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Good Samaritans, Practical Philosophers, and the “Brick-and-Mortar Elysium”:
Dickens’s Satire of the New Poor Law in Oliver Twist
James D. Wisner Jr.
Bradwell Institute
Hinesviille, GA
NEH Seminar 2006
Introduction
“Oliver Twist,” suggests Stephen Gill, “though dealing with the New Poor Law only in part, remains the most famous attack on the system of which the workhouses were the potent symbol” (Appendix 451). When Charles Dickens introduced his second novel through serial installment in Bentley’s Miscellany in 1837, its dramatic departures in theme and tone from the twenty-five year-old author’s wildly successful debut, The Pickwick Papers, stunned its readers with its “bold, powerful portrayal of aspects of early Victorian life that literature (let alone polite literature for a middle-class audience) had mostly kept away from” (Kaplan ix). An “extraordinary mixture of satire, nightmare, documentary, farce, melodrama and near-tragedy” (Slater 508) unfolding against the brutal backdrops of a parish workhouse and the crime-plagued streets of London, Oliver Twist is hailed by Fred Kaplan as:
the first and perhaps still the most powerful work of fiction to attempt to bring to the attention of those who read such books the misery that daily life is for large numbers of people caught up in generational cycles of poverty and despair and in the selfishness and stupidity of government and its agencies. (ix)
Although the bulk of the novel explores the issues of crime and morality through its graphic portrayal of life among London’s thieves, pickpockets, and prostitutes, its first seven chapters target the workings of a parish workhouse under the Utilitarian principles of the New Poor Law of 1834. In order to appreciate the nuances of the satire dominating this initial phase of Oliver Twist, argues Dennis Walder, “it is essential to clarify the immediately topical, historical situation which inspired the[se] opening chapters” (46).
Benthamite Utilitarianism and the New Poor Law of 1834
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“The Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834,” asserts Kenneth Morgan, “was the most important legislation associated with the operation of the poor law since its Elizabethan origins” (66). Amid much controversy, this New Poor Law took its place alongside the Reform Bill of 1832 and the Factory Act of 1833 within the vanguard of reform legislation which the newly-ascendant middle-class Liberals were then pushing through Parliament. Following closely the recommendations of the Royal Poor Law Commission of 1832, it “applied the principles of political economy to the problem of the poor as stringently as common feeling and opinion could, under the circumstances, allow” (Engel 52). A systematic overhaul of the Old Poor Law system, the Poor Law Amendment Act is far too broad a topic for thorough discussion here. Yet two prominent changes in the law which particularly provoked the wrath of the young Dickens do merit closer consideration: the harsh, heavy-handed influence of Benthamism and “political economy” on shifts in the government’s attitude toward pauperism; and the deliberately deterrent function assigned to parish workhouses in consequence of this new attitude.
The New Poor Law of 1834, asserts K.J. Fielding, was no mere “practical expedient”; it reflected, rather, the systematic application of “Benthamite principles” to legislation and governance “as a matter of public conduct” (53-54). Jeremy Bentham, 1748-1832, exerted a profound influence on the parliamentary reforms of the 1830s and 1840s. The father of Utilitarianism, he devoted his life to the promotion of social and political reforms based on his “principle of utility”, or “greatest happiness principle”, which he explained through the “fundamental axiom” that the greatest good for the greatest number should always be the ultimate goal of any action (Hall 261). Possessing a rational, mechanistic world-view shaped by the eighteenth-century principles of the Enlightenment, Bentham promoted the use of a “felicific” or “moral calculus”; all decisions, he suggested, whether collective or individual, should follow from the “scientific” analysis of “facts” and the “calculation of future probabilities” arising from any particular course of action (Hall 271). “Fearlessly investigating traditional practices in law and government, and, on the basis of statistical evidence, pushing through drastic changes,” he and his well-intentioned disciples enthusiastically promoted one reform project after another (Ford and Monod 315). While stressing increased governmental centralization, bureaucratic efficiency, and public accountability, however, his school of thought paradoxically remained closely associated with the individualistic free-market theories of Adam Smith and the “dismal science” of economists Thomas Malthus and David Ricardo. Utilitarianism, as Graham Law explains:
was . . . firmly linked to those bourgeois and manufacturing interests known later as the Manchester School; it tended to see legal and social reform in the removal of obstructions to the operation of the market, in other words, it believed in laissez-faire; its mode of thought tended toward mechanism, as we can see from the details of Bentham’s own methods of calculating happiness, or, more influentially, in the iron-clad laws of the new school of political economy led by David Ricardo; and its harsh moral tone was sometimes reminiscent of the puritanical intolerance of contemporary evangelicalism.” (15)
Deserved or not, by 1837 the critics of Utilitarianism had branded it with a reputation for cold, calculating rationality and for harsh, inhumane insensitivity to the plight of individuals.
