Explore English novelist Charles Dickens's early Victorian era and literature with Clifton Fadiman

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CLIFTON FADIMAN: Princess Victoria became Queen Victoria in 1837. She died in 1901. And that long span of 64 years we call for convenience the Victorian era. What was it like to be a Victorian during the first half of this period--oh, say, from 1837 to 1870--the years when Charles Dickens was writing his novels? During the next half hour let's try to get some feeling of the age Dickens reflected, attacked, and transcended.

Where shall we start? Why not with a symbolic moment at which the era was born?

It is early morning, June 20, 1837. We are looking at Kensington Palace in London, where the 18-year-old Victoria, granddaughter of George III, and her mother, the duchess of Kent, have been living and waiting for this very moment: a visit upon urgent state business of the archbishop of Canterbury and the lord chamberlain of England.

DUCHESS OF KENT: Your grace. My Lord Cunningham. You have news for us?

LORD CHAMBERLAIN: For her royal highness, the princess, we have news, madam.

DUCHESS OF KENT: Ah, the king, then? . . .

LORD CHAMBERLAIN: . . .is dead.

DUCHESS OF KENT: And my daughter is now? . . .

LORD CHAMBERLAIN: . . . queen of England.

DUCHESS OF KENT: It has come, then, at last. And I am the queen mother.

LORD CHAMBERLAIN: No madam. Your royal highness is not the queen mother.

DUCHESS OF KENT: Not?

LORD CHAMBERLAIN: Your royal highness is the queen's mother. That is the distinction. Only had your royal highness been queen in the first place would that other title now follow.

DUCHESS OF KENT: Then if it is not mine by your laws, she shall give it to me.

LORD CHAMBERLAIN: That madam, I fear, will be impossible.

DUCHESS OF KENT: I will go myself and speak to her at once. That shall settle it.

LORD CHAMBERLAIN: Madam, we are here to see her majesty, the queen, on urgent business, and we must not be delayed. Your presence at the interview, madam, will not be required unless her majesty sends for you.

DUCHESS OF KENT: This is not to be borne.

ARCHBISHOP OF CANTERBURY: Madam, this is a very historic occasion. We are here officially only. Etiquette and immemorial tradition prescribe certain rules which have to be observed. Your royal highness will not wish to break them?

LORD CHAMBERLAIN: Your grace, she's coming. Your majesty.

CLIFTON FADIMAN: And, starting from this very moment, for 64 long, crowded years, the wishes, taste, and personality of this young girl, this middle-aged woman, this old lady will stand for much, though far from all, of what Victorian England was.

What was it? There is no one answer, there is no short answer. It was an age of startling contrasts, of artistic bad taste in some fields and of artistic triumph in others, of morality and hypocrisy, of splendor and squalor, and, the most striking contrast of all, of prosperity and poverty.

Benjamin Disraeli was twice Queen Victoria's prime minister. He also wrote novels. And in one of them he makes a character refer to England's two nations--the privileged and the people--the privileged and the people, wealth and grinding poverty. How true was this? Well, in 1842 there was an official investigation of working conditions in the coal mines of England. And various witnesses came to testify before the commission. One of them spoke these words:

"I am Sarah Gooder, I am eight years old. I'm a coal carrier in the Gawber mine. It does not tire me, but I have to trap without a light, and I am scared. I go at four and sometimes half past three in the morning and come out at five and half past in the evening. I never go to sleep in the pit. Sometimes I sing when I have light but not in the dark. I dare not sing then. I don't like being in the pit. I'm very sleepy when I go in the morning. I go to Sunday school and learn to read, and they teach me to pray. I've heard tell of Jesus many a time. I don't know why he came on earth. I don't know why he died. But he had stones for his head to rest on."

Sarah Gooder, coal carrier, eight years old. But what of the other side of the coin? Just nine years after little Sarah Gooder had testified, another witness spoke for England, and this witness was a building, a vast and wonderful structure of glass and cast iron, erected in Hyde Park, London, and known as the Crystal Palace. In 1851 under the sponsorship of Prince Albert, Victoria's German-born husband, the Crystal Palace was opened to the public. It housed the Great Exhibition, and the Great Exhibition displayed to the whole world Victorian England's truly marvelous achievements in trade, industry, science, and technology.

