or less high social standing doing
horrible, bestial things to those below
them in station, such as forcing human
excrement into a servant's mouth, or
forcing women to prostitute themselves;
eye-witness accounts of adultery; murder
cases with financial or sexual motives.
For the middle classes sensuality was still
synonymous to slavery, promisquity to
degradation.
Ackroyd adequately sums up this fear
when he describes Dickens's reaction to
the blacking warehouse:
'The 'working classes' were in a very
real sense a race apart, a substratum of
society which bred in those above them a
fear of disease, a horror of uncleanliness
and of course the dread of some kind of
social revolution if ever these individual
Fagins and Greens became a 'mob'. For
Dickens, the boy who had hopes 'of
growing up to be a learned and
distinguished man', such close contact
and the resultant fear of contamination
must have been appalling; it is often
forgotten how precarious early
nineteenth-century society could be, how
easy it was for a person to slip down
through the social classes - through drink,
or improvidence, or misfortune - and in a
sense to disappear."(77-78)
In later years, Dickens "never really
sympathised with the working class as
such; he pitied and helped individual
members of that class, but he had scant
sympathy for any kind of collective or
organised groupings within it. Here was a
man who had, after all, successfully
suppressed any public knowledge of his
working-class experience in the blacking
warehouse and who had, at the time,
shrunk from contact with his 'low"
companions." (Ackroyd, 740) He was too
boisterous, too radical and too serious in
wishing for social reform to ever become a
real Victorian, yet this class
consciousness he did share with most
Victorians and his fascination for slums,
poverty and degradation was mingled
with fear and horror of what he had seen
in his youth.
Bibliography
Ch. Dickens, The Posthumous Papers of
the Pickwick Club, Chapman Hall,
Household ed., 1880s.
Ch. Dickens, Bleak House, Chapman
Hall, 1914.
Ch. Dickens, The Mystery of Edwin
Drood, Chapman Hall, 1907.
E. Gaskell, Mary Barton, Oxford
University Press, 1989.
Ch. Palliser, The Quincunx, Penguin
Books, 1990.
Th. de Quincey, Confessions of an English
Opium Eater, Penguin Books, 1988.
P. Ackroyd, Dickens, Sinclair Stevenson,
1990
V. Berridge and G. Edwards, Opium and
the People, Opiate Use in Nineteenth-
Century England, Allan Lane/St Martin's
Press, 1981.
V. Berridge 'Victorian Opium Eating:
Responses to Opiate use in Nineteenth-
Century England', Victorian Studies, vol.
21, no. 4, Summer 1984, 437-461.
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