"It was the best of times; it was the worst of times.” It was the 1800s and industrialism was creating social tumult in a new Age of Reform. By the hundreds, authors and educators from Europe were traveling to America to explore this new nation steeped in ideals of “government of, by, and for the people.” What they found in the American character angered the nation’s press. Observers abhorred a rudeness of ill manners and eschewed the practice of slavery.
In 1832, Frances Trollope, who spent five years in America near the wilderness of Cincinnati, wrote in “Domestic Manners of Americans” of being appalled by slavery, the popularity of tobacco chewing and spitting, and the arrogance of the middle-class that acted as if they were the first and best of the human race. Evaluating “Society in America” in 1837, Harriet Martineau, “the first woman sociologist,” asked how a society that claimed to value freedom could be so discriminatory and ignorant of the meaning of freedom. Recognizing that injustice embodied in slavery breeds injustice, she linked the institution of slavery with a characteristic of indulgence that fed the degradation of women at the hands of those who held power over civil rights.
These books and others were in the library of Charles Dickens when he enthusiastically traveled to America in 1842 to compare the English class society with that of America. Dickens, at age 30, was the most celebrated author in the world. His books, The Pickwick Papers and Oliver Twist, attacked poverty and appealed to the heart. Americans treated Dickens as a literary rock star. Every city hosted galas that eventually left him emotionally exhausted and so deprived of privacy that finally he declared, “I can do nothing that I want to do, go nowhere I want to go [prisons, mental institutions, bars, and brothels, were on his agenda from the dark allies and filth he had left behind in London]. I am disappointed. This is not the republic of my imagination.”
According to Professor Jerome Meckler, Dickens venture in America was traumatizing. An idealist and optimist intent on social reform, Dickens downgraded his view of human nature after his American experience. Like others, he was appalled at slavery, appalled at tobacco chewing and spitting, amazed at an attitude of distrust and primitive standards of personal cleanliness. And violence. In American Notes, in between the good things he saw, he described the land of opportunity as a land of opportunists with no sense of humor and bad manners who cared only for politics and money. Unlike within a class society, power in a classless society was vested in and driven by greed for the almighty dollar.
The American press excoriated him, insulted by the indulgences shown by him he was a classified as a traitor. Returning to England, he wrote what he described as his best work, Martin Chuzzlewit, a satire on greed that was not popular with the public. Too overcome its failure he regained his optimism of good over evil and his Christian morality in A Christmas Carol—a message of love and generosity and for Scrooge, a second chance in his world renewed.
Dickens, the man some say reinvented Christmas and the spirit of giving, believed in the ethical and political potential of literature. His books wrestle with the problems of evil, the social injustice he experienced, and need for reforms on child labor, prostitution, prisons, and education. Yet, he offers no institutional solutions. The villains in his books are punished, however, and good, kindness, and love prevail over evil.
Dickens, born in 1812, put his money behind his thoughts for reform. As a philanthropist, he invested in causes for a better society. He helped found Urania Cottage, a safe house from prostitution that offered education for useful employment. He invested in Ragged schools, charitable institutions for educating destitute children, and supported housing reform and sanitation for the poor. He held hard to his belief that the rich had a social responsibility to care for others.
He appealed to the heart “trying to right the wrongs inflicted by society, above all, by giving the dispossessed a voice.” In his writings during an Age of Reform, Dickens spoke for the people.
And he still does. Though not a theologian, but a believer in the Sermon on the Mount, his books for near 200 years, have never been out of print.
Are manners, goodness, kindness, civility, and social justice Pollyanna? Or is Charles Dickens’ faith in the triumph of good over evil right on the mark in today’s calamitous world?
What do you think and why?
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