Chapter 24 Work
There are two ways to approach the relationship between Dickens’s novels and Victorian work, one through his biography and
the other through the history of the industrialisation and urbanisation of Britain in the nineteenth century. It is easy to
trace the impact of Dickens’s early experiences of work as a 12-year-old child at Warren’s Blacking in his opposition to child
labour and general sympathy for working people, but the restructuring of Britain by the forces of industrialisation and urban
growth is equally important in understanding the types of labour that he represents in his various novels. Complicating analysis
of the theme of work in Dickens, however, is the tendency in Victorian novels to render labour invisible and to represent
it through plots focussing on domestic settings, interpersonal relationships and issues of gender and sexuality.
From the late eighteenth century onwards Britain was transformed from an agricultural to an industrial society as the population
moved from the country to industrial cities such as Manchester and Birmingham, or to the economic and political centre of
London, seeking better wages if not better living conditions. From 1801 to 1851 the population in the principal towns and
cities tripled, resulting, not surprisingly, in appalling overcrowding. London went from 958,803 to 2,362,236 inhabitants
in this period, spawning some notorious slum areas and inspiring Dickens’s description of Jacob’s Island in Oliver Twist.
The first wave of industrialisation was felt in the cotton industry. Northern industrial cities such as Manchester grew over
ten times in size in the period from 1760 to 1830.1 Some of the effects of this process are reflected in Hard Times as well as in Dickens’s journalism, such as his coverage of the Preston weavers’ strike of 1853.2 The 1840s saw the second wave of industrialisation thanks to the railway boom and its dramatic restructuring both of the
rural and the urban landscape. Dickens’s description of the tearing down and remaking of Staggs’s Gardens in Dombey and Son captures both the threat and the promise of the railway. At a local level, a rural and slow-paced life was destroyed by the reshaping of the urban landscape; new inflows of capital and commerce transform
the ‘gardens’ into an extension of the expanding London metropolis.
The iron and coal industries trebled their output between 1830 and 1850 and a glut of investment followed, epitomised by the
‘railway mania’ of 1845–7. The century was marked by wild economic swings between rises in production and prosperity and depressions,
the worst coming during the Hungry Forties with widespread unemployment and misery causing anxiety that the working classes
might revolt and leading directly to ‘condition of England’ novels such as Disraeli’s Sybil (1845), Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton (1848) and Dickens’s own Hard Times. For the latter half of the nineteenth century, Britain was the pre-eminent global producer of industrial goods and boasted
of itself as the ‘workshop of the world’.
Industrialisation produced new forms of wealth: the ‘self-made man’ is a representative Victorian figuration of such ‘new
money’ that was not tied to land ownership (the traditional, aristocratic way of measuring social status). This is the kind
of figure parodied by Dickens through Josiah Bounderby in Hard Times, or criticised as a heartless businessman through Paul Dombey in Dombey and Son. However, the economic uncertainty of many of Dickens’s middle-class characters mirrors both his own experience of a loss
of social status thanks to his father’s imprudent ways and the fluctuations in wealth felt by many Victorian families. The
Victorians extolled the virtues of hard work, but the experiences of many of Dickens’s characters show that wider economic
and social forces could shape their trajectory. Even when they experienced sudden wealth, such as Pip in Great Expectations, its source could be dubious when made overseas in colonies such as Australia and India. Such a plot also shows that Britain’s
status as ‘workshop of the world’ was due not only to industrialisation but also thanks to the exploitation of the natural
resources of the countries colonised under the British Empire. ‘New money’ came, therefore, not only from the factories but
also from the colonies.
Dickens himself experienced family bankruptcy thanks to his father’s inept handling of money. The autobiographical connections
between Dickens and work are most obvious in David Copperfield, which is hardly surprising since in its depiction of David’s early years it is a fictionalised version of his own experience.
David begins working at Murdstone and Grinby’s at the same age that Dickens moved to London with his family and was subsequently
employed at Warren’s Blacking.3 Dickens’s experience of working at Warren’s Blacking thus had a direct influence on David Copperfield but also on his attitudes to child labour generally; he supported such causes as the Ten Hour Movement to limit the amount
of time that children could be employed.