In the mid-19th century the Great Exhibition symbolized British progress and power. It stands at one extreme. At the other extreme, we have the testimony of an eight-year-old coal carrier, Sarah Gooder, who said, "Sometimes I sing when I have light but not in the dark. I dare not sing then." In between the Crystal Palace and Sarah Gooder lies the rest of England.

Let's now block in some of its main features in terms of the man who is perhaps its greatest observer, Charles Dickens. As I said, Dickens reflected his age, attacked it, and transcended it. But we must add a fourth relationship of Dickens to his age--he ignored it. There are certain areas of English life which seemed not to interest Dickens, at least as far as material for his novels went. For example, to get a broad, realistic picture of the clergy of his day or of the political life of the era or the life of the landed gentry and the fox-hunting squires, for all this, it's better to turn to another bearded Victorian novelist, Anthony Trollope. And if you were looking for a picture of the great--the fashionable--world of the aristocracy, you'd find it better portrayed in the works of William Makepeace Thackeray. Dickens, too, like Thackeray, wrote about the shams and hypocrisies, the snobbery of class-conscious England. But Thackeray, born a gentleman, knew the world of the aristocracy from the inside out. Whereas, Dickens, in a way, never escaped from his unhappy, lower middle-class origins. And there's something else you won't find reflected in Dickens--any sense of the great outsized personalities who flourished in Victorian England and who helped to change its spirit: Florence Nightingale, whom we should remember whenever we see a modern hospital; George Stephenson, one of the men who, in a few short years, laid down the basis for the British railway system; Charles Darwin, who shook the world to its foundations with his theory of evolution; Cardinal Newman, convert to Catholicism, subtle theologian, and brilliant philosopher of education; John Stuart Mill, champion of liberty and the emancipation of women, reformer on a dozen fronts. People such as these are not to be found in Dickens's novels, and yet they were among the giants who shaped the Victorian world. Living in an age that was, for many, one of prosperity and security, they dared to question its basis. They acted as the ferment of their time, they forced their countrymen to grow in spirit. And one of them, in some ways the greatest, was Dickens himself. He had a gift the others didn't possess: he touched people's hearts, he played like a musician on their emotions, he gripped their imaginations. No novelist before his time had reached so many people so directly.

It's hard for us to understand what a powerful influence the novel was in those days and especially the novels of Dickens. Often they appeared in fortnightly parts, one installment at a time. And, as G.K. Chesterton has put it, "in the days when Dickens's work was coming out in serial, people talked as if real life were itself the interlude between one issue of 'Pickwick' and another." Dickens was not a philosopher, not an intellectual, indeed not even a very well-educated man, but he understood intuitively the spirit of his age. Even when he attacked it, he was part of it.

How shall we characterize that age? Behind all the contradictions that we have already mentioned lay one underlying, driving force--the impulse toward growth. Other words have been applied to it; it's been called the age of imperialism, of expansion, of trade, of progress, of optimism. But all these words suggest growth. Dickens reflected the spirit in many ways, and one of the most amusing occurs in "Great Expectations." Pip, the young hero, has ambitions to rise in life. He comes to London, and there, under the tutelage of another young man, Herbert Pocket, begins his education as a gentleman. To Pip's question, "What did Herbert Pocket do? What was he?," that young man replies that he is a capitalist.

PIP: A capitalist?

HERBERT POCKET: Yes, an insurer of ships.

PIP: Oh, I see.

HERBERT POCKET: However, I shall not rest satisfied with merely employing my capital in insuring ships. I shall buy up some good Life Assurance shares, and cut into the Direction. I shall also do a little in the mining way. None of these things will interfere with my chartering a few thousand tons on my own account. I think I shall trade to the East Indies for silks, shawls, spices, dyes, drugs, and precious woods. It's an interesting trade.

PIP: And are the profits large?

HERBERT POCKET: Tremendous!

PIP: Tremendous.

HERBERT POCKET: I think I shall trade also to the West Indies for sugar, tobacco, and rum. Also to Ceylon, especially for elephants' tusks.

PIP: You will want a good many ships?

HERBERT POCKET: The perfect fleet.

PIP: And--and how many ships do you insure at present?

HERBERT POCKET: Well, I haven't begun insuring yet. I'm looking about me.

PIP: Oh.

