‘What connexion? Always the same, in
Oliver Twist and
Nicholas Nickleby,
Bleak House and
Great Expectations,
Little Dorrit,
Our Mutual Friend.’
1 So writes Franco Moretti, inspired by the moment in
Bleak House where the unnamed narrator questions the coherence of the bafflingly complex, disjointed and partial vision of human life
which the novel has thus far presented. However, in this novel, as with Dickens’s others, it becomes clear as the text progresses
that in fact people, places and objects are connected, despite the apparently random way in which they have been thrown together.
As many critics have observed, Dickens is concerned in his fiction to reveal some form of relational, coherent system underpinning
what seems to be an impossibly complex and unrelated series of characters, events and situations. This commitment – which
can be understood in political as well as aesthetic terms – is significant, because Dickens was writing at a time when the
discipline of political economy was making significant declarations about its own power to reveal societal connections.
Keeping the idea of making connections to the fore, this chapter will explore how and why political economy was defined by
its practitioners and proponents as a science able to discern systematic coherence beneath the most complicated of social
scenarios. Such a claim was often couched in terms that celebrated capitalism’s capacity to forge social unity and promote
universal progress. But if this was an authoritative and compelling claim, it was by no means universally accepted. Victorian
commentators condemned political economy for a variety of different reasons, covering economic, social and cultural grounds.
By linking his work to such critiques, Dickens can be understood as a writer disinclined to refute the worth of political
economy’s social vision, but concerned also that it could promote a depiction of human existence that obscured the inequalities
and ravages of industrial capitalism, and that was limited in its understanding of what constituted a good, moral life.
In 1857, as he reflected upon significant advances in human knowledge, the historian Henry Thomas Buckle declared political
economy to be crucial. Here he highlighted Adam Smith, whose work he held to have systematically comprehended ‘the laws which
regulate the creation and diffusion of wealth’, thus promoting ‘the happiness of man’: ‘In the year 1776, Adam Smith published
his
Wealth of Nations; which, looking at its ultimate results, is probably the most important book ever written, and is certainly the most valuable
contribution ever made by a single man towards establishing the principles upon which government should be based.’
2 Such tremendous acclaim for Smith simplifies and distorts the range and complexity of his writing, as well as its relationship
with works in the field that preceded and followed it. But although figures in Britain such as David Ricardo and J. S. Mill
would contribute significantly to the development of classical political economy as it circulated when Dickens wrote, Buckle’s
celebration of
The Wealth of Nations speaks powerfully to the ‘vulgar version of Adam Smith handed down to the mid-Victorian generation’.
3 A brief discussion of some key tenets of Smith’s work, and of the way they were taken up in the nineteenth century, will
demonstrate how political economy was seen to generate a reductive but compelling account of
laissez-faire capitalism – in which humanity’s ‘happiness’ was produced by a form of social connection that was driven by individual self-interest,
that revolved around the extraction of surplus value from the privately owned means of production and that required little
governmental stewardship or intervention.
Fundamental to the thesis Smith presented in
The Wealth of Nations, and to the political economy that followed, was his account of ‘the propensity in human nature … to truck, barter, and exchange
one thing for another’.
4 It was because humans recognised that they could better meet their needs and improve their lot via exchange rather than self-sufficiency
that divisions of labour based around private property, comparative advantage and competitive exchange emerged. Importantly,
then, Smith explained that while individuals trading one thing for another only desired to grow wealthier themselves, and
certainly did not intend to bring about greater good, their actions allowed that industrial techniques could be refined, industrial
processes rationalised and industrial rewards reaped. In this way market-orientated divisions of labour, and the monetary
systems that facilitated their increased scope and smooth operation, were established as engines of civilisation, driving
the stadial model of development with which political economy charted human evolution from hunter-gathering through to what
Smith called the ‘commercial society’ of
his own time. Explicating the socio-economic sophistication of this final stage – where peoples were enabled in accordance
with the laws of supply and demand to invest their labour and capital wherever they saw fit, and where previously limited
commodities were increasingly available to all – Smith noted that the extensively divided production processes behind the
woollen coat of even ‘the most common artificer or day-labourer’ demonstrated why his was ‘a civilized and thriving country’.
