likely to be a coal-miner. Nearly all the time the boy who
reads these papers — in nine cases out often a boy who is going to spend his life working
in a shop, in a factory or in some subordinate job in an office — is led to identify with
people in positions of command, above all with people who are never troubled by
shortage of money. The Lord Peter Wimsey figure, the seeming idiot who drawls and
wears a monocle but is always to the fore in moments of danger, turns up over and over
again. (This character is a great favourite in Secret Service stories. ) And, as usual, the
heroic characters all have to talk B. B. C. ; they may talk Scottish or Irish or American, but
no one in a star part is ever permitted to drop an aitch. Here it is worth comparing the
social atmosphere of the boys’ weeklies with that of the women’s weeklies, the
ORACLE, the FAMILY STAR, PEG’S PAPER, etc.
The women’s papers are aimed at an older public and are read for the most part by girls
who are working for a living. Consequently they are on the surface much more realistic.
It is taken for granted, for example, that nearly everyone has to live in a big town and
work at a more or less dull job. Sex, so far from being taboo, is THE subject. The short,
complete stories, the special feature of these papers, are generally of the ‘came the dawn’
type: the heroine narrowly escapes losing her ‘boy’ to a designing rival, or the ‘boy’ loses
his job and has to postpone marriage, but presently gets a better job. The changeling-
fantasy (a girl brought up in a poor home is ‘really’ the child of rich parents) is another
favourite. Where sensationalism comes in, usually in the serials, it arises out of the more
domestic type of crime, such as bigamy, forgery or sometimes murder; no Martians,
death-rays or international anarchist gangs. These papers are at any rate aiming at
credibility, and they have a link with real life in their correspondence columns, where
genuine problems are being discussed. Ruby M. Ayres’s column of advice in the
ORACLE, for instance, is extremely sensible and well written. And yet the world of the
ORACLE and PEG’S PAPER is a pure fantasy- world. It is the same fantasy all the time;
pretending to be richer than you are. The chief impression that one carries away from
almost every story in these papers is of a frightful, overwhelming ‘refinement’.
Ostensibly the characters are working-class people, but their habits, the interiors of their
houses, their clothes, their outlook and, above all, their speech arc entirely middle class.
They are all living at several pounds a week above their income. And needless to say, that
is just the impression that is intended. The idea is to give the bored factory-girl or worn-
out mother of five a dream-life in which she pictures herself — not actually as a duchess
(that convention has gone out) but as, say, the wife of a bank-manager. Not only is a five-
to-six-pound-a-week standard of life set up as the ideal, but it is tacitly assumed that that
is how working-class people really DO live. The major facts arc simply not faced. It is
admitted, for instance, that people sometimes lose their jobs; but then the dark clouds roll
away and they get better jobs instead. No mention of un-employment as something
pennanent and inevitable, no mention of the dole, no mention of trade unionism. No
suggestion anywhere that there can be anything wrong with the system AS A SYSTEM;
there arc only individual misfortunes, which are generally due to somebody’s wickedness
and can in any case be put right in the last chapter. Always the dark clouds roll away, the
kind employer raises Alfred’s wages, and there are jobs for everybody except the drunks.
It is still the world of the WIZARD and the GEM, except that there are orange-blossoms
instead of machine-guns.
The outlook inculcated by all these papers is that of a rather exceptionally stupid member
of the Navy League in the year 1910. Yes, it may be said, but what does it matter? And in
any case, what else do you expect?
