Fifty Orwell Essays Read online

thrashes them, reciting Dr. Watts's 'Let dogs delight to bark and bite'

  between blows of the cane, and then takes them to spend the afternoon

  beneath a gibbet where the rotting corpse of a murderer is hanging. In

  the earlier part of the century scores of thousands of children, aged

  sometimes as young as six, were literally worked to death in the mines

  or cotton mills, and even at the fashionable public schools boys were

  flogged till they ran with blood for a mistake in their Latin verses.

  One thing which Dickens seems to have recognized, and which most of his

  contemporaries did not, is the sadistic sexual element in flogging. I

  think this can be inferred from DAVID COPPERFIELD and NICHOLAS NICKLEBY.

  But mental cruelty to a child infuriates him as much as physical, and

  though there is a fair number of exceptions, his schoolmasters are

  generally scoundrels.

  Except for the universities and the big public schools, every kind of

  education then existing in England gets a mauling at Dickens's hands.

  There is Doctor Blimber's Academy, where little boys are blown up with

  Greek until they burst, and the revolting charity schools of the period,

  which produced specimens like Noah Claypole and Uriah Heep, and Salem

  House, and Dotheboys Hall, and the disgraceful little dame-school kept by

  Mr. Wopsle's great-aunt. Some of what Dickens says remains true even

  today. Salem House is the ancestor of the modern 'prep school', which

  still has a good deal of resemblance to it; and as for Mr. Wopsle's

  great-aunt, some old fraud of much the same stamp is carrying on at this

  moment in nearly every small town in England. But, as usual, Dickens's

  criticism is neither creative nor destructive. He sees the idiocy of an

  educational system founded on the Greek lexicon and the wax-ended cane;

  on the other hand, he has no use for the new kind of school that is

  coming up in the fifties and sixties, the 'modern' school, with its

  gritty insistence on 'facts'. What, then, DOES he want? As always, what

  he appears to want is a moralized version of the existing thing--the old

  type of school, but with no caning, no bullying or underfeeding, and not

  quite so much Greek. Doctor Strong's school, to which David Copperfield

  goes after he escapes from Murdstone & Grinby's, is simply Salem House

  with the vices left out and a good deal of 'old grey stones' atmosphere

  thrown in:

  Doctor Strong's was an excellent school, as different from Mr. Creakle's

  as good is from evil. It was very gravely and decorously ordered, and on

  a sound system; with an appeal, in everything, to the honour and good

  faith of the boys...which worked wonders. We all felt that we had a part

  in the management of the place, and in sustaining its character and

  dignity. Hence, we soon became warmly attached to it--I am sure I did

  for one, and I never knew, in all my time, of any boy being

  otherwise--and learnt with a good will, desiring to do it credit. We had

  noble games out of hours, and plenty of liberty; but even then, as I

  remember, we were well spoken of in the town, and rarely did any

  disgrace, by our appearance or manner, to the reputation of Doctor

  Strong and Doctor Strong's boys.

  In the woolly vagueness of this passage one can see Dickens's utter lack

  of any educational theory. He can imagine the MORAL atmosphere of a good

  school, but nothing further. The boys 'learnt with a good will', but what

  did they learn? No doubt it was Doctor Blimber's curriculum, a little

  watered down. Considering the attitude to society that is everywhere

  implied in Dickens's novels, it comes as rather a shock to learn that he

  sent his eldest son to Eton and sent all his children through the

  ordinary educational mill. Gissing seems to think that he may have done

  this because he was painfully conscious of being under-educated himself.

  Here perhaps Gissing is influenced by his own love of classical learning.

  Dickens had had little or no formal education, but he lost nothing by

  missing it, and on the whole he seems to have been aware of this. If he

  was unable to imagine a better school than Doctor Strong's, or, in real

  life, than Eton, it was probably due to an intellectual deficiency rather

  different from the one Gissing suggests.