5 This, then, was a vision of human life where self-interest coupled with the capacity to exchange structured a rational, mutually
beneficial and dynamic way of connecting people, allowing free-market competition to generate social welfare and to push forward
social progress. Declaring ‘I have never known much good done by those who affected to trade for the public good’, it was,
Smith famously advised, the market’s ‘invisible hand’ which meant that free competition led to an harmonious, self-regulating
and prosperous socio-economic system.
6
With this declaration came the conviction that the ‘invisible hand’ should be freed up to work its magic on the international
stage. Critical to Smith’s work, and the liberal political economy that followed on from it, was the belief that market laws
of supply and demand were distorted by protectionist trade barriers, mistakenly erected by nations seeking to preserve a positive
balance of trade. Smith’s insistence that international free trade would allow instead an international division of labour
– and thus an ‘obvious and simple system of natural liberty’
7 – to take shape within the world economy grew in popular appeal as the nineteenth century wore on. Significantly, then, the
thirty-five-year period in which Dickens was writing was also a period that saw free trade policies increasingly agitated
for and adopted across Europe, with Britain leading the way. In 1846, following a lengthy and highly publicised campaign by
free trade reformers (most notably the Manchester School headed up by Richard Cobden and John Bright), the protectionist Corn
Laws were repealed. This prompted Victorian commentators to celebrate what they believed to be Britain’s inauguration of a
new world order, championing – in terms that Dickens would consistently parody – the capacity of free trade, in Cobden’s words,
to act as a ‘grand panacea’, serving like a ‘beneficent medical discovery’ to ‘inoculate with the healthy and saving taste
for civilization all the nations of the world’.
8
Analysing finance in the Victorian period, Christina Crosby identifies three key processes for the student of the nineteenth
century to keep in mind: ‘capitalization, industrialization, and urbanization, the transformation of local and agrarian economies
and ways of life into the modern
world of steam and iron, metropolitan centres and worldwide interdependencies’.
9 The ongoing impact of these processes meant that the mid nineteenth-century world had moved on from that of Adam Smith, but
it is important to underscore that there was an authoritative bid on the part of commentators working at the same time as
Dickens not only to explain but also to herald these processes with relation to Smithian economics. In Dickens’s
Dombey and Son the ships’ instrument maker, Solomon Gills, is confused and intimidated by his city environment and the new industrialised
and globalised mode of being he holds it to represent: ‘The world has gone past me. I don’t blame it, but I no longer understand
it. Tradesmen are not the same as they used to be, apprentices are not the same, business is not the same, business commodities
are not the same’ (book 1, ch. 4). Set against this disorientated reaction to the very processes Crosby outlines, however,
Dombey himself understands the world systematically, holding that the earth constitutes an entity ‘made for Dombey and Son
to trade in’ (book 1, ch. 1). Political economy provided Dombey’s systematic yet self-centred understanding of commerce with
an harmonious social context, extracting a collective economic moral from individual acts of commercial acquisitiveness. So
while industrial capitalist society was certainly complicated, particularly in its urban forms, there was available to the
Victorian a socio-economic account of modernity that proposed capitalism, in Catherine Gallagher’s words, as a ‘life form
… a megabeing whose telos was expanding wealth and whose motive was believed to be the promise of individual happiness’.
10
Dickens’s writing, like that of many of his contemporaries, can be understood to mount an angry challenge to this vision of
modern commercial society as an organic system of relations that nourished its constituent human elements. This is not to
say that Dickens should be understood in any straightforward sense as an opponent of political economy, or of the industrial
capitalist progress it could explain as a vitalising system. Noting that Dickens’s response to the development of capitalism
was ‘neither approval nor rejection’, G. R. Searle holds that the writer typified a ‘dominant middle-class response’ that
was essentially ambivalent.
11 But it is true to say that Dickens felt hostile towards those advocates of market society who tended, as he suggested, to
‘push arithmetic and political economy beyond all bounds of sense’.
12 What follows examines this broadly representative hostility – found in fiction writing throughout the nineteenth century,
and particularly prominent in the politically diverse and variously inflected work of social and cultural commentators
contemporary with Dickens – in relation to the human costs such unrestrained thinking preferred to ignore.
