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Dickens and Modernity: Background

Dickens and Modernity: Background

Last updated on: September 6, 2017 at 10:53 pm by Peter Leithart

Dickens and Modernity: Background 2017-09-06T22:53:15+06:00 Peter Leithart

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This is the opening portion of a lecture on Dickens’s Hard Times, but I want to examine Dickens not only as an artist but in relation to his fictional depiction of what we think of as “modernity.” Modernity is in part a set of ideas and aspirations, a set of beliefs about progress and humanity’s place in the universe. But it is also, perhaps more basically, a social and political reality, a set of institutions and trends that have profoundly affected the way everyone lives.

To take one example, one of the main innovative features of modernity, according to British sociologist Anthony Giddens, is the separation of time and space. Every premodern culture had calendars, but their everyday calculation of time was, he says, “imprecise and variable.” The mechanical clock changed all that: “The clock expressed a uniform dimension of ‘empty’ time, quantified in such a way as to permit the precise designation of ‘zones’ of the day.” He’s arguing that where time was once identified and kept by natural movements of the sun, or by human activities, it now became a purely mathematical entity. Times didn’t have any natural or human quality of their own; time is simply a commodity, which we can save, budget, control. It’s an empty container that we can fill with anything we like.

The clock measured time in a standard way, and to this technical innovation was added a “uniformity in the social organization of time.” The calendar became standardized worldwide, so that virtually every nation celebrated the year 2000 when it came round. Time was also standardized across regions. As late as the late 19th century, different regions and different states had different times. You can’t make trains run effectively when the clock changes at every state boundary. So times were standardized throughout the US. (Indiana is a throwback to this older world, in that it still doesn’t use Daylight Savings Time.)

Two of the crucial features of this process of modernization were urbanization and industrialization. These two trends make up what 19th-century Christians called the “social problem,” which was addressed in various ways in European countries and by creative new ministries from the church.

URBANIZATION
Of course, there have been cities since ancient times, but modern cities are different in important respects from the cities of the ancient and medieval world.

Modern cities are much larger than ancient or medieval or even early modern cities. Urban historian Lewis Mumford wrote, “Though these cities represented «a new magnitude in human settlements», the populations of Lagash, Umma, and Khafaje are «reliably estimated to have been 19,000, 16,000, and 12,000 respectively during the third millennium». The Levitical cities described in the Bible, confirmed by modern excavations of Gezer, had a town area of about 22 acres, with pasture land, permanently reserved, amounting to about 300 acres. More than four thousand years later, as late as the sixteenth century, the characteristic size of the city in western Europe ranged from 2,000 to 20,000 people; it was only in the seventeenth century that cities of more than 100,000 began to multiply. In both the Near East in ancient times and in western Europe in the Middle Age, cities prudently retained some portion of the land within their walls for gardens and the harboring of animals for food in case of military siege. Even the vast domains of Babylon must not mislead us into looking upon it as comparable in density to modern London. A map drawn in 1895 by Arthur Schneider . . . shows that Babylon covered an area big enough to contain Rome, Tarentum, Syracuse, Athens, Ephesus, Thebes, Jerusalem, Carthage, Sparta, Alexandria and Tyre, together with almost as much open space between these cities as they occupied in their own right. Even in Herodotus’s time, Babylon had many of the aspects of an overgrown village.” Some ancient cities grew to 1 million in population, but not nearly so many as in modern times. In 1800, London had over 2 million inhabitants. Today, there are over 20 cities in the world with populations exceeding 10 million and over 100 with populations of 1 million or more.

The rising urban population was driven in part by increasing population, and increasing rates of population growth. Accompanying this, however, were technical improvements that made it possible for larger populations to live together in a single urban area. Mumford again: “These two factors, technical improvement and population growth, have been interacting since at least the sixteenth century, for it was the improvement in the sailing ship and the art of navigation that opened up the almost virginal territory of the New World. The resulting increase of food supply, in terms of added tillage, was further augmented by New World crops like maize and the potato. Meanwhile, the increased production of energy foods —-vegetable oils, animals fats, and sugar cane and sugar beet—- not merely helped support a large population but in turn, through the supply of fat, turned soap from a courtly luxury to a household necessity; and this major contribution to hygiene —-public and personal—- probably did more to lower death rate that any other single factor. From the beginning of the nineteenth century the surplus population made it possible for old cities to expand and new cities to be founded. As Webber long ago pointed out, the rate was even faster in Germany in the second half of the nineteenth century than it was in the United States.”

