The England of Marx and Mill as

Reflected in Fiction
i

T HE economic distress and the new concern with social problems

in England in the 1840's, which underlay the reformulations of
political economy in that decade, had also an extensive and significant
reflection in imaginative literature. While the novel with a thesis, even
a social thesis, was nothing new, it was only in the forties that English
literature began to deal on a major scale with the social problems
raised by the industrial revolution. One can sense in the novels of this
decade an increased urgency and pressure, a more daring and direct
attack. This emphasis is so marked that one critic has attempted a cor-
relation between literature and socialism, and has sought to find in
the novels of Dickens the same type of social observation and emotional
reaction that prompted the analyses of Karl Marx.1 While such a thesis
goes too far and is almost certainly invalid, one can nevertheless find
in these novels a historical meaning of a different sort, more complex,
but also more interesting and suggestive to the historian.
It is impossible to summarize in a few words what is really a con-
siderable body of literature, but at least some notion can be given of its
extent and scope. Four writers of the period are especially important:
Charles Dickens in his novels of the 1840's developed a vein of social
criticism that he was to intensify in his writings of the fifties and sixties.
Mrs. Gaskell portrayed labor-management relations in Mary Barton
(1848) and, a few years later, in North and South (1855). Charles
Kingsley began to work out his attitude toward the rural poor in
Yeast (1848) and dealt with the urban workers and the Chartists in
Alton Loc\e (1850). Disraeli tried to survey the whole political, social,
and spiritual malaise of the times in his trilogy of Coningsby (1844),
Sybil (1845), and Tancred (1847). But t n e s e ^ o u r w e r e n o t ^ on
h
ones. Mrs. Trollope opened the decade with a novel on factory condi-
tions, Michael Armstrong, the Factory Boy; and even Charlotte Bronte
in Shirley (1849) turned to the unfamiliar topic of troubles between
millowners and operatives in the period 1810-1812. In a different but
related field of social criticism, Thackeray was dissecting the values of
1
T . A. Jackson, Charles Dickens, the Progress of a Radical (New York: International Pub-
lishers Co., 1938).
 Marx and Mill in Fiction 43
fashionable society and the attitudes of arrivistes in his sketches for
Punch and in Vanity Fair (1847). The new social emphasis was by no
means restricted to fiction; it might be illustrated in other forms of
literature by the poems of Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Thomas
Hood, or by the writings of Carlyle.
What can the historian learn from these novelists? Their range is
wide and all together they deal with most of the important social ques-
tions of the period: the New Poor Law, slums, public health, factory
conditions, unemployment, class hostilities, labor-management rela-
tions, and, above all, the economic distress of the petty bourgeoisie and
the working classes. One would then expect them to be a mine of infor-
mation for the social historian. Yet in effect they are not, for the factual
information they provide about social conditions is highly suspect for
the scholar's purposes; it is spotty, impressionistic, and inaccurate.
These writers were primarily novelists and artists; their reporting of
social conditions is always limited by the background and interests of
the writer and, still more important, subordinate to his artistic purpose.
It should be understood from the start that, for the facts about social
conditions in this period, our other and more conventional sources are
far more satisfactory; and the attempt to tell the social history of a
period by quotations from its novels is a kind of dilettantism which the
historian would do well to avoid.
The historical interest of these novels lies in something quite differ-
ent: in what they reveal about the opinions and attitudes of the men
who wrote them. A novel helps to show not the facts of the age, but the
mind of the novelist, not social conditions, but attitudes toward social
conditions. The historical value of fiction, often misconceived, unfor-
tunately, is not for the history of facts but for the history of opinions.
A novelist may not be typical of his age—more often he is not—but at
least his attitudes constitute one datum in our total picture of a climate
of opinion. In this delicate subject of the history of the formation of
opinions, a novel is the more illuminating because of its highly personal
and subjective character; a novelist will sometimes reveal things about
himself, basic attitudes, unconscious preconceptions, even motives,
which other men would succeed in keeping hidden. A study of the
novelists of the 1840's, this crucial decade in the formation of new ideas
and attitudes, may throw a fresh light on the new concern of the edu-
cated classes for the sufferings of the poor in an industrial society.
Taking the four most important social novelists of the decade, Dick-
ens, Kingsley, Disraeli, and Mrs. Gaskell, we will try first to say what
Vol.3
44 William 0. Aydelotte
were the social attitudes reflected in their writings, and second to trace
as far as possible the factors that lay behind these attitudes.