Of course no one in his senses would want to turn the so-called penny dreadful into a
realistic novel or a Socialist tract. An adventure story must of its nature be more or less
remote from real life. But, as I have tried to make clear, the unreality of the WIZARD
and the GEM is not so artless as it looks. These papers exist because of a specialized
demand, because boys at certain ages find it necessary to read about Martians, death-rays,
grizzly bears and gangsters. They get what they are looking for, but they get it wrapped
up in the illusions which their future employers think suitable for them. To what extent
people draw their ideas from fiction is disputable. Personally I believe that most people
are influenced far more than they would care to admit by novels, serial stories, films and
so forth, and that from this point of view the worst books are often the most important,
because they are usually the ones that are read earliest in life. It is probable that many
people who would consider themselves extremely sophisticated and ‘advanced’ are
actually carrying through life an imaginative background which they acquired in
childhood from (for instance) Sapper and lan Hay. If that is so, the boys’ twopenny
weeklies are of the deepest importance. Here is the stuff that is read somewhere between
the ages of twelve and eighteen by a very large proportion, perhaps an actual majority, of
English boys, including many who will never read anything else except newspapers; and
along with it they are absorbing a set of beliefs which would be regarded as hopelessly
out of date in the Central Office of the Conservative Party. All the better because it is
done indirectly, there is being pumped into them the conviction that the major problems
of our time do not exist, that there is nothing wrong with LAISSEZ-FAIRE capitalism,
that foreigners are un-important comics and that the British Empire is a sort of charity-
concern which will last for ever. Considering who owns these papers, it is difficult to
believe that this is un-intentional. Of the twelve papers I have been discussing (i. e. twelve
including the THRILLER and DETECTIVE WEEKLY) seven are the property of the
Amalgamated Press, which is one of the biggest press-combines in the world and controls
more than a hundred different papers. The GEM and MAGNET, therefore, are closely
linked up with the DAILY TELEGRAPH and the FINANCIAL TIMES. This in itself
would be enough to rouse certain suspicions, even if it were not obvious that the stories
in the boys’ weeklies are politically vetted. So it appears that if you feel the need of a
fantasy-life in which you travel to Mars and fight lions bare -handed (and what boy
doesn’t? ), you can only have it by delivering yourself over, mentally, to people like Lord
Camrose. For there is no competition. Throughout the whole of this run of papers the
differences are negligible, and on this level no others exist. This raises the question, why
is there no such thing as a left-wing boys’ paper?
At first glance such an idea merely makes one slightly sick.
It is so horribly easy to
imagine what a left-wing boys’ paper would be like, if it existed. I remember in 1920 or
1921 some optimistic person handing round Communist tracts among a crowd of public-
school boys. The tract I received was of the question-and-answer kind:
Q,. ‘Can a Boy Communist be a Boy Scout, Comrade? ’ A. ‘No, Comrade. ’ Q,. ‘Why,
Comrade? ’ A. ‘Because, Comrade, a Boy Scout must salute the Union Jack, which is the
symbol of tyranny and oppression,’ etc. , etc.
Now suppose that at this moment somebody started a left-wing paper deliberately aimed
at boys of twelve or fourteen. I do not suggest that the whole of its contents would be
exactly like the tract I have quoted above, but does anyone doubt that they would be
SOMETHING like it? Inevitably such a paper would either consist of dreary up-lift or it
would be under Communist influence and given over to adulation of Soviet Russia; in
either case no normal boy would ever look at it. Highbrow literature apart, the whole of
the existing left-wing Press, in so far as it is at all vigorously ‘left’, is one long tract. The
one Socialist paper in England which could live a week on its merits AS A PAPER is the
DAILY HERALD: and how much Socialism is there in the DAILY HERALD? At this
moment, therefore, a paper with a ‘left’ slant and at the same time likely to have an
appeal to ordinary boys in their teens is something almost beyond hoping for.
But it does not follow that it is impossible. There is no clear reason why every adventure
story should necessarily be mixed up with snobbishness and gutter patriotism. For, after
all, the stories in the HOTSPUR and the MODERN BOY are not Conservative tracts;
they are merely adventure stories with a Conservative bias. It is fairly easy to imagine the
process being reversed. It is possible, for instance, to imagine a paper as thrilling and
lively as the HOTSPUR, but with subject-matter and ‘ideology’ a little more up to date. It
is even possible (though this raises other difficulties) to imagine a women’s paper at the
same literary level as the ORACLE, dealing in approximately the same kind of story, but
taking rather more account of the realities of working-class life. Such things have been
done before, though not in England. In the last years of the Spanish monarchy there was a
large output in Spain of left-wing novelettes, some of them evidently of anarchist origin.