CLIFTON FADIMAN: Of course, Dickens is making gentle fun of the Victorian spirit of enterprise. But the dreams of Herbert Pocket, nonetheless, reflect what the commercial classes of Victorian England wanted and got. They weren't satisfied like Herbert just to look about them. These new enterprising people, of whom Herbert himself wants to be one, were the middle class. And it is they, the middle class, who dominate the life of the period, supply many of its ideas, produce many of its men and women of high ability. They had astounding energy, these new middle-class men, with their passion for trade, machinery, commerce, markets, expansion--in a word, growth. As men of business, they were bold, imaginative, and often ruthless, but in their social and private lives they stressed respectability and convention. And here their model was probably the royal family. The queen and Prince Albert lived a well-publicized life of domestic virtue, piety, decorum. And their middle-class subjects, for the most part, imitated them. The conduct of the middle class, then, was dominated by respectability, but their minds were dominated by optimism, a belief which to us today seems a little naive in the inevitability of progress in all fields--moral, intellectual, economic. And as a matter of fact, this seemed to be some justification for this optimism. The Industrial Revolution was transforming society. The age of steam, as it was often called, did make possible a vast flow of products which streamed outward to every corner of the world. And back from every corner, including England's far-flung colonial possessions, came a return stream, to echo Herbert Pocket, of silks, shawls, dyes, precious woods, even elephant tusks. Finally, this optimism rested on the reality of peace, just as our uncertainty is based on the fear of war. I, who am in my 50s, have lived through two world wars and half a dozen smaller ones. But remember that during the entire 64 years of Queen Victoria's reign there was no major war.

These were the people, then, for whom Dickens wrote his novels. These respectable, pious, energetic, optimistic, and often materialistic people of the dominant middle class, the class to which, once having achieved success, he himself belonged. Some of their beliefs he shared. Some, as we shall see, he transcended. But others he loathed. For example, he is aware of the sordid reality that lay back of Herbert Pocket's innocent dreams of wealth. Perhaps you remember Marley's Ghost in "A Christmas Carol" and his complaint to Scrooge. "My spirit never walked beyond our counting house. In life my spirit never roved beyond the narrow limits of our money changing hole." But the Victorians were not all Marleys and Scrooges by any means. With prosperity assured they, too, like most of us, wanted some of the good things of life. And these good things they found, following the example of royalty in the comforts and dignity of family life. These comforts and this dignity depended to a great extent on the possession of things, on the enjoyment of large heavy dinners, eaten in large fussy houses, on the display of works of art, all too often bad art.

The title of this painting is "The Suffering Husband" by Augustus Egg. Why is the husband suffering? What is contained in the letter he clutches hopelessly in his hand? Why is his wife weeping? Charles Dickens was well aware of the absurdity of this emphasis on pious morality. He attacks it again and again. There is a scene in his novel "Little Dorrit" in which the young heroine is instructed by the genteel Mrs. General in the demeanor proper to young Victorian ladies.

MR. DORRIT: Ah! Amy, my dear. Pray, be seated. Amy, you have been subject to some conversation between myself and Mrs. General. We agree you scarcely seem at home here. How is this?

AMY: I think, father, I require a little time.

MRS. GENERAL: Papa is a preferable mode of address my dear. Father is rather vulgar. The word Papa, besides, gives a pretty form to the lips. Papa, potatoes, poultry, prunes, and prism are all very good words for the lips, especially prunes and prism. You will find it serviceable, in the formation of a demeanor, if you sometimes say to yourself in company--on entering a room, for instance--Papa, potatoes, poultry, prunes and prism, prunes and prism.

MR. DORRIT: Pray, my child, attend to the precepts of Mrs. General.

AMY: I--I will try fath . . . Papa.

MR. DORRIT: I hope so. I--I most devoutly hope so, Amy.

MRS. GENERAL: If Miss Dorrit will accept of my poor assistance in the formation of a surface, Mr. Dorrit will have no further cause for anxiety. And may I take this opportunity of remarking, as an instance in point, it scarcely seems delicate to look at vagrants and other low creatures with the attention which I have seen bestowed upon them by a very dear young friend of mine. But they should not be looked at. Nothing disagreeable should ever be looked at. Apart from such a habit standing in the way of that gracious equanimity of surface, so expressive of good breeding, it seems hardly compatible with the refinement of mind. A truly refined mind will seem to be ignorant of the existence of anything that is not perfectly proper, placid, and pleasant.