II
Anyone who wants to discuss these novels of the 1840's starts with a
great advantage because of the admirable study of them published by
Louis Francois Cazamian forty-five years ago. There is no need to
retraverse the ground that he has so well covered, and instead of dealing
at length with his exposition, I should prefer to make a fresh start and
try to put the whole matter in a different way, suggesting a few
reformulations that seem important in the light of our present under-
standing of the period.
Even allowing for the individual differences that we find in any
group of artists, it seems fair to say that in general terms all four of
these novelists exhibit in their social opinions a common attitude. It is
really a double attitude, the two halves of which might appear incon-
sistent to a modern reader. On the one hand, they display a great
sympathy for and interest in the underprivileged, an indignant protest
against the treatment of the poor in modern society. On the other hand,
they show also a negative or conservative aspect which I shall describe
more fully in a moment.
The positive aspect, the element of social protest, need not detain us,
for it is the best-understood feature of this literature. It manifests itself,
of course, not in any restatement of economic theory, but in an emo-
tional attitude. The student who, following A. V. Dicey's argument,
seeks in this literature evidence of the impending change from indi-
vidualism to socialism will find slim pickings. The practical proposals
of these writers are amazingly tame in comparison with the vehe-
mence of their social criticism, and they were more generally on the
side of private philanthropy than of state action. Dickens' criticisms of
philanthropy relate more to method than to principle, and philanthropy
remained the solution he sought in his private life as well as in the
denouements of his novels—the benevolent man with a long purse who
rewards the virtuous. Dickens had a kind of horror of the state in all
its aspects, Parliament and bureaucracy alike, and it is hard to imagine
him wanting to entrust the welfare of the people of England to the
Circumlocution Office. Kingsley at the end of Alton Locke proposes
Christian philanthropy as a substitute for discredited Chartism, and
Mrs. Gaskell seems to find her solution to the labor-management prob-
lem, not in acts of Parliament, but in charity and mutual sympathy.
 Marx and Mill in Fiction 45
Some of these writers do support factory and public-health legislation,
but these measures do not loom large in the total picture of what they
wanted done. Their attitude is hardly surprising. The issue between
state action and philanthropy, so important to us, was by no means so
clear to the generality of men in the 1840's, who seem to have made no
very sharp distinction between the two procedures. The collectivist
aspects of the factory acts, which now seem highly significant, were
less apparent to men at the time, who thought of these acts more as
limited measures to remedy particular grievances, not as a precedent
for socialism. Factory legislation in the nineteenth century was even
supported by the skilled trade-unions, "administrative nihilists" who
were altogether opposed to any socialistic policy. In the forties private
bills were still frequent in Parliament, and Parliamentary action on
behalf of the poor could be regarded simply as a means of carrying
further the policies of private philanthropy.
These four writers display, not so much a consistent demand for
state action, but more what Cazamian happily describes as a sense of
social solidarity. They repudiated rationalistic utilitarianism, often
through the mouth of a principal character speaking obviously for the
author: Disraeli through Sidonia; Dickens through Cissy Jupe; Mrs.
Gaskell in Job's reply to Mr. Carson; Kingsley perhaps through Tre-
garva. Although they failed, like most of their contemporaries, to antici-
pate the potentialities of the state for social services, it is much more
important that they gave expression to demands for social improvement
which a later generation was to implement by state action. In this
respect, this literature is of central importance, since it expresses the
psychological or deeper aspects of the reaction against economic
individualism.
We may now turn to the negative side, the framework or boundaries
in which the social ideals of these authors were constrained, the factors
which constituted a limitation on their demands for reform. Here again
we must allow for wide individual differences. Even so, we can see
fairly clearly three principal elements that all these novelists have in
common: (1) they looked to the past instead of the future; (2) they
favored a system of class distinctions; (3) they showed little sympathy
for democracy. All this is the more surprising in that they occasionally
displayed inclinations in a different direction. Disraeli co-operated with
the Radicals against the New Poor Law. Mrs. Gaskell was rebuked by
Greg and others for taking too strongly the line of the poor in Mary
Barton. Kingsley described himself as a "Christian Socialist," and even
19*
46 William 0. Aydelotte
on one occasion as a "Chartist." Dickens called himself a Radical and
was undoubtedly so thought of by his contemporaries.
