Advocates for a New Social Order:  Dickens, Marx, and the Trade Union in Hard Times
Mary Ann Tobin, Duquesne University

 For over a century, Charles Dickens has been praised as being the working man's advocate, and the lower classes have played a major role in peopling his vast world of characters. Always, the reader is left with a sense of sympathy and pity for these characters as Dickens' journalistic descriptions of their plight are often dramatic, stirring, and pathetic. Although he renders the living conditions of the poor in such a way that no reader can escape feeling sympathy for such characters, Dickens never once offers a solution to such distress. In Hard Times we find a man who suffers not only the degradations of the industrial city, but also the ostracism of his own kind when he refuses to join the ranks of a budding trade union. Dickens has often been deemed a reformer by many modern critics. However, if he truly sought reform for the treatment of the lower classes in Victorian England, why, then, does he refuse Stephen Blackpool a chance to take a part in that reform? Like Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Dickens realized and reported upon the conditions of the working classes, but he chose to offer a more spiritual form of aid rather than to suggest a complete political reformation.
 
Dickens published his views on labor issues in several of his journals, and he spoke on the subject frequently as well. Although he was moved by the plight of the workers, he could not understand why they would become violent at times. Peter Ackroyd cites a letter to Angela Burdett-Coutts, describing Dickens’ views on trade union violence.  The reason for such violence, Dickens contends in the letter, is that the lower classes were being brainwashed and swindled by what he terms "designing persons who have. . . immeshed the workmen in a system of tyranny and oppression" (690). In other words, trade union "agitators" incited strikes and riots among a typically orderly,  peaceful and honest group of people. Dickens never referred to these organizers as anything but "agitators,” and he thought them to be nothing but rabblerousers concerned only with lining their own pockets.
 
Perhaps because of his journalistic training, Dickens was able to present characters from the lower classes in a believable and heart-rending fashion, but he never truly understood them. It is true that he spent several months as a child working in a bootblacking (shoe polish) factory while his father was incarcerated for debt, but he was soon returned to his middle class household and was able to continue his education. Dickens then worked his way up to becoming a parliamentary reporter, and he was later able to write for a living. His being a self-made man is perhaps the key to understanding his view on the lower classes.  If he was content with his hard-earned position in the social order, why should they not be as well? This was the typical bourgeois attitude of the time.
 
In The Grudrisse of Karl Marx, this attitude toward the status quo of the social order is given attention: "The bourgeois view has never got beyond opposition to this romantic outlook and thus will be accompanied by it, as a legitimate antithesis, right up to its blessed end" (71). In other words, the middle classes still believed that so long as the industries depended on workers, and vice versa, no one should have anything to complain of as they were dependent upon one another. The workers should be happy to have jobs, and the factory owners should be willing to pay a decent wage. Marx will go on, however, to prove that the capitalist system destroys this codependency by forcing the worker and the factory owner into disassociated lives, with only the factory’s product having any value.
 
This system, according to Marx, requires individuals to become indifferent to each other in their need to produce in order to earn a wage. Therefore, to a Marxist, Dickens has it completely right when Blackpool is ostracized by his employer and his fellow employees. If the trade union was to flourish, all of the employees would necessarily need to join; and, on Bounderby's side, keeping the employees a solid happy mass was beneficial to the continuation of production.  The various situations that Stephen Blackpool finds himself in throughout the novel are illustrations of Marx's critique on capitalism. Blackpool has neither legal nor social recourse to either his divorce or his being fired, and he must seek recourse elsewhere. That no one lends him a hand is a case in point for Marx. Blackpool meets with nothing but indifference from his fellows. He does, however, engender the reader’s sympathy.
 
It seems that sympathy is the only thing that Dickens has to offer to the working classes. Repeatedly, Blackpool utters his pitiful refrain, "It's aw a muddle! Fro' first to last, a muddle!," even upon his deathbed (200). This displays a cynicism on Dickens' part: a distrust in those in power to do anything of service to the poor, and a lack of faith in the poor being able to do anything for themselves. Instead of offering suggestions to either the suffering or those who had the power to stop such suffering, Dickens will repeatedly beg for charitable aid or mere sympathy for the suffering masses.  His own attempts at housing delinquent young women is a case in point.  From his letters to Burdett-Coutts and others, we can see that Dickens often distrusted the ability of the corrupted lower class women to truly reform.
 
Perhaps he was hoping for a sympathetic response from his readers upon writing the article “Locked Out,” in February 1854.  In this article about the Preston strike, Dickens gives the customary sympathetic treatment to the workers who had first gone on strike, and then were locked out by the factory owners. The oppression of the machinery is described, as well as the low literacy rates. Although Dickens uses this point of illiteracy as a means of garnering sympathy from his readers, he simultaneously uses literacy to attack the "agitators":

On the one hand, we are to deplore the state of the illiterate masses; on the other, we are to be wary of the educated, as they can cause trouble, both for the workers and for the factory owners.
 
To illustrate this point, Dickens describes the labor meeting in a comical, if not overtly sarcastic, manner.  In fact, this passage is remarkably similar to the scene in Chapter Four of Hard Times, and has been taken as the base for that scene by many scholars. He describes the main speaker thus: This passage may, upon first glance, seem pleasant enough, but the sarcasm is inescapable, nevertheless. The words "rightly or wrongly" and "constant agitation" especially display Dickens' mistrust of the union organizer.
 
The bitterness grows as Dickens introduces the second speaker with the somewhat unfortunate name of "Swindle.” Most likely, this surname is an invention of Dickens', as well as the name "Cowler.”  This device of naming characters for their characteristics is prevalent in all of Dickens' works. Swindler is likened to "a modern Cassius,” the very examplar of an agitator, and he is described as being blessed with an education, although Dickens doubts he has made much use of it. Dickens finishes this section of the article with a direct commentary on the proceedings, stating of the third speaker: Clearly, Dickens does not hold any faith in the union organizers, and he believes them to be misleading the working classes with fruitless visions of ending their misery.
 
