circumstance and triumphing at last', and
Dickens certainly knew what he was say
ing when he formulated this idea.
For who else was the Oliver he described
but the young Charles Dickens himself?
And what circumstances had moulded the
author when he was a child? I quote the
words used by Ackroyd at the end of the
fourth chapter of his outstanding biograp
hy: Insecure. Maltreated. Frail. Oppres
sed. Guilty. Small. Orphaned. This was all
the consequence of adverse circumstances,
yet these did not prevent him from beco
ming a great writer. On the contrary, they
actually caused him to become one. The
French author André Maurois who had a
great knowledge of England and English
literature and deep insight into Dickens's
character, declared that his parents could
not possibly have given the young Charles
a better education, even if they had meant
him from the beginning to become a wri
ter: En vérité, si ses parents avaient voulu
former un grand romancier et avait cher-
ché pour lui la carrière la plus propre a le
modeler, ils n'en auraient pu concevoir
une plus ingénieuse, ni plus compléte.A
graduate of this school of life, in his wri
tings he severely attacked the institutions
that were responsible for those adverse cir
cumstances - the New Poor Laws, the
workhouses, the Circumlocution Officers,
the debtors prisons, the Yorkshire schools.
In the end he did actually have some in
fluence against them, but by virtue of a
very unusual method of attack. This beco
mes even clearer when we compare Dic
kens with another writer working in Lon
don who was as genuinely moved by the
miseries of the poor and attacked the
prevalent system as radically as Charles
Dickens. But unlike Dickens, this writer
did not walk the streets of London by
night nor visit the prisons and the morgues
but sat in the reading room of the British
Museum. Unlike Dickens he did not use
his eyes but his brains. What a difference
in method and what a difference of outco
me as we now know. For while Karl Marx
invented theories, Dickens created human
beings; Marx made blueprints of an ab
stract society; Dickens's society met in the
Leather Bottle or theBlue Dragon, or the
Three Jolly Bargemen. Marx thought he
could conquer the evils of mankind by the
struggle of abstract workers and peasants.
Dickens actually did conquer those evils
without any struggle on the part of his
imaginary children. For it is Dickens's
children who are paradoxically the real
rebels who in their innocence represent a
far greater threat to evil institutions than
all the radical sentences in all the radical
pamphlets Dickens wrote. They are the
ones who in the end effectively undermine
the rotten structures of the system, or as
Sir Leicester Dedlock would put it from
his feudal point of view, who obliterate the
landmarks and open the floodgates by their
naive remarks and questions, to which the
intellectuals and the powerful have no
answer. It is not the analytical essays of
Dickens the journalist but the one sentence
of Oliver: 'Please sir, I want some more',
that dealt the workhouse system a mortal
blow.
Please sir, I want some more
5