  It seems that in every attack Dickens makes upon society he is always

  pointing to a change of spirit rather than a change of structure. It is

  hopeless to try and pin him down to any definite remedy, still more to

  any political doctrine. His approach is always along the moral plane, and

  his attitude is sufficiently summed up in that remark about Strong's

  school being as different from Creakle's 'as good is from evil'. Two

  things can be very much alike and yet abysmally different. Heaven and

  Hell are in the same place. Useless to change institutions without a

  'change of heart'--that, essentially, is what he is always saying.

  If that were all, he might be no more than a cheer-up writer, a

  reactionary humbug. A 'change of heart' is in fact THE alibi of people

  who do not wish to endanger the STATUS QUO. But Dickens is not a humbug,

  except in minor matters, and the strongest single impression one carries

  away from his books is that of a hatred of tyranny. I said earlier that

  Dickens is not IN THE ACCEPTED SENSE a revolutionary writer. But it is

  not at all certain that a merely moral criticism of society may not be

  just as 'revolutionary'--and revolution, after all, means turning things

  upside down--as the politico-economic criticism which is fashionable at

  this moment. Blake was not a politician, but there is more understanding

  of the nature of capitalist society in a poem like 'I wander through each

  charted street' than in three-quarters of Socialist literature. Progress

  is not an illusion, it happens, but it is slow and invariably

  disappointing. There is always a new tyrant waiting to take over from the

  old--generally not quite so bad, but still a tyrant. Consequently two

  viewpoints are always tenable. The one, how can you improve human nature

  until you have changed the system? The other, what is the use of changing

  the system before you have improved human nature? They appeal to

  different individuals, and they probably show a tendency to alternate in

  point of time. The moralist and the revolutionary are constantly

  undermining one another. Marx exploded a hundred tons of dynamite beneath

  the moralist position, and we are still living in the echo of that

  tremendous crash. But already, somewhere or other, the sappers are at

  work and fresh dynamite is being tamped in place to blow Marx at the

  moon. Then Marx, or somebody like him, will come back with yet more

  dynamite, and so the process continues, to an end we cannot yet foresee.

  The central problem--how to prevent power from being abused--remains

  unsolved. Dickens, who had not the vision to see that private property is

  an obstructive nuisance, had the vision to see that. 'If men would behave

  decently the world would be decent' is not such a platitude as it sounds.

  II

  More completely than most writers, perhaps, Dickens can be explained in

 
; terms of his social origin, though actually his family history was not

  quite what one would infer from his novels. His father was a clerk in

  government service, and through his mother's family he had connexions

  with both the Army and the Navy. But from the age of nine onwards he was

  brought up in London in commercial surroundings, and generally in an

  atmosphere of struggling poverty. Mentally he belongs to the small urban

  bourgeoisie, and he happens to be an exceptionally fine specimen of this

  class, with all the 'points', as it were, very highly developed. That is

  partly what makes him so interesting. If one wants a modern equivalent,

  the nearest would be H. G. Wells, who has had a rather similar history

  and who obviously owes something to Dickens as novelist. Arnold Bennett

  was essentially of the same type, but, unlike the other two, he was a

  midlander, with an industrial and noncomformist rather than commercial

  and Anglican background.

  The great disadvantage, and advantage, of the small urban bourgeois is

  his limited outlook. He sees the world as a middle-class world, and

  everything outside these limits is either laughable or slightly wicked.

  On the one hand, he has no contact with industry or the soil; on the

  other, no contact with the governing classes. Anyone who has studied

  Wells's novels in detail will have noticed that though he hates the

  aristocrat like poison, he has no particular objection to the plutocrat,

  and no enthusiasm for the proletarian. His most hated types, the people

  he believes to be responsible for all human ills, are kings, landowners,

  priests, nationalists, soldiers, scholars and peasants. At first sight a

  list beginning with kings and ending with peasants looks like a mere

  omnium gatherum, but in reality all these people have a common factor.

  All of them are archaic types, people who are governed by tradition and

  whose eyes are turned towards the past--the opposite, therefore, of the

  rising bourgeois who has put his money on the future and sees the past

  simply as a dead hand.