Bentham, Malthus, and Ricardo had all weighed in on the issue of poor law reform long before 1834. Although Bentham argued for the continuation of poor relief “so that the happiness principle was not eroded by people being subject to starvation or the fear of starvation”, he nevertheless wanted the system to operate “much differently than it currently did” (Morgan 65). Increased accountability and efficiency, he suggested, would relieve the growing financial burden it was placing on parish rate-payers. The political economists, meanwhile, argued that open-air relief not only undermined the operation of the free-market system, but actually “added to the problem of poverty” by encouraging earlier marriages and larger families. The existing system of poor relief, moreover, threatened its able-bodied recipients with “moral degradation” by “inuring them” to handouts and thereby destroying their natural tendencies toward “self-reliance” (Morgan 64).
The 1834 Report of the Poor Law Commission, which suggested the path the Poor Law Amendment Act subsequently would follow, clearly bore the imprint of these influential theorists. Dominated by Edwin Chadwick, Bentham’s one-time secretary, and the political economist Nassau Senior, the Commission submitted findings to Parliament which:
stressed the economic costs and moral failure that they found in the provision of poor relief. . . . Underpinning the report were views, congenial to political economists, that the current operation of the poor laws created poverty by its generosity and by reducing incentives to seek paid employment. . . . It argued for the Old Poor Law [actually] creating the conditions of poverty. (Morgan 65)
Formulated within its Benthamite climate, pursues Monroe Engel, the Report therefore argued (without formally recommending it) that “pauperism must be made less desirable than the condition of people dependent for their subsistence on the most menial kind of work, or else it [would] soon be impossible to get people to do this menial work” (53). This harsh attitude, that the Poor Law should “deter all but the otherwise helpless from seeking poor relief,” would characterize the spirit governing the operation of the New Poor Law (Gill, Appendix 452).
With its vast bureaucracy of Poor Law Commissioners and its new system of parliamentary oversight, observes Gill, “the New Poor Law introduced a wholly new structure to poor relief” through which, in theory at least, “local variety of provision was to give way to centralized uniformity”; regional disparities in costs, and thus of poor rates, were expected to become “a thing of the past”. Yet the New Poor Law, he continues, was also new in a much different sense; its provisions introduced “a tougher attitude toward poor relief, altogether” (Appendix 452). The embodiment of this new attitude was the workhouse, a deliberately grim, intimidating environment in which those receiving relief would be required to live as inmates. Out-of-door relief, theoretically, would cease to exist. “The workhouse system,” explains Morgan:
was intended to symbolize the New Poor Law . . .. These new workhouses were intended to act as a deterrent to the able-bodied poor. Accordingly, they were designed and run as forbidding institutions. Many were large stone structures with the outward appearance of a prison; not surprisingly, their opponents referred to them as “bastilles”. . . . They were divided into separate wards for adult men, adult women, children, the sick and the mentally incapacitated [with family members being formally separated from one another]. Inmates wore uniforms. The daily regimen was a relentless routine of work — hence the name “workhouse” — and strict meal times and curfews. . . . The food provided was monotonous and stodgy. Inmates were subject to the discipline overseen by the master of the workhouse. . . . The regimen tended to be spartan and strict. (68)
Such practices as these aggressively discouraged the poor from seeking relief. “Conditions at the workhouse,” corroborates Gill, “were to be such that no one would choose to enter unless they had no alternative. In other words, the standard of life was deliberately made poorer than that enjoyed (or endured) by the lowest-paid independent labourer” (Appendix 452).