In Hard Times, we are presented with a similar view of trade union meetings, but Dickens is much more obvious in his approach in his treatment of Slackbridge. The "agitator" is described as being ". . . not so honest, he was not so manly, he was not so good-humoured; he substituted cunning for [the crowd's] simplicity, and passion for their safe solid sense" (105). Here, Dickens is free to present his opinions without fear of reprisal, and he unleashes all of his venom in an uncompromising manner. He is also free to present a character who maintains his "safe solid sense" in opposition to the union organizers--a stand-in for the author perhaps. Stephen Blackpool is the only member of the audience who remains unaffected by the sophistry of the union organizers. Unfortunately, Blackpool comes to suffer the alienation of his peers by speaking out after he is publicly denounced and humiliated for his refusal to join the union.
 
This distrust of the "agitators" can be explained by Dickens' feelings toward anyone in a position of authority, especially toward those who designated that authority upon themselves. Richard Faber, in Proper Stations, suggests that this cynicism stems from Dickens' memories of the various legal catastrophes his family suffered from his father's poor handling of money matters. This distrust was strengthened by Dickens' tenure as a parliamentary reporter for The Morning Chronicle. Dickens had first-hand experience of the intricate, and oftentimes devious, workings of the British court and governmental systems. Faber states: To further this distrust, the stability and efficacy of the trade unions of the time were hardly impressive. Unlike our modern union organizations, organizers could not offer more than the pity and sympathy that Dickens himself encouraged. According to H. C. G. Matthew in The Oxford History of Britain, the trade unions were "for the most part rather narrowly-based 'craft unions"' that were more concerned with matters of seniority than anything else (537). In other words, self-interest and self-preservation was their main agenda, not the furtherance of the working classes as a whole. Once again, this alienation and indifference to the welfare of others fits what Marx cited as a characteristic of capitalist society.  Paradoxically, however, Matthew also makes the claim that ". . . little ideology except for the concept of solidarity" existed within the trade unions (538). This is not, however, the solidarity which promotes growth, but rather that which protects what the individual already possesses.
 
We can safely say that Marx, Engels, and Dickens shared at least a few opinions concerning the plight of the working classes in capitalist societies.  However, where Dickens saw a deplorable practice that, in the long run, would damage the working classes, Marx and Engels saw the uniting of laborers to improve their situation as an inevitability and a necessity. Because the rise of capitalism destroys the connection between the classes and, by extension, their interdependency, the individual must act to protect and provide for himself. The society that had once depended upon the loyalty of the serf to the lord, and the reverse, no longer exists when production of goods becomes the goal. The bourgeoisie becomes the major force of power due to its possession of monetary wealth, and the proletariat must produce to earn wages in order to survive (The Grundrisse 106-118).
 
The first reaction against this capitalist system, as cited in The Communist Manifesto, was violence against the very machines that the workers operated (164). This was one of the concerns Dickens voiced in his criticism of union "agitators.” Instead of offering real aid, he felt that they could be responsible for urging the workers to destruction, which would then force them from their work and the means to support themselves (Ackroyd 690). Marx and Engels would insist that this was a temporary phase which would soon become something more lasting and beneficial: Indeed this final point was true of the strike at Preston. In Dickens' article, he reports of a committee hard at work in dividing funds collected from working members of the union from neighboring towns to the striking members of Preston. Although he may not approve of the trade unions completely, Dickens is ready to give them the credit they are due for such acts.
 
Where Dickens is most distrustful is the final unionization of the working classes. He simply cannot believe that such a system can work. Marx and Engels see it differently, believing that by joining their resources and maintaining solidarity among their own ranks, the proletariat can eventually use the very tools of the bourgeoisie to overcome the system (Bowditch 165). The Proletariat would then be in the authoritative position, but any form of authority was a thorn in the side to Dickens. He saw such combinations not as a new political force, but merely a crude replacement of the one already in power.  In Dickens’ view, the analogy of a bunch of thugs displacing and replacing another would be apt for the so-called "reformer.”
 
For Dickens, any reform would eventually decay into another form of oppression, if indeed it did not begin in that manner. The only consolation possible, then, would be pity, sympathy, and Christian charity. All Dickens wanted to convey to his readers was the importance of the sympathetic Christian mode of behavior to the lower classes. He did not advocate the rise of the proletariat, but instead he sought to provide a better understanding of their situation. In this light, the actions of Stephen Blackpool can be better understood as he possessed both a charitable and noble soul. He could not have joined the union as he did not believe it would help matters any, and he maintains his dignity even though he pays the ultimate penalty for it in the end.
Works Consulted

The Oxford History of Britain. Ed. Kenneth O. Morgan. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1984.

Ackroyd, Peter. Dickens. New York: HarperCollins, 1990.

Bowditch, John and Clement Ramsland. Voices of the Industrial Revolution. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1961.

Dickens, Charles. Hard Times.  Ed. George Ford and Sylvere Monod. 2nd ed. New York: Norton, 1990.

---.  "Locked Out.”  Household Words 8 (1854): 345-8.

Faber, Richard. Proper Stations. London: Faber and Faber, 1971.

Marx, Karl. The Grundrisse. Ed. and trans. David McLellan.  New York: Harper, 1971.

Williams, Raymond. Culture and Society: 1780-1950. New York:  Harper, 1958.
 

Return to the Order and Disorder main page.

This document Copyright © Thomas J. Tobin and Duquesne University
Last updated 3 February 1998