Despite technical improvements, the cities of the 19th century were often hell-holes, unlivable by today’s Western standards. In London, sewage was drained into an open sewer that was known as Jacob’s Island, around which slums proliferated. A journalist at the time described the scene, smell, and life of those who lived near the Island: “It is not only the nose, but the stomach, that tells how heavily the air is loaded with sulphuretted hydrogen . . . The water is covered with a scum almost like a cobweb, and prismatic with grease. In it float large masses of green, rotting weed, and against the posts of the bridges are swollen carcasses of dead animals, almost bursting with the gases of putrefaction. Along its shores are heaps of indescribable filth, the phosphretted smell from which tells you of the rotting fish there, while the oyster shells are like pieces of slate, from their coating of mud and filth. In some parts the fluid is almost red as blood, from the colouring matter that pours into it from the reeking leather-dressers close by.” According to Michael Burleigh, who quotes this passage, 1858 saw a ” ‘Great Stink’ that had MPs retching into their handkerchiefs as they caught the fetid odours of the Thames.” This motivated Parliament to take care of the problem, and a sewer system was developed.

The cities of the 19th century not only represented a new and more complicated form of urban organization, but changed the way of life for many people who migrated there. This is what “urbanization” is really about; when sociologists talk about it, it’s not just the fact of more and larger cities and larger proportions of populations in cities. It’s about the way social structures, daily life, habits, mentalities, beliefs, aspirations, and so on change as a result of this trend.

For instance, Peter Berger argues that the key fact of modernity is the enlarged number of choices that we have. Cities are marketplaces of goods, and also of ideas, and as people move from the country, with its settled and apparently eternal ways of life, to the fast-paced city, their choices are expanded. They face what Berger calls the “heretical imperative,” the necessity of choosin

g what otherwise would be imposed by the whole social and cultural order. (Bauman makes the same point with his contrast of premodern cultural “rivers” and modern cultural “oceans.”) Berger summarizes the work of Gabriel LeBras, a French sociologist who examined the effect of migration from Breton to Paris during the 1930s: “At that time (and this may well be so even today) Brittany was one of the most strongly Catholic areas of France and Bretons scored highest on any indicator of religious commitment. All this changed drastically and suddenly as soon as Breton migrants arrived in Paris, to the point that LeBras remarked that there must be a magical piece of pavement in the Gare du Nord (the railroad station where most Bretons arrived in the capital) which changed good Catholics into agnostics or at least non-practitioners.” Berger explains this by saying that “the plausibility structure of traditional belief and practice is severely weakened by the migration.” The secularity of the urban environment, the choices offered, the option of NOT being Catholic puts pressure on the migrant. He may continue to practice his Catholicism, but it will be the result of a conscious choice.

INDUSTRIALIZATION
The other great aspect of the “social question” of the 19th century was industrialization and the rise of the factory system. Adam Smith had envisioned the great increase in productivity that could be had by introducing a division of labor in a pin factory. He estimated something between a 240 and 4800fold increase in production: “To take an example, therefore, from a very trifling manufacture; but one in which the division of labour has been very often taken notice of, the trade of the pin-maker; a workman not educated to this business (which the division of labour has rendered a distinct trade), nor acquainted with the use of the machinery employed in it (to the invention of which the same division of labour has probably given occasion), could scarce, perhaps, with his utmost industry, make one pin in a day, and certainly could not make twenty. But in the way in which this business is now carried on, not only the whole work is a peculiar trade, but it is divided into a number of branches, of which the greater part are likewise peculiar trades. One man draws out the wire, another straights it, a third cuts it, a fourth points it, a fifth grinds it at the top for receiving the head; to make the head requires two or three distinct operations; to put it on, is a peculiar business, to whiten the pins is another; it is even a trade by itself to put them into the paper; and the important business of making a pin is, in this manner, divided into about eighteen distinct operations, which, in some manufactories, are all performed by distinct hands, though in others the same man will sometimes perform two or three of them. I have seen a small manufactory of this kind where ten men only were employed, and where some of them consequently performed two or three distinct operations. But though they were very poor, and therefore but indifferently accommodated with the necessary machinery, they could, when they exerted themselves, make among them about twelve pounds of pins in a day. There are in a pound upwards of four thousand pins of a middling size. Those ten persons, therefore, could make among them upwards of forty-eight thousand pins in a day. Each person, therefore, making a tenth part of forty-eight thousand pins, might be considered as making four thousand eight hundred pins in a day. But if they had all wrought separately and independently, and without any of them having been educated to this peculiar business, they certainly could not each of them have made twenty, perhaps not one pin in a day; that is, certainly, not the two hundred and fortieth, perhaps not the four thousand eight hundredth part of what they are at present capable of performing, in consequence of a proper division and combination of their different operations.”