1. Yet when we analyze this literature, we find that so far from being
revolutionary it has signs of what might almost be described as an
archaic character: all these writers show a nostalgia for the past and a
tendency to seek the solution to their problems in institutions or for-
mulas borrowed from the past. This may be illustrated most simply by
the vogue of the historical novel in the 1840's. The fashion had, of
course, been set by Scott. But his example was followed in the mid-
century period, not only by writers of straight historical romances like
Harrison Ainsworth and G. P. R. James, but by most of the better-
known novelists as well. Kingsley wrote three historical novels, Dickens
two, and Mrs. Gaskell one. Charlotte Bronte went back a generation, to
the Napoleonic age, for the scene of Shirley. Thackeray also reverted to
that period in Vanity Fair and to the early eighteenth century in Henry
Esmond. Disraeli's novels are soaked in historical background and
constitute a kind of rhapsody upon the past. This reversion to a
departed age is common enough also in other aspects of the intellectual
history of the period; one thinks at once of the medieval interlude in
Past and Present, or of the Oxford movement and the doctrine of
apostolical succession.
A deeper current of nostalgia for the past shows in other ways, for
example, in Disraeli's lengthy historical justifications for his ideas in
Sybil. Or again, Mrs. Gaskell's theme in North and South is not simply
a return to the labor-management problem of Mary Barton; it is also,
and still more, as is pointed up in the title, a contrast between the old
and new civilizations: the agricultural, patriarchal, traditional south as
opposed to the bustling, industrial north. And Mrs. Gaskell clearly
prefers the south, though she tries also to be fair to Mr. Thornton, the
manufacturer. The romantic appeal to the Middle Ages is a common
theme in Kingsley; he expresses it, to give one example, in a letter to a
friend: "I would, if I could, restore the feudal system, the highest form
of civilization—in ideal, not in practice—which Europe has ever seen."
2. All four of these writers lay a principal emphasis on the leadership
of the upper classes in improving society; they are nonequalitarian and
unwilling to see workingmen take part in determining their own
destiny. Their frequent attacks on the higher orders do not conceal the
general respect they all have for position and authority; they attack
individuals rather than the upper class as a whole. There is never any
 Marx and Mill in Fiction 47
suggestion that the well-to-do should abdicate the duties of govern-
ment. On the contrary, all of these writers regard action by working-
men on their own initiative as suspect. Chartism seems to them a
menace, and a trade-union, though they can sympathize with the needs
and wants that lie behind it, is something mysterious and sinister.
Dickens is at pains to show in Hard Times that unions do not help the
workingman and that the union organizer is an unscrupulous agitator.
And Kingsley, though he was willing to help in the founding of work-
ingmen's co-operatives, posted a placard to the Chartists in April 1848
telling them in effect to cease their agitation and let their friends
among the upper classes take care of things.
The working class cannot lead itself, as Disraeli makes Egremont say
to Sybil: "The People are not strong; the People never can be strong.
Their attempts at self-vindication will end only in suffering and con-
fusion You deem you are in darkness, and I see a dawn. The new
generation of the aristocracy of England are not tyrants, not oppres-
sors, Sybil, as you persist in believing. Their intelligence, better than
that, their hearts, are open to the responsibility of their position
Enough that their sympathies are awakened; time and thought will
bring the rest. They are the natural leaders of the People, Sybil; believe
me they are the only ones."
All these novelists see life from an upper-class angle, to such an
extent that they even have difficulty in visualizing their proletarian
characters. In contrast to the many successful portraits of middle-class
figures, characters of the proletarian class are not vividly depicted, not
completely realized; they tend to be one-dimensional. This is true for
Kingsley; also to some extent for Dickens, whose Stephen Blackpool is
no proletarian hero but a mere model of meekness. Mrs. Gaskell had
perhaps the most extensive personal acquaintance of any of them with
the industrial poor, yet one recent critic, Lord David Cecil, thinks she
is least successful in exactly this aspect of her work, where she tries to
report on the social situation she has observed. Even Disraeli's accounts
of the working classes, though based on the latest information from the
government blue books, do not ring true. They are well documented,
but they are not alive. It was perhaps impossible for these writers to
regard a working-class background as anything but a stigma; hence, a
working-class character was someone they could not completely enter
into or identify themselves with. Mrs. Gaskell chose a woman of this
class as the heroine of one of her social novels, but she is much closer
to Margaret Hale than she is to Mary Barton. Disraeli's proletarian
48 William O. Aydelotte
heroine, Sybil, turns out to be the daughter of a nobleman. Her father,
Stephen Gerard, whom Disraeli plays up as the possessor of the true
proletarian virtues, proves in the end to be the rightful Earl of Marney.