Two key issues emerge here. The first relates to the idea that modern, industrialising commercial society featured economic
losers as well as winners, have-nots as well as haves. The second relates to the wider point that while industrial capitalist
progress brought material benefits to some members of society (although not others), the doctrines associated with it were
perceived to support a pernicious system that denied those aspects of sympathetic fellow-feeling and imaginative freedom so
many Victorians believed were central to a pious and full life. To this dualistic way of thinking, then, industrial capitalist
modernity constituted a ‘megabeing’ that threatened rather than guaranteed the health and happiness of the nation, with health
and happiness here understood culturally and spiritually, as well as materially.
Pulling together both these themes, a significant passage from
Hard Times, ‘that most political-economic of novels’,
13 depicts the ‘Coketown Hands’ in the abstracted, cold-hearted terms Dickens associated with the conception of human existence
reduced to the laws of the market:
Something to be worked so much and paid so much, and there ended; something to be infallibly settled by laws of supply and
demand; something that blundered against those laws, and floundered into difficulty; something that was a little pinched when
wheat was dear, and over-ate itself when wheat was cheap; something that increased at such a rate of percentage, and yielded
such another percentage of crime, and such another percentage of pauperism; something wholesale, of which vast fortunes were
made. (book 2, ch. 6)
When Elizabeth Gaskell wrote
Mary Barton (1848), she prefaced with an apology her ‘Condition-of-England’ investigation into the ‘agony of suffering’ endured by those
labouring under the new conditions of the industrialised north, stating ‘I know nothing of Political Economy, or the theories
of trade … and if my accounts agree or clash with any system, the agreement or disagreement is unintentional’.
14 In
Hard Times, Dickens proposed no such disclaimer to his attack upon the factory system, political economy and the distinct although related
philosophy of utilitarianism, employing instead the respectively representative caricatures Bounderby, M’Choakumchild and
Gradgrind in order to draw out the calamitous consequences of an industrial capitalist system underpinned and impelled by
doctrinal positions taken to ends so reductively logical as to render them morally indefensible. Although
Hard Times’s account of pollution, degradation and exploitation was echoed by a host of other Victorian fiction writers and social commentators
focussing
upon the conditions of Britain’s rapidly emerging manufacturing centres, Dickens’s target here was not industrialisation
per se – elsewhere he associated industrialisation with strength, utility and progress – but rather the inadequacy of the idea that,
as the novel’s dedicatee Carlyle put it, in an age when ‘Men are grown mechanical in head and in heart’, ‘Cash payment’ should
serve ‘as the sole nexus between man and man’.
15
Shifting away from Coketown, then, Dickens readily identified the kinds of injustices and inequalities he felt resulted from
a socio-economic climate in which the self-interested, materialistic ideologies of the ‘cash nexus’ were allowed to prevail.
Perhaps most obviously,
Oliver Twist responded to the New Poor Law of 1834, which was seen to legislate against charitable sentiment and communal responsibility.
The fact that as part of the act all paupers, even married couples, were segregated by sex within the workhouse was a measure
associated with the political economy of Thomas Malthus, who had warned in the late eighteenth century against the dangers
of population growth, particularly amongst the poor. Describing the impact of Malthus’s thinking upon later generations, Roy
Porter notes the way in which Dickens sent up and challenged Malthusian economics, with its ‘Gradgrindian reverence for scientific
facts and figures’ and dismal predictions: ‘Food supplies crept up arithmetically: 2, 4, 6, etc.; human population leapt up
geometrically: 2, 4, 8, 16, etc. The implication of this simple arithmetic was, as Mr Micawber would have spotted, disaster
– that is, the positive checks of famine, war and pestilence.’
16 Oliver’s request for ‘more’ is in this sense specifically anti-Malthusian, because with feeding came breeding, but it can
be read more broadly with regard to Dickens’s concern to stress that while liberal economists insisted that social welfare
would be achieved via the market, all too often – and in the name of good economics – the poor went hungry while the rich
grew fat. Bringing to the fore the way in which the hegemony of such
laissez-faire attitudes meant the weak had to submit to the will of the powerful,
Our Mutual Friend thus records the surrender of ‘us smaller vermin’ to the ruinous demands of the market – and those that control it: ‘Relieve
us of our money, scatter it for us, buy us and sell us, ruin us, only we beseech ye take rank among the powers of the earth,
and fatten on us!’ (book 1, ch. 10). In
Capital (1867), Marx attacked political economy for the way in which it served to commodify social relations, alienating workers
from the product of their labour and naturalising the surplus value appropriated as profit by the capitalist investor. Without
advocating Marx’s socialist solution, Dickens was
likewise at pains to point out that beneath the gains of globalised commerce, high finance and heavy industry were to be found
the wasted bodies of the poor.