CLIFTON FADIMAN: Proper, placid, and pleasant. The aim of much Victorian home life was to arrange things so that there would be nothing which was not proper, placid, and pleasant. This high moral tone was set by the Victorian father inside his home, though not always outside it. The household was often ordered like a petty kingdom, with a heavy father as the autocratic tyrant, his wife and children as the court retainers, and an army of servants as the carefully graded ordinary subjects. Behavior was formal, etiquette rigid.

Would you like to get some idea of the atmosphere of such a household? Here is Mr. Gradgrind in Dickens "Hard Times" talking to his daughter, Louisa.

MR. GRADGRIND: Louisa, my dear. I prepared you last night to give your serious attention to the conversation which we are now going to have together.

LOUISA: Yes, father.

MR. GRADGRIND: My dear Louisa, you are the subject of a proposal of marriage that has been made to me. A proposal of marriage, my dear.

LOUISA: I hear you, father. I'm attending, I assure you.

MR. GRADGRIND: Well, perhaps you are not unprepared for the announcement which I have it in charge to make.

LOUISA: I cannot say that father until I hear it.

MR. GRADGRIND: What you say, my dear Louisa, is perfectly reasonable. I have undertaken, then, to let you know that, well, in short, Mr. Bounderby has informed me that he has long watched your progress with particular interest and pleasure, and has made his proposal of marriage to me, and has entreated me to make it known to you and to express his hope that you will take it into your favorable consideration.

CLIFTON FADIMAN: Louisa, of course, says nothing. No well-brought up Victorian young lady would dare.

And there you have the Victorian weakness. All this striving for respectability, for gentility, for a high moral tone; all this went against the grain of human nature. The Victorian had to pay for it, and he paid for it by an inner unhappiness. Behind the smooth, formal surface of his home life, there often lay friction, hypocrisy, and divided souls. Two characters, again from "Little Dorrit," Mr. Merdle and his wife, are in Mrs. Merdle's sitting room.

MRS. MERDLE: Mr. Merdle. Mr. Merdle!

MR. MERDLE: Eh? Yes? What is it?

MRS. MERDLE: What is it? It is, I suppose, that you have not heard a word of my complaint.

MR. MERDLE: Your complaint, Mrs. Merdle? What complaint?

MRS. MERDLE: A complaint of you.

MR. MERDLE: Oh! A complaint of me.

MRS. MERDLE: A complaint which I could scarcely show the justice of more emphatically, than by having to repeat it. I might as well have stated it to the wall. But if you wish to know the complaint I make against you, it is, in so many plain words, that you really ought not to go into Society unless you accommodate yourself to Society.

MR. MERDLE: Now, in the name of all the furies, Mrs. Merdle, who does more for Society than I do? Do you see these premises, Mrs. Merdle? Do you see this furniture, Mrs. Merdle? Do you look at yourself in the mirror and see yourself, Mrs. Merdle? Do you know the cost of all this, and who it's all provided for? And will you tell me that I ought not to go into Society. I, who shower money upon it in this way every day of my life.

MRS. MERDLE: Pray, don't be violent, Mr. Merdle.

MR. MERDLE: Violent? You're enough to make me desperate. You don't know half of what I do to accommodate Society. You don't know anything of the sacrifices I make for it.

MRS. MERDLE: I know that you receive the best in the land. I know that you move in the whole Society of the country. And I believe I know (indeed, not to make any ridiculous pretence about it, I know I know) who sustains you in it, Mr. Merdle.

MR. MERDLE: Mrs. Merdle, I know that as well as you do. If you were not an ornament to Society, and if I was not a benefactor to Society, you and I would never have come together. And when I say a benefactor, I mean a person who provides it with all sorts of expensive things to eat and drink and look at. But, to tell me that I'm not fit for it after all I've done for it--after all I've done for it, after all! To tell me I mustn't mix with it after all, it's a pretty reward.

MRS. MERDLE: I say that you ought to make yourself fit for it by being more "degage," and less preoccupied. There is a positive vulgarity in carrying your business affairs about with you as you do.

MR. MERDLE: How do I carry them about with me, Mrs. Merdle?

MRS. MERDLE: How do you carry them about? Look at yourself in the mirror, Mr. Merdle.

CLIFTON FADIMAN: The face of Mr. Merdle reflected in the looking glass is the face of a man who could commit suicide. And, eventually, that is what he does.

