education, decrying ignorance and those who sought to perpetuate it, and thereby affirming a belief in the possibility of an individual’s capability for self-determination that fuels debate among social theorists to this day.
Dickens had lifted himself up from penniless wretch to become the leading literary practitioner of his day; Andrew Carnegie would carry a version of the by-one’s-own-bootstraps gospel to America, remaking himself from bobbin boy into steel titan and richest man on earth—then building 3,000 free libraries so that others could presumably follow in his path. In this view, and with the application of his knowledge, reason, and innate decency, mankind had everything needed to make a just and happy world.
6.
I f it is true that Dickens never left Manchester without bearing pleasure away, he could not have conceived of the gift that this 1843 visit to what had been called “the chimney of the world” would provide him. Yet it was in the hours after his speech at the Athenaeum, as he walked alone through the city’s darkened streets with his mind churning, that the idea came upon him for a new work, one that would one day be called the best-known work of fiction in the language.
Dickens obviously had practical reasons for seeking inspiration: there was the matter of his debt to Chapman and Hall, and his marked decline in sales. But he also felt a deep desire to prove his critics wrong and an equal urgency to prove to himself as well as his public that he had not lost his touch.
There were more positive factors at work as well. He assured his audience at the close of his speech that night that he would long carry with him the pleasure of seeing the response that his remarks had brought—all those bright eyes and beaming faces looking up at him. And he also acknowledged that his audience was counting on him: he would not “easily forget this scene, the pleasing tasks your favour has devolved on me.”
As his letters to his friend Forster record, he also carried other memories with him as he walked the streets that night. Shortly before the trip to Manchester, he had taken a tour of a so-called ragged school in London, in the company of Baroness Angela Burdett Coutts, philanthropist and heiress to a banking fortune. He had gone to the Field Lane School in Saffron Hill, perhaps the sorriest neighborhood in London, as research for Martin Chuzzlewit, hoping the visit would help him in efforts to shine a light on the wretched conditions of the country’s workers and also strengthen his resolve to bring a “Sledge-hammer” down upon the rampant abuses of child labor. But Chuzzlewit was no longer looking like an effective vehicle with which to bring widespread attention to anything.
However, his visit to the Field Lane School—one of a number of free public schools for poor children—brought him face to face with a collection of young boys and girls who were the embodiment, in Dickens’s words, of “profound ignorance and perfect barbarism.” Most of these “students” were illiterate, all were filthy and shabbily dressed (thus the epithet “ragged”), and many resorted to thievery or prostitution in order to live.
Dickens, who entered the school in a gleaming pair of white trousers and brightly shined boots, was met by howls of derision, and a companion, Clarkson Stanfield, was so overwhelmed by the stench of the place that he fled the scene at once. But despite what he described as “a sickening atmosphere, in the midst of taint and dirt and pestilence: with all the deadly sins let loose, howling and shrieking at the doors,” Dickens remained, doggedly asking question after question until the children finally began to sense compassion in this alien creature and actually began to talk with him.
What he beheld at the Saffron Hill school was bad enough—he told Miss Burdett Coutts that “in all the strange and dreadful things I have seen in London and elsewhere,” seldom had he
Dickens had lifted himself up from penniless wretch to become the leading literary practitioner of his day; Andrew Carnegie would carry a version of the by-one’s-own-bootstraps gospel to America, remaking himself from bobbin boy into steel titan and richest man on earth—then building 3,000 free libraries so that others could presumably follow in his path. In this view, and with the application of his knowledge, reason, and innate decency, mankind had everything needed to make a just and happy world.
6.
I f it is true that Dickens never left Manchester without bearing pleasure away, he could not have conceived of the gift that this 1843 visit to what had been called “the chimney of the world” would provide him. Yet it was in the hours after his speech at the Athenaeum, as he walked alone through the city’s darkened streets with his mind churning, that the idea came upon him for a new work, one that would one day be called the best-known work of fiction in the language.
Dickens obviously had practical reasons for seeking inspiration: there was the matter of his debt to Chapman and Hall, and his marked decline in sales. But he also felt a deep desire to prove his critics wrong and an equal urgency to prove to himself as well as his public that he had not lost his touch.
There were more positive factors at work as well. He assured his audience at the close of his speech that night that he would long carry with him the pleasure of seeing the response that his remarks had brought—all those bright eyes and beaming faces looking up at him. And he also acknowledged that his audience was counting on him: he would not “easily forget this scene, the pleasing tasks your favour has devolved on me.”
As his letters to his friend Forster record, he also carried other memories with him as he walked the streets that night. Shortly before the trip to Manchester, he had taken a tour of a so-called ragged school in London, in the company of Baroness Angela Burdett Coutts, philanthropist and heiress to a banking fortune. He had gone to the Field Lane School in Saffron Hill, perhaps the sorriest neighborhood in London, as research for Martin Chuzzlewit, hoping the visit would help him in efforts to shine a light on the wretched conditions of the country’s workers and also strengthen his resolve to bring a “Sledge-hammer” down upon the rampant abuses of child labor. But Chuzzlewit was no longer looking like an effective vehicle with which to bring widespread attention to anything.
However, his visit to the Field Lane School—one of a number of free public schools for poor children—brought him face to face with a collection of young boys and girls who were the embodiment, in Dickens’s words, of “profound ignorance and perfect barbarism.” Most of these “students” were illiterate, all were filthy and shabbily dressed (thus the epithet “ragged”), and many resorted to thievery or prostitution in order to live.
Dickens, who entered the school in a gleaming pair of white trousers and brightly shined boots, was met by howls of derision, and a companion, Clarkson Stanfield, was so overwhelmed by the stench of the place that he fled the scene at once. But despite what he described as “a sickening atmosphere, in the midst of taint and dirt and pestilence: with all the deadly sins let loose, howling and shrieking at the doors,” Dickens remained, doggedly asking question after question until the children finally began to sense compassion in this alien creature and actually began to talk with him.
What he beheld at the Saffron Hill school was bad enough—he told Miss Burdett Coutts that “in all the strange and dreadful things I have seen in London and elsewhere,” seldom had he
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