Dickens does not show children working in mines or employed in industrial labour, but his novels do have children engaged
as messengers and shop assistants or on the streets as pickpockets or street sweepers. Various factory acts between 1819 and
1833 set a limit to the age and the number of hours a child could work, and in 1842 the Mines Act outlawed child labour in
the mines. Not until national elementary education was made compulsory by the Education Act of 1870 can it be said that the
effort to move children from work into education really made headway, although compulsory education for all children under
age 10 was not enacted until 1880.
That said, Dickens’s approach to the representation of work is often oblique. Even in those works of fiction in which the
factory and industrial labour play the most prominent role, there is no direct depiction of work. In Hard Times, Dickens gives a view of the factory from outside as a ‘fairy palace’ illuminated at night rather than any images of the
labour in the mill. He uses this novel to express broad sympathy with the working classes. Within the novel, Sleary gives
voice to Dickens’s views by saying that ‘people must be amuthed, Thquire, thomehow … they can’t be alwayth a working, nor
yet they can’t be alwayth a learning’ (book 1, ch. 6). Sleary echoes Dickens’s characterisation of the English, in his introduction
to the book, ‘as hard-worked as any people upon whom the sun shines. I acknowledge to this ridiculous idiosyncrasy, as a reason
why I would give them a little more play’. The novel broadly pits the ‘heart’ and domestic affections against industrialisation
and regimented education, but the main alternative to the factory in the story is the circus, and clearly not all Victorians
could run away with the circus in order to avoid industrialised labour. A novel ostensibly about industrial labour and the
‘Condition of England’ question, it focusses on emotions and the domestic affections as an alternative to the mechanisation
of labour and the philosophy of utilitarianism as an extension of industrialisation.
Dickens’s overall attitude to industrialisation is contradictory. In ‘Amusements of the People’ (1850) he writes appreciatively
of British ‘innate love … for dramatic entertainment’, going on to claim that ‘there is a range of imagination in most of
us, which no amount of steam engines will satisfy’, opposing industrialisation and imagination in ways reminiscent of Hard Times.4 In Little Dorrit, however, he seems to idealise small-scale industrial production in Daniel Doyce’s workshop in Bleeding Heart Yard. Doyce’s workers seem both productive and happy, in dramatic contrast to the overworked Britons described by Dickens
in his introduction to Hard Times. In this apparent ideal there is, as Patrick Brantlinger argues, a dark undercurrent in the machinery that seems on a ‘suicidal
mission’, and even when it is in operation, the workshop is like ‘a bleeding heart of iron’.5 Even at his most appreciative, then, Dickens represents industrial labour in terms of death rather than imagination and life.
Another example can be found in Nicholas Nickleby, where the central character moves through several different kinds of work, starting out as a teacher at Dotheboys Hall,
then becoming a tutor, an actor/dramatist and then a clerk. He turns down a position as secretary to Mr Gregsbury, MP, when
the duties of the position sound too overwhelming. In this, Dickens shows Nickleby refusing work on the basis of his instinctual
pride, suggesting that there are some forms of labour too onerous for a young gentleman. Nickleby accepts the position of
private tutor in French, albeit under the pseudonym bestowed on him by Newman Noggs of ‘Mr Johnson’. While he is a successful
actor and writer with the Crummles theatre company, he does not ultimately earn his living this way, being rescued instead
by the benevolent employment practices of the brothers Cheeryble. Rather than present any work as ennobling, Nickleby is rewarded
for his refusal of jobs that seem inappropriate by the intervention of the wealthy and philanthropic brothers. The novel thus
gives very mixed messages about labour that can, at least in part, be traced back to the ideal of the ‘gentleman’. The work
ethic may have been embraced by the middle classes, but the ideal of the gentleman still carried with it associations of leisure
and landed capital that were at odds with mercantilism and business.
While he valued play and leisure, and was of course in the entertainment business himself, Dickens also shared a deep commitment
to what is usually termed the Victorian ‘Gospel of Work’, as expounded by writers such as Thomas Carlyle and Samuel Smiles.
Thus David Copperfield asserts that ‘whatever I have tried to do in life, I have tried to do well; that whatever I have devoted
myself to, I have devoted myself to completely; that, in great aims and in small, I have always been thoroughly in earnest’
(ch. 42). The emphasis on ‘earnest’ endeavour includes a host of work-related ideals such as self-discipline, seriousness
and self-sacrifice, all of which are extolled as transcendent ideals by writers such as Carlyle and Smiles. Excluded in this
severe Puritan work ethic, as many commentators have noted, are notions of play and pleasure, which are often lumped together
in the excoriated term ‘idleness’. Some of the contradictions in the Victorian attitude to work are played out in Hard Times, where Dickens pronounces that the English should not have to be always working but has trouble creating a compelling alternative
that values play and leisure. Dickens can understand the working-class love of ‘amusements’ in such essays as ‘Amusements
of the People’, but his novels place most emphasis on work and duty.