Advocate of the Poor: Dickens’s Hostility to the New Poor Law
From its earliest installments in 1837, Dickens employed Oliver Twist as a vicious assault on the New Poor Law system; Gill favorably compares its darkly satiric invective to the work of Jonathan Swift and William Hogarth (Introduction ix-x). Subtitled The Parish Boy’s Progress, the new novel directed the main thrust of its criticism not at any one aspect of the new system of relief, but more broadly at “the spirit” pervading its general application at the parish level (Gill, Introduction xi). “In a story begun in 1837,” Gill notes, such a spirit “could only be interpreted as the spirit of the New Poor Law of 1834” (Appendix 453). Coming from his background as a parliamentary reporter, Dickens not only was well-acquainted with the political and press debates that had swirled around the implementation of the Poor Law Amendment, but also had formed very strong opinions of his own regarding the topic (Fielding 61-62). He would eventually write:
That my view of the Poor Law may not be mistaken or misrepresented, I will state it. I believe there has been in England, since the days of the STUARTS, no law so often infamously administered, no law so openly violated, no law habitually so ill-supervised. In the majority of the shameful cases of disease and death from destitution, that shock the Public and disgrace the country, the illegality is quite equal to the inhumanity – and known language could say no more of their lawlessness. (Postscript 856-857)
The fundamental reason for Dickens’s antipathy toward the New Poor Law, in all of its alleged “corruptions” and “inhumanity”, should be abundantly clear to anyone familiar with the author’s life and works. His indictment of poor law legislation, and of the mechanistic Utilitarian principles driving its administration, reflected his life-long advocacy of working-class Englishmen’s rights, an advocacy stemming from his recollections of his own childhood. “Dickens,” explains Engel, “learned about poverty in the least desirable way, by being a poor child” (49). Throughout his life, the author remained haunted by his traumatic experience, at the age of twelve, of being thrust out into the world, and into a boot-blacking warehouse, while his father was imprisoned for debt:
It is wonderful to me how I could have been so easily cast away at such an age . . . that . . . no one had compassion enough on me. . . . The deep remembrance of the sense I had of being utterly neglected and helpless; of the shame I felt in my position; of the misery it was to my young heart to believe that, day by day, what I had learned, and thought, and delighted in, and raised my fancy and my emulation up by, was passing away from me, never to be brought back any more; cannot be written. My whole nature was so penetrated with the grief and humiliation of such considerations, that even now, famous and caressed and happy, I often forget in my dreams that I have a dear wife and children; even that I am a man; and wander desolately back to that time of my life. (qtd. by Gill, Introduction xviii-xix)
Scarred by the memories of his own ordeal, which he had done nothing to deserve, Dickens the novelist consistently exhibited great compassion for the plight of Industrial Britain’s lower classes. As “the thorough-going advocate of the poor, the uncompromising Radical” (Gissing 68-69), Dickens’s “interest in the poor,” according to Engel, “was constant and passionate. The pity and pain of their condition was always apparent to him, and part of the great obsessive center of his writing. In all his fiction, there was purpose in his portraits of the poor” (49). Dickens himself confirmed this sense of purpose:
I have great faith in the Poor; to the best of my ability I always endeavor to present them in a favourable light to the rich; and I shall never cease, I hope, until I die, to advocate their being made as happy and as wise as the circumstances of their condition in its utmost improvement, will admit of their becoming. (qtd. by Engel 49-50)
This self-proclaimed champion of the masses was therefore critical not only of the New Poor Law as such, “but of the whole structure of beliefs concerning the poor which underlay the legal system of his time” (Walder 51). Toward the Benthamite legislation’s “seemingly harsh treatment of a helpless class” he expressed great bitterness, regarding it “as the outcome of cold-blooded theory, evolved by well-to-do persons of the privileged caste, who neither perceive[d] nor care[d] about the result of their system in individual suffering” (Gissing 68).
The Parish Boy’s Progress: Poor Law Satire in Oliver Twist
The seven chapters opening Oliver Twist expose the evils of the New Poor Law of 1834 through a lurid satire of its operation within a parish workhouse. Oliver, an illegitimate orphan born into the workhouse, serves as “the traditional symbolic satiric hero” of the novel, an “innocent to whom the things that happen reveal the appalling nature of the world through which he is passing” (Slater 509). Dickens uses this “Parish Boy’s Progress” to expose the New Poor Law’s provisions “through the simple device of showing how they bear upon a child” (Gill, Introduction xi). In the characters of Mr. Bumble, Mrs. Mann, the gentleman in the white waistcoat, and the other “great experimental philosophers” (20) among the parish officials, he introduces his readers to a collection of “jacks-in-office whose cruelty, shading from mere heedlessness to sadism, is sanctioned, even dignified, by the ordinances of legislation driven by the social vision of Benthamism” (Gill, Introduction ix). And the plot developments of the early chapters explore a variety of specific features of the New Poor Law. Several of the practices Dickens addresses, such as the “farming” of infants and the apprenticing of orphans, were not new to the 1834 law; he recruits them, however, for their effectiveness in attacking a system in which they remained significant features (Walder 52-53). Throughout his portrayals of such practices, along with those governing the operation of the workhouse itself, he repeatedly levels the following charges against the operation of the New Poor Law: inadequate and monotonous dietary provisions; “uncaring, inadequate” health services; and unnecessary cruelty and petty tyranny (Gill, Appendix 453-454).
Dickens’s attack on the severity of workhouse dietary restrictions produces not merely the most memorable line in Oliver Twist --- “Please, sir, I want some more” (27) --- but arguably one of the most iconic moments in the entire canon of British fiction. Yet by no means does the author limit his criticism to one passage. From the outset, he symbolically characterizes the parish board of directors as “eight or ten fat gentlemen” under the leadership of a “particularly fat” chairman (24). Their corpulence starkly contrasts the emaciated figures of the workhouse inmates; young Oliver himself, the reader learns, is “a pale thin child, somewhat diminutive in stature, and decidedly small in circumference” (21). These over-fed gentlemen’s blueprint for the provision of workhouse sustenance is painfully austere:
They contracted with the water-works to lay on an unlimited supply of water; and with the corn-factor to supply periodically small quantities of oatmeal; and issued three meals of thin gruel a day, with an onion twice a week, and half a roll on Sundays. (26)