3. Such an attitude implies a lack of sympathy with democracy, and
the interest of these four writers in democracy is at best only luke-
warm. Kingsley commiserated the Chartists on being excluded from
"a Freeman's just right of voting," but he promised to get for them
"something nobler than Charters and dozens of Acts of Parliament—
more useful than this 'fifty thousandth share in a Talker in the
National Palaver at Westminster' can give you." The borrowing of a
phrase from Carlyle is significant. When Kingsley wrote in his first
"Parson Lot" letter that "my only quarrel with the Charter is that it
does not go far enough in reform," all he seems to have meant was that
he thought reform should be spiritual rather than material. He was no
enthusiast for unlimited democracy. Disraeli makes his sophistical plea
against democracy when Coningsby protests to Oswald Millbank he
has no wish to abjure the representative principle, but representation is
not necessarily, nor even in a principal sense, parliamentary. The repre-
sentation of the press is far more complete than the representation of
Parliament. Parliamentary representation, says Coningsby, is the happy
device of a ruder age to which it was well adapted; it now shows
symptoms of desuetude.
The antipathy to democracy among Victorian intellectuals is, of
course, by no means restricted to these four writers. One could add
other novelists, the Trollopes and Charles Reade for example, and
critical writers like Carlyle, Ruskin, Maine, and Lecky. The hostility
of creative writers to democracy in the mid-nineteenth century has
been brought out and interestingly treated by B. E. Lippincott in his
Victorian Critics of Democracy; it was not just an exceptional affair,
but a major phenomenon of the age.
We can get more closely into the problem by taking up in detail a
single example. Dickens exemplifies all three of these tendencies,
though in doing so he also shows a certain ambivalence, and seems at
times to reverse them completely: he was impatient with the past, he
violently attacked the governing classes, and he proclaimed himself a
Radical in politics. Yet the pattern, though complex, is clear.
1. Toward the past, Dickens appears to share all the Radical preju-
dices. He was not historically minded, he had no gift for entering into
the point of view of another epoch; like Thomas Paine he weighed the
past by the standards of the present and found it all a great mistake. In
 Marx and Mill in Fiction 49
his Child's History of England, as well as in his correspondence and in
his historical novels, he attacked the past, the Middle Ages, and the
Catholic church in true Benthamite fashion. Among the dummy books
he had made for his library was a seven-volume set called The Wisdom
of Our Ancestors, the different volumes being entitled Ignorance, Super-
stition, Dirt, Disease, and such names—an idea ultimately derived,
whether Dickens knew it or not, from a passage in the writings of
Bentham.
But behind this superficial modernism lurks an affection for the old
preindustrial England. Though Dickens' intentions were not reac-
tionary, his instinctive preferences led him to the past rather than to
the future. The customs and habits he described have an archaic flavor;
and he had a habit of putting the setting of his novels about twenty
years back even when he was attacking contemporary abuses. Although
he lived in the city and wrote about it and caught much of its atmos-
phere and poetry, he shows also a yearning and affection for the
countryside. The country appears as a significant symbol in several of
his books, generally associated with a lightening of mood. (See, for
example, Little Nell's escape to the country with her grandfather, or
David Copperfield's journey down the Dover Road.) His love for his
country house at Gad's Hill, with its Falstaffian associations, forms a
part of this. We sense consistently in Dickens a sentimental affection
for an old rural England, an England perhaps that never was, repre-
sented by stagecoaches, cold milk punch, and Christmas at Dingley
Dell.
2. Dickens is, of course, famous for his satire of the governing classes:
in a series of sharp and bitter portraits he attacks both the aristocracy,
which seems to him to be preying upon society, and the rich bourgeoi-
sie, who play a larger and even more ominous role in his novels. In
contrast to this, he glorifies the lower orders, apparently as the really
decent people, the representatives of the basic values he tries to
inculcate.