Dickens’s personal attitude expressed in his correspondence suggests that his practical experience of work did not always
align with some of the more idealistic public pronouncements of Carlyle and Smiles about its ennobling and sanctifying effects.
In his letters he expresses a desire to relax, but also a relentless work ethic that made it difficult for him to rest without
feelings of guilt because of his ‘idleness’. He frequently complains of not getting enough work done (even though his rate
of productivity was phenomenal) and writes that ‘I have now no relief but in action. I am become incapable of rest. I am quite
confident that I should rust, break, and die, if I spared myself. Much better to die, doing.’6 In such a formulation, rest and idleness are the functional equivalent of death, and life is equivalent to work. Despite
Sleary’s pronouncement that people cannot always be working, Dickens felt personally that he had no choice in the matter and
could not indulge in more ‘play’. In another letter he complains that ‘I did intend to be as lazy as I could through the summer,
but here I am with my armour on again’, figuring his writing as a sort of manly combat, echoing Carlylean notions of work
as a struggle against ‘idleness’.7
The other aspect of Dickens’s fiction that concerns work has to do with small-scale production and commerce, especially that
found on the streets of London. Henry Mayhew in London Labour and the London Poor documented the dizzying array of vendors and services available on London streets, and the same diversity is to be found
in Dickens’s fiction. The range of labour figured in Dickens’s novels is as vast as that documented by Mayhew, with such figures
as Jo the crossing sweeper (Bleak House), Cruncher the bank messenger (A Tale of Two Cities), Brogley the dealer in second-hand goods and Joe the wharf labourer (Dombey and Son), Jemima Evans the straw-bonnet maker (Sketches by Boz), Fascination Fledgby the moneylender (Our Mutual Friend), Bullamy the porter (Martin Chuzzlewit), Cheggs the market-gardener (The Old Curiosity Shop), Conkey Chickweed the public-house owner (Oliver Twist), Mrs Chivery the keeper of a tobacco shop (Little Dorrit), Tom Cobb the chandler (Barnaby Rudge), Short and Collins the owners of a Punch and Judy show and Grinder and his travelling stilt act (The Old Curiosity Shop), Deputy the boy servant at a lodging-house (although all the boys employed there are called Deputy as their individuality is subsumed by their labour), Durdles the stonemason
(The Mystery of Edwin Drood), Mrs Dilber the laundress (A Christmas Carol) and so on. There are also more clerks, lawyers, curates, doctors and minor bureaucrats thronging the pages of Dickens’s
novels and journalism than can be enumerated in this space. This range of occupations gives Dickens’s imaginative universe
its sense of depth and breadth, but it also shows the problem that can be encountered when trying to classify Victorian society,
as Mayhew attempted, under the rubric of ‘work’. Many read the social history of Britain in terms of large-scale industry,
but it was also characterised by small-scale production by individuals and family businesses.
More and more businesses were also employing clerks and copyists in a growing bureaucracy: examples include Bob Cratchit in
A Christmas Carol and Walter Gay in Dombey and Son. Dickens’s representation of clerks could veer from depicting them as lazy and socially pretentious (Dodson and Fogg in Pickwick Papers), figures of comedy (Mr Guppy in Bleak House) or as positive characters (Dick Swiveller in The Old Curiosity Shop). The same range of attitudes can be seen in his portrayal of lawyers, ranging from Uriah Heep in David Copperfield to Mr Grewgious in Edwin Drood.
In rapidly industrialising and expanding Britain the range of occupations was dizzying and new ones were being added by technology;
in Dombey and Son, Toodle the engine fireman works for that new social force, the railway. By 1873 railway employment in Britain numbered 275,000
or 3 per cent of the male labour force, and 630 million pounds had been invested in infrastructure,8 so that Mr Toodle was representative of a rapidly growing form of labour. Not only does Toodle work for the railways, but
his job becomes part of his identity; his appearance, with ‘cinders in his whiskers, and a smell of half-slaked ashes all
over him’ (ch. 20), and his actions are determined by his occupation. Many of Dickens’s minor characters have their identities
defined by their labour; just as Mayhew defined Londoners by their work roles, so Dickens made their work a defining characteristic
of many of his characters.