Unfortunately at the time when they were appearing I did not see their social
significance, and I lost the collection of them that I had, but no doubt copies would still
be procurable. In get-up and style of story they were very similar to the English
fourpcnny novelette, except that their inspiration was ‘left’. If, for instance, a story
described police pursuing anarchists through the mountains, it would be from the point of
view of the anarchist and not of the police. An example nearer to hand is the Soviet film
CHAPAIEV, which has been shown a number of times in London. Technically, by the
standards of the time when it was made, CHAPAIEV is a first-rate film, but mentally, in
spite of the unfamiliar Russian background, it is not so very remote from Hollywood. The
one thing that lifts it out of the ordinary is the remarkable perfonnance by the actor who
takes the part of the White officer (the fat one) — a performance which looks very like an
inspired piece of gagging. Otherwise the atmosphere is familiar. All the usual
paraphernalia is there — heroic fight against odds, escape at the last moment, shots of
galloping horses, love interest, comic relief. The film is in fact a fairly ordinary one,
except that its tendency is ‘left’. In a Hollywood film of the Russian Civil War the
Whites would probably be angels and the Reds demons. In the Russian version the Reds
are angels and the Whites demons. That is also a lie, but, taking the long view, it is a less
pernicious lie than the other.
Here several difficult problems present themselves. Their general nature is obvious
enough, and I do not want to discuss them. I am merely pointing to the fact that, in
England, popular imaginative literature is a field that left-wing thought has never begun
to enter. ALL fiction from the novels in the mushroom libraries downwards is censored
in the interests of the ruling class. And boys’ fiction above all, the blood-and-thunder
stuff which nearly every boy devours at some time or other, is sodden in the worst
illusions of 1910. The fact is only unimportant if one believes that what is read in
childhood leaves no impression behind. Lord Camrose and his colleagues evidently
believe nothing of the kind, and, after all, Lord Camrose ought to know.
CHARLES DICKENS (1940)
I
Dickens is one of those writers who are well worth stealing. Even the burial of his body
in Westminster Abbey was a species of theft, if you come to think of it.
When Chesterton wrote his introductions to the Everyman Edition of Dickens’s works, it
seemed quite natural to him to credit Dickens with his own highly individual brand of
medievalism, and more recently a Marxist writer, Mr. T. A. Jackson, has made spirited
efforts to turn Dickens into a blood-thirsty revolutionary. The Marxist claims him as
‘almost’ a Marxist, the Catholic claims him as ‘almost’ a Catholic, and both claim him as
a champion of the proletariat (or ‘the poor’, as Chesterton would have put it). On the
other hand, Nadezhda Krupskaya, in her little book on Lenin, relates that towards the end
of his life Lenin went to see a dramatized version of THE CRICKET ON THE HEARTH,
and found Dickens’s ‘middle-class sentimentality’ so intolerable that he walked out in the
middle of a scene.
Taking ‘middle-class’ to mean what Krupskaya might be expected to mean by it, this was
probably a truer judgement than those of Chesterton and Jackson. But it is worth noticing
that the dislike of Dickens implied in this remark is something unusual. Plenty of people
have found him unreadable, but very few seem to have felt any hostility towards the
general spirit of his work. Some years later Mr. Bechhofer Roberts published a full-
length attack on Dickens in the form of a novel (THIS SIDE IDOLATRY), but it was a
merely personal attack, concerned for the most part with Dickens’s treatment of his wife.
It dealt with incidents which not one in a thousand of Dickens’s readers would ever hear
about, and which no more invalidates his work than the second-best bed invalidates
HAMLET. All that the book really demonstrated was that a writer’s literary personality
has little or nothing to do with his private character. It is quite possible that in private life
Dickens was just the kind of insensitive egoist that Mr. Bechhofer Roberts makes him
appear. But in his published work there is implied a personality quite different from this,
a personality which has won him far more friends than enemies. It might well have been
otherwise, for even if Dickens was a bourgeois, he was certainly a subversive writer, a
radical, one might truthfully say a rebel. Everyone who has read widely in his work has
felt this. Gissing, for instance, the best of the writers on Dickens, was anything but a
radical himself, and he disapproved of this strain in Dickens and wished it were not there,
but it never occurred to him to deny it. In OLIVER TWIST, HARD TIMES, BLEAK
HOUSE, LITTLE DORRIT, Dickens attacked English institutions with a ferocity that has
never since been approached. Yet he managed to do it without making himself hated,
and, more than this, the very people he attacked have swallowed him so completely that
he has become a national institution himself. In its attitude towards Dickens the English
public has always been a little like the elephant which feels a blow with a walking-stick
as a delightful tickling. Before I was ten years old I was having Dickens ladled down my
throat by schoolmasters in whom even at that age I could see a strong resemblance to Mr.