But Dickens' attitude to the upper classes may be very easily mis-
understood. The great point—and one which may escape a modern
reader at first glance—is that when Dickens describes a wicked rich
man he is portraying a moral type and not a class type. The notion
that a man's conduct could be determined by his economic position,
that a rich man is compelled by his class affiliation to be a menace to
society, is entirely alien to Dickens. The callousness and neglect shown
50 William 0. Aydelotte
by the upper classes toward the lower is for him, not the inevitable
product of sociological relationships, but simply a moral lapse. He con-
demns not the bourgeois class as a whole, which is what some modern
critics have tried to read into him, but rather the moral faults exhibited
by individuals.
Dickens, like the others, has a disposition to view things from the
upper-class angle. His lower-middle-class characters (he deals rela-
tively little with the proletariat) receive in general sympathetic treat-
ment, but they are seldom persons with whom the reader is tempted to
identify himself. They may be virtuous in the highest degree, "nature's
gentlemen," but they are also a little ridiculous—Miss La Creevy, New-
man Noggs, Mrs. Todgers, Captain Cuttle, and the whole gallery.
Dickens is friendly to them, but also condescending. His heroes and
heroines, by contrast, who play for the most part "straight" and not
comic roles, are almost invariably of gentle birth, above the general
line of social demarcation that he seems to make. Little Nell is socially
redeemed by having a rich relation, and Oliver Twist by being (like
Gerard in Sybil) a missing heir. Barnaby Rudge, though he gives his
name to the book, is not a hero in the usual sense, not a "young, walk-
ing gentleman." Even Pip, though he comes to despise some, not all, of
the values his education has given him, has nevertheless acquired these
values; they have become a part of him and help to make up the point
of view from which the story is told.
Contrary to what is sometimes asserted, Dickens was no equalitarian.
In The Chimes he satirizes those who expect the poor to know their
station. But that is exactly what he does expect himself, and this uncon-
scious demand of his may be illustrated by the fact that the "good" poor
in his novels always do know their stations: Mark Tapley, Mr. Peg-
gotty, Joe Gargery, and the others. Dickens, in other words, is not
opposed to the upper class as a class; he hopes not to destroy it but to
educate and reform it, to produce in it a change of heart. He preaches,
not against the upper class, but to it. He has no wish to equalize ranks;
in fact, he not only accepts the current distinctions but even seems to
welcome them. He is sympathetic to the poor, but his object is, as
Edmund Wilson well puts it, to make the poor real to the upper classes.
3. Dickens' attitude to democracy is of a piece with this. Although the
reforms he occasionally demanded could be accomplished only by
act of Parliament, his final position seems to have been to give Parlia-
ment up as hopeless, to reject it as a possible agency of reform. This
 Marx and Mill in Fiction 51
rejection was not partial or conditional; it was absolute. "I solemnly
declare to you," he wrote to Sir Joseph Paxton in 1857, "that direfully
against my will, I have come to the conclusion that representative Gov-
ernment is a miserable failure among us." This could be paralleled by
similar passages in other letters. Dickens expressed always for Parlia-
ment a horror and disgust, dating and partly deriving no doubt from
his early thralldom as a Parliamentary reporter.

Ill
We come now to the explanation. All that has been said so far goes
to show that the radical interpretation of these authors is wrong, that
we can in no way describe them as being in the vanguard of revo-
lution. Neither collectivism nor democracy has any particular appeal
for them. Yet, since we are looking for attitudes rather than theories,
we may claim to find in them an attitude that is logically not uncon-
nected with the development of collectivism later. Although they fore-
see little of the functions the state was to assume toward the end of the
century, they do show a new appreciation of social problems and a
more vigorous concern about the condition of the people, the kind of
concern that was part of the basis of an increased assumption of respon-
sibility by the state in the generations that followed.
We do not on the other hand find in them attitudes that could be
said to lead logically to any sympathy with democracy. The drift is
nonequalitarian, and what little they have to say about democracy is
either unfavorable or at best unenthusiastic. This is the puzzle. Why did
these novelists, with their intense social concern, and living in an age
when democratic liberalism was on the offensive, tend so strongly to
the opposed point of view?
Part of the answer might be found in a closer analysis of the times.
