(3) The Writer Charles Dickens Had A Lot To Say About Poverty.

Charles Dickens

And he is probably along with Shakespeare, England’s best-known writer.

He was born in Portsmouth in 1809, where his father was employed as a clerk at the Naval Pay Office. In January 1815, John Dickens was called back to London, and the family moved to Norfolk Street, Fitzrovia.

Then, when Charles was four, they relocated to Sheerness and then to Chatham, Kent, where he lived for the next seven years. He thought himself a "very small and not-over-particularly-taken-care-of boy.”

He became much less taken care of when the family moved back to London, and then little care turned into no care when his father was committed to Marshalsea debtors’ prison, along with Dickens’s mother and the couple’s younger children.

Charles went into lodgings by himself and worked in a boot-blacking factory just off the Strand, where he pasted labels onto bottles for six shillings a week. He wrote;

“No words can express the secret agony of my soul as I sunk into this companionship… and felt my early hopes of growing up to be a learned and distinguished man crushed in my breast.”

When the family was reunited in 1829, it was again in Norfolk Street.

Close to their home at 10 Norfolk Street was the Cleveland Street Workhouse. Dickens wrote Oliver Twist in part as a response to the appalling conditions he witnessed in this and other workhouses.

Opposite the Cleveland Street Workhouse was a chandler’s shop. The name of the man who ran it was Bill Sykes.

The name may have come from Cleveland Street, but the man's character was created a few miles east of Fitzrovia.

When Fagan calls on Bill Sykes, he takes a nighttime journey through the alleyways of Spitalfields, Whitechapel, until he arrives at the home of Bill Sykes in Bethnal Green.

One suspect in the Jack the Ripper saga made the same journey six days a week.

On his journey, Charles Allen Letchmere left his home at 22 Doveton Street in Bethnal Green. He would enter Buck’s Row to make his way through Whitechapel and Spitalfields to get to his place of work near Liverpool Street Station.

On his nighttime walks, Charles Dickens explored London, including its notorious East End.

His very real experiences of poverty marked him, and his writing reflected his attitude toward the harsh life experienced by the poor. In David Copperfield, he wrote:

"I had no advice, no counsel, no encouragement, no consolation, no assistance, no support, of any kind, from anyone that I can call to mind, as I hope to go to heaven!”

Words that were given to the fictional hero of the story but words that were obviously heartfelt by the author.

Other writers protested the exploitation of the poor in the 19th century, but he is the one we remember.

In 1850, he wrote ‘A Walk in a Workhouse.’ Dickens ends it by looking into the eyes of a child and imagining him asking “for a little more liberty—and a little more bread.”

Dickens had little patience with the popular view that poverty was the fault of the poor. In Our Mutual Friend, Dickens includes this scene:

“In the meantime, a stray personage of a meek demeanour . . . eliminated Mr Podsnap's flush and flourish by a highly unpolite remark; no less than a reference to the circumstance that some half-dozen people had lately died in the streets, of starvation. It was clearly ill-timed after dinner . . . It was not in good taste.

'I don't believe it,' said Mr Podsnap, putting it behind him.

The meek man was afraid we must take it as proved because there were the Inquests and the Registrar's returns.

'Then it was their own fault,' said Mr Podsnap.

The man of meek demeanour intimated that truly it would seem from the facts, as if starvation had been forced upon the culprits in question—as if, in their wretched manner, they had made their weak protests against it—as if they would have taken the liberty of staving it off if they could—as if they would rather not have been starved upon the whole, if perfectly agreeable to all parties.

'There is not,' said Mr Podsnap, flushing angrily, 'there is not a country in the world, sir, where so noble a provision is made for the poor as in this country.'

The meek man was quite willing to concede that, but perhaps it rendered the matter even worse, as showing that there must be something appallingly wrong somewhere.

‘You know; at least I hope you know;' said Mr Podsnap, with severity, 'that Providence has declared that you shall have the poor always with you?'

The meek man also hoped he knew that.

'I am glad to hear it,' said Mr Podsnap with a portentous air. 'I am glad to hear it. It will render you cautious about how you fly in the face of Providence.

Besides,’ said Mr Podsnap, flushing high up among his hair brushes with a strong consciousness of personal affront, 'the subject is a very disagreeable one. I will go so far as to say it is an odious one. It is not one to be introduced among our wives and young persons, and I-' He finished with that flourish of his arm which added more expressively than any words, ‘And I remove it from the face of the earth.’

Dickens did not intend us to like Podsnap, but Podsnap has had the last laugh.

What the Podsnaps believed when Dickens began Our Mutual Friend in 1864 is what Podsnaps believe today.

Podsnap today would still say that we don’t have poverty, not real poverty. And anyway, if there are poor people, it is their own fault.

And certainly, the poor will always be with us.

And anyway, it is not a fit subject for polite conversation.

But hopefully, it is a fit subject for my blog posts because I still hope to discover the reason that the poor will always be with us.