The conditions of many factories was abysmal, and industrialization often led to environmental and social upset. These effects were described and attacked by many of the reformers of the period. Hippolyte Taine, a French historian and philosopher, visited Manchester in 1859, and recorded his observations about the factories and their effect on the life of the city: “We were coming to the iron and coal country, with signs of industrial activity everywhere. Slag-heaps like mountains, the earth deforested by excavation, and fall, flaming furnaces. Manchester: a sky turned coppery red by the setting sun; a cloud, strangely shaped resting upon the plain; and under the motionless cover a bristling of chimneys by hundreds, all tall as obelisks. Then a mass, a heap, blackish, enormous, endless rows of buildings; and you are there, at the heart of a Babel built of brick.” Walking through the town, he says that the earth and air were “impregnated with fog and soot.” Factories of “fouled brick” with “shutterless windows” impressed him as “economical and colossal prisons.” (Foucault noted that the “panopticon” model was adopted in factories as a way to maintain surveillance on workers.”

Again, the human effects were also noted. Taine visited Shadwell and noted the inhabitants seemed to be permanent intoxicated, brawling, with “black eyes, bandaged noses, cut cheeks.” And he noted the psychological effects as well. Inside one factory, he wrote, “lit by gas-jets and deafened by the uproar of their own labor, toil thousands of workmen, penned in, regimented, hands active, feet motionless, all day and every day, mechanically serving their machines. Could there by any kind of life more outraged, more opposed to man’s natural instincts.” To a young German traveling in England, London seemed a physics experiment: “The dissolution of mankind into monads, of which each one has a separate essence, and a separate purpose, a world of atoms, is here carried out to its utmost extreme” The young German was Friedrich Engels.

Burleigh summarizes: “the Industrial Revolution resulted in rapid and unprecedented concentrations of population and large-scale units of production, the mechanization of time and work, the emergence of new social classes with rival claims to political power, novel forms of wealth and poverty, and liberal political economy which denied the state’s claim to interfere in the autonomous workings of the market.”

AMBIVALENCE
Nineteenth century writers were both impressed by the dynamism of industrial cities and factories and appalled by the environmental, social, and personal costs. Marx was of course a hefty opponent of capitalism, but even Marx displays a kind of ambivalence toward these features of modernity that are not evident in later writers. He bemoaned the way that capitalism and industrialization dissolve every fixed stability of social life: “All that is solid melts into air,” he wrote in the Communist Manifesto, echoing Prospero’s words in The Tempest. More fully, “All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is sold melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and men at last are forced to face . . . the real conditions of their lives and their relations with their fellow men.”

But Marx saw a fundamental contradiction at the heart of modernity: “On the one hand, there have started into life industrial and scientific forces which no epoch of human history has ever suspected. On the other hand, there exist symptoms of decay, far surpassing the horrors of the latter times of the Roman Empire. In our days, everything seems pregnant with its contrary. Machinery, gifted with the wonderful power of shortening and fructifying human labor, we behold
starving and overworking it. The new-fangled sources of wealth, by some weird spell, are turned into sources of want. The victors of art seem bought by the loss of character. At the same pace that mankind masters nature, man seems to become enslaved to other men or to his own infamy. Even the pure light of science seems unable to shine but on the dark background of ignorance. All our invention and progress seem to result in endowing material forces with intellectual life, and stultifying human life into a material force.”

This didn’t leave him a thoroughly anti-modern writer: “On our part,” he wrote, “we do not mistake the shrewd spirit that continues to mark all these contradictions. We know that to work well . . . the new-fangled forces of society want only to be mastered by new-fangled men – and such are the working men. They are as much the invention of modern time as machinery itself.”

This ambivalence toward the urban, industrialized world is found in all the great 19th-century critics of modernity – Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Whitman, Baudelaire, Melville, Dostoevsky. Closer to Dickens, it’s also found in an unlikely place, in the poetry of the English Romantics.

