Advocates for a New Social Order: Dickens, Marx, and the Trade Union in Hard Times

Advocates for a New Social Order: Dickens, Marx, and the Trade Union in Hard Times

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 swindle...

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... 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.