Creakle, and one knows without needing to be told that lawyers delight in Sergeant
Buzfuz and that LITTLE DORRIT is a favourite in the Home Office. Dickens seems to
have succeeded in attacking everybody and antagonizing nobody. Naturally this makes
one wonder whether after all there was something unreal in his attack upon society.
Where exactly does he stand, socially, morally, and politically? As usual, one can define
his position more easily if one starts by deciding what he was NOT.
In the first place he was NOT, as Messrs. Chesterton and Jackson seem to imply, a
‘proletarian’ writer. To begin with, he does not write about the proletariat, in which he
merely resembles the overwhelming majority of novelists, past and present. If you look
for the working classes in fiction, and especially English fiction, all you find is a hole.
This statement needs qualifying, perhaps. For reasons that are easy enough to see, the
agricultural labourer (in England a proletarian) gets a fairly good showing in fiction, and
a great deal has been written about criminals, derelicts and, more recently, the working-
class intelligentsia. But the ordinary town proletariat, the people who make the wheels go
round, have always been ignored by novelists. When they do find their way between the
covers of a book, it is nearly always as objects of pity or as comic relief. The central
action of Dickens’s stories almost invariably takes place in middle-class surroundings. If
one examines his novels in detail one finds that his real subject-matter is the London
commercial bourgeoisie and their hangers-on — lawyers, clerks, tradesmen, innkeepers,
small craftsmen, and servants. He has no portrait of an agricultural worker, and only one
(Stephen Blackpool in HARD TIMES) of an industrial worker. The Plomishes in
LITTLE DORRIT are probably his best picture of a working-class family — the
Peggottys, for instance, hardly belong to the working class — but on the whole he is not
successful with this type of character. If you ask any ordinary reader which of Dickens’s
proletarian characters he can remember, the three he is almost certain to mention are Bill
Sykes, Sam Weller, and Mrs. Gamp. A burglar, a valet, and a drunken midwife — not
exactly a representative cross-section of the English working class.
Secondly, in the ordinarily accepted sense of the word, Dickens is not a ‘revolutionary’
writer. But his position here needs some defining.
Whatever else Dickens may have been, he was not a hole-and-comer soul-saver, the kind
of well-meaning idiot who thinks that the world will be perfect if you amend a few
bylaws and abolish a few anomalies. It is worth comparing him with Charles Reade, for
instance. Reade was a much better-informed man than Dickens, and in some ways more
public-spirited. He really hated the abuses he could understand, he showed them up in a
series of novels which for all their absurdity are extremely readable, and he probably
helped to alter public opinion on a few minor but important points. But it was quite
beyond him to grasp that, given the existing form of society, certain evils CANNOT be
remedied. Fasten upon this or that minor abuse, expose it, drag it into the open, bring it
before a British jury, and all will be well that is how he sees it. Dickens at any rate never
imagined that you can cure pimples by cutting them off. In every page of his work one
can see a consciousness that society is wrong somewhere at the root. It is when one asks
‘Which root? ’ that one begins to grasp his position.
