Les Standiford by The Man Who Invented Christmas: Charles Dickens's

when business turned slow. Mechanization had turned men into one more statistical element in an equation of production, Marx and Engels would argue, putting an end to all paternal relationships between owners and workers left over from the feudal days, to leave “no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous ‘cash payment.’”
    Conditions were so bad in Manchester, more than one modern labor economist has surmised, that had Engels come of age in some far more pleasant surroundings such as London,
The Communist Manifesto
might not have been written the way it was. Says analyst David McLellan, had Engels spent more time in that capital, “where manufacture was still dominated by artisans, he would have got a different picture.” Of course, Dickens, who had spent some time in the so-called patriarchal employ of a London “artisan,” might have begged to differ, but there is little disagreement with the fact that the Manchester of 1843 was a hellhole.
    One out of every thirty-one people living in that city died each year, compared with a rate of one in forty-five for the country as a whole. Fifty-seven percent of children born to working-class parents died before they reached the age of five.
    And the effects of the great depression of 1841–42 were still lingering, with as many as 3,000 people per day lining up at soup kitchens. A number of the city’s 130 smoke-and gas-spewing mills had gone into bankruptcy with the downturn in business, and in late 1842 Engels wrote of “crowds of unemployed working men at every street corner, and many mills…still standing idle.”
    The development of the power loom made earning a living particularly difficult on hand-weavers, whose wages—when they could still find work—had dropped by 60 percent between 1820 and 1840. As there were still about 100,000 of such craftsmen living and seeking work in the Manchester area, their desperation, according to one labor historian, “cast a pall over the entire period and over all the working classes.”(Interestingly, the desperation of the times led to the emigration of one such unemployed Scottish hand-weaver named Carnegie to the United States, where his son Andrew would become the chief industrialist of all time.)

    T he city to which Dickens had come was in many ways the apotheosis, then, of all that he abhorred. He had made a brief visit in 1838, while he was beginning work on
Nicholas Nickleby
—“his purpose to see the interior of a cotton mill, I fancy with reference to some of his publications,” wrote fellow novelist Harrison Ainsworth in a letter of introduction for Dickens. And what Dickens found in those factories had an indelible effect: “What I have seen [in Manchester] has disgusted and astonished me beyond all measure.”
    Still, he felt a great affinity for those who struggled on behalf of the downtrodden, and he had developed a number of friends among the locals in Manchester, including his first schoolmaster at Chatam, the Reverend William Giles. For that reason, he contended that despite conditions in the city, “I never came to Manchester without expecting pleasure, and I never left it without taking pleasure away,” though one might wonder if he expected to take any away on this night.
    Disraeli up there at the podium, the rising star, while he sat contemplating fortunes on the wane. His sales a fifth of what they had once been. His publishers ready to dock his salary. The critics turned shortsighted and vicious.
    And this audience before him, expecting what? Wisdom? Comfort? Salvation? Good Lord, it seemed he could not keep himself afloat. What had he to offer all them?
    But Disraeli had finished, and now it was Dickens’s time.

    A fter a hearty introduction and welcome that would surely have done something to boost his spirits, Dickens began his speech with a reminder of his faith in the power of