As a child, I walked the streets of Rochester barefoot, my shirt torn and my face covered in soot. If I had read them, which I hadn’t, I could have echoed the words of Pip at the beginning of Great Expectations: “Ours was the marsh country, down by the river, within, as the river wound, twenty miles of the sea.” However, unlike Pip, I didn’t know true poverty. When I paced the streets of Rochester without any shoes on, I was merely acting in the annual Dickens Festival. While the adults traveled down from London dressed as Mr. Pickwick or Betsey Trotwood, the children chose from a less extensive range of characters. Not knowing about Pip, I pretended to be Oliver Twist and looked forward to the day when I could be more warmly clad.
I was first exposed to the world of Charles Dickens not in the pages of a book but in the world around me. From the kitchen window of our house, we could peer across the River Medway to Chatham Dockyard, where Dickens’ improvident father worked as a clerk in the Naval Pay Office. Just up the road was Gad’s Hill Place, where Dickens wrote his final works in a magnificent Swiss writing chalet. The school bus took us as far as central Rochester where Pip was apprenticed, the Pickwick Club took refreshment, and Edwin Drood disappeared. Despite its magnificent Norman castle and cathedral, Rochester was still rather down at heel when I was young. The tourist boom, built on the back of Dickens’ popular and critical success, was yet to come.
I wasn’t that impressed when the local council began to cash in on the city’s Dickensian connections. To my youthful annoyance, the school bus was re-routed away from the high street, which was turned into a pedestrian zone complete with faux-Victorian lampposts. With hindsight, I realize that the revival was only ever partial. While local businesses rushed to rename themselves after characters from Dickens’ novels, pockets of poverty remained. Rochester High Street tailed off into empty shop fronts and derelict buildings. For every successful restaurant and ice cream parlor, there was another seedy shop desperately struggling to survive. Alongside such literary masterpieces as Jaggers Cocktail Bar and Sweet Expectations, there were several establishments with less portentous names: the Little Dorrit Tattoo Parlour chief among them.
Rochester may have enjoyed mixed fortunes in the late twentieth century, but I cannot claim that poverty came close to scarring my comfortable childhood existence. Though my grandparents had grown up in poverty during the 1930s and my parents never had a whiff of a university education, but I was on a sure, middle-class trajectory: grammar school—the grandly named Sir Joseph Williamson’s Mathematical School for Boys, Rochester—followed by university, followed by some as-yet-undecided career. My parents’ suggestions followed mathematical lines, even as I was developing an unexpected, and somewhat regretted, interest in Latin and Classical Greek. Eventually, I settled on History as a worthy subject for a degree and my education lifted me away from poverty’s low tide and carried me downstream, away from the Medway Towns so that I might develop my own great expectations.
It was only years later, after I had worked in an emergency night shelter for homeless men, that I began to appreciate Dickens’ genius: his ability to write light, bright books that were also dappled with shadows; his ability to conjure powerful images of poverty; his refusal to thrust them back into his magician’s hat when he was done.
Fretting, chafing, and making an uproar are the privileges of the rich and powerful.
But I didn’t leave Rochester entirely. I remained in my imagination at least. At school a wonderful teacher had introduced me to the Pickwick Papers. What I remember of that glorious summer was a glorious, carefree book. A book to wallow in. I ignored the book’s gentle reminders of a darker, dirtier world, or merely noted them before passing on, much as Mr. Pickwick did.
“Not a wery nice neighbourhood, this, sir,” said Sam, with a touch of the hat, which always preceded his entering into conversation with his master.
“It is not indeed, Sam,” replied Mr Pickwick, surveying the crowded and filthy street through which they were passing.
“It’s a wery remarkable circumstance, sir,” said Sam, “that poverty and oysters always seem to go together.”
“I don’t understand you, Sam,” said Mr Pickwick.
“What I mean, sir,” said Sam, “is, that the poorer a place is, the greater call there seems to be for oysters. Look here, sir; here’s a oyster-stall to every half-dozen houses. The street’s lined vith ’em. Blessed if I don’t think that ven a man’s wery poor, he rushes out of his lodgings, and eats oysters in reg’lar desperation.”
“To be sure he does,” said Mr Weller, senior; “and it’s just the same vith pickled salmon!”
“Those are two very remarkable facts, which never occurred to me before,” said Mr. Pickwick. “The very first place we stop at, I’ll make a note of them.”