However, much of the drama in Dickens’s novels takes place not at work but in a domestic setting, and in novels such as Bleak House women’s labour plays an important if unacknowledged role. Given the separation of the spheres, women’s labour cannot be recognised
as such and is shown in a secondary role to male work. The separation of the spheres,
encoded most famously by John Ruskin in Of Queens’ Gardens (1865), divided the world into a competitive, hostile outside world, the domain of men, and a domestic space of tranquillity
ruled over by women, which mirrored the increasing separation of home from work brought about by industrialisation and new
patterns of commuting enabled by the railways. Conventionally, men inhabited the ‘public’ world of work while women presided
over the ‘private’ domestic sphere and did not ‘work’. Nonetheless characters such as Esther Summerson are trained in their
role as supervisor of a household of domestic servants, which is a form of labour. Women were ‘managers’ of household work,
as Isabella Beeton’s Book of Household Management of 1861 showed more directly, so that domestic labour was carried out by women of all classes.
12. ‘Phiz’ (Hablot Knight Browne), ‘Mr Pickwick and Sam in the Attorney’s Office’, Pickwick Papers, 1836–7.
Most of the overt working roles for women in the Victorian household were of course those of domestic servants. Domestic service
was ‘the largest single source of employment for women and girls in the nineteenth century’, and by 1851 13.3 per cent of
the entire employed population were domestic servants; by 1881 this figure had risen to a staggering 15.9 per cent of the
working population.9 Just as there are a dizzying number of different work roles in Dickens’s novels, so there is a huge supporting cast of housekeepers,
maids, cooks and laundresses whose labour is made invisible in the novels as it was in the household itself. In Dombey and Son the extremity of Mr Dombey’s indifference to his daughter is measured by the way in which Florence is ignored by him to the
extent that ‘she’s left, unnoticed, among the servants’ (ch. 4). Dombey’s favouring of his son renders her as insignificant
as the servants and their work. A direct representation of female labourers engaged in menial tasks is only to be found in
odd corners of Victorian cultural representations, such as Arthur Munby’s collection of photographs of working-class women.
The central role of women in Dickens’s novels in terms of work is made clearer if we define their function as providing ‘emotional
labour’. Women such as Agnes in David Copperfield, Esther Summerson in Bleak House or Sissy Jupe in Hard Times are shown as sources of emotional support for their family and for the males who are in search of their respective vocations;
their work is therefore both domestic and emotional. This is their role as much as domestic manual labour was that of the
working-class women who populate Dickens’s novels, but for differing reasons in neither case could this be acknowledged as
‘work’. Servants were supposed to be invisible unless spoken to, but women who wanted to maintain their elevated social status
could not work. Harriet Martineau in her Autobiography represents it as a relief when her family lose their social status due to economic misfortune, so that she could acknowledge
overtly her writing as work. The ideological contradictions facing women from the middle and upper classes who ‘worked’ in
this sense are analogous to the fissures that have been traced in the figure of the governess, who was part of the family
and cared for children, was paid a wage, but who was not technically a servant; these contradictions are represented by Dickens
through such characters as Ruth Pinch in Martin Chuzzlewit and Miss Wade in Little Dorrit.
Dickens’s novels thus capture the energy of an industrialising and expanding Britain, and reflect the range of possible occupations
that working people could undertake. Dickens himself benefited from the increasing industrialisation of book printing, as his novels
were mass-produced to reach an increasingly literate reading public. Dickens himself thus produced commodities for the growing
consumer market in his own work as a writer.
Notes
1 Sally Mitchell, ed., Victorian Britain: An Encyclopedia (New York: Garland, 1988), 391.
3 Ibid., 59.
4 Charles Dickens, ‘The Amusements of the People’, in The Works of Charles Dickens (New York: National Library Company, 1903), vol. XXXV, 118.
5 Patrick Brantlinger, ‘Dickens and the Factories’, Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 26:3 (1971), 273.
6 John Forster, The Life of Charles Dickens, ed. J. W. T. Ley (London: Cecil Palmer, 1928), 638.
7 Letters, VII, 288.
8 Mitchell, Encyclopaedia, 664.
9 Ibid., 705–6.