Democracy, even if it seemed the creed of the future, had still only a
limited application in the 1840's. Universal suffrage was still far ahead,
the working classes had almost no political power and were not to
become any kind of a force in Parliament for another fifty years. What
social reform there was, even when it came through Parliament, was
from the top down, strictly benevolent and philanthropic. It is plausible
to argue, then, that these writers simply took their cue from the time,
and did not think of democracy as a serious possibility for practical
politics. By this argument it would be anachronistic to regard them as
making a choice between democracy and philanthropy, for democracy
52 William 0. Aydelotte
was not vividly enough presented to their imaginations for them to
regard it as a possible alternative, or for them to have any sense of
choosing. One might also argue that the liberal creed, which embraced
democracy, also embraced economic individualism against which these
writers were to varying degrees in rebellion. Yet this may be pushing
things too hard; there is much doubt that men of the 1840's would be
so keenly alive to this ideological alignment. More important, perhaps,
is the effect of Tory propaganda for social reform in this decade, in
which we could include not only the "Tory radicals" in politics, but
also Carlyle, whose influence on all four of these novelists was sub-
stantial. One might argue, along this line, that Toryism was a synthesis
to which a literary man concerned with problems of human suffering
might naturally turn.
But this will not quite answer. To begin with, it goes much too far
to say that no one in that age took democracy as a serious possibility.
On the contrary, this was a period of aggressive liberalism, and uni-
versal suffrage was being advocated from many different sources. To
mention three sources that come to mind at once: democratic pro-
posals had issued from the Jacobins in France, from the Chartists in
England, and, above all, formed a part of the philosophy of Bentham.
The anti-Jacobin scare had lost a lot of its punch by the 1840's, and Eng-
land was deeply stirred by events across the channel. Chartism was, far
from being unfamiliar, an object of major concern to all four of these
novelists—they were, of course, hostile to it. Benthamism was the
dominating political philosophy of the age, and must have been pres-
ent in some form in the minds of all of them, particularly Dickens who
had spent four years of his early manhood reporting debates in the
newly reformed Parliament. Dickens indeed thought of himself as a
Radical: he accepted the editorship of the Daily News in 1846, which
had been founded to advocate the Cobden-Bright line, and he reflects
Radical influence in other ways, as in the attack on the abuses of the
past.
Nor does it take us very far to say that these writers were influenced
by the propaganda of Tory reformism. The role of the Tories in eco-
nomic reform, incidentally, may have been somewhat exaggerated by
scholars in the last few years. In any case, it does not explain this litera-
ture to demonstrate that the attitudes it reflects bear a resemblance to
attitudes displayed by other groups at the same time. We have to show
 Marx and Mill in Fiction 53
further why these writers imitated one attitude and not another. To
point out a resemblance is not to offer an explanation. And it would be
hard to fit these writers, who were none of them (except Kingsley in a
minor way) aristocrats, into the pattern of opportunistic Tory land-
owners, needling the Whig factory magnates for the sake of political
advantage, or to see them as inheritors of the aristocratic tradition of
feudal benevolence.
The difficulty in any interpretation of literature in the light of the
times in which it was written is the simplistic assumption that litera-
ture takes its character from something we vaguely refer to as the
"spirit of the age." This assumption is a fallacious short cut which
closes the road to accurate analysis. Literature is, of course, affected by
the age in which it is written, and it also affects the age. But the rela-
tionship is involved, and different in the case of each author. Nor, so
far as we can speak of such a thing as the character of an age, does
literature necessarily follow it. More often it is in rebellion: Gide defines
the raison d'etre of the writer as being at odds with his times. And
these writers in particular seem to stand out against whatever we can
name as the major trend of their era. They flew in the face of the gen-
erally accepted economic doctrine, and their deeper and more under-
lying ideas seem more allied to romanticism and opposed to the most
noticeable intellectual current of the age, which was more rationalistic
and scientific.
A different explanation of the archaism and class prejudice of these
authors might be sought in the very fact that they were writers. An
attractive hypothesis could be set up to the effect that there is inevitably
a conflict between an artist and any mass movement. Although he may
reject the values of the society he lives in, the artist yet hesitates to join
a large general movement against this society. The highly personal
nature of his work makes him an individualist, sensitive to his own
laws of development; he is unwilling therefore to take part in a popu-
lar movement in which his own individuality is in danger of being lost.