It was only years later, after I had worked in an emergency night shelter for homeless men, that I began to appreciate Dickens’ genius: his ability to write light, bright books that were also dappled with shadows; his ability to conjure powerful images of poverty; his refusal to thrust them back into his magician’s hat when he was done. The rough sleepers I tried to help in Leeds may have drunk cheap cider rather than gin, but Dickens, in one of his Sketches of London, seemed to understand them better than I did:
Gin-drinking is a great vice in England, but poverty is a greater; and until you can cure it, or persuade a half-famished wretch, not to seek relief in the temporary oblivion of his own misery, with the pittance which, divided among his family, would just furnish a morsel of bread for each, gin-shops will increase in number and splendour.
I started to work my way through Dickens’ novels but I didn’t yet have the strength of character or the Dickensian energy that would have allowed me to rise to the challenges he threw down in his work. Leaving the night shelter, I took the simpler option of returning to the classroom, where I threw myself into the safer task of helping children to appreciate fine writing. Ultimately, though, there was no escape from poverty and its obligations. It was Dickens who brought me back to my senses.
One of the most persistent themes in Dickens’ writing is the need to “walk abroad among our fellow-men,” as Marley’s ghost puts it in A Christmas Carol, to turn “aside from the wide thoroughfares and great houses” so that we might pay attention to “the wretched dwellings in byways where only poverty may walk,” as the narrator of The Old Curiosity Shop declaims. Dickens himself was a great walker. He once claimed that “the streets of London, to be beheld in the very height of their glory, should be seen on a dark, dull, murky winter’s night, when there is just enough damp gently stealing down to make the pavement greasy, without cleansing it of any of its impurities.” Most of us prefer to be warmly at home. Even Scrooge, whose home was as unwelcoming as those dark, damp streets, needed to be frightened out of his wits before he agreed to travel abroad with the three spirits. Less susceptible to apparitions in this secular age of ours, we need another form of haunting to spur us into action. We need to be haunted by words.
The power of Dickens’ writing—that wonderful combination of humor and excoriating social criticism—takes his readers out of themselves, leads them from the security of their circumscribed lives out onto the streets where poverty lurks. Like Scrooge, we see what we could, perhaps should, already have seen, if only we had taken the trouble to look. And once we have seen that Dickensian poverty and the evils it creates, we are left with a problem we must confront or ignore.
There are times in his work when Dickens addresses a particular problem—the impact of the Poor Law or the horrors of child labor, for instance—and, through his narrative, suggests ways of overcoming that problem. More often than not, though, he leaves the solutions to us: if we are moved by the work Lizzie Hexham is compelled to do at the start of Our Mutual Friend, we might well ask ourselves how she, and all those like her, can be saved from it. If we pity Oliver Twist or David Copperfield or Martin Chuzzlewit, we are likely to pity other children whose lives are not confined to the page.
The suffering of children was a particular obsession for Dickens, not least because he suffered terribly as a child laborer in a blacking factory. Time and time again in his fiction, we find children whose lives are blighted by poverty because of the actions of those who should have known better. Time and time again, we read about the power of education to make or to mar. Dickens knew that a bad education could damage a child for life, but he also believed that a good education—by which he meant an education that was responsive to the child as a child—could set him free.
These three themes of poverty, childhood and education come together in one of the most haunting passages in all his work, that moment in A Christmas Carol when the Ghost of Christmas Present brings forth two children, “wretched, abject, frightful, hideous, miserable,” from underneath his robe:
Where graceful youth should have filled their features out, and touched them with its freshest tints, a stale and shrivelled hand, like that of age, had pinched and twisted them, and pulled them into shreds. Where angels might have sat enthroned, devils lurked, and glared out menacing. No change, no degradation, no perversion of humanity, in any grade, through all the mysteries of wonderful creation, has monsters half so horrible and dread.
Scrooge is appalled by these horrors, but he does not fully understand what he is seeing. “This boy is Ignorance. This girl is Want,” the Spirit tells him, before challenging him with these unexpected words: “Beware them both, and all of their degree, but most of all beware this boy, for on his brow I see that written which is Doom, unless the writing be erased.” Poverty is a terrible sight, but Ignorance is worse. Scrooge learns his lesson. He turns away from his earlier life and, crucially, becomes “a second father” to Tiny Tim, thereby saving him from the effects of both poverty and ignorance.
It is no exaggeration to say that it is Tiny Tim, a little child, who saves Scrooge, quite as much as Marley’s ghost and the three spirits. The lived experience of Tiny Tim teaches Scrooge more than any book could. The spirits take Scrooge out of his cramped little office and cramped little life, but Tiny Tim, the Christ-like child who dies and then comes back to life, converts him from one way of living to another.