As stated, political economy tended to associate the emergence of competitive divisions of labour, and the increasingly complex
market economies they sustained, with industrial improvement, commercial expansion and social prosperity. If this vision structured
a compelling narrative about industrial capitalism, and if on occasion Dickens was drawn to champion the advances of his times,
it is also true that he plotted in his writing a far less celebratory version of modernity’s socio-economic system at work:
one where tremendous wealth flowed, but did so in abstracted, indeterminate and seemingly meaningless forms; one where speculative
ventures could prove nothing more than fraudulent hot air; one where mechanised divisions of labour reduced workers to ‘Hands’;
one where exploitation, uneven development and financial ruin were shown to be consequences rather than anomalies of the market’s
proper operation; and one where the drive to make money rendered it impossible to live life to the full. Particularly as regards
this final point, it should be underlined here that in fact political economists were not necessarily blind to the shortcomings
and inadequacies of their capitalist vision. In The Wealth of Nations, Smith spoke to the potentially negative impact of commercial society, especially for the socially disadvantaged. In The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) he set out that though humanity was driven by self-interest, it was also distinguished by its capacity for imaginative
sympathy. In Principles of Political Economy (1848), J. S. Mill was openly concerned that this altruistic capacity was not sufficiently encouraged by the competitive
climate of his times:
I am not charmed with the ideal of life held out by those who think that the normal state of human beings is that of struggling
to get on; that the trampling, crushing, elbowing, and treading on each other’s heels, which form the existing type of social
life, are the most desirable lot of human kind, or anything but the disagreeable symptoms of one of the phases of industrial
progress.
17
Notwithstanding, and as Dickens was keen to stress, when so much public discourse demanded one ‘accept without inquiry’ ‘the
last new polite reading of the parable of the camel and the needle’s eye’ (
Little Dorrit, book 1, ch. 30), it seemed as though Victorian Britain was in thrall to just such a vulgar understanding of political economy,
and the destructive, debilitating mode of existence it legitimised. Small wonder, then, that the socio-economic connections
Dickens discerned at the heart of his fiction,
and in his writing elsewhere, were often those associated with debt, disease and misery, rather than wealth, health and happiness.
So it was that while Dickens did not dispute the central thrust of political economy’s account of progress, he did stress
that this account was not the whole story, both because it effaced from view poverty and injustice, and because its individualism
promoted a dreadfully impoverished conception of social responsibility and personal development. Taking up this latter concern,
John Ruskin’s trenchant essay ‘Unto This Last’ (1860) dismissed the praise commentators such as Buckle lavished upon ‘the
modern soi-disant science of political economy’, which Ruskin condemned for assuming ‘not that the human being has no skeleton,
but that it is all skeleton’: ‘it founds an ossifiant theory of progress on this negation of a soul; and having shown the
utmost that may be made of bones, and constructed a number of interesting geometrical figures with death’s-head and humeri,
successfully proves the inconvenience of the reappearance of a soul among these corpuscular structures’.
18 For the conservative Ruskin, as for the radical Marx, political economy was deficient because its attention to the progressive,
productive value of the division of labour disallowed it from attending in an holistic, imaginative manner to the character
and quality of life lived by the producer. Without disputing in the same way the rationale behind a divided, industrialised
mode of production, Dickens was anxious too that the self-interested, materialist emphasis of political economy should not
be allowed to dominate and thus diminish humanity’s potential. Hence his commitment ‘to administrative, political and social
reform, aware as he was that it was only at the level of national and social government that substantial social change could
be brought about’.
19 But so too his literary investment in representing those kinds of social bonds and cultural activities that were not organised
by government or determined by the laws of the market, but which were embodied by particular individuals or groupings and
which cultivated trust, love, imagination and a capacity both to question and to resist those socio-economic forces which
engendered atomisation and alienation. One way of reading Dickens in relation to political economy, then, is to look for the
figures, communities and loci that lie outside or disrupt the hegemonic space and time of industrial capitalist modernity
and its prevailing ideologies.