Or, when he does join it, it will be with ambivalent loyalties, perhaps
just to cover his own failures and frustrations. Furthermore, and this
may help to explain the matter of insistence on class distinctions, artists
and intellectuals are in general very sensitive to questions of status,
especially their own. Their material rewards are not large, they are
highly conscious of their own individuality—and all this makes them
preoccupied with the issue of status in their writings (it is a principal
54 William 0. Aydelotte
subject of Victorian literature), and in their own lives insistent on main-
taining their position.2
But these explanations, though suggestive, may not be the whole
story. These novelists reflect attitudes that cannot be entirely explained
by saying that they were writers or that they were affected by the
ideologies of their age. They display, not simply the crotchets of intel-
lectuals nor the irresolution of men living in an era of transition, but
something that was for them more fundamental and basic. The
explanation in terms of status is promising, but may be capable of a
wider application. We have not space to discuss in detail more than
one of these authors, and even for Dickens, our principal example, I
do not like to oversimplify what is a very complicated and interesting
pattern. But perhaps one or two points can be suggested.
The apparent contradiction in Dickens, his genuine sympathy with
the "lower orders" combined with his insistence on class boundaries
separating them from those above, has led to fantastically divergent
interpretations of him by different writers, some of whom, like Edwin
Pugh and T. A. Jackson, find him a leftist, while others, such as Wil-
helm Dibelius or even G. K. Chesterton, find him pretty much of a
conservative. The trouble is that most critics have been unwilling to
try to reconcile both aspects of Dickens' social ideas. Since the facts
seemed inconsistent, many students have tended to ignore one body of
evidence or the other. But I think that a solution to the puzzle can
be found, that the two aspects of Dickens are consistent with each
other, and are indeed closely related and help to explain each other.
His ambiguity, rightly considered, makes sense.
The connection can be found in a closer study of Dickens himself.
As I said earlier, literature reflects principally not the times but the
author, and any attempt to use novels for history must undertake at
some step in the process an intimate study of the novelist concerned.
Edmund Wilson in his perceptive essay on Dickens in The Wound and
the Bow has made an effort to show how Dickens' political and social
ideas were related to his personal problems and experiences. While I
cannot follow Mr. Wilson in some of his views, particularly when he
tries to find in Dickens a left-wing alignment, I think his approach is
fruitful and can do something to explain the special pattern of Dickens'
social ideas. Without going all the way into a psychological interpreta-
8
For some of the suggestions in this paragraph I am indebted to my colleague, Walter
Metzger.
 Marx and Mill in Fiction 55
tion, we can admit that Mr. Wilson's stress on the traumatic experi-
ences of Dickens' childhood seems reasonable, for we know from many
sources that Dickens was unhappily conscious of these experiences all
his life and was searching for some means of counterbalancing them.
This much is generally agreed, and indeed critics have harped so much
on the troubles of Dickens' youth—the domestic-service background of
his grandparents, his father's financial ruin and arrest for debt, his own
brief experience as a member of the working class in Warren's blacking
establishment—that these matters have become hackneyed. There is no
doubt of the enormous impact of these experiences on Dickens; the
only question is their meaning for him. But this meaning is dear. The
significance of these experiences for Dickens was unquestionably that
they involved humiliation, loss of status. Dickens' experience of pov-
erty, whatever else it did for him, gave him a horror of it, a determina-
tion to escape from being poor or losing status himself.
This basic insecurity is quite apparent in his frantic attempts to
compensate for these earlier experiences during his years of artistic
production. It comes out, for example, in his exceptional efforts to con-
ceal his background. The truth about his grandparents was kept a
strict secret and was first revealed only in 1939. He kept hidden even
from members of his family that the Murdstone and Grimby episode
in David Copperfieldhad been a personal experience of his own. In the
same novel, which is semiautobiographical, he makes significant altera-
tions and substitutions in the events of his own life: thus, as one illus-
tration, his father, John Dickens, becomes Mr. Micawber, still some-
what disreputable, but now happily no blood relation of the hero.
Along the same line, Dickens attempted to build himself up as a man
of position: sending his son to Eton; adding field after field to the
Gad's Hill estate; affecting an excessive dandyism of dress and a con-
spicuously lavish standard of living; undertaking a hazardous second
trip to America to increase his already ample fortune. He shows a kind
of self-dramatization (not unconnected probably with his passion for
amateur theatricals), which sometimes emerges naively in his corre-
spondence: at the time of his separation from his wife he wrote that he
could not have been more generous if she had been a woman of high
birth and he a gentleman of fortune.
The pattern emerges clearly. Whatever else we may find in Dickens,
we also find a preoccupation with his own position, his status, which
colors everything he does. A large part of the error of the radical inter-
56 William 0. Aydelotte
pretation of Dickens is the assumption that an experience of loss of
status and a sense of social insecurity will drive a man toward the left.