In Tiny Tim, we see power as Dickens believed it should be: power working through meekness. This paradoxical form of power appears throughout his novels, but the example of Little Dorrit is perhaps as instructive as any. This 900-page novel is divided into two books, the first entitled “Poverty” and the second “Riches.” However, the riches of the second half of the novel are not a solution to the poverty we meet in abundance in the first half. In fact, both riches and poverty seem to bring similar difficulties, as Little Dorrit discovers when she swaps the Marshalsea debtors’ prison for another form of confinement among the rich on their grand tour of Europe:
It appeared on the whole, to Little Dorrit herself, that this same society in which they lived, greatly resembled a superior sort of Marshalsea. Numbers of people seemed to come abroad, pretty much as people had come into the prison; through debt, through idleness, relationship, curiosity, and general unfitness for getting on at home. They were brought into these foreign towns in the custody of couriers and local followers, just as the debtors had been brought into the prison. They prowled about the churches and picture-galleries, much in the old, dreary, prison-yard manner.
The solution to poverty, Dickens suggests, is not simply money. Money does not bring Amy Dorrit happiness. It is poverty of spirit that allows her to survive the horror of having been born and raised in a debtors’ prison and it is poverty of spirit that enables her to survive the challenges presented by her new-found wealth.
At the very end of the novel, “Little Dorrit and her husband walked out of the church alone. They paused for a moment on the steps of the portico, looking at the fresh perspective of the street in the autumn morning sun’s bright rays, and then went down. Went down into a modest life of usefulness and happiness.”
That a 900-page novel should culminate in a “modest life of usefulness” was as counter-cultural in Dickens’ day as it is in ours. If it is a virtue, modesty is usually seen to be a very anemic one. That was not Dickens’ view. What modesty meant for Little Dorrit was that she “[w]ent down to give a mother’s care, in the fulness of time, to Fanny’s neglected children no less than to their own, and to leave that lady going into Society for ever and a day. Went down to give a tender nurse and friend to Tip for some few years, who was never vexed by the great exactions he made of her in return for the riches he might have given her if he had ever had them, and who lovingly closed his eyes upon the Marshalsea and all its blighted fruits. They went quietly down into the roaring streets, inseparable and blessed; and as they passed along in sunshine and shade, the noisy and the eager, and the arrogant and the forward and the vain, fretted and chafed, and made their usual uproar.”
Fretting, chafing, and making an uproar are the privileges of the rich and powerful. By contrast, Little Dorrit’s modest life, much like the little way of St Thérèse, did not draw attention to itself but was, ultimately, more powerful.
In his American Notes, Dickens notes that, “It is easy and common to declaim against the viciousness of the poor; the self-complacent moralist deplores it as he writes his quarterly check to pay his wine-merchant; the rich man hugs himself that he is guilty of no petty larceny, and shudders at the hungry stealer of a loaf. Englishmen will tolerate anything but poverty, and yet they unlock not their hoards to aid their brethren: they hold forth no helping hand, but dilate on the laziness of a man to whom employment is refused, and who dares prefer begging to famishing.”
Little Dorrit does not concern herself with debates about poverty: she unlocks her hoards to aid her brethren. She knows that the poor are often poor because the rich are powerful. She knows that it is “immensely rich” men like Mr. Merdle, “a Midas without the ears,” who dominate society and, in dominating it, oppress the poor. But she also senses that power can be used against the powerful. By simply getting on with her modest life of usefulness, she achieves so much more than Merdle or Barnacle or any of the other great men who dominate the book. It is a lesson many of us still struggle to learn.
In one of his letters, Dickens wrote that “I have always observed within my experience that the men who have left home young have, many long years afterwards, had the tenderest love for it. That’s a pleasant thing to think of, as one of the wise adjustments of this life of ours.” That chimes with my experience. Like Dickens and Pip, I returned to Rochester recently. Having experienced the Dickens Festival as a child, read and taught Dickens’ books as an adult, I was now in Rochester to meet some colleagues from Mary’s Meals, a charity that addresses issues of child poverty by providing a meal a day in children’s places of education. I think Dickens would have approved.
In 2002, the founder of the charity, Magnus MacFarlane-Barrow, was inspired by the words of a child. When Magnus asked Edward, a 14-year-old boy, what his ambitions were in life, Edwards had replied: “I would like to have enough food to eat and I would like to go to school one day.” He may not have known it but it was a sentence that could have appeared in any Dickens novel. The problem may have been Dickensian, but Magnus’s response was Dickensian too: he didn’t agonize over his lack of power, he simply got on with providing a meal a day for children in their places of education. He started by feeding 200 children in Malawi. Today, Mary’s Meals is feeding 2,429,182 children in seventeen countries around the world. If that is not a powerful response to the problem of poverty that Dickens wrote about and that still stalks our world today, I don’t know what is. It seems that a modest life of usefulness can still overpower the loudest voices and the most elaborate schemes. Power need not be naked to change the world.
Roy Peachey is the author of ten books and works for Mary’s Meals UK.