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. He attacks the law,
parliamentary government, the educational system and so forth, without ever clearly
suggesting what he would put in their places. Of course it is not necessarily the business
of a novelist, or a satirist, to make constructive suggestions, but the point is that
Dickens’s attitude is at bottom not even DEStructive. There is no clear sign that he wants
the existing order to be overthrown, or that he believes it would make very much
difference if it WERE overthrown. For in reality 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, for instance,
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. Of course one can draw this inference for
oneself, and one can draw it again from the remarks about Bounderby’s will at the end of
HARD TIMES, and indeed from the whole of Dickens’s work one can infer the evil of
LAISSEZ-FAIRE capitalism; but Dickens makes no such inference himself. It is said that
Macaulay refused to review HARD TIMES because he disapproved of its ‘sullen
Socialism’. Obviously Macaulay 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. Bounder by 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. This character
belongs especially to Dickens’s early optimistic period. 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. Of course he is a pure dream figure, much further from real life than, say,
Squeers or Micawber. 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. Nevertheless this character runs like a connecting thread through
most of the earlier books. Pickwick, the Cheerybles, old Chuzzlewit, Scrooge — it is the
same figure over and over again, the good rich man, handing out guineas. Dickens does
however show signs of development here. In the books of the middle period the good rich
man fades out to some extent. There is no one who plays this part in A TALE OF TWO
CITIES, nor in GREAT EXPECTATIONS— GREAT EXPECTATIONS is, in fact,
definitely an attack on patronage — and in HARD TIMES it is only very doubtfully
played by Gradgrind after his refonnation. The character reappears in a rather different
form as Meagles in LITTLE DORRIT and John Jarndyce in BLEAK HOUSE — one
might perhaps add Betsy Trotwood in DAVID COPPERFIELD. But in these books the
good rich man has dwindled from a ‘merchant’ to a RENTIER. This is significant. A
RENTIER is part of the possessing class, he can and, almost without knowing it, does
make other people work for him, but he has very little direct power. Unlike Scrooge or
the Cheerybles, he cannot put everything right by raising everybody’s wages. The
seeming inference from the rather despondent books that Dickens wrote in the fifties is
that by that time he had grasped the helplessness of well-meaning individuals in a corrupt
society. Nevertheless in the last completed novel, OUR MUTUAL FRIEND (published
1 864-5), the good rich man comes back in full glory in the person of Boffin. Boffin is a
proletarian by origin and only rich by inheritance, but he is the usual DEUS EX
MACHINA, solving everybody’s problems by showering money in all directions. He
even ‘trots’, like the Cheerybles. In several ways OUR MUTUAL FRIEND is a return to
the earlier manner, and not an unsuccessful return either. Dickens’s thoughts seem to
have come full circle. Once again, individual kindliness is the remedy for everything.
One crying evil of his time that Dickens says very little about is child labour. There are
plenty of pictures of suffering children in his books, but usually they are suffering in
schools rather than in factories. The one detailed account of child labour that he gives is
the description in DAVID COPPERFIELD of little David washing bottles in Murdstone
& Grinby’s warehouse. This, of course, is autobiography. Dickens himself, at the age of
ten, had worked in Warren’s blacking factory in the Strand, very much as he describes it
here. It was a terribly bitter memory to him, partly because he felt the whole incident to
be discreditable to his parents, and he even concealed it from his wife till long after they
were married. Looking back on this period, he says in DAVID COPPERFIELD:
It is a matter of some surprise to me, even now, that I can have been so easily thrown
away at such an age. A child of excellent abilities and with strong powers of observation,
quick, eager, delicate, and soon hurt bodily or mentally, it seems wonderful to me that
nobody should have made any sign in my behalf. But none was made; and I became, at
ten years old, a little labouring hind in the service of Murdstone & Grinby.
And again, having described the rough boys among whom he worked:
No words can express the secret agony of my soul as I su nk into this companionship. . .
and felt my hopes of growing up to be a learned and distinguished man crushed in my
bosom.
Obviously it is not David Copperfield who is speaking, it is Dickens himself. He uses
almost the same words in the autobiography that he began and abandoned a few months
earlier. Of course Dickens is right in saying that a gifted child ought not to work ten
hours a day pasting labels on bottles, but what he does not say is that NO child ought to
be condemned to such a fate, and there is no reason for inferring that he thinks it. David
escapes from the warehouse, but Mick Walker and Mealy Potatoes and the others are still
there, and there is no sign that this troubles Dickens particularly. As usual, he displays no
consciousness that the STRUCTURE of society can be changed. He despises politics,
does not believe that any good can come out of Parliament — he had been a Parliamentary
shorthand writer, which was no doubt a disillusioning experience — and he is slightly
hostile to the most hopeful movement of his day, trade unionism. In HARD TIMES trade
unionism is represented as something not much better than a racket, something that
happens because employers are not sufficiently paternal. Stephen Blackpool’s refusal to
join the union is rather a virtue in Dickens’s eyes. Also, as Mr. Jackson has pointed out,
the apprentices’ association in BARNABY RUDGE, to which Sim Tappertit belongs, is
probably a hit at the illegal or barely legal unions of Dickens’s own day, with their secret
assemblies, passwords and so forth. Obviously he wants the workers to be decently
treated, but there is no sign that he wants them to take their destiny into their own hands,
least of all by open violence.