Such a state of mind may, as seems to be the case with Dickens, work
very much in the opposite direction. Dickens' personal circumstances
induced him, perhaps compelled him, to welcome a class stratification,
to think of the poor as something apart. In the same way, Dickens'
aggressiveness and truculence toward the upper classes, of which
radical critics have made so much, can, so far as this is an attitude
directed against a whole class, be given a quite different and nonradical
interpretation. It can be explained just as well (in fact this fits better
the other things we know about him) as the result of insecurity, an
inverted snobbishness, not a desire to reject society but a fear of being
rejected by it. It may also be significant that he did not begin his bit-
terest attacks on the upper classes until well on in his career; his social
criticism on the whole increases in intensity in the later novels. In his
early years, when his poverty was close behind him, he wrote as one
remote from the poor, friendly but condescending. Later, in his period
of success and prosperity, he is more warm in their cause and more
bitter against those above. In other words, he did not begin his strong-
est attacks on the upper class until he was financially secure and had
established his position as a member of it; he became ultrafriendly to
the poor only after it was no longer possible that he could be identified
with them.
Thus, Dickens' background colored his whole social thinking and
exerted, to a degree at least, a normative influence upon it. This is not
to minimize the great undercurrent of rebellion and dissatisfaction
which Dickens expresses, not so much through his formulated ideas as
through his mood, atmosphere, and symbolism. To depict him as pas-
sively acquiescing in the existing order of things would be contrary to
the whole spirit of the later novels. All I am trying to show is that
when this mood of rebellion did get itself translated into more precise
concepts, it was affected and limited by certain underlying elements
that gave it a particular character. To say this is not to indulge in
debunking or cynicism. In a problem of this kind no explanation can
be exclusive. Furthermore, Dickens' awareness of the issue of status
affected his social ideas in a more positive way too: it made him
exceptionally sensitive to the effect of philandiropy on the personal
dignity of the recipient—not always a common thing in his age. Hence,
for example, the imaginative sympathy and the incredible humanity
 Marx and Mill in Fiction 57
and decency he displayed in the plans that he drew up for that ill-
starred experiment, Miss Burdett-Coutts' Home for Fallen Women.
We have not time to explore further the relations between these two
strands in Dickens, his reformism and his drive for status, which seem
so closely and so interestingly interwoven. The object of this paper is
not so much to attempt any full interpretation of Dickens, which would
be impossible in this brief scope, but rather to suggest by using him as
an example the kind of information that the historian may extract
from literature. What the historian can find, in a word, is a more inti-
mate glimpse into the factors behind the formation of opinion; he can
get a grasp of the influences bearing upon the attitude of one man,
which may be suggestive for the entire period. Such an approach may
take the historian more directly to the causes of events, the ideas in the
minds of men, and may help to emancipate him from the psychological
naivete which since the days of Adam Smith has been the bane of
economic history.
How far patterns of this kind could be set up for other novelists or
other figures of the period is a difficult question to answer. We may
not generalize from the individual to the group, especially when the
individual concerned has so many special quirks as Dickens. Yet one
might not unreasonably anticipate that patterns like this would occur
fairly frequently in the Victorian age, when on the one hand status
mattered, and on the other hand class boundaries were fluid enough
so that status could be successfully pursued or so that there was danger
of losing it. The case of Dickens is suggestive, and it is amusing to con-
sider whether anything like it could be worked out for others. Disraeli
seems a possibility; and Eric Russell Bentley has suggested how a
similar line of criticism might be applied to Carlyle. Ranging more
widely, a trend of thought of the kind here suggested might throw
light on certain puzzling facts of modern English social history: why
it is that conservative movements tend to draw their ideology, their
formative ideas, from homines novi; or why "feudal benevolence" and
noblesse oblige were in nineteenth-century England most enthusias-
tically expounded and practiced by those who were in origin conspicu-
ously not noble or feudal. The role played by benevolence as a label of
status offers interesting possibilities for criticism.
But these are speculations, attempts to suggest wider implications
that this line of argument might have. All I have tried to show here
is the kind of information the historian can get out of literature, the
58 William O. Aydelotte
attitudes and preconceptions literature reveals—attitudes which, though
they may be trivial in themselves, yet, to the extent that they are widely
shared, underlie and motivate basic historical changes.
State University of Iowa WILLIAM O. AYDELOTTE