  Actually, although Dickens lived in a period when the bourgeoisie was

  really a rising class, he displays this characteristic less strongly than

  Wells. He is almost unconscious of the future and has a rather sloppy

  love of the picturesque (the 'quaint old church', etc.). Nevertheless his

  list of most hated types is like enough to Wells's for the similarity to

  be striking. He is vaguely on the side of the working class--has a sort

  of generalized sympathy with them because they are oppressed--but he

  does not in reality know much about them; they come into his books

  chiefly as servants, and comic servants at that. At the other end of the

  scale he loathes the aristocrat and--going one better than Wells in this

  loathes the big bourgeois as well. His real sympathies are bounded by Mr.

  Pickwick on the upper side and Mr. Barkis on the lower. But the term

  'aristocrat', for the type Dickens hates, is vague and needs defining.

  Actually Dickens's target is not so much the great aristocracy, who

  hardly enter into his books, as their petty offshoots, the cadging

  dowagers who live up mews in Mayfair, and the bureaucrats and

  professional soldiers. All through his books there are countess hostile

  sketches of these people, and hardly any that are friendly. There are

  practically no friendly pictures of the landowning class, for instance.

  One might make a doubtful exception of Sir Leicester Dedlock; otherwise

  there is only Mr. Wardle (who is a stock figure the 'good old squire')

  and Haredale in BARNABY RUDGE, who has Dickens's sympathy because he is a

  persecuted Catholic. There are no friendly pictures of soldiers (i.e.

  officers), and none at all of naval men. As for his bureaucrats, judges

  and magistrates, most of them would feel quite at home in the

  Circumlocution Office. The only officials whom Dickens handles with any

  kind of friendliness are, significantly enough, policemen.

  Dickens's attitude is easily intelligible to an Englishman, because it is

  part of the English puritan tradition, which is not dead even at this

  day. The class Dickens belonged to, at least by adoption, was growing

  suddenly rich after a couple of centuries of obscurity. It had grown up

  mainly in the big towns, out of contact with agriculture, and politically

  impotent; government, in its experience, was something which either

  interfered or persecuted. Consequently it was a class with no tradition

  of public service and not much tradition of usefulness. What now strikes

  us as remarkable about the new moneyed class of the nineteenth century is

  their complete irresponsibility; they see everything in terms of

  individual success, with hardly any consciousness that the community

  exists. On the other hand, a Tite Barnacle, even when he was neglecting

  his duties, would have some vague notion of what duties he was

  neglecting. Dickens's attitude is never irresponsible, still less does he

  take the money-grubbing Smilesian line; but at the back of his mind there

  is usually a half-belief that the whole apparatus of government is

  unnecessary. Parliament is simply Lord Coodle and Sir Thomas Doodle, the

  Empire is simply Major Bagstock and his Indian servant, the Army is

  simply Colonel Chowser and Doctor Slammer, the public services are simply

  Bumble and the Circumlocution Office--and so on and so forth. What he

  does not see, or only intermittently sees, is that Coodle and Doodle and

  all the other corpses left over from the eighteenth century ARE

  performing a function which neither Pickwick nor Boffin would ever bother

  about.