According to Matthew C Brennan (Southern Quarterly, Winter 2003), Wordsworth was an enemy of industrialization. “Central to Wordsworth’s romanticism is the role of poetry to combat the evils of industrialization. In the ‘Preface’ he argues that urbanization and factory life generate the need for a poetry that can strengthen and purify readers’ ‘affections’ (735). He asserts, the ‘increasing accumulation of men in cities’ and the 11 uniformity of their occupations’ not only blunt the mind’s ‘discriminating powers’ but also ‘reduce it to a state of almost savage torpor’ (735). Similarly, shortly after publishing the ‘Preface’ Wordsworth complained to the statesman Charles James Fox about the spread throughout England of ‘manufactures’ as well as ‘workhouses’ and ‘Houses of Industry.’ These institutions, he reasons, are ‘evil’ in part because of ‘the vanity and pride of their promoters’-disciples of Adam Smith’s economic system of self-interest (Letters 313-14). Thus Wordsworth’s poems depict rustic life and not the city, for only in rural environments are men’s passions ‘incorporated with the beautiful and permanent forms of Nature’ (‘Preface’ 735). One of the few poems he did set in the city, ‘The Reverie of Poor Susan’ from Lyrical Ballads, 1800, makes this preference clear. Displaced from her native country landscape, Susan walks down a London street and has ‘a vision of trees’ and ‘Green pastures.’ But when the images ‘fade’apparently as she nears the factory where she’ll spend the daylight hours-‘the colours’ pass ‘away from her eyes!’ (6,9, 13, 16). As Wordsworth laments in his sonnet ‘The World Is Too Much With Us,’ ‘late and soon, / Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers’ and give ‘our hearts away’ (1-2, 4). In the drudgery of earning a living in the overcrowded city, poor Susan tries to heal herself with memories of nature’s permanent forms, but her occupation blunts her vision and she loses heart. The evils of Adam Smith’s self-interested money culture rob her soul of its lifeblood.

“Wordsworth elsewhere describes the degrading results of trade and commerce. ‘Tintern Abbey’ similarly characterizes the effects of city life as enervating. Between his first and second visits to the ruined abbey, Wordsworth lived in London for about six months in 1795. Here he says he lived ‘in lonely rooms, and ,mid the din / Of towns and cities’ (25-26) that made the world ‘heavy’ and full of ‘weary weight’ (39-40). In Susan’s city of markets, mills, and self-interested money-making, Wordsworth lived ‘amid the many shapes / Of joyless daylight’ and experienced ‘the fretful stir / Unprofitable’ (51-53)-unprofitable, that is, to a poet committed to combating ‘the sneers of selfish men’ and ‘the dreary intercourse of daily life’ (129-31). Cut off from the mysterious teachings of nature, the mind-as Coleridge quotes Thomas Burnet in the epigraph to ‘The Ancient Mariner’-becomes ‘habituated to the petty things of daily life’ and ‘too much contract[s] itself,’ thereby ‘wholly’ sinking ‘down to trivial thoughts’ (520).”

Wordsworth’s Preface to Lyrical Ballads, as Brennan points out, makes the case that poetry of the kind he offers is especially needful in his time: “A sense of false modesty shall not prevent me from asserting, that the Reader’s attention is pointed to this mark of distinction, far less for the sake of these particular Poems than from the general importance of the subject. The subject is indeed important! For the human mind is capable of being excited without the application of gross and violent stimulants; and he must have a very faint perception of its beauty and dignity who does not know this, and who does not further know, that one being is elevated above another, in proportion as he possesses this capability. It has therefore appeared to me, that to endeavour to produce or enlarge this capability is one of the best services in which, at any period, a Writer can be engaged; but this service, excellent at all times, is especially so at the present day. For a multitude of causes, unknown to former times, are now acting with a combined force to blunt the discriminating powers of the mind, and, unfitting it for all voluntary exertion, to reduce it to a state of almost savage torpor. The most effective of these causes are the great national events which are daily taking place, and the increasing accumulation of men in cities, where the uniformity of their occupations produces a craving for extraordinary incident, which the rapid communication of intelligence hourly gratifies. to this tendency of life and manners the literature and theatrical exhibitions of the country have conformed themselves. The invaluable works of our elder writers, I had almost said the works of Shakespeare and Milton, are driven into neglect by frantic novels, sickly and stupid German Tragedies, and deluges of idle and extravagant stories in verse.—When I think upon this degrading thirst after outrageous stimulation, I am almost ashamed to have spoken of the feeble endeavour made in these volumes to counteract it; and, reflecting upon the magnitude of the general evil, I should be oppressed with no dishonourable melancholy, had I not a deep impression of certain inherent and indestructible qualities of the human mind, and likewise of certain powers in the great and permanent objects that act upon it, which are equally inherent and indestructible; and were there not added to this impression a belief, that the time is approaching when the evil will be systematically opposed, by men of greater powers, and with far more distinguished success.”

And the poem about Poor Susan is definitely a lament for a lost, rural world:

At the corner of Wood Street, when daylight appears,
Hangs a Thrush that sings loud, it has sung for three years:
Poor Susan has pass’d by the spot, and has heard
In the silence of morning the song of the bird.