Thus, in its more critical moments, the Victorian could not help feeling that his success and prosperity, even his so-called morality, were built on the unhappiness of others, one of whom might be little Sarah Gooder. Often he was riddled with guilt, preyed upon by melancholia. Often his personality was split. It's no accident that Robert Louis Stevenson's story about a man with two personalities, "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde," should've appeared in 1886 at the very height of Victorian power. The Victorian period itself was both Jekyll and Hyde, like Mr. Merdle, looked in the mirror and often did not like what it saw. It saw progress, it saw growth, it saw prosperity, but it also saw the cost of these things. And that's why we must describe this great period not only as a period of growth and optimism but as a period of reform.

The reaction to Victorian complacency, optimism, and piety was reform. Florence Nightingale, Matthew Arnold, John Stuart Mill, Charles Dickens--these were not voices crying in the wilderness. They were listened to; the abuses to which they pointed were often, if slowly, corrected, and the terrible gap between Disraeli's two nations was gradually bridged. This would not have been possible if all the Victorians had been Gradgrinds and Merdles. They were not. The famous Victorian conscience may seem stuffy, but it was real. It was there. It could be appealed to, and it was. Think only of a few parliamentary reforms that you may have encountered in your history studies.

We have now traced certain patterns in Victorian England, patterns of optimism, progress, growth; patterns of self-doubt; patterns of reform and human decency. Some of these patterns we shall find in concrete form as we study "Great Expectations." And to this novel, perhaps the most beautifully balanced one that Dickens ever wrote, we now turn.

From time to time, as we consider the book, our company of actors will continue to make vivid for us crucial scenes, and, so, to the first chapter of Charles Dickens's "Great Expectations," surely, one of the most gripping opening scenes in fiction.

STAGE CREW: Mark it, seven take two.

DIRECTOR: Action.

PIP: Sacred to the Memory of Philip Pirrip . . .

ESCAPED CONVICT: Hold your noise! Keep still, you little devil, or I'll cut your throat!

PIP: Please don't cut my throat, sir. Pray don't do it, sir.

ESCAPED CONVICT: Tell us your name! Quick!

PIP: Pip, sir.

ESCAPED CONVICT: Once more. Give it mouth!

PIP: Pip. Pip, sir.

ESCAPED CONVICT: Show us where you live. Point out the place.

PIP: Over yonder, sir.

ESCAPED CONVICT: You young dog, what fat cheeks you got. Darn me if I couldn't eat 'em.

PIP: Please, sir. I hope you won't, sir.

ESCAPED CONVICT: Lookee here. Where's your mother?

PIP: Here, sir! Here, sir! Also Georgiana. That's my mother.

ESCAPED CONVICT: Was your father alongside your mother?

PIP: Yes, sir, him, too; late of this parish.

ESCAPED CONVICT: Lookee here. Who you live with, that's supposin' you're kindly let to live, which I ain't made up me mind about yet?

PIP: My sister, sir--Mrs. Joe Gargery, wife of Joe Gargery, the blacksmith, sir.

ESCAPED CONVICT: Blacksmith, eh? Now then, the question being whether you're going to be let to live. You know what a file is?

PIP: Yes, sir.

ESCAPED CONVICT: You know what wittles is?

PIP: Yes, sir. It's food.

ESCAPED CONVICT: You bring me a file. And you bring me wittles. You bring 'em both to me. Or I'll have your heart and your liver out.

PIP: If you would kindly please to let me keep upright, perhaps I shouldn't be sick and perhaps I could attend more.

ESCAPED CONVICT: You bring me, tomorrow morning early, that file and them wittles. You do it, and you never dare to say a word nor dare to make a sign concerning your having seen such a person as me or any persons sumever, and you'll be let to live. But you fail or you go from my words in any particular, no matter how small it is, and your heart and your liver will be tore out, roasted, and ate. Now, what do you say?

PIP: I'll get them, sir.

ESCAPED CONVICT: Say the Lord strike you dead if you don't.

PIP: Lord strike me dead if I don't.

ESCAPED CONVICT: Good. Now, you remember what you undertook and get on home.

PIP: Goo-good night, sir.

ESCAPED CONVICT: Much of that!

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CLIFTON FADIMAN: And so, through a chance meeting with this escaped convict, Pip has started on the first stage of his great expectations.