  And of course this narrowness of vision is in one way a great advantage

  to him, because it is fatal for a caricaturist to see too much. From

  Dickens's point of view 'good' society is simply a collection of village

  idiots. What a crew! Lady Tippins! Mrs. Gowan! Lord Verisopht! The

  Honourable Bob Stables! Mrs. Sparsit (whose husband was a Powler)! The

  Tite Barnacles! Nupkins! It is practically a case-book in lunacy. But at

  the same time his remoteness from the landowning-military-bureaucratic

  class incapacitates him for full-length satire. He only succeeds with

  this class when he depicts them as mental defectives. The accusation

  which used to be made against Dickens in his lifetime, that he 'could not

  paint a gentleman', was an absurdity, but it is true in this sense, that

  what he says against the 'gentleman' class is seldom very damaging. Sir

  Mulberry Hawk, for instance, is a wretched attempt at the wicked-baronet

  type. Harthouse in HARD TIMES is better, but he would be only an ordinary

  achievement for Trollope or Thackeray. Trollope's thoughts hardly move

  outside the 'gentleman' class, but Thackeray has the great advantage of

  having a foot in two moral camps. In some ways his outlook is very

  similar to Dickens's. Like Dickens, he identifies with the puritanical

  moneyed class against the card-playing, debt-bilking aristocracy. The

  eighteenth century, as he sees it, is sticking out into the nineteenth in

  the person of the wicked Lord Steyne. VANITY FAIR is a full-length

  ve
rsion of what Dickens did for a few chapters in LITTLE DORRIT. But by

  origins and upbringing Thackeray happens to be somewhat nearer to the

  class he is satirizing. Consequently he can produce such comparatively

  subtle types as, for instance, Major Pendennis and Rawdon Crawley. Major

  Pendennis is a shallow old snob, and Rawdon Crawley is a thick-headed

  ruffian who sees nothing wrong in living for years by swindling

  tradesmen; but what Thackery realizes is that according to their tortuous

  code they are neither of them bad men. Major Pendennis would not sign a

  dud cheque, for instance; Rawdon certainly would, but on the other hand

  he would not desert a friend in a tight corner. Both of them would behave

  well on the field of battle--a thing that would not particularly appeal

  to Dickens. The result is that at the end one is left with a kind of

  amused tolerance for Major Pendennis and with something approaching

  respect for Rawdon; and yet one sees, better than any diatribe could make

  one, the utter rottenness of that kind of cadging, toadying life on the

  fringes of smart society. Dickens would be quite incapable of this. In

  his hands both Rawdon and the Major would dwindle to traditional

  caricatures. And, on the whole, his attacks on 'good' society are rather

  perfunctory. The aristocracy and the big bourgeoisie exist in his books

  chiefly as a kind of 'noises off', a haw-hawing chorus somewhere in the

  wings, like Podsnap's dinner-parties. When he produces a really subtle

  and damaging portrait, like John Dorrit or Harold Skimpole, it is

  generally of some rather middling, unimportant person.

  One very striking thing about Dickens, especially considering the time he

  lived in, is his lack of vulgar nationalism. All peoples who have reached

  the point of becoming nations tend to despise foreigners, but there is

  not much doubt that the English-speaking races are the worst offenders.

  One can see this from the fact that as soon as they become fully aware of

  any foreign race they invent an insulting nickname for it. Wop, Dago,

  Froggy, Squarehead, Kike, Sheeny, Nigger, Wog, Chink, Greaser,

  Yellowbelly--these are merely a selection. Any time before 1870 the list

  would have been shorter, because the map of the world was different from

  what it is now, and there were only three or four foreign races that had

  fully entered into the English consciousness. But towards these, and

  especially towards France, the nearest and best-hated nation, the English

  attitude of patronage was so intolerable that English 'arrogance' and

  'xenophobia' are still a legend. And of course they are not a completely

  untrue legend even now. Till very recently nearly all English children

  were brought up to despise the southern European races, and history as

  taught in schools was mainly a list of battles won by England. But one

  has got to read, say, the QUARTERLY REVIEW of the thirties to know what

  boasting really is. Those were the days when the English built up their

  legend of themselves as 'sturdy islanders' and 'stubborn hearts of oak'

  and when it was accepted as a kind of scientific fact that one Englishman

  was the equal of three foreigners. All through nineteenth-century novels

  and comic papers there runs the traditional figure of the 'Froggy'--a

  small ridiculous man with a tiny beard and a pointed top-hat, always

  jabbering and gesticulating, vain, frivolous and fond of boasting of his

  martial exploits, but generally taking to flight when real danger

  appears. Over against him was John Bull, the 'sturdy English yeoman', or

  (a more public-school version) the 'strong, silent Englishman' of Charles

  Kingsley, Tom Hughes and others.

  Thackeray, for instance, has this outlook very strongly, though there are

  moments when he sees through it and laughs at it. The one historical fact

  that is firmly fixed in his mind is that the English won the battle of

  Waterloo. One never reads far in his books without coming upon some