‘Tis a note of enchantment: what ails her? She sees
A mountain ascending, a vision of trees;
Bright volumes of vapour through Lothbury glide,
And a river flows on through the vale of Cheapside.

Green pastures she views in the midst of the dale
Down which she so often has tripp’d with her pail;
And a single small cottage, a nest like a dove’s
,
The one only dwelling on earth that she loves.

She looks, and her heart is in heaven: but they fade,
The mist and the river, the hill and the shade;
The stream will not flow, and the hill will not rise,
And the colours have all pass’d away from her eyes!

Blake expressed a similar hostility to industrial urbanization, and especially to its commercialization, in his poem London, one of the Songs of Experience.

I wander through each chartered street,
Near where the chartered Thames does flow,
And mark in every face I meet,
Marks of weakness, marks of woe.

In every cry of every man,
In every infant’s cry of fear,
In every voice, in every ban,
The mind-forged manacles I hear:

How the chimney-sweeper’s cry
Every blackening church appals,
And the hapless soldier’s sigh
Runs in blood down palace-walls.

But most, through midnight streets I hear
How the youthful harlot’s curse
Blasts the new-born infant’s tear,
And blights with plagues the marriage-hearse.

Yet, even Wordsworth expresses admiration for some aspects of industrial, urban modernity. In an essay on the attitude of Romantic poets toward modern science, University of Virginia’s Paul Cantor, while acknowledging their opposition to some trends (Wordsworth’s “we murder to dissect”) also notes that Blake, Wordsworth, and Shelley are all favorable to some dimensions of modern science.

In the Preface, Wordsworth (with Coleridge) writes, “If the labours of men of Science should ever create any material revolution . . . in our condition, . . . the Poet will sleep then no more than at present, but he will be ready to follow the steps of the man of Science. . . . The remotest discoveries of the Chemist, the Botanist, or Mineralogist, will be as proper objects of the Poet’s art as any upon which it can be employed. . . . If the time should ever come when what is now called Science, thus familiarized to men, shall be ready to put on, as it were, a form of flesh and blood, the Poet will lend his divine spirit to aid the transfiguration.” He envisions a science that has “a form of flesh and blood,” a humanized science. But once science is humanized, he believes it would provide suitable material for poetry.

In a poem entitled “Steamboats, Viaducts, and Railways” Wordsworth sees that human invention and industry is also an expression of nature:

Motion and Means, on land and sea at war
With old poetic feeling, not for this,
Shall ye, by Poets even, be judged amiss!
Nor shall your presence, howsoe’er it mar
The loveliness of nature, prove a bar
To the Mind’s gaining that prophetic sense
Of future change, that point of vision, whence
May be discovered what in soul ye are.
In spite of all that beauty may disown
In your harsh features, Nature doth embrace
Her lawful offspring in Man’s art; and Time,
Pleased with your triumphs o’er his brother Space,
Accepts from your bold hands the proffered crown
Of hope, and smiles on you with cheer sublime.

Cantor comments, “It certainly runs counter to our common conception of the Romantics to find their chief representative using a poem to celebrate ‘steamboats, viaducts, and railways’—prime examples of the cutting edge of technology in his day, and cutting right into the English countryside. To be sure, Wordsworth observes how these forms of modern technology ‘mar the loveliness of nature’ and for that reason he views them as ‘at war / With old poetic feeling.’ But rather than seeing technology as simply at odds with nature, Wordsworth in this sonnet chooses to view it as an extension of nature’s power: ‘Nature doth embrace / His lawful offspring in Man’s art.’ Wordsworth has a point—insofar as man is part of nature, even his technological powers may be said to grow out of nature and are in that sense natural themselves.

Marshall Berman has argued that the early 20th century lost this complex attitude toward modernity, and that in the works of Max Weber and others, modernity loses its wonder and turns into an “iron cage” that “determines the lives of all individuals who are born into this mechanism with irresistible force.” Modernity had, he believed, actually achieved its aim, actually produced “specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart; and this nullity is caught in the delusion that it has achieved a level of development never before attained by mankind.” (Bruno Latour makes similar points in his We Have Never Been Modern, arguing that the achievements of modern science and technology should fill us with as much wonder as natural wonders.

Dickens belongs in this 19th century group. He doesn’t celebrate the dynamism of industrial life, and his portrait of the life of workers in Hard Times is darker than in any other novels. But he does offer some notion of an alternative structuring of life, and some hope for a more human kind of industrial society.

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