As it happens, Dickens deals with revolution in the narrower sense in two novels,
BARNABY RUDGE and A TALE OF TWO CITIES. In BARNABY RUDGE it is a
case of rioting rather than revolution. The Gordon Riots of 1780, though they had
religious bigotry as a pretext, seem to have been little more than a pointless outburst of
looting. Dickens’s attitude to this kind of thing is sufficiently indicated by the fact that his
first idea was to make the ringleaders of the riots three lunatics escaped from an asylum.
He was dissuaded from this, but the principal figure of the book is in fact a village idiot.
In the chapters dealing with the riots Dickens shows a most profound horror of mob
violence. He delights in describing scenes in which the ‘dregs’ of the population behave
with atrocious bestiality. These chapters are of great psychological interest, because they
show how deeply he had brooded on this subject. The things he describes can only have
come out of his imagination, for no riots on anything like the same scale had happened in
his lifetime. Here is one of his descriptions, for instance:
If Bedlam gates had been flung open wide, there would not have issued forth such
maniacs as the frenzy of that night had made. There were men there who danced and
trampled on the beds of flowers as though they trod down human enemies, and wrenched
them from their stalks, like savages who twisted human necks. There were men who cast
their lighted torches in the air, and suffered them to fall upon their heads and faces,
blistering the skin with deep unseemly burns. There were men who rushed up to the lire,
and paddled in it with their hands as if in water; and others who were restrained by force
from plunging in, to gratify their deadly longing. On the skull of one drunken lad — not
twenty, by his looks — who lay upon the ground with a bottle to his mouth, the lead from
the roof came streaming down in a shower of liquid lire, white hot, melting his head like
wax. . . But of all the howling throng not one learnt mercy from, or sickened at, these
sights; nor was the fierce, besotted, senseless rage of one man glutted.
You might almost think you were reading a description of ‘Red’ Spain by a partisan of
General Franco. One ought, of course, to remember that when Dickens was writing, the
London ‘mob’ still existed. (Nowadays there is no mob, only a flock. ) Low wages and the
growth and shift of population had brought into existence a huge, dangerous slum-
proletariat, and until the early middle of the nineteenth century there was hardly such a
thing as a police force. When the brickbats began to fly there was nothing between
shuttering your windows and ordering the troops to open fire. In A TALE OF TWO
CITIES he is dealing with a revolution which was really about something, and Dickens’s
attitude is different, but not entirely different. As a matter of fact, A TALE OF TWO
CITIES is a book which tends to leave a false impression behind, especially after a lapse
of time.
The one thing that everyone who has read A TALE OF TWO CITIES remembers is the
Reign of Terror. The whole book is dominated by the guillotine — tumbrils thundering to
and fro, bloody knives, heads bouncing into the basket, and sinister old women knitting
as they watch. Actually these scenes only occupy a few chapters, but they are written
with terrible intensity, and the rest of the book is rather slow going. But A TALE OF
TWO CITIES is not a companion volume to THE SCARLET PIMPERNEL. Dickens
sees clearly enough that the French Revolution was bound to happen and that many of the
people who were executed deserved what they got. If, he says, you behave as the French
aristocracy had behaved, vengeance will follow. He repeats this over and over again. We
are constantly being reminded that while ‘my lord’ is lolling in bed, with four liveried
footmen serving his chocolate and the peasants starving outside, somewhere in the forest
a tree is growing which will presently be sawn into planks for the platform of the
guillotine, etc. , etc. , etc. The inevitability of the Terror, given its causes, is insisted upon
in the clearest